phoenix_ca

Part of the problem there is that now that some of us have nuclear weapons, it's really, really hard to get rid of them. No one in that position wants to take their hands off the trigger first, so-to-speak. Well AECL has a nice contact form on their website so I contacted them directly. Perhaps I'll have an answer to what happens to all that heavy water soon. Unfortunately, even here, we have complete and absolute morons, campaigning against that which they don't understand. Thankfully, our government has thus far had the intelligence to not listen to their insanity. Here's a fun quote from their website: "Its use of natural uranium and online fueling makes it attractive to countries hoping to acquire the capacity to divert plutonium from used fuel to build atomic weapons. India used a Canadian reactor to build an atomic bomb; AECL stated last week it would like to sell additional reactors to India." Yeah no. The only part of that that might be true is AECL wanting to sell more reactors to India. The rest is just lies.

Given Russia's...I mean Putin's recent behaviour, I doubt they are interested in space exploration. More "what can this tech and research do for our military program". Unfortunately, people can go out, explore the solar system, and simultaneously remain just as myopic and stuck in the stone age as before.

Well. I give up. There's no reasoning with someone who just keeps arguing from ignorance. I've decided that gpisic must be this guy (or at least friends with this guy) on the left: The world will end. Why? Because magnetic poles and this grapefruit.

Sooooo, no one's mentioned this yet. Weird. I can't read. Docking Port Alignment Indicator, don't leave Kerbin without it!

Oh dear. Okay, I'll take you through it step-by-step. First, Dodgey says this: See, right there? GPS system. Then NASAFanboy, quoting the above from Dodgey, says: Then I say, responding specifically to the last line, concluding that NASAFanboy is suggesting that GPS can be done with merely radio towers and underground cables, say this: So first off, that's not a non sequitur as you suggested. What I said indeed does follow from those posts before. Specifically in reference to the accuracy of GPS, without general relativity we could not turn the different timings of the signals coming from three satellites into accurate positional data. If you attempted to do so, you would inevitably get erroneous results because you wouldn't be taking into account the slight variance in the passage of time between your frame of reference and those of the satellites. Some reading: http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html Underground cables are out for the rather obvious reason that they do not create a signal, so you have nothing with which to triangulate your position. Radio towers are, by their nature, limited in range because they are on earth. At the very least they are bound by the necessity to create a taller tower the more range you require. To replace the GPS system with radio towers would require, for one, exceptionally accurate receivers and a vast network of towers, if your goal is to cover the globe. We're talking build-islands-in-the-ocean kind of vast. So perhaps it isn't entirely impossible, but again, I seriously doubt that you would get anywhere close to the same accuracy, to say nothing of the complexity of such a network and the mess it would leave behind had it been created by some sort of advanced civilization. O.o And, after all the work, you still wouldn't get the same accuracy without nanosecond precision. Find me some super-advanced civilization that did this on Earth and I'll eat my hat. Ah true enough. Inertial navigation systems are annoyingly bad without those updates though, with compounding errors as they move that eventually add-up to them being useless if not corrected. Handy for if/when you lose sight of the GPS sats though.

Thinking rationally and being able to create such wonders aren't mutually exclusive though. I can still create pieces of music, or paintings, or photographs, and they needn't stem from purely logical reasoning. (And in fact such seemingly illogical pursuits are entirely compatible with existentialism.) By all means use "common sense" when you have verified that it actually works. That's why the appeal to common sense or personal incredulity is an informal one after all. Sometimes common sense turns-out to be right and useful. But what's meant by people who call an argument fallacious because of an appeal to common sense is that the act of simply predicating an argument based on what is or is perceived to be common sense is unsound. That something is considered common sense doesn't necessarily mean it is correct. Besides, if you've verified that it's correct, it's not really "common sense" now is it? I'd even argue it's not even a good rule-of-thumb most of the time, but I haven't any numbers to share on that off the top of my head and as I recall they're hard to pin-down anyway. I doubt it's made with such malice. It probably ends at "I don't have time to check it". Which is understandable. The vast amounts of scientific data we produce now are extremely difficult to keep-up with, especially if you actually are trying to practice science or medicine. Indeed, IBM seems to have had to foresight to recognize the problem and attempt to find a solution with Waston and interpreting the vast amounts of medical data available.

Quick scan of that page reads that the accuracy of Omega was around 1-4 km. That's...quite paltry in comparison to the accuracy achieved by GPS using a high-quality receiver. True enough, though GPS has supplanted a lot of it in civil aviation. Used to be that planes would use those transmitters to stay in certain flight paths so as to not run into each other. Now its far more common to just fly GPS direct and use VOR stations for management in an airport's local airspace. Besides, unless I'm mistaken, VOR can't give you positional data on your aircraft, only rough directional data on what bearing the transmitter is. Certainly not accurate enough (if it could; I suppose you could try to triangulate your position from two or three stations) for use in our (somewhat frighteningly) congested airspace.

