Re:evolution -- Did I hear "Von Daniken"
on
New Human Ancestor?
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· Score: 1
How pleasant to hear those old Von Daniken books brought up. Takes me back to good old Leonard Nimoy on In Search Of...
I'd point out that the idea that human evolution is "higher" or "more complex" than that of any other species is ridiculous, but anyone who's reading Eric Von Daniken and taking it seriously doesn't need any more trouble than she's inflicting on herself.
C'mon, popular science reporting is frightening, but are we so scared we can't read the thing carefully before we bash it?
This article clearly states these were the first neutrinos seen by AMANDA:
THE FIRST SIGHTING of the high-energy particles called neutrinos with the AMANDA Telescope...
In the next paragraph it correctly characterizes the novelty as having to do with the level of energy in the neutrinos observed:
"We have a unique probe with a sensitivity well beyond other experiments, and the neutrinos we've seen are of a higher energy than has been seen before," Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin, said in a statement.
It skimmed the surface, granted, but the article doesn't make the errors we're accusing it of. What gives?
You can't expect much better of MSNBC; after all, they have all the science headlines under "Technology," their industry-conquering "boy we sure are innovative" section.
If it wasn't for the 75%-of-the-original's-strength angle, this would be life imitating art. Does anyone else remember "The Man in the White Suit"? It's an old Alec Guiness movie in which Alec plays a young textile whiz who invents the perfect material for use in clothing.
The crux of the movie is that he develops this suit made from his amazing textile -- it needs no washing or ironing, it lasts forever -- and of course the powers that be in the clothing industry immediately see why they need to kill him and bury the suit, literally. Lots of fun gets poked at modern consumer culture; it's just the sort of movie that got made during the U.K. Labor years after WWII.
The whole "you don't have to fear the big brutes, you have to worry about the agile small competitors" message to the squirrel ad was just wrong, wasn't it?
If you had a medium-sized IS company right now, would you fear web start-ups? Or would you, instead, be worried that Microsoft would undercut your core technology release and then tie you up in obstructive litigation until you starved or accepted the buyout on their terms? The 900-pound bull(y) in Redmond is a hell of a lot scarier than the little guy reading the comic about Charles Atlas.
The irony is that the commerical was aimed at "the bulls" -- the ponderous big competitors mentioned in the tag line. If you're a huge corporate IS interest, then yes, it makes sense to hire someone to take out the little, mobile runts who want part of your God-given market. That's the only way the ad even makes sense, if you think about it.
I've always wondered why this wasn't the standard deep ocean research method. Both in terms of cost and in terms of research payoff, it seems better than subs.
Dropping down at intervals in Alvin (or whatever other submersible, crewed or not) is pricey, and you can only be down for a little while every once in a blue moon. Only a few vent sites have been visited regularly enough to get a sense of how things change there. Put down remote sensors with a steady signal back, and you can maybe try to figure out how tube worms and shrimp and so on colonize new areas. This is a totally different basis for life down there; those animals live on chemosynthesis at the base of their food chain, not photosynthesis, and we know almost nothing about them. What we need is to do what old time naturalists did -- watch a while to get the basics down.
Plus, our clumsy sub's scared off anything mobile by the time it staggers noisily into view. Here's hoping architeuthis dux slips into view of one of these remotes at some point.
As for dumping nuclear waste down there -- you think putting nuclear waste directly into a fault makes sense? Even if you didn't have to lower it down through pressures that'd crack all but the most specialized, titanium sub, that'd be idiotic. (Here's hoping that giant squid mutates like in an old movie and comes for you.)
"One of the reasons Hollywood studios support this is because the video is uncompressed," McCarron said. "By compressing it, it's easier to transmit over the Internet because it's smaller. Because of its size when uncompressed, it's harder to trade or copy."
Excuse me?
I couldn't beleive the lack of compression was being viewed as a positive, so I went to the story itself, and sure enough, they're actually trying to sell themselves based on inefficiency. Get with it, people; the solution to copy protection problems isn't to make the thing so ungainly that people can't use it. Storage is going to catch up with whatever size files you're talking about anyway; remember when a gig was a LOT on a local BBS? (No, they don't remember, because they've got their heads up their *sses.)
Next up: the EXTREMELY big tape player, so you can't possibly put two of them next to each other to record from one to the other. Oh, and really short wires. Whew, thought of everything...
I've got one, too. The guy's a retired cop, and a decent neighbor on balance, but you can just see it KILLING him to witness someone who doesn't conform to his 1950s idea of what suburbia should look like. He mows his own grass way too low way too often, which is unhealthy.
There's no way a reel mower makes even close to the same amount of noise a gas one does. One of the reasons I use the reel is that I can talk on the phone, or to my kids, while I mow. Makes a big difference.
The safety thing with the kids is a big deal for me, too. (Mom's a doctor, and has seen her share of lawn mower injuries.)
Suspended gets my vote for Infocom's high moment. The premise was that you were in a cryogenic state, able to manipulate things on your interstellar ship only through interactions with a bunch of proxy robots. The robots all had different senses (hearing, smell) and abilities (modes of locomotion, etc.).
