I never get the hang of sarcasm. Incurring in the risk of explaining your joke, I have to reply that black holes are never "seen naked". Actually, there's a conjecture that a naked singularity cannot exist.
Actually, it does discuss it. Unfortunately, here's what it says:
Palmer's idea suggests a third possibility - that the kinds of experiments considered by Kochen and Specker are simply impossible to get answers from and hence irrelevant.
So, if you have an experiment that disagrees with your beautiful theory, you just say the experiment is irrelevant. Yay science!
It is not a trivial effect. See wikipedia. You're right in that it evens out day and night temperatures, but wrong in that it reduces energy use. The mean temperature is considerably higher, so more air conditioning is used during the day. I don't know the effect on heating during the night, though.
The problem is that most estimatives just use the "giving the current rate of expansion", without accounting for the rise in prices and consequent dimnishing consum. If you think it that way, there will be more a gradual transition, with the ones who can jumping to the newer energies, and those who can't spending every dime to run their oil-hungry business.
It looks to me that we're already in this era. After all, we are exploring lower quality oil, and (save the current down due to reccession) the prices are steadily rising.
And if it were, we'd see the number of applications slowly climbing as we evolve, but they're mostly constant in the recent years.
In my country the number of applications was and is climbing, but that may be statistically meaningless due to a general expansion of higher education and several other external changes. So no hard data there.
Allow me to clarify. The percentage of female applications should be slowly climbing. This would seem hard data to me.
The best of these had to endure an enormous amount of unjustified crap from her (male) supervisor, which held back her career, and still does... and which her successor as his student did not have any trouble with. But then, her successor was a lesbian.
Wow. Wait a minute. Allow me to clarify here. She had trouble solely by being a woman but her successor had success (sorry, couldn't resist) because she was a lesbian woman? What was that about? Some weird fetish of the supervisor? A bonus because lesbians are less likely to have families? That is just shocking to me. Your country is advanced enough to allow a lesbian to succeed but backwards enough to discriminate women? In mine (Brasil) she would be burned at the stake if she came out. As a gay man, I know what I'm talking about. But discriminating (machist, I don't know if it's an english word) advisors here are far and between, and publicly ridiculed. Women just go to the right ones.
If I wanted to stereotipise the groups (which I do), I'd say the females were hard working, while the males were slackers.
Hmmm... I'd agree, actually. But I'm not sure whether that supports your argument or mine. If any.
What I was trying to say is that women had to work harder to achieve the same level of success than men. But this could just mean that they were working against the male establishment. I don't think they were, but it's not a good point anyway.
This is where we part company again; if the history of gender/ethnic group/national/whatever relations tells us anything, it's that '[group X] are innately less talented at [activity Y]' is a natural, but extremely dangerous, default assumption. There too many easily concealed social biases for this one ever to be safe without strong, direct evidence. We know for certain that there were very strong social factors preventing equal opportunity for women in sciences, until (at best) recently. So any claim that these factors are now safely gone requires a strong burden of proof... it's certainly easy to name other areas where the biases have definitely not gone _anywhere_.
I see your point. Its about the easiest attack one can use to justify the segregation of a minority, and was often used thorough history. What bothers me is that this hypothesis is banned from polite society, in a way that makes any serious studies about it impossible. Which relegates us to anecdotal evidence and endless arguments.
Ah, and now I see how I was rude. I was being both sarcastic and facetious here, but the 'you' was intended to be the impersonal and general 'anyone' you; I didn't mean you specifically. My bad.
Oh. Indeed. I'm sorry, I guess my english still lacks polishing.
I stand by my basic point, however - I think you're leaping from the facts you have to a conclusion that's completely unsupported. The data certainly suggests that there exists a reason why women do not pursue careers in physics research. I see no evidence that this reason is 'women are inherently less likely to be talented mathematicians'.
