That's one reason that LOFAR isn't. LOFAR is designed to, well, look at the radio emission from fucking great *galaxies*, not some crappy little alien version of Radio 1.
but LOFAR is most definitely not designed to look for ET. LOFAR is a serious project that aims, amongst other things, to act as a testbed for the Square Kilometre Array which shares many of the same principles but will be far, far bigger. In the process, LOFAR will hopefully probe the large-scale structure in more depth than most other surveys have managed and tighten the bounds on the baryon acoustic oscillations on large scales, which are currently one of -- or possibly the best -- probe of dark energy. I believe that it will also be tracking near Earth asteroids but that's out of my field so I don't actually know.
Any use by SETI would be entirely beside the point, and the title is wholly misleading, although the summary is a bit less so.
It's the convenience of it -- I turn up at the airport, read till the flight, then read on the flight. Even if the flight's only 90 minutes or so, that's a good few hours. But I can still read it without needing to recharge on the way to the airport too, and from the airport, and at the hotel that evening and so on and so forth. Whereas I imagine that a couple of films on your iPhone would drain the battery?
Not knocking it, but if I want to watch a film I'm happy to get my laptop out, which can also take a couple of films before the battery conks out, but I'd rather not have to constantly recharge my book (or MP3 player).
Just the convenience, really. Flame wars over how to read books have to be the most pathetic thing in years...
And I hear you on the "electronic device" thing. There's no point arguing with the stewardesses when they tell you to turn it off but for fuck's sake, what do you think it can *do*? It's a book. It's not even got WiFi, it's an older-generation Sony.
Didn't mean to post that Anonymous Coward. That was me. Though why you'd care that a meaningless pseudonym posted it rather than an anonymous pseudonym, I don't know.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not taking any sides, I didn't like either side of your argument. I don't particularly like anyone speaking for "atheists" as a whole and saying "We tend to be skeptics" and have "good BS detectors", most likely brushing dorrito crumbs out of his neckbeard as he does so. Self-serving twaddle, for the most part, although it took me a good few years to notice and stop doing it myself...
If we're going to start talking about "correct and rigorous arguments" you might want to start at 'there is no functional proof of the bible'.
1: Define how we can "prove" a book. 2: Define what you mean by "functional proof" in particular. 3: Explain how this might apply to the Bible. 4: Present your "functional proof for the Bible", whatever on Earth that is meant to mean.
What are you even talking about? I can "prove" the Bible in that I can easily demonstrate it exists. I've got, what, four of my own. (Well, three and a copy of the New Testament). I can also find passages of the Bible that are self-evidently factually incorrect. The first that springs to mind is the statement that the bat is a bird. The bat isn't a bird; ergo the Bible is false.
Stupid argument, isn't it? Yes, it is. Equally stupid would be any attempts to "functionally prove" a book, whatever that's meant to mean.
The rest of your post... yeah, whatevs. "Math works" in that within itself, maths works. Incompleteness theorems themselves are part of maths, or did that somehow pass you by? Can we apply it wrongly to the world? Well, yes, of course. I've lost count of the amount of times I've demonstrated something that's clearly false. I once proved that magnetic fields produce a dark energy. They don't, I'd set up an inconsistent definition. The maths was all fine, but the application right at the start was totally wrong.
"Technically science is in much worse shape than the Bible" is a totally meaningless statement. How can science be in bad shape? It's not a *thing*, it's not some kind of religious movement, "science" is an abstract concept relating to the study of nature. The study of nature and applications of that study are in incredibly rude health if you hadn't noticed. No, you hadn't. lift your head out of your book and go onto the street and see the fruits of the study into nature in the cities all around you. Or just look at your LCD monitor showing you the fruits of a broadband internet and reflect on how none of this was here even a decade back. The internet was (fuck it, Slashdot probably was for all I know) but it was slow, and normally on CRTs because LCDs were too expensive. Tell you what, let's all go back to dial-up like we had in the mid 90s, well within our lifetimes, and see how well the world survives. Not bloody very.
