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A theory must be falsifiable, so I guess, in that sense, if a theory is proven false (i.e. if the theory is "The cat will always go to her food when coming in from outside" and the cat is observed going to the bed instead, it has been proven false) it's false, but more correctly,, since a theory is an *explantion* it's *wrong*. It cannot be proven to be true. It can be supported by observation. It can be generally accepted (the theory of gravity, for example) but it can't be considered true in the way an observation is true or false (I either observed the cat go to her food at 3:40pm today, or I didn't).

Some reading for you:
This
this and
this

Specifically on evolution. When people say 'the theory of evolution' they usually mean one of two things:

1. The theory that states that over generations, through natural selection, species change to better fit their environment. This one has a great deal of evidence supporting it. It's extremely hard to argue against this one. I don't bother. As far as I can tell there are no glaring inconsistancies and it's about as close to correct as we can get right now.

2. The theory that humans evolved from the same predecessor as non-human primates. This one is a bit more interesting. There's lots of evidence for: physical and genetic similarities between humans and non-human primates. But we're missing the 'missing link'. While it is, to me, far more likely that humans evolved over eons than that some outside force (god? aliens?) zapped some poor unsuspecting monkey into the first human being, we don't have enough fossil evidence (or other evidence) to show that this didn't happen. My personal opinion is that this is the most likely theory, but that data could come up, even within my lifetime that suggests otherwise.

Incidently, I don't belive in god or creationism but I'd rather talk to people who have a well reasoned response for why they don't think the theory of evolution (either version) is correct then people who parrot it as gospel without thinking.

A theory must be falsifiable, so I guess, in that sense, if a theory is proven false (i.e. if the theory is "The cat will always go to her food when coming in from outside" and the cat is observed going to the bed instead, it has been proven false) it's false, but more correctly,, since a theory is an *explantion* it's *wrong*. It cannot be proven to be true. It can be supported by observation. It can be generally accepted (the theory of gravity, for example) but it can't be considered true in the way an observation is true or false (I either observed the cat go to her food at 3:40pm today, or I didn't).

Some reading for you:
This
this and
this

Specifically on evolution. When people say 'the theory of evolution' they usually mean one of two things:

1. The theory that states that over generations, through natural selection, species change to better fit their environment. This one has a great deal of evidence supporting it. It's extremely hard to argue against this one. I don't bother. As far as I can tell there are no glaring inconsistancies and it's about as close to correct as we can get right now.

2. The theory that humans evolved from the same predecessor as non-human primates. This one is a bit more interesting. There's lots of evidence for: physical and genetic similarities between humans and non-human primates. But we're missing the 'missing link'. While it is, to me, far more likely that humans evolved over eons than that some outside force (god? aliens?) zapped some poor unsuspecting monkey into the first human being, we don't have enough fossil evidence (or other evidence) to show that this didn't happen. My personal opinion is that this is the most likely theory, but that data could come up, even within my lifetime that suggests otherwise.

Incidently, I don't belive in god or creationism but I'd rather talk to people who have a well reasoned response for why they don't think the theory of evolution (either version) is correct then people who parrot it as gospel without thinking.

Sounds fine to me. Trouble with your hypothesis is, controlled experiments aren't required for the scientific method. See here. Note particularly the part where it says, "Test those predictions by experiments or further observations" [emphasis mine]

Observations and Inferences are what Aristotle did and he was later found to be wrong on just about every count with regard to the natural world.

The reason that what Aristotle did was unscientific, is that once he made his inferences, he didn't make any subsequent observations to test them. He just made his inferences and accepted them as true, without any further investigation to see if they were really true. He didn't do anything further to test his inferences--neither performing experiments, nor making further observations.

If you refuse or are unable to test your ideas with the Scientific Method, it's not science, in my book.

I agree with that statement 100%. I simply don't agree with the assertion that the scientific method requires controlled experiments.

A simple scenario: an astrophysicist comes up with a hypothesis of stellar evolution which predicts, among other things, that the sun will go supernova in 2003. When the sun does NOT go supernova in 2003, he either modifies or discards his hypothesis, now knowing that his original hypothesis is incorrect.

By what bizarre definition of "science" is this NOT science??

Why is it so important to you that a field of inquiry be identified as a Science?

You're the one who first raised the issue, in regard to evolution. Why is it so important to you?

Of course, you are actually in the mainstream here with your definitions and I'm out tilting at windmills as long as most Universities have Political Science and other similar departments.

I actually agree with you that Political Science is not a science. In fact, I tend to agree with the assertion that any field that has "science" in its name is not a science.

