I've seen that particular policy, and I've got to say, I don't really understand how a company can employ it for great lengths of time and see it working.
If you induct a bunch of new, young hires at the same time - which seems to be common - they bond with each other. Then they hang out in the company for a while - maybe even a year.
Then they realize that raises aren't forthcoming. Sometimes, the bigger trigger is one of the group finds something elsewhere for higher pay just with that tiny bit of experience under their belts, and that emboldens the rest.
I saw a company finally wake up to that, and they changed their policy to allow hiring of senior people... then the complaint was that they couldn't find good senior people any more, a complaint reflected across their particular industry.
With software, I guess that those "cost centers" actually take a little while for their effects to kick in, because they can coast on the work of the people who are gone just because of the way release cycles work. That's a barrier to corporate learning.
Looking at some of the science fiction of the pre-70s, it was full of possibility. Things could shrink and grow, turkeys could be formed in matter dispensers, radiation might give you powers, you could 'reverse your polarity' and become antimatter and, instead of just exploding like we know antimatter would now, we could throw lightning bolts (okay, I'll fess up - I got the Space:1999 Megaset for my birthday).
Besides all the "expired" science possibilities, there's a real gamble to be made trying to second-guess what physics will discover. We're finding all sorts of nifty quantum effects in quantum computing, but we are hardly much closer to understanding what it "really means" than Niehls Bohr. Care to guess whether MOND will actually come out on top? What the LHC will find in a year or two?
It seems like we're at the point where:
Somebody's already patented it, feasible or not
Somebody's already working on it, if it's technically feasible
Somebody's already made it, but it's really expensive
We know it will get there, it will just take a lot of time and money
We're already jaded of hearing about it, if it's been going on for 30 years
The idea's at a high risk of being based on faulty physics
It would be great if battery power were portable and infinite, but right now, it's a pain
Apart from immortality, I don't think I have tons on my personal wish list right now that isn't merely a matter of money or waiting.
Does anyone still have a long "wouldn't it be cool if" list that's feasible given current science and human nature?
It has been known for a while now that enucleating an egg (i.e. removing its nucleus) and putting the nucleus of an adult cell inside it seems to do somewhat of a reset. This makes a little sense, since mammalian eggs have chemicals and chemical gradients necessary to uncover the right genes to start off the process.
Given how hard it is to get eggs from humans, other animals would be ideal.
The thing is, the nuclei of these eggs are removed. There is one thing of the animals' genes that would remain, though: the mitochondria. That's why you can trace just your maternal line through your mitochondria - they are provided almost exclusively by the egg. If this ever gets used for actual cloning, imagine how this could screw up a deep ancestry project!
Mitochondria do pretty much the same job and have done so for aeons. They do mutate faster, though, so there *might* be other jobs that they are doing for us that are slightly incompatible. On the whole, though, probably not. In the end, chances are that the only fantasy "hybrid" part of this is human cells with animal batteries.
There's a lot of basic research left to do to see how cow and rabbit eggs (especially the ever-copious rabbit eggs!) differ from human eggs in terms of the chemical environment they provide, but once we figure that out, we will have another avenue of making stem cell equivalents, valuable for all sorts of things including spinal cord repair.
Cloning is a little different than therapeutic stem cell application would be, however. You cannot just throw cloned 'stem' cells into a body - you will get a teratoma: a disgusting ball of flesh with all the body tissues in it. You need to coax it down other development paths first. You can wait for a cloned embryo to develop and take out that particular kind of tissue, which is where some ethical considerations come in, or you can apply hormones and other chemicals to do the job.
There are those who write just to be "cool". There are even those who know a lot and like to exercise it but find correctness "boring". Avoid those at all costs. If a "genius" can't be bothered cleaning up their own messes, then they really don't know their subject matter as well as they say they do, and you will have to rewrite those fancy pieces of crap on your own dime.
That's not to say that there aren't geniuses that listen to needs and clean up their own messes around, but they are more rare than the lazy self-professed pseudo-geniuses you sound like you have already had the misfortune of meeting.
There isn't really one overarching "programming IQ". There's programming, empathy (why should I put in that feature? for idiots!?), debugging, testing, designing, analyzing. Someone can be a savant in one area and an untrainable mess in another.
You go to Kenya for a Safari then pretend to know the whole of kenya. very pathetic individual.
Where did I claim to know the whole of Kenya? The information on corruption, the trucks, the state of the roads, and what to do in case we were carjacked, came from talking with Kenyans, my pen pal, my guides, and those with whom I was practising Kiswahili.
Your mentality is that you expected Kenya to be really nice.
Ukiyasoma maneno niliyayoandika (if you read the words I wrote)... I expected Nairobi to be nicer than it actually was. When I got to Nairobi, we took a small walk from where we were staying, and it made me very uncomfortable. I liked many parts of the country. I quite liked Nakuru and Eldoret, and Naivasha was beautiful.
You also presume by your tone that I am comparing it with the U.S. (where I do not live). No, I have traveled to a number of different countries, and I am judging by how safe the local people make me feel. Foreigners stick out in Kenya and attract a lot of unwelcome attention.
I know countries have their dark sides. Cities, too. Even nice cities. Things are always the most dangerous when people get desperate. If you have been shot at in the US at all, then you would have a skewed view of the rest of the country. So much for a tech post indeed.
I hope the UN Habitat/Safer Nairobi initiative makes some headway. I would like to take my soon-to-be-born children back there someday, so that David can see them, and perhaps so that they can GMail their friends videos of nyumba (gnus) marching across the Mara.
There's a fair amount of town and city electrification there. Nairobi might make an okay place for them, but it really is crime-ridden in a lot of spots, and Kibera is a freaking huge shantytown on the edge. Someone was shot out in open daylight not too far away from one of our co-safari travelers. Karen is a pretty nice suburb, as close as you can get to a "North American" feel. We didn't brave any transport to get us to the business center of town - the one you always see in pictures that makes you think the rest of Nairobi would be really nice. Nairobi's a mile-high city, and is not as freakishly hot as I would have imagined.
The rest of Kenya that we saw varied a lot. As far as towns go in Kenya, Nakuru was my favorite by far. Apart from a number of annoying vendors where safari buses stop, it was a decently relaxed place with some nice grocery/department stores and less pestering than usual, and right next to a game park that contained pretty much half of every kind of animal we saw in Africa. I vote for them to set up base there:)
Google Maps Kenya needs a legend for the roads for number of spines broken, though. They essentially killed the railway so that officials could have their own little trucking companies that are habitually overloaded. Yeah, Google will have to settle for somewhere with an airport.
I'm unsure about that as well. It's one of the main advantages of sexual reproduction. Genes in combination can have a whole host of slightly different effects, good ones can mask bad ones, or can even manage to be better for the conditions by producing only half of what they do.
That said, I've looked at the genetic alphabet as well, and mutations of any single letter usually have less of an effect than one might think. There are chemical similarities in amino acids that are coded for with similar spellings. UUA codes for Leucine, GUA for Valine, both of which are very hydrophobic. Mutations make for slight changes in shape and/or solubility in proteins.
Chromosome pairs make those mutations easier to experiment with, and crossovers let those mutations appear in various combinations with other variations already present in the population.
Mutations don't really work alone. Crossovers allow mutational experiments to happen, though crossovers can work with variety that is already there.
When there are small populations, though, a mutation can be much more likely to get established, since there ends up being fewer working materials for crossovers to work with in the first place, and homozygous Mutation+Mutation actually has a decent chance of occurring. So if it's advantageous at all in a homozygous configuration, it can pop out and be established within relatively few generations.
I think that feature of small populations is what causes speciation, but YMMV.
I'd be disturbed about the governmental agencies getting their hands on this, given the general climate of misapprehension that video games are a major cause of actual, physical violence (thanks a bunch for jumping on the bandwagon, Hilary:( ). Without some assurances that the ratings system won't be held over a barrel for any number of spurious motivations, such as the unfortunately credible possibility of lobby groups complaining that fantasy games teach witchcraft and should therefore be kept out of the hands of children.
The ESRB has been running quite nicely for over a decade and, though not perfect, seems pretty on par with the MPAA in terms of hits and misses. Rating World of Warcraft Teen works great, and the more violent, disturbing Prey is properly rated Mature, though there are certainly younger folks who can deal with games like Prey (and certainly the old Ultima IX, which is also rated Mature).
