continue your classes in the summer. Do not take your summers off.
If science is your thing, then try your damndest to get a research job. Do something to get your hands 'wet', where you can learn what real scientists do day in and out.
I was able to get my job after undergrad (I was a physics major) because I worked 2 years writing software and building electronic systems for a physics department, and landed a sweet job at an MIT lab. Without the undergrad job I never would have accumulated the experience to get the MIT job.
And on the other side of the coin, I left my MIT job after a few years to go back to school because I saw the limits of my undergraduate knowledge and realized that I must go back to school to really master the field. One boost of confidence was that my group hired BOTH an EE and CS guy to replace me (the EE guy had a masters degree to boot).
I went back to study graduate physics, and it was a great time because I came in refreshed. Many other students that went right to grad school seemed to be exhausted, and many just wanted to get their requirements over with and get out. I was actually there to learn, not just get it over with. So I actually spent alot of time on homeworks not because I wanted grades but I wanted to learn how to do the problems. Interestingly enough, while I spent alot of time on homeworks other students often scored higher than me (many students work together). However, I noticed that during exams I'd tend to blow away the other students, probably because I wanted to learn what was going on, instead of just finishing the problem.
Of course in grad school grades don't mean anything anyway, as long as you pass your classes. What matters is your research, how well you do, how good your publications are, and basically how much impact you can make in your field.
But anyway, now that I'm straying way off-offtopic, I'd highly recommend getting a research job if you want to do research.
The fun *is* in the hard problems. The hard problems in databases are scaling (speed and size), robustness (ability to recover from error), and security (prevention of unathorized viewing or changing). These are truly hard problems.
He's absolutely right, and it's for all fields of science, not just for comp sci databass.
In otherwords, the non-hard problems have all been solved already, and the cutting edge research is always 'hard'. In physics, for example, there are occasional students that want to work with something like classical general relativity (ie, classical field theory), because it's well-defined and well-understood and very elegant. While this is true, there's not much more (presumably) to discover here, and the 'hard' problems are pushing outwards, for example trying to apply quantum mechanics to general relativity.
The problem lies w/ equilibrium, and that opposite far ends of the universe appear to be in equilibrium with each other (ie, at the same temperature), but they couldn't have physically interacted within the scope of relativity.
I'm not sure why one cannot assume things are locally in equilibrium, and that there wasn't significant fluctuations in the beginning such that things can be uniformly cooled now. But apparently people that have considered the general-relativistic thermodynamics of the universe aren't so convinced.
But you're getting modded down for whining about your moderation like an idiot.
I actually don't care how my 'whining' about the moderation posts got moderated, it's the two original posts I was talking about. But anyway it's annoying that moderators implicitly assume that having a mac link implies spammer.
Ironically I kind of feel bad that the moderators are wasting their precious mod points on my mostly harmless posts instead of real trolls, flames, and actual insightful/informative posts.
And speaking of, it's amusing that your post was actually modded 'insightful' when it's just as off-topic as my previous posts were. You did make me laugh with the 'whaaambulance' line, though.
Anyway, I've had the mac mini links in my sig since i created this account, but I was never modded down for that. I guess it's okay to write a post about NASA or whatever and have the sig there, but apparently I cannot write about the actual mac mini offer for some reason.
Jeezuz, an actually on-topic post (on topic of the article AND the thread), about my actual experiences, and it's modded down to hell.
Apparently moderators cannot adequately distinguish between unsolicited spam and a relevent article that happens to have a link to the free mac site.
Moderators - get a clue. I'm responding to the parent about his experiences how easy people will sell their details for a free t-shirt, and how what I went through w/ the mac mini really wasn't so bad at all.
I don't know why these moderators are so freaking anal today.
I surprised a moderator is modding down my posts about the conga, even though they're direclty related to BOTH the thread and article topics at hand. My posts are also descriptive and based on my actual experiences. But apparently some moderator has a bug up his/her ass because someone else is trying to get a mac mini.
If I was posting those same posts on a thread about anything else OR a/. article about anything else, than the 'overrated' mod would be justified.
But for crying out loud, it's directly relevent to the freaking discussion, and about what I went through, how I think it's similar/different to what the parent was talking about, etc.
Attention moderator - save your mod points for the real trolls, the real spammers, and the real off-topic posts.
For an uninformed or disconected soul, the "chance" for a free iPod is well worth selling out your vital statistics. I'm always amazed at how easy it is to convice someone to sign on the dotted line, and it's offten only for a T-Shirt.
I signed up for the free Mac Mini via the Equal Opportunity Conga a few weeks ago (I'm about to update my slashdot journal, which is hopelessly out of date about this).
While it was maybe 10-15 annoying minutes going through the process, it really wasn't that bad overall. I used a gmail account, so all spam emails I've gotten so far have been successfully pre-sorted into the spam folder already. Actually, it's only been 26 spam I've gotten since creating the account too.
So you enter your name, address, email, and then spend maybe 10 mins clicking through a stream of advertising pages. Much of it was for credit cards and loans. Then at the end you get a list of about 10 'offers', of which you must complete one to fulfill your obligation to get the free mac.
These offers didn't really seem bad, I chose the Blockbuster DVD service, which is basically a clone of Netflix. There was only a one-month minimum time to fulfill the obligation, and first month is $10, subsequent months $15. So it's not a bad price for getting movies.
After this, you get a specific referral number, and need to get 10 other people to sign on and complete their offers to get your free mac. That's the tricky part, getting 10 other people to do it.
That's why the Conga is cool, you get your referral through the Conga, and then you're on a public list so you don't have to actively advertise it (unlike what I'm doing now).
The Equal Opportunity Conga is cool because all users are treated equally, unlike pyramid scams. There is equal chance of any referral coming up (the admin has a slightly higher chance, since he funded the site, but he said he's changing this in a few days). So even though I'm advertising for the Conga right now, the other people on the Conga are reaping the same benefits that I am.
Whether you consider the Pyramid Scheme a scam, is up to you.
That's why the Equal Opportunity Conga is a much better idea. All people are treated equally, regardless of when you joined.
The way the free Mac Mini thing works is that you sign up via somebody's specific link. They get a hit, and when they get 10 referrals they get a mac mini. Similarly, you get a free mac mini when you get 10 referrals.
Now why would a stranger choose your specific referral number? That's how the Conga concept formed, basically a webpage that maintains a FIFO queue of users, a visitor to the site will choose the popped referral from the oldest user when they sign up. (after getting 10 referrals and the free mac, users are removed from the stack). This approach offers larger exposure than just a single user, but newer users still have to wait on a long queue (sometimes hundreds long).
Hence the Equal Opportunity idea. You go to the page above, it has the list of registered users so far, and will randomly pull one of the links from the database. You use that referral, and then you get added to the database. After that newer users are equally likely to get your number as the first person there, unlike other congas. But you still get the wide exposure a group effort gives.