Thanks so much for lumping these both under the same heading of theory, Mr. Reagan.

Here's the difference: evolution is a scientific hypothesis developed to support observed evidence. Since no other hypothesis fits the observed data as well, it has been promoted to theory, but can still be supplanted by a better hypothesis or refuted by evidence which cannot be explained by current theory. Some other scientific theories you might be interested in are the theory of relativity, the universal law of gravitation, and the uncertainty principal.

Creationism is a dictated myth which observed evidence is forced to support. It cannot be refuted by any given evidence, as it is a matter of faith, and dictated to us from a single source which is assumed to be correct, and also cannot be supplanted. It is not subject to the scientific method, nor does it allow for the possibility of better explanations of observed data.

What this survey shows is not that people do not understand science, but that they cannot discern what is scientific from what is not. If something cannot be tested, or have the possibility of being refuted, then it is by nature unscientific. That doesn't make it wrong, or unbeliveable, or evil. It just means that science has nothing apropos to say on the matter. It is religion that has characterized science as evil, primarily because it encourages the individual to investigate, to think for one's self, to come to an independant conclusion, rather than accept dogmatic explanations of the nature of the universe. The case of Galileo comes to mind.

The public can't tell the difference. And religion isn't helping the public learn for themselves. As clearly evidenced by the quoted statement above. Science and faith are mutually exclusive. Science makes no assertions as to the validity of faith, or the place that faith has in society. Faith, on the other hand, feels threatened, and has lashed out at science. The result is that science education during the school week has faltered, while faith's impregnable Sunday fortress remains. I don't apply the scientific method to matters of faith. Those who do are weak believers: true faith needs no rational explanation.

Oh, just go listen to Particle Man.

no matter where you are in the universe, the laws of physics are the same for all inertial (constant velocity) frames

Are you saying that light will always be moving at c ?? Just because light enteres a medium, doesn't mean that time slows down because light is slowing down. The reason light slows down is because it has to exite every atom that it encounteres, then be thrown out again.

That's why I mentioned that c is the speed of light in a vacuum. The speed of light in a non-vacuum medium is slowed down, to c divided by the refractive index of the medium (1.33 for water, for instance). Basic optics, known well before Einstein's time.

They've even collected good evidence that the speed of light has changed over time... I'm really starting to doubt einstein.

Citations, please?

Suppose you're on a hypothetical train traveling at a constant velocity of 0.5c towards a friend, and you point a flashlight straight forward and turn it on. You perceive the beam of light as traveling toward your friend at speed c; however, your friend sees the beam of light as traveling toward him at speed c, and not speed 1.5c. How can this be?

Take a jet for example. Say it it traveling at mach 2, and it fires a missle in which the missile maximum speed is mach 5. Now there is a stationary SAM site on the ground that will be blown up in a little bit... but the SAM site sees the missle coming at him at mach 5, and not mach 7. How can this be? Because you're missing the obvious....

I'm not the one missing the obvious. Unfortunately, Slashdot won't let me draw some ASCII art to explain, but I'll try and describe it in terms that you'll understand... remember that airspeed is speed relative to the air, and that air is essentially stationary compared to the ground when you're talking about Mach speeds.

From the perspective of the SAM site, the plane is moving at speed Mach 2 angle 0 with respect to the ground, then launches a missle that quickly assumes a path in which it is traveling at speed Mach 5 angle 315, which happens to be perfectly aimed such that it will impact the SAM site.

From the perspective of the plane, the SAM site is zooming underneath at speed Mach 2 angle 180. It launches the missle (let's presume it's guided), then observes as the missle fires up and assumes a path of travel with speed Mach 3.57 angle 293.5. The missle looks like it will fall short, except that the SAM site rushes underneath the missle just in time to be hit. Stupid SAM site!

In the train example, we have a train traveling at speed 0.5c angle 0. You are standing on the train, and your friend is directly in front of the train by a safe enough distance that he'll be able to sidestep the train when it gets close. So, from your perspective, your friend is rushing toward you at speed 0.5c angle 180, and the beam of light is rushing away from you at speed c angle 0. What does your friend see? According to Newton's mechanics, he should see you rushing toward him at speed 0.5c angle 0, and the beam of light should be traveling at speed 1.5c angle 0 (simple trigonometry -- you add two vectors with the same angle by adding their magnitudes). In reality, as confirmed by countless experiments, the most famous of which are known as as the Michelson-Morley experiments, your friend perceives the beam of light as traveling at precisely c. If you fire a railgun from the train with a slug that travels at speed 0.5c angle 0 relative to you, then your friend will see the slug traveling toward him at speed 0.8c angle 0. These results have been confirmed by many, many experiments, so the burden of proof is on Einstein's doubters to show -- using repeatable and accurate experimental methods -- that an alternative explanation can exist. The physics department at the University of California at Riverside has an excellent site introducing physics, including these two pages that explain why the ether theory from the late 19th and early 20th centuries is thoroughly debunked and cannot be modified to fit the facts without becoming an unfalsifiable hypothesis (i.e. a matter of faith).

