Ah, I was looking for an actual study - as in the published in a journal type - which was explicitly titled "global warming could raise temperatures 10C!" when that wasn't the primary result. Most material produced for public consumption is almost bound to be hyped up and selectively choose the most 'exciting' results, and outlier predictions are expected in serious studies, so it can quite often lead to stuff taken out of context.
If the planet warms, big deal. All that means is some variant of us more adapted to a hotter planet will thrive and displace us, until, of course, the earth cools again as it wavers up and down in the galactic plane.
I dunno about you, but I think many people do consider it a "big deal" that our civilisation, and indeed our species, could be made obsolete by these actions, and that's the motivation for the concern over global warming.
There was a study released a few years ago entitled "global warming could raise temperatures 10C!" (if CO2 levels double from current levels).
I'm intrigued now - was the study actually given this title, or was this a title of a story about the study? Such a blatantly "LOOK AT ME!" title isn't the sort of thing you see very often, at least not where such things are taken seriously. Do you have a reference? (I would search myself, but I presume you're paraphrasing, and it's a rather generic phrase to search on).
Lets see... if she actually presents this properly, this job would demonstrate some business skills, a willingness to take risks and do something different and 'outside the box', not to mention the types of design and programming skills required by her Second Life job, which have a proven marketability (and, if she's primarily interested in design, they're also probably fairly portable to other sorts of "real life" design jobs).
Admittedly it's quite likely that an interviewer for most positions will simply adopt your opinion and think she spent 2 years playing a game, but if the employer is even a little open minded, I'd say there are much much worse things you could spend a year or two doing, from an employabilty point of view.
Er... no, it is not. Most tests which make use of the concept of an "IQ score" do so by fitting it to a normal distribution, with a mean of 100, but the standard deviation is quite often different, which can cause the fraction of people (or, in other words, the corresponding percentile) who can obtain a given score to vary by orders of magnitude at the high end.
In some of the more common tests, this is true, but it is completely inaccurate to make it a blanket statement. Quoth Mensa.org:
The term "IQ score" is widely used but poorly defined. There are a large number of tests with different scales. The result on one test of 132 can be the same as a score 148 on another test.
for throwing away someone with a 192 IQ (i've been tested, by them ironically)
Completely off-topic, but this is something which always annoys me about IQ tests - just stating a number is rather meaningless, as there is absolutely no indication as to what scale is used. It's like saying your intelligence is eleventy-seven quatloos. Sure, that's great, but how does that compare to anyone else? Percentiles are the way to go. But then I'm sure a smart guy like you knew that, right?;)
Yes, I'm quite aware of these ideas - I was merely addressing the parent post's assertion that the GP's points were addressed in the article, wheras the closest thing to a response was the blather about relativity, which I did in no way mean to endorse - perhaps hand-wavy wasn't a strong enough term, neh?;)
You're probably right, the behaviour of this system while it's under acceleration would be more complex - assuming it worked at all. However, that is, at no point, addressed in his paper, and instead he suggests that when the device reaches a certain speed that it can no longer accelerate. This requires there to be some preferred frame for these measurements to be made in, and directly contradicts the core principle of relativity.
Ok, so, instead of sleeping like a sensible person, I read the paper a bit. He seems to suggest (I think, I'm tired and it's quite possible that I've misunderstood) that you have to consider the motion (that is, the group velocity) of the microwaves relative some seemingly arbitrary "stationary" reference frame, in which he did his initial derivation, even when the entire system is moving at some constant speed. (I put stationary in quotes, because the concept of a truly stationary rest frame in relativity is nonsense, and in fact the exact antitheses of the core principle, which is that intertial reference frames are indistinguishable.)
He then proceeds to derive a maximum speed this engine can attain, relative to this arbitrary stationary frame, to illustrate the consequences of this idea. He has, as far as I can see, recreated the ether in his attempt to justify the machine using relativity.
Point A) does, indeed, seem to be exactly what he's forgetting. A quick glance at the outline of the theory in the paper seems to show that he only considers the forces at either end, states that they are not equal, and claims this difference as the thrust, and does up some calculations to evaluate this difference (claiming relativity as the explanation for why he chooses not to treat the microwave/cavity system as closed). He completely neglects to mention (as far as I can see) the fact that the forces acting on the sides of the chamber would differ along its length, and cause a net force on the cavity as well, which would probably act counter to the force induced on the end-plates (I haven't done the math, it's 2am and I'm about to go to bed)
But, he does claim to have a working prototype, and it will be interesting to see if anything does come of it. I've been known to be wrong in the past, after all.
