The AIRA declared all Australians to be DJs, and that converting from optical media to an electronic signal in a player (and then from the electronic signal to an audible one) were conversions requiring a license. Botany Bay is to be used to house all juveniles who fail to pay the double licenses.
There are going to be a near-infinite number of quantum-scale black holes and wormholes in whatever volume of space you care to imagine. They evaporate almost instantly. As for stellar black holes, the Chandrasaker Limit is 2.5 solar masses, with a relatively small margin of error. Absolutely nothing of interest will be learned until we're within 2.75 solar masses, because then we can define sensible confidence limits on what the value actually is.
A further search shows the same correlation with Freshmeat and the Get Fuzzy cartoon. Other communications mechanisms and cartoons are on distinctly different paths. It is clearly all the fault of Bucky Katt.
Ok, that's a reasonable point. I was thinking specifically ancient Mayan, the ancient codices, monumental Mayan heiroglyphs (which aren't 100% guaranteed the same as Mayan heiroglyphs anywhere else), and the fact that their writing system appears novel. (Most can be divided into left-right, right-left and alternating - also known as ox-plough. The page may remain as-is, rotated, flipped, or rotated and flipped. Easter Island's RongoRongo is ox-plough with the page rotated 180 degrees each line.) Mayan writings appear closer in style to the modern graphic novel, making any kind of deductive reasoning highly subjective. Stan Lee has a better chance of cracking the writing system code than conventional language analysts.
There are two big hopes I see, for a breakthrough: if someone finds a Mayan complex in which there's a corpus of original material, or if some such material is ever found in a cold, dry cave. Much beyond that will be tough.
Gas giant planets contain heavy elements which - if you try to fuse them - will take more heat than they release. I can't see how you'd ever reach either ignition or self-sustaining conditions. Now, there ARE gas supergiant planets that are larger than small stars. Some were accused of being mis-identified brown dwarfs*. I think this find makes it very likely supergiant planets do indeed exist.
(Brown dwarfs are easy to mis-identify, unlike white dwarfs, which carry warhammer adverts.)
Getting snarky. Hmmm. Well, I won't argue. The Greeks copied anything and everything they could, and it's really not as if it was significantly harder for them to make two copies rather than one. Which, of course, they probably did in many cases, which is why the Palimset contains so many "lost" ancient Greek works. They copied things down and kept the copies elsewhere. (Which, as the parent likely refers to, was my chief slam against the Seahenge archivists and archaeologsts.) Very likely, when the damaged, rotten parchments are (finally) scanned, we will recover much of the Library's lost works.
This, incidently, is why throwing my comments back at me is so patently stupid and a waste of time. You can find out all of this stuff from the palimpset's website, numerous science journals, press releases, etc. None of this is hidden knowledge, it's insanely easy to find and verify. I may not know everything in the world, but we have this thing called the Internet. Sorry, but ignorance and naivety are neither amusing nor cute, they are the relics of, well, not the stone age, they appear to have used their brains. You could know anything and everything I can ever know within seconds with just a suitable search string from the right site. That just leaves the variable of intelligence, and I'm ranked top 1%. Your mental capacity is your own problem.
You're probably right. Block-length FEC and Turbo Codes allow you to fix errors assuming bursty data corruption of exactly this kind, which is why NASA uses them for deep space missions. You can't exactly ask a probe on the edge of the solar system or skimming geysers to repeat itself. With sound, there's also the fact that you've multiple parameters - delay, amplitude and frequency. Unless they plan to randomize all three, you can use any of the others for covert data. Data compression isolates anything either side, so whatever they are "protecting" is limited to that one side. Shouldn't be hard to use the other.
That and x-ray purity, and a highly controllable coherent source (you can set the energy to what you like), one ring can have hundreds of outlets whereas one laser has one, and they are Seriously Geeky.
The Romans were just as stumped as everyone else. That's not to say you're wrong, but the Romans don't appear to have done much excavation and don't record much beyond total bafflement. Also, massive weight would likely alter the ground beneath for a substantial depth, and we should still see signs of that via GPR. If, of course, they've done GPR.
On the other hand, "Queen Maeve"'s barrow is massive, so huge burial structures certainly got built.
