I thought this was going to be a global warming study, rising sea levels...
Congratulations! You got the coveted insightful+troll moderation. I got one of those years ago, and I was quite proud of it. I've also got funny+troll and insightful+funny; now I'm trying for all three. But you could beat me to it. Maybe some moderator will give you a funny mod in the next day or two. If I had mod points, I'd do it myself. But I don't, so I'll just settle for congratulating you.
The number of published papers *that get cited by others* would be a much better metric.
Yes, though this does have a well-known "perverse" side effect. It encourages researchers to divide their papers up into small "minimal publishable unit" papers, get them published in different journals, and have them reference each other. This works especially well with teams of researchers, but supposedly independent researchers can also team up and game the citation system this way.
It's similar to the way that search sites like google rate sites by the number of links to their pages. This encourages the "link farm" approach of registering hundreds of domain names and setting them up as web sites that all link to the pages that you want to rank highly in the search sites' results. Some of these link farms openly advertise their services. "Pay us $N per month, and we'll set up 10,000 links to your page."
Unfortunately, there isn't any known rating approach known that can determine the long-term value of a web page or scientific paper. The only reliable algorithm is to wait N years, and see how many references are still appearing. This works, but has a minor problem in determining the current value of a document. We probably won't do any better until we have true AI that can understand a scientific paper. Even then, it's unlikely that an AI will ever be capable of predicting the value of something in the distant future.
No, they don't.... It's more like, "Fallow fields that aren't drenched in blood."
There's something a bit wrong with this metaphor. You'd think that blood would be a fairly good fertilizer. It's mostly water, of course, but it has a significant organic component that's already broken up into single-cell packets which will decay quickly. So it should be good plant food.
For pity sake. Classification is fundamental to science,...
Of course. But classification by itself isn't necessarily scientifically useful. The criticisms of the current IAU definition "planet" as "junk science" are examples of this. An incorrect classification is sometimes not just useless; it can impede understanding.
A historic example was the 17th-century debate over "momentum" versus "impetus", which had similar definitions with subtle differences. Newton effectively showed that "momentum" was the correct term, and "impetus" was dropped from scientific terminology (though it's still around in common English speech and writing). The difference might be subtle, but it's important. If you confuse the two, you can't understand basic physics correctly.
A major recent example of this is the success (over the course of successful decades) for the "cladistics" approach in the biological sciences. This is a purely classification concept, and is based on the idea that the only valid classifications are the ones based on common descent. A common textbook example is the term "invertebrate", which is bogus because it's not a complete evolutionary group. It excludes a subset, the vertebrates (which is a valid classification). If you think "invertebrate" is a valid classification, you have a serious misunderstanding of basic biology. It's useful as an informal description, but it's not a classification.
One of my favorite examples is to remark that humans are a species of fish. This mostly gets me funny looks, except among biologists who typically say something like "Of course". We are descended from fish, and if your definition of fish excludes humans, your definition is bogus and impedes your scientific understanding.
A more common example is that the term "ape" must include humans to be valid. This is, of course, rejected by most of humanity, especially the religious types. But we are descended from apes, so that term must include us to be of any scientific value.
The current term "planet" is a nice example of a similarly bogus scientific classification. A small group of publicity-minded astronomers basically decided that they want a term for the publicly-memorable set of big objects that orbit our sun, and made up a convoluted definition that works for that purpose. But the result is just a PR term, of little if any value for any scientific purpose. Yeah, you see "planet" in some scientific writings. You see a lot of informal terms. But all it really means is "a big object that's not a star". When they want to say more about it, they drop the term, and talk about the details.
Biologists figured out that the popular exclusion of humans from such terms like "ape", "fish" and "animal" results in a bogus classification, and define all those informal terms in a way that includes humans. For astronomers to define a term that includes Jupiter and Mercury while excluding Ganymede, Titan, Ceres and Pluto is equally bogus. It's just embarrassing that they would do such a thing in our supposedly modern, scientifically enlightened age.
Yeah, I understand why that small group might make such a definition. But I find it embarrassing, even if I'm not an astronomer. They should just publicly wash their hands of the term, and let the media deal with it. Or define it as "big thing that isn't a star". Like other bogus semi-scientific terms, it leads to public misunderstanding. And it wastes our time with discussions like this, which shouldn't be necessary in a supposedly technically-oriented forum.
Adam Smith pointed out the need for regulation to avoid exactly that fate.
can you provide a link to a source. it would be great to clear out some misconceptions in future discussions.
Nah; it wouldn't clear up anything. I've read the Adam Smith comments on the topic in other/. discussions and in numerous other forums. It never has any effect. The True Believers never accept that Smith wrote such things, and others Who Knew It All Along just skim over them and go onto more interesting things. Quoting him once again won't have any more effect than it did elsewhere.
Let's face it, very few of the Free Market types have ever bothered to read Adam Smith. It's a lot like the way that most people who "believe" other religious texts like the Bible or Koran don't bother with reading them, or don't keep their minds in gear while reading them. All they need to know is that the sacred texts support their beliefs.
Quoting actual passages from the sacred texts rarely if ever affects the believers.
You don't find it significant that there are 8 bodies in the solar system that have a larger than 1000:1 ratio of their mass to the mass of other objects in the orbit...?
Um, by that criterion, the Earth isn't a "planet" either. Its mass is only about 81.3 times the mass of a certain well-known object that shares its orbit about the sun.;-)
There's also the observation that, strictly speaking, Jupiter isn't in orbit about the sun. The center of mass of the sun-Jupiter pair is outside the surface of the sun by a few thousand km. 44,000 km actually, which is only about 7% of the sun's radius. Jupiter orbits that point, or rather the nearby barycenter of the solar system.
There's a good wikipedia summary that includes numbers for the sun, Jupiter, and a few other important bodies.
It's more useful to define bodies in terms of their own properties than where they orbit; if I were going to make a split amongst bodies that are large enough to remain spherical but didn't fuse, it would be between gas giants and rocky planets.
True, That's most of why this discussion is so pointless.
Actually, it would probably be useful to also split the "rocky planets" into two distinct groups: Those with an atmosphere dense enough to have weather, and those without an effective atmosphere. In our solar syste, there are five such "rocky planets with atmosphere". In decreasing order of their atmosphere's density, they are Venus, Titan, Earth, Mars and Triton. Note that this is a rather different order than the order given by their masses, and only three of them are currently called "planet" by the IAU's definition. But it does make sense to have a term for those five, and a different term for the spheroidal rocky objects without air, which range from Ganymede down to Ceres, and maybe a bit smaller. (Or larger, depending what else we find out in the Kuiper Belt.)
Lessee, how many airless rocky (dwarf) planets/moons do we actually know of now?
Planets of other solar systems are exoplanets, and calling them "planets" is just a colloquial short form.
Pluto, Eris, and other similar objects outside the inner solar system are called "dwarf planets", and calling them "planets" is just a colloquial short form.