I would surmise most of the issues people run up against are things like Parents or Granny buying Junior M-rated games (perhaps even because Junior asked for the game in question, as Juniors are wont to do), and totally missing the meaning of the rating.
That's not equivalent to the ratings on going to the movies, because people don't go to video games - they bring them home. However, when buying movies for someone, you have to pay attention to the rating on the movie; buying Body Double for your 9-year-old isn't a good thing, but the salesperson isn't going to stop you at the till to ask who you're buying it for. With games, salespeople are more likely to ask than with movies, especially if you're a senior who has just picked up an M or AO-rated game, but if you're 40 or under and don't look confused, they will properly assume that you've done a modicum of homework (and if you look nerdy, the chances of them asking trend towards zero:) You can always ask the people behind the counter, though - ESRB ratings are not hard to puzzle out.
It's the "not necessarily for me" part of video game purchasing that tends to lead to more oopsies. I don't see how any FTC oversight is going to help that issue in the slightest, unless it's to bend the needle to severe overprotection. Who amongst us can imagine what form that would take? No video games except Barbie and Veggie Tales in Wal-Mart? A tiny front section at EG with a beaded curtain dividing the FTC-approved-for-public-malls part from the vast majority of titles (perhaps an exaggeration, but if other legislation came down the pipe making sure minors had no access to even looking at a likely increased number of rated titles, how would EG and other retailers have to respond?)
...or would the effect be simply more insidious and behind-the-scenes? Vaunted games that were developed that the FTC simply prevented from being sold, or games being horribly watered down just to get to the wide audience that could have handled it in the first place?
Have these folks proposed a content rating system on books in the last little while?
Support the ESA in their fights against jokers like this.
I think biology will take us a lot further than physics for the short term. Besides the tremendous human benefit that dissecting and controlling genes will allow us, and the numerous medical revolution that can happen from gene therapy and in-vivo or in-vitro organ growth, biology has ready-made chemical factories that may be able to be manipulated into what we want on the industrial side.
Currently, it's pretty hard to make petroleum. Granted, though, chemistry and engineering may already be able to get us there in the meantime via TDP once we can get an economy of scale from it, but biology shows a lot of promise, especially if we want precisely controlled chemical reactions.
Biology may also give us a source of nanotechnology.
Physics is spinning madly, but is relatively 'weak' at the moment. String theory has given us new math, but little else in its several decades with us, and the main interpretation of quantum mechanics still says "don't ask; you can never find out" when it comes to quantum reality.
Perhaps there will be some surprises that come out of quantum computing or decoherence research. A room-temperature superconductor would sure help a lot! It will likely be a while before physics comes to the rescue again, though. I'd agree with the article: this will be the century of biology.
Mathematical logic and philosophical logic still bring two problems to the table: they are far, far less limited than nature itself is.
It's that tie to nature, especially in predictive form, that should be the ideal strived for. Evolutionary theories of evolutionary fact get pretty darned close as far as science is concerned.
If it dosent want to accept any philisophical logic, it must uncermoniously give the boot to any branch of physics that isnt backed by physcial evidence.
Strangely, I agree with you to some degree on this point. Physics is in trouble in many spots here. They can come up with numerous laws, but the theories are in trouble. Quantum computing can at least be tested against nature. String theory has been failing to do so (including failing to give us interesting inventions) for a couple of decades now - if there was ever a better example of sipping the spiked punch of mathematical logic without physical evidence, I can't think of one:)
Talk about misrepresenting the government's position, and then wrapping yourself up in the robes of the oppressed!
You can't scream about "fairness" when the backers of intelligent design try to do an end run around the science community, the science process, good pedagogy and teachers to strike at the soft, sympathetic elected officials to sneak themselves into grade 9 classes.
Creationist tactics reek of contrived dualism: the utterly incorrect "if you're wrong on X then we must be right" view. If evolution were in some fantasy land 'disproven' tomorrow, that would not make literal biblical creationism automatically right. Neither would creationists in this day and age tolerate a grade 8 science class being taught about body thetans. Creationists are not interested in "fairness".
However, if ID ever gets a decent legal and scientific team on its side, we should make some headway.
Not just "scientific team", but if it ever gets decent science on its side like the Discovery Institute was supposed to do in 'Phase I: Scientific Research, Writing & Publicity' and was supposed to be the basis of everything that followed. But they got lazy, wanted a shortcut, and moved straight on to Phase III: Cultural Confrontation & Renewal.
If it could be shown that any one of these propositions does not hold, then Biblical creationism would crumble.
Horsepuckey. They have been proven wrong, and the response has been to just move the goalposts off the field, or as seems to be more common, just keep repeating exactly what you have just stated. It's a slick ruse, occasionally having to concede a point, and then to just stick it right back in as though nothing happened.
If you want to learn more about specific pieces of the evidence, you can buy books and read papers from any number of creation institutes, it's not worth discussing them here as I've done so many times before.
I have done so with many, and they repeat the same, tired mistakes. I find it interesting the way they present it, though. They use good logic in many spots, and then pull a switcheroo or an assumption out of the air at step 1, 5, or 10.
One of Dembski's latest on "specified complexity" is entirely like that. Strings out his math like a master. Then, in the last pages' worth of his paper, he lies about evolution. His entire mathematical proof is that you can't target a particular, exact spot in a mathematical space with a random walk; it needs explanation. In equating evolution with this, he implies that every generation would be using a 'random walk' with the express intention of producing you. My, my, jolly good, Dembski, you're such a smart man, but you lied on the last page to try to prove a false point about your opponents.
Papers like the ones Humphreys puts out are done in layers. The most "reasonable sounding" ones are the most public-facing, but they heavily rely on his other papers. When you check out his other papers, especially a couple of layers deep, you get gems like The Creation of Planetary Magnetic Fields which tries to prove that the Earth was a sphere of water, as he interprets in Genesis, and on the difficult steps, he invokes God in an utterly untestable manner...
In normal circumstances, the number of molecules in each of the four groups-three ortho and one para - is roughly equal. All the magnetic moments cancel out, so that water normally has no net magnetic moment of its own. However, God was under no requirement to create the water molecules in their normal order. For example, He could have created all the molecules with their proton magnetic moments lined up in a given direction
Henry Morris is not the best source of information on probabilities of harmful mutations. The probability of a mutation being harmful is overstated, and to have five happen at the same time in a generation in functionally related genes is highly unlikely.
Mutations that are seriously harmful can prevent child bacteria from dividing or living, or in humans, can prevent sperm from surviving, eggs from surviving, sperm and eggs from fusing, zygotes from being implanted, can cause miscarriages, or can lead to unattractive people who give potential mates the creeps.
Despite all the 'dice rolling' that natural selection and gene crossover in meiosis do, natural selection is the opposite process. It cuts down on the number of variations that are not so good or appropriate for the conditions.
Even Behe, admittedly ID's "powerhouse", had to back off from such statistical arguments on day 12 of the Dover case.
Creationism is what is easier to understand, and isn't science at all. ID is less understandable, because it attempts to dress itself up as science.
Actually, most people I've seen on the pro-ID side here are either actually thinking of creationism, perhaps in part because Intelligent Design is less well-defined (?) ("there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence" is not the best definition of a whole field), or the oft-repeated and oft-debunked carried-over-from-creationism jabs against evolutionary theory.
Intelligent design does not specify the intelligent designer, though almost to a fault, its proponents are unequivocal that it's God, but try to pretend it's not when making their sales pitches (whether winking across the table at the school boards or not).
Most of the creationist literature that dresses itself up in science makes a lot more assumptions than it ever should. The rest of the paper may flow logically, but the third or seventh assumption on which the entire thing is based is bogus, whether snuck in there on purpose or not. Not all of them are as egregious as Humphrey and his "God didn't have to keep the average magnetic moment of the primordial sphere of water the Earth was made of at zero", but they are omnipresent. Usually there's a good debunking or two around, but they don't get popular until big court cases come out.
