Only the Voyager 2 probe flew past Uranus, and I don't think it took pictures of the poles. The Galileo probe orbited Jupiter for many years, but I don't think its orbit was high enough (in terms of latitude) to get clear views of the poles. For example, this site includes a polar view of Jupiter: http://thebigfoto.com/jupiter-from-space but it's a composite of many pictures, and the fuzziness of the polar region suggests that it's a re-projection of oblique views taken from a lower-latitude images.
Doesn't Steve Mann record audio too? The way his page explains it, it feels like strange mute men assaulted him and tried to forcibly remove his glasses. Surely those men weren't mute. They must have said something. Of course, they were speaking French, but Mann's daughter understands French. It would be nice to get her point of view, so we could get a better grasp on what happened. There's something missing here. It's like a silent movie.
There is a lot of opinion here, and very little data. Here is a simple bit of research everyone can do: find a map of the USA, showing rates of poverty, and another showing rates of obesity. Bingo! They match one-for-one!
The correlation is especially marked in Appalachia, the lower Mississippi and the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia. What's going on here? Do poor people exercise less? I doubt it. Most poor people have physical jobs, while rich people sit in offices. I think the problem is that most poor people can't afford much beyond spaghetti, potatoes, and bread (cheap starches), whereas rich people can afford protein, butter, and vegetables.
We have to be careful about making statements about obese people's lifestyles. Usually our statements about fat people are little more than racial and class prejudice: "those people eat too much" really means "they're uncontrolled gluttons", and "those people don't get enough exercise" really means "they're lazy slobs". As long as social classes have existed, the rich and comfortable have justified their privilege by claiming that the poor are weak and immoral.
Actually, the Black-Scholes formula is innocent. Sure, it assumes that stock movements follow a standard distribution, but that's not as big a sin as is being made out in the article. The formula computes the fair price for an option contract. Such a contract gives its owner the right (or "option") to buy or sell some asset up to a future date (the expiry date), at some given price (the "strike" price). The formula uses the following values:
1. The time remaining until the contract expires
2. The current price of the undelying asset
3. The strike price (the contract gives its buyer the right or "option" to buy the asset at the strike price)
4. The risk-free rate of return on cash (return that could be earned by putting your money into, say, treasuries rather than stock)
5. The volatility of the underlying asset.
At the time the contract is written, the first four of these values are known (assuming of course that the risk-free rate stays constant, which is pretty close to a sure bet). The LAST value is the problem. It says how much the stock will fluctuate, between the present time and the time of expiry. This is unknown, because, after all, it requires knowledge of the future. Usually, PAST volatility is used in its place, going with the assumption that the stock will behave in the future the same way it behaved in the recent past.
If the stock suddenly becomes very quiet, and stops fluctuating, the buyer payed too much for the contract, on average. If the stock gets very wild, the buyer got a bargain, on average. In either case, the contract buyer and seller guessed wrong. They should have used a different volatility to price the option.
Of course, stock fluctuations do NOT follow a normal curve, after all. And option traders do NOT follow Black-Scholes exactly either (see "volatility smile"). But the much bigger flaw, I think, is lack of clairvoyance. The formula requires knowledge of the future.
I kinda see where you're coming from. I attended two different high schools: one in the suburbs of Toronto, which served children of working-class parents (many worked at the local auto assembly plant). It was hell. Few students valued academic subjects, and if you excelled in math or English you got persecuted. Shop class was highly valued, though.
Then we moved to downtown Toronto, where students were well off (Toronto reverses the American pattern of rich suburbs and poor downtown). It was lovely: students valued learning.
What I experienced was class solidarity: if you try to step outside your class (eg, if you value book learning when your peers value mechanical skills), you will be ostracized. The instinct to fit in and conform is very powerful, especially during adolescence.
But just because the ITU says they don't have the mandate, or the budget, and insist that the alleged plan is just a mis-information campaign, why should be believe them? Of course they would deny it. They're just trying to get our guard down, as any sinister anti-American organization would. Just watch: the minute the WSJ stops running editorials like this, the UN will take over!;-)
If you look at an actuarial table from the USA:
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
and plot the probability of death versus age, on a semi-log graph, you get a straight line after age 30. This means that the probability of death rises exponentially with time. It reaches 100% probability at age 121. Hence that's the hard limit.
Interestingly, there's a slight change in slope around age 97: maybe some other aging mechanism takes over. Nevertheless, the change is slight, and the probability continues its lethal rise to 100%.
