Oops. Moderated you wrong and can't undo it so I'm posting to wipe that out. Sorry.
This is more or less the plan that Bush put in place, and was essentially mandated by the Iraqi government. They have a legitimate (or at least "recognized") government there, and we're no longer an invading army. We have permission, under a Status of Forces agreement.
So the timing is completely unsurprising, and Obama's doing nothing that wasn't basically mandated, but it is what he wanted all along. McCain would have had to do the same, though probably less willingly.
Broadway is the cheap gringo alternative to actual theater.
Gringo alternative, perhaps, but not cheap. If audiences are up in arms about this, it's because Broadway ticket prices are very high, at least in part because a whole orchestra of musicians is expensive. They're replacing it with something cheaper, but is the price going to go down?
It probably won't go down by much. Broadway has become increasingly about spectacle and special effects. The live musicians are only a part of that, but they are a part, and the shows are ever so slightly less spectacular for having prerecorded music rather than human beings.
I completely concur that this is a poor substitute for the magic of real theater (I'm a Shakespearean actor myself), the junk food of live entertainment, and I don't much care if they're substituting corn syrup for sugar. But like junk food, it's sure potent stuff.
I'm happy that it was phrased in the form of a question. Too often, the reaction to a bit of science that somebody doesn't wish to believe is simply rejection of it, perhaps combined with unsourced assertions (or assertions to un-peer-reviewed sources).
You don't have to know everything in science. There's too much to know. Ignorance is fine, as long as you're (a) aware of it, (b) curious, and (c) not going to fight against those who do know it.
The paper got more than the usual attention from the media because of it's charming title and charismatic author, as well as a very attractive accompanying illustration.
It was nonetheless serious research, and as others have noted has been cited numerous times. It has been kicked around in the usual way of advanced theories, with nothing conclusive either way.
In the popular press it was really more human-interest story than science story; practically no science writers are even remotely capable of reading a paper like that. In the relevant community it gets about the right amount of attention: a difficult theory in a far-out reach of theoretical physics, competing with other equally difficult theories, all of them purely abstract at this point.
So abstract, that is, that it really has no business being in the popular press at all, but people are curious about the cosmological implications even if they're really not in a position to understand them.
And falsifiability isn't just an arbitrary criterion. It's the essence of why science is relevant.
Falsifiability means that you can do things with the information: it makes a prediction that if you do X, Y will happen. If Y doesn't happen, you know X was wrong.
If Y does happen, it doesn't actually prove X, but if Y was something you wanted, you've created something of value. Something you couldn't have gotten without the theory.
Not every prediction is immediately useful, but it's all part of the enterprise of science. If it weren't involved in making useful predictions, there would be no point in learning science.
I'd have settled for a digital rendering from plans. This isn't even that. These are paintings, containing no more engineering than you'd see on the cover of a sci-fi pulp novel.
Well, that was part of the joke. Makeup, skillfully applied, can do remarkable things.
And yes, she is a gorgeous woman who looks fantastic without makeup. But makeup can be used to create a variety of looks, rather than just the one you were born with, like dressing up.
ZIP-confirmation and other two-factor authentication hacks aren't going to cut it.
ZIP confirmation has always seemed spectacularly useless. If you've got somebody's card, the ability to get their address seems trivial. The card comes with the name on it (including on the mag stripe), and Google will give you an address much of the time from that.
Is there some secret advantage here that I'm missing, or is it just the credit card company's lazy way of pretending to add security?
You don't get all that much tactile feedback from a mouse. You can feel it moving, but you can feel your hand moving even without the mouse.
The only tactile feedback that you get from the mouse is when you click the key, and if the action on screen responds you don't really need tactile feedback.
What's not clear to me is how it distinguishes click-and-drag from "I lifted my finger and now I'm putting it down."
This pretty much is the "laser virtual keyboard", only with an IR laser instead. You can't see the grid, but you don't have to, since the cursor on screen gives you feedback.
Are you just troling, or hoping nobody notices that the same criteria we use to distinguish ID from science (lack of testable predictions) thus far applies to string theory as well?
That's not really true. String theory makes a great many testable predictions, in that it devolves down to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Every test of quantum mechanics tests part of string theory, and those tests pass with flying colors.
