The cite you link to is pure activism, a message board for people who want to interfere with these tests for whatever reason.
Looking at the other references on that page, including the ABC news article, we see that the "link" between these specific sonar experiments and beached whales is that one beaching took place a few days after one of the tests occurred.
That's not a link, that's a coincidence. And yes, I know that the scientist calculated the "odds" of this being just a coincidence as being 0.07 percent, but that's an excellent example of lying with numbers. You could use similar logic to link whale beachings to the release of Limp Bizkit albums if you really felt like it.
Nothing on that page bolsters the original post's claim that "the US government plans to start using powerful sonar communications that, in test runs, have caused whales to beach with under highly atypical signs of death (the equivalent of bleading ears). "
Speed of sound through seawater isn't constant; it can vary dramatically with temperature and salinity.
I question the usefulness of this technique. As described in the article, then went between a land-based station and a hydrophone. The article claimed that for it to work, they needed to know the location of the hydrophone. It also seems that water conditions needed to remain static; if they change significantly, I don't think you have a link anymore.
And more importantly, when communicating with subs at sea, you don't know their precise location. Subs go out on patrol, and might be assigned to a given area, but they don't constantly update COMSUBLANT or whoever of their position and depth. Generally, they're alerted to incoming message traffic by ELF radio transmission, which tells them to go shallow and talk to a satellite for more detailed information.
A transmission system that requires the person sending the message to know exactly where the submarine is kind of defeats the entire purpose of having submarines in the first place.
I live in Vienna, VA. Vienna is a fairly well-to-do suburb of Washington, D.C., arguably the most important city on earth.
I cannot get DSL. Verizon claims it's not in my area. According to DSLreports.com, I'm within the requisite distance to my CO, and Speakeasy, Megapath, and Earthlink should all be capable of selling me service. But when I tried to actually buy it, in the time between when the order was processed and when it was installed, I was told that I'm actually too far from my CO, and that Verizon had given them bad information.
I could get cable, but @home is one stale bean fart away from going under.
Some choice, isn't it? A significantly higher percentage of Koreans have broadband than Americans. Here's a product which everyone wants, which everyone wants to pay for, and which the various communications companies are seemingly unwilling/unable to provide.
Screw 'em. If I could get broadband like I get my water, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Obviously, this is just a brilliant strategem with which @home hopes to stave off their impending backruptcy.
I have no idea how it's supposed to work, but I'm sure alienating your current customers when you're already near-broke it really a good idea. Somehow.
Valid points? Like what? His arguments against the formation of life here are based on the strawman of random chemical processes, which any biologist will dispute. Hoyle has made grand arguments about a topic out of his field, and they're very superficial ones that only demonstrate his own misunderstanding of what actually goes on.
They're crap. They're every bit as much crap as Creation "science." The fact that they come from an educated astronomer doesn't change the quality of those arguments.
I'm really not surprised that this is happening, and noone else should be, either. It's just the logical extension of the same sort of attitude that results in lawsuits against tobacco companies for the illnesses suffered by chronic smokers, or attempts to sue gun manufacturers for crimes committed with their products.
From now on, if you do something that leads to someone else doing something wrong, you can probably expect to be sued.
Shoot the lawyers. More skin on HBO. LH Puttgrass signing off and heading for the tub.
The 1st Law of Thermodynamics is that the change in the internal energy of a closed system equals the heat added to the system minus the work done by the system; put more simply, it says that energy is conserved in a closed system. You're thinking of Newtonian mechanics.
I fail to understand how a steady-state universe would preclude the existence of paired forces. I don't believe the universe is steady-state, but I'd still be curious to see your reasoning here.
It is a problem with the theory, because Hoyle makes the claim not that life did not arise here, but that life could not arise here, and he supports this by saying that life cannot arise out of a random process.
But life arose somewhere. But Hoyles arguments about why life cannot have arisen on earth apply equally well to everywhere else. So if life drifted down on a comet, Hoyle's arguments can be used to show that life could not have arisen spontaneously on that comet. If it didn't arise on the comet, but came from Planet X, Hoyle's arguments can be used to show that life could not have arisen on Planet X, but must have come from somewhere else, like another comet.
Repeat this line of reasoning until you get tired of the recursion and realize that, according to panspermia, it's just turles all the way down.
That's not all Hoyle said. What Hoyle said was that life could not have originated on Earth.
That assertion does run into the problems above. Clearly, life exists. If it exists, it must have originated on Earth, or somewhere else. If it could not have originated on Earth, why did it originate elsewhere? Hoyle's arguments say nothing about that, and if they are valid arguments, they seem like they could be equally valid about the rest of the universe; I mean, if life is far too complicated to arise out of a random process on Earth, then it would seem that life is far too complicated to arise out of a random process anywhere.
