My wife's lab - she's an evolutionary biologist, in a sense - gathered around Spore last week, and we all had a good laugh. Out of something like three master's students, three Ph.D. candidates, three Ph.D.s, and me, lowly MFA that I am, nobody could think of a single thing it did right in terms of actual evolution... but, at the same time, it's so thoroughly, ludicrously wacko (all herbivores want to be friends with other species? Anyone who's ever seen a hippo in the wild wouldn't agree with that... ) that we agreed that it couldn't possibly help the ID folks, either. I mean... would *they* want people to think that God sends piles of bones down to induce change in how well species dance?
It's a Big Bucket of Fail on pretty much every level, no matter what direction you're coming from.
Dude, he's mainstream enough to appear on the Simpsons as himself, have his own TV show (terrible one, but, still,) his own movie, hit the top ten with his last album... the man may not be Tom Cruise-level famous, but I guarantee you that more people know who he is than know who the Vice President is.
So, um, er, this logically includes *releasing the SDK*? My goodness. I can only assume that if they had locked down the system as much as they *wanted*, in their neo-Orwellian way, they would have released not only the SDK, but the complete source code as well as the circuit diagrams for every chip inside the thing.
No, it means that your NPR station will be charged $120,000 a year to stream their broadcasts, when they're charged $20,000 for over-the-air broadcasting. But thanks for playing.
Of course, you have no idea what you're talking about.
Lightroom *is not the same kind of program as Photoshop*.
It is not an image editor in the same way *at all*.
Lightroom is intended to let you sort, do basic manipulation and very minor fixes on, and organize thousands of photos. It is designed to let you plug your Compact Flash card in, scan through all couple-of-hundred images on that card, pick the ones that you like, adjust their contrast, and mark them as Something The Client Might Like. That's it.
Photoshop is intended to let you do anything you want to a single image. It (if you ignore, say, Bridge) has no organizational features at all.
So - please - pipe down until you know what you're discussing.
I know several vertebrate paleontologists, and every time I hear them talk about this guy, the general impression I get is that he's kind of a crank. He's not, to put it mildly, well-respected in the vert paleo community, and his views on this are about as widely held as the view that Wensleydale cheese is the root taxon for frogs.
Your comment is on the ragged edge of possibly-being-a-joke-or-not, so I might be being trolled, here. However; Sony has, indeed, teamed up with Pizza Hut to do that in at least one SOE game.
I keep wanting to find Vinge and slap him around a bit until he shuts up about "The Singularity". The thing is, there have been several "singularities" in human history: the Agricultural Singularity, the Industrial Singularity, the Computer Singularity, and so on and so forth. Or, to use the term that most historians use - rather than "Singularity", "Revolution." Yes, technology will change the context of human interaction. Yes, nifty and non-nifty things will happen. But, dammit, it's not as if technology has never fundamentally altered society before. Get over it, already.
There *are*. I worked with some people who were doing an educational MMOG (believe it or not,) and we talked to a bunch of middleware providers, such as Butterfly.net, Big Planet, NDL, and so on. If you have somewhere on the order of $2 to $3 million, you can license pretty much a complete set of everything you need to make a MMOG.
Seriously - do these guys have any standing, any connection, any track record that would lead anyone to suspect that they could actually produce the show? And do they have any connection with Whedon and company that would indicate that Whedon would *let* them produce it?
Actually, it is millions of years, if you do the analyses on the rock. The stuff on the pipe is... and this may stun you... the dissolved remnants of the rock around there being left behind when the water that's in that rock runs out.
Wait, I know, this may boggle your mind, so we'll go through it slowly:
You have water-soluble rock.
You run water through it.
You stick something else in there.
Water runs onto the something else.
Some of the minerals that formed that rock are left behind.
Oh, lawsy! How shocking! Rock gets left behind!
