The syllogism and its little brother the enthymeme date back to ancient Greece and are styles of argument. The reason the syllogism gets criticized to the point of being deprecatory is that it is easily abused.
Here:
Major premise: The universe is older than 6,000 years if some of its components took longer than 6,000 years to form.
Minor premise: The gas giants took less than 6,000 years to form.
Conclusion: The universe probably (more so than yesterday) took less than 6,000 years to form.
To me, there are several logical flaws there, and this has not a thing to do with religion. The main one is that the major premise is false; the theories concerning the age of the universe are not based on the sum of series of events. You may be making this false assumption because (to my understanding) the 6,000-year version of creationism is derived from how long various individuals lived, added to their descendants, and so on.
So the gas giants might never have formed, the estimates for the age of the universe would not change because they are indifferent to gas giants. Really, the formation of the planets is a bit trivia in the view of the universe, and the difference in formation time proposed here, mere millions of years, are the 0.01% insignificant blink of an eye to a universe thought to be over 10 thousand million (billion) years of age, and a solar system of a sprightly 4.5 billion (again with a "b").
Another trivial bit of semantics is that you misuse the word "hypothesis." Science really doesn't use hypothesis in this way, and when scientists speak of theories they don't mean educated guess, but a framework to explain a fact. So the age of the universe is a fact to a very high degree of certainty; it is older than 6,000 years by billions; and various theories strive to explain the nature of or refine the fact. But whether a theory of good or bad does not alter the fact, and the age of the universe is something so well established that it is inconceivable it will someday turn out to be 6,000 years. Besides the huge difference between the estimates, there's enough evidence on earth -- even the weathering of a mountain takes millions of years -- the pyramids haven't weathered much in that time -- and I won't even bring up the fossil record.
But again, even if these events happened faster than we can imagine, the age of the universe is judged by independent data.
The only remaining hope for a doctrinaire 6,000-year view would be that the universe and earth were created pre-aged, but I doubt the Bible supports that view. I don't care how many people believe it, the majority has erred often enough before, is the name of many causes. You acknowledge that truth isn't determined democratically anyway -- then turn around and say "I am being persecuted for what are mainstream beliefs in much of the US." No, you are being criticized (persecuted? that's a little much) not for relating "popular" beliefs but for your faulty logic concerning astrophysics, and science generally. Don't take refuge in "mainstream." And I am not claiming that God lies, just that falliable humans don't get the message right sometimes.
I would think it obvious that the Bible makes heavy use of metaphor, and that things like the 6 days of creation may not be at all literal. Of course I'm not the first to wonder about this. But I think more and more people will eventually accept that the Earth is old and move on to that evolution debate, or something else. The truth of the Bible is hardly imperiled.
Everyone realizes that not everything is scalable; what works on a certain scale may not on another.
Libraries are a wonderful institution that doubtlessly cut into the income of those who produce the books. More importantly (to me) they are repositories of books that are out of print and can't easily be located. Older books doubtless stimulate interest in buying newer ones. In the very earliest days, of course, few could afford books at all.
The thing is, electonic distribution blows up the apple cart. It's just too easy. And I worry it will somehow fundamentally change a system that we have grown used to over many decades. Just because the library system is familiar and effective doesn't mean that scaling it to the Web will work. It will be wonderful for the user, but the producer? In fact, in could be a disaster, save the current reality that reading books on a computer just isn't like a real book.
Whether or not you believe, or believe in believing, it begs the questions of "what does it say?" Your definition addresses faith, not content. Reading "literally" supposedly promises some sort of absolute and unassailable interpretation, but such is impossible. Only some fundamentalists even accept the 6,000-year figure -- it doesn't appear in the text and was rather inferred by certain interpreters. Ultimately someone has to make the call.
Whatever the philosophical position, creationism is not science. Approaching a question with an predetermined result in mind is not science. The creationist doctrine has its place in theology, not science, because it is by its nature a rejection of science. My primary objection is the continual pitting of evolution against creationism when the two are apples and oranges, fact and faith, and neither can disprove the other.
I'm not quite defending them, many of their policy choices have been unfortunate, though I think their actual business is run fairly well.
Yes, I'm glad it hasn't occurred to Bezos to patent breathing. ("A method of assimilating oxygen molecules into a ferrous-impreganted aqueous solution for later facilitation of metabolism.") This stuff is easy to make fun of. But it does employ a lot of lawyers in this slow economy -- and that's a good thing, right?
One Q: with a 15-year transition, aren't there a lot of people in the middle left with the quandary whether to (1) buy an expensive digital set; or (2) buy a sooner-or-later-to-be-outmoded cheap analog set? I suppose price parity will occur at some point, but with the industry producing two kinds of sets it seems the economy of scale will take decades to arrive. I tend to keep equipment until it dies -- the perfectly nice Sony I'm looking at is almost 15 years old, from when their products were sturdier.
Again, I do acknowledge the inevitability (if not the necessity:) of the move, but question the allocation of the burdens.
A better way? Hmm. Wouldn't it be nice for the transition to be (more?) market-driven. This would delay introduction significantly, but, well, I don't particularly care. I don't think broadcast HDTV is all that valuable, and everything is going cable/satellite anyway -- most certainly for the high-end users interested in DTV in the immediate future. Even with gov't mandates, I'm curious just how many years the transition will take, for things like the 85% cutoff to be met will depend on consumer interest (and how will the % be measured? I'm sure many households will be hybrids of digital and analog sets). I'm guessing many years, your 15 is more plausible than the FCC's 2006. I also wonder how much all of this will cost. A lot.