If you refresh a number of times you see the referral numbers change. You might notice one number appears to come up more often than the others, and I asked the admin about this. He said that was his own referral number, and that since he setup and financed the page he justified giving his number larger probability. He's about to move the conga to a new page and said when that happens he'll put it back on fully equal footing. But as far as the other non-administrators of the conga, we're all at equal opportunity (supposedly).
Now the one flaw comes about that the propability of getting chosen goes as 1/N, so as the userbase increases it will get harder to have your number chosen from the pool. But unlike pyramid and traditional conga's, the first few people don't get special benefits (except that they were around when the conga had a smaller pool of people).
I joined this Conga a few weeks ago, and I've created a slashdot journal to describe the process. I haven't gotten around to updating that, but I will now. I'll even allow comments so people can ask about it, although I'll probably get flamed.
The Conga admin is also about to upgrade to a newer page to allow users a choice of which conga's they want to use (traditional, equal opportunity, etc).
Any PCB designer knows that to get the least interference from lines, you try to cross them at 90 degrees, so they only "overlap" at a very small point.
No, the twisted wires aren't twisted to cut capacitance between those two wires. It's the crosstalk between parallel channels that you want to cut down on. The twisted pair itself is basically a poor-man's transmission line, with characteristic impedance of 93 Ohm or thereabouts, depending on the twist pitch. Each twisted pair contains signal and ground (ie, it's return), and ideally should have zero net current flow within the pair (like coax). Ie, the current flow in the pair goes 'there and back again' for the signal/ground. By twisting them you effectively couple them together better, so they're less likely to crosstalk to the other pairs, either through capacitive or mutual inductuve coupling.
While there is definitely capacitance between the two twister pair lines, there is a roughly constant mutual inductance that lets it approximate a tramsission line w/ real impedance (ie, no filtering to first order). This is how typical 50-Ohm and 75-Ohm Coax cable works too, but they're better shielded and have a better-defined characteristic impedance. (Ie, you can form a TEM wave in coax, but not so well in twisted pair).
So by twisting you are forming a more-isolated transmission line channel, which will reduce crosstalk between the other twisted pairs, not between the two wires in the pair, as they are ultimately tied together.
So you criticize this guy for having too many management jobs, and then use that as the argument for why he's unfit for the top management job as NASA?
You also criticize a guy that loves science for jumping to the 'dark side' of management. But just what kind of manager are you looking for at NASA anyway? Someone that doesn't like science?
As for your doubts that he actually built stuff, according to that first link above he helped design the Delta 180 missile components of the SDI program. He was also SDI's deputy of technology, associate administrator for exploration at NASA, and COO of In-Q-Tel (a private CIA-funded group to invest in relevent technology companies). He also had leadership positions at Orbital Sciences Corporation, and tech jobs at NASA JPL and Computer Science Corporation.
Regardless of whether you agree w/ SDI and the other jobs, you cannot doubt the fact that he has had both engineering and management positions, and apparently been rather successful and has a buttload of experience.
So back to your quote above, I'd say you'd make a pretty lousy hiring manager if you just judged their time in school without putting their work experience into context.
$4.2 million dollars to analyse incoming data? You could employ 80 PhD astrophysicists for a year for that much.
When I saw the figure I thought 4.2 million is quite cheap.
You are assuming 80 astrophysicists would make $52k annually. This is a very naive assumption because it entirely ignores administrative overhead that must always be included with salaries.
A rough rule of thumb is that a person costs about 2x their salary, to pay for utilities, housekeeping, human resources, etc. So a $50k salaried employee will cost roughly $100k. That would leave only 40 astrophysicists in your example.
Secondly, communication with Voyager occurs through the Deep Space Network, which has a slew of technicians and scientists that operate it. Voyager might spend about half to 3/4 of its budget paying for time on the Deep Space Network, even though they probably only communicate with Voyager a few hours (or tens of hours) annually. I believe most of Voyagers instruments are turned off because the RTG is winding down. IIRC, the bulk of the science down w/ Voyager now is tracking it's slowdown through the heliopause, by carefully monitoring the Doppler shift of its transmissions.
So $4.2 million will run out quite quickly. And I would guess they'd have maybe 10 scientists working on it nowadays, not 40. And these ten might only be part time too. But the bulk of it's expenditures would probably be on the Deep Space Network.
If Rutan had NASA's budget, the question would not be ``Will they get into orbit?'', but ``Which planet will they orbit next?''.
Except that a large part of NASA's budget isn't directly related to space flight, but space exploration
Reconfigure NASA's budget and take out all the funding for launch/design/maintenance/support of Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope (lots already spent on it's design and test), Chandra Observatory, all the solar/comet science missions, etc.
Then take out the funding used to pay for astronomical research, astrobiological research (yes, this happens on ISS despite the bad rep ISS ets on/.), planetary science and geology, etc.
Then take out the funding for developing all the extraplanetary orbiters and landers, including the Pioneers, Voyagers, Magellan, Cassini, Pathfinder, Spirit/Opportunity, all the other Martian landers/orbiters, Lunar landers/orbiters, etc.
Also take out all the funding for PR efforts, including all the classroom tools and pictures, etc.
Also take out the funding for ISS, as that isn't really related to space flight. This means subtract the money for ISS design, and all the shuttle launches.
What is left? Well, that leaves the bureaucracy costs as well as some things that do relate to propulsion and getting out of earth orbit. How much of NASA's budget is left?
Also you should compare that most of what NASA did hasn't been done before, and expensive aerospace research needed to be done to see what methods/fuels/wing designs/etc are feasible. As per the grandparent, Rutan got to Mach 2 and 100 km altitude, which has been done many times for the past 40 years. Lots of prior art to study and learn from there.
Basically - Rutan had the benefit of multi-million dollar studies carried out by NASA, Air Force, German and Russian rocket/space programs from the past 40 years to learn from. Plus Rutan's focus on suborbital (and soon orbital) flight is only a small subset of what NASA does. So claiming he only used $10 million compared to NASA's overall budget is a little disingenuous.
Sorry to disappoint you, but they sent the clocks up, around the earth for a few rounds, and brought them back and then compared with the ones that were left on earth. Differences existed.
Umm, I never said there weren't differences. I actually thought the poster was talking about making the measurements in two different reference frames, in which case there would be a definite simultaneity issue.
The case the poster originally mentioned, where they're back in the same reference frame, is also interesting. The short answer is : it would depend how you measure the particles. The classic entangled-pair scenario is to entangle two spin-1/2 fermions (eg electrons) in the spin-singlet state. If there is no external magnetic field or other effect that would cause a splitting of the degenerate energy levels, there is no time dependence built into the system, and it shouldn't matter that one is time-dilated. Ie, the overall phase incurred through the time evolution would normalize out when you take the inner product between the starting and final states.