Infocom was often quite good at giving you the little perks -- in this case, a laminated map of the ship -- that established real atmosphere. I think you got one of those scrubbable crayons, or something, to scribble on the map with.
If they made that today, you'd spend more time installing the Voo-DooDoo X smell-enhanced card than I ever did playing the original game...
Um, as my old Logic professor would have said: Check the predicate assumptions.
IF we buy this guy's assumptions about metabolic rates, then we can accept his conclusions. The seemingly nonsensical assertion that dinos would have had long necks that they held WAAAY out in front of them should make us question that metabolic rate even more closely. In case someone didn't notice, the whole hot- vs. cold-blooded (i.e. metabolic rate) thing is a little bit of a hot issue among dino sorts. (Heart size is based on all sorts of morphological details having to do with chest cavity size, and gets disputed less.)
Either we question the metabolism thing, or we start imagining what possible other encouragement they would have had for a face on a long stick in the middle of primeval forests that stretched to the sky. (Maybe it was a sexual display. Heeeeey, baby!)
The only reason that NASA has for not sponsoring this sort of event is that people in politics have a habit of only going for the options that mean profit for their companies.
That sets them apart from the virtuous private sector how, exactly?
Salon had an article a while back about the deaf community's ambivalence toward cochlear implants. Basically the argument was whether implants would give kids who were deaf a sort of half-real entry into the hearing world -- and whether the community, or culture, of deaf people would be damaged as a result. Supposedly, hearing parents who got cochlear implants for their deaf kids were "stealing" their kids from the deaf culture, which would lose a whole generation of kids as a result. And no, some deaf people don't care to be thought of as "defective" so that hearing people can "fix" them. It was a really surprising article, or it was for me anyway...
So what's the analogous dispute here? Rallies of deaf folks complaining that blind kids shouldn't be given the specious "gift" of sight? People protesting that braille shouldn't die as a language? From the perspective of someone who isn't deaf or blind, it's hard to imagine...
The main reason you have standards of usage in any language is to prevent misunderstandings. (Anyone who's ever read the journals of Lewis and Clark could tell you that. "Creative" spellings that could be any one of three words take much longer to read through.)
It'd be e-mail in my style guide.
Tons of other potential words are gonna screw you up when you set the marketing types to adding "e" in front of everything. You want to "evote"? Victims of SPAM would be "evictims"? I find that really "eevocative"? You could see any of those confusing readers who didn't know whether "evote" might be some other word they just didn't know. "E-vote," to anyone who's ever heard the term "e-mail," makes immediate sense.
And thanks to all those folks who logged on just to complain about this thread. You're just too cool, and that fact that you posted something on this thread to prove it only makes you more impressive. (Hope I never have to edit your code, in which you name the same variables three different ways.)
Every's par for the course
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 1
Sure, in this case David Every stepped on a semantic land mine; sure, you'd think if he was writing a whole article about a definition he might have bothered to look the term up. (Fine, okay, he could explicitly say the term is evolving beyond its old definition, but then he doesn't give us a clear definition of his own, does he, he just kind of stirs the sediment up...)
IMHO there isn't much of technology journalism that doesn't seem to need an editor just about as badly as this does. Every stands out mainly for his court-jester-as-lightning-rod swagger. Mac folks are more than a little chargrined by his gifts that way. But go scan C/Net a bit, and you'll wince just the same.
Every doesn't think the technology through any more than he does his occasional political opinion. (We had an e-mail exchange once about gays in the military, and he didn't have a clue what he'd put his foot in there either.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd point out that the idea that human evolution is "higher" or "more complex" than that of any other species is ridiculous, but anyone who's reading Eric Von Daniken and taking it seriously doesn't need any more trouble than she's inflicting on herself.
This article clearly states these were the first neutrinos seen by AMANDA:
In the next paragraph it correctly characterizes the novelty as having to do with the level of energy in the neutrinos observed:It skimmed the surface, granted, but the article doesn't make the errors we're accusing it of. What gives?
You can't expect much better of MSNBC; after all, they have all the science headlines under "Technology," their industry-conquering "boy we sure are innovative" section.
The crux of the movie is that he develops this suit made from his amazing textile -- it needs no washing or ironing, it lasts forever -- and of course the powers that be in the clothing industry immediately see why they need to kill him and bury the suit, literally. Lots of fun gets poked at modern consumer culture; it's just the sort of movie that got made during the U.K. Labor years after WWII.
If you had a medium-sized IS company right now, would you fear web start-ups? Or would you, instead, be worried that Microsoft would undercut your core technology release and then tie you up in obstructive litigation until you starved or accepted the buyout on their terms? The 900-pound bull(y) in Redmond is a hell of a lot scarier than the little guy reading the comic about Charles Atlas.
