The internet as existential threat - <AUTHOR> https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existential-threat/ <comment><USER2> I'm getting worried. I've been harping on the Maersk downtime lately. The ports of the largest shipping company in the world have been shut down for two days by a cyber attack. Trucks can't unload or load at many of the world's ports, including the main container ports of LA, NYC, and Rotterdam. They're going to be down tomorrow, too. Maybe partial operation by Friday.[1] Maersk even lost phone and email systems. One of the few good sources of info has been somebody at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey who sends out alerts to truckers.

It's a distributed outage. The usual forms of disaster preparation involve geographic dispersal. That doesn't work against this threat. Few companies are as physically dispersed as Maersk, which has major facilities in 61 countries. It didn't help.

What happens when someone figures out how to take over Windows Update or the Intel Management Engine or Ubuntu Update?

[1] [http://btt.paalerts.com/recentmessages.aspx](http://btt.paalerts.com/recentmessages.aspx)

<comment><USER3> The first step would be to stop using C (and any other memory-unsafe language). The vast majority of these problems come about by memory corruption tricking the computer into executing attacker-delivered code (or ROP gadgets).

Yes there will be other security flaws like missing access checks, etc. But none are so pervasive nor so devastating as out-of-bounds read/write. If C arrays were bounds-checked by default then the majority (literally) of exploits would be rendered void immediately. The Rust borrow checker, Swift ARC, or GCs would eliminate use-after-free. Combined that would drastically reduce all available attack surface.

The second step is to assign a separate identity to every piece of code, rather than running everything as the current user. Unless it has been initiated by a user action there is no reason for malware to even have write access to your files (or system files for that matter). The idea that any ol random bit of code that manages to execute should be just as trusted as the user is crazytown. IMHM macOS SIP is a good step in that direction, enforcing read-only access to /System and most of /usr.

The third step is to have pervasive copy-on-write, including in all filesystems by default. If your system does get pwned it should be a trivial matter of booting to a read-only recovery mode and rolling back to a known- good state.

The fourth step is to have more interlocks enforced by the system that cannot be overridden. For example there might be a legitimate reason to truncate shadow copies but why should anyone with admin rights be allowed to do so from a normal login session? That's just stupid. (For those unaware, malware now routinely disables Windows' volume shadow copy and nukes the existing copies to stop you from rolling your files back). Stuff like that should require rebooting into single-user mode or recovery mode.

There's always a lot of resistance to the idea of dropping C. Before you go replying with a counter-argument I urge you to stop and think seriously. We've been pushing secure coding standards as an industry for many years now. Everyone is well aware of the risks. We have tools like Address Sanitizer and Undefined Behavior Sanitizer. We have lots of static analysis tools. We have tools like valgrind. And yet... the exploits keep on coming. Despite the thousands upon thousands of years of effort poured into fixing it, we still routinely have new out-of-bounds and use-after-free exploits in critical C code. Even experienced developers get bitten by signed integer overflow and other forms of undefined behavior... and most C code is not being written by experienced careful developers. Embedded code is even worse. If you read the source behind your car's ECU you'd probably never drive again.

It is time to admit the truth: programming languages should be memory-safe by default. Period. Whatever the cost it is worth paying.

<comment><USER4> _Before you go replying with a counter-argument I urge you to stop and think seriously._

I have thought about these things for a _long_ time, and arrived at the exact opposite conclusion: had such levels of security been there since the beginning of computing, there would be no jailbreaks, rooting, homebrew, or any real freedom. Everything would be so locked down and unbreakable that there would be no "possibility to disobey", and that is a far more terrifying alternative.

A world in which there is no crime is one where everyone has already been strongly coerced into submission and every aspect of their lives closely monitored and controlled. Ultimately, humans are imperfect and that's where all of these exploits and vulnerabilities come from. If we attempt to eradicate them, by essentially removing imperfection, we will literally be taking the humanity out of life. Is that really the (cyber-)world you want to live in, or move towards?

 _Whatever the cost it is worth paying._

I see this continuing insecurity as consolation that we still have some freedom left, but positions like yours --- increasingly popular, it seems --- are strongly reminiscent of the "war on terrorism" and its associated repugnance, because it is really the "war on cyberterrorism".

As the classic saying goes, "Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."

<comment><USER5> I agree. The real danger is software monoculture. We need many diverse systems with very different attack surfaces. Less standardization. That's the way nature survives. We just need to learn the lesson.

<comment><USER6> Nature also has things like immune systems, but you get into very sketchy legal territory there. Our legal system have not caught up with this new interconnected reality.

Oh, and nature very frequently suffers all kinds of systemic collapse. Nature isn't immune to this.

<comment><USER5> Still kicking after 3 billion years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The Internet ... started out by only connecting computer networks. But today > it connects networks of vastly different sorts: computers, yes, but also > financial networks, distribution networks, road networks, water networks, > power networks, communication networks, social networks.

Those are all computer networks. It just happens that some of them involve computers running financial software, or computers running electrical control software, or computers running social software. Or computers running phone software, or light-bulb software, or toaster software.

Perhaps we don't need networked toasters, but I don't want to go back to a world where financial transactions are conducted based on hand-scratched notes and shouting on trading floors.

Computers are just too powerful to ignore. The problem is not that they are computers, but that some are locked down for user control of networking, but simultaneously designed insecurely as, say, "smart web cams" without the necessary incentives to keep them secure.

<comment><USER8> > I don't want to go back to a world where financial transactions are > conducted based on hand-scratched notes and shouting on trading floors.

Seemed to work pretty well for a long time.

<comment><USER9> Our expectations have since increased. I wouldn't want to go back to the GDP I thought was fine ten years ago.

<comment><USER10> Adjusted for inflation, has it changed that much in 10years? Ditto for median wages.

<comment> Tuna-Fish Absolutely yes for both. The past decade was one of the most successful ones, if not _the_ most successful one, in global wage increases and poverty reduction. Literally billions of people have been raised to standards of living they didn't dare to dream of a decade ago.

Of course, these increases have been concentrated among the poorest people in the world, so you don't see them in the US.

<comment><USER11> Almost all of that in two countries: China and India. And much of that in China. Which had a hell of a lot more to do with raising the floor than lifting the ceiling.

Some of our international globalisation tools assisted in that -- shipping (Maersk included), finance, and realtime shelf-to-factory inventory control. But a lot of it didn't.

As Gibson's noted, the future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed. You might also want to ask, from time to time, just which trends truly represent "the future".

<comment><USER12> I'm glad to see you're still here dredmorbius.

The facts and statistics in history and economics appear to be 'politically incorrect' for every type of political belief system. Liberal, Left, Libertarian, Conservative, doesn't matter, there's some factor out there that hasn't been incorporated. I think the Google people say something like "unless you're God, bring data".

<comment><USER11> Thanks.

Yes, epistemology and ideology seem rather opposed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The analogy with electricity is pretty good. When the electricity goes out, most people are pretty screwed: it powers our lighting, air conditioning, household appliances, refrigeration, gasoline pumps, Internet access, point- of-sale systems, and in many places, cooking and running water too.

However, when the electricity goes out, it usually comes back on within a day or so, because a power outage is viewed as a top priority to fix, simply because so many aspects of modern life depend on it. And really critical businesses (supermarkets, hospitals, etc.) invest in generators so that they can run independently of the power grid.

The Internet will likely follow that path. It'll become indispensable to modern life, which means that when there's a threat against it, a lot of experts will be mobilized to put it back in service. And really critical businesses will invest in making sure their systems work even when offline.

<comment><USER14> The scary case isn't the internet going down. The scary thing is the internet becoming to hostile a place.

When I can't reach the internet, all it takes is a new cable. When anything I connect to the internet is going to be infected and DDosed to oblivion, the fix is a lot harder.

The other scare is that some critical infrastructure is exposed but not widely known. This allows the infrastructure to develop resilience to unintended failures, but not malicious failures. When this finally gets found, carnage may happen. An interesting example of this is BGP.

<comment><USER13> The same concerns were expressed about electricity [1] when it was first invented. The usage of the electric chair for executions was sponsored by Edison Electric [2] (now GE) as a way to link rival alternating current (and specifically Westinghouse; Thomas Edison made sure that the first executions were conducted with Westinghouse machines) with death in the public's mind.

The solution wasn't to give up on electricity, it was to adopt basic safety precautions like step-down transformers to household voltage, elevated power lines, and insulated couplings.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents#Safety_concern...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents#Safety_concerns)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_chair#The_Medico- Lega...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_chair#The_Medico- Legal_commission)

<comment><USER15> The three-letter agencies haven't changed their minds. They still think that every computer being insecure makes us all more secure, and they will and they have acted to create this situation. That's the difference between now and a century ago. The govt back then didn't feel it was in their interest for electricity to be fundamentally unsafe for consumers. Until the agencies genuinely reverse course, inventions to promote safety can't move forward. We'd have basic safety now, as you describe, had room been made for it. But instead, they played past the edge - way past the edge, and have no profound regrets about that that I've heard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > I've often wanted to sit down with Mark Zuckerberg and argue with him about > Facebook. It is premised on the notion that "connecting everyone" is an > unmitigated good.

This isn't the author's _major_ point. But worth noting Zuckerberg changed FB's mission recently to "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."

