One of the sources of bacteria is thought to be those that lie dormant in rocks that cross space. So where do these come from.
And it's not a disproven hypothesis that ET life exits, and are observing. It's just that we like to cut it off with Oscram's Razor.
The idea could be that they "farm" planets in much the same way that we turn virgin soil into productive cropland through planting a series of different crops may reflect the reality. It's just that we're too frightened or arrogant to deal with this notion.
Even according to our own reckonings, life has arrisen on this world twice, the precambrian and the second in the cambrian. See SJ Gould's "Wonderous Life" for a discussion on this.
I have a shared mail account with a fixed name at work, so I know what you are talking about.
If you are looking at a file system as a heirarchial structure, why can't you have more than one such table.
The idea being that some mail clients would be only in the "person" tree, and that others would only be in a "function" tree. One could then be given access to both the person and function trees, and shunt mail between them for others to see.
The other thing that we should do is do things that encourage the use of these things. Make the tools for doing this easier to use and understand, and make the concepts easier to grasp.
The main hassle I have with email is that there is little thought given to official positions. Under snail mail, I could write to "recruitment" or "finances", and expect my mail to get to the right area.
Very few systems give alternate functional views to different views. In order to send a letter to a section, I'd have to find out a name of a person in the section, send it to that person's email, and then hope that person is in.
What is needed is a parallel view where people can add functions to their role (at user level, for example).
So an email to recruitment@sample.com will get to the recruitment folder, and any of the recruitment officers can deal with it.
The only way around this is then to look at the issue of spam. If everyone has a "recruitment" address, then one could send out mail to "recruitment@[each domain]" a lot easier than getting the right name for each domain.
The idea is that a section inbox should be available to a section, and not an individual, and that people in the section should be given access when appropriate. A section would then retain the same name, regardless of the personnel making it up.
None of the mail systems that I see grasp this point.
One could have view sets, which are alternate tree structures, with the accounts at the leaf objects. One could be in the flat "name" tree, or access the personnel\recruitment intray, or whatever.
Even a single-cell organism is "multi-bacteria". There are independent forms of the organals of a single cell.
Something like a sponge is a multi-cell colony that has division of labour, sort of like a city. NS has stories about slugs that in their life fall into intependant cells.
Ants and bees are multipart animals. Others hold things like trees are colonies of separate plants, with different branches being genetically different. So what is life?
Life has a nasty habit of starting up anywhere, and given that it's rumoured that some bacteria come from space, where exactly in space *is* that...
I'm aware of all of this. But even in the soviet empire, there were extra letters. Compare this in the west, where Icelandic still uses thorn and etha. Thorn was used in english before the latin alphabet arrived, and continued afterwards. edda or etha is a crossed d. Capital thorn looked something a Y with a vertical left stroke. Hence "Ye Olde Shoppe".
Ohter english letters to fade is yoch [looks like a 3] - this is the z in Menzies = Men3ies "Menges".
Also of note is digamma. In the greek number system, this is 6, that is, the 6th letter of the alphabet. As a letter, it appear between epsilon and zeta. Since our alphabet is derived from the greek, one notes the letter here not only looks like digamma, but preserves much of the original sound: F. Phi was an asperated p.
Cyrillic bears a much closer resemblance to the classical greek letters, and the theta, indeeds represents an f here.
Unicode reflects current realities. There is more than one Cyrillic Alphabet, just as there is more than one Latin alphabet.
Russian Cyrillic is not redundant. The other languages that use cyrillic letters have different letters, (eg Ukrainian has an "I", instead of the back-to-front N), and some of the Russian letters are uniquely Russian.
If I download at 10pm or midnight, my modem runs at near full speed. If I download at 6pm or 5pm, when the school children are home, I'd be lucky to see half-speed, with the occasional drop-out.
Just because your modem can only pull at a maximum of 56 kb, the traffic on the wire might only be passing 20 kb. By rescheduling downloads to later in the night, you may be able to pull 40 or 50 kb.
