So do we have any credible estimates of the costs of capturing such near-Earth objects and mining them? Would it really be profitable with our current technology?
I've read a few wide-eyed "sci-fi" suggestions about this, but nothing that would convince the management of any mining company to invest in it. Of course, I could have missed 99% of what's been written on the topic, and some of it might actually be accurate.
If it's the US we're talking about, expect to get the answer least likely to qualify for a lawsuit.
What I've seen a lot of over the past few years is lists of "requirements" that include many new, obscure packages, many that I've never heard of. When I google them, they usually turn out to be some new software development package that's being heavily marketed to managers, but are proprietary and cost far more than I'd be willing to pay just to get "experience" on them.
So it's easy for the people hiring to explain why they won't talk to me. They just name one or two of those obscure packages, point out that they aren't mentioned on my resume, so obviously I'm not qualified.
(And sometimes they include a requirement of N years experience with some packages, which have typically been available for <N years. This is a very old trick to "prove" that a candidate isn't qualified.;-)
So does anyone have any idea how my message above got a "troll" rating? It strikes me as quite reasonable to ask about slashdot-like forums in other languages, especially when we've just read "accusations" that slashdot is US-centric. Why might someone consider this trolling?
We might also note that the (few) replies have also been simple and informative, pointing to two sites that do look like clones of slashdot, in Japanese and Spanish. Unlike most "troll" posts, my question doesn't seem to have aroused any emotional responses, just straightforward, to-the-point replies.
I am a bit disappointed that we didn't get more such pointers. I'd thought there might also be French, German, Russian, and Mandarin versions of slashdot by now, but I don't know how to look for them. (Google doesn't seem to be very helpful in this case.;-) I wouldn't be surprised to read about similar sites in Hindi/Urdu, Arabic, Swedish or Malay, either. And I don't think it would qualify as trolling to ask if such sites exist. It's just a query about how far this approach might have spread.
Yeah, barrapunto.com works, while barrapunto.org still doesn't. But they both resolve to valid IP addresses, and I don't get a "connection failed" with barrapunto.org, so there's something listening there. I guess they just don't want to talk to me.
The barrapunto.com site is indeed a tech forum that looks a lot like slashdot.
So there are at least two such forums in languages other than English. It's not surprising that they're in Spanish and Japanese.
So are there slashdot clones in other languages yet? The code is still available, isn't it? A lot of us here might encourage setting up instances that operate in other languages.
It is sometimes annoying that we can't use non-Latin1 text here. Shis sorta limits discussions of east-Asia-related topics. One benefit that non-USians could bring is debugging the code for UTF-8. Why don't some of the complainers get to the job? Are the nice guys who run/. giving you some sort of hassle about it? If so, let us know...
Actually, I've seen that site. I thought it odd that it would be the Treasury Dept that keeps the lists. There are still a few questions, though. First, the site's downloadable files include a lot of.exe program, i.e., they're only executable on Microsoft Windows, which I don't run (for well-known security reasons;-). I could try them under Wine, but how do I know they're safe to run on my machines? Standard security rules say I shouldn't run downloadable executables.
Second, they don't seem to explain how I would go about matching an arbitrary Internet login ID (pseudonymous by its very nature) with entries in their lists. Or maybe my site, like slashdot, allows "Anonymous Coward" posts. How would I determine whether the human behind an ID is on one of these lists? Is there a way to do this that doesn't draw the attention of the (possible terrorist) people behind the ID?
Let's suppose I have a web site that lets people post messages to a discussion. How would I go about discovering which of them are "terrorists" according to the US government's definition, so I can exclude them? None of the "terrorist" organizations seem to have posted their membership list online.
Unless I can determine who is a member of any organization, I'll have to consider such laws as "secret laws" designed to trick me into unknowingly committing a crime. And I'll have to consider the legislative body that passed such laws my clear enemy.
One obvious conjecture is that the intent of the law was to punish anyone who hosts a public forum on any topic. After all, it means that any organization can ask one member to join my forum, and then report me to the US government. I see no defense against this other than shutting down all public forums.
