You're thinking of Stanislaw Lem's "The Invincible", dating from the early 1970's, at least in translation. The original Polish may have been late '60's.
For some reason no one ever cites this book as the source of so many ideas about autonomous swarm robots, which Lem called "synthects" for "synthetic insects", although it predates everyone else's "discovery" of these ideas by decades.
Just as a matter of interest, I assume you have some personal knowledge of the original poster? Because there's nothing in their post that would indicate their sexual orientation, so I'm curious how you know they aren't homosexual.
One of the more subtle aspects of heteronormativity is the tacit assumption that everyone is heterosexual until proved otherwise, so we can safely assert anyone who is not openly out or has "I'm gay!" in their.sig is not gay, because heterosexual is the default, with all the subtle biases that that comes (which as software developers everyone here is surely aware of, having seen the effects of default-centric thinking in code.)
Statistically, of course, the assumption of heterosexuality is sensible, but given the fact of active persecution of homosexuals, even in the developed world, much less the backward and primitive Muslim-dominated countries and places where less enlightened versions of Christianity dominate, it behooves us to be as positively inclusive as possible. More than just celebrating gay culture, we need to welcome gay individuals as a normal part of human discourse.
"Celebration" to me suggests a special event--it should be an ingrained part of our daily lives to include homosexuals, bi and transgendered people in our language. Every time we do, we strike a blow against oppression, ignorance and hate.
I appreciate that you may have personal knowledge of the original poster, but it struck me as odd that you'd make such a strong assertion regarding someone's sexual orientation without apparent proof.
If you don't have prior knowledge of their orientation, perhaps you can read what I've written here and tell me what my orientation is. I've always wanted to know.
Would you argue that from a scientific, logic point of view, homosexuality is not a flaw? I mean, if ever I saw a trait that evolution would suppress, this would be it.
Yet homosexuality is a widely observed phenomenon.
Ergo, either evolution is broken, or there is something going on that is more subtle and interesting than your naive notions of what is adaptive or "logical". Personally, I'm betting the latter.
"I can't make sense of this in evolutionary terms" does not mean "This does not make sense in evolutionary terms." It most probably means, "There are things that make sense in evolutionary terms that I don't understand (yet)."
Given the known correlation between homosexuality in male humans and birth order (men with older brothers are more likely to be homosexual) there is such a stunningly obvious evolutionary reason for it that I can't be bothered to explain it to you.
The average is 1 million pounds (thats 453,592.27 kilograms) PER YEAR since the bans began.
You say that like it's somehow significant, yet give no indication whatsoever that it is in any way significant. Your entire post consists of "OMG LOOK REALLY BIG NUMBERS!!!!"
Is there any reason to believe that a mere 0.5 Mg of this stuff is in any way bad for the atmosphere, which is after all 5e15 Mg?
Big numbers aren't scary. Stupid people are. You kinda scare me.
Please come back when you have an actual argument. In the meantime, please note the fact that the ozone layer is thickening just now, so the eventually damage this stuff might do is less than whatever damage was done by the original problem with CFC's, which is no surprise given North American emissions are down to a few percent of their peak values.
Oh, and I'd also recommend putting things in grams rather than kg, as that will make the numbers BIGGER, and apparently you think that is important for some reason.
Can't wait to see who the N2O bogeymen are going to be.
Whoever they are you can be damned sure they won't be individuals who are the recipients of the stuff, because that would necessarily mean putting the environment front-and-centre, whereas almost all "environmental" policy is about social and legal control of some people by others, which is always UNSUSTAINABLE.
Next they'll have talking heads on sympathetic cable news networks suggesting that Canada is being taken over by Socialists and "real patriots" should start showing up at meetings with guns
This is where the strategy breaks down, as we've had numerous socialist governments at the provincial level that have been variously disastrous (Ontario), middling-competent (BC) and really quite good (Manitoba.)
So "socialist" ain't the scare-word up here it is in the USA, although that's helped by Canadians being generally braver and more tolerant of diversity than Americans (see our gay marriage laws, for example.)
The difference is due to two things, I think: we have a long history of robust alternative political experimentation, so we tend to go, "Ok, another bunch of wingnuts... let's see what they have to bring to the table..." because we have lots of examples, particularly at the provincial level, of wingnuts not turning out to be any more dangerous/stupid/insane than the mainstream parties.
On the other hand, we have no imperial ambitions, and that means we aren't afraid to be seen to try and fail. This makes us more successful, in the long run, because it gives our political and economic system more freedom to experiment. Whereas the Americans know they'll be mocked around the world if they try anything and fail, which often leads them to simply not try, except in the area of military adventurism where even failure is so terrible and terrifying that there isn't a lot of mocking going on.
In any case, attempts by Americans to influence Canadian policy have not been notably successful even with our most neo-conservative Federal government ever, and antics like these at the town hall meeting are only going to result in conditions that make it politically impossible for the Conservatives to table legislation that is seen to kowtow to American corporate interests.
Americans typically see Canadians as stoic and think we're passive. You see we're self-deprecating and think we lack confidence. You see we're polite and think we're weak. Then you come up against our hard limits and wonder what you were thinking.
In their world, politicians acting on voters wishes is 'buying votes', while lobbyists using the promise of campaign contributions to get favourable legislation passed is 'Democracy in Action'.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
The time has come to eschew abstractions in debate to the greatest extent possible, because they have been taken over by the liars and lobbyists.
Using concrete terms is more wordy, but much harder to distort.
Don't talk about "copyright" or "pirating", talk about "laws against making copies of songs or movies". It works in part because people think that "copyright|" means exactly one thing, and they know what that thing is. When you use more concrete language you actually INCREASE certain types of necessary ambiguity, and raise questions in people's heads like, "WHICH laws against making WHAT KIND of copies of songs or movies FOR WHAT PURPOSE?" To have an intelligent opinion on these matters you need to know the answers to those questions, and many people do not, but think they do because the comfortable abstraction "copyright" makes them feel they have a handle on the issue.
