Not only is this 'story' over a month old, but it is 95% bullshit. Snopes, though, has you covered.
Quoting: 'There are no plans to stop teaching the Holocaust. Indeed, the education department's plan seems to be ensuring that it is taught everywhere. A spokesman for the Department of Education and Skills (DES) maintained that "The Adjegbo report on citizenship [a different report authored by Sir Keith Adjegbo and released in January 2007] said key British historical events must be taught" and that while "the national curriculum is a broad framework and there is scope for schools to make their own decisions, teaching elements including the Holocaust and key British events will be compulsory."'
Damn my spell check abilities. It should be R^2 of course, not R, so the radius has to be only about 3/7 that of the earth, not 1/5th (and 1/11th the volume)
The mass of the planet is not the only thing which specifies its gravity. The earth's surface gravity is given by g=GM/R where M is the planet's mass and R is the radius (the gravitational force in the atmosphere is about the same, as the atmosphere extends 100 km or so up, while R is about 6000 km) . So without knowing the radius of the planet, there's no way to tell what the gravity could be (and the radius I would imagine has something to do with what elements were used to form that solar system). The planet is about 5 earth masses, which means it would have to be about 1300km in radius (or 1/125th the volume) to have the same gravity as earth on it's surface.
A planet of Earthlike mass in the habitable band would almost certainly have to have an atmosphere of some kind.
I don't know much about formation of the atmosphere, so could you please explain why that has to be the case for any star and any planet of mass roughly 1 earth mass? Certainly issues like the chemical composition of the star, chemical composition of the planet, radius of the planet (from which we get a value for gravitational acceleration on the planet), and probably other factors too play an important role in determining whether an atmosphere forms.
I would also like to point out that (1) the planet would be tidally locked, rendering most of it inhabitable and (2) I had been told that the team that found the planet had retracted their statement that it lay inside the habitable zone (apparently it lies just outside).
Having briefly read through the paper, they state that the dominant mechanism is thermal pressure. They are assuming here that the dark matter is weakly interacting (they say their result is very general, but in the paper they work with a specific candidate for dark matter: neutralinos, the supersymmetric partner of neutrinos. With theoretical bounds, they find that in these DM stars, the heating from neutralino reactions overpower any cooling mechanisms, leading to this giant star. Note that the stars are not entirely made of dark matter. The starting point for these calculations is 85% DM and 15% normal matter.
There are two mechanisms which prevents stars from collapsing under gravitational attraction. For stars like our sun it is thermal pressure and radiation pressure (for massive stars, this is the larger pressure) caused by nuclear fusion and the massive amount of energy released by it. However, when stars stop fusing and cool down into white dwarfs or neutron stars, they are still supported by what's called a degeneracy pressure. The basic idea is that the laws of quantum mechanics prevent all the particles from occupying the same energy state (this is the Pauli exclusion principle), and as a result, there is a density dependent pressure. Such a mechanism could keep dark matter stars from collapsing, assuming they are fermionic in nature.
That is a fair argument, but approval voting still isn't democratic. If there is a single candidate who garners a majority of first place votes, then in a democracy, he should be the winner. In your specific example, you should also note that D is not the favourite candidate in any voting block. In fact, if you play around with the numbers you can make every winner in each block lose in the overall vote.
The point I really want to make is that Condorcet voting has all the advantages of Approval voting while retaining the majority criterion.
As much as I agree with your assessment of IRV and the strengths of Condorcet methods, Approval voting does not even satisfy the majority criterion*, which is the least you would demand in a democracy.
*A voting system satisfies this criterion if, when 50% or more pick a candidate A as their first choice, then A wins the election.
The way that we tell if a theory is broken is by experimentation.
That is not entirely true. A theory which also gives infinite answers to certain questions, or answers which contract results from other (accepted) theories must be broken as well. For the standard model, however, we DO have results that conflict with observation. For example, there is the so called cosmological constant problem. For GR, I assume the poster was referring to the problem of trying to integrate GR with quantum field theory. Most physicists accept that a full theory of the universe should describe gravity as a quantum phenomena.
