Unless you measure health outcomes, rather than user experience. I agree the user experience sucks, and while private care is not entirely unavailable here it is generally only available to the ultra-rich and politically well-connected.
However, by any measure you care to name--longer lives, lower infant mortality, lower morbidity...--we have considerably better health care outcomes in Canada than Americans have, and we pay less for them.
Critics of the Canadian system don't actually care about health care outcomes, which is why they always focus on the lousy user experience. The curious question is: if they don't care about health care outcomes, why are they bothering to get all worked up about the system in the first place? They could avoid all the inconveniences of our system and get EXACTLY THE SAME CARE as an uninsured person in the United States without ever leaving home.
In-class writing samples would seem to be the only hope of detecting ghostwriting.
The problem with this is that the same students could provide writing samples to ghosting services, ensuring a degree of similarity between them.
The problem with all of this is not that students can so easily circumvent the nominal evaluative process, but that "higher" education has such low standards of evaluation. We grade students in ways that are completely unscientific, all in the name of cramming huge numbers of kids into classes like cattle while unmotivated and generally untrained professors deliver canned lectures.
In a university setting, once the class size gets over fifty there is no way the prof can even begin to keep track of students as individuals, and grades become meaningless. With fewer than twenty students, and especially fewer than ten, teaching really starts to become fun again, both for the prof and the students, because you're engaging each other mind-to-mind.
I don't know what the solution is, but large classes are the problem, not poor plagarism-detection software.
False. The detector you used was not a black box. The discussion you're replying too specifically cited turnitin.com as a detector that IS a blackbox.
At best you have a plausible conjecture based on your limited experience that all detectors are transparent and give adequate feedback on the sources of suspected plagiarism, but as someone once said, "plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive."
I RTFA, but can someone more well-versed in Physics explain what sort of implications this has?
Not my field, but this is my sense of what's going on:
1) Rydberg atoms have one electron in a very high state of excitation, and look like Bohr-model atoms, as the highly-excited single outer electron is so far from the rest of the atom that the combination of the inner electrons and the nuclear charge look like a point-charge, so the outer electron experiences a 1/r potential. This makes Rydberg atoms theoretically tractable with simple Bohr theory, which is always fun to play with.
2) Rydberg molecules are make from a Rydberg atom and a normal (unexcited) atom. My guess is that the normal atom is actually inside the "orbit" of the Rydberg atom's outer electron, so it will be slightly polarized by the core field, and the resulting dipole will interact with the electron to produce the bound state. Sounds like a job for linear response theory.
3) In general, testing systems under such extreme conditions allows us to measure precisely various properties of matter, like the fine structure constant or the electric charge or whatever. I don't know if anything like that will come out of this, but extreme systems often allow for precise tests of esoteric phenomena.
4) Yes, this does validate quantum theory. No, it probably doesn't have much in they way of practical application, but then again, it doesn't have to.
if $100m invested in another movie would have given higher profits, then they didn't make as much money as they could have.
I've been arguing for a while that we need quantum accounting to deal with the high degree of correlation in market behaviour seen during bubbles and crashes, and this kind of thinking reinforces that belief.
The central mantra of quantum mechanics is: "An experiment which is not performed does not have a result!"
It makes sense to talk about what you might do in the future. It does not make sense (however badly anyone wants it to) to talk about what you might have done in the past. You did in the past what you did. There is zero opportunity cost to past actions because we have no opportunity to change them. There is only opportunity cost when considering future actions.
If people really believed in opportunity cost they wouldn't limit it to a comparison with a single thing they might have done: they would take the weighted average over ALL the things they might have done, and asked if what they actually did generated more or less revenue than that mean. That the mean is completely unphysical is irrelevant, because "the movie they might have made if they didn't make the Watchmen" is completely unphysical as well.
This is one of the wonderful things about science: it doesn't matter where the puzzle comes from, the same techniques work to solve it.
Reverse engineering of this kind is one of the most useful areas of applied science, and it is as much research as any other area of scientific enquiry. It is frequently the case that there are many ways to find the answer to a puzzle, and this guy has chosen one of them based on the resources he has available. More power to him for demonstrating how good science can be used to discover what others want to keep secret.
You say that like you think there's an alternative. There isn't.
The viral ecology is an real ecology, where like all ecologies nothing is stable and everything is temporary.
What this demonstrates, though, is that there are inherent limits to viral capabilities, because with added capability there is added vulnerability. This is true for OS's but it is equally true for viruses (yes, that is a correct English plural, ok?)
So as virus programs get more complex and capable, they will generally also become more open to detection via exploitation of exactly those additional capabilities.
In reality, money is created out of thin air every day.
In reality, the money created out of thin air in a fractional reserve banking system is debt. Debt is still money, but to pay it off requires... more debt. Fractional reserve banking is a Ponzi scheme. We are currently experiencing the collapse of it.
