So far as I can tell, science grows more powerful in each of two different but interrelated ways.
1. As the experimental data come in, the theories must change so that they accurately predict the results from an ever wider set of experimental circumstances.
2. Occasionally, there is a theoretical improvement that both increases the range of predicted circumstances and simplifies at some level the overall conceptual framework.
So long as civilization does not altogether collapse, and the various scientific communities along with it, neither of these two senses of scientific accomplishment depends on funding, but the rate at which science becomes more powerful does depend on funding.
Although I've never played with VOIP, I have been watching from the sidelines.
I have noticed that a typical cell-phone conversation has noticeable latency. It's bad enough so that, when I'm calling from my cell phone, I try to call a land-line if possible. I don't want to incur the full latency of a cell-to-cell call.
I have often wondered what the source of the latency is. Does one handset have worse latency than another because of variable processing power? Or is the latency dominated by delays in processing at the tower? Or somewhere else? Is the latency asymmetric? For example, is it mostly on the encoding side in the handset and not so much on the decoding side? It would be cool if an expert would drop by this thread to enlighten me.:^)
Anyway, if latency were a real issue for VOIP (and I have no experience to say one way or the other), then, even if the audio fidelity of what comes through were substantially greater than that of a land line, I'd still prefer a land line for a real-time conversation.
We cannot ever rightly say that general relativity is true, for it is a scientific theory. A scientific theory is not something that can be proved true, though it can be proved false.
In the hundred years or so since Einstein's introduction of general relativity, no observation has produced data that would rule out general relativity from its status as a candidate for the true description of gravity. So in a loose sense, it still "holds true". But such wording can be subtly confusing and, in my opinion, should be discouraged.
No experiment---not even any experiment related to quantum mechanics---no experiment has exposed flaws in general relativity. It is well known that general relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible. They cannot both be true. Still, no experiment yet devised has been able to rule out either of those great theoretical foundations of modern physics.
A theory of everything would need to be inconsistent, in some sense, with either GR or with QM or with both.
That's a good point, and it should be elaborated as the proper response to cyberchondriac.
cyberchondriac identifies the grid-bent-by-balls as "the current popular gravity model". It is in fact a popular model, which I remember from watching PBS even as far back as the 1970s. The good thing about this model is that it allows one to visualize how a mass both distorts space and moves in response to the distortion caused by another object. But its goodness as a model of gravity ends there, in part due to cyberchondriac's astute observation that it makes use of gravity to explain gravity. Still, the model is not bad because it uses one aspect of gravity (that it is nearly uniform near the surface of the Earth) to explain a *different* aspect of gravity (that distortions caused by multiple objects can interfere with each other and lead to motion).
In reality, it's both space *and* time that are being distorted.
Not quite. In reality, the best model that we have is general relativity, according to which both space and time are being distorted. But this is not to say that space and time are being distorted in reality, because we will never know for sure what's going on in reality. That is, a scientific theory (like general relativity) can never be proved true, though it can be proved false. Who knows? General relativity might be ruled out by some future experiments and replaced with a fundamentally different view of gravity.
Having a degree in physics means nothing if you didn't do anything in this branch of physics.
That seems a bit strong. A physics degree does mean that you can reasonably expect an explanation to be understood without too much effort on your part.
First off, the electron is not the lightest particle. Strictly speaking, the electron neutrino weighs in at less than 2.2 eV, where the electron weighs in at 0.511 MeV. Then you have the tau neutrino, which weighs in at 15.5 MeV. Then you have the proton, which weighs 938 MeV. After that we have the tauon, which has a mass of 1.7 GeV. All of which, so far, are leptons.
I can see where you're going, but you made a careless error. The proton is not a lepton.
In the standard model, leptons and quarks are fundamental particles. Leptons and quarks are reflections of each other through a certain symmetry. But a quark never appears by itself. A quark-antiquark pair is called a meson (which is a boson because it has whole-integer quantum spin), and a triplet of quarks, like a proton or neutron, is called a baryon (which is a fermion because it has half-integer quantum spin). A hadron is any particle that interacts through the strong force; this includes mesons and baryons but not leptons.
I posted this on the wiki, to you see why it doesn't make any difference.
Are you referring to the OFF wiki? I haven't gone back there since my initial visit.
Whenever the receiver completes its assembly of the work -- from a Torrent, or from the randomized bits on the OFF net -- the sender is "distributing one copy". Which, if (s)he has not the right to do, is copyright infringement.
I agree. I did not dispute this in my post.
The bits are not the work. The tape was not the work. The vinyl disk was not the work. The covers and the paper of a book are not the work. The canvas, the frame, and the paint in the Mona Lisa on the Louvre are not the work.
(cue revealing music!!)
They are... the media!
Good point, and I agree, but I did not dispute this in my post.
If you put a poem to be read by Patricia Arquette in Phoenix and Jennifer Love Hewitt transcribes it in Grandview, there was no intermediate copy (as is the case with OFF) but there was a copy nevertheless.
Well, this depends on what you mean by "intermediate copy".
My points were merely
that the bits output from a traditional encryption could be considered Coloured by someone who espouses a particular legal theory and
that a similar theory would not see the bits stored in OFF blocks as Coloured.
It is an interesting philosophical curiousity.
Perhaps there are interesting, practical uses, but I wasn't commenting on such.
And Medium is liable for copyright infringement. And Ghost Whisperer's copy is not a legitimate copy, so it cannot be sold or otherwise distributed.
I don't know what you are talking about here.
I understand that copyright can be used by the owner of a work to sue the producer of an unauthorized representation of that same work.
In the case of OFF, the distributor of the URL containing the instructions referring to the OFF would seem to be liable.
What is interesting, however, is that anyone who merely stores or distributes blocks in the OFF would seem, at least according to the Colour theory, not to be liable for anything.
Under the lawyer's rules, Colour is not a mathematical function of the bits that you can determine by examining the bits. It matters where the bits came from. The scrambled file still has the copyright Colour because it came from the copyrighted input file. It doesn't matter that it looks like, or maybe even is bit-for-bit identical with, some other file that you could get from a random number generator. It happens that you didn't get it from a random number generator. You got it from copyrighted material; it is copyrighted.
