NASA budget: $19 billion US military budget: $685 billion (including $79 billion for R&D alone)
If you do a pie chart of the federal budget, NASA barely even gets a sliver.
That's one of the oddities I've seen among those who generally oppose government spending: They tend to have a wildly distorted view of where most of the federal spending actually goes. The big items that account for almost all of it are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the military, and interest on previously accumulated debt, so if you're really trying to reduce the size of government, you have to do something about those.
They also don't seem to understand the funding models. For example, Social Security is (currently) fully funded - in fact, revenues exceed expenses. Fixing it longer term just requires removing the income cap (Disclaimer: My personal income is over the cap). Medicare and Medicaid have dedicated funding, but are currently underfunded (by a fair amount if my reading of the current numbers is correct). Military spending and interest come out of the general fund.
Leaving SS out of the picture, the Wikipedia numbers show that even if Medicare/Medicaid was eliminated(despite their dedicated funding), spending would still exceed revenue by about $700B. Dropping all discretionary spending would still leave about 100B to find, while reducing the federal government to just the military and its support systems. From a historical perspective, this is probably not a desirable state of affairs. So both cuts in military spending and revenue increases are needed for a non-pathological society.
<rant>Why the hell do people insist on using pie charts to compare numbers? The human visual system is really bad at comparing angles. Bar charts are a much better choice.</rant>
I imagine mind uploading would have to be by destructive readout. Destroy the brain in order to extract the information from it. Getting the kind of resolution required for scanning is going to take a nanotech revolution too - if you just sliced it up and used conventional microscopes, it would be time-prohibative.
See Alastair Reynolds, Chasm City, Monument to the Eighty.
I have heard it claimed that part of the reason for the pogroms against Jews during the plague was that Jews would kill rats (because they were unclean) and this led to lower plague rates in Jewish communities - which of course led to accusations that they were responsible (as they say, no good deed goes unpunished). Not that a reason was needed given the attitudes of the time...
I was reminded of this because of the large green area in central Poland. IIRC there were many Jewish communities in that part of the world and I wondered if it could have kept the infection rate down.
Link on the subject. Maybe not very scholarly, but quite informative.
Also, the pest affected different areas quite differently. See this map (green: no or minor occurrences of the Black Death). As far as I can see, the areas unaffected by the pest were not special in any way (not specially poor or uninhabited or anything) as far as my - admittedly small - knowledge goes.
Maybe someone there got the "hygiene" or "quarantaine" thing correctly, though.
Nice map - thanks.
I have heard it claimed that part of the reason for the pogroms against Jews during the plague was that Jews would kill rats (because they were unclean) and this led to lower plague rates in Jewish communities - which of course led to accusations that they were responsible (as they say, no good deed goes unpunished). Not that a reason was needed given the attitudes of the time...
I was reminded of this because of the large green area in central Poland. IIRC there were many Jewish communities in that part of the world and I wondered if it could have kept the infection rate down.
The numbers in the Reuter's article show the speed of light for neutrinos is 1 part in 40,000 times faster than the speed of light for normal matter.
I don't think this involves causality violations just yet. All our speed of light experiments to date involve measuring particles involving the electromagnetic force (protons, electrons, photons). Even if confirmed, it could be that there's some measurement error in the EM-derived speed of light, which the neutrino is immune to. In which case, it's not useful for time travel. It simply means our measurement of c was off by a smidge.
And given the small size of the result, if FTL neutrino communication is proved true, I expect the only real-world application would be financial companies trying to squeeze a few more nanoseconds off NYC-London communications.
I had exactly the same thought. Maybe the "speed of light" is actually "the speed of neutrinos" - or even "the speed of non-interacting dark matter"?
Right, because there is no better response to the problems of scarcity than systematically dedicating your entire productive capacity to creating more scarcity...
Sadly, just because such a solution exists does not mean it will be applied.
Free will is just as incompatible with a random universe as it is with a deterministic universe. Random events are statistically deterministic. We know that quantum events are truly random, and not affected by hidden variables (such as "will"), due to Bell's theorem. Free will is simply incompatible with what we know about physics.
That's not what Bell's theorem says. It say that quantum physics must necessarily violate either the principle of locality or counterfactual definiteness. Free will could violate locality if it was the result of agents external to the universe. Conversely, free will could violate counterfactual definiteness if the universe was being made up as we go along. The latter seems not only compatible with free will, but a necessary consequence of it.
