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Comment: Re:They don't understand the difference (Score 1) 517

by jd (#45945761) Attached to: How Weather Influences Global Warming Opinions

The restrictions on teaching in America are severe. The restrictions in the UK make it doable, for now, but the backlash against Free Schools will likely end that.

I'd love to get off my high horse. I'm getting vertigo. The problem is that educating people has got so much red tape and legal bumfluff involved. PLEASE let me educate! It is my natural state of being!

Comment: Re:Global vs. local effects (Score 1) 517

by jd (#45939751) Attached to: How Weather Influences Global Warming Opinions

You are correct. Global warming refers to heat, on a climatic scale, on average. It doesn't refer to temperature (the number one mistake people make), local conditions, day-to-day variations or local phenomena.

But it's worse! For the price of three mistakes, we'll throw in three more, absolutely free!

Heat flows around the planet. You've the conveyor belts, trade winds, gulf stream and many, many more. But air doesn't just circulate around these, it also circulates around regions of high pressure and low pressure (forget which way for which) and from high pressure to low pressure, but pressure systems aren't trivial things and you'll hear of one blocking another, not one cancelling another.

Climate also has myriad feedback mechanisms. Hot air rises, expands and cools as it does so. (Temperature is inversely proportional to volume, near enough.) As air cools, it sinks. If the air sinks when it is 100% saturated with water vapour, the air cannot retain it and it falls out the sky in various unpleasant forms. Usually, whatever you're not dressed for. It Knows! But what affects air temperature? Solar heat, yes, but also the ground. Air is fairly transparent when it comes to thermal radiation but not to conduction or convection, which is why the ice caps (which reflect 100% of what reaches the ground) have very cold air masses, whilst thick forest (which absorbs a very high percentage) have very hot air masses.

(You also have to figure that water holds a LOT of heat. To heat water one degree C, you need to put in far more than you would to heat carbon one degree C. Forests, by their nature, tend to have higher humidity in their vicinity. Polar air, by contrast, is usually very dry. This changes the reservoir available.)

Finally, organic systems are negative feedback systems. They have to be. Using James Lovelock's Daisyworld as an example, white daisies (which cool a region) like warm weather. But what if they liked hot? If it was a positive feedback loop, the daisies would cook themselves. Even if you picture a response curve, so their preference waned above the ideal, they would still create highly unfavourable conditions and die out. The only way to make the loop stable is for the daisy to have a negative feedback loop, so that it and the environment are in dynamic equilibrium. An ideal state is actively maintained.

Humans don't really understand dynamic systems well, and dynamic equilibria even less. I despair of your species, Earthlings. Anyways, there are all manner of regions on your planet, all with their own different temperature preferences and all actively maintaining them. Air circulates. Globally. The instantaneous result is weather, the long-term result is climate.

Try to picture a radio station with static. You can distinguish the instantaneous (the pops, whistles and crackles) from the aggregate (whatever is being broadcast). To equate them is to assume a time invariance that has no basis in reality.

Honestly, sometimes I think my seminar series "Ethics 101 For Daleks" was easier.

Comment: Re:Oh, please (Score 0) 1043

by jd (#45935383) Attached to: Doctors Say Food Stamp Cuts Could Cause Higher Healthcare Costs

Why would healthcare costs increase? Demand outstrips supply by a long way, but if people postpone treatment to avoid the smaller costs, they'll end up with greater health problems at far greater cost, which they can't then pay and the doctor/hospital is forced to eat the bill. The treatment is indeed more expensive, but for the supplier.

When you have a healthier populace, you want to minimize costs by treating early that which hasn't been prevented. A very large number of micropayments is a lot of money.

When you have a very sick population, treating is largely futile. Disease can live in pockets undetected and surge at random intervals. You could never find, let alone vaccinate and treat, every solitary member of the underclasses. Rather, you want the disease to burn itself out. Incinerating the victims is cheap, efficient and prevents recurrence. This is the "Atlas Shrugged" philosophy. And, economically, it makes sense in the short term. Starving these people to death is slower and annoys pop stars. Well, it sort of makes sense. Ability is normally distributed, so if N% of the rich have a particular rare and valuable mental or physical skill, N% of the poor will also have it. There are a lot more poor than rich (80/20 rule), so with a better diet and better education, it should be obvious that you can scale up your entire economy, which means greater cashflow, greater resilience and greater overall profit.