We do it over here. Low priority items, like water heating, shuts down in peak times. You don't necessarily "save" it, but rather use it when the machine is otherwise idle or less in use. Hooking various appliances like the water heater, you can even the load.
It's important to note that you can't "save" bandwidth for later
Actually, you can. If you don't need it straight away, you should be able to schedule it for later download. I mean, when computing power is scarse (as it does with big iron), you can run batch jobs overnight.
The problem is not that bandwidth is not "saveable", but no programs routinely do it, and people are generally impatient to wait.
Bandwidth traffic can be greatly reduced if greater use of bug-fix cds were made use of. A 100 meg download may cost you and other people more in connection time and storage media, then a $5 mass-printed cdrom. The same could even be done for Linux distros, etc.
Those of us who work for large companies, do not have the choice of what browser, email client, word processor, spread sheetm we can use.
Even if we were rabbid open source users, and card-carrying MSFT haters, we'd still have to use MSFT's legacy stuff, or find a new job. Jobs are tight, and so you just accept this.
The point is is that if outlook is so bug-infested that it shuts the business down, it does not affect me, since it's their choice, not mine.
The ultimate irony is that the US DoD defined the internet standards in the first place.....:)
My experience with business is that curses "innovation and change" when one has to hunt back through decades of old records [and their assorted systems.]
Face it: if you still use MSIE, you are one lazy, sorry bastard with a really crappy job. It sucks to be you.
Or you work for a large corporation, which has a policy of using MSIE. You don't expect them to let users pick their own mail clients, browsers, etc, do you?
Out past your life, it's bear-skins and stone axes as far as the eye can see, I'm afraid.
If the Register is anything to go by. the closure of Realnames is hurting people who rely on it to surf the net in their own languages (eg Japan, China). But the post is relatively silent on this matter.
I mean, Google is a good idea in the west, but in the east, it's still an english-language tool. And it's not just google: realnames was using the address line, so that {asian glyphs} were substutuded with {european letters}.
Re:Some of the other books are interesting too....
on
RIP: Stephen Jay Gould
·
· Score: 2
Oh, dear me, dear me. You should really watch what's going on, diddums.
I went all the way back to my first message, and searched for the string "direct". I used it just once, as in "not an indirect one". It appears in one of your messages too.
All my messages are consistant with the comparisons of two time durations. The second/minute/hour thing is just another time example to show principle of ratio. No connexion was intended between that and the life in heart-beat value.
With calling it a "cardiac cycle length", this is just a technical term. Really, most people understand the "length of a heart beat" more clearly than the other term. For all I know, they may be entirely different (such as in a "pace" and its cycle). But that's an irrelevant point.
In fact, I have not changed *any* of the terms in my arguement. I have always suggested that the ratio of lengths of the heart beat and lifetimes are relatively constant, and not a function of size of the animal concerned. I've seen the thing scaled up to creatures the size of cities, and planets [eg the biosphere as "Gaia"], for example. In the Gaia example, what passes for us in a year is seen by Gaia as a second.
Use of "off-topic" examples is a legitimate process in maths, when applying an unfamiliar process to an unfamilar subject, you can break it down to the same process on a familiar subject first.
I have the nasty suspicion that I'm being "trolled":(
Yes, I did, actually. And this is what struck me. It took the British 30 years from first discovery 1770 to colonisation 1788 of Australia.
The thing is, without some sort of on-going space effort, whether it's colonisation of the moon, or a moon base, or space stations, or whatever, we will always be earth-bound. Not that it matters much.....
Some 600 years ago, China ruled the eastern seas, but then they decided that ther was nothing outside of home. And they burnt their fleets, and went into a long hibernation, that only the modern world has roused them from.
Is this the beginning of the next hibernation??
FWIW, I play civ3 in much the same way, but while I am not playing the politics game, I'm revving up everything else.