For someone who says they are qualified to evaluate the science, you seem to have an easy time forming an opinion off solely unscientific statements, most of which only appear in the media. Would you like to link to an actual paper which says "we are going to all die unless we stop global climate change", or anything remotely like that? Would you like to explain how you are skeptical of the earth getting warmer in the face of experimental data that the earth is getting warmer?
If you feel your credentials alone justify your unscientific opinion, well, I have an bachelor's in physics as well (honours), and I see no reason to deny the conclusions of almost all respected scientists in the field: that anthropogenic global climate change is a reality. If you wish to understand more clearly why they think that, I suggest asking someone with knowledge in the subject at your university. I'm sure they'd be more than willing to explain the science at an undergraduate level. If, though, you aren't willing to make even a basic effort to understand the science, then why should your degree give your opinion any more weight than people without any scientific knowledge.
It's sad when contributors pick and choose only the parts of an article that support their own viewpoint and hope that readers are unwilling to read the whole article. Anyone who has RTFA can see that fully half of the article is a repudiation of this man's hypothesis by most of the scientific community:
Choice quotes
"His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University.
"And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report."
Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface.
To add to this, I'd like to point out that global warming deniers are quick to dismiss 650,000 years of data about earth's temperature as not being representative of the facts, but they jump on 3 years of data (and data confined to a local area and not the whole planet) as evidence against global warming, solely because they think it supports their opinion. If they were serious about science, they would apply the same rigour to the arguments they agree with as to the arguments they disagree with.
The law was originally introduced by the Liberal party which is the exact same party that voted against it this time.
The law was a temporary measure that was up for renewal this year. Since it hadn't even been used once, they decided it wasn't worth keeping on the books. It's ridiculous to complain that they're somehow being hypocrites by repealing laws which serve no purpose.
his has absolutely nothing to do with moral objection, as many Liberal members broke rank from their party and actually voted *for* the bill.
Really? Because the CBC says a grand total of one Liberal voted for the bill.
You can't close your eyes and pretend that bad people don't exist and those advocating such an approach are ignorant in my view.
Not every law is a good law and not every law helps fight crime, no matter what the intentions were when the law was put into place. The fact that most of parliment recognizes this shows that they are at least less ignorant than you.
Regardless of the validity of the claims made in the paper, the results WERE suppressed and it took an eight year court battle to get them to release it.
At the very least, the paper deserves to be judged on its scientific merits before being dismissed.
Alright, that's fair. I respectfully withdraw my argument.
But please explain, then: why don't superclusters, which are also gravitationally bound, stay together in the scenario where -1/3 w = -1?
On top of this, Forbes is reporting that this whole sorry episode didn't even help raise the number of people who watch the show. The good news is that the ratings haven't gone down either.
I would like to add something to the previous post. While it's true that there will not be a big rip, in an accelerating universe we will still end up with a universe with no atoms. The reason is that in an accelerating universe, the horizon (the maximum distance at which we can interact with objects*) is forever shrinking. That means that after a long enough time, it will be smaller than the distance between electrons and protons in atoms. Wih the electron outside the proton's horizon, there will be no interaction to hold the atom together. So the process which starts with our galaxy being isolated from other galaxies will continue on down until nothing interacts with anything else.
*In a universe which is static, the horizon is just given by the age of the universe times the speed of light. But in an expanding universe (where the scale is given by a(t), it depends on the rate of expansion, given by the hubble constant H (H = (1/a)* da/dt) . An accelerating universe satisfies d/dt c/(aH) 0, which is the precise condition that the horizon is shrinking
Here's one from mathematics that caught my eye. The goal is to find out whether 78,557 is the lowest Sierpinski* number. All but 8 candidates have been eliminated and there's a project called 17 or bust which is working on the last eight. As their name suggests, the project has personally eliminated 9 numbers already.
* Some of you may recognize Sierpinski from the carpet which bears his name.
In my view, there can't be ANY advertising which is less helpful than the pushing of prescription medicines on TV. I'd rather see our local prostitutes get air time.
Yeah, sorry, the market was ruined by the consumers, not the producers.
