Danger Will Robinson, Danger! This article doesn't actually provide what its title claims. Clickbait, pure and unadulterated. Plus, it's not even that informative. All stuff we see in Slashdot comments any time anyone mentions FTL travel.
Forget it. You're picking at tiny details to the exclusion of my actual point.
NO DATA.
No numbers, no figures, no statistics, nothing. Anecdote. That's all. You have no actual argument, merely a conjecture.
Look, I'm not interested in continuing this. You don't want to address my actual point in the least, and I've restated it three times. I'm done. Enjoy your evening.
I'll spell it out for you. You said that academic labs performing undirected research will show up and eat the lunch of labs performing directed research. I posted a quote which gave one example of a situation where undirected research was beaten to the punch by directed research.
How hard is that to comprehend? Further, I stated that we could keep coming up with these anecdotes all day long. I'm sure you can find situations in which the opposite happened.
My point is this: you supplied no data, therefore your argument is anecdotal at best.
Another meeting, some years later, had more interesting results. In June 1966, a symposium on fluorine chemistry was held at Ann Arbor and one of the papers, by Professor Neil Bartlett of the University of British Columbia, was to be on the discovery and properties of ONF3. Bartlett, a virtuoso of fluorine chemistry, the discoverer of OIF5 and of the xenon fluorides, had, of course, never heard of Rocketdyne's and Allied's classified research. But Bill Fox, seeing an advance program, hurriedly had his report on the compound declassified, and presented it immediately after Bartlett's, describing several methods of synthesis, and just about every interesting property of the compound. Bill did his best not to make Bartlett look foolish, and Bartlett grinned and shrugged it off—"well, back to the old vacuum rack" — but the incident is something that should be noted by the ivory tower types who are convinced of the intellectual (and moral) superiority of "pure" undirected research to the applied and directed sort.
I think you might need data to support your assertion, since I'm sure we can play anecdote tag all day long. For the record, I have no opinion on the subject, since I don't happen to have data showing whether directed or undirected research is more fruitful.
Science does not deal in truth, only in models. A scientist can use the word "truth" casually and understand that it refers to a prediction made by a model (a human construct to help us approximate/cope with the universe). A layperson sees the word "truth" and imagines some inviolate deity handing down an edict.
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
James Dewar (later Sir James, and the inventor of the Dewar flask and hence of the thermos botde), of the Royal Institute in London, in 1897 liquefied fluorine, which had been isolated by Moisson only eleven years before, and reported that the density of the liquid was 1.108. This wildly (and inexplicably) erroneous value (the actual density is 1.50) was duly embalmed in the literature, and remained there, unquestioned, for almost sixty years, to the confusion of practically everybody.
Bill Doyle, at North American, had also fired a small fluorine motor in 1947, but in spite of these successes, the work wasn't immediately followed up. The performance was good, but the density of liquid fluorine (believed to be 1.108 at the boiling point) was well below that of oxygen, and the military (JPL was working for the Army at that time) didn't want any part of it.
This situation was soon to change. Some of the people at Aerojet simply didn't believe Dewar's 54-year-old figure on the density of liquid fluorine, and Scott Kilner of that organization set out to measure it himself. (The Office of Naval Research put up the money.) The experimental difficulties were formidable, but he kept at it, and in July, 1951, established that the density of liquid fluorine at the boiling point was not 1.108, but rather a little more than 1.54. There was something of a sensation in the propellant community, and several agencies set out to confirm his results. Kilner was right, and the position of fluorine had to be re-examined. (ONR, a paragon among sponsors, and the most sophisticated —by a margin of several parsecs — funding agency in the business, let Kilner publish his results in the open literature in 1952, but a lot of texts and references still list the old figure. And many engineers, unfortunately, tend to believe anything that is in print.)
