FWIW, the story talks about "Linux Market Share" of netbook sales. Given that "China, Singapore, and "Hongkong"" have a much larger combined population than the US, availability of the devices under discussion in those markets *does* have the potential to significantly affect "Linux Market Share" of netbook sales.
To make a bad analogy, let's suppose that we had a story posted on Slashdot that claimed "In Korea, only old people use email.". Would it then be at all relevant for you to say "Show me a young person "in the US" who doesn't use email, or don't post the story?" No. Nor is it relevant now to gripe about non-availability "in the US" of a device which is purported to have some percentage of the *worldwide* market.
One year of design energy running. At 14 TeV and design luminosity, the LHC will deliver 10/fb of data to each experiment per year. Either CMS or ATLAS can discover the Higgs at 5 sigma across nearly the entire available mass range with 10/fb, and with much less data for many masses. In combination (like CDF and D0 do now), it would take even less data for ATLAS and CMS to discover it together.
Of course, that's assuming that commissioning goes well in the next year. I believe the LHC is currently on schedule to come up to design specs in about a year from now. So we should expect to see a Higgs discovery paper sometime in the 2-2.5 year timeframe (allowing time for the data to be validated and the analyses to be completed).
To clarify: If MBHs from cosmic rays destroy astronomical bodies routinely enough that we should be worried, then we should expect to observe at least a decent number of black holes with masses below the Chandrasekhar limit (1.4 solar masses), simply because there are plenty of stars (like our sun) with masses below that limit. It appears, based on the spectrum of masses that we have been able to observe, that stellar mass black holes form via gravitational collapse, and specifically not through consumption by micro black holes. HTH.
The argument goes like this: There are plenty of cosmic rays which impact our atmosphere, the other planets in the solar system, the sun, other stars, everything, with energies across a huge spectrum, including LHC energies. Either the LHC will produce MBH or it will not. If it will, then cosmic rays also produce MBH, and do so without destroying any of the things we can see in the sky, so MBH from the LHC would similarly not destroy the earth. If the LHC will not produce MBH, then we have nothing to worry about in that regard anyway.
This argument works for just about any Earth destroying LHC scenario, except, I suppose, the time traveling killer Higgs;)
an analogy with the (marginalized, demonized) economists who warned of a coming economic collapse in 2007.
Great. This argument boils down to "Someone who we were told was wrong turned out to be right. Therefore, this other person who we are told is wrong (and by extension everyone who we are told is wrong) must also be right." I have no idea whether or not these whistleblowers are correct or not, but this "argument" by analogy is worse than useless, because it encourages fuzzy thinking.
I've been hesitant to jump into this discussion, but I will here. Which is preferable to you? To have a large class of people who are not well suited to do any kind of useful work, but who are supported by society (which means that, if you can do useful work and earn a wage, a much smaller percentage of the work you do goes toward making you happy in whatever way you see fit)? Or to simply gradually train up the culture of the current working class so that their children are better educated (and better able to be educated) and able to take part in society?
Your argument for health care run by the federal government seems to be that the former is inevitable. I don't believe that it is. This will probably quickly get us into a "nature vs. nuture" debate, since you seem to implicitly claim that the children of those who are not particularly good thinkers will also be not particularly good thinkers. A culture that says that being smart is OK, and that teaches its children early on how to think and how to learn, provides a much bigger boost to intelligence than almost any variance in genetics reduces it, IMO. So, if we don't need to support a large class of people whose usefulness has disappeared, do we still need health care run by the federal government?
N.B. I am making a careful distinction between socialized health care and federally socialized health care, as there are other ways to do it. There are states, and municipalities, and just generic groups of people getting together (also known as private companies).
Well shoot. You got us all figured out. We're all just a bunch of charlatan priests. I guess we'll just give up and go home now.
You want scientists to consider their theories falsified, question their premises, and come up with new ideas, eh? OK, when I find that galactic rotation curves don't line up with what I've predicted, I'll consider my theories (standard model with, as best we can manage, general relativity) falsified. I'll question my premises (for instance, the premise that I know exactly what particles exist in the universe). I'll come up with some new ideas (for instance, that there might be some type of particle that I don't know about). Looks OK so far, right? At what point do you have an objection to this?
