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> Except it is known the blocks used are quarried limestone and granite, not concrete.

No, they've always been ASSUMED to have been quarried limestone and granite. About 10 years ago, someone analyzed a chunk of "stone" from one of the pyramids & discovered the same kind of bubbles you'd find in manmade cast stone.

http://www.materials.drexel.ed...

The conclusion of the above: the pyramids are a combination of cast and quarried stone... basically the lower stones were quarried, and the upper stones were cast... basically, they used quarried stone up to the point where it became more difficult/expensive to transport and lift the blocks into place, and used cast stone for the rest (because cast stone would have been too expensive to use for everything, so they only used it where they HAD to).

anti-science nutters that cannot understand

My irony meter just exploded.

Yes some warming is occurring, but not enough to matter in any way worth even getting excited about - at least that's what the hard facts and careful research tell us.

Funny how the anti-science nutters are always so highly selective about their "hard facts and careful research", hand-waving away all the rest of the data that doesn't fit their own narrative as "manipulated". Let me guess, the whole of the IPCC Working Group II's collected data is all compromised and ignorable, every bit; none of those described impacts could possibly happen, amirite?

Heck it's probably

Ah, another hard fact, with more careful research behind it?

not even enough to counteract the next global cooling phase which is close at hand

It started 8000 years ago, temperatures have been dropping since then - up until we changed everything.

Now the soft facts and panicked revelations made by so called "scientists" who are backed by governments trying to bilk the people into more central control

Now the baseless allegations of conspiracy and paranoia, with the inevitable government agenda behind it. Did you notice all the Australian climate scientists recently protesting their government's agenda?

But of course I forgot, they just want to keep their jobs, and they have to keep manipulating their data and falsifying their results even when their government clearly doesn't want to hear it - low-paying research on global warming is all they can do, because the fossil fuel industry certainly doesn't have any money for them.

isn't it astounding that after literally decades of being utterly wrong about long term climate forecasts, people still listen to them?

Dammit, my brand new irony meter just exploded as well.

It is well known that a human brain can operate a (finite) Turing machine, albeit very slowly. There are Turing machine in cardboard form for teaching the way computers work, here for instance.

So the brain can definitely emulate a Turing machine. The reverse is very likely to be true, because it is possible to simulate finite collections of atoms to a very high degree of accuracy with a Turing machine, including quantum effects. So in theory we *could*, with enough resources, simulate a whole brain down to the atomic level and run it.

Neither proposition is practical though. AI research is precisely about emulating intelligence practically.

As opposed to the Kochsuckers paid by Exxon and Shell and BP and Koch?
Paid, we may add, FAR more Institutionalizing Delay, Drexel University to LIE

Being in your forties you have already well passed the timespan in which you can have healthy children. Children born from mothers over thirty have a much higher rate of getting autism.

(Guess why autism rates are skyrocketing? That's right, women having kids well past their thirties because they were too busy having a job. Thanks feminism.)

Bear meat is pretty greasy but I don't think even they would eat something as slimy as either of those 2. Maybe pigs?

"Old Educational Computer Resurrected As a Spreadsheet" http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Which links to:
http://www.drdobbs.com/embedde...

See also:
https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~bls...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

A downloadable emulator mentioned in the Dr. Dobbs article:
http://www.kaleberg.com/softwa...

But ideally it would be in JavaScript and run in a web browser... Could make a nice small project for someone...

Just as not only one person thought of 3D printing a gun, lots of groups have had the idea to 3D print the output of medical imaging (e.g. http://depts.washington.edu/uw... and http://digm.drexel.edu/portfol...). One company has even gotten FDA medical device approval (http://3dprint.com/18577/materialise-heartprint-class-1/) and one man printed his tumor before and after chemotherapy (http://3dprint.com/14359/3d-printed-cancer-tumors-2/).

So my point is, this is /.-worthy news?

She is following standard Ebola protocol. It's the people calling for quarantine that aren't. She knows the protocol better than the governor who is (in my opinion) threatening her.

Sorry, but that's not her call to make. If a state wants to specify stricter protocols than the standard policies call for, that is well within their rights to do, so long as it is not overly burdensome. And in her state, they have done so, which means that no, she is not following standard Ebola protocol as defined in her state. You can't just allow people to ignore a quarantine order simply because they think they know better.

And it isn't just the governor who thinks that a 21-day quarantine period is reasonable. Lots of medical professionals and Nobel-winning immune system researchers do, too. In fact, it seems to be mostly politicians who are arguing against the quarantine.

Then again, there are also studies that suggest that 21 days may not be long enough. But I digress.

BTW, that second article from nj.com is worth reading, because the doctor/researcher in the article pretty much echoes what I've been saying—that Ebola may be transmissible even from asymptomatic patients in rare situations.