Please people, read the article in Wired. It points out something very simple and very important: since websites lock you after a handful of failed login attempts (or slow you down with captchas), brute-force cracking of passwords is no longer an issue! Strong passwords are a thing of the past.
Feel free to use as simple a password as your system allows. No one will guess it.
Another way to look at this is that antibiotics are a short-term imbalance on a nature's long-term balance. In the short time (since the 1930s) that antibiotics have existed, we have managed to push back against bacteria. In the long term, organisms develop defenses against pathogens, and the pathogens develop ways around the defenses. We can expect that nature, with its huge numerical advantage (many microbes vs very few antibiotics), will eventually find evolutionary pathways around our defenses.
> The nth doughnut disappears just about as quickly as the first.
Not if you are the only person in the room, and are eating all twelve donuts. Back when I was young and strong, I could eat a dozen donuts in one sitting, but I did slow down near the end of the box.
As slashdot.org/~Sir_Sri points out, the study quoted here is provocative, but it's way off the mark. Go to the newscientist article, and you'll see, for example, that Vanguard is #8 in the list of evil companies. Vanguard is a mutual fund company. It doesn't have its own money. It just takes your money, keeps a small fee (theirs are among the lowest in the business), and uses your money to buy shares in other companies.
.
It is more accurate to say that a large fraction of the middle class in Western countries owns, through mutual funds, a substantial portion of the stock of the largest publicly-traded companies in the world. What's the big deal?
Or maybe it's some vast middle-class conspiracy. If so, you're probably part of it.
I don't see how that could have been rendered in real time, especially the fully shaded hand. Think of all those pixels! Each frame was rendered on a CRT and photographed individually.
Ingredients:
1 lb of beef chuck, chopped into 1-inch pieces
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 onion, chopped
2 tbsp oil for frying
one bay leaf
salt and pepper to taste
water
Directions:
1. Attach a large pan directly to the server CPU with heatsink compound, and brown the beef, a few pieces at a time, to avoid steaming them. Set aside.
2. Detach the pan from the CPU about 5 mm, and sautee the onions until golden brown, about 5 minutes.
3. Add the garlic, sautee 1 minute.
4. Add beef, salt and pepper, bay leaf, and water to cover.
5. Place pan over 1kW multi-GPU exhaust, and simmer two hours, or until meat is tender.
Not that nonsense again. Jeez. How many times are people going to quote this energy balance equation as if it were gospel?
Lots of good research shows that exercise does not cause weight loss. Getting lots of exercise just makes you hungry. So it's got nothing to do with "calories out".
Again, read Taubes' books, or his article from New York Mag "The scientist and the stairmaster." What actually seems to happen is that skinny people (like me) have trouble storing fat, so we have an excess of nutrients running loose in our blood, and hence our bodies jump into action to burn those calories off. In other words, being unable to store fat causes you to exercise. You exercise because you're thin, not the other way around!
On the other hand, fat people's bodies tend to grab every nutrient in their bloodstream and stash it into their fat cells. They have no available fuel, and hence their bodies slow things down. They are sedentary (and hungry!) because they are fat.
There's a lot of misinformed prejudice showing its ugly head on this topic.
Actually this is false. I think only your cornea needs glucose to run on. The remaining organs can run on glucose, fatty acids, or ketone bodies. Even your brain can run on fatty acids and ketones.
As Atkins used to say, "you hear about essential amino acids and essential fatty acids, but you never hear about essential carbohydrates".
This idea exists in Greek myth: "[Semele] then demanded that Zeus reveal himself in all his glory as proof of his godhood. Though Zeus begged her not to ask this, she persisted and he was forced by his oath to comply. Zeus tried to spare her by showing her the smallest of his bolts and the sparsest thunderstorm clouds he could find. Mortals, however, cannot look upon Zeus without incinerating, and she perished, consumed in lightning-ignited flame"
You should not ask the Godhead to reveal itself in its pure form. No mortal can sustain it.
I think what we're seeing here is that, if you steal from very rich and powerful people (like the directors of GS), you will be severely punished. That's why Bernie Madoff is in prison for the rest of his life: he too stole primarily from rich people.
Of course, if you steal from the less-well-connected, nothing much will happen to you. Thus the directors of Goldman, AIG, Citi, etc who bet their shareholders' equity, and also risked the pensions of many workers, did not go to jail. Instead, they got themselves installed in the Treasury department, and got their cronies even more money from taxpayers!
