And Canada, but we’re really messed up. Most people I know across multiple generations use Fahrenheit for indoor temperature, cooking, and water you might swim in. Celsius is for outdoor air temperature, mostly, I think, because that’s how weather is reported. There is a fair amount of variation, but I don’t think I’ve heard anyone using Celsius for cooking.
That, too! I’ve taken to using any autotldr as a substitute for a “proper” title and author summary. If the autotldr looks like there might be based on something I find interesting, I’ll go read the article.
I sympathize. I’ve been caught out a couple of times by depending on autotldr as a substitute for reading the actual article. My own casual comparisons between autotldr and source articles suggest that autotldr is probably about 80% faithful to its source, on average.
I don’t know if it’s real or in my own mind, but it also seems to me that autotldr is faithful to the article inversely proportional to the quality of its source material. That is, the better and more complete the article, the more likely it is that autotldr trashes it.
Now that I’ve written it down, it strikes me that that may be an insurmountable problem. If we think of good articles as being “high information” and garbage articles as “low information”, summarizing will always be more likely to cause important “damage” the higher the information content. Thus, hitting 95% on a good article might trash it, while hitting 60% on a trash article is just fine. This might be especially true if you consider that the best articles might already be as compact as is reasonable.
Yes, but it’s important to remember that a much (most?) of that work was performed by those with hereditary wealth, under the patronage of those with hereditary wealth, under the patronage of the church, or by clergy who had plenty of free time beyond their duties and no separate need to earn income for housing and food. In fact, one reason to enter the clergy was to gain access to the resources to pursue other activities.
I also think there are better places to put this kind of money, including on projects that we are certain have obvious potential to change the world for the better.
What I was getting at was the very idea that we absolutely have to know what the return is before we start. Just because we know the potential return doesn’t mean that it’s not research (as in your fusion example), but just because we can’t identify a return ahead of time doesn’t mean there won’t be one.
Also, I don’t know if there have been any tangible benefits from the LHC. Precision manufacturing? Improvements in large-scale, multi-jurisdiction project management? Data analytics techniques? More efficient superconducting magnets? I don’t know if those are actual side effects of the project and, if they are, I don’t know that the LHC was the only way to get them.
Edit: or, like the quantum physics underlying our electronics, maybe we won’t know for 50-100 years just how important that proof was.
Yes, with finite resources, we have to make choices. As long as there are some resources for people to just poke around, I’m good with whatever. If we’re actually looking for some place to drop a few billion, I actually don’t think another collider should be on the list, let alone at the top.
The problem as I see it is that “but what good is it” is used to limit pretty much all fundamental research.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any advance that didn’t at some point depend on people just dicking around to see what they could see.
“What happens if we spin this stick really really fast against this other stick?”
“Cool! What happens if we put some dried moss around it?”
“That’s nuts, man! Hey, I wonder what happens if we toss some of our leftovers in there?”
“C’mon over here, guys. You gotta taste this!”
At worst, a project like this keeps a lot of curious people in one place where we can make sure they don’t cause harm with their explorations. At best, whole new industries are founded. Never forget that modern electronics would never have existed without Einstein and Bohr arguing over the behaviour of subatomic particles.
Say the actual construction cost is $100 billion over 10 years and operational costs are $1 billion a year. Compared to all the stupid and useless stuff we already spend money on, that’s little more than pocket lint. We could extract that much from the spending of one military alliance and it would look like a rounding error. Hell, we could add one cent to the price of each litre of soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, and bottled water and have money left over.
As a non-geologist living next to Lake Diefenbaker (the reservoir formed by damming the South Saskatchewan River), I also like geological history.
I have a standard reply for when I’m asked why we chose to move to this “treeless wasteland”. “I look out at the flat horizon and see how the glaciers planed the earth the way a woodworker flattens a board. I look around me at the river breaks and see how the meltwater from retreating glaciers carved the earth away into shapes that defy imagination.” I don’t know accurate any of that is, but it fits my mental model of what I was taught in high school.
(What we call the river breaks are twisted and braided networks of coulees, some with sides so steep as to require mountaineering equipment. Most still run with meltwater in the spring.)
I would draw your attention to the difference between mathematics and reality. Although mathematics is extremely useful in modeling reality, it’s important to remember that while all models are wrong, some are nonetheless useful.
Thus, a household gardener or storage tank owner or a builder of small boats can choose the appropriate diameter of hose, tank, or pontoon very effectively by rounding PI to 3 but cannot do so when “rounding” to 1 or 5. In these cases, it literally doesn’t matter how many decimal points you use, because the difference between 3 and any arbitrary decimal expansion of PI will be too small to have concrete meaning in actual use.
Under the philosophy you are promoting, it would be impossible to act in the physical world whenever it throws an irrational number at us.
I don’t know, but I suspect that there is a whole branch of mathematics, engineering, or philosophy that describes what kinds of simplifications and rounding are acceptable when choosing to act in the physical world.
The real world in which we act has a fuzziness about it. I think it’s better to embrace it and find ways to work with that than to argue problems that literally have no numerical solution, at least when those arguments would have the effect of making it impossible to act.