Given that we do not know why there is an excess of matter over antimatter in the observed universe, your argument would lead us to believe that there isn't a universe.
In fact this result is evidence that supports a wider scope for life. It shows that rocks can act as a shield for relatively fragile molecules which are components of larger organic molecules. This is a key argument; for life to be abundant, if the necessary molecules start to appear from natural causes in the early planet they must last long enough for further synthesis to occur. This research shows that this is possible for larger molecules than hitherto known.
First, I didn't refer to you. I wrote "People who argue that we are unique...", which you did not do. You adopted a sceptical position which runs counter to the positions which are usually reached by considering what is known so far about biology, planet formation and the like, but you did not argue that we are unique. I noticed that.
I am, however permitted (as, among other things, a one time student of the history of science and religion) to note that arguments to uniqueness normally have a religious foundation, because there is no evidence whatsoever that they are correct whereas there is evidence that life exists in the Universe and that the rocks floating around the bits of the universe which interact with us are similar to our rocks.
Interestingly, it only really seems to be since the rise of American fundamentalism that anyone with a Western university education has seriously questioned that life exists elsewhere in the Universe. Pope in one of his poems treats it as an obvious given. Catholic theologians have debated (including at Vat II) how salvation would work for people from other planets, and C S Lewis, an Anglican scholar and novelist, actually proposed a theodicy in three novels which was intended to provide a mechanism. Whole genres - science fiction and fantasy - treat it as a given. It seems to be a part of the American retreat from science.
The guy was either out on magic mushrooms, or trying to describe a flying saucer. Or both...though, seriously, given that I have actual evidence for magic mushrooms, and I have no belief in Biblical inerrancy, I'll take the psilocybin explanation.
The anthropomorphic fallacy (we overestimate the probability of life-related thing because we are living and we are there to see it) has a counter-argument which runs "We live on a planet which originally had no life, and we are here. Life must arise spontaneously because the initial conditions of the universe did not admit of any life, and there is at least some (us). If it has arisen at least once (regardless of how it got here) and survived despite all the cosmic and other accidents to the Earth, whether it's asteroid collisions or becoming a snowball, life is fairly tough. Therefore, based on present knowledge, and our understanding of how big the Universe is, life is most likely fairly common".
People who argue that we are unique in a very large universe are in essence taking a position which at base is religious, not scientific. Science assumes that once we observe a phenomenon, if we reproduce the initial conditions it will recur. This has worked extremely well up till now, whereas the successive religious claims of uniqueness, beginning with the Earth at the centre of the universe, have all been exploded.
Yeah, right. Richer than most of the UK. One view of what is going on (and favoured by this former North Londoner) is that the police shot a "professional criminal" and the criminal gangs of North London are retaliating by demonstrating their ability to get out the foot soldiers. This is an area popular with the BNP/EDL, a stronghold of the original National Front, the British Nazi equivalent. The subsequent riots were mainly in strongly BNP areas like Enfield.
This looks like the Mob trying to intimidate the Government and the police because one of its capos got shot. If this is in fact the current line, RIM is obliged to co-operate. It is probably nothing whatsoever to do with poor people opposing Government cuts.
If I actually need to see a GP urgently, I get a same day appointment. If a lot of people need urgent appointments, our GPs go home late. When it was thought my father might have cancer, he was in the local hospital that week.
The horror stories don't actually apply to most of the UK. They tend to apply to areas which are overpopulated with excessive house prices, i.e. London.
US politicians are more or less allowed to buy influence and votes by adding riders to Bills which entail spending in their districts. The amounts of money involved are really quite eye-watering. In fact, the use of Government spending for pork barrel is one of the factors in the current standoff - the Republicans are demanding spending cuts for things they don't like while continuing to send pork-barrel bills for approval.
Although the money doesn't go directly to the politicians, some of it often ends up indirectly benefiting them or their relatives.
I am not excusing what British MPs were up to - but by world standards, and US standards, they weren't even trying.
