What do the insults accomplish? Millions of years is indeed the timescale over which human evolution has occurred. And long term human survival on earth seems like a pretty clear critical issue for humans to think about.
It is a nice dream...build a Moon colony, let it develop industry and grow into a jumping off point. But what economic benefit will it provide while we spend 10s or 100s of trillions of dollars getting it going? The analogy to colonies on earth is just not relevant. We evolved on earth and developed economic models that worked on earth. So new land was naturally economically productive. There is plenty of desert and polar land on earth that is much more hospitable than anything on the moon. You underestimate the difficulties of colonizing a planet when a pressure vessel failure is catastrophic. We are 100s of years from an economically viable moon base for humans. We could build one that functions like the space station right now...transport supplies and food from earth to allow people to survive. But we would need to allocate 10s or 100s of billions of dollars per year to keep it afloat. But there are no reasonable ideas for an economically viable moon settlement based on earth biology. If you instead base it on harvesting energy to support machines, it might eventually work, but we are very far from building that also.
This critical issue deserves a more subtle discussion that guesses about when humans will go extinct on earth. Without human foolishness (nuclear weapons, pollution, etc) we would expect we have millions of years. But humans are foolish, so we really don't know. I am suspicious of claims that the human future is in space. Both because there is no plausible way for sustainable human settlements off planet to be manufactured with current technology and because it enables a short sighted approach that treats this planet as a disposable stepping stone to better things. More likely, intelligent machines we make will colonize space before we do since it is much easier to design them to tolerate the harsh environment than it is to modify biology to survive off planet. Maybe we will teach them to build habitats for us, but in that case, it will really be the machines that are doing the colonizing. And this is much further off than many people suspect.
Are flawed programmers creating bad code? Yes, but there is a bigger cause.
Our era assumes that complicated things should be able to be done by a small number of people in a tiny amount of time. It is the failure to simplify and allocate adequate resources to creating great code that are really creating bad code.
3d Xpoint is a fairly different technology. It is much faster than NAND and much cheaper than DRAM while still being non-volatile. Initially some people may use it in expensive high speed SSD configurations like Optane, but I think the real potential is in new architectures with huge non-volatile fast memory. Maybe it will replace Flash in mobile devices that currently operate without off-processor DRAM. It is possible that manufacturing becomes cheaper and it will compete with NAND Flash for non-volatile storage, but except in applications where write speed is much more valuable than total capacity, current 3D Xpoint can't compete.
That is an insightful article. Hopefully we can keep this conversation at a high level. The usual thing when energy supply in transition runs into a rough patch is for many to argue that we should just keep depending on coal and natural gas. But any time you do something new, there is trial and error. Hopefully more of the forseen problems could be avoided, but humans seem to have to make mistakes before they can learn from them. As integrated wind, solar, transmission, and storage systems become more mature, we can run a stable energy system with mostly renewables and much less damage to the ecosystems we depend on. But there will be a learning curve.
They are simply important problems. It doesn't really matter what category of fundamental theory you place them under. Planet formation will be solved with continuum mechanics and standard chemistry/quantum mechanics to describe dust formation and aggregation. The solution will ignore general and special relativity. Emergent problems can't be solved with more computational power. Try to calculate the properties of a tree by solving the many body quantum problem. We can't even fully compute 5 particle scattering problems using quantum mechanics.
"General physics is more or less solved" That belief is precisely the problem. Could you predict the mechanical properties of DNA from quantum mechanics for us? Could you calculate the viscosity of water from first principles? Could you determine how the albedo of clouds on earth will respond to changing CO2 concentrations? Could you determine the distribution of sizes, chemical makeup, and orbital radii of planets we have discovered? If not, in what sense is "general physics" solved? What people do is redefine these problems as not physics because they are useful enough that they attract a community of non-physicists to work on them also. You seem to believe in the reductionist idea that once you know the underlying equations you have solved a problem.