Likewise the Bible can't be in good shape. How can it be? It's a book, for fuck's sake. My Bible is in very good shape, because I've taken care of it. My other Bible is in very good shape, because the person i bought it from took care of it. My other Bible is in good shape because I took care of it. And my NT is in good shape because I've not touched it since I was given it. Is that what you mean?
Tell you what, how about this. "Technically, the Bible is in much worse shape than Noddy Went to the Market". Totally meaningless.
(Oh, by the way, the developed world has churches because... well... wealthy countries have the money to spare to build such buildings of staggeringly little practical use except as a magnet for bombs during wars. Countries which are wastelands rarely have time to spare from hunting water and trying to coerce food out of the scratchy ground to build fucking great towers to demonstrate the power of the local lords. I'd argue it's got nothing to do with building churches leading to God's love leading to power and is more the other way round -- I've seen plenty of churches in downtrodden parts of Africa, and it doesn't seem to help them very much, does it?)
You're trying to compare a scientist working on a long-standing problem in theoretical physics (to whit: given that the Maxwell equations predict a velocity of light and don't specify a frame for this to be measured with respect to, and given Galilean relativity which relates the velocity of objects measured from frames moving with respect to one-another, why do we not observe a change in the speed of light from the sun as measured in December and in June?), to which a *mathematical* solution was known, the Lorentz transformations, but to which a physical understanding hadn't been addressed, with the murky and highly politicised world of climate research, one of the messiest and error-prone fields of study one can work on? Climate science is a horribly complicated, alarmingly nonlinear, alarmingly chaotic (in a mathematical sense) area of study, and one which is polluted by vested interests on both sides. You're not even beginning to compare like for like.
"there is nothing setting math apart from a fairy tale in the eyes of someone demanding proof of its existence, they both lack any physical evidence."
LOL. Except perhaps the computer in front of you, the internet you're typing on and the very modern world you're living in? Without physics, which is ultimately nothing more than applied maths, you'd never have any of these. Without engineering, which being basically applied physics is also just applied maths, you'd never have any of these. No modern world and *nothing* that is in it. Comparing that to "God", who is attested to by a bunch of books derived from a bunch of books compiled by a bunch of captive goatherders in skirts in Babylon -- a credibility that is actually well surpassed by the Grimm Brothers, which was compiled by a couple of linguists who revolutionised the study of language and myth and folklore, is too breathtaking to be laughable.
The observer only freezes at the event horizon as viewed from asymptotic infinity. From the point of view of the observer themselves there's nothing special happens at the event horizon -- it just looks like normal space. (It's a basic tenet of general relativity that you can always remove the effects of gravity locally; that's why singularities are such a problem, because the theory itself breaks down. If an event horizon *did* fuck up for an observer falling over it, something would be very wrong with the theory. If you're interested an of a mathematical bent, try googling for Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates, that's a coordinate system that proves that nothing odd happens at the event horizon.) It's a tiny fraction of a second later when they're dashed into a singularity that they notice something. Or perhaps a bit before when tidal forces rip them to bloodied spaghetti, of course.
Do *not* go for the full moon, the light washes out all the interesting stuff. Go at a waxing or waning moon, and look along the line of shadow to properly see the craters. Also, be warned, it hurts like crazy if you're not careful. There's enough light coming off even the moon to nuke your eye unless you filter it.
As for stars, be warned that even on a clear night the "seeing" is likely to be poor unless the air's really still. The "seeing" is basically how much the moving air pushes the image around as it's coming down, and unless the night is very still indeed it absolutely kills stars -- they're just pinpricks of light, and they'll jump around in your view like crazy. It will also tend to blur even Saturn and Jupiter, but certainly go for Saturn anyway. Jupiter's worthwhile if you've got quite a few well-spread nights to view on, so that you can see how the moons move. You can get them to draw Jupiter and its moons, and compare their pictures over the course of a month or two. Otherwise it's probably not going to be all that exciting unless you're very lucky and get to see some of the bands.