Yeah, and when a scientific theory doesn't match experiment, it's not the theory that's failed, it's the universe's fault.
Look, what use is a theory if it doesn't match the real world? Free market capitalism's desirable results come from specific predictions about how consumers behave. And if those predictions doesn't match up with how consumers really behave, then the theory has little or no use. A good economic theory shouldn't make demands on how we spend out money, it should take that as a given and develop the rest accordingly.
After all, the economy exists to benefit US, not the corporations. Corporations are just a tool that are supposedly designed to maximize useful economic output.
They tried that one years ago. Noone took them seriously back then, and noone does now. The problem with that argument is that it fails to account for Venus being closer to the sun. When you sit on the electric heater, CO2 is not the reason your ass gets hot.
Sorry AC, you're full of shit.
From wikipedia:
Venus has an extremely thick atmosphere, which consists mainly of carbon dioxide and a small amount of nitrogen. The pressure at the planet's surface is about 90 times that at Earth's surface--a pressure equivalent to that at a depth of 1 kilometer under Earth's oceans. The enormously CO2-rich atmosphere generates a strong greenhouse effect that raises the surface temperature to over 400 C. This makes Venus' surface hotter than Mercury's, even though Venus is nearly twice as distant from the Sun and receives only 25% of the solar irradiance.
In fact, if we ignored the greenhouse effect, and made a simplyfying blackbody assumption, the increase in temperature due to distance D from the sun goes like 1/sqrt(D). So Venus, being 71% of the distance from the earth to the sun, would be only at 64 C without it's greenhouse effect (albeido plays a role as well, but that in turn is related to the atmospheric content).
They did not say that the most fertile women were chosen 60% of the time, but 60% more than pure chance would dictate. So it was 24 (1.6*(30/2)) out of the 30 women chosen that were more fertile, or 80%. Although I agree that 30 women is way too small a sample size.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only is this 'story' over a month old, but it is 95% bullshit. Snopes, though, has you covered.
Quoting: 'There are no plans to stop teaching the Holocaust. Indeed, the education department's plan seems to be ensuring that it is taught everywhere. A spokesman for the Department of Education and Skills (DES) maintained that "The Adjegbo report on citizenship [a different report authored by Sir Keith Adjegbo and released in January 2007] said key British historical events must be taught" and that while "the national curriculum is a broad framework and there is scope for schools to make their own decisions, teaching elements including the Holocaust and key British events will be compulsory."'
Damn my spell check abilities. It should be R^2 of course, not R, so the radius has to be only about 3/7 that of the earth, not 1/5th (and 1/11th the volume)
The mass of the planet is not the only thing which specifies its gravity. The earth's surface gravity is given by g=GM/R where M is the planet's mass and R is the radius (the gravitational force in the atmosphere is about the same, as the atmosphere extends 100 km or so up, while R is about 6000 km) . So without knowing the radius of the planet, there's no way to tell what the gravity could be (and the radius I would imagine has something to do with what elements were used to form that solar system). The planet is about 5 earth masses, which means it would have to be about 1300km in radius (or 1/125th the volume) to have the same gravity as earth on it's surface.
A planet of Earthlike mass in the habitable band would almost certainly have to have an atmosphere of some kind.
I don't know much about formation of the atmosphere, so could you please explain why that has to be the case for any star and any planet of mass roughly 1 earth mass? Certainly issues like the chemical composition of the star, chemical composition of the planet, radius of the planet (from which we get a value for gravitational acceleration on the planet), and probably other factors too play an important role in determining whether an atmosphere forms.
I would also like to point out that (1) the planet would be tidally locked, rendering most of it inhabitable and (2) I had been told that the team that found the planet had retracted their statement that it lay inside the habitable zone (apparently it lies just outside).
Having briefly read through the paper, they state that the dominant mechanism is thermal pressure. They are assuming here that the dark matter is weakly interacting (they say their result is very general, but in the paper they work with a specific candidate for dark matter: neutralinos, the supersymmetric partner of neutrinos. With theoretical bounds, they find that in these DM stars, the heating from neutralino reactions overpower any cooling mechanisms, leading to this giant star. Note that the stars are not entirely made of dark matter. The starting point for these calculations is 85% DM and 15% normal matter.
