And it is very difficult (sometimes impossible) to concentrate on difficult or subtle problems with other employees phone chatter, work conversations, banter creating a constant noise background.
Then there are some distractions that are peculiar to tech environments left over from "dot com" culture. In a number of places I have worked there are toy foam projectile guns (or similar things) kept around, and various teams will periodically "let off steam" by running around firing the damn things off as fast they can (making a loud clacking sound). Whatever value the practice may have for team building or whatever, it is tremendously disruptive when you are deep in handling an urgent, difficult situation.
True, Voyager 1 has only travelled a short way between stars within our galaxy -- but here is a cool fact (I think).The Milky Way Galaxy is moving relative to the rest of the Universe (as defined by the Cosmic Microwave Background frame of reference) at 279 ± 68 km/sec, just under 0.1% the speed of light. This is the speed with which we are moving through the Universe. Thus if you live to be 80 years old (a typical lifespan today) you will die in a region of the Universe 0.074 light years from where you were born, and the first pyramids were built in Egypt in a region of the Universe more distant than Alpha Centauri.
For the love of GOD won't they please declare that internet service is a "utility" and regulate it as such?
Oh yea, you really want politicians to decide how internet access is provided and who subsidizes whom....
It is certainly preferable to having the corporations make those decisions.
The only reason rural America can send and receive mail at a reasonable cost (the same cost as everyone else, and the cheapest rates in the world) is that the USPS is a government regulated "utility". The only reason rural America got electrical power and a phone system was also due to government regulation and "interference" via the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) which was abolished in 1994 after completing its job of bringing those service to all Americans.
A corporation is only interested in its bottom line (they are compelled to do this by law in fact) not the national interest. So raking in large fees for service that is far below international standards is perfectly fine for them. If you believe that the Internet is important and that new industries and productive activities can grow out of state-of-the-art high speed data access then the U.S. is at a competitive disadvantage. You cable company doesn't care about this but national politicians should.
And of course there is the Patriot missile software clock issue - that led to a failure to engage a SCUD on February 25, 1991 at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers.
This failure is rather similar to the Soviet defense and NORAD errors mentioned in the article in that it was a weakness designed into the system that did not account for the range of operational condition and issues. In the Petrov Incident case - a natural condition, in the NORAD case an easy to make operator error, in the Dhahran barracks Patriot incident it was a failure to consider that a unit might be operated for weeks without a restart.
Or another attempt at lending credence to the myth, by people of a faith where it's central?
It is unscientific to dismiss a theory because it lends credence to religious beliefs. Do you realize that the current cosmological theory for the origin of the universe, the "big bang" theory, was initially dismissed by the "leading scientists" of the day because (1) it was developed by a roman catholic priest and (2) it seemed too close to the "creation myth of genesis". The term "big bang" was coined by these "leading scientists" to mock the theory.
Secondly, many myths and legends have a bit of truth behind them. Sometimes based on a multigenerational telling of historical events and sometimes as an attempt to explain things beyond a culture's scientific understanding. A real scientist tries to interpret myths and legends, not ignore or dismiss them.
True. And further there is evidence of oral traditions documenting verifiable facts and events 10,000 years old (aboriginal land form tales in Australia). But there has also been an uncritical enthusiasm for trying to historicize and generate scientific support for ancient stories and accounts of miracles. When applied in a fictional context they have been dubbed "shaggy god stories" (Brian Aldiss, 1965). Even leaving pseudo-science (Velikovsky, von Daniken, ad nauseam) this tends to make scientists and historians leery of these attempts to tie myths, legends, and religious doctrines to scientific findings as the theory proponents tend to set the standards of evidence and reasoning pretty low.
it's possible that they/did/ evolve just to eat the titanic. Maybe there were some microbes that ate some other iron-filled delicacy, and happened across this gluttonous feast. over the next thousands/millions of generations, the microbes then evolved to specifically eat the titanic...
As it happens there is a natural source of elemental iron for them to eat - elemental iron forms naturally as inclusions in volcanic gabbro -- like those continuously erupting from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Such metallic iron deposits are found in Greenland, where it is called "telluric iron" - it was collected and used for tools by the Inuit (in addition to meteroic iron) see.
Given the massive size of the ridge, there is probably quite a lot of iron for them to eat in an absolute sense.
... The Atlantic is quite saline. Any oceanographers out there who can explain why salinity is distributed this way? I would expect the most saline areas to be near the tropics, and the least saline to be near the poles where you find melting ice and lower dissolving capacity of water (can you tell I'm not a chemist?)....
You have the arctic ice thing exactly backwards - the predominant process producing ice in the arctic is not glacier calving, but the formation of sea-ice through freezing. This process locks up freshwater and thus drives up the salinity. The other thing is that after the descending air circulation near the poles dumps its moisture as snow, it is really dry, and is it moves south along the surface it is both warming and picking up moisture further driving up the salinity, and the enclosed basin of the North Atlantic tends to traps the saline water thus formed.