Here's the definition: "The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune." The rest of the definition is noise because they failed to define "clearing the neighborhood".
Actually the original list when the term "planet" was coined was "Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn". At the time, Uranus was apparently unknown to European scientists, though it was known to people with good eyes in other parts of the world with clearer skies. Neptune wasn't known until 1846.
The current list of eight planets is the result of several revisions that had less to do with science than with the media. At one point, the revision was basically to exclude Ceres, which fit the previous definition, and hardly anyone wanted that. We can expect further revisions in the future, and they'll be as inconsequential as the earlier revisions. This won't stop people from discussing the topic endlessly.
Sure, the definition of a 'planet' could be better, but it's still better than no definition AT ALL, which is what we had before. And don't worry, it will no doubt be revised in the future, lots of times.
No definition at all is MUCH better than an incorrect, imprecise, politically driven definition.
Well, now; that depends on what you think the motive for the (re)definition might have been. One possibility was that they were just trying to tweak us, and if so, they certainly succeeded. And further support for this can be found to talking to a few astronomers, who mostly react to the topic by grinning.
Let's face it, "planet" is not exactly what you'd call a technical term. All it really ever meant was (first) that it wandered around in the Earth's sky, rather than following a fixed path like the stars did; then (second) wandered in an orbit around the sun; then (third) orbited around a star-like object but wasn't another star. This is far too vague a concept to be of much value, other than to refer to "a big object in orbit around a star".
A precise definition isn't really needed for any technical reasons, because when you get to the point of wanting to distinguish, say, Jupiter from Luna or Titan or Ganymede, there are better terms available. Or you just name the object and list its numbers. Which "bin" it belongs in isn't all that useful, especially from one bin includes Jupiter and Mercury, but not Ceres or Titan, which are in a different bin.
Granted, some astronomers have put a rough lower bound to a planet's size, mostly that it should be approximately spherical. But that's also vague and fuzzy. The Earth has bumps several km high, so does that make it lumpy enough to not be a planet? Obviously not, so how out of round can a "planet" be? No astronomer has ever really said. Ceres certainly looks round in low-res photos, though we got pictures good enough nearly a century ago to decide that it was too lumpy. But some astronomers still refer to Ceres as a planet, probably just to tweak the rest of us. Others suggest that the Earth/Luna pair should be called a double planet in the same solar orbit. Nothing much ever seems to have come of this, though, so it's probably also just to tweak us (and perhaps also other astronomers).
The demotion of Pluto from an unmodified "planet" to a modified "dwarf planet" does seem to have set off the sort of legalistic dispute that is usually reserved for theological and political discussions. This is further support that the redefinition was intended to be entertaining, rather than anything really significant from a scientific viewpoint. The way that actual astronomers just ignore the issue (and grin) is further evidence that they don't consider it anything serious that applies to them.
So continue your debate over this vexing "scientific" issue. Meanwhile, most astronomers will be off doing science and not wasting their time with such silliness. And using actual scientific terminology in their reports, except when they want to be vague and fuzzy because the data has large error bars.
I would love to see the government sue people who grossly underbid contracts.
It might also be interesting if the defense's strategy was to demonstrate to the court that the government requires underbidding. This is easily demonstrated by showing that the contracts are usually awarded to the lowest bidder, regardless of whether the bid is realistic.
It would be fairly reasonable for a judge to agree that underbidding is required by current law, and thus can't be considered unlawful.;-)
Of all the $6 billion investments in science the government could be making with our tax dollars, what makes you think that this one is particularly effective at making the economy a better place?
This is, of course, the standard argument that has always been used against most research, exploration, etc. If our ancestors had listened to it, we'd still be living in caves or on the plains of East Africa, living short, violent, disease-ridden lives.
It's likely true that 90% of all research has no (direct) benefit. But the remaining 10% is what has made our lives what they are today. And we don't know beforehand which 10% will pay off.
The same argument is used every day by millions of school children. "How will I ever use this stupid 'knowledge' in my life?" You probably won't. But if you apply that reasoning, you'll grow up illiterate and ignorant, and you won't know the things you'll need to survive. And nobody knows what information will be useful to you later. We only know that remaining illiterate and ignorant isn't a good survival strategy.
Telescopes are an interesting case. I've seen a number of versions (translations) of the criticisms of Galileo's discovery of Jupiter's moons. Several (church) leaders of the day ridiculed this discovery as utterly pointless, since those moons are far too remote to ever be of value to humanity. It was only a few decades later that tables of Jupiter's moons' positions were published. It turned out that they moved rapidly enough that they could be used to solve a serious problem of the day: longitude determination. If you're sailing a boat full of people or goods across an ocean, not knowing your longitude meant you didn't know when you were getting near things like shoals or reefs.
Measuring latitude is easy; you just measure the altitude of some visible stars near either pole, and subtract that from their known altitude. But there was no good way of knowing your longitude. Then people figured out that the Jovian moons would work as a clock, accurate to within a minute or so (depending on your equipment and viewing conditions). This gave a much better estimate of longitude than the mechanical clocks they had then. It did turn out that this method was very difficult to use from a rolling ship at sea, so it wasn't all that useful unless you had a very good navigator with some expensive equipment. But it was easy to use on land, and led to much better maps (of those shoals and reefs) than they'd had before. Then, when better clocks came along, all the navigators at sea already had accurate maps; they now knew where they were on those maps.
If Galileo and his colleagues hadn't done all that "worthless" research with telescopes, studying things that were so far away that we couldn't even see them, a lot more sailors and goods would have died earlier, and a lot more goods would never have been shipped due to the uncertainties in delivery. So after the fact, even the most strict "profits are the only thing that's important" capitalist will agree that the early telescope development had paid off. Even knowledge of the orbits of "insignificant" celestial bodies had paid off. But nobody knew beforehand that that particular research would be worthwhile in a few decades.
Ridiculing the "waste" of orbiting expensive new telescopes mostly indicates a lack of knowledge of history. Even if you don't approve of knowledge for knowledge's sake, you should at least be aware that this sort of research has paid off in the past. And with what we've learned lately of small, insignificant objects like comets and asteroids, you should also be aware that it is likely to pay off if the form of warning us of an impending disaster at some (currently unknown) time in the future.
In English punctuation is supposed to go before closing quotation marks,...
Careful; you're likely to get some grammar Nazi criticising you for saying "English" when you mean "American".;-)
Actually, the replies that already explain this distinction are wrong, too. In reality, the rule - when there is one - is really determined by editors and publishers, not by countries or language peevers. Various publishers, especially newspapers and the like, have their own standards that they enforce, and it has only a little to do with which country their headquarters are in.
Also, it's common for people involved with computers to use the rule "only punctuation that's part of the quote belongs inside the quote. This makes it easy to write software that does it correctly. It also allows one to write sentences like:
Joe asked "Is Bill there?".
In this case, the '?' belongs inside the quote, because it's part of the question. The '.' doesn't, because the sentence as a whole isn't a question. It's a statement of fact about what Joe said, so it should end with a period.
