The term anonymity could use a few qualifiers. Note that on slashdot you can post with your forum id or as an AC. They're both anonymous but they're very different. In a (modest) way your forum id is like a real, parallel identity and you don't like it if it gets a bad reputation - more so if the forum acts like a small community. If you ruin your id you have to start over as a new forum person, and build up credibility again. And you have a secret now too. This is not comfortable.
As an AC the social control is less, which gives you the chance to either give free rein to your nasty tendencies or voice honest thoughts that for legitimate reasons you're reluctant to be open about(a coward with something to be coward about). Or both.
Hm, i note a certain desire to disagree... I could start by agreeing with what you say. Then, let's add some corrections.
- You may underestimate the value of opinion and intuition. If a model contradicts your intuition it does need to carry some weight before it can overrule your opinion. It's easy to say the old guys were stupid to object to the fact that the earth was rotating around the sun, but I think that's not entirely fair. If somethings upsets your worldview it's reasonable to be more demanding for the proof. Of course we know that the old worldview wasn't very decent and we also know that there were murky reasons for finding a result unacceptable. I may seem to mix up "existing base of knowledge" with intuition, but that's a matter of degree. Let's drag in Einstein: "Gott wurfelt nicht", God doesn't play dice: that's an opinion. It's an educated opinion. Not all opinions are equally good. It appears the opinion was wrong, but I think it makes good sense to value the opinion.
- You may overestimate the reliability of the existing models. It's not just letting an equation do its work, there are assumptions. I doubt if people readily accept the conclusion if the model says the rings are recent. So slashdot may print "previously suspected" but the fact that models exist says nothing about the degree of trust there is in the previous models. That doesn't mean they're wrong. They can still be right.
The claim that the rings around Saturn would have been brand new - or the astronomical equivalence thereof - is quite shocking though. They'd need very strong arguments to back this up. Let's put it this way, the normal conclusion of previous research should have been "where did we go wrong?".
So that's why the password in the Incredibles was Kronos...
Re:Firefox should come with a minimal PDF reader
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PDF Exploits On the Rise
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· Score: 3, Informative
Not disagreeing here but you might like to know there is a common habit of disabling the loading of all the plugins in adobe. I forget how it is best done, but a cheap trick is renaming the plugin directory.
The magnets are only for keeping the particles inside, for keeping them from flying in a straight line. For accelleration an electrostatic approach is normally used. True, making things fly in a circle also is a form of accelleration, but without the speeding up part.
Why grandparent mentions vacuum I can't imagine.. The point about lightspeed is, it is the relativistic equivalent of infinite speed. You can't go faster than infinite, but you can still keep accellerating. You can keep accelerating close to lightspeed, and while speed only changes a tiny bit, the particle can still accumulate all the momentum you want to put in to cause a big bang on impact. So momentum and energy keep growing to infinity just like you would expect, as you're pumping in energy, only speed creeps along and never gets beyond lightspeed.
I think that makes good sense, more than people readily accept. Since any cheapo meccano accelerator achieves particle speeds close to lightspeed, it becomes kind of silly to describe LHC speeds as "close to lightspeed". So "at lightspeed" is technically wrong but practically fine. Energy or mass is a much better way to point out the difference.
1. believing that humans evolved from a kind of monkey is not hugely inaccurate. It gets the point of evolution sufficiently across. It's a bit worse if they think it's from an actual contemporary monkey. But why is the argument used? To point at the big differences and claim they can't be bridged with evolution. There's the rub.
3. The criticism is valid but it's good to point out that there are many degrees of certainty.
4. Darwinism can't tell about origins. Since creationism only cares about attacking science it will attack prebiotic science as well as Darwin.
6. If people claim there are no intermediate forms, it's indeed completely false. But there are gaps. Small gaps, big ones.
7. there are a few problems indeed with hindsight justification of why a property evolved, and the mechanics of a belief system are present. There are testability problems.
8. yes. The answer would be "So?"
9/ that evolution is neutral or partly neutral is an existing theory of Motoo Kimura. It is not a stupid theory. It's not exactly the same as random but the comparison is useful.
10. there are indeed huge problems in building up the necessary complexity, and eg Robert Shapiro has pointed them out. It's a problem and many darwinists have tried to ignore it. Meanwhile concepts of selforganisation at least point in the direction of an answer, but they mean selection is degraded from prime source of order to secondary.