The author of the summary is not up to date on the recent release of info on Dreadnoughtus schrani, now believed to be the largest creature to ever have walked on land. See the following:

http://drexel.edu/now/archive/2014/September/Dreadnoughtus-Dinosaur/

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/04/world/americas/dreadnoughtus-huge-dinosaur/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnoughtus

Damn Whales, walking on land everywhere. Oh what's that, they swim? And they way three times as much as the Dreadnoughtus? The author of this comment is not up to date...

http://drexel.edu/now/archive/2014/September/Dreadnoughtus-Dinosaur/

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/04/world/americas/dreadnoughtus-huge-dinosaur/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnoughtus

Billons were spent between 2003 and 2010 to deny climate change (pdf) and probably even more has been used for that goal in the last 3 years. In any case, is more money that was ever used to measure climate change, to detect dangerous asteroids, and prevent the spreading of pandemic diseases.

Maybe science should stop doing warnings and studies and let things happens with no preparations from our side. We deserve it.

Your characterization of the paper is misleading. They're looking at all the groups that have a denialist position and taking a sum of their income, but those groups aren't exclusively doing climate change. The billions help characterize the influence of the advocates but not the amount of advocating they're doing.

Besides, the biggest denialist advocate in the US is Fox News and the Republican party, I'd say they're worth far more than these advocacy groups to cast doubt on AGW.

Billons were spent between 2003 and 2010 to deny climate change (pdf) and probably even more has been used for that goal in the last 3 years. In any case, is more money that was ever used to measure climate change, to detect dangerous asteroids, and prevent the spreading of pandemic diseases.

Maybe science should stop doing warnings and studies and let things happens with no preparations from our side. We deserve it.

Submited the story earlier but wasn't voted. The paper can be found here

No one gets a law degree in IP--that sounds like you don't know what you are talking about.

Except when they do. It took me less than a minute to find a law degree from a very legitimate university with a concentration in IP law
http://earlemacklaw.drexel.edu/academics/concentrations/intellectual_property/
I'm sure with a little more time, it would be no challenge to find others.

Aylin Caliskan and Rachel Greenstadt. Translate once, translate twice, translate thrice and attribute: Identifying authors and machine translation tools in translated text. Sixth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2012). https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~ac993/papers/Aylin_ICSC_2012.pdf

Ashley L Podhradsky, Doctor of Science in Information Systems

Education:
Doctoral Information Systems, Specializing in Information Assurance, Dakota State University
M.S., Information Systems, Specializing in Network Security, Dakota State University
B.S., Electronic Commerce and Computer Security, Dakota State University
Certificate: Computer Hacking Forensic Investigator, AccessData Certified Examiner

Areas of Expertise:
Computer Forensics
Digital Forensics
Consumer Privacy
Risk Management

http://goodwin.drexel.edu/sotaps/Ashley_Podhradsky.php

Vs

Jim Alkove
Aliases and Other Names: James Alkove

Bio
Software Design Engineer at Microsoft Corporation
Career
Microsoft Corporation
Software Design Engineer

Achievements and Recognition:
.
.
.

http://www.spoke.com/info/p1N6wTr/JimAlkove

this is just some unfounded rumor that has no basis on reality

It's more than a rumour, it's a research paper from some forensics experts that has been submitted to a conference. Of course, that does not mean that it is correct, and afaik it has not been published yet.

The PDF (found via xbox-experts.com:
Identity Theft and Used Gaming Consoles: Recovering Personal Information from Xbox 360 Hard Drives

The relevant text shows that they just got a credit card hit from some forensics tool:

Performing a fast scan on one of the drives resulted in a possible credit card hit as demonstrated in Image 10. Although this does not definitively prove there are any credit card numbers on the hard drive, it is highly probable given the results obtained. The Bank Identification Number in this hit identifies this as a Bank of America Discover Card [37].

The authors appeal to have credible prior experience in digital forensics:

Dr. Asley L. Podhradsky, Drexel University
Dr. Rob D'Ovidio, Drexel University
Cindy Casey, Drexel University

They have published work on XBOX 360 previously, so they may have some experience in this specific area (or not):
The Xbox 360 and Steganography: How Criminals and Terrorists could be Going Dark
A Practitioners Guide to the Forensic Investigation of Xbox 360 Gaming Consoles

this is just some unfounded rumor that has no basis on reality

It's more than a rumour, it's a research paper from some forensics experts that has been submitted to a conference. Of course, that does not mean that it is correct, and afaik it has not been published yet.

The PDF (found via xbox-experts.com:
Identity Theft and Used Gaming Consoles: Recovering Personal Information from Xbox 360 Hard Drives

The relevant text shows that they just got a credit card hit from some forensics tool:

Performing a fast scan on one of the drives resulted in a possible credit card hit as demonstrated in Image 10. Although this does not definitively prove there are any credit card numbers on the hard drive, it is highly probable given the results obtained. The Bank Identification Number in this hit identifies this as a Bank of America Discover Card [37].