Said Mark: "Connecting friends and family has been pretty positive, but I think there is just this collective feeling that we have a responsibility to do more than that and also help build communities and help people get exposed to new perspectives and meet new people -- not just give people a voice, but also help build common ground so people can actually move forward together."

<comment><USER17> Wow, that's really interesting. Hadn't noticed the change in the mission statement. For reference, it used to be: "Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."

They changed from making the world more "open" to making it "closer", which are antonyms in a certain way. They changed from the idea of having Facebook be this sort of universal community of people getting together to searching for more intimacy, getting people closer, etc. but they keep talking about "the world."

I've always thought there was room for an "anti-Facebook" that would be the opposite of their original vision statement. Its goal is not to "share things", i.e. to make things public, but to create more private communities that are tighter; not to make the world "more connected" (everyone having 5000 friends) but better connected (i.e. the value of relationships is higher).

It seems like FB may be trying to go in that direction after all, but who knows what they really meant.

<comment><USER18> It seems to be facebook acknowledging that close-ties networks are of significantly more long term transactional value than the loose-ties network who's value is almost entirely advertorial.

<comment><USER17> Yeah. But what does that mean for their business model?

<comment><USER19> Not much. If they can still be the place where all the small communities gather then they still have all the data. It's clearly in Facebook's best interest to provide maximum value to their users; whether that is small or large groups doesn't matter to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "But today it connects networks of vastly different sorts: computers, yes, but also financial networks, distribution networks, road networks, water networks, power networks, communication networks, social networks."

This is, I hope, incorrect.

Power, water, road, etc. should not be Internet connected and in many cases should not be networked at all.

Homeowners doing cute things with arduino and their lawn sprinklers (and learning good lessons about simplicity and fragility) are one thing. It's quite another to bear the responsibility for critical infrastructure.

I hope the adults in the room have the wisdom and experience to eschew these kind of "improvements".

<comment><USER14> Sensor networks are great boons to any infrastructure. It allows for much quicker reactions and much better tuning. However, this network doesn't need to be public.

I can see how you'd pick the internet as a base-layer for this network, which would be a bad idea. The alternative is building an entire separate network, which seems almost un doable.

<comment><USER21> For some industries it makes sense. Rail and power networks use their own physical infrastructure as they have specific latency and reliability requirements for protection and signalling systems and it's convenient to just build their own comms networks alongside their other infrastructure.

<comment><USER14> Rail and power also already have physical infrastructure and property along which they can setup networks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't think this is a revelation to anyone in tech circles. For this reason, I usually choose products that aren't internet enabled.

<comment><USER23> The article's point is more than about consumer devices being internet enabled, it's about how many things are internet _dependent_. Everything from critical infrastructure to production and distribution networks are now Internet dependent in terms of actual delivery.

<comment><USER24> In large part because of companh and government cost savings via off the shelf parts and BYOD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm starting to believe we need some kind of Geneva convention among intelligence services.

It's one thing for them all to be spying on dissidents and terrorists or however they want to bother their internal populations, because they'll be limited in how much damage they want to do to their own economies.

Once you have intelligence services engaged in all out warfare with each other, there's really no limit to how much damage they can do. Up to and including deaths.

We need to get to some kind of gentlemans agreement between the CIA and the FSB really quickly before the world economy collapses.

</comment><comment><USER26> It is kind of ironic, since the internet was designed as exactly the opposite: a damage-tolerant coast-to-coast communications system, i.e. one without a single point of failure.

<comment><USER27> Double-plus-so. The Internet continues to be damage tolerant. The problem is that we have collectively expended the last 20 years building single points of failure, and hooking them up all through the Internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Site got ycombinator'd, so here's a google cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AyxA4F...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AyxA4FAqnfcJ:https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the- internet-as-existential-threat/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie)

<comment><USER29> Unfortunately, the Google Cache is still trying to load data from raphkoster.com

Do you have a pastebin dump?

<comment><USER30> Webarchive works for me:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20170628133305/https://www.raphko...](http://web.archive.org/web/20170628133305/https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the- internet-as-existential-threat/)

<comment><USER29> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Tainter postulates that societies collapse when they reach their limit of complexity.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter#Social_complexi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter#Social_complexity)

</comment><comment><USER32> When Raph speaks my ears always perk up.

</comment><comment><USER33> Site not loading for me. Internet archive mirror: [http://web.archive.org/web/20170629000253/https://www.raphko...](http://web.archive.org/web/20170629000253/https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the- internet-as-existential-threat/) (Also I realize I share a surname with the author but am of no relation that I know of.)

</comment><comment><USER34> Thanks for reminding me to back up my gmail and gdocs.

I think she makes a good point about not getting one's paycheck - that could definitely have a devastating ripple effect on the economy. But, is it really possible, that the entire internet go down?

<comment><USER35> That's the thing, he seems to be ignorant of just how redundant and reliable the system is. He uses the example of a worldwide economic collapse if Google went down for a month. Which is probably true. Thing is, that's about as likely as a worldwide economic collapse from the US being nuked off the face of the planet and everyone else left untouched.

The beauty of software is that it can be replaced/repaired quickly. If a power plant gets utterly destroyed, it could take a minimum of months to build a new one. If a piece of software gets corrupted, you load from backups or buy a new copy. Downtime is incredibly minimized for even the worst designed system.

That's not to say disasters can't happen, but they will be limited in time and scope so long as there's enough money to throw as the problem, and if the amount of money-throwing ever becomes too much to swallow then we might finally see some widespread solid security practices.

Honestly simply keeping systems updated would mitigate most of the potential "devastating" attacks, the reason the recent ransomware attacks got as far as they did is lack of funding/will, because it's largely cheaper for organizations to let themselves get pwned then it is for them to protect themselves.

<comment><USER36> Part of the issue is not redundancy, but heterogeny. It is like monoculture crops - doesn't matter if you're growing 4x what you need if something comes along that kills all of them.

> If a piece of software gets corrupted, you load from backups or buy a new > copy

Software is cheap, as you say. Data isn't. The piece's author indicated that the influenza-of-the-month was launched via tax software, which generally isn't interoperable. If there is no reasonable replacement, what do you do?

Heterogeneous systems are more expensive to operate, require more expertise, and cause more compatibility problems than monocultures. But they also don't all die at once due to the same bug.

<comment><USER35> The same thing you do if physical tax/medical/financial records get lost in a fire, or any other data for that matter. It's a major loss, maybe even an economic crisis for some, but not an unrecoverable one. Worst case scenario you move foreword with less data and insurance does what it can. Create countermeasures so it doesn't happen again. Said data should also be backed up for this very reason.

Also, just because devices are on the same network does not mean they're homogenous. A Windows vulnerability won't take out a Linux server or an IoT webcam. For everything to truly "die at once due to the same bug" you'd need a network layer attack. Compromising the internet protocol itself, even if possible would cut off the attacker as well, so that leaves us with denial of service attacks, which are common. But services like Cloudflare already effectively defend against such attacks, and even compromising an entire major cloud platform (as in the author's AWS hypothetical) will simply result in the cloud provider as well as other interested parties pouring all possible effort into fixing the problem as quickly as possible.

Imagine that your monoculture crop could develop immunity to a new disease within hours, days or weeks, with immunity developing faster for more serious diseases. Then all you need is a big enough field to absorb any potential losses.

<comment><USER36> > Worst case scenario you move foreword with less data and insurance does what > it can

Well, yes. Just like, after a house fire, you rebuild and try to carry on. It is still catastrophic.

> Also, just because devices are on the same network does not mean they're > homogenous.

Of course not. The point is that there are many pressures towards running homogenous systems - easier to hire for, easier to manage, fewer support systems to run, fewer interop problems, bigger vendor discounts, etc. etc.

These pressures are hard to resist, but we have to do better at running heterogenous systems, because without them, your entire farm can burn down before you notice.

Nothing you say is wrong, but just because "it's just software" doesn't mean these aren't catastrophes.

<comment><USER35> Not saying they're not, but the author specifically mentions "existential threat", "paralyzed economies", and worlds where people without technical skills are instantly hacked upon connecting to the internet. He uses the example of water supply so completely poisoned that no one can drink from it.

The author seems to be making an assumption that we could enter a world where insecure technology could be taken offline all at once by some random hacker(s) and remain in such a state long enough to completely destroy economies and institutions. Frankly the system just isn't that brittle, if it was it would have failed long ago.

It's like looking at Hurricane Katrina, which while catastrophic was never an existential threat to the US, and saying, "now imagine if Hurricane Katrina happened everywhere, every day!" without considering if such a thing were possible or likely in the first place.

As for heterogeneous systems, what do you think the cloud is? Sure it may be homogenous for users, but that's all abstraction for what is a VERY heterogeneous system under the hood. Sure having independent/redundant subsystems is ideal for reliability, but at the end of the day I don't see the need for all the frightful abstractions. The farm isn't going to burn down without anyone noticing, there are simply too many powerful interested parties and too much built-in resiliency.

I'm all for building in more resiliency/redundancy to prevent catastrophes as you mention, but the author takes a couple of major security incidents and spins them into apocalyptic techno-panic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> If anything, the Internet was created with resilience in mind. In fact there's no "the Internet" but rather a network of networks that is by design very hard to shut down.

