There is a theory that the flood story of Noah is based on the actual deluge which created the Black Sea.
No, the flood story of Noah is based on the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim. The Sumerian story of Utnapishtim may be based on the Black Sea (or even Mediterranian) inundation, but the Noah story is just a copy of the Sumerian story, with all the roles of the various Sumerian gods subsumed by a rather confused and contradictory Hebrew god.
Given the Sumerians were a river culture (think about what "Mesopotamia" means) it is at least as plausible that the Sumerian flood story, which is what the biblical flood story is based on, arose from plausible fears of a great innundation, much as zombie stories arise today from a plausible fear of Republicans.
Actually, it's a theoretical explanation for some difficult experimental results.
Which itself needs to be experimentally verified. The model they are using is fairly simple. In particular, they introduce the terahertz driving force into the model by hand. That's ok to suggest that under reasonable assumptions it is plausible that terahertz radiation can drive non-linear breathing-mode resonances that can create localized "bubbles" in double-stranded DNA, where the linking bonds between the two strands are broken. But it's a long, long way from a solid empirical result.
Of course, if you believe GCM's are a sound basis for public policy, you would have to argue that there is no need to do any experimental follow-up on this: simply use the computer model to determine the safe limits. There should be no problem with that because this model is orders of magnitude more realistic than the best GCM.
the IT admin simply points at Google and says "it's not my fault or my problem".
I'm not sure who you mean by "the IT admin"? Is that like a buggy-whip maker?
One of the big advantages that makes remote hosting with a standard application infrastructure (which is all "cloud computing" is in this context) attractive is that you get to fire most of your admins because you no longer have much in the way of in-house servers.
One of the reasons why this is happening now is because after a decade of of living with "a computer on every desktop and in every home" we have a very good idea of what we want these gadgets to do, and a pretty good idea of how to do it. So the economic viability of remotely hosted standard applications is the result of the rapidly slowly pace of innovation in desktop office software (which is no surprise.)
I don't know for sure but I think that's a rather small difference and could be accounted for just by the size of the star that exploded.
You're confused because the summary, and the press release on which it is based, are misleading and wrong.
This is a gamma ray burst (GRB), which originate from neutron stars, not a super-nova (which is the only reasonable meaning one can give "exploding star".) Neutron stars are small, resulting in much finer burst timescales.
The paper discusses the time-structure of GRB's, which has been extensively studied. The fundamental result they get is from a single high-energy gamma ray at the end of the last spike in the burst, which comes 0.9 s after the onset of that spike (seen in the lower-energy photon flux). They do a lot of analysis to argue that the most plausible explanation of that single photon is that it is a member of that spike rather than a random cosmic ray. Anyone familiar with modern statistical techniques will see that this is straightforward, albeit non-trivial.
This is the way science works: we squeeze limited and imperfect experimental evidence as hard as we can using established theory and other, supporting, observations. All the "yeah, well, it could be something else" kind of commentary we see so much of on/. is irrelevant to the scientific process, because it is doing nothing but repeating what everyone already knows: sometimes the most plausible explanation turns out to be wrong.
The exciting thing about this measurement is that they have shown it is possible to put quantum gravity to a rather good test using entirely conventional gamma-ray spectroscopy techniques, and repeating this kind of measurement over the next few years or decades on different bursts will rapidly push down the limits on potential planck-scale effects, because eventually we'll see bursts where there are a few high-energy photons closer to the onset, or we will see bursts from objects at larger (known) distances.
The present authors argue, rightly, that their observation makes theories that have a linear dependence of light velocity on wavelength less plausible. At some point in the next few years it is likely that those theories will be dead, and there's really nothing so beautiful as a theory killed by a fact.
If Afshar's theory/experiment contradicts the mainstream physics
The funny thing is that it doesn't even do that: it is an attempt to find an experiment that distinguishes between different interpretations of QM, which no one has ever been able to do. Everyone agrees, phenomenologically, what the results of the experiment should be, and the results of the experiment are consistent with the results predicted by QM.
The question that got people arguing is whether or not this proves or disproves the Copenhagen Interpretation. My own view is that since the Copenhagen Interpretation is barely coherent (pun intended) it is very hard to "disprove". And the very fact that physicists have got along with Copenhagen for decades shows how little interpretation matters when it comes to QM: any old thing will do, so long as it provides a reasonable guide to calculation.
Because Copenhagen insists that we only compute things in the context of the experiments actually being performed, it does this quite well. This has practical implications when taking integrals in calculations of angular correlations in gamma-ray spectroscopy, for example: you integrate over the things you aren't measuring because Copenhagen tells you they have no objective meaning. I'm sure other interpretations could do the same thing, but there is no experimental basis to choose between them, so it's just a parlor game to talk about them.
"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States." [greenspun.com]
Which is why you find so few women in the sciences. Women are far more sensible than men about career choices, not having been filled with idiotic propaganda all their lives about the value of sacrificing their lives (often literally) to "be a provider for their family." That's why when a job is really dangerous, dirty, or underpaid, it is almost certainly done by a man. And if all you know about someone is that they died on the job, you can predict their sex with 98% accuracy.