There's a lot of "ladder of life" assumptions around, teleology, I think the term is, and it's not true. Amount of genetic material, once you get "past" sponges, is adequate for a lot of things. Remember: DNA is not a blueprint, it's a recipe. There gets to be a point at which lots of the steps are redundant or useless, but you can still "mutate 350 degrees to 360 degrees in the oven" as it were. If you take a look a research into DNA comparisons, it's amazing how many pieces are shared by things as widely varied as humans and yeast. The other way organisms make sure that the DNA still works is by going back to a small, divide-many-times stage that weeds out the bad mutations. That happens every day in peoples' groins.
Radiometric dating has more meat on its bones than creationists would like to admit. There are multi-element-and-isotope techniques that do not just compare a mother and daughter amount, but actually cross-check multiple ones such that the normal "you don't know how much was in there in the first place" arguments do not matter, and the techniques with solid-to-gas phase changes in the decay products also serve to corroborate.
The "preponderance of evidence" the creationists carry around with them is similar to what they do in their set-up debates. It doesn't matter how many times they are disproved or have significant shadows cast across their assumptions. They pack up the exact same arguments and evidence and publish and espouse it as though nothing had happened.
You're welcome to your own opinion, but do not think us dishonest in the face of all this "evidence":)
Being just about to marry a teacher in a system where a switch was made from WebCT to Desire2Learn, and knowing what utter chaos D2L threw the school into, I've got some opinions based on the frustrations I've seen.
If you're an online teacher, paging features suck. I've seen how much of a workload online teaching involves, and this is just one more "ringing phone" that utterly destroys teacher productivity. It's too easy to use, and the student-to-teacher ratios for all courses (100:1), even though not necessarily at the same time, are overwhelming. The pages are often on common questions, as well, which makes them more appropriate for discussions, where the question can be answered once (e.g. why are the images broken in quiz #2?) instead of answered over and over (imagine 30 kids raising their hands in class and asking the same question:).
The e-mail in D2L works much better for students that way than WebCT did, but I can tell you that it's pretty bad for teachers. Privacy legislation (at least here) prevents identifying minors without explicit consent, and the D2L e-mail boxes are not limited to the D2L courses, tripping the legislation (at least, this was the essence of the explanation I heard). This means you get reams of e-mail from students identified only by ID# with no name unless they sign it and (though this may be simply a D2L failing) no course identification ("Could you tell me what you meant in question 3 in the last quiz I re-took?"... ack!).
My fiancée used the WebCT e-mail organization by course to concentrate on getting that course's questions, assignments, etc. done, which is invaluable if you teach multiple subjects. All of them, including managerial odds and ends, getting tossed into the same bucket makes it much harder to be organized.
There have been some serious D2L teething problems, with questionable hope of them ever going away. One great feature of D2L was supposed to be sharable learning objects, and being able to use "baseline" courses as templates and modify them for individual classes. Well, in amongst various server hangs and crashes, the very features the system was bought for have had to be turned off.
I won't defend WebCT, especially in light of what I've heard here on this forum (being too browser-specific and losing work are two subjects that choke me, too), but this was sure a frying-pan-to-fire move, and it has caused a lot of stress around these parts.
Maybe D2L can stabilize itself, maybe not. If so, I hope they do it soon. My future married life depends on it!
Seeing the photon rendition reminded me of virtual photons. I wonder how such art would represent virtual particles?
Now, I have seen said in many places that virtual photons are the carriers of the electromagnetic force. With infinite range, the carrier would have to be of a class like a photon.
What I haven't seen yet is a cogent explanation as to why a "colorless", chargeless particle could carry both the attractive (positive to negative) and repulsive (positive-positive or negative-negative) forces. I've seen some amazing somersaults and backflips like this, but little else.
It was pretty disappointing to waste my once-in-almost-a-lifetime opportunity in Geneva on eating at the CERN café I'm glad I didn't miss too much.
We don't do a whole lot of 'science vacationing', though I take in science centers and botanical gardens whenever I can. In Vancouver, I take in the science center in the big Olympic golf ball. Last time I was there, there was a China exhibit with papermaking and a spouting bowl (I loved these so much, I ordered one from Acme Klein Bottle:) The observatory on Vancouver Island near Victoria has some fantastic little tours and a great visitor center, including a nearly-portable planetarium (seriously, it seats maybe 8 people) and some displays (I got a chuckle out of the Big Bang exhibit, which was shut down with an appropriate sign "Still Working The Bugs Out":)
We did get some CERN postcards and send them off to people, and took pictures in front of all the used equipment anyways:)
Thanks for the kind offer of a tour! The probability of us going that way is small, and we're likely to interfere with ourselves *grin*, but if we do happen to be by Denmark in the next few years, we'll look you up, and if it's later, we'll try anyhow!
Well, when it comes to QM we're only taught (what else?) the Copenhagen interpretation - the rest aren't even mentioned, except maybe for some graduate courses which is really a shame.
I may not have all the nuances of the Copenhagen interpretation, but it always struck me as a "dead end" in the search for reality. Not that there necessarily is a reality "behind" QM, but even with Bell's nonlocality proof, strange things like the neorealists' pilot wave theory seem like they open up more avenues of investigation even if they do end up wrong or misguided. QM is too incredibly strong and counterintuitive to stop at 'just' using the probability equations.
Well, in my humble opinion, etc.:)
P.S. Drop by sometime.
We live in Canada, and actually won a trip to Switzerland this summer. We went to Geneva and rode the #9 down to CERN. Couldn't get a tour booked in under a year, never mind the few months we had, unfortunately, and when we got there, even the Microcosm exhibit was closed, so my attempts at getting to a scientific "mecca" were foiled (though I did eat in the cafe and had the Menu Proton special:)
There are so many things over there - it's a shame we're at such a distance. At least my fiancée-soon-to-be-wife, who's a high school science teacher, has a lot of Danish heritage - which might make a good excuse to visit. I trust you don't have to book campus tours or anything too far in advance?:)
We also picked up, some time ago, an odd little 'graphic novel' about Niels Bohr's life called Suspended In Language. I'd be surprised if they didn't sell it on campus - it was a mighty nifty book, something that belongs in a collection next to Gonicks' Cartoon History of the Universe:)
It's still bizarre to me that we still don't have any direct proof that there's an Oort cloud out there. Except for long-period comets, everything else we've discovered has been within so many degrees of the ecliptic.
Could be the same observability problem with dark matter (though dark energy is, IMO, a crock:). It could also be that there's no Oort cloud, but discs of material stretch out a lot further than we think, not just for solar systems, but perhaps for galaxies as well.
I'm pretty glad to hear of your experience. The Copenhagen institute has a mythical quality for those of us looking at the last 100 years of science. Niels cast a pretty big shadow. I'm glad that it's still pretty open and free.
I've been following cosmology for ages, and the current mainstream ideas seem like an exercise in being exotic for exoticness' sake. I've been singularly unsurprised at information coming back from Spitzer and the like that we're still finding normal galaxies 13.3 billion light years away. I've been reading some of the material from the 30's and 40's, and quite frankly, we haven't addressed their concerns very well in the intervening 65+ years. But I digress:)
Quantum Mechanics is pretty amazing, all things considered. No matter what weird experiments have been thrown at it, including Einstein's objections, it just works. It's freaky and awe-inspiring that the universe has an utterly "invincible" underpinning that isn't about actual waves or particles of matter or energy, but probability. Do your probability wave math, run the experiment, and watch the statistics pile up. I must admit, I still don't know how to absorb the fact that you can get individual electrons seemingly "interfering with themselves".
It's a little embarrassing that we really have no idea what quantum mechanics means. If Nick Herbert's summary is still valid, we have four, completely separate mathematical ways of looking at quantum mechanics and eight major camps of interpretation. All of the mathematical means (Feynman's sum-over-histories, Heisenberg's matrices, etc.) are utterly indistinguishable. It's an embarrassment of riches in the 'possible explanations' department.
Personally, though, I'll take the options that don't require some airy-fairy "consciousness" as the only observer that can 'collapse the wave function', making consciousness mystical instead of an extremely complicated but theoretically understandable biological process, and options that don't prevent further questioning (I don't want any "the theory is all there is" bits like with, ironically named considering the open atmosphere, the Copenhagen interpretation:).
Nick Herbert's book, albeit some 20 years old now, is still excellent. I just finished it recently, and reviewed it on my blog.
It's a sobering thought that so many 'realities' could describe what's going on in quantum mechanics.