But, you know, that has very little to do with the price of beans. Rock can be deposited quickly. Rock can be formed very slowly. Rock can do a lot of things. It can melt. It can be ground up and sort of squeezed. It can just sort of sit there. It can do lots of things... and, oddly enough, geologists have a pretty good idea of what happens to rock in each case, and... wow, this may shock you... how long it takes for it to happen.
By the way, do you understand the term "deposition rate"? I'm just asking.
However, your point about the speed of deposition of rock is still ludicrous and wrong. Do you know how we get fossils? In many cases, we get fossils through the extremely quick formation of rock, as when a volcano blows out a heavy load of ash that falls onto lifeforms nearby, who, upon being covered with hot ash, tend to die right there, at which point the ash compacts around them, and in a reasonably short time, forms something we could call 'rock'. The key thing is that the resulting rock is then left alone by erosion for a very long time (for various reasons) until Mr. Paul Sereno and His Wacky Madcap Undergraduates come along with pickaxes and shovels.
No, wait. Let me rephrase that in a manner you might possibly understand.
"It not matter how fast rock form. It matter what happen then. Ugh."
See, this is where you're being an ignoramus: You don't even understand enough about the situation to bring up *relevant* counter-arguments.
No, I'm sorry, you're still wrong, because you don't understand what you're talking about. I'd be happy to recommend a few books on the subject so that you might possibly be able to discuss the issue without being a complete buffoon.
I suggest that you go have a look at a good dictionary definition of 'science'. Also, of 'theory', and of 'fact.'
There is such a thing as observational experimentation: it's what astronomy is based on, as well as evolutionary biology. Plus, in case you didn't know, there are mechanisms involved in evolution which *are* testable in the laboratory. We can test atomic decay rates, we can test vitrification and ossification mechanisms, we can examine the molecular clock data, we can go out and find magnetically oriented strata in the shorelines of Africa and South America, we can run phylogenetic analyses, and so on and so forth.
So, no, No, it's not faith-based at all. But thanks for playing.
How do you explain antibiotic-resistant bacteria? The development of new strains of avian flu? How do you explain Darwin's finches, the phylogeny of artiodactyls, and the rise of C4-based grasslands in the Miocene?
Oh, wait, right. You wouldn't know about that. You haven't looked at the evidence. Man, ignorance lets you make such interestly sweeping statements, doesn't it?
Bullpuckey. Science is considered 'the best answer we have right now'. It's done by people. Sometimes people disagree. Sometimes, people make mistakes in math (there's a lovely paper by Dan Graur and W. Martin, called "Reading the Entrails of Chickens: Molecular Timescales of Evolution and the Illusion of Precision", Trends in Genetics, Feb 2004, Vol. 20, #2, which goes through and shreds some of the math done by the molecular clock researchers. It is, in passing, one of the most entertaining papers in the history of science, even for the layperson, and I recommend it highly - it's one of the finest examples of scientific surliness ever written. The highlight is, of course, the conclusion, which is that some of the molecular clock researchers, through neglecting basic statistical procedures, should have error bars for the age-of-species results that they get which are longer than the age of the Earth. But the fact that this paper was written to show errors in math doesn't mean that the entirety of molecular dating should be thrown out.)
Does the fact that people disagree mean that it's all wrong? No. It means that we're getting closer to the truth as more research is done, which may refute certain earlier statements and confirm others.
The Tyrannosaurus example is really, really badly chosen. For one thing, almost all terrestrial predators are also scavengers, at least part of the time. Meat is meat, dammit, and if you turn up your nose at a kill just because you didn't make it, then you're not going to survive too long. For another, the conclusion as to whether T. Rex was primarily a pursuit hunter or a cursorial hunter depends on assumptions made on possibly inadequate data on the tensile strength of tyrannosaurus musculature, the mount points of those muscles on the skeleton, and the exact posture of the hips. Everybody, including the people who wrote the paper, would be willing to admit that the answer to the question of pursuit-vs-"hey, look, meat!" isn't carved in stone quite yet. The thing is, sometimes, you have to say *something*, and so you go with the best you've got right then. There are, however, other results from evolutionary research that are very well supported and can be presented as as-close-to-fact-as-we-get - it's just that you don't often see papers in Nature that go "You know that cladogram of the Rhinogradentia that Stümpke published in 1920? Yup, it's still good", and when you do, it's because new techniques (e.g., CT scanning of fossils) have come along - which means that you hear about the controversies a hell of a lot more often than the settled stuff.
