There are a lot of ways to disprove evolution. In fact, there are so many ways of disproving evolution that I think the most compelling evidence FOR evolution is the lack of evidence against it.
- You could find DNA that doesn't make sense, like a whole new unique sequence in a species that's supposed to be related to some other species that lack this sequence. That would disprove evolution. But no, all DNA that we've found makes sense. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK3O6KYPmEw&feature=related
Compare the computer code in an iPhone 1 with an iPhone 2 with an iPhone 3 with an iPhone 4. What if you compared the code in in iPhone with the code in an iPad? You would most certainly see a high commonality of code. Would you argue that the progression of that code is the result of natural selection acting on random mutation? Or would you recognize that the designers of the iPhone/iPad chose to take existing code and use it in another design.
Yes, common "code" could indicate a common designer, but you're missing my point. My point is that there is no DNA anywhere that doesn't make sense from an evolutionary perspective.
Homology of body plans and DNA are explained equally by common ancestor and common designer, the homology itself cannot tell you which one is correct. You need a mechanism that can be tested. We can observe scientists in a lab designing new species of organisms, mainly plants and single-celled organisms right now, but attempts to replicate natural selection acting on random mutation have failed to demonstrate anything more than variation within a species, the Lenski E. coli long-term evolution experiment being the most famous example.
Which is, of course, due to lack of time. I don't really get this change-within-species argument. According to the theory of evolution, there's no difference between a change that preserves interfertility and one that doesn't. If you think there is some mechanism that somehow prevents evolution from going "too far" and gradually forming another species, then you have the burden of proof. Why would that rule exist? How would it work?
Wonderful example of yet another case where evolution provides the best explanation. What does it have to do with anything?
- If you find ONE animal of the wrong type in the wrong geological layer, evolution is wrong. This brings vast opportunities to creationists - they only have to find one to disprove the entire theory of eveolution! But no, ALL fossils ever found are found in exactly the layer where you'd expect them.
Explain the Cambrian Explosion via Darwinian mechanisms. Darwin himself recognized it was a legitimate and serious objection to his theory since his mechanism could only progress gradually and the Cambrian Explosion happened far too quickly. Virtually all the major body plans show up at once with no transitional forms. His explanation was that the fossil record was incomplete, 150 years later and the problem has only gotten worse.
To get an idea of what happened in the Cambrian explosion, imagine yourself on one goal line of a Football field. That line represents the first fossil, a microscopic, single-celled organism. Now start marching down the field. You pass the twenty-yard line, the forty-yard line, midfield, and continue steadily toward the other goal line. You come to the sixteen-yard line on the far end of the field, and now you see the appearance of some sponge
There are a lot of ways to disprove evolution. In fact, there are so many ways of disproving evolution that I think the most compelling evidence FOR evolution is the lack of evidence against it.
- You could find DNA that doesn't make sense, like a whole new unique sequence in a species that's supposed to be related to some other species that lack this sequence. That would disprove evolution. But no, all DNA that we've found makes sense. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK3O6KYPmEw&feature=related
- If you find ONE animal of the wrong type in the wrong geological layer, evolution is wrong. This brings vast opportunities to creationists - they only have to find one to disprove the entire theory of eveolution! But no, ALL fossils ever found are found in exactly the layer where you'd expect them.
- You could find some body function of an animal or plant that could not have arisen by means of evolution - much as I hate the term irreducible complexity, they sort of would have a point if only they could show a decent example. Which of course they cannot - eyes, ears and so on can plausibly and logically be constructed by gradual improvements.
- You could live on a world whose timescale does not allow for evolution (if the Earth was proven to be less than 10 000 years old, evolution would be wrong). Again, it turns out to be 4.5 billion years old which is plenty of time for evolution to occur.
- You could prove that evolution is impossible by artificial means - then it'd be impossible by natural means as well. Unfortunately for their case, breeding of dogs and other animals has been proven to work for thousands of years.
I'm sure I've forgotten plenty of ways to disprove evolution but I can safely say that I'd be able to refute each and every one of them.
This. I'm not even that young - at 28, I've lived through 56k modems and Napster and all that stuff. But nowadays, bandwidth just isn't a big deal. Having access to all of Spotify's library all the time is.
