the NSA (in their role of protecting the nation's data infrastructure, not their role of spying on everyone -- two very different organizations within the NSA)
THAT SEEMS LIKE A GOOD IDEA. I'M VERY HAPPY WITH MY NEW CAPS LOCK KEY. OH WAIT, DID YOU MEAN A SHIFT KEY?
the one problem with using my new caps lock key is that the slashdot filter complains that it's like yelling and refuses to post my comment. maybe these sentences will mollify it. haha it worked.
Looking at the map, it seems like the direction to look from Connecticut will be south/southeast (but mostly south). It first has to rise above the Earth's curvature far enough to be visible from CT, and by that time it's already quite far out to sea to the east.
Looks like a similar situation in NJ - it's not going to appear to the southwest.
Haha, you first have to convince NASA there's a problem. Last I heard (as of 2009), NASA is still using imperial units for development of the future replacement for the Space Shuttle.
You don't need a test. Check if you allow bash to be invoked remotely by untrusted users, ever, directly or indirectly. If you do, find the responsible architect, pour a cup of soda over his head, demote him to level 1 support, and fix your systems.
Yeah, this is what bothers me about this whole thing. People are acting like this is a terrible security hole outside of anyone's control, but if you're running an environment which allows for remote execution of anything via bash, I feel like Agent Smith said it best: "your men are already dead." That hasn't been a plausible architecture for public-facing applications for at least a decade.
I remember working hard to get away from CGI-style approaches in the late '90s - back then, it was more for performance than security, but the security was an added bonus that became more apparent later.
In this case, the connection out of Svalbard is decent - 10 Gb/s, "with a future potential capacity of 2,500 Gbit/s" via currently unused fiber. See Svalbard Undersea Cable System.
One imagines that with the $50 million cost partly funded by NASA, that they also paid some attention to the peering connection at Harstad, where the connection terminates.
would particles have formed differently, or at all?
Many different outcomes are possible. It's not due to "energy vibrating at different frequencies" - energy does that anyway, every color of visible light you see is energy vibrating at a different frequency, for example. But during an event like the Big Bang, properties of the universe that we observe as constants or laws today could have turned out differently.
Rather than representing order, symmetry principles actually correspond to a state of high disorder; they describe situations where no particular axis is preferred and thus a system has no structure. Order is not symmetry - order is broken symmetry. It occurs as the result of a phase transition from more symmetric but less orderly states, as with the freezing of a cloud of water vapour into a six-pointed snow-flake. Force laws result from broken symmetry.
Those phase transitions as an early-stage universe cools could lead to different force laws, among other differences, in the resulting universe.
Why does this upset you? Is it the recognition that people much more intelligent than you are spending time on problems whose significance you don't understand, and attacking them makes you feel better?
The article is discussing a consequence of some of the most well-established scientific models in existence: general relativity, quantum field theory, and the Big Bang cosmological model. That knowledge is what allowed the computer you're using to be built, and what allows GPS satellites to work. Those models make predictions which have been tested over and over and found to be accurate. The article is describing another prediction of those models. Your argument from incredulity (a logical fallacy) is nothing but a reflection of your own ignorance.
There's no standard definition for the term "multiverse", because it's not a term that corresponds to any established physical theory. The theory described in the article has a good claim to the term multiverse, because it's much more than just separate regions.
The region of the universe we're in almost certainly extends beyond the limits that we observe, so there are already "separated observable regions" in the universe we know. The article is talking about a scenario in which multiple Big Bangs occur, so each region is not just separated by distance but also by the nature of the space in that region - how much it has inflated, how fast it is inflating. Each such inflating region is possibly also distinguished by different laws of physics in that region. There would also be non-inflating regions which would have properties different from anything we're familiar with.
Back when other galaxies were first discovered, they were originally referred to as "island universes". This eventually changed to "galaxy" as our understanding of the extent of the universe shifted. If the theory in the article were somehow confirmed (difficult!) then in future, we might indeed refer to that larger space as just "the Universe", and refer to the inflating bubble we're in as something less all-encompassing than "the Universe". For now, though, it would be very confusing if we started referring to speculative constructs way beyond our ability to observe as "the Universe". Multiverse is as good as a term as any.
I spent a good bit of time trying to explain this to laycreatures
Sounds like the blind leading the blind.
You can't naively apply Popper in this case (who in any case is by no means the last word on philosophy of science), because the situation is quite complex: the article describes a possible consequence of existing established theories, including quantum field theory, general relativity, and Big Bang cosmological models. As such, Popper's rules don't say anything about those theories not being science, or whatever.
