Well, is it helpful to know that the amount of energy needed to run this in sleep mode or thirty years is sufficient to raise a one pound weight by about 2 1/4 inches, or roughly 5.6cm?
When Britain really ruled the waves, In good Queen Bess's day, The House of Lords made no pretense, to intellectual eminence, or scholarship sublime. Yet Britan won its proudes bays, in good Queen Bess's days.
When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte, as every child can tell, the House of Lords throughout the war, did nothing in par-tic-ular. Yet Britain set the world ablaze, in Good King George's glorious days.
And while the House of Peers withholds, its legislative hand, And noble statement do not itch, to interfere in matters which, They do not understand, As bright will shine Great Britains rays, as in King George's glorious days!
Actually, the House of Lords is not such a bad idea, except for the heredity thing. For one thing, it's the only way somebody who's not in the idle rich to participate in politics. It's the elected bodies around the world that are bastions of elitism these days, except it's economic elitism.
Now, a House of Lords that was selected by an open lottery, rather than a hereditary one, would be an interesting idea. Maybe you'd require some level of educational attainment, say make it open to anybody with an advanced degree.
American XO: here he comes. American CO: wait for it...
[Chinese sub pops to the surface]
American CO (over radio): Lordy! Where do you come from? Chinese CO: Where did you come from? I hope I am not interrupting anything? American CO: Oh, nothing important. You sure surprised me, popping up out of nowhere like that! Chinese CO: Did I? Please excuse me! We had no idea anybody was up here. We're having a little trouble with our engines! American CO: Do you need help? Chinese CO: Any chance you could give us a jump?
[American XO and CO exchange looks]
American CO: Uh, sure, can you take 440 volts? Chinese CO: One moment, I check with engineer...
[sounds of argument in Chinese]
Chinese CO: So sorry. My Engineer says 440 volt no work! American XO: That's not right, they should have... American CO (cutting in): Uh, don't you have an operators manual or something? Chinese CO: Engineer says cook used pages to wrap leftovers. No problem, I fix
[sound of large spanner being whacked against steel hull of sub]
Chinese CO: Hah! Now engines go! American CO: That's very amazing! You fixed your boat by whacking the hull with a spanner? Chinese CO: Oh, yes, you know us primitive Chinamen. Our boats are junk! Get it? Junk! Ha ha! American XO and CO: Ha ha! Chinese CO: Well engine make go now, so we leave. We be lucky to make back to Hainan without sinking. American CO: I'll be lucky to make it back to Honolulu without having a heart attack. You took ten years off my life, popping out of nowhere like that! I honestly had no idea there was anybody else in the area. Chinese CO: Sorry! We not know you here, really. You know Chinaman navigation equipment! No good! We go in straight line until bump into something! American CO: Sorry to hear that. I hope you stay clear of us, we run into things all the time, since I dropped my sextant. Chinese CO: Me too, since lousy Chinese boat leak on my chronometer! I go now! Bye! American CO: Bye!
[Chinese sub submerges]
American CO (under breath): Asshole. Chinese CO (under breath): Asshole.
Well, there's two elements to the use of fabric here. The first is the use of a fabric over a frame to produce the skin, the second is the use of a flexible skin over a moving frame to allow the care to redesign its shape.
Personally, I think the latter is the gee-whiz part, but the former is more fundamentally interesting. If you don't need the fabric to be flexible, you can choose to make it out of something like lightweight ballistic cloth.
Another possibility would be to stretch the kind of polyethylene sheeting used to protected boats in winter storage over a basketwork of metal tubing and kevlar fibers. Although this could be easily damaged, it could be patched in seconds with duct tape, and permanently repaired in a few minutes with fresh sheeting and a heat gun.
This would work great to provide a light weight, weatherproof shell for a small, personal electric vehicle.
Notice there's no Wiccan award. That's because Wiccans are banned because they don't believe in a single creator God, even though the same can be said for Buddhists, who aren't banned.
The difference is that they don't like the Wiccans.
It's like a lot of organizations: the higher up in the organization you go, the worse it gets.
All the good done in scouting is done locally, by unpaid volunteers. That is the foundation of scouting movement. The basic unit of scouting is the patrol, then the troop. Then you have the council, which is the first level with professional staff.
The council is much less important than the troop. It's also the highest level of scouting that does anything useful for the scouting movement. Who are the people who run the national organization to tell a troop that they can't admit an atheist, or a Wiccan? The troop is the scouting movement. The national organization is there to provide the bureaucratic equivalent of janitorial services.
These people aren't the second coming of Baden Powell. They don't even believe in or use his system, they just use his name to promote their sectarian agenda. They don't serve the movement, they use it for their political ends. In a nutshell, they're parasites that take resources away from the movement and create problems for it by working a cross purposes. If you kicked everyone out of the movement who doesn't buy into the national organization's evangelical agenda, it'd be a tiny fraction of what it is.
Visual Studio is what killed the tools market, what was left was vendors snatching for crumbs in niches or scrambling to erect barriers against Microsoft, which had a beachead to everywhere with their desktop monopoly. You just couldn't compete with Microsoft selling tools to target Microsoft platforms.
While I think open source is progress, it's not the benevolent hand of Historic Destiny at work. It's necessity mothering invention, or in this case, re-invention.
Commercial embrace of open source is a reaction to the inability to compete against an entrenched monopoly. In order to survive, you choose a business model which doesn't require you to sell anything in a product class that Microsoft "owns". If you remember the dark days before the dot com boom got rolling, there was real sense of gloom among software entrepreneurs. There was a sense that it was almost not worth trying, because if you had a good idea MS would grab it and squash your product.
