Slashdot Mirror

If you really want to understand this(time dilation), you must read some notes on special relativity, keeping in mind 2 things:

1) Light moves at a constant speed no matter where it originates from/what frame it is in
2) Our appreciation of "speed" is only terms of information/light reaching us from from other frames

Think of this: You have a metre long ruler with a laser source attached to one end, and identical clocks at both ends. If the ruler is now made to move at a constant speed along some visible x-axis, the laser/light beam STILL moves with the same speed c along the x-axis with the ruler. It is not "pushed" along with the ruler at all. This means that it will take more time for the light to reach the other end, even though the light is moving with the ruler which moving with speed v with respect to the axis.

Of course, if the ruler was sliding in the negative x-axis, the light will still have the same speed (i.e it wont get "pulled" in the new direction) meaning that it will complete the "metre" distance in less time as measured by the clocks.

And that is where the story begins. If you really want to know, and it is indeed worth knowing, try:

http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/notes/
http://people.hofstra.edu/faculty/Stefan_Waner/dif f_geom/tc.html

Just out of curiosity, have any of those that downloaded the torrent bought either of your books? If somebody found some value in your work they would surely encourage($$) you to produce more. Especially if you're small-time when it's much harder. Maybe the bagel man analogy doesn't work on the Internet?

The H20 has a different absorption spectra than CO2.

As a consequence increasing CO2 concentrations will trap different frequencies of IR radiation. Making the earth warmer, which increases the H20 component as well (both a positive (h20 vapor) and negative(clouds) feedback).

Water vapor readily condenses out of the atmosphere, (with a half life measured in days or weeks).. Meanwhile CO2 has a significantly longer half life in the atmosphere. CO2 was in equilibrium before mankind started burning all of those buried fossil fuels. Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels starting tomorrow it would take centuries before earth's atmosphere reached it's previous equilibrium.

Recently observed spike in the rate of CO2 PPM change indicated that the earth's biosphere is reaching a saturation point and might start out gassing stored CO2 in a self re-enforcing feedback. Increasing probability of triggering an ELE like the one which occurred during the Permian-Triassic extinction.

There are a number of other self re-enforcing GW feedbacks in Earth's biosphere.

Thawing out of frozen tundra and restarting the suspended decay process,
Releasing tens of billion tons of CH4 into atmosphere,
half life 9 years before decaying to C02 and 2*H20.

Thawing out of frozen methane hydrate deposits under ocean floor.
(Trillions of tons of CH4.)

Desolving of existing calcium carbonate deposits (coral reefs).
Note: Nearly all of Florida is one big coral reef.

And finally, the ultimate re-enforcing feedback Biosphere KILLER.
Photosynthesis reaction ceases once a plant's cell temperature reaches 104F (40C)!!!!!

Race is a social construction. The term race is itself "racist" because it has roots in a scientific theory that there are different sub-species of humans. There are only a few ultra right-wing scientists left who still hold on to this theory.

Over the sample period we observe 1.75 million file downloads or roughly ten per minute.10 This is about 0.01% of all the downloads in the world. A significant majority of the downloads were music files. U.S. users accounted for about one third of the downloads (and the data contain about 0.01% of all music downloads by U.S. users).

The mean of sales for these albums during our observation period is 151,786 copies, ranging from 71 copies to 3.5 million copies.

We find that file sharing has no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample.

If we are correct in arguing that downloading has little effect on the production of music, then file sharing probably increases aggregate welfare. Shifts from sales to downloads are simply transfers between firms and consumers. And while we have argued that file sharing imposes little dynamic cost in terms of future production, it has considerably increased the consumption of recorded music. File sharing lowers the price and allows an apparently large pool of individuals to enjoy music. The sheer magnitude of this activity, the billions of tracks which are downloaded each year, suggests the added social welfare from file sharing is likely to be quite high.

I know it isn't the point, but take a look at the keyboard in these pictures:

http://www.activewin.com/screenshots/officexpkeybo ard/images/officekeyboard.JPG
http://home.uchicago.edu/~iyjung/bigpictures/48.jp g

That is the way MS is pushing for layouts. Do you notice that the Insert key isn't there? It's now a control key off of some other random key. Which key that is will change between just about every keyboard model.

Sure, we can keep the Caps Lock key in the wrong place, hell, even on dedicated key at all, but we get rid of the Insert key. Go figure.

"Maybe, just maybe, the poor can't afford the fat cat lifestyles of suberbia."

