There's a matter-antimatter collider in production since the 1990's. It's called the Tevatron, it collides protons with antiprotons and it is in Illinois.
And this one is bigger and more powerful. Lets just hope it doesn't come with a 'Designed for windows 7' sticker on the side though.
Actually, not really. Neither future linear colliders are expected to have collisions with more than a factor of 2 to 3 more energy than the Tevatron.
First of all I think he was refering to the CitroÃn DS.
Secondly the point of the 2CV was to have no engine power. The 2CV stands for 2 horse power. The taxation of cars was based on their horse power rating, so a low number meant very little tax.
The Danish study was quite simple. Take people born at the same time at the same place and compare their life/personality. These children turned out to be just as diverse a bunch as anyone else.
I am sure you have found the predictions useful and matching your experiences. The problem is that you are not an impartial observer. you are a "victim" of the placebo effect. Astrology has never been able to to produce a statistically significant prediction under scientific experimentation, or in medical terms: the drug has not outperformed a placebo.
While astrology therefore cannot be called true in a scientific sense, I am sure there is truth to be found in astrology. In the same way that the bible is not true, but there are truths to be gained from it. Again in medical terms, astrology might be no better than a placebo, but a placebo can be better than nothing.
As a trained scientist I have learned to be skeptical of everything. I test and check as much as possible. I can therefore not believe in Astrology and will therefore not benefit from it.
Anyway I think we have exhausted the subject, have a great weekend.
The fact is that targeting ads works. It creates more clicks. So we could believe a survey or we could believe the imperical results. More people click targeted ads than non-targeted ads and therefore people would rather have targeted ads than non-targeted ads.
Of course people would rather not have ads at all. I would also prefer that everything was free in the supermarket, but that is not possible.
You cannot dismiss the stars as unimportant and just say that it is the planet's position that matters. Why? Because the only way we can measure a planet's position is by comparing it with the location of stars.
Furthermore the orbits themselves of both the earth and jupiter precesses. Giving even further problems for astrology's prediction.
Chinese astrology is based on the astronomy of the Han dynasty or about 400 years before the first sugestion of a heliocentric worldview. They still thought earth was in the center. They've also missed a couple of planets.
There is no explanation of how astrology could work, how does the planets and the stars interact with the infant? Why does a clump of stars that looks to be close together from eath have any significance, when we now know that some of them might be 1000s of light years further away than others. Take Orion's belt for example, most cultures on earth have grouped this striking three star constellation together(including western and chinese). The furthest star is 600 light years further away than the nearest.
As a student of science(physics/atronomy) I am by nature a skeptic, but I would be glad to change my mind if I saw significant result of a double blind test of astrology. But in the 2000 years astrology has existed it has never passed such a test. I am sure James Randi would also, and there's a cool million to the winner. Astrology being right would be amazing it would usher in a new era of physics. An entirely new force would be needed to explain the interaction.
An interesting experiment in astrology was done by danish television, although that was not their aim. They've been following the lives of the children born at midnight january 1st 2000. That is they were all born in a small country many at the same hospital at the same time. According to astrology these children should have similar character traits, and similar experiences. There is video documentation that this is not true.
Even if we start of by assuming that astrology was valid when it was created, that was thousand of years ago. The axis of the earth has precessed, the axis of the ecliptic has precessed and the stars have moved. Since chinese astrology is about 2000 years old, that would mean that we are actually born under a different zodiac sign than what tradition describes.
Astrology is valid insofar as it describes a set of wishes,fears and general advice that are recognizable to all humans. See for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dp2Zqk8vHw.
I think such long copyrights are a wonderful idea. But surely if life+70 years is so important to the profitability of creative art, it must also be so retroactively. If we are granting rights to dead people in the future we should also grant them to dead people in the past.
And now on behalf of the danish family of H.C.Andersen and the german family of the brothers Grimm I would like to charge the Disney corporation and all it's resellers for criminal copyright infringement (theft and piracy) to damages of 150'000$ pr instance and jail sentences all round.
That Disney can argue that such a long copyright term is necessary, when their own business model is and was to steal works that would be under copyright when using their own definition, is a display of a mind-bogling amount of hypocrisy.
My bessie is ever so happy with her spiderman lunchbox.
