I always thought it a bit of a shame that, given the amount of time and money spent on the Soderbergh/Clooney film adaptation, no-one kicked back enough for a straight Polish-English translation of the original novel.
On the other hand I was laughing when I read Stanislaw Lem's comment on this movie: "My book was not about the sexual problems of humans in space."
The "insufficient" population density argument is bullshit. New Jersey has a higher population density than all of the European states and Japan, and yet most of the state has zero access to a public transportation system that will deliver them somewhere other than New York or Philadelphia. I lived in a rural Scottish town for a short while that had public transportation options that were lightyears better than anything I can get living in NJ, just across the river from NYC.
There are lots of details that are wrong with public transport in the U.S. When I was in the Bay Area around 2000, I was trying to look up a public transport connection from St. Clara to San Francisco. Coming from Europe, I expected a website somewhere, where I entered starting and ending point, and the system then would look up the timetables and put out a schedule, as I knew it from Germany. But no! Not even the timetables of the different busses were reachable from a single site, I had to look up several public transportation maps and had to figure out what company is serving which line and then hoping I could get a timetable on the website of the company. No information about connections to other lines, no links to partner companies within the BART system... It was horrible.
At the same time nearly all train, streetcar, bus and ferry schedules of Germany, covering municipal, federal and private transportation companies, were reachable within a single system, and it even was possible to enter a point of interest or an address as starting or ending point, and it would put out a nice schedule including walking distances and traffic fares.
And on a side note: I am currently living in a village with ~8300 inhabitants, and I was considering buying an appartement in another village with ~2500 inhabitants. When I asked the seller about bus schedules, he was apologizing. Yes, there was a bus station just over the street, and it was regularily served by busses from and to the next bigger town (about 20 mls away), but sadly... there was a hole in the schedule during the night. No bus between 2.30 am and 3.30 am in the morning! Before and after that busses were going each 30 mins in both directions.
Very easy. J.S.Bach (as Director of Music at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig) had a contract that demanded one cantata for each week. He had one week to write the cantata, to rehearse it with the chorus and the instrumentalists and then put it on stage. He got paid if the cantata was performed each week independently of the possibility that the same cantata might have been performed somewhere else (which in fact was quite impossible because the time frame was much too short).
But as you pointed out correctly, with a sale online you have some expectations, which involve you, the seller and the sale: You expect for instance the bought good to arrive at your home, and there is no problem for you to announce publically that you bought exactly the item in question. So it's very easy for you to detect fraud. If your money is missing, but the item not arriving, then there might be fraud going on. If the seller sent the good, but the money never arrives, then there miht be fraud going on.
In the legislations I live in or have lived in, the rules are thus: Absentee ballots are allowed as long as they don't represent the majority of all votes (for exactly the reasons you stated).
Lets come up with a car analogy here. Popper describes, how the winner of a race is determined, while Kuhn points out, that the rules (explicit in the rule books and implicit in engineering traditions), after which racing cars are built, have been changing over time in the racing series.
Do it as the bavarian judge did, when the new Buergerliches Gesetzbuch (Civil Code of Law) was introduced in 1900 in Germany. A law inspector was impressed by the amount of decisions the judge had already based on the new Code of Law. And the judge just told him: "You know, beforehand I wrote down that I based my decision on the Pandects (Roman Law). Today I keep it in mind."
Pterodactyls are no proto-birds, they aren't even directly related to birds. Flying has evolved several times in reptiles, and pterodactyls were just one strand of flying reptils.
There never was an Egyptian empire, there was the state of the pharaos, starting about ~2700 B.C. and falling to Alexandre the Great in the 4. century BC, followed by the greek-ptolemaean Egyptian kingdom, which was coming to an end in 30 BC with the suicide of Cleopatra.
PS: We are completely offtopic, because Byzanz/Constantinople/Istanbul never was a part of Egypt anyway.
This criterion works only with livings which actually interbreed. It won't work for parthenogenetic livings or for livings like bacteria.
And even within sexual species it is problematic. Take dandelion (yes, this yellow flower) for example.
According to your definition of a species there are hundreds of thousands of species within the "dandelion" (taraxacum) genus.
Dandelion comes in three general types: A diploid one (with two sets of chromosoms), a triploid (with three sets of chromosoms) and a tetraploid one (four sets). If two diploid plants interbred, they have tetraploid offspring. If a tetraploid plant interbreeds with a diploid plant, they have triploid offspring. Triploid plants are infertile, they don't interbreed. Instead they generate triploid clones of themselves. Sometimes the number of chromosome sets is reduced to two in that process, generating diploid offspring, which then can interbreed with tetraploid and diploid plants. So the generation cycle is closed.