There are two mechanisms which prevents stars from collapsing under gravitational attraction. For stars like our sun it is thermal pressure and radiation pressure (for massive stars, this is the larger pressure) caused by nuclear fusion and the massive amount of energy released by it. However, when stars stop fusing and cool down into white dwarfs or neutron stars, they are still supported by what's called a degeneracy pressure. The basic idea is that the laws of quantum mechanics prevent all the particles from occupying the same energy state (this is the Pauli exclusion principle), and as a result, there is a density dependent pressure. Such a mechanism could keep dark matter stars from collapsing, assuming they are fermionic in nature.
That is a fair argument, but approval voting still isn't democratic. If there is a single candidate who garners a majority of first place votes, then in a democracy, he should be the winner. In your specific example, you should also note that D is not the favourite candidate in any voting block. In fact, if you play around with the numbers you can make every winner in each block lose in the overall vote.
The point I really want to make is that Condorcet voting has all the advantages of Approval voting while retaining the majority criterion.
As much as I agree with your assessment of IRV and the strengths of Condorcet methods, Approval voting does not even satisfy the majority criterion*, which is the least you would demand in a democracy.
*A voting system satisfies this criterion if, when 50% or more pick a candidate A as their first choice, then A wins the election.
The way that we tell if a theory is broken is by experimentation.
That is not entirely true. A theory which also gives infinite answers to certain questions, or answers which contract results from other (accepted) theories must be broken as well. For the standard model, however, we DO have results that conflict with observation. For example, there is the so called cosmological constant problem. For GR, I assume the poster was referring to the problem of trying to integrate GR with quantum field theory. Most physicists accept that a full theory of the universe should describe gravity as a quantum phenomena.
That's the Democrats fault.
For someone who says they are qualified to evaluate the science, you seem to have an easy time forming an opinion off solely unscientific statements, most of which only appear in the media. Would you like to link to an actual paper which says "we are going to all die unless we stop global climate change", or anything remotely like that? Would you like to explain how you are skeptical of the earth getting warmer in the face of experimental data that the earth is getting warmer?
If you feel your credentials alone justify your unscientific opinion, well, I have an bachelor's in physics as well (honours), and I see no reason to deny the conclusions of almost all respected scientists in the field: that anthropogenic global climate change is a reality. If you wish to understand more clearly why they think that, I suggest asking someone with knowledge in the subject at your university. I'm sure they'd be more than willing to explain the science at an undergraduate level. If, though, you aren't willing to make even a basic effort to understand the science, then why should your degree give your opinion any more weight than people without any scientific knowledge.
It's sad when contributors pick and choose only the parts of an article that support their own viewpoint and hope that readers are unwilling to read the whole article. Anyone who has RTFA can see that fully half of the article is a repudiation of this man's hypothesis by most of the scientific community:
Choice quotes
"His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University. "And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report."
Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface.
To add to this, I'd like to point out that global warming deniers are quick to dismiss 650,000 years of data about earth's temperature as not being representative of the facts, but they jump on 3 years of data (and data confined to a local area and not the whole planet) as evidence against global warming, solely because they think it supports their opinion. If they were serious about science, they would apply the same rigour to the arguments they agree with as to the arguments they disagree with.
The law was originally introduced by the Liberal party which is the exact same party that voted against it this time.
The law was a temporary measure that was up for renewal this year. Since it hadn't even been used once, they decided it wasn't worth keeping on the books. It's ridiculous to complain that they're somehow being hypocrites by repealing laws which serve no purpose.
his has absolutely nothing to do with moral objection, as many Liberal members broke rank from their party and actually voted *for* the bill.
Really? Because the CBC says a grand total of one Liberal voted for the bill.
You can't close your eyes and pretend that bad people don't exist and those advocating such an approach are ignorant in my view.
Not every law is a good law and not every law helps fight crime, no matter what the intentions were when the law was put into place. The fact that most of parliment recognizes this shows that they are at least less ignorant than you.
