If all it took was one mutation to turn the tobacco mosaic virus into something that could infect humans readily and virulently, Nature would have done it already.
She is very good at optimizing things to reproduce. You're unlikely to make a superbug that She hasn't already tried out.
That would be useful to have on all phones: a "I am doing XYZ important task, please let me have that last 10%; yes, I know it'll wear out faster, thanks, but grandma's in the hospital".
Atheism is not a "tenet". It is simply the lack of faith in the supernatural.
There are quite a few irreligious societies, in fact if not in name, that are doing quite well -- the Japanese, for instance, and some European countries (~20% religious).
No, statisticians certainly do not assume that. If everything in my field were normally distributed then my life would be a lot easier, but it's not, and we're aware that it's not.
Giffords wasn't shot by a "patsy", and her shooting had nothing to do with her political views. She was shot by a crazy guy who had no coherent agenda at all. The only connection between the way she practiced politics and her getting shot was that she was holding a "talk to the voters" event in a supermarket parking lot when it happened.
I would rather just work very hard to create a system where there are fewer positions of power. That is what the establishment of a republic is a step toward: rather than worrying so much about who is king, let's just get rid of the kingship entirely. This is why democratic-republicanism is better than monarchy.
But there are still positions of power in a republic, and we need to work at diminishing those to the greatest extent practical, too.
It happens once in a while. This is why the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords was such a tragedy, since she was one of the few in the House who wasn't completely corrupt.
In the US, we have this phobia of The Terrorists which is completely unfounded in the way the world actually works. But in Europe, it's GMO's and (in Germany) nuclear power.
That's just wrong, though. The whole national cowardice thing -- being terrified of every bump in the night -- was alive and well in the Bush years (q.v. the TSA, etc.)
That's a very anti-free-market position, you know. I thought a conservative position was that someone who works and earns money now owns that money and, so long as he doesn't do violence to anyone, can spend it however he likes? The whole "We built it" mentality? One guy might work hard and earn money and send his kids to college. Another might work hard and donate to her church.
Well, a Mexican fellow who works hard and earns money has just that same right as you do: to spend the fruits of his labor as he chooses. He owes you nothing, and you have no claim over what he does with his income, because he earned it fairly in trade for enriching someone else with his labor. If the answer's "support his family back in Mexico", then that's his right.
Yep. This whole thing was cynical political theater: the Republicans cynically shut down the government and the Democrats cynically tried to make it look worse than it was.
I'm in Washington DC, so there are national parks everywhere -- I live 50 feet away from a little one. All the famous monuments that people crossed the ocean to see? Barrycades everywhere. Glover Park? Nope, since nobody's ever heard of it.
Yes, they're out there: the North Korean government, for instance, tops the list. But the standard of living of a vast majority of people will be improved more by worrying about other things than evil people. As a proud American I think that our nation's response to the North Koreans should be to not worry about them so much and try to (for instance) find a cure for Alzheimer's disease.
Nuclear radiation doesn't work that way. We have gizmos that turn nuclear radiation into power; they're called radiothermal generators, and work by absorbing the radiation with some material that heats up, then capturing the thermal energy as it flows across a Peltier junction. We power spacecraft with 'em.
But this doesn't make the plutonium less radioactive any faster. Those plutonium nuclei are still going to take their sweet time decaying.
Nuclear power plants take advantage of this, too; heat in the reactor core is heat in the reactor core, and it doesn't matter whether it comes from fission directly or from secondary decay of fission products. But we can't do anything magic to fission products to make them decay into something stable any faster; eventually they get far enough down the decay chain to something long-lived enough that it's not worth trying to harvest the heat they release any more.
Lattice gauge theory calculations. We use Monte Carlo techniques to numerically evaluate the Feynman path integral to simulate the behavior of quarks in the medium-energy regime, which is the interesting one since it governs the properties of protons and neutrons. Other techniques (perturbative QCD) work fantastically at higher energies, and at low energies effective field theories like chiral perturbation theory work, but in the medium-energy regime all anyone knows how to do is to brute-force the quark dynamics with computers.
So we do that. It gets a lot bigger than what we're doing on our little old cluster; some groups measure their computer-time allocations in hundreds of millions of core-hours.
Yesterday and today I installed 20 Titans in a compute cluster at work, replacing the crappy GTX480's that crash constantly. The cost of these ($20K) would buy us TWO nodes on the local K20 cluster.
We don't really care that much about the float performance, even; much of our code is memory-bandwidth bound, and much of the rest runs iterative sparse-matrix solvers that can be run in "mixed precision", where you iterate a hundred times in single precision, do one update in double precision, a hundred more in single... So we could use the cheaper gamer cards, but the Titan's a price/performance sweet spot that we can't beat. It's even faster than the K20, and compared to the other gamer cards the 6GB memory gives us a huge amount of flexibility.
I was arguing that not having children was a sufficient condition for permitting sibling marriage; I wasn't claiming it was necessary, and your argument that it is not necessary is pretty sensible.
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If all it took was one mutation to turn the tobacco mosaic virus into something that could infect humans readily and virulently, Nature would have done it already.
She is very good at optimizing things to reproduce. You're unlikely to make a superbug that She hasn't already tried out.
That would be useful to have on all phones: a "I am doing XYZ important task, please let me have that last 10%; yes, I know it'll wear out faster, thanks, but grandma's in the hospital".
