I have a BSc too but... That Gravitation book is great, trouble is I put it down in 1990 to learn tensor calculus (should be a piece of cake right? after solving second order partial differential equations) but I never quite finished that either. At least reading it doesn't seem to have given you the ability to guess the answer to the 13mm too quick space craft. I guess those 1279 pages weren't the answer to life the universe and everything after all.
Ah good. I'm looking for an expert to explain to me why the solar system is a pancake with all the planets lined up along the ecliptic and why galaxies are flat discs. Also why elliptical galaxies result from the collision of spiral ones.
Ah ha ha ha this is so funny. Looks like the US state behaves worse than any of its historical enemies and guess what the people being treated the worst are those losing their lives in order to defend it. hahha uh ah ha. Sorry I just fell off my chair I'm laughing so hard.
Are you people really as stupid as this makes you look?
You may have cause to revise this opinion in a decade or twos time when the lynch mob strings you up as a nasty Evolutionist. A few decades of indoctrination in the public schools should make it easy enough to overthrow the scientific aristocracy.
Ideas are powerful things, the religious meme is visibly powerful; once installed it resists all efforts to cure the person infected with it. Thats why its so important for religions to get hold of children in schools before their rational thinking processes can build up any defense.
Still lets face it, if you don't think your scientific meme needs to be protected then you probably wont miss it much when it dies out.
I don't think it will interoperate or have published specifications. It will have lots of DRM to preserve the content providers rights over the material distributed. I am pretty sure that it will not be like anything else available. Having said that its probably hackable in the end. Expect the death penalty or 500 years in jail for cracking it though.
We have to bear in mind that the Soviet Union took quite a few decades to kill off and that the hegemony of big business may take a little more to unseat than youngsters with open source technology. Particularly as big business has now clearly identified the free open internet as its only credible enemy and is going all out to kill it off and take control over it before the rest of the population notices.
The profit and loss accounts of content providers are small beer compared to passing control of the internet over to them. I would prefer every internet user in the UK to pay $40 a month into a fund to subsidize them rather than pass control over what I access to them.
The scientific revolution only came about because of books and books only came about through the Gutenberg printing press. Its lucky that control over printing wasn't passed over to the Town Criers Guild in 1439 or we would still be living in sheds heated by the pigs on the ground floor. Stronger Faster Harder Better comes at a price and it looks like the battle of this century is going to be for the free internet, unless you prefer living in your feudal pig shed of course.
you want to bet that it wont just affect a few thousand? The only viable implementation scheme I can think of is for the ISP to ban all file sharing protocols except those going to the content providers nominated web sites. Looks like control of the UK's internet access is about to be put in the hands of Walt Disney. That would be par for the course for Nu Labor.
If you don't put your head above the parapet sometimes then you don't deserve to stay free.
All the nasty dictators and vile political systems have had people stand up against them and eventually they win. You may be the one that dies in the Gulag but you may also be the one that gets lucky and kicks down the Berlin Wall.
If you think its wrong, then stand up and say so, and never ever give up hope. Nil illegitimo in desperandum carborundum.
Nutjobs who think its a good idea to kill and maim innocent civilians in the name of a cause by the way deserve to die of an unpleasant disease that takes a long time to kill them.
Uh-huh thanks for that. I finally grok what all the fuss is about the Higgs from your analogy of the Higgs to the gravity field and the photon to the electromagnetic field. Just because we don't see Higgs running about all over the place on earth doesn't mean that there isn't a gravitational field. Just like if we looked inside a Faraday cage and saw no photons doesn't mean that there isn't an electromagnetic field to describe.
Another thought is, does this mean that there is a zoo of Higgs like things and is there an analogy to the kinds of things we have discovered about the electromagnetic field. Like the electron has charge and we have electrostatic attraction, atoms have magnetic (moments?) and forces between them. So would the zoo of Higgs like entities express similar disparate behaviors with a root in the mechanisms of the gravitational field? If we look at large scale things in the universe like galactic clusters and decide that they have 'dark matter' expressing additional mass effects through the lensing of quasars, does that mean that the gravitational fields equivalent of 'magnetism' for example only shows up on that large scale - which would explain how tough it is for us to do experiments and play with the gravitational fields inner workings down here on earth.
