Not quite. Because fusion reactors will contain mostly light elements, the waste produced will be almost all relatively short-lived (decades or years or less, not centuries). This is a huge benefit over fission, which necessarily creates a great deal of long-lived waste simply by virtue of neutron irradiation of heavy elements.

I do agree that fission (today) and fusion (in the future) are far better alternatives to base-load coal than anything else going, and get frustrated no end with self-proclaimed "environmentalists" who will do anything--absolutely anything--to stave off climate change except admit they were wrong about the risk-reward proposition on nuclear back in the '70's.

Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and Bayesian inference. The last one is important, because Bayesian inference never "proves" or "disproves" anything in the Cartesian (or Poperian) sense of those terms. It instead increases or decreases the plausibility of propositions.

At best, "proof" and "disproof" are convenience terms that mean "overwhelmingly plausible with no alternative that has remotely similar plausibility" and "hugely implausible regardless of alternatives."

The asymmetry that Popper pointed out still exists on the Bayesian view: an extremely plausible idea may turn out to be in competition with unknown alternative ideas (think Newtonian gravity vs General Relativity) that are incrementally more plausible. Newtonian gravity (in its modified form) is still fairly plausible (although I don't think anyone really accepts it is better than GR), unlike, say, phlogiston theory, which is utterly implausible.

This is important because it means we don't have to accept the "most plausible" idea as "true"--the Bayesian standard of plausibility is absolute, not relative. It just never reaches a value of 1.0, only 1 - epsilon (or conversely epsilon for a maximally implausible idea.)

Bayesianism is compatible with "I don't know" as an answer when all current ideas have very low plausibility, and with "This is good enough for going on with" when one idea alone has high absolute plausibility, and "Could be this or that" when two or more ideas have similarly high plausibilities.

Not exactly. One thing missing from the popular discussions of this question is why we believe that isotope ratios necessarily vary across all larger bodies in the solar system.

It is true that measurements on meteorites show different ratios from what we see on Earth, but no particular conclusion can be drawn from that. It certainly does not follow from "None of the people I measure are the same height" that "No two people anywhere are the same height", so it would be bizarre in the extreme to go from a sample of fairly odd, mostly non-planetary, space rocks to a sweeping generalization about what is necessarily the case across the whole solar system. There may be some theoretical reason for believing this to be the case, but I've never seen it mentioned in any of the articles on this subject.

Furthermore, Theia has a very, very special property: its orbit intersected that of Earth's almost instantly after its formation. This is not the case with meteors, which have been wandering the solar system for more than four billion years, and therefore likely formed in very distant regions. Theia almost by necessity formed in a similar orbit to that of Earth. We know this, because only a body that formed in a similar orbit would likely find itself in a collision with Earth almost immediately after formation.

None of this "proves" or "disproves" anything, mind, because we're talking about knowledge here, not faith. Knowledge is by its nature uncertain, and the quest for certainty is simply an error pursued by pre-scientific peoples (philosophers), no different from the alchemical pursuit of transmutation of base metals into gold, or attempts to build perpetual motion machines, or attempts to trisect angles with nothing but straight-edge and compass.

Which raises the burning question: why is anyone reporting user feelings rather than actual data to /.? It's the 21st century... surely by now everyone on here knows that how people feel and what is actually going on are almost completely decoupled.

Some people "feel" that wifi is interfering with their qi, even though the data show that no such effect occurs (that is, no one is able to tell if wifi signals are turned on based on such feelings.)

Ten years ago a surgeon I know worked on a study of post-operative pain in people with knee implants to see if different implants made a difference to patient outcome. While there were some objective measures (range of motion, etc) that showed a correlation with a suspect implant, simply asking patients about pain revealed only one thing: how much they liked their surgeon.

