biofuel is great in small scale, but greatly reduces the ecological diversity and might pave way for invasive species * solar plants might provide all the power the world needs one way, but at the cost of placing vast land areas in shadow
How does biofuel reduce biodiversity? Modern agricultural techniques reduce biodiversity, but this has nothing specific to do with biofuels, and there is no reason so assume that agriculture for biofuels will have a greater effect on ecological diversity than argriculture for food. In fact, since we care a good deal more about what we put in our bodies than in our cars, it is likely that biofuels will support a more diverse agricultural industry than we currently have.
Whenever I hear someone making a claim about what something "might" do, without assigning any cause to it or arguing for it's plausibility, I immediately change the statement in my mind to the opposite. In this case, your post would have exactly the same meaning if you said, "biofuels might prevent the incursion of invasive species" instead of "biofuels might pave the way for invasive species." The only way to change that is to provide an argument for your claim.
Finally, the amount of land area placed in shadow by solar cells is rather modest--far more land area has been placed in shadow by buildings in the past hundred years, and quite unaccountably the world has failed to come to an end.
Try comparing with 50 years ago instead of 500. Then we have not made progress, but taken many step backwards in social equality.
Unless (in the Western world) you happen to be non-white, homosexual, or a woman.
Social equality comes in many guises, and while disparity of incomes should be a matter of concern to all, it is worth remembering that the "good old days" were decidedly not so good in terms of civil liberties.
If you aren't expecting an attachment, don't open it. If you are expecting it, and it is from a trusted source, go ahead.
This is not a useful guideline. I am a businessperson. I sometimes get Word documents sent to me by people looking for jobs. I got a resume' last week this way, with a cover letter from a guy saying, "I saw your website and think you have cool technology, I'm looking for a sales position, etc." There are other examples as well. I have a large, loosely coupled network, and am apt to get odd doc files for a variety of reasons coming out of the blue.
So for me, at least, "unexpected" doc files are the norm. Opening none of them is not an option. Checking all of them is more than my time is worth--it would be like going back to the '80's, when every time you sent an important e-mail you made a phone call to see if got through ok.
The reasonable alternative is to open them with OpenOffice, which is what I do, and frankly what Microsoft would be advising if they cared about their customers. There isn't even a profit motive to not recommend OpenOffice, because Word is so enormously superior to OpenOffice that no one will ever switch to it after a few weeks of painful security-driven transition.
For domestic protests I'll have to retract my statement. You're right, as well as the guy above you. My conclusions are far more likely to be correct in Iraq at the moment.
In Iraq today, as in India once upon a time, resistance to a foreign occupying power is "domestic protest". Unless by "domestic" you mean "American", in which case that is what you should have said.
Domestic protestors in Iraq know full well they are likely to be attacked by any number of forces, including militias of groups opposed to them, as well as the American occupying forces. Any reasonable protestor would come prepared to deal with a variety of threats, and if American forces deploy this weapon then it is reasonable that anyone who thinks they might be a target of it will take appropriate counter-measures.
The only way one could believe that counter-measures are not appropriate for peaceful protestors is if you think that American troops never make mistakes. The last time I looked, although on average amongst the best soldiers on the world, American troops are still human beings, and therefore make mistakes really rather easily.
Re:it's a rather straightforward observation
on
Tim Bray Says RELAX
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· Score: 2, Informative
XML was designed with people in mind, which is why it's easier for people to read and manipulate than your traditional binary file format.
Err... no.
XML was a step back from SGML's "human-friendly" clever tricks. XML was intended to be easy to PARSE, not easy to read.
I was at SGML '96 where XML was first announced, and was one of those people who went home and wrote a (non-validating) XML parser over the weekend, based on the draft spec. I've used both DTDs and XML Schemas and can say without question that schemas are actually a bigger pain to work with than DTDs. DTDs were bad enough, but schemas have been a major step backwards, adding complexity without adding the features one actually needs.
Some years ago I wrote a code generator that used DTDs as the data modelling language. I sold it to the company I was working for at the time and someone I had no control over re-wrote it use schemas because they were "simpler". The result had major bugs and dropped features, not entirely due to schema-related problems, although it is worth noting that the "simplifications" included handling schemas in completely incorrect ways, because if you handled them correctly they could not do the job. I created a new generator from scratch last year and tried to do thing "properly" with schemas. It was essentially impossible, and I wound up creating a custom XML-based language use as input.
At the time there was no Relax NG standards process, so I stayed clear of it. But it has the blessing of James Clarke too (author of the SP SGML parser and the expat XML parser.) So it is probably worth another very hard look.
The logic is similar, but the statistics are a lot harder to generate in this case because the probability of non-ownership of any given book by any given person is extremely high. So they need to collect much more data than Amazon does to answer the question they are answering.
I was going to toss Pratchett in there and see if King was the result, but with the slashdotting of the site, I think that will have to wait..
Wyrd Sisters results in a bunch of Christian evangelicalish stuff, some of which is not totally dissimilar to some of what's on my shelves (I have an interest in ecclesiastical history.)
