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I know I'm wasting my time, but pi is defined as the ratio between a circle's diameter and it's circumference.
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Api

Bible claims about 30/10
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=701359

One interesting thing about these studies is they always point out the difference between men and women. Perhaps because that is something that people can giving a knowing chuckle about over their morning tea, because everyone knows that women are naturally more sophisticated and men are naturally the hunters.
Notice how none of these evolutionary geneticists are writing about how black people got a sense of rhythm because of some remnant of their stone age past, and that the Chinese aren't good at math because the proto-Chinese used math in their mammoth hunts, etc.
That aside,

A little over a year ago, I wrote my own critique, called Women, Men and the Bad Scientific Study of the Week

"Apparently your belief in individual responsibility doesn't extend to the level that you refuse to post AC."

Apparently you have to resort to Ad Hominem attacks (or are you unaware that you did that?) when you can't make a coherent argument.

Referring to qualities of a speaker does not make it an ad hominem attack. In this case, I was noting a possible instance of hypocrisy in the difference between your posting AC and championing individual responsibility. To learn more about why this is not an ad hominem attack, I would suggest you read this article.

And why is it you assholes who hide behind pseudonyms think that makes you so much more credible than AC's?

And, believe it or not, even your use of 'asshole' here does not qualify as ad hominem. (See the linked article). To answer your question, I'm not claiming 'much' more credibility, but merely 'some'; I've posted a fair bit, and interested parties can at least decide if what I'm posting in this thread is consistent with what I've held elsewhere. Even that (fairly low) level of personal identity is not met by ACs.

"The government is responsible because it equipped this person with a uniform, badge, gun, and (most importantly) training, as well as giving him a mandate to enforce the law."

Except THAT IS NOT THE LEGAL TEST YOU DULLARD SO STOP PRESUMING YOUR OPINION ABOUT THE LAW HAS ANY BEARING ON THE ACTUAL LAW ITSELF.

I'm still not getting your point. Perhaps a larger font size would help?

I never said anything about a legal test. The one point that I was trying to make is that I don't find it 'sad' that the relevant government may have to offer financial restitution in this case, because it is apparently the only efficacious way to hold a government, and by extension the citizens who voted that government into office, responsible for its role in the violation of civil rights that occurred. You don't believe that the government holds any responsibility; fine. I happen to think that your opinion can't be made consistent with most reasonable ideas about government. Our disagreement, at least as I see it, is one of political philosophy, not one about the current state of law.

"But he 'arrested' someone, which is the act of a government..."

No, IT IS NOT. Citizen's arrest is an example that shows you're full of shit.

So now you're claiming that this 'individual', employed as a police officer, on duty, was actually making a citizen's arrest, because he was in error? If you read up on citizen's arrest, you will find that among the many restrictions on this concept is the requirement to turn the 'arrestee' over to proper authorities as soon as is practicable. There is no "citizen's judicial system" of which citizen's arrest is a part; it's merely a stopgap measure to hold the guy until you call a cop.

But because you're clearly too dimwittd to grasp the point, being an agent of the government DOES NOT ALWAYS AND IRREVOCABLY MAKE THE GOVERNMENT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR ACTIONS.

Ah, finally an actual ad hominem! Unfortunately, your grammar makes it somewhat of a nonsequitur -- my level of dimwittedness, whatever it is, clearly has no effect on whether or not 'being an agent of the government, etc., etc. ' Further, I never claimed that it was 'always and irrevocably' so, I just was claiming that in this case -- an officer, on duty, in uniform, dispached to the scene in response to a call to the police -- was acting in his capacity as an agent of the government. I'll concede that there are many actions performed by someone who is an agent of the government for which the governm

Hold on, dude! There are enough problems with Iraq, and drums are sounding for Iran (and Korea?)... Just in case George W. gets strange ideas, have you people checked the General Strike called for 9/11/07? It might be more even more needed now!

Here a description of the School in Italy (in English): http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=983707 Caveat. That was wrote in 2001. The prescribed years went from 9 to 12 and the courses were reformed and re-reformed. And nothing changed really.

I was immediately reminded of the shadowy interstellar creatures in Cordwainer Smith's The Game of Rat and Dragon (1955).. Google cache link cause the site's slow today.

