Domain: uwgb.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to uwgb.edu.
Comments · 45
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Re:30 yr gig
One of the things you might conclude from this business is that you shouldn't put the Army in charge when you want things done cleanly.
Another thing you might conclude is that every slogan that draws a comparison to Chernobyl is grossly inflammatory and can be safely ignored.
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Re:94% submerged "continent"?
This isn't a simple case of whether or not water is on top of land. The Earth's crust is thinner under the oceans than under land masses.
Basically the crust is expanding at mid-oceanic ridges. The molten magma that surfaces in those regions solidifies into thin crustal plates. These plates are pushed apart until they meet resistance (other plates), and begin to bump up against each other. When they do that, the crust squashes and thickens - both above and below the water. The part that thickens above the water form continents and land masses.
The argument here is that the crust under New Zealand is one such thickened region, just that most of it is still underwater. However, every map of the plates I've seen places New Zealand at the edge of the Australian plate (i.e. there is no major tectonic activity between New Zealand and Australia). So it would seem to me to be more correct to say the Australian continent is actually larger than Australia and encompasses New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.
If there's a revision to the continents that's needed, Europe and Asia need to be combined into a single Eurasian continent. -
Re:Good
It's also weird that me, an African, seem to understand EU structures better than the parent poster
That's the power of the alt-right. They are quite literally insane. Yesterday, we had somebody with a UID disputing that smoking tobacco causes cancer. They believe the idea that cannabis has medicinal uses is nothing more than political correctness. I wouldn't be surprised to read that the idea that the Earth is older than 6,000 years is now just politically correct nonsense as well.
I haven't been able to nail down the year that they want to return us to, but I'd hazard a guess of somewhere around 1950, possibly right before that 1951 date.
This is the end of Western civilization. When this many people decide to reject any ideas that have happened since 1950 as "political correctness," it's the end. It's the insatiable desire to repeal any and all progress, and while 1950 may be a good estimate of where they're going now, they won't be happy until slavery is instituted again and women don't serve on juries or own property. They won't get that far by the time it all collapses, but they are the unaware architects of the coming shitstorm, culminating in nuclear war some time around 2025, followed by the year from hell.
Read this essay about a phenomenon the author calls thar. It's beyond authoritarianism, beyond machismo, beyond honor, beyond all sense. It's what's wrong with Middle Eastern cultures and why migrants are failing--refusing--to integrate in Europe.
Abandon all hope that this will turn around. There's no need to fear a Muslim invasion. This mental illness is contagious and spreading, and the alt-right will be happy creating a thar society to call their very own or at least rabidly rioting and killing to try to make it happen. Muslim? Christian? Does it matter whose Sharia law?
It's quite a lot like watching a zombie apocalypse start. First it's a few people here and there. "Boy, that AC has some strange views," one thinks to oneself. "Wow, that guy at the gas station was a nutter! Why does he obsess about the government tracking sexual orientation instead of talking about the whole panopticon?" But it spreads and spreads. British people harassing and assaulting other UK citizens because Brexit passed? They seriously thought that Brexit was going to cause Muslims and blacks with UK citizenship to get rounded up and deported the next day??? People who had rational opinions begin to turn. Once somebody has been infected with the T virus and turned, they are no longer capable of rational thought, and I mean that in a very clinical sense. Then one day, one realizes that this is the new normal. One is surrounded by bloodthirsty intellectual zombies. Either kill zombies or be killed.
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Re:Yeah, um, not so much
Your link doesn't support your argument.
I know that, but I figured that most readers wouldn't know what the Mulford Act was. Does this help?
The data clearly shows that Jews are disproportionately the target of hate and crime.
Woah there, I did not claim otherwise. This isn't the Oppression Olympics here, and there's more than one target of bigotry in your fine country.
Using the FBI statistics from 2012, here's a rough guide to how likely you are to be the target of a hate crime if you are a member of various groups of people:
- Anti-Jewish hate crimes: 140 per million (using the "core Jewish population" of 6 million; if you use the "total" figure of 10 million, it's 80 per million population)
- Anti-Islamic hate crimes: 60 per million
- Anti-indigenous (American Indian/Alaskan Native) hate crimes: 30 per million
- Anti-Hispanic hate crimes: 9 per million
- Anti-Atheist/Agnostic hate crimes: 6 per million
- Anti-Catholic hate crimes: 1.2 per million
- Anti-Protestant hate crimes: 0.2 per million
To say that Muslims are disproportionately the target of hate crime is not to say that Jews are not.