Then came the dot com boom, and suddenly the land rush was on, and nobody wanted to pay rent to a landlord. It was like the olden days when software was given away with hardware: the software had to be there, but it wasn't where the profit was. The software license bonanza had been bust for years, dead by the hand of its greatest beneficiary.
Open source is good for programmers and good for customers, and it is a fact of life for vendors.So much of the software business revolves around whether you drink the MS kool-aid or not. The anticipated but not quite here mobile boom in the post dot com era was wishful thinking -- to create an end run around MS by going straight from server to phone or PDA. It might still happen.
I'm talking about a storm with sustained winds of 175 mph winds, the third most powerful storm ever to make landfall in the US, and the fifth largest in the Atlantic since records have been kept.
I'd call that "something special".
In the whole of the prior century, only three category five hurricanes made landfall in the US. I would't call that "routine".
However, note that I did not claim that Katrina was "caused" by climate change.
Giving people who forgot their IDs a pat down serves a purpose: it lets people travel after they had their IDs lost or stolen. It benefits any travel who might have his wallet stolen while he is on a trip.
Giving people who refuse to supply their IDs a pat down serves a different kind of purpose. It serves the desire of the individual passenger to feel free of scrutiny. That only benefits passengers who have that need. So logically, the cost of providing this service should be borne by those passengers alone.
In any case, the focus on IDs is silly. They don't need your drivers license to track you. So by insisting on NOT showing your ID, you are engaging in your own kind of security theater.
IDs are, of course, a security hole, but one that serves a purpose. It makes it possible to avoid patting down everyone. Since we aren't going to do that anyway, the primary line of defense should be random searches. IDs are secondary; given the current state of ID standardization in the US, they won't foil Al Qaeda, but they might catch a few homegrown Timothy McVeighs.
When an employee of the vendor steals a customers identity, the vendor may well be liable. Usually, you aren't responsible for the misdeeds of others, but when you insist on something that invites crime, it might successfully be argued that you are assuming a responsibility towards the people exposed to harm.
The problem with the "prevent just one" kind of logic is that it's based on the idea that the cost to the vendor is nothing. If you count statistical risk, as you ought, then the cost is not nothing. This kind of thinking is a red flag -- it's not necessarily wrong, but it suggest something is missing from the analysis.
Well, because the economy here is currently shaky. If it were solid, then some people here probably would drive SUVs with $9 gas, but when the future is shaky you think more about how you'll never see the money you're pouring into your tank again.
I think it is also true, though, that Americans aren't as selfish and stupid as we're depicted as being. Much is made of America's rugged individualism, but there is also a streak of communitarianism in the American character. The people who think SUVs are cool vs. the people who think that hybrids are cool. It is the pendulum swinging between these extremes that gives American society its dynamism. Americans on whole sit these two poles, moving towards one of them until it feels like they've gone to far, then going the other way.
2005 was a watershed year. Americans looked at Katrina, and said to themselves, "this isn't working." It isn't just the possible connection of climate change in the intensity of the storm, it was disgust at the inefficiency of the response that made people decide things had gone far enough. It was Katrina that killed the SUV. High prices and economic uncertainty finished it off.
Well, the basic question is so simplistic that it's broken.
There are two big things that have happened over the last two centuries: the speeding of the pace of life, and the democratizing of intellectual pursuits. In simple terms, there are more people who can read now than two centuries ago, but a relatively smaller proportion of readers spend time with long, complex, and challenging books.
For questions where there is a clear answer, if we take the ability to arrive at an accurate answer in the shortest possible time, then humanity is functionally smarter than it has ever been. There has never been a better age in which to ask a question like, "How many bushels are there in a cubic parsec?"
For intellectual pursuits that can't be graded in terms of arriving at a known correct answer in the minimum time, the picture is not so simple. Are composers better than they were in Bach's time? Are writers in the age of the word processor better than those in the age of the typewriter?
The greater and more highly educated population is one factor that confounds the question of whether speed has changed the human mind. Among educated people, it is perhaps less probable that they will exhibit the kinds of analytical skills that come from long struggle with the details of a problem. But there are just more people who are educated. And there has probably never been a better time to undertake the study of complex systems like the economy or the environment, because we have more data on those systems, and the informatics tools needed to explore dynamic behavior.
I would say that human intelligence is being shaped by its challenges and its tools, like it always has. A smaller portion of educated people have a familiarity of Euclid, or a basic functional grasp of Latin, or a detailed knowledge of Shakespeare than at one time, all of which are misfortunes for them. On the other hand, they're more likely to understand things like the differences between European and other cultures (relatively speaking), because that's working knowledge for many more people.
I'm looking at your question, and while it's clearly quite incisive in its scope of relevance, I've come to the conclusion I don't want to bother thinking about how to answer it.
In fact, I am even regretting the time I spent considering whether I should think about answering it.
Well, seeing as the KdF-Wagen was practically a point by point rip off of the Czech Tatra T97, down to the distinctive "beetle" shape, there isn't much reason to associate the design with Hitler. Tatra sued Porsche, and Porsche was going to settle when Hitler stepped in and told him he'd "fix his problem," which he did by invading Czechoslovakia.
VW settled with Tatra in 1961 for 3M DM.
Hitler doesn't really deserve any credit for the Beetle. It's amazing people have given it to him for so many years.
