If the radiation from the machine itself was negligible then it means that a test with just the machine would not really matter.

That is only true IF you assume that radiation from the machine is the only possible cause of the sperm damage. However, that's what they are trying to prove, so assuming their desired conclusion when they designed their control is pretty bad experimental design, one that makes the whole thing almost worthless.

That may work well for airliners in areas where all aircraft are required to have a working transponder (roughy speaking, within 30 miles of 'large' airports - or above 18,000 feet)... but large majority of the U.S. airspace doesn't require this, and most smaller aircraft don't have TCAS, or sometimes even a transponder. 'See & Avoid' (or if you are feeling cynical, "The Big Sky Theory") is supposed to be the primary method of collision avoidance in VFR conditions, and even in IFR, you are expected, if you see something, that 'shouldnt be there', to avoid it!

When limitations of See & Avoid [SAA] were encountered in the past, specific mechanisms were implemented to preserve the concept while carving out sensible guidelines for exceptions. For instance, the military has some mighty fast airplanes that are designed to be extremely low visibility - not so good from the SAA perspective. So, large chunks of airspace called Military Operations Areas were carved out where they could go play. When an MOA is hot, you are not prohibited from going in there... but most sensible pilots do. Airliners fly in all sorts of weather & lighting, and as flights became longer in duration and more 'heads down' (navigating by instruments, more radio work, attitude instrument flying, systems monitoring, etc.), and in much faster aircraft, SAA became harder & harder to maintain. So, above 18,000 in the US, you are in class A airspace, which used to be called, much more descriptively, Positive Control Airspace. Every airplane there is under ATC control, and they take responsibility for aircraft separation. No VFR traffic allowed. Since this is generally above the altitudes most private airplanes fly, it was a nice idea that gained safety for the airlines while allowing general aviation to keep its freedoms & flexibility.

I hope something sensible like that will be done, perhaps to restrict drones to certain types of airspace... require some form of piloting qualifications for drone operators... require transponders on all drones, or... well something. Or one day, a drone is going to be enginebait & cause an accident. One of the biggest incentives for safety as a pilot is the fact that you are first to arrive at the scene of an accident. Drone operators don't have that, and I wonder if it will be possible to maintain such a robust safety culture without it....

No they don't. If it's not a puddle jumper, the damn thing lands itself.

Well, unless you count 737s, 757s, 767s, 777s, and a few dozen other 100+ seat commercial aircraft as 'puddle jumpers', you are wrong. These airplanes have the capability to autoland, under a highly restricted set of conditions, involving maximum wind speeds (on the 737, max headwind 25 kts, xwind 15 and tailwind 10), clearing a large ILS safe zone on the surface of the airport to assure no interference with the localizer & glide slope antennas, minimum visibilites (because many autopilot systems work only the ailerons & elevator, not the rudder, and once you are on the deck you need the rudder to track the centerline, which the autopilot can no longer do, and neither can you if you can't see), etc., etc., etc.

I flew 600 hours for a major airline on the 737 last year. I did exactly one autoland in the entire year, and it was because the Captain & I wanted the procedural practice, the airport had a CAT III ILS, and it was a quiet day & ATC was accommodating.

I really wish I knew what urges people to forcefully declare they know about something when they plainly don't. It only subtracts from the discussion and your credibility.

I'm sorry, but I had to correct this:

according to special relativity, there are no privileged frames of reference.

