"I'm one individual that is damn abrasive. And oversensitive at times. And I've grown a hell of a lot in how to deal with people because of the flamewars as well as the cooling off periods."
Grown so great, indeed, that your given name is not worthy enough to dignify your comments, Mr. Coward.
Ernest Tomlinson.
P.S. If you have to tell people how mature you are, you've probably got some way to go before you get there.
One can, with enormous effort and a bit of cheating (didn't a team of engineers desperately make alterations to Deep Thought _during_ its infamous match against Kasparov?), build a computer which can acceptably fake a man's ability to play chess--but no effort will ever make the computer that _wants_ to challenge a man to a game of chess. The programmer still has to do that.
Incidentally, when are they ever going to put one of these heavily-publicized chess-playing machines in a real tournament where it would have to play a wide variety of real chess players, instead of a specially conceived vanity match against a handpicked challenger, like Kasparov or Kramnik?
hyacinthus.
Connection between F'd Co. and morbid sexuality?
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F'd Companies
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· Score: 1
Every few weeks I check out Fucked Company for a laugh (and when I was working at such a company, I kept hoping it would appear on the site--I didn't have the guts to submit it myself.) But I'm never amused for long, because the site seems overrun with people who, frankly, seem like good candidates for psychological counselling. There's something a little disquieting about an anonymous geek posting to a public forum on how he'd like to "fuck [CEO of company] in the ass" or how some company's workers must be "bending over for the bosses" or how some woman executive makes the geek want to "blow his load". It is cliche to say this, I know, but These Guys Have Issues.
A cancellation of one's subscription to _Scientific American_. The magazine has become complete pap. No "Amateur Scientist", no "Mathematical Recreations", no "Computer Recreations", no Phil Morrison, no James Burke. They booted James Burke for wossisname Shermer? What the f. is this, _Scientific American_ or "Skeptical Enquirer"?
A hearty "up yours" to anyone on the SciAm publication staff out there. To the rest of you, have a good Thanksgiving.
I am reminded of one of David Brin's essays in which he bashes George Lucas and Star Wars. (Let it be said that I've bashed Lucas and Star Wars myself a few times.) At one point Brin delivers himself of the self-serving observation that while Lucas and others like him are obsessed with the past, Brin himself looks to the future.
Yes, indeedy, where would we be if it weren't for forward-thinkers like Dave Brin? Just about the same place, I guess. Science fiction writers' track record for predicting the future isn't really any better than that of your average "Weekly World News" fortune-teller, except that the fortune-tellers tend to risk their predictive powers on such quotidian affairs as whether Brad Pitt will stay married to whoever that ditz is from "Friends", while SF writers confine themselves to lofty predictions about the fate of human society and technology. Now and again, one of the sci-fi boys will accidentally get something right, or sort of close (thus has Asimov been credited with "predicting" pocket calculators), as opposed to all those other writers who "predicted" that we'd still be using slide rules),.
As I see science fiction writers and futurists, we could have done without the whole clan of them and it wouldn't have made a scrap of difference. But one can say the same thing about any entertainment--I don't propose that entertainment _per se_ is useless, only that SF is just that, entertainment.
Somewhere in the conception of Spawn was a good idea--a disbeliever in any conception of God or the hereafter dies violently and, without any real understanding of what he is doing, makes a deal with infernal powers, and returns, not knowing exactly what happened or what he should do next. A good writer could have made a fascinating story from such a character. But it didn't take me more than a few books to realize that McFarlane was not that writer. There is a special frustration one gets from seeing a good idea botched--I remember feeling this frustration with many Batman comics--and I gave up on Spawn before Neil Gaiman ever showed up. I could track the issue down, I suppose, but why?
As for Spawn's appearance, I thought his initial garb was striking, although I could have done without the chains. It must be said though that Spawn looks vaguely like a lot of comic-book characters--McFarlane didn't really conceive anything new. I take it that Spawn's costumes grew more and more elaborate as the comic progressed, and McFarlane learned that money could be made in toys. He's Barbie for straight males. As for why people like that sort of thing, I ask, why do so many people go in for cartoonish depictions of Hell, with their Etrigan-style monsters, colorful sets and backgrounds, and an overabundance of red and black costumes?
I don't think he cares whether he looks like a fool or not. Remember that "Seinfeld" episode where George gets a job by pretending that he was disabled, and then after he's found out, continues showing up at the job because his employers are contractually bound to keep him on for a full year? His boss hates George and makes his life miserable, his coworkers all tell him to drop dead in the hallways, but George doesn't care--his paycheck is worth more to him than his dignity or his reputation, and as long as he gets it, George thinks that he's won.
