I think we are getting a little too detailed for "the ideal quantum mechanics for the masses one line popular science explanation"
An explanation I've found often works is to mention a comment I heard from a reporter a few years back, about an company that had had a "quantum leap" in income in the previous year. My immediate thought was "The company's income goes up by $0.01 in a year, and it's news?" When people give me a funny look, I just comment "Well, the quantum in the US money system is the penny, so a quantum leap would obviously be one cent, right? Or maybe they meant it went up by $0.02? But that'd be two quanta, so probably not."
But I have a feeling that most people who misuse the term aren't too concerned with the abstruse physics meaning; they just know that the media uses it to mean a huge increase, and that's all they need to know to use it in their speech or writing.
Now I look at the slope of the line on that chart and I think the Arctic is going to be to be pretty close to ice free THIS summer.
Well, note that the graph is missing it's zero line. If you add that in, below the line of month names, you get a better picture of it all.
What I see is that the top (light grey) curve, representing the 1980s' average, bottoms out somewhat below 8. This year, it looks like the minimum will be somewhat below 4. So over roughly 3 decades, we've lost roughly half the Arctic sea ice. This would imply a back-of-the-envelope, one-significant-digit estimate of an ice-free Arctic somewhere around 2040.
Of course, if you look at the graphs too closely, you can sorta see an acceleration, with the 1990s curve somewhat closer to the 1980s curve than to the 2000s curve. Then there are the three lowest years' curves that don't show much of a pattern, and this year's curve way lower than any of the others. But this isn't very many data curves. Maybe it's all accelerating and the Arctic will be ice free by 2020; maybe not.
One thing that is clear is that we're not going to do much about it. So we should just stock up on a good supply of popcorn, and watch the show. And not buy any ocean-front property, no matter how good a deal the seller makes it sound like (because it's not just sea ice that's melting).
It's like measuring the distance between continents in the morning and then in the afternoon and claiming that because no meaningful difference exists between the two that continents are stationary and don't move.
Nah; the graph the temperature curves for several years, plus decade averages. So it's more like measuring the distances between continents and showing graphs of the changes for years and decades. We've been able to do this for a while now, and the results for the Atlantic (a few cm wider each year) turn out to be quite consistent with the 80-100 million year age for that ocean.
So maybe we something different from widths of oceans, if we want to ridicule the significance of these graphs. I wonder what other roughly similar measurements might work better...
Repairing the file (DRM can be considered a design fault) may be illegal, but then it just becomes an issue of not getting caught.
Well, yeah, but the topic of discussion is what happens to your stuff when you die. This is something that the legal folks have ways of getting involved with (for a price, of course). If you give away your digital good before you die, the legal system doesn't need to know about it, as is usual with physical goods. But digital things get a little trickier, since the legal system hasn't had much experience with it, and are taking the approach that says it's all illegal unless there's a specific law that makes it illegal. So your digital stuff is likely to just disappear (along with a portion of your money).
The whole point of the discussion is to find ways to get our digital stuff handed over to our friends and/or families when the legal system is looking over our (dead) shoulders.
Ever heard of tape backups? They're archival quality, even!
Don't be too sure about that. Lots of people are finding that tapes bought and written a mere decade ago are now unreadable. This isn't an accident. If you're enough of a sucker to pay "archival quality" prices for something that hasn't passed any real-world tests (despite what the marketers may claim), they're happy to sell you the tape. They'll be long gone in a decade, and there'll be nothing you can do to them when the tape fails.
This has generally been true for most of the history of the computer industry, with a few exceptions. There's no reason to believe the quality claims for things being sold today, given the failure rate of previous media used for backup.
I bought it, I own it, and I intend to use it as I see fit. I don't copy it and give it to others. But my son will inherit my sifi collection, and he likes sifi.
Excellent summary and on-point my friend! Well said!
Now, just convince the MAFIAA that the other 99.999999% of people in the world aren't stealing all their products while you legitimately buy your collection.
Actually, they're not the ones that really matter. And neither does your arrogant attitude (or mine;-). What matters is the attitude of the courts where you live. As long as they agree that you don't have the right to use what you bought, you in fact don't have that right, and you can legally be punished for attempting to use your collection as you see fit.
That's what this whole issue is all about. The legal system has taken away our legal rights to what used to be legal, accepted usage of purchased chunks of "intellectual property". In the past, there was no question that you could loan, give, bequeath, or sell a book to someone else. Only a few years ago, you could also do any of these with recordings that you bought. But the publishers and recording companies have persuaded the legislators and courts to void those rights, so that you're only leasing those things for your personal use, and they can legally be taken from you at the whim of the actual owners. Publishers have even reached out and erased things that customers had purchased, and this is apparently now legal.
Right, just like the Jews developed resistance to Xyklon-B, or how the victims of the Spanish Inquisition developed resistance to fire and trauma.
Well, if you were to apply them at a low rate over a thousand generations, they might evolve a resistance. But you might not like the techniques they'd use to implement their resistance to your attacks, since their resistance might very well leave you dead.
The thing about bacteria is that for many species, a "generation" is on the order of 20 or 30 minutes. They can evolve "slowly" over thousands of generations, but that might only be a few months of our time.
And hard to envisage habitable plants [around the two Alpha Centauri stars] remaining stable for sufficiently long periods of time for complex life to evolve.