Not true at all - we already have a couple of health programs being run by the US government - Medicare and the VA health system are two of the biggest... and both of these consistently outscore private programs in areas like cost, customer satisfaction, and health outcomes.
Dunno about the VA, but Medicare is more expensive and less effective than the various Canadian public-only health care systems, which is what my point is about. It is easy to beat the disastrous inefficiency and ineffectiveness of private care providers in the US, but honestly even your public care is pretty poor compared to the rest of the world.
Remember: the US currently spends more public money per capita on health care via programs like Medicare than Canada does on its universal system, any you die about three years earlier than we do, on average.
While I don't have much sympathy for the conservative's anti-public-health-care agenda, I do have to admit that the core of their argument, which amounts to, "We have fucked up the American government so badly that it can't do nearly as well at delivering basic services as Canada or other countries routinely manage" has some empirical merit.
Of course, the solution is to ditch the conservatives (in both parties--most Democrats are as dedicated to preserving the status quo as Republicans are) not to abandon the long-term goal of public health care.
Also, I found it a little strange that the BBC article didn't mention this, but the Chandrayaan-1 had already been in successful operation for 312 days and had completed all of its primary mission goals.
What's strange about the Western media ignoring the enormous positive achievements of anyone with brown skin? We only do it if said person is an athlete (physical achievement is so primitive) or there is significant Western input into the achievement (so we can feel good about how we are helping the backward peoples of the Earth along... just so long as they never quite catch up to us.)
The 21st century will belong to India, and they are earning it with intelligence, democracy, education and a political culture that is insanely chaotic yet somehow kinda sorta mostly works well enough often enough that the country keeps moving in a direction not too far from forward.
If we could either directly interpret thoughts accurately or feed information into the brain (a task of incredible complexity) we could drastically speed up all sorts of information processing tasks.
Why do you believe that?
You insist that we "think of all the unnecessary processing" that goes on, but give us no reason to believe that it is unnecessary other than, presumably, the fantasy that it can be dispensed with. Why do you believe that it can be dispensed with? The most likely case seems to me that it can be externalized, so that a computing device will interface with our neural networks and neuro-chemical systems somewhat further upstream than it does now.
In particular, I have no idea at all what you mean by "directly interpret thoughts". What is a "thought" in this context? There is a huge amount of stuff going on in the brain at any given time, and no reason to believe that any of it can be mapped onto an isolated entity that could reasonably be labelled a "thought" by any means other than looking at the operational outputs of our conventional interfaces: our words (spoke, written, or internally recited) and actions.
You are bringing an huge and utterly unjustified load of assumptions to your argument, and if some doesn't buy into your peculiar model of the brain, which I don't, then what you're arguing for it just silly and your conclusion that somehow externalizing the transformation from internal neuro-chemical and neuro-electrical behaviour to operational effects could "drastically speed up all sorts of information processing tasks" is entirely unjustified.
The brain is primarily a neuro-chemical machine--the neuro-electrical aspects of it that computer people tend to focus on are a very small layer on top of the underlying neuro-chemistry. And the chemistry has time constants associated with it that are adequate for information processing using the operational inputs and outputs we have: there is no reason to believe that bypassing those systems would result in any speedup at all. Indeed, it would be evolutionarily bizarre if the brain were capable of doing much more than its current speed, because there cannot ever have been any evolutionary pressure of any kind to select for that.
Your argument is like saying that if we put a couple of jet engines on a steam locomotive it would be able to break the speed of sound, ignoring things like the mechanical limitations of th wheels and the tracks: you're focused on one obvious limiting factor in the body/brain identity's performance, and supposing that because you can imagine the rest of the system is capable of much faster speeds that it actually is.
I assume by "impact" you mean "reduce". But really, why use a more concrete term when a more abstract one is available? It will impress the ignorant by making your writing marginally harder to read without actually becoming incoherent.
That's the fundamental purpose of all the specialized terminology around commercialized software development methods: to give people a false sense of superiority based on their mastery of the terminology. The ideal language is sufficiently evocative that ignorant people can get a sense of what it means but aren't able to speak it fluently themselves, which puts them at a psychological disadvantage.
Humans are hierarchical social primates, and men especially want innately and desperately to climb the hierarchy because that's how our male ancestors scored the most high-value mates. The methods market in software development does nothing but provide an excuse to create novel hierarchies for us to climb. None of the methods that various companies sell actually increase the speed of development (laughably called "velocity" because you really need a signed quantity if you use one of these methods as you'll be going backwards half the time). None of them increase the robustness or maintainability of the finished product.
This is not to say that methods and process aren't important, but that as soon as a method is commercialized and sold as a product you can be sure that the primary draw is not the method's utility but its social hierarchy value.
Side note: "methodology" is or ought to be the study of methods. "Method" is the term we ought to use for a method of developing software. But of course to use the language that way would identify me as an outsider who is no where near the top of the hierarchy...
I saw a talk by t'Hooft a number of years ago (I actually had lunch with him and my adviser). He was talking about a similar idea then, and my interpretation was that it evaded Bell's Theorem by being a non-local hidden variables theory.
Ok, I've read the rest of the paper sufficiently closely to get the gist of his argument, which is that that universe must have been created in a quantum-entangled state, and so the only measurements we are allowed to make on entangled pairs are actually incredibly limited. He chooses to reject any notion of free will--why he makes this choice is not precisely clear, but I'm sure a lot of people who don't understand free will are jumping in on this thread to argue about why we should choose not to believe in free will, the way they have. Needless to say, those of us who choose to believe that self-consistency is desirable will not be swayed by these arguments in favour of choosing to believe that free will does not exist.
To call a theory "local" when it argues that the entire universe is carefully fine-tuned at almost all scales to produce what amounts to a rigged demo, seems to me to be stretching the meaning of the word beyond all recognition.
