I don't think I'd go so far as to say the evidence is broken.
Yeah, that'll show me for not RTFM'ing before posting. Bent a little, maybe, and I'd really like to see the raw data published for open review--perhaps they already are, but I got the impression from the article that they are not, which is why they have to go back and review things themselves.
This is a good example of why science that is used as a basis for public policy must be subject to public and highly critical scrutiny. Anyone who's done an experiment knows that you get these weird things happening, and a lot of eyes are needed to catch the inconsistencies and problems. If people are going to be asked to trust the data, they need to see the data, all of it, so that it can be independently scrutinized.
Thanks for the links--I wasn't aware of the ESNO connection. It will be very interesting to see what happens to Arctic sea ice in the next few years, one way or the other.
I would be interested to know the criteria and qualifications you use to define "professional scrutiny" in this context
If someone wants to offer a professional opinion on GCM's they certainly need a computational physics background, and if they want to offer a professional opinion on climate data they certainly need an experimental physics background.
We live in the physical world and experience entanglement all the time
Absolutely. This is just a PR stunt, and very bad science if you think that science involves not misleading naive people for the purposes of PR.
The claim that the two human observers would be entangled is problematic at best. Not only wouldn't any entanglement last longer than the coherence time of a human being (~10^27 particles in thermal equilibrium at 310 K!), it is difficult to understand how the researchers would fail to notice that in some reference frames one observer would detect their photons quite a bit sooner than the other observer. In those frames the entanglement of the observation systems never happens, which is why sensible people don't talk about such things.
The very notion of assigning "an instant" to an "event" that is by its nature nonlocal is simply incoherent. This is what makes the whole business spooky: it cannot be described using the relativistic physics that necessarily describes the world of human experience.
Yeah, it's "them", "they" are causing the problems!
Listen to yourself. Alternative explanations for climate observations are all testable, and many have been tested. They are NOTHING like creationism or intelligent design, which are anti-scientific nonsense.
Saying things like "variations in cosmic ray flux may result in long-term changes to Earth's albedo which could explain observed climate variations" is not anti-scientific nonsense. It is a perfectly plausible, testable hypothesis of the best scientific kind (I believe, in fact, that it has been tested and found wanting.)
Looking at the new graph it's still pretty obvious that the trend is "downwards",
Err... no. What I see looking at the data is two very low years: 2007 and to a lesser extent 2008. Calling that a "pretty obvious trend" nicely reveals your bias, but not much else. I could as easily say it is a "pretty obvious oscillation", as 2008 is "clearly" recovering from the 2007 perturbation.
I can see why the guys doing this aren't using the new data, as there is no way that there is adequate statistical power here to make a judgement about trends. Unfortunately, now that the old data have been shown to be badly flawed, the dire predictions of an imminently ice-free Arctic no longer have any very robust empirical support.
THIS is the way science works: you look at the evidence, squeeze it hard and see if it breaks. There is no doubt that the evidence for a soon-to-be-ice-free Arctic is broken. Ergo, the plausibility of dramatic climate change effects in our near future has gone down, no matter what anyone's politics drives them to prefer.
The only robust signal for global climate change I'm aware of is global ocean heat content, which seems to be increasing. However, given the number of reversals of supposedly robust results in the field of climate science I want to take a much closer look at those data before being convinced by them.
I used to be very concerned about global climate change, and in open-minded arguing with "deniers" I took a hard, critical look at the data and the models, because I wanted to find a compelling, unproblematic argument to convince my opponents, whom I credit with being able to change their minds when faced with the evidence. What I found was that neither the data nor especially the models stood up to professional scrutiny. There is good science being done, but it is not the kind of stuff you'd want to base public policy on.
There are good arguments for environmental policy that do not depend on the risk of global climate change, and the environmental movement is doing itself no good by linking policy and science together they way they have, so that people think "if there is no risk of global climate change then driving my SUV must be ok."
Yeah, I heard the whooshing sound--I'm just reflexively correcting ignorant Americans these days about the use of the word "socialism", which has been watered down to the point where it means almost nothing beyond a generic slur.
I think you'll find most Canadians know what socialism is, and know that we have less of it now than any time in the past several decades. The very examples you cite require reaching back a decade or more and don't have much to do with contemporary Canada.
Here in Ontario OPG is no longer strictly government owned, and the Canada Health Act doesn't actually ban private hospitals, it just makes most of them uneconomical. Private hospitals do exist, and are likely to become more common in the future as Canadians get increasingly fed up with being told what they can and cannot do by self-righteous hypocrites like Jack Layton, who got his hernia repaired at Shouldice, a private hospital in Toronto.
Canada is a social/liberal democracy. It is not socialist in the meaning of the term that has been, until recently at least, widely accepted.
Hey, hey now. It's called "Canada", not "Socialist America".
Canada is somewhere in between a liberal democracy and a social democracy. Socialism is government ownership of the means of production, which Canada has less of than the US, particularly after the Bush national socialist spree.
The punishment must fit the crime. Clearly, for the aggregate theft of life from children, these judges deserve death.
Other than your deep and deranged feelings, can you articulate why you think that killing these people would constitute "justice"? Or what dimensions you are measuring "fit" along such that somehow locking innocent kids up "fits" with being killed?
Just to get one thing out of the way, killing people does not reduce the crime rate. For example, North Dakota has never had the death penalty and has one of the lowest murder rates in the US, whereas Texas has the death penalty and kills people pretty regularly, and has one of the highest murder rates in the US.