It has shown that the current explanations using sulfates and ammonia for nucleation can be boosted by a factor of ten pending on the presence of cosmic radiation. They also say that further research will be required to see what effect cosmic rays have on the nucleation properties of other compounds to get the full picture.
Thus the nucleation change as a result of real world GCR modulation is going to be much smaller than seen in these experiments, and much less important than the amount of pollutants.
In summary, this is a great example of doing science and making progress, even if it isn’t what they first thought they’d find.
If there was no fall, there was no need for redemption. If there was no need for redemption, there was no need for a savior. And without a savior, there is no Christianity.
Unless the fall happens to everyone and the story is (wait for it) allegorical!
It's not just Roman Catholics and it is not recent. John Calvin said much the same thing during the Protestant Reformation, as did St. Augustine of Hippo around 400 AD. Augustine was explicitly worried that Christians who took Genesis literally were opening the new faith up to ridicule by pagans with any education. Looks like he was right.
In fact Churchill was one of the strongest proponents of a united Europe, which is ironic because the far-right BNP now uses his image to peddle their hateful messages.
Quite true. On the eve of the French defeat, he even offered to make France part of the commonwealth with full citizenship (cite: "Their Finest Hour")
Why won't people listen to this guy? It's like everyone fell asleep or left after the first half of the movie or something.
For the same reason people doesn't listen to greenpeace. While he says a lot of things that are true the hit/miss ratio is too bad for anyone to be able to take anything he says at face value. It's not enough to say a lot of things that are true. If you wan't people to start listening to you you will also have to stop telling things that aren't.
How well does the film handle the science? Admirably, I thought. It is remarkably up to date, with reference to some of the very latest research. Discussion of recent changes in Antarctica and Greenland are expertly laid out. He also does a very good job in talking about the relationship between sea surface temperature and hurricane intensity. As one might expect, he uses the Katrina disaster to underscore the point that climate change may have serious impacts on society, but he doesn’t highlight the connection any more than is appropriate (see our post on this, here).
Which is not to say that they agree completely with everything in the book and film:
For the most part, I think Gore gets the science right, just as he did in Earth in the Balance. The small errors don’t detract from Gore’s main point, which is that we in the United States have the technological and institutional ability to have a significant impact on the future trajectory of climate change.
but to cast his "hit/miss ratio" as "bad" seems like unsubstantiated rhetoric to me.
This is the inspiration for the name, from a book by Arthur Eddington:
"In ancient days two aviators procured to themselves wings. Daedalus flew safely through the middle air and was duly honoured on his landing. Icarus soared upwards to the sun till the wax melted which bound his wings and his flight ended in fiasco. In weighing their achievements, there is something to be said for Icarus. The classical authorities tell us that he was only “doing a stunt”, but I prefer to think of him as the man who brought to light a serious constructional defect in the flying-machines of his day. So, too, in Science. Cautious Daedalus will apply his theories where he feels confident they will safely go; but by his excess of caution their hidden weaknesses remain undiscovered. Icarus will strain his theories to the breaking-point till the weak joints gape. For the mere adventure? Perhaps partly; this is human nature. But if he is destined not yet to reach the sun and solve finally the riddle of its constitution, we may at least hope to learn from his journey some hints to build a better machine."
Eddington seems to have forgotten that in the story Daedelus actually knew what the "serious constructional defect" was and specifically warned his son about it. Too often engineers are ignored because somebody wants to get their rocks off (e.g. NASA management vs NASA engineers just before the Challenger disaster.)
Didn't you just describe why agile came about? Because we, as software professionals, realize that specifications are not set in stone and the system should be easy to adapt and modify for future requirements.
So I'd say that is the bigger question we are facing. If the top 25% have everything while the bottom 75% starve society will collapse, crime will be rampant as they try to survive, yet at the same time we simply don't need the labor of more and more people on this planet. What do we do with these jobless masses? Blowing more bubbles doesn't change it, neither does pushing the "education!" meme that politicians keep harping about while ignoring that more and more that graduate from all these colleges and trade schools have nothing to show but debt they can't pay, because in the end machines will do it better.
Especially if they have easy access to weaponry, like they do in the US of A.
if you have a problem, you fix it. its as simple as that. when you go into calculations of 'worth' as if your biosphere was a business venture, the 'not worth' you have 'not saved' comes bites you in the ass due to chain reactions in biosphere.
i see that as an ill that capitalist mindset brought to our civilization - we are seeing everything from a window of 'cost/benefit'. not surprisingly, just like how economies come crashing down due to extreme adherence to these cost/benefit perspectives.there are too many variables that even the most foresighted analyst, the most complex computer forecasting cannot see and prepare for. ecosystems are no different - they are objects that are formed by inherently interrelated infinite number of elements.
there are areas in life where you should leave nothing to chance. the ecosystem you live in, is one of them.