Appeal to authority isn't a logical fallacy though, it's an informal one. There are cases that can be made where an appeal to authority is actually logical and well-reasoned. It isn't irrational to appeal to the expertise of a human who has the credentials and knowledge to prove their expertise. In fact science isn't really an appeal to authority as you say, as scientists don't appeal to one authoritative body or person, but the collective, peer-reviewed literature. There is a difference between an appeal to authority or appeal to popularity and an appeal to scientific consensus.

That's covered under informal fallacies too: Cu.m (period because this is Latin, dang it) hoc ergo propeter hoc (it happens at the same time therefore there is causation; correlation proves causation), and post hoc ergo propter hoc (it happens after therefore what happened before was the cause). (Edit: OH FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE. It's LATIN. Not ****o references! Edit again: BAH!!!) Rather, in stock KSP putting nosecaps on things does not make logical sense. I believe you meant to say it makes common sense (appeal to common sense is yet another fallacy, for those keeping score ). Bah. Even in a world where magic were commonplace, a black cat over the road being bad luck wouldn't make much sense unless proven. I rather like the characters in TES that were magicians but tried to take a scientific approach to the study anyway, the idea being that they may live in a world with magic, but scientific methodology would still be the better way to find the truth. Then again, maybe that's just an over-extension of what I think reality behaves like; other universes could have entirely different rules and perhaps there are even some where logic that works in our universe simply doesn't in the other...hmm...I bet there's a decent if confusing sci-fi novel in that.

Well not entirely. It's possible to conceive of some kind of improved human that's less prone to these mistakes. In fact we may soon give ourselves that very ability, by stimulating the hippocampus to recall specific memories or various memories more clearly. Assuming anything comes of that research. The brain is a tricky beast, and we're still learning much about it (it may even be fair to say we know very little about it compared to how much is going on). Then again we recently discovered new anatomical structures of the knee and eye so that's not saying much. I find watching and reading both the BBC and Al Jazeera coverage of any particular event a decent way to weed-out bias. They are both somewhat biased but they tend to do a good job keeping it in check most of the time, and their possible agendas are fairly dissimilar. If you're talking about the USA though...yes the media there is ridiculously polarized. Then again, so is the media in most Islamic states ("Repent for dancing on YouTube!").

Don't forget that a large part of the reason why cable is cheaper for us to use now is because we laid so goddamn much of it in anticipation of a huge boom in internet data traffic that never came. We still have thousands of kilometers of "dark cable" all over the place. That and the bigger issue with data transmission over fibre-optic cable isn't that you need to lay a bunch of it, it's the difficulty of transmitting and receiving multiple wavelengths of light along it. Buuuuut I'm going on a tangent here. That really is debatable. GPS use is ubiquitous, and often times necessary. Ships and aircraft use it all the time to make sure they're going where they want to, and avoiding weather. A lot of cargo ships depend on our ability to predict weather (using satellites) and navigating around that weather with accuracy (using satellites). Without satellites, we'd be losing a lot more of our cargo to the large swells of raging storms. In fact a lot of advances in technology came directly from space exploration and the very particular demands of it. Teflon, for instance. And a great deal of radio technology.

Uhhhh, no. Go back, read the posts. Link? I highly doubt such a navigation system would be accurate to within a few meters (down to centimetres depending on the sensitivity of your equipment), and be universally accessible around the world (with some very slight annoyances at the poles). I still really don't get why people want to invent a "super advanced race" that lived in ancient times. It's rather confusing, given the rather conspicuous lack of evidence.

