- Discoveries, factfinding are based on unique revelations, not repeatable. A certain knowledge was apparently revealed once, to once person: [insert random prophet type person here]. Your faith is therefor not only in god, but also (primarily) in the reliability of the prophet, and the people who repeated the story. The word 'hearsay' comes to mind. Was he lying? Was he making it up to get attention? Was he mad? Or did [random deity] really reveal [random religious truth] to him? -In case of headache: [random prophet] is said to have made the headache of [person] go away by perfroming [religious ritual] many thousands of years ago.
Faith in reason:
-Discoveries, 'revelations', REPEATABLE. I capitalise, because any experiment in the scientific method is only valid if it is in principle repeatable. Facts can be checked and double checked by anyone willing and able to repeat the experiment. You are not forced to believe the experimentor on his word, or the publication you read the results in. -In case of headache: Aspirin gives relief. Not in all cases of headache, but in a sufficiently large percentage of headaches, to have reasonable faith in the possibility that it will relief my headache. Not just today, but any day. Not just for me, but for anyone. It's repeatable, reliable, and we have unraveled the mechanism that makes it work. You don't have to be a chosen one to experience the miracle of headache relief. -----
Re:Aww. How sweet. God decided to help 10% of them
on
Can Computers Pray?
·
· Score: 1
When it was presented on a congress for medical research, these faith healers were puzzled that almost the entire audience burst out in laughter, thinking it was intended as a joke.
In most of the rest of the world, even in Iran, science and religion are seperated to a large degree. I've heard a religious bilogist describe it as "I'm a catholic on sunday, a scientist the rest of the week"
Only in america some christians seem to want to mix science and religion, and apply the scientific methods to their religious beliefs. In my view this is as stupid and pointless as sacrificing a sample on the altar of the Shimadzu spectrograph to the spirit of enzyme kinetics. -----
I'm a bit of a disgrunteled Netscape user, so my opinion is a bit biased. Under FreeBSD I am forced to use the Linux binary version under linux emulation, because it is marginally more stable than the BSD version. Still, not stable enough to view Slashdot without turning off Java first. It also seems a little strange to me that mail/news and web browser should all be incorporated into one application that does not object to gobbling up 40 megabytes memory and 15% or more cpu time.
IE 5.0 on NT workstation never crashed on me. It hasn't even shown as much as a glitch. It works perfectly. Preferences and security can be customised to great detail, it takes a second to load, and is very light on the resources. The only reason I can think of to prefer eudora or communicator over Outlook for mail and news is if you insist on using as few Microsoft products as possible, or If you don't like the user interface. Both perfectly valid reasons ofcourse, but for me they don't apply.
The implementation of IE 5.0 is great too, and even Java actually works. Not only that, but Java works faster, and seemingly more reliable than the java implementation in Sun's own HotJava browser on Solaris (I've seen glitches, though no coredumps so far). It is certainly more reliable than Netscape.
This shows microsoft really is capable of making a quality product, if they are forced to do so by competition. In the browser 'market' they had some stiff competition from market leader Netscape, and they went and made a better browser. One good enough to play and win a game of monopoly with.
I'm of the opinion that NT workstation is also such an excellent desktop operating system, because of the competition with OS/2. That competition is all but gone now, so I wonder what effect that will have on Windows 2000. -----
You can date wood samples, accurately to the year and the season, by counting the rings. By overlaying the rings from different samples from different trees (different trees in the same area face the same varations in climate, which shows up in the ring patters). These records often go back several tousands of years. If the skull is older than that, it surely is an interesting find, but not for reasons of extraterrestrial origin. By including other organic samples from the finding site, like (fossil) pollen, pupae etc, that are often only found a few weeks in a year, You CAN sometimes date an ancient organic sample accurately to within a few weeks. This is not the only method of determining the C12/14 ratio in a given period, but just one example I could think of without getting my books.
There is no need to 'estimate' the half-life of carbon-14. Radioactive decay can be measured extremely accurately, and stays constant over time. The margin of error in measuring the C-14 content is in the chemical analysis, not in the method. By increasing the size of the sample, the accuracy can be improved a lot. The usfulness of this ends, when you've ground up and analysed the entire skull:-) -----
Where does this 'carbon dating is inaccurate' rumour come from? For dating relatively recent organic material it can sometimes be incredibly accurate, because by examining old wood samples (and other things you can date accurately to withing a few weeks) you know exactly what the levels of carbon-14 in a certain area were in a given year and season.