All three formes exist in the same biotope. All three look the same. Dandelion is pretty adaptive with this generation cycle: You have diploid forms which remix genetic traits. You have tetraploid forms which help generating triploid forms, and you have the triploids, whose mutations are spread wide. If some of those mutations manage to survive for enough generations, they generate fertile forms for remix of the genetic pool.
According to your definition each individual plant of triploid dandelion and his identical clones are a separate species, because they don't interbreed with any other dandelion. Also the tetraploid forms are separate species, because they don't generate fertile offspring. Only the diploid forms are able to generate fertile offspring at all!
We have observed speciation! For instance E.coli is separated from similar bacteria by the fact that E.coli is not able to digest citric acid (as bacteria don't interbred, the "generating fertile offspring together" criterion doesn't work).
But an experiment of about 50.000 generations of E.coli in a citric acidic environment proved to bring into existance an E.coli strain able to digest citric acid. So by definition this strain of E.coli is a different species.
The affiliation of the judge in a case he has to decide with one of the both parties is called bias. If the judge who has to judge if it was bias is in the same organization whose membership was the grounds on which the accusation of bias was based on, is in exactly the same organization, then his judgement about exactly this membership will be as biased.
I don't believe in evolution. There is nothing to believe. I use it as a very valuable vehicle to make sense of the biological world. But if it turns out that there was something fundamental going on we didn't spot yet, I am ready to abandon the concepts.
Mathematics (even math that is really complex and so mystifies people like algorithms, software, etc), chemical compounds, genetics. These are all things that were already there waiting for someone to stumble upon them.
Mathematics are both: invented and discovered.
Think about real numbers: There are at least three methods to describe the continuum, invented by Bolzano & Weierstrass, by Cauchy and by Dirichlet. Those definitely are inventions. The discovery was, that all three are equivalent, and axiomately setting one you can prove the others.
As someone who lives in a region with many wild boars, I have to say:
If you ever manage to behave that badly that a wild boar feels enclined to attack you, I would trust you neither with a knife able to kill a boar, nor with a gun.
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I always thought it a bit of a shame that, given the amount of time and money spent on the Soderbergh/Clooney film adaptation, no-one kicked back enough for a straight Polish-English translation of the original novel.
On the other hand I was laughing when I read Stanislaw Lem's comment on this movie: "My book was not about the sexual problems of humans in space."
The Invincible (I read it at the age of 11) was the only book ever I got nightmares after reading it.
The "insufficient" population density argument is bullshit. New Jersey has a higher population density than all of the European states and Japan, and yet most of the state has zero access to a public transportation system that will deliver them somewhere other than New York or Philadelphia. I lived in a rural Scottish town for a short while that had public transportation options that were lightyears better than anything I can get living in NJ, just across the river from NYC.
There are lots of details that are wrong with public transport in the U.S. When I was in the Bay Area around 2000, I was trying to look up a public transport connection from St. Clara to San Francisco. Coming from Europe, I expected a website somewhere, where I entered starting and ending point, and the system then would look up the timetables and put out a schedule, as I knew it from Germany. But no! Not even the timetables of the different busses were reachable from a single site, I had to look up several public transportation maps and had to figure out what company is serving which line and then hoping I could get a timetable on the website of the company. No information about connections to other lines, no links to partner companies within the BART system... It was horrible.
At the same time nearly all train, streetcar, bus and ferry schedules of Germany, covering municipal, federal and private transportation companies, were reachable within a single system, and it even was possible to enter a point of interest or an address as starting or ending point, and it would put out a nice schedule including walking distances and traffic fares.
And on a side note: I am currently living in a village with ~8300 inhabitants, and I was considering buying an appartement in another village with ~2500 inhabitants. When I asked the seller about bus schedules, he was apologizing. Yes, there was a bus station just over the street, and it was regularily served by busses from and to the next bigger town (about 20 mls away), but sadly... there was a hole in the schedule during the night. No bus between 2.30 am and 3.30 am in the morning! Before and after that busses were going each 30 mins in both directions.
Very easy. J.S.Bach (as Director of Music at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig) had a contract that demanded one cantata for each week. He had one week to write the cantata, to rehearse it with the chorus and the instrumentalists and then put it on stage. He got paid if the cantata was performed each week independently of the possibility that the same cantata might have been performed somewhere else (which in fact was quite impossible because the time frame was much too short).
Interestingly though white paper manages to be readable in full sunlight without any backlight ;)
But that's only why the bought the $39 portable USB drive ;)
But as you pointed out correctly, with a sale online you have some expectations, which involve you, the seller and the sale: You expect for instance the bought good to arrive at your home, and there is no problem for you to announce publically that you bought exactly the item in question. So it's very easy for you to detect fraud. If your money is missing, but the item not arriving, then there might be fraud going on. If the seller sent the good, but the money never arrives, then there miht be fraud going on.