  They're frail and almost undetectable, but highly telepathic, and pose a huge danger to space travel. In the earlier "Scanners Live in Vain" they are unknown, and their effects are referred to as "the Great Pain of Space", and ships works around the problem by putting passengers in protective stasis and using crews of "habermen" who've had their brains disconnected and shielded from their bodies in a process invented by one Dr. Haber..
  By the time of "...Rat and Dragon" the dangers are better understood and teams of pinlighters work to fight the creatures in the brief seconds after each planoforming (jump) across space.
  The rats/dragons are easily harmed by bright light, so the pinlighters use specifically designed missiles to destroy and drive them off. Because human reflexes are too slow, the pinlighter teams are pairings of psychically-gifted humans and cats, the humans directing tactics and their linked partners providing the reflexes on high-speed attack craft which they control via neural interfaces.

  It would make an awesome game, maybe a minigame in a science fiction MMORPG -- but I'd hate to get hit with insanity or death when the pinlighters fucked up. :)

  - mantar

  Heh. Captcha for this was "battler." What a coinkydink!

You mean the Heinlein-Hubbard wager?

William S. Burroughs would disagree. Third line after the cough

you're getting bogged down in the sensationalism.

An understanding of some of the chemical or molecular interactions in your food can be handy knowledge. It'll keep you away from the old Swedish Lemon Angel debacle at least.

My limited experience with food scientists suggests that they rarely think about measuring things to infinite precision, but rather think about the underlying systems. More of a hacker mentality.

How do you classify a rat as being schizophrenia when, even today, the /existence/ of schizophrenia has been questioned by noted psychologists Carl Jung and, more recently, the anti-psychiatry group, not to mention, the all pervasive, Phillip K Dick. Whether you read into psychotic symptoms as an emergent property of a modified perception of time (Dick's explanation), an internalization of alternative social maps that leads to a breakdown of defense mechanisms in a violent catharsis (Jung), or simply "individuality" (anti-psychiatry), we haven't yet falsified schizophrenia: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=125704 7 Now, taking all that into consideration, how many orders of magnitude in difference are human beings from rats? Even if a rat could be one-dimensionally classified as "schizophrenic" by a gene-level modification, it would be a schizophrenia stretch (pun intended), I posit, to induce that a human would be likewise affected by the same gene in a similar manner -- and this is only if we concede that "schizophrenia" exists and if so we can finally arrive at a operational definition of it (which we have yet to do): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6033013.stm Take off your tinfoil hat, doctor. ;-)

Pretty much in the vein of Napster of Puppets... "Napster, Napster, where's the songs that I've been after? Napster, Napster, show me where it lies..."

If the obesity problem were simply a result of us not being used to availability of food, we would have seen nearly constant levels of obesity for the past two or three generations. Instead, we're seeing an order of magnitude increase in morbid obesity (>40% BMI) since the mid 1980s. We weren't all struggling to find food in the mid 1980s. If this study were done in the 1950s comparing against the 1930s (Great Depression), I might believe that explanation, but it just doesn't make sense in this day and age.

In reality, the mass obesity problem coincides perfectly with the rise of processed foods. This got worse after the U.S. government started giving huge corn subsidies and putting high import duties on sugar to encourage use of high fructose corn syrup. Fructose is processed by the body very quickly, but does not trigger the same insulin response as glucose. Thus, your body A. does not feel satiated, so you consume more, B. does not gain the metabolic surge that normally occurs in response to elevated insulin levels, and so does not use all that energy, C. stores the resulting excess energy as fat. Replacing that same amount of fructose with glucose will cause a significant weight loss.

assumptions that

1) Maximizing US Federal Government revenue is equivalent to maximizing public good.
2) That airwaves, which by natural law are a shared public resource, can somehow be auctioned/sold.

It is the modern equivalent of the English Enclosure movement.

I sought out the infamous penn and teller game too. And I have driven a bus to Las Vegas, but crashed on the way home. I got one point for that.

Tolkien says in the foreword that he heard that it was symbolic of something a lot, and that it was simply untrue. Basically, he says that Lord of the Rings not allegorical. It's quoted here, although reading it yourself is very enlightening.

...the porn hidden in Star Castle...?

IV waste removal is actually a pretty interesting idea, even if a bit sci-fi. I wonder what would happen to the "plumbing" organs, though, if an IV i/o system were used for long periods of time.

And if we're going to get totally sci fi, then how about a transporter? or a worm hole?* (I imagine that would suck if you lived on the receiving end of the toilet wormhole. "Where does all this shit keep coming from?"

*Link goes to Everything2 article about a comic. One of the storylines in the comic is the reverse of the above idea, where the receiving end of the wormhole is in a man's anus and he can't stop shitting.