Given all this speculative rambling I'm now very interested in what could be learned from the Higgs if it is found by the LHC.
Mind you as Douglas Adams said 'Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, well that's just peanuts to space."
I make it about 10 to the power of 60 between vacuum fluctuations and the observable universe and if the multi-universe view is right, to accommodate all the different choices of the basic physical constants, there's another 10 to the power of 500 on top of that. Its going to take quite a bit of computing power to work out the details of 10 to the power 500 different universes each with a volume containing things over a range of scales of 10 to the 60. Looks like we need a bit more than 'Deep Thought' to do this calculation. I dont think even IBM is going to build a computer significantly bigger than the size of our observable universe any time soon. Mind you theres still a passable living to be made appearing on tv chat shows talking about how difficult is is answering the question of 'what is the answer to life the universe and everything'.
As an aside, the physicists say that many of the universes in the multi-universe have bad choices for the physical constants that would make life and therefore intelligence like ours very unlikely. This neatly does away with the anthropic principle for one thing, but it also raises the intriguing idea that there might be universes with far better choices of the physical constants than ours that give rise to something spectacularly more competent than carbon based lifeforms about to extinguish themselves with the greenhouse effect. (SETI is wasting its time looking for carbon based lifeforms, they all die out spectacularly quickly in a hot Venusian fog).
Cosmology has to be just THE most fascinating subject going. Of course we shouldn't get too worried about all this stuff, the answer as Douglas pointed out is quite simple 'keep on banging those rocks together':=)
its utter cobblers. Ford are so far up their own backsides that I am seriously considering not buying a Ford Focus in the near future and instead buying something else. Its a pity because the Focus is a great car in the UK.
To all of you who think giving up you rights to privacy in order to 'thwart terrorism' 'improve tax collection' 'improve targeted advertising' or whatever the bureaucrats want - well here is a great example of why that isn't a great idea.
People do stuff in their private lives that if made public would get them in trouble. One assumes that all these alcohol swilling students are not raving criminals about to murder their neighbours though they will now be treated as such.
It is perhaps understandable that because the US is pretty lively place, that schools will have alcohol bans for aspiring athletes. But what we see as sensible discipline for young people could equally be seen as Soviet style state repression for adults.
The loss of privacy that we face in future will mean that every single rule infringement you ever make will be recorded and used against you by the institutions you interact with. So that means the perfectly well behaved will get medical treatment, work, marriage, loans; the less than perfect will not.
Looking on the bright side of things though, it does mean that you wont have to wait for the afterlife to discover whether you are going to Heaven or Hell. On the other hand it isn't God who is going to be making the decision about where you are going.
What you have to remember is that all large organizations need to make fantastic amounts of cash to pay the employees and shut the shareholders up. Its really quite surprising that we don't notice their sometimes outrageously bad behavior more than we do.
Its not all the big bad companies fault either - take the case of a startup company that used to give away free software upgrades which discovers when it has been bought out by a large company with a legal department - that it is illegal to give away software in the US unless you don't declare your sales as revenue. The law is there to stop people selling half completed stuff and pretending that they wont have to spend most of the sales money on fixing their crap product. The other effect is that everybody has to charge a huge whack for software upgrade support and cant give anything away for free. It also goes someway to explaining why you have to keep buying the next version of everything.
When we talk about big bad Microsoft, it is true, they do aggressive and objectionable things to ram product down our throats against our wishes and they will do stuff to destroy the competition. In the case of Intel I really cannot understand how they managed to get involved in the OLPC thing in the first place if it wasn't commercially useful to them. Thats what I would complain about, not the fact that some poor sales sap in South America tried to take advantage of a commercial opening.
Agreed, Radio 4 news has declined to cereal packet level except for the longer programs in the early morning, late afternoon and the World tonight at 10pm. I learned a lot about the world in the late 70's listening to the World Tonight which at that time was an hour long program. In the intervening years they tried to kill it off by cutting it to half an hour but it currently survives with a 45 minute slot. Admittedly most of the news is about which politician has lied/shagged the most in the previous couple of days or other entertainment matters. But they do tend to mention real news filtered though which ever English white middle classed graduate fad is flavor of the moment - "DEMOCRACY" seems to be the infra dig thing this week so the slow slide into Civil War in Pakistan is whole heartedly supported by an endless diatribe on how wicked it is that this basket case of a county hasn't got DEMOCRACY. If they did of course the Democratically elected civilian leaders would be bitterly blamed for the secession of the north and street executions of women wearing the wrong clothing whilst terrorists fought openly with the army for possession of the nuclear weapons.
