You're not making simplifying assumptions. You are completely misrepresenting the mechanism, and your numbers are meaningless. You are wrong, the posters who called you on your original post are right, and snarky comments about "basic physics" aren't going to cover that up.
Just let me bet that the mass of solar panel + water extractor + electrolysis apparatus is larger than the ordinary, earth-brought mass of fuel that'd bring the same thrust.
If you're thinking of this as a one-off thing, then you're probably right. But once the equipment is up there, it can stay up there and keep producing fuel. So we could seed suitable asteroids with fuel plants and let them sit there, making fuel, to act as "gas stations" for later stops.
Neither of the articles you link to (which are both copies of the same AP article) actually quotes Obama as saying "I support the troops, but not their mission." It's a paraphrase by the reporter. I'd be interested to know what Obama actually said.
In any case, if you believe that any of the conversations described in the American Thinker essay actually happened the way they're written, you're a fool. They're classic examples of made-up victories, the type of thing you come up with thirty seconds after an argument: "Oh, if only I'd said..." Like masturbation, it's something everybody does -- don't try to pretend you don't -- but most people have too much sense to describe it in detail on a public forum.
You spoiled my joke. I'm going to have to report you to the International Global Warming Conspiracy HQ for that, you know. Al Gore will be dispatching the black helicopters to your location shortly.
We're lucky in biology to have funding agencies which regularly kick out rather large amounts of money specifically for the purpose of building and maintaining public data repositories. Most other branches of science, including climatology, don't have that. Now, you'd think that with all the billions of dollars that the deniers insist environmentalists are making on climate change, someone could find a few bucks here and there for a server farm, but so far it doesn't seem to be happening.
Knowing that dirty water spreads disease isn't the same thing as knowing why it spreads disease. Sanitation can be observed to be effective without any explanation of the underlying mechanism. My question is, did Varro and his Indian predecessors actually have evidence for their pathogen hypothesis, or did they simply pick the one of several possible explanations that happened to be right? If the former, I'd very interested to know what it was -- it's always fascinating when some bit of scientific knowledge turns out to be older than is generally believed.
Imagination isn't the same thing as inference. The fact that they could imagine germs, and for that matter atoms, doesn't mean that they actually knew such things existed in the same sense that we know today that they exist. Now, obviously, we can in fact infer the existence of things we can't see, and we have a well-established process for doing just that. I'm mainly curious as to how far back that process goes; the body of practices that we now call "the scientific method" is generally dated to the late Rennaissance, and I think it would be pretty cool if it turned out to be significantly older.
Boyle's laws can be confirmed by experiment without knowledge of the kinetics; he wasn't just guessing, he was formulating a model based on his observations. With regards to infectious disease, this is roughly equivalent to sanitary practices, which can be shown to work without an underlying knowledge of germ theory. But if you're going to propose a mechanism -- the behavior of gas molecules in the first case, that of infectious microorganisms in the second -- then unless you have some kind of evidence, then yes, it's a lucky guess. There is a reason why "model" and "theory" are two different words. Note that I'm not claiming models aren't useful; of course they are. But they do not lead to understanding of the underlying mechanisms in and of themselves.
The question is, did those ancient Roman and Indian physicians actually know about germs, or were they just making a lucky guess? Without a microscope, the idea of "miasma" ("bad air") as an explanation for infectious disease, which was popular up through the 19th c., actually makes just about as much sense as germ theory. So I'd be interested to know the process by which the ancients arrived at their conclusion -- unless they devised some very clever experiments, they didn't really know what they were dealing with.
Reading the article, it's pretty clear that who we have to thank is a conservative columnist reporting a bunch of imaginary conversations he had in his head with straw-man liberals. Note to Mr. Robinson: lots of people have imaginary conversations in which we display our slashing wit and insight until our opponents slink away in shame, but most of us don't embarrass ourselves by publishing them.
Get your head out of your free market ass and wake up.
Wow. It's been a while since anyone so dramatically misread what I wrote -- and on Slashdot, that's saying something. If you think my posts are "everything is fine" la-la, or pushing free market fundamentalism, then I'm not sure there's anything I can say that will help you understand my actual position.