I apologize if you thought I was picking on Joe Six Pack. My point is that the hardware is up to the task, but the bloated, slow, and inefficient software grinds down the performance of the machine. I base this on personal experience and run a MythDora (MythTV + Fedora Linux) media center on a Pentium III without any performance issues. It happily plays and records TV, burns DVDs, shows pictures, plays games, plays/rips DVDs, transcodes video, surfs RSS feeds, streams video and audio without any performance problems.

The modern hardware we have is very powerful in terms of computing power. It is the bloated software like Vista/Java/.NET which make your shiny new machine feel slooooow. If we could get the DirectX guys and the Linux kernel guys together, we could have a killer O/S.

> Actually, no. In 1994, SCOTUS found that using a melody from another song is legal fair use,
> if the new version is genuinely a new song, even if the entire song is noticeably similar to the original.

And I thought that you could copyright as little as four notes.

It's 2007 and STILL people are spreading the myth. Hey, I also hear Bill Gates will give you a check if you forward his email...

Ibn Warraq, the author, was debunked quickly after this came out. Any Muslim will tell you that the Quran originated from God (and Muhammad PBUH was not in Syria to pick up the Syrian Ibn Warraq claims), the Quran is in Arabic (and not Syrian like the author claims), and that there are hadith (another source of Islam) that specifically state that they are people and not raisins. His stupid methodology is nothing but sour grapes, pardon the pun.

Everyone knows that alien motherships run Mac OS. The fact that it's almost Independence Day should have reminded you of that fact.

First, let me say that there's really no problem with the statement that the star has probably already gone supernova and we just haven't seen it yet. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to say that refers to things according to the time and space coordinates of our frame of reference here on Earth.

However, it is true that according to special relativity, this is a subjective statement. An observer moving relative to us in the right way would disagree. In his frame of reference the supernova explosion has not happened yet by the time this story went up on Slashdot. This is because the two events, the story being posted on Slashdot and the star going supernova, are space-like separated, which is to say that you'd have to go faster than light to be present at both events and one cannot directly influence the other. When two events in spacetime have space-like separation, they don't have an objective ordering in time, observers in different reference frames may disagree about which happened first. Any statement about the timing of such events is a subjective statement that depends on the observer's frame of reference. If the events had a time-like separation (like any two events that affect one another) then their time ordering would be an objective fact that all observers could agree on.

For more detail on this topic, please see my articles on relative simultaneity and the light cone of an event (where I try to explain this clearly) or consult a book on Special Relativity. General relativity probably isn't very relevant here.

First, let me say that there's really no problem with the statement that the star has probably already gone supernova and we just haven't seen it yet. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to say that refers to things according to the time and space coordinates of our frame of reference here on Earth.

However, it is true that according to special relativity, this is a subjective statement. An observer moving relative to us in the right way would disagree. In his frame of reference the supernova explosion has not happened yet by the time this story went up on Slashdot. This is because the two events, the story being posted on Slashdot and the star going supernova, are space-like separated, which is to say that you'd have to go faster than light to be present at both events and one cannot directly influence the other. When two events in spacetime have space-like separation, they don't have an objective ordering in time, observers in different reference frames may disagree about which happened first. Any statement about the timing of such events is a subjective statement that depends on the observer's frame of reference. If the events had a time-like separation (like any two events that affect one another) then their time ordering would be an objective fact that all observers could agree on.

For more detail on this topic, please see my articles on relative simultaneity and the light cone of an event (where I try to explain this clearly) or consult a book on Special Relativity. General relativity probably isn't very relevant here.

Help him out. The myth is reviewed at snopes.com [snopes.com]. Maybe his dad reads snopes just for stories to unload on him.

Nice. Calvin's dad would.

Nevermind, I surrender.

• francesucks.com
• i-hate-france.com
• Why France sucks@Everything2.com
• w a n d e r l i s t - Why France Sucks

A 1m or less sphere, accurate to an atom's radius?

Not as many digits as you might think.

"note that 39 digits of pi suffice to calculate the circumference of the known universe from its radius to within the diameter of the hydrogen atom"

Remember, each digit is a 10* order of magnitude.

A 1m or less sphere, accurate to an atom's radius?

Not as many digits as you might think.

"note that 39 digits of pi suffice to calculate the circumference of the known universe from its radius to within the diameter of the hydrogen atom"

Remember, each digit is a 10* order of magnitude.

I found some alternate theories that are also attempting to precisely measure the kilogram at everything2. They look pretty interesting, here's a small excerpt:

Superconducting levitation

This method works along essentially the same principles as the Watt Balance. In it, a superconductor of a known mass is placed within a superconducting coil. By running current through the coil, a magnetic field is generated that causes the superconducting mass to levitate. By levitating it at different positions and measuring the current required to do so, the magnetic flux can be calculated. Magnetic flux relates directly to Planck's constant, and because the force generated by the magnetically-induced levitation and the downward force of gravity must be equal, Planck's constant can thus be precisely related to the kilogram.