He was talking about a similar idea then, and my interpretation was that it evaded Bell's Theorem by being a non-local hidden variables theory.
I haven't finished reading the paper, but as well as violating rotational symmetries he's violating Lorentz Invariance and apparently also Liouville's theorem (conservation of density in phase space) because he wants different states at time t0 to evolve into identical states as time t1 > t0.
In a universe that allows those kinds of things, it isn't even clear what "local" might mean! He refers to the latter phenomenon as "pseudo-non-local", but non-locality by any other name would smell as bad to local determinists.
He further points out that in most of the family of theories he's dealing with the equivalent of a Hamiltonian doesn't appear to have a ground state, which he also points out "makes it impossible to do thermodynamics"! My own biases lean heavily toward theoretical approaches that are fundamentally thermodynamic, so the unitary and other invariants of probabilities are what give rise to the more complex relations we are wont to call physical law. So a theory where the possibility of doing thermodynamics is a special case seems to me deeply flawed. But that's just my bias... reality may differ!
His ideas are interesting, in a good way, but at best are a step on the very long road to reconceptualizing physics in a way that will admit of both quantization and general invariance.
On my reading of the article they've only attained a height of 42 inches so far--the 9 or 9 1/2 feet is speculation./.: news that's wrong, stuff that's false.
I suspect the schools don't run the scheduler until a few days before school actually starts
Then they are doing it wrong. This is like not producing a project schedule until the work is almost done.
You create a more-or-less continuously updated schedule (in my project management days I updated once or twice a week) and add information as it comes in.
The fact is, you know MOST of what you need to know early on, and everything after that is incremental updating. If a teacher dies you hire a fill-in, you don't cancel the class. Or you spread the students across other sections of the same course. You know to the third decimal place how many students will register in the last few weeks before school, because you have data on that going back years (unless you are just brain-dead incompetent) so keeping spaces open for those people is no big deal.
Only an idiot would use a big-bang type scheduling procedure for this job.
Every government program I can think of that doesn't suck badly has two things in common: a limited amount of money changing hands, and a limited amout of power over peoples lives.
Or is run by a non-American government.
The only reason government-only health care might be a bad option in the US is because it would be the American government running it, and the American government is uniquely and completely dysfunctional when it comes to delivering effective domestic programmes.
Here in Canada we have government-only health care, for all practical purposes: the Canada Health Act makes it effectively impossible to deliver health care services outside of the government system, although we are starting to see more private-care options due to long waiting lists for some procedures in some parts of the country, and the government-run courts have ruled that "access to a waiting list is not access to care."
However, despite the undoubted issues with our system, we live longer than Americans and spend less money per capita on health care than the PUBLIC health care system in the US spends, much less the vastly inefficient and ineffective private system. And this despite being more ethnically diverse and having a much smaller, more thinly-spread population than in the US.
So it is clearly and simply false, a flat-out contradiction of fact, to say that public-only health care necessarily sucks. To believe that is exactly equivalent to the belief that the Sun moves around the Earth. The only way anyone could believe it is as an article of faith, side-stepping all the empirical evidence to the contrary.
I mention Canada's system here because it is the one I'm most familiar with, but their are plenty of European systems that are closer to the mixed public option system the US is talking about, and they all work at least as well as Canada's and some better. But in most cases the public aspect of the system does a good job of delivering basic care. The logically disabled will at this point for some reason always point to the few places with sucky public systems, as if "some public systems suck" in some way disproves the undoubted empirical fact that "many public systems do not suck."
There's very little point in arguing with people blinded by faith, so I doubt merely pointing out raw empirical facts will convince you of anything. But hopefully other people reading will discount your delusional--but mysteriously common--view a little bit more.
Based on prior probabilities, any resemblance to a Dr. Who reference is a coincidence, while any resemblance is/. editors wilfully an deliberately misleading people by writing a false headline and bad article summary is a result of ongoing/. policy to be as sensationalist as possible so the discussion, while heated, will mostly focus on how bad the headline and summary is, not on the science.
This is a curious object, and may indicate that their are significant effects in the orbital dynamics of hot Jupiters that no one has thought of yet. For example (just pulling ideas out of the air) there could be magnetohydrodynamic effects that become large in such a close orbit, resulting in the planet being "supported" by angular momentum from the star.
A phenomenon like that would be interesting, but only a brain dead idiot (or a science journalist) would suggest that it means throwing out or even substantially revising 300 years of orbital dynamics. Kepler's Laws (which is presumably what the '400 years' claim refers to) are useful and fairly general consequences of Newton's Laws and the Law of Universal Gravitation, but we know perfectly well they are false when non-gravitational forces come into play, or even when non-central gravitational forces become important.
So "scientists discover another (and quite dramatic) case where non-gravitational forces may be important to a planetary orbit" would be an accurate description of this situation. "Scientists discover impossible planet" is just stupid, Dr. Who reference or no.
Fat women have always hit on me. Now I know why -- they're stupid!
Why do you think that? The article says absolutely nothing about intelligence. The gray matter in the cerebral cortex of educated people is THINNER than that in people without post-secondary educations. Do you think that makes educated people stupid? The current belief is that their brains are simply BETTER ORGANIZED and more efficient because of their continued intellectual growth in their late teens and early 20's.
People who think that "more brains is better brains" are either zombies, or the kind of brain-dead manager who thinks that having software developers work really long hours is a great idea, because surely "longer hours means shorter schedules" even though it doesn't.
Take a look at the finance and automotive industries, then tell me that the politicians we have right now aren't socialist.
Which were bailed out by the Bush Administration, although with autos he left Obama to actually pull the trigger on the gun he loaded.
And yet you said you would vote Republican rather than vote for socialists, so your position makes no sense at all, since in this response you seem to be admitting that the Republicans are as socialist as the Democrats.
