Rubbish. The overwhelming majority of Australians are descended (in the main) from more recent immigrants. Indeed, nearly a quarter of Australians living today were born overseas.
While Mythbusters is a hell of a lot better about this kind of thing than the terrible British equivalent Brainiac, the major comment I'd make is sometimes it's a little bit vague on experimental design and statistical validity. I am well aware that mentioning anything remotely mathematically-related on television is an instant audience turnoff, but it would be kind of cool if they could introduce the public to ideas like hypothesis, null hypothesis (though maybe not using those words), and the idea of statistical significance.
But you really have to congratulate the team behind Mythbusters. It's the only show I've ever seen that actually comes even vaguely close to giving the uninitiated a real idea of what science is and how it works. If more people understood this, we might not be fighting constant battles with numbskulls like the ID crowd.
If you want to know the kind of stuff that NIAC funds, here a list of the reports from studies they've funded before. Perhaps the most famous one to Slashdotters is Bradley Edwards' investigation of the Space Elevator, but there are plenty of other wild ideas, like collecting the miniscule amounts of antimatter that get trapped in the Earth's magnetic field, genetically engineering plants to survive on Mars, and suchlike.
I've been trying to figure out a software engineering project fun and out there enough to get funded by these guys, but nothing springs to mind yet:)
Could be combined with conventional hybrid...
on
Steam Hybrid Car from BMW
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· Score: 4, Interesting
One thing people don't seem to be grasping here is that this technology is essentially orthogonal to conventional combustion-electric hybrids. There's no reason (aside from not owning the tech, of course) why Toyota couldn't add this to the Prius IV, and make it more powerful and even more fuel efficient than it is today. Or, alternatively, it could be added to those European diesels some of you are so enamoured with. The limiting factor, of course, would be size, weight and cost - could you really have room for both the steam system and the paraphenalia of a hybrid car, and could you afford to add both?
I'm a bit skeptical that really make this practical, but it's an impressive idea; a combined cycle automobile-sized piston engine.
I'm no expert in oil pipeline control, but I do know something about software. Being able to sabotage the software in a way that was so predictable, when the Soviets presumably had to customize it to get it to work with their own systems, so as to create a huge explosion that miraculously doesn't kill anyone, strains credibility a little.
I've no doubt that they did *something*, but my guess is the it's gotten garbled by being told by non-technical people. I'd love to hear an actual technical account of the story by people who really understood the actual details of the hack, but I suspect we might have to wait another decade or two before the CIA lightens up enough to let them speak.
The French apparently supplied information to the British that allowed them to disable the Exocet missiles the French had sold the Argentinians. Frankly, I wouldn't count too much on *any* electronically-controlled weapons except those you develop yourself if you were facing a major Western military. And even then, I'd be real suspicious of imported components...
That said, that oil pipeline story sounds like it's gotten a little bit garbled in the telling. It doesn't really make sense as written.
This article quotes figures from the US government suggesting that you can produce 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel on 500,000 acres of land. That works out to about 15,000 gallons per acre, per year. The Wikipedia article (which is actually well-referenced, but doesn't include references for those specific figures) was right. Why can algae do so well? Because it grows really, really fast, and a huge fraction of the plant is actually oil.
However, it's not as simple as that; the technology hasn't been developed to actually farm the stuff on a commercial scale, but there are people working on that. The first test deployments are by these guys, who are using the exhaust systems from conventionally-fired power to provide nutrients for the algae and prevent the release of CO2 and NOx into the atmosphere.
But yes, in the future you might well be able to grow all the fuel for your car in your backyard.
Yeah, that's reasonable, but the end result was that the last 30 years of his life he didn't contribute that much because he backed the wrong horse. Not that he was wrong to try an alternative approach, but it proved remarkably unproductive. If things had turned out differently and he had said "OK, I don't like QM, but let's see where the idea takes us", he might have made considerably more progress towards his ultimate goal of finding a more general theory that superceded it!
IIRC his biggest blunder was discounting quantum physics and spending the last half of his life trying to come up with an alternative model that didn't require the universe to be probabilistic.
