> I find it impossible to believe that life, even in a primitive form, could spontaneously form from random atoms flying around in space, and that its formation happened on a planet with exactly the right chemical make-up and just the right temperature and just the right atmosphere, and that I evolved from this thing. It's way too big a coincidence to be believable.
Yeah, that's why scientists suspect things like gravity and chemistry got involved with those atoms flying around in space. You might have noticed that the universe isn't a completely random gas of atoms.
> I think it's unfortunate that scientists are stuck with the Big Bang Theory, since God is outside the realm of science.
The only thing outside the realm of science is stuff that doesn't have any observable properties.
> Your post does bring up something else that I have thought of. What sense does it make to reward or punish for eternity based on what a person does during their short life on earth? I'm probably going to spend on the order of 100 years on this planet. 100 years is an insignificant amount of time compared to eternity. Look at the ratios: (1 second / 100 years) > (100 years / infinity) My point is that punishing me for the rest of my life based on what I do over the next second is less rediculous than sentencing me for an eternity based on what I do over the next century.
<stentorian_voice>You err in expecting all this crap to make sense, my son.</stentorian_voice>
> To ask a totally random and silly question, does Unicode support Egyptian hieroglyphics, or is it technically counted among the non-living languages not supported?
I haven't followed this stuff carefully, but I understand that people are busy working on Uncode representations for dead languages as well as living, because people still like to publish documents that include the text of dead languages.
> The problem with trying to analyze why religions were "made up" and what social purposes (deterrence, discrimination, thought control, etc.) they are used for is that it ignores the possibility that there actually is a God, and that which we call "religion" came to exist as a result of God's revelation of himself, not as a result of random guesses or evil conspiracies.
a) What have "liberals" got to do with any of this?
b) You seem blithely unaware that there are thousands of religions out there, many making mutually exclusive claims. You've got to recognize that most of them are bogus. If you want yours to be treated differently you need to give people a reason for it.
> Everyone wants to treat religion as merely an object of study, like politics or literature...but has it occurred to anyone that there may actually be truth to it? And if there is a God and an afterlife, and your life on earth determines where you will spend eternity, isn't this something you just might want to take seriously? I mean, eternity is an awfully long time, and a lake of fire doesn't sound like too much fun.
Ah, Pascal's Wager rears its ugly head. Haven't you ever considered Homer's Counteroffer, which I'll take the liberty of misquoting from memory -
What if we're going to the wrong church? We're just making Him madder and madder every Sunday!
What if the real god just wants people to get on with their lives, and only punishes those who waste it on useless religious superstitions and ceremonies? Are you going to bet on that, too?
> A Grand Funk Electric song captures this best - "You've got the English translation of the Roman translation of the Greek translation of the pure Babylonian".
If you're intersted in decypherments you should look at John Chadwick's Decipherment of Linear B and more recent literature on that topic, a stunning intellectual feat done without the benefit of any Rosetta Stone.
> AFTER peeling off the pad?! you know your suppose to peel that off BEFORE you install the cpu, right?
Ah, no. You're supposed to pull off the bit of tape that keeps it from sticking to other stuff and then squish it down on the CPU. Per the manufacturer's instructions, kind of thing.
> > Lots of OEM or low end cooling setups use either a thermal interface pad (TIM) or that white goop you get at radio shack. The fact is that neither of those does a great job of transferring heat from the processor to the heatsink. While they work ok, they don't exactly assist Moore's law in fulfilling itself by limiting clock speeds with heat.
> Actually, that's hardly true at all. RS's compound has been found to be one of the best out there. Just take a look at some reviews that include it.
I built a couple of Athlons that kept barfing on CPU-intensive jobs due to overheating, and they ran about 3C cooler after peeling off the pad and replacing it with silver-based paste.
> I also stick around while I learn the particular package in full, and offer new passers by the answers others were nice enough to offer me.
Yeah, I feel a social obligation to hang around long enough to answer several newbie questions that are even simpler than mine, partly to "pay" for the service I'm getting, and partly to unload the burden on the gurus so they'll have time to cover the hard questions.