It's really not addressed. The closest thing is a vague, hand-wavy argument stating that it has something to do with relativity requiring that the photons must be treated only in their own reference frame, which makes little sense - the defining feature of relativity is that the laws of physics behave identically in all reference frames, and stating that it requires you to only consider some given frame seems to indicate either a reporter who doesn't understand what he's being told or a mistake on the part of the person who put forward the idea.
It's possible that it's covered more accurately in his paper, I haven't got around to reading that yet, but TFA is certainly not the place to go for a serious treatment of this information.
I am aware of Godel's incompleteness theory, but I will admit that it's been a few years since I dealt with it in any formal context (and even then not in great detail), so I may have misremembered it. So, a question for you (or anyone else who's dug down this deeply), to refresh my memory - Isn't it possible to (in principle, at least) identify a statement as being unprovable in a given system and prove it as such? I could have sworn this was the case (hence my statement of "True, false, or unprovable"), but, as I said, it's quite possible I have misremembered this point and the "unprovable" proof is only applicable to some statements.
A very precise and technically correct criticism, but we do have this little thing in language called context - given the nature of the discussion in this thread, I would have thought the particular type of theory under discussion would have been self-evident. My apologies for making such an apparently unwarranted assumption.
Yes, I was lazy with the semantics of my statement, I should have noted that it is possible for these things, instead of being proven totally untrue, to be subsumed into some larger and more complete theory as a special case. But it is still quite possible for something to be proven completely wrong - it's just become rather unlikely in recent times due to the higher standards of proof required before modern theories gain credence.
I was replying to this post, which does quite clearly confuse a mathematical theorem (specifically Pythagoras) with a physical proof. He's now been down-moderated a bit, so you may have been unable to see that post, depending on what settings you use for browsing these discussions.
You are confusing the concept of mathematical and scientific proof.
Mathematics is a closed system, for which we know all the rules (because we define them). Thus, things can be proven as being objectively true, false, or unprovable (for as given set of axioms, there are many self-consistent sets).
Physics and the other sciences, on the other hand, are faced with the dilemma that we can never observe all the behaviour of everything in the universe at once, and thus we are forever working with partial data sets, and fitting our theories to them. As a result, the best we can say is that the theory we have put together fits the observed data to a high degree of precision - but that this may be invalidated at any time by new phenomena. See, for example, the progression from Newtonian mechanics to Relativity, or the long-running debate over the nature of light.
I have a PhD in chemistry, and I have learnt stuff from mythbusters. I now know that the terminal velocity of a penny is lower than that of a human, and that high velocity rounds shatter when they are fired into water.
Clearly, this is why you should have set your sights higher. Say... a degree in Physics.
Don't be so naive to think the "troubles" were entirely political. It was, in large part, because of religion that the politics of Ireland have been so volitile in the last 100 years.
I know it's fashionable for Religion to be the scapegoat for everything these days, but this is grossly misleading.
If anything, it is more correct to say that it is because of Anglo-Irish politics that the religious relationship has been so strained. Your comparison that, in general Catholic is synonymous with republicanism and Protestant with unionism is generally true, but this is another case of correlation not implying causality.
In reality, the reason for this correlation can readily be seen if you consider the history of the two religions: If your family is a member of the Church of Ireland, it basically means that they were most likely A) Plantation settlers, selected by the British govt because of loyalty or B) Native Irish who converted to demonstrate their allegiance to the British crown. Conversely, if you're a catholic Irish, it means your family chose not to convert to Protestantism as an overt show of defiance to the British.
Claiming that 'religion' was the cause of strife would imply that there was some aspect of the two religions which was a cause for conflict - in reality, the only 'religious' issue was acknowledging the monarch of Britain as the head of your religion, which comes right back to the political issue.
A word of warning to add to this though: This is highly dependant on the realms your server is grouped with, and the faction you play. I know, on my old server, the Alliance are up in arms because their BG queues have skyrocketed, as they were grouped with a number of realms with tiny Horde populations. Conversely, on my present server, any time of the day or night, you can pick a battleground and get in instantly as a Horde character.
And of course, September 11th was a perfectly valid way to shed light on the issues some groups in the middle east had with America's foreign policy, right?
Yes, but an important difference is that Alterac Valley wasn't really designed to last that long - it's just that several hours of progress could be wiped out in less than 10 minutes by a small well organised team of 5 people if the opposing team doesn't respond (which happens more times than I care to recall). In this case, it sounds like ten hours of cumulative progress will be required to finish a round. The fact that they designed for this number troubles me. A 4 hour AV was beyond my tolerance, this is just scary.