That doesn't make him wrong. Viewed as a parlor game, of course he lost, because he made the tactical mistake of setting the goalposts too close. However, I don't think its reasonable to conclude that academic journals play a useful role if and only if there are fewer than two cases of monetary interests trumping academic ones. Why two? Why not one, or ten?
The problem is that if this is a game, the game is broken.
It should work like this: A proposes an instance where monetary interests did NOT trump academic instances. B then proposes an instance where monetary instances DID trump academic ones. This process repeats in rounds until one or the other runs out of instances. The player at the end of the game who has instances remaining wins. Naturally, this is a very crude game, but not so crude as the "name two" version.
If I disassembled you into your component cells, I could probably select a certain tissue -- let's say skin, and create a cell culture weighing several thousand kilograms.
Does that sound like an attractive proposition?
It's all about information. The quality of your life is not encoded in your biomass -- although your cultured self might disagree, if it had anything to think with.
This reminds me of a course I took in neuroscience in which we learned that after certain kinds of brain trauma, the forms new connections in the affected area. We all felt warm and fuzzy about the Wisdom of Evolution encoded in our DNA, until it was pointed out that the new connections were actually malfunctions. Brain function would be better preserved if the new connections were suppressed, than having it rewired by the local cells, which don't really know what the hell they are doing.
Anthropocentrism has its place. but not in determining what the natural world is up to. You are prefectly free to believe that the highest use of the natural world is the care and feeding of humans, and maximizing their amusements. But the natural world doesn't take any notice of that opinion. All things being equal, we humans prefer an ocean that is richly stocked with finned fish and full of things like coral reefs. However is conditions are bad for fish or reef building organism, Gaia can always fall back on generating algal mats. An ocean choked with algal slime would not be to most of our likings at all, although perhaps to yours because it would probably contain more biomass.
Concepts like "damage" and "disaster" are purely human opinions about matters; brain cells or ocean algae simply do what life does: they adapt. The idea that Nature in Her Wisdom intervenes to protect us from our own actions is rubbish. This is the junk religion part of the Gaia hypothesis, the romantic anthropomorphizing of what is basically a gigantic machine for maximizing entropy. Nature adjusts, and most adjustments are not going to be our liking.
What any single species "likes" is to encounter favorable conditions for growth and reproduction. However, since even the resources of the entire planet are limited, it doesn't get favorable conditions forever. It either overshoots its carrying capacity, or it settles into an equilibrium with other species. Even humans, the most adaptable of species, are no different. The difference is we can understand the consequences of our actions, and therefore we can choose which of these fates we will experience.
A species that can live on everything from African veldt to arctic permafrost, from the Amazonian rain forest to the Tibetan plateau, such a species will never go extinct. At least not so long as the Sun shines, and possibly longer than that. But our species can experience population decline. This is a perfectly normal event in the history of the biosphere, but it will be for us a "disaster".
"Disaster", after all, is just our species' word for something that is perfectly predictable, but only statistically so. Since it is "only statistically probable", we assume it's somebody else's job to deal with it when it happens and put everything back to "normal" afterwards. They can prepare for it if they like, so long as it doesn't cost money or require us to make any effort whatsoever.
If you are conservative, you can choose to be one of two kinds of conservative: one who wants to keep things more or less as they have been, or one who wants to keep doing things more or less the same way we always have. You can't claim that they are both the same thing, not without the intervention of a Benevolent Agency. Things aren't to rosy on that front either, since I seem to recall that Benevolent Agencies are often quite keen on meting out mandatory change on people who aren't so keen on mending their ways.
In a nutshell, Nature doesn't care about us, because it doesn't even know we exist, apart from being an bag of c
Well, what you say may be true, but the decline in the difficulty of math tests can't be used to prove anything one way or the other.
A more difficult test is not a better test -- as a test. The function of a test is to yield information. I can make a test that 99% of graduating seniors will get statistically close to zero on, but it serves no more purpose than a test that 99% will ace.
If I am interested in ranking students by "mathematical ability" (assuming such a thing exists in a way that can be measured precisely), I want a test that maximizes the most likely score difference between any two randomly chosen cadidates. If I am interested in determining the qualifications of students for some particular purpose, then I want the test to have a grade that corresponds as precisely as possible to the divisio between "good enough" and "not good enough". It would make sense that that divisio be on the midpoint of the test grading scale. If I am qualifying students for a variety of purposes, then my design task is trickier, but one thing remains constant: a "tougher" test doesn't mean a better one.
Nor, in education, do you want a "tough" curriculum. "Tough" is just a security blanket for when you don't know what to do. If you designed a curriculum that only 1% of the students could follow, it wouldn't be much, if any more useful than one which 99% of the students found easy. What you want ideally is a curriculum that maximizes the mathematical competence of each student. If that is not possible, then you want one which minimizes the difference between the societal need for certain mathematical skills and the supply of people who can fill that need.
Different societies have different needs. India has a huge middle class, but a massive underclass. India's opportunities were historically limited relative to its total population, so a culture of "teaching to the top" made a grim kind of sense. If you couldn't keep up, it was not much loss to society, because somebody sharper is ready to step on you as they climb the ladder of economic advancement. The United States has had for most of its existece an environment of opportunity for all. It makes sense, therefore, to start by teaching to the middle of the class, and sorting out the tail ends of the distribution with special needs programs ("gifted" is really a different form of "special needs").