Light does have it's speed limit. The easiest explanation for that would be a drag in the ether that keeps it from exceeding that speed.

Again, see the above links for an explanation of why ether theory cannot be falsified if it is modified to be consistent with our existing knowledge.

You perceive the beam of light as traveling toward your friend at speed c

That is the mistake in the example... It is trying to prove relativity, but without relativity, that sentence would be false... You can't prove something by initially assuming that it is true; using the theory within the explanation for the theory.

The statement assumes that relativity is true, but it's a testable and falsifiable statement that, if it were false, should be trivial to debunk. Despite multitudes of measurements and experiments, especially by the people who passionately desired to show it to be false, that very statement has not been found untrue even once.

Didn't Einstein fail math?

Yes and no. He understood math quite well, but due to dyslexia he couldn't deal very well with the rote memorization and mechanized learning required of him by the school system. He eventually learned to deal with it well enough to get excellent grades.

no matter where you are in the universe, the laws of physics are the same for all inertial (constant velocity) frames

Are you saying that light will always be moving at c ?? Just because light enteres a medium, doesn't mean that time slows down because light is slowing down. The reason light slows down is because it has to exite every atom that it encounteres, then be thrown out again.

That's why I mentioned that c is the speed of light in a vacuum. The speed of light in a non-vacuum medium is slowed down, to c divided by the refractive index of the medium (1.33 for water, for instance). Basic optics, known well before Einstein's time.

They've even collected good evidence that the speed of light has changed over time... I'm really starting to doubt einstein.

Citations, please?

Suppose you're on a hypothetical train traveling at a constant velocity of 0.5c towards a friend, and you point a flashlight straight forward and turn it on. You perceive the beam of light as traveling toward your friend at speed c; however, your friend sees the beam of light as traveling toward him at speed c, and not speed 1.5c. How can this be?

Take a jet for example. Say it it traveling at mach 2, and it fires a missle in which the missile maximum speed is mach 5. Now there is a stationary SAM site on the ground that will be blown up in a little bit... but the SAM site sees the missle coming at him at mach 5, and not mach 7. How can this be? Because you're missing the obvious....

I'm not the one missing the obvious. Unfortunately, Slashdot won't let me draw some ASCII art to explain, but I'll try and describe it in terms that you'll understand... remember that airspeed is speed relative to the air, and that air is essentially stationary compared to the ground when you're talking about Mach speeds.

From the perspective of the SAM site, the plane is moving at speed Mach 2 angle 0 with respect to the ground, then launches a missle that quickly assumes a path in which it is traveling at speed Mach 5 angle 315, which happens to be perfectly aimed such that it will impact the SAM site.

From the perspective of the plane, the SAM site is zooming underneath at speed Mach 2 angle 180. It launches the missle (let's presume it's guided), then observes as the missle fires up and assumes a path of travel with speed Mach 3.57 angle 293.5. The missle looks like it will fall short, except that the SAM site rushes underneath the missle just in time to be hit. Stupid SAM site!

In the train example, we have a train traveling at speed 0.5c angle 0. You are standing on the train, and your friend is directly in front of the train by a safe enough distance that he'll be able to sidestep the train when it gets close. So, from your perspective, your friend is rushing toward you at speed 0.5c angle 180, and the beam of light is rushing away from you at speed c angle 0. What does your friend see? According to Newton's mechanics, he should see you rushing toward him at speed 0.5c angle 0, and the beam of light should be traveling at speed 1.5c angle 0 (simple trigonometry -- you add two vectors with the same angle by adding their magnitudes). In reality, as confirmed by countless experiments, the most famous of which are known as as the Michelson-Morley experiments, your friend perceives the beam of light as traveling at precisely c. If you fire a railgun from the train with a slug that travels at speed 0.5c angle 0 relative to you, then your friend will see the slug traveling toward him at speed 0.8c angle 0. These results have been confirmed by many, many experiments, so the burden of proof is on Einstein's doubters to show -- using repeatable and accurate experimental methods -- that an alternative explanation can exist. The physics department at the University of California at Riverside has an excellent site introducing physics, including these two pages that explain why the ether theory from the late 19th and early 20th centuries is thoroughly debunked and cannot be modified to fit the facts without becoming an unfalsifiable hypothesis (i.e. a matter of faith).

