This isn't a proof, but the Drake equations are actually wrong. You can never add huge amounts of time to a probability statement. Otherwise you end up with monkeys typing Shakespeare. Multiplying odds by enough time guarantees shit happens, such as life.
For a better approach, still full of swag, start with today's number and count and assume.
If there are 10 to the 11th power stars in the Milky Way, then all I need are 11 events in a row with a 1 in 10 chance of occurring. Life doesn't seem so inevitable now. Rocky planet (1/10) in the right zone (1/10) in a stable orbit around a stable star (3.5 billion years of evolution requires stability 1/10). A big moon so water life can spread to land. 1/100 (having a moon is a biggie). Assume cyanobacteria happen. You still need eukaryotes and prekaryotes to evolve and combine, multicellular life to occur, life to move out of the ocean, a magnetic core to save land life from cosmic rays.
I think life is a lot more unlikely than folks assume. Regardless of what assumptions you do make, remember that multiplying probable odds by enough time is as invalid as dividing by zero. You can claim whatever results you want.
You don't have to recycle it.
We aren't talking about pulling out toys.
There are a bazillion "original" plastic pellets infesting the oceans, the same pellets they use to make plastic stuff in the first place.
Filtering that out shouldn't be too much harder than running a gravel pit operation.
In Chicago, to prepare for global warming and more rain, they are replacing the alley pavement with similar stuff that lets the water soak into the ground. It's one way of not having to triple the size of your storm water drainage systems. apparently, within 90 years, they expect a climate similar to Baton Rouge Louisiana.
You have obviously never coded in any language, let alone Perl. Comments like these are usually from people with zero real life experience.
Ditto. I remember trying to write reports for people in Fortran and C out of an Oracle dbs.
When I discovered the text processing capability of Perl, I was hooked. And so were my users.
Seems the almost all of our important data, on the reports, is text, not id fields like we use in the dbs.
I can use Perl to resort the reports any which way at all without retouching the dbs.
You can write poorly in any language: C#, JavaScript (the LAMP stack replacement) and different folks either write well or poorly in Englyshe.
What do you mean? Every single web view on iOS uses Safari's renderer. It's against the App Store rules to have your own renderer. The problem is that sure, if you design a website around Safari it'll work everywhere else, but it's a pain in the ass to design it to a 5 year old standard when all the other major browsers support other upgrades, extensions and capabilities that can make code easier/faster/better. It's most apparent when an open standard has replaced an Apple designed one that's inferior, and Apple refuses to change, such as WebSQL/IndexedDB.
Like I/E used to force you to do. Write for them and then write for everybody else that was current.
But surely iOS users don't all stick to Safari. Safari came with my work Mac, but nevertheless, I use Chrome. Why wouldn't other people do that? Just because someone blunders into the Apple Trap doesn't mean they all have to drink all the Apple koolaide, does it?
uhhhh, I think that was kind of the point of the title of article. You didn't even have to RTFA,just understand the title. You know how Internet Explorer came with Windows but people would install other browsers like Netscape?
He painstakingly measured how much information an astronaut/jet pilot could pay attention to at once, and react to within a certain time frame.
Aviation folks have an awesome term for when pilots freeze from information overload. They call it having a helmet fire which to this day cracks me up and is a perfect term for the problem.
Bell Labs tested people memorizing numbers and that's how we ended up with the 7-digit ones. People can only handle so much info. And some people can only handle less.
Actually, the drone operators are going to end up with more PTSD than regular pilots. There was a really good article on Wired a few months ago by a pilot who flew in WWII and Korea and other places. You drop your bombs and you land back home.
Drone operators follow a man for months. He's a real person. They see his wife and kids and see him shopping and whatever.
Then they kill him.
Then they keep watching. See his wife come out and cry over the body. See the ambulance pick him up while his children are crying.
Then they monitor his funeral to look for other targets.
If that doesn't affect you deeply, you're probably a psychopath.
How are police more vulnerable than others? They are issued weapons,...
They are more "vulnerable" because they are attacked more often. Wearing a shield is like wearing a target. The likelihood of being attacked is increased.
are bad laws. Period. I am hard pressed to think of an exception.
