I worked in the aerial surveillance industry for several years. In the niche I was in, everyone pretended it was about patriotism and national service. But if you looked at what actually drove the decisions, it was mostly about money, spiced up a little bit with vicarious violence. Aside from some minimal ass covering, there wasn't anybody in the whole chain of command that considered morality or what was actually helping, this was always regarded as someone else's responsibility. And for what they put into it, the money was actually quite good. I have almost no sympathy. Many of them are too far into it to get out now, but they got themselves there by lying to themselves. If they were actually sincere, when they came across evidence of corruption, they'd want to do something about it. But when I started discovering more of what was going on, nobody wanted to hear a thing about it. How they represent their actions to themselves, in their own imagination, doesn't change the nature of what they are doing.

At least half of the people I know are Chinese, most of them in their early 40's or so who came over in the 90's. You're the first one I've knowingly encountered who seems to have any clue about this sort of thing. Though its a gross oversimplification, I tend to view Chinese and eastern European immigrants as the inheritors of western civilization in the US, since the rest of us seem to have given up on it. Their kids are going to be powerful in another 40 or 50 years. Yet my Chinese friends generally don't seem to have a clue about political and cultural history, they're all about money and taking care of their families. In some ways they know a lot less than I do even about Chinese cultural history. I've toyed with the idea of trying to teach a class on it at the local weekend Chinese school, aimed at parents. Not that they would necessarily be interested or that my preaching would accomplish anything.

Hi. A few comments....

Few people can read Latin. To a significant extent, words really do mean what you want them to.

There are many Christian gods. Though the Christ gods are all interrelated, being united under the same name and a common scripture, some of them are a lot better than others. And in different ways, many Christians are smart enough to recognize that their god is not The One True God. I think that when you communicate your view and experience to those Christians, their god changes a little bit, because it thinks through them, sort of. I think that this is necessary, that their gods can not be defeated by force.

Also it appears to me that every major philosophy or religion, however screwed up, has a half-truth or two that it does better than other religions. For those of us who must fight Christianity because it persecutes our spirits and offends our moral sensibilities, I think it's still worth keeping this in perspective, to avoid cutting ourselves off from something we need. Unfortunately, I think it's a little bit like living in a country with a corrupt culture and government. No path forward is quite satisfactory.

I'm not really expressing a view on C.E. vs A.D., just throwing some related thoughts out there.

Cocaine isn't chemically addictive. Like cocaine, marijuana is psychologically addictive. I'm not for or against legalizing marijuana, just pointing out that it is not nonaddictive. I know a couple of people that are addicted enough that they can't get through a day without it. Arguably its still not as bad for them as alcohol though.

I went to crappy universities, not because my grades and test scores wouldn't get me in to the top tier schools, but because I didn't have financial help from my parents and preferred not to go deeply into debt. I foolishly figured that if I was intelligent, worked hard and respected other people I could get a decent job. My classmates got jobs from relatives at Intel and HP as soon as they graduated, while I never even got a phone screen.

So if the heuristic works 90% of the time the other 10% of guys don't deserve to work? I haven't found work within 500 miles of my wife and kids for 4 of the past 5 years, and its still rare that I can even get as far as a phone screen, notwithstanding that I've been effective in every job I've had. I think the heuristic stinks.

And yet, in almost every market, we see one or two companies dominating more than half the market. By your analysis that's way, way too much monopolistic power, and it's the norm. Not very much negative feedback. It seems to me this dynamic has very much in common with communism, even though communism is a purer form so everything goes to hell in a faster and more thorough fashion.

In nature, two species can never survive in exactly the same niche, there has to be something that differentiates them. Oscillations in climate will do it, one species gets the upper hand for a while, then the other, and its stable. (This is like how its easier to balance a pole on your finger if you move you finger randomly back and forth - same principle.) Geographic diversity can help too, and animals can survive in the same fixed locality in slightly different niches that overlap. But within a particular locality, one species always dominates a particular niche. The same dynamics apply to companies. Very quickly things move towards something close to monopoly. Just a moderate amount of regulation isn't enough to fix that. And a large amount of regulation obviously isn't going to fix it either when the political system is corrupted by the same dynamics.

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.