Well, perhaps it's worth noting that in 1932 only about 33 million people voted in the Presidential election, while in 2004 the figure was closer to 110 million. Takes a bigger organization, with more layers, to reach four times as many people.
More importantly, in the 1930s many people tended to get their voting patterns from local organizations that more or less owned their vote, e.g. unions and "machines." FDR worried quite a bit about keeping the "machine" and union boss vote. Harry Truman was selected as his veep in part to get that vote (Truman was widely understood to be the protege of the Pendergast Kansas City machine). He more or less dumped his much more intellectual (and socialist) former veep Henry Wallace, who was more in tune with him (and arguably the country) on the "issues."
So the amount of actual true personal interaction required -- which might usefully be deployed to change someone's mind, whose vote wasn't already "owned" -- was pretty modest in the 30s. To put it another way, there were a lot fewer voters who had the option to vote as they pleased, and it took a lot less personal effort to reach them. You'd really only need to reach the bosses, the key players, those who could tell fleets of other people how to vote.
Today's elections are far more direct candidate-to-citizen appeals. Machines and union endorsements hardly matter at all; people tend to make up their own minds independently, and directly from what they see and hear on the tube. To reach 110 million voters directly requires, indeed, a massive, tightly controlled communications heirarchy. And, not surprisingly, the average amount of personal time the candidate can give to each of 110 million totally independent voters is measured in microseconds.
You think? But I think your scenario has as much chance of coming true as that of the evangelicals, who think in 800 years Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead.
In fact, I see more than a little psychological similarity between your apocalyptic vision and theirs. Throughout history there's been a good market for predictions of imminent doom. It seems to suit something dark in human nature to so easily believe that our folly and wickedness are about to be severely punished unless we repent right now.
Er...unless you have some brilliant piece of logic up your sleeve that proves that extraterrestrial life is impossible, despite the obvious counter-example of life having evolved spontaneously at least once that we know of, you've got it backward. There clearly is a chance of success.
Unless an alien transmitter is broadcasting at the correct frquency and in the right direction as it passes near or through our solar system, we will not detect or receive its signals.
Oh come on. You think all those fancy-pants science boys forgot about the inverse-square law? That they didn't, for example, sit down with an envelope and work out whether they could at least detect alien I Love Lucy reruns if they were emanating from Alpha Centauri? Geez, friend, that's a little arrogant. To assume everyone except you is a complete blithering idiot about the nature of radio...
The best argument against SETI is Fermi's, to wit, given that the Universe is so large and so old, it is overwhelmingly probable that if life has evolved more than once, the ETs are all way older and more advanced than we are, and therefore if it is possible to communicate over interstellar distances they should be doing it already with us. They're not. Why not? SETI has no good answer for that, and that's their main problem.
What have we discovered? Have we learned anything from the rock samples or pictures?
You're confusing data collection with theorizing. What we've "learned" is gigabytes of photographs, measurements, and so forth, which will, in the coming years, be used to sort through the various theories about the formation and evolution of Mars, and (more indirectly) about the possibility of life on it.
It seems likely there is something missing in your understanding of how science works, because you seem under the impression that we come up with theories and then we go do an experiment that confirms them, and if it does, that's successful science.
Doesn't work that way. What we do is go out and collect oodles of data, pretty much anything we can measure, regardless of whether or not it is relevant to anyone's pet pre-existing speculations. Then we sit down and try to explain all this data, correlate it with other data, et cetera. That's when the theories get formed, and shot down. It is, generally speaking, just a total waste of time to theorize when you have no data. That's religion, or politics, or some such non-scientific endeavor. In science we collect data first, and then we theorize, because only then can our theories acquire the solid backing of empirical fact and become actually useful. You have, in essence, imagined that the theoretical cart comes before the empirical horse.
Can you give me something that justifies all of this money spent?
Of course not. You can only do that yourself, and if you've already looked into what the rovers are doing and concluded it doesn't suit your philosophical goals, then that's that. Why would you even want a meme transplant from someone else that would make you feel differently about the money spent?
But it doesn't matter. The way it works is, we all get to decide for ourselves whether we like government money spent this way -- for whatever reason, e.g. because we think knowing how Mars formed is nifty, because we like seeing photos from the ground from Mars, because of your and NASA's 'inspiring the kids' hooey, or just because it keeps government cash from otherwise being thrown down the rathole of futile social engineering or bureaucrat full-employment programs. Then we tally up the votes. If there are more of us who think the money is well spent, it gets spent, whatever you folks on the losing side think.
As it is, those of us who like rovers poking around on Mars have more votes than those of you who don't. I can easily see why you would want to convince us that it's money wasted, so some of us might change our minds and you might become the new majority. But why would you imagine any of us in the majority would want to waste our time trying to convince you to change your mind? Who cares whether you do or not?
These are all the reasons Microsoft gives for using their product, and I expect if their product wasn't riddled with bugs and annoyances, you'd be a closed MS shop.
I think the bottom line is that Linux is, and always will be, a bit of a hobbyist and/or experimentalist bleeding edge platform. It's like the difference between commercial radio and amateur (ham) radio: the former is all about "getting work done," as you say, and so it's streamlined, standardized, and widespread. The latter is about experimenting with new ways of doing stuff, about cooking it up at home by yourself, about trying out your individual creative thoughts and ideas. So it's idiosyncratic, quirky, customizable, and thinly spread.
Each has its place, of course. Without streamlined standardized production platforms, people trying to get stuff done who don't give a hoot about computers and software would be endlessly frustrated. Without weird individual experimentation, advancement stagnates. (I don't doubt that one of the reasons OS X is so much more useful than, say, OS 9 or, God forbid, that bombing monster Mac OS, is because it was goosed by Linux coming up fast from behind.)
