We heard this joke the morning after the disaster.
What I would have loved to have seen is collection of data of how sick jokes spread after a disaster. Given this was pre-internet, the sick Challenger jokes spread extremely quickly, and it would be interesting to see how many origins they had and how they spread out from there. I suspect most of the Challenger jokes weren't thought up by one person and spread, but thought up independently by perhaps hundreds of different people and spread out from there.
I was TA-ing a calculus class at the time, and the prof had added an extra credit question to the final "For 5 points, tell a joke, any joke" just to get us through the 5 hours grading marathon without killing each other. We got a bunch of jokes, but sadly the only one that stuck was
Q: What do NASA and Van Halen have in common? A: They are both "Hot for Teacher".
At the time, one of my friends with Wall Street connections opined that financiers were the source of a lot of these jokes (this was just when email was taking off). It's good to know that the callousness of the financial industry has only improved with time...
The second reason is that the deviation from rationality may often be viewed as a stochastic variable with zero mean. Ignoring it affects individual cases, but not the overall conclusions.
What is interesting about current research is that this assumption appears to not be true a lot of the time.
My wife loves chocolate as well, but hates to eat it because she likes being skinny more than she likes eating chocolate (and if you ask any woman, the two are mutually exclusive).
Right: You're the one perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes, but I'm the guy who knows nothing about women...
...and you are the one who missed that the GP was making a statement of fact about one particular woman who they know well, not making a stereotypical generalisation. But since you bring it up, my wife has also said this to me pretty much verbatim...
I am not a nuclear physicist, so I really don't know the answer to this. Hasn't a controlled meltdown been done in a lab experiment before though? If so, what is different with this one in comparison to past experiments?
Good question, and the answer is: Yes, many times in multiple countries. One of the other posts in this thread is by a guy who was in charge of the data processing for one of them.
The paradigm where engineers attempt to make sure it never happens has its limits. Looking at what happens during the failure will allow engineers to develop meaningful "defense in depth" measures.
That was understood decades ago, and has been SOP for that long in other safety critical applications like aircraft. The fact that it wasn't done before this is extreme negligence.
As any number of posters have pointed out, this kind of testing has been done many times before in multiple countries. This is just the first time that Japan has conducted such experiments.
When thinking about human abilities way back when it's useful to remember St. Ambrose.
Living around 400AD, St Ambrose is reported to be the first human to read without moving his lips.
Yes, before him, no one thought to read a book without saying the words aloud...
I don't know about the first. Plutarch records that Julius Caesar had the same skill. (The context is pretty funny too - Caesar was reading a mash note from Cato's sister during a Senate meeting, but Cato thought it was an incriminating letter from an enemy of the state and demanded to read it, much to Cato's embarrassment. The fact that Cato threw it back at him, calling him a drunkard, is also funny because Cato was himself a notorious drunk whose Stoic principles didn't allow him to even buy good wine...)
Even if it gets wired somehow, the visual cortex would has to adapt to the new signal... something that doesn't normally happen in adults. Oliver Sacks wrote about one patient that had some visual impairment fixed (cataract, IIRC) after being effectively blind for 40 years. After the surgery he was overwhelmed by the unexpected (to the brain) flow of visual information, which he couldn't make sense of, and regretted the decision to have his eyes fixed.
There is a difference between giving vision to someone who never had it and changing the input to a functioning visual cortex. There was some guy who did an experiment where he made "inverting glasses" that turned his visual field upside-down and it only took him a few days to get used to it. So I expect that this technique could be used effectively for folks who have damaged retinas (like the poor sod above who lost a spot of his vision due to errant lasers).
(And for another interesting story along these lines, have a look at this two-step healing from Mark's Gospel. First Jesus healed the man's eyes, but then he had to heal his head to make it work!)
Yet Joseph Akinyede, director of the African Regional Centre for Space Science and Technology Education in Nigeria, an education centre affiliated with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, says that the application of space science technology and research to “basic necessities” of life – health, education, energy, food security, environmental management – is critical for the development of the continent.
Yea, send more UN money. I'm confident that the leaders of those countries will spend it wisely.
You mean give it all to the plutocrats? After all, that is the American way!
While scientifically interesting, I can imagine a dystopian future where employers mandate their works to wear special "brain helmets" so that they are fully focused on the task at hand...
Sounds like one of the creepiest books I have ever read: Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky.
In some ways, and in some places, America is little better than the Taliban ever was.
Yep, because the Supreme Court will stone you to death if you try to teach the truth rather than creationism.
You know, my initial reaction to this was "Yeah, probably." It actually took me a moment to realise that things are not quite that bad - at least not yet.