> > There may be more than one winner if there are several good entries! I have permission to select as many as 3 winners if there are many good entries!
> How about a Slashdot poll to pick the 3rd shirt?
Actually, it's just going to be a repeat of the first shirt.
Re: "Leaky Irrigation" In A Watershed?
on
Aral Sea Disappearing
·
· Score: 4, Informative
> Is the irrigation surrounding the rivers taking the water out of the sea's watershed? Seems unlikely. The water would just eventually run back into the river and the sea.
No, much irrigation water is lost to evaporation or to incorporation into the crops.
Remember that crops, like most other life-forms, are mostly water. So for those little seeds turn into railcar-loads of consumables, all that water has to come from somewhere. Irrigation converts flowing water into money.
Also, some kinds of irrigation are extremely wasteful in terms of evaporation. Next time you drive through Texas under a blazing sun and see all those endless acres of rice shoots submerged under 6" of water, ask yourself what the evaporation rate must be. The lakes behind big dams also greatly increase the evaporation rate in a drainage system.
And though what goes up eventually comes down, it might come down half a continent away.
> I mean, how is water leaking from a poorly-built irrigation system different from the rain that falls right next to it and feeds the rivers and the sea to begin with?
In general terms, it is distributed differently, which means it can behave differently w.r.t. evaporation etc.
To make up an illustrative example, suppose you water your lawn to a total of 10" over 10 months, just a little bit every night. Not much runs off, right? But if you get a 10" rain over a couple of days it stacks up faster than it can be absorbed or evaporate, so most of it runs downhill into streams that feed the sea.
Surely that's not precisely what's happening in Central Asia, but it should call attention to the fact that the way water is distributed in space and time can have a big effect on where it ends up.
> What does Bush or his policies have to do with a sea in Asia that started to disappear 10 years before he came to office?
Well, we tried to blame it on Clinton but couldn't make it stick because it predates him too. Can we agree on Nixon, or maybe Johnson if someone steps up to defend Nixon's honor?
> I recall watching a documentary on a Soviet-era facility dedicated to researching and developing bioweapons. As of the late '90s, there were massive stores of anthrax and smallpox buried there, and some of it was leaking.
WMD on island... sea is disappearing... I think I'm on to a theory about why WMD go AWOL. Any disappearing seas or lakes in Iraq?
> The article says that it's more likely to be due to the excessive and wasteful irrigation systems in the area which take water from the rivers that supply the sea.
Doesn't our own Colorado River now disappear in the sand rather than flowing into the Gulf of California as it once did, as a result of so many people tapping its water?
> First thing: read Tony Hoare's critique of Ada. (CAR Hoare, Hints on Programming Language Design, 1978). All the current common languages are way too complex.
I thought it was in his 1981 speech, but either way notice that he commented on the language before it was complete (1983). However, I understand that the language was simplified somewhat between the time of his remarks and the time it came out of the oven, possibly as a direct result of his comments.
> This semantics needs to include concurrency and how it works. I can think of half a dozen languages (Ada, C++, Java,...) in the last 20 years that decided this was just too hard, and eventually paid for it.
Concurrency as in multitasking/multithreading? It's really easy in Ada, and it works quite well everywhere I've used it.
As an aside, it's quite apparent that the evolution of the C family of languages (C, C++, Java, C#) is converging on a language very like Ada, except unfortunately as a kludgepile rather than a clean design.
> Could it just be that with our very limited (~40 years worth) sample of scientific data that we just do not have a very good understanding of how the cycles of the Ozone Layer work? Perhaps ozone holes occur and disappear naturally, and we are only beginning to learn this.
Yes, and perhaps 'intelligent' species arise and pollute themselves to extinction in natural cycles too. Wanna play?
> But here's another disturbing thought. John Anthony West argues that water erosion on the Sphynx indicates that the thing was built before Egypt was an arid country. That's about 10,000 years ago. Of course this runs totally against accepted archaeological thought -- but you still have to wonder if Egyptian civilization isn't a tad older than currently accepted.
