Scientists Crowdfund The Theory of Everything (cphpost.dk) 189
einar.petersen writes: Danish scientists are seeking to fund their research on the theory of everything in a rather unconventional way, namely via crowdfunding. The two researchers have launched a campaign that as of writing is 55% funded....
"Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life searching for an answer to the deepest question about the universe: does a fundamental principle, that governs all of reality, exist...?" reads their Indiegogo page. "In 2013 we, the theoretical physicist Jesper Moller Grimstrup and the mathematician Johannes Aastrup, discovered a simple mathematical principle, which we believe could be exactly what Einstein was searching for." One Danish newspaper jokes that the mathematician and theoretical physicist "are now offering mere mortals a chance to get in on the action."
"Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life searching for an answer to the deepest question about the universe: does a fundamental principle, that governs all of reality, exist...?" reads their Indiegogo page. "In 2013 we, the theoretical physicist Jesper Moller Grimstrup and the mathematician Johannes Aastrup, discovered a simple mathematical principle, which we believe could be exactly what Einstein was searching for." One Danish newspaper jokes that the mathematician and theoretical physicist "are now offering mere mortals a chance to get in on the action."
The answer is.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Q: What do you get if you multiply six by nine?
A: 42
Re:The answer is.... (Score:5, Funny)
#include <stdio.h>
#define SIX 1+5
#define NINE 8+1
main() {
printf("What do you get if you multiply %d by %d? %d!\n", SIX, NINE, SIX * NINE);
}
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This is a good reason to use constexpr. If someone can tell me how to do stringification without macros I'd stop using macros all together.
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Then a mouse with a saw cuts his head open...
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The only question that will be answered is how to best squander $30k.
does a fundamental principle... exist...? (Score:2)
Of course it does. It is extremely simple too:
Everything will grow as big as it can before it explodes.
Re: does a fundamental principle... exist...? (Score:2)
Re: does a fundamental principle... exist...? (Score:2)
Sanity Check (Score:2)
Can anyone knowledgable in the field give a yes/no on the sanity of their research? If I decide to help fund it, I would like some idea that it isn't all snake oil.
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You've never tried to get a proposal accepted, have you?
Research dollars aren't exactly easy to come by - especially in a field like theoretical physics. So, it might be good work - but far enough outside the mainstream to be unfunded.
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The monetary value of a Nobel prize is about a million euros. I suspect that the lucrative sponsorship deals that a championship winning sportsperson can use to enhance prize money probably aren't available to Nobel prize winners, so the cash bit is probably all they'll ever see. It is possible to raise more than a million euros on Kickstarter but I don't think this is the sort of thing that will grab enough attention to be one of those record-breaking kickstarters, so they might have been better going for
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You can conclude whatever you like.
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Can anyone knowledgable in the field give a yes/no on the sanity of their research?
If people knowledgeable in their field thought their approach was likely to succeed, they would already have plenty of funding.
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Can anyone knowledgable in the field give a yes/no on the sanity of their research?
If people knowledgeable in their field thought their approach was likely to succeed, they would already have plenty of funding.
Nobody knowledgeable in the field has funding to give, hence they give to people like Tyson, Kaku and Hawking because they are celebrities. Knowledge in the field being defined as at least being on the right track to a grand unified theory.
Probably junk (Score:2)
Re:Sanity Check (Score:5, Informative)
TL:DR - yes, it's a bit out there, but no more so than any other of the big attempts.
I've talked with Jesper and Johannes at length whilst I was a PhD student - their ideas are based on applying the techniques of loop quantum gravity to non-commutative geometry. To give a brief summary of each:
LQG regards the basic variables of geometry to be holonomies and fluxes - a holonomy is the transport of a vector around a small loop, coming back to the start to find the vector isn't pointing the same way (think about carrying an arrow around the a triangle from north pole to equator). This measures the curvature of the underlying manifold. The fluxes are like field lines in electromagnetism. It is these variables that are quantized (discretized) on a spin-network in LQG.