There are a few limitations to our lifespan. The Hayflick limit may be a driving factor. Body cells, with very few exceptions, have a limit on the number of divisions they can make. This may be related to the way that every time a cell divides, one of the daughter cells has a slightly shorter copy. The ends of the chromosome are telomeres, the aglets on our gene shoelaces.
Of course, many of our tissues divide more than others, and we're vulnerable to a weak point of failure, whether it be skin tissue (definitely a point of infection), blood supply, blood vessels or what have you.
There have been two major schools of thought about aging, and many points in-between. On one side, some think that aging is caused by an incredible number of small failures from separate causes, and to try to beat aging is doomed to fail on this alone. On the other side of the issue, there are those who believe one or perhaps two major items are at fault for aging, and that we can close to an Elixir of Youth. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.
I still highly recommend Michael D. West's book The Immortal Cell for an inside account of one search for a cure for aging. (He's also one of the co-authors of the hefty tome Principles of Cloning). Fascinating stuff, and definitely not the stuff of 'fringe' science.
...and you can scientifically investigate 'actual design'?
Intelligent Design, regardless of its appearance to stay above the fray, is not interested in the supposed designer being a Hindu god or goddess, or aliens, or robots. It is interested in an appearance of science as a second attempt to put a wedge in education to open the doors to Christianity in school.
Dembski can't help but have an agenda:
"The job of apologetics is to clear the ground, to clear obstacles that prevent people from coming to the knowledge of Christ," Dembski said. "And if there's anything that I think has blocked the growth of Christ [and] the free reign of the Spirit and people accepting the Scripture and Jesus Christ, it is the Darwinian naturalistic view.... It's important that we understand the world. God has created it; Jesus is incarnate in the world."
After having followed the activities of the creationist movement, and this is creationism rebadged, the key strategies are that the end justifies the means, everything must agree with Genesis, repeated misquoting of evolutionary proponents, deliberate misuses of terms and deliberate confusion of separate subjects and terms.
"Just a theory" mischaracterizes scientific theories; irreducible complexities, when disproven (like the Krebs cycle) just drive them to pull the next one out of their hat, and, in this particular case, they confuse natural selection and evolutionary theory with abiogenesis, the search for a non-biological origin of life.
Every piece of life on the face of this planet excluding viruses has DNA and ribosomes. These are complex in and of themselves, so they are extremely poor candidates for a non-miraculous origin of life. That, and the similarities and differences in ribosomal DNA (like reconstructing the original program in a fractured open source project gone wild) indicate a shared ancestor before that point.
Precursors lie in the area of conjecture. We cannot directly observe such precursors; DNA has been so incredibly successful that everything else has become food. Hence projects like this.
Criminy. ScienceAgainstEvolution has all the hallmarks of intellectual dishonesty that has become the creationist hallmark, with heaps of question-begging and snide, often mischaracterizing, rhetorical questions. Everything in bold in their Two Silver Anniversaries page typifies the approach.
To get back to the ID movement, we have a right to question the motives underneath, not simply address the surface questions that are designed to 'sound reasonable'. To do otherwise would be to like inviting Scientology's Narconon into schools because 'drugs are bad'. Or a good-looking control freak into bed:)
Oh no, the trouble isn't with everything receding. That's not what singles us out because it can easily be explained by everywhere expanding at once.
The 'shells' of which I speak make it looks like there are rough, intermittent spheres. Take a gander on the 'net for Tifft and either "spheres" or "quantized redshift".
Unlike simple running away in any direction you look, if the concentric spheres were 'real', then you couldn't actually go anywhere else in the universe and be in the center of the spheres.
I don't personally believe the spheres are really out there - we're not at the center of the danged universe:) I think it's an illusion caused by another mechanism, but unless there are additional redshift mechanisms apart from redshift due to velocity, there's not nearly enough you can attribute to "measurement error".
The "Fingers of God" (that long chains of celestial objects line up in 'ribbons' away from us) phenomenon is also something else that appears, apart from any expansion, to point at us. This has been 'explained away' by use of the Virial Theorem, but it requires a particular motion in clusters to be true.
So it's not all "raisins in the expanding pudding", as it were:)
*laugh* Oh my goodness - the disproof of God. That's a philosophical and logical minefield unto itself; a darn fine intellectual exercise, but you'd be surprised at what you run up against:)
I ran across an interesting snippet a while back on the subject of modern-day Gnostic Christianity, and this particular person was ranting up a storm against the fundamentalists who seem to basically want us to stop asking questions, and to revile science as a means of finding the truth. His view, which I found interesting (it resembles what I remember of the Gnostics in post-Roman times), was that you should not fetter the search for truth, because if God were out there, you'd eventually find it to be true from all the knowledge humankind eventually collected about the universe.
Actually, on the subject of proof versus Laws, is that even Laws are conditional, though they've been upgraded to near 100% certainty in local conditions.
The Law of Gravity, for example, holds within the solar system to a very fine degree, but there have been murmurs, even in the mainstream, about whether it might hold differently on the large scale. The excessive amount of 'missing matter' required to hold a galaxy together seems to be the main sticking point. The amount of conjecture when the Voyagers went "off course" was unexpected:)
As to whether or not science accepts non-disproven theories... actually, it does, but there's a pretty good reason for it. For more wonderful philosophy, here's an outline version of Kuhn's Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. The basic piece to get out of it is that science, when presented with a number of alternatives that seem impossible to decide between, decides on something, because then you actually have an explanation you can actually test against; throw the spaghetti at the wall and see if it sticks.
It takes quite a while to overturn things, because there's usually some way to explain it in the current theory, but there's usually some loss of internal consistency as observations come in.
Anyhow, Kuhn is kinda cool:)
Still early days on cosmology - Spitzer has been coming up with some new and very surprising things... stuff like neon being present in the same quantities in stars 10 billion light years away, which doesn't make sense as it stands, since neon is a secondary product of supernovas in BBT.
*laugh* Sounds like a darned fine physics teacher! My fiancée is actually a high school science teacher; dealing with the 'slowpokes' who frustrate everyone in the class is high art:) *laugh* I remember her story of dropping glycerin on a pile of KMn04, looking disappointed that nothing happened, then turning back to write things on the chalkboard... then, of course, it ignites, and she blithely pretends nothing's going on as the students are screaming. Teachers with a sense of humor are worth their weight in osmium:)
*laugh* I thought you were serious about the first two, but less so about dividing by the phase of the moon:)
(But, if Intelligent Design should get equal time in Biology, shouldn't Astrology get equal time in Astronomy?... *laugh* Here's your barf bag:)
What residual energy would that be, though?
The only residual energy I've heard of in BBT (and feel free to correct me on this) is the cosmic background radiation.
If it's CMB as residual energy, then that was a retrodiction, not a prediction. Most of the prominent guesses before it was measured were off by a factor of ten or more:) (e.g. ~50 Kelvins)
I'm not saying the Big Bang Theory can't explain things. It has to. But that doesn't imply that the particular explanation is really the correct one (it hinges on the theory it's a part of), or that the observed phenomena can't be used in a different manner in a different theory.
Take an extreme example: the "God Did It" theory. Why is there a CMB? Because God made it that way. Thus, it is explained. That doesn't follow that because there is a CMB, that God Did It.
Now, that's not falsifiable, which is what makes it irritating to science. However, in a nearly equivalent way, the explanation of CMB by Big Bang Theory is not falsifiable in some very important ways. What counter-evidence could prove the CMB was not caused by a Big Bang? They didn't stick their neck out on the too-smooth isotropy question, and now it's under revision or being ignored for the time being. That's actually a perfectly fine thing to do, but then you can't use the original phenomenon as proof.
That's the trap we have to watch out for here. Descriptive power does not equal predictive power.
Oh my god, it's a long way down from this soapbox. Sorry. *dizzy from the height*:)
The grandparent has a point. The assumption that the only, or at the very least major, reason for frequency change is motion, has to be made for today's mainstream cosmological position to work.
If you're going to question that, you'll have to quesion everything from e = mc^2 to f = ma!
*laugh* There's no domino effect involved here! Even the odd people who refuse the validity of evolutionary theory don't, by and large, run off to NASA and scream that they'll never achieve orbit because their physics of gravity is wrong.
Radial velocities do seem to give Doppler shifts, so there's no reason to think that velocities don't give redshift. There are, however, a few odd cases which give very strange results if velocities are the only thing underlying redshift.