While it's true that "the math does not lead only and exclusively to that conclusion", it's a valid possible conclusion. As such, given the status of the theories that it's based on, we can't avoid taking it seriously as a possible description of reality. The task then becomes to discover if there's any way to improve our certainty about its correctness or lack thereof, and that's why people like Linde write papers about this stuff. Rejecting this as "not science" or whatever based on one particular view of what science is, is terribly short-sighted, and it's lucky that actual scientists don't pay attention to such nonsense.
One of the interesting consequences of eternal inflation style theories is that in principle, it addresses questions of fine-tuning. One can take the "evidence of fine tuning" as an argument in favor of multiverses in some form. From that perspective, the idea that our observable universe that started with the Big Bang is the only universe is actually the more difficult theory to defend, since we don't know how some of the parameters managed to come out on the knife-edge of allowing the universe to expand to a useful size and have useful properties like the ability for matter to form.
The "big bang" is the flat earthers looking out at the horizon, the most distant photons they can see... "yep, that is as far as we can see, it must be the edge of everything!"
No cosmologist says that. The edge you're referring to is the edge of the observable universe, nothing more.
If you *heart* science but suck at it, be a troll.
That's why I don't eat steak. If you're going to eat meat, you may as well make it intelligent meat. As Professor Farnsworth said when eating dolphin, "Pass me the speech center of the brain!"
In only answering the easy question, you answered the hard ones too.
I'm glad you noticed.
You do know that that your dreamed "removal of false superstitions" has already been tried, and it resulted in the biggest mass murderers in history
How cliched and tedious, and you even had to misquote me to get there. I didn't say "removal" of false superstitions, I said "escaping many of" them. Aside from my recognition that we are never going to escape all of them, the difference is that "removal" suggests an imposition by force. I'm not suggesting anything of the kind.
However, I find it disappointing when people with apparently rational potential exhibit an irrational antipathy towards science, without proposing any better alternative. What "more stable" thing do you think human spirituality should be based on, than a rational appreciation of their world?
For a long time, human spirituality has been based on gods of various kinds and having various properties, but these shift quite rapidly themselves. So much so, that the term "god of the gaps" has been used to refer to the way the various conceptions of gods have shifted in response to our better understanding of the world. In that sense, the shiftiness of gods is directly proportional to the shiftiness of science, and doesn't provide any more stable foundation for anything - in fact, a less stable one by definition, because it is one rooted in ignorance rather than knowledge.
Your attacks on my character are amusing.
You used a slur which I find offensive. Your character reveals itself.
That is one use of the term. But in general, it just refers to a network as a whole, without singling out individual machines. It's closely related to, very likely derived from, the cloud-shaped icon that's used to denote a network in diagrams.
In the "old days", the cloud icon would usually correspond to the network infrastructure itself, i.e. clients and servers would both connect to the cloud. The cloud itself didn't used to be perceived as a location for data storage or computing activity, because most activities involved a well defined server or servers.
In the old approach, you might indicate Google's server farm on a diagram with a repeating server icon with "..." to indicate multiple machines. But as distributed systems have become more common, someone came up with the bright idea of treating such distributed resources as residing "in the cloud", presumably to convey the idea that the exact location or identity of the machines in question didn't matter.
I'm not denying spirituality's role in humanity's needs - that's your own projection of what science does. I'm saying that spirituality can't be the sole basis, or even the primary basis, for our knowledge of external reality. It might be a lens through which we interpret it, but even that requires great care.
Spirituality is based on the truths that our ancestor's have discovered before us. Throw away that wisdom at your own peril.
Science, logic, and reason itself are based on the truths that our ancestors have discovered before us. Throw away that wisdom at your own peril.
And what hopes of yours for the human race are dashed by what I wrote?
The hope of finally escaping many of the false superstitions that have tyrannized human life on Earth for so many millennia. The hope of gaining some sort of understanding of the universe that goes beyond those superstitions. The hope of living a life relatively free from the insanities imposed on us by the religious nuts that run countries (or try to) in both the West and the East, and the hope of replacing them with something other than a different set of spiritually deluded nuts.
The hope of recognizing how our actions really affect the world, rather than how we want them to affect the world. An example of this are the religious people who believe that we do not need to worry about things such as global warming or even pollution because the bible tells them so. The hope of recognizing the distinction between our dreams and fantasies, and the world outside our bodies.
On another note, your characterization of science as a "shifty bitch" is inherently misogynist, which marks you as something other than a truly spiritual person.
Science is one shifty bitch. Human spirituality needs something more stable.
Oh right, so instead of using the best available evidence, we should just make something up with no evidence, based on what we *feel*, and then stick with that indefinitely to avoid shiftiness?
There's no hope for the human race as long as attitudes like this prevail.
Slashdot Mirror
I always use a VPN when looking at the sky.
Or so the NSA would have you believe...
