I'm a bit confused by the article too. What is so remarkable about this? All space travel, including satelites, has to take relativistic effects into account. Your GPS would be off by many miles if it didn't.
Maybe! Certainly hummingbirds will like the sugar water as much as bees do.
Not a problem in Britain
Here's another trick that would probably work if you are only interested in attracting bees to your feeder: Paint it yellow. Hummingbirds are attracted to the color red, not so much to yellow.
But yellow may attract a flock of song chavs or a legless tree asbo.
We geeks find it hard to "get in touch with our emotional side" sometimes...
Oh my...
The "alpha-male jocks" mentioned in TFA aren't stupid, they're socially so successful because of their high social/emotional intelligence.
(Some) women may think that what they want in a man is someone who is 'in touch with his emotional side', essentially a girly-man, but in reality a woman with a penis isn't any more attractive to women than it is to men.
You have to be someone she can look up to. In this day and age this doesn't have to mean huge amounts of muscle bulk. She might look up to you for your leet skillz, your artistic prowess or your meticulously cultivated good manners, whatever, but if that element is missing, but being all touchy-feely is not a plus, but something that has to be compensated for.
This also explains why highly successful women so often end up single, or go through divorce after divorce. The selection of men they can look up to is much smaller, and in that segment they have to compete with not very successful but seriously good looking girls.
Let me see you design a five trillion electron volts connection.
Electron volt is not a measure of electric 'volts' but of the kinetic energy of two particles colliding with each other
If I understand TFA correctly, the dodgy joints are between the superconducting coils of the electromagnets. When I last worked in a lab (it's been a while) there was no such thing as superconducting welding material; maybe making these joins to spec is very difficult?
Maybe the transmission happened when somebody ate the gorilla (or prepared the raw meat)? This seems more likely than interspecies sex.
When I was in college (a long long time ago in a land far far away) a professor, discussed the 'single immoral man' theory behind the origin of AIDS. A student brought up this same argument as you do: "people in Africa hunt and eat apes, or keep them as pets. There are specialized monkey butchers, it is more likely that AIDS jumped species during hunting or preparation of the meat. ".
The reaction from professor (an American) was interesting: "Ugh, disgusting. I don't believe it" and he continued his story about the single immoral man theory.
I hope none of the students got romantically involved with this gentleman:)
You're mostly correct, except it wasn't the Germans themselves who did it. It was the Allies, then still occupying Germany, who imposed most of those restrictions as the required condition of Germany becoming a free independent state again.
Am I alone in thinking that this seems rather ironic? The countries that traditionally valued freedom disallowing the very same freedom in a conquered country? (However, most of these so called "freedom loving" countries are now devolving into fascist regimes in their own right.)
It's benign compared to some alternative punishments that were considered at the time, ranging from canceling the country and dividing it among their neighbors to shrinking the population by means of starvation or forced sterilization to razing all cities and reducing the economy to a subsistence farming model without industry or technology.
In the end, they decided to shrink Germany, split it in two, ethnically cleanse all Germans from areas outside German borders and write a new constitution for them.
On such a small system, Linux really can play its cards. Full HD + Flash in browser + 10 hours of battery life + nearly no heat = $100-$200. Out this fall.
That would be nice.
The batteries of both my laptop and my netbook drain in much less time when booted into Linux, compared to booting them in XP. Especially the battery use while idle, in full powersaving mode, still seems disappointing. I'm not a noob, I've been using Linux as a server OS since the mid 90's, I'm just not entirely convinced by your claims of superiority on mobile hardware, as compared to gadgets running Windows or OSX.
Scandinavians in the 19th century didn't rely on dictionaries for writing runes; it wasn't a lost skill at the time.
How is it 'simplest' to assume that 15th century Scandinavian explorers traveled hundreds of miles inland on an unfamiliar continent, frequently having to port their ship many miles overland across considerable differences in elevation, and that after being ambushed, they took a day or so to carve an elaborate inscription on a stone, that happened to be politically apropos 5 centuries later?
