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Comment Re:i question the wisdom of this (Score 4, Interesting) 100

The main cost here is spare parts storage - something you need to have anyway. Replacting some storage space with a very expencive 3D printer (you really thought they want to use a 300$ one? think again) makes no sense, you get lower quality parts and making them takes longer than it would take for you to get the parts from storage.

The military is considering the logistics of access to storage in a battle. It may be considerably cheaper to take a 3D printer and some material to the front than backups of all your parts. I recall reading somewhere that warships tended to carry 3 replacement parts for everything. Since you never know what's going to break you have to carry much more than necessary. A 3D printer should require much less mass and storage since you only need material for the things that actually break, instead of material for everything that might break. The costs of moving backup lenses in hundreds of styles around a battlefield may make 3D printing them more economically viable.

Comment Re:Question and answer (Score 4, Informative) 189

Did you look at any of the links returned by your search? The first one is about the return of amateur science. The second is your post. The 3rd is about a novel. The fourth is an explanation of how transistors work. The fifth is a blog about the importance of science. The sixth is actually a list of amateur scientist that changed the world (kind of the exact opposite you were going for). I did not see any links explaining why I should be wary of armchair scientists. Anyone can follow the scientific method.

Posting search results is a bad idea for a source. For starters, Google tailors search results to a great number of things including IP address. In other words, Google won't necessarily return the same results for me as it does for you. Another reason it's a bad idea, is you're not really providing a source. You're simply claiming something and then telling us to look it up if we don't believe you.

Mendel and Faraday were amateurs whose work we still use and teach today. From your results I learned a little factoid. One amateur scientist liked to collect sea shells and wound up discovering several dinosaurs. She became someone known for selling her sea shells which is the source of the tongue twister. She sells sea shells by the sea shore...

Science is science. It makes little difference whether it comes from authority or not. If the science is good then it's good. If not, it's not. To argue that amateur scientist 'suck' is kind of an argument from authority and generally considered a logical fallacy.

Submission + - Computers Learning from Experience? (nytimes.com)

schwit1 writes: Computers have entered the age when they are able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the digital world on its head.

The first commercial version of the new kind of computer chip is scheduled to be released in 2014. Not only can it automate tasks that now require painstaking programming — for example, moving a robot’s arm smoothly and efficiently — but it can also sidestep and even tolerate errors, potentially making the term “computer crash” obsolete.

The new computing approach, already in use by some large technology companies, is based on the biological nervous system, specifically on how neurons react to stimuli and connect with other neurons to interpret information. It allows computers to absorb new information while carrying out a task, and adjust what they do based on the changing signals.

Comment Re:Forming accretion disks (Score 1) 56

Thanks, that helped me understand support for dark matter as well. For clarification though, would it be fair to say that we do use the same math and when the answer didn't fit our prediction, we didn't change the math, but rather assumed the math is right and that we must not be able to observe all of the mass?

Comment Re:Isn't "exo" a bit redundant here? (Score 2) 32

Planets orbit Sol. An exoplanet is a planet that orbits any star that is not named Sol. Maybe it's useful to say 'we've discovered X number of exoplanets' at this point of discovery, but I imagine it will get dropped eventually. Scientist don't usually stick with anthropocentric terminology.

Comment Re:Solitary Confinement (Score 3, Interesting) 192

No, I do not believe it. I believe that you just made it up. Do you have a citation? Because a Google search finds nothing except a law banning "aggressive begging" (blocking traffic, badgering or pursuing people, loitering next to ATMs, etc.).

I wouldn't go so far as to accuse him of just making it up. There are several places he might have picked up the idea. Some, the courts overrule the laws or parts of it. Some are just proposed. Some require a permit to 'gather' (eg more than 5 people). On Thanksgiving, the church should have 1 person with food in the park. 4 at a time, the homeless could come over. Then, walk away and 4 more could come up. I think the homeless should not be able to look at each other either ;) Get a permit right? I believe in the Orlando case, the problem was, you can only get a permit twice a year for each park so you have to move around. Are the activist intentionally getting in trouble making their point? Sure. Does feeding the poor in the same park, week after week, putting wear and tear on the park? Sure.



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Comment Re:More Bennettt Haselton cock sucking (Score 1) 61

I was asking whether the defendant's right to remain silent is good for society as a whole.

I believe as a whole that it is. a few of my thoughts.

Without the Fifth, what prevents a suspect from being locked up until they confess? If there isn't evidence for conviction do we want to allow compelled confession.

If an innocent man is held, a guilty man may be free. Given overcrowding prisons and early paroles, one could argue that it's statistically true.

Is there data that we would convict more guilty people without the Fifth? Are the guilty going to confess if the Fifth didn't exist?

