The thing about SCIENCE, as opposed to scientists, is that it is apolitical. It's self-correcting.
True, of course, but this sorta misses the same point that so many of your critics are also missing: The original article wasn't about science at all; it was about the media's "balanced" misreporting of scientific news.
, so perhaps they should stop reporting on new studies altogether.
Indeed. One problem that seems to stand out is that journalists seem to have an idea that science is merely opinion of self-proclaimed experts. This is especially clear in the old evolution debate, where most reporting makes it clear that "theory" is a synonym for "opinion". But this comes out in all sorts of science reporting. This pretty much tells us that the journalists are clueless about science.
Anyone with an interest in science should be looking at scientific news sources. There's no shortage of them. Of course, the best do tend to require a subscription (aka membership), as they rarely get much money from advertisers.
Every once in a while, you find a journalist who understands scientific methods. But the approach of the media corporations to such people is all too often as described in this article: The editors mandate a fake "balance" that forces the good journalists to treat pseudo-science as the equal of real science.
So don't bother. Go to the real scientific sources. If you want just summaries of breaking scientific news, suscribe to Science News. Lots of brief summaries of scientific news stories, and they usually tell you where to find the primary articles.
You probably already know the good sites for your specialties...
Because you can't be part of the in-crowd unless you have a gmail address.
Heh. My usual email address ends with ".mit.edu", so gmail is actually a step down in geekiness. Similarly with all the folks here whose email addresses are at Cal Tech or Stanford or Berserkeley or RPI or any of the other geek schools.
Still, it's been interesting to have a gmail.com address for a few months. And I've been able to get a few friends off hotmail or yahoo by offering them a gmail account. The "geek points" are a fun thing to mention, and they seem to like it better than the more egregiously commercial services they were using.
But we'll see what the google crowd does with it. Their "Don't be evil" mantra may be in for some modifying, now that they're a "public" corporation with shareholders holding the reins. In a few years, we may find that they've gone the way of hotmail and yahoo, and we have to do something else for long-term geek-friendly email. Or maybe their mantra will still be in effect, and we'll still like them.
I think you might be onto something there. It's possible that part of Kerry's problem, along with Dukakis and Carter before him, is that the more "liberal" voters actually prefer someone who seems like a real person who's having a bit of fun. Kerry's such a straightlaced, serious fellow. Yeah, he's a wonk who know far more than you or I do about nearly everything government. But so was Clinton, and he was clearly having the time of his life.
I did think at first that the cigar story might offend the anti-smoking crowd. But they figured out pretty quickly that the story wasn't about Clinton actually smoking the cigar. Monica wasn't harmed by second-hand smoke, so it was ok.
Likewise, I've sometimes wondered if all the stories about Bush's drunken or coke-inspired escapades would only endear him to everyone but the extreme right wing. Those folks are going to vote for him anyway, because he likes to kill people, so he won't drive them away by seeming human and enjoying life a bit. The stories are probably planted by Karl Rove to tell the rest of us that he has a bit of Clinton inside him, too.
(But not literally, of course; I wouldn't want to imply that. Anyway, Clinton would be going after Laura or Jenna. Laura and Jenna. And Barbara. Both Barbaras.;-)
You're right there. I also noticed those studies saying that around 70-80% of Bush's supporters couldn't accurately answer questions about his or Kerry's policies. Meanwhile, around 2/3 of Kerry's supporters could answer some of the questions. I was disappointed not to hear the percentage for Nader supporters; I'd guess they'd be even higher than for Kerry.
I feel that the "we need to support America to get the security in return" argument is invalid, as long as Bush is robbing my friends of freedoms, he does not provide neither me nor my friends with security, on the contrary. My security, in fact, our security as humans, depends on that everyone supports each others freedom.
Well, lots of people have observed that the main danger to freedom and security usually comes from your own government, not any foreign devil. The foreign devils are the excuse that your government uses to scare you into accepting controls in the guise of security. And, as seems to be happening in the Middle East, the government's actions are usually such as to make the foreign devils more scary. The US government has been busy turning Iraq into a center for terrorism. But not many Americans can be bothered to study the topic enough to understand what's going on there. Most can't even point to Iraq on a map.
Most Americans still consider the World Trade Center attack as unprovoked, no matter how many words are written explaining it. They dismiss all explanations as disloyal and traitorous, and just want revenge. They usually don't care who is punished, as long as someone pays for it. So they accept killing people with no connection to the attack as revenge. Anyone following the story will easily understand that the inevitable result will be more terrorist attacks, as people in Afghanistan and Iraq plan their revenge for "unprovoked" American killing of their friends and loved ones. And if Norway is cooperating militarily with the US, they become targets, too. And Sweden becomes a target because it's next to Norway (and because Iraqis are no more logical than Americans.;-)
But I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.
My main thought is "We're all in this together." I have friends in Norway, too, from both computing and music/dance connections. More in Sweden and Finland, actually, but numbers don't mean much, especially on the Net.
My other main thought is that we need a lot more education here. People in the rest of the world should understand that half the American voters voted against Bush (not for Kerry) because of his policies. Americans should be led to understand that certain other countries aren't 100% populated by terrorists. Some people are interested and want to learn. Most aren't and don't . But a lot of innocent bystanders are dying, and we'll all be safer if we can find a way to stop it and somehow make ammends.
I'm not betting on that happening any time soon, though.
Are you kidding? The red states are the best states out there -... Outside of the downtown and suburbs of the big cities (Denver, Salt Lake, etc), the people are the nicest people you will ever meet...
Funny story: Last year at about this time, my wife and I went on a month-long drive around the western states. She had never been out west, though I grew up in Washington and Arizona and found everything familiar. She really enjoyed most of the places we stopped, and found nearly everyone rather open and friendly.
Then we drove into Salt Lake City. She freaked out. She wouldn't even let me out of the car to take pictures, out of fear of the people. I joked about it at first, then realized she was serious. She couldn't explain why, but the people in the street terrified her. We drove around, enjoyed the rows of 1800's-era houses and so on, for maybe an hour. Then we had to leave town without stopping anywhere.
It wasn't a racial thing. We're two of the palest white people around, and we'd have fit in visually. Well, maybe we needed some slightly more office-like clothes, but there were others in casual attire on the sidewalks. She couldn't really say what triggered the fright, but it was real. She just knew that those were people she didn't want around her.
Later, in Moab, we got out, walked around, had a nice meal, talked to people, and she was relaxed. She even talked about what a nice place it might be to live in. But SLC she just couldn't take. No reason; just an instinctive fear of the people.
We didn't pass through Denver. But she enjoyed Flagstaff, Tucson, San Diego, San Antonio, and other equally citified areas. Tucson is even visually similar to Salt Lake City. So the true reason for her reaction is a mystery.
It's perhaps interesting that Utah just went for Bush by a higher margin than any other state, even Texas. I suspect that there might be a connection there somewhere.
Lying to pollsters would seem especially likely if one of the candidates has publicly declared that if you're not with him, you're with the terrorists. It's even more likely if that candidate's people have a record of hauling people off to camps for years without access to lawyers or trials.
