P.S. if you are running a website please help reduce the need for url shorteners by using sensible urls.
Sensible URLs are human-readable and meaningful. This often is directly opposed to ultrashort URLs, which are convenient for use in venues (e.g., SMS, Twitter) where bits are at a premium. Shortening services exist to provide the latter, not the former, and providing the former won't reduce demand for the latter.
On the other hand, I don't think a generation ship is entirely beyond the realms of possibility within the next 50 years. Yes, it would require some incredible engineering to get it done. But it wouldn't require as much new technology as one might think - the sheer size allows you to get away with things that aren't practical in a smaller ship. Like lakes, fields, forests, that sort of thing.
A generation ship wouldn't just be an epic feat of engineering, it would be an epic feat of engineering that has no payoff for centuries (from the point of view of the population assigned to the ship, unless just being on the ship is a payoff for them) or millenia (from the point of view of the rest of the planet.) So, really, where is the huge investment going to come from? Epic engineering projects -- the Panama Canal, for instance -- do happen, but they happen because the people paying for them expect some substantial benefit that will start accruing in a reasonable time.
We aren't as far off as you think. What's important is being able to constantly accelerate during the journey. Slow and steady acceleration wins the race. You're not going to do that with a chemical rocket, but with an on-board nuclear reactor and a few advancements in ion propulsion or vacuum propellers, we could make the trip. We could easily launch a probe to start making the journey in the next five years, if we allocated the budget to do so. Humans could make the trip as well, given the right accommodations--only a few years would be passing on-board.
Just a "few advancements"? At the limits imposed by conservation of energy, a photon drive (of which a vacuum propeller is just a special case) requires on the order 300MW to produce 1N of thrust. So even if you had an outstandingly mass efficient nuclear plant with, say, a power-to-mass ratio of 1MW per metric ton (about what is projected by proponents of uranium hydride plants with a few more advancements), even if you ignore the mass of everything else on the ship (including the vacuum propellers, passengers, cargo, etc.) and the need to refuel the power plant, you could only acheive an acceleration of something like 3 microns per second^2, and would take on the order of 200 years to reach 0.001% of light speed (and cover only 0.1 light year of the 28 light year voyage in that time.)
We are far from being able to build anything that could make the journey in any reasonable time, whether considering the time from the perspective of anyone on the ship, or from the perspective of anyone on Earth.
I actually wanted on the Jury Duty (big software corp was not exciting enough), but was disqualified with this question: "Is a police officer exactly as believable as a citizen?" (although it was worded slightly differently), and my answer was "slightly higher, perhaps 55%", didn't even have time to give my rationale (they have training in situational awareness and in mentally recording a scene for later documentation).
Unsurprising, a bias to favor one class of witness over another by a broad general, status, rather than the particular individual circumstances and qualifications entered into evidence in the cas, if that class of witness is going to show up in the case, is a pretty big reason for disqualifying jurors.
When Republicans were kind of the 'permanent minority' in Congress, we remained the party of small, local government (our founding principles).
The Republican Party was founded in 1854, and elected its first President in 1860. Given the most notable events of that first administration, I don't think the Republican Party's "founding principles" had much to do with "small, local government".
It's the party of force-your-conservative-viewpoints-on-everyone instead of the mildly Libertarian "just generally leave us alone" original party platform.
Please present a copy of the text of this "just generally leave us alone" original platform of the Republican Party. Because the earliest party platforms -- those of 1856 and 1860 -- I can find contains a call for building new infrastructure (a transcontinental railroad, river and harbor improvements, etc.) as a government priority, including a positive call for an expansive view of federal Constitutional authority to support that effort, and a call for strong federal regulation on certain contemporary areas of trade. Insofar as they contain "just generally leave us alone" provisions at all, they are in regard to the 1860 platforms declaration of the inviolability of State's rights to control its own domestic institutions, which certainly didn't seem to survive very long past 1860 as a core Republican principle.
This was likewise the party that supported the GWBush 'spend like a drunken sailor' plan, and the Bush 'massively broaden the powers and reach of the Federal government plan' that would have had Republicans even from the 70's and 80's going WTF?