Oh, and if the total amount of money were constant interests rates would not be zero: the future value of money would still be less than the present value, in the sense that I'd rather have a dollar today than 1.1 dollars ten years from now unless deflation really got out of control, so debt and interest would still be with us. But any productive enterprise would have to be MORE productive than the deflationary increment in monetary value to be worth investing in. Of course, since economic growth in a system of sound money would be much slower than in a fractional reserve system this would be much less of a barrier to entry than today. And all of the economic growth in such a system would be real, rather than the fictional growth--followed by inevitable collapse--that fractional reserve economies experience.
An unconfirmed rumor also developed this weekend of an OS that is so carefully and explicitly restricted that consumers interaction with it is limited to attempting to install it...
I'm not sure what this idea of "true" is that you keep talking about. You seem to want to preserve a false-to-the-point-of-incoherence idea of truth, and then say that physics doesn't produce propositions that fulfil this incoherent idea as if that was somehow a limitation on physics, rather than a demonstration of a mistake about the nature of truth on your part.
Nothing anywhere has ever looked remotely like anything close to your incoherent idea of "true", except in the delusional fantasies of philosophers and theologians.
Truth is what allows us to understand and manipulate the world in controllable and predictable ways, and nothing more. Any other idea of truth is a fantasy, a useless concept made up by low-quality thinkers who can't distinguish between fantasy and reality.
Physics certainly produces truths by this quite ordinary standard. Newtonian physics is true. So is quantum mechanics. So is relativity. As opposed to Cartesian physics, phlogiston theory and the mechanical electrodynamics of Lorentz and Poincare', which are false.
This is the huge downside of the fantasy-land, all-unicorns-all-the-time idea of "truth" that delusional philosophers promote: it leaves us with no coherent way of talking about the perfectly ordinary distinction between false Cartesian physics and true Newtonian physics, which is a USEFUL and IMPORTANT distinction, unlike the distinction between true Newtonian physics and the delusional fantasy that philosophers for some inexplicable reason want to call "truth".
Heinlein pretty much posits that all wars are a matter of population growth and limited resources.
This is so weirdly Malthusian, particularly coming from a technological optimist like Heinlein, that I never bought into it. The Future History stories are a broad refutation of this premise.
Ask any economist and they'll tell you that wars are not only not inevitable, but there is no rational explanation for them at all, if by "rational" you mean "economically rational." There is a serious problem in economics called "the war puzzle" or "the war problem" that tries to figure out why the hell people ever go to war, because it is never economically rational for either side to do so, regardless of outcome.
Heinlein tries to pretty up various completely irrational ideas as to why people fight to make it seem inevitable, but the only one that made sense to me was at the individual level. The rest amounted to, "Eventually we will meet something that wants to fight us, and we'd better be ready"--the H&MP instructor says almost exactly that at some point. And we will meet something that wants to fight us because "that's the way the world is."
This is far less rational, on a purely empirical basis, than Haldeman's admittedly thin "why can't we all just get along" schtick: flat-out to-the-death conflict is extremely rare in nature, and even in human history until fairly recently. Limited warfare was the norm until the late 1700's: the past 200 years of total war are the anomaly, and Heinlein's view took that anomaly to be the norm, the model for all conflict between intelligent or quasi-intelligent beings (see Daniel Bell's "The First Total War" for a good introduction to changing beliefs about war in the time of Napoleon.)
I just keep thinking about how this was supposed to be a response to Heinlein's Starship Troopers (or vice versa?)
Response to. "Starship Troopers" was first published in '59, "The Forever War" was published in the early '70's.
Heinlein's book tries to be pro-military rather than pro-war, but it's sometimes a distinction without a difference. On the other hand I know people who read Haldeman's book as a pro-war story, missing the larger point entirely.
Heinlein was a naval officer who never saw action. Haldeman a combat engineer who did. Differences in experience and generational differences are important to understanding the differences between the books.
I personally find "The Forever War" a more satisfying story, both morally and narratively, although the resolution of the conflict with the Taurans is tantamount to magic, which I found disappointing. On the other hand, Heinlein asks, "Why do people fight?" and ultimately gives us no deeper answer than "Unit cohesion", although the quasi-nationalist racial hygiene stuff clouds that conclusion at times.
Now, officially, wind speed must be measured on a pole of 10 meter height.
Thanks for the links!
It is clear that the real take-home from this study is "don't put small windmills on towers that are less than 50 m high" (in my area, 80 m is more like the the minimum--I'm only about 2 km from the coast and there are few tall buildings in the way, but the effect of moving away from the water is dramatic.)
There is a commercial wind-farm going up on an island off-shore here, and their towers are well over 100 m high. It makes me wonder what the issues would be with a 100 m unguyed tower for a small windmill. Better tower technology may be the thing the small windmill industry really needs.