I wasn't accosted by any exit pollster, but if I had been, I'd have been quite tempted to say that I'd voted for the non-terrorist candidate. After all, I don't really know who the supposed pollster is reporting to, or whether they might recognize me.
I'd think that any sensible person might be nervous about admitting to a stranger to being "with the terrorists", as our president would describe us.
The machines give roughly the same answers as the exit polls. That's a crude measure, but it implies that there wasn't widespread fraud.
Funny; I've already seen a lot online discussing the inaccuracies in the exit polls. NPR had a program on the topic a couple hours back, where the exit-poll reps admitted that they overestimated the Kerry vote by 5% or more. They seemed especially bothered by the fact that so many polls were off by roughly the same amount.
They didn't quite say it, but one obvious suspicion was a systematic 5% (roughly) error in counting the votes.
The other obvious suspicion is a systematic bias in all the polls. But it's more difficult to see how this might happen, given the wide range in political stances of the polling organizations.
One, uh, "interesting" thing I ran across a few weeks ago was a discussion of a growing difficulty that pollsters have in the US: There are a lot of states now using proprietary electronic voting equipment that can't be audited or examined by outsiders. It's essentially impossible for a pollster to estimate the bias introduced by such equipment and add it to the poll estimates. And, of course, if a poll turns out different from the final vote tally, it's a huge embarrassment to the polling company.
It was interesting hearing them discuss this problem openly. It was as if they just accepted the bias of the equipment as a given that we all know about. Their problem is that they couldn't poll the machines and determine their biases, which makes for a large unknown in their calculations.
Well, it'll be interesting to see what blackboxvoting discovers, if anything.
Al Quaeda WAS STRIVING FOR CIVILIAN AMERICAN CASUALTIES and still has had
Actually, the more thoughtful analyses don't generally interpret it this way. The Sep 11 attack was on the World Trade Center, and citizens of more than 50 countries died in that attack. US politicians rant on about the "attack on America", but that's not what it was at all. It was an attack on a major center of international corporate power. It just happened to be in New York, but the evidence is that that's not why it was attacked.
Those more familiar with Osama bin Laden's work have generally concluded that his battle is with the entire modern, secular world. America is a large part of what he sees as evil, true, but he isn't specifically attacking America. He's fighting the entire modern secular world.
This could be considered quibbling, of course. But it is probably more significant than most US politicians understand. By ignoring the non-Americans who died in the World Trade Center, US politicians are basically saying we don't care about them. Only American casualties count. The relatives of the other victims have been told that their deaths don't matter to Americans. This probably has a lot to do with the poor support they have shown for the American "coalition".
If you want to fight back effectively, misinterpretations like this that divide our own side against itself are not going to help. We need to understand what Osama and friends really stand for and what they're really doing. Saying "Oh, poor us; we're being attacked" isn't very helpful if you reject and offend the others who are also being attacked.
One thing the rest of the world has to come to terms with is that roughly half the voters in the US have just expressed their approval of what George Bush has done. They approve of invading another country on false pretenses. They approve of killing civilians by the tens of thousands. They approve of putting religion into government (and probably don't approve of whatever religion you may follow). They approve of putting companies like Haliburton in charge of projects in your country through no-bid contracts and no voice for your citizens. They don't care whether your countrymen may have done anything at all against the US; they'll still approve attacking you just because of what you might be capable of doing sometime in the iindefinite future.
I'll bet that there is a lot of discussion of such things going on in the rest of the world. It'll be interesting to see what the rest of the world can do to defend themselves.
The one good sign is that I've already heard and read a number of comments from the rest of the world pointing out that roughly half the US voters were opposed to all of the above. It's fairly clear that most of the Kerry votes weren't really for Kerry; they were votes to get Bush and his policies out of power. Many people in the rest of the world understand this and that the US isn't a monolith supporting whatever Bush does.
But still, the rest of the world has gotta be considering how to deal with a George Bush who now thinks he has a "mandate" for his policies. It's time to start looking for information about what people around the world are going to do about it.
You might also check out their 2004 Election Guide for more great reporting on the whole story.
Why is it that the best political coverage is now coming from comedians like The Onion and Jon Stewart? (Now if they could only make the Daily Show's web site work properly. They just made it worse, though, by going over to Windows Media format entirely. Maybe it's their attempt at subtle web humor?;-)
Well, I guess they all have four more years of good material...
A possible quick fix would be to partition a drive to *nix the file system, and have apps on another partition?
I don't think this would work too well. As I understand it, Apple's problem was that the old MacOS did caseless filename matching, so their software could play fast and loose with capitalization. When programs were ported to OSX, they found lots of failures because a program created a file "Foo" and later tried to reference it as "foo" or "FOO". They took the quick fix, making the kernel's file-name compare use strcasecmp() rather than strcmp(). This got their apps up and running quickly, but produces a real problem for people trying to port packages to OSX.
A far better solution would be to do as the unix world has done all along - keep the kernel simple by just doing "dumb" string comparisons, and push the calls of strcasecmp() out to the apps. This isn't difficult, and there are lots of unix apps that do caseless string comparisons. It would have meant more debugging time at Apple, and a slightly later release of their first product. Not much later, really, because most of this could be done just once in the MacOS compatibility libraries that their apps would call on OSX.
Actually, this is really just part of the original unix design that tried to keep the kernel as small and simple as possible, and to push "policy" decisions like caselessness out to user space. This approach is a clear win in this case. If the OS does case-sensitive comparisons, you can easily implement caselessness at a higher level. But if the OS does caseless comparison, you're stuck with it and can't undo it at a higher level.
But I think I do need to find a way to split a partition on OSX. I'm typing this on my PowerBook, which is a nice machine in many respects. It has one big partition, and I don't have the nerve to try to do anything with it. I've put off moving a lot of things to it because of this sort of problem. (Also, none of my wish scripts work worth a damn.;-) I now treat it as an "end" system, suitable for user interaction but not seriously usable as a server in a world where I need to move things around among a lot of widely-separated systems with different OSs.
Another file-system problem that is probably related to the caselessness is that, while I can rsync trees of directories freely among linux and all the *BSD systems, and the Latin-1 (8859-1) filenames on some machines work fine everywhere, it doesn't work with OSX. The filenames that use 8-bit chars (German, French, Swedish, Finnish, etc) produce garbled filenames on OSX. Some of them can't even be renamed or deleted. I have some "zombie" directories on several OSX boxes because of such file names. Again, I've asked about this, and the suggestions either don't work, or can't be implemented because they're just comments that I'm an idiot for using such file names. But I can't enforce OSX file-name conventions on the owners of those other machines...
There seems to be a move in the linux/unix world to slip in a file-name comparison routine that assumes UTF-8. I don't know if this is what has been done everywhere, but my impression is that it would explain why rsync works as well as it does between different systems. But it doesn't work sanely when copying to OSX. I haven't yet found a coherent explanation of what's going on here; just "explanations" that I'm obviously not smart enough to understand the problem, and I shouldn't worry my little head about it.
Actually, this condescension and difficulty of getting proper geek-friendly explanations is one of the general reasons I'd put OSX below most unixoid systems as a serious server. I don't like having to say that, but it's a fact of life. The Mac world is strongly oriented towards the "it just works" crowd, and is often frustrating to someone who wants to know how it works so that I can make my own stuff "just work" there.