While this is a kinda clever marketing idea--see what you hate!--I'm doubtful about the underlying logic. For one, some of us are really ecelectic: I own works ranging from de Sade to Augustine, formulaic pulp SF to the nominated-for-the-Booker genre, chick-lit to classical history, and so on. No Dan Brown, though, so maybe there is something to it after all...
Lomborg set out an economic case based on the costs of mitigation that showed that flaws in the way Kyoto work will make it very ineffective and excessively expensive.
I wish I could laugh when I see statements like this: "X has proven that Y will cause Z" when Y and Z are an incredibly complex solution and a poorly understood problem, respectively. The world is just a hell of a lot less controallable and predictable than we would like, but a willingness to experiment with imperfect solutions is one of the best ways toward improving them.
Lomborg has at best shown that there are plausible arguments against the effectiveness of Kyoto. It is good for such critics to be engaged, and we would all do well to listen to them. Their voices need to be heard and heeded in the globa climate change debate. But to suggest that anyone is in a position to know at a level beyond guesswork that one solution or another will or will not work is naive.
Kyoto is a flawed attempt to address the problem, but it is for the moment all we've got. It may work better than anyone ever expected. No one has a crystal ball to give them 20/20 foresight. Anyone who has ever solved a novel technical problem is aware that the first solution is rarely the best and frequently not even a solution at all. But they also know that it is better to start working with the solution you have, and thus better understand the problem, than to do nothing until you have a solution that satisfies everyone.
It's some form of neural net tutorial, but the conclusions are (at least to me) remarkable:
The claimed results are very nearly unbelievable. A neural net that performs with better than 90% accuracy on a binary classification problem on independent test data is practically unheard of. I smell jack-knifing or some similarly illegitmate evaluation method.
We throw nerual nets at classification problems we don't understand, and we don't understand them in part because the classes are in reality not crisply defined by any number of variables. It is easy to get a neural net to perform with 100% accuracy on training data, because with enough parameters you can fit an elephant, and neural nets have oodles of parameters. But the reality is that the training data almost never fully encompasses the richness of the problem domain. Performance typically degrades badly on independent test data, and only very rarely stays as good as 90%. 75% is typical.
When people claim 90%+ accuracy they are typically "testing" the trained net on a subset of the training data, which is often excused on the basis that insufficient data are available to use some of for evaluation. There are more subtle effects, too: because there are few good principles for network design, people often try different network architectures until they get one that performs well on the test data. In this case, even though they never formally train the net on the test data, they have effectively reduced the statistical confidence of the final result by re-using the test data until they get a good result on it.
The ideal way to train and test a non-linear classifier is to specify the number of architectures you are going to investigate, partition your data so that you have independent test sets for each, and throw those test data away after they have been used ONCE. There are valid tweaks to this kind of process that will allow you to reuse your test data in different combinations a few times, but unless great care is taken you will reduce the statistical strength of your results with astonishing rapidity.
They use high tech RF mapping signature maps to see where there are dark spots in the FBis monitoring systems.
A lot of what I see on the topic of bugging and bug detection seems implausible, and this is one of those implausible things. How does one detect a monitoring system? Receivers are passive and potentially quite far away. So what is the actual process you are claiming makes it possible to detect what areas are not being monitored? I don't know what "high tech RF mapping signature maps" means, although I'm familiar with all the words and have actually designed moderately high frequency boards.
There are a lot of clever tricks out there, and I freely admit my ignorance, but really, a great deal of what is being talked about here sounds like magic, and some pointers to detailed technical explanations of how these things are done would be much appreciated.
Actually they say it far surpasses the current method of separation and assuming this is a passive process
They say nothing of the kind. Quote from the abstract, "The efficiency of the photoproduction of H2 was greater than that of the system using the well-known organic chromophore, tetrakis(1-methylpyridinium-4-yl)porphinatozinc(II ) (ZnTMPyP4+), under the same conditions."
could not find in the paper the pressure for the 0.044 ml of generated hydrogen, nor it's weight, so I made a gross assumption the energy density listed in Wikipedia (at 700 bar) was close enough.
1 bar is more likely, so the miniscule efficiency you've computed needs to be reduced by a further factor of 700.
Thanks for providing these numbers, which look quite sensible. I don't have access to the article, and neither the abstract nor the press release contain any information that would be useful in evaluating the practical status of this technique.
High-energy physics has reached a point where the cost-effectiveness of larger particle accelerators is questionable.
One of the things that differentiates science from other areas of human endeavour is that science uses up fields of study. Once upon a time there was a major scientific enterprise involving filling out the peroidic table. New elements were isolated every few years. Eventually, all the blanks were filled in, leaving only a very small number of labs pursuing the trans-uranics.
In traditional nuclear physics there was an industry that lasted for about thirty years, between 1960 and 1990, of measuring the excitation energy, spin and parity of the low-lying levels of all of the isotopes near the line of stability. Graduate students could be reliably churned out by small accelerator labs by simply handing them a nucleus to measure, and the table of isotopes grew from thin to thick. And then it all stopped, because there weren't any more isotopes to measure, and the measurements we had, while not always perfect, were good enough for going on with.
The major strides in particles physics in the late 20th century may be reaching a similar plateau. The triumph of the electro-weak theory, the clear limits on the number of generations of elementary particles, and the likely detection of the Higgs Boson by the LHC may signal a similar ending to one chapter in the scientific enterprise.