I'll believe that conditions in science and engineering have improved not when the best men are retained in the field, but when we see a lot more women.
While women in the sciences do face some discrimination--just as women doctors and lawyers used to--that is an effect of their being so few of them, not a cause. The cause is that women aren't idiots, and can see that a career in the sciences is a bad bargain.
I call bs...whenever an attractive woman walks by smelling like she just stepped out of the shower I have only immoral thoughts.
Really? That's extremely weird. When that happens to me I think about how much fun it would be to chat her up, get her naked and have wildly good sex with her.
What kind of immoral thoughts do you have? Do you feel sudden urges to restrict people's freedom of expression? Do you want to ban abortion? Or deprive people of life, liberty or property without due process of law?
And how on earth does an attractive women stimulate these thoughts? Or are they of the all-too-common immoral variety that she should be stoned to death for being more autonomous than you are comfortable with?
It is deeply sad that an attractive woman should stimulate immoral thoughts, rather than healthy and moral sexual desire.
they usually have a few passages that they conveniently claim to mean something that they don't really, then they repeat those parts over and over to drown out anyone who contradicts them.
Almost everyone who calls themselves a "Christian" today does exactly this. They ignore all the contradictions, God-driven violence and slavery in the Old Testament, they ignore that Jesus said not one jot of the law would pass away, they ignore the prohibiition on divorce and remarriage, they ignore the contradictory accounts of the resurrection, they ignore Jesus' claim to have come to put the world to the sword...
The bits they don't ignore entirely they interpret bizarrely, typically dropping the Jewish context and inserting thier own fantasies.
It is unfortunately extremely difficult for people like this to even see the words on the page in front of them and interpret them as they would an ordinary text, which is all it is. The act of reading gets replaced by the act of interpretation, so that it is almost impossible for the person so aflicted to so much as consider the possibility that the words might have other meanings than the interpretation they are comfortable with.
Now, whether or not.33 is a STRONG correlation is another matter. By most definitions, it is not, although.52 would be a moderate correlation.
Without a p-value these are just meaningless numbers, and it is extremely hard to generate a p-value from Pearson's r. Almost any measure of correlation is superior to it, but it continues to get used in the social sciences because "we've always done it that way."
Which sounds a lot like arbitrary coherence to me: the failure to challenge a statistic that has terrible underlying properties is a result of people "anchoring" on it, as they did on the arbitrary prices and wages described in TFA.
To give a concrete example, I once worked with a data-set where 0.98 was a terrible correlation. It all depends on the distribution of the underlying data. Without knowing that, and using it to compute a p-value, you can't say anything meaningful about the significance of a particular r-value.
I'm pretty sure the Apollo people thought all this out and they came up with a pretty good solution that is known to work. I wager they figured it was best to launch everything at once where possible.
This was done for reasons that no longer apply. The goal was "get to the Moon", not "build a sustainable space program for the human exploration of the solar system". That was the dream (of the engineers) but not the goal (of the politicians.)
The two models considered by Apollo were "Earth rendezvous" and "Lunar rendezvous". In the first model, multiple launches were used to assemble a large lunar spacecraft in Earth orbit, a true space ship, not just a coracle like the CM/LM combination. That ship would go to the Moon, land, take off and return to Earth orbit.
Lunar rendezvous was what was selected (over von Braun's objections): a one-shot mission that would go directly to the Moon, detach a small lunar lander that would return to lunar orbit. There is no doubt this produced the lowest cost and shortest time-line for reaching the Moon for the first time. But it is equally pretty likely that we'd be a decade or two ahead in our exploration of space if we'd gone with Earth rendezvous, and at relatively trivial cost (if by "relatively" you mean "relative to what the US spends daily on killing people to ineffectually pursue poorly-thought-out foreign policy goals".)
You win the prize for Biggest Failure to Think Ahead.
Who cares about what the situation is right now, when commerical launch is a small business with solely government clients. Look forward 25 years, when commerical launch is a big business catering primarily to rich tourists.
"Higher profits today at the cost of abject failure tomorrow" is business as usual for human beings. Governments--being made out of human beings, just like corporations--are subject to this phenomenon as well, but with a different definition of "profit." Since things like prestige loom larger for the human beings in government, poluting the orbital commons is a bit of a big deal for them. For the virtually identical human beings who run companies... not so much.
Your claim is like someone saying, "There's no way banks would ever loan hundreds of billions to bad creditors." That's true, until some clever dick figured out how to secuitize all that junk paper based on bogus statistical models that weren't scrutinized too closely because,hey, we're getting rich off it!
Technological, economic and political factors will ensure that the Keychest service will go away. It is a certainty, not a probability.
And users who pay real money for "access" rather than content will get hosed. Again.
Personally, I'm willing to pay for perpetual access so long as I get back a fraction of my money equal to the fraction of "in perpetuity" left when the service goes away.
