I'm sure mechanics will be just thrilled at the idea of undoing a dozen bolts just to check under the hood. They'll be so pleased with it they'll probably call owners of this car in more often than they need to and charge them more for it.
This isn't a car for women. This is a car for ignorant women with style and an inability to comprehend that making others lives a little easier can make yours easier as well. The sort of thing the sex in the city girls would drive, if they knew how.
Of course, the F-16 was designed to be cheap (hence the single engine design) so they could be made en masse to counter the perceived Soviet numerical superiority in fighters.
Likewise (to address some of the other comments out there): The F-14 is one of the oldest fighters in use, and still has the best range of any fighter in the arsenal. The ancient B-52s still put massive amounts of steel on target. The C-130 is the mainstay of our cargo craft, and fulfills a variety of other roles beautifully including tanker and gunship. And the F-15 still performs better than just about everything, Super Hornet included, despite its "outdated" design (The F-18 is however MUCH easier to maintain, but its range sucks).
Remember, just becase something is old doesn't necessarily mean that it is worth replacing. The law of diminishing returns is in full force when it comes to designing replacements. And cost is an issue too. Refitting with modernized components is often more effective. Lately, the US military has depended on stealth only for critical or exceptionally difficult targets, mostly in the early phase of the war before we establish complete air dominace. Of course, we've mostly been fighting weak countries lately.
Not all of us can get vision correction. My pupils are too big, for instance. If you do a little research you'll find that laser vision correction as it stands now is neither as sophisticated nor as powerful as it claims to be. Mainly because it only reshapes a small portion of the light-refracting area.
Yes, I am afraid of ghosts. And starbursts, and halos. Where can I get a pair of intacs?
Heh heh. Well, there's a fine line between dogged determination and pedanticity. The main difference here being that science matters, and slashdot typos (along with faulty statements regarding computers, entertainment, etc.) don't.
Of course this is just one example, and a highly inflammatory one at that. But the fact remains that it all boils down to the administration wanting to have some dissenting voices weigh in on scientific issues when public policy is affected.
Yeah... dissenting voices that just happen to have little to no credibility in the wider scientific community, and who are paid by the lobbies of prominent administration allies, and who conviniently offer theories that support the administrations policies.
But this administration wouldn't use experts like that. Why, that would be like not listening to the intelligence agencies that do the hard work and give reasoned explanations, but the ones that tell you what you want to support your policy even if they have to exaggerate/make up/cherry-pick it. It would be a recipe for disaster - you might even go to war on false pretenses and a completly wrong idea of the actual costs involved!
See, what y'all have to understand is, it's not politics, it's just that scientists hate bad science. When they see it, they just can't help themselves, they have to destroy it. And by destroy I don't mean bury or ignore it, I mean publicly tearing that faulty logic/research to pieces and sending the proponent of it packing with tears of shame in his/her eyes. They absolutely will not give up until the fool either admits s/he was wrong, proves they are right, or is so thoroughly discredited they can't even get anyone to listen anymore.
Why? Because when someone is clearly WRONG, they'll be damned if they let them pretend that they're right. And they especially hate it when psuedo-scientists try to use their profession.
Remember Galileo? Hundreds of years of attempted suppression, but they never gave up and never let anyone forget until the Church officially apologized. There were a lot of reasons for Vatican II, but I'd argue that the Church's losing battle against the forces of reason was the major one. Darwin? They're still fighting tooth and nail. States can pass laws allowing "creation science" but they soon find they're the butt of ridicule and have acquired a reputation for ignorance. If Junior has any brains at all (which is debatable) he'll quietly start leaving the science to the scientists... and if he doesn't he'll soon find his intelligence will be a rather large issue.
The fact that copper wire telephone networks supply their own power for basic functionality is about the only thing really good about them.
You could duplicate this by having the fiber to your house (and along the whole network) come with and operate off of a secondary power network besides the regular electrical grid. It would need relatively little power. Thus preserving your ability to have basic communication. However this has the disadvantage of requiring the very copper wiring that fiber optic eliminated! Building a backup battery into the low-power fiber routers/signal converters might be more sensible.
Build a bigger road... and more people will drive on it. And they'll probably be driving alone, and further. This is a fundamental truth ignored by virtually every city planner in the country. Building more road won't automatically solve your problems. The fundamental value to plan for is convenience, aka time. Most people will commute for an hour to get to or from work - consequently, anywhere within an hour is fair game. Efficiency only comes into play when the traffic is already clogged.
