... it's not much of a year end list... being published in March of 05...
Oh, I dunno about that. A number of societies have used calendars that start the year at the spring equinox. March 19 is real close to the equinox. And the Gregorian calendar hasn't totally conquered the world; there are still lots of people who use other calendars to date certain events such as holidays. So, depending on the author's preference in calendars, this could very well have been a year-end list.
I think if we level all mountain ranges and melt both ice caps it should be enough to make Earth spin faster enough to compensate for this leap second
Um, if you melt the ice caps, won't the water spread itself out through the oceans? This will, on the average, make the molecules move away from the axis, thus slowing the planet's rotation.
What you want to do is pile mass up close to the axis, i.e., at the poles. With water, you'd need to precipitate it out at the poles. This isn't what we're doing, though.
For mountains, you don't want to just level them; you want to move the mass closer to the axis. So you want to pile the rubble on the poleward side of where the mountain used to be (north in the northern hemisphere, etc.).
Heh; good examle. I've heard that sort of thing more times than I can count.
Of course, on most hardware, it's trivial to distinguish the OS level from the application level. There's a machine opcode called "system call", usually SC in the assembly language. If you need to invoke SC to do something, you're an application; if not, you're part of the OS. But this isn't visible to most people sitting at the keyboard and looking at the screen, so the confusion is understandable.
Shh! Most of the people here don't understand the difference between an OS and an "app". Many of them will even tell you with a straight face that a runtime library is part of the OS. (Really; look through the/. archive.;-)
So let's keep quiet on the sidelines, and let the all make fools of themselves in public.
I often wonder why people still write in C at all,...
Well, my last big project was written almost entirely in C for the simple reason that that's what the client wanted. We did a lot of prototyping in perl and python, but that code wasn't acceptable for delivery; we had to rewrite all the production code in C. If not, it wouldn't be accepted.
Much of the explanation was that the client had accepted C++ and java in earlier projects, and they were disasters for all the familiar reasons. They were determined that this wouldn't happen again, so they went with a "proven" language with a track record of use in major successful systems.
Similarly, I have a couple of friends who recently did a project in Cobol. They hated it, but they wanted to get paid, and that's what the client would accept.
In the Real World[TM], the decision about which language to use is very often made by managers who aren't programmers and don't have a clue about the real issues. So they make decisions based on things that they can understand and measure.
Hey, you missed the even bigger method of increasing the unix/linux score: counting each distro separately.
Thus, if you go to distrowatch.com, you find 100 distros for linux alone. So for most actual kernel bugs, you can count each one at least 100 times. And for apps that run on all unix releases, the multiplier can be a lot higher.
Of course, there are several distros of Windows, too. But not nearly as many, and the people adding up the bug counts somehow always seem to miss this trick with Windows.
Anyone else got a favorite way of producing misleading bug scores?
Not paying attention to things until something bad happens; See also September 11, 2001
Then taking fast, effective action, e.g. banning nail clippers on airplanes.
Then, when it turns out that you had lots of information beforehand, but didn't have enough translators to handle it, you respond by harrassing the competent translators and forcing them out of government service. See also Sibyl Edmonds.
Apparently the government, just like private industry, doesn't pay attention to security until something bad happens to it.
Sure, they pay attention. They make sure they've got plenty of meaningless but showy actions and PR releases in place to convince the public that they're doing something. Just like private industry, if you think about it.
Then, when something bad happens, it's more of the same.
Meanwhile, if someone points out a real, specific problem that could be fixed, the usual response of both public and private organizations is to attack the messenger rather than the problem. And to increase secrecy, so that other problems can't be found easily and we can pretend that they don't exist.
The formula for a circle is x^2 + y^2 = r^2; for the sphere it is x^2 + y^2 + z^2 = r^2. What happens with the sum of x[n]^2 + x[n-1]^2 + x[n-2]^2... = r^2 as n approaches infinity?
Google for Hilbert Space. Or ask wikipedia, where there's a simple definition and lots of links to further reading.
