With what did the collision happen if the earth wasn't already there? I fail to see how the moon being carved out the earth 60 Myr earlier affects the age of the earth.
I believe that conclusion comes from the idea that the collision was between two proto-planets - that is, for all intents and purposes, the Earth and the Moon only came into being after the collision. Wikipedia calls them "the proto-Earth" and "the impactor" which supposedly was the size of Mars. An impact like that would have changed everything so dramatically that even if we had some age-measurable material that survived the impact, we wouldn't know whether it came from the proto-Earth or the impactor. So it makes some sense to use that event as the "birth" of our planet.
And of course you can't just use the absolute age of some atoms, if we could measure such a thing. Maybe some of the heavier atoms fused in that impact, but some material came the supernova(e) that seeded our solar nebula with heavier atoms and induced the rotation that eventually became the Sun's accretion disk, some came from other, smaller impacts of bodies probably formed at the beginning of the Solar System, etc.
So, do you really believe you get a good system of government when the more money you have the more access you have to political speech?
Of course he doesn't believe that, but those bills are sponsored by a bunch of Democrats. Don't be fooled by how the political process worked in the past; these days, the only item of importance in any given bill is the letter between the sponsor's name and home state.
It's implied from his background - he is a Christian - and his use of religious terms like "sanctity of life." The main logical fallacy in his theological position is that his god is a god of the gaps. He is using gaps in evidence for the prevailing theory to "prove" that it's wrong. I don't know personally, but I wouldn't be surprised or dismayed if there is still a "missing link" in the fossil record that tells us how single-celled organisms evolved certain relatively complex things like flagella. The lack of evidence is not evidence to the contrary, so I am content to wait until further science sheds light on the matter. But the fact that we aren't sure how life got started doesn't throw the rest of Evolutionary Theory away. The fact that the Piltdown Man was a hoax doesn't either. Wikipedia has a fascinating series of articles on evolutionary biology, but here's a good place to start.
Also, as GP implied, jumping from "intelligent designer" to the benevolent and omnipotent Christian god just does not follow from "there are issues with Evolutionary Theory." There is no logical connection between the two, and his use of Occam's Razor only makes sense to those who take it as a given that there are extradimensional beings of unimaginable power. A biologist using Occam's Razor would instead extrapolate from observed processes like natural selection, and then look for evidence (which is exactly what we've done with Evolutionary Theory, and it has worked out pretty well so far).
It is illegal to expose illegalities performed by US officials, so Kim Dotcom performing a corrupt action in hopes that someone involved in the process is corrupt enough to expose the corruption.
He's going about bribery all wrong though; it's not illegal if you call it "campaign donations."
Quoted for emphasis. Even if the only thing we could extract was water, we could potentially use it for potable water, breathable air, rocket fuel, radiation shielding, hydroponics, cleaning... Basically, it would be difficult to have too much water on any extraterrestrial habitat.
Second to water would be just oxygen itself, which supposedly we can bake out of various oxides if we get it hot enough.
After those two items, it's a toss up, at least until we can do much fancier things. The article suggests extracting and purifying silicon and making simple solar cells out of that, as an example. But water and oxygen will be, by far, the two most important and relatively simple things to extract and use.
The truth is, we have given very little thought to what traits would be selected for in a hostile, alien environment.
We haven't put a lot of thought into it because it doesn't require much. Any corporation's HR department is already well-equipped to draft requirements for that kind of position: 15-20 years of experience building and maintaining extraterrestrial habitats, and able to make solid decisions and perform under intense pressure (or an increasing lack thereof).
Your children are a reflection of yourself. If they are difficult, it's because you are difficult. It absolutely amazes me that people never quite get this. If you want to have good children, be a better person. Seriously.
This is probably mostly true if you're only speaking of behavior. Obviously my wife and I are the main influence since my kids have never been in day care, but they do soak up habits of other people they trust, especially older kids they look up to. My kids are all well-behaved, even on the three- to four-hour flights we take a few times a year, but my oldest (6) has picked up various bad or annoying habits in the past from his friends. One of his old playdate friends had a very annoying tantrum cry that my son tried once or twice. I had to break out the very rare Dad Voice on that one, and he never did it again. A worse example was his friend in kindergarten...my son would do stupid things on his worksheets (scribble instead of drawing or coloring, just guessing when it came to math and reading), just because that's what his friend would do. We asked the teacher to move him, and it got better, then we happened to move across the country, and now he's doing pretty awesome.
Also, my middle child has always been more difficult in other ways. Only recently have we started to make progress on that front by starting a chore chart, where she can earn stars for things we normally have to fight to get her to do, like picking up her room and eating well.