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Re:illogical captain
This prof has a decent essay about that.
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Re:So just wondering...
It would probably take at least tens to hundreds of thousands of years, given that in locations such as Canada and northern Europe that formerly had several kilometres of glacial ice on them are still rising today due to isostatic rebound. The ice was thickest in these areas about 100000 years ago and most of it had melted away by about 10000 years ago, but it's still rising. Total rise is on the order of several tens of metres depending upon location. Along Hudson's Bay (northern Canada) there are raised beaches all over the place on the land, marking the former location of the shorelines.
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Re:Measurement exactly?//flaws
"The measurements are valid, but IIUC, the dating typically uses the assumption that ther is/was not significant radioactivity in the region."
No, in this case it assumes that the rocks are significantly radioactive, with natural radioactivity primarily from K, U, and Th, the main sources of natural radioactivity in the Earth, and traces from other sources (usually daughter isotopes in the decay chains from these three).
"Yet for dating of rocks, that would require that magma and lava not be radioactive. Tests on Mt. st. Helens lava, though, showed that it is."
Oh, I see. You're not even trying to formulate a rational argument, you're just parroting some "young Earth" creationist or other pseudoscience nonsense. Badly.
Firstly, what happens to the magma is mostly irrelevant to radiometric dating methods because the minerals involved don't start trapping daughter products until the minerals form and cool sufficiently. It's like the clock is being constantly reset until the rock cools. Granted, there are some situations where it can be more complicated, but usually the story doesn't start until you've actually got a solid rock.
Secondly, practically all rocks are radioactive to some degree, because practically all rocks contain some K, U, or Th. The concentration varies widely, but there's always some in there. If the assumption that rocks were non-radioactive were built into radiometric dating methods it wouldn't make a lot of sense, because rocks are radioactive. So, you're confused about the claims of "tests on Mt. St. Helens" somehow. My guess is that you're trying to mention the fact that Mt. St. Helens lavas do have variable amounts of initial radiogenic, non-atmospheric Ar in them that would affect conventional (whole rock) K-Ar methods, but that's a well-known issue that is not peculiar to Mt. St. Helens and is routinely solved by using Ar-Ar stepwise heating measurements and/or isochron techniques.
Finally, there is no "crater around the Hudson". I'm assuming you mean the curved eastern part of Hudson's Bay in Canada, which is not a crater at all because it doesn't have any of the other attributes of a crater (e.g., impact melt and high-pressure shocked minerals), but is merely a circular basin kind of like the Michigan Basin is. This contrasts with the Vredefort Structure in South Africa which is interpreted as an impact crater. The georeactor explosion stuff you refer to is pure speculation for which there is no evidence. A huge natural nuclear reactor exploding onto the surface of the Earth? Please. Such an event would leave obvious isotopic signatures all over the place if it ever happened (like the obvious isotopic signatures at the genuine Oklo natural reactor, but a thousand times more obvious than that). It's a bit ridiculous to be disputing this research on the basis of an idea that is so bizarre and unsupported.
Better luck with your investigations.
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Guns level the playing field
Guns equalize a fight, and massively up the risk even for experienced gunfighters. Without legal guns, any criminal can reliably steal from anyone he can easily best in hand-to-hand combat. In other words, without guns there is no effective defense for anyone over 60 against criminals, or for (most) women (and since 25 years or so, for most men as well, I'm pretty sure I can do whatever I want to anyone 25 or less). And please don't say "the police", we all know what the problem is with that, either in cities (criminal just hides in a crowd, potentially with the whole crowd in on it), or outside of cities (response time is > 30 mins, at which point they might as well do nothing).
As to why military guns are scary, ask the military. I believe the general gist of the answer would be "better them than us".
Here's of course the big crime of guns : they are a very blatant rejection of the idea that the state can take care of you. They limit state power over individuals, in fact they limit anyone's power over individuals. Which is a very good thing. And of course, it's a pretty blatant expose that "liberals" are 100% pro mob-rule, mostly intent destroying whatever the fashionable enemy du-jour is. It might make it very risky to attack a farm that's helping some university phds experiment with GMO. You see liberals like to attack others for perceived injustices, with themselves as "victims" even while physically attacking others. And like all bullies, they just won't stand for a real response. And like all non-flattering truths, this one is to be suppressed at all costs.