Laws need to be public, but negotiations must _always_ be private or else they aren't negotiations. If you know my bottom line, I've got no wiggle room which means I have zero ability to negotiate.
You mean sanity and logic in politics? Laws that make sense and are rooted in reality instead of panic?
No, we can't have that! That could be sensible, and we can't have that in our legislative.
Not in a democracy, that's for damn sure. And I'm not being sarcastic.
We like choosing our government policy the same way we choose Top 40 hits or internet memes--purely by the popularity of personal preference. It's my right to vote for people who say good government can be done for free.
It's the same reason our American government prefers to support dictators. You can rely on them better than you can rely on the fickle desires of the general population. Governing is difficult because these are not bullshit issues. It seems to be part of the essential biology of human civilization.
I am very surprised to see that IE is still up at 56% while Chrome is at 26%. Seriously, that many people still use IE?!
For a lot of installed applications, especially in the medical field, it is as mandatory as Windows XP is (there are hardware reasons why that is still in use many places).
In addition, lots of businesses have client-server software that really only works with I/E (altho they may call their internal thing a web-based system)
People who have money tend to feel entitled to it.
That's because they buy into the Libertarian myth that they made their money themselves.
Daniel Boone couldn't build his own rifle from rocks and sticks, because he didn't have the time nor the skills and Bill Gates could not get rich in Yemen or Somalia simply because the market wasn't big enough, regardless of whether it was steady enough and supported by laws and regulations and trust-worthy money.
Business folks refuse to recognize the need for a government and a market, thinking those things just happen naturally. Even today, the conservative voters and their politicians (get cause-effect correct if you're defining a problem) still want to fix the Bush-recession by raising interest rates even tho most economists recognize the lack of recovery is because of a depressed market and not because of a depressed ability to borrow money. There is no reason to expand a factory if you cannot sell what's already being produced.
The top tax rate in the US during the 1950s was 90%. That meant businesses paid their top employees a lot more (instead of giving _all_ the money to the CEO) and the government had enough money to build the interstate highway system (what is that worth for marketing) and fly to the moon. Then we decided rich people needed to keep "their" money and gradually for most of the people in America (more than half), life started to trend downhill.
We're all in this together. Whether you believe it or not is irrelevant. And this isn't a plea for communism which many conservatives scream at folks who aren't on board with them 1000%. We already know communism doesn't work in groups larger than about 280 or so (but it works fantastically well for a nuclear family. We also know unfettered Capitalism that puts all the money into the rich folks hands without investing in infrastructure will destroy the society. You can see this in any kingdom that didn't invest in bridges or roads or put the collected tax money back in the hands of the people somehow.
Adam Smith (1776) didn't push for complete economic freedom, just for competition within a well-regulated marketplace. Of course, he was writing to kings, most of whom had an interest in keeping their country runnning for mutiple generations.
That doesn't seem to be a true statement about voters nowadays.
I actually did RTFA. The historical stuff is interesting. The assertion that no place else will ever come close is completely unsupported.
I remember reading excerpts from historical articles about NYC and London in economic texts and how they would never be eclipsed.
1. Both NY and London hit certain sizes and then the close interaction (required according to the author) between peoples cannot happen as well because of the size of the crowd.
2. When the prices of renting get too high, the smartest students can't afford to move there, not unless they go into finance (or can live on H1-B wages)
3. The price of water in California is going to skyrocket. That changes everything about the immediate area.
Tulips in Holland (1500s), Tea from Asia (1600s), Beaver pelts from America (1700s), Watches from Switzerland (1800s), all highy profitable markets not only guranteed to never fail by their salesmen, but ones that failed spectacularly fast when the end did hit.
A social worker friend of mine said that Ritalin was a _diagnostic_ drug. If you had ADD symptoms and they went away with Ritalin, then you had ADD. IF the symptoms didn't go away, you had something else. I thought that was interesting and weird, but if you think about it, actually useful too in a backasswards kind of way.
NASA will use all sorts of experts, but they will of course ignore the discoveries of the first expert they hired to help find life on Mars, James Lovelock.
Hired to build machines to search for life on Mars, he investigated biology and quickly realized that over geologic time, extremophiles such as bacteria found in hot springs or in the arctic could not survive without all the rest of life creating the free oxygen and other elements and compounds necessary for life. NASA ignored The Gaia Hypothesis completely yet that was a discovery they paid for.