The novelty of that is falling away, though, when it comes to eating. My wife and I love all kinds of food, and my oldest almost always eats whatever we put in front of him. My youngest (1) eats literally everything we put in front of her, edible or not. The middle one, though... We do try to make what she likes but that changes all the time. She won't touch pizza anymore. As of Monday, she apparently no longer likes ribs. In fact it's probably easier to list what she does like: cereal, white rice, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, and any kind of noodles as long as there isn't too much "stuff" on them (like soup, she won't touch any kind of soup).
Hopefully our one-year-old continues to take after her brother.
Re:Auto-save is NOT your friend
on
Goodbye, Ctrl-S
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Sometimes, I don't want to save. I will open a document with the explicit purpose of making changes that I don't want saved. Even Gmail's autosave has burned me pretty badly. I spent an hour typing out a very long email. Toward the end of it, something happened, and the whole body of text was gone. I'm still not really sure if it was a keyboard shortcut I inadvertently triggered, browser bug, or what. But I just thought "no biggie... I'll just go back to the auto-saved version". So I open up the autosaved version, and the latest auto-save happened AFTER the email body was deleted.
Ctrl-Z my friend. Undo works perfectly fine in many web forms (including Gmail) when you accidentally select a bunch of text and overwrite it. My wife almost cried when she thought she lost the text from a huge email to a relative she hadn't seen in a while, but luckily I was there when it happened or else she would have given up.
I just tested it and undo works on Slashdot comment fields on IE, FF, and Chrome on Windows 7, and I know it works in Linux because I use it all the time at home.
the obvious question is why hasn't everyone jumped on it yet?
Did you see the name they picked? You might as well just skip the middle man and mail Ford Motor Company a few hundred dollars as prepayment for their impending trademark lawsuit.
Thinking requires energy in the form of glucose in the blood, derived from food that we eat. So sustaining critical thinking processes require the consumption of more food, which generally comes from a grocer. They have to truck tons of it in every week, which inevitably belches many tons of CO2 in the air.
Therefore, they only oppose thinking for the purposes of saving the environment for our children. Won't you just think of the children? The best thing you can do is not think about them.
Yep, I use vim all the time for scripting tasks and FocusWriter for writing. At first I also used it for the rich text formatting, but I was using hacky scripts to convert it to other formats, e.g. starting OpenOffice in headless mode and converting to HTML...it was hideous. On top of that, changing text to bold and italic was easy enough, but I was doing things like changing three hyphens to em dashes and a specific character sequence to horizontal rules in those scripts because those things weren't easy to put in while I was trying to write.
These days I just write in Markdown and convert it with pandoc, and the HTML and EPUB output is infinitely better. All those special cases like em dashes and horizontal rules are handled correctly by pandoc with the -S (smart) option. Since it's just plain text now I could probably do it in vim, but I'm too lazy to come up with settings to do that since it's all there for free in Focuswriter. It looks just as good in Linux as it does in Windows, too.
I'm not going to condemn you for this. My own perceptions of what I would be doing with my engineering degree turned out to be so far off target that it's not even funny. I'm not working on the stuff that fascinated me. I'm working on the stuff my boss lets me do. I try to find the "joy of engineering" when and where I can, but it is very difficult to earn a living, raise a family, have the intrinsic qualifications and market demand to pursue one's very specific interests. I suspect that many other readers here would agree.
This is not to mention that working on the stuff that fascinates you doesn't mean it's all joy. I've found this even in my hobbies: I want to make video games, but there is a lot of tedium involved. At my day job, I've spent days hunting down intermittent software bugs, and just because I do it for rockets and missiles and satellites doesn't make it any more fun than doing it for industrial wastewater management systems.
More relevantly, with a whole lot of calculus and some really interesting tech advances, this might provide an example of how to do some STL intergalactic travel.
No no no, you (and another guy just a little ways down) haven't made the most interesting connection yet. This is a fancy gravity assist on steroids, but it would still take millions if not billions of years to get to even one of Milky Way's satellite galaxies, let alone Andromeda. So forget about intergalactic travel for now. Where this becomes more immediately interesting is finding pairs of very close, very large gravity wells within the same galaxy. That makes them into something rather like Mass Effect relays. Just wait for the proper alignment and launch toward the opposite pair at very high speeds, which can only be canceled by a similar gravity well. Alpha Centauri is a binary star system but the stars are quite far away, so I doubt it would work there, which is too bad since something relatively close like that would have been nice for us. Gliese 667 is a triple star system where the two larger ones are 12.6 AU apart, so that's a much better but still might not be close enough (I don't know, haven't done any math).
it's the human attraction for what is hidden and mysterious that always lives in the minds of explorers and scientists are first and foremost explorers
The above observation is right, but your implied conclusion is wrong. Science always grows to infringe upon what was previously thought to be the domain of some supernatural entity. Explorers are named such because they don't see the unknown and simply accept that it will remain that way. Scientific progress happens precisely because scientists don't reach a point and say, "well, I can't go any further, because obviously [supernatural entity] did it."
