Anything that includes circuitry would be affected (destroyed) by magnetic storms from the sun. In 1859, telegraph wires visibly sparked across the United States due to a geomagnetic solar storm, the largest recorded in history.
I wonder whether anyone has simulated what would happen if such a storm hit today. It's hard to rebuild civilization when you've got not food, and most of us wouldn't have much food after a few days of grocery stores not being able to place orders and motor vehicles not being able to deliver.
Would it put us back into the Stone Age? Is such a simple thing the explanation for the Fermi Paradox?
Fraud would be if the candidate or someone on their behalf tampered with the results or the machines to get them elected. If the voting machines are defective and produce a illegitimate outcome then it's something else.
Yeah... it's fraud on the part of the people who make the machines.
They can coexist, as oil and water can coexist. The pertinent question, as the kids are asking these days, is "Will it blend?"
The answer is a definite no, religious apologists aside.* By definition, faith is belief in something without evidence. Science requires the collection and examination of evidence.
That sounds right on paper, but in practice people have a strange ability to compartmentalize their minds, and thus perform well as a scientist even while holding strange beliefs. Except for combinations such as a creationist who wants to be a biologist or geologist, their may not be any problem.
Also, frankly, I doubt that any of us go through life without believing a lot of things we don't have any evidence for.
to spend the next 20 years stressing over grant deadlines that threaten to destroy whatever little autonomy you've managed to gain, in an environment where something like 5% of the projects get funded.
I talked to a Canadian math professor who said he fills out a grant application once every five years, then forgets grants for the next five.
For grad school in the sciences, loan debt is uncommon--- students typically get paid stipends as research assistants or teaching assistants, which cover full tuition plus a modest salary
There's never enough of these positions to go around, and a large portion of students who work off campus never finish.
I think the biggest problem is, as you point out, post-PhD. There are too many PhDs being produced relative to good research jobs, so typically one has to do several postdocs, might have to take a lecturer position somewhere, etc., in hopes of eventually, maybe when you're 40 or something, getting a tenure-track faculty position. Oh, and that's a tenure-track position, which is basically 6-7 years of probation (but at least you're getting paid well at that point).
It's almost impossible to get a tenure-track job if you're more than a few years out of grad school.
I heard Pinker speak to a university crowd about a decade ago, and came away with the same opinion about him. He had a bad habit of brushing off challenging questions with glib answers that weren't really answers.
I suppose that's the risk if you want to be a pop star among intellectuals.
Is it better to be 99.9% accurate after 1 hour or 95% accurate after 5 minutes?
Supposedly that's what the over-hyped "speed reading" industry teaches you. IIRC someone compared grad students untrained in speed reading with people who had taken a course, and found no difference in the two groups' speed and comprhension.
In 800 BCE, before the Greeks began to write things down, Homer (or another man by the same name:-)) could compose and recite two vast epic tales - the Iliad and the Odyssey - purely from memory.
There is absolutely no evidence for this.
The general view among classicists, based on the work of Milman Parry, is that bards would synthesize the tale on the fly from a tradition of stories and a grab-bag of phrases that fit the meter.
I am skeptical of even that much: if you actually read Parry's transcriptions of the Yugoslav bards, you see that they paint themselves into a corner within about three pages, and have to start over.
The Iliad and Odyssey were undoubtedly based on oral traditions, but you can bet that someone sat down and wrote them out much the way that novels are written today.
phone calls pitching worthless extended auto warranties and credit card interest rate-reduction programs.
What I hate most is when a bill collector calls and asks for someone I've never heard of, but has the same surname that I do. They're obviously not doing their homework, just calling anyone with the same last name in hopes of getting lucky.
They would call and tell me my car warranty was about to expire. I thanked one of them and asked which of my two cars had the warranty problem... and the guy couldn't answer and hung up.
When robocalls get a hit there is a 2-3 second delay while they connect you to a salesjerk. You almost never get this delay when it's a human caller; they respond to your hello at normal conversational reaction time.
So when I'm feeling surly I just lie the (landline) phone down when I hear the pause, rather than hanging up. I figure if they're willing to waste my time I might as well waste theirs.
I also read somewhere that robocalling software remembers useless numbers and skips over them, so I turned off my answering machine when I was going to be away from the phone for a couple of weeks, and sure 'nough, I get a lot less telespam than I used to.
I have one phone (mobile) and I use Google Voice for all calls.
If I get a call and don't recognize the number or if caller ID is blocked then I don't answer.
If they leave a voicemail I will decide if it is someone I want to talk to or not. If the answer is yes I add them to the address book and call them back. If the answer is no I mark the number as spam and never get bother by it ever again.
I got a cell phone for emergency use, have never given out the phone number or made a call on it, but I get calls and texts all the time.
Now I just delete off the phone and let the stuff in the voice box rot - the UI makes it too much trouble to delete messages.
Back when I first got it and listened to some of the messages in the voice box, about half of them were prefixed with a recording saying that the call was coming from the state pen. (Especially on holidays - do they get extra phone time or something?) So I wonder if I got a number that formerly belonged to a delivery boy, or if inmates just call random numbers hoping to start some sh*t with someone.
