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[Radio Controlled]

Pabst too watch.

[ChairmanPoo]

The scientific community...

...didn't exist for a significant period of time. There wasn't a single scientific community for the period of time from 1950s to 1980s. You know, Cold War and all that. They've had plenty of motive to point out errors in each other's theories if they could; but theories that we're using now have survived that.

there remain reasons to point out scientific mistakes. If someone overturned general relativity he'd get the Nobel prize, at the very least

[Rose]

Not sure why I don't have this thread in my watch list yet.

[Sergarr]

Not sure why I don't have this thread in my watch list yet.

I've always wanted to ask: what's "watch list"?

[Arx]

The updated topics page.

Or 'undead reptiles' page, if you're surqimus.

[Eagleon]

Within the scientific community, there is a lot of debate and argument over free publishing, but in recent years, due to this growing anti-intellectualism that is strangling science in its crib, many researchers are also publishing in open journals, hoping that people interested in science will be able to get the papers, the datasets, and perhaps even try to replicate results from them, and further contribute to the scientific process.

I've started to see another, related problem - scientific papers also kind of suck balls right now, because "That's the Standard". This is what I want to start working on as soon as my life stops self-destructing every 3-6 months (*poke Agora link*). Almost all of it is presented in PDF, and when it isn't, there's still almost never any nod to the fact that the vast majority of consumption is done digitally. You can present information differently using computers than you can on a flat piece of paper. The way we communicate science outside of the groups doing it hasn't caught up to that.

Even if we simply (only) abandoned PDF, crawlers would get a hell of a lot easier to make for searching and creating semantic data about papers. Then we could start compositing data from them to create perfectly reference-matched data sets from sources that would still have to be examined, but which could suggest patterns that haven't been seen yet - ground-level research assistance leveraging the network of references already found in papers. At that point we might have a chance to speed basic research up to where we are with restaurant reviews and pornography indexing/retrieval.

[Helgoland]

Everyone uses Latex anyway - maybe people should simply start publishing their Tex files along with the finished PDF.

[Eagleon]

Everyone uses Latex anyway - maybe people should simply start publishing their Tex files along with the finished PDF.

Yes, please 100x. Edit: hurp. You're talking about people using Latex to make the finished PDFs. That also explains things a bit - I'm unfortunately a bit out of touch, I apologize. It'd probably still be easier to parse than PDF, because you'd have access to the markup, but really what we need are scientists that have an active interest in presenting their work online - rather than just as a document, some effort needs to be made to leverage the fact that they are publishing on a network, not in a book.

[Tylui]

Sergarr: Every thread you've posted in will show up in the "Show new replies to your posts" link seen here when someone else posts in it. when threads die, they filter to the bottom. If you've made the mistake of posting in happy thread and tons of ongoing word association game threads, it can get really useless really fast. There might be a way to unwatch a thread, but I haven't found it yet. Also, if you want to silently watch, there's a Notify link at the top of the thread, but I've never used that either.

EDIT: Looks like the Notify link does something different, but similar.

[Gentlefish]

It'll send you e-mail notifications about postings made in the thread.

[forsaken1111]

Is it possible for a black hole to NOT be a point source? If sufficient mass were gathered in an area of space but kept from infalling by some unknown technology, would there be a schwarzschild radius for this matter?

For example, if an alien race relocated something like 1000 stellar objects to a specific region of space and kept them very close to one another but, by application of unknown technology, kept the stars in place and did not allow them to collapse together.. would this collection of matter still generate such a radius where light could not escape?

I ask because such a situation is described in a science fiction novel I read and I'm curious just how that would work.

[Sergarr]

Is it possible for a black hole to NOT be a point source?

It can be a source no bigger than the radius of the black hole itself, so no, you can't magically create a radius where light couldn't escape by placing a lot of objects around one place.

[Rose]

No, the Hee-Chee are pretty much full of shit, as far as I know.

[Angle]

Everyone uses Latex anyway - maybe people should simply start publishing their Tex files along with the finished PDF.

Yes, please 100x. Edit: hurp. You're talking about people using Latex to make the finished PDFs. That also explains things a bit - I'm unfortunately a bit out of touch, I apologize. It'd probably still be easier to parse than PDF, because you'd have access to the markup, but really what we need are scientists that have an active interest in presenting their work online - rather than just as a document, some effort needs to be made to leverage the fact that they are publishing on a network, not in a book.

Funny you should mention that. Agora's coming along pretty well, and at some vaguely defined point in the distant future I would like to take a look into leveraging it to reform our science publishing process.

[forsaken1111]

No, the Hee-Chee are pretty much full of shit, as far as I know.

Good to know.

It was an interesting idea for fiction but throughout reading that book I had the feeling that it was pretty much all bullshit.