DNA does not have to be intact to use it for identifying a species. To analyse the DNA you will chop it to tiny pieces anyway. It does have to be intact if you want to make a clone. This is a serious obstacle in the way of cloning a wooly mammoth or an egyptian pharao. You have plenty of DNA, but it's broken in tiny pieces. -----
We made that so called hybrid to fool Fox Mulder into thinking all those evil government plots were really alien plots. -----
Re:Taste is culturally defined...
on
Focus Group Art
·
· Score: 1
You're right. With it's cheerful colours and friendly round curves, your art would make a good impression over here;-)
I must really be the avarage Dutchman when it comes to taste in art, because I kind of like it, and I can't politely express how much I hate the Dutch 'Least Wanted' painting.
-----
Re:Taste is culturally defined...
on
Focus Group Art
·
· Score: 1
Well, waddaya know. It's the same survey. Holland least favourite painting really is the most awful dog ever to smear the canvas. -----
Taste is culturally defined...
on
Focus Group Art
·
· Score: 2
A similar survey held in the Netherlands several years ago showed that the Netherlands is one of the few places where the casual viewer preferred an abstract style. The 'avarage favourite' painting made for the Dutch was an abstract piece with cheerful colours and friendly round shapes.
The painting the casual viewer in the Netherlands would HATE most was also made: a horrible (awful! terrible!) landscape, painted in a messy style, and containing a fruitbowl and a portrait of Bill Clinton. Apparently contemporary celebrities, landscapes, still-lifes and a messy painting style were what the Dutch dislike most. -----
I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone would go through a lot of trouble to crack and decode the conversations between patients and their doctors. The potential risk (risk of getting caught, and potential punishment) will be similar to the risk when breaking into a bank's system, while the potential reward seems to me to be minute. No financial reward I can think of, and 37337 d00d5 will not exactly impress their friends by revealing that mrs Jones is suffering from a nasty headache.
Whatever scheme is chosen, I think it might be more important to make it easy to understand and use for the customers, than it is to make it absolutely secure. -----
If MS is found guilty of abusing their monopoly, the best punishment would be to require MS to allow competitors to licence the source of windows, and release their own version. Then they would likely keep their dominant market share, but with an Oracle Windows and a Caldera Windows available, MS would no longer be able to set the price at any amount they want without influencing sales, thus eliminating the potential harm for consumers. -----
The little monster is obviously a green penguin, because of the martian connection and the southpole connection, and has nothing in common with tux or linux. I insist that he gets antennae. I baptise him Polaroid -----
Are you kidding? Minty green has an air of 'freshness'. It is a colour associated with 'cool, clean, healthy'. Exactly the kind of charisma a chip needs to have in this age where processors are like little ovens. I wonder if they come in translucentt blue, yellow,red or magenta... -----
I don't get it. The only reason I can think of, is that Sun's primary objective is to try and harm Microsoft.
I know very little about IT marketing, but somehow from a business point of view, it seems to me that they would have more to gain by making sure Windows2000 performs best on Sun hardware, instead of supporting the flagship of a major competitor.
Does this mean that Sun now concedes that intel cannot be beaten? -----
Armed only with a bible and a first aid kit, you set out to convert the pagans in the jungle. For every savage you baptise you score two points. If you get them to wear trousers you score an additional point. Bonus points can be scored by demolishing pagan shrines, and fighting lucifers unholy gorillas, serpents and alligators.
Once you have gathered a sufficiently large flock, you can start building 'wonders', like hospitals and churches, which increase the probability for a pagan to convert.
Be prepared to fend off the relentless attacks from pagan bandits, and from competing organised religions. Act fast! the catholics are gaining ground! Atheist forces converted one of your settlements! Will your technological edge over the muslim missionaries be enough to overcome their numerical advantage?
What new technology must your theologists pursue next? Choose from the following:
Creation Science 1: leads to +1 bonus in converting Atheist settlements. -1 penalty on medical research
Find Noas Ark: leads to: +2 probability of converting pagans -2 relations with atheist forces.