The MP Geoffrey Bacon has been working on this for years. It is simply untrue that MPs are getting kickbacks as suggested above; UK political corruption is minute compared to US corruption because we don't have budget riders to Bills. And in any case much of our corruption is exported from the United States, isn't it, Rupert, Donald and co.?
The main areas of waste are simply large infrastructure projects that are badly designed by unqualified Civil Servants with unrealistic and underspecified objectives, which are then divided up among too many contractors with too many legal interfaces between them, and then have to be repeatedly redesigned and reimplemented as the scope changes. It is like our national habit of building motorways that are too small, and then having to pay more to widen them than the original building cost.
The cost of PCs and support is utterly irrelevant in this. It is the way in which, say, it can cost nearly £30000 in legal fees just to have one contractor run a wire between two boxes operated by different contractors, because the scope of contracts has to be changed.
The answer is a radical reform of the Civil Service to ensure that anybody involved in an infrastructure project is actually qualified in the right areas, rather than having graduated from Oxford with a classics degree thirty years ago. But every attempt to reform the Civil Service is handled internally - good luck with that.
I consult in this area. I have to tell you that where the NHS and local authorities are concerned, printing is a very competitive business and only efficient suppliers make a go of it. (The contracts you describe are, however, going out of date.) In fact, the worst cost offenders in both areas are not the IT/facilities providers and the supply companies; they are the end users who buy inkjets and run them on petty cash.
My own GP is very clued up in this area and keeps a close watch on the local trust to see if they are getting good value for money. Generally speaking, they do. In fact, compared to privatised healthcare in the US, the NHS is amazingly efficient and low cost - which is why we have very similar life expectancy adjusted for social class, but we only spend half as much of our GDP as does the US - and our GDP per head is lower to begin with.
I am not sure about the US, but in the UK if a director of a company makes an oral statement on a commercial matter it has the same force of law as a written statement, provided there is independent evidence if (s)he subsequently retracts. Subsequent purchase of the company does not invalidate any contracts which do not have an appropriate invalidity clause.
When in the past I have addressed customers as a director, I have always been careful to state that either no oral comments I made would be legally binding, or I would have to refuse all questions on technical or commercial matters, for this very reason. This is exactly the same as a politician speaking "off the record".
Ebuyer in the UK had a brief fit and sold off a load of Pre 2s for under $200 each, unlocked. This is the going price for a Pre. I bought one, and should have bought several. The Pre 2 is simply the best phone I have ever owned and is now in use as my main phone. webOS is simply extremely easy to use, end of story. However, this is being written on an Android tablet, because I think that Android is evolving to be a better overall general purpose mobile computer platform.
If Nokia, may they swallow a tram and have it drive around inside them with people getting on and off at their livers and their kidneys, kayn anoreh, hadn't screwed up Maemo I would have stuck with it- but the redacted redacteds have screwed the pooch. The Pre 2 has a workable screen and keyboard, which is what I need. I can now wait as long as it takes for a new contract and the next Pre, and I'm prepared to do it because I suspect I will never miss a call on webOS.
NotW's servers are currently in police custody, which is why they had to stop publication. The NotW building was a crime scene. As the servers are currently wrapped in plastic waiting for the police to extract data from the hard drives, Lulzsec may have trouble hacking them.
The GP post is really stupid, especially given the usual life span of steel ships (many decades).
However, it's a myth that stainless steel is the best thing for salt water. It is fine for above-deck use because it gets washed clean by freshwater in rain. But the interesting ingredients of seawater can cause pinholing and stress corrosion in stainless steels, though A4/316 is better than most. Bronze (tin/copper alloy) is good and is traditionally used for throughhulls and seacocks. The usual solution (pun intended) is of course not to let seawater near any working fluid circuits but to use either hydraulic oils or a mixture of propylene glycol and water (anti-freeze) - use propylene rather than ethylene because it doesn't kill fish if it leaks out.
Corrosion engineering is a really fascinating discipline with many unexpecteds and gotchas.