Get real: Very few people cooperate to control very many people.
Which is pretty much the way it's always been, everywhere, under every political and economic system ever devised. I don't like it any better than you do, and I believe that we should do what we can to change it -- which is why I'm a fan of net neutrality. I also believe that there are certain attempts at changing the situation, such as pushing the fairness doctrine, which are counterproductive to this goal. Or to put it more simply: if we tie net neutrality to the fairness doctrine, we lose.
Acting like this isn't real is your own problem; and I'm sorry you may be too naive to see it.
The naivete comes in believing that there is any possible way that the American political system will enforce anything that could reasonably be called "fairness" within a single media outlet. Look around. It can't and won't be done. Choose the battles you have a prayer of winning.
You can't make people learn. Before the days of cable channels carefully crafted to appeal to specific political groups, TV news viewers would simply turn off the TV, or change the channel to a sitcom, when a reporter they didn't like came on the air. If a debate show came on, they'd do the same -- or watch for the purpose of cheering "their guy" and booing "the other guy" like they were watching a football game. Newspaper readers glance at the headlines before deciding which stories to read, and flip past editorial columnists with whom they disagree. Unless we go with some Orwellian TV-watching-you requirement that people sit down and watch their daily ration of government-mandated news, there's nothing we can do about this... and the consequences of instituting such a requirement would be much, much worse than any amount of cable "news" propaganda or echo-chamber blogging is ever likely to be.
Do you really think that people were better informed in the days of the fairness doctrine? Remember, it was Reagan who got rid of it -- and in order to do that, he had to get elected in the first place, which says to me that it didn't really do a whole lot of good.
Eh, not exactly. The "long tail" is a phrase that usually comes up in discussions of financial matters, and I agree that (unfortunately) it hasn't panned out the way we were hoping it would. But ideas are not measurable in dollars. I would argue that the active, constant, and often very healthy (as well as yes, often polarized and idiotic) political debate that takes place across the internet is in fact a success: more people have access to a greater range of facts and opinions than ever before, and more ways to speak out. There is just about nothing said in print or broadcast media that isn't immediately dissected in every possible way, all in public view. It doesn't work perfectly, but it works better than just about anything we've tried before.
tell me that the current way the news is reported is good for the political health of the United States
Of course it's not. But that does not mean that for the government to decide what news can be reported, and how it will be reported, is better.
the constitution doesn't give you the freedom to deliberately lie to the electorate about news they will vote upon
Of course it does. The First Amendment doesn't say, "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of true speech, or of the press except when they're lying." You have the right to say what you want to say, I have the right to say what I want to say, and Fox News and CNN have the right to say what they want to say even when it's apparent to you and me and a lot of other people that what they're saying is bilge. The solution to speech we don't like is, always, more speech. There is never a good alternative.
And this is why net neutrality is so damned important: as long as we have the mechanism by which we can speak out -- and I think you'll agree that the internet is one of the greatest such mechanisms in history -- we have a chance to counter all the crap that gets shoveled at us by politicians and massive corporate media. Lose that mechanism, and we lose the best hope we have. By mixing up net neutrality with the fairness doctrine, we increase the chance of losing it all.
The fairness doctrine is dead as a doornail, and as much as I'd like to see more balance in mainstream media, that's probably a good thing; it's not the government's place to decide how the news is reported. Meanwhile, advocates of net neutrality do themselves no favors by comparing the two. It is the mainly the enemies of net neutrality who keep bringing up the fairness doctrine, because they want to discredit net neutrality, a technical matter, by mixing it up in people's minds with the fairness doctrine, a political matter. Please don't fall into their trap.
Hey, at least it's better than the liberal socialist backyard Kumbaya drum circle! It's about time we told those damn hippies with their "free exchange of information" and "open source" and all that communist bilge where to get off -- only good old fashioned American capitalism can produce successes like Netscape!
