The research that was done in that area back in the 1950s, which was basically *the* seminal study AFAIK, was later essentially shown to be useless because of either contamination or inconsistencies in the protocol.
However, I think there's been some other research in that area more recently, and that's what was in those Discover articles.
Fair 'nuff. In case you're interested, there have been a couple interesting articles in Discover in the last couple months (one in August, one about two or three months earlier) about just how life might have begun in that primordial soup.
The problem is that when a bunch of folks get together and start making noise about how evolution is the devil and creationism should be taught alongside it in a science class, they mean Creationism, as in the Judeo-Christian belief. There's no scientific evidence *at all* for such a belief.
There *is*, however, a small mountain of evidence that proves evolution happens and that evolution is a viable means of speciation. There's a lot of really good reading on this topic (with references!) at TalkOrigins.
And just in case I'm not being abundantly clear on this point, evolution is a fact. It happens. We've seen it.
The problem with teaching anything other than evolution in a *science* class is that anything else *isn't science.* No matter what, creationist theories cannot be proven because they rely on faith. Faith is not evidence, nor is it proof, and that's what's conveniently forgotten by most folks in favour of teaching Creationism.
If they want to teach about different creation stories in a social studies class, great. I'd be all in favour of that too. It's Constitutional, it's a good exposure to other cultures, and it just seems well-balanced. But that isn't what the right-wingers are asking for. They want Judeo-Christian Creationism taught as a science, and that's just ridiculous.
The underlying principle of science classes is that you teach that which is supported by research.
If you throw that principle out on its ear and teach creationism as valid science, which is essentially what Kansas did, then you might as well not teach any science at all, because you've effectively said you don't care whether there's any research to support the theories you're teaching.
It isn't censorship when you don't teach that the Earth is the centre of the universe, because research says that's not true. Yet the creationism fanatics make a similar argument about teaching creationism. Go figure.
(The other reason you don't teach creationism is that teaching it violates the separation of church and state by giving preference to the Judeo-Christian view of creation, and any creationist who claims otherwise is either lying or is a giant hypocrite. You ever notice staunch creationists aren't Buddhists or Muslims?)
As I pointed out before, having a #1 album doesn't mean the "artist" has any talent whatsoever. (I do rather enjoy Outkast, but lately they've become more of a manufactured hip-hop/pop act.)
Whitney Houston had a couple (?) big hits back around the time that the movie The Bodyguard came out, but everyone was quick to point out that the RIAA can't pretend that 1000 copies of that soundtrack are actually worth anything *now*. Likewise with someone like Britney Spears or n*sync or [insert name of current MTV darling here].
The problem here is that the RIAA thinks that any pop "artist" they manufacture is, by association, talented enough to be in a library, and the Kansas AG didn't have the balls to stand up to them, but instead played his own game of relative morality.
That doesn't mean they're *talented* or that they make good music.
I happen to like Outkast, but their latest two albums weren't up to the standards of their first two, IMO. Notorious is a decent rapper, but I've heard better, and he and Tupac both suffered from the "now that they're dead, let's release another album every year for the next five years" policy that their record labels seemed to love so much. It doesn't diminish their earlier work, but it doesn't excuse that behaviour on the part of the labels, either.
The "librarians" in charge of the Kansas Librarians' Association, if they don't object to what the state AG is doing, *are* most definitely into censorship.
Betcha those folks aren't even real librarians, though. All the librarians I know would be putting up a fight against this. Then again, all the librarians I know wouldn't have let the state school board mandate the teaching of Creationism, either.
He said they were making sure that the state government was not giving out materials that people might find objectionable. The Kansas Librarians' Association had no objections.
Oh, so if the people running the libraries are just as ass-backwards as the AG, this makes censorship OK?
Just because all the powers that be agree to censorship doesn't make it NOT censorship.
I bet the Kansas Librarians' Association wouldn't put up a fight if the AG decided Darwin's "Origin of Species" was "objectionable," either.
Read the article on CNN again. Specifically, and I quote:
The Kansas attorney general has withheld more than 1,600 compact discs from distribution to state libraries because officials determined the albums promote violence or illegal activity, records show.
The albums removed by Attorney General Phill Kline's office were part of 51,000 discs given to Kansas as part of a nationwide settlement to resolve allegations of price fixing.
The Kansas AG has specifically targeted a set of 1600 CDs out of the total distribution of 51000 CDs given to the state as part of the settlement.
If the AG wanted to take the stance that the settlement is total bullshit -- which it IS -- he should have sent all 51,000 back to the RIAA and said, "Piss off with your worthless crap."
Instead, by rejecting only 1,600 CDs, he has effectively said, "These 25 different artists are promoting values contrary to those I perceive my constituency to hold, so these 1,600 CDs will not be distributed."