You could argue that there's DNS and that's more centralized. Sure, point granted. But in theory you can use any DNS server you want... and there are projects which make it less centralized.

Now, a different topic is how devices can be taken over... and that's something where we are largely to blame. The EFF, and the old-school Open source folks like Stallman have been warning for years that we are giving away our freedoms by trusting in closed source. And they were right. Now we are in the endgame where every single computer has one of these "management engines" that cannot be turned off and have total control over a computer, and where your source of entropy is RDRAND.</comment>


A Folding Language - <AUTHOR> http://olabini.com/blog/2009/01/a-folding-language/

<comment><USER2> Writes about how Steve Yegge's concept of a very expressive "folding language" relates to his own programming language, Ioke (he quotes someone saying that Ioke is an infinitely-foldable language). I still do not know what Ioke has over LISP, especially one like PLT Scheme.

<comment><USER3> You can't change the way lookups happen at runtime in Lisps. In Ioke (and Io), you can modify the proto chain as the application runs. You can also add and remove slots of objects. You can't add and remove variables from a closure in any Lisps that I am aware of.</comment></comment>


The transpacific partnership and "free trade" - <AUTHOR> http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/

<comment><USER2> Oh dear.

Leaving aside the cheap ad-hominems against opponents of taxation, his argument is based upon several incorrect assumptions (especially the one that 'stimulus' works).

Have a read of:

[https://mises.org/library/human-action-0](https://mises.org/library/human- action-0)

... for the dissenting view :[https://mises.org/library/human- action-0](https://mises.org/library/human-action-0)) It _is_ lacking funny cartoons lampooning capitalists as gun-toting hicks, though, so it might not provoke the same sort of laughs.</comment>


The Legend of Zelda in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://zelda30tribute.com/ <comment><USER2> Well, that didn't last long:

"Nintendo asked us to remove this site for copyright infringement. I guess Zelda30Tribute was a little too pixel perfect :-) We're sad about that, but we get it. We started this project because we love Nintendo and the joy they have given us throughout the years. From the start of development, we knew this result could potentially happen. Nintendo has every right to protect their IP. No complaints from us, we had a blast working on this tribute and made some friends along the way. "

From the exact site linked. Looks like this project went the same way as that Mario 64 Bob-omb Battlefield remake and Full Screen Mario.

<comment><USER3> Nintendo is very very fast at copyright infringement notices. I am curious if they have fancy tech, or just a department of 50 people surfing the net all day.

<comment><USER2> I suspect just looking at gaming news sites would probably be adequate for this stuff. Search for the game, and results come up from Kotaku, CNet, the Verge, Nintendo Life and Reddit, among a ton of others. It's even on Product Hunt.

Heck, why even go that far? Given how often it gets updated, Nintendo's legal team is probably just skimming GoNintendo posts and seeing what 'questionable' projects come up.

So no fancy tech or constant surfing. Just likely some bored guy checking a few gaming sites every few minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Take your tech and build your own game with it, using original graphics sounds, levels, etc. of course. Might as well put your hard work to good use! I loved the old Zeldas and would love to play a new game with the same mechanics and style.</comment>


Learning coding from boredom - <AUTHOR> http://bitquabit.com/post/learning-coding-from-boredom/

<comment><USER2> The reason I learned to code at age 13 was so that I could automate slaying monsters in a text-based RPG that I loved. Today, I code for a number of other reasons: to earn a living, to make tasks in my life easier, to impress the ladies, etc.

Over the years I did eventually develop a deep passion for understanding data structures, algorithms, design patterns, and all the other "boring" aspects of software development. But one thing is certain — you could never have lured me into programming by teaching me about the knapsack problem or the strategy pattern.</comment>


The Devops Job - <AUTHOR>

I just the The Phoenix Project by  Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr. I've working in IT for thirty plus years and I didn't understand what DevOps was.  I now think I can define it.
Devops Job is to help and maybe do:
A - Identify each IT product B – Document each step from build to deployment C – Automate each step D – Create feedback for each step and production E – Identify ways to reduce or remove steps F – Consult with Development and Operations to build standards
Can anyone add more. <comment><USER2> [http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/06/11/front-end- ops/](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/06/11/front-end-ops/) Great front- end ops discussion, though I'd add that instead of a single "front-end ops" title, the responsibility should be held by every individual on the team to contribute to and leverage the dev-ops tools, process, and strategy.</comment>


Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/21/death-by-gentrification-the-killing-that-shamed-san-francisco <comment><USER2> > When they arrive in a flood, as they have during economic booms since the > 19th-century gold rush, including the dotcom surge of the late 1990s and the > current tech tsunami, they scour out what was there before. By 2012 the > incursion of tech workers had gone from steady stream to deluge, and more > and more people and institutions – bookstores, churches, social services, > bars, small businesses – began to be evicted.

Flood, scour out, incursion, deluge... it's very rare for a liberal publication such as The Guardian to describe immigration in such negative terms!

<comment><USER3> The idea that several forms of social influx (immigration vs gentrification) have some things in common despite being received differently along a political continuum is probably worth some examination.

But I'd start by looking at whether "flood" or "deluge" are justified not in terms of positive/negative connotation, but whether they accurately represent the scale of what's going on.

IIRC, post-civil-war in-migration to the US hasn't ever resulted in more than 15% of the _total_ population being immigrants. The CIA World Factbook says the US had 3.9 migrants per 1000 citizens in 2017. Wikipedia says there's a recent rate of about 1 million immigrants per year, about half of which are changing status for people already here.

I'm less sure where to get observations about the portion/influx of tech in the Bay Area or SF itself. But if I were guessing, I'd bet tech pushes up to 20-25% of employmees and activity, and that the influx over the last decade (or in the 90s) is a _considerably_ steeper curve.

One might also consider some qualitative factors. An influx of people of average or perhaps even lower than average means primarily represents an impact on (a) competition in the labor force and (b) demand. Those two things ought to cancel each other out in terms of general economic impacts (or perhaps even work in tandem to drive growth), except where there are supply bottlenecks... say, real estate/housing, especially in a geographically constrained area. So, one might expect the impacts to be outsized in a place like San Francisco vs the United States at large (which has plenty of places with modest population destiny). An influx of people of average to higher- than-average means (say, workers in a field commanding a larger salary than many past residents) would massively magnify this problem.

So... perhaps there are good reasons to treat the volatility and dynamics of tech-focused in-migration to SF/Bay as distinct from the volatility and dynamics of immigration to the US.

<comment><USER2> > Wikipedia says there's a recent rate of about 1 million immigrants per year, > about half of which are changing status for people already here.

Would that mean they weren't counted as immigrants when they first arrived, because they had the wrong 'status'? Or are they counted twice, first when they arrive, and again when they change status?

Edit: It occurred to me, immigration to the US is probably concentrated in the south, so the "15% of _total_ US population being immigrant" is not the most relevant statistic to compare to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is from 2016, but you can see that even three years ago, the Guardian was already busy milking every possible story for outrage. Nothing can happen, clearly, without it being connected to _something_ bad caused by tech.

</comment><comment><USER5> Police officers are killed on the job at something like 60x the rate of the regular population. There is a lot of material to work with here, but if the guy really pulled his Tazer on the cops, he more or less engaged in death by cop.

<comment><USER6> It is a challenging job, no doubt. But for some perspective: [https://thefreethoughtproject.com/cop-top-10-dangerous- jobs-...](https://thefreethoughtproject.com/cop-top-10-dangerous-jobs-country- tanks/)

<comment><USER7> I like the updated source data better it has actually changed quite a bit. [https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational- inju...](https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational- injuries/number-and-rate-of-fatal-work-injuries-by- industry.htmhttps://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational- injuries/civilian-occupations-with-high-fatal-work-injury-rates.htm)

<comment><USER5> The page says:

        Sorry, the page you're looking for can't be found;

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a huge stretch. It's not only white people that call the cops when it looks like someone has a gun.

However, the guardian salivates at the opportunity to blame rich white people for our problems, so im not surprised.

<comment><USER9> You're absolutely right. One of the murderers was asian, as were three of the jurors. But this isn't purely a matter of race, it's very much a matter of class.

<comment><USER10> I don't think poor people are ok with guns being pointed at them either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Police Officers "He was coming right for us" defense is a bit suspect considering the mixed up stories. Nevertheless this article is leaping to a whole ton of conclusions. He was carrying a weapon when the cops were called on him and there is no indication who called the cops on him.

Quite a xenophobic leap to conclusions to blame this on some racist newcomer for such a woke progressive newspaper.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is from 2016. It is included in a collection of Rebecca Solnit's essays the name of which escapes me right now.

</comment><comment><USER13> More like death by pointing a gun like object at police...

</comment><comment><USER14> IMO non-whites can't trust the police, they can't trust white people, and they know interactions with either is likely to lead to their death. How much longer before they say it's better to die fighting, and start shooting first? I'm angry at those men walking their dogs. They are just as much to blame for this as the police.

<comment><USER15> I am curious if you are non-white, because I am not and I can't agree with this. All my interactions with the police have been curtious and professional on their behalf even if I am clearly in the wrong, even if I am discourteous.

I can't think of a single person of color that I know, and I know many that has had a poor interaction with the police.

America isn't a bastion of racial equality, but by and large the police are okay.