Actually, astronomers have published some fairly detailed analyses of this. The two stars (A and B) orbit each other at distances that range from about 11.6 AU to 35.6 AU, a bit farther than to our sun's distances to Saturn and Neptune. This would allow for long-term stable orbits somewhat farther than 1 AU from both stars (about 1.5 AU for A and 1.1 AU for B). Since A is brighter than B, it turns out that there's a wider "habitable zone" around B, but an Earth-like planet could exist for both.
The Alpha Centauri system is estimated to be a bit older than our solar system, but "only" about 250 million years or so, which isn't very significant. So, unless there has been a close encounter with another star, planets there would have had roughly the same time as ours to develop life.
But so far, nothing is known about any planets in the system, despite its nearness to us. There aren't any Jupiter-size gas giants, but we can't yet detect the effects of an Earth-size planet, even around the nearest stars. In particular, the two stars' orbits about each other is sufficiently inclined to our line of sight that transits by planets are unlikely, at least if the planets' orbits are in roughly the same plane. (Does anyone know if the two stars' planetary disks have been measured?)
That's hindsight bias. There are LOTS of disasters being predicted all the time - so what do you do? AFTERWARDS saying "oh we should have listened to THAT guy" is sooooo useless.
That's the logic that leads to the disasters. A more sensible approach would be to look at the record of the would-be prophets, and say "Hmmm... That guy has accurately predicted a lot of the recent disasters. Maybe we should be paying attention to him."
This could be used to summarize the sciences' "experimental method". This consists of generating a bunch of hypotheses about how something works, using them to make predictions of the form "If we do X, Y should follow", set up instances of X, and see which of the hypotheses predicted the Ys that result. This is pure "hindsight", of course, with the goal of discovering the accurate predictors. Over the past few centuries, it has produced results that are remarkably more accurate than the methods generally used before (which mostly just asked the society's religious and political leaders what would happen).
The scientific/engineering endeavor has demonstrated how good a job "hindsight bias" can do, if done correctly. Thus, one of the many gotchas is that you have to look at failed predictions, too. It's typical for the media to report successful predictions but not the failures. I can easily exploit this, by making so many predictions that, whatever happens, I'll have predicted it. If I can trick you into reporting only my successes, you can help me build a reputation as a prophet. But scientific/engineering methods require recording the failures and studying them to get more insight or to fine-tune the equations. Again, this uses "hindsight", to tell you which predictors you shouldn't take seriously because of their poor record in the past.
And there has been a long, ongoing discussion among scientists about the common failure to report "failures". This is well understood as a problem in doing science correctly. If "failed" experiments aren't reported, others don't know about them, and can easily waste time repeating the same experiment because they didn't read about the previous work. This slows down the whole process. There is now growing pressure to put scientific data online, so that it will be accessible to others working on the same topics. In the past, it was far too expensive to keep and distribute all scientific data, but the Internet is making it very cheap and fast. Eventually, the inertia of the older reporting system will be overcome, though, and useful "failure" data will be more widely available.
(And I've put "failure" in quotes because it's actually not a common term in scientific or engineering fields, except when used to describe mechanical failure of physical objects under stress. When hypotheses or theories "fail", other terminology is generally used, depending on the field and what sort of failure has occurred. Thus, the media generally doesn't report the "error bars" around numbers, leading to them to report a "failure" of a predicted catastrophe when the prediction gave a very small probability that it would happen because the numbers had large error bars. This is routinely visible in weather predictions, and highly visible in the occasional predictions of asteroid impacts.;-)
Here in the US, we had a case much smaller than the K-T asteroid impact just a few years ago, in New Orleans. If you want to read about what the experts were saying, google "Hurricane Pam". That was a simulation/exercise that studied the effects of a hurricane much like Katrina. The study did a remarkably good job of describing the impact of Katrina. Part of the study pinpointed the places where the levees would be breached. Applications to Congress for funding to fortify those levees were voted down.
Human history is full of similar events, when the experts made accurate predictions of disasters, and the people in charge decided to ignore them.
Do you actually have reliable data on this? If so, a lot of people who study such things might be very interested in how the numbers can be verified.
I recently ran across a typical example showing how little is known of rat populations, in the form of a list of "expert" estimates for New York City that ranged from 1/4 million to 100 million rats. This is a 400:1 range, and most actual experts on the topic will openly admit that the estimates aren't much more reliable than this. New York may be one of the best-studied cities.
The conventional estimate is that most human urban areas have on the order of 10 rats per human. This estimate has only one significant digit, though, and probably less than one digit for a lot of the world's cities. (Do you really think we know how many rats there are in Calcutta or Lagos or Mexico city or Shanghai or...?;-)
Of course, it's common for us humans to base our policies on numbers that were just made up by self-proclaimed experts, often for PR purposes.
I have even seen mac and linux users, who generally have a far superior pdf viewer installed by default, using acrobat... Never understood why.
Well, I ran across a reason a few weeks ago. I have a Macbook Pro, and I'd been using the builtin Preview program to display PDFs, as well as the Safari browser which does the job in its own windows. Then, a few weeks ago, I downloaded a PDF file from IMSLP, and both Preview and Safari showed a lot of the pages as illegible smudges. I tried it in xpdf on my nearby Ubuntu box, and had the same problem there (though a few of the problematic pages did display legibly.
Just for fun, I decided to finally download Acrobat and see how it screwed up the file. It didn't screw up at all. Amazing! All the pages that Preview and Safari showed as smudges are quite readable. In fact, it's still sitting there, with a half-buried page 103 partly visible at the upper right of my screen.
