I'm almost certain I read an interview with Jack Cover (one of the early inventors of these systems) in which he explicitly likened the effect to an electric eel, implying that may have been precisely on his mind when he developed the device although the similarity in the process at that point may just have been general.
As much as I like the idea of anything confirming that life in the universe is abundant, this is again little more than an educated guess.
RTFA, he seems to be trying to update the drake equation based on the presence of planets in the goldielocks zones of local stellar populations. Fine as far as that goes, but I strongly suspect that such populations will derive more consistently from where they are on the main sequence, as well as their stellar neighborhoods.
This means that simply extrapolating our local population of such planets is no more reliable than extrapolating the globe's population of insects based on where you're sitting now: whether you are in the arctic or the jungles of Belize is going to give you radically different results, neither of which are representative.
I understand your points, but my succinct answer particularly to the 'nonsensical' bit would be "SHE'S 4." Tomorrow she might want to be a dinosaur. (My mom said that when I read Johnathan Livingston Seagull as a little kid, I cried for 2 days that I couldn't be a seagull.)
Ironically in 2028 when she's 18, the most secure career choice she could have in the US might be to be a plumber or an electrician.
So my point to Mr Auerbach would be to calm the hell down and let his daughter know only that she can be anything her talents and desire take her. "Dinosaur" might be unlikely, but hell, who knows?
I agree with the bulk of your analysis and commentary.
I would only submit that Dad here is simply reflecting larger social pressures that we don't comfortably talk about much: curiously implicit in much of the pro-woman conversation is still "why can't women be more like men?" - albeit from the opposite direction. Instead of male chauvinists denigrating & trivializing womens' preferences, it's female chauvinists doing the SAME thing because women aren't apparently making their choices in a "male enough" way. Ironic, indeed.
Not to mention too that the discussion always seems to revolve around "not enough women" - maybe it's that an OVERselection of men are choosing that field instead?
People make lots of choices as they grow and mature. I believe women make these choices categorically differently from men. I think they're basically saner and better socially-adapted generally than males - we don't see 50% of felons as female, for example.
In this case, Dad seems to just be parroting the politically-correct position in the conversation today. The fact that (I agree) his position is still very much gender-assumption-loaded reflects that the public discussion remains so as well.
He's talking about 'encouraging' his daughter to be a scientist. Why? Because every other fucking slashdot story is about how "we need more women scientists"....a position developed and maintained entirely by meme, unsupported by facts.
Actually some data suggests that programmers, engineers, scientists tend to be a touch OCD about their preferences throughout life, leading them to prioritize these rather "hard" subjects over other things early on, other than, say, social development (thus the stereotype of nerd=science). Girls seem to prefer social development, thus, they tend not to direct to these fields unless highly motivated.
So the social pressure at work here is a father who thinks his daughter "ought" to be anything. Particularly at 4 - that's fucked up.
I appreciate the use of the term "fiendish" as artfully coined in this discussion.
It paints the companies trying to avoid taxes as nearly-diabolical agents skulking around in the dark, not to mention adding a delightful soupcon of sinfulness.
Of course, what this seems to conveniently ignore is that national taxation policies are likewise "fiendishly" complicated, sometimes driven by complicated corporate structures, but just as often driven by a quasi-socialist, populist, and (as long as we're painting in Medieval imagery) a quasi-Dulcinian desire to appropriate at least a piece of anything valuable "for the public" meaning actually "for politicians to spend and gain votes without the usual pain of public taxation or debt".
Companies respond to these policies. If the policies are so contrived and convoluted that there remain loopholes that are worth pursuing to evade tax, that's the LAW WRITERS' fault, not the companies' for exploiting it. But it plays so much better in the press to blame companies for being greedy, rather than politicians for being incompetent.
"In short, it's a deeply biased article from a deeply biased source."
Agreed. But it should also be said that just because it's a deeply biased article from a deeply biased source doesn't logically mean it's wrong, either.
