It's hard to win an argument about semantics when the person you're arguing with refuses to admit that words are invariably ambiguous. That was one of the joys of taking the "Philosophy of Space, Time, and Matter" course offered by the Physics Department here at UIUC. Every idea we discussed could be expressed very explicitly in terms of some physical system. That presented an opportunity to discuss difficult questions (What is observation? What is the past? What is knowledge?) in an environment where we didn't have to worry about semantics. It may surprise oliverthered to hear that such discussions are even possible.
Anyway, just writing this in hopes that this thread doesn't bother going on any longer. I think you've made it sufficiently clear that there's no real debate going on here:).
I'd mod you up if I had points at the moment. I work in a web development group on a number of internal and external projects and have had to fight this battle on every last one. Bottom line: the customer may always be right, but they're also almost always ignorant. The web simply isn't an "anything goes" environment when it comes to design, at least when you're going for staying power (as opposed to simply attracting customers for a single page view). Conciseness, consistency, simplicity, maintainability... those will always win in the long run. The challenge is convincing the tunnel-visioned clients that there actually is a long run to be concerned about.
I started on this, but don't have the time or patience to complete it. IE really can do a lot of those things. I hate IE, despite the fact that I use it every day. But at least I hate it for reasons based on fact. You'll have to read down the link provided in the article, so open it up in a different window or tab or something.
I don't use it (yet), so I won't comment on it.
Disable Javascript to disable popups. Not as good a solution,
but it works fine for me.
Again, I can disable scripting altogether. There are also some
"advanced" security settings that give you some control over these.
Woo-hoo! This is actually very cool, and I wish IE would just do it.
Same in IE, but whether they're better may be a matter of opinion.
As far as I know, it is possible for third-party developers to make
sidebar plugins, but I don't use them anyway.
Yeah, more sizes would be nice, especially for presentations and when
people are looking over my shoulder. The "shortcut" is that you hold
down control and use the scrollwheel. Quite nice, actually.
I assume this doesn't work properly in IE. You shouldn't use absolute
font sizes on the web, anyway (think accessibility).
Yes! I also love this feature.
This is available under File -> Properties, but it sounds like it's
not quite as complete as Mozilla's. Combine with View Source and #11
below, and it's all there.
This is part of the "Web Tools" or whatever MS calls it now. They'll
give you the complete DOM representation of the page.
Definitely not available in IE. How useful is it? (I know that's not
the issue at hand, though.)
A minimal amount of customization is available, largely through the
windowing system. Fortunately, the "theme" that they have (nasty
Windows widgets) is at least generally consistent with the rest of
the operating system.
"Displays more informatin" doesn't sound like a "can't do" kind of
thing. Fact is, it does display some info, even if it's not
the best.
Sweet. Can't quite do that, but the "Quick Search" thing that MS
provides sounds similar. I have it set up, for example, so that
when I type "dict lentiform" it maps to
"http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=lentiform". I have similar
mappings for the Java API, AcronymFinder.com, etc.
Nice.
IE just does it differently. The funtionality is still there, and
perhaps difficult to get to for the novice. But then is a novice
going to be doing this, anyway?
See #17. I don't have to "search around my filesystem". They're in
exactly one place, which you can get to through a control panel in IE.
Time for a meta article on "The Incredible Shrinking Attention Span". Oh wait... the editors are too afraid to post meta articles. All of the criticisms of this site would be on-topic, making it harder to use mod-bombing or IMP or whatever. *sigh* Wake up, editors. This stuff is getting old.
My apologies. I didn't see the older story. I suppose I could have done a search before I submitted, but then... couldn't the editors have? *sigh* Thanks for the link, in any case.
That idea is actually discussed to some extent in The Dancing Wu-Li Masters, albeit in the context of physics. I guess the book is somewhat dated now, but I think it's still well worth a read if you're interested. Basically, one of the chapters brought up the notion that none of these particles (particularly the "strange" new ones... kaons, pions, and whatnot) didn't seem to exist until we came up with a theory that implied that they should exist. Think of the electron, for example. We didn't have any clue about it until some guy started doing crazy experiments. People had been happy to accept electricity as some kind of fluid up until that point. Just food for thought. I personally don't see much value in the idea:).
