Sorry, that star would have been invisible except for brief flares, so it would indeed have been seen as something quite usual, if noticed. And the flares would have been brief and irregular, so someone reporting seeing them probably wouldn't have been believed. Only if a group of people say it at the same time would it have been believed. And then it would probably have been counted less remarkable than a meteor.
It's not clear to me that the Neanderthals, the Denisovians, etc. were actually separate species rather than merely geographic variants. There clearly were some anatomical differences, but that doesn't really suffice. Saint Bernards and Chihuahuas are the same species.
That's a bit hard to believe. If true it's going to take a lot of explanation, but do you have a link? The evidence is going to need to be pretty good before I'll accept it.
They wouldn't have noticed it as something unusual. It moved much too slowly for that, but the Arabs used to use one of the stars of the handle of the Big Dipper as an eye test. If you could see that there were two stars rather than one, you had sharp eyes. So it's quite possible that some of them saw it and used it in some way. But you're right that they wouldn't have thought it remarkable.
I don't know about London, but here we get clear nights occasionally, and the street lights are such that about all I can recognize is the belt of Orion.
It's more complicated than that. The extent of the Oort cloud is determined by where things that are nearly stationary WRT the gravitational dominants would fall towards the Sun rather than towards some other source. So a star approaching will alter the shape (and membership) of the cloud, as it's moving a new strong gravitational field into the area. Also it's not a sphere, being shallower in the direction of the Alpha Centuari system, because that's got it's own area of dominance, and it extends further in directions that are far from any near star.
That said, there's no good measurement of how densely populated the Oort cloud is. Or even whether there are any fairly large planets in it. It wouldn't be impossible that there's something the size of Neptune floating around out there, and we haven't seen it, because it's *DARK* out there. The best chance of seeing it would probably be in the infra-red. But my real guess is that there are a lot of things smaller than Pluto, and most of those smaller than Charon. As for what the total mass of the cloud is ????? I don't think there's even a good basis for making an estimate.
What this is about is that sharp edges are almost always an illusion of the way you are classifying things. We know there's stuff in the area called the Oort cloud, but the name is an attractive illusion. We don't, e.g., see those comets that never come within Uranus' orbit, but they almost certainly exist. And saying they live in the Oort cloud is... well, they spend *most* of their time out there, but that's because of the way orbital mechanics works. Anything with an eccentric orbit is going to spend more time further from the sun than closer to it. This is even true of Earth.
That the number of objects out there isn't as high as they estimate is a possibility, but I'd give odds in the other direction. The number of objects estimated is based on those that are visible, and smaller objects almost always greatly outnumber larger objects.
Now if you were instead talking about the total mass of the Oort cloud...there you might be on firmer ground, though I don't recall seeing any recent estimate of the mass.
I think you misunderstand the difference between a web site and an operating system.
That said, Linux also has it's holes. There are fewer of them, and more irregularly distributed, and they get patched more quickly, but they exist. It's been claimed by, IIRC, OpenBSD, that they haven't been had an exploit in decades, but I don't recall just when I read that claim. I don't think it's true anymore. Still, if security is your concern, the one of the BSDs would be your best choice. But I'll admit that I'm a Linux user.
While that's probably correct, the process of deduction is faulty. I'd say that the basic problem is, at a guess, running Javascript. Given that most systems have some hole you can wriggle through.
Why would you believe Wikipedia on something like this?? On things that aren't emotional, they can be alright, though even there they have the reputation of censoring expert opinions in favor of someone else, or just deciding the entire topic isn't interesting enough.
The NASA astronauts are expected to exercise control over things in multiple ways. It's not even a bad analogy. The safety driver is supposed to just sit there until things go pear shaped and then instantly be on top of it. A test pilot couldn't handle that job.
Unfortunately, "General Welfare" *doesn't* have a clear meaning, and people are always disagreeing about exactly what it means. Originally it didn't even apply to interstate roads.
That said, I feel the main problem with the constitution is that it's been interpreted by lawyers to mean that they can do whatever the guy paying them wants to do. Sometimes the changes in meaning were necessary, but that should have been done by amendment rather than by lying about what the words meant. Unfortunately, the process was so hard that it was usually skipped, even when there was a general agreement that the change was needed. And now the government has a tradition of "if the constitution doesn't let you do what you want, lie about what the words mean". The interstate commerce clause is the most notoriously used in that way, but it's far from the only one.