Rereading my post, I plead guilty on non sequitur. However, one thing is still right: there's no correlation (in my data) between the period that women usually have children and the rate of dropouts. And, anecdotally, I seem to recall my female teachers were all married with kids (except the lesbian ones). So, family-making is not a plausible explanation.
Cultural baggage is not either. It would have been about 30 years ago, but nowadays we're far more advanced. And if it were, we'd see the number of applications slowly climbing as we evolve, but they're mostly constant in the recent years.
So, there must be an alternative explanation. I have no serious data to support my hypothesis. But from my experience: the mean grade of the females was always lower than the male one (any chance of finding public records on this?). As the group of females was always small, this is quite sensible to fluctuations. And, now I'm gonna sound like a real misogynist, none of the women I worked with was actually brilliant. If I wanted to stereotipise the groups (which I do), I'd say the females were hard working, while the males were slackers.
I could even imagine that, back to hunter-gatherer society, males had more necessity of understanding velocity, position and rates of change. Very useful in hunting. But I'm not a biologist, and this intuition would hardly do any good to someone studying quantum information.
Isolated, these aren't strong data, but collectively, and in absence of a better hypothesis, were enough to make up my mind.
You have been thoroughly impolite with these ad hominem attacks. Nevertheless, I will still be honest with you, even if a bit sarcastic.
First, a little surprise for you: not all universities are the same. I quoted data about my field (physics) and my university. And frankly, I've never seen numbers very different from these. I will give you references, in case you think I'm making them up.
Undergraduate: ~10% women. Actually, I can't give a reference on this one, as the numbers fluctuate a lot and there's no public record of them.
You have to be a serious failure as a statistician to look at a drop off like that and not think there's an endemic bias in the system.
That was very rude of you. I'm not a statistician but I am quite capable of gathering data and analysing it. You assumed your data and mine are the same. They aren't. And a serious statistician would never quote numbers from his memory.
Anyway, there isn't any drop between doctorate students and faculty members. The number of women is very low from the start. Interestingly, more women get to postgraduation than men, but from there the trend is smoothly downward.
And iris-n? When you say "Women don't like math. They don't have ability with math... their brain it's not suited to do math.", you are saying "stupid bitches", complete with your condescending 'but I'm sure they "often do well in other fields".' Women do pretty damn well in this field, given a chance, so the other fields can go recruit elsewhere.
You just don't want to admit to yourself that you're saying 'well, you suckers who want families can always leave the hard sciences for us men, and go back to your humanities playground.'
Well, I do consider humanities a playground. I've made up my mind to learn some real philosophy one time, and took a one semester course in a respected humanities college. The horror, the horror.
Nevertheless, there are fields other than hard sciences and humanities. Medicine strikes me as a hard subject in which women seem to do very well.
And I was not aware that the fields were currently recruiting. We are heading to a war of the sciences? Man, I must be getting old. In my time people enroled in a field because they were interested in it.
For thousands of years males were happy to work and provide for the family while females had the children and took care of them. But comes one day the feminist movement* and decides that women should have careers too. Good for them and it's quite beautiful. The result? Countries that have this mentality have birth rates lesser than 2, and would be shrinking in population if it weren't for immigration.
*I now that this isn't historically accurate, industrial revolution et al, but it does not alter the point.
Sure, raising a family is a quite plausible explanation for the top positions, but does not explain why so few women begin the careers at all.
A girl is hardly planning to have a family when she enters undergraduate course. And, even so, less than 20% of the freshmen are women.
The reason is obvious: women don't like math. They don't have ability with math. I'm not saying "stupid bitches", they often do well in other fields, is just that their brain it's not suited to do math. Even amongst the few who enter, very few get it to the end. And don't tell me that people leave undergrad school to have children.
It is possible to have female brains that can do math? Of course! I have had two female teachers that were truly genius. But it isn't statistically likely.
It's that hard to acknowledge that there are biological differences between men and women? Next time feminists will be hunting down whoever who says that women have XX chromosomes instead of XY.