True, perhaps the use of "is" was a bit too emphatic, but the point remains - we still have pretty much no solid information on any properties other than the two I specified in my post.
This means that there are numerous possible explanations of the nature of dark matter - there are numerous potential explanations of how regular matter could account for this mass (brown dwarves and the like) not to mention countless theoretical forms of 'exotic' dark matter (that is, consisting of entirely new elementary particles) which it could be.
These different possible particle types all possess greatly differing properties, and so until we get a bit more information on these properties, we are effectively no closer to characterising this matter in any effective fashion, which was what I identifying what it "is".
They claim proof that it's real, but they have no mention of proof of what it actually is. All this proves is that there is "something" there, and that it A) is not observable directly through our favourite tools (EM Emission) and B) It does exert a graviational force.
To draw any conclusions about the potential applications of this material is pretty much impossible until we actually work out what it is.
Well, it's true, you could quite probably build a quantum computer around some more complex system with more than two levels, but the same applies to a classical computer, if you really wanted to. The issue there is whether or not it's actually worthwhile to do so, given any resulting changes in complexity and the like.
But the thing is, any such quantum computer would not be referred to as being made up of a number of "qubits", as that explicitly implies a 2-level system - Wikipedia suggests "qutrit" for your hypothetical 3-level system, and so forth. It's not just a minor technicality either, as the difference in complexity and power is quite significant.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I was looking for an actual study - as in the published in a journal type - which was explicitly titled "global warming could raise temperatures 10C!" when that wasn't the primary result. Most material produced for public consumption is almost bound to be hyped up and selectively choose the most 'exciting' results, and outlier predictions are expected in serious studies, so it can quite often lead to stuff taken out of context.
I dunno about you, but I think many people do consider it a "big deal" that our civilisation, and indeed our species, could be made obsolete by these actions, and that's the motivation for the concern over global warming.
I'm intrigued now - was the study actually given this title, or was this a title of a story about the study? Such a blatantly "LOOK AT ME!" title isn't the sort of thing you see very often, at least not where such things are taken seriously. Do you have a reference? (I would search myself, but I presume you're paraphrasing, and it's a rather generic phrase to search on).
Admittedly it's quite likely that an interviewer for most positions will simply adopt your opinion and think she spent 2 years playing a game, but if the employer is even a little open minded, I'd say there are much much worse things you could spend a year or two doing, from an employabilty point of view.
Er... no, it is not. Most tests which make use of the concept of an "IQ score" do so by fitting it to a normal distribution, with a mean of 100, but the standard deviation is quite often different, which can cause the fraction of people (or, in other words, the corresponding percentile) who can obtain a given score to vary by orders of magnitude at the high end.
In some of the more common tests, this is true, but it is completely inaccurate to make it a blanket statement. Quoth Mensa.org:
The term "IQ score" is widely used but poorly defined. There are a large number of tests with different scales. The result on one test of 132 can be the same as a score 148 on another test.
Completely off-topic, but this is something which always annoys me about IQ tests - just stating a number is rather meaningless, as there is absolutely no indication as to what scale is used. It's like saying your intelligence is eleventy-seven quatloos. Sure, that's great, but how does that compare to anyone else? Percentiles are the way to go. But then I'm sure a smart guy like you knew that, right? ;)
Yes, I'm quite aware of these ideas - I was merely addressing the parent post's assertion that the GP's points were addressed in the article, wheras the closest thing to a response was the blather about relativity, which I did in no way mean to endorse - perhaps hand-wavy wasn't a strong enough term, neh? ;)
You're probably right, the behaviour of this system while it's under acceleration would be more complex - assuming it worked at all. However, that is, at no point, addressed in his paper, and instead he suggests that when the device reaches a certain speed that it can no longer accelerate. This requires there to be some preferred frame for these measurements to be made in, and directly contradicts the core principle of relativity.
He then proceeds to derive a maximum speed this engine can attain, relative to this arbitrary stationary frame, to illustrate the consequences of this idea. He has, as far as I can see, recreated the ether in his attempt to justify the machine using relativity.
But, he does claim to have a working prototype, and it will be interesting to see if anything does come of it. I've been known to be wrong in the past, after all.
It's possible that it's covered more accurately in his paper, I haven't got around to reading that yet, but TFA is certainly not the place to go for a serious treatment of this information.