That's it, really. Small IC engines are usually air cooled using a ducted fan. My rotavator has one. As I note in a post above, IC engines don't really have the problem because the path from heat to sink is short and the power density is quite low, and the main benefit of well designed fan cooling is that the cooling is even around the cylinder. The fin depth on a Honda 50cc engine is less than that on many CPU heatsinks.
At last an intelligent post on this subject - much of the above falls into RTFA land. Though part of the benefit arose simply from the fact that the engine continued to be cooled even when the air speed was close to zero, and another part because both sides of the cylinder were cooled, whereas in a conventional engine only one side was cooled. That is why the famous Moto-Guzzi single could run with such low distortion; the horizontal cylinder was air cooled on all sides, even better than the BMW twin.
In the case of an aircraft engine, the air cooled cylinders have a short thermal path to the air from the heat source. The problem with cpu cooling is mainly the long thermal path which makes it hard to get moving air down in the fins.
Finally, you might be amused to know that the lubricant (castor oil) was simply better than any mineral oil up until the 1930s. The Castrol oil company derived its name from it. And the solution of the pilots to the laxative problem was to drink whisky. It's not surprising that WW1 pilots had an operation life expectancy of a few hours.
How hard would it be for Facebook to do some elementary background check on a submission, and put up a warning for any public event of the "Do you really mean to do that" variety? For all the bloviating above, the moral of this story is that Facebook actually has some piss-poor programming practices. It's only beginners who don't validate and sanity check user input. Who is reviewing this stuff at Facebook? Anyone over 30?
So when a colleague of mine went to catch his plane home, and they asked him where was the latest place he visited, he said "I was in a meeting with the Defence Minister".
So they locked him in a cell with an armed guard outside. After several hours they were persuaded to, you know, actually try the Ministry. Most of whom had gone home. They eventually reached the Defence Minister, who confirmed that indeed Dr X. Y. had been in a meeting with him that morning and had left to catch a plane to the airport.
Now, you would think that in any civilised country an apology would be in order. Not in Israel. Instead, they refused to speak to him or make eye contact, and eventually almost pushed him onto the plane home without a word of apology.
This apologia is unwarranted. Israeli security goons are surely no better, no worse than security goons anywhere. There are just far more of them and they search far more people more thoroughly.
Unless you can work out a way to pay yourself for writing a will, no.
The statute was obviously intended to deal with fake lawyers - yes there are people who will brave the social opprobrium of claiming to be a lawyer in exchange for money. However, provided that the website doesn't itself produce wills, deeds or other legal instruments, it should be in the clear.
This is a grey area - the law could have benefits in preventing the automatic generation of, say, RIAA-type fishing expedition claim documents. It would be interesting if a real lawyer were to comment on the EULA issue; there is probably a good reason why it is excluded.
Learn some history. In WW2, after the initial German successes they came up against the Russian winter, and Russian troops who were superbly equipped with cold weather clothing. The Russians had Diesel tanks whose engines could be safely heated before starting. German tanks used gasoline and tended to catch on fire when warmed up. The Germans never got their cold-weather logistics together, and they were ultimately defeated in the East.
Most insulation either does not tolerate vibration, water, impact, is toxic when on fire, is toxic or semi-toxic to transport and apply by untrained personnel, or the lifetime under combat conditions is so short that disposal becomes an environmental problem
Thinsulate.
Yurts (properly called "ger")
Many boats are nowadays insulated with thinsulate-like materials, which are very effective. And MBTs are insulated - didn't you know? - because the kevlar that protects to some degree against shrapnel and spalling also provides thermal insulation.
Which is why the US auto industry came close to disappearing. The Japanese, Korean and European car makers believe in continuous development, and they fixed things like high fuel consumption and poor quality before US car makers perceived them as being broken. "If it ain't broke don't fix it" only works if you have a very market-oriented view of what "broke" means.
Nowadays Germany turns out passenger cars in volume with both supercharging and turbocharging for light weight and high efficiency, and Japan turns out reliable, efficient hybrid power trains. The US is having to play copy and catch up.
