Google searches (and online documentation found by other means) are great for finding details about stuff you already know exists. They stink at helping you discover really useful tools it never occurred to you might exist.
The biggest difference is that models of real objects using fairly simple models of dark matter can match observations very well while reasonable ones without it do not seem to. Tachyons etc. do not seem to be of any help in explaining anything.
Of course models that match observations may still be wrong, and we just haven't thought up the correct one yet, but in this case it seems unlikely.
It certainly is possible that "we don't know as much as we thought," but given what we do know, dark matter seems to be by far the most plausible.
First, it fits obervations well, and there is no particular reason to believe that we *can* see everything. There is certainly precedent (eg neutrinos).
While in themselves they are not reasonable candidates for dark matter, do we really have any strong observation evidence that the universe is not filled with iron basketballs? We certainly would have trouble seeing them directly... Iron basketballs aren't the only things we might miss, either.
Of course, there may both be dark matter and a misunderstanding of gravity.
As far as the cause of our difficulty being a misunderstanding of gravity, it seems unlikely: globular clusters do not show evidance of dark matter, but small compact dwarf galaxies do.
While the JWST will indeed be a big improvement over the HST for the projects you mention, it will not be as versatile an instrument, and so cannot really be considered a replacement. It's good, but different.
The competition for use of the HST is still fierce, and for good reason.
The problem is that it still offers capabilities that nothing else can replicate, or will for some considerable period of time.
Yes, there are other telescopes that can do better than HST for some tasks, but there are still many tasks for which the HST is the best there is. Even if we consider planned future telescopes, they are all optimized for different things. The Webb telescope, for example, is optomized for infrared observations.
Yes, we should be able to build someting with the capabilities of the Hubble much more cheaply now, but nobody actually has funding to do such a thing, and I suspect the chances of such a project being funded are worse that a repair (even if the repair is more expensive).
If your 15 year old car were the only car ever built with the features you wanted, and nobody was willing to build another one, you might approach a major repair differently.
Depending on what you consider a "single picture," I think SDSS (see http://sdss.org/) has them beat. SDSS scans aren't generally stored in a single file, but they are taken in a single exposure (sort of; see http://www.sdss.org/dr3/instruments for more information on drift scanning), and have vastly more pixels than the one presented in the article. The pixels are stored in many files for convenience, but I think it unreasonable to claim that a stripe is not a single picture, but that a single file constructed by stitching together many files is.
If having all the pixels stitched together, but not in a single file, is enough for it to be considered a single image, an argument can be made that the entire survey is a single picture!
If you like this approach, you might want to take
a look at Knuth's "Literate Programming." One place
to start is http://www.literateprogramming.com/
In either case, one needs to remember that too much
can be as bad (or worse!) than too little. In real
life, you may not always be the one to edit the
code, and if someone edits the code but doesn't
update the commentary, you can get into real
trouble.
In fact, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (in which Fermilab also plays a major role) transfers its imaging data from the the observatory to Fermilab (where it is reduced) by FedExing DLT tapes.
I do not know what it planned for the DEC.
You are assuming that Stallman's goal is for free software to be used by businesses and the masses. It is, I think, quite clear that it is the freedom, cooperation, and community of developers with which Stallman is concerned.
The question of whether "most people and businesses" use free software is totally unimportant except for its effect on developers. Getting "the masses" to use free software is just a means to an end, not the end itself.
Complaining that his goal of freedom, cooperation, and community among developers is interfering with the adoption of free software among nondevelopers is complaining that his ends are interfering with his means.
Personally, I find his goal a lot more intersting than the mere popularity of free software. The *only* reason why the popularity of free software is desireable is that it provides resources (monetary and intellectual) for developers.
(Of course, the absence of free software probably provides more monetary resources to some developers, but fewer intellectual resources, and to far fewer developers.)
Perhaps improving batteries is simply a more difficult problem. Some problems are genuinely harder than others, and which are harder than others is not always intuitive. While there are certainly industries willing and able to stear technological development for their own benefit, I doubt the battery industry is one of them.
Asside from tuition wavers and pay for research
assistantship or teaching assistantship (more
available in some fields than others) the
universities offer something very different than
corporations do: the education (or the degree, or both) one is interested in.
Yes, many jobs will teach you things,
and even conduct or pay for training. What they
will pay for, though, may not be what you want to
be taught.
Of course, many students do not get good
educations from their universities. This is not
much different from paying for any other sort of
expensive lemon. The student can, however, leave
far before they are finished. At the graduate
level, one needs to be vary careful in choosing an advisor that one will do well with, and be willing to change advisors (or even schools) if one is not being mentored to ones satisfaction.
