"look up acquaintances who have it worse off, and feel a bit better"

I for one welcome our Schadenfreuding overlords!

Mod parent up.

iggymanz posting as AC so he doesn't lose more /. karma. Sad.

I already preempted your argument in http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

So what matters here is what's interesting to you? How autistic can you get? There's nothing boring or yawn-worthy about a quasi-particle; all you've done is shown that physics is just not your thing. Unlike the GP post, which is high quality and got moderated appropriately, all you've done is take a dump in this discussion. Good job.

False dichotomy. I'm not ranting, but you can't think logically. It's not a choice between restricting freedom and spreading the disease. One can move about without doing the latter--and while the risk is higher, it is doable. Spreading the disease requires at the very least proximity--which one can take steps to avoid while being ambulant--and for many diseases, direct contact is required. It's perfectly acceptable to have such actions restricted while one is a carrier, as they directly infringe on others' rights (indeed, unwanted contact is illegal anyways)**. But just being able to move about does not directly cause spread of the disease, and thus a restriction on that is unjustified, as there is only a modest increase in the chance of spreading the infection.

**To elaborate further, one can count as unwanted contact that would have been unwanted had the other party known that the subject is infectious, which takes care of a situation where the other party otherwise allows the subject to get close to them because they were not notified of the subject's infectious status.

So the government can force house arrest upon you against your will even though you've committed no crime? Land of the free, my ass. It's quite ironic that the average slashdot poster, who rushes to criticize government overreach and trampling of freedoms in the name of safety (how many times has Franklin's "They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety..." been quoted here?--countless!) sees nothing wrong with this example OF THE VERY SAME FUCKING THING! Talk about hypocrisy! I'm sure I'll get BS replies about thresholds etc. from people that forget that fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of mobility, are supposedly inviolable.

I'm all for colonization of other worlds in order to hedge our bets for humanity's survival, but given results showing deleterious health effects when one is not subject to Earth gravity for a prolonged period, it would be silly to try to colonize Mars and its feebler-than-Earth gravity until genetic engineering can assure good health for the colonists. Good luck having this wrinkle ironed out in a century--and that's something I'd be willing to long bet on.

There is reason to be greatly pessimistic in regards to space exploration, because the general tendency has become for us to turn towards inner space, not outer--a phenomenon driven by information technology and the continued encroachment of the virtual into the daily lives of most. It's far cheaper (effort, energy, and resources--not merely finance), and the eternal human drive for short term rewards and maximal convenience at minimum cost pretty much guarantees eventually the physical world will be relegated in status to the minimum necessary to survive "for the time being", while most of a mind's time is spent in the virtual. Little attention will be paid by the vast majority to long-term continuation of humanity--far less than even today, when this concern is already so impoverished.

I'll note here that Asimov's greatest novel (albeit one not among his most famous works), The End of Eternity, has direct bearing upon this issue, and is more relevant now than it was at the time it came out back in the 1950s.

How so? I'm an engineer, not a finance guy.

The only assumption made is that of standard semantics of the use of a qualitative term to indicate a quantity in an imprecise or relative manner. In the case of your post, "fragile" stands for "fragile relative to the average expectation of a population relevant to the context of this subject or discussion". Of course, the assumption of standard language semantics presupposes a more basic one: that one's interlocutor is an entity to which assignment of semantic understanding is apropos; I must admit, though, the possibility that in this assumption I have erred, and you're but a chatbot.

I know this is Slashdot, but even here the level of stereotyping and hateful crowd mentality exhibited by your post is an eyesore. So let me take this occasion to mirror your posting style by reminding you that, if you perhaps on occasion ventured out from your parents' basement, you might find that there's little basis to your intimation of a statistically significant correlation between involvement in the financial industry and being a "mean, ornery son of a bitch".

BS. The nervous system is an electrochemical system, not an electrical one; and, while it is physically fragile, it is not nearly as electrically fragile as you suggest, exactly because it is electrochemical rather than electrical in nature. This is a significant reason why 90% of lightning strike victims survive (the skin's lower resistance being another), and why execution through electrocution is nowhere close to being an instant process.

Even high CRI (color rendering index) LED lighting has a nasty spike in the blue region. See: http://www.ecse.rpi.edu/~schub... This is very different than the smooth blackbody spectrum of solar radiation, though not nearly as bad as the many narrow spikes of a CFL bulb. Color reproduction still suffers, even if not as much as in the case of fluorescents. Compare to a high-end incandescent bulb (such as used in museums and galleries, and in my house), which use filtering reflectors to match daylight spectrum very closely. You can only do this with the smooth spectra of blackbody radiators (such as incandescents) because we lack sufficiently specific (narrow band) filters to deal with the spikes in LEDs, fluorescents, and HIDs, at least without going to extreme expense. So for those of us to whom it matters that artificial lighting should strive to reproduce natural lighting reasonably well, incandescents remain a necessity. At the same time, I do realize that to others efficiency matters, and that is becoming an increasingly significant factor, especially through the actions of the anti-nuclear power lobby.

You're discussing a paper by Rovelli and Vidotto, whereas this discussion is about an unrelated paper by Mersini-Houghton and Pfeiffer. They're unrelated because in the latter an event horizon never forms. Moreover, the Rovelli and Vidotto paper is garbage--see http://backreaction.blogspot.c...

Nothing new under the sun. Look up the old term for a black holes resulting from stellar collapse, "frozen star" (after all, to an outside observer, the collapse takes an infinite time to reach the formation of an event horizon due to time dilation--and according to this paper, even that doesn't happen).