I'm surprised by the comments assuming nuclear power is safe, as if it's a given. As if the safety of our nuclear power plants can be dismissed from thought. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!

Yes, our power plants are generally safe, but they will only stay that way through constant vigilance. Do not trivialize the matter. That is how the Chernobyl disaster happened. On top of that, they are prime targets for terrorist strikes, so even if you could eliminate human error inside the plant, you must constantly guard against unknown factors from outside the plant.

I don't want that to happen here or anywhere else for that matter, and I will not support someone who thinks it is not a serious matter.

I also work in IT and i belive you can design IT systems that are better than paper systems , yes you will probably always have human error however due to the nature of IT you can reduce this more so than PAper bassed systems.

your bound to presume malice with annyhting that favors mcain due to the amount of liying his party partakes in.

^human error?

Light is both a particle and a wave. It seems confusing to average Joe, and it may seem to be a paradox, but the definition of "paradox" is: An assertion that is essentially self-contradictory, though based on a valid deduction from acceptable premises. A paradox is not a "circular statement." That is something entirely different. That may be what you are thinking of when you think "paradox." When I was studying the quantum mechanics section of physical chemistry class, I honestly thought I would go crazy. It is NOT easily graspable. The equations that Schrodinger used and others like him used are insanely complicated. In the end, I, like everyone else, forgot all the equations and only remembered the concepts and the sheer TERROR of it all. If anyone here chooses to pursue it in curiosity, I recommend keeping to the general terms and avoiding the math... unless you're a genius or some sort of servant, that is.

Anyway, relativity is easy to buy and it has been proven. In brief, they synchronized an atomic clock "stationary" on the ground (that is, it was the "stationary" frame of reference for the experiment) and an atomic clock on a high-speed jet that proceeded to fly VERY fast around the world and such. At the end of the experiment the clock on the jet was BEHIND the one on the ground. There were significant and quality controls in place that allow us to conclude that time itself was moving at a relatively slower rate on the jet than it was on the ground. Light is related to both velocity and "length" of space. A GREAT explanation can be easily found on Wikipedia.

The mind-boggling part of this is that if you are on the top of a high mountain, you are experiencing time at a slower rate than those in a valley. Soooo, if you wanna life a millionth of a second longer than the Jones's in the valley, get thee to a mountain.

Also of note, several authors have used special relativity as a key part in their works, see the "Ender's Game" series (A LEGENDARY CLASSIC) in which Ender et.al. sometimes jets off into space at HUGE speeds in order to let a HUGE amount of time pass before he returns.

I absolutely love special relativity, but it really complicates everything. Newton may have been right about a number of things, but not on a quantum level. And not in reality in fact. Chaos theory is the new Newtonian theory. Now THAT is fun stuff.

In brief? Chaos Theory is the idea that in order for one to understand an event in REALITY, one must include EVERY SINGLE VARIABLE in addition to Newtonian physical calculation. That means: the mass of the object, the wind, the air resistance, the chemical make-up of the air at that moment and throughout the experiment, the particulate matter in the air, the light amount and angle, the gravity, the velocity relative to the many gravity sources, the many gravity sources, the human error, the sensor error, and on and on and on. This is of basically impossible since it would change constantly... in other words, it would change so fast that you would not be able to isolate a single moment with everything stable. mwahahaha fun.

And all this makes Rougy's citation absolutely relevant: "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

Good quote, dude.

Some quotes:

"Traffic that grinds to a halt and then restarts for no apparent reason is one of the biggest causes of frustration for drivers. Now a team of Japanese researchers has recreated the phenomenon on a test-track for the first time.

The mathematical theory behind these so-called "shockwave" jams was developed more than 15 years ago using models that show jams appear from nowhere on roads carrying their maximum capacity of free-flowing traffic – typically triggered by a single driver slowing down.

After that first vehicle brakes, the driver behind must also slow, and a shockwave jam of bunching cars appears, travelling backwards through the traffic."

They go on to say they've done this on computers, but did in person as seen above.

"They asked drivers to cruise steadily at 30 kilometres per hour, and at first the traffic moved freely. But small fluctuations soon appeared in distances between cars, breaking down the free flow, until finally a cluster of several vehicles was forced to stop completely for a moment.

That cluster spread backwards through the traffic like a shockwave. Every time a vehicle at the front of the cluster was able to escape at up to 40 km/h, another vehicle joined the back of the jam.