Light does have it's speed limit. The easiest explanation for that would be a drag in the ether that keeps it from exceeding that speed.

Again, see the above links for an explanation of why ether theory cannot be falsified if it is modified to be consistent with our existing knowledge.

You perceive the beam of light as traveling toward your friend at speed c

That is the mistake in the example... It is trying to prove relativity, but without relativity, that sentence would be false... You can't prove something by initially assuming that it is true; using the theory within the explanation for the theory.

The statement assumes that relativity is true, but it's a testable and falsifiable statement that, if it were false, should be trivial to debunk. Despite multitudes of measurements and experiments, especially by the people who passionately desired to show it to be false, that very statement has not been found untrue even once.

Didn't Einstein fail math?

Yes and no. He understood math quite well, but due to dyslexia he couldn't deal very well with the rote memorization and mechanized learning required of him by the school system. He eventually learned to deal with it well enough to get excellent grades.

no matter where you are in the universe, the laws of physics are the same for all inertial (constant velocity) frames

Are you saying that light will always be moving at c ?? Just because light enteres a medium, doesn't mean that time slows down because light is slowing down. The reason light slows down is because it has to exite every atom that it encounteres, then be thrown out again.

That's why I mentioned that c is the speed of light in a vacuum. The speed of light in a non-vacuum medium is slowed down, to c divided by the refractive index of the medium (1.33 for water, for instance). Basic optics, known well before Einstein's time.

They've even collected good evidence that the speed of light has changed over time... I'm really starting to doubt einstein.

Citations, please?

Suppose you're on a hypothetical train traveling at a constant velocity of 0.5c towards a friend, and you point a flashlight straight forward and turn it on. You perceive the beam of light as traveling toward your friend at speed c; however, your friend sees the beam of light as traveling toward him at speed c, and not speed 1.5c. How can this be?

Take a jet for example. Say it it traveling at mach 2, and it fires a missle in which the missile maximum speed is mach 5. Now there is a stationary SAM site on the ground that will be blown up in a little bit... but the SAM site sees the missle coming at him at mach 5, and not mach 7. How can this be? Because you're missing the obvious....

I'm not the one missing the obvious. Unfortunately, Slashdot won't let me draw some ASCII art to explain, but I'll try and describe it in terms that you'll understand... remember that airspeed is speed relative to the air, and that air is essentially stationary compared to the ground when you're talking about Mach speeds.

From the perspective of the SAM site, the plane is moving at speed Mach 2 angle 0 with respect to the ground, then launches a missle that quickly assumes a path in which it is traveling at speed Mach 5 angle 315, which happens to be perfectly aimed such that it will impact the SAM site.

From the perspective of the plane, the SAM site is zooming underneath at speed Mach 2 angle 180. It launches the missle (let's presume it's guided), then observes as the missle fires up and assumes a path of travel with speed Mach 3.57 angle 293.5. The missle looks like it will fall short, except that the SAM site rushes underneath the missle just in time to be hit. Stupid SAM site!

In the train example, we have a train traveling at speed 0.5c angle 0. You are standing on the train, and your friend is directly in front of the train by a safe enough distance that he'll be able to sidestep the train when it gets close. So, from your perspective, your friend is rushing toward you at speed 0.5c angle 180, and the beam of light is rushing away from you at speed c angle 0. What does your friend see? According to Newton's mechanics, he should see you rushing toward him at speed 0.5c angle 0, and the beam of light should be traveling at speed 1.5c angle 0 (simple trigonometry -- you add two vectors with the same angle by adding their magnitudes). In reality, as confirmed by countless experiments, the most famous of which are known as as the Michelson-Morley experiments, your friend perceives the beam of light as traveling at precisely c. If you fire a railgun from the train with a slug that travels at speed 0.5c angle 0 relative to you, then your friend will see the slug traveling toward him at speed 0.8c angle 0. These results have been confirmed by many, many experiments, so the burden of proof is on Einstein's doubters to show -- using repeatable and accurate experimental methods -- that an alternative explanation can exist. The physics department at the University of California at Riverside has an excellent site introducing physics, including these two pages that explain why the ether theory from the late 19th and early 20th centuries is thoroughly debunked and cannot be modified to fit the facts without becoming an unfalsifiable hypothesis (i.e. a matter of faith).

