Sign, burning two mod points on this (both +funny, whatever), but it's an issue that comes up whenever I talk with Europeans about mass transit, and how they can't understand why we don't have a rail system.

The fundamental problem is that Europeans cannot fully grasp the difference in scale invoved in America, especially in the American West. (It's big. It is really really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it is long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to Texas.) I travel rather often from San Diego, through Los Angeles, and to the Bay Area / San Francisco (these are the three major cities in California, incidentally). The trip takes 8-10 hours to complete, depending on traffic passing through Los Angeles. There is a single rail line that runs down the coast. Once per day it travels between SF and SD, and you have to get up at 5AM to catch it. It takes 11 hours.

San Francisco and San Diego are 500 miles apart.

By comparison, Amsterdam to Paris is 500 *km* apart. The distance from San Diego to San Francisco would span the breadth of England (London to Inverness was 8 hours by train, and is about 550 miles, as is Paris to Nice). When I was in Europe, I was constantly surprised about how little time it took to travel from one city to the next while I was on a train. When you live in the American West, you get used to 6 hour drives at 75-80 miles per hour where you literally see no living human beings outside of the gas stations and rest stops. And maybe some farms.

Europe is very heavily built up. It's dense. Rail networks make a lot more sense in dense networks than in sparse ones. That same rail line that runs to Oxford (60 miles from London) can be used to connect to Warwick, or Stratford-upon-Avon (if my memory serves). The rail network in California is essentially a 3-node graph with a line between SF, LA, and SD. With two mountain ranges in between, to boot. The train company loses money on the line pretty consistently. There's literally nothing in between to make the run profitable. San Luis Obispo and Santa Cruz are nice places, don't get me wrong, but they simply aren't volume destinations. And because it's not profitable, there won't be any more private infrastructure development. The State of California has been toying with the notion of building a high speed line from SF to SD for a while now, but, hell, I ran the numbers myself. Japan wouldn't have built a high speed rail line if their cities were all 500 miles apart. It's too costly. The main island of Japan is about 600 miles long, total.

It's not a better-than or worse-than comparison, I'm simply stating the facts. You have to have a certain critical mass of density to make rail networks worth your while. An analogy that works well with Europeans I've met: Imagine France. Now imagine there is nothing in the country but Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. None of the little villages, towns, and cities. Nothing but desert. Now consider the practicality of a rail network in the country. This is Texas.

-----

This isn't an America-is-bigger-is-better argument. In fact, I can pretty firmly say that I would greatly prefer being able to travel to another city in an hour or two. I lose an entire day whenever I make the trip. A drive to Phoenix, first major city east of San Diego (Yuma doesn't count) is 6 hours (@75 MPH) through almost nothing but desert. To the average San Diegan or San Franciscan, the other city is akin to a vacation destination. Road Trips are boring as hell unless you find a way to entertain yourself -- I personally go through audiobooks like water.

Rail Networks simply don't work when the graphs are so sparse. Out in the middle of the desert, a car moves faster than a train, and costs less, so why bother going to the hassle of parking your car in long term parking (unless you have a garage of your own), and paying more money to travel slower? I'd do it just for the scenic-ness of it, except you have to board at 5AM to get into the other town by 6PM (and then have a friend or family pick you up from downtown, which is another hassle). By and large, airplanes simply seem to be the mass transit of the future. $35 one-way between SF and SD (cheaper than gas for driving), and the trip takes 45 minutes instead of 11 hours. The same train ticket is around $40-$60.

I'd agree that America could use better mass transit systems, especially between transit hubs like Airports and downtowns, but most American cities are so geographically disperse now that they almost require a car to get around in anyway (for example, if you were to take a bus to downtown San Diego, I doubt you could even find a hotel room there -- the hotel district is 10 minutes away by car). You can't even walk from Point A to Point B in San Diego. It's just too far away, and the sidewalk will just vanish at some point. The geographical area that the greater LA area encompasses is an oval about 130 miles in diameter. By comparison, this would be almost the entire southern half of the UK (not counting Wales). Leicester east to the coast, and south to the coast, that square would be covered by the city of LA. All American cities have picked up such sprawl to a certain degree, and, as you said, tend to build their airports outside of the city for sound and traffic reasons.

When I travel in Europe, I take a train.
In America, I rent a car.

You can't say that America is bad for not having a train network. Trains don't make economic sense in a sparse network. France and Texas are the same size, and shape, but Texas along the I-80 is filled with 10 hours of nothing but desert and homocidal cops (a long story for another time).