Hardly. Simply get out a camcorder and go record angels flying down and re-painting the wings of Manchester-area moths. Or take notes and watch giraffes stretch their necks to get the leaves at the top of the trees, and discover that the giraffes that stretched their necks the most had offspring with longer necks.
Or, you know, come up with an explanation that better fits the megatons of evidence that you walk on every day.
What's wrong with it is a: it begs the question, b: it's clearly (and, originally, admittedly) a first step for Christian fundamentalists to get evolution out of the science classroom, and c: there's absolutely no evidence *for* it - remember, absence of evidence for one hypothesis is not postive evidence for another. The ID types say "You don't have any evidence for X" (ignoring, quite often, the fact that there *is* evidence for X) "so therefore OUR idea is correct"... but that ain't the way it works, and offering teaching that says it does weakens the entire system that we call science. If Intelligent Design gets into science classrooms, then the whole idea of "offering evidence for claims" that's kind of, you know, important in science, will go out the window.
The MythBusters *frequently* come into experiments with preconceptions. Have you ever watched the show?
Furthermore, I suspect you miss the point. The point is that people often don't understand the appropriate skill-set required to test particular claims. In Randi's case, because a significant portion of what he's been asked to test involves fraud and trickery (Uri Geller's amazing spoon-bending sleight-of-hand, Peter Popoff's Holy Radio Transmitter, the kids who can change the color of a match in a matchbox, but only if you turn your back and don't tape the matchbox shut) the skill-set of a stage magician applies. In the MythBusters' case, much of what they're asked to do involves recreating (or creating) particular oddball scenarios in front of a camera, and, since the profession of practical visual effects artist can best be described as "recreating or creating particular oddball scenarios in front of a camera," that skill-set applies.
In other words, you don't need to be an optical engineer with eighteen patents and tenure at MIT to be able to point a lot of mirrors at something. You do have to, however, be able to point a lot of mirrors at something.
Remember that 7-Up commercial from a couple'a years back? The one that features a 7-Up machine on treads that rolled around and fired cans of soda at people?
Jamie built that.
His company, M5 Industries Inc., specializes in robotic designs for visual effects. He's got a lot of experience building, you know, robots. He's designed or been involved in designing things that are required to do a huge variety of bizarre and wacky things - from the aforementioned surly soda-firing vending machine robot to a motorized shoe-cycle to a articulated giant hand (as seen in the film Monkeybone).
And, to remind those of you who watched Battlebots when it was on:
He built Blendo.
So, yes, he's got engineering experience. He's got a lot of engineering experience. And, yes, special and visual effects work *does* require a lot of skill and talent - and the ability to judge whether something is practicable in the field.
(I'd also recommend that you look at the career of one James "The Amazing" Randi before commenting further. Take an especially close look at how often people claim that a stage magician shouldn't be trying to debunk so-called "real" paranormal events.)
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My wife's lab - she's an evolutionary biologist, in a sense - gathered around Spore last week, and we all had a good laugh. Out of something like three master's students, three Ph.D. candidates, three Ph.D.s, and me, lowly MFA that I am, nobody could think of a single thing it did right in terms of actual evolution ... but, at the same time, it's so thoroughly, ludicrously wacko (all herbivores want to be friends with other species? Anyone who's ever seen a hippo in the wild wouldn't agree with that... ) that we agreed that it couldn't possibly help the ID folks, either. I mean ... would *they* want people to think that God sends piles of bones down to induce change in how well species dance?