Now if you did something to split the degeneracy, eg by applying a magnetic field which would cause Zeeman splitting, then the two energy levels should incur definite sinusoidal phase shifts relative to each other through time evolution. But this limited analysis so far is done within the scope of classical quantum mechanics, and obviously not applicable here.
This scenario requires an in-depth study of Quantum Electrodynamics because you need a field-theoretic application of quantum mechanics to the system involved. And not just that, but by acclerating one system around the world you are involving non-inertial reference frames that might require some aspects of General Relativity into quantum mechanics (I don't know if QED specifically covers non-inertial reference frames). Also I don't know what happens with the spins themselves - they are quantized bits of angular momentum (already with relativistic underpinnings), and Lorentz-boosting them might have weird effects. But anyway, the application of General Relativity to Quantum Mechanics is hitting many problems today, eg gravity hasn't been properly quantized yet. So the long answer is that I don't really know enough field theory to answer this question satisfactorily. But it is an interesting question the original parent asked.
[On a side note, that atomic clock on the jet plane experiment is the oft-mentioned textbook experiment anyway, but there are far more verifications of relativity. For example you can easily measure relativistic effects by accelerating electrons through not-too-high voltages and using simple velocity and momentum filters to demonstrate the effective increase in mass of the high-speed electron. This is standard practice for most undergraduate-level modern physics classes.]
You ask good questions, and basically they have to do with diffraction. Look up some articles on diffraction. The 2-slit is relatively easy to solve mathematically. A single wide slit problem is a bit harder. And something like you suggest w/ dividers will be even harder.
Actually, what you're really looking at is scattering.
You may have seen scattering systems before. Have you ever seen the laser pointers that you can shine various patterns onto a wall? They work by scattering your coherent laser beams, and what you effectively see is a two-dimensional spatial fourier transform of the pattern that you shine the laser through.
Ie, if your pattern is opaque/transparent bars, it looks like a 1-D square wave, and you'll see a series of dots on the wall, decreasing in amplitude by the appropriate amount as the fourier series of a square wave would do. Note that the dots are formed from scattering and diffraction, not as a mask. A laser makes a single point, if you masked part of the beam the point would get smaller. These dots are farther away from the main un-scattered laser point due to scattering.
If you put a checkerboard pattern, you've got a square wave in 2-D, and will get a grid of points to the fourier decomposition in 2 dimensions.
Similarly, if your pattern wasn't black/white bars, but had a sinusoidal variation between opaque and transparent, that's a single sine wave, and your diffraction pattern would have only 2 dots on each side of the 'main' dot. The distance of this dot would depend on the "spatial frequency" of the sinusoid pattern being scattered.
Anyway, that's all modern optics. For your case you could do a Feynman path integral and consider all possible paths (infinitely many), and consider which are sufficiently far from the classical path that they can be neglected. But you'd probably need to simulate this on a computer, too hard to do exactly analytically.
The particle sent into orbit be slightly in the past relative to the other one. So would they then be entangled across the dimension of time?
Firstly, you're not sending one particle in the past, it's that time just moves slower for that particle. You'd still have no way of sending information back in time to that person, everything would still be causal.
Regarding the entangled particles, they would remain entangled, but now you have to resolve the problem of simultaneity. Ie, simultaneous events for me will be non-simultaneous for him, etc.
Quantum Field Theory has merged Quantum Mechanics with Special Relativity for over 50 years now, so there might be some interesting differences that happen as opposed to the non-relativistic quantum mechanics. But there still shouldn't be any way to send information through time or faster than light, etc.
No, time isn't a wave. As another poster mentioned, time is another dimension.
But it's much more tricky than that, time is very different from space. If you rotate a vector in 3-D space, it's length (x^2+y^2+z^2) will remain the same, even though the x,y, and z components are different and kind of mixed together. What Einstein showed is that in 4-dimension space-time, the quantity (-t^2+x^2+y^2+z^2) is what is conserved if you 'rotate' in 4-D spacetime (in other words, if you change reference frames, like going from standing on the ground to standing on a freigh train). So spatial dimensions look spherical while the time dimension looks hyperbolic.
There are obvious parallels between Space and Time in non-relativistic quantum mechanics, namely a time translation evolves the wavefunction by a factor exp(-i*H*t/hbar) and a spatial translation evolves the wavefunction by a factor exp(-i*p*x/hbar). What this means is that momentum is the 'generator' of space translations, and the 'Hamiltonian' is the generator of time translations.
But making relativity works in quantum mechanics isn't as straightforward as physicists hoped, and involved alot of extra work, which finally culminated as quantum field theory. You can read more detail here . But here's a quick summary :
In quantum mechanics, position and momentum aren't just parameters but are operators. They don't commute, which is why you cannot simultaneously know a position and momentum. But time is NOT an operator, it is a parameter, it's the corresponding Hamiltonian that is the operator.
So you have 4-dimensional space, 3 dimensions act like operators, 1 dimension acts as a parameter.
So anyway, back to this experiment, what the physicists did was to show that an electron, with a probability of being created during two discrete times (each of the laser pulses) turns out to have an interference pattern just like photons traveling through two slits in space.
The resulting electrons weren't produced from laser pulse 1 or laser pulse 2, but were produced from a superposition of both pulses, and the complex phase that I showed previously with time evolution causes an interference pattern between the two pulses.
I'll explain the 'classic' double-slit experiment so you can see how this is cool, similar yet different.
The double-slit experiment classically involved sending light through two small slits closely separated, onto a dark screen. If light was particulate, you'd expect to see only two bright spots on the screen. But you see a whole interference pattern, with the brightest spot located between the two slits.
This is because of diffraction, and that light acts like a wave, so you get constructive and destructive interference on the screen.
What we didn't know until the 20th century is that light consists of photons, which are individual quanta of electromagnetic radiation. These photons interfere with each other in space as they go through the slits, to give the characteristic interference pattern on the far screen. Or, that the photons don't go through a single slit, but the photons actually go through both slits, and you don't know where the photon is until you measure it (ie, let it hit the screen).
The current experiment effectively used a laser to create two 'slits' in time. They made two quick laser pulses (really two maxima and one minimum). The pulses have some probability of creating an electron, and by making two discrete pulses in time, there is a similar 'interference pattern' associated with observing the electron at various points in time. This means that the electron wasn't created from one laser pulse or the other, but was effectively created through both slits, the time separation of which created an interference effect.
There's no new quantum mechanics here, but here's an attempt at a layman's explanation of what's called the propagator. In classical mechanics you have a well-defined trajectory from a set of well-defined initial conditions (ie, a ball on a spring has a well-defined position and momentum at some time, and you can exactly predict where the ball will be at future times). See this article for example.