The US already has access to all banking data in the EU by means of electronic espionage. It might be for the EU to formalize the transfer of private information to the US, so that they will at least be informed when the US makes use of it, rather than having them simply take the information without asking.
This is what happens when you read an exciting book about an epic adventure that you desperately want to be true.
Dr. Kehoe writes that Kensington is fourteen days journey from Lake Superior (easily reached from Newfoundland via the St. Lawrence River), and Hudson's Bay, via Winnipeg and Canadian rivers. However, both routes would require porting a ship over land for tens of miles at several points. sailing a boat up the extremely violent Niagara river, let alone the falls, is obviously out of the question. Hiking over land would take a lot more than 14 days, even disregarding the nagging question what motivation men in such a situation would have for venturing hundreds of miles inland. This last question is very difficult get past occam's razor, especially compared to the great simplicity of the alternative options: a forgery, or a genuine stone found somewhere around the baltic and transported to Minnesota in the 19th century.
If you reject evidence simply because it is incompatible with what you "know", how do you expect to ever improve your knowledge?
Consider some hypothetical examples. If you found a 15th century document describing Saturn's rings, would you spend 5 years of your life trying to prove the document is genuine, even though the technology needed (telescope) to make such a discovery wasn't available until the 17th century?
How could 15th century sailors have circumnavigated and mapped greenland, as it is attached to the permanent sea ice of the north pole?
Anyway, America was named before Columbus for Richard Amerike, a Bristol trader who had a fishing fleet that went to Newfoundland waters for Cod.
Insightful. This explains why the Americas were often labeled as 'Bristolia' on older maps, and it explains the fact that sheep shagging jokes existed among native American tribes, decades before the arrival of the first sheep.
He didn't underestimate it, he purposely faked his calculations. As you say, the actual circumference had been known for a long time, and it was the principle objection to his plan. Somehow he talked the queen into believing his numbers as opposed to everyone else's.
He did underestimate it quite a bit. He happened to find another continent at roughly the longitude where he expected China to be.
Also, on a more fundamental level, all things that are true and affect our reality are knowable. Using the word unknowable to mean "I don't understand how they could have found out" is an abuse of logic.
Not at all. Some discoveries must have followed other discoveries that they were based on or the invention of other technologies that were required in their discovery.
If you find evidence of the following discovery having been made before the technology or discoveries that must have been available, you have found a dating error - or a forgery.
They could not have circumnavigated greenland and map the coastline to a high degree of accuracy, as the northern part is attached to the permanent sea ice of the north pole. The vikings thought Greenland was attached to northern Russia.
Note: the map predates the *known* effective computation of longitude. The Vikings could probably do it. Of course, they didn't try to sail across the middle like some impulsive Italian trader apparently did without thinking in advance: "hmm. maybe hitting islands along the way that I know about would be easier."
You are under the impression that Columbus was acting on impulse? He didn't just happen to have three well supplied ships and crew.
The Turkish empire was in control of the land route to India and China, and the Portuguese seemed in control of any eastern route around Africa. Like astronomers and scientists did at the time, Columbus knew the earth was round, and knew he could get to 'India' via the western route. He tried to sell this idea to investors in various places, until he found the queen of Spain willing to finance an expedition.
He did underestimate the size of the Earth and thus the length of his journey, even though Eratosthenes had calculated it to reasonable accuracy more than 17 centuries earlier. Going through the middle is simply the shortest route by sail, following the prevailing wind.
Newfoundland is the only site in the Americas where actual Viking artifacts and remains of a building were found: L'Anse aux Meadows
As for the map, there really wasn't any need for physical analysis of it to know that it cannot be genuine, as it contains information that was unknowable in the 15th century. According to the wikipedia page, the writing on the map also contains anachronisms. Did someone take a genuine map and add Japan, Australia and Newfoundland, or was it a complete forgery from the ground up? I guess it doesn't really matter.