I've downloaded a fair bit over the years, but streaming is the first thing since CDs that has made me pay for music again because it's even simpler than downloading. No connecting to peers, no waiting for the song to download, no unzipping rars, nothing of the sort. Just search for a song and click play. Works on any computer or phone with the Spotify program installed, I just need to log in with my username and password. It's especially great when you're at a party or hanging around with friends who want to hear a particular song.
I feel the whole debate about DRM and mp3 and ogg vorbis and bitrates that I used to care about just isn't worth it anymore. I don't care about owning my music or building a collection, I just want to listen to music, and Spotify lets me do that in the most convenient way possible.
You must have had really poor teachers. There are SO many ways of making chemistry fun, and not all of them involve hard-to-get chemicals. You can start out with just boiling water on a bunsen burner to teach him some safety procedures and tell him about the different states of matter. Sounds boring? My 12-year-olds loved it. Molecule models are fun to build. You can do all sorts of fun tricks with indicators of pH (like water that turns red, then transparent, then red again). You can blow up a hydrogen balloon (use a match on a stick!) and if you want to make it extra fun add some aluminum or iron powder in the balloon. Mix an alcohol with an acid and get an ester. Soap bubbles are fun. Baking soda and water is fun. Lemon batteries are fun. Stuff that burns is always fun, no matter what. Stuff that flies is always fun, no matter what. Even trite knowledge like the periodic table can be made fun with rhymes or the like.
The Internet is your friend. Check out some Youtube videos. Ask on a teachers' forum. Search the web. The tricky part is seldom finding fun things to do, but rather to do them in the right order and connect the experiment to the actual chapter you're teaching. You also have to remember that abstract material like protons, neutrons and electrons can be challenging to a young kid. Check out a curriculum to get an idea about what subjects to teach at what age.
Another example: I once stepped in as a swim coach for kids, and didn't have any stopwatch, so I downloaded an app for my smartphone. Didn't work. The operation of a stopwatch requires you to press a button with your thumb while your eyes are focused on something else. Having to look at the screen to see where that button is defeats its purpose. A button is at least one order of magnitude more accurate in this case.
Touchscreens are great when you can reasonably assume that the user's full concentration will be at the screen. Other times, buttons are far better. Buttons have the additional advantage of staying in the same place, which means you can usually find it by feeling your way forward. This can work extremely well, for our brains are wired to remember certain oft-repeated movements of the fingers. A guitar player doesn't have to look at the strings to play, and you can probably tie your shoelace without looking.
In the case of Game of Thrones, there's another reason: money and convenience.
Game of Thrones is mostly being filmed in Belfast due to good facilities, tax breaks and partial funding from Northern Ireland Screen. During casting they specifically looked for local actors. There are a few exceptions such as Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage, but most of the other actors (especially the children) are British. One of the most important reasons is availability: when you're planning a multiple-year series you don't want to engage actors that are likely to drop out due to other jobs. Actors already living in Britain will be far more likely to be available for subsequent seasons than actors based in Hollywood.
LFS is a great learning process that shows you exactly WHAT makes your Linux tick, and what packages depend on eachother. Anyone who uses Linux should do it at least once.
No. Anyone who works with Linux, develops for Linux, is a Linux sysadmin or just happens to be interested should do it at least once. Then there's us who prefer distros of the more automated type (I'd rather avoid terms like "beginner-friendly", "user-friendly" or "bloated" but you probably know what I mean). People who use some flavour of Linux simply because it fits our needs. We shouldn't go anywhere near LFS.
Cars now may be junk, but at least they're safe junk. You get airbags, deformation zones, traction control, ABS and so on. Even small cars today are much better than the large ones of old. Plus you get a mileage that old cars couldn't dream of.
A study from the recruiting firm Manpower was recently published in Swedish newspapers. It listed HR manager as the number 1 job people want. "Nobody ever wants to do it" seems like quite an incorrect statement.
I strongly recommend reading the abstract, it's very descriptive and easy to understand I wish more abstracts were like that.
By the way, what's the deal with describing them simply as "astronomers"? Better than the all-too-often-used "scientists" I suppose, but wouldn't it be even nicer to write "a team of astronomers led by Saul Rappaport from M.I.T."? Scientists are people with names, and the more we use them the more we raise the status of pursuing a scientific career. Science needs more superstars!
