The reason some of us "hippies" are deeply concerned about this war is that the priorities of this Administration are exactly opposite to what you are talking about. If their real aim was to stop all the sanctions the US/UN imposed by overthrowing Saddam Hussein (thus saving face for the US and UN and restoring clean water to Iraq), they would've said that at the beginning. In fact, they tried every other idea under the sun (including the Bizarro-world idea that Saddam, a militantly secular leader, was in league with Osama bin Laden) before pleading for the relief of the suffering of the Shi`a (and, to a much lesser extent, the Kurds). They honestly don't give a flying damn about either group -- they want to extend US hegemony and establish a launching point for a potential two-front invasion of Iran.
The countrymen should have organized a coup and oust the turd. Instead everybody knuckled under his regime. It's a real shame.
OK, asshole. Guess what? There wasn't one time a coup was organized, but TWO, right after Gulf War I. You know what happened? The air support that the US promised to provide was pulled completely. The Shi`a in the southand the Kurds in the north both tried and the good old democracy-loving, anti-despotic USA allowed Saddam's army to mow them down from the sky INSIDE THE SO-CALLED NO-FLY ZONE.
Perhaps an example would make it more clear, then. A person who had access to all the technology currently available would be considered a god two millenia ago. Are we gods now? If not, how technically are we different from "gods" in the generic sense?
If an extraterrestrial civilization were two millenia advanced from us technologically, would they be gods? I really do think there is a serious difficulty in definition. [As my description and.sig would indicate, I certainly don't buy into the Yahwistic concept of a god system, but that is not the only definition.]
Actually, there's another more subtle problem. I've never seen a definition of "god" which is simultaneously always applicable (i.e., all examples of gods of all cultures will fit) and non-circular. A simple example of the latter is "Gods are things people worship" and "Worship is what people do to gods"; most are not quite so obvious, but circularity always seems to emerge.
I think the speculation will be at a fever pitch the next few days since he was one of the pilots who bombed the nuclear reactor in Iraq back in the early 1980s.
The wisdom of the ages?! The same stuff that gives us magic fish without digestive systems in the Mediterranean, a disk-shaped Earth with big honking pillars all around the edges (laid by the Invisible Guy in the Sky) to hold the sky up, talking jackasses of the kind that don't appear on TBN, dragons, unicorns and sea monsters? The Old Testament is a couple of borrowed stories from the Sumerians, the Hammurabi Code and a whole bunch of bullshit made up by goat farmers. The New Testament is what you get when you cross the Old Testament with classical Greek philosophy.
The problem the Greeks would've had was "why don't they 'fall' just like objects on the Earth do?" The answer they came up with was that the bodies in the sky were "ethereal" (essentially massless in modern parlance) and were moved about in regularity by the gods (or the planets' Ideals if one were a Platonist). Thus they wouldn't have imagined the bodies in space to be like the matter on Earth, making, by default, the Earth the center of the cosmos.
This was a weird idea (re)invented by the Catholic Church. Eratosthenes [sp?] not only demonstrated the Earth was round, he actually calculated its diameter (accurate to about 5%)... around 300 BCE. The reason everyone thought Columbus was a lunatic wasn't because of the supposed "sea monsters" -- it was because they couldn't possibly carry enough supplies for them to reach modern Indonesia by boat! (If the Caribbean plate weren't there, causing the long island chain, they would've all perished before even reaching the Yucatan peninsula.)
The Egyptians also made "beer" (really about 0.5% or 1 proof) for normal drinking from the waters of the Nile. It is an interesting question whether their civilization was really based on the inadvertent discovery of the astringent property of ethanol.
Did you know the cathlic church built and maintian one of the planets first observatories?
Oh goodness, you have to be kidding. The Chinese had numerous such locations two millenia earlier. Around the same time, Stonehenge was built for the same reason. The Egyptians may have even earlier than that (certain explanations of the pyramids' relative locations for example). And the Bible itself refers to the Magi that interpret the movement of the planets in the sky.