She did whinge a bit in the beginning. Something about hooves and oposable digits, but I never listen to the cow.
And newspaper owners wonder why they are losing business?
Sure. We're all turning to bloggers. For their investigative skills.
No. But, I get the same level of journalism for free.
The only paper I pay to read only comes out once a week. But it features much more indepth articles and they are better researched.
Harsh? No. Unoriginal and poorly constructed? Certainly.
Surely slashdot comments are not scientific papers or a Ph.D. disertation where originality matters?
If you must critisize, I would be endebted
to you if you could do so in a contructive manner.
What have you not understood? Where do you think my argument fails?
As for your last sentence, who are you to grant forgiveness? And to whom should they repent? God? FSM? or is there no one to which one can repent, as there is no Deity?
I am me to grant forgiveness. I can forgive and I can condemn. Not in the Jesus kind of way, where I can grant total forgiveness by divine fiat. But, I never said, nor implied that.
You don't need a deity to repent. Unless you mean to imply that morals can only be derived from divine mandate. At first I thought that maybe I had mistakenly used a wrong word(English is not my native language), but a quick look in the dictionary showed that I did indeed mean repent. Repenting requires no repentee just a repenter.
So why does the Pope drive around in an armored car? Certainly that must be extraordinary?
The catholic church is nothing but the ghost of the dead roman empire. Their ideas and opinions have no merit in modern society for two reasons. They base their morals on a doomsday cult's propaganda material instead of humanistic ideals from the enlightment spiced up with scientific knowledge. They do not derive their power from a social contract, a mandate from the masses and therefore have no place in a secular state.
I know this sounds harsh. But I cannot forgive an organization that throughout it's history has committed the most horrible crimes and have yet to repent, and to this day continue to create untold suffering throughout the world by their unenlighted positions.
Except it has been shown in a recent study publisghed in the american journal of medicine that a more expensive placebo works better. Not that using a more expensive material for the placebo is better, but if the patient thought it was a more expensive drug the results were better.
It all boils down to whether or not you believe in it. You and I who think that homeopathy, reflexology etc. is the waste product of male domesticated ungulates will likely get no benefits from it, and we would spend our money better on hookers and blow. But there are people who could benefit.
I don't believe that Real Evil(tm) always believe what it does is all good. It might think that in the end the result will be for the best. But not that all it's actions are good. Why did the Nazi try to keep the death camps secret, why did they invite Red Cross observers to special camps where the conditions where much better? Of course it will always try to project the image of respectability and goodness.
I see Dr. Ferris as Ayn Rand's comment on the russian leadership at the time, which had basically given up the pretense of being good, of trying to create the workers paradise. If Dr. Ferris is cartoon evil then it was because Stalin was cartoon evil. If you said something disparaging about a member of the party's wife's dress off to the Gulag. Did your people have cultural ties to non-Soviet nations, then you were moved thousands of miles to lessen the risk of rebellion.
My problem with Atlas Shrugged is that I don't understand the gold fetish of her utopian society. Her utopia is only interested in the extrinsic value of the work people could do, but gold is basically worthless it has very few industrial uses. I might have understood if she had chosen steel. It is as if she wanted some indestructible, eternal, fixed value to assign to work. That's not possible there are no intrinsic, eternal values. My work as a computer programmer/scientist is valuable to modern society, but worthless if there was a famine and i was need to work the fields. But, I believe that is a point that Frank Herbert makes much better than i ever could.
<quote><p>Maybe it was the placebo effect, who knows.</p></quote>
<p>Yes, maybe. And you know what? The placebo effect is measurable. Things which are more effective than that become medicine.</p></quote>
And? One thing we do know is that placebo is often measurably better than not doing anything. So taking natural medicine might work better than doing nothing.
I'm not advocating throwing away modern medicine in favour of natural medicine. Modern medicine is the best bet, but when that hasn't worked...
The "problem" with modern medicine is that it can only tell us about a medicines average efficacy across a broad group of people. So to ~90% of people penicilin is a cure for ~10% it makes no difference and to a small group penicillin is a poison. So it makes sense to adminster penicillin to people with an infection, but that is little consolation to the people for whom it is a poison. There must be "medicines" where this distribution is reversed so that it is only helpful to a small percentage. Should we then offer this as a general treatment? Of course not, but neither can it be completely dismissed.