In the article, he advised using the extension cable and not plugging it directly in. The article is good, not by the vendor.
It even has a little fan inside that puts out a high-pitched annoying whine after longterm use.
I appreciate your on-the-spot insight, but it seems as if there would also be facts to back up your assertion. Granted, it would be hard to discriminate between the folks who drive for Uber every Saturday vs the ones who drive only on the Saturdays they "think" there might be surge pricing.
With prices changing every 5 minutes, seems to me the astute driver would foregoe the first surge that attracts other drivers to an area and try to be in the vacant area that receives the next surge 5 minutes later.
By the way, he isn't poking holes in anybody's approach. Everyone agrees there are three ways surge prices address scarcities. Uber says their approach worksby doing option 1 but the researcher says it works by doing option 3. It thought it was pretty clear in both the summary and the article but apparently not.
Actually, it is Uber that says their surge pricing puts more drivers on the road and the researcher who says that is not true, that Uber's surge pricing merely redistributes the current drivers, it does not add new drivers.
I'm so sorry you confuse explanation of facts with conspiracies.
Actually, studies show that the higher one's intelligence, the more they hold on to their positions, even if shown to be wrong. It is the idiot, that is more readily swayed, than the genius.
That's who demagogues rely on for their support.
There are upsides and downsides to _everything_.
The smarter you are, the more that fact hits you in the face every place you look. There actually are benefits to mankind from religion, not just costs. Same with Capitalism, science and whatever pet aspect of life you completely hate or love.
I think it's pretty damned easy to tell how smart someone is, child or adult, after being with them for a few hours.
Smart people don't really need to give tests to determine this (within a reasonable range).
If you can't tell how smart someone is without a test, I'll bet I can predict your own IQ test score;-)
Slashdot Mirror
How else am I supposed to watch porn while masturbating in the toilet?
Playboy magazine centerfold.
Talk about old technology.
This isn't a proof, but the Drake equations are actually wrong. You can never add huge amounts of time to a probability statement. Otherwise you end up with monkeys typing Shakespeare. Multiplying odds by enough time guarantees shit happens, such as life.
For a better approach, still full of swag, start with today's number and count and assume.
If there are 10 to the 11th power stars in the Milky Way, then all I need are 11 events in a row with a 1 in 10 chance of occurring. Life doesn't seem so inevitable now. Rocky planet (1/10) in the right zone (1/10) in a stable orbit around a stable star (3.5 billion years of evolution requires stability 1/10). A big moon so water life can spread to land. 1/100 (having a moon is a biggie). Assume cyanobacteria happen. You still need eukaryotes and prekaryotes to evolve and combine, multicellular life to occur, life to move out of the ocean, a magnetic core to save land life from cosmic rays.
I think life is a lot more unlikely than folks assume. Regardless of what assumptions you do make, remember that multiplying probable odds by enough time is as invalid as dividing by zero. You can claim whatever results you want.
You don't have to recycle it. We aren't talking about pulling out toys. There are a bazillion "original" plastic pellets infesting the oceans, the same pellets they use to make plastic stuff in the first place. Filtering that out shouldn't be too much harder than running a gravel pit operation.
In Chicago, to prepare for global warming and more rain, they are replacing the alley pavement with similar stuff that lets the water soak into the ground. It's one way of not having to triple the size of your storm water drainage systems. apparently, within 90 years, they expect a climate similar to Baton Rouge Louisiana.
You have obviously never coded in any language, let alone Perl. Comments like these are usually from people with zero real life experience.
Ditto. I remember trying to write reports for people in Fortran and C out of an Oracle dbs.
When I discovered the text processing capability of Perl, I was hooked. And so were my users.
Seems the almost all of our important data, on the reports, is text, not id fields like we use in the dbs.
I can use Perl to resort the reports any which way at all without retouching the dbs.
You can write poorly in any language: C#, JavaScript (the LAMP stack replacement) and different folks either write well or poorly in Englyshe.
