That is certainly what students think. It also turns out not to be true. If the goal is "learn stuff", but you haven't learned it yet: I'm pretty sure that you don't even know what you don't know.

It's also a bad feedback loop. In the case of my students, they'll cheat on the homework, because "it's just homework, why bother?" Then, since they skipped the "practice it" step, they're screwed on tests since they don't actually know how to go about solving the problems, so are strongly motivated to cheat to cover up the fact that they haven't learned what they're supposed to have by that point. (and then it becomes my fault for writing a test that's "too hard!!!")

I teach physics: a random engineering student might indeed never end up needing "useless" information about electromagnetism, for example: but the real value comes in being able to approach a complicated problem and figure out how to solve it: a skill which is at the core of any future engineering job. So, not bothering with actually doing the useless homework: that student is completely missing the point as to why they're there in the first place.

It's a new-ish (1800's) Protestant church formed here in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

As a Catholic myself, I can point out that the current pope (also a Jesuit) has come out and said that it's a moral obligation to get vaccinated, in the "helping other people" sense. Unfortunately, there are a noticeable and vocal number of Catholic people here in the US (including bishops and clergy) who'd rather plug their ears, humm loudly, and listen to Fox News over the Vatican on this issue. Partisan politics is corrosive to the point of derailing people who otherwise put a huge amount of stock in religious tradition/theology.

Now we can queue the usual anti-religion slashdot crowd to come in and take shots because organized religion was mentioned. Whatever. Just pointing out that thinking things through in a consistent way, in whatever your own belief framework is, has been sacrificed on the altar of Owning The Other Team.

If your fridge has a 100% duty cycle, it's broken. You're confusing Watts = J/s = a rate, with kWh = (kJ/s x hour = 3600 kJ).

Competing effects. Hawking radiation slowly bleeds mass energy out of black holes over time, yes. It works best for tiny ones, works very slowly on big ones.

This article says the expansion of space could add mass, and do it faster than Hawking radiation leaks it. The energy is coming from vacuum energy, which is reasonably well understood in QM. Dark Energy could be a source too, it grows as space stretches, but no one understands it at the moment. Note that the expansion of the universe doesn't happen on the edges: it's everywhere that's stretching. A meter tomorrow is slightly longer than a meter today, which was slightly longer than a meter yesterday. Only really adds up on the billions of years scale, but that's what's happening.

my use case - students need to be doing stuff in linux, but they're not geeks, have windows laptops, and aren't about to go blow away their whole computing life for the work they need to do for a class or a small research project.

Current WSL involves a lot of fiddling which is difficult for that target audience, because adding an X-server never seems to go the same way twice for two different students a semester apart, gotta find the current version, get env variables set, remember to run the X-server, etc. Yes, easy if you're already someone who's got unix experience: but those people are, as everyone else here says, already running linux anyway.

So, I for one welcome a WSL that skips the extra step of going to a 3rd party to install a hard to configure thing that has ten years of "how tos" spread out on the web over more versions than there are howtos, and may or may not be actually free anymore (looking at you, Xming).

From an open source evangelist perspective, the more people who have positive experiences when first touching linux, the more who will delve deeper and actually get to the point where they're happier just running linux in the first place. Currently, the experience is (perhaps semi-intentionally, from both the Windows and Linux sides?) a muggle repellent.

Different people. The "peace" prize (who have such a great track record that one of the most recent winners is busy trying to commit genocide in Ethiopia) is a different batch of people from a whole different country (Norway), compared to the "real" Nobel prizes in sciency fields in Sweden.

Fellow libertarian here. But also a scientist, so obligated to point out where your takes are not quite on the money from the "facts as best as we can sort them out" angle.

True, although "decades" is a slow timescale for a human, on climate timescales (centuries/millennia) it's quite sudden; so, very much not slowly. There's a classic xkcd that visualizes this really well. And this is slashdot, so one must cite any relevant xkcd :)

Simply wrong here. Climate tracks orbital mechanics and solar activity quite well... until the last couple hundred years, when it suddenly goes off the rails (see your point #1). This is one of the main reasons current changes are attributed to humans (your point #3). The other being the very tight correlation with atmospheric CO2 levels, which match human output levels this go round (vs. distance past cases where outbreaks of vulcanism were the culprits).