Psychology literature is full of things like this: it is an uncontroversial fact that what we feel is a lousy indicator of anything except our own internal state. Feelings are facts. They are just facts about us. While sometimes facts about us are important, they are a terrible gauge of anything else. Reporting feelings as if they were relevant to the actual edge a player has is exactly like saying, "My brother and my cousin--both big into gaming--use PC-style controls with their Xbox because the are both six feet tall, so they say this gives them an edge over users of the Xbox controller". "Being six feet tall" is a fact about them, just like "feeling it gives them an edge" is a fact about them. It is not a fact about the rest of the world (that is, their actual performance).

I'm being long-winded and pedantic about this (because hey, this is /.) but the parent was such a nice example of this extremely common failure mode in human thinking (confusing facts about ourselves with facts about the rest of reality) that it was too good an opportunity to pass up. That's how I feel about it, anyway...

That statement is false. Quantum mechanics deals explicitly with "identical particles", which are particles that are literally indistinguishable from each other, but are not the same particle. This is an empirically demonstrable violation of the principle of "identity of indiscernibles", which states that if two things are indiscernible any means whatsoever, even in principle, they are the same thing. Even though we have known this principle to be false for almost a century, philosophers still take it seriously for some reason.

There is a relatively simple proof that atoms of the same kind are indiscernible. The heat capacity of solids is a measure of how much the temperature goes up as you add energy to a block of material. The temperature is just the average energy per vibrational mode of the crystal lattice. The number of vibrational modes is intimately linked to the number of distinguisable particles in the crystal. N distinguishable particles have a different number of modes than N indistinguishable particles, so crystals will have a different heat capacity depending on which situation actually obtains.

This can be seen by considering a pair of distinguishable coiins vs a pair of indistinguishable coins. If we have two coins that are distinguished by the labels A and B, we have four ways of arranging them by which face is showing (H for heads, T for tails): AH/BH, AT/BH, AH/BH, AT/BT. If they are not distinguishable we only have three states: H/H, H/T, T/T because there is no way to distinguish AT/BH from AH/BT when we remove the labels.

So by a simple macroscopic measurements like the heat capacity of crystalline solids we can prove positively and directly by experiment that atoms of the same kind are in fact indistinguishable, and that the principle of the identity of indiscernibles is false. It is not false "for quantum particles" but false, absolutely--it just happens that quantum particles are the only case we know of where different particles are genuinely indiscernible from each other. But there is no limited domain of application to this result, and philosopher's attempts to treat it as somehow restrictive to the quantum domain are simply misguided (it turns out that the identity of indiscernibles being false makes nonsense of a bunch of other things philosophers want badly to believe, not least of which is how utterly useless the human imagination is in deciding what is and is not true of the world.)

Except, of course, you are commenting on an article that is very literally about scientists "looking beyond" what has been theorized.

Perhaps you mean instead that scientists are rarely given to baseless imaginings that violate current theory when they have no empirical basis for doing so. That is a good thing: people who attempt to understand the world by using their imaginings of how it might be or ought to be as their primary tool are called "philosophers", and they have failed to materially advance our understanding of the world significantly over thousands and thousands of years.

There is a reason for this: despite its many virtues, the human imagination is a terrible instrument of understanding. The world simply does not work in the ways we find it easy to imagine, and we find it hard to image the ways it does. We are incapable of imaging things the way they actually are (quantum spooky actions at a distance) and capable of imagining things that are impossible (perpetual motion machines, flying horses, etc.)

So it isn't a problem that scientists are reticent about using a tool that has proven to be lousy to understand the world. It is a problem that people who know nothing about science keep complaining about that.

Also, don't forget the ever-popular, "Scientists are flip-floppers who can't make up their minds, while my ancient religion is always the same, century after century!"

The same strain runs through all of these: the implication that scientists should feel humiliated because what they thought to be highly plausible has turned out to be much less so. So long as people believe this--that being a good Bayesian and adjusting your beliefs in the face of new evidence is somehow shameful and "unmanly"--we will be stuck in this mire of evidence-free policy-making and anti-science gibberish on all sides.

Actually, I do. It's called my arms.