But the OFF is a bit different from standard encryption. In the OFF, every data block is produced by a random-number generator.
The only thing that would have Colour, from the lawyer's point of view, would be the instructions at the URL, as indicated on the OFF wiki. So the data blocks in the OFF would be Colourless even to the lawyer in the example above.
the ancient alchemists goal was to turn lead into gold. which they thought possible, because they did not perceive magic in gold, it was just stuff. surely, with the right manipulations, some stuff could be turned into other stuff, right?
and from that basic fantasy thought came the groundwork for centuries of hard work, the discovery of the fields of chemistry, physics, all the subfields...
Interesting comparison. And it's very refreshing to see the tradition of the alchemists portrayed as ennobled by their not regarding gold as magical.
What I find interesting, though, is what almost everyone in this forum assumes: That what gives an adult human being his amazing mind is, to use your analogy, just stuff. That is, everyone seems to assume that the existence of a human brain---or some physical equivalent---is sufficient for the existence of a human mind.
Of course, this is a natural assumption for anyone who subscribes to philosophical materialism, according to which matter (stuff) is all that really exists anyway. (Though the modern materialist would no doubt admit also the existence of other forms of energy besides matter.) So perhaps it is just the dominance of materialism that is evident here.
such that one day in the middle of the last century, some dudes with some extra time at a cyclotron said "hey, why don't we bombard some lead atoms, i have a feeling about what the decay product will be (snigger)"
and there, as a completely forgotten afterthought, was a fulfillment of the ancient alchemist's original goals, many generations before
This is very entertaining, and there would seem to be some truth in it.
However, your presentation is also misleading. If we could produce gold from a more common element by transmutation *efficiently*, then, and only then, would we have achieved the ancient alchemist's original goal. We have still not achieved that goal. It is far too expensive to produce gold in a nuclear reactor or collider.
And if we *did* find a way to do this efficiently, it would *not* be just an afterthought. It would have a major impact on the economy.
to me, i think this is the fate of AI: it will be a formative motivation. just as the ancient alchemist's looked at gold and saw just stuff, we look at the brain and just see neurons. and all of the ffort to replicate the human brain will spawn incredibly sophisticated fields of information science we can only begin to grasp at the foundations of right now.
Yes, there is no doubt that the effort spent on understanding the human brain and on designing machines that mimic certain aspects of the brain's behavior will have amazing and interesting consequences.
But there is, I think, at least some room to doubt that a human brain is equivalent to a human mind.
And there is even more room to doubt that algorithms in a digital computer could every produce a mind like that of a human being. Roger Penrose, in particular, has made some interesting arguments for how human thought is non-algorithmic.
It is perhaps politically unwise to suggest, in a room populated mostly by materialists, that there could exist anything more fundamental than matter. Maybe I am committing karma suicide by posting this here (unless no one notices my post:^).
This is not as undisputed as you say. I did not claim that something is undisputed. I claimed rather that belief in infallibility is primordial. (Disbelief in infallibility is also primordial.)
Most catholics still don't believe it. What merely nominal "Catholics" believe is irrelevant to my point. The Church has clear and official teaching, some of which she considers infallibly promulgated. One who doesn't accept the teachings of the ecumenical councils as infallibly promulgated is not really a Catholic, regardless of what he calls himself.
Heck, there were even dissenting bishops at Vatican I. Yes, and some of them even started a schismatic sect, known as the "Old Catholics", but they seem actually to be more like New Protestants.
So what can you do on the Moon that would make it so fabulously valuable? Beats me. The only unique resources the Moon has (exceedingly low temperatures in the shade, unbelievably good vacuum) you can also get in orbit, where you don't have to worry about any gravity at all, and can build eight-mile wide factories out of gossamer and shoe strings, if you want. The features of earth orbit include:
Good availability of sunlight for power.
Microgravity.
Good view of the earth.
Hard vacuum.
The features of the lunar surface include:
Good availability of sunlight for power (on peaks near the poles).
Gravity (1/6 of earth).
Hard vacuum.
Stable bedrock.
Mineral resources.
Gravity turns out to be useful for construction and for manufacturing. It is not available for use in earth orbit (except to keep the space station in orbit:^). Low gravity, as on the moon, would be great enough to enable some conventional techniques to be applied but small enough to enable some novel approaches. Of course, one could simulate gravity in orbit by way of centrifugal force, but that complicates the system. Good old gravity can be an advantage on the moon.
Stable bedrock also turns out to be a useful thing that is not available in orbit. Orbiting structures undergo vibrations that don't dampen easily. Any manufacturing or other application that requires a quiet, steady platform is difficult to set up on an orbiting platform. It can certainly be done, but there's something to be said for the simplicity of just anchoring to bedrock, especially if other parts of the complex generate noisy vibrations. The moon has less geological activity than the earth, and, with its near-vacuum it is a good platform for precise astronomical observations, etc.
The belief in the infallibility of the corpus of apostolic successors and of the office of Peter in particular is primordial in Christianity. It is related to the idea of binding and loosing, the keys to the kingdom. The Church does not formally define doctrine until there is a clear need to make something explicit and specific. In the matter of infallibility, there was for almost two thousand years no need to define explicitly and specifically what was always held implicitly.
But of course only WE were created in His image, right? Pope John Paul II pointed out that man, particularly in his speculative intellect, is created in the image of God.
Perhaps any creature with a speculative intellect is, like a human, created in God's image.
Apologizing to Galileo, Hell is a metaphor, evolution is real, now aliens could exist. The Vatican is really taking their modernization seriously, aren't they? You have some interesting misconceptions.