Would his father have lived as long without his "alternative" medicine? Perhaps, but we cannot conclude either way with certainity, for we cannot do the experiment. Another possibility is that his father believed in it, and that the placebo effect kept him alive.
Until we can and are allowed to make mindless clones that we can experiment on, medicine will be a numbers game. It makes sense to bet on a full house, but sometimes you'll win with just a single jack.
Another issue that ties in with this is that many medicines are a more efficient on caucasians than other races. That's because most medicine is developed and tested in the western world. As far as I remember the effect is especilly strong among anti-depressants.
Except 10% of the road budget comes from federal funds (from ordinary taxes i.e. not gasoline taxes ). So the bikers have also help pay for 10% of the roads, and I have a hard time believing that bikes take up more than 10% of the wear on roads in Oregon.
Now I know the conditions are quite different in Oregon from in Copenhagen, Denmark. Here almost 40% of people commute by bike. A recent study(this June) showed that cycling created a net gain to the state of 1,2 DKK per km biked compared to a net loss of 0,7 DKK per km driven in a car. So investing in bike infrastructure is actually a sound business strategy.
But, if googles case against Germany(Whether a thumbnail is a "quote" under fair use(i know there is no such thing in specifically written in EU law, but everyone understands the term) or it is the same as the original image) fails in the EU courts, then we would not have to generate 32x32 we could make do with all 2*2 images(google makes images about 100*100px of pictures up to 3000x2000 so a factor ~10 seems resonable). Thats only 50 Petaabyte. That's 50'000 modern harddrives, so not completely infeasible, and it will be cheaper and cheaper to do.
Except you might not actually have taken his pair of sciccors. As another poster pointed out: You might have asked someone to borrow a pair of sciccors and that someone gave you a stolen pair of sciccors. How would you know?
The correct response would be to contact you to inform you that i believed the pair of sciccors to be my stolen pair. Give you chance to explain how you got it. Not run a nationwide smear campaign.
When you weight lift you could also try not to let your heart rest. I've been getting good results by not having a between sets pause. Plus it also works as an aerobic work out.
What you do is take ~10 reps of your maximum then take 10% less weight and continue immediately do this the number of sets you like then continue without pause with the next exercise. you'll quickly be as out of breath as if you were sprinting.
Why shouldn't german interest be the most important if they are the ones who are going to buy most of the gas?
I can understand the baltic states, Poland and Finland might be difficult countries to go through. They would probably for historic reasons(and not without cause) be problematic to deal with.
The question is also whether Sweden would be interested in having the pipeline running through their country if they have no use for it themselves. Or as a car analogy: You wouldn't let your neighbour put his driveway through your garden, even if he saved money doing so.
I'm sorry but I haven't really understood why you are opposed to the pipeline. Could you explain?
I believe it is because of our animal instinct to want heroes. We want the charismatic superman to come and save the day. We yearn for the ability to match his powers. To solve whatever problem we encounter with the wave of a hand. That is what sportstars, celebrities etc. are selling. The magic.
Science is diametrically opposite. It says there are no easy solutions. Science requires years of dedication, patience, hard work, and failures from a large number of people to create results. There is nothing romantic about that.
What we should be celebrating is the end result. So what if Usain Bolt can run a 100 m in just under 10s, that's worth nothing. The real heroes are the german engineers and workers that have invented and built my car that allows any person to go the same distance in half the time.
A friendly hello from Denmark another of the world's small countries. I've always felt an inexplicable kinship with new zealanders and the dutch. I've never been to either country, but I just have this feeling that they are quite similar to Denmark. Small countries where the people are perfectly happy to lead quiet lives out of the lime light of the world stage and yet producing a large amount of culture and research compared to their size.
I guess i'm trying to say that there are many ways for a country to succeed.
And, it would solve the funding problem, and that scientist are seen as arrogant.
"I shan't even endeavour to give you the slightest idea of what I am working on, for it's complexity is so far above your abilities that the mere thought is ridiculous. Now give me a huge pile of money and sit quietly in the corner and stare in amazement at my wonderous cranial capacity."
