Which makes every comet and every asteroid and the Moon and the Sun planets too - they are also wandering stars, moving around the other objects in the sky. And with the stellar system moving around the center of the Galaxy every 26000 years, every other star and all other Galaxies are wandering stars too.
Sometimes, a definition really loses its meaning if applied too literally.
Because you never know what you might discover next. Pluto is not even known for 100 years yet, it differs from all other planets (which are either stone planets with a defined surface and run on orbits close to the Sun, or gas planets which run further away and don't have a defined surface), in that it is basicly a dirty snowball, much more similar to the large moons of the gas planets, its orbit is so different from a circular one, that it crosses the orbit of Neptune, and while all other planets stay pretty much in the plane of the Earth orbit, Pluto's orbit is quite slanted.
The kilo was defined in 1793 (yes, more than 200 years ago) as meaning "1000 of the base unit". So how much earlier do you want the 1024 be defined? And which is the "newer" definition?
It would not include Mercury, which is a planet for more than 3000 years (at least since the Babylonians defined 'planets' as those objects in the sky that change their place within the other objects).
What use is the average gifted player who lacks the skill to throw a ball or to spot a game situation? Those players get trained to be able to lead by example. No one expects the rookie to learn Football all by himself and then come on the field and throw the deciding pass. Everyone knows that this requires years of constant exercise and training and educated coaches and medical supervision far away from the normal school curriculum. But the intelligent children are supposed to learn it all by themselves?
Failure at the NSA may cause you to lose WW III. Currently, the successes of the NSA are basicly pissing everyone off, weakening anything that could help protect information and not producing anything worthwile. The only result ever the NSA produced in the War on Terror so far seems to be detecting one wire transfer to Somalia.
Metro is still illegal to use for anything at Microsoft in the E.U. Metro is a trademark of Metro AG (not only) in the computer business. So not even the design language can be named Metro in the E.U. without clashing with Metro AG. (And that's why I only see the new tiled surface of Microsoft Windows called Metro on Slashdot.)
And before someone asks: The yearly revenue of Metro AG (66 billion EUR ~ 90 billion USD) is larger than that of Microsoft (77 billion USD).
I think the renaming of Metro to Modern UI has to do with the trademark rights of Metro AG in the E.U. Microsoft is not allowed to call the GUI Metro in Europe, thus the need for a new name.
There are also speculations that the core of Jupiter might be some exotic material like metallic Hydrogenium (compressed so much that normal Hydrogenium changes into a metallic state with the electrons freely floating between the Hydrogenium cores e.g. protons).
No, not just arithmetic, you also learn algebra by rote memorization and constant exercise. With time this helps you to spot regularities and later you are able to see possible solutions in complex mathematical problems.
There are experiments about what helps pupils best to get better with mathematics, and it has been shown that drill and constant exercise is the most effective way, even for complexer mathematical problems.
Actually, you do learn math by rote memorization. Those of us who were interested in math from the beginning were training it all the time by playing around with numbers or geometrical objects, which is just rote memorization with spices on top. And you get really good at math by doing math chores all the time.
You seem to misunderstand the "consumption of water" concept used in the article. If you irrigate an arid region like California, you increase the amount of water evaporating. Since evaporated water can't be used anymore, it is lost for local production (except you create some big ass industry to get evaporated water back from air). That's why in the case of an arid region, we really have water consumption (e.g. less water than before), other than in a humid region, where there is a surplus of water from rainfall compared with the possible evaporation, and thus any water used can be recycled or replaced by fresh water.
When the article talks about "exporting water", it actually means that this water used to grow the alfalfa is lost for any other uses, because it is long evaporated. It's not the actual water that gets exported to China (except if the wind blows the vapor to China where it adds to local rainfalls), it's the consumption of water necessary to actually grow enough alfalfa to export it.
The main question is: Where does the water California is watering its crops come from, and what will California do if the source is exhausted?
I just read the Wikipedia entry again, it seems to be a horrible attempt at automatically translating the german entry. You can tell from the fact that the station Kaiserdamm is called "Emperor dam", and that "Olympische Strasse" is still in the german grammar form ("Olympischen Strasse") of the original german sentence.
Yes, there is the Berlin S-Bahn, but that's a completely different track system, and that's not what I am talking about.
Take the U2 for instance, it is a line listed as U-Bahn (as you can see from the line number). It runs above ground from Ruhleben to Olympiastadion. Then it disappears in a tunnel until Wittenbergplatz. There it goes up a ramp, and then runs as elevated railway until Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Park, where it goes down again in a tunnel. At Eberswalder Strasse, it appears again above ground and runs on an elevated railway along Schoenhauser Allee for two stops, and then disappears again in a tunnel until the terminal.
Ironically it might be still a subway. London and Berlin, two towns with very large subway systems, have them running in part above ground. And they are still called subways. It would be strange if a transport system changes names when it leaves a tunnel and changes it again when it enters the next one, as it happens several times on some lines in Berlin or London.
[...] in keeping the sword of judicial damocles off their heads.
As it is the Sword of Damocles, and it was hanging on a single hair of a horse's tail above Damocles' head, the correct metapher would be the judical Sword of Damocles.