Now, I do have to admit that Acrobat is a royal PITA. For example, about an hour after I first fired it up, whenever I clicked on its window, the menu bar at the top of the screen disappeared. It took an unbelievable amount of googling to find more than just questions about this, but after wasting the time over several weeks, I finally stumbled across a mention of the magic key combo (CMD-Shift-M) that turns the menu bar on and off. Maybe I'd accidentally fat-fingered that one time; maybe it came from some hidden default; I'll probably never know.
I won't go into all the other hassles, and I don't intend to use Acrobat much. But for this one file, whatever the problems are, Acrobat does at least make its contents readable. So I'll probably keep it around for when Preview and Safari screw up on some other file. I've seen a few other files that show one or two pages that are smudges, but I've found those pages elsewhere in a different format. This time, the smudged pages (or the whole file) doesn't seem to exist anywhere else, and Acrobat is the only thing I know that displays it in its entirety.
(Well, except for the pages where it just displays a message saying that the page is missing from the museum's hard copy. But I'm pretty sure that's not Adobe's fault.;-)
Perhaps we can now start a project to match new popular music against this database, and figure out that all new music is just a shameless copy/basic rewrite of existing classical music.
This is such an absurd statement that I don't know how to refute it without sounding absurd myself.
It's not absurd at all. Ask google about "George Harrison" "He's So Fine" for a canonical illustration of why not.
The main word in dispute above is actually "shameless", since even the judge in Harrison's case agreed that it probably was a case of "subconscious plagiarism". Even if you don't know you're copying, the legal system will still convict you and hand you a hefty fine should you accidentally "copy" something that was composed in the past century or so.
Actually, I've asked several reps of music publishers how I might go about determining if a tune I have in my mind (and am thinking of playing at some event that's coming up) is something that they own the rights to. They have all replied that I should buy a copy of everything they've published, and search it all for the tune. As far as I can tell, they're not joking when they suggest this. I've replied that it could be more practical to visit the Library of Congress and do the search there, and they seem upset that I'd thought of this. (But they don't retract their suggestion.-)
Of course, this isn't really practical. It'd probably take the rest of my life to do such a search there. And it would mostly only work for things published in the US; the LoC doesn't have copies of all music ever published anywhere in the world.
So, seriously: If I have what I think might be a new piece of music in my head, how exactly would I go about verifying that it's not a "shameless copy" of someone else's music? Where do I get access to the needed data (all published or recorded music), and what's the algorithm for comparing the music in my head (which I can write down if you promise not to prosecute me;-) with all the music in that database?
Note that all existing music notation is rather variable, and it's always easy to write down a piece of music in several forms that are not obviously similar to a reader. Attempts to write code to do such comparisons have had only partial success. And most computerized music notation is presented either in PDF or in any of several proprietary encodings, none of which I can legally code for without permission from the owners of the encodings. And extracting musical info from a PDF-encoded score is a major AI task -- which most humans would fail.
A practical answer to the above question would be a real benefit to musicians who don't want to replicate the "George Harrison" incident.
We might also register a TLD.corn, dedicated to sites dealing with agriculture and/or humor.
And we might then register a subdomain keming.corn, dedicated to typographical topics. This could lead to some fun follow-ons to things like keming t-shirts, and other related products.
Huh? I've known any number of people who've memorized the magic number 299,792,458. How hard is that? It's nothing compared to the nutcases who memorize pi to thousands of places.;-)
Myself, I only memorized pi to 20 places (or 21, counting the initial 3), then decided I had more interesting ways to waste chunks of my life. But a 9-digit number is less than half that. Anyone with half a brain should be able to memorize it in under a day. And it is one of the most important numbers in our universe, after all. Well, except for the fact that it's essentially a nonsense number, since it's based on the meter, and that's a totally arbitrary distance.
(Actually, I have used pi to over 10 places, though I don't think I've ever needed it to 20 places.)
I don't think that domain means that what you think it means.;-)
But it might be fun to register a subdomain to.com that deals with discussions of communism (or even Communism). Maybe we could then set up subsubdomains that deal with the various factions. Then we could publicize this, and see how long it takes for the commercial world to abandon its domain out of fear that people will misunderstand what it's all about.
While we're at it, we might set up domain names like.fishing.net,.volleyball.net, and so on.
Yes, it's possible, it's always possible, it's a question of time and money.
Obviously, you've never had a marketing person ask for something that is so out of the ballpark that it would be an equivalent of solving "strong AI" problems...
Heh. A team I was once on was asked to do a task that provably required an upgrade to the speed of light. It involved the time for getting messages between widely separated places on the planet. The managers couldn't accept that the universe imposes a speed limit on such things. It was clear that they understood this to mean that we weren't smart enough to solve the problem. We on the development team quickly updated our resumes...
Human body: 10tril human cells
Human body: 100tril bacterial cells
Even in our own body, there is more bacteria than us, by pure numbers.
Well, yeah, by cell count. But our cells average about 10 times the diameter and 1000 times the volume of the typical bacterial cell, so by mass we're only around 1% bacteria. (And these numbers are only accurate to 1 decimal place; you may be 2% bacteria by volume.;-)
Cell count and total volume/mass are both valid measures of "size", of course, though they mean rather different things.
It's also occasionally pointed out that most of the biomass on our planet is in the form of bacteria (and archaea). Multi-celled creatures like us (and trees) are a tiny portion of the world's total biomass, whether you use cell count or mass or volume.
Wait; Apple doesn't have a 7-inch tablet yet? The strategy of the others is obvious: They sue Apple for infringing their "innovative" format. If they can find a friendly judge, they can block sales of Apple's gadget of the same size for a year or two, and by then people will be galloping off after the latest hot thing (maybe a 7.5-inch tablet?), and it won't matter. If Amazon, B&N and a few others pool their resources, they should be able to drag this out for a few years, even against Apple.