The authors appeal to have credible prior experience in digital forensics:

Dr. Asley L. Podhradsky, Drexel University
Dr. Rob D'Ovidio, Drexel University
Cindy Casey, Drexel University

They have published work on XBOX 360 previously, so they may have some experience in this specific area (or not):
The Xbox 360 and Steganography: How Criminals and Terrorists could be Going Dark
A Practitioners Guide to the Forensic Investigation of Xbox 360 Gaming Consoles

Ok, so let's make a computer science degree exclusively about "computer science" as opposed to "computer programming".

At a local university they pride themselves on having a "computer science degree with an emphasis on software engineering," followed up closely by "our courses are taught by computer scientists, NOT engineers." Yikes. Perhaps we need more software engineering programs?

"You know how volatile mercury is on earth," said Randy Gladstone of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, in a press conference on Thursday. "It's probably more volatile than other metals on the moon."

Must be because the Moon shows more oil and interest rate shocks

you're probably right... it's probably just a coincidence that 20 minutes after talking with them, the offending content in your "stuff" directory on your www.cs.drexel.edu student file server account was removed from the system.... i'm sure you just happened to coincidentally remove that content yourself... content that has been there since 2007... lame attempt to convey the belief that i'm lying, bro.

how come on this site, at the very bottom there is a link to your drexel university student account where you served up copyrighted texts as pdf ebooks free to download?

i was contacted by the office. i did tell them about the files. they were removed. who do you think they'll contact next?

http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~jlg95/stuff/vert.png

Dunno, it didn't prompt me to install any fonts at least.

*shrug*

It's not like anything bad's ever happened when critical systems are rolled-out untested, unprepared, or irresposibly.

I mean it's not like someone's life is ever put in jeaopardy by minor software glitches, especially in hospitals. ...on a side note, Googling "IT disasters" leads to some very interesting results.

-Matt

http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~jlg95/bnxc/

I can't say it's ready for general consumption, but more or less it works for my day to day needs.

The quantum effects that occur within your cells is negligible.

Actually, you'd be surprised. Quantum biophysics is a hot area. One of the interesting results explains why it is that ribosomes can churn out proteins at a constant rate, which one wouldn't normally expect given a random distribution of bound amino acids in the cell. Quantum effects may occur on much larger scales than we suppose.

Speaking as a chemist, could you explain what exactly this means? Up until this very moment I have been under the misguided notion that the nucleus of an atom was orbited by electrons within groups called "shells", and these worked very similarly to satellites around a planet.

You're thinking of the Bohr model.

So, could you in any way explain how we get from "think of it as a planet with many moons" to this or more importantly, what gives orbitals this shape?

It's because the Schrodinger equation is a Laplacian, and the hydrogen atom is a spherically symmetric problem. The natural basis for the Laplacian in spherical coordinates is spherical harmonics. The shape you are seeing is the characteristic shape of different spherical harmonics, corresponding to the angular momentum of the electron.

tacky photos, weird fonts and poor layouts

Don't worry, they're currently hard at work on it.

http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~jlg95/stuff/shittycode.png

http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~jlg95/index-crash.html

Check out the little table on that page. Lockes Internet Explorer hard every time.
Point is, nothing is perfect. Some things are just better than others.

You are not going to get a straight answer on this question. There are so many facets that are going to come into play that each case has to be dealt with separately. Some of the things that you may have to consider. As a research assistant it is very likely that you will be grouped into a "work-for-hire" category, which places you a weaker footing. This is the case whether the money for the project was internal to the university or through another source. At the end of the day, the University hired you. Another factor is the perception of the code. If it is viewed as a "product" the University will retain it - even more likely is that the federal sponsor will argue a stake in it. The Bayh-Dole act has had an interesting effect. It "forces" that Universities protect their IP, and work to commercialize. The intention was to get new know-how to the market. The side affect has been that everyone is a little bit more aware of the potential that lies in the IP. I have seen mixed reports on the effectiveness of the Bayh-Dole Act. What I have however seen is an increased interest by Universities to retain IP. In most cases, faculty and researchers listed on projects will be given consideration of ownership of the IP (at least shared). In fact many Universities now have policies that are quite explicit about ownership distribution and who stands to make what of IP (e.g. http://www.drexel.edu/provost/policies/copyright.asp, http://www.research.northwestern.edu/ori/copyright/CopyrightPolicySept2006.pdf). Northwestern mentions work-for-hire specifically which I suspect you fall under. In any IP discussion you will get a mass of moral and ethical viewpoints. Careful not to pay to much heed to these. Under some of those arguments, I should be able to lay claim to e-Bay, after all, it was my idea (I think). Best suggestion, get legal advice; and not from the University lawyers or IP office.