A Hilbert Space has countably-infinite dimension, but only points whose sums-of-squares value is finite; i.e., only points a finite distance from the origin are in the space. This doesn't mean that the origin is special, of course; one can easily prove that all points are a finite distance from each other, so choosing another point in the space as origin won't change the set of points.
There has been a lot of theoretical work on Hilbert Spaces. They are important to Quantum Mechanics.
I always got the impression that Einstein being bad at math was exaggerated.
Yeah; that belongs in the same bin as the myth that he was a poor student. There's plenty of evidence that he was a better mathematician than most of the rest of us. But there's also a theory that the real mathematician behind his work was Mileva.
The main argument is that his seminal papers were written during the years that they were together, and after they split up, he never again produced anything of such importance.
Of course, one could argue that what he (or they) had already published should be enough for any two people.
It would be interesting to know just how important she was to his work. But we'll probably never know much more than we do now. The culture back then was not very interested in recording the details of a mere wife's contributions.
An interesting sci-fi scenario might be the alternate world in which Albert and Mileva stayed together, and worked out their Theory of Everything. I wonder if any writer has tackled this question of what effect this would have had on our world?
I've achieved a new state of Quantum Enlightenment. I both get it and don't get it, at the same time!
Well, Albert Einstein beat you to that state by eight decades or so. He simultaneously wrote some of the seminal papers on QM, while also refusing to accept that the universe was so bizarre as to permit such absurdities.
Of course, by most of the definitions of scientific methods, he was just being a true scientist. After all, even (or especially) if you believe a theory, you should try to debunk it. If you fail, that's support for the theory. If you succeed, the theory wasn't valid in the first place, and it's better that you debunk it yourself than that someone else get the credit for doing so.
Just the other day we saw some postings arguing, that Bush is much like Hitler. Today -- that he is a "clueless baboon". The two are mutually exclusive, so which is it?
Probably neither. A better term might be UCT (Upper Class Twit).
Much of the evidence supports the conjecture that he actually believes most of what he says. That long string of broken, bankrupt companies that he left in his wake? He probably believes that he was a good manager, and it's just bad luck that caused all the disasters. The New Orleans disaster? He probably still has no idea that his people had orchestrated the defunding of levee maintenance, that the Corps of Engineers and a massive government simulation study had predicted it all in detail; to him it was an "Act of God" that was totally unexpected. (It may have been to punish all the sinners in NO, but there's no explanation for why the French Quarter was barely touched.;-)
Reports are that most of his associates consider him essentially a "tool", who is smart enough to parrot their ideology and PR phrases to the public, while not willing or able to bother his pretty head with the operational details. In this way, he's not very Hitleresque at all, since the evidence is that Hitler was very aware and really was orchestrating it all. Bush doesn't have the interest or patience for that; he delegates the actual work to his trusted minions.
It could be that we're taking the first steps towards becoming cyborgs, or something.
Actually, our ancestors took those first steps several hundred thousand years ago, when they started chipping stones to make them better cutting (or killing) tools. Then they progressed to searching out flint, quartzite and volcanic glass to make even more high-tech cutting tools.
Since then, we've become hopelessly dependent on our technology. If stripped of it and tossed into a jungle, how many of us would survive a month?
Was there too more violence in New Orleans than our government should have permitted?
Well, yes; a hurricane is a rather violent event.
Of course, our government can't exactly prevent this sort of violence (any more than it can always prevent human violence). But it can do a lot to ameliorate the effect of such violent events. In fact, it had been doing this in the New Orleans area, in the form of the levees and other flood-control measures. However, it the past few years the government has defunded such protections. This wasn't done innocently; they had plenty of warnings from experts on the subject, including the Army Corps of Engineers. But they decided they had better uses for the money (such as funding violence against the citizens of another country).
The fact that a government can't totally prevent all violence from all sources doesn't excuse it from failing so dramatically to do what it is capable of doing. This is, after all, one of the standard explanations of why we should pay our taxes without complaint.