In a nutshell, if you cut welfare beyond a certain point and replace education by religion beyond a certain point, you can create a downward spiral where recovery is uneconomic. No matter what you do, the salvage operation will cost more than the value of what is salvaged. Disease is not known for respecting rank nor privilege. It may affect the affluent last, but as the support system dies, the affluent will also die. And, in pure economic terms, there's plenty of skilled people from overcrowded countries to replace them with. To the ruling elite, the rich are ultimately as disposable as anyone. Economically, everyone is replaceable and replacement is cheaper than stagnation.

This is where I differ from Ayn Rand. (Ok, I differ on almost everything. She was a seriously ill woman.) I do not believe stagnation is necessary or useful. Way too much potential is getting wasted, far more than can be justified by the logic of diminishing returns. I do not believe the upper caste has exclusive rights to intelligence. I do not believe scale efficiency is sublinear. (I do not believe Ayn Rand would have comprehended the technical terms in my post. She was not very bright.) I do not believe America has passed the event horizon and is descending into the black hole of oblivion... although its leaders are trying very hard to reach that point...

I do believe that with a sensible food policy and a decent educational system, any country at all would see a major economic boom. Add in better mental healthcare, better housing and a cleaner environment, and you could see rejuvenation beyond the imaginings of most.

Comment: This should be obvious (Score 1) 1043

by jd (#45934993) Attached to: Doctors Say Food Stamp Cuts Could Cause Higher Healthcare Costs

You cannot make money without spending money
You cannot save money without spending money
Cheap solutions can end up very expensive
Expensive but appropriate solutions can wind up costing less

This is all very basic stuff. Sticker price is rarely the only price.

NB: Appropriate is there for a reason. Charging more for a bad product doesn't magically make it a good product. If it did, can you imagine how good bank CEOs would be by now? In fact, there are a number of situations where the normal economic rules invert, where high prices are desirable and price wars lead to ever-higher costs.

Equally, low sticker prices don't automatically mean bad. Think of Linux, which has the lowest sticker price possible and is superb. But that only appears degenerate because of looking at sticker price alone. If you cost the time spent developing and testing, you actually show Linux to be in the fourth category. If you value developer time at typical market rates, Linux probably weighs in at around $1.2 billion. Very expensive, but the TCO of using it is very very low.

Comment: Re:Let's mod up things that use big words... (Score 0) 162

by jd (#45928955) Attached to: Kazakh Professor Claims Solution of Another Millennium Prize Problem

Comprehension is also your problem. Go read James Gleik for a bit, then maybe read some Mandelbrot. THEN come back and tell me about chaotic systems.

You have zero understanding of the Holographic Universe theory, that much is obvious. I won't waste my time explaining it, all I will say is that it is the only possible way this Kazakh professor could have done what he claimed. It is the only way to transform a non-solvable problem into one that could conceivably be solved. I do not believe he has succeeded (I am not sure I believe the theory either), but I am convinced he does and that he believes he has. There is only one path he could have taken to reach such a belief. Ergo, that is the path he took.

It should be obvious to even the smallest child that if approach X is doomed to failure, that the professor did not follow approach X. He did something else. It should also be obvious that, with the plethora of Holographic Universe papers on arXiv, along with papers on reduced-dimension n-body problem papers, that reduced-dimension approaches to problems has gained traction. But you're too busy complaining about terms you know nothing of to actually look at what people are doing. Way too busy.

So stop posting gibberish, read for once in your life, and maybe - just maybe - you will grasp what others are saying before you start spewing. God, how I hate it when lazy, incompetent bastards start thinking they know everything.

Comment: Re:His bio: Solution for n-particle problem (Score 1) 162

by jd (#45928861) Attached to: Kazakh Professor Claims Solution of Another Millennium Prize Problem

You are confusing setting up a system of differential equations (which you can do) with the system being differentiable (which is quite another matter).

Your post largely restates what I stated, so as far as I am concerned, you are more concerned with being pompous than with comprehending what it is you are being pompous about. Wake me up when you grow enough of a pair to read as well as write.

Comment: Re:His bio: Solution for n-particle problem (Score 4, Informative) 162

by jd (#45927875) Attached to: Kazakh Professor Claims Solution of Another Millennium Prize Problem

Well, yes and no. There is no general solution to the n-body problem, where n is greater than 2. The nature of the system makes that inevitable. The system isn't differentiable and you can't actually perform infinitesimal steps.