I do have one question : when is it your turn ? We've all been to high school, and we all know groups turn into mobs united against you. Tell me, when that happens, do you want a democrat or a republican police officer present ? Would you want to have a gun ?
To see just how peaceful liberalism is, you only need to count the bodies that their hero, Gandhi, has on his conscience. Because in real life, the tally easily surpasses the 10 million figure, in reality the guys is a monster, hiding behind the fact that he himself didn't attack, while ordering mobs of tens of thousands to loot pillage and burn. The point is about as valid as the fact that Hitler never himself harmed a single Jew, of course. But like all flawed reasoning that paints liberals as smart, tolerant and peaceful, it is accepted without question.
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Re:Can a star really last for 13 billion years ?I was curious about this as well, since this star is an F dwarf not terribly dissimilar from our G type Sun, and the lifespan of the Sun is usually estimated at 10 billion years. I found this presentation (Powerpoint format) about the life cycles of stars that includes a rule-of-thumb formula for the main sequence lifespan of a star with respect to its mass:
Lifetime=1/Mass^2.5.
Note that lifetime here is as a ratio of solar lifetime (so a Lifetime of 1=10 billion years) and mass is in solar masses. The paper gives the mass of HIP 11952 as about 0.83 solar masses, so an estimated main sequence lifetime would be 1/0.83^2.5= 15.9 billion years, after which it would become a red giant. Not liking the odds for its planets at that time, especially the one with a 7 day orbital period. So, it probably has a long while left, though there are wide bounds listed for mass and age, so if it is actually older and heavier, it might be living on borrowed time.
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Re:big loss
Well, I'm neither an AGW-denier nor a creationist, but at least Mr. Fuckwit would have some basis for calling me an AGW denier, even though my criticisms are valid; the CRU was behaving in an anti-scientific sort of way, and the investigation rightly called them out for it. Calling me a creationist, though, is as stupid a criticism as calling me short. [ShakaUVM]
FWIW, I believe in AGW, and think it’s a serious problem. Does that sound like a crackpot creationist to you? No? Oh, I guess you don’t fucking know what you’re talking about, do you? [ShakaUVM]
... referencing the Salem Hypothesis (a reference to Creationism) *was* insulting. [ShakaUVM]
Thanks for making the record. You sounded just like the Creationists that get really evasive when pressed to explain some of their answers. In fact, saying that they don’t have time to educate people is one of their favorite lines. [ShakaUVM]
Years ago, I wrote an article defining science using falsifiability, and explained why ID/creationism doesn't qualify. In it, I pointed out that "Intelligent Design" advocates are humorously evasive about the identity of the Designer, but "wossname" has to be the funniest example I've ever heard. Anyway, a computer scientist replied to my article, saying "I'm a creationist" then claimed that a prominent atheist scientist's belief in panspermia amounted to secular belief in ID/creationism. He argued that "evolution is almost infinitely adaptable like this, and is thus unfalsifiable" which can be rephrased as "you can prove nearly anything using evolution" or "you can sort of argue anything using evolution" or "... With the same rationale, evolution is impossible to falsify as well...". Like most creationists, he used the term evolutionist liberally but at least he didn't babble about ID excluding creationism. He also didn't pull a Ben Stein by trying to link Darwin to Nazis. Brett's real classy like that.
Later, Marble joined Andy Schlafly and other "skeptics" in
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This site suggests melting ice
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/SeaIce.HTM
Why Doesn't Anyone Mention the Record Growth of Sea Ice Around Antarctica?
Typical of the commentaries on sea ice is this by Harold Ambler, published, of all places, in the Huffington Post, on January 3, 2009:
P.S. One of the last, desperate canards proposed by climate alarmists is that of the polar ice caps. Look at the "terrible," "unprecedented" melting in the Arctic in the summer of 2007...
So, to answer Ambler's final question:
Why, I ask, has Mr. Gore not chosen to mention the record growth of sea ice around Antarctica? If the record melting in the Arctic is significant, then the record sea ice growth around Antarctica is, too, I say. If one is insignificant, then the other one is, too.
The answer is simple. The Arctic decrease is statistically significant, and the Antarctic increase is not. This is Stats 101. Ambler is flat out wrong. Not all trends are equally statistically significant.