I think the biggest problem is that the stages of construction overlapped, so there may not have been any time (until the final stage) in which it could have been used as a giant round barrow. The next-biggest problem is that at the start of construction, Neolithic people in Britain used long barrows, not round barrows.
However, it does seem an interesting theory and I'm certainly out of information which might contradict it, so I would suggest contacting the professors on this dig. Remember that most of the really good stuff we're getting from Stonehenge right now is from an ex-banker who happens to enjoy archaeology and mysteries, and he's not remotely unique in "outsiders" breaking into the field in a very big way through insights and non-obvious observations. (However, if you become rich and famous, I insist on 10% of your appearance fees for getting you to go beyond speculating about things.)
Not just Mayan, but virtually all Mesoamerican writings. They also burned the vast majority of writings on Easter Island, rendering the language unreadable even today. (We actually know a little Mayan, although little is hopelessly optimistic.) As people might have realized by now, I get rather upset when knowledge is lost - especially in fire.
We do know a few things about the Great Library of Alexandria - they had a theory of robotics, a copy of the Old Testament many times larger than all known books from that work, they probably had substantial texts on sun-centered solar systems (they'd worked on that for a long time), and since one rather mysterious artifact has been shown to have had differential gearing inside, I'm willing to bet they had substantial texts on such systems. Although Greek society was notoriously patriarchial, it is also known that there were female chief scientists, chief librarians and teachers. Whether they could have broken through their mindset will never be known, but their achievements in liberal, equalitarian science were unrivalled by many western nations until the 19th and 20th centuries and compare well with some parts of the world today.
We don't know all the books were lost - the Archimedes Palimset shows that, and there are tales of many rotting and unreadable (by conventional means) documents in rubbish tips of Ancient Greece. Whether there will ever be a full study to see if other salvagable recorded history is out there, I don't know. It hasn't happened yet, and time only reduces what might have survived. I would argue that it is possible we could recover far more material than we currently have, but impossible if - as is happening - nothing is happening.
...in Buddhism, conflict is deemed the natural state of matter. In mathematics, all is chaos. Even order is chaos, and only appears as order because of the nature of chaos itself. Harmony is not a state of nature. Where Lovelock's Gaia produces "balance", it does so not through harmony or entanglement but through stable conflict, through all things being at war with each other and themselves. (Daisyworld scenarios only work if white daisies - which reflect heat and thus produce cold - require the very thing they oppose, heat. Any other arrangement will destroy itself.)
The oxygen in the air, without which you would die, is poisoning your cells and attacking your DNA. That which gives life is also a leading cause of death.
The rest of the cosmos is no different. All things are their own opposites and are self-destructive. A star, to remain a star, must undergo nuclear fusion. In large stars, this creates elements that, when fused, require more heat than is released, thus ultimately destroying the star. That which allows it to exist will - literally - rip the guts out and blast the remainder in a supernova across great swathes of space.
If solar systems did, indeed, look like atoms, planets would regularly smash through the sun and the rest of the time exist so far out that they would freeze. 99.9% of an atom is nothing. Totally Bohring. (Ok, quantum foam, but statistically that's nothing.) The electrons, far from following circular orbits, are probability waves whose position is not only indeterminate, it doesn't even exist. It's not even clear the nucleus can be said to "exist" in the centre, as that would violate the uncertainty principle.
The only "balance" that will ever exist will be at the heat-death of the final particle of matter, when nothing remains and nothing will ever happen again. That is the Universe as it really is.
...that algorithms and data are, in fact, different animals. Algorithms are simply mapping functions, which can in turn be entirely represented as data. A true algorithm represents a set of statements which, when taken as a collective whole, will always be true. In other words, it's something that is generic, across-the-board. Think object-oriented design - you do not write one class for every variable. Pure data will contain a mix of the generic and the specific, with no trivial way to always identify which is which, or to what degree.
Thus, an algorithm-driven design should always out-perform data-driven designs when knowledge of the specific is substantially less important than knowledge of the generic. Data-driven designs should always out-perform algorithm-driven design when the reverse is true. A blend of the two designs (in order to isolate and identify the nature of the data) should outperform pure implementations following either design when you want to know a lot about both.
The key to programming is not to have one "perfect" methodology but to have a wide range at your disposal.