Given the similar expansion and spending of the Reagan years, I have trouble understanding that. Unless you are suggesting that the intervening decade would have caused Republicans from that time to forget the 1980s.
FWIW the Democrats have pretty much also morphed into something unrecognizable by their grandfathers. Can you see a blue-collar steelworker from the 1960s looking at NAMBLA and saying "oh yeah, I'll vote with them!"?
What does NAMBLA have to do with anything? I can't imagine current Democrats supporting NAMBLA any more than I can imagine 1960s Democrats doing so (well, except that 1960s Democrats -- like 1960s Republicans -- wouldn't have a choice, since NAMBLA didn't exist.)
A more real change in the Democratic Party since the 1960s was a result of the Civil Rights movement, which drove a wedge between the conservative (and often segregationist) wing of the party and the rest of the party, which was exploited by Republicans with Nixon's Southern strategy and subsequent efforts, over time turning the South from a Democratic stronghold to a Republican one.
The reason our spaceships don't have flashlights in the back is that the maximum force that can be produced using small scale light sources is rather low.
Well, no, because then you'd just use bigger flashlights.
The problem is that the power:thrust ratio, regardless of the scale of the light source, for a photon drive sucks, despite the great specific impulse. 300MW per Newton of thrust in the ideal case means you need some giant power source (and fuel for that power source) to power it, which kind of negates the advantages of not carrying reaction mass.
This seems to be a different mechanism that achieves essentially the same effect as a photon drive, so while the engineering might be different, the ideal physical limits seem like they would be the same.
Imparting a force upon existing photons and creating new photons are two different endeavors (from an engineering standpoint; a physicist could easily argue that they are the same). The end result might be the same (photons running screaming from the back of your thruster), but the energy input could be very different.
Well, sure, differences in the engineering inefficiencies between the two might make the input energy different, the useful energy (before any engineering inefficiencies) requirement to generate a given thrust the same, and its a pretty huge one (~300MW/N). If photons are "running screaming back from your thruster", we know their velocity (photons not having many options in that regard), which tells us everything we need to know -- to wit, that in the ideal case for this is the same as an ideal photon drive.
But, also consider this: Cars push against the road. In essence they are throwing the road back (even though the road isn't part of the car, unlike rocket fuel which is part of a rocket). I only scanned the summary, but this seems to work without throwing anything back.
If it didn't, it would violate conservation of momentum; the whole point is that it doesn't violate conservation of momentum, and that it is a momentum-transfer reaction drive that doesn't use internal reaction mass, instead, pushing back on something external to the moving craft.
"You can't sail across the Atlantic to China. If you could, it would mean the Earth was round" (many, many errors on all sides of that statement!)
The main error being the claim that it was ever a serious criticism; a myth that appears to have been created by erroneous 19th century writings about Columbus. By the time anyone Europeans were looking for better trade routes to China and the Indies, both that the Earth was round and its rough diameter had been established for many centuries, and in fact navigation at that time relied on those quite heavily.
The criticism of Columbus's idea that he could reach (and, after his first trip, that he had reached, a claim he maintained until he died) the (East, now) Indies more quickly and efficiently by sailing across the Atlantic concerned the distance involved, since Columbus's plans required the Earth to be much smaller than the size it was generally accepted to be.
One should note that, in fact, Columbus was wrong and the criticism based on the generally-accepted results that he was challenging was right.
Rockets in space don't have that luxury. So they pretty much have to carry a bunch of "reaction mass" with them and throw it at high speed out the ass end of the rocket.
You can trade off how much mass for how fast you toss it, with the limit case being a photon drive, which shoots out photons (very low mass, obviously, but naturally at the speed of light.) The input energy required for that is about 300MW per Newton of thrust (for comparison, the 3 Mile Island nuclear plant generates 800MW.) Since this is a momentum transfer drive -- and, hence, reaction drive -- it doesn't functionally change that, its just seems to be an alternative mechanism for acheiving the same effect as a photon drive. So, instead of pushing around lots of reaction mass, you've got to push around a giant power plant.
I see plenty to be excited about. For one, you're not having to chuck stuff out the back. With a rocket, you are carrying your reaction mass along with you.