It has been a year or two since I read anything about that, but IIRC the guy is demonstrably a kook on the basis of other claims he has pushed in the past. The one redeeming issue is that he hired a regular geologist, an oil geologist from Texas IIRC, to give an opinion on it and the oilman concurred.
It would be nice to have a second opinion on it as a sanity check, but skeptics don't seem to put enough stock in the story to bother with it. Maybe that tells us something; maybe it doesn't. I tend to be skeptical of the story since there are so many people so eager to peddle bullshit about ancient Egypt and its culture, but I won't dismiss it out of hand until a disinterested party surveys it.
The claim isn't really too far fetched, IMO. The standard model is that Egypt AWKI formed as the result of people from all over the region converging on the valley as North Africa went arid. But there could have been a smaller civization there already, or maybe it was a sacred site where people from all over would gather periodically. IIRC much of the Sphinx is a natural outcropping, so building it with a small population over a long period might not be entirely out of the question, allowing us to date it long before the dynastic era without really having to change much of our model of Egyptian history.
What I find most interesting about it is that the head seems to be way too small for the body, and some have speculated that it originally actually had a lion's head in correct proportion to the size of the body, which was later trimmed down to the shape of a human head. It could have been a cult site for a long time, like Stonehenge or something, and then been converted to a dynastic symbol sometime in late prehistory or the early historic period.
> Always consider the source and agenda of such claims. It's been my experience that some "experts" latch on to one or two details of a many-faceted civilization and extrapolate it to make the case for a liberal, enlightened, politically-correct utopia.
Also, a pharoah who wasn't a total fuckwit might have been able to figure out that they'd get the job done in a more timely manner if they actually had enough to eat and a spot for a decent night's sleep instead of starvation, daily beatings, and torture on weekends. Moving big rocks around is hard work, rollerboards or no.
Slaves weren't always treated the way they are depicted in B movies.
Slashdot Mirror
> I find it impossible to believe that life, even in a primitive form, could spontaneously form from random atoms flying around in space, and that its formation happened on a planet with exactly the right chemical make-up and just the right temperature and just the right atmosphere, and that I evolved from this thing. It's way too big a coincidence to be believable.
Yeah, that's why scientists suspect things like gravity and chemistry got involved with those atoms flying around in space. You might have noticed that the universe isn't a completely random gas of atoms.
> I think it's unfortunate that scientists are stuck with the Big Bang Theory, since God is outside the realm of science.
The only thing outside the realm of science is stuff that doesn't have any observable properties.
> Your post does bring up something else that I have thought of. What sense does it make to reward or punish for eternity based on what a person does during their short life on earth? I'm probably going to spend on the order of 100 years on this planet. 100 years is an insignificant amount of time compared to eternity. Look at the ratios:
(1 second / 100 years) > (100 years / infinity)
My point is that punishing me for the rest of my life based on what I do over the next second is less rediculous than sentencing me for an eternity based on what I do over the next century.
<stentorian_voice>You err in expecting all this crap to make sense, my son.</stentorian_voice>
> To ask a totally random and silly question, does Unicode support Egyptian hieroglyphics, or is it technically counted among the non-living languages not supported?
Google is your friend.
I haven't followed this stuff carefully, but I understand that people are busy working on Uncode representations for dead languages as well as living, because people still like to publish documents that include the text of dead languages.
What if the real god just wants people to get on with their lives, and only punishes those who waste it on useless religious superstitions and ceremonies? Are you going to bet on that, too?> *prepares to be modded down by liberals*
> The problem with trying to analyze why religions were "made up" and what social purposes (deterrence, discrimination, thought control, etc.) they are used for is that it ignores the possibility that there actually is a God, and that which we call "religion" came to exist as a result of God's revelation of himself, not as a result of random guesses or evil conspiracies.
a) What have "liberals" got to do with any of this?
b) You seem blithely unaware that there are thousands of religions out there, many making mutually exclusive claims. You've got to recognize that most of them are bogus. If you want yours to be treated differently you need to give people a reason for it.
