You can't have freedom of speech unless you're willing to stand up and support your most vocal opponent's right to say the most offensive things.
Free speech is all well and good, but what about things like hate speech, child pornography, videos of youths knifing other youths and so forth? Yes, it may be the stereotypical and usually worthless "Think of the children!" cry, but it makes it extremely difficult to effectively argue against it in a public space, claims of Free Speech or no. As a result this sort of ridiculous law can be seriously contemplated, because anyone trying to stand up against it is faced with vague tutting and the veiled implication that you approve of such things.
Of course, the real issue is that censorship doesn't actually address any of these issues, but it gives a nice big headline which the government can point to as showing how they're looking out for us.
While your point is somewhat valid, you're missing the crux of the argument presented in the original Wired article, which went somewhat beyond the simle "smaller costs make rarer sales profitable"
The idea was not only that the internet would enable sellers to tap into this market more effectively (through lower costs) but also that this would in turn lead to the tail becoming yet larger (both because increasing number of items sold means more potential sales, and because these rarer items may pick up additional momentum and sell more copies, thus giving more events with higher frequencies) as compared to the "blockbuster" events, which suffer due to increased choice.
More specifically, the issue is not "stuff one person will buy won't outsell stuff millions of people will buy" but rather "will many items purchased by a few people exceed the sales of a few items purchased by many people", given improved choice. The long tail hypothesis as presented in the Wired article says yes (or, at least, that the few-selling items will gain ground in the scenario presented by the internet) but evidence in this article says no. Perhaps still not the most shocking discovery in the world, but certainly a bit more than the trite discovery you make it out to be.
Also, as an aside, IQ is a very bad choice to illustrate the "long tail" because IQ is by definition normally distributed, and thus has a relatively short tail, as such things go - a long tail distribution is typically characterised by a significant slowdown in falloff as you move further from the median.
Re:I cited through pubmed because it's public
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Trick or Treatment
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· Score: 1
Perhaps I didn't make the initial point clear - you cannot cite Pubmed, as it is a search engine. It's comprable to citing "Google" as the source for a given search result, when it is in fact the webpages it indexes which give the results. Similarly, in this case it is the journals indexed by Pubmed, not Pubmed itself which is the source of the information (and it is no more free than the journals it indexes, since it still requires a subscription to access the articles, and the abstracts are available on the journal's own websites also).
But coming to the main point, yes, there are many articles that purport to show a positive result beyond placebo - but there is also a significant body of work which indicates that there are many cases where it does not have a significant effect, or that many of the studies which purport to show it has a significant effect have experimental flaws (like the obvious placebo control point I noted above).
I agree that an open mind is necessary to study almost any field in science - but an open mind does not necessarily imply accepting any conclusions that are presented to you, even if it is in a scientific journal. A rational evaluation of all the evidence is necessary to fully understand these issues, and that is something that still seems lacking from your criticisms of the author here.
Re:The author is wrong about accupuncture
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Trick or Treatment
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· Score: 2, Informative
As a first point, "Pubmed" says nothing about these things. Pubmed is a search engine which indexes various medical journals. The appearance of something on Pubmed is by itself in no way an indication of quality.
But the main point about researching any medical articles is that picking out limited data points is a terrible, terrible way to draw conclusions. Holding up a couple of papers as proof is a rather dubious method of calling "bullshit" on a position. Appraoching things that way, we have to assume that MMR undoubtably causes autism, for example, since there are published articles which express support of this claim. Cherry-picking abstracts does no good, particularly without a critcal eye - the obvious observation on the first article is that it lacks a placebo control, which is a common criticism of many accupunture trials, I believe.
A more comprehensive examination of this field (and indeed, most medical fields) typically shows there is actually disagreement in the field with published articles supporting both positions, and it must be evaluated as a whole to determine the validity of a given statement. Perhaps the author has actually performed such an experiment and reached this sort of conclusion? That's the sort of thing which needs to be investigated before dismissing the work out of hand.
