Australia is really stable. The edges of the Australian plate are in New Zealand and Java, which aren't. But tectonic plates are big, and we're in the middle.
1,056 karma · joined February 27, 2009
A point of comparison is Harry Potter. Rowling is still coy about it—as you would be, given the money at stake. But every gay or lesbian reader, and lots of straight ones beside, immediately see what inspired lycanthropy. Not to mention the adolescent protagonist who moves out of his suburban closet to discover a hidden world at the back of a strange pub, where power comes from the point of a spark-shooting wand, and his latent talent for riding broomsticks makes him the most popular boy in his boarding school.
With Rowling's sense for wordplay, she must have been aware of that interpretation, even if it wasn't entirely deliberate. But it isn't just words: the whole structure of magical Britain, and the muggle world's surprising failure to notice things that are sitting in plain sight, are strikingly familiar to gay and lesbian readers who were around when the books were written.
Fake papers and plagiarism are the most blatant form of corruption. They tend to come from certain, let's say, large countries with less developed scientific cultures. Those countries need to put an end to it, because the rest of us keep having to work harder to suppress the racist impressions that we're bound to form of colleagues who look and sound like the cheats.
In more traditional scientific countries, the corruption is more subtle. Today, many groups publish every paper with half a dozen authors, and no indication of what each of them contributed. This enables the professors who run those groups to manipulate authorship more or less as they please, and have total control over who gets to have a career in science. It turns out that absolute power corrupts senior scientists as absolutely as it does other people.
No doubt there are more clever ways to game the system, that I haven't noticed. As long as million dollar grants and first-world citizenship keep being doled out for something as contrived as scientific paper authorship, corruption is inevitable.
It's not uncommon for the acknowledgements section of a paper to thank an anonymous reviewer for, e.g., suggesting the authors further investigate a detail that turned out to be important. But in this case, where the authors couldn't write their own explanation of a technical term, maybe it's a bit premature for them to be writing technical papers.
I don't like claims to authority, but maybe you should read the papers I've published about Bell inequalities too? :-p
It sounds like you're saying that, in principle, physical processes are all reversible. (Although that is often thermodynamically impossible in practice.) You're also saying that it's impossible in principle for someone to learn the result of a measurement in the morning, then unlearn it when the measurement is reversed during the afternoon. I don't see how there could be a self-consistent interpretation of quantum measurement where both those things are true.
The weird part is precisely this: "you can get back to a state where you can no longer tell what the outcome of the 'measurement' was." In other words, at lunchtime you believed that a horizontally polarised photon hit your nose at 10am in morning, and you were right. Now it's dinner time, you don't believe that, and you would be wrong if you did. If the Everett interpretation doesn't pose a massive challenge to your ideas about reality and human identity, you haven't understood it. There are physics professors who picture photons choosing which way to go at a beam splitter, then transmitting the news backwards in time, because that seems more plausible to them.
Of course, interpretations are not science. Everyone agrees how an experiment would go: any attempt to reverse the interaction of the photon with your nose and brain would fail, because thermodynamics. From a purely scientific viewpoint, it simply doesn't matter how many other yous are superposed in parallel universes, because their existence or lack of it has no consequences that (any of?) you can observe. But scientists are as fascinated by this as everyone else is.
First, I have to place a lot of trust in Abine. They get to see everything! It would be nice if the EFF or FSF audited these services.
Also, it would be nice if each part of the privacy respecting web supported the other parts. Blur supports Google and Apple browsers on smart phones, but doesn't (officially) support Firefox.
In that scenario, why do you think it helps to put the membrane 100m deep, instead of 5m deep?
Unfortunately, that's not how pressure works. There's a 100m column of water above the salt side of the membrane, but there's also a 100m column of water in the pipe on the fresh side. Those columns generate an enormous pressure, but it's pushing from both sides, which doesn't help you get water through the membrane.
This is a reversible process, as you can get the energy back by using the osmotic pressure to drive a piston. A desalination process that used a lot less energy would let you build a perpetual motion machine, and is seriously against the laws of physics.
Go Ghengis!
That's quite interesting. Lots of Mongol rulers drank themselves to death. The timing had world historic consequences: they tended to cark it just after they nuked the entire muslim world from horseback, and just before they moved on to Europe. Maybe the invention of distilled spirits was the key to European domination.
The cost of a second-hand mathematics textbook is immaterial compared to the cost of the time I spend learning its contents. A text that lets me learn the same material in half the time is worth a lot: within reason, cost is no object for serious physics and maths books.
Those are corroborated by sentinel cases in Australia. The rate has risen to the point where quarantine is struggling to cope, and the doctors' union has suggested a complete ban on flights from India.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-21/nt-covid-active-cases...
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/why-are-you-like-this
I don't know if iView works overseas, but I think the show is on Netflix too.
The Murdoch family's claim ... I mean, Australia's ... is ridiculous. Facebook are totally within their rights to stop using Australian content and not pay for it. If the law is so sloppily worded that it arguably defines the Health Department website as news, well, it wasn't Facebook who drafted it.
On the other hand, this does stuff around a lot of innocent bystanders, and Facebook could easily have given a month's notice that they were going to do it. Which is, ironically, one of the things that the law would require them to do. What ever else Facebook might have demonstrated by their irresponsible reaction, they have shown that this law isn't all wrong, rather some parts of it are urgently necessary.
Here's something I find really amusing. In the late 90s, when IPv6 was being introduced, the joke was that 128 bits would suffice until we all had massively parallel wrist watches. Which would never happen, certainly not in our lifetimes.
The iPhone was released in 2007.
That's the point.
It's very easy to travel through the snow without exposing yourself to any avalanche risk: just stay away from snow that's steep enough to avalanche. If you're going "hiking on skis", that's all you need to know.
It's not quite so easy if you want to go climbing, but it isn't that hard. If an avalanche sweeps you off the mountain, your immediate problem is falling off a mountain. Being caught in an avalanche is a comparatively minor issue. So you're going to be conservative: if any kind of subtle analysis is called for, you stay in the hut, and wait until the snow is obviously stable. In climbing season, that will happen soon enough.
What's tricky is going skiing. In winter, either you're willing to take some calculated risks with avalanches, or you'll be limited to pretty boring skiing. People don't do avalanche courses to be safe (you can do that without a course). They do them to take more risks, skiing in less obviously safe conditions, and get away with it. Which is all good, provided that you're honest about what you're doing.
Maybe a good comparison is a pilot getting an instrument rating. The safest option will always be to stay on the ground in bad weather. The reason they'd get the rating is to travel reliably, but less safely, by flying through bad weather when the rewards justify the risks.
There is an old type of PLB and a new type. That was a problem for the old type, in principle. In practice, the search coordination centres got pretty good at triage. Going down Route 66 at 70 mph, unlikely to be a real emergency; halfway up Mt McKinley, scramble the chopper. Accidental activations are far more common than abusive ones.
The new type broadcasts its serial number, and everyone is required to register an emergency contact person when they buy their PLB. If the beacon is activated, the contact person gets a call from search and rescue, asking what the beacon user is up to.
Which actual scientists describe themselves that way? We're physicists, geologists, botanists, psychologists or whatever. When someone says they're a scientist, it suggests that they're not part of any actual scientific discipline, but making a false appeal to authority.
The difference is that Australians are, for the most part, paying the bills as they come due.
What are you referring to? The Second World War seems like the obvious case. I think there were two things at play there. European climbers returned to the Himalayas, and resumed where they left off in 1939; perhaps the war delayed the ascent of Everest instead of causing it. Also, nylon! Ropes that don't break—and that don't break falling lead climbers—were a huge enabling technology for rock climbing.