But Hoyle says it did arise somewhere else. So, barring a supernatural creator, it must have arisen out of the same random process that Hoyle claims is impossible. So how did it arise?
Panspermia is at best unnecessary to explain life, and at worst just plain bad science. Shame on Hoyle for supporting it.
It's irrelevant. It may have happened. It may not have happened. But whether it happened or not has absolutely no impact whatsoever on evolutionary theory.
This is not, in any way, evidence of Panspermia. It is evidence for "the presence of clumps of living cells in air samples from as high as 41 kilometers" at altitidues which normally do not see mixing with air from lower altitudes.
For Wickramasinghe to look at that evidence and view it as support for not only the assertion that living organisms are carried to Earth on comets, but also for the assertion that these organisms are the origin for life on earth, is a stunning example of crackpottery.
We found these organisms in the atmosphere. Where did they come from? Somewhere down below, where we observe an abundance of life in a multitude of forms, or from space?
The problem with all these arguments, which are also used by Creationists, is that these things simply don't happen like that. He says "If amino acids were linked at random...", but the very simple fact is that they don't.
Chemicals don't combine randomly; they do so according to predictable physical laws. Carbon atoms don't link up with hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen at random. Proteins don't form randomly. And considering that the time needed for a chemical reaction to occur can be on the order of femtoseconds, the universe has had plenty of time and sufficient raw material for those non-random linkages to occur. Also, his estimates are too high; he commonly uses the figure of 2000 essential enzymes, but we don't know if they are in fact essential; are there alternatives that would do just as well? Hoyle also categorically denies that biochemistries other than our own particular flavor of carbon-based biochemistry are even possible, an assertion that isn't even scientific, let alone supported by evidence.
Hoyle's arguments on this topic are indistinguishable from standard Creationist spiel, and it's profoundly disappointing to see a scientist of his accomplishment sink down into irrational morass in his later years.
It wouldn't even be interesting if it did happen. Ideas and theories stand and fall on their own merits, not on the opinions of their originators. If Einstein in his later years recanted, and took to hanging out in airports wearing saffron robes and handing out daffodils, it wouldn't make relativity any less accurate.
From the link:
"...it is not clear that it is even possible to voluntarily place your software into the public domain under United States law. There is a common myth that one can do so simply by creating a work and writing "This software/work/text is hereby placed in the public domain.", but that does not do, legally, what it is commonly believed to do. For example, it might later be possible for you to assert your ownership over the code and forbid others to use it. "
So current copyright law, which is supposed to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, all for the benefit of the public, now actually makes it difficult for a creator to voluntarily release his work to that public?
Actually, NASA gets "escape velocity" wrong on that page. They're saying it's the speed you need to go just to reach orbit. That's obviously not true, because if you're in orbit, you haven't escaped.
Imagine a universe comprised entirely of the Earth and a freeze-dried aardvark. The aardvark is floating in space at a distance of infinity from the Earth. It begins to fall towards the Earth, accelerating as it goes.
The speed it will have attained by the time it impacts is equal to Earth's escape velocity. It is indeed 11.2km/s, and quite a bit faster than mere orbital velocities.
Not much less. The whole problem to attaining orbit isn't so much that you've got to get up really high, but that you've got to get going really fast. The "first half" of an orbital flight isn't getting to 40,000 feet, it's getting to 8,500 miles per hour.
Starting the engines only at 40,000 feet is helpful if all you want to do is fire a sub-orbital shot that leaves most of the atmosphere and comes back, but for actually putting substantial packages into orbit it doesn't help much, except with tiny payload masses.
Still, I wish the guy good luck. Hopefully he'll fare better than Larry Waters.
Because I felt it sucked. I have no problems whatsoever with buying albums from artists whose work I enjoy, which is why I continue to add to my collection of over 300 CDs even as I use Napster to download songs.
If compensating the artist is the point here, then can I download songs from OpenNap servers and just send the artists checks directly? They'd probably get more from me than if I just bought the CD, after all.
Of course, compensating the artists *isn't* the point. This is about control.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with using a product for which the creator is not being compensated; there can be, under many sets of circumstances, but it's not necessarily. In this case, it's only wrong because it violates certain laws which were only set up for a very specific purpose that had *nothing* to do with rewarding creators.
Actual theft of actual rival goods is a crime that violates another, entirely different set of laws. You won't find copyright violation treated as theft or stealing in any court, legal document, or economic theory in the world. You can try to draw all the analogies you want between them, but again, you'll only point out that you really don't know what you're talking about.
One thing that's always so enjoyable about the Great Copyright Debate is how few people seem able to grasp the difference between rival goods and non-rival goods.