Point being, you make these pipes, and people will blow the bandwidth on crap, at the expense of the important services. And they'll probably ruin it for their neighbors too. Unless the network is capable of giving everyone essential service simultaneously, and prioritizes leaf access to pipe bandwidth such that everyone can simultaneously get their essential cut, you'll see things like phone service cut off. Etc.
Why should I foot the bill for your access, when you CHOOSE to live 60 miles outside of where you work? If it's so nice to live out there, you should be willing to pay extra for the extra effort needed to provide access to you way out in the boonies. Or live without it. Hey, thanks for burning all that gas too.
There are good arguments for universal service - mainly for folks who need to live out in the middle of nowhere providing vital services (and even then you could argue that they should simply be paid more, but enough about self-defeating farm subsidies). You aren't one of them.
If I programmed the system, I'd favor slightly annoyed callers over calm ones, and "accidentally" drop the annoyed and angry ones. Just try talking to the manager now, punk. We'll give you service when we feel like it.
But see, that's my point. There are many Goedel numbers, and many other numbers that could be considered unique or interesting. But there's only one pi (or phi, or e, or i, or 1, or 0) and it really gets around. Pi shows up as a critical element in many broadly-useful formula. There is no such thing as "a" pi. There is only THE pi.
Now that's not to say there might not be some integer drawn from some set that is especially meaningful within/outside the set. Even pi is in the set of real numbers, and has formula to calculate it, and can be used genericly. But it would have to be of fundamental significance beyond merely the generic rules used to generate and use the set it came from.
Yeah I'm no expert on hebrew numbers either, but it looks like it wouldn't match. And strictly speaking there's no such thing as digits in hebrew numbers, since it's an additive system more like the romans than the place system! Now you could have a string of letters interpreted as a string of numerals, with the sum meaning something.
IIRC there was a book recently called the Bible Code, which said that when you took the bible in hebrew, laid it out as a regular grid like a crossword, there were all sorts of hidden prophecies in particular patterns. However, somebody pointed out that "meaningful" statements would pop out of ANY document or even random strings laid out in such a fashion, with a certain probability. Which is kind of what that couple of scenes look like.
But, I like your automata/program idea, with the God Number in fact representing some fundamental algorithm or state machine. Put it in a context that lets it evolve and wham! Maybe Wolfram found it and that's where his incredible sense of hubris comes from.
Yeah I did think of that one. Perhaps it's the number of dimensions in the the Universal Vector, the total number of variables which describe the universe in its entirety. Current estimates put the number of atoms in the universe at ~10^80. If you figure in interactions or subatomic particles a 10^216 might be about right.
Uh, but enough unscientific speculation over hebrew numerology and independent film...
I literally watched that movie 2 nights ago. Spooooooky....
Not bad (aside from one glaringly obviousl mathematical error). The thing that I mulled over the most was the proposition that a large integer could be a number of fundamental significance. In the movie it was 216 digits long. I had always figured all the really fundamental numbers were irrational. After thinking about it and looking up on the internet it seems there are actually only 6: pi, e, i, 1, 0, and phi (and arguably, -1). And the first five can be directly related with the equation:
e^(pi*i) + 1 = 0
phi is not directly related to the others in such a manner (In the movie the god number is somehow tied to both pi and phi). Although pi and phi both happen to be ratios that are also irrational. But to get back to my original point, the suggestion that any number of a truly fundamental significance besides 0 and 1 would be not only rational but an integer seems improbable.
People aren't going to get naked to buy clothes. Maybe they would go down to underwear. Maybe they would do it once and save it for later so that they didn't have to do it again until they changed size - unfortunately that would entail giving anyone access to your profile online, which wouldn't be so bad as long as it's just a set of points and not a picture.
Alternatively, you could use terahertz imaging to scan the body through clothes.
... and it took a few hours too. On my old Wallstreet it would have taken minutes, and I wouldn't be sweating over static sensitive components or wires that somehow wouldn't in the case properly.
Along with installing the airport card and upgrading your ram, replacing/upgrading a hard drive is one of the only reasons people have to crack open their 'book. Hard drives are after all relatively sensitive things, as they are one of the few things in your computer that involve moving parts. In fact the only other easily-broken thing in the notebook happens to be the only other mechanical component - the hinges and wires that pass through them (all of which I have had to replace at various times, with much hassle). Nearly everything else involves damaged or faulty solid state components, which just plain shouldn't happen in the lifetime of the computer and if it does is an indicator of bad design. For instance, my Wallstreet also had the power jack and various others soldered directly to the logic board, and predictably enough they broke. My iBook separates it on wires I think.
Long story short, make anything that is involved with mechanical force easily replaceable or appropriately engineered, and your problems are minimized.