I really wish people would stop using "brain controlled" for "brain plus millions of dollars of specialized machinery to replace your arms controlled". Saying something is "brain controlled" tells us nothing--it's like calling heavier-than-air flight "massive flight", or fixed-wing aircraft "aerofoil flight". The terminology does nothing to differentiate one thing from another.

While this may seem like a trivially pedantic cavil, it has been my experience that terminology that differentiates on the basis of non-essentials very often ends up misleading laypeople. There is already a robust mythology of disembodied brains as viable objects of philosophic consideration (really) this kind of sloppy language is at the very least not helping.

So can we please start calling these "arms free controllers" or similar, and acknowledge that there is always a brain involved? We're replacing the interface, not introducing a brain. It's like calling a touch-screen machine a "CPU controlled computer" because it lacks a keyboard.

Which has nothing at all to do with computability.

We are not Turing machines. This is obvious. Turing machines don't have I/O. Turing machines don't have sensors or effectors. We do.

We can and do interact with the world in ways that Turing machines do not, and those interactions are a fundamental aspect of our intelligence.

This means that we can compute things that Turing machines can't. If we coupled a Turing machine to senors and effectors (that is, built a robot) it would have the potential to be as intelligent as we are, but it would no longer be a Turing machine and would be able to reach conclusions about non-computable problems, just as we can.

Turing computability is one very, very limited aspect of intelligence. Interaction with the world is at least as important.

The thing that all these finger-wagging missives fail to take into account is that masculinity, like femininity, is a social construct. There are underlying biological differences between the male and female populations, but there are also broad distributions of individual characteristics, and the gender binary model attempts to impose a crisp, discontinuous division between "masculine" and "feminine".

In doing so, it does violence to anyone who fails to fit very well with the nominal masculine or feminine ideals of the society they happen to find themselves in.

The feminist movement has done a reasonably good job, more-or-less, in pointing out how these forces operate to shape women's lives.

We have done a lousy job of appreciating that the same kinds of forces shape men's lives as well, so we get these ridiculous claims that individual men are creatures of perfect agency, utterly unaffected by the social forces that are attempting to bludgeon them into good little emotionless soldiers (or whatever your society's favoured model of masculinity is at the moment). Telling profoundly damaged, struggling individuals to "stop whining" and so on is the opposite of what they need. They need to be told: "I feel you pain, but I hate your behaviour..."

The utter lack of compassion for men, and the complete lack of awareness of how the social construction of masculinity affects them, is one of the most depressing things about the current discourse on these issues.

None of this excuses individuals who behave badly, but if we want men to get better, we have to stop failing them as completely and systematically as we are now. We have to start valuing their lives, their experiences, their reality, rather than simply hitting them harder with various real and rhetorical hammers when they refuse to fit into the socially constructed masculine role that has been prepared for them.

With emphasis on "slightly". This is a nice piece of work, particularly because it is constructive--it both demonstrates the phenomenon and gives us some idea of how to replicate it. But there is nothing very surprising about demonstrating "non-linear classifiers behave non-linearly."

Everyone who has worked with neural networks has been aware of this from the beginning, and in a way this result is almost a relief: it demonstrates for the first time a phenomenon that most of us were suspicious would be lurking in there somewhere.

The really interesting question is: how dense are the blind spots relative to the correct classification volume? And how big are they? If the blind spots are small and scattered then this will have little practical effect on computer vision (as opposed to image processing) because a simple continuity-of-classification criterion will smooth over them.

Proofing my novel (344 pages) would have cost $1800 in Canada through a reputable service. I've talked to editors who charge around $1500 and up turning your book into something publishable. That's somewhat less than you're suggesting.

I agree many people are ill-equipped to deal with the costs and skills required for independent publishing... but those same people are also incapable of getting published traditionally.

The distribution looks like this:

|A|aaaaaaaaaa|bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb....

where:

A = traditionally published authors
a = people with the skills/resources to be successful indie authors
b = everyone else

Obviously b >> a, but equally obviously, a >> A.