I agree that it's become somewhat dull, but keep in mind that this recent (last few years?) wave of robot competition shows isn't the first. I remember watching Nova on PBS as a kid (err... well, maybe 10 years ago). My favorite ones were the robot competitions, only they generally weren't this one-on-one battle sort of situation. They'd have tasks to complete, and whichever did it best or fastest won. So they'd be building robots out of Legos and whatnot that would have to move ping pong balls from one box to another or fly magnetic discs over a net. I seem to remember them generally being autonomous, but I'm not sure. Anybody else remember these shows? (Heck, I'm sure some people here were involved directly in them!) Does this kind of thing still air anywhere?
Richard_at_work had a valid point, even if he didn't necessarily state it all that well. (Or perhaps the moderators were just to eager to flamebait it.) His point was that the thermodynamic laws aren't some kind of mystical inviolate property of being that we should not question. They're the result of hundreds of years of patient scientific observation. The fact that observations have borne out the laws so well is the only reason they've been elevated to the level of "laws" instead of remaining as lowly "theories" (e.g. relativity, QCD, supersymmetry; take your pick).
It's a sort of linguistic distinction that unfortunately people take far too seriously. It comes up frequently for me in other contexts. People bash the theory of evolution, saying that since scientists admit it's only a "theory", it has no true merit. This is clearly flawed and really nothing more than exploiting our (err... my, anyway) language's shortcomings. The theory has plenty of empirical evidence. Not nearly as much as the laws of thermodynamics, but that's all the change of words means.
Of course your original point still stands, and perhaps we shouldn't be attacking you about this detail:).
I don't think that obstruction of view would be too big of a factor. The high-alititude balloons that I've seen photos of seem to generally be very large (need room for gas to expand into), but also extremely tall. The only constraint would be that you couldn't point your telescope within, say, 15 degrees or so of straight overhead. But foolish's point about it being very heavy is probably the main factor. BOOMERANG was relatively small. Check out this picture of the gondola with the telescope inside. The whole thing can't be more than 6m or 7m tall, and the main mirror only weighed about 12kg.
I was surprised to see that the platform for the telescope is a 747. I was under the impression that most stratospheric observation was done with balloons. This is what BOOMERANG used to map the cosmic microwave background, which (along with COBE) was pretty groundbreaking. So is there something about infrared astronomy that makes a jet a more suitable platform? I would assume that a jet's flight would cause a lot of small-scale vibration in the telescope that would seriously degrade the quality. Is there some way around that? Adaptive optics or something?
Also, slightly OT, but a new ground-based gamma ray telescope has just been put into action. Interesting, because it detects the rays indirectly by observing the Cherenkov radiation.
I think another possibility is that they feel their research isn't important enough that other people will try to verify it. I can imagine them saying, "Well, it almost works. Let's just publish to get get the department head off our back. I'm sure other people will have the time to go through our work more thoroughly." Sometimes they'll just be wrong, and further research will not bear out their claims. Of course this doesn't explain cases where researchers have falsified groundbreaking or surprising research (e.g. elements 116 and 118, cold fusion, etc.). It's still the wrong thing to do, though.
I don't necessarily agree with your point about stability. My experience (I've used Win2kPro on my laptop for about two years now and used NT4 at work for about 1.5 years) has been that while I very rarely get out-right crashes (maybe 10 BSoDs in the time I've had the laptop), Win2kPro does tend to just gradually get to the point that it needs to be rebooted. Memory leaks, needing to install service packs, etc., etc., all add up to poor MTBF. But yeah, outright stability has improved drastically from the 95/98/ME days.
I don't really think you have the right idea in your second point, though. My impression is that while the Lindows OS itself is aimed at eventually swaying over current Windows users, the Microtel / WalMart offering is really aimed at first-time users / buyers who don't aren't thinking "I need my win apps to run". They're thinking "My kids keep telling me I need to get the Internet". I don't think there are many people currently using desktop computers (home, work, whatever) who would take this machine seriously as a home system.
I think one long-term problem with relying on panel-like technologies is that the will require a lot more material. Looking around my apartment, I've got a lot of empty walls, which I'd love to have something on (posters and whatnot). It'd be great if I could have some kind of cut-to-size material like you describe that I could simply put anywhere I want and have it display some kind of (presumably non-static) information. But in that scenario, I've got to have maybe four or five square meters of material to cover all the area I'd like.