I've attempted to move some web sites over to an OSX system, and it was a disaster for a reason that they never warn you about: OSX comes with a caseless file system. This means that if some directory contains files "foobar" and "Foobar", "fooBar" and "FooBar", when you scp or rsync them over to OSX, you get only one of those names, the first one encountered, and it contains the data of the last one encountered. This is inevitably a disaster.
I asked about this in a number of fora (including this one, but you can probably imagine how effective that was;-). The main answers that I got were far from helpful.
The main answer was that Apple also supports a "unix" file system that is case sensitive. That's fine if you control the server and can reformat the disk and reinstall everything. If not, it doesn't help at all. And you have to face the vague, non-specific warnings that some unlisted number of Apple apps won't work right with the unix file system. There's also the question of whether the disk might be partitioned into two file systems, one case-sensitive and one not. This might be doable, but in over a year, I haven't stumbled across instructions on how to do it.
The other main answer was of the form "You're an 1D10T!" if you have files whose names differ only in capitalization. Well, maybe I am. But if you're getting the files from other systems, you can't necessarily dictate the file-naming rules. And many English-speaking people routinely use case for a number of purposes that make perfect sense in file names, so it's not really correct to say that things shouldn't be case sensitive. We all know the difference between buying an apple and buying an Apple, after all.
The whole thing was frustrated by the inordinately long time that it took to diagnose the reason for the bizarre misbehavior of some of the things in our ported web sites. The symptoms were never indicative of the real problem (e.g., an app execing the/usr/bin find program when it wanted the "Find" program in its own directory).
Telling victims of this kind of problems that it's because they're stupid does not endear you to the people figthing the problems. In our case, we eventually reached a firm conclusion: Don't even attempt to move web sites over to OSX. It's probably fine if you are building a web site from scratch and aren't importing anything from anywhere else. But OSX is its own pocket universe with some "interesting" file-system characteristics. Porting to OSX often appears easy at first, until you find yourself going crazy tracking down something like this.
Maybe eventually some OSX guru will write a HOWTO explaining just how to solve this problem. Meanwhile, I'd suggest extreme care with using OSX as part of your server farm.
And I wouldn't expect a real HOWTO to be produced soon. The OSX world is, un fortunately, infested with the attitude that you shouldn't worry your pretty little head about it; it "just works". When it doesn't, you'll find the help not nearly as helpful as in the rest of the unix universe.
Not knowing how to drive the vehicle you are using is always driver error.
Well, yes and no. It's useful to use the distinction between "proximate" and "ultimate" causes. It's true that the proximate cause of such accidents are driver error. But the ultimate cause is a lot more complex. To understand, you have to ask why so many drivers of those vehicles are making that sort of error.
It's common in the design industry to say that user error is always a euphemism for bad design. Actually, it may be that, or it may be bad documentation (sometimes called education).
Fact is, few if any auto salesmen are likely to emphasize the inherent instability that goes with a high center of gravity. Most people buy their cars based on marketing, fashion, public image, and so on. These sources of "information" rarely mention a difference in handling, unless it's something fun (like my wife's Mini Cooper, which is incredibly fun to drive - partly because it's so stable that you can take corners at very high speeds). You only learn about things like rollover problems from boring sources like government reports and Consumer Reports. The flashy ads never mention them.
The old military jeep had a similar stability problem. The military had very few problems with rollovers, though. They required a brief training program, where the vehicle's special handling was emphasized. You got to drive one after you'd been thoroughly beat over the head with its horizontal instabilities. Once you understood this, driving a jeep was easy, and it wasn't dangerous because you knew about how far you could push it. The jeep was very popular with civilians in rural areas, because it was a good off-road vehicle. But that population was willing and able to deal with the idea that a jeep might drive differently than a car (or pickup or tractor or combine or...).
Then they started marketing jeeps and similar vehicles to the general public. But they didn't insist on training customers on the special driving techniques needed for such unstable vehicles. And there were accidents. And they blamed the users.
Just like we always do in the computer field.
Frankly, I don't blame Windows users when their machine is 0wned by some piece of malware. They've been suckered by the same sort of marketing that sells SUVs to anyone who walks into the sales room. In both cases, the blame belongs on the designers who built a "consumer" product that is too dangerous to use without special training. And the blame is shared by the marketers who sell such products to unsuspecting customers without warning them of the dangers and teaching them how to protect themselves from harm while operating the products.
Yeah, you can excuse bad design by chanting "user error". But ultimately, if a lot of users are making the same error, the problem is bad design and/or bad marketing and/or failure to warn the users of problems.
... doesn't MS still have the majority of market share in the server market?"
According to Netcraft Apache has the biggest web presence.
If you read the words carefully, they can be saying the same thing. This is a case where you have to read with your skeptometer turned to High. Look carefully at the exact words, and ask yourself what exactly they mean.
Microsoft has long claimed that IIS is the most successful commercial web server. Note that word "commercial". Apache isn't for sale; it's free from apache.org. So it's not a "commercial" web server, and it is regularly ignored in comparisons of "commercial web servers".
The above comments are compatible in the same sense. MS can claim the majority of "market share" in the "server market", because apache isn't for sale, so it isn't part of that market. Netscape isn't counting sales; it's counting online servers. These numbers need not be closely related, especially when a major server isn't for sale.
This is straightforward marketing technique. To avoid falling for it, you need to understand how marketers use terminology to make you think they're saying something very different from what they're actually saying.
In brief, MS's IIS server is the most sold web server; apache is the most used web server.
A funny example I saw recently: A box was sold with Windows XP Pro, including the IIS server (which was never used). Its disk was wiped, then linux with apache were installed. Microsoft counts this machine as Windows running IIS; Netcraft counts it as linux running apache. In "market" statistics, Microsoft is correct; in "running" statistics, Netcraft is correct.
As before, the study ignores the thousands of automatically-spreading viruses for Windows.
And in other news, a new auto-safety study by the National Traffic Safety Commission has shown that SUVs are no more dangerous to drive than other types of cars. This conclusion was reached by ignoring roll-over accidents, which are due to the SUV's design, and are thus not caused by the driver.
Yeah; that's the textbook example of an early measurement of the Earth. The point of the puzzle I mentioned was that it can be done without any travelling, using technology that was available about then. As I recall (vaguely), it was one of a list of interesting ways of determining the Earth's size using fairly simple measuring tools. Not that this lessens Eratosthenes' approach.
The transit scheme does have one potential error: If there are waves at the horizon, you'll get an overestimage of the Earth's radius that's proportional to the wave height. So you want a really calm day, and even then, there may be waves out at the horizon. So you might want to repeat the measurement a few times and take the minimum.
If... America's small business community goes for Linux...Bill has a really big problem on his hands.
We might also note the comment in the article that much of the "movement" is outside the US. And, of course, linux originated outside the US.
As an American programmer, I've been a bit bemused by the several projects that I've recently worked on that were "outsourced" to us by non-American companies who were migrating to linux.
In each case, the sales approach that persuaded their management was "Do you really want to trust your company's data to closed-source software from a big American company that doesn't have your interests at heart?" The marketing guys say that questions like this are more and more producing a lot of nervous, scared looks on management faces.