But nested logic like that is far too complex for the typical human brain, I suppose. And a century from now, we'll still be reading silly complaints about such things.
The last I checked "zillions" of sites don't support https. Slashdot for instance.
True. And I've learned a lot of the reasons this might be true. The main one is the difficulty of keeping both your "http" and "https" site up to date and functioning. It seems that every 2nd or 3rd time there's an apache upgrade, the https site stops working. So we have to dig in and discover what slight tweak has broken our config this time, and then ask questions on forums until we find the trivial-looking change to httpd.conf that will make it work again.
Right now, I have a site that I want to update to the latest release, but in my test setup, once again the https version doesn't work, and there are no error messages saying what's wrong.
Years ago, I remember stumbling across a version in which all I had to do was:
Listen 80
Listen 443 and it Just Worked. But that problem was fixed in the next release. Anyway, I now once again have a lot of browser windows in the background that are showing various pages that might explain why the latest release silently fails for SSL in our test setup, and the public 80/443 site is still running an older version. Maybe I'll stumble across the fix today, maybe it'll be next week, and maybe it'll be after the next update is released.
It's even worse with the several other servers that I've tried out. Maybe some day, someone will figure out a way to make SSL "Just Work" out of the box, and keep working through upgrades. Until then, it'll continue to be a major PITA, and many people will just throw up their hands at the opaqueness of it all.
Unless, of course, you decide to not install any updates, and just go with a release that you managed to get working. But of course people will jump all over me for suggesting that people might be doing that for good reason...
It is not sufficient to merely provide links. Telstra must provide the source code.
Huh? If this were literally true, then an N-level distribution chain would require separate copies of the source on machines owned by every part of the distribution chain, including the delivery companies that merely transport the physical packages, or the customer's ISP if the product is downloaded. It's fairly common for GPL-compliant suppliers to merely link to the source on a web site owned by one company in the chain. As far as I know, this has generally been held acceptable.
If every company involved in the distribution has to have a separate source repository, it would seriously interfere with the distribution of GPL'd software. It would be quite reasonable for a distribution company to refuse to deliver GPL'd products if they were required to supply the source to software inside packages that they were delivering. Here in the US, I'd expect that USP and FedEx would be very unhappy about being required to run source repositories, as would every ISP (though the ISPs would at least have employees who know what software source code is;-).
I hope this isn't an actual requirement of any version of the GPL. Has anyone collected a list of the wording of various versions, with explanations of their legal implications? If some version does actually have such a stringent requirement, it would be useful to know about it, so we can avoid using that version with software that needs to be "delivered" in physical or electronic form.
Someone needs to give it a mathematical treatment.
It's been done. Years ago, it was determined that the intelligence of a group of humans is inversely proportional to log(N), where N is the number of people in the group.
Actually, there has been some dispute over exactly what sort of (inverse) function applies, since in some groups, the leaders find ways to divide the group up into functional sub-groups. This produces a set of smaller groups, each with a higher intelligence than the entire group would have if it worked together. But then the top-level intelligence is limited by the inter-group communication, so a similar function may be used to combine the subgoups' intelligence into a measure of the entire group's intelligence, and we all know how exponential functions combine, right? What? Some of us don't? Uh....
There have been some wags that claim that the inverse function actually involves N squared or cubed, but there seems little evidence that (outside of politics) it's really all that bad.
There has also been some confusion caused by tests being done that included religious groups. But that data had to be discarded, since those groups tend to have a firm ban on the application of intelligence in any group activity, and researchers don't have tools capable of measuring the intelligence level of people who are blindly following (and misinterpreting) the commands of a leader. But there is hope that we may some day be able to measure quantities that small, similarly to how physicists can measure individual elementary particles. This may lead to some interesting results in the study of intelligence.
internet was developed with tax dollars.. did the ISP pay for the development costs? no
Right. That's how we always have done things here in the US, and in much of the rest of the world. Most scientific research has always been funded by governments. Before 1800, scientists were almost all the same aristocrats who were the government. Then, when something with commercial value is discovered, it is normally turned over to the corporations who made the biggest campaign contributions (or are owned by the aristocrats who handle the funding), so they can collect the profits from what was discovered and built by our taxes.
Thus, if you look back, you'll find that the railroad system was built in the 19th century on right-of-ways that were created by government agencies using eminent domain to take the property. Much of the early railroad lines were created by military contractors, especially during wars such as the US's Civil War. Then the use of these right-of-ways was licensed to private railway corporations on a monopoly basis, so that those corporations could profit hugely from their monopoly on transportation.
Looking farther back, in the 12th century (in Asia) and the 15th century (in Europe), printing presses were invented that could be used in a small shop to print thousands of copies of documents much faster and cheaper than any previous method. If you look into it, you'll find that the development work was done by people working for the rulers, i.e., the government. Did this open up a fast path to universal literacy and massive publication? No; the copyright system was developed at the same time, to limit the right of small printers and keep strict control of what was published in the hands of a very small population of powerful people. Literacy took centuries to develop, and was fought every step of the way by powerful financial interests who wanted to keep control of knowledge. We still haven't broken this hold, and we still don't have universal literacy.
The Internet, with its near-100% military funding in its early years, is only the latest in a long series of tax-funded development being handed to corporations and privatized, to the detriment of the public. Our politicians and corporate leaders have had so much practice at this that they know pretty well how to carry it out. It's not obvious that we can have any more success at keeping the Internet open and public than we could with any of the other major technical advances of the past.
The authors of this work may believe that an open Internet will succeed on its merits alone. I don't.
Why not? That's what happened with the first Internet. Take a look back at the 1980s. At that time, there were lots of proprietary networks, one per vendor, and it was difficult or impossible for users of different vendors' equipment to communicate with each other. But over in academia, the open Internet was alive and getting attention. When it went "public" and finally allowed connections to businesses and homes, everyone jumped on it. The vendors all tried their mightiest to convince everyone that they had a better network, but everyone wanted the one that was open and could connect everyone to everyone, even if it might not be the perfect one in all its details. Eventually, one by one, the vendors grudgingly moved onto the Internet, as they realized that they couldn't compete with an open network.
The obvious prediction would be that the same thing will happen after the corporations succeed in taking control of the Internet. It will devolve into a set of "walled gardens", one per comm company, with limited communication between people on different parts of the Internet. If someone can come along and offer an alternative that connects everyone to everyone else, people will once again jump on it wherever they are permitted access.
Maybe this is how IPv6 will take over. The people working on it should be pushing for ways to sneak it into our homes and businesses in a manner that's beyond the control of the powerful commercial interests. If they can manage this, we can relegate IPv4 to the backwaters of walled gardens like IBM's and DEC's networks were back in the 1980s. The comm companies can then control the connectivity in their walled gardens all they like, and their customers will slowly find ways of getting onto the real, open Internet2, just as we all did in the early 1990s.