The saline water does escape the North Atlantic of course, by sinking to the bottom (forming the North Atlantic Deep Water, NADW) and flowing south. This drives the very important global thermohaline circulation system.
I love the "paytaxesinstead" tag -- because the government will be so much *more* efficient with large sums of money than a charitable organization could?
Actually governments are quite efficient in this manner. The "government can never do anything right" meme is a religious belief on the right - one taken on faith without any need for evidence. The U.S government (this being an almost exclusively American religion) takes a much smaller fraction of its revenue to provide charitable aid than most private charities.
If you live in the US, try not paying your taxes, then see if you still believe that's the case.
And this is different from living where exactly? I would appreciate a list of countries where laws are followed purely voluntarily, and where the government is supported only from donations made without legal obligation?
This taxation is theft, and governments are evil because they use force if you break the law, meme amounts to declaring civilization intrinsically immoral.
I understand Somalia is free from this tyranny. Perhaps you'd like to relocate?
Good points.
I am an "agile programmer" from way back - I have been pushing Boehm's Spiral Model of development since 1986 when he published it. Having been a practitioner of this for some 15 years before it got relaunched under the name "agile" I am unimpressed by the recent prescriptive formulations on the "right" way to be agile - but the principles are sound.
One of the best simple take-aways is to avoid over-designing. Keep the code clean and strive for simplicity and clarity. If you only have on type of object (not several types) why create an interface, an abstract implementation of the interface, the concrete implementation of the abstract class, a factory class when you could just instantiate the damn object with its own constructor (I am working with inherited code that does exactly this).
...Am I the only one who is given pause by the implicit assurance of a so-called controlled burn that none of these explosives are going to detonate?
Actually some of them are almost certain to detonate - but this is not necessarily a problem. They know the maximum amount of explosive material that may be found in one location in the house (apparently about a grenade's worth in any one mass) and the fire fighters will be 300 feet away with the whole area evacuated. Explosive's have finite power. When (not if) some of it goes "kaboom" during the burn, big deal.
Someone else will probably beat me to this short bout of pedanticism questioning how micro and nano are applied in this situation (micro-ton?) and highlighting the fact that there are three orders of magnitude separating the micro and nano scale.
It does make one ponder how far this terminology extends. Is 100-1000 kg a "mini satellite" and 1000-10000 kg just a "satellite"?
Slashdot Mirror
And it is very difficult (sometimes impossible) to concentrate on difficult or subtle problems with other employees phone chatter, work conversations, banter creating a constant noise background.
Then there are some distractions that are peculiar to tech environments left over from "dot com" culture. In a number of places I have worked there are toy foam projectile guns (or similar things) kept around, and various teams will periodically "let off steam" by running around firing the damn things off as fast they can (making a loud clacking sound). Whatever value the practice may have for team building or whatever, it is tremendously disruptive when you are deep in handling an urgent, difficult situation.
True, Voyager 1 has only travelled a short way between stars within our galaxy -- but here is a cool fact (I think).The Milky Way Galaxy is moving relative to the rest of the Universe (as defined by the Cosmic Microwave Background frame of reference) at 279 ± 68 km/sec, just under 0.1% the speed of light. This is the speed with which we are moving through the Universe. Thus if you live to be 80 years old (a typical lifespan today) you will die in a region of the Universe 0.074 light years from where you were born, and the first pyramids were built in Egypt in a region of the Universe more distant than Alpha Centauri.
For the love of GOD won't they please declare that internet service is a "utility" and regulate it as such?
Oh yea, you really want politicians to decide how internet access is provided and who subsidizes whom....
It is certainly preferable to having the corporations make those decisions.
The only reason rural America can send and receive mail at a reasonable cost (the same cost as everyone else, and the cheapest rates in the world) is that the USPS is a government regulated "utility". The only reason rural America got electrical power and a phone system was also due to government regulation and "interference" via the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) which was abolished in 1994 after completing its job of bringing those service to all Americans.
A corporation is only interested in its bottom line (they are compelled to do this by law in fact) not the national interest. So raking in large fees for service that is far below international standards is perfectly fine for them. If you believe that the Internet is important and that new industries and productive activities can grow out of state-of-the-art high speed data access then the U.S. is at a competitive disadvantage. You cable company doesn't care about this but national politicians should.
And of course there is the Patriot missile software clock issue - that led to a failure to engage a SCUD on February 25, 1991 at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers.
This failure is rather similar to the Soviet defense and NORAD errors mentioned in the article in that it was a weakness designed into the system that did not account for the range of operational condition and issues. In the Petrov Incident case - a natural condition, in the NORAD case an easy to make operator error, in the Dhahran barracks Patriot incident it was a failure to consider that a unit might be operated for weeks without a restart.
So is this the origin of the flood myth?
Or another attempt at lending credence to the myth, by people of a faith where it's central?
