First off, I should point out to those that aren't familiar with the world of physics that Lee Smolin is one of the principal advocates, at least in the public discourse, of Loop Quantum Gravity, a competitor to String Theory. That is certainly not to say he's bashing string theory for his own benefit, though. His arguements are all quite sound.
Secondly, in my own experience, speaking to physics professors about string theory, we're starting to see some saturation in the number of students willing to work on topics in string theory for their PhDs, and as jobs become more scarce for those who enter into the field (after all if they don't advance with predictions, there's less and less to do), we'll see more people entering into other areas, ro examining other theories.
And finally, I should point out that the last line, That string theory abandoned testable predictions may be its ultimate betrayal of science , is extremely insulting. I'm sure there's nothing string theorists would like more than to come up with a testable hypothesis that could be tested immediately, but the fact is that it's a difficult subject. Just because we can't test it now is no reason to start crying "pseudo-science".
The test administrators translate scores into three achievement levels: advanced, proficient and basic.
On the most recent test, 68 percent of fourth-graders achieved at or above the basic level, compared to 63 percent on the 2000 and 1996 tests.
Among high school seniors, 54 percent performed at or above the basic level in science in 2005, compared to 57 percent in 1996.
Eighth-grade scores were largely unchanged from 10 years ago, with 59 percent of students scoring at or above the basic level in 2005, while 60 percent of students were at or above basic in 1996.
To achieve at the basic level on the National Assessment, high school seniors must demonstrate knowledge of very basic concepts about the earth, physical and life sciences, and show a rudimentary understanding of scientific principles.
This is he standard by which you judge science ability in the US? A demonstration of "very basic concepts" and "rudimentary understanding"? And still less than 70% at any grade level has this bare bones knowledge? Please, tell me, what exactly are they doing in your high school classes. Because they sure as hell aren't teaching you.
Now, I know we all enjoy reading reporters vain attempts to understand complex scientific theories, and we all have a good laugh when they say things like "The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought..." when it's clear that they just took a rough estimate of 1 trillion and subtracted the accepted value of 14 billion, but can we please have useful links now and then? I mean it's not like there isn't a website that has every damn phyisics paper written since 1994. If you can't add useful links, at least reject submissions that only link to the news reporters "interpretation" (and I use that term loosely) of the theory.
For those of you that want to see the real physics, the first paper I could find on the subject is here. It's from 2001, by the way.
I appreciate the attempt to provide numbers with a reference, but I think you know the response that a citation like that would get from a supporter of these new regulations. 1994 was not exactly a banner year for the internet, and people could easily argue that those numbers changed drastically in the last 12 years (or more, since I assume the study was done well in advance of the publishing date) as more and more people came online. If you could show that those numbers haven't changed over the period where the internet gained widespread appeal, then you'd have something we could really use against the 'child-molesters are everywhere' crowd.
I'm not sure how much of a help I can be, since I happen to be a bit behind you in my education (I start my PhD in September and I'll be where you are at this time next year). But here goes.
What m_g = m_i (called the weak equivalence principle) is telling us is that somehow gravity is more universal than other forces. In EM for instance, acceleration in an electric field E is given by a = (q/m_i) E. You can think of the q/m_i as the 'reduced charge' here. And, of course, it varies with the total charge q of the object. For gravity though, the eqn for acceleration in a gravity field is a = m_g/m_i g = g. The reduced charge is one for all objects. It's in this sense that I'm referring to universality. In fact, this universality really is the basis for General Relativity. In GR, you don't actually work with mass, but with a 4x4 matrix called the energy-momentum tensor T_{mu,nu}. If you're familiar with it, it is closely related to the idea of the Maxwell stress tensor in EM. Formally, T_{mu,nu} can be defined from an action principle. There is another, equivalent, definition, where we obtain a conservation equation through the symmetry of any system under spacetime translations. This definition is only of use for flat spacetime however. In this manner, we generalize the concept of mass even moreso than in special relativity. For a perfect fluid, for instance, T_{mu,nu} depends on energy density and PRESSURE. So if you start from general relativity, you don't really see this equivalence. Although to some extent, it's hidden in the axioms of GR, which assume that all particles 'feel' gravity in the same way, in the same sense that a = g for all particles.