For those who prefer mantras, have the serenity to accept the invariants aren't going to change, the courage to recognize the methodology will, and the wisdom to apply the difference.
Many of yesterday's finds are believed to have been the remains left from a 1920s excavation, making establishing context hard. They have also found one piece of possibly shaped blue granite and evidence of flint knapping. Flint knapping may go along with the idea of a medical centre, as shaped flint (as others have pointed out in this discussion) is comparable to surgical steel and easy to sterilize. I'm not seeing any mention of quern stones, which is interesting. (Quern stones are heat-crazed, superheated pebbles that were dropped in water or food to heat it. Very common around settlements and camps.)
Heh! No, as Random Goblin pointed out, it's a mockery of their numerous typos. It may be urban legend, but the story is that The Guardian actually did spell its own name "Grauniad", which is where everyone else picked up on the name. Private Eye, Spike Milligan and Spitting Image really dissed them over it. They have some (probably spellchecked) archives online of their pre-electronic days, when they were at their worst, but if you can get hold of any scanned copies of their early newsprint, do so. (If you know any English teachers, supply them with copies and have them run a school contest on who can find the most errors.)
One of the better satires out there. There are 78,900 other references to Grauniad on Google. April 1st is a good day to campaign to have the word introduced formally into the English language,
Start with this report, and tell me why no backups existed, when even the most juvenile delinquent in modern science has that drummed into them. Then tell me how you leap they should have kept better notes to they should never have excavated. A leap even Superman would envy. We have no contextual information, so any display will be generalized and if it includes the primary timbers (the circle was linked by wooden trails to other wooden circles, some of which were also excavated), those timbers can be placed at best by guesswork, not by archaeological work. That work no longer exists.
(You might also want to tell me how the hell you missed this article and found only English Heritage's pathetic piece of self-congratulatory text, when the article was covered by most of the archaeological press, not to mention most of the major news outlets. Google not working today?)
Oh, and the druids weren't the only ones complaining. According to the book "Seahenge", the locals were called to a meeting to discuss what was to be done... to be told that the henge was to be removed. "Told" falls a little short of "discussion" in any language I know of, so although I agree totally with the decision, I vehemently disagree with what English Heritage has been quoted elsewhere as saying was "heavy-handed". I'd also consider giant mechanical excavators to fall, oh, just a tad short of the accepted standard of "dig a trowel's-worth, sift twice" that everyone else in the profession manages.
Count me in on having a problem. Governments are elected officials who are accountable to the people. But how can you be accountable if you are the one making up all of the truthiness? Generals and the military in general are far less accountable, with almost zero successful prosecutions for war crimes against Americans, and yet are appointed to protect citizens against outside threats. Uhhh, and who decides what is an outside threat? Oh, the people with no accountability. Buy One Red Scare, Get One Free. Psychological warfare is also not always nicey-nice. The bombing of Dresden, the attrocities in Darfur - these are all simple military adaptations of propoganda. It's so much easier to create a myth around nuggets of truth.
This is not to say that the alternatives to propoganda are any better. More honest, perhaps, and shocking enough that people understand the consequences of their actions, as a classic Star Trek (old series) illustrated nicely. Shocking enough that after World War I, the link between the military and nationalism went into decline throughout Europe.
I don't believe there will ever be a "good" answer to conflict or an acceptable solution to war, but I do believe it criminal negligence to go from saying we can never do this acceptably to saying we should tolerate what we have. I believe it paramount to force the issue, force the evolution of new methods, never allow yesterday's limited understanding interfere with taking another fairy-footstep in a better direction.
The stars are very very close and very very large. You'd need some very precise conditions to arise, or:
They'd merge
The gravitational fields would screw up the star formation
The gravitational waves in the oscillating system would necessarily damp it and cause the stars to collide
The original seeding material would have collapsed to the common center of gravity
The original seeding material would have flown apart
The gasses the stars formed from would not have been uniform enough for two equal-sized stars to form
The stellar nursary would have had another star close enough to disrupt/destroy the system
One or both would have exploded early on, from the massive, continuous surface disruption
So, yes, they'll occur. Obviously, since they have. However, they are probably some of the rarest of stellar phenomena. Unique, no. Staggeringly rare, definitely.
Slashdot Mirror
I curse the ARIA with a plague of Rolf Harrises! And may they never guess what it is!