[A teacher of a programming course not knowing how to program]'s the kind of stuff I'd expect at a high school level, not a post secondary that you are paying tons of money for.
OTOH, at the college level most of the instructors look down on teaching programming as being below-college-level material, similar with teaching arithmetic in a math course. They're wrong about this, of course, because writing computer code requires an approach and a mindset that isn't much required for anything else you've likely done during your childhood. But that's the attitude of most of academia.
When I got my M.S. in Computer Science, I realized that I'd never once had to demonstrate the ability to write a correctly functioning computer program. Most of my profs never wrote any code, and as far as I could tell, neither did most of the grad students. I'd developed a number of programs that were in use at the school by then, but most of my colleagues thought I was a bit bizarre for doing such things.
The bottom line is that our educational system doesn't teach programming at any level. Well, maybe in a few courses at vocational schools and community colleges. But not in "normal" (junior-)high schools or colleges or universities.
And no, I won't tell you what university I was at. I do this with malice aforethought, because I want you to suspect that it might have been your school.;-)
A person without insurance is betting everything on not getting bankruptingly sick
And here in the US, a person with insurance is betting everything on the chance that the insurance company won't find a way to say "Sorry; that's not covered by your policy", and wash their hands of you and your medical problem.
This has always been a problem, of course, but it has become epidemic (;-) in recent years, as the price of medical help has slowly risen to eat up more and more of our income.
This is in large part based on a legal problem: When you get sick, the medical folks can just make up a price for their treatment, and whatever they settle on, that's what you have to pay. Imagine if your car had a problem, you took it to a dealer's repair shop (because no others are legal), and they'd decide how to fix it and how much you have to pay. If they decide you need a new transmission for $15,000, that's what they'd do, and that's what you or your insurance company would be legally obligated to pay.
That's not the situation with auto repairs, but it is essentially the way human-body repair works. It should be no surprise that the purveyors of medical help would slowly push the boundaries of "whatever the market will bear", until we're all bankrupt.
One of the things a "single payer" system would work against is this process. It would create a powerful price-negotiation bureaucracy that the medical establishment would have no choice but to deal with. That bureaucracy would have a much better negotiating position than you or I do at present. So, with all its idiocies and inefficiencies, it should work better than a "market" in which the buyers' alternative is sickness and death and in which they negotiate from a position of mostly ignorance.
Hey, imagine how entertained I was to find that the thread I'd replied to had migrated to the top of the discussion.;-) It's no longer preceded by all the misdirection about sailing, sails, sailboats, etc. Well, except for the message that I replied to that described the faster-than-wind trick as "a common part of sailing".
But now that the furor has died down, and the linked videos aren't slashdotted, it might be time to explain: No, it has little if anything to do with sailing. The gadgets under discussion don't have sails. If they did, when running downwind, the drag would be too strong to get up to wind speed; the sail would act as a big parachute to brake the motion.
Instead, what is shown is a simple mechanism to convert the wind-vs-ground differential to rotary wheel motion. It's fairly simple if you look at it. And its upper speed is basically limited by the friction in the mechanism (including friction with the surrounding air;-). It's fairly obvious that the engineers who built these have managed to build the linkage with low enough friction that the mechanism as a whole can build up some pretty good speeds.
This really should be no more surprising than the fact that sailboats (there I go introducing them again;-) can sail into the wind. An amusing historical factoid was that back in the 15th century, Europeans apparently didn't know how to do this, and their big square-rigged sailing monsters couldn't sail into the wind. They learned how to do it when they finally visited the Pacific and Indian oceans. There have been some pretty funny stories about the confusion among the crews when they approached Pacific islands, where the inhabitants came out to greet them in their puny, primitive sailing canoes - and sailed in circles around the big European ships! So much for advanced European technology. Of course, the European sailors quickly got over their surprise, took a few sailing lessons from the natives, and figured out how to build and use that sort of sail.
Actually, I once saw some hobbyists demo a small boat with a square sail that could tack into the wind. It had internal battens that maintained its curved shape, and was attached to the mast like polynesian sails, so it could be swung around without the shape change required by most sails. It wasn't quite as efficient as a big triangular sail, but it worked as an airfoil in the same way.
Anyway, it could be interesting to see if these guys can make their mechanism work in a boat pushing through water. The resistance might be too high there, though. OTOH, they might be able to doctor it into a mechanism that work for all headings relative to the wind. Sailboats can't sail within 35 degrees of the wind or so, depending on things like hull shape, but this mechanism probably could. Whether it would achieve better efficiency overall isn't obvious.
Of course, another idea might be to use the prop to drive a turbine. I wonder how the efficiency would work out in that case, over a wide range of speeds and directions.
Yes, and iceboat races often have top speeds 3 or more times the wind speed. But it's not achieved when running downwind; it's when moving approximately at right angles to the wind. That's when the airfoil effect is the most effective. When you're aimed downwind, the sail is little more than a parachute, and can't move faster than the wind (though with the low friction of an iceboat's runners, you can get a ground speed pretty close to wind speed).
The summary claims a "downwind" speed faster than the wind. Is this physically possible? I'd think that you could build a perpetual-motion machine if you could do this.
With the added bonus that you get to look at everything through a screen door!
Uh, what the hell are you talking about?
I think they're talking about the grid effect that's often very visible to people with good close-up vision on most screens. I notice it a lot more than my wife does, probably because my eyes are a lot better than hers. But I learned years ago to quietly ignore that part of using a screen. The little blank lines between the pixels aren't moving or blinking or anything, so it's easy to ignore them and just notice what the pixels are telling you.
Something funny I learned recently, since I got a good digital camera, is that its resolution is a whole lot better than any computer screen. So when I take a picture of something on a screen, the "screen door" effect really shows up in the pictures, especially when I crop them to remove the stuff I don't want and the image editor dutifully expands the remaining image to fill the window. This seems a bit weird, because I'm looking at the camera's image on a screen that doesn't have any better resolution than the original, but the vertical and horizontal black lines in the image are a lot harder to ignore than they were in the original.
I'm typing this on a Mac Powerbook with a 1920x1200 17" screen, and I can easily ignore the pixel borders, but if I shift my attention to look as a small chunk of screen, I can see them. Even in the white areas, there's a visible vertical and horizontal "banding" effect, despite the blurring that the bright white pixels produce.
You can get those (convertible mittens/gloves) from llbean.com and rei.com, and probably in their stores if you have one nearby. A quick check showed that the llbean version is fleece and also has a little flip-over cover for the thumb tip. The rei version looks a lot warmer, but has only the mitten-like cover for the four fingers, not for the thumb.
There are probably other sources for them, but they might be hard to find because they don't have a consistent name for them. Searching for both "mitten" and "glove" would probably turn up a lot of them in the first few pages, though.
This sort of mitten/glove combo has been around since at least the 1970s. They're quite practical. All that I've seen have a velcro fastener to the mitten cover back when you want to expose the finger (or thumb) tips.
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I thought this was going to be a global warming study, rising sea levels ...