Slashdot Mirror
There's a matter-antimatter collider in production since the 1990's. It's called the Tevatron, it collides protons with antiprotons and it is in Illinois.
And this one is bigger and more powerful. Lets just hope it doesn't come with a 'Designed for windows 7' sticker on the side though.
Actually, not really. Neither future linear colliders are expected to have collisions with more than a factor of 2 to 3 more energy than the Tevatron.
How is that not more powerful?
First of all I think he was refering to the CitroÃn DS. Secondly the point of the 2CV was to have no engine power. The 2CV stands for 2 horse power. The taxation of cars was based on their horse power rating, so a low number meant very little tax.
The Life of Brian is especially worth a second view if you saw it when you were younger.
I'm not going to bother then. I saw it when I was older.
The Danish study was quite simple. Take people born at the same time at the same place and compare their life/personality. These children turned out to be just as diverse a bunch as anyone else.
I am sure you have found the predictions useful and matching your experiences. The problem is that you are not an impartial observer. you are a "victim" of the placebo effect. Astrology has never been able to to produce a statistically significant prediction under scientific experimentation, or in medical terms: the drug has not outperformed a placebo.
While astrology therefore cannot be called true in a scientific sense, I am sure there is truth to be found in astrology. In the same way that the bible is not true, but there are truths to be gained from it. Again in medical terms, astrology might be no better than a placebo, but a placebo can be better than nothing.
As a trained scientist I have learned to be skeptical of everything. I test and check as much as possible. I can therefore not believe in Astrology and will therefore not benefit from it.
Anyway I think we have exhausted the subject, have a great weekend.
The fact is that targeting ads works. It creates more clicks. So we could believe a survey or we could believe the imperical results. More people click targeted ads than non-targeted ads and therefore people would rather have targeted ads than non-targeted ads.
Of course people would rather not have ads at all. I would also prefer that everything was free in the supermarket, but that is not possible.
A little note on surveys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gMcZic1d4U
You cannot dismiss the stars as unimportant and just say that it is the planet's position that matters. Why? Because the only way we can measure a planet's position is by comparing it with the location of stars.
Furthermore the orbits themselves of both the earth and jupiter precesses. Giving even further problems for astrology's prediction.
Chinese astrology is based on the astronomy of the Han dynasty or about 400 years before the first sugestion of a heliocentric worldview. They still thought earth was in the center. They've also missed a couple of planets.
There is no explanation of how astrology could work, how does the planets and the stars interact with the infant? Why does a clump of stars that looks to be close together from eath have any significance, when we now know that some of them might be 1000s of light years further away than others. Take Orion's belt for example, most cultures on earth have grouped this striking three star constellation together(including western and chinese). The furthest star is 600 light years further away than the nearest.
As a student of science(physics/atronomy) I am by nature a skeptic, but I would be glad to change my mind if I saw significant result of a double blind test of astrology. But in the 2000 years astrology has existed it has never passed such a test. I am sure James Randi would also, and there's a cool million to the winner. Astrology being right would be amazing it would usher in a new era of physics. An entirely new force would be needed to explain the interaction.
An interesting experiment in astrology was done by danish television, although that was not their aim. They've been following the lives of the children born at midnight january 1st 2000. That is they were all born in a small country many at the same hospital at the same time. According to astrology these children should have similar character traits, and similar experiences. There is video documentation that this is not true.
Astrology is valid insofar as it describes a set of wishes,fears and general advice that are recognizable to all humans. See for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dp2Zqk8vHw.
I think such long copyrights are a wonderful idea. But surely if life+70 years is so important to the profitability of creative art, it must also be so retroactively. If we are granting rights to dead people in the future we should also grant them to dead people in the past.
And now on behalf of the danish family of H.C.Andersen and the german family of the brothers Grimm I would like to charge the Disney corporation and all it's resellers for criminal copyright infringement (theft and piracy) to damages of 150'000$ pr instance and jail sentences all round.
That Disney can argue that such a long copyright term is necessary, when their own business model is and was to steal works that would be under copyright when using their own definition, is a display of a mind-bogling amount of hypocrisy.
My bessie is ever so happy with her spiderman lunchbox. She did whinge a bit in the beginning. Something about hooves and oposable digits, but I never listen to the cow.