Well, yeah, but I had no idea what an "ACH payment" might be. I just googled the acronym ("define:ACH"), and I'm still not enlightened. To my knowledge, I've never used an Automated Clearing House, or even heard of one. I'm certainly not knowingly paying that way. My bank tells me it's sending the payment to the company, not to a clearing house. So I should probably be on the lookout for such a "convenience fee" in the near future.
(I'm assuming that ACH doesn't stand for Association for Computers and the Humanities, or Arkansas Children's Hospital, or the Aluminum Corporation of China (NYSE:ACH) or Analysis of Competing Hypotheses or...;-)
This happened a week ago! Seems Slashdot ain't what it used to be.
Sure it is. It's still publishing "news" stories that are a week old, aren't they? We'll probably read another report like it next week, too.
(I was tempted to say "You must be new here." But I realized that that might not be quite the right wording for a reply to a claim that something ain't what it used to be.;-)
Due dates are 20-25 days after the bill date anyways so you have plenty of time.
For the last few years, I've been noticing that more and more bills arrive in my mailbox less than a week before the due date. Those that have postmarks show that they were mailed only a few days earlier; it wasn't the postal service's incompetence that got them here so late.
My conjecture is that this is a way to increase the likelihood that customers' check won't reach them until after the due date. I usually pay electronically now, but even then, sometimes (such as when I'm away from home for a few days) I end up with late fees due to this short lead time.
This is especially true of credit-card bills. But I've seen it with our cell-phone bills, too.
Part of the news here in the US has been the proposals in Washington to cut back on postal service support. So snail mail may soon be a lot slower (and no Saturday deliveries). This will presumably add to the difficulty in getting payments in on time, and increase the corporate world's income from late fees. And give us all lower credit ratings when we fall for such tactics.
So they're charging you to use the options that make their businesses easier and cheaper.
There's a lot of precedent for this. For example, Verizon Wireless has the common $.20 per message if you sign up for instant messaging. It has been pointed out that, in terms of money per kb of data, this is (by a large factor) the most expensive communication scheme that has ever existed. Each IM is just a single IP packet, and the cost to the comm company is a fraction of a cent, so it's almost pure profit. But people are willing to pay it, so of course that's what they're charged.
If there's enough customer resistance, Verizon will probably drop this charge. But they'll continue thinking up new names (and excuses) for other extra charges, and keep the ones that don't get as much customer resistance. It's all part of their techniques for determining What The Market Will Bear.
As people here on/. keep pointing out, corporations exist to make profit. That's their only concern, and any way that will get the money coming in is what they'll do. Many people think this is the way they should behave. So I wouldn't expect it to change any time soon.
You should use the bill pay services at your bank.
That's what we do. And one thing I can't tell from the wording of TFA or the/. summary is: Does this "convenience charge" apply if we pay by using our bank's "Bill Pay" package? That is "Paying your bill online", after all. Or do they mean just using credit cards?
It is interesting how much can be written about such a topic, without anyone being specific enough that I can tell whether I'm going to be charged this way. But if they do this, we'll probably go back to sending a paper check. That's gotta be a lot more expensive for them than just letting our bank's computer talk to their IT department's computer.
I watched the video with an eye out for things like terminal windows, an ssh session, etc. I didn't see them. I also didn't see any examples of two apps running at the same time, i.e., two or more windows visible on the screen. Is this like other tablets (even the iPad) that only permit the user to use one app at a time?
I routinely run 4 or 6 terminals on my Macbook Pro, to ssh to various remote servers that I'm responsible for. This is something that I'd like a very portable tablet to do, too. I also routinely run two or more browsers simultaneously (or several windows in a single browser), which my wife's iPad can't do, and I saw no evidence that the ThinkPad permits this.
You'd think that, with a 1200x800 screen, you can have a real windowing system, not just a single window at a time. The fact that they don't show this off looks to me like a silent admission that they don't permit it. There are many things that work a lot better if you can just bring up several windows and see them all at the same time. That way, for instance, you can see the source code while stepping an app or a web site through its tasks.