The Egyptians would like a word with you.
which is funny, because the Scientologists already use ohmmeters in their "auditing"...
"Here, hold these soup cans, and we'll help you be a god!"
The bits of the EU that are worst off are the more religious bits, incidentally.
Atheism is not a "tenet". It is simply the lack of faith in the supernatural.
There are quite a few irreligious societies, in fact if not in name, that are doing quite well -- the Japanese, for instance, and some European countries (~20% religious).
No, statisticians certainly do not assume that. If everything in my field were normally distributed then my life would be a lot easier, but it's not, and we're aware that it's not.
narmstrong is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Hollywood occasionally makes non-fiction movies.
Giffords wasn't shot by a "patsy", and her shooting had nothing to do with her political views. She was shot by a crazy guy who had no coherent agenda at all. The only connection between the way she practiced politics and her getting shot was that she was holding a "talk to the voters" event in a supermarket parking lot when it happened.
I would rather just work very hard to create a system where there are fewer positions of power. That is what the establishment of a republic is a step toward: rather than worrying so much about who is king, let's just get rid of the kingship entirely. This is why democratic-republicanism is better than monarchy.
But there are still positions of power in a republic, and we need to work at diminishing those to the greatest extent practical, too.
It happens once in a while. This is why the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords was such a tragedy, since she was one of the few in the House who wasn't completely corrupt.
(--a Tucsonan)
Feinstein is a politician. The only thing they're afraid of is not getting reelected.
There is fear and paranoia in Europe, too.
In the US, we have this phobia of The Terrorists which is completely unfounded in the way the world actually works. But in Europe, it's GMO's and (in Germany) nuclear power.
That's just wrong, though. The whole national cowardice thing -- being terrified of every bump in the night -- was alive and well in the Bush years (q.v. the TSA, etc.)
That's a very anti-free-market position, you know. I thought a conservative position was that someone who works and earns money now owns that money and, so long as he doesn't do violence to anyone, can spend it however he likes? The whole "We built it" mentality? One guy might work hard and earn money and send his kids to college. Another might work hard and donate to her church.
Well, a Mexican fellow who works hard and earns money has just that same right as you do: to spend the fruits of his labor as he chooses. He owes you nothing, and you have no claim over what he does with his income, because he earned it fairly in trade for enriching someone else with his labor. If the answer's "support his family back in Mexico", then that's his right.
Yep. This whole thing was cynical political theater: the Republicans cynically shut down the government and the Democrats cynically tried to make it look worse than it was.
I'm in Washington DC, so there are national parks everywhere -- I live 50 feet away from a little one. All the famous monuments that people crossed the ocean to see? Barrycades everywhere. Glover Park? Nope, since nobody's ever heard of it.
The evil people are far less capable than you think.
I would just worry less about the evil people.
Yes, they're out there: the North Korean government, for instance, tops the list. But the standard of living of a vast majority of people will be improved more by worrying about other things than evil people. As a proud American I think that our nation's response to the North Koreans should be to not worry about them so much and try to (for instance) find a cure for Alzheimer's disease.
"Supposed" is a funny word. Who is doing the supposing? The American people? The American government? Which branch of it?
I wasn't going to muddy the waters by talking about that :)
Nuclear radiation doesn't work that way. We have gizmos that turn nuclear radiation into power; they're called radiothermal generators, and work by absorbing the radiation with some material that heats up, then capturing the thermal energy as it flows across a Peltier junction. We power spacecraft with 'em.
But this doesn't make the plutonium less radioactive any faster. Those plutonium nuclei are still going to take their sweet time decaying.
Nuclear power plants take advantage of this, too; heat in the reactor core is heat in the reactor core, and it doesn't matter whether it comes from fission directly or from secondary decay of fission products. But we can't do anything magic to fission products to make them decay into something stable any faster; eventually they get far enough down the decay chain to something long-lived enough that it's not worth trying to harvest the heat they release any more.
Lattice gauge theory calculations. We use Monte Carlo techniques to numerically evaluate the Feynman path integral to simulate the behavior of quarks in the medium-energy regime, which is the interesting one since it governs the properties of protons and neutrons. Other techniques (perturbative QCD) work fantastically at higher energies, and at low energies effective field theories like chiral perturbation theory work, but in the medium-energy regime all anyone knows how to do is to brute-force the quark dynamics with computers.
So we do that. It gets a lot bigger than what we're doing on our little old cluster; some groups measure their computer-time allocations in hundreds of millions of core-hours.
This.
Yesterday and today I installed 20 Titans in a compute cluster at work, replacing the crappy GTX480's that crash constantly. The cost of these ($20K) would buy us TWO nodes on the local K20 cluster.
We don't really care that much about the float performance, even; much of our code is memory-bandwidth bound, and much of the rest runs iterative sparse-matrix solvers that can be run in "mixed precision", where you iterate a hundred times in single precision, do one update in double precision, a hundred more in single... So we could use the cheaper gamer cards, but the Titan's a price/performance sweet spot that we can't beat. It's even faster than the K20, and compared to the other gamer cards the 6GB memory gives us a huge amount of flexibility.
I was arguing that not having children was a sufficient condition for permitting sibling marriage; I wasn't claiming it was necessary, and your argument that it is not necessary is pretty sensible.