It is part of America's ethos that individual rights trump society's. Such that some of the harm done to society is mitigated by good done to our psyche. There is a hypothesis that this gives us a we can do anything mentality. An offshoot is getting away with things. We often idolize people that get away with things. We make fun of the Fifth. Depending on who uses it, we can love or hate it. It's part of our culture.

Comment Re:I like my letters better (Score 1) 345

As I said

I was being silly with my examples because an all or nothing attitude is silly.

For the sake of progress. Focus on this part. Is a 3 degree change over 500 years equally as catastrophic as a 3 degree change over 50? I contend that it makes a difference how long the change takes. Do you disagree?

Comment Re:Millions of years of life-supporting conditions (Score 1) 312

I've never personally been a fan of panspermia, but I think that if life could start at this time, it would help in several ways. Things were closer. If the Universe was in the Goldilocks zone, life might form on a huge number of objects. How many objects in the Oort Cloud might have life if the Universe were on average the right temperature. Life would would be seeded much more densely. Instead of life starting in one place and spreading out, it starts everywhere and just keeps reseeding. If it happened 15 billion years ago there's a lot more time to move around. On the downside, a planet like Earth might be too hot in such a Universe.

Personally, I think a day/night cycle is needed for life to get started. I think it helps similar to how a PCR machine works. Each day as the Earth heated up, some molecules broke apart. At night they came together. After a while, the molecules grow sides and mirror each other. Molecules whose chemical traits allow their mirror images to pick up more chemicals in the environment began to outnumber those that didn't. Molecules that impacted their environment in such a way that they retained their traits continued the traits. At some point. we call the complex chemical reactions between those molecules life.

Comment Re:I like my letters better (Score 1) 345

This is the part I disagree with. Frankly, I think it makes zero difference to humanity if we do it in 100 years or 1,000 years, the result will be just as horrible and life changing to everyone here.>

Yes, we do disagree.

We don't have to cut to zero, we simply have to cut to a sustainable number. But that number is much closer to 0 than what we're doing now, we probably do need to cut our CO2 emissions by 90%

This seems conflicting. Wouldn't a 90% reduction in CO2 emissions be the difference between burning them in 100 years or 1000?

hink of it like the federal budget for the US. 4 things make up most of it... Social Security, Medicare, Defense, Welfare. If you don't tackle those 4 big items, nothing you do to everything else matters. No amount of cuts to NASA or the CDC is going to change the outcome if you won't touch the big 4.

You got me there. I have to concede to that. You're right that a little bit doesn't help and I see what you're saying. A little bit won't help, And here's where I'm conflicted. I don't want people to avoid getting say a hybrid instead of a full gas vehicle because they think it's just a little bit. Each person needs to do a little bit so that we can do a lot as a society.

Someone posted the other day that 17 new solar panels are installed every day in the US

Here's recent good news we can both be happy about then.

Comment Re:I like my letters better (Score 1) 345

I understand that. Even so, all of the carbon (that we're talking about) used to be in the atmosphere. The earth has been warmer in it's past. My main disagreement is that it's all or nothing. I completely agree that burning all of it in a few years is bad. However, if we burned all of those fossil fuels over 1000 years it would not be as bad as if we do it over 100 years. The earth's temperature will change. We just don't want it to change to quickly. If we can reduce fossil fuels it helps. A change of 3 degrees over 1000 years is not nearly as catastrophic as a change over 50 years.

I completely agree that we need to get off of fossil fuels as soon as we can. For environmental reasons and many more. Every bit we do to reduce it, does help. It's not bad that the earth will be warmer, it's bad that it will change quickly. Thus, anything we can do to slow that change is helpful. If it were truly all or nothing, there wouldn't be any point in even trying. Nothing isn't going to happen any time soon.

I just feel that an all or nothing attitude is too extreme and not founded in what the problem is. It's also very defeatist since we've already burned a trillion barrels. It's not any particular amount of fossil fuel burned that causes a catastrophe, it's how fast we burn it. Burning fossil fuels over a million years isn't nothing, but I'm not sure you'd be able to argue it would be catastrophic. As you acknowledge, fossil fuels are the result of carbon sequestration over millions of years. That process is still occurring today, carbon in the atmosphere is being turned into fossil fuels by way of plants consuming it in swamps, dying and turning into coal. Over a long enough time, that will cool the earth. Certainly if we burned fossil fuels at the rate their created, that wouldn't be a problem. That's not nothing. Either way, the earth changes, but it's the speed of change that's catastrophic, not the change itself.

Can you provide evidence that burning all of the fossil fuels over 100 years, 1000 years and 10,000 years is equally catastrophic? If not, every bit helps.

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