Neither are socialist, of course: both are fascist, which involves leaving technical ownership of the means of production in private hands while declaring certain industries so vital to the health of the Reich... err... Homeland... that government must use its influence to preserve and protect them.
The common factor is how hard these athletes work.
Huh? Is this like International Nonsequitur Day and I missed it?
I'm talking about individuals, and for some reason you're responding by talking about national training programs. Obviously an genetically freakish Kenyan will benefit (enormously) from a well-funded development program. But as individuals the top athletes in any country are still genetic freaks.
I'm assuming you are not suggesting that everyone in Kenya who has partaken in the development program and worked equally hard has achieved the same level of athletic capability!
If you have data that actually measures how hard athletes work, rather than some weird collectivist notion of indirect inference from national training programs, then please do point to it. Otherwise, you're just making stuff up.
I have no doubt that British sprinters are lazy, but I equally have no doubt that if British sprinters all worked harder the ones who came out on top would be the genetic freaks: the ones whose bodies are optimized structurally and physiologically for sprinting, and which respond most readily to training.
It's all about individuals, see, not national averages. Human beings, not vaguely defined groups.
My point is that if you legalize cannabis, what prevents the situation from becoming as bad as it was in Sweden in the mid 19th century?
Nothing, but if it happens it will have to be dealt with in the same way: through social pressures, changed expectations of acceptable behaviour, etc.
Prohibition came at the END of the war against alcohol, and did relatively little to curtail drinking, which was already on the wane due to the kind of social pressures and legal measures short of out-right banning that had already occurred.
We live in a world where cannabis exists, and we have to adapt to it, as a society, in a more sophisticated and nuanced way than simply banning it, because, in case you haven' t entirely noticed, attempting to ban it has failed miserably.
Not only has the attempt to ban cannabis resulted in the gratuitous incarceration of harmless people, it has pushed growers to develop more potent strains so they can reduce the bulk of their product.
Being a nutjob conspiracy theorist I seriously believe that the War on Drugs has an important role in supporting the American Empire, as it gives that Empire a faux justification for flexing its muscles abroad, as Manuel Noriega knows. Drug trafficking also funds U.S. government black ops, or so at least some of the evidence suggests.
So the Attempt To Ban Grass has been a complete failure, just as the Attempt To Ban Alcohol.
It's time for the cannabis equivalent of Sunday closing laws and the like: minor prohibitions to deal with the worst effects (which aren't anything close to alcohol's) rather than major prohibitions to deal with what are thus far mostly imaginary consequences of freely available pot.
The majority of the Republican base are anti-authoritarian. The leadership of the party is authoritarian, though, and the voters typically go along with it when faced with the choice of that or an out-and-out socialist.
Wake up!
The majority of the Republican base are pro-authority. The Democratic Party leadership is so far from socialist to suggest otherwise is nothing but a declaration of your complete ignorance of political terminology and actual Democratic policies.
NEITHER wing of the single, informal, unified Party that runs the United States cares a tithe for your values or your vote.
Congress has a 10% approval rate and a 90% re-election rate of incumbents. That tells you how little they care for votes or values.
Both wings of the Party are dedicated to increasing their own power, and nothing but. They use slightly different tactics to do it--the Republicans pushing the "America the terrified" button and the Democrats pushing the "America the poor and stupid" button, but in both cases the Party is trying to sell you protection from phony threats, while taking your freedom left and right.
For people who don't take hormones, where do you think they come from?
That's right: our genes tell our cells to manufacture them! Some women manufacture more testosterone than others (so do some men) as well as other hormones, and these genetic differences in hormone production are a significant factor in athletic performance.
All top-ranked athletes are genetic freaks. This one is just more-so, and to arbitrarily rule her out of competition is silly.
All categories are artificial, the result of lines we draw between similar things to allow us to think easily about concepts rather than individuals. However, all the lines we draw are created for a given purpose, and they may not be adequate for other purposes. This is a case when a line-of-convenience has been drawn between men and women that happens to lump together things like developed breasts, lack of facial hair, and female genitalia. She hast the last characteristic, but not the former two, so the line breaks down.
The solution to this kind of extremely common problem is to create a new category that covers the intermediate region. For example, we have areas of the Earth that are covered by deep water, and we call them "oceans". We have areas of the Earth that are pretty much dry, and we call them "land". But we also have areas in between that we call "beaches" that contain pretty much arbitrary mixes of land and water at different times.
Only a flaming idiot would suggest either that "land" and "water" aren't useful categories because there are regions that can't be adequately put into one or the other, and only a flaming idiot would suggest that "beach" isn't a valid category because "land" and "water" are "real" categories and "beach" is some kind of weird made-up thing that falls in between them. All categories are made up--the only question is, "Are they useful or not?" (note that the way the world actually is puts significant constraints on what categories are useful, but does not in any way determine them uniquely, which frustrates innumerate philosophers.)
In the present case, we only have one instance of the potential new category, which isn't an adequate basis for creating it, and the rough, crude and approximate division into "male" and "female" has a whole lot of social machinery of sport built around it, so adding a new category for this person isn't an option.
What is an option is to let her compete in the category she most closely resembles: genetically freakish women of the kind who make great athletes, which is happily the company she finds herself in if she is permitted to compete as a woman.
It probably just means the spacetime metric has two positive terms and two negative terms
That is correct. The paper points out that "due to causality restrictions the analogy is purely formal" or words to that effect.
As someone else pointed out above, the/. article title, which uncritically apes the title of the linked article, is false. A correct title would be "Toy Model Analog of Big Bang Could Be Created Inside Metameterials." As it stands the title is as correct as "Supertanker can float in bathtub" when linked to a story about the latest Fisher Price supertanker bathtub toy.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't it Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"
No, it was Stanislaw Lem's "The Invincible".