This is horrible on two counts. He's committing blatant censorship, and he's tacitly endorsing the complete crock-of-shit RIAA settlement as acceptable.
Gee, what did Live, Lou Reed, Soul Asylum, or Stone Temple Pilots ever do to anybody?
I can understand the reasons that parents wouldn't want their children to listen to a lot of the hip-hop on the list, but that doesn't give the AG the right to impose his set of morals on an entire state. If the parents don't want their kids listening to it, DON'T LET THEM CHECK IT OUT FROM THE LIBRARY! How difficult is that?
No offence, but parents should take a proactive stance toward keeping their kids "in line," rather than a passive one. Trusting the government to fall in line with your particular social and cultural values is just stupid.
If parents don't want their kids checking out what they view as "distasteful" or "offensive" CDs from the library, then they need to make sure they're accompanying their kids to the library. Just because children are allowed in libraries doesn't mean all the material in them has to be targeted to (or even appropriate for) an under-18 audience.
I'm not suggesting that libraries should provide pornography, but I'm sure folks who disapprove of some of these musical expressions wouldn't think twice about allowing a Danielle Steel novel on the shelves. "Values," indeed.
Kansas isn't exactly known for its progressive thinking, which leads me to believe that it's mostly a censorship and "values" issue. However -- and the CNN article doesn't help to clarify this because it doesn't mention specific albums -- a pretty good argument could be made in the case of certain Outkast and Notorious B.I.G. albums that it's the RIAA foisting off more un-saleable crap on the public just to comply with the letter of the law.
Just like when they sent a library in Wisconsin 1000 copies of The Bodyguard soundtrack.
...this will take some of the sting out of the planned retirement of the Hubble.
I agree with another poster here that we need to get a suitable replacement up ASAP, but perhaps now that Hubble is truly showing its age, the public will accept its retirement as an eventuality. After all, Skylab was a pioneering space "device" (for lack of a better term) and we let that fall back down to Earth.
I'm not saying we should necessarily write it off right now, but that maybe those folks at NASA who said six months ago that Hubble was getting near retirement age were right. Now, instead of lots of expensive repair missions, let's get a new and better 'scope up there ASAP!
Apparently some of you ACs don't know the definition of "ultralight."
While these $50,000-sans-engine homebuilt helicopter kits are cool, if I had that much money, I'd buy a used Robinson, which has the added benefit of being certified for commercial ops, possibly IFR, etc.
The FAA defines "ultralight" as a powered aircraft with an empty weight of 254 pounds or less, 5 gallons or less of fuel capacity, a maximum airspeed of 55 knots at full power in level flight, and a power-off stall speed of greater than 24 knots.
AC103-7 explains all of it. Check paragraph 12 for the definitions, which are based on 14 CFR Part 103 (aka FAR 103).
The Rotorway and Ace Helicopter kits are most definitely NOT ultralights.
The students on the team, according to the Vancouver Sun article, underwent extensive testing to see if any of them were up to it. The test pilot says he's been doing a LOT of cycling over the last five years as conditioning and practise.
Even if he can't, I'll bet money that Lance Armstrong or a similarly well-conditioned pro cyclist can hold this thing off the ground easily.
Whilst there's something undeniably cool about what basically amounts to an airborne bicycle, I'd settle for an airborne moped. Using a small (~1-2 bhp) moped engine would make for only a minor weight increase, and it would surely make for less sweat;)
I'm a certificated pilot (fixed-wing) who's flown helicopters (a Robinson R22 Beta) once, and that was so incredibly fun that I'd hop in an ultralight homebuilt chopper in a second. Just let me know where to buy the kit.
When should the public have access to the research results?
I only ask because I can see some good reasons for keeping certain research classified until such time as it's determined that declassification won't unduly endanger anyone. Also, a lot of research that was never intended to benefit the public turned out to serve exactly that purpose. A great deal of our modern technology (microwaves and radar, LASERs and related, the Internet itself, Tang, freeze-dried ice cream...) was developed out of classified, taxpayer-funded, military research. It didn't benefit the public right away, but it eventually benefitted the public greatly.
My point is that you can't always -- heck, you can hardly EVER -- predict what overall results will come of new research, and it seems a bit impractical to force that research to be released to the public immediately.
Now, to address another point you made:
if they want to keep their research bottled up, then don't use government grants
If it's a choice between doing the research on a government grant and not doing the research at all -- and many times it is, as I spent a number of years in academia seeing how the process works -- I'd rather see them do the research.
Slashdot Mirror
The research that was done in that area back in the 1950s, which was basically *the* seminal study AFAIK, was later essentially shown to be useless because of either contamination or inconsistencies in the protocol.