Light does have it's speed limit. The easiest explanation for that would be a drag in the ether that keeps it from exceeding that speed.

Again, see the above links for an explanation of why ether theory cannot be falsified if it is modified to be consistent with our existing knowledge.

You perceive the beam of light as traveling toward your friend at speed c

That is the mistake in the example... It is trying to prove relativity, but without relativity, that sentence would be false... You can't prove something by initially assuming that it is true; using the theory within the explanation for the theory.

The statement assumes that relativity is true, but it's a testable and falsifiable statement that, if it were false, should be trivial to debunk. Despite multitudes of measurements and experiments, especially by the people who passionately desired to show it to be false, that very statement has not been found untrue even once.

Didn't Einstein fail math?

Yes and no. He understood math quite well, but due to dyslexia he couldn't deal very well with the rote memorization and mechanized learning required of him by the school system. He eventually learned to deal with it well enough to get excellent grades.

According to item #15 of The Crackpot Index, I score your post as +5 (-5 point starting credit + 10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it). Or were you trying to be funny?

In Einstein's theory of General Relativity (which is what predicts ways of building devices allowing travel backwards in time), even stating conservation laws is problematic, and in fact on a large scale in our universe, they appear to be violated.

(Yes, stuff your physics teacher didn't tell you about.)

Which is why I'm a fan of absurdist logic.

All successful arguments must contain a contradiction/paradox somewhere.

I thought tachyons were conjectured to be possible http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndN uclear/tachyons.html. Though this does not mean time travel is possible, the idea of time travel may not be as "bizzare or impossible" as some people are saying in their posts. On a lighter note, there a funny onion spoof on time travel that is pretty funny.

17 - 10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein, or claim that special or general relativity are fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).

8 - 5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann".

A unified field theory might modify the small-distance (Planck scale) behavior of general relativity -- thus, might give different results regarding spacetime singularities. But it would not be expected to change any of the classical, general relativity results.

(That's pretty much by definition: if it doesn't reproduce the large-scale classical limit of our current theory of gravity, which is general relativity, then it wouldn't be called a "unification with gravity". Of course, if we had evidence that GR was wrong, and we replaced it with some other theory, then what would constitute a "unification with gravity" would change.)

As for your graviton question (none of your three conjectures are right), see the FAQ.

According to general relativity, gravity propagates at the speed of light. There aren't any known shortcuts, even in theory, around the problem of communicating any information whatsoever faster than lightspeed. It might be possible to do something with quantum nonlocality, but I've yet to see a credible suggestion for doing that.

In the case of evolution, however, the addition of this "god" thing is, as Ockham would say, an unnecessary entity.

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Common Lisp HyperSpec
• Common Lisp the Language, 2. ed
• Common Lisp - A gentle Introduction to symbolic computation
• The Scheme Programming language, 2. ed
• Reflections on trusting trust
• Lisp: Good News, Bad News. How to Win Big
• John McCarthy's homepage
• Dennis Ritchie's homepage
• Various classic papers it's a shame ACM never bothered to continue adding to
• Another list of classic papers (this time related mostly to programming language design)
• GTK-Gnome Application Development (not a classic, though, as the field is too young)
• KDE 2.0 Development (not a classic though, as the field is too young)
• Eric Weissteins Mathworld
• Compilers and compiler generators - an introduction with C++ (although I'm not too sure if it deserves being called a classic...)
• Parsing techniques - A practical guide
• Art of assembly language programming (never was a dead tree, but good anyway)
• Paul Carters 386 assembly book (same comment as above)
• An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation (see comment above)
• How to design programs - An introduction to programming and computing (not a classic, yet!)
• The Gutenberg archives contains much non-copyrighted classic fiction in ASCII format
• Sacred texts has copies of or links to many religious text for various major (or minor) religions

Well here's the interesting thing about 3D QG (or at least one type of 3D QG): you can express it as a bunch of partial differential equations which means it's basically about continuous fields that aren't discrete in any way. But you can also write it in a completely discrete way where you do calculations on a kind of spacetime tesselated into (4 dimensional) tetrahedra. Guess what? They are exactly equivalent. So it's your pick whether to think about it being 'pixellated' or not - both views are correct.

Some info on this can be found here: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week19.html/

Yeah!

In case youre fed up with the Physicists Feynman Path Integral stuff, goto these pages to get a grasp of the Math thrill behind Quantum Theory of Everything. (Also featuring: Einsteins Field Equation in words!)