Somebody remembers that Gibson novel
You're thinking of Stanislaw Lem's "The Invincible", dating from the early 1970's, at least in translation. The original Polish may have been late '60's.
For some reason no one ever cites this book as the source of so many ideas about autonomous swarm robots, which Lem called "synthects" for "synthetic insects", although it predates everyone else's "discovery" of these ideas by decades.
Right, but Turing was homosexual and you're not
Just as a matter of interest, I assume you have some personal knowledge of the original poster? Because there's nothing in their post that would indicate their sexual orientation, so I'm curious how you know they aren't homosexual.
One of the more subtle aspects of heteronormativity is the tacit assumption that everyone is heterosexual until proved otherwise, so we can safely assert anyone who is not openly out or has "I'm gay!" in their .sig is not gay, because heterosexual is the default, with all the subtle biases that that comes (which as software developers everyone here is surely aware of, having seen the effects of default-centric thinking in code.)
Statistically, of course, the assumption of heterosexuality is sensible, but given the fact of active persecution of homosexuals, even in the developed world, much less the backward and primitive Muslim-dominated countries and places where less enlightened versions of Christianity dominate, it behooves us to be as positively inclusive as possible. More than just celebrating gay culture, we need to welcome gay individuals as a normal part of human discourse.
"Celebration" to me suggests a special event--it should be an ingrained part of our daily lives to include homosexuals, bi and transgendered people in our language. Every time we do, we strike a blow against oppression, ignorance and hate.
I appreciate that you may have personal knowledge of the original poster, but it struck me as odd that you'd make such a strong assertion regarding someone's sexual orientation without apparent proof.
If you don't have prior knowledge of their orientation, perhaps you can read what I've written here and tell me what my orientation is. I've always wanted to know.
Would you argue that from a scientific, logic point of view, homosexuality is not a flaw? I mean, if ever I saw a trait that evolution would suppress, this would be it.
Yet homosexuality is a widely observed phenomenon.
Ergo, either evolution is broken, or there is something going on that is more subtle and interesting than your naive notions of what is adaptive or "logical". Personally, I'm betting the latter.
"I can't make sense of this in evolutionary terms" does not mean "This does not make sense in evolutionary terms." It most probably means, "There are things that make sense in evolutionary terms that I don't understand (yet)."
Given the known correlation between homosexuality in male humans and birth order (men with older brothers are more likely to be homosexual) there is such a stunningly obvious evolutionary reason for it that I can't be bothered to explain it to you.
The average is 1 million pounds (thats 453,592.27 kilograms) PER YEAR since the bans began.
You say that like it's somehow significant, yet give no indication whatsoever that it is in any way significant. Your entire post consists of "OMG LOOK REALLY BIG NUMBERS!!!!"
Is there any reason to believe that a mere 0.5 Mg of this stuff is in any way bad for the atmosphere, which is after all 5e15 Mg?
Big numbers aren't scary. Stupid people are. You kinda scare me.
Please come back when you have an actual argument. In the meantime, please note the fact that the ozone layer is thickening just now, so the eventually damage this stuff might do is less than whatever damage was done by the original problem with CFC's, which is no surprise given North American emissions are down to a few percent of their peak values.
Oh, and I'd also recommend putting things in grams rather than kg, as that will make the numbers BIGGER, and apparently you think that is important for some reason.
Can't wait to see who the N2O bogeymen are going to be.
Whoever they are you can be damned sure they won't be individuals who are the recipients of the stuff, because that would necessarily mean putting the environment front-and-centre, whereas almost all "environmental" policy is about social and legal control of some people by others, which is always UNSUSTAINABLE.
Next they'll have talking heads on sympathetic cable news networks suggesting that Canada is being taken over by Socialists and "real patriots" should start showing up at meetings with guns
This is where the strategy breaks down, as we've had numerous socialist governments at the provincial level that have been variously disastrous (Ontario), middling-competent (BC) and really quite good (Manitoba.)
So "socialist" ain't the scare-word up here it is in the USA, although that's helped by Canadians being generally braver and more tolerant of diversity than Americans (see our gay marriage laws, for example.)
The difference is due to two things, I think: we have a long history of robust alternative political experimentation, so we tend to go, "Ok, another bunch of wingnuts... let's see what they have to bring to the table..." because we have lots of examples, particularly at the provincial level, of wingnuts not turning out to be any more dangerous/stupid/insane than the mainstream parties.
On the other hand, we have no imperial ambitions, and that means we aren't afraid to be seen to try and fail. This makes us more successful, in the long run, because it gives our political and economic system more freedom to experiment. Whereas the Americans know they'll be mocked around the world if they try anything and fail, which often leads them to simply not try, except in the area of military adventurism where even failure is so terrible and terrifying that there isn't a lot of mocking going on.
In any case, attempts by Americans to influence Canadian policy have not been notably successful even with our most neo-conservative Federal government ever, and antics like these at the town hall meeting are only going to result in conditions that make it politically impossible for the Conservatives to table legislation that is seen to kowtow to American corporate interests.
Americans typically see Canadians as stoic and think we're passive. You see we're self-deprecating and think we lack confidence. You see we're polite and think we're weak. Then you come up against our hard limits and wonder what you were thinking.
In their world, politicians acting on voters wishes is 'buying votes', while lobbyists using the promise of campaign contributions to get favourable legislation passed is 'Democracy in Action'.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
The time has come to eschew abstractions in debate to the greatest extent possible, because they have been taken over by the liars and lobbyists.
Using concrete terms is more wordy, but much harder to distort.
Don't talk about "copyright" or "pirating", talk about "laws against making copies of songs or movies". It works in part because people think that "copyright|" means exactly one thing, and they know what that thing is. When you use more concrete language you actually INCREASE certain types of necessary ambiguity, and raise questions in people's heads like, "WHICH laws against making WHAT KIND of copies of songs or movies FOR WHAT PURPOSE?" To have an intelligent opinion on these matters you need to know the answers to those questions, and many people do not, but think they do because the comfortable abstraction "copyright" makes them feel they have a handle on the issue.