Quantum mechanics extends this because there is a classical path the ball would take, but also infinitely many other 'quantum' paths that can also bring the ball from position X at time 0 to position Y at time T. Many of these are classically impossible. But Quantum Mechanics deals with a wavefunction (which describes the state of the system) which is complex. So you need to consider all these other paths too, but each path has an associated phase with it. When you maintain this phase coherence between all paths, you are basically building a similar interference pattern. So when you take the modulus squared of the wavefunction to find the probability of finding the electron, you have interference from the wavefunction going through either of the two slits in time.
The difficulty is that you have to repeat the experiment many times to see when you measure the electron, just like w/ the classical double-slit experiment you need enough photons to give a relative intensity that can be measured.
Here's a little math for anyone curious. The time progression of a wavefunction looks like |Psi(t)>=exp(-i*H*t/hbar)|Psi(0)> where |Psi(t)> is the wavefunction at time t, i is the square root of negative one, H is the Hamiltonian Operator, hbar is the Planck constant. See here for more information on the Hamiltonian for classical and quantum mechanics. In many cases it's the energy operator (expressed in terms of position and momentum), and acts on discrete energy eigenstates.
But you can see that time translation evolves the 'phase' of the wavefunction. And if the wavefunction isn't in a single energy eigenstate but a combination of them, each individual component will have have the phase evolve at a different
You mention two things - spying via EMF and sound.
Trying to pick up a speaker's EMF will be quite difficult because a 1kHz electromagnetic oscillation will have a wavelength of about 300 km! Try making a stealth quarter-wave antenna with that frequency. Of course you can inefficiently pick up signals with non-matched antennas, but I don't know how efficiently you can do this for such a huge wavelength mismatch.
You mention CRT scanners (I remember reading about such raster scanners awhile back), but these are more feasible because a 1024x768 screen refreshed at 75Hz will put out a baseline of roughly 60 MHz (a wide-bandwidth signal with notable harmonics and subharmonics, depending on the screen image). Making a small 60MHz antenna is quite doable (quarter-wave antenna would be about 1 meter). So you cannot really compare CRT scanner to a speaker-EMF scanner.
On the other hand, using a parabolic dish with a microphone to pick up the actual acoustic transmissions of a speaker is certainly more feasible. However at large distances it will be hard to pick out one speaker out of many noise sources in a room, unless you use bigger and bigger dish (this is due to diffraction). So you'd need to be fairly close for this method to work. Soundproofing would also be a damper (literally), and you can bet any sensitive room would (ideally) be soundproofed. Anyway this method might work if you were in an apartment across the street from your target in an urban landscape, where you could be fairly discrete. B this would be far more difficult in the field, unless you luck out and find some unguarded forest nearby your target for example.
You can always shoot a laser on a window and pick up the oscillations that cause the beam to move, but that's also tricky to do in the field without being spotted. Maybe this would be more feasible at larger distances, though.
You obviously don't work in the field. Your analogy is flawed because back in the day we could easily produce gamma rays and other radioactive sources, we just didn't know what the effects were. Today we are extremely limited in what nanoscale systems we can make, so much of the research conducted now is to develop new ways to control atoms and actually make atomic and nanotech systems.
I never said not to "proceed with a more measured and careful approach". I pointed out that stopping research is backward becasue we don't know how to even build many nanoscale systems at this point. Without ways to build them, we cannot have the nanoscale systems to test. How can you test something you cannot make? Simulations only let you get so far, and considering the mesoscopic physics involved, simulations will be extremely limiting (you're stuck between the two extremes, so your large sample-size statistics starts to hit a brick wall, yet the bodies are complex enough that you cannot adequately simulate the atom scale). YOu need nanoscale systems to test nanoscale systems, and you cannot test nanoscale systems unless you develop methods to build them, etc.
Tiny flakes of rock or minerals like asbestos cause mesophelioma, plant spores cause allergies and some even cause death, soot causes asthma and other breathing difficulties.
You prove the poster's point. After 20,000 years of fire, we better now decide not to burn any more wood until we can discover just how bad all the carbon nanotubes and buckyballs, along with amorphous soot, that are formed in the fireplace really are for people. Studying health problems is a worthy goal, but why do you suddenly want to do this NOW because of a field called nanotechnology comes about? Why is this field different from any other field? It's not, but people are so much more scared of nanotech than other fields for some reason, probably because of all the 'grey-goo' sci-fi stories. Pretty similar to people being scared shitless of radioactivity in the 50's and 60's (when all the Marvel characters got their powers from radioactivity), as compared to the Spiderman movie from a few years ago, where Spiderman got his power not from a radioactive spider but from a genetically-modified spider.
It's better to lay down guidelines for testing to ensure the risks are studied before these things make their way into the world.
So where do you draw the line? I'm researching in nanotech too, in the university. How are we supposed to test nanotech systems if we cannot study ways to build them because people think it'll inevitably make a self-replicating army of nanobots that will devour all carbon life on the planet?
Should I therefore not try learning to program Python because I might accidently create a self-replicating virus program that could infect every computer on the internet and eventually bring the whole net down? And that we should form a python taskforce to adequately make sure this isn't a big enough risk before letting people program it?
It's better to lay down guidelines for testing to ensure the risks are studied before these things make their way into the world.
How does this work for chemistry? Ie, if a company wants to ship a new plastic polymer in their flyswatter, do they have to be approved by the FDA? What if they change the plastic formula only slightly, or mix two different plastics together that haven't been mixed previously. What are the rules in that situation?
But for nanotech, at this point nobody's talking about mass producing consumer products with easily-removable carbon nanotubes or anything. Nanotech is still pretty much confined to nanotech-specific laboratories (there are companies that will sell you raw nanotubes, or furnaces for growing them, etc).
If you want to limit putting products into market that use nanotubes until a few years of research have been conducted, well that's one way. But to suspend all nanotech research until we know all the risks is ridiculous because we cannot study the risks if we don't make the nanotech systems to begin with.
For example, one big area of nanotech is determining how to actually construct nano-scale systems. Shouldn't research within this field continue so people can figure out better ways to make nanoscale systems so they can study them better? And of course any study of new materials should involve studying associated health risks, but does it make sense to suspend all research until all health risks have been studied? How do you research health risks without researching the systems anyway?
But seriously, why is a scientist making a carbon-nanotube memory chip to sell to the markets in any way more dangerous than a chemist making a polymer that involves DeoxyriboBozoChloroNovicain, a polymer which has never been used before either?
Sadly enough, that's mostly americans doing this. And this research would help educate the americans in this.. it is not Europe who claims to be superior in the world.. we remain fairly humble, compared to america.
well, the majority of country bashing i encounter on slashdot tends to be anti-US. Most notably in attempts to prove that something else is better in Europe or elsewhere.
Ask the average american about who is superior, in science, medical care (availability especially) or educational standards, and I bet you majority will say US.
And similarly, ask the average European who is superior in science, medical care, or educational standards, and I bet you a majority will say Europe.