>>Genetically, we have a concept called races.
>No, we don't. Race is cultural, and is of little interest genetically.

Really? Explain that to my black friend in 8th grade as he suffered during a sickle-cell anemia crisis.

I'm sure he'd be happy to know that he can't have a disease that affects primarily African-Americans, because there are no genetic differences in races.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease#Genetics

Or to my Chinese roommate who lacks alcohol dehydrogenase enzymes in his liver and so has one drink and turns bright red. Embarassing for a guy who was in a frat that prized heavy drinking skills very highly. The enzyme deficiency has a huge penetration in Asia, something like up to 70% in some countries, a couple percent in Germany, 0% in Ireland. Go figure.

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

Or the Jewish student organization that sponsored a free screening day for Tay-Sachs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay-Sachs_disease

The concept that race is solely a cultural construct is mere wishful thinking: "I wish there were no genetic differences in people, because then there'd be no racism, and we'd all live in a world filled with flowers and ponies." No, as we discover more about genetic diversity we learn which genes have greater tendencies in certain ethnic groups. This is NOT an excuse for racism -- the concept that one person can be somehow metaphysically superior than another due to skin pigmentation is absurd -- but denying uncontroversial science for political reasons is troubling as well.

This is in reference to the following post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178269&threshold=5&commentsort=0&mode=nested&cid=14782984

  A critical part of the full understanding of a concept is the ability to express it simply.

As soon as you use jargon, you lose your audience unless they also understand the specialized vocabulary of your field. With such a simple question they are blatantly not physicists, so you're just (perhaps intentionally) talking over their heads, making yourself sound smart. /shrug

Not a big deal, most professors do it, but it's a bad habit, and one I hope academia will someday break. My fiancee is at UCSF, so I have to constantly tell her to use plain English. Skin works just as well as Epidermis, honey. She works with the public, so she has a more critical need to break that habit than most academes.

Just recalling my high school physics, if I'd have written it (and you were responding to a troll, IMO), I'd just have said that all electrical waves are electromagnetic in nature. Maybe talked about the history of ether, and how the electrical and magnetic components provide the medium for each other.

Perhaps the worst field is Philosophy, though. Philosophers are especially bad at it. Or especially good, depending on your perspective, of taking something that can be stated clearly and simply, and loading it up with propositions and jargon until only they know what they're arguing about. And sometimes not even then. Kant took an idea that could be stated in a sentence, expanded it out to hundreds of pages, and ended with something not even his other contemporaries could understand. Ditto Wittgenstein (whose thesis Bertrand Russell couldn't understand), ditto Hegel, etc.

Not a criticism of you, but a criticism of your defense of your post.

---------------------
2nd post on the subject
in response to
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178269&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&pid=14783558
---------------------

>>In general most modern applications are not expressed clearly or simply to
>>normal every day people and programmers or advanced/expert users (i.e. much of
>>the Slashdot crowd) simply make fun of them. Why should we expect any better
>>when we don't understand something? Pot, meet kettle.

I majored in computer science with a minor in writing. I hold nothing but contempt for people that take a simple idea and make it complicated. For people that 'understand' a complex concept but cannot express it with less complexity, again I hold low regard for their intellect.

I flip it around see it rather as a challenge. If a person asks me, say, what the advantages are of a hyperthreading chip, and I found myself unable to reduce the issue into a correct, meaningful, and jargon-free response, I'd see that as a sign that I didn't understand it well enough, and would hit the books again. Defending a baroque explanation of divs, grads, and undefined variables to someone who obviously hasn't taken basic physics with this:

"I can only report the truth. I do not have the ability to explain it better than Einstein, Bergmann and Wheeler themselves (Covariant 4-vector formalism is their work mainly)... This person is clearly ignorant about many things, and too arrogant to admit it and try to learn something interesting and relevant to the discussion. (American? Nah! That's just a stereotype)."

is indefensible. Again, giving an explanation that only someone who already knows the answer can understand is no explanation at all. Perhaps you would call it a proof, or some such, but certainly not an explanation.

>>My Jargon vocabulary was highly limited until I entered the business world.
>> At University we used the specific, word that concisely and precisely
>>describes what we are talking about. The Epidermis -> skin point you use is
>>actually a good example as skin generally covers multiple layers as aspects,
>>while epidermis is precise.

Do you really think that you should tell people to apply a creme to their 'epidermis' instead of their 'skin'? Is Mrs Jones at risk of pulling back her epidermis and dermis so she can apply her antifungal creme to her hypodermis? Hey, you said "skin", after all.