We are already doing it. But not in fundamental particle physics. It is in applied physics where the massive progress is being made. There are a huge range of problems in biology, geology, chemistry, mechanical engineering, nanoscience, neuroscience, and even sociology and economics to which the rigorous, empirical traditions of physics are making major contributions. Last decade we finally solved the problem of transition to turbulence in pipe flow. A more than 100 year old problem with deep mathematical challenges and practical implications on top. But it likely will not receive a nobel prize because of the deep inertia in the dead end idea that physics is reductionist physics. It turns out that it is going to be very slow going to make further improvements in reductionist particle physics. So many people have been told that the "real physics" problems are reductionist problems, so they go to making up philosophical questions they can talk about when they run out of empirical problems they can solve. Physics will experience a renaissance when it finally embraces the empirical study of emergent phenomena for which there are a large number of problems that society really needs physicists to contribute to solving.
Taking us back to the original post. Jobs for people with training in computer science and biology usually pay pretty well. The problem is that they require extensive training and society has a hard time prioritizing education to provide the training people need.
I wouldn't go to computer science or biology today. Both are oversaturated with people thinking they are the ticket to a great career. I would look at applied physics and some of the science based engineering disciplines. A new science and computation based approach to mechanical, aerospace, civil, and chemical engineering is changing the world. Bioengineering and environmental engineering are growing rapidly. If you can build the math and computer skills to make it, those are the big growth areas of the 21st century. Molecular biology is really really complicated. Messing with it usually does more harm than good. So I suspect the pharmaceutical industry is not a growth area for the next century. And the phalanxes of post-docs sorting out the pathways regulating each gene are going to soon find that the details they unearth are usually not relevant. Sure that gene is involved in cancer risk...but what are you going to do about it if the network is so complicated that external modification messes up too many other parts of cell function. (Just like everything is made of quarks and electrons, but we don't use quantum chromodynamics for engineering, everything in biology depends on molecular biology but molecular biology isn't that useful.) While everyone focuses on biology with dreams of improving health, science based tools for materials science and fabrication are changing the world. Now if only we could solve some political problems so we could train a few billion people to join the effort...
OK, it is standard to argue on slashdot, but it is more interesting to learn and build better ideas. You have interesting points, but are missing the big picture. If you want to be technical I did say 'economic growth rate' which is the exponential rate constant, so steady exponential growth would have zero first derivative of the economic growth rate.
Modern electronics is dominated by classical E&M. Quantum mechanics is important. But the idea of electronic computers was clear and they were being used well before anyone used quantum mechanics to build solid state transistors to make them much more efficient and powerful. On the other hand, in 1800, no one knew what electricity was and no one had any idea that electric currents could emit radio waves to communicate around the planet. By 1900 the electron had been discovered, Niagara falls power plant was powering electric lights in a city and radio communication had begun. The scientific innovations of the 19th century were profoundly transformational. The 20th century added some important pieces...and you are right that biology is where the 20th century really holds its own. But even the green revolution has its roots well into the 19th century. Most of the technology for the green revolution dates back to the 1800s. It was the social embrace of better seed varieties, fertilizer, irrigation, machinery and scientific management much more than genetic engineering that transformed our food supply.
Of course the original post has the provocative title 'Greatest era of innovation' and that is subjective. But I think you haven't put a dent in my argument that the 19th century has a pretty strong case for it.
Yes, but that is maybe a bit too easy. The scientific thinking and economic arrangements that allowed the industrial revolution are continuing to spread around the world and to transform our lives. The commonly labelled 'industrial revolution' of 1760-1830 produced machine made cloth, readily available power from water and steam, and the beginnings of railroads, but it is prominent for the derivative of the economic growth rate and not the maximum value. Without question, growth measured by economic measures has never been higher than in China from 1980 to 2010. But innovation? That is somewhat nebulous. Does innovative painting count? Maybe I come back to agree with you though. Almost nothing has been as revolutionary or innovative as the transformation in how we conceive of the workings of the universe between 1687 and 1960. Arguably the most rapid period of scientific innovation was between 1800 and 1900 when most of our understanding of thermodynamics, basic chemistry, fluid dynamics, geology, evolution, electricity, magnetism, and optics were placed on solid phenomenological and empirical foundations. Cool stuff happened in the 20th century, but relativity, quantum mechanics, and detailed computational chemistry have been much less transformational than electromagnetism, basic chemistry, and evolution have been.