The current atmosphere here on slashdot, at least, appears to say that pro-US nationalism is bad, being nationalistic for almost any other country is just fine. Myself, I'm stuck in the middle because I know there are many other countries doing things much better than the US, but it's also annoying to hear citizens of these counties being cocky, bashing regular Americans, or just trying to find any way to belittle the US for no apparent reason. sigh.
And yes, you're right, Scandinavian countries are very good in the sciences, but the original poster was drawing conclusions that didn't logically follow from the data.
But refusing to take the breathalyzer DOES NOT by default imply failure of the test. *Evidence* is required by our judicial system, remember?
It does imply failure of the test in NJ, at least according to the state driver's manual from about 10 years ago. Or at least that's how I understood it back then, with our driver's ed teacher being very insistent upon it.
I do remember the driver's education teacher saying there was only one case in NJ history where someone refused the test and was found not guilty. That was after he wrecked his car, with enough witnesses to testify, that it wasn't his fault. But right after seeing him lose his car one of the bystanders said "hey, that's a horrible loss, here have a drink" and gave him some sips from a flask. Not the smartest thing the driver could have done, but the witnesses were able to testify for him.
(Actually, there was a stupid email joke going around a few years ago loosely based on this story).
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If science is your thing, then try your damndest to get a research job. Do something to get your hands 'wet', where you can learn what real scientists do day in and out.
I was able to get my job after undergrad (I was a physics major) because I worked 2 years writing software and building electronic systems for a physics department, and landed a sweet job at an MIT lab. Without the undergrad job I never would have accumulated the experience to get the MIT job.
And on the other side of the coin, I left my MIT job after a few years to go back to school because I saw the limits of my undergraduate knowledge and realized that I must go back to school to really master the field. One boost of confidence was that my group hired BOTH an EE and CS guy to replace me (the EE guy had a masters degree to boot).
I went back to study graduate physics, and it was a great time because I came in refreshed. Many other students that went right to grad school seemed to be exhausted, and many just wanted to get their requirements over with and get out. I was actually there to learn, not just get it over with. So I actually spent alot of time on homeworks not because I wanted grades but I wanted to learn how to do the problems. Interestingly enough, while I spent alot of time on homeworks other students often scored higher than me (many students work together). However, I noticed that during exams I'd tend to blow away the other students, probably because I wanted to learn what was going on, instead of just finishing the problem.
Of course in grad school grades don't mean anything anyway, as long as you pass your classes. What matters is your research, how well you do, how good your publications are, and basically how much impact you can make in your field.
But anyway, now that I'm straying way off-offtopic, I'd highly recommend getting a research job if you want to do research.
He's absolutely right, and it's for all fields of science, not just for comp sci databass.
In otherwords, the non-hard problems have all been solved already, and the cutting edge research is always 'hard'. In physics, for example, there are occasional students that want to work with something like classical general relativity (ie, classical field theory), because it's well-defined and well-understood and very elegant. While this is true, there's not much more (presumably) to discover here, and the 'hard' problems are pushing outwards, for example trying to apply quantum mechanics to general relativity.
I'm not sure why one cannot assume things are locally in equilibrium, and that there wasn't significant fluctuations in the beginning such that things can be uniformly cooled now. But apparently people that have considered the general-relativistic thermodynamics of the universe aren't so convinced.
I actually don't care how my 'whining' about the moderation posts got moderated, it's the two original posts I was talking about. But anyway it's annoying that moderators implicitly assume that having a mac link implies spammer.
Ironically I kind of feel bad that the moderators are wasting their precious mod points on my mostly harmless posts instead of real trolls, flames, and actual insightful/informative posts.
And speaking of, it's amusing that your post was actually modded 'insightful' when it's just as off-topic as my previous posts were. You did make me laugh with the 'whaaambulance' line, though.
Anyway, I've had the mac mini links in my sig since i created this account, but I was never modded down for that. I guess it's okay to write a post about NASA or whatever and have the sig there, but apparently I cannot write about the actual mac mini offer for some reason.
oh well, peace out.
Apparently moderators cannot adequately distinguish between unsolicited spam and a relevent article that happens to have a link to the free mac site.
Moderators - get a clue. I'm responding to the parent about his experiences how easy people will sell their details for a free t-shirt, and how what I went through w/ the mac mini really wasn't so bad at all.
I don't know why these moderators are so freaking anal today.
If I was posting those same posts on a thread about anything else OR a /. article about anything else, than the 'overrated' mod would be justified.
But for crying out loud, it's directly relevent to the freaking discussion, and about what I went through, how I think it's similar/different to what the parent was talking about, etc.
Attention moderator - save your mod points for the real trolls, the real spammers, and the real off-topic posts.
I signed up for the free Mac Mini via the Equal Opportunity Conga a few weeks ago (I'm about to update my slashdot journal, which is hopelessly out of date about this).
While it was maybe 10-15 annoying minutes going through the process, it really wasn't that bad overall. I used a gmail account, so all spam emails I've gotten so far have been successfully pre-sorted into the spam folder already. Actually, it's only been 26 spam I've gotten since creating the account too.
So you enter your name, address, email, and then spend maybe 10 mins clicking through a stream of advertising pages. Much of it was for credit cards and loans. Then at the end you get a list of about 10 'offers', of which you must complete one to fulfill your obligation to get the free mac.
These offers didn't really seem bad, I chose the Blockbuster DVD service, which is basically a clone of Netflix. There was only a one-month minimum time to fulfill the obligation, and first month is $10, subsequent months $15. So it's not a bad price for getting movies.
After this, you get a specific referral number, and need to get 10 other people to sign on and complete their offers to get your free mac. That's the tricky part, getting 10 other people to do it.
That's why the Conga is cool, you get your referral through the Conga, and then you're on a public list so you don't have to actively advertise it (unlike what I'm doing now).
The Equal Opportunity Conga is cool because all users are treated equally, unlike pyramid scams. There is equal chance of any referral coming up (the admin has a slightly higher chance, since he funded the site, but he said he's changing this in a few days). So even though I'm advertising for the Conga right now, the other people on the Conga are reaping the same benefits that I am.
That's why the Equal Opportunity Conga is a much better idea. All people are treated equally, regardless of when you joined.
The way the free Mac Mini thing works is that you sign up via somebody's specific link. They get a hit, and when they get 10 referrals they get a mac mini. Similarly, you get a free mac mini when you get 10 referrals.
Now why would a stranger choose your specific referral number? That's how the Conga concept formed, basically a webpage that maintains a FIFO queue of users, a visitor to the site will choose the popped referral from the oldest user when they sign up. (after getting 10 referrals and the free mac, users are removed from the stack). This approach offers larger exposure than just a single user, but newer users still have to wait on a long queue (sometimes hundreds long).