Re:Some of the other books are interesting too....
on
RIP: Stephen Jay Gould
·
· Score: 2
Actually, honey, if you read what I said, I never said the "heart beat rates", but the "heart beats". The length of the time of a heart beat and the length of the time of the life do rise and fall in direct ratio.
The example I made with seconds, minutes and hours makes the same point: making the lesser and longer units larger can preserve the same ratio.
It was the anomynous coward that introduced the "heart beat rate", and hence inverted it, not me.
Relativity has nothing to do with a speed of light that changes, any more than geodesics have anything to do with the size of the earth.
Let me explain. Both relativity and geodesics posit that we must modify the notion of space-time or space in the large scale, to deal with the fact that the "flat model of space/time" is inappropriate in some conditions.
In geodesy, the size of the earth is a constant that you use to convert angles into length, and in relativity, the speed of light is something that you convert time to length.
Assuming that you have other ways of recovering time and length from ancient sources, you can recover therefore an ancient speed of light.
Actually, the book that the constants table comes from in the first place, goes into the physics of defining standards [including endlength prototypes], and their dependence on different universal constants, in some length.... The speed of light in this is not assumed constant...
Does not refute my arguement. You see, there is a number 3:16E8 E3... (base 120) = 3.14159265359 (base 10), but you have not established why we sould us it in preference tp something else, like 6.28318530718, or 12.566373144 or whatever.
Just because you can throw excellent links about 3.14159265359 at me, it does not mean that every culture, or separate mathematical tradition is going to write the circumference of the circle as 2k of the radius.
I've seen good cases for using 6.28318530718 as the fundemental constant for the circle.
Therefore "pi" is not a fundemental constant, but just a convenient expression for the circle and circular things.
On the other hand, "e" will always evolve from logarithms. "e" was not set before-hand, like pi was. The definition of pi is simply the circumferance divided by the diameter of a circle. Every other expression, formula and so forth relate to this definition.
But... there are other properties of the circle that can set a ratio, such as the circumference divided by the radius. Given that the radius is the correct mathematical expression of the circle (all formulae relate to the radius), then the constant of 6.28... is "more correct".
The values of 0, 1, and e are determined from the outcomes of pre-existing conditions. 1 from a pre-counting era, and 0 as a symbol for an empty item [I recognise something like eight or nine idioms for "0", and several different symbols].
For example, remember that "0" is the "empty column". The "column" could be an empty tray by itself, or one in the middle of others. For example, if your purse is empty, it's a different story to if you have a $1 and a 5c peice in it (which involves a different kind of 0, $1.05, and this is a different kind of zero to the one in "3 hours [0 min] 22 sec". There's also the "dash zero", filling a column with a dash to indicate that it's empty.
My studies of Egyptian mathematics seem to indicate that the values pi/4 may have been the form used.
Pi as 3.1415926... seems to be established when the circle was described in terms of its diameter. A circular inch, for example is an area of a circle of one inch diameter.
The fine structure constant, and its related fine structure hundred [the latter is my name for 137.036...] is something that evolves from physics, and is not "set before hand".
Re:Some of the other books are interesting too....
on
RIP: Stephen Jay Gould
·
· Score: 2
faster heart beats + shorter life form a direct ratio, not an indirect ratio. Eg 60s = 1 min, and 60 min = 1 hr, the ratio of sec / min is the same as the ratio of min / hrs.
If you slow your heart beat to zero, you will indeed live for ever, and miss the passing parade. This is what suspended animation is all about. Unless you can find somewhere safe to hide, you may be recycled in the meantime, though.
Some of the other books are interesting too....
on
RIP: Stephen Jay Gould
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Like the "flamingo's smile".
He did studies on Disney characters to show that our affection with them is similar to our affection to small children: Goofy, who head occupies as much of his height as an adult, attracts less affection than Mickey. This is true even when both play adult roles. Mickey has a wife and three kids.
Another area he looked at is that most animals have the same number of heart-beats: that is, the length of the life and the heart beats scale at the same ratios. Humans have a longer life, about three times an animal of that size.
