Both theories can play the game of "adding stuff" to fit measurements of course.
You can add epicycles to get better fit to your measurements in a ptolemic theory.
Similarly,you can also add unseen "Dark Matter" near the sun to fit Mercury's orbit using Newton's theory. The fun fact is that this is actually the first invocation of "Dark Matter", not the more common ones used to fit galaxy rotation curves (which by the way, failed both GR and Newton's laws without invocation of unseen, undetected Dark matter).
But that's besides the point really. If "Ptolemic theory" is just adding eigenmodes to better fit the curves, it is not a theory at all, it's "fitting curves".
Anyway, it is true that unifying principles are the guideposts of modern science. But that's not the same as "simplicity". The ultimate viability of a scientific theory is not how simple it is, but how accurate it is. You can argue about "adding gazillion parameters to make a poor theory fit measurements" being the anticedent of such a viewpoint, but I do think that's a vacous argument.
I disagree. Basically, it is a matter of principle that we should aim for more accurate theory. Now, it is true that one can put in more parameters to fit your measurements, but there is a "roughly well defined" way of ruling that kind of fitting invalid (the jargon is "fine tuning", which translates to having parameters which are not of the same order of magnitude).
The reason I mention that is that there is really no good way of defining what is "more simple" or "more practical", so it's hard to say "what's simpler".
Your example of Keplerian theory is better than ptolemic theory is actually not so good. In fact, Kepler's laws, ultimately derived from Newton's Laws, is much much much more accurate than Ptolemaic theory with gazillion epicycles. So it's better by virtue of being more accurate (the simplicity is a bonus).
To extend the analogy, consider the even more accurate theory that predicts the orbits : General Relativity. It's elegant and beautiful (just words of course), but definitely much harder to learn than Newton's Laws:). But both of them have exactly one parameter : Newton's Constant. So, it's a matter of subjective argument which theory (Newton's or GR) is "simpler". But, GR wins because it's more accurate. (Newton's laws are "more practical", of course, if "practical" means what one used to find accurate trajectories for multibillion dollar spacecraft).
I don't know what are you talking about in this sentence: The pressure differential very efficiently transfers the reentry energy to the material of the meteor, causing it to explode with enormous force.
(a)Why "pressure differential" can "efficiently transfer" "reentry energy" to the material of the meteor?
(b) What is "reentry energy"?
(c) Why does tranferring energy into the meteor cause it to explode? (Adding energy to any system does not cause it to explode, it just, uh, adds energy.)
And, the whole thread is really a bit besides the point anyway. A 100ft thing heading straight into earth's path will have a relative velocity of, maybe, about 30km/s, may even be faster (or slower) depending on its orbit aroudn the sun. Earth's orbit at around 30km/s, which is where I took my number.
The earth's effective atmosphere is about 200-250 km (also about where Skylab is orbiting). That gives it about 8 secs travel time : I don't see what physical mechanism, can burn a 100ft thing in 8 secs. This meteor, my friends, is going to hit the ground. And that means a nice E=1/2 m v^2 release of explosive energy. A few nukes I guess (I don't know the explosive power of nukes nowadays....)
And, say, if you can really invent some mechanism to "explode" the meteor up in the atmosphere, the energy release will still be the same. I.e. it's like doing a Nuke Test in the sky....and we all know what THAT can do.
Star Trek : Space Soap Opera in Skimpy Leotards Babylon 5 : Space Soap Opera with Bad Hardo Millenieum : Soap Opera overdosed with sedatives Space Above and Beyond : Vietnam in Space Opera Setting
Of course not. Having something *on land* (whereever that be) is BAD, especially if it is on someplace where it is harder to get at (e.g. the Moon).
Why?
(a) Moonquakes (b) It costs more to fly to the moon, *decelerate* to land on it, than just to fly to someplace like L2. (c) Albedo (the moon reflects light) (d) Pointing (the moon covers half the sky).
etc etc etc etc.
In short, it is much easier to maneuver and fly a telescope in the nice, mechanically quiet (read : vacuum is very nice to fly in), and thermally benign empty space than to put something on the Moon.
