I'm finding myself hoping that this is true, not truly knowing whether it is or not. Textbooks have become a political battleground. I guess I'll show my leanings, by saying that it looks to me as if "Creation Science" is trying to work its way in, while other forces are trying to get sex education pushed out, or at least heavily watered down.
Moving to online texts may do nothing to resolve this part of the issue, in that no doubt there will be a similar structure to publishing them, as today Texas has inordinate power. It might even make things worse, if standardization were to go away. I don't know if its worse to have everyone using texts where religion encroaches on science, or having some people taught science and some taught religion as science.
Several comments, much snark, some serious, but none relevant. I figured the nerd reference to "Arrival" / "The Story of Your Life" would be picked up readily. It's considerably less obscure than, "The Philosopher's Stone", by Colin Wilson.
By the way, even if you're going to insist that this is all "natural" and has nothing to do with man's activities, it still means that we need to figure out how to adapt to it. We also need to measure it, so we can understand what's happening. In the name of AGW denial, both of those things, sensible whether or not AGW is real, are being cut back.
You can get hit by a truck or by a charging bear. The latter is "natural", the former not. You're dead in either case.
I don't consider most of those "failures" to have been valid evaluations of predictions in the first place.
Second, I wasn't going after "think of the children" emotional arguments. I'll place it this way:
If AGW is real, and we don't take preventive measures, people will die, in large numbers.
If AGW is fake, and we do take preventive measures, some people will be slightly less wealthy than they would have, had we not taken those measures.
Life is on one side of the balance, money is on the other. I realize of course that we're probably betting with other peoples' lives, not our own. But you never know. Do you feel lucky?
Interesting that for many of those "failed" predictions, the evaluation date for the prediction is still well in the future. You cannot make a pass/fail judgement in 2014 for a prediction of what is going to happen by 2050. Others look as if they take sensationalist press and consider that to be a prediction.
Drudge Report has a vested interest in calling this all bunk, and their list reflects that. If you really want to validate predictions, science is generally pretty good at that - take a look at the methods used by real scientists.
But this is Slashdot. I expected no less than rampant denialism here.
Let's look at this from a risk point of view. If Climate Change is real, people are going to die - lots of them. Not because the heat is going to kill them, but because our society is not responding well, there will be famines, wars, refugees, and all of that stuff that doesn't help longevity. If Climate Change is a complete fake, but we take preventive actions, a few very wealthy people are slightly less wealthy, but there won't be extra quantities of people dying. Come to think of it, as for heat, there are now places in the Persian Gulf that are technically uninhabitable. It's so hot and humid that you can't cool yourself enough by sweating. Without air conditioning, you will die if outdoors for too long. But we really can't assign blame to that one - yet.
Maybe they should try calling it the "Osbourne 2". I guess it's not the same, presumably their trucks can keep them afloat as their car sales die until the new model is really out.
> Finally, the big discovery seems to be that you won't be destroyed by all the energy of the universe > falling through the event horizon at the same time as you, thanks to the expansion of the universe.
The catch here is that, "all the energy in the universe," may not be hitting you as you fall through the event horizon, but a lot will, more than likely enough to give you a Bad Day. You're only down from "infinity" to "the horizon observable over the black hole's future," still a pretty big number.
> But what about spaghettification?
Others have answered this, that the gravity gradients are soft enough around a big enough black hole.
There is another fun fact here... For spinning black holes, which I believe means most of them, or at least the big ones we could think of entering in the non-spaghetti state, there are actually two event horizons, and it might be possible to leave from the zone in between them. Gregory Benford, physicist and science fiction author, set several books in that region.
"The attached message describes the method for total conversion of matter to energy, as well as the techniques necessary to limit the process to the small scales necessary for powering devices such as communications, computing, food synthesis, and transport. Simply decompress the attached message."
Human translation, "Whoever decompresses this message WINS. Get our guys in the bunker decompressing, and let the nukes fly to stop everyone else."
Aliens' secret, there is nothing in the compressed attachment, it's just a long stream from a very good random number generator. Who would be stupid enough to give a savage species like THEM any sort of advanced technology?
Short - when will it be safe to let Windows 10 updates happen, again?
My laptop is dual-boot, and 90+ percent of the time it boots Linux, which I have kept fully updated through this whole mess. I still have the Windows installation live and runnable, because there are those things that just won't work without Windoes. Occasionally I unplug my USB flash with/boot, let it boot Windows, and keep that up-to-date. Most of what I do with Windows is update Windows, and occasionally update my GPS, and a rare few other things.