Related technologies: Disprove nuclear physics 1, Find ark or the covenant, Quest for holy grail, Accuse rival of satanism 1 -----
A consensus among american climatologists, may be disputed by european physisists and vice-versa.
The change in climate is not disputed. What is disputed is the casual certainty with which it seems to be blamed on man caused CO2 emissions.
I am not an anti-environmentalist. I feel it has been proven beyond any doubt that the hole in the ozone layer is caused by human polution. Acid rain is very real too, and almost completely caused by the burning of fossil fuel.
However, casually blaming the rise in global temperature on the rise in CO2 levels, raises questions. In the frequency band in which CO2 absorbs infrared (heat) radiation, absorbtion in the atmosphere is already pretty much 100%. Furthermore, the IR absorbtion of CO2 must surely be dwarfed compared to the absorbtion by water. Both on the earth's surface, and in the atmosphere.
A few years ago, as I'm sure you know, a Danish team showed that the change in global temperature had a very strong correlation with changes in solar activity.
The strong correllation between CO2 levels and global temperature found in geological records, makes no statements about cause and effect. Rising temperatures could cause CO2 levels to rise (seems logical), or that both share a common cause.
If you wish to flame, convert or enlighten me, rve can be mailed @ null.net -----
Nope, makes perfect sense to me. The later adding of parameters to gradually increase accuracy sounds good in theory, but in a chaotic system (such as the atmosphere) a seemingly small effect can make a dramatic difference (though the butterfly causing a hurricane is a rediculous exaggeration). My problem with these climatic models, is that they can always be altered to fit the last 50 years perfectly, yet be completely wrong in every other aspect. For instance (random, imaginary example) if the avarage global temperature roughly follows a sinewave, with a period of 10000 years, at any one period you could look at the last 50 years, and see a perfect fit for a straight line which suggests a rise or decline in avarage temperature, while if you had had the data of the last 20000 years instead of 50, you would see no change at all.
Microsoft was probably (im not 100% sure) the first software company. Up to then, commercial software had only (?) been produced by hardware companies, as a component of their hardware. Commercial software for microcomputers (again not 100% sure). Before the Apple II, microsoft already made commercial software for microcomputers. I would not be surprised if they were one of the first. Microsoft had the vision not to sell DOS to IBM, but to license it, specifically reserving the right to license it to other harware vendors as well. This allowed them to fully profit from the IBM clone. DOS being readily available for IBM clones built by anyone, certainly played a part in the popularity of the PC. Again, not the technical merits of DOS, but the way it was marketed was responible for this. So, although microsoft is not known for cutting edge technological innovation, they sure have shaped/pioneered the business of marketing software. Although most slashdot readers will liken this sort of innovation to the novel design of the guillotine.
This is not really a translation, but an equally silly mistake: A western pharmaceutical company placed advertisement billboards by the side of the highways in Saudi arabia. To make them universally understandable, the boards were in the form of 3 pictures: first a picture of a man who is clearly ill, grasping his head in pain. Next a picture of that man taking one of the advertised pills, and finally to the left a picture of the same man looking happy and healthy again. It never occurred to them that in Saudi arabia people are used to reading from right to left, and not from left to right. -----
Don't let the article confuse you. Just becaue it has new scientist stuck on the bottom, doesn't mean that whatever is described in it is in fact the universe.
The writer proposes a mathematical model that doesn't have time in the equation. Instead it describes 'states', or 'sets of probabilities'. This could be a perfectly valid model.
Statistical thermodynamics is a very successful model for describing and calculating/predicting properties and behaviour of matter, with the use of equtions that are sets of probabilities of configurations, and do not include time. That doesn't mean that the model requires that individual particles that compose a piece of matter do not have a place or a displacement over time. It is just a model that does not include these properties.
If i recall correctly, the uncertainty principle doesn't require that a particle does not have a place and a velocity at the same time. It just describes how and why both these properties can't be determined to arbitrary precision at the same time.
In my opinion complete freedom for all is not possible, in a society where groups and individuals may have conflicting interests. Different groups of people set different priorities with regard to freedom.