Hey wait, TFA skims over what they're going to do with the Silicon ball once its made. Again, from everything1:

X-ray interferometry is used to determine the distance between lattice planes in the silicon crystal, permitting physicists to determine, as closely as possible, the number of atoms in these spheres. Currently, a measurement accuracy of one part in 10^7 is possible, after considering all of the various sorts of error introduced in the process, but it is hoped that ten times this accuracy will be possible within five years.

Nope, not offtopic, you ignoramuses

Offtopic should be used sparingly ... all too often I see it used in a way that only reveals the moderator's ignorance of the topic. Rant, rave, etc. ....

You're new here, aren't you?

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=139135 2

It's called Tongue in Cheek humor. It can require some ability to recognize nuances in language or technique, and given the number of self-proclaimed Asperger's syndrome patients on Slashdot, I'm not entirely surprised it has been modded troll.

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=tap has a list. I'd copy paste it but the lameness filter throws a fit.

"Teleporting matter by breaking it down and reconstructing it on the other end ain't going to happen. There are so many holes in that approach that its not funny."

Bwahahaahaha!

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=174681 7
"So many holes..." oh dear me...

The gist of the argument is that special relativity divides the universe into three regions of spacetime: the timelike future (which is the set of all points where you COULD be in the future if you could travel at any speed up to and including the speed of light), the timelike past (which is where all events that could POSSIBLY have an affect on you at the present reside) and "elsewhere", which is comprised of all other events. An example of an "elsewhere" event is the state of the Mars rovers RIGHT NOW. I can't possibly know that at the moment because there's about a 30 minute light travel time delay. It's important to realize that FTL communication connects you to an event in "elsewhere" in a causal manner.

If you draw a spacetime diagram for two people, one of whom is moving very fast (at a conventional sublight speed) relative to the other, you'll find that the "elsewhere" of one observer intersects the past of the other. So using FTL communication and sublight engines to send a message to the past would work like this:

1. Bob gets in his fancy spaceship and travels directly away from earth at 90% the speed of light. He travels for 1 year (the time and speed aren't really important, they just allow the message to be sent farther into the past).

2. Alice, on earth, sends Bob an instantaneous message using her FTL communication device. It travels to Bob along what Alice considers to be her "line of simultaneous events" - the line in her spacetime diagram that goes through her present position and on through "elsewhere", to define the "present". It's not necessary for Alice's communication to be instantaneous, but it makes the argument (a little) clearer and doesn't really matter because going 1.0000001x the speed of light is just as impossible as going infinitely fast (as an instantaneous communication device would have to do).

3. Bob receives the message at the exact instant (in Alice's timeframe) as when she sent it. He then sends the message back to Alice using the same FTL device. The difference is that Bob is travelling at 90% of the speed of light, so his "line of simultaneous events" is completely different- it actually intersects Alice's "timelike past".

All of this makes a lot more sense once you get the hang of drawing spacetime diagrams, but it confused me for many years. You might want to google for tutorials on spacetime diagrams or "pole and barn" paradoxes to see some examples of spacetime diagrams...

But I checked the other answers to the original question, and found that they answer it by redefining words. That's a non-answer in my book. But that's the only way people can still use the word.

Parody has successfully been used as a defence against trademark infringements, also. See this excellent article on the subject. It seems tricky to make the defence work, but it can be done.

Had Lincoln been saved, the United States and probably the world would not be recognizable.
 
If I recall history correctly, it was not Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation nor even the defeat of the Confederate States in the Civil War that brought our country together. Lincoln's death had a major impact on the people as a whole. Reunification was cemented by it. The south was embarrassed by Boothe's action and rebellious groups ceased their activities.

Lincoln was a visionary and a very ethical man according to the history books. Had he lived, the country likely would have remained divided amongst the peoples, mentally and spiritually. I doubt our country would have unified, worked together and developed as we have. Very possibly Japan and Russia would have ended up as the only super powers in the 30's and 40's and that would leave us in a fascist/socialist/communist world.

Besides, if Lincoln were alive today he'd be appalled at the current legal, political and governmental systems we have in place. No room for ethics whatsoever.

Binding a honeydew mellon with an inch of fiberglass tape to represent Kennedy's skull (on the model proposed by Nobel-laureate physicist Luis Walter Alvarez), Teller puts a shot through it. Slow motion photography shows how the spray of goo exiting the mellon propels it back towards the shooter. Put another way, "back and to the left" is another way to say "shot from the Texas School Book Depository Building."