Well, the "Safety Driver" is, and has to be, nearly decoration. As another poster has frequently said, research shows universal human failure to maintain attention in that kind of situation. It's true there haven't been large group studies, so it's possible that some small fraction of people can maintain attention in that kind of a situation. But do notice that *small*. It's definitely well under 10%, and probably well under 1%.
A good point. The only men I can think of off-hand who got famous for tech are Steve Wozniak and Linus Torvald. The others got famous for being rich or powerful.
Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace. I can't think of anybody current. (I refuse the include that ex-board member from HP.)
Of course, one could branch outside computers and come up with names like Rosalind Franklin... but I had to search that name up on Google. And there were Madame Curie...but now I'm digging into the past again.
I think you're wrong about age not making a difference. Young adults tend to be more aggressive, and less willing to obey rules they don't agree with. This is just a statistical extrapolation from personal observations, and certainly doesn't translate into "belligerent punks that trash the neighborhood", but I remember my friends from just post-college years, and tales my younger brothers told, and...well, lots of anecdotal stuff. And it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, too. Enough so that I'd require a reasonable amount of evidence before I'd believe otherwise. Older people just tend to be less active, and that's going to translate in a lot of different ways.
If you read the Robert Frost poem that feature that line, you won't find it exactly ironic, as much as an interesting literary reference. The poem is called, IIRC, "Mending Wall". And it's about a disagreement about precisely that point. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall..."
If you think China is Marxist communist, then you don't understand either. Rhetoric isn't reality. OTOH, Confucianism also doesn't have anything to do with communism (of any sort!) which makes the picture in your link quite peculiar.
That said, I'm sure they will use their access to push beliefs favorable to them.
40 years ago most students at the university I went to had to take remedial English classes. Others needed to take remedial math classes. And that university only even considered admitting students from the upper quarter of the grade profile (normalized via the SAT tests, of course).
So don't think it's a new problem.
OTOH, I do admit that I usually found the lectures to be less educational than the section meetings. If all you do is sit in the lectures, then you are either attending an inferior school, or you are skipping the most valuable part of the teaching. (And at the university I attended, you would also be automatically failing the classes.)
Sorry, but large institutions don't relate well to individuals. Ever. Small institutions sometimes do. Excellence in education requires relating to the students as individuals.
The problem is that large and expensive tools require a large institution to support them. You can't study X-Ray diffraction in nano-crystilline alloys without a lot of rather expensive tools. But you wouldn't do that until you were a grad student anyway.
I suspect the entire design of the college system needs to be revamped, with the grad schools separated from the undergrad schools, but then the problem is getting quality professors.
So I don't really have a good answer, but claiming that it's a constitutional question is really silly. I challenge you to produce the sections of the US Constitution that you believe are relevant and they explain why. The entire justification for the Federal government having anything at all to do with education is extremely flimsy.
Actually, I think that even some of the large states were doing a poor job. (I'm certain that some of the small states were.)
FWIW, the University of California started declining when Clark Kerr ("The Uses of a University") ran the place. He lead the way towards turning the University into a trade school, and trying to make the various departments "profit centers", though the profit he was more interested in was political rather than economic (and thus the quotes). It has continued the decline under his successors. I suspect that a part of the reason is that it just got too large, but it's also true that the change in goals didn't help things. It became a great university while under the goal of "pursuit of excellence" and "pursuit of knowledge". The shift towards "publish or perish" and "pursuit of grants" coincided with the decline of excellence. It's still in many ways a lot better than the average school WRT excellence, but that's largely due to inertia. Having a reputation for excellence allows it to attract the best students. Even with a mediocre educational environment the best students will perform above average, and, to be fair, the educational environment is still above average. But it's been declining significantly. (I can't speak to the social environment. When I went there I was, as now, socially isolated. Then I was extremely unhappy a lot of the time, which really depressed my studies. Others did much better. And, of course, there's no real way to gauge what it's like now...except that it's even larger and presumably more impersonal. Given how impersonal it was before, I doubt that would have much effect.)
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Sorry, that star would have been invisible except for brief flares, so it would indeed have been seen as something quite usual, if noticed. And the flares would have been brief and irregular, so someone reporting seeing them probably wouldn't have been believed. Only if a group of people say it at the same time would it have been believed. And then it would probably have been counted less remarkable than a meteor.