Now, I know less about the UK than the US, but in the post WW2 decades the UK economy was far less dynamic than the US. Historically, the UK was probably between the US and India, albeit closer to the US. Therefore it makes sense that its educational system was more elitist. However, the UK economy is stronger and more diverse now, so the population the tests characterize is different.
I've been following the testing "sky is falling" phenomenon for decades now. In the 80's, I ran a volunteer group that prepared low income kids for college entrace exams, so I've always been interested in the topic. When dealing with population numbers, you have to consider the sample you are measuring. Are the same proporition of the population preparing for the same mathematical tasks? If not, then you can't use the tests or their score distributions as proof of anything.
For years the college entrance exams became easier in the US, and scores fell on the exams, but it is critical to realize that the scores are calibrated to produce precisely that decline. College bound seniors have become, as a group, stupider. However, they're just as smart as individuals as they ever were. If you took the top 10% of students today and gave them the same tests as their predecessors from fifty years ago, they'd be pretty similar.
I could go on and on about this. Do the curricula have the same diversity of topics? At one time, mathematical education consisted mainly of Euclid, and a student raised on Euclid became very good indeed in the topics in the Ele
Years ago, when we said "operating system", we meant what today is called a "kernel". Of course, the OS came with enough utilities to organize and execute programs. And there were often extras thrown in.
Then software in general, and OS's in particular, became products that competed. This meant having lots of features became important to the vendors. "OS" came to mean as much, if not more, the stuff that goes around the kernel. When people ask "Is Linux ready for the desktop?" they aren't talking about the kernel, which has been excellent for many years. What they're really asking is, "Does any Linux distro add enough of the right features to make it usable for mass desktop usage?"
As you say, that's been true for years. In fact, you get more out of the box -- far more -- than you do in any proprietary system.
But, we've come full circle. We used to be focused on the hardware, because it was fabulously expensive. But now hardware is incredibly cheap, which recreates the problem: because it is cheap, there is lots of it, in great diversity. That means managing it is a big problem again.
Linux contributors do a positively amazing job at supporting the vast diversity of hardware out there that users might have, especially when you consider that the hardware vendors do this for Microsoft. But amazing is not the same as consistent enough for some newbie to grab a linux install CD and reliably experience open source bliss. Taking a kernel upgrade from your distro often means having something break, which might mean messing with BIOS tables, or building your own custom kernel, or doing without. The first two aren't that hard to do technically, but most users without support will do without and be unhappy.
As it stands, there is no reason an enterprise couldn't go Linux on the desktop, so long as it regulated the hardware in use so it has good Linux support, or that they efficiently deal with any problems that come up. Likewise, consumers who buy Linux preinstalled from somebody like Dell ought to be pretty happy with it. But the dominant user model, where somebody downloads the installers and puts it on their own machine, is not a good one for most users.
Until vendors of hardware make Linux a priority, there are only three ways that Linux works on a desktop: (1) A sophisticated Linux user doing self-support; (2) An IT department with a small number of standardized hardware configurations; (3) Linux preinstalls supported by the manufacturer.
Well you're assuming that it will stand for centuries without any problem. Validating that assumption is useful as an engineering test case.
And the Tower is only useless if art and history and engineering education are useless. While its foundation of course is famously defective, consider this: the oldest parts of this structure are nine hundred years old; the newest parts are seven hundred years old. What the medieval world lacked in civil engineering, it had to make up out of a combination of trial and error, craft, and sheer daring. Because they did not have the civil engineering knowledge, any structure like this that they built might collapse at any time. It's remarkable people even undertook projects like this, which were the work of centuries, many, many short lived generations.
Yet even so, the tower has stood all this time, out of true. At the very least a fitting monument to the generations of craftsmen who built it so well.
In any case the Leaning Tower serves as the bell tower of the Cathedral of Pisa, so it is not literally "useless".
Well, that's because all commercially valuable apple trees are hybrids. They're also grafted onto different rootstock, but that's s different issue: the varieties that have good root systems aren't the ones that produce the best fruit.
The "crab apple" is simply an apple that is either not hybridized or if hybridized, selected for its flowering properties. They are often used to pollinate orchard trees. The fruit of the crab apple is often quite flavorful, it's just small and usually not very sweet. They make excellent additions to cider.
All the apple varieties are genetic clones of each other: every Cortland Apple tree comes from cuttings of a single, ancestral Cortland.
The phenomenon you describe is the reason for this. It is also a good illustration of the purpose of sexual reproduction: to increase genetic diversity by shuffling genes. You can try to inbreed genetic lines from McIntosh stock, but most fruit won't be edible, and those that are won't resemble McIntosh apples.
This is correct. There are hundreds, if not thousands of varieties of bananas. The reason we don't see them is that many of them aren't as good as the Cavendish; and none of the many varieties that are better store and ship well. So consumers in India and Central America will continue to have access to superior, locally grown varieties.
However -- this doesn't mean that we should blithely accept the extinction of an important food crop. This is a warning. What if it were rice? Or sweet corn?
The properties that make bananas vulnerable are shared by many other, more important food crops. Mainly these amount to one thing: the crop in question is economically attractive to plant on a large scale and ship around the world.
It's important that we look at this as both a lesson, and an opportunity to try out different strategies to respond. The global food supply is already under pressure from energy prices and population growth. It should be manageable over the coming decades, but we shouldn't trust our luck too much.
This also bears watching because bananas are an extremely important food source in areas where they grow. Even though this is not a variety that is used as a basic staple by anybody, the biology of banana diseases is very important.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, is it helpful to know that the amount of energy needed to run this in sleep mode or thirty years is sufficient to raise a one pound weight by about 2 1/4 inches, or roughly 5.6cm?