I hope this post is not misunderstood as an anti American rant, it is certainly not intended as such. I am certainly aware that we thank our present freedom largely to the Americans. I am certainly very happy we were liberated by the Americans, and not the Russians.
Here in western Europe many people have trouble understanding the American notion of freedom. Americans seem to be very keen on economic- and certain forms of political freedom, yet seem to have a different priority for personal freedom.
In most European countries nazi propaganda, membership of fascist organisations, even display of fascist imagery or gestures (the 'hitler salute') is illegal. Where I come from, an organisation like the KKK would be fiercely persecuted.
It is difficult to understand how a racist's freedom of expression is somehow considered more important than an ethnic minorities freedom to live without being threatened and discriminated against. Why is a religious fanatic's freedom from being 'offended' more important than a persons freedom to live and love who and however they choose. Why is an 18 year old boy old enough to die for his country, but too young to drink beer? Is beer more dangerous than war? Nudity certainly seems more dangerous than violence. An exposed breast leads to parental advisory rating, while cutting off a head is good clean family fun.
It is also difficult to understand why Americans continually try and teach us a lesson about freedom, because we limit economic freedom a little, in order to somewhat ensure the freedom of being exploited of the weak by the strong.
Americans mock us for having a non democratically elected head of state (a purely ceremonial function), but see nothing strange in a political system where there effectively only is a choice between two identical political parties: christian conservative, and christian slightly more conservative.
In short, in my opinion the American system puts so much emphasis on the freedom of the majority, that this is sometimes achieved at the expense of the freedom of the minorities. -----
Have you ever read 'The Time Machine',by H.G. Wells? In this 19th century short story, a scientist travels to the future, and finds that the human species have split into two species: one evolved from the upper class, the other from the working class. For a long time, this view seemed like an overly pessimistic extrapolation of the situation during the industrial revolution, but if the rich get the means to engineer their children, this might well happen. On the other hand, how can you refuse parents the right to prevent passing on myopia, asthma and other hereditary ailments to their offspring, if the technology is there?
Slashdot Mirror
Faith in religion:
- Discoveries, factfinding are based on unique revelations, not repeatable. A certain knowledge was apparently revealed once, to once person: [insert random prophet type person here]. Your faith is therefor not only in god, but also (primarily) in the reliability of the prophet, and the people who repeated the story. The word 'hearsay' comes to mind. Was he lying? Was he making it up to get attention? Was he mad? Or did [random deity] really reveal [random religious truth] to him?
-In case of headache: [random prophet] is said to have made the headache of [person] go away by perfroming [religious ritual] many thousands of years ago.
Faith in reason:
-Discoveries, 'revelations', REPEATABLE. I capitalise, because any experiment in the scientific method is only valid if it is in principle repeatable. Facts can be checked and double checked by anyone willing and able to repeat the experiment. You are not forced to believe the experimentor on his word, or the publication you read the results in.
-In case of headache: Aspirin gives relief. Not in all cases of headache, but in a sufficiently large percentage of headaches, to have reasonable faith in the possibility that it will relief my headache. Not just today, but any day. Not just for me, but for anyone. It's repeatable, reliable, and we have unraveled the mechanism that makes it work. You don't have to be a chosen one to experience the miracle of headache relief.
-----
90% must have been sinners
-----
When it was presented on a congress for medical research, these faith healers were puzzled that almost the entire audience burst out in laughter, thinking it was intended as a joke.
In most of the rest of the world, even in Iran, science and religion are seperated to a large degree. I've heard a religious bilogist describe it as "I'm a catholic on sunday, a scientist the rest of the week"
Only in america some christians seem to want to mix science and religion, and apply the scientific methods to their religious beliefs. In my view this is as stupid and pointless as sacrificing a sample on the altar of the Shimadzu spectrograph to the spirit of enzyme kinetics.
-----
...you will see this as flamebait.
I'm a bit of a disgrunteled Netscape user, so my opinion is a bit biased. Under FreeBSD I am forced to use the Linux binary version under linux emulation, because it is marginally more stable than the BSD version. Still, not stable enough to view Slashdot without turning off Java first. It also seems a little strange to me that mail/news and web browser should all be incorporated into one application that does not object to gobbling up 40 megabytes memory and 15% or more cpu time.