Unless you have an external energy source, you still are stuck doing essentially the same thing with this, in the form of whatever you are converting to energy to feed into it to transfer momentum to the quantum vacuum. Just like the case with a photon drive. Its an interesting mechanism, but its still a reaction (momentum-transfer) drive, and, as such, its going to still be limited by the conservation of energy.
OTOH, it might still be useful -- having alternatives to a photon drive at the limit case of reaction drives means that, while we haven't expanded the theoretical ideal performance, there are more opportunities for engineering efficiencies.
A reactionless drive almost sounds too good to be true.
Reactionless drives break conservation of momentum and conservation of energy, so a claim of one would be an extraordinary claim. However, this drive is not reactionless -- reactionless drives are not drives that feature no loss of mass, they are drives that feature no transfer of momentum. This is a no-mass-loss reaction drive, which would seem to be different in mechanism but not effect to a photon drive, subject to conservation of momentum and energy, and consequently requiring enormous input power for its thrust.
And since we're talking electromagnetism, a really strong force in the grand scheme of things, maybe this will be a lot of energy efficient that simply throwing almost-massless particles out your rear.
Since it is a momentum-transfer (hence, reaction) drive, it would seem to face the same constraints as any such drive imposed by conservation of energy, so in the ideal case, it would perform exactly the same as an ideal photon drive. Of course, engineering efficiencies might, in practice, favor one over the other, but even an ideal photon drives has an enormous input power to thrust ratio on the order of 300MW per Newton of thrust.
A reactionless drive would be nifty because it can gather kinetic energy very easily (that's what makes travel so cheap with one). However, there's a darker side to that coin. If you can accelerate a ship to near-c with little difficulty, there's not much stopping you from extorting the Earth by threatening to drop the ship (or for that matter, a bunch of tungsten telephone poles traveling at.99c) on them.
The main attraction of the idea of reactionless drives is that, since delta-V isn't limited by reaction mass, you can theoretically get arbitrarily close to C, presuming you can power the drive long enough. This doesn't necessarily mean "easily".
OTOH, this isn't a reactionless drive (which makes it less implausible, since such drives necessarily violate both conservation of momentum--obviously--and also the conservation of energy independent of reference frame, since they make changes in kinetic energy reference frame dependent), but a special kind of reaction drive since it involves transfer of (and preserves conservation of) momentum. Unless it still violates conservation of energy, it is still limited by conservation of energy, which means you'll still have to be able to generate usable energy at least equal to the change in kinetic energy you want to acheive, which even given the ability to convert matter directly into usable energy with 100% efficieny means to accelerate to 0.5c you'd need to convert 1/4 of the mass you were accelerating into energy to power the system.
This isn't only happening in Climate science. My wife works in Mollecular Biology and has told me dozens of stories about PHD's fudging their results so that they can maintain their grants. Big Gov't gives them money to prove certain things for them, so inevitably, they need to prove those things to keep getting the money.
This happens wherever people's livelihood depends on Government Grants.
Actually, it happens more generally where people's interests depend on money, attention, or validation from other people -- a certain percentage of people will, if they think they can get away with it, lie to get more money (whether its a promotion, keeping the job they have, or whatever), more attention, more prestige, or...
Government grants are no different than a private industry paycheck in this regard; do you seriously believe think scientists in industry don't fudge results to please those who supply their cash at least as much as scientists in academia seeking grants? And if you do believe that, on what basis?
That's a bit disingenuous. The "small stuff" is actually much harder to predict that "big picture" stuff.
Its also not even the same branch of science. Weather (which is studied by meteorologists) has about the same relation to climate (which is studied by climatologists) as psychology has to political science or economics, or particle physics has to geology.
True, but sometimes the current models are more complicated models that have been closely tuned to appear to match reality, but in fact are overcomplicated.
Overcomplicated, in regard to a scientific model, means that there exists an actual, existing alternative model which is equally predictive and simpler.
Take quantum mechanics. It really looks to me like somewhere along the line we ignored Occam's Razor and jumped to a more complicated model.
Really? Where is the more parsimonious model that handles everything QM does?
