I'm actually a bit surprised that no one ever talks about using grid-connected electric cars as distributed storage. It would cut everyone's range down by a bit, but as more and more pluggable electrics and hybrids are manufactured, the ability to set the last 10 or 20% charge as on-demand storage seems like it might be viable.

It would require some pretty smart grid tech, but we are working on that anyway.

The problem with load balancing is real, though. In Alberta, they have already capped the fraction of supply from wind because basically all the wind in the province is in one fairly small area, and if it supplies more than about 3% of the total they have a lot of issues when the wind drops.

There are (almost) no muons produced by fission. Fission events produce energies of around 200 MeV. Muons have a mass of just over 100 MeV. The phase space available for muon production is essentially nil because so much energy is almost always carried away by the fission products. Basically, to make a muon you have to have everything else stand still. The production rate isn't quite zero, but is close enough to it to not matter.

The technology they are using in this case is to look at cosmic ray muons passing through the reactor core. Similar technology was used to look for undiscovered chambers in Egyptian pyramids in the 80's, if memory serves: cosmic ray muons have ridiculous amounts of energy (they are the bane of neutrino physicists because no matter how deep the lab the muon signal is still appreciable, even under a kilometer or rock. SNO, which is one of the deepest labs in the world, is 2 km down and muons are still detectable, although only at rates of a few per day if memory serves.

None. However, a few will be killed by C++ programmers. I say this as someone who has written code to guide surgeons, but my mantra was: "The surgeon is in control", and I have in fact seen surgeons over-ride the guidance information the software gives them.

Driverless cars are actually less likely than humans to screw up, I think, but it'll take another decade to prove that. Software engineering is still a nascent field, but in another generation or three it will be at a point where we can be somewhat confident in most critical code. Unfortunately, it will still be dependent on hacked-together operating systems and heuristically designed hardware...

We are having a bit of a moment with some wack-jobs in the "Conservative" Party of Canada at the moment, which is actually a radical populist party that is opposed to everything conservatism in this country has ever stood for (fiscal probity, institutional stability, Westminsterian democracy...)

A few of the loonier tunes, like Justice Minister Peter McKay, seem to believe that women have no agency (or at least that's what one infers from his attempts to push a "Swedish model" prostitution law through the system) and I believe former party leader [*] Stockwell Day is on record for a Young Earth.

This has more to do with the wonderful (and I do mean that seriously) randomness of our electoral system, which is capable of electing a majority government with 35% of the vote, as well as the institutional disarray of the Liberal Party in the past decade. We're reasonably likely to throw the bastards out next year, although the Liberals have more than a few loonies of their own.

[*] The history of the CPC is complex, but Day was the leader of one of it's fore-runners about ten years ago.

The report says nothing of the kind. Did you read it? GMOs and nuclear power are mentioned as divisive issues, but there is no data on the ranking of people against them.

The Globe and Mail article says, "Canadians also expressed the lowest level of reservation about science and its impacts. Compared with the U.S., Europe and Japan, far fewer Canadians said that they thought science is making our way of life change too fast."

Sounds about right.

Canadians are generally very aware that our lives would be miserable if it weren't for science and technology keeping us safe and warm and fed. We have our tree-hugging reactionaries, of course, but they have far less influence than you might think despite the vast amounts of noise (and I do mean "noise" in the information theoretic sense) they generate.

Why do you think that an unconfirmed anecdote being presented fallaciously as an argument is against everything /.?

It would actually be astonishing if no one had "seen it work a couple of times", for several reasons. One, if there were a 100% failure rate dousing would have been abandoned years ago. Even pre-scientific peoples mostly abandoned things that were never, ever correlated with their nominal goals.

Second, given humans are known to be prone to confirmation bias, we can predict that almost everyone who has ever seen a dowser identify one of the many, many places where water can be found will come away believing "dowsing works".

So a large number of scientifically illiterate people saying, "Hey I saw it work a few times that proves it's true so I believe it!" is exactly what science would predict if dowsing doesn't work.

If dowsing did work science would predict a bunch of peer-reviewed studies systematically detailing how accurate it is and investigating the factors that influence it's accuracy.

We see the former, not the latter.

Posts like yours actually constitute evidence that dowsing does not work.

First, E = 1/2 m*v^2, not m*v, although your later statement seems to acknowledge that.

Second: you are correct that the two situations are not the same, because the energy in the center-of-motion (zero momentum) frame of the two vehicles is what matters (you can think about this as the kinetic energy that is available to deform the vehicles in the crash, leaving them with a lot of bent metal and no momentum after the crash.)

With two trucks moving toward each other at equal and opposite velocities, the zero momentum frame is the just the ground, where the total energy is m*v^2 (twice the energy of each individual vehicle).

In the case of hitting a wall, the wall has effectively infinite mass, so the zero momentum frame is moving with an infinitesimal velocity toward the truck, and the total energy is 2*m*v^2 (where "v" is still 55 MPH and the multiplier come from squaring the factor of two in front of it to get the full 110 MPH of the single truck).