In case you and GP haven't thought it through to conclusion, the fact that Science does not include religious-type beliefs is a good thing. Popular understanding of science is already horrible enough in the US due to politics, we don't need schools refusing to teach algebra just because it was first described by a Muslim. Newton is not "given a free pass." To discredit his work in physics and calculus because of his "work" in alchemy would be logical fallacy (probably the most common one: ad hominem). Similarly, we don't throw out Einstein's contributions just because he didn't like what quantum theory implied about the universe.
By the way, Newton saw proof of alchemy in phenomena like Diana's Tree. Without the understanding provided by modern chemistry, seeing it as evidence of life in metals would have seemed pretty plausible back then, I imagine.
Considering the vastness of space, I have doubts that you hypothesis holds weight. Essentially you're arguing that in the very finite period of time we've been able to not be soldiers and peasants that other life should have found us. I, OTOH, would bet that other life follows our social paradigms and rotates around entertainment/news cycles more than giving a crap that we exist.
There will always be some who want to push the boundaries of science, even if they consume lots of entertainment. I think the fact that we have not encountered intelligent life is probably a combination of three things: advanced civilization being exceedingly rare, interstellar travel remaining impossible or at least exceedingly impractical, and the fact that the Earth seems completely silent beyond 110 light-years away (and those signals degrade so fast they would be noise anyway).
To expand on that first point, consider that it has taken Earthlings over 3.5 billion years to evolve to this point, having pushed through many near extinctions. Granted, other worlds may have enabled intelligent life faster, but that's 25% of the life of the universe, and more than half of that time went by before a multi-celled organism evolved! So of course intelligent life is going to be exceedingly rare. The Milky Way may have 300 billion stars, but a large percentage of those are in a region of space that sees far more potential extinction events than our region of space.
To extrapolate from our current technological position (I know, we are always terrible at doing that) we'll become more and more efficient at extracting, making use of, and recycling closer resources. We'll probably find it just as easy, if not easier to manipulate our own genes to require less energy and survive in a permanent space habitat closer to its home planet than travel to the stars. So it's not difficult to imagine a situation where a civilization will not need to leave its own star system (at least until the star dies, and maybe not even then) outside of probes, especially if no signals distinguishable from cosmic noise ever reach them or their probes. But at that level of technology on those time scales, who knows how artificial intelligence might change the game.
I think some of those numbers are too low. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says 2012 median pay is: welder - 36K plumber - 49K electrician - 50K
I know median isn't the same as average, but this article says plumbers average $51,500, and this one says $52,950. Also, I think a small part of this is due to work location. Obviously not all of it, but every podunk town in the country has welders, plumbers, and electricians, but engineers and social scientists are much more concentrated in cities with higher costs of living. If you look at San Jose, CA, the median plumber salary ($79K) is 60% higher than the national median (see USNews link above), but the mean electrical engineer salary ($121K) is only 30% higher than the national mean.
I'm an engineer, but some of the most rewarding work I've done was at a research lab where I did all kinds of trade-like stuff, like cutting and hanging electrical conduit and pressurized gas lines, a bit of simple PVC water plumbing (replacing a leaky valve here and there), and a bit of carpentry, building test stands and partition walls with metal studs and drywall. We had all manual pipe cutters, threaders, and reamers/deburring tools, too, which are more physically demanding but way more satisfying to use than the automatic stuff. There were the also simple painting or cleaning tasks, too, but that more fun stuff is what I remember most clearly.
So why poll the general public about this question when most the general public really only knows what they were told to recite in school or what they saw on Nova?
It doesn't matter to some people: whether my ancestors evolved from the same creatures as apes did or a fluffy pink unicorn farted them into existence doesn't affect their day-to-day activities (with the possible exception of the occasional worship of said fluffy pink unicorn). Unfortunately, though, it does affect who people elect to represent them, and it does affect how they lead us. The results of this survey imply that, for the foreseeable future, we are going to keep getting into situations where elected officials try to do things like inject non-science into science classes when the science conflicts with their religious beliefs, and shape public policy in ways that conform to their particular religion. And the numbers show we still have a long way to go to fix that.