Not true at all - we already have a couple of health programs being run by the US government - Medicare and the VA health system are two of the biggest... and both of these consistently outscore private programs in areas like cost, customer satisfaction, and health outcomes.
Dunno about the VA, but Medicare is more expensive and less effective than the various Canadian public-only health care systems, which is what my point is about. It is easy to beat the disastrous inefficiency and ineffectiveness of private care providers in the US, but honestly even your public care is pretty poor compared to the rest of the world.
Remember: the US currently spends more public money per capita on health care via programs like Medicare than Canada does on its universal system, any you die about three years earlier than we do, on average.
While I don't have much sympathy for the conservative's anti-public-health-care agenda, I do have to admit that the core of their argument, which amounts to, "We have fucked up the American government so badly that it can't do nearly as well at delivering basic services as Canada or other countries routinely manage" has some empirical merit.
Of course, the solution is to ditch the conservatives (in both parties--most Democrats are as dedicated to preserving the status quo as Republicans are) not to abandon the long-term goal of public health care.
Also, I found it a little strange that the BBC article didn't mention this, but the Chandrayaan-1 had already been in successful operation for 312 days and had completed all of its primary mission goals.
What's strange about the Western media ignoring the enormous positive achievements of anyone with brown skin? We only do it if said person is an athlete (physical achievement is so primitive) or there is significant Western input into the achievement (so we can feel good about how we are helping the backward peoples of the Earth along... just so long as they never quite catch up to us.)
The 21st century will belong to India, and they are earning it with intelligence, democracy, education and a political culture that is insanely chaotic yet somehow kinda sorta mostly works well enough often enough that the country keeps moving in a direction not too far from forward.
If we could either directly interpret thoughts accurately or feed information into the brain (a task of incredible complexity) we could drastically speed up all sorts of information processing tasks.
Why do you believe that?
You insist that we "think of all the unnecessary processing" that goes on, but give us no reason to believe that it is unnecessary other than, presumably, the fantasy that it can be dispensed with. Why do you believe that it can be dispensed with? The most likely case seems to me that it can be externalized, so that a computing device will interface with our neural networks and neuro-chemical systems somewhat further upstream than it does now.
In particular, I have no idea at all what you mean by "directly interpret thoughts". What is a "thought" in this context? There is a huge amount of stuff going on in the brain at any given time, and no reason to believe that any of it can be mapped onto an isolated entity that could reasonably be labelled a "thought" by any means other than looking at the operational outputs of our conventional interfaces: our words (spoke, written, or internally recited) and actions.
You are bringing an huge and utterly unjustified load of assumptions to your argument, and if some doesn't buy into your peculiar model of the brain, which I don't, then what you're arguing for it just silly and your conclusion that somehow externalizing the transformation from internal neuro-chemical and neuro-electrical behaviour to operational effects could "drastically speed up all sorts of information processing tasks" is entirely unjustified.
The brain is primarily a neuro-chemical machine--the neuro-electrical aspects of it that computer people tend to focus on are a very small layer on top of the underlying neuro-chemistry. And the chemistry has time constants associated with it that are adequate for information processing using the operational inputs and outputs we have: there is no reason to believe that bypassing those systems would result in any speedup at all. Indeed, it would be evolutionarily bizarre if the brain were capable of doing much more than its current speed, because there cannot ever have been any evolutionary pressure of any kind to select for that.
Your argument is like saying that if we put a couple of jet engines on a steam locomotive it would be able to break the speed of sound, ignoring things like the mechanical limitations of th wheels and the tracks: you're focused on one obvious limiting factor in the body/brain identity's performance, and supposing that because you can imagine the rest of the system is capable of much faster speeds that it actually is.
impact your velocity
I assume by "impact" you mean "reduce". But really, why use a more concrete term when a more abstract one is available? It will impress the ignorant by making your writing marginally harder to read without actually becoming incoherent.
That's the fundamental purpose of all the specialized terminology around commercialized software development methods: to give people a false sense of superiority based on their mastery of the terminology. The ideal language is sufficiently evocative that ignorant people can get a sense of what it means but aren't able to speak it fluently themselves, which puts them at a psychological disadvantage.
Humans are hierarchical social primates, and men especially want innately and desperately to climb the hierarchy because that's how our male ancestors scored the most high-value mates. The methods market in software development does nothing but provide an excuse to create novel hierarchies for us to climb. None of the methods that various companies sell actually increase the speed of development (laughably called "velocity" because you really need a signed quantity if you use one of these methods as you'll be going backwards half the time). None of them increase the robustness or maintainability of the finished product.
This is not to say that methods and process aren't important, but that as soon as a method is commercialized and sold as a product you can be sure that the primary draw is not the method's utility but its social hierarchy value.
Side note: "methodology" is or ought to be the study of methods. "Method" is the term we ought to use for a method of developing software. But of course to use the language that way would identify me as an outsider who is no where near the top of the hierarchy...
I saw a talk by t'Hooft a number of years ago (I actually had lunch with him and my adviser). He was talking about a similar idea then, and my interpretation was that it evaded Bell's Theorem by being a non-local hidden variables theory.
Ok, I've read the rest of the paper sufficiently closely to get the gist of his argument, which is that that universe must have been created in a quantum-entangled state, and so the only measurements we are allowed to make on entangled pairs are actually incredibly limited. He chooses to reject any notion of free will--why he makes this choice is not precisely clear, but I'm sure a lot of people who don't understand free will are jumping in on this thread to argue about why we should choose not to believe in free will, the way they have. Needless to say, those of us who choose to believe that self-consistency is desirable will not be swayed by these arguments in favour of choosing to believe that free will does not exist.
To call a theory "local" when it argues that the entire universe is carefully fine-tuned at almost all scales to produce what amounts to a rigged demo, seems to me to be stretching the meaning of the word beyond all recognition.