However, gravitons do not work the way you describe; what you're talking about is the old classical LeSage model of "particulate pressure" for gravity, which doesn't work. (Try a Google search for sci.physics* discussions.) The properties of gravitons do not intrinsically have anything to do with the cosmological constant; you can have graviton-based theories with and without one.

You're also getting confused between real and virtual particles. Massive bodies always gravitate, because they radiate virtual gravitons. Charged bodies have an electric field, because they radiate virtual photons. These particles don't contribute any real energy, and are not even measurable, so you don't have to worry about "running out" of them. Radiation of real particles leads to energy loss. Stars radiate real photons, and can run out of energy; orbiting bodies can radiate gravitational waves (and hence real gravitons), and can inspiral into each other.

Real gravitons cannot escape a black hole any more than real photons can; virtual gravitons and photons can escape, and are responsible respectively for the hole's external gravitational field and electric fields. See the FAQ.

Being hit by a real, measurable graviton does not make a particle move towards the source of the graviton. It makes it move away, just as you'd expect. See the FAQ. Virtual gravitons can basically have any momentum, even one that opposes the direction of their "source" (an ambiguous concept); so can photons, for that matter.

If this project becomes a centralized point of distribution or access (ie: SourceForge,) this could really help the open-knowledge community.

For example, many people run out to buy expensive assembler books when the best resource is available online. Or, they run out to buy expensive Linux device driver manuals when the best resource is available online.

Open-source software mainly helps people write new software that uses key techniques / algorithms from open software. Open-source documentation, on the other hand, helps impart the foundations on which the open-source programs get created.

Ideally, this openscience approach would spread -- and students wouldn't need to spend $500 per semester on textbooks. And unfortunately, the Project Gutenberg idea to import books as their copyright expires (50 years after the author dies) would never fly for technology-based books.

As a side note, this index of online books has a lot of good information.

Well, I think there's a few more inconsistencies we might not have realized in this story:

1. Slashdot was founded in 1997. The Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 1996. I know that Slashdot is cool, but do you think that it spread by word of mouth to Afghanistan?
2. Linux was ported to Commodore in 1998. Was this guy infatuated in Linux without ever installing or seeing it?
3. The state of Texas initated the Microsoft antitrust debacle in 1997. Even if that (and details of it) spread by word of mouth, do you think this guy would have had time to form a rational opinion? ("I thought they were going to get Microsoft.")

As a side note, I feel sorry for anyone using any of the search engines that they remember from 1996.

I wish I knew more about the PowerPC, but I noticed that the discussion has taken a turn to the usefulness of assembly. Someone also mentioned that there are no good assembly books. I totally agree - almost none teach effective techniques, but instead just explain the instructions (you're lucky to see a jump table explained). But Randall Hyde has an excellent online textbook for the x86 (mainly focusing on the older Intels). It does stress technique, and doesn't bog you down with too much syntax.

Just an added use of assembly---it's pretty essential in programming the older consoles, although probably not these days :). I don't know about the Game Boy Advance (I heard that a C compiler was planned in the pre-release days), but one definitly wrote in assembly for the older Game Boys.

Babbage's printer , was also completed. Holy smokes! The thing could line-space, character-space, do column-and-row formatting, and even word-wrap.
Man, and I was impressed with his breaking of the Vigenère ciphre . . . .

Interestingingly, there is a a parasite that sort-of does reorder the host's DNA. There is a wasp that lays its eggs tobacco hornworm. It also injects a virus into the hornworm to disable the hornworm's immune cells, and mess up some other biological systems. Here is a link the researcher, but I couldn't find a link to an article explaining exactly what happens.

A pilot plant for extracting hydrogen by electrolysis, driven by solar cells was built in Riverside, California in the early 1990s. Overall efficiency was 4.7%, which isn't too good.

There are occasional lab reports of better schemes for separating hydrogen, but so far none of them work in production. The U.S. Department of Energy funds work in this area, but no breakthroughs yet.

This isn't a new idea. It's an old one with lousy performance.

By the way, another candidate for a theory of quantum gravity besides superstring theory is the so-called canonical formulation of general relativity, which can be used as a basis for quantization. Much information on this line of research can be found for example at John Baez' web page.

"What contest, held via Usenet, is dedicated to examples of weird, obscure, bizarre, and really bad programming?"

"Windows."

Are you aware of the logical concept called Occam's Razor?

Since you seem to spouting off irrational paranoid crap, I assume you have not a clue what Occam's Razor is, I will explain. Put in most simple terms for dumbasses like you, "If you have two theories which both explain the observed facts then you should use the simplest until more evidence comes along."