I was going to post as AC but fuck it. I'm too tired of this political correctness fashion.
There's no physical reason a modern OS can't boot under 5 seconds. If it takes considerably longer than that, it's due to redundancy and inefficiency. In short: bloat.
So yes, I can wait 30 seconds, but if see a system that boots in a rational (non-integer) amount of time I now it's very cruft-free. It wont hog my cpu needlessly, it won't spin my disk all the time. It was carefully designed, that's all.
And yes, I know that getting gimp as good as corel is more important to the success of linux than a fast boot time, but the thing is. It is hard. And boring. It requires new software, new research, et al. As for the boot time, it's just utilising right what you already have. Sure, a prefetcher may help, but choosing the right order of the daemons will impact more, and even more disabling needless ones.
I do turn off my computer at night. I don't think we have the luxury of wasting that energy anymore. And who cares, I know I'll take very much longer to wake than my pc will.
But I'll ask you this. If you think I'm wrong, then please tell me how. Tell the date when the Maxwell's equations will give any useful results. Tell me when the Maxwell equations will give us public lighting, electric cars, computers. What's the date that's going to happen by? Just give me a date that you can guarantee success by.
See how stupid that sounded? Nevertheless, it was indeed quite a long time before the unification of electromagnetism by Maxwell gave any practical results. So, just because you don't have any use for them in the near future, don't mean that they are worthless.
This is basic science. People trying to understand the processes of life. Cell differentiation, growth, ageing. It can have implications in almost any field of biology. So don't try to tell what is useful science and what isn't until you have some scientific training.
The adult stem cells are not nearly as powerful or easy to obtain than the embryonic ones.
What I think its wrong is imposing an artificial limitation on a very promising field because of the moral difficulties that a religious minority have with it. This is clearly a case of failing to separate church and state. And this is a particularity of the christian religion. Hinduism springs to my mind as an example of a religion that has no problem with it. I thought that everyone agreed that religion has no say in science. Why go backwards in this point?
Now just imagine if the millions of dollars that were wasted trying to make adult stem cells were spent on actual research. I bet the US wouldn't be in such a sorry state of advancement in this field.
It sucks for us latin. We just have "Sol" and "Lua", so there's no way to distinguish them in spoken form except for "the Luas of Mars" or "the $EXTRASOLAR_PLANET's Sol".
You're right. But MathML is still a few years from now. The best thing we have now is TeX. And one hardly needs a turing-complete TeX just to type in some math. You could just allow the standard LaTeX macros and disable the creation of more. Right now, what I do is just type the bloody thing like $e^{i \pi} +1 = 0 $. It's easier to understand than badly typed math, and who doesn't can just render the thing. And people who can't render TeX should just hand in their geek card.
On a side note, I've found very difficult trying to make anything resembling actual programming in TeX. One does not just write a web server in it.
If pluto-like objects were to be considered planets, we would have about 13 planets in the Solar System right now, and that number is steadily increasing.
And this is a problem how?...
Two things. They are all uninteresting asteroid-like bodies (except for Ceres, I grant you that. It is interesting, but just a rock in the middle of the asteroid belt nevertheless), that can't be seen by the naked eye.
The other is a matter of coherence. The only strong reason I've seen to keep Pluto a planet is a matter of tradition. I disagree with it, of course, but it does have its strength. And to add the four other dwarfs to the club would just upset tradition even more.
So you think Mercury has more in common with Jupiter than it does with Ceres?
You're cherry picking. Mercury does have a lot in common with Venus, Earth and Mars. You know, small, rocky, near the sun. And Jupiter has a lot in common with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Clearly, they are not isolated. Of course, the gas giants are quite different from the rocky planets. They are more like stars.
Pluto actually has a lot more in common with Mercury than Mercury does with Jupiter, but whatever.