Galileo
John Paul II did apologize for the Church's wrong treatment of Galileo. Although, as indicated by the Pope, there were errors in Church's dealing with Galileo, the Church's view at the time was essentially correct: Galileo had no observational evidence to distinguish between the Copernican model and the (geocentric) model of Tycho. So there was no compelling reason at the time of Galileo for everyone to abandon the prevailing view. Nevertheless, it was the Church's position, expressed by the Inquisition's Cardinal Bellarmine at the time, that if evidence disproving the geocentric model were to come forth, then a reconsideration of the interpretation of the relevant portions of Scripture would be in order. In the mean time, after Galileo's first appearance before the Inquisition, he was ordered to refrain from asserting that the heliocentric view is a certain truth and to advance it only as one hypothesis. Galileo's refusal to do this ultimately got him in trouble later.
Hell
The Church has always taught, still teaches, and will always teach the reality of Hell. The Church does not teach that Hell is merely a metaphor for something. Specifically, the Church teaches that human beings are eternal creatures (so each of us will perceive an infinitely long existence); that there will be a resurrection of the dead; that there are essentially only two possible ends for our resurrected bodies: eternal life or eternal death; that the choice between them is one that we make in freedom; and that eternal death is extremely unpleasant.
Evolution
The Catholic Church has never changed its official position on evolution. St. Augustine, in the 300s AD, proposed an idea of evolution over long periods (though not of course involving natural selection). St. Augustine is a doctor of the Church. The earliest official response that I've seen to Darwin is in the 1870s, when a German bishop remarked that there is nothing objectionable to the physical theory of evolution. The Church did not deliver a universal message until Pope Pius XII in 1950 published Humani Generis, in which he basically said that there is nothing wrong with the idea of the evolution of creatures, even of humans, so long as one remembers that the human soul is not the product of evolution.
Aliens
In the context of the idea of many worlds, the Church's position is that Christ goes wherever he is needed.
Modernization
Modernization, yes, modernism, no. With respect to grave matter, about which the Church claims to teach infallibly, the Church changes only her mode of expression to suit the times, not the content of her expression. There is a valid concept of doctrinal development over time, as laid out by John Henry Newman. This involves, among other things, the idea that the Church becomes more explicit whenever she needs to, but she never contradicts anything that she has previously proclaimed as infallible.
With respect to natural science, this is irrelevant, however, because the Church has never made any infallible assertions dealing with natural science. The whole business about heliocentrism versus geocentrism, for example, did not concern teachings that the Church considered infallible. Otherwise, Bellarmine would have expressed quite a different opinion.
It's had regex find/replace by default for years... Not sure if 1.x had it, but the beta builds of 2.x and everything since has. Yeah, but, in the latest release, back-references are finally supported, and so it's actually generally useful now.
Freenet seems to be designed primarily for anonymity, and I have read that it does not have the best performance. However, it does try to become efficient over time by moving frequently requested data around automatically on the various nodes in order to reduce overall bandwidth use and improve performance. That is, the network adapts itself to optimize for something.
I wonder if, in principle, using something like freenet would accidentally be beneficial for providers like Verizon, at least with respect to the issue at hand.
Yours has no more and no less proof than any of the others. That's an interesting claim. I should expect that one religion might very well have more evidence in favor of its truth claims than another religion has.
For all you know you're going to be punished for not being a Muslim; and it's impossible for you to tell, barring outlandish and torturous logic derived from superstition, coincidence, and the influence of other people. At least the traditional Christian view accords with a rational view of the conscience, and so, if Christianity were true, then even someone who is not a Christian in this life might nevertheless live eternally. Similarly, if Christianity were true, then even someone who professes Christianity in this life might die eternally. The real question is whether one honestly believes that the Truth exists, seeks out the Truth, and actively reforms one's life in light of the Truth. There is an interesting discussion of this in The Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Kreeft and Tacelli. Tortuous logic, etc. is not a requirement for Christian belief.
Your choice of religion is, essentially, an arbitrary one and has no practical relevance to the rest of the world. Indeed, there is always something arbitrary about one's choice of religion. That's because it is a choice, and there is no forcing it. Of course, your position (whether it be that of relativism, atheism, or something else) is just as arbitrary. Still, it is not completely arbitrary because one system might have more evidence for it than another. For example, your writing suggests that you think that the claims of the atheist might have the best evidence. I don't buy anyone's claim, however, that there is some system, the belief in which is so compelled as not to have anything arbitrary about it.
As to the point about practicality, it is of course likely that there is little publicly noticeable, practical consequence to a given individual's religious belief. But practical import can't be ruled out altogether. Any individual, no matter how lowly, may end up having an important role to play in history.
I am well aware that the density and temperature at the core of Jupiter are a long way from those suitable for detectable nuclear fusion. Detectable, that is, by looking at Jupiter's surface temperature.
However, even in the conditions of Jupiter's core, the cross-section for various fusion reactions is not zero. It's just really, really small. Given the large number of particles in Jupiter's core, though, it is likely that fusion is nevertheless going on at some undetectable rate.
The point is that saying, "Fusion doesn't happen below a certain mass," is not right.
Better would be to say that the diminishing effect of nuclear fusion, below a certain mass of object, is no longer able to stabilize the size and temperature of an object.
The comments that I read here on Slashdot have mentioned many interesting things, most especially the agreement between the observed minimum mass and the predicted minimum mass, around 70 M_Jupiter.
What seems missing from the discussion, however, though perhaps I just missed it, is any mention of what it means to claim that there is a mass below which fusion of some sort doesn't occur. Surely there is fusion at some undetectable level even in Jupiter. The question is whether the rate of fusion is high enough to have an observable effect. What would be an observable effect? That is the question that I should like to have answered.
According to the theory of star formation, a protostar approaches the main sequence along the Hayashi track in the HR diagram. Contraction releases gravitational potential energy during this phase, and, for a low-mass protostar, the surface temperature remains roughly constant while the luminosity decreases due to the shrinking size of the photosphere. Eventually, the temperature and pressure in the core become high enough so that fusion halts the gravitational contraction. At this point, the surface temperature and luminosity stabilize, and we have a "zero-age" main sequence star.
If for a protostar with sufficiently low mass the gravitational collapse is such that the pressure and temperature at the core increase only slowly toward an asymptotic value, and if at every time during the contraction the rate of fusion is insufficient to halt the contraction, then what would otherwise be a tight main sequence at this point on the HR diagram would end up being a wide distribution because no long-term, stable condition (such as that provided by core fusion) would constrain a large population to a narrow band in temperature-luminosity space for a long time (billions of years).
