What is the "best they can at their job" mean for an insurance company?
It means achieving excellence in raising prices and not paying claims while simultaneously limiting quantified regulatory and legal liability to an acceptable fraction of revenue.
I think US health insurance companies are very good at their jobs.
Tritium isn't the problem. The weapons were designed since the beginning for in-shop tritium replenishment already, removing helium and putting in more tritium.
The reliabliity problems are more subtle, such as neutron-induced brittlement and chemical reactions in some of the stuff of unspecified nature. NIF doens't help much with this either, they're more chemistry.
The NIF is mostly about calibrating the radiative transfer and thermodynamics used in simulation codes. This is all for the thermonuclear secondary (which is difficult fluid physics) as opposed to the tritium decaying in the fission primary.
"We've also sort of been spoiled by the previous success with fission power. The United States pored a massive amount of funding and resources into fission research from the beginning of the Manhattan project until a bit after World War 2. If fusion power was treated the same way we might be able to develop it quickly also. "
Fission worked right away because neutrons are neutral electrically, but nuclei aren't. Fusion did work pretty soon too, but you can only do it with a fission weapon.
Fusion power is hard because there are many 'near-collisions' which do not release nuclear energy because the minimum radius was not small enough, however, these collisions do contribute to increasing entropy and reducing the proportion of fast-moving nuclei which could generate power. Fission doesn't have this problem: shine neutrons on uranium, and you'll get fission.
So in a tokamak there are N thousand near-collisions for each fusion reaction, so it is a great challenge to keep all the energy inside the nuclei from leaking (as it wants to at every opportunity) before fusing.
The difficulty of controlled fusion power is intrinsic in the physics. We have plenty enough of R&D to know this.
We should concentrate on better fission plants and actinide burners to reduce the long-term waste. Of course the fission disaster at Fukushima is prompting people to do precisely the wrong thing which is NOT to replace less safe nuclear reactors or invest in long-term reprocessing. If it were like cars, it would be finding a flaw which caused the accident, and then refusing to fix any car in the field and shutting down the parts factory.
"climatology gravy train"? ?????????? Ha ha ha ha ha!
Have YOU ever tried to get a scientific grant? Or get a professor job at a research institution? Scientific research takes the largest amount of work and largest intrinsic skill compared to the reward of any professional vocation.
It's way way way way easier to spin some pseudo-BS and get a nice retainer from the crankiest right-wing-welfare organizations/
"Maybe the Earth's climate goes through cycles... nah, that's too crazy of an idea.."
yeah, and every single one of those cycles had specific physical causes. If technological civilization had been around, they would ahve figured out why.
We do have such knowledge and data now. We also know the specific cause, and we have ruled out all sorts of other causes.
You can't just say "whah it could be the purple flying monster effect" and "we don't know anything about climate", when the work of decades of scientists and the physical laws we know which predict successfully everything else we can measure about the planet say the same bleeping thing.
You need to show an alternative which has BETTER explanatory power and better empirical justification from measurements. Not just throw out "oh in the past climate changed" which is true, and the implication that if it's also changing now humans have no responsibility for it, which is preposterous.
It's like saying that because trees fell down in forests in the Jurassic, then a team of loggers with power saws can't be responsible for felling a forest grove, despite clear evidence from satellites that they were there, and they were using power tools, and the phsyics of the power tools has been discovered, and we measured the exhaust from the use of their power tools.
I.e. "Oh it could be a natural tree-falling-down-cycle!" is plainly idiotic. And this is EVERY BIT THE SAME as climate change denialism with our current state of knowledge.
The main problem is that Spencer and Christie have been wrong and made serious mistakes before about climate, not just biology. They previously published results from spacecraft data which purportedly showed much less warming than the ground stations, implying that the ground stations were contaminated by 'heat island' effects, etc etc.
Turned out that they were just plain wrong; they didn't apply the proper calibration for the satellite orbit. When this was done (not by the original authors unfortunately), the revised satellite data and ground station data showed consistent behavior and with results in agreement with mainstream climate change results (i.e. it's happening).
So it appears that Spencer now likes making intentional and difficuilt-to-find mistakes in order to push his anti global-warming position. The mainstream results have had far more cross-checks and internal consistency and external consistency. That's why they're correct.
There are a very small number of contrary scientists (the same ones, nearly always, Spencer, Christie, Lindzen) as opposed to thousands of others whose names you don't know.
it's a world of slaughter, a world of tears it's a world of dope, it's a world of fear there's so much that we hate don't get us too irate it's a small nuke after all
Yes. The original poster is describing mathematical equivalences. Since complex numbers happen to be so useful, humans have special notation for them which simplifies manipulations. Hermite, Pauli, Heisenberg and Dirac all knew about both matrices and complex numbers and used both.