It may make you happy that the math doesn't seem to right in any case , based on a CR2032 battery, which is rated at 3V, 220mah. 263 years sounds more like what you'd get running off a large electrolytic capacitor, but that is an even more annoying notion.
Actually, the House of Lords is not such a bad idea, except for the heredity thing. For one thing, it's the only way somebody who's not in the idle rich to participate in politics. It's the elected bodies around the world that are bastions of elitism these days, except it's economic elitism.
Now, a House of Lords that was selected by an open lottery, rather than a hereditary one, would be an interesting idea. Maybe you'd require some level of educational attainment, say make it open to anybody with an advanced degree.
American XO: here he comes. ...
American CO: wait for it
[Chinese sub pops to the surface]
American CO (over radio): Lordy! Where do you come from?
Chinese CO: Where did you come from? I hope I am not interrupting anything?
American CO: Oh, nothing important. You sure surprised me, popping up out of nowhere like that!
Chinese CO: Did I? Please excuse me! We had no idea anybody was up here. We're having a little trouble with our engines!
American CO: Do you need help?
Chinese CO: Any chance you could give us a jump?
[American XO and CO exchange looks]
American CO: Uh, sure, can you take 440 volts?
Chinese CO: One moment, I check with engineer...
[sounds of argument in Chinese]
Chinese CO: So sorry. My Engineer says 440 volt no work!
American XO: That's not right, they should have...
American CO (cutting in): Uh, don't you have an operators manual or something?
Chinese CO: Engineer says cook used pages to wrap leftovers. No problem, I fix
[sound of large spanner being whacked against steel hull of sub]
Chinese CO: Hah! Now engines go!
American CO: That's very amazing! You fixed your boat by whacking the hull with a spanner?
Chinese CO: Oh, yes, you know us primitive Chinamen. Our boats are junk! Get it? Junk! Ha ha!
American XO and CO: Ha ha!
Chinese CO: Well engine make go now, so we leave. We be lucky to make back to Hainan without sinking.
American CO: I'll be lucky to make it back to Honolulu without having a heart attack. You took ten years off my life, popping out of nowhere like that! I honestly had no idea there was anybody else in the area.
Chinese CO: Sorry! We not know you here, really. You know Chinaman navigation equipment! No good! We go in straight line until bump into something!
American CO: Sorry to hear that. I hope you stay clear of us, we run into things all the time, since I dropped my sextant.
Chinese CO: Me too, since lousy Chinese boat leak on my chronometer! I go now! Bye!
American CO: Bye!
[Chinese sub submerges]
American CO (under breath): Asshole.
Chinese CO (under breath): Asshole.
Well, there's two elements to the use of fabric here. The first is the use of a fabric over a frame to produce the skin, the second is the use of a flexible skin over a moving frame to allow the care to redesign its shape.
Personally, I think the latter is the gee-whiz part, but the former is more fundamentally interesting. If you don't need the fabric to be flexible, you can choose to make it out of something like lightweight ballistic cloth.
Another possibility would be to stretch the kind of polyethylene sheeting used to protected boats in winter storage over a basketwork of metal tubing and kevlar fibers. Although this could be easily damaged, it could be patched in seconds with duct tape, and permanently repaired in a few minutes with fresh sheeting and a heat gun.
This would work great to provide a light weight, weatherproof shell for a small, personal electric vehicle.
Notice there's no Wiccan award. That's because Wiccans are banned because they don't believe in a single creator God, even though the same can be said for Buddhists, who aren't banned.
The difference is that they don't like the Wiccans.
It's like a lot of organizations: the higher up in the organization you go, the worse it gets.
All the good done in scouting is done locally, by unpaid volunteers. That is the foundation of scouting movement. The basic unit of scouting is the patrol, then the troop. Then you have the council, which is the first level with professional staff.
The council is much less important than the troop. It's also the highest level of scouting that does anything useful for the scouting movement. Who are the people who run the national organization to tell a troop that they can't admit an atheist, or a Wiccan? The troop is the scouting movement. The national organization is there to provide the bureaucratic equivalent of janitorial services.
These people aren't the second coming of Baden Powell. They don't even believe in or use his system, they just use his name to promote their sectarian agenda. They don't serve the movement, they use it for their political ends. In a nutshell, they're parasites that take resources away from the movement and create problems for it by working a cross purposes. If you kicked everyone out of the movement who doesn't buy into the national organization's evangelical agenda, it'd be a tiny fraction of what it is.
Visual Studio is what killed the tools market, what was left was vendors snatching for crumbs in niches or scrambling to erect barriers against Microsoft, which had a beachead to everywhere with their desktop monopoly. You just couldn't compete with Microsoft selling tools to target Microsoft platforms.
While I think open source is progress, it's not the benevolent hand of Historic Destiny at work. It's necessity mothering invention, or in this case, re-invention.
Commercial embrace of open source is a reaction to the inability to compete against an entrenched monopoly. In order to survive, you choose a business model which doesn't require you to sell anything in a product class that Microsoft "owns". If you remember the dark days before the dot com boom got rolling, there was real sense of gloom among software entrepreneurs. There was a sense that it was almost not worth trying, because if you had a good idea MS would grab it and squash your product.
Then came the dot com boom, and suddenly the land rush was on, and nobody wanted to pay rent to a landlord. It was like the olden days when software was given away with hardware: the software had to be there, but it wasn't where the profit was. The software license bonanza had been bust for years, dead by the hand of its greatest beneficiary.
