if someone on Slashdot tells me that they bought these +50% efficient solar cells
I know you're exaggerating, but...never going to happen. The theoretical maximum efficiency on solar cells is 50%, which doesn't count losses from things like resistance in the transmission media and so forth.
Even NASA's newest, sexiest solar cell design is only about 22% efficient.
>>But [the Web] falls flat on its face for in-depth information
That's not true for all subjects.
Hmm. It could be that I've just not delved heavily enough into the Web for certain types of geeking. It would be technically very easy for a community of interested aviation or what-have-you geeks to create a strong web presence...but I tend to think it would take one very driven person to get the ball rolling, or for there to already be a strong community and lots of data in place, as in the case of newsgroups that have websites.
Most of the information I've sought through online sources has been technical or trivial in nature. (What is the lifetime throughput of an NSTAR ion engine? What was the name of the actor who played that guy in that movie?) The Web, especially, lends itself to this--you don't have to be creative or skilled to put up a website with technical specs you typed out of a textbook or full of quotations or famous poetry. I don't know how good the Internet is for substantive content in "fuzzy" subjects, like English lit or psychology--except that, if you're looking for the source of a quote or a line of poetry, all must worship at the altar of Google (whose handmaiden is Project Gutenberg).
The Web cannot be beat for current events. It's also a great source for directory information: phone numbers, locations, maps, and the like. But it falls flat on its face for in-depth information, unless you're looking for computer and related geekery in all 31 flavors.
Are you talking about USENET?
Great place to find an expert. On anything. This expert may even take the time to talk to you. Since the advent of Google archiving, it's become easier to search newsgroups for back posts--and there is a *lot* of good data passing through USENET.
Are you talking about P2P?
Right now, it's all pr0n and thr33z. I'm not sure this is what you're talking about when you say "information."
Are you talking about subscription-based database and index services, like LEXIS-NEXIS, CompendexWeb, PUBMED, and WorldCat?
These are where the professional and research quality information is on the Internet. They are useful, but expensive, and chances are you don't have access unless you are at a university or a company that pays for a subscription.
Are you talking about intranets?
These can be a source of good information in large companies and organizations. NASA has an excellent one, some of which they mirror to the Web where it's available to all, but the really spiffy stuff is only available to employees.
So to answer your question, I use the Web to follow the news, USENET for hobby interests, P2P for pretty much nothing, databases and intranets for some professional work.
But nothing beats dead trees for in-depth information--if you can find where it's been published. I went to my thesis advisor to tell him I couldn't find a paper that had been published only in conference proceedings from the 80's (it's notoriously hard to get your hands on conference proceedings), only to have him root through a file cabinet and hand them to me. This was in 2002. Professors are scary.
...are the instances of similar government overreaches that we *aren't* hearing about.
Transparency, tranparency, transparency. When a government, especially one theoretically existing by permission of the governed, can do things in secret and without accountability, be afraid.
Be even more afraid when your fellow citizens don't rise up against it.
Heh. If I'd let myself go on for a few more paragraphs, I would have started doing math and trying to make little ASCII orbital diagrams, and it would have gone from "+5 Interesting" to "-1 Truly Sad" real quick.;)
One of my thesis advisors is a technical consultant on Genesis. I heard this from *her* supervisor, who is one of the project leads.
Genesis is going to capture a bunch of particles, and return to Earth so that they can be analyzed. It has a lid which is open now, collecting ions and such, which will snap shut for the flight back to Earth and reentry. The spacecraft body is of a similar design to other missions, and the contractor only had to make minor changes to it for this mission.
Shortly after Genesis launched, a NASA employee asked a contractor how to they were going to open the lid to get the samples out. The contractor was confused, then alarmed after he found out that the NASA employee was serious. Turns out that there is no provision for getting the spacecraft open...the latches are on the inside of the lid, and spring-loaded. They snap into place, and are not designed to be opened.
So now NASA is working on ways to cut the aluminum latches that *don't* generate all kinds of heat, electricity, and/or aluminum powder to contaminate the samples....