IE 5.0 on NT workstation never crashed on me. It hasn't even shown as much as a glitch. It works perfectly. Preferences and security can be customised to great detail, it takes a second to load, and is very light on the resources.
The only reason I can think of to prefer eudora or communicator over Outlook for mail and news is if you insist on using as few Microsoft products as possible, or If you don't like the user interface. Both perfectly valid reasons ofcourse, but for me they don't apply.
The implementation of IE 5.0 is great too, and even Java actually works. Not only that, but Java works faster, and seemingly more reliable than the java implementation in Sun's own HotJava browser on Solaris (I've seen glitches, though no coredumps so far). It is certainly more reliable than Netscape.
This shows microsoft really is capable of making a quality product, if they are forced to do so by competition. In the browser 'market' they had some stiff competition from market leader Netscape, and they went and made a better browser. One good enough to play and win a game of monopoly with.
I'm of the opinion that NT workstation is also such an excellent desktop operating system, because of the competition with OS/2. That competition is all but gone now, so I wonder what effect that will have on Windows 2000.
-----
You can date wood samples, accurately to the year and the season, by counting the rings. By overlaying the rings from different samples from different trees (different trees in the same area face the same varations in climate, which shows up in the ring patters). These records often go back several tousands of years. If the skull is older than that, it surely is an interesting find, but not for reasons of extraterrestrial origin.
:-)
By including other organic samples from the finding site, like (fossil) pollen, pupae etc, that are often only found a few weeks in a year, You CAN sometimes date an ancient organic sample accurately to within a few weeks.
This is not the only method of determining the C12/14 ratio in a given period, but just one example I could think of without getting my books.
There is no need to 'estimate' the half-life of carbon-14. Radioactive decay can be measured extremely accurately, and stays constant over time. The margin of error in measuring the C-14 content is in the chemical analysis, not in the method. By increasing the size of the sample, the accuracy can be improved a lot. The usfulness of this ends, when you've ground up and analysed the entire skull
-----
Where does this 'carbon dating is inaccurate' rumour come from? For dating relatively recent organic material it can sometimes be incredibly accurate, because by examining old wood samples (and other things you can date accurately to withing a few weeks) you know exactly what the levels of carbon-14 in a certain area were in a given year and season.
DNA does not have to be intact to use it for identifying a species. To analyse the DNA you will chop it to tiny pieces anyway. It does have to be intact if you want to make a clone. This is a serious obstacle in the way of cloning a wooly mammoth or an egyptian pharao. You have plenty of DNA, but it's broken in tiny pieces.
-----
We made that so called hybrid to fool Fox Mulder into thinking all those evil government plots were really alien plots.
-----
You're right. With it's cheerful colours and friendly round curves, your art would make a good impression over here ;-)
I must really be the avarage Dutchman when it comes to taste in art, because I kind of like it, and I can't politely express how much I hate the Dutch 'Least Wanted' painting.
-----
Well, waddaya know. It's the same survey. Holland least favourite painting really is the most awful dog ever to smear the canvas.
-----
A similar survey held in the Netherlands several years ago showed that the Netherlands is one of the few places where the casual viewer preferred an abstract style. The 'avarage favourite' painting made for the Dutch was an abstract piece with cheerful colours and friendly round shapes.
The painting the casual viewer in the Netherlands would HATE most was also made: a horrible (awful! terrible!) landscape, painted in a messy style, and containing a fruitbowl and a portrait of Bill Clinton. Apparently contemporary celebrities, landscapes, still-lifes and a messy painting style were what the Dutch dislike most.
-----
I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone would go through a lot of trouble to crack and decode the conversations between patients and their doctors. The potential risk (risk of getting caught, and potential punishment) will be similar to the risk when breaking into a bank's system, while the potential reward seems to me to be minute. No financial reward I can think of, and 37337 d00d5 will not exactly impress their friends by revealing that mrs Jones is suffering from a nasty headache.
Whatever scheme is chosen, I think it might be more important to make it easy to understand and use for the customers, than it is to make it absolutely secure.