Actually, the exact opposite is true: Poor people are fatter than rich people.

Why? The answer is obvious: processed, fatty foods are cheaper than natural, organic health foods. Potato chips for 99 cents, pizzas for $4-$6 each, generic soda 24 cans for $5, 2-liter soda for 99 cents, McD's Dollar Menu, all you can eat pizza for $4.49. Compare that with the expensive foods at your local Health Food Store, soy milk, free-range eggs, growth-hormone free vegetables, etc. It's expensive to live a healthy lifestyle and the poor can not afford to do so so they're fatter than the rich who can afford $7 per gallon of Soy Milk compared to ~$2.50 for 1 gallon of regular milk.

There is a theory that back in the way back, human hunters used to chase animals into a daze. They just ran them to exhaustion. Pretty cool.

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?i d=doi:10.1086/508695&erFrom=-4804578890453717243Gu est
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/164829

And by 'theory' and 'way back', I mean that there are people that still do it today...

And what do you mean that I have to count that giant bag of Doritos as calories? I just had it for a snack, not at dinner time.

There's a ten year old study that says that just having other citizens carry concealed weapons improves your safety overall. I've never heard a rebuttal that held any water. So, even if you don't want to carry a weapon yourself, you do want to live in a state that allows it. :)

Noah Webster, Miscellaneous Remarks on Divizions of Property . . . in the United States

Noah Webster, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution

Noah Webster, of Webster's Dictionary fame (the reason we don't spell color, colour), was the Federalist who gave the most detailed account of the nature of property and wealth to a free society. Essentially, he stated that the point of the Constitution was to break up power so that it would be too difficult to gain enough for one group of citizens to deny the rights of another group. The creation of 2nd class citizens (slaves were not citizens and indentured servants had rights) undermines the Constitution. The idea that Webster brought to the forefront was that wealth is power, therefore one the Constitution cannot survive an economic system that concentrates wealth and therefore power.

The second link was a paper written "at the request of the federalist leadership shortly after the ratification debate had begun" (Bailyn, Ideological Origins... p373). These ideas were in response to alleged errors made by Montesquieu first noted by the Willian Vans Murrary, an American law-student studying in London after the revolution.

Webster talks primarily of real property, ie land. In an agrarian economy real land is the primary infrastructure for the creation of wealth. Now that we have moved to a different economy, the fact that wealth equals power and the vulnerabilities of the Constitution have not changed, so we must adapt our regulations of the market in accordence. The historic record shows that the vast majority of the Founding generation would be shocked and deeply disturbed by the inequality of wealth in this country today and the trends regarding those statistics. They would see it as endangering the Constitution itself. I'm not for radical reorganization of wealth, I believe redistributing growth is much more efficient and fair than redistributing existing wealth. That's why income inequality is such an important factor and why it matters. It may not be the only problem and it may be a symptom of larger issues, but it's an effective measure given the current economic structure of the nation.

Noah Webster, Miscellaneous Remarks on Divizions of Property . . . in the United States

Noah Webster, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution

Noah Webster, of Webster's Dictionary fame (the reason we don't spell color, colour), was the Federalist who gave the most detailed account of the nature of property and wealth to a free society. Essentially, he stated that the point of the Constitution was to break up power so that it would be too difficult to gain enough for one group of citizens to deny the rights of another group. The creation of 2nd class citizens (slaves were not citizens and indentured servants had rights) undermines the Constitution. The idea that Webster brought to the forefront was that wealth is power, therefore one the Constitution cannot survive an economic system that concentrates wealth and therefore power.

The second link was a paper written "at the request of the federalist leadership shortly after the ratification debate had begun" (Bailyn, Ideological Origins... p373). These ideas were in response to alleged errors made by Montesquieu first noted by the Willian Vans Murrary, an American law-student studying in London after the revolution.

Webster talks primarily of real property, ie land. In an agrarian economy real land is the primary infrastructure for the creation of wealth. Now that we have moved to a different economy, the fact that wealth equals power and the vulnerabilities of the Constitution have not changed, so we must adapt our regulations of the market in accordence. The historic record shows that the vast majority of the Founding generation would be shocked and deeply disturbed by the inequality of wealth in this country today and the trends regarding those statistics. They would see it as endangering the Constitution itself. I'm not for radical reorganization of wealth, I believe redistributing growth is much more efficient and fair than redistributing existing wealth. That's why income inequality is such an important factor and why it matters. It may not be the only problem and it may be a symptom of larger issues, but it's an effective measure given the current economic structure of the nation.