I can only conclude you're a bit on the young side if you believe the cure for being suckered is to become highly educated. Live a few more decades and you'll realize highbrows with PhDs are at least as easy to con as the plain folks who fix your car and take your trash away. Probably easier, actually, since the former's intellectual arrogance will blind them to the possibility that they might be fooled.
Of course, the scams intellectuals fall for -- dot-com stock, "flipping" hot Bay Area real estate with subprime mortgage money, socialism, etc. -- tend to be more complex and dazzling then the ol' ATM switcheroo or Nigerian bank fraud. And, since well-spoken intellectuals control the narrative, we tend to laugh at the fools taken in by penis pills while we "smart" people smugly shop for micronutrients, dehydrated horse piss and extracts of Chinese weeds at the organic food store to ward off cancer. Ha ha indeed.
A susceptibility to being conned is part of your character, not a function of your intelligence or education. It's a question of whether you tend to think you know more than you really do, and are willing to make assumptions not backed up by data.
There's a logic error here, I think. By this logic, we should do nothing except the very highest priority thing in our life, and society should pour all of its resources into the very most important priority. For example, we should all live in a thatched hut, eat weeds and grubs, wear the untanned raw skins of animals (or just go naked), and slave 18 hours a day so all our labor and energy can go into....whatever the single highest social priority is...curing cancer, fighting war 'n' injustice, whatever.
Which is silly. The goal of life is maximize overall satisfaction, not accomplish one single highest goal. It's important to rank your priorities, of course, both as an individual and as a society. But the notion that because A is "more important" than B implies ipso facto that A should get all the resources and B should get none is maximally silly.
Indeed, it's kind of OCD obsessive to always be focussed on pursuing the Top Goal, the kind of thing that when we see people doing it in practise -- giving up everything, including enough sleep and good nutrition, to, say, play World of Warcraft and become the biggest baddest player -- we conclude they need to do some growing up.
Holy cats, can you also tell me who'll win the US Presidential election in 2008? I'd like to get a few bets down on tradesports.com...with my chutzpah and your omniscience, we can't lose!
And that is what passes for proof of a theory? No wonder psychology is the poor stepchild of the true sciences. I mean, I can think of about three other explanations off the top of my head that also explain why the mouse was less aware of danger after being prevented from REM sleep, viz.:
(1) It was bloody tired after being woken up all the time the night before.
(2) REM sleep is just a way for the short-term memory banks to do a dump and clean out all the crap that's accumulated during the day, useless sensory data. Since the poor mouse was prevented from doing the reformat on/dev/swap, it didn't work so well the next day, and the mouse's short-term sensory memory of what was in its environment was degraded. You might as well have given it a few hard knocks on the head.
(3) REM sleep is just a weird, accidental by-product of some necessary biochemical house-cleaning that goes on at night. Some metabolic side-product chemical gets produced, and it jiggles the imagination handle randomly in the brain while we're asleep. The resulting images don't mean a damn thing, any more than the flashes in the eye when you rub your tired eyes. But because the mouse was prevented from doing the biochemical house-cleaning, whatever it is, he didn't function as well the next day. That is, the mouse's poor performance had nothing to do with the prevention of its dreams, but rather with the prevention of whatever else was going on that independently caused the dreams.
None of these theories is disproved by the data you mention, so they're just as good as the psychology professor's theory.
One of the unfortunate ways in which even quite educated people misunderstand empirical science is that they don't fully appreciate that finding an explanation for the data isn't at all the same as finding the explanation. There are usually bazillions of theories that match the data: the trick is designing an experiment that, along with common sense and experience, can rule all but one of them out. This experiment with the mouse certainly doesn't qualify.
Well...let me put it this way. If no chemistry is done by a certain influence, then none of the molecules in your body can change. So how can any permanent or serious harm be done? What's left? Could we be talking about purely temporary things like whether your arm is up or down, or whether you have a certain thought or feeling in your brain or not?
If you want to argue that EM radiation in the RF region might make you have peculiar thoughts....well OK, but this enters the realm of the pretty far-fetched. It just doesn't seem worth worrying about when...
(1) There are way more important, measureable, threats to your well-being, including smoking, obesity, drug-resistant bacteria, radon, trans fats and failing to wear your seat belt, and...
(2) We are all, as I mentioned above, constantly bathed in a sea of radio-frequency radiation, principally from that huge ball of fusing hydrogen in the sky (the Sun), but also including the sea of 60 Hz radiation we swim in because we live in houses (and work in offices) the walls of which are filled with cables carrying ac current at 60 Hz.
But there's more to it than simple chemistry.
With this I disagree. Every aspect of life is, when you get right down to it, simple chemistry, nothing more, unless you want to start arguing about ineffable things like souls. You might as well argue there's somehow more to the behaviour of computers than the behaviour of electrons.
Humans have not evolved to deal with radiation at these frequencies.
Dude...are you aware of how much energy the Sun puts out in the radio spectrum? Or lightning storms? Get a wideband receiver and tune it to 1 GHz or so, near the wireless frequencies, and turn down the squelch. All that static noise you hear is natural radiation on radio frequencies. Been around since God was in diapers.
And while we're on the subject, you might google around for any successful example of radiofrequency EM radiation being used to cause a chemical reaction (which is the only way it could damage your precious bodily fluids). You won't find any. The photon energy in the RF spectrum is absurdly small compared to typical chemical bond energies. Heck, it's way less than the photon energy of infrared radiation, which of course your own body emits in copious quantities.