Your argument is actually way off, 3.8 m/s is rather windy...
Err... no. My argument is not that "3.8 m/s is not very windy" (although it's not). My argument is "3.8 m/s is well known to be far below the acceptable level of wind required for wind power."
With regard to the first point, as others have pointed out here, 3.8 m/s is Beaufort force 3, which is technically known as a "gentle breeze", and spans the range of 7 to 10 knots. While you can have a nice day on the water under those conditions, it is not in any sailor's estimation "rather windy".
But more importantly, as I said clearly before: everyone who knows anything about wind power knows that winds of less than 5 m/s aren't really worth talking about with regard to wind power. Ergo, this study is exactly as I described it: a test of the viability of wind power at wind speeds that everyone who knows anything about wind power knows are too low to be viable.
The result is therefore entirely unsurprising. If there are people arguing that 3.8 m/s is sufficient for a viable wind power installation at any scale, do please link to them--the installations I'm familiar with in Ontario have average wind speeds in the 6.5 to 7.5 m/s range.
I agree that 100 m is far higher than most micro-windmill installations, but that's the installer's problem. If I were to install a micro-windmill it would have to be that high to get decent wind, and that's a viable critique. If the study had said, "Micro-windmills are routinely installed on towers so short that they can't get enough wind to be worthwhile" that would be one thing, but instead for some reason the study picks a wind speed that, again, is KNOWN to be inadequate, and demonstrates that what we already know is true.
On my block, which is downtown in a lake-shore city, at 100 magl (metres above ground level, an acronym that does not appear to be defined anywhere on this otherwise excellent site) the average wind speed is 6 m/s, which is in the acceptable range. Because available power goes as the cube of wind velocity 6 m/s is nearly a four times increase in power over 3.8 m/s!
Small windmills are not for everyone, but this study is simply bogus if they're reporting the wind velocity correctly.
The antarctic is supposed to be a desert because it is too cold to snow.
False. It is never too cold to snow.
The fact the central area is now accumulating snow points to warming and accompanying increased precipitation.
Right, so if ice thickness is declining that is evidence that the climate is warming because the only possible cause is increased melting due to higher temperatures, but if the ice thickness is increasing that is evidence that the climate is warming because the only possible cause is increased snow accumulation due to more precipitation that results from warmer temperatures.
One has to be very careful what one looks at for indicators of global warming/cooling.
Since apparently any change whatsoever can be used as evidence for global warming it would seem that the only care required is that you never let your contradictory positions get juxtaposed too closely, as that might allow someone to notice they are contradictory.
"Environmentalists" sometimes argue that the decrease in a species' local population is evidence that humans are killing them all, and an increase in a species' local population is evidence that habitat destruction has forced it into human-inhabited areas. Anyone who makes this kind of argument is rightfully suspect.
The one signal that should be unambiguous with regard to increased global heat content is ocean heat content, which seems to be increasing and is free of most of the issues that make nonsense of so many of the climate signals that people get up in arms over. I really don't know why ocean heat content is so little discussed: anyone who actually cares about the science of global climate change will be led inevitably to it, and will be repulsed by the wild assumptions and poor science that goes into most claims about atmospheric heat content (or worse still, the thermodynamically meaningless "global average temperature".)
My "contrived example" was straight out of the JSON docs, so if it was a contrivance it wasn't MY contrivance.
But in actual practice, XML contains a lot of redundancy in the form of open/close tags.
As I said in reply to another comment, if that's your actual practise, you're doing it wrong. Base types should be expressed as attributes, obviously. There is absolutely no reason to express anything as an element unless it has a complex structure.
This is why I've found JSON vs XML comparisons so difficult to grasp: people use XML badly, and then justify the use of JSON base one how bloated the XML is. The argument that you get JSON parsing naturally and almost effortlessly in JavaScript is compelling. "I use XML badly so my XML is bloated" is less so.
Well... JSON wasn't really "invented". It's really just the syntax for an object literal in javascript. JSON parsing is not much more than eval() and a regular expression.
This actually makes sense. Thanks.
I can see that the advantage of leveraging an in-built language capability can plausibly out-weigh the other advantages of XML, particularly, as others have pointed out, you have to suck the XML parser down over the wire. While it would obviously be possible to support a very light-weight subset of XML to do exactly the job JSON does, that too would require work to write and maintain. I didn't appreciate that JSON is so close to 'self-supporting' in Javascript.
To the people who seem to think that XML is inherently bloated: you're doing it wrong. There is absolutely nothing that requires XML to be bloated, and yes, I believe most values can be captured as attributes. The rule is: base types are attributes, classes are elements.
If that can be achieved by using robots instead of humans, that's just fine.
Oh, it's still achieved by using humans... as targets.