It's not clear to me that the Neanderthals, the Denisovians, etc. were actually separate species rather than merely geographic variants. There clearly were some anatomical differences, but that doesn't really suffice. Saint Bernards and Chihuahuas are the same species.
That's a bit hard to believe. If true it's going to take a lot of explanation, but do you have a link? The evidence is going to need to be pretty good before I'll accept it.
They wouldn't have noticed it as something unusual. It moved much too slowly for that, but the Arabs used to use one of the stars of the handle of the Big Dipper as an eye test. If you could see that there were two stars rather than one, you had sharp eyes. So it's quite possible that some of them saw it and used it in some way. But you're right that they wouldn't have thought it remarkable.
I don't know about London, but here we get clear nights occasionally, and the street lights are such that about all I can recognize is the belt of Orion.
It's more complicated than that. The extent of the Oort cloud is determined by where things that are nearly stationary WRT the gravitational dominants would fall towards the Sun rather than towards some other source. So a star approaching will alter the shape (and membership) of the cloud, as it's moving a new strong gravitational field into the area. Also it's not a sphere, being shallower in the direction of the Alpha Centuari system, because that's got it's own area of dominance, and it extends further in directions that are far from any near star.
That said, there's no good measurement of how densely populated the Oort cloud is. Or even whether there are any fairly large planets in it. It wouldn't be impossible that there's something the size of Neptune floating around out there, and we haven't seen it, because it's *DARK* out there. The best chance of seeing it would probably be in the infra-red. But my real guess is that there are a lot of things smaller than Pluto, and most of those smaller than Charon. As for what the total mass of the cloud is ????? I don't think there's even a good basis for making an estimate.
What this is about is that sharp edges are almost always an illusion of the way you are classifying things. We know there's stuff in the area called the Oort cloud, but the name is an attractive illusion. We don't, e.g., see those comets that never come within Uranus' orbit, but they almost certainly exist. And saying they live in the Oort cloud is ... well, they spend *most* of their time out there, but that's because of the way orbital mechanics works. Anything with an eccentric orbit is going to spend more time further from the sun than closer to it. This is even true of Earth.
That the number of objects out there isn't as high as they estimate is a possibility, but I'd give odds in the other direction. The number of objects estimated is based on those that are visible, and smaller objects almost always greatly outnumber larger objects.
Now if you were instead talking about the total mass of the Oort cloud...there you might be on firmer ground, though I don't recall seeing any recent estimate of the mass.
Well, the first post was pretty good, but not *that* good.
I think you misunderstand the difference between a web site and an operating system.
That said, Linux also has it's holes. There are fewer of them, and more irregularly distributed, and they get patched more quickly, but they exist. It's been claimed by, IIRC, OpenBSD, that they haven't been had an exploit in decades, but I don't recall just when I read that claim. I don't think it's true anymore. Still, if security is your concern, the one of the BSDs would be your best choice. But I'll admit that I'm a Linux user.
While that's probably correct, the process of deduction is faulty. I'd say that the basic problem is, at a guess, running Javascript. Given that most systems have some hole you can wriggle through.
Nobody cares? Didn't you notice that reports say the payroll system was infected?
Why would you believe Wikipedia on something like this?? On things that aren't emotional, they can be alright, though even there they have the reputation of censoring expert opinions in favor of someone else, or just deciding the entire topic isn't interesting enough.
The problem with that analysis is that some people will pay it, and that attacks aren't individually targeted.
OTOH, reports are that half the time they don't send the decryption key anyway.
The NASA astronauts are expected to exercise control over things in multiple ways. It's not even a bad analogy. The safety driver is supposed to just sit there until things go pear shaped and then instantly be on top of it. A test pilot couldn't handle that job.
Unfortunately, "General Welfare" *doesn't* have a clear meaning, and people are always disagreeing about exactly what it means. Originally it didn't even apply to interstate roads.
That said, I feel the main problem with the constitution is that it's been interpreted by lawyers to mean that they can do whatever the guy paying them wants to do. Sometimes the changes in meaning were necessary, but that should have been done by amendment rather than by lying about what the words meant. Unfortunately, the process was so hard that it was usually skipped, even when there was a general agreement that the change was needed. And now the government has a tradition of "if the constitution doesn't let you do what you want, lie about what the words mean". The interstate commerce clause is the most notoriously used in that way, but it's far from the only one.