If that seems like too much of a cop out to you (and I guess it is), you may have to wait until a unification of gravity and the other forces is achieved. I'm not sure how much quantum field theory you know, but you probably have heard of the electroweak theory, uniting EM and the weak force. What happens is that at a certain temperature (T_EW, for 'electroweak'), the universe undergoes a kind of phase change. At higher temperatures, the weak force carriers (the W+, W- and Z bosons) and the EM force carriers (photons) appear the same. After the phase change, the weak carriers gain mass, while the photon, as you know, remains massless (they 'freeze out', in the terminology). By studying this phase change, we learn about how the two forces are connected. Now, the fact that m_i, which is related to all forces through F=ma, is equal to m_g suggests that there is a deep relationship between gravity and the other forces. What I'm suggesting is that in order to understand this relationship, we need a theory which details the point at which gravity 'freezes out' from the other forces.
That's the best I can offer you, but hopefully if you search for Weak Equivalence Principle (WEP) on arXiv.org, you'll find something more.
-shma
Mass is more fundamental than you imply in your statement. The mass of the electron is not found by simply 'weighing' it (measuring its gravitational force under earth's gravity), as you suggest. Of course, you know that force, any force, is related to acceleration through mass, and in the electrons case, we use mangetic force experiments to determine its mass. The force of a magnet on an electron (mass m_e) is F_B = m_e a_B = qvB, where v is the velocity of the electron perpendicular to a magnetic field of strength B.
It turns out that quantum mechanically, this results in the discrete energies of an electron in an atom to be dependent on the mass as well, through the mass to charge ration e/m. Experiments observing atomic spectra can, and have, measured this to great accuracy.
For a more fundamental defninition of what mass is, we can work it out in terms of fundamental constants, whose constancy, at least for now, has not been challenged: sqrt(h*c/G), (where h is planck's constant, c is the speed of light, and G is Newton's gravitational constant) has the units of mass, and is given the name of "the Planck mass". This can be used as a fundamental unit of mass, in the same way one lightsecond is used to define the meter (1 ls = 299 792 458 meters exactly).
I've always had an issue with quantum encryption that doesn't so much stem from the technical aspects so much as from the basic requirements of any cypher.
Probably the most basic requirement of any encryption system is that it be able to send the encoded message quickly and easily. If I have an ultra secure magic box that I want to use to send key information to someone, but I can't get him the box, then it's useless to me. Now, the details of the transfer of information generally don't come into play when discussing most cyphers because the details of transfer are completely unrelated to the particular cypher being used. But quantum encryption is different. Any evesdropping on a transfer line will corrupt the message, not allowing the receiving party a chance to decode it. This makes jamming any line as simple as listening in (and of course, if we weren't worried about people listening in, we wouldn't need encryption in the first place). So does anyone here know how this issue is being addressed?
Griffin defended the agency's 2007 budget proposal, announced on 6 February, at a hearing before the US House of Representatives' science committee. The $16.8 billion budget includes $5.3 billion for science in 2007 but calls for $3.1 billion in cuts to science programmes by 2010 compared to projections made in the 2006 budget request.
Despite all the sybolism associated with sending people out into space, it's just not worth cancelling so many science programs. This related story details exactly what they're planning on cutting and states that from 2008 to 2011 science spending will increase by just 1% each year (is that even enough to keep up with inflation?). Is it really that important to send people back to the moon or to Mars?
And for those of you who just can't afford to pay one more bill each month, we're keeping a low bandwidth stream. It may not be the best quality, but you can still tune in for free.
They are only charging for CD quality streams. It seems they're moving more towards a donation (with perks) scheme rather than a subscription only service. And moving to such a system certainly doesn't mean support isn't out there. I'm a fan of KEXP which has done very well with membership drives while keeping the music free for everyone.
Recently, a user wrote in a Wikipedia bio that Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor "smells of cow dung." Another wrote that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is "ineffective." These statements were traced to the House Internet-protocol (IP) address.