It's a Big Bucket of Fail on pretty much every level, no matter what direction you're coming from.
Dude, he's mainstream enough to appear on the Simpsons as himself, have his own TV show (terrible one, but, still,) his own movie, hit the top ten with his last album ... the man may not be Tom Cruise-level famous, but I guarantee you that more people know who he is than know who the Vice President is.
"Lock down the platform as much as possible", eh?
So, um, er, this logically includes *releasing the SDK*? My goodness. I can only assume that if they had locked down the system as much as they *wanted*, in their neo-Orwellian way, they would have released not only the SDK, but the complete source code as well as the circuit diagrams for every chip inside the thing.
No, no. It's a typo. It's really wiz.py ; they're selling a Python-based music player. All Python, all the time.
You are, of course, insane. And your statement is, of course, hideously off-topic.
Please, go away, and figure out what the subject of the discussion is before injecting ludicrous absurdities into it.
Gad. OS X is much, much, much closer to being an implementation of FreeBSD than it is an implementation of Linux.
No, it means that your NPR station will be charged $120,000 a year to stream their broadcasts, when they're charged $20,000 for over-the-air broadcasting. But thanks for playing.
So, Slashdot is running Lucasarts press releases now?
Of course, you have no idea what you're talking about.
Lightroom *is not the same kind of program as Photoshop*.
It is not an image editor in the same way *at all*.
Lightroom is intended to let you sort, do basic manipulation and very minor fixes on, and organize thousands of photos. It is designed to let you plug your Compact Flash card in, scan through all couple-of-hundred images on that card, pick the ones that you like, adjust their contrast, and mark them as Something The Client Might Like. That's it.
Photoshop is intended to let you do anything you want to a single image. It (if you ignore, say, Bridge) has no organizational features at all.
So - please - pipe down until you know what you're discussing.
I know several vertebrate paleontologists, and every time I hear them talk about this guy, the general impression I get is that he's kind of a crank. He's not, to put it mildly, well-respected in the vert paleo community, and his views on this are about as widely held as the view that Wensleydale cheese is the root taxon for frogs.
Your comment is on the ragged edge of possibly-being-a-joke-or-not, so I might be being trolled, here. However; Sony has, indeed, teamed up with Pizza Hut to do that in at least one SOE game.
I keep wanting to find Vinge and slap him around a bit until he shuts up about "The Singularity". The thing is, there have been several "singularities" in human history: the Agricultural Singularity, the Industrial Singularity, the Computer Singularity, and so on and so forth. Or, to use the term that most historians use - rather than "Singularity", "Revolution." Yes, technology will change the context of human interaction. Yes, nifty and non-nifty things will happen. But, dammit, it's not as if technology has never fundamentally altered society before. Get over it, already.
Does anybody else see the circular logic here? "the PS3 will succeed because it has Blu-Ray, and Blu-Ray will succeed because it's in the PS3."
There *are*. I worked with some people who were doing an educational MMOG (believe it or not,) and we talked to a bunch of middleware providers, such as Butterfly.net, Big Planet, NDL, and so on. If you have somewhere on the order of $2 to $3 million, you can license pretty much a complete set of everything you need to make a MMOG.
Seriously - do these guys have any standing, any connection, any track record that would lead anyone to suspect that they could actually produce the show? And do they have any connection with Whedon and company that would indicate that Whedon would *let* them produce it?
He's already taken down the emails in question, apparently having had second thoughts about the appropriateness of posting private emails.
Actually, it is millions of years, if you do the analyses on the rock. The stuff on the pipe is ... and this may stun you ... the dissolved remnants of the rock around there being left behind when the water that's in that rock runs out.
... and, oddly enough, geologists have a pretty good idea of what happens to rock in each case, and ... wow, this may shock you ... how long it takes for it to happen.