Now imagine another scenario where I've got something either overlaid on my vision or inserted directly into the optical signal (progress is being made there, too!). Now I've just got a small device coupled to a computer (which I'd also need in the first scenario) that can change what I see based on where I look. If I look at my north wall, I see a Kraftwerk poster; if I look south, I see the news. Significantly less material and less maintenance, I imagine, but at the cost of significantly more advanced technology. I suspect the panel approach will win in the short term, and will certainly face less social or ethical resistance.
There was an article in Science News a year or so ago that described some research on the topic of making DNA code for new bases. Apparently it's somewhat of a mystery why all life has "chosen" to use the same set of amino acids as a basis. With 64 codons, one would expect to be able to code for 64 different amino acids, but there's some redundancy that allows for some error tolerance. It turns out that there are some branches of life (maybe the Archea or something, I'm not sure anymore) that actually use bases that don't appear in any other organisms. So that spurred researchers to see if they could take some other amino acid that isn't used (something other than the familiar GATC, etc.), and make functional DNA with it. I don't remember exactly how far they got with it, but I believe they essentially had a functioning bacterium. (Whether it could reproduce or not, I'm not sure.)
Ah! Here's the original article: Code Breakers. It's definitely worth a read.
Obviously there are two issues here. There is a scientific issue to be debated and an ethical issue to be debated. Debate scientific merit is practically non-existant. Most biologists agree that there is a tremendous amount of useful scientific knowledge to be gained from studying less-differentiated stem cells (as opposed to the more specialized cells commonly found in adults). The ethical debate is still wide open. As Richard Feynman (and many others) have pointed out, science gives you the keys to heaven and hell. It doesn't tell you which key to use. (Paraphrased, but you can find more of his thoughts in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out".)
As for my particular opinion, I believe a collection of 8 or 16 or 32 embryonic cells isn't "alive enough" for removing them from the mother to be considered murder. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, and I openly admit the problems with this perspective. (For example, at what point does the embryo or fetus become alive / conscious / sentient enough for me to consider it a human life? 2^10 cells? 2^20 cells? I don't claim to have an answer.) I am personally not satisfied with my opinion, but so far, it seems the best to me.
I should probably assume from the fact that you brought up the Nazis so early that your post was a troll, but it's important to realize that science is a tool, just as a gun or a knife or a hammer is a tool. It can be used for good or evil. The specific issue I was addressing was the fact that pluripotent stem cells are of more scientific use than multipotent cells.
As I understand it, there are (at least) several types of stem cell that form a kind of heirarchy. At the top, there are totipotent stem cells, which can become any cell (more or less) in the human or the placenta. Once those cells differentiate, you get pluripotent stem cells, which can form any kind of tissue in the developing human. The next differentiation leads to various kinds of multipotent stem cells, which each have a more limited set of things they can eventually form. Note that these differentiations are difficult for biologists to control, since you need a rather precise mixture of biological chemicals in the cell's environment for it to turn into what you want it to.
So anyway, in this particular case, it's great that they can isolate such large quantities of stem cells safely from an adult human, but it's still rather limiting. All those cells will ever be able to form is bone, cartilage, and whatever else that particular type of multipotent cell can give rise to. This is why it's still important to many biologists to be able to collect less-differentiated stem cells. With only that type of cell, we may not be able to learn much about diseases that aren't specifically related to that limited set of tissues. (Though of course there's still a lot left to be learned about even a specific type of multipotent stem cell.)
My brother's been in the National Guard for a couple years now, so all I know about current MREs comes from him. Basically, the problem is that if you live on them for weeks or months at a time, you get sick of them. The only way to make them worth eating is to put tabasco sauce on everything, he says, and apparently it's a pretty standard thing to do. So take that for what it's worth. I had one MRE years ago that a friend in the Guard gave to my brother and me, and didn't think it was that bland, but I imagine it may have seemed a lot more exciting as a kid:).