The point with arguments from creationists is not that these arguments are wrong(although they often are), but that they're used against science. Creationists can dig up problems in the literature and build a case with them against science. The sequence works a bit like this:
- Scientists makes theories. Creationists stand on the side and claim God did it all. - Scientists find problems, creationists try to use them to show the failure of science and that there is only one explanation possible. - Science finds solutions, creationists still try to make a case, possibly adjusting their story. - Science finds more problems, creationists use them to strengthen their case with. - Science finds solutions and new problems...
One is a development process, the other is just partisan advocacy. But that doesn't mean all the arguments are false. Maybe I should have used Intelligent Design here, because Creationists generally are a bit more hm, challenged. But you can imagine a smart ID'er making up a strong case about the weaknesses in current theory - using all the arguments scientists have made. The foggy part is that last big jump they make.
What this also means is that ID might convince many smart people if they are listening open and honestly.
Schools need something I'd call a Randi Hour. that's a lesson where an authoritative person takes some pseudoscience subject, and tries to make a convincing case for it. And it leaves you on your own to see what you do with it. It's easy to disregard pseudoscience when you only hear it from helpful sources who ridicule it.
i wouldn't introduce it too early though, and as part of a course in hardcore skepticism. (unfortunately not-)Needless to say, this would be a very different proposal than the creationist proposal to just introduce creationism in the curriculum.
I'm not sure. It does seem similar, the radical political statements and not suffering fools gladly. Maybe it's just that what he stood for didn't look as nice in reality as it did in his books. But I don't see him being hypocritical about it, or deceiving himself.
All that's needed now is to outlaw all garments like kaftans and the likes. If that doesn't work, there's still hope: Bin Laden is large. Possibly the software can deduce "long shadow" >> "long person". Then again, gait analysis + terrorist probably attracts more funds than "software that can tell if a person is large from the length of the shadow".
If you'd replace the sun with a black hole of the same mass, the earth would remain on the same orbit as it does now. A black hole doesn't pull any harder than another object of the same mass.
It's only when you get close that things start to change. Gravity is zero if you're 3km from the center of the sun, but with its black hole replacement, it would be impossible even for light to get away from it.
by an invisible sky wizard that looks kinda like Sean Connery in a white beard and robe... that wished he looked like Sean Connery in a white beard and robe.
oh dammit. I used an escape velocity of 10m/s instead of 10km/s for earth. That means the momentum in rotation is much bigger than the momentum needed for deviating the trajectory.
You're right that I assumed that the asteroid wouldn't be rotating. I mean, who reads the article. Let's try an off the cuff upper limit for the rotation: take a radius 10.000 smaller than the earth, so over one km, then the escape velocity would be 100 times smaller(square root), of the order of 10cm/s. So stopping the asteroid from rotating would be similar in effort to accelerating it to a few cm/s, in the worst case (fastest spinning).
But(still stubbornly refusing to do any calculations), the article mentions accelerations of 0.22 microns per day during several years as being enough for 'the purpose'(and that would be valid whatever the size of the asteroid). An engine that provides this acceleration would have to spend a million seconds or a few months to stop the asteroid from rotating. A year is a few million seconds. The smaller the asteroid the cheaper it becomes to stop the thing from rotating first.
Does rotation mean you have to give up on the idea of "the bag". Probably, but not in principle. The idea of the bag is the most naive image i could think of for anchoring in a pile of rubble or a waterball. A net bag around it is the first idea that arises. It would be lighter than a solar sail. Another idea would be a kind of web anchored inside part of the asteroid(you can't pull away a big piece of the asteroid anyway, because of gravity).
I can imagine pulling on the bag in the same way as you think of pushing on the asteroid. Even, if you tighten up the bag enough, the device would be on the surface too. You can pull on the bag sideways as well so you can slow down rotation or to accelerate the asteroid, or both at the same time. Both with pulling and pushing the engines wouldn't be able to run in a constant fashion, and they create wobbles, waves , and deformations. You'd need smart engines that adapt all the time. An engine that pushes may even have to crawl out the hole it creates. Imagine pushing a waterball. Gravity is much better in that respect. I like the gravity idea.
About the long stick: it could be a cable actually:) You can use it for the gravity tractor too if the tractor is too close to the asteroid. The engine would be at the far end of the cable while the energy plant, and any other balast you want to take from the asteroid, would be near the asteroid. In terms of strengh it's a lot easier than a space elevator. On the other hand with a gravity tractor it would be easier to scoop up mass from the asteroid so you become heavier and can move further away from it.
The more powerful the engines the more mass you need as well. You shouldn't be bringing all that mass with you.
