Is it also possible that the quasars we are observing are differing light years away and thus we are making observations based on data from several billion years ago (as the article states)?
Oh, it's worse than that. The quasars are different distances away. How do we figure out how far away they are? By measuring the redshift in the frequencies of their spectra. What do we use for that? The relativistic Doppler formula. What is the key constant in the Doppler formula? The speed of light. Actualy, it's even worse, because it's not the naive Doppler formula but one that includes cosmological effects which are not independently observable.
In other words, the distance of the quasars -- and the frequency their light "should" be -- are highly model-dependent.
I've read the linked article but not the actual Phys Rev paper, so I'm likely blowing smoke but...
The "news cycle" is 24 hours, due to historical roots in daily newspapers (augmented by the evening news, etc.) Assume for the moment that people stay interested in a news story. After a day, if the story is ongoing, the original article is likely to be replaced by an update. Real-life example: Over the weekend, the NY Times Science section had these stories in a row: "Shuttle astronauts complete spacewalk", "shuttle astronauts inspect tiles", "shuttle Discovery meets space station", "shuttle Discovery set for launch". (paraphrased) Clearly, the first story in the list is the most recent and, were I looking for news on the Discovery, I'd probably click that one. Even if I really liked the Times' coverage of the rendez-vous, I'm not likely to read that article again if a new one has been posted. Does that mean I've "lost interest" in the shuttle?
The results seem drawn from traffic at a particular Hungarian portal and might not have any generalized relevance.
Ease of navigation seems important but not addressed. If stories "fall off" the homepage after 36 hours, it would make it look like people were less interested. (Or, really, the fact that some stories are highlit on the front page makes it look like people are more interested than they really are.)
The missing thing is the ability to easily add meta-data to emails, etc. I don't care what flag the sender sets; I should be able to one-key categorize something as important, not important, whatever. Likewise I want to be able to add stick-note like comments for myself but add them to other people's messages. I'd like to be able to categorize an email not just by the sender's name or email address, but by the hat the sender was wearing (i.e., friend, coworker, godparent of my kid, whatever).
You can do some of this with folders but so far it seems pretty clunky to me.
Of course, none of this seems poised to take over the world, considering how hard it is to get people just to use descriptive subject lines.
No offense, but I don't plan on sending my children to a public school, ever. I'd even like to avoid private schools, since they often have religious agendas.
No offense taken. But be warned that just about every private school is far more aggressive than any public school on these issues. What's more, since attendance at a private school is something you choose (and you sign a contract), the strictures of, say, the First Amendment simply do not apply. A private school can restrict student speech (assuming the restriction is in the contract or the student handbook) with absolutely no recourse for the student except to choose another school.
... is how this increase in surveillance is coupled to a decrease in transparency:
[The proposed legislation will:]
Eliminate the current legal requirement saying the Justice Department must publish a public "notice of the actual number of communications interceptions" every year. That notice currently also must disclose the "maximum capacity" required to accommodate all of the legally authorized taps that government agencies will "conduct and use simultaneously."
Now, if they have nothing to hide, why are they so worried that we know how often this tool is used?
If privacy is dead, then transparency is our only hope. But the current mood in our government is to trust no one -- not a single citizen. Yet somehow, anyone in law enforcement or homeland security is deemed automatically trustworthy.
Denying officials access to these systems would be like denying them access to certain buildings.
No, the procedures in place (including getting a warrant) already give them access. This is more like the FBI saying, "Everyone must change their locks so our superskeleton key can open them... and you should pay for the new lock, not us."
If people hate you for your post, that's sad and a poor reflection on them. For myself, I regret that you see things the way you do, because it means one more step along the very dark path we are traveling.
You are a person. You are not a citizen. (These are different things, despite your apparent conflation of them.) One way to tell? You can't vote.
You might not like this reasoning but it is not inconsistent. And regardless of your hyperbole, the vast majority of 14-year-olds are not ready to be full and productive members of society. Are the majority of 18-year-olds? 35-year-olds? I don't know -- but more in each case than for the 14-year-olds.
If there were a nice simple metric, then we could just administer a test and let the people who "pass" take their place as full citizens, with full responsibility for themselves and full rights. (And, by the way, it's the responsibility thing that in fact demands the lesser collection of rights for children.) There is no simple metric and no test -- and who would get to write it or grade it, anyway? So there is an arbitrary cut-off line which, through the twists of history and sociology, is set at 18 in the US. It's not optimal but it's also not hell.