It was not uncommon in the 19th and 20th century, with the emergence of the nation state and nationalism, to forge artifacts with the intention to make ones ancestors look smarter and more important than they really were. Not just in Europe. The Kensington Runestone is an example from the US, and mr Shinichi Fujimura planted forged stone tools in an attempt to 'prove' that human civilization must have started in Japan.
Ah, so your not a fan of casablanca, or more likely since this is a/. crowd 2001: a space odyssey?
I'm sorry, but just because something is old does not by default make it crap. Quality is quality, if something was ever truly good it should be able to stand up on it's own regardless of graphics.
Casablanca? no. I know it was memorable for lots of people for various reasons, but by today's standards the story is simple, the acting is wooden, and the lack of color wasn't by design but because of technical limitations.
I wouldn't say that something is crap just because it's old - the pyramids and the Saint Peter in Rome are still worth seeing - but that not all art ages equally well.
Video games and TV shows are examples of art that generally doesn't age very well. Probably because these media are relatively new, and have made such rapid progress in production quality in our lifetimes.
That was then, when it was all there was. I can't stand to watch black & white movies from the 50s with claymation special effects anymore either. No matter how great the game play and the story are, if the artwork isn't up to the same standard, it's just not a finished product.
Compare it to a book, with a great plot and a compelling story, but typed on a typewriter and littered with corrections, typos and spelling errors.
This policy has global impact, with sometimes tragic consequences for completely innocent people.
There was a minor incident some time ago, when the nuclear physics faculty at a technical university was forced to exclude a student from one of their courses. The faculty is forced to do this, to avoid their staff being denied visas or even arrested when traveling to the USA.
The student's crime was being the child of an Iranian refugee.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not worth as much as you think...
Oi! I paid half a million dollar for mine on eBay!
I'm a bit confused by the article too. What is so remarkable about this? All space travel, including satelites, has to take relativistic effects into account. Your GPS would be off by many miles if it didn't.
Maybe! Certainly hummingbirds will like the sugar water as much as bees do.
Not a problem in Britain
Here's another trick that would probably work if you are only interested in attracting bees to your feeder: Paint it yellow. Hummingbirds are attracted to the color red, not so much to yellow.
But yellow may attract a flock of song chavs or a legless tree asbo.
I might have expected this from a dog, terrible, immoral creatures as they are, but a sweet, fluffy cat? Never!
Small piece of advice.
We geeks find it hard to "get in touch with our emotional side" sometimes...
Oh my...
The "alpha-male jocks" mentioned in TFA aren't stupid, they're socially so successful because of their high social/emotional intelligence.
(Some) women may think that what they want in a man is someone who is 'in touch with his emotional side', essentially a girly-man, but in reality a woman with a penis isn't any more attractive to women than it is to men.
You have to be someone she can look up to. In this day and age this doesn't have to mean huge amounts of muscle bulk. She might look up to you for your leet skillz, your artistic prowess or your meticulously cultivated good manners, whatever, but if that element is missing, but being all touchy-feely is not a plus, but something that has to be compensated for.
This also explains why highly successful women so often end up single, or go through divorce after divorce. The selection of men they can look up to is much smaller, and in that segment they have to compete with not very successful but seriously good looking girls.
Let me see you design a five trillion electron volts connection.
Electron volt is not a measure of electric 'volts' but of the kinetic energy of two particles colliding with each other
If I understand TFA correctly, the dodgy joints are between the superconducting coils of the electromagnets.
When I last worked in a lab (it's been a while) there was no such thing as superconducting welding material; maybe making these joins to spec is very difficult?
Maybe the transmission happened when somebody ate the gorilla (or prepared the raw meat)? This seems more likely than interspecies sex.
When I was in college (a long long time ago in a land far far away) a professor, discussed the 'single immoral man' theory behind the origin of AIDS. A student brought up this same argument as you do: "people in Africa hunt and eat apes, or keep them as pets. There are specialized monkey butchers, it is more likely that AIDS jumped species during hunting or preparation of the meat. ".
