Can you give me a hard problem? Something at least partially challenging? You know the rules of physics and chemistry better than this. There will be no rise in temperature in any area undergoing a phase change, until the change is complete. The heat is entirely taken up by the phase change itself.
Since the world's glaciers and ice sheets are demonstrably melting, we have a phase change. None of the regions in which the phase change is taking place will be rising in temperature for the same reason that water with melting ice will not rise in temperature.
BUT THEY ARE ALL WARMING!!!
You are confusing temperature with heat. The two are NOT the same! The two are proportional IF AND ONLY IF no phase change is taking place.
In order to create the kinds of phase change being observed, an enormous amount of heat is involved, but without any corresponding rise in temperature. This is very basic stuff.
Ok, so what about the fall in temperature? What about it? Temperature is only proportional to heat for a specific material, including a specific mix of gasses. As water evaporation increases, you are altering the composition of the atmosphere. Ergo, an absolute temperature means bugger all. You must calculate the heat present (based on the gasses/vapour) and then talk about the change in heat.
This is really basic stuff and I shouldn't have to be telling you this. You learned it in school and the laws of physics haven't changed since. Not even Scotty could change the laws of physics, so don't think that believers or skeptics could do so.
And as I've said before, the only person I regard as a credible voice in all of this is James Lovelock. Since he believes that Global Warming is real, man-made and far too advanced to be stopped (merely limited in impact), and as he's been entirely correct on all prior predictions, his conclusion is the one I will be going with.
Let's see. 8 years under Bush Jr, 4 years under Bush Jr, 8 years under Ronnie "The Raygun" -- at this point the poor guy's brains will be toast. Anyone who has survived all that should be given a Purple Heart and a nice, quiet padded room to call their own.
(That goes for anyone, regardless of political affiliation. There's only so much insanity a civil servant can endure before they go nuts. Personally, I think there should be a law requiring mental health checks annually, a complete rest one year out of every seven, and compulsory retirement from any politically-related activity after a maximum of 28 years in the nuthouse, with mental disability paid for anyone surviving the full distance.)
Given the average person relies on machines to read maps, machines to add even trivial numbers together, and machines to do their reading for them, what is the difference between a four-year-old and the average person?
I'm trawling for opinions on various genetic newsgroups and mailing lists, as although there is some mention of a check for gross abnormalities (chromosome count, etc) taking place, I can find NO mention of researchers doing a full genome decode. Which surprises me - they need to decode her plus a couple of siblings and some subset of the changes unique to her must have the answer.
I assume that, given the money being poured into aging research, that such a decode (relatively cheap these days) has been considered. The question that remains is whether it has been done and, if not, why the researchers feel it's not worth it. Do they already have a good idea of the cause, enough to not need to do the field work?
The oldest tree, at the time it was cut down, was over 6000 years old. They've found grey whales with harpoon tips in them that hadn't been made by hunters for at least the past 400 years. There were stories of a multi-centurian lobster that was freed a while back by a restaurant. Nobody is quite sure about the aging process, other than being sure we do not really understand it.
I agree, though I think your point may be related to mine - if there's no data to base such a grand unified theory on, you can't construct one. Mind you, there's no guarantee that even if we had enough data that we could construct such a theory - we don't understand enough about the way the coding works and more data might not provide that information.
eg: we know that the same codon can code for different proteins in different organisms, but we don't always know why.
eg: We know that the same codon can change behaviour within the same organism, but we don't always know why.
eg: We know that instructions can migrate from peripheral nucleic acids into the DNA in the nucleus of the cell, but if the junk DNA handles tuning for a bunch of functions, how does the transfer move over the right junk and put it into the right place, when it might have no relationship with what it controls in terms of location in the DNA? It's not a simple block cut-and-paste.
Some of these things cannot be answered by studying human DNA, because humans haven't existed long enough for significant changes. But to use a programming analogy, you can only get so far with understanding a program if you can't read that language. Sure, you can understand the generic idea, but you can't possibly understand the subtlety or the specifics.
Even though all humans may have X, Y and Z in common, if you don't really know what X, Y and Z are, it doesn't help to know that they're common. You could assign them any universal trait and claim the data fit.
Well, there are probably more groupings out there than there are posters on Slashdot. (See Syke's Seven Daughters of Eve for another of them.) Some of these groupings are real, some are only real because of limited data, and some will turn out to be completely wrong. Any study that helps strengthen or weaken the case for any given grouping is going to be "new information" even if it's not a new result.
(But, then, since there are bound to be an infinite number of monkeys somewhere, are there ANY "new" results, since every imaginable result will be published somewhere?)