Non-commutative geometry is the idea that geometrical operators care about the order in which they are applied - area(A) length(B) != length(B) area(A) (very loosely). Non-commutativity is at the heart of quantum mechanics, and is the root of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
What they're hoping to do is build on the work of Connes and Chamseddine who have shown that the spectral action (special type of object in a non-commutative geometry, coming from application to the standard model) naturally reproduces the Einstein-Hilbert action (Basis of General Relatvity) in certain conditions. They hope that by applying LQG techniques here they'll get a full quantum theory of everything.
It's a long shot, of course, but all such things are - non commutative geometry is a strange beast, and no-one has shown that LQG is the right way to quantize gravity (though they have had some theoretical success in cosmology and black holes). It's a personal aesthetic as to whether you think this is more or less plausible than extra dimensions, or symmetries, or some altogether new principle. It's not something I choose to spend my time on as I don't think it's the right way to go (I don't like non-commutativity, and LQG involves fundamental discreteness in a way that I think doesn't work) but I would say it's as good an idea as any other on the market and deserves to be explored.
Re:Sanity Check (Score:5, Funny)
You know, that doesn't help a bit.
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Helped me. Then again I have a physics degree :-)
Re:Sanity Check (Score:4, Funny)
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Fraud! Physicists use radians, not degrees.
Kelvin. You mean Kelvin. Radians are for mathematicians.
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All the carpenters I know have 90.
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...[Correct, detailed and insightful explanation]...
You know, that doesn't help a bit.
Helped me. Then again I have a physics degree :-)
This pretty much sums up the problem with many wikipedia pages on complex subjects... for outsiders they are man pages where even the syntax is esoteric... only useful when you want to remind yourself the details of something you already know quite well... If not then it's a difficult decoding exercise.
The "simple english" version isn't really a proper solution, it would be nice to be able to dynamically and automatically break down complex components for a better subjective understanding... in a similar ki
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This pretty much sums up the problem with many wikipedia pages on complex subjects... for outsiders they are man pages where even the syntax is esoteric... only useful when you want to remind yourself the details of something you already know quite well... If not then it's a difficult decoding exercise.
There's a (relatively) modern buzzphrase, "life-long learning," that basically means you take up those difficult decoding exercises in order to make yourself a better person.
Re: Sanity Check (Score:1)
I agree completely. One hint at where this problem stems from is the fact that scientists often even have trouble communicating with other scientists outside of their own field (and these are the people writing the wikipedia articles). The goal of research is to go very deep, so scientists tend to get entrenched in their own specialized terminology and way of looking at the world. Furthermore, in my experience as a PhD student, being able to communicate scientific ideas with the broader public is not a skil
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It's not that something is a particle and a wave simultaneously, it's that we can get particle-like and wave-like behavior out of it depending on what we do. It's a particle or a wave at any given time, and can change freely. That's how I understand it, anyway, not being a physicist.
Feynman diagrams rely on the fact that one spatial dimension is like any other, and there are things that can adequately be represented along a line. For example, a photon travels along a line, so you can pick that line as
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Funnily enough, I had no trouble with differential equations at school, but then struggled slightly with partial fractions, and when we got to partial differential equations, that's when my brain exploded and my A-level maths went down the toilet.
But thanks for the post anyway. :-)
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I'm not understanding why we shouldn't try for a theory of everything. There pretty much has to be one, or physics is fundamentally broken.
It doesn't have to derive from the current theories of GR and QFT; after all, neither GR nor QFT is derivable from classical physics. It does have to reduce to GR in the case of objects large enough so we can disregard their quantum nature, and to QFT in weak enough gravitational fields. (Similarly, GR and QFT reduce to classical physics for the most part, so excep
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You may want to check out Bee's blog at http://backreaction.blogspot.c... [blogspot.com]
She is an outstanding theoretical physicist with a nag to explain things in plain English, without dumbing them down too much (at least I think so, then again I may not be the best person to judge that).