I believe this happened when we decided to take particle statistics and claim that these applied to individual particles. So instead of a particle having a position it has a position probability field, etc.
IIRC, there are some important predictive differences between particles-as-waveforms and particles-as-classical-objects-with-difficult-to-determine-properties, and the former not the latter predicts behavior in the real world better. I'm certainly aware that QM is complicated enough to make people's brains hurt thinking about it, but I'm not at all convinced that the complication is unnecessary.
Compair that to QM, where the basic premises are not well defined, and where one really can't say that it is the simplest possible model that supports a small number of well supported premises.
(1) Models don't support premises, they (if "premises" are relevant at all) flow from them. Models support predictions. (2) Its not as important, scientifically speaking, that a model flow from a small set of premises as it is that it provide useful predictions. Complexity is only an issue in choosing between models that are equally predictive.
Now lets say I come up with a simpler model, that is a closer match to experimental data than early QM was. However it is not as good a match as the latest really complicated and heavily tunes QM models are. It would be largely ignored by most Theoretical physicists, since the current model is better.
Actually, that's not necessarily true. If it was, in all cases equal to or worse than current models, it would certainly be ignored. If it was not as good as current models over all, but it was simpler and better predicted behavior in some area than current models, it would have a chance to be taken at least somewhat seriously as something which might be the basis of a viable alternative approach.
But, yes, if your new model is nothing but a giant step backward from where we are now in all ways accept simplicity, then its not going to fly. And why should it?
The problem basically is that the modern models are so complicated and so highly tuned that it is not viable to devise a substantially different model that has results just as good as the current ones.
That's not a problem. What you are basically doing is complaining that our current models explain reality very well, so it is hard to come up with something radically different that explains reality better. But, you know, producing models that explain reality very well is the goal of science, not a problem with science.
there is no way to get more than a small team to work on such a model.
Sure there is, which is why people work on, say, superstring theories, which haven't yet shown any predictive advantages over the theories they hope to generalize and displace.
Now maybe all the companies out there who are thinking of wasting money on cloud computing can just buy one of these, and basically have their own in-house cloud.
$212,000 could buy you a not-insignificant quantity of commodity x86 hardware, and Ubuntu Server (probably not uniquely among server distros) already includes software (in the case of the one with Ubuntu Server, API-compatible with Amazone EC2) to run your own cloud.
For example Darwinism does not imply that atheism is a correct belief system. But many back woods preachers rant that Darwinism and atheism are one and the same thing.
Those arguing that science (and evolution and/or cosmological science particularly) demands atheism are not limited to backwoods preachers, or even the pro-religion side of the issue more generally. Consider, e.g., Richard Dawkins.
We also know that neither GR nor QM can simultaneous be correct explanations of the Universe, because of their mutual incompatibility, but that doesn't make them "wrong".
Yes, in fact, it makes at least one of them, and as I recall the nature of the problem probably both, wrong.
It doesn't mean they aren't the best available models within certain domains, which is what science is about more than "right" and "wrong". Recognizing wrong, though, is important to science, too: that some model is wrong is an indicator that there is a place where it may be productive to search for a better model, and what is known about how the model is wrong gives you a place to start looking.
I think the issue here is that someone like Al Gores makes a film full of factual inaccuracies, wins a Nobel peace prize for his efforts and is lauded by the pro Climate change scientists.
I've seen him lauded for raising awareness of the issue. Like most popularizers, he's been criticized on the details by scientists, including those who support the broad consensus view on anthropogenic global warming. The Nobel Prize was the Peace Prize, not one of the scientific prizes.
The scientists should actually have pointed out the inaccuracies in the video, but they didn't.
In fact, plenty of them have, including those who support the point Gore was making in the speeches and video.
I think the "special" part of the news is that since its being hosted on the cloud its harder to remove - since it'll be running on multiple computers capable of replicating itself across multiple machines. In order to purge it, you'd probably have to take down the entire infected cloud and clean it all seperately or at least all in synch.