And newspaper owners wonder why they are losing business?
Sure. We're all turning to bloggers. For their investigative skills.
No. But, I get the same level of journalism for free. The only paper I pay to read only comes out once a week. But it features much more indepth articles and they are better researched.
Harsh? No. Unoriginal and poorly constructed? Certainly.
Surely slashdot comments are not scientific papers or a Ph.D. disertation where originality matters?
If you must critisize, I would be endebted to you if you could do so in a contructive manner. What have you not understood? Where do you think my argument fails?
As for your last sentence, who are you to grant forgiveness? And to whom should they repent? God? FSM? or is there no one to which one can repent, as there is no Deity?
I am me to grant forgiveness. I can forgive and I can condemn. Not in the Jesus kind of way, where I can grant total forgiveness by divine fiat. But, I never said, nor implied that.
You don't need a deity to repent. Unless you mean to imply that morals can only be derived from divine mandate. At first I thought that maybe I had mistakenly used a wrong word(English is not my native language), but a quick look in the dictionary showed that I did indeed mean repent. Repenting requires no repentee just a repenter.
So why does the Pope drive around in an armored car? Certainly that must be extraordinary?
The catholic church is nothing but the ghost of the dead roman empire. Their ideas and opinions have no merit in modern society for two reasons. They base their morals on a doomsday cult's propaganda material instead of humanistic ideals from the enlightment spiced up with scientific knowledge. They do not derive their power from a social contract, a mandate from the masses and therefore have no place in a secular state.
I know this sounds harsh. But I cannot forgive an organization that throughout it's history has committed the most horrible crimes and have yet to repent, and to this day continue to create untold suffering throughout the world by their unenlighted positions.
Except it has been shown in a recent study publisghed in the american journal of medicine that a more expensive placebo works better. Not that using a more expensive material for the placebo is better, but if the patient thought it was a more expensive drug the results were better.
It all boils down to whether or not you believe in it. You and I who think that homeopathy, reflexology etc. is the waste product of male domesticated ungulates will likely get no benefits from it, and we would spend our money better on hookers and blow. But there are people who could benefit.
I don't believe that Real Evil(tm) always believe what it does is all good. It might think that in the end the result will be for the best. But not that all it's actions are good. Why did the Nazi try to keep the death camps secret, why did they invite Red Cross observers to special camps where the conditions where much better? Of course it will always try to project the image of respectability and goodness.
I see Dr. Ferris as Ayn Rand's comment on the russian leadership at the time, which had basically given up the pretense of being good, of trying to create the workers paradise. If Dr. Ferris is cartoon evil then it was because Stalin was cartoon evil. If you said something disparaging about a member of the party's wife's dress off to the Gulag. Did your people have cultural ties to non-Soviet nations, then you were moved thousands of miles to lessen the risk of rebellion.
My problem with Atlas Shrugged is that I don't understand the gold fetish of her utopian society. Her utopia is only interested in the extrinsic value of the work people could do, but gold is basically worthless it has very few industrial uses. I might have understood if she had chosen steel. It is as if she wanted some indestructible, eternal, fixed value to assign to work. That's not possible there are no intrinsic, eternal values. My work as a computer programmer/scientist is valuable to modern society, but worthless if there was a famine and i was need to work the fields. But, I believe that is a point that Frank Herbert makes much better than i ever could.
<quote><p>Maybe it was the placebo effect, who knows.</p></quote>
<p>Yes, maybe. And you know what? The placebo effect is measurable. Things which are more effective than that become medicine.</p></quote>
And? One thing we do know is that placebo is often measurably better than not doing anything. So taking natural medicine might work better than doing nothing.
I'm not advocating throwing away modern medicine in favour of natural medicine. Modern medicine is the best bet, but when that hasn't worked...
The "problem" with modern medicine is that it can only tell us about a medicines average efficacy across a broad group of people. So to ~90% of people penicilin is a cure for ~10% it makes no difference and to a small group penicillin is a poison. So it makes sense to adminster penicillin to people with an infection, but that is little consolation to the people for whom it is a poison. There must be "medicines" where this distribution is reversed so that it is only helpful to a small percentage. Should we then offer this as a general treatment? Of course not, but neither can it be completely dismissed.