Microsoft should spend $400 million on a browser because it runs on a platform they don't want to support anymore?
Well, yeah; and they don't want Opera to work well on Macs, either. That's why they'd buy it, and then order changes that destroy its usefulness.
This is especially likely as their motive in the handheld market. Opera is a major player there, and has a reputation as by far the best tiny browser. MS wants that market. $400 million would be a small price for them to eliminate their main competitor.
What I wonder is: If Opera does sell out (to MS or anyone else), will they first free their source code, so the refugees can continue to develop it despite the new owner? It worked with mozilla...
Um.... I know that that's just an instance of trying to blow a guy's mind, but that explanation is still deeply flawed.
Yeah, yeah; I know. But consider that we're trying to "help" a guy who doesn't understand what keeps the vacuum out of the Earth's atmosphere.
With such an intellect, you have to find an explanation that's simpler than what your typical 10-year-old would easily understand. A real explanation of the physics involved would just produce glazed eyes and no understanding at all.
Of course, an alternative would be to just laugh and walk away.
Outer space is a vacuum. Earth is not. The vacuum begins just beyond our atmosphere. What is our atmosphere made of that prevents the vacuum from penetrating it..?
Well, I'd just explain that this has happened. If you look up the details of our atmosphere, you'll find that it's made up almost entirely of various molecules. But it's a gas, which means that those molecules aren't touching each other. They are separated by small gaps, and those gaps are full of - vacuum! It's only the lowest parts of the Earth's surface that are covered with liquid water, where the molecules are able to exclude the vacuum and touch each other. But the air we're breathing has been completely penetrated by vacuum.
I wonder how that fellow would react to this explanation? Would he be shocked by the realization that every breath he takes is only partly air, but mostly vacuum?
... most people who believe in conspiracy theories are conservatives...
Well, see, this is because conservatives engage in conspiracies all the time, so they naturally think that everyone else does it, too.
Liberals, OTOH, are too individualistic and anarchic to ever be able to form an effective conspiracy, so they aren't inclined to believe that others are able to organize effectively, either.
Then there are those of us who engage in extreme over-generalization ("stereotyping"), because we see so many others doing it with impunity, so it must be an acceptable way to look at the world.
The moon landings will always be doubted, and doubtable, until we're heading there for vacations and doing real business there which provides materials or situations that move the moon into the common experience.
There was a good parody of this a few years ago, in the form of an "open debate" on the existence of Idaho.
Now, I've been in Idaho, and lived just next to the border in Pullman WA for several years. But that puts me in a tiny minority of the world's population. For most people, the evidence for Idaho isn't really any better than the evidence for the moon landing, the existence of some random god, etc.
Then there was the movie Wag the Dog, about a faked war with an imaginary country. So how do we know that there's really an Iraq? I've never been there, and all the evidence I've seen could have easily been faked in just about any other middle-eastern country.
But the obvious example in recent times is the development of DDT resistance among insects. Indeed it is possible within a *very* short timeframe (evolutionarily speaking) to make a population of insects quite resistant to any given insecticide or other environmental hazard.... Perhaps if HIV is unchecked, we will see the human population develop resistance to it too (untreated HIV has an 90-95% mortality rate, perhaps 1-2% less).
There is a hypothesis that this is why the bubonic plague is no longer a problem. The idea is that, after killing 30-50% of all Europeans every generation for a couple of centuries, Europeans evolved resistance. The disease also affected Asia and Africa, so we can also guess that the resistance spread there in the obvious ways. Or maybe it originated outside Europe.
The alternative hypothesis is based on the idea that it's not a good idea for a parasite to totally devastate the prey. If you kill all your hosts, you die too. This would mean that in areas of high human mortality, the plague organism died out, and was eventually replaced by a less-virulent form that left the prey alive long enough to spread the parasite.
Of course, both of these could be true. That's probably what really happened, with humans evolving resistance while the plague evolved less virulence.