It would be interesting to have a large enough sample to see past the low end of the main sequence. The article suggests only that the observers saw the bottom of the main sequence, but there should be brown dwarfs below it, and further tests of the theory would compare the observed distribution just below the bottom of the main sequence with predicted distributions. Such a comparison might even be useful for constraining the initial mass function of the distribution.
If only we could figure out how to build a safe nuclear launch vehicle. The energy density of nuclear fuel is something like a thousand times larger than that of chemical fuel.
Maybe you could put a reactor into an upper stage and heat something like water in a closed cycle for launch. Steam would power turbofans for vertical or horizontal liftoff. At say 50,000+ feet or so, the first stage with turbofans separates exposing nozzles for the fluid to be ejected as rocket exhaust. Now the reactor cranks up the heat higher on the working fluid and uses it directly as propellant.
I don't know. Are there any actual good designs for nuclear launch out there? I saw something about RITA, but it didn't have many details.
StumbleUpon's toolbar for Firefox and MSIE make maintaining one's own blog *really* easy, the discussion forums are lively, and the community is quite interesting and diverse.
I've been using Debian unstable continuously for years. I'm not a developer, but there's never been a circumstance that I couldn't work around. Unstable keeps me on my toes just enough so that I maintain knowledge of how my system works, even as it evolves almost continuously. And there's always the fun of seeing what new coolness arrives in the daily update.
I grant that Debian unstable is not for everyone, but it is surely not just for the developer. It's for anyone who wants to know how his operating system works. It's for anyone who wants the best of both worlds: ease of maintenance and latest daily software.
The developers have never suggested that I switch to stable, not even when on the rare occasion I ask for help on debian-devel.
The very best book that I encountered during my undergraduate days was Frank Shu's The Physical Universe. It is classic. Although it was published in 1982, Shu's book is still something that I would recommend to anyone who really wants to understand physics and astronomy.
The material on the solar system is dated, but that's not the point. The real value is the historical approach, in which the reader is invited to work out key problems himself. The problems are integrated in-line with the text, and the more difficult problems (those requiring calculus) are identified as such. Despite the book's being billed as an introduction to astronomy, it really grounds the reader in the fundamentals of mechanics and thermodynamics. The material from basic physics is given excellent motivation by its immediate application to certain astrophysical problems. The reader is not left to wonder, "Why do I need to learn this?" Shu presents the physics, and then immediately shows why it's interesting and valuable.
I believe that one's conscience is an internal device. You, on the other hand, have chosen to treat the Catholic church as generally authoritative.
I am glad to see that we agree on the primacy of conscience. One who always follows his conscience, even when it is painful to do so, is a practitioner of natural religion. The Church is the trustee and teacher of revealed religion. Natural religion is true religion. If revealed religion also be true religion, then it must contain natural religion as a subset. That's why the Church officially teaches that it is better for one to follow one's conscience against the Church than to follow the Church against one's conscience.
I do not understand how you contradict the preciousness of the souled embryo with the fact that God allows 50% of them to die. If he has the power to protect them, and chooses not to, then how should we be held to a higher standard, made as we are in his image? If he cares even for the sparrow in the field, is he not as much the "protector" of the embryo as we are?
Your question is right on target. It is essentially the classical question of the atheist. The author of Genesis 1, who made the classically Theistic pitch about God's only and ever creating good, anticipated the question, "Why then is there evil?" That's what the story of the Garden of Eden is all about. The point is that evil exists in the world because of human free will. God does not desire evil as such, but God's primary desire is human freedom. In true freedom there is the real possibility of acting against the conscience. Perhaps the hardest part of all this for the atheist, and even for the Christian who bothers to think about it, is that all evil in the world, not just moral evil but also physical evil (such as human death due to a hurricane or to spontaneous abortion), is somehow due to human sinfulness, the inevitable result of true freedom. Even though it is true that even physical evil is due to human sinfulness, and even though it is true that God permits this evil to exist because He values highly true freedom in man, it is also true that the individual man is, in the end, only held responsible for the evil in violating his own conscience. My argument here, and the argument of the Church as I understand it, is that a properly informed conscience should object to the willful destruction of an embryo. I am engaging in this debate in what seems to be a hopeless attempt to publicize the facts that lead to the proper formation of conscience.
I apologize, but I see little point in further debate. I do not recognize either the authority or the validity of the Catholic Church or its various doctrines. I reject an organization which preaches morality and conscience, but transfers child molesters from parish to parish and covers up their crimes. If there is a God, and he wishes to correct me on the moral choices I have made, then on judgement day I will stand and take responsibility for them. I will never stand there and say, "I did wrong, but unknowingly, because the Church said it was okay and I accepted their authority."
Again I would point out that the Church does not ask anyone to accept her authority against one's conscience. Rather, she calls one to examine one's conscience in the light of her arguments. This is a call to study and to search, not only to discuss as we are doing now. You seem to be a person who recognizes the importance of conscience, and so we are in full agreement on the most fundamental of issues regarding morality. You will be judged by the Christ in the end, but you will be judged only against your own conscience. Ignorance, however, will save you only if it is of an invincible character; so you have the responsibility to seek the truth even if it is uncomfortable or requires you to change your views at the end of an honest and thorough search.
Do not fall into the trap of equating the immoral behavior of certain priests and bishops with the teaching
I like science and stuff, too. My mother is a professor of neuroanatomy, my father is an endocrinologist who worked for a long time at the Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston, my brother got his M.S. in mathematics, and I got my Ph.D. in astrophysics. Not only are we all Catholic, but my brother is studying for his doctorate at the Dominican School of Theology in San Francisco.
The Church does not espouse Luddite philosophy. The only reason that the Church opposes a very small number of very specific technologies is that the Church is trying to defend the helpless and innocent. In general, you will find that the Church is much more friendly to science than, say, the fundamentalists. Did you know that Georges Lemaitre, a colleague of Einstein and a Catholic priest, is known as the father of modern big-bang cosmology? Did you know that at least as early as the 1870s, the Church made clear that it has in principle no objection to the hypotheses in Darwin's Origin of Species?