This is quite untrue. By a 'privileged frame of reference', physicists have always meant ones in which the laws are particularly simple. There are, in special relativity, a privileged set of frames called internal reference frames. These are the same priviliged reference frames as existed under Newton's Laws. What Einstein did is hypothesize (to explain the negative result of the Michelson-Morely experiment as well as the seeming demand for some sort of absolutely special, 'non-moving' internal reference frame from Maxwell's equations) that the transformation equations between two used by Newton were incorrect. The Galilean transforms, which (roughly speaking) say if a pitcher throws a 90 mph fastball directly to the rear of a train moving forward at 50 mph, it will emerge from the train's rear (i.e. from the perpective of an observer on the side of the tracks) at 90-50=40 mph, are not quite right. Einstein derived the Lorentz transforms (after Lorentz, somewhat in desperation, came upon them as a way to explain how the speed of light might be the same for all observers) from some basic postulates, which change the addition of velocities in such a way that they never add up to c. The reason it's called special relativity is because it apples to only a special subset of all possible frames of reference - the inertial ones.

The idea that one can, with additional difficulty, calculate and make correct predictions in non-convenient frames of reference predates Einstein by quite a bit. The General theory of relativity, I believe, applies in the same form to all reference frames but it's not simple at all.

If you want a quick mental experiment to demonstrate that Special Relativity isn't meant to apply to all reference frames, consider the following. Special Relativity says that if you wish to preserve causality, no object can travel faster than the speed of light. Go outside on a clear night. Look at the Andromeda Galaxy. Rotate your body 90 degrees. Consider what speed the Andromeda Galaxy would have to be moving from the point of view of your (briefly) rotating reference frame.

Well, I don't think these guys and gals are a bunch of 'dirty twenty-somethings'.

http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/27/7995471-pilots-from-continental-and-united-airlines-demonstrate-on-wall-street

Only about 800 pilots, to be sure. But I don't think the focus was that 'rich people are rich' - more like, 'our highly paid executives are mismanaging our company, and we are stuck with the results.'

Regardless of whether you agree with the message, perhaps you will agree that the major media tends to ignore peaceful, organized and coherent messages in favor of 'bad boy' protestors & violence.

Very little mention was made in the media of the pilot protests on Wall Street today, despite significant organization, and a coherent message.

A Video of such, you can skip the first minute.

IMHO, traditional media outlets do tend to ignore marches and protests, unless something violent occurs. To wit, how many of you reading this were even aware of pilots picketing Wall Street today, with 5x the numbers of the other Wall Street protestors? Because we were organized, polite and non-violent, we didn't garner much media attention. Because the other protestors were scruffy, angrier, and less compliant, they were 'noticed'.

On the other hand, the NYPD was extremely helpful with the mechanics of the protest. It helps to be well behaved in some ways.

As we all know (speaking at least for the fifth row), Dedekind is famous for the line: God made the natural numbers. Everything else is the work of man.

Not to be rude, but Dedekind said nothing of the sort - considering that Dedekind cuts defining the Reals in terms of the Rationals was, well, Dedekind's invention, he obviously felt that there was more to mathematics than Z. Leopold Kronecker was the source of your quote.

I disagree. I'd like to see them go under. They should sell their printer division to a company that's currently named "Agilent", and then they should just sell off all their assets and shut their doors. Then Agilent should rename themselves "HP".

Where's a +1 mod point when you need one?

I still have an old HP48GX I used to use hours a day when I tutoring kids in physics and math. Donnelly's(sp?) book on SystemRPL and the underlying arch was a lot of what got me into digging into the internals of computers for fun.

I miss that HP and would like to have it back.

There's also much "anecdotal evidence" of ghosts and associated metaphysics. No one believes them to be true either, unless one haunted house can be scientifically and rigorously tested. Without tests, "anecdotal evidence" of PED interference is worth nothing. Pilots are indeed usually superstitious, but airplane engineers should not be.

I see you are quite comfortable using anecdotal evidence when it suits you, unless you happen to have a peer-reviewed study in your pocket regarding the average superstition level of pilots.

Contract '02 did suck, didn't it? You should talk to the guy two numbers senior to you about that one... if I'm guessing right. Nice to see another golden meatballer on here!