Welcome to AOL-Time-Warner-Starbucks-US Government long distance!
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Please say the name of the party you wish to call!

Does infrared light have the ability to pass through the skull ?... sounds like snake oil to me... I'll stick with my pyramid hat.

Yes, infrared light can pass through the skull. In fact, there's a technique called fNIR (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) which uses a system of IR emitters and detectors to measure brain activity. Some links:

http://www.lab-times.org/methods/m_07_03.html

http://www.biomed.drexel.edu/fnir/Contents/brain_imaging/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FNIR

David Kirk's explanation is totally correct. The need for "accuracy" in gaming is not high enough to justify the downside of ray tracing. Multipass rendering and shaders are obviously sufficient for 99% of the games given the state of GPUs and the quality of today's modern game engines. I consulted with nVidia back in the 90s on multipass techniques based on my PhD work at Upenn (available at my current webpage: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~pjd37/diefenbach96thesis.pdf ), and these so-called "hacks" can approximate physics-based calculations very closely for non-critical applications.

Arguing against a planned economy because of GOSPLAN is like arguing that sorting large arrays will never be possible because bubblesort has such lousy time complexity. I know about the craziness of GOSPLAN, about how they first commissioned panes of glass by weight (guess what, really thick windows), then by area (you think thick was bad, here's thin!), about storming, and about how the factories would weld lumps of metal to their products to increase their mass (when that was what they were scored by).

A well working planned economy must handle both logistics and innovation. GOSPLAN didn't handle either, except when the dictatorship was the "customer" (funny, that!). That doesn't imply it's impossible. Allende's government of Chile used real-time management to run their logistics (just before the coup), where careful organization of 200 trucks thwarted a blockade by 50000 small business owners, for instance.

On the matters of scoring, GOSPLAN tried to score "objectively", to set plans by objective factors. That didn't work, because there was always a loophole. But it's possible to make "accounting prices" that serve the same adjustment purpose as real prices do in capitalism. Oskar Lange (and earlier, Strumilin) advocated using such accounting prices, but the computational power at the time wasn't nearly sufficient to get the work done. The USSR and similar nations were stuck with a bubble sort (or maybe even a bozo sort terminated after n swaps) because neither better algorithms nor the power required to run them were present, they were too dictatorial to use iterative processes, and to some extent they didn't see the problem at all.

But now one could be decentralized and use iteration, solve the economy as an input output matrix (which is easier than thought since the matrix is sparse) to get "accounting prices", or go at it more directly.

Yes, GOSPLAN made all the wrong choices, and yes, the economy suffered for it. But so did their politics, yet we don't say totalitarian dictatorship is the only option possible for political government. So why should we say that their "oh, let's plan a little bit based on what the dictator wants and then hope the rest works out" approach is the only option possible for economic regulation?

Arguing against a planned economy because of GOSPLAN is like arguing that sorting large arrays will never be possible because bubblesort has such lousy time complexity. I know about the craziness of GOSPLAN, about how they first commissioned panes of glass by weight (guess what, really thick windows), then by area (you think thick was bad, here's thin!), about storming, and about how the factories would weld lumps of metal to their products to increase their mass (when that was what they were scored by).

A well working planned economy must handle both logistics and innovation. GOSPLAN didn't handle either, except when the dictatorship was the "customer" (funny, that!). That doesn't imply it's impossible. Allende's government of Chile used real-time management to run their logistics (just before the coup), where careful organization of 200 trucks thwarted a blockade by 50000 small business owners, for instance.

On the matters of scoring, GOSPLAN tried to score "objectively", to set plans by objective factors. That didn't work, because there was always a loophole. But it's possible to make "accounting prices" that serve the same adjustment purpose as real prices do in capitalism. Oskar Lange (and earlier, Strumilin) advocated using such accounting prices, but the computational power at the time wasn't nearly sufficient to get the work done. The USSR and similar nations were stuck with a bubble sort (or maybe even a bozo sort terminated after n swaps) because neither better algorithms nor the power required to run them were present, they were too dictatorial to use iterative processes, and to some extent they didn't see the problem at all.

But now one could be decentralized and use iteration, solve the economy as an input output matrix (which is easier than thought since the matrix is sparse) to get "accounting prices", or go at it more directly.

Yes, GOSPLAN made all the wrong choices, and yes, the economy suffered for it. But so did their politics, yet we don't say totalitarian dictatorship is the only option possible for political government. So why should we say that their "oh, let's plan a little bit based on what the dictator wants and then hope the rest works out" approach is the only option possible for economic regulation?