If we take galactic clusters, then either no matter which way we look, late-type (I believe this is the right way 'round) spirals group on the far side of the cluster and early-type on the near side. Are we at the center of the universe? Unlikely, but that's a possible implication of what we see if we don't admit the possibility of other causes of redshift.
Other oddities that merit investigation are the "K Effect", which is redshift in hot stars (unless all hot stars are running away from us), and the appearance of concentric "shells" around our galaxy in larger-scale structure.
I personally would hold the cosmological principle in higher regard than any particular current theory. That is to say, the universe is not pointing at us. Which is why I'm willing to say that the aforementioned assumption may not hold. Which could have profound implications.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen that particular policy, and I've got to say, I don't really understand how a company can employ it for great lengths of time and see it working.
If you induct a bunch of new, young hires at the same time - which seems to be common - they bond with each other. Then they hang out in the company for a while - maybe even a year.
Then they realize that raises aren't forthcoming. Sometimes, the bigger trigger is one of the group finds something elsewhere for higher pay just with that tiny bit of experience under their belts, and that emboldens the rest.
I saw a company finally wake up to that, and they changed their policy to allow hiring of senior people... then the complaint was that they couldn't find good senior people any more, a complaint reflected across their particular industry.
With software, I guess that those "cost centers" actually take a little while for their effects to kick in, because they can coast on the work of the people who are gone just because of the way release cycles work. That's a barrier to corporate learning.
Looking at some of the science fiction of the pre-70s, it was full of possibility. Things could shrink and grow, turkeys could be formed in matter dispensers, radiation might give you powers, you could 'reverse your polarity' and become antimatter and, instead of just exploding like we know antimatter would now, we could throw lightning bolts (okay, I'll fess up - I got the Space:1999 Megaset for my birthday).
Besides all the "expired" science possibilities, there's a real gamble to be made trying to second-guess what physics will discover. We're finding all sorts of nifty quantum effects in quantum computing, but we are hardly much closer to understanding what it "really means" than Niehls Bohr. Care to guess whether MOND will actually come out on top? What the LHC will find in a year or two?
It seems like we're at the point where:
Apart from immortality, I don't think I have tons on my personal wish list right now that isn't merely a matter of money or waiting.
Does anyone still have a long "wouldn't it be cool if" list that's feasible given current science and human nature?
It has been known for a while now that enucleating an egg (i.e. removing its nucleus) and putting the nucleus of an adult cell inside it seems to do somewhat of a reset. This makes a little sense, since mammalian eggs have chemicals and chemical gradients necessary to uncover the right genes to start off the process.
Given how hard it is to get eggs from humans, other animals would be ideal.
The thing is, the nuclei of these eggs are removed. There is one thing of the animals' genes that would remain, though: the mitochondria. That's why you can trace just your maternal line through your mitochondria - they are provided almost exclusively by the egg. If this ever gets used for actual cloning, imagine how this could screw up a deep ancestry project!
Mitochondria do pretty much the same job and have done so for aeons. They do mutate faster, though, so there *might* be other jobs that they are doing for us that are slightly incompatible. On the whole, though, probably not. In the end, chances are that the only fantasy "hybrid" part of this is human cells with animal batteries.
There's a lot of basic research left to do to see how cow and rabbit eggs (especially the ever-copious rabbit eggs!) differ from human eggs in terms of the chemical environment they provide, but once we figure that out, we will have another avenue of making stem cell equivalents, valuable for all sorts of things including spinal cord repair.
Cloning is a little different than therapeutic stem cell application would be, however. You cannot just throw cloned 'stem' cells into a body - you will get a teratoma: a disgusting ball of flesh with all the body tissues in it. You need to coax it down other development paths first. You can wait for a cloned embryo to develop and take out that particular kind of tissue, which is where some ethical considerations come in, or you can apply hormones and other chemicals to do the job.
There are those who write just to be "cool". There are even those who know a lot and like to exercise it but find correctness "boring". Avoid those at all costs. If a "genius" can't be bothered cleaning up their own messes, then they really don't know their subject matter as well as they say they do, and you will have to rewrite those fancy pieces of crap on your own dime.
That's not to say that there aren't geniuses that listen to needs and clean up their own messes around, but they are more rare than the lazy self-professed pseudo-geniuses you sound like you have already had the misfortune of meeting.
There isn't really one overarching "programming IQ". There's programming, empathy (why should I put in that feature? for idiots!?), debugging, testing, designing, analyzing. Someone can be a savant in one area and an untrainable mess in another.
See also: Dunning-Kruger Effect :)
Usikisi hivyo.
Where did I claim to know the whole of Kenya? The information on corruption, the trucks, the state of the roads, and what to do in case we were carjacked, came from talking with Kenyans, my pen pal, my guides, and those with whom I was practising Kiswahili.
Ukiyasoma maneno niliyayoandika (if you read the words I wrote)... I expected Nairobi to be nicer than it actually was. When I got to Nairobi, we took a small walk from where we were staying, and it made me very uncomfortable. I liked many parts of the country. I quite liked Nakuru and Eldoret, and Naivasha was beautiful.
You also presume by your tone that I am comparing it with the U.S. (where I do not live). No, I have traveled to a number of different countries, and I am judging by how safe the local people make me feel. Foreigners stick out in Kenya and attract a lot of unwelcome attention.
I know countries have their dark sides. Cities, too. Even nice cities. Things are always the most dangerous when people get desperate. If you have been shot at in the US at all, then you would have a skewed view of the rest of the country. So much for a tech post indeed.
I hope the UN Habitat/Safer Nairobi initiative makes some headway. I would like to take my soon-to-be-born children back there someday, so that David can see them, and perhaps so that they can GMail their friends videos of nyumba (gnus) marching across the Mara.
There's a fair amount of town and city electrification there. Nairobi might make an okay place for them, but it really is crime-ridden in a lot of spots, and Kibera is a freaking huge shantytown on the edge. Someone was shot out in open daylight not too far away from one of our co-safari travelers. Karen is a pretty nice suburb, as close as you can get to a "North American" feel. We didn't brave any transport to get us to the business center of town - the one you always see in pictures that makes you think the rest of Nairobi would be really nice. Nairobi's a mile-high city, and is not as freakishly hot as I would have imagined.
The rest of Kenya that we saw varied a lot. As far as towns go in Kenya, Nakuru was my favorite by far. Apart from a number of annoying vendors where safari buses stop, it was a decently relaxed place with some nice grocery/department stores and less pestering than usual, and right next to a game park that contained pretty much half of every kind of animal we saw in Africa. I vote for them to set up base there :)
Google Maps Kenya needs a legend for the roads for number of spines broken, though. They essentially killed the railway so that officials could have their own little trucking companies that are habitually overloaded. Yeah, Google will have to settle for somewhere with an airport.
I'm unsure about that as well. It's one of the main advantages of sexual reproduction. Genes in combination can have a whole host of slightly different effects, good ones can mask bad ones, or can even manage to be better for the conditions by producing only half of what they do.
That said, I've looked at the genetic alphabet as well, and mutations of any single letter usually have less of an effect than one might think. There are chemical similarities in amino acids that are coded for with similar spellings. UUA codes for Leucine, GUA for Valine, both of which are very hydrophobic. Mutations make for slight changes in shape and/or solubility in proteins.
Chromosome pairs make those mutations easier to experiment with, and crossovers let those mutations appear in various combinations with other variations already present in the population.
Mutations don't really work alone. Crossovers allow mutational experiments to happen, though crossovers can work with variety that is already there.
When there are small populations, though, a mutation can be much more likely to get established, since there ends up being fewer working materials for crossovers to work with in the first place, and homozygous Mutation+Mutation actually has a decent chance of occurring. So if it's advantageous at all in a homozygous configuration, it can pop out and be established within relatively few generations.
I think that feature of small populations is what causes speciation, but YMMV.
I'd be disturbed about the governmental agencies getting their hands on this, given the general climate of misapprehension that video games are a major cause of actual, physical violence (thanks a bunch for jumping on the bandwagon, Hilary :( ). Without some assurances that the ratings system won't be held over a barrel for any number of spurious motivations, such as the unfortunately credible possibility of lobby groups complaining that fantasy games teach witchcraft and should therefore be kept out of the hands of children.