I did like the hand-written input. One thing I wonder: Since this was built by a Chinese company, presumably it also works for hand-written Chinese (or Japanese or Korean) input. Would I be able to use this in a ThinkPad ordered in the US? (Some of us Americans actually know and use languages other than English. And my wife is frustrated by not being able to use Arabic on her iPad, though she can on the iMac on her desk.;-)
I'll have you know my Mayan solstice computer won't boot after that day when the CMOS clock overflows.
Well, that's not surprising. You'd sorta expect Mayan software people to make the same mistake that led to Y2K: They'd save a character by using only a 2-digit Mayan year, rather than the usual 3. After all, if every date you've ever seen starts with the "12" numeral (in your base-20 number system), you'd naturally consider it the default, and ignore the fact that the current b'ak'tun 12 has only a few years left. So your software that adds a 12 to the start of every date will break on the first day of b'ak'tun 13.
Such software stupidity probably isn't unique to programmers that use the Gregorian calendar. I'd imagine that we'll see similar bugs appear in software dealing with the Jewish and Islamic calendars when the century digits of their 4-digit years change. This won't be for a while, though, since their years are currently 5772 and 1433, respectively.
I wonder how many other calendars are in use that count such long time periods. Are there any others that have a high-order digit change coming up soon?
How could you have the meme about typing a sentence but accidentally the verb?
Of course, Method320's post was a submeme of the original missing-verb meme, with a compound verb in the usual place, but the infinitive missing. Maybe that what confused you? Compound verbs too difficult for a lot of English-speaking people nowadays.
(And some of us now studying Engrish and Chinglish instead. Those languages will valuable in coming Chinese century.;-)
Yeah, the Chicxulub crater is an interesting discovery. But what does it have to do with the Mayan calendar stuff? Were there dinosaurs around before the impact who had a calendar whose low-order digits went to zero on the Big Day?
... the place of origin of a doomsday prophecy would be exactly where you would not want to be.
Do we know where this "doomsday prophecy" actually originated? I'd think it wasn't likely in Mexico, because there are lots of people there who understand the Mayan calendar). And they understand that all that'll happen next December 21 is that the first digit of the year will increase by 1 (and the rest of the digits will reset to 0). That is, it'll be about as big a doomsday as Y2K was.
It seems more likely that this "doomsday" was generated by someone with no understanding at all of the Mayan calendar. Either that, or they were your typical charlatan trying to scare people for personal profit. (Actually, that sort of person is easy enough to find in Mexico.;-)
Yeah; a special case of this is the problem with Rh-negative mothers with an Rh-positive fetus. The mother builds up antibodies to the Rh factor, but the first child usually survives. If the second is also Rh-positive, her antibodies often kill it. But a subsequent pregnancy with an Rh-negative fetus is usually safe, so sometimes an Rh-negative mother will have several children.
There are a few other cases like this known. It's probably not surprising that they're all relatively rare conditions, since Natural Selection would work against them. But they don't totally prevent the mother from reproducing, so they can hang around at a low level. This is especially true for humans, since we're a top-level predator, and such species tend to have low reproduction rates anyway. So a small depression in birth rate won't affect a breeding population of humans as much as it might other animals that need a higher rate of reproduction.
Sure, there is. The latest version has its own sacred scripture, known to us as Mao's Little Red Book. It's followed by China's current leaders about as well as the Bible is followed by America's oh-so-religious leaders.
Of course, China had (and still has) other religions before that. One derives from the writings of Kong Fuzi (Confucius). And older one derives from that Indian fellow that we call Buddha. None of these three writers considered themselves to be founders of a religion; they were all trying to teach people how to Live Right. As were many of the founders of Western religions.
But it's all to no avail. As someone else has already quoted: "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. [Seneca]".
Hmmm... I wonder if I punctuated that last sentence correctly.;-) Anyway, China's leaders have been as good as European and American leaders at turning their wisdom into holy texts that are followed blindly and unthinkingly, often producing the opposite of what the religious "founders" were trying to achieve.