Congratulations! You got the coveted insightful+troll moderation. I got one of those years ago, and I was quite proud of it. I've also got funny+troll and insightful+funny; now I'm trying for all three. But you could beat me to it. Maybe some moderator will give you a funny mod in the next day or two. If I had mod points, I'd do it myself. But I don't, so I'll just settle for congratulating you.
The number of published papers *that get cited by others* would be a much better metric.
Yes, though this does have a well-known "perverse" side effect. It encourages researchers to divide their papers up into small "minimal publishable unit" papers, get them published in different journals, and have them reference each other. This works especially well with teams of researchers, but supposedly independent researchers can also team up and game the citation system this way.
It's similar to the way that search sites like google rate sites by the number of links to their pages. This encourages the "link farm" approach of registering hundreds of domain names and setting them up as web sites that all link to the pages that you want to rank highly in the search sites' results. Some of these link farms openly advertise their services. "Pay us $N per month, and we'll set up 10,000 links to your page."
Unfortunately, there isn't any known rating approach known that can determine the long-term value of a web page or scientific paper. The only reliable algorithm is to wait N years, and see how many references are still appearing. This works, but has a minor problem in determining the current value of a document. We probably won't do any better until we have true AI that can understand a scientific paper. Even then, it's unlikely that an AI will ever be capable of predicting the value of something in the distant future.
No, they don't.... It's more like, "Fallow fields that aren't drenched in blood."
There's something a bit wrong with this metaphor. You'd think that blood would be a fairly good fertilizer. It's mostly water, of course, but it has a significant organic component that's already broken up into single-cell packets which will decay quickly. So it should be good plant food.
There's gotta be a better metaphor ...
For pity sake. Classification is fundamental to science, ...
Of course. But classification by itself isn't necessarily scientifically useful. The criticisms of the current IAU definition "planet" as "junk science" are examples of this. An incorrect classification is sometimes not just useless; it can impede understanding.
A historic example was the 17th-century debate over "momentum" versus "impetus", which had similar definitions with subtle differences. Newton effectively showed that "momentum" was the correct term, and "impetus" was dropped from scientific terminology (though it's still around in common English speech and writing). The difference might be subtle, but it's important. If you confuse the two, you can't understand basic physics correctly.
A major recent example of this is the success (over the course of successful decades) for the "cladistics" approach in the biological sciences. This is a purely classification concept, and is based on the idea that the only valid classifications are the ones based on common descent. A common textbook example is the term "invertebrate", which is bogus because it's not a complete evolutionary group. It excludes a subset, the vertebrates (which is a valid classification). If you think "invertebrate" is a valid classification, you have a serious misunderstanding of basic biology. It's useful as an informal description, but it's not a classification.
One of my favorite examples is to remark that humans are a species of fish. This mostly gets me funny looks, except among biologists who typically say something like "Of course". We are descended from fish, and if your definition of fish excludes humans, your definition is bogus and impedes your scientific understanding.
A more common example is that the term "ape" must include humans to be valid. This is, of course, rejected by most of humanity, especially the religious types. But we are descended from apes, so that term must include us to be of any scientific value.
The current term "planet" is a nice example of a similarly bogus scientific classification. A small group of publicity-minded astronomers basically decided that they want a term for the publicly-memorable set of big objects that orbit our sun, and made up a convoluted definition that works for that purpose. But the result is just a PR term, of little if any value for any scientific purpose. Yeah, you see "planet" in some scientific writings. You see a lot of informal terms. But all it really means is "a big object that's not a star". When they want to say more about it, they drop the term, and talk about the details.
Biologists figured out that the popular exclusion of humans from such terms like "ape", "fish" and "animal" results in a bogus classification, and define all those informal terms in a way that includes humans. For astronomers to define a term that includes Jupiter and Mercury while excluding Ganymede, Titan, Ceres and Pluto is equally bogus. It's just embarrassing that they would do such a thing in our supposedly modern, scientifically enlightened age.
Yeah, I understand why that small group might make such a definition. But I find it embarrassing, even if I'm not an astronomer. They should just publicly wash their hands of the term, and let the media deal with it. Or define it as "big thing that isn't a star". Like other bogus semi-scientific terms, it leads to public misunderstanding. And it wastes our time with discussions like this, which shouldn't be necessary in a supposedly technically-oriented forum.
Adam Smith pointed out the need for regulation to avoid exactly that fate.
can you provide a link to a source. it would be great to clear out some misconceptions in future discussions.
Nah; it wouldn't clear up anything. I've read the Adam Smith comments on the topic in other /. discussions and in numerous other forums. It never has any effect. The True Believers never accept that Smith wrote such things, and others Who Knew It All Along just skim over them and go onto more interesting things. Quoting him once again won't have any more effect than it did elsewhere.
Let's face it, very few of the Free Market types have ever bothered to read Adam Smith. It's a lot like the way that most people who "believe" other religious texts like the Bible or Koran don't bother with reading them, or don't keep their minds in gear while reading them. All they need to know is that the sacred texts support their beliefs.
Quoting actual passages from the sacred texts rarely if ever affects the believers.
You don't find it significant that there are 8 bodies in the solar system that have a larger than 1000:1 ratio of their mass to the mass of other objects in the orbit ...?
Um, by that criterion, the Earth isn't a "planet" either. Its mass is only about 81.3 times the mass of a certain well-known object that shares its orbit about the sun. ;-)
There's also the observation that, strictly speaking, Jupiter isn't in orbit about the sun. The center of mass of the sun-Jupiter pair is outside the surface of the sun by a few thousand km. 44,000 km actually, which is only about 7% of the sun's radius. Jupiter orbits that point, or rather the nearby barycenter of the solar system.
There's a good wikipedia summary that includes numbers for the sun, Jupiter, and a few other important bodies.
It's more useful to define bodies in terms of their own properties than where they orbit; if I were going to make a split amongst bodies that are large enough to remain spherical but didn't fuse, it would be between gas giants and rocky planets.
True, That's most of why this discussion is so pointless.
Actually, it would probably be useful to also split the "rocky planets" into two distinct groups: Those with an atmosphere dense enough to have weather, and those without an effective atmosphere. In our solar syste, there are five such "rocky planets with atmosphere". In decreasing order of their atmosphere's density, they are Venus, Titan, Earth, Mars and Triton. Note that this is a rather different order than the order given by their masses, and only three of them are currently called "planet" by the IAU's definition. But it does make sense to have a term for those five, and a different term for the spheroidal rocky objects without air, which range from Ganymede down to Ceres, and maybe a bit smaller. (Or larger, depending what else we find out in the Kuiper Belt.)
Lessee, how many airless rocky (dwarf) planets/moons do we actually know of now?
Planets of other solar systems are exoplanets, and calling them "planets" is just a colloquial short form.
Pluto, Eris, and other similar objects outside the inner solar system are called "dwarf planets", and calling them "planets" is just a colloquial short form.