A capitalist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
If there's one thing Icarus didn't do, it was "[build] on the knowledge of Daedalus!"
As I remember the story, Iccarus did build on the knowledge of Daedalus (who built his wings), and flew higher than Daedalus.
...after his father warned him not to because the sun would melt the wax holding the wings together. So I'm not sure he "built" on his father's knowledge, merely confirmed it in a spectacular way! As a father myself, I can sympathise...
And yet, one of my toy projects in grad school generated over a billion data points that needed analysis. The only database server I had access to choked on the first analysis pass (of about a dozen). It took about three months of processing to get to a point that could even be considered acceptable. Since then, on a whim, I've redone the program using Hadoop and HBase. A MapReduce job completed the analysis, on worse hardware, in less than a day. A major contributing factor was the lack of a rigid structure in HBase, which greatly improved the organization of data.
NoSQL solutions are certainly not the best tool for every job, but neither are normal relational databases. In my opinion, it's worthwhile to be familiar with both, and to be able to choose the right one for every task.
Or you could have just used an analytic database. There are any number of them available these days including commercial offerings like Vertica, ParAccel, VectorWise, and Greenplum, not to mention open source projects such as MonetDB and C-Store.
Hell, the darn things aren't even that hard to write - I built a commercial grade one with two other guys in about 18 months. It can query 1 billion rows in seconds and comes built into my company's data visualisation product Tableau Desktop. Free trials, and student rates. Plus, it talks to all the other databases I mentioned (well, maybe not the OSS ones, but if they have ODBC drivers, you should be able to get it hooked up).
Now, for data shaping, some of your tools are pretty useful. But for raw speed for computation and aggregation, I'd go with a tool designed for processing numbers, not text.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA uses a lot of tax money
NASA budget: $19 billion
US military budget: $685 billion (including $79 billion for R&D alone)
If you do a pie chart of the federal budget, NASA barely even gets a sliver.
That's one of the oddities I've seen among those who generally oppose government spending: They tend to have a wildly distorted view of where most of the federal spending actually goes. The big items that account for almost all of it are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the military, and interest on previously accumulated debt, so if you're really trying to reduce the size of government, you have to do something about those.
They also don't seem to understand the funding models. For example, Social Security is (currently) fully funded - in fact, revenues exceed expenses. Fixing it longer term just requires removing the income cap (Disclaimer: My personal income is over the cap). Medicare and Medicaid have dedicated funding, but are currently underfunded (by a fair amount if my reading of the current numbers is correct). Military spending and interest come out of the general fund.
Leaving SS out of the picture, the Wikipedia numbers show that even if Medicare/Medicaid was eliminated(despite their dedicated funding), spending would still exceed revenue by about $700B. Dropping all discretionary spending would still leave about 100B to find, while reducing the federal government to just the military and its support systems. From a historical perspective, this is probably not a desirable state of affairs. So both cuts in military spending and revenue increases are needed for a non-pathological society.
<rant>Why the hell do people insist on using pie charts to compare numbers? The human visual system is really bad at comparing angles. Bar charts are a much better choice.</rant>
I imagine mind uploading would have to be by destructive readout. Destroy the brain in order to extract the information from it. Getting the kind of resolution required for scanning is going to take a nanotech revolution too - if you just sliced it up and used conventional microscopes, it would be time-prohibative.
See Alastair Reynolds, Chasm City, Monument to the Eighty.
I have heard it claimed that part of the reason for the pogroms against Jews during the plague was that Jews would kill rats (because they were unclean) and this led to lower plague rates in Jewish communities - which of course led to accusations that they were responsible (as they say, no good deed goes unpunished). Not that a reason was needed given the attitudes of the time...
I was reminded of this because of the large green area in central Poland. IIRC there were many Jewish communities in that part of the world and I wondered if it could have kept the infection rate down.
Link on the subject. Maybe not very scholarly, but quite informative.
Also, the pest affected different areas quite differently. See this map (green: no or minor occurrences of the Black Death). As far as I can see, the areas unaffected by the pest were not special in any way (not specially poor or uninhabited or anything) as far as my - admittedly small - knowledge goes.
Maybe someone there got the "hygiene" or "quarantaine" thing correctly, though.
Nice map - thanks.