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Ummm, remind me where in the description of the purpose of Wikipedia that it says the purpose is to provide tuition manuals? There are MOOCs and that sort of thing for that job. Wikipedia is intended to be an encyclopedia - a compilation of the (current) state of knowledge on a subject.
Acquiring knowledge and understanding is not easy, and probably never will be. Which rem
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It's a pleasure. I'm lucky enough to work on my passion, and to be able to talk about stuff like this with the people who work on it.
A side note - both Jesper and Johannes are very open and easy to talk to - I'm sure if they're not overwhelmed they'll respond to questions from the public about their ideas.
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Thanks for that. I'm just a guy on the Internet, but this explanation was enough to convince me that it's a non-crank proposal, even if it's being oversold.
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A link to their thesis, in it's simple beauty: arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0601127v1.pdf (yeah, I was being slightly sarky).
I used to study these things in a previous eon, and my main problem back then was (and still is) that physicists seem too reluctant to explore what might explain quantum mechanics; or perhaps that is just the way it looked to a student who kept asking annoying questions :-) We keep trying to guess a solution, but there has for a long time been a strong reluctance against questioning the basic
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I don't get what you mean by explaining quantum mechanics. You can't explain it in terms of classical physics, because things don't work that way. It might help if you were to give an example of what an explanation of some quantum phenomenon could be like (it doesn't have to be correct). It sounds to me like you're looking for meaning that may well not exist (an explanation of the Kantian noumenon in terms of phenomena). There's not necessarily a "why" to laws of physics (although your questions about
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Also, do not under any circumstances open the box!
Seriously, I would never open a box with the letters "PANDORA" on it, and whoever had the idea of branding cheap jewellery with that name must have been a sick cynic.
Re: Sanity Check (Score:1)
Re: Sanity Check (Score:1)
Ask Slashdot: (Score:1)
What will you do if the ToE proves we are just NPCs in a simulation?
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What would you do if you discovered that the world, the universe was just one of god's jokes?
Would you work any less hard to make it a good joke?
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Depends on the god. If it were Crom, nope because Crom doesn't give a fuck.
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And has no sense of humor.
Re: Ask Slashdot: (Score:1)
I think by definition I would have to classify myself as a PC (player character).
The real question is, are all of YOU people PCs in a massively multiple universe, or just NPCs in my own open world universe.
Psychopaths seem to act like they believe the latter, but most of us seem to act like we believe the former (well, outside of slahhdot comment posts anyway ;p )
What would be very strange is if I am the only PC, everyone else are NPCs, but DMed by the same intelligence. Everyone I treat differently in som
Wondering what AI can do (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been wondering whether AI systems may advance science @ some point. I mean: not just as a tool with a human at the control knobs & interpreting results, but by itself as the 'entity' doing the advancing.
Some significant advances have been made not through heaps of grunt work, but when great minds like Einstein did their thing. Seeing patterns in their mind that no-one else saw. Sadly, such great minds are rare. And have a limited lifespan - of which a big part is spent learning the subject matter. And no matter how genius, with hard limits on the # of grey cells that can be thrown at the problem.
Artificial intelligent systems don't have such flesh-and-blood limitations: these can effectively be built at will, any size, optimized for specific problems sets, etc. Lately computerized systems have beat humans at increasingly complex tasks. Sometimes using brute force. Sometimes by looking at a problem from many angles at once. Fed with enough data, 'seeing' connections somehow that even experts in the field might overlook.
Regardless how it works exactly, fact is you might say that for some problems, we've built AI systems that are more capable than a "genius" human at finding solutions. Would it be hard to imagine that @ some point, an AI system might spit out a new formula, discover some as-of-yet-unseen regularity in scientific data, or find a path to unify as-of-yet-non-unified scientific theories?