The ESRB has been running quite nicely for over a decade and, though not perfect, seems pretty on par with the MPAA in terms of hits and misses. Rating World of Warcraft Teen works great, and the more violent, disturbing Prey is properly rated Mature, though there are certainly younger folks who can deal with games like Prey (and certainly the old Ultima IX, which is also rated Mature).
I would surmise most of the issues people run up against are things like Parents or Granny buying Junior M-rated games (perhaps even because Junior asked for the game in question, as Juniors are wont to do), and totally missing the meaning of the rating.
That's not equivalent to the ratings on going to the movies, because people don't go to video games - they bring them home. However, when buying movies for someone, you have to pay attention to the rating on the movie; buying Body Double for your 9-year-old isn't a good thing, but the salesperson isn't going to stop you at the till to ask who you're buying it for. With games, salespeople are more likely to ask than with movies, especially if you're a senior who has just picked up an M or AO-rated game, but if you're 40 or under and don't look confused, they will properly assume that you've done a modicum of homework (and if you look nerdy, the chances of them asking trend towards zero :) You can always ask the people behind the counter, though - ESRB ratings are not hard to puzzle out.
It's the "not necessarily for me" part of video game purchasing that tends to lead to more oopsies. I don't see how any FTC oversight is going to help that issue in the slightest, unless it's to bend the needle to severe overprotection. Who amongst us can imagine what form that would take? No video games except Barbie and Veggie Tales in Wal-Mart? A tiny front section at EG with a beaded curtain dividing the FTC-approved-for-public-malls part from the vast majority of titles (perhaps an exaggeration, but if other legislation came down the pipe making sure minors had no access to even looking at a likely increased number of rated titles, how would EG and other retailers have to respond?)
...or would the effect be simply more insidious and behind-the-scenes? Vaunted games that were developed that the FTC simply prevented from being sold, or games being horribly watered down just to get to the wide audience that could have handled it in the first place?
Have these folks proposed a content rating system on books in the last little while?
Support the ESA in their fights against jokers like this.
I think biology will take us a lot further than physics for the short term. Besides the tremendous human benefit that dissecting and controlling genes will allow us, and the numerous medical revolution that can happen from gene therapy and in-vivo or in-vitro organ growth, biology has ready-made chemical factories that may be able to be manipulated into what we want on the industrial side.
Currently, it's pretty hard to make petroleum. Granted, though, chemistry and engineering may already be able to get us there in the meantime via TDP once we can get an economy of scale from it, but biology shows a lot of promise, especially if we want precisely controlled chemical reactions.
Biology may also give us a source of nanotechnology.
Physics is spinning madly, but is relatively 'weak' at the moment. String theory has given us new math, but little else in its several decades with us, and the main interpretation of quantum mechanics still says "don't ask; you can never find out" when it comes to quantum reality.
Perhaps there will be some surprises that come out of quantum computing or decoherence research. A room-temperature superconductor would sure help a lot! It will likely be a while before physics comes to the rescue again, though. I'd agree with the article: this will be the century of biology.
(Nod to Wikipedia for the links, too :)
-- Ritchie Annand
Mathematical logic and philosophical logic still bring two problems to the table: they are far, far less limited than nature itself is.
It's that tie to nature, especially in predictive form, that should be the ideal strived for. Evolutionary theories of evolutionary fact get pretty darned close as far as science is concerned.
Strangely, I agree with you to some degree on this point. Physics is in trouble in many spots here. They can come up with numerous laws, but the theories are in trouble. Quantum computing can at least be tested against nature. String theory has been failing to do so (including failing to give us interesting inventions) for a couple of decades now - if there was ever a better example of sipping the spiked punch of mathematical logic without physical evidence, I can't think of one :)
You're funny :)
Talk about misrepresenting the government's position, and then wrapping yourself up in the robes of the oppressed!
You can't scream about "fairness" when the backers of intelligent design try to do an end run around the science community, the science process, good pedagogy and teachers to strike at the soft, sympathetic elected officials to sneak themselves into grade 9 classes.
Creationist tactics reek of contrived dualism: the utterly incorrect "if you're wrong on X then we must be right" view. If evolution were in some fantasy land 'disproven' tomorrow, that would not make literal biblical creationism automatically right. Neither would creationists in this day and age tolerate a grade 8 science class being taught about body thetans. Creationists are not interested in "fairness".
Not just "scientific team", but if it ever gets decent science on its side like the Discovery Institute was supposed to do in 'Phase I: Scientific Research, Writing & Publicity' and was supposed to be the basis of everything that followed. But they got lazy, wanted a shortcut, and moved straight on to Phase III: Cultural Confrontation & Renewal.
Horsepuckey. They have been proven wrong, and the response has been to just move the goalposts off the field, or as seems to be more common, just keep repeating exactly what you have just stated. It's a slick ruse, occasionally having to concede a point, and then to just stick it right back in as though nothing happened.
I have done so with many, and they repeat the same, tired mistakes. I find it interesting the way they present it, though. They use good logic in many spots, and then pull a switcheroo or an assumption out of the air at step 1, 5, or 10.
One of Dembski's latest on "specified complexity" is entirely like that. Strings out his math like a master. Then, in the last pages' worth of his paper, he lies about evolution. His entire mathematical proof is that you can't target a particular, exact spot in a mathematical space with a random walk; it needs explanation. In equating evolution with this, he implies that every generation would be using a 'random walk' with the express intention of producing you . My, my, jolly good, Dembski, you're such a smart man, but you lied on the last page to try to prove a false point about your opponents.
Papers like the ones Humphreys puts out are done in layers. The most "reasonable sounding" ones are the most public-facing, but they heavily rely on his other papers. When you check out his other papers, especially a couple of layers deep, you get gems like The Creation of Planetary Magnetic Fields which tries to prove that the Earth was a sphere of water, as he interprets in Genesis, and on the difficult steps, he invokes God in an utterly untestable manner...
Henry Morris is not the best source of information on probabilities of harmful mutations. The probability of a mutation being harmful is overstated, and to have five happen at the same time in a generation in functionally related genes is highly unlikely.
Mutations that are seriously harmful can prevent child bacteria from dividing or living, or in humans, can prevent sperm from surviving, eggs from surviving, sperm and eggs from fusing, zygotes from being implanted, can cause miscarriages, or can lead to unattractive people who give potential mates the creeps.
Despite all the 'dice rolling' that natural selection and gene crossover in meiosis do, natural selection is the opposite process. It cuts down on the number of variations that are not so good or appropriate for the conditions.
Even Behe, admittedly ID's "powerhouse", had to back off from such statistical arguments on day 12 of the Dover case.
Dembski is one of the creationists who likes to play the numbers game, but plays loosely with information theory.
Creationism is what is easier to understand, and isn't science at all. ID is less understandable, because it attempts to dress itself up as science.
Actually, most people I've seen on the pro-ID side here are either actually thinking of creationism, perhaps in part because Intelligent Design is less well-defined (?) ("there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence" is not the best definition of a whole field), or the oft-repeated and oft-debunked carried-over-from-creationism jabs against evolutionary theory.
Intelligent design does not specify the intelligent designer, though almost to a fault, its proponents are unequivocal that it's God, but try to pretend it's not when making their sales pitches (whether winking across the table at the school boards or not).
Most of the creationist literature that dresses itself up in science makes a lot more assumptions than it ever should. The rest of the paper may flow logically, but the third or seventh assumption on which the entire thing is based is bogus, whether snuck in there on purpose or not. Not all of them are as egregious as Humphrey and his "God didn't have to keep the average magnetic moment of the primordial sphere of water the Earth was made of at zero", but they are omnipresent. Usually there's a good debunking or two around, but they don't get popular until big court cases come out.
There's a lot of "ladder of life" assumptions around, teleology, I think the term is, and it's not true. Amount of genetic material, once you get "past" sponges, is adequate for a lot of things. Remember: DNA is not a blueprint, it's a recipe. There gets to be a point at which lots of the steps are redundant or useless, but you can still "mutate 350 degrees to 360 degrees in the oven" as it were. If you take a look a research into DNA comparisons, it's amazing how many pieces are shared by things as widely varied as humans and yeast. The other way organisms make sure that the DNA still works is by going back to a small, divide-many-times stage that weeds out the bad mutations. That happens every day in peoples' groins.