I'm not going to completely disagree with you, but I do think it's rather unfair to suggest Einstein was unproductive after publishing his theories of relativity. In particular, he played an important part in the early interpretations of quantum mechanics (as opposed to the formulations). One of the truly astounding thought experiments he (along with Podolsky and Rosen) came up with is still being sorted out. Essentially he first recognized the problems with assuming local realism; that it is in some sense possible for quantum entities to communicate faster than the speed of light. The thought experiment was later refined by J. S. Bell, to whom the idea of exploiting this quantum entanglement is now popularly attributed. This is just one of many conceptual contributions Einstein made to the early development of quantum physics. (Google can find you much more information about Bell's experiment and Einstein's hand in it, along with a better description of exactly why the EPR experiment is so mind-bending.) On a different note, I believe he also became very politically active, with the rise of the Nazi regime in that era, but I'm not really qualified to comment on that.
Your comment on the scientists is unwarranted. The article is poorly written, implying several times that scientists had never seen this insect in southern California before. On the contrary, the insect's presence in the area is well known and documented. The interesting (though not so exciting) news is that there are a number of different species of Jerusalem cricket, and that the adults of one of the species are significantly larger than those of other species, making it the largest insect (by mass).
I agree totally. It may be slightly misleading, perhaps even more misleading than one could reasonably justify. But the space to the right is not only fairly clearly labelled as an advertisement, but it's also the same space that ads always appear on Yahoo and many other sites. The only difference here is that the ad doesn't clash horribly with the rest of the site (aside from the nasty unseriffed font). It's very common practice. If you do so little reading of news on the web that you don't realize it, you need to spend some more time hardening yourself to online advertising. It's just a friggin' game at this point; every few months, you've just got to learn to filter out a new kind of ad.
Oops... thanks for the correction. I was apparently not thinking very hard when I responded (particularly seeing as I grew up in a family of biologists:). In any case, I feel the first point is more important to make. People seem to like to forget just how big the world (and indeed the whole universe) is, and thus how many unusual or unlikely things happen. It's becoming increasingly relevant now that we're becoming more connected. It makes it much easier for knowledge of unlikely events to spread. Thus it seems to me increasingly dangerous to forget how many unlikely things are constantly happening.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, just writing this in hopes that this thread doesn't bother going on any longer. I think you've made it sufficiently clear that there's no real debate going on here :).
I'd mod you up if I had points at the moment. I work in a web development group on a number of internal and external projects and have had to fight this battle on every last one. Bottom line: the customer may always be right, but they're also almost always ignorant. The web simply isn't an "anything goes" environment when it comes to design, at least when you're going for staying power (as opposed to simply attracting customers for a single page view). Conciseness, consistency, simplicity, maintainability... those will always win in the long run. The challenge is convincing the tunnel-visioned clients that there actually is a long run to be concerned about.
It's a sort of linguistic distinction that unfortunately people take far too seriously. It comes up frequently for me in other contexts. People bash the theory of evolution, saying that since scientists admit it's only a "theory", it has no true merit. This is clearly flawed and really nothing more than exploiting our (err... my, anyway) language's shortcomings. The theory has plenty of empirical evidence. Not nearly as much as the laws of thermodynamics, but that's all the change of words means.
Of course your original point still stands, and perhaps we shouldn't be attacking you about this detail :).
Also, slightly OT, but a new ground-based gamma ray telescope has just been put into action. Interesting, because it detects the rays indirectly by observing the Cherenkov radiation.
I think another possibility is that they feel their research isn't important enough that other people will try to verify it. I can imagine them saying, "Well, it almost works. Let's just publish to get get the department head off our back. I'm sure other people will have the time to go through our work more thoroughly." Sometimes they'll just be wrong, and further research will not bear out their claims. Of course this doesn't explain cases where researchers have falsified groundbreaking or surprising research (e.g. elements 116 and 118, cold fusion, etc.). It's still the wrong thing to do, though.
Worst S/N ratio ever!
</CBG>
Just to stay on-topic to some extent, here's his story in Asimov's . Definitely worth a read! Has a sense of humor that reminds me of Stephenson.
I don't really think you have the right idea in your second point, though. My impression is that while the Lindows OS itself is aimed at eventually swaying over current Windows users, the Microtel / WalMart offering is really aimed at first-time users / buyers who don't aren't thinking "I need my win apps to run". They're thinking "My kids keep telling me I need to get the Internet". I don't think there are many people currently using desktop computers (home, work, whatever) who would take this machine seriously as a home system.