Part of this is that people are starting to get the message about spyware. And even a cursory web search turns up story after story about spyware embedded in Microsoft software. Who know what data is being passed back to some MS site, to be sold to other interested parties?
Remember a year or two back, when they were caught taking things (mostly images) from msn.com customer web sites and using them in ads? Public outrage made them back down, but it was obvious from their response that they weren't at all apologetic, and considered it their legal right.
It doesn't take a software genius to figure out that there's really only one solution to such threats. If you care about your data, and especially if you don't want your data being seen by competitors, you'd be smart to stick with open-source software. And hire a few good hackers to study it, to make sure that nobody has snuck something in that you didn't order.
American companies may not be so smart, and we could end up with Microsoft being important in the US but nowhere else. After all, the US is still using the English "Imperial" system of measurements, long after even the Brits have (mostly) abandoned it.
(Also, it's hard to imagine most American managers going for something that was done by a Finnish student and a gang of his friends, no matter how good it is. There's a lot of idiocy in this business.;-)
Indeed, though those terms might not be obvious to someone who doesn't already know them. The "pit organ" problem illustrates an ongoing frustration with keyword searches. Similar terms or phrases are often used in unrelated fields, leading to the notorious difficulty of finding what you're looking for in a large haystack of unrelated pages.
The pit vipers were so named for the pits on their faces, of course, but I think that the term predates the discovery of infrared light and its relationship to heat. Those pits are now textbook examples of a separate development of an imaging "eye". Like the brittle starts, the pits' images don't have very good resolution, but they don't need good resolution. Picking out a spot of warmth in a scene is useful to a predator, and the other eyes are good enough at focusing on the details.
But it is somewhat curious that the pit vipers wouldn't have just adapted their older eyes to see in the infrared. Other animals do so, and it wouldn't have been difficult for snakes to adjust their frequency response. This is useful in the evolution/creation debate, because it's not something that an intelligent engineer would likely do. But an unintelligent evolutionary process could very well do something so apparently idiotic.
Then again, I've seen "committee" designs that are every bit as idiotic, where every member of the group objected to the design but went along because it was the only way to get agreement. So maybe there isn't just one "intelligent designer", but rather a whole committee of them.
That would certainly explain a lot of the absurdities in this world much better than an omniscient god does.;-)
Some still believe the world is flat, I hear. Something about a mountain one can climb and see everything.
Such people have probably never done much mountain climbing.;-)
One of the problems with this whole idea is that people throughout history have figured out the shape (and sometimes even the approximate size) of the earth without any high-tech equipment.
The usual textbook example is sailors. It doesn't take much sailing on a large body of water until you realize that you can "see" the curvature of the surface. The most obvious clue is the way that things appear and disappear at the horizon. They don't just shrink or grow. A ship sailing away disappears from the bottom up, and from the sailor's viewpoint, tall objects on shore also disappear from the bottom up. As you approach land, the opposite happens. After a while, your brain integrates all this, and the shape of the world is obvious. If someone tries to say that the world is flat, you just dismiss them as ignorand landlubbers.
Mountain climbers can see the same thing, especially if you're climbing a mountain on the edge of a range where you can see out over an expanse of relatively flat land. As you climb, things farther away "come up over the horizon". Then, as you descend, things disappear in the reverse order. Again, if you do this very often, the overall curved shape of the plains becomes obvious. Anyone who says otherwise is merely displaying their ignorance of easily-observed fact.
There was a cute puzzle in Scientific American many years ago. The puzzle was: Using no more equipment that was available to surveyors centuries ago, and standing in one place, measure the radius of the Earth.
The solution was to carry your transit (or whatever you call your device for precisely measuring angles) to a shore where you can't see the opposite shore. You need a calm day so that there aren't any tall waves. Sight on the horizon and measure the angle with the transit's plumb line. This will be slightly less than a right angle. Draw a diagram of the curved surface with two radii, one to the horizon and one to the transit. Measure the height of the transit above the surface of the water. The line from the transit to the horizon forms a right angle with the remote radius. You know the other two angles. The hypotenuse is the Earth's radius plus the height of your transit. Solve for the radius.
There was a comment that Roman engineers could have done this and gotten the radius to within a few percent. Their main limitation was the accuracy of their equivalent of trig tables. (Actually, you'd probably have done better by asking a Greek nautical engineer.;-)
Yeah, but this is pretty much because the (mammalian) eye is soft tissue that doesn't fossilize well. So it has long been a "mystery". The religious folks are really just arguing that "Scientists don't have any evidence about how our eye evolved, so it must have been a miracle." Anything not preserved in the fossil record can be used in this sort of fallacious argument.
On the other hand, you can read an interesting scientific story of the past few years by googling for "brittle-star eye". This is about a group of starfish, not mammals, but it's a case where we can see the early stages of a functional eye. The evolution has happened in the past million years or so. It's a nice case where the animals don't have a very good eye, with resolution of several degrees, but it's better than what their relatives have. Comparing the brittle stars with other starfish shows clearly how this eye is evolving.
In a few more hundreds of millions of years, when the descendants of the brittle stars are having their scientific revolution, they will probably have lots of fossil evidence showing how their advanced eye developed, and their religious people will have to use other arguments against evolution by natural selection. And they'll probably insist that those strange ancient creatures with internal skeletons couldn't have had vision, because their fossils don't show anything like the compound eye that all advanced species use.
(There's another interesting recently-developed sort of "eye" in the pit vipers, giving them a sort of pinhole camera that works in the infrared. But that's harder to find by googling.)
It isn't supposed to be proof. Its additional evidence supporting evolution theory.
And, of course, that's how the scientific process works.
Any number of people (including Karl Popper) have argued that scientific methods rarely (if ever) actually prove anything, and the phrase "scientific proof" is usually an indication that the writer doesn't understand scientific methods. If you look closely at most scientific tests, they are actually methods of disproof. You think up a lot of explanations of what you've observed ("hypotheses"), and attempt to shoot them down. If all your tests fail to disprove one explanation, you tentatively accept it as valid ("theory"). But you continue to test it, out of general skepticism.
This is why the most important scientific concept is "falsifiability". And it's why creationism probably won't ever be considered a scientific theory. It can't be falsified by any methods that we know of. After all, no matter what tests you do, whatever happens is God's will. Nothing can happen that isn't God's will. So you can't test creationism.
I've always liked the theory that the world was created 5 minutes ago, including all of our memories. How can you disprove this? Obviously you can't. Any evidence to the contrary was obviously put there by God to fool us.
Another idea that I like is that all the fossil evidence was planted by God to make us believe in a long geologic history and evolution of living things. Since God went to so much work to make us believe all this, we are obviously thwarting God's will if we don't believe. This is a fun concept, but it's completely non-falsifiable.
I've forgotten who came up with that one. Anyone know?
Slashdot Mirror
The thing about SCIENCE, as opposed to scientists, is that it is apolitical. It's self-correcting.
True, of course, but this sorta misses the same point that so many of your critics are also missing: The original article wasn't about science at all; it was about the media's "balanced" misreporting of scientific news.
, so perhaps they should stop reporting on new studies altogether.