I did this test using three different programs. They said that at least two people wrote the work.
This is interesting, but have you validated this method of analysis by applying it to works of known authorship, say on fanfic sites or alt.politics newsgroups, which would be reasonable control sources--unedited outpourings of interested amateurs? That would tell you that works of the same author don't get flagged as different simply due to your reading-level split.
Ideally I'd like to see a p-value for your claim that "the work was written by at least two people" against the null hypothesis "only one person wrote the work". Without a p-value you really aren't saying anything. Presumably the plagiarism detection software produces a probability of works being by the same author. What you need to do is apply your reading-level split to a bunch of works and generate a distribution (histogram) of the probabilities that the two parts of each work are from different authors. Then ask the question: what are the odds that the probability I get from applying this analysis of Kaczynski was drawn from this distribution? That is your p-value. If it is very small, it is implausible that Kaczynski's work was written by one author.
There are still problems with your approach, but doing this would bring you into the realm of discourse where people could argue about your method, but not dispute the objectivity of your result given your assumptions.
Would be interesting to see if a computer comes up with the same JEDP authors though.
The authorship question aside, it's doubtful that this kind of analysis would catch the more interesting bits of plagerism in the Bible. The lifting of the Flood story from the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim, and the bits of Gilgamesh that are spliced into Eclesiastes, for example.
Although in the latter case Siduri's advice to Gilgamesh (go home and enjoy your life taking joy in your spouse and children, quit trying to live forever) is virtually identical to what the Teacher writes (can't recall the exact reference--somewhere in chapter 4, I think) the differences in language probably make this kind of semantics-free analysis less than useful.
And of course, most of the source material that the Bible was plagerized from is lost to us, which limits the applications of this technique to that problem as well. This is unfortunate, as an understanding of the works that the Bible authors plagiarized would help us understand the place of the Bible in the history of literature and give more clues as to the culture that produced it.
Why, for example, was the Sumerian flood story plagiarized, and not the quest for imortality? Why was Siduri's advice plagiarized and not Gilgamesh's lament on the death of Enkidu, or Enkidu's lament in the underworld?
This kind of analysis is extremely valuable in understanding the context in which a particular literary work was created: we know that Shakespeare and his contemporaries borrowed plots and characters from each other all the time, repeating the same basic stories with variations, like film remakes in the modern world (Henry V is a good example of Shakespeare transforming a story that had been covered before into something new and wonderful, despite the many borrowed scenes). What an author chose to plagiarize out of the many source works available tells us a lot about his time and place and how he saw the world. We can't do that with the Bible, because so many of the source works it was plagiarized from have been lost to us.
The Book of Mormon, now... it would definitely be worth applying this kind of analysis to that...
You don't think it possible that they might want to know whether their beliefs are well founded?
Of course not. If they did, they would base their beliefs on rational empricism, not a logically inconsistent fantasy whose primary source is a collection of scriptures full of falsehoods, violence and vindictiveness (as well as some beautiful poetry and a smidgen of worthy moral advice that doesn't come close to redeeming the whole.)
In other words, the names should be protected based on what we know these elements will do with them.
Right, and Iran should be bombed back into the stone age based on what we "know" they will do with nuclear technology when they get their hands on it.
This is cowardice masquerading as amoral pragmatism.
We do not know what "these elements" will do, and if we suspect they'll do something bad we should be prepared to counter those bad things rather than letting of our fear of what they might do prod us into doing evil ourselves.
And gosh, we do have exactly those preparations in this case: the rule of law. People who are assualted, defamed, slandered, have the legal machinery of one of the most prosecution-happy nations on Earth to back them up.
Beyond that, if they don't have the stones to stand up and take the public shaming they are getting for engaging in a shameful act--and surely wilful interference with the freedom of others to enjoy the misery of marriage is a shameful act--then to hell with them.
The only way to ensure freedom from fear is to not be a coward. No amount of societal fiddling will ever free a coward from fear, and attempting to do so will always produce a police state. No thanks.
just having a hard time visualising that sometime in our evolutionary history there were some animals that didn't age.
They're called micro-organisms, although they don't exactly "not age". They reproduce by binary fission and therefore the offspring cells are nominally genetically identical to the parent. You can, if you like, say that one of them IS "the parent" (possibly with a bit of genetic modification) and the other is "the offspring." If you look at it that way (which admittedly takes a bit of squinting) their are single-celled organisms that around that are millions of years old (but genetically very different from their nominally identical selves of millions of years ago, due to those accumulated modifications.)
The GP's point is also not exactly correct: "competition" in the evolutionary sense doesn't happen between species. It happens between individuals of the same species. So a better way of putting the argument is: species with very long lifespans will be strongly selected for shorter lifespans when the rate of environmental change is high.
That is, the individuals who reproduce younger will have a larger chance of having offspring that are well-suited for the current environment, and those offspring will tend to reproduce younger as well, allowing the next generation's selective filtering (a nice euphemism for killing lots and lots of individuals) to operate rather more gently than on the offspring of individuals that reproduce later in life.