Of course, Apple might countersue for infringing on their patent on their process of patenting things that are only minimally different from what others have had for years. But that's a different/. story...
I don't know specifics about how the procedures are in US, but I do know that under HIPAA they must give you any results you request They can't legally refuse to do so.
Actually, the way it typically works in the US is: The company can make the judgement that you don't have the funds (or the time;-) for a successful court challenge, which will take a decade for all the appeals and more money than you'd believe. In the meantime, they can continue to refuse to give you their medical info, without any further legal repercussions than your lawsuit, which they will delay with every legal trick available. If you actually do have the funds (and live long enough), yes, you can get them to obey the law -- and give you their data from a decade earlier. Meanwhile, they've upgraded your implants, and the court didn't order them to give you the data from your current model(s), so they don't.
Hmmm... I've used nearly everything in all those lists, when I found them appropriate for the job. I wonder what that makes me... Probably a software engineer, I suppose. Except that we were just told in another thread that there's no such thing. Oh, well...
Actually, since I live in the US, and am too familiar with this country's use of the conservative/liberal labels, I tend to start from a position of high skepticism when a writer uses those terms. And, sure enough, they are here used in their usual political propaganda senses, clearly intended to maximally confuse the reader.
Yeah, I'd guess you're right, though Australia and New Zealand don't add up to a whole lot of people.;-) Actually, I'd guess that lots of places settled by folks from the UK would also eat crustacea, as we Americans do.
I'd also guess that the coastal population of China eats a lot of crustacea, but haven't been part of such statistics until fairly recently. And I've read a number of claims that Chinese data is still widely excluded, because there's such a strong history of bogus numbers coming from their government agencies, numbers sufficiently incorrect to seriously compromise the accuracy of global fish population estimates.
We do still have serious problems getting accurate population estimates for many important species (not to mention the unimportant ones).
I like to point out that a "veggie burger" is pretty much the same thing as falafel, which is a staple of the Middle-Eastern diet, and which is never considered a meat substitute. It's a perfectly good food item on its own, and not a substitute for anything else. It can be fun to mention to people not familiar with such things that, if they're in a Middle-Eastern restaurant and see something that looks like a meatball, it's almost certainly vegetarian. And people there will look at you weird if you call it a meatball.;-)
In American southern-style restaurants, "hush puppies" are a staple item, and if thoroughly cooked, often look a lot like meatballs (or falafel). Again, they're not a substitute for anything. Everyone from the South knows they're made of cornmeal (usually with a bit of egg as a binder), and not even vaguely related to meat. I've also seen cornmeal dumplings that look a lot like meatballs, but that's not nearly as common. My wife's family is southern (and she made fried green tomatoes as part of today's dinner), and she likes the taste of caramelized carbohydrates, so she tends to overcook hush-puppies and corn dumplings to a brown color, making them look much like meatballs. Others prefer them their normal yellow color, or white if they used white cornmeal, but who does that?
Shrimp and the like are in effect "sea insects", and we eat those...
Actually, I've seen food statistics saying that almost all the world's shrimp catch is consumed in 3 countries, the US, the UK and Japan. In much of the rest of the world, they're considered big ocean-going bugs, and not normal people food.
One story I read about this back in the 1990s was typical if a bit odd: It was a report on the first successful shrimp "farms", which had been developed in Mexico. The report went on to say that this was odd because Mexicans mostly don't eat shrimp; they catch them and sell them to those weird northerners who like them. Supposedly most of the shrimp consumption in Mexico happens at vacation spots frequented by Americans.
OTOH, I've personally known a number of people from Mexico and other parts of Central America who, when here in the US, eat shrimp as if they were normal food. Maybe it has changed over the years, or depends on just where they came from. Maybe if they lived in a tourist zone, they learned to eat the funny stuff that the tourists liked to eat.
In any case, sometimes when there's shrimp on the table I like to refer to them as "water bugs", to see the reactions that gets. Some people grin and grab a shrimp; others get confused and have an "I never thought of it that way" look on their faces. While they're deciding what to do, I and the grinners can eat most of the shrimp.
I've also liked to point out to some of my kosher-eating Jewish friends that the Bible explicitly lists grasshoppers, locusts, and their kin as being on the "approved eating" list, while excluding other invertebrates. This is good for confusing the Fundie Christian types, too. Point out that eating shrimp, lobster or crab is forbidden by their Bible, but locusts and grasshoppers are explicitly approved. They usually don't have a good answer to this. Sometimes they express disbelief, but that's dangerous for them, because someone is likely to ask to see their Bible for a minute, and turn to the food-law sections, and guess what?;-)
(This is also a good tactic when they express disapproval of things like homosexuality. Ask them to find a ban on such things in the Bible, and when they do, point out the nearby ban on eating things like shrimp. Then ask them if they ever eat shrimp. It's as bad as gay sex, y'know. Actually, I learned this tactic from some of gay friends, whom I don't criticize, because I just know they'll turn around and criticize me for liking shrimp and crab meat.;-)
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I think we are getting a little too detailed for "the ideal quantum mechanics for the masses one line popular science explanation"
An explanation I've found often works is to mention a comment I heard from a reporter a few years back, about an company that had had a "quantum leap" in income in the previous year. My immediate thought was "The company's income goes up by $0.01 in a year, and it's news?" When people give me a funny look, I just comment "Well, the quantum in the US money system is the penny, so a quantum leap would obviously be one cent, right? Or maybe they meant it went up by $0.02? But that'd be two quanta, so probably not."