Anyway, the disease is still around, but it doesn't kill very many people. Here in the US, there are 10 or so cases per year. China has about 40 cases/year, and India has 35. These numbers are roughly the percent of the populations, implying a somewhat consistent but very low incidence everywhere.
If you take a certain species of squirrel from Pennsylvania and mate it with one in Ohio, fertile offspring will be produced. Take this same squirrel and mate it with one of the same species from California and no fertile offspring will be produced.
Actually, this might not be a transitional state. It could be a long-term stable state. If conditions vary continuously across a species' range, local populations could all be well adapted to local conditions. Widely-separated populations could be very different, while they are all very similar to adjacent populations.
There isn't really a standard name for this phenomenon, though I've seen the term "range species" coined to describe it. Most of the known examples live along a seashore, or have a range that is long and narrow for some other reason.
There are also special cases, such as the domestic dog, which can interbreed with gray wolves and jackals, but the wolves and jackals produce either infertile or no offspring. But such cases are more likely incomplete speciation events.
Another confusing example is typified by lions and tigers. They can interbreed, but usually male offspring are sterile while female offspring are fertile. They are separate in the wild mostly because their ranges don't overlap. Google for "tion" and "liger" for more information.
Anyway, biologists generally accept that "species" can't really be defined precisely, and all sorts of borderline cases are seen in nature. The creationist/ID crowd makes a fuss over it, but it's not much of a problem for anyone else. You just have to accept that nature doesn't need to obey the human desire for terminology or dichotomies.
The term "species" is useful for scientific purposes, but it's not an exact match for what happens in nature. Breeding happens between individuals, while "species" is an emergent property of populations.
Slashdot Mirror
Jeeus-H-Christ-On-A-Crutch!!
BTW, does anyone know where the 'H' came from as Jesus' middle initial?
I read somewhere that it stands for "Haploid".
... it's not much of a year end list... being published in March of 05 ...
Oh, I dunno about that. A number of societies have used calendars that start the year at the spring equinox. March 19 is real close to the equinox. And the Gregorian calendar hasn't totally conquered the world; there are still lots of people who use other calendars to date certain events such as holidays. So, depending on the author's preference in calendars, this could very well have been a year-end list.
I think if we level all mountain ranges and melt both ice caps it should be enough to make Earth spin faster enough to compensate for this leap second
Um, if you melt the ice caps, won't the water spread itself out through the oceans? This will, on the average, make the molecules move away from the axis, thus slowing the planet's rotation.
What you want to do is pile mass up close to the axis, i.e., at the poles. With water, you'd need to precipitate it out at the poles. This isn't what we're doing, though.
For mountains, you don't want to just level them; you want to move the mass closer to the axis. So you want to pile the rubble on the poleward side of where the mountain used to be (north in the northern hemisphere, etc.).
How about if we describe it as fighting for the rights of children and (dead) grannies?
Heh; good examle. I've heard that sort of thing more times than I can count.
Of course, on most hardware, it's trivial to distinguish the OS level from the application level. There's a machine opcode called "system call", usually SC in the assembly language. If you need to invoke SC to do something, you're an application; if not, you're part of the OS. But this isn't visible to most people sitting at the keyboard and looking at the screen, so the confusion is understandable.
Shh! Most of the people here don't understand the difference between an OS and an "app". Many of them will even tell you with a straight face that a runtime library is part of the OS. (Really; look through the /. archive. ;-)
So let's keep quiet on the sidelines, and let the all make fools of themselves in public.
I often wonder why people still write in C at all, ...
Well, my last big project was written almost entirely in C for the simple reason that that's what the client wanted. We did a lot of prototyping in perl and python, but that code wasn't acceptable for delivery; we had to rewrite all the production code in C. If not, it wouldn't be accepted.
Much of the explanation was that the client had accepted C++ and java in earlier projects, and they were disasters for all the familiar reasons. They were determined that this wouldn't happen again, so they went with a "proven" language with a track record of use in major successful systems.