Same with his fellow Novak, I guess. He must know that the lawsuits are frivolous and that his name is mud among everyone who's ever heard of him. No matter--he keeps suing and keeps collecting from people who can't afford a protracted legal action, and so by his lights, he's won.
hyacinthus.
Steve Jobs's anality--some good, some bad results
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No More Mac Tweaking?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
There's an irony in the Wired article praising the alterable nature of old System 7; one of the reasons why using System 7 was such a pleasure was that nearly all of the applications looked much the same and used the same interface elements. The readily available tools for constructing interfaces, notably ResEdit, tended to enforce uniformity as well. Yet appearance and behavior _were_ alterable, although it wasn't easy. I wasted a few months playing with custom WDEFs and CDEFs myself--with effort and trickery, you could do almost anything, but it was a great way to crash the system too.
The main thing about System 7, though, was that it didn't really _need_ much modification. Oh, there were some useful little add-ons--toolbars like the Control Strip which floated above all other windows, menubar additions, Apple Menu tweaks. But mostly, the system was just fine the way it was, until Apple started fucking with it--the introduction of the "Platinum" (or Copland, or "Aaron", or whatever) look is when Apple jumped the shark, in my opinion. I played with Kaleidoscope for a bit, but I never used it for more than a few days, partly because it rendered the behavior of the system somewhat unpredictable (you never knew when some application's interface might not look really strange with Kaleidoscope enabled), partly because making the system look _pretty_, as in "ain't this a wonderful screenshot?" pretty, also makes it more difficult to use.
But for whatever reason, many people think that the ability to set your system font to 48-point Wingdings and your window frame colors to be yellow and purple is the ultimate freedom. Hence the Enlightenment window manager, for example. Lots of fun to play with, great for amassing an album of pictures of people's desktops, but good and useful? Not really.
Having a locked-down interface isn't necessarily bad. The BeOS interface (remember BeOS?) was even more closed than Apple's (either System 7 or MacOS X), but since it was spare, functional, and worked reasonably well, most BeOS users, including myself, didn't really mind.
The trouble with Steve Jobs's obsession with preserving the Aqua look is that the Aqua look stinks. Not as badly as it used to, but the Dock is still an abomination, everything still takes up too much room, and if you're running a system at all limited in capacity (a 2nd-generation iBook in my case), the GUI's performance is irksome and slow. The beauty of System 7 was that it looked good whether you ran it on a Mac Classic or a PowerMac 8500. But Jobs's attitude seems to be, "Well, you should just buy a faster computer if it's slow, and a bigger monitor if it takes up too much room. Get with the program." (Ironic, considering that Apple is notorious for providing packaged systems with not enough built-in memory and small monitors.)
Oh, I agree. I mean, no Christian writer ever admitted the possibility of life outside of Earth. I can't think of a single devout Christian writer who even considered it.
Just because you're not religious, friend, doesn't mean that you're not also a moron.
I found an interesting article which, among other things, discusses the presence of hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide in volcanic gases. The article is on the website of the U. S. Geological Survey and can be found here. A highlight:
An interesting chemical relationship exists between the sulfur dioxide and the hydrogen sulfide released by the volcano. These two gases react quickly (within minutes) with each other to produce sulfur particles and water vapor. Both of the products of this reaction are odorless and are less toxic than either H2S or SO2. Most of the hydrogen sulfide released in eruptive areas on Kilauea is consumed and is converted to sulfur particles by this process, because there is much more sulfur dioxide than hydrogen sulfide coming out of the volcano. This is why you seldom smell hydrogen sulfide at the summit caldera or along the eruptive east rift. The volcano has its own hydrogen sulfide abatement system! Geothermal areas, by contrast, have no large quantities of SO2 available for reaction, so any H2S released is removed by reaction with oxygen in the air to form sulfur dioxide, a process that takes a day or more.
But another sentence in the article implies that nevertheless the two gases can be found together. And certainly neither of them are produced by biological activity in this case.
As for carbonyl sulfide (also "carbon oxysulfide", or COS - essentially carbon dioxide with sulfur substituting for one of the oxygens), I don't know much about how it can be synthesized. I suspect that it is a product of careful hydrolysis of thiophosgene (CSCl2 - itself not an easy thing to make), but this would hardly be occurring naturally. I know that the gas is unstable, susceptible to hydrolysis into carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. This article discusses its presence in our own atmosphere; the bulk of it comes from natural sources.