So this is what politics is now? Insults not worthy of a 5-year-old intellect? How much more can it possibly take to get voters to throw these people out of office?
As far as I can tell, the argument is that dark matter is massive enough to account for 6 times the mass of normal baryonic matter, not that is is 6 times as common. But even that is not reason enough to dismiss it. Photons are 10 billion times more common than ordinary matter(or so, the number comes from cosmolgy calculations). Every second, 10^38 neutrinos come from the sun (in fact, neutrinos were once considered a candidate for dark matter unitl the upper limit on their mass showed they could account for no more than ~20% of it). The black hole at the center of the galaxy contains the mass of a million suns The fact that we don't come into contact in our everyday lives with these extremes don't mean they aren't out there.
And yes, there are many examples where the laws of physics had to be changed to account for new phenomena. In fact, physics is nothing more than the sum total of these changes. But even with Mercury, more than half of the precession could have been explained by the newtonian gravity of the other planets.
My question didn't suppose that these other theories are wrong or should be dismissed. In fact they shouldn't. Until there is more evidence, all possible avenues should be taken. But the/. community's overeagerness to dismiss dark matter is what I take issue with. 'Dark matter is bullshit' is the accepted view here, and views to the contrary are rarely expressed. Looking at my score now, it seems they are not tolerated either.
Why is it that the slashdot community is so ready to dismiss concepts like dark matter in favour of much more radical physical theories? The fact that dark matter sounds like a makeshift solution doesn't take away from the fact that it is still a much simpler explanation of the galactic rotation curves than these more outlandish theories. OF the options presented on slashdot we have:
- Newton's force law must be modified (MOND)
- Gravity must be modified (many others)
- there's matter out there that we haven't observed directly yet
Of those three options, which one best satisfies Occam's razor?
And for those who are quick to yell out "it's just like the aether" or "it's just like phlogiston", this seems much closer to another famous situation in physics. If you've done high school physics, you know that you can work out a two body conservation of momentum problem exactly. I.E. there's only one value for momentum that each body can have. When beta decay experiments were just starting out, however, experiments showed that despite the fact that the neutron seemed to decay into just a proton and electron, the products did not have a fixed momentum. They had to conclude that either there was a tiny neutral invisible particle no one could see, or else conservation of momentum failed. Some scientists argued the latter, but in the end the particle was finally found and named the neutrino.
I see no reason why this situation will be any different
Einstein, at least, was not particularly religious and certainly did not believe in the same God as any organized religion. From Wikipedia:
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
Also, keep in mind that in 1938 that the Nazi party and Hitler were fairly new, and were not yet seen as that bad.
This is not even remotely true. Perhaps you've heard of this set of laws, enacted in 1935. The truth is Hitler aims were apparent from the 1920's. If Time did indeed take into account only the magnitude, rather than nature, of a man's influence on world events when choosing their Man of the Year, then undoubtably Hitler deserved the title. But I would at least consider the idea, considering the institutionalized nature of racism and especially anti-semitism at the time in many parts of the world (including the US), that his actions may not have been unfavourable in the eyes of some of the Time editors.
Andreas Scheuer, a parliamentarian serving under the banner of the conservative Christian Social Union, told Der Spiegel that violent games 'have no place in Germany's bedrooms.'
We have a saying here in Canada, coined by one of our Prime Ministers no less:
"The State has no place in the nation's bedrooms". He was actually talking about striking down laws banning homosexuality, but, oddly, it appplies equally well in here.
On another note, I would like to point out that this article is proof that it is not only liberals that advocate this kind of misguided legislation. The CSU/CDU coalition was the conservative group that just barely beat out Schroder's social democrats.
Of course, in highly red-shifted American political spectrum, they're both far left.
Should a lack of patent laws cause the death of people? Imagine that the entire world declared that for "serious disease" no one had to respect patent laws. Let's say that AIDS was declared such a disease. Would any more private sector research money (by far the most research money spent) go into finding a cure or better treatment for AIDS? Would anyone be able to write a business case to get venture money to start a new bio-tech firm looking at AIDS treatment?
And what, exactly, is the benefit of private sector drug development if the drugs aren't sold to the vast majority of the people who need it?