They wouldn't bankrupt they U.S., they would make interest rates go up.
However, China couldn't maintain the peg of their currency with the dollar if they stopped buying bonds, and that peg keeps the business in their factories.
Remember, China buying all these bonds is a policy that China instituted for the benefit of China and against the long-term interests of the USA.
"And just because there are few published reports or incidents of the "West" retaliating doesn't mean there isn't massive preparation underway. If there isn't, it's due to incompetence. Waiting to show your hand is just a smart play in the game."
For five years? Seems to be 100% incompetence and lack of will.
"Apparently because Christians claim to be in a monotheistic religion, makes it so..."
Probably uniquely among any subjects, what believers in a religion believe the religion to be about does deserve to be considered authoritative descriptions of its beliefs.
One could from the outside mention observable practices which parallel other polytheistic religions (prayer to distinctly different physical representations) and those that do not (mythic stories in polytheistic pantheons frequently involved serious conflicts of opinion, intention, and will among gods, but this rarely heard of among branches of Christian trinity.)
"It is the best known bastion (and possibly the only one) in the fight against ipse-dixit-ism [wikipedia.org], a disease deeply embedded in human DNA."
[citation needed]
"Also, why so many people think here that real names are the answer, while in comments on articles about Google Plus debacle they correctly identify that policy as flawed?!?"
Because social networks are meant for private conversation and interaction, not public intellectual research. Real names are useful for somebody else's creepy marketing (at best).
They should do what legitimate encyclopedias once did: hire writers who actually know WTF they are talking about and editors who know how to manage.
For example, for one of the most famous editions of Encyclopedia Britannica, Albert Einstein wrote the article on relativity (and no doubt a professional editor helped with the English).
This goes against the naive "everybody is equal on the Internet so they should be equal on Wikipedia" BS. Of course it's not true on Wikpiedia either---the obsessive passive-aggressive deletionist nerds and pettifogging procedural bureaucrats practically run the place and this has little correlation with insight, but a huge correlation with pissing off more mature people who know the subject.
With good editors then academics can get "publication credit" for writing and editing articles.
No, the scroll bars are a proxy of "where the display is relative to the document", it is a one-step-cognitively-removed representation.
When you "pull" on the graphics/text you are manipulating the document as a physical thing. When you pull on the scroll bar you are manipulating a controller which is itself a machine which moves the document on the screen. That physical analogy is unnatural.
Really, we need a physical "spinner knob" on our devices---that's the most natural. But it's hard to manufacture and the phone won't fit in a sleek case.
"Promoting deeper research and understanding is best done with subject-based methods. E.g. the way libraries are organized, Library of Congress cataloguing system, etc.
Problem is, AI is nowhere near good enough to do that yet. So you need to hire humans, lots of humans, to actually think about the information. "
This is not true. Automatic document-topic induction techniques (look up Latent Dirichlet Allocation, for example) are fairly sophisticated these days. It's not strong AI, but it does human-useful soft-clustering from text alone in a way quite useful for search. Roughly it attempts to figure out the intrinsic subject(s) of your search.
It means that you can search for documents using keywords A,B,C and it can return documents which have none of those words and yet are likely to be related because they share many words with the set of documents which tend to have A,B,C frequently. A search engine can also remember recent searches in a session whose desired topics are likely to be correlated.
All the search companies use close to state of the art versions of these methods.
(Google is finding that good weak AI combined with Big Data can do remarkable things --- statistical language translation is much better than I expected, and that's substantially harder than document clustering).
"Google is now as bad as Yahoo was when Google appeared on the scene - people have bought 'words' searches in Google no longer are accurate to what I search for."
Unless google is selling search words (which I think they aren't---ads are still on the right side), this is a consequence of the site owners getting much more sophisticated about gaming the system.
If it had 1999 level Altavista or Yahoo technology (i.e. look for pages and links which have words similar to the ones being searched for), the first 20 pages of any search would all be commercial searchspam & linkfarms.
This is a hostile technological war---the searchees are attempting to trick the searcher.
In this, no doubt Google has quite a bit of proprietary experience on how to deal with this problem which most startups wouldn't---and this requires deep statistical analysis over immense data. This problem also greatly increases the investment necessary to have a good search engine today vs the previous decade.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the "best they can at their job" mean for an insurance company?
It means achieving excellence in raising prices and not paying claims while simultaneously limiting quantified regulatory and legal liability to an acceptable fraction of revenue.
I think US health insurance companies are very good at their jobs.
Tritium isn't the problem. The weapons were designed since the beginning for in-shop tritium replenishment already, removing helium and putting in more tritium.
The reliabliity problems are more subtle, such as neutron-induced brittlement and chemical reactions in some of the stuff of unspecified nature. NIF doens't help much with this either, they're more chemistry.
