Not all creationists believe the world was 6,000 years old.
That's right: only the intellectually rigorous creationists believe that. Old Earth Creationists have to for some reason accept geology and parts of physics and chemistry, while denying the greater part of physics, chemistry and, most importantly, probability theory. Which I guess makes sense to them, because it's "only a theory".
They are subject to the same sort of insanity makes people think casino gambling is a game of chance.
If they're going to randomly pull letters to make the acronym anything they feel like they're opening up a real can of worms:
mArS atmoSphere and vOlatiLe Evolution Mission Mars Atmosphere anD VOlatiLe Evolution Mission...
The possibilities are endless, and meaningless, and irritating.
Is it just me, or is this use of weird acronyms a particularly American thing? I'm thinking of things like the PATRIOT Act, FIRST Robitics, and so on.
I find it equally annoying when applied to things I approve of (MAVEN, FIRST) and things I don't (PATRIOT), so I don't think my response is just anti-Americanism (assuming this really is an American thing, and there aren't British, Canadian, French, etc equivalents I'm woefully ignorant of.)
Eventually, you get enough ballistic photons through that you can map out an image.
Physicists don't actually use terms like "opaque" very often. We are more likely to talk about material that is "highly absorbing" or "highly scattering". The human body contains lots of both.
One area where people have tried to apply this is in optical mamography: women's breasts are primarily fatty tissue that is highly scattering but very weakly absorbing, so you get a surprisingly large fraction of transmitted light. You have to do a huge amount of processing to deconvolve the scattering kernel, but when I worked in the area in the late '90's it was getting close to useful.
For people reading this who are female or who have wives or girlfreinds willing to go along, go into a dark room and hold a flashlight under your (partner's) breast. You'll be amazed by the amount of veinous structure and whatnot you can see. Squeeze the breast flat to get more detail. Insert joke here about how now you're in a dark room with a woman who has at least one breast exposed so you know what comes next...
Very athletic women with smaller breasts may not see much: the chest muscles are highly absorbing and any any photon that scatters into them is lost.
High-speed computation is making visible light a more useful medium of detection all the time, and the work described in TFA is an interesting step along the way.
You are aware the Nazis had their own nuclear program, correct?
It was nothing much, and not oriented toward building a bomb. Michael Frane's play "Cophenhagen" gets it right: if Heisenberg had wanted to build a bomb he wouldn't have needed a week to work out a reasonable estimate of the mass of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
There is simply no plausible case that the NAZIs were working on viable a nuclear weapons program.
And CANDUs use natural uranium as a fuel source. So what? They still generate a vast amount of highly toxic, highly radioactive waste due to the prolific production of long-lived isotopes during operation.
That the fuel happens to be safe is completely irrelevant to the risk involved, as after three months of operation there will be a wide variety of plutonium isotopes, iodine isotopes, and other goodies to spread around when (not if) containment is breached by the other group of idiots who think killing people is an efficient and effective way to achieve any particular end (other than killing people: killing people is great for that, so if your only goal is to kill people, I highly recommend killing people as a means of achieving it. Anything else... not so much.)
And thus Randi's challenge money disappears in a puff of logic.
Nope: Randi is paying out for phenomenology. A demonstrated capacity to DO any of the wide range of things that many, many people claim to be able to do. They just have to do it under circumstances that radically reduce the risk of fraud or self-delusion.
Science is primarily about evidence. If you claim, as you do above, that human beings have "auras" that some people can see, you need to adduce evidence of THAT CLAIM before introducing speculative claims regarding what might cause such "auras".
You cannot increase the plausibility of a claim that has failed every systematic observation and controlled experiment that has investigated it by speculating on what might cause a phenomenon that has not been demonstrated to exist.
And if you didn't claim that people have "auras" that some people can see, why are you introducing the speculation as to the cause of a phenomenon you do not believe exists? Introducing the claim that X might cause Y is de facto evidence that you believe Y, regardless of any counter-claims you might make. If you do not believe "auras" exist it is completely incomprehensible, at least to my limited mind, why you would speculate on their causes.
It would be like speculating on what causes fine English cusine or nuanced American politics.