But I have a feeling that most people who misuse the term aren't too concerned with the abstruse physics meaning; they just know that the media uses it to mean a huge increase, and that's all they need to know to use it in their speech or writing.
Now I look at the slope of the line on that chart and I think the Arctic is going to be to be pretty close to ice free THIS summer.
Well, note that the graph is missing it's zero line. If you add that in, below the line of month names, you get a better picture of it all.
What I see is that the top (light grey) curve, representing the 1980s' average, bottoms out somewhat below 8. This year, it looks like the minimum will be somewhat below 4. So over roughly 3 decades, we've lost roughly half the Arctic sea ice. This would imply a back-of-the-envelope, one-significant-digit estimate of an ice-free Arctic somewhere around 2040.
Of course, if you look at the graphs too closely, you can sorta see an acceleration, with the 1990s curve somewhat closer to the 1980s curve than to the 2000s curve. Then there are the three lowest years' curves that don't show much of a pattern, and this year's curve way lower than any of the others. But this isn't very many data curves. Maybe it's all accelerating and the Arctic will be ice free by 2020; maybe not.
One thing that is clear is that we're not going to do much about it. So we should just stock up on a good supply of popcorn, and watch the show. And not buy any ocean-front property, no matter how good a deal the seller makes it sound like (because it's not just sea ice that's melting).
It's like measuring the distance between continents in the morning and then in the afternoon and claiming that because no meaningful difference exists between the two that continents are stationary and don't move.
Nah; the graph the temperature curves for several years, plus decade averages. So it's more like measuring the distances between continents and showing graphs of the changes for years and decades. We've been able to do this for a while now, and the results for the Atlantic (a few cm wider each year) turn out to be quite consistent with the 80-100 million year age for that ocean.
So maybe we something different from widths of oceans, if we want to ridicule the significance of these graphs. I wonder what other roughly similar measurements might work better ...
Repairing the file (DRM can be considered a design fault) may be illegal, but then it just becomes an issue of not getting caught.
Well, yeah, but the topic of discussion is what happens to your stuff when you die. This is something that the legal folks have ways of getting involved with (for a price, of course). If you give away your digital good before you die, the legal system doesn't need to know about it, as is usual with physical goods. But digital things get a little trickier, since the legal system hasn't had much experience with it, and are taking the approach that says it's all illegal unless there's a specific law that makes it illegal. So your digital stuff is likely to just disappear (along with a portion of your money).
The whole point of the discussion is to find ways to get our digital stuff handed over to our friends and/or families when the legal system is looking over our (dead) shoulders.
Ever heard of tape backups? They're archival quality, even!
Don't be too sure about that. Lots of people are finding that tapes bought and written a mere decade ago are now unreadable. This isn't an accident. If you're enough of a sucker to pay "archival quality" prices for something that hasn't passed any real-world tests (despite what the marketers may claim), they're happy to sell you the tape. They'll be long gone in a decade, and there'll be nothing you can do to them when the tape fails.
This has generally been true for most of the history of the computer industry, with a few exceptions. There's no reason to believe the quality claims for things being sold today, given the failure rate of previous media used for backup.
I bought it, I own it, and I intend to use it as I see fit. I don't copy it and give it to others. But my son will inherit my sifi collection, and he likes sifi.
Excellent summary and on-point my friend! Well said!
Now, just convince the MAFIAA that the other 99.999999% of people in the world aren't stealing all their products while you legitimately buy your collection.
Actually, they're not the ones that really matter. And neither does your arrogant attitude (or mine ;-). What matters is the attitude of the courts where you live. As long as they agree that you don't have the right to use what you bought, you in fact don't have that right, and you can legally be punished for attempting to use your collection as you see fit.
That's what this whole issue is all about. The legal system has taken away our legal rights to what used to be legal, accepted usage of purchased chunks of "intellectual property". In the past, there was no question that you could loan, give, bequeath, or sell a book to someone else. Only a few years ago, you could also do any of these with recordings that you bought. But the publishers and recording companies have persuaded the legislators and courts to void those rights, so that you're only leasing those things for your personal use, and they can legally be taken from you at the whim of the actual owners. Publishers have even reached out and erased things that customers had purchased, and this is apparently now legal.
This is what we have to fight.
Right, just like the Jews developed resistance to Xyklon-B, or how the victims of the Spanish Inquisition developed resistance to fire and trauma.
Well, if you were to apply them at a low rate over a thousand generations, they might evolve a resistance. But you might not like the techniques they'd use to implement their resistance to your attacks, since their resistance might very well leave you dead.
The thing about bacteria is that for many species, a "generation" is on the order of 20 or 30 minutes. They can evolve "slowly" over thousands of generations, but that might only be a few months of our time.
And hard to envisage habitable plants [around the two Alpha Centauri stars] remaining stable for sufficiently long periods of time for complex life to evolve.
Actually, astronomers have published some fairly detailed analyses of this. The two stars (A and B) orbit each other at distances that range from about 11.6 AU to 35.6 AU, a bit farther than to our sun's distances to Saturn and Neptune. This would allow for long-term stable orbits somewhat farther than 1 AU from both stars (about 1.5 AU for A and 1.1 AU for B). Since A is brighter than B, it turns out that there's a wider "habitable zone" around B, but an Earth-like planet could exist for both.