In a world where real tyranny is infecting real nations and people are at actual risk of oppression or worse, this kind of carping just nettles me. Sorry.
Guess again, counselor. You don't "lose" your rights because they're violated.
True but irrelevant. These students aren't "losing" rights by going to school. They don't have those rights to begin with. At least, that is the interpretation the school will take, and it's backed up by both laws and court decisions.
A thing a lot of students don't like to hear is, they simply are not accorded the same status and rights as a majority-age citizen. I know a lot who find that autocratic and unfair, which is (ironically) their right.
On the other hand, it's clear that a child at birth is not actualized enough to make informed and healthy choices. So no matter how much we "liberate" children, there will be a lower end to it. Is 18 the right bound? I don't know. It seems to work more or less for most kids.
Disclaimer: I am a high school teacher so of course I can be expected to side with The Man on this.
Yes, but the syllables don't then group into words; nor are they made of letters.
Clearly, since language is at least 50,000 years old and alphabetic writing is something like 3,000 years old, the spoken tongue did not evolve to match the written one. And the constructs of the written language are not found in the spoken one.
That's all I was saying.
There is, apparently, also some fMRI research that indicates that different brain structures are involved when composing something to be spoken as opposed to be written. But I don't have any good sources on that.
... That the written language "should" reflect the spoken language. We make the unconscious (but unsupportable) connection that "written English" and "spoken English" are the same language, but they're not. They just happen to have easy mappings -- not as easy as these folks want, apparently, but nonetheless, not too difficult.
For example, when you speak, what do you do to separate words form one another? The surprising answer is, nothing. Take a tape of ordinary conversation. Run it through an oscilloscope. Look for the breaks. You won't find them. We "blur" words together in sentences. (I suspect this is why anyone speaking a different tongue always sounds like he/she is speaking very quickly... your brain hasn't learned to put the "spaces" back in by context.)
And that's for words. It's worse for letters. In an oscillograph of the word "bat", you won't see discrete units for "b", "a", and "t". It's just one sound. Heck, the "letters" we pronounce depend on what comes before or after.
The people behind this movement also act as if pronunciation is fixed, while of course, it is not. Some of the "nonsense" words they offer up as looking the same but not rhyming did rhyme, once. Then the spoken language evolved and, since the written language is considerably less plastic (an advantage, I would maintain), the oddness is frozen in.
Finally, when we adopt spelling that "looks like" the pronunciation... whose pronunciation will it look like? Bostoners and New Yorkers and Atlanteans pronounce many words in different ways. Who gets to be the official "correct" one?
Moving in favor of spoken English won't help literacy. I suspect, albeit without proof, that such a move would hurt it.
Protecting the homeland doesn't have involve illegality, despite the current efforts of the administration to convince you otherwise. Warrants aren't technicalities; they're safeguards of freedom. Legislation (as opposed to executive order) is not surrender; it's the linchpin of democracy. Oversight by the other two branches isn't a handicapping of homeland security -- it's at the heart of what we're fighting to protect.
There are legitimate tools available that preserve both the efficiency of the investigators and the rights of citizens. Just because the current yahoos in power are too lazy to use them, relying instead on a neo-monarchist theory of the "unitary executive", doesn't mean we should abandon several centuries of the rule of law and the habit of democracy.
It's not about the terrorists, it's about us and what sort of people we want to be. What has been offered to the American people is a false dichotomy between safety and liberty, used to lend authenticity to a failed paradigm. We are stronger than that. We are smarter than that. We are better than that.
Speak no ill of the dead, eh? I don't subscribe, sorry. If you're a rat-bastard in life, you don't suddenly become not a rat-bastard just by dying. If his loved ones have to live through the opprobation of the community, well, maybe he should have weighed that in before beginning this whole journey.
You see, it's all well and good for those in power to spy on ordinary citizens, to tape them or sift their data. But apparently turnabout is not fair play, because the same powers cannot abide anyone watching them. Of course, really, public servants should expect to be watched even more, and every citizen should have the right to tape their interactions with the Powers that Be.
That said, this is probably more a local power trip than a big dastardly conspiracy. What worries me is, these attitudes are percolating throughout society.
It burns them everytime evidence gets thrown out on 'technicalities'.
You'd think that. But in fact some of the strongest supporters of suspect rights (like reading the Miranda rights, etc.) are law enforcement associations. Why? Because (a) they actually believe in all that crazy land-of-the-free stuff and (b) they know that having (and following!) constraints on the police power helps keep them from being seen as -- and from becoming -- the Bad Guys. The positive impacts of being respected by the community, rather than feared by it, far outweigh the occasional slip in the system. Anyone who looks knows that effective policing requires community support.