Ion engines are a mature technology. They have existed since the 60's, and are currently used for stationkeeping on a great number of satellites. They performed far beyond expectations on NASA's Deep Space 1 mission in 1998, and are a logical and economical choice for any mission of relatively low mass where time is not a critical factor--which it is not in this case.
The reason ion engines are a good thing is because they are so efficient. But they also have their share of problems.
The figure of merit for rocket propulsion is specific impulse (Isp). It is a measure of unit thrust per unit mass of fuel consumed per unit time. Conventional (chemical) propulsion, such as solid rocket boosters, have an Isp in the 200 - 300 range. But they generate many many thousands of kilonewtons of thrust. That's why we use them for launching things out of gravity wells.
Ion engines, on the other hand, have Isps from 2000 - 3500 (though the higher end of that range is only test-stand stuff right now). They, however, produce only millinewtons of thrust, and cannot be used for fast orbit transfers or launches. But they can be made small. Very, very small, with correspondingly small amounts of fuel, which is pure joy for aerospace engineers trying to design robotic missions.
Unfortunately, they are also power-hungry little buggers. A single ion engine can use a kilowatt of power while running...and they must be running all the time to generate enough delta-v to have an effect on the course of a spacecraft. (Delta-v is the measurement of how much of a change in a velocity vector is necessary to effect the desired change in course, and mission designers begrudge every cm/s...every maneuver burns propellant, and there are no gas stations in space.) There are only two ways to get power in space right now: solar cells, and some form of nuclear decay. Only solar cells have a good enough power/mass ratio to run ion engines, and as missions proceed farther out from the Sun, array area must be bigger, which adds mass. It's a tricky balancing act.
For this mission, however, the craft will always be close enough to the sun to generate the power it needs fairly easily. (Except when it's in shadow, but that's why we have storage batteries.)
Ion propulsion is an old technology, incidentally. It's been around in some form or another since the 60's. It's only recently that it became economical, though.
I could go on for pages, but I'm unconvinced anyone wants to see that.;) I did my senior thesis on a solar electric propulsion Mars mission, and I find it to be far more interesting than most people seem to.
I have a friend who owns a Honda Insight. His record is 77 mpg, and he swears one day he's going to take out the passenger seat and spare tire and break 80 mpg. He is very happy with the Insight, and has not had any maintenance problems he's seen fit to share. Still, the Insight only seats two, and I wouldn't want to be in the Electric Rollerskate during an accident.
The Toyota Prius and Honda Civic hybrid get poorer mileage than the Insight. The Prius does better mileage-wise than the Civic, since it was specifically designed with a lighter body for the electric motor, while the Civic looks like a "real" car. Another friend who owns a Prius is quite happy with his choice, as well. For more geek cred, the Prius also has an in-dash computer that can show gas mileage and battery charge, and uses regenerative braking. The weird center console might be a turnoff, though.
Bear in mind, if anything does go wrong, expecially with the transmission, you are in for some expensive service. Hybrids aren't nearly as user-serviceable as pure ICE cars. Also, they list around $US5,000 (or more) higher than comparable regular cars (at least when I was looking), which will take a while to make up in savings on gas. If you're doing it for the environment, well, good for you.
Last, hybrids haven't been around long enough to have decent reliability statistics yet. But they're made by Honda and Toyota, so you're probably safe on that score.
For actual data, instead of anecdotes, you might want to go to your local library (where they keep the dead trees), and look at some back issues of car magazines. Consumer Reports also took a look at hybrids a while back.
He worked and continues to work hard on Linux, and then along comes a company claiming to own his work and the work of every other Linux developer. They won't show any proof, are obviously completely full of it, and yet still get reported as straight news in supposedly tech-savvy media sources.
Hell, I'd be in Utah trying to strangle board members with their own neckties, not just writing snarky open letters.
The education establishment...allow only Darwin's dogma to be taught in public schools. Polls indicate that a clear majority of U.S. tax-payers do not believe in evolution.
And they are right to do so. Science is not a matter of majority vote. Parents may fill their childrens' heads with whatever nonsense they like outside school, but science teachers have a responsibility to teach fact, not opinion. There is no disagreement among biological scientists that evolution is fact. There is some debate about the exact mechanisms...but that is how science progresses.