(I'm not sure how Ceres fits into this scheme. ;-)
Here's the definition: "The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune." The rest of the definition is noise because they failed to define "clearing the neighborhood".
Actually the original list when the term "planet" was coined was "Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn". At the time, Uranus was apparently unknown to European scientists, though it was known to people with good eyes in other parts of the world with clearer skies. Neptune wasn't known until 1846.
The current list of eight planets is the result of several revisions that had less to do with science than with the media. At one point, the revision was basically to exclude Ceres, which fit the previous definition, and hardly anyone wanted that. We can expect further revisions in the future, and they'll be as inconsequential as the earlier revisions. This won't stop people from discussing the topic endlessly.
Sure, the definition of a 'planet' could be better, but it's still better than no definition AT ALL, which is what we had before. And don't worry, it will no doubt be revised in the future, lots of times.
No definition at all is MUCH better than an incorrect, imprecise, politically driven definition.
Well, now; that depends on what you think the motive for the (re)definition might have been. One possibility was that they were just trying to tweak us, and if so, they certainly succeeded. And further support for this can be found to talking to a few astronomers, who mostly react to the topic by grinning.
Let's face it, "planet" is not exactly what you'd call a technical term. All it really ever meant was (first) that it wandered around in the Earth's sky, rather than following a fixed path like the stars did; then (second) wandered in an orbit around the sun; then (third) orbited around a star-like object but wasn't another star. This is far too vague a concept to be of much value, other than to refer to "a big object in orbit around a star".
A precise definition isn't really needed for any technical reasons, because when you get to the point of wanting to distinguish, say, Jupiter from Luna or Titan or Ganymede, there are better terms available. Or you just name the object and list its numbers. Which "bin" it belongs in isn't all that useful, especially from one bin includes Jupiter and Mercury, but not Ceres or Titan, which are in a different bin.
Granted, some astronomers have put a rough lower bound to a planet's size, mostly that it should be approximately spherical. But that's also vague and fuzzy. The Earth has bumps several km high, so does that make it lumpy enough to not be a planet? Obviously not, so how out of round can a "planet" be? No astronomer has ever really said. Ceres certainly looks round in low-res photos, though we got pictures good enough nearly a century ago to decide that it was too lumpy. But some astronomers still refer to Ceres as a planet, probably just to tweak the rest of us. Others suggest that the Earth/Luna pair should be called a double planet in the same solar orbit. Nothing much ever seems to have come of this, though, so it's probably also just to tweak us (and perhaps also other astronomers).
The demotion of Pluto from an unmodified "planet" to a modified "dwarf planet" does seem to have set off the sort of legalistic dispute that is usually reserved for theological and political discussions. This is further support that the redefinition was intended to be entertaining, rather than anything really significant from a scientific viewpoint. The way that actual astronomers just ignore the issue (and grin) is further evidence that they don't consider it anything serious that applies to them.
So continue your debate over this vexing "scientific" issue. Meanwhile, most astronomers will be off doing science and not wasting their time with such silliness. And using actual scientific terminology in their reports, except when they want to be vague and fuzzy because the data has large error bars.
I would love to see the government sue people who grossly underbid contracts.
It might also be interesting if the defense's strategy was to demonstrate to the court that the government requires underbidding. This is easily demonstrated by showing that the contracts are usually awarded to the lowest bidder, regardless of whether the bid is realistic.
It would be fairly reasonable for a judge to agree that underbidding is required by current law, and thus can't be considered unlawful. ;-)
Of all the $6 billion investments in science the government could be making with our tax dollars, what makes you think that this one is particularly effective at making the economy a better place?
This is, of course, the standard argument that has always been used against most research, exploration, etc. If our ancestors had listened to it, we'd still be living in caves or on the plains of East Africa, living short, violent, disease-ridden lives.
It's likely true that 90% of all research has no (direct) benefit. But the remaining 10% is what has made our lives what they are today. And we don't know beforehand which 10% will pay off.
The same argument is used every day by millions of school children. "How will I ever use this stupid 'knowledge' in my life?" You probably won't. But if you apply that reasoning, you'll grow up illiterate and ignorant, and you won't know the things you'll need to survive. And nobody knows what information will be useful to you later. We only know that remaining illiterate and ignorant isn't a good survival strategy.
Telescopes are an interesting case. I've seen a number of versions (translations) of the criticisms of Galileo's discovery of Jupiter's moons. Several (church) leaders of the day ridiculed this discovery as utterly pointless, since those moons are far too remote to ever be of value to humanity. It was only a few decades later that tables of Jupiter's moons' positions were published. It turned out that they moved rapidly enough that they could be used to solve a serious problem of the day: longitude determination. If you're sailing a boat full of people or goods across an ocean, not knowing your longitude meant you didn't know when you were getting near things like shoals or reefs.
Measuring latitude is easy; you just measure the altitude of some visible stars near either pole, and subtract that from their known altitude. But there was no good way of knowing your longitude. Then people figured out that the Jovian moons would work as a clock, accurate to within a minute or so (depending on your equipment and viewing conditions). This gave a much better estimate of longitude than the mechanical clocks they had then. It did turn out that this method was very difficult to use from a rolling ship at sea, so it wasn't all that useful unless you had a very good navigator with some expensive equipment. But it was easy to use on land, and led to much better maps (of those shoals and reefs) than they'd had before. Then, when better clocks came along, all the navigators at sea already had accurate maps; they now knew where they were on those maps.
If Galileo and his colleagues hadn't done all that "worthless" research with telescopes, studying things that were so far away that we couldn't even see them, a lot more sailors and goods would have died earlier, and a lot more goods would never have been shipped due to the uncertainties in delivery. So after the fact, even the most strict "profits are the only thing that's important" capitalist will agree that the early telescope development had paid off. Even knowledge of the orbits of "insignificant" celestial bodies had paid off. But nobody knew beforehand that that particular research would be worthwhile in a few decades.
Ridiculing the "waste" of orbiting expensive new telescopes mostly indicates a lack of knowledge of history. Even if you don't approve of knowledge for knowledge's sake, you should at least be aware that this sort of research has paid off in the past. And with what we've learned lately of small, insignificant objects like comets and asteroids, you should also be aware that it is likely to pay off if the form of warning us of an impending disaster at some (currently unknown) time in the future.
In English punctuation is supposed to go before closing quotation marks, ...
Careful; you're likely to get some grammar Nazi criticising you for saying "English" when you mean "American". ;-)
Actually, the replies that already explain this distinction are wrong, too. In reality, the rule - when there is one - is really determined by editors and publishers, not by countries or language peevers. Various publishers, especially newspapers and the like, have their own standards that they enforce, and it has only a little to do with which country their headquarters are in.
Also, it's common for people involved with computers to use the rule "only punctuation that's part of the quote belongs inside the quote. This makes it easy to write software that does it correctly. It also allows one to write sentences like:
Joe asked "Is Bill there?".