For some reason, humans seem to naturally adhere to this simplistic "if a is wrong, then b is right" position. It's entirely possible that both 1) 60 Minutes mendaciously presented the situation to conform to certain preconceived biases or for commercial/political motivations outside the story itself, in fact given their history I daresay it's likely, AND 2) the critic here is also lying (or at least spinning facts in ways that most people would feel is dishonest, and, given that he's a pro nuclear advocate, I daresay that's likely too.
1) Montana is largely still a land of self-reliant, independent people with substantial foundations of common sense, and 2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... - being 48th on that list (and WAAAY 48th: the density of 2.7 (persons/km2) is barely 3% of the average US value, which is itself low for developed countries) might also have something to do with it.
I think we should get rid of all sports in fact. Probably the arts, and likely music too. What does physical education really add to education any way? Home ec, for sure. Likely shop, those kids should go to vocational training for that.
Great plan. Really. I'd love to meet the products of that system, not sterile at all!
Let's remember that one of the "triumphs" of the Civil Rights movement in 1965 was the voting rights act that LEGITIMIZED gerrymandering in order to offer minorities more political power by concentrating them in districts so that they could win.
We can't have it both ways - we can't legitimize fiddling with boundaries for your precious cause (giving minorities the vote), and then not do it for mine (re-electing me). Slippery slope indeed.
So? The original Star Wars (IV, for the clueless) was just meant to be a superficial serial-action cowboy movie in space. (shrug) It doesn't have to be deep to be enjoyable.
And seriously: "... I tried to watch Episode I with my wife, " If you're introducing Star Wars to anyone why in heaven's name would you start with Ep I? Holy Christ, I'd show them 4, 5, apologetically 6, and pretend 1-2-3 never happened
I watched the trailer, and it's on the bubble for me. I'll probably go see it mainly because Lucas ISN'T in charge. If he was? It would be a netflix-when-I-have-2-hours-to-kill at best.
"If we really want our elections to reflect the will of the people,"
What "people", though?
Let me be absolutely clear: gerrymandering is bullshit - I'm *all* in favor of algorithmically-determined districts, such that they conform to: - must have the same population - must be contiguous...that's great, as far as it goes, and in reading the article, that seems to be where they stopped. I'd add one further, complicating factor: - they have to recognize communities
It's easy enough to parcel a state into clumps of districts with the same population, but if they split (for example) a town's two voting precincts into different districts, that's a failed algorithm. I can't tell from the article how they addressed that. It seems like they may have tried.
The other point is that we need to decide that each person gets one vote. Not "one person gets one vote but because we feel sorry for a specific group we need to twist things to make sure that they have a chance". That - whatever the motivation - is intrinsically antithetical to actual democracy.
(I'm going to assume you're either European or referring to Europe by your snark; we'll just set aside definitions of developed as something we might fundamentally disagree on.)
Critically: the US has an overall population density 1/10 that of countries like Germany. If you can't understand the impact of that, you're not paying attention. Further, the US doesn't have draconian commmunity laws that compel people to only build new homes within town limits, as some Euro states do. (Making the effective density of populated Europe much much higher.) If you buy land in the US, you can usually build a house on it, whether you're in a town or not. Ergo, the ability to quickly/cheaply stretch power to remote locations has more value here. It's a tradeoff that people make in their home choices, whether they recognize it or not.
In places like cities, where population density warrants it, yes, the power cables do usually go underground.
If, as the op asserts, it's an ongoing problem regarding the major lines that feed the municipality, then eventually the municipality will address it with their local utility. If the OP has such a problem with it, and is sure everyone else does, I'm sure it will provide a firm point for them to be elected to the city council to fix it. Or wait, was he not actually looking to get off his ass to FIX the problem, just whine about it?
You apparently forget that utilities are state-sponsored and validated monopolies. I'm not sure blaming capitalist mechanisms here makes a ton of sense.
It's almost like this is a very HARD PROBLEM that hundreds if not thousands of very, very bright people have been working on for years without much success.