Turn in your "Turn in your statistics card" card immediately.
The odds of 3 heads turning up when 5 coins are tossed is 50%, wheras the odds of 30 heads turning up from a set of 50 coin tosses is only 10%. (The appropriate formula is (n!/(n-k!)(k!))*0.5^n, if you want to check).
Re:Does this seem a bit obvious to anyone
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Hot Water, Hot Earth
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· Score: 3, Informative
What's interesting is that the statements you made are only true up to a certain point - as pressure increases, boiling point rises, true. But above a certain pressure/temperature combination, the distinction between "liquid" and "gas" becomes meaningless, and so the boiling point stops being a meaningful value. While this has been shown in other materials in the past, this one is interesting because it's in water, and everyone loves water.
The problem with nuclear is that breeder reactors seem to be completely off the table. In principle, designs like the IFR offer massive reductions in both the amount of waste (total volume of material going through the reactor is reduced by potentially a factor of almost 100) and the longevity of the waste, with products which only exhibit significantly above background levels of radiation for hundreds of years, rather than thousands.
Most of the issues raised with the reactor are commercial - at the moment it's economically more viable to simply burn the fuel in a shamefully inefficient manner and bury the waste. There is also an issue about proliferation threats due to the fact that some of the by-products of the reactor are technically usable in nuclear weapons - but it seems like the sort of issue which would be possible to address, and seems like a small price to pay for such an effective source of energy.
What the GP was thinking of was, I believe, normal numbers, which are defined as those whose digits have a uniform distribution. Obviously all normal numbers are irrational, but not all irrational numbers are normal, as you point out.
Governments have no qualms with offering some free music, I'm sure. But I'd be willing to wager that the income they derive from taxes on the various bits of the entertainment industry which would be affected by an abolition of copyright is orders of magnitude greater than whatever it is they give to support music as art.
This is one of those wonderful headlines where they convert the big scary numbers into a nice friendly unit and completely miss the point. What's interesting about this memory is not that it could be locked away and would be stable, but that it's much more stable under repeated use (100 million writes as opposed to tens of thousands). So they've presumably taken some arbitrary number of "writes per year" and divided to get their 100 year figure.
(Bonus exercise for the reader: Calculate the lifetime of these chips in libraries of congress written!)
The noise from "real" photons (that is, those directly produced by black body radiation) is really rather small - vanishingly so, at visible and higher frequencies for an emitter at room temperature. Cooling in detectors at such energies is primarily needed for electrical noise caused in the system by events at thermal energies, something which is significantly less of a problem in avalanche photodiodes.
Obviously, if you want to measure photons at thermal energies, then cooling is certainly a requirement.
I think you misread the article. Specifically where it says:
Various people, including Shields himself, have come up with complex, cooled devices that can count photons.
It is the current generation of photon counting detectors which typically require high degrees of cooling (usually with LN2, as you suggest). Photodiodes of the type discussed in the article typically don't have such extreme cooling requirements under normal operation, so presumably that's what's so nice about this mod, as well.
While what you say is somewhat correct, there is a glaring difference between "proof" as it corresponds to physics, and "proof" as it corresponds to mathematics, and indeed what constitutes a failure of a given theory.
Addressing the latter first, Newton's equations describe to a very high degree of accuracy (perfectly, in the limit of ignoring relativistic and other high-order corrections) the interaction of any arbitrarily large number of bodies. The fact that we cannot solve these equations is in no way a failure of the models - the only possible failure is if we found them to be incorrect in some way. Provided they continue to produce correct results (as can be verified by two-body experiments and extended to n-body through numerical modelling, if nothing else) then the models are correct. That they are hard (or impossible) to solve in general has no bearing on the validity of the model - it tells us how they work, the fact it doesn't fit neatly into analytic mathematics is an irrelevance to how the universe proceeds.
