ALMA is just insanely awesome. Electrical engineers are a dime a dozen, and there are a reasonable number of good RF/microwave people among them. Among them are the gurus who've made themselves household names in the industry. A few of those people are actually as smart, creative, and well-informed as they think they are.
Then there are the guys who distribute phase-coherent millimeter wave LOs for hundreds of meters over fiber optics, and when they can't buy a mixer at Mini-Circuits that does what they want, they grow one from a freakin' crystal. Those guys all seem to end up at NRAO, even though there's no money in radio astronomy and even less glory.
Respect to the NRAO folks for not only doing some of the most hardcore RF work on the planet and elsewhere, but maintaining open, paywall-free distribution of their R&D papers. This shouldn't be taken for granted nowadays. If you're an EE, you can (and should) lose a whole weekend just reading the ALMA papers.
The first time I ever saw the word used that way was in H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds. Late at night, on the run from the Martians, the main character enters someone's house -- IIRC it was the mayor of the town the character was passing through -- and the unfortunate phrase used to describe the situation was something like The mayor came down the stairs, ejaculating.
When you're 12 years old it's not immediately clear how to picture a scene like this. I had the sense not to ask my mom, at least...
He may care about the product, but I don't believe he cares about the customer at all.
Which is exactly the way it's supposed to be. Customer focus is inherently reactionary. A customer-focused company is always going to be dancing to somebody else's fiddle. As a business, your obligation to the customer extends to delivering and supporting the product you sold them, in a fair and reasonable manner.
The right approach is to build the product you want to use... and if you're right, other people will want to use it as well. Maybe tens of millions of other people, as in Apple's case.
Henry Ford once pointed out that if he had relied on his customers to tell him what they wanted, they would asked for a faster horse.
He already did the Obi-Wan Gandalf Jesus thing, remember, when he came back to Apple and saved their bacon after they fired him.
Jobs proved once and for all that F. Scott Fitzgerald was full of shit when he said something to the effect of "There are no second acts in American success stories," but it's pretty clear there isn't going to be a third, at least not this time.
Both science and religion are the work of human beings, who sometimes aren't as intellectually honest as we'd all like to pretend. Big surprise. But science has a proven (if cumbersome) process for correcting mistakes and moving forward, while classical religions do not.
When a distinguished scientist admits he was wrong, people make fun of him at the next conference and then everybody moves on. When the Pope admits he was wrong, it undermines his entire role in human culture, so he hardly ever does.
So now they have to work for a giant company who has a mountain of patents in its vault just so they have protection from being sued out of existence by companies like the ones they work for.
It only recently occurred to me that this might be intentional. Large companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google clearly lose more than they gain from the current system, so why don't they throw their weight around Washington to have software declared unpatentable? Perhaps it's because the patent minefield might kill the one disruptive startup that's destined to eat the company's lunch in the future. At that point, the occasional eight-figure judgements won by patent trolls will have been worth it.
Large companies will always try to find ways to erect barriers to competition, and patents are the ultimate barrier since they grant ownership of ideas rather than concrete expressions. It's a shame the individual engineers and developers at these companies don't recognize what they're really doing when they write up patent disclosures.
So, you're not the least bit troubled by the fact that medicines that target HIV also have the oddly coincidental side effect of saving the lives of AIDS patients?
Evolutionary theory has weaknesses; there is the difficulty of demonstrating that there is some sequence of small, viable, inheritable mutations that can, over hundreds of millions of years, slowly turn fish into elephants
As another poster alluded to above, given a few cosmic rays through your henhouse with the right (wrong) parameters, your chicken's offspring will grow a dinosaur-like tail and teeth.
So either the chicken had an evolutionary predecessor that was, indeed, almost as different from it as a fish is different from an elephant, or there's something else wrong with your argument from incredulity.
What's not OK, however, is logically invalid responses to creationist claims, like you have done by assuming the conclusion.
I'd say you're the one who has assumed a conclusion, in this particular case.
"If the numbers can change"... maybe you can elaborate on this, because it sounds to me like you are stretching an analogy to a point that simply doesn't apply to the constraints at hand. Each mutation has a finite probability, a combination of such mutations has a probability of the product of each individually. So far, simple math. Survivability at each generation, if proposed occurring individually, or the above probability as represented as a product if proposes as occurring in a single organism.
Today's vocabulary term is "fitness function." Lotteries don't have a fitness function -- the ticket is printed, it wins or it loses, and then it's discarded, with no further influence over the system.
If, however, the "lottery" is a continuous process rather than a discrete event, and if the numbers on a single ticket can change in a way that makes it slightly more likely to win, it's no longer just a numbers game. Whoever suggested blind luck to you as a model for thinking about evolution had a reason for offering such a flawed paradigm. What was that reason? Did you bother asking?