Linux may have some technical merit, but is a mess where people without advanced computer skills are left in the dark.
The same can be said of Windows. People ask me for help with their Windows computers all the time, but I can rarely help because I don't often use anything besides Linux, and contrary to what you'd like to believe, there's nothing inherently intuitive about the way Windows works.
One of my computer science professors once stated, quite succinctly, that Microsoft was not in business to make a quality operating system (or quality product). They are in business to make money.
More specifically, a stock pyramid, though that model has faltered in recent years.
I'm surprised they're just now getting around to this. It's a straightforward pattern classification problem, and there is a huge set of training examples to be used for training a neural network or other Learning Classifier System technologies.
Yet here we are nearly two months after this started and there has been very little vitriolic attacking on the current President.
News must be slow to reach whatever planet you live on. The anti-anything-not-Republican crowd was calling it "Obama's Katrina" about 3 days after the leak hit the news.
Also, it's not clear what usa.gov can do. So far as I know, they don't have the equipment for fighting underwater oil leaks.
(Not to imply that I think Obama is anything but just another do-nothing-Democrat.)
Is it possible if the BP accountants and lawyers have done their jobs properly the amount of money that can be extracted from BP might be "capped"?
There's already a low-ball legal cap.
All the talk about raising it or removing it is probably just hot-air politics: IANAL, but I'm pretty sure a change in the law can't be applied retroactively.
for a bit, the big question has been: is the seabed there generally fractured so that the only real option to seal the leaks is nuclear explosives.
Some experts are saying that that would be folly. According to one I saw on the boob tube a couple of days back, underground explosions do produce a glassified hollow sphere around the bomb, but unfortunately the glass isn't very strong and the top crashes down and just leaves a big crater of broken rock.
Also, apparently no one has ever tried an underwater 'underground' explosion, so there's no experience with what would happen. The claims that Russia or the USSR have done it are apparently bunkum based on someone's shallow knowledge of the use of nukes for excavation.
Now I read that there are two fractures anyway.
Alarming suspicions are now being voiced from various quarters, claiming or speculating that the leak you see on TV is a minor problem, and a broken casing further down or off to the side is the real gusher.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't plot the weather here on Earth more than 3 days from now accurately
But you can easily predict that next summer will be warmer than next winter.
So would something like an EMP destroy pace makers, artificial hearts, etc.?
Might be for the best. Anything strong enough to do that is going to kill most of us by starvation. Those who die instantly might be the lucky ones.
Anything that includes circuitry would be affected (destroyed) by magnetic storms from the sun. In 1859, telegraph wires visibly sparked across the United States due to a geomagnetic solar storm, the largest recorded in history.
I wonder whether anyone has simulated what would happen if such a storm hit today. It's hard to rebuild civilization when you've got not food, and most of us wouldn't have much food after a few days of grocery stores not being able to place orders and motor vehicles not being able to deliver.
Would it put us back into the Stone Age? Is such a simple thing the explanation for the Fermi Paradox?
Fraud would be if the candidate or someone on their behalf tampered with the results or the machines to get them elected. If the voting machines are defective and produce a illegitimate outcome then it's something else.
Yeah... it's fraud on the part of the people who make the machines.
They can coexist, as oil and water can coexist. The pertinent question, as the kids are asking these days, is "Will it blend?"
The answer is a definite no, religious apologists aside.* By definition, faith is belief in something without evidence. Science requires the collection and examination of evidence.
That sounds right on paper, but in practice people have a strange ability to compartmentalize their minds, and thus perform well as a scientist even while holding strange beliefs. Except for combinations such as a creationist who wants to be a biologist or geologist, their may not be any problem.
Also, frankly, I doubt that any of us go through life without believing a lot of things we don't have any evidence for.
to spend the next 20 years stressing over grant deadlines that threaten to destroy whatever little autonomy you've managed to gain, in an environment where something like 5% of the projects get funded.
I talked to a Canadian math professor who said he fills out a grant application once every five years, then forgets grants for the next five.
For grad school in the sciences, loan debt is uncommon--- students typically get paid stipends as research assistants or teaching assistants, which cover full tuition plus a modest salary
There's never enough of these positions to go around, and a large portion of students who work off campus never finish.
I think the biggest problem is, as you point out, post-PhD. There are too many PhDs being produced relative to good research jobs, so typically one has to do several postdocs, might have to take a lecturer position somewhere, etc., in hopes of eventually, maybe when you're 40 or something, getting a tenure-track faculty position. Oh, and that's a tenure-track position, which is basically 6-7 years of probation (but at least you're getting paid well at that point).
It's almost impossible to get a tenure-track job if you're more than a few years out of grad school.
Back in the '90s everyone surfed nekkid, and you didn't have to worry about them guessing the green denim jacket.
I don't think the case for visiting the moon (and Mars) is compelling enough for the current economic climate.
a narcissistic idiot.
I heard Pinker speak to a university crowd about a decade ago, and came away with the same opinion about him. He had a bad habit of brushing off challenging questions with glib answers that weren't really answers.
I suppose that's the risk if you want to be a pop star among intellectuals.