Age of first reproduction tends to be strongly anti-correlated with longevity. It's just like writing code under a tight deadline: the adaptations to get the job done fast tend to reduce maintainability, and it appears that the advantage of reaching the age of reproduction earlier and having a shorter reproductive lifespan is, in the typical environments found on Earth, more significant than building to last but not squeezing out those first pups for a couple of years after your contemporaries have.
If the Earth's environment were far more stable, species would be much longer lived. As it is, with significant natural climate variation on all timescales from decadal to milenial, a very long-lived species would have individuals adapted to one environment pushing out offspring in environments that they would be relatively ill-adapted for. There's very little selective advantage in that (although one could perhaps argue for the advantage of a really, really long-lived species that was able to wait it out until the next round of optimium conditions occurred. But there are some minima that even evolutionary algorithms have a hard time reaching.)
I can't really see how it is even relevant in a discussion about nuclear safety.
Because if you performed an analogous test with a coal or oil you would not end up with a few hundred square kilometers of your country permanently evacuated.
This is what makes fission power problematic: not that it kills anyone, but that the kind of routine stupidity that humans engage in all the time can result in extremely high economic costs. Three Mile Island was the same way: no danger to life and limb, but a very expensive, very complex machine was written off by a relatively trivial design error in the coolant control system (an incompetent engineer designed a system in which the position of valves was based on integrated current running to the motors controlling them, so operators were told that certain valves were closed that were in fact stuck open.)
Human beings behave like idiots all the time, and fission power is particularly susceptible to idiotic behaviour. Ergo, Chernobyl is relevant to nuclear safety because it demonstrates that design errors of a kind that would be no big deal in a coal or oil plant are a big deal in a fission plant, and no one anywhere has any idea of how to ensure that design errors of that kind do not happen (if we did, we'd be able to build systems that were robust against idiotic behaviour we haven't thought of yet.)
Hey, ISP is in seconds, it's an industry standard.
But it shouldn't be. N*s/kg is the correct unit for specific impulse. "Seconds" is only used by American engineers who don't understand the difference between weight and mass.
When I was a kid I was deeply interested in space, but it wasn't until years later that I understood the meaning of Isp because of the idiotic convention of designating it in seconds, rather than force*time/mass, which makes its meaning completely obvious.
If you want to turn people off an understanding of the most basic aspects of space travel, by all means go ahead and keep using seconds for Isp. But it's really time for the United States to get with the rest of the world and abandon Imperial units, although I guess as an imperial power they seem like a natural fit.
[Ok, now wondering if this'll get more "troll" or "flamebait" mods. It should probably lean toward "flamebait", as the story is true: Isp in seconds really did confuse me for years. The egregious America-bashing is, well, egregious, so probably warrants a flamebait mod. But really, what's with the Imperial units, kids?]
The point of a casino is that they make money by running games of chance where the odds are in favor of the house.
Ergo, from the house's point of view, there is no chance involved. The apparent role of "chance" in casino gambling is an illusion that results from the player's perspective. From the perspective of the house, winning is an absolute certainty.
On the other hand, there's really no perfect separation between the software and our books.
Any time you run into an argument that relies on this kind of "there's no perfect separation" argument you know you're in deep trouble, either because you're an idiot (probably not true in your case) or because you've found a genuine boardline case.
The idiot problem is more common, because nothing is perfectly separated from anything else, ever, and yet we deal with those cases just fine every single day. There's no perfect separation between "inside" and "outside" when talking about a building, yet somehow most of us still managed to make our way from one to the other this morning. There is no perfect separation between ocean and dry land, but no one ever has any difficulty using those concepts, because we've created a bunch of special concepts to deal with the borderline cases ("beach", "littoral", etc.)
If you hit on a case where it really matters that there's no perfect separation between two completely different things (the software and the book, in this case) you need to define some intermediate concepts that will let you understand better the relationship between them, and to deal intelligently with the region in which they overlap. Unfortunately, it will take the legal community a few decades to do that, and in the meantime the best you can hope for is to not become a precedent.
The article essentially says that the terminology used needs more rigorous definition, and needs to match more closely with the existing legal terminology.
The article also says, "This marks one of the core questions of GPLv2: Is it based on copyright or is it a contract that, while borrowing some copyright terms, ultimately stands on its own?", which is so bizzare that it makes me question the whole thing.
I have no idea why anyone who knows anything about contract law or the GPL would ask this question. The GPL involves no consideration (payment) and therefore is not a contract in any jurisdiction governed by Common Law. The GPL further depends explicitly on the software author's copyright for its legal force.
So why exactly would anyone think this is a "core question of GPLv2"? A core question of clueless jurnos writing far outside their comfort zone, maybe. But not a question anyone who wasn't that profoundly ignorant would ask.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a theory that the flood story of Noah is based on the actual deluge which created the Black Sea.
No, the flood story of Noah is based on the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim. The Sumerian story of Utnapishtim may be based on the Black Sea (or even Mediterranian) inundation, but the Noah story is just a copy of the Sumerian story, with all the roles of the various Sumerian gods subsumed by a rather confused and contradictory Hebrew god.