There was a case in the early 1990s when the Supreme Court appeared to weaken Miranda rights (shamefully, I can't recall the case or a cite for it). Some of the most outspoken criticism came from a national association of sheriffs.
It's not about "letting criminals go". It's about having a fair and legitimate system for ascertaining who is a criminal, and it's about constraining the police power to prevent the abuse of actually innocent citizens. Or to put it more briefly, it's about that whole "innocent until proven guilty" jazz, plus that "due process of law" business.
In other words, it's basically about the meaning of America.
I wasn't taking anyone's side on that issue. But you made an inconsistent charge: If the protesters believed the threat was real, then they weren't lying. It's as simple as that. If Bush believed the intelligence, then he wasn't lying either. In both cases it might be reasonable to level charges of gross incompetence or even of criminal negligence -- but not lying.
Of course you don't get off scott-free for putting your fingers in your ears and shouting "la-la-la, I can't hear you!". Of course you have a responsibility to make sure that your belief accords with the turth and that you have good reason to think that it does. But if you cherry-pick your sources and construct an over-precise and fragile chain of evidence -- if you willfully ignore people because they're telling you something you don't want to hear -- then at root, you don't believe the thing you're asserting. If you're afraid to look at the alternate arguments, then at your core, you don't believe what you're saying.
One of the founders of Greenpeace has now come out and said that Greenpeace's protests and statements about nuclear power where[sic] all wrong. AKA they lied but they probably did believe their lie.
To tell a lie is wrong. To be wrong is not necessarily to tell a lie. The protesters might have been misinformed. You can't lie and believe what you say... the worst is that you can tell an untruth.
That's only true if all the ice was in the water (to displace it). What about if it's above the water? That ice will contribute to sea levels.
Actually, no. Assuming that the ice is made of water that (when melted) has the same density as the original water, then the water level will remain unchanged when the ice melts.
Awhile back I wrote a brief handout for my AP Physics course that goes through a proof of this. (There are others, probably clearer.) Of course, there are simplifications. For example, I assume the water densities are the same (but glacial ice is freshwater and so melts to a lower density) and that the melting of the ice doesn't impact the temperature of the water enough to influence its density.
More important that all of that, of course, is the fact that while the arctic ice pack sits on water, the antarctic one sits largely on land... and that Greenland also supports a significant ice pack. Since these are supported by the land (not buoyant force), when they melt, they would significantly raise the waterlevel globally.
We don't have a republic here in the UK - we have a monarchy. But we still have a representative democracy.
Hmmm. Do you? I'm not trying to hurl firebombs but it's an interesting question. Can there be a monarch and yet the people rule? Isn't there a contradiction at the heart of the system, then?
"Republic" comes from "res publica", literally, the "people's thing". It is meant to denote that the state belongs to the people, as opposed to the king (monarchy) or the rich (plutocracy) etc.
"Democracy" in turn means "rule by the people".
They are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, every democracy has to be a republic, as the people cannot rule a thing that is not their own.
It's time to leave behind the 5th-grade civics textbook that incorrectly put repbulics and democracies in opposition just because it served someone's ideology or sense of aesthetics back in the 1950s...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, it's worse than that. The quasars are different distances away. How do we figure out how far away they are? By measuring the redshift in the frequencies of their spectra. What do we use for that? The relativistic Doppler formula. What is the key constant in the Doppler formula? The speed of light. Actualy, it's even worse, because it's not the naive Doppler formula but one that includes cosmological effects which are not independently observable.
In other words, the distance of the quasars -- and the frequency their light "should" be -- are highly model-dependent.
There's less to this story than meets the eye.
which plays off the first quote (by Herodotus?).
And of course, Sir Winston did write it.
The missing thing is the ability to easily add meta-data to emails, etc. I don't care what flag the sender sets; I should be able to one-key categorize something as important, not important, whatever. Likewise I want to be able to add stick-note like comments for myself but add them to other people's messages. I'd like to be able to categorize an email not just by the sender's name or email address, but by the hat the sender was wearing (i.e., friend, coworker, godparent of my kid, whatever).
You can do some of this with folders but so far it seems pretty clunky to me.
Of course, none of this seems poised to take over the world, considering how hard it is to get people just to use descriptive subject lines.