This is not to say that particle physics is dead. There are still mysteries--others here have commented on the improbably high energies observed in cosmic ray showers, and there are the various unrelated dark matter problems, some of which suggest exotic particles that are still eluding us, and which may finally prove to be the guide that takes us beyond the standard model.
But for some centuries Roman intellectual and technological power was centered in the West, and it is likely that the techological community that created this device would have migrated west as Roman power grew in the 1st century. So when the Western Empire fell, there is a good chance that the community was no longer able to sustain itself, if it had not already failed due to the vast increases in economic hardship during that last century before the final division of the Empire and the collapse of the West.
Nor were things exactly great in the East at the time--Greece itself as well as most of Asia Minor was at times under "barbarian" control, and the tides of migration and conquest that flowed over the region for several hundred years would not have been conducive to maintaining the kind of fine artisanship displayed by this device.
It also isn't clear how the "Greek fire" of the Byzantines is related to that described by Thucydides: it may have be a rediscovery of a simple and practical warlike technology rather than hanging on to ancient technology. And while the Byzantine Empire wasn't without technological capability there were such huge expenditures of intellectual capability on disputes with but one iota of difference between the sides that there wasn't much intellectual power left over for practical matters.
As to the legend about Thales, it's a legend for a reason.
The decline of Greek culture started with the Roman conquest of the Greek empire. (Some would argue that it started with the emergence of a Greek empire itself.)
Technology is culture. Every viable technology requires a group of practioners large enough to transmit it across generations. That means they must have the resources to train apprentices and sufficient prospect of future revenues from their work to attract capable people.
The Athenian Greek leisure class (free adult male citizens) were interested in theoretical knowledge, but looked down on the practical. Romans were interested almost exclusively in practical knowledge, and saw little or no value in the Greek passion for theory.
The Greeks were excellent mathematicians--one of the big unanswered questions in the study of ancient Greek mathematics is why they did not invent at least the conceptual basis of calculus, as they seem to have had all the precursor concepts. But the mathematicians rarely talked to the machinists, so this technology may have grown out of some rare collaboration between a practical artisan and a gifted mathematician, or it may have been a still rarer individual who combined both skills.
Curiously, the existence of such a sophisticated device makes virtually certain that some kind of viable community of skilled artisans working with micro (for the time) machinery had existed for decades or centuries prior to the construction of this device, and probably for some time after. So while the technological culture of the ancient world may have been delicate--as all technological cultures are, including our own--is was also long-lived. Its death was probably due to the general economic decline during the Western European Dark Age, rather than anything specfic to Christianity. The Dark Age actually saw significant development in many technological areas, but they tended to focus on the more practical aspects of farming and war-making than on what amounts to a wonderful yet expensive toy.
Religion exists because people need to believe in something greather than themselves.
"That word you keep using, I do not think it means what you think it means."
Art can fulfil the purpose of giving something greater than themselves to believe in. So can science. There's so much to simply WONDER at in the universe, from the smallest bug to the farthest star. Religion, as it is commonly understood rather than according to your personal definition of it, has nothing to offer anyone who is aware of the world around them.
But these questions should always be regarded as a theory, not as facts, and should be considered from a scientific point of view, instead of a religious one.
The fact/theory distinction is devoid of scientific interest. No scientist has ever had a debate over the status of a particular piece of knowlege, wondering if it is a fact or a theory. Opponents of science are the only people who bring up the distinction, but they never explain what it is.
MS would make a bug-ridden ODF reader/writer for MSWord, which would still be what most people would use, because that's what they're familiar with, and we'd be stuck in the same boat as we are with HTML.
The difference is huge: money.
People use IE because it's "free" and pre-installed, not because it's good.
People use Word because it's "the standard", but they (or their IT department) have to pay serious coin to use it. So if ODF becomes the HTML of word processing, MS will have two options: support it, and lose their lock on the office suite market; or don't support it, and lose their lock on the office suite market.
MS has always understood that the file format is the drug to which their users are addicted, and control of the file format is control of the market. That's why Gates' 1995 Internet memo was so focussed on the lack of MS document formats available on the Web.
In the case of ODF, MS is up against the wall, because if you are an IT department who is being asked to a) shell out a zillion dollars for Office 07 for Vista or whatever it's called, or b) face a one-time upgrade to OOo or something equivalent, the bottom line cost is starting to look not totally insane.
since so MANY people are so instantly ready to criticize, they MUST have solutions themselves, right?
Wrong.
Let's consider the example of science. It is far easier to prove someone else wrong--for example, to prove that their theory is contradicted by some of the data--than it is to come up with a theory that is consistent with all of the data. And doing this kind of thing is perfectly legitimate science. It is true that if that is all that you do, other scientists will consider you a bit boring and strange, but it is simply anti-scientific to suggest that anyone who criticizes must have their own solution.
It also appears that you are attempting to forumlate a blanket justification of all currrent anti-terrorist programs by delegitimizing all criticism of them. Yet your language clearly indicates the profound cowardice that motivates those programs. Some of us are simply not that scared of dying at the hands of a fanatic. We are willing to take that risk in order to be free. And we are getting rather tired of the cowards running the show selling out our liberties in the name of their own fear.