For years people had noted that a standing drum of acid slowly built up pressure, and had to be vented periodically. But they assumed that this pressure was a by-product of drum corrosion, and didn't think much about it. But then, around the beginning of 1950, they began to get suspicious. They put WFNA in glass containers and in the dark (to prevent any photochemical reaction from complicating the results) and found, to their dismay, that the pressure buildup was even faster than in an aluminum drum. Nitric acid, or WFNA at least, was inherently unstable, and would decompose spontaneously, all by itself. This was a revolting situation.
All of this goes to show that even well-respected scientists and engineers are not immune to bad science.
Yep. I've come to realize that when you say, "camping", most people immediately think of an RV stuffed with every gadget imaginable cranked up to 11.
Screw that. I like my hammock, tarp, and wool blankets. It's not for everyone, though. If you don't actually like being outside, then not much is going to change that. RVs are just a way for people to claim that they're "camping" and have a few beers in a different pub than usual.
You confuse mass and matter. You should read the wiki article for details.
The law of conservation of mass, or principle of mass conservation, states that for any system closed to all transfers of matter and energy (both of which have mass), the mass of the system must remain constant over time, as system mass cannot change quantity if it is not added or removed. Hence, the quantity of mass is "conserved" over time. The law implies that mass can neither be created nor destroyed, although it may be rearranged in space, or the entities associated with it may be changed in form, as for example when light or physical work is transformed into particles that contribute the same mass to the system as the light or work had contributed. The law implies (requires) that during any chemical reaction, nuclear reaction, or radioactive decay in an isolated system, the total mass of the reactants or starting materials must be equal to the mass of the products.
The closely related concept of matter conservation was found to hold good in chemistry to such high approximation that it failed only for the high energies treated by the later refinements of relativity theory, but otherwise remains useful and sufficiently accurate for most chemical calculations, even in modern practice.
In special relativity, mass is not converted to energy, since mass and energy cannot be destroyed, and energy in all of its forms always retains its equivalent amount of mass throughout any transformation to a different type of energy within a system (or translocation into or out of a system). Certain types of matter (a different concept) may be created or destroyed, but in all of these processes, the energy and mass associated with such matter remains unchanged in quantity (although type of energy associated with the matter may change form).
In general relativity, mass (and energy) conservation in expanding volumes of space is a complex concept, subject to different definitions, and neither mass nor energy is as strictly and simply conserved as is the case in special relativity and in Minkowski space. For a discussion, see mass in general relativity.
My anecdotal experience is that mosquitoes don't seem to "like me", but that's because I absolutely hate flying insects and am aggressive about dealing with any that come near me. I rarely get bitten.
I have friends who complain of being eaten by mosquitoes in the exact same conditions, but they're not busy swatting them off when they bite.
Interestingly enough, it's difficult to find quantitative information ranking mosquito predators. I tried, and all I came up with was a literature review on British mosquito predation, which primarily listed lots of things known to eat mosquitoes if placed in a tank with only mosquitoes. That paper also made the comment that it's difficult to find information. The phrase "poorly understood" is frequently found in the papers I did come across.
Pull up to the meter, plug it in. Or even the parking lot of today, with a credit card payment kiosk. Lay the cables, meter it, and charge your card automatically.
This is already done at a local grocery store. Friend of mine drives an EV. It uses an app on his phone and automatically charges his card. It also lets you know how much time is remaining to finish charging, kW used, etc..
A sufficiently massive or energetic object works just fine as an inertial dampener. That mosquito flying back and forth? Critically damped by the nearest hardcover book.
Slashdot Mirror
They'll come up with some sort of emergency measure or other. Not a snowflake's chance in Hell this will die.
I am not saying his name doing so is sort of like saying "Beetlejuice" 3 times
I suggest you say Betelgeuse instead. It's safer that way.
Basically, the internet is trolls all the way down.
Shazbot! You caught me!
Danger Will Robinson, Danger! This article doesn't actually provide what its title claims. Clickbait, pure and unadulterated. Plus, it's not even that informative. All stuff we see in Slashdot comments any time anyone mentions FTL travel.