Pleiades is a good call, as is the Orion nebula. Also, Betelgeuse so the kids can see how damned *red* the star actually is -- I find that's much clearer through a telescope than to the naked eye. Otherwise I'd stick to planets and the moon because the seeing could well be a killer.
He also seems unaware that pretty much every eBook reader will read a wide variety of formats from ASCII through to proprietry formats. It's the DRM that's the killer. But I suspect he knows this, and he's actually meaning Apple's decision to strip the DRM from iTunes rather than letting iPods play MP3s. In a similar vein, we can hope that the Kindle dies an exceedingly ugly death and the other vendors all strip the DRM from their ePubs, which would be more or less the equivalent scenario..
This may or may not be true in general, I've no idea, but Baen *have* been re-issuing Poul Anderson's Technic series. Four books, possibly five (depending if they do one or two Flandry books, I can't remember). They've also got the complete Time Patrol, and a couple of other books by him.
Naturally, being dead he's not in a position to explain, but his estate would certainly be able to.
Wow. The idea of being able to have images, a contents page and an index appeals to many people -- probably including those who'll desperately find any objection they can to back up their objections, which are generally founded on the idea that they should be objecting.
ePub is pretty much a zipped XHTML file. So it's ultimately in tagged ASCII, except the file is much smaller, because it's zipped. It also supports images, which ASCII singularly fails to do, and allows one to have both contents and index pages.
ASCII, on the other hand, lacks all of this *and* gives you larger files.
Refuse all you like -- that's your prerogative, even if it is based on an absurd stance.
Point taken, but my point (badly and sarcastically phrased because it's been a rubbish day -- sorry) was that if you feel free to do as you wish to each section then you *can* cook it to say what you like. It's if the rationale behind the sectioning makes sense that this would begin to persuade me more.
You know, you have a very good point. It's classic da Vinci! You need to read it from the back towards the front and then it all makes sense! How could we all have been so stupid for 500 years?
Tactic to decoding any encrypted or otherwise obfuscated work:
1) Pick an arbitrary set of words 2) Perform an arbitrary map from those words to the Latin alphabet 3) Play a quick game of anagrams 4) Declare those words deciphered
5) Pick another arbitrary set of words 6) Declare these words encrypted with a simple shift algorithm 7) Declare the results anagrammatic and play games 8) Declare those words deciphered
9) Rinse and repeat for any arbitrary sets of words and arbitrary encryption mechanism you like until the entire work says what you want it to say or 9) Rinse and repeat for any arbitrary sets of words and arbitrary encryption mechanism you like until you get bored and decide that leaving illustrations labelled "illustration" is good enough for government work and go home for a happy wank
What actually helps persuade me about that version of events is that he evidently *did* write it down somewhere -- and realised his mistake and burned it in the fire.
Yeah but on the other hand take a look at page 4. http://www.edithsherwood.com/voynich_decoded/image_list.php?page=4 We are lead to believe that these illustrate "Rose bush" (looks like few roses I've ever seen that haven't been trampled on), "illustration" (gee, really? Thanks for telling me that this illustration illustrates an illustration -- I mean, is she serious?) and "oil". Which isn't oil. It may be something that can *produce* oil, but it isn't oil, it's a plant with a name.
This isn't news, this is just someone making a wild guess and pulling out some words from her arse, not many of which make sense.
Seriously, also on page 4, "mushroom"? OK, you could argue that's like the stem of a mushroom. So why are the very similar figures on previous pages marked "forget" (eh? unless in some medieval italian slang that apparently both dante and da vinci spoke a "forget" was a mushroom of some sort), "waste" (eh? this is the bit of the mushroom, or forget, that you're meant to waste? seriously?), "rapid" (evidently if you eat this particular mushroom, or forget, you rapidly produce waste) or two question marks.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed the main ones -- TFS is misleading and the TFT is dead wrong. Oh, and I doubt many read TFA.