THAT SEEMS LIKE A GOOD IDEA. I'M VERY HAPPY WITH MY NEW CAPS LOCK KEY. OH WAIT, DID YOU MEAN A SHIFT KEY?
the one problem with using my new caps lock key is that the slashdot filter complains that it's like yelling and refuses to post my comment. maybe these sentences will mollify it. haha it worked.
Looking at the map, it seems like the direction to look from Connecticut will be south/southeast (but mostly south). It first has to rise above the Earth's curvature far enough to be visible from CT, and by that time it's already quite far out to sea to the east. Looks like a similar situation in NJ - it's not going to appear to the southwest.
Haha, you first have to convince NASA there's a problem. Last I heard (as of 2009), NASA is still using imperial units for development of the future replacement for the Space Shuttle.
I like to eat people who insert a possessive apostrophe when they mean to use a plural. Yes, that's right - I'm a grammar cannibal.
Do you have some remedy for the desire to claw out my own eyeballs that comes from being forced to use Windows?
As the parent pointed out, use of CGI is basically "an existing hole."
You don't need a test. Check if you allow bash to be invoked remotely by untrusted users, ever, directly or indirectly. If you do, find the responsible architect, pour a cup of soda over his head, demote him to level 1 support, and fix your systems.
Yeah, this is what bothers me about this whole thing. People are acting like this is a terrible security hole outside of anyone's control, but if you're running an environment which allows for remote execution of anything via bash, I feel like Agent Smith said it best: "your men are already dead." That hasn't been a plausible architecture for public-facing applications for at least a decade. I remember working hard to get away from CGI-style approaches in the late '90s - back then, it was more for performance than security, but the security was an added bonus that became more apparent later.
In that case why not go have your picnic somewhere where you're not surrounded by a bunch of frightfully boring cricket fans?
In this case, the connection out of Svalbard is decent - 10 Gb/s, "with a future potential capacity of 2,500 Gbit/s" via currently unused fiber. See Svalbard Undersea Cable System.
One imagines that with the $50 million cost partly funded by NASA, that they also paid some attention to the peering connection at Harstad, where the connection terminates.
would particles have formed differently, or at all?
Many different outcomes are possible. It's not due to "energy vibrating at different frequencies" - energy does that anyway, every color of visible light you see is energy vibrating at a different frequency, for example. But during an event like the Big Bang, properties of the universe that we observe as constants or laws today could have turned out differently.
Victor Stenger describes it as follows near the end of his 1990 paper The Universe: the ultimate free lunch:
Those phase transitions as an early-stage universe cools could lead to different force laws, among other differences, in the resulting universe.
Why does this upset you? Is it the recognition that people much more intelligent than you are spending time on problems whose significance you don't understand, and attacking them makes you feel better?
The article is discussing a consequence of some of the most well-established scientific models in existence: general relativity, quantum field theory, and the Big Bang cosmological model. That knowledge is what allowed the computer you're using to be built, and what allows GPS satellites to work. Those models make predictions which have been tested over and over and found to be accurate. The article is describing another prediction of those models. Your argument from incredulity (a logical fallacy) is nothing but a reflection of your own ignorance.
There's no standard definition for the term "multiverse", because it's not a term that corresponds to any established physical theory. The theory described in the article has a good claim to the term multiverse, because it's much more than just separate regions.
The region of the universe we're in almost certainly extends beyond the limits that we observe, so there are already "separated observable regions" in the universe we know. The article is talking about a scenario in which multiple Big Bangs occur, so each region is not just separated by distance but also by the nature of the space in that region - how much it has inflated, how fast it is inflating. Each such inflating region is possibly also distinguished by different laws of physics in that region. There would also be non-inflating regions which would have properties different from anything we're familiar with.
Back when other galaxies were first discovered, they were originally referred to as "island universes". This eventually changed to "galaxy" as our understanding of the extent of the universe shifted. If the theory in the article were somehow confirmed (difficult!) then in future, we might indeed refer to that larger space as just "the Universe", and refer to the inflating bubble we're in as something less all-encompassing than "the Universe". For now, though, it would be very confusing if we started referring to speculative constructs way beyond our ability to observe as "the Universe". Multiverse is as good as a term as any.
I spent a good bit of time trying to explain this to laycreatures
Sounds like the blind leading the blind.
You can't naively apply Popper in this case (who in any case is by no means the last word on philosophy of science), because the situation is quite complex: the article describes a possible consequence of existing established theories, including quantum field theory, general relativity, and Big Bang cosmological models. As such, Popper's rules don't say anything about those theories not being science, or whatever.
While it's true that "the math does not lead only and exclusively to that conclusion", it's a valid possible conclusion. As such, given the status of the theories that it's based on, we can't avoid taking it seriously as a possible description of reality. The task then becomes to discover if there's any way to improve our certainty about its correctness or lack thereof, and that's why people like Linde write papers about this stuff. Rejecting this as "not science" or whatever based on one particular view of what science is, is terribly short-sighted, and it's lucky that actual scientists don't pay attention to such nonsense.