I used to have the same feelings as you did from watching the media, but it's like the medias portrayal is not representative. Just look at their coverage on violent crime, if you watch it you'd believe that everyone is at risk all the time but my county hasn't had a single assault in the past 5 years.

IMO people are better served looking at these problems as local issues to which the aegis of greater government can help.

<comment><USER6> If you are on HN then you probably are White/Asian/Indian and middle class or above now, or in upbringing. You are less likely to mix with who have bad interactions with the police.

I agree broad statements like minorities can't trust the police are ridiculous. Very rarely do you hear Asian man shot by police.

Clearly black Americans(mostly men)have a problematic history in interactions with police , with some great abuse by some departments. Unfortunately, bad cops get protected, so abuse doesn't lead to punishment....BUT also CNN and clickbait media/Twitter outrage manufacturers turn every white cop/black citizen encounter in to a racial episode when it isn't, which further makes black men/boys feel under siege. Even though that isn't the case most of the time. When actual abuse does happen, the well is poisoned already by the clickbait, and (some) of their fellow citizens are not as empathetic.

<comment><USER15> > If you are on HN then you probably are White/Asian/Indian and middle class > or above now, or in upbringing. You are less likely to mix with who have bad > interactions with the police.

I'm actually a black man.

Those friends I was mentioning who have gone their entire lives without a poor interaction with the police?

Also black men. Worse yet, some of them are _immigrant_ black men with accents.

Racism exists. Police corruption exists. It's a known issue, but its not so systemic that it affects all jurisdictions equally.

As I said, I believe its much better to look at your current locality and ask "can I trust _my_ police?" rather than think about the situation as a national problem.

Now, you might say that I'm lucky, or that I have never broken the law so its a non-issue.

Let me tell you a story. Once, I and two of my friends were in a car smoking marijuana. The police, having heard recent burglaries in the area, were on the look out, and thought it particularly sketchy for a poorly maintained looking car to be parked inside such a good neighborhood. As they turned on their lights, one of my friends gets the bright idea that he should run---yes run from the police. He doesn't get very far, and we're all gathered together and the story comes out in torrid detail. We're sure we'll all go to prison, but the worst that happens is that we are driven to our parents' houses and given an unofficial warning.

That's it. No writes ups, no tickets. The worst part of that night (for me) was that our stash was confiscated.

This is the kind of story you'd expect to only happen to a white guy? Perhaps even a rich white guy, right?

Nope, it happened to 3 black guys who ended up going to university on scholarships.

This stuff isn't rare. Lot's of time, the police are reasonable but people's bias colors their view of it. One of my friends, who was in the car with me, used to say (when we were younger) that this night was an example of the cops unfairly brutalizing us because we were frisked and he was handcuffed initially---he's the one that ran. Yet if you look at it from another angle, we were the criminals caught in possession of drugs who got a slap on the wrist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> And the HN comment section has all the surprises of a box of biscuits: loyal belief in police testimony, and a complete ignorance of the point of the article in favour of pedantic point scoring. If anyone is looking for a position to fill, whataboutisms and supporting the right of the rich to walk all over you are still up for grabs.

<comment><USER9> > If anyone is looking for a position to fill, whataboutisms and supporting > the right of the rich to walk all over you are still up for grabs.

I dunno, the comment framing this article as "anti-immigration" is firmly straddling the two.</comment></comment>


Bauhaus Ideology and the Future of Web Design - <AUTHOR> http://colly.com/comments/bauhaus_ideology_and_the_future_of_web_design/

<comment><USER2> If you're looking for architecture-inspired design manifestos for web and software design, check out A Pattern Language:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language>

The ideas in that book helped create the notion of "design patterns" in software and engineering. The book provides hundreds of insights into the way people use their environment: marriage beds, child caves, dancing in the streets, staircases as stages, sleeping in public, spaces for self- governance...

Pattern Language is a more humanizing design philosophy than Bauhaus. It brings the emotional and sociological aspects of design together with technological complexity.

The concepts of vocabulary, syntax and grammar are applicable to programming language and API design, as well as visual design and architecture.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.amazon.com/From-Bauhaus-Our-House- Wolfe/dp/031242...](http://www.amazon.com/From-Bauhaus-Our-House- Wolfe/dp/0312429142)

I am generally sympathetic with the aesthetic choices of this school. But it is necessary to note that Bauhaus's approach, as informed by socialist ideology of its core members, is dehumanizing at scale. And when 'it' -- it being the logical conclusion via Corbu et al -- was embraced (at scale), it resulted in the backlash that was Post-Modernism and the rest of it.

Finally, it needs to be pointed out that the 'problem' that informed the ideological 'solution' of Bauhaus maps far more sensibly to software methodology rather than software manifestation.

<comment><USER4> Not sure about the rest of the world, but in the southwest, LA to Phoenix, the modernism of Bauhaus has more sway in contemporary starchitecture than post- modernism.

<comment><USER3> Because it is more profitable to build identical cookie cutter artifacts.

Postmodernism (in architecture) was an _academic_ reactionary movement: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Venturi>

[p.s.: This is the seminal critical retort that started it: [http://designtheory.fiu.edu/readings/venturi_complexity_comp...](http://designtheory.fiu.edu/readings/venturi_complexity_complete.pdf)]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Form Follows Function."

The concept comes from the American Louis Sullivan, not the Bauhaus. His use of ornamentation and references to forms from the past (e.g. the skyscraper as a column with base, shaft, and capital) would have been rejected.

<comment><USER3> Sullivan and Wright are not to be mentioned (except in passing) given that they did not hail from Europe and do not share the _political_ ideology behind Bauhaus and other related early 20th century movements in Europe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> old and "mew" article (2010), trends are what they are and dont last long , especially in web design where any design trend gets outdated fast.

<comment><USER7> While there's a trendiness to the superficial application of the Bauhaus/International/Swiss style in graphical layouts, there's a timeless value in removing the separation between engineering and design and fostering cultures that encourage cross-disciplinary communication.</comment></comment>


The rise of Kevin Systrom, the cofounder and former CEO of Instagram - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/kevin-systrom-instagram-ceo-life-rise-2018-9 <comment><AUTHOR> Who's reportedly one possible candidate to be TikTok's next CEO</comment>


Dr. Stone an anime and manga about the love for science - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Stone <comment><AUTHOR> 3700 years after civilization ends with petrification. A teen scientist plans to bring civilization back step by step.

Wouldn't you agree this should be on every first education Curriculum?</comment>


The Red Bias - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/24k/the_red_bias/ <comment><USER2> > _In the matches where one side dominated the other outfit color made little > difference. In close matches, however, combatants in red won over 60% > percent of the time._

Very interesting.

Thankfully, red gis are not allowed in Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition. Though it might be a good idea to sew red patches all over a white one...</comment>


Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nber.org/papers/w26316.pdf <comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037400](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037400)

<comment><USER4> A dupe from 9 months ago?

<comment><USER3> Of course, this is standard moderation.

 _When a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we bury reposts as duplicates._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ALDC (or at least LDC) preferences remain the most unjust (elitist) aspects of college admissions. Sadly, there seems to be limited political pressure to ban them (by which I mean extending various civil rights acts to ban institutions receiving federal funding from preferring LDC status).

A cynic would even point out that Ivy League schools heavily use race-based affirmative action to change the narrative and appear diverse. Sadly, no one looks at how poorly they look in terms of socio-economic diversity - <USER2> around 15% of students receive Pell Grants compared to 30% at the top UCs that don't practice LDC preferences ([https://www.usnews.com/best- colleges/rankings/national-unive...](https://www.usnews.com/best- colleges/rankings/national-universities/economic-diversity-among-top-ranked- schools))

</comment><comment><USER6> I was shocked when I first learned what legacy students were. Everyone talks about the uk bring super classist but legacy students would never fly over here. The US seems to have some seriously blatant classism. The other obvious one is the teeth obsession.

<comment><USER7> > The US seems to have some seriously blatant classism.

We just like to dress it up and call it "Meritocracy". Nevermind that your merits are that you were born into a wealthy, well-connected family.

<comment><USER8> Anybody who calls legacy admissions "meritocracy" is just lying. Proponents of meritocracy take it as a design goal, not a normative description of all existing systems. If you want meritocracy then you want to get rid of legacy admissions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's illuminating to also compare Harvard demographics vs the US. Sorted by most to least represented:

        Jewish: 14.0% vs 2.6% (5.38x)
        Asian American: 25.3% vs 5.3% (4.77x)
        Native Hawaiian: 0.6% vs 0.2% (3.00x)
        Native American: 1.8% vs 0.7% (2.57x)
        African American: 14.3% vs 12.7% (1.13x)
        Hispanic or Latino: 12.2% vs 17.6% (0.69x)
        non-Jewish white: 33.0% vs 58.9% (0.56x)

Sources:

[https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions- statistics](https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics) from 2019

[https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish- undergraduat...](https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish- undergraduates/)

[https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman- survey/lifesty...](https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman- survey/lifestyle/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews), upper estimate used

<comment><USER10> Is there a reason to compare the demographics to those _of the US_ , when many Harvard students aren't US citizens?

I have a feeling the stats make a bit more sense if you just assume Harvard is country-of-origin blind, and so compare Harvard admissions to the racial make- up of the entire global population (perhaps weighted by how much of each country's population declares intent to attend a university.)