Radiometric dating has more meat on its bones than creationists would like to admit. There are multi-element-and-isotope techniques that do not just compare a mother and daughter amount, but actually cross-check multiple ones such that the normal "you don't know how much was in there in the first place" arguments do not matter, and the techniques with solid-to-gas phase changes in the decay products also serve to corroborate.
The "preponderance of evidence" the creationists carry around with them is similar to what they do in their set-up debates. It doesn't matter how many times they are disproved or have significant shadows cast across their assumptions. They pack up the exact same arguments and evidence and publish and espouse it as though nothing had happened.
You're welcome to your own opinion, but do not think us dishonest in the face of all this "evidence" :)
Being just about to marry a teacher in a system where a switch was made from WebCT to Desire2Learn, and knowing what utter chaos D2L threw the school into, I've got some opinions based on the frustrations I've seen.
If you're an online teacher, paging features suck. I've seen how much of a workload online teaching involves, and this is just one more "ringing phone" that utterly destroys teacher productivity. It's too easy to use, and the student-to-teacher ratios for all courses (100:1), even though not necessarily at the same time, are overwhelming. The pages are often on common questions, as well, which makes them more appropriate for discussions, where the question can be answered once (e.g. why are the images broken in quiz #2?) instead of answered over and over (imagine 30 kids raising their hands in class and asking the same question :).
The e-mail in D2L works much better for students that way than WebCT did, but I can tell you that it's pretty bad for teachers. Privacy legislation (at least here) prevents identifying minors without explicit consent, and the D2L e-mail boxes are not limited to the D2L courses, tripping the legislation (at least, this was the essence of the explanation I heard). This means you get reams of e-mail from students identified only by ID# with no name unless they sign it and (though this may be simply a D2L failing) no course identification ("Could you tell me what you meant in question 3 in the last quiz I re-took?"... ack!).
My fiancée used the WebCT e-mail organization by course to concentrate on getting that course's questions, assignments, etc. done, which is invaluable if you teach multiple subjects. All of them, including managerial odds and ends, getting tossed into the same bucket makes it much harder to be organized.
There have been some serious D2L teething problems, with questionable hope of them ever going away. One great feature of D2L was supposed to be sharable learning objects, and being able to use "baseline" courses as templates and modify them for individual classes. Well, in amongst various server hangs and crashes, the very features the system was bought for have had to be turned off.
I won't defend WebCT, especially in light of what I've heard here on this forum (being too browser-specific and losing work are two subjects that choke me, too), but this was sure a frying-pan-to-fire move, and it has caused a lot of stress around these parts.
Maybe D2L can stabilize itself, maybe not. If so, I hope they do it soon. My future married life depends on it!
Seeing the photon rendition reminded me of virtual photons. I wonder how such art would represent virtual particles?
Now, I have seen said in many places that virtual photons are the carriers of the electromagnetic force. With infinite range, the carrier would have to be of a class like a photon.
What I haven't seen yet is a cogent explanation as to why a "colorless", chargeless particle could carry both the attractive (positive to negative) and repulsive (positive-positive or negative-negative) forces. I've seen some amazing somersaults and backflips like this, but little else.
It was pretty disappointing to waste my once-in-almost-a-lifetime opportunity in Geneva on eating at the CERN café I'm glad I didn't miss too much.
We don't do a whole lot of 'science vacationing', though I take in science centers and botanical gardens whenever I can. In Vancouver, I take in the science center in the big Olympic golf ball. Last time I was there, there was a China exhibit with papermaking and a spouting bowl (I loved these so much, I ordered one from Acme Klein Bottle :) The observatory on Vancouver Island near Victoria has some fantastic little tours and a great visitor center, including a nearly-portable planetarium (seriously, it seats maybe 8 people) and some displays (I got a chuckle out of the Big Bang exhibit, which was shut down with an appropriate sign "Still Working The Bugs Out" :)
We did get some CERN postcards and send them off to people, and took pictures in front of all the used equipment anyways :)
Thanks for the kind offer of a tour! The probability of us going that way is small, and we're likely to interfere with ourselves *grin*, but if we do happen to be by Denmark in the next few years, we'll look you up, and if it's later, we'll try anyhow!
Kind regards,
-- Ritchie :)
Well, when it comes to QM we're only taught (what else?) the Copenhagen interpretation - the rest aren't even mentioned, except maybe for some graduate courses which is really a shame.
I may not have all the nuances of the Copenhagen interpretation, but it always struck me as a "dead end" in the search for reality. Not that there necessarily is a reality "behind" QM, but even with Bell's nonlocality proof, strange things like the neorealists' pilot wave theory seem like they open up more avenues of investigation even if they do end up wrong or misguided. QM is too incredibly strong and counterintuitive to stop at 'just' using the probability equations.
Well, in my humble opinion, etc. :)
P.S. Drop by sometime.
We live in Canada, and actually won a trip to Switzerland this summer. We went to Geneva and rode the #9 down to CERN. Couldn't get a tour booked in under a year, never mind the few months we had, unfortunately, and when we got there, even the Microcosm exhibit was closed, so my attempts at getting to a scientific "mecca" were foiled (though I did eat in the cafe and had the Menu Proton special :)
There are so many things over there - it's a shame we're at such a distance. At least my fiancée-soon-to-be-wife, who's a high school science teacher, has a lot of Danish heritage - which might make a good excuse to visit. I trust you don't have to book campus tours or anything too far in advance? :)
We also picked up, some time ago, an odd little 'graphic novel' about Niels Bohr's life called Suspended In Language. I'd be surprised if they didn't sell it on campus - it was a mighty nifty book, something that belongs in a collection next to Gonicks' Cartoon History of the Universe :)
It's still bizarre to me that we still don't have any direct proof that there's an Oort cloud out there. Except for long-period comets, everything else we've discovered has been within so many degrees of the ecliptic.
Could be the same observability problem with dark matter (though dark energy is, IMO, a crock :). It could also be that there's no Oort cloud, but discs of material stretch out a lot further than we think, not just for solar systems, but perhaps for galaxies as well.
Who would have predicted the Kuiper belt?
I'm pretty glad to hear of your experience. The Copenhagen institute has a mythical quality for those of us looking at the last 100 years of science. Niels cast a pretty big shadow. I'm glad that it's still pretty open and free.
I've been following cosmology for ages, and the current mainstream ideas seem like an exercise in being exotic for exoticness' sake. I've been singularly unsurprised at information coming back from Spitzer and the like that we're still finding normal galaxies 13.3 billion light years away. I've been reading some of the material from the 30's and 40's, and quite frankly, we haven't addressed their concerns very well in the intervening 65+ years. But I digress :)
Quantum Mechanics is pretty amazing, all things considered. No matter what weird experiments have been thrown at it, including Einstein's objections, it just works. It's freaky and awe-inspiring that the universe has an utterly "invincible" underpinning that isn't about actual waves or particles of matter or energy, but probability. Do your probability wave math, run the experiment, and watch the statistics pile up. I must admit, I still don't know how to absorb the fact that you can get individual electrons seemingly "interfering with themselves".
It's a little embarrassing that we really have no idea what quantum mechanics means. If Nick Herbert's summary is still valid, we have four, completely separate mathematical ways of looking at quantum mechanics and eight major camps of interpretation. All of the mathematical means (Feynman's sum-over-histories, Heisenberg's matrices, etc.) are utterly indistinguishable. It's an embarrassment of riches in the 'possible explanations' department.
Personally, though, I'll take the options that don't require some airy-fairy "consciousness" as the only observer that can 'collapse the wave function', making consciousness mystical instead of an extremely complicated but theoretically understandable biological process, and options that don't prevent further questioning (I don't want any "the theory is all there is" bits like with, ironically named considering the open atmosphere, the Copenhagen interpretation :).
Nick Herbert's book, albeit some 20 years old now, is still excellent. I just finished it recently, and reviewed it on my blog.
It's a sobering thought that so many 'realities' could describe what's going on in quantum mechanics.
There are a few limitations to our lifespan. The Hayflick limit may be a driving factor. Body cells, with very few exceptions, have a limit on the number of divisions they can make. This may be related to the way that every time a cell divides, one of the daughter cells has a slightly shorter copy. The ends of the chromosome are telomeres, the aglets on our gene shoelaces.