There do seem to be a lot of lemon educations
out there, and the schools can still maintain good reputations. This at least partially because some
schools specialize more in selling degrees than
education. In this case, it is the degree for sale
rather than the education. (Indeed, in many fields, particularly those that pay well, the students are more interested in the degrees than the education, and so there is a good match.) Students just need to be careful to go to a school (and find an advisor at that school) that can and will give them what they are looking for. No, this is not easy. In fact it is particularly difficult at the stage in ones career when one is choosing a school. Such is life.
The Principia Discordia, which really exists, and was not invented by Wilson, used it earlier. I have no clue if the Pricipia was its origin, but it was not Wilson.
It is currently being published by both Loompanics and Steve Jackson Games, and I believe was floating around in other less formal forms before these before either.
In astronomy, to some minor extent, this has already happened. The important journals are owned by professional societies, not publishing companies, and very few restrictions are placed on how the authors can distribute copies of their own work, even after it has been published by the journal.
Furthermore, many papers get "published" electronically on a preprint server, which many astronomers pay more attention to than journals themselves. These papers are often subsequently published in a paper journal without fuss.
The success of this model in astronomy is, I think, a good demonstration of the uselessness of commertial publishers
get-apt and rpm are not the only options, although
they may be the only options for which you can get
a reasonably complete assortment of distributed
products. Personally, though, I like UPS/UPD , available through FermiTools .
Particularly nice is the capacity to have many
different versions of any given product installed
at the same time, each possibly with different
dependencies (or dependencies on different versions of a different product). It is not only possible, but
convenient for different users to run different
versions by default, or even for a user to run
different versions of the same program
simultaneously, or switch back an forth between different versions. Very handy in a
development environment.
Of course, it handles things like dependencies
nicely as well.
Unfortunatly, the only place I know of that
distributes anything using UPS/UPD is Fermilab,
and although they do make the UPS/UPD software
available, they
do not distribute software publicly using it.
For that matter, why don't the insurance companies offer policies that do and don't cover it, and let the customer decide (with the benefit of genetic testing, if they so choose) which coverage they want? Wouldn't this ammount to the same thing, but with less work for (and invasion by) the insurance companies?
The wasteful bit was building them in the first place. Now that they are up there, the best thing that can be done is to take them down. Their intended purpose is better served by other technology, mostly already in place. They are like a treatment for a disease already cured using a different treatment with fewer adverse side effects. The best thing that can be done is to stop administering the treatment.
Their major function seems to have been to make life difficult for astronomers. (These things are numerous and *bright*.) Their destruction will be a relief.
Having finished my dissertation roughly a year ago, I remember pretty clearly how it worked here. I keep the copyright, but the university required that I grant it and UMI the right to publish it at they see fit.
If you like classical (particularly pre-baroque) or pre-60's folk, Dorian Recordings has some good stuff. Unfortunately, their web page (http://www.dorian.com/) has very little content.
Re:The Forbes perspective is the only one that cou
on
Be to Drop BeOS? No.
·
· Score: 1
The "true nerd" perspective doesn't count with corperate types, but, by definition, it does for "true nerds." Given that this is a "news for nerds" site, the nerd perspective would seem to count here.
The whole notion that sales make something count is a corporate one. Now, in many (most?) circumstances, sales have consequences (availablity of cool stuff, getting paid enough to afford it) about which most nerds do care, but are not in themselves particularly important. Whether that applies in this case is what is being debated.
I don't think many astronomers at all were convinced by the data when it first came out, and many (including the serious planet hunters I know) were convinced that it was not a planet.
It was, I think, far to early for a press release to have been made, and I think the press too readily accepts the judgement of only one or two scientists. Even when they do include the opinions of skeptics in their articles, they are often strongly biased in favor of the "new discovery."
I think it would be interesting to have a web site that is a combination of the e-print server and slashdot. Not only would this help discussion within the comminuty, a lurking press might get an insight into the state of different ideas.
Actually, a lot of work has gone into making it possible to write IRAF scripts in Python rather than cl. I've yet to try it, but I'm told it's about ready for use. (An abstract is available.)
Of course, tcl is also used. Most of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey software is written in Dervish, which is a Fermilab branch of tcl.
As I see it, there are two basic problems with invoking QM (and Heisenberg) to establish that "free will" is scientifically consistent. First of all, the evidence (at least that of which I am aware) that QM effects play a significant role in the brain is pretty pathetic. Second, even if they were important, all it would establish is that our bahavior is at least partially random, and that the relative probabilities of different actions can be described deterministically. Frankly, I don't see how this helps free will any, at least relative to a strictly deterministic view.
Personally, I don't see any problem with free will being consistent with either. Scientific laws are descriptive, not proscriptive. Nobody will throw you in jail for violating a scientific law. Rather, they describe what will happen. If my sister tells you I like lobster, and will order it whenever I am at a particular resturant, she would be right. She is not, however, forcing me to choose lobster. I will order it, and furthermore will do so of my own free will.