I am aware of Godel's incompleteness theory, but I will admit that it's been a few years since I dealt with it in any formal context (and even then not in great detail), so I may have misremembered it. So, a question for you (or anyone else who's dug down this deeply), to refresh my memory - Isn't it possible to (in principle, at least) identify a statement as being unprovable in a given system and prove it as such? I could have sworn this was the case (hence my statement of "True, false, or unprovable"), but, as I said, it's quite possible I have misremembered this point and the "unprovable" proof is only applicable to some statements.
A very precise and technically correct criticism, but we do have this little thing in language called context - given the nature of the discussion in this thread, I would have thought the particular type of theory under discussion would have been self-evident. My apologies for making such an apparently unwarranted assumption.
Yes, I was lazy with the semantics of my statement, I should have noted that it is possible for these things, instead of being proven totally untrue, to be subsumed into some larger and more complete theory as a special case. But it is still quite possible for something to be proven completely wrong - it's just become rather unlikely in recent times due to the higher standards of proof required before modern theories gain credence.
I was replying to this post, which does quite clearly confuse a mathematical theorem (specifically Pythagoras) with a physical proof. He's now been down-moderated a bit, so you may have been unable to see that post, depending on what settings you use for browsing these discussions.
Mathematics is a closed system, for which we know all the rules (because we define them). Thus, things can be proven as being objectively true, false, or unprovable (for as given set of axioms, there are many self-consistent sets).
Physics and the other sciences, on the other hand, are faced with the dilemma that we can never observe all the behaviour of everything in the universe at once, and thus we are forever working with partial data sets, and fitting our theories to them. As a result, the best we can say is that the theory we have put together fits the observed data to a high degree of precision - but that this may be invalidated at any time by new phenomena. See, for example, the progression from Newtonian mechanics to Relativity, or the long-running debate over the nature of light.
Clearly, this is why you should have set your sights higher. Say... a degree in Physics.
I know it's fashionable for Religion to be the scapegoat for everything these days, but this is grossly misleading.
If anything, it is more correct to say that it is because of Anglo-Irish politics that the religious relationship has been so strained. Your comparison that, in general Catholic is synonymous with republicanism and Protestant with unionism is generally true, but this is another case of correlation not implying causality.
In reality, the reason for this correlation can readily be seen if you consider the history of the two religions: If your family is a member of the Church of Ireland, it basically means that they were most likely A) Plantation settlers, selected by the British govt because of loyalty or B) Native Irish who converted to demonstrate their allegiance to the British crown. Conversely, if you're a catholic Irish, it means your family chose not to convert to Protestantism as an overt show of defiance to the British.
Claiming that 'religion' was the cause of strife would imply that there was some aspect of the two religions which was a cause for conflict - in reality, the only 'religious' issue was acknowledging the monarch of Britain as the head of your religion, which comes right back to the political issue.
A word of warning to add to this though: This is highly dependant on the realms your server is grouped with, and the faction you play. I know, on my old server, the Alliance are up in arms because their BG queues have skyrocketed, as they were grouped with a number of realms with tiny Horde populations. Conversely, on my present server, any time of the day or night, you can pick a battleground and get in instantly as a Horde character.
And of course, September 11th was a perfectly valid way to shed light on the issues some groups in the middle east had with America's foreign policy, right?
Yes, but an important difference is that Alterac Valley wasn't really designed to last that long - it's just that several hours of progress could be wiped out in less than 10 minutes by a small well organised team of 5 people if the opposing team doesn't respond (which happens more times than I care to recall). In this case, it sounds like ten hours of cumulative progress will be required to finish a round. The fact that they designed for this number troubles me. A 4 hour AV was beyond my tolerance, this is just scary.
This means that there are numerous possible explanations of the nature of dark matter - there are numerous potential explanations of how regular matter could account for this mass (brown dwarves and the like) not to mention countless theoretical forms of 'exotic' dark matter (that is, consisting of entirely new elementary particles) which it could be.
These different possible particle types all possess greatly differing properties, and so until we get a bit more information on these properties, we are effectively no closer to characterising this matter in any effective fashion, which was what I identifying what it "is".
To draw any conclusions about the potential applications of this material is pretty much impossible until we actually work out what it is.
But the thing is, any such quantum computer would not be referred to as being made up of a number of "qubits", as that explicitly implies a 2-level system - Wikipedia suggests "qutrit" for your hypothetical 3-level system, and so forth. It's not just a minor technicality either, as the difference in complexity and power is quite significant.