Hawking is essentially saying that there very well may not be one single theory which explains everything. Instead, there may be a bunch of theories, each of which is valid only in certain areas, and which agree with one another where they overlap, even without a global solution.
This is consistent with Hawking's history of repeating old and not necessarily very good philsophy, although I'll take Cartwright over Hume (whom Hawking swallows whole in "A Brief History of Time") any day:
Cartwright's suggestion, based on nothing much, is that there may not be any theory of everything, and that the laws of physics may look more like a bunch of slim volumes on specific topics rather than one big book.
Cartwright's book was published getting on for thirty years ago.
Stop artificially extending outdated technology if it doesn't need to happen (it doesn't).
And yet the odds are you typed that on a machine that's using the wretched x86 instruction set...
Better technology never wins. More convenience does. ISP-level NAT is starting to look awfully convenient...
Note that I'm not saying this is a good thing. I was an early adopter of RISC technology and stunned that x86 has lasted so long, even though it's mostly RISC under the hood for the past decade or more. I'm just pointing out that this is the way things have tended to go.
Yeah, I should have written "non-evaporating black holes". Creating them requires all of physics we know to be true, plus some speculative stuff. Preventing them from evaporating requires that precisely the right bits of physics we know to be true, to be false.
Why does everyone assume that Puritans never got any?
Because they hated any public display of sexuality or any expression of sexuality outside of church-sanctioned marriage.
While it is true that within marriage they were a lusty lot, their rabid insistence that everyone else play by their rules meant that many people assume they were sexually frustrated themselves, which they probably would have been had not they generally married relatively young.
Also, because God for some unaccountable reason left the germ theory of disease out of the Bible, childbirth was a very high-risk event, particularly due to post-partum infection. Ergo, there were many unmarried older Puritan males about who couldn't have sex within marriage because their wife was dead.
So being sexually active only within highly restricted context of a non-traditional marriage[*] is hardly a recipe for sexual satisfaction generally. Rather the opposite, if the divorce rate is any indication.
[*] I say "non-traditional" because the Puritan, and modern, notion of monogamy is quite unusual, the traditional marriage consisting of one man, his wife, his household servants and slaves, the stable-boy, his concubines, and his livestock.
So they are actually going to make black holes at LHC without even knowing if it will evaporate?
For the LHC to create black holes at all would require a whole bunch of very speculative physics to be true, and a whole bunch of very well-established physics to be false.
In particular, if the LHC can create black holes then millions of black holes are being created every day by cosmic rays, which can have twenty orders of magnitude more energy than the LHC. No evidence of those black holes is seen anywhere, not in geochemical track analysis, not in the radiation signature of cosmic ray showers, no where. Ergo, either such black holes are not being created, or they are being destroyed with incredible rapidity.
For the beam dump of the LHC to behave any differently would require physics so arcane as to be basically magic, and anyone who is worried about it should also be terrified that a herd of flying elephants will trample them to death, because that's a far more probable event.
So in effect what the Russian Minister said the VOA and BBC in the 60s through 90s was an act of aggression.
Damn right. It was aggression against people who hate freedom, who want to rule, who sent tanks in Poland and quite a few other places as well over the years.
It was non-violent aggression, which is the kind that actually works.
We don't know that it didn't bounce or roll there- no telling when it got there, the planetary conditions at the time it arrived- maybe Mars had a thicker atmosphere then, whether it impacted there or is it just a fragment of something else that landed there.
This is the amusing bit: the dweebs here who assume that the only way a piece of rock from space ever winds up on a planetary surface is to come crashing straight down into the atmosphere and drill a deep hole without any fragmentation or ejecta.
I guess they are ignorant of the entire class of meteorites found on Earth that are believed to be ejecta from Martian impacts. Or they are too stupid to realize that if a rock can hit Mars hard enough that fragments sometimes wind up on Earth, maybe a few of the fragments might just possibly hit Mars at far distant locations.
Man/. is depressing this morning. The parade of arrogant ignorance on display here these days is really something to see.
It's nothing of the kind. Consider the following statements:
1) The two versions of the creation myth don't match. Furthermore... it gets the order wrong. Plants are created before the sun, moon and stars. The seas were populated after the land.