-----
If MS is found guilty of abusing their monopoly, the best punishment would be to require MS to allow competitors to licence the source of windows, and release their own version. Then they would likely keep their dominant market share, but with an Oracle Windows and a Caldera Windows available, MS would no longer be able to set the price at any amount they want without influencing sales, thus eliminating the potential harm for consumers.
-----
The little monster is obviously a green penguin, because of the martian connection and the southpole connection, and has nothing in common with tux or linux. I insist that he gets antennae. I baptise him Polaroid
-----
Are you kidding? Minty green has an air of 'freshness'. It is a colour associated with 'cool, clean, healthy'. Exactly the kind of charisma a chip needs to have in this age where processors are like little ovens. I wonder if they come in translucentt blue, yellow,red or magenta...
-----
I don't get it. The only reason I can think of, is that Sun's primary objective is to try and harm Microsoft.
I know very little about IT marketing, but somehow from a business point of view, it seems to me that they would have more to gain by making sure Windows2000 performs best on Sun hardware, instead of supporting the flagship of a major competitor.
Does this mean that Sun now concedes that intel cannot be beaten?
-----
War in Heaven II: The missionary position
Armed only with a bible and a first aid kit, you set out to convert the pagans in the jungle. For every savage you baptise you score two points. If you get them to wear trousers you score an additional point. Bonus points can be scored by demolishing pagan shrines, and fighting lucifers unholy gorillas, serpents and alligators.
Once you have gathered a sufficiently large flock, you can start building 'wonders', like hospitals and churches, which increase the probability for a pagan to convert.
Be prepared to fend off the relentless attacks from pagan bandits, and from competing organised religions. Act fast! the catholics are gaining ground! Atheist forces converted one of your settlements! Will your technological edge over the muslim missionaries be enough to overcome their numerical advantage?
What new technology must your theologists pursue next? Choose from the following:
Creation Science 1:
leads to
+1 bonus in converting Atheist settlements.
-1 penalty on medical research
Find Noas Ark:
leads to:
+2 probability of converting pagans
-2 relations with atheist forces.
Related technologies:
Disprove nuclear physics 1, Find ark or the covenant, Quest for holy grail, Accuse rival of satanism 1
-----
This is very strange... every time I use preview before posting, my post turns up as an AC
-----
A consensus among american climatologists, may be disputed by european physisists and vice-versa.
The change in climate is not disputed. What is disputed is the casual certainty with which it seems to be blamed on man caused CO2 emissions.
I am not an anti-environmentalist. I feel it has been proven beyond any doubt that the hole in the ozone layer is caused by human polution. Acid rain is very real too, and almost completely caused by the burning of fossil fuel.
However, casually blaming the rise in global temperature on the rise in CO2 levels, raises questions. In the frequency band in which CO2 absorbs infrared (heat) radiation, absorbtion in the atmosphere is already pretty much 100%. Furthermore, the IR absorbtion of CO2 must surely be dwarfed compared to the absorbtion by water. Both on the earth's surface, and in the atmosphere.
A few years ago, as I'm sure you know, a Danish team showed that the change in global temperature had a very strong correlation with changes in solar activity.
The strong correllation between CO2 levels and global temperature found in geological records, makes no statements about cause and effect. Rising temperatures could cause CO2 levels to rise (seems logical), or that both share a common cause.
If you wish to flame, convert or enlighten me, rve can be mailed @ null.net
-----
or am i missing something?
Nope, makes perfect sense to me. The later adding of parameters to gradually increase accuracy sounds good in theory, but in a chaotic system (such as the atmosphere) a seemingly small effect can make a dramatic difference (though the butterfly causing a hurricane is a rediculous exaggeration).
My problem with these climatic models, is that they can always be altered to fit the last 50 years perfectly, yet be completely wrong in every other aspect.
For instance (random, imaginary example) if the avarage global temperature roughly follows a sinewave, with a period of 10000 years, at any one period you could look at the last 50 years, and see a perfect fit for a straight line which suggests a rise or decline in avarage temperature, while if you had had the data of the last 20000 years instead of 50, you would see no change at all.
-----
Microsoft was probably (im not 100% sure) the first software company. Up to then, commercial software had only (?) been produced by hardware companies, as a component of their hardware.