They can only be proven true, by finding the so called dark matter, but cannot be proven false by any means.

Even your interpretation doesn't admit to the possibility that a scientist may not wish to bother fighting the regulations. That is, by accepting the workplace requirements it's not an endorcement of pseudoscience, but simply not wishing to bother fighting the regulations.

More and more I've seen people demand scientists become political advocates of one form or another. Al Gore asks scientists to become advocates of Global Warming policy change. This guy demands scientists rebel against workplace changes intended to reduce secrecy leaks. And all demand that scientists become political advocates and engage in policy discussions--and suggest that if scientists are not advocates, they cannot possibly be scientists. (After all, if as a scientist you are not demanding passage of HR bill something-or-another, you're just supporting pseudo-science.)

Uh, excuse me, but my fundamental problem here is that science is not advocacy. Science is about discovery and uncovering the truth. Politics is about advocating people change their behavior either through coersion or through force, such as the force of laws. The more and more I hear people state that Science is about Advocacy--that is, the more and more I see people demand scientists become politicians and advocates, the more and more I see science being perverted and twisted away from the desire for Truth and towards framing research to support a particular policy position.

Frankly it concerns me that as science is used for advocacy purposes and not for the simple joy of discovering the truth, we will see more and more "scientific" results framed to advocate a point of view--be it the "health benefits" of cigarette smoking to the "damaging results" of game playing or pornography--and "science" itself will be perverted to the point of untrustworthiness.

In fact, we're most of the way there: how quickly would people on Slashdot reject a "scientific report" showing that people who play video games are more antisocial and more prone to violent behavior?

For those of you wanting high quality and a connection that works:

http://banshee.uchicago.edu/~nathanw/2230_6163_2.p ng
http://banshee.uchicago.edu/~nathanw/2230_6163_3.t if

For those of you wanting high quality and a connection that works:

http://banshee.uchicago.edu/~nathanw/2230_6163_2.p ng
http://banshee.uchicago.edu/~nathanw/2230_6163_3.t if

Here goes slashdotting my own machine (100 Mbit should do it, though):
http://banshee.uchicago.edu/~nathanw/2230_6163_2.p ng

TIFF version will be up soon-ish

Would you say, then, that the Progress Clause (or whatever we should call it) has always been a dead letter, overridden completely by the First Amendment? It's a legally plausible position, as you'd be saying that the Amendment (which came after the Clause) eliminates and blocks all restrictions on freedom of the press, therefore canceling the authority that the Clause gives Congress to grant exclusive reproduction rights to media. But if that's so, then all copyrights are unconstitutional, and possibly even patents.

A letter by Jefferson presented his idea that "the exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society." He wrote that "natural law" or "universal law" or "nature" was the source of our rights. He distinguished between those rights "derived from nature" and those from "the gift of social law," putting patent/copyright firmly in the latter category and questioning its practical worth even in that capacity.

The legal implications of this tool greatly outweighs the technical considerations. Especially when you consider that there is a good chance somebody from another country might be infringing and then you get into a big mess of bureaucracy. But I think these sorts of ventures will ultimately fail because they underestimate the honesty of most people. See this interesting little tidbit from Freakonomics for a telling example.

Arp's ejection model (1998):
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/issue s/ApJ/v496n2/36745/36745.html

As seen in the above illustration, quasars are ejected from their parent galaxy and will evolve into mature galaxies over time. Arp's model is based on observations of active (Seyfert) galaxies that show pairing of identically redshifted quasars predominantly along the minor (rotation) axis of these galaxies.

In a recent paper by astronomers Lopéz-Corredoira and Gutiérrez (astro-ph/0609514), a statistical investigation was performed to test if there are overdensities of QSOs along the minor axis (rotation axis) of nearby galaxies, as predicted by Arp's model. To this end, the authors selected 71 nearby edge-on spiral galaxies that were sufficiently well-studied and compared the positions of QSOs from a large database. The edge-on constraint was necessary to ensure a clear direction of the rotation axis. Indeed, the authors found an overdensity towards the minor axis. Depending on the magnitude of the quasars, the overdensity was found to be between 13% and 38%, with a statistical significance of 3.9 sigma (chance of this finding being a fluke is roughly 1 in 10,000). While the authors are cautiously describing this result as "tentative", it is the first time that a statistical relation was found in support of Arp's ejection model.

