That is kind of amazing, actually. I'd like to see somebody bring up this resolution with respect to UNHRC member Saudi Arabia's textbooks (the ones that calls Jews "apes").
> Which is to say we should really think about what we are talking about.
For the most part "we" aren't really entitled to an opinion. I'm not a climate scientist, and (most likely) neither are you. Neither as Al Gore, nor Freeman Dyson. And definitely not James Inhofe.
"We" need to sit down and listen to what those who are climatologists say. It's practically impossible to get that information, unfortunately, because you'll find that most people go out and select scientists who agree with what they want, regardless of whether they understand the work. That clutters up every source except (maybe) the peer-reviewed journals with misinformation and half-truths.
The peer-reviewed journals, the ones written by climatologists and reviewed by other climatologists, are pretty clear and consistent in their conclusions. Leading to either two possibilities: 1. They are correct 2. They are part of a large and elaborate conspiracy
I find option #2 bizarre, but it seems to be pretty popular.
You don't need to be an alchemist to to proclaim the absurdity of turning lead to gold.
But you need to be an expert in the field to show why. It's not at all obvious that you can't do it. It wasn't until the 20th century that scientists began to understand the nature of the atom.
The moral being that significant changes to the scientific consensus nearly always come from experts inside the field, rather than from crusading outsiders. Insights are great, but you need to know what you're having an insight into, or you're just guessing.
So what you are saying is that, the hypothesis does not make any predictions, so it is "Not even wrong" ?
That's true, except that the few predictions it does make are wrong. (The age of the earth is clearly greater than 6,000 years, and the creation theory contains no explanation for why all the evidence should consistently point to a much older age. Species do not always reproduce after their kind. And so on.)
The theory can be pushed and prodded to make it not actually inconsistent ("See, by 'day', we mean a couple of billion years...") But it doesn't predict those things; these explanations are formed after the fact.
That's the real problem: there is no one Creationism Theory. It continually shifts to avoid being proven wrong. Which wouldn't be so bad; every science does this. But since it has yet to have ANY predictive successes, it doesn't seem a particularly fruitful avenue of research.
Don't worry about click tracks, real musicians with real talent probably don't have any need for them.
But real musicians are hard to come by. And performers (at least live performers) have to do things beyond just play music. They have to look pretty, and dance, and entertain the audience between songs. They even have to be able to get along with other musicians, not always an easy thing to do. Heck, just getting them to show up on time is hard.
By eliminating the talent portion of the competition, record companies can create performances that people want to see. It's musically rubbish, but we're talking about a business, not art.
It's very sad. A good friend is an extremely talented musician, the whole package: good ear, good songwriter, hits it on the first take, good with audiences, pretty, etc. But she has to compete against talentless hacks who can be overproduced into sounding good, making it very hard to get noticed, and a lot of her key skills are now computerized. She'd have made it big 20 years ago, but today, she's about to give up.
There were a few scenarios in this past election where McCain and Obama tied, and it would have taken only a single faithless elector to swing the result. That would have made somebody _very_ famous, in a Steve Bartman kind of way.
There was talk that the nutjob camp were lobbying electors to change their votes on the grounds that Obama faked his birth certificate. Unsurprisingly, they were 100% unsuccessful.
"Darwinian" is an honorific title, and is perfectly acceptable. The article is complaining about the term "Darwinism". The suffix "-ism" connotes an ideology or religion, like "socialism" or "Judaism".
That is, it goes beyond merely honoring the guy, but suggests a way of life devoted to it, irrespective of reality. "Creationism" is an -ism, and they see "Darwinism" as the dual, with a different god.
Not that insisting otherwise will do any good. Creationism will remain an -ism, and they'll remain attached to it regardless of reference to reality.
Thanks. Interesting. I drive a small car myself, and would rather see more of them on the road. I just get cranky about stories whose headline is "look what kind of mileage we got from this alternative fuel/engine" when the real message is "look what kind of mileage you can get when you take all of the steel off the car".
The Aptera looks like a recumbent bicycle. Is it going to be legal to take it on American roads?
It's easy to make a car get a zillion miles to the gallon (or the charge) if you remove all of the safety features, like a body that crunches instead of the driver.
If you want high mileage, get a motorcycle. It may also significantly improve organ donations.
I think part of the problem is that lawyers and legislators are really bad programmers. They cover corner cases by jamming in lots of special-case code, rather than refactoring.