Microsoft and Yahoo are set to announce on Wednesday a blockbuster interoperability deal that will reshape the landscape of the fragmented instant messaging market.
I can't wait to message all my friends with gaim to tell them the good news.
It's not that trigonmetric functions are hard to learn, it's that they rely on transcendal function like sine/cosine which are calculated numerically (as a taylor power series expansion, for example) thus are only approximations to the true values...I think that having a percise, simple (polynomials, rational fractions) alternative to current methods in eucleadian trigonometry, is very welcome.
Then why not just use the taylor polynomial to calculate sines and cosine? It's fairly easy to do these calculations by hand. For instance:
We can take x between -pi and pi (sin(x) = sin(x+2pi), so if x was say, 11pi/2 we can replace it by 11pi/2 -6pi = -pi/2). Then the absolute error is less than 0.007 regardless of what angle you choose. For more precision, take a higher polynomial. Or, choose one of the many many other methods of simple approximations to sine and cosine functions. gives a formula for computing sin x as a continued fraction, so if x is rational, this formula will give you a rational approximation to sin x to an arbitrary degree of accuracy.
It should be very clear, not only from the journal the article is quoted in, but also from the types of studies he is considering, that he is not talking about scientific studies as a whole but more specifically medical studies (although it appears his logic can be extended to the social sciences as well). Many of his arguments, cannot, however, be extended to the pure sciences.
"If the flick is supposed to be a documentary (and not a mockumentary), it should've went into detail about the typical bullying the two received throughout their high school career, and not interviewed a famous talking head just because he also graduated from the same institution. That's why I do not take it seriously and did not feel the need to mention Stone's involvement, or Manson's piece either, no matter how intelligent Manson was."
But the film wasn't merely about Columbine. Columbine was used as a stepping stone to address the larger issue: why there are so many gun-related deaths in America. I agree that he could have spent more time on the kids background, but most gun violence doesn't come from kids shooting up thier schools.
" If your point about bowling was actually accurate, Moore would've interviewed the head of the bowling federation to get his opinion on why bowling didn't contribute to the kids shooting up their school when videogames supposedly did."
But it would have made him look as ridiculous as the people who interview videogame makers and ask them if their games kill people, wouldn't it? The idea that bowling kills is not something anyone could take seriously and making the statement shows just how ridiculous arguments that games or music kills really are.
I will agree with you that he purposely set out to attack the NRA and its credibility. But that certainly is not outside the bounds of what a documentary is allowed to do. After all, he did the same thing with GM in "Roger & Me", and in countless other documentaries (especially the best ones), the director pushes you to certain conclusions about his subjects. Watch Capturing the Freidmans, a doc which paints a sympathetic portayal of two convicted child rapists, questioning if they were even guilty. It, like Bowling for Columbine is an indictment of the hysteria produced by the media after a tragic story breaks.
On a less argumentative note, I haven't heard about gun legislation in the UK or Australia (most articles tend to focus on the US laws). What has the effect of gun legislation been in those countries?
I find it amusing that you would take issue with the title of the film in this conversation, when the issue of the kids bowling was specifically chosen to ridicule the placing of blame at the feet of videogame and music companies. IIRC the narration was something like "People had been blaming DOOM and Marylin Manson for the killings, so why not bowling?" Whether or not they bowled is not important to the message of the film, or that scene. I also wonder where you were during the extended period of the movie where he discredited the idea that more guns means more violence, or during the scene where he discussed high school alienation with Matt Stone (a columbine graduate). This sounds like a comment from someone who didn't see the movie, and just assumed it was a standard rant against guns.
Getting enough of us common folk to pay for projects like these may be a problem, but certainly another space agencty could be found that could take over some of NASA's projects, especially such low cost ones like voyager. There are many other governmnets that see the value in advancing human knowledge and with the self-restraint to keep these programs funded even in the face of deficits.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, I should point out to those that aren't familiar with the world of physics that Lee Smolin is one of the principal advocates, at least in the public discourse, of Loop Quantum Gravity, a competitor to String Theory. That is certainly not to say he's bashing string theory for his own benefit, though. His arguements are all quite sound.