The matter ejected from the tractor would hit the asteroid, pushing it back on course and negating the pull of the tractor. you can put the engines on a long long stick. The advantage of the ship is you control the structure, you can pull on it without it breaking. With pulling a blob, you have to take care you just don't pull off a bit. With pushing, you just push a hole in it and it starts to get wobbly as well.
Just the same, if you had a large bag to put the asteroid in, and then you pull on the bag with a long rope, it would work too:) The task is "how to anchor your cable". The bag is a way to fill that in. Pulling with gravity is another way to replace the bag+cable. More hightech "anchor for cable" ideas are a set of devices that burrow through the asteroid creating a strong spiderweb that you can pull on.
When using gravity to pull, obviously it's smarter to mine the asteroid for mass instead of bringing it with you. You also would like to use the asteroid's mass to have something to eject from your engines.
In one of his books Dyson warns against the idea of blowing up approaching asteroids and proposes mass drivers that push the asteroid into a new orbit over extended periods, possibly years. Factors I can think of from the top of my head:
- a mass driver needs mass, which it gets from the asteroid. So you don't have to sling huge masses towards the asteroids. - anchoring the mass drivers can be a problem if the asteroid is brittle. Bigger asteroids may be stronger but you also have to push harder. - you can have many mass drivers - the more time you have the better.
So the special thing about a gravity tractor is that it's a reliable way to attach a mass driver to any type of asteroid. The tractor still needs mass drivers and it needs a lot of mass to build up the gravity. If you see the asteroid as a "soft waterball" that is hard to push, you could consider the tractor as an empty box with . It flies over, fills itself with parts of the asteroid and starts pulling.
Camera is being dishonest and you're blowing up the caricature. I found the full interview here. CAMERA is trying to turn Pappe's argument around to make it the opposite of what it means. Pappe points out that there is always a subjective element and a dose of case making in his approach. And there are those who don't want to admit that. I call that honest. CAMERA turns signs of honesty into signs of dishonesty. I would call Pappe a very good source.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're not greedy you are a lot less vulnerable. If you're smart you can be outsmarted.
Do these sounds come installable as part of a windows sound scheme?
The term anonymity could use a few qualifiers. Note that on slashdot you can post with your forum id or as an AC. They're both anonymous but they're very different. In a (modest) way your forum id is like a real, parallel identity and you don't like it if it gets a bad reputation - more so if the forum acts like a small community. If you ruin your id you have to start over as a new forum person, and build up credibility again. And you have a secret now too. This is not comfortable.
As an AC the social control is less, which gives you the chance to either give free rein to your nasty tendencies or voice honest thoughts that for legitimate reasons you're reluctant to be open about(a coward with something to be coward about). Or both.
The article is correct. A picosecond is 10-12s or a millionth of a microsecond. Light does 300m in a microsecond so 0.3mm in a picosecond.
Hm, i note a certain desire to disagree... I could start by agreeing with what you say. Then, let's add some corrections.
- You may underestimate the value of opinion and intuition. If a model contradicts your intuition it does need to carry some weight before it can overrule your opinion. It's easy to say the old guys were stupid to object to the fact that the earth was rotating around the sun, but I think that's not entirely fair. If somethings upsets your worldview it's reasonable to be more demanding for the proof. Of course we know that the old worldview wasn't very decent and we also know that there were murky reasons for finding a result unacceptable.
I may seem to mix up "existing base of knowledge" with intuition, but that's a matter of degree. Let's drag in Einstein: "Gott wurfelt nicht", God doesn't play dice: that's an opinion. It's an educated opinion. Not all opinions are equally good. It appears the opinion was wrong, but I think it makes good sense to value the opinion.
- You may overestimate the reliability of the existing models. It's not just letting an equation do its work, there are assumptions. I doubt if people readily accept the conclusion if the model says the rings are recent. So slashdot may print "previously suspected" but the fact that models exist says nothing about the degree of trust there is in the previous models. That doesn't mean they're wrong. They can still be right.
The Longhorn RSOD had a typo. Well it's appropriate i guess.
The claim that the rings around Saturn would have been brand new - or the astronomical equivalence thereof - is quite shocking though. They'd need very strong arguments to back this up. Let's put it this way, the normal conclusion of previous research should have been "where did we go wrong?".
So that's why the password in the Incredibles was Kronos...
Not disagreeing here but you might like to know there is a common habit of disabling the loading of all the plugins in adobe. I forget how it is best done, but a cheap trick is renaming the plugin directory.