But not that long ago I started hearing about the Meltdown/Spectre mitigations bricking machines, so was especially careful to quit booting Windows. At some point I presume the dust will have settled and it will be safe and prudent to update again.
Difference is that we've been breeding super-bugs with our abuse of antibiotics. The bugs some are worrying about are a heck of a lot worse than the ones we survived for a hundred thousand years. (+/-)
Or from another perspective, the super-bugs likely won't wipe us all out - just a lot of us, until we're down to the people with the best immune systems.
So the plane is supposed to be flying by 2030 - that's twelve years away. Yet they also say,
"We couldnâ(TM)t have made the engine itselfâ"it would have melted down into slag if we had tried to produce it five years ago,â Oâ(TM)Banion said. âoeBut now we can digitally print that engine with an incredibly sophisticated cooling system integral into the material of the engine itself and have that engine survive for multiple firings for routine operation.â The aircraft is also agile at hypersonic speeds, with reliable engine starts, he said. A half-decade before, he added, developers âoecould not have even built it even if we conceived of it.â
This makes it sound as if they have solved the hardest problem, that they couldn't have solved five years ago, yet they won't have anything flying for twelve more years? The numbers add up, with gobs of room to spare.
I've said for a while now that I want a self-driving car before my kids come to me to take my keys away. I see the value and dignity of independent mobility, but I also know that at some point accumulated knowledge and experience will no longer compensate for an ageing body and brain.
and good luck selling to those folks abroad if you kept your export license because you installed backdoors for the US government.
Basically, US software companies are put at a serious disadvantage. The real question becomes, whose cryptographic software can you trust? Certainly not Russian or Chinese, I'd say, and I'm sure others would add to that list.
Because a strong minority doesn't want to face the fact that we need to manage our population. Beyond that, they don't want to fact the fact that, "Just say no to sex!" simply isn't going to work, even if they wanted to manage the population. Even farther beyond that, they don't want to accept that if you really want to stop, or at least minimize abortions, you need to make birth control easily and readily available.
I can manage to believe that both global warming and overpopulation are real - at the same time. (I don't believe "in" them, because that moves the stage from science to religion.)
They also used a few seconds out of the existing "Shada" footage to add Tom Baker to "The Five Doctors". I suspect he was in his, "I am not Spock" recovery phase at the time, and didn't want to do it live.
I was on vacation last week, but I happened to see a news article at the airport, and it looked as if Level3 had been sold. Though from the financial page to fumbling the packets on the raised floor would probably take longer than this, so I doubt it's related.
There is another potential reason, though I'm not sure how valid this is. (I can admit when I'm wrong - this is a conjecture.)
The existing satellites have specific instrumentation and procedures for measuring sea ice, and for that reason there is an uninterrupted record. I will presume that the backup satellite, if not of the same design, at least had instrumentation designed to be compatible with that record.
A new, cheaper satellite will likely be somewhat different, both in instrumentation and necessarily procedures. Therefore its measurements will not precisely match previous ones - there will be a measurement discontinuity. It will be possible to recalibrate and restore continuity, but effort will be required. It would be best to have a new cheaper satellite up there before current ones fail, so that that recalibration can more easily be done.
I remember several other circumstances where such recalibration had to be done, I believe for temperature for one. There was no end to crying "FOUL!" when it happened, even though those who were doing it recognized the need.
Being a "Wally" is definitely a skill, taking training and attitude. Add to that that any number of Wallies have found that management can be the safest place to hide the fact that they do little/no work.
OTOH, working from home is like schoolteachers. One can say, "six hours a day, summers off," but anyone who knows a good teacher knows that they work their butts off, putting in a lot of what people with normal work hours would consider overtime. It can often be hard to measure work output, and measuring office hours seems to be a comfortable substitute.
OTGH, this may not in fact be a repudiation of remote work - it may just be a gimmick to get rid of workers. Once they've gotten the workforce spite-sized, they may open up remote work again.
I will say that I sometimes work from home, and when I do I tend to keep myself chained tighter to the chair than I do at work.
There is a range in between, trust-fund baby and, "I only do things to get money." I'd like to think that most of us don't live at the extremes of that distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a pretty bold accusation. Can you back it up?
I'm finding myself hoping that this is true, not truly knowing whether it is or not. Textbooks have become a political battleground. I guess I'll show my leanings, by saying that it looks to me as if "Creation Science" is trying to work its way in, while other forces are trying to get sex education pushed out, or at least heavily watered down.