It is unscientific to dismiss a theory because it lends credence to religious beliefs. Do you realize that the current cosmological theory for the origin of the universe, the "big bang" theory, was initially dismissed by the "leading scientists" of the day because (1) it was developed by a roman catholic priest and (2) it seemed too close to the "creation myth of genesis". The term "big bang" was coined by these "leading scientists" to mock the theory. Secondly, many myths and legends have a bit of truth behind them. Sometimes based on a multigenerational telling of historical events and sometimes as an attempt to explain things beyond a culture's scientific understanding. A real scientist tries to interpret myths and legends, not ignore or dismiss them.
True. And further there is evidence of oral traditions documenting verifiable facts and events 10,000 years old (aboriginal land form tales in Australia). But there has also been an uncritical enthusiasm for trying to historicize and generate scientific support for ancient stories and accounts of miracles. When applied in a fictional context they have been dubbed "shaggy god stories" (Brian Aldiss, 1965). Even leaving pseudo-science (Velikovsky, von Daniken, ad nauseam) this tends to make scientists and historians leery of these attempts to tie myths, legends, and religious doctrines to scientific findings as the theory proponents tend to set the standards of evidence and reasoning pretty low.
it's possible that they /did/ evolve just to eat the titanic. Maybe there were some microbes that ate some other iron-filled delicacy, and happened across this gluttonous feast. over the next thousands/millions of generations, the microbes then evolved to specifically eat the titanic...
As it happens there is a natural source of elemental iron for them to eat - elemental iron forms naturally as inclusions in volcanic gabbro -- like those continuously erupting from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Such metallic iron deposits are found in Greenland, where it is called "telluric iron" - it was collected and used for tools by the Inuit (in addition to meteroic iron) see .
Given the massive size of the ridge, there is probably quite a lot of iron for them to eat in an absolute sense.
... The Atlantic is quite saline. Any oceanographers out there who can explain why salinity is distributed this way? I would expect the most saline areas to be near the tropics, and the least saline to be near the poles where you find melting ice and lower dissolving capacity of water (can you tell I'm not a chemist?). ...
You have the arctic ice thing exactly backwards - the predominant process producing ice in the arctic is not glacier calving, but the formation of sea-ice through freezing. This process locks up freshwater and thus drives up the salinity. The other thing is that after the descending air circulation near the poles dumps its moisture as snow, it is really dry, and is it moves south along the surface it is both warming and picking up moisture further driving up the salinity, and the enclosed basin of the North Atlantic tends to traps the saline water thus formed.
The saline water does escape the North Atlantic of course, by sinking to the bottom (forming the North Atlantic Deep Water, NADW) and flowing south. This drives the very important global thermohaline circulation system.
So you're saying that we just need to exert massive control over the economy so we can force it to be a free market?
Like the OP said: "queue ignoramus libertarian armchair economist rant".
Check!
I love the "paytaxesinstead" tag -- because the government will be so much *more* efficient with large sums of money than a charitable organization could?
Actually governments are quite efficient in this manner. The "government can never do anything right" meme is a religious belief on the right - one taken on faith without any need for evidence. The U.S government (this being an almost exclusively American religion) takes a much smaller fraction of its revenue to provide charitable aid than most private charities.
If you live in the US, try not paying your taxes, then see if you still believe that's the case.
And this is different from living where exactly? I would appreciate a list of countries where laws are followed purely voluntarily, and where the government is supported only from donations made without legal obligation?
This taxation is theft, and governments are evil because they use force if you break the law, meme amounts to declaring civilization intrinsically immoral.
I understand Somalia is free from this tyranny. Perhaps you'd like to relocate?
Good points. I am an "agile programmer" from way back - I have been pushing Boehm's Spiral Model of development since 1986 when he published it. Having been a practitioner of this for some 15 years before it got relaunched under the name "agile" I am unimpressed by the recent prescriptive formulations on the "right" way to be agile - but the principles are sound. One of the best simple take-aways is to avoid over-designing. Keep the code clean and strive for simplicity and clarity. If you only have on type of object (not several types) why create an interface, an abstract implementation of the interface, the concrete implementation of the abstract class, a factory class when you could just instantiate the damn object with its own constructor (I am working with inherited code that does exactly this).
...Am I the only one who is given pause by the implicit assurance of a so-called controlled burn that none of these explosives are going to detonate?
Actually some of them are almost certain to detonate - but this is not necessarily a problem. They know the maximum amount of explosive material that may be found in one location in the house (apparently about a grenade's worth in any one mass) and the fire fighters will be 300 feet away with the whole area evacuated. Explosive's have finite power. When (not if) some of it goes "kaboom" during the burn, big deal.
Someone else will probably beat me to this short bout of pedanticism questioning how micro and nano are applied in this situation (micro-ton?) and highlighting the fact that there are three orders of magnitude separating the micro and nano scale.
It does make one ponder how far this terminology extends. Is 100-1000 kg a "mini satellite" and 1000-10000 kg just a "satellite"?