<comment><USER11> The "Asian American" stat presumably doesn't include international students (just like "African American" wouldn't include someone from Africa)

<comment><USER12> Oh, it might well do that. It's a somewhat common American tic to use "African American" to mean "black" even when talking about people who are definitely not American.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Always found the combination of non-profit status and legacy or donor-enhanced admissions to be odd bedfellows.

</comment><comment><USER14> What's interesting are the odds of non-ALDC whites being admitted.

<comment><USER15> > ALDC

What does this mean? Athlete, legacy, donor, ...C? Celebrity?

<comment><USER16> Based on my research the term "ALDC" refers to "recruited Athletes, Legacies, those on the Dean's interest list, and Children of faculty and staff."

<comment><USER17> Amused by "based on my research" being "I read the linked abstract". Not hating, just amused at what appears to be a euphemistic response.

<comment><USER15> Sorry, the original title of the post used the word "Staff" so I suppose I was primed for "ALD - Staff" and missed "ALD - [Children of] Staff"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hate to say stuff like this, but the more I learn about Harvard, the more I think it exists to sustain itself so that it can serve the interest of handful. Education is just a byproduct.

<comment><USER19> I'm no defender of Harvard but I can guarantee you that most "elite" schools do this, including the whole Ivy league- and there are definitely other Ivies that are worse offenders. Harvard is just in the spotlight. Not that this changes the criticism of Harvard necessarily, but there are system-wide problems here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have a question about the abstract for anyone that looked deeper at the paper- does the following statement take into account rejected student stats or only those of accepted students? Because it seems plausible to me that white students "on the cusp" are more likely to get rejected to "make room" for ALDCs. Meaning that removing this preference may actually benefit a typical white applicant more than others. I could of course also imagine that not being the case though.

"Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students, with the share of white admits falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged."

I do recall the popular line about how everyone at orientation could be replaced with a new cohort that has similar academic profile, which implies that there is quite a bit of judgement call going on.

Overall, it is unsurprising yet disappointing that they estimate ~3/4 of ALDCs would not get admitted without that status. This system is probably a big reason that most elite schools have ~15% of their students from the top 1%, while MIT is closer to 5%. MIT definitely does not do legacies and of course gives little weight to athletics. I am not sure about children of faculty though.

<comment><USER20> The numbers wind up pretty grim. 43% of white students are legacy or athletic, 3/4 of those are otherwise inadmissible, so that's 32% of white students ALDC and inadmissible otherwise. Harvard is 44% white, so it's 30% (academically) competitively chosen white. That compares to 58% of the overall college population in the U.S.

<comment><USER19> But at whose expense are ALDCs chosen? I suppose we cannot know, but are there rejected non-ALDC white students that could fill those spots who the model would consider deserving to be there? FWIW MIT is ~40% white without AL(DC?) [0], so that is closer to H's current distribution.

The whole admissions situation is of course an opaque, handwavy, crapshoot. But I am just curious in practice what would happen to the distribution if Harvard decided to drop say legacy status.

[0] [https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/profile/](https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/profile/)

<comment><USER20> I can't really say except that obviously non-ALDC white students are a much smaller proportion of Harvard's class than undergraduate students overall. My guess is that they have target numbers for diversity. Since the overwhelming majority the ALDCs are, due to economic and historical factors, white, it is quite difficult to get into Harvard if you're white and your parents didn't go to Harvard, dont' work at Harvard, aren't rich enough to make a big donation, or aren't moderately wealthy and savvy enough to get you into some obscure Harvardy sport like rowing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Another interesting stat- 55% of Harvard graduate students are Jewish.

[https://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/harvard- uni...](https://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/harvard-university)

<comment><USER22> That number is wildly inaccurate but even so, it's no doubt very different from the bad old days:

 _Certain private universities, most notably Harvard, introduced policies which effectively placed a quota on the number of Jews admitted to the university. According to historian David Oshinsky, on writing about Jonas Salk, "Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale) had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in." He notes that Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions were remarkably precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all."_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota)

<comment><USER4> If Jews are extremely over-represented (with respect to their share in the US population, which is about 1.7%), shouldn't there be an affirmative action for non-jewish students?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Students whose parents went to Harvard tend to grow up aiming for Harvard themselves. It's likely that a high percentage of the Harvard applicant pool are legacies in the first place. If their stats are as good or better than the average of the admitted class, then what's the problem?

Is there clear evidence that legacies have an easier time getting in on a per case basis compared to a similar student without that that designation, as is the case for applicants with the URM designation?

</comment><comment><USER24> I know of a professor, who used to be at MIT, then Microsoft research. He joined Harvard a few years ago; one of the side benefits is to secure admission for his progeny.

<comment><USER25> Some universities automatically admit children of faculty, but Harvard is not among them. Source: Me, DP of Harvard faculty member. See also [https://hr.harvard.edu/faculty](https://hr.harvard.edu/faculty)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Do we really need to include race in our analysis? Why not look at all Harvard students?

<comment><USER27> Because race has been built into the fabric of our society. If we don't acknowledge that, then racial injustice will continue to propagate through time un-impeded.

<comment><USER23> Only by overcoming the concept of race can we actually overcome social division. Divisions among whites have melted away as they stopped seeing each other as "English" or "Italian" and instead came to unite. Similarly for us as citizens to unite we need to stop seeing each other as "white" and "black" and instead overcome these superficial differences.

Injustice can easily be rooted out while also overcoming the concept of race.

The problem is that race-oriented thinkers obsess over race and reify it, actually making racial tension worse.

<comment><USER21> Competition for reproduction and resources between groups of genetically proximate organisms is the history of "life".

<comment><USER23> Through the mixing pot of America we can come together and overcome our natural tendency towards division. This is part of what makes America a great nation.

Again, the racially-oriented thinkers often just exacerbate division.

<comment><USER27> America's history has a continuous component of oppression. At no point since the founding of the country have all folk present on this land been equal and free. Pretending that past (and current) atrocities didn't happen, and ignoring whom they targeted, means that the inequalities they created will linger.

Even today, COVID 19 affects Black and Latino folks at greater rates. That is a real, physical, manifestation of racial injustice. Ignoring that means ignoring structural problems in America.

<comment><USER23> This is the case for every single country on Earth, and is actually still the case for most countries on Earth. Show me a country today and I'll show you a set of groups who are oppressed in that country.

However it is America that has come the farthest in overcoming racial discrimination, which is why people from around the world want to come here in droves.

Those groups are disproportionately affected because they are disproportionately living in cities, which has nothing to do with racial oppression.

The Latino population has swelled in recent decades and new immigrants to the US are almost always poorer than the general population. That's been true for the last 200 years and there's nothing wrong with that.

Yet racialists like yourself ignore this and try to claim discrimination. It's intellectually dishonest.

As for Blacks in America, the only thing that will bring them up and negate past discrimination is a improvement of their culture and focusing on the future. Most of black poverty today is caused by broken homes and other cultural issues, not oppression.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Mix the smart and the rich paints and call it one color.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'd need to know what the percentage of ALDC students across races and across the total population is in order to interpret this statistic

<comment><USER30> From the abstract:

> Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the > share is less than 16% each.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> And when Harvard puts quotas for "minorities", it doesn't limit offers for these people, it limits them for the other 57%.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Non paywall access: [https://sci-hub.se/10.3386/w26316](https://sci- hub.se/10.3386/w26316)</comment>


CDC employee last seen 11 days ago when he left work feeling unwell - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cdc-employee-timothy-cunningham-went-missing-more-week-ago-n850721 <comment><USER2> Well the zombie apocalypse has to start somewhere</comment>


Study: Experiencing Childhood Trauma Makes Body and Brain Age Faster - <AUTHOR> https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2020/08/experiencing-childhood-trauma <comment><USER2> Well shit. I had a rough childhood (not nearly as bad as some folks, but bad enough that I'm still in therapy and dealing with fallout like anxiety and depression), and this study makes intuitive sense.

I also encourage anyone struggling with mental illness to see a therapist if you can, and explore your childhood. I knew my early life was bad, but I had no idea that it could still affect me decades later and manifest as something like anxiety. I've seen a few professionals that have helped me put the pieces together and give me some tools to cope. You can't go back and change the past, but you can try to make a better future.

</comment><comment><USER3> Originally, studies claimed not being hugged or loved as a child might be damaging.

Somehow the focus shifted towards trauma being blamed rather than a lack of relationship or connection.</comment>


First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2149742-half-the-universes-missing-matter-has-just-been-finally-found/ <comment><USER2> Dang I read the first paragraph of the article and immediately went searching for the real papers since I didn't expect any media outlet to include them at the bottom, but here they are for anyone who made the same mistake I did! [https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.05024](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.05024) [https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.10378](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.10378)

Not a cosmologist but here's my go at the de Graff paper. (Let's get this out of the way, the title is click-bait and the paper/researchers makes no such claims as to anything near 50%. New Scientist is trolling for hits with the word "half" or the journalist is fundamentally misunderstanding the work.) In de Graff, et al, they claim 30% of "90% of the missing baryonic matter [that composes the ~25% of our total universe observable from within our light cone]" has been found in the CMB structured as filaments between galaxies. They claim there's effectively a planar network layered on top of Minkowski space composed this baryonic matter. The temperature was at this "Goldilocks" midrange no one had previously analyzed (ranging from 10^5-10^7K). This wasn't previously found because people were searching "only the lower and higher temperature end of the warm-hot baryons, leaving the majority of the baryons still unobserved(9)". [See "Warm-hot baryons comprise 5-10 percent of filaments in the cosmic web.", _Nature_ , Eckert et al for more about baryons of this composition.]