The only reason I care about Ubuntu updates is that they are followed by Mint updates. I really don't see why anyone would still want to use Ubuntu when there is an equally good (if not better) Debian/Ubuntu-based distro, especially given Shuttleworth's complete and utter contempt for the open source community.
Probably because ideology isn't really important to most people, who just want stuff that works. They don't care if they're running X or Wayland/Weston or Mir. And Shuttleworth definitely does not have contempt for the open source community in general...just the developers who don't follow his lead. Which definitely isn't cool, of course, but those developers don't represent everybody.
After my old laptop with a highly-customized Arch Linux setup died, I went back to Ubuntu (which I've used since Warty Warthog!) because I didn't feel like spending the time to mess with stuff anymore. My personal laptop is currently sitting on 12.04 LTS. I might upgrade once 14.04.1 is released in August, depending on how reviews are. It looks like they didn't choose as many cutting-edge packages, so it may not be as big of a problem as the first releases of previous LTS editions were (remember the time they shipped an LTS release with a beta version of Firefox?).
I'm using Mint 16 Cinnamon at work, so I could be convinced to switch, but my wife and kids are used to Unity by now. I have a terminal shortcut pinned near the top of the sidebar, so I get around easily enough.
By carrying on with this project you're just continuing a fork that serves no purpose to the community.
Actually, AOO 4.0 was the first one to have a sidebar (their answer to the ribbon?), and LO copied it later. Also, there are Apache developers committing a nontrivial amount of code to LO (one article I read said 400 of 3000 bugfixes in LO 4.1 were submitted by people with apache.org email addresses).
Excel is actually pretty nice for quick, one-off, interactive data browsing and visualization. I see that pivot tables are present in OpenOffice and LibreOffice now, so I don't see any reason to use Excel over one of the free options, because they're all absolutely terrible at anything beyond the aforementioned use case. Anything more involved and anything you'll have to repeat on further data sets should absolutely not be done in a spreadsheet (I personally prefer Python with the MATLAB-like libraries).
My library has a digital subscription to Mental Floss magazine, which I check out every time I remember it (I'm doing so now, thanks for reminding me). The best part about newspapers and magazines (analog or digital) is that, when I pick them up, I read stories I would not otherwise seek out. Mental Floss is especially cool because of the interesting trivia represented as infographics, and their featured interviews are almost always awesome even if not very well known (two recent ones: Bill Watterson and Neil deGrasse Tyson [before Cosmos, that is]).
Those same pieces can be used to build what ever you can imagine.
No so easily nowadays. Lego comes with huge numbers of very specialized pieces which are taylor made for that particular model. You can get the basic bricks but most Lego today is aimed at building one model and then playing with it rather than getting a pile of bricks and letting your imagination run wild.
There is one exception though: Mindstorms! This is simply brilliant and the new EV3 version even runs Linux! It's one of the few toys that are around today that I really wish I had been available when I was a kid.
I have a six year old, and this is mostly true. There are a large number of non-standard pieces, which makes digging for pieces much more frustrating. On the other hand, there are a lot more possibilities when it comes to building things with articulations. My son builds robots all the time (cannibalized from various robot sets), and I showed him how using a ball-and-socket joint at the shoulders and hips, and a hinge joint at the knees and elbows makes it more like us. And he doesn't know any better, so he uses those non-standard pieces for decorations anyway. Some of that is, as another poster said, partially because of all the tie-in sets out there, but we tend to stay away from those. The Creator series, which literally has full instructions for three different models using the same set of blocks, should be everybody's first stop (and they're cheaper than tie-in sets anyway).
As for the article, my son has played with the smallest size Legos since he was almost 4, and my daughter started even before she turned 3 (to keep up with her brother). Even though they do play on phones and tablets and gaming systems, they spend more time with Legos than anything else...and that's by choice. I'm not saying this in an attempt to brag here, I'm saying, parents, get your kid Legos, and build stuff with them. You know you'll enjoy it, too.
The reason tablets became popular is because people had begun to use their phones in similar ways, and the price wasn't too outrageous. Microsoft had tablets before they became popular, too, but they didn't kick off the tablet craze. Pioneering technology is one part tech, ten parts timing.
...and a whole lot of marketing, I should have added.
Slashdot Mirror
With what did the collision happen if the earth wasn't already there? I fail to see how the moon being carved out the earth 60 Myr earlier affects the age of the earth.