The research says that cellphones don't cause cancer. Agreed. But do cellphone EM fields affect your thoughts? Has that kind of research been done?
Of course USING a cellphone affects your thoughts. It can even cause brain injury, if you are driving a car and end up hitting your head on the windshield because you were distracted and hit a tree. The question is whether the radio waves from the cellphone antenna are doing something unusual to your neurons.
The snowblower was invented in Montreal, for a good reason: they get lots of snow, and it stays in place until March. Hence the city has come up with an almost militaristic solution. It involves giant snowblowers, dump trucks, blinking red lights, and looking for your car (which is not where you parked it) after the city crews come up your street:
http://chicagomontreal.blogspot.com/2006/01/snow-removal-in-montreal.html
This comes as a surprise only to Americans. The rest of the developing world knows that the U.S. likes dictators. Many latin American countries endured dictatorships that were endorsed or tolerated by the U.S. government, mostly because the dictators favoured the interests of American companies. It's nothing new. What's surprising is that Joe Biden would be candid enough to claim on national TV that Mubarak isn't a dictator.
As Walter Benn Michaels puts it in "The Trouble with Diversity," universities are where the rich send their children, in order to "launder their privilege into qualifications." What a great phrase!
The USA claims to be a free and open society, where anyone can, through natural talent and hard work, rise to a higher class, and become wealthy and influential. But of course that's a lie. Social classes exist here just as they do in all countries, and the rich upper classes will always remain dominant, the poor you will always have with you, and the middle class will always be insecure and will strive to move into the upper class. It's not different here, it's just that we've been sold on the myth of equal opportunity.
Because of this lie, the rich have to hide their inherited advantages, and must show evidence that they actually have talents and are hard-working. Middle-class workers have to be kept asleep, lest they realize that the people who own the corporation do so through wealth, and not through merit. Hence the corporate owners send their kids to Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford, to mask that inherited privilege with the trappings of actual skill and effort.
I've walked through the campus at Princeton, and the undergraduates there all appeared to float through space, as if life had never presented them with any obstacles, as if anything was possible, as if the future held great delights. They weren't snobbish. They were very nice people, but they truly knew that they were masters of their universe.
So how does this relate to the NY times article in question? Why do private-university graduates have higher salaries than state-university graduates? Simply because they are rich and connected *BEFORE* they enter the hallowed halls. That wealth and advantage are there after they graduate, and helps them land great jobs. They would probably land those jobs if they didn't attend those schools, but then the resentful middle-class workers would smell a rat.
In other words, the school you attend makes no difference. What matters is what class you were born into.
Slashdot Mirror
Only the Voyager 2 probe flew past Uranus, and I don't think it took pictures of the poles. The Galileo probe orbited Jupiter for many years, but I don't think its orbit was high enough (in terms of latitude) to get clear views of the poles. For example, this site includes a polar view of Jupiter: http://thebigfoto.com/jupiter-from-space but it's a composite of many pictures, and the fuzziness of the polar region suggests that it's a re-projection of oblique views taken from a lower-latitude images.
I strung together 7 raw images from cassini's website into a simple animtation: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5BO-IJLRe8EdjFiTDZJS21QNXM/edit
Doesn't Steve Mann record audio too? The way his page explains it, it feels like strange mute men assaulted him and tried to forcibly remove his glasses. Surely those men weren't mute. They must have said something. Of course, they were speaking French, but Mann's daughter understands French. It would be nice to get her point of view, so we could get a better grasp on what happened. There's something missing here. It's like a silent movie.
Obesity: http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/October-2011/The-Low-Poverty-Diet/
Poverty: http://visualecon.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/percent_in_poverty.gif
The correlation is especially marked in Appalachia, the lower Mississippi and the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia. What's going on here? Do poor people exercise less? I doubt it. Most poor people have physical jobs, while rich people sit in offices. I think the problem is that most poor people can't afford much beyond spaghetti, potatoes, and bread (cheap starches), whereas rich people can afford protein, butter, and vegetables.
We have to be careful about making statements about obese people's lifestyles. Usually our statements about fat people are little more than racial and class prejudice: "those people eat too much" really means "they're uncontrolled gluttons", and "those people don't get enough exercise" really means "they're lazy slobs". As long as social classes have existed, the rich and comfortable have justified their privilege by claiming that the poor are weak and immoral.
