I assume that's what they were up to, but of course a bridge by its nature is more extreme in one direction. It may have had nothing to do with the collapse, it may have caused the collapse.
People in these situations want fast answers, so they jump to conclusions based on reports of cracks, or cables being tightened. But good answers take time, and it's a fair bet by the time we get good answers the public's curiosity will have waned. Even if the things drawing our attention now are involved, they're embedded in a much more complex scenario than most people have the patience for.
The complexity and risk of the intermediate stages of a project are the most impressive things to me about civil engineering. It's one thing to design a dam, it's another to build that dam in the middle of an actual river; you need a dam to build a dam. It's one thing to draw a bridge that's perfectly stable once built, it's another to ensure the partially completed structure is in perfect equilibrium at every point from the time the moment the ground is cleared until the last cable is tightened.
If you think about what ABC involves, it really ought to make bridge construction safer, but I think in this case people simply put too much faith in it. Any time you put something heavy over someone's head, you're taking a terrible risk. For a completed bridge, engineering reduces that risk to negligible, but if you're going to be building that bridge while people pass under it every intermediate step has to be as safe as the completed structure. I wonder if that's even possible.
I don't know if there are any pictures, but the situation has been confused by media reports that workers were "tightening cables" at the time it collapsed. However it turns out the pylon for the suspension cables had not been erected yet; the workers were tightening cables that ran through the structure.
It's impossible to say whether the cable-tightening, or the cracks reportedly found in the span, had anything to do with the collapse. It's possible that neither did; it's possible that both did. Engineering disasters tend to be complex and they take time to nail down.
Microplastics are the result of the breakdown of all the plastic waste that makes its way into landfills and oceans.
In other words this is not the kind of contamination you'd expect coming from the bottle the water ships in. Given how slowly these compounds break down, with a sensitive enough assay you're bound to find this stuff everywhere in an industrialized country. Microplastics are found in most municipal tap water, which is the source for most bottled water. If your test is sufficiently sensitive, you'll find them in spring water due to worker, airborne and general environmental contamination.
The question is whether the currently detectable levels of microplastics are biologically significant. Nobody is ready to answer that question yet. This kind of question frequently comes up when there's an advance in testing. When you can test for heretofore undetectable levels of something, you find it in places you didn't know it was, and can't be sure what that means.
"Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of a cancer cell."
What makes Amazon a formidable competitor is the will to grow -- not profit, but grow. This is a natural phase that any startup normally goes through, but unlike a regular business Amazon never settled down to the business of maximizing profit; instead it metastasizes into additional business areas.
Small world phenomenon, I guess, but I have a friend who's a friend with Saudi Arabia's Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud -- for 22 years Ambassador to the US under King Fahd.
According to my friend, this was Prince Bandar's view on the difference between democracy and monarchy: in a democracy if you screw up the people vote you out; in a monarchy they drag you out of your palace and cut off your head.
My takeaway: if you don't vote, you'd better be willing to storm the palace. And increasingly our lives are governed by international, extra-governmental organizations: corporations.
Really the summary is talking about two things: what I agree is a rather low rate of accusations submitted to the particular unit in question (is that they only way they are handled?), and allegation of a culture which condones sexual harassment, without any evidence offered.
That second issue might well be real. I don't know, somebody ought to look into it. I'm a numbers guy myself, but that also means that I understand that numbers are only as good as the system you have for collecting them.
"Essentially amounts to" is just another way of saying "if you want to call it that," which is the point. The distinction is an empty terminological distinction but it changes how we feel about things.
Well, I actually value my memories, apart from any issue of qualia. I'd certainly give up a few minutes of conscious life, particularly painful conscious life, in return for my memories being preserved.
That said, consider the Star Trek transporter. It converts your body to energy, transmits that energy to a different place, and reassembles it. Would you use a machine that did that? Before you answer, note that it's just as reasonable to describe the operation of the device this way: it destroys you and then creates an exact duplicate of you in a different place. There is in fact no material, observable way to choose between these characterizations; it's just quibbling over terminology.
Given that, if you'd be willing to use a transporter at all, you should be willing to use a perfect copying mechanism, even if it kills one of your copies.
In Clifford Simak's Hugo-winning 1963 novel, Way Station, he posits a method if interstellar travel that works precisely that way. An exact duplicate of the traveler is created at the destination, after which the copy at the origin is unceremoniously killed and dumped.
Your argument would be cogent if people who oppose Trump believed Mexico would pay for the wall. The thing is, I think almost nobody believed Mexico would pay for the wall, even people who applauded when he said that. They were applauding the sentiment, not endorsing the belief.
This is classic bullshit. Bullshit is a lie that isn't for believing, it's for going along with.
Leaking is remarkably rarely prosecuted, especially given how much administrations complain about it. The reason that administrations don't pursue leaking more aggressively is that the people in the administration want to preserve their own ability to leak.