Well, the "Safety Driver" is, and has to be, nearly decoration. As another poster has frequently said, research shows universal human failure to maintain attention in that kind of situation. It's true there haven't been large group studies, so it's possible that some small fraction of people can maintain attention in that kind of a situation. But do notice that *small*. It's definitely well under 10%, and probably well under 1%.
If he were being honest, it's my guess that he would list the mistakes as;
1. Not being paid enough for the data, and
2. Getting caught.
A good point. The only men I can think of off-hand who got famous for tech are Steve Wozniak and Linus Torvald. The others got famous for being rich or powerful.
Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace. I can't think of anybody current. (I refuse the include that ex-board member from HP.)
Of course, one could branch outside computers and come up with names like Rosalind Franklin ... but I had to search that name up on Google. And there were Madame Curie...but now I'm digging into the past again.
I think you're wrong about age not making a difference. Young adults tend to be more aggressive, and less willing to obey rules they don't agree with. This is just a statistical extrapolation from personal observations, and certainly doesn't translate into "belligerent punks that trash the neighborhood", but I remember my friends from just post-college years, and tales my younger brothers told, and...well, lots of anecdotal stuff. And it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, too. Enough so that I'd require a reasonable amount of evidence before I'd believe otherwise. Older people just tend to be less active, and that's going to translate in a lot of different ways.
If you read the Robert Frost poem that feature that line, you won't find it exactly ironic, as much as an interesting literary reference.
The poem is called, IIRC, "Mending Wall". And it's about a disagreement about precisely that point.
"Something there is that doesn't love a wall..."
If you think China is Marxist communist, then you don't understand either. Rhetoric isn't reality.
OTOH, Confucianism also doesn't have anything to do with communism (of any sort!) which makes the picture in your link quite peculiar.
That said, I'm sure they will use their access to push beliefs favorable to them.
40 years ago most students at the university I went to had to take remedial English classes. Others needed to take remedial math classes. And that university only even considered admitting students from the upper quarter of the grade profile (normalized via the SAT tests, of course).
So don't think it's a new problem.
OTOH, I do admit that I usually found the lectures to be less educational than the section meetings. If all you do is sit in the lectures, then you are either attending an inferior school, or you are skipping the most valuable part of the teaching. (And at the university I attended, you would also be automatically failing the classes.)
Sorry, but large institutions don't relate well to individuals. Ever. Small institutions sometimes do. Excellence in education requires relating to the students as individuals.
The problem is that large and expensive tools require a large institution to support them. You can't study X-Ray diffraction in nano-crystilline alloys without a lot of rather expensive tools. But you wouldn't do that until you were a grad student anyway.
I suspect the entire design of the college system needs to be revamped, with the grad schools separated from the undergrad schools, but then the problem is getting quality professors.
So I don't really have a good answer, but claiming that it's a constitutional question is really silly. I challenge you to produce the sections of the US Constitution that you believe are relevant and they explain why. The entire justification for the Federal government having anything at all to do with education is extremely flimsy.
Actually, I think that even some of the large states were doing a poor job. (I'm certain that some of the small states were.)
FWIW, the University of California started declining when Clark Kerr ("The Uses of a University") ran the place. He lead the way towards turning the University into a trade school, and trying to make the various departments "profit centers", though the profit he was more interested in was political rather than economic (and thus the quotes). It has continued the decline under his successors. I suspect that a part of the reason is that it just got too large, but it's also true that the change in goals didn't help things. It became a great university while under the goal of "pursuit of excellence" and "pursuit of knowledge". The shift towards "publish or perish" and "pursuit of grants" coincided with the decline of excellence. It's still in many ways a lot better than the average school WRT excellence, but that's largely due to inertia. Having a reputation for excellence allows it to attract the best students. Even with a mediocre educational environment the best students will perform above average, and, to be fair, the educational environment is still above average. But it's been declining significantly. (I can't speak to the social environment. When I went there I was, as now, socially isolated. Then I was extremely unhappy a lot of the time, which really depressed my studies. Others did much better. And, of course, there's no real way to gauge what it's like now...except that it's even larger and presumably more impersonal. Given how impersonal it was before, I doubt that would have much effect.)