That's a strawman argument (I know you are semi-jesting but...)
#/.'ers don't fit the target demographics (Ow! That hurts!)
I don't see what's so wrong about this. Why does it hurt?
#/.'ers are apparently sedentary, they sit at their screens so much that weight isn't a consideration, for that matter, they can listen to stuff while sitting at the screen, so why bother?
I play soccer, which as a contact sport, does not go well with wearable consumer electronics. Unlike, say, less violent and wimpy sports like "jogging".
#/.'ers are more interested in pushing consumer technology to its more than whether there's a need. (It's all about the game!)
Which is fine. I like to get a good deal.
#/.'ers must be colorblind (I'm R/G) so the colors aren't interesting, let along exciting.
I'm B/G. But I like blue, it's just not as important as some people who finds them "exciting" which, IMHO, boggles my mind. I mean, why would colors excite so much?
#/.'ers were wrong, and can't stand being wrong and are currently working on a strategy to change that rather than get a date for a Friday night. (Hey! This is important!)
What does disagreeing with Apple's pricing has anything to do with "can't stand being wrong"? Besides, I'm already happily getting some:P.
String theory certainly does predict a number of things that are easily testable... just not right now.
Ah, words from a theorist!
There are really very few things that ST actually predicts that is even remotely close to reality. Even things like compactified dimensions...we can only make handwavy arguments about what they should actually "look" like in reality (jargon : WTH is the ground state).
ST, despite its apparent elegance in its formulation (2 words : conformal invariance), runs into the problem of which realization of it is the correct "ST". Without experimental input, I think it is very difficult to find out.
I like to compare this (unfairly) to how a QFTheorist would face if he has *no* experimental input. I.e. how would we know that the standard model is SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) if we have no experimental data? We can write down perfectly selfconsistent QFT in other gauge groups. Similarly, how would a STheorist know how which vacuum in the Calabi-yau manifold is the correct ground state of the universe?
In QFT, we are within reach of experiments, so we can pin down the gauge groups. In ST, unless we have planck-scale experiments (which is NOT easy, if downright impossible to build on Earth), we have no such help...
Malaysia is losing investments, on big labour intensive manufacturing jobs, to China.
But the govt recognizes that, and is at the moment transforming (at least attempting to) the country into a more services base economies.
Say all the bad things about the Malaysian govt (and i got lot to say about it too), one thing you can't say is that they like to bitch about being victimized by China.
But nevertheless, the nature of a trap is that it is often not what you think it actually is... a fact which has been exploited quite well in many marketplaces.
Ok I am blissfully unaware that I am in a trap.;P. Happy?
I've been skateboarding for years....but then I decided to try skiing.
(ditto your post).
I've been almost linux for the past 5 years, and I have no idea how to do even "simple" things in windows now. (I recall staring, embarrassed, at my mom's winXP and not knowing how to change the dial-up phone number to a new ISP.)
I agree with your conclusions on Wintel, but disagree with your blanket judgements that games are a trap.
I've been playing games for years, arcade games, computer games, rpg, board games, chess you name it.
I certainly don't feel that they are a waste of my time, and I don't feel that they generate "completely artificial memories".
OTOH, I think games honed my analyical AND social skills. When I hang out in a chess club, I learn to interact with an assortment of people I don't meet at work/school. When I play FPS over the net, I learn to think in 3D, and make splitsecond decisions (FPS are not as mindless as you may think they are). When I spend hours playing a strategic wargame, I learned a lot of military history.
I might not be Bill Gates and have a billion bucks. But I do like to think that part of who I am came from the fact that I played, and still play, games.
The bombing was done in Feb 45, when the allies were poised to crossed the rhine and into Germany.
On your question about how much it did to stop Hitler, one will never know. But if that's the justification what it takes, then the allies had indeed stared very deeply into the abyss when they fought the monster.
I am not saying that you are defending the firebombing (it's clear to me that you are not), but I do think that one should not try to rationalize away a horrible act of wanton destruction.
I think it's more important that we take a hard look at our own history, and be honest about it. Including criticizing the choices that we have made, so we don't make them again in the future.