Leaking is an essential part of the way government works. It's going over the head of the regular channels and appealing directly to the people. This can be done for both personal/professional reasons, and for patriotic reasons.
There has only been one exception to this pattern I can remember: the Obama administration. Obama didn't complain much about leakers publicly, he just quietly went after them. Only 13 people have ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917, and eight of those thirteen were on Obama's watch.
It's all relative to what the alternative is. If you've got a Dean Acheson or George Marshall waiting in the wings, and you go for a Warren Christopher instead, Warren Christopher is trash. If your alternative to Warren Christopher is Rex Tillerson, then Warren Christopher is a hero.
If your alternative to Rex Tillerson is Mike Pompeo, then Tillerson looks like a hero. The Secretary of State is the country's top diplomat, and Pompeo has no relevant experience. He's a short-term tea party Congressman who's been at CIA for a year, barely enough time to get his bearings. The only Secretaries of State in living memory with less experience in foreign affairs were William Rogers and Cy Vance.
To be precise, surfaces illuminated by the full moon will recieve 0.1 lux, or 0.1 lumens/m^2.
The moon is very bright (candelas), but also quite small in the sky (steradians). This means that while is bright, its illuminating power measured in lux (candela-steradians/m^2) is quite modest.
It's a bit like the uncanny valley: the closer we get to a computer system like the one depicted on Star Trek TNG, the more we'll focus on how it falls short.
The thing about that Enterprise computer is that it could easily pass a pretty unconstrained Turing test. Used in a wide variety of tasks, it actually understood what the person was trying to do and could anticipate what they might want -- unless the writers required otherwise.
At the extreme opposite end of the spectrum is the late 1960s AI program SHRDLU, which could respond reasonably to commands and queries about stacking blocks. You could tell it to "put the red block on top of the blue block," then ask it "Why did you move the yellow block?" and it would answer "To get at the red block." The performance of the program was astounding, especially if you look at the relatively small volume of code involved. I think this lends credence to the claim that we'd be a lot more impressed with Siri if its application domain were restricted to a constrained set of tasks like making travel reservations.
The advances in natural language processing embodied by Siri are impressive, but positioning Siri as a kind of general purpose assistant means we're bound to be disappointed. We're continually reminded that the software doesn't actually understand us, canned humorous responses to anticipated questions notwithstanding. To impress at the job of general purpose assistant the program would need a fairly comprehensive understanding of us, something that a human upbringing naturally equips people with, or most people at least.
As terrible as Lotus was at user interfaces, Lotus Notes had strong message encryption, digital signatures, and two-factor authentication as standard features all the way back in 1989. As such it was actually ahead of what most people have today.
The main problem was that you couldn't find administrators who understood any of that shit back in 1990.
Well, cultures rise and fall. A modern person transported in time a thousand years back would find Europe to be quite horrible, and certain places in Africa far more civilized, like Ghana for example. Even five hundred years ago you'd probably prefer living somewhere like Benin to anywhere in Europe, which was at the start of a two hundred year period of religious warfare.
If you look at history quite a few civlizations achieve a kind of cultural and political domination Europe achieved after, say 1700. And very few continue to enjoy that for more than three or four hundred years.
Going by sustained cultural achievement, you'd have to choose either Han Chinese or South Asian civilization as representative of humanity. Population-wise, they're also the more numerous than Europeans. India in particular has had continuous civilization dating back to before the First Dynasty of Egypt.
Well, in my mind race is a "just so" story that doesn't hold up under genetic scrutiny.
However people from different regions *do* have superficial resemblances, e.g. very, very pale skin among northern Europeans. That's actually a somewhat unusual trait.
National Geographic a few years ago attempted to identify what the "most typical" human would look like, and the answer is a 28 year-old Han Chinese male. While culturally speaking light skin is prized, Han people's skin varies tremendously with sun exposure. My father was Han and had pale skin, but if he spent even a few days out in the sun he'd get very dark. I'm the same, even though my Mom is Northern European and her family very fair-skinned. At the start of the summer most people would identify me as white, by the end of the summer not many would.
In a few decades time the most typical person on Earth would be an even darker-skinned South Asian.
This is a rather pointless mode of arguing. "Cat" and "dog" both have alternative standard definitions referring on one hand to the domesticated animal and on the other to any member of the wider genus. You can argue either side by selecting a definition. In logic this is called "equivocation".
You've also selected "cat" and "dog" to represent the poster's entire argument because these particular words happen to have this property. That's called "cherry picking".
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I assume that's what they were up to, but of course a bridge by its nature is more extreme in one direction. It may have had nothing to do with the collapse, it may have caused the collapse.