The biggest problem is that our educational system was designed in the Great Depression (before that, there was generally only education until 8th grade). Over the course of the last 40 years, we have lost most of the agricultural jobs and a large fraction of the factory jobs which can be filled with those who are basically innumerate. The history of the US system was sort of a sink-or-swim approach, and since it was preparing you for the dull factory jobs (at the bottom of the education scale) anyway, getting used to monotony was a feature not a bug! The developments in our economy have outstripped the ability of teachers (especially in math) to keep up. So there's a time lag built into the system, unfortunately.
As an aside: Everything I remember of myself and my friends, from before prolonged exposure to education, suggests to me that children in their "natural" state really do enjoy learning.
It seems humans are hardwired for feeling this way -- until puberty. Children must put forth immense work in learning language, but they do it "automatically" because of this hardwiring. However, at puberty, for biological reasons, students become much more interested in their developing sexuality, which overrides the older paradigm. Because of the great reduction in mean age of puberty since the US general curriculum was developed (during the Great Depression), there is more distraction than was expected by those who crafted this pedagogical system.
The USPS does something that really does help the economy, though: it equalizes the cost of delivery anywhere in the US. Under a privatized system, mail would be a lot cheaper between Chicago and New York City, but it would be a lot MORE expensive to send from Lower Armpit, Arkansas to Road Hole, Alaska. This dramatically lowers costs for developing areas away from the largest cities.
As a non-diamond-wearing woman, if I see one more "if she says she doesn't want one, she's lying" post, I'm going to throw up.
You've just discovered the reason de Beers has advertisements during college football games (it's not just movies anymore;)). Some tripe like "show her that you'd marry her all over again" [this is pawning some anniversary item, a bracelet I think]. I think they started those adverts because they had a sudden spike in 3/4-1 ct diamond supplies from Australia.
Many things in life are a poor investment when viewed solely in monetary terms. A brand-new car, for instance, which will depreciate maybe 20-30% in its first year. (doesn't stop all you guys lusting after them, though, does it!).
I certainly don't, and I think anyone who does is really stupid. "New car smell" is an amalgam of monomers from the plastic of the car's interior, many of which are carcinogenic.
Having children is a serious monetary burden, looked at solely from an investment point of view.
This is true in Western society, but not in the Orient -- there working children are expected to send 10% or more of their net income to their parents as a show of "filial piety." And it will be really helpful to have a child or children when Social Security (and other nations' equivalents) goes down the drain.
Going out for a restaurant meal when you could cook it yourself for less; paying thirty bucks for a bottle of wine worth maybe five bucks so you can drink it at a table at Florian's cafe in the Piazza San Marco, listening to the orchestra. I could go on, but...
The thing each of these has in common is the idea of exchanging your money for someone else's time. This is, after all, what money really is an attempt to quantify in the first place -- the difference between the meal in a restaurant and the one at home is the money the cooks, the servers, the dishwashers, etc. earn, depreciation on the building, and a reward for the people who made a place that you would like to visit.
The thing is, sure, some aspects of the de Beers monopoly are unpalatable,
Candidate for the Slashdot Understatement of the Year Award, 2002
but most commodities - coffee, steel, grain - are accompanied by exploitation and other bad things.
Modern capitalism is evil, news at 11. The great difference between de Beers and these is that the three listed above are actually valuable for something. Cartel diamonds, since synthetics are cheaper for drill bits, etc., are completely and totally worthless. When buying gem diamonds, you are basically paying multilevel protection fees for a publicly traded organized crime syndicate.
I know, for sure, there are darn few women who don't think a diamond ring is the acme of romantic love.
There are darn few USians who recognize there's a distinction between socialism and Soviet Communism. But that doesn't mean they're right either.
I mean in theory any atom with any integer number of protons CAN exist for some period of time greater than Planck time,
Not necessarily. There is some theoretical weirdness that comes into play when you have more than 1/(alpha) charges (past element 137), and whether this precludes formation of "stable" (in the physicist's sense -- more than a fraction of an attosecond or so) nuclei at all.
it always amazes me how computers are "scary" - what's it gonna do, eat you?
Actually, the fear is that it is expensive -- if they have seen computers crash, hard drives fail, etc., they may be terrified that they will make their computer unusable. Which really isn't all that insane after all!