The NIF is mostly about calibrating the radiative transfer and thermodynamics used in simulation codes. This is all for the thermonuclear secondary (which is difficult fluid physics) as opposed to the tritium decaying in the fission primary.
"We've also sort of been spoiled by the previous success with fission power. The United States pored a massive amount of funding and resources into fission research from the beginning of the Manhattan project until a bit after World War 2. If fusion power was treated the same way we might be able to develop it quickly also. "
Fission worked right away because neutrons are neutral electrically, but nuclei aren't. Fusion did work pretty soon too, but you can only do it with a fission weapon.
Fusion power is hard because there are many 'near-collisions' which do not release nuclear energy because the minimum radius was not small enough, however, these collisions do contribute to increasing entropy and reducing the proportion of fast-moving nuclei which could generate power. Fission doesn't have this problem: shine neutrons on uranium, and you'll get fission.
So in a tokamak there are N thousand near-collisions for each fusion reaction, so it is a great challenge to keep all the energy inside the nuclei from leaking (as it wants to at every opportunity) before fusing.
The difficulty of controlled fusion power is intrinsic in the physics. We have plenty enough of R&D to know this.
We should concentrate on better fission plants and actinide burners to reduce the long-term waste. Of course the fission disaster at Fukushima is prompting people to do precisely the wrong thing which is NOT to replace less safe nuclear reactors or invest in long-term reprocessing. If it were like cars, it would be finding a flaw which caused the accident, and then refusing to fix any car in the field and shutting down the parts factory.
"climatology gravy train"? ?????????? Ha ha ha ha ha!
Have YOU ever tried to get a scientific grant? Or get a professor job at a research institution? Scientific research takes the largest amount of work and largest intrinsic skill compared to the reward of any professional vocation.
It's way way way way easier to spin some pseudo-BS and get a nice retainer from the crankiest right-wing-welfare organizations/
"Maybe the Earth's climate goes through cycles... nah, that's too crazy of an idea.."
yeah, and every single one of those cycles had specific physical causes. If technological civilization had been around, they would ahve figured out why.
We do have such knowledge and data now. We also know the specific cause, and we have ruled out all sorts of other causes.
You can't just say "whah it could be the purple flying monster effect" and "we don't know anything about climate", when the work of decades of scientists and the physical laws we know which predict successfully everything else we can measure about the planet say the same bleeping thing.
You need to show an alternative which has BETTER explanatory power and better empirical justification from measurements. Not just throw out "oh in the past climate changed" which is true, and the implication that if it's also changing now humans have no responsibility for it, which is preposterous.
It's like saying that because trees fell down in forests in the Jurassic, then a team of loggers with power saws can't be responsible for felling a forest grove, despite clear evidence from satellites that they were there, and they were using power tools, and the phsyics of the power tools has been discovered, and we measured the exhaust from the use of their power tools.
I.e. "Oh it could be a natural tree-falling-down-cycle!" is plainly idiotic. And this is EVERY BIT THE SAME as climate change denialism with our current state of knowledge.
The main problem is that Spencer and Christie have been wrong and made serious mistakes before about climate, not just biology. They previously published results from spacecraft data which purportedly showed much less warming than the ground stations, implying that the ground stations were contaminated by 'heat island' effects, etc etc.
Turned out that they were just plain wrong; they didn't apply the proper calibration for the satellite orbit. When this was done (not by the original authors unfortunately), the revised satellite data and ground station data showed consistent behavior and with results in agreement with mainstream climate change results (i.e. it's happening).
So it appears that Spencer now likes making intentional and difficuilt-to-find mistakes in order to push his anti global-warming position. The mainstream results have had far more cross-checks and internal consistency and external consistency. That's why they're correct.
There are a very small number of contrary scientists (the same ones, nearly always, Spencer, Christie, Lindzen) as opposed to thousands of others whose names you don't know.
Funny, I saw a film with Al Gore that had scientific graphs in it and explanations using the laws of physics.
just a few localization modifications needed
it's a world of slaughter, a world of tears
it's a world of dope, it's a world of fear
there's so much that we hate
don't get us too irate
it's a small nuke after all
"open the pod-bay doors! open the pod-bay doors! Crap. Stupid ISS doesn't speak Chinese."
I hear Somalia and Afghanistan will be launching their 100% infidel-free capsule any millennium now.
spammers are competitors to Google's paying clients
"Am I missing something ?"
Yes. The original poster is describing mathematical equivalences. Since complex numbers happen to be so useful, humans have special notation for them which simplifies manipulations. Hermite, Pauli, Heisenberg and Dirac all knew about both matrices and complex numbers and used both.
a) extremely good trainers & dieticians making food for them.
b) very hot young girlfriends.
c) a much better win/loss record than political leaders
Sometimes the selection is random. Sometimes it is not. But it always called "random".