Actually the only other movie I saw on the list was Lost in Translation. The closer you look at the film itself the more flaws you see. The script is full of cliches (particularly when you think who the director is) but thankfully spends most of the time observing the characters being themselves - and Bill Murray put in what is without a doubt the finest and most honest performance in his career. He totally deserves best actor.
Well in that case you wouldn't want to use an expensive, dangerous nuclear vessel close-in to the battlefield. Too big a target, too big a liability. Regular oilers are just big cheap tanks.
The carrier is the center of all modern fleets, and also the prime consumer of aviation fuel. Why not just use the existing nukes on board to refine the hydrogen?
Same goes for subs, they could be pressed into fuel service. It'd be an effective use for older missle boats, since there's little need for cold war strategy vessels these days. However, they may not have the reactor capacity for it.
Of course, the steps necessary to refit your ships to run on hydrogen are not trivial. It'd probably be easier to just phase in such vessels.
Only suckers and congressmen think hydrogen is a fuel source. It's just another type refined fuel, essentially. It has the great advantages of packing more energy per weight than just about any chemical compound, easy production from water or hydrocarbons and energy, and producing only water as an emission, and the great disadvantage of being a very difficult to store gas. From a practical standpoint, liquid fuels like diesel are far easier to work with and have the infrastructure to back their widespread distribution, which I why I was always in favor of diesel fuel cell technology for cars (they do exist).
As far as energy sources are concerned - solar and solar-derived (aka wind hydro and bio) energy is the way to go. Unless they start using helium 3, of course.
Certainly Evangelion spawned a whole genre of shows ripping off itself (along with a broader category of anime addressing more esoteric and philosophical themes, with mixed results), but RahXephon pretty much takes the cake. Nice music though, and I would add that it hung together better but had much less passion.
Judging by the concept art and some other stuff I've heard, it appears may very well set it in NYC. The art say "New City" on it, and isn't any more specific, but at least one building in there looked familiar.
Also, if you've spent any time at all in NYC, you'd know there are tons of Asians living there, along with every other ethnicity. And not just in Chinatown (chinese, vietnamese) and Queens (korean). The City is over half immigrant you know. Not to mention that Asians tend to be overrepresented in the sciences.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure mechanics will be just thrilled at the idea of undoing a dozen bolts just to check under the hood. They'll be so pleased with it they'll probably call owners of this car in more often than they need to and charge them more for it.
This isn't a car for women. This is a car for ignorant women with style and an inability to comprehend that making others lives a little easier can make yours easier as well. The sort of thing the sex in the city girls would drive, if they knew how.
But he's just sooooo traumatized by his life.
Of course, the F-16 was designed to be cheap (hence the single engine design) so they could be made en masse to counter the perceived Soviet numerical superiority in fighters.
Likewise (to address some of the other comments out there):
The F-14 is one of the oldest fighters in use, and still has the best range of any fighter in the arsenal. The ancient B-52s still put massive amounts of steel on target. The C-130 is the mainstay of our cargo craft, and fulfills a variety of other roles beautifully including tanker and gunship. And the F-15 still performs better than just about everything, Super Hornet included, despite its "outdated" design (The F-18 is however MUCH easier to maintain, but its range sucks).
Remember, just becase something is old doesn't necessarily mean that it is worth replacing. The law of diminishing returns is in full force when it comes to designing replacements. And cost is an issue too. Refitting with modernized components is often more effective. Lately, the US military has depended on stealth only for critical or exceptionally difficult targets, mostly in the early phase of the war before we establish complete air dominace. Of course, we've mostly been fighting weak countries lately.
Not all of us can get vision correction. My pupils are too big, for instance. If you do a little research you'll find that laser vision correction as it stands now is neither as sophisticated nor as powerful as it claims to be. Mainly because it only reshapes a small portion of the light-refracting area.
Yes, I am afraid of ghosts. And starbursts, and halos. Where can I get a pair of intacs?
Heh heh. Well, there's a fine line between dogged determination and pedanticity. The main difference here being that science matters, and slashdot typos (along with faulty statements regarding computers, entertainment, etc.) don't.
Of course this is just one example, and a highly inflammatory one at that. But the fact remains that it all boils down to the administration wanting to have some dissenting voices weigh in on scientific issues when public policy is affected.
Yeah... dissenting voices that just happen to have little to no credibility in the wider scientific community, and who are paid by the lobbies of prominent administration allies, and who conviniently offer theories that support the administrations policies.