I believe that conclusion comes from the idea that the collision was between two proto-planets - that is, for all intents and purposes, the Earth and the Moon only came into being after the collision. Wikipedia calls them "the proto-Earth" and "the impactor" which supposedly was the size of Mars. An impact like that would have changed everything so dramatically that even if we had some age-measurable material that survived the impact, we wouldn't know whether it came from the proto-Earth or the impactor. So it makes some sense to use that event as the "birth" of our planet.
And of course you can't just use the absolute age of some atoms, if we could measure such a thing. Maybe some of the heavier atoms fused in that impact, but some material came the supernova(e) that seeded our solar nebula with heavier atoms and induced the rotation that eventually became the Sun's accretion disk, some came from other, smaller impacts of bodies probably formed at the beginning of the Solar System, etc.
So, do you really believe you get a good system of government when the more money you have the more access you have to political speech?
Of course he doesn't believe that, but those bills are sponsored by a bunch of Democrats. Don't be fooled by how the political process worked in the past; these days, the only item of importance in any given bill is the letter between the sponsor's name and home state.
It's implied from his background - he is a Christian - and his use of religious terms like "sanctity of life." The main logical fallacy in his theological position is that his god is a god of the gaps. He is using gaps in evidence for the prevailing theory to "prove" that it's wrong. I don't know personally, but I wouldn't be surprised or dismayed if there is still a "missing link" in the fossil record that tells us how single-celled organisms evolved certain relatively complex things like flagella. The lack of evidence is not evidence to the contrary, so I am content to wait until further science sheds light on the matter. But the fact that we aren't sure how life got started doesn't throw the rest of Evolutionary Theory away. The fact that the Piltdown Man was a hoax doesn't either. Wikipedia has a fascinating series of articles on evolutionary biology, but here's a good place to start.
Also, as GP implied, jumping from "intelligent designer" to the benevolent and omnipotent Christian god just does not follow from "there are issues with Evolutionary Theory." There is no logical connection between the two, and his use of Occam's Razor only makes sense to those who take it as a given that there are extradimensional beings of unimaginable power. A biologist using Occam's Razor would instead extrapolate from observed processes like natural selection, and then look for evidence (which is exactly what we've done with Evolutionary Theory, and it has worked out pretty well so far).
It is illegal to expose illegalities performed by US officials, so Kim Dotcom performing a corrupt action in hopes that someone involved in the process is corrupt enough to expose the corruption.
He's going about bribery all wrong though; it's not illegal if you call it "campaign donations."
Water.
Quoted for emphasis. Even if the only thing we could extract was water, we could potentially use it for potable water, breathable air, rocket fuel, radiation shielding, hydroponics, cleaning... Basically, it would be difficult to have too much water on any extraterrestrial habitat.
Second to water would be just oxygen itself, which supposedly we can bake out of various oxides if we get it hot enough.
After those two items, it's a toss up, at least until we can do much fancier things. The article suggests extracting and purifying silicon and making simple solar cells out of that, as an example. But water and oxygen will be, by far, the two most important and relatively simple things to extract and use.
The truth is, we have given very little thought to what traits would be selected for in a hostile, alien environment.
We haven't put a lot of thought into it because it doesn't require much. Any corporation's HR department is already well-equipped to draft requirements for that kind of position: 15-20 years of experience building and maintaining extraterrestrial habitats, and able to make solid decisions and perform under intense pressure (or an increasing lack thereof).
Your children are a reflection of yourself. If they are difficult, it's because you are difficult. It absolutely amazes me that people never quite get this. If you want to have good children, be a better person. Seriously.
This is probably mostly true if you're only speaking of behavior. Obviously my wife and I are the main influence since my kids have never been in day care, but they do soak up habits of other people they trust, especially older kids they look up to. My kids are all well-behaved, even on the three- to four-hour flights we take a few times a year, but my oldest (6) has picked up various bad or annoying habits in the past from his friends. One of his old playdate friends had a very annoying tantrum cry that my son tried once or twice. I had to break out the very rare Dad Voice on that one, and he never did it again. A worse example was his friend in kindergarten...my son would do stupid things on his worksheets (scribble instead of drawing or coloring, just guessing when it came to math and reading), just because that's what his friend would do. We asked the teacher to move him, and it got better, then we happened to move across the country, and now he's doing pretty awesome.
Also, my middle child has always been more difficult in other ways. Only recently have we started to make progress on that front by starting a chore chart, where she can earn stars for things we normally have to fight to get her to do, like picking up her room and eating well.