What do you mean? Every single web view on iOS uses Safari's renderer. It's against the App Store rules to have your own renderer. The problem is that sure, if you design a website around Safari it'll work everywhere else, but it's a pain in the ass to design it to a 5 year old standard when all the other major browsers support other upgrades, extensions and capabilities that can make code easier/faster/better. It's most apparent when an open standard has replaced an Apple designed one that's inferior, and Apple refuses to change, such as WebSQL/IndexedDB.
Like I/E used to force you to do. Write for them and then write for everybody else that was current.
But surely iOS users don't all stick to Safari. Safari came with my work Mac, but nevertheless, I use Chrome. Why wouldn't other people do that? Just because someone blunders into the Apple Trap doesn't mean they all have to drink all the Apple koolaide, does it?
uhhhh, I think that was kind of the point of the title of article. You didn't even have to RTFA ,just understand the title.
You know how Internet Explorer came with Windows but people would install other browsers like Netscape?
He painstakingly measured how much information an astronaut/jet pilot could pay attention to at once, and react to within a certain time frame.
Aviation folks have an awesome term for when pilots freeze from information overload. They call it having a helmet fire which to this day cracks me up and is a perfect term for the problem.
Bell Labs tested people memorizing numbers and that's how we ended up with the 7-digit ones. People can only handle so much info. And some people can only handle less.
If well done," almost anything works. Problem is a HUD designed by marketers, salesmen or engineers in love with technology.
...
How 'bout a big red box when your smartphone battery is low?
And of course we need tire pressure indicators and fuel gauge and
I didn't see much "news" in that little biddy article, I saw a sales pitch and video.
In America, that's what IS known as "news."
Actually, the drone operators are going to end up with more PTSD than regular pilots. There was a really good article on Wired a few months ago by a pilot who flew in WWII and Korea and other places. You drop your bombs and you land back home.
Drone operators follow a man for months. He's a real person. They see his wife and kids and see him shopping and whatever.
Then they kill him.
Then they keep watching. See his wife come out and cry over the body. See the ambulance pick him up while his children are crying.
Then they monitor his funeral to look for other targets.
If that doesn't affect you deeply, you're probably a psychopath.
How are police more vulnerable than others? They are issued weapons, ...
They are more "vulnerable" because they are attacked more often. Wearing a shield is like wearing a target. The likelihood of being attacked is increased.
are bad laws. Period. I am hard pressed to think of an exception.
Laws need to be public, but negotiations must _always_ be private or else they aren't negotiations. If you know my bottom line, I've got no wiggle room which means I have zero ability to negotiate.
You mean sanity and logic in politics? Laws that make sense and are rooted in reality instead of panic?
No, we can't have that! That could be sensible, and we can't have that in our legislative.
Not in a democracy, that's for damn sure. And I'm not being sarcastic.
We like choosing our government policy the same way we choose Top 40 hits or internet memes--purely by the popularity of personal preference. It's my right to vote for people who say good government can be done for free.
It's the same reason our American government prefers to support dictators. You can rely on them better than you can rely on the fickle desires of the general population. Governing is difficult because these are not bullshit issues. It seems to be part of the essential biology of human civilization.
I am very surprised to see that IE is still up at 56% while Chrome is at 26%. Seriously, that many people still use IE?!
For a lot of installed applications, especially in the medical field, it is as mandatory as Windows XP is (there are hardware reasons why that is still in use many places).
In addition, lots of businesses have client-server software that really only works with I/E (altho they may call their internal thing a web-based system)
People who have money tend to feel entitled to it.
That's because they buy into the Libertarian myth that they made their money themselves.
Daniel Boone couldn't build his own rifle from rocks and sticks, because he didn't have the time nor the skills and Bill Gates could not get rich in Yemen or Somalia simply because the market wasn't big enough, regardless of whether it was steady enough and supported by laws and regulations and trust-worthy money.
Business folks refuse to recognize the need for a government and a market, thinking those things just happen naturally. Even today, the conservative voters and their politicians (get cause-effect correct if you're defining a problem) still want to fix the Bush-recession by raising interest rates even tho most economists recognize the lack of recovery is because of a depressed market and not because of a depressed ability to borrow money. There is no reason to expand a factory if you cannot sell what's already being produced.