Incidentally, why do these articles on Slashdot of genuine scientific interest attract more stupid posts than usual? Everyone's trying to crack lame sci-fi jokes, and few are addressing the matter seriously.
One thing that I try to impress upon people about distilled spirits is that when you have a bottle, you will do _more_ than just have a social cocktail once or twice a week. When you've got a stash of booze in the house, it suddenly makes sense to have an aperitif before dinner, a couple of drinks to wash the food down, a nightcap to help you get to sleep, an eye-opener in the morning to get you going, and so on.
Of course, you may argue that it's silly to compare Internet access with liquor, but I do not think the comparison is entirely inapt. Both can addict people who find themselves turning to the Internet (as to alcohol) to deal with the smallest details of daily living: "Gee, a friend of mine told me about a movie coming out on Friday. I'd better spend an hour reading online reviews of it first."
Perhaps television offers a more apt comparison. Spring the big bucks for cable TV and, if you're at all of an indolent or sedentary disposition, you _will_ find yourself watching it all the time. But will your life really be improved thereby?
Halliday and Resnick is an excellent text; I'd get a copy any way I could. An older edition is fine--classical mechanics and E & M haven't changed much.
I have a soft spot in my heart for David Goodstein's _The Mechanical Universe_, both the text and the TV show, but I don't think that the text is the best out there. I can say from personal experience (Ph 2b at Caltech) that Goodstein is an excellent lecturer; the TV shows are worth watching (N. B. the kids in the audience were all hired from nearby Pasadena City College--real Caltech students are a bunch of lazy, inconsiderate bums.)
Avoid the Feynman Lectures and "Six Easy Pieces". Everyone I know who bought the books looked at them briefly and then filed them away on the bookshelf never to be touched again. Feynman may have been a legend, and for all I know he was an excellent lecturer, but his Lectures are no substitute for a real physics text.
Purcell's text is good if you want a standalone E & M text.
By the way, don't think that you can tackle physics without a good math background. My inability to get much past freshman level math at 'Tech was the main reason why I couldn't handle quantum mechanics when I came to it. Mastering Apostol's _Calculus_ texts, both volumes, would be a good start (but then I would say that, being a former 'Tech student:-b)
Finally, remember that physics isn't the be-all and end-all that it used to be. There's a reason why the president of Caltech, a school which once taught physics (and a few other sciences on the side), now is a biologist. The hardcore physicist might say that chemistry, astronomy, and biology are all physics in the end, and that's true, but the specialist in quantum electrodynamics never synthesized a drug or created a new disease-resistant strain of wheat.
"I know the "NY-Times Free Registration" horse is dead, but it would be nice to warn users that it's a NY Times link....Just so we don't bother."
Yeah, who wants to bother with articles in one of the oldest and best newspapers in the United States, just because they ask for a user name and password and haven't ever sent one word of junk mail to registered users. A reputable journalistic organization like Slashdot would _never_ do something like that. F**k the bastards at the New York _Times_!
hyacinthus.
(P. S. If it weren't for the _Times_ supplying a good fraction of Slashdot's reportage, so-called, there wouldn't be terribly much interesting to read here.)
...where the two main characters of the story, who have been working together to solve a mystery involving an illegal virtual gaming universe created from a book whose author had specifically forbade such adaptation, get married--virtually, of course. I guess it's a bit like how Creative Anachronist types will celebrate personal liaisons by getting themselves up in period dress and drinking mead--only at least _they're_ wearing real clothes and drinking real alcohol.
It's sweet, I guess...but really creepy, too, if you ask me.
I am not a geologist, but I have long understood that the crusts of planets are generally composed of minerals rich in light elements (e.g. magnesium, aluminum, silicon), and that only tectonic activity and volcanism bring the heavier elements up from deeper in the planet. The Moon is a very small body and not tectonically active (although there are some volcanic craters and features on her surface.) I would guess that the Moon's surface rocks are mostly silicates of the light metals, not much different from the most common rocks on Earth. We've already got magnesium, aluminum, and silicon in enormous abundance.
I've done some amateur optical work myself, and I know the properties of pitch first-hand. It's worth mentioning that the stuff sold as "pitch" these days isn't really pitch. Proper pitch is a pine-tar product; it smells nice and piney, but it's abominably sticky and subject to enormous changes of viscosity with respect to temperature, and also dangerously flammable. When the old writers like Rev. Ellison write about pitch, this is the material they mean.