Hence the Equal Opportunity idea. You go to the page above, it has the list of registered users so far, and will randomly pull one of the links from the database. You use that referral, and then you get added to the database. After that newer users are equally likely to get your number as the first person there, unlike other congas. But you still get the wide exposure a group effort gives.
If you refresh a number of times you see the referral numbers change. You might notice one number appears to come up more often than the others, and I asked the admin about this. He said that was his own referral number, and that since he setup and financed the page he justified giving his number larger probability. He's about to move the conga to a new page and said when that happens he'll put it back on fully equal footing. But as far as the other non-administrators of the conga, we're all at equal opportunity (supposedly).
Now the one flaw comes about that the propability of getting chosen goes as 1/N, so as the userbase increases it will get harder to have your number chosen from the pool. But unlike pyramid and traditional conga's, the first few people don't get special benefits (except that they were around when the conga had a smaller pool of people).
I joined this Conga a few weeks ago, and I've created a slashdot journal to describe the process. I haven't gotten around to updating that, but I will now. I'll even allow comments so people can ask about it, although I'll probably get flamed.
The Conga admin is also about to upgrade to a newer page to allow users a choice of which conga's they want to use (traditional, equal opportunity, etc).
No, the twisted wires aren't twisted to cut capacitance between those two wires. It's the crosstalk between parallel channels that you want to cut down on. The twisted pair itself is basically a poor-man's transmission line, with characteristic impedance of 93 Ohm or thereabouts, depending on the twist pitch. Each twisted pair contains signal and ground (ie, it's return), and ideally should have zero net current flow within the pair (like coax). Ie, the current flow in the pair goes 'there and back again' for the signal/ground. By twisting them you effectively couple them together better, so they're less likely to crosstalk to the other pairs, either through capacitive or mutual inductuve coupling.
While there is definitely capacitance between the two twister pair lines, there is a roughly constant mutual inductance that lets it approximate a tramsission line w/ real impedance (ie, no filtering to first order). This is how typical 50-Ohm and 75-Ohm Coax cable works too, but they're better shielded and have a better-defined characteristic impedance. (Ie, you can form a TEM wave in coax, but not so well in twisted pair).
So by twisting you are forming a more-isolated transmission line channel, which will reduce crosstalk between the other twisted pairs, not between the two wires in the pair, as they are ultimately tied together.
If by toaster you mean a 3GHz x86 CPU, which gets hot enough to almost be a toaster, then you're in luck.
You also criticize a guy that loves science for jumping to the 'dark side' of management. But just what kind of manager are you looking for at NASA anyway? Someone that doesn't like science?
Real work? Like heading the Space Department, a group with more than 600 people, which is the 2nd-largest group at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory?
As for your doubts that he actually built stuff, according to that first link above he helped design the Delta 180 missile components of the SDI program. He was also SDI's deputy of technology, associate administrator for exploration at NASA, and COO of In-Q-Tel (a private CIA-funded group to invest in relevent technology companies). He also had leadership positions at Orbital Sciences Corporation, and tech jobs at NASA JPL and Computer Science Corporation.
Regardless of whether you agree w/ SDI and the other jobs, you cannot doubt the fact that he has had both engineering and management positions, and apparently been rather successful and has a buttload of experience.
So back to your quote above, I'd say you'd make a pretty lousy hiring manager if you just judged their time in school without putting their work experience into context.
When I saw the figure I thought 4.2 million is quite cheap.
You are assuming 80 astrophysicists would make $52k annually. This is a very naive assumption because it entirely ignores administrative overhead that must always be included with salaries.
A rough rule of thumb is that a person costs about 2x their salary, to pay for utilities, housekeeping, human resources, etc. So a $50k salaried employee will cost roughly $100k. That would leave only 40 astrophysicists in your example.
Secondly, communication with Voyager occurs through the Deep Space Network, which has a slew of technicians and scientists that operate it. Voyager might spend about half to 3/4 of its budget paying for time on the Deep Space Network, even though they probably only communicate with Voyager a few hours (or tens of hours) annually. I believe most of Voyagers instruments are turned off because the RTG is winding down. IIRC, the bulk of the science down w/ Voyager now is tracking it's slowdown through the heliopause, by carefully monitoring the Doppler shift of its transmissions.
So $4.2 million will run out quite quickly. And I would guess they'd have maybe 10 scientists working on it nowadays, not 40. And these ten might only be part time too. But the bulk of it's expenditures would probably be on the Deep Space Network.
Except that a large part of NASA's budget isn't directly related to space flight, but space exploration
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Reconfigure NASA's budget and take out all the funding for launch/design/maintenance/support of Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope (lots already spent on it's design and test), Chandra Observatory, all the solar/comet science missions, etc.
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Then take out the funding used to pay for astronomical research, astrobiological research (yes, this happens on ISS despite the bad rep ISS ets on
/.), planetary science and geology, etc.
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Then take out the funding for developing all the extraplanetary orbiters and landers, including the Pioneers, Voyagers, Magellan, Cassini, Pathfinder, Spirit/Opportunity, all the other Martian landers/orbiters, Lunar landers/orbiters, etc.
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Also take out all the funding for PR efforts, including all the classroom tools and pictures, etc.
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Also take out the funding for ISS, as that isn't really related to space flight. This means subtract the money for ISS design, and all the shuttle launches.
What is left? Well, that leaves the bureaucracy costs as well as some things that do relate to propulsion and getting out of earth orbit. How much of NASA's budget is left?Also you should compare that most of what NASA did hasn't been done before, and expensive aerospace research needed to be done to see what methods/fuels/wing designs/etc are feasible. As per the grandparent, Rutan got to Mach 2 and 100 km altitude, which has been done many times for the past 40 years. Lots of prior art to study and learn from there.
Basically - Rutan had the benefit of multi-million dollar studies carried out by NASA, Air Force, German and Russian rocket/space programs from the past 40 years to learn from. Plus Rutan's focus on suborbital (and soon orbital) flight is only a small subset of what NASA does. So claiming he only used $10 million compared to NASA's overall budget is a little disingenuous.
Umm, I never said there weren't differences. I actually thought the poster was talking about making the measurements in two different reference frames, in which case there would be a definite simultaneity issue.
The case the poster originally mentioned, where they're back in the same reference frame, is also interesting. The short answer is : it would depend how you measure the particles. The classic entangled-pair scenario is to entangle two spin-1/2 fermions (eg electrons) in the spin-singlet state. If there is no external magnetic field or other effect that would cause a splitting of the degenerate energy levels, there is no time dependence built into the system, and it shouldn't matter that one is time-dilated. Ie, the overall phase incurred through the time evolution would normalize out when you take the inner product between the starting and final states.
Now if you did something to split the degeneracy, eg by applying a magnetic field which would cause Zeeman splitting, then the two energy levels should incur definite sinusoidal phase shifts relative to each other through time evolution. But this limited analysis so far is done within the scope of classical quantum mechanics, and obviously not applicable here.