A lot has actually happened since then -- especially recently with the Deep Impact mission. It would appear that the results of that mission don't match traditional cometary theory *at all*. The curious thing though is that the unusual Deep Impact results did not cause a lot of chatter. And this is the problem with astrophysics today that links these two cases together: there is no interest in understanding anomalies anymore. If Whipple's theory about comets being pushed around by jets appears to be wrong, then comets continue to have unexplained non-gravitational acceleration. This is exactly what EU Theory states -- that there is a link between gravity and electrical charge of a body in space.

I've spent time learning about the traditional model of astronomy. I didn't start out with EU Theory. But I found EU Theory to be more compelling. The EU guys make some good points and I've thought a lot about them on my own. My own opinion is that astrophysics has made the mistake of attempting a divide-and-conquer strategy. Rather than trying to identify unifying principles of the universe, they have subdivided the universe's components into small parts. Planets and comets are great examples. We know that both planets and comets have plasma tails. But rather than trying to understand the plasma tail in terms that affect them both, they've created completely different terminology for the two things -- even

The original article is from The Astrophysical Journal and I'm not sure if you can read this but I'll link it here. I have an account so that may be unreachable, if it is try the PDF of it or the abstract. I often enjoy reading the original article no matter how large and complex it is. If anything, it causes me to look up more terms so that I feel like I'm learning something.

The original article is from The Astrophysical Journal and I'm not sure if you can read this but I'll link it here. I have an account so that may be unreachable, if it is try the PDF of it or the abstract. I often enjoy reading the original article no matter how large and complex it is. If anything, it causes me to look up more terms so that I feel like I'm learning something.

The original article is from The Astrophysical Journal and I'm not sure if you can read this but I'll link it here. I have an account so that may be unreachable, if it is try the PDF of it or the abstract. I often enjoy reading the original article no matter how large and complex it is. If anything, it causes me to look up more terms so that I feel like I'm learning something.

This is more-or-less lifted straight from the book "Freakonomics," by Steven D. Levitt that came out last year; so what is new?..

-Here is Levitt's homepage; here is his blog..

..Here is *cough*

I guess you're really buying the corporate justification argument. Copyrights, patents, trade secrets, were not created to benefit society at large, but to create IP rights.

Copyrights, patents, trade secrets, were not created to benefit society at large, but to create IP rights.

"Prove" is a very high standard, so probably not. "Support," yes. Here is the very first google result for "computer-games children violence", which is 5 years old but references a meta-analysis of 35 studies which had already been performed. And these studies are mentioned on Slashdot from time to time. Of course, people are very quick to discount studies they don't want to believe. Let's assume the studies are only somewhat rigorous. Even so, are there some equally rigorous studies disputing these results? I know there are some touting other benefits of games, like cognitive skills. But enough work has been done on a link to violence to raise it as an issue.

Take a look at this article of recent evolution in homo sapiens over the last 10,000 years.
A layperson's summary.
The actual publication.

I have long been against this, primarily because my Grandmother railed about it, God bless her soul. The older generation does die out, the newer generation forgets the promises Government made. We are not to be assigned ID numbers like in the concentration camp! People were justly afraid of being identified by a permanent number. And they would only vote for Social Security, if they were assured the SSN was limited and private.

They trusted their government. It is quite hopeful, the world was so naiive then.

My Grandmother also railed against the toll on the Bay Bridge being reinstated. They PROMISED that when the bridge was "paid off" in 35 years, they would no longer charge a toll. And then what happened? Suffice it to say, Grandma is rolling in her grave.

So, yes, we used to not be obliged to identify ourselves by permanent number, but now we are obliged. People do what authority tells them. We most of us know it's wrong, but the world does not consult with us... Anyone read They Thought They Were Free lately?

The current issue of the Journal of Law & Economics has four articles dealing with similar issues and analyses. The authors of each of the articles are, as typical in academic literature, fairly cautious in drawing their conclusions and they are a mixed bag. The articles and their topics are limited in scope but they're peer reviewed and fairly interesting. Alejandro Zentner, the author of one of the article "Measuring the Effect of File-Sharing on Music Purchases," seems to have reached a similar conclusion as the article of the article described by Ars Technica.

Here's what it actually says:

[1] the Congress shall have Power... [8] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries....

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/tocs/a1_8_ 8.html

NOTE: This response became amazingly long. I pasted it into OpenOffice.org and ran a word-count. 2,630. Better get your popcorn now, 'cause there's no intermission.