As for your sig, that is nonsense. If you live in a city, how do you get food, water and shelter? You have to pay. If you think that the water companies and landlords don't use coercion, then you probably think the Tea Party is a rational and progressive political movement.
The fact that you don't understand why you need to learn some humanities, and that you think your secondary education "covered them in detail" only shows that, if you want a career rather than a job, you do need to spend some time on them. Improving your knowledge of English (or philosophy) will make you better at any job where you have to communicate. Learning a bit of history will rapidly teach you why The Art of War is not a useful guide to management, and help you find your way around the companies you will work for, as the same kind of issues constantly come up and get resolved in the same way - as Hegel observed, those who know no history are doomed to repeat it.
Also, since the tone of your post suggests you are male, can I observe that exposure to the humanities tends also to enable you to meet (and discuss interesting subjects with) women? I'm not talking about sex, but improving your familiarity with the people you will meet as soon as you step outside the IT department, some of whom will influence your career.
It isn't that cheap, but it is in fact a netbook, running Linux, with an SSD. One the other hand the IPS screen is better than that on the iPad, the multitouch touchpad is more convenient than using the touchscreen, the dedicated keys for Android are very nice, the keyboard protects the screen, and with Wyse Pocketcloud it makes a very effective thin client. The Asus production rate is currently 300000 a month. So yes, not dead, but evolving rapidly. In fact, you could say that 2011 is starting to look like the year of Linux on the desktop - it's just that "desktop" is being redefined.
In the US today, "Liberal" and "Conservative" seem to have reversed meaning. You would expect a Conservative to say "this (data mining) didn't exist when the Constitution was written, and therefore should come under States Rights. And, anyway, we should be very wary of allowing any part of the community to bring about social changes that may affect the majority in ways we can't yet predict". And you would expect a Liberal - i.e. a free-market, laissez-faire capitalist - to say "if they want to do it let them, and then if it goes wrong someone can sue."
But in fact "Conservative" now seems to be used to mean "someone who sells the intent of the Constitution to the highest bidder", and "Liberal" means someone who wants the Government not to interfere so much in people's private lives and their privacy - which I imagine the Founding Fathers would be in favor of.
In the late 80s it was the Democrats - Lloyd Bentsen in particular - that were in bed with Big Oil. Now it's the Republicans. Why the switch?
Slashdot Mirror
In fact this result is evidence that supports a wider scope for life. It shows that rocks can act as a shield for relatively fragile molecules which are components of larger organic molecules. This is a key argument; for life to be abundant, if the necessary molecules start to appear from natural causes in the early planet they must last long enough for further synthesis to occur. This research shows that this is possible for larger molecules than hitherto known.
I am, however permitted (as, among other things, a one time student of the history of science and religion) to note that arguments to uniqueness normally have a religious foundation, because there is no evidence whatsoever that they are correct whereas there is evidence that life exists in the Universe and that the rocks floating around the bits of the universe which interact with us are similar to our rocks.
Interestingly, it only really seems to be since the rise of American fundamentalism that anyone with a Western university education has seriously questioned that life exists elsewhere in the Universe. Pope in one of his poems treats it as an obvious given. Catholic theologians have debated (including at Vat II) how salvation would work for people from other planets, and C S Lewis, an Anglican scholar and novelist, actually proposed a theodicy in three novels which was intended to provide a mechanism. Whole genres - science fiction and fantasy - treat it as a given. It seems to be a part of the American retreat from science.
The guy was either out on magic mushrooms, or trying to describe a flying saucer. Or both...though, seriously, given that I have actual evidence for magic mushrooms, and I have no belief in Biblical inerrancy, I'll take the psilocybin explanation.
People who argue that we are unique in a very large universe are in essence taking a position which at base is religious, not scientific. Science assumes that once we observe a phenomenon, if we reproduce the initial conditions it will recur. This has worked extremely well up till now, whereas the successive religious claims of uniqueness, beginning with the Earth at the centre of the universe, have all been exploded.