I have two young children, and like any parent I want them to grow up free. Security takes a far-distant second place that, particularly when on a statistical basis their risk of being killed by bad weather is far, far greater than their risk of being killed by a bunch of nitwits whose philosophy of hatred will die a natural death over the next century as oil becomes an irrelevant commodity.
And that, by the way, is the solution I would propose: heavy investment--say about 300 billion U.S. dollars--in alternative fuels and energy generation. And let the fanatics do their worst in the meantime. On the evidence, their worst is not particularly bad.
The other "given" result of the invasion is that Saddam was removed - an unequivical "good thing"
"The tumor was removed - an unequivical 'good thing'"
"You removed the tumor by shooting him in the head! He was a little unstable before, but now he's in intensive care."
"Well, he was a danger to himself and others. You saw how he was acting. Threats, bluster, arrogance. He could have snapped at any time!"
"Yeah, and you had 'reliable reports' he was stockpiling weapons in his bedroom."
"Damn right I did. Look, even though it turned out he wasn't really planning anything for that afternoon, everyone believed he had the weapons. Even you thought it could be true."
"That's because you lied about the information you had. When we checked it turned out there was one rusty pistol, unloaded, in his nightstand. You said he'd been buying AK's and M-72's for weeks from dealers in secret. You said you'd seen paperwork to prove it, and found cartridge casings in the vacant lot by his house."
"We thought that's what they were--high-tech cartridges for a new type of RPG. I can show you plans from an old issue of Popular Science that look just like them."
"They were Red Bull cans! With the labels worn off!"
"It's a mistake anybody could have made. He was dangerous. A dangerous maniac. You know what his behaviour was like. How long were you willing to wait before he killed someone?"
"I agree he had issues, but shooting him in the head is hardly the only solution. I can't help but think you're just pissed off because his property is sitting on that oilfield."
"That's totally false! I shot him for his own good, and the good of his family!"
"Who have no means of support now that he's in hospital and they've been ruined by their share of the medical bills. How much is that costing, anyway?"
"Way less than people are saying! And I'm paying for most of it anyway. It's a noble sacrifice, but the least I can do to prove my actions were done in good faith. Besides, I've just talked to the doctors and they say he's about to be discharged to a critical care ward. There's been real improvement in the last few days. He can move fingers on both hands now, you know."
"Yeah, you said that last week, and the week before. Real progress, huh."
"So what would you have me do? Cut and run? Just because his care is costing you a little money too?"
"Nope. You did the deed. You pulled out your gun and shot him in the face. You made the choice. Now you need to face the consequences, and that means taking care of him, and his family, for as long as it takes to get them back on their feet."
"Give me a break! Do you know how much that'll cost?"
"You should have thought about that before you pulled the trigger."
"But I removed the tumour - an unequivical 'good thing'!"
I think it is fair to say, however, that a significant number of influential christians are very anti-science
It is also the case that a significant number of influencial "environmentalists" are also very anti-science. Anyone familiar with the history of Greenpeace, for example, will be aware that they started out as a scientific organization and when the science did not justify the political program of some of the founders they becamse essentially a political organization. Research results from Greenpeace always supports the political program of the organization, and there is no way that would happen if they were a scientific organization with a science-driven political agenda. Instead, they are that most obscene entity: a politics-driven pseudo-science organization, just like the lying bastards who claim that "Intelligent Design" is in any way scientific.
Thankfully, science-driven environmentalism seems to be on the rise today, in part because fission power is such a compelling option in the face of global warming. Anyone who calls themself and environmentalist (I do) and opposes fission power (I'm on the fence, as I think there are renewable and conservation options that may be both more cost-efficient and safer) has a lot of hard questions to answer.
Claim: A causes B. Observation: B is occuring in the absence of A. Conclusion: A does not cause B.
How does the conclusion relate to the observation? As near as I can tell they have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Here's a concrete example, for the logically-impaired:
Drunk driving causes car crashes. Car crashes occur when no one is drunk driving. Ergo, drunk driving does not cause car crashes.
Does this mean that MADD is "morally and intellectually bankrupt"?
Your post is a fine example of why politics are involved in this aspect of science: because the world is full of logically impaired people who are going to believe whatever they want, regardless of facts. There is no doubt that these people are rife within the environmental movement: there is a well known division between scientific environmentalists and political environmentalists, and most scientific environmentalists consider the political environmentalists to be a major impediment to sane environmental policy.
And regardless of what is happening on Mars, there is no doubt whatsoever that anthropogenic CO2 and other anthropogentic greenhouse gasses have increased the insolation at the top of the troposphere by just under 2 W/m**2 over the past century or so. Nothing that happens on Mars can change that fact, and nothing you want to believe will make it true that the Earth's climate will not respond somehow to that increase. The scientific debate is over what will happen and how big the effects will be. For example, as the heat content of the atmosphere increases the temperature may drop in some areas, for obvious reasons. As someone with a strong opinion on this issue you will of course be familiar with why that could be so.