Secondly, in my own experience, speaking to physics professors about string theory, we're starting to see some saturation in the number of students willing to work on topics in string theory for their PhDs, and as jobs become more scarce for those who enter into the field (after all if they don't advance with predictions, there's less and less to do), we'll see more people entering into other areas, ro examining other theories.
And finally, I should point out that the last line, That string theory abandoned testable predictions may be its ultimate betrayal of science , is extremely insulting. I'm sure there's nothing string theorists would like more than to come up with a testable hypothesis that could be tested immediately, but the fact is that it's a difficult subject. Just because we can't test it now is no reason to start crying "pseudo-science".
The test administrators translate scores into three achievement levels: advanced, proficient and basic.
On the most recent test, 68 percent of fourth-graders achieved at or above the basic level, compared to 63 percent on the 2000 and 1996 tests.
Among high school seniors, 54 percent performed at or above the basic level in science in 2005, compared to 57 percent in 1996.
Eighth-grade scores were largely unchanged from 10 years ago, with 59 percent of students scoring at or above the basic level in 2005, while 60 percent of students were at or above basic in 1996.
To achieve at the basic level on the National Assessment, high school seniors must demonstrate knowledge of very basic concepts about the earth, physical and life sciences, and show a rudimentary understanding of scientific principles.
This is he standard by which you judge science ability in the US? A demonstration of "very basic concepts" and "rudimentary understanding"? And still less than 70% at any grade level has this bare bones knowledge? Please, tell me, what exactly are they doing in your high school classes. Because they sure as hell aren't teaching you.
Now, I know we all enjoy reading reporters vain attempts to understand complex scientific theories, and we all have a good laugh when they say things like "The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought..." when it's clear that they just took a rough estimate of 1 trillion and subtracted the accepted value of 14 billion, but can we please have useful links now and then? I mean it's not like there isn't a website that has every damn phyisics paper written since 1994 . If you can't add useful links, at least reject submissions that only link to the news reporters "interpretation" (and I use that term loosely) of the theory.
For those of you that want to see the real physics, the first paper I could find on the subject is here. It's from 2001, by the way.
I appreciate the attempt to provide numbers with a reference, but I think you know the response that a citation like that would get from a supporter of these new regulations. 1994 was not exactly a banner year for the internet, and people could easily argue that those numbers changed drastically in the last 12 years (or more, since I assume the study was done well in advance of the publishing date) as more and more people came online. If you could show that those numbers haven't changed over the period where the internet gained widespread appeal, then you'd have something we could really use against the 'child-molesters are everywhere' crowd.
I'm not sure how much of a help I can be, since I happen to be a bit behind you in my education (I start my PhD in September and I'll be where you are at this time next year). But here goes.
What m_g = m_i (called the weak equivalence principle) is telling us is that somehow gravity is more universal than other forces. In EM for instance, acceleration in an electric field E is given by a = (q/m_i) E. You can think of the q/m_i as the 'reduced charge' here. And, of course, it varies with the total charge q of the object. For gravity though, the eqn for acceleration in a gravity field is a = m_g/m_i g = g. The reduced charge is one for all objects. It's in this sense that I'm referring to universality. In fact, this universality really is the basis for General Relativity. In GR, you don't actually work with mass, but with a 4x4 matrix called the energy-momentum tensor T_{mu,nu}. If you're familiar with it, it is closely related to the idea of the Maxwell stress tensor in EM. Formally, T_{mu,nu} can be defined from an action principle. There is another, equivalent, definition, where we obtain a conservation equation through the symmetry of any system under spacetime translations. This definition is only of use for flat spacetime however. In this manner, we generalize the concept of mass even moreso than in special relativity. For a perfect fluid, for instance, T_{mu,nu} depends on energy density and PRESSURE. So if you start from general relativity, you don't really see this equivalence. Although to some extent, it's hidden in the axioms of GR, which assume that all particles 'feel' gravity in the same way, in the same sense that a = g for all particles.