I read about your COSA thing. It looks like you reinvented LabView's language G...and not particularly well. Needless to say, there are many problems with it. If it was really that good, wouldn't it have caught on sometime in the past 20 years? Here are a few of the many reasons it sucks:

1. It does NOT eliminate programmers. Sure, it doesn't require typing, but that just means it eliminates typists (and it doesn't really do that because you still have to type in comments). Anybody can drag and drop a component, but it takes a programmer to figure out which ones to use and how to connect the components together.

2. It's a bitch to debug because you have potentially thousands of things all running in parallel. You can't easily single-step. You can't easily comment out a block of code you think is causing problems. You can't just start sticking Print statements everywhere.

3. Cutting and pasting code is a mess! When you have to insert some code into the middle of your algorithm, you can't just insert a new line, you have to insert rows and columns of pixels. If your components aren't all on a grid, that may not be easy.

4. Printing out your program requires cutting and pasting because it's 2-dimensional. It's hard to visually understand things like switch constructs and sequential operations, particularly when they're nested, because that makes it 3-dimensional.

5. Non-text files are difficult to deal with. You can't tell your friend to look at line XXX to help you figure out why you have a bug. You can't diff the code, meaning it's not really possible to version control properly. Have you ever posted a small code snippet to have somebody copy it, get it working, and post a reply with the fixed code? It's not possible with these programs.

6. It gives new meaning to the term "spaghetti code" because data flow is indicated by lines, and complex data flows look like a plate of spaghetti. In a traditional programming language, you can compute some value (say, average of Foos) and assign it to a variable (say, avgFoo). You can then use that value 100 different times in your function by typing 'avgFoo' and every time you see it you know that it's the average of Foos. With this graphical method, you just have some icon with a line coming out of it with some comment hopefully indicating somewhere that the line is the average of Foos. Then you have 100 lines distributing this value all over the place in your diagram, all of them looking just like any other line in the diagram (in the case of G, every line of the same data type looks the same). Can you make sense of this program snippet?

Unfortunately, G is not the only visual programming language I've ever had to use. In fact, the company I currently work for has such a method of programming its system. It was designed because the users apparently had trouble using the text-based language. I think the engineer who designed the graphical system is the only one in the company who still uses it. Keep in mind that the text-based language is still implicitly parallel, it just doesn't have all of the problems I mentioned above (although it's not much easier to debug).

For those who don't know what this sort of programming looks like, see this for a good example of how it takes a 2MP bitmap to describe a page of code.

dom

The number you quote seems to be closer to the extraterrestial solar flux of between 1.3 and 1.4 kW/square meter.
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~brooksdr/DRB_web_page/papers/UsingTheSun/using.htm/
According to ASHRAE, a horizontal surface on the earth will get around 256 btuh/sq ft peak at noon on a clear, sunny day. By my calcs, that's about 800 Watts/sq meter.
For yesterday's data on actual insolation at the surface in the Western US, see this:
http://www.soils.wisc.edu/wimnext/insol/westinsol.html/
Here's a little more on the subject:
http://www.solar4power.com/solar-power-insolation-window.html/
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/redbook/atlas//

There are obstacles, though: One of the key components needed for silicon PICs is the very high-speed silicon optical modulator, which is used to encode data on optical beam.

Elvira.

The perfect girl for your average computer nerd. Not at all standoffish. She's unusual, but so down-to-earth.
Who wouldn't feel right at home with her? A little off the wall for her to be hawking some complicated computer software, I have no idea what is was supposed to do from the advertisement. Must have been something from the old days before Netscape, when computers were supposed to do "office" and "business" stuff.
To see how far we have come, the decendants of Netscape are used everyday, all day in every office and business out there. Nevermind that the new-found purpose is to look on the internet for nice-looking girls like Elvira.
To prove my point, here are a few links to Elvira images for your enjoyment:

• Here's one. Appears to be an autographed picture of Elvira, no doubt sent to some lonely nerd.
  
• This one appears to be another advertisement featuring Elvira.
  
• In this shot, an impersonator does Elvira, right down to the creepy eye-plastic-surgery, which by the way would be a good conversation starter topic for anyone lucky enough to get a date with Elvira.
  
• Here we have Elvira on/in a game. Perhaps some of you have wasted your money on this one.
  
• Supposedly this is a picture of Elvira's car, apparently a T-Bird, with some spooky changes.
  
• Out selling vacuum cleaners, and you ring this doorbell, get greeted by Elvira and friends.
   

• This one was taken in 2003, you can tell it's really Elvira, because of the little dagger on her belt, with the red and green gemstones. (Elvira has been in show business for a while now, and she is not as young as she used to be, but who cares)
  
• Here is a photo of Elvira with her pet snake. Lots of wannabe Elvira's felt they had to have a snake too, mostly a bad idea, only Elvira herself knows how to handle the little varmits.
  