I suppose that rather than blame them, we could blame the fact that they're doing maintenance on a 200 year old legacy system. That mandates leaving lots of crap in place and trying to cover it up with more, baroque crap.
I'm not in favor of refactoring the same way we went about it last time (with guns in the hands of extremely peeved users), but I've heard it suggested that it's time for another Constitutional Convention.
Which is a stupid reason to be for a scientific theory
But an excellent reason to be against a candidate. As a scientific question it's deeply flawed, but it does zero in on candidates who have an insufficient understanding of science and cannot be trusted (in my opinion) with an office where science is supposed to inform their actions.
Nearly all complex theories are poorly understood by non-scientists (and even scientists in a different field). Which is OK; I don't have to be an automotive engineer to drive a car, either. We accept the work of the experts and get on with our lives, knowing that we could go back and verify their work if the impulse moved us. So a person who believes that they know better than the experts (in any field) is either wildly brilliant or seriously deluded, and it's vastly more likely to be the latter.
When you standardize on something, it continues to work, at the cost of being unable to integrate anything new.
GMail was invented more recently than whenever this company standardized on W2K and IE6. It's a new feature of the web, and you guys can't have it. It's up to management to decide what the cost of doing business is worth to them.
It sounds in this case like the cost is pretty considerable, unfortunately. Old apps don't upgrade cheaply.
> If the collective "landlords" want to impose certain requirements for use of their property, so be it.
I agree, though it's not clear that we landlords actually do want filtering. It is the cause of a vocal minority, one which happens to have the ear of the current President (who has considerable authority over the FCC). But we're getting a new President soon who may be less censorious.
TFA says it's a $170 flashlight. It's got a lifetime warranty, but I always lose flashlights before they fail on me.
What I want to know is, how quickly does it self-discharge? It doesn't do me any good to have it charge in 90 seconds if I don't need it until the power goes out.
I'm not a big fan of add-ons either, but I find some sort of anti-flashiness blocker absolutely essential. No flash, no animated gifs, no dancing javascriptiness unless I say it should go.
Get that into Chrome and I'm all over it. I keep it around for certain pages that I know don't suck but which need a performance boost.
In Minnesota, don't you need a block heater anyway? Since you're plugging your car in to charge it, it seems a simple operation to also keep the battery warm enough.
No. I find his work visually attractive but stultifyingly misogynistic. I hate the way it glorifies violence. I'm familiar with it mostly from films rather than the books, but the films seem to hew very closely to the books.
Sin City is the only film I've walked out of in disgust. 300 was beautiful but best viewed with the sound off because the dialogue was incredibly stupid.
I admit, Wikipedia has restored a little bit of my faith in humanity. Seriously.
I've browsed Slashdot at -1 and it will sear your soul. There are a lot of people with little to do except cause grief for other people, and they seem to have a lot of free time. I believed that Wikipedia would spend more time vandalized than not.
I do fairly frequently have to edit out minor vandalism, but it remains long enough for me to edit it out only because it's so minor. There really do seem to be more people willing to put a bit of effort into helping than I had thought.
Unfortunately philanthropy won't ever take off unless it's profitable.
When it's profitable, they don't call it "philanthropy". They call it "business".
There are plenty of important philanthropists out there, willing to spend money at a "loss" in financial terms. Most notably, Bill Gates is spending more money than the entire network of all of Slashdot's readers to try to cure malaria and other global development programs. Carnegie Mellon University is the result of a massive philanthropic donation.
I'd say philanthropy has already taken off, despite not being profitable, because a lot of people think that there's more to life than profit. They have to start with the profit to make the money to donate, but they don't end there.
> Take 'global warmming' both sides have a lot of theory but very little in the way of good tests that can prove it one way or the other.
No, they don't. One side has a vast array of scientists who all draw the same conclusions from peer-reviewed research with near universal accord. They also have a good deal of data to back up their theories.
The other side has a bunch of deliberately designed, mutually contradictory, un-peer-reviewed theories for the sole purpose of making non-climate-scientists believe that the science is bad on both sides.
It's deliberately designed to appeal to people who don't know the difference between climate and weather. It should be pretty clear that I can predict that it'll be colder in January than August (in the northern hemisphere) without being able to tell you it will rain tomorrow.
There is science on one side, and a deliberately anti-scientific campaign on the other. Science has uncertainty, quantified and part of the theory. The other side exploits that people don't understand how scientists deal with uncertainty to achieve a political, not scientific, goal.