The Alpha Centauri system is estimated to be a bit older than our solar system, but "only" about 250 million years or so, which isn't very significant. So, unless there has been a close encounter with another star, planets there would have had roughly the same time as ours to develop life.
But so far, nothing is known about any planets in the system, despite its nearness to us. There aren't any Jupiter-size gas giants, but we can't yet detect the effects of an Earth-size planet, even around the nearest stars. In particular, the two stars' orbits about each other is sufficiently inclined to our line of sight that transits by planets are unlikely, at least if the planets' orbits are in roughly the same plane. (Does anyone know if the two stars' planetary disks have been measured?)
That's hindsight bias. There are LOTS of disasters being predicted all the time - so what do you do? AFTERWARDS saying "oh we should have listened to THAT guy" is sooooo useless.
That's the logic that leads to the disasters. A more sensible approach would be to look at the record of the would-be prophets, and say "Hmmm ... That guy has accurately predicted a lot of the recent disasters. Maybe we should be paying attention to him."
This could be used to summarize the sciences' "experimental method". This consists of generating a bunch of hypotheses about how something works, using them to make predictions of the form "If we do X, Y should follow", set up instances of X, and see which of the hypotheses predicted the Ys that result. This is pure "hindsight", of course, with the goal of discovering the accurate predictors. Over the past few centuries, it has produced results that are remarkably more accurate than the methods generally used before (which mostly just asked the society's religious and political leaders what would happen).
The scientific/engineering endeavor has demonstrated how good a job "hindsight bias" can do, if done correctly. Thus, one of the many gotchas is that you have to look at failed predictions, too. It's typical for the media to report successful predictions but not the failures. I can easily exploit this, by making so many predictions that, whatever happens, I'll have predicted it. If I can trick you into reporting only my successes, you can help me build a reputation as a prophet. But scientific/engineering methods require recording the failures and studying them to get more insight or to fine-tune the equations. Again, this uses "hindsight", to tell you which predictors you shouldn't take seriously because of their poor record in the past.
And there has been a long, ongoing discussion among scientists about the common failure to report "failures". This is well understood as a problem in doing science correctly. If "failed" experiments aren't reported, others don't know about them, and can easily waste time repeating the same experiment because they didn't read about the previous work. This slows down the whole process. There is now growing pressure to put scientific data online, so that it will be accessible to others working on the same topics. In the past, it was far too expensive to keep and distribute all scientific data, but the Internet is making it very cheap and fast. Eventually, the inertia of the older reporting system will be overcome, though, and useful "failure" data will be more widely available.
(And I've put "failure" in quotes because it's actually not a common term in scientific or engineering fields, except when used to describe mechanical failure of physical objects under stress. When hypotheses or theories "fail", other terminology is generally used, depending on the field and what sort of failure has occurred. Thus, the media generally doesn't report the "error bars" around numbers, leading to them to report a "failure" of a predicted catastrophe when the prediction gave a very small probability that it would happen because the numbers had large error bars. This is routinely visible in weather predictions, and highly visible in the occasional predictions of asteroid impacts. ;-)
Actual experts have never been wrong.
But they have often been ignored. ;-)
Here in the US, we had a case much smaller than the K-T asteroid impact just a few years ago, in New Orleans. If you want to read about what the experts were saying, google "Hurricane Pam". That was a simulation/exercise that studied the effects of a hurricane much like Katrina. The study did a remarkably good job of describing the impact of Katrina. Part of the study pinpointed the places where the levees would be breached. Applications to Congress for funding to fortify those levees were voted down.
Human history is full of similar events, when the experts made accurate predictions of disasters, and the people in charge decided to ignore them.
Man is more populous than the rat ...
Do you actually have reliable data on this? If so, a lot of people who study such things might be very interested in how the numbers can be verified.
I recently ran across a typical example showing how little is known of rat populations, in the form of a list of "expert" estimates for New York City that ranged from 1/4 million to 100 million rats. This is a 400:1 range, and most actual experts on the topic will openly admit that the estimates aren't much more reliable than this. New York may be one of the best-studied cities.
The conventional estimate is that most human urban areas have on the order of 10 rats per human. This estimate has only one significant digit, though, and probably less than one digit for a lot of the world's cities. (Do you really think we know how many rats there are in Calcutta or Lagos or Mexico city or Shanghai or ...? ;-)
Of course, it's common for us humans to base our policies on numbers that were just made up by self-proclaimed experts, often for PR purposes.
I have even seen mac and linux users, who generally have a far superior pdf viewer installed by default, using acrobat... Never understood why.
Well, I ran across a reason a few weeks ago. I have a Macbook Pro, and I'd been using the builtin Preview program to display PDFs, as well as the Safari browser which does the job in its own windows. Then, a few weeks ago, I downloaded a PDF file from IMSLP, and both Preview and Safari showed a lot of the pages as illegible smudges. I tried it in xpdf on my nearby Ubuntu box, and had the same problem there (though a few of the problematic pages did display legibly.
Just for fun, I decided to finally download Acrobat and see how it screwed up the file. It didn't screw up at all. Amazing! All the pages that Preview and Safari showed as smudges are quite readable. In fact, it's still sitting there, with a half-buried page 103 partly visible at the upper right of my screen.
Now, I do have to admit that Acrobat is a royal PITA. For example, about an hour after I first fired it up, whenever I clicked on its window, the menu bar at the top of the screen disappeared. It took an unbelievable amount of googling to find more than just questions about this, but after wasting the time over several weeks, I finally stumbled across a mention of the magic key combo (CMD-Shift-M) that turns the menu bar on and off. Maybe I'd accidentally fat-fingered that one time; maybe it came from some hidden default; I'll probably never know.