Additionally, these baryons have 10x the density of what we observe (so this could potentially be evidence for the first stable baryonic matter composed of second generation quarks, or more likely the binding energies are different from our standard uud/udd nucleon quarks) permeating the universe, and where the roads in the network meet ("dark matter haloes"), you have embedded galaxies and galaxy clusters. They continue with their analytic methods of the CMASS data, and claim within the framework 30% of the total baryonic content (which, again, all analytical methods put this into no more than ~25%) is composed of this form of this matter. I skimmed their methods and it seemed to at least logically hold -- they are using the appropriate data (SDSS 12) and didn't cherry-pick their galaxy pairs (so, no p-hacking here!).

<comment><USER3> From what I can tell, this basically also proves that large scale plasma exists between all bodies at any scale (planetary to systems to galaxies to clusters), and universe sized Birkeland currents exist; which is something cosmologists have been trying to prove/disprove for awhile.

So, not only did they find some of the missing matter, they found some of the missing energy, too. This does, however, screw some of the more classical cosmologists.

<comment><USER4> > So, not only did they find some of the missing matter, they found some of > the missing energy, too.

Nope, this has nothing to do with dark energy.

> This does, however, screw some of the more classical cosmologists.

Not sure who you're referring to. These results are completely consistent with the standard model of cosmology.

<comment><USER5> > Not sure who you're referring to. These results are completely consistent > with the standard model of cosmology.

Not if what is being detected is simply mass associated with filamentary currents of energy (with attendant magnetic fields) rather than particular particles.

<comment><USER4> They're modelling filaments as cylindrical tubes of hot electrons connecting pairs of galaxies. I don't know what you mean by "mass associated with filamentary currents of energy", but while the electrons are hot (~million Kelvin), they're non-relativistic and their kinetic energy is negligible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/75944s/half_the_univ...](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/75944s/half_the_universes_missing_matter_has_just_been/do4mfjx/)

> The approximate distribution in the Universe is 5% regular matter, 25% Dark > Matter, and 70% Dark Energy. Half of that 5% was missing, and now found.

> Regular matter makes stars and visible galaxies, so it is "bright". Dark > Matter is so named because it does not make things we can see with > telescopes directly - it is "dark". We can see the effects it makes with > gravity, such as the rotation curves of galaxies, and gravitational lensing. > So we know something is there, just not what it is made of. Dark Energy was > invented to solve a couple of mysteries. One is the geometrical "flatness" > of the Universe, and the other is the apparent acceleration of the > Universe's expansion. Like Dark Matter, we don't yet know what it is. But > something is causing the flatness and acceleration, so we gave it a name as > a place-holder for theories.

> A similar situation happened a century ago, with the precession (shift) of > Mercury's orbit with time. We thought it was caused by a planet inside of > Mercury's orbit that we hadn't found yet. It was named Vulcan, after the > Roman god of fire (not Spock's home planet). It turns out relativity was the > right answer - the Suns gravity bends space near it, and causes the orbit to > shift. Vulcan was just "a name we gave to whatever causes the observed > effect".

> Dark Matter and Dark Energy could turn out to be something entirely > different than types of matter and energy, but in the mean time it gives > them names we can attach theories about them to.

<comment><USER6> Thank you! 2.5% of the universe's missing matter has been found.

<comment><USER7> Not 2.5% of the missing matter. 2.5% of the matter.

<comment><USER8> I have a real trouble figuring out how they could say 2.5% was missing when 95% of all things in the universe is just a theory, according to those figures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > At the largest size, Google image search tells me that it looks exactly like > foam rubber. Foam rubber is created by combining a chemical agent that > glomps together through the wonder of polymerization with another chemical > agent that delivers lots of gas bubbles to make space between the polymers. > Universes are created by rapidly expanding a superdense plasma that glomps > together through the wonders of gravity, while lots of expanding vacuum > makes space between the galaxy clusters.

[https://palmstroem.blogspot.de/2016/01/no-universe-is-not- br...](https://palmstroem.blogspot.de/2016/01/no-universe-is-not-brain.html)

Edit: This explains, in a light-hearted way, why there are filaments between galaxies and galaxy clusters.

<comment><USER10> Why should vacuum expand?

Is it due to gravity of the filament molecules pulling those molecules together into larger 'strings' or 'planes' which leave 'holes'? Or some other mechanism?

<comment><USER11> The universe expands. Things bound by gravity tend not to expand that much. As a result, most of the space that expands is vacuum.

<comment><USER12> 'The universe expands' in what? I thought everything was the universe, as meant by the term 'universal'.

<comment><USER13> Imagine you have a meter-stick. It has uniform graduation markings to show you centimeters and millimeters.

Now imagine that it is getting longer. No matter how hard you look at it, the stick is still one meter long. That's what the markings on it say, anyway. It's actually getting longer at the same rate as all the other meter-sticks. That's the expansion of the universe.

Now imagine you balanced two marbles on the stick. They bow the stick ever so slightly, and roll together at the 50 cm mark. They are not expanding--or at least not expanding like the meter-stick expands. But they will continue to roll together. They are detectable masses acting under the effect of gravity. If you look closely, they appear to be shrinking. But it's actually the meter- stick expanding.

When you expand this out to galaxy scale, two galaxies that are not moving with respect to each other are getting further apart. The mass in the galaxies have enough intra-galactic gravitational attraction to keep themselves from flying apart along with the vacuum, but not enough the keep their neighbor galaxies close. The inter-galactic gravitation doesn't pull hard enough to overcome the expansion. So they surf away from each other, becoming further apart.

At least, that's how I understand it. I could be wrong.

<comment><USER14> > At least, that's how I understand it. I could be wrong.

General Relativity deals in spacetime, but it is often convenient to slice spacetime into spacelike volumes in which every point in the volume ("the spacelike hypersurface") is at the same timelike coordinate. One important consideration is that no timelike axis is any more preferred by nature than any other, and one can always find an observer who disagrees with any choice of splitting one happens to make. In particular, two inertial observers related by a Lorentz boost generally will not agree on what event (e.g. two bits of matter colliding) is at what time coordinate, and thus this type of 3+1 slicing will result in different spacelike hypersurfaces for each such observer.

The cosmological frame picks out a frame that a family of special observers can agree on: these observers agree that at the largest scales, the universe is homogeneous and isotropic, that they themselves are moving inertially, and can agree on a function relating a time coordinate to the average density of matter in a universe-sized spacelike hypersurface at that time coordinate. Each such observer is assigned a spacelike location which persists into the infinite future: the observers are all stationary at a constant set of three spatial coordinates. The centres of mass of practically all galaxy clusters are essentially this type of observer, so those remain at the same spatial coordinates at all times too.

We then take this set of coordinates and apply it to a universe described by a Robertson-Walker metric. Our universe _approximately_ obeys the Robertson- Walker (R-W) metric outside of galaxy clusters; more on that in a moment. The R-W metric relies on a 3+1 slicing of a homogeneous and isotropic universe, and uses two coefficients r and k to determine respectively the radius and shape of each spacelike 3-hypersurface. If we knock out a spacelike dimension, we can think of an R-W universe as a stack of infinitesimally thin plates where each plate at time t is related to its infinitesimally earlier predecessor and infinitesimally later successor plate by a function giving its radius r. (It is perfectly reasonable to rotate the axes so that you stack the plates vertically from the floor upwards, where we substitute a height coordinate for the timelike coordinate).

In an expanding-with-a-cosmological-constant R-W universe, r shrinks smoothly towards the past and grows smoothly towards the future. The coefficient k determines whether the 2-d planes give globally Euclidean geometry (k=0), globally hyperbolic geometry or globally spherical geometry. Finally, if r >>> the Hubble volume, there may be no practical way of recovering k != 0 observationally, or in other words the local geometry of a R-W slice of a Hubble volume may be flat even if the global geometry is not.

On this R-W universe we apply the coordinate system above, but remember that our observers stay at fixed spacelike coordinates. We need to notice here that our coordinates do not determine distances by light-travel-time. That's fine, we can use arbitrary measures of distance in General Relativity, and can practically always find a consistent and useful transformation from a description of physics in one system of coordinates to another. We just have to be careful either to work only in generally covariant formulations, or to recognize that using some systems of coordinates entice one into the use of fictitious forces that disappear in other systems of coordinates. In this case, an observer at the centre of mass of our galaxy in spherical coordinates centred on her would naturally say that distant galaxy clusters on _this_ spacelike hypersurface now will be at a larger radial coordinate in future spacelike hypersurfaces, in our cosmological coordinates she and the distant galaxies are all working in coordinates _comoving_ with r, so their spatial distance is constant at all times.

The metric expansion of space is just that: r increases.