The novelty of that is falling away, though, when it comes to eating. My wife and I love all kinds of food, and my oldest almost always eats whatever we put in front of him. My youngest (1) eats literally everything we put in front of her, edible or not. The middle one, though... We do try to make what she likes but that changes all the time. She won't touch pizza anymore. As of Monday, she apparently no longer likes ribs. In fact it's probably easier to list what she does like: cereal, white rice, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, and any kind of noodles as long as there isn't too much "stuff" on them (like soup, she won't touch any kind of soup).
Hopefully our one-year-old continues to take after her brother.
Sometimes, I don't want to save. I will open a document with the explicit purpose of making changes that I don't want saved. Even Gmail's autosave has burned me pretty badly. I spent an hour typing out a very long email. Toward the end of it, something happened, and the whole body of text was gone. I'm still not really sure if it was a keyboard shortcut I inadvertently triggered, browser bug, or what. But I just thought "no biggie... I'll just go back to the auto-saved version". So I open up the autosaved version, and the latest auto-save happened AFTER the email body was deleted.
Ctrl-Z my friend. Undo works perfectly fine in many web forms (including Gmail) when you accidentally select a bunch of text and overwrite it. My wife almost cried when she thought she lost the text from a huge email to a relative she hadn't seen in a while, but luckily I was there when it happened or else she would have given up.
I just tested it and undo works on Slashdot comment fields on IE, FF, and Chrome on Windows 7, and I know it works in Linux because I use it all the time at home.
the obvious question is why hasn't everyone jumped on it yet?
Did you see the name they picked? You might as well just skip the middle man and mail Ford Motor Company a few hundred dollars as prepayment for their impending trademark lawsuit.
They're opposed to thinking.
Thinking requires energy in the form of glucose in the blood, derived from food that we eat. So sustaining critical thinking processes require the consumption of more food, which generally comes from a grocer. They have to truck tons of it in every week, which inevitably belches many tons of CO2 in the air.
Therefore, they only oppose thinking for the purposes of saving the environment for our children. Won't you just think of the children? The best thing you can do is not think about them.
You know, for the children.
Yep, I use vim all the time for scripting tasks and FocusWriter for writing. At first I also used it for the rich text formatting, but I was using hacky scripts to convert it to other formats, e.g. starting OpenOffice in headless mode and converting to HTML...it was hideous. On top of that, changing text to bold and italic was easy enough, but I was doing things like changing three hyphens to em dashes and a specific character sequence to horizontal rules in those scripts because those things weren't easy to put in while I was trying to write.
These days I just write in Markdown and convert it with pandoc, and the HTML and EPUB output is infinitely better. All those special cases like em dashes and horizontal rules are handled correctly by pandoc with the -S (smart) option. Since it's just plain text now I could probably do it in vim, but I'm too lazy to come up with settings to do that since it's all there for free in Focuswriter. It looks just as good in Linux as it does in Windows, too.
I'm not going to condemn you for this. My own perceptions of what I would be doing with my engineering degree turned out to be so far off target that it's not even funny. I'm not working on the stuff that fascinated me. I'm working on the stuff my boss lets me do. I try to find the "joy of engineering" when and where I can, but it is very difficult to earn a living, raise a family, have the intrinsic qualifications and market demand to pursue one's very specific interests. I suspect that many other readers here would agree.
This is not to mention that working on the stuff that fascinates you doesn't mean it's all joy. I've found this even in my hobbies: I want to make video games, but there is a lot of tedium involved. At my day job, I've spent days hunting down intermittent software bugs, and just because I do it for rockets and missiles and satellites doesn't make it any more fun than doing it for industrial wastewater management systems.
More relevantly, with a whole lot of calculus and some really interesting tech advances, this might provide an example of how to do some STL intergalactic travel.
No no no, you (and another guy just a little ways down) haven't made the most interesting connection yet. This is a fancy gravity assist on steroids, but it would still take millions if not billions of years to get to even one of Milky Way's satellite galaxies, let alone Andromeda. So forget about intergalactic travel for now. Where this becomes more immediately interesting is finding pairs of very close, very large gravity wells within the same galaxy. That makes them into something rather like Mass Effect relays. Just wait for the proper alignment and launch toward the opposite pair at very high speeds, which can only be canceled by a similar gravity well. Alpha Centauri is a binary star system but the stars are quite far away, so I doubt it would work there, which is too bad since something relatively close like that would have been nice for us. Gliese 667 is a triple star system where the two larger ones are 12.6 AU apart, so that's a much better but still might not be close enough (I don't know, haven't done any math).
it's the human attraction for what is hidden and mysterious that always lives in the minds of explorers and scientists are first and foremost explorers
The above observation is right, but your implied conclusion is wrong. Science always grows to infringe upon what was previously thought to be the domain of some supernatural entity. Explorers are named such because they don't see the unknown and simply accept that it will remain that way. Scientific progress happens precisely because scientists don't reach a point and say, "well, I can't go any further, because obviously [supernatural entity] did it."