Maybe instead of just deciding that anybody who goes "against cloning and technology" is the enemy, you might consider finding out about the reasons for opposition. Maybe somebody who can't defend himself is being hurt. Maybe something sacred is being destroyed. Maybe the person saying, "Wait a minute," is neither an asshole nor an idiot.
I am interested in knowing what you mean by "when I was religious" and why you think that God, if He exists, is a bastard. Please contact me via e-mail (tevaughan@comcast.net) because we're straying too far off of the thread and because I can much more easily use vim (the one true editor) to compose messages via e-mail. I dislike having to use this damned point-and-click GUI piece-of-shit editor when I post to Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
So far as I can tell, science grows more powerful in each of two different but interrelated ways.
1. As the experimental data come in, the theories must change so that they accurately predict the results from an ever wider set of experimental circumstances.
2. Occasionally, there is a theoretical improvement that both increases the range of predicted circumstances and simplifies at some level the overall conceptual framework.
So long as civilization does not altogether collapse, and the various scientific communities along with it, neither of these two senses of scientific accomplishment depends on funding, but the rate at which science becomes more powerful does depend on funding.
That's a really good question.
Although I've never played with VOIP, I have been watching from the sidelines.
I have noticed that a typical cell-phone conversation has noticeable latency. It's bad enough so that, when I'm calling from my cell phone, I try to call a land-line if possible. I don't want to incur the full latency of a cell-to-cell call.
I have often wondered what the source of the latency is. Does one handset have worse latency than another because of variable processing power? Or is the latency dominated by delays in processing at the tower? Or somewhere else? Is the latency asymmetric? For example, is it mostly on the encoding side in the handset and not so much on the decoding side? It would be cool if an expert would drop by this thread to enlighten me. :^)
Anyway, if latency were a real issue for VOIP (and I have no experience to say one way or the other), then, even if the audio fidelity of what comes through were substantially greater than that of a land line, I'd still prefer a land line for a real-time conversation.
We cannot ever rightly say that general relativity is true, for it is a
scientific theory. A scientific theory is not something that can be
proved true, though it can be proved false.
In the hundred years or so since Einstein's introduction of general
relativity, no observation has produced data that would rule out general
relativity from its status as a candidate for the true description of
gravity. So in a loose sense, it still "holds true". But such wording
can be subtly confusing and, in my opinion, should be discouraged.
No experiment---not even any experiment related to quantum
mechanics---no experiment has exposed flaws in general relativity. It
is well known that general relativity and quantum mechanics are
incompatible. They cannot both be true. Still, no experiment yet
devised has been able to rule out either of those great theoretical
foundations of modern physics.
A theory of everything would need to be inconsistent, in some sense,
with either GR or with QM or with both.
It's only a very crude analogy.
That's a good point, and it should be elaborated as the proper response
to cyberchondriac.
cyberchondriac identifies the grid-bent-by-balls as "the current popular
gravity model". It is in fact a popular model, which I remember from
watching PBS even as far back as the 1970s. The good thing about this
model is that it allows one to visualize how a mass both distorts space
and moves in response to the distortion caused by another object. But
its goodness as a model of gravity ends there, in part due to
cyberchondriac's astute observation that it makes use of gravity to
explain gravity. Still, the model is not bad because it uses one aspect
of gravity (that it is nearly uniform near the surface of the Earth) to
explain a *different* aspect of gravity (that distortions caused by
multiple objects can interfere with each other and lead to motion).
In reality, it's both space *and* time that are being
distorted.
Not quite. In reality, the best model that we have is general
relativity, according to which both space and time are being distorted.
But this is not to say that space and time are being distorted in
reality, because we will never know for sure what's going on in reality.
That is, a scientific theory (like general relativity) can never be
proved true, though it can be proved false. Who knows? General
relativity might be ruled out by some future experiments and replaced
with a fundamentally different view of gravity.
Having a degree in physics means nothing if you didn't do
anything in this branch of physics.
That seems a bit strong. A physics degree does mean that you can
reasonably expect an explanation to be understood without too much
effort on your part.
First off, the electron is not the lightest particle. Strictly
speaking, the electron neutrino weighs in at less than 2.2 eV, where the
electron weighs in at 0.511 MeV. Then you have the tau neutrino, which
weighs in at 15.5 MeV. Then you have the proton, which weighs 938 MeV.
After that we have the tauon, which has a mass of 1.7 GeV. All of which,
so far, are leptons.
I can see where you're going, but you made a careless error. The proton
is not a lepton.
In the standard model, leptons and quarks are fundamental particles.
Leptons and quarks are reflections of each other through a certain
symmetry. But a quark never appears by itself. A quark-antiquark pair
is called a meson (which is a boson because it has whole-integer quantum
spin), and a triplet of quarks, like a proton or neutron, is called a
baryon (which is a fermion because it has half-integer quantum spin). A
hadron is any particle that interacts through the strong force; this
includes mesons and baryons but not leptons.
I posted this on the wiki, to you see why it doesn't make any
difference.
Are you referring to the OFF wiki? I haven't gone back there since my
initial visit.
Whenever the receiver completes its assembly of the work -- from a
Torrent, or from the randomized bits on the OFF net -- the sender is
"distributing one copy". Which, if (s)he has not the right to do, is
copyright infringement.
I agree. I did not dispute this in my post.
The bits are not the work. The tape was not the work. The vinyl disk was
not the work. The covers and the paper of a book are not the work. The
canvas, the frame, and the paint in the Mona Lisa on the Louvre are not
the work.
(cue revealing music!!)
They are ... the media!
Good point, and I agree, but I did not dispute this in my post.
If you put a poem to be read by Patricia Arquette in Phoenix and
Jennifer Love Hewitt transcribes it in Grandview, there was no
intermediate copy (as is the case with OFF) but there was a copy
nevertheless.
Well, this depends on what you mean by "intermediate copy".
My points were merely
considered Coloured by someone who espouses a particular legal theory
and
blocks as Coloured.