If that seems like too much of a cop out to you (and I guess it is), you may have to wait until a unification of gravity and the other forces is achieved. I'm not sure how much quantum field theory you know, but you probably have heard of the electroweak theory, uniting EM and the weak force. What happens is that at a certain temperature (T_EW, for 'electroweak'), the universe undergoes a kind of phase change. At higher temperatures, the weak force carriers (the W+, W- and Z bosons) and the EM force carriers (photons) appear the same. After the phase change, the weak carriers gain mass, while the photon, as you know, remains massless (they 'freeze out', in the terminology). By studying this phase change, we learn about how the two forces are connected. Now, the fact that m_i, which is related to all forces through F=ma, is equal to m_g suggests that there is a deep relationship between gravity and the other forces. What I'm suggesting is that in order to understand this relationship, we need a theory which details the point at which gravity 'freezes out' from the other forces.
That's the best I can offer you, but hopefully if you search for Weak Equivalence Principle (WEP) on arXiv.org, you'll find something more. -shma
Mass is more fundamental than you imply in your statement. The mass of the electron is not found by simply 'weighing' it (measuring its gravitational force under earth's gravity), as you suggest. Of course, you know that force, any force, is related to acceleration through mass, and in the electrons case, we use mangetic force experiments to determine its mass. The force of a magnet on an electron (mass m_e) is F_B = m_e a_B = qvB, where v is the velocity of the electron perpendicular to a magnetic field of strength B.
/G), (where h is planck's constant, c is the speed of light, and G is Newton's gravitational constant) has the units of mass, and is given the name of "the Planck mass". This can be used as a fundamental unit of mass, in the same way one lightsecond is used to define the meter (1 ls = 299 792 458 meters exactly).
It turns out that quantum mechanically, this results in the discrete energies of an electron in an atom to be dependent on the mass as well, through the mass to charge ration e/m. Experiments observing atomic spectra can, and have, measured this to great accuracy.
For a more fundamental defninition of what mass is, we can work it out in terms of fundamental constants, whose constancy, at least for now, has not been challenged: sqrt(h*c
I've always had an issue with quantum encryption that doesn't so much stem from the technical aspects so much as from the basic requirements of any cypher.
Probably the most basic requirement of any encryption system is that it be able to send the encoded message quickly and easily. If I have an ultra secure magic box that I want to use to send key information to someone, but I can't get him the box, then it's useless to me. Now, the details of the transfer of information generally don't come into play when discussing most cyphers because the details of transfer are completely unrelated to the particular cypher being used. But quantum encryption is different. Any evesdropping on a transfer line will corrupt the message, not allowing the receiving party a chance to decode it. This makes jamming any line as simple as listening in (and of course, if we weren't worried about people listening in, we wouldn't need encryption in the first place). So does anyone here know how this issue is being addressed?
Arxiv.org
Because sometimes, you might want more than a press release.
Griffin defended the agency's 2007 budget proposal, announced on 6 February, at a hearing before the US House of Representatives' science committee. The $16.8 billion budget includes $5.3 billion for science in 2007 but calls for $3.1 billion in cuts to science programmes by 2010 compared to projections made in the 2006 budget request.
Despite all the sybolism associated with sending people out into space, it's just not worth cancelling so many science programs. This related story details exactly what they're planning on cutting and states that from 2008 to 2011 science spending will increase by just 1% each year (is that even enough to keep up with inflation?). Is it really that important to send people back to the moon or to Mars?
From TFA
And for those of you who just can't afford to pay one more bill each month, we're keeping a low bandwidth stream. It may not be the best quality, but you can still tune in for free.
They are only charging for CD quality streams. It seems they're moving more towards a donation (with perks) scheme rather than a subscription only service. And moving to such a system certainly doesn't mean support isn't out there. I'm a fan of KEXP which has done very well with membership drives while keeping the music free for everyone.
From TFA
Recently, a user wrote in a Wikipedia bio that Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor "smells of cow dung." Another wrote that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is "ineffective." These statements were traced to the House Internet-protocol (IP) address.
So this is what politics is now? Insults not worthy of a 5-year-old intellect? How much more can it possibly take to get voters to throw these people out of office?