Since then, high-boiling coal-tar and petroleum fractions have been formulated which resemble pitch in their physical qualities, but which are much more predictable and constant in their properties, and safer to work with (but smell like roofing tar when they're hot.) "Gugolz" pitch is a petroleum product. "Asphalt" would be a more accurate name, but "pitch" has come to mean any dark-colored organic tar.
One nit: ferric oxide (iron(III) oxide), not ferrous oxide, is the composition of red optical rouge. The cerium oxide used for polishing is the quadrivalent oxide, ceric oxide (cerium(IV) oxide), I believe.
One of the old writers (Ellison, maybe?) writes that if you put a cork at the bottom of container of pitch, the cork will eventually rise to the top. I don't know if this experiment has ever been tried.
My own mirror-making project eventually failed, by the way. I never got a good polish and eventually I gave up.
"If I had ever had $1500 at one time while I was at college, I would have changed it into 20's and rolled around in it naked."
You would have rolled around naked in a pile of seventy-five bills? That's an awfully small pile. You might as well roll naked in a deck of playing cards.
As for no college student having $1500, I smile at that; I worked through college (a cheap California State college, to be sure, so tuition wasn't a big expense), took out no loans, and by the time I graduated I had quite a bit more than $1500 saved up. But I think I was very lucky to get as good a job as I did, and that was back before the high-tech job market collapsed.
I find this a curious notion, that hiring someone to do menial labor at substandard wages is actually doing that person a _favor_, because at least you're giving him a job. And I really shouldn't have used the word "butler", which conjures images of cultured and well-compensated servants out of P. G. Wodehouse and Oscar Wilde--the "butler" of today is more likely to be an immigrant, hired as a nanny or a gardener or whatever, and paid under the table. And of course a similar sort of thing happens in industries which depend largely on unskilled migrant labor, such as the agricultural and meat-packing industries. This is exploitation pure and simple, and the argument that it's good that at least you're giving someone a job doesn't fly with me.
I don't know the solution to the problem, though. It'd be nice if employers paid all their workers decent wages and benefits, but they don't and they won't.
My first response was something like yours, but then I thought--in an earlier age, this guy would be hiring a butler or servant to do a lot of this stuff for him. He may be too lazy to draw his own window-shades or flip his own light switches, but at least he isn't making someone else do it for him.
I wonder if he has a lawn or a garden. It's pretty hard to automate gardening and landscaping (although I've heard about crude automated lawn mowers.)
...playing _The Man in the White Suit_, one of the old Ealing comedies from the fifties. Guinness plays a scientist who comes up with a fabric which doesn't wear out and doesn't ever stain or get dirty. He ends up in hot water both with the textile and clothing manufacturers who don't like the idea of garments that don't need constant replacement, and with the textile workers' unions because they're afraid that Guinness's invention is going to put them out of work. Complications ensue.
hyacinthus (who thinks the whole idea of wearing a computer or even carrying one in a pocket is pretty daft. Even my watch is mechanical--and it's lasted about twice or three times as long as any digital watch I've owned.)
Admit it, "PhysicsGenius". You call yourself a physics genius, but you probably watched "The Mechanical Universe" a few times on TV and maybe read Hawking's _A Brief History of Time_. You know as much physics as I do, and I failed Ph 2b at Caltech.
Experiments can be beautiful (although "elegant" is the description I prefer.) An elegant experiment has a certain simplicity to it, and a certain definitiveness to it which convinces everyone. Foucault's famous pendulum, for example--there are other ways to demonstrate the rotation of the earth, but Foucault was able to do so, graphically and undeniably, with a weight and a length of wire. Beautiful.
Or take the experiment which demonstrated that nucleic acids and not proteins carried genetic information. Hershey's and Chase's method was simplicity itself: proteins contains sulfur, and nucleic acids do not; proteins contain no phosphorus (or little of it), nucleic acids abound in it. So infect cells with a virus whose protein coat is labelled with radioactive sulfur, or whose nucleic acid payload is labelled with radioactive phosphorus, and see where the radioactivity ends up when cells are infected with the labelled viruses. The phosphorus gets transferred; the sulfur does not; hence it's the nucleic acid which carries the virus's genetic information. Again, beautiful.
If your view of science is really so crudely utilitarian, I suggest either that you get out of the profession, or (far more likely) you're not really a scientist at all but you've read about it in _Skeptical Inquirer_. Get back to your Linux installation, will you?
3) What caused the Big Bang? What happened in the first 10E-38th of a second after the Big Bang happened?
I'd just like to point out the obvious, that the theory of Darwinian evolution, and the science of biology in general, have about as much to say about the Big Bang as they do about whether it will rain in Seattle on Labor Day. Biology asks the question, "OK, there's life on this planet, so how does it work?" How the planet got there in the first place is not a question relevant to biology.