That's one reason that LOFAR isn't. LOFAR is designed to, well, look at the radio emission from fucking great *galaxies*, not some crappy little alien version of Radio 1.
but LOFAR is most definitely not designed to look for ET. LOFAR is a serious project that aims, amongst other things, to act as a testbed for the Square Kilometre Array which shares many of the same principles but will be far, far bigger. In the process, LOFAR will hopefully probe the large-scale structure in more depth than most other surveys have managed and tighten the bounds on the baryon acoustic oscillations on large scales, which are currently one of -- or possibly the best -- probe of dark energy. I believe that it will also be tracking near Earth asteroids but that's out of my field so I don't actually know.
Any use by SETI would be entirely beside the point, and the title is wholly misleading, although the summary is a bit less so.
It's the convenience of it -- I turn up at the airport, read till the flight, then read on the flight. Even if the flight's only 90 minutes or so, that's a good few hours. But I can still read it without needing to recharge on the way to the airport too, and from the airport, and at the hotel that evening and so on and so forth. Whereas I imagine that a couple of films on your iPhone would drain the battery?
Not knocking it, but if I want to watch a film I'm happy to get my laptop out, which can also take a couple of films before the battery conks out, but I'd rather not have to constantly recharge my book (or MP3 player).
Just the convenience, really. Flame wars over how to read books have to be the most pathetic thing in years...
And I hear you on the "electronic device" thing. There's no point arguing with the stewardesses when they tell you to turn it off but for fuck's sake, what do you think it can *do*? It's a book. It's not even got WiFi, it's an older-generation Sony.
Isn't everyone??
Didn't mean to post that Anonymous Coward. That was me. Though why you'd care that a meaningless pseudonym posted it rather than an anonymous pseudonym, I don't know.
Wow. "Arrogant" I'd accept, but "Troll"? Slashdot's moderation system truly is broken.
Haha I wondered if I'd got that wrong.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not taking any sides, I didn't like either side of your argument. I don't particularly like anyone speaking for "atheists" as a whole and saying "We tend to be skeptics" and have "good BS detectors", most likely brushing dorrito crumbs out of his neckbeard as he does so. Self-serving twaddle, for the most part, although it took me a good few years to notice and stop doing it myself...
If we're going to start talking about "correct and rigorous arguments" you might want to start at 'there is no functional proof of the bible'.
1: Define how we can "prove" a book.
2: Define what you mean by "functional proof" in particular.
3: Explain how this might apply to the Bible.
4: Present your "functional proof for the Bible", whatever on Earth that is meant to mean.
What are you even talking about? I can "prove" the Bible in that I can easily demonstrate it exists. I've got, what, four of my own. (Well, three and a copy of the New Testament). I can also find passages of the Bible that are self-evidently factually incorrect. The first that springs to mind is the statement that the bat is a bird. The bat isn't a bird; ergo the Bible is false.
Stupid argument, isn't it? Yes, it is. Equally stupid would be any attempts to "functionally prove" a book, whatever that's meant to mean.
The rest of your post... yeah, whatevs. "Math works" in that within itself, maths works. Incompleteness theorems themselves are part of maths, or did that somehow pass you by? Can we apply it wrongly to the world? Well, yes, of course. I've lost count of the amount of times I've demonstrated something that's clearly false. I once proved that magnetic fields produce a dark energy. They don't, I'd set up an inconsistent definition. The maths was all fine, but the application right at the start was totally wrong.
"Technically science is in much worse shape than the Bible" is a totally meaningless statement. How can science be in bad shape? It's not a *thing*, it's not some kind of religious movement, "science" is an abstract concept relating to the study of nature. The study of nature and applications of that study are in incredibly rude health if you hadn't noticed. No, you hadn't. lift your head out of your book and go onto the street and see the fruits of the study into nature in the cities all around you. Or just look at your LCD monitor showing you the fruits of a broadband internet and reflect on how none of this was here even a decade back. The internet was (fuck it, Slashdot probably was for all I know) but it was slow, and normally on CRTs because LCDs were too expensive. Tell you what, let's all go back to dial-up like we had in the mid 90s, well within our lifetimes, and see how well the world survives. Not bloody very.