As far as I can tell, the argument is that dark matter is massive enough to account for 6 times the mass of normal baryonic matter, not that is is 6 times as common. But even that is not reason enough to dismiss it. Photons are 10 billion times more common than ordinary matter(or so, the number comes from cosmolgy calculations). Every second, 10^38 neutrinos come from the sun (in fact, neutrinos were once considered a candidate for dark matter unitl the upper limit on their mass showed they could account for no more than ~20% of it). The black hole at the center of the galaxy contains the mass of a million suns The fact that we don't come into contact in our everyday lives with these extremes don't mean they aren't out there. And yes, there are many examples where the laws of physics had to be changed to account for new phenomena. In fact, physics is nothing more than the sum total of these changes. But even with Mercury, more than half of the precession could have been explained by the newtonian gravity of the other planets. My question didn't suppose that these other theories are wrong or should be dismissed. In fact they shouldn't. Until there is more evidence, all possible avenues should be taken. But the /. community's overeagerness to dismiss dark matter is what I take issue with. 'Dark matter is bullshit' is the accepted view here, and views to the contrary are rarely expressed. Looking at my score now, it seems they are not tolerated either.
Why is it that the slashdot community is so ready to dismiss concepts like dark matter in favour of much more radical physical theories? The fact that dark matter sounds like a makeshift solution doesn't take away from the fact that it is still a much simpler explanation of the galactic rotation curves than these more outlandish theories. OF the options presented on slashdot we have:
- Newton's force law must be modified (MOND)
- Gravity must be modified (many others)
- there's matter out there that we haven't observed directly yet
Of those three options, which one best satisfies Occam's razor?
And for those who are quick to yell out "it's just like the aether" or "it's just like phlogiston", this seems much closer to another famous situation in physics. If you've done high school physics, you know that you can work out a two body conservation of momentum problem exactly. I.E. there's only one value for momentum that each body can have. When beta decay experiments were just starting out, however, experiments showed that despite the fact that the neutron seemed to decay into just a proton and electron, the products did not have a fixed momentum. They had to conclude that either there was a tiny neutral invisible particle no one could see, or else conservation of momentum failed. Some scientists argued the latter, but in the end the particle was finally found and named the neutrino. I see no reason why this situation will be any different
Einstein, at least, was not particularly religious and certainly did not believe in the same God as any organized religion. From Wikipedia:
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
Somewhere, where fictional characters continue to live on after their creator has let them go, Malcolm Reynolds is punching someone in the face.
Also, keep in mind that in 1938 that the Nazi party and Hitler were fairly new, and were not yet seen as that bad.
This is not even remotely true. Perhaps you've heard of this set of laws, enacted in 1935. The truth is Hitler aims were apparent from the 1920's. If Time did indeed take into account only the magnitude, rather than nature, of a man's influence on world events when choosing their Man of the Year, then undoubtably Hitler deserved the title. But I would at least consider the idea, considering the institutionalized nature of racism and especially anti-semitism at the time in many parts of the world (including the US), that his actions may not have been unfavourable in the eyes of some of the Time editors.
Andreas Scheuer, a parliamentarian serving under the banner of the conservative Christian Social Union, told Der Spiegel that violent games 'have no place in Germany's bedrooms.'
We have a saying here in Canada, coined by one of our Prime Ministers no less:
"The State has no place in the nation's bedrooms". He was actually talking about striking down laws banning homosexuality, but, oddly, it appplies equally well in here.
On another note, I would like to point out that this article is proof that it is not only liberals that advocate this kind of misguided legislation. The CSU/CDU coalition was the conservative group that just barely beat out Schroder's social democrats.
Of course, in highly red-shifted American political spectrum, they're both far left.
Should a lack of patent laws cause the death of people? Imagine that the entire world declared that for "serious disease" no one had to respect patent laws. Let's say that AIDS was declared such a disease. Would any more private sector research money (by far the most research money spent) go into finding a cure or better treatment for AIDS? Would anyone be able to write a business case to get venture money to start a new bio-tech firm looking at AIDS treatment?
And what, exactly, is the benefit of private sector drug development if the drugs aren't sold to the vast majority of the people who need it?