Wait, I know, this may boggle your mind, so we'll go through it slowly:
You have water-soluble rock.
You run water through it.
You stick something else in there.
Water runs onto the something else.
Some of the minerals that formed that rock are left behind.
Oh, lawsy! How shocking! Rock gets left behind!
But, you know, that has very little to do with the price of beans. Rock can be deposited quickly. Rock can be formed very slowly. Rock can do a lot of things. It can melt. It can be ground up and sort of squeezed. It can just sort of sit there. It can do lots of things
By the way, do you understand the term "deposition rate"? I'm just asking.
However, your point about the speed of deposition of rock is still ludicrous and wrong. Do you know how we get fossils? In many cases, we get fossils through the extremely quick formation of rock, as when a volcano blows out a heavy load of ash that falls onto lifeforms nearby, who, upon being covered with hot ash, tend to die right there, at which point the ash compacts around them, and in a reasonably short time, forms something we could call 'rock'. The key thing is that the resulting rock is then left alone by erosion for a very long time (for various reasons) until Mr. Paul Sereno and His Wacky Madcap Undergraduates come along with pickaxes and shovels.
No, wait. Let me rephrase that in a manner you might possibly understand.
"It not matter how fast rock form. It matter what happen then. Ugh."
See, this is where you're being an ignoramus: You don't even understand enough about the situation to bring up *relevant* counter-arguments.
No, I'm sorry, you're still wrong, because you don't understand what you're talking about. I'd be happy to recommend a few books on the subject so that you might possibly be able to discuss the issue without being a complete buffoon.
Nope. Sorry, you lose.
I suggest that you go have a look at a good dictionary definition of 'science'. Also, of 'theory', and of 'fact.'
There is such a thing as observational experimentation: it's what astronomy is based on, as well as evolutionary biology. Plus, in case you didn't know, there are mechanisms involved in evolution which *are* testable in the laboratory. We can test atomic decay rates, we can test vitrification and ossification mechanisms, we can examine the molecular clock data, we can go out and find magnetically oriented strata in the shorelines of Africa and South America, we can run phylogenetic analyses, and so on and so forth.
So, no, No, it's not faith-based at all. But thanks for playing.
Really.
So, um.
How do you explain antibiotic-resistant bacteria? The development of new strains of avian flu? How do you explain Darwin's finches, the phylogeny of artiodactyls, and the rise of C4-based grasslands in the Miocene?
Oh, wait, right. You wouldn't know about that. You haven't looked at the evidence. Man, ignorance lets you make such interestly sweeping statements, doesn't it?
So, research has not gotten us closer to understanding, e.g, whether or not the atom may be successfully split?
My goodness. I'm sure that many physicists would be pleased to know this. Why don't you inform them?
Bullpuckey. Science is considered 'the best answer we have right now'. It's done by people. Sometimes people disagree. Sometimes, people make mistakes in math (there's a lovely paper by Dan Graur and W. Martin, called "Reading the Entrails of Chickens: Molecular Timescales of Evolution and the Illusion of Precision", Trends in Genetics, Feb 2004, Vol. 20, #2, which goes through and shreds some of the math done by the molecular clock researchers. It is, in passing, one of the most entertaining papers in the history of science, even for the layperson, and I recommend it highly - it's one of the finest examples of scientific surliness ever written. The highlight is, of course, the conclusion, which is that some of the molecular clock researchers, through neglecting basic statistical procedures, should have error bars for the age-of-species results that they get which are longer than the age of the Earth. But the fact that this paper was written to show errors in math doesn't mean that the entirety of molecular dating should be thrown out.)
Does the fact that people disagree mean that it's all wrong? No. It means that we're getting closer to the truth as more research is done, which may refute certain earlier statements and confirm others.