Scientists and educators who disbelieve in evolution often face discrimination and sorts of black-listing from the evolutionist "good ole boy" networks in academia and scientific circles. If a person doesn't fall in line with the evolutionist orthodoxy, they risk major damage to their career and professional reputation and sometimes personal reputation through smearing tactics and other dirty politics.
An institution of education is perfectly justified in discriminating against a biologist, geologist, or the like who does not accept evolution, and I would in fact consider that institution remiss if it did not do so. Science is not a matter of opinion or deeply-held belief.
Smear tactics, sadly, I believe, since I spent some time in academia. It's no one's business what non-scientist educators believe about evolution--until they pull some stunt like insisting upon "equal time for creationism."
It is wise to learn from your mistakes. It is wiser to learn from the mistakes of others.
Hee. Us godless heathens have more fun, though.
Who's your Daddy? Nietzsche?
Nah. My Dad's less crazy (no syphilis, doncha know) but just as cynical.
(We are never, ever going to agree on this, you realize?)
Really..."Answers In Genesis?" I knew about that site in high school, and it's as funny now as it was then.
No one's telling you what you can or can't believe. If people laugh at you because what you believe contradicts logic, that's your problem, but it sure ain't persecution.
And what have you got against atheism and licentiousness? Tried either one lately? They're both a blast.
Fair enough. But if you can't trust at least the very basic evidence of your senses, where are you? As support for our perceptions being accurate, science seems to be working fairly well. To put it in the form of a proof by contradiction:
Assume our perceptions are inaccurate.
Based on our observations and mathematical description of the behavior of electrons, we build a device called a cathode ray tube (CRT).
This CRT can be used to excite electrons in a phosphorus-doped glass sheet, generating recognizable patterns by algorithmic control of which portions of the glass to excite.
This combination of CRT and phosphorus-doped glass (a monitor) regularly reproduces these recognizable patterns.
If our perceptions were innacurate, the monitor would not work.
Thus, our perceptions cannot be innacurate.
(The above is nothing even approaching a real proof.)
It's a matter of taste. All three authors I mentioned have their flaws, but I brought them up because they did new things with SF, or at least put polish on old things. No one's saying you have to like 'em, but they are innovating.
And I really think you should give the Mars trilogy another chance. Once you get into the flashbacks of the trip out, it speeds up considerably. KSR paints an entire world and culture over a century of development. It's a phenomenal narrative accomplishment as well as being some of the hardest SF on the market.
But...I read Star Wars and Star Trek paperbacks, so feel free to ignore me. *deep shame*
Mr. Robinson (if that is in fact your *real* name--sounds like an alias to me. You writer-types are a shady lot):
"Mick of Time" is quite possibly the noblest pun ever penned, contested in my less-than-humble opinion only by Zelazny's "when the fit hit the Shan" and Asimov's "Pompey and Circumstance."
Well, I got a better offer to be a theater commander for the Brotherhood of Nod, but those jerks in the GDI kept completely destroying everything, so I quit and joined the Great Alliance. But no one in the army or the navy ever paid any attention to me; all they wanted to do was make smartass remarks. And all the Elves thought I was a lesbian.
So I guess I'm not really cut out for a military career.
(No, I haven't bought a PC game since high school, why?)
...they're not a government. They have no legal standing which would permit them to prosecute or pardon anyone for crimes.
Promising not to prefer civil charges is awfully, awfully magnanimous of our RIAA overlords, but it's not amnesty. And incidentally (pardon my native cynicism), but why do I doubt that the RIAA is willing to enter into a binding contract not to sue? Especially after you've been so kind as to provide them with your identity?
Like King Canute, they're trying to sweep back the tide.
Unlike King Canute, it's starting to look like they might be successful, at least on the short term.
I really want to see the data--has this trend he's upset about been going on long enough to actually be a trend? And has he picked up anything by Kim Stanley Robinson, Iain Banks, or David Brin lately? Society has taken a different turn than the Golden Age writers predicted, and our speculative fiction is mirroring this. SF isn't dying, Spider, it's just changing form.