The increasing unfashionableness of scientific knowledge in the West is a curious thing.
It seems to reflect a corrupted and disintegrating society where the new toys provided to us by industrialization and science like flush toilets and medicine are taken for granted. Most catch up societies in the Third World which are industrializing at this moment are fanatically interested in science and education as they understand that these skills are vital to their societies success. It seems that along with manufacturing we are now exporting technical capability. Within a generation the West will be poor.
Television is the most visible manifestation of this western weakness, every year it becomes dumber and more saccharine. I haven't watched it since the 80's in the UK, radio has replaced it. BBC public radio 3 and 4 retain the ability to go in to some intellectual depth on a wide range of subjects compared to televisions cereal packet treatment of all subjects.
Fortunately I have also recently discovered intelligent life on the other side of the Atlantic in the USA in the form of podcasts. Many special interest groups have taken up the torch for their subjects. I only hope that millions of ipod owning youngsters will take up listening to them when they get bored with 0dB compressed bling and violence obsessed brand 'urban music'. Greek history is really quite interesting and you just wouldn't believe how many exoplanets have been discovered.
If the West really is going down the tubes, then its probably just as well that the masses have the low grade waste that passes for television to brighten up their dreary lives sufficiently to keep them in their places. Remember, whilst you watch television it is someone else's thoughts ringing around in your head.
Contemplate that on your death bed - how many years were you really alive and how many were you just echoing what was on the tube along with millions of others. Now there is a scary thought.
The speed limits in England have all been reduced by >=10 mph on any road where an accident has taken place in the last ten years.
The reason for the reduction is the incontrovertible evidence that reduced impact speed reduces your probability of being killed. This fact has been seized upon by local government who have been given targets for reducing road traffic accident fatalities. Elected officials now have to look as if they are doing something to stop someone suing them and putting them in jail for the rest of their natura lives. So local government have solved the problem by leaving the roads in the same state they came to power in, with the same number of accidents, but they have reduced the death count by cutting everybodies speed.
As a consequence there are a fair number of motorists who would like to take the speed cameras and shove them up the darkest orifices of our elected officials. The accidents continue to happen and the number of people disabled for life in accidents is unchanged. However we have great statistics for reductions in deaths and the whole country is gridlocked with slow moving traffic.
Best of all the self rightous sycophants of government always drive at the speed limit, oblivious of driving conditions because they were born without brains or the ability to make judgments. Happily it is these people who expect someone else to have made the roads totaly safe who are still killed in accidents.
My point is that a computer controlled motor vehicle (unlikely to be available before the oil runs out and we all have to use public transport) is another example of the safety first control freak brigade at work. Just like the athletes who want to set up a surveillance system for fellow athletes the solution is seen to be the removal of personal responsibility by the imposition of technological monitoring and control. This universal trend to seek a solution which involves supervision of the individual by the output of a committee of experts (or bigots) is anathema to me. I can give you a very long list of things that have been banned or tightly regulated in the last few years that I was able to do 30 years ago. I guess I'm a dinosaur in this wimpish society we live in today, "its not my fault sir, somebody should have told me what to do / been watching me."
And there we have it, the unthinking assumption that it will be safer if someone else were to take responsibility for moving traffic from A to B. What makes you think that the software is going to make it any safer? I'm happier with sensors that detect poor driving and warn you and maybe in extremis take corrective action, airbags have saved plenty of lives and safe distance detection could save more. Just remember that airbags also kill a few people.
Anyone who signs up to this no longer counts as a human being in my estimation. I rather hope that sport ends up doing this and it puts so many people off it that it becomes history.
Even today the whole dope testing for 'performance enhancing' drugs thing makes sport a huge joke. When you cannot take a headache pill but can perform pissed out of your head it has rather become a performing dog show.
Maybe we should keep athletes in a designated building where we can monitor them 24/7 with specially trained enforcement staff to prevent them taking drugs. Oh sorry we already have that, its called prison and the place is rife with smack and charlie.