One objection that I can see is that you might think that no other avenues of investigation have been explored. However, they have. Instead of questioning the standard model (giving us dark matter), we could question general relativity. This gives us a theory called MOND. It doesn't really work very well, but a lot of very smart people spent a great deal of time and effort investigating it.
In the end, in order to be a good scientist, you've got to come full circle. You take all the new ideas (new theories) that you've come up with, and you make predictions with them. Turns out that dark matter predicts something different from, say, MOND for a collision between two galaxy clusters which contain gas, stars, and dark matter. Well, we found such a collision (Bullet Cluster), and dark matter made the correct prediction, whereas MOND made the wrong prediction.
But that's not all. When you start to enumerate all the properties that dark matter ought to have in order to fit what we've observed in galactic rotation curves, the bullet cluster, etc, it turns out that there are not too many different ways in which to fit dark matter onto the standard model. And those ways in general predict different things about what astroparticle experiments like Fermi, ICECUBE, etc should see. Give it a few (~10) years, and these experiments will either have indirectly observed dark matter (and the characteristics of that observation will narrow down the particular type of dark matter dramatically), or they will have ruled out a large number of the candidate dark matter models, leaving even fewer. Give it long enough, and we'll have either made the indirect observation or ruled out all the models.
If we rule out all the models, then it's back to the drawing board. We'd have a falsified theory, we'd question our premises, and we'd come up with some new ideas. But until then, dark matter is a very good avenue for investigation. You shouldn't "believe" in it until it's been observed, but neither should you claim it's bad science. It isn't.
FWIW, I don't really expect to convince you of this, as you seem to be quite firmly decided that it is bad science, even though it fits your apparent criteria for what science should be. But hopefully I can prevent others who read both of our comments from being infected by you.
A V6 is definitely not a "big block" engine. At any rate, it certainly wasn't when the phrase "big block" originated. Not even all V8s were/are "big blocks". source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Big-Block_engine I'm not a big-block aficionado either. My car (1993) has a V6, but if I were buying a new car, I'd expect to find that lighter, smaller, more modern engines could put out more than enough power for me.
As far as typing odd symbols goes, here's my.xmodmaprc for anyone who wants it. It lets me type in greek symbols, and a few other things, by making the caps lock (original function: worthless) into a new shift key:
! first set caps lock to be a group shift key
keycode 66 = Mode_switch
! Now set up all the keys: first two are the normal qwerty en_US keys, 3rd and 4th are greek characters (or others)
keysym a = a A Greek_alpha Greek_ALPHA
keysym b = b B Greek_beta Greek_BETA
keysym c = c C Greek_psi Greek_PSI
keysym d = d D Greek_delta Greek_DELTA
! there exists
keysym e = e E Greek_epsilon 0x01002203
keysym f = f F Greek_phi Greek_PHI
keysym g = g G Greek_gamma Greek_GAMMA
!hbar
keysym h = h H Greek_eta 0x0100210F
! set ownership
keysym i = i I Greek_iota 0x01002208
keysym j = j J Greek_xi Greek_XI
keysym k = k K Greek_kappa Greek_KAPPA
keysym l = l L Greek_lamda Greek_LAMDA
keysym m = m M Greek_mu Greek_MU
keysym n = n N Greek_nu Greek_NU
keysym o = o O Greek_omicron Greek_OMICRON
keysym p = p P Greek_pi Greek_PI
! partial, del
keysym q = q Q 0x01002202 0x01002207
keysym r = r R Greek_rho Greek_RHO
keysym s = s S Greek_sigma Greek_SIGMA
! dagger
keysym t = t T Greek_tau 0x01002020
keysym u = u U Greek_theta Greek_THETA
keysym v = v V Greek_omega Greek_OMEGA
! times
keysym x = x X Greek_chi 0x010000D7
keysym y = y Y Greek_upsilon Greek_UPSILON
keysym w = w W Greek_finalsmallsigma Greek_SIGMA
! cdot
keysym period = period greater 0x010022C5
!infinity
keysym 8 = 8 asterisk 0x0100221E
! equiv
keysym equal = equal plus 0x01002261
Maybe you don't need as much greek, and instead need more random mathematical symbols. Easy to change things out. The hex codes are 0x01######, where ###### is the unicode hex code for the symbol. In general, with the ucs package, LaTeX understands these.
An extremely careful analysis would probably set much more stringent bounds. We (scientists) don't always have time to be that careful, so we generally go with much coarser estimates of uncertainties and the like, resulting in very conservative bounds.