Yes. This 95% is the mass everybody expected to see in plain old ordinary matter, but wasn't previously accounted for in the QCD theory. We already had the experimental observation; now, we just know that the the theory gives the same answer.
Essentially, it's not telling us anything we didn't already know, so we don't get any new theories out of it. It does increase the confidence in the existing theory, so people who are trying to figure out what the dark matter is can rely more strongly on the theories we already have. But it's not opening up any new avenues.
It's always a little too bad when theory and observation do mesh, because it's when they disagree that we really learn something. But it's also nice to know that the theories are good ones, so at least we can use them as a basis for seeking out other discrepancies.
the skull bears a cut mark above the left eye that corresponds with a scar shown in the painting.
Scars are one thing, but a wound that leaves a mark all the way down to the skull... that's gotta sting.
TFA also says that the reconstruction shows a broken nose. Is it even possible to have evidence of a broken nose on the skull? "Broken nose" as shown in the painting is cartilage damage, which would probably all be gone by now.
I'm sure you can add in a broken nose to the reconstruction, but in context, it was being cited as evidence. Just bad journalism, or dubious research?
I found this part at least as interesting as the stem cells:
To create the new windpipe, the team took a seven-centimeter (2.75-inch) segment of trachea from a 51-year-old who had died. Over a six-week period, the team then removed all the cells from the donor trachea, because those cells could lead to rejection of the organ after transplant.
All that remained of the donor's stripped-down trachea was a matrix of collagen, a sort of scaffolding onto which the team then put Castillo's own stem cells -- along with cells taken from a healthy part of her trachea.
So there's still a donor involved, but there's less risk of rejection. We're still a ways from growing sophisticated organs from scratch, but this is an interesting implementation detail.
âoeWe have overcome some significant technological challenges in developing the I-Ball technology,â said Paul Thompson of Dreampact. âoeAlthough it is in its early stages, we are very excited about the technology's potential to help our troops to be better prepared for battle.â
In other words, "We had an idea, and we've got no idea how to actually implement it, but if the MoD gives us a bunch of money we'll happily spend it."
Maybe the UK MoD is better than the US DoD about not funding projects just because some legislator is owed a favor, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Slashdot Mirror
I am amazed they didn't exclude Judaism from it.
That is kind of amazing, actually. I'd like to see somebody bring up this resolution with respect to UNHRC member Saudi Arabia's textbooks (the ones that calls Jews "apes").
> Which is to say we should really think about what we are talking about.
For the most part "we" aren't really entitled to an opinion. I'm not a climate scientist, and (most likely) neither are you. Neither as Al Gore, nor Freeman Dyson. And definitely not James Inhofe.
"We" need to sit down and listen to what those who are climatologists say. It's practically impossible to get that information, unfortunately, because you'll find that most people go out and select scientists who agree with what they want, regardless of whether they understand the work. That clutters up every source except (maybe) the peer-reviewed journals with misinformation and half-truths.
The peer-reviewed journals, the ones written by climatologists and reviewed by other climatologists, are pretty clear and consistent in their conclusions. Leading to either two possibilities:
1. They are correct
2. They are part of a large and elaborate conspiracy
I find option #2 bizarre, but it seems to be pretty popular.
You don't need to be an alchemist to to proclaim the absurdity of turning lead to gold.
But you need to be an expert in the field to show why. It's not at all obvious that you can't do it. It wasn't until the 20th century that scientists began to understand the nature of the atom.
And not too long after that, they DID actually turn lead into gold. In trivial amounts, a few atoms at a time.
The moral being that significant changes to the scientific consensus nearly always come from experts inside the field, rather than from crusading outsiders. Insights are great, but you need to know what you're having an insight into, or you're just guessing.
So what you are saying is that, the hypothesis does not make any predictions, so it is "Not even wrong" ?
That's true, except that the few predictions it does make are wrong. (The age of the earth is clearly greater than 6,000 years, and the creation theory contains no explanation for why all the evidence should consistently point to a much older age. Species do not always reproduce after their kind. And so on.)
The theory can be pushed and prodded to make it not actually inconsistent ("See, by 'day', we mean a couple of billion years...") But it doesn't predict those things; these explanations are formed after the fact.
That's the real problem: there is no one Creationism Theory. It continually shifts to avoid being proven wrong. Which wouldn't be so bad; every science does this. But since it has yet to have ANY predictive successes, it doesn't seem a particularly fruitful avenue of research.
Don't worry about click tracks, real musicians with real talent probably don't have any need for them.