Is it better to be 99.9% accurate after 1 hour or 95% accurate after 5 minutes?
Supposedly that's what the over-hyped "speed reading" industry teaches you. IIRC someone compared grad students untrained in speed reading with people who had taken a course, and found no difference in the two groups' speed and comprhension.
In 800 BCE, before the Greeks began to write things down, Homer (or another man by the same name :-)) could compose and recite two vast epic tales - the Iliad and the Odyssey - purely from memory.
There is absolutely no evidence for this.
The general view among classicists, based on the work of Milman Parry, is that bards would synthesize the tale on the fly from a tradition of stories and a grab-bag of phrases that fit the meter.
I am skeptical of even that much: if you actually read Parry's transcriptions of the Yugoslav bards, you see that they paint themselves into a corner within about three pages, and have to start over.
The Iliad and Odyssey were undoubtedly based on oral traditions, but you can bet that someone sat down and wrote them out much the way that novels are written today.
These are completely useless for commandos.
The next version will activate the self-cleaning system after it hears the sound of an artillery barrage.
phone calls pitching worthless extended auto warranties and credit card interest rate-reduction programs.
What I hate most is when a bill collector calls and asks for someone I've never heard of, but has the same surname that I do. They're obviously not doing their homework, just calling anyone with the same last name in hopes of getting lucky.
I would support jail time for all involved from top to bottom. Maybe just a month or so for those at the bottom,
Unless they were a whistleblower; then I'd give them a reward.
They would call and tell me my car warranty was about to expire. I thanked one of them and asked which of my two cars had the warranty problem... and the guy couldn't answer and hung up.
When robocalls get a hit there is a 2-3 second delay while they connect you to a salesjerk. You almost never get this delay when it's a human caller; they respond to your hello at normal conversational reaction time.
So when I'm feeling surly I just lie the (landline) phone down when I hear the pause, rather than hanging up. I figure if they're willing to waste my time I might as well waste theirs.
I also read somewhere that robocalling software remembers useless numbers and skips over them, so I turned off my answering machine when I was going to be away from the phone for a couple of weeks, and sure 'nough, I get a lot less telespam than I used to.
I have one phone (mobile) and I use Google Voice for all calls.
If I get a call and don't recognize the number or if caller ID is blocked then I don't answer.
If they leave a voicemail I will decide if it is someone I want to talk to or not. If the answer is yes I add them to the address book and call them back. If the answer is no I mark the number as spam and never get bother by it ever again.
I got a cell phone for emergency use, have never given out the phone number or made a call on it, but I get calls and texts all the time.
Now I just delete off the phone and let the stuff in the voice box rot - the UI makes it too much trouble to delete messages.
Back when I first got it and listened to some of the messages in the voice box, about half of them were prefixed with a recording saying that the call was coming from the state pen. (Especially on holidays - do they get extra phone time or something?) So I wonder if I got a number that formerly belonged to a delivery boy, or if inmates just call random numbers hoping to start some sh*t with someone.
Linux may have some technical merit, but is a mess where people without advanced computer skills are left in the dark.
The same can be said of Windows. People ask me for help with their Windows computers all the time, but I can rarely help because I don't often use anything besides Linux, and contrary to what you'd like to believe, there's nothing inherently intuitive about the way Windows works.
One of my computer science professors once stated, quite succinctly, that Microsoft was not in business to make a quality operating system (or quality product). They are in business to make money.
More specifically, a stock pyramid, though that model has faltered in recent years.
I'm surprised they're just now getting around to this. It's a straightforward pattern classification problem, and there is a huge set of training examples to be used for training a neural network or other Learning Classifier System technologies.
Yet here we are nearly two months after this started and there has been very little vitriolic attacking on the current President.
News must be slow to reach whatever planet you live on. The anti-anything-not-Republican crowd was calling it "Obama's Katrina" about 3 days after the leak hit the news.
Also, it's not clear what usa.gov can do. So far as I know, they don't have the equipment for fighting underwater oil leaks.
(Not to imply that I think Obama is anything but just another do-nothing-Democrat.)
Is it possible if the BP accountants and lawyers have done their jobs properly the amount of money that can be extracted from BP might be "capped"?
There's already a low-ball legal cap.
All the talk about raising it or removing it is probably just hot-air politics: IANAL, but I'm pretty sure a change in the law can't be applied retroactively.
for a bit, the big question has been: is the seabed there generally fractured so that the only real option to seal the leaks is nuclear explosives.
Some experts are saying that that would be folly. According to one I saw on the boob tube a couple of days back, underground explosions do produce a glassified hollow sphere around the bomb, but unfortunately the glass isn't very strong and the top crashes down and just leaves a big crater of broken rock.
Also, apparently no one has ever tried an underwater 'underground' explosion, so there's no experience with what would happen. The claims that Russia or the USSR have done it are apparently bunkum based on someone's shallow knowledge of the use of nukes for excavation.
Now I read that there are two fractures anyway.
Alarming suspicions are now being voiced from various quarters, claiming or speculating that the leak you see on TV is a minor problem, and a broken casing further down or off to the side is the real gusher.
By the way, how come it's been a long, long time since I received any mod points?
Maybe another leak...