Tongue-in-cheek humor aside, this does summarize something that biologists consider an important scientific/medical question: Since a mammal's fetus is genetically different from its mother, why doesn't the mother's immune system recognize it as a "foreign" parasite and kill it?
Part of the answer is that sometimes this does happen. It's part of the explanation for miscarriages and stillbirths. There is also a conjecture that the mother's immune system is able to recognize some classes of defects, and kill a fetus that shows them. But more generally, there's a question of how a female mammal recognizes a (normal) fetus as something foreign that shouldn't be attacked. Some research has been done on this, but we're still a long way from understanding how it works.
By some coincidence, just yesterday someone replied to a post of mine with a link to a relevant book on the topic. This was in the discussion of the report that a lot of security cameras are broken or were never installed correctly (or were fakes from the start), but it applies here equally well.
It's all part of a universal aspect of "human nature", in which groups (including governments, corporations, etc.) rarely respond to a problem until it has grown into a serious disaster. This is true even when a problem is well-understood by part of the population. There are often pressures to make decisions that produce short-term benefits to the decision makers. This typically involves ignoring unpleasant facts, and denigrating the people who push for acting on problems.
About all we can do is keep trying to bring the facts (including the science) to people's attention. But so far, we don't seem to have any effective ways to persuade them to listen. And society's leaders always seem to have good reasons to encourage general ignorance ("bread and circuses").
Maybe this will be the next big social advance, to follow the Enlightenment and Democracy after an unknown number of centuries. I wonder if there are any studies that have turned up any approaches that are verified to work? I haven't read of them, if they exist.
Can you really imagine ANY private company where a vast number of physical security measures simply do not work at all?
Yep, our company has dealt with several. Normally the situation arises because the original system was installed incorrectly by the maintenance/facilities staff, ignored or actively sabotaged by IT, and covered up by managers and executives that have since moved on....
Heh. I held off replying to see what other responses might appear. It seems that at least a few people here don't have that "private business never does anything wrong but governments are always incompetent" belief system.
A few years back, I was one of the organizers of an evening event at an organization that I consulted for. When I got there maybe 10 minutes before it was to start, I found the place dark, and a crowd of people outside. Nobody with a key had showed up, and calls hadn't gotten through to anyone with a key. Several people said they'd tried to attract the attention of the guard, to no avail. I walked up to the double door, jiggled it a little, noticed that I could push one door in a bit, pulled out a credit card, slid it in between the doors, pulled the door open, and waved the people in. It took me under 10 seconds to "break in". We looked around, and verified that the (not very large) building contained no guard or any other people. We had our meeting, closed up, and went home.
The next day, my boss of course called me in, and when I got there, I found him trying to suppress a grin. The summary of the discussion was sorta like "I heard there might be a security issue with the front door." "Yeah, it shouldn't be so easy; maybe we should ask the security guys to make it more difficult for the next person who wants in during the night." "I've already suggested that to them, and asked why no guard was on duty." "Maybe next time, we should do a better job of making sure there's someone there with a key, so we aren't embarrassed like this again." "OK, I'll see if I can arrange that; have a nice day."
I also knew a number of the security folks, who never mentioned the incident to me, but usually showed a lot of grins over the next couple of months. You can probably imagine the effect such an topic had on their job security, after it was made clear to upper management that the security guys had been making a lot of suggestions to management that hadn't been funded, and this included more people to man the evening shifts. (The "night" shift apparently always had guards, but weekday evenings usually didn't, because "there are always a lot of people around to spot problems.";-)
Of course, in a large corporation, I'd probably have been fired for what I did, and security wouldn't benefit from it. In this case, though, the top boss (and his secretary) were quite friendly to me thereafter, and I did a lot more work for them. I don't think I'd try such a thing at a large company's site, though.
Slashdot Mirror
So do we have any credible estimates of the costs of capturing such near-Earth objects and mining them? Would it really be profitable with our current technology?