The reaction from professor (an American) was interesting: "Ugh, disgusting. I don't believe it" and he continued his story about the single immoral man theory.
I hope none of the students got romantically involved with this gentleman :)
You're mostly correct, except it wasn't the Germans themselves who did it. It was the Allies, then still occupying Germany, who imposed most of those restrictions as the required condition of Germany becoming a free independent state again.
Am I alone in thinking that this seems rather ironic? The countries that traditionally valued freedom disallowing the very same freedom in a conquered country? (However, most of these so called "freedom loving" countries are now devolving into fascist regimes in their own right.)
It's benign compared to some alternative punishments that were considered at the time, ranging from canceling the country and dividing it among their neighbors to shrinking the population by means of starvation or forced sterilization to razing all cities and reducing the economy to a subsistence farming model without industry or technology.
In the end, they decided to shrink Germany, split it in two, ethnically cleanse all Germans from areas outside German borders and write a new constitution for them.
On such a small system, Linux really can play its cards. Full HD + Flash in browser + 10 hours of battery life + nearly no heat = $100-$200. Out this fall.
That would be nice.
The batteries of both my laptop and my netbook drain in much less time when booted into Linux, compared to booting them in XP. Especially the battery use while idle, in full powersaving mode, still seems disappointing. I'm not a noob, I've been using Linux as a server OS since the mid 90's, I'm just not entirely convinced by your claims of superiority on mobile hardware, as compared to gadgets running Windows or OSX.
Scandinavians in the 19th century didn't rely on dictionaries for writing runes; it wasn't a lost skill at the time.
How is it 'simplest' to assume that 15th century Scandinavian explorers traveled hundreds of miles inland on an unfamiliar continent, frequently having to port their ship many miles overland across considerable differences in elevation, and that after being ambushed, they took a day or so to carve an elaborate inscription on a stone, that happened to be politically apropos 5 centuries later?
The EU is perhaps not ideal democratic system, but AFAIK they do not ask to US gov openning banking accounts of their occupants !
You might as well ask the US to choose Lithuanian as its official language, or ask the Nile to stop flowing.
The US already has access to all banking data in the EU by means of electronic espionage. It might be for the EU to formalize the transfer of private information to the US, so that they will at least be informed when the US makes use of it, rather than having them simply take the information without asking.
If you're feeling really ambitious, up the ladder and find out why it's only by version.
That one is easy: this is how you work with software from Sun or IBM
This is what happens when you read an exciting book about an epic adventure that you desperately want to be true.
Dr. Kehoe writes that Kensington is fourteen days journey from Lake Superior (easily reached from Newfoundland via the St. Lawrence River), and Hudson's Bay, via Winnipeg and Canadian rivers. However, both routes would require porting a ship over land for tens of miles at several points. sailing a boat up the extremely violent Niagara river, let alone the falls, is obviously out of the question. Hiking over land would take a lot more than 14 days, even disregarding the nagging question what motivation men in such a situation would have for venturing hundreds of miles inland. This last question is very difficult get past occam's razor, especially compared to the great simplicity of the alternative options: a forgery, or a genuine stone found somewhere around the baltic and transported to Minnesota in the 19th century.
If you reject evidence simply because it is incompatible with what you "know", how do you expect to ever improve your knowledge?
Consider some hypothetical examples. If you found a 15th century document describing Saturn's rings, would you spend 5 years of your life trying to prove the document is genuine, even though the technology needed (telescope) to make such a discovery wasn't available until the 17th century?
How could 15th century sailors have circumnavigated and mapped greenland, as it is attached to the permanent sea ice of the north pole?
Anyway, America was named before Columbus for Richard Amerike, a Bristol trader who had a fishing fleet that went to Newfoundland waters for Cod.
Insightful. This explains why the Americas were often labeled as 'Bristolia' on older maps, and it explains the fact that sheep shagging jokes existed among native American tribes, decades before the arrival of the first sheep.