Yes, NotDrWho and Logic Bomb give important addendums. Resource constraints are a huge part of the puzzle. In an ideal world, even your group learning uses groups tailored to an individual learner, and that is often not practical. Eventually we may have data capable of guiding which kinds of groups should be working on which kinds of activities, and then analyzing that data and monitoring the groups will be a labor intensive operation, so we are back to resource constraints. In the long run, artificial intelligence may start to help us with these tasks, but by that point, artificial intelligence will start to make education itself a very different process with somewhat different goals.
Yes, all the studies showing problems with personalized learning are simply showing that we had not yet figured out how to do it well. There is simply no way that a one-size-fits all bureaucracy can educate as well as a system with tools that allow teachers to tailor activities to individual children. The problem is that personalized education is a much harder problem than many believe. It is easy to make an app that adapts the math problems assigned to a student's performance. But it is much harder to produce group learning activities that match varied skills. And if you put kids each on a single computer which is 'personalized', you can be sure they will learn less than if they are working together learning the social skills and executive function needed to succeed in the world. Eventually we'll succeed in personalizing teaching of social skills, executive function, reading, and math. But it is a hard problem.
In many ways the problem is like artificial intelligence. It is a much harder problem than people thought. But that doesn't mean that it is impossible and as parts of it are solved it slowly changes everything.
Yes it might be useful in very low power applications that benefit from light weight But the article says the current version is not very efficient, meaning it only extracts a small fraction of the energy in the light striking it. Standard solar cells might be 10% to 25% efficient. This may be only a few percent. In most applications I can think of, solar power is more limited by collecting area than by photocell weight, so this seems like niche product.
Yes, that is right. Reminds me of EEStor which every now and then repeats their promise of transformative super-capacitors based on their granted patents. But it is just vaporware. Hopefully this time is better, but anyone who is not a fool knows to expect most of these press releases to come to nothing.
Yes, and gravity wave astronomy could become a hugely important complement to electromagnetic astronomy. Because gravity wave frequencies are set by the motion of mass rather than by atomic (or other) transitions between quantum states of charged particles, gravity waves provide a more direct measurement of the motion of the objects in the systems of interest. So we directly measure the time dependent frequency of one signal and can immediately determine orbital parameters of relatively small objects that are a billion light years away. Imagine a day when we can detect black hole and neutron star binaries much earlier in their inspiral. We could be continuously monitoring millions of gravity wave sources spread across the universe and develop a much more precise picture of how our universe works. General relativity would either be become a theory with the quantitative triumphs of quantum mechanics or it would be replaced by something more accurate. It is an exciting day!
"The now-incipient field of gravitational waves astronomy is sure to make many glorious discoveries in this century."
This is the reason this detection is so exciting. Until now, we had only quite indirect ways of detecting what was happening in exotic regions of space where very dense objects were orbiting at high speeds. Now we have direct experiments to tell us about these phenomena.
I think you don't understand. We now have an entirely new way to observe what happens in regions of the universe where the mass density is high and changing. In many ways, this is like the first telescope. It is an entirely new way of observing. The reason this is so important is not the single black hole merger they detected. It is because this is the first of what will become a major source of astronomical data. Soon other frequency ranges of gravitational waves will be measurable (see LISA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...). Just because the first observation agrees with existing theory is no reason to dismiss an entirely new class of measurements as uninteresting.
Yes, they do need to record good notes. But the times are changing. There is huge potential in a cheap general purpose sensor array. Imagine a system that recorded temperature, humidity, room brightness, vibrations, maybe some chemical species concentrations, and maybe data from a set of special sensors in an apparatus. This is straight forward to do, but right now it requires someone to write custom software and integrate a variety of sensors. If there becomes a standard that just ran with very little customization, it could greatly decrease the amount of 'something happened to this experiment but I don't know what'.