That's not quantifiable. And I disagree, Pluto has very little in common with Mercury. They are very small, and that's all. Their formation history and composition are radically different. And Pluto is just one in the middle of tens of thousands of kuiper belt objects, while Mercury is all alone. The fact is that all three are quite different objects.
When you look to the bigger picture, the IAU made quite a good job in a difficult task. They had to make a definition of planet based on scientific principles that was more or less aligned with the traditional conception of a planet. I they were completely scientific, they'd have to let out the gas giants, and we'd have only the first four (I take it that you agree that the Earth has to be a planet). But I don't think the general public would accept "losing" Saturn and Jupiter. I can already imagine the astrologists rioting.
Last but not least, Pluto was an historical mistake. They were looking for a planet that caused the disturbance in Uranus' orbit. By chance, they've found Pluto moving in the neighbourhood. It could never been what they were looking for, due to it's low mass. I'm glad that this was finally corrected.
If a pluto-like object were found that cleared its orbital path, then that would be a IAU-approved planet.
Then it wouldn't be a kuiper belt object. There wouldn't even be a kuiper belt. And I would gladly accept it as a planet.
If you're going to nitpick, at least get your facts straight.
You seem to be a sincere troll so I will speak honestly.
The thing is, they haven't changed Pluto's status just for the sake of it. It was a matter of consistency. If pluto-like objects were to be considered planets, we would have about 13 planets in the Solar System right now, and that number is steadily increasing. So the right thing to do was to remove Pluto (and it's pals) from the planets club, because they really have nothing in common with them. It was correcting a historical anomaly, only.
And if you think that a international body of scientist is not the most indicated to make scientific definitions, well. Pity.
Well, Pluto's orbit is about 16Â farther from the plane than Earth's. Illinois' latitude is about 37Â, and Earth's axial tilt is about 23.5Â. So, we can have a minimum of 13.5Â of Illinois' "overhead" to the earth's plane, and a maximum of 60.5Â. So the orbit of Pluto is indeed overhead Illinois many times in the american summer. The odds that Pluto itself is in the spot are astronomically (literally) low.
PS: Fuck slashdot and it's lack of unicode support. And while we're at it, inline TeX would be nice to.
To be completely fair, the should have done it to every major browser in every major OS. So its 9*3 = 27 analyses. Then if you wan to cross-compare them, its 27c2 = 351 analyses. So no, thanks, I'm not that idle.
Actually, I've never seen someone encoding information in the spin of photons. As a spin-1 particle, they are a 3-state system, not very cosy to use as a qubit.
Usually people encode information in the polarization of photons. In theoretical physics at least. But I guess for commercial uses its more practical to use frequency, as networking equipment are used to transmit it with high fidelity. But that's just a guess.
In Brasil we have voting machines available for playing for some months before the election. It's quite fun, actually, the candidates are all poets and writers from the 19th century.
You're serious? Your whole argument seems serious, even though I disagree with it, but you're really looking after the interests of the Luddite? Because, you know, the best way to develop a society is to hear the ignorant and unwilling, and dumb down the system to their level. Lets just rehire all the bank cashiers, because, people love to do this job, and while we're at it, why not bus agents for those who can't count money,
If your brother is 40 and he can't (does not want to) use ATMs he is in serious trouble. My grandmother can use them. She's 90. She has never used a computer. She can read the instructions on the screen and follow them, it's not too hard.
Sure, advanced technologies must be opt-in to account for the necessities of the elderly and disabled, but one has to draw a line somewhere. Online banking may be difficult for some, I grant it. VCR programming is a famous issue. But it's the first time I've seen someone claiming that ATMs are hard to use.
Slashdot Mirror
I never get the hang of sarcasm. Incurring in the risk of explaining your joke, I have to reply that black holes are never "seen naked". Actually, there's a conjecture that a naked singularity cannot exist.
Actually, it does discuss it. Unfortunately, here's what it says:
Palmer's idea suggests a third possibility - that the kinds of experiments considered by Kochen and Specker are simply impossible to get answers from and hence irrelevant.