No. Use terminology only when the difference is important, and if you must, define your terms before unleashing them. Call it a bruise instead of a hematoma, so they don't get a heart attack thinking they have cancer.

Even when my fiancee is explaining things like pharmokinetics to me, as long I stop her from using terms like AUC, MEC, MTC, etc. I can understand her lectures.

The key defining factor, of course, is your audience. If I am conducting technology training with K-12 teachers, which I do on a fairly regular basis, I have two options: 1) Use big fancy words to make myself look and feel smart, or 2) Express the exact same concept in words they understand and can use. There's a reason why I get universally good reviews on my workshops: I don't have an ego to get in the way of a clear explanation.

It doesn't just apply to the general public either. At my university, people applying for professorial positions and people giving defenses of their theses wuold generally talk for an hour or so on their respective areas of expertise, and then would be asked questions. Almost always, the first question was: explain your thesis in three sentences or less. If the person stumbled, or even worse, couldn't answer, they were almost sure to not get the position (graduating students were obviously given a little more leniency, but at the same time the dept chair would tell them they'd better damn well have an answer for that question ready when asked).

This is a fairly common trend from what I've seen. Some say, for example, the genius of Einstein was not in his theory of relativity, but in his E=mc^2.

It's a movement I wholeheartedly support.

>>Is that the simplest explanation? Could I take that to an average 5 year old
>>and explain electrical and magnetic energy fields are related and have them
>>understand? I'd guess not. Which of course is the problem, simplicity is in
>>the eye of the beholder.

Simplicity is entirely dependent on the audience. The very worst workshops I like to give are to audiences of mixed backgrounds. I once gave a talk on "Tips and Tricks in UNIX Shell Script". Was advertised around the department and held in a department lecture area. So when I got into the talk and started talking about setting up neat little autocompletion tricks in TCSH, I noticed only blank stares coming back. I trailed off and asked the audience for their background. 25% of the audience were UNIX experts, 75% had never used UNIX before. How do you lecture to that? How can you possibly satisfy all of your customers, so to speak? You can't. So I simply gave an hour long lecture on an introduction to UNIX, and by the time the hour was over, all the UNIX hackers had long since walked out.

>>I'm sure his answer is a pretty simplistic one for someone in his position. I
>> bet post-grad physicists call people losers when they don't understand basic
>> physics.

I agree, if he was addressing an audience of physicists, he could give divs, grads, curls and super duper 4-dimensional tensor flux capacitors all day long while he realigns the main deflector dish to catch hypertachyons in his n-dimensional subspace receiver.

His audience was one person, and one who obviously hadn't even taken an introductory physics class. Hence his mistake.

But to come back to my original point, my main criticism of him is not that he gave an incomprehensible, jargon loaded response, but that he defended it by saying that the other person was stupid, and too lazy to learn something new. As I said, the fault in this case is entirely in the bad and lazy explanation of the physicist, a trend altogether too common in academia, and which reveals the academics own lack of undertsanding of the subject.

I am deeply troubled by the ongoing and perplexing trend I have seen recently of people denying the holocaust online. It is not the Nazi holocaust I am referring to, but rather the even greater mass murderers called Stalin, and Mao.

I've long become accustomed to the media focusing mainly on the Nazi genocide in WWII (Nazis are such easy targets), while mainly ignoring the order of magnitude greater murder of people in communist countries. But denying that the communist holocausts occured... that just ain't right.

This post was in response to:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177016&threshold=5&commentsort=0&mode=nested&cid=14693711
(But this is certainly not the only such post I've seen recently, claiming the same thing)

No, communism is the single greatest murderer of innocents the world has ever seen.

You said...
"Murdered few million under misguided regime of Stalin."

WTF? Please tell me this was said in some sort of morbid tongue and cheek manner. Or do you actually believe this?? Are you like a holocaust denier, but for communists? Try 20,000,000 innocents killed by Stalin, mainly by his own hand. He beat Hitler hands down. The Communist Revolution in China has killed 65,000,000 since the revolution started. It depends on if you count starving your own people to death because you believe in a retarded philosophy like communism as better than, or worse than, sending them to death camps to be executed, in Siberia.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/atrox.htm
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/tyrants.htm

Educate yourself... please. Learn to think for yourself. For the sake of everyone on this planet. People willing to lightly dismiss the largest mass murderers the world has ever seen are not just deluded, but scarily so.

I think the discoveries in the latter part of the 20th Century were quite exciting from a philosophical point of view. Watson or Crick (I can't remember which) became a strong determinist after his ongoing research in DNA led him to a mechanistic viewpoint -- essentially saying that we're slaves to our DNA, that we have no free will.