I won't go into all the other hassles, and I don't intend to use Acrobat much. But for this one file, whatever the problems are, Acrobat does at least make its contents readable. So I'll probably keep it around for when Preview and Safari screw up on some other file. I've seen a few other files that show one or two pages that are smudges, but I've found those pages elsewhere in a different format. This time, the smudged pages (or the whole file) doesn't seem to exist anywhere else, and Acrobat is the only thing I know that displays it in its entirety.
(Well, except for the pages where it just displays a message saying that the page is missing from the museum's hard copy. But I'm pretty sure that's not Adobe's fault. ;-)
Perhaps we can now start a project to match new popular music against this database, and figure out that all new music is just a shameless copy/basic rewrite of existing classical music.
This is such an absurd statement that I don't know how to refute it without sounding absurd myself.
It's not absurd at all. Ask google about "George Harrison" "He's So Fine" for a canonical illustration of why not.
The main word in dispute above is actually "shameless", since even the judge in Harrison's case agreed that it probably was a case of "subconscious plagiarism". Even if you don't know you're copying, the legal system will still convict you and hand you a hefty fine should you accidentally "copy" something that was composed in the past century or so.
Actually, I've asked several reps of music publishers how I might go about determining if a tune I have in my mind (and am thinking of playing at some event that's coming up) is something that they own the rights to. They have all replied that I should buy a copy of everything they've published, and search it all for the tune. As far as I can tell, they're not joking when they suggest this. I've replied that it could be more practical to visit the Library of Congress and do the search there, and they seem upset that I'd thought of this. (But they don't retract their suggestion .-)
Of course, this isn't really practical. It'd probably take the rest of my life to do such a search there. And it would mostly only work for things published in the US; the LoC doesn't have copies of all music ever published anywhere in the world.
So, seriously: If I have what I think might be a new piece of music in my head, how exactly would I go about verifying that it's not a "shameless copy" of someone else's music? Where do I get access to the needed data (all published or recorded music), and what's the algorithm for comparing the music in my head (which I can write down if you promise not to prosecute me ;-) with all the music in that database?
Note that all existing music notation is rather variable, and it's always easy to write down a piece of music in several forms that are not obviously similar to a reader. Attempts to write code to do such comparisons have had only partial success. And most computerized music notation is presented either in PDF or in any of several proprietary encodings, none of which I can legally code for without permission from the owners of the encodings. And extracting musical info from a PDF-encoded score is a major AI task -- which most humans would fail.
A practical answer to the above question would be a real benefit to musicians who don't want to replicate the "George Harrison" incident.
We might also register a TLD .corn, dedicated to sites dealing with agriculture and/or humor.
And we might then register a subdomain keming.corn, dedicated to typographical topics. This could lead to some fun follow-ons to things like keming t-shirts, and other related products.
Huh? I've known any number of people who've memorized the magic number 299,792,458. How hard is that? It's nothing compared to the nutcases who memorize pi to thousands of places. ;-)
Myself, I only memorized pi to 20 places (or 21, counting the initial 3), then decided I had more interesting ways to waste chunks of my life. But a 9-digit number is less than half that. Anyone with half a brain should be able to memorize it in under a day. And it is one of the most important numbers in our universe, after all. Well, except for the fact that it's essentially a nonsense number, since it's based on the meter, and that's a totally arbitrary distance.
(Actually, I have used pi to over 10 places, though I don't think I've ever needed it to 20 places.)
Is it too late for me to object to .COM?
Are you against commies?
I don't think that domain means that what you think it means. ;-)
But it might be fun to register a subdomain to .com that deals with discussions of communism (or even Communism). Maybe we could then set up subsubdomains that deal with the various factions. Then we could publicize this, and see how long it takes for the commercial world to abandon its domain out of fear that people will misunderstand what it's all about.
While we're at it, we might set up domain names like .fishing.net, .volleyball.net, and so on.
Yes, it's possible, it's always possible, it's a question of time and money.
Obviously, you've never had a marketing person ask for something that is so out of the ballpark that it would be an equivalent of solving "strong AI" problems ...
Heh. A team I was once on was asked to do a task that provably required an upgrade to the speed of light. It involved the time for getting messages between widely separated places on the planet. The managers couldn't accept that the universe imposes a speed limit on such things. It was clear that they understood this to mean that we weren't smart enough to solve the problem. We on the development team quickly updated our resumes ...
Human body: 10tril human cells Human body: 100tril bacterial cells Even in our own body, there is more bacteria than us, by pure numbers.
Well, yeah, by cell count. But our cells average about 10 times the diameter and 1000 times the volume of the typical bacterial cell, so by mass we're only around 1% bacteria. (And these numbers are only accurate to 1 decimal place; you may be 2% bacteria by volume. ;-)
Cell count and total volume/mass are both valid measures of "size", of course, though they mean rather different things.
It's also occasionally pointed out that most of the biomass on our planet is in the form of bacteria (and archaea). Multi-celled creatures like us (and trees) are a tiny portion of the world's total biomass, whether you use cell count or mass or volume.
Wait; Apple doesn't have a 7-inch tablet yet? The strategy of the others is obvious: They sue Apple for infringing their "innovative" format. If they can find a friendly judge, they can block sales of Apple's gadget of the same size for a year or two, and by then people will be galloping off after the latest hot thing (maybe a 7.5-inch tablet?), and it won't matter. If Amazon, B&N and a few others pool their resources, they should be able to drag this out for a few years, even against Apple.