I've read a few wide-eyed "sci-fi" suggestions about this, but nothing that would convince the management of any mining company to invest in it. Of course, I could have missed 99% of what's been written on the topic, and some of it might actually be accurate.
Just dont espect to get an honest answer.
If it's the US we're talking about, expect to get the answer least likely to qualify for a lawsuit.
What I've seen a lot of over the past few years is lists of "requirements" that include many new, obscure packages, many that I've never heard of. When I google them, they usually turn out to be some new software development package that's being heavily marketed to managers, but are proprietary and cost far more than I'd be willing to pay just to get "experience" on them.
So it's easy for the people hiring to explain why they won't talk to me. They just name one or two of those obscure packages, point out that they aren't mentioned on my resume, so obviously I'm not qualified.
(And sometimes they include a requirement of N years experience with some packages, which have typically been available for <N years. This is a very old trick to "prove" that a candidate isn't qualified. ;-)
So does anyone have any idea how my message above got a "troll" rating? It strikes me as quite reasonable to ask about slashdot-like forums in other languages, especially when we've just read "accusations" that slashdot is US-centric. Why might someone consider this trolling?
We might also note that the (few) replies have also been simple and informative, pointing to two sites that do look like clones of slashdot, in Japanese and Spanish. Unlike most "troll" posts, my question doesn't seem to have aroused any emotional responses, just straightforward, to-the-point replies.
I am a bit disappointed that we didn't get more such pointers. I'd thought there might also be French, German, Russian, and Mandarin versions of slashdot by now, but I don't know how to look for them. (Google doesn't seem to be very helpful in this case. ;-) I wouldn't be surprised to read about similar sites in Hindi/Urdu, Arabic, Swedish or Malay, either. And I don't think it would qualify as trolling to ask if such sites exist. It's just a query about how far this approach might have spread.
Yeah, barrapunto.com works, while barrapunto.org still doesn't. But they both resolve to valid IP addresses, and I don't get a "connection failed" with barrapunto.org, so there's something listening there. I guess they just don't want to talk to me.
The barrapunto.com site is indeed a tech forum that looks a lot like slashdot.
So there are at least two such forums in languages other than English. It's not surprising that they're in Spanish and Japanese.
Hmmm ... I tried connecting to barrapunto.org, and my browser just hangs with a "Connecting to barrapunto.org" message.
Oops; it just displayed a "The connection has timed out" message.
Have we slashdotted it? ;-)
So are there slashdot clones in other languages yet? The code is still available, isn't it? A lot of us here might encourage setting up instances that operate in other languages.
It is sometimes annoying that we can't use non-Latin1 text here. Shis sorta limits discussions of east-Asia-related topics. One benefit that non-USians could bring is debugging the code for UTF-8. Why don't some of the complainers get to the job? Are the nice guys who run /. giving you some sort of hassle about it? If so, let us know ...
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/SDN-List/Pages/default.aspx
Actually, I've seen that site. I thought it odd that it would be the Treasury Dept that keeps the lists. There are still a few questions, though. First, the site's downloadable files include a lot of .exe program, i.e., they're only executable on Microsoft Windows, which I don't run (for well-known security reasons ;-). I could try them under Wine, but how do I know they're safe to run on my machines? Standard security rules say I shouldn't run downloadable executables.
Second, they don't seem to explain how I would go about matching an arbitrary Internet login ID (pseudonymous by its very nature) with entries in their lists. Or maybe my site, like slashdot, allows "Anonymous Coward" posts. How would I determine whether the human behind an ID is on one of these lists? Is there a way to do this that doesn't draw the attention of the (possible terrorist) people behind the ID?
State in your Terms of Service that the user has to agree not to participate in terrorist activities.
Hey, good Idea! After all, we know that political extremists always follow any suggestions from strangers about how to best interact with others. ;-)
Let's suppose I have a web site that lets people post messages to a discussion. How would I go about discovering which of them are "terrorists" according to the US government's definition, so I can exclude them? None of the "terrorist" organizations seem to have posted their membership list online.