People speak of string theory as if it were some sort of wild guess, but that's simply untrue. It's an extension of existing, well-founded work in quantum field theory. It is very much unlike intelligent design, which fails what few tests it does have, and is not built on top of any other cogent theory.
What string theory lacks is a set of tests for distinguishing it from other solutions to the problems of quantum mechanics. That is indeed a serious fault with it, and it means it may be premature to be putting much effort into string theory, especially at the cost of other theories. All of them, however, have only guesses as to their practical value, since the other theories also lack testable predictions. We pursue any of them only in the pure-science sense that good things sometimes come in unexpected places.
Nobody would give two hoots about string theory if it weren't for the philosophical ramifications: they're working on origin-of-the-universe stuff, which is of tremendous interest but little value since it's a state of the world we can't actually reproduce. It may yet prove to have practical value in unexpected ways, as quantum mechanics did, but to the general public it's all (literally) Greek except for the "how did we get here" question. Which causes a lot of people to express strong opinions about a field in which, curiously, they have essentially zero experience.
I only know about this in what I get from western media, but the impression I get of Chavez is that he seems to be heavily invested in a paranoid vision of the US that sounds an awful lot like what I hear from Iran and North Korea.
I'm perfectly willing to believe he's not as bad as the media makes him out to be, but I know for sure that the US is not as bad as he makes it out to be. (Or at least, what my media tells me he makes us out to be.)
My tentative conclusion so far is that he's actually running the country rather poorly, and that he succeeds only because he's got a lot of oil revenue coming in. The rest is built on jingoism and instilling fear of a nonexistent aggressor. (OK, the US has given depressing indications that this "aggression" isn't as nonexistent as I'd like, but he practically seems to be inviting it by painting us as monsters.)
It sounds like you've got better first-hand info and I'd really like to hear it.
And of course, there's that stupid cat-in-a-box thing...
Not relevant in this case. The uncertainty is between two different measurements, say, mass and momentum. You don't care about the momentum in this case, so the uncertainty in the momentum can be as high as you like. (In this case they're measuring radius rather than mass, but the uncertainty principle governs many different pairs of measurements.)
Doesn't it seem more likely that it's just not possible to get an accurate measurement with the electron -- like measuring a grape with a yardstick instead of a micrometer?
It's more like trying to measure an watermelon with a yardstick rather than a grape. The muon is heavier by a factor of 200, so the energy levels are higher, making them easier to detect with precision. The energy levels of the electron are very small and fine, making them hard to measure with precision.
The public does not need to know anything in any given field, but it would be helpful if they really understood how science works.
I agree, though I think it's slightly aside from the question. No scientist has the job of communicating how science works. A working scientist studies her field, and communicates the results from that.
But as you say, that's only possible against a background of understanding science. And for the anti-science people I had in mind, they start with a distrust of scientists. "Controversial" science matters frequently boil down to people who think that a vast swath of scientists are engaged in some sort of swindle.
If you could eliminate those people from the voting pool, the job of a scientist to communicate would be radically different. Unfortunately, they are a loud and obnoxious vote, and there's no way for actual science to be communicated against that background.
The public doesn't necessarily have to understand science. It's not their job.
I would say, however, that it's their job to at least not actively be misled, and that's the rub here. When you don't understand something, you can be neutral, and you haven't made life any worse for anybody.
But being vocal in the opposite direction, and showing an active aversion to learning it... that's something no scientist can fix. Worse, the more a scientist tries, the more you can take the multiple attempts to dumb it down as evidence that it can't be explained.
Scientists do need to learn to explain well, and that's an ongoing challenge to be met. But the vocal and anti-science part of the public is not a problem that can be met. That's damage that has to be worked around.
It's a good thought, and definitely worth a try once they've worked the algorithm more. (This is very preliminary stuff.)
But Linear A is going to be hard. There are a lot of fragments, but they're still fragments. The longest texts are only a few sentences long, and most are much shorter than that.
Nonetheless, it's a very promising start. When you combine what the algorithm can put out with the rest of what researchers know (semantic information that the algorithm doesn't have and probably won't any time soon), it might just be possible.
For YouTube, the content creation isn't done on Flash. It's done in a video editor.
Flash is, however, the content delivery system, and that's of interest to the content creators. Or at least, the content deliverers, like YouTube. And both care a lot more about getting the content delivered to the vast majority of potential users than any other concerns.
A historian of philosophy would, of course, focus on the historical aspects.