What the last two (2) maps don't indicate is if warmer ocean temperatures increase precipitation inland.
http://www.sciencebits.com/CO2orSolar
I suggest if anyone wants to dig into this check Sciencebits. More specifically look here:
http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate
http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate#ShavivVeizerSince we are still waiting for a very anemic solar cycle#24 to build up sunspots, I think perhaps we should wait till past 2015 because it seems the great solar science experiment in the sky is already underway.
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Re:Quick
ICEs and all the other mechanical parts of the traditional car have a huge internal friction that can not be overcome. Multiply that by the efficiency of the ICE itself. And then add lower weight and lower center of gravity. An electric car with hub motors only needs a fraction of the power to get the same results, in most cases an electric car can get the same performance with 1/10th of the power usage.
Here is the reference http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pseudosc/200mpgcar.htm .
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Re:This is IRRELEVENT unless clarified in Joules
This guy has done the hard math to show what is possible. http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pseudosc/200mpgcar.htm
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Please read this before posting
It gets really old seeing the same old tired arguments against evolution from people who completely fail to understand the basics of what science even is.
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Re:But they're anarchists! They can't have meeting
Murder is a kind of killing in the sense that theft is a type of moving. In the sense that rape is a type of physical excercise. Or in the sense that a mafia is a type of police force.
Let's analyse this point of yours. How come you are safe ? Surely there are people who prefer stealing to work near you.
So answer this question : who commits violence, and kills if necessary, on your behalf (and don't give me shit about judicial proceedings, if a person attacks you and won't stand down, he will be killed *without* judicial proceedings preceding that kill). Will you seriously claim that you can do without them ?
This is a nice article on the subject :
http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/ProblemWithPacifism.HTM -
Re:Jesus Fucking Christ
"religion doesn't have much to say about math"
Heh. Read this. -
How to test it:
If you want to test a perpetual motion machine, here's a good place to start:
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/TestPerpM.HTM -
Re:300 What?
The above responses, I think, are over-complicating the assessment. The calculation should be as simple as work performed/energy consumed. There's probably an official reference somewhere, but I quickly found this page mentioning 125,000,000 joules in a gallon of fuel.
This page on the Powertrain & Energy tab says that the 10e (electric model) uses a 10Kwh battery pack.
1 joule is 1 watt/second. So we take 10,000 watt-hours, multiply by 3600 (# seconds per hour) to get 36,000,000 joules total energy put in. So.... if a gallon of fuel is 125,000,000 joules, then we charged up with the equivalent energy of 0.288 gallons of fuel.
With a total range of 120 miles on 0.288 gallons of fuel it comes out to 428MPG. This is inexact obviously; I don't see what they're claiming for MPG on the electric model (though I'm sure it's less), but any difference could be accounted for in losses and/or margins of error such as actual versus listed capacity of the storage pack. If, for example, the battery pack actually holds 11Kwh instead of 10Kwh, the number drops to 378MPG. The point is that this CAN be calculated in terms of equivalency to gasoline based on the amount of potential energy in a gallon of gas.
That's the best I can come up with imperically off the top of my head. I'm without a doubt though that using the price of fuel versus the price of electricity to make this determination is not the way to go. -
Re:Interesting position for U-Tube & Google to
Imagine the scenario where the ID folks were saying "here's what we believe, and this is the logical basis behind it" while the evolution proponents were screaming "OMGWTFBBQ11!11! th3z3 guys r t3h suck". That's not likely, true, [...]
It's Richard Dawkins that is complaining. I have no problems accepting your scenario as true, as this is exactly the way Dawkins behaves.
Dawkins and his followers do more damage to scientific rationality than the Creationism/ID crowd, IMO. Their petulance tends to scare people off, and their total unwillingness to engage in debate with even rational believers is a sure sign of a fundamentalist mindset that is just as bad as the one they accuse their opponents of.
Professor Dutch, a professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin, and definitely not a lover of pseudoscience, puts it much better than I can.
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Re:slashkos
WTF is the legal difference between "Americans" and "Americans talking to the enemy"? They're still Americans, and the Constitution still applies. You can't just say "ooh, So-and-so hangs out with naughty people!" and expect that to fly in the face of the First Amendment right to Freedom of Association (nevermind the other 9).