(Flamebait: And I don't know why he's talking about "his" genre. The Callahan books aren't SF; they're Chicken Soup for the Geek's Soul.)
Agreed, in general principle. The people to whom you refer are not dealing with science, but with what they think science is. I don't see a way to correct that, but I still get annoyed when I see something modded up to "+5 Insightful" when it is patently "-1 Clearly Not Getting It." I still expect, despite all experience to the contrary, for the level of discourse on Slashdot to be higher than that. There's some faith for you.;)
I am so sick of hearing this. I am tired of being lectured on statistics and the weaknesses of the scientific method by people who evince no familiarity with either.
Science is a process. It is a method of attaching degrees of certainty to explanations of observed phenomena, of understanding our universe without bias or wishful thinking. The process has no ethical component, though the scientists who practice it do.
Unlike religion, science has no asserted dogma. If I so desire, I can follow every step in the chain from 2+2=4 through general relativity, and see, carefully footnoted, the areas where we think there needs to be further work, or we are not sure of our answers.
Unlike religion, science produces tangible results, like the penicillin that saved my life as a baby, or the computer I'm using to write this reply.
Unlike religionists, the only time scientists get stuffy when someone questions their data is when that someone has made no effort to understand the process, and is speaking from a position of obvious fallacy.
Unlike some other posters have asserted, you can prove a negative by contradiction (did it in high school), but insofar as science is concerned with proof, it doesn't deal in proofs in the geometrical sense, but of the statisical one--assigning percentages of certainty based on the goodness of the data. Scientific tests can be shown to have generality; that is, apply to larger groups than the test sample, otherwise, statistics would be a useless discipline.
So is the study valid? Can't tell from a Reuters article. Their methodology seems somewhat suspect. But no general interest journalist is going to report on control groups, selection methodology, or statistical analysis, and I'm not even close to interested enough to look up the actual paper.
But I've hied afield from my initial point, which is simply this: Science requires no faith...only hard work and an open mind. Maybe that's why religion is so popular?
Are you referring to the scientific method? That little thing which enabled us to claw our way out of the Dark Ages?
No one in the article is calling infrasound an "explanation" of haunting. The quoted scientists all use conditionals (emphasis mine): "some scienists.." "These results suggest..." They are looking for facts. I find what I can see of the study's methodology to be flawed (no apparent control group, attesting significance to a ~20% positive return), but I can't judge accurately from a single Reuters article. And if it turns out that the study isn't credible, it will be discarded and science will look elsewhere.
The reason the scientific community laughs at "fuzzy-headed tree-huggers" is because so very few of them propose testable, falsifiable hypotheses. All any scientist ever asks is "Show me the data." Show that the test is both reliable and valid. Show me a double-blind study with a proper control group.
What makes me cringe is that people are still spending money and time to "disprove" bogus phenomena like haunted houses and UFO abuductions.
(In the absence of any citation, I can't effectively refute your claims about cows or DU...but I doubt the debate on either issue is as "us vs. them" as you claim. I submit, as a side point, however, that cannibalism happens all the time in nature and is in no way "unnatural"...mantises do it, mice do it, male lions do it, chimps do it, hell, our ancestors did it. And maybe, just maybe, it's a bad idea to feed meat to herbivores?)
Not only a great novelist, but a pioneer in IP law.;)
(I just remembered while reading your post that the MST3k movie Delta Knights ripped off Citizen of the Galaxy so badly it hurts. I'm going to go be simultaneously annoyed and depressed that I actually remembered that now.)
Slashdot Mirror
if someone on Slashdot tells me that they bought these +50% efficient solar cells
I know you're exaggerating, but...never going to happen. The theoretical maximum efficiency on solar cells is 50%, which doesn't count losses from things like resistance in the transmission media and so forth.
Even NASA's newest, sexiest solar cell design is only about 22% efficient.
-Carolyn
>>But [the Web] falls flat on its face for in-depth information
That's not true for all subjects.