Similarly, I have a couple of friends who recently did a project in Cobol. They hated it, but they wanted to get paid, and that's what the client would accept.
In the Real World[TM], the decision about which language to use is very often made by managers who aren't programmers and don't have a clue about the real issues. So they make decisions based on things that they can understand and measure.
Hey, you missed the even bigger method of increasing the unix/linux score: counting each distro separately.
Thus, if you go to distrowatch.com, you find 100 distros for linux alone. So for most actual kernel bugs, you can count each one at least 100 times. And for apps that run on all unix releases, the multiplier can be a lot higher.
Of course, there are several distros of Windows, too. But not nearly as many, and the people adding up the bug counts somehow always seem to miss this trick with Windows.
Anyone else got a favorite way of producing misleading bug scores?
Not paying attention to things until something bad happens; See also September 11, 2001
Then taking fast, effective action, e.g. banning nail clippers on airplanes.
Then, when it turns out that you had lots of information beforehand, but didn't have enough translators to handle it, you respond by harrassing the competent translators and forcing them out of government service. See also Sibyl Edmonds.
Apparently the government, just like private industry, doesn't pay attention to security until something bad happens to it.
Sure, they pay attention. They make sure they've got plenty of meaningless but showy actions and PR releases in place to convince the public that they're doing something. Just like private industry, if you think about it.
Then, when something bad happens, it's more of the same.
Meanwhile, if someone points out a real, specific problem that could be fixed, the usual response of both public and private organizations is to attack the messenger rather than the problem. And to increase secrecy, so that other problems can't be found easily and we can pretend that they don't exist.
The formula for a circle is x^2 + y^2 = r^2; for the sphere it is x^2 + y^2 + z^2 = r^2. What happens with the sum of x[n]^2 + x[n-1]^2 + x[n-2]^2... = r^2 as n approaches infinity?
Google for Hilbert Space. Or ask wikipedia, where there's a simple definition and lots of links to further reading.
A Hilbert Space has countably-infinite dimension, but only points whose sums-of-squares value is finite; i.e., only points a finite distance from the origin are in the space. This doesn't mean that the origin is special, of course; one can easily prove that all points are a finite distance from each other, so choosing another point in the space as origin won't change the set of points.
There has been a lot of theoretical work on Hilbert Spaces. They are important to Quantum Mechanics.
I always got the impression that Einstein being bad at math was exaggerated.
Yeah; that belongs in the same bin as the myth that he was a poor student. There's plenty of evidence that he was a better mathematician than most of the rest of us. But there's also a theory that the real mathematician behind his work was Mileva.
The main argument is that his seminal papers were written during the years that they were together, and after they split up, he never again produced anything of such importance.
Of course, one could argue that what he (or they) had already published should be enough for any two people.
It would be interesting to know just how important she was to his work. But we'll probably never know much more than we do now. The culture back then was not very interested in recording the details of a mere wife's contributions.
An interesting sci-fi scenario might be the alternate world in which Albert and Mileva stayed together, and worked out their Theory of Everything. I wonder if any writer has tackled this question of what effect this would have had on our world?
I've achieved a new state of Quantum Enlightenment. I both get it and don't get it, at the same time!
Well, Albert Einstein beat you to that state by eight decades or so. He simultaneously wrote some of the seminal papers on QM, while also refusing to accept that the universe was so bizarre as to permit such absurdities.
Of course, by most of the definitions of scientific methods, he was just being a true scientist. After all, even (or especially) if you believe a theory, you should try to debunk it. If you fail, that's support for the theory. If you succeed, the theory wasn't valid in the first place, and it's better that you debunk it yourself than that someone else get the credit for doing so.
Just the other day we saw some postings arguing, that Bush is much like Hitler. Today -- that he is a "clueless baboon". The two are mutually exclusive, so which is it?
;-)
Probably neither. A better term might be UCT (Upper Class Twit).