Nice to see another big science project providing results. The data from all these recent big experiments should be quite helpful in winnowing out some theories. It looks some supersymmetry theories appear inconsistent with the data being seen.
Can you explain what the actual, tangible benefits of throwing hundreds of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars at the US Military would have been? Other than a demand from The Military Industrial Complex for even more money a few years later to build Even Bigger Weapons?
FTFY... Note the change in the orders of magnitude.
Discrediting scientists (and by extension science) is going to be paying dividends for a long time. I wonder how quickly it'll accelerate the USA's loss of leadership in the sciences.
Here is one of the "dividends". Exxon and their shills have been casting scientists as venal, incompetent fools for about two decades now, then suddenly they are alarmed that they can't hire any competent scientists...
I wouldn't be surprised if Russia is wetting themselves as more and more countries are abandoning nuclear power and switching to natural gas, which Russia has a monopoly over in Asia.
Since Russia also has a thriving nuclear export industry, its kind of a win-win scenario for them...
I can't speak for the life sciences and social sciences, but as a physicist, I reproduce results all the time. You don't usually have follow-up papers that only reproduce results because pretty much *any* follow-up paper will have to do this as a minimum.
If a paper is interesting (relevant), others will want to do research that builds off of and extends it. The first step in this is usually to... reproduce the original results. This is necessarily not because you are skeptical of them, but so you can make sure you understand what they did, and that you are capable of performing the same experiment/calculation. In fact, I can't imagine how you could proceed without doing so. This is why we don't worry about peer review being only cursory, because if the results are interesting (ie, worth reproducing), they will get reproduced many times in due course as part of subsequent research.
I wonder if intellectual property might cause friction here in some disciplines? If the work in the paper is patented, why would anyone try to reproduce it if they can't build on it? That might be more of a problem for life sciences these days.
Slashdot Mirror
So what does it say about you that you find such things attractive?
We heard this joke the morning after the disaster.
What I would have loved to have seen is collection of data of how sick jokes spread after a disaster. Given this was pre-internet, the sick Challenger jokes spread extremely quickly, and it would be interesting to see how many origins they had and how they spread out from there. I suspect most of the Challenger jokes weren't thought up by one person and spread, but thought up independently by perhaps hundreds of different people and spread out from there.
I was TA-ing a calculus class at the time, and the prof had added an extra credit question to the final "For 5 points, tell a joke, any joke" just to get us through the 5 hours grading marathon without killing each other. We got a bunch of jokes, but sadly the only one that stuck was
Q: What do NASA and Van Halen have in common?
A: They are both "Hot for Teacher".
At the time, one of my friends with Wall Street connections opined that financiers were the source of a lot of these jokes (this was just when email was taking off). It's good to know that the callousness of the financial industry has only improved with time...
The second reason is that the deviation from rationality may often be viewed as a stochastic variable with zero mean. Ignoring it affects individual cases, but not the overall conclusions.
What is interesting about current research is that this assumption appears to not be true a lot of the time.
You obviously know nothing about women.
My wife loves chocolate as well, but hates to eat it because she likes being skinny more than she likes eating chocolate (and if you ask any woman, the two are mutually exclusive).
Right: You're the one perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes, but I'm the guy who knows nothing about women...
...and you are the one who missed that the GP was making a statement of fact about one particular woman who they know well, not making a stereotypical generalisation. But since you bring it up, my wife has also said this to me pretty much verbatim...
Isn't this what the "wearable computing" poll was all about?
I am not a nuclear physicist, so I really don't know the answer to this. Hasn't a controlled meltdown been done in a lab experiment before though? If so, what is different with this one in comparison to past experiments?
Good question, and the answer is: Yes, many times in multiple countries. One of the other posts in this thread is by a guy who was in charge of the data processing for one of them.
Don't they have an open-air experiment going on already? Just take a day trip to Fukushima.
As some other wag pointed out, that one was poorly instrumented...
The paradigm where engineers attempt to make sure it never happens has its limits. Looking at what happens during the failure will allow engineers to develop meaningful "defense in depth" measures.
That was understood decades ago, and has been SOP for that long in other safety critical applications like aircraft. The fact that it wasn't done before this is extreme negligence.
As any number of posters have pointed out, this kind of testing has been done many times before in multiple countries. This is just the first time that Japan has conducted such experiments.
When thinking about human abilities way back when it's useful to remember St. Ambrose.
Living around 400AD, St Ambrose is reported to be the first human to read without moving his lips.
Yes, before him, no one thought to read a book without saying the words aloud...