Go read this

Fer crying out loud, you nitwit, a plane has been hijacked by a bunch of fundamentalist extremists. Why ignore the gigantic pile of facts before your face and speculate on byzantine theories involving the silent conspiracy of millions just to please your paranoid mind?

Due to a process called Hawking Radiation they tend to "evaporate" rather quickly. The time it will take depends on the size of the black hole, and the density of the surrounding material.
The exact formula is rather complex, but for average environments, a black hole has to be more than a 1000 tons at creation to be of any danger. Considering that particle accelerators never handle material heavier than a few atoms, we are quite a bit on the safe side...

I've been reading your comments in this thread and have come to the conclusion that Ockham's Razor is this new theoretical toy you've just found out about, and now you want to knock all kinds of shit over with it. You wield it like it is a magic wand that can take any experimental data and come up with the appropriate hypothesis to fit it. Well, "Sorry for the cold glass of reality", but Ockham don't do that.

I've graciously provided a link above that can tell you what the Razor is all about, but for now lemme tell you why you just don't go using Ockham in this case:

Various people have been giving different possible hypotheses for the increased number of bugzilla entries. Each hypothesis predicts different statements about the individual bugzilla data and events surrounding the data.

For instance, one ./er suggests that the increased bug reports come from increased numbers of eyes looking at Mozilla, and that the bugs are actually old and hitherto undocumented. A closer look at the bug reports would be able to see if in fact the bugs pertain to old unchanging segments in the code.

Since Ockam's Razor can only be applied to situations where two competing hypotheses would predict the same data, and since your hypothesis (Mozilla is getting buggier) would imply that the new bug reports are pertaining to newer segments in the Mozilla code--in contrast to the competing hypothesis--you can't use the Razor to imply your hypothesis is better suited to the data. In general, one should never use the Razor to circumvent more careful examination of data and further experimentation. If further experimentation can be used to distinguish between two competing hypotheses, then Ockham does not apply.

Though, secretly I must admit it would be helluva cool if there did exist a magic wand that could give me the perfect hypothesis for any data set. It would greatly simplify my life.

Second, alpha does indeed change with energy. The ratio of constants you know as "alpha" is actually the zero-energy limit of the energy-dependent alpha, sometimes known as alpha0. In particle accelerators, the energies are large enough that alpha begins to noticeably deviated from alpha0. As the other poster said, this is known as "running of the coupling constants". You can read about the idea here. (That discussion is generic and applies to any kind of coupling constant, including the fine structure constant.)

Thirdly, you're right, the experiment needs to be reproduced and improved.

see

Specifically, as to van Flandern, here's the comment I made in response to the earlier guy who brought up the same web page:

van Flandern is a crank who doesn't understand gravitational radiation, despite careful correction. (Though he has done some decent work in other areas.) This issue has been beat to death on Usenet. See, for instance, the FAQ, Carlip's correction of van Flandern, Hillman's archive of a Usenet discussion with van Flandern, etc.

This page contains a lot of links generally rebutting a lot of "fringe" claims on physics topics. He has A Whole Section devoted to Mr. van Flander's paper, in which he links to rebuttals by gravitational physicists of Mr. van Flander's ideas. The short answer from them seems to be "Tom van Flanders doesn't understand relativity very well."

This page contains a lot of links generally rebutting a lot of "fringe" claims on physics topics. He has A Whole Section devoted to Mr. van Flander's paper, in which he links to rebuttals by gravitational physicists of Mr. van Flander's ideas. The short answer from them seems to be "Tom van Flanders doesn't understand relativity very well."

van Flandern is a crank who doesn't understand gravitational radiation, despite careful correction. (Though he has done some decent work in other areas.) This issue has been beat to death on Usenet. See, for instance, the FAQ, Carlip's correction of van Flandern, Hillman's archive of a Usenet discussion with van Flandern, etc.

It's just a theory, and as such has yet to be conclusively proven.
* 10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it.

A competing theory, put forward fictionally in the book Fallen Angels
* 20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact.

Including the -5 starting credit, I score your post at a crackpot level of 25. Not bad.

I think it has to do with atomic forces are not expanding. This document might answer your question better then I could. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/expanding_un iverse.html

-------------------

I was talking to a string theorist friend of mine about this final infinite period in the life of the universe, and we both agreed that all you'd have left is electrons and neutrinos (maybe also protons, but they might not ever decay).

On a side note, it was already known that the universe would never recollapse. Recent findings show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and there is no reason to believe that this acceleration will ever taper off.