I see a lot of comments bashing the overhead costs of different charity organisations. Granted, some of it might be unnecessary, but not all of it. The logistics needed for a relief operation in a catastrophe site is a huge and difficult challenge, and only a sufficiently large and professional organisation can handle it. You need materials, food, shelter, trucks, people with different skill sets, lawyers and diplomats to ensure the cooperation of the local government, and so on. It can be quite chaotic, and of course it's going to be inefficient form time to time - but it helps. Without the people who are handling the economics and the logistics, there would be no food or shelter for the workers in the field to hand out.
Five years ago Linux was sort of cool to use, required a bit of hacking, and provided a desktop full of eye-candy. The cons were that Wine didn't work so well if you wanted to use Windows programs, there weren't any good drivers for the latest hardware and you often ended up with some non-functioning parts (suspend/hibernate, peripherals, printers, 3D graphics...).
Nowadays the exact same things are still true. Wine still doesn't work reliably. There still aren't drivers for the newest hardware. There are very few Linux games compared to Windows games. Photoshop, MS Office and Outlook still aren't available for Linux.
It's an uphill struggle to keep Linux up-to-date. I'm starting to think it's probably never going to get there - and life is too short to keep tinkering with my own computer. It's not fun any longer when you're still facing the same problems year after year. And I know most of these problems aren't Linux' fault per se but rather lack of third-party support, but that doesn't matter - I'm the one who has to deal with it anyway.
That, and the fact that Windows doesn't suck anymore.
I agree to this. Make a distribution that works like Windows 7 except:
1) Free (as in speech and beer)
2) Huge loads of great free software available
3) Super easy software installation via GUI interface or command line
4) Faster and lighter on resources
5) More possibilities to customize everything
6) Rotating 3D cube! Yay!
7) Command line still available for advanced users
8) Nice online community of friendly people eager to help
Ubuntu used to be this distribution. Which distro comes closest now?
Be sure to check out Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It's like Nineteen Eighty-Four but with a private industry spin, foreseeing things like flatscreens, reality shows, censorship... Great stuff.
If services start using Facebook as sole login credential - which Answers.com apparently hasn't done, but Spotify, for instance, has - what's there to prevent millions of users to register accounts like bjsjfo88803 or e93u9f39f for the sole purpose of logging in to other sites? I already do this for Youtube.
Thing is, oil will very soon be prohibitively expensive (we're talking a few decades, tops) and even coal will start to become scarce within a relatively short time span of only a few hundred years. Short I say? Yes. The earth's been around for some 4 billion years and we've been using up its stored resources in a miniscule amount of time.
And when that time comes, well, we'd damn well better have the techontopian future you're talking about or the problem is going to solve itself, likely in a very unpleasant way (starvation, war etc). We don't have a choice - no matter how inferior the renewable energy sources seem compared to fossil fuels, they're our only hope in the long run. The faster we can make the transition, the better.
"He'd always been frightened of ending up as one of those child prodigies that never amounted to anything and spent the rest of their lives boasting about how cool they'd been at age ten. But then most adult geniuses never amounted to anything either. There were probably like a thousand people as intelligent as Einstein for every actual Einstein in history. Because they hadn't gotten their hands on the one thing you absolutely needed to achieve greatness. They'd never found an important problem."
From Harry Potter and the methods of rationality by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
I frequently host conference calls with people from other parts of the world. Every time I schedule them it takes something like two minutes for me to check the local time for everyone. It's a minor inconvenience, sure, but nothing I can't manage, it's just a matter looking it up. Same thing goes for traveling across time zones - I mean, you have to buy tickets, wait in line to check in the baggage, wait in line for the security check, wait for the gate to open, sit on a plane for several hours, and then to everything again in reverse order on your destination. Adjusting your clock, on the other hand, only takes a few seconds to do.
Time zones are good. They were invented for a reason, and those reasons still stand. In fact, in China where the whole country runs on the same time for political reasons, the Western parts of the country has adopted an unofficial local time that better matches the sun's movement.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it was pretty obvious that it was obvious. "Slide-to-unlock"? Aargh! The stupidity of the patent system is staggering.
There are a lot of ways to disprove evolution. In fact, there are so many ways of disproving evolution that I think the most compelling evidence FOR evolution is the lack of evidence against it. - You could find DNA that doesn't make sense, like a whole new unique sequence in a species that's supposed to be related to some other species that lack this sequence. That would disprove evolution. But no, all DNA that we've found makes sense. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK3O6KYPmEw&feature=related
Compare the computer code in an iPhone 1 with an iPhone 2 with an iPhone 3 with an iPhone 4. What if you compared the code in in iPhone with the code in an iPad? You would most certainly see a high commonality of code. Would you argue that the progression of that code is the result of natural selection acting on random mutation? Or would you recognize that the designers of the iPhone/iPad chose to take existing code and use it in another design.