I don't know about the first. Plutarch records that Julius Caesar had the same skill. (The context is pretty funny too - Caesar was reading a mash note from Cato's sister during a Senate meeting, but Cato thought it was an incriminating letter from an enemy of the state and demanded to read it, much to Cato's embarrassment. The fact that Cato threw it back at him, calling him a drunkard, is also funny because Cato was himself a notorious drunk whose Stoic principles didn't allow him to even buy good wine...)
This is the world we live in, and these are the hands we're given
(A more real Genesis, insofar as it actually exists and isn't a fiction made up to maintain control)
Oh, come on, even Dawkins keeps the KJV around because he loves the poetry and quotes it all the time.
as it turns out, they were viewing it thru an SN7404 and so the image was actually inverted.
Ah, another nerd from the 1970s! I'm getting all sniffly about my Heathkit digital breadboarding um thingo with the LEDs!
You seem to be knowledgeable about history, but I hope you never teach English.
Not to mention cooking...
Even if it gets wired somehow, the visual cortex would has to adapt to the new signal... something that doesn't normally happen in adults. Oliver Sacks wrote about one patient that had some visual impairment fixed (cataract, IIRC) after being effectively blind for 40 years. After the surgery he was overwhelmed by the unexpected (to the brain) flow of visual information, which he couldn't make sense of, and regretted the decision to have his eyes fixed.
There is a difference between giving vision to someone who never had it and changing the input to a functioning visual cortex. There was some guy who did an experiment where he made "inverting glasses" that turned his visual field upside-down and it only took him a few days to get used to it. So I expect that this technique could be used effectively for folks who have damaged retinas (like the poor sod above who lost a spot of his vision due to errant lasers).
(And for another interesting story along these lines, have a look at this two-step healing from Mark's Gospel. First Jesus healed the man's eyes, but then he had to heal his head to make it work!)
They're conflating "cheaper" with "requires not being lazy."
Time is money.
Yet Joseph Akinyede, director of the African Regional Centre for Space Science and Technology Education in Nigeria, an education centre affiliated with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, says that the application of space science technology and research to “basic necessities” of life – health, education, energy, food security, environmental management – is critical for the development of the continent.
Yea, send more UN money. I'm confident that the leaders of those countries will spend it wisely.
You mean give it all to the plutocrats? After all, that is the American way!
Both are important. Believe me, the name matters a lot.
I think you missed the GPs sarcasm. It was rather dry.
While scientifically interesting, I can imagine a dystopian future where employers mandate their works to wear special "brain helmets" so that they are fully focused on the task at hand...
Sounds like one of the creepiest books I have ever read: Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky .
In some ways, and in some places, America is little better than the Taliban ever was.
Yep, because the Supreme Court will stone you to death if you try to teach the truth rather than creationism.
You know, my initial reaction to this was "Yeah, probably." It actually took me a moment to realise that things are not quite that bad - at least not yet.
Nice to see another big science project providing results. The data from all these recent big experiments should be quite helpful in winnowing out some theories. It looks some supersymmetry theories appear inconsistent with the data being seen.
Don't worry, there are plenty more...
I think TFS meant "litre"...
Can you explain what the actual, tangible benefits of throwing hundreds of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars at the US Military would have been? Other than a demand from The Military Industrial Complex for even more money a few years later to build Even Bigger Weapons?
FTFY... Note the change in the orders of magnitude.
Discrediting scientists (and by extension science) is going to be paying dividends for a long time. I wonder how quickly it'll accelerate the USA's loss of leadership in the sciences.
Here is one of the "dividends". Exxon and their shills have been casting scientists as venal, incompetent fools for about two decades now, then suddenly they are alarmed that they can't hire any competent scientists...
Well said.
Yep.
I wouldn't be surprised if Russia is wetting themselves as more and more countries are abandoning nuclear power and switching to natural gas, which Russia has a monopoly over in Asia.
Since Russia also has a thriving nuclear export industry, its kind of a win-win scenario for them...
I can't speak for the life sciences and social sciences, but as a physicist, I reproduce results all the time. You don't usually have follow-up papers that only reproduce results because pretty much *any* follow-up paper will have to do this as a minimum.
If a paper is interesting (relevant), others will want to do research that builds off of and extends it. The first step in this is usually to ... reproduce the original results. This is necessarily not because you are skeptical of them, but so you can make sure you understand what they did, and that you are capable of performing the same experiment/calculation. In fact, I can't imagine how you could proceed without doing so. This is why we don't worry about peer review being only cursory, because if the results are interesting (ie, worth reproducing), they will get reproduced many times in due course as part of subsequent research.
I wonder if intellectual property might cause friction here in some disciplines? If the work in the paper is patented, why would anyone try to reproduce it if they can't build on it? That might be more of a problem for life sciences these days.