Cognitive dissonance is the effect on a person when they hold two contradicting views or beliefs. For example, if a person simultaneously held that their god was omni-benevolent, and at the same time held that their god approves of killing or condemning non-believers in that god, this would be a state of cognitive dissonance, assuming that they knew, consciously, that they held these beliefs and they are contradictory. As for "the human mind's inability to think twice and make suspicion of itself", again, this can be learned independently or taught. People can be taught the limits of their own psyche and taught methods of avoiding these issues, such as the scientific method. It doesn't take much either, just the realization that humans are fallible and that one needs to develop the tools of rational thought to avoid such mistakes. Why not? People like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins do it all the time. It's not hard to avoid spouting fallacies everywhere once you know how to think rationally. Hell, even Mark Dillahunty can do it, and he was once a priest. He learned the tools of reason, found his faith to be unreasonable, and was honest enough to bin it. This is really just a different take on argumentum ad antiquitam (appeal to tradition). Reason and logic do not know culture, and they are not relative. In fact the idea that morality is not objective and is entirely subjective such that it varies from culture-to-culture and each culture is "right" has been discussed at great length; what you are describing is called Cultural Relativism. While it still has its proponents, moral relativism as a whole has pretty much been shredded. Let me give you an example. Say someone steals a loaf of bread from a store. There are two people, each from different cultures, who are asked what an appropriate punishment would be. One person's cultural heritage suggests that the one who stole should pay a small fine for the act. The other's cultural heritage demands that the person be stoned to death in a public square. By the standard of a cultural relativist, both of these moral decisions are right. However a moral absolutist would conclude that there is in fact a right course of action, and that right course of action is independent of cultural tradition. In fact most of the progress we've managed to make in law is due to moral absolutism; it's what lets us say "Murder is wrong" instead of "Murder is wrong in this country but it's okay that the government of that other country is killing all its citizens, that's just their culture". Reason and logic are not relative, they are universal. Edit: If you want to see where moral relativism leads, look at the murder of Kitty Genovese. She was brutally murdered in a New York street, in view and earshot of thirty-seven people. Those people, when asked why they didn't call the police, said they expected someone else would do it, or just didn't want to get involved. In both moral relativism and cultural relativism, their actions to not do anything to help her were morally right, because either they decided that that was the right choice (the former) or that they had a culture of not calling the police when someone was murdered outside their window (the latter), or of "not getting involved" (also the latter). There are better arguments to be made against relativism but this is the easiest way to drive the point home.

GPS exists because we understand relativity and have satellites, period. You can't replace that with radio towers and underground cables.

The vast majority of logical fallacies are created by lack of education on the topic. Socrates showed us all very clearly that a new brain isn't required to think logically. What is required is proper education in how to think rationally, in understanding the limits of human cognitive ability and to work around them. Really, the solution to this is to teach children philosophy, at the very latest by high school, as a mandatory course just like science or math, not as an optional course in post-secondary school.

Actually the e-paper idea is a very good one (though more specifically reflective displays over transmissive ones). By a very wide margin, the largest power drain on a smartphone is from its transmissive display. The same thing goes for laptops. Reduce the power consumption of that display, and you can have devices with stand-by times measured in months. If you were able to replace a smartphone display with a reflective display with similar performance to a transmissive LCD one (and a backlight for low-light environments), then the same-sized battery would last much, much longer. The main issue is getting a display to respond fast enough. It's being worked-on by plenty of companies but so far I haven't seen anything that came close to the roughly 6ms response time of an IPS LCD display. :/ Well...I'd hope that you wouldn't bring a cell phone with you to the wild. A purpose-built radio would be a far, far better idea, so that you can, you know, actually transmit on frequencies that rescue services are listening to. O.o (It's quite literally in every survival guide worth reading. Bring a radio. Know how to use said radio. Be prepared to lose said radio, or use its battery for fire as a last resort. Etc. etc.)

So, now we know that massive rocky planets and itty-bitty gas planets exist (well...comparatively speaking). Good. Will do humans some good to understand, even more, that the solar system isn't super-special.

Russia wants to try this again? Their Venera landers were plagued with problems: lens caps staying on, things frying, refrigeration failing, yadda yadda. The surface of Venus just plain sucks. >.<

Funny...I don't recall saying anything about chocolate. *looks at original post* Nope, nothing about chocolate. Perhaps we should send another lander to look at it. Not a manned mission though. Still think that's absurd.

Disaster might be an over-statement. They are, like so much else in our society, dependant on our technological advancement. You already pointed-out the solution to your problem: Get solar panels. If you expected the military to use these things for mission-critical operations, then yes, you could call that a "disaster", because one day of use is just absurd. But we're talking about civil applications here. In any case, graphene circuits for some components could be a solution to the efficiency problem. Graphene is ridiculously efficient and has already been tested successfully for use in a cell phone transceiver. http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.ca/2014/01/graphene-circuit-ready-for-wireless.html

Not really. Even at absolute zero atoms are still jostling and jiggling and wiggling (and I couldn't help rhyming). Well, their constituent particles are at least. Because intense heat over a long period of time in atmosphere never did anything weird to metals.

Exactly. Those aren't important to the running of our civilization at all. Nope. Definitely not useful.

I don't see why this is tagged "Sci Fi". It doesn't take wild speculation to take a stab at what might be on Titan. It's not like we can prove any hypothesis right now but still, we can make some educated guesses.

Um...yeah...it's already been done...see the link. The one in my post you were replying to... O.o Edit: And here's another. http://www.neimagazine.com/features/featureload-following-capabilities-of-npps/ And another: http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp.pdf And another: www.elforsk.se/Rapporter/?download=report&rid=12_71_

I only talk about it because I know about it. I'd bet that other reactors also have load-following abilities. Edit: Oh hey look, Wikipedia even has a page on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#Nuclear_power_plants