These machines, and the engineers who work on them, are evil. Yes, they will save American and British and probably even Canadian lives. But they will make it easier and easier for us to kill and kill and kill, and open the doors to even more horrible forms of warfare than those we practise now. And if you think the effect on our enemies is going to be bad, wait until you see the effect on us.
We are about to perform the Standford Prison Experiment with our entire society, with the West in the role of arbitrarily powerful jailers and everyone else as a prisoner.
It won't end well, y'know. "Kill them harder" has almost never been a viable basis for policy, foreign or domestic. Punitive action feels good, but objectively it has lousy effectiveness and efficiency. We do it because we like it, not because it works. Even I, with a deep-seated loathing of killing, can feel the draw of these machines. So powerful, so seductive, and so wrong, both morally and practically.
Gandhi threw the British out of India using active, aggressive, non-violent resistance. That's the model people should be looking to if they want to find new and effective ways to impose their will on the world, not building machines that will make a desert and call it peace.
I wish I could figure out why this is so, given that XML was already a standard when JSON was invented, and is widely supported and just as compact. Here's an example of a JSON specification:
The XML is 129 characters, the JSON is 142 characters (counting each white-space sequence as just one character in both cases.)
So JSON is fatter than XML and less standardized, or was when it was invented. There is a minor impact on the naming because XML names can't have spaces in them, but this seems to me insufficient to justify the invention of an entirely new language when a simple XML specification would have worked just as well.
I've looked at this question a couple of times, and never been able to find any argument other than "Badly written XML can be incredibly bloated compared to JSON" but this seems to me entirely inadequate. I'd really like to be enlightened regarding alternative justifications for JSON.
which discusses mostly celebrity responses to public statements that they are gay. The little bit it says about skin colour suggests that the it would no longer be considered defamation in the U.S. to say someone has dark skin.
Yeah, but attempting to force people to make an arbitrary and meaningless choice about what humans "REALLY" are is the best way to stimulate page views and comments from stupid people, while driving smart people off to wherever it is that smart people go (if you know, please tell me!)
In every case that we know of there is more than one way to usefully carve up the universe into conceptual chunks. Stupid people think that one of these must be the One True Way, which is, well, stupid. The universe is what it is, but how we carve it up is as much about what we are as about what it is.
Unless one stupidly makes the mistake of reifying our categories there is no reason to believe that a single set of categories is implied by the universe being one (non-categorical) way.
Why would calling someone gay be defamation (the root crime of libel and slander)?
Defamation has to generate a negative image of the person being defamed. Since there is nothing wrong with being gay there's no possibility of defamation.
Imagine if someone "outed" a person on a mailing list by saying, "He has dark skin!" Could that possibly under any circumstances be considered defamation? I'd argue not, because there's nothing wrong with having dark skin, even though the world is full of evil crazy people who think there is.
Being falsely outed as a dark-skinned individual doesn't seem to me to be defamation, even though it might subject the person to prejudicial behaviour from the evil and insane. The same logic would seem to apply to being falsely outed as gay.
Yes, but this experiment was concerned with levels 100 times higher, over 200 dB. The odds of dolphins being THAT close to ships doesn't seem likely.
I'd expect that sound intensity drops off with at least a 1/r**2 dependency, and a factor of r1**2/r2**2 = 100 would mean the dolphins would have to be within 20-30 m of a ship when the sonar was turned on to get 200 dB if there's 180 db at 200-300 m. That's really not very likely, for very long--they're going to presumably get the hell out of there when the noise starts.
Again: I'm not saying that sonar can't screw up dolphins. I'm saying that studying the effects of such intense sounds seems like looking in the wrong place, where the basic physiological response is deafness, not confusion etc.
The blind-person analogy doesn't really work for me, but I'm losing my hearing, and can tell you want a huge difference just a bit of background noise can make. Rock concerts are deafening (I wear earplugs when I go) but even moderate background noise can make speech unintelligible to me, and the phenomenology at the two different scales is completely different. Therefore it seems to me unlikely that studying deafening sounds will teach us much about the means by which dolphins may be confused and disoriented by sounds that are much lower in intensity.
Slashdot Mirror
To say this system works better is ridiculous.
Unless you measure health outcomes, rather than user experience. I agree the user experience sucks, and while private care is not entirely unavailable here it is generally only available to the ultra-rich and politically well-connected.
However, by any measure you care to name--longer lives, lower infant mortality, lower morbidity...--we have considerably better health care outcomes in Canada than Americans have, and we pay less for them.
Critics of the Canadian system don't actually care about health care outcomes, which is why they always focus on the lousy user experience. The curious question is: if they don't care about health care outcomes, why are they bothering to get all worked up about the system in the first place? They could avoid all the inconveniences of our system and get EXACTLY THE SAME CARE as an uninsured person in the United States without ever leaving home.
In-class writing samples would seem to be the only hope of detecting ghostwriting.