They wouldn't bankrupt they U.S., they would make interest rates go up.
However, China couldn't maintain the peg of their currency with the dollar if they stopped buying bonds, and that peg keeps the business in their factories.
Remember, China buying all these bonds is a policy that China instituted for the benefit of China and against the long-term interests of the USA.
"And just because there are few published reports or incidents of the "West" retaliating doesn't mean there isn't massive preparation underway. If there isn't, it's due to incompetence. Waiting to show your hand is just a smart play in the game."
For five years? Seems to be 100% incompetence and lack of will.
"Apparently because Christians claim to be in a monotheistic religion, makes it so..."
Probably uniquely among any subjects, what believers in a religion believe the religion to be about does deserve to be considered authoritative descriptions of its beliefs.
One could from the outside mention observable practices which parallel other polytheistic religions (prayer to distinctly different physical representations) and those that do not (mythic stories in polytheistic pantheons frequently involved serious conflicts of opinion, intention, and will among gods, but this rarely heard of among branches of Christian trinity.)
"It is the best known bastion (and possibly the only one) in the fight against ipse-dixit-ism [wikipedia.org], a disease deeply embedded in human DNA."
[citation needed]
"Also, why so many people think here that real names are the answer, while in comments on articles about Google Plus debacle they correctly identify that policy as flawed?!?"
Because social networks are meant for private conversation and interaction, not public intellectual research. Real names are useful for somebody else's creepy marketing (at best).
They should do what legitimate encyclopedias once did: hire writers who actually know WTF they are talking about and editors who know how to manage.
For example, for one of the most famous editions of Encyclopedia Britannica, Albert Einstein wrote the article on relativity (and no doubt a professional editor helped with the English).
This goes against the naive "everybody is equal on the Internet so they should be equal on Wikipedia" BS. Of course it's not true on Wikpiedia either---the obsessive passive-aggressive deletionist nerds and pettifogging procedural bureaucrats practically run the place and this has little correlation with insight, but a huge correlation with pissing off more mature people who know the subject.
With good editors then academics can get "publication credit" for writing and editing articles.
No, the scroll bars are a proxy of "where the display is relative to the document", it is a one-step-cognitively-removed representation.
When you "pull" on the graphics/text you are manipulating the document as a physical thing. When you pull on the scroll bar you are manipulating a controller which is itself a machine which moves the document on the screen. That physical analogy is unnatural.
What would be natural?
Now, *these* are *real* scroll bars:
http://www.earlychurchofjesus.org/images2/torah%20book%202.jpg
Really, we need a physical "spinner knob" on our devices---that's the most natural. But it's hard to manufacture and the phone won't fit in a sleek case.
To Wall Street what matters is whether when they merge the same software will be sold on them. The top-level UI does matter.
The degradation is because of the creation of sophisticated site spam designed by clever and hostile parties.
Google's algorithms today on 1999's web would be exceptionally good.
"Promoting deeper research and understanding is best done with subject-based methods. E.g. the way libraries are organized, Library of Congress cataloguing system, etc.
Problem is, AI is nowhere near good enough to do that yet. So you need to hire humans, lots of humans, to actually think about the information. "
This is not true. Automatic document-topic induction techniques (look up Latent Dirichlet Allocation, for example) are fairly sophisticated these days. It's not strong AI, but it does human-useful soft-clustering from text alone in a way quite useful for search. Roughly it attempts to figure out the intrinsic subject(s) of your search.
It means that you can search for documents using keywords A,B,C and it can return documents which have none of those words and yet are likely to be related because they share many words with the set of documents which tend to have A,B,C frequently. A search engine can also remember recent searches in a session whose desired topics are likely to be correlated.
All the search companies use close to state of the art versions of these methods.
(Google is finding that good weak AI combined with Big Data can do remarkable things --- statistical language translation is much better than I expected, and that's substantially harder than document clustering).
"Google is now as bad as Yahoo was when Google appeared on the scene - people have bought 'words' searches in Google no longer are accurate to what I search for."
Unless google is selling search words (which I think they aren't---ads are still on the right side), this is a consequence of the site owners getting much more sophisticated about gaming the system.
If it had 1999 level Altavista or Yahoo technology (i.e. look for pages and links which have words similar to the ones being searched for), the first 20 pages of any search would all be commercial searchspam & linkfarms.
This is a hostile technological war---the searchees are attempting to trick the searcher.
In this, no doubt Google has quite a bit of proprietary experience on how to deal with this problem which most startups wouldn't---and this requires deep statistical analysis over immense data. This problem also greatly increases the investment necessary to have a good search engine today vs the previous decade.
"Need your clothes, boots and and foreskin."
"You forgot to say L'chaim!"