Slashdot Mirror
biofuel is great in small scale, but greatly reduces the ecological diversity and might pave way for invasive species
* solar plants might provide all the power the world needs one way, but at the cost of placing vast land areas in shadow
How does biofuel reduce biodiversity? Modern agricultural techniques reduce biodiversity, but this has nothing specific to do with biofuels, and there is no reason so assume that agriculture for biofuels will have a greater effect on ecological diversity than argriculture for food. In fact, since we care a good deal more about what we put in our bodies than in our cars, it is likely that biofuels will support a more diverse agricultural industry than we currently have.
Whenever I hear someone making a claim about what something "might" do, without assigning any cause to it or arguing for it's plausibility, I immediately change the statement in my mind to the opposite. In this case, your post would have exactly the same meaning if you said, "biofuels might prevent the incursion of invasive species" instead of "biofuels might pave the way for invasive species." The only way to change that is to provide an argument for your claim.
Finally, the amount of land area placed in shadow by solar cells is rather modest--far more land area has been placed in shadow by buildings in the past hundred years, and quite unaccountably the world has failed to come to an end.
Try comparing with 50 years ago instead of 500. Then we have not made progress, but taken many step backwards in social equality.
Unless (in the Western world) you happen to be non-white, homosexual, or a woman.
Social equality comes in many guises, and while disparity of incomes should be a matter of concern to all, it is worth remembering that the "good old days" were decidedly not so good in terms of civil liberties.
If you aren't expecting an attachment, don't open it. If you are expecting it, and it is from a trusted source, go ahead.
This is not a useful guideline. I am a businessperson. I sometimes get Word documents sent to me by people looking for jobs. I got a resume' last week this way, with a cover letter from a guy saying, "I saw your website and think you have cool technology, I'm looking for a sales position, etc." There are other examples as well. I have a large, loosely coupled network, and am apt to get odd doc files for a variety of reasons coming out of the blue.
So for me, at least, "unexpected" doc files are the norm. Opening none of them is not an option. Checking all of them is more than my time is worth--it would be like going back to the '80's, when every time you sent an important e-mail you made a phone call to see if got through ok.
The reasonable alternative is to open them with OpenOffice, which is what I do, and frankly what Microsoft would be advising if they cared about their customers. There isn't even a profit motive to not recommend OpenOffice, because Word is so enormously superior to OpenOffice that no one will ever switch to it after a few weeks of painful security-driven transition.
Instead it induces a panic response. There is a difference. I'm not saying waterboarding is right, only that it isn't torture.
Torture, (n) 1 a : anguish of body or mind
That word you keep abusing, I do not think it means what you would like it to mean.
For domestic protests I'll have to retract my statement. You're right, as well as the guy above you. My conclusions are far more likely to be correct in Iraq at the moment.
In Iraq today, as in India once upon a time, resistance to a foreign occupying power is "domestic protest". Unless by "domestic" you mean "American", in which case that is what you should have said.
Domestic protestors in Iraq know full well they are likely to be attacked by any number of forces, including militias of groups opposed to them, as well as the American occupying forces. Any reasonable protestor would come prepared to deal with a variety of threats, and if American forces deploy this weapon then it is reasonable that anyone who thinks they might be a target of it will take appropriate counter-measures.
The only way one could believe that counter-measures are not appropriate for peaceful protestors is if you think that American troops never make mistakes. The last time I looked, although on average amongst the best soldiers on the world, American troops are still human beings, and therefore make mistakes really rather easily.
XML was designed with people in mind, which is why it's easier for people to read and manipulate than your traditional binary file format.
Err... no.
XML was a step back from SGML's "human-friendly" clever tricks. XML was intended to be easy to PARSE, not easy to read.
I was at SGML '96 where XML was first announced, and was one of those people who went home and wrote a (non-validating) XML parser over the weekend, based on the draft spec. I've used both DTDs and XML Schemas and can say without question that schemas are actually a bigger pain to work with than DTDs. DTDs were bad enough, but schemas have been a major step backwards, adding complexity without adding the features one actually needs.
Some years ago I wrote a code generator that used DTDs as the data modelling language. I sold it to the company I was working for at the time and someone I had no control over re-wrote it use schemas because they were "simpler". The result had major bugs and dropped features, not entirely due to schema-related problems, although it is worth noting that the "simplifications" included handling schemas in completely incorrect ways, because if you handled them correctly they could not do the job. I created a new generator from scratch last year and tried to do thing "properly" with schemas. It was essentially impossible, and I wound up creating a custom XML-based language use as input.
At the time there was no Relax NG standards process, so I stayed clear of it. But it has the blessing of James Clarke too (author of the SP SGML parser and the expat XML parser.) So it is probably worth another very hard look.
The logic is similar, but the statistics are a lot harder to generate in this case because the probability of non-ownership of any given book by any given person is extremely high. So they need to collect much more data than Amazon does to answer the question they are answering.
I was going to toss Pratchett in there and see if King was the result, but with the slashdotting of the site, I think that will have to wait..
Wyrd Sisters results in a bunch of Christian evangelicalish stuff, some of which is not totally dissimilar to some of what's on my shelves (I have an interest in ecclesiastical history.)
While this is a kinda clever marketing idea--see what you hate!--I'm doubtful about the underlying logic. For one, some of us are really ecelectic: I own works ranging from de Sade to Augustine, formulaic pulp SF to the nominated-for-the-Booker genre, chick-lit to classical history, and so on. No Dan Brown, though, so maybe there is something to it after all...