Huh. Who'd'a thought?
(I think this entire project, while worthy, shows a staggering level of conceit, if not profound disrespect for brilliant scientists and engineers of previous generations. "Well, if we just get some smart people - I mean GOOGLE smart - and let them think about it, I'm sure they'll find the answer!")
Sometimes the historical ignorance displayed by people today is breathtaking.
"I don't know if he was guilty." You should have just stopped there because the rest of your post is essentially: "I don't really know anything except what some media outlets have told me, based on histrionic eyewitnesses and a need to fill a 24/7 news cycle with outrage, but I'm vaguely upset because the outcome doesn't match the presumptions I've come to from this incomplete information."
1) The police have every reason to try to protect their officer. One hopes that they're honest about the data they're presenting, but we've seen plenty of examples of it not being so. 2) the 'community' - from political leaders to thugs that just want to get a new TV, sneakers, and beer from a looting rampage - have every reason to try to see the situation in the worst possible light.
It's abundantly clear (from the physical impossibility of some of their observations) that many of the so-called witnesses are lying. It's possible that the cop is lying.
The ONLY people that ostensibly saw and heard every viewpoint and piece of evidence were the grand jury and the judge. It may not be perfect, but that's as close as we can get to objective.
To be "upset" about something from as peripheral a pov as we have is ludicrous. (To loot a store, or burn a restaurant in 'outrage' is idiotic.)
PS I fail to see how this is "tech news for nerds"?
....but I sincerely hope that my car of the 2030s will be designed by engineers around the necessary performance requirements of the roads of the time, not fucking "design consultants".
I'm more interested in how people repeatedly get paid quite hefty salaries to come up with this overproduced, artiste-crap.
This is exactly comparable to someone with lung cancer who started smoking in 2002 and saying "I wish I'd known there was a risk."
What he needs to do next is figure out how to frame himself as a victim. If only he was brown or female instead of a fat white man. Everyone knows fat white men are the last approved object of public ridicule.
"Gamma ray bursts would wipe out any live more complex than microbes".......that is, unless life evolved to use radiation as an energy source.
In other words, a couple of astrophysicists speculate to a degree that's only slightly and unquantifiably less than sheer "wild ass guessing", news at 11.
...mainly because the US African American community has major cultural issues with broken families and an habitual acceptance of criminality that not enough of them are trying to fix internally. HOWEVER:
"...Some law-enforcement experts say the NYCLU is going beyond civics lessons and doling out criminal-defense advice...."
Then "some law-enforcement experts" need to pull their head out of their collective asses and understand that everyone - including cops - knowing who has what rights is a GOOD THING, for everyone. Remember the whole "presumed innocent" thing? Stop and frisk is already pushing pretty far into 'unreasonable search' territory; to imply then that the cops are somehow entitled to even push it further if they can bully/trick people into accepting it is frankly bullshit.
Police that act like it's a bad thing to tell kids what their rights are (and how to defend them reasonably and respectfully) during stop & frisk smell suspiciously like thugs with badges, and not police officers doing a difficult, dangerous, and high-stress task as constructively as possible.
I'm not an astronomer, but I was pretty sure that the idea that the US passes through periodic 'clouds' of debris was as old as astronomy - how is this substantially different than the Leonid (passing through the debris left by comet Swift-Tuttle)or Perseid meteor shower (passing through the debris left by comet Tempel-Tuttle)?
Personally, I've wondered if some of these could coincide with truly massive volcanic eruptions or meteorite impacts historically, the ones hefty enough to land earth rocks on the moon or Mars. Such an eruption would, it seems to me, leave a 'cloud' of very small debris with its own orbit that would logically impact earth's orbit at the point they were created.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm almost certain I read an interview with Jack Cover (one of the early inventors of these systems) in which he explicitly likened the effect to an electric eel, implying that may have been precisely on his mind when he developed the device although the similarity in the process at that point may just have been general.
As much as I like the idea of anything confirming that life in the universe is abundant, this is again little more than an educated guess.