The San people (one of the first to split off from the earliest-known haplogroup) are supposed to have one of the greatest levels of genetic diversity of any of the African groups, which themselves are, as you say, generally more diverse than those that left Africa.
So, to get good genomic data from these people, you have to sample a lot more of them to get an accurate picture. I wonder if the researchers took that into account.
Oh, another point of interest. The earliest known religious structure in Africa is also 70K years old. Maybe Africans got fed up with them and kicked them out, the way the Europeans did with the Pilgrims.
I think the first question is complicated by the fact that mutations in the genome will follow some sort of time-directed graph but simply counting the nodes in the graph doesn't truly reflect the number of clusters as most of those are clusters within other clusters and not truly independent groups.
The second question is complicated by the fact that we have very, very limited genetic data to work on. There are various genome projects out there, but the largest one that actually studies human history on this sort of timescale - the National Geographics "Genographics" project - only looks at 12 STRs in the Y chromosome, it makes no effort to look at anything else. All the other projects are just too small to have collected a meaningful sample size. For now, anyway.
The third point suffers from the same problem. A lot of these projects have a hundred complete genomes sampled or less. Out of a population of 7 billion. Studying a full genome is expensive - a single test can run into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. The Genographic Project has collected 100,000 samples (give or take) and is barely scratching the surface. Nobody is going to throw a billion dollars into full genome decodes to settle the question of the reality of ethnicity.
That might fall under cluster munitions, though. Oh, they're still legal in the US. You're in with a chance, but you'd better get that meteorite swarm in quick.
If the defendant claims frivolous lawsuit, and the plaintiff shows it isn't, the court can penalize the defendant for wasting court time.
If a lawsuit is shown to not merely be frivolous but actually willfully malicious, the plaintiff faces fines comparable to those the defendant would have faced if found guilty.
Sure, anyone has the right to their day in court. On the other hand, it is most certainly the fault of the law if the cost of failing in a malicious or frivolous lawsuit is so minor and the rewards of success are so great that there is every incentive to flood the system.
The system must protect itself if it is to fulfill its alleged role of protecting society. The moment corporations can DDoS the legal system for fun and profit is the moment the legal system stops protecting anyone.
At that length, "fair use" probably applies. But as it is a private phone, it's not a public performance - the other listeners are eavesdropping and don't count.
Actually, you're probably best off finding friends at a LARP club or a game club of some kind. There are just too many types of geek who will be interested in computing and so any attempt to find friends/relationships amongst Linux geeks will be futile. Too large a collection of too many utterly divergent personalities.
No, you need to find a way to isolate a much, much smaller pool of geeks, ones who share multiple interests in common with you, and the only way to do that is to find groups that share your interests.
(Looking online very, very rarely works, mostly because online spaces allow people to be totally dishonest. If there's no honest representation, you cannot find people by presupposing they are being honest.)
Not sure about your local university, but the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester started with 40,000 titles and is now over the 4 million mark. And, to be quite frank with you, I regard that as being the bottom-of-the-barrel minimum for a University - especially in Britain, given that it's a day's trip to Hay-on-Wye (one of the few places you'll find more books than Amazon.com).
Secondly, sure you can write an Open Source application using your $300 Dell laptop. And within a matter of days, the local University should (if it is doing its job) have obtained a copy, and if it's an application with significant potential, said University should have dissected the logic, assigned students to work on it, and be contributing patches.
Sir Isaac Newton is supposed to have said that if he could see further, it's because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. University researchers are standing on the shoulders of the best the planet has to offer, whether those "best" are at University or not. If they are not leveraging what you and other people produce, they are not doing their jobs.
This is less about being the repository of all knowledge and research and more about the fact that (in theory) they know where to look, what to look for, how to look, and what to do once they find something. If they're not looking, and aren't doing anything significant with what they find, then there's something wrong. They don't have to do everything, but they should always be doing something.
Ummm, they're being pressured into biologically re-engineering Hollywood movies, and the corresponding reduction in brain torture will lead to an improvement in ethics?
The theory behind universities is that you can pool resources, share data, collaborate easily and largely ignore the limitations of the "real world". If you look up the history of Cambridge University, you'll see that that includes niceties like laws.
(For those not wanting to bother, Cambridge University was founded by Oxford University lecturers and students fleeing a lynch mob after the University tried to become the law. It's also said to have involved students being freer with the local lasses than local custom permitted.)
When garage developers out-University the Universities, one must ask if Universities are following their obligations towards learning and understanding. If they are not, honouring those obligations, maybe we should dispose of them and replace them with groups that can.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you give me a hard problem? Something at least partially challenging? You know the rules of physics and chemistry better than this. There will be no rise in temperature in any area undergoing a phase change, until the change is complete. The heat is entirely taken up by the phase change itself.