I was contrasting it with "working philosophers" (with whom I am connected, being in ontologies) who often seem to hold the original description of a theory (Plato, Neitzsche, Augustine, etc.) as if the descriptive document itself were important. If you haven't read Sartre, then you don't know Sartre, and so on.
It's almost like a work of fiction: if you're reading somebody else's description of Harry Potter, you don't know Harry Potter. Only Rowling has the One True Harry Potter.
But that's foreign thinking to a scientist: you can be an excellent physicist without reading Newton; you can be an excellent chemist without reading Arrhenius. The originals are historically important, but there's no requirement to read them. The description in your textbook is sufficient, and arguably better, since it's improved by the intervening years (made clearer, refuted ideas skipped, new frameworks incorporated, etc.)
I know this isn't true of all philosophers or all philosophical disciplines. But it's a thing I hear a lot, and I'm not so certain that philosophers draw as strong a distinction between philosophy and history of philosophy. Given the nature of philosophy, a historical view may be critical to the practice of it.
I'll have to finish the paper to see if it is reasonable.
It sure doesn't look that way to me. Certainly not enough to justify the self-aggrandizement in the press release. It's not so much a "code" as a structure. It's not steganography.
It may reveal some details of how Plato himself thought of things, but it's not really any sort philosophical revelation. (From a scientist's point of view, philosophers have an odd fascination with the original sources, of which descendants are treated as degraded versions rather than improvements. Nobody would think to look in Principia or Origin of Species for special clues about the science that only Newton or Darwin would have had.)
Don't bother. Their "source" is Glenn Beck or similar, whom they believe without reservation.
It didn't matter who the nominee was. They've got their preferred epithets (including both "communist" and "fascist", despite being contradictions in terms). Obama could have nominated an aardvark and it would have been a communist, fascist, death-panel-craving aardvark.
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Oops. Moderated you wrong and can't undo it so I'm posting to wipe that out. Sorry.
This is more or less the plan that Bush put in place, and was essentially mandated by the Iraqi government. They have a legitimate (or at least "recognized") government there, and we're no longer an invading army. We have permission, under a Status of Forces agreement.
So the timing is completely unsurprising, and Obama's doing nothing that wasn't basically mandated, but it is what he wanted all along. McCain would have had to do the same, though probably less willingly.
Broadway is the cheap gringo alternative to actual theater.
Gringo alternative, perhaps, but not cheap. If audiences are up in arms about this, it's because Broadway ticket prices are very high, at least in part because a whole orchestra of musicians is expensive. They're replacing it with something cheaper, but is the price going to go down?
It probably won't go down by much. Broadway has become increasingly about spectacle and special effects. The live musicians are only a part of that, but they are a part, and the shows are ever so slightly less spectacular for having prerecorded music rather than human beings.
I completely concur that this is a poor substitute for the magic of real theater (I'm a Shakespearean actor myself), the junk food of live entertainment, and I don't much care if they're substituting corn syrup for sugar. But like junk food, it's sure potent stuff.
I'm happy that it was phrased in the form of a question. Too often, the reaction to a bit of science that somebody doesn't wish to believe is simply rejection of it, perhaps combined with unsourced assertions (or assertions to un-peer-reviewed sources).
You don't have to know everything in science. There's too much to know. Ignorance is fine, as long as you're (a) aware of it, (b) curious, and (c) not going to fight against those who do know it.
The paper got more than the usual attention from the media because of it's charming title and charismatic author, as well as a very attractive accompanying illustration.
It was nonetheless serious research, and as others have noted has been cited numerous times. It has been kicked around in the usual way of advanced theories, with nothing conclusive either way.
In the popular press it was really more human-interest story than science story; practically no science writers are even remotely capable of reading a paper like that. In the relevant community it gets about the right amount of attention: a difficult theory in a far-out reach of theoretical physics, competing with other equally difficult theories, all of them purely abstract at this point.
So abstract, that is, that it really has no business being in the popular press at all, but people are curious about the cosmological implications even if they're really not in a position to understand them.
And falsifiability isn't just an arbitrary criterion. It's the essence of why science is relevant.
Falsifiability means that you can do things with the information: it makes a prediction that if you do X, Y will happen. If Y doesn't happen, you know X was wrong.
If Y does happen, it doesn't actually prove X, but if Y was something you wanted, you've created something of value. Something you couldn't have gotten without the theory.