The problem with this is that the same students could provide writing samples to ghosting services, ensuring a degree of similarity between them.
The problem with all of this is not that students can so easily circumvent the nominal evaluative process, but that "higher" education has such low standards of evaluation. We grade students in ways that are completely unscientific, all in the name of cramming huge numbers of kids into classes like cattle while unmotivated and generally untrained professors deliver canned lectures.
In a university setting, once the class size gets over fifty there is no way the prof can even begin to keep track of students as individuals, and grades become meaningless. With fewer than twenty students, and especially fewer than ten, teaching really starts to become fun again, both for the prof and the students, because you're engaging each other mind-to-mind.
I don't know what the solution is, but large classes are the problem, not poor plagarism-detection software.
These detectors are not black boxes at all.
False. The detector you used was not a black box. The discussion you're replying too specifically cited turnitin.com as a detector that IS a blackbox.
At best you have a plausible conjecture based on your limited experience that all detectors are transparent and give adequate feedback on the sources of suspected plagiarism, but as someone once said, "plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive."
Next time someone runs into a critical fault in a COM shack in the south Pacific...
And what, pray tell, does a guy in a COM shack in the South Pacific have to do with defending the Constitution?
Defending the American Empire, yeah. The Constitution... not so much.
I RTFA, but can someone more well-versed in Physics explain what sort of implications this has?
Not my field, but this is my sense of what's going on:
1) Rydberg atoms have one electron in a very high state of excitation, and look like Bohr-model atoms, as the highly-excited single outer electron is so far from the rest of the atom that the combination of the inner electrons and the nuclear charge look like a point-charge, so the outer electron experiences a 1/r potential. This makes Rydberg atoms theoretically tractable with simple Bohr theory, which is always fun to play with.
2) Rydberg molecules are make from a Rydberg atom and a normal (unexcited) atom. My guess is that the normal atom is actually inside the "orbit" of the Rydberg atom's outer electron, so it will be slightly polarized by the core field, and the resulting dipole will interact with the electron to produce the bound state. Sounds like a job for linear response theory.
3) In general, testing systems under such extreme conditions allows us to measure precisely various properties of matter, like the fine structure constant or the electric charge or whatever. I don't know if anything like that will come out of this, but extreme systems often allow for precise tests of esoteric phenomena.
4) Yes, this does validate quantum theory. No, it probably doesn't have much in they way of practical application, but then again, it doesn't have to.
if $100m invested in another movie would have given higher profits, then they didn't make as much money as they could have.
I've been arguing for a while that we need quantum accounting to deal with the high degree of correlation in market behaviour seen during bubbles and crashes, and this kind of thinking reinforces that belief.
The central mantra of quantum mechanics is: "An experiment which is not performed does not have a result!"
It makes sense to talk about what you might do in the future. It does not make sense (however badly anyone wants it to) to talk about what you might have done in the past. You did in the past what you did. There is zero opportunity cost to past actions because we have no opportunity to change them. There is only opportunity cost when considering future actions.
If people really believed in opportunity cost they wouldn't limit it to a comparison with a single thing they might have done: they would take the weighted average over ALL the things they might have done, and asked if what they actually did generated more or less revenue than that mean. That the mean is completely unphysical is irrelevant, because "the movie they might have made if they didn't make the Watchmen" is completely unphysical as well.
This is not riddle posed by Nature
This is one of the wonderful things about science: it doesn't matter where the puzzle comes from, the same techniques work to solve it.
Reverse engineering of this kind is one of the most useful areas of applied science, and it is as much research as any other area of scientific enquiry. It is frequently the case that there are many ways to find the answer to a puzzle, and this guy has chosen one of them based on the resources he has available. More power to him for demonstrating how good science can be used to discover what others want to keep secret.
Doesn't this sound like a temporary measure
You say that like you think there's an alternative. There isn't.
The viral ecology is an real ecology, where like all ecologies nothing is stable and everything is temporary.
What this demonstrates, though, is that there are inherent limits to viral capabilities, because with added capability there is added vulnerability. This is true for OS's but it is equally true for viruses (yes, that is a correct English plural, ok?)
So as virus programs get more complex and capable, they will generally also become more open to detection via exploitation of exactly those additional capabilities.
In reality, money is created out of thin air every day.
In reality, the money created out of thin air in a fractional reserve banking system is debt. Debt is still money, but to pay it off requires... more debt. Fractional reserve banking is a Ponzi scheme. We are currently experiencing the collapse of it.
Oh, and if the total amount of money were constant interests rates would not be zero: the future value of money would still be less than the present value, in the sense that I'd rather have a dollar today than 1.1 dollars ten years from now unless deflation really got out of control, so debt and interest would still be with us. But any productive enterprise would have to be MORE productive than the deflationary increment in monetary value to be worth investing in. Of course, since economic growth in a system of sound money would be much slower than in a fractional reserve system this would be much less of a barrier to entry than today. And all of the economic growth in such a system would be real, rather than the fictional growth--followed by inevitable collapse--that fractional reserve economies experience.