Or, more likely, just disable the affected virtual instances, and maybe all instances for the affected account (assuming that by violating the hosted instances security, the intruders gained full access to the account.) Only if they compromised EC2's own security to the extent of getting, essentially, administrative access to EC2, not just administrative access to a hosted instance, would the cloud itself be compromised.
Certain results of observational cosmology cast critical doubt on the foundations of standard cosmology but leave most cosmologists untroubled. Alternative cosmological models that differ from the Big Bang have been published and defended by heterodox scientists; however, most cosmologists do not heed these. This may be because standard theory is correct and all other ideas and criticisms are incorrect, [...] --Martin Lopez-Corredoira, astrophysicist.
Most likely, its because observational results that "cast critical doubt" often don't come with better models. Troubling results are the first step to producing better models, but until those are followed by actual better models, you don't displace the dominant model, instead, the dominant model remains dominant, with the problematic results noted.
Daniel Henninger thinks it's a bigger problem for the scientific community as a whole and he calls out the real problem as seen through the eyes of a lay person in an opinion piece for the WSJ. Henninger muses 'I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them,' and carries on that vein in saying, 'This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons.
This piece seems to have about the same grip on facts as most WSJ opinion pieces. Gallup polls over something like the last 25 years have found consistently about 45% of the US public believes in young earth creationism (specifically, that "God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.") Hard science is quite evidently not something that most untrained lay persons, at least int the US, accord "automatic stature and respect".
But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies.
AFAICT, the "average person" hasn't been much influenced by the attempt to gin up a scandal over so-called "climategate". OTOH, in fact, there are quite a few groups pushing political agendas and calling it science, and the "average person" would be well served to be aware of that and engage in critical evaluation, rather than unquestioning acceptance, of things that are sold as science.
Will people even begin to doubt the most rigorous sciences like Mathematics and Physics?
Insofar as their results causes problems for political, theological, or other beliefs that they hold, people already flat-out deny (not merely "doubt") the most rigorous science. (And Mathematics isn't a science, in the empirical sense.)
Really, Henningers article mostly isn't about the so-called "climategate" issue as it is about trying to argue (without quite saying) that public policy decisions must always be based on scientific certainty, that you can never take action on a sign of a problem without absolute, incontrovertible proof, denigrating as improper and "postmodern" the precautionary principle, the public policy (not even notionally scientific -- it addresses "should" not "is" issues) principle that where there is a plausible risk of extreme and irreversible harm of a particular policy action or inaction, the contrary course should be taken barring equally or more significant risks. (Interestingly, Henninger was also a big defender of the Iraq war and most of the Bush Administration's expansions of executive power and intrusions into civil liberties justified as necessary to mitigate the risk of potential future terrorism, whose notional justification was the same essential principle; critics generally didn't question the principle, but instead the plausibility of the risk justifying certain actions, whether the action plausibly mitigated the risk in others, and whether there were equally or more significant harms imposed by the mitigation than justified by the risk sought to be mitigated.)
Slashdot Mirror
Getting people to follow links without knowing where they are going.
Sensible URLs are human-readable and meaningful. This often is directly opposed to ultrashort URLs, which are convenient for use in venues (e.g., SMS, Twitter) where bits are at a premium. Shortening services exist to provide the latter, not the former, and providing the former won't reduce demand for the latter.
A generation ship wouldn't just be an epic feat of engineering, it would be an epic feat of engineering that has no payoff for centuries (from the point of view of the population assigned to the ship, unless just being on the ship is a payoff for them) or millenia (from the point of view of the rest of the planet.) So, really, where is the huge investment going to come from? Epic engineering projects -- the Panama Canal, for instance -- do happen, but they happen because the people paying for them expect some substantial benefit that will start accruing in a reasonable time.
Just a "few advancements"? At the limits imposed by conservation of energy, a photon drive (of which a vacuum propeller is just a special case) requires on the order 300MW to produce 1N of thrust. So even if you had an outstandingly mass efficient nuclear plant with, say, a power-to-mass ratio of 1MW per metric ton (about what is projected by proponents of uranium hydride plants with a few more advancements), even if you ignore the mass of everything else on the ship (including the vacuum propellers, passengers, cargo, etc.) and the need to refuel the power plant, you could only acheive an acceleration of something like 3 microns per second^2, and would take on the order of 200 years to reach 0.001% of light speed (and cover only 0.1 light year of the 28 light year voyage in that time.)