So, if you have an experiment that disagrees with your beautiful theory, you just say the experiment is irrelevant. Yay science!
Really? If we polled random people on the street, I don't think many would be capable of answering correctly how airplanes fly.
"Makes sense" is a very suspicious category. All we can (should) hope for is a theory that is mathematically sound and in agreement with experiment.
It is not a trivial effect. See wikipedia. You're right in that it evens out day and night temperatures, but wrong in that it reduces energy use. The mean temperature is considerably higher, so more air conditioning is used during the day. I don't know the effect on heating during the night, though.
Well, none that I heard of, but hot pavements increase the mean temperature of the city, contributing to global warming.
You can also notice that pavements tend to have huge termal inertia, making them a very efficient heater for the rest of the city.
The problem is that most estimatives just use the "giving the current rate of expansion", without accounting for the rise in prices and consequent dimnishing consum. If you think it that way, there will be more a gradual transition, with the ones who can jumping to the newer energies, and those who can't spending every dime to run their oil-hungry business.
It looks to me that we're already in this era. After all, we are exploring lower quality oil, and (save the current down due to reccession) the prices are steadily rising.
And if it were, we'd see the number of applications slowly climbing as we evolve, but they're mostly constant in the recent years.
In my country the number of applications was and is climbing, but that may be statistically meaningless due to a general expansion of higher education and several other external changes. So no hard data there.
Allow me to clarify. The percentage of female applications should be slowly climbing. This would seem hard data to me.
The best of these had to endure an enormous amount of unjustified crap from her (male) supervisor, which held back her career, and still does... and which her successor as his student did not have any trouble with. But then, her successor was a lesbian.
Wow. Wait a minute. Allow me to clarify here. She had trouble solely by being a woman but her successor had success (sorry, couldn't resist) because she was a lesbian woman? What was that about? Some weird fetish of the supervisor? A bonus because lesbians are less likely to have families? That is just shocking to me. Your country is advanced enough to allow a lesbian to succeed but backwards enough to discriminate women? In mine (Brasil) she would be burned at the stake if she came out. As a gay man, I know what I'm talking about. But discriminating (machist, I don't know if it's an english word) advisors here are far and between, and publicly ridiculed. Women just go to the right ones.
If I wanted to stereotipise the groups (which I do), I'd say the females were hard working, while the males were slackers.
Hmmm... I'd agree, actually. But I'm not sure whether that supports your argument or mine. If any.
What I was trying to say is that women had to work harder to achieve the same level of success than men. But this could just mean that they were working against the male establishment. I don't think they were, but it's not a good point anyway.
This is where we part company again; if the history of gender/ethnic group/national/whatever relations tells us anything, it's that '[group X] are innately less talented at [activity Y]' is a natural, but extremely dangerous, default assumption. There too many easily concealed social biases for this one ever to be safe without strong, direct evidence. We know for certain that there were very strong social factors preventing equal opportunity for women in sciences, until (at best) recently. So any claim that these factors are now safely gone requires a strong burden of proof... it's certainly easy to name other areas where the biases have definitely not gone _anywhere_.
I see your point. Its about the easiest attack one can use to justify the segregation of a minority, and was often used thorough history. What bothers me is that this hypothesis is banned from polite society, in a way that makes any serious studies about it impossible. Which relegates us to anecdotal evidence and endless arguments.
Ah, and now I see how I was rude. I was being both sarcastic and facetious here, but the 'you' was intended to be the impersonal and general 'anyone' you; I didn't mean you specifically. My bad.
Oh. Indeed. I'm sorry, I guess my english still lacks polishing.
I stand by my basic point, however - I think you're leaping from the facts you have to a conclusion that's completely unsupported. The data certainly suggests that there exists a reason why women do not pursue careers in physics research. I see no evidence that this reason is 'women are inherently less likely to be talented mathematicians'.
