Hmmm... A bit of checking shows it attributed to both of them, and to a few other people. They probably all stole it from someone earlier, whose name we don't know.
Meanwhile, I was reminded about another Mark Twain comment that is a pretty good summary of politics: "Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it." The US's past few presidents could be used to argue that it's both.
The definition of progressive is really simple, it just isn't anything that you think: progressives believe that society can be improved for all through organized action, including government policy.
Liberals are people who value personal liberty, the rights and well being of the individual person.
Conservatives are people who place importance on laws, tradition and hard learned lessons.
Hey, you're about 50 years too late with those dictionary definitions.;-)
We're talking American politics here, where all the labels have been totally redefined by all the factions, and you can't tell what anyone means by a political label unless you know which faction they belong to.
However, none of them use the old dictionary definitions.
For example, most of the American politicians who self-identify as "conservative" are actually (in the dictionary sense) radical reformers who want to "go back" to an authoritarian religious state that hasn't existed in the USA since it was founded.
Similarly for all the other political labels, whose meanings can't be learned by consulting any dictionary.
It also presumes the sensors collected the data correctly.
With the growing computerization of autos, this is a growing problem.
I've worked with computers for a few decades now, and I've seen more cases than I can count where the software "sees" input different from what I gave it. One incidence was just yesterday. It may have had something to do with the high humidity here in new England, where we're having a few days of thunderstorms. Anyway, I went to use my cell phone (which model I won't say so you'll suspect it's the same as yours;-), and the first couple of digits were ignored. They were all in the right column, so I typed a couple of 1's -- and the little display showed 3's. A bit more testing showed that all the on-screen "buttons" in the left column registered as their value + 2, i.e., the number in the right column. Buttons in colums 2 and 3 didn't register at all.
I took the phone inside, where the humidity was significantly lower, sat the phone down for 15 or 20 minutes, and tried it again -- and it worked fine. Later, when I took it outside, it also seemed to work. It's humid again today, and the phone works fine. So I don't actually know it was a humidity problem; that just seems the most likely explanation. In any case, it was a clear example of the computerized gadget consistently reporting a different button than the one I'd touched. The left and right columns are far enough apart that it couldn't be due to a "fat finger problem". I could easily see what part of the screen I touched, and there was a clear gap between the reported key and finger tip.
In general, reported activation of computerized sensing devices shouldn't be trusted, unless you have multiple reports from physically different sensor mechanisms that all agree. I'd bet that the data recorders in those Toyotas use exactly the same sensory hardware for the brake and throttle pedals, and only have a single sensor for each. If I were asked in a courtroom what this meant for accuracy of the record, I'd have to testify that it makes the record totally useless.
If 1 in 100,000 people cannot properly operate a device, it might be fair to conclude that the problem is with the people.
Alternatively, if 1 in 100,000 people cannot properly operate a device, but there is no apparent similar failure rate with other manufacturers' similar devices, it might be fair to conclude that there's a subtle problem with that one brand's UI. If the device weighs a ton or more, travels at high speed through inhabited areas, and is a physical danger to people in the vicinity, it might also be fair to say that its sale should be restricted to people who have demonstrated an ability to control it; people who haven't passed those tests would have to buy from other vendors with more user-friendly controls that they can operate properly.
Think Toyota would go along with restricting their sales to non-dummies who can tell their left foot from their right?;-)
As pointed out in the xkcd discussion, the real homeopathy interpretation is a bit more complex. It's related to a biological mystery: Why don't female mammals react to a pregnancy as an infection by a small parasite? The fetus is genetically different from the mother, so her immune system should recognize it and try to kill it.
If you (correctly;-) consider a pregnancy as a kind of parasitic infection, the homeopathic theory would predict that a semen dilution would "cure" it, i.e., would trigger an abortion. So you are in an ideal position to test this. Make a dilute semen sample, and inject it. If this doesn't produce an abortion, publish it as evidence against homeopathy.
For some reason, nobody seems to have tested this yet. If it works, you could become famous (though it would be at the cost of a lost child).
You'd think that there would be a lot of geeks and other scientifically included who would like to test this. I wonder why they haven't done so yet?
... he's just an entertainer like any other news or talk media figure.
Then there's the case of Jon Stewart, who keeps reminding people that he's a professional comedian, and still so many people treat him as a serious journalist. The same thing happens repeatedly to his other people. No matter that they identify themselves as being from Comedy Central, their interviewees still often take them seriously.
It's all part of why the folks who do satire and parody keep saying how difficult their job is, especially when Real World people keep doing things that are even crazier than anything they'd dare write as comedy.
I've actually seen both mechanisms suggested - that crossing the plane is somewhat more disruptive than average, or that it's the change in motion at the end of each cycle which causes the Oort Cloud to be disrupted.
It'd be interesting to read about a mechanism that would cause the solar system to feel a change in motion at the peak of the oscillation through the galactic plane. That's pretty much a sinusoidal motion, and there's no change of motion at an orbital peak. The orbit looks like a long, straight, horizontal line to the orbiting thing. Similarly, the Earth's orbit around the sun is slightly eliptical, and the Earth feels no change of motion at the point where it's most distant from the sun (which happens to be in late December, a few days away from the solstice, in this epoch).
There couldn't be anything with mass sitting and waiting for us at the peaks of the solar system's oscillations, which are roughly 200 ly above/below the plane. (Some estimates say 230 ly, but that probably still has a large error bar.) An object in a fixed position there wouldn't be a stable orbit, because it would feel a slight pull from the galaxy's mass, which would all be slightly off to one side of the position. The only way there could be something consistently 200 ly above/below the galactic plane when the solar system reaches a peak position would be if something in the galaxy were specifically aware of our solar system and were firing off projectiles to reach our extreme orbital points at the same time we did. This seems unlikely. Granted, there could be stuff there, but in general, it would be thinner than where we are right now, and would be a couple of orders of magnitude thinner than the mean density of the galactic plane.