No, sorry, the drug creators will always be one step ahead of the authorities and almost all individual sports events will be won by cheats in future. The only thing keeping the whole charade going is the money made by the advertisers off the back of the activity. They have to keep the illusion that sport is drug free so they wont become tainted by the sordidness of the whole thing.
Maybe we should start allowing the use of some performance enhancing drugs (we already do that to some extent by allowing them to eat any kind of food - at least we don't specify the number of calories they are allowed to take on board each day unlike motor racing where you only get a certain amount of fuel) Certain drugs which have been shown to be relatively safe should be legalized and the trick would be for the athlete to find the right combination of the different things to get the best performance.
Hopefully if they are already doped up to the eyeballs there wont be any incentive to test some wonder drug made in a dirty sink by a backstreet criminal organization. I feel sorry for athletes and what the progress of our society has done to them. Sadly they have become history, like so many other things that I used to enjoy in my life before progress and the safety brigade banned and outlawed them.
This is all part of an insidious trend that is taking away most of the fun in life. I hope to be dead before the safety lobby enforce computer controlled vehicles. I'm betting that some of you reading this, will one day, remember fondly your youth where you were allowed to drive a car yourself.
Athletics is history, move on folks, nothing to see here.
I just downloaded the Mars rover vid to show my brothers kids when we meet up in an offline environment over Christmas. Used a windows program Orbit downloader. Its closed source and runs some P2p stuff that I blocked off until I find out what their credentials are.
The videos are terrific, JPL also have some interesting stuff they share through podcasting that are well worth seeking out.
The oil is going to run out in a few decades if China and India carry on growing at their present rate. Never mind the fact that its source is in countries which will have no compunction in screwing us whenever they get the chance.
Who are we going to have to invade next to guarantee the supply of cheap hydrocarbon fuel? Russia?. How much does our fuel really cost once we factor in the cost of occupying Iraq?
Seems like sensible insurance to take advantage of technology and make transport more efficient whilst we still have an economy that can afford it.
We need to get our heads out of the sand and look at the big picture, not just the debate over whether we care about the possibility of global warming. These reasons should be enough to justify the move without even discussing global warming. Unlike almost any other commodity there is no substitute for oil at the moment.
I agree, this is the fundamental reason why the totally fluid workspace is absolute nonsense. People should associate with and work with a team. If your whole team is on another continent then you should probably be working at home and saving the company the cost of providing you office space. If you can be around your team in the workspace then you need to be in physical proximity with them so that if nothing else you can build up personal relationships with them.
Anything else is a complete rejection of the human condition and should be resisted by inappropriate force. Take a look at zoo animals which in less enlightened times were forced to live in spaces which their evolution made them poorly adapted to - its fairly well understood now that they exhibit strong evidence of mental illness. Screw around with the working environment too much and your workforce are going to become psychotic.
Having said that there are lots of good ideas for slight modifications to working environments. Like holding certain kinds of meetings around barstool height circular tables - but without the stools - should focus the mind on getting to the point as a collective effort. Some degree of mobility should help move paper into the computer. I'm 47 and don't really keep anything on Real_Life tm paper anymore so my filing cabinet only has books in it these days - books that could just as well be in a locker somewhere for the amount of use they get.
The hardware engineers I work with have a dedicated space on a lab bench as well as their office space so they don't really need a dedicated office space - except for the initial reason I cited - you wont get any team building going if they are scattered across a building and they will fail to produce a coherent design.
People who have no relationship with each other cannot sell stuff to each other and as a result will fail to communicate effectively. If you think the clashes between managers and workers are bad now, just take their desks away and wait for the company to go bust.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a BSc too but... That Gravitation book is great, trouble is I put it down in 1990 to learn tensor calculus (should be a piece of cake right? after solving second order partial differential equations) but I never quite finished that either. At least reading it doesn't seem to have given you the ability to guess the answer to the 13mm too quick space craft. I guess those 1279 pages weren't the answer to life the universe and everything after all.
Ah good. I'm looking for an expert to explain to me why the solar system is a pancake with all the planets lined up along the ecliptic and why galaxies are flat discs. Also why elliptical galaxies result from the collision of spiral ones.