When focusing only on the undoubted fact that b is a huge population of incompetents, it is important not to lose sight of the equally certain fact that there are many competent, inspired, creative people in the "a" population who for various reasons can't get a leg up in the traditional publishing world.

The question is, "If we have to, are we willing to ditch A for a?"

Personally, I am. I don't think the world would be a poorer place on net if the Charles Stosses of the world had to go back to ditch digging while ten times their number became successful indie author/publishers.

Or they need to learn to do it themselves, most of which is not too difficult.

My recent book (DRM free on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...) cost me $200 to produce (assuming my time is worth nothing), which went to pay for the cover art.

If I had wanted to pay an editor it would have cost around $1500--I looked into this, but decided to play with a combination of early-reader feedback (I have a number of friends whom I trust to tell me when things are crap, and believe me, they did), mechanical editing based on research-grade natural-language processing tools, and semi-automated proofreading (which I wrote my own code for using a variety of heuristics tailored to the kinds of errors I'm particularly prone to making.)

I'm sure there are typos and minor grammar issues remaining, but at a level that is not materially worse than many professionally edited books. And this was a first-pass at this method. I'm sure that with more work the process of editing and proof-reading can be much more highly automated, although nothing short of a full AI will be able to replace first readers for basic feedback.

As to design and layout, anyone with a reasonable level of HTML, CSS and LaTeX experience should be able to produce a decent-looking ebook or print book. There are tricks, but it's not rocket science.

We are in the early days of indie publishing, and things are only going to get better as we automate more processes and lower barriers between authors and readers. There is nothing today stopping a writer from producing a professional-quality book with minimal resources, and that's a good thing.

Exactly. Stoss is, after all, the author of, "A Score is not an Album", or something equally limited in it's perspective. He apparently believes that there is no indie music, because musicians are not capable of doing all the things that labels do.

While I'm perfectly willing to believe that Charles Stoss is incapable of doing all the things that are required to make an indie author successful--hire or otherwise collaborate with a decent, professional editor, learn or hire out for design and production, pursue marketing opportunities, etc--the claim that no one has those capabilities is obviously absurd.

There will be plenty of books to read in the glorious future... it just won't be Charles Stoss writing them. While that sucks for him, it isn't clear that his product is of a sufficiently novel and irreplaceable kind that anyone will miss him more than they will appreciate the indie authors who would otherwise be shut out by the traditional publishing industry.

He fails particularly on the claim that this process will end by "leaving just Amazon as a monopoly distribution channel retailing the output of an atomized cloud of highly vulnerable self-employed piece-workers like myself."

There was this clever guy who once pointed out the "contradictions in capitalism" who suggested that situations like this were unstable. There was another guy--possibly more clever, as he didn't think world-wide revolution was required to resolve them--who even coined a term for what happens when such an unsatisfactory situation arises: "creative destruction".

Amazon will no-doubt try to build and maintain a monopoly, but already there is an indie ecosystem that is reacting to that and working to create alternative quality and delivery systems. It is still in its infancy, but Amazon is going to lose in the end, because they can't control the delivery process. At worst they will become the iTunes of books: influential, but hardly all-powerful.

This is not strictly true, at least with respect to publishing. Amazon owns CreateSpace, which is a publisher. As such, it is in direct competition with other publishers, or soon will be.

CreateSpace is currently aimed at the indie/print-on-demand market (for example: https://www.createspace.com/47...) but Amazon has expressed an interest in branching out into mainstream publication.

As such, it is positioned to dominate the publishing and distribution vertical completely, and people are worried about this, for good or ill. This story is less about what Amazon is doing today than what they might do tomorrow.

Personally, as an independent author/publisher I'm not too worried: the more restrictive Amazon becomes the more they set up the conditions of their own demise, because they have no way of effectively erecting barriers to entry in the publishing business, particularly in e-books.

No one will be able to make any money at it, but for authors writing hasn't been about money for decades, so this won't change anything except the viability of traditional publishing.