Moving to online texts may do nothing to resolve this part of the issue, in that no doubt there will be a similar structure to publishing them, as today Texas has inordinate power. It might even make things worse, if standardization were to go away. I don't know if its worse to have everyone using texts where religion encroaches on science, or having some people taught science and some taught religion as science.
Several comments, much snark, some serious, but none relevant. I figured the nerd reference to "Arrival" / "The Story of Your Life" would be picked up readily. It's considerably less obscure than, "The Philosopher's Stone", by Colin Wilson.
I wonder how the effects compare to Heptapod B, for changing time perception.
By Scott Kelly
By the way, even if you're going to insist that this is all "natural" and has nothing to do with man's activities, it still means that we need to figure out how to adapt to it. We also need to measure it, so we can understand what's happening. In the name of AGW denial, both of those things, sensible whether or not AGW is real, are being cut back.
You can get hit by a truck or by a charging bear. The latter is "natural", the former not. You're dead in either case.
https://www.theguardian.com/ci...
I don't consider most of those "failures" to have been valid evaluations of predictions in the first place.
Second, I wasn't going after "think of the children" emotional arguments. I'll place it this way:
If AGW is real, and we don't take preventive measures, people will die, in large numbers.
If AGW is fake, and we do take preventive measures, some people will be slightly less wealthy than they would have, had we not taken those measures.
Life is on one side of the balance, money is on the other. I realize of course that we're probably betting with other peoples' lives, not our own. But you never know. Do you feel lucky?
Interesting that for many of those "failed" predictions, the evaluation date for the prediction is still well in the future. You cannot make a pass/fail judgement in 2014 for a prediction of what is going to happen by 2050. Others look as if they take sensationalist press and consider that to be a prediction.
Drudge Report has a vested interest in calling this all bunk, and their list reflects that. If you really want to validate predictions, science is generally pretty good at that - take a look at the methods used by real scientists.
But this is Slashdot. I expected no less than rampant denialism here.
Let's look at this from a risk point of view. If Climate Change is real, people are going to die - lots of them. Not because the heat is going to kill them, but because our society is not responding well, there will be famines, wars, refugees, and all of that stuff that doesn't help longevity. If Climate Change is a complete fake, but we take preventive actions, a few very wealthy people are slightly less wealthy, but there won't be extra quantities of people dying. Come to think of it, as for heat, there are now places in the Persian Gulf that are technically uninhabitable. It's so hot and humid that you can't cool yourself enough by sweating. Without air conditioning, you will die if outdoors for too long. But we really can't assign blame to that one - yet.
Maybe they should try calling it the "Osbourne 2". I guess it's not the same, presumably their trucks can keep them afloat as their car sales die until the new model is really out.
Thinking it's just Facebook, and that you'll be safe by avoiding Facebook, is a bigger mistake than using Facebook.
> Finally, the big discovery seems to be that you won't be destroyed by all the energy of the universe
> falling through the event horizon at the same time as you, thanks to the expansion of the universe.
The catch here is that, "all the energy in the universe," may not be hitting you as you fall through the event horizon, but a lot will, more than likely enough to give you a Bad Day. You're only down from "infinity" to "the horizon observable over the black hole's future," still a pretty big number.
> But what about spaghettification?
Others have answered this, that the gravity gradients are soft enough around a big enough black hole.
There is another fun fact here... For spinning black holes, which I believe means most of them, or at least the big ones we could think of entering in the non-spaghetti state, there are actually two event horizons, and it might be possible to leave from the zone in between them. Gregory Benford, physicist and science fiction author, set several books in that region.
Way simpler than that...
"The attached message describes the method for total conversion of matter to energy, as well as the techniques necessary to limit the process to the small scales necessary for powering devices such as communications, computing, food synthesis, and transport. Simply decompress the attached message."
Human translation, "Whoever decompresses this message WINS. Get our guys in the bunker decompressing, and let the nukes fly to stop everyone else."
Aliens' secret, there is nothing in the compressed attachment, it's just a long stream from a very good random number generator. Who would be stupid enough to give a savage species like THEM any sort of advanced technology?
I'm trying to reconcile nationalizing the 5G network with abolishing network neutrality. Those two just aren't fitting together well.
Same with the whole neo-colonialism thing, and the obvious issue of US vs Chinese neo-colonialism.
This is just silly and full of cognitive dissonance.
Short - when will it be safe to let Windows 10 updates happen, again?
My laptop is dual-boot, and 90+ percent of the time it boots Linux, which I have kept fully updated through this whole mess. I still have the Windows installation live and runnable, because there are those things that just won't work without Windoes. Occasionally I unplug my USB flash with /boot, let it boot Windows, and keep that up-to-date. Most of what I do with Windows is update Windows, and occasionally update my GPS, and a rare few other things.