It is an interesting philosophical curiousity.
Perhaps there are interesting, practical uses, but I wasn't commenting
on such.
And Medium is liable for copyright infringement. And Ghost Whisperer's
copy is not a legitimate copy, so it cannot be sold or otherwise
distributed.
I don't know what you are talking about here.
I understand that copyright can be used by the owner of a work to sue
the producer of an unauthorized representation of that same work.
In the case of OFF, the distributor of the URL containing the
instructions referring to the OFF would seem to be liable.
What is interesting, however, is that anyone who merely stores or
distributes blocks in the OFF would seem, at least according to the
Colour theory, not to be liable for anything.
Except that is probably bullshit to copyright lawyers.
There's a great explanation of why in this essay, What Colour are
your Bits. It's actually about another system based on the same sort of
ideas.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php
Under the lawyer's rules, Colour is not a mathematical function of
the bits that you can determine by examining the bits. It matters where
the bits came from. The scrambled file still has the copyright Colour
because it came from the copyrighted input file. It doesn't matter that
it looks like, or maybe even is bit-for-bit identical with, some other
file that you could get from a random number generator. It happens that
you didn't get it from a random number generator. You got it from
copyrighted material; it is copyrighted.
But the OFF is a bit different from standard encryption. In the OFF,
every data block is produced by a random-number generator.
The only thing that would have Colour, from the lawyer's point of view,
would be the instructions at the URL, as indicated on the OFF wiki. So
the data blocks in the OFF would be Colourless even to the lawyer
in the example above.
the ancient alchemists goal was to turn lead into gold. which they
thought possible, because they did not perceive magic in gold, it was
just stuff. surely, with the right manipulations, some stuff could be
turned into other stuff, right?
and from that basic fantasy thought came the groundwork for centuries
of hard work, the discovery of the fields of chemistry, physics, all the
subfields...
Interesting comparison. And it's very refreshing to see the
tradition of the alchemists portrayed as ennobled by their not regarding
gold as magical.
What I find interesting, though, is what almost everyone in this
forum assumes: That what gives an adult human being his amazing mind is,
to use your analogy, just stuff. That is, everyone seems to assume that
the existence of a human brain---or some physical equivalent---is
sufficient for the existence of a human mind.
Of course, this is a natural assumption for anyone who subscribes to
philosophical materialism, according to which matter (stuff) is all that
really exists anyway. (Though the modern materialist would no doubt
admit also the existence of other forms of energy besides matter.) So
perhaps it is just the dominance of materialism that is evident
here.
such that one day in the middle of the last century, some dudes with
some extra time at a cyclotron said "hey, why don't we bombard some lead
atoms, i have a feeling about what the decay product will be
(snigger)"
and there, as a completely forgotten afterthought, was a fulfillment
of the ancient alchemist's original goals, many generations
before
This is very entertaining, and there would seem to be some truth in
it.
However, your presentation is also misleading. If we could produce
gold from a more common element by transmutation *efficiently*, then,
and only then, would we have achieved the ancient alchemist's original
goal. We have still not achieved that goal. It is far too expensive to
produce gold in a nuclear reactor or collider.
And if we *did* find a way to do this efficiently, it would *not* be
just an afterthought. It would have a major impact on the economy.
to me, i think this is the fate of AI: it will be a formative
motivation. just as the ancient alchemist's looked at gold and saw just
stuff, we look at the brain and just see neurons. and all of the ffort
to replicate the human brain will spawn incredibly sophisticated fields
of information science we can only begin to grasp at the foundations of
right now.
Yes, there is no doubt that the effort spent on understanding the
human brain and on designing machines that mimic certain aspects of the
brain's behavior will have amazing and interesting consequences.
But there is, I think, at least some room to doubt that a human brain
is equivalent to a human mind.
And there is even more room to doubt that algorithms in a digital
computer could every produce a mind like that of a human being. Roger
Penrose, in particular, has made some interesting arguments for how
human thought is non-algorithmic.
It is perhaps politically unwise to suggest, in a room populated :^).
mostly by materialists, that there could exist anything more fundamental
than matter. Maybe I am committing karma suicide by posting this here
(unless no one notices my post
belief in infallibility is primordial. (Disbelief in infallibility is
also primordial.) Most catholics still don't believe it. What merely nominal "Catholics" believe is irrelevant to my point. The
Church has clear and official teaching, some of which she considers
infallibly promulgated. One who doesn't accept the teachings of the
ecumenical councils as infallibly promulgated is not really a Catholic,
regardless of what he calls himself. Heck, there were even dissenting bishops at Vatican I. Yes, and some of them even started a schismatic sect, known as the "Old
Catholics", but they seem actually to be more like New Protestants.
valuable? Beats me. The only unique resources the Moon has
(exceedingly low temperatures in the shade, unbelievably good vacuum)
you can also get in orbit, where you don't have to worry about any
gravity at all, and can build eight-mile wide factories out of gossamer
and shoe strings, if you want. The features of earth orbit include:
The features of the lunar surface include:
poles).
Gravity turns out to be useful for construction and for manufacturing.
It is not available for use in earth orbit (except to keep the space
station in orbit
enough to enable some conventional techniques to be applied but small
enough to enable some novel approaches. Of course, one could simulate
gravity in orbit by way of centrifugal force, but that complicates the
system. Good old gravity can be an advantage on the moon.
Stable bedrock also turns out to be a useful thing that is not available
in orbit. Orbiting structures undergo vibrations that don't dampen
easily. Any manufacturing or other application that requires a quiet,
steady platform is difficult to set up on an orbiting platform. It can
certainly be done, but there's something to be said for the simplicity
of just anchoring to bedrock, especially if other parts of the complex
generate noisy vibrations. The moon has less geological activity than
the earth, and, with its near-vacuum it is a good platform for precise
astronomical observations, etc.
The belief in the infallibility of the corpus of apostolic successors and of the office of Peter in particular is primordial in Christianity. It is related to the idea of binding and loosing, the keys to the kingdom. The Church does not formally define doctrine until there is a clear need to make something explicit and specific. In the matter of infallibility, there was for almost two thousand years no need to define explicitly and specifically what was always held implicitly.