Given the Sumerians were a river culture (think about what "Mesopotamia" means) it is at least as plausible that the Sumerian flood story, which is what the biblical flood story is based on, arose from plausible fears of a great innundation, much as zombie stories arise today from a plausible fear of Republicans.
Actually, it's a theoretical explanation for some difficult experimental results.
Which itself needs to be experimentally verified. The model they are using is fairly simple. In particular, they introduce the terahertz driving force into the model by hand. That's ok to suggest that under reasonable assumptions it is plausible that terahertz radiation can drive non-linear breathing-mode resonances that can create localized "bubbles" in double-stranded DNA, where the linking bonds between the two strands are broken. But it's a long, long way from a solid empirical result.
Of course, if you believe GCM's are a sound basis for public policy, you would have to argue that there is no need to do any experimental follow-up on this: simply use the computer model to determine the safe limits. There should be no problem with that because this model is orders of magnitude more realistic than the best GCM.
the IT admin simply points at Google and says "it's not my fault or my problem".
I'm not sure who you mean by "the IT admin"? Is that like a buggy-whip maker?
One of the big advantages that makes remote hosting with a standard application infrastructure (which is all "cloud computing" is in this context) attractive is that you get to fire most of your admins because you no longer have much in the way of in-house servers.
One of the reasons why this is happening now is because after a decade of of living with "a computer on every desktop and in every home" we have a very good idea of what we want these gadgets to do, and a pretty good idea of how to do it. So the economic viability of remotely hosted standard applications is the result of the rapidly slowly pace of innovation in desktop office software (which is no surprise.)
I don't know for sure but I think that's a rather small difference and could be accounted for just by the size of the star that exploded.
You're confused because the summary, and the press release on which it is based, are misleading and wrong.
This is a gamma ray burst (GRB), which originate from neutron stars, not a super-nova (which is the only reasonable meaning one can give "exploding star".) Neutron stars are small, resulting in much finer burst timescales.
The paper discusses the time-structure of GRB's, which has been extensively studied. The fundamental result they get is from a single high-energy gamma ray at the end of the last spike in the burst, which comes 0.9 s after the onset of that spike (seen in the lower-energy photon flux). They do a lot of analysis to argue that the most plausible explanation of that single photon is that it is a member of that spike rather than a random cosmic ray. Anyone familiar with modern statistical techniques will see that this is straightforward, albeit non-trivial.
This is the way science works: we squeeze limited and imperfect experimental evidence as hard as we can using established theory and other, supporting, observations. All the "yeah, well, it could be something else" kind of commentary we see so much of on /. is irrelevant to the scientific process, because it is doing nothing but repeating what everyone already knows: sometimes the most plausible explanation turns out to be wrong.
The exciting thing about this measurement is that they have shown it is possible to put quantum gravity to a rather good test using entirely conventional gamma-ray spectroscopy techniques, and repeating this kind of measurement over the next few years or decades on different bursts will rapidly push down the limits on potential planck-scale effects, because eventually we'll see bursts where there are a few high-energy photons closer to the onset, or we will see bursts from objects at larger (known) distances.
The present authors argue, rightly, that their observation makes theories that have a linear dependence of light velocity on wavelength less plausible. At some point in the next few years it is likely that those theories will be dead, and there's really nothing so beautiful as a theory killed by a fact.
If Afshar's theory/experiment contradicts the mainstream physics
The funny thing is that it doesn't even do that: it is an attempt to find an experiment that distinguishes between different interpretations of QM, which no one has ever been able to do. Everyone agrees, phenomenologically, what the results of the experiment should be, and the results of the experiment are consistent with the results predicted by QM.
The question that got people arguing is whether or not this proves or disproves the Copenhagen Interpretation. My own view is that since the Copenhagen Interpretation is barely coherent (pun intended) it is very hard to "disprove". And the very fact that physicists have got along with Copenhagen for decades shows how little interpretation matters when it comes to QM: any old thing will do, so long as it provides a reasonable guide to calculation.
Because Copenhagen insists that we only compute things in the context of the experiments actually being performed, it does this quite well. This has practical implications when taking integrals in calculations of angular correlations in gamma-ray spectroscopy, for example: you integrate over the things you aren't measuring because Copenhagen tells you they have no objective meaning. I'm sure other interpretations could do the same thing, but there is no experimental basis to choose between them, so it's just a parlor game to talk about them.
"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States." [greenspun.com]
Which is why you find so few women in the sciences. Women are far more sensible than men about career choices, not having been filled with idiotic propaganda all their lives about the value of sacrificing their lives (often literally) to "be a provider for their family." That's why when a job is really dangerous, dirty, or underpaid, it is almost certainly done by a man. And if all you know about someone is that they died on the job, you can predict their sex with 98% accuracy.
I'll believe that conditions in science and engineering have improved not when the best men are retained in the field, but when we see a lot more women.