Of course, wandering rocks are found everywhere in (and around) the galaxy. But the farther you get from the galactic plane, the less likely you are to encounter them. Unless you're in the trails left by the Magellanic Clouds, but our orbit takes us nowhere near that stream of litter.
The real danger would be passing through the galactic plane in the middle of a spiral arm. But the solar system's orbit seems to be such that this hasn't happened for at least a couple of billion years.
That's probably correct, in the sense that almost everything in the galaxy does some "bobbing". It would be unusual for any massive object to orbit exactly in the galactic plane, and even then, a distant encounter with another massive object (such as a star only a light year away) would add a vertical component to the orbit. Galactic mechanics are rather chaotic over periods of millions of years.
OTOH, even at its densest, the galactic plane is still pretty low density. The mean density is below one atom per cubic cm (and the Local Bubble is roughly 10 times thinner than that).
But each time we pass through the galactic plane at roughly 30-million-year intervals, there's a small chance that we'll meet a much denser cloud, and perhaps even a lot of rocks.
The sun doesn't just orbit the center of the galaxy, though. It also moves up and down relative to the galactic plane. Some have suggested that whenever the solar system reverses direction in that oscillation, very bad things happen,...
That's close to a conventional explanation, but off by 1/4 cycle. The extreme high/low points of the solar system's bobbing orbit are outside the galactic plane, and would be the low-danger points. The rough parts of the (approx. 60 million year) cycle are the two crossings through the central part of the galactic plane, which are the densest portions. During the crossings, the solar system is zipping through the galactic plane at a few hundred km/s, producing lots of collisions with whatever rubble happens to be there.
Part of the explanation from the astronomers who've done the studies is that, although we're about in the middle of the galactic plane right now, we're actually in a "Local Bubble" about 300 light years across, so there's not much galactic rubble in the solar system right now. There are low-density bubbles like this scattered around, the results of things like supernova explosions in the distant past.
Stick around for another million years or so, and we'll exit the local bubble. There might be some nice fireworks then, and perhaps another mass extinction.
Of course, we are going through a mass extinction event right now, but it's an unusual one with a known causative agent that's not astronomical. It seems that a new top-level predator has recently evolved, which has been devastating the ecosystem all over the planet. This will probably confuse the paleontologists in the future, since they'll see a mass extinction during a crossing of the galactic plane, but won't see any evidence at all of the impact that presumably caused it. They'll also see the evidence of a species with high intelligence, but of course that couldn't be the cause, because you wouldn't expect a highly-intelligent species to destroy its own ecosystem, right? So the extinction event will remain a mystery.
It sounded like fun, so I tried stepping through google's instructions. I was a bit surprised when their Getting Started page said "Whether you are using a Mac or a PC, a Nexus One or a MyTouch, this section will tell you everything you need to know to get App Inventor set up on your computer and phone." This seems to exclude my linux box, which seemed odd. Oh, well, I grabbed my Macbook Pro and tried following the instructions there.
After a bit of stumbling around, appinventor said it's installed. So I connected my G1 to the Mac, and it said it was connected via USB and in debug mode. So I clicked on the link to http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/ which shows me an App Inventor window that should appear. It doesn't. I do get a page that says App Inventor, asking me to log in with my google account. I do that, and get another App Inventor page asking for some information (including the email address that I just logged in with;-). I fill in that information, hit the Submit button, get yet another App Inventor page saying "Thank you. Your information has been sent to the App Inventor team." There are no links on this page.
That's apparently the end of the install tree. I've tried a few different paths through the maze of links, and they all lead to the same dead end. I expected some feedback through a gmail message, but after several hours, no messages from google have appeared there.
So how have others tested App Inventor? Have you got it working? I'm obviously missing something, but I can't see what. Maybe it's a test to see whether I can spot something that I'm failing to spot...
(Hmmm... It occurs to me that gmail may have sent me a message that was tossed in the spam folder. Hold on... Nope; just one message since I started on App Inventor, and it was from me offering "VIAGRA cheap".)
Funny TFA should use bad math as its illustration. My first thought from the title was of my high school math teacher in 9th grade. When I decided to read the entire (algebra) text the first month, and then ask for more math books, he reacted by telling me I "wasn't ready" and couldn't have the more advanced textbooks.
I thought he thought that I probably didn't understand it, so I started talking about some of the more advanced stuff in the book. It soon became obvious that he was the one who didn't understand all of it, and my asking for more advanced texts was a threat to his position of authority. So he wasn't just bad; he was acting as an active barrier to my education.
It didn't work, though. I had some friends at a nearby college who were happy to check books out of their library and loan them to me. So by the end of the year, I'd absorbed several geometry & trig books, plus first and second year calculus.
Yeah, I suppose one could argue that he was "good" for me. He got the idea across to me that the educational system could and would act as a barrier to education in topics that didn't fit its hierarchy or schedule. So if I really wanted to learn about something, I should ignore the educational system and simply tackle it myself.
But I'd counter this with the observation that he wasn't nearly the first so-called teacher who taught me this lesson. It had already happened any number of times, and sometimes I wasn't able to get access to the texts that I wanted. One of my memories was a 6th-grade teacher who, when she realized that I knew everything she was supposed to teach, quietly let me sit at a desk in the back, ignore the class, and read whatever books I'd been able to get. But she was a rare exception. He was the norm, in my experience. And I'd argue that, while one or two such "bad" teachers might teach a useful lesson, it's not useful for most of the teachers to be like this, and the helpful ones so rare that I can count them on the fingers of one hand.