Perhaps any creature with a speculative intellect is, like a human, created in God's image.
Galileo
John Paul II did apologize for the Church's wrong treatment of Galileo. Although, as indicated by the Pope, there were errors in Church's dealing with Galileo, the Church's view at the time was essentially correct: Galileo had no observational evidence to distinguish between the Copernican model and the (geocentric) model of Tycho. So there was no compelling reason at the time of Galileo for everyone to abandon the prevailing view. Nevertheless, it was the Church's position, expressed by the Inquisition's Cardinal Bellarmine at the time, that if evidence disproving the geocentric model were to come forth, then a reconsideration of the interpretation of the relevant portions of Scripture would be in order. In the mean time, after Galileo's first appearance before the Inquisition, he was ordered to refrain from asserting that the heliocentric view is a certain truth and to advance it only as one hypothesis. Galileo's refusal to do this ultimately got him in trouble later.
Hell
The Church has always taught, still teaches, and will always teach the reality of Hell. The Church does not teach that Hell is merely a metaphor for something. Specifically, the Church teaches that human beings are eternal creatures (so each of us will perceive an infinitely long existence); that there will be a resurrection of the dead; that there are essentially only two possible ends for our resurrected bodies: eternal life or eternal death; that the choice between them is one that we make in freedom; and that eternal death is extremely unpleasant.
Evolution
The Catholic Church has never changed its official position on evolution. St. Augustine, in the 300s AD, proposed an idea of evolution over long periods (though not of course involving natural selection). St. Augustine is a doctor of the Church. The earliest official response that I've seen to Darwin is in the 1870s, when a German bishop remarked that there is nothing objectionable to the physical theory of evolution. The Church did not deliver a universal message until Pope Pius XII in 1950 published Humani Generis, in which he basically said that there is nothing wrong with the idea of the evolution of creatures, even of humans, so long as one remembers that the human soul is not the product of evolution.
Aliens
In the context of the idea of many worlds, the Church's position is that Christ goes wherever he is needed.
Modernization
Modernization, yes, modernism, no. With respect to grave matter, about which the Church claims to teach infallibly, the Church changes only her mode of expression to suit the times, not the content of her expression. There is a valid concept of doctrinal development over time, as laid out by John Henry Newman. This involves, among other things, the idea that the Church becomes more explicit whenever she needs to, but she never contradicts anything that she has previously proclaimed as infallible.
With respect to natural science, this is irrelevant, however, because the Church has never made any infallible assertions dealing with natural science. The whole business about heliocentrism versus geocentrism, for example, did not concern teachings that the Church considered infallible. Otherwise, Bellarmine would have expressed quite a different opinion.
Freenet seems to be designed primarily for anonymity, and I have read that it does not have the best performance. However, it does try to become efficient over time by moving frequently requested data around automatically on the various nodes in order to reduce overall bandwidth use and improve performance. That is, the network adapts itself to optimize for something.
I wonder if, in principle, using something like freenet would accidentally be beneficial for providers like Verizon, at least with respect to the issue at hand.
As to the point about practicality, it is of course likely that there is little publicly noticeable, practical consequence to a given individual's religious belief. But practical import can't be ruled out altogether. Any individual, no matter how lowly, may end up having an important role to play in history.
I am well aware that the density and temperature at the core of Jupiter are a long way from those suitable for detectable nuclear fusion. Detectable, that is, by looking at Jupiter's surface temperature.
However, even in the conditions of Jupiter's core, the cross-section for various fusion reactions is not zero. It's just really, really small. Given the large number of particles in Jupiter's core, though, it is likely that fusion is nevertheless going on at some undetectable rate.
The point is that saying, "Fusion doesn't happen below a certain mass," is not right.
Better would be to say that the diminishing effect of nuclear fusion, below a certain mass of object, is no longer able to stabilize the size and temperature of an object.
The comments that I read here on Slashdot have mentioned many interesting things, most especially the agreement between the observed minimum mass and the predicted minimum mass, around 70 M_Jupiter.
What seems missing from the discussion, however, though perhaps I just missed it, is any mention of what it means to claim that there is a mass below which fusion of some sort doesn't occur. Surely there is fusion at some undetectable level even in Jupiter. The question is whether the rate of fusion is high enough to have an observable effect. What would be an observable effect? That is the question that I should like to have answered.
According to the theory of star formation, a protostar approaches the main sequence along the Hayashi track in the HR diagram. Contraction releases gravitational potential energy during this phase, and, for a low-mass protostar, the surface temperature remains roughly constant while the luminosity decreases due to the shrinking size of the photosphere. Eventually, the temperature and pressure in the core become high enough so that fusion halts the gravitational contraction. At this point, the surface temperature and luminosity stabilize, and we have a "zero-age" main sequence star.
If for a protostar with sufficiently low mass the gravitational collapse is such that the pressure and temperature at the core increase only slowly toward an asymptotic value, and if at every time during the contraction the rate of fusion is insufficient to halt the contraction, then what would otherwise be a tight main sequence at this point on the HR diagram would end up being a wide distribution because no long-term, stable condition (such as that provided by core fusion) would constrain a large population to a narrow band in temperature-luminosity space for a long time (billions of years).
It would be interesting to have a large enough sample to see past the low end of the main sequence. The article suggests only that the observers saw the bottom of the main sequence, but there should be brown dwarfs below it, and further tests of the theory would compare the observed distribution just below the bottom of the main sequence with predicted distributions. Such a comparison might even be useful for constraining the initial mass function of the distribution.
If only we could figure out how to build a safe nuclear launch vehicle. The energy density of nuclear fuel is something like a thousand times larger than that of chemical fuel.
Maybe you could put a reactor into an upper stage and heat something like water in a closed cycle for launch. Steam would power turbofans for vertical or horizontal liftoff. At say 50,000+ feet or so, the first stage with turbofans separates exposing nozzles for the fluid to be ejected as rocket exhaust. Now the reactor cranks up the heat higher on the working fluid and uses it directly as propellant.