Just as a footnote, I don't trust the political FCC denying use of broadcast spectrum for other purposes being the end of the matter (and besides, if can be done it seems inefficient to bar it for fear of the broadcasters getting a windfall -- perhaps they can just pay a royalty for any extra mileage); and I could swear I've seen lots of mentions of DRM re digital TV... perhaps it's a dead letter, I'd hate to see it starting that all over again as with the music CD's and such.
If you look closely, I don't make *any* firm assertion of the age of the Earth. I just know that 6,000 is ridiculous, beyond the pale of scientific plausibility, and unsupported by anything but the palpably ridiculous reasoning of creationists who start out with what they want to prove and warp everything else to fit that initial prejudice. Stated differently, what would it take to persuade you creationism is in error? For me, I'll pitch evolution is that evidence comes along -- I'm not bound by faith to ignore the facts.
You are mistaken about real-world Christians, though perhaps you would arrogantly say they are not "real" Christians. But to the rest of the world they are Christians, and I don't think should have to share the burden of criticism targeting the subset who are creationists. There is a reason the latter are called fundamentalist Christians; they represent only a segment of all Christians, though some of them may believe themselves better than everyone else.
Is one a lousy Christian if one doesn't believe what a creationist tells them to think? No, I'd suggest looking to the Bible, not the creationists, and remembering the difference between the literal and the allegorical. If we must be literal we must start stoning adulterers and all the rest.
A Brookings Institute study you and others might enjoy on the cost, policy, and conduct of the U.S. nuclear weapons program ($4 trillion). Interesting history reading.... and I'm not sure I'm ready to sign on to a "single world power" just yet:)...
Re Ariane, I was really asking whether it was ever designed to drop bombs on anyone. Presumably anything that puts payloads in or near orbit could do this, but was it ever intended.
As for spy satellites I assumed as much -- but are any American?
I wouldn't presume anything; as a scientific type I am obsessed with fact.
I'm not sure whether you think the % of creationists is high or low, and I don't have time to research the web. There are however various surveys out there; the question has been studied extensively because of the evolution v. creationism debate for public school classrooms.
I should add that by Creationist I intend the fundamentalists who insist on a literal interpretation of Bible (if such a thing is possible given its complexities, various translations, and internal contradictions -- this is not a criticism but an acknowledgement I hope most of us can make) that leads to the 6,000-year figure and so on. These are the most conservatives.
As with most things, Americans cover the spectrum from Creationist to evolutionary-ist (?) with most kind trying to be accommodating. I don't count these accommodating Christians among the ones who claim their reading of the Bible is the end of all debate, and so the % who think maybe creationism should be discussed in school are not the hard-liners most folks think of when they hear "creationist." I personally think many of those who vote for creationism never had evolution properly explained to them -- note the correlation with less education. A poll may thus unfairly suggest their minds are closed to alternatives, as with the creationists. Better PR for evolution is part of why we've seen an upsurge of "intelligent design," a kind of soft-sell creationism.
I think they very recently discovered some sedimentary rock of an age close to the 4.5 billion figure, and that life has been believed to go back maybe 3.8 billion years for some time now. These estimates are based on radioactive decay and the like rather than theoretical models of solar system formation (or so I understood it). It would surprising if the estimates were off by much, but we've had surprises before.
When life forms must depend to a certain extent on chance, though to be the fact Earth has almost always had life suggests that maybe it's not that phenomenal a miracle, at least for simple single-celled creatures of extreme simplicity.
The universe's age is also a topic of speculation, based on the rate of expansion and current size, etc. Stay tuned.:)
Unremarkably, you miss that the study suggests the gas giants formed quickly not recently.
6,000 years is a lot more reasonable-sounding... why? A staggering amount of evidence point towards a time period much, much longer. "Reasonable" is believing things in reasonable accord with the evidence, and the estimate need never be completely proved to be accepted as fact. That's just not how people do things in real life.
Evolution, for that matter, is a fact under the same principle of overwhelming evidence. The debate or theory now centers on how it happened, which might be Darwin's theory or something else; if Darwin is disproved the fact of evolution will remain. You are free to believe otherwise, but won't change the real world any more than your refusal to believe in the fact of gravity will enable you to fly.
Is this disrespectful? Yes. I think it would be untenable to grant any belief a held by any person person with equal weight. I thought creationism, with its tenuous basis in the Bible, had been left by the wayside long ago, though I realize there will always be a core that will believe anything.
(For the interested, a detailed chart of freq. allocations.)
Yes, by "double" I referred to the "loan," if you prefer of add'l spectrum to broadcasters. There will be at least a decade before the spectrum returns, assuming the broadcasters don't figure out the political means to squat on it by then. They have to return it in 2006 or 85% market penetration, which clearly won't happen until later, esp. in non-early adopter areas.
There has been some debate over whether stations can exploit additional space within their bandwidth, used for neither digital nor analog signals, for commercial purposes. I'm not sure how that came out.
Your analogy to early TV is inept. The introduction of TV forced no one to buy anything unless they wanted to participate. Same with color, which was cleverly compatible with B&W TV's. Opt-outs did not subsidize early adopters, and improvements did not needlessly obsolete existing equipment. Now, with DTV we face losing our equipment -- unless we buy $$ converters -- and of higher cable fees as they transition to digital, etc. Already digital tuners are supposedly to be required for all new TV's whether you need one or not (most of us have cable). Moreover, HDTV also portends a new round of DRM that may ultimately peel off some fair use rights.
I don't mind the advance to DTV at all, indeed it is probably a good thing. Many people do seem to want it, but -- and this is key -- I'm not at all interested in subsidizing them or the manufacturers in their entertainment or profits, respectively. I would like converting to me my choice, quaint notion though that may be, and will hold off as long as possible until the people who just absolutely positively have to have DTV rigth away have paid for the bleeding edge of technology and the prices drop.