The column-books like this (and nearly all of Martin Gardner's) are ideal reading on the bus, as it gives you a new story every day:)
In punctuated equalibrium, one day, it's there, the next it's not. Rest in peace, Stephen. You deserve it.
If you use k to represent pi/4, as I suggested, then Euler's equation is e^4ki. Euler's equation simply says that e^3.1415926... i = -1. It is not a requirement that we allocate a symbol to 3.1415926. We do not allocate a symbol to 6.2831852, for example, even though this occurs a lot in physics. In the form of k above, then 3.1415926 = 4k, 6.2831852 = 8k, and a circular inch is k square inches. Euler's equation then becomes exp(4kc) = cos(x)+i sin(x)
Actually, in the history of evaluating pi, there are some people who evaluated the value 6.2831852 to large number of places, from which we can deduce their value of 3.14159...
All that is required of pi is to have the circumference of the circle expressiable as a product or quotient with just one irrational. Whether you call 3.14159265359 n/k or nk, and the value of n are pretty much free variables. Ergo, pi is not a fundemental constant.
Unlike pi, the values e, 0, and 1 would be the same for all cultures. The number e has only one meaning: e^(1/x) ~> 1+1/x as x gets large.
Slashdot Mirror
- The greatest depths of oceans
- Thermal vents, with extreme temperatures.
- outer space
One of the sources of bacteria is thought to be those that lie dormant in rocks that cross space. So where do these come from.And it's not a disproven hypothesis that ET life exits, and are observing. It's just that we like to cut it off with Oscram's Razor.
The idea could be that they "farm" planets in much the same way that we turn virgin soil into productive cropland through planting a series of different crops may reflect the reality. It's just that we're too frightened or arrogant to deal with this notion.
Even according to our own reckonings, life has arrisen on this world twice, the precambrian and the second in the cambrian. See SJ Gould's "Wonderous Life" for a discussion on this.
I'm not sure. I had a recent message that went
:(
+2 karma 49
+1 Interesting karma 50
-1 Offtopic karma 49
+1 Underrated karma 49
--
3 Offtopic karma 49
This suggests to me that a message is the normal sum (with the least desirable showing), and this is what the karma goes.
It's as if all your good karma is added first, and all the bad stuff taken off second
If you are looking at a file system as a heirarchial structure, why can't you have more than one such table.
The idea being that some mail clients would be only in the "person" tree, and that others would only be in a "function" tree. One could then be given access to both the person and function trees, and shunt mail between them for others to see.
The other thing that we should do is do things that encourage the use of these things. Make the tools for doing this easier to use and understand, and make the concepts easier to grasp.
Very few systems give alternate functional views to different views. In order to send a letter to a section, I'd have to find out a name of a person in the section, send it to that person's email, and then hope that person is in.
What is needed is a parallel view where people can add functions to their role (at user level, for example).
So an email to recruitment@sample.com will get to the recruitment folder, and any of the recruitment officers can deal with it.
The only way around this is then to look at the issue of spam. If everyone has a "recruitment" address, then one could send out mail to "recruitment@[each domain]" a lot easier than getting the right name for each domain.
The idea is that a section inbox should be available to a section, and not an individual, and that people in the section should be given access when appropriate. A section would then retain the same name, regardless of the personnel making it up.
None of the mail systems that I see grasp this point.
One could have view sets, which are alternate tree structures, with the accounts at the leaf objects. One could be in the flat "name" tree, or access the personnel\recruitment intray, or whatever.
Something like a sponge is a multi-cell colony that has division of labour, sort of like a city. NS has stories about slugs that in their life fall into intependant cells.
Ants and bees are multipart animals. Others hold things like trees are colonies of separate plants, with different branches being genetically different. So what is life?
Life has a nasty habit of starting up anywhere, and given that it's rumoured that some bacteria come from space, where exactly in space *is* that...
Ohter english letters to fade is yoch [looks like a 3] - this is the z in Menzies = Men3ies "Menges".