The top tax rate in the US during the 1950s was 90%. That meant businesses paid their top employees a lot more (instead of giving _all_ the money to the CEO) and the government had enough money to build the interstate highway system (what is that worth for marketing) and fly to the moon. Then we decided rich people needed to keep "their" money and gradually for most of the people in America (more than half), life started to trend downhill.
We're all in this together. Whether you believe it or not is irrelevant. And this isn't a plea for communism which many conservatives scream at folks who aren't on board with them 1000%. We already know communism doesn't work in groups larger than about 280 or so (but it works fantastically well for a nuclear family. We also know unfettered Capitalism that puts all the money into the rich folks hands without investing in infrastructure will destroy the society. You can see this in any kingdom that didn't invest in bridges or roads or put the collected tax money back in the hands of the people somehow.
Adam Smith (1776) didn't push for complete economic freedom, just for competition within a well-regulated marketplace. Of course, he was writing to kings, most of whom had an interest in keeping their country runnning for mutiple generations.
That doesn't seem to be a true statement about voters nowadays.
I actually did RTFA. The historical stuff is interesting. The assertion that no place else will ever come close is completely unsupported.
I remember reading excerpts from historical articles about NYC and London in economic texts and how they would never be eclipsed.
1. Both NY and London hit certain sizes and then the close interaction (required according to the author) between peoples cannot happen as well because of the size of the crowd.
2. When the prices of renting get too high, the smartest students can't afford to move there, not unless they go into finance (or can live on H1-B wages)
3. The price of water in California is going to skyrocket. That changes everything about the immediate area.
Tulips in Holland (1500s), Tea from Asia (1600s), Beaver pelts from America (1700s), Watches from Switzerland (1800s), all highy profitable markets not only guranteed to never fail by their salesmen, but ones that failed spectacularly fast when the end did hit.
How about CNTL-ALT-DEL?
Yup. Reboot the plane every time it's at the gate.
A social worker friend of mine said that Ritalin was a _diagnostic_ drug. If you had ADD symptoms and they went away with Ritalin, then you had ADD. IF the symptoms didn't go away, you had something else. I thought that was interesting and weird, but if you think about it, actually useful too in a backasswards kind of way.
NASA will use all sorts of experts, but they will of course ignore the discoveries of the first expert they hired to help find life on Mars, James Lovelock.
Hired to build machines to search for life on Mars, he investigated biology and quickly realized that over geologic time, extremophiles such as bacteria found in hot springs or in the arctic could not survive without all the rest of life creating the free oxygen and other elements and compounds necessary for life. NASA ignored The Gaia Hypothesis completely yet that was a discovery they paid for.
In the article, he advised using the extension cable and not plugging it directly in. The article is good, not by the vendor.
It even has a little fan inside that puts out a high-pitched annoying whine after longterm use.
I appreciate your on-the-spot insight, but it seems as if there would also be facts to back up your assertion. Granted, it would be hard to discriminate between the folks who drive for Uber every Saturday vs the ones who drive only on the Saturdays they "think" there might be surge pricing.
With prices changing every 5 minutes, seems to me the astute driver would foregoe the first surge that attracts other drivers to an area and try to be in the vacant area that receives the next surge 5 minutes later.
By the way, he isn't poking holes in anybody's approach. Everyone agrees there are three ways surge prices address scarcities. Uber says their approach worksby doing option 1 but the researcher says it works by doing option 3. It thought it was pretty clear in both the summary and the article but apparently not.
Actually, it is Uber that says their surge pricing puts more drivers on the road and the researcher who says that is not true, that Uber's surge pricing merely redistributes the current drivers, it does not add new drivers.
I'm so sorry you confuse explanation of facts with conspiracies.
Actually, studies show that the higher one's intelligence, the more they hold on to their positions, even if shown to be wrong. It is the idiot, that is more readily swayed, than the genius.
That's who demagogues rely on for their support.
There are upsides and downsides to _everything_.
The smarter you are, the more that fact hits you in the face every place you look. There actually are benefits to mankind from religion, not just costs. Same with Capitalism, science and whatever pet aspect of life you completely hate or love.
I think it's pretty damned easy to tell how smart someone is, child or adult, after being with them for a few hours. ;-)
Smart people don't really need to give tests to determine this (within a reasonable range).
If you can't tell how smart someone is without a test, I'll bet I can predict your own IQ test score