Your comment reminds me of a James Thurber story, in which his grandmother (who grew up in the 19th century) insisted that all the electrical outlets in her house be stopped up, because she was sure invisible electricity was leaking out of them, spreading out across the floor, and could be causing all kinds of mischief. After all, human beings did not evolve around electricity...
One thing that would bug me about depending on this system, if I were Russian, is that the Russians are notoriously inept at ensuring long life for their satellites. They tend to just launch a lot of them and accept a short lifespan as they wig out. The US, by contrast, tends to go for gold-plated satellites that live a very long time, and launch far fewer. Is the Russian "shotgun" scheme going to work out for a navigation satellite system? I don't know, but it's a question I'd be asking myself before switching from GPS to Glonass.
I mean, in addition to asking myself whether some cut of the profits from Glonass are going to be spent ensuring that Vladimir Putin stays Supreme Leader for Life.
Right you are, and this is why the gullible tend to outlive the skeptical when both are part of a large tribe. Blindly believing what your neighbor tells you (instead of going to the considerable trouble and perhaps danger of verifying it yourself) tends, in a large community, to be a remarkably quick and efficient way to maximize your survival probability. This is, of course, why as a species we are so prone to it, to the dismay of libertarians everywhere and the glee of those who make their living in advertising.
These things frustrate clever asocial (or antisocial) geeks, of course. We'd all like to think that individual intelligence beats mindless groupthink combined with the tendency of a few individuals to make wild guesses so that the rest of the tribe can learn something (and not uncoincidentally individual cleverness triumphing over groupthink is the theme of many a geeky favorite SF story). But in practise it doesn't actually work out that way. It turns out that random guesses plus groupthink works faster and more efficiently than individual intelligence, pretty much. Oh well.
(1) People remember new and surprising things better than old and expected things.
(2) People are willing to believe stuff that is not well-supported by their own experience and personally known facts.
Both are clearly powerful advantages for members of a highly social species living in a changeable environment.
Obviously remembering something new and strange is more important than remembering something old and familiar, since what is old and familiar can be reconstructed from other stuff you already know, or from the memories of other members of the tribe, and you've already evolved some way of dealing with it anyway. For example, it's more important to remember that you saw strange new tracks of some large feline predator thingy at the water hole than to remember precisely where the water hole is. Other members of the tribe can help you remember how to get to the water hole, but you're the only one who can warn everyone else that something new and scary might be waiting for them there.
As for number 2, that's more subtle, but I suggest it comes in essence from the fact that individuals are quite expendable in the interests of the tribe. It make sense for the tribe if individual members of a tribe take wild guesses about what various ambiguous data mean. 90% of the time (say) they'll be wrong and perish but the rest of the tribe will learn from their mistake. The other 10% of the time they'll be right and discover as if by some magic powerful intuition some hidden fact about the world. Once again, the tribe will profit from observing them. Hence, although it's clearly stupid for the individual to make wild guesses about what causes lightning or whether this peculiar plant is safe to eat, the tribe will probably learn something quite useful if he does.
Er...wait a minute...you don't give a fsck what comments people might make about an article in Google News, but you imagine Google engineers will be greatly caring about comments random/. geeks make about an article about Google News in old media?
>fzzt<
Damn, that logical consistency fuse went out again...must use higher rating...
The problem with TFA is that it makes little logical sense. In what possible sense can time be "slowing down?" "Slowing down" is a statement that something is changing less per unit time. If you like, that dx/dt is negative.
But how can you measure the "rate" at which time itself is changing? If "change in time" (dt) is going to go in the numerator, what will go in the denominator? Can't be dt, of course. So how do you define the "rate" at which time changes? I can't think of anything. It's like asking the price of money. "Price" means "how much you get per unit money." You can't ask how much money you get per unit money. (Note to nitpickers: the price of currency, e.g. the price of dollars in drachma, is not a valid counterexample.)
I'm sure the physics makes sense, but the language in this news article does not. If anyone knows what the actual science is, I at least would be grateful for a better explanation than this news article provides. Anyone?
Courtesy of a course I audited at MIT on discrete mathematics, about 20 years ago, which included a fascinating section on the mathematics of traffic...
(1) They're not really standing waves, which are composed of traveling waves going both forward and backward (and waves can't propagate forward in traffic). They're ordinary traveling waves. The best analogy is to the flow of a compressible gas in a pipe. You can easily get strong shock waves at various densities and flow rates when you introduce obstructions or change the flow rate at various branch points.
Part of the problem in our expectations is that we (unreasonably) expect traffic flow to be more like the flow of an incompressible fluid like water, where, generally speaking, more pressure simply equals faster flow. It's the presence of compressibility that makes gas flow in certain critical regions much more complicated than water flow, so that, for example, an increase in pressure (e.g. an increase in cars entering at a given on-ramp, or a constriction due to an accident) can result in drastic decreases in flow. The compressibility comes about in traffic because the density of cars is quite variable.
(2) Along those lines, the density per se -- the space between the cars -- really has very little to do with the peculiarities of traffic. It's the fact that the density can change locally which makes the "car gas" compressible, and allows for density waves (traffic jams, stop-n-go traffic, etc.).
But the reason the density changes locally is not because people don't leave enough space between their car and the car ahead, but because of human reaction time. If the car spacing (i.e. density) changes here at time t, human reaction time means it cannot propagate very fast -- it will change there at some time t' significantly later than t. That is, a density wave must propagate. Under the right conditions, it's quite easy for such a density wave to grow in amplitude as it goes. Hence, a very small initial perturbation in the density -- one driver slamming on the brakes -- can grow much larger as it propagates, so that at some distance away large numbers of cars must come to a halt.