• OK, here's the best for last, showing lots of Elvira's legs, and her car. As you can see, that's a real car, based on a T-Bird, and those are real legs too.
  
• Here's a screenshot of some Elvira software. I have no idea what it does, and am returning to the image above, much more interesting.
  
  
  -- Rapidweather

There's been a Java app
http://gicl.cs.drexel.edu/people/sevy/airport/ since 2000 for administering the Apple Airport since the Airports are administered by the ancient network device management standard of SNMP instead of some non-standard kludge over HTTP.

1. Joseph Davidovits (who first proposed it decades ago) actually making the pyramid blocks by pouring them! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQk_yBHre4
2. Official presentation from Dr. Michel Barsoum's group at Drexel University: http://www.mse.drexel.edu/max/PyramidPresentation. htm. (Sorry it's HUGE right now, we'll be compressing it soon.)

• Multi-ton blocks, up to 60 tons each and an average of about 2.5 tons, fit together so precisely that a playing card can't be wedged between them.
• The Great Pyramid is the largest of all the pyramids. To fit into the accepted timeline for its construction, one block, weighing on average more than two tons, would have to be placed every six minutes. The number of men working in the quarries to harvest the blocks, to transport them across the desert, and to drop them into place at the site is estimated to be substantially larger than the population of the nearby city at Giza.
• Their copper tools would have blunted almost immediately when carving solid limestone.
• Many of the outer pyramid blocks obviously and curiously take the non-uniform shape of surrounding blocks.

• There are obvious natural grains in granite pyramid blocks. This means they're almost certainly natural.
• Observation has shown that the lower 2/3 of the pyramid seem to be filled with rubble! (rocks which seem to have been cut and "tossed" in.
• Archeologists have discovered a quarry which shows evidence of carved blocks.

No need to have two cameras. Have the laser pointing slightly higher than the camera. The farther the object is, the higher the point will show up in the cam. Been done.
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~twd25/webcam_laser_ra nger.html

These examples illustrate the importance of observation and appeals to evidence in defeasible reasoning. The idea of defeasible reasoning may not sound very good -- after all, defeasible is a synonym for "fallible" -- until we realize that scientific reasoning is always defeasible, and we know the power of scientific reasoning from our everyday life. It is a commonplace of basic scientific method that experimental evidence is never quite conclusive -- it is always a logical possibility that the next experiments will go differently. Indeed, philosopher John Pollack developed the idea of defeasible reasoning largely (as I understand it) to give a stronger basis for the philosophy of science.

-- the page on Defeasible Reasoning

Now, we've come across this word "fact."

You've invoked it in a scientific sense, in the sense of "an empirically observed truth." But we are having an epistemological conversation: We can speak of mathematical truths as facts, even though we cannot empirically determine them- not in a justifiable way, at least: We cannnot know if the universe is playing tricks on us, after all. But if our reasoning in our minds is not interfered with, we can reach justifiable mathematical truth, without any reference to the universe at all. And in the language of philosophers, we would call these discoveries "facts."

Let's look at the Wikipedia page on "Reason." Somebody wrote a line there, "No philosopher of any note has ever argued that logic is the same as reason." Quite accurate.

Do you believe it? Is the Wikipedia article wrong here? We know that Wikipedia is wrong in many places; Is this one of those places?

Maybe there is a notable philosopher, somewhere, who said that logic is the same as reason. Can you find this philosopher?

Let me tell you my theory. You can disagree with it, but let me communicate it to you. My belief is that, in say, 4 years, in the quiet of your own thoughts, you may come to value this theory.

I'm going to suggest that the reasoning of all people is supported by a "thinking goo." It's not a rational thing, though it's not totally irrational, either. There is a quirky logic to it (the laws of physics, the emergence of human desires and interests and needs and so on,) but it's certainly not spock, no matter how much the person is revered for their skills at logic, no matter how they hold their glasses tip in their mouth, no matter how many puffs of the pipe they take, before speaking something penetrating and wise.

We can isolate pieces of logic in our thinking, but they are just little islands of logical constistency. To be entirely logical and reasonable is utterly impossible; It's simply too costly for any system. Even Ray Kurzweil's most ideal computer will still have these problems. (And I speak as a bona fida TransHumanist, and Artificial Intelligence enthusiast, not as a critic of the intellectual capabilities of computers.) One argument (that I'll present briefly) is that thinking is a evolutionary process; For thinking to work at all, it must include irrational components. Something that works consistently in the same way is a dead somethin

These examples illustrate the importance of observation and appeals to evidence in defeasible reasoning. The idea of defeasible reasoning may not sound very good -- after all, defeasible is a synonym for "fallible" -- until we realize that scientific reasoning is always defeasible, and we know the power of scientific reasoning from our everyday life. It is a commonplace of basic scientific method that experimental evidence is never quite conclusive -- it is always a logical possibility that the next experiments will go differently. Indeed, philosopher John Pollack developed the idea of defeasible reasoning largely (as I understand it) to give a stronger basis for the philosophy of science.

