Severian

Just because something is technically within the rules doesn't make it the right thing to do. We have had the discussion of morality v. legality many times. Anyone who asks the taxpayer to pay for their TV is morally corrupt.

Do you mean the guy who hired a top interior designer to refurbish his small flat in central London at taxpayers’ expense, spending nearly £10,000 on scatter cushions, a king-sized bed and a flat-screen television? You mean the guy who claimed the maximum amount allowable on his second home, at the expense of the tax payer, and boasted in an interview with GQ magazine that he had boned 30 women? You mean the guy who won the Newark Mayor election by spending 25 times the amount spent by the opposition candidate? The problem is that all these people want to rule, not to serve.

That seems fair enough.

One can certainly define paedophiles as 'broken', and can also define people with other fetishes as 'broken'. That doesn't, in itself, mean that they can't be functional members of society, just as a car can still function with a chip in the windscreen. Gay people can probably be constructive members of society, so I have no problem with them. On the other hand, I would hold though that paedophiles are dangerous enough that they should be removed from society. Executing them would cure them though. Sure they can. Or at least they can be arrested for displaying outwards signs that they are thinking about it.

I challenge you to name a single politician who is not corrupt and self-serving? An honest politician is a contradiction in terms.

Yes, castration would work. But I think it would add to the confusion. Since I would advocate the death penalty for any (serious) violent crime, you would have a problem with rape. Is it sexual, or violent? I would say violent, so kill them all.

We need to bring back the death penalty. If they are dead they can't harm anyone.

I am afraid that article was a little too close to the truth to be funny.

I think it fills a niche in the market that will do quite well. I think it will sell. I won't buy one though, because I don't see a need for it in my life. My laptop and iphone fit my needs quite well.

It is definitely not a full time thing. In fact, I usually wait a respectable time after they send the papers to me before sending my review back, so that they don't just keep sending me stuff. If you write enough papers and publish them in a journal, the journal will eventually ask you to review for them.

Why would that stop them being fundamental? It is also not true - we have observed asymptotic freedom. At high energies quarks are not confined.

I am sure you will be fine. I think I am quite a bit more fussy than most reviewers. There is an awful lot of papers published which shouldn't be, so I try to stem the tide a little. I am sure the authors of the paper I rejected will just ask for another referee and the next one will probably be more sympathetic.

I usually reject papers due to lack of rigour. For example, they may have calculated a process but forgotten some important contribution. Or they may make an assumption which isn't true. The last one I rejected because it wasn't interesting - minor corrections to an uninteresting process in an unlikely physics scenario. I rejected it on the grounds the Physical Review is supposed to be high impact, so they should send it somewhere else.

Congratulations ajb! May you have many more. I was amused to receive my end of year summary from Physical Review cataloguing the papers I reviewed from them throughout the year. I actually rejected every paper they sent me! I am usually pretty lenient, so they must have just been sending me crap. (I just rejected another one a for them a couple of days ago too, so the trend is continuing.)

I am hoping that we can have a black hole in every kitchen by 2020. Not only would it act as a garbage disposal, but it is a universal recycler, taking in anything at all and re-radiating its energy as heat (a perfect black-body spectrum). Just watch your fingers on that event horizon!

Pandora doesn't work outside the US though.

What music sites do you use? I recently got an iphone, so I have been trying out different options. itunes is rather expensive, so I am not buying much from them, and have been trying things like last.fm, spotify and grooveshark. Of these 3, I like grooveshark best, but unfortunately they haven't released an iphone app yet, so I can only use it on my desktop. Spotify have released one, but it is only available to premium members (£10 a month) and I am too cheap for that. Also, I am not sure I like the idea of 'renting' my music rather than buying it. So I think for now I am stuck with last.fm, which lets you choose an artist and it will create a 'radio station' which plays similar artists. It is pretty nice, though it doesn't seem to work very stably over a mobile phone (ie non-wifi) connection. So what do you use? I suspect I am just being cheap in not using spotify...

You get turned on by the dimples? You are weird.

Sometimes I despair of these forums. A mass-speed diagram would be a bit boring for photons since they only travel at c. As Klaynos says, one normally discusses the mass of massive particles using rest mass, since relativistic mass is frame dependent. In the case of a photon though, you have no choice - rest mass is the only definition of mass for the photon and it is zero, period. If the photon mass were not zero, you would have broken the electromagnetic symmetry and electromagnetism would stop being a long range force. That would really bugger up the universe.

Photon's have no rest frame, so 'rest mass' is ill-defined for a photon. Photons have zero mass, period. (Or, to qualify that, the photon's mass is so small it has never been measured.)

While I think it is probably possible in principle, the sheer scale of the thing is probably unreasonable. The magnetic fields would need to be enormous - so much so that I think a human being couldn't survive near them, and electronic equipment certainly wouldn't. So as it is depicted in the movie is, I think, not possible.

These days I publish mainly in the Journal of High Energy Physics (IF 5.375 in 2008), though sometimes in Physical Review D (IF 5.050 in 2008). Interestingly most people in my field look down on Nature and Science. They view it as PR, rather than proper science. I think that is mainly due to my field being extremely quantitative, so we disapprove of the more qualitative studies in other fields. The 'low impact' journal I referred to earlier had an IF of 3.485 for 2007, which rather surprises me, since it isn't very low.

Not sure I would call that science. I would call that maths.

I have only ever published in high impact journals. I have actually witnessed a job committee turn down an applicant because they published a single paper (out of many) in a low impact journal.

I am not qualified to comment on most of these, but I would dispute the two particle physics ones. On the dark matter front, the two events from Soudan are not statistically significant. The statistical error on 2 events is [math]\sqrt{2}[/math], so the result is basically [math]2 \pm 1.4[/math] (the systematic error is small). This is not even evidence, never mind discovery. (CDMS, the actual collaboration, agree with me: "We estimate that there is about a one in four chance to have seen two backgrounds events, so we can make no claim to have discovered WIMPs.") As for the LHC, it is not a scientific achievement until it does some science. So far, it is an engineering achievement (albeit a great one).