This is all LITERALLY true of the Bible. Creative, imaginative, metaphorical readings are possible that make these problems seem to go away, but of course then you have completely rejected the Bible as the basis of your belief and replaced it with whatever principle you used to create the imaginative reading that makes these literal falsehoods seem coherent.
2) Women and children are treated little better than chattle. Blind obedience is exalted (Abraham and Isaac). Genocide is a commandment from God. Ritual vicarious atonement is practiced as blood sacrifices, which the Christians later claim as a precursor to Jesus' sacrifice. The New Testament would seem better if it didn't add in the concept of Hell, reinforced the earlier misogyny and make claims which can be empirically proven false about the efficacy of Christian prayer.
Again, all LITERALLY true, and furthermore there is a goodly body of specifically Christian theology that accepts these aspects of the Bible as literally true. Again, you can abandon the Bible as the foundation of your belief and use some other, completely unrelated principle, to make up some just-so stories about how "things were different" back then regarding women and children, and how the power of prayer isn't really the power to acomplish anything but rather the power to be told "no", which is in direct contradition to the literal reading of the Bible.
3) The theology... starts with a concept of man as a deviant, broken being in need of salvation. The... deity which created him... enable[s] that salvation through the [sacrifice] of his son/self.
Again, stripped of the inflamatory language, this is unexceptionable theology. You cannot possibly deny this and call yourself a Christian. It is at the core of Christian doctrine. You can disagree with the OP's evaluation of this doctrine, but you cannot disagree that it IS doctrine.
The up-flap cancels out the down-flap as the wings appear to move vertically.
Wow! By watching a two-minute video you've been able to analyze the air-flow pattern throughout the entire cycle of the flap! Could you please post vorticity diagrams? I'd also like to see the torsion angle of the wing as a function of flap phase, as apparently you've measured that as well.
And also, could you give me the equation that relates lift to maximum torsion? Because to justify the claim you make you need to have that, so of course you must have that. I'm sure the people who designed and built this do.
So what is it? And how much lift was generated at each phase of the flap?
I'm always amazed at how much more an ignorant person can learn about a system by eye-balling it than the designer can know by studying and measuring it for years, but since you've seen fit to share your deep insights with us here on/. it's only fair that you give us the equations and raw data you are basing your profound conclusions on, so the rest of us can at last truly grasp how the ignorant can know so much while understanding so little.
This did not look like a flight, it looked like a delayed fall.
The way an albatross crosses the Pacific, then, in a delayed fall thousands of miles long. You'd better log off/. and go tell the ornithologists they've got it wrong, that the albatross doesn't actually fly!
That's because you're ignorant, and I'm pretty sure the team that did this aren't trying to impress the ignorant, any more than they are trying to impress cows and pigs.
They're trying to do something they can be proud of, and as an incidental byproduct to impress people like me: the physicists and engineers of the world who have done cool things ourselves and know how insanely rewarding it is. And I'm incredibly impressed.
I was under the impression that it took off like a bird.
Which "bird" would that be?
I've long argued that the first purpose of abstractions is to mislead and lie, frequently to ourselves. Using "bird" in the context of a manner of take-off is just such a use.
What you are misled about here is apparently the vast diveristy of different take-off modes that different birds use. In particular, if you have ever seen an albatross take off, you wouldn't be snearing at using a car to assist an ornithopter off the ground. While the albatross hasn't evolved a tow-hook (yet) it generally requires a combination of wind and waves to assist it into fight.
I'm not sure if an albatross can take off from still water on a windless day at all, and they certainly find it much, much easier in conditions where the waves shape the surface winds to give added lift. They use this in thier gliding flight as well, but it is particularly important in takeoff.
So given the vast diversity of ways in which birds take off, including the use of power-assist from the environment, the claim that this "doesn't take off like a bird" is meaningless as well as churlish.
I typically make fun of U of T grads (because hey, they went to U of T) but this is an excellent example of what brilliant people can do even in such benighted circumstances, and I'm sure everyone who worked on the project is justifiably proud of their role in the first human-powered ornithopter ever, both for the simple wonder of the technical achievement and the value they have added to human knowledge of areonautics along the way.
God, being holy, couldn't interact with us without a proxy anymore.
Wow, so you not only believe God is incompetent--having failed in His creation of Man--but also that he is limited in his capabilities. Most Christians claim to believe that God is omnipotent, but here you are claiming that there is something God couldn't do: interact with unholy things.
