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Comment Re:Small-scale, real-time. (Score 1) 502

The Daily Fail readers will be annoyed with anything that the paper tells them is annoying. If they claim that aliens are lurking in alleyways and eating cats, that is what that demographic will be annoyed with. Their readership is so gullible and stupid that they will believe anything as long as the article has as many pictures as it has words.

Comment Re:String theory is voodoo physics (Score 4, Informative) 259

The theory of relativity wasn't testable when it was first proposed. Part of the reason Einstein never got a nobel for it was that it wasn't until the 1970's that there was real firm experimental evidence for it.

There's a distinction between something that can never be tested and something that can't be tested now due to technological limitations.

You mean the observations Eddington took in 1919 confirming light bending in accordance with predictions by general relativity didn't take place? From the Wikipedia entry:

"Eddington's observations published the next year[5] confirmed Einstein's theory, and were hailed at the time as a conclusive proof of general relativity over the Newtonian model."

Also, relativity made a number of testable predictions. From the wiki page on the theory of relativity:

"The predictions of special relativity have been confirmed in numerous tests since Einstein published his paper in 1905, but three experiments conducted between 1881 and 1938 were critical to its validation. These are the Michelson–Morley experiment, the Kennedy–Thorndike experiment, and the Ives–Stilwell experiment. Einstein derived the Lorentz transformations from first principles in 1905, but these three experiments allow the transformations to be induced from experimental evidence."

Obviously the testing of the theory still continues as we gather more data from around the universe, but to say there wasn't firm experimental evidence until the 1970s isn't correct.

Until string theory makes some testable predictions it's just mathematical and philosophical wanking.

Comment Re: Coincidence (Score 2) 387

There is some logic behind

A Russian scientist turned wild foxes into cute puppies in about 10 generations by breeding for lower adrenaline levels

Not necessarily adrenaline levels, but that may have been the way it worked out. All they bred for was aggression, the more aggressive foxes were not allowed to breed. This resulted in a tamer fox, but also a lot of other traits that we associate with dogs (juvenilization, coloration patterns, vocalization, etc). Just selecting for one thing can have a profound effect on the species.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Comment Re:Perfectly fair (Score 1) 25

'Major sponsors include Ford, General Motors, IMRA, Michigan Engineering, NYK, Qatar Airways and Siemens PLM Software.'

Why is that unfair? Other teams are permitted to get sponsors. It's their problem if they can't recruit good sponsors. Plus most of those companies hire Michigan engineering graduates so why wouldn't they sponsor the students they are likely to hire?

Sure, I think they should be able to get as much money as they want from sponsors. However, the article made it sound like they were getting engineering help from their sponsors. This is supposed to be a student competition, not a professional contest. In this case, the team that won didn't even build their car, they just drove a car built by previous students and sponsors. I guess they drove it competently, but in an engineering competition I would like to see more engineering on the part of the participants.

Comment Re:Figures it would not be the US (Score 2) 190

Except for the fact that it was the vehicle trials which occurred in the US (california, nevada), trials that demonstrated the safety of these vehicles and which have caused the UK to fully allow them on the roads in Jan 2014, rather than their initial plans for trials to occur by the end of 2013. While the article does not explicitly state this to be the reason for the change, I believe it to be a fair presumption that the 300,000 miles google's cars have driven in Califonia were taken into consideration.

Trials are different than allowing manufacturers to sell driverless cars or allowing the general public to drive them. Even the Nevada law just instructs the DOT to set safety standards for driverless cars, which they have not yet completed. That also doesn't address insurance, which all cars in the US are required to have to drive on public roads. If the insurance companies won't insure the cars because of the litigation-happy Americans, the only way to drive such a car would be to underwrite the insurance yourself (which generally involves posting a large bond).

Comment Figures it would not be the US (Score 1, Interesting) 190

Obviously the US will not have this for some time ("Oh my god, somebody might sue!"), it's nice to see at least some countries see the advantage of cars that can drive themselves better than humans can drive them, even if the self-driving cars are not perfect. I would expect initially they would require a licensed driver behind the wheel, at least until the technology has proven itself.

Comment Re:The only good thing (Score 4, Insightful) 511

I was taught that using marijuana leads to heroin use. When you see many people around you that do not adhere to that model, you start disregarding the information as BS. After realizing how ridiculous some of the information presented about drugs was, I disregarded it all, so it actually backfired. The purpose of drug programs should be to inform students of the real consequences of drug use, not to make up horror stories to scare students.

Comment Re:Ban caffeine! (Score 4, Insightful) 511

The whole notion of a "gateway drug" is the misconception that correlation implies causation. Just because someone used caffiene, nicotine, alcohol, or marijuana before moving on to more powerful drugs does not mean that they caused the use of more powerful drugs. You could ban all of those drugs, and some other drug would become the first one users try.

Submission + - Why are the world's scientists continuing to take chances with smallpox? (thebulletin.org)

Lasrick writes: MIT's Jeanne Guillemin looks at the recent blunders with smallpox and H5N1 at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health to chronicle the fascinating history of smallpox eradication efforts and the attempts (thwarted by Western scientists) to destroy lab collections of the virus in order to make it truly extinct. 'In 1986, with no new smallpox cases reported, the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the WHO, resolved to destroy the strain collections and make the virus extinct. But there was resistance to this; American scientists in particular wanted to continue their research.' Within a few years, secret biological warfare programs were discovered in Moscow and in Iraq, and a new flurry of defensive research was funded. Nevertheless, Guillemin and others believe that changes in research methods, which no longer require the use of live viruses, mean that stocks of the live smallpox virus can and should finally be destroyed.

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