In this case, the '?' belongs inside the quote, because it's part of the question. The '.' doesn't, because the sentence as a whole isn't a question. It's a statement of fact about what Joe said, so it should end with a period.
But nested logic like that is far too complex for the typical human brain, I suppose. And a century from now, we'll still be reading silly complaints about such things.
The last I checked "zillions" of sites don't support https. Slashdot for instance.
True. And I've learned a lot of the reasons this might be true. The main one is the difficulty of keeping both your "http" and "https" site up to date and functioning. It seems that every 2nd or 3rd time there's an apache upgrade, the https site stops working. So we have to dig in and discover what slight tweak has broken our config this time, and then ask questions on forums until we find the trivial-looking change to httpd.conf that will make it work again.
Right now, I have a site that I want to update to the latest release, but in my test setup, once again the https version doesn't work, and there are no error messages saying what's wrong.
Years ago, I remember stumbling across a version in which all I had to do was:
Listen 80
Listen 443
and it Just Worked. But that problem was fixed in the next release. Anyway, I now once again have a lot of browser windows in the background that are showing various pages that might explain why the latest release silently fails for SSL in our test setup, and the public 80/443 site is still running an older version. Maybe I'll stumble across the fix today, maybe it'll be next week, and maybe it'll be after the next update is released.
It's even worse with the several other servers that I've tried out. Maybe some day, someone will figure out a way to make SSL "Just Work" out of the box, and keep working through upgrades. Until then, it'll continue to be a major PITA, and many people will just throw up their hands at the opaqueness of it all.
Unless, of course, you decide to not install any updates, and just go with a release that you managed to get working. But of course people will jump all over me for suggesting that people might be doing that for good reason ...
... educate people ...
I think I see a problem with your scheme ...
It is not sufficient to merely provide links. Telstra must provide the source code.
Huh? If this were literally true, then an N-level distribution chain would require separate copies of the source on machines owned by every part of the distribution chain, including the delivery companies that merely transport the physical packages, or the customer's ISP if the product is downloaded. It's fairly common for GPL-compliant suppliers to merely link to the source on a web site owned by one company in the chain. As far as I know, this has generally been held acceptable.
If every company involved in the distribution has to have a separate source repository, it would seriously interfere with the distribution of GPL'd software. It would be quite reasonable for a distribution company to refuse to deliver GPL'd products if they were required to supply the source to software inside packages that they were delivering. Here in the US, I'd expect that USP and FedEx would be very unhappy about being required to run source repositories, as would every ISP (though the ISPs would at least have employees who know what software source code is ;-).
I hope this isn't an actual requirement of any version of the GPL. Has anyone collected a list of the wording of various versions, with explanations of their legal implications? If some version does actually have such a stringent requirement, it would be useful to know about it, so we can avoid using that version with software that needs to be "delivered" in physical or electronic form.
Someone needs to give it a mathematical treatment.
It's been done. Years ago, it was determined that the intelligence of a group of humans is inversely proportional to log(N), where N is the number of people in the group.
Actually, there has been some dispute over exactly what sort of (inverse) function applies, since in some groups, the leaders find ways to divide the group up into functional sub-groups. This produces a set of smaller groups, each with a higher intelligence than the entire group would have if it worked together. But then the top-level intelligence is limited by the inter-group communication, so a similar function may be used to combine the subgoups' intelligence into a measure of the entire group's intelligence, and we all know how exponential functions combine, right? What? Some of us don't? Uh ....
There have been some wags that claim that the inverse function actually involves N squared or cubed, but there seems little evidence that (outside of politics) it's really all that bad.
There has also been some confusion caused by tests being done that included religious groups. But that data had to be discarded, since those groups tend to have a firm ban on the application of intelligence in any group activity, and researchers don't have tools capable of measuring the intelligence level of people who are blindly following (and misinterpreting) the commands of a leader. But there is hope that we may some day be able to measure quantities that small, similarly to how physicists can measure individual elementary particles. This may lead to some interesting results in the study of intelligence.
internet was developed with tax dollars.. did the ISP pay for the development costs? no
Right. That's how we always have done things here in the US, and in much of the rest of the world. Most scientific research has always been funded by governments. Before 1800, scientists were almost all the same aristocrats who were the government. Then, when something with commercial value is discovered, it is normally turned over to the corporations who made the biggest campaign contributions (or are owned by the aristocrats who handle the funding), so they can collect the profits from what was discovered and built by our taxes.
Thus, if you look back, you'll find that the railroad system was built in the 19th century on right-of-ways that were created by government agencies using eminent domain to take the property. Much of the early railroad lines were created by military contractors, especially during wars such as the US's Civil War. Then the use of these right-of-ways was licensed to private railway corporations on a monopoly basis, so that those corporations could profit hugely from their monopoly on transportation.
Looking farther back, in the 12th century (in Asia) and the 15th century (in Europe), printing presses were invented that could be used in a small shop to print thousands of copies of documents much faster and cheaper than any previous method. If you look into it, you'll find that the development work was done by people working for the rulers, i.e., the government. Did this open up a fast path to universal literacy and massive publication? No; the copyright system was developed at the same time, to limit the right of small printers and keep strict control of what was published in the hands of a very small population of powerful people. Literacy took centuries to develop, and was fought every step of the way by powerful financial interests who wanted to keep control of knowledge. We still haven't broken this hold, and we still don't have universal literacy.
The Internet, with its near-100% military funding in its early years, is only the latest in a long series of tax-funded development being handed to corporations and privatized, to the detriment of the public. Our politicians and corporate leaders have had so much practice at this that they know pretty well how to carry it out. It's not obvious that we can have any more success at keeping the Internet open and public than we could with any of the other major technical advances of the past.
The authors of this work may believe that an open Internet will succeed on its merits alone. I don't.
Why not? That's what happened with the first Internet. Take a look back at the 1980s. At that time, there were lots of proprietary networks, one per vendor, and it was difficult or impossible for users of different vendors' equipment to communicate with each other. But over in academia, the open Internet was alive and getting attention. When it went "public" and finally allowed connections to businesses and homes, everyone jumped on it. The vendors all tried their mightiest to convince everyone that they had a better network, but everyone wanted the one that was open and could connect everyone to everyone, even if it might not be the perfect one in all its details. Eventually, one by one, the vendors grudgingly moved onto the Internet, as they realized that they couldn't compete with an open network.
The obvious prediction would be that the same thing will happen after the corporations succeed in taking control of the Internet. It will devolve into a set of "walled gardens", one per comm company, with limited communication between people on different parts of the Internet. If someone can come along and offer an alternative that connects everyone to everyone else, people will once again jump on it wherever they are permitted access.
Maybe this is how IPv6 will take over. The people working on it should be pushing for ways to sneak it into our homes and businesses in a manner that's beyond the control of the powerful commercial interests. If they can manage this, we can relegate IPv4 to the backwaters of walled gardens like IBM's and DEC's networks were back in the 1980s. The comm companies can then control the connectivity in their walled gardens all they like, and their customers will slowly find ways of getting onto the real, open Internet2, just as we all did in the early 1990s.