Open source is good for programmers and good for customers, and it is a fact of life for vendors.So much of the software business revolves around whether you drink the MS kool-aid or not. The anticipated but not quite here mobile boom in the post dot com era was wishful thinking -- to create an end run around MS by going straight from server to phone or PDA. It might still happen.
I'm talking about a storm with sustained winds of 175 mph winds, the third most powerful storm ever to make landfall in the US, and the fifth largest in the Atlantic since records have been kept.
I'd call that "something special".
In the whole of the prior century, only three category five hurricanes made landfall in the US. I would't call that "routine".
However, note that I did not claim that Katrina was "caused" by climate change.
I don't think anybody thinks IDs are going to foil Al Qaeda. For one thing, the suicide bombers of 9/11 would have had valid IDs.
An imperfect ID might foil a more amateur hijacking attempt.
Well, let's play devil's advocate for a moment.
Giving people who forgot their IDs a pat down serves a purpose: it lets people travel after they had their IDs lost or stolen. It benefits any travel who might have his wallet stolen while he is on a trip.
Giving people who refuse to supply their IDs a pat down serves a different kind of purpose. It serves the desire of the individual passenger to feel free of scrutiny. That only benefits passengers who have that need. So logically, the cost of providing this service should be borne by those passengers alone.
In any case, the focus on IDs is silly. They don't need your drivers license to track you. So by insisting on NOT showing your ID, you are engaging in your own kind of security theater.
IDs are, of course, a security hole, but one that serves a purpose. It makes it possible to avoid patting down everyone. Since we aren't going to do that anyway, the primary line of defense should be random searches. IDs are secondary; given the current state of ID standardization in the US, they won't foil Al Qaeda, but they might catch a few homegrown Timothy McVeighs.
Well, it's not exactly harmless.
When an employee of the vendor steals a customers identity, the vendor may well be liable. Usually, you aren't responsible for the misdeeds of others, but when you insist on something that invites crime, it might successfully be argued that you are assuming a responsibility towards the people exposed to harm.
The problem with the "prevent just one" kind of logic is that it's based on the idea that the cost to the vendor is nothing. If you count statistical risk, as you ought, then the cost is not nothing. This kind of thinking is a red flag -- it's not necessarily wrong, but it suggest something is missing from the analysis.
Well, because the economy here is currently shaky. If it were solid, then some people here probably would drive SUVs with $9 gas, but when the future is shaky you think more about how you'll never see the money you're pouring into your tank again.
I think it is also true, though, that Americans aren't as selfish and stupid as we're depicted as being. Much is made of America's rugged individualism, but there is also a streak of communitarianism in the American character. The people who think SUVs are cool vs. the people who think that hybrids are cool. It is the pendulum swinging between these extremes that gives American society its dynamism. Americans on whole sit these two poles, moving towards one of them until it feels like they've gone to far, then going the other way.
2005 was a watershed year. Americans looked at Katrina, and said to themselves, "this isn't working." It isn't just the possible connection of climate change in the intensity of the storm, it was disgust at the inefficiency of the response that made people decide things had gone far enough. It was Katrina that killed the SUV. High prices and economic uncertainty finished it off.
And equally simple, not to mention more accurate, to say "I don't know," but we're not the kind of people here, that take the easy way out.
Well, the basic question is so simplistic that it's broken.
There are two big things that have happened over the last two centuries: the speeding of the pace of life, and the democratizing of intellectual pursuits. In simple terms, there are more people who can read now than two centuries ago, but a relatively smaller proportion of readers spend time with long, complex, and challenging books.
For questions where there is a clear answer, if we take the ability to arrive at an accurate answer in the shortest possible time, then humanity is functionally smarter than it has ever been. There has never been a better age in which to ask a question like, "How many bushels are there in a cubic parsec?"
For intellectual pursuits that can't be graded in terms of arriving at a known correct answer in the minimum time, the picture is not so simple. Are composers better than they were in Bach's time? Are writers in the age of the word processor better than those in the age of the typewriter?
The greater and more highly educated population is one factor that confounds the question of whether speed has changed the human mind. Among educated people, it is perhaps less probable that they will exhibit the kinds of analytical skills that come from long struggle with the details of a problem. But there are just more people who are educated. And there has probably never been a better time to undertake the study of complex systems like the economy or the environment, because we have more data on those systems, and the informatics tools needed to explore dynamic behavior.
I would say that human intelligence is being shaped by its challenges and its tools, like it always has. A smaller portion of educated people have a familiarity of Euclid, or a basic functional grasp of Latin, or a detailed knowledge of Shakespeare than at one time, all of which are misfortunes for them. On the other hand, they're more likely to understand things like the differences between European and other cultures (relatively speaking), because that's working knowledge for many more people.
I'm looking at your question, and while it's clearly quite incisive in its scope of relevance, I've come to the conclusion I don't want to bother thinking about how to answer it.
In fact, I am even regretting the time I spent considering whether I should think about answering it.
Well, seeing as the KdF-Wagen was practically a point by point rip off of the Czech Tatra T97, down to the distinctive "beetle" shape, there isn't much reason to associate the design with Hitler. Tatra sued Porsche, and Porsche was going to settle when Hitler stepped in and told him he'd "fix his problem," which he did by invading Czechoslovakia.
VW settled with Tatra in 1961 for 3M DM.
Hitler doesn't really deserve any credit for the Beetle. It's amazing people have given it to him for so many years.