If you don't know whether or not you live in his district you must not vote very often. If you don't vote I don't see why your congressman would care what you had to say....
They may not care anyway, but its hard to take you seriously when you seemingly don't know who your congressman is and complain about them not listening. Maybe I missed something?
This is the first term following the 2000 Census; I am not aware of the current status of redistricting in California, but in my state the new districts was only OKd by the courts a few weeks ago. That may not be the reason for his confusion, but if it is, it's entirely legitimate IMO.
why is the scale between 1-5 MUCH, MUCH larger than the scale between 5-10, 10-15, and 10-20?
It's on a logarithmic scale, which makes much more sense than a linear one. If you buy KMart at 75 cents and sell it for $1.50, you're up 100% (which shows up logarithmicaly), instead of being lost on zero axis (since it was about $15 last year). It will make it easier to see where people make money trading WCOM as a penny stock.:)
Re:Ozone Depletion not Global Warming
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 1
OK, you're just using a non-standard term. The real "cosmic rays" that generate ozone in our atmosphere is ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. The stuff usually called "cosmic rays" is radiation and nuclei that have extremely high energy (at least GeV in kinetic energy). But the energy flux of cosmic radiation is much too small to account for ozone production (if it weren't, the night sky would be as bright as noonday with Cerenkov radiation!).
Re:Ozone Depletion not Global Warming
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 1
I think you're failing to grasp the difference between oxygen atoms and (di)oxygen molecules. You are correct in saying that 3O2->2O3 (three dioxygen molecules reacting to form two ozone molecules) is quite endothermic. But 3O->O3 (three oxygen atoms forming ozone) is extremely exothermic. And the difference between the two is because it is highly endothermic for an oxygen molecule to dissociate into two oxygen atoms (O2->2O). And parent's parent explains why the direct reaction 3O2 + 3 (or 6) hv -> 2O3 is almost impossible in the gas phase. That's why it is pictured as a stepwise reaction.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason some of us "hippies" are deeply concerned about this war is that the priorities of this Administration are exactly opposite to what you are talking about. If their real aim was to stop all the sanctions the US/UN imposed by overthrowing Saddam Hussein (thus saving face for the US and UN and restoring clean water to Iraq), they would've said that at the beginning. In fact, they tried every other idea under the sun (including the Bizarro-world idea that Saddam, a militantly secular leader, was in league with Osama bin Laden) before pleading for the relief of the suffering of the Shi`a (and, to a much lesser extent, the Kurds). They honestly don't give a flying damn about either group -- they want to extend US hegemony and establish a launching point for a potential two-front invasion of Iran.
The countrymen should have organized a coup and oust the turd. Instead everybody knuckled under his regime. It's a real shame.
OK, asshole. Guess what? There wasn't one time a coup was organized, but TWO, right after Gulf War I. You know what happened? The air support that the US promised to provide was pulled completely. The Shi`a in the southand the Kurds in the north both tried and the good old democracy-loving, anti-despotic USA allowed Saddam's army to mow them down from the sky INSIDE THE SO-CALLED NO-FLY ZONE.
Perhaps an example would make it more clear, then. A person who had access to all the technology currently available would be considered a god two millenia ago. Are we gods now? If not, how technically are we different from "gods" in the generic sense?
.sig would indicate, I certainly don't buy into the Yahwistic concept of a god system, but that is not the only definition.]
If an extraterrestrial civilization were two millenia advanced from us technologically, would they be gods? I really do think there is a serious difficulty in definition. [As my description and
Actually, there's another more subtle problem. I've never seen a definition of "god" which is simultaneously always applicable (i.e., all examples of gods of all cultures will fit) and non-circular. A simple example of the latter is "Gods are things people worship" and "Worship is what people do to gods"; most are not quite so obvious, but circularity always seems to emerge.
I think the speculation will be at a fever pitch the next few days since he was one of the pilots who bombed the nuclear reactor in Iraq back in the early 1980s.
Do you honestly think this White House will give the Chinese the chance to be first to Mars?
He needs an embiggened physics department, I think.