[A teacher of a programming course not knowing how to program]'s the kind of stuff I'd expect at a high school level, not a post secondary that you are paying tons of money for.
OTOH, at the college level most of the instructors look down on teaching programming as being below-college-level material, similar with teaching arithmetic in a math course. They're wrong about this, of course, because writing computer code requires an approach and a mindset that isn't much required for anything else you've likely done during your childhood. But that's the attitude of most of academia.
When I got my M.S. in Computer Science, I realized that I'd never once had to demonstrate the ability to write a correctly functioning computer program. Most of my profs never wrote any code, and as far as I could tell, neither did most of the grad students. I'd developed a number of programs that were in use at the school by then, but most of my colleagues thought I was a bit bizarre for doing such things.
The bottom line is that our educational system doesn't teach programming at any level. Well, maybe in a few courses at vocational schools and community colleges. But not in "normal" (junior-)high schools or colleges or universities.
And no, I won't tell you what university I was at. I do this with malice aforethought, because I want you to suspect that it might have been your school. ;-)
And here in the US, a person with insurance is betting everything on the chance that the insurance company won't find a way to say "Sorry; that's not covered by your policy", and wash their hands of you and your medical problem.
This has always been a problem, of course, but it has become epidemic (;-) in recent years, as the price of medical help has slowly risen to eat up more and more of our income.
This is in large part based on a legal problem: When you get sick, the medical folks can just make up a price for their treatment, and whatever they settle on, that's what you have to pay. Imagine if your car had a problem, you took it to a dealer's repair shop (because no others are legal), and they'd decide how to fix it and how much you have to pay. If they decide you need a new transmission for $15,000, that's what they'd do, and that's what you or your insurance company would be legally obligated to pay.
That's not the situation with auto repairs, but it is essentially the way human-body repair works. It should be no surprise that the purveyors of medical help would slowly push the boundaries of "whatever the market will bear", until we're all bankrupt.
One of the things a "single payer" system would work against is this process. It would create a powerful price-negotiation bureaucracy that the medical establishment would have no choice but to deal with. That bureaucracy would have a much better negotiating position than you or I do at present. So, with all its idiocies and inefficiencies, it should work better than a "market" in which the buyers' alternative is sickness and death and in which they negotiate from a position of mostly ignorance.
Hey, imagine how entertained I was to find that the thread I'd replied to had migrated to the top of the discussion. ;-) It's no longer preceded by all the misdirection about sailing, sails, sailboats, etc. Well, except for the message that I replied to that described the faster-than-wind trick as "a common part of sailing".
But now that the furor has died down, and the linked videos aren't slashdotted, it might be time to explain: No, it has little if anything to do with sailing. The gadgets under discussion don't have sails. If they did, when running downwind, the drag would be too strong to get up to wind speed; the sail would act as a big parachute to brake the motion.
Instead, what is shown is a simple mechanism to convert the wind-vs-ground differential to rotary wheel motion. It's fairly simple if you look at it. And its upper speed is basically limited by the friction in the mechanism (including friction with the surrounding air ;-). It's fairly obvious that the engineers who built these have managed to build the linkage with low enough friction that the mechanism as a whole can build up some pretty good speeds.
This really should be no more surprising than the fact that sailboats (there I go introducing them again ;-) can sail into the wind. An amusing historical factoid was that back in the 15th century, Europeans apparently didn't know how to do this, and their big square-rigged sailing monsters couldn't sail into the wind. They learned how to do it when they finally visited the Pacific and Indian oceans. There have been some pretty funny stories about the confusion among the crews when they approached Pacific islands, where the inhabitants came out to greet them in their puny, primitive sailing canoes - and sailed in circles around the big European ships! So much for advanced European technology. Of course, the European sailors quickly got over their surprise, took a few sailing lessons from the natives, and figured out how to build and use that sort of sail.
Actually, I once saw some hobbyists demo a small boat with a square sail that could tack into the wind. It had internal battens that maintained its curved shape, and was attached to the mast like polynesian sails, so it could be swung around without the shape change required by most sails. It wasn't quite as efficient as a big triangular sail, but it worked as an airfoil in the same way.
Anyway, it could be interesting to see if these guys can make their mechanism work in a boat pushing through water. The resistance might be too high there, though. OTOH, they might be able to doctor it into a mechanism that work for all headings relative to the wind. Sailboats can't sail within 35 degrees of the wind or so, depending on things like hull shape, but this mechanism probably could. Whether it would achieve better efficiency overall isn't obvious.
Of course, another idea might be to use the prop to drive a turbine. I wonder how the efficiency would work out in that case, over a wide range of speeds and directions.
Yes, and iceboat races often have top speeds 3 or more times the wind speed. But it's not achieved when running downwind; it's when moving approximately at right angles to the wind. That's when the airfoil effect is the most effective. When you're aimed downwind, the sail is little more than a parachute, and can't move faster than the wind (though with the low friction of an iceboat's runners, you can get a ground speed pretty close to wind speed).
The summary claims a "downwind" speed faster than the wind. Is this physically possible? I'd think that you could build a perpetual-motion machine if you could do this.
With the added bonus that you get to look at everything through a screen door!
Uh, what the hell are you talking about?
I think they're talking about the grid effect that's often very visible to people with good close-up vision on most screens. I notice it a lot more than my wife does, probably because my eyes are a lot better than hers. But I learned years ago to quietly ignore that part of using a screen. The little blank lines between the pixels aren't moving or blinking or anything, so it's easy to ignore them and just notice what the pixels are telling you.
Something funny I learned recently, since I got a good digital camera, is that its resolution is a whole lot better than any computer screen. So when I take a picture of something on a screen, the "screen door" effect really shows up in the pictures, especially when I crop them to remove the stuff I don't want and the image editor dutifully expands the remaining image to fill the window. This seems a bit weird, because I'm looking at the camera's image on a screen that doesn't have any better resolution than the original, but the vertical and horizontal black lines in the image are a lot harder to ignore than they were in the original.
I'm typing this on a Mac Powerbook with a 1920x1200 17" screen, and I can easily ignore the pixel borders, but if I shift my attention to look as a small chunk of screen, I can see them. Even in the white areas, there's a visible vertical and horizontal "banding" effect, despite the blurring that the bright white pixels produce.
You can get those (convertible mittens/gloves) from llbean.com and rei.com, and probably in their stores if you have one nearby. A quick check showed that the llbean version is fleece and also has a little flip-over cover for the thumb tip. The rei version looks a lot warmer, but has only the mitten-like cover for the four fingers, not for the thumb.
There are probably other sources for them, but they might be hard to find because they don't have a consistent name for them. Searching for both "mitten" and "glove" would probably turn up a lot of them in the first few pages, though.
This sort of mitten/glove combo has been around since at least the 1970s. They're quite practical. All that I've seen have a velcro fastener to the mitten cover back when you want to expose the finger (or thumb) tips.