Right on!

Time is an attribute of how the human mind/brain perceives the universe. There is no way of untangling the psychology of perception from the study of physics at the quantum level. But there is probably no way of convincing most persons who have invested effort in reading and learning about quantum mechanics that this is so. I understand that the few persons who have invested a LOT of effort into learning physics have an understanding of this entanglement, though they probably describe it in different terms.

I am NOT saying that physics is somehow wrong. It isn't. But physics at all levels, from QM to the pure classical physics of Newton, is built up on abstractions of how we perceive the world around us, and those abstractions by definition are only pieces of reality seen from particular points of view. In other words, and has been said many times before, the observer is an integral part of the event being observed.

Time is usually best seen as an attribute we bring with us to each and every one of our observations. As such, it belongs more to the psychology side of the psych/physics entanglement than to the physics side.

One man's pull is another man's push. All parent post indicates is that the poster is demonstrably deficit in his understanding of relativity; he is hopelessly mired in his classical universe with its "objective observer".

The problem is in poster's head. His model of the universe lacks the fluidity necessary to a deep understanding of quantum mechanics, where the mind must be trained to jump with agility between incomplete and flawed models of Reality, staying poised on the knife edge of each one for only the brief moment where it suggests something useful before dancing to the next model. He could maybe benefit from listening to the Sugar Beats: "I can't believe I used to think that what I thought was happening is really going on".

That statement seems like the product of a sexist mind. An alternative phrasing that might get you further with the chicks, and may lead to some fascinating insights:

She dreams, therefore we are.

As it says on Albert's sweatshirt: Quantum Mechanics: the dreams stuff is made of.

Now if someone would dream up the interaction between Unruh radiation and gravity waves, we can get on with making kewl hoverboards, flying cars, and all kinds of antigravity devices. We just need the theoretical physicists to dream a little harder. If they do that, we wouldn't have to sweat so much.

...more coffee... need more coffeee... too early to do slashdot.... where's the damn coffee?

I, too, live in the Pacific Northwest, and I have encountered the problem with reading the screen when outside. But I have found the solution:

Wipe the screen against your shirt cuff. This will distribute the raindrops into a thin sheet of water that makes it easier to read the screen's contents.

RTFA. Pay attention to the first sentence in the second paragraph.

Persons who bother to RTFA before they comment usually manage to avoid looking like such a drivelling idiot.

No, that's wrong.

While the battle to decrease fossil fuel use was lost before it had begun-- for the reason you cite-- there are personal and public reasons for calling your position a "heads up the ass" posture:

Personally, if Hansen et al might be right, then it would be prudent to NOT investment your retirement savings in that condominium project in south Florida. Multiply you by all the potential investors, and that is going to affect real estate values, today. Not years later, but today.

Publicly, if Hansen might be right, then opposing the ballot measure to fund a ten year multi-million dollar project for waterfront improvements would make a lot of sense, since that waterfront might well be submerged before the work has paid for itself.

There are serious right-now, today and not tomorrow, reasons for thoroughly studying what Hansen and the other experts are warning about.

Frankly, it seems to be a matter of whether you consider the distant future to be when you are twenty or thirty years older than you now are. Or whether to you the distant future is the year after next year. Your position is consistent with the view of a younger person who regards a decade as a third or more of the life that he has so far lived, and has no concept of responsibility for decisions that will affect your kids' and grandkids' lives. Short-sighted. Git offa m' lawn!

Obama will nominate someone in the next 30 - 60 days. If the Senate Republicans screw around with blocking the nomination "just because", that is likely to torpedo any hope they have of a Republican White House. No matter who they nominate.

The true conservative leaders of the GOP are going to be sweating bullets as they try to figure out what to do.

I disagree with rest of AC's comment, but this point should be considered. With the present lack of accountability, the moderation system is too much abused.

Yes.

.

Anecdotally, there appears to be a variance in the average intelligence of Slashdot's comments that is related to the USA academic year. Slashdot gets dumber in the early Fall, recovers somewhat around the time of study for mid term exams, gets dumber during the Winter break, etc.

This suggests that one way of improving Slashdot would be to prevent persons under the age of 25 years from making comments. But that might be difficult to enforce. Blacklisting persons who are enrolled students in certain schools (Princeton, Yale, Stanford, etc) would also be effective, but also difficult to enforce.

An enforceable policy would be to start all newbies with a karma score of -1 (negative one), to be increased automatically on the 3rd anniversary of their join date, or by merit of their posts (the usual). Most of us who care enough to not want to see the garbage could filter at zero and above-- which should be the default anyway.

Or do it up proper and get rid of the undercarriage, and have the plane mate with an electrically driven cradle on the runway. We've got the technology to do that now. The only thing to fear is fear of a new idea.

We also have the technology to convert passenger and cargo jets to drones, flown by operators on the ground. Get rid of the flight crew. Each airport would have its own corps of operators specialized in landings and take-offs at that airport, with hand-offs to regional operators who manage the high altitude flying.

All of today's jet planes are internal combustion engines. Steam locomotives are not ICEs. Steam jets are not ICEs, but there are no coal burning, steam jet airplanes that I know of.

('Twould be a neat steampunk idea though. Maybe do it up in Blender)

Those were all published after the printers conventions gained common acceptance among publishers and dictionary writers (between 1450 and 1550 or so). They are proper for printed English. But written English is much older than that. The use of "y" at the end of a word and "i" in its place in the middle of a word was a convention by printers which made it easier to deal with the "y" descender in a stylish way.

I would not say this in many forums, but this is slashdot....

'Twas perfectlyacceptable before the Printers' Convention imposed unnatural standards on English spelling and punctuation. So it was good English for the first 500 years or so.

I would suggest that they temporarily replace their theme song (which I like) with "Soft Kitty". That would be one way of making lemonade.