But real musicians are hard to come by. And performers (at least live performers) have to do things beyond just play music. They have to look pretty, and dance, and entertain the audience between songs. They even have to be able to get along with other musicians, not always an easy thing to do. Heck, just getting them to show up on time is hard.
By eliminating the talent portion of the competition, record companies can create performances that people want to see. It's musically rubbish, but we're talking about a business, not art.
It's very sad. A good friend is an extremely talented musician, the whole package: good ear, good songwriter, hits it on the first take, good with audiences, pretty, etc. But she has to compete against talentless hacks who can be overproduced into sounding good, making it very hard to get noticed, and a lot of her key skills are now computerized. She'd have made it big 20 years ago, but today, she's about to give up.
There were a few scenarios in this past election where McCain and Obama tied, and it would have taken only a single faithless elector to swing the result. That would have made somebody _very_ famous, in a Steve Bartman kind of way.
There was talk that the nutjob camp were lobbying electors to change their votes on the grounds that Obama faked his birth certificate. Unsurprisingly, they were 100% unsuccessful.
Well, compare your internet and mobile phone service to Asian countries, and let me know.
"Darwinian" is an honorific title, and is perfectly acceptable. The article is complaining about the term "Darwinism". The suffix "-ism" connotes an ideology or religion, like "socialism" or "Judaism".
That is, it goes beyond merely honoring the guy, but suggests a way of life devoted to it, irrespective of reality. "Creationism" is an -ism, and they see "Darwinism" as the dual, with a different god.
Not that insisting otherwise will do any good. Creationism will remain an -ism, and they'll remain attached to it regardless of reference to reality.
Thanks. Interesting. I drive a small car myself, and would rather see more of them on the road. I just get cranky about stories whose headline is "look what kind of mileage we got from this alternative fuel/engine" when the real message is "look what kind of mileage you can get when you take all of the steel off the car".
The Aptera looks like a recumbent bicycle. Is it going to be legal to take it on American roads?
It's easy to make a car get a zillion miles to the gallon (or the charge) if you remove all of the safety features, like a body that crunches instead of the driver.
If you want high mileage, get a motorcycle. It may also significantly improve organ donations.
I think part of the problem is that lawyers and legislators are really bad programmers. They cover corner cases by jamming in lots of special-case code, rather than refactoring.
I suppose that rather than blame them, we could blame the fact that they're doing maintenance on a 200 year old legacy system. That mandates leaving lots of crap in place and trying to cover it up with more, baroque crap.
I'm not in favor of refactoring the same way we went about it last time (with guns in the hands of extremely peeved users), but I've heard it suggested that it's time for another Constitutional Convention.
Which is a stupid reason to be for a scientific theory
But an excellent reason to be against a candidate. As a scientific question it's deeply flawed, but it does zero in on candidates who have an insufficient understanding of science and cannot be trusted (in my opinion) with an office where science is supposed to inform their actions.
Nearly all complex theories are poorly understood by non-scientists (and even scientists in a different field). Which is OK; I don't have to be an automotive engineer to drive a car, either. We accept the work of the experts and get on with our lives, knowing that we could go back and verify their work if the impulse moved us. So a person who believes that they know better than the experts (in any field) is either wildly brilliant or seriously deluded, and it's vastly more likely to be the latter.
When you standardize on something, it continues to work, at the cost of being unable to integrate anything new.
GMail was invented more recently than whenever this company standardized on W2K and IE6. It's a new feature of the web, and you guys can't have it. It's up to management to decide what the cost of doing business is worth to them.
It sounds in this case like the cost is pretty considerable, unfortunately. Old apps don't upgrade cheaply.
> If the collective "landlords" want to impose certain requirements for use of their property, so be it.
I agree, though it's not clear that we landlords actually do want filtering. It is the cause of a vocal minority, one which happens to have the ear of the current President (who has considerable authority over the FCC). But we're getting a new President soon who may be less censorious.
TFA says it's a $170 flashlight. It's got a lifetime warranty, but I always lose flashlights before they fail on me.
What I want to know is, how quickly does it self-discharge? It doesn't do me any good to have it charge in 90 seconds if I don't need it until the power goes out.
I'm not a big fan of add-ons either, but I find some sort of anti-flashiness blocker absolutely essential. No flash, no animated gifs, no dancing javascriptiness unless I say it should go.
Get that into Chrome and I'm all over it. I keep it around for certain pages that I know don't suck but which need a performance boost.
In Minnesota, don't you need a block heater anyway? Since you're plugging your car in to charge it, it seems a simple operation to also keep the battery warm enough.