6) How do you counter the charge that modern Information Theory (IT) renders evolution all but impossible?
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm one individual that is damn abrasive. And oversensitive at times. And I've grown a hell of a lot in how to deal with people because of the flamewars as well as the cooling off periods."
Grown so great, indeed, that your given name is not worthy enough to dignify your comments, Mr. Coward.
Ernest Tomlinson.
P.S. If you have to tell people how mature you are, you've probably got some way to go before you get there.
One can, with enormous effort and a bit of cheating (didn't a team of engineers desperately make alterations to Deep Thought _during_ its infamous match against Kasparov?), build a computer which can acceptably fake a man's ability to play chess--but no effort will ever make the computer that _wants_ to challenge a man to a game of chess. The programmer still has to do that.
Incidentally, when are they ever going to put one of these heavily-publicized chess-playing machines in a real tournament where it would have to play a wide variety of real chess players, instead of a specially conceived vanity match against a handpicked challenger, like Kasparov or Kramnik?
hyacinthus.
Every few weeks I check out Fucked Company for a laugh (and when I was working at such a company, I kept hoping it would appear on the site--I didn't have the guts to submit it myself.) But I'm never amused for long, because the site seems overrun with people who, frankly, seem like good candidates for psychological counselling. There's something a little disquieting about an anonymous geek posting to a public forum on how he'd like to "fuck [CEO of company] in the ass" or how some company's workers must be "bending over for the bosses" or how some woman executive makes the geek want to "blow his load". It is cliche to say this, I know, but These Guys Have Issues.
hyacinthus.
Anyone who owns a dog knows that "to worm" means to _get rid_ of worms, not to infect with them.
hyacinthus.
A cancellation of one's subscription to _Scientific American_. The magazine has become complete pap. No "Amateur Scientist", no "Mathematical Recreations", no "Computer Recreations", no Phil Morrison, no James Burke. They booted James Burke for wossisname Shermer? What the f. is this, _Scientific American_ or "Skeptical Enquirer"?
A hearty "up yours" to anyone on the SciAm publication staff out there. To the rest of you, have a good Thanksgiving.
hyacinthus.
So, you're Duwamish Indian then?
"Native" of Seattle = someone who moved to Seattle eighteen months before all of his friends did.
hyacinthus (not a "native" of anywhere.)
I am reminded of one of David Brin's essays in which he bashes George Lucas and Star Wars. (Let it be said that I've bashed Lucas and Star Wars myself a few times.) At one point Brin delivers himself of the self-serving observation that while Lucas and others like him are obsessed with the past, Brin himself looks to the future.
Yes, indeedy, where would we be if it weren't for forward-thinkers like Dave Brin? Just about the same place, I guess. Science fiction writers' track record for predicting the future isn't really any better than that of your average "Weekly World News" fortune-teller, except that the fortune-tellers tend to risk their predictive powers on such quotidian affairs as whether Brad Pitt will stay married to whoever that ditz is from "Friends", while SF writers confine themselves to lofty predictions about the fate of human society and technology. Now and again, one of the sci-fi boys will accidentally get something right, or sort of close (thus has Asimov been credited with "predicting" pocket calculators), as opposed to all those other writers who "predicted" that we'd still be using slide rules),.
As I see science fiction writers and futurists, we could have done without the whole clan of them and it wouldn't have made a scrap of difference. But one can say the same thing about any entertainment--I don't propose that entertainment _per se_ is useless, only that SF is just that, entertainment.
hyacinthus.
Somewhere in the conception of Spawn was a good idea--a disbeliever in any conception of God or the hereafter dies violently and, without any real understanding of what he is doing, makes a deal with infernal powers, and returns, not knowing exactly what happened or what he should do next. A good writer could have made a fascinating story from such a character. But it didn't take me more than a few books to realize that McFarlane was not that writer. There is a special frustration one gets from seeing a good idea botched--I remember feeling this frustration with many Batman comics--and I gave up on Spawn before Neil Gaiman ever showed up. I could track the issue down, I suppose, but why?
As for Spawn's appearance, I thought his initial garb was striking, although I could have done without the chains. It must be said though that Spawn looks vaguely like a lot of comic-book characters--McFarlane didn't really conceive anything new. I take it that Spawn's costumes grew more and more elaborate as the comic progressed, and McFarlane learned that money could be made in toys. He's Barbie for straight males. As for why people like that sort of thing, I ask, why do so many people go in for cartoonish depictions of Hell, with their Etrigan-style monsters, colorful sets and backgrounds, and an overabundance of red and black costumes?
hyacinthus.