Of course, Apple might countersue for infringing on their patent on their process of patenting things that are only minimally different from what others have had for years. But that's a different /. story ...
No, that would mean your son/daughter; and as soon as they are old enough to legally grant you permission to do so, you can get that abortion.
Reminds me of the old Jewish joke, to the effect that Jews believe abortion should be legal until the fetus gets its law or medical degree.
(This has gotta work for a few other ethnic groups, too, but I've only heard it from Jewish sources. ;-)
I don't know specifics about how the procedures are in US, but I do know that under HIPAA they must give you any results you request They can't legally refuse to do so.
Actually, the way it typically works in the US is: The company can make the judgement that you don't have the funds (or the time ;-) for a successful court challenge, which will take a decade for all the appeals and more money than you'd believe. In the meantime, they can continue to refuse to give you their medical info, without any further legal repercussions than your lawsuit, which they will delay with every legal trick available. If you actually do have the funds (and live long enough), yes, you can get them to obey the law -- and give you their data from a decade earlier. Meanwhile, they've upgraded your implants, and the court didn't order them to give you the data from your current model(s), so they don't.
Hmmm ... I've used nearly everything in all those lists, when I found them appropriate for the job. I wonder what that makes me ... Probably a software engineer, I suppose. Except that we were just told in another thread that there's no such thing. Oh, well ...
Actually, since I live in the US, and am too familiar with this country's use of the conservative/liberal labels, I tend to start from a position of high skepticism when a writer uses those terms. And, sure enough, they are here used in their usual political propaganda senses, clearly intended to maximally confuse the reader.
Oh, well ...
Yeah, I'd guess you're right, though Australia and New Zealand don't add up to a whole lot of people. ;-) Actually, I'd guess that lots of places settled by folks from the UK would also eat crustacea, as we Americans do.
I'd also guess that the coastal population of China eats a lot of crustacea, but haven't been part of such statistics until fairly recently. And I've read a number of claims that Chinese data is still widely excluded, because there's such a strong history of bogus numbers coming from their government agencies, numbers sufficiently incorrect to seriously compromise the accuracy of global fish population estimates.
We do still have serious problems getting accurate population estimates for many important species (not to mention the unimportant ones).
I like to point out that a "veggie burger" is pretty much the same thing as falafel, which is a staple of the Middle-Eastern diet, and which is never considered a meat substitute. It's a perfectly good food item on its own, and not a substitute for anything else. It can be fun to mention to people not familiar with such things that, if they're in a Middle-Eastern restaurant and see something that looks like a meatball, it's almost certainly vegetarian. And people there will look at you weird if you call it a meatball. ;-)
In American southern-style restaurants, "hush puppies" are a staple item, and if thoroughly cooked, often look a lot like meatballs (or falafel). Again, they're not a substitute for anything. Everyone from the South knows they're made of cornmeal (usually with a bit of egg as a binder), and not even vaguely related to meat. I've also seen cornmeal dumplings that look a lot like meatballs, but that's not nearly as common. My wife's family is southern (and she made fried green tomatoes as part of today's dinner), and she likes the taste of caramelized carbohydrates, so she tends to overcook hush-puppies and corn dumplings to a brown color, making them look much like meatballs. Others prefer them their normal yellow color, or white if they used white cornmeal, but who does that?
Shrimp and the like are in effect "sea insects", and we eat those...
Actually, I've seen food statistics saying that almost all the world's shrimp catch is consumed in 3 countries, the US, the UK and Japan. In much of the rest of the world, they're considered big ocean-going bugs, and not normal people food.
One story I read about this back in the 1990s was typical if a bit odd: It was a report on the first successful shrimp "farms", which had been developed in Mexico. The report went on to say that this was odd because Mexicans mostly don't eat shrimp; they catch them and sell them to those weird northerners who like them. Supposedly most of the shrimp consumption in Mexico happens at vacation spots frequented by Americans.
OTOH, I've personally known a number of people from Mexico and other parts of Central America who, when here in the US, eat shrimp as if they were normal food. Maybe it has changed over the years, or depends on just where they came from. Maybe if they lived in a tourist zone, they learned to eat the funny stuff that the tourists liked to eat.
In any case, sometimes when there's shrimp on the table I like to refer to them as "water bugs", to see the reactions that gets. Some people grin and grab a shrimp; others get confused and have an "I never thought of it that way" look on their faces. While they're deciding what to do, I and the grinners can eat most of the shrimp.
I've also liked to point out to some of my kosher-eating Jewish friends that the Bible explicitly lists grasshoppers, locusts, and their kin as being on the "approved eating" list, while excluding other invertebrates. This is good for confusing the Fundie Christian types, too. Point out that eating shrimp, lobster or crab is forbidden by their Bible, but locusts and grasshoppers are explicitly approved. They usually don't have a good answer to this. Sometimes they express disbelief, but that's dangerous for them, because someone is likely to ask to see their Bible for a minute, and turn to the food-law sections, and guess what? ;-)
(This is also a good tactic when they express disapproval of things like homosexuality. Ask them to find a ban on such things in the Bible, and when they do, point out the nearby ban on eating things like shrimp. Then ask them if they ever eat shrimp. It's as bad as gay sex, y'know. Actually, I learned this tactic from some of gay friends, whom I don't criticize, because I just know they'll turn around and criticize me for liking shrimp and crab meat. ;-)
We humans aren't very consistent in our tastes ...