There's a lot of physical therapy equipment that is basically light exercise equipment, and can certainly be used to good effect by healthy people. Should the government or insurance companies refuse to pay for it on that basis? Look, the guy's physician prescribed it, and as other posters have pointed out, it's a lot cheaper than sessions with an actual therapist. Its other uses are irrelevant. This case sounds to me a lot more like a politician trying to score points than any real debate over cost-effective medical care.
Heh, to each his own, I guess. I mostly work in R these days, and while I admit it's quirky, once you get used to its quirks it's quite a useful langauge. Overall, I'd rather be programming in Python than just about anything else, but in my lines of work (bioinformatics and biostatistics) R provides the best overall combination of features and usability. YMMV, and obviously does in this particular case.
R is not a "knockoff of S". It is a free implementation of the S language. S-Plus is a proprietary implementation of that language. Maybe you should read up on the history.
And... "freetard"? WTF? If you're identifying this is a F/OSS problem, what's MathWorks' excuse?
SciPy/NumPy, R, and Octave are all perfectly good alternatives to MATLAB these days for most work. But there are a lot of people who rely on MATLAB-specific toolboxes. I look forward to the day when proprietary math and stats packages take their place in the bitbucket of computing history, but we're not quite there yet.
The purpose of establishing an int64 data type is to allow direct manipulation, without resort to such hackery, of integers which are larger than 32 bits but smaller than 64 bits. You may have noticed that there are lot of such integers... very nearly 2^64 of them, in fact.
If MATLAB is optimized for 32-bit integer arithmetic, then maybe it's time to change that?
By your logic, we wouldn't need any integer type longer than 2 bits. You could certainly design an integer arithmetic scheme on that basis, but I doubt you'd want to.
Re:Article needs a course in experimental design
on
The Data-Driven Life
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So if you wanted to know the effect of coffee intake on your productivity -- not the population in general, but you personally; remember that caffeine is a drug to which many people react idiosyncratically -- how would you suggest designing the experiment? Speaking as a fellow statistician, I'd say it sounds like the guy's doing the best he can with what he's got to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not making simplifying assumptions. You are completely misrepresenting the mechanism, and your numbers are meaningless. You are wrong, the posters who called you on your original post are right, and snarky comments about "basic physics" aren't going to cover that up.
Just let me bet that the mass of solar panel + water extractor + electrolysis apparatus is larger than the ordinary, earth-brought mass of fuel that'd bring the same thrust.
If you're thinking of this as a one-off thing, then you're probably right. But once the equipment is up there, it can stay up there and keep producing fuel. So we could seed suitable asteroids with fuel plants and let them sit there, making fuel, to act as "gas stations" for later stops.
Neither of the articles you link to (which are both copies of the same AP article) actually quotes Obama as saying "I support the troops, but not their mission." It's a paraphrase by the reporter. I'd be interested to know what Obama actually said.
In any case, if you believe that any of the conversations described in the American Thinker essay actually happened the way they're written, you're a fool. They're classic examples of made-up victories, the type of thing you come up with thirty seconds after an argument: "Oh, if only I'd said ..." Like masturbation, it's something everybody does -- don't try to pretend you don't -- but most people have too much sense to describe it in detail on a public forum.
Ah, good point.
You spoiled my joke. I'm going to have to report you to the International Global Warming Conspiracy HQ for that, you know. Al Gore will be dispatching the black helicopters to your location shortly.
We're lucky in biology to have funding agencies which regularly kick out rather large amounts of money specifically for the purpose of building and maintaining public data repositories. Most other branches of science, including climatology, don't have that. Now, you'd think that with all the billions of dollars that the deniers insist environmentalists are making on climate change, someone could find a few bucks here and there for a server farm, but so far it doesn't seem to be happening.
Knowing that dirty water spreads disease isn't the same thing as knowing why it spreads disease. Sanitation can be observed to be effective without any explanation of the underlying mechanism. My question is, did Varro and his Indian predecessors actually have evidence for their pathogen hypothesis, or did they simply pick the one of several possible explanations that happened to be right? If the former, I'd very interested to know what it was -- it's always fascinating when some bit of scientific knowledge turns out to be older than is generally believed.