The irony is that the commerical was aimed at "the bulls" -- the ponderous big competitors mentioned in the tag line. If you're a huge corporate IS interest, then yes, it makes sense to hire someone to take out the little, mobile runts who want part of your God-given market. That's the only way the ad even makes sense, if you think about it.
Dropping down at intervals in Alvin (or whatever other submersible, crewed or not) is pricey, and you can only be down for a little while every once in a blue moon. Only a few vent sites have been visited regularly enough to get a sense of how things change there. Put down remote sensors with a steady signal back, and you can maybe try to figure out how tube worms and shrimp and so on colonize new areas. This is a totally different basis for life down there; those animals live on chemosynthesis at the base of their food chain, not photosynthesis, and we know almost nothing about them. What we need is to do what old time naturalists did -- watch a while to get the basics down.
Plus, our clumsy sub's scared off anything mobile by the time it staggers noisily into view. Here's hoping architeuthis dux slips into view of one of these remotes at some point.
As for dumping nuclear waste down there -- you think putting nuclear waste directly into a fault makes sense? Even if you didn't have to lower it down through pressures that'd crack all but the most specialized, titanium sub, that'd be idiotic. (Here's hoping that giant squid mutates like in an old movie and comes for you.)
The End?...
Excuse me?
I couldn't beleive the lack of compression was being viewed as a positive, so I went to the story itself, and sure enough, they're actually trying to sell themselves based on inefficiency. Get with it, people; the solution to copy protection problems isn't to make the thing so ungainly that people can't use it. Storage is going to catch up with whatever size files you're talking about anyway; remember when a gig was a LOT on a local BBS? (No, they don't remember, because they've got their heads up their *sses.)
Next up: the EXTREMELY big tape player, so you can't possibly put two of them next to each other to record from one to the other. Oh, and really short wires. Whew, thought of everything...
There's no way a reel mower makes even close to the same amount of noise a gas one does. One of the reasons I use the reel is that I can talk on the phone, or to my kids, while I mow. Makes a big difference.
The safety thing with the kids is a big deal for me, too. (Mom's a doctor, and has seen her share of lawn mower injuries.)
Infocom was often quite good at giving you the little perks -- in this case, a laminated map of the ship -- that established real atmosphere. I think you got one of those scrubbable crayons, or something, to scribble on the map with.
If they made that today, you'd spend more time installing the Voo-DooDoo X smell-enhanced card than I ever did playing the original game...
All in favor of classifying any unwanted Flash movie as a trojan horse, please perform the self-indulgent marketers' salute.
The reason people refer to Illinois as winning the narrow election for JFK has to do with the order in which returns came in.
IF we buy this guy's assumptions about metabolic rates, then we can accept his conclusions. The seemingly nonsensical assertion that dinos would have had long necks that they held WAAAY out in front of them should make us question that metabolic rate even more closely. In case someone didn't notice, the whole hot- vs. cold-blooded (i.e. metabolic rate) thing is a little bit of a hot issue among dino sorts. (Heart size is based on all sorts of morphological details having to do with chest cavity size, and gets disputed less.)
Either we question the metabolism thing, or we start imagining what possible other encouragement they would have had for a face on a long stick in the middle of primeval forests that stretched to the sky. (Maybe it was a sexual display. Heeeeey, baby!)
That sets them apart from the virtuous private sector how, exactly?
So what's the analogous dispute here? Rallies of deaf folks complaining that blind kids shouldn't be given the specious "gift" of sight? People protesting that braille shouldn't die as a language? From the perspective of someone who isn't deaf or blind, it's hard to imagine...
The main reason you have standards of usage in any language is to prevent misunderstandings. (Anyone who's ever read the journals of Lewis and Clark could tell you that. "Creative" spellings that could be any one of three words take much longer to read through.)
It'd be e-mail in my style guide.
Tons of other potential words are gonna screw you up when you set the marketing types to adding "e" in front of everything. You want to "evote"? Victims of SPAM would be "evictims"? I find that really "eevocative"? You could see any of those confusing readers who didn't know whether "evote" might be some other word they just didn't know. "E-vote," to anyone who's ever heard the term "e-mail," makes immediate sense.
And thanks to all those folks who logged on just to complain about this thread. You're just too cool, and that fact that you posted something on this thread to prove it only makes you more impressive. (Hope I never have to edit your code, in which you name the same variables three different ways.)
Sure, in this case David Every stepped on a semantic land mine; sure, you'd think if he was writing a whole article about a definition he might have bothered to look the term up. (Fine, okay, he could explicitly say the term is evolving beyond its old definition, but then he doesn't give us a clear definition of his own, does he, he just kind of stirs the sediment up...)
IMHO there isn't much of technology journalism that doesn't seem to need an editor just about as badly as this does. Every stands out mainly for his court-jester-as-lightning-rod swagger. Mac folks are more than a little chargrined by his gifts that way. But go scan C/Net a bit, and you'll wince just the same.
Every doesn't think the technology through any more than he does his occasional political opinion. (We had an e-mail exchange once about gays in the military, and he didn't have a clue what he'd put his foot in there either.)
Let it roll off.