Ooo, this one's interesting. But actually, I have already thought about this. Let me go through and actually answer all those rhetorical questions you pose. (That's the danger with asking rhetorical questions - if your audience answers them in a way you didn't anticipate, they rapidly become unpersuasive.)

> When you share your ideas with others, do you own those ideas?

Nope. You can't own ideas; they're non-tangible. Perhaps you are thinking of Thomas Jefferson's Letter to Isaac Mcpherson, wherein he states "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."

> Does it matter if you wrote them down first?

Again, no.

> Does it matter where you drew inspiration for those ideas?

Depends on how you mean "matter." If you're trying to imply that drawing inspiration from older works makes the derivative work less valuable, then clearly the answer is "no."

> While you and I might agree that plagiarism is lying, theft, and wrong, would it shock you to
> learn that not everyone thinks as we do?

I teach rhetoric and composition for a living. That's ALL about disagreement. Furthermore, I'm not stupid. Of course people think differently from one another; and what a dull, lifeless world it would be if we didn't!

> Is it equally shocking that after a whole freaking class period on the topic, others still do not agree?

Since we've established that I'm not shocked by the existence of disagreement, I am also not shocked by the fact that my students disagree with me about plagiarism. What I do find irritating (and puzzling!) is that when they're clearly told "X is plagiarism; don't do it; if you do you'll get punished," they apparently lack the self-interest to avoid the punishment. I think perhaps that they're still learning that (shock!) rules really do apply to them, they're not exempt.

> Do you attribute this to a lack of moral values or understanding?

If by "this" you mean "the student's disagreement," then neither. I attribute it to broad cultural forces that have de-emphasized the importance of personal responsibility, and also to their youth. Young people do stupid stuff, because they haven't learned better. IF, however, the word "this" refers to the infringing behavior, then it depends on the student. I've seen some who simply didn't understand; and others who consciously set out to subvert the system for their own personal gain.

> As more and more members of society become literate writers, and as our capacity to both capture and
> share these writings increase, the total space available for new and original work decreases.

Two points. First, I find your assumption that there is a finite amount of knowledge highly dubious. There are three types of knowledge: that which we know and understand; that which we know of but do not understand; and that which we do not know at all. In the first type, we often discover that something we thought we understood we actually didn't. EG: Newton's laws of gravity turned out not to account for all observable phenomena, and so Einstein was led to re-consider the problem. The second type is often easier to see -- we know there's something going on, but don't fully understand it. EG: we know what the human genome does, but there remains a huge amount that we don't know about how exactly it works, hence the field of proteomics. The third type is the most troublesome of all. We don't know what we don't

Funny, we had a robotics class for "gifted studends" in my elementary school using some setup called Lego-Logo. It was around 1989-1990. It was like mindstorms. Build a little Lego gizmo, hook up the controllable parts to the computer, and use LOGO to drive it. See this for some info.

For those of you who want to read more on it. I'm currently ploguhing through his paper and and a few others but if anyone of the top knows whether Lieu used sigma8 from the WMAP 3yr results and how he selected clusters and estimated cluster mass... Skimming Lieu's paper his conclusion already claims that it is not inconsistent with previous SZE data for individual clusters. Anyways back to digesting papers.
 
Linkys

A primer on the SZE

[PDF WARNING]
Their paper on astro-ph

The WMAP 3 year results paper

[/PDF WARNING]

As far as I understood the article, the shadowing effect is expected not due to absorption/inelastic scattering (where I could understand the shadow effect), but due to elastic scattering (the photons just change their direction).

The article is probably a bit misleading. The Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect seems to come from inelastic Compton scattering. This leads to a distortion of the original blackbody spectrum of the CMBR. The term "shadow" merely comes from the observation that at lower frequencies there are less photons being detected since they are shifted to higher frequencies.

so I can get one of these??
 
Stroke patients always get the coolest shit, like this.

And you think you are better of as a 'client'?
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/ secondary/SMIGRA*/Cliens.html
(in short: the word seems to go back to the latin verb cluere, to "hear" or "obey" . It is connected with slaves and owned people.)

These e-textbooks are not books in the customary sense. Sandi Kirshner, chief marketing officer for Pearson's higher-education group, says the e-textbook is offered only on a "subscription basis," which means that a student buys access for a defined period, like a semester, and cannot resell access to the book to others.