RTFA, he seems to be trying to update the drake equation based on the presence of planets in the goldielocks zones of local stellar populations. Fine as far as that goes, but I strongly suspect that such populations will derive more consistently from where they are on the main sequence, as well as their stellar neighborhoods.
This means that simply extrapolating our local population of such planets is no more reliable than extrapolating the globe's population of insects based on where you're sitting now: whether you are in the arctic or the jungles of Belize is going to give you radically different results, neither of which are representative.
I understand your points, but my succinct answer particularly to the 'nonsensical' bit would be "SHE'S 4."
Tomorrow she might want to be a dinosaur. (My mom said that when I read Johnathan Livingston Seagull as a little kid, I cried for 2 days that I couldn't be a seagull.)
Ironically in 2028 when she's 18, the most secure career choice she could have in the US might be to be a plumber or an electrician.
So my point to Mr Auerbach would be to calm the hell down and let his daughter know only that she can be anything her talents and desire take her. "Dinosaur" might be unlikely, but hell, who knows?
I agree with the bulk of your analysis and commentary.
I would only submit that Dad here is simply reflecting larger social pressures that we don't comfortably talk about much: curiously implicit in much of the pro-woman conversation is still "why can't women be more like men?" - albeit from the opposite direction. Instead of male chauvinists denigrating & trivializing womens' preferences, it's female chauvinists doing the SAME thing because women aren't apparently making their choices in a "male enough" way. Ironic, indeed.
Not to mention too that the discussion always seems to revolve around "not enough women" - maybe it's that an OVERselection of men are choosing that field instead?
People make lots of choices as they grow and mature. I believe women make these choices categorically differently from men. I think they're basically saner and better socially-adapted generally than males - we don't see 50% of felons as female, for example.
In this case, Dad seems to just be parroting the politically-correct position in the conversation today. The fact that (I agree) his position is still very much gender-assumption-loaded reflects that the public discussion remains so as well.
He's talking about 'encouraging' his daughter to be a scientist.
Why?
Because every other fucking slashdot story is about how "we need more women scientists"....a position developed and maintained entirely by meme, unsupported by facts.
Actually some data suggests that programmers, engineers, scientists tend to be a touch OCD about their preferences throughout life, leading them to prioritize these rather "hard" subjects over other things early on, other than, say, social development (thus the stereotype of nerd=science). Girls seem to prefer social development, thus, they tend not to direct to these fields unless highly motivated.
So the social pressure at work here is a father who thinks his daughter "ought" to be anything. Particularly at 4 - that's fucked up.
So "hack" is now a synonym for the simple word "use" whenever it's cool?
"I hacked the door to go outside."
"I hacked the language so I could keep using the word 'hack' as much as possible."
I appreciate the use of the term "fiendish" as artfully coined in this discussion.
It paints the companies trying to avoid taxes as nearly-diabolical agents skulking around in the dark, not to mention adding a delightful soupcon of sinfulness.
Of course, what this seems to conveniently ignore is that national taxation policies are likewise "fiendishly" complicated, sometimes driven by complicated corporate structures, but just as often driven by a quasi-socialist, populist, and (as long as we're painting in Medieval imagery) a quasi-Dulcinian desire to appropriate at least a piece of anything valuable "for the public" meaning actually "for politicians to spend and gain votes without the usual pain of public taxation or debt".
Companies respond to these policies. If the policies are so contrived and convoluted that there remain loopholes that are worth pursuing to evade tax, that's the LAW WRITERS' fault, not the companies' for exploiting it. But it plays so much better in the press to blame companies for being greedy, rather than politicians for being incompetent.
"In short, it's a deeply biased article from a deeply biased source."
Agreed. But it should also be said that just because it's a deeply biased article from a deeply biased source doesn't logically mean it's wrong, either.