Can anyone explain why the solar system is a pancake or that galaxies end up in disks?
Ah ha ha ha this is so funny. Looks like the US state behaves worse than any of its historical enemies and guess what the people being treated the worst are those losing their lives in order to defend it. hahha uh ah ha. Sorry I just fell off my chair I'm laughing so hard.
Are you people really as stupid as this makes you look?
You may have cause to revise this opinion in a decade or twos time when the lynch mob strings you up as a nasty Evolutionist. A few decades of indoctrination in the public schools should make it easy enough to overthrow the scientific aristocracy.
Ideas are powerful things, the religious meme is visibly powerful; once installed it resists all efforts to cure the person infected with it. Thats why its so important for religions to get hold of children in schools before their rational thinking processes can build up any defense.
Still lets face it, if you don't think your scientific meme needs to be protected then you probably wont miss it much when it dies out.
Nuking the lot of them would be a lot cheaper in the long run.
I don't think it will interoperate or have published specifications. It will have lots of DRM to preserve the content providers rights over the material distributed. I am pretty sure that it will not be like anything else available. Having said that its probably hackable in the end. Expect the death penalty or 500 years in jail for cracking it though.
Righteously said brother.
We have to bear in mind that the Soviet Union took quite a few decades to kill off and that the hegemony of big business may take a little more to unseat than youngsters with open source technology. Particularly as big business has now clearly identified the free open internet as its only credible enemy and is going all out to kill it off and take control over it before the rest of the population notices.
The profit and loss accounts of content providers are small beer compared to passing control of the internet over to them. I would prefer every internet user in the UK to pay $40 a month into a fund to subsidize them rather than pass control over what I access to them.
The scientific revolution only came about because of books and books only came about through the Gutenberg printing press. Its lucky that control over printing wasn't passed over to the Town Criers Guild in 1439 or we would still be living in sheds heated by the pigs on the ground floor. Stronger Faster Harder Better comes at a price and it looks like the battle of this century is going to be for the free internet, unless you prefer living in your feudal pig shed of course.
you want to bet that it wont just affect a few thousand? The only viable implementation scheme I can think of is for the ISP to ban all file sharing protocols except those going to the content providers nominated web sites. Looks like control of the UK's internet access is about to be put in the hands of Walt Disney. That would be par for the course for Nu Labor.
If you don't put your head above the parapet sometimes then you don't deserve to stay free.
All the nasty dictators and vile political systems have had people stand up against them and eventually they win. You may be the one that dies in the Gulag but you may also be the one that gets lucky and kicks down the Berlin Wall.
If you think its wrong, then stand up and say so, and never ever give up hope. Nil illegitimo in desperandum carborundum.
Nutjobs who think its a good idea to kill and maim innocent civilians in the name of a cause by the way deserve to die of an unpleasant disease that takes a long time to kill them.
Uh-huh thanks for that. I finally grok what all the fuss is about the Higgs from your analogy of the Higgs to the gravity field and the photon to the electromagnetic field. Just because we don't see Higgs running about all over the place on earth doesn't mean that there isn't a gravitational field. Just like if we looked inside a Faraday cage and saw no photons doesn't mean that there isn't an electromagnetic field to describe.
:=)
Another thought is, does this mean that there is a zoo of Higgs like things and is there an analogy to the kinds of things we have discovered about the electromagnetic field. Like the electron has charge and we have electrostatic attraction, atoms have magnetic (moments?) and forces between them. So would the zoo of Higgs like entities express similar disparate behaviors with a root in the mechanisms of the gravitational field? If we look at large scale things in the universe like galactic clusters and decide that they have 'dark matter' expressing additional mass effects through the lensing of quasars, does that mean that the gravitational fields equivalent of 'magnetism' for example only shows up on that large scale - which would explain how tough it is for us to do experiments and play with the gravitational fields inner workings down here on earth.
Given all this speculative rambling I'm now very interested in what could be learned from the Higgs if it is found by the LHC.
Mind you as Douglas Adams said 'Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, well that's just peanuts to space."