Poking around, lots of NASA and NOAA sites with details, but surprisingly enough wikipedia has one of the better-crafted pages with the graph I've most often seen used to show this.

Combining the orbital stuff and solar cycle is done here in this NASA plot. The "it's really taking off in the last few decades, when solar conditions say it should be going the other way" is really obvious here.

Here's one of many places (this one NASA again) where you can compare CO2 to temperature, both recently and int he distance past.

The current warming episode nailing the human-induced CO2 levels and not something else says otherwise.

This is out of my wheelhouse (physics, data analysis), so I've nothing to contribute here.

The thing that amps up discussions about policy debates is that they change what's lawful. As a scientist, all I can hope for is that what's actually going on is used to inform such policy debates, rather than misinformation or hyperbole.

See above. a) When new laws get passed, they're lawful; b) in this case, anthropic global warning with some serious side effects (that as you say, could disrupt the whole nation state model) is far from delusional. In fact, I'd argue that it's ostrich-head-in-the-sand level delusional to NOT be concerned about this.

Answer: based on how well google drive organizes things with just a search function and little hierarchical structure: "hell no, not an improvement!". Maybe I'm just too old to know how to do it right, but finding anything in Google Drive is really frustrating: and they're a search engine company!

Came here to post this too, remembered reading the article when it came out. Apparently it's not just Slashdot editors who recycle old news!

I also loved the trackball games. Best use of a trackball, though: Marble Madness. Rather than simply using it to move around a cursor, it felt more akin to actually imparting spin to the marble you were moving around the maze. Great game.

If the E=mc^2 energy needed to make an electron/positron pair is 2x 512keV (mass energy of electrons/positrons), the two photons need at least 1.024MeV between them (n.b. - you also need to conserve momentum before and after, so this is slightly over-simplified). If the two photons have less than this "threshold" energy, then energy is conserved simply by nothing happening: the photons afterwards have the same energy as the photons did to start with, and no matter/antimatter is produced, and they pass through each other. Since electrons and positrons are the lightest charged particles (and this is an electromagnetic interaction, so you need charged particles to play), there's nothing smaller that can get made.

Nine months ago it hadn't been tested as much as previous products, although it was remarkably well studied for such a short time frame. But by this point, it's been tested way more than any other not-fully-approved medicine ever. So many people have had it that we now get to hear about the parts per million really rare oddball side effects that would have never come to light in a "normal" clinical trial. If you want to look at the emergency authorization as something of a roll of the dice, ok. But it came up roses in the end, so cool. And works remarkably well, even against mutations that have cropped up since. Great! Humanity just got triple lucky. But, as you say, no, we can't be happy about it, because people love being polarized more than they like anything else. Hooray for America.

Had this worked, everyone would have been shocked. But, it's a thing you gotta say before letting the NSA off the leash. Now whether that actually has any chance of working is a different story, and if done properly, we'll never know anyway, one way or the other.

Hmm. So given the choice of "ineffectual blowhard" vs "Putin suck-up actively undermining US foreign policy", Putin chooses... who? Any actual election interference aside, you just have to look at the coverage of the election campaign in the Russian state media to see where the rooting interests were at.

But it's not even a rare observation. A cool one, yes. Any search on "colliding galaxies" gets you as many different pictures of them as you'd care to search through. Note that this was the CBS take on it, not NASA's. NASA's article was "here's some pretty pictures, it works, now here's the repair story".

There are several radio-based neutrino efforts at the south pole, too. RICE was the first, deployed back with the AMANDA protptype more than 20 years ago. ARA and ARIANNA are current efforts (all have Wikipedia entries if you're curious). ANITA is a balloon-borne one that observes the ice sheet from above for even higher energy events. TFA is about current efforts to do the same in Greenland, which will indeed give us complementary sky coverage to the south pole efforts.