Likewise the Bible can't be in good shape. How can it be? It's a book, for fuck's sake. My Bible is in very good shape, because I've taken care of it. My other Bible is in very good shape, because the person i bought it from took care of it. My other Bible is in good shape because I took care of it. And my NT is in good shape because I've not touched it since I was given it. Is that what you mean?
Tell you what, how about this. "Technically, the Bible is in much worse shape than Noddy Went to the Market". Totally meaningless.
(Oh, by the way, the developed world has churches because... well... wealthy countries have the money to spare to build such buildings of staggeringly little practical use except as a magnet for bombs during wars. Countries which are wastelands rarely have time to spare from hunting water and trying to coerce food out of the scratchy ground to build fucking great towers to demonstrate the power of the local lords. I'd argue it's got nothing to do with building churches leading to God's love leading to power and is more the other way round -- I've seen plenty of churches in downtrodden parts of Africa, and it doesn't seem to help them very much, does it?)
The mind absolutely boggles.
You're trying to compare a scientist working on a long-standing problem in theoretical physics (to whit: given that the Maxwell equations predict a velocity of light and don't specify a frame for this to be measured with respect to, and given Galilean relativity which relates the velocity of objects measured from frames moving with respect to one-another, why do we not observe a change in the speed of light from the sun as measured in December and in June?), to which a *mathematical* solution was known, the Lorentz transformations, but to which a physical understanding hadn't been addressed, with the murky and highly politicised world of climate research, one of the messiest and error-prone fields of study one can work on? Climate science is a horribly complicated, alarmingly nonlinear, alarmingly chaotic (in a mathematical sense) area of study, and one which is polluted by vested interests on both sides. You're not even beginning to compare like for like.
"there is nothing setting math apart from a fairy tale in the eyes of someone demanding proof of its existence, they both lack any physical evidence."
LOL. Except perhaps the computer in front of you, the internet you're typing on and the very modern world you're living in? Without physics, which is ultimately nothing more than applied maths, you'd never have any of these. Without engineering, which being basically applied physics is also just applied maths, you'd never have any of these. No modern world and *nothing* that is in it. Comparing that to "God", who is attested to by a bunch of books derived from a bunch of books compiled by a bunch of captive goatherders in skirts in Babylon -- a credibility that is actually well surpassed by the Grimm Brothers, which was compiled by a couple of linguists who revolutionised the study of language and myth and folklore, is too breathtaking to be laughable.
The observer only freezes at the event horizon as viewed from asymptotic infinity. From the point of view of the observer themselves there's nothing special happens at the event horizon -- it just looks like normal space. (It's a basic tenet of general relativity that you can always remove the effects of gravity locally; that's why singularities are such a problem, because the theory itself breaks down. If an event horizon *did* fuck up for an observer falling over it, something would be very wrong with the theory. If you're interested an of a mathematical bent, try googling for Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates, that's a coordinate system that proves that nothing odd happens at the event horizon.) It's a tiny fraction of a second later when they're dashed into a singularity that they notice something. Or perhaps a bit before when tidal forces rip them to bloodied spaghetti, of course.
Do *not* go for the full moon, the light washes out all the interesting stuff. Go at a waxing or waning moon, and look along the line of shadow to properly see the craters. Also, be warned, it hurts like crazy if you're not careful. There's enough light coming off even the moon to nuke your eye unless you filter it.
As for stars, be warned that even on a clear night the "seeing" is likely to be poor unless the air's really still. The "seeing" is basically how much the moving air pushes the image around as it's coming down, and unless the night is very still indeed it absolutely kills stars -- they're just pinpricks of light, and they'll jump around in your view like crazy. It will also tend to blur even Saturn and Jupiter, but certainly go for Saturn anyway. Jupiter's worthwhile if you've got quite a few well-spread nights to view on, so that you can see how the moons move. You can get them to draw Jupiter and its moons, and compare their pictures over the course of a month or two. Otherwise it's probably not going to be all that exciting unless you're very lucky and get to see some of the bands.
Pleiades is a good call, as is the Orion nebula. Also, Betelgeuse so the kids can see how damned *red* the star actually is -- I find that's much clearer through a telescope than to the naked eye. Otherwise I'd stick to planets and the moon because the seeing could well be a killer.