I make it about 10 to the power of 60 between vacuum fluctuations and the observable universe and if the multi-universe view is right, to accommodate all the different choices of the basic physical constants, there's another 10 to the power of 500 on top of that. Its going to take quite a bit of computing power to work out the details of 10 to the power 500 different universes each with a volume containing things over a range of scales of 10 to the 60. Looks like we need a bit more than 'Deep Thought' to do this calculation. I dont think even IBM is going to build a computer significantly bigger than the size of our observable universe any time soon. Mind you theres still a passable living to be made appearing on tv chat shows talking about how difficult is is answering the question of 'what is the answer to life the universe and everything'.
As an aside, the physicists say that many of the universes in the multi-universe have bad choices for the physical constants that would make life and therefore intelligence like ours very unlikely. This neatly does away with the anthropic principle for one thing, but it also raises the intriguing idea that there might be universes with far better choices of the physical constants than ours that give rise to something spectacularly more competent than carbon based lifeforms about to extinguish themselves with the greenhouse effect. (SETI is wasting its time looking for carbon based lifeforms, they all die out spectacularly quickly in a hot Venusian fog).
Cosmology has to be just THE most fascinating subject going. Of course we shouldn't get too worried about all this stuff, the answer as Douglas pointed out is quite simple 'keep on banging those rocks together'
http://dingo.care2.com/cards/flash/5409/galaxy.swf
While away a useful few hours with Google Tech Talks
http://research.google.com/video.html
Then do some searching for podcasts, both audio and video. A quick sample of a hundred feeds or so:
http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/podcast/podcast.xml
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AiBquicktime
http://www.archaeologychannel.org/rss/TACfeed.xml
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/rss/archive.php?seriesid=1906978378
http://aaweekly.blip.tv/?skin=rss
http://www.techonline.mtu.edu/iTunes_Media/astronomy_rss.xml
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Audio/Podcast.xml
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Audio/Podcast.xml
http://astronomy.libsyn.com/rss
http://www.astronomy.com/asy/podcasts
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~clgroks/groks.rss
Pick your own subjects!
its utter cobblers. Ford are so far up their own backsides that I am seriously considering not buying a Ford Focus in the near future and instead buying something else. Its a pity because the Focus is a great car in the UK.
To all of you who think giving up you rights to privacy in order to 'thwart terrorism' 'improve tax collection' 'improve targeted advertising' or whatever the bureaucrats want - well here is a great example of why that isn't a great idea.
People do stuff in their private lives that if made public would get them in trouble. One assumes that all these alcohol swilling students are not raving criminals about to murder their neighbours though they will now be treated as such.
It is perhaps understandable that because the US is pretty lively place, that schools will have alcohol bans for aspiring athletes. But what we see as sensible discipline for young people could equally be seen as Soviet style state repression for adults.
The loss of privacy that we face in future will mean that every single rule infringement you ever make will be recorded and used against you by the institutions you interact with. So that means the perfectly well behaved will get medical treatment, work, marriage, loans; the less than perfect will not.
Looking on the bright side of things though, it does mean that you wont have to wait for the afterlife to discover whether you are going to Heaven or Hell. On the other hand it isn't God who is going to be making the decision about where you are going.
What you have to remember is that all large organizations need to make fantastic amounts of cash to pay the employees and shut the shareholders up. Its really quite surprising that we don't notice their sometimes outrageously bad behavior more than we do.
Its not all the big bad companies fault either - take the case of a startup company that used to give away free software upgrades which discovers when it has been bought out by a large company with a legal department - that it is illegal to give away software in the US unless you don't declare your sales as revenue. The law is there to stop people selling half completed stuff and pretending that they wont have to spend most of the sales money on fixing their crap product. The other effect is that everybody has to charge a huge whack for software upgrade support and cant give anything away for free. It also goes someway to explaining why you have to keep buying the next version of everything.
When we talk about big bad Microsoft, it is true, they do aggressive and objectionable things to ram product down our throats against our wishes and they will do stuff to destroy the competition. In the case of Intel I really cannot understand how they managed to get involved in the OLPC thing in the first place if it wasn't commercially useful to them. Thats what I would complain about, not the fact that some poor sales sap in South America tried to take advantage of a commercial opening.