Since the world's glaciers and ice sheets are demonstrably melting, we have a phase change. None of the regions in which the phase change is taking place will be rising in temperature for the same reason that water with melting ice will not rise in temperature.
BUT THEY ARE ALL WARMING!!!
You are confusing temperature with heat. The two are NOT the same! The two are proportional IF AND ONLY IF no phase change is taking place.
In order to create the kinds of phase change being observed, an enormous amount of heat is involved, but without any corresponding rise in temperature. This is very basic stuff.
Ok, so what about the fall in temperature? What about it? Temperature is only proportional to heat for a specific material, including a specific mix of gasses. As water evaporation increases, you are altering the composition of the atmosphere. Ergo, an absolute temperature means bugger all. You must calculate the heat present (based on the gasses/vapour) and then talk about the change in heat.
This is really basic stuff and I shouldn't have to be telling you this. You learned it in school and the laws of physics haven't changed since. Not even Scotty could change the laws of physics, so don't think that believers or skeptics could do so.
And as I've said before, the only person I regard as a credible voice in all of this is James Lovelock. Since he believes that Global Warming is real, man-made and far too advanced to be stopped (merely limited in impact), and as he's been entirely correct on all prior predictions, his conclusion is the one I will be going with.
Let's see. 8 years under Bush Jr, 4 years under Bush Jr, 8 years under Ronnie "The Raygun" -- at this point the poor guy's brains will be toast. Anyone who has survived all that should be given a Purple Heart and a nice, quiet padded room to call their own.
(That goes for anyone, regardless of political affiliation. There's only so much insanity a civil servant can endure before they go nuts. Personally, I think there should be a law requiring mental health checks annually, a complete rest one year out of every seven, and compulsory retirement from any politically-related activity after a maximum of 28 years in the nuthouse, with mental disability paid for anyone surviving the full distance.)
Be fair. No real scientist would be seen dead with a degree in economics. It makes it impossible to write grant proposals with a straight face.
Given the average person relies on machines to read maps, machines to add even trivial numbers together, and machines to do their reading for them, what is the difference between a four-year-old and the average person?
I'm trawling for opinions on various genetic newsgroups and mailing lists, as although there is some mention of a check for gross abnormalities (chromosome count, etc) taking place, I can find NO mention of researchers doing a full genome decode. Which surprises me - they need to decode her plus a couple of siblings and some subset of the changes unique to her must have the answer.
I assume that, given the money being poured into aging research, that such a decode (relatively cheap these days) has been considered. The question that remains is whether it has been done and, if not, why the researchers feel it's not worth it. Do they already have a good idea of the cause, enough to not need to do the field work?
The oldest tree, at the time it was cut down, was over 6000 years old. They've found grey whales with harpoon tips in them that hadn't been made by hunters for at least the past 400 years. There were stories of a multi-centurian lobster that was freed a while back by a restaurant. Nobody is quite sure about the aging process, other than being sure we do not really understand it.
No, you divide the larger by the smaller.
I agree, though I think your point may be related to mine - if there's no data to base such a grand unified theory on, you can't construct one. Mind you, there's no guarantee that even if we had enough data that we could construct such a theory - we don't understand enough about the way the coding works and more data might not provide that information.
eg: we know that the same codon can code for different proteins in different organisms, but we don't always know why.
eg: We know that the same codon can change behaviour within the same organism, but we don't always know why.
eg: We know that instructions can migrate from peripheral nucleic acids into the DNA in the nucleus of the cell, but if the junk DNA handles tuning for a bunch of functions, how does the transfer move over the right junk and put it into the right place, when it might have no relationship with what it controls in terms of location in the DNA? It's not a simple block cut-and-paste.
Some of these things cannot be answered by studying human DNA, because humans haven't existed long enough for significant changes. But to use a programming analogy, you can only get so far with understanding a program if you can't read that language. Sure, you can understand the generic idea, but you can't possibly understand the subtlety or the specifics.
Even though all humans may have X, Y and Z in common, if you don't really know what X, Y and Z are, it doesn't help to know that they're common. You could assign them any universal trait and claim the data fit.
Well, there are probably more groupings out there than there are posters on Slashdot. (See Syke's Seven Daughters of Eve for another of them.) Some of these groupings are real, some are only real because of limited data, and some will turn out to be completely wrong. Any study that helps strengthen or weaken the case for any given grouping is going to be "new information" even if it's not a new result.
(But, then, since there are bound to be an infinite number of monkeys somewhere, are there ANY "new" results, since every imaginable result will be published somewhere?)