-- the page on Defeasible Reasoning

Now, we've come across this word "fact."

You've invoked it in a scientific sense, in the sense of "an empirically observed truth." But we are having an epistemological conversation: We can speak of mathematical truths as facts, even though we cannot empirically determine them- not in a justifiable way, at least: We cannnot know if the universe is playing tricks on us, after all. But if our reasoning in our minds is not interfered with, we can reach justifiable mathematical truth, without any reference to the universe at all. And in the language of philosophers, we would call these discoveries "facts."

Let's look at the Wikipedia page on "Reason." Somebody wrote a line there, "No philosopher of any note has ever argued that logic is the same as reason." Quite accurate.

Do you believe it? Is the Wikipedia article wrong here? We know that Wikipedia is wrong in many places; Is this one of those places?

Maybe there is a notable philosopher, somewhere, who said that logic is the same as reason. Can you find this philosopher?

Let me tell you my theory. You can disagree with it, but let me communicate it to you. My belief is that, in say, 4 years, in the quiet of your own thoughts, you may come to value this theory.

I'm going to suggest that the reasoning of all people is supported by a "thinking goo." It's not a rational thing, though it's not totally irrational, either. There is a quirky logic to it (the laws of physics, the emergence of human desires and interests and needs and so on,) but it's certainly not spock, no matter how much the person is revered for their skills at logic, no matter how they hold their glasses tip in their mouth, no matter how many puffs of the pipe they take, before speaking something penetrating and wise.

We can isolate pieces of logic in our thinking, but they are just little islands of logical constistency. To be entirely logical and reasonable is utterly impossible; It's simply too costly for any system. Even Ray Kurzweil's most ideal computer will still have these problems. (And I speak as a bona fida TransHumanist, and Artificial Intelligence enthusiast, not as a critic of the intellectual capabilities of computers.) One argument (that I'll present briefly) is that thinking is a evolutionary process; For thinking to work at all, it must include irrational components. Something that works consistently in the same way is a dead somethin

I have pored over every reference that these activists have cited to me, everything from philosophical treatises to the citations they use to support their claims about animal research, veganism, farming, wildlife management, etc. I have listened to lectures, read their pamphlets and newsletters.

If it is just, then why can't they use persuasion instead of intimidation? Maybe it isn't as persuasive as they think?

Oh, I'll bet they're thinking on lines like:

"Animals need to be defended, because they have no voice for themselves. I could try to convince people that animals need rights, but only a handful are going to listen. If they do listen, those that do won't be persuaded."

"Therefore, I must become not only the voice of the animals, but I must also become their hand. There is urgency to their requests, and it is not being met. The issue needs to be escalated, and force is now necessary."

(Proceed from there.)

It's not that they think it is "so persuasive" -- they think, exactly, that it is not persuasive, and thus, they are upping their ante.

Obviously, they themselves think that their perspective is true.

"Persuasive" tends to imply: "Can I sing a pied piper tune, and get you to come with me." It's important to recognize that, here.

I certainly haven't seen any examples of "real reasoning"; quite the opposite, in fact.

This is because you aren't listening.

They actually have some pretty intense volumes of literature, mounted up through the ages, that explain their reasoning, their whole line of thought. Philosophy papers, essays, serious books, art projects, childrens books, the whole gambit; it's all there.

Just google for "Animal Rights," and you've got a place to start.

See? "Real Reasoning." It's all over the place, just as real as all other reasoning. You, like me, likely disagree with them in several points. But reasoning isn't about reaching the same conclusions as you.

So you are faced, then, with an arduous task: You must have conversations with people you disagree with, and so on, and so forth.

If it gets to be sufficiently laborous, and if there is a pacing to expectations and so on, you can see how people might even prefer violence. In the initial stages, playing war is fun, exciting, and attractive.

Hm. It just occurs to me, that perhaps we should retitle war "Hand-to-hand philosophy." It's what it is, isn't it?

-- One final thing --

A movement, any movement, cannot be judged by the thoughts and reasons of the majority of it's adherents.

It's because they're stupid about their movement. It's a necessary situation, actually, part of specialization and the distribution of intelligence.

You can't just criticize the Republicans, because of what Aunt Tuni says about taxes or whatever.

You can't just criticize the Democrats, because of what Bob Marleson down the street said.

Not if you're interested in making progress on the arguments, at any rate, and really solve problems.

Instead, what you have to do, is talk with the really smart folk, who are working in each of these domains. You have to really get down to it, and understand the structures, and then seek out the smartest people in the particular territories, and challenge what they think.