Agreed, Radio 4 news has declined to cereal packet level except for the longer programs in the early morning, late afternoon and the World tonight at 10pm. I learned a lot about the world in the late 70's listening to the World Tonight which at that time was an hour long program. In the intervening years they tried to kill it off by cutting it to half an hour but it currently survives with a 45 minute slot. Admittedly most of the news is about which politician has lied/shagged the most in the previous couple of days or other entertainment matters. But they do tend to mention real news filtered though which ever English white middle classed graduate fad is flavor of the moment - "DEMOCRACY" seems to be the infra dig thing this week so the slow slide into Civil War in Pakistan is whole heartedly supported by an endless diatribe on how wicked it is that this basket case of a county hasn't got DEMOCRACY. If they did of course the Democratically elected civilian leaders would be bitterly blamed for the secession of the north and street executions of women wearing the wrong clothing whilst terrorists fought openly with the army for possession of the nuclear weapons.
The increasing unfashionableness of scientific knowledge in the West is a curious thing.
It seems to reflect a corrupted and disintegrating society where the new toys provided to us by industrialization and science like flush toilets and medicine are taken for granted. Most catch up societies in the Third World which are industrializing at this moment are fanatically interested in science and education as they understand that these skills are vital to their societies success. It seems that along with manufacturing we are now exporting technical capability. Within a generation the West will be poor.
Television is the most visible manifestation of this western weakness, every year it becomes dumber and more saccharine. I haven't watched it since the 80's in the UK, radio has replaced it. BBC public radio 3 and 4 retain the ability to go in to some intellectual depth on a wide range of subjects compared to televisions cereal packet treatment of all subjects.
Fortunately I have also recently discovered intelligent life on the other side of the Atlantic in the USA in the form of podcasts. Many special interest groups have taken up the torch for their subjects. I only hope that millions of ipod owning youngsters will take up listening to them when they get bored with 0dB compressed bling and violence obsessed brand 'urban music'. Greek history is really quite interesting and you just wouldn't believe how many exoplanets have been discovered.
If the West really is going down the tubes, then its probably just as well that the masses have the low grade waste that passes for television to brighten up their dreary lives sufficiently to keep them in their places. Remember, whilst you watch television it is someone else's thoughts ringing around in your head.
Contemplate that on your death bed - how many years were you really alive and how many were you just echoing what was on the tube along with millions of others. Now there is a scary thought.
The speed limits in England have all been reduced by >=10 mph on any road where an accident has taken place in the last ten years.
The reason for the reduction is the incontrovertible evidence that reduced impact speed reduces your probability of being killed. This fact has been seized upon by local government who have been given targets for reducing road traffic accident fatalities. Elected officials now have to look as if they are doing something to stop someone suing them and putting them in jail for the rest of their natura lives. So local government have solved the problem by leaving the roads in the same state they came to power in, with the same number of accidents, but they have reduced the death count by cutting everybodies speed.
As a consequence there are a fair number of motorists who would like to take the speed cameras and shove them up the darkest orifices of our elected officials. The accidents continue to happen and the number of people disabled for life in accidents is unchanged. However we have great statistics for reductions in deaths and the whole country is gridlocked with slow moving traffic.
Best of all the self rightous sycophants of government always drive at the speed limit, oblivious of driving conditions because they were born without brains or the ability to make judgments. Happily it is these people who expect someone else to have made the roads totaly safe who are still killed in accidents.
merry Christmas!
oddly enough it is mine too .
Its the goats, they're in it with the Aliens no doubt.
http://tinyurl.com/yxz5ze
Merry Christmas
My point is that a computer controlled motor vehicle (unlikely to be available before the oil runs out and we all have to use public transport) is another example of the safety first control freak brigade at work. Just like the athletes who want to set up a surveillance system for fellow athletes the solution is seen to be the removal of personal responsibility by the imposition of technological monitoring and control. This universal trend to seek a solution which involves supervision of the individual by the output of a committee of experts (or bigots) is anathema to me. I can give you a very long list of things that have been banned or tightly regulated in the last few years that I was able to do 30 years ago. I guess I'm a dinosaur in this wimpish society we live in today, "its not my fault sir, somebody should have told me what to do / been watching me."
And there we have it, the unthinking assumption that it will be safer if someone else were to take responsibility for moving traffic from A to B. What makes you think that the software is going to make it any safer? I'm happier with sensors that detect poor driving and warn you and maybe in extremis take corrective action, airbags have saved plenty of lives and safe distance detection could save more. Just remember that airbags also kill a few people.