Unless I can determine who is a member of any organization, I'll have to consider such laws as "secret laws" designed to trick me into unknowingly committing a crime. And I'll have to consider the legislative body that passed such laws my clear enemy.
One obvious conjecture is that the intent of the law was to punish anyone who hosts a public forum on any topic. After all, it means that any organization can ask one member to join my forum, and then report me to the US government. I see no defense against this other than shutting down all public forums.
Well, yeah, but I had no idea what an "ACH payment" might be. I just googled the acronym ("define:ACH"), and I'm still not enlightened. To my knowledge, I've never used an Automated Clearing House, or even heard of one. I'm certainly not knowingly paying that way. My bank tells me it's sending the payment to the company, not to a clearing house. So I should probably be on the lookout for such a "convenience fee" in the near future.
(I'm assuming that ACH doesn't stand for Association for Computers and the Humanities, or Arkansas Children's Hospital, or the Aluminum Corporation of China (NYSE:ACH) or Analysis of Competing Hypotheses or ... ;-)
This happened a week ago! Seems Slashdot ain't what it used to be.
Sure it is. It's still publishing "news" stories that are a week old, aren't they? We'll probably read another report like it next week, too.
(I was tempted to say "You must be new here." But I realized that that might not be quite the right wording for a reply to a claim that something ain't what it used to be. ;-)
Verbing weirds language.
So you should intentionally the verb out.
Due dates are 20-25 days after the bill date anyways so you have plenty of time.
For the last few years, I've been noticing that more and more bills arrive in my mailbox less than a week before the due date. Those that have postmarks show that they were mailed only a few days earlier; it wasn't the postal service's incompetence that got them here so late.
My conjecture is that this is a way to increase the likelihood that customers' check won't reach them until after the due date. I usually pay electronically now, but even then, sometimes (such as when I'm away from home for a few days) I end up with late fees due to this short lead time.
This is especially true of credit-card bills. But I've seen it with our cell-phone bills, too.
Part of the news here in the US has been the proposals in Washington to cut back on postal service support. So snail mail may soon be a lot slower (and no Saturday deliveries). This will presumably add to the difficulty in getting payments in on time, and increase the corporate world's income from late fees. And give us all lower credit ratings when we fall for such tactics.
So they're charging you to use the options that make their businesses easier and cheaper.
There's a lot of precedent for this. For example, Verizon Wireless has the common $.20 per message if you sign up for instant messaging. It has been pointed out that, in terms of money per kb of data, this is (by a large factor) the most expensive communication scheme that has ever existed. Each IM is just a single IP packet, and the cost to the comm company is a fraction of a cent, so it's almost pure profit. But people are willing to pay it, so of course that's what they're charged.
If there's enough customer resistance, Verizon will probably drop this charge. But they'll continue thinking up new names (and excuses) for other extra charges, and keep the ones that don't get as much customer resistance. It's all part of their techniques for determining What The Market Will Bear.
As people here on /. keep pointing out, corporations exist to make profit. That's their only concern, and any way that will get the money coming in is what they'll do. Many people think this is the way they should behave. So I wouldn't expect it to change any time soon.
You should use the bill pay services at your bank.
That's what we do. And one thing I can't tell from the wording of TFA or the /. summary is: Does this "convenience charge" apply if we pay by using our bank's "Bill Pay" package? That is "Paying your bill online", after all. Or do they mean just using credit cards?
It is interesting how much can be written about such a topic, without anyone being specific enough that I can tell whether I'm going to be charged this way. But if they do this, we'll probably go back to sending a paper check. That's gotta be a lot more expensive for them than just letting our bank's computer talk to their IT department's computer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXFexk6k39M
I watched the video with an eye out for things like terminal windows, an ssh session, etc. I didn't see them. I also didn't see any examples of two apps running at the same time, i.e., two or more windows visible on the screen. Is this like other tablets (even the iPad) that only permit the user to use one app at a time?