The shockwave jam travelled backwards through the ring of vehicles at roughly 20 km/h, which is the same as the speed of the shockwave jams observed on roads in real life, says lead researcher Yuki Sugiyama, a physicist in the department of complex systems at Nagoya University.

"Although the emerging jam in our experiment is small, its behaviour is not different from large ones on highways," he told New Scientist.

...
Pinpointing the causes of shockwave jams is an exercise in psychology more than anything else. "If they had set up an experiment with robots driving in a perfect circle, flow breakdown would not have occurred. Human error is needed to cause the fluctuations in behaviour," says Rees."

So our humanity is to blame. But of course.

Farhad, that I can understand. Although this doesn't mean advances in technology are a bad thing. People will continue to refine the ability to kill one another as they always have. I think this artillery piece would be a step towards minimizing civilian casulaties. More accuracy means its more likely to actually hit your target and not take out a whole city block instead. Minimizing human error is a good thing. It even auto corrects to ensure collateral damage is minimized.

atheism doesn't require critical thought. In fact it requires no thought at all. I don't see why Dawkins takes so much time to try and defeat religion. If he doesn't believe in God then why try to prove that there isn't one? In fact Dawkins has yet to even begin to disprove that there is no God. His observations are based on examples of human error and a narrow line of scientific reasoning. He leaves too much out of his arguments to persuade anyone who has more then very limited experience and knowledge.

it's just advertising executives having a collective wank all over their "art" when really they wish they could direct movies instead of selling shit.

btw i would rather have one nuclear power station than seven gajillion acres of inefficient turbines. They are not made of recycled paper, you know?

And you should read about Chernobyl. Stupid sleepy soviet corrupt safety practices, big big stupid human error. The world learnt a lesson, nuclear power became ridiculously safe (like air travel compared to road travel) and you have nothing to worry about.
I live near Ignalina which was built to the same design as Chernobyl, and after chernobyl they put so many safety features on the place you couldn't blow it up if you tried. But anyway they are decommissioning it because it is the same design as Chernobyl and maybe politically Lithuania isn't supposed to be allowed so much power generating capacity.

If you like progress, and you think a fucking windmill is progress, then you're mental.

If you think nuclear waste is a problem, go check out how much plastic packaging you throw out in comparison, and get your moaning priorities straight.

"why is it that the Fed is able to manipulate the money supply such that the dollars you and I work for are cleaved of their real value and inflated at their discretion, with no Congressional oversight?"

Congress must never have a hand in managing the money supply. The whole point of the Fed is its impartiality. If you had guys afraid to put the brakes on the economy just because it's an election year, that's quite the conflict of interest.

The Fed's job is to protect the value of money, above all. This may mean encouraging lending, this may mean engineering recession, but in the end it's just to keep money worth money.

Forget about your bank collapsing, the Fed is there to keep the money itself from collapsing. It's terribly scary to have that power anywhere, so a suggestion to automate the process against inflation, take some or all human error out, that I can understand. But managing the money supply can't be a democratic process, whereby we all get representation in what we want: we'll all say we like money, we want more, ignorant of the intricacies of how money is valued, and to what extent this disbursment is damaging the value of the money. Sometimes recession is the only way to maintain the value of money, to manage inflation; and we would never choose recession, we could never endure such a thing by choice, because it's more tangible than suffering inflation.

The ramifications of a failing currency, like clockwork, are unspeakable violence in the streets, sometimes marked by counter-revolutions into war-mongering barbarism. It's a pretty basic human instinct: if what we have is worth nothing, let's go take what they have.

It's for the latter reason that people are reluctant to start pulling blocks out of the Jenga tower that is the Fed. It's been a long time since worldwide economic hardship precipitated an Italian invasion of Ethiopia, a Japanese invasion of China, and a Weimar Germany in which beer cost 4 million marks per glass (France needed those reparations, because it too was hungry).

This video is crazy. "Do you want your money gaining value every year, or losing value every year?" Well, shucks! Didn't realize it was THAT simple! I WANT MORE MONEY, DOG!

Because radioactive waste has a half-life of 10 to the 19th years and is the by-product of a system subject to human error and unpredictable natural disasters, I don't believe anyone can say it is truly safe.

eh? am i missing something here or did OwenHiggins' comment seem more for the Moon Landing controversy video?

bug or human error?

Replaced by correctly embedded video- HUMAN error