The magnets are only for keeping the particles inside, for keeping them from flying in a straight line. For accelleration an electrostatic approach is normally used. True, making things fly in a circle also is a form of accelleration, but without the speeding up part.
Why grandparent mentions vacuum I can't imagine..
The point about lightspeed is, it is the relativistic equivalent of infinite speed. You can't go faster than infinite, but you can still keep accellerating. You can keep accelerating close to lightspeed, and while speed only changes a tiny bit, the particle can still accumulate all the momentum you want to put in to cause a big bang on impact. So momentum and energy keep growing to infinity just like you would expect, as you're pumping in energy, only speed creeps along and never gets beyond lightspeed.
I think that makes good sense, more than people readily accept. Since any cheapo meccano accelerator achieves particle speeds close to lightspeed, it becomes kind of silly to describe LHC speeds as "close to lightspeed". So "at lightspeed" is technically wrong but practically fine. Energy or mass is a much better way to point out the difference.
This list is not a fair case of debunking.
1. believing that humans evolved from a kind of monkey is not hugely inaccurate. It gets the point of evolution sufficiently across. It's a bit worse if they think it's from an actual contemporary monkey. But why is the argument used? To point at the big differences and claim they can't be bridged with evolution. There's the rub.
3. The criticism is valid but it's good to point out that there are many degrees of certainty.
4. Darwinism can't tell about origins. Since creationism only cares about attacking science it will attack prebiotic science as well as Darwin.
6. If people claim there are no intermediate forms, it's indeed completely false. But there are gaps. Small gaps, big ones.
7. there are a few problems indeed with hindsight justification of why a property evolved, and the mechanics of a belief system are present. There are testability problems.
8. yes. The answer would be "So?"
9/ that evolution is neutral or partly neutral is an existing theory of Motoo Kimura. It is not a stupid theory. It's not exactly the same as random but the comparison is useful.
10. there are indeed huge problems in building up the necessary complexity, and eg Robert Shapiro has pointed them out. It's a problem and many darwinists have tried to ignore it. Meanwhile concepts of selforganisation at least point in the direction of an answer, but they mean selection is degraded from prime source of order to secondary.
The point with arguments from creationists is not that these arguments are wrong(although they often are), but that they're used against science. Creationists can dig up problems in the literature and build a case with them against science. The sequence works a bit like this:
- Scientists makes theories. Creationists stand on the side and claim God did it all.
- Scientists find problems, creationists try to use them to show the failure of science and that there is only one explanation possible.
- Science finds solutions, creationists still try to make a case, possibly adjusting their story.
- Science finds more problems, creationists use them to strengthen their case with.
- Science finds solutions and new problems...
One is a development process, the other is just partisan advocacy. But that doesn't mean all the arguments are false.
Maybe I should have used Intelligent Design here, because Creationists generally are a bit more hm, challenged. But you can imagine a smart ID'er making up a strong case about the weaknesses in current theory - using all the arguments scientists have made. The foggy part is that last big jump they make.
What this also means is that ID might convince many smart people if they are listening open and honestly.
Schools need something I'd call a Randi Hour. that's a lesson where an authoritative person takes some pseudoscience subject, and tries to make a convincing case for it. And it leaves you on your own to see what you do with it. It's easy to disregard pseudoscience when you only hear it from helpful sources who ridicule it.
i wouldn't introduce it too early though, and as part of a course in hardcore skepticism. (unfortunately not-)Needless to say, this would be a very different proposal than the creationist proposal to just introduce creationism in the curriculum.
Yeah, I
I'm not sure. It does seem similar, the radical political statements and not suffering fools gladly. Maybe it's just that what he stood for didn't look as nice in reality as it did in his books. But I don't see him being hypocritical about it, or deceiving himself.
All that's needed now is to outlaw all garments like kaftans and the likes. If that doesn't work, there's still hope: Bin Laden is large. Possibly the software can deduce "long shadow" >> "long person". Then again, gait analysis + terrorist probably attracts more funds than "software that can tell if a person is large from the length of the shadow".
If you'd replace the sun with a black hole of the same mass, the earth would remain on the same orbit as it does now. A black hole doesn't pull any harder than another object of the same mass.
It's only when you get close that things start to change. Gravity is zero if you're 3km from the center of the sun, but with its black hole replacement, it would be impossible even for light to get away from it.
The Ossies have computers too, as you may know.
by an invisible sky wizard that looks kinda like Sean Connery in a white beard and robe. .. that wished he looked like Sean Connery in a white beard and robe.