Not every prediction is immediately useful, but it's all part of the enterprise of science. If it weren't involved in making useful predictions, there would be no point in learning science.
I'd have settled for a digital rendering from plans. This isn't even that. These are paintings, containing no more engineering than you'd see on the cover of a sci-fi pulp novel.
Here's an article about it that sucks slightly less, with more and bigger paintings:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1007/21boeing/
It's still a stretch to call it "showing off" when you haven't even got a mock up.
Well, that was part of the joke. Makeup, skillfully applied, can do remarkable things.
And yes, she is a gorgeous woman who looks fantastic without makeup. But makeup can be used to create a variety of looks, rather than just the one you were born with, like dressing up.
ZIP-confirmation and other two-factor authentication hacks aren't going to cut it.
ZIP confirmation has always seemed spectacularly useless. If you've got somebody's card, the ability to get their address seems trivial. The card comes with the name on it (including on the mag stripe), and Google will give you an address much of the time from that.
Is there some secret advantage here that I'm missing, or is it just the credit card company's lazy way of pretending to add security?
You don't get all that much tactile feedback from a mouse. You can feel it moving, but you can feel your hand moving even without the mouse.
The only tactile feedback that you get from the mouse is when you click the key, and if the action on screen responds you don't really need tactile feedback.
What's not clear to me is how it distinguishes click-and-drag from "I lifted my finger and now I'm putting it down."
This pretty much is the "laser virtual keyboard", only with an IR laser instead. You can't see the grid, but you don't have to, since the cursor on screen gives you feedback.
Are you just troling, or hoping nobody notices that the same criteria we use to distinguish ID from science (lack of testable predictions) thus far applies to string theory as well?
That's not really true. String theory makes a great many testable predictions, in that it devolves down to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Every test of quantum mechanics tests part of string theory, and those tests pass with flying colors.
People speak of string theory as if it were some sort of wild guess, but that's simply untrue. It's an extension of existing, well-founded work in quantum field theory. It is very much unlike intelligent design, which fails what few tests it does have, and is not built on top of any other cogent theory.
What string theory lacks is a set of tests for distinguishing it from other solutions to the problems of quantum mechanics. That is indeed a serious fault with it, and it means it may be premature to be putting much effort into string theory, especially at the cost of other theories. All of them, however, have only guesses as to their practical value, since the other theories also lack testable predictions. We pursue any of them only in the pure-science sense that good things sometimes come in unexpected places.
Nobody would give two hoots about string theory if it weren't for the philosophical ramifications: they're working on origin-of-the-universe stuff, which is of tremendous interest but little value since it's a state of the world we can't actually reproduce. It may yet prove to have practical value in unexpected ways, as quantum mechanics did, but to the general public it's all (literally) Greek except for the "how did we get here" question. Which causes a lot of people to express strong opinions about a field in which, curiously, they have essentially zero experience.
I only know about this in what I get from western media, but the impression I get of Chavez is that he seems to be heavily invested in a paranoid vision of the US that sounds an awful lot like what I hear from Iran and North Korea.
I'm perfectly willing to believe he's not as bad as the media makes him out to be, but I know for sure that the US is not as bad as he makes it out to be. (Or at least, what my media tells me he makes us out to be.)
My tentative conclusion so far is that he's actually running the country rather poorly, and that he succeeds only because he's got a lot of oil revenue coming in. The rest is built on jingoism and instilling fear of a nonexistent aggressor. (OK, the US has given depressing indications that this "aggression" isn't as nonexistent as I'd like, but he practically seems to be inviting it by painting us as monsters.)
It sounds like you've got better first-hand info and I'd really like to hear it.
It allows to to more accurately compute the position of your dangling modifiers!
Er, right. Position and momentum is what I'd meant to say.
And of course, there's that stupid cat-in-a-box thing...
Not relevant in this case. The uncertainty is between two different measurements, say, mass and momentum. You don't care about the momentum in this case, so the uncertainty in the momentum can be as high as you like. (In this case they're measuring radius rather than mass, but the uncertainty principle governs many different pairs of measurements.)
Doesn't it seem more likely that it's just not possible to get an accurate measurement with the electron -- like measuring a grape with a yardstick instead of a micrometer?