Thankfully we don't just do things that people "want" is offensive. I don't know how you distinguish between "we" and "people," but people were excited as hell about TV's debut. DTV is more ho-hum despite years of promotion and hype. More perceptive souls have questioned whether DTV is a rip-off for the ordinary consumer here or here or here or various other places not preoccupied with how neat DTV is --- or what a favor they're doing for the little "people."
The channel gaps are not universal in my experience. I think they are maintained more out of an abundance of caution -- an excess of bandwidth is reserved for TV in the first place -- and to avoid interference from transmitters outside the service area yet close enough to cause contamination.
God made the Earth about 6000 years ago so it couldn't have formed in millions of years.
Interesting logic. In other words, "Because CONCLUSION, then QUESTION must lead to CONCLUSION." I believe this is called a syllogism.
I don't care if oil forms in ten minutes, the Earth is not 6,000 years old to a 99.9% level of certainty unless God has a very odd sense of humor (possible). Personally I'm leaning towards 4.5 billion years.
Seriously, in defense of Christianity, and I am agnostic, scant few Christians subscribe to creationism or intelligent design, so whatever you may believe be careful not to stereotype Christians based on it.
Odd, they have a different abstract from the summary. Sorry, I don't have a full subscription to Science.... not that I would blow their copyright and post it here.:)
To wit:
Formation of Giant Planets by Fragmentation of Protoplanetary Disks
Lucio Mayer,1*dagger Thomas Quinn,1* James Wadsley,2 Joachim Stadel3dagger
The evolution of gravitationally unstable protoplanetary gaseous disks has been studied with the use of three-dimensional smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations with unprecedented resolution. We have considered disks with initial masses and temperature profiles consistent with those inferred for the protosolar nebula and for other protoplanetary disks. We show that long-lasting, self-gravitating protoplanets arise after a few disk orbital periods if cooling is efficient enough to maintain the temperature close to 50 K. The resulting bodies have masses and orbital eccentricities similar to those of detected extrasolar planets.
1 Department of Astronomy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. 2 Department of Physics & Astronomy, McMaster University, 1280 Main St. West, Hamilton, ON L8S 4M1, Canada. 3 University of Victoria, Department of Physics and Astronomy, 3800 Finnerty Road, Elliot Building, Victoria, BC V8W 3PG, Canada. * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: lucio@physik.unizh.ch, trq@astro.washington.edu
dagger Present address: Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland.
The study actually looked at gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. My understanding is that these planets formed by scooping up gas as they orbited the sun. The interior rocky planets of the inner disk probably took longer to achieve final shape, though their materials would have been the first to cool into solid form.
Neat stuff.
Here's the Science abstract:
A Quickie Birth for Jupiters and Saturns Richard A. Kerr
On page 1756, a group of astrophysicists presents computer simulations of the nascent solar system that suggest a possible mechanism for the formation of the gas giant planets: runaway fluctuations in the density of the protoplanetary disk. In their model, gas giants of about the right size, number, and orbit condense from a disk of gas to look like very young Jupiters. The trick was to simulate the process in fine detail so that the gas's own gravity could take over.
I should have elaborated -- PDF is better (for now) because it is trivial for anyone to read it for free. It is a public standard; it is not proprietary; I have de/encoders other than Adobe's. I'm not sure what % of people will be able to translate a Word doc, or how many will get the subtle message "Word is the standard -- why am I not using it?" PDF does faintly suggest one should buy Acrobat, I suppose.
ASCII text is fine, except for enhancements like images and decent formatting.
The gov't theoretically works for use. Imagine they started releasing reports in Russian and just told us "get a translator!" A Word doc might as well me in Russian for all I can do with it (let's see, I have a translator here somewhere).
But this is 100% consistent with the FCC being in industry's pocket (cf. HDTV).
I suggest focusing complaints also on the webmaster and such, people who will have an idea of what you're talking about. The commissioners would probably figure we're just hippie scum or something like that.:)
P.S. Did you notice the anonymous response you got? What computer company do you think the AC works for?
Gee, I groused elsewhere that the FCC was in the industry pocket in mandating HDTV (I not sure consumers or broadcasters wanted it all that bad, but the manufacturers sure did -- seems many of us were inconsiderately holding on to old sets for too many years). And now they issue statement in proprietary MS Word format? Sure, there are lots of translators, but should we have to use translators to listen to our own government?
SO many people think Word is the lingua franca of the computer world. There's an example of a Microsoft success -- name it something generic like Word and make it the de facto standard. Not that I don't love MS, but I have avoided MS Word for about ten years. Even the IRS at least uses PDF.
I consider the government using proprietary formats offensive, and have routinely complained about "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" tags on Virginia gov't homepages (I do live in VA). Their response (beside groaning at another crank email) was that Frontpage told them to put it there....
Anyway -- now we return to our scheduled programming....
If you've ever seen a map of the frequency spectrum, the dominance of TV signals is astonishing, all the more so with double-wide HDTV. If I recall, nearly every radio (audio or navigation) frequency you can think of takes up less spectrum than a single TV station. I love TV and all, but think of the possibilities if we merely dropped Gilligan's Island reruns (haven't you seen them all before?).:)
The expression "at times when the spectrum lay fallow" is interesting. To let a field lie fallow is to take it out of production for a season or more to allow it to replenish its nutrients, so that desirable crops will grow better later. A complimentary approach is to rotate crops, alternating ones that, say, replenish the bioavailable nitrogen in the soil, with others that deplete it. (I see that there is also something called "improved fallow".)