Also of note is digamma. In the greek number system, this is 6, that is, the 6th letter of the alphabet. As a letter, it appear between epsilon and zeta. Since our alphabet is derived from the greek, one notes the letter here not only looks like digamma, but preserves much of the original sound: F. Phi was an asperated p.
Cyrillic bears a much closer resemblance to the classical greek letters, and the theta, indeeds represents an f here.
Unicode reflects current realities. There is more than one Cyrillic Alphabet, just as there is more than one Latin alphabet.
If I download at 10pm or midnight, my modem runs at near full speed. If I download at 6pm or 5pm, when the school children are home, I'd be lucky to see half-speed, with the occasional drop-out.
Just because your modem can only pull at a maximum of 56 kb, the traffic on the wire might only be passing 20 kb. By rescheduling downloads to later in the night, you may be able to pull 40 or 50 kb.
Actually, you can. If you don't need it straight away, you should be able to schedule it for later download. I mean, when computing power is scarse (as it does with big iron), you can run batch jobs overnight.
The problem is not that bandwidth is not "saveable", but no programs routinely do it, and people are generally impatient to wait.
Bandwidth traffic can be greatly reduced if greater use of bug-fix cds were made use of. A 100 meg download may cost you and other people more in connection time and storage media, then a $5 mass-printed cdrom. The same could even be done for Linux distros, etc.
Those of us who work for large companies, do not have the choice of what browser, email client, word processor, spread sheetm we can use.
Even if we were rabbid open source users, and card-carrying MSFT haters, we'd still have to use MSFT's legacy stuff, or find a new job. Jobs are tight, and so you just accept this.
The point is is that if outlook is so bug-infested that it shuts the business down, it does not affect me, since it's their choice, not mine.
You should really get out more.
My experience with business is that curses "innovation and change" when one has to hunt back through decades of old records [and their assorted systems.]
The issue here is that the named constant is 3.1415926..., and not 6.2831853 or 0.785398....
You can any of take these to arbitary precision.
Face it: if you still use MSIE, you are one lazy, sorry bastard with a really crappy job. It sucks to be you.
Or you work for a large corporation, which has a policy of using MSIE. You don't expect them to let users pick their own mail clients, browsers, etc, do you?
Out past your life, it's bear-skins and stone axes as far as the eye can see, I'm afraid.
I mean, Google is a good idea in the west, but in the east, it's still an english-language tool. And it's not just google: realnames was using the address line, so that {asian glyphs} were substutuded with {european letters}.
I went all the way back to my first message, and searched for the string "direct". I used it just once, as in "not an indirect one". It appears in one of your messages too.
All my messages are consistant with the comparisons of two time durations. The second/minute/hour thing is just another time example to show principle of ratio. No connexion was intended between that and the life in heart-beat value.
With calling it a "cardiac cycle length", this is just a technical term. Really, most people understand the "length of a heart beat" more clearly than the other term. For all I know, they may be entirely different (such as in a "pace" and its cycle). But that's an irrelevant point.
In fact, I have not changed *any* of the terms in my arguement. I have always suggested that the ratio of lengths of the heart beat and lifetimes are relatively constant, and not a function of size of the animal concerned. I've seen the thing scaled up to creatures the size of cities, and planets [eg the biosphere as "Gaia"], for example. In the Gaia example, what passes for us in a year is seen by Gaia as a second.
Use of "off-topic" examples is a legitimate process in maths, when applying an unfamiliar process to an unfamilar subject, you can break it down to the same process on a familiar subject first.
I have the nasty suspicion that I'm being "trolled" :(
The thing is, without some sort of on-going space effort, whether it's colonisation of the moon, or a moon base, or space stations, or whatever, we will always be earth-bound. Not that it matters much.....
Is this the beginning of the next hibernation?? FWIW, I play civ3 in much the same way, but while I am not playing the politics game, I'm revving up everything else.
The example I made with seconds, minutes and hours makes the same point: making the lesser and longer units larger can preserve the same ratio.