In the legislations I live in or have lived in, the rules are thus: Absentee ballots are allowed as long as they don't represent the majority of all votes (for exactly the reasons you stated).
Lets come up with a car analogy here. Popper describes, how the winner of a race is determined, while Kuhn points out, that the rules (explicit in the rule books and implicit in engineering traditions), after which racing cars are built, have been changing over time in the racing series.
It it this hypothesis that does not make (sufficiently) falsifiable predictions.
It does. It predicts species (possibly long died out and only preserved in fossils) which share properties of different, already known species.
Though both have problems in their work, Thomas Kuhn comes closer to describing the way science actually works than Karl Popper.
Ah! This has to be the reason why Thomas Kuhn in 1995 stated: "Paradigm was a perfectly good word, until I messed it up."
Do it as the bavarian judge did, when the new Buergerliches Gesetzbuch (Civil Code of Law) was introduced in 1900 in Germany.
A law inspector was impressed by the amount of decisions the judge had already based on the new Code of Law. And the judge just told him: "You know, beforehand I wrote down that I based my decision on the Pandects (Roman Law). Today I keep it in mind."
Pterodactyls are no proto-birds, they aren't even directly related to birds. Flying has evolved several times in reptiles, and pterodactyls were just one strand of flying reptils.
There never was an Egyptian empire, there was the state of the pharaos, starting about ~2700 B.C. and falling to Alexandre the Great in the 4. century BC, followed by the greek-ptolemaean Egyptian kingdom, which was coming to an end in 30 BC with the suicide of Cleopatra.
PS: We are completely offtopic, because Byzanz/Constantinople/Istanbul never was a part of Egypt anyway.
This criterion works only with livings which actually interbreed. It won't work for parthenogenetic livings or for livings like bacteria.
And even within sexual species it is problematic. Take dandelion (yes, this yellow flower) for example.
According to your definition of a species there are hundreds of thousands of species within the "dandelion" (taraxacum) genus.
Dandelion comes in three general types: A diploid one (with two sets of chromosoms), a triploid (with three sets of chromosoms) and a tetraploid one (four sets). If two diploid plants interbred, they have tetraploid offspring. If a tetraploid plant interbreeds with a diploid plant, they have triploid offspring. Triploid plants are infertile, they don't interbreed. Instead they generate triploid clones of themselves. Sometimes the number of chromosome sets is reduced to two in that process, generating diploid offspring, which then can interbreed with tetraploid and diploid plants. So the generation cycle is closed.
All three formes exist in the same biotope. All three look the same. Dandelion is pretty adaptive with this generation cycle: You have diploid forms which remix genetic traits. You have tetraploid forms which help generating triploid forms, and you have the triploids, whose mutations are spread wide. If some of those mutations manage to survive for enough generations, they generate fertile forms for remix of the genetic pool.
According to your definition each individual plant of triploid dandelion and his identical clones are a separate species, because they don't interbreed with any other dandelion. Also the tetraploid forms are separate species, because they don't generate fertile offspring. Only the diploid forms are able to generate fertile offspring at all!
We have observed speciation! For instance E.coli is separated from similar bacteria by the fact that E.coli is not able to digest citric acid (as bacteria don't interbred, the "generating fertile offspring together" criterion doesn't work).
But an experiment of about 50.000 generations of E.coli in a citric acidic environment proved to bring into existance an E.coli strain able to digest citric acid. So by definition this strain of E.coli is a different species.
Ah yes... but it was stated in the Wired article.
The affiliation of the judge in a case he has to decide with one of the both parties is called bias. If the judge who has to judge if it was bias is in the same organization whose membership was the grounds on which the accusation of bias was based on, is in exactly the same organization, then his judgement about exactly this membership will be as biased.
I don't believe in evolution. There is nothing to believe. I use it as a very valuable vehicle to make sense of the biological world. But if it turns out that there was something fundamental going on we didn't spot yet, I am ready to abandon the concepts.
Mathematics (even math that is really complex and so mystifies people like algorithms, software, etc), chemical compounds, genetics. These are all things that were already there waiting for someone to stumble upon them.
Mathematics are both: invented and discovered.
Think about real numbers: There are at least three methods to describe the continuum, invented by Bolzano & Weierstrass, by Cauchy and by Dirichlet. Those definitely are inventions. The discovery was, that all three are equivalent, and axiomately setting one you can prove the others.
Ok, then lets reformulate: "What if the U.S. violate someone else's human rights, and not enough americans care about it?"
Ah, the good ol' "It came from the President, it must be legal" defense.
What if the U.S. violate someone elses human rights, and no american cares about it?
Just keep the distance.
As someone who lives in a region with many wild boars, I have to say:
If you ever manage to behave that badly that a wild boar feels enclined to attack you, I would trust you neither with a knife able to kill a boar, nor with a gun.