They've already tried it. Subliminal advertising doesn't work, but there was a report in Salon magazine a few years ago about hypnotizing people (note: obnoxious ad to get access) to get their unconscious reactions to various consumer products for marketing research.
You're right; I've seen at least one report of subsequent discovery of bird flu infections in people who weren't sick enough to seek medical treatment. Secondly it's common for epidemic bugs to become less lethal as they spread; killing the host is a bad way to reproduce yourself. So, as I understand it, a pandemic strain that kills 50% of the people it infects is pretty unlikely. But even a 1-2% mortality rate is going to make even the Indian Ocean tsunami look pretty trivial in terms of death toll.
Look, if you're going to have awards specifically for people who contributed to Freedom, use the word "Freedom" in the award. But Jack Nicklaus was a professional golfer who went on to career in designing golf courses. He's contributed precisely zero to "freedom" (IIRC, he refused to play in South Africa in the 1970's when the sporting boycotts began to be enforced. That was the right thing to do, but hardly exceptional).
Rename the damn award the "Presidential Medal of Achievement" or "Presidential Medal of Service", and then it won't be so incongruous to give it to golfers.
I do have to wonder about giving the highest civilian award to Nicklaus, whatever it's called. He was a great golfer, sure. But he was very, very well renumerated for that, and won all manner of sporting awards. Did he do something exceptional beyond that to improve the lives of Americans in any way? I don't think so. But, hey, it's your country, and my own is hardly pure as snow on this kind of thing... The easiest way to become Australian of the Year is to captain the Australian cricket team...
I would be very happy if this thing could replace surgeons, for several reasons:
It'll only do so if it's better than what a surgeon could do.
If it's cheaper (which is far from guaranteed) so much the better.
It'll free up doctors to do other tasks, which is important given the doctor shortage (albeit one largely created by the doctors trade unions artificially restricting the amount of training places available).
That's getting a bit too close to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy for mine. While I agree that it is not normative behaviour for scientists to falsify data, people purporting to be conducting legitimate science, and with perfectly respectable academic credentials, sadly sometimes do so. It is damaging to science for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the effect it can have on the careers of those who *report* scientific fraud (as they often, particularly in medicine-related research, tend to be junior researchers who actually conduct the legwork on behalf of senior researchers who then massage data to fit their favoured conclusions).
I still think the track record of science in dealing with its bad apples is a tad better than organized religion (Hey, Reverend Bloggs, we've heard some reports that you're a kiddy-fiddler. I know that this is the fifth time this has come up; I don't know what it was with all these townspeople; Maine, Massachusetts, Montana - they've all got overactive imaginations. Don't worry about it, we'll just pack you off to Bolivia for a couple of years till it all blows over. You'll love it. Beautiful country. Very friendly people, as I'm sure you'll find out. Very respectful towards us over there.)
When was the last time you heard about the Khazakstan space program?
Seriously, if a hypothetical British space program did want to launch in Australia it's highly likely Australia would want to get involved in some way, but if the astronauts were British and the rockets were built primarily by British engineers I think the world would figure out who was responsible pretty quickly.
And, frankly, if the British government said "we want to lease an area of your desert, spend a pile of money in it, create a bunch of jobs for Australians providing logistics for this joint, and this time we're not going to leave nuclear fallout behind" the Australian government would jump at the chance.
I've edited a bunch of articles on major Australian corporations, and I think I've a reasonable nose for somebody pushing the corporate line. If there are PR flacks editing a lot of articles, they're being pretty subtle about it. To take one example, the article on Rupert Murdoch doesn't pull too many punches.
As a regular Wikipedia contributor, I would agree with much of the above. With regards to leaving stuff out and unnecessary churn, check the edit history of the Computer article. After doing a rewrite (which I fully admit isn't perfect but was much clearer than what was there before) I end up reverting quite a lot because somebody decides that some obscure aspect of computing history deserves three paragraphs. Another particular annoyance for me is "X in fiction" sections, where teenagers with way too much enthusiasm for role playing games add every time some US weapons system, for instance, appears in Wrath of Doom XVII Super Platinum Edition Gold.