I routinely run 4 or 6 terminals on my Macbook Pro, to ssh to various remote servers that I'm responsible for. This is something that I'd like a very portable tablet to do, too. I also routinely run two or more browsers simultaneously (or several windows in a single browser), which my wife's iPad can't do, and I saw no evidence that the ThinkPad permits this.
You'd think that, with a 1200x800 screen, you can have a real windowing system, not just a single window at a time. The fact that they don't show this off looks to me like a silent admission that they don't permit it. There are many things that work a lot better if you can just bring up several windows and see them all at the same time. That way, for instance, you can see the source code while stepping an app or a web site through its tasks.
I did like the hand-written input. One thing I wonder: Since this was built by a Chinese company, presumably it also works for hand-written Chinese (or Japanese or Korean) input. Would I be able to use this in a ThinkPad ordered in the US? (Some of us Americans actually know and use languages other than English. And my wife is frustrated by not being able to use Arabic on her iPad, though she can on the iMac on her desk. ;-)
I'll have you know my Mayan solstice computer won't boot after that day when the CMOS clock overflows.
Well, that's not surprising. You'd sorta expect Mayan software people to make the same mistake that led to Y2K: They'd save a character by using only a 2-digit Mayan year, rather than the usual 3. After all, if every date you've ever seen starts with the "12" numeral (in your base-20 number system), you'd naturally consider it the default, and ignore the fact that the current b'ak'tun 12 has only a few years left. So your software that adds a 12 to the start of every date will break on the first day of b'ak'tun 13.
Such software stupidity probably isn't unique to programmers that use the Gregorian calendar. I'd imagine that we'll see similar bugs appear in software dealing with the Jewish and Islamic calendars when the century digits of their 4-digit years change. This won't be for a while, though, since their years are currently 5772 and 1433, respectively.
I wonder how many other calendars are in use that count such long time periods. Are there any others that have a high-order digit change coming up soon?
I must have missed the meme.
How could you have the meme about typing a sentence but accidentally the verb?
Of course, Method320's post was a submeme of the original missing-verb meme, with a compound verb in the usual place, but the infinitive missing. Maybe that what confused you? Compound verbs too difficult for a lot of English-speaking people nowadays.
(And some of us now studying Engrish and Chinglish instead. Those languages will valuable in coming Chinese century. ;-)
Yeah, the Chicxulub crater is an interesting discovery. But what does it have to do with the Mayan calendar stuff? Were there dinosaurs around before the impact who had a calendar whose low-order digits went to zero on the Big Day?
... the place of origin of a doomsday prophecy would be exactly where you would not want to be.
Do we know where this "doomsday prophecy" actually originated? I'd think it wasn't likely in Mexico, because there are lots of people there who understand the Mayan calendar). And they understand that all that'll happen next December 21 is that the first digit of the year will increase by 1 (and the rest of the digits will reset to 0). That is, it'll be about as big a doomsday as Y2K was.
It seems more likely that this "doomsday" was generated by someone with no understanding at all of the Mayan calendar. Either that, or they were your typical charlatan trying to scare people for personal profit. (Actually, that sort of person is easy enough to find in Mexico. ;-)
There are a few other cases like this known. It's probably not surprising that they're all relatively rare conditions, since Natural Selection would work against them. But they don't totally prevent the mother from reproducing, so they can hang around at a low level. This is especially true for humans, since we're a top-level predator, and such species tend to have low reproduction rates anyway. So a small depression in birth rate won't affect a breeding population of humans as much as it might other animals that need a higher rate of reproduction.
Thank god there is no religion in china.
Sure, there is. The latest version has its own sacred scripture, known to us as Mao's Little Red Book. It's followed by China's current leaders about as well as the Bible is followed by America's oh-so-religious leaders.
Of course, China had (and still has) other religions before that. One derives from the writings of Kong Fuzi (Confucius). And older one derives from that Indian fellow that we call Buddha. None of these three writers considered themselves to be founders of a religion; they were all trying to teach people how to Live Right. As were many of the founders of Western religions.
But it's all to no avail. As someone else has already quoted: "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. [Seneca]".