Commercial software for microcomputers (again not 100% sure). Before the Apple II, microsoft already made commercial software for microcomputers. I would not be surprised if they were one of the first.
Microsoft had the vision not to sell DOS to IBM, but to license it, specifically reserving the right to license it to other harware vendors as well. This allowed them to fully profit from the IBM clone.
DOS being readily available for IBM clones built by anyone, certainly played a part in the popularity of the PC. Again, not the technical merits of DOS, but the way it was marketed was responible for this.
So, although microsoft is not known for cutting edge technological innovation, they sure have shaped/pioneered the business of marketing software. Although most slashdot readers will liken this sort of innovation to the novel design of the guillotine.
-----
This is not really a translation, but an equally silly mistake:
A western pharmaceutical company placed advertisement billboards by the side of the highways in Saudi arabia. To make them universally understandable, the boards were in the form of 3 pictures: first a picture of a man who is clearly ill, grasping his head in pain. Next a picture of that man taking one of the advertised pills, and finally to the left a picture of the same man looking happy and healthy again.
It never occurred to them that in Saudi arabia people are used to reading from right to left, and not from left to right.
-----
Ahhhh, gotcha.
Does this mean I've fallen for a joke, and I've once again made a fool of myself by giving a serious answer to a satirical question?
-----
Don't let the article confuse you. Just becaue it has new scientist stuck on the bottom, doesn't mean that whatever is described in it is in fact the universe.
The writer proposes a mathematical model that doesn't have time in the equation. Instead it describes 'states', or 'sets of probabilities'.
This could be a perfectly valid model.
Statistical thermodynamics is a very successful model for describing and calculating/predicting properties and behaviour of matter, with the use of equtions that are sets of probabilities of configurations, and do not include time. That doesn't mean that the model requires that individual particles that compose a piece of matter do not have a place or a displacement over time. It is just a model that does not include these properties.
If i recall correctly, the uncertainty principle doesn't require that a particle does not have a place and a velocity at the same time. It just describes how and why both these properties can't be determined to arbitrary precision at the same time.
-----
In my opinion complete freedom for all is not possible, in a society where groups and individuals may have conflicting interests. Different groups of people set different priorities with regard to freedom.
I hope this post is not misunderstood as an anti American rant, it is certainly not intended as such. I am certainly aware that we thank our present freedom largely to the Americans. I am certainly very happy we were liberated by the Americans, and not the Russians.
Here in western Europe many people have trouble understanding the American notion of freedom. Americans seem to be very keen on economic- and certain forms of political freedom, yet seem to have a different priority for personal freedom.
In most European countries nazi propaganda,
membership of fascist organisations, even display of fascist imagery or gestures (the 'hitler salute') is illegal. Where I come from, an organisation like the KKK would be fiercely persecuted.
It is difficult to understand how a racist's freedom of expression is somehow considered more important than an ethnic minorities freedom to live without being threatened and discriminated against. Why is a religious fanatic's freedom from being 'offended' more important than a persons freedom to live and love who and however they choose. Why is an 18 year old boy old enough to die for his country, but too young to drink beer? Is beer more dangerous than war? Nudity certainly seems more dangerous than violence. An exposed breast leads to parental advisory rating, while cutting off a head is good clean family fun.
It is also difficult to understand why Americans continually try and teach us a lesson about freedom, because we limit economic freedom a little, in order to somewhat ensure the freedom of being exploited of the weak by the strong.
Americans mock us for having a non democratically elected head of state (a purely ceremonial function), but see nothing strange in a political system where there effectively only is a choice between two identical political parties: christian conservative, and christian slightly more conservative.
In short, in my opinion the American system puts so much emphasis on the freedom of the majority, that this is sometimes achieved at the expense of the freedom of the minorities.
-----
Have you ever read 'The Time Machine',by H.G. Wells?
In this 19th century short story, a scientist travels to the future, and finds that the human species have split into two species: one evolved from the upper class, the other from the working class.
For a long time, this view seemed like an overly pessimistic extrapolation of the situation during the industrial revolution, but if the rich get the means to engineer their children, this might well happen.
On the other hand, how can you refuse parents the right to prevent passing on myopia, asthma and other hereditary ailments to their offspring, if the technology is there?