Here's a guy who really seems to know what he's talking about:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/end.html

Now, I think science is good, and I think teaching children is good, and I think this article is good for that, sure. Anyone really expecting it to be anything more than that, though, is just plain deluded. I mean, c'mon, you can't possibly write a serious article about the current thinking on black holes without using the words "accretion disk," "Cherenkov radiation," or "spacetime curvature."

In short, there's nothing there that's not available in a children's book of 25 years ago. I could probably, with a little effort, even dig up the children's book I read all of that in about 25 years ago.

Van Flandern (who wrote the article) is a wellknown crackpot in the usenet physics goups. Here is a page about his theory of FTL gravity waves

Administrative contact: Michael Van Flandern

Technical contact: Kevin Van Flandern

Mouthpiece for: Tom Van Flandern, big-time Cydonia-face, um, "enthusiast".

Have yourself a browse through metaresearch.org and you'll find out all sorts of interesting things. Like, apparently the speed of gravity is "not less than 2 x 10^10 c", and therefore probably infinite.

Feel free to read some stuff on Jerry Pournelle's site about this guy.

Here's another URL that directly addresses the gravity-speed thing Tom Van Flandern loves so dearly.

If he were a bit more dedicated, he'd qualify as a real, quality, Usenet kook. I don't think he quite makes the grade, though.

Actually, the "whole supercooled liquid or not" question re: glass remains a bit open still. One reasonable discussion of it reaches the conclusion that there is no clear answer.

Perhaps some are apt to forget this but, glass is a liquid (albeit an extremely viscous one). Over time, it pours.

I believe you score highly on the Crackpot Index

I'm not so sure about this claim, and find it interesting that there is no corroborating evidence elsewhere on the net (I tried, believe me). If this isn't "Cold Fusion II", then Sheldon Schultz has some explaining to do. Why is this not published in the Scientific American?

I suspect we will read about it in the paper tomorrow, and there will be an Entertainment Tonight feature on it later in the week. What ever happened to responsible journalism and scientific inquiry?

Hype alone will not change the laws of Physics. Although it is true that light will bend according to the refractive index, it is the angle itseld that determines the index of Refraction, if I recall correctly. Therefore, light will bend one way when going from air into glass, and another when going from air into a vacuum. So which way does light go here? If it goes from a vacuum into the medium in the same way it would go from air into a vacuum (or glass into air, i.e., from a higher to a lower medium), then, okay, you have something there. But why doesn't the article bother explaining the phenomena?

It reminds me of that article wherein they claimed that they found something that travels faster than the speed of light. I am still somewhat dubious on that, since it is only infomation that has passed out of that medium faster than a light beam would have traversed the medium, but not the initial pulse: that was absorbed, I believe.

Of course, I am just one guy. I could be wrong here. But not about the dearth of explanation...

I know that the University that I currently attend (UC Riverside) has a lot of it's courses available online. It's quite usefull to have your course notes available in an easily desiminated and modifiable format like most of the available digital formats allow.

Of course, MIT's plan seems to be much better than ours, as online class information is generally only available to students who are enrolled in the corse for most courses (although this is at the discretion of the professor, who can decided whether or not to allow public acces.)

In it's short tenure here on campus, it has become one of the most usefull resourses available for many classes. (Saves me from getting my information on dead tree format)

I know quite a large number of fellow slashdotters are also university students, or recently graduated, so I'll pose a question (that hopefully will be answered by at least a few of you): What sorts of resources are available on your campus?

Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"

I know that the University that I currently attend (UC Riverside) has a lot of it's courses available online. It's quite usefull to have your course notes available in an easily desiminated and modifiable format like most of the available digital formats allow.

Of course, MIT's plan seems to be much better than ours, as online class information is generally only available to students who are enrolled in the corse for most courses (although this is at the discretion of the professor, who can decided whether or not to allow public acces.)

In it's short tenure here on campus, it has become one of the most usefull resourses available for many classes. (Saves me from getting my information on dead tree format)

I know quite a large number of fellow slashdotters are also university students, or recently graduated, so I'll pose a question (that hopefully will be answered by at least a few of you): What sorts of resources are available on your campus?

Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"

Look up information on the "Invisible Web" - islands typically untouched by search engines, where you need another site to "hop" to these nets of information - cool stuff can abound in these disconnected areas. Here are some links to get started with:

DirectSearch - Invisible Web Search

The InvisibleWeb

WebData.com - Invisible Web Search

InfoMine - Scholarly Internet Resource Collections

AlphaSearch - Invisible Web Search

IIRC, Slashdot even ran an article about this not too long ago - I think this is it, not sure...

Worldcom - Generation Duh!