But this administration wouldn't use experts like that. Why, that would be like not listening to the intelligence agencies that do the hard work and give reasoned explanations, but the ones that tell you what you want to support your policy even if they have to exaggerate/make up/cherry-pick it. It would be a recipe for disaster - you might even go to war on false pretenses and a completly wrong idea of the actual costs involved!
See, what y'all have to understand is, it's not politics, it's just that scientists hate bad science. When they see it, they just can't help themselves, they have to destroy it. And by destroy I don't mean bury or ignore it, I mean publicly tearing that faulty logic/research to pieces and sending the proponent of it packing with tears of shame in his/her eyes. They absolutely will not give up until the fool either admits s/he was wrong, proves they are right, or is so thoroughly discredited they can't even get anyone to listen anymore.
Why? Because when someone is clearly WRONG, they'll be damned if they let them pretend that they're right. And they especially hate it when psuedo-scientists try to use their profession.
Remember Galileo? Hundreds of years of attempted suppression, but they never gave up and never let anyone forget until the Church officially apologized. There were a lot of reasons for Vatican II, but I'd argue that the Church's losing battle against the forces of reason was the major one. Darwin? They're still fighting tooth and nail. States can pass laws allowing "creation science" but they soon find they're the butt of ridicule and have acquired a reputation for ignorance. If Junior has any brains at all (which is debatable) he'll quietly start leaving the science to the scientists... and if he doesn't he'll soon find his intelligence will be a rather large issue.
The fact that copper wire telephone networks supply their own power for basic functionality is about the only thing really good about them.
You could duplicate this by having the fiber to your house (and along the whole network) come with and operate off of a secondary power network besides the regular electrical grid. It would need relatively little power. Thus preserving your ability to have basic communication. However this has the disadvantage of requiring the very copper wiring that fiber optic eliminated! Building a backup battery into the low-power fiber routers/signal converters might be more sensible.
Build a bigger road... and more people will drive on it. And they'll probably be driving alone, and further. This is a fundamental truth ignored by virtually every city planner in the country. Building more road won't automatically solve your problems. The fundamental value to plan for is convenience, aka time. Most people will commute for an hour to get to or from work - consequently, anywhere within an hour is fair game. Efficiency only comes into play when the traffic is already clogged.
Point being, you make these pipes, and people will blow the bandwidth on crap, at the expense of the important services. And they'll probably ruin it for their neighbors too. Unless the network is capable of giving everyone essential service simultaneously, and prioritizes leaf access to pipe bandwidth such that everyone can simultaneously get their essential cut, you'll see things like phone service cut off. Etc.
Why should I foot the bill for your access, when you CHOOSE to live 60 miles outside of where you work? If it's so nice to live out there, you should be willing to pay extra for the extra effort needed to provide access to you way out in the boonies. Or live without it. Hey, thanks for burning all that gas too.
There are good arguments for universal service - mainly for folks who need to live out in the middle of nowhere providing vital services (and even then you could argue that they should simply be paid more, but enough about self-defeating farm subsidies). You aren't one of them.
Of course for more demanding folks who like their indexes fast, complete, and unfiltered, there's anime.mircx.com.
If I programmed the system, I'd favor slightly annoyed callers over calm ones, and "accidentally" drop the annoyed and angry ones. Just try talking to the manager now, punk. We'll give you service when we feel like it.
But see, that's my point. There are many Goedel numbers, and many other numbers that could be considered unique or interesting. But there's only one pi (or phi, or e, or i, or 1, or 0) and it really gets around. Pi shows up as a critical element in many broadly-useful formula. There is no such thing as "a" pi. There is only THE pi.
Now that's not to say there might not be some integer drawn from some set that is especially meaningful within/outside the set. Even pi is in the set of real numbers, and has formula to calculate it, and can be used genericly. But it would have to be of fundamental significance beyond merely the generic rules used to generate and use the set it came from.
Good call. (Cryptochrome starts studying the monster group)
Yeah I'm no expert on hebrew numbers either, but it looks like it wouldn't match. And strictly speaking there's no such thing as digits in hebrew numbers, since it's an additive system more like the romans than the place system! Now you could have a string of letters interpreted as a string of numerals, with the sum meaning something.
IIRC there was a book recently called the Bible Code, which said that when you took the bible in hebrew, laid it out as a regular grid like a crossword, there were all sorts of hidden prophecies in particular patterns. However, somebody pointed out that "meaningful" statements would pop out of ANY document or even random strings laid out in such a fashion, with a certain probability. Which is kind of what that couple of scenes look like.
But, I like your automata/program idea, with the God Number in fact representing some fundamental algorithm or state machine. Put it in a context that lets it evolve and wham! Maybe Wolfram found it and that's where his incredible sense of hubris comes from.