It was the anomynous coward that introduced the "heart beat rate", and hence inverted it, not me.
Let me explain. Both relativity and geodesics posit that we must modify the notion of space-time or space in the large scale, to deal with the fact that the "flat model of space/time" is inappropriate in some conditions.
In geodesy, the size of the earth is a constant that you use to convert angles into length, and in relativity, the speed of light is something that you convert time to length.
Assuming that you have other ways of recovering time and length from ancient sources, you can recover therefore an ancient speed of light.
Actually, the book that the constants table comes from in the first place, goes into the physics of defining standards [including endlength prototypes], and their dependence on different universal constants, in some length.... The speed of light in this is not assumed constant...
Does not refute my arguement. You see, there is a number 3:16E8 E3... (base 120) = 3.14159265359 (base 10), but you have not established why we sould us it in preference tp something else, like 6.28318530718, or 12.566373144 or whatever.
Just because you can throw excellent links about 3.14159265359 at me, it does not mean that every culture, or separate mathematical tradition is going to write the circumference of the circle as 2k of the radius.
I've seen good cases for using 6.28318530718 as the fundemental constant for the circle.
Therefore "pi" is not a fundemental constant, but just a convenient expression for the circle and circular things.
On the other hand, "e" will always evolve from logarithms. "e" was not set before-hand, like pi was. The definition of pi is simply the circumferance divided by the diameter of a circle. Every other expression, formula and so forth relate to this definition.
But ... there are other properties of the circle that can set a ratio, such as the circumference divided by the radius. Given that the radius is the correct mathematical expression of the circle (all formulae relate to the radius), then the constant of 6.28... is "more correct".
The values of 0, 1, and e are determined from the outcomes of pre-existing conditions. 1 from a pre-counting era, and 0 as a symbol for an empty item [I recognise something like eight or nine idioms for "0", and several different symbols].
For example, remember that "0" is the "empty column". The "column" could be an empty tray by itself, or one in the middle of others. For example, if your purse is empty, it's a different story to if you have a $1 and a 5c peice in it (which involves a different kind of 0, $1.05, and this is a different kind of zero to the one in "3 hours [0 min] 22 sec". There's also the "dash zero", filling a column with a dash to indicate that it's empty.
My studies of Egyptian mathematics seem to indicate that the values pi/4 may have been the form used.
Pi as 3.1415926... seems to be established when the circle was described in terms of its diameter. A circular inch, for example is an area of a circle of one inch diameter.
The fine structure constant, and its related fine structure hundred [the latter is my name for 137.036...] is something that evolves from physics, and is not "set before hand".
If you slow your heart beat to zero, you will indeed live for ever, and miss the passing parade. This is what suspended animation is all about. Unless you can find somewhere safe to hide, you may be recycled in the meantime, though.
He did studies on Disney characters to show that our affection with them is similar to our affection to small children: Goofy, who head occupies as much of his height as an adult, attracts less affection than Mickey. This is true even when both play adult roles. Mickey has a wife and three kids.
Another area he looked at is that most animals have the same number of heart-beats: that is, the length of the life and the heart beats scale at the same ratios. Humans have a longer life, about three times an animal of that size.
The column-books like this (and nearly all of Martin Gardner's) are ideal reading on the bus, as it gives you a new story every day :)
In punctuated equalibrium, one day, it's there, the next it's not. Rest in peace, Stephen. You deserve it.
Actually, in the history of evaluating pi, there are some people who evaluated the value 6.2831852 to large number of places, from which we can deduce their value of 3.14159...
All that is required of pi is to have the circumference of the circle expressiable as a product or quotient with just one irrational. Whether you call 3.14159265359 n/k or nk, and the value of n are pretty much free variables. Ergo, pi is not a fundemental constant.
Unlike pi, the values e, 0, and 1 would be the same for all cultures. The number e has only one meaning: e^(1/x) ~> 1+1/x as x gets large.