All that goes doubly so when the Executive Branch claims the power to unilaterally declare which people are "enemies" this month — a category that's gotten progressively broader and broader since 9/11. In a matter of days, it expanded from al-Qaeda to the Taliban — no tears wept there — and then onward to Saddam Hussein, and then to every Iraqi who didn't view foreign soldiers in their homeland as liberators. If those same Iraqis had been Americans repelling a Soviet invasion 30 years ago, using the same guerrilla tactics and IEDs against Soviet troops, those same Republicans would be calling them heroes and patriots, and the Soviets would be scratching their heads wondering why we didn't appreciate their wonderful gifts of communism and more efficient government. (That's not to say that democracy isn't the better system in both cases — it is — but there's no sense in trying to craft a democratic country out of a culture that's hostile to the very idea, especially by invading them first.)
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Re:best missile defense system
The fundamental defect in your position is that you ascribe western values as universal and just below the surface in everyone- hence, your faith in education alone. You do not grasp how deeply toxic cultures are ingrained in their participants.
Modern western society is built on several fundamental concepts that we take for granted, and practice unconsciously to the point where many of us can't conceive of a vastly different line of thought. Here's a primer of one to get you started: Thar Mentality
Yes, but i know that relative comfort is only because there are people around the world who live in despicable conditions - which is why there are a lot of people envying and hating us.
Wealth is not a zero-sum game. You could wall off modern nations from 'developing'/3rd world nations completely and the bottom 1% of western nations would still be better off than the the 80th percentile of the rest of the world. Sure, there would be some painful adjustment but the basis of western wealth is not the taking of raw materials cheaply from undeveloped countries. It's the processing and use of such materials that make us wealthy, and they can be pretty much had for a somewhat higher price with the borders of modern nations.
Oh, envy is a base human emotion, and I will not adjust my behavoir according to someone else's character defects. I may keep my behavoir in check out of humility, but that's not the same as weakining oneself to avoid envy.
killing ? NEVER. fighting,dieing: yes.
You're missing something fundamental about the concept of 'fighting', but If you can't figure it out by reading your own words, I don't imagine I can explain it to you.
Yes, by educating them, sure.
by letting them live their own life, With ya there too
by giving them chances, ... I'm all for that
NOT BY POINTING GUNS.
Another concept you're unfamiliar with: Prime divider societies
Here's the short version of the relevance: In any undeveloped country, there are the poor starving & suffering masses, and there are the few elite who do profit and live comfortably by theft, intimidation and outright murder. (This is different from wealth created by western societies, which is much more widespread and based on conducting mutually agreeable transactions)
Educating the masses in more productive ways of life will improve them, but it challenges the authority & wealth of the current people in the top positions & their cronies.
Such people aren't usually conducive to the changes, because the change into an overall better society involves an immediate and real decline in their prestige. They may very well protect their positions with force, and you asking them nicely to step down so their subjects can be better off isn't going to work. The only way to get such people out of the way is to remove them from the public scene, and if there's too many of them that are too well armed to imprison, then you have to kill them.
Again, the fundamental western concepts you unconsciously take for granted are not universal. You imagine great change in the societies we talk about, yet you imagine those who currently benefit will go quietly into the night. You want the crops without tilling the earth. You want the beauty of a snow-covered scene without the blizzard the night before. You want the life-giving rain without the thunder, lightning and floods that come with it.
It ain't that easy. Please, follow the links I put up there with an open mind. We gave peace a chance. -
How very western of youYou seem to be under the impression that the arab/jihaadist sort treats negotiations seriously. Any serious review of the Israel-Palestine problem or Muslims Warfare in general will reveal that they don't negotiate in good faith, and use cease-fires & summits as an opportunity to re-arm. As soon as they're ready again, they attack. Why even bother entering into negotiations with that sort? It makes sense to set the bar really high like we have- because if they meet our prerequisites, it'll show they are actually serious. History has shown that getting a jihaadist leader to sit at a table and talk is no indication of seriousness at all.
You believe that Iran has grievences that can be satisfied on conditions acceptable to us, and that the rulers of Iran are interested in settling things calmly if only given the chance. This is a very western view and not a universal human attitude. There are utterly different mindsets out there that you don't seem to understand.Western societies become great by this basic tenant: mutually agreeable transactions (of any sort- economic, political, etc) make all participants better off. That's my mindset, that's your mindset, that's what makes the west so great. In the middle east we're most often dealing with the "Thar" mentality. I suggest you read up on it and realize there are non-western schools of thought out there.