I assume checmical fertilizers have made these quaint practices obsolescent in the developed world (except for organic farmers perhaps) but what an intriguing metaphor for the airwaves. Perhaps if you hold off on passing out frequencies, more interesting uses will come along.
Just as a footnote, I don't remember demanding HDTV, I barely tolerate TV because of programming not resolution, and I haven't been happy at the industry-driven FCC resolution to force all of us to upgrade. I realize they faced a chicken-or-egg dilemma with introducing HDTV and digital signals to a skeptical public, but I would have preferred methods other than a gov't mandate. If I recall, the bandwidth was handed out for free, an interesting sacrifice given all the money made from auctioning cellphone channels. Will there come a time we regret dedicating so much spectrum to it? Or will cable make broadcast a thing of the past, anytime soon? Will HDTV flop, driving some stations to seek more useful applications for their free spectrum? Do I have even some of my facts right?:)
You have an implicit point I think -- wouldn't it be nice if the size of the ad ran in inverse proportion to its obnoxiousness? I know large ads are automatically obnoxious, but the "punch the monkey" and sexual performance ads have nauseating impact far greater than their physical size.
The IAB site ironically doesn't need ads. It probably draws funding exclusively from its membership, so essentially they subscribe to its content.
The ad people should know that the more rigid their template the easier they'll be to block.
And I feel sorry for the otherwise decent sites who feel compelled to adopt these increasingly irritating novels. Pop-up ads are one of the worst. Beyond a certain point the site is not worth visiting unless you are bristling with anti-ad weaponry, what a waste.
Hmm, I guess it's how you judge the overlap. It's a good question, for one, whether we would have gone to the Moon when we did, or ever, without the race against the Soviets, a race with strong military overtones. Or to ask how much it would have cost to go to the Moon if ICBM and the Cold War had never happened. Either way, it is undeniable the U.S. was terrified of the Soviet Union, particularly its (largely imagined) nuclear missile capability. Kennedy ran in 1960 partly on a fabricated "missile gap" platform.
Small nukes? I don't think they got really small until the 60's, when we became interested in MIRV's. The ICBM business took its own path when it switched to the far more manageable and reliable solid fuel rockets, the Minuteman series. (I remember a Titan exploding when I was a kid because a wrench was dropped down the silo. It took them a while to figure out where the warhead has gone.) Obviously the Saturn V was designed with a special civilian purpose, but its roots were predictably military.
It was also not clear for a while whether we might have a manned military presence in orbit. Happily we went the stabilizing route of the ABM treaty instead. Oh yeah, the former ABM treaty -- but that's a whole 'nuther topic!
My point anyway was to humbly acknowledge that the American dominance of space flight wasn't just due to our brilliance and hard work and love of discovery:); we subsidized it with many billions for grim military reasons, some altogether necessary. The secondary point, before anyone could say the cold war didn't waste trillions, was that military objectives are an inefficient way to pursue civilian space exploration. Programs like Ariane went straight to the target (I'm hoping here that Ariane never had military purposes?).
Gee, NASM even has a page on the military origins of the space race. I'm finding these things through Google, things I fuzzily recall reading elsewhere over the years. Anyway, what I'm seeing at the moment is a pervasive military motivation, even if the ways the monery was spent didn't always make sense. I would bet Americans somehow felt more secure that it was Americans landing on the Moon rather than Soviets. I remember the vague worries about being incinerated in the 70's quite clearly.
I don't believe that the civilian space program has ever fully disengaged from the military. The Space Shuttle itself was designed with significiant military purposes in mind. IIRC most of the military business went elsewhere after Challenger, and our satellite launching rockets may still be behind because of exaggerated hopes and hypes that the Shuttle could do it all. As the subsidies have been reduced the space program has suffered, to the point that I believe the military is very concerned with maintaining our current launch capabilities. I assume that the market for military satellites is still strong, and that the U.S. won't be launching these on foreign rockets anytime soon.
No, not all our "space stuff" is government, such as Pegasus, and most of the projects are run by contractors. NASA just picks the worng, er, right programs to fund. Someone quipped that while most agencies have a public relations dept., NASA is a public relations dept. that happens to have an agency. In other words, politics.
It should be noted that our arms race gave a huge boost (ha-ha) to the space program that came as a very heavy price. Yes, I'm glad we got some peaceful dividends from ICBM work, but this could have been achieved more cheaply, as with the Ariane.
I wouldn't be too quick to pick a winner by political system or nationality. The Ariane is quite the success story, and now the Russians are picking up some significant American contracts with their wonderfully reliable booster, and it looks like the Chinese will in time get it together. The overall payload delivery system will ultimately be quite international -- as any non-jingoistic capitalist would want it to be, competition will spur innovation and lower price. Also, as a peacenik I would be delighted to see everyone preoccupied with getting stuff into orbit and leaving it there, not dropping it on someone else.
That said -- I will admit feeling a little twinge each time the American space program shrinks one little bit more. Living here, we all have it as just a bit of our pride, silly or not. Same for passenger jets.
Hmmm... as a formerly active pilot, you now have me trying to guess your brand...:) Does it begin with a "C"? An "N"?
There are a number of avionics companies, two or three of them major leaders. And I did get the impression that quality was declining, although gadgets and prices were going up just fine. For the uninitiated here, these avionics boxes are big bucks (thousands) and aggravating as heck to fix. Plus in-flight failure is annoying, or worse. (Real pilots don't admit that a defective little gadget like an instrument would slow them down. More seriously, there is a certain amount of redundancy so that a point failure, compared to the failure of an engine, is rarely that big a deal. Nor is a failure welcome.)
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I'll try to wrap up one tiny detail....
The syllogism and its little brother the enthymeme date back to ancient Greece and are styles of argument. The reason the syllogism gets criticized to the point of being deprecatory is that it is easily abused.