Hint: Songs are not rival goods. Rival goods are treated entirely different in law, and are entirely different economically. Making analogies between the two is a pretty good way to demonstrate your lack of Clue.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm.
The cite you link to is pure activism, a message board for people who want to interfere with these tests for whatever reason.
Looking at the other references on that page, including the ABC news article, we see that the "link" between these specific sonar experiments and beached whales is that one beaching took place a few days after one of the tests occurred.
That's not a link, that's a coincidence. And yes, I know that the scientist calculated the "odds" of this being just a coincidence as being 0.07 percent, but that's an excellent example of lying with numbers. You could use similar logic to link whale beachings to the release of Limp Bizkit albums if you really felt like it.
Nothing on that page bolsters the original post's claim that "the US government plans to start using powerful sonar communications that, in test runs, have caused whales to beach with under highly atypical signs of death (the equivalent of bleading ears). "
Speed of sound through seawater isn't constant; it can vary dramatically with temperature and salinity.
I question the usefulness of this technique. As described in the article, then went between a land-based station and a hydrophone. The article claimed that for it to work, they needed to know the location of the hydrophone. It also seems that water conditions needed to remain static; if they change significantly, I don't think you have a link anymore.
And more importantly, when communicating with subs at sea, you don't know their precise location. Subs go out on patrol, and might be assigned to a given area, but they don't constantly update COMSUBLANT or whoever of their position and depth. Generally, they're alerted to incoming message traffic by ELF radio transmission, which tells them to go shallow and talk to a satellite for more detailed information.
A transmission system that requires the person sending the message to know exactly where the submarine is kind of defeats the entire purpose of having submarines in the first place.
You don't have a cite for that, do you?
Great. Now we're going to have Geo Metros with inferiority complexes repeatedly crashing into Jaguar dealerships.
I live in Vienna, VA. Vienna is a fairly well-to-do suburb of Washington, D.C., arguably the most important city on earth.
I cannot get DSL. Verizon claims it's not in my area. According to DSLreports.com, I'm within the requisite distance to my CO, and Speakeasy, Megapath, and Earthlink should all be capable of selling me service. But when I tried to actually buy it, in the time between when the order was processed and when it was installed, I was told that I'm actually too far from my CO, and that Verizon had given them bad information.
I could get cable, but @home is one stale bean fart away from going under.
Some choice, isn't it? A significantly higher percentage of Koreans have broadband than Americans. Here's a product which everyone wants, which everyone wants to pay for, and which the various communications companies are seemingly unwilling/unable to provide.
Screw 'em. If I could get broadband like I get my water, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Obviously, this is just a brilliant strategem with which @home hopes to stave off their impending backruptcy.
I have no idea how it's supposed to work, but I'm sure alienating your current customers when you're already near-broke it really a good idea. Somehow.
Valid points? Like what? His arguments against the formation of life here are based on the strawman of random chemical processes, which any biologist will dispute. Hoyle has made grand arguments about a topic out of his field, and they're very superficial ones that only demonstrate his own misunderstanding of what actually goes on.
They're crap. They're every bit as much crap as Creation "science." The fact that they come from an educated astronomer doesn't change the quality of those arguments.
I'm really not surprised that this is happening, and noone else should be, either. It's just the logical extension of the same sort of attitude that results in lawsuits against tobacco companies for the illnesses suffered by chronic smokers, or attempts to sue gun manufacturers for crimes committed with their products.
From now on, if you do something that leads to someone else doing something wrong, you can probably expect to be sued.
Shoot the lawyers. More skin on HBO. LH Puttgrass signing off and heading for the tub.
The 1st Law of Thermodynamics is that the change in the internal energy of a closed system equals the heat added to the system minus the work done by the system; put more simply, it says that energy is conserved in a closed system. You're thinking of Newtonian mechanics.
I fail to understand how a steady-state universe would preclude the existence of paired forces. I don't believe the universe is steady-state, but I'd still be curious to see your reasoning here.
It is a problem with the theory, because Hoyle makes the claim not that life did not arise here, but that life could not arise here, and he supports this by saying that life cannot arise out of a random process.
But life arose somewhere. But Hoyles arguments about why life cannot have arisen on earth apply equally well to everywhere else. So if life drifted down on a comet, Hoyle's arguments can be used to show that life could not have arisen spontaneously on that comet. If it didn't arise on the comet, but came from Planet X, Hoyle's arguments can be used to show that life could not have arisen on Planet X, but must have come from somewhere else, like another comet.
Repeat this line of reasoning until you get tired of the recursion and realize that, according to panspermia, it's just turles all the way down.
That's not all Hoyle said. What Hoyle said was that life could not have originated on Earth.