You might like Nelson Email Organizer, which does something similar.
No offense taken. But be warned that just about every private school is far more aggressive than any public school on these issues. What's more, since attendance at a private school is something you choose (and you sign a contract), the strictures of, say, the First Amendment simply do not apply. A private school can restrict student speech (assuming the restriction is in the contract or the student handbook) with absolutely no recourse for the student except to choose another school.
Now, if they have nothing to hide, why are they so worried that we know how often this tool is used?
If privacy is dead, then transparency is our only hope. But the current mood in our government is to trust no one -- not a single citizen. Yet somehow, anyone in law enforcement or homeland security is deemed automatically trustworthy.
No, the procedures in place (including getting a warrant) already give them access. This is more like the FBI saying, "Everyone must change their locks so our superskeleton key can open them... and you should pay for the new lock, not us."
If people hate you for your post, that's sad and a poor reflection on them. For myself, I regret that you see things the way you do, because it means one more step along the very dark path we are traveling.
You are a person. You are not a citizen. (These are different things, despite your apparent conflation of them.) One way to tell? You can't vote.
You might not like this reasoning but it is not inconsistent. And regardless of your hyperbole, the vast majority of 14-year-olds are not ready to be full and productive members of society. Are the majority of 18-year-olds? 35-year-olds? I don't know -- but more in each case than for the 14-year-olds.
If there were a nice simple metric, then we could just administer a test and let the people who "pass" take their place as full citizens, with full responsibility for themselves and full rights. (And, by the way, it's the responsibility thing that in fact demands the lesser collection of rights for children.) There is no simple metric and no test -- and who would get to write it or grade it, anyway? So there is an arbitrary cut-off line which, through the twists of history and sociology, is set at 18 in the US. It's not optimal but it's also not hell.
In a world where real tyranny is infecting real nations and people are at actual risk of oppression or worse, this kind of carping just nettles me. Sorry.
True but irrelevant. These students aren't "losing" rights by going to school. They don't have those rights to begin with. At least, that is the interpretation the school will take, and it's backed up by both laws and court decisions.
A thing a lot of students don't like to hear is, they simply are not accorded the same status and rights as a majority-age citizen. I know a lot who find that autocratic and unfair, which is (ironically) their right.
On the other hand, it's clear that a child at birth is not actualized enough to make informed and healthy choices. So no matter how much we "liberate" children, there will be a lower end to it. Is 18 the right bound? I don't know. It seems to work more or less for most kids.
Disclaimer: I am a high school teacher so of course I can be expected to side with The Man on this.
Yes, but the syllables don't then group into words; nor are they made of letters.
Clearly, since language is at least 50,000 years old and alphabetic writing is something like 3,000 years old, the spoken tongue did not evolve to match the written one. And the constructs of the written language are not found in the spoken one.
That's all I was saying.
There is, apparently, also some fMRI research that indicates that different brain structures are involved when composing something to be spoken as opposed to be written. But I don't have any good sources on that.
Wasn't eliminating words the modus operandi of Newspeak?
... That the written language "should" reflect the spoken language. We make the unconscious (but unsupportable) connection that "written English" and "spoken English" are the same language, but they're not. They just happen to have easy mappings -- not as easy as these folks want, apparently, but nonetheless, not too difficult.
For example, when you speak, what do you do to separate words form one another? The surprising answer is, nothing. Take a tape of ordinary conversation. Run it through an oscilloscope. Look for the breaks. You won't find them. We "blur" words together in sentences. (I suspect this is why anyone speaking a different tongue always sounds like he/she is speaking very quickly... your brain hasn't learned to put the "spaces" back in by context.)
And that's for words. It's worse for letters. In an oscillograph of the word "bat", you won't see discrete units for "b", "a", and "t". It's just one sound. Heck, the "letters" we pronounce depend on what comes before or after.
The people behind this movement also act as if pronunciation is fixed, while of course, it is not. Some of the "nonsense" words they offer up as looking the same but not rhyming did rhyme, once. Then the spoken language evolved and, since the written language is considerably less plastic (an advantage, I would maintain), the oddness is frozen in.
Finally, when we adopt spelling that "looks like" the pronunciation... whose pronunciation will it look like? Bostoners and New Yorkers and Atlanteans pronounce many words in different ways. Who gets to be the official "correct" one?
Moving in favor of spoken English won't help literacy. I suspect, albeit without proof, that such a move would hurt it.