What you can do is define bounds for certain special cases, where the solutions must exist within those bounds. The error on the bounds increases quite quickly, which is why space probes are forever making course corrections. Bounds do not exist in all cases, as three bodies is sufficient for the system to be chaotic (deterministic but not predictable), which means in those cases, you rely heavily on probability (meteorologists perform hundreds of thousands of simulations and see what general patterns have the highest probability of cropping up) and on very short timeframes (in snooker, you can make a reasonable guess as to what will happen one or two reflections ahead).

These are inescapable properties of multibody dynamics, because you can do bugger all with infinite multiway recursion. There is no way to simplify it... ...as it is.

What you CAN do is flatten the universe into a 2D holographic model. If there is no time, there is no place for recursion. That might yield something. Alternatively, with time dilation, you can make infinitesimal time arbitrarily large. Neither of these will yield an absolute answer, but could be expected to yield an answer that looked as though it was.

Comment: Re:Why not in English? (Score 0) 162

by jd (#45927663) Attached to: Kazakh Professor Claims Solution of Another Millennium Prize Problem

Russian was the International standard for publication of scientific discoveries in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Russian was fluently spoken as a second language in academia across Europe and America at that time. Einstein's early publications would have had Russian translations or might even have been written in Russian first. It was the lingua franca of science at that time. That matters, in that all the necessary terminology and shorthand developed in science in the last few hundred years will already exist in the language. It is fit for purpose.

So, no, there is nothing wrong with a paper in Russian. There won't be many American professors left who could read it, and for political reasons they would likely deny any such ability. Europeans are less extreme and more multicultural, but Russian has never been a particularly hot second language. Ok, more so than Old Icelandic, Akkadian or Finnish, but Babylon hasn't done much new maths in 5,000 years and Scandanavia only produces hot computer geeks, hot models and hot saunas.

Comment: Re:Thought experiments (Score 1) 264

by jd (#45884943) Attached to: Experiments Reveal That Deformed Rubber Sheet Is Not Like Spacetime

Well, yes. I should hope so. Einstein did most of his best work imagining cows travelling near or at the speed of light. If relativity had to wait for NASA to modify a cow's digestive system to fuel a ramjet capable of near-light speeds, we would still be waiting. Not that it isn't fun to picture such a cow.

But, yeah, his thought experiments were definitely figurative descriptions, not mathematically precise models and it is not necessary for NASA to engineer a cow capable of making his figurative descriptions physically correct in all respects. Although it would make a change from firing pumpkins by catapult.

Comment: Re:If you have a better idea ... (Score 2) 264

by jd (#45884909) Attached to: Experiments Reveal That Deformed Rubber Sheet Is Not Like Spacetime

First, it's an analogy, not a model, so it doesn't need to be mathematically correct, it only has to be conceptually correct. I don't see the problem there. Conceptually, gravity bends the spacetime around the mass, such that objects moving through the distortion appear to an observer to travel along a path that is not straight (it is straight to the object) in space or in time. The rubber sheet is a perfectly good representation of this concept.

If you want it mathematically perfect, you have problems. First, we don't yet know for certain if you should treat a mass as a point source or one with volume. The ternary star system recently found will help there. Second, in order for something to change state, there must be a force. With springs or rubber, this is a restoring force of known value. It not only removes curvature where there is no mass, it prevents the mass stretching the material to infinity and beyond. The nuclear forces play a role in reproducing some of this. The object cannot collapse further than the point where gravity and the nuclear forces all balance out. But as far as I know, the nuclear forces do NOT prevent spacetime bending infinitely, nor remove the distortion when the mass moves elsewhere. This matters. You cannot produce a mathematically-correct simulation with a deformable surface if you don't know the precise rules governing the deformation and restoration.

Let us imagine, though, that we know Hooke's Constant for spacetime. Ok, you get a material (or invent one) with the same constant. Unfortunately, not quite that simple. Relativistic equations are non-linear. You'd need a material where the forces involved reversibly (important!) altered the material in such a way that at any given instant, Hooke's Constant was correct, but that this constant would be purely an instantaneous value.

Ok, that is doable, we've plenty of adaptable materials. Gives you a geometrically correct solution and therefore the right mathematical results. Messy, though.

Is there an alternative?

Well, yes. This is all about reproducing forces. There is absolutely no rule that says you can use only physical shapes to do this. There are plenty of other forces (eg: electromagnetism) which can substitute for one of the others. Have the "fixed" mass as an electromagnet to encapsulate all the details that exist in spacetime that don't readily transpose to a rubber sheet. Let the sheet model gravity alone. That is what it is supposed to do. The other variables are factored in, so the geometry is still correct, only this time by imposing values rather than letting them naturally be correct.

Problem solved. Nobel prize to the usual address, please.