The AIRA declared all Australians to be DJs, and that converting from optical media to an electronic signal in a player (and then from the electronic signal to an audible one) were conversions requiring a license. Botany Bay is to be used to house all juveniles who fail to pay the double licenses.
There are going to be a near-infinite number of quantum-scale black holes and wormholes in whatever volume of space you care to imagine. They evaporate almost instantly. As for stellar black holes, the Chandrasaker Limit is 2.5 solar masses, with a relatively small margin of error. Absolutely nothing of interest will be learned until we're within 2.75 solar masses, because then we can define sensible confidence limits on what the value actually is.
A further search shows the same correlation with Freshmeat and the Get Fuzzy cartoon. Other communications mechanisms and cartoons are on distinctly different paths. It is clearly all the fault of Bucky Katt.
There are two big hopes I see, for a breakthrough: if someone finds a Mayan complex in which there's a corpus of original material, or if some such material is ever found in a cold, dry cave. Much beyond that will be tough.
One of these trends is not like the others. One of these trends is not the same. One of these trends is not like the others. Which trend goes down?
(Brown dwarfs are easy to mis-identify, unlike white dwarfs, which carry warhammer adverts.)
I asked Asterix. He heard something about it being By Jupiter.
This, incidently, is why throwing my comments back at me is so patently stupid and a waste of time. You can find out all of this stuff from the palimpset's website, numerous science journals, press releases, etc. None of this is hidden knowledge, it's insanely easy to find and verify. I may not know everything in the world, but we have this thing called the Internet. Sorry, but ignorance and naivety are neither amusing nor cute, they are the relics of, well, not the stone age, they appear to have used their brains. You could know anything and everything I can ever know within seconds with just a suitable search string from the right site. That just leaves the variable of intelligence, and I'm ranked top 1%. Your mental capacity is your own problem.
You're probably right. Block-length FEC and Turbo Codes allow you to fix errors assuming bursty data corruption of exactly this kind, which is why NASA uses them for deep space missions. You can't exactly ask a probe on the edge of the solar system or skimming geysers to repeat itself. With sound, there's also the fact that you've multiple parameters - delay, amplitude and frequency. Unless they plan to randomize all three, you can use any of the others for covert data. Data compression isolates anything either side, so whatever they are "protecting" is limited to that one side. Shouldn't be hard to use the other.
That and x-ray purity, and a highly controllable coherent source (you can set the energy to what you like), one ring can have hundreds of outlets whereas one laser has one, and they are Seriously Geeky.
On the other hand, "Queen Maeve"'s barrow is massive, so huge burial structures certainly got built.
I think the biggest problem is that the stages of construction overlapped, so there may not have been any time (until the final stage) in which it could have been used as a giant round barrow. The next-biggest problem is that at the start of construction, Neolithic people in Britain used long barrows, not round barrows.
However, it does seem an interesting theory and I'm certainly out of information which might contradict it, so I would suggest contacting the professors on this dig. Remember that most of the really good stuff we're getting from Stonehenge right now is from an ex-banker who happens to enjoy archaeology and mysteries, and he's not remotely unique in "outsiders" breaking into the field in a very big way through insights and non-obvious observations. (However, if you become rich and famous, I insist on 10% of your appearance fees for getting you to go beyond speculating about things.)
We do know a few things about the Great Library of Alexandria - they had a theory of robotics, a copy of the Old Testament many times larger than all known books from that work, they probably had substantial texts on sun-centered solar systems (they'd worked on that for a long time), and since one rather mysterious artifact has been shown to have had differential gearing inside, I'm willing to bet they had substantial texts on such systems. Although Greek society was notoriously patriarchial, it is also known that there were female chief scientists, chief librarians and teachers. Whether they could have broken through their mindset will never be known, but their achievements in liberal, equalitarian science were unrivalled by many western nations until the 19th and 20th centuries and compare well with some parts of the world today.
We don't know all the books were lost - the Archimedes Palimset shows that, and there are tales of many rotting and unreadable (by conventional means) documents in rubbish tips of Ancient Greece. Whether there will ever be a full study to see if other salvagable recorded history is out there, I don't know. It hasn't happened yet, and time only reduces what might have survived. I would argue that it is possible we could recover far more material than we currently have, but impossible if - as is happening - nothing is happening.