The wisdom of the ages?! The same stuff that gives us magic fish without digestive systems in the Mediterranean, a disk-shaped Earth with big honking pillars all around the edges (laid by the Invisible Guy in the Sky) to hold the sky up, talking jackasses of the kind that don't appear on TBN, dragons, unicorns and sea monsters? The Old Testament is a couple of borrowed stories from the Sumerians, the Hammurabi Code and a whole bunch of bullshit made up by goat farmers. The New Testament is what you get when you cross the Old Testament with classical Greek philosophy.
The problem the Greeks would've had was "why don't they 'fall' just like objects on the Earth do?" The answer they came up with was that the bodies in the sky were "ethereal" (essentially massless in modern parlance) and were moved about in regularity by the gods (or the planets' Ideals if one were a Platonist). Thus they wouldn't have imagined the bodies in space to be like the matter on Earth, making, by default, the Earth the center of the cosmos.
This was a weird idea (re)invented by the Catholic Church. Eratosthenes [sp?] not only demonstrated the Earth was round, he actually calculated its diameter (accurate to about 5%)... around 300 BCE. The reason everyone thought Columbus was a lunatic wasn't because of the supposed "sea monsters" -- it was because they couldn't possibly carry enough supplies for them to reach modern Indonesia by boat! (If the Caribbean plate weren't there, causing the long island chain, they would've all perished before even reaching the Yucatan peninsula.)
The Egyptians also made "beer" (really about 0.5% or 1 proof) for normal drinking from the waters of the Nile. It is an interesting question whether their civilization was really based on the inadvertent discovery of the astringent property of ethanol.
Did you know the cathlic church built and maintian one of the planets first observatories?
Oh goodness, you have to be kidding. The Chinese had numerous such locations two millenia earlier. Around the same time, Stonehenge was built for the same reason. The Egyptians may have even earlier than that (certain explanations of the pyramids' relative locations for example). And the Bible itself refers to the Magi that interpret the movement of the planets in the sky.
The biggest problem is that our educational system was designed in the Great Depression (before that, there was generally only education until 8th grade). Over the course of the last 40 years, we have lost most of the agricultural jobs and a large fraction of the factory jobs which can be filled with those who are basically innumerate. The history of the US system was sort of a sink-or-swim approach, and since it was preparing you for the dull factory jobs (at the bottom of the education scale) anyway, getting used to monotony was a feature not a bug! The developments in our economy have outstripped the ability of teachers (especially in math) to keep up. So there's a time lag built into the system, unfortunately.
As an aside: Everything I remember of myself and my friends, from before prolonged exposure to education, suggests to me that children in their "natural" state really do enjoy learning.
It seems humans are hardwired for feeling this way -- until puberty. Children must put forth immense work in learning language, but they do it "automatically" because of this hardwiring. However, at puberty, for biological reasons, students become much more interested in their developing sexuality, which overrides the older paradigm. Because of the great reduction in mean age of puberty since the US general curriculum was developed (during the Great Depression), there is more distraction than was expected by those who crafted this pedagogical system.
The USPS does something that really does help the economy, though: it equalizes the cost of delivery anywhere in the US. Under a privatized system, mail would be a lot cheaper between Chicago and New York City, but it would be a lot MORE expensive to send from Lower Armpit, Arkansas to Road Hole, Alaska. This dramatically lowers costs for developing areas away from the largest cities.
Analysis frequently requires advanced techniques such as wave decomposition (I'm forgetting the real term for this, though).
(Fast) Fourier Transform analysis? I know it works miracles on other types of spectroscopy.
As a non-diamond-wearing woman, if I see one more "if she says she doesn't want one, she's lying" post, I'm going to throw up.
;)). Some tripe like "show her that you'd marry her all over again" [this is pawning some anniversary item, a bracelet I think]. I think they started those adverts because they had a sudden spike in 3/4-1 ct diamond supplies from Australia.
You've just discovered the reason de Beers has advertisements during college football games (it's not just movies anymore
Many things in life are a poor investment when viewed solely in monetary terms. A brand-new car, for instance, which will depreciate maybe 20-30% in its first year. (doesn't stop all you guys lusting after them, though, does it!).
I certainly don't, and I think anyone who does is really stupid. "New car smell" is an amalgam of monomers from the plastic of the car's interior, many of which are carcinogenic.