I don't think he cares whether he looks like a fool or not. Remember that "Seinfeld" episode where George gets a job by pretending that he was disabled, and then after he's found out, continues showing up at the job because his employers are contractually bound to keep him on for a full year? His boss hates George and makes his life miserable, his coworkers all tell him to drop dead in the hallways, but George doesn't care--his paycheck is worth more to him than his dignity or his reputation, and as long as he gets it, George thinks that he's won.
Same with his fellow Novak, I guess. He must know that the lawsuits are frivolous and that his name is mud among everyone who's ever heard of him. No matter--he keeps suing and keeps collecting from people who can't afford a protracted legal action, and so by his lights, he's won.
hyacinthus.
There's an irony in the Wired article praising the alterable nature of old System 7; one of the reasons why using System 7 was such a pleasure was that nearly all of the applications looked much the same and used the same interface elements. The readily available tools for constructing interfaces, notably ResEdit, tended to enforce uniformity as well. Yet appearance and behavior _were_ alterable, although it wasn't easy. I wasted a few months playing with custom WDEFs and CDEFs myself--with effort and trickery, you could do almost anything, but it was a great way to crash the system too.
The main thing about System 7, though, was that it didn't really _need_ much modification. Oh, there were some useful little add-ons--toolbars like the Control Strip which floated above all other windows, menubar additions, Apple Menu tweaks. But mostly, the system was just fine the way it was, until Apple started fucking with it--the introduction of the "Platinum" (or Copland, or "Aaron", or whatever) look is when Apple jumped the shark, in my opinion. I played with Kaleidoscope for a bit, but I never used it for more than a few days, partly because it rendered the behavior of the system somewhat unpredictable (you never knew when some application's interface might not look really strange with Kaleidoscope enabled), partly because making the system look _pretty_, as in "ain't this a wonderful screenshot?" pretty, also makes it more difficult to use.
But for whatever reason, many people think that the ability to set your system font to 48-point Wingdings and your window frame colors to be yellow and purple is the ultimate freedom. Hence the Enlightenment window manager, for example. Lots of fun to play with, great for amassing an album of pictures of people's desktops, but good and useful? Not really.
Having a locked-down interface isn't necessarily bad. The BeOS interface (remember BeOS?) was even more closed than Apple's (either System 7 or MacOS X), but since it was spare, functional, and worked reasonably well, most BeOS users, including myself, didn't really mind.
The trouble with Steve Jobs's obsession with preserving the Aqua look is that the Aqua look stinks. Not as badly as it used to, but the Dock is still an abomination, everything still takes up too much room, and if you're running a system at all limited in capacity (a 2nd-generation iBook in my case), the GUI's performance is irksome and slow. The beauty of System 7 was that it looked good whether you ran it on a Mac Classic or a PowerMac 8500. But Jobs's attitude seems to be, "Well, you should just buy a faster computer if it's slow, and a bigger monitor if it takes up too much room. Get with the program." (Ironic, considering that Apple is notorious for providing packaged systems with not enough built-in memory and small monitors.)
hyacinthus.
Hm. Hey, all the pages are blank!
hyacinthus (as are the pages of the book's sequel, _Hacker Philosophy_)
Oh, I agree. I mean, no Christian writer ever admitted the possibility of life outside of Earth. I can't think of a single devout Christian writer who even considered it.
Just because you're not religious, friend, doesn't mean that you're not also a moron.
hyacinthus.
But another sentence in the article implies that nevertheless the two gases can be found together. And certainly neither of them are produced by biological activity in this case.
As for carbonyl sulfide (also "carbon oxysulfide", or COS - essentially carbon dioxide with sulfur substituting for one of the oxygens), I don't know much about how it can be synthesized. I suspect that it is a product of careful hydrolysis of thiophosgene (CSCl2 - itself not an easy thing to make), but this would hardly be occurring naturally. I know that the gas is unstable, susceptible to hydrolysis into carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. This article discusses its presence in our own atmosphere; the bulk of it comes from natural sources.
Incidentally, why do these articles on Slashdot of genuine scientific interest attract more stupid posts than usual? Everyone's trying to crack lame sci-fi jokes, and few are addressing the matter seriously.
One thing that I try to impress upon people about distilled spirits is that when you have a bottle, you will do _more_ than just have a social cocktail once or twice a week. When you've got a stash of booze in the house, it suddenly makes sense to have an aperitif before dinner, a couple of drinks to wash the food down, a nightcap to help you get to sleep, an eye-opener in the morning to get you going, and so on.