It is easy to say 'they should take better lab notes', but no one has ever been able to accurately record all the relevant conditions. It is an imaginary world we describe in which the conditions of the experiment are recorded in the lab notebook. In research, you always have factors that you don't yet know are important, and high quality cheap general purpose sensors could be a big benefit.
ARC is a fusion reactor experiment proposed by the scientists at MIT who currently run the Alcator C-MOD experiment. You can read many details about both of these experiments on Wikipedia or other online sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
ARC is a very interesting scientific and engineering development project, but it is not a power generation facility. It is a demonstration experiment to learn how to run a fusion reactor with net energy production. There are still several major steps between ARC and a commercial electric generation facility.
Some college students have been raised in an environment where unpleasant experiences are carefully avoided and so they are oversensitive. College should be a place for these students to grow up. But the extreme political polarization of our era makes that difficult. I see the biggest culprit in the 'oppression studies' focus on many college campuses. Everyone claims membership in some oppressed group, looks to take offense, and wants special treatment. Once you are looking for oppression, you are guaranteed to find it and along the way lose focus on the hard work necessary to succeed in our highly competitive global economy. Oppression exists and it is a terrible burden holding people back. But the PC response on college campuses mostly makes it worse.
Can someone explain why the article cites Wilbur Atwater as a Department of Agriculture scientist? I think he did his research as a faculty member at Wesleyan University. http://www.britannica.com/biog... Maybe he had funding from the Department of Agriculture? Maybe the author is trying to be dismissive of the scientific results by implying that it was serving an agenda? It was primitive work in the late 1800s, but it did set the foundation for a lot of more precise work on human metabolism. No one is questioning the main conclusions of Atwater that human metabolism obeys the law of conservation of energy, and that it is important (and difficult) to quantify energy intake.
Slashdot Mirror
What do the insults accomplish? Millions of years is indeed the timescale over which human evolution has occurred. And long term human survival on earth seems like a pretty clear critical issue for humans to think about.
It is a nice dream...build a Moon colony, let it develop industry and grow into a jumping off point. But what economic benefit will it provide while we spend 10s or 100s of trillions of dollars getting it going? The analogy to colonies on earth is just not relevant. We evolved on earth and developed economic models that worked on earth. So new land was naturally economically productive. There is plenty of desert and polar land on earth that is much more hospitable than anything on the moon. You underestimate the difficulties of colonizing a planet when a pressure vessel failure is catastrophic. We are 100s of years from an economically viable moon base for humans. We could build one that functions like the space station right now...transport supplies and food from earth to allow people to survive. But we would need to allocate 10s or 100s of billions of dollars per year to keep it afloat. But there are no reasonable ideas for an economically viable moon settlement based on earth biology. If you instead base it on harvesting energy to support machines, it might eventually work, but we are very far from building that also.
This critical issue deserves a more subtle discussion that guesses about when humans will go extinct on earth. Without human foolishness (nuclear weapons, pollution, etc) we would expect we have millions of years. But humans are foolish, so we really don't know. I am suspicious of claims that the human future is in space. Both because there is no plausible way for sustainable human settlements off planet to be manufactured with current technology and because it enables a short sighted approach that treats this planet as a disposable stepping stone to better things. More likely, intelligent machines we make will colonize space before we do since it is much easier to design them to tolerate the harsh environment than it is to modify biology to survive off planet. Maybe we will teach them to build habitats for us, but in that case, it will really be the machines that are doing the colonizing. And this is much further off than many people suspect.
Are flawed programmers creating bad code? Yes, but there is a bigger cause. Our era assumes that complicated things should be able to be done by a small number of people in a tiny amount of time. It is the failure to simplify and allocate adequate resources to creating great code that are really creating bad code.