He was talking about a similar idea then, and my interpretation was that it evaded Bell's Theorem by being a non-local hidden variables theory.
I haven't finished reading the paper, but as well as violating rotational symmetries he's violating Lorentz Invariance and apparently also Liouville's theorem (conservation of density in phase space) because he wants different states at time t0 to evolve into identical states as time t1 > t0.
In a universe that allows those kinds of things, it isn't even clear what "local" might mean! He refers to the latter phenomenon as "pseudo-non-local", but non-locality by any other name would smell as bad to local determinists.
He further points out that in most of the family of theories he's dealing with the equivalent of a Hamiltonian doesn't appear to have a ground state, which he also points out "makes it impossible to do thermodynamics"! My own biases lean heavily toward theoretical approaches that are fundamentally thermodynamic, so the unitary and other invariants of probabilities are what give rise to the more complex relations we are wont to call physical law. So a theory where the possibility of doing thermodynamics is a special case seems to me deeply flawed. But that's just my bias... reality may differ!
His ideas are interesting, in a good way, but at best are a step on the very long road to reconceptualizing physics in a way that will admit of both quantization and general invariance.
9 feet is only 2.74 metres. Hardly 'many'.
On my reading of the article they've only attained a height of 42 inches so far--the 9 or 9 1/2 feet is speculation. /.: news that's wrong, stuff that's false.
I suspect the schools don't run the scheduler until a few days before school actually starts
Then they are doing it wrong. This is like not producing a project schedule until the work is almost done.
You create a more-or-less continuously updated schedule (in my project management days I updated once or twice a week) and add information as it comes in.
The fact is, you know MOST of what you need to know early on, and everything after that is incremental updating. If a teacher dies you hire a fill-in, you don't cancel the class. Or you spread the students across other sections of the same course. You know to the third decimal place how many students will register in the last few weeks before school, because you have data on that going back years (unless you are just brain-dead incompetent) so keeping spaces open for those people is no big deal.
Only an idiot would use a big-bang type scheduling procedure for this job.
Every government program I can think of that doesn't suck badly has two things in common: a limited amount of money changing hands, and a limited amout of power over peoples lives.
Or is run by a non-American government.
The only reason government-only health care might be a bad option in the US is because it would be the American government running it, and the American government is uniquely and completely dysfunctional when it comes to delivering effective domestic programmes.
Here in Canada we have government-only health care, for all practical purposes: the Canada Health Act makes it effectively impossible to deliver health care services outside of the government system, although we are starting to see more private-care options due to long waiting lists for some procedures in some parts of the country, and the government-run courts have ruled that "access to a waiting list is not access to care."
However, despite the undoubted issues with our system, we live longer than Americans and spend less money per capita on health care than the PUBLIC health care system in the US spends, much less the vastly inefficient and ineffective private system. And this despite being more ethnically diverse and having a much smaller, more thinly-spread population than in the US.
So it is clearly and simply false, a flat-out contradiction of fact, to say that public-only health care necessarily sucks. To believe that is exactly equivalent to the belief that the Sun moves around the Earth. The only way anyone could believe it is as an article of faith, side-stepping all the empirical evidence to the contrary.
I mention Canada's system here because it is the one I'm most familiar with, but their are plenty of European systems that are closer to the mixed public option system the US is talking about, and they all work at least as well as Canada's and some better. But in most cases the public aspect of the system does a good job of delivering basic care. The logically disabled will at this point for some reason always point to the few places with sucky public systems, as if "some public systems suck" in some way disproves the undoubted empirical fact that "many public systems do not suck."
There's very little point in arguing with people blinded by faith, so I doubt merely pointing out raw empirical facts will convince you of anything. But hopefully other people reading will discount your delusional--but mysteriously common--view a little bit more.
It's a Doctor Who reference.
Based on prior probabilities, any resemblance to a Dr. Who reference is a coincidence, while any resemblance is /. editors wilfully an deliberately misleading people by writing a false headline and bad article summary is a result of ongoing /. policy to be as sensationalist as possible so the discussion, while heated, will mostly focus on how bad the headline and summary is, not on the science.
This is a curious object, and may indicate that their are significant effects in the orbital dynamics of hot Jupiters that no one has thought of yet. For example (just pulling ideas out of the air) there could be magnetohydrodynamic effects that become large in such a close orbit, resulting in the planet being "supported" by angular momentum from the star.
A phenomenon like that would be interesting, but only a brain dead idiot (or a science journalist) would suggest that it means throwing out or even substantially revising 300 years of orbital dynamics. Kepler's Laws (which is presumably what the '400 years' claim refers to) are useful and fairly general consequences of Newton's Laws and the Law of Universal Gravitation, but we know perfectly well they are false when non-gravitational forces come into play, or even when non-central gravitational forces become important.
So "scientists discover another (and quite dramatic) case where non-gravitational forces may be important to a planetary orbit" would be an accurate description of this situation. "Scientists discover impossible planet" is just stupid, Dr. Who reference or no.
Fat women have always hit on me. Now I know why -- they're stupid!
Why do you think that? The article says absolutely nothing about intelligence. The gray matter in the cerebral cortex of educated people is THINNER than that in people without post-secondary educations. Do you think that makes educated people stupid? The current belief is that their brains are simply BETTER ORGANIZED and more efficient because of their continued intellectual growth in their late teens and early 20's.
People who think that "more brains is better brains" are either zombies, or the kind of brain-dead manager who thinks that having software developers work really long hours is a great idea, because surely "longer hours means shorter schedules" even though it doesn't.
Take a look at the finance and automotive industries, then tell me that the politicians we have right now aren't socialist.
Which were bailed out by the Bush Administration, although with autos he left Obama to actually pull the trigger on the gun he loaded.