Slashdot Mirror
Google searches (and online documentation found by other means) are great for finding details about stuff you already know exists. They stink at helping you discover really useful tools it never occurred to you might exist.
The biggest difference is that models of real objects using fairly simple models of dark matter can match observations very well while reasonable ones without it do not seem to. Tachyons etc. do not seem to be of any help in explaining anything.
Of course models that match observations may still be wrong, and we just haven't thought up the correct one yet, but in this case it seems unlikely.
-Hil
It certainly is possible that "we don't know as much as we thought," but given what we do know, dark matter seems to be by far the most plausible.
First, it fits obervations well, and there is no particular reason to believe that we *can* see everything. There is certainly precedent (eg neutrinos).
While in themselves they are not reasonable candidates for dark matter, do we really have any strong observation evidence that the universe is not filled with iron basketballs? We certainly would have trouble seeing them directly... Iron basketballs aren't the only things we might miss, either.
Of course, there may both be dark matter and a misunderstanding of gravity.
As far as the cause of our difficulty being a misunderstanding of gravity, it seems unlikely: globular clusters do not show evidance of dark matter, but small compact dwarf galaxies do.
-Hil
While the JWST will indeed be a big improvement over the HST for the projects you mention, it will not be as versatile an instrument, and so cannot really be considered a replacement. It's good, but different.
The competition for use of the HST is still fierce, and for good reason.
The problem is that it still offers capabilities that nothing else can replicate, or will for some considerable period of time.
Yes, there are other telescopes that can do better than HST for some tasks, but there are still many tasks for which the HST is the best there is. Even if we consider planned future telescopes, they are all optimized for different things. The Webb telescope, for example, is optomized for infrared observations.
Yes, we should be able to build someting with the capabilities of the Hubble much more cheaply now, but nobody actually has funding to do such a thing, and I suspect the chances of such a project being funded are worse that a repair (even if the repair is more expensive).
If your 15 year old car were the only car ever built with the features you wanted, and nobody was willing to build another one, you might approach a major repair differently.
-Hil
There are differences (described in other answers) which may make cell phones worse, but driving with passengers *is* more dangerous for younger drivers (see http://kidshealth.org/teen/safety/safebasics/drivi ng_safety.html)
Then note that the study in the cell phone article was of younger drivers.
-Hil
Depending on what you consider a "single picture," I think SDSS (see http://sdss.org/) has them beat. SDSS scans aren't generally stored in a single file, but they are taken in a single exposure (sort of; see http://www.sdss.org/dr3/instruments for more information on drift scanning), and have vastly more pixels than the one presented in the article. The pixels are stored in many files for convenience, but I think it unreasonable to claim that a stripe is not a single picture, but that a single file constructed by stitching together many files is.
If having all the pixels stitched together, but not in a single file, is enough for it to be considered a single image, an argument can be made that the entire survey is a single picture!
-Hil
If you like this approach, you might want to take a look at Knuth's "Literate Programming." One place to start is http://www.literateprogramming.com/
In either case, one needs to remember that too much can be as bad (or worse!) than too little. In real life, you may not always be the one to edit the code, and if someone edits the code but doesn't update the commentary, you can get into real trouble.
-Hil
In fact, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (in which Fermilab also plays a major role) transfers its imaging data from the the observatory to Fermilab (where it is reduced) by FedExing DLT tapes. I do not know what it planned for the DEC.
Except, of course, that Fermilab does no classified or weapons related research at all.
-Hil
You are assuming that Stallman's goal is for free software to be used by businesses and the masses. It is, I think, quite clear that it is the freedom, cooperation, and community of developers with which Stallman is concerned.
The question of whether "most people and businesses" use free software is totally unimportant except for its effect on developers. Getting "the masses" to use free software is just a means to an end, not the end itself.
Complaining that his goal of freedom, cooperation, and community among developers is interfering with the adoption of free software among nondevelopers is complaining that his ends are interfering with his means.
Personally, I find his goal a lot more intersting than the mere popularity of free software. The *only* reason why the popularity of free software is desireable is that it provides resources (monetary and intellectual) for developers.
(Of course, the absence of free software probably provides more monetary resources to some developers, but fewer intellectual resources, and to far fewer developers.)
-Hil
Perhaps improving batteries is simply a more difficult problem. Some problems are genuinely harder than others, and which are harder than others is not always intuitive. While there are certainly industries willing and able to stear technological development for their own benefit, I doubt the battery industry is one of them.
-Hil
Asside from tuition wavers and pay for research assistantship or teaching assistantship (more available in some fields than others) the universities offer something very different than corporations do: the education (or the degree, or both) one is interested in.
Yes, many jobs will teach you things, and even conduct or pay for training. What they will pay for, though, may not be what you want to be taught.