...
Indeed. One problem that seems to stand out is that journalists seem to have an idea that science is merely opinion of self-proclaimed experts. This is especially clear in the old evolution debate, where most reporting makes it clear that "theory" is a synonym for "opinion". But this comes out in all sorts of science reporting. This pretty much tells us that the journalists are clueless about science.
Anyone with an interest in science should be looking at scientific news sources. There's no shortage of them. Of course, the best do tend to require a subscription (aka membership), as they rarely get much money from advertisers.
Every once in a while, you find a journalist who understands scientific methods. But the approach of the media corporations to such people is all too often as described in this article: The editors mandate a fake "balance" that forces the good journalists to treat pseudo-science as the equal of real science.
So don't bother. Go to the real scientific sources. If you want just summaries of breaking scientific news, suscribe to Science News. Lots of brief summaries of scientific news stories, and they usually tell you where to find the primary articles.
You probably already know the good sites for your specialties
Because you can't be part of the in-crowd unless you have a gmail address.
Heh. My usual email address ends with ".mit.edu", so gmail is actually a step down in geekiness. Similarly with all the folks here whose email addresses are at Cal Tech or Stanford or Berserkeley or RPI or any of the other geek schools.
Still, it's been interesting to have a gmail.com address for a few months. And I've been able to get a few friends off hotmail or yahoo by offering them a gmail account. The "geek points" are a fun thing to mention, and they seem to like it better than the more egregiously commercial services they were using.
But we'll see what the google crowd does with it. Their "Don't be evil" mantra may be in for some modifying, now that they're a "public" corporation with shareholders holding the reins. In a few years, we may find that they've gone the way of hotmail and yahoo, and we have to do something else for long-term geek-friendly email. Or maybe their mantra will still be in effect, and we'll still like them.
Hey, you beat me to it. I'd like to see the data, too. This could be very useful in the growing argument around electronic voting, if it's true.
Anyone got any URLs for information on this topic?
(Of course, with the message count on this topic above 3000, it's not likely that many people will ever read any of these messages.)
I think you might be onto something there. It's possible that part of Kerry's problem, along with Dukakis and Carter before him, is that the more "liberal" voters actually prefer someone who seems like a real person who's having a bit of fun. Kerry's such a straightlaced, serious fellow. Yeah, he's a wonk who know far more than you or I do about nearly everything government. But so was Clinton, and he was clearly having the time of his life.
;-)
I did think at first that the cigar story might offend the anti-smoking crowd. But they figured out pretty quickly that the story wasn't about Clinton actually smoking the cigar. Monica wasn't harmed by second-hand smoke, so it was ok.
Likewise, I've sometimes wondered if all the stories about Bush's drunken or coke-inspired escapades would only endear him to everyone but the extreme right wing. Those folks are going to vote for him anyway, because he likes to kill people, so he won't drive them away by seeming human and enjoying life a bit. The stories are probably planted by Karl Rove to tell the rest of us that he has a bit of Clinton inside him, too.
(But not literally, of course; I wouldn't want to imply that. Anyway, Clinton would be going after Laura or Jenna. Laura and Jenna. And Barbara. Both Barbaras.
The Democrats really need someone like him.
You're right there. I also noticed those studies saying that around 70-80% of Bush's supporters couldn't accurately answer questions about his or Kerry's policies. Meanwhile, around 2/3 of Kerry's supporters could answer some of the questions. I was disappointed not to hear the percentage for Nader supporters; I'd guess they'd be even higher than for Kerry.
I feel that the "we need to support America to get the security in return" argument is invalid, as long as Bush is robbing my friends of freedoms, he does not provide neither me nor my friends with security, on the contrary. My security, in fact, our security as humans, depends on that everyone supports each others freedom.
;-)
Well, lots of people have observed that the main danger to freedom and security usually comes from your own government, not any foreign devil. The foreign devils are the excuse that your government uses to scare you into accepting controls in the guise of security. And, as seems to be happening in the Middle East, the government's actions are usually such as to make the foreign devils more scary. The US government has been busy turning Iraq into a center for terrorism. But not many Americans can be bothered to study the topic enough to understand what's going on there. Most can't even point to Iraq on a map.
Most Americans still consider the World Trade Center attack as unprovoked, no matter how many words are written explaining it. They dismiss all explanations as disloyal and traitorous, and just want revenge. They usually don't care who is punished, as long as someone pays for it. So they accept killing people with no connection to the attack as revenge. Anyone following the story will easily understand that the inevitable result will be more terrorist attacks, as people in Afghanistan and Iraq plan their revenge for "unprovoked" American killing of their friends and loved ones. And if Norway is cooperating militarily with the US, they become targets, too. And Sweden becomes a target because it's next to Norway (and because Iraqis are no more logical than Americans.
But I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.
My main thought is "We're all in this together." I have friends in Norway, too, from both computing and music/dance connections. More in Sweden and Finland, actually, but numbers don't mean much, especially on the Net.
My other main thought is that we need a lot more education here. People in the rest of the world should understand that half the American voters voted against Bush (not for Kerry) because of his policies. Americans should be led to understand that certain other countries aren't 100% populated by terrorists. Some people are interested and want to learn. Most aren't and don't . But a lot of innocent bystanders are dying, and we'll all be safer if we can find a way to stop it and somehow make ammends.
I'm not betting on that happening any time soon, though.
... weighted the results ... giving women more weight than men.
;-)
What!!??
That's just guaranteed to offend 90% of American women.
Are you kidding? The red states are the best states out there - ... Outside of the downtown and suburbs of the big cities (Denver, Salt Lake, etc), the people are the nicest people you will ever meet ...
Funny story: Last year at about this time, my wife and I went on a month-long drive around the western states. She had never been out west, though I grew up in Washington and Arizona and found everything familiar. She really enjoyed most of the places we stopped, and found nearly everyone rather open and friendly.
Then we drove into Salt Lake City. She freaked out. She wouldn't even let me out of the car to take pictures, out of fear of the people. I joked about it at first, then realized she was serious. She couldn't explain why, but the people in the street terrified her. We drove around, enjoyed the rows of 1800's-era houses and so on, for maybe an hour. Then we had to leave town without stopping anywhere.
It wasn't a racial thing. We're two of the palest white people around, and we'd have fit in visually. Well, maybe we needed some slightly more office-like clothes, but there were others in casual attire on the sidewalks. She couldn't really say what triggered the fright, but it was real. She just knew that those were people she didn't want around her.
Later, in Moab, we got out, walked around, had a nice meal, talked to people, and she was relaxed. She even talked about what a nice place it might be to live in. But SLC she just couldn't take. No reason; just an instinctive fear of the people.
We didn't pass through Denver. But she enjoyed Flagstaff, Tucson, San Diego, San Antonio, and other equally citified areas. Tucson is even visually similar to Salt Lake City. So the true reason for her reaction is a mystery.
It's perhaps interesting that Utah just went for Bush by a higher margin than any other state, even Texas. I suspect that there might be a connection there somewhere.
Lying to pollsters would seem especially likely if one of the candidates has publicly declared that if you're not with him, you're with the terrorists. It's even more likely if that candidate's people have a record of hauling people off to camps for years without access to lawyers or trials.