Here:
Major premise: The universe is older than 6,000 years if some of its components took longer than 6,000 years to form.
Minor premise: The gas giants took less than 6,000 years to form.
Conclusion: The universe probably (more so than yesterday) took less than 6,000 years to form.
To me, there are several logical flaws there, and this has not a thing to do with religion. The main one is that the major premise is false; the theories concerning the age of the universe are not based on the sum of series of events. You may be making this false assumption because (to my understanding) the 6,000-year version of creationism is derived from how long various individuals lived, added to their descendants, and so on.
So the gas giants might never have formed, the estimates for the age of the universe would not change because they are indifferent to gas giants. Really, the formation of the planets is a bit trivia in the view of the universe, and the difference in formation time proposed here, mere millions of years, are the 0.01% insignificant blink of an eye to a universe thought to be over 10 thousand million (billion) years of age, and a solar system of a sprightly 4.5 billion (again with a "b").
Another trivial bit of semantics is that you misuse the word "hypothesis." Science really doesn't use hypothesis in this way, and when scientists speak of theories they don't mean educated guess, but a framework to explain a fact. So the age of the universe is a fact to a very high degree of certainty; it is older than 6,000 years by billions; and various theories strive to explain the nature of or refine the fact. But whether a theory of good or bad does not alter the fact, and the age of the universe is something so well established that it is inconceivable it will someday turn out to be 6,000 years. Besides the huge difference between the estimates, there's enough evidence on earth -- even the weathering of a mountain takes millions of years -- the pyramids haven't weathered much in that time -- and I won't even bring up the fossil record.
But again, even if these events happened faster than we can imagine, the age of the universe is judged by independent data.
The only remaining hope for a doctrinaire 6,000-year view would be that the universe and earth were created pre-aged, but I doubt the Bible supports that view. I don't care how many people believe it, the majority has erred often enough before, is the name of many causes. You acknowledge that truth isn't determined democratically anyway -- then turn around and say "I am being persecuted for what are mainstream beliefs in much of the US." No, you are being criticized (persecuted? that's a little much) not for relating "popular" beliefs but for your faulty logic concerning astrophysics, and science generally. Don't take refuge in "mainstream." And I am not claiming that God lies, just that falliable humans don't get the message right sometimes.
I would think it obvious that the Bible makes heavy use of metaphor, and that things like the 6 days of creation may not be at all literal. Of course I'm not the first to wonder about this. But I think more and more people will eventually accept that the Earth is old and move on to that evolution debate, or something else. The truth of the Bible is hardly imperiled.
Everyone realizes that not everything is scalable; what works on a certain scale may not on another.
Libraries are a wonderful institution that doubtlessly cut into the income of those who produce the books. More importantly (to me) they are repositories of books that are out of print and can't easily be located. Older books doubtless stimulate interest in buying newer ones. In the very earliest days, of course, few could afford books at all.
The thing is, electonic distribution blows up the apple cart. It's just too easy. And I worry it will somehow fundamentally change a system that we have grown used to over many decades. Just because the library system is familiar and effective doesn't mean that scaling it to the Web will work. It will be wonderful for the user, but the producer? In fact, in could be a disaster, save the current reality that reading books on a computer just isn't like a real book.
Whether or not you believe, or believe in believing, it begs the questions of "what does it say?" Your definition addresses faith, not content. Reading "literally" supposedly promises some sort of absolute and unassailable interpretation, but such is impossible. Only some fundamentalists even accept the 6,000-year figure -- it doesn't appear in the text and was rather inferred by certain interpreters. Ultimately someone has to make the call.
Whatever the philosophical position, creationism is not science. Approaching a question with an predetermined result in mind is not science. The creationist doctrine has its place in theology, not science, because it is by its nature a rejection of science. My primary objection is the continual pitting of evolution against creationism when the two are apples and oranges, fact and faith, and neither can disprove the other.
I thought they had posted a profit at some point...
I'm not quite defending them, many of their policy choices have been unfortunate, though I think their actual business is run fairly well.
Yes, I'm glad it hasn't occurred to Bezos to patent breathing. ("A method of assimilating oxygen molecules into a ferrous-impreganted aqueous solution for later facilitation of metabolism.") This stuff is easy to make fun of. But it does employ a lot of lawyers in this slow economy -- and that's a good thing, right?
One Q: with a 15-year transition, aren't there a lot of people in the middle left with the quandary whether to (1) buy an expensive digital set; or (2) buy a sooner-or-later-to-be-outmoded cheap analog set? I suppose price parity will occur at some point, but with the industry producing two kinds of sets it seems the economy of scale will take decades to arrive. I tend to keep equipment until it dies -- the perfectly nice Sony I'm looking at is almost 15 years old, from when their products were sturdier.
:) of the move, but question the allocation of the burdens.
... perhaps it's a dead letter, I'd hate to see it starting that all over again as with the music CD's and such.
Again, I do acknowledge the inevitability (if not the necessity
A better way? Hmm. Wouldn't it be nice for the transition to be (more?) market-driven. This would delay introduction significantly, but, well, I don't particularly care. I don't think broadcast HDTV is all that valuable, and everything is going cable/satellite anyway -- most certainly for the high-end users interested in DTV in the immediate future. Even with gov't mandates, I'm curious just how many years the transition will take, for things like the 85% cutoff to be met will depend on consumer interest (and how will the % be measured? I'm sure many households will be hybrids of digital and analog sets). I'm guessing many years, your 15 is more plausible than the FCC's 2006. I also wonder how much all of this will cost. A lot.