So I'd say that, contrary to the approach of TFA, the bad teachers should be limited to a very small number. If this were done, it would be a major improvement.
Anybody else find this just a little bit ironic, given the OP?
Well, I've wondered about that. Does this copyright notice mean that if I write something that uses those words according to the Houghton Mifflin definitions, I'm in violation of the copyright?
Doesn't extortion require some sort of demand for payment?
Apparently not. If you scan through this discussion for the word "extortion", you'll find that very few of them mention any such demand. They (and most people in corporate management positions) treat "Fix this or I'll tell the public" as extortion, even when there is no request for any sort of payment.
The common and media meanings of words are often very different from the legal or technical definitions.
Noone sane "demands" anything else when reporting security flaws.
Indeed. In fact, when you tell a company that they have N days to fix the problem or you'll release it, the usual reaction is to treat your "demand" as extortion.
The only way to avoid getting a reputation as a money-grubbing extortionist is to not make demands. When you find a problem, you simply release it in the appropriate forums. You're better off if you don't even tell the company responsible, because they'll publicly label you a "hacker" and extortionist.
Don't let them treat you this way. Just release the info to the public. That way, it'll probably get fixed soon. Any other way, the company just delays action, and does their best to damage your reputation.
It'd be nice to have a list of companies that don't treat knowledgeable people like this. But I haven't seen such a list. And I suppose even if there were one, entries would become obsolete fairly quickly, so it'd be a PITA to maintain.
... if you're in a field that requires a professional license, that board can and will ask for arrests. Failure to disclose can be grounds for denial. The same is true of security clearances - an arrest in which charges are dropped probably won't be an issue, but failing to tell them about it would be.
It should also be noted that failure to disclose an arrest of someone with a name similar to yours can also be grounds for denial. And, contrary to many PR claims, they generally don't tell you why you were denied. If you insist on knowing, that's a sign of being a troublemaker and anti-authority type, which is also (informal) grounds for denial. If you can't get along with the interviewers, you don't get hired.
For that matter, look at all the reports recently of people stopped by Homeland Security because their name is similar to a name on a list. This isn't exactly a new story, either; it's an old failing of every security setup that uses "name files".
There are many reasons why, even if you're honest and innocent and all that, you still have many reasons to worry.
... the top 10 feet (3 meters) of the ocean contains as much heat energy as the entire atmosphere. The average depth of the oceans is over 10,000 feet. That gives some perspective on how much of a heat sink/buffer the oceans are...
True, and a more relevant number is probably the one mentioned by the article just before yours: the ocean's so-called "upper mixing layer" that is roughly 30 m thick on average. The article comments that the water below that generally mixes with the top layer on times scales that are long compared with a human lifetime. The article's estimate is that the 30 m mixing layer has roughly 10 times the heat capacity of the troposphere (which is over 80% of the atmosphere's mass), and these two layer are exchanging heat on a reasonably short ( 1 year) time scale.
Measuring the temperature of the top 30 m of the oceans is easier than doing the same for the troposphere, and the water does a lot of averaging for us. As has been pointed out by others, the lower atmosphere has routine temperature changes in the 10-20 degrees C range on a daily time scale. You can see this by watching the thermometer out in your yard. The ocean surface changes much more slowly than this, adding to its value as a good temperature record. (Of course, it's not too handy if you live in Colorado or Bolivia or Chad or Kazakhstan.)
In any case, the ocean depths (below 30 or 50 m) and the stratosphere are not very relevant to the question of climate change. One changes too slowly; the other changes too quickly. The oceans' mixing layer and the lower atmosphere are the best places to get a useful record of global temperatures. But it still requires a bit of math to make the mass of measurements meaningful. It's fairly clear that most people don't understand the math at all.
I'm afraid anymore to walk to the end of the platform and look down the subway tunnels. I'm afraid to take pictures of bridges. I'm afraid to be just plain curious, because it's apparently abnormal and suspicous. It's getting ridiculous. And it's going to come back and bite us in the butt.
It might be better if it did something painful like that.
The real problem is that, in reality, the effect will more likely be a subtle, painless dampening of the willingness of the next generation to be openly curious.
Curiosity and the willingness to investigate things we don't understand is the basis of the advanced science and technology that has made the American economy the powerhouse it is. Damping down that curiosity will decrease the "R&D" talents of the next generation.
We're already seeing a lot of this, in the "productivity" part of the economy. While Americans still dominate the world in basic science and experimental engineering, the results are now mostly turned into products in other parts of the world. Our young people aren't going into industrial development much any more, because our industries don't "need" (i.e., want) a lot of people doing that sort of risky task.
We can look forward to this process extending all the way to basic research, and we'll slowly become a second- and then a third-world economy.
Or, alternatively, we can openly discuss stupid things like this story, publicly ridicule the people responsible, and try to get across the idea that we want our kids experimenting.
So keep the stories coming. We need them made public, so we can see the problem and work on fighting the dummies responsible for it.
(And why is the input textarea in this window only about 20 chars wide no matter how wide I make the window? Is there something I can do to make it revert to full window width?
yes, corporations and authoritarianism threaten your freedoms. the only question is: what the fuck are YOU going to do about it?
Well, personally, I intend to continue doing what I (and a few thousand others, many of whom are friends of mine) have been doing: I'll continue to find ways to develop the Net into something that, as John Gilmore so elegantly put it, treats censorship as packet damage and routes around it. This approach can be (and has been) done at all levels of the hardware and software stack. Identify the damage, and find alternate ways of getting the data through. Don't worry about whether the contents are "good" or "bad"; that's for the endpoints in the exchange to decide. As a developer of the Net's components, our job has been to just Get The Data Through.