You got something wrong. "Being in favor of QT" is something quite different than "contribution to QT". Albert Einstein always saw QT as some clumsy patch to explain some weird observations (e.g. the non-existance of the ultraviolett catastrophe). He was always believing that QT should and will be replaced with something much more deterministic, more in the lines of the Field Theory he was working on in his later years. Yes, Albert Einstein contributed some important details to QT (the external photoelectric effect, for which he got awarded the Nobel prize, the Bose-Einstein-statistics and even the prediction of the properties of supraconduction). But ironically, at least the last two were created by Albert Einstein partly to show the problems with QT, because it predicted some really counterintuitive results. Albert Einstein was convinced that both would not exist in reality, for him, for him, they were examples of how fundamentally wrong QT must be. The Bose-Einstein-condensate and supraconduction were proven to exist only after Albert Einstein's death. I wonder how he would have reacted if those "monstrosities of the brain" had been created during his lifetime.
With the exception of 1998 (which was an incredibly hot year), we had constant warming. TFA even has the graphics. If you start your trending graph with any year before 1998 or with any year later, you get a clear trend. Only if you start it with exactly 1998, the tendency is weaker. You don't even need to exclude 1998 as an outlier to still keep the trend.
I wouldn't give much on a statistic that only works if you arbitrarily choose a specified starting point. And yes, you can manipulate every trend by choosing your starting point accordingly. So I call all claims that "since 1998, we don't have a warming trend anymore" manipulated statistics.
You greatly underestimate the chance of a child to learn about possible educations. Children are not oblivious to their environment. They see planes flying ahead, they see electric lights and vending machines. They know that there is something out there they didn't learn anything about yet. So all a closed society can do is trying to suppress the interest in anything outside the society. But this will work only for some small groups (like the Haredi jews), and even there it will not be perfect in the long run. If the group gets any larger (I estimate the limit somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 persons), some people will look for the outside and trying to discover what's out there.
Even your example of FTL does not hold -- there are enough people out there today greatly interested in anything that makes FTL travel possible, and no one is really hindering them to find out how it works, if it works at all. The whole idea that you just have to hide a secret and it will be gone forever is questionable at best. That's why I think the concept of an "evolution towards less education" is flawed. If the interest in education gets lost, it's not because of biological reasons. Then it's because of a general breakdown of society, where the structures that made it possible and worthwile to actually get an education that goes beyond the knowledge you need for daily survival, crumble and die. There were situations like this, Western Europe experienced them after the end of the Roman Empire. It didn't happen because the people of education died out. It did happen because the once stable environment of 1000 years of tradition, education and careers vanished, and a series of short lived, feuding kingdoms appeared, in a constant struggle to their own survival and in a constant fear of invadors. It took about 400 years for the situation to settle, and then suddenly, education appeared again, universities were founded, ancient texts were rediscovered, commented and a series of new discoveries started.
Actually, each generation has another chance at their own Enlightment. Just because you are born into a uneducated society, it doesn't mean you are forced to stay there. Uneducated people are not less brainy than educated ones, they have differently developed skills. But each child born into an uneducated society still has the theoretical chance to get the education - even if closed societies are trying to make those chances as small as possible.
So it's not an evolution game of us vs. them, it's a game of where the children of each society will go to. Think of the U.S. of the 19th and early 20th century. People from all over the world were coming there to start a new life. They came from very different educational backgrounds, born into societies of very different levels of openess. Three to five generations later, their offspring has a typical american education, typical american behaviour and typical american goals and dreams.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes, a definition really loses its meaning if applied too literally.
Because you never know what you might discover next. Pluto is not even known for 100 years yet, it differs from all other planets (which are either stone planets with a defined surface and run on orbits close to the Sun, or gas planets which run further away and don't have a defined surface), in that it is basicly a dirty snowball, much more similar to the large moons of the gas planets, its orbit is so different from a circular one, that it crosses the orbit of Neptune, and while all other planets stay pretty much in the plane of the Earth orbit, Pluto's orbit is quite slanted.
The kilo was defined in 1793 (yes, more than 200 years ago) as meaning "1000 of the base unit". So how much earlier do you want the 1024 be defined? And which is the "newer" definition?
It would not include Mercury, which is a planet for more than 3000 years (at least since the Babylonians defined 'planets' as those objects in the sky that change their place within the other objects).
No. It's actually hard work to turn a gifted child into a prodigy and later a well educated adult. Everything else is a waste of talent.
Yes, there are people who won the lottery. This doesn't make buying lottery tickets a worthwile investition.
What use is the average gifted player who lacks the skill to throw a ball or to spot a game situation? Those players get trained to be able to lead by example. No one expects the rookie to learn Football all by himself and then come on the field and throw the deciding pass. Everyone knows that this requires years of constant exercise and training and educated coaches and medical supervision far away from the normal school curriculum. But the intelligent children are supposed to learn it all by themselves?
And if you don't have the money to do so, future be damned?
There are no "physics" professions. Maybe that wasn't apparent enough for you to grasp.