Are there any other limitations you put on God's potentialities? And how exactly did God manage to create unholy things to being with?
Could it be that you don't actually believe in God, who made the universe, at all, but actually believe in scripture, which is a bunch of bizarre fairy-tales written by igorant primitives who didn't know about the germ theory of disease (which would explain its mysterious absense from scripture, when clearly God knew about it and would have known humans would benefit from it?)
it's kind of a nervous laugh since there is this constant reminder that people exist who want to turn the clock on human knowledge back hundreds of years.
They are also the kind of people who believe that God is a liar, a charlatan and a cheat. If God created the universe as it is and gave us the brains we have, then it is only reasonable to expect that God wants us to use these brains to understand the universe He made. If the answers we get about the universe God made using the brains God gave us contradict scripture, then so much the worse for scripture.
Anyone who believes in scripture does not and cannot believe in God, as they are essentially claiming that God got scripture right, and the universe wrong.
Google is a corporation with a duty to its shareholders to try and increase profits.
Gibberish that doesn't withstand even the most superficial scrutiny.
The arms trade has vastly higher profit margins than internet search. If Google had the duty you for some reason claim, they would become an arms dealer.
For some reason everyone magically pretends corporations are restricted to their current mode of business when they trot out this fairy tale about profit maximization, but no one ever gives any reason for it.
And then again, how exactly does annoying the hell out of the owners of the eyeballs they are selling maximize profit again?
One could make the argument that accurately targeted ads do benefit the user.
But one can then make the obvious argument that if that were the case users would be willing to pay to get targeted ads.
Yet somehow no one ever tries that. It's almost like users see ads, targeted or otherwise, as obtrusive annoyances they are willing to put up with for the sake of the service or content.
Slashdot Mirror
Not all creationists believe the world was 6,000 years old.
That's right: only the intellectually rigorous creationists believe that. Old Earth Creationists have to for some reason accept geology and parts of physics and chemistry, while denying the greater part of physics, chemistry and, most importantly, probability theory. Which I guess makes sense to them, because it's "only a theory".
They are subject to the same sort of insanity makes people think casino gambling is a game of chance.
The N comes from the end of "Evolution".
If they're going to randomly pull letters to make the acronym anything they feel like they're opening up a real can of worms:
mArS atmoSphere and vOlatiLe Evolution Mission ...
Mars Atmosphere anD VOlatiLe Evolution Mission
The possibilities are endless, and meaningless, and irritating.
Is it just me, or is this use of weird acronyms a particularly American thing? I'm thinking of things like the PATRIOT Act, FIRST Robitics, and so on.
I find it equally annoying when applied to things I approve of (MAVEN, FIRST) and things I don't (PATRIOT), so I don't think my response is just anti-Americanism (assuming this really is an American thing, and there aren't British, Canadian, French, etc equivalents I'm woefully ignorant of.)
Eventually, you get enough ballistic photons through that you can map out an image.
Physicists don't actually use terms like "opaque" very often. We are more likely to talk about material that is "highly absorbing" or "highly scattering". The human body contains lots of both.
One area where people have tried to apply this is in optical mamography: women's breasts are primarily fatty tissue that is highly scattering but very weakly absorbing, so you get a surprisingly large fraction of transmitted light. You have to do a huge amount of processing to deconvolve the scattering kernel, but when I worked in the area in the late '90's it was getting close to useful.
For people reading this who are female or who have wives or girlfreinds willing to go along, go into a dark room and hold a flashlight under your (partner's) breast. You'll be amazed by the amount of veinous structure and whatnot you can see. Squeeze the breast flat to get more detail. Insert joke here about how now you're in a dark room with a woman who has at least one breast exposed so you know what comes next...
Very athletic women with smaller breasts may not see much: the chest muscles are highly absorbing and any any photon that scatters into them is lost.
High-speed computation is making visible light a more useful medium of detection all the time, and the work described in TFA is an interesting step along the way.
You are aware the Nazis had their own nuclear program, correct?