People in these situations want fast answers, so they jump to conclusions based on reports of cracks, or cables being tightened. But good answers take time, and it's a fair bet by the time we get good answers the public's curiosity will have waned. Even if the things drawing our attention now are involved, they're embedded in a much more complex scenario than most people have the patience for.
The complexity and risk of the intermediate stages of a project are the most impressive things to me about civil engineering. It's one thing to design a dam, it's another to build that dam in the middle of an actual river; you need a dam to build a dam. It's one thing to draw a bridge that's perfectly stable once built, it's another to ensure the partially completed structure is in perfect equilibrium at every point from the time the moment the ground is cleared until the last cable is tightened.
If you think about what ABC involves, it really ought to make bridge construction safer, but I think in this case people simply put too much faith in it. Any time you put something heavy over someone's head, you're taking a terrible risk. For a completed bridge, engineering reduces that risk to negligible, but if you're going to be building that bridge while people pass under it every intermediate step has to be as safe as the completed structure. I wonder if that's even possible.
I don't know if there are any pictures, but the situation has been confused by media reports that workers were "tightening cables" at the time it collapsed. However it turns out the pylon for the suspension cables had not been erected yet; the workers were tightening cables that ran through the structure.
It's impossible to say whether the cable-tightening, or the cracks reportedly found in the span, had anything to do with the collapse. It's possible that neither did; it's possible that both did. Engineering disasters tend to be complex and they take time to nail down.
From TFA:
Microplastics are the result of the breakdown of all the plastic waste that makes its way into landfills and oceans.
In other words this is not the kind of contamination you'd expect coming from the bottle the water ships in. Given how slowly these compounds break down, with a sensitive enough assay you're bound to find this stuff everywhere in an industrialized country. Microplastics are found in most municipal tap water, which is the source for most bottled water. If your test is sufficiently sensitive, you'll find them in spring water due to worker, airborne and general environmental contamination.
The question is whether the currently detectable levels of microplastics are biologically significant. Nobody is ready to answer that question yet. This kind of question frequently comes up when there's an advance in testing. When you can test for heretofore undetectable levels of something, you find it in places you didn't know it was, and can't be sure what that means.
"Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of a cancer cell."
What makes Amazon a formidable competitor is the will to grow -- not profit, but grow. This is a natural phase that any startup normally goes through, but unlike a regular business Amazon never settled down to the business of maximizing profit; instead it metastasizes into additional business areas.
Small world phenomenon, I guess, but I have a friend who's a friend with Saudi Arabia's Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud -- for 22 years Ambassador to the US under King Fahd.
According to my friend, this was Prince Bandar's view on the difference between democracy and monarchy: in a democracy if you screw up the people vote you out; in a monarchy they drag you out of your palace and cut off your head.
My takeaway: if you don't vote, you'd better be willing to storm the palace. And increasingly our lives are governed by international, extra-governmental organizations: corporations.
Really the summary is talking about two things: what I agree is a rather low rate of accusations submitted to the particular unit in question (is that they only way they are handled?), and allegation of a culture which condones sexual harassment, without any evidence offered.
That second issue might well be real. I don't know, somebody ought to look into it. I'm a numbers guy myself, but that also means that I understand that numbers are only as good as the system you have for collecting them.
"Essentially amounts to" is just another way of saying "if you want to call it that," which is the point. The distinction is an empty terminological distinction but it changes how we feel about things.
Well, I actually value my memories, apart from any issue of qualia. I'd certainly give up a few minutes of conscious life, particularly painful conscious life, in return for my memories being preserved.
That said, consider the Star Trek transporter. It converts your body to energy, transmits that energy to a different place, and reassembles it. Would you use a machine that did that? Before you answer, note that it's just as reasonable to describe the operation of the device this way: it destroys you and then creates an exact duplicate of you in a different place. There is in fact no material, observable way to choose between these characterizations; it's just quibbling over terminology.
Given that, if you'd be willing to use a transporter at all, you should be willing to use a perfect copying mechanism, even if it kills one of your copies.
In Clifford Simak's Hugo-winning 1963 novel, Way Station, he posits a method if interstellar travel that works precisely that way. An exact duplicate of the traveler is created at the destination, after which the copy at the origin is unceremoniously killed and dumped.
Your argument would be cogent if people who oppose Trump believed Mexico would pay for the wall. The thing is, I think almost nobody believed Mexico would pay for the wall, even people who applauded when he said that. They were applauding the sentiment, not endorsing the belief.
This is classic bullshit. Bullshit is a lie that isn't for believing, it's for going along with.
I assume you're just pretending to be obtuse.
Leaking is remarkably rarely prosecuted, especially given how much administrations complain about it. The reason that administrations don't pursue leaking more aggressively is that the people in the administration want to preserve their own ability to leak.
Leaking is an essential part of the way government works. It's going over the head of the regular channels and appealing directly to the people. This can be done for both personal/professional reasons, and for patriotic reasons.
