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Comment Re:Wake me when they actually shift (Score 2) 46

The bigger you are, the harder it is to turn the ship in an emergency. See Titanic.

At some point the inertia of change isn't worth it, as you suggested. It is possible, but is it worth it?

The last way to look at this is a way to start the process of diversifying our Tech holdings. Windows, Office, Adobe, VMWare etc. But here is my take, STEAM is showing the way out. We're not there yet, but the tide appears to be turning (to keep the nautical terms going).

Submission + - Nazi Germany had no hope of making an atomic bomb, uranium cubes reveal (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: One morning in August 2013, Timothy Koeth was out for a jog on the University of Maryland (UMD) campus in College Park when the university’s radiation safety officer called and asked to see him urgently. The materials scientist, “all sweaty and out of breath,” he recalls, met the officer in a parking lot, where she opened her car’s trunk and produced a lunch bag. Inside, nestled in paper towels, was a gray cube, 5 centimeters wide and startlingly dense.

“She says, ‘Do you know what this is?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but do you know what this is?’”

Confirming Koeth’s suspicions was a handwritten note accompanying the cube: “Taken from the reactor that [Adolf] Hitler tried to build.” The officer handed it over and wished him a happy birthday. “She knew my birthday was in a few days,” he says.

The safety officer had recovered the cube of Nazi uranium from the drawer of a deceased geology faculty member whose office was being cleared out, Koeth says. That unexpected gift helped propel an investigation that would overturn Koeth’s own understanding of Germany’s nuclear effort during World War II. He and colleagues once thought the Germans could have built a working nuclear reactor—a step toward an atomic bomb—by pooling their scattered supplies. Now, measurements of surviving uranium cubes, archival research, and computer simulations indicate that even Germany’s combined stocks would have been insufficient.

The study, published this week in PNAS Nexus, challenges a postwar claim by Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who led Germany’s final reactor experiment, B8. He suggested a small addition of uranium would have allowed it to sustain a nuclear chain reaction.

A working reactor could have produced plutonium, one option for making a bomb. For wartime Germany, it was the only realistic path, says Malte Göttsche, a physicist at TU Darmstadt and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. German scientists investigated the alternative—uranium enrichment—but “Germany’s efforts remained limited to some research,” he says. B8’s immediate goal was simply to sustain a chain reaction; success would have left Germany far from producing enough plutonium for a weapon.

Submission + - Five physics breakthroughs that should have won a Nobel Prize—but didn't (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Next week, the Nobel Prizes will raise a handful of scientists to global, if fleeting, fame. Since the Nobels were first presented in 1901, the physics prize has honored advances ranging from the discovery of the electron and the development of quantum mechanics to the detection of gravitational waves and the modeling of climate change. There’s no doubt the prize has identified momentous achievements.

Still, when looking back on the physics awards, it’s clear they have missed some of the most important discoveries in the field. In fact, for various reasons, several foundational concepts in modern physics were never honored with a Nobel. Here is a list of five seminal developments in physics that did not earn a Nobel Prize—at least, not yet—in increasing order of obviousness.

This list of missed Nobels isn’t comprehensive. “You could probably come up with 100 of these,” says Michael Norman, a condensed matter physicist at Argonne National Laboratory. The list also doesn’t address snubs in which the Nobel Committee omitted a key scientist from an award—such as the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which honored Otto Hahn for the discovery of nuclear fission, but left out Lise Meitner, who explained how it works.

Making a list of missed Nobel Prizes may be foolhardy, but as Nobel laureate Albert Einstein once wrote: “Everybody has to sacrifice at the altar of stupidity from time to time.”

Comment Re:First Amendment (Score 2) 131

by Archangel Michael (#66355578) Attached to: California Is Banning Public Officials From Making Memecoins

There is a reason why its not enforced, it is exceptionally hard to prove AND generally doesn't rise to criminal activity. Politicians lie all the time in Advertisements. All sides do it. It isn't new, or one side is better than the other.

A politician can say they are in favor of the new "don't kill puppies and kittens" law, that also has a bit that allows them to send millions to their buddies at the "don't kill puppies and kitten NGO" and doesn't save a single puppy or kitten. And if you oppose it, you hate puppies and kittens and want to kill them. Its all a lie, wrapped up in emotional language. What can I do to stop it? Who do I call? And why do they hate puppies and kittens?

So, this Meme Coin Law isn't going to do anything useful except for "Owning " someone somewhere for political points. Puppies and Kittens.

Comment Re:First Amendment (Score 1) 131

by Archangel Michael (#66355414) Attached to: California Is Banning Public Officials From Making Memecoins

You can shout "Fire" in a theater. There is no such prohibition anywhere. Especially if there is a fire. What you can't do, which doesn't fall into 1st Amendment arena, is causing panic without cause. That has VERY specific legal criteria that must be met. "Narrowly tailored".

And people can lie in advertising, and do all the time. There are a whole bunch of hoops that one must jump through to bring such a charge against the advertiser, specifically to protect 1st Amendment rights. There are, indeed very NARROW and TAILORED precedents that are designed to PROTECT 1st Amendment rights.

You're the kind of person the 1st Amendment Auditors love to target. They are annoying, but also operating legally, as much as that upsets people.

Comment Re:First Amendment (Score 0) 131

by Archangel Michael (#66355402) Attached to: California Is Banning Public Officials From Making Memecoins

Crying "Bullshit" does not make your case, it literally says exactly what's going on, you are emotionally responding to things you don't like.

You can claim all the stuff you want to claim, and that doesn't make it right simply because you cried "BULLSHIT".

And yes, a business plan is a first amendment right. If it is a pyramid scheme, then go after that, it is already illegal. Meme coins are just modern Digital BeanieBabies. I know plenty of people who spent enormous amounts on those (and similar pop culture items), and then are left holding mostly worthless trinkets.

Sorry, but just because some Karen (Newsom here) says "There ought to be a law" doesn't mean there should be a law.

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