This looks like the Mob trying to intimidate the Government and the police because one of its capos got shot. If this is in fact the current line, RIM is obliged to co-operate. It is probably nothing whatsoever to do with poor people opposing Government cuts.
The horror stories don't actually apply to most of the UK. They tend to apply to areas which are overpopulated with excessive house prices, i.e. London.
Although the money doesn't go directly to the politicians, some of it often ends up indirectly benefiting them or their relatives.
I am not excusing what British MPs were up to - but by world standards, and US standards, they weren't even trying.
The main areas of waste are simply large infrastructure projects that are badly designed by unqualified Civil Servants with unrealistic and underspecified objectives, which are then divided up among too many contractors with too many legal interfaces between them, and then have to be repeatedly redesigned and reimplemented as the scope changes. It is like our national habit of building motorways that are too small, and then having to pay more to widen them than the original building cost.
The cost of PCs and support is utterly irrelevant in this. It is the way in which, say, it can cost nearly £30000 in legal fees just to have one contractor run a wire between two boxes operated by different contractors, because the scope of contracts has to be changed.
The answer is a radical reform of the Civil Service to ensure that anybody involved in an infrastructure project is actually qualified in the right areas, rather than having graduated from Oxford with a classics degree thirty years ago. But every attempt to reform the Civil Service is handled internally - good luck with that.
In fact, the worst cost offenders in both areas are not the IT/facilities providers and the supply companies; they are the end users who buy inkjets and run them on petty cash.
My own GP is very clued up in this area and keeps a close watch on the local trust to see if they are getting good value for money. Generally speaking, they do. In fact, compared to privatised healthcare in the US, the NHS is amazingly efficient and low cost - which is why we have very similar life expectancy adjusted for social class, but we only spend half as much of our GDP as does the US - and our GDP per head is lower to begin with.
When in the past I have addressed customers as a director, I have always been careful to state that either no oral comments I made would be legally binding, or I would have to refuse all questions on technical or commercial matters, for this very reason. This is exactly the same as a politician speaking "off the record".
I must be imagining things, then. Because I could have sworn that there are Android projects in my NetBeans projects folder. Ho hum.
If Nokia, may they swallow a tram and have it drive around inside them with people getting on and off at their livers and their kidneys, kayn anoreh, hadn't screwed up Maemo I would have stuck with it- but the redacted redacteds have screwed the pooch. The Pre 2 has a workable screen and keyboard, which is what I need. I can now wait as long as it takes for a new contract and the next Pre, and I'm prepared to do it because I suspect I will never miss a call on webOS.
NotW's servers are currently in police custody, which is why they had to stop publication. The NotW building was a crime scene. As the servers are currently wrapped in plastic waiting for the police to extract data from the hard drives, Lulzsec may have trouble hacking them.
However, it's a myth that stainless steel is the best thing for salt water. It is fine for above-deck use because it gets washed clean by freshwater in rain. But the interesting ingredients of seawater can cause pinholing and stress corrosion in stainless steels, though A4/316 is better than most. Bronze (tin/copper alloy) is good and is traditionally used for throughhulls and seacocks. The usual solution (pun intended) is of course not to let seawater near any working fluid circuits but to use either hydraulic oils or a mixture of propylene glycol and water (anti-freeze) - use propylene rather than ethylene because it doesn't kill fish if it leaks out.
Corrosion engineering is a really fascinating discipline with many unexpecteds and gotchas.
That's it, really. Small IC engines are usually air cooled using a ducted fan. My rotavator has one. As I note in a post above, IC engines don't really have the problem because the path from heat to sink is short and the power density is quite low, and the main benefit of well designed fan cooling is that the cooling is even around the cylinder. The fin depth on a Honda 50cc engine is less than that on many CPU heatsinks.
In the case of an aircraft engine, the air cooled cylinders have a short thermal path to the air from the heat source. The problem with cpu cooling is mainly the long thermal path which makes it hard to get moving air down in the fins.