Of course, many of our tissues divide more than others, and we're vulnerable to a weak point of failure, whether it be skin tissue (definitely a point of infection), blood supply, blood vessels or what have you.
There have been two major schools of thought about aging, and many points in-between. On one side, some think that aging is caused by an incredible number of small failures from separate causes, and to try to beat aging is doomed to fail on this alone. On the other side of the issue, there are those who believe one or perhaps two major items are at fault for aging, and that we can close to an Elixir of Youth. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.
I still highly recommend Michael D. West's book The Immortal Cell for an inside account of one search for a cure for aging. (He's also one of the co-authors of the hefty tome Principles of Cloning). Fascinating stuff, and definitely not the stuff of 'fringe' science.
...and you can scientifically investigate 'actual design'?
Intelligent Design, regardless of its appearance to stay above the fray, is not interested in the supposed designer being a Hindu god or goddess, or aliens, or robots. It is interested in an appearance of science as a second attempt to put a wedge in education to open the doors to Christianity in school.
Dembski can't help but have an agenda:
After having followed the activities of the creationist movement, and this is creationism rebadged, the key strategies are that the end justifies the means, everything must agree with Genesis, repeated misquoting of evolutionary proponents, deliberate misuses of terms and deliberate confusion of separate subjects and terms.
"Just a theory" mischaracterizes scientific theories; irreducible complexities, when disproven (like the Krebs cycle) just drive them to pull the next one out of their hat, and, in this particular case, they confuse natural selection and evolutionary theory with abiogenesis, the search for a non-biological origin of life.
Every piece of life on the face of this planet excluding viruses has DNA and ribosomes. These are complex in and of themselves, so they are extremely poor candidates for a non-miraculous origin of life. That, and the similarities and differences in ribosomal DNA (like reconstructing the original program in a fractured open source project gone wild) indicate a shared ancestor before that point.
Precursors lie in the area of conjecture. We cannot directly observe such precursors; DNA has been so incredibly successful that everything else has become food. Hence projects like this.
Criminy. ScienceAgainstEvolution has all the hallmarks of intellectual dishonesty that has become the creationist hallmark, with heaps of question-begging and snide, often mischaracterizing, rhetorical questions. Everything in bold in their Two Silver Anniversaries page typifies the approach.
To get back to the ID movement, we have a right to question the motives underneath, not simply address the surface questions that are designed to 'sound reasonable'. To do otherwise would be to like inviting Scientology's Narconon into schools because 'drugs are bad'. Or a good-looking control freak into bed :)
Oh no, the trouble isn't with everything receding. That's not what singles us out because it can easily be explained by everywhere expanding at once.
The 'shells' of which I speak make it looks like there are rough, intermittent spheres. Take a gander on the 'net for Tifft and either "spheres" or "quantized redshift".
Unlike simple running away in any direction you look, if the concentric spheres were 'real', then you couldn't actually go anywhere else in the universe and be in the center of the spheres.
I don't personally believe the spheres are really out there - we're not at the center of the danged universe :) I think it's an illusion caused by another mechanism, but unless there are additional redshift mechanisms apart from redshift due to velocity, there's not nearly enough you can attribute to "measurement error".
The "Fingers of God" (that long chains of celestial objects line up in 'ribbons' away from us) phenomenon is also something else that appears, apart from any expansion, to point at us. This has been 'explained away' by use of the Virial Theorem, but it requires a particular motion in clusters to be true.
So it's not all "raisins in the expanding pudding", as it were :)
*laugh* Oh my goodness - the disproof of God. That's a philosophical and logical minefield unto itself; a darn fine intellectual exercise, but you'd be surprised at what you run up against :)
I ran across an interesting snippet a while back on the subject of modern-day Gnostic Christianity, and this particular person was ranting up a storm against the fundamentalists who seem to basically want us to stop asking questions, and to revile science as a means of finding the truth. His view, which I found interesting (it resembles what I remember of the Gnostics in post-Roman times), was that you should not fetter the search for truth, because if God were out there, you'd eventually find it to be true from all the knowledge humankind eventually collected about the universe.
Actually, on the subject of proof versus Laws, is that even Laws are conditional, though they've been upgraded to near 100% certainty in local conditions.
The Law of Gravity, for example, holds within the solar system to a very fine degree, but there have been murmurs, even in the mainstream, about whether it might hold differently on the large scale. The excessive amount of 'missing matter' required to hold a galaxy together seems to be the main sticking point. The amount of conjecture when the Voyagers went "off course" was unexpected :)
As to whether or not science accepts non-disproven theories... actually, it does, but there's a pretty good reason for it. For more wonderful philosophy, here's an outline version of Kuhn's Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. The basic piece to get out of it is that science, when presented with a number of alternatives that seem impossible to decide between, decides on something, because then you actually have an explanation you can actually test against; throw the spaghetti at the wall and see if it sticks.
It takes quite a while to overturn things, because there's usually some way to explain it in the current theory, but there's usually some loss of internal consistency as observations come in.
Anyhow, Kuhn is kinda cool :)
Still early days on cosmology - Spitzer has been coming up with some new and very surprising things... stuff like neon being present in the same quantities in stars 10 billion light years away, which doesn't make sense as it stands, since neon is a secondary product of supernovas in BBT.
*laugh* Sounds like a darned fine physics teacher! My fiancée is actually a high school science teacher; dealing with the 'slowpokes' who frustrate everyone in the class is high art :) *laugh* I remember her story of dropping glycerin on a pile of KMn04, looking disappointed that nothing happened, then turning back to write things on the chalkboard... then, of course, it ignites, and she blithely pretends nothing's going on as the students are screaming. Teachers with a sense of humor are worth their weight in osmium :)
*laugh* I thought you were serious about the first two, but less so about dividing by the phase of the moon :)
(But, if Intelligent Design should get equal time in Biology, shouldn't Astrology get equal time in Astronomy?... *laugh* Here's your barf bag :)
What residual energy would that be, though?
The only residual energy I've heard of in BBT (and feel free to correct me on this) is the cosmic background radiation.
If it's CMB as residual energy, then that was a retrodiction, not a prediction. Most of the prominent guesses before it was measured were off by a factor of ten or more :) (e.g. ~50 Kelvins)
I'm not saying the Big Bang Theory can't explain things. It has to. But that doesn't imply that the particular explanation is really the correct one (it hinges on the theory it's a part of), or that the observed phenomena can't be used in a different manner in a different theory.
Take an extreme example: the "God Did It" theory. Why is there a CMB? Because God made it that way. Thus, it is explained. That doesn't follow that because there is a CMB, that God Did It.
Now, that's not falsifiable, which is what makes it irritating to science. However, in a nearly equivalent way, the explanation of CMB by Big Bang Theory is not falsifiable in some very important ways. What counter-evidence could prove the CMB was not caused by a Big Bang? They didn't stick their neck out on the too-smooth isotropy question, and now it's under revision or being ignored for the time being. That's actually a perfectly fine thing to do, but then you can't use the original phenomenon as proof.
That's the trap we have to watch out for here. Descriptive power does not equal predictive power.
Oh my god, it's a long way down from this soapbox. Sorry. *dizzy from the height* :)
The grandparent has a point. The assumption that the only, or at the very least major, reason for frequency change is motion, has to be made for today's mainstream cosmological position to work.
*laugh* There's no domino effect involved here! Even the odd people who refuse the validity of evolutionary theory don't, by and large, run off to NASA and scream that they'll never achieve orbit because their physics of gravity is wrong.
Radial velocities do seem to give Doppler shifts, so there's no reason to think that velocities don't give redshift. There are, however, a few odd cases which give very strange results if velocities are the only thing underlying redshift.
If we take galactic clusters, then either no matter which way we look, late-type (I believe this is the right way 'round) spirals group on the far side of the cluster and early-type on the near side. Are we at the center of the universe? Unlikely, but that's a possible implication of what we see if we don't admit the possibility of other causes of redshift.
Other oddities that merit investigation are the "K Effect", which is redshift in hot stars (unless all hot stars are running away from us), and the appearance of concentric "shells" around our galaxy in larger-scale structure.
I personally would hold the cosmological principle in higher regard than any particular current theory. That is to say, the universe is not pointing at us. Which is why I'm willing to say that the aforementioned assumption may not hold. Which could have profound implications.
And so on :)