An unconfirmed rumor also developed this weekend of an OS that is so carefully and explicitly restricted that consumers interaction with it is limited to attempting to install it...
Hurd.
Ideas in physics are never proven true.
I'm not sure what this idea of "true" is that you keep talking about. You seem to want to preserve a false-to-the-point-of-incoherence idea of truth, and then say that physics doesn't produce propositions that fulfil this incoherent idea as if that was somehow a limitation on physics, rather than a demonstration of a mistake about the nature of truth on your part.
Nothing anywhere has ever looked remotely like anything close to your incoherent idea of "true", except in the delusional fantasies of philosophers and theologians.
Truth is what allows us to understand and manipulate the world in controllable and predictable ways, and nothing more. Any other idea of truth is a fantasy, a useless concept made up by low-quality thinkers who can't distinguish between fantasy and reality.
Physics certainly produces truths by this quite ordinary standard. Newtonian physics is true. So is quantum mechanics. So is relativity. As opposed to Cartesian physics, phlogiston theory and the mechanical electrodynamics of Lorentz and Poincare', which are false.
This is the huge downside of the fantasy-land, all-unicorns-all-the-time idea of "truth" that delusional philosophers promote: it leaves us with no coherent way of talking about the perfectly ordinary distinction between false Cartesian physics and true Newtonian physics, which is a USEFUL and IMPORTANT distinction, unlike the distinction between true Newtonian physics and the delusional fantasy that philosophers for some inexplicable reason want to call "truth".
Heinlein pretty much posits that all wars are a matter of population growth and limited resources.
This is so weirdly Malthusian, particularly coming from a technological optimist like Heinlein, that I never bought into it. The Future History stories are a broad refutation of this premise.
Ask any economist and they'll tell you that wars are not only not inevitable, but there is no rational explanation for them at all, if by "rational" you mean "economically rational." There is a serious problem in economics called "the war puzzle" or "the war problem" that tries to figure out why the hell people ever go to war, because it is never economically rational for either side to do so, regardless of outcome.
Heinlein tries to pretty up various completely irrational ideas as to why people fight to make it seem inevitable, but the only one that made sense to me was at the individual level. The rest amounted to, "Eventually we will meet something that wants to fight us, and we'd better be ready"--the H&MP instructor says almost exactly that at some point. And we will meet something that wants to fight us because "that's the way the world is."
This is far less rational, on a purely empirical basis, than Haldeman's admittedly thin "why can't we all just get along" schtick: flat-out to-the-death conflict is extremely rare in nature, and even in human history until fairly recently. Limited warfare was the norm until the late 1700's: the past 200 years of total war are the anomaly, and Heinlein's view took that anomaly to be the norm, the model for all conflict between intelligent or quasi-intelligent beings (see Daniel Bell's "The First Total War" for a good introduction to changing beliefs about war in the time of Napoleon.)
I just keep thinking about how this was supposed to be a response to Heinlein's Starship Troopers (or vice versa?)
Response to. "Starship Troopers" was first published in '59, "The Forever War" was published in the early '70's.
Heinlein's book tries to be pro-military rather than pro-war, but it's sometimes a distinction without a difference. On the other hand I know people who read Haldeman's book as a pro-war story, missing the larger point entirely.
Heinlein was a naval officer who never saw action. Haldeman a combat engineer who did. Differences in experience and generational differences are important to understanding the differences between the books.
I personally find "The Forever War" a more satisfying story, both morally and narratively, although the resolution of the conflict with the Taurans is tantamount to magic, which I found disappointing. On the other hand, Heinlein asks, "Why do people fight?" and ultimately gives us no deeper answer than "Unit cohesion", although the quasi-nationalist racial hygiene stuff clouds that conclusion at times.
Now, officially, wind speed must be measured on a pole of 10 meter height.
Thanks for the links!
It is clear that the real take-home from this study is "don't put small windmills on towers that are less than 50 m high" (in my area, 80 m is more like the the minimum--I'm only about 2 km from the coast and there are few tall buildings in the way, but the effect of moving away from the water is dramatic.)
There is a commercial wind-farm going up on an island off-shore here, and their towers are well over 100 m high. It makes me wonder what the issues would be with a 100 m unguyed tower for a small windmill. Better tower technology may be the thing the small windmill industry really needs.
Your argument is actually way off, 3.8 m/s is rather windy...
Err... no. My argument is not that "3.8 m/s is not very windy" (although it's not). My argument is "3.8 m/s is well known to be far below the acceptable level of wind required for wind power."