While women in the sciences do face some discrimination--just as women doctors and lawyers used to--that is an effect of their being so few of them, not a cause. The cause is that women aren't idiots, and can see that a career in the sciences is a bad bargain.
I call bs...whenever an attractive woman walks by smelling like she just stepped out of the shower I have only immoral thoughts.
Really? That's extremely weird. When that happens to me I think about how much fun it would be to chat her up, get her naked and have wildly good sex with her.
What kind of immoral thoughts do you have? Do you feel sudden urges to restrict people's freedom of expression? Do you want to ban abortion? Or deprive people of life, liberty or property without due process of law?
And how on earth does an attractive women stimulate these thoughts? Or are they of the all-too-common immoral variety that she should be stoned to death for being more autonomous than you are comfortable with?
It is deeply sad that an attractive woman should stimulate immoral thoughts, rather than healthy and moral sexual desire.
they usually have a few passages that they conveniently claim to mean something that they don't really, then they repeat those parts over and over to drown out anyone who contradicts them.
Almost everyone who calls themselves a "Christian" today does exactly this. They ignore all the contradictions, God-driven violence and slavery in the Old Testament, they ignore that Jesus said not one jot of the law would pass away, they ignore the prohibiition on divorce and remarriage, they ignore the contradictory accounts of the resurrection, they ignore Jesus' claim to have come to put the world to the sword...
The bits they don't ignore entirely they interpret bizarrely, typically dropping the Jewish context and inserting thier own fantasies.
It is unfortunately extremely difficult for people like this to even see the words on the page in front of them and interpret them as they would an ordinary text, which is all it is. The act of reading gets replaced by the act of interpretation, so that it is almost impossible for the person so aflicted to so much as consider the possibility that the words might have other meanings than the interpretation they are comfortable with.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
What Nietzsche actually said was, "There are no interpretations, only facts." That's my interpretation, anyway.
[Self consistency! Not just for scientists any more!]
Now, whether or not .33 is a STRONG correlation is another matter. By most definitions, it is not, although .52 would be a moderate correlation.
Without a p-value these are just meaningless numbers, and it is extremely hard to generate a p-value from Pearson's r. Almost any measure of correlation is superior to it, but it continues to get used in the social sciences because "we've always done it that way."
Which sounds a lot like arbitrary coherence to me: the failure to challenge a statistic that has terrible underlying properties is a result of people "anchoring" on it, as they did on the arbitrary prices and wages described in TFA.
To give a concrete example, I once worked with a data-set where 0.98 was a terrible correlation. It all depends on the distribution of the underlying data. Without knowing that, and using it to compute a p-value, you can't say anything meaningful about the significance of a particular r-value.
I'm pretty sure the Apollo people thought all this out and they came up with a pretty good solution that is known to work. I wager they figured it was best to launch everything at once where possible.
This was done for reasons that no longer apply. The goal was "get to the Moon", not "build a sustainable space program for the human exploration of the solar system". That was the dream (of the engineers) but not the goal (of the politicians.)
The two models considered by Apollo were "Earth rendezvous" and "Lunar rendezvous". In the first model, multiple launches were used to assemble a large lunar spacecraft in Earth orbit, a true space ship, not just a coracle like the CM/LM combination. That ship would go to the Moon, land, take off and return to Earth orbit.
Lunar rendezvous was what was selected (over von Braun's objections): a one-shot mission that would go directly to the Moon, detach a small lunar lander that would return to lunar orbit. There is no doubt this produced the lowest cost and shortest time-line for reaching the Moon for the first time. But it is equally pretty likely that we'd be a decade or two ahead in our exploration of space if we'd gone with Earth rendezvous, and at relatively trivial cost (if by "relatively" you mean "relative to what the US spends daily on killing people to ineffectually pursue poorly-thought-out foreign policy goals".)
The people in space launch right now
You win the prize for Biggest Failure to Think Ahead.
Who cares about what the situation is right now, when commerical launch is a small business with solely government clients. Look forward 25 years, when commerical launch is a big business catering primarily to rich tourists.
"Higher profits today at the cost of abject failure tomorrow" is business as usual for human beings. Governments--being made out of human beings, just like corporations--are subject to this phenomenon as well, but with a different definition of "profit." Since things like prestige loom larger for the human beings in government, poluting the orbital commons is a bit of a big deal for them. For the virtually identical human beings who run companies... not so much.
Your claim is like someone saying, "There's no way banks would ever loan hundreds of billions to bad creditors." That's true, until some clever dick figured out how to secuitize all that junk paper based on bogus statistical models that weren't scrutinized too closely because,hey, we're getting rich off it!
Don't you mean "when"?
Technological, economic and political factors will ensure that the Keychest service will go away. It is a certainty, not a probability.
And users who pay real money for "access" rather than content will get hosed. Again.
Personally, I'm willing to pay for perpetual access so long as I get back a fraction of my money equal to the fraction of "in perpetuity" left when the service goes away.
I did this test using three different programs. They said that at least two people wrote the work.