With regards to the nature of proof in physics as opposed to mathematics - it is not generally correct to say that a "proof" of a physical theory has been found, but rather that its predictions have been verified against experimental evidence. A (correct) mathematical proof is by definition irrefutable: proving the Riemann Hypothesis would mean it is true, with no dispute. On the other hand, every bit of evidence supporting Newtonian mechanics, relativity, or any other physical theory is only valid until an exception appears, and then the theories must be updated, leading to a series of increasingly exacting tests.
The recent "proofs" of theories which have been around for decades are really only these more stringent tests - and as applications typically require orders of magnitude less precision than the level required to test a theory at a given time, it is unsurprising that theories can be easily be applied to these much less difficult test cases.
Something like the Riemann hypothesis is quite interesting, as it falls somewhere between the two - there is a certain degree of "experimental mathematics", if you will, where people are valiantly trying to find the limits of the hypothesis, which thus far indicates that it holds for a very wide range of numbers, which is comparable to the tests physicists must perform to attempt to determine physical laws. These results are encouraging as they validate any proofs which only put similar requirements on the hypothesis, but there is a higher level of proof in mathematics which would verify it in all conditions, everywhere, which would in turn validate all theories based on the hypothesis completely, and close the loophole that they will break in some (obviously ill-defined) conditions.
(Also, as an addendum, I assume you meant Poincaré spent a long time on the n-body problem, as opposed to Pasteur who was more of a biologist, as far as I recall)
100%+ "pure" slot games aren't exactly common (because as you say, they will invariably lose you money). What is very common is 100%+ return poker machines or games with similar levels of user input, where the machines pay out more than 100% if you play 'perfectly', forever. Of course perfect play is often unintuitive and involves things like taking the safe bet rather than higher payout options - not something most people in Vegas are renowned for.
Golden age... equal people having more kids... equal end of golden age with an even larger die off. You make this statement quite confidently, but have you any evidence that it is the case? Looking at birth rate statistics, there's a pretty clear negative correlation between quality of life and birth rate in a given country. There would probably be a single generation or so rise in growth rate as birth rates take some time to equalise to the new longer life expectancies and better quality of life, but the world's population running away if quality of life improves globally does not seem like a forgone conclusion to me at all.
The very fact that a plasma is an electrical conductor tells us that it cannot be electrically neutral, but consists of charges that move in response to an electric field. I think there is something of a miscommunication here with regards to the term "electrically neutral". I have a block of copper here - it's an excellent conductor, but certainly holds no net charge in the bulk. Indeed, if I attempt to drive a current through it without maintaining this overall neutrality, it will effectively become insulating as a potential builds up between the two ends. Similarly, to suggest that a material is "charged" because individual constituents of it have a net charge is simply incorrect. The behaviour of current and material flow in plasmas which the rest of your post talks about is a large and complex field, and it is actively being applied to the description of astrophysical plasmas in the areas where it is relevant. But these scales are typically local (that is, given lumps of plasma, such as stars) rather than galactic, since the bulk neutrality of matter means any charges are very strongly screened, causing observed charge at long distances to tend very strongly towards zero.
Hopping onto your response to the other responder:
So are you saying that the so named "solar wind" is a stream of neutral atoms? That is obviously false. Of course not, but once again we encounter the issue that "charged constituents" does not imply "charged bulk". The solar wind consists of large amounts of ions and electrons - as with the other plasmas we're discussing, it is electrically neutral. A quick check of google on "solar wind net charge" yields oodles of comments to that effect, as does a simple back of the envelope calculation (if the sun is a net source of positive current on the order of the solar wind, it would be presently holding a charge of billions of coulombs per square meter at this point). And it should be noted that the plasma nature of the solar wind is well-known and is regularly used to explain how the solar wind behaves, as it is a correct domain to apply plasma physics to.
Really, I do think this last line is telling:
The fact is that we live in an electrically active universe. That should figure in prominently in all theories that pretend to tell us anything at all about how the universe operates. It's almost a true statement, but requires a caveat: Yes, we live in an electrically active universe, of that there is no doubt. And this fact should (and mostly is, in the examples of the sun, solar wind and so forth) feature prominently in all theories where it is relevant. However, I have yet to see any suggestion that net charges in the various systems under consideration are significant enough to be anything other than a vastly high-order correction to gravitationally based theories the electric universe people seek to challenge, which I presume is why it's still just a fringe theory.