Since then, various advances showing the essential unpredictability of the world at the atomic and subatomic levels makes me hopeful that it will be actually impossible for, say, a perfectly oracular computer to ever be built, regardless of how much processing power it has. I.e., it will actually be impossible for a computer to state that two years from now you'll be working as a tuna packer in Alaska, on the lam from the law for murdering the Future Crimes policeman...

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171476&threshold=5&commentsort=0&tid=103&mode=nested&cid=14282493

Recently, I have been posting on the Slashdot article relating to the Kansas Board of Education voting to approve teaching Intelligent Design (ID) in schools. The Slashdot editor seeming to claim that intelligent, scientifically minded people have no business coming near Intelligent Design with a 10 foot pole.

I feel that ID is an interesting theory, whether or not it is actually true. I think that ID can be stated in such a way that it is a scientific theory, using the definition that in order for something to be scientific, it must be falsifiable. I make no claims about whether or not it is true.

First, I will address some of the commonly held notions about ID, many of which are wrong, then I will state ID in such a way that it is a scientific theory.

ID is a term with a wide collection of individual belief, the nexus of which is that a designer influenced evolution. This is the definition I will use, and will ignore the plethora of muddle headed arguments for ID, most of which are arguments from example ("Look at the pretty rose! Tell me it isn't the product of an intelligent creature!") or appeals to ignorance ("We don't know how evolution happened, so it couldn't have happened!"), neither one of which are valid forms of argumentation. One can just as easily claim that clouds that look like ships are designed, or that one day, as the literature grows, we will have a complete understanding of evolutionary mechanisms.

I rely heavily on statistics, and recommend anyone who hasn't gotten past the "mean, median, mode" bit to go out there and read up on t-tests, analysis of variance, and similar topics. I consider statistics to be the solution to the age old question of Epistemology: how do we know when we know anything? Answer -- when our confidence level in a statement exceeds 95% or 99%.

Commonly held false idea #1: ID is Creationism. This myth is repeated over and over. *ID is NOT Creationism.* Creationism (to use the common definition) is the belief in the literal word of the Bible found in the first creation story in Genesis (and, incidentally, not the second creation story). ID is contradictory with this belief as ID says that evolution happened, but was influenced by a designer.

Commonly held false idea #2: The designer is God. The Theory of ID is religion-neutral. *ID at its core does not care one whit who the designer is or why he influenced evolution.* These are all realms for speculation, but has nothing to do with ID. It is a common counter-argument to ask "Why did God do ?" and then look smug. However, this argument carries no weight at all since ID is not based on the Who or Why of the development of life, only the How (which, incidentally, is the same question Evolution answers). Additionally, it is common for atheists to attack ID because they assume it is a Christian idea. On the contrary, not only is ID religion-neutral, it is surprisingly common for atheists to believe in ID (though they often do not call it that). Theories regarding aliens influencing evolution, or even DNA blown in from outer space (Francis Crick's idea of panspermia) are also possible 'designers'. But as I said before, Who the designer is or Why he did it is completely immaterial. ID can be proven or disproven solely through math, without resorting to metaphysics.

Commonly held false idea #3: ID conflicts with evolution. This is an interesting debate to watch because ID states that evolution is true -- it simply was influenced by a designer. Stating things like proofs of genetic drift or even examples of speciation doesn't disprove ID because they are tenets of ID, as odd as that is to consider. When one does something like point to the famous moths of industrial England and state that it disproves ID, this is just another case of the "ID is Creationism" fallacy that so many people subscribe to. ID is Evolution, not Creationism.

Commonly held false idea #4: ID is not a "scientific" theory because it is not falsifiable. (Many people have the wrong idea on what falsifiability means. I recommend you read Bertrand Russell, or the wiki article on the subject.) Essentially, in order for a theory to be scientific, it must be possible via one means or other to show it is false. It is true that many of the arguments and theories made by IDers amount to nothing more than hand-waving, but it IS possible to state ID in such a way that it is falsifiable, and hence a scientific theory. I shall do so now.

-----

The Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design
by Bill Kerney

Summary of Evolution: New species emerge from the process of random mutations and selective pressures.

Summary of Intelligent Design: Bias existed in the random mutation component of Evolution.

All the hot air, court trials, ridiculous statements, and emotional debates aside, this is sole point of difference between the theories of Evolution and Intelligent Design.