Just as a footnote, I don't trust the political FCC denying use of broadcast spectrum for other purposes being the end of the matter (and besides, if can be done it seems inefficient to bar it for fear of the broadcasters getting a windfall -- perhaps they can just pay a royalty for any extra mileage); and I could swear I've seen lots of mentions of DRM re digital TV
Thanks for the info.
If you look closely, I don't make *any* firm assertion of the age of the Earth. I just know that 6,000 is ridiculous, beyond the pale of scientific plausibility, and unsupported by anything but the palpably ridiculous reasoning of creationists who start out with what they want to prove and warp everything else to fit that initial prejudice. Stated differently, what would it take to persuade you creationism is in error? For me, I'll pitch evolution is that evidence comes along -- I'm not bound by faith to ignore the facts.
You are mistaken about real-world Christians, though perhaps you would arrogantly say they are not "real" Christians. But to the rest of the world they are Christians, and I don't think should have to share the burden of criticism targeting the subset who are creationists. There is a reason the latter are called fundamentalist Christians; they represent only a segment of all Christians, though some of them may believe themselves better than everyone else.
Is one a lousy Christian if one doesn't believe what a creationist tells them to think? No, I'd suggest looking to the Bible, not the creationists, and remembering the difference between the literal and the allegorical. If we must be literal we must start stoning adulterers and all the rest.
A Brookings Institute study you and others might enjoy on the cost, policy, and conduct of the U.S. nuclear weapons program ($4 trillion). Interesting history reading. ... and I'm not sure I'm ready to sign on to a "single world power" just yet :) ...
Re Ariane, I was really asking whether it was ever designed to drop bombs on anyone. Presumably anything that puts payloads in or near orbit could do this, but was it ever intended.
As for spy satellites I assumed as much -- but are any American?
I wouldn't presume anything; as a scientific type I am obsessed with fact.
I'm not sure whether you think the % of creationists is high or low, and I don't have time to research the web. There are however various surveys out there; the question has been studied extensively because of the evolution v. creationism debate for public school classrooms.
I should add that by Creationist I intend the fundamentalists who insist on a literal interpretation of Bible (if such a thing is possible given its complexities, various translations, and internal contradictions -- this is not a criticism but an acknowledgement I hope most of us can make) that leads to the 6,000-year figure and so on. These are the most conservatives.
As with most things, Americans cover the spectrum from Creationist to evolutionary-ist (?) with most kind trying to be accommodating. I don't count these accommodating Christians among the ones who claim their reading of the Bible is the end of all debate, and so the % who think maybe creationism should be discussed in school are not the hard-liners most folks think of when they hear "creationist." I personally think many of those who vote for creationism never had evolution properly explained to them -- note the correlation with less education. A poll may thus unfairly suggest their minds are closed to alternatives, as with the creationists. Better PR for evolution is part of why we've seen an upsurge of "intelligent design," a kind of soft-sell creationism.
I think they very recently discovered some sedimentary rock of an age close to the 4.5 billion figure, and that life has been believed to go back maybe 3.8 billion years for some time now. These estimates are based on radioactive decay and the like rather than theoretical models of solar system formation (or so I understood it). It would surprising if the estimates were off by much, but we've had surprises before.
:)
When life forms must depend to a certain extent on chance, though to be the fact Earth has almost always had life suggests that maybe it's not that phenomenal a miracle, at least for simple single-celled creatures of extreme simplicity.
The universe's age is also a topic of speculation, based on the rate of expansion and current size, etc. Stay tuned.
Unremarkably, you miss that the study suggests the gas giants formed quickly not recently.
... why? A staggering amount of evidence point towards a time period much, much longer. "Reasonable" is believing things in reasonable accord with the evidence, and the estimate need never be completely proved to be accepted as fact. That's just not how people do things in real life.
6,000 years is a lot more reasonable-sounding
Evolution, for that matter, is a fact under the same principle of overwhelming evidence. The debate or theory now centers on how it happened, which might be Darwin's theory or something else; if Darwin is disproved the fact of evolution will remain. You are free to believe otherwise, but won't change the real world any more than your refusal to believe in the fact of gravity will enable you to fly.
Is this disrespectful? Yes. I think it would be untenable to grant any belief a held by any person person with equal weight. I thought creationism, with its tenuous basis in the Bible, had been left by the wayside long ago, though I realize there will always be a core that will believe anything.
(For the interested, a detailed chart of freq. allocations.)
Yes, by "double" I referred to the "loan," if you prefer of add'l spectrum to broadcasters. There will be at least a decade before the spectrum returns, assuming the broadcasters don't figure out the political means to squat on it by then. They have to return it in 2006 or 85% market penetration, which clearly won't happen until later, esp. in non-early adopter areas.
There has been some debate over whether stations can exploit additional space within their bandwidth, used for neither digital nor analog signals, for commercial purposes. I'm not sure how that came out.
Your analogy to early TV is inept. The introduction of TV forced no one to buy anything unless they wanted to participate. Same with color, which was cleverly compatible with B&W TV's. Opt-outs did not subsidize early adopters, and improvements did not needlessly obsolete existing equipment. Now, with DTV we face losing our equipment -- unless we buy $$ converters -- and of higher cable fees as they transition to digital, etc. Already digital tuners are supposedly to be required for all new TV's whether you need one or not (most of us have cable). Moreover, HDTV also portends a new round of DRM that may ultimately peel off some fair use rights.
I don't mind the advance to DTV at all, indeed it is probably a good thing. Many people do seem to want it, but -- and this is key -- I'm not at all interested in subsidizing them or the manufacturers in their entertainment or profits, respectively. I would like converting to me my choice, quaint notion though that may be, and will hold off as long as possible until the people who just absolutely positively have to have DTV rigth away have paid for the bleeding edge of technology and the prices drop.