It was nothing much, and not oriented toward building a bomb. Michael Frane's play "Cophenhagen" gets it right: if Heisenberg had wanted to build a bomb he wouldn't have needed a week to work out a reasonable estimate of the mass of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
There is simply no plausible case that the NAZIs were working on viable a nuclear weapons program.
TWRs use depleted uranium as a fuel source
And CANDUs use natural uranium as a fuel source. So what? They still generate a vast amount of highly toxic, highly radioactive waste due to the prolific production of long-lived isotopes during operation.
That the fuel happens to be safe is completely irrelevant to the risk involved, as after three months of operation there will be a wide variety of plutonium isotopes, iodine isotopes, and other goodies to spread around when (not if) containment is breached by the other group of idiots who think killing people is an efficient and effective way to achieve any particular end (other than killing people: killing people is great for that, so if your only goal is to kill people, I highly recommend killing people as a means of achieving it. Anything else... not so much.)
And thus Randi's challenge money disappears in a puff of logic.
Nope: Randi is paying out for phenomenology. A demonstrated capacity to DO any of the wide range of things that many, many people claim to be able to do. They just have to do it under circumstances that radically reduce the risk of fraud or self-delusion.
Science is primarily about evidence. If you claim, as you do above, that human beings have "auras" that some people can see, you need to adduce evidence of THAT CLAIM before introducing speculative claims regarding what might cause such "auras".
You cannot increase the plausibility of a claim that has failed every systematic observation and controlled experiment that has investigated it by speculating on what might cause a phenomenon that has not been demonstrated to exist.
And if you didn't claim that people have "auras" that some people can see, why are you introducing the speculation as to the cause of a phenomenon you do not believe exists? Introducing the claim that X might cause Y is de facto evidence that you believe Y, regardless of any counter-claims you might make. If you do not believe "auras" exist it is completely incomprehensible, at least to my limited mind, why you would speculate on their causes.
It would be like speculating on what causes fine English cusine or nuanced American politics.
Hawking is essentially saying that there very well may not be one single theory which explains everything. Instead, there may be a bunch of theories, each of which is valid only in certain areas, and which agree with one another where they overlap, even without a global solution.
This is consistent with Hawking's history of repeating old and not necessarily very good philsophy, although I'll take Cartwright over Hume (whom Hawking swallows whole in "A Brief History of Time") any day:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Laws-Physics-Nancy-Cartwright/dp/0198247044
Cartwright's suggestion, based on nothing much, is that there may not be any theory of everything, and that the laws of physics may look more like a bunch of slim volumes on specific topics rather than one big book.
Cartwright's book was published getting on for thirty years ago.
Stop artificially extending outdated technology if it doesn't need to happen (it doesn't).
And yet the odds are you typed that on a machine that's using the wretched x86 instruction set...
Better technology never wins. More convenience does. ISP-level NAT is starting to look awfully convenient...
Note that I'm not saying this is a good thing. I was an early adopter of RISC technology and stunned that x86 has lasted so long, even though it's mostly RISC under the hood for the past decade or more. I'm just pointing out that this is the way things have tended to go.
Sense vehicular motion (including vibration) and shut down the texting function while in motion.
Yeah, I should have written "non-evaporating black holes". Creating them requires all of physics we know to be true, plus some speculative stuff. Preventing them from evaporating requires that precisely the right bits of physics we know to be true, to be false.
Why does everyone assume that Puritans never got any?
Because they hated any public display of sexuality or any expression of sexuality outside of church-sanctioned marriage.
While it is true that within marriage they were a lusty lot, their rabid insistence that everyone else play by their rules meant that many people assume they were sexually frustrated themselves, which they probably would have been had not they generally married relatively young.
Also, because God for some unaccountable reason left the germ theory of disease out of the Bible, childbirth was a very high-risk event, particularly due to post-partum infection. Ergo, there were many unmarried older Puritan males about who couldn't have sex within marriage because their wife was dead.
So being sexually active only within highly restricted context of a non-traditional marriage[*] is hardly a recipe for sexual satisfaction generally. Rather the opposite, if the divorce rate is any indication.
[*] I say "non-traditional" because the Puritan, and modern, notion of monogamy is quite unusual, the traditional marriage consisting of one man, his wife, his household servants and slaves, the stable-boy, his concubines, and his livestock.