That appeal to the description of the universe in terms of plasmas seems to overlook that the vast majority of plasmas are in fact electrically neutral, and the nature of a plasma (by definition) serves to aggressively screen the effect of any applied electrical field such that the bulk is unaffected.
The majority of proponents of the electric universe argument seem to overlook the power of screening effects in general (a point illustrated by the way that a large fraction of your posts attempt to emphasise this 10^36 figure and act as if nothing could explain its omission), which is why I must confess I haven't been able to bring myself to give it any sort of serious consideration. If this is how it's presented in more serious forums, I can't blame the astrophysical community for its skepticism.
Parallax is, unfortunately, terribly limited when you consider the sheer size of our universe. To get an idea, keep in mind that the shift in angular position of a body measured in arcseconds which is observed at opposite ends of earth's orbit is inversely proportional to the distance to the star in parsecs.
Thus, something able to track the position of a star to within a milliarcsecond is able to measure distances out to 1000 parsecs (that is, a bit under 4,000 light years, only a fraction of the way to our nearest galactic neighbour).
Even the Gaia mission the ESA are sending up in a couple of years for this explicit purpose only gains about a factor of 50 on that, and that only lets us clearly measure the distance to three or four galaxies. Parallax is a nice base measurement, but unfortunately other methods are simply required to calculate distances to the vast majority of things we can observe.
Fusion is "clean" in that it has no inherent long-lived radioactive by-products. The actual reaction which happens in reactors produces significant amount of neutron, gamma and proton radiation (specifically, the most probable reactions are two deuterium to one tritium, giving off a spare proton, and deuterium and tritium to helium-4 giving off a spare neutron, both of which also potentially involve nuclear de-excitation afterwards which would have an associated gamma, and that's only the leading few processes). It's a ferociously hot set of processes, in reality.
Indeed, one of the main issues with ITER-type fusion powerplants is actually building a confinement vessel which can stand up to such a massive barrage of radiation without becoming so radioctive or physically degraded that it has to be replaced too often.
The key word in the reason why the protons wouldn't be detected was not "heavy", but "charged". Charged particles have vastly more methods to lose energy than neutral ones, and thus have shorter ranges in a material, all other things (like mass and velocity) being equal.
The 2 Deuterium to 1 Helium-4 reaction is only one of the results which would happen in that situation - the production of Tritium (Possibly leading to Tritium+Deuterium reactions producing He4 and a neutron) or Helium-3 and a spare neutron is also possible, and indeed are significantly more energetically favourable under normal circumstances, and would lead to a neutron flux.
On the other hand, if it is a purely 2D->He4 reaction, there should be a significant gamma flux with a characteristic (IIRC) energy as the product nucleus relaxed, which should be fairly easy to verify, at least in a ballpark measurement.
Heh, ironically, San Andreas' "sheer size" was one of the things which I liked least about it - one thing which bugged me about the earlier games was that it felt a bit like there were chunks of the final island which were close to wasteland - no real events going on there or particularly engaging areas to explore, just a bit of backdrop while driving between missions and other areas of interest. SA by comparison had vast, vast areas which fell into this trap and it meant I really didn't feel as engaged in any given area as I did in older haunts in GTA3 or Vice City.
And while there's no doubt some of the tweaks are very nice, some of them can also be frustrating (starting off in SA with minimal driving skill was rather painful, not to mention the whole "Oh yes, all those gang territories you captured? We'll be having them all back now" bit. Is there any game where that gimmick has been a positive thing?)
You say the "simplest" formula which combines the properties of mass and velocity is a multiplication of these values - but it also happens to be the only correct one to describe this new property of matter (barring tomfoolery with constants and so forth).