Failure at the NSA may cause you to lose WW III. Currently, the successes of the NSA are basicly pissing everyone off, weakening anything that could help protect information and not producing anything worthwile. The only result ever the NSA produced in the War on Terror so far seems to be detecting one wire transfer to Somalia.
For me, the NSA is the enemy. People who constantly spy on me are the enemy. It's that simple.
And before someone asks: The yearly revenue of Metro AG (66 billion EUR ~ 90 billion USD) is larger than that of Microsoft (77 billion USD).
I think the renaming of Metro to Modern UI has to do with the trademark rights of Metro AG in the E.U. Microsoft is not allowed to call the GUI Metro in Europe, thus the need for a new name.
There are also speculations that the core of Jupiter might be some exotic material like metallic Hydrogenium (compressed so much that normal Hydrogenium changes into a metallic state with the electrons freely floating between the Hydrogenium cores e.g. protons).
There are experiments about what helps pupils best to get better with mathematics, and it has been shown that drill and constant exercise is the most effective way, even for complexer mathematical problems.
Actually, you do learn math by rote memorization. Those of us who were interested in math from the beginning were training it all the time by playing around with numbers or geometrical objects, which is just rote memorization with spices on top. And you get really good at math by doing math chores all the time.
When the article talks about "exporting water", it actually means that this water used to grow the alfalfa is lost for any other uses, because it is long evaporated. It's not the actual water that gets exported to China (except if the wind blows the vapor to China where it adds to local rainfalls), it's the consumption of water necessary to actually grow enough alfalfa to export it.
The main question is: Where does the water California is watering its crops come from, and what will California do if the source is exhausted?
I just read the Wikipedia entry again, it seems to be a horrible attempt at automatically translating the german entry. You can tell from the fact that the station Kaiserdamm is called "Emperor dam", and that "Olympische Strasse" is still in the german grammar form ("Olympischen Strasse") of the original german sentence.
Take the U2 for instance, it is a line listed as U-Bahn (as you can see from the line number). It runs above ground from Ruhleben to Olympiastadion. Then it disappears in a tunnel until Wittenbergplatz. There it goes up a ramp, and then runs as elevated railway until Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Park, where it goes down again in a tunnel. At Eberswalder Strasse, it appears again above ground and runs on an elevated railway along Schoenhauser Allee for two stops, and then disappears again in a tunnel until the terminal.
Ironically it might be still a subway. London and Berlin, two towns with very large subway systems, have them running in part above ground. And they are still called subways. It would be strange if a transport system changes names when it leaves a tunnel and changes it again when it enters the next one, as it happens several times on some lines in Berlin or London.
[...] in keeping the sword of judicial damocles off their heads.
As it is the Sword of Damocles, and it was hanging on a single hair of a horse's tail above Damocles' head, the correct metapher would be the judical Sword of Damocles.
You got something wrong. "Being in favor of QT" is something quite different than "contribution to QT". Albert Einstein always saw QT as some clumsy patch to explain some weird observations (e.g. the non-existance of the ultraviolett catastrophe). He was always believing that QT should and will be replaced with something much more deterministic, more in the lines of the Field Theory he was working on in his later years. Yes, Albert Einstein contributed some important details to QT (the external photoelectric effect, for which he got awarded the Nobel prize, the Bose-Einstein-statistics and even the prediction of the properties of supraconduction). But ironically, at least the last two were created by Albert Einstein partly to show the problems with QT, because it predicted some really counterintuitive results. Albert Einstein was convinced that both would not exist in reality, for him, for him, they were examples of how fundamentally wrong QT must be. The Bose-Einstein-condensate and supraconduction were proven to exist only after Albert Einstein's death. I wonder how he would have reacted if those "monstrosities of the brain" had been created during his lifetime.
I wouldn't give much on a statistic that only works if you arbitrarily choose a specified starting point. And yes, you can manipulate every trend by choosing your starting point accordingly. So I call all claims that "since 1998, we don't have a warming trend anymore" manipulated statistics.
Even your example of FTL does not hold -- there are enough people out there today greatly interested in anything that makes FTL travel possible, and no one is really hindering them to find out how it works, if it works at all. The whole idea that you just have to hide a secret and it will be gone forever is questionable at best. That's why I think the concept of an "evolution towards less education" is flawed. If the interest in education gets lost, it's not because of biological reasons. Then it's because of a general breakdown of society, where the structures that made it possible and worthwile to actually get an education that goes beyond the knowledge you need for daily survival, crumble and die. There were situations like this, Western Europe experienced them after the end of the Roman Empire. It didn't happen because the people of education died out. It did happen because the once stable environment of 1000 years of tradition, education and careers vanished, and a series of short lived, feuding kingdoms appeared, in a constant struggle to their own survival and in a constant fear of invadors. It took about 400 years for the situation to settle, and then suddenly, education appeared again, universities were founded, ancient texts were rediscovered, commented and a series of new discoveries started.
So it's not an evolution game of us vs. them, it's a game of where the children of each society will go to. Think of the U.S. of the 19th and early 20th century. People from all over the world were coming there to start a new life. They came from very different educational backgrounds, born into societies of very different levels of openess. Three to five generations later, their offspring has a typical american education, typical american behaviour and typical american goals and dreams.