But not that long ago I started hearing about the Meltdown/Spectre mitigations bricking machines, so was especially careful to quit booting Windows. At some point I presume the dust will have settled and it will be safe and prudent to update again.
Anyone know when that will be?
Difference is that we've been breeding super-bugs with our abuse of antibiotics. The bugs some are worrying about are a heck of a lot worse than the ones we survived for a hundred thousand years. (+/-)
Or from another perspective, the super-bugs likely won't wipe us all out - just a lot of us, until we're down to the people with the best immune systems.
So the plane is supposed to be flying by 2030 - that's twelve years away. Yet they also say,
"We couldnâ(TM)t have made the engine itselfâ"it would have melted down into slag if we had tried to produce it five years ago,â Oâ(TM)Banion said. âoeBut now we can digitally print that engine with an incredibly sophisticated cooling system integral into the material of the engine itself and have that engine survive for multiple firings for routine operation.â The aircraft is also agile at hypersonic speeds, with reliable engine starts, he said. A half-decade before, he added, developers âoecould not have even built it even if we conceived of it.â
This makes it sound as if they have solved the hardest problem, that they couldn't have solved five years ago, yet they won't have anything flying for twelve more years? The numbers add up, with gobs of room to spare.
I've said for a while now that I want a self-driving car before my kids come to me to take my keys away. I see the value and dignity of independent mobility, but I also know that at some point accumulated knowledge and experience will no longer compensate for an ageing body and brain.
Houston, Houston, Do You Read?
(by James Tiptree, Jr. - btw, a woman who used a man's name as a pseudonym, in order to get published)
and good luck selling to those folks abroad if you kept your export license because you installed backdoors for the US government.
Basically, US software companies are put at a serious disadvantage. The real question becomes, whose cryptographic software can you trust? Certainly not Russian or Chinese, I'd say, and I'm sure others would add to that list.
Because a strong minority doesn't want to face the fact that we need to manage our population. Beyond that, they don't want to fact the fact that, "Just say no to sex!" simply isn't going to work, even if they wanted to manage the population. Even farther beyond that, they don't want to accept that if you really want to stop, or at least minimize abortions, you need to make birth control easily and readily available.
I can manage to believe that both global warming and overpopulation are real - at the same time. (I don't believe "in" them, because that moves the stage from science to religion.)
I had that, back in my VHS days.
They also used a few seconds out of the existing "Shada" footage to add Tom Baker to "The Five Doctors". I suspect he was in his, "I am not Spock" recovery phase at the time, and didn't want to do it live.
I was on vacation last week, but I happened to see a news article at the airport, and it looked as if Level3 had been sold. Though from the financial page to fumbling the packets on the raised floor would probably take longer than this, so I doubt it's related.
There is another potential reason, though I'm not sure how valid this is. (I can admit when I'm wrong - this is a conjecture.)
The existing satellites have specific instrumentation and procedures for measuring sea ice, and for that reason there is an uninterrupted record. I will presume that the backup satellite, if not of the same design, at least had instrumentation designed to be compatible with that record.
A new, cheaper satellite will likely be somewhat different, both in instrumentation and necessarily procedures. Therefore its measurements will not precisely match previous ones - there will be a measurement discontinuity. It will be possible to recalibrate and restore continuity, but effort will be required. It would be best to have a new cheaper satellite up there before current ones fail, so that that recalibration can more easily be done.
I remember several other circumstances where such recalibration had to be done, I believe for temperature for one. There was no end to crying "FOUL!" when it happened, even though those who were doing it recognized the need.
It will no doubt happen again.
Being a "Wally" is definitely a skill, taking training and attitude. Add to that that any number of Wallies have found that management can be the safest place to hide the fact that they do little/no work.
OTOH, working from home is like schoolteachers. One can say, "six hours a day, summers off," but anyone who knows a good teacher knows that they work their butts off, putting in a lot of what people with normal work hours would consider overtime. It can often be hard to measure work output, and measuring office hours seems to be a comfortable substitute.
OTGH, this may not in fact be a repudiation of remote work - it may just be a gimmick to get rid of workers. Once they've gotten the workforce spite-sized, they may open up remote work again.
I will say that I sometimes work from home, and when I do I tend to keep myself chained tighter to the chair than I do at work.
There is a range in between, trust-fund baby and, "I only do things to get money." I'd like to think that most of us don't live at the extremes of that distribution.