As to PR professionals, surreptitiously editing without disclosing their affiliation might not be such a good idea. If they get caught, Wikipedia's profile is such that such interference would likely be of interest to the mainstream media, and would probably embarrass the company more than any changes to the article would be worth.
Fuel is much more expensive in Europe than the United States, so your $20 in gas is probably closer to the equivalent of $40 in much of Europe (though Europeans generally drive smaller, more fuel-efficient cars to compensate).
The second thing to keep in mind is that because the public transport systems within cities are so much better (New York is a bit of an exception, as the subway on Manhattan is very good), a lot of Europeans simply don't own a car even if they can afford it. Therefore, even if the train is a bit dearer in terms of variable cost, the money saved by not owning, garaging and servicing a car more than makes up for it.
Yes, smartass, I do remember my high school physics. I reckon with our modern engineering genius we might be able to design a bridge to take advantage of a material with enormous tensile strength but mediocre compressive strength. Like, say, http://goldengatebridge.org/photos/">this well-known example.
As innumerable slashdotters have said before, when Bradley Edwards can build a bridge as long as this one out of nanotubes of the requisite tensile strength, then I'll take the space elevator seriously. Until then, it's science fiction and NASA's quite correct to plan its Moon-Mars program out of technology that actually exists.
After I posted the above reply, I was reading somewhere on the MarsGravity site (too lazy, Google it yourself) that NASA actually had such a lab to go on the ISS, but it's going to get canned because of the well-known difficulties facing that station. An editorial in the New York Times caned them for doing so, wondering how the heck they were planning to do long-term stays on the moon without collecting data on what low-G does to the body.
This rates right up there with International Sanitation Day, World Election Monitoring Day, and Legal Precedent Appreciation Week in the excitement stakes.
Don't get me wrong, I am fully aware of the importance of standards, but by their nature they are extremely boring things.
Slashdot Mirror
Rubbish. The overwhelming majority of Australians are descended (in the main) from more recent immigrants. Indeed, nearly a quarter of Australians living today were born overseas.
But you really have to congratulate the team behind Mythbusters. It's the only show I've ever seen that actually comes even vaguely close to giving the uninitiated a real idea of what science is and how it works. If more people understood this, we might not be fighting constant battles with numbskulls like the ID crowd.
I've been trying to figure out a software engineering project fun and out there enough to get funded by these guys, but nothing springs to mind yet :)
I'm a bit skeptical that really make this practical, but it's an impressive idea; a combined cycle automobile-sized piston engine.
I've no doubt that they did *something*, but my guess is the it's gotten garbled by being told by non-technical people. I'd love to hear an actual technical account of the story by people who really understood the actual details of the hack, but I suspect we might have to wait another decade or two before the CIA lightens up enough to let them speak.
That said, that oil pipeline story sounds like it's gotten a little bit garbled in the telling. It doesn't really make sense as written.
Anybody using free software to write scientific papers either uses LaTeX or has rocks in their head.
However, it's not as simple as that; the technology hasn't been developed to actually farm the stuff on a commercial scale, but there are people working on that. The first test deployments are by these guys, who are using the exhaust systems from conventionally-fired power to provide nutrients for the algae and prevent the release of CO2 and NOx into the atmosphere.
But yes, in the future you might well be able to grow all the fuel for your car in your backyard.
OK, genius, *you* explain it to me. In words of three syllables or less.
Yeah, that's reasonable, but the end result was that the last 30 years of his life he didn't contribute that much because he backed the wrong horse. Not that he was wrong to try an alternative approach, but it proved remarkably unproductive. If things had turned out differently and he had said "OK, I don't like QM, but let's see where the idea takes us", he might have made considerably more progress towards his ultimate goal of finding a more general theory that superceded it!
IIRC his biggest blunder was discounting quantum physics and spending the last half of his life trying to come up with an alternative model that didn't require the universe to be probabilistic.
They've already tried it. Subliminal advertising doesn't work, but there was a report in Salon magazine a few years ago about hypnotizing people (note: obnoxious ad to get access) to get their unconscious reactions to various consumer products for marketing research.