He didn't underestimate it, he purposely faked his calculations. As you say, the actual circumference had been known for a long time, and it was the principle objection to his plan. Somehow he talked the queen into believing his numbers as opposed to everyone else's.
He did underestimate it quite a bit. He happened to find another continent at roughly the longitude where he expected China to be.
Experts have apparently been proving it a fake or a forgery on and off over the past 50 years
Also, on a more fundamental level, all things that are true and affect our reality are knowable. Using the word unknowable to mean "I don't understand how they could have found out" is an abuse of logic.
Not at all. Some discoveries must have followed other discoveries that they were based on or the invention of other technologies that were required in their discovery.
If you find evidence of the following discovery having been made before the technology or discoveries that must have been available, you have found a dating error - or a forgery.
They could not have circumnavigated greenland and map the coastline to a high degree of accuracy, as the northern part is attached to the permanent sea ice of the north pole. The vikings thought Greenland was attached to northern Russia.
Note: the map predates the *known* effective computation of longitude. The Vikings could probably do it. Of course, they didn't try to sail across the middle like some impulsive Italian trader apparently did without thinking in advance: "hmm. maybe hitting islands along the way that I know about would be easier."
You are under the impression that Columbus was acting on impulse? He didn't just happen to have three well supplied ships and crew.
The Turkish empire was in control of the land route to India and China, and the Portuguese seemed in control of any eastern route around Africa. Like astronomers and scientists did at the time, Columbus knew the earth was round, and knew he could get to 'India' via the western route. He tried to sell this idea to investors in various places, until he found the queen of Spain willing to finance an expedition.
He did underestimate the size of the Earth and thus the length of his journey, even though Eratosthenes had calculated it to reasonable accuracy more than 17 centuries earlier. Going through the middle is simply the shortest route by sail, following the prevailing wind.
Newfoundland is one possible site
Newfoundland is the only site in the Americas where actual Viking artifacts and remains of a building were found: L'Anse aux Meadows
As for the map, there really wasn't any need for physical analysis of it to know that it cannot be genuine, as it contains information that was unknowable in the 15th century. According to the wikipedia page, the writing on the map also contains anachronisms. Did someone take a genuine map and add Japan, Australia and Newfoundland, or was it a complete forgery from the ground up? I guess it doesn't really matter.
It was not uncommon in the 19th and 20th century, with the emergence of the nation state and nationalism, to forge artifacts with the intention to make ones ancestors look smarter and more important than they really were. Not just in Europe. The Kensington Runestone is an example from the US, and mr Shinichi Fujimura planted forged stone tools in an attempt to 'prove' that human civilization must have started in Japan.
Ah, so your not a fan of casablanca, or more likely since this is a /. crowd 2001: a space odyssey?
I'm sorry, but just because something is old does not by default make it crap. Quality is quality, if something was ever truly good it should be able to stand up on it's own regardless of graphics.
Casablanca? no. I know it was memorable for lots of people for various reasons, but by today's standards the story is simple, the acting is wooden, and the lack of color wasn't by design but because of technical limitations.
I wouldn't say that something is crap just because it's old - the pyramids and the Saint Peter in Rome are still worth seeing - but that not all art ages equally well.
Video games and TV shows are examples of art that generally doesn't age very well. Probably because these media are relatively new, and have made such rapid progress in production quality in our lifetimes.
That was then, when it was all there was. I can't stand to watch black & white movies from the 50s with claymation special effects anymore either. No matter how great the game play and the story are, if the artwork isn't up to the same standard, it's just not a finished product.
Compare it to a book, with a great plot and a compelling story, but typed on a typewriter and littered with corrections, typos and spelling errors.
This policy has global impact, with sometimes tragic consequences for completely innocent people.
There was a minor incident some time ago, when the nuclear physics faculty at a technical university was forced to exclude a student from one of their courses. The faculty is forced to do this, to avoid their staff being denied visas or even arrested when traveling to the USA.
The student's crime was being the child of an Iranian refugee.