Rereading my post, I plead guilty on non sequitur. However, one thing is still right: there's no correlation (in my data) between the period that women usually have children and the rate of dropouts. And, anecdotally, I seem to recall my female teachers were all married with kids (except the lesbian ones). So, family-making is not a plausible explanation.
Cultural baggage is not either. It would have been about 30 years ago, but nowadays we're far more advanced. And if it were, we'd see the number of applications slowly climbing as we evolve, but they're mostly constant in the recent years.
So, there must be an alternative explanation. I have no serious data to support my hypothesis. But from my experience: the mean grade of the females was always lower than the male one (any chance of finding public records on this?). As the group of females was always small, this is quite sensible to fluctuations. And, now I'm gonna sound like a real misogynist, none of the women I worked with was actually brilliant. If I wanted to stereotipise the groups (which I do), I'd say the females were hard working, while the males were slackers.
I could even imagine that, back to hunter-gatherer society, males had more necessity of understanding velocity, position and rates of change. Very useful in hunting. But I'm not a biologist, and this intuition would hardly do any good to someone studying quantum information.
Isolated, these aren't strong data, but collectively, and in absence of a better hypothesis, were enough to make up my mind.
You have been thoroughly impolite with these ad hominem attacks. Nevertheless, I will still be honest with you, even if a bit sarcastic.
First, a little surprise for you: not all universities are the same. I quoted data about my field (physics) and my university. And frankly, I've never seen numbers very different from these. I will give you references, in case you think I'm making them up.
You have to be a serious failure as a statistician to look at a drop off like that and not think there's an endemic bias in the system.
That was very rude of you. I'm not a statistician but I am quite capable of gathering data and analysing it. You assumed your data and mine are the same. They aren't. And a serious statistician would never quote numbers from his memory.
Anyway, there isn't any drop between doctorate students and faculty members. The number of women is very low from the start. Interestingly, more women get to postgraduation than men, but from there the trend is smoothly downward.
And iris-n? When you say "Women don't like math. They don't have ability with math... their brain it's not suited to do math.", you are saying "stupid bitches", complete with your condescending 'but I'm sure they "often do well in other fields".' Women do pretty damn well in this field, given a chance, so the other fields can go recruit elsewhere.
You just don't want to admit to yourself that you're saying 'well, you suckers who want families can always leave the hard sciences for us men, and go back to your humanities playground.'
Well, I do consider humanities a playground. I've made up my mind to learn some real philosophy one time, and took a one semester course in a respected humanities college. The horror, the horror.
Nevertheless, there are fields other than hard sciences and humanities. Medicine strikes me as a hard subject in which women seem to do very well.
And I was not aware that the fields were currently recruiting. We are heading to a war of the sciences? Man, I must be getting old. In my time people enroled in a field because they were interested in it.
The problem is that it plains doesn't work.
For thousands of years males were happy to work and provide for the family while females had the children and took care of them. But comes one day the feminist movement* and decides that women should have careers too. Good for them and it's quite beautiful. The result? Countries that have this mentality have birth rates lesser than 2, and would be shrinking in population if it weren't for immigration.
*I now that this isn't historically accurate, industrial revolution et al, but it does not alter the point.
Sure, raising a family is a quite plausible explanation for the top positions, but does not explain why so few women begin the careers at all.
A girl is hardly planning to have a family when she enters undergraduate course. And, even so, less than 20% of the freshmen are women.
The reason is obvious: women don't like math. They don't have ability with math. I'm not saying "stupid bitches", they often do well in other fields, is just that their brain it's not suited to do math. Even amongst the few who enter, very few get it to the end. And don't tell me that people leave undergrad school to have children.
It is possible to have female brains that can do math? Of course! I have had two female teachers that were truly genius. But it isn't statistically likely.
It's that hard to acknowledge that there are biological differences between men and women? Next time feminists will be hunting down whoever who says that women have XX chromosomes instead of XY.