All that's needed for evolution to occur is a localized environment that offers some form of feedback -- any conceivable mechanism that supports the tendency for the numbers on some of the 'lottery tickets' to change in the right direction -- and energy to make it happen. Given a quadrillion square meters of surface area that's both fertile and varied, and billions of years of available energy on the order of a hundred watts per square meter, it would take a God to stop life from arising.
As for being "lied to", well, of course you have no possible way of knowing my history, so your supernatural claims to psychic knowledge might be something for you to look at, but... indeed, I have asked for proof from the relevant entity able to provide it, and duly received it. That you haven't, and do not know, is not even -possibly- relevant to the fact I have. What you can validly claim, and cannot, your psychic powers notwithstanding, have been well-defined by the subject of epistemology. I'd suggest a refresher.
You're not fooling anyone but yourself. Either stand behind your faith or walk away from it.
Follow the probabilities of the necessary mutations.
Hint: it's not just a matter of 'probability' if the numbers on your lottery ticket can change.
No, macro- and micro- evolution are absolutely quantitatively distinct due to the probabilities involved regarding the number of mutually-reinforcing mutations that must occur for the necessary outcome, while maintaining survivability.
Your mental model of the scientific process is broken. Chances are that you're religious, which would mean that you've been lied to, probably all your life. You should be pissed about that. Instead, you respond with incredulity, sophistry, counterattacks against meaningless straw men ("only evolution occurs"), and continuing demands for proof from the people who have already shown it to you.
Meanwhile, you're cheerfully content with the complete lack of proof from people who have asked you to believe ridiculous things.
Which is kind of sad... but I guess it works for you. Except when it doesn't.
That sounds like a real pain in the neck for manufacturing, but if that's how it works, I can see how it might slow down the cloners. Until now, anyway.
Heck, a modern DSO will even decode the I2C bitstream for you. Even if it's encrypted, the data can still be copied.
The Chinese have proven capable of cloning a whole goddamned Apple store, so I don't imagine a serial EEPROM is going to cause them too much grief. As a culture, they seem to be happy to invest amounts of money and effort to copy our stuff that could otherwise have been used to compete legitimately. Go figure...
The whole problem is, it's ridiculously easy to find those "most sociopathic" people you're talking about, and almost impossible to find people who will put themselves at risk to interfere with them. It's almost as if there's something in almost everybody that's open to the sort of behaviors observed by Zimbardo and Milgram, given the right leadership.
But don't underestimate the psychological barrier that merely being told "you can't quit" amounts to when you're already in a situation of powerlessness.
Here's another good example of the same phenomenon -- in this case, the people who were told "you can't quit" bravely stayed in the game until they earned their own Darwin award.
People who criticize Zimbardo's experiment on the grounds that it was 'unscientific' or 'unethical' are missing the whole point. It may have been both unscientific and unethical, but it damned sure wasn't irreproducible.
Zimbardo essentially selected the people most likely to produce the result that would "confirm" his hypothesis.
Which is the most chilling implication of the experiment! The idea that you can always find people willing to do harmful things while the rest stand aside is enough to undermine the whole concept of individual morality.
Together with the equally infamous Milgram experiment, which has been shown to be reproducible under all sorts of conditions, Zimbardo's work shows how humans, as basically non-'evil' beings, rationalize and perpetuate organized acts of evil. (How many times have you heard someone say, "If I don't do $BAD_THING, somebody else will. Maybe the best thing to do is for me to take the job, and try to change the system from within"?)
...we don't have nearly the same blight on our social landscape as America does with their ridiculously conservative "Christian Fundies"
You're right, we don't have the same brand of conservative Christians at all. Here in the US, for instance, they actually failed to fuck with our Internet service.
Apple is definitely looking like Microsoft in the 1990s era. Their strengths and fortunes are exactly the same: they're one of many large technology companies with competent management and a healthy engineering culture, and they're uniquely blessed with the most head-slappingly retarded competitors in the history of human commerce.
So yes... if history repeats itselfl, Apple is most likely going to cross paths with antitrust authorities in the USA, EU, or both. It's not a good-versus-evil thing, it's just what happens when a company gets that lucky.
Nice try, but something tells me he's not going to read Fundamentals of Space Systems or anything else that's not written on a purple-and-black web page that somehow survived both the Geocities and AOL Hometown purges. As for him and his house, they will follow the Precautionary Principle... all the way back to the caves, if necessary.
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ALMA is just insanely awesome. Electrical engineers are a dime a dozen, and there are a reasonable number of good RF/microwave people among them. Among them are the gurus who've made themselves household names in the industry. A few of those people are actually as smart, creative, and well-informed as they think they are.
Then there are the guys who distribute phase-coherent millimeter wave LOs for hundreds of meters over fiber optics, and when they can't buy a mixer at Mini-Circuits that does what they want, they grow one from a freakin' crystal. Those guys all seem to end up at NRAO, even though there's no money in radio astronomy and even less glory.