Yes, common "code" could indicate a common designer, but you're missing my point. My point is that there is no DNA anywhere that doesn't make sense from an evolutionary perspective.
Homology of body plans and DNA are explained equally by common ancestor and common designer, the homology itself cannot tell you which one is correct. You need a mechanism that can be tested. We can observe scientists in a lab designing new species of organisms, mainly plants and single-celled organisms right now, but attempts to replicate natural selection acting on random mutation have failed to demonstrate anything more than variation within a species, the Lenski E. coli long-term evolution experiment being the most famous example.
Which is, of course, due to lack of time. I don't really get this change-within-species argument. According to the theory of evolution, there's no difference between a change that preserves interfertility and one that doesn't. If you think there is some mechanism that somehow prevents evolution from going "too far" and gradually forming another species, then you have the burden of proof. Why would that rule exist? How would it work?
I did not see it mentioned in the video, correct me if I am wrong, but mice and humans share a 60-85% DNA commonality. (Depends on your definition and who you cite.) http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/OF-MICE-AND-MEN-Striking-similarities-at-the-2748350.php
Wonderful example of yet another case where evolution provides the best explanation. What does it have to do with anything?
- If you find ONE animal of the wrong type in the wrong geological layer, evolution is wrong. This brings vast opportunities to creationists - they only have to find one to disprove the entire theory of eveolution! But no, ALL fossils ever found are found in exactly the layer where you'd expect them.
Explain the Cambrian Explosion via Darwinian mechanisms. Darwin himself recognized it was a legitimate and serious objection to his theory since his mechanism could only progress gradually and the Cambrian Explosion happened far too quickly. Virtually all the major body plans show up at once with no transitional forms. His explanation was that the fossil record was incomplete, 150 years later and the problem has only gotten worse. To get an idea of what happened in the Cambrian explosion, imagine yourself on one goal line of a Football field. That line represents the first fossil, a microscopic, single-celled organism. Now start marching down the field. You pass the twenty-yard line, the forty-yard line, midfield, and continue steadily toward the other goal line. You come to the sixteen-yard line on the far end of the field, and now you see the appearance of some sponge
There are a lot of ways to disprove evolution. In fact, there are so many ways of disproving evolution that I think the most compelling evidence FOR evolution is the lack of evidence against it.
- You could find DNA that doesn't make sense, like a whole new unique sequence in a species that's supposed to be related to some other species that lack this sequence. That would disprove evolution. But no, all DNA that we've found makes sense. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK3O6KYPmEw&feature=related
- If you find ONE animal of the wrong type in the wrong geological layer, evolution is wrong. This brings vast opportunities to creationists - they only have to find one to disprove the entire theory of eveolution! But no, ALL fossils ever found are found in exactly the layer where you'd expect them.
- You could find some body function of an animal or plant that could not have arisen by means of evolution - much as I hate the term irreducible complexity, they sort of would have a point if only they could show a decent example. Which of course they cannot - eyes, ears and so on can plausibly and logically be constructed by gradual improvements.
- You could live on a world whose timescale does not allow for evolution (if the Earth was proven to be less than 10 000 years old, evolution would be wrong). Again, it turns out to be 4.5 billion years old which is plenty of time for evolution to occur.
- You could prove that evolution is impossible by artificial means - then it'd be impossible by natural means as well. Unfortunately for their case, breeding of dogs and other animals has been proven to work for thousands of years.
I'm sure I've forgotten plenty of ways to disprove evolution but I can safely say that I'd be able to refute each and every one of them.
This. I'm not even that young - at 28, I've lived through 56k modems and Napster and all that stuff. But nowadays, bandwidth just isn't a big deal. Having access to all of Spotify's library all the time is.
I've downloaded a fair bit over the years, but streaming is the first thing since CDs that has made me pay for music again because it's even simpler than downloading. No connecting to peers, no waiting for the song to download, no unzipping rars, nothing of the sort. Just search for a song and click play. Works on any computer or phone with the Spotify program installed, I just need to log in with my username and password. It's especially great when you're at a party or hanging around with friends who want to hear a particular song.