On Roman ships, yes, but the Greek ones banked their oarsmen in Beowulf clusters and only had one oarsman per oar.
It wouldn't need to be. The slaves near the middle of war gallies were the ones subject to in-fight catering. After that, it became common knowledge.
Due to the adjustments in the Gregorian calendar, I think you'll find you're 14 days off.
The oxygen in the air, without which you would die, is poisoning your cells and attacking your DNA. That which gives life is also a leading cause of death.
The rest of the cosmos is no different. All things are their own opposites and are self-destructive. A star, to remain a star, must undergo nuclear fusion. In large stars, this creates elements that, when fused, require more heat than is released, thus ultimately destroying the star. That which allows it to exist will - literally - rip the guts out and blast the remainder in a supernova across great swathes of space.
If solar systems did, indeed, look like atoms, planets would regularly smash through the sun and the rest of the time exist so far out that they would freeze. 99.9% of an atom is nothing. Totally Bohring. (Ok, quantum foam, but statistically that's nothing.) The electrons, far from following circular orbits, are probability waves whose position is not only indeterminate, it doesn't even exist. It's not even clear the nucleus can be said to "exist" in the centre, as that would violate the uncertainty principle.
The only "balance" that will ever exist will be at the heat-death of the final particle of matter, when nothing remains and nothing will ever happen again. That is the Universe as it really is.
The Universe plays rock. Haven't you read Pratchett's "Soul Music"?
Thus, an algorithm-driven design should always out-perform data-driven designs when knowledge of the specific is substantially less important than knowledge of the generic. Data-driven designs should always out-perform algorithm-driven design when the reverse is true. A blend of the two designs (in order to isolate and identify the nature of the data) should outperform pure implementations following either design when you want to know a lot about both.
The key to programming is not to have one "perfect" methodology but to have a wide range at your disposal.
For those who prefer mantras, have the serenity to accept the invariants aren't going to change, the courage to recognize the methodology will, and the wisdom to apply the difference.
Many of yesterday's finds are believed to have been the remains left from a 1920s excavation, making establishing context hard. They have also found one piece of possibly shaped blue granite and evidence of flint knapping. Flint knapping may go along with the idea of a medical centre, as shaped flint (as others have pointed out in this discussion) is comparable to surgical steel and easy to sterilize. I'm not seeing any mention of quern stones, which is interesting. (Quern stones are heat-crazed, superheated pebbles that were dropped in water or food to heat it. Very common around settlements and camps.)
One of the better satires out there. There are 78,900 other references to Grauniad on Google. April 1st is a good day to campaign to have the word introduced formally into the English language,
(You might also want to tell me how the hell you missed this article and found only English Heritage's pathetic piece of self-congratulatory text, when the article was covered by most of the archaeological press, not to mention most of the major news outlets. Google not working today?)
Oh, and the druids weren't the only ones complaining. According to the book "Seahenge", the locals were called to a meeting to discuss what was to be done... to be told that the henge was to be removed. "Told" falls a little short of "discussion" in any language I know of, so although I agree totally with the decision, I vehemently disagree with what English Heritage has been quoted elsewhere as saying was "heavy-handed". I'd also consider giant mechanical excavators to fall, oh, just a tad short of the accepted standard of "dig a trowel's-worth, sift twice" that everyone else in the profession manages.
No, it was botched, badly.
This is not to say that the alternatives to propoganda are any better. More honest, perhaps, and shocking enough that people understand the consequences of their actions, as a classic Star Trek (old series) illustrated nicely. Shocking enough that after World War I, the link between the military and nationalism went into decline throughout Europe.
I don't believe there will ever be a "good" answer to conflict or an acceptable solution to war, but I do believe it criminal negligence to go from saying we can never do this acceptably to saying we should tolerate what we have. I believe it paramount to force the issue, force the evolution of new methods, never allow yesterday's limited understanding interfere with taking another fairy-footstep in a better direction.
So, yes, they'll occur. Obviously, since they have. However, they are probably some of the rarest of stellar phenomena. Unique, no. Staggeringly rare, definitely.
It also bombarded Cute Overload with links. They now have a permanent boast on how they survived a Slashdotting, and a link to the original story.