The only real solution is to make the car "gas" much less compressible, and that requires greatly raising the speed at which density fluctuations can propagate, in other words, tremendously shortening the time it takes for cars to respond to slight changes in spacing. Presumably, that suggests computer control of cars.
There's a whole field of philosophy that is devoted essentially to this and similar problems...
Ah yes, I know. I had a good friend who was a philosopher, and we used to have endless fun indulging in exactly the same debate we are almost about to have here. I used to amusingly frustrate him no end by my tendency to cut the Gordian knots philosophers so often tie -- and you've tied many of them, very nicely, here -- with blunt empirical categoricals, stuff that works out perfectly well in practise but which has the philosophers gnashing their teeth and howling You can't DO that...!
Well, fair enough. I'm a confirmed empiricist. What works in practise is good enough for me. But I do recognize that there is a good use for the work of those who love the slow carving of exceedingly precise abstract theoretical definitions.
But one point: I don't agree zero is not a real-world concept. I think the problem is the philosopher's insistence on cleanly separating the concepts of existence and the concepts of number. That's the only way you can come up with a statement like "Yes, I have zero apples." Because you've argued that the number of apples is disconnected from the question of their existence. Hence, if the number can be defined at all, they must exist, and that leads to the silliness.
But in the real world, we don't cleanly separate abstract principles like that. Existence and number are intermingled. It's not a problem for people to define the number of apples they have, even if that number is zero ("I don't have any right now"), negative ("I borrowed an apple from Tim yesterday and ate it, so I guess I owe Tim an apple, and if you give me one now, I'll give it to Tim in payback and have none"), or rational ("I just ate half of my last apple..."). The question of whether apples exist in my possession is naturally commingled with the question of their number. Normal people would say there do not exist apples in my possession if the number is zero or negative, and they do if it's positive. So you can't separate the concepts in practise. Which is just fine, in practice.
To be sure, we had written counting numbers before we had zero or negative numbers from the Arabs, but I wouldn't make much of this evidence as to how people thought. I do not think Romans had any difficult with the idea of having no apples, or with owing someone apples. The fact that they did not invent formal symbols for the abstract manipulation of these ideas does not prove they didn't understand the ideas, or didn't use them. All we can be sure it proves is that they didn't have much taste for abstract theoreticals -- and we already knew that, courtesy of, e.g. those unfortunates in Palestine after the Jewish War. A very practical people, the Romans.
Nor is it impossible to observe zero. You might say anytime I look for apples and don't find them, then I've observed zero. I have evidence of absence, so to speak, and that is not at all the same as an absence of evidence. There's a big difference between "I don't know" and "I know, and the answer is none." That's what an observation of zero means, and how it's different from no observation at all.
I don't agree. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that (for example) if in June of 2500 AD physicists have in hand a complete and fully consistent theory of everything that predicts every actual measurement, and predicts nothing (e.g. asymptotic divergences) that are clearly impossible or self-contradictory, and can be shown to predict every imaginable experiment...why, there remains the possibility that in August of 2500 a new measurement, of a type never before imagined, will make the whole thing come down like a house of cards.
But so what? If, in June of 2500, you have more than one ToE which satisfy these conditions, then I'd say you have indeed proved that alternate universes are logically conceivable. (You've obviously proved nothing about whether they are physical realizable.) If previously inconceivable new data comes along in August that tears down your ToE, then of course all your conclusions must be altered, and alternate universes may no longer be conceivable.
I mean, if you're saying the only "proof" that is acceptable is a proof that can somehow be proved to not only be true, and not only immune to any conceivable kind of test or measurement, but be proved to be immune to any new measurement or line of thought whatsoever...well, that "proof" doesn't exist, outside of trivial formal systems lacking a Goedel theorem, and we might as well just retire the word. I meant "proof" in the ordinary sense of the word, in the way people use it when they say experiments "prove" F = ma. It has to convince ordinary folks, not Ouroboros-like maniacs willing to debate their own existence and disappear into their metaphysical navel.
Well, let me put it this way: if you want to ask the question of what is and is not "correct," you need to define what you mean by "correct." As soon as you've done so, you've created laws of logic, and by definition they are correct.
Try it. Try defining "correct" and "incorrect" without presupposing some rules of logic!
Also, 1 = 1 is not an axiom but an observable fact. The most obvious proof is that 1 - 1 = 0, that is, if I have an apple and I eat it, I now have zero apples. Would you deny this?
Oh no, I don't agree at all. It's certainly disprovable. All you need to do is come up with an alternate set of physical laws that are perfectly consistent. Something like a "Flatland," where some key law or other is different, and all else is consistent with it. If you can do that, then you've proved that alternate universes are at least logically conceivable.
Of course, doing this requires at least one consistent theory of everything, so we know what the general class of such theories looks like, and what makes a theory of everything consistent. We don't have one yet, alas, so that's a problem at square one. That is, we don't yet have a consistent set of laws for the universe we actually live in, let alone any alternates. (Quantum mechanics and general relativity are mutually contradictory, for example; at least one of them is incomplete, or wrong.)
Mmmm....I don't think so. Don't forget they underly our understanding of the astrophysics that explains things like the progress and typical radiation signatures of distant supernovae, how light is affected by dust and gas and gravity, and so forth, and observations of those phenomena have been made out to billions of light years.
I'm not saying we haven't tested the conservation laws much more thoroughly close to home, but it's a mistake to forget observational astronomy does a great deal to confirm our understanding of the basic laws of physics even billions of light years away.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, perhaps it's worth noting that in 1932 only about 33 million people voted in the Presidential election, while in 2004 the figure was closer to 110 million. Takes a bigger organization, with more layers, to reach four times as many people.