So in the case of hitting a brick wall, there is twice the energy available. This is quite different, conceptually, from the explanation you've given, which is wrong. In the case of a vehicle hitting a brick wall at v = 55 MPH the energy is just 1/2 m*v^2, not m*v^2 as in the case of two colliding vehicles, or 2*m*v^2 as in the case of a vehicle at 2v hitting the wall.

The history of science teaches us that what is intuitive to any particular person is unrelated to the best way of understanding the world, and your reasoning is a nice example of this: it got you part way toward a correct conclusion, but fell short of the full understanding that the general principles of Newtonian physics give us.

Or both. Any new understanding of the world will be used in as many ways as people can think of using it. I wrote a novel that speculates on precisely the topic of what might happen with exactly this kind of technology, and part of the fun was thinking about how different groups might use it for good or ill: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...

...she got a notification of the tweets aimed at her, viewed them without logging in and screen-capped it.

The level of paranoid thinking required to believe that it is more likely that a public figure like Sarkeesian would violate the law by faking threats of this nature than that an obviously hate-filled, fragile and easily offended group of nutjobs has a few members who are so over-the-top that they would actually threaten her speaks to a deeply deranged sense of the world.

Look at the discussion here on /. There are people who are absolutely incensed at her relatively mild and well-documented criticisms of some common features of video games. I personally find her theoretical approach a tad doctrinaire, but for depth and quality it easily exceeds the bar required to get a PhD from a decent school (I have a PhD--in physics--from a decent school, and have friends in a number of fields, so I've seen the standards of humanities departments up-close-and-personal.)

So what is more likely: that a large, irate, irrational, angry mob contains a few nutjobs who would go so far as uttering actual death threats, or that a well-known, widely respected, widely reviled public figure would go to such lengths to fake threats, putting her in a position of risk of discovery and criminal charges when it is inevitably found out?

Anyone who picks the second option as more likely is living in a paranoid fantasy of the kind that might lead them to, well, make death threats against a public figure they disagree with.

You do realize that "politically correct, professionally offended people" is a stereotype, right?

I don't agree with all of Sarkeesian's criticisms, and find much of her analysis doctrinaire and tendentious, but for all of that her work or something like it is clearly needed, as evidenced by the backlash against it.

She isn't being "professionally offended": she's engaging in legitimate, deep analysis of an important artistic medium. Even granted that I disagree with some of her theoretical positions, he work has tremendous value even at the level of raw empiricism. Her episode on "the damsel in distress" trope is a compelling argument that sexism makes for very bad art, and that the way women are used in a large number of video games is lazy and stupid.

In a well-ordered world she would be getting a PhD for work of this depth and quality. And again, in case you missed it: I don't particularly agree with a goodly chunk of her theoretical frame, and she often says things that I think are simply wrong. I would love to see a cogent, relevant critique of her positions, but people who are driven by simplistic stereotypes of "professionally offended people" are making that impossible. There is so much noise that any rational discussion is simply impossible to maintain.

Correct.

Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference. As such, proof is simply not relevant to what it does, which is produce knowledge. Knowledge--unlike faith--is inherently uncertain.

It'll take a few hundred years for the popular science press to catch up to this. What is being presented here is evidence that the idea p-p fusion powers the sun is correct, so the posterior pluasibility of that idea goes up, although not to 1 (which would be a certainty, and therefore an error: an idea that was immune to additional evidence.)

If neutrinos had not been detected, the plausibility would have gone down, although not to 0 because that would be the same error. Science never disproves anything any more than it proves anything. Proof and certainty are like the philosopher's stone sought by alchemists: a fundamentally mistaken goal.

Philosophers are the alchemists of epistemology, discovering all kinds of cool things while on a hiding to no-where.

But falsification is at best marginally relevant to science, which is the discipline (not method) of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference.

Falsification simply never comes into it, outside of outlandishly models of science promoted by ignorant philosophers. Promoters of "scientific method" and falsification are almost never scientists, and most scientists will quietly ridicule the ideas if you give them a couple of beer.

Bayesian logic is established by mathematical deduction using an argument from invariance of a kind that originated within mathematical physics (Einstein's arguments for relatively are the most famous of the kind).

Philosophers don't even have the right goal--they are always running after "certainty", which we now know to be a epistemic error. Knowledge is not certain and cannot be certain, because only Bayesian reasoning can produce knowledge, and Bayesian reasoning is not capable of producing a posterior plausibility of 1 or 0 (ie certainty).

This has been my experience as well. I would go so far as to say that statisticians understand probability less well than most working experimental scientists. They are overly-enamoured of abstract models and rarely dig down to the raw probability distributions underneath, which is what working scientists actually care about.

What is mind-boggling is that anyone takes a virulently anti-science organization like the dishonestly-named "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" seriously as a source of news about anything.

All you have to do is look at the source, and dismiss the claims as hysteria and lies.

This is not to say there might not be a story here, or something worth discussing, but until it is sourced from something other than an outlet for anti-science, anti-technology political shills it is all noise and no signal.

Yup, and such things belong in novels, not scientific papers: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...