Forget it. You're picking at tiny details to the exclusion of my actual point.
NO DATA.
No numbers, no figures, no statistics, nothing. Anecdote. That's all. You have no actual argument, merely a conjecture.
Look, I'm not interested in continuing this. You don't want to address my actual point in the least, and I've restated it three times. I'm done. Enjoy your evening.
I'll spell it out for you. You said that academic labs performing undirected research will show up and eat the lunch of labs performing directed research. I posted a quote which gave one example of a situation where undirected research was beaten to the punch by directed research.
How hard is that to comprehend? Further, I stated that we could keep coming up with these anecdotes all day long. I'm sure you can find situations in which the opposite happened.
My point is this: you supplied no data, therefore your argument is anecdotal at best.
Really, how complicated is that concept?
Lay off dude. He's having a reasonable discussion.
The local parking garage also has EV charging spots. You're on a roll!
You know what's said about genius: 1% inspiration, 99% staying up way too late reading Slashdot.
Wish I had mod points, but I'll settle for burning karma. +1, Frickin' Hilarious.
From Ignition! by John Clark:
Another meeting, some years later, had more interesting results. In June 1966, a symposium on fluorine chemistry was held at Ann Arbor and one of the papers, by Professor Neil Bartlett of the University of British Columbia, was to be on the discovery and properties of ONF3. Bartlett, a virtuoso of fluorine chemistry, the discoverer of OIF5 and of the xenon fluorides, had, of course, never heard of Rocketdyne's and Allied's classified research. But Bill Fox, seeing an advance program, hurriedly had his report on the compound declassified, and presented it immediately after Bartlett's, describing several methods of synthesis, and just about every interesting property of the compound. Bill did his best not to make Bartlett look foolish, and Bartlett grinned and shrugged it off—"well, back to the old vacuum rack" — but the incident is something that should be noted by the ivory tower types who are convinced of the intellectual (and moral) superiority of "pure" undirected research to the applied and directed sort.
I think you might need data to support your assertion, since I'm sure we can play anecdote tag all day long. For the record, I have no opinion on the subject, since I don't happen to have data showing whether directed or undirected research is more fruitful.
Science does not deal in truth, only in models. A scientist can use the word "truth" casually and understand that it refers to a prediction made by a model (a human construct to help us approximate/cope with the universe). A layperson sees the word "truth" and imagines some inviolate deity handing down an edict.
Feynman's take:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Two more examples from Ignition! by John Clark.
James Dewar (later Sir James, and the inventor of the Dewar flask and hence of the thermos botde), of the Royal Institute in London, in 1897 liquefied fluorine, which had been isolated by Moisson only eleven years before, and reported that the density of the liquid was 1.108. This wildly (and inexplicably) erroneous value (the actual density is 1.50) was duly embalmed in the literature, and remained there, unquestioned, for almost sixty years, to the confusion of practically everybody.
Bill Doyle, at North American, had also fired a small fluorine motor in 1947, but in spite of these successes, the work wasn't immediately followed up. The performance was good, but the density of liquid fluorine (believed to be 1.108 at the boiling point) was well below that of oxygen, and the military (JPL was working for the Army at that time) didn't want any part of it.
This situation was soon to change. Some of the people at Aerojet simply didn't believe Dewar's 54-year-old figure on the density of liquid fluorine, and Scott Kilner of that organization set out to measure it himself. (The Office of Naval Research put up the money.) The experimental difficulties were formidable, but he kept at it, and in July, 1951, established that the density of liquid fluorine at the boiling point was not 1.108, but rather a little more than 1.54. There was something of a sensation in the propellant community, and several agencies set out to confirm his results. Kilner was right, and the position of fluorine had to be re-examined. (ONR, a paragon among sponsors, and the most sophisticated —by a margin of several parsecs — funding agency in the business, let Kilner publish his results in the open literature in 1952, but a lot of texts and references still list the old figure. And many engineers, unfortunately, tend to believe anything that is in print.)