We are far from being able to build anything that could make the journey in any reasonable time, whether considering the time from the perspective of anyone on the ship, or from the perspective of anyone on Earth.
Unsurprising, a bias to favor one class of witness over another by a broad general, status, rather than the particular individual circumstances and qualifications entered into evidence in the cas, if that class of witness is going to show up in the case, is a pretty big reason for disqualifying jurors.
The Republican Party was founded in 1854, and elected its first President in 1860. Given the most notable events of that first administration, I don't think the Republican Party's "founding principles" had much to do with "small, local government".
Please present a copy of the text of this "just generally leave us alone" original platform of the Republican Party. Because the earliest party platforms -- those of 1856 and 1860 -- I can find contains a call for building new infrastructure (a transcontinental railroad, river and harbor improvements, etc.) as a government priority, including a positive call for an expansive view of federal Constitutional authority to support that effort, and a call for strong federal regulation on certain contemporary areas of trade. Insofar as they contain "just generally leave us alone" provisions at all, they are in regard to the 1860 platforms declaration of the inviolability of State's rights to control its own domestic institutions, which certainly didn't seem to survive very long past 1860 as a core Republican principle.
Given the similar expansion and spending of the Reagan years, I have trouble understanding that. Unless you are suggesting that the intervening decade would have caused Republicans from that time to forget the 1980s.
What does NAMBLA have to do with anything? I can't imagine current Democrats supporting NAMBLA any more than I can imagine 1960s Democrats doing so (well, except that 1960s Democrats -- like 1960s Republicans -- wouldn't have a choice, since NAMBLA didn't exist.)
A more real change in the Democratic Party since the 1960s was a result of the Civil Rights movement, which drove a wedge between the conservative (and often segregationist) wing of the party and the rest of the party, which was exploited by Republicans with Nixon's Southern strategy and subsequent efforts, over time turning the South from a Democratic stronghold to a Republican one.
Well, no, because then you'd just use bigger flashlights.
The problem is that the power:thrust ratio, regardless of the scale of the light source, for a photon drive sucks, despite the great specific impulse. 300MW per Newton of thrust in the ideal case means you need some giant power source (and fuel for that power source) to power it, which kind of negates the advantages of not carrying reaction mass.
This seems to be a different mechanism that achieves essentially the same effect as a photon drive, so while the engineering might be different, the ideal physical limits seem like they would be the same.
Well, sure, differences in the engineering inefficiencies between the two might make the input energy different, the useful energy (before any engineering inefficiencies) requirement to generate a given thrust the same, and its a pretty huge one (~300MW/N). If photons are "running screaming back from your thruster", we know their velocity (photons not having many options in that regard), which tells us everything we need to know -- to wit, that in the ideal case for this is the same as an ideal photon drive.
If it didn't, it would violate conservation of momentum; the whole point is that it doesn't violate conservation of momentum, and that it is a momentum-transfer reaction drive that doesn't use internal reaction mass, instead, pushing back on something external to the moving craft.
The main error being the claim that it was ever a serious criticism; a myth that appears to have been created by erroneous 19th century writings about Columbus. By the time anyone Europeans were looking for better trade routes to China and the Indies, both that the Earth was round and its rough diameter had been established for many centuries, and in fact navigation at that time relied on those quite heavily.
The criticism of Columbus's idea that he could reach (and, after his first trip, that he had reached, a claim he maintained until he died) the (East, now) Indies more quickly and efficiently by sailing across the Atlantic concerned the distance involved, since Columbus's plans required the Earth to be much smaller than the size it was generally accepted to be.
One should note that, in fact, Columbus was wrong and the criticism based on the generally-accepted results that he was challenging was right.
You can trade off how much mass for how fast you toss it, with the limit case being a photon drive, which shoots out photons (very low mass, obviously, but naturally at the speed of light.) The input energy required for that is about 300MW per Newton of thrust (for comparison, the 3 Mile Island nuclear plant generates 800MW.) Since this is a momentum transfer drive -- and, hence, reaction drive -- it doesn't functionally change that, its just seems to be an alternative mechanism for acheiving the same effect as a photon drive. So, instead of pushing around lots of reaction mass, you've got to push around a giant power plant.