One interesting thing that stood out is they used the assumption that the effect of quantum gravity would be proportional to the energy of the light; is this what the theories suggested or is this another case of science getting lost in the translation to newspapers?
As far as I understand from my colleagues who worked on this analysis (now departed for other groups/institutions), the theories of quantum gravity which predict a linear relationship between photon energy and propagation speed are the simplest to test. There are other theories, and they are worth testing too, and some of them would no doubt also be falsified by the Fermi data, but the analysis to do so is more difficult and more complicated, so nobody has done it yet.
In short,.9s is well within the uncertainty on the measurement, and from that uncertainty, you can decide which class of quantum gravity theories your experiment is sensitive to. If you had a theory that said the deviation should be.000001s at these energies, then this experiment would never be able to say anything about that theory. But we have otherwise good theories of quantum gravity that claim the deviation at these energies should be much larger than the experimental uncertainty. This experiment falsifies those theories.
Credentials: Two guys in my group (CDF and Fermi) have worked on this very analysis. One of them worked on it just for this past summer (and didn't get too far, really), and the other used it for his thesis (graduated last summer).
Redbox is already being sued by and suing all the major studios, so I think they don't really care too much. But then again I'm certainly no expert on this. What little knowledge I have here is secondhand.
He has to actually drive to each of them. I'm not sure that he doesn't have his underlings help now that he has underlings, but last time I was in town, he was doing it all himself.
My brother in law works for redbox, and sure enough, every time a new major film is released to DVD, he goes to every walmart in his area (and we're not talking just one county here) and purchases anywhere from several hundred to a couple thousand copies, starting at midnight. He then takes them home and one by one puts them into non studio-branded cases, then goes out and stocks the redbox machines he manages.
Slashdot Mirror
"You can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead, code." What were we doing again?
FWIW, the story talks about "Linux Market Share" of netbook sales. Given that "China, Singapore, and "Hongkong"" have a much larger combined population than the US, availability of the devices under discussion in those markets *does* have the potential to significantly affect "Linux Market Share" of netbook sales.
To make a bad analogy, let's suppose that we had a story posted on Slashdot that claimed "In Korea, only old people use email.". Would it then be at all relevant for you to say "Show me a young person "in the US" who doesn't use email, or don't post the story?" No. Nor is it relevant now to gripe about non-availability "in the US" of a device which is purported to have some percentage of the *worldwide* market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation_(helicopter) Au contraire, mon bon sieur.
It is about 5.2 × 10^-23 miles. http://www.google.com/search?q=hbar+*+c+%2F+(2.36+TeV+)+in+miles. Yes physicists really divide hbar*c by energy to get length. It's a useful thing to do sometimes.
FWIW, Tevatron is 99.99995% of c, and LHC at design energies will be 99.9999991% of c.
One year of design energy running. At 14 TeV and design luminosity, the LHC will deliver 10/fb of data to each experiment per year. Either CMS or ATLAS can discover the Higgs at 5 sigma across nearly the entire available mass range with 10/fb, and with much less data for many masses. In combination (like CDF and D0 do now), it would take even less data for ATLAS and CMS to discover it together.
Of course, that's assuming that commissioning goes well in the next year. I believe the LHC is currently on schedule to come up to design specs in about a year from now. So we should expect to see a Higgs discovery paper sometime in the 2-2.5 year timeframe (allowing time for the data to be validated and the analyses to be completed).
To clarify: If MBHs from cosmic rays destroy astronomical bodies routinely enough that we should be worried, then we should expect to observe at least a decent number of black holes with masses below the Chandrasekhar limit (1.4 solar masses), simply because there are plenty of stars (like our sun) with masses below that limit. It appears, based on the spectrum of masses that we have been able to observe, that stellar mass black holes form via gravitational collapse, and specifically not through consumption by micro black holes. HTH.
mumble mumble Brute Squad mumble mumble!
The argument goes like this: There are plenty of cosmic rays which impact our atmosphere, the other planets in the solar system, the sun, other stars, everything, with energies across a huge spectrum, including LHC energies. Either the LHC will produce MBH or it will not. If it will, then cosmic rays also produce MBH, and do so without destroying any of the things we can see in the sky, so MBH from the LHC would similarly not destroy the earth. If the LHC will not produce MBH, then we have nothing to worry about in that regard anyway.