Much of the evidence supports the conjecture that he actually believes most of what he says. That long string of broken, bankrupt companies that he left in his wake? He probably believes that he was a good manager, and it's just bad luck that caused all the disasters. The New Orleans disaster? He probably still has no idea that his people had orchestrated the defunding of levee maintenance, that the Corps of Engineers and a massive government simulation study had predicted it all in detail; to him it was an "Act of God" that was totally unexpected. (It may have been to punish all the sinners in NO, but there's no explanation for why the French Quarter was barely touched.
Reports are that most of his associates consider him essentially a "tool", who is smart enough to parrot their ideology and PR phrases to the public, while not willing or able to bother his pretty head with the operational details. In this way, he's not very Hitleresque at all, since the evidence is that Hitler was very aware and really was orchestrating it all. Bush doesn't have the interest or patience for that; he delegates the actual work to his trusted minions.
It could be that we're taking the first steps towards becoming cyborgs, or something.
Actually, our ancestors took those first steps several hundred thousand years ago, when they started chipping stones to make them better cutting (or killing) tools. Then they progressed to searching out flint, quartzite and volcanic glass to make even more high-tech cutting tools.
Since then, we've become hopelessly dependent on our technology. If stripped of it and tossed into a jungle, how many of us would survive a month?
Was there too more violence in New Orleans than our government should have permitted?
Well, yes; a hurricane is a rather violent event.
Of course, our government can't exactly prevent this sort of violence (any more than it can always prevent human violence). But it can do a lot to ameliorate the effect of such violent events. In fact, it had been doing this in the New Orleans area, in the form of the levees and other flood-control measures. However, it the past few years the government has defunded such protections. This wasn't done innocently; they had plenty of warnings from experts on the subject, including the Army Corps of Engineers. But they decided they had better uses for the money (such as funding violence against the citizens of another country).
The fact that a government can't totally prevent all violence from all sources doesn't excuse it from failing so dramatically to do what it is capable of doing. This is, after all, one of the standard explanations of why we should pay our taxes without complaint.
Hmmm ... more productive laywers ... just what the world needs ...
If MS needs a new browser, which they don't, ...
Nobody is really saying that MS needs or wants a new browser.
The scenario is that they buy out opera and shut it down, to eliminate a competitor.
Microsoft should spend $400 million on a browser because it runs on a platform they don't want to support anymore?
...
Well, yeah; and they don't want Opera to work well on Macs, either. That's why they'd buy it, and then order changes that destroy its usefulness.
This is especially likely as their motive in the handheld market. Opera is a major player there, and has a reputation as by far the best tiny browser. MS wants that market. $400 million would be a small price for them to eliminate their main competitor.
What I wonder is: If Opera does sell out (to MS or anyone else), will they first free their source code, so the refugees can continue to develop it despite the new owner? It worked with mozilla
Um.... I know that that's just an instance of trying to blow a guy's mind, but that explanation is still deeply flawed.
Yeah, yeah; I know. But consider that we're trying to "help" a guy who doesn't understand what keeps the vacuum out of the Earth's atmosphere.
With such an intellect, you have to find an explanation that's simpler than what your typical 10-year-old would easily understand. A real explanation of the physics involved would just produce glazed eyes and no understanding at all.
Of course, an alternative would be to just laugh and walk away.
Outer space is a vacuum. Earth is not. The vacuum begins just beyond our atmosphere. What is our atmosphere made of that prevents the vacuum from penetrating it..?
Well, I'd just explain that this has happened. If you look up the details of our atmosphere, you'll find that it's made up almost entirely of various molecules. But it's a gas, which means that those molecules aren't touching each other. They are separated by small gaps, and those gaps are full of - vacuum! It's only the lowest parts of the Earth's surface that are covered with liquid water, where the molecules are able to exclude the vacuum and touch each other. But the air we're breathing has been completely penetrated by vacuum.