Momentum scales linearly with both mass and velocity, fields fall off with inverse square relations, and so on. You cannot change the equations describing them away from these truths in any meaningful fashion without making the equations wrong - this is not human convention or definition, it is how the universe works.
Time between releases is in no way correlated with difference between those releases. Going back to the key point from the first post in the thread:
does anyone honestly think they'll see a lot they're not expecting? GTA3 was successful because it took the whole sandbox game idea and really ran with it, and made something where it really was enjoyable to just mess around in for a long time with no real restirctions, while still providing a story to give everything you're doing a bit of background and meaning (if you so desire, of course). Very different from most everything else out at the time - but since then, what's changed? Graphical improvements, a few tweaks or new mechanics (Finally, our characters can swim!), but little that was genuinely new. I'll confess to being a bad gamer and not being up to speed with everything that's going on in this newest release, but is there anything that really really sets it apart from "More of the same, but shinier"?
While this isn't strictly a bad thing, it does basically map back to the FIFA style of game release, if on a longer timescale.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't have freedom of speech unless you're willing to stand up and support your most vocal opponent's right to say the most offensive things.
Free speech is all well and good, but what about things like hate speech, child pornography, videos of youths knifing other youths and so forth? Yes, it may be the stereotypical and usually worthless "Think of the children!" cry, but it makes it extremely difficult to effectively argue against it in a public space, claims of Free Speech or no. As a result this sort of ridiculous law can be seriously contemplated, because anyone trying to stand up against it is faced with vague tutting and the veiled implication that you approve of such things.
Of course, the real issue is that censorship doesn't actually address any of these issues, but it gives a nice big headline which the government can point to as showing how they're looking out for us.
You know, whether we want them to or not.
The idea was not only that the internet would enable sellers to tap into this market more effectively (through lower costs) but also that this would in turn lead to the tail becoming yet larger (both because increasing number of items sold means more potential sales, and because these rarer items may pick up additional momentum and sell more copies, thus giving more events with higher frequencies) as compared to the "blockbuster" events, which suffer due to increased choice.
More specifically, the issue is not "stuff one person will buy won't outsell stuff millions of people will buy" but rather "will many items purchased by a few people exceed the sales of a few items purchased by many people", given improved choice. The long tail hypothesis as presented in the Wired article says yes (or, at least, that the few-selling items will gain ground in the scenario presented by the internet) but evidence in this article says no. Perhaps still not the most shocking discovery in the world, but certainly a bit more than the trite discovery you make it out to be.
Also, as an aside, IQ is a very bad choice to illustrate the "long tail" because IQ is by definition normally distributed, and thus has a relatively short tail, as such things go - a long tail distribution is typically characterised by a significant slowdown in falloff as you move further from the median.
But coming to the main point, yes, there are many articles that purport to show a positive result beyond placebo - but there is also a significant body of work which indicates that there are many cases where it does not have a significant effect, or that many of the studies which purport to show it has a significant effect have experimental flaws (like the obvious placebo control point I noted above).
I agree that an open mind is necessary to study almost any field in science - but an open mind does not necessarily imply accepting any conclusions that are presented to you, even if it is in a scientific journal. A rational evaluation of all the evidence is necessary to fully understand these issues, and that is something that still seems lacking from your criticisms of the author here.
But the main point about researching any medical articles is that picking out limited data points is a terrible, terrible way to draw conclusions. Holding up a couple of papers as proof is a rather dubious method of calling "bullshit" on a position. Appraoching things that way, we have to assume that MMR undoubtably causes autism, for example, since there are published articles which express support of this claim. Cherry-picking abstracts does no good, particularly without a critcal eye - the obvious observation on the first article is that it lacks a placebo control, which is a common criticism of many accupunture trials, I believe.
A more comprehensive examination of this field (and indeed, most medical fields) typically shows there is actually disagreement in the field with published articles supporting both positions, and it must be evaluated as a whole to determine the validity of a given statement. Perhaps the author has actually performed such an experiment and reached this sort of conclusion? That's the sort of thing which needs to be investigated before dismissing the work out of hand.