And I think that, what you'll find, if you do that, is that there's good thinking going on everywhere, and that there are honest to God solid psychological tensions at play everywhere in the world, where there is intense reasoning at play from all sides.

So, if you want to criticize animal rights people, and you're saying, "I'm not hearing reason here," it's because you're talking about some college kid you saw holding up a sign.

What you really need to do, is find the books that that college kid read, and you need to argue with the points being made in those books.

That college kid with the sign: That college kid is really just your introduction

What is the duration in other countries?

This page The Optimal Lifetime of a Patent is interesting. They say the lifetime should vary based on a cost/benefit analysis. I would guess that the "optimal term" is closer to 3 years than 20 years for most computer/electronics patents.

You're right -- I should have provided more information.

The author was Carl R. Pacifico. The document has not been peer reviewed, and the full paper, 'The Human Thinking Process - A Hypothesis in Evolutionary Neuropsychology' (pdf) has only been published on the internet through Drexel Univeristy's Carl. R. Pacifico Professorship of Neuropsychology, which he funded, so can't be considered an unbiased peer review.

As he died last month, he won't have a chance to conduct further research to prove or disprove his hypothesis.

I'm not in the field, myself, so I can't make a judgement if any of his research is sound

You're right -- I should have provided more information.

The author was Carl R. Pacifico. The document has not been peer reviewed, and the full paper, 'The Human Thinking Process - A Hypothesis in Evolutionary Neuropsychology' (pdf) has only been published on the internet through Drexel Univeristy's Carl. R. Pacifico Professorship of Neuropsychology, which he funded, so can't be considered an unbiased peer review.

As he died last month, he won't have a chance to conduct further research to prove or disprove his hypothesis.

I'm not in the field, myself, so I can't make a judgement if any of his research is sound

But if two things have an exact one-to-one correspondance with each other, such that if you do something to one of the things, the other thing changes accordingly, then logically, they are the same thing.

No, that's not true- our digital communication systems are about making things exactly the same on either side of the channel.

There is an exact, one-to-one relationship, between the signals coming out of your video card, and the pixels on your display. But they're clearly not the same thing.

Do you accept my undercut?

And if so, how was it possible that you made such (you'll excuse my rudeness:) a simple mistake? Is it possible that you're mind is directing your thoughts away on the basis of undesirable conclusions? Or was it, in fact, a bona fida mistake in reasoning? (This paragraph only applies if you accept the undercut. If you have an undercut to my undercut, I'm happy to hear it out.) It seems to me that you accepted a conclusion based on trust in a belief system, and so relaxed the rigour of your arguments. I ask you to question that trust, and consider the arguments more carefully.

If you believe electrical signals are always accompanied with experience, then that means you're a panpsychist. And you believe that your computer is actually having an experience, and is aware, because there are electrical signals.

I suspect that you are actually a panpsychist. You seem to recognize the idea that there is something that it is to be having an experience. You recognize, on the other hand, that there is a 1:1 relationship between the contents of experience, and the manipulations at work in the world. If you can recognize that one did not necessarily need to entail the other, that it is conceivable (in an alternative universe, let's pretend,) that physics plays out exactly the same, but that nobody is actually aware in that universe, then you have discovered the space that is called: "the explanatory gap." That is, that we are missing an explanation for why we are aware, why there is an experience.

The easiest solution is panpsychism, weird though it may be: Wherever there is anything that seems like it would be aware, then it is aware. It is an explanation, by way of a 5th law: "Wherever matter and energy are specially arranged in space and time, there is an experience." It's just not particularly persuasive or predictive. Which is okay. We just need to recognize it in it's place: This isn't science. There can be no science amidst the unmeasurable, after all. And that's okay.

No, I'm not a panpsychist. I actually think that the world's "just a dream." No proof, just a belief- but it clearly doesn't contradict science either.

I had a dream once. In the dream, there were scientists. I told them that I was alive in another universe as well. They told me, it clearly wasn't true. In the dream, the dream scientists showed me dream books and dream microscopes, and showed me dream neurons, and I went to dream school. I learned dream physics and wrote dream papers, and learned that the dream world was the only one and that rational dream people were the only people.

But of course, we know better, and that it was only a dream. Because 100 years is an entire lifespan, and surely, any duration of time longer than 3 days is a firm ground in any universe for any purpose and for any point. Surely what seems to be 100 years must constitute proof enough of reality, for any logical mind.

I offer no proof. I do suggest that I am the deeper, more profoundly skeptical, than the people who call themselves "skeptics," and I do mean to show true limits to what is called "knowledge."

I want to briefly reaffirm for you: I believe in determinism, and I am a very strong suporter of the Enlightenment, the scientific method, and liberal thinking. I am a transhumanist. I am also an agnostic theist. I think our highest responsibilities lie