It's a quote from steven hawking (a famous physicist) which refers to the nature of authority. It's about who you trust as an authority in any given subject. When Stephen Hawking says something about physics, people tend to believe him. In context, a person of no fame in physics discovered something new. Stephen Hawking then renamed the phenomenon, and took credit for it. When confronted about his stealing of the discovery, his reply was simply:
Who is The Journal Of Quantum Physics going to believe?
Even though the truth was that the other person made the discovery, Hawking was sure to get the credit because he had authority and the other person did not.
I particularly like the quote in the context of Slashdot, where people often post as if they have authoritative knowledge of a subject, and sometimes are believed by significant numbers of other slashdotters, even though it is likely that there is very little real authority around here, and a lot of widely believed posts are full of untrue garbage.
As one example, the post of mine which you responded to might seem to indicate that i'm pro-life, or even just an authority on what pro-lifers believe, neither of which is true.
Hint: The pro-life movement believes that any abortion is equal to murder. When you believe that there are large numbers of people running around committing murder, you try to do something about it.
Try searching for just billboard puzzle answer, it's much less obvious.
Plus those billboards have been up for long enough that google has probably stopped accepting submissions by now. They want the people who could solve it before it got documented.
Take 1000: no radio Give 1000: Massively improved detection and broadcasting capabilities.
The odds of all the other civilizations being even within 1k years is tiny. What SETI counts on is that we won't be able to hear the people less sophisticated than us. The people much more sophisticated than us should be capable of blaring out messages so loud they would be hard to miss (if they are interested in sending messages).
If the numbers you plug in produce a number less than one, you've estimated too low somewhere.
There is a lower bound for number of stars in milky way at about 100 billion.
And the fraction with planets needs to be at least around 20% given the extrasolar planetary observations we've made.
You can make a plausible estimate of a lower bound for the transmit time span based on us.
The other fractions are still pretty unknown.
One of the reasons the equation is interesting is that you can make very reasonable sounding low estimates of all the variables and still come up with a large estimated number of currently transmitting civilizations in the galaxy.
Yes, and it is a reasonable assumption given the time scale that we are not the furthest ahead in technology, by at least 1k years. In fact, there's no particular reason the dinosaurs couldn't have had big brains and radio transmissions millions of years ago, it's just that as far as we know that just didn't happen to evolve at the time.
So yes, we're counting on our friend mr. probability to have set some of the other civilizations in the galaxy ahead of us in technology, and some behind. The ones behind we won't be able to hear yet.
ne = number planets per star that can spawn life (???)
fl = fraction on which life evolves (??? but if we discover life evolved on mars and earth separately we'll have to assume this is reasonably large, so this might be settled soon)
fi = % where intelligent life evolves (???)
fc = % which communicate (???)
fL = % of planetary lifetime during which communication takes place (currently we can assume this is a small non-zero value, and the longer we use radio waves the larger we can assume this value is).
fp is rising rapidly as we discover more and more extrasolar planets.
fL is rising steadily as our radio emitting civilization persists.
ne may be more accurately guessable once we find out if mars, venus or europa harbor or ever harbored life.
The key to the drake equation is that N* is a very very big number. And now that we know fp is not small (up to a few years ago many people argued that fp would be close to 0) we know that the other fractions need to be quite tiny to avoid having radio communicating civilizations other than our own around.
Of course some people actually saw romulans. But the federation buried them in debriefing centers and claimed that no one had ever seen the 'secretive' (and hence evil) romulans as part of their smear campaign against the enemy.
The romulans were really some nice people before the federation launched their unprovoked attacks and destroyed much of their culture.
When i was young the sky was mostly brown and orange. Now it is mostly blue. A vast improvement in the air quality has really happened over the years, and it looks like things are going to continue to improve!
Slashdot Mirror
whew! shift-f6 that was hard.
Of course, but the only thing that matters to my sig is that the real life steven hawking spoke those words. The context is irrelevant to the meaning.
He actually stole the discovery.
v 16 .shtmll
Of course, he was portraying a perhaps more evil version of himself in an episode of a cartoon television program called Futurama.
So maybe he has never actually stolen a discovery this way, but how would you ever be sure?
Here's a couple links with scripts for you:
http://www.futurama-madhouse.com.ar/scripts/2ac
http://www.things.org/~jym/y3k/2ACV16.htm
do a text search for 'journal' to find the quote, but you'll have to read a fair amount of the script to fully understand the context.
It's a quote from steven hawking (a famous physicist) which refers to the nature of authority. It's about who you trust as an authority in any given subject. When Stephen Hawking says something about physics, people tend to believe him. In context, a person of no fame in physics discovered something new. Stephen Hawking then renamed the phenomenon, and took credit for it. When confronted about his stealing of the discovery, his reply was simply:
Who is The Journal Of Quantum Physics going to believe?