Anywhich way, I'm sick of the attitude that the US is always wrong, so the US must capitulate or accomodate belligerents. There are well over 100 countries on this planet today, and in any given year, 99.8% of them aren't on the list of "Who might the US blow up next?." Staying off this list doesn't require much.
Maybe Iran should start asking itself "What are all the other countries in the world doing differently to stay out of America's cross hairs? What can we do to change?"
Of course, only the USA/westerners do evil, right? So only we should ever have to change our position- is that what you're getting at? -
Re:Why wouldn't they?
The patterns shown in the article are not true penrose patterns, it exhibits two lines of reflection, horizontal and vertical and the pattern does not repeat indefinitely.
Even the fact of local five-fold symmetry is interesting, although I agree these are not true Penrose tiles, which typically use only two shapes (I count at least three or four in the picture) each of which have a reflection symmetry but no rotation symmetry.
The tiling shown in the picture with the article looks quite a lot like a Kepler Tiling, with its local five-fold symmetry and use of five hexagons to fill out the pattern. I have no idea where Kepler got the idea from--he lived in the 16th century, about a hundred years after the Arab tilings the article talks about.
In any case, the practical arts routinely outstripped scientific and mathematical understanding until very recently, and even now we do sometimes see science playing catch-up with empirical ability. It is doubtful that anyone at the time understood very much about any of these tilings in the way a modern mathematician would. But by the same token science and mathematics would have a lot less interesting stuff to work with if artisans didn't explore empirical possibilities for their own reasons. -
Re:This sounds like a troll
I'll correct myself...for conspiracy nutcases, no evidence will EVER change your mind... already, you set some arbitrary standard that somebody has to create some "collapsing model" of a 110 story building, built in the early seventies and have a fully fueled commercial airliner crash into in at a certain height and then see if it actually collapses... that is the only evidence that you claim would change your mind... but then you assert that you are surprised that because noone has taken the million dollar prize then this proves that the buildings did not collapse as reported by the government investigation... you are basing your whole conspiracy theory on the premise that if someone cannot, or has not, created a model, then a conspiracy demolition brought it down... of course, no government report would convince you because conspiracist dismiss anything from the government as biased... and anybody else that comes out with any evidence that exposes any conspiracy theories as wrong... then your response is that people like that must either be blackmailed into supporting the government's theory or they are in on it...
Hell, I still see nutcase conspiracist that still think the Oklahoma bombing was the work of the government... despite the fact that McVeigh admitted to it -
Re:Not possible
I've never heard of well-established, fundamental theory being "remade". Sometimes it's refined or elaborated, but never totally changed. Especially something like the law of conservation of momentum. Not to mention, the guy "proved" that his device works by deriving equations USING THE SAME THEORY THAT MAKES HIS DEVICE IMPOSSIBLE. This occurred mainly because he made a simple error in his calculations. Of course, now he believes that his thing works, and is getting results mainly due to the experimenter expectation effect. Anyway, try reading this first, and explain how the man is not a crank.
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Re:Bzzzzt!
The interested reader is directed to Sense and Nonsense about Plagiarism and The Plagiarism Witch Hunt Hall of Shame for further information regarding plagiarism.
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Re:Bzzzzt!
The interested reader is directed to Sense and Nonsense about Plagiarism and The Plagiarism Witch Hunt Hall of Shame for further information regarding plagiarism.
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Re:Moons
The moon's gravity is strong enough to be felt at the Earth's surface even today. It's pretty weak, but it's still strong enough to lift up the water in the oceans, causing the tides you see every day. For that matter, the sun's gravity lifts the oceans, too.
You don't have to have the moon pull all of the gases off the planet's surface, just act in a tidal action to loft them somewhat. 2.5 billion years ago, the moon was closer and the atmosphere was thicker. When the lunar tidal forces acted on the atmosphere, it expanded fractionally, and a small fraction of the uppermost atmosphere was ionized and blown away by the solar wind. Lather, rinse, repeat for 2.5 billion years and you have the atmophere we enjoy today. -
Other uses for these GPS measurement stations
Just wanted to add that these GPS measurement stations put up for this purpose could give valauable information that could also be used for other many purposes, I can mostly think of geophysics purposes as that is what I work with myself, but I imagine such a web could be used for many other things
I remember a paper about the isostatic rebound after the icecap in Scandinavia where GPS recievers were used. A curiosity I remember from the paper was that at the coastal areas there were quite a lot more uncertainty on the vertical movement, which the authors said probably was caused by the bigger amount of snow that assembles on the GPS devices and thereby causing refraction of the waves used for the GPS measurement
GPS information could is also used to determine the absolute movement of plates and I imagine that this system could also with time, be used to predict big earthquakes more precisely and thereby give even more time to prepare for the tsunamies etc. -
First bridge linking Europe to Africa
Yes, Sicilia is on the African tectonic plate: http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/EarthSC102Notes/102PTE
a rthHist.htm -
My kingdom for a Shakespeare manuscript!