I have heard it claimed that part of the reason for the pogroms against Jews during the plague was that Jews would kill rats (because they were unclean) and this led to lower plague rates in Jewish communities - which of course led to accusations that they were responsible (as they say, no good deed goes unpunished). Not that a reason was needed given the attitudes of the time...
I was reminded of this because of the large green area in central Poland. IIRC there were many Jewish communities in that part of the world and I wondered if it could have kept the infection rate down.
The numbers in the Reuter's article show the speed of light for neutrinos is 1 part in 40,000 times faster than the speed of light for normal matter.
I don't think this involves causality violations just yet. All our speed of light experiments to date involve measuring particles involving the electromagnetic force (protons, electrons, photons). Even if confirmed, it could be that there's some measurement error in the EM-derived speed of light, which the neutrino is immune to. In which case, it's not useful for time travel. It simply means our measurement of c was off by a smidge.
And given the small size of the result, if FTL neutrino communication is proved true, I expect the only real-world application would be financial companies trying to squeeze a few more nanoseconds off NYC-London communications.
I had exactly the same thought. Maybe the "speed of light" is actually "the speed of neutrinos" - or even "the speed of non-interacting dark matter"?
Two jokes about women named "Amber" and none about the one true world?
Of course there are dinosaur feathers in Amber - our dinosaurs are just shadows of them.
This place is really going to the dogs!
War
Right, because there is no better response to the problems of scarcity than systematically dedicating your entire productive capacity to creating more scarcity...
Sadly, just because such a solution exists does not mean it will be applied.
Using bacteria (or any other process) to rearrange the chemical bonds of a substance doesn't come free. It consumes energy.
You mean like photosynthesis?
...which consumes energy from the sun.
Free will is just as incompatible with a random universe as it is with a deterministic universe. Random events are statistically deterministic. We know that quantum events are truly random, and not affected by hidden variables (such as "will"), due to Bell's theorem. Free will is simply incompatible with what we know about physics.
That's not what Bell's theorem says. It say that quantum physics must necessarily violate either the principle of locality or counterfactual definiteness. Free will could violate locality if it was the result of agents external to the universe. Conversely, free will could violate counterfactual definiteness if the universe was being made up as we go along. The latter seems not only compatible with free will, but a necessary consequence of it.
It has shown that the current explanations using sulfates and ammonia for nucleation can be boosted by a factor of ten pending on the presence of cosmic radiation. They also say that further research will be required to see what effect cosmic rays have on the nucleation properties of other compounds to get the full picture.
Not.
Thus the nucleation change as a result of real world GCR modulation is going to be much smaller than seen in these experiments, and much less important than the amount of pollutants.
In summary, this is a great example of doing science and making progress, even if it isn’t what they first thought they’d find.
For all intensive purposes
Sigh. Did you mean "For all intents and purposes"?
If there was no fall, there was no need for redemption. If there was no need for redemption, there was no need for a savior. And without a savior, there is no Christianity.
Unless the fall happens to everyone and the story is (wait for it) allegorical!
It's not just Roman Catholics and it is not recent. John Calvin said much the same thing during the Protestant Reformation, as did St. Augustine of Hippo around 400 AD. Augustine was explicitly worried that Christians who took Genesis literally were opening the new faith up to ridicule by pagans with any education. Looks like he was right.
Either that or get public transport.
Are you sure you are a Libertarian?
In fact Churchill was one of the strongest proponents of a united Europe, which is ironic because the far-right BNP now uses his image to peddle their hateful messages.
Quite true. On the eve of the French defeat, he even offered to make France part of the commonwealth with full citizenship (cite: "Their Finest Hour")
Why won't people listen to this guy? It's like everyone fell asleep or left after the first half of the movie or something.
For the same reason people doesn't listen to greenpeace.
While he says a lot of things that are true the hit/miss ratio is too bad for anyone to be able to take anything he says at face value.
It's not enough to say a lot of things that are true. If you wan't people to start listening to you you will also have to stop telling things that aren't.
Such as? From a review by actual climatologists:
Which is not to say that they agree completely with everything in the book and film:
but to cast his "hit/miss ratio" as "bad" seems like unsubstantiated rhetoric to me.
When that infant formula costs more maybe those little babies will get a little less of it - and what is the health impact of that?
Um, breast feeding?