> The inter-galactic gravitation doesn't pull hard enough to overcome the > expansion

This gets trickier. In the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker model we treat the sources of the matter tensor as a set of perfect fluids with some pressure and density, and the fluids dilute away with expanding Robertson-Walker universe. We ignore the local overdensities of matter ("galaxies" and "people" and so on) and at the largest scales, that's reasonable.

However _inside_ galactic clusters and galaxies, in the standard model there is no expansion at all; gravity doesn't work against it, it just isn't there in the first place. From a technical perspective what we do is treat galaxies as approximate sources of a Schwarzschild metric up to some boundary enclosing the galaxy, and then we embed that into Robertson-Walker space. This is certainly not faultless, but it matches observation extremely well. What does _not_ match observation extremely well is naive quintessence models where the metric expansion works within galaxies and is simply checked by the gravitational interactions of the matter within them, but acts as a cosmological constant outside galaxy clusters.

Likewise, comoving galaxy clusters are just drifting along inertially into the future; even under a different system of coordinates there are no extra forces working to separate them -- throwing away the 3+1 slicing with its preferred timelike axis, in the spacetime view galaxy clusters' timelike worldlines converge near the hot dense phase of the universe.

If you took your second paragraph's metre stick[1] and put it in space as a comoving observer well outside galaxy clusters, it would still be a metre long in the far future, whether measured locally or with a really really really good telescope. "Rulers" aren't expanding in the metric expansion; instead the cosmological coordinates on each spacelike hypervolume are adjusted, and in general coordinates while useful are not themselves physical while an actual metre stick is. Physical objects themselves do not change when we change coordinates; distant galaxies can have no idea that you're putting cosmological or spherical or cartesian or conformal coordinates on them, or calculating their movements against those coordinates.

I'm afraid I don't understand the point in your second paragraph.

> two galaxies that are not moving with respect to each other

They aren't moving against comoving coordinates. But if you choose other coordinates (e.g. spherical coordinates with the origin on the centre of one of the galaxies) they can move against those. We can do various transformations to convert the descriptions of the motions of these galaxies (and any fictitious forces and relating to coordinate motion, and other coordinate-dependent quantities) in one set of coordinates into another set of coordinates. The trick is finding a set of coordinates in which one can extract some intuitions about observables like the cosmological redshift, the dark night sky (cf. Olbers's paradox), or the details of the cosmic microwave background.

\- --

[1] in principle, and with some care, you could line up a hundred 1 cm objects (e.g. ball bearings) and they would not separate from each other with the expansion of the universe (one has to be careful about other things that may cause them to move relative to one another, such as radionuclide decay within the objects, interactions with cosmic rays or other particles, and so on; but in standard General Relativity they should continue on their parallel timelike worldlines indefinitely).

<comment><USER15> Can you please give any usable link for this:

> What does not match observation extremely well is naive quintessence models > where the metric expansion works within galaxies and is simply checked by > the gravitational interactions of the matter within them

Or write some additional details about it. I know that the "popular" explanations claim that "everything" expands, and I understood from your reply that what we see can be technically modeled in equations as if there's nothing that expands inside of whole galaxies, but what is the _actual proof_ that there are actually no expansion forces inside of the galaxies at all? Thanks in advance.

<comment><USER14> > "usable link"

How much technical detail do you want?

Starting with the "gimme hardcore!" end, I was thinking of how to construct an argument using vierbiens and then how to boil it down to something accessible (or at least representable on LaTeX-free HN), and then remembered that it had already been done by Cooperstock et al.: [http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro- ph/9803097](http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9803097) The tl;dr is that _if_ the cosmological expansion induces strain on matter, the strain is too small to be measurable.

Retreating from the hardest of answers, Peter Coles has an old moderate-detail article on this at [https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/is-space- expandi...](https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/is-space-expanding/) and he refers to both Peacock's and Harrison's textbooks which give greater detail (I recommend the latter if you can get your hands on it at a library).

His approach to the question you're asking ("roughly, does the solar system expand with the universe?") is how I'd go about it too, following on from the comment you replied to. My central point would be that in General Relativity we use exact solutions of the Einstein Field Equations because they're well- understood not because they're accurate. Natural systems don't source e.g the exact Schwarzschild spacetime for several reasons including lack of perfect spherical symmetry, lack of perfect vacuum to infinity outside the source, and nonzero angular momentum. Yet we get good approximate results when we use Schwarzschild to model the Earth or the Sun or the Milky Way, and usually the bad results are fixable with linear corrections). But the _real_ picture is that each of these bodies sources an unknown metric that is slightly different from Schwarzschild, and additionally one has to stitch together two metrics sourced by two bodies each sourcing (different, unknown) Schwarszschild-ish metrics into an (unknown) expanding background.

Numerical relativity has opened up the study of approximate solutions which give better results for real physical systems than the toolkit of known exact solutions (plus linear in v/c corrections), so one could argue that the central research programme in classical General Relativity is the study of the mechanisms that generate the (true) metric.

All that said, we can be much more confident (because of analyses under e.g. the parameterized post-Newtonian formalism and experimental data from gravitational probes of many varieties) about the fit of exact solutions to the bodies in our solar system than the fit of _any_ metric to the cosmos-in- the-large. For the bodies in hydrostatic equilibrium that means Schwarzschild to at least the first order in v/c [in linearized gravity]. If you accept that Schwarzschild is an excellent substitute for the unknown real metric, then you must have a very close fit to a static, asymptotically flat spacetime. Around that you can establish a boundary condition. Outside the boundary is the expanding spacetime, inside is asymptotically flat (i.e., not expanding). Coles discusses some of this ( as does Hossenfelder at [http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/08/you-dont-expand- jus...](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/08/you-dont-expand-just-because- universe.html) ).

Alternatively, you can argue that the real metric sourced by e.g. the Earth (or yourself at a distance where you subtend a very small angle on an observer's sky, or one of your molecules) is less close to Schwarzschild. In that case, Coles takes us back to Cooperstock via Ned Wright's Cosmology FAQ: you will get bad results with poor choices of coordinates (so use e.g. Fermi coordinates because then you know exactly where you have valid and comparable results, and you are forced to consider whether and where geodesics drift apart[1]).

Finally, if you were asking about "naive quintessence models" and their problems, ch 3.2 in Elise Jenning's _Simulations of Dark Energy Cosmologies_ (Springer, 2012) is a decent overview (it contains material from her Ph.D. thesis; she is now at KICP/FNAL).

> "actual proof"

This would make an excellent postdoc research project !

Linked with [1] above, on proving the conjecture, the soft underbelly is the behaviour of geodesics: in an expanding universe, comoving geodesics drift apart. The geodesics in Schwarzschild spacetime do _not_ drift apart. Geodesics in the solar system do not drift apart, and haven't over the course of a few billion years. Geodesics at cosmological scales clearly do drift very noticeably apart over the same period of time. Worse, evidence suggests that the Hubble constant _isn 't constant_ in time, so where are the matching perturbations in the orbits of various bodies in the solar system? However, I'm not sure this is the right path to a definitive answer, since one is likely to be able to claim that your atoms in general are not following geodesics; their free-fall is interrupted by the surface of the Earth.

<comment><USER15> Many thanks, your answer covers everything I wanted to ask you. You recognized that there were two directions in which I wanted to ask you (the second being why you mentioned the "naive quintessence models") and you covered both. Thanks for all the links.

(To anybody who's also interested, I've found the thesis by Elise Jennings here: [http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/616/](http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/616/) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Both teams took advantage of a phenomenon called the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect that occurs when _light left over from the big bang_ passes through hot gas."

That just seems unreal to me.

Edit: To clarify, I'm not accusing it of being made up. I just think it's amazing.

<comment><USER17> They can tell that the big bang is the light source because of Hubble's Law[0]. In short, the universe itself (so _space itself_ ) expands[1], and it does so fast enough to create a Doppler effect in light, causing redshift[2].

When we look further out into space, we effectively look "back" into time because of the limit of the speed of light. The older the light, the more it has redshifted because the more space has expanded while it was travelling. So this redshift increases very predictably the further we look out into space and back into time.

As a result, when observing space we can say when light is left-over from the big bang, because we can tell the age of the light by how much its spectral lines have redshifted.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_llA2q1rlSg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_llA2q1rlSg)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter"

That's clumsily worded, as it makes it sound like it's still something exotic. _We're_ made of baryons: this is just normal matter.

<comment><USER17> As a former physics student, I see your point but disagree.

Apologies for the wall of text about just this one choice of wording, but discussing why science communication is a _very difficult_ trade-off takes a bit of space.

One reason to stick to "baryons" is that it is the term used by the researchers in their papers. So it is more true to the research that is being summarised.

The start of the article (unlike its title...) mentions that this research is about normal matter quite clearly, so this should give enough context to avoid confusion:

> _This is the first detection of the roughly half of the normal matter in our > universe – protons, neutrons and electrons – unaccounted for by previous > observations of stars, galaxies and other bright objects in space. You have > probably heard about the hunt for dark matter, a mysterious substance > thought to permeate the universe, the effects of which we can see through > its gravitational pull. But our models of the universe also say there should > be about twice as much ordinary matter out there, compared with what we have > observed so far._

Baryons are subatomic particles[0][1], not atoms, which is what most people think of when discussing "matter". If we say "normal matter", some people will think we're talking about chunks of dirt floating between galaxies. I'm not joking, have you ever been to a public physics lecture? And mistakes like this are not the audience's fault - it's the expert's fault for assuming non- experts know what they know.