Lomborg set out an economic case based on the costs of mitigation that showed that flaws in the way Kyoto work will make it very ineffective and excessively expensive.
I wish I could laugh when I see statements like this: "X has proven that Y will cause Z" when Y and Z are an incredibly complex solution and a poorly understood problem, respectively. The world is just a hell of a lot less controallable and predictable than we would like, but a willingness to experiment with imperfect solutions is one of the best ways toward improving them.
Lomborg has at best shown that there are plausible arguments against the effectiveness of Kyoto. It is good for such critics to be engaged, and we would all do well to listen to them. Their voices need to be heard and heeded in the globa climate change debate. But to suggest that anyone is in a position to know at a level beyond guesswork that one solution or another will or will not work is naive.
Kyoto is a flawed attempt to address the problem, but it is for the moment all we've got. It may work better than anyone ever expected. No one has a crystal ball to give them 20/20 foresight. Anyone who has ever solved a novel technical problem is aware that the first solution is rarely the best and frequently not even a solution at all. But they also know that it is better to start working with the solution you have, and thus better understand the problem, than to do nothing until you have a solution that satisfies everyone.
It's some form of neural net tutorial, but the conclusions are (at least to me) remarkable:
The claimed results are very nearly unbelievable. A neural net that performs with better than 90% accuracy on a binary classification problem on independent test data is practically unheard of. I smell jack-knifing or some similarly illegitmate evaluation method.
We throw nerual nets at classification problems we don't understand, and we don't understand them in part because the classes are in reality not crisply defined by any number of variables. It is easy to get a neural net to perform with 100% accuracy on training data, because with enough parameters you can fit an elephant, and neural nets have oodles of parameters. But the reality is that the training data almost never fully encompasses the richness of the problem domain. Performance typically degrades badly on independent test data, and only very rarely stays as good as 90%. 75% is typical.
When people claim 90%+ accuracy they are typically "testing" the trained net on a subset of the training data, which is often excused on the basis that insufficient data are available to use some of for evaluation. There are more subtle effects, too: because there are few good principles for network design, people often try different network architectures until they get one that performs well on the test data. In this case, even though they never formally train the net on the test data, they have effectively reduced the statistical confidence of the final result by re-using the test data until they get a good result on it.
The ideal way to train and test a non-linear classifier is to specify the number of architectures you are going to investigate, partition your data so that you have independent test sets for each, and throw those test data away after they have been used ONCE. There are valid tweaks to this kind of process that will allow you to reuse your test data in different combinations a few times, but unless great care is taken you will reduce the statistical strength of your results with astonishing rapidity.
They use high tech RF mapping signature maps to see where there are dark spots
in the FBis monitoring systems.
A lot of what I see on the topic of bugging and bug detection seems implausible, and this is one of those implausible things. How does one detect a monitoring system? Receivers are passive and potentially quite far away. So what is the actual process you are claiming makes it possible to detect what areas are not being monitored? I don't know what "high tech RF mapping signature maps" means, although I'm familiar with all the words and have actually designed moderately high frequency boards.
There are a lot of clever tricks out there, and I freely admit my ignorance, but really, a great deal of what is being talked about here sounds like magic, and some pointers to detailed technical explanations of how these things are done would be much appreciated.
his obnoxious tone
My tone was not (intended to be) obnoxious.
Actually they say it far surpasses the current method of separation and assuming this is a passive process
I ) (ZnTMPyP4+), under the same conditions."
They say nothing of the kind. Quote from the abstract, "The efficiency of the photoproduction of H2 was greater than that of the system using the well-known organic chromophore, tetrakis(1-methylpyridinium-4-yl)porphinatozinc(I
Note the complete lack of superlatives.
could not find in the paper the pressure for the 0.044 ml of generated hydrogen, nor it's weight, so I made a gross assumption the energy density listed in Wikipedia (at 700 bar) was close enough.
1 bar is more likely, so the miniscule efficiency you've computed needs to be reduced by a further factor of 700.
Thanks for providing these numbers, which look quite sensible. I don't have access to the article, and neither the abstract nor the press release contain any information that would be useful in evaluating the practical status of this technique.
High-energy physics has reached a point where the cost-effectiveness of larger particle accelerators is questionable.
One of the things that differentiates science from other areas of human endeavour is that science uses up fields of study. Once upon a time there was a major scientific enterprise involving filling out the peroidic table. New elements were isolated every few years. Eventually, all the blanks were filled in, leaving only a very small number of labs pursuing the trans-uranics.
In traditional nuclear physics there was an industry that lasted for about thirty years, between 1960 and 1990, of measuring the excitation energy, spin and parity of the low-lying levels of all of the isotopes near the line of stability. Graduate students could be reliably churned out by small accelerator labs by simply handing them a nucleus to measure, and the table of isotopes grew from thin to thick. And then it all stopped, because there weren't any more isotopes to measure, and the measurements we had, while not always perfect, were good enough for going on with.