Imagination isn't the same thing as inference. The fact that they could imagine germs, and for that matter atoms, doesn't mean that they actually knew such things existed in the same sense that we know today that they exist. Now, obviously, we can in fact infer the existence of things we can't see, and we have a well-established process for doing just that. I'm mainly curious as to how far back that process goes; the body of practices that we now call "the scientific method" is generally dated to the late Rennaissance, and I think it would be pretty cool if it turned out to be significantly older.
Boyle's laws can be confirmed by experiment without knowledge of the kinetics; he wasn't just guessing, he was formulating a model based on his observations. With regards to infectious disease, this is roughly equivalent to sanitary practices, which can be shown to work without an underlying knowledge of germ theory. But if you're going to propose a mechanism -- the behavior of gas molecules in the first case, that of infectious microorganisms in the second -- then unless you have some kind of evidence, then yes, it's a lucky guess. There is a reason why "model" and "theory" are two different words. Note that I'm not claiming models aren't useful; of course they are. But they do not lead to understanding of the underlying mechanisms in and of themselves.
The question is, did those ancient Roman and Indian physicians actually know about germs, or were they just making a lucky guess? Without a microscope, the idea of "miasma" ("bad air") as an explanation for infectious disease, which was popular up through the 19th c., actually makes just about as much sense as germ theory. So I'd be interested to know the process by which the ancients arrived at their conclusion -- unless they devised some very clever experiments, they didn't really know what they were dealing with.
And both of us have to thank the Democratic Party for this wonderfully creative and innovative weaselese, that started it all: "We support the troops, but not their mission."
Reading the article, it's pretty clear that who we have to thank is a conservative columnist reporting a bunch of imaginary conversations he had in his head with straw-man liberals. Note to Mr. Robinson: lots of people have imaginary conversations in which we display our slashing wit and insight until our opponents slink away in shame, but most of us don't embarrass ourselves by publishing them.
They'll only do that if the students in question have last names ending in "-ez".
That's not irony.
Its hypocrisy.
It's neither. And thinking that it's either, or both, is stupidity.
Yeah... and the world is perfect.
Get your head out of your free market ass and wake up.
Wow. It's been a while since anyone so dramatically misread what I wrote -- and on Slashdot, that's saying something. If you think my posts are "everything is fine" la-la, or pushing free market fundamentalism, then I'm not sure there's anything I can say that will help you understand my actual position.
Get real: Very few people cooperate to control very many people.
Which is pretty much the way it's always been, everywhere, under every political and economic system ever devised. I don't like it any better than you do, and I believe that we should do what we can to change it -- which is why I'm a fan of net neutrality. I also believe that there are certain attempts at changing the situation, such as pushing the fairness doctrine, which are counterproductive to this goal. Or to put it more simply: if we tie net neutrality to the fairness doctrine, we lose.
Acting like this isn't real is your own problem; and I'm sorry you may be too naive to see it.
The naivete comes in believing that there is any possible way that the American political system will enforce anything that could reasonably be called "fairness" within a single media outlet. Look around. It can't and won't be done. Choose the battles you have a prayer of winning.
You can't make people learn. Before the days of cable channels carefully crafted to appeal to specific political groups, TV news viewers would simply turn off the TV, or change the channel to a sitcom, when a reporter they didn't like came on the air. If a debate show came on, they'd do the same -- or watch for the purpose of cheering "their guy" and booing "the other guy" like they were watching a football game. Newspaper readers glance at the headlines before deciding which stories to read, and flip past editorial columnists with whom they disagree. Unless we go with some Orwellian TV-watching-you requirement that people sit down and watch their daily ration of government-mandated news, there's nothing we can do about this ... and the consequences of instituting such a requirement would be much, much worse than any amount of cable "news" propaganda or echo-chamber blogging is ever likely to be.
Do you really think that people were better informed in the days of the fairness doctrine? Remember, it was Reagan who got rid of it -- and in order to do that, he had to get elected in the first place, which says to me that it didn't really do a whole lot of good.