I wasn't accosted by any exit pollster, but if I had been, I'd have been quite tempted to say that I'd voted for the non-terrorist candidate. After all, I don't really know who the supposed pollster is reporting to, or whether they might recognize me.
I'd think that any sensible person might be nervous about admitting to a stranger to being "with the terrorists", as our president would describe us.
The machines give roughly the same answers as the exit polls. That's a crude measure, but it implies that there wasn't widespread fraud.
Funny; I've already seen a lot online discussing the inaccuracies in the exit polls. NPR had a program on the topic a couple hours back, where the exit-poll reps admitted that they overestimated the Kerry vote by 5% or more. They seemed especially bothered by the fact that so many polls were off by roughly the same amount.
They didn't quite say it, but one obvious suspicion was a systematic 5% (roughly) error in counting the votes.
The other obvious suspicion is a systematic bias in all the polls. But it's more difficult to see how this might happen, given the wide range in political stances of the polling organizations.
One, uh, "interesting" thing I ran across a few weeks ago was a discussion of a growing difficulty that pollsters have in the US: There are a lot of states now using proprietary electronic voting equipment that can't be audited or examined by outsiders. It's essentially impossible for a pollster to estimate the bias introduced by such equipment and add it to the poll estimates. And, of course, if a poll turns out different from the final vote tally, it's a huge embarrassment to the polling company.
It was interesting hearing them discuss this problem openly. It was as if they just accepted the bias of the equipment as a given that we all know about. Their problem is that they couldn't poll the machines and determine their biases, which makes for a large unknown in their calculations.
Well, it'll be interesting to see what blackboxvoting discovers, if anything.
Al Quaeda WAS STRIVING FOR CIVILIAN AMERICAN CASUALTIES and still has had
Actually, the more thoughtful analyses don't generally interpret it this way. The Sep 11 attack was on the World Trade Center, and citizens of more than 50 countries died in that attack. US politicians rant on about the "attack on America", but that's not what it was at all. It was an attack on a major center of international corporate power. It just happened to be in New York, but the evidence is that that's not why it was attacked.
Those more familiar with Osama bin Laden's work have generally concluded that his battle is with the entire modern, secular world. America is a large part of what he sees as evil, true, but he isn't specifically attacking America. He's fighting the entire modern secular world.
This could be considered quibbling, of course. But it is probably more significant than most US politicians understand. By ignoring the non-Americans who died in the World Trade Center, US politicians are basically saying we don't care about them. Only American casualties count. The relatives of the other victims have been told that their deaths don't matter to Americans. This probably has a lot to do with the poor support they have shown for the American "coalition".
If you want to fight back effectively, misinterpretations like this that divide our own side against itself are not going to help. We need to understand what Osama and friends really stand for and what they're really doing. Saying "Oh, poor us; we're being attacked" isn't very helpful if you reject and offend the others who are also being attacked.
One thing the rest of the world has to come to terms with is that roughly half the voters in the US have just expressed their approval of what George Bush has done. They approve of invading another country on false pretenses. They approve of killing civilians by the tens of thousands. They approve of putting religion into government (and probably don't approve of whatever religion you may follow). They approve of putting companies like Haliburton in charge of projects in your country through no-bid contracts and no voice for your citizens. They don't care whether your countrymen may have done anything at all against the US; they'll still approve attacking you just because of what you might be capable of doing sometime in the iindefinite future.
I'll bet that there is a lot of discussion of such things going on in the rest of the world. It'll be interesting to see what the rest of the world can do to defend themselves.
The one good sign is that I've already heard and read a number of comments from the rest of the world pointing out that roughly half the US voters were opposed to all of the above. It's fairly clear that most of the Kerry votes weren't really for Kerry; they were votes to get Bush and his policies out of power. Many people in the rest of the world understand this and that the US isn't a monolith supporting whatever Bush does.
But still, the rest of the world has gotta be considering how to deal with a George Bush who now thinks he has a "mandate" for his policies. It's time to start looking for information about what people around the world are going to do about it.
The Onion already has a wonderful article on the US election.
;-)
...
You might also check out their 2004 Election Guide for more great reporting on the whole story.
Why is it that the best political coverage is now coming from comedians like The Onion and Jon Stewart? (Now if they could only make the Daily Show's web site work properly. They just made it worse, though, by going over to Windows Media format entirely. Maybe it's their attempt at subtle web humor?
Well, I guess they all have four more years of good material
A possible quick fix would be to partition a drive to *nix the file system, and have apps on another partition?
;-) I now treat it as an "end" system, suitable for user interaction but not seriously usable as a server in a world where I need to move things around among a lot of widely-separated systems with different OSs.
...
I don't think this would work too well. As I understand it, Apple's problem was that the old MacOS did caseless filename matching, so their software could play fast and loose with capitalization. When programs were ported to OSX, they found lots of failures because a program created a file "Foo" and later tried to reference it as "foo" or "FOO". They took the quick fix, making the kernel's file-name compare use strcasecmp() rather than strcmp(). This got their apps up and running quickly, but produces a real problem for people trying to port packages to OSX.
A far better solution would be to do as the unix world has done all along - keep the kernel simple by just doing "dumb" string comparisons, and push the calls of strcasecmp() out to the apps. This isn't difficult, and there are lots of unix apps that do caseless string comparisons. It would have meant more debugging time at Apple, and a slightly later release of their first product. Not much later, really, because most of this could be done just once in the MacOS compatibility libraries that their apps would call on OSX.
Actually, this is really just part of the original unix design that tried to keep the kernel as small and simple as possible, and to push "policy" decisions like caselessness out to user space. This approach is a clear win in this case. If the OS does case-sensitive comparisons, you can easily implement caselessness at a higher level. But if the OS does caseless comparison, you're stuck with it and can't undo it at a higher level.
But I think I do need to find a way to split a partition on OSX. I'm typing this on my PowerBook, which is a nice machine in many respects. It has one big partition, and I don't have the nerve to try to do anything with it. I've put off moving a lot of things to it because of this sort of problem. (Also, none of my wish scripts work worth a damn.
Another file-system problem that is probably related to the caselessness is that, while I can rsync trees of directories freely among linux and all the *BSD systems, and the Latin-1 (8859-1) filenames on some machines work fine everywhere, it doesn't work with OSX. The filenames that use 8-bit chars (German, French, Swedish, Finnish, etc) produce garbled filenames on OSX. Some of them can't even be renamed or deleted. I have some "zombie" directories on several OSX boxes because of such file names. Again, I've asked about this, and the suggestions either don't work, or can't be implemented because they're just comments that I'm an idiot for using such file names. But I can't enforce OSX file-name conventions on the owners of those other machines
There seems to be a move in the linux/unix world to slip in a file-name comparison routine that assumes UTF-8. I don't know if this is what has been done everywhere, but my impression is that it would explain why rsync works as well as it does between different systems. But it doesn't work sanely when copying to OSX. I haven't yet found a coherent explanation of what's going on here; just "explanations" that I'm obviously not smart enough to understand the problem, and I shouldn't worry my little head about it.