One of the interesting consequences of eternal inflation style theories is that in principle, it addresses questions of fine-tuning. One can take the "evidence of fine tuning" as an argument in favor of multiverses in some form. From that perspective, the idea that our observable universe that started with the Big Bang is the only universe is actually the more difficult theory to defend, since we don't know how some of the parameters managed to come out on the knife-edge of allowing the universe to expand to a useful size and have useful properties like the ability for matter to form.
Re Popper, you should look into Imre Lakatos, who pointed out various flaws with basing all of science on falsificationism. See e.g. The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes.
The "big bang" is the flat earthers looking out at the horizon, the most distant photons they can see... "yep, that is as far as we can see, it must be the edge of everything!"
No cosmologist says that. The edge you're referring to is the edge of the observable universe, nothing more.
If you *heart* science but suck at it, be a troll.
FTFY
He was killed by a digestive virus? Oh, those French doctors...
That's why I don't eat steak. If you're going to eat meat, you may as well make it intelligent meat. As Professor Farnsworth said when eating dolphin, "Pass me the speech center of the brain!"
In only answering the easy question, you answered the hard ones too.
I'm glad you noticed.
You do know that that your dreamed "removal of false superstitions" has already been tried, and it resulted in the biggest mass murderers in history
How cliched and tedious, and you even had to misquote me to get there. I didn't say "removal" of false superstitions, I said "escaping many of" them. Aside from my recognition that we are never going to escape all of them, the difference is that "removal" suggests an imposition by force. I'm not suggesting anything of the kind.
However, I find it disappointing when people with apparently rational potential exhibit an irrational antipathy towards science, without proposing any better alternative. What "more stable" thing do you think human spirituality should be based on, than a rational appreciation of their world?
For a long time, human spirituality has been based on gods of various kinds and having various properties, but these shift quite rapidly themselves. So much so, that the term "god of the gaps" has been used to refer to the way the various conceptions of gods have shifted in response to our better understanding of the world. In that sense, the shiftiness of gods is directly proportional to the shiftiness of science, and doesn't provide any more stable foundation for anything - in fact, a less stable one by definition, because it is one rooted in ignorance rather than knowledge.
Your attacks on my character are amusing.
You used a slur which I find offensive. Your character reveals itself.
That is one use of the term. But in general, it just refers to a network as a whole, without singling out individual machines. It's closely related to, very likely derived from, the cloud-shaped icon that's used to denote a network in diagrams.
In the "old days", the cloud icon would usually correspond to the network infrastructure itself, i.e. clients and servers would both connect to the cloud. The cloud itself didn't used to be perceived as a location for data storage or computing activity, because most activities involved a well defined server or servers.
In the old approach, you might indicate Google's server farm on a diagram with a repeating server icon with "..." to indicate multiple machines. But as distributed systems have become more common, someone came up with the bright idea of treating such distributed resources as residing "in the cloud", presumably to convey the idea that the exact location or identity of the machines in question didn't matter.
I'm not denying spirituality's role in humanity's needs - that's your own projection of what science does. I'm saying that spirituality can't be the sole basis, or even the primary basis, for our knowledge of external reality. It might be a lens through which we interpret it, but even that requires great care.
Spirituality is based on the truths that our ancestor's have discovered before us. Throw away that wisdom at your own peril.
Science, logic, and reason itself are based on the truths that our ancestors have discovered before us. Throw away that wisdom at your own peril.
And what hopes of yours for the human race are dashed by what I wrote?
The hope of finally escaping many of the false superstitions that have tyrannized human life on Earth for so many millennia. The hope of gaining some sort of understanding of the universe that goes beyond those superstitions. The hope of living a life relatively free from the insanities imposed on us by the religious nuts that run countries (or try to) in both the West and the East, and the hope of replacing them with something other than a different set of spiritually deluded nuts.
The hope of recognizing how our actions really affect the world, rather than how we want them to affect the world. An example of this are the religious people who believe that we do not need to worry about things such as global warming or even pollution because the bible tells them so. The hope of recognizing the distinction between our dreams and fantasies, and the world outside our bodies.
On another note, your characterization of science as a "shifty bitch" is inherently misogynist, which marks you as something other than a truly spiritual person.
Science is one shifty bitch. Human spirituality needs something more stable.
Oh right, so instead of using the best available evidence, we should just make something up with no evidence, based on what we *feel*, and then stick with that indefinitely to avoid shiftiness? There's no hope for the human race as long as attitudes like this prevail.
Where are the links and book citations to the scientific research that *supports* ID?