Anyone who signs up to this no longer counts as a human being in my estimation. I rather hope that sport ends up doing this and it puts so many people off it that it becomes history.
Even today the whole dope testing for 'performance enhancing' drugs thing makes sport a huge joke. When you cannot take a headache pill but can perform pissed out of your head it has rather become a performing dog show.
Maybe we should keep athletes in a designated building where we can monitor them 24/7 with specially trained enforcement staff to prevent them taking drugs. Oh sorry we already have that, its called prison and the place is rife with smack and charlie.
No, sorry, the drug creators will always be one step ahead of the authorities and almost all individual sports events will be won by cheats in future. The only thing keeping the whole charade going is the money made by the advertisers off the back of the activity. They have to keep the illusion that sport is drug free so they wont become tainted by the sordidness of the whole thing.
Maybe we should start allowing the use of some performance enhancing drugs (we already do that to some extent by allowing them to eat any kind of food - at least we don't specify the number of calories they are allowed to take on board each day unlike motor racing where you only get a certain amount of fuel) Certain drugs which have been shown to be relatively safe should be legalized and the trick would be for the athlete to find the right combination of the different things to get the best performance.
Hopefully if they are already doped up to the eyeballs there wont be any incentive to test some wonder drug made in a dirty sink by a backstreet criminal organization. I feel sorry for athletes and what the progress of our society has done to them. Sadly they have become history, like so many other things that I used to enjoy in my life before progress and the safety brigade banned and outlawed them.
This is all part of an insidious trend that is taking away most of the fun in life. I hope to be dead before the safety lobby enforce computer controlled vehicles. I'm betting that some of you reading this, will one day, remember fondly your youth where you were allowed to drive a car yourself.
Athletics is history, move on folks, nothing to see here.
I just downloaded the Mars rover vid to show my brothers kids when we meet up in an offline environment over Christmas. Used a windows program Orbit downloader. Its closed source and runs some P2p stuff that I blocked off until I find out what their credentials are.
The videos are terrific, JPL also have some interesting stuff they share through podcasting that are well worth seeking out.
The oil is going to run out in a few decades if China and India carry on growing at their present rate. Never mind the fact that its source is in countries which will have no compunction in screwing us whenever they get the chance.
Who are we going to have to invade next to guarantee the supply of cheap hydrocarbon fuel? Russia?. How much does our fuel really cost once we factor in the cost of occupying Iraq?
Seems like sensible insurance to take advantage of technology and make transport more efficient whilst we still have an economy that can afford it.
We need to get our heads out of the sand and look at the big picture, not just the debate over whether we care about the possibility of global warming. These reasons should be enough to justify the move without even discussing global warming. Unlike almost any other commodity there is no substitute for oil at the moment.
I agree, this is the fundamental reason why the totally fluid workspace is absolute nonsense. People should associate with and work with a team. If your whole team is on another continent then you should probably be working at home and saving the company the cost of providing you office space. If you can be around your team in the workspace then you need to be in physical proximity with them so that if nothing else you can build up personal relationships with them.
Anything else is a complete rejection of the human condition and should be resisted by inappropriate force. Take a look at zoo animals which in less enlightened times were forced to live in spaces which their evolution made them poorly adapted to - its fairly well understood now that they exhibit strong evidence of mental illness. Screw around with the working environment too much and your workforce are going to become psychotic.
Having said that there are lots of good ideas for slight modifications to working environments. Like holding certain kinds of meetings around barstool height circular tables - but without the stools - should focus the mind on getting to the point as a collective effort. Some degree of mobility should help move paper into the computer. I'm 47 and don't really keep anything on Real_Life tm paper anymore so my filing cabinet only has books in it these days - books that could just as well be in a locker somewhere for the amount of use they get.
The hardware engineers I work with have a dedicated space on a lab bench as well as their office space so they don't really need a dedicated office space - except for the initial reason I cited - you wont get any team building going if they are scattered across a building and they will fail to produce a coherent design.
People who have no relationship with each other cannot sell stuff to each other and as a result will fail to communicate effectively. If you think the clashes between managers and workers are bad now, just take their desks away and wait for the company to go bust.