It was understood from the start that a lot of damaged or lost data packets are because of hostile action. Dealing with enemy action was an important part of [D]ARPA's original requirements for the ARPAnet. Remember that it was built mostly with military funding. The idea was to build a comm system that would Get The Data Through despite efforts of assorted enemies to block it. Those enemies were understood to be government agencies, typically of a different government. But the developers didn't spend too much time on such mundane details. It was understood that there were assorted forces, natural and man-made, that would attempt to block or destroy data in transit. Lightning, bombs and court orders can target your routers or antennas. It was the job of the developers to find (partial) solutions to this general problem and Get The Data Through.
Actually, it probably helped a lot that the developers didn't concentrate on any particular kind of "enemy". If they had done so, the result would probably be a lot less robust than what we have now.
There was one major part of the original design that hasn't been well implemented, and it's a source of a lot of our current problems: The ARPA/Internet was supposed to be multiply interconnected as much as possible. The more alternate routes there are, the more likely it is that the system can find good paths. Multiple paths means that you can route around congestion, and give faster results even during busy times. And multiple paths means that the enemy trying to block your data has a much more difficult job, since the software can find alternate paths and route around the blocking.
But this is an implementation detail. The important thing is that developers continue to work on solving the general problem of "Get The Data Through". Congestion, blown fuses, storm damage, and political censorship are all special cases of the general problem that we're trying to solve.
The best approach is to just continue working on this problem. Any tools we have to solve it will help solve the censorship problem as a side effect.
In the long run, China's attempts to limit their population's access to information will mostly hurt their own economy. To be part of the future world, China needs strong network connectivity to the whole world. The better that connectivity is, the more difficult it will be for them to block their citizens' access to information of any sort. This isn't because of explicit attempts to block censorship; it's because a good network is so interconnected that the software can always find a good way to Get The Data Through.
Actually, the usefulness of mathematics in the sciences has a straightforward explanation that most scientists tacitly accept. It is based on the fact that mathematics is, at its heart, a study of the various kinds of logic that are possible, and how systems that follow specific rules of logic must behave. The fact that the results of this study of logic turn out to describe the "real" physical universe is evidence that the physical universe does in fact obey logical rules; its behavior isn't fundamentally "random" or illogical. We might call this the "Logical Universe Theory".
This sort of metatheory is (so far) beyond our ability to test. But the current acceptance of the Logical Universe Theory follows from the obvious fact that scientists have been essentially testing the theory with every study that's ever been done. When tests turn out consistent with a theory, and none refute it, we consider that grounds for (tentatively) accepting the theory as valid. If our universe didn't follow some logic, scientific methods simply wouldn't work, and scientific specialties would be unable to come up with theories that explain their subject matter.
This doesn't actually tell us much about what our universe's logic actually is, of course. Both Relativity and Quantum theory required (and still require) a good amount of "mind stretching" on the part of people trying to learn them. Both predict results that are contrary to the intuition of most people, despite the way that those predictions turn out to be true. The universe's "logic" has turned out to be rather different in many respects than the naive logic that people pick up in their childhood.
Mathematicians have had similar mind-stretching experiences. Consider the centuries of attempts to prove Euclid's parallel postulate. Then, in the 1800s, it was shown that it couldn't be proved (in the sense that people meant), because there were consistent geometries that included all of Euclid's other postulates but replaced the parallel postulate with something different and inconsistent. Some of these were subspaces of a Euclidean space, so if they were inconsistent, then so was the Euclidean space, and vice-versa. Today, this is part of (some) high-school geometry courses, but a few hundred years ago it was a wild idea not accepted by many mathematicians. This turns out to be useful to modern physicists, since it appears that our universe isn't (quite) Euclidean.
Of course, the real mind-stretching event in modern mathematics was Kurt Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem. That is now understood and accepted by most mathematicians, but so far it has made little if any real impact on the sciences. There is a conjecture that it might turn out important to understanding the universe, but this conjecture could be wrong...
to infiltrate the upper echelons of US government and business circles and pass back intelligence to the Russians
If they're looking for intelligence, the past couple of decades of US government and business decisions should be enough to convince anyone with a few ounces of brain that that's not the place to look for it.
The more we learn about physics, the more 'pure' our models will get, and the closer we get to stand to those elitist mathematicians. 8)
Yeah, but you'll never even get close to closing the gap. Physicists have a constraint that mathematicians are immune to: To qualify as "physics", your model must be tested against physical reality. Mathematics can be (and very often is) independent of any so-called "reality". A mathematical model can be shown valid even if it is shown not to model anything in our universe. In general, physical reality is irrelevant to mathematicians, and they aren't shy about stating this.
One of the ongoing mysteries in mathematics is how often mathematical systems turn out to be applicable to various fields of science. This is sometimes a bit of an embarrassment to mathematicians, who often pride themselves on their refusal to even consider the real world. The ongoing usefulness of obscure branches of mathematics to scientists hasn't been satisfactorily explained, to my knowledge (though there are a number of interesting conjectures).
Once again we see an instance of Dave Barry's observation that in modern English spelling, an apostrophe is used to alert the reader that an "s" is coming up at the end of the word.;-)
There's no way a sane person would allow patenting of 50 year old business practices.
The changes in the patent laws that allow this weren't made by sane people. This was done by lawyers who were elected to Congress with campaign funding paid for by many the corporations who are now filing such patents.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm ... A bit of checking shows it attributed to both of them, and to a few other people. They probably all stole it from someone earlier, whose name we don't know.