Respect to the NRAO folks for not only doing some of the most hardcore RF work on the planet and elsewhere, but maintaining open, paywall-free distribution of their R&D papers. This shouldn't be taken for granted nowadays. If you're an EE, you can (and should) lose a whole weekend just reading the ALMA papers.
But how much of that was the device, and how much because Jobs is a marketing genius... (snip the usual drivel)
Hey. Use an iPad for a few minutes, then post your opinion. Until then, you're just wasting bandwidth.
Very much on-topic. The whole theme of ACO is that you can't solve social problems with technological measures.
If public schools manage to render 500 years of foul language obsolete, they will leave a vacuum that will be filled with something much like Nadsat.
The first time I ever saw the word used that way was in H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds. Late at night, on the run from the Martians, the main character enters someone's house -- IIRC it was the mayor of the town the character was passing through -- and the unfortunate phrase used to describe the situation was something like The mayor came down the stairs, ejaculating.
When you're 12 years old it's not immediately clear how to picture a scene like this. I had the sense not to ask my mom, at least...
He may care about the product, but I don't believe he cares about the customer at all.
Which is exactly the way it's supposed to be. Customer focus is inherently reactionary. A customer-focused company is always going to be dancing to somebody else's fiddle. As a business, your obligation to the customer extends to delivering and supporting the product you sold them, in a fair and reasonable manner.
The right approach is to build the product you want to use... and if you're right, other people will want to use it as well. Maybe tens of millions of other people, as in Apple's case.
Henry Ford once pointed out that if he had relied on his customers to tell him what they wanted, they would asked for a faster horse.
So what you're saying is that millions of people are wrong and should bow to your taste. Sounds like a dictatorship.
It certainly worked for Steve.
He already did the Obi-Wan Gandalf Jesus thing, remember, when he came back to Apple and saved their bacon after they fired him.
Jobs proved once and for all that F. Scott Fitzgerald was full of shit when he said something to the effect of "There are no second acts in American success stories," but it's pretty clear there isn't going to be a third, at least not this time.
If Apple had wanted those patents, they could have bought Motorola for breakfast and still had enough cash left over to buy Microsoft for lunch.
Both science and religion are the work of human beings, who sometimes aren't as intellectually honest as we'd all like to pretend. Big surprise. But science has a proven (if cumbersome) process for correcting mistakes and moving forward, while classical religions do not.
When a distinguished scientist admits he was wrong, people make fun of him at the next conference and then everybody moves on. When the Pope admits he was wrong, it undermines his entire role in human culture, so he hardly ever does.
But it's in a way upsetting to see so many dinosaur "established facts" I thought I knew turn out to be wrong
That's a feature of science, not a bug!
So now they have to work for a giant company who has a mountain of patents in its vault just so they have protection from being sued out of existence by companies like the ones they work for.
It only recently occurred to me that this might be intentional. Large companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google clearly lose more than they gain from the current system, so why don't they throw their weight around Washington to have software declared unpatentable? Perhaps it's because the patent minefield might kill the one disruptive startup that's destined to eat the company's lunch in the future. At that point, the occasional eight-figure judgements won by patent trolls will have been worth it.
Large companies will always try to find ways to erect barriers to competition, and patents are the ultimate barrier since they grant ownership of ideas rather than concrete expressions. It's a shame the individual engineers and developers at these companies don't recognize what they're really doing when they write up patent disclosures.
And the control for this study was the same subject holding an equally warm object, correct?
So, you're not the least bit troubled by the fact that medicines that target HIV also have the oddly coincidental side effect of saving the lives of AIDS patients?
Evolutionary theory has weaknesses; there is the difficulty of demonstrating that there is some sequence of small, viable, inheritable mutations that can, over hundreds of millions of years, slowly turn fish into elephants
As another poster alluded to above, given a few cosmic rays through your henhouse with the right (wrong) parameters, your chicken's offspring will grow a dinosaur-like tail and teeth.
So either the chicken had an evolutionary predecessor that was, indeed, almost as different from it as a fish is different from an elephant, or there's something else wrong with your argument from incredulity.
What's not OK, however, is logically invalid responses to creationist claims, like you have done by assuming the conclusion.
I'd say you're the one who has assumed a conclusion, in this particular case.
"If the numbers can change"... maybe you can elaborate on this, because it sounds to me like you are stretching an analogy to a point that simply doesn't apply to the constraints at hand. Each mutation has a finite probability, a combination of such mutations has a probability of the product of each individually. So far, simple math. Survivability at each generation, if proposed occurring individually, or the above probability as represented as a product if proposes as occurring in a single organism.
Today's vocabulary term is "fitness function." Lotteries don't have a fitness function -- the ticket is printed, it wins or it loses, and then it's discarded, with no further influence over the system.