He also seems unaware that pretty much every eBook reader will read a wide variety of formats from ASCII through to proprietry formats. It's the DRM that's the killer. But I suspect he knows this, and he's actually meaning Apple's decision to strip the DRM from iTunes rather than letting iPods play MP3s. In a similar vein, we can hope that the Kindle dies an exceedingly ugly death and the other vendors all strip the DRM from their ePubs, which would be more or less the equivalent scenario..
This may or may not be true in general, I've no idea, but Baen *have* been re-issuing Poul Anderson's Technic series. Four books, possibly five (depending if they do one or two Flandry books, I can't remember). They've also got the complete Time Patrol, and a couple of other books by him.
Naturally, being dead he's not in a position to explain, but his estate would certainly be able to.
Wow. The idea of being able to have images, a contents page and an index appeals to many people -- probably including those who'll desperately find any objection they can to back up their objections, which are generally founded on the idea that they should be objecting.
ePub is pretty much a zipped XHTML file. So it's ultimately in tagged ASCII, except the file is much smaller, because it's zipped. It also supports images, which ASCII singularly fails to do, and allows one to have both contents and index pages.
ASCII, on the other hand, lacks all of this *and* gives you larger files.
Refuse all you like -- that's your prerogative, even if it is based on an absurd stance.
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1463472&cid=30299028 :) I'm comfortable with it.
Oh dear, what a pity.
And yet, somehow, I'll carry on living with the knowledge that I'm a moron who can't spell.
Point taken, but my point (badly and sarcastically phrased because it's been a rubbish day -- sorry) was that if you feel free to do as you wish to each section then you *can* cook it to say what you like. It's if the rationale behind the sectioning makes sense that this would begin to persuade me more.
Might be a British/American spelling difference, I've always used "lead" and pronounced it to rhyme with the metal, which is also spelled "lead".
Of course, I'm not discounting that I might be a moron who can't spell, but it could just be one of the differences in the language.
You know, you have a very good point. It's classic da Vinci! You need to read it from the back towards the front and then it all makes sense! How could we all have been so stupid for 500 years?
So...
Tactic to decoding any encrypted or otherwise obfuscated work:
1) Pick an arbitrary set of words
2) Perform an arbitrary map from those words to the Latin alphabet
3) Play a quick game of anagrams
4) Declare those words deciphered
5) Pick another arbitrary set of words
6) Declare these words encrypted with a simple shift algorithm
7) Declare the results anagrammatic and play games
8) Declare those words deciphered
9) Rinse and repeat for any arbitrary sets of words and arbitrary encryption mechanism you like until the entire work says what you want it to say
or
9) Rinse and repeat for any arbitrary sets of words and arbitrary encryption mechanism you like until you get bored and decide that leaving illustrations labelled "illustration" is good enough for government work and go home for a happy wank
What actually helps persuade me about that version of events is that he evidently *did* write it down somewhere -- and realised his mistake and burned it in the fire.
Yeah but on the other hand take a look at page 4.
http://www.edithsherwood.com/voynich_decoded/image_list.php?page=4
We are lead to believe that these illustrate "Rose bush" (looks like few roses I've ever seen that haven't been trampled on), "illustration" (gee, really? Thanks for telling me that this illustration illustrates an illustration -- I mean, is she serious?) and "oil". Which isn't oil. It may be something that can *produce* oil, but it isn't oil, it's a plant with a name.
This isn't news, this is just someone making a wild guess and pulling out some words from her arse, not many of which make sense.
Seriously, also on page 4, "mushroom"? OK, you could argue that's like the stem of a mushroom. So why are the very similar figures on previous pages marked "forget" (eh? unless in some medieval italian slang that apparently both dante and da vinci spoke a "forget" was a mushroom of some sort), "waste" (eh? this is the bit of the mushroom, or forget, that you're meant to waste? seriously?), "rapid" (evidently if you eat this particular mushroom, or forget, you rapidly produce waste) or two question marks.
Total nonsense. I quite agree that this hurts.