The Tyrannosaurus example is really, really badly chosen. For one thing, almost all terrestrial predators are also scavengers, at least part of the time. Meat is meat, dammit, and if you turn up your nose at a kill just because you didn't make it, then you're not going to survive too long. For another, the conclusion as to whether T. Rex was primarily a pursuit hunter or a cursorial hunter depends on assumptions made on possibly inadequate data on the tensile strength of tyrannosaurus musculature, the mount points of those muscles on the skeleton, and the exact posture of the hips. Everybody, including the people who wrote the paper, would be willing to admit that the answer to the question of pursuit-vs-"hey, look, meat!" isn't carved in stone quite yet. The thing is, sometimes, you have to say *something*, and so you go with the best you've got right then. There are, however, other results from evolutionary research that are very well supported and can be presented as as-close-to-fact-as-we-get - it's just that you don't often see papers in Nature that go "You know that cladogram of the Rhinogradentia that Stümpke published in 1920? Yup, it's still good", and when you do, it's because new techniques (e.g., CT scanning of fossils) have come along - which means that you hear about the controversies a hell of a lot more often than the settled stuff.
Hardly. Simply get out a camcorder and go record angels flying down and re-painting the wings of Manchester-area moths. Or take notes and watch giraffes stretch their necks to get the leaves at the top of the trees, and discover that the giraffes that stretched their necks the most had offspring with longer necks.
Or, you know, come up with an explanation that better fits the megatons of evidence that you walk on every day.
Ye gods.
... but that ain't the way it works, and offering teaching that says it does weakens the entire system that we call science. If Intelligent Design gets into science classrooms, then the whole idea of "offering evidence for claims" that's kind of, you know, important in science, will go out the window.
What's wrong with it is a: it begs the question, b: it's clearly (and, originally, admittedly) a first step for Christian fundamentalists to get evolution out of the science classroom, and c: there's absolutely no evidence *for* it - remember, absence of evidence for one hypothesis is not postive evidence for another. The ID types say "You don't have any evidence for X" (ignoring, quite often, the fact that there *is* evidence for X) "so therefore OUR idea is correct"
The MythBusters *frequently* come into experiments with preconceptions. Have you ever watched the show?
Furthermore, I suspect you miss the point. The point is that people often don't understand the appropriate skill-set required to test particular claims. In Randi's case, because a significant portion of what he's been asked to test involves fraud and trickery (Uri Geller's amazing spoon-bending sleight-of-hand, Peter Popoff's Holy Radio Transmitter, the kids who can change the color of a match in a matchbox, but only if you turn your back and don't tape the matchbox shut) the skill-set of a stage magician applies. In the MythBusters' case, much of what they're asked to do involves recreating (or creating) particular oddball scenarios in front of a camera, and, since the profession of practical visual effects artist can best be described as "recreating or creating particular oddball scenarios in front of a camera," that skill-set applies.
In other words, you don't need to be an optical engineer with eighteen patents and tenure at MIT to be able to point a lot of mirrors at something. You do have to, however, be able to point a lot of mirrors at something.
Remember that 7-Up commercial from a couple'a years back? The one that features a 7-Up machine on treads that rolled around and fired cans of soda at people?
Jamie built that.
His company, M5 Industries Inc., specializes in robotic designs for visual effects. He's got a lot of experience building, you know, robots. He's designed or been involved in designing things that are required to do a huge variety of bizarre and wacky things - from the aforementioned surly soda-firing vending machine robot to a motorized shoe-cycle to a articulated giant hand (as seen in the film Monkeybone).
And, to remind those of you who watched Battlebots when it was on:
He built Blendo.
So, yes, he's got engineering experience. He's got a lot of engineering experience. And, yes, special and visual effects work *does* require a lot of skill and talent - and the ability to judge whether something is practicable in the field.
(I'd also recommend that you look at the career of one James "The Amazing" Randi before commenting further. Take an especially close look at how often people claim that a stage magician shouldn't be trying to debunk so-called "real" paranormal events.)