Yeah I did think of that one. Perhaps it's the number of dimensions in the the Universal Vector, the total number of variables which describe the universe in its entirety. Current estimates put the number of atoms in the universe at ~10^80. If you figure in interactions or subatomic particles a 10^216 might be about right.
Uh, but enough unscientific speculation over hebrew numerology and independent film...
I literally watched that movie 2 nights ago. Spooooooky....
Not bad (aside from one glaringly obviousl mathematical error). The thing that I mulled over the most was the proposition that a large integer could be a number of fundamental significance. In the movie it was 216 digits long. I had always figured all the really fundamental numbers were irrational. After thinking about it and looking up on the internet it seems there are actually only 6: pi, e, i, 1, 0, and phi (and arguably, -1). And the first five can be directly related with the equation:
e^(pi*i) + 1 = 0
phi is not directly related to the others in such a manner (In the movie the god number is somehow tied to both pi and phi). Although pi and phi both happen to be ratios that are also irrational. But to get back to my original point, the suggestion that any number of a truly fundamental significance besides 0 and 1 would be not only rational but an integer seems improbable.
People aren't going to get naked to buy clothes. Maybe they would go down to underwear. Maybe they would do it once and save it for later so that they didn't have to do it again until they changed size - unfortunately that would entail giving anyone access to your profile online, which wouldn't be so bad as long as it's just a set of points and not a picture.
Alternatively, you could use terahertz imaging to scan the body through clothes.
... and it took a few hours too. On my old Wallstreet it would have taken minutes, and I wouldn't be sweating over static sensitive components or wires that somehow wouldn't in the case properly.
Along with installing the airport card and upgrading your ram, replacing/upgrading a hard drive is one of the only reasons people have to crack open their 'book. Hard drives are after all relatively sensitive things, as they are one of the few things in your computer that involve moving parts. In fact the only other easily-broken thing in the notebook happens to be the only other mechanical component - the hinges and wires that pass through them (all of which I have had to replace at various times, with much hassle). Nearly everything else involves damaged or faulty solid state components, which just plain shouldn't happen in the lifetime of the computer and if it does is an indicator of bad design. For instance, my Wallstreet also had the power jack and various others soldered directly to the logic board, and predictably enough they broke. My iBook separates it on wires I think.
Long story short, make anything that is involved with mechanical force easily replaceable or appropriately engineered, and your problems are minimized.
Actually the only other movie I saw on the list was Lost in Translation. The closer you look at the film itself the more flaws you see. The script is full of cliches (particularly when you think who the director is) but thankfully spends most of the time observing the characters being themselves - and Bill Murray put in what is without a doubt the finest and most honest performance in his career. He totally deserves best actor.
Well in that case you wouldn't want to use an expensive, dangerous nuclear vessel close-in to the battlefield. Too big a target, too big a liability. Regular oilers are just big cheap tanks.
The carrier is the center of all modern fleets, and also the prime consumer of aviation fuel. Why not just use the existing nukes on board to refine the hydrogen?
Same goes for subs, they could be pressed into fuel service. It'd be an effective use for older missle boats, since there's little need for cold war strategy vessels these days. However, they may not have the reactor capacity for it.
Of course, the steps necessary to refit your ships to run on hydrogen are not trivial. It'd probably be easier to just phase in such vessels.
Only suckers and congressmen think hydrogen is a fuel source. It's just another type refined fuel, essentially. It has the great advantages of packing more energy per weight than just about any chemical compound, easy production from water or hydrocarbons and energy, and producing only water as an emission, and the great disadvantage of being a very difficult to store gas. From a practical standpoint, liquid fuels like diesel are far easier to work with and have the infrastructure to back their widespread distribution, which I why I was always in favor of diesel fuel cell technology for cars (they do exist).
As far as energy sources are concerned - solar and solar-derived (aka wind hydro and bio) energy is the way to go. Unless they start using helium 3, of course.
Certainly Evangelion spawned a whole genre of shows ripping off itself (along with a broader category of anime addressing more esoteric and philosophical themes, with mixed results), but RahXephon pretty much takes the cake. Nice music though, and I would add that it hung together better but had much less passion.
Judging by the concept art and some other stuff I've heard, it appears may very well set it in NYC. The art say "New City" on it, and isn't any more specific, but at least one building in there looked familiar.
Also, if you've spent any time at all in NYC, you'd know there are tons of Asians living there, along with every other ethnicity. And not just in Chinatown (chinese, vietnamese) and Queens (korean). The City is over half immigrant you know. Not to mention that Asians tend to be overrepresented in the sciences.