I don't know. Are there any actual good designs for nuclear launch out there? I saw something about RITA, but it didn't have many details.
You didn't mention perhaps the coolest one of all (and the one that I use):
StumbleUpon.com
StumbleUpon's toolbar for Firefox and MSIE make maintaining one's own blog *really* easy, the discussion forums are lively, and the community is quite interesting and diverse.
Really?
I've been using Debian unstable continuously for years. I'm
not a developer, but there's never been a circumstance that
I couldn't work around. Unstable keeps me on my toes just
enough so that I maintain knowledge of how my system works,
even as it evolves almost continuously. And there's always
the fun of seeing what new coolness arrives in the daily
update.
I grant that Debian unstable is not for everyone, but it is
surely not just for the developer. It's for anyone who
wants to know how his operating system works. It's for
anyone who wants the best of both worlds: ease of
maintenance and latest daily software.
The developers have never suggested that I switch to stable,
not even when on the rare occasion I ask for help on
debian-devel.
The very best book that I encountered during my undergraduate days was Frank Shu's The Physical Universe. It is classic. Although it was published in 1982, Shu's book is still something that I would recommend to anyone who really wants to understand physics and astronomy.
The material on the solar system is dated, but that's not the point. The real value is the historical approach, in which the reader is invited to work out key problems himself. The problems are integrated in-line with the text, and the more difficult problems (those requiring calculus) are identified as such. Despite the book's being billed as an introduction to astronomy, it really grounds the reader in the fundamentals of mechanics and thermodynamics. The material from basic physics is given excellent motivation by its immediate application to certain astrophysical problems. The reader is not left to wonder, "Why do I need to learn this?" Shu presents the physics, and then immediately shows why it's interesting and valuable.
I believe that one's conscience is an internal device. You, on the other hand, have chosen to treat the Catholic church as generally authoritative.
I am glad to see that we agree on the primacy of conscience. One who always follows his conscience, even when it is painful to do so, is a practitioner of natural religion. The Church is the trustee and teacher of revealed religion. Natural religion is true religion. If revealed religion also be true religion, then it must contain natural religion as a subset. That's why the Church officially teaches that it is better for one to follow one's conscience against the Church than to follow the Church against one's conscience.
I do not understand how you contradict the preciousness of the souled embryo with the fact that God allows 50% of them to die. If he has the power to protect them, and chooses not to, then how should we be held to a higher standard, made as we are in his image? If he cares even for the sparrow in the field, is he not as much the "protector" of the embryo as we are?
Your question is right on target. It is essentially the classical question of the atheist. The author of Genesis 1, who made the classically Theistic pitch about God's only and ever creating good, anticipated the question, "Why then is there evil?" That's what the story of the Garden of Eden is all about. The point is that evil exists in the world because of human free will. God does not desire evil as such, but God's primary desire is human freedom. In true freedom there is the real possibility of acting against the conscience. Perhaps the hardest part of all this for the atheist, and even for the Christian who bothers to think about it, is that all evil in the world, not just moral evil but also physical evil (such as human death due to a hurricane or to spontaneous abortion), is somehow due to human sinfulness, the inevitable result of true freedom. Even though it is true that even physical evil is due to human sinfulness, and even though it is true that God permits this evil to exist because He values highly true freedom in man, it is also true that the individual man is, in the end, only held responsible for the evil in violating his own conscience. My argument here, and the argument of the Church as I understand it, is that a properly informed conscience should object to the willful destruction of an embryo. I am engaging in this debate in what seems to be a hopeless attempt to publicize the facts that lead to the proper formation of conscience.
I apologize, but I see little point in further debate. I do not recognize either the authority or the validity of the Catholic Church or its various doctrines. I reject an organization which preaches morality and conscience, but transfers child molesters from parish to parish and covers up their crimes. If there is a God, and he wishes to correct me on the moral choices I have made, then on judgement day I will stand and take responsibility for them. I will never stand there and say, "I did wrong, but unknowingly, because the Church said it was okay and I accepted their authority."
Again I would point out that the Church does not ask anyone to accept her authority against one's conscience. Rather, she calls one to examine one's conscience in the light of her arguments. This is a call to study and to search, not only to discuss as we are doing now. You seem to be a person who recognizes the importance of conscience, and so we are in full agreement on the most fundamental of issues regarding morality. You will be judged by the Christ in the end, but you will be judged only against your own conscience. Ignorance, however, will save you only if it is of an invincible character; so you have the responsibility to seek the truth even if it is uncomfortable or requires you to change your views at the end of an honest and thorough search.
Do not fall into the trap of equating the immoral behavior of certain priests and bishops with the teaching
How did religion piss you off?
I like science and stuff, too. My mother is a professor of neuroanatomy, my father is an endocrinologist who worked for a long time at the Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston, my brother got his M.S. in mathematics, and I got my Ph.D. in astrophysics. Not only are we all Catholic, but my brother is studying for his doctorate at the Dominican School of Theology in San Francisco.
The Church does not espouse Luddite philosophy. The only reason that the Church opposes a very small number of very specific technologies is that the Church is trying to defend the helpless and innocent. In general, you will find that the Church is much more friendly to science than, say, the fundamentalists. Did you know that Georges Lemaitre, a colleague of Einstein and a Catholic priest, is known as the father of modern big-bang cosmology? Did you know that at least as early as the 1870s, the Church made clear that it has in principle no objection to the hypotheses in Darwin's Origin of Species?
Maybe instead of just deciding that anybody who goes "against cloning and technology" is the enemy, you might consider finding out about the reasons for opposition. Maybe somebody who can't defend himself is being hurt. Maybe something sacred is being destroyed. Maybe the person saying, "Wait a minute," is neither an asshole nor an idiot.
I am interested in knowing what you mean by "when I was religious" and why you think that God, if He exists, is a bastard. Please contact me via e-mail (tevaughan@comcast.net) because we're straying too far off of the thread and because I can much more easily use vim (the one true editor) to compose messages via e-mail. I dislike having to use this damned point-and-click GUI piece-of-shit editor when I post to Slashdot.