I was going to post as AC but fuck it. I'm too tired of this political correctness fashion.
There's no physical reason a modern OS can't boot under 5 seconds. If it takes considerably longer than that, it's due to redundancy and inefficiency. In short: bloat.
So yes, I can wait 30 seconds, but if see a system that boots in a rational (non-integer) amount of time I now it's very cruft-free. It wont hog my cpu needlessly, it won't spin my disk all the time. It was carefully designed, that's all.
And yes, I know that getting gimp as good as corel is more important to the success of linux than a fast boot time, but the thing is. It is hard. And boring. It requires new software, new research, et al. As for the boot time, it's just utilising right what you already have. Sure, a prefetcher may help, but choosing the right order of the daemons will impact more, and even more disabling needless ones.
I do turn off my computer at night. I don't think we have the luxury of wasting that energy anymore. And who cares, I know I'll take very much longer to wake than my pc will.
Let me give you an historical analogy:
But I'll ask you this. If you think I'm wrong, then please tell me how. Tell the date when the Maxwell's equations will give any useful results. Tell me when the Maxwell equations will give us public lighting, electric cars, computers. What's the date that's going to happen by? Just give me a date that you can guarantee success by.
See how stupid that sounded? Nevertheless, it was indeed quite a long time before the unification of electromagnetism by Maxwell gave any practical results. So, just because you don't have any use for them in the near future, don't mean that they are worthless.
This is basic science. People trying to understand the processes of life. Cell differentiation, growth, ageing. It can have implications in almost any field of biology. So don't try to tell what is useful science and what isn't until you have some scientific training.
The adult stem cells are not nearly as powerful or easy to obtain than the embryonic ones.
What I think its wrong is imposing an artificial limitation on a very promising field because of the moral difficulties that a religious minority have with it. This is clearly a case of failing to separate church and state. And this is a particularity of the christian religion. Hinduism springs to my mind as an example of a religion that has no problem with it. I thought that everyone agreed that religion has no say in science. Why go backwards in this point?
Now just imagine if the millions of dollars that were wasted trying to make adult stem cells were spent on actual research. I bet the US wouldn't be in such a sorry state of advancement in this field.
It sucks for us latin. We just have "Sol" and "Lua", so there's no way to distinguish them in spoken form except for "the Luas of Mars" or "the $EXTRASOLAR_PLANET's Sol".
You're right. But MathML is still a few years from now. The best thing we have now is TeX. And one hardly needs a turing-complete TeX just to type in some math. You could just allow the standard LaTeX macros and disable the creation of more. Right now, what I do is just type the bloody thing like $e^{i \pi} +1 = 0 $. It's easier to understand than badly typed math, and who doesn't can just render the thing. And people who can't render TeX should just hand in their geek card.
On a side note, I've found very difficult trying to make anything resembling actual programming in TeX. One does not just write a web server in it.
If pluto-like objects were to be considered planets, we would have about 13 planets in the Solar System right now, and that number is steadily increasing.
And this is a problem how?...
Two things. They are all uninteresting asteroid-like bodies (except for Ceres, I grant you that. It is interesting, but just a rock in the middle of the asteroid belt nevertheless), that can't be seen by the naked eye.
The other is a matter of coherence. The only strong reason I've seen to keep Pluto a planet is a matter of tradition. I disagree with it, of course, but it does have its strength. And to add the four other dwarfs to the club would just upset tradition even more.
So you think Mercury has more in common with Jupiter than it does with Ceres?
You're cherry picking. Mercury does have a lot in common with Venus, Earth and Mars. You know, small, rocky, near the sun. And Jupiter has a lot in common with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Clearly, they are not isolated. Of course, the gas giants are quite different from the rocky planets. They are more like stars.
Pluto actually has a lot more in common with Mercury than Mercury does with Jupiter, but whatever.