There has only been one exception to this pattern I can remember: the Obama administration. Obama didn't complain much about leakers publicly, he just quietly went after them. Only 13 people have ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917, and eight of those thirteen were on Obama's watch.
It's all relative to what the alternative is. If you've got a Dean Acheson or George Marshall waiting in the wings, and you go for a Warren Christopher instead, Warren Christopher is trash. If your alternative to Warren Christopher is Rex Tillerson, then Warren Christopher is a hero.
If your alternative to Rex Tillerson is Mike Pompeo, then Tillerson looks like a hero. The Secretary of State is the country's top diplomat, and Pompeo has no relevant experience. He's a short-term tea party Congressman who's been at CIA for a year, barely enough time to get his bearings. The only Secretaries of State in living memory with less experience in foreign affairs were William Rogers and Cy Vance.
No, her being Deputy Director is a problem, AND being made Director is a bigger problem.
To be precise, surfaces illuminated by the full moon will recieve 0.1 lux, or 0.1 lumens/m^2.
The moon is very bright (candelas), but also quite small in the sky (steradians). This means that while is bright, its illuminating power measured in lux (candela-steradians/m^2) is quite modest.
Hundreds of millions for climate mitigation? What planet do you live on?
Hundreds of millions of dollars? Where will the DoD get that kind of money?
It's a bit like the uncanny valley: the closer we get to a computer system like the one depicted on Star Trek TNG, the more we'll focus on how it falls short.
The thing about that Enterprise computer is that it could easily pass a pretty unconstrained Turing test. Used in a wide variety of tasks, it actually understood what the person was trying to do and could anticipate what they might want -- unless the writers required otherwise.
At the extreme opposite end of the spectrum is the late 1960s AI program SHRDLU, which could respond reasonably to commands and queries about stacking blocks. You could tell it to "put the red block on top of the blue block," then ask it "Why did you move the yellow block?" and it would answer "To get at the red block." The performance of the program was astounding, especially if you look at the relatively small volume of code involved. I think this lends credence to the claim that we'd be a lot more impressed with Siri if its application domain were restricted to a constrained set of tasks like making travel reservations.
The advances in natural language processing embodied by Siri are impressive, but positioning Siri as a kind of general purpose assistant means we're bound to be disappointed. We're continually reminded that the software doesn't actually understand us, canned humorous responses to anticipated questions notwithstanding. To impress at the job of general purpose assistant the program would need a fairly comprehensive understanding of us, something that a human upbringing naturally equips people with, or most people at least.
I'm surprised and delighted when I get through a day without a piece of crappy software giving me grief.
Hmm.. I seem to have misunderstood your point. The key is "invalidate"; I'd have used "does not support", which is a different thing.
As terrible as Lotus was at user interfaces, Lotus Notes had strong message encryption, digital signatures, and two-factor authentication as standard features all the way back in 1989. As such it was actually ahead of what most people have today.
The main problem was that you couldn't find administrators who understood any of that shit back in 1990.
Well, cultures rise and fall. A modern person transported in time a thousand years back would find Europe to be quite horrible, and certain places in Africa far more civilized, like Ghana for example. Even five hundred years ago you'd probably prefer living somewhere like Benin to anywhere in Europe, which was at the start of a two hundred year period of religious warfare.
If you look at history quite a few civlizations achieve a kind of cultural and political domination Europe achieved after, say 1700. And very few continue to enjoy that for more than three or four hundred years.
Going by sustained cultural achievement, you'd have to choose either Han Chinese or South Asian civilization as representative of humanity. Population-wise, they're also the more numerous than Europeans. India in particular has had continuous civilization dating back to before the First Dynasty of Egypt.
Well, in my mind race is a "just so" story that doesn't hold up under genetic scrutiny.
However people from different regions *do* have superficial resemblances, e.g. very, very pale skin among northern Europeans. That's actually a somewhat unusual trait.
National Geographic a few years ago attempted to identify what the "most typical" human would look like, and the answer is a 28 year-old Han Chinese male. While culturally speaking light skin is prized, Han people's skin varies tremendously with sun exposure. My father was Han and had pale skin, but if he spent even a few days out in the sun he'd get very dark. I'm the same, even though my Mom is Northern European and her family very fair-skinned. At the start of the summer most people would identify me as white, by the end of the summer not many would.
In a few decades time the most typical person on Earth would be an even darker-skinned South Asian.
This is a rather pointless mode of arguing. "Cat" and "dog" both have alternative standard definitions referring on one hand to the domesticated animal and on the other to any member of the wider genus. You can argue either side by selecting a definition. In logic this is called "equivocation".
You've also selected "cat" and "dog" to represent the poster's entire argument because these particular words happen to have this property. That's called "cherry picking".
Smartphones are only *truly* loyal to the platform vendor.