I didn't make that comment on Coventry. It was some other poster but I agree with him. And Dresden was not the only city bombed this way. Cologne and others were also bombed to bits. The allies knew the kind of damage their strategic bombing could do ful well.
Firebombing is a technique the allies used, to do maximum damage to cities (which clearly have civilians in them). Curtis Lemay was the main proponent, and when he was transfered from 8th AF in Europe to the Pacific, he instigated firebombing of japanese cities.
Some people said it's OK to bomb Dresden because of the existence of military targets. Some people say "no the allies bomb dresden to kill civilians". I don't know which idea is the one being revised (neither is probably the correct answer). But does it matter? If hundreds of civilians were worth it, then what can I say anymore?
What has some idiot (who, as a diplomat, should have been more levelheaded : no wonder the world's screwed up) defacing some deliberately provocative art has anything to do with the discussion on firebombing of cities?
Which, incidentally, includes UK, country where Mr Shoe Bomber Richard Reid came from.
Doh. I don't mind the fingerprinting (IANAA) : the US Gov (and its corporations) prolly knows more about me than my own country:). But I think if they want to do it, they should just go all the way and fingerprint everybody. Personally I doubt this is gonna make anything any safer.
Besides, I don't know how they are going to use the data. But I do know that some interesting new techniques better be there go mine all those data they are going to get.
Slashdot Mirror
Both theories can play the game of "adding stuff" to fit measurements of course.
You can add epicycles to get better fit to your measurements in a ptolemic theory.
Similarly,you can also add unseen "Dark Matter" near the sun to fit Mercury's orbit using Newton's theory. The fun fact is that this is actually the first invocation of "Dark Matter", not the more common ones used to fit galaxy rotation curves (which by the way, failed both GR and Newton's laws without invocation of unseen, undetected Dark matter).
But that's besides the point really. If "Ptolemic theory" is just adding eigenmodes to better fit the curves, it is not a theory at all, it's "fitting curves".
Anyway, it is true that unifying principles are the guideposts of modern science. But that's not the same as "simplicity". The ultimate viability of a scientific theory is not how simple it is, but how accurate it is. You can argue about "adding gazillion parameters to make a poor theory fit measurements" being the anticedent of such a viewpoint, but I do think that's a vacous argument.
I disagree. Basically, it is a matter of principle that we should aim for more accurate theory. Now, it is true that one can put in more parameters to fit your measurements, but there is a "roughly well defined" way of ruling that kind of fitting invalid (the jargon is "fine tuning", which translates to having parameters which are not of the same order of magnitude).
:). But both of them have exactly one parameter : Newton's Constant. So, it's a matter of subjective argument which theory (Newton's or GR) is "simpler". But, GR wins because it's more accurate. (Newton's laws are "more practical", of course, if "practical" means what one used to find accurate trajectories for multibillion dollar spacecraft).
The reason I mention that is that there is really no good way of defining what is "more simple" or "more practical", so it's hard to say "what's simpler".
Your example of Keplerian theory is better than ptolemic theory is actually not so good. In fact, Kepler's laws, ultimately derived from Newton's Laws, is much much much more accurate than Ptolemaic theory with gazillion epicycles. So it's better by virtue of being more accurate (the simplicity is a bonus).
To extend the analogy, consider the even more accurate theory that predicts the orbits : General Relativity. It's elegant and beautiful (just words of course), but definitely much harder to learn than Newton's Laws
>Sure scientific theories should be as simple as possible. But not simpler!
Not true. Scientific theories should be as accurate as possible to measurements . If it is very complicated, that's the way it is.
*waves hand*
There is no Phantom Menance.
*waves hand*
There are only THREE star wars movies.
I don't know what are you talking about in this sentence :
The pressure differential very efficiently transfers the reentry energy to the material of the meteor, causing it to explode with enormous force.
(a)Why "pressure differential" can "efficiently transfer" "reentry energy" to the material of the meteor?
(b) What is "reentry energy"?