The great accomplishment of late-twentieth-century cosmology was putting together a complete inventory of the universe. We can tell a story that fits all the known data, in which ordinary matter (every particle ever detected in any experiment) constitutes only about 5% of the energy of the universe, with 25% being dark matter and 70% being dark energy. The challenge for early-twentyfirst-century cosmology will actually be to understand the nature of these mysterious dark components. A beautiful new result illuminating (if you will) the dark matter in galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56 is an important step in this direction. (Heres the press release, and an article in the Chandra Chronicles.)

A prerequisite to understanding the dark sector is to make sure we are on the right track. Can we be sure that we havent been fooled into believing in dark matter and dark energy? After all, we only infer their existence from detecting their gravitational fields; stronger-than-expected gravity in galaxies and clusters leads us to posit dark matter, while the acceleration of the universe (and the overall geometry of space) leads us to posit dark energy. Could it perhaps be that gravity is modified on the enormous distance scales characteristic of these phenomena? Einsteins general theory of relativity does a great job of accounting for the behavior of gravity in the Solar System and astrophysical systems like the binary pulsar, but might it be breaking down over larger distances?

A departure from general relativity on very large scales isnt what one would expect on general principles. In most physical theories that we know and love, modifications are expected to arise on small scales (higher energies), while larger scales should behave themselves. But, we have to keep an open mind in principle, its absolutely possible that gravity could be modified, and its worth taking seriously.

Furthermore, it would be really cool. Personally, I would prefer to explain cosmological dynamics using modified gravity instead of dark matter and dark energy, just because it would tell us something qualitatively different about how physics works. (And Vera Rubin agrees.) We would all love to out-Einstein Einstein by coming up with a better theory of gravity. But our job isnt to express preferences, its to suggest hypotheses and then go out and test them.

The problem is, how do you test an idea as vague as modifying general relativity? You can imagine testing specific proposals for how gravity should be modified, like Milgroms MOND, but in more general terms we might worry that any observations could be explained by some modification of gravity.

But its not quite so bad there are reasonable features that any respectable modification of general relativity ought to have. Specifically, we expect that the gravitational force should point in the direction of its source, not off at some bizarrely skewed angle. So if we imagine doing away with dark matter, we can safely predict that gravity always be pointing in the direction of the ordinary matter. Thats interesting but not immediately helpful, since its natural to expect that the ordinary matter and dark matter cluster in the same locations; even if there is dark matter, its no surprise to find the gravitational field pointing toward the visible matter as well.

What we really want is to ta

Ahem ... "obscure journal" indeed!!!

The APJ would have to be the premier publication for publishing astrophysical papers. It is a journal read by everybody doing astronomy related research.

Nature and Science are generalist magazines with severe space constraints. Nobody would choose to publish this sort of paper in either of those journals.

They can claim Bush molested his daughters knowing full well he didn't and get rid of him.

That would be silly, given all the unconstitutional/illegal things he has admitted (even bragged) about doing.

Now, assuming Congress is going to do things legally, I don't think you can impeach and convict a judge for the rulings he makes.

Not at all correct. As Hamilton pointed out in the Federalist Papers, impeachment of judges for rulings which go against the intent of congress is an essential part of the checks and balances:

There never can be danger that the judges, by a series of deliberate usurpations on the authority of the legislature, would hazard the united resentment of the body entrusted with it, while this body was possessed of the means of punishing their presumption by degrading them from their stations. While this ought to remove all apprehensions on the subject, it affords at the same time a cogent argument for constituting the senate a court for the trial of impeachments.

--MarkusQ

I find the lack of 'intermediate' species, (like fish who are starting to grow legs, or whatever) difficult for me to accept

Copyright infringement is NOT theft.

I've seen that argument so many times, but let me present you with this scenario. If you come up with an idea that is unique, and some schmuck takes that idea and beats you to the USPTO with it, don't you consider that idea stolen? Of course you do. But why? You haven't lost the idea.

Alright, here's the (hopefully definitive) solution to this argument.

The problem here is semantics: we're trying to use the words "stolen" and "theft" in three different ways. They have a legal definition, a colloquial definition, and an emotional connotation.

The GP is correct: the legal definition of "theft" is not the same as the legal definition of "copyright infringment.

You're correct: people often use the word "stolen" to describe a wide variety of property-related wrongs done to them, regardless of whether it fits the legal definition or not.

So, both of you are correct... yet you're contradicting each other. How can that be?