For people with the right background (chemists, physicists, astronomers, etc) it is clear this is "just normal matter". For everyone else - so most people - _" normal matter"_ means matter in earth-typical circumstances of pressure and temperature, in a solid/liquid/vapour phase.

The papers describe intergalactic plasma filaments with a temperature between 10⁴ to 10⁵ K. That is pretty exotic by normal-people standards.

And yes, fire is a plasma, but for most people fire is just very hot gas, and the article even builds on that:

> _Because the gas is so tenuous and not quite hot enough for X-ray telescopes > to pick up, nobody had been able to see it before._

So the other reason reason to stick to "baryons" is that this _is_ exotic matter from the point of view of non-experts. When describing research you have to start from _their_ model of the physical world, and build your way back to the research.

I think the choice in wording appropriate here. The other paragraphs make it clear this is about normal matter, while this sentence makes it clear it's not normal matter in Earth-circumstances, which is how the average human thinks about it if not corrected.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon)

[1] [https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon) (the Simple English wiki is probably more useful to us non-cosmologists here)

<comment><USER18> It seems I know just enough to be dangerous. Thank you for your well-written explanation.

<comment><USER17> You're very welcome, and don't be hard on yourself!

It is easy to underestimate how difficult it is to give good explanations to non-experts, regardless of the topic at hand. I mean, just look at how how much I wrote about the choice of _one word_.

When writing for non-experts, an expert must imagine what it is like to _not_ know the right answer. Our brains seem to be terrible at that: most people are unable to "not see" the cow in that famous gestalt picture once spotted[0], and I think the same thing applies to many kinds of thinking.

The only way out for an expert seems to be a lot of exposure to "dumb questions" (there is no such thing, of course) from non-experts, to figure out what logic the latter's wrong conclusions are. It doesn't help that there are many more ways to come to perfectly logical but wrong conclusions based on wrong premises, than there are ways to come to the right conclusion with the right premises.

And _even_ once you are aware of these mismatches, you still have to explain yourself in such a way that there is a path from the incorrect interpretation to the more correct interpretation, without getting lost in trying to explain _everything_.

So no wonder that even professional educators and science writers, who are supposed to be skilled at this, tend to do a poor job!

[0] [http://icog.group.shef.ac.uk/what-can-you-see-some- questions...](http://icog.group.shef.ac.uk/what-can-you-see-some-questions- about-the-content-of-visual-experience/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Half the universe's missing matter has just been finally found

The first paragraph clarifies that this headline means _" The missing (regular) matter comprising half the (regular matter in the) Universe has been finally found"_ rather than _" Half of the missing (regular) matter in the Universe has just been found (and where could the other half be?)"_.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am not an astrophysicist... but does this mean dark matter has finally been "seen"? That's a big deal, right?

<comment><USER21> __EDIT: My understanding is incorrect. __See the replies to the post for a correction.

No. They're saying that 50% of the "dark matter" isn't dark, it's just regular matter that we weren't able to see.

The density of this stuff (filaments of gas stretching between galaxies) is so low that it is really, really, really hard to detect.

"Dark matter" theories posit that the missing matter isn't just regular matter that's hard to see; they posit that this dark matter is a fundamentally different... something.

I don't believe this announcement addresses some of the other oddities (possibly) explained by dark matter, such as the rotation of galaxies: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve)

<comment><USER22> No, this has nothing to do with dark matter. Dark matter has to be in galaxies because the reason we think it exists at all is because galaxies spin 'too fast', so there is more mass in them and therefore more gravity than can be accounted for. This article is talking about gas between galaxies.

<comment><USER23> Isn't it more probable that the formulars to calculate the spin are wrong?

<comment><USER24> That's a theory called Modified Newton Dynamics (MOND).

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics)

<comment><USER25> This theory (when appropriately hacked) describes rotation curves of galaxies extremely well. Unfortunately it doesn't work at larger scales. There are many nice videos on YouTube by Sean Carroll on MOND, which explain it's limits, albeit for the fairly educated layperson.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can I just check - my understanding is that we can only see 5% of the expected mass in the universe - so we have just found another 5%? meaning dark matter needs to account for 90%?

plus, how awesomely beautiful is the idea of tendrils of has connecting the galaxies through space.

<comment><USER27> Tendrils between galaxies is mind-blowing. Aren't galaxies very very far apart? And there is basically nothing in between? How are subatomic particles - baryons - able to survive the constant expansion? Do the tendrils keep getting thinner? Can they be a medium to transmit intergalactic information someday?

<comment><USER28> Also, to expand on that (I have no knowledge, just making assumptions), the space between galaxies would need to either create new matter, or the matter would get infinitely spread out over time?

So, if the stretching thing is true, would there be areas with absolutely no matter or anything at all?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> im confused about baryons. they say that it is a particle (presumably like an electron or photon or other particle) but then they go on to say that its a gas, not a particle. very confusing.

<comment><USER30> A baryon is a subatomic particle that is composed of three quarks, such as a proton or a neutron. An electron would be categorized as a lepton, rather than a baryon as it is not made of multiple quarks and is rather an elementary particle, for reference.

Here's a good reference for subatomic elementary particles, where you can see some familiar names like electron and photon: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon#/media/File:Standard_Mo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon#/media/File:Standard_Model_of_Elementary_Particles.svg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The best visualization I could find is on pg 14 of the pdf on this page: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.10378v1](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.10378v1)

</comment><comment><USER32> Is it just me, or does anyone else get put off by hyperbolic scientific news coverage? Even if the result is interesting, the framing of one result as representative of all unknown normal matter makes me not want to bother reading the article, it's hard enough splitting out facts from bullshit when you have a decent grounding in a subject, it's even harder when your knowledge is almost nonexistent.

</comment><comment><USER33> Does this mean the universe is more weird or less weird than we thought?

<comment><USER34> Less weird. A large amount of the missing matter, but not all lot it, has been observed where it was theorized. The issue was we've not had reliable ways to measure that specific matter in the area it is

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Stacking a hundred thousand scans in order to find something made me think of the dead salmon study that won the igNobel prize.

</comment><comment><USER36> Well, I wouldn't exactly say I've been _missing_ it OP.

</comment><comment><USER37> The title is effectively click-bait because of: [https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/75944s/half_the_univ...](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/75944s/half_the_universes_missing_matter_has_just_been/do4mfjx/)

<comment><USER38> We should assume by default that every headline is clickbait now, unfortunately this is the business model of the internet. It's not good for accuracy and most articles are just a headline and some inane filler up words. I hope we'll smart up and find a better model for news soon. :/

<comment><USER39> We could pay for it like we did for the hundreds of years prior to the internet, but they'll still make-up eye-grabbing headlines.

<comment><USER40> We're still paying for it. It's just that the currency's changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Duped by [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15439321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15439321)

</comment><comment><USER42> Ok, it seems like a lot of people here think dark matter is a "thing" but it's not. Dark matter is simply unaccounted for mass in the universe. When we discover mass that we didn't know about before, the amount of "dark" matter decreases. The word "dark" here merely means "known unknown" because we observe the effect but not the cause. This discovery has unveiled some of the dark matter as baryon particles in a plasma. So some of that dark matter is now known.

<comment><USER43> >This discovery has unveiled some of the dark matter as baryon particles in a plasma. So some of that dark matter is now known.

The article clearly points out that this is not the case. The amount of dark matter is still the same.

>Dark matter is simply unaccounted for mass in the universe.

The article clearly points out that this is not the case.

<comment><USER42> You are correct, i misread one of the first paragraphs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> They probably looked under the cushions on the couch.

Anything you lose is always there.

</comment><comment><USER45> Missing /regular/ matter. Doesn't count dark matter. Shame on New Scientist for incorrect headline.

</comment><comment><USER46> So on the eve of the seventh day, god swept half the matter under a rug and then went out to play.

I guess we really are created in his image...</comment>


Archive.org - Free Greatful Dead Music - <AUTHOR> http://www.archive.org/details/GratefulDead

<comment><USER2> I ran a site called Deadabase which I had to later rename to Astrojams (see Archive.org for copies of it) which was one of the first to distribute Dead shows on MP3. 1996 I think. The Dead sent me a cease and desist letter and I fought it. In the end they ended up allowing me to continue to do it, but released the MP3 statement that you've referenced in your post.

This was pre Napster and the cost of bandwidth was about $5000 per month. I was in college and couldn't afford it so I was running Double Click ad banners which generated $7000 a month. The Dead were contacted by an attorney interested in making a name for himself and he was the one that issued the legal pressure. I got to speak to Bob Weir and Jon Barlow about it and both supported what I was doing but because the Dead organization was a corporation, it was out of their hands.

I had to shutdown the site because although the Dead allowed me to continue distributing their MP3's, I couldn't generate any revenues, even as a non- profit. I didn't think outside the box and invent Napster (I tried really hard.) It was a great experience for me and I went on to do better things.

The sad thing is that I pitched the idea of creating the first digital music website to the CEO of the company, it would've been a joint venture, but he was against it. It would've been the first artist sanctioned digital download site, way before its time. That guy missed the boat on that one.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wooo!Kthxbye.</comment>