Meanwhile, I was reminded about another Mark Twain comment that is a pretty good summary of politics: "Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it." The US's past few presidents could be used to argue that it's both.
The definition of progressive is really simple, it just isn't anything that you think: progressives believe that society can be improved for all through organized action, including government policy.
Liberals are people who value personal liberty, the rights and well being of the individual person.
Conservatives are people who place importance on laws, tradition and hard learned lessons.
Hey, you're about 50 years too late with those dictionary definitions. ;-)
We're talking American politics here, where all the labels have been totally redefined by all the factions, and you can't tell what anyone means by a political label unless you know which faction they belong to.
However, none of them use the old dictionary definitions.
For example, most of the American politicians who self-identify as "conservative" are actually (in the dictionary sense) radical reformers who want to "go back" to an authoritarian religious state that hasn't existed in the USA since it was founded.
Similarly for all the other political labels, whose meanings can't be learned by consulting any dictionary.
It also presumes the sensors collected the data correctly.
With the growing computerization of autos, this is a growing problem.
I've worked with computers for a few decades now, and I've seen more cases than I can count where the software "sees" input different from what I gave it. One incidence was just yesterday. It may have had something to do with the high humidity here in new England, where we're having a few days of thunderstorms. Anyway, I went to use my cell phone (which model I won't say so you'll suspect it's the same as yours ;-), and the first couple of digits were ignored. They were all in the right column, so I typed a couple of 1's -- and the little display showed 3's. A bit more testing showed that all the on-screen "buttons" in the left column registered as their value + 2, i.e., the number in the right column. Buttons in colums 2 and 3 didn't register at all.
I took the phone inside, where the humidity was significantly lower, sat the phone down for 15 or 20 minutes, and tried it again -- and it worked fine. Later, when I took it outside, it also seemed to work. It's humid again today, and the phone works fine. So I don't actually know it was a humidity problem; that just seems the most likely explanation. In any case, it was a clear example of the computerized gadget consistently reporting a different button than the one I'd touched. The left and right columns are far enough apart that it couldn't be due to a "fat finger problem". I could easily see what part of the screen I touched, and there was a clear gap between the reported key and finger tip.
In general, reported activation of computerized sensing devices shouldn't be trusted, unless you have multiple reports from physically different sensor mechanisms that all agree. I'd bet that the data recorders in those Toyotas use exactly the same sensory hardware for the brake and throttle pedals, and only have a single sensor for each. If I were asked in a courtroom what this meant for accuracy of the record, I'd have to testify that it makes the record totally useless.
If 1 in 100,000 people cannot properly operate a device, it might be fair to conclude that the problem is with the people.
Alternatively, if 1 in 100,000 people cannot properly operate a device, but there is no apparent similar failure rate with other manufacturers' similar devices, it might be fair to conclude that there's a subtle problem with that one brand's UI. If the device weighs a ton or more, travels at high speed through inhabited areas, and is a physical danger to people in the vicinity, it might also be fair to say that its sale should be restricted to people who have demonstrated an ability to control it; people who haven't passed those tests would have to buy from other vendors with more user-friendly controls that they can operate properly.
Think Toyota would go along with restricting their sales to non-dummies who can tell their left foot from their right? ;-)
The GOP are better at it, though, because they understand organization.
Yeah, it's like that comment by Mark Twain, that he was a member of no organized political party. In other words, he was a Democrat.
Actually, you could do a test.
As pointed out in the xkcd discussion, the real homeopathy interpretation is a bit more complex. It's related to a biological mystery: Why don't female mammals react to a pregnancy as an infection by a small parasite? The fetus is genetically different from the mother, so her immune system should recognize it and try to kill it.
If you (correctly;-) consider a pregnancy as a kind of parasitic infection, the homeopathic theory would predict that a semen dilution would "cure" it, i.e., would trigger an abortion. So you are in an ideal position to test this. Make a dilute semen sample, and inject it. If this doesn't produce an abortion, publish it as evidence against homeopathy.
For some reason, nobody seems to have tested this yet. If it works, you could become famous (though it would be at the cost of a lost child).
You'd think that there would be a lot of geeks and other scientifically included who would like to test this. I wonder why they haven't done so yet?
... he's just an entertainer like any other news or talk media figure.
Then there's the case of Jon Stewart, who keeps reminding people that he's a professional comedian, and still so many people treat him as a serious journalist. The same thing happens repeatedly to his other people. No matter that they identify themselves as being from Comedy Central, their interviewees still often take them seriously.
It's all part of why the folks who do satire and parody keep saying how difficult their job is, especially when Real World people keep doing things that are even crazier than anything they'd dare write as comedy.
I've actually seen both mechanisms suggested - that crossing the plane is somewhat more disruptive than average, or that it's the change in motion at the end of each cycle which causes the Oort Cloud to be disrupted.
It'd be interesting to read about a mechanism that would cause the solar system to feel a change in motion at the peak of the oscillation through the galactic plane. That's pretty much a sinusoidal motion, and there's no change of motion at an orbital peak. The orbit looks like a long, straight, horizontal line to the orbiting thing. Similarly, the Earth's orbit around the sun is slightly eliptical, and the Earth feels no change of motion at the point where it's most distant from the sun (which happens to be in late December, a few days away from the solstice, in this epoch).
There couldn't be anything with mass sitting and waiting for us at the peaks of the solar system's oscillations, which are roughly 200 ly above/below the plane. (Some estimates say 230 ly, but that probably still has a large error bar.) An object in a fixed position there wouldn't be a stable orbit, because it would feel a slight pull from the galaxy's mass, which would all be slightly off to one side of the position. The only way there could be something consistently 200 ly above/below the galactic plane when the solar system reaches a peak position would be if something in the galaxy were specifically aware of our solar system and were firing off projectiles to reach our extreme orbital points at the same time we did. This seems unlikely. Granted, there could be stuff there, but in general, it would be thinner than where we are right now, and would be a couple of orders of magnitude thinner than the mean density of the galactic plane.