With regard to the first point, as others have pointed out here, 3.8 m/s is Beaufort force 3, which is technically known as a "gentle breeze", and spans the range of 7 to 10 knots. While you can have a nice day on the water under those conditions, it is not in any sailor's estimation "rather windy".
But more importantly, as I said clearly before: everyone who knows anything about wind power knows that winds of less than 5 m/s aren't really worth talking about with regard to wind power. Ergo, this study is exactly as I described it: a test of the viability of wind power at wind speeds that everyone who knows anything about wind power knows are too low to be viable.
The result is therefore entirely unsurprising. If there are people arguing that 3.8 m/s is sufficient for a viable wind power installation at any scale, do please link to them--the installations I'm familiar with in Ontario have average wind speeds in the 6.5 to 7.5 m/s range.
I agree that 100 m is far higher than most micro-windmill installations, but that's the installer's problem. If I were to install a micro-windmill it would have to be that high to get decent wind, and that's a viable critique. If the study had said, "Micro-windmills are routinely installed on towers so short that they can't get enough wind to be worthwhile" that would be one thing, but instead for some reason the study picks a wind speed that, again, is KNOWN to be inadequate, and demonstrates that what we already know is true.
3.8 meters/second average is not a windy area
No kidding! This is a "study of wind power in an area that anyone who knows anything about wind power knows is unsuitable for wind power." Duh.
The Government of Ontario has an excellent resource on available wind in the province:
http://www.lio.ontario.ca/imf-ows/imf.jsp?site=windpower_en
The legend doesn't even go down to 3.8 m/s!
On my block, which is downtown in a lake-shore city, at 100 magl (metres above ground level, an acronym that does not appear to be defined anywhere on this otherwise excellent site) the average wind speed is 6 m/s, which is in the acceptable range. Because available power goes as the cube of wind velocity 6 m/s is nearly a four times increase in power over 3.8 m/s!
Small windmills are not for everyone, but this study is simply bogus if they're reporting the wind velocity correctly.
The antarctic is supposed to be a desert because it is too cold to snow.
False. It is never too cold to snow.
The fact the central area is now accumulating snow points to warming and accompanying increased precipitation.
Right, so if ice thickness is declining that is evidence that the climate is warming because the only possible cause is increased melting due to higher temperatures, but if the ice thickness is increasing that is evidence that the climate is warming because the only possible cause is increased snow accumulation due to more precipitation that results from warmer temperatures.
One has to be very careful what one looks at for indicators of global warming/cooling.
Since apparently any change whatsoever can be used as evidence for global warming it would seem that the only care required is that you never let your contradictory positions get juxtaposed too closely, as that might allow someone to notice they are contradictory.
"Environmentalists" sometimes argue that the decrease in a species' local population is evidence that humans are killing them all, and an increase in a species' local population is evidence that habitat destruction has forced it into human-inhabited areas. Anyone who makes this kind of argument is rightfully suspect.
The one signal that should be unambiguous with regard to increased global heat content is ocean heat content, which seems to be increasing and is free of most of the issues that make nonsense of so many of the climate signals that people get up in arms over. I really don't know why ocean heat content is so little discussed: anyone who actually cares about the science of global climate change will be led inevitably to it, and will be repulsed by the wild assumptions and poor science that goes into most claims about atmospheric heat content (or worse still, the thermodynamically meaningless "global average temperature".)
Well anyone can present a contrived example...
My "contrived example" was straight out of the JSON docs, so if it was a contrivance it wasn't MY contrivance.
But in actual practice, XML contains a lot of redundancy in the form of open/close tags.
As I said in reply to another comment, if that's your actual practise, you're doing it wrong. Base types should be expressed as attributes, obviously. There is absolutely no reason to express anything as an element unless it has a complex structure.
This is why I've found JSON vs XML comparisons so difficult to grasp: people use XML badly, and then justify the use of JSON base one how bloated the XML is. The argument that you get JSON parsing naturally and almost effortlessly in JavaScript is compelling. "I use XML badly so my XML is bloated" is less so.
Well... JSON wasn't really "invented". It's really just the syntax for an object literal in javascript. JSON parsing is not much more than eval() and a regular expression.
This actually makes sense. Thanks.
I can see that the advantage of leveraging an in-built language capability can plausibly out-weigh the other advantages of XML, particularly, as others have pointed out, you have to suck the XML parser down over the wire. While it would obviously be possible to support a very light-weight subset of XML to do exactly the job JSON does, that too would require work to write and maintain. I didn't appreciate that JSON is so close to 'self-supporting' in Javascript.
To the people who seem to think that XML is inherently bloated: you're doing it wrong. There is absolutely nothing that requires XML to be bloated, and yes, I believe most values can be captured as attributes. The rule is: base types are attributes, classes are elements.
If that can be achieved by using robots instead of humans, that's just fine.
Oh, it's still achieved by using humans... as targets.