However, I think there's been some other research in that area more recently, and that's what was in those Discover articles.
p
Fair 'nuff. In case you're interested, there have been a couple interesting articles in Discover in the last couple months (one in August, one about two or three months earlier) about just how life might have begun in that primordial soup.
p
The problem is that when a bunch of folks get together and start making noise about how evolution is the devil and creationism should be taught alongside it in a science class, they mean Creationism, as in the Judeo-Christian belief. There's no scientific evidence *at all* for such a belief.
There *is*, however, a small mountain of evidence that proves evolution happens and that evolution is a viable means of speciation. There's a lot of really good reading on this topic (with references!) at TalkOrigins.
And just in case I'm not being abundantly clear on this point, evolution is a fact. It happens. We've seen it.
The problem with teaching anything other than evolution in a *science* class is that anything else *isn't science.* No matter what, creationist theories cannot be proven because they rely on faith. Faith is not evidence, nor is it proof, and that's what's conveniently forgotten by most folks in favour of teaching Creationism.
If they want to teach about different creation stories in a social studies class, great. I'd be all in favour of that too. It's Constitutional, it's a good exposure to other cultures, and it just seems well-balanced. But that isn't what the right-wingers are asking for. They want Judeo-Christian Creationism taught as a science, and that's just ridiculous.
p
The underlying principle of science classes is that you teach that which is supported by research.
If you throw that principle out on its ear and teach creationism as valid science, which is essentially what Kansas did, then you might as well not teach any science at all, because you've effectively said you don't care whether there's any research to support the theories you're teaching.
It isn't censorship when you don't teach that the Earth is the centre of the universe, because research says that's not true. Yet the creationism fanatics make a similar argument about teaching creationism. Go figure.
(The other reason you don't teach creationism is that teaching it violates the separation of church and state by giving preference to the Judeo-Christian view of creation, and any creationist who claims otherwise is either lying or is a giant hypocrite. You ever notice staunch creationists aren't Buddhists or Muslims?)
p
As I pointed out before, having a #1 album doesn't mean the "artist" has any talent whatsoever. (I do rather enjoy Outkast, but lately they've become more of a manufactured hip-hop/pop act.)
Whitney Houston had a couple (?) big hits back around the time that the movie The Bodyguard came out, but everyone was quick to point out that the RIAA can't pretend that 1000 copies of that soundtrack are actually worth anything *now*. Likewise with someone like Britney Spears or n*sync or [insert name of current MTV darling here].
The problem here is that the RIAA thinks that any pop "artist" they manufacture is, by association, talented enough to be in a library, and the Kansas AG didn't have the balls to stand up to them, but instead played his own game of relative morality.
Ugh.
p
(also partly in response to the AC's comment below)
Dude, Britney and n*sync are popular, too.
That doesn't mean they're *talented* or that they make good music.
I happen to like Outkast, but their latest two albums weren't up to the standards of their first two, IMO. Notorious is a decent rapper, but I've heard better, and he and Tupac both suffered from the "now that they're dead, let's release another album every year for the next five years" policy that their record labels seemed to love so much. It doesn't diminish their earlier work, but it doesn't excuse that behaviour on the part of the labels, either.
p
librarians aren't into censorship
The "librarians" in charge of the Kansas Librarians' Association, if they don't object to what the state AG is doing, *are* most definitely into censorship.
Betcha those folks aren't even real librarians, though. All the librarians I know would be putting up a fight against this. Then again, all the librarians I know wouldn't have let the state school board mandate the teaching of Creationism, either.
p
He said they were making sure that the state government was not giving out materials that people might find objectionable. The Kansas Librarians' Association had no objections.
Oh, so if the people running the libraries are just as ass-backwards as the AG, this makes censorship OK?
Just because all the powers that be agree to censorship doesn't make it NOT censorship.
I bet the Kansas Librarians' Association wouldn't put up a fight if the AG decided Darwin's "Origin of Species" was "objectionable," either.
p
Read the article on CNN again. Specifically, and I quote:
The Kansas AG has specifically targeted a set of 1600 CDs out of the total distribution of 51000 CDs given to the state as part of the settlement.
If the AG wanted to take the stance that the settlement is total bullshit -- which it IS -- he should have sent all 51,000 back to the RIAA and said, "Piss off with your worthless crap."
Instead, by rejecting only 1,600 CDs, he has effectively said, "These 25 different artists are promoting values contrary to those I perceive my constituency to hold, so these 1,600 CDs will not be distributed."
This is horrible on two counts. He's committing blatant censorship, and he's tacitly endorsing the complete crock-of-shit RIAA settlement as acceptable.
p
Gee, what did Live, Lou Reed, Soul Asylum, or Stone Temple Pilots ever do to anybody?
I can understand the reasons that parents wouldn't want their children to listen to a lot of the hip-hop on the list, but that doesn't give the AG the right to impose his set of morals on an entire state. If the parents don't want their kids listening to it, DON'T LET THEM CHECK IT OUT FROM THE LIBRARY! How difficult is that?
p
No offence, but parents should take a proactive stance toward keeping their kids "in line," rather than a passive one. Trusting the government to fall in line with your particular social and cultural values is just stupid.