This is interesting, but have you validated this method of analysis by applying it to works of known authorship, say on fanfic sites or alt.politics newsgroups, which would be reasonable control sources--unedited outpourings of interested amateurs? That would tell you that works of the same author don't get flagged as different simply due to your reading-level split.
Ideally I'd like to see a p-value for your claim that "the work was written by at least two people" against the null hypothesis "only one person wrote the work". Without a p-value you really aren't saying anything. Presumably the plagiarism detection software produces a probability of works being by the same author. What you need to do is apply your reading-level split to a bunch of works and generate a distribution (histogram) of the probabilities that the two parts of each work are from different authors. Then ask the question: what are the odds that the probability I get from applying this analysis of Kaczynski was drawn from this distribution? That is your p-value. If it is very small, it is implausible that Kaczynski's work was written by one author.
There are still problems with your approach, but doing this would bring you into the realm of discourse where people could argue about your method, but not dispute the objectivity of your result given your assumptions.
Would be interesting to see if a computer comes up with the same JEDP authors though.
The authorship question aside, it's doubtful that this kind of analysis would catch the more interesting bits of plagerism in the Bible. The lifting of the Flood story from the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim, and the bits of Gilgamesh that are spliced into Eclesiastes, for example.
Although in the latter case Siduri's advice to Gilgamesh (go home and enjoy your life taking joy in your spouse and children, quit trying to live forever) is virtually identical to what the Teacher writes (can't recall the exact reference--somewhere in chapter 4, I think) the differences in language probably make this kind of semantics-free analysis less than useful.
And of course, most of the source material that the Bible was plagerized from is lost to us, which limits the applications of this technique to that problem as well. This is unfortunate, as an understanding of the works that the Bible authors plagiarized would help us understand the place of the Bible in the history of literature and give more clues as to the culture that produced it.
Why, for example, was the Sumerian flood story plagiarized, and not the quest for imortality? Why was Siduri's advice plagiarized and not Gilgamesh's lament on the death of Enkidu, or Enkidu's lament in the underworld?
This kind of analysis is extremely valuable in understanding the context in which a particular literary work was created: we know that Shakespeare and his contemporaries borrowed plots and characters from each other all the time, repeating the same basic stories with variations, like film remakes in the modern world (Henry V is a good example of Shakespeare transforming a story that had been covered before into something new and wonderful, despite the many borrowed scenes). What an author chose to plagiarize out of the many source works available tells us a lot about his time and place and how he saw the world. We can't do that with the Bible, because so many of the source works it was plagiarized from have been lost to us.
The Book of Mormon, now... it would definitely be worth applying this kind of analysis to that...
You don't think it possible that they might want to know whether their beliefs are well founded?
Of course not. If they did, they would base their beliefs on rational empricism, not a logically inconsistent fantasy whose primary source is a collection of scriptures full of falsehoods, violence and vindictiveness (as well as some beautiful poetry and a smidgen of worthy moral advice that doesn't come close to redeeming the whole.)
In other words, the names should be protected based on what we know these elements will do with them.
Right, and Iran should be bombed back into the stone age based on what we "know" they will do with nuclear technology when they get their hands on it.
This is cowardice masquerading as amoral pragmatism.
We do not know what "these elements" will do, and if we suspect they'll do something bad we should be prepared to counter those bad things rather than letting of our fear of what they might do prod us into doing evil ourselves.
And gosh, we do have exactly those preparations in this case: the rule of law. People who are assualted, defamed, slandered, have the legal machinery of one of the most prosecution-happy nations on Earth to back them up.
Beyond that, if they don't have the stones to stand up and take the public shaming they are getting for engaging in a shameful act--and surely wilful interference with the freedom of others to enjoy the misery of marriage is a shameful act--then to hell with them.
The only way to ensure freedom from fear is to not be a coward. No amount of societal fiddling will ever free a coward from fear, and attempting to do so will always produce a police state. No thanks.
just having a hard time visualising that sometime in our evolutionary history there were some animals that didn't age.
They're called micro-organisms, although they don't exactly "not age". They reproduce by binary fission and therefore the offspring cells are nominally genetically identical to the parent. You can, if you like, say that one of them IS "the parent" (possibly with a bit of genetic modification) and the other is "the offspring." If you look at it that way (which admittedly takes a bit of squinting) their are single-celled organisms that around that are millions of years old (but genetically very different from their nominally identical selves of millions of years ago, due to those accumulated modifications.)
The GP's point is also not exactly correct: "competition" in the evolutionary sense doesn't happen between species. It happens between individuals of the same species. So a better way of putting the argument is: species with very long lifespans will be strongly selected for shorter lifespans when the rate of environmental change is high.
That is, the individuals who reproduce younger will have a larger chance of having offspring that are well-suited for the current environment, and those offspring will tend to reproduce younger as well, allowing the next generation's selective filtering (a nice euphemism for killing lots and lots of individuals) to operate rather more gently than on the offspring of individuals that reproduce later in life.