More importantly, in the 1930s many people tended to get their voting patterns from local organizations that more or less owned their vote, e.g. unions and "machines." FDR worried quite a bit about keeping the "machine" and union boss vote. Harry Truman was selected as his veep in part to get that vote (Truman was widely understood to be the protege of the Pendergast Kansas City machine). He more or less dumped his much more intellectual (and socialist) former veep Henry Wallace, who was more in tune with him (and arguably the country) on the "issues."
So the amount of actual true personal interaction required -- which might usefully be deployed to change someone's mind, whose vote wasn't already "owned" -- was pretty modest in the 30s. To put it another way, there were a lot fewer voters who had the option to vote as they pleased, and it took a lot less personal effort to reach them. You'd really only need to reach the bosses, the key players, those who could tell fleets of other people how to vote.
Today's elections are far more direct candidate-to-citizen appeals. Machines and union endorsements hardly matter at all; people tend to make up their own minds independently, and directly from what they see and hear on the tube. To reach 110 million voters directly requires, indeed, a massive, tightly controlled communications heirarchy. And, not surprisingly, the average amount of personal time the candidate can give to each of 110 million totally independent voters is measured in microseconds.
You think? But I think your scenario has as much chance of coming true as that of the evangelicals, who think in 800 years Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead.
In fact, I see more than a little psychological similarity between your apocalyptic vision and theirs. Throughout history there's been a good market for predictions of imminent doom. It seems to suit something dark in human nature to so easily believe that our folly and wickedness are about to be severely punished unless we repent right now.
Er...unless you have some brilliant piece of logic up your sleeve that proves that extraterrestrial life is impossible, despite the obvious counter-example of life having evolved spontaneously at least once that we know of, you've got it backward. There clearly is a chance of success.
Unless an alien transmitter is broadcasting at the correct frquency and in the right direction as it passes near or through our solar system, we will not detect or receive its signals.
Oh come on. You think all those fancy-pants science boys forgot about the inverse-square law? That they didn't, for example, sit down with an envelope and work out whether they could at least detect alien I Love Lucy reruns if they were emanating from Alpha Centauri? Geez, friend, that's a little arrogant. To assume everyone except you is a complete blithering idiot about the nature of radio...
The best argument against SETI is Fermi's, to wit, given that the Universe is so large and so old, it is overwhelmingly probable that if life has evolved more than once, the ETs are all way older and more advanced than we are, and therefore if it is possible to communicate over interstellar distances they should be doing it already with us. They're not. Why not? SETI has no good answer for that, and that's their main problem.
What have we discovered? Have we learned anything from the rock samples or pictures?
You're confusing data collection with theorizing. What we've "learned" is gigabytes of photographs, measurements, and so forth, which will, in the coming years, be used to sort through the various theories about the formation and evolution of Mars, and (more indirectly) about the possibility of life on it.
It seems likely there is something missing in your understanding of how science works, because you seem under the impression that we come up with theories and then we go do an experiment that confirms them, and if it does, that's successful science.
Doesn't work that way. What we do is go out and collect oodles of data, pretty much anything we can measure, regardless of whether or not it is relevant to anyone's pet pre-existing speculations. Then we sit down and try to explain all this data, correlate it with other data, et cetera. That's when the theories get formed, and shot down. It is, generally speaking, just a total waste of time to theorize when you have no data. That's religion, or politics, or some such non-scientific endeavor. In science we collect data first, and then we theorize, because only then can our theories acquire the solid backing of empirical fact and become actually useful. You have, in essence, imagined that the theoretical cart comes before the empirical horse.
Can you give me something that justifies all of this money spent?
Of course not. You can only do that yourself, and if you've already looked into what the rovers are doing and concluded it doesn't suit your philosophical goals, then that's that. Why would you even want a meme transplant from someone else that would make you feel differently about the money spent?
But it doesn't matter. The way it works is, we all get to decide for ourselves whether we like government money spent this way -- for whatever reason, e.g. because we think knowing how Mars formed is nifty, because we like seeing photos from the ground from Mars, because of your and NASA's 'inspiring the kids' hooey, or just because it keeps government cash from otherwise being thrown down the rathole of futile social engineering or bureaucrat full-employment programs. Then we tally up the votes. If there are more of us who think the money is well spent, it gets spent, whatever you folks on the losing side think.
As it is, those of us who like rovers poking around on Mars have more votes than those of you who don't. I can easily see why you would want to convince us that it's money wasted, so some of us might change our minds and you might become the new majority. But why would you imagine any of us in the majority would want to waste our time trying to convince you to change your mind? Who cares whether you do or not?
These are all the reasons Microsoft gives for using their product, and I expect if their product wasn't riddled with bugs and annoyances, you'd be a closed MS shop.
I think the bottom line is that Linux is, and always will be, a bit of a hobbyist and/or experimentalist bleeding edge platform. It's like the difference between commercial radio and amateur (ham) radio: the former is all about "getting work done," as you say, and so it's streamlined, standardized, and widespread. The latter is about experimenting with new ways of doing stuff, about cooking it up at home by yourself, about trying out your individual creative thoughts and ideas. So it's idiosyncratic, quirky, customizable, and thinly spread.
Each has its place, of course. Without streamlined standardized production platforms, people trying to get stuff done who don't give a hoot about computers and software would be endlessly frustrated. Without weird individual experimentation, advancement stagnates. (I don't doubt that one of the reasons OS X is so much more useful than, say, OS 9 or, God forbid, that bombing monster Mac OS, is because it was goosed by Linux coming up fast from behind.)