For some reason, humans seem to naturally adhere to this simplistic "if a is wrong, then b is right" position. It's entirely possible that both 1) 60 Minutes mendaciously presented the situation to conform to certain preconceived biases or for commercial/political motivations outside the story itself, in fact given their history I daresay it's likely, AND 2) the critic here is also lying (or at least spinning facts in ways that most people would feel is dishonest, and, given that he's a pro nuclear advocate, I daresay that's likely too.
...because I know that if I don't charge my credit card every flipping night, it will be useless tomorrow too!
Oh wait.
Of course it wasn't an issue before.
1) Montana is largely still a land of self-reliant, independent people with substantial foundations of common sense, and
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... - being 48th on that list (and WAAAY 48th: the density of 2.7 (persons/km2) is barely 3% of the average US value, which is itself low for developed countries) might also have something to do with it.
I think we should get rid of all sports in fact. Probably the arts, and likely music too. What does physical education really add to education any way? Home ec, for sure. Likely shop, those kids should go to vocational training for that.
Great plan. Really. I'd love to meet the products of that system, not sterile at all!
Let's remember that one of the "triumphs" of the Civil Rights movement in 1965 was the voting rights act that LEGITIMIZED gerrymandering in order to offer minorities more political power by concentrating them in districts so that they could win.
We can't have it both ways - we can't legitimize fiddling with boundaries for your precious cause (giving minorities the vote), and then not do it for mine (re-electing me). Slippery slope indeed.
"Let's face it, it is a merchandising excuse."
So? The original Star Wars (IV, for the clueless) was just meant to be a superficial serial-action cowboy movie in space. (shrug) It doesn't have to be deep to be enjoyable.
And seriously:
"... I tried to watch Episode I with my wife, "
If you're introducing Star Wars to anyone why in heaven's name would you start with Ep I? Holy Christ, I'd show them 4, 5, apologetically 6, and pretend 1-2-3 never happened
I watched the trailer, and it's on the bubble for me. I'll probably go see it mainly because Lucas ISN'T in charge. If he was? It would be a netflix-when-I-have-2-hours-to-kill at best.
"If we really want our elections to reflect the will of the people,"
What "people", though?
Let me be absolutely clear: gerrymandering is bullshit - I'm *all* in favor of algorithmically-determined districts, such that they conform to: ...that's great, as far as it goes, and in reading the article, that seems to be where they stopped. I'd add one further, complicating factor:
- must have the same population
- must be contiguous
- they have to recognize communities
It's easy enough to parcel a state into clumps of districts with the same population, but if they split (for example) a town's two voting precincts into different districts, that's a failed algorithm. I can't tell from the article how they addressed that. It seems like they may have tried.
The other point is that we need to decide that each person gets one vote. Not "one person gets one vote but because we feel sorry for a specific group we need to twist things to make sure that they have a chance". That - whatever the motivation - is intrinsically antithetical to actual democracy.
NEJM is part of the vast right-wing conspiracy harping on the dangers of Ebola merely because faux news tells them to?
(I'm going to assume you're either European or referring to Europe by your snark; we'll just set aside definitions of developed as something we might fundamentally disagree on.)
Critically: the US has an overall population density 1/10 that of countries like Germany. If you can't understand the impact of that, you're not paying attention. Further, the US doesn't have draconian commmunity laws that compel people to only build new homes within town limits, as some Euro states do. (Making the effective density of populated Europe much much higher.) If you buy land in the US, you can usually build a house on it, whether you're in a town or not. Ergo, the ability to quickly/cheaply stretch power to remote locations has more value here. It's a tradeoff that people make in their home choices, whether they recognize it or not.
In places like cities, where population density warrants it, yes, the power cables do usually go underground.
If, as the op asserts, it's an ongoing problem regarding the major lines that feed the municipality, then eventually the municipality will address it with their local utility. If the OP has such a problem with it, and is sure everyone else does, I'm sure it will provide a firm point for them to be elected to the city council to fix it. Or wait, was he not actually looking to get off his ass to FIX the problem, just whine about it?
You apparently forget that utilities are state-sponsored and validated monopolies.