3d Xpoint is a fairly different technology. It is much faster than NAND and much cheaper than DRAM while still being non-volatile. Initially some people may use it in expensive high speed SSD configurations like Optane, but I think the real potential is in new architectures with huge non-volatile fast memory. Maybe it will replace Flash in mobile devices that currently operate without off-processor DRAM. It is possible that manufacturing becomes cheaper and it will compete with NAND Flash for non-volatile storage, but except in applications where write speed is much more valuable than total capacity, current 3D Xpoint can't compete.
That is an insightful article. Hopefully we can keep this conversation at a high level. The usual thing when energy supply in transition runs into a rough patch is for many to argue that we should just keep depending on coal and natural gas. But any time you do something new, there is trial and error. Hopefully more of the forseen problems could be avoided, but humans seem to have to make mistakes before they can learn from them. As integrated wind, solar, transmission, and storage systems become more mature, we can run a stable energy system with mostly renewables and much less damage to the ecosystems we depend on. But there will be a learning curve.
They are simply important problems. It doesn't really matter what category of fundamental theory you place them under. Planet formation will be solved with continuum mechanics and standard chemistry/quantum mechanics to describe dust formation and aggregation. The solution will ignore general and special relativity. Emergent problems can't be solved with more computational power. Try to calculate the properties of a tree by solving the many body quantum problem. We can't even fully compute 5 particle scattering problems using quantum mechanics.
"General physics is more or less solved" That belief is precisely the problem. Could you predict the mechanical properties of DNA from quantum mechanics for us? Could you calculate the viscosity of water from first principles? Could you determine how the albedo of clouds on earth will respond to changing CO2 concentrations? Could you determine the distribution of sizes, chemical makeup, and orbital radii of planets we have discovered? If not, in what sense is "general physics" solved? What people do is redefine these problems as not physics because they are useful enough that they attract a community of non-physicists to work on them also. You seem to believe in the reductionist idea that once you know the underlying equations you have solved a problem.
We are already doing it. But not in fundamental particle physics. It is in applied physics where the massive progress is being made. There are a huge range of problems in biology, geology, chemistry, mechanical engineering, nanoscience, neuroscience, and even sociology and economics to which the rigorous, empirical traditions of physics are making major contributions. Last decade we finally solved the problem of transition to turbulence in pipe flow. A more than 100 year old problem with deep mathematical challenges and practical implications on top. But it likely will not receive a nobel prize because of the deep inertia in the dead end idea that physics is reductionist physics. It turns out that it is going to be very slow going to make further improvements in reductionist particle physics. So many people have been told that the "real physics" problems are reductionist problems, so they go to making up philosophical questions they can talk about when they run out of empirical problems they can solve. Physics will experience a renaissance when it finally embraces the empirical study of emergent phenomena for which there are a large number of problems that society really needs physicists to contribute to solving.
Taking us back to the original post. Jobs for people with training in computer science and biology usually pay pretty well. The problem is that they require extensive training and society has a hard time prioritizing education to provide the training people need.
I wouldn't go to computer science or biology today. Both are oversaturated with people thinking they are the ticket to a great career. I would look at applied physics and some of the science based engineering disciplines. A new science and computation based approach to mechanical, aerospace, civil, and chemical engineering is changing the world. Bioengineering and environmental engineering are growing rapidly. If you can build the math and computer skills to make it, those are the big growth areas of the 21st century. Molecular biology is really really complicated. Messing with it usually does more harm than good. So I suspect the pharmaceutical industry is not a growth area for the next century. And the phalanxes of post-docs sorting out the pathways regulating each gene are going to soon find that the details they unearth are usually not relevant. Sure that gene is involved in cancer risk...but what are you going to do about it if the network is so complicated that external modification messes up too many other parts of cell function. (Just like everything is made of quarks and electrons, but we don't use quantum chromodynamics for engineering, everything in biology depends on molecular biology but molecular biology isn't that useful.) While everyone focuses on biology with dreams of improving health, science based tools for materials science and fabrication are changing the world. Now if only we could solve some political problems so we could train a few billion people to join the effort...