That doesn't make him wrong. Viewed as a parlor game, of course he lost, because he made the tactical mistake of setting the goalposts too close. However, I don't think its reasonable to conclude that academic journals play a useful role if and only if there are fewer than two cases of monetary interests trumping academic ones. Why two? Why not one, or ten?
The problem is that if this is a game, the game is broken.
It should work like this: A proposes an instance where monetary interests did NOT trump academic instances. B then proposes an instance where monetary instances DID trump academic ones. This process repeats in rounds until one or the other runs out of instances. The player at the end of the game who has instances remaining wins. Naturally, this is a very crude game, but not so crude as the "name two" version.
If I disassembled you into your component cells, I could probably select a certain tissue -- let's say skin, and create a cell culture weighing several thousand kilograms.
Does that sound like an attractive proposition?
It's all about information. The quality of your life is not encoded in your biomass -- although your cultured self might disagree, if it had anything to think with.
This reminds me of a course I took in neuroscience in which we learned that after certain kinds of brain trauma, the forms new connections in the affected area. We all felt warm and fuzzy about the Wisdom of Evolution encoded in our DNA, until it was pointed out that the new connections were actually malfunctions. Brain function would be better preserved if the new connections were suppressed, than having it rewired by the local cells, which don't really know what the hell they are doing.
Anthropocentrism has its place. but not in determining what the natural world is up to. You are prefectly free to believe that the highest use of the natural world is the care and feeding of humans, and maximizing their amusements. But the natural world doesn't take any notice of that opinion. All things being equal, we humans prefer an ocean that is richly stocked with finned fish and full of things like coral reefs. However is conditions are bad for fish or reef building organism, Gaia can always fall back on generating algal mats. An ocean choked with algal slime would not be to most of our likings at all, although perhaps to yours because it would probably contain more biomass.
Concepts like "damage" and "disaster" are purely human opinions about matters; brain cells or ocean algae simply do what life does: they adapt. The idea that Nature in Her Wisdom intervenes to protect us from our own actions is rubbish. This is the junk religion part of the Gaia hypothesis, the romantic anthropomorphizing of what is basically a gigantic machine for maximizing entropy. Nature adjusts, and most adjustments are not going to be our liking.
What any single species "likes" is to encounter favorable conditions for growth and reproduction. However, since even the resources of the entire planet are limited, it doesn't get favorable conditions forever. It either overshoots its carrying capacity, or it settles into an equilibrium with other species. Even humans, the most adaptable of species, are no different. The difference is we can understand the consequences of our actions, and therefore we can choose which of these fates we will experience.
A species that can live on everything from African veldt to arctic permafrost, from the Amazonian rain forest to the Tibetan plateau, such a species will never go extinct. At least not so long as the Sun shines, and possibly longer than that. But our species can experience population decline. This is a perfectly normal event in the history of the biosphere, but it will be for us a "disaster".
"Disaster", after all, is just our species' word for something that is perfectly predictable, but only statistically so. Since it is "only statistically probable", we assume it's somebody else's job to deal with it when it happens and put everything back to "normal" afterwards. They can prepare for it if they like, so long as it doesn't cost money or require us to make any effort whatsoever.
If you are conservative, you can choose to be one of two kinds of conservative: one who wants to keep things more or less as they have been, or one who wants to keep doing things more or less the same way we always have. You can't claim that they are both the same thing, not without the intervention of a Benevolent Agency. Things aren't to rosy on that front either, since I seem to recall that Benevolent Agencies are often quite keen on meting out mandatory change on people who aren't so keen on mending their ways.
In a nutshell, Nature doesn't care about us, because it doesn't even know we exist, apart from being an bag of c
After all, the initials SDO aren't taken yet.
Well, what you say may be true, but the decline in the difficulty of math tests can't be used to prove anything one way or the other.
A more difficult test is not a better test -- as a test. The function of a test is to yield information. I can make a test that 99% of graduating seniors will get statistically close to zero on, but it serves no more purpose than a test that 99% will ace.
If I am interested in ranking students by "mathematical ability" (assuming such a thing exists in a way that can be measured precisely), I want a test that maximizes the most likely score difference between any two randomly chosen cadidates. If I am interested in determining the qualifications of students for some particular purpose, then I want the test to have a grade that corresponds as precisely as possible to the divisio between "good enough" and "not good enough". It would make sense that that divisio be on the midpoint of the test grading scale. If I am qualifying students for a variety of purposes, then my design task is trickier, but one thing remains constant: a "tougher" test doesn't mean a better one.
Nor, in education, do you want a "tough" curriculum. "Tough" is just a security blanket for when you don't know what to do. If you designed a curriculum that only 1% of the students could follow, it wouldn't be much, if any more useful than one which 99% of the students found easy. What you want ideally is a curriculum that maximizes the mathematical competence of each student. If that is not possible, then you want one which minimizes the difference between the societal need for certain mathematical skills and the supply of people who can fill that need.
Different societies have different needs. India has a huge middle class, but a massive underclass. India's opportunities were historically limited relative to its total population, so a culture of "teaching to the top" made a grim kind of sense. If you couldn't keep up, it was not much loss to society, because somebody sharper is ready to step on you as they climb the ladder of economic advancement. The United States has had for most of its existece an environment of opportunity for all. It makes sense, therefore, to start by teaching to the middle of the class, and sorting out the tail ends of the distribution with special needs programs ("gifted" is really a different form of "special needs").