Why is this modded as funny? Muon-catalyzed fusion has benn well understood for years.
Regardless of the validity of the claims made in the paper, the results WERE suppressed and it took an eight year court battle to get them to release it.
At the very least, the paper deserves to be judged on its scientific merits before being dismissed.
Alright, that's fair. I respectfully withdraw my argument. But please explain, then: why don't superclusters, which are also gravitationally bound, stay together in the scenario where -1/3 w = -1?
On top of this, Forbes is reporting that this whole sorry episode didn't even help raise the number of people who watch the show. The good news is that the ratings haven't gone down either.
I would like to add something to the previous post. While it's true that there will not be a big rip, in an accelerating universe we will still end up with a universe with no atoms. The reason is that in an accelerating universe, the horizon (the maximum distance at which we can interact with objects*) is forever shrinking. That means that after a long enough time, it will be smaller than the distance between electrons and protons in atoms. Wih the electron outside the proton's horizon, there will be no interaction to hold the atom together. So the process which starts with our galaxy being isolated from other galaxies will continue on down until nothing interacts with anything else. *In a universe which is static, the horizon is just given by the age of the universe times the speed of light. But in an expanding universe (where the scale is given by a(t), it depends on the rate of expansion, given by the hubble constant H (H = (1/a)* da/dt) . An accelerating universe satisfies d/dt c/(aH) 0, which is the precise condition that the horizon is shrinking
Mocking the media with a fake press conference about haircuts in the 70's?
Priceless.
Here's one from mathematics that caught my eye. The goal is to find out whether 78,557 is the lowest Sierpinski* number. All but 8 candidates have been eliminated and there's a project called 17 or bust which is working on the last eight. As their name suggests, the project has personally eliminated 9 numbers already.
* Some of you may recognize Sierpinski from the carpet which bears his name.
In my view, there can't be ANY advertising which is less helpful than the pushing of prescription medicines on TV. I'd rather see our local prostitutes get air time.
Wouldn't we all.
Yeah, sorry, the market was ruined by the consumers, not the producers.
Yeah, and when a scientific theory doesn't match experiment, it's not the theory that's failed, it's the universe's fault.
Look, what use is a theory if it doesn't match the real world? Free market capitalism's desirable results come from specific predictions about how consumers behave. And if those predictions doesn't match up with how consumers really behave, then the theory has little or no use. A good economic theory shouldn't make demands on how we spend out money, it should take that as a given and develop the rest accordingly.
After all, the economy exists to benefit US, not the corporations. Corporations are just a tool that are supposedly designed to maximize useful economic output.
They tried that one years ago. Noone took them seriously back then, and noone does now. The problem with that argument is that it fails to account for Venus being closer to the sun. When you sit on the electric heater, CO2 is not the reason your ass gets hot.
Sorry AC, you're full of shit.
From wikipedia:
Venus has an extremely thick atmosphere, which consists mainly of carbon dioxide and a small amount of nitrogen. The pressure at the planet's surface is about 90 times that at Earth's surface--a pressure equivalent to that at a depth of 1 kilometer under Earth's oceans. The enormously CO2-rich atmosphere generates a strong greenhouse effect that raises the surface temperature to over 400 C. This makes Venus' surface hotter than Mercury's, even though Venus is nearly twice as distant from the Sun and receives only 25% of the solar irradiance.
In fact, if we ignored the greenhouse effect, and made a simplyfying blackbody assumption, the increase in temperature due to distance D from the sun goes like 1/sqrt(D). So Venus, being 71% of the distance from the earth to the sun, would be only at 64 C without it's greenhouse effect (albeido plays a role as well, but that in turn is related to the atmospheric content).
CNN, MSNBC news, CBS, etc all lean to the left of American Politics.
And American politics leans so far to the right of the rest of the world, I'm surprised you haven't fallen over.
They did not say that the most fertile women were chosen 60% of the time, but 60% more than pure chance would dictate. So it was 24 (1.6*(30/2)) out of the 30 women chosen that were more fertile, or 80%. Although I agree that 30 women is way too small a sample size.