The San people (one of the first to split off from the earliest-known haplogroup) are supposed to have one of the greatest levels of genetic diversity of any of the African groups, which themselves are, as you say, generally more diverse than those that left Africa.
So, to get good genomic data from these people, you have to sample a lot more of them to get an accurate picture. I wonder if the researchers took that into account.
Oh, another point of interest. The earliest known religious structure in Africa is also 70K years old. Maybe Africans got fed up with them and kicked them out, the way the Europeans did with the Pilgrims.
I think the first question is complicated by the fact that mutations in the genome will follow some sort of time-directed graph but simply counting the nodes in the graph doesn't truly reflect the number of clusters as most of those are clusters within other clusters and not truly independent groups.
The second question is complicated by the fact that we have very, very limited genetic data to work on. There are various genome projects out there, but the largest one that actually studies human history on this sort of timescale - the National Geographics "Genographics" project - only looks at 12 STRs in the Y chromosome, it makes no effort to look at anything else. All the other projects are just too small to have collected a meaningful sample size. For now, anyway.
The third point suffers from the same problem. A lot of these projects have a hundred complete genomes sampled or less. Out of a population of 7 billion. Studying a full genome is expensive - a single test can run into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. The Genographic Project has collected 100,000 samples (give or take) and is barely scratching the surface. Nobody is going to throw a billion dollars into full genome decodes to settle the question of the reality of ethnicity.
I thought it was "Slashdotters", "Idiots" and "The Rich".
That might fall under cluster munitions, though. Oh, they're still legal in the US. You're in with a chance, but you'd better get that meteorite swarm in quick.
How about:
It would not surprise me if the Trimphone ring was indeed copyrighted.
A meteor? That's so sick and twisted! It should be a comet, at least.
Sure, anyone has the right to their day in court. On the other hand, it is most certainly the fault of the law if the cost of failing in a malicious or frivolous lawsuit is so minor and the rewards of success are so great that there is every incentive to flood the system.
The system must protect itself if it is to fulfill its alleged role of protecting society. The moment corporations can DDoS the legal system for fun and profit is the moment the legal system stops protecting anyone.
At that length, "fair use" probably applies. But as it is a private phone, it's not a public performance - the other listeners are eavesdropping and don't count.
Yorkshire Tea, PG Tips or Tetley Tea?
Sounds like an excellent reason to call it that to me.
Actually, you're probably best off finding friends at a LARP club or a game club of some kind. There are just too many types of geek who will be interested in computing and so any attempt to find friends/relationships amongst Linux geeks will be futile. Too large a collection of too many utterly divergent personalities.
No, you need to find a way to isolate a much, much smaller pool of geeks, ones who share multiple interests in common with you, and the only way to do that is to find groups that share your interests.
(Looking online very, very rarely works, mostly because online spaces allow people to be totally dishonest. If there's no honest representation, you cannot find people by presupposing they are being honest.)
Not sure about your local university, but the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester started with 40,000 titles and is now over the 4 million mark. And, to be quite frank with you, I regard that as being the bottom-of-the-barrel minimum for a University - especially in Britain, given that it's a day's trip to Hay-on-Wye (one of the few places you'll find more books than Amazon.com).
Secondly, sure you can write an Open Source application using your $300 Dell laptop. And within a matter of days, the local University should (if it is doing its job) have obtained a copy, and if it's an application with significant potential, said University should have dissected the logic, assigned students to work on it, and be contributing patches.
Sir Isaac Newton is supposed to have said that if he could see further, it's because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. University researchers are standing on the shoulders of the best the planet has to offer, whether those "best" are at University or not. If they are not leveraging what you and other people produce, they are not doing their jobs.
This is less about being the repository of all knowledge and research and more about the fact that (in theory) they know where to look, what to look for, how to look, and what to do once they find something. If they're not looking, and aren't doing anything significant with what they find, then there's something wrong. They don't have to do everything, but they should always be doing something.
Drinking everclear also results in DNA extraction from your liver, apparently.
Ummm, they're being pressured into biologically re-engineering Hollywood movies, and the corresponding reduction in brain torture will lead to an improvement in ethics?
The theory behind universities is that you can pool resources, share data, collaborate easily and largely ignore the limitations of the "real world". If you look up the history of Cambridge University, you'll see that that includes niceties like laws.
(For those not wanting to bother, Cambridge University was founded by Oxford University lecturers and students fleeing a lynch mob after the University tried to become the law. It's also said to have involved students being freer with the local lasses than local custom permitted.)
When garage developers out-University the Universities, one must ask if Universities are following their obligations towards learning and understanding. If they are not, honouring those obligations, maybe we should dispose of them and replace them with groups that can.