Of course, many students do not get good educations from their universities. This is not much different from paying for any other sort of expensive lemon. The student can, however, leave far before they are finished. At the graduate level, one needs to be vary careful in choosing an advisor that one will do well with, and be willing to change advisors (or even schools) if one is not being mentored to ones satisfaction.
There do seem to be a lot of lemon educations out there, and the schools can still maintain good reputations. This at least partially because some schools specialize more in selling degrees than education. In this case, it is the degree for sale rather than the education. (Indeed, in many fields, particularly those that pay well, the students are more interested in the degrees than the education, and so there is a good match.) Students just need to be careful to go to a school (and find an advisor at that school) that can and will give them what they are looking for. No, this is not easy. In fact it is particularly difficult at the stage in ones career when one is choosing a school. Such is life.
-Hil
It is currently being published by both Loompanics and Steve Jackson Games, and I believe was floating around in other less formal forms before these before either.
-Hil
In astronomy, to some minor extent, this has already happened. The important journals are owned by professional societies, not publishing companies, and very few restrictions are placed on how the authors can distribute copies of their own work, even after it has been published by the journal.
Furthermore, many papers get "published" electronically on a preprint server, which many astronomers pay more attention to than journals themselves. These papers are often subsequently published in a paper journal without fuss.
The success of this model in astronomy is, I think, a good demonstration of the uselessness of commertial publishers
Particularly nice is the capacity to have many different versions of any given product installed at the same time, each possibly with different dependencies (or dependencies on different versions of a different product). It is not only possible, but convenient for different users to run different versions by default, or even for a user to run different versions of the same program simultaneously, or switch back an forth between different versions. Very handy in a development environment.
Of course, it handles things like dependencies nicely as well. Unfortunatly, the only place I know of that distributes anything using UPS/UPD is Fermilab, and although they do make the UPS/UPD software available, they do not distribute software publicly using it.
from simply not covering Huntingdon's Chorea?
For that matter, why don't the insurance companies offer policies that do and don't cover it, and let the customer decide (with the benefit of genetic testing, if they so choose) which coverage they want? Wouldn't this ammount to the same thing, but with less work for (and invasion by) the insurance companies?
-Hil
The wasteful bit was building them in the first place. Now that they are up there, the best thing that can be done is to take them down. Their intended purpose is better served by other technology, mostly already in place. They are like a treatment for a disease already cured using a different treatment with fewer adverse side effects. The best thing that can be done is to stop administering the treatment.
Their major function seems to have been to make life difficult for astronomers. (These things are numerous and *bright*.) Their destruction will be a relief.
Having finished my dissertation roughly a year ago, I remember pretty clearly how it worked here. I keep the copyright, but the university required that I grant it and UMI the right to publish it at they see fit.
If you like classical (particularly pre-baroque) or pre-60's folk, Dorian Recordings has some good stuff. Unfortunately, their web page (http://www.dorian.com/) has very little content.
The "true nerd" perspective doesn't count with corperate types, but, by definition, it does for "true nerds." Given that this is a "news for nerds" site, the nerd perspective would seem to count here.
The whole notion that sales make something count is a corporate one. Now, in many (most?) circumstances, sales have consequences (availablity of cool stuff, getting paid enough to afford it) about which most nerds do care, but are not in themselves particularly important. Whether that applies in this case is what is being debated.
I don't think many astronomers at all were convinced by the data when it first came out, and many (including the serious planet hunters I know) were convinced that it was not a planet.
It was, I think, far to early for a press release to have been made, and I think the press too readily accepts the judgement of only one or two scientists. Even when they do include the opinions of skeptics in their articles, they are often strongly biased in favor of the "new discovery."
I think it would be interesting to have a web site that is a combination of the e-print server and slashdot. Not only would this help discussion within the comminuty, a lurking press might get an insight into the state of different ideas.
Of course, tcl is also used. Most of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey software is written in Dervish, which is a Fermilab branch of tcl.
As I see it, there are two basic problems with invoking QM (and Heisenberg) to establish that "free will" is scientifically consistent. First of all, the evidence (at least that of which I am aware) that QM effects play a significant role in the brain is pretty pathetic. Second, even if they were important, all it would establish is that our bahavior is at least partially random, and that the relative probabilities of different actions can be described deterministically. Frankly, I don't see how this helps free will any, at least relative to a strictly deterministic view.
Personally, I don't see any problem with free will being consistent with either. Scientific laws are descriptive, not proscriptive. Nobody will throw you in jail for violating a scientific law. Rather, they describe what will happen. If my sister tells you I like lobster, and will order it whenever I am at a particular resturant, she would be right. She is not, however, forcing me to choose lobster. I will order it, and furthermore will do so of my own free will.