When restated this way, it becomes obvious that Intelligent Design can be proven true or false simply by showing if there was or was not statistical bias in evolution. Intelligent Design claimed that a designer "leaned on" evolution to make the world turn out the way it did. And any time something influences a population on a large scale, statistics can easily, easily distill the truth out of the white noise. If I had a team of people pay everyone in New York making a call at a public phone booth to either talk longer, talk at a different time, or even just call a different person than they were intending too, stats could pluck the truth of it out of the phone company's call records.

All arguments along the lines of specific examples (eyes, knees, etc.) are useless simply because you can't really argue from example. Just as if I can't claim there was a widespread effort to disrupt the phone network in New York just because someone paid me $20 to dial the operator, proof or disproof of a single example is actually, interestingly enough, almost entirely irrelevant to the debate. Hence you won't find any discussion of irreducable complexity or arguments from ignorance here -- ID simply claims that a designer introduced a bias in evolution, and that is the *only thing* that needs to be considered to show ID true or false.

(Commonly held false idea #5: You can never absolutely show one side or the other to be right. But statistics are a wonderful thing. With enough data, you gain confidence in your conclusions to state whether something is true or not. Generally speaking, a statement is "true" in science when it is 95%+ or 99%+ likely to be correct (the most common p-values used). It's always amusing when supporters of 'science' claim they would need ID to be 100% proven correct when science itself doesn't work that way.)

The Casino Analogy: I think that the best statistical analogy for Intelligent Design is that of a person in a shady casino playing a game. He is winning (or losing) a lot more than what he thinks he really should be. How does that player know if the game is rigged or not? In a nutshell, he usually can't know. He doesn't have enough information; his sample size is too small. At one casino I was at, after a hot winning streak, they switched dealers and I lost 17 straight hands of 5$ blackjack before I finally got aggravated and left. Was the casino cheating? While it's fun to contemplate, again, you just can't really know.

However, this is where most people's thought processes stop when it comes to statistical analysis.

The fact it, it's possible to detect bias in casino games -- it's actually an easy problem that readily succumbs to math. You simply have to have enough observations in order to gain a confidence level in your statement that "the game is rigged" is correct. The less the bias, the more observations you have to make in order to gain a 95% or 99% confidence level. Contrawise, the greater the bias (say, a slot machine that pays a one-in-a-million jackpot with every pull) the less observations you have to make. But for every bias, there is a number of observations that will reveal it, for any confidence level you choose. Bias simply cannot hide from statistical analysis.

Coming back to the Intelligent Design issue. ID claims that the random mutations in evolution has someone "rigging the dice" making life turn out in a fashion unaccountably complicated for something sheerly the result of random processes and selection. (Again, ID claims this, not me. I'm tired of being flamed for stating other peoples' beliefs.) The surprising thing is, this is now a scientific theory. It may be wrong -- but it is a falsifiable claim. I actually consider it likely that it will be conclusively proven or disproven one day (and again, to all of you pendantists, 'conclusively' means within a given level of confidence).

Join me in a thought experiment to show how easy it is to prove or disprove.

Thought experiment: Scientists don't have anywhere close to an exact number, but there is somewhere between 1 million and 100 million species on the planet, the majorty of which are insects. Approximately 300,000 of them are the so-called "interesting species" (pandas, marmots, supermodels) that we care about and wish to observe. Let's assume the British model of security has been adopted worldwide and we have cameras blanketing every inch of the world and crack teams of scientists standing by, who repeatedly sample the DNA of every creature and embryo on the planet.

All that needs to be done to prove or disporve ID is:
1) Quantify random mutations types and rates (before selection pressures).
2) Observe the random mutations in each population (before selection pressures)
3) New "interesting species" are expected to emerge at a rate of between one per three years to 30 per year (the expected value changes depending on how long you consider the average time for a new species to evolve, from 1 million years to 10,000 years).
4) See if a bias exists/existed.

That's it. ID can be shown to be true or false. The same experiment could be done on evolution in the past with archaic DNA if (ala Jurassic Park) we could get a DNA record, with the requisite detail. On the other hand, if no new species emerge, even with global information, then the confidence level that Evolution is false will rise over time until the theory is discarded.

Of course, any given designer might have given up designing and taken a day off, but if species emerge through statistically normal events, then most reasonable people would assume that the rest of evolution could have happened through similarly unshocking means.

Conclusion:

Simply stated, ID claims that the dice were rigged in evolution. Math provides us with a powerful tool to discover bias. Hence, ID is a falsifiable claim. Hence, ID is a scientific claim -- though the strong possibility exists it might be completely wrong.