> Everyone wants to treat religion as merely an object of study, like politics or literature...but has it occurred to anyone that there may actually be truth to it? And if there is a God and an afterlife, and your life on earth determines where you will spend eternity, isn't this something you just might want to take seriously? I mean, eternity is an awfully long time, and a lake of fire doesn't sound like too much fun.
Ah, Pascal's Wager rears its ugly head. Haven't you ever considered Homer's Counteroffer, which I'll take the liberty of misquoting from memory -
> A Grand Funk Electric song captures this best - "You've got the English translation of the Roman translation of the Greek translation of the pure Babylonian".
There's biblical scholars you can bank on!
If you're intersted in decypherments you should look at John Chadwick's Decipherment of Linear B and more recent literature on that topic, a stunning intellectual feat done without the benefit of any Rosetta Stone.
> AFTER peeling off the pad?! you know your suppose to peel that off BEFORE you install the cpu, right?
Ah, no. You're supposed to pull off the bit of tape that keeps it from sticking to other stuff and then squish it down on the CPU. Per the manufacturer's instructions, kind of thing.
> What's the point of buying exepnsive silver-based paste if 3C reduction is all that you will get?
A couple of bucks and no more signals? What was I supposed to want?
> > Lots of OEM or low end cooling setups use either a thermal interface pad (TIM) or that white goop you get at radio shack. The fact is that neither of those does a great job of transferring heat from the processor to the heatsink. While they work ok, they don't exactly assist Moore's law in fulfilling itself by limiting clock speeds with heat.
> Actually, that's hardly true at all. RS's compound has been found to be one of the best out there. Just take a look at some reviews that include it.
I built a couple of Athlons that kept barfing on CPU-intensive jobs due to overheating, and they ran about 3C cooler after peeling off the pad and replacing it with silver-based paste.
> I also stick around while I learn the particular package in full, and offer new passers by the answers others were nice enough to offer me.
Yeah, I feel a social obligation to hang around long enough to answer several newbie questions that are even simpler than mine, partly to "pay" for the service I'm getting, and partly to unload the burden on the gurus so they'll have time to cover the hard questions.
I heard some MCI execs were hoping for a latency of 5 years + good behavior.
> > There may be more than one winner if there are several good entries! I have permission to select as many as 3 winners if there are many good entries!
> How about a Slashdot poll to pick the 3rd shirt?
Actually, it's just going to be a repeat of the first shirt.
> Is the irrigation surrounding the rivers taking the water out of the sea's watershed? Seems unlikely. The water would just eventually run back into the river and the sea.
No, much irrigation water is lost to evaporation or to incorporation into the crops.
Remember that crops, like most other life-forms, are mostly water. So for those little seeds turn into railcar-loads of consumables, all that water has to come from somewhere. Irrigation converts flowing water into money.
Also, some kinds of irrigation are extremely wasteful in terms of evaporation. Next time you drive through Texas under a blazing sun and see all those endless acres of rice shoots submerged under 6" of water, ask yourself what the evaporation rate must be. The lakes behind big dams also greatly increase the evaporation rate in a drainage system.
And though what goes up eventually comes down, it might come down half a continent away.
> I mean, how is water leaking from a poorly-built irrigation system different from the rain that falls right next to it and feeds the rivers and the sea to begin with?
In general terms, it is distributed differently, which means it can behave differently w.r.t. evaporation etc.
To make up an illustrative example, suppose you water your lawn to a total of 10" over 10 months, just a little bit every night. Not much runs off, right? But if you get a 10" rain over a couple of days it stacks up faster than it can be absorbed or evaporate, so most of it runs downhill into streams that feed the sea.
Surely that's not precisely what's happening in Central Asia, but it should call attention to the fact that the way water is distributed in space and time can have a big effect on where it ends up.
> What does Bush or his policies have to do with a sea in Asia that started to disappear 10 years before he came to office?
Well, we tried to blame it on Clinton but couldn't make it stick because it predates him too. Can we agree on Nixon, or maybe Johnson if someone steps up to defend Nixon's honor?
> I recall watching a documentary on a Soviet-era facility dedicated to researching and developing bioweapons. As of the late '90s, there were massive stores of anthrax and smallpox buried there, and some of it was leaking.
