I'll get modded to oblivion if anyone sees this, but I get objectively verifiable premonitions in dreams that can't plausibly be extrapolated from past experience. This happens occasionally to a lot of people, though most scientific types who have experienced it are shy about talking about it. Like most other personal characteristics there's a distribution of tendencies, with a few people being way out on the tail. How it works I have no idea, but it works somehow.

OK. Though if you have an idea about how something can be understood, and you successfully use that idea to describe an event or process, that illustration amounts to a kind of evidence that your idea isn't grossly wrong, even if it doesn't prove it to be better than alternative descriptions.

I see that you've been reading slashdot longer than me, but for the six years I've been doing it, the summaries are almost all wrong. The distinction between evidence and illustration, while important, seems small to me in that context.

Whoohoo. First time I've ever encountered anyone else who recognizes this. Likewise with sound.

As a mathematical convenience, the system doing the measuring is conceptually separated from the one being measured. There being an 'observer' just means that there's a physical interaction, it has nothing to do with the presence of a scientist.

I think that the system itself, even though non-coherent, is still in an indeterminate state relative to anything outside the system though, and that the philosophical implications of this aren't generally recognized. Most people think of wavefunctions as being collapsed or not collapsed in an absolute sense, but I don't think that's right. They're collapsed for things they're interacting with, or else there wouldn't be chemistry, but the whole system is still in a complicated indeterminate state from an outside standpoint, even though it can't be described by a single coherent wavefunction.

^this^their

Right, because there should be two classes of people. Those who make this living creating, maintaining, or otherwise empowering the fascist system should should be able to travel without being inconvenienced by it.

I received a spam e-mail from ADT a few hours after mentioning home security in an e-mail from a google account to a yahoo account.

The 'virtual particles' are photons. As far as I understand, it is one of several equivalent ways of describing an electromagnetic interaction. There is the familiar inverse-squared electromagnetic force, but the next term in the series has an r^6 in the denominator, so it matters on a much shorter distance.

The idea that the so-called Casimir force could be made small or negative with a geometry change has been around for a long time. The outcome for a particular geometry is not easy to theoretically predict though.

The summary is bad. For the most part its not about reduction in surface area. So all the comments about how obvious it is that the force should go down with surface area are ignorant.

Almost everything one reads about the Casimir force is based on a misunderstanding of the math tricks used to derive it for parallel plates. Its the van der Waals force, with nothing meaningful going on with 'infinite vacuum energy'. Some scientists are to blame for the confusion, because they exploit the misunderstanding to get funding from ignorant DoE and DoD program managers.

So the summary is misleading, as always, and many of the slashdot comments are off base, as always. The study itself may or may not be stupid or spun in a dishonest manner, I'd have to read the paper and get up to date on other research in the last ten years in order to know. Based on past experience, I would not be surprised either way.

Also....For a non-flat surface, the force can't be estimated from surface area and distance, it doesn't work like that. The resonances are different depending on the shape. A good estimate of the force of attraction (or repulsion) would have to be derived from first principles, which would be prohibitively difficult for all but the most trivial of geometries. Its not right to say that the reduced force is due to the reduced surface area.

Its the van der Waals force derived for a bulk material. The rest is marketing.

I think the essential thing to understand is that people have different abilities and needs. No category is quite adequate. I have trouble with speech, but unlike your son, apparently, I have almost no "mind's eye" at all, and a terrible memory for anything that I can't logically relate to other facts or feel in a musical way. I don't think that necessarily means that he's more or less genuinely Asperger's than I am. One of my three children has trouble with speech also, and is overly affectionate with strangers by most people's standards. He is very different from me in a lot of equally significant ways. Some people have characterized my social skills as Asperger's like, but I think the main difference is I have less of a veneer of pretense over everything. I actually don't think I'm lacking in social skills or social perceptiveness at all, relatively speaking. I think that slick, salesman types have just been more successful at getting their particular strengths and characteristics defined as the norm. (Though the 'sociopath' category is a win for my team I suppose.) One of my other children has freakishly good language and social skills: he was able to BS comfortably with adults as if he were a peer when he was 2. I don't think this is a syndrome either though, just something he's really good at, and strengths almost always come with other weaknesses and tradeoffs. He's smart, but his 'Asperger's-like brother is smarter in some ways, and that intelligence has a deep connection to his speech difficulty, in my opinion. He finds it harder to put things into words in part because he's able to think in ways that don't map neatly into a string of grammatical concepts. People are complicated machines, and in everyone a lot of small pieces are broken or don't work well, and other interrelated pieces that may be genius. It just may or may not be recognized depending on how externally obvious those pieces are.

You've added an additional step that is possible with your mom or your friend but quite a bit more difficult with the subconscious part of your mind. They communicate with the test maker without you being aware of what was said. Take that communication between them and the test maker away, and the test fails for your mom or friend. Yet even without that you still must have some way of determining that your conversations with them are not just noise.

With this kind of test, conversations with your mom or your best friend, which I hope are not "mere noise", would almost certainly fail to demonstrate meaningful content.

People who waffle new-agey platitudes may or may not understand much of anything, and I wouldn't defer to their judgment in any case.

But if you want to know what you're talking about when calling bullshit, you need an adequate understanding of the ostensibly "unmeasurable subjective experiences" in question. How unmeasurable and subjective are they really? Are they in agreement with the remarkably successful model commonly thought of as "laws of physics", or do they contradict it, or do they fall outside of that scope? You're guessing that your knowledge is adequate to make a reasonably informed judgment that the new-agey claims are all bullshit. My assertion, based on my experience with a subject I've devoted much of my life to studying, is that your knowledge is not adequate.

You're right that the new-agey claims are mostly bullshit. But there's stuff that's true and that can be understood to matter mixed in with the bullshit. If you don't want to hassle with trying to separate the two, and just want to ignore all of it, that's a reasonable stance in my view. Not everyone has time for this stuff. But then if you make strong assertions about other people's beliefs and experiences, very often you'll just be wrong.

Many scientific subjects require a lot of effort to understand to more than a superficial degree also. The physics of physics journalism, for instance, or even undergraduate physics, is typically a sketchy caricature of real physics. Most of what seems "counter-intuitive" to people about 20th century physics seems that way because its described in a way that's actually wrong. Understanding dreaming doesn't require the same type of kind of logical rigor as physics, and the abstractions are different, but takes a lot of work to sort out what's real from what's not.

When I first had astral projection experiences in the mid 90's, I messed around with it, figured out what I was doing with my senses, and dismissed it as meaningless. It took me ten years to discover that there was more going on than the more superficial aspects of the experience, even though I was mostly right about the part that I thought I understood. And if I'd put less effort into it, or my luck had been a bit different, I never would have figured that out. I'm not claiming intellectual superiority, I'm just sharing what I can see from where I am now, that if you put a fair degree of effort into understanding dreaming, you find that there's a lot there that's not what it seemed at the outset. I'm not even expecting you to take my word for it: I don't think that putting that kind of faith in other people's claims is a good idea. But I think if you relax your judgment a little bit, leaving the door open a little wider to the possibility that people like myself are not just blowing smoke, then you'll be 'forcing assumptions' a bit less yourself.