I mean seriously, Shakespeare was great, but would we want to have saved every piece of parchment he scribbled on?
For centuries, historians and literary scholars have longed for hard evidence of how Shakespeare worked or what his literary background was. Unfortunately:"with the possible exception of a few pages of Sir Thomas More, a play that Shakespeare may have helped write, no manuscripts of Shakespeare's survive. The only certain evidence we have of his handwriting is his signature."
Our knowledge of Shakespeare is so sparse that there's an entire genre of claims that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by someone else. Everyone from Ben Jonson to Francis Bacon to Sir Walter Raleigh has been put forward as the "real author". David Kahn's classic work on cryptography, The Codebreakers , devotes almost an entire chapter to debunking the "secret coded messages", supposedly hidden inside Shakespeare's plays, which reveal their true author.
All of this speculation could be disposed of, if only we had a few scribbled pages of Hamlet or The Tempest. But we don't.
Fortunately, Aardman Animations is far better documented than Shakespeare. But the destruction of their storyboards and sets is still a terrible loss.
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gender and computers
Actually the number of women and girls using computers doesn't differ greatly from that of men, at least so the studies show. The difference appears to be identification with the world of computing, and participation in activities around computers (like
/., or signing on to a Firefox ad). There was a time about ten years ago when I saw figures saying that the majority of computer users at work were women, probably due to jobs in data entry and other office work. So your statement "representational of how much women *like* computers" pretty much nails it. -
Re:Already started in 15th century!Here's a pretty good explanation.
The author credits Piri Re for making a very good map of South America using the cartographic techniques of the time, but concludes that it is not Antarctica. Instead what is often interpreted as Antarctica is the coast of South America, perhaps bent around to fit the map onto the irregular parchment (or whatever) it is drawn on.
Perhaps most damning to the Antarctica interpretation are the marginal notes which (according to the site author) say the coastline in question was reported by sailors blown off course, who described the region as "very hot".
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Re:Already started in 15th century!
No, but this guy already did: http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/PiriRies.HTM
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Re:Light takes 25 years from nearest star..Oh, come on now this is
/. lets be accurate: It takes about 8.5 minutes for light to reach Earth from the nearest star.Think about it. for a refresher
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Re:Print the article...
Note that everything you have in your post is pure speculation about what might happen if the Libertarian Party became the dominant party
Actually, what I said was not spaculation, just look at lp.org, The Libertarian Party is against Minimum Wage, Public transportation, public education, Student Financial Aid and Loans, State Universities/Public Colleges.
In fact, if you look at lp.org, you will see that they want to abolish this and Abolish that, privatize this and privatize that. Also, take a look Here
In other words, they actually DO believe in dog-eat-dog/Survival of the fittest.
The reason why I said libertarian is because when something like this come up "The Patriot Act II" then a few /.ers usually responds by saying "Vote Libertarian next election" At least I have links legitamate links to back up my claims, unlike a few /.ers.
So what I said was not being a troll or a flamebait, but just giving the cold, hard facts of the libertarian party. -
The irrational number defense
How about a non-terminating, non repeating decimal expansion of a number? Pi? sqrt(2)? The square root of 2, in particular, has been shown to be an irrational number. This means that it cannot be written as the form m/n, where m and n are integers.
This means that it can't be repeating (0.454545... = 45/99) and it can't terminate (0.3453 = 3453/10000). This was proved back in pythagorean times (second yellow box as you scroll down the page).
Note that most square roots, cube roots, 4th roots, etc are going to be irrational. Is that a big enough choice of random OTPs for you? Say only a tiny fraction of numbers are irrational. A tiny fraction of an Aleph-one infinite numbers is still infinite. (See degrees of infinity, about halfway down the page). -
Re:Need help choosing new computerA Mac would be a terrible choice. It's not nearly ghey enough to accomodate the effeminate, yet manly man you are.