I can only conclude you're a bit on the young side if you believe the cure for being suckered is to become highly educated. Live a few more decades and you'll realize highbrows with PhDs are at least as easy to con as the plain folks who fix your car and take your trash away. Probably easier, actually, since the former's intellectual arrogance will blind them to the possibility that they might be fooled.
Of course, the scams intellectuals fall for -- dot-com stock, "flipping" hot Bay Area real estate with subprime mortgage money, socialism, etc. -- tend to be more complex and dazzling then the ol' ATM switcheroo or Nigerian bank fraud. And, since well-spoken intellectuals control the narrative, we tend to laugh at the fools taken in by penis pills while we "smart" people smugly shop for micronutrients, dehydrated horse piss and extracts of Chinese weeds at the organic food store to ward off cancer. Ha ha indeed.
A susceptibility to being conned is part of your character, not a function of your intelligence or education. It's a question of whether you tend to think you know more than you really do, and are willing to make assumptions not backed up by data.
There's a logic error here, I think. By this logic, we should do nothing except the very highest priority thing in our life, and society should pour all of its resources into the very most important priority. For example, we should all live in a thatched hut, eat weeds and grubs, wear the untanned raw skins of animals (or just go naked), and slave 18 hours a day so all our labor and energy can go into....whatever the single highest social priority is...curing cancer, fighting war 'n' injustice, whatever.
Which is silly. The goal of life is maximize overall satisfaction, not accomplish one single highest goal. It's important to rank your priorities, of course, both as an individual and as a society. But the notion that because A is "more important" than B implies ipso facto that A should get all the resources and B should get none is maximally silly.
Indeed, it's kind of OCD obsessive to always be focussed on pursuing the Top Goal, the kind of thing that when we see people doing it in practise -- giving up everything, including enough sleep and good nutrition, to, say, play World of Warcraft and become the biggest baddest player -- we conclude they need to do some growing up.
Holy cats, can you also tell me who'll win the US Presidential election in 2008? I'd like to get a few bets down on tradesports.com...with my chutzpah and your omniscience, we can't lose!
And that is what passes for proof of a theory? No wonder psychology is the poor stepchild of the true sciences. I mean, I can think of about three other explanations off the top of my head that also explain why the mouse was less aware of danger after being prevented from REM sleep, viz.:
/dev/swap, it didn't work so well the next day, and the mouse's short-term sensory memory of what was in its environment was degraded. You might as well have given it a few hard knocks on the head.
(1) It was bloody tired after being woken up all the time the night before.
(2) REM sleep is just a way for the short-term memory banks to do a dump and clean out all the crap that's accumulated during the day, useless sensory data. Since the poor mouse was prevented from doing the reformat on
(3) REM sleep is just a weird, accidental by-product of some necessary biochemical house-cleaning that goes on at night. Some metabolic side-product chemical gets produced, and it jiggles the imagination handle randomly in the brain while we're asleep. The resulting images don't mean a damn thing, any more than the flashes in the eye when you rub your tired eyes. But because the mouse was prevented from doing the biochemical house-cleaning, whatever it is, he didn't function as well the next day. That is, the mouse's poor performance had nothing to do with the prevention of its dreams, but rather with the prevention of whatever else was going on that independently caused the dreams.
None of these theories is disproved by the data you mention, so they're just as good as the psychology professor's theory.
One of the unfortunate ways in which even quite educated people misunderstand empirical science is that they don't fully appreciate that finding an explanation for the data isn't at all the same as finding the explanation. There are usually bazillions of theories that match the data: the trick is designing an experiment that, along with common sense and experience, can rule all but one of them out. This experiment with the mouse certainly doesn't qualify.
Well...let me put it this way. If no chemistry is done by a certain influence, then none of the molecules in your body can change. So how can any permanent or serious harm be done? What's left? Could we be talking about purely temporary things like whether your arm is up or down, or whether you have a certain thought or feeling in your brain or not?
If you want to argue that EM radiation in the RF region might make you have peculiar thoughts....well OK, but this enters the realm of the pretty far-fetched. It just doesn't seem worth worrying about when...
(1) There are way more important, measureable, threats to your well-being, including smoking, obesity, drug-resistant bacteria, radon, trans fats and failing to wear your seat belt, and...
(2) We are all, as I mentioned above, constantly bathed in a sea of radio-frequency radiation, principally from that huge ball of fusing hydrogen in the sky (the Sun), but also including the sea of 60 Hz radiation we swim in because we live in houses (and work in offices) the walls of which are filled with cables carrying ac current at 60 Hz.
But there's more to it than simple chemistry.
With this I disagree. Every aspect of life is, when you get right down to it, simple chemistry, nothing more, unless you want to start arguing about ineffable things like souls. You might as well argue there's somehow more to the behaviour of computers than the behaviour of electrons.
Totally held together with duct tape and Orthodox prayer, also the aforementioned millions of launches to fix stuff.
Humans have not evolved to deal with radiation at these frequencies.
Dude...are you aware of how much energy the Sun puts out in the radio spectrum? Or lightning storms? Get a wideband receiver and tune it to 1 GHz or so, near the wireless frequencies, and turn down the squelch. All that static noise you hear is natural radiation on radio frequencies. Been around since God was in diapers.
And while we're on the subject, you might google around for any successful example of radiofrequency EM radiation being used to cause a chemical reaction (which is the only way it could damage your precious bodily fluids). You won't find any. The photon energy in the RF spectrum is absurdly small compared to typical chemical bond energies. Heck, it's way less than the photon energy of infrared radiation, which of course your own body emits in copious quantities.