Protecting the homeland doesn't have involve illegality, despite the current efforts of the administration to convince you otherwise. Warrants aren't technicalities; they're safeguards of freedom. Legislation (as opposed to executive order) is not surrender; it's the linchpin of democracy. Oversight by the other two branches isn't a handicapping of homeland security -- it's at the heart of what we're fighting to protect.
There are legitimate tools available that preserve both the efficiency of the investigators and the rights of citizens. Just because the current yahoos in power are too lazy to use them, relying instead on a neo-monarchist theory of the "unitary executive", doesn't mean we should abandon several centuries of the rule of law and the habit of democracy.
It's not about the terrorists, it's about us and what sort of people we want to be. What has been offered to the American people is a false dichotomy between safety and liberty, used to lend authenticity to a failed paradigm. We are stronger than that. We are smarter than that. We are better than that.
Speak no ill of the dead, eh? I don't subscribe, sorry. If you're a rat-bastard in life, you don't suddenly become not a rat-bastard just by dying. If his loved ones have to live through the opprobation of the community, well, maybe he should have weighed that in before beginning this whole journey.
Yes, we call it the Quayle Shield...
You see, it's all well and good for those in power to spy on ordinary citizens, to tape them or sift their data. But apparently turnabout is not fair play, because the same powers cannot abide anyone watching them. Of course, really, public servants should expect to be watched even more, and every citizen should have the right to tape their interactions with the Powers that Be.
That said, this is probably more a local power trip than a big dastardly conspiracy. What worries me is, these attitudes are percolating throughout society.
You'd think that. But in fact some of the strongest supporters of suspect rights (like reading the Miranda rights, etc.) are law enforcement associations. Why? Because (a) they actually believe in all that crazy land-of-the-free stuff and (b) they know that having (and following!) constraints on the police power helps keep them from being seen as -- and from becoming -- the Bad Guys. The positive impacts of being respected by the community, rather than feared by it, far outweigh the occasional slip in the system. Anyone who looks knows that effective policing requires community support.
There was a case in the early 1990s when the Supreme Court appeared to weaken Miranda rights (shamefully, I can't recall the case or a cite for it). Some of the most outspoken criticism came from a national association of sheriffs.
It's not about "letting criminals go". It's about having a fair and legitimate system for ascertaining who is a criminal, and it's about constraining the police power to prevent the abuse of actually innocent citizens. Or to put it more briefly, it's about that whole "innocent until proven guilty" jazz, plus that "due process of law" business.
In other words, it's basically about the meaning of America.
I wasn't taking anyone's side on that issue. But you made an inconsistent charge: If the protesters believed the threat was real, then they weren't lying. It's as simple as that. If Bush believed the intelligence, then he wasn't lying either. In both cases it might be reasonable to level charges of gross incompetence or even of criminal negligence -- but not lying.
Of course you don't get off scott-free for putting your fingers in your ears and shouting "la-la-la, I can't hear you!". Of course you have a responsibility to make sure that your belief accords with the turth and that you have good reason to think that it does. But if you cherry-pick your sources and construct an over-precise and fragile chain of evidence -- if you willfully ignore people because they're telling you something you don't want to hear -- then at root, you don't believe the thing you're asserting. If you're afraid to look at the alternate arguments, then at your core, you don't believe what you're saying.
And then you are lying.
Fair enough. That's not how it read to me, but it's a reasonable interpretation, in which case, my apologies to the GPP.
To tell a lie is wrong. To be wrong is not necessarily to tell a lie. The protesters might have been misinformed. You can't lie and believe what you say... the worst is that you can tell an untruth.
More important that all of that, of course, is the fact that while the arctic ice pack sits on water, the antarctic one sits largely on land ... and that Greenland also supports a significant ice pack. Since these are supported by the land (not buoyant force), when they melt, they would significantly raise the waterlevel globally.
Hmmm. Do you? I'm not trying to hurl firebombs but it's an interesting question. Can there be a monarch and yet the people rule? Isn't there a contradiction at the heart of the system, then?
"Republic" comes from "res publica", literally, the "people's thing". It is meant to denote that the state belongs to the people, as opposed to the king (monarchy) or the rich (plutocracy) etc.
"Democracy" in turn means "rule by the people".
They are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, every democracy has to be a republic, as the people cannot rule a thing that is not their own.
It's time to leave behind the 5th-grade civics textbook that incorrectly put repbulics and democracies in opposition just because it served someone's ideology or sense of aesthetics back in the 1950s...
Wait. There's a rest of the world? When did that get here?