A super choice would be this!
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My favorite is the Princeton Tec Attitude Light
My favorite is the Princeton Tec Attitude Light. We sell them along with a large selection of other LED's.
Because we sell LED flashlights I'm pretty familiar with what is popular among our customers. The time-tested favorite seems to be the Streamlight Stylus penlight.
A great resource for reading about the differences between a lot of LED's is Brock's LED Page.
Bryan Noonan
Zbattery.com
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Return to the Moon?! We were never there!
Didn't we? or Did we? I belive that it was all hoaxed.
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There is a reason they aren't commercially viable
Scroll down to Freak waves.
The fundamental issue is this. The vehicle has to be close to the water. As a result, running into a single large wave is a problem. The larger the vehicle is, the larger a wave it can handle. But the larger the vehicle is, the more it costs to build and the more it needs to transport to be profitable.
So you need quiet water which a lot of people want to cross fast. But the water has to be a lot quieter than you think. You see every so often several different waves of different frequencies fall into sync, and form one really large wave. This may only happen to you once per year, but even once per year is far too often if it happens under a vehicle that you needs several years to pay off.
So you make a bigger craft. Fine, but now it is going to take you even longer to pay off. There is no practical limit to the size of a freak wave. Bigger ones happen more rarely, but they still happen.
As a result this kind of vehicle, which by nature needs to be very delicate and very expensive, has always wound up on the wrong side of the cost curve. People have looked into them in several markets, but they are just too easy to sink in a freak accident to be commercially viable.
Of course regular ships run into these, and occasionally sink from them as well. But they don't need to be so light, nor do they hit waves as fast, and therefore ships cost less and can take more wave. this makes the risk acceptably small. -
Re:Three FlawsAbout the flashlight. They would have gotten them from here or from here. Here's a good intro to flashlights beyond what you can get from K-Mart or Big-5. Some of these flashlights are designed to blind you at close range. Plenty bright enough to wake up a guy across the garden (not street). Oh their batteries only last about 1 hour or so, and their batteries cost $4 bucks EACH and they flashlights themselves cost $100 and up. Still, for the money, the brightest light you can carry in your hand (hidden if you have biggish hands).
If it were me moving in, I would have had a shotgun in the panic room with a couple of vests. Would have made for a much shorter film.
enkidu EOT
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More info here...Hmm. I think there are more sites that deserve recognition. My favorite site is Brock's LED comparison page, which I used to get a good idea before making purchases.
Having purchased a ton of flashlights myself, here are some things you should realize before making a LED light purchse. Most flashlight review sites fail to point out the disadvantages of LED lights:- Cannot focus the beam, as the reflector is inside the LED itself
- Thus... the beam must be either non-focused, or too focused. Short focus LED lights have a very small range of 30 feet or so, while exceptions (like the PAL light) have such a focused beam that it is useless in close range)
- The "white" light, while impressive and cool, is not that great for night-time viewing. It can ruin your night vision, and does not display contrast as well as the yellow light. (of course, no one wants to put a yellow LED in their flashlight, even if they exist, because it's not "cool")
- pricey. (new technology is always pricey)
Just my 2 cents. -
booyah?
ummm... booyah? You mean this?
Booyah For a Crowd
Or do you mean the word that in certain Nguni languages (e.g. Zulu) means "Come here?"
:)
P.S. Don't ask me how the Zulu word is spelt, but I'm sure it's not like that.
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Next hurdle - omni-directional LED lighting
If you don't have a LED light, go get one - it's compact, durable, extremely bright, and battery life is awesome. Quite enjoyable! I personally love the Photon II, but be sure to read Brock's LED Flashlight Page first, before buying a dud like the NightHawk, which is not bright at all.
Now that I'm done with links - I'll say this - while LED lights are great for directional lighting, they are not good at all for omni-directional lighting. This is because the reflector is housed inside the LED itself, and the light will always be facing the direction of the LED plate.
Now... I wonder how difficult it would be to get that LED plate inside the plastic/resin housing into a shape of a cylinder, and install it in place of a standard tungsten filament? If that is possible, then the LED light will truly be able to replace all lightbulbs... Not just the directional ones.
Hmm, I guess I don't have much to say other than the good links up top, and my hope for tomorrow's LED, household lightbulb. If you experts have something to say about the possibility of the cylindrical LED plate, I'm all ears. I surely don't know if it's possible or not.