I'm not sure blaming capitalist mechanisms here makes a ton of sense.
Yeah, my stupid. Not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that.
-1, facepalm.
It's almost like this is a very HARD PROBLEM that hundreds if not thousands of very, very bright people have been working on for years without much success.
Huh. Who'd'a thought?
(I think this entire project, while worthy, shows a staggering level of conceit, if not profound disrespect for brilliant scientists and engineers of previous generations. "Well, if we just get some smart people - I mean GOOGLE smart - and let them think about it, I'm sure they'll find the answer!")
Sometimes the historical ignorance displayed by people today is breathtaking.
"I don't know if he was guilty."
You should have just stopped there because the rest of your post is essentially: "I don't really know anything except what some media outlets have told me, based on histrionic eyewitnesses and a need to fill a 24/7 news cycle with outrage, but I'm vaguely upset because the outcome doesn't match the presumptions I've come to from this incomplete information."
1) The police have every reason to try to protect their officer. One hopes that they're honest about the data they're presenting, but we've seen plenty of examples of it not being so.
2) the 'community' - from political leaders to thugs that just want to get a new TV, sneakers, and beer from a looting rampage - have every reason to try to see the situation in the worst possible light.
It's abundantly clear (from the physical impossibility of some of their observations) that many of the so-called witnesses are lying. It's possible that the cop is lying.
The ONLY people that ostensibly saw and heard every viewpoint and piece of evidence were the grand jury and the judge. It may not be perfect, but that's as close as we can get to objective.
To be "upset" about something from as peripheral a pov as we have is ludicrous. (To loot a store, or burn a restaurant in 'outrage' is idiotic.)
PS I fail to see how this is "tech news for nerds"?
....but I sincerely hope that my car of the 2030s will be designed by engineers around the necessary performance requirements of the roads of the time, not fucking "design consultants".
I'm more interested in how people repeatedly get paid quite hefty salaries to come up with this overproduced, artiste-crap.
This is exactly comparable to someone with lung cancer who started smoking in 2002 and saying "I wish I'd known there was a risk."
What he needs to do next is figure out how to frame himself as a victim. If only he was brown or female instead of a fat white man. Everyone knows fat white men are the last approved object of public ridicule.
"Gamma ray bursts would wipe out any live more complex than microbes".... ...that is, unless life evolved to use radiation as an energy source.
In other words, a couple of astrophysicists speculate to a degree that's only slightly and unquantifiably less than sheer "wild ass guessing", news at 11.
...mainly because the US African American community has major cultural issues with broken families and an habitual acceptance of criminality that not enough of them are trying to fix internally. HOWEVER:
"...Some law-enforcement experts say the NYCLU is going beyond civics lessons and doling out criminal-defense advice...."
Then "some law-enforcement experts" need to pull their head out of their collective asses and understand that everyone - including cops - knowing who has what rights is a GOOD THING, for everyone. Remember the whole "presumed innocent" thing? Stop and frisk is already pushing pretty far into 'unreasonable search' territory; to imply then that the cops are somehow entitled to even push it further if they can bully/trick people into accepting it is frankly bullshit.
Police that act like it's a bad thing to tell kids what their rights are (and how to defend them reasonably and respectfully) during stop & frisk smell suspiciously like thugs with badges, and not police officers doing a difficult, dangerous, and high-stress task as constructively as possible.
...that this is news?
I'm not an astronomer, but I was pretty sure that the idea that the US passes through periodic 'clouds' of debris was as old as astronomy - how is this substantially different than the Leonid (passing through the debris left by comet Swift-Tuttle)or Perseid meteor shower (passing through the debris left by comet Tempel-Tuttle)?
Personally, I've wondered if some of these could coincide with truly massive volcanic eruptions or meteorite impacts historically, the ones hefty enough to land earth rocks on the moon or Mars. Such an eruption would, it seems to me, leave a 'cloud' of very small debris with its own orbit that would logically impact earth's orbit at the point they were created.