Of course, you may argue that it's silly to compare Internet access with liquor, but I do not think the comparison is entirely inapt. Both can addict people who find themselves turning to the Internet (as to alcohol) to deal with the smallest details of daily living: "Gee, a friend of mine told me about a movie coming out on Friday. I'd better spend an hour reading online reviews of it first."
Perhaps television offers a more apt comparison. Spring the big bucks for cable TV and, if you're at all of an indolent or sedentary disposition, you _will_ find yourself watching it all the time. But will your life really be improved thereby?
hyacinthus.
Halliday and Resnick is an excellent text; I'd get a copy any way I could. An older edition is fine--classical mechanics and E & M haven't changed much.
:-b)
I have a soft spot in my heart for David Goodstein's _The Mechanical Universe_, both the text and the TV show, but I don't think that the text is the best out there. I can say from personal experience (Ph 2b at Caltech) that Goodstein is an excellent lecturer; the TV shows are worth watching (N. B. the kids in the audience were all hired from nearby Pasadena City College--real Caltech students are a bunch of lazy, inconsiderate bums.)
Avoid the Feynman Lectures and "Six Easy Pieces". Everyone I know who bought the books looked at them briefly and then filed them away on the bookshelf never to be touched again. Feynman may have been a legend, and for all I know he was an excellent lecturer, but his Lectures are no substitute for a real physics text.
Purcell's text is good if you want a standalone E & M text.
By the way, don't think that you can tackle physics without a good math background. My inability to get much past freshman level math at 'Tech was the main reason why I couldn't handle quantum mechanics when I came to it. Mastering Apostol's _Calculus_ texts, both volumes, would be a good start (but then I would say that, being a former 'Tech student
Finally, remember that physics isn't the be-all and end-all that it used to be. There's a reason why the president of Caltech, a school which once taught physics (and a few other sciences on the side), now is a biologist. The hardcore physicist might say that chemistry, astronomy, and biology are all physics in the end, and that's true, but the specialist in quantum electrodynamics never synthesized a drug or created a new disease-resistant strain of wheat.
Good luck,
hyacinthus.
"I know the "NY-Times Free Registration" horse is dead, but it would be nice to warn users that it's a NY Times link....Just so we don't bother."
Yeah, who wants to bother with articles in one of the oldest and best newspapers in the United States, just because they ask for a user name and password and haven't ever sent one word of junk mail to registered users. A reputable journalistic organization like Slashdot would _never_ do something like that. F**k the bastards at the New York _Times_!
hyacinthus.
(P. S. If it weren't for the _Times_ supplying a good fraction of Slashdot's reportage, so-called, there wouldn't be terribly much interesting to read here.)
...where the two main characters of the story, who have been working together to solve a mystery involving an illegal virtual gaming universe created from a book whose author had specifically forbade such adaptation, get married--virtually, of course. I guess it's a bit like how Creative Anachronist types will celebrate personal liaisons by getting themselves up in period dress and drinking mead--only at least _they're_ wearing real clothes and drinking real alcohol.
It's sweet, I guess...but really creepy, too, if you ask me.
hyacinthus.
I am not a geologist, but I have long understood that the crusts of planets are generally composed of minerals rich in light elements (e.g. magnesium, aluminum, silicon), and that only tectonic activity and volcanism bring the heavier elements up from deeper in the planet. The Moon is a very small body and not tectonically active (although there are some volcanic craters and features on her surface.) I would guess that the Moon's surface rocks are mostly silicates of the light metals, not much different from the most common rocks on Earth. We've already got magnesium, aluminum, and silicon in enormous abundance.
hyacinthus.
I've done some amateur optical work myself, and I know the properties of pitch first-hand. It's worth mentioning that the stuff sold as "pitch" these days isn't really pitch. Proper pitch is a pine-tar product; it smells nice and piney, but it's abominably sticky and subject to enormous changes of viscosity with respect to temperature, and also dangerously flammable. When the old writers like Rev. Ellison write about pitch, this is the material they mean.
Since then, high-boiling coal-tar and petroleum fractions have been formulated which resemble pitch in their physical qualities, but which are much more predictable and constant in their properties, and safer to work with (but smell like roofing tar when they're hot.) "Gugolz" pitch is a petroleum product. "Asphalt" would be a more accurate name, but "pitch" has come to mean any dark-colored organic tar.