Exciting times...
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I wonder when we're going to engineer organic brain-in-a-tank (for lack of a better description) that don't age, and if it will beat out a sentient AI to existence.
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Isn't organic brain-in-a-tank basically a process of disconnecting all the sense neurons from a brain and isolating it in a tank of fluid?
How will the ever amount to anything?
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Eventually we will get to the point where AI figures it all out, tries to dumb it down enough for us to understand, fails, gets frustrated, and gives up trying to explain it to puny humans.
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Mind only comes from healthy, living brain.
And we cannot make brains to very narrow specifications with these and those features because...?
And those designed brains cannot be made from silicon instead of carbon because...?
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and its unlikely we ever will.
Ah, those sweeping generalizations coming from speculative thinking! They're nice! I did a lot of speculation myself, and read even more of those, during my 4 years majoring in Philosophy. It was fun, particularly because my teachers provided us with top Philosophers who reached diametrically opposed conclusions about basically everything, all of which perfectly argued for. Even better, it turned me into a skeptic about Philosophy's ability to reach actual answers about anything.
On the other hand, it also p
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Observing the limits of physics and human technology is not any sort of sweeping generalization.
We're nowhere near those limits. We've just entered the beginning of the S-curve no biotechnology. And while Moore's Law has slowed, it's still an exponential curve, a projected 30 times performance increase per generation instead of the 100,000 times increase observed until now, not counting what will be possible with Quantum computers once they become available.
There's absolutely no way you can know what can and cannot be done in 100, 1,000, 10,000, 1,000,000 and more years of applied engineering.
Then I am certain you are familiar with the argument from authority, or the appeal to authority, and conversly, how to construct non-fallacious argument
Yep, I a
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we will never be able to propel anything with mass to match the speed of light
As far as is currently known. Maybe our grasp of physics is already perfect and that's indeed the case. Maybe it isn't and it isn't. Now, do you know how we can make it absolutely sure, 100% certainty, that it'll never happen? If we shrug, think we've achieved perfection (completeness), and give up searching.
That applies to everything else you said. The fact of the matter is, finite beings' consciousness exists, it's finite, and it had a beginning, if for no other reason than that finite beings themselves h
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Actually we know for absolute certainty
No. We know with absolute certainty that it has never been observed, and we have theories that explain with 99.9999999% certainty the phenomena we do observe and predict with the same accuracy new phenomena. These theories are falsifiable and haven't been falsified yet.
However, we also know, and this one is a 100% certainty, which is infinitely more than the above 99.9999999% figure, that no amount of evidence allows one to affirm an induction to be absolutely certain, for Laplace's rule of succession [wikipedia.org] prove
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Nobody else saw it clearly. Poincare had the math for Special Relativity worked out, but didn't believe what the math told him (that there was no preferred inertial reference frame). Einstein was the one who was willing to throw out the ideas of absolute space and time.
Quantum holonomy (Score:3)
Good luck to them. FWIW, their "Quantum holonomy" theory has only a minor mention in the Wikipedia article on quantum gravity.
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Interesting find! Jesper promotes his theory on Wikipedia as well as Indiegogo.
However, {{Self-published}} was added on 6 October 2011.
Is it just a coincidence that "grim Jester" is so similar to "Jesper grim"?
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What is the difference between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and Quantum holonomy?
Who knows. (Score:2)
Who knows, maybe these guys are onto something. I see some warning signs, though.
See, these guys have been working on this theory for some time. They've developed some language (as in L) of their own and it sounds like they're having some trouble showing that it is internally consistent. This shouldn't really be a speedbump. It should be possible to first of all show that a space can exist in the algebra, by finding a basis. This would simply require finding a set of linearly independent vectors satisfying
"Einstein was working on this just before he died" (Score:3)
...is pretty much a guaranteed signal of a terrible idea. Obviously if you were actually carrying on some work from Einstein that would be super cool, but this phrase gets used for every perpetual motion machine and grand unified crackpot theory; it's a weird dog whistle for conspiracy theorists, dreamers and idiots.