1. The time remaining until the contract expires
2. The current price of the undelying asset
3. The strike price (the contract gives its buyer the right or "option" to buy the asset at the strike price)
4. The risk-free rate of return on cash (return that could be earned by putting your money into, say, treasuries rather than stock)
5. The volatility of the underlying asset.
At the time the contract is written, the first four of these values are known (assuming of course that the risk-free rate stays constant, which is pretty close to a sure bet). The LAST value is the problem. It says how much the stock will fluctuate, between the present time and the time of expiry. This is unknown, because, after all, it requires knowledge of the future. Usually, PAST volatility is used in its place, going with the assumption that the stock will behave in the future the same way it behaved in the recent past.
If the stock suddenly becomes very quiet, and stops fluctuating, the buyer payed too much for the contract, on average. If the stock gets very wild, the buyer got a bargain, on average. In either case, the contract buyer and seller guessed wrong. They should have used a different volatility to price the option.
Of course, stock fluctuations do NOT follow a normal curve, after all. And option traders do NOT follow Black-Scholes exactly either (see "volatility smile"). But the much bigger flaw, I think, is lack of clairvoyance. The formula requires knowledge of the future.
I kinda see where you're coming from. I attended two different high schools: one in the suburbs of Toronto, which served children of working-class parents (many worked at the local auto assembly plant). It was hell. Few students valued academic subjects, and if you excelled in math or English you got persecuted. Shop class was highly valued, though. Then we moved to downtown Toronto, where students were well off (Toronto reverses the American pattern of rich suburbs and poor downtown). It was lovely: students valued learning. What I experienced was class solidarity: if you try to step outside your class (eg, if you value book learning when your peers value mechanical skills), you will be ostracized. The instinct to fit in and conform is very powerful, especially during adolescence.
But just because the ITU says they don't have the mandate, or the budget, and insist that the alleged plan is just a mis-information campaign, why should be believe them? Of course they would deny it. They're just trying to get our guard down, as any sinister anti-American organization would. Just watch: the minute the WSJ stops running editorials like this, the UN will take over! ;-)
If you look at an actuarial table from the USA: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html and plot the probability of death versus age, on a semi-log graph, you get a straight line after age 30. This means that the probability of death rises exponentially with time. It reaches 100% probability at age 121. Hence that's the hard limit. Interestingly, there's a slight change in slope around age 97: maybe some other aging mechanism takes over. Nevertheless, the change is slight, and the probability continues its lethal rise to 100%.
Feel free to use as simple a password as your system allows. No one will guess it.
Another way to look at this is that antibiotics are a short-term imbalance on a nature's long-term balance. In the short time (since the 1930s) that antibiotics have existed, we have managed to push back against bacteria. In the long term, organisms develop defenses against pathogens, and the pathogens develop ways around the defenses. We can expect that nature, with its huge numerical advantage (many microbes vs very few antibiotics), will eventually find evolutionary pathways around our defenses.
Not if you are the only person in the room, and are eating all twelve donuts. Back when I was young and strong, I could eat a dozen donuts in one sitting, but I did slow down near the end of the box.
.
It is more accurate to say that a large fraction of the middle class in Western countries owns, through mutual funds, a substantial portion of the stock of the largest publicly-traded companies in the world. What's the big deal?
Or maybe it's some vast middle-class conspiracy. If so, you're probably part of it.
I don't see how that could have been rendered in real time, especially the fully shaded hand. Think of all those pixels! Each frame was rendered on a CRT and photographed individually.
Ingredients:
1 lb of beef chuck, chopped into 1-inch pieces
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 onion, chopped
2 tbsp oil for frying
one bay leaf
salt and pepper to taste
water
Directions:
1. Attach a large pan directly to the server CPU with heatsink compound, and brown the beef, a few pieces at a time, to avoid steaming them. Set aside.
2. Detach the pan from the CPU about 5 mm, and sautee the onions until golden brown, about 5 minutes.
3. Add the garlic, sautee 1 minute.
4. Add beef, salt and pepper, bay leaf, and water to cover.
5. Place pan over 1kW multi-GPU exhaust, and simmer two hours, or until meat is tender.
Not that nonsense again. Jeez. How many times are people going to quote this energy balance equation as if it were gospel?
Lots of good research shows that exercise does not cause weight loss. Getting lots of exercise just makes you hungry. So it's got nothing to do with "calories out".
Again, read Taubes' books, or his article from New York Mag "The scientist and the stairmaster." What actually seems to happen is that skinny people (like me) have trouble storing fat, so we have an excess of nutrients running loose in our blood, and hence our bodies jump into action to burn those calories off. In other words, being unable to store fat causes you to exercise. You exercise because you're thin, not the other way around!