No. I find his work visually attractive but stultifyingly misogynistic. I hate the way it glorifies violence. I'm familiar with it mostly from films rather than the books, but the films seem to hew very closely to the books.
Sin City is the only film I've walked out of in disgust. 300 was beautiful but best viewed with the sound off because the dialogue was incredibly stupid.
I admit, Wikipedia has restored a little bit of my faith in humanity. Seriously.
I've browsed Slashdot at -1 and it will sear your soul. There are a lot of people with little to do except cause grief for other people, and they seem to have a lot of free time. I believed that Wikipedia would spend more time vandalized than not.
I do fairly frequently have to edit out minor vandalism, but it remains long enough for me to edit it out only because it's so minor. There really do seem to be more people willing to put a bit of effort into helping than I had thought.
Unfortunately philanthropy won't ever take off unless it's profitable.
When it's profitable, they don't call it "philanthropy". They call it "business".
There are plenty of important philanthropists out there, willing to spend money at a "loss" in financial terms. Most notably, Bill Gates is spending more money than the entire network of all of Slashdot's readers to try to cure malaria and other global development programs. Carnegie Mellon University is the result of a massive philanthropic donation.
I'd say philanthropy has already taken off, despite not being profitable, because a lot of people think that there's more to life than profit. They have to start with the profit to make the money to donate, but they don't end there.
> Take 'global warmming' both sides have a lot of theory but very little in the way of good tests that can prove it one way or the other.
No, they don't. One side has a vast array of scientists who all draw the same conclusions from peer-reviewed research with near universal accord. They also have a good deal of data to back up their theories.
The other side has a bunch of deliberately designed, mutually contradictory, un-peer-reviewed theories for the sole purpose of making non-climate-scientists believe that the science is bad on both sides.
It's deliberately designed to appeal to people who don't know the difference between climate and weather. It should be pretty clear that I can predict that it'll be colder in January than August (in the northern hemisphere) without being able to tell you it will rain tomorrow.
There is science on one side, and a deliberately anti-scientific campaign on the other. Science has uncertainty, quantified and part of the theory. The other side exploits that people don't understand how scientists deal with uncertainty to achieve a political, not scientific, goal.
Yes. This 95% is the mass everybody expected to see in plain old ordinary matter, but wasn't previously accounted for in the QCD theory. We already had the experimental observation; now, we just know that the the theory gives the same answer.
Essentially, it's not telling us anything we didn't already know, so we don't get any new theories out of it. It does increase the confidence in the existing theory, so people who are trying to figure out what the dark matter is can rely more strongly on the theories we already have. But it's not opening up any new avenues.
It's always a little too bad when theory and observation do mesh, because it's when they disagree that we really learn something. But it's also nice to know that the theories are good ones, so at least we can use them as a basis for seeking out other discrepancies.
From TFA:
the skull bears a cut mark above the left eye that corresponds with a scar shown in the painting.
Scars are one thing, but a wound that leaves a mark all the way down to the skull... that's gotta sting.
TFA also says that the reconstruction shows a broken nose. Is it even possible to have evidence of a broken nose on the skull? "Broken nose" as shown in the painting is cartilage damage, which would probably all be gone by now.
I'm sure you can add in a broken nose to the reconstruction, but in context, it was being cited as evidence. Just bad journalism, or dubious research?
I found this part at least as interesting as the stem cells:
To create the new windpipe, the team took a seven-centimeter (2.75-inch) segment of trachea from a 51-year-old who had died. Over a six-week period, the team then removed all the cells from the donor trachea, because those cells could lead to rejection of the organ after transplant.
All that remained of the donor's stripped-down trachea was a matrix of collagen, a sort of scaffolding onto which the team then put Castillo's own stem cells -- along with cells taken from a healthy part of her trachea.
So there's still a donor involved, but there's less risk of rejection. We're still a ways from growing sophisticated organs from scratch, but this is an interesting implementation detail.
From TFA:
âoeWe have overcome some significant technological challenges in developing the I-Ball technology,â said Paul Thompson of Dreampact. âoeAlthough it is in its early stages, we are very excited about the technology's potential to help our troops to be better prepared for battle.â
In other words, "We had an idea, and we've got no idea how to actually implement it, but if the MoD gives us a bunch of money we'll happily spend it."
Maybe the UK MoD is better than the US DoD about not funding projects just because some legislator is owed a favor, but I wouldn't bet on it.