I feel the whole debate about DRM and mp3 and ogg vorbis and bitrates that I used to care about just isn't worth it anymore. I don't care about owning my music or building a collection, I just want to listen to music, and Spotify lets me do that in the most convenient way possible.
You must have had really poor teachers. There are SO many ways of making chemistry fun, and not all of them involve hard-to-get chemicals. You can start out with just boiling water on a bunsen burner to teach him some safety procedures and tell him about the different states of matter. Sounds boring? My 12-year-olds loved it. Molecule models are fun to build. You can do all sorts of fun tricks with indicators of pH (like water that turns red, then transparent, then red again). You can blow up a hydrogen balloon (use a match on a stick!) and if you want to make it extra fun add some aluminum or iron powder in the balloon. Mix an alcohol with an acid and get an ester. Soap bubbles are fun. Baking soda and water is fun. Lemon batteries are fun. Stuff that burns is always fun, no matter what. Stuff that flies is always fun, no matter what. Even trite knowledge like the periodic table can be made fun with rhymes or the like.
The Internet is your friend. Check out some Youtube videos. Ask on a teachers' forum. Search the web. The tricky part is seldom finding fun things to do, but rather to do them in the right order and connect the experiment to the actual chapter you're teaching. You also have to remember that abstract material like protons, neutrons and electrons can be challenging to a young kid. Check out a curriculum to get an idea about what subjects to teach at what age.
Another example: I once stepped in as a swim coach for kids, and didn't have any stopwatch, so I downloaded an app for my smartphone. Didn't work. The operation of a stopwatch requires you to press a button with your thumb while your eyes are focused on something else. Having to look at the screen to see where that button is defeats its purpose. A button is at least one order of magnitude more accurate in this case.
Touchscreens are great when you can reasonably assume that the user's full concentration will be at the screen. Other times, buttons are far better. Buttons have the additional advantage of staying in the same place, which means you can usually find it by feeling your way forward. This can work extremely well, for our brains are wired to remember certain oft-repeated movements of the fingers. A guitar player doesn't have to look at the strings to play, and you can probably tie your shoelace without looking.
Here's an excellent article on the future of interactive tools: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/
Everyone knows that math is just applied philosophy.
I stand corrected. Thanks.
In the case of Game of Thrones, there's another reason: money and convenience.
Game of Thrones is mostly being filmed in Belfast due to good facilities, tax breaks and partial funding from Northern Ireland Screen. During casting they specifically looked for local actors. There are a few exceptions such as Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage, but most of the other actors (especially the children) are British. One of the most important reasons is availability: when you're planning a multiple-year series you don't want to engage actors that are likely to drop out due to other jobs. Actors already living in Britain will be far more likely to be available for subsequent seasons than actors based in Hollywood.
We consume 160 exajoules per year of the world's finite oil reserves
FTFY
LFS is a great learning process that shows you exactly WHAT makes your Linux tick, and what packages depend on eachother. Anyone who uses Linux should do it at least once.
No. Anyone who works with Linux, develops for Linux, is a Linux sysadmin or just happens to be interested should do it at least once. Then there's us who prefer distros of the more automated type (I'd rather avoid terms like "beginner-friendly", "user-friendly" or "bloated" but you probably know what I mean). People who use some flavour of Linux simply because it fits our needs. We shouldn't go anywhere near LFS.
Cars now may be junk, but at least they're safe junk. You get airbags, deformation zones, traction control, ABS and so on. Even small cars today are much better than the large ones of old. Plus you get a mileage that old cars couldn't dream of.
A study from the recruiting firm Manpower was recently published in Swedish newspapers. It listed HR manager as the number 1 job people want. "Nobody ever wants to do it" seems like quite an incorrect statement.
Source (translated): http://translate.google.se/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.manpower.se%2FMPNet3%2FContent.asp%3FNodeRef%3D58911%26Ref%3DSWEDEN_NORDIC%26LangID%3Dse&act=url
I strongly recommend reading the abstract, it's very descriptive and easy to understand I wish more abstracts were like that.
By the way, what's the deal with describing them simply as "astronomers"? Better than the all-too-often-used "scientists" I suppose, but wouldn't it be even nicer to write "a team of astronomers led by Saul Rappaport from M.I.T."? Scientists are people with names, and the more we use them the more we raise the status of pursuing a scientific career. Science needs more superstars!