Hmm. It could be that I've just not delved heavily enough into the Web for certain types of geeking. It would be technically very easy for a community of interested aviation or what-have-you geeks to create a strong web presence...but I tend to think it would take one very driven person to get the ball rolling, or for there to already be a strong community and lots of data in place, as in the case of newsgroups that have websites.
Most of the information I've sought through online sources has been technical or trivial in nature. (What is the lifetime throughput of an NSTAR ion engine? What was the name of the actor who played that guy in that movie?) The Web, especially, lends itself to this--you don't have to be creative or skilled to put up a website with technical specs you typed out of a textbook or full of quotations or famous poetry. I don't know how good the Internet is for substantive content in "fuzzy" subjects, like English lit or psychology--except that, if you're looking for the source of a quote or a line of poetry, all must worship at the altar of Google (whose handmaiden is Project Gutenberg).
-Carolyn
Are you talking about the Web?
The Web cannot be beat for current events. It's also a great source for directory information: phone numbers, locations, maps, and the like. But it falls flat on its face for in-depth information, unless you're looking for computer and related geekery in all 31 flavors.
Are you talking about USENET?
Great place to find an expert. On anything. This expert may even take the time to talk to you. Since the advent of Google archiving, it's become easier to search newsgroups for back posts--and there is a *lot* of good data passing through USENET.
Are you talking about P2P?
Right now, it's all pr0n and thr33z. I'm not sure this is what you're talking about when you say "information."
Are you talking about subscription-based database and index services, like LEXIS-NEXIS, CompendexWeb, PUBMED, and WorldCat?
These are where the professional and research quality information is on the Internet. They are useful, but expensive, and chances are you don't have access unless you are at a university or a company that pays for a subscription.
Are you talking about intranets?
These can be a source of good information in large companies and organizations. NASA has an excellent one, some of which they mirror to the Web where it's available to all, but the really spiffy stuff is only available to employees.
So to answer your question, I use the Web to follow the news, USENET for hobby interests, P2P for pretty much nothing, databases and intranets for some professional work.
But nothing beats dead trees for in-depth information--if you can find where it's been published. I went to my thesis advisor to tell him I couldn't find a paper that had been published only in conference proceedings from the 80's (it's notoriously hard to get your hands on conference proceedings), only to have him root through a file cabinet and hand them to me. This was in 2002. Professors are scary.
-Carolyn
...are the instances of similar government overreaches that we *aren't* hearing about.
Transparency, tranparency, transparency. When a government, especially one theoretically existing by permission of the governed, can do things in secret and without accountability, be afraid.
Be even more afraid when your fellow citizens don't rise up against it.
-Carolyn
Heh. If I'd let myself go on for a few more paragraphs, I would have started doing math and trying to make little ASCII orbital diagrams, and it would have gone from "+5 Interesting" to "-1 Truly Sad" real quick. ;)
-Carolyn
One of my thesis advisors is a technical consultant on Genesis. I heard this from *her* supervisor, who is one of the project leads.
Genesis is going to capture a bunch of particles, and return to Earth so that they can be analyzed. It has a lid which is open now, collecting ions and such, which will snap shut for the flight back to Earth and reentry. The spacecraft body is of a similar design to other missions, and the contractor only had to make minor changes to it for this mission.
Shortly after Genesis launched, a NASA employee asked a contractor how to they were going to open the lid to get the samples out. The contractor was confused, then alarmed after he found out that the NASA employee was serious. Turns out that there is no provision for getting the spacecraft open...the latches are on the inside of the lid, and spring-loaded. They snap into place, and are not designed to be opened.
So now NASA is working on ways to cut the aluminum latches that *don't* generate all kinds of heat, electricity, and/or aluminum powder to contaminate the samples....
Truly an "oh, shit" moment in engineering.
-Carolyn
Ion engines are a mature technology. They have existed since the 60's, and are currently used for stationkeeping on a great number of satellites. They performed far beyond expectations on NASA's Deep Space 1 mission in 1998, and are a logical and economical choice for any mission of relatively low mass where time is not a critical factor--which it is not in this case.
-Carolyn
The reason ion engines are a good thing is because they are so efficient. But they also have their share of problems.