Age of first reproduction tends to be strongly anti-correlated with longevity. It's just like writing code under a tight deadline: the adaptations to get the job done fast tend to reduce maintainability, and it appears that the advantage of reaching the age of reproduction earlier and having a shorter reproductive lifespan is, in the typical environments found on Earth, more significant than building to last but not squeezing out those first pups for a couple of years after your contemporaries have.
If the Earth's environment were far more stable, species would be much longer lived. As it is, with significant natural climate variation on all timescales from decadal to milenial, a very long-lived species would have individuals adapted to one environment pushing out offspring in environments that they would be relatively ill-adapted for. There's very little selective advantage in that (although one could perhaps argue for the advantage of a really, really long-lived species that was able to wait it out until the next round of optimium conditions occurred. But there are some minima that even evolutionary algorithms have a hard time reaching.)
Firstly, coal isn't the only fossil fuel. Natural gas is quite a bit cleaner and more efficient
And much scarcer.
I can't really see how it is even relevant in a discussion about nuclear safety.
Because if you performed an analogous test with a coal or oil you would not end up with a few hundred square kilometers of your country permanently evacuated.
This is what makes fission power problematic: not that it kills anyone, but that the kind of routine stupidity that humans engage in all the time can result in extremely high economic costs. Three Mile Island was the same way: no danger to life and limb, but a very expensive, very complex machine was written off by a relatively trivial design error in the coolant control system (an incompetent engineer designed a system in which the position of valves was based on integrated current running to the motors controlling them, so operators were told that certain valves were closed that were in fact stuck open.)
Human beings behave like idiots all the time, and fission power is particularly susceptible to idiotic behaviour. Ergo, Chernobyl is relevant to nuclear safety because it demonstrates that design errors of a kind that would be no big deal in a coal or oil plant are a big deal in a fission plant, and no one anywhere has any idea of how to ensure that design errors of that kind do not happen (if we did, we'd be able to build systems that were robust against idiotic behaviour we haven't thought of yet.)
Hey, ISP is in seconds, it's an industry standard.
But it shouldn't be. N*s/kg is the correct unit for specific impulse. "Seconds" is only used by American engineers who don't understand the difference between weight and mass.
When I was a kid I was deeply interested in space, but it wasn't until years later that I understood the meaning of Isp because of the idiotic convention of designating it in seconds, rather than force*time/mass, which makes its meaning completely obvious.
If you want to turn people off an understanding of the most basic aspects of space travel, by all means go ahead and keep using seconds for Isp. But it's really time for the United States to get with the rest of the world and abandon Imperial units, although I guess as an imperial power they seem like a natural fit.
[Ok, now wondering if this'll get more "troll" or "flamebait" mods. It should probably lean toward "flamebait", as the story is true: Isp in seconds really did confuse me for years. The egregious America-bashing is, well, egregious, so probably warrants a flamebait mod. But really, what's with the Imperial units, kids?]
The point of a casino is that they make money by running games of chance where the odds are in favor of the house.
Ergo, from the house's point of view, there is no chance involved. The apparent role of "chance" in casino gambling is an illusion that results from the player's perspective. From the perspective of the house, winning is an absolute certainty.
Casino gambling is not a game of chance.
Great article, however you should realize it's impossible to completely avoid bias.
It's also impossible to completely avoid banal truisms masquerading as insight, but that doesn't stop us from trying.
On the other hand, there's really no perfect separation between the software and our books.
Any time you run into an argument that relies on this kind of "there's no perfect separation" argument you know you're in deep trouble, either because you're an idiot (probably not true in your case) or because you've found a genuine boardline case.
The idiot problem is more common, because nothing is perfectly separated from anything else, ever, and yet we deal with those cases just fine every single day. There's no perfect separation between "inside" and "outside" when talking about a building, yet somehow most of us still managed to make our way from one to the other this morning. There is no perfect separation between ocean and dry land, but no one ever has any difficulty using those concepts, because we've created a bunch of special concepts to deal with the borderline cases ("beach", "littoral", etc.)
If you hit on a case where it really matters that there's no perfect separation between two completely different things (the software and the book, in this case) you need to define some intermediate concepts that will let you understand better the relationship between them, and to deal intelligently with the region in which they overlap. Unfortunately, it will take the legal community a few decades to do that, and in the meantime the best you can hope for is to not become a precedent.
The article essentially says that the terminology used needs more rigorous definition, and needs to match more closely with the existing legal terminology.
The article also says, "This marks one of the core questions of GPLv2: Is it based on copyright or is it a contract that, while borrowing some copyright terms, ultimately stands on its own?", which is so bizzare that it makes me question the whole thing.
I have no idea why anyone who knows anything about contract law or the GPL would ask this question. The GPL involves no consideration (payment) and therefore is not a contract in any jurisdiction governed by Common Law. The GPL further depends explicitly on the software author's copyright for its legal force.
So why exactly would anyone think this is a "core question of GPLv2"? A core question of clueless jurnos writing far outside their comfort zone, maybe. But not a question anyone who wasn't that profoundly ignorant would ask.