That assertion does run into the problems above. Clearly, life exists. If it exists, it must have originated on Earth, or somewhere else. If it could not have originated on Earth, why did it originate elsewhere? Hoyle's arguments say nothing about that, and if they are valid arguments, they seem like they could be equally valid about the rest of the universe; I mean, if life is far too complicated to arise out of a random process on Earth, then it would seem that life is far too complicated to arise out of a random process anywhere.
But Hoyle says it did arise somewhere else. So, barring a supernatural creator, it must have arisen out of the same random process that Hoyle claims is impossible. So how did it arise?
Panspermia is at best unnecessary to explain life, and at worst just plain bad science. Shame on Hoyle for supporting it.
It's irrelevant. It may have happened. It may not have happened. But whether it happened or not has absolutely no impact whatsoever on evolutionary theory.
This is not, in any way, evidence of Panspermia. It is evidence for "the presence of clumps of living cells in air samples from as high as 41 kilometers" at altitidues which normally do not see mixing with air from lower altitudes.
For Wickramasinghe to look at that evidence and view it as support for not only the assertion that living organisms are carried to Earth on comets, but also for the assertion that these organisms are the origin for life on earth, is a stunning example of crackpottery.
We found these organisms in the atmosphere. Where did they come from? Somewhere down below, where we observe an abundance of life in a multitude of forms, or from space?
Chemicals don't combine randomly; they do so according to predictable physical laws. Carbon atoms don't link up with hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen at random. Proteins don't form randomly. And considering that the time needed for a chemical reaction to occur can be on the order of femtoseconds, the universe has had plenty of time and sufficient raw material for those non-random linkages to occur. Also, his estimates are too high; he commonly uses the figure of 2000 essential enzymes, but we don't know if they are in fact essential; are there alternatives that would do just as well? Hoyle also categorically denies that biochemistries other than our own particular flavor of carbon-based biochemistry are even possible, an assertion that isn't even scientific, let alone supported by evidence.
Hoyle's arguments on this topic are indistinguishable from standard Creationist spiel, and it's profoundly disappointing to see a scientist of his accomplishment sink down into irrational morass in his later years.
It wouldn't even be interesting if it did happen. Ideas and theories stand and fall on their own merits, not on the opinions of their originators. If Einstein in his later years recanted, and took to hanging out in airports wearing saffron robes and handing out daffodils, it wouldn't make relativity any less accurate.
So current copyright law, which is supposed to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, all for the benefit of the public, now actually makes it difficult for a creator to voluntarily release his work to that public?
No sense. None at all.
Yes, they laughed at Newton. They laughed at Galileo. But they also laughed at Bozo the CLown.
Actually, NASA gets "escape velocity" wrong on that page. They're saying it's the speed you need to go just to reach orbit. That's obviously not true, because if you're in orbit, you haven't escaped. Imagine a universe comprised entirely of the Earth and a freeze-dried aardvark. The aardvark is floating in space at a distance of infinity from the Earth. It begins to fall towards the Earth, accelerating as it goes. The speed it will have attained by the time it impacts is equal to Earth's escape velocity. It is indeed 11.2km/s, and quite a bit faster than mere orbital velocities.
Not much less. The whole problem to attaining orbit isn't so much that you've got to get up really high, but that you've got to get going really fast. The "first half" of an orbital flight isn't getting to 40,000 feet, it's getting to 8,500 miles per hour. Starting the engines only at 40,000 feet is helpful if all you want to do is fire a sub-orbital shot that leaves most of the atmosphere and comes back, but for actually putting substantial packages into orbit it doesn't help much, except with tiny payload masses. Still, I wish the guy good luck. Hopefully he'll fare better than Larry Waters.
Because I felt it sucked. I have no problems whatsoever with buying albums from artists whose work I enjoy, which is why I continue to add to my collection of over 300 CDs even as I use Napster to download songs. If compensating the artist is the point here, then can I download songs from OpenNap servers and just send the artists checks directly? They'd probably get more from me than if I just bought the CD, after all. Of course, compensating the artists *isn't* the point. This is about control.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with using a product for which the creator is not being compensated; there can be, under many sets of circumstances, but it's not necessarily. In this case, it's only wrong because it violates certain laws which were only set up for a very specific purpose that had *nothing* to do with rewarding creators. Actual theft of actual rival goods is a crime that violates another, entirely different set of laws. You won't find copyright violation treated as theft or stealing in any court, legal document, or economic theory in the world. You can try to draw all the analogies you want between them, but again, you'll only point out that you really don't know what you're talking about.
One thing that's always so enjoyable about the Great Copyright Debate is how few people seem able to grasp the difference between rival goods and non-rival goods. Hint: Songs are not rival goods. Rival goods are treated entirely different in law, and are entirely different economically. Making analogies between the two is a pretty good way to demonstrate your lack of Clue.