So they are actually going to make black holes at LHC without even knowing if it will evaporate?
For the LHC to create black holes at all would require a whole bunch of very speculative physics to be true, and a whole bunch of very well-established physics to be false.
In particular, if the LHC can create black holes then millions of black holes are being created every day by cosmic rays, which can have twenty orders of magnitude more energy than the LHC. No evidence of those black holes is seen anywhere, not in geochemical track analysis, not in the radiation signature of cosmic ray showers, no where. Ergo, either such black holes are not being created, or they are being destroyed with incredible rapidity.
For the beam dump of the LHC to behave any differently would require physics so arcane as to be basically magic, and anyone who is worried about it should also be terrified that a herd of flying elephants will trample them to death, because that's a far more probable event.
So in effect what the Russian Minister said the VOA and BBC in the 60s through 90s was an act of aggression.
Damn right. It was aggression against people who hate freedom, who want to rule, who sent tanks in Poland and quite a few other places as well over the years.
It was non-violent aggression, which is the kind that actually works.
We don't know that it didn't bounce or roll there- no telling when it got there, the planetary conditions at the time it arrived- maybe Mars had a thicker atmosphere then, whether it impacted there or is it just a fragment of something else that landed there.
This is the amusing bit: the dweebs here who assume that the only way a piece of rock from space ever winds up on a planetary surface is to come crashing straight down into the atmosphere and drill a deep hole without any fragmentation or ejecta.
I guess they are ignorant of the entire class of meteorites found on Earth that are believed to be ejecta from Martian impacts. Or they are too stupid to realize that if a rock can hit Mars hard enough that fragments sometimes wind up on Earth, maybe a few of the fragments might just possibly hit Mars at far distant locations.
Man /. is depressing this morning. The parade of arrogant ignorance on display here these days is really something to see.
Unfortunately, it's also wrong and misguided.
It's nothing of the kind. Consider the following statements:
1) The two versions of the creation myth don't match. Furthermore... it gets the order wrong. Plants are created before the sun, moon and stars. The seas were populated after the land.
This is all LITERALLY true of the Bible. Creative, imaginative, metaphorical readings are possible that make these problems seem to go away, but of course then you have completely rejected the Bible as the basis of your belief and replaced it with whatever principle you used to create the imaginative reading that makes these literal falsehoods seem coherent.
2) Women and children are treated little better than chattle. Blind obedience is exalted (Abraham and Isaac). Genocide is a commandment from God. Ritual vicarious atonement is practiced as blood sacrifices, which the Christians later claim as a precursor to Jesus' sacrifice. The New Testament would seem better if it didn't add in the concept of Hell, reinforced the earlier misogyny and make claims which can be empirically proven false about the efficacy of Christian prayer.
Again, all LITERALLY true, and furthermore there is a goodly body of specifically Christian theology that accepts these aspects of the Bible as literally true. Again, you can abandon the Bible as the foundation of your belief and use some other, completely unrelated principle, to make up some just-so stories about how "things were different" back then regarding women and children, and how the power of prayer isn't really the power to acomplish anything but rather the power to be told "no", which is in direct contradition to the literal reading of the Bible.
3) The theology ... starts with a concept of man as a deviant, broken being in need of salvation. The ... deity which created him ... enable[s] that salvation through the [sacrifice] of his son/self.
Again, stripped of the inflamatory language, this is unexceptionable theology. You cannot possibly deny this and call yourself a Christian. It is at the core of Christian doctrine. You can disagree with the OP's evaluation of this doctrine, but you cannot disagree that it IS doctrine.
So, this is NOT merely a glider.
Hey, who are you going to believe? The engineers who spent years designing and building it, or some ignorant twit on /.?
The up-flap cancels out the down-flap as the wings appear to move vertically.
Wow! By watching a two-minute video you've been able to analyze the air-flow pattern throughout the entire cycle of the flap! Could you please post vorticity diagrams? I'd also like to see the torsion angle of the wing as a function of flap phase, as apparently you've measured that as well.
And also, could you give me the equation that relates lift to maximum torsion? Because to justify the claim you make you need to have that, so of course you must have that. I'm sure the people who designed and built this do.
So what is it? And how much lift was generated at each phase of the flap?