(c) Why does tranferring energy into the meteor cause it to explode? (Adding energy to any system does not cause it to explode, it just, uh, adds energy.)
And, the whole thread is really a bit besides the point anyway. A 100ft thing heading straight into earth's path will have a relative velocity of, maybe, about 30km/s, may even be faster (or slower) depending on its orbit aroudn the sun. Earth's orbit at around 30km/s, which is where I took my number.
The earth's effective atmosphere is about 200-250 km (also about where Skylab is orbiting). That gives it about 8 secs travel time : I don't see what physical mechanism, can burn a 100ft thing in 8 secs. This meteor, my friends, is going to hit the ground. And that means a nice E=1/2 m v^2 release of explosive energy. A few nukes I guess (I don't know the explosive power of nukes nowadays....)
And, say, if you can really invent some mechanism to "explode" the meteor up in the atmosphere, the energy release will still be the same. I.e. it's like doing a Nuke Test in the sky....and we all know what THAT can do.
They are all soap operas :
Star Trek : Space Soap Opera in Skimpy Leotards
Babylon 5 : Space Soap Opera with Bad Hardo
Millenieum : Soap Opera overdosed with sedatives
Space Above and Beyond : Vietnam in Space Opera Setting
Of course not. Having something *on land* (whereever that be) is BAD, especially if it is on someplace where it is harder to get at (e.g. the Moon).
Why?
(a) Moonquakes
(b) It costs more to fly to the moon, *decelerate* to land on it, than just to fly to someplace like L2.
(c) Albedo (the moon reflects light)
(d) Pointing (the moon covers half the sky).
etc etc etc etc.
In short, it is much easier to maneuver and fly a telescope in the nice, mechanically quiet (read : vacuum is very nice to fly in), and thermally benign empty space than to put something on the Moon.
That's a strawman argument (I know you are semi-jesting but...)
/.'ers don't fit the target demographics (Ow! That hurts!)
/.'ers are apparently sedentary, they sit at their screens so much that weight isn't a consideration, for that matter, they can listen to stuff while sitting at the screen, so why bother?
/.'ers are more interested in pushing consumer technology to its more than whether there's a need. (It's all about the game!)
/.'ers must be colorblind (I'm R/G) so the colors aren't interesting, let along exciting.
/.'ers were wrong, and can't stand being wrong and are currently working on a strategy to change that rather than get a date for a Friday night. (Hey! This is important!)
:P.
#
I don't see what's so wrong about this. Why does it hurt?
#
I play soccer, which as a contact sport, does not go well with wearable consumer electronics. Unlike, say, less violent and wimpy sports like "jogging".
#
Which is fine. I like to get a good deal.
#
I'm B/G. But I like blue, it's just not as important as some people who finds them "exciting" which, IMHO, boggles my mind. I mean, why would colors excite so much?
#
What does disagreeing with Apple's pricing has anything to do with "can't stand being wrong"? Besides, I'm already happily getting some
String theory certainly does predict a number of things that are easily testable ... just not right now.
Ah, words from a theorist!
There are really very few things that ST actually predicts that is even remotely close to reality. Even things like compactified dimensions...we can only make handwavy arguments about what they should actually "look" like in reality (jargon : WTH is the ground state).
ST, despite its apparent elegance in its formulation (2 words : conformal invariance), runs into the problem of which realization of it is the correct "ST". Without experimental input, I think it is very difficult to find out.
I like to compare this (unfairly) to how a QFTheorist would face if he has *no* experimental input. I.e. how would we know that the standard model is SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) if we have no experimental data? We can write down perfectly selfconsistent QFT in other gauge groups. Similarly, how would a STheorist know how which vacuum in the Calabi-yau manifold is the correct ground state of the universe?
In QFT, we are within reach of experiments, so we can pin down the gauge groups. In ST, unless we have planck-scale experiments (which is NOT easy, if downright impossible to build on Earth), we have no such help...
I know you were not and I am not implying you were.
I am just trying to use it to make the point that even "outsourced" jobs don't stay permanent : everyone has to constantly evolve to deal with change.
How about what happened with Malaysia?