It's more like trying to measure an watermelon with a yardstick rather than a grape. The muon is heavier by a factor of 200, so the energy levels are higher, making them easier to detect with precision. The energy levels of the electron are very small and fine, making them hard to measure with precision.
In large part, I agree, but I don't think we're there yet. Yes, I'd like people to understand science. The whole country would be better off.
But step 1 is to stop mis-understanding it, and that's a fight that's proving shocking difficult. In some ways, the scientists appear to be losing it.
The public does not need to know anything in any given field, but it would be helpful if they really understood how science works.
I agree, though I think it's slightly aside from the question. No scientist has the job of communicating how science works. A working scientist studies her field, and communicates the results from that.
But as you say, that's only possible against a background of understanding science. And for the anti-science people I had in mind, they start with a distrust of scientists. "Controversial" science matters frequently boil down to people who think that a vast swath of scientists are engaged in some sort of swindle.
If you could eliminate those people from the voting pool, the job of a scientist to communicate would be radically different. Unfortunately, they are a loud and obnoxious vote, and there's no way for actual science to be communicated against that background.
The public doesn't necessarily have to understand science. It's not their job.
I would say, however, that it's their job to at least not actively be misled, and that's the rub here. When you don't understand something, you can be neutral, and you haven't made life any worse for anybody.
But being vocal in the opposite direction, and showing an active aversion to learning it... that's something no scientist can fix. Worse, the more a scientist tries, the more you can take the multiple attempts to dumb it down as evidence that it can't be explained.
Scientists do need to learn to explain well, and that's an ongoing challenge to be met. But the vocal and anti-science part of the public is not a problem that can be met. That's damage that has to be worked around.
It's a good thought, and definitely worth a try once they've worked the algorithm more. (This is very preliminary stuff.)
But Linear A is going to be hard. There are a lot of fragments, but they're still fragments. The longest texts are only a few sentences long, and most are much shorter than that.
Nonetheless, it's a very promising start. When you combine what the algorithm can put out with the rest of what researchers know (semantic information that the algorithm doesn't have and probably won't any time soon), it might just be possible.
Cool! I wasn't aware of this. So you get thanks (in lieu of mod points, which is what you'd have gotten from me yesterday when I had some.)
Too bad Claudius didn't leave a dictionary.
For YouTube, the content creation isn't done on Flash. It's done in a video editor.
Flash is, however, the content delivery system, and that's of interest to the content creators. Or at least, the content deliverers, like YouTube. And both care a lot more about getting the content delivered to the vast majority of potential users than any other concerns.
A historian of philosophy would, of course, focus on the historical aspects.
I was contrasting it with "working philosophers" (with whom I am connected, being in ontologies) who often seem to hold the original description of a theory (Plato, Neitzsche, Augustine, etc.) as if the descriptive document itself were important. If you haven't read Sartre, then you don't know Sartre, and so on.
It's almost like a work of fiction: if you're reading somebody else's description of Harry Potter, you don't know Harry Potter. Only Rowling has the One True Harry Potter.
But that's foreign thinking to a scientist: you can be an excellent physicist without reading Newton; you can be an excellent chemist without reading Arrhenius. The originals are historically important, but there's no requirement to read them. The description in your textbook is sufficient, and arguably better, since it's improved by the intervening years (made clearer, refuted ideas skipped, new frameworks incorporated, etc.)
I know this isn't true of all philosophers or all philosophical disciplines. But it's a thing I hear a lot, and I'm not so certain that philosophers draw as strong a distinction between philosophy and history of philosophy. Given the nature of philosophy, a historical view may be critical to the practice of it.
I'll have to finish the paper to see if it is reasonable.
It sure doesn't look that way to me. Certainly not enough to justify the self-aggrandizement in the press release. It's not so much a "code" as a structure. It's not steganography.
It may reveal some details of how Plato himself thought of things, but it's not really any sort philosophical revelation. (From a scientist's point of view, philosophers have an odd fascination with the original sources, of which descendants are treated as degraded versions rather than improvements. Nobody would think to look in Principia or Origin of Species for special clues about the science that only Newton or Darwin would have had.)
Source?
Don't bother. Their "source" is Glenn Beck or similar, whom they believe without reservation.
It didn't matter who the nominee was. They've got their preferred epithets (including both "communist" and "fascist", despite being contradictions in terms). Obama could have nominated an aardvark and it would have been a communist, fascist, death-panel-craving aardvark.