The odds of 3 heads turning up when 5 coins are tossed is 50%, wheras the odds of 30 heads turning up from a set of 50 coin tosses is only 10%. (The appropriate formula is (n!/(n-k!)(k!))*0.5^n, if you want to check).
What's interesting is that the statements you made are only true up to a certain point - as pressure increases, boiling point rises, true. But above a certain pressure/temperature combination, the distinction between "liquid" and "gas" becomes meaningless, and so the boiling point stops being a meaningful value. While this has been shown in other materials in the past, this one is interesting because it's in water, and everyone loves water.
Most of the issues raised with the reactor are commercial - at the moment it's economically more viable to simply burn the fuel in a shamefully inefficient manner and bury the waste. There is also an issue about proliferation threats due to the fact that some of the by-products of the reactor are technically usable in nuclear weapons - but it seems like the sort of issue which would be possible to address, and seems like a small price to pay for such an effective source of energy.
What the GP was thinking of was, I believe, normal numbers, which are defined as those whose digits have a uniform distribution. Obviously all normal numbers are irrational, but not all irrational numbers are normal, as you point out.
Governments have no qualms with offering some free music, I'm sure. But I'd be willing to wager that the income they derive from taxes on the various bits of the entertainment industry which would be affected by an abolition of copyright is orders of magnitude greater than whatever it is they give to support music as art.
(Bonus exercise for the reader: Calculate the lifetime of these chips in libraries of congress written!)
Obviously, if you want to measure photons at thermal energies, then cooling is certainly a requirement.
Various people, including Shields himself, have come up with complex, cooled devices that can count photons.
It is the current generation of photon counting detectors which typically require high degrees of cooling (usually with LN2, as you suggest). Photodiodes of the type discussed in the article typically don't have such extreme cooling requirements under normal operation, so presumably that's what's so nice about this mod, as well.
Addressing the latter first, Newton's equations describe to a very high degree of accuracy (perfectly, in the limit of ignoring relativistic and other high-order corrections) the interaction of any arbitrarily large number of bodies. The fact that we cannot solve these equations is in no way a failure of the models - the only possible failure is if we found them to be incorrect in some way. Provided they continue to produce correct results (as can be verified by two-body experiments and extended to n-body through numerical modelling, if nothing else) then the models are correct. That they are hard (or impossible) to solve in general has no bearing on the validity of the model - it tells us how they work, the fact it doesn't fit neatly into analytic mathematics is an irrelevance to how the universe proceeds.
With regards to the nature of proof in physics as opposed to mathematics - it is not generally correct to say that a "proof" of a physical theory has been found, but rather that its predictions have been verified against experimental evidence. A (correct) mathematical proof is by definition irrefutable: proving the Riemann Hypothesis would mean it is true, with no dispute. On the other hand, every bit of evidence supporting Newtonian mechanics, relativity, or any other physical theory is only valid until an exception appears, and then the theories must be updated, leading to a series of increasingly exacting tests.
The recent "proofs" of theories which have been around for decades are really only these more stringent tests - and as applications typically require orders of magnitude less precision than the level required to test a theory at a given time, it is unsurprising that theories can be easily be applied to these much less difficult test cases.
Something like the Riemann hypothesis is quite interesting, as it falls somewhere between the two - there is a certain degree of "experimental mathematics", if you will, where people are valiantly trying to find the limits of the hypothesis, which thus far indicates that it holds for a very wide range of numbers, which is comparable to the tests physicists must perform to attempt to determine physical laws. These results are encouraging as they validate any proofs which only put similar requirements on the hypothesis, but there is a higher level of proof in mathematics which would verify it in all conditions, everywhere, which would in turn validate all theories based on the hypothesis completely, and close the loophole that they will break in some (obviously ill-defined) conditions.