When the only information passengers have is route and ticket price, the airline that can scheme to have the lowest upfront price will win. Only initially, and only with very occasional travelers. Taking me as an example, I don't fly more often than 2-3 times a year, yet I've had my share of good and bed experiences with different airlines... and I'll always look for options from the airlines I had good experiences with while scanning through Kayak's results. Now, if they are much more expensive than somebody else, I'll consider the others... but I'll pay the 5-10% more to fly the ones I like. We all remember the crappy legroom, shitty entertainment options, and bad food, even if the search engine doesn't show it.

Unfortunately, you are in a quite slim minority of people who are actually willing to pay a revenue premium for decent service. The large majority of people who fly today are not. This is, unfortunately, a well demonstrated fact that every airline marketing department is highly aware of and literally testing every day with their revenue models.

Southwest is quite an anomaly - they are operationally extremely efficient (one unified fleet type, eliminating burecratic cost holes and personnel time sucks like assigned seating, etc.), and have spent decades building both their 'can do' culture and reputation for (dare I say the word) 'fairness'. I think in Southwest's case, 'fairness' is really a proxy for simple/transparent/understandable. It's sorta the flat-taxer's argument that the simplicity of the rules would pay for itself in lots of ways, even if some are hard to measure. In Southwest's case, it works, it works well, but it takes decades to build up such a thing. People who work there take a lot of pride in their jobs, and that may be hard to measure but it comes across. I have several friends who made the jump to work for them (and you lose a LOT when you jump from one airline to another), and none of them regret it a bit.

So... tell your friends to vote with their wallets and be willing to pay more for decent service, and not to give business to airlines with lousy service. It might actually make a difference if enough people do it.

At least, I hope it does....

I think you need the pricing model of the airlines explained to you. It is designed to maximize revenue per flight. Period. Fairness's got nothing to do with it. The airlines, if it would maximize revenue per flight, would beat you with dead chickens to make you more slippery so you could get on and off more quickly.

And if you think this concentration on revenue per flight is a little short-sighted, pisses off people and chases away global revenue in the long run, I'd agree with you. But please don't suffer under the delusion that any large business cares about fairness, other than as a marketing/reputation concern or perhaps coincidentally when you meet a decent human who works for them. Some businesses have simple pricing models because complexifing them, 'more fair' or not, would increase costs or reduce revenue. In the case of the airlines, they have very complex models for how much to charge at what point in time to maximize revenue per flight. The changes in the cost side based on the differential weights of passengers is extremely minor, so minor that to track it would cost far more than any 'fairness' reputational benefit you might get or slightly enhanced revenue such a weight tax would bring in.

As a matter of fact, you might get a revenue penalty, if you operate in the Domestic 48. There are more overweight Americans than not, and so the majority of people would be charged slightly more, in a way that I can guarantee would piss them off. I see lawsuits galore. And empirical evidence shows that most people buy tickets on airlines (assuming point A to B, same day & departure time, same number of stopovers) entirely based on presented price. So you might wind up driving customers away and revenue down.

In most corporate charters, the executives of the company are required to maximize profit for the shareholders - fairness doesn't enter into it. While you could argue that a corporation is made of people, and people should be decent and fair, I think you'll find that without enforcement, either via customer outrage (revenue reduction), lawsuits (cost increases), government regulation/enforcement, it doesn't happen at a planning/operational level, even if individuals on the front-lines, or their sups, try to be decent.

For what it's worth, a pax now weighs 195 pounds in the winter. Exactly. Including carry-ons. At least, that's how we do our performance calculations in the U.S. There is no realistic gain in being more precise.

Well, for what it's worth, I'm an airline pilot.

And when I commute between DC and NYC, I drive. Everything you say is true - it bothers me a lot that the industry has sunk so low, and it bothers a lot of other pilots too.