;)
This argument works for just about any Earth destroying LHC scenario, except, I suppose, the time traveling killer Higgs
I cast magic missile! ... at the DOSness.
an analogy with the (marginalized, demonized) economists who warned of a coming economic collapse in 2007.
Great. This argument boils down to "Someone who we were told was wrong turned out to be right. Therefore, this other person who we are told is wrong (and by extension everyone who we are told is wrong) must also be right." I have no idea whether or not these whistleblowers are correct or not, but this "argument" by analogy is worse than useless, because it encourages fuzzy thinking.
I've been hesitant to jump into this discussion, but I will here. Which is preferable to you? To have a large class of people who are not well suited to do any kind of useful work, but who are supported by society (which means that, if you can do useful work and earn a wage, a much smaller percentage of the work you do goes toward making you happy in whatever way you see fit)? Or to simply gradually train up the culture of the current working class so that their children are better educated (and better able to be educated) and able to take part in society?
Your argument for health care run by the federal government seems to be that the former is inevitable. I don't believe that it is. This will probably quickly get us into a "nature vs. nuture" debate, since you seem to implicitly claim that the children of those who are not particularly good thinkers will also be not particularly good thinkers. A culture that says that being smart is OK, and that teaches its children early on how to think and how to learn, provides a much bigger boost to intelligence than almost any variance in genetics reduces it, IMO. So, if we don't need to support a large class of people whose usefulness has disappeared, do we still need health care run by the federal government?
N.B. I am making a careful distinction between socialized health care and federally socialized health care, as there are other ways to do it. There are states, and municipalities, and just generic groups of people getting together (also known as private companies).
Neither of which is the same thing as ferromagnetic.
which we have not created or even measured properly
There. Fixed it for you. That makes all the difference in the world.
Well shoot. You got us all figured out. We're all just a bunch of charlatan priests. I guess we'll just give up and go home now.
You want scientists to consider their theories falsified, question their premises, and come up with new ideas, eh? OK, when I find that galactic rotation curves don't line up with what I've predicted, I'll consider my theories (standard model with, as best we can manage, general relativity) falsified. I'll question my premises (for instance, the premise that I know exactly what particles exist in the universe). I'll come up with some new ideas (for instance, that there might be some type of particle that I don't know about). Looks OK so far, right? At what point do you have an objection to this?
One objection that I can see is that you might think that no other avenues of investigation have been explored. However, they have. Instead of questioning the standard model (giving us dark matter), we could question general relativity. This gives us a theory called MOND. It doesn't really work very well, but a lot of very smart people spent a great deal of time and effort investigating it.
In the end, in order to be a good scientist, you've got to come full circle. You take all the new ideas (new theories) that you've come up with, and you make predictions with them. Turns out that dark matter predicts something different from, say, MOND for a collision between two galaxy clusters which contain gas, stars, and dark matter. Well, we found such a collision (Bullet Cluster), and dark matter made the correct prediction, whereas MOND made the wrong prediction.
But that's not all. When you start to enumerate all the properties that dark matter ought to have in order to fit what we've observed in galactic rotation curves, the bullet cluster, etc, it turns out that there are not too many different ways in which to fit dark matter onto the standard model. And those ways in general predict different things about what astroparticle experiments like Fermi, ICECUBE, etc should see. Give it a few (~10) years, and these experiments will either have indirectly observed dark matter (and the characteristics of that observation will narrow down the particular type of dark matter dramatically), or they will have ruled out a large number of the candidate dark matter models, leaving even fewer. Give it long enough, and we'll have either made the indirect observation or ruled out all the models.
If we rule out all the models, then it's back to the drawing board. We'd have a falsified theory, we'd question our premises, and we'd come up with some new ideas. But until then, dark matter is a very good avenue for investigation. You shouldn't "believe" in it until it's been observed, but neither should you claim it's bad science. It isn't.
FWIW, I don't really expect to convince you of this, as you seem to be quite firmly decided that it is bad science, even though it fits your apparent criteria for what science should be. But hopefully I can prevent others who read both of our comments from being infected by you.
The command line equivalent is "sudo do-release-upgrade", fyi.
A V6 is definitely not a "big block" engine. At any rate, it certainly wasn't when the phrase "big block" originated. Not even all V8s were/are "big blocks". source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Big-Block_engine I'm not a big-block aficionado either. My car (1993) has a V6, but if I were buying a new car, I'd expect to find that lighter, smaller, more modern engines could put out more than enough power for me.