That reminds me of this site: http://everything2.com/?node_id=1029506

He talks about a court case that determined only 4 notes had to be in common to violate copyright. With that logic, he determined that there are only 46,656 distinct melodies.

Assume that all songs use a Western musical scale and that such a scale contains twelve distinct intervals. Assume that a judge (not a musician but a judge) will distinguish three distinct note durations (which roughly correspond to eighth, quarter, and half notes, or through a trivial change in time signature, to quarter, half, and whole notes, or to sixteenth, eighth, and quarter notes). Thus, there are 36 possible distance vectors from one note to the next, and 36^(n - 1) melodies of n notes.

And not all of those would be worth listening to... so pretty much any 4-notes you play probably violate someone's copyright.

I agree it is all down too driving sensibly. Alot of people don't seem to realise there is no point accellerating towards slow moving traffic, you'll end up waiting, also in a jam wait for a good sized gap in front of you car.

BTW I did not know that Priuses had jump engines...

Sure, that's a reasonable thing to say. But while we're being pedantic, we could also point out that it's all relative. Since the event of the explosion has a space-like separation from the events occurring on Earth now (e.g. the post), the time ordering of the events is different in different inertial frames of reference. Thus, it may not have happened yet, or it may already have happened, depending on whom you ask (specifically, what reference frame they're in). Still, I'll grant you that in the instantaneously co-moving rest frame of anybody on Earth right now, it would be correct to say it has probably already happened.

Have we got that all out of our systems now?

PASS will use a solid-state laser, which only needs a supply of electricity, but the engineering challenges are still significant, says Braun.

"The biggest problems with mobile laser systems in the field are the power supply concerns, overall size of the laser and optics, and the tolerance for those optics to endure rapid changes in temperature, airborne particulate and the kinds of vibrations a military platform imparts on its load." Says Braun.

we need to be increasing our manned space program, and start some colonies of our own.

Right, let me begin by saying that after reading ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/dburger/papers/IEEECOM PUTER04_trips.pdf it actually became a bit more clear about what they were talking about.

It might sound very novel if you are only accustomed to normal processors. Look at MOVE http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=103228 8&lastnode_id=0 to see what transport-triggered architectures are about. They are more power efficient, etc etc.

Secondly, they talk about how execution graphs are mapped onto their processing grid. I don't think any scheduler has a problem with scheduling an execution graph (or whatever name you give it) to an architecture. Generally, it can be scheduled in-time (there is a critical path somewhere) or it is scheduled with a certain degree (generally > .9 efficient) of optimality. I don't see the gain there in efficiency.

Now here comes the shameless self-plug. If you want to gain efficiency in scheduling a node of an execution graph you have to know which node is more critical than the other. The critical nodes (the ones on the critical path) need to be scheduled to the fast/optimized processing units and the others can be scheduled to slow/efficient processing units (and they can get some communication delays without penalty). Look http://ce.et.tudelft.nl/publicationfiles/786_11_dh ofstee_v1.0_18july2003_eindverslag.pdf here for my thesis.

Were you on a specific diet? What foods did you a) eat and b) not eat. Just a health-aware geek trying to get in shape.

I was on something like the Atkins diet, but I didn't buy a book or anything. I just kept my carb intake below 50g/day religiously - NO CHEATING - and the weight dropped off. For the first nine months I was pretty much sitting on my ass and consistently lost ten pounds a month.

I wrote the following two articles about the atkins diet and the food pyramid and what to eat on the atkins diet for Everything2.

Were you on a specific diet? What foods did you a) eat and b) not eat. Just a health-aware geek trying to get in shape.

I was on something like the Atkins diet, but I didn't buy a book or anything. I just kept my carb intake below 50g/day religiously - NO CHEATING - and the weight dropped off. For the first nine months I was pretty much sitting on my ass and consistently lost ten pounds a month.

I wrote the following two articles about the atkins diet and the food pyramid and what to eat on the atkins diet for Everything2.

Were you on a specific diet? What foods did you a) eat and b) not eat. Just a health-aware geek trying to get in shape.

I was on something like the Atkins diet, but I didn't buy a book or anything. I just kept my carb intake below 50g/day religiously - NO CHEATING - and the weight dropped off. For the first nine months I was pretty much sitting on my ass and consistently lost ten pounds a month.

I wrote the following two articles about the atkins diet and the food pyramid and what to eat on the atkins diet for Everything2.

The E2 "building" is right here. Dang kids; get off of my lawn.