If parents don't want their kids checking out what they view as "distasteful" or "offensive" CDs from the library, then they need to make sure they're accompanying their kids to the library. Just because children are allowed in libraries doesn't mean all the material in them has to be targeted to (or even appropriate for) an under-18 audience.
I'm not suggesting that libraries should provide pornography, but I'm sure folks who disapprove of some of these musical expressions wouldn't think twice about allowing a Danielle Steel novel on the shelves. "Values," indeed.
p
Kansas isn't exactly known for its progressive thinking, which leads me to believe that it's mostly a censorship and "values" issue. However -- and the CNN article doesn't help to clarify this because it doesn't mention specific albums -- a pretty good argument could be made in the case of certain Outkast and Notorious B.I.G. albums that it's the RIAA foisting off more un-saleable crap on the public just to comply with the letter of the law.
Just like when they sent a library in Wisconsin 1000 copies of The Bodyguard soundtrack.
Asshats.
p
Yeah, "less" is exactly what I meant. Oops. :)
p
More to the point, this comment seems to be the one, from February of 1999.
Where were *you* on 25 February 1999?
p
But how many Beowulf clusters in a googol?
p
...this will take some of the sting out of the planned retirement of the Hubble.
I agree with another poster here that we need to get a suitable replacement up ASAP, but perhaps now that Hubble is truly showing its age, the public will accept its retirement as an eventuality. After all, Skylab was a pioneering space "device" (for lack of a better term) and we let that fall back down to Earth.
I'm not saying we should necessarily write it off right now, but that maybe those folks at NASA who said six months ago that Hubble was getting near retirement age were right. Now, instead of lots of expensive repair missions, let's get a new and better 'scope up there ASAP!
p
No way, man. Most of /. doesn't even know what sex *is*...
p
Apparently some of you ACs don't know the definition of "ultralight."
While these $50,000-sans-engine homebuilt helicopter kits are cool, if I had that much money, I'd buy a used Robinson, which has the added benefit of being certified for commercial ops, possibly IFR, etc.
The FAA defines "ultralight" as a powered aircraft with an empty weight of 254 pounds or less, 5 gallons or less of fuel capacity, a maximum airspeed of 55 knots at full power in level flight, and a power-off stall speed of greater than 24 knots.
AC103-7 explains all of it. Check paragraph 12 for the definitions, which are based on 14 CFR Part 103 (aka FAR 103).
The Rotorway and Ace Helicopter kits are most definitely NOT ultralights.
p
Thanks! That actually looks really interesting!
I gots to get me a G-1...
p
The students on the team, according to the Vancouver Sun article, underwent extensive testing to see if any of them were up to it. The test pilot says he's been doing a LOT of cycling over the last five years as conditioning and practise.
Even if he can't, I'll bet money that Lance Armstrong or a similarly well-conditioned pro cyclist can hold this thing off the ground easily.
p
...for a motorised version.
;)
Whilst there's something undeniably cool about what basically amounts to an airborne bicycle, I'd settle for an airborne moped. Using a small (~1-2 bhp) moped engine would make for only a minor weight increase, and it would surely make for less sweat
I'm a certificated pilot (fixed-wing) who's flown helicopters (a Robinson R22 Beta) once, and that was so incredibly fun that I'd hop in an ultralight homebuilt chopper in a second. Just let me know where to buy the kit.
p
When should the public have access to the research results?
I only ask because I can see some good reasons for keeping certain research classified until such time as it's determined that declassification won't unduly endanger anyone. Also, a lot of research that was never intended to benefit the public turned out to serve exactly that purpose. A great deal of our modern technology (microwaves and radar, LASERs and related, the Internet itself, Tang, freeze-dried ice cream...) was developed out of classified, taxpayer-funded, military research. It didn't benefit the public right away, but it eventually benefitted the public greatly.
My point is that you can't always -- heck, you can hardly EVER -- predict what overall results will come of new research, and it seems a bit impractical to force that research to be released to the public immediately.
Now, to address another point you made:
if they want to keep their research bottled up, then don't use government grants
If it's a choice between doing the research on a government grant and not doing the research at all -- and many times it is, as I spent a number of years in academia seeing how the process works -- I'd rather see them do the research.
p
So much for the negative reviews on Amazon.
As of this evening (2130 EDT) they're all down. There were over 200 of them this afternoon...
p
Want to register the domain name McDomalds.com for yourself?
Looks like Avanova already did...
p
I just wish this sort of intential wrong doing was punishable by some law.
:-\
It is.
Problem is that you have to have enough money to hire a lawyer to take the case.
BTW, I think you mean trademark-light. Copyright is automatic as soon as material is published and requires no registration.
p