Thankfully we don't just do things that people "want" is offensive. I don't know how you distinguish between "we" and "people," but people were excited as hell about TV's debut. DTV is more ho-hum despite years of promotion and hype. More perceptive souls have questioned whether DTV is a rip-off for the ordinary consumer here or here or here or various other places not preoccupied with how neat DTV is --- or what a favor they're doing for the little "people."
The channel gaps are not universal in my experience. I think they are maintained more out of an abundance of caution -- an excess of bandwidth is reserved for TV in the first place -- and to avoid interference from transmitters outside the service area yet close enough to cause contamination.
This is a troll, right?
God made the Earth about 6000 years ago so it couldn't have formed in millions of years.
Interesting logic. In other words, "Because CONCLUSION, then QUESTION must lead to CONCLUSION." I believe this is called a syllogism.
I don't care if oil forms in ten minutes, the Earth is not 6,000 years old to a 99.9% level of certainty unless God has a very odd sense of humor (possible). Personally I'm leaning towards 4.5 billion years.
Seriously, in defense of Christianity, and I am agnostic, scant few Christians subscribe to creationism or intelligent design, so whatever you may believe be careful not to stereotype Christians based on it.
Odd, they have a different abstract from the summary. Sorry, I don't have a full subscription to Science.... not that I would blow their copyright and post it here. :)
To wit:
Formation of Giant Planets by Fragmentation of Protoplanetary Disks
Lucio Mayer,1*dagger Thomas Quinn,1* James Wadsley,2 Joachim Stadel3dagger
The evolution of gravitationally unstable protoplanetary gaseous disks has been studied with the use of three-dimensional smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations with unprecedented resolution. We have considered disks with initial masses and temperature profiles consistent with those inferred for the protosolar nebula and for other protoplanetary disks. We show that long-lasting, self-gravitating protoplanets arise after a few disk orbital periods if cooling is efficient enough to maintain the temperature close to 50 K. The resulting bodies have masses and orbital eccentricities similar to those of detected extrasolar planets.
1 Department of Astronomy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
2 Department of Physics & Astronomy, McMaster University, 1280 Main St. West, Hamilton, ON L8S 4M1, Canada.
3 University of Victoria, Department of Physics and Astronomy, 3800 Finnerty Road, Elliot Building, Victoria, BC V8W 3PG, Canada.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: lucio@physik.unizh.ch, trq@astro.washington.edu
dagger Present address: Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland.
The study actually looked at gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. My understanding is that these planets formed by scooping up gas as they orbited the sun. The interior rocky planets of the inner disk probably took longer to achieve final shape, though their materials would have been the first to cool into solid form.
Neat stuff.
Here's the Science abstract:
A Quickie Birth for Jupiters and Saturns
Richard A. Kerr
On page 1756, a group of astrophysicists presents computer simulations of the nascent solar system that suggest a possible mechanism for the formation of the gas giant planets: runaway fluctuations in the density of the protoplanetary disk. In their model, gas giants of about the right size, number, and orbit condense from a disk of gas to look like very young Jupiters. The trick was to simulate the process in fine detail so that the gas's own gravity could take over.
Full Text
Thx. The IRS does something similar with forms, though all the formats (I think) are non-proprietary.
I should have elaborated -- PDF is better (for now) because it is trivial for anyone to read it for free. It is a public standard; it is not proprietary; I have de/encoders other than Adobe's. I'm not sure what % of people will be able to translate a Word doc, or how many will get the subtle message "Word is the standard -- why am I not using it?" PDF does faintly suggest one should buy Acrobat, I suppose.
ASCII text is fine, except for enhancements like images and decent formatting.
Thank you! I groused about this elsewhere here.
:)
The gov't theoretically works for use. Imagine they started releasing reports in Russian and just told us "get a translator!" A Word doc might as well me in Russian for all I can do with it (let's see, I have a translator here somewhere).
But this is 100% consistent with the FCC being in industry's pocket (cf. HDTV).
I suggest focusing complaints also on the webmaster and such, people who will have an idea of what you're talking about. The commissioners would probably figure we're just hippie scum or something like that.
P.S. Did you notice the anonymous response you got? What computer company do you think the AC works for?
Gee, I groused elsewhere that the FCC was in the industry pocket in mandating HDTV (I not sure consumers or broadcasters wanted it all that bad, but the manufacturers sure did -- seems many of us were inconsiderately holding on to old sets for too many years). And now they issue statement in proprietary MS Word format? Sure, there are lots of translators, but should we have to use translators to listen to our own government?
SO many people think Word is the lingua franca of the computer world. There's an example of a Microsoft success -- name it something generic like Word and make it the de facto standard. Not that I don't love MS, but I have avoided MS Word for about ten years. Even the IRS at least uses PDF.
I consider the government using proprietary formats offensive, and have routinely complained about "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" tags on Virginia gov't homepages (I do live in VA). Their response (beside groaning at another crank email) was that Frontpage told them to put it there....
Anyway -- now we return to our scheduled programming....
If you've ever seen a map of the frequency spectrum, the dominance of TV signals is astonishing, all the more so with double-wide HDTV. If I recall, nearly every radio (audio or navigation) frequency you can think of takes up less spectrum than a single TV station. I love TV and all, but think of the possibilities if we merely dropped Gilligan's Island reruns (haven't you seen them all before?). :)
:)
The expression "at times when the spectrum lay fallow" is interesting. To let a field lie fallow is to take it out of production for a season or more to allow it to replenish its nutrients, so that desirable crops will grow better later. A complimentary approach is to rotate crops, alternating ones that, say, replenish the bioavailable nitrogen in the soil, with others that deplete it. (I see that there is also something called "improved fallow".)