This scenario requires an in-depth study of Quantum Electrodynamics because you need a field-theoretic application of quantum mechanics to the system involved. And not just that, but by acclerating one system around the world you are involving non-inertial reference frames that might require some aspects of General Relativity into quantum mechanics (I don't know if QED specifically covers non-inertial reference frames). Also I don't know what happens with the spins themselves - they are quantized bits of angular momentum (already with relativistic underpinnings), and Lorentz-boosting them might have weird effects. But anyway, the application of General Relativity to Quantum Mechanics is hitting many problems today, eg gravity hasn't been properly quantized yet. So the long answer is that I don't really know enough field theory to answer this question satisfactorily. But it is an interesting question the original parent asked.
[On a side note, that atomic clock on the jet plane experiment is the oft-mentioned textbook experiment anyway, but there are far more verifications of relativity. For example you can easily measure relativistic effects by accelerating electrons through not-too-high voltages and using simple velocity and momentum filters to demonstrate the effective increase in mass of the high-speed electron. This is standard practice for most undergraduate-level modern physics classes.]
Actually, what you're really looking at is scattering.
You may have seen scattering systems before. Have you ever seen the laser pointers that you can shine various patterns onto a wall? They work by scattering your coherent laser beams, and what you effectively see is a two-dimensional spatial fourier transform of the pattern that you shine the laser through.
Ie, if your pattern is opaque/transparent bars, it looks like a 1-D square wave, and you'll see a series of dots on the wall, decreasing in amplitude by the appropriate amount as the fourier series of a square wave would do. Note that the dots are formed from scattering and diffraction, not as a mask. A laser makes a single point, if you masked part of the beam the point would get smaller. These dots are farther away from the main un-scattered laser point due to scattering.
If you put a checkerboard pattern, you've got a square wave in 2-D, and will get a grid of points to the fourier decomposition in 2 dimensions.
Similarly, if your pattern wasn't black/white bars, but had a sinusoidal variation between opaque and transparent, that's a single sine wave, and your diffraction pattern would have only 2 dots on each side of the 'main' dot. The distance of this dot would depend on the "spatial frequency" of the sinusoid pattern being scattered.
Anyway, that's all modern optics. For your case you could do a Feynman path integral and consider all possible paths (infinitely many), and consider which are sufficiently far from the classical path that they can be neglected. But you'd probably need to simulate this on a computer, too hard to do exactly analytically.
Firstly, you're not sending one particle in the past, it's that time just moves slower for that particle. You'd still have no way of sending information back in time to that person, everything would still be causal.
Regarding the entangled particles, they would remain entangled, but now you have to resolve the problem of simultaneity. Ie, simultaneous events for me will be non-simultaneous for him, etc.
Quantum Field Theory has merged Quantum Mechanics with Special Relativity for over 50 years now, so there might be some interesting differences that happen as opposed to the non-relativistic quantum mechanics. But there still shouldn't be any way to send information through time or faster than light, etc.
They have both known to be true, coupled together, for a long time. That's exactly what Quantum Field Theory is.
No, time isn't a wave. As another poster mentioned, time is another dimension.
But it's much more tricky than that, time is very different from space. If you rotate a vector in 3-D space, it's length (x^2+y^2+z^2) will remain the same, even though the x,y, and z components are different and kind of mixed together. What Einstein showed is that in 4-dimension space-time, the quantity (-t^2+x^2+y^2+z^2) is what is conserved if you 'rotate' in 4-D spacetime (in other words, if you change reference frames, like going from standing on the ground to standing on a freigh train). So spatial dimensions look spherical while the time dimension looks hyperbolic.
There are obvious parallels between Space and Time in non-relativistic quantum mechanics, namely a time translation evolves the wavefunction by a factor exp(-i*H*t/hbar) and a spatial translation evolves the wavefunction by a factor exp(-i*p*x/hbar). What this means is that momentum is the 'generator' of space translations, and the 'Hamiltonian' is the generator of time translations.
But making relativity works in quantum mechanics isn't as straightforward as physicists hoped, and involved alot of extra work, which finally culminated as quantum field theory. You can read more detail here . But here's a quick summary :
In quantum mechanics, position and momentum aren't just parameters but are operators. They don't commute, which is why you cannot simultaneously know a position and momentum. But time is NOT an operator, it is a parameter, it's the corresponding Hamiltonian that is the operator. So you have 4-dimensional space, 3 dimensions act like operators, 1 dimension acts as a parameter.
So anyway, back to this experiment, what the physicists did was to show that an electron, with a probability of being created during two discrete times (each of the laser pulses) turns out to have an interference pattern just like photons traveling through two slits in space.
The resulting electrons weren't produced from laser pulse 1 or laser pulse 2, but were produced from a superposition of both pulses, and the complex phase that I showed previously with time evolution causes an interference pattern between the two pulses.
The double-slit experiment classically involved sending light through two small slits closely separated, onto a dark screen. If light was particulate, you'd expect to see only two bright spots on the screen. But you see a whole interference pattern, with the brightest spot located between the two slits.
This is because of diffraction, and that light acts like a wave, so you get constructive and destructive interference on the screen.
What we didn't know until the 20th century is that light consists of photons, which are individual quanta of electromagnetic radiation. These photons interfere with each other in space as they go through the slits, to give the characteristic interference pattern on the far screen. Or, that the photons don't go through a single slit, but the photons actually go through both slits, and you don't know where the photon is until you measure it (ie, let it hit the screen).
The current experiment effectively used a laser to create two 'slits' in time. They made two quick laser pulses (really two maxima and one minimum). The pulses have some probability of creating an electron, and by making two discrete pulses in time, there is a similar 'interference pattern' associated with observing the electron at various points in time. This means that the electron wasn't created from one laser pulse or the other, but was effectively created through both slits, the time separation of which created an interference effect.
There's no new quantum mechanics here, but here's an attempt at a layman's explanation of what's called the propagator. In classical mechanics you have a well-defined trajectory from a set of well-defined initial conditions (ie, a ball on a spring has a well-defined position and momentum at some time, and you can exactly predict where the ball will be at future times). See this article for example.
Quantum mechanics extends this because there is a classical path the ball would take, but also infinitely many other 'quantum' paths that can also bring the ball from position X at time 0 to position Y at time T. Many of these are classically impossible. But Quantum Mechanics deals with a wavefunction (which describes the state of the system) which is complex. So you need to consider all these other paths too, but each path has an associated phase with it. When you maintain this phase coherence between all paths, you are basically building a similar interference pattern. So when you take the modulus squared of the wavefunction to find the probability of finding the electron, you have interference from the wavefunction going through either of the two slits in time.
The difficulty is that you have to repeat the experiment many times to see when you measure the electron, just like w/ the classical double-slit experiment you need enough photons to give a relative intensity that can be measured.