These machines, and the engineers who work on them, are evil. Yes, they will save American and British and probably even Canadian lives. But they will make it easier and easier for us to kill and kill and kill, and open the doors to even more horrible forms of warfare than those we practise now. And if you think the effect on our enemies is going to be bad, wait until you see the effect on us.
We are about to perform the Standford Prison Experiment with our entire society, with the West in the role of arbitrarily powerful jailers and everyone else as a prisoner.
It won't end well, y'know. "Kill them harder" has almost never been a viable basis for policy, foreign or domestic. Punitive action feels good, but objectively it has lousy effectiveness and efficiency. We do it because we like it, not because it works. Even I, with a deep-seated loathing of killing, can feel the draw of these machines. So powerful, so seductive, and so wrong, both morally and practically.
Gandhi threw the British out of India using active, aggressive, non-violent resistance. That's the model people should be looking to if they want to find new and effective ways to impose their will on the world, not building machines that will make a desert and call it peace.
Json has dethroned XML for pure data interchange
I wish I could figure out why this is so, given that XML was already a standard when JSON was invented, and is widely supported and just as compact. Here's an example of a JSON specification:
{
"name": "Jack (\"Bee\") Nimble",
"format": {
"type": "rect",
"width": 1920,
"height": 1080,
"interlace": false,
"frame rate": 24
}
}
And here's exactly the same thing in XML:
<o name="Jack ("Bee") Nimble">
<format type="rect" width="1920" height="1080" interlace="false" frame_rate="24"/>
</o>
The XML is 129 characters, the JSON is 142 characters (counting each white-space sequence as just one character in both cases.)
So JSON is fatter than XML and less standardized, or was when it was invented. There is a minor impact on the naming because XML names can't have spaces in them, but this seems to me insufficient to justify the invention of an entirely new language when a simple XML specification would have worked just as well.
I've looked at this question a couple of times, and never been able to find any argument other than "Badly written XML can be incredibly bloated compared to JSON" but this seems to me entirely inadequate. I'd really like to be enlightened regarding alternative justifications for JSON.
Sadly, that's not the case, which what makes possible to be defamation call "nigger" someone depending on circumnstances, even if he is black skinned.
Can you point to any case law on this? A quick google turns up this link:
http://www.slate.com/id/2212339/pagenum/all
which discusses mostly celebrity responses to public statements that they are gay. The little bit it says about skin colour suggests that the it would no longer be considered defamation in the U.S. to say someone has dark skin.
Yeah, but attempting to force people to make an arbitrary and meaningless choice about what humans "REALLY" are is the best way to stimulate page views and comments from stupid people, while driving smart people off to wherever it is that smart people go (if you know, please tell me!)
In every case that we know of there is more than one way to usefully carve up the universe into conceptual chunks. Stupid people think that one of these must be the One True Way, which is, well, stupid. The universe is what it is, but how we carve it up is as much about what we are as about what it is.
Unless one stupidly makes the mistake of reifying our categories there is no reason to believe that a single set of categories is implied by the universe being one (non-categorical) way.
When it's libelous or slanderous?
Why would calling someone gay be defamation (the root crime of libel and slander)?
Defamation has to generate a negative image of the person being defamed. Since there is nothing wrong with being gay there's no possibility of defamation.
Imagine if someone "outed" a person on a mailing list by saying, "He has dark skin!" Could that possibly under any circumstances be considered defamation? I'd argue not, because there's nothing wrong with having dark skin, even though the world is full of evil crazy people who think there is.
Being falsely outed as a dark-skinned individual doesn't seem to me to be defamation, even though it might subject the person to prejudicial behaviour from the evil and insane. The same logic would seem to apply to being falsely outed as gay.
180 db is still extremely strong.
Yes, but this experiment was concerned with levels 100 times higher, over 200 dB. The odds of dolphins being THAT close to ships doesn't seem likely.
I'd expect that sound intensity drops off with at least a 1/r**2 dependency, and a factor of r1**2/r2**2 = 100 would mean the dolphins would have to be within 20-30 m of a ship when the sonar was turned on to get 200 dB if there's 180 db at 200-300 m. That's really not very likely, for very long--they're going to presumably get the hell out of there when the noise starts.
Again: I'm not saying that sonar can't screw up dolphins. I'm saying that studying the effects of such intense sounds seems like looking in the wrong place, where the basic physiological response is deafness, not confusion etc.
The blind-person analogy doesn't really work for me, but I'm losing my hearing, and can tell you want a huge difference just a bit of background noise can make. Rock concerts are deafening (I wear earplugs when I go) but even moderate background noise can make speech unintelligible to me, and the phenomenology at the two different scales is completely different. Therefore it seems to me unlikely that studying deafening sounds will teach us much about the means by which dolphins may be confused and disoriented by sounds that are much lower in intensity.