One nit: ferric oxide (iron(III) oxide), not ferrous oxide, is the composition of red optical rouge. The cerium oxide used for polishing is the quadrivalent oxide, ceric oxide (cerium(IV) oxide), I believe.
One of the old writers (Ellison, maybe?) writes that if you put a cork at the bottom of container of pitch, the cork will eventually rise to the top. I don't know if this experiment has ever been tried.
My own mirror-making project eventually failed, by the way. I never got a good polish and eventually I gave up.
hyacinthus.
"If I had ever had $1500 at one time while I was at college, I would have changed it into 20's and rolled around in it naked."
You would have rolled around naked in a pile of seventy-five bills? That's an awfully small pile. You might as well roll naked in a deck of playing cards.
As for no college student having $1500, I smile at that; I worked through college (a cheap California State college, to be sure, so tuition wasn't a big expense), took out no loans, and by the time I graduated I had quite a bit more than $1500 saved up. But I think I was very lucky to get as good a job as I did, and that was back before the high-tech job market collapsed.
hyacinthus.
I find this a curious notion, that hiring someone to do menial labor at substandard wages is actually doing that person a _favor_, because at least you're giving him a job. And I really shouldn't have used the word "butler", which conjures images of cultured and well-compensated servants out of P. G. Wodehouse and Oscar Wilde--the "butler" of today is more likely to be an immigrant, hired as a nanny or a gardener or whatever, and paid under the table. And of course a similar sort of thing happens in industries which depend largely on unskilled migrant labor, such as the agricultural and meat-packing industries. This is exploitation pure and simple, and the argument that it's good that at least you're giving someone a job doesn't fly with me.
I don't know the solution to the problem, though. It'd be nice if employers paid all their workers decent wages and benefits, but they don't and they won't.
"(Yay for Terminator 3 coming soon!)"
Ugh. The second was lame enough.
hyacinthus.
My first response was something like yours, but then I thought--in an earlier age, this guy would be hiring a butler or servant to do a lot of this stuff for him. He may be too lazy to draw his own window-shades or flip his own light switches, but at least he isn't making someone else do it for him.
I wonder if he has a lawn or a garden. It's pretty hard to automate gardening and landscaping (although I've heard about crude automated lawn mowers.)
hyacinthus.
...playing _The Man in the White Suit_, one of the old Ealing comedies from the fifties. Guinness plays a scientist who comes up with a fabric which doesn't wear out and doesn't ever stain or get dirty. He ends up in hot water both with the textile and clothing manufacturers who don't like the idea of garments that don't need constant replacement, and with the textile workers' unions because they're afraid that Guinness's invention is going to put them out of work. Complications ensue.
hyacinthus (who thinks the whole idea of wearing a computer or even carrying one in a pocket is pretty daft. Even my watch is mechanical--and it's lasted about twice or three times as long as any digital watch I've owned.)
Admit it, "PhysicsGenius". You call yourself a physics genius, but you probably watched "The Mechanical Universe" a few times on TV and maybe read Hawking's _A Brief History of Time_. You know as much physics as I do, and I failed Ph 2b at Caltech.
Experiments can be beautiful (although "elegant" is the description I prefer.) An elegant experiment has a certain simplicity to it, and a certain definitiveness to it which convinces everyone. Foucault's famous pendulum, for example--there are other ways to demonstrate the rotation of the earth, but Foucault was able to do so, graphically and undeniably, with a weight and a length of wire. Beautiful.
Or take the experiment which demonstrated that nucleic acids and not proteins carried genetic information. Hershey's and Chase's method was simplicity itself: proteins contains sulfur, and nucleic acids do not; proteins contain no phosphorus (or little of it), nucleic acids abound in it. So infect cells with a virus whose protein coat is labelled with radioactive sulfur, or whose nucleic acid payload is labelled with radioactive phosphorus, and see where the radioactivity ends up when cells are infected with the labelled viruses. The phosphorus gets transferred; the sulfur does not; hence it's the nucleic acid which carries the virus's genetic information. Again, beautiful.
If your view of science is really so crudely utilitarian, I suggest either that you get out of the profession, or (far more likely) you're not really a scientist at all but you've read about it in _Skeptical Inquirer_. Get back to your Linux installation, will you?
hyacinthus.
I'd just like to point out the obvious, that the theory of Darwinian evolution, and the science of biology in general, have about as much to say about the Big Bang as they do about whether it will rain in Seattle on Labor Day. Biology asks the question, "OK, there's life on this planet, so how does it work?" How the planet got there in the first place is not a question relevant to biology.
When did you stop beating your wife?
hyacinthus.