Even though the truth was that the other person made the discovery, Hawking was sure to get the credit because he had authority and the other person did not.
I particularly like the quote in the context of Slashdot, where people often post as if they have authoritative knowledge of a subject, and sometimes are believed by significant numbers of other slashdotters, even though it is likely that there is very little real authority around here, and a lot of widely believed posts are full of untrue garbage.
As one example, the post of mine which you responded to might seem to indicate that i'm pro-life, or even just an authority on what pro-lifers believe, neither of which is true.
Hint: The pro-life movement believes that any abortion is equal to murder. When you believe that there are large numbers of people running around committing murder, you try to do something about it.
It doesn't cause nothing but problems, it causes profits and problems. IE microsoft.
Try searching for just billboard puzzle answer, it's much less obvious.
Plus those billboards have been up for long enough that google has probably stopped accepting submissions by now. They want the people who could solve it before it got documented.
Worst Movie Ever!
No, thanks to entropy we know you can't stabilize the environment, and so the conclusion that follows is that you can't stop evolution.
Thanks to entropy, evolution can't be stopped, at least not in this universe, to the best of current scientific knowledge.
So when it's down to Alice and Bob, Bob can leave his diary unlocked?
I use a silence generator, they work great. You can buy them from a number of places.
It's not a complete fallacy: airplanes still win even if you compare deaths per person-mile travelled.
When you say give or take 1k years ...
Take 1000: no radio
Give 1000: Massively improved detection and broadcasting capabilities.
The odds of all the other civilizations being even within 1k years is tiny. What SETI counts on is that we won't be able to hear the people less sophisticated than us. The people much more sophisticated than us should be capable of blaring out messages so loud they would be hard to miss (if they are interested in sending messages).
If the numbers you plug in produce a number less than one, you've estimated too low somewhere.
There is a lower bound for number of stars in milky way at about 100 billion.
And the fraction with planets needs to be at least around 20% given the extrasolar planetary observations we've made.
You can make a plausible estimate of a lower bound for the transmit time span based on us.
The other fractions are still pretty unknown.
One of the reasons the equation is interesting is that you can make very reasonable sounding low estimates of all the variables and still come up with a large estimated number of currently transmitting civilizations in the galaxy.
Yes, and it is a reasonable assumption given the time scale that we are not the furthest ahead in technology, by at least 1k years. In fact, there's no particular reason the dinosaurs couldn't have had big brains and radio transmissions millions of years ago, it's just that as far as we know that just didn't happen to evolve at the time.
So yes, we're counting on our friend mr. probability to have set some of the other civilizations in the galaxy ahead of us in technology, and some behind. The ones behind we won't be able to hear yet.
Yes, you have to try to pick valid values for the variables, however, many of the variables are rapidly becoming well defined:
I /d rake_equation.html
http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/SET
If we consider only our galaxy:
N = N* fp ne fl fi fc fL
of which we have answers for
N* = number of stars in galaxy (~100billion)
fp = fraction with planets (at least ~20%)
ne = number planets per star that can spawn life (???)
fl = fraction on which life evolves (??? but if we discover life evolved on mars and earth separately we'll have to assume this is reasonably large, so this might be settled soon)
fi = % where intelligent life evolves (???)
fc = % which communicate (???)
fL = % of planetary lifetime during which communication takes place (currently we can assume this is a small non-zero value, and the longer we use radio waves the larger we can assume this value is).
fp is rising rapidly as we discover more and more extrasolar planets.
fL is rising steadily as our radio emitting civilization persists.
ne may be more accurately guessable once we find out if mars, venus or europa harbor or ever harbored life.
The key to the drake equation is that N* is a very very big number. And now that we know fp is not small (up to a few years ago many people argued that fp would be close to 0) we know that the other fractions need to be quite tiny to avoid having radio communicating civilizations other than our own around.
Yes, indeed they were. That's why the movie was titled that.
Well I could do that, but while I'm pro employment creation, I'm mildly against hurting random people.
Sony are the agglomeration of the several Son* companies.
But but .... volunteer work _does_ cause unemployment for those who would wish to do those jobs for pay.
That's why I leave my grocery cart in the parking lot rather than return it to the store!
I stand by my joke. It's mildly funny on 3 levels. Not intensely funny, but i prefer multilayered jokes to gutbusters anyway.
[I can't read or write you insensitive clod!]
Of course some people actually saw romulans. But the federation buried them in debriefing centers and claimed that no one had ever seen the 'secretive' (and hence evil) romulans as part of their smear campaign against the enemy.
The romulans were really some nice people before the federation launched their unprovoked attacks and destroyed much of their culture.
When i was young the sky was mostly brown and orange. Now it is mostly blue. A vast improvement in the air quality has really happened over the years, and it looks like things are going to continue to improve!