;) I did my senior thesis on a solar electric propulsion Mars mission, and I find it to be far more interesting than most people seem to.
The figure of merit for rocket propulsion is specific impulse (Isp). It is a measure of unit thrust per unit mass of fuel consumed per unit time. Conventional (chemical) propulsion, such as solid rocket boosters, have an Isp in the 200 - 300 range. But they generate many many thousands of kilonewtons of thrust. That's why we use them for launching things out of gravity wells.
Ion engines, on the other hand, have Isps from 2000 - 3500 (though the higher end of that range is only test-stand stuff right now). They, however, produce only millinewtons of thrust, and cannot be used for fast orbit transfers or launches. But they can be made small. Very, very small, with correspondingly small amounts of fuel, which is pure joy for aerospace engineers trying to design robotic missions.
Unfortunately, they are also power-hungry little buggers. A single ion engine can use a kilowatt of power while running...and they must be running all the time to generate enough delta-v to have an effect on the course of a spacecraft. (Delta-v is the measurement of how much of a change in a velocity vector is necessary to effect the desired change in course, and mission designers begrudge every cm/s...every maneuver burns propellant, and there are no gas stations in space.) There are only two ways to get power in space right now: solar cells, and some form of nuclear decay. Only solar cells have a good enough power/mass ratio to run ion engines, and as missions proceed farther out from the Sun, array area must be bigger, which adds mass. It's a tricky balancing act.
For this mission, however, the craft will always be close enough to the sun to generate the power it needs fairly easily. (Except when it's in shadow, but that's why we have storage batteries.)
Ion propulsion is an old technology, incidentally. It's been around in some form or another since the 60's. It's only recently that it became economical, though.
I could go on for pages, but I'm unconvinced anyone wants to see that.
-Carolyn
I notice slashdotters are exercising their usual incisive wit in the comments section of the Corp Law Blog.
Keep it up, guys. If the slashdot moderators don't find you funny, I'm sure the corporate lawyers will.
-Carolyn
I have a friend who owns a Honda Insight. His record is 77 mpg, and he swears one day he's going to take out the passenger seat and spare tire and break 80 mpg. He is very happy with the Insight, and has not had any maintenance problems he's seen fit to share. Still, the Insight only seats two, and I wouldn't want to be in the Electric Rollerskate during an accident.
The Toyota Prius and Honda Civic hybrid get poorer mileage than the Insight. The Prius does better mileage-wise than the Civic, since it was specifically designed with a lighter body for the electric motor, while the Civic looks like a "real" car. Another friend who owns a Prius is quite happy with his choice, as well. For more geek cred, the Prius also has an in-dash computer that can show gas mileage and battery charge, and uses regenerative braking. The weird center console might be a turnoff, though.
Bear in mind, if anything does go wrong, expecially with the transmission, you are in for some expensive service. Hybrids aren't nearly as user-serviceable as pure ICE cars. Also, they list around $US5,000 (or more) higher than comparable regular cars (at least when I was looking), which will take a while to make up in savings on gas. If you're doing it for the environment, well, good for you.
Last, hybrids haven't been around long enough to have decent reliability statistics yet. But they're made by Honda and Toyota, so you're probably safe on that score.
For actual data, instead of anecdotes, you might want to go to your local library (where they keep the dead trees), and look at some back issues of car magazines. Consumer Reports also took a look at hybrids a while back.
-Carolyn
He worked and continues to work hard on Linux, and then along comes a company claiming to own his work and the work of every other Linux developer. They won't show any proof, are obviously completely full of it, and yet still get reported as straight news in supposedly tech-savvy media sources.
Hell, I'd be in Utah trying to strangle board members with their own neckties, not just writing snarky open letters.
-Carolyn
The education establishment...allow only Darwin's dogma to be taught in public schools. Polls indicate that a clear majority of U.S. tax-payers do not believe in evolution.
And they are right to do so. Science is not a matter of majority vote. Parents may fill their childrens' heads with whatever nonsense they like outside school, but science teachers have a responsibility to teach fact, not opinion. There is no disagreement among biological scientists that evolution is fact. There is some debate about the exact mechanisms...but that is how science progresses.