Well, that rests with the third (emotive) use of the word. The GP insists that copyright infringment is not theft because he feels that theft of real property is a greater moral offense than copying of "intellectual property," and therefore to equate the two is unfair. You say the opposite, because (apparently) you feel that copying of "intellectual property" is equally morally wrong as theft of real property. Thus the disagreement.

Now, here's where my bias comes in: we need to break the tie.

First of all, I agree with the GP: I say that copyright infringment is not only not as morally wrong as theft, but that in many cases it isn't morally wrong at all. I say this because copyright was never about protecting "intellectual property" to begin with. Instead, it is a social contract that exists for the purpose of maximizing the benefit to society. Therefore, when considering the merits of copyright, the effect it has on society as a whole is the only thing that matters, and that monopoly consideration afforded to individual artists is irrelevant. In fact, the artist never had any property rights to begin with: when a work is created it automatically becomes Public Domain but is then leased back to the artist, with the payment having been the original creation of it.

Second, you don't have to take my word on this; the writings of the guy who created the copyright clause in the Constitution (i.e., Thomas Jefferson) make his position quite clear. See: 1, 2.

Hutter naming this theory after himself is silly. It's called the theory of "minimum description length" and it's been around for a while (well before the 2004 copyright on Hutter's book). The idea is to find some model which minimizes the sum: size of model + incorrectness of model's predictions. The Linguistica folks use it, and in fact would probably be in the running for this prize.

Terrorism, n. [Cf. F. terrorisme.] The act of terrorizing, or state of being terrorized; a mode of government by terror or intimidation. Jefferson.

There are several posts that mention that the universe can expand faster than light. They are right but let me see if I can expand on it some.

If you have taken a fair bit of math skip this and and go here http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/notes/ to Chapter 8 in particular.

We want the universe on the largest of scales to look isotropic and be homogeneous spatially. The first means it looks the same in all directions about some point, and the second meaning that its physical properties are the same everywhere. If the universe is isotropic about one point and it is homogeous it follows that it is isotropic about every point. Straight away there is no priveleged center and it is meaningless to talk about the center of the Big Bang or some such. Insert standard dots on a balloon or raisn bread rising explanation here but neither is perfect.

We can look at galaxies and can see spectral lines and can measure their shifts and recognize that they must be moving with respect to us, and are typically moving away from us so the univsere is expanding. So the universe must look the same from every point in space but it is not static and can look different at different times. Because we want to maintain homogeneity and isotropy through time and because we believe there are no privleged directions or points in space we want this expansion to be solely a function of time. This function of time is what is called the scale factor and it is the fundamental quantity that determines what present distances in the universe are and how fast they are changing. There is no speed of light anywhere around the scale factor, and there isn't going to be.

With all this we can write down the model for the universe, and its called the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker metric after the smart people who came up with it. Thats fancy talk for a single line that tells you how to compute the "distance" between two events each occuring at their own space and time coordinates. Its equation 8.7 in the article. If you believe we live in a flat universe which you should because theres lots of good experimental evidence for it from studying the cosmic microwave background, even that simplifies a fair bit to something that can look like ds^2 = dt^2-a^2(t)(dx^2+dy^2+dz^2).

The second section in brackets to the right of the scale factor is the way you'd compute the distance between two events in 3d space, just the sum of the squares of their differences in position, and the dt^2 is the bit that adds on time. In any local region of the universe a(t) is constant and can be taken to be one and then you have a return to happy special relativity where the speed of light is constant to all inertial observers. Take a(t) to zero and you see the singularity in the equations which we call the Big Bang. This is where the model and the equations break down and thats all we can truly say about it. The universe (hopefully) does not break down, only our model to describe it does.

This metric, which we can write happily as a diagonal matrix even can be plugged into Einsteins equations and give you yet more equations like the Friedmann equation and the acceleration equation (Carroll 8.35 and 8.36), and you can derive Hubbles law and discusses all the interesting forms of matter you can have in it including what happens in Einstein's equation has a cosmological constant term. You'll notice theres still no speed of light. Stuff in the universe cannot move faster than the speed of light according to some local observer. However, the universe is sort of the fabric on which all the stuff is and that fabric can stretch faster than the speed of light. We do see object moving faster than light. See near end for an example, more information and no serious equations http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/doppler.htm

Thats become somewhat important following the studies of distant supernovae from '98 and we now know that the univer

He had fewer votes than Gore did in Florida. See the unbiased research done months after the election. But then, who's counting? Certainly no one who thinks that votes should determine the political leadership.