If, however, the "lottery" is a continuous process rather than a discrete event, and if the numbers on a single ticket can change in a way that makes it slightly more likely to win, it's no longer just a numbers game. Whoever suggested blind luck to you as a model for thinking about evolution had a reason for offering such a flawed paradigm. What was that reason? Did you bother asking?
All that's needed for evolution to occur is a localized environment that offers some form of feedback -- any conceivable mechanism that supports the tendency for the numbers on some of the 'lottery tickets' to change in the right direction -- and energy to make it happen. Given a quadrillion square meters of surface area that's both fertile and varied, and billions of years of available energy on the order of a hundred watts per square meter, it would take a God to stop life from arising.
As for being "lied to", well, of course you have no possible way of knowing my history, so your supernatural claims to psychic knowledge might be something for you to look at, but... indeed, I have asked for proof from the relevant entity able to provide it, and duly received it. That you haven't, and do not know, is not even -possibly- relevant to the fact I have. What you can validly claim, and cannot, your psychic powers notwithstanding, have been well-defined by the subject of epistemology. I'd suggest a refresher.
You're not fooling anyone but yourself. Either stand behind your faith or walk away from it.
Follow the probabilities of the necessary mutations.
Hint: it's not just a matter of 'probability' if the numbers on your lottery ticket can change.
No, macro- and micro- evolution are absolutely quantitatively distinct due to the probabilities involved regarding the number of mutually-reinforcing mutations that must occur for the necessary outcome, while maintaining survivability.
Your mental model of the scientific process is broken. Chances are that you're religious, which would mean that you've been lied to, probably all your life. You should be pissed about that. Instead, you respond with incredulity, sophistry, counterattacks against meaningless straw men ("only evolution occurs"), and continuing demands for proof from the people who have already shown it to you.
Meanwhile, you're cheerfully content with the complete lack of proof from people who have asked you to believe ridiculous things.
Which is kind of sad... but I guess it works for you. Except when it doesn't.
That sounds like a real pain in the neck for manufacturing, but if that's how it works, I can see how it might slow down the cloners. Until now, anyway.
Heck, a modern DSO will even decode the I2C bitstream for you. Even if it's encrypted, the data can still be copied.
The Chinese have proven capable of cloning a whole goddamned Apple store, so I don't imagine a serial EEPROM is going to cause them too much grief. As a culture, they seem to be happy to invest amounts of money and effort to copy our stuff that could otherwise have been used to compete legitimately. Go figure...
So what's your take on Milgram?
The whole problem is, it's ridiculously easy to find those "most sociopathic" people you're talking about, and almost impossible to find people who will put themselves at risk to interfere with them. It's almost as if there's something in almost everybody that's open to the sort of behaviors observed by Zimbardo and Milgram, given the right leadership.
But don't underestimate the psychological barrier that merely being told "you can't quit" amounts to when you're already in a situation of powerlessness.
Here's another good example of the same phenomenon -- in this case, the people who were told "you can't quit" bravely stayed in the game until they earned their own Darwin award.
People who criticize Zimbardo's experiment on the grounds that it was 'unscientific' or 'unethical' are missing the whole point. It may have been both unscientific and unethical, but it damned sure wasn't irreproducible.
Zimbardo essentially selected the people most likely to produce the result that would "confirm" his hypothesis.
Which is the most chilling implication of the experiment! The idea that you can always find people willing to do harmful things while the rest stand aside is enough to undermine the whole concept of individual morality.
Together with the equally infamous Milgram experiment, which has been shown to be reproducible under all sorts of conditions, Zimbardo's work shows how humans, as basically non-'evil' beings, rationalize and perpetuate organized acts of evil. (How many times have you heard someone say, "If I don't do $BAD_THING, somebody else will. Maybe the best thing to do is for me to take the job, and try to change the system from within"?)
You're right, we don't have the same brand of conservative Christians at all. Here in the US, for instance, they actually failed to fuck with our Internet service.
Did you read what he wrote? We could build and launch another Hubble from scratch, for less than the cost of one or two Shuttle launches alone.
Apple is definitely looking like Microsoft in the 1990s era. Their strengths and fortunes are exactly the same: they're one of many large technology companies with competent management and a healthy engineering culture, and they're uniquely blessed with the most head-slappingly retarded competitors in the history of human commerce.
So yes... if history repeats itselfl, Apple is most likely going to cross paths with antitrust authorities in the USA, EU, or both. It's not a good-versus-evil thing, it's just what happens when a company gets that lucky.
Nice try, but something tells me he's not going to read Fundamentals of Space Systems or anything else that's not written on a purple-and-black web page that somehow survived both the Geocities and AOL Hometown purges. As for him and his house, they will follow the Precautionary Principle... all the way back to the caves, if necessary.