Unless you have an external energy source, you still are stuck doing essentially the same thing with this, in the form of whatever you are converting to energy to feed into it to transfer momentum to the quantum vacuum. Just like the case with a photon drive. Its an interesting mechanism, but its still a reaction (momentum-transfer) drive, and, as such, its going to still be limited by the conservation of energy.
OTOH, it might still be useful -- having alternatives to a photon drive at the limit case of reaction drives means that, while we haven't expanded the theoretical ideal performance, there are more opportunities for engineering efficiencies.
Note: I am not a physicist.
It seems superficially plausible.
Reactionless drives break conservation of momentum and conservation of energy, so a claim of one would be an extraordinary claim. However, this drive is not reactionless -- reactionless drives are not drives that feature no loss of mass, they are drives that feature no transfer of momentum. This is a no-mass-loss reaction drive, which would seem to be different in mechanism but not effect to a photon drive, subject to conservation of momentum and energy, and consequently requiring enormous input power for its thrust.
Since it is a momentum-transfer (hence, reaction) drive, it would seem to face the same constraints as any such drive imposed by conservation of energy, so in the ideal case, it would perform exactly the same as an ideal photon drive. Of course, engineering efficiencies might, in practice, favor one over the other, but even an ideal photon drives has an enormous input power to thrust ratio on the order of 300MW per Newton of thrust.
The main attraction of the idea of reactionless drives is that, since delta-V isn't limited by reaction mass, you can theoretically get arbitrarily close to C, presuming you can power the drive long enough. This doesn't necessarily mean "easily".
OTOH, this isn't a reactionless drive (which makes it less implausible, since such drives necessarily violate both conservation of momentum--obviously--and also the conservation of energy independent of reference frame, since they make changes in kinetic energy reference frame dependent), but a special kind of reaction drive since it involves transfer of (and preserves conservation of) momentum. Unless it still violates conservation of energy, it is still limited by conservation of energy, which means you'll still have to be able to generate usable energy at least equal to the change in kinetic energy you want to acheive, which even given the ability to convert matter directly into usable energy with 100% efficieny means to accelerate to 0.5c you'd need to convert 1/4 of the mass you were accelerating into energy to power the system.
This isn't only happening in Climate science. My wife works in Mollecular Biology and has told me dozens of stories about PHD's fudging their results so that they can maintain their grants. Big Gov't gives them money to prove certain things for them, so inevitably, they need to prove those things to keep getting the money.
This happens wherever people's livelihood depends on Government Grants.
Actually, it happens more generally where people's interests depend on money, attention, or validation from other people -- a certain percentage of people will, if they think they can get away with it, lie to get more money (whether its a promotion, keeping the job they have, or whatever), more attention, more prestige, or...
Government grants are no different than a private industry paycheck in this regard; do you seriously believe think scientists in industry don't fudge results to please those who supply their cash at least as much as scientists in academia seeking grants? And if you do believe that, on what basis?
Its also not even the same branch of science. Weather (which is studied by meteorologists) has about the same relation to climate (which is studied by climatologists) as psychology has to political science or economics, or particle physics has to geology.
Overcomplicated, in regard to a scientific model, means that there exists an actual, existing alternative model which is equally predictive and simpler.
Really? Where is the more parsimonious model that handles everything QM does?
IIRC, there are some important predictive differences between particles-as-waveforms and particles-as-classical-objects-with-difficult-to-determine-properties, and the former not the latter predicts behavior in the real world better. I'm certainly aware that QM is complicated enough to make people's brains hurt thinking about it, but I'm not at all convinced that the complication is unnecessary.
(1) Models don't support premises, they (if "premises" are relevant at all) flow from them. Models support predictions.
(2) Its not as important, scientifically speaking, that a model flow from a small set of premises as it is that it provide useful predictions. Complexity is only an issue in choosing between models that are equally predictive.