Here's a little math for anyone curious. The time progression of a wavefunction looks like
|Psi(t)>=exp(-i*H*t/hbar)|Psi(0)>
where |Psi(t)> is the wavefunction at time t, i is the square root of negative one, H is the Hamiltonian Operator, hbar is the Planck constant. See here for more information on the Hamiltonian for classical and quantum mechanics. In many cases it's the energy operator (expressed in terms of position and momentum), and acts on discrete energy eigenstates.
But you can see that time translation evolves the 'phase' of the wavefunction. And if the wavefunction isn't in a single energy eigenstate but a combination of them, each individual component will have have the phase evolve at a different
Trying to pick up a speaker's EMF will be quite difficult because a 1kHz electromagnetic oscillation will have a wavelength of about 300 km! Try making a stealth quarter-wave antenna with that frequency. Of course you can inefficiently pick up signals with non-matched antennas, but I don't know how efficiently you can do this for such a huge wavelength mismatch.
You mention CRT scanners (I remember reading about such raster scanners awhile back), but these are more feasible because a 1024x768 screen refreshed at 75Hz will put out a baseline of roughly 60 MHz (a wide-bandwidth signal with notable harmonics and subharmonics, depending on the screen image). Making a small 60MHz antenna is quite doable (quarter-wave antenna would be about 1 meter). So you cannot really compare CRT scanner to a speaker-EMF scanner.
On the other hand, using a parabolic dish with a microphone to pick up the actual acoustic transmissions of a speaker is certainly more feasible. However at large distances it will be hard to pick out one speaker out of many noise sources in a room, unless you use bigger and bigger dish (this is due to diffraction). So you'd need to be fairly close for this method to work. Soundproofing would also be a damper (literally), and you can bet any sensitive room would (ideally) be soundproofed. Anyway this method might work if you were in an apartment across the street from your target in an urban landscape, where you could be fairly discrete. B this would be far more difficult in the field, unless you luck out and find some unguarded forest nearby your target for example.
You can always shoot a laser on a window and pick up the oscillations that cause the beam to move, but that's also tricky to do in the field without being spotted. Maybe this would be more feasible at larger distances, though.
I never said not to "proceed with a more measured and careful approach". I pointed out that stopping research is backward becasue we don't know how to even build many nanoscale systems at this point. Without ways to build them, we cannot have the nanoscale systems to test. How can you test something you cannot make? Simulations only let you get so far, and considering the mesoscopic physics involved, simulations will be extremely limiting (you're stuck between the two extremes, so your large sample-size statistics starts to hit a brick wall, yet the bodies are complex enough that you cannot adequately simulate the atom scale). YOu need nanoscale systems to test nanoscale systems, and you cannot test nanoscale systems unless you develop methods to build them, etc.
So stopping research to test them is a catch-22.
You prove the poster's point. After 20,000 years of fire, we better now decide not to burn any more wood until we can discover just how bad all the carbon nanotubes and buckyballs, along with amorphous soot, that are formed in the fireplace really are for people. Studying health problems is a worthy goal, but why do you suddenly want to do this NOW because of a field called nanotechnology comes about? Why is this field different from any other field? It's not, but people are so much more scared of nanotech than other fields for some reason, probably because of all the 'grey-goo' sci-fi stories. Pretty similar to people being scared shitless of radioactivity in the 50's and 60's (when all the Marvel characters got their powers from radioactivity), as compared to the Spiderman movie from a few years ago, where Spiderman got his power not from a radioactive spider but from a genetically-modified spider.
It's better to lay down guidelines for testing to ensure the risks are studied before these things make their way into the world.
So where do you draw the line? I'm researching in nanotech too, in the university. How are we supposed to test nanotech systems if we cannot study ways to build them because people think it'll inevitably make a self-replicating army of nanobots that will devour all carbon life on the planet?
Should I therefore not try learning to program Python because I might accidently create a self-replicating virus program that could infect every computer on the internet and eventually bring the whole net down? And that we should form a python taskforce to adequately make sure this isn't a big enough risk before letting people program it?
It's better to lay down guidelines for testing to ensure the risks are studied before these things make their way into the world.
How does this work for chemistry? Ie, if a company wants to ship a new plastic polymer in their flyswatter, do they have to be approved by the FDA? What if they change the plastic formula only slightly, or mix two different plastics together that haven't been mixed previously. What are the rules in that situation?
But for nanotech, at this point nobody's talking about mass producing consumer products with easily-removable carbon nanotubes or anything. Nanotech is still pretty much confined to nanotech-specific laboratories (there are companies that will sell you raw nanotubes, or furnaces for growing them, etc).
If you want to limit putting products into market that use nanotubes until a few years of research have been conducted, well that's one way. But to suspend all nanotech research until we know all the risks is ridiculous because we cannot study the risks if we don't make the nanotech systems to begin with.
For example, one big area of nanotech is determining how to actually construct nano-scale systems. Shouldn't research within this field continue so people can figure out better ways to make nanoscale systems so they can study them better? And of course any study of new materials should involve studying associated health risks, but does it make sense to suspend all research until all health risks have been studied? How do you research health risks without researching the systems anyway?
But seriously, why is a scientist making a carbon-nanotube memory chip to sell to the markets in any way more dangerous than a chemist making a polymer that involves DeoxyriboBozoChloroNovicain, a polymer which has never been used before either?
well, the majority of country bashing i encounter on slashdot tends to be anti-US. Most notably in attempts to prove that something else is better in Europe or elsewhere.
Ask the average american about who is superior, in science, medical care (availability especially) or educational standards, and I bet you majority will say US.
And similarly, ask the average European who is superior in science, medical care, or educational standards, and I bet you a majority will say Europe.
The current atmosphere here on slashdot, at least, appears to say that pro-US nationalism is bad, being nationalistic for almost any other country is just fine. Myself, I'm stuck in the middle because I know there are many other countries doing things much better than the US, but it's also annoying to hear citizens of these counties being cocky, bashing regular Americans, or just trying to find any way to belittle the US for no apparent reason. sigh.
And yes, you're right, Scandinavian countries are very good in the sciences, but the original poster was drawing conclusions that didn't logically follow from the data.
It does imply failure of the test in NJ, at least according to the state driver's manual from about 10 years ago. Or at least that's how I understood it back then, with our driver's ed teacher being very insistent upon it.
I do remember the driver's education teacher saying there was only one case in NJ history where someone refused the test and was found not guilty. That was after he wrecked his car, with enough witnesses to testify, that it wasn't his fault. But right after seeing him lose his car one of the bystanders said "hey, that's a horrible loss, here have a drink" and gave him some sips from a flask. Not the smartest thing the driver could have done, but the witnesses were able to testify for him.
(Actually, there was a stupid email joke going around a few years ago loosely based on this story).