Scientists and educators who disbelieve in evolution often face discrimination and sorts of black-listing from the evolutionist "good ole boy" networks in academia and scientific circles. If a person doesn't fall in line with the evolutionist orthodoxy, they risk major damage to their career and professional reputation and sometimes personal reputation through smearing tactics and other dirty politics.
An institution of education is perfectly justified in discriminating against a biologist, geologist, or the like who does not accept evolution, and I would in fact consider that institution remiss if it did not do so. Science is not a matter of opinion or deeply-held belief.
Smear tactics, sadly, I believe, since I spent some time in academia. It's no one's business what non-scientist educators believe about evolution--until they pull some stunt like insisting upon "equal time for creationism."
It is wise to learn from your mistakes. It is wiser to learn from the mistakes of others.
Hee. Us godless heathens have more fun, though.
Who's your Daddy? Nietzsche?
Nah. My Dad's less crazy (no syphilis, doncha know) but just as cynical.
(We are never, ever going to agree on this, you realize?)
-Carolyn
Really..."Answers In Genesis?" I knew about that site in high school, and it's as funny now as it was then.
No one's telling you what you can or can't believe. If people laugh at you because what you believe contradicts logic, that's your problem, but it sure ain't persecution.
And what have you got against atheism and licentiousness? Tried either one lately? They're both a blast.
-Carolyn, licentious atheist
Fair enough. But if you can't trust at least the very basic evidence of your senses, where are you? As support for our perceptions being accurate, science seems to be working fairly well. To put it in the form of a proof by contradiction:
Assume our perceptions are inaccurate.
Based on our observations and mathematical description of the behavior of electrons, we build a device called a cathode ray tube (CRT).
This CRT can be used to excite electrons in a phosphorus-doped glass sheet, generating recognizable patterns by algorithmic control of which portions of the glass to excite.
This combination of CRT and phosphorus-doped glass (a monitor) regularly reproduces these recognizable patterns.
If our perceptions were innacurate, the monitor would not work.
Thus, our perceptions cannot be innacurate.
(The above is nothing even approaching a real proof.)
-Carolyn
It's a matter of taste. All three authors I mentioned have their flaws, but I brought them up because they did new things with SF, or at least put polish on old things. No one's saying you have to like 'em, but they are innovating.
And I really think you should give the Mars trilogy another chance. Once you get into the flashbacks of the trip out, it speeds up considerably. KSR paints an entire world and culture over a century of development. It's a phenomenal narrative accomplishment as well as being some of the hardest SF on the market.
But...I read Star Wars and Star Trek paperbacks, so feel free to ignore me. *deep shame*
-Carolyn
Mr. Robinson (if that is in fact your *real* name--sounds like an alias to me. You writer-types are a shady lot):
"Mick of Time" is quite possibly the noblest pun ever penned, contested in my less-than-humble opinion only by Zelazny's "when the fit hit the Shan" and Asimov's "Pompey and Circumstance."
I salute you, sir.
P.S. It's only slander if it's false, pal.
-Carolyn
Well, I got a better offer to be a theater commander for the Brotherhood of Nod, but those jerks in the GDI kept completely destroying everything, so I quit and joined the Great Alliance. But no one in the army or the navy ever paid any attention to me; all they wanted to do was make smartass remarks. And all the Elves thought I was a lesbian.
So I guess I'm not really cut out for a military career.
(No, I haven't bought a PC game since high school, why?)
-Carolyn
...they're not a government. They have no legal standing which would permit them to prosecute or pardon anyone for crimes.
Promising not to prefer civil charges is awfully, awfully magnanimous of our RIAA overlords, but it's not amnesty. And incidentally (pardon my native cynicism), but why do I doubt that the RIAA is willing to enter into a binding contract not to sue? Especially after you've been so kind as to provide them with your identity?
Like King Canute, they're trying to sweep back the tide.
Unlike King Canute, it's starting to look like they might be successful, at least on the short term.
-Carolyn
I wish you were wrong.