Actually, this condescension and difficulty of getting proper geek-friendly explanations is one of the general reasons I'd put OSX below most unixoid systems as a serious server. I don't like having to say that, but it's a fact of life. The Mac world is strongly oriented towards the "it just works" crowd, and is often frustrating to someone who wants to know how it works so that I can make my own stuff "just work" there.
I've attempted to move some web sites over to an OSX system, and it was a disaster for a reason that they never warn you about: OSX comes with a caseless file system. This means that if some directory contains files "foobar" and "Foobar", "fooBar" and "FooBar", when you scp or rsync them over to OSX, you get only one of those names, the first one encountered, and it contains the data of the last one encountered. This is inevitably a disaster.
;-). The main answers that I got were far from helpful.
/usr/bin find program when it wanted the "Find" program in its own directory).
I asked about this in a number of fora (including this one, but you can probably imagine how effective that was
The main answer was that Apple also supports a "unix" file system that is case sensitive. That's fine if you control the server and can reformat the disk and reinstall everything. If not, it doesn't help at all. And you have to face the vague, non-specific warnings that some unlisted number of Apple apps won't work right with the unix file system. There's also the question of whether the disk might be partitioned into two file systems, one case-sensitive and one not. This might be doable, but in over a year, I haven't stumbled across instructions on how to do it.
The other main answer was of the form "You're an 1D10T!" if you have files whose names differ only in capitalization. Well, maybe I am. But if you're getting the files from other systems, you can't necessarily dictate the file-naming rules. And many English-speaking people routinely use case for a number of purposes that make perfect sense in file names, so it's not really correct to say that things shouldn't be case sensitive. We all know the difference between buying an apple and buying an Apple, after all.
The whole thing was frustrated by the inordinately long time that it took to diagnose the reason for the bizarre misbehavior of some of the things in our ported web sites. The symptoms were never indicative of the real problem (e.g., an app execing the
Telling victims of this kind of problems that it's because they're stupid does not endear you to the people figthing the problems. In our case, we eventually reached a firm conclusion: Don't even attempt to move web sites over to OSX. It's probably fine if you are building a web site from scratch and aren't importing anything from anywhere else. But OSX is its own pocket universe with some "interesting" file-system characteristics. Porting to OSX often appears easy at first, until you find yourself going crazy tracking down something like this.
Maybe eventually some OSX guru will write a HOWTO explaining just how to solve this problem. Meanwhile, I'd suggest extreme care with using OSX as part of your server farm.
And I wouldn't expect a real HOWTO to be produced soon. The OSX world is, un fortunately, infested with the attitude that you shouldn't worry your pretty little head about it; it "just works". When it doesn't, you'll find the help not nearly as helpful as in the rest of the unix universe.
Not knowing how to drive the vehicle you are using is always driver error.
...).
Well, yes and no. It's useful to use the distinction between "proximate" and "ultimate" causes. It's true that the proximate cause of such accidents are driver error. But the ultimate cause is a lot more complex. To understand, you have to ask why so many drivers of those vehicles are making that sort of error.
It's common in the design industry to say that user error is always a euphemism for bad design. Actually, it may be that, or it may be bad documentation (sometimes called education).
Fact is, few if any auto salesmen are likely to emphasize the inherent instability that goes with a high center of gravity. Most people buy their cars based on marketing, fashion, public image, and so on. These sources of "information" rarely mention a difference in handling, unless it's something fun (like my wife's Mini Cooper, which is incredibly fun to drive - partly because it's so stable that you can take corners at very high speeds). You only learn about things like rollover problems from boring sources like government reports and Consumer Reports. The flashy ads never mention them.
The old military jeep had a similar stability problem. The military had very few problems with rollovers, though. They required a brief training program, where the vehicle's special handling was emphasized. You got to drive one after you'd been thoroughly beat over the head with its horizontal instabilities. Once you understood this, driving a jeep was easy, and it wasn't dangerous because you knew about how far you could push it. The jeep was very popular with civilians in rural areas, because it was a good off-road vehicle. But that population was willing and able to deal with the idea that a jeep might drive differently than a car (or pickup or tractor or combine or
Then they started marketing jeeps and similar vehicles to the general public. But they didn't insist on training customers on the special driving techniques needed for such unstable vehicles. And there were accidents. And they blamed the users.
Just like we always do in the computer field.
Frankly, I don't blame Windows users when their machine is 0wned by some piece of malware. They've been suckered by the same sort of marketing that sells SUVs to anyone who walks into the sales room. In both cases, the blame belongs on the designers who built a "consumer" product that is too dangerous to use without special training. And the blame is shared by the marketers who sell such products to unsuspecting customers without warning them of the dangers and teaching them how to protect themselves from harm while operating the products.
Yeah, you can excuse bad design by chanting "user error". But ultimately, if a lot of users are making the same error, the problem is bad design and/or bad marketing and/or failure to warn the users of problems.
... doesn't MS still have the majority of market share in the server market?"
According to Netcraft Apache has the biggest web presence.
If you read the words carefully, they can be saying the same thing. This is a case where you have to read with your skeptometer turned to High. Look carefully at the exact words, and ask yourself what exactly they mean.
Microsoft has long claimed that IIS is the most successful commercial web server. Note that word "commercial". Apache isn't for sale; it's free from apache.org. So it's not a "commercial" web server, and it is regularly ignored in comparisons of "commercial web servers".
The above comments are compatible in the same sense. MS can claim the majority of "market share" in the "server market", because apache isn't for sale, so it isn't part of that market. Netscape isn't counting sales; it's counting online servers. These numbers need not be closely related, especially when a major server isn't for sale.
This is straightforward marketing technique. To avoid falling for it, you need to understand how marketers use terminology to make you think they're saying something very different from what they're actually saying.
In brief, MS's IIS server is the most sold web server; apache is the most used web server.
A funny example I saw recently: A box was sold with Windows XP Pro, including the IIS server (which was never used). Its disk was wiped, then linux with apache were installed. Microsoft counts this machine as Windows running IIS; Netcraft counts it as linux running apache. In "market" statistics, Microsoft is correct; in "running" statistics, Netcraft is correct.
As before, the study ignores the thousands of automatically-spreading viruses for Windows.
And in other news, a new auto-safety study by the National Traffic Safety Commission has shown that SUVs are no more dangerous to drive than other types of cars. This conclusion was reached by ignoring roll-over accidents, which are due to the SUV's design, and are thus not caused by the driver.
Yeah; that's the textbook example of an early measurement of the Earth. The point of the puzzle I mentioned was that it can be done without any travelling, using technology that was available about then. As I recall (vaguely), it was one of a list of interesting ways of determining the Earth's size using fairly simple measuring tools. Not that this lessens Eratosthenes' approach.
The transit scheme does have one potential error: If there are waves at the horizon, you'll get an overestimage of the Earth's radius that's proportional to the wave height. So you want a really calm day, and even then, there may be waves out at the horizon. So you might want to repeat the measurement a few times and take the minimum.
If ... America's small business community goes for Linux ...Bill has a really big problem on his hands.
;-)
We might also note the comment in the article that much of the "movement" is outside the US. And, of course, linux originated outside the US.
As an American programmer, I've been a bit bemused by the several projects that I've recently worked on that were "outsourced" to us by non-American companies who were migrating to linux.