I see a lot of comments bashing the overhead costs of different charity organisations. Granted, some of it might be unnecessary, but not all of it. The logistics needed for a relief operation in a catastrophe site is a huge and difficult challenge, and only a sufficiently large and professional organisation can handle it. You need materials, food, shelter, trucks, people with different skill sets, lawyers and diplomats to ensure the cooperation of the local government, and so on. It can be quite chaotic, and of course it's going to be inefficient form time to time - but it helps. Without the people who are handling the economics and the logistics, there would be no food or shelter for the workers in the field to hand out.
No, but I can add a place where people have been equally unhappy without their government: Belgium.
Five years ago Linux was sort of cool to use, required a bit of hacking, and provided a desktop full of eye-candy. The cons were that Wine didn't work so well if you wanted to use Windows programs, there weren't any good drivers for the latest hardware and you often ended up with some non-functioning parts (suspend/hibernate, peripherals, printers, 3D graphics...).
Nowadays the exact same things are still true. Wine still doesn't work reliably. There still aren't drivers for the newest hardware. There are very few Linux games compared to Windows games. Photoshop, MS Office and Outlook still aren't available for Linux.
It's an uphill struggle to keep Linux up-to-date. I'm starting to think it's probably never going to get there - and life is too short to keep tinkering with my own computer. It's not fun any longer when you're still facing the same problems year after year. And I know most of these problems aren't Linux' fault per se but rather lack of third-party support, but that doesn't matter - I'm the one who has to deal with it anyway.
That, and the fact that Windows doesn't suck anymore.
I agree to this. Make a distribution that works like Windows 7 except:
1) Free (as in speech and beer)
2) Huge loads of great free software available
3) Super easy software installation via GUI interface or command line
4) Faster and lighter on resources
5) More possibilities to customize everything
6) Rotating 3D cube! Yay!
7) Command line still available for advanced users
8) Nice online community of friendly people eager to help
Ubuntu used to be this distribution. Which distro comes closest now?
The only way Linux takes longer to setup is if your hardware isn't supported by your distribution, while being supported by your version of Windows.
Which is unfortunately nearly every single time.
Be sure to check out Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It's like Nineteen Eighty-Four but with a private industry spin, foreseeing things like flatscreens, reality shows, censorship... Great stuff.
If services start using Facebook as sole login credential - which Answers.com apparently hasn't done, but Spotify, for instance, has - what's there to prevent millions of users to register accounts like bjsjfo88803 or e93u9f39f for the sole purpose of logging in to other sites? I already do this for Youtube.
Thing is, oil will very soon be prohibitively expensive (we're talking a few decades, tops) and even coal will start to become scarce within a relatively short time span of only a few hundred years. Short I say? Yes. The earth's been around for some 4 billion years and we've been using up its stored resources in a miniscule amount of time.
And when that time comes, well, we'd damn well better have the techontopian future you're talking about or the problem is going to solve itself, likely in a very unpleasant way (starvation, war etc). We don't have a choice - no matter how inferior the renewable energy sources seem compared to fossil fuels, they're our only hope in the long run. The faster we can make the transition, the better.
"He'd always been frightened of ending up as one of those child prodigies that never amounted to anything and spent the rest of their lives boasting about how cool they'd been at age ten. But then most adult geniuses never amounted to anything either. There were probably like a thousand people as intelligent as Einstein for every actual Einstein in history. Because they hadn't gotten their hands on the one thing you absolutely needed to achieve greatness. They'd never found an important problem."
From Harry Potter and the methods of rationality by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
Basically they're so small that quantum mechanical effects come into play.
I frequently host conference calls with people from other parts of the world. Every time I schedule them it takes something like two minutes for me to check the local time for everyone. It's a minor inconvenience, sure, but nothing I can't manage, it's just a matter looking it up. Same thing goes for traveling across time zones - I mean, you have to buy tickets, wait in line to check in the baggage, wait in line for the security check, wait for the gate to open, sit on a plane for several hours, and then to everything again in reverse order on your destination. Adjusting your clock, on the other hand, only takes a few seconds to do. Time zones are good. They were invented for a reason, and those reasons still stand. In fact, in China where the whole country runs on the same time for political reasons, the Western parts of the country has adopted an unofficial local time that better matches the sun's movement.