Of course, wandering rocks are found everywhere in (and around) the galaxy. But the farther you get from the galactic plane, the less likely you are to encounter them. Unless you're in the trails left by the Magellanic Clouds, but our orbit takes us nowhere near that stream of litter.
The real danger would be passing through the galactic plane in the middle of a spiral arm. But the solar system's orbit seems to be such that this hasn't happened for at least a couple of billion years.
That's probably correct, in the sense that almost everything in the galaxy does some "bobbing". It would be unusual for any massive object to orbit exactly in the galactic plane, and even then, a distant encounter with another massive object (such as a star only a light year away) would add a vertical component to the orbit. Galactic mechanics are rather chaotic over periods of millions of years.
OTOH, even at its densest, the galactic plane is still pretty low density. The mean density is below one atom per cubic cm (and the Local Bubble is roughly 10 times thinner than that).
But each time we pass through the galactic plane at roughly 30-million-year intervals, there's a small chance that we'll meet a much denser cloud, and perhaps even a lot of rocks.
The sun doesn't just orbit the center of the galaxy, though. It also moves up and down relative to the galactic plane. Some have suggested that whenever the solar system reverses direction in that oscillation, very bad things happen, ...
That's close to a conventional explanation, but off by 1/4 cycle. The extreme high/low points of the solar system's bobbing orbit are outside the galactic plane, and would be the low-danger points. The rough parts of the (approx. 60 million year) cycle are the two crossings through the central part of the galactic plane, which are the densest portions. During the crossings, the solar system is zipping through the galactic plane at a few hundred km/s, producing lots of collisions with whatever rubble happens to be there.
Part of the explanation from the astronomers who've done the studies is that, although we're about in the middle of the galactic plane right now, we're actually in a "Local Bubble" about 300 light years across, so there's not much galactic rubble in the solar system right now. There are low-density bubbles like this scattered around, the results of things like supernova explosions in the distant past.
Stick around for another million years or so, and we'll exit the local bubble. There might be some nice fireworks then, and perhaps another mass extinction.
Of course, we are going through a mass extinction event right now, but it's an unusual one with a known causative agent that's not astronomical. It seems that a new top-level predator has recently evolved, which has been devastating the ecosystem all over the planet. This will probably confuse the paleontologists in the future, since they'll see a mass extinction during a crossing of the galactic plane, but won't see any evidence at all of the impact that presumably caused it. They'll also see the evidence of a species with high intelligence, but of course that couldn't be the cause, because you wouldn't expect a highly-intelligent species to destroy its own ecosystem, right? So the extinction event will remain a mystery.
It sounded like fun, so I tried stepping through google's instructions. I was a bit surprised when their Getting Started page said "Whether you are using a Mac or a PC, a Nexus One or a MyTouch, this section will tell you everything you need to know to get App Inventor set up on your computer and phone." This seems to exclude my linux box, which seemed odd. Oh, well, I grabbed my Macbook Pro and tried following the instructions there.
After a bit of stumbling around, appinventor said it's installed. So I connected my G1 to the Mac, and it said it was connected via USB and in debug mode. So I clicked on the link to http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/ which shows me an App Inventor window that should appear. It doesn't. I do get a page that says App Inventor, asking me to log in with my google account. I do that, and get another App Inventor page asking for some information (including the email address that I just logged in with ;-). I fill in that information, hit the Submit button, get yet another App Inventor page saying "Thank you. Your information has been sent to the App Inventor team." There are no links on this page.
That's apparently the end of the install tree. I've tried a few different paths through the maze of links, and they all lead to the same dead end. I expected some feedback through a gmail message, but after several hours, no messages from google have appeared there.
So how have others tested App Inventor? Have you got it working? I'm obviously missing something, but I can't see what. Maybe it's a test to see whether I can spot something that I'm failing to spot ...
(Hmmm ... It occurs to me that gmail may have sent me a message that was tossed in the spam folder. Hold on ... Nope; just one message since I started on App Inventor, and it was from me offering "VIAGRA cheap".)
Funny TFA should use bad math as its illustration. My first thought from the title was of my high school math teacher in 9th grade. When I decided to read the entire (algebra) text the first month, and then ask for more math books, he reacted by telling me I "wasn't ready" and couldn't have the more advanced textbooks.
I thought he thought that I probably didn't understand it, so I started talking about some of the more advanced stuff in the book. It soon became obvious that he was the one who didn't understand all of it, and my asking for more advanced texts was a threat to his position of authority. So he wasn't just bad; he was acting as an active barrier to my education.
It didn't work, though. I had some friends at a nearby college who were happy to check books out of their library and loan them to me. So by the end of the year, I'd absorbed several geometry & trig books, plus first and second year calculus.
Yeah, I suppose one could argue that he was "good" for me. He got the idea across to me that the educational system could and would act as a barrier to education in topics that didn't fit its hierarchy or schedule. So if I really wanted to learn about something, I should ignore the educational system and simply tackle it myself.
But I'd counter this with the observation that he wasn't nearly the first so-called teacher who taught me this lesson. It had already happened any number of times, and sometimes I wasn't able to get access to the texts that I wanted. One of my memories was a 6th-grade teacher who, when she realized that I knew everything she was supposed to teach, quietly let me sit at a desk in the back, ignore the class, and read whatever books I'd been able to get. But she was a rare exception. He was the norm, in my experience. And I'd argue that, while one or two such "bad" teachers might teach a useful lesson, it's not useful for most of the teachers to be like this, and the helpful ones so rare that I can count them on the fingers of one hand.