Malaysia is losing investments, on big labour intensive manufacturing jobs, to China.
But the govt recognizes that, and is at the moment transforming (at least attempting to) the country into a more services base economies.
Say all the bad things about the Malaysian govt (and i got lot to say about it too), one thing you can't say is that they like to bitch about being victimized by China.
one of the biggest wastes of time known to a very select percentage of mankind.
Yeah,
But nevertheless, the nature of a trap is that it is often not what you think it actually is ... a fact which has been exploited quite well in many marketplaces.
;P. Happy?
Ok I am blissfully unaware that I am in a trap.
I've been skateboarding for years....but then I decided to try skiing.
(ditto your post).
I've been almost linux for the past 5 years, and I have no idea how to do even "simple" things in windows now. (I recall staring, embarrassed, at my mom's winXP and not knowing how to change the dial-up phone number to a new ISP.)
It's about getting used to things.
I agree with your conclusions on Wintel, but disagree with your blanket judgements that games are a trap.
I've been playing games for years, arcade games, computer games, rpg, board games, chess you name it.
I certainly don't feel that they are a waste of my time, and I don't feel that they generate "completely artificial memories".
OTOH, I think games honed my analyical AND social skills. When I hang out in a chess club, I learn to interact with an assortment of people I don't meet at work/school. When I play FPS over the net, I learn to think in 3D, and make splitsecond decisions (FPS are not as mindless as you may think they are). When I spend hours playing a strategic wargame, I learned a lot of military history.
I might not be Bill Gates and have a billion bucks. But I do like to think that part of who I am came from the fact that I played, and still play, games.
The bombing was done in Feb 45, when the allies were poised to crossed the rhine and into Germany.
On your question about how much it did to stop Hitler, one will never know. But if that's the justification what it takes, then the allies had indeed stared very deeply into the abyss when they fought the monster.
I am not saying that you are defending the firebombing (it's clear to me that you are not), but I do think that one should not try to rationalize away a horrible act of wanton destruction.
I think it's more important that we take a hard look at our own history, and be honest about it. Including criticizing the choices that we have made, so we don't make them again in the future.
I didn't make that comment on Coventry. It was some other poster but I agree with him. And Dresden was not the only city bombed this way. Cologne and others were also bombed to bits. The allies knew the kind of damage their strategic bombing could do ful well.
Firebombing is a technique the allies used, to do maximum damage to cities (which clearly have civilians in them). Curtis Lemay was the main proponent, and when he was transfered from 8th AF in Europe to the Pacific, he instigated firebombing of japanese cities.
Some people said it's OK to bomb Dresden because of the existence of military targets. Some people say "no the allies bomb dresden to kill civilians". I don't know which idea is the one being revised (neither is probably the correct answer). But does it matter? If hundreds of civilians were worth it, then what can I say anymore?
I think the point is that hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the raid.
If the fact that some factories in Dresden produced some military goods justify their deaths, then what more can I say?
What has some idiot (who, as a diplomat, should have been more levelheaded : no wonder the world's screwed up) defacing some deliberately provocative art has anything to do with the discussion on firebombing of cities?
Just Germans killing civilians justified the allies' killing of civilians too? War sucks I suppose.
I wonder who is being revisionist.
Dresden Firebombing.
Is anyone else frightened by the 2004 Christina?
Only after the hot steamy sex.
There will be a new story on how the government conspire to shutdown the mars-news.de website on the 9th of Jan 2004....
coincidentally after this story was posted.
Which, incidentally, includes UK, country where Mr Shoe Bomber Richard Reid came from.
:). But I think if they want to do it, they should just go all the way and fingerprint everybody. Personally I doubt this is gonna make anything any safer.
Doh. I don't mind the fingerprinting (IANAA) : the US Gov (and its corporations) prolly knows more about me than my own country
Besides, I don't know how they are going to use the data. But I do know that some interesting new techniques better be there go mine all those data they are going to get.
Man, the acronyms! The Acronyms!
DAoC, MMORPG, WoW, EQ, SWG, NWN.
I know 2 out of 6.
Make it Stop!