I want to be a flatearther. Do they have a clothing line to go with it?
oh dammit. I used an escape velocity of 10m/s instead of 10km/s for earth. That means the momentum in rotation is much bigger than the momentum needed for deviating the trajectory.
You're right that I assumed that the asteroid wouldn't be rotating. I mean, who reads the article.
Let's try an off the cuff upper limit for the rotation: take a radius 10.000 smaller than the earth, so over one km, then the escape velocity would be 100 times smaller(square root), of the order of 10cm/s. So stopping the asteroid from rotating would be similar in effort to accelerating it to a few cm/s, in the worst case (fastest spinning).
But(still stubbornly refusing to do any calculations), the article mentions accelerations of 0.22 microns per day during several years as being enough for 'the purpose'(and that would be valid whatever the size of the asteroid). An engine that provides this acceleration would have to spend a million seconds or a few months to stop the asteroid from rotating. A year is a few million seconds. The smaller the asteroid the cheaper it becomes to stop the thing from rotating first.
Does rotation mean you have to give up on the idea of "the bag". Probably, but not in principle. The idea of the bag is the most naive image i could think of for anchoring in a pile of rubble or a waterball. A net bag around it is the first idea that arises. It would be lighter than a solar sail. Another idea would be a kind of web anchored inside part of the asteroid(you can't pull away a big piece of the asteroid anyway, because of gravity).
I can imagine pulling on the bag in the same way as you think of pushing on the asteroid. Even, if you tighten up the bag enough, the device would be on the surface too. You can pull on the bag sideways as well so you can slow down rotation or to accelerate the asteroid, or both at the same time. Both with pulling and pushing the engines wouldn't be able to run in a constant fashion, and they create wobbles, waves , and deformations. You'd need smart engines that adapt all the time. An engine that pushes may even have to crawl out the hole it creates. Imagine pushing a waterball. Gravity is much better in that respect. I like the gravity idea.
About the long stick: it could be a cable actually :) You can use it for the gravity tractor too if the tractor is too close to the asteroid. The engine would be at the far end of the cable while the energy plant, and any other balast you want to take from the asteroid, would be near the asteroid. In terms of strengh it's a lot easier than a space elevator. On the other hand with a gravity tractor it would be easier to scoop up mass from the asteroid so you become heavier and can move further away from it.
The more powerful the engines the more mass you need as well. You shouldn't be bringing all that mass with you.
The matter ejected from the tractor would hit the asteroid, pushing it back on course and negating the pull of the tractor.
you can put the engines on a long long stick. The advantage of the ship is you control the structure, you can pull on it without it breaking. With pulling a blob, you have to take care you just don't pull off a bit. With pushing, you just push a hole in it and it starts to get wobbly as well.
Just the same, if you had a large bag to put the asteroid in, and then you pull on the bag with a long rope, it would work too :) The task is "how to anchor your cable". The bag is a way to fill that in. Pulling with gravity is another way to replace the bag+cable. More hightech "anchor for cable" ideas are a set of devices that burrow through the asteroid creating a strong spiderweb that you can pull on.
When using gravity to pull, obviously it's smarter to mine the asteroid for mass instead of bringing it with you. You also would like to use the asteroid's mass to have something to eject from your engines.
In one of his books Dyson warns against the idea of blowing up approaching asteroids and proposes mass drivers that push the asteroid into a new orbit over extended periods, possibly years. Factors I can think of from the top of my head:
- a mass driver needs mass, which it gets from the asteroid. So you don't have to sling huge masses towards the asteroids.
- anchoring the mass drivers can be a problem if the asteroid is brittle. Bigger asteroids may be stronger but you also have to push harder.
- you can have many mass drivers
- the more time you have the better.
So the special thing about a gravity tractor is that it's a reliable way to attach a mass driver to any type of asteroid. The tractor still needs mass drivers and it needs a lot of mass to build up the gravity. If you see the asteroid as a "soft waterball" that is hard to push, you could consider the tractor as an empty box with . It flies over, fills itself with parts of the asteroid and starts pulling.
I think you're being dishonest too. Don't beat that trick to death by overusing it.
Camera is being dishonest and you're blowing up the caricature. I found the full interview here. CAMERA is trying to turn Pappe's argument around to make it the opposite of what it means. Pappe points out that there is always a subjective element and a dose of case making in his approach. And there are those who don't want to admit that.
I call that honest. CAMERA turns signs of honesty into signs of dishonesty. I would call Pappe a very good source.