Finally, you might be amused to know that the lubricant (castor oil) was simply better than any mineral oil up until the 1930s. The Castrol oil company derived its name from it. And the solution of the pilots to the laxative problem was to drink whisky. It's not surprising that WW1 pilots had an operation life expectancy of a few hours.
How hard would it be for Facebook to do some elementary background check on a submission, and put up a warning for any public event of the "Do you really mean to do that" variety? For all the bloviating above, the moral of this story is that Facebook actually has some piss-poor programming practices. It's only beginners who don't validate and sanity check user input. Who is reviewing this stuff at Facebook? Anyone over 30?
So when a colleague of mine went to catch his plane home, and they asked him where was the latest place he visited, he said "I was in a meeting with the Defence Minister".
So they locked him in a cell with an armed guard outside. After several hours they were persuaded to, you know, actually try the Ministry. Most of whom had gone home. They eventually reached the Defence Minister, who confirmed that indeed Dr X. Y. had been in a meeting with him that morning and had left to catch a plane to the airport.
Now, you would think that in any civilised country an apology would be in order. Not in Israel. Instead, they refused to speak to him or make eye contact, and eventually almost pushed him onto the plane home without a word of apology.
This apologia is unwarranted. Israeli security goons are surely no better, no worse than security goons anywhere. There are just far more of them and they search far more people more thoroughly.
The statute was obviously intended to deal with fake lawyers - yes there are people who will brave the social opprobrium of claiming to be a lawyer in exchange for money. However, provided that the website doesn't itself produce wills, deeds or other legal instruments, it should be in the clear.
This is a grey area - the law could have benefits in preventing the automatic generation of, say, RIAA-type fishing expedition claim documents. It would be interesting if a real lawyer were to comment on the EULA issue; there is probably a good reason why it is excluded.
Learn some history. In WW2, after the initial German successes they came up against the Russian winter, and Russian troops who were superbly equipped with cold weather clothing. The Russians had Diesel tanks whose engines could be safely heated before starting. German tanks used gasoline and tended to catch on fire when warmed up. The Germans never got their cold-weather logistics together, and they were ultimately defeated in the East.
Thinsulate.
Yurts (properly called "ger")
Many boats are nowadays insulated with thinsulate-like materials, which are very effective. And MBTs are insulated - didn't you know? - because the kevlar that protects to some degree against shrapnel and spalling also provides thermal insulation.
Nowadays Germany turns out passenger cars in volume with both supercharging and turbocharging for light weight and high efficiency, and Japan turns out reliable, efficient hybrid power trains. The US is having to play copy and catch up.
As for your sig, that is nonsense. If you live in a city, how do you get food, water and shelter? You have to pay. If you think that the water companies and landlords don't use coercion, then you probably think the Tea Party is a rational and progressive political movement.
Also, since the tone of your post suggests you are male, can I observe that exposure to the humanities tends also to enable you to meet (and discuss interesting subjects with) women? I'm not talking about sex, but improving your familiarity with the people you will meet as soon as you step outside the IT department, some of whom will influence your career.
It isn't that cheap, but it is in fact a netbook, running Linux, with an SSD. One the other hand the IPS screen is better than that on the iPad, the multitouch touchpad is more convenient than using the touchscreen, the dedicated keys for Android are very nice, the keyboard protects the screen, and with Wyse Pocketcloud it makes a very effective thin client. The Asus production rate is currently 300000 a month. So yes, not dead, but evolving rapidly. In fact, you could say that 2011 is starting to look like the year of Linux on the desktop - it's just that "desktop" is being redefined.
But in fact "Conservative" now seems to be used to mean "someone who sells the intent of the Constitution to the highest bidder", and "Liberal" means someone who wants the Government not to interfere so much in people's private lives and their privacy - which I imagine the Founding Fathers would be in favor of.
In the late 80s it was the Democrats - Lloyd Bentsen in particular - that were in bed with Big Oil. Now it's the Republicans. Why the switch?