OK, it is standard to argue on slashdot, but it is more interesting to learn and build better ideas. You have interesting points, but are missing the big picture. If you want to be technical I did say 'economic growth rate' which is the exponential rate constant, so steady exponential growth would have zero first derivative of the economic growth rate.
Modern electronics is dominated by classical E&M. Quantum mechanics is important. But the idea of electronic computers was clear and they were being used well before anyone used quantum mechanics to build solid state transistors to make them much more efficient and powerful. On the other hand, in 1800, no one knew what electricity was and no one had any idea that electric currents could emit radio waves to communicate around the planet. By 1900 the electron had been discovered, Niagara falls power plant was powering electric lights in a city and radio communication had begun. The scientific innovations of the 19th century were profoundly transformational. The 20th century added some important pieces...and you are right that biology is where the 20th century really holds its own. But even the green revolution has its roots well into the 19th century. Most of the technology for the green revolution dates back to the 1800s. It was the social embrace of better seed varieties, fertilizer, irrigation, machinery and scientific management much more than genetic engineering that transformed our food supply. Of course the original post has the provocative title 'Greatest era of innovation' and that is subjective. But I think you haven't put a dent in my argument that the 19th century has a pretty strong case for it.
Yes, but that is maybe a bit too easy. The scientific thinking and economic arrangements that allowed the industrial revolution are continuing to spread around the world and to transform our lives. The commonly labelled 'industrial revolution' of 1760-1830 produced machine made cloth, readily available power from water and steam, and the beginnings of railroads, but it is prominent for the derivative of the economic growth rate and not the maximum value. Without question, growth measured by economic measures has never been higher than in China from 1980 to 2010. But innovation? That is somewhat nebulous. Does innovative painting count? Maybe I come back to agree with you though. Almost nothing has been as revolutionary or innovative as the transformation in how we conceive of the workings of the universe between 1687 and 1960. Arguably the most rapid period of scientific innovation was between 1800 and 1900 when most of our understanding of thermodynamics, basic chemistry, fluid dynamics, geology, evolution, electricity, magnetism, and optics were placed on solid phenomenological and empirical foundations. Cool stuff happened in the 20th century, but relativity, quantum mechanics, and detailed computational chemistry have been much less transformational than electromagnetism, basic chemistry, and evolution have been.
Yes, NotDrWho and Logic Bomb give important addendums. Resource constraints are a huge part of the puzzle. In an ideal world, even your group learning uses groups tailored to an individual learner, and that is often not practical. Eventually we may have data capable of guiding which kinds of groups should be working on which kinds of activities, and then analyzing that data and monitoring the groups will be a labor intensive operation, so we are back to resource constraints. In the long run, artificial intelligence may start to help us with these tasks, but by that point, artificial intelligence will start to make education itself a very different process with somewhat different goals.
Yes, all the studies showing problems with personalized learning are simply showing that we had not yet figured out how to do it well. There is simply no way that a one-size-fits all bureaucracy can educate as well as a system with tools that allow teachers to tailor activities to individual children. The problem is that personalized education is a much harder problem than many believe. It is easy to make an app that adapts the math problems assigned to a student's performance. But it is much harder to produce group learning activities that match varied skills. And if you put kids each on a single computer which is 'personalized', you can be sure they will learn less than if they are working together learning the social skills and executive function needed to succeed in the world. Eventually we'll succeed in personalizing teaching of social skills, executive function, reading, and math. But it is a hard problem.
In many ways the problem is like artificial intelligence. It is a much harder problem than people thought. But that doesn't mean that it is impossible and as parts of it are solved it slowly changes everything.
Yes it might be useful in very low power applications that benefit from light weight But the article says the current version is not very efficient, meaning it only extracts a small fraction of the energy in the light striking it. Standard solar cells might be 10% to 25% efficient. This may be only a few percent. In most applications I can think of, solar power is more limited by collecting area than by photocell weight, so this seems like niche product.