I assume checmical fertilizers have made these quaint practices obsolescent in the developed world (except for organic farmers perhaps) but what an intriguing metaphor for the airwaves. Perhaps if you hold off on passing out frequencies, more interesting uses will come along.
Just as a footnote, I don't remember demanding HDTV, I barely tolerate TV because of programming not resolution, and I haven't been happy at the industry-driven FCC resolution to force all of us to upgrade. I realize they faced a chicken-or-egg dilemma with introducing HDTV and digital signals to a skeptical public, but I would have preferred methods other than a gov't mandate. If I recall, the bandwidth was handed out for free, an interesting sacrifice given all the money made from auctioning cellphone channels. Will there come a time we regret dedicating so much spectrum to it? Or will cable make broadcast a thing of the past, anytime soon? Will HDTV flop, driving some stations to seek more useful applications for their free spectrum? Do I have even some of my facts right?
You have an implicit point I think -- wouldn't it be nice if the size of the ad ran in inverse proportion to its obnoxiousness? I know large ads are automatically obnoxious, but the "punch the monkey" and sexual performance ads have nauseating impact far greater than their physical size.
The IAB site ironically doesn't need ads. It probably draws funding exclusively from its membership, so essentially they subscribe to its content.
The ad people should know that the more rigid their template the easier they'll be to block.
And I feel sorry for the otherwise decent sites who feel compelled to adopt these increasingly irritating novels. Pop-up ads are one of the worst. Beyond a certain point the site is not worth visiting unless you are bristling with anti-ad weaponry, what a waste.
Hmm, I guess it's how you judge the overlap. It's a good question, for one, whether we would have gone to the Moon when we did, or ever, without the race against the Soviets, a race with strong military overtones. Or to ask how much it would have cost to go to the Moon if ICBM and the Cold War had never happened. Either way, it is undeniable the U.S. was terrified of the Soviet Union, particularly its (largely imagined) nuclear missile capability. Kennedy ran in 1960 partly on a fabricated "missile gap" platform.
:); we subsidized it with many billions for grim military reasons, some altogether necessary. The secondary point, before anyone could say the cold war didn't waste trillions, was that military objectives are an inefficient way to pursue civilian space exploration. Programs like Ariane went straight to the target (I'm hoping here that Ariane never had military purposes?).
Small nukes? I don't think they got really small until the 60's, when we became interested in MIRV's. The ICBM business took its own path when it switched to the far more manageable and reliable solid fuel rockets, the Minuteman series. (I remember a Titan exploding when I was a kid because a wrench was dropped down the silo. It took them a while to figure out where the warhead has gone.) Obviously the Saturn V was designed with a special civilian purpose, but its roots were predictably military.
It was also not clear for a while whether we might have a manned military presence in orbit. Happily we went the stabilizing route of the ABM treaty instead. Oh yeah, the former ABM treaty -- but that's a whole 'nuther topic!
My point anyway was to humbly acknowledge that the American dominance of space flight wasn't just due to our brilliance and hard work and love of discovery
Gee, NASM even has a page on the military origins of the space race. I'm finding these things through Google, things I fuzzily recall reading elsewhere over the years. Anyway, what I'm seeing at the moment is a pervasive military motivation, even if the ways the monery was spent didn't always make sense. I would bet Americans somehow felt more secure that it was Americans landing on the Moon rather than Soviets. I remember the vague worries about being incinerated in the 70's quite clearly.
I don't believe that the civilian space program has ever fully disengaged from the military. The Space Shuttle itself was designed with significiant military purposes in mind. IIRC most of the military business went elsewhere after Challenger, and our satellite launching rockets may still be behind because of exaggerated hopes and hypes that the Shuttle could do it all. As the subsidies have been reduced the space program has suffered, to the point that I believe the military is very concerned with maintaining our current launch capabilities. I assume that the market for military satellites is still strong, and that the U.S. won't be launching these on foreign rockets anytime soon.
No, not all our "space stuff" is government, such as Pegasus, and most of the projects are run by contractors. NASA just picks the worng, er, right programs to fund. Someone quipped that while most agencies have a public relations dept., NASA is a public relations dept. that happens to have an agency. In other words, politics.
It should be noted that our arms race gave a huge boost (ha-ha) to the space program that came as a very heavy price. Yes, I'm glad we got some peaceful dividends from ICBM work, but this could have been achieved more cheaply, as with the Ariane.
I wouldn't be too quick to pick a winner by political system or nationality. The Ariane is quite the success story, and now the Russians are picking up some significant American contracts with their wonderfully reliable booster, and it looks like the Chinese will in time get it together. The overall payload delivery system will ultimately be quite international -- as any non-jingoistic capitalist would want it to be, competition will spur innovation and lower price. Also, as a peacenik I would be delighted to see everyone preoccupied with getting stuff into orbit and leaving it there, not dropping it on someone else.
That said -- I will admit feeling a little twinge each time the American space program shrinks one little bit more. Living here, we all have it as just a bit of our pride, silly or not. Same for passenger jets.
Hmmm... as a formerly active pilot, you now have me trying to guess your brand... :) Does it begin with a "C"? An "N"?
There are a number of avionics companies, two or three of them major leaders. And I did get the impression that quality was declining, although gadgets and prices were going up just fine. For the uninitiated here, these avionics boxes are big bucks (thousands) and aggravating as heck to fix. Plus in-flight failure is annoying, or worse. (Real pilots don't admit that a defective little gadget like an instrument would slow them down. More seriously, there is a certain amount of redundancy so that a point failure, compared to the failure of an engine, is rarely that big a deal. Nor is a failure welcome.)