And yet you said you would vote Republican rather than vote for socialists, so your position makes no sense at all, since in this response you seem to be admitting that the Republicans are as socialist as the Democrats.
Neither are socialist, of course: both are fascist, which involves leaving technical ownership of the means of production in private hands while declaring certain industries so vital to the health of the Reich... err... Homeland... that government must use its influence to preserve and protect them.
The common factor is how hard these athletes work.
Huh? Is this like International Nonsequitur Day and I missed it?
I'm talking about individuals, and for some reason you're responding by talking about national training programs. Obviously an genetically freakish Kenyan will benefit (enormously) from a well-funded development program. But as individuals the top athletes in any country are still genetic freaks.
I'm assuming you are not suggesting that everyone in Kenya who has partaken in the development program and worked equally hard has achieved the same level of athletic capability!
If you have data that actually measures how hard athletes work, rather than some weird collectivist notion of indirect inference from national training programs, then please do point to it. Otherwise, you're just making stuff up.
I have no doubt that British sprinters are lazy, but I equally have no doubt that if British sprinters all worked harder the ones who came out on top would be the genetic freaks: the ones whose bodies are optimized structurally and physiologically for sprinting, and which respond most readily to training.
It's all about individuals, see, not national averages. Human beings, not vaguely defined groups.
My point is that if you legalize cannabis, what prevents the situation from becoming as bad as it was in Sweden in the mid 19th century?
Nothing, but if it happens it will have to be dealt with in the same way: through social pressures, changed expectations of acceptable behaviour, etc.
Prohibition came at the END of the war against alcohol, and did relatively little to curtail drinking, which was already on the wane due to the kind of social pressures and legal measures short of out-right banning that had already occurred.
We live in a world where cannabis exists, and we have to adapt to it, as a society, in a more sophisticated and nuanced way than simply banning it, because, in case you haven' t entirely noticed, attempting to ban it has failed miserably.
Not only has the attempt to ban cannabis resulted in the gratuitous incarceration of harmless people, it has pushed growers to develop more potent strains so they can reduce the bulk of their product.
Being a nutjob conspiracy theorist I seriously believe that the War on Drugs has an important role in supporting the American Empire, as it gives that Empire a faux justification for flexing its muscles abroad, as Manuel Noriega knows. Drug trafficking also funds U.S. government black ops, or so at least some of the evidence suggests.
So the Attempt To Ban Grass has been a complete failure, just as the Attempt To Ban Alcohol.
It's time for the cannabis equivalent of Sunday closing laws and the like: minor prohibitions to deal with the worst effects (which aren't anything close to alcohol's) rather than major prohibitions to deal with what are thus far mostly imaginary consequences of freely available pot.
The majority of the Republican base are anti-authoritarian. The leadership of the party is authoritarian, though, and the voters typically go along with it when faced with the choice of that or an out-and-out socialist.
Wake up!
The majority of the Republican base are pro-authority. The Democratic Party leadership is so far from socialist to suggest otherwise is nothing but a declaration of your complete ignorance of political terminology and actual Democratic policies.
NEITHER wing of the single, informal, unified Party that runs the United States cares a tithe for your values or your vote.
Congress has a 10% approval rate and a 90% re-election rate of incumbents. That tells you how little they care for votes or values.
Both wings of the Party are dedicated to increasing their own power, and nothing but. They use slightly different tactics to do it--the Republicans pushing the "America the terrified" button and the Democrats pushing the "America the poor and stupid" button, but in both cases the Party is trying to sell you protection from phony threats, while taking your freedom left and right.
So genetics is really not the issue here.
Huh?
For people who don't take hormones, where do you think they come from?
That's right: our genes tell our cells to manufacture them! Some women manufacture more testosterone than others (so do some men) as well as other hormones, and these genetic differences in hormone production are a significant factor in athletic performance.
All top-ranked athletes are genetic freaks. This one is just more-so, and to arbitrarily rule her out of competition is silly.
All categories are artificial, the result of lines we draw between similar things to allow us to think easily about concepts rather than individuals. However, all the lines we draw are created for a given purpose, and they may not be adequate for other purposes. This is a case when a line-of-convenience has been drawn between men and women that happens to lump together things like developed breasts, lack of facial hair, and female genitalia. She hast the last characteristic, but not the former two, so the line breaks down.
The solution to this kind of extremely common problem is to create a new category that covers the intermediate region. For example, we have areas of the Earth that are covered by deep water, and we call them "oceans". We have areas of the Earth that are pretty much dry, and we call them "land". But we also have areas in between that we call "beaches" that contain pretty much arbitrary mixes of land and water at different times.
Only a flaming idiot would suggest either that "land" and "water" aren't useful categories because there are regions that can't be adequately put into one or the other, and only a flaming idiot would suggest that "beach" isn't a valid category because "land" and "water" are "real" categories and "beach" is some kind of weird made-up thing that falls in between them. All categories are made up--the only question is, "Are they useful or not?" (note that the way the world actually is puts significant constraints on what categories are useful, but does not in any way determine them uniquely, which frustrates innumerate philosophers.)
In the present case, we only have one instance of the potential new category, which isn't an adequate basis for creating it, and the rough, crude and approximate division into "male" and "female" has a whole lot of social machinery of sport built around it, so adding a new category for this person isn't an option.
What is an option is to let her compete in the category she most closely resembles: genetically freakish women of the kind who make great athletes, which is happily the company she finds herself in if she is permitted to compete as a woman.
It probably just means the spacetime metric has two positive terms and two negative terms
That is correct. The paper points out that "due to causality restrictions the analogy is purely formal" or words to that effect.
As someone else pointed out above, the /. article title, which uncritically apes the title of the linked article, is false. A correct title would be "Toy Model Analog of Big Bang Could Be Created Inside Metameterials." As it stands the title is as correct as "Supertanker can float in bathtub" when linked to a story about the latest Fisher Price supertanker bathtub toy.