As far as typing odd symbols goes, here's my .xmodmaprc for anyone who wants it. It lets me type in greek symbols, and a few other things, by making the caps lock (original function: worthless) into a new shift key:
! first set caps lock to be a group shift key
keycode 66 = Mode_switch
! Now set up all the keys: first two are the normal qwerty en_US keys, 3rd and 4th are greek characters (or others)
keysym a = a A Greek_alpha Greek_ALPHA
keysym b = b B Greek_beta Greek_BETA
keysym c = c C Greek_psi Greek_PSI
keysym d = d D Greek_delta Greek_DELTA
! there exists
keysym e = e E Greek_epsilon 0x01002203
keysym f = f F Greek_phi Greek_PHI
keysym g = g G Greek_gamma Greek_GAMMA
!hbar
keysym h = h H Greek_eta 0x0100210F
! set ownership
keysym i = i I Greek_iota 0x01002208
keysym j = j J Greek_xi Greek_XI
keysym k = k K Greek_kappa Greek_KAPPA
keysym l = l L Greek_lamda Greek_LAMDA
keysym m = m M Greek_mu Greek_MU
keysym n = n N Greek_nu Greek_NU
keysym o = o O Greek_omicron Greek_OMICRON
keysym p = p P Greek_pi Greek_PI
! partial, del
keysym q = q Q 0x01002202 0x01002207
keysym r = r R Greek_rho Greek_RHO
keysym s = s S Greek_sigma Greek_SIGMA
! dagger
keysym t = t T Greek_tau 0x01002020
keysym u = u U Greek_theta Greek_THETA
keysym v = v V Greek_omega Greek_OMEGA
! times
keysym x = x X Greek_chi 0x010000D7
keysym y = y Y Greek_upsilon Greek_UPSILON
keysym w = w W Greek_finalsmallsigma Greek_SIGMA
! cdot
keysym period = period greater 0x010022C5
!infinity
keysym 8 = 8 asterisk 0x0100221E
! equiv
keysym equal = equal plus 0x01002261
Maybe you don't need as much greek, and instead need more random mathematical symbols. Easy to change things out. The hex codes are 0x01######, where ###### is the unicode hex code for the symbol. In general, with the ucs package, LaTeX understands these.
An extremely careful analysis would probably set much more stringent bounds. We (scientists) don't always have time to be that careful, so we generally go with much coarser estimates of uncertainties and the like, resulting in very conservative bounds.
One interesting thing that stood out is they used the assumption that the effect of quantum gravity would be proportional to the energy of the light; is this what the theories suggested or is this another case of science getting lost in the translation to newspapers?
As far as I understand from my colleagues who worked on this analysis (now departed for other groups/institutions), the theories of quantum gravity which predict a linear relationship between photon energy and propagation speed are the simplest to test. There are other theories, and they are worth testing too, and some of them would no doubt also be falsified by the Fermi data, but the analysis to do so is more difficult and more complicated, so nobody has done it yet.
In short, .9s is well within the uncertainty on the measurement, and from that uncertainty, you can decide which class of quantum gravity theories your experiment is sensitive to. If you had a theory that said the deviation should be .000001s at these energies, then this experiment would never be able to say anything about that theory. But we have otherwise good theories of quantum gravity that claim the deviation at these energies should be much larger than the experimental uncertainty. This experiment falsifies those theories.
Credentials: Two guys in my group (CDF and Fermi) have worked on this very analysis. One of them worked on it just for this past summer (and didn't get too far, really), and the other used it for his thesis (graduated last summer).
Redbox is already being sued by and suing all the major studios, so I think they don't really care too much. But then again I'm certainly no expert on this. What little knowledge I have here is secondhand.
He has to actually drive to each of them. I'm not sure that he doesn't have his underlings help now that he has underlings, but last time I was in town, he was doing it all himself.
My brother in law works for redbox, and sure enough, every time a new major film is released to DVD, he goes to every walmart in his area (and we're not talking just one county here) and purchases anywhere from several hundred to a couple thousand copies, starting at midnight. He then takes them home and one by one puts them into non studio-branded cases, then goes out and stocks the redbox machines he manages.
Don't forget John Entwistle and Keith Moon. Zombies are^Wwere people too, you insensitive clod!