Eh, not exactly. The "long tail" is a phrase that usually comes up in discussions of financial matters, and I agree that (unfortunately) it hasn't panned out the way we were hoping it would. But ideas are not measurable in dollars. I would argue that the active, constant, and often very healthy (as well as yes, often polarized and idiotic) political debate that takes place across the internet is in fact a success: more people have access to a greater range of facts and opinions than ever before, and more ways to speak out. There is just about nothing said in print or broadcast media that isn't immediately dissected in every possible way, all in public view. It doesn't work perfectly, but it works better than just about anything we've tried before.
tell me that the current way the news is reported is good for the political health of the United States
Of course it's not. But that does not mean that for the government to decide what news can be reported, and how it will be reported, is better.
the constitution doesn't give you the freedom to deliberately lie to the electorate about news they will vote upon
Of course it does. The First Amendment doesn't say, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of true speech, or of the press except when they're lying." You have the right to say what you want to say, I have the right to say what I want to say, and Fox News and CNN have the right to say what they want to say even when it's apparent to you and me and a lot of other people that what they're saying is bilge. The solution to speech we don't like is, always, more speech. There is never a good alternative.
And this is why net neutrality is so damned important: as long as we have the mechanism by which we can speak out -- and I think you'll agree that the internet is one of the greatest such mechanisms in history -- we have a chance to counter all the crap that gets shoveled at us by politicians and massive corporate media. Lose that mechanism, and we lose the best hope we have. By mixing up net neutrality with the fairness doctrine, we increase the chance of losing it all.
The fairness doctrine is dead as a doornail, and as much as I'd like to see more balance in mainstream media, that's probably a good thing; it's not the government's place to decide how the news is reported. Meanwhile, advocates of net neutrality do themselves no favors by comparing the two. It is the mainly the enemies of net neutrality who keep bringing up the fairness doctrine, because they want to discredit net neutrality, a technical matter, by mixing it up in people's minds with the fairness doctrine, a political matter. Please don't fall into their trap.
Hey, at least it's better than the liberal socialist backyard Kumbaya drum circle! It's about time we told those damn hippies with their "free exchange of information" and "open source" and all that communist bilge where to get off -- only good old fashioned American capitalism can produce successes like Netscape!
There's a lot of physical therapy equipment that is basically light exercise equipment, and can certainly be used to good effect by healthy people. Should the government or insurance companies refuse to pay for it on that basis? Look, the guy's physician prescribed it, and as other posters have pointed out, it's a lot cheaper than sessions with an actual therapist. Its other uses are irrelevant. This case sounds to me a lot more like a politician trying to score points than any real debate over cost-effective medical care.
Heh, to each his own, I guess. I mostly work in R these days, and while I admit it's quirky, once you get used to its quirks it's quite a useful langauge. Overall, I'd rather be programming in Python than just about anything else, but in my lines of work (bioinformatics and biostatistics) R provides the best overall combination of features and usability. YMMV, and obviously does in this particular case.
Wow. You're one of those people who thought "open sores" was clever, aren't you?
R is not a "knockoff of S". It is a free implementation of the S language. S-Plus is a proprietary implementation of that language. Maybe you should read up on the history.
And ... "freetard"? WTF? If you're identifying this is a F/OSS problem, what's MathWorks' excuse?
SciPy/NumPy, R, and Octave are all perfectly good alternatives to MATLAB these days for most work. But there are a lot of people who rely on MATLAB-specific toolboxes. I look forward to the day when proprietary math and stats packages take their place in the bitbucket of computing history, but we're not quite there yet.
The purpose of establishing an int64 data type is to allow direct manipulation, without resort to such hackery, of integers which are larger than 32 bits but smaller than 64 bits. You may have noticed that there are lot of such integers ... very nearly 2^64 of them, in fact.
If MATLAB is optimized for 32-bit integer arithmetic, then maybe it's time to change that?
By your logic, we wouldn't need any integer type longer than 2 bits. You could certainly design an integer arithmetic scheme on that basis, but I doubt you'd want to.
So if you wanted to know the effect of coffee intake on your productivity -- not the population in general, but you personally; remember that caffeine is a drug to which many people react idiosyncratically -- how would you suggest designing the experiment? Speaking as a fellow statistician, I'd say it sounds like the guy's doing the best he can with what he's got to work with.