I wonder how that fellow would react to this explanation? Would he be shocked by the realization that every breath he takes is only partly air, but mostly vacuum?
... most people who believe in conspiracy theories are conservatives...
Well, see, this is because conservatives engage in conspiracies all the time, so they naturally think that everyone else does it, too.
Liberals, OTOH, are too individualistic and anarchic to ever be able to form an effective conspiracy, so they aren't inclined to believe that others are able to organize effectively, either.
Then there are those of us who engage in extreme over-generalization ("stereotyping"), because we see so many others doing it with impunity, so it must be an acceptable way to look at the world.
The moon landings will always be doubted, and doubtable, until we're heading there for vacations and doing real business there which provides materials or situations that move the moon into the common experience.
There was a good parody of this a few years ago, in the form of an "open debate" on the existence of Idaho.
Now, I've been in Idaho, and lived just next to the border in Pullman WA for several years. But that puts me in a tiny minority of the world's population. For most people, the evidence for Idaho isn't really any better than the evidence for the moon landing, the existence of some random god, etc.
Then there was the movie Wag the Dog, about a faked war with an imaginary country. So how do we know that there's really an Iraq? I've never been there, and all the evidence I've seen could have easily been faked in just about any other middle-eastern country.
Deciding which stories to believe can be tricky.
But the obvious example in recent times is the development of DDT resistance among insects. Indeed it is possible within a *very* short timeframe (evolutionarily speaking) to make a population of insects quite resistant to any given insecticide or other environmental hazard. ... Perhaps if HIV is unchecked, we will see the human population develop resistance to it too (untreated HIV has an 90-95% mortality rate, perhaps 1-2% less).
There is a hypothesis that this is why the bubonic plague is no longer a problem. The idea is that, after killing 30-50% of all Europeans every generation for a couple of centuries, Europeans evolved resistance. The disease also affected Asia and Africa, so we can also guess that the resistance spread there in the obvious ways. Or maybe it originated outside Europe.
The alternative hypothesis is based on the idea that it's not a good idea for a parasite to totally devastate the prey. If you kill all your hosts, you die too. This would mean that in areas of high human mortality, the plague organism died out, and was eventually replaced by a less-virulent form that left the prey alive long enough to spread the parasite.
Of course, both of these could be true. That's probably what really happened, with humans evolving resistance while the plague evolved less virulence.
Anyway, the disease is still around, but it doesn't kill very many people. Here in the US, there are 10 or so cases per year. China has about 40 cases/year, and India has 35. These numbers are roughly the percent of the populations, implying a somewhat consistent but very low incidence everywhere.
If you take a certain species of squirrel from Pennsylvania and mate it with one in Ohio, fertile offspring will be produced. Take this same squirrel and mate it with one of the same species from California and no fertile offspring will be produced.
Actually, this might not be a transitional state. It could be a long-term stable state. If conditions vary continuously across a species' range, local populations could all be well adapted to local conditions. Widely-separated populations could be very different, while they are all very similar to adjacent populations.
There isn't really a standard name for this phenomenon, though I've seen the term "range species" coined to describe it. Most of the known examples live along a seashore, or have a range that is long and narrow for some other reason.
There are also special cases, such as the domestic dog, which can interbreed with gray wolves and jackals, but the wolves and jackals produce either infertile or no offspring. But such cases are more likely incomplete speciation events.
Another confusing example is typified by lions and tigers. They can interbreed, but usually male offspring are sterile while female offspring are fertile. They are separate in the wild mostly because their ranges don't overlap. Google for "tion" and "liger" for more information.
Anyway, biologists generally accept that "species" can't really be defined precisely, and all sorts of borderline cases are seen in nature. The creationist/ID crowd makes a fuss over it, but it's not much of a problem for anyone else. You just have to accept that nature doesn't need to obey the human desire for terminology or dichotomies.
The term "species" is useful for scientific purposes, but it's not an exact match for what happens in nature. Breeding happens between individuals, while "species" is an emergent property of populations.