(Also, as an addendum, I assume you meant Poincaré spent a long time on the n-body problem, as opposed to Pasteur who was more of a biologist, as far as I recall)
100%+ "pure" slot games aren't exactly common (because as you say, they will invariably lose you money). What is very common is 100%+ return poker machines or games with similar levels of user input, where the machines pay out more than 100% if you play 'perfectly', forever. Of course perfect play is often unintuitive and involves things like taking the safe bet rather than higher payout options - not something most people in Vegas are renowned for.
Hopping onto your response to the other responder:
So are you saying that the so named "solar wind" is a stream of neutral atoms? That is obviously false. Of course not, but once again we encounter the issue that "charged constituents" does not imply "charged bulk". The solar wind consists of large amounts of ions and electrons - as with the other plasmas we're discussing, it is electrically neutral. A quick check of google on "solar wind net charge" yields oodles of comments to that effect, as does a simple back of the envelope calculation (if the sun is a net source of positive current on the order of the solar wind, it would be presently holding a charge of billions of coulombs per square meter at this point). And it should be noted that the plasma nature of the solar wind is well-known and is regularly used to explain how the solar wind behaves, as it is a correct domain to apply plasma physics to.Really, I do think this last line is telling:
The fact is that we live in an electrically active universe. That should figure in prominently in all theories that pretend to tell us anything at all about how the universe operates. It's almost a true statement, but requires a caveat: Yes, we live in an electrically active universe, of that there is no doubt. And this fact should (and mostly is, in the examples of the sun, solar wind and so forth) feature prominently in all theories where it is relevant. However, I have yet to see any suggestion that net charges in the various systems under consideration are significant enough to be anything other than a vastly high-order correction to gravitationally based theories the electric universe people seek to challenge, which I presume is why it's still just a fringe theory.The majority of proponents of the electric universe argument seem to overlook the power of screening effects in general (a point illustrated by the way that a large fraction of your posts attempt to emphasise this 10^36 figure and act as if nothing could explain its omission), which is why I must confess I haven't been able to bring myself to give it any sort of serious consideration. If this is how it's presented in more serious forums, I can't blame the astrophysical community for its skepticism.
Thus, something able to track the position of a star to within a milliarcsecond is able to measure distances out to 1000 parsecs (that is, a bit under 4,000 light years, only a fraction of the way to our nearest galactic neighbour).
Even the Gaia mission the ESA are sending up in a couple of years for this explicit purpose only gains about a factor of 50 on that, and that only lets us clearly measure the distance to three or four galaxies. Parallax is a nice base measurement, but unfortunately other methods are simply required to calculate distances to the vast majority of things we can observe.
Indeed, one of the main issues with ITER-type fusion powerplants is actually building a confinement vessel which can stand up to such a massive barrage of radiation without becoming so radioctive or physically degraded that it has to be replaced too often.
The key word in the reason why the protons wouldn't be detected was not "heavy", but "charged". Charged particles have vastly more methods to lose energy than neutral ones, and thus have shorter ranges in a material, all other things (like mass and velocity) being equal.
Deuterium is Hydrogen-2 (1P+1N), Hydrogen is 1P alone. It's somewhat annoying that hydrogen isotopes have different names, but what can you do.
On the other hand, if it is a purely 2D->He4 reaction, there should be a significant gamma flux with a characteristic (IIRC) energy as the product nucleus relaxed, which should be fairly easy to verify, at least in a ballpark measurement.
And while there's no doubt some of the tweaks are very nice, some of them can also be frustrating (starting off in SA with minimal driving skill was rather painful, not to mention the whole "Oh yes, all those gang territories you captured? We'll be having them all back now" bit. Is there any game where that gimmick has been a positive thing?)
Momentum scales linearly with both mass and velocity, fields fall off with inverse square relations, and so on. You cannot change the equations describing them away from these truths in any meaningful fashion without making the equations wrong - this is not human convention or definition, it is how the universe works.
While this isn't strictly a bad thing, it does basically map back to the FIFA style of game release, if on a longer timescale.