I'm always amazed at how much more an ignorant person can learn about a system by eye-balling it than the designer can know by studying and measuring it for years, but since you've seen fit to share your deep insights with us here on /. it's only fair that you give us the equations and raw data you are basing your profound conclusions on, so the rest of us can at last truly grasp how the ignorant can know so much while understanding so little.
This did not look like a flight, it looked like a delayed fall.
The way an albatross crosses the Pacific, then, in a delayed fall thousands of miles long. You'd better log off /. and go tell the ornithologists they've got it wrong, that the albatross doesn't actually fly!
Sorry, doesn't impress me all that much.
That's because you're ignorant, and I'm pretty sure the team that did this aren't trying to impress the ignorant, any more than they are trying to impress cows and pigs.
They're trying to do something they can be proud of, and as an incidental byproduct to impress people like me: the physicists and engineers of the world who have done cool things ourselves and know how insanely rewarding it is. And I'm incredibly impressed.
I was under the impression that it took off like a bird.
Which "bird" would that be?
I've long argued that the first purpose of abstractions is to mislead and lie, frequently to ourselves. Using "bird" in the context of a manner of take-off is just such a use.
What you are misled about here is apparently the vast diveristy of different take-off modes that different birds use. In particular, if you have ever seen an albatross take off, you wouldn't be snearing at using a car to assist an ornithopter off the ground. While the albatross hasn't evolved a tow-hook (yet) it generally requires a combination of wind and waves to assist it into fight.
I'm not sure if an albatross can take off from still water on a windless day at all, and they certainly find it much, much easier in conditions where the waves shape the surface winds to give added lift. They use this in thier gliding flight as well, but it is particularly important in takeoff.
So given the vast diversity of ways in which birds take off, including the use of power-assist from the environment, the claim that this "doesn't take off like a bird" is meaningless as well as churlish.
I typically make fun of U of T grads (because hey, they went to U of T) but this is an excellent example of what brilliant people can do even in such benighted circumstances, and I'm sure everyone who worked on the project is justifiably proud of their role in the first human-powered ornithopter ever, both for the simple wonder of the technical achievement and the value they have added to human knowledge of areonautics along the way.
God, being holy, couldn't interact with us without a proxy anymore.
Wow, so you not only believe God is incompetent--having failed in His creation of Man--but also that he is limited in his capabilities. Most Christians claim to believe that God is omnipotent, but here you are claiming that there is something God couldn't do: interact with unholy things.
Are there any other limitations you put on God's potentialities? And how exactly did God manage to create unholy things to being with?
Could it be that you don't actually believe in God, who made the universe, at all, but actually believe in scripture, which is a bunch of bizarre fairy-tales written by igorant primitives who didn't know about the germ theory of disease (which would explain its mysterious absense from scripture, when clearly God knew about it and would have known humans would benefit from it?)
This is one of the most clear and brief accounts of what is wrong with the Bible I have ever read. Thanks!
it's kind of a nervous laugh since there is this constant reminder that people exist who want to turn the clock on human knowledge back hundreds of years.
They are also the kind of people who believe that God is a liar, a charlatan and a cheat. If God created the universe as it is and gave us the brains we have, then it is only reasonable to expect that God wants us to use these brains to understand the universe He made. If the answers we get about the universe God made using the brains God gave us contradict scripture, then so much the worse for scripture.
Anyone who believes in scripture does not and cannot believe in God, as they are essentially claiming that God got scripture right, and the universe wrong.
Google is a corporation with a duty to its shareholders to try and increase profits.
Gibberish that doesn't withstand even the most superficial scrutiny.
The arms trade has vastly higher profit margins than internet search. If Google had the duty you for some reason claim, they would become an arms dealer.
For some reason everyone magically pretends corporations are restricted to their current mode of business when they trot out this fairy tale about profit maximization, but no one ever gives any reason for it.
And then again, how exactly does annoying the hell out of the owners of the eyeballs they are selling maximize profit again?
One could make the argument that accurately targeted ads do benefit the user.
But one can then make the obvious argument that if that were the case users would be willing to pay to get targeted ads.
Yet somehow no one ever tries that. It's almost like users see ads, targeted or otherwise, as obtrusive annoyances they are willing to put up with for the sake of the service or content.