You're right; I've seen at least one report of subsequent discovery of bird flu infections in people who weren't sick enough to seek medical treatment. Secondly it's common for epidemic bugs to become less lethal as they spread; killing the host is a bad way to reproduce yourself. So, as I understand it, a pandemic strain that kills 50% of the people it infects is pretty unlikely. But even a 1-2% mortality rate is going to make even the Indian Ocean tsunami look pretty trivial in terms of death toll.
Look, if you're going to have awards specifically for people who contributed to Freedom, use the word "Freedom" in the award. But Jack Nicklaus was a professional golfer who went on to career in designing golf courses. He's contributed precisely zero to "freedom" (IIRC, he refused to play in South Africa in the 1970's when the sporting boycotts began to be enforced. That was the right thing to do, but hardly exceptional).
Rename the damn award the "Presidential Medal of Achievement" or "Presidential Medal of Service", and then it won't be so incongruous to give it to golfers.
I do have to wonder about giving the highest civilian award to Nicklaus, whatever it's called. He was a great golfer, sure. But he was very, very well renumerated for that, and won all manner of sporting awards. Did he do something exceptional beyond that to improve the lives of Americans in any way? I don't think so. But, hey, it's your country, and my own is hardly pure as snow on this kind of thing... The easiest way to become Australian of the Year is to captain the Australian cricket team...
I still think the track record of science in dealing with its bad apples is a tad better than organized religion (Hey, Reverend Bloggs, we've heard some reports that you're a kiddy-fiddler. I know that this is the fifth time this has come up; I don't know what it was with all these townspeople; Maine, Massachusetts, Montana - they've all got overactive imaginations. Don't worry about it, we'll just pack you off to Bolivia for a couple of years till it all blows over. You'll love it. Beautiful country. Very friendly people, as I'm sure you'll find out. Very respectful towards us over there.)
Seriously, if a hypothetical British space program did want to launch in Australia it's highly likely Australia would want to get involved in some way, but if the astronauts were British and the rockets were built primarily by British engineers I think the world would figure out who was responsible pretty quickly.
And, frankly, if the British government said "we want to lease an area of your desert, spend a pile of money in it, create a bunch of jobs for Australians providing logistics for this joint, and this time we're not going to leave nuclear fallout behind" the Australian government would jump at the chance.
I've edited a bunch of articles on major Australian corporations, and I think I've a reasonable nose for somebody pushing the corporate line. If there are PR flacks editing a lot of articles, they're being pretty subtle about it. To take one example, the article on Rupert Murdoch doesn't pull too many punches.
As to PR professionals, surreptitiously editing without disclosing their affiliation might not be such a good idea. If they get caught, Wikipedia's profile is such that such interference would likely be of interest to the mainstream media, and would probably embarrass the company more than any changes to the article would be worth.
The second thing to keep in mind is that because the public transport systems within cities are so much better (New York is a bit of an exception, as the subway on Manhattan is very good), a lot of Europeans simply don't own a car even if they can afford it. Therefore, even if the train is a bit dearer in terms of variable cost, the money saved by not owning, garaging and servicing a car more than makes up for it.
It'd just be an embarrassment, not an actual security risk.
Yes, smartass, I do remember my high school physics. I reckon with our modern engineering genius we might be able to design a bridge to take advantage of a material with enormous tensile strength but mediocre compressive strength. Like, say, http://goldengatebridge.org/photos/">this well-known example.
As innumerable slashdotters have said before, when Bradley Edwards can build a bridge as long as this one out of nanotubes of the requisite tensile strength, then I'll take the space elevator seriously. Until then, it's science fiction and NASA's quite correct to plan its Moon-Mars program out of technology that actually exists.
After I posted the above reply, I was reading somewhere on the MarsGravity site (too lazy, Google it yourself) that NASA actually had such a lab to go on the ISS, but it's going to get canned because of the well-known difficulties facing that station. An editorial in the New York Times caned them for doing so, wondering how the heck they were planning to do long-term stays on the moon without collecting data on what low-G does to the body.
Don't get me wrong, I am fully aware of the importance of standards, but by their nature they are extremely boring things.