Unfortunately, our ideas don't count for much, and the reality is that the huge majority of paying people pick how to get from A to B on the basis of price alone. The amount of resources airlines bring to 'revenue management' (a fancy way of saying figuring out how much to charge for a seat) is rather amazing; they have models that adjust the value a seat will bring in based on time to departure, and they are constanly refining their models, to the point where they can predict their revenue from a given flight within +-1% pretty consistenly desipte cancellations, rasing, lowering, then rasing the price of the seat (Costs? Not so much :-/). And those finely tuned revenue models all say the same thing - people buy for the sticker price, and expect fees to be added in anyway. If you include those fees in the 'sticker price', your seat will bring in less revenue as most people order flights between A and B by sticker price, and sticker price alone. Consider it a fact.

Several airlines have tried the idea of 'all first class' - establish a brand specifically known for its top notch service, and deliver it. They have all failed in recent years, Midwest being one of the last. It seems that there are not enough people willing to pay for superior service to make a go of it as a scheduled airline. The non-scheduled operators, who charge an order of magnitude more (see Netjets et al.), on the other hand, apparently take superior service with absolute seriousness, and deliver it well - they are growing relatively robustly to fill the gap between dedicated corporate/celebrity bizjets and the becoming Greyhound scheduled operators.

I actually wish more people would think and do as you, so it was economic to run a quality airline, even if it was smaller in size. When enough people demand something, the market sometimes delivers. Enjoy your travels!

Use Macports. Manual package management is something I try to avoid - 'sudo port install matplotlib py26-matplotlib' and all the dependencies and compiling are taken care of, not to mention the ability to cleanly uninstall if you wish. Macports recently upped to v1.9.1, which now tracks which ports you requested, so it's easy to prune away orphan libraries you no longer need.

And matplotlib is a gem. It's got a ridiculuous number of plot-styles so it's remarkably flexible - if you are into GIS, look at matplotlib-basemap, which adds many map projections and the ability to plot geo data on those.

I do wonder why people would pay for the 'special' (i.e. non-free, non-community) version of ActivePython. AFAIK, ActivePython neither develops the base libraries (matplotlib, SciPy and Numpy), nor python itself. What do they add other than as a bundling service?

If the survival of each individual's genes were paramount, there would be no homosexuality and no parents killing their own children, 'cause those are pretty much dead-end paths from the standpoint of survival of the individual.

You just missed the flaw in your reasoning - you confuse an individual's GENES with the INDIVIDUAL. Consider that a parent only has 50% of their genes in a child; if it turns out that killing the child would allow for the opportunity to invest more in other children, and increase their probability of having offspring (i.e. getting more copies of your genes in circulation), it might be very RATIONAL to kill your own child from the standpoint of increasing the frequency of your genes in the population. This behavior is observed frequently in animal species besides man. Consider how violently men react to adulterous women and thier offspring - the possibility that they might have been investing resources in a child with 0% of their genes means they have nothing to lose, genetically, by offing them. The math of kin selection has been worked out quite precisely, in many different species with different mating habits, and the numbers work out; we (as in man and virtually every other species) tend to behave in such a way as to maximize the spread of our genes, regardless of whether the copies come from us or from our kin.

You mention ants - ants behave the way they do because of the highly unusual way they pass genes on - or should I say, the way most ants DON'T. In a given colony, all the future ants (and future genes) come from the queen, who has sex briefly (for a day or two) with between 1 and 10 males, and stores their sperm to produce eggs for the rest of her life. The reason so many ants work themselves to death, engage in combat to the death to protect the queen, and in general seem to not care for themselves as individuals, is they are, as individual reproducers, done. The only chance they have for enhancing the odds of their GENES being spread is by doing everything possible to protect and nuture the only possible reproducer of those genes - the queen. And guess what - the genes that influence aunt behavior in that way are the ones that have been the most successful.

Group level selection has very little evidence going for it, although in highly advanced creatures (like us), it may play a greater role than in general. You should read The Selfish Gene, and The Extended Phenotype, by Dawkins, to see the arguments about group vs. individual vs. genetic selection really hashed out in detail.