Heck, I thought by this point that was kind of an established joke - like saying your new board game "takes minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master".
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Einstein was working on a Grand Unified Theory for decades before he died, but he came nowhere close.
It didn't help that he was sceptical about quantum mechanics (especially aspects like non-locality and entanglement).
This is a completely different kind of GUT, related only by the fact that it is designed to reduce to General Relativity in the classical limit.
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Einstein was working on a Grand Unified Theory for decades before he died, but he came nowhere close.
It didn't help that he was sceptical about quantum mechanics (especially aspects like non-locality and entanglement).
This is a completely different kind of GUT, related only by the fact that it is designed to reduce to General Relativity in the classical limit.
Well where has embracing the "weird" aspects of quantum mechanics actually taken us besides horribly misunderstood analogies?
You should avoid saying things like that while using semiconductors.
Wasn't this once a Slashdot tagline? (Score:1)
Many fine physicists have burned away their lives grappling with the problem of quantum gravity. - R. P. Woodard
Wrong, this is not how senior researchers want. (Score:2)
There is a very simple rule: "Science proceeds one funeral at a time."
Basically this translates to a near complete banning of any research that could out do or overturn any established theories that were fleshed out by an active member of the senior academic community. They will have written many well cited papers, potentiall
Why even ask the question. (Score:2)
The most obvious answer to this question is 42.
However, that answer also outlines the more obvious question that should be posed before beginning research like this. as those who received an "answer" before didn't know what the hell to do with it.
What exactly will we do with the proverbial answer to "everything", other than fight the masses who have their own answers based on their own beliefs?
Oh well, at least Douglas Adams and PT Barnum are having a good laugh.
Money doesn't buy genius (Score:3)
obligatory (Score:2)
http://www.arjenlucassen.com/c... [arjenlucassen.com]
If you love progressive metal... you will not be disappointed.
That is all.
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What kind of sloppy reporting is that? It was carried out by Jews, with help from the Illuminati and David Icke's lizards. Sasquatch flew one of the planes, and Nessie, the other. The team that faked the Moon landings was in charge of installing the charges that brought down the Twin Towers, as Nostradamus predicted.
Re: Did you know? (Score:3, Funny)
That post pretty much wraps up an entire day of History Channel programming
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Don't they have the Hitler Hour any more? At one time they used to have it every 60 minutes.
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I get so tired of the hock shop shows.
Stupid bubbas paw all over interesting stuff and bring in an 'expert' who is just a guy they play poker with who hoards whatever the item is in their barn so are 'experts' on whatever it is.
The Antiques Road Show made at least a pretense of being something other than people ripping apart the historical record to make big bucks selling stuff to rich people in the cities.
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Did you know that Jews carried out the 9/11 attacks with the backing of Israel? Zionists have conspired to suppress this information and blame Muslims. It's obvious listening to recordings that the attackers had Israeli accents. The trail of money leads back to Mossad. Can anyone provide any real evidence to disprove these facts?
The burden is on you.
Also a fact would be pretty strong.
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Most of this seems fascinating to read, and a some of these have interesting implications :)
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Research on World of Warcraft has been used to study things from how information is distributed to pathogen transmission.
Much cheaper than having to design and populate those systems on their own.
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You have no idea how science works and knowledge proceeds.
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Well maybe so, I am always open to the possibility I may be in error.
Your statement however hasn't given me any cause to reconsider my position or that you have any comprehension of the subject you are pontificating on.
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Much of the research you've quoted seems fairly interesting to me (interest is relative, of course) and some of it also seems to be very important (e.g. genital washing practises).