So I'd say that, contrary to the approach of TFA, the bad teachers should be limited to a very small number. If this were done, it would be a major improvement.
Commas, will be misplaced.
Don't use commas, which aren't necessary.
Well, I've wondered about that. Does this copyright notice mean that if I write something that uses those words according to the Houghton Mifflin definitions, I'm in violation of the copyright?
Doesn't extortion require some sort of demand for payment?
Apparently not. If you scan through this discussion for the word "extortion", you'll find that very few of them mention any such demand. They (and most people in corporate management positions) treat "Fix this or I'll tell the public" as extortion, even when there is no request for any sort of payment.
The common and media meanings of words are often very different from the legal or technical definitions.
Noone sane "demands" anything else when reporting security flaws.
Indeed. In fact, when you tell a company that they have N days to fix the problem or you'll release it, the usual reaction is to treat your "demand" as extortion.
The only way to avoid getting a reputation as a money-grubbing extortionist is to not make demands. When you find a problem, you simply release it in the appropriate forums. You're better off if you don't even tell the company responsible, because they'll publicly label you a "hacker" and extortionist.
Don't let them treat you this way. Just release the info to the public. That way, it'll probably get fixed soon. Any other way, the company just delays action, and does their best to damage your reputation.
It'd be nice to have a list of companies that don't treat knowledgeable people like this. But I haven't seen such a list. And I suppose even if there were one, entries would become obsolete fairly quickly, so it'd be a PITA to maintain.
... if you're in a field that requires a professional license, that board can and will ask for arrests. Failure to disclose can be grounds for denial. The same is true of security clearances - an arrest in which charges are dropped probably won't be an issue, but failing to tell them about it would be.
It should also be noted that failure to disclose an arrest of someone with a name similar to yours can also be grounds for denial. And, contrary to many PR claims, they generally don't tell you why you were denied. If you insist on knowing, that's a sign of being a troublemaker and anti-authority type, which is also (informal) grounds for denial. If you can't get along with the interviewers, you don't get hired.
For that matter, look at all the reports recently of people stopped by Homeland Security because their name is similar to a name on a list. This isn't exactly a new story, either; it's an old failing of every security setup that uses "name files".
There are many reasons why, even if you're honest and innocent and all that, you still have many reasons to worry.
... the top 10 feet (3 meters) of the ocean contains as much heat energy as the entire atmosphere. The average depth of the oceans is over 10,000 feet. That gives some perspective on how much of a heat sink/buffer the oceans are ...
True, and a more relevant number is probably the one mentioned by the article just before yours: the ocean's so-called "upper mixing layer" that is roughly 30 m thick on average. The article comments that the water below that generally mixes with the top layer on times scales that are long compared with a human lifetime. The article's estimate is that the 30 m mixing layer has roughly 10 times the heat capacity of the troposphere (which is over 80% of the atmosphere's mass), and these two layer are exchanging heat on a reasonably short ( 1 year) time scale.
Measuring the temperature of the top 30 m of the oceans is easier than doing the same for the troposphere, and the water does a lot of averaging for us. As has been pointed out by others, the lower atmosphere has routine temperature changes in the 10-20 degrees C range on a daily time scale. You can see this by watching the thermometer out in your yard. The ocean surface changes much more slowly than this, adding to its value as a good temperature record. (Of course, it's not too handy if you live in Colorado or Bolivia or Chad or Kazakhstan.)
In any case, the ocean depths (below 30 or 50 m) and the stratosphere are not very relevant to the question of climate change. One changes too slowly; the other changes too quickly. The oceans' mixing layer and the lower atmosphere are the best places to get a useful record of global temperatures. But it still requires a bit of math to make the mass of measurements meaningful. It's fairly clear that most people don't understand the math at all.
I'm afraid anymore to walk to the end of the platform and look down the subway tunnels. I'm afraid to take pictures of bridges. I'm afraid to be just plain curious, because it's apparently abnormal and suspicous. It's getting ridiculous. And it's going to come back and bite us in the butt.
It might be better if it did something painful like that.
The real problem is that, in reality, the effect will more likely be a subtle, painless dampening of the willingness of the next generation to be openly curious.
Curiosity and the willingness to investigate things we don't understand is the basis of the advanced science and technology that has made the American economy the powerhouse it is. Damping down that curiosity will decrease the "R&D" talents of the next generation.
We're already seeing a lot of this, in the "productivity" part of the economy. While Americans still dominate the world in basic science and experimental engineering, the results are now mostly turned into products in other parts of the world. Our young people aren't going into industrial development much any more, because our industries don't "need" (i.e., want) a lot of people doing that sort of risky task.
We can look forward to this process extending all the way to basic research, and we'll slowly become a second- and then a third-world economy.
Or, alternatively, we can openly discuss stupid things like this story, publicly ridicule the people responsible, and try to get across the idea that we want our kids experimenting.
So keep the stories coming. We need them made public, so we can see the problem and work on fighting the dummies responsible for it.
(And why is the input textarea in this window only about 20 chars wide no matter how wide I make the window? Is there something I can do to make it revert to full window width?
yes, corporations and authoritarianism threaten your freedoms. the only question is: what the fuck are YOU going to do about it?
Well, personally, I intend to continue doing what I (and a few thousand others, many of whom are friends of mine) have been doing: I'll continue to find ways to develop the Net into something that, as John Gilmore so elegantly put it, treats censorship as packet damage and routes around it. This approach can be (and has been) done at all levels of the hardware and software stack. Identify the damage, and find alternate ways of getting the data through. Don't worry about whether the contents are "good" or "bad"; that's for the endpoints in the exchange to decide. As a developer of the Net's components, our job has been to just Get The Data Through.