In case you and GP haven't thought it through to conclusion, the fact that Science does not include religious-type beliefs is a good thing. Popular understanding of science is already horrible enough in the US due to politics, we don't need schools refusing to teach algebra just because it was first described by a Muslim. Newton is not "given a free pass." To discredit his work in physics and calculus because of his "work" in alchemy would be logical fallacy (probably the most common one: ad hominem). Similarly, we don't throw out Einstein's contributions just because he didn't like what quantum theory implied about the universe.
By the way, Newton saw proof of alchemy in phenomena like Diana's Tree. Without the understanding provided by modern chemistry, seeing it as evidence of life in metals would have seemed pretty plausible back then, I imagine.
What are the other countries that have death penalties?
China, Malaysia, vietnam, Uganda, Indonesia, Gambia, Thailand, India, pakistan, Bahrain, Botswana, Equitorial guinea, Bangla desh, UAE, North Korea, Kuwait, afghanistan, Taiwan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Sudan North and South, Ethiopia, Somalia.
Nice crowd.
Bringing up the rear? Don't sell us short, dude, we execute way more people than some of those places.
Considering the vastness of space, I have doubts that you hypothesis holds weight. Essentially you're arguing that in the very finite period of time we've been able to not be soldiers and peasants that other life should have found us. I, OTOH, would bet that other life follows our social paradigms and rotates around entertainment/news cycles more than giving a crap that we exist.
There will always be some who want to push the boundaries of science, even if they consume lots of entertainment. I think the fact that we have not encountered intelligent life is probably a combination of three things: advanced civilization being exceedingly rare, interstellar travel remaining impossible or at least exceedingly impractical, and the fact that the Earth seems completely silent beyond 110 light-years away (and those signals degrade so fast they would be noise anyway).
To expand on that first point, consider that it has taken Earthlings over 3.5 billion years to evolve to this point, having pushed through many near extinctions. Granted, other worlds may have enabled intelligent life faster, but that's 25% of the life of the universe, and more than half of that time went by before a multi-celled organism evolved! So of course intelligent life is going to be exceedingly rare. The Milky Way may have 300 billion stars, but a large percentage of those are in a region of space that sees far more potential extinction events than our region of space.
To extrapolate from our current technological position (I know, we are always terrible at doing that) we'll become more and more efficient at extracting, making use of, and recycling closer resources. We'll probably find it just as easy, if not easier to manipulate our own genes to require less energy and survive in a permanent space habitat closer to its home planet than travel to the stars. So it's not difficult to imagine a situation where a civilization will not need to leave its own star system (at least until the star dies, and maybe not even then) outside of probes, especially if no signals distinguishable from cosmic noise ever reach them or their probes. But at that level of technology on those time scales, who knows how artificial intelligence might change the game.
average incomes:
welder - 32K
plumber - 26k
electrician - 39K
software - 71k
software engineer - 90k
electrical engineer - 83k
civil engineer - 78k
social scientist - 86k
I think some of those numbers are too low. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says 2012 median pay is:
welder - 36K
plumber - 49K
electrician - 50K
I know median isn't the same as average, but this article says plumbers average $51,500, and this one says $52,950. Also, I think a small part of this is due to work location. Obviously not all of it, but every podunk town in the country has welders, plumbers, and electricians, but engineers and social scientists are much more concentrated in cities with higher costs of living. If you look at San Jose, CA, the median plumber salary ($79K) is 60% higher than the national median (see USNews link above), but the mean electrical engineer salary ($121K) is only 30% higher than the national mean.
I'm an engineer, but some of the most rewarding work I've done was at a research lab where I did all kinds of trade-like stuff, like cutting and hanging electrical conduit and pressurized gas lines, a bit of simple PVC water plumbing (replacing a leaky valve here and there), and a bit of carpentry, building test stands and partition walls with metal studs and drywall. We had all manual pipe cutters, threaders, and reamers/deburring tools, too, which are more physically demanding but way more satisfying to use than the automatic stuff. There were the also simple painting or cleaning tasks, too, but that more fun stuff is what I remember most clearly.
So why poll the general public about this question when most the general public really only knows what they were told to recite in school or what they saw on Nova?