Now imagine another scenario where I've got something either overlaid on my vision or inserted directly into the optical signal (progress is being made there, too!). Now I've just got a small device coupled to a computer (which I'd also need in the first scenario) that can change what I see based on where I look. If I look at my north wall, I see a Kraftwerk poster; if I look south, I see the news. Significantly less material and less maintenance, I imagine, but at the cost of significantly more advanced technology. I suspect the panel approach will win in the short term, and will certainly face less social or ethical resistance.
Any other thoughts on this?
Ah! Here's the original article: Code Breakers. It's definitely worth a read.
As for my particular opinion, I believe a collection of 8 or 16 or 32 embryonic cells isn't "alive enough" for removing them from the mother to be considered murder. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, and I openly admit the problems with this perspective. (For example, at what point does the embryo or fetus become alive / conscious / sentient enough for me to consider it a human life? 2^10 cells? 2^20 cells? I don't claim to have an answer.) I am personally not satisfied with my opinion, but so far, it seems the best to me.
I should probably assume from the fact that you brought up the Nazis so early that your post was a troll, but it's important to realize that science is a tool, just as a gun or a knife or a hammer is a tool. It can be used for good or evil. The specific issue I was addressing was the fact that pluripotent stem cells are of more scientific use than multipotent cells.
So anyway, in this particular case, it's great that they can isolate such large quantities of stem cells safely from an adult human, but it's still rather limiting. All those cells will ever be able to form is bone, cartilage, and whatever else that particular type of multipotent cell can give rise to. This is why it's still important to many biologists to be able to collect less-differentiated stem cells. With only that type of cell, we may not be able to learn much about diseases that aren't specifically related to that limited set of tissues. (Though of course there's still a lot left to be learned about even a specific type of multipotent stem cell.)
My brother's been in the National Guard for a couple years now, so all I know about current MREs comes from him. Basically, the problem is that if you live on them for weeks or months at a time, you get sick of them. The only way to make them worth eating is to put tabasco sauce on everything, he says, and apparently it's a pretty standard thing to do. So take that for what it's worth. I had one MRE years ago that a friend in the Guard gave to my brother and me, and didn't think it was that bland, but I imagine it may have seemed a lot more exciting as a kid :).
I'm not going to completely disagree with you, but I do think it's rather unfair to suggest Einstein was unproductive after publishing his theories of relativity. In particular, he played an important part in the early interpretations of quantum mechanics (as opposed to the formulations). One of the truly astounding thought experiments he (along with Podolsky and Rosen) came up with is still being sorted out. Essentially he first recognized the problems with assuming local realism; that it is in some sense possible for quantum entities to communicate faster than the speed of light. The thought experiment was later refined by J. S. Bell, to whom the idea of exploiting this quantum entanglement is now popularly attributed. This is just one of many conceptual contributions Einstein made to the early development of quantum physics. (Google can find you much more information about Bell's experiment and Einstein's hand in it, along with a better description of exactly why the EPR experiment is so mind-bending.) On a different note, I believe he also became very politically active, with the rise of the Nazi regime in that era, but I'm not really qualified to comment on that.
Before anyone corrects me, I meant the largest insect in that area. The largest insect known is rather drastically larger :).
Your comment on the scientists is unwarranted. The article is poorly written, implying several times that scientists had never seen this insect in southern California before. On the contrary, the insect's presence in the area is well known and documented. The interesting (though not so exciting) news is that there are a number of different species of Jerusalem cricket, and that the adults of one of the species are significantly larger than those of other species, making it the largest insect (by mass).
I agree totally. It may be slightly misleading, perhaps even more misleading than one could reasonably justify. But the space to the right is not only fairly clearly labelled as an advertisement, but it's also the same space that ads always appear on Yahoo and many other sites. The only difference here is that the ad doesn't clash horribly with the rest of the site (aside from the nasty unseriffed font). It's very common practice. If you do so little reading of news on the web that you don't realize it, you need to spend some more time hardening yourself to online advertising. It's just a friggin' game at this point; every few months, you've just got to learn to filter out a new kind of ad.
Oops... thanks for the correction. I was apparently not thinking very hard when I responded (particularly seeing as I grew up in a family of biologists :). In any case, I feel the first point is more important to make. People seem to like to forget just how big the world (and indeed the whole universe) is, and thus how many unusual or unlikely things happen. It's becoming increasingly relevant now that we're becoming more connected. It makes it much easier for knowledge of unlikely events to spread. Thus it seems to me increasingly dangerous to forget how many unlikely things are constantly happening.