Your comment reminds me of a James Thurber story, in which his grandmother (who grew up in the 19th century) insisted that all the electrical outlets in her house be stopped up, because she was sure invisible electricity was leaking out of them, spreading out across the floor, and could be causing all kinds of mischief. After all, human beings did not evolve around electricity...
One thing that would bug me about depending on this system, if I were Russian, is that the Russians are notoriously inept at ensuring long life for their satellites. They tend to just launch a lot of them and accept a short lifespan as they wig out. The US, by contrast, tends to go for gold-plated satellites that live a very long time, and launch far fewer. Is the Russian "shotgun" scheme going to work out for a navigation satellite system? I don't know, but it's a question I'd be asking myself before switching from GPS to Glonass.
I mean, in addition to asking myself whether some cut of the profits from Glonass are going to be spent ensuring that Vladimir Putin stays Supreme Leader for Life.
Right you are, and this is why the gullible tend to outlive the skeptical when both are part of a large tribe. Blindly believing what your neighbor tells you (instead of going to the considerable trouble and perhaps danger of verifying it yourself) tends, in a large community, to be a remarkably quick and efficient way to maximize your survival probability. This is, of course, why as a species we are so prone to it, to the dismay of libertarians everywhere and the glee of those who make their living in advertising.
These things frustrate clever asocial (or antisocial) geeks, of course. We'd all like to think that individual intelligence beats mindless groupthink combined with the tendency of a few individuals to make wild guesses so that the rest of the tribe can learn something (and not uncoincidentally individual cleverness triumphing over groupthink is the theme of many a geeky favorite SF story). But in practise it doesn't actually work out that way. It turns out that random guesses plus groupthink works faster and more efficiently than individual intelligence, pretty much. Oh well.
What you're saying can be boiled down to...
(1) People remember new and surprising things better than old and expected things.
(2) People are willing to believe stuff that is not well-supported by their own experience and personally known facts.
Both are clearly powerful advantages for members of a highly social species living in a changeable environment.
Obviously remembering something new and strange is more important than remembering something old and familiar, since what is old and familiar can be reconstructed from other stuff you already know, or from the memories of other members of the tribe, and you've already evolved some way of dealing with it anyway. For example, it's more important to remember that you saw strange new tracks of some large feline predator thingy at the water hole than to remember precisely where the water hole is. Other members of the tribe can help you remember how to get to the water hole, but you're the only one who can warn everyone else that something new and scary might be waiting for them there.
As for number 2, that's more subtle, but I suggest it comes in essence from the fact that individuals are quite expendable in the interests of the tribe. It make sense for the tribe if individual members of a tribe take wild guesses about what various ambiguous data mean. 90% of the time (say) they'll be wrong and perish but the rest of the tribe will learn from their mistake. The other 10% of the time they'll be right and discover as if by some magic powerful intuition some hidden fact about the world. Once again, the tribe will profit from observing them. Hence, although it's clearly stupid for the individual to make wild guesses about what causes lightning or whether this peculiar plant is safe to eat, the tribe will probably learn something quite useful if he does.
Er...wait a minute...you don't give a fsck what comments people might make about an article in Google News, but you imagine Google engineers will be greatly caring about comments random /. geeks make about an article about Google News in old media?
>fzzt<
Damn, that logical consistency fuse went out again...must use higher rating...
Phoo, once you've detected O2 in the atmosphere, you're done. Only life could produce that much free oxidizer in a strongly reducing universe.
The problem with TFA is that it makes little logical sense. In what possible sense can time be "slowing down?" "Slowing down" is a statement that something is changing less per unit time. If you like, that dx/dt is negative.
But how can you measure the "rate" at which time itself is changing? If "change in time" (dt) is going to go in the numerator, what will go in the denominator? Can't be dt, of course. So how do you define the "rate" at which time changes? I can't think of anything. It's like asking the price of money. "Price" means "how much you get per unit money." You can't ask how much money you get per unit money. (Note to nitpickers: the price of currency, e.g. the price of dollars in drachma, is not a valid counterexample.)
I'm sure the physics makes sense, but the language in this news article does not. If anyone knows what the actual science is, I at least would be grateful for a better explanation than this news article provides. Anyone?
Courtesy of a course I audited at MIT on discrete mathematics, about 20 years ago, which included a fascinating section on the mathematics of traffic...
(1) They're not really standing waves, which are composed of traveling waves going both forward and backward (and waves can't propagate forward in traffic). They're ordinary traveling waves. The best analogy is to the flow of a compressible gas in a pipe. You can easily get strong shock waves at various densities and flow rates when you introduce obstructions or change the flow rate at various branch points.
Part of the problem in our expectations is that we (unreasonably) expect traffic flow to be more like the flow of an incompressible fluid like water, where, generally speaking, more pressure simply equals faster flow. It's the presence of compressibility that makes gas flow in certain critical regions much more complicated than water flow, so that, for example, an increase in pressure (e.g. an increase in cars entering at a given on-ramp, or a constriction due to an accident) can result in drastic decreases in flow. The compressibility comes about in traffic because the density of cars is quite variable.
(2) Along those lines, the density per se -- the space between the cars -- really has very little to do with the peculiarities of traffic. It's the fact that the density can change locally which makes the "car gas" compressible, and allows for density waves (traffic jams, stop-n-go traffic, etc.).
But the reason the density changes locally is not because people don't leave enough space between their car and the car ahead, but because of human reaction time. If the car spacing (i.e. density) changes here at time t, human reaction time means it cannot propagate very fast -- it will change there at some time t' significantly later than t. That is, a density wave must propagate. Under the right conditions, it's quite easy for such a density wave to grow in amplitude as it goes. Hence, a very small initial perturbation in the density -- one driver slamming on the brakes -- can grow much larger as it propagates, so that at some distance away large numbers of cars must come to a halt.