Yes, that is right. Reminds me of EEStor which every now and then repeats their promise of transformative super-capacitors based on their granted patents. But it is just vaporware. Hopefully this time is better, but anyone who is not a fool knows to expect most of these press releases to come to nothing.
Yes, and gravity wave astronomy could become a hugely important complement to electromagnetic astronomy. Because gravity wave frequencies are set by the motion of mass rather than by atomic (or other) transitions between quantum states of charged particles, gravity waves provide a more direct measurement of the motion of the objects in the systems of interest. So we directly measure the time dependent frequency of one signal and can immediately determine orbital parameters of relatively small objects that are a billion light years away. Imagine a day when we can detect black hole and neutron star binaries much earlier in their inspiral. We could be continuously monitoring millions of gravity wave sources spread across the universe and develop a much more precise picture of how our universe works. General relativity would either be become a theory with the quantitative triumphs of quantum mechanics or it would be replaced by something more accurate. It is an exciting day!
"The now-incipient field of gravitational waves astronomy is sure to make many glorious discoveries in this century." This is the reason this detection is so exciting. Until now, we had only quite indirect ways of detecting what was happening in exotic regions of space where very dense objects were orbiting at high speeds. Now we have direct experiments to tell us about these phenomena.
It just came out in Physical Review Letters today: http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab...
I think you don't understand. We now have an entirely new way to observe what happens in regions of the universe where the mass density is high and changing. In many ways, this is like the first telescope. It is an entirely new way of observing. The reason this is so important is not the single black hole merger they detected. It is because this is the first of what will become a major source of astronomical data. Soon other frequency ranges of gravitational waves will be measurable (see LISA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...). Just because the first observation agrees with existing theory is no reason to dismiss an entirely new class of measurements as uninteresting.
Yes, they do need to record good notes. But the times are changing. There is huge potential in a cheap general purpose sensor array. Imagine a system that recorded temperature, humidity, room brightness, vibrations, maybe some chemical species concentrations, and maybe data from a set of special sensors in an apparatus. This is straight forward to do, but right now it requires someone to write custom software and integrate a variety of sensors. If there becomes a standard that just ran with very little customization, it could greatly decrease the amount of 'something happened to this experiment but I don't know what'. It is easy to say 'they should take better lab notes', but no one has ever been able to accurately record all the relevant conditions. It is an imaginary world we describe in which the conditions of the experiment are recorded in the lab notebook. In research, you always have factors that you don't yet know are important, and high quality cheap general purpose sensors could be a big benefit.
ARC is a fusion reactor experiment proposed by the scientists at MIT who currently run the Alcator C-MOD experiment. You can read many details about both of these experiments on Wikipedia or other online sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
ARC is a very interesting scientific and engineering development project, but it is not a power generation facility. It is a demonstration experiment to learn how to run a fusion reactor with net energy production. There are still several major steps between ARC and a commercial electric generation facility.
Some college students have been raised in an environment where unpleasant experiences are carefully avoided and so they are oversensitive. College should be a place for these students to grow up. But the extreme political polarization of our era makes that difficult. I see the biggest culprit in the 'oppression studies' focus on many college campuses. Everyone claims membership in some oppressed group, looks to take offense, and wants special treatment. Once you are looking for oppression, you are guaranteed to find it and along the way lose focus on the hard work necessary to succeed in our highly competitive global economy. Oppression exists and it is a terrible burden holding people back. But the PC response on college campuses mostly makes it worse.
Can someone explain why the article cites Wilbur Atwater as a Department of Agriculture scientist? I think he did his research as a faculty member at Wesleyan University. http://www.britannica.com/biog... Maybe he had funding from the Department of Agriculture? Maybe the author is trying to be dismissive of the scientific results by implying that it was serving an agenda? It was primitive work in the late 1800s, but it did set the foundation for a lot of more precise work on human metabolism. No one is questioning the main conclusions of Atwater that human metabolism obeys the law of conservation of energy, and that it is important (and difficult) to quantify energy intake.