On the other hand, fat people's bodies tend to grab every nutrient in their bloodstream and stash it into their fat cells. They have no available fuel, and hence their bodies slow things down. They are sedentary (and hungry!) because they are fat.
There's a lot of misinformed prejudice showing its ugly head on this topic.
Actually this is false. I think only your cornea needs glucose to run on. The remaining organs can run on glucose, fatty acids, or ketone bodies. Even your brain can run on fatty acids and ketones. As Atkins used to say, "you hear about essential amino acids and essential fatty acids, but you never hear about essential carbohydrates".
radiation is God's pure love
This idea exists in Greek myth: "[Semele] then demanded that Zeus reveal himself in all his glory as proof of his godhood. Though Zeus begged her not to ask this, she persisted and he was forced by his oath to comply. Zeus tried to spare her by showing her the smallest of his bolts and the sparsest thunderstorm clouds he could find. Mortals, however, cannot look upon Zeus without incinerating, and she perished, consumed in lightning-ignited flame" You should not ask the Godhead to reveal itself in its pure form. No mortal can sustain it.
Of course, if you steal from the less-well-connected, nothing much will happen to you. Thus the directors of Goldman, AIG, Citi, etc who bet their shareholders' equity, and also risked the pensions of many workers, did not go to jail. Instead, they got themselves installed in the Treasury department, and got their cronies even more money from taxpayers!
As Matt Taibbi said "Why isn't Wall Street in jail?" : http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/2/22/matt_taibbi_why_isnt_wall_street_in_jail
Then again, as Billie Holiday sang, "Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose. So the bible says, and it still is news!"
The research says that cellphones don't cause cancer. Agreed. But do cellphone EM fields affect your thoughts? Has that kind of research been done? Of course USING a cellphone affects your thoughts. It can even cause brain injury, if you are driving a car and end up hitting your head on the windshield because you were distracted and hit a tree. The question is whether the radio waves from the cellphone antenna are doing something unusual to your neurons.
The snowblower was invented in Montreal, for a good reason: they get lots of snow, and it stays in place until March. Hence the city has come up with an almost militaristic solution. It involves giant snowblowers, dump trucks, blinking red lights, and looking for your car (which is not where you parked it) after the city crews come up your street: http://chicagomontreal.blogspot.com/2006/01/snow-removal-in-montreal.html
Toronto has such a machine: http://www.toronto.ca/transportation/snow/torontomelt.htm
This comes as a surprise only to Americans. The rest of the developing world knows that the U.S. likes dictators. Many latin American countries endured dictatorships that were endorsed or tolerated by the U.S. government, mostly because the dictators favoured the interests of American companies. It's nothing new. What's surprising is that Joe Biden would be candid enough to claim on national TV that Mubarak isn't a dictator.
As Walter Benn Michaels puts it in "The Trouble with Diversity," universities are where the rich send their children, in order to "launder their privilege into qualifications." What a great phrase!
The USA claims to be a free and open society, where anyone can, through natural talent and hard work, rise to a higher class, and become wealthy and influential. But of course that's a lie. Social classes exist here just as they do in all countries, and the rich upper classes will always remain dominant, the poor you will always have with you, and the middle class will always be insecure and will strive to move into the upper class. It's not different here, it's just that we've been sold on the myth of equal opportunity.
Because of this lie, the rich have to hide their inherited advantages, and must show evidence that they actually have talents and are hard-working. Middle-class workers have to be kept asleep, lest they realize that the people who own the corporation do so through wealth, and not through merit. Hence the corporate owners send their kids to Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford, to mask that inherited privilege with the trappings of actual skill and effort.
I've walked through the campus at Princeton, and the undergraduates there all appeared to float through space, as if life had never presented them with any obstacles, as if anything was possible, as if the future held great delights. They weren't snobbish. They were very nice people, but they truly knew that they were masters of their universe.
So how does this relate to the NY times article in question? Why do private-university graduates have higher salaries than state-university graduates? Simply because they are rich and connected *BEFORE* they enter the hallowed halls. That wealth and advantage are there after they graduate, and helps them land great jobs. They would probably land those jobs if they didn't attend those schools, but then the resentful middle-class workers would smell a rat.
In other words, the school you attend makes no difference. What matters is what class you were born into.
You've just rediscovered anti-aliasing!
This one's on APOD: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap101110.html