The only real solution is to make the car "gas" much less compressible, and that requires greatly raising the speed at which density fluctuations can propagate, in other words, tremendously shortening the time it takes for cars to respond to slight changes in spacing. Presumably, that suggests computer control of cars.
There's a whole field of philosophy that is devoted essentially to this and similar problems...
Ah yes, I know. I had a good friend who was a philosopher, and we used to have endless fun indulging in exactly the same debate we are almost about to have here. I used to amusingly frustrate him no end by my tendency to cut the Gordian knots philosophers so often tie -- and you've tied many of them, very nicely, here -- with blunt empirical categoricals, stuff that works out perfectly well in practise but which has the philosophers gnashing their teeth and howling You can't DO that...!
Well, fair enough. I'm a confirmed empiricist. What works in practise is good enough for me. But I do recognize that there is a good use for the work of those who love the slow carving of exceedingly precise abstract theoretical definitions.
But one point: I don't agree zero is not a real-world concept. I think the problem is the philosopher's insistence on cleanly separating the concepts of existence and the concepts of number. That's the only way you can come up with a statement like "Yes, I have zero apples." Because you've argued that the number of apples is disconnected from the question of their existence. Hence, if the number can be defined at all, they must exist, and that leads to the silliness.
But in the real world, we don't cleanly separate abstract principles like that. Existence and number are intermingled. It's not a problem for people to define the number of apples they have, even if that number is zero ("I don't have any right now"), negative ("I borrowed an apple from Tim yesterday and ate it, so I guess I owe Tim an apple, and if you give me one now, I'll give it to Tim in payback and have none"), or rational ("I just ate half of my last apple..."). The question of whether apples exist in my possession is naturally commingled with the question of their number. Normal people would say there do not exist apples in my possession if the number is zero or negative, and they do if it's positive. So you can't separate the concepts in practise. Which is just fine, in practice.
To be sure, we had written counting numbers before we had zero or negative numbers from the Arabs, but I wouldn't make much of this evidence as to how people thought. I do not think Romans had any difficult with the idea of having no apples, or with owing someone apples. The fact that they did not invent formal symbols for the abstract manipulation of these ideas does not prove they didn't understand the ideas, or didn't use them. All we can be sure it proves is that they didn't have much taste for abstract theoreticals -- and we already knew that, courtesy of, e.g. those unfortunates in Palestine after the Jewish War. A very practical people, the Romans.
Nor is it impossible to observe zero. You might say anytime I look for apples and don't find them, then I've observed zero. I have evidence of absence, so to speak, and that is not at all the same as an absence of evidence. There's a big difference between "I don't know" and "I know, and the answer is none." That's what an observation of zero means, and how it's different from no observation at all.
I don't agree. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that (for example) if in June of 2500 AD physicists have in hand a complete and fully consistent theory of everything that predicts every actual measurement, and predicts nothing (e.g. asymptotic divergences) that are clearly impossible or self-contradictory, and can be shown to predict every imaginable experiment...why, there remains the possibility that in August of 2500 a new measurement, of a type never before imagined, will make the whole thing come down like a house of cards.
But so what? If, in June of 2500, you have more than one ToE which satisfy these conditions, then I'd say you have indeed proved that alternate universes are logically conceivable. (You've obviously proved nothing about whether they are physical realizable.) If previously inconceivable new data comes along in August that tears down your ToE, then of course all your conclusions must be altered, and alternate universes may no longer be conceivable.
I mean, if you're saying the only "proof" that is acceptable is a proof that can somehow be proved to not only be true, and not only immune to any conceivable kind of test or measurement, but be proved to be immune to any new measurement or line of thought whatsoever...well, that "proof" doesn't exist, outside of trivial formal systems lacking a Goedel theorem, and we might as well just retire the word. I meant "proof" in the ordinary sense of the word, in the way people use it when they say experiments "prove" F = ma. It has to convince ordinary folks, not Ouroboros-like maniacs willing to debate their own existence and disappear into their metaphysical navel.
Well, let me put it this way: if you want to ask the question of what is and is not "correct," you need to define what you mean by "correct." As soon as you've done so, you've created laws of logic, and by definition they are correct.
Try it. Try defining "correct" and "incorrect" without presupposing some rules of logic!
Also, 1 = 1 is not an axiom but an observable fact. The most obvious proof is that 1 - 1 = 0, that is, if I have an apple and I eat it, I now have zero apples. Would you deny this?
On the contrary, you should never believe anything you've not read, especially what I didn't say.
Oh no, I don't agree at all. It's certainly disprovable. All you need to do is come up with an alternate set of physical laws that are perfectly consistent. Something like a "Flatland," where some key law or other is different, and all else is consistent with it. If you can do that, then you've proved that alternate universes are at least logically conceivable.
Of course, doing this requires at least one consistent theory of everything, so we know what the general class of such theories looks like, and what makes a theory of everything consistent. We don't have one yet, alas, so that's a problem at square one. That is, we don't yet have a consistent set of laws for the universe we actually live in, let alone any alternates. (Quantum mechanics and general relativity are mutually contradictory, for example; at least one of them is incomplete, or wrong.)
Mmmm....I don't think so. Don't forget they underly our understanding of the astrophysics that explains things like the progress and typical radiation signatures of distant supernovae, how light is affected by dust and gas and gravity, and so forth, and observations of those phenomena have been made out to billions of light years.
I'm not saying we haven't tested the conservation laws much more thoroughly close to home, but it's a mistake to forget observational astronomy does a great deal to confirm our understanding of the basic laws of physics even billions of light years away.