This is the inspiration for the name, from a book by Arthur Eddington:
"In ancient days two aviators procured to themselves wings. Daedalus flew safely through the middle air and was duly honoured on his landing. Icarus soared upwards to the sun till the wax melted which bound his wings and his flight ended in fiasco. In weighing their achievements, there is something to be said for Icarus. The classical authorities tell us that he was only “doing a stunt”, but I prefer to think of him as the man who brought to light a serious constructional defect in the flying-machines of his day. So, too, in Science. Cautious Daedalus will apply his theories where he feels confident they will safely go; but by his excess of caution their hidden weaknesses remain undiscovered. Icarus will strain his theories to the breaking-point till the weak joints gape. For the mere adventure? Perhaps partly; this is human nature. But if he is destined not yet to reach the sun and solve finally the riddle of its constitution, we may at least hope to learn from his journey some hints to build a better machine."
Eddington seems to have forgotten that in the story Daedelus actually knew what the "serious constructional defect" was and specifically warned his son about it. Too often engineers are ignored because somebody wants to get their rocks off (e.g. NASA management vs NASA engineers just before the Challenger disaster.)
Didn't you just describe why agile came about? Because we, as software professionals, realize that specifications are not set in stone and the system should be easy to adapt and modify for future requirements.
There is a big difference between "set in stone" and "unconstrained". Put another way, "XP is aimed at customers who don't know what they want."
So I'd say that is the bigger question we are facing. If the top 25% have everything while the bottom 75% starve society will collapse, crime will be rampant as they try to survive, yet at the same time we simply don't need the labor of more and more people on this planet. What do we do with these jobless masses? Blowing more bubbles doesn't change it, neither does pushing the "education!" meme that politicians keep harping about while ignoring that more and more that graduate from all these colleges and trade schools have nothing to show but debt they can't pay, because in the end machines will do it better.
Especially if they have easy access to weaponry, like they do in the US of A.
Now that is what I thought... "Uhg asshole-bitch, we show him!"
In that case, why bury him at all?
its WRONG to say it.
if you have a problem, you fix it. its as simple as that. when you go into calculations of 'worth' as if your biosphere was a business venture, the 'not worth' you have 'not saved' comes bites you in the ass due to chain reactions in biosphere.
i see that as an ill that capitalist mindset brought to our civilization - we are seeing everything from a window of 'cost/benefit'. not surprisingly, just like how economies come crashing down due to extreme adherence to these cost/benefit perspectives.there are too many variables that even the most foresighted analyst, the most complex computer forecasting cannot see and prepare for. ecosystems are no different - they are objects that are formed by inherently interrelated infinite number of elements.
there are areas in life where you should leave nothing to chance. the ecosystem you live in, is one of them.
A capitalist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
If there's one thing Icarus didn't do, it was "[build] on the knowledge of Daedalus!"
As I remember the story, Iccarus did build on the knowledge of Daedalus (who built his wings), and flew higher than Daedalus.
...after his father warned him not to because the sun would melt the wax holding the wings together. So I'm not sure he "built" on his father's knowledge, merely confirmed it in a spectacular way! As a father myself, I can sympathise...
Q: How do you tell a mathematician, a physicist and an engineer apart with one question?
A: Ask them "Are all the odd numbers above 2 prime?"
Mathematician: Well, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime, so NO.
Physicist: Well, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime, but that is just experimental error.
Engineer: Well, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime...
(My father was an engineer, my brother is a physicist and I was a mathematician at one point, so this turned into a family joke!)
And yet, one of my toy projects in grad school generated over a billion data points that needed analysis. The only database server I had access to choked on the first analysis pass (of about a dozen). It took about three months of processing to get to a point that could even be considered acceptable. Since then, on a whim, I've redone the program using Hadoop and HBase. A MapReduce job completed the analysis, on worse hardware, in less than a day. A major contributing factor was the lack of a rigid structure in HBase, which greatly improved the organization of data.
NoSQL solutions are certainly not the best tool for every job, but neither are normal relational databases. In my opinion, it's worthwhile to be familiar with both, and to be able to choose the right one for every task.
Or you could have just used an analytic database. There are any number of them available these days including commercial offerings like Vertica, ParAccel, VectorWise, and Greenplum, not to mention open source projects such as MonetDB and C-Store.
Hell, the darn things aren't even that hard to write - I built a commercial grade one with two other guys in about 18 months. It can query 1 billion rows in seconds and comes built into my company's data visualisation product Tableau Desktop. Free trials, and student rates. Plus, it talks to all the other databases I mentioned (well, maybe not the OSS ones, but if they have ODBC drivers, you should be able to get it hooked up).
Now, for data shaping, some of your tools are pretty useful. But for raw speed for computation and aggregation, I'd go with a tool designed for processing numbers, not text.