In each case, the sales approach that persuaded their management was "Do you really want to trust your company's data to closed-source software from a big American company that doesn't have your interests at heart?" The marketing guys say that questions like this are more and more producing a lot of nervous, scared looks on management faces.
Part of this is that people are starting to get the message about spyware. And even a cursory web search turns up story after story about spyware embedded in Microsoft software. Who know what data is being passed back to some MS site, to be sold to other interested parties?
Remember a year or two back, when they were caught taking things (mostly images) from msn.com customer web sites and using them in ads? Public outrage made them back down, but it was obvious from their response that they weren't at all apologetic, and considered it their legal right.
It doesn't take a software genius to figure out that there's really only one solution to such threats. If you care about your data, and especially if you don't want your data being seen by competitors, you'd be smart to stick with open-source software. And hire a few good hackers to study it, to make sure that nobody has snuck something in that you didn't order.
American companies may not be so smart, and we could end up with Microsoft being important in the US but nowhere else. After all, the US is still using the English "Imperial" system of measurements, long after even the Brits have (mostly) abandoned it.
(Also, it's hard to imagine most American managers going for something that was done by a Finnish student and a gang of his friends, no matter how good it is. There's a lot of idiocy in this business.
Indeed, though those terms might not be obvious to someone who doesn't already know them. The "pit organ" problem illustrates an ongoing frustration with keyword searches. Similar terms or phrases are often used in unrelated fields, leading to the notorious difficulty of finding what you're looking for in a large haystack of unrelated pages.
;-)
The pit vipers were so named for the pits on their faces, of course, but I think that the term predates the discovery of infrared light and its relationship to heat. Those pits are now textbook examples of a separate development of an imaging "eye". Like the brittle starts, the pits' images don't have very good resolution, but they don't need good resolution. Picking out a spot of warmth in a scene is useful to a predator, and the other eyes are good enough at focusing on the details.
But it is somewhat curious that the pit vipers wouldn't have just adapted their older eyes to see in the infrared. Other animals do so, and it wouldn't have been difficult for snakes to adjust their frequency response. This is useful in the evolution/creation debate, because it's not something that an intelligent engineer would likely do. But an unintelligent evolutionary process could very well do something so apparently idiotic.
Then again, I've seen "committee" designs that are every bit as idiotic, where every member of the group objected to the design but went along because it was the only way to get agreement. So maybe there isn't just one "intelligent designer", but rather a whole committee of them.
That would certainly explain a lot of the absurdities in this world much better than an omniscient god does.
Some still believe the world is flat, I hear. Something about a mountain one can climb and see everything.
;-)
;-)
Such people have probably never done much mountain climbing.
One of the problems with this whole idea is that people throughout history have figured out the shape (and sometimes even the approximate size) of the earth without any high-tech equipment.
The usual textbook example is sailors. It doesn't take much sailing on a large body of water until you realize that you can "see" the curvature of the surface. The most obvious clue is the way that things appear and disappear at the horizon. They don't just shrink or grow. A ship sailing away disappears from the bottom up, and from the sailor's viewpoint, tall objects on shore also disappear from the bottom up. As you approach land, the opposite happens. After a while, your brain integrates all this, and the shape of the world is obvious. If someone tries to say that the world is flat, you just dismiss them as ignorand landlubbers.
Mountain climbers can see the same thing, especially if you're climbing a mountain on the edge of a range where you can see out over an expanse of relatively flat land. As you climb, things farther away "come up over the horizon". Then, as you descend, things disappear in the reverse order. Again, if you do this very often, the overall curved shape of the plains becomes obvious. Anyone who says otherwise is merely displaying their ignorance of easily-observed fact.
There was a cute puzzle in Scientific American many years ago. The puzzle was: Using no more equipment that was available to surveyors centuries ago, and standing in one place, measure the radius of the Earth.
The solution was to carry your transit (or whatever you call your device for precisely measuring angles) to a shore where you can't see the opposite shore. You need a calm day so that there aren't any tall waves. Sight on the horizon and measure the angle with the transit's plumb line. This will be slightly less than a right angle. Draw a diagram of the curved surface with two radii, one to the horizon and one to the transit. Measure the height of the transit above the surface of the water. The line from the transit to the horizon forms a right angle with the remote radius. You know the other two angles. The hypotenuse is the Earth's radius plus the height of your transit. Solve for the radius.
There was a comment that Roman engineers could have done this and gotten the radius to within a few percent. Their main limitation was the accuracy of their equivalent of trig tables. (Actually, you'd probably have done better by asking a Greek nautical engineer.
True, but the eye is pretty much the Big One.
Yeah, but this is pretty much because the (mammalian) eye is soft tissue that doesn't fossilize well. So it has long been a "mystery". The religious folks are really just arguing that "Scientists don't have any evidence about how our eye evolved, so it must have been a miracle." Anything not preserved in the fossil record can be used in this sort of fallacious argument.
On the other hand, you can read an interesting scientific story of the past few years by googling for "brittle-star eye". This is about a group of starfish, not mammals, but it's a case where we can see the early stages of a functional eye. The evolution has happened in the past million years or so. It's a nice case where the animals don't have a very good eye, with resolution of several degrees, but it's better than what their relatives have. Comparing the brittle stars with other starfish shows clearly how this eye is evolving.
In a few more hundreds of millions of years, when the descendants of the brittle stars are having their scientific revolution, they will probably have lots of fossil evidence showing how their advanced eye developed, and their religious people will have to use other arguments against evolution by natural selection. And they'll probably insist that those strange ancient creatures with internal skeletons couldn't have had vision, because their fossils don't show anything like the compound eye that all advanced species use.
(There's another interesting recently-developed sort of "eye" in the pit vipers, giving them a sort of pinhole camera that works in the infrared. But that's harder to find by googling.)
It isn't supposed to be proof. Its additional evidence supporting evolution theory.
;-)
And, of course, that's how the scientific process works.
Any number of people (including Karl Popper) have argued that scientific methods rarely (if ever) actually prove anything, and the phrase "scientific proof" is usually an indication that the writer doesn't understand scientific methods. If you look closely at most scientific tests, they are actually methods of disproof. You think up a lot of explanations of what you've observed ("hypotheses"), and attempt to shoot them down. If all your tests fail to disprove one explanation, you tentatively accept it as valid ("theory"). But you continue to test it, out of general skepticism.
This is why the most important scientific concept is "falsifiability". And it's why creationism probably won't ever be considered a scientific theory. It can't be falsified by any methods that we know of. After all, no matter what tests you do, whatever happens is God's will. Nothing can happen that isn't God's will. So you can't test creationism.
I've always liked the theory that the world was created 5 minutes ago, including all of our memories. How can you disprove this? Obviously you can't. Any evidence to the contrary was obviously put there by God to fool us.
Another idea that I like is that all the fossil evidence was planted by God to make us believe in a long geologic history and evolution of living things. Since God went to so much work to make us believe all this, we are obviously thwarting God's will if we don't believe. This is a fun concept, but it's completely non-falsifiable.
I've forgotten who came up with that one. Anyone know?
(No, it wasn't Doug Adams.