It was understood from the start that a lot of damaged or lost data packets are because of hostile action. Dealing with enemy action was an important part of [D]ARPA's original requirements for the ARPAnet. Remember that it was built mostly with military funding. The idea was to build a comm system that would Get The Data Through despite efforts of assorted enemies to block it. Those enemies were understood to be government agencies, typically of a different government. But the developers didn't spend too much time on such mundane details. It was understood that there were assorted forces, natural and man-made, that would attempt to block or destroy data in transit. Lightning, bombs and court orders can target your routers or antennas. It was the job of the developers to find (partial) solutions to this general problem and Get The Data Through.
Actually, it probably helped a lot that the developers didn't concentrate on any particular kind of "enemy". If they had done so, the result would probably be a lot less robust than what we have now.
There was one major part of the original design that hasn't been well implemented, and it's a source of a lot of our current problems: The ARPA/Internet was supposed to be multiply interconnected as much as possible. The more alternate routes there are, the more likely it is that the system can find good paths. Multiple paths means that you can route around congestion, and give faster results even during busy times. And multiple paths means that the enemy trying to block your data has a much more difficult job, since the software can find alternate paths and route around the blocking.
But this is an implementation detail. The important thing is that developers continue to work on solving the general problem of "Get The Data Through". Congestion, blown fuses, storm damage, and political censorship are all special cases of the general problem that we're trying to solve.
The best approach is to just continue working on this problem. Any tools we have to solve it will help solve the censorship problem as a side effect.
In the long run, China's attempts to limit their population's access to information will mostly hurt their own economy. To be part of the future world, China needs strong network connectivity to the whole world. The better that connectivity is, the more difficult it will be for them to block their citizens' access to information of any sort. This isn't because of explicit attempts to block censorship; it's because a good network is so interconnected that the software can always find a good way to Get The Data Through.
Actually, the usefulness of mathematics in the sciences has a straightforward explanation that most scientists tacitly accept. It is based on the fact that mathematics is, at its heart, a study of the various kinds of logic that are possible, and how systems that follow specific rules of logic must behave. The fact that the results of this study of logic turn out to describe the "real" physical universe is evidence that the physical universe does in fact obey logical rules; its behavior isn't fundamentally "random" or illogical. We might call this the "Logical Universe Theory".
This sort of metatheory is (so far) beyond our ability to test. But the current acceptance of the Logical Universe Theory follows from the obvious fact that scientists have been essentially testing the theory with every study that's ever been done. When tests turn out consistent with a theory, and none refute it, we consider that grounds for (tentatively) accepting the theory as valid. If our universe didn't follow some logic, scientific methods simply wouldn't work, and scientific specialties would be unable to come up with theories that explain their subject matter.
This doesn't actually tell us much about what our universe's logic actually is, of course. Both Relativity and Quantum theory required (and still require) a good amount of "mind stretching" on the part of people trying to learn them. Both predict results that are contrary to the intuition of most people, despite the way that those predictions turn out to be true. The universe's "logic" has turned out to be rather different in many respects than the naive logic that people pick up in their childhood.
Mathematicians have had similar mind-stretching experiences. Consider the centuries of attempts to prove Euclid's parallel postulate. Then, in the 1800s, it was shown that it couldn't be proved (in the sense that people meant), because there were consistent geometries that included all of Euclid's other postulates but replaced the parallel postulate with something different and inconsistent. Some of these were subspaces of a Euclidean space, so if they were inconsistent, then so was the Euclidean space, and vice-versa. Today, this is part of (some) high-school geometry courses, but a few hundred years ago it was a wild idea not accepted by many mathematicians. This turns out to be useful to modern physicists, since it appears that our universe isn't (quite) Euclidean.
Of course, the real mind-stretching event in modern mathematics was Kurt Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem. That is now understood and accepted by most mathematicians, but so far it has made little if any real impact on the sciences. There is a conjecture that it might turn out important to understanding the universe, but this conjecture could be wrong ...
to infiltrate the upper echelons of US government and business circles and pass back intelligence to the Russians
If they're looking for intelligence, the past couple of decades of US government and business decisions should be enough to convince anyone with a few ounces of brain that that's not the place to look for it.
The more we learn about physics, the more 'pure' our models will get, and the closer we get to stand to those elitist mathematicians. 8)
Yeah, but you'll never even get close to closing the gap. Physicists have a constraint that mathematicians are immune to: To qualify as "physics", your model must be tested against physical reality. Mathematics can be (and very often is) independent of any so-called "reality". A mathematical model can be shown valid even if it is shown not to model anything in our universe. In general, physical reality is irrelevant to mathematicians, and they aren't shy about stating this.
One of the ongoing mysteries in mathematics is how often mathematical systems turn out to be applicable to various fields of science. This is sometimes a bit of an embarrassment to mathematicians, who often pride themselves on their refusal to even consider the real world. The ongoing usefulness of obscure branches of mathematics to scientists hasn't been satisfactorily explained, to my knowledge (though there are a number of interesting conjectures).
is Bezo's offering to pay us ...
Once again we see an instance of Dave Barry's observation that in modern English spelling, an apostrophe is used to alert the reader that an "s" is coming up at the end of the word. ;-)
There's no way a sane person would allow patenting of 50 year old business practices.
The changes in the patent laws that allow this weren't made by sane people. This was done by lawyers who were elected to Congress with campaign funding paid for by many the corporations who are now filing such patents.