That's not quantifiable. And I disagree, Pluto has very little in common with Mercury. They are very small, and that's all. Their formation history and composition are radically different. And Pluto is just one in the middle of tens of thousands of kuiper belt objects, while Mercury is all alone. The fact is that all three are quite different objects.
When you look to the bigger picture, the IAU made quite a good job in a difficult task. They had to make a definition of planet based on scientific principles that was more or less aligned with the traditional conception of a planet. I they were completely scientific, they'd have to let out the gas giants, and we'd have only the first four (I take it that you agree that the Earth has to be a planet). But I don't think the general public would accept "losing" Saturn and Jupiter. I can already imagine the astrologists rioting.
Last but not least, Pluto was an historical mistake. They were looking for a planet that caused the disturbance in Uranus' orbit. By chance, they've found Pluto moving in the neighbourhood. It could never been what they were looking for, due to it's low mass. I'm glad that this was finally corrected.
If a pluto-like object were found that cleared its orbital path, then that would be a IAU-approved planet.
Then it wouldn't be a kuiper belt object. There wouldn't even be a kuiper belt. And I would gladly accept it as a planet.
If you're going to nitpick, at least get your facts straight.
The same to you.
You seem to be a sincere troll so I will speak honestly.
The thing is, they haven't changed Pluto's status just for the sake of it. It was a matter of consistency. If pluto-like objects were to be considered planets, we would have about 13 planets in the Solar System right now, and that number is steadily increasing. So the right thing to do was to remove Pluto (and it's pals) from the planets club, because they really have nothing in common with them. It was correcting a historical anomaly, only.
And if you think that a international body of scientist is not the most indicated to make scientific definitions, well. Pity.
So, they're actually the Simpsons? This explains everything.
Apologies accepted.
But seriously, you're only one here who has the authority to complain that they're wasting your money with this bullshit. You should write to them.
Well, Pluto's orbit is about 16Â farther from the plane than Earth's. Illinois' latitude is about 37Â, and Earth's axial tilt is about 23.5Â. So, we can have a minimum of 13.5Â of Illinois' "overhead" to the earth's plane, and a maximum of 60.5Â. So the orbit of Pluto is indeed overhead Illinois many times in the american summer. The odds that Pluto itself is in the spot are astronomically (literally) low.
PS: Fuck slashdot and it's lack of unicode support. And while we're at it, inline TeX would be nice to.
Hush. If they hear you talking all this bullshit of logic and science they will just change the definition of overhead as well.
To be completely fair, the should have done it to every major browser in every major OS. So its 9*3 = 27 analyses. Then if you wan to cross-compare them, its 27c2 = 351 analyses. So no, thanks, I'm not that idle.
Actually, I've never seen someone encoding information in the spin of photons. As a spin-1 particle, they are a 3-state system, not very cosy to use as a qubit.
Usually people encode information in the polarization of photons. In theoretical physics at least. But I guess for commercial uses its more practical to use frequency, as networking equipment are used to transmit it with high fidelity. But that's just a guess.
In Brasil we have voting machines available for playing for some months before the election. It's quite fun, actually, the candidates are all poets and writers from the 19th century.
"I'm a Luddite, you sensitive clod!"
You're serious? Your whole argument seems serious, even though I disagree with it, but you're really looking after the interests of the Luddite? Because, you know, the best way to develop a society is to hear the ignorant and unwilling, and dumb down the system to their level. Lets just rehire all the bank cashiers, because, people love to do this job, and while we're at it, why not bus agents for those who can't count money,
If your brother is 40 and he can't (does not want to) use ATMs he is in serious trouble. My grandmother can use them. She's 90. She has never used a computer. She can read the instructions on the screen and follow them, it's not too hard.
Sure, advanced technologies must be opt-in to account for the necessities of the elderly and disabled, but one has to draw a line somewhere. Online banking may be difficult for some, I grant it. VCR programming is a famous issue. But it's the first time I've seen someone claiming that ATMs are hard to use.