WMD on island
> The article says that it's more likely to be due to the excessive and wasteful irrigation systems in the area which take water from the rivers that supply the sea.
Doesn't our own Colorado River now disappear in the sand rather than flowing into the Gulf of California as it once did, as a result of so many people tapping its water?
> FINALLY! After all these years of scrambled languages, we can finally get together and plan that tower of Babel!
Vebwe? Kootchka qwim?
> Yoda, is that you?
Shouldn't you ask, "Yoda, that you is?"
> First thing: read Tony Hoare's critique of Ada. (CAR Hoare, Hints on Programming Language Design, 1978). All the current common languages are way too complex.
I thought it was in his 1981 speech, but either way notice that he commented on the language before it was complete (1983). However, I understand that the language was simplified somewhat between the time of his remarks and the time it came out of the oven, possibly as a direct result of his comments.
> This semantics needs to include concurrency and how it works. I can think of half a dozen languages (Ada, C++, Java,
Concurrency as in multitasking/multithreading? It's really easy in Ada, and it works quite well everywhere I've used it.
As an aside, it's quite apparent that the evolution of the C family of languages (C, C++, Java, C#) is converging on a language very like Ada, except unfortunately as a kludgepile rather than a clean design.
Just my opinion.
> Could it just be that with our very limited (~40 years worth) sample of scientific data that we just do not have a very good understanding of how the cycles of the Ozone Layer work? Perhaps ozone holes occur and disappear naturally, and we are only beginning to learn this.
Yes, and perhaps 'intelligent' species arise and pollute themselves to extinction in natural cycles too. Wanna play?
> But here's another disturbing thought. John Anthony West argues that water erosion on the Sphynx indicates that the thing was built before Egypt was an arid country. That's about 10,000 years ago. Of course this runs totally against accepted archaeological thought -- but you still have to wonder if Egyptian civilization isn't a tad older than currently accepted.
It has been a year or two since I read anything about that, but IIRC the guy is demonstrably a kook on the basis of other claims he has pushed in the past. The one redeeming issue is that he hired a regular geologist, an oil geologist from Texas IIRC, to give an opinion on it and the oilman concurred.
It would be nice to have a second opinion on it as a sanity check, but skeptics don't seem to put enough stock in the story to bother with it. Maybe that tells us something; maybe it doesn't. I tend to be skeptical of the story since there are so many people so eager to peddle bullshit about ancient Egypt and its culture, but I won't dismiss it out of hand until a disinterested party surveys it.
The claim isn't really too far fetched, IMO. The standard model is that Egypt AWKI formed as the result of people from all over the region converging on the valley as North Africa went arid. But there could have been a smaller civization there already, or maybe it was a sacred site where people from all over would gather periodically. IIRC much of the Sphinx is a natural outcropping, so building it with a small population over a long period might not be entirely out of the question, allowing us to date it long before the dynastic era without really having to change much of our model of Egyptian history.
What I find most interesting about it is that the head seems to be way too small for the body, and some have speculated that it originally actually had a lion's head in correct proportion to the size of the body, which was later trimmed down to the shape of a human head. It could have been a cult site for a long time, like Stonehenge or something, and then been converted to a dynastic symbol sometime in late prehistory or the early historic period.
> Always consider the source and agenda of such claims. It's been my experience that some "experts" latch on to one or two details of a many-faceted civilization and extrapolate it to make the case for a liberal, enlightened, politically-correct utopia.
Also, a pharoah who wasn't a total fuckwit might have been able to figure out that they'd get the job done in a more timely manner if they actually had enough to eat and a spot for a decent night's sleep instead of starvation, daily beatings, and torture on weekends. Moving big rocks around is hard work, rollerboards or no.
Slaves weren't always treated the way they are depicted in B movies.
> What part of GNU's not Unix don't they understand?
Maybe they haven't finished expanding the acronym yet.
> GNU has helpfully published a version of "Hello, World!" that uses autoconf
Why make things so complicated!
SCO: "Too similar"
TOG: "Too different"
LSB: "Just right!"