The major strides in particles physics in the late 20th century may be reaching a similar plateau. The triumph of the electro-weak theory, the clear limits on the number of generations of elementary particles, and the likely detection of the Higgs Boson by the LHC may signal a similar ending to one chapter in the scientific enterprise.
This is not to say that particle physics is dead. There are still mysteries--others here have commented on the improbably high energies observed in cosmic ray showers, and there are the various unrelated dark matter problems, some of which suggest exotic particles that are still eluding us, and which may finally prove to be the guide that takes us beyond the standard model.
But for some centuries Roman intellectual and technological power was centered in the West, and it is likely that the techological community that created this device would have migrated west as Roman power grew in the 1st century. So when the Western Empire fell, there is a good chance that the community was no longer able to sustain itself, if it had not already failed due to the vast increases in economic hardship during that last century before the final division of the Empire and the collapse of the West.
Nor were things exactly great in the East at the time--Greece itself as well as most of Asia Minor was at times under "barbarian" control, and the tides of migration and conquest that flowed over the region for several hundred years would not have been conducive to maintaining the kind of fine artisanship displayed by this device.
It also isn't clear how the "Greek fire" of the Byzantines is related to that described by Thucydides: it may have be a rediscovery of a simple and practical warlike technology rather than hanging on to ancient technology. And while the Byzantine Empire wasn't without technological capability there were such huge expenditures of intellectual capability on disputes with but one iota of difference between the sides that there wasn't much intellectual power left over for practical matters.
As to the legend about Thales, it's a legend for a reason.
The decline of Greek culture started with the Roman conquest of the Greek empire. (Some would argue that it started with the emergence of a Greek empire itself.)
Technology is culture. Every viable technology requires a group of practioners large enough to transmit it across generations. That means they must have the resources to train apprentices and sufficient prospect of future revenues from their work to attract capable people.
The Athenian Greek leisure class (free adult male citizens) were interested in theoretical knowledge, but looked down on the practical. Romans were interested almost exclusively in practical knowledge, and saw little or no value in the Greek passion for theory.
The Greeks were excellent mathematicians--one of the big unanswered questions in the study of ancient Greek mathematics is why they did not invent at least the conceptual basis of calculus, as they seem to have had all the precursor concepts. But the mathematicians rarely talked to the machinists, so this technology may have grown out of some rare collaboration between a practical artisan and a gifted mathematician, or it may have been a still rarer individual who combined both skills.
Curiously, the existence of such a sophisticated device makes virtually certain that some kind of viable community of skilled artisans working with micro (for the time) machinery had existed for decades or centuries prior to the construction of this device, and probably for some time after. So while the technological culture of the ancient world may have been delicate--as all technological cultures are, including our own--is was also long-lived. Its death was probably due to the general economic decline during the Western European Dark Age, rather than anything specfic to Christianity. The Dark Age actually saw significant development in many technological areas, but they tended to focus on the more practical aspects of farming and war-making than on what amounts to a wonderful yet expensive toy.
Religion exists because people need to believe in something greather than themselves.
"That word you keep using, I do not think it means what you think it means."
Art can fulfil the purpose of giving something greater than themselves to believe in. So can science. There's so much to simply WONDER at in the universe, from the smallest bug to the farthest star. Religion, as it is commonly understood rather than according to your personal definition of it, has nothing to offer anyone who is aware of the world around them.
But these questions should always be regarded as a theory, not as facts, and should be considered from a scientific point of view, instead of a religious one.
The fact/theory distinction is devoid of scientific interest. No scientist has ever had a debate over the status of a particular piece of knowlege, wondering if it is a fact or a theory. Opponents of science are the only people who bring up the distinction, but they never explain what it is.
MS would make a bug-ridden ODF reader/writer for MSWord, which would still be what most people would use, because that's what they're familiar with, and we'd be stuck in the same boat as we are with HTML.
The difference is huge: money.
People use IE because it's "free" and pre-installed, not because it's good.
People use Word because it's "the standard", but they (or their IT department) have to pay serious coin to use it. So if ODF becomes the HTML of word processing, MS will have two options: support it, and lose their lock on the office suite market; or don't support it, and lose their lock on the office suite market.
MS has always understood that the file format is the drug to which their users are addicted, and control of the file format is control of the market. That's why Gates' 1995 Internet memo was so focussed on the lack of MS document formats available on the Web.
In the case of ODF, MS is up against the wall, because if you are an IT department who is being asked to a) shell out a zillion dollars for Office 07 for Vista or whatever it's called, or b) face a one-time upgrade to OOo or something equivalent, the bottom line cost is starting to look not totally insane.
since so MANY people are so instantly ready to criticize, they MUST have solutions themselves, right?
Wrong.
Let's consider the example of science. It is far easier to prove someone else wrong--for example, to prove that their theory is contradicted by some of the data--than it is to come up with a theory that is consistent with all of the data. And doing this kind of thing is perfectly legitimate science. It is true that if that is all that you do, other scientists will consider you a bit boring and strange, but it is simply anti-scientific to suggest that anyone who criticizes must have their own solution.
It also appears that you are attempting to forumlate a blanket justification of all currrent anti-terrorist programs by delegitimizing all criticism of them. Yet your language clearly indicates the profound cowardice that motivates those programs. Some of us are simply not that scared of dying at the hands of a fanatic. We are willing to take that risk in order to be free. And we are getting rather tired of the cowards running the show selling out our liberties in the name of their own fear.