Before this goes off the front page, I'd like to thank everyone who wrote in with their puzzles. They'll certainly be keeping me busy for a while.
-Shma
Microsoft and Yahoo are set to announce on Wednesday a blockbuster interoperability deal that will reshape the landscape of the fragmented instant messaging market.
I can't wait to message all my friends with gaim to tell them the good news.
It's not that trigonmetric functions are hard to learn, it's that they rely on transcendal function like sine/cosine which are calculated numerically (as a taylor power series expansion, for example) thus are only approximations to the true values...I think that having a percise, simple (polynomials, rational fractions) alternative to current methods in eucleadian trigonometry, is very welcome.
Then why not just use the taylor polynomial to calculate sines and cosine? It's fairly easy to do these calculations by hand. For instance:
sin(x) = x - x^3/6 + x^5/120 -x^7/5040 +x^9/9! + error
We can take x between -pi and pi (sin(x) = sin(x+2pi), so if x was say, 11pi/2 we can replace it by 11pi/2 -6pi = -pi/2). Then the absolute error is less than 0.007 regardless of what angle you choose. For more precision, take a higher polynomial. Or, choose one of the many many other methods of simple approximations to sine and cosine functions. gives a formula for computing sin x as a continued fraction, so if x is rational, this formula will give you a rational approximation to sin x to an arbitrary degree of accuracy.
It should be very clear, not only from the journal the article is quoted in, but also from the types of studies he is considering, that he is not talking about scientific studies as a whole but more specifically medical studies (although it appears his logic can be extended to the social sciences as well). Many of his arguments, cannot, however, be extended to the pure sciences.
"If the flick is supposed to be a documentary (and not a mockumentary), it should've went into detail about the typical bullying the two received throughout their high school career, and not interviewed a famous talking head just because he also graduated from the same institution. That's why I do not take it seriously and did not feel the need to mention Stone's involvement, or Manson's piece either, no matter how intelligent Manson was."
But the film wasn't merely about Columbine. Columbine was used as a stepping stone to address the larger issue: why there are so many gun-related deaths in America. I agree that he could have spent more time on the kids background, but most gun violence doesn't come from kids shooting up thier schools.
" If your point about bowling was actually accurate, Moore would've interviewed the head of the bowling federation to get his opinion on why bowling didn't contribute to the kids shooting up their school when videogames supposedly did."
But it would have made him look as ridiculous as the people who interview videogame makers and ask them if their games kill people, wouldn't it? The idea that bowling kills is not something anyone could take seriously and making the statement shows just how ridiculous arguments that games or music kills really are.
I will agree with you that he purposely set out to attack the NRA and its credibility. But that certainly is not outside the bounds of what a documentary is allowed to do. After all, he did the same thing with GM in "Roger & Me", and in countless other documentaries (especially the best ones), the director pushes you to certain conclusions about his subjects. Watch Capturing the Freidmans, a doc which paints a sympathetic portayal of two convicted child rapists, questioning if they were even guilty. It, like Bowling for Columbine is an indictment of the hysteria produced by the media after a tragic story breaks.
On a less argumentative note, I haven't heard about gun legislation in the UK or Australia (most articles tend to focus on the US laws). What has the effect of gun legislation been in those countries?
I find it amusing that you would take issue with the title of the film in this conversation, when the issue of the kids bowling was specifically chosen to ridicule the placing of blame at the feet of videogame and music companies. IIRC the narration was something like "People had been blaming DOOM and Marylin Manson for the killings, so why not bowling?" Whether or not they bowled is not important to the message of the film, or that scene. I also wonder where you were during the extended period of the movie where he discredited the idea that more guns means more violence, or during the scene where he discussed high school alienation with Matt Stone (a columbine graduate). This sounds like a comment from someone who didn't see the movie, and just assumed it was a standard rant against guns.
Getting enough of us common folk to pay for projects like these may be a problem, but certainly another space agencty could be found that could take over some of NASA's projects, especially such low cost ones like voyager. There are many other governmnets that see the value in advancing human knowledge and with the self-restraint to keep these programs funded even in the face of deficits.