It doesn't matter to some people: whether my ancestors evolved from the same creatures as apes did or a fluffy pink unicorn farted them into existence doesn't affect their day-to-day activities (with the possible exception of the occasional worship of said fluffy pink unicorn). Unfortunately, though, it does affect who people elect to represent them, and it does affect how they lead us. The results of this survey imply that, for the foreseeable future, we are going to keep getting into situations where elected officials try to do things like inject non-science into science classes when the science conflicts with their religious beliefs, and shape public policy in ways that conform to their particular religion. And the numbers show we still have a long way to go to fix that.
The only reason I care about Ubuntu updates is that they are followed by Mint updates. I really don't see why anyone would still want to use Ubuntu when there is an equally good (if not better) Debian/Ubuntu-based distro, especially given Shuttleworth's complete and utter contempt for the open source community.
Probably because ideology isn't really important to most people, who just want stuff that works. They don't care if they're running X or Wayland/Weston or Mir. And Shuttleworth definitely does not have contempt for the open source community in general...just the developers who don't follow his lead. Which definitely isn't cool, of course, but those developers don't represent everybody.
After my old laptop with a highly-customized Arch Linux setup died, I went back to Ubuntu (which I've used since Warty Warthog!) because I didn't feel like spending the time to mess with stuff anymore. My personal laptop is currently sitting on 12.04 LTS. I might upgrade once 14.04.1 is released in August, depending on how reviews are. It looks like they didn't choose as many cutting-edge packages, so it may not be as big of a problem as the first releases of previous LTS editions were (remember the time they shipped an LTS release with a beta version of Firefox?).
I'm using Mint 16 Cinnamon at work, so I could be convinced to switch, but my wife and kids are used to Unity by now. I have a terminal shortcut pinned near the top of the sidebar, so I get around easily enough.
By carrying on with this project you're just continuing a fork that serves no purpose to the community.
Actually, AOO 4.0 was the first one to have a sidebar (their answer to the ribbon?), and LO copied it later. Also, there are Apache developers committing a nontrivial amount of code to LO (one article I read said 400 of 3000 bugfixes in LO 4.1 were submitted by people with apache.org email addresses).
Excel is actually pretty nice for quick, one-off, interactive data browsing and visualization. I see that pivot tables are present in OpenOffice and LibreOffice now, so I don't see any reason to use Excel over one of the free options, because they're all absolutely terrible at anything beyond the aforementioned use case. Anything more involved and anything you'll have to repeat on further data sets should absolutely not be done in a spreadsheet (I personally prefer Python with the MATLAB-like libraries).
My library has a digital subscription to Mental Floss magazine, which I check out every time I remember it (I'm doing so now, thanks for reminding me). The best part about newspapers and magazines (analog or digital) is that, when I pick them up, I read stories I would not otherwise seek out. Mental Floss is especially cool because of the interesting trivia represented as infographics, and their featured interviews are almost always awesome even if not very well known (two recent ones: Bill Watterson and Neil deGrasse Tyson [before Cosmos, that is]).
Those same pieces can be used to build what ever you can imagine.
No so easily nowadays. Lego comes with huge numbers of very specialized pieces which are taylor made for that particular model. You can get the basic bricks but most Lego today is aimed at building one model and then playing with it rather than getting a pile of bricks and letting your imagination run wild. There is one exception though: Mindstorms! This is simply brilliant and the new EV3 version even runs Linux! It's one of the few toys that are around today that I really wish I had been available when I was a kid.
I have a six year old, and this is mostly true. There are a large number of non-standard pieces, which makes digging for pieces much more frustrating. On the other hand, there are a lot more possibilities when it comes to building things with articulations. My son builds robots all the time (cannibalized from various robot sets), and I showed him how using a ball-and-socket joint at the shoulders and hips, and a hinge joint at the knees and elbows makes it more like us. And he doesn't know any better, so he uses those non-standard pieces for decorations anyway. Some of that is, as another poster said, partially because of all the tie-in sets out there, but we tend to stay away from those. The Creator series, which literally has full instructions for three different models using the same set of blocks, should be everybody's first stop (and they're cheaper than tie-in sets anyway).
As for the article, my son has played with the smallest size Legos since he was almost 4, and my daughter started even before she turned 3 (to keep up with her brother). Even though they do play on phones and tablets and gaming systems, they spend more time with Legos than anything else...and that's by choice. I'm not saying this in an attempt to brag here, I'm saying, parents, get your kid Legos, and build stuff with them. You know you'll enjoy it, too.
The reason tablets became popular is because people had begun to use their phones in similar ways, and the price wasn't too outrageous. Microsoft had tablets before they became popular, too, but they didn't kick off the tablet craze. Pioneering technology is one part tech, ten parts timing.
...and a whole lot of marketing, I should have added.