"Puzzled open"? What? So now "puzzle" has become a verb that is essentially a redundant synonym for.... "solve"? *sigh*

Quoth the 1913 edition of Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary:

Puz"zle, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Puzzled (?); p. pr. & vb. n. Puzzling (?).]
...
3. To solve by ingenuity, as a puzzle; -- followed by out; as, to puzzle out a mystery.
...
Puz"zle, v. i.
...
2. To work, as at a puzzle; as, to puzzle over a problem.

Unless you're at least 90 years old, no complaining that the word's meaning has drifted.

for at least 5 years.

Granted, it seems like their tweezers might be slightly more precise than Chicago's, but as far as I can tell, the article is little more than University of Bonn's press-release saying that they're playing in the same league. Granted, Chicago now has 5 years of experience patenting the process and developing applications with it.

http://mrsec.uchicago.edu/Nuggets/Holographic_Opti cal_Tweezers/

It should be noted Chicago's method is a little more "rubic's cubish" than Bonn's "conveyor belt" setup. Coupled with what is probably a different setup for the optical trap and laser mesh, and the 5 year difference in publications, I would doubt that there would be any patent conflict and that this will wind up being a competing product.

Also, my guess is that these laser tweezers are going to play a part in the design of the first functional general nanoassemblers (of the style of Enterprise's 'replicators', not of the style of a grey goo assembler).

yes, that's an issue between the artist and the publisher, so how does that give you the right to steal the artist's work, because sony's a bitch?

The artist and Sony have a contract. Sony and I (as a member of society) have a contract. The artist and I do not have a contract (since the artist assigned the social contract to Sony). Therefore, nothing I do can affect the artist.

Look, the artist charged Sony with distributing the music. If the artist has an issue with that, then the artist has to take it up with Sony. If Sony, in turn, wants to take it up with me, then it can because it's the one that was responsible for handling that sort of thing. In fact, unless I'm mistaken if the artist has assigned copyright he can't sue anyone for infringment anymore.

that's a horrible analogy. (unless you're only refering to sony's root-kit-shit) they're not damaging you with DRM, they're just not letting you have some entertainment in the fasion that you should have it.

By trying to lock up all media, the DRM thugs are damaging culture itself. You know how the ancient world has the Library of Alexandria, and when it burned down thousands of scrolls containing priceless knowledge were lost? Well, the same thing is going to happen again today if all media becomes DRM'd! Indeed, it's even happening without DRM, because copyright keeps getting extended (which effectively makes it permanant, which is unconstitutional). There are lots of movies from the 30s and such rotting away in warehouses because they're not in the Public Domain (so interested hobbyists can't preserve them) and not profitable enough for the rights holder to preserve.

(Incidentally, although I've only particularly mentioned DRM so far, just the sheer length of copyright is, in my opinion, a violation of the social contract.)

your response assumes that what your doing is actually moral, which is not the case. though it does do a great job of averting my point. you should try to argue your opinion, no?

As should you, since you just only asserted that it's not moral also.

I think the fundamental problem here is that we're arguing from such different perspectives that our basic assumptions are incompatible. In particular, you reason from the axiom that a person's ideas are inherently his property, and that he deserves to be rewarded just for expressing them. I, on the other hand, reject that axiom and instead posit that ideas are inherently the property of society because, unlike physical property, ideas become more valuable when given away. Thomas Jefferson said "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." I completely agree with him.

Incidentally, you might want to read this (which is referenced by both this and this, which I ran across while looking up the quote) in order to better understand my position.

actually your reponce was amazing. you should become press-fucking-secretary or something, that was amazing. you just said something that sounded really intelligent, but really was nothing more than being a pompus jack-ass saying "I'm right".

What did you expect me to say? I couldn't answer either "yes" or "no" to your question, because it would require me to implicitly confirm your assumption.

How would you appreciate it if I asked you "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" when you had never beaten her to begin with (or were not married, or any other condition that would render the assuption invalid)? The answer to the question cannot be yes or no; in fact, the only single word to describe it is mu (See: "Mu in hacker culture").

...the extreme difficulty of digitizing some parts of the collection (like a 16-ton statue, for example)...

Actually, at the University of Chicago we've been doing this sort of thing for about four years now, though with a bit more than statues. It's time consuming given the current state of scanner hardware, the shear amount of data to be collected and stored and the absolutly shitty software availiable, but it's certainly not extremely difficult. Unless, of course, you count something that's time consuming as difficult.