Actually, that's not necessarily true. If it was, in all cases equal to or worse than current models, it would certainly be ignored. If it was not as good as current models over all, but it was simpler and better predicted behavior in some area than current models, it would have a chance to be taken at least somewhat seriously as something which might be the basis of a viable alternative approach.
But, yes, if your new model is nothing but a giant step backward from where we are now in all ways accept simplicity, then its not going to fly. And why should it?
That's not a problem. What you are basically doing is complaining that our current models explain reality very well, so it is hard to come up with something radically different that explains reality better. But, you know, producing models that explain reality very well is the goal of science, not a problem with science.
Sure there is, which is why people work on, say, superstring theories, which haven't yet shown any predictive advantages over the theories they hope to generalize and displace.
$212,000 could buy you a not-insignificant quantity of commodity x86 hardware, and Ubuntu Server (probably not uniquely among server distros) already includes software (in the case of the one with Ubuntu Server, API-compatible with Amazone EC2) to run your own cloud.
Those arguing that science (and evolution and/or cosmological science particularly) demands atheism are not limited to backwoods preachers, or even the pro-religion side of the issue more generally. Consider, e.g., Richard Dawkins.
Not correct.
Yes, in fact, it makes at least one of them, and as I recall the nature of the problem probably both, wrong.
It doesn't mean they aren't the best available models within certain domains, which is what science is about more than "right" and "wrong". Recognizing wrong, though, is important to science, too: that some model is wrong is an indicator that there is a place where it may be productive to search for a better model, and what is known about how the model is wrong gives you a place to start looking.
I've seen him lauded for raising awareness of the issue. Like most popularizers, he's been criticized on the details by scientists, including those who support the broad consensus view on anthropogenic global warming. The Nobel Prize was the Peace Prize, not one of the scientific prizes.
In fact, plenty of them have, including those who support the point Gore was making in the speeches and video.
Or, more likely, just disable the affected virtual instances, and maybe all instances for the affected account (assuming that by violating the hosted instances security, the intruders gained full access to the account.) Only if they compromised EC2's own security to the extent of getting, essentially, administrative access to EC2, not just administrative access to a hosted instance, would the cloud itself be compromised.
Most likely, its because observational results that "cast critical doubt" often don't come with better models. Troubling results are the first step to producing better models, but until those are followed by actual better models, you don't displace the dominant model, instead, the dominant model remains dominant, with the problematic results noted.
This piece seems to have about the same grip on facts as most WSJ opinion pieces. Gallup polls over something like the last 25 years have found consistently about 45% of the US public believes in young earth creationism (specifically, that "God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.") Hard science is quite evidently not something that most untrained lay persons, at least int the US, accord "automatic stature and respect".
AFAICT, the "average person" hasn't been much influenced by the attempt to gin up a scandal over so-called "climategate". OTOH, in fact, there are quite a few groups pushing political agendas and calling it science, and the "average person" would be well served to be aware of that and engage in critical evaluation, rather than unquestioning acceptance, of things that are sold as science.
Insofar as their results causes problems for political, theological, or other beliefs that they hold, people already flat-out deny (not merely "doubt") the most rigorous science. (And Mathematics isn't a science, in the empirical sense.)
Really, Henningers article mostly isn't about the so-called "climategate" issue as it is about trying to argue (without quite saying) that public policy decisions must always be based on scientific certainty, that you can never take action on a sign of a problem without absolute, incontrovertible proof, denigrating as improper and "postmodern" the precautionary principle, the public policy (not even notionally scientific -- it addresses "should" not "is" issues) principle that where there is a plausible risk of extreme and irreversible harm of a particular policy action or inaction, the contrary course should be taken barring equally or more significant risks. (Interestingly, Henninger was also a big defender of the Iraq war and most of the Bush Administration's expansions of executive power and intrusions into civil liberties justified as necessary to mitigate the risk of potential future terrorism, whose notional justification was the same essential principle; critics generally didn't question the principle, but instead the plausibility of the risk justifying certain actions, whether the action plausibly mitigated the risk in others, and whether there were equally or more significant harms imposed by the mitigation than justified by the risk sought to be mitigated.)