Would his father have lived as long without his "alternative" medicine? Perhaps, but we cannot conclude either way with certainity, for we cannot do the experiment. Another possibility is that his father believed in it, and that the placebo effect kept him alive.
Until we can and are allowed to make mindless clones that we can experiment on, medicine will be a numbers game. It makes sense to bet on a full house, but sometimes you'll win with just a single jack.
Another issue that ties in with this is that many medicines are a more efficient on caucasians than other races. That's because most medicine is developed and tested in the western world. As far as I remember the effect is especilly strong among anti-depressants.
Except 10% of the road budget comes from federal funds (from ordinary taxes i.e. not gasoline taxes ). So the bikers have also help pay for 10% of the roads, and I have a hard time believing that bikes take up more than 10% of the wear on roads in Oregon.
Now I know the conditions are quite different in Oregon from in Copenhagen, Denmark. Here almost 40% of people commute by bike. A recent study(this June) showed that cycling created a net gain to the state of 1,2 DKK per km biked compared to a net loss of 0,7 DKK per km driven in a car. So investing in bike infrastructure is actually a sound business strategy.
You don't have Article 1 section 8 ?
But, if googles case against Germany(Whether a thumbnail is a "quote" under fair use(i know there is no such thing in specifically written in EU law, but everyone understands the term) or it is the same as the original image) fails in the EU courts, then we would not have to generate 32x32 we could make do with all 2*2 images(google makes images about 100*100px of pictures up to 3000x2000 so a factor ~10 seems resonable). Thats only 50 Petaabyte. That's 50'000 modern harddrives, so not completely infeasible, and it will be cheaper and cheaper to do.
Except you might not actually have taken his pair of sciccors. As another poster pointed out:
You might have asked someone to borrow a pair of sciccors and that someone gave you a stolen pair of sciccors. How would you know?
The correct response would be to contact you to inform you that i believed the pair of sciccors to be my stolen pair. Give you chance to explain how you got it. Not run a nationwide smear campaign.
When you weight lift you could also try not to let your heart rest. I've been getting good results by not having a between sets pause. Plus it also works as an aerobic work out.
What you do is take ~10 reps of your maximum then take 10% less weight and continue immediately do this the number of sets you like then continue without pause with the next exercise. you'll quickly be as out of breath as if you were sprinting.
Why shouldn't german interest be the most important if they are the ones who are going to buy most of the gas?
I can understand the baltic states, Poland and Finland might be difficult countries to go through. They would probably for historic reasons(and not without cause) be problematic to deal with.
The question is also whether Sweden would be interested in having the pipeline running through their country if they have no use for it themselves.
Or as a car analogy:
You wouldn't let your neighbour put his driveway through your garden, even if he saved money doing so.
I'm sorry but I haven't really understood why you are opposed to the pipeline. Could you explain?
I believe it is because of our animal instinct to want heroes. We want the charismatic superman to come and save the day. We yearn for the ability to match his powers. To solve whatever problem we encounter with the wave of a hand. That is what sportstars, celebrities etc. are selling. The magic.
Science is diametrically opposite. It says there are no easy solutions. Science requires years of dedication, patience, hard work, and failures from a large number of people to create results. There is nothing romantic about that.
What we should be celebrating is the end result. So what if Usain Bolt can run a 100 m in just under 10s, that's worth nothing. The real heroes are the german engineers and workers that have invented and built my car that allows any person to go the same distance in half the time.
A friendly hello from Denmark another of the world's small countries.
I've always felt an inexplicable kinship with new zealanders and the dutch.
I've never been to either country, but I just have this feeling that they are
quite similar to Denmark. Small countries where the people are perfectly
happy to lead quiet lives out of the lime light of the world stage and
yet producing a large amount of culture and research compared to their size.
I guess i'm trying to say that there are many ways for a country to succeed.
And, it would solve the funding problem, and that scientist are seen as arrogant.
"I shan't even endeavour to give you the slightest idea of what I am working on, for it's complexity is so far above your abilities that the mere thought is ridiculous. Now give me a huge pile of money and sit quietly in the corner and stare in amazement at my wonderous cranial capacity."