Hmmm ... I wonder if I punctuated that last sentence correctly. ;-) Anyway, China's leaders have been as good as European and American leaders at turning their wisdom into holy texts that are followed blindly and unthinkingly, often producing the opposite of what the religious "founders" were trying to achieve.
Baby or not, I think they're just parasites ...
Tongue-in-cheek humor aside, this does summarize something that biologists consider an important scientific/medical question: Since a mammal's fetus is genetically different from its mother, why doesn't the mother's immune system recognize it as a "foreign" parasite and kill it?
Part of the answer is that sometimes this does happen. It's part of the explanation for miscarriages and stillbirths. There is also a conjecture that the mother's immune system is able to recognize some classes of defects, and kill a fetus that shows them. But more generally, there's a question of how a female mammal recognizes a (normal) fetus as something foreign that shouldn't be attacked. Some research has been done on this, but we're still a long way from understanding how it works.
By some coincidence, just yesterday someone replied to a post of mine with a link to a relevant book on the topic. This was in the discussion of the report that a lot of security cameras are broken or were never installed correctly (or were fakes from the start), but it applies here equally well.
It's all part of a universal aspect of "human nature", in which groups (including governments, corporations, etc.) rarely respond to a problem until it has grown into a serious disaster. This is true even when a problem is well-understood by part of the population. There are often pressures to make decisions that produce short-term benefits to the decision makers. This typically involves ignoring unpleasant facts, and denigrating the people who push for acting on problems.
About all we can do is keep trying to bring the facts (including the science) to people's attention. But so far, we don't seem to have any effective ways to persuade them to listen. And society's leaders always seem to have good reasons to encourage general ignorance ("bread and circuses").
Maybe this will be the next big social advance, to follow the Enlightenment and Democracy after an unknown number of centuries. I wonder if there are any studies that have turned up any approaches that are verified to work? I haven't read of them, if they exist.
Can you really imagine ANY private company where a vast number of physical security measures simply do not work at all?
Yep, our company has dealt with several. Normally the situation arises because the original system was installed incorrectly by the maintenance/facilities staff, ignored or actively sabotaged by IT, and covered up by managers and executives that have since moved on. ...
Heh. I held off replying to see what other responses might appear. It seems that at least a few people here don't have that "private business never does anything wrong but governments are always incompetent" belief system.
A few years back, I was one of the organizers of an evening event at an organization that I consulted for. When I got there maybe 10 minutes before it was to start, I found the place dark, and a crowd of people outside. Nobody with a key had showed up, and calls hadn't gotten through to anyone with a key. Several people said they'd tried to attract the attention of the guard, to no avail. I walked up to the double door, jiggled it a little, noticed that I could push one door in a bit, pulled out a credit card, slid it in between the doors, pulled the door open, and waved the people in. It took me under 10 seconds to "break in". We looked around, and verified that the (not very large) building contained no guard or any other people. We had our meeting, closed up, and went home.
The next day, my boss of course called me in, and when I got there, I found him trying to suppress a grin. The summary of the discussion was sorta like "I heard there might be a security issue with the front door." "Yeah, it shouldn't be so easy; maybe we should ask the security guys to make it more difficult for the next person who wants in during the night." "I've already suggested that to them, and asked why no guard was on duty." "Maybe next time, we should do a better job of making sure there's someone there with a key, so we aren't embarrassed like this again." "OK, I'll see if I can arrange that; have a nice day."
I also knew a number of the security folks, who never mentioned the incident to me, but usually showed a lot of grins over the next couple of months. You can probably imagine the effect such an topic had on their job security, after it was made clear to upper management that the security guys had been making a lot of suggestions to management that hadn't been funded, and this included more people to man the evening shifts. (The "night" shift apparently always had guards, but weekday evenings usually didn't, because "there are always a lot of people around to spot problems." ;-)
Of course, in a large corporation, I'd probably have been fired for what I did, and security wouldn't benefit from it. In this case, though, the top boss (and his secretary) were quite friendly to me thereafter, and I did a lot more work for them. I don't think I'd try such a thing at a large company's site, though.