I have two young children, and like any parent I want them to grow up free. Security takes a far-distant second place that, particularly when on a statistical basis their risk of being killed by bad weather is far, far greater than their risk of being killed by a bunch of nitwits whose philosophy of hatred will die a natural death over the next century as oil becomes an irrelevant commodity.
And that, by the way, is the solution I would propose: heavy investment--say about 300 billion U.S. dollars--in alternative fuels and energy generation. And let the fanatics do their worst in the meantime. On the evidence, their worst is not particularly bad.
The other "given" result of the invasion is that Saddam was removed - an unequivical "good thing"
"The tumor was removed - an unequivical 'good thing'"
"You removed the tumor by shooting him in the head! He was a little unstable before, but now he's in intensive care."
"Well, he was a danger to himself and others. You saw how he was acting. Threats, bluster, arrogance. He could have snapped at any time!"
"Yeah, and you had 'reliable reports' he was stockpiling weapons in his bedroom."
"Damn right I did. Look, even though it turned out he wasn't really planning anything for that afternoon, everyone believed he had the weapons. Even you thought it could be true."
"That's because you lied about the information you had. When we checked it turned out there was one rusty pistol, unloaded, in his nightstand. You said he'd been buying AK's and M-72's for weeks from dealers in secret. You said you'd seen paperwork to prove it, and found cartridge casings in the vacant lot by his house."
"We thought that's what they were--high-tech cartridges for a new type of RPG. I can show you plans from an old issue of Popular Science that look just like them."
"They were Red Bull cans! With the labels worn off!"
"It's a mistake anybody could have made. He was dangerous. A dangerous maniac. You know what his behaviour was like. How long were you willing to wait before he killed someone?"
"I agree he had issues, but shooting him in the head is hardly the only solution. I can't help but think you're just pissed off because his property is sitting on that oilfield."
"That's totally false! I shot him for his own good, and the good of his family!"
"Who have no means of support now that he's in hospital and they've been ruined by their share of the medical bills. How much is that costing, anyway?"
"Way less than people are saying! And I'm paying for most of it anyway. It's a noble sacrifice, but the least I can do to prove my actions were done in good faith. Besides, I've just talked to the doctors and they say he's about to be discharged to a critical care ward. There's been real improvement in the last few days. He can move fingers on both hands now, you know."
"Yeah, you said that last week, and the week before. Real progress, huh."
"So what would you have me do? Cut and run? Just because his care is costing you a little money too?"
"Nope. You did the deed. You pulled out your gun and shot him in the face. You made the choice. Now you need to face the consequences, and that means taking care of him, and his family, for as long as it takes to get them back on their feet."
"Give me a break! Do you know how much that'll cost?"
"You should have thought about that before you pulled the trigger."
"But I removed the tumour - an unequivical 'good thing'!"
I think it is fair to say, however, that a significant number of influential christians are very anti-science
It is also the case that a significant number of influencial "environmentalists" are also very anti-science. Anyone familiar with the history of Greenpeace, for example, will be aware that they started out as a scientific organization and when the science did not justify the political program of some of the founders they becamse essentially a political organization. Research results from Greenpeace always supports the political program of the organization, and there is no way that would happen if they were a scientific organization with a science-driven political agenda. Instead, they are that most obscene entity: a politics-driven pseudo-science organization, just like the lying bastards who claim that "Intelligent Design" is in any way scientific.
Thankfully, science-driven environmentalism seems to be on the rise today, in part because fission power is such a compelling option in the face of global warming. Anyone who calls themself and environmentalist (I do) and opposes fission power (I'm on the fence, as I think there are renewable and conservation options that may be both more cost-efficient and safer) has a lot of hard questions to answer.
Global warming does exist... on Mars
So let me see if I understand your logic.
Claim: A causes B.
Observation: B is occuring in the absence of A.
Conclusion: A does not cause B.
How does the conclusion relate to the observation? As near as I can tell they have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Here's a concrete example, for the logically-impaired:
Drunk driving causes car crashes.
Car crashes occur when no one is drunk driving.
Ergo, drunk driving does not cause car crashes.
Does this mean that MADD is "morally and intellectually bankrupt"?
Your post is a fine example of why politics are involved in this aspect of science: because the world is full of logically impaired people who are going to believe whatever they want, regardless of facts. There is no doubt that these people are rife within the environmental movement: there is a well known division between scientific environmentalists and political environmentalists, and most scientific environmentalists consider the political environmentalists to be a major impediment to sane environmental policy.
And regardless of what is happening on Mars, there is no doubt whatsoever that anthropogenic CO2 and other anthropogentic greenhouse gasses have increased the insolation at the top of the troposphere by just under 2 W/m**2 over the past century or so. Nothing that happens on Mars can change that fact, and nothing you want to believe will make it true that the Earth's climate will not respond somehow to that increase. The scientific debate is over what will happen and how big the effects will be. For example, as the heat content of the atmosphere increases the temperature may drop in some areas, for obvious reasons. As someone with a strong opinion on this issue you will of course be familiar with why that could be so.