-Carolyn
I really want to see the data--has this trend he's upset about been going on long enough to actually be a trend? And has he picked up anything by Kim Stanley Robinson, Iain Banks, or David Brin lately? Society has taken a different turn than the Golden Age writers predicted, and our speculative fiction is mirroring this. SF isn't dying, Spider, it's just changing form.
(Flamebait: And I don't know why he's talking about "his" genre. The Callahan books aren't SF; they're Chicken Soup for the Geek's Soul.)
-Carolyn
Agreed, in general principle. The people to whom you refer are not dealing with science, but with what they think science is. I don't see a way to correct that, but I still get annoyed when I see something modded up to "+5 Insightful" when it is patently "-1 Clearly Not Getting It." I still expect, despite all experience to the contrary, for the level of discourse on Slashdot to be higher than that. There's some faith for you. ;)
-Carolyn
I certainly enjoyed blowing up Rebel scum in TIE Fighter, but I didn't enlist in the Imperial Navy.
-Carolyn
"...science is a religion."
I am so sick of hearing this. I am tired of being lectured on statistics and the weaknesses of the scientific method by people who evince no familiarity with either.
Science is a process. It is a method of attaching degrees of certainty to explanations of observed phenomena, of understanding our universe without bias or wishful thinking. The process has no ethical component, though the scientists who practice it do.
Unlike religion, science has no asserted dogma. If I so desire, I can follow every step in the chain from 2+2=4 through general relativity, and see, carefully footnoted, the areas where we think there needs to be further work, or we are not sure of our answers.
Unlike religion, science produces tangible results, like the penicillin that saved my life as a baby, or the computer I'm using to write this reply.
Unlike religionists, the only time scientists get stuffy when someone questions their data is when that someone has made no effort to understand the process, and is speaking from a position of obvious fallacy.
Unlike some other posters have asserted, you can prove a negative by contradiction (did it in high school), but insofar as science is concerned with proof, it doesn't deal in proofs in the geometrical sense, but of the statisical one--assigning percentages of certainty based on the goodness of the data. Scientific tests can be shown to have generality; that is, apply to larger groups than the test sample, otherwise, statistics would be a useless discipline.
So is the study valid? Can't tell from a Reuters article. Their methodology seems somewhat suspect. But no general interest journalist is going to report on control groups, selection methodology, or statistical analysis, and I'm not even close to interested enough to look up the actual paper.
But I've hied afield from my initial point, which is simply this: Science requires no faith...only hard work and an open mind. Maybe that's why religion is so popular?
-Carolyn
"The same cynical BS..."
Are you referring to the scientific method? That little thing which enabled us to claw our way out of the Dark Ages?
No one in the article is calling infrasound an "explanation" of haunting. The quoted scientists all use conditionals (emphasis mine): "some scienists.." "These results suggest..." They are looking for facts. I find what I can see of the study's methodology to be flawed (no apparent control group, attesting significance to a ~20% positive return), but I can't judge accurately from a single Reuters article. And if it turns out that the study isn't credible, it will be discarded and science will look elsewhere.
The reason the scientific community laughs at "fuzzy-headed tree-huggers" is because so very few of them propose testable, falsifiable hypotheses. All any scientist ever asks is "Show me the data." Show that the test is both reliable and valid. Show me a double-blind study with a proper control group.
What makes me cringe is that people are still spending money and time to "disprove" bogus phenomena like haunted houses and UFO abuductions.
(In the absence of any citation, I can't effectively refute your claims about cows or DU...but I doubt the debate on either issue is as "us vs. them" as you claim. I submit, as a side point, however, that cannibalism happens all the time in nature and is in no way "unnatural"...mantises do it, mice do it, male lions do it, chimps do it, hell, our ancestors did it. And maybe, just maybe, it's a bad idea to feed meat to herbivores?)
-Carolyn
He also had the ideas for several inventions including the waterbed...
;)
Which cannot be patented because of Heinlein's prior art.
Not only a great novelist, but a pioneer in IP law.
(I just remembered while reading your post that the MST3k movie Delta Knights ripped off Citizen of the Galaxy so badly it hurts. I'm going to go be simultaneously annoyed and depressed that I actually remembered that now.)
-Carolyn