Now, I know less about the UK than the US, but in the post WW2 decades the UK economy was far less dynamic than the US. Historically, the UK was probably between the US and India, albeit closer to the US. Therefore it makes sense that its educational system was more elitist. However, the UK economy is stronger and more diverse now, so the population the tests characterize is different.
I've been following the testing "sky is falling" phenomenon for decades now. In the 80's, I ran a volunteer group that prepared low income kids for college entrace exams, so I've always been interested in the topic. When dealing with population numbers, you have to consider the sample you are measuring. Are the same proporition of the population preparing for the same mathematical tasks? If not, then you can't use the tests or their score distributions as proof of anything.
For years the college entrance exams became easier in the US, and scores fell on the exams, but it is critical to realize that the scores are calibrated to produce precisely that decline. College bound seniors have become, as a group, stupider. However, they're just as smart as individuals as they ever were. If you took the top 10% of students today and gave them the same tests as their predecessors from fifty years ago, they'd be pretty similar.
I could go on and on about this. Do the curricula have the same diversity of topics? At one time, mathematical education consisted mainly of Euclid, and a student raised on Euclid became very good indeed in the topics in the Ele
Years ago, when we said "operating system", we meant what today is called a "kernel". Of course, the OS came with enough utilities to organize and execute programs. And there were often extras thrown in.
Then software in general, and OS's in particular, became products that competed. This meant having lots of features became important to the vendors. "OS" came to mean as much, if not more, the stuff that goes around the kernel. When people ask "Is Linux ready for the desktop?" they aren't talking about the kernel, which has been excellent for many years. What they're really asking is, "Does any Linux distro add enough of the right features to make it usable for mass desktop usage?"
As you say, that's been true for years. In fact, you get more out of the box -- far more -- than you do in any proprietary system.
But, we've come full circle. We used to be focused on the hardware, because it was fabulously expensive. But now hardware is incredibly cheap, which recreates the problem: because it is cheap, there is lots of it, in great diversity. That means managing it is a big problem again.
Linux contributors do a positively amazing job at supporting the vast diversity of hardware out there that users might have, especially when you consider that the hardware vendors do this for Microsoft. But amazing is not the same as consistent enough for some newbie to grab a linux install CD and reliably experience open source bliss. Taking a kernel upgrade from your distro often means having something break, which might mean messing with BIOS tables, or building your own custom kernel, or doing without. The first two aren't that hard to do technically, but most users without support will do without and be unhappy.
As it stands, there is no reason an enterprise couldn't go Linux on the desktop, so long as it regulated the hardware in use so it has good Linux support, or that they efficiently deal with any problems that come up. Likewise, consumers who buy Linux preinstalled from somebody like Dell ought to be pretty happy with it. But the dominant user model, where somebody downloads the installers and puts it on their own machine, is not a good one for most users.
Until vendors of hardware make Linux a priority, there are only three ways that Linux works on a desktop: (1) A sophisticated Linux user doing self-support; (2) An IT department with a small number of standardized hardware configurations; (3) Linux preinstalls supported by the manufacturer.
Well you're assuming that it will stand for centuries without any problem. Validating that assumption is useful as an engineering test case.
And the Tower is only useless if art and history and engineering education are useless. While its foundation of course is famously defective, consider this: the oldest parts of this structure are nine hundred years old; the newest parts are seven hundred years old. What the medieval world lacked in civil engineering, it had to make up out of a combination of trial and error, craft, and sheer daring. Because they did not have the civil engineering knowledge, any structure like this that they built might collapse at any time. It's remarkable people even undertook projects like this, which were the work of centuries, many, many short lived generations.
Yet even so, the tower has stood all this time, out of true. At the very least a fitting monument to the generations of craftsmen who built it so well.
In any case the Leaning Tower serves as the bell tower of the Cathedral of Pisa, so it is not literally "useless".
Well, that's because all commercially valuable apple trees are hybrids. They're also grafted onto different rootstock, but that's s different issue: the varieties that have good root systems aren't the ones that produce the best fruit.
The "crab apple" is simply an apple that is either not hybridized or if hybridized, selected for its flowering properties. They are often used to pollinate orchard trees. The fruit of the crab apple is often quite flavorful, it's just small and usually not very sweet. They make excellent additions to cider.
All the apple varieties are genetic clones of each other: every Cortland Apple tree comes from cuttings of a single, ancestral Cortland.
The phenomenon you describe is the reason for this. It is also a good illustration of the purpose of sexual reproduction: to increase genetic diversity by shuffling genes. You can try to inbreed genetic lines from McIntosh stock, but most fruit won't be edible, and those that are won't resemble McIntosh apples.
This is correct. There are hundreds, if not thousands of varieties of bananas. The reason we don't see them is that many of them aren't as good as the Cavendish; and none of the many varieties that are better store and ship well. So consumers in India and Central America will continue to have access to superior, locally grown varieties.
However -- this doesn't mean that we should blithely accept the extinction of an important food crop. This is a warning. What if it were rice? Or sweet corn?
The properties that make bananas vulnerable are shared by many other, more important food crops. Mainly these amount to one thing: the crop in question is economically attractive to plant on a large scale and ship around the world.
It's important that we look at this as both a lesson, and an opportunity to try out different strategies to respond. The global food supply is already under pressure from energy prices and population growth. It should be manageable over the coming decades, but we shouldn't trust our luck too much.
This also bears watching because bananas are an extremely important food source in areas where they grow. Even though this is not a variety that is used as a basic staple by anybody, the biology of banana diseases is very important.