Having children is a serious monetary burden, looked at solely from an investment point of view.
This is true in Western society, but not in the Orient -- there working children are expected to send 10% or more of their net income to their parents as a show of "filial piety." And it will be really helpful to have a child or children when Social Security (and other nations' equivalents) goes down the drain.
Going out for a restaurant meal when you could cook it yourself for less; paying thirty bucks for a bottle of wine worth maybe five bucks so you can drink it at a table at Florian's cafe in the Piazza San Marco, listening to the orchestra. I could go on, but...
The thing each of these has in common is the idea of exchanging your money for someone else's time. This is, after all, what money really is an attempt to quantify in the first place -- the difference between the meal in a restaurant and the one at home is the money the cooks, the servers, the dishwashers, etc. earn, depreciation on the building, and a reward for the people who made a place that you would like to visit.
The thing is, sure, some aspects of the de Beers monopoly are unpalatable,
Candidate for the Slashdot Understatement of the Year Award, 2002
but most commodities - coffee, steel, grain - are accompanied by exploitation and other bad things.
Modern capitalism is evil, news at 11. The great difference between de Beers and these is that the three listed above are actually valuable for something. Cartel diamonds, since synthetics are cheaper for drill bits, etc., are completely and totally worthless. When buying gem diamonds, you are basically paying multilevel protection fees for a publicly traded organized crime syndicate.
I know, for sure, there are darn few women who don't think a diamond ring is the acme of romantic love.
There are darn few USians who recognize there's a distinction between socialism and Soviet Communism. But that doesn't mean they're right either.
As far as experimental evidence goes, the largest completely stable atom is lead.
Doesn't bismuth (Bi-209) have that distinction?
I mean in theory any atom with any integer number of protons CAN exist for some period of time greater than Planck time,
Not necessarily. There is some theoretical weirdness that comes into play when you have more than 1/(alpha) charges (past element 137), and whether this precludes formation of "stable" (in the physicist's sense -- more than a fraction of an attosecond or so) nuclei at all.
it always amazes me how computers are "scary" - what's it gonna do, eat you?
Actually, the fear is that it is expensive -- if they have seen computers crash, hard drives fail, etc., they may be terrified that they will make their computer unusable. Which really isn't all that insane after all!
If you don't know whether or not you live in his district you must not vote very often. If you don't vote I don't see why your congressman would care what you had to say....
They may not care anyway, but its hard to take you seriously when you seemingly don't know who your congressman is and complain about them not listening. Maybe I missed something?
This is the first term following the 2000 Census; I am not aware of the current status of redistricting in California, but in my state the new districts was only OKd by the courts a few weeks ago. That may not be the reason for his confusion, but if it is, it's entirely legitimate IMO.
why is the scale between 1-5 MUCH, MUCH larger than the scale between 5-10, 10-15, and 10-20?
:)
It's on a logarithmic scale, which makes much more sense than a linear one. If you buy KMart at 75 cents and sell it for $1.50, you're up 100% (which shows up logarithmicaly), instead of being lost on zero axis (since it was about $15 last year). It will make it easier to see where people make money trading WCOM as a penny stock.
OK, you're just using a non-standard term. The real "cosmic rays" that generate ozone in our atmosphere is ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. The stuff usually called "cosmic rays" is radiation and nuclei that have extremely high energy (at least GeV in kinetic energy). But the energy flux of cosmic radiation is much too small to account for ozone production (if it weren't, the night sky would be as bright as noonday with Cerenkov radiation!).
I think you're failing to grasp the difference between oxygen atoms and (di)oxygen molecules. You are correct in saying that 3O2->2O3 (three dioxygen molecules reacting to form two ozone molecules) is quite endothermic. But 3O->O3 (three oxygen atoms forming ozone) is extremely exothermic. And the difference between the two is because it is highly endothermic for an oxygen molecule to dissociate into two oxygen atoms (O2->2O). And parent's parent explains why the direct reaction 3O2 + 3 (or 6) hv -> 2O3 is almost impossible in the gas phase. That's why it is pictured as a stepwise reaction.