For years people had noted that a standing drum of acid slowly built up pressure, and had to be vented periodically. But they assumed that this pressure was a by-product of drum corrosion, and didn't think much about it. But then, around the beginning of 1950, they began to get suspicious. They put WFNA in glass containers and in the dark (to prevent any photochemical reaction from complicating the results) and found, to their dismay, that the pressure buildup was even faster than in an aluminum drum. Nitric acid, or WFNA at least, was inherently unstable, and would decompose spontaneously, all by itself. This was a revolting situation.
All of this goes to show that even well-respected scientists and engineers are not immune to bad science.
Yep. I've come to realize that when you say, "camping", most people immediately think of an RV stuffed with every gadget imaginable cranked up to 11.
Screw that. I like my hammock, tarp, and wool blankets. It's not for everyone, though. If you don't actually like being outside, then not much is going to change that. RVs are just a way for people to claim that they're "camping" and have a few beers in a different pub than usual.
Pretty sure that cats still need servants too.
No.
The Time Cube would like to have a word with you.
You confuse mass and matter. You should read the wiki article for details.
The law of conservation of mass, or principle of mass conservation, states that for any system closed to all transfers of matter and energy (both of which have mass), the mass of the system must remain constant over time, as system mass cannot change quantity if it is not added or removed. Hence, the quantity of mass is "conserved" over time. The law implies that mass can neither be created nor destroyed, although it may be rearranged in space, or the entities associated with it may be changed in form, as for example when light or physical work is transformed into particles that contribute the same mass to the system as the light or work had contributed. The law implies (requires) that during any chemical reaction, nuclear reaction, or radioactive decay in an isolated system, the total mass of the reactants or starting materials must be equal to the mass of the products.
The closely related concept of matter conservation was found to hold good in chemistry to such high approximation that it failed only for the high energies treated by the later refinements of relativity theory, but otherwise remains useful and sufficiently accurate for most chemical calculations, even in modern practice.
In special relativity, mass is not converted to energy, since mass and energy cannot be destroyed, and energy in all of its forms always retains its equivalent amount of mass throughout any transformation to a different type of energy within a system (or translocation into or out of a system). Certain types of matter (a different concept) may be created or destroyed, but in all of these processes, the energy and mass associated with such matter remains unchanged in quantity (although type of energy associated with the matter may change form).
In general relativity, mass (and energy) conservation in expanding volumes of space is a complex concept, subject to different definitions, and neither mass nor energy is as strictly and simply conserved as is the case in special relativity and in Minkowski space. For a discussion, see mass in general relativity.
My anecdotal experience is that mosquitoes don't seem to "like me", but that's because I absolutely hate flying insects and am aggressive about dealing with any that come near me. I rarely get bitten.
I have friends who complain of being eaten by mosquitoes in the exact same conditions, but they're not busy swatting them off when they bite.
Interestingly enough, it's difficult to find quantitative information ranking mosquito predators. I tried, and all I came up with was a literature review on British mosquito predation, which primarily listed lots of things known to eat mosquitoes if placed in a tank with only mosquitoes. That paper also made the comment that it's difficult to find information. The phrase "poorly understood" is frequently found in the papers I did come across.
Information can be destroyed. Mass and energy must be conserved, but entropic processes destroy information.
Called Wanda.
Pull up to the meter, plug it in. Or even the parking lot of today, with a credit card payment kiosk. Lay the cables, meter it, and charge your card automatically.
This is already done at a local grocery store. Friend of mine drives an EV. It uses an app on his phone and automatically charges his card. It also lets you know how much time is remaining to finish charging, kW used, etc..
A sufficiently massive or energetic object works just fine as an inertial dampener. That mosquito flying back and forth? Critically damped by the nearest hardcover book.
Cashew see that other people almond the world have different preferences? Butternut of this, I'm not pistachio. Just don't be such a beech.
Thanks, I'm here all week! Try the veal, it's delicious.