In any case, since you're not familiar with how this works, here is a rough explanation: The scientist(s) have to write a very detailed research proposal, including a long state of the art overview, precise outline of the experiments to be conducted or methodology used, have to explain why the research is important, explain exactl
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Oh great, I should have known that you're not only an ignorant but really just trolling. :/
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Had a bad day or what? What happened to common standards of decency in the US? Too out of fashion for guys like you?
Anyway, fact is that the research projects you've mentioned must have been gone through a lengthy competition that was evaluated by experts in the field. So you should really never judge research projects from the popular summaries (which are written for people like you, though apparently not with much success). Sure, this process can go wrong sometimes but there is no better way to distribute
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Had a bad day or what? What happened to common standards of decency in the US? Too out of fashion for guys like you?
Oh great, I should have known that you're not only an ignorant but really just trolling. :/
Your words indict you.
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No, they don't. You have entirely ignored the facts I've laid out and just made snippy remarks to boost your ego all along, so there was and is certainly no other conclusion to make. I should also make clear that I'm not interested in arguing with you or talking to you at all. My original post was and is only intended to explain to other readers why you're wrong, and I'm sure I've succeeded in that.
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The reasons for studying most of the things in that list are self-evident even to a non-expert. Your position is bafflingly ignorant, similar to Sarah Palin's 'stupid scientists studying fruit flies' comment. You deserve a bit of heckling.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture once gave researchers at the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.
For anyone who thinks that's wasted money:
a) Read up on the causes of climate change.
b) Read up on how many people are affected by climate change. And what the damage in economic terms may be.
c) Read up on how powerful a greenhouse gas methane is. and
d) Read up on how many cows there are in the world, and ballpark figure(s) for how much methane each cow produces.
$700k to know more about that? Perhaps find ways to knock off some % from that methane output? $700k is nothing to achieve such goals. W
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It certainly is nothing when it isn't your money. When it's my money 700K is a pretty good chunk of change, and I would be willing to bet the same research could be done for 10% or less of that 700k.
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Oh just to put this in perspective, the people TFA is talking about, are asking for 30K for a unified field theory.
I can understand having to pay more to people to stick sensors up a cow's ass but somehow I think farmers might be willing to foot some of the bill to learn about the metabolic efficiency of their livestock.
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The U.S. government has spent $175,587 to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior
A: Not for long. The cats were NOT pleased and made their displeasure known.
The National Institutes of Health paid researchers $400,000 to find out why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they are drunk
A: Because they're drunk. Because living in Argentina is itself risky behavior, so that's why they're drunk in the first place.
The National Institutes of Health also
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Too bad there isn't a +1 commonsnense/funny
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It's from a conservative website. I bet they exaggerated most of these and/or left out key details of the story.
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*facepalm*
They used to call me "Reagan" in high school because of how conservative I was. I was never as stupid as I see "conservatives" being these days. You do nothing more than attack strawmen. You are frankly fucking delusional. You're not capable of any kind of fucking rational discussion without tilting at one of your strawmen who just don't fucking actually exist.
Illegal immigrants swaying elections in favor of the D team? What the actual fuck? Illegal immigrants getting free medicaid (to help
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It's related to item #5 in the original list. You could argue it's not "outright wrong", but it's still highly misleading by omitting that the grant was really about testing elderly brain exercises. Video games are a sub-topic of it. If you went to school and passed, you know to summarize (title) on the primary topic, not sub-topics. Crashmarik's list is either a poorly written summary via sloppy thinking and writing, or intentionally slanted.
Re: Crowdfunding couldn't do worse than the govern (Score:2)
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Your tone implies that none of that was worth studying
No. My tone implies that I don't want public funds used to study this material. If you are willing to spend your money to do it, that's fine go cut a check to the people seeking crowdfunding.
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Whose funds should be used? This is a great example of infrastructure development, which is generally considered best handled by government, albeit more abstract than roads and airports.
As someone whose tax money went to the Iraq war, I have no sympathy with people who just don't want their money spent on moral things the rest of us agree should be tax-funded.
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"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."