Anyone with a shred of humanity would look at this and say, "Obviously we need to figure out how to make Texas more like North Dakota in some non-facetious way." But I see no end of people who seem to think that it means Texas isn't killing enough people, although they are never able to explain why this will help other than to mutter violently that murderers, corrupt judges, or whatever "deserve" to die.
No one has ever been able to explain to me what "deserve" means, other than "I really strongly feel it should be so."
A class action lawsuit being brought against the judges
The class action ought to be broader than that, although sovereign immunity makes it tough.
Anyone who knows anything about legal history knows that mixing private and public sector functions in this way creates a certainty of such kick-back schemes. The system has conflict of interest designed in, making it inevitable that someone will take advantage of it, people being what they demonstrably, empirically are.
When you pay a private company to supply a public service to deal with a social problem, you create a pecuniary interest in having more of that social problem, or at least the appearance of it.
For example, back in the days when the Poor Law was administered at the parish level in England there was a system of private coaches that was used to transport indigent people back to their home parish. This immediately resulted in a scam whereby poor people colluded with coachmen by declaring themselves to be indigent and from a distant parish, and then splitting the prescribed fee with the coaching company.
These kinds of scams are incredibly common throughout history, and anyone creating policy for such government services ought to be aware of that, unless they are wilfully dedicated to remaining ignorant of any and all empirical facts that are relevant to doing their job.
Yeah, typical/. headline: so misleading that you have to read the article to figure out what they're talking about, and 90% of the discussion is focused on either annoyance about or misapprehension of the false headline.
There's a story below that has a headline about the odds of finding an Earth-like planet within a few dozen lightyears of Earth, but I'm pretty sure the actual story is about a new way to bake pastry. With a/. headline, why would anyone assume otherwise?
Thanks for making this point--I was scanning the thread to see if I was going to have to make it (again) myself.
Every proprietary app uses its own unique license. There are thousands, possibly tens of thousands of them. Anyone who says, "There are too many open source licenses, I'm so confused, I can't handle it, let's buy from Microsoft" is either an idiot or hiding an ulterior motive the size of as small spacecraft. Maybe even a large one.
It also says the change is not permanent - it only lasts a few months. I didn't notice any mention of whether the mother rat still functions at a high level when she's pregnant. If she does, the change could be due to the environment in utero, which would be consistent with the effect fading over time.
All of which makes the use of the term "inheritable" misleading to the point of being wrong, in a typical sensationalist/. headline that is not at all justified by the article. There have been minor violations of the central dogma known for decades, mostly in bacteria but more recently in other organisms, in which environmental conditions trigger pathways that result in alternations in DNA which can be inherited by offspring and, like all inheritable characteristics, then passed on to the next generation after that and so on.
However, "an effect on the parent that results in an effect on the first few months of life of the first generation of descendants" is not "inheritance" in the usual biological sense of the term. The "inheritance" being described here is more plausibly explained as a change in the biochemical environment of the mother's body that results in the same kind of "inheritance" that one sees in some babies born to crack addicts.
This is entirely different from Lamarkian theory, which posited true, multi-generational inheritance of acquired characteristics, and which IS observed in cases where the genetic material of inheritance (which includes but is not limited to DNA) is altered by the organism's evolved biochemical response to the environment.
Let's face it -- ANY comment made online could be considered actionable!
Only if you're an idiot, ignorant of law and incapable of acts of discrimination that ordinary people perform every single day without confusion or undue difficulty.
There are well-known, well-developed legal standards as to what is and is not actionable. Truth, for example, is a defence. Stating an opinion is in many cases adequate defence, rather than stating a fact. If you can't distinguish between those please consult a psychologist.
Finally: your last example doesn't make any sense. What is wrong with being a faggot?
Re:NOTE: This is NOT the ATC network
on
FAA Network Hacked
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm sure that will be a great comfort to the people who are subject to identity theft because of this breach.
Today there is no supersonic passenger aircraft in service.
The economics of supersonic flight suck, although it wasn't apparent at the time.
I've read accounts that suggest the 747's raised flight deck was designed that way because it was assumed the primary purpose of the aircraft would be cargo hauling, and they wanted access to the full diameter of the fuselage without hinging the nose, as is often done in cargo aircraft. The reason why cargo was targeted was because everyone believed that supersonics were going to own the passenger transport market "once a few bugs were worked out."
It turns out those bugs--noise, engine sizing and fuel efficiency--are pretty difficult to work around, and cutting an five hour flight to two and a half hours isn't such a big deal when the time spent getting into and out of the airport are added in. It's more like cutting an eight hour experience to a five or six hour one. Not worth the price.
The Sandinista regime in Nicaragua was aligned with Moscow and Havana which was unacceptable to most people in the US.
So what? I mean really, if one wanted to encase American Arrogance in amber and preserve it for posterity one could hardly do better than this statement.
There's this concept called "national sovereignty" that says the internal affairs of one nation are no business of any other. It is frequently violated in this crazy world of ours, and never so often as by the United States.
That anyone would put forward "this was unacceptable to many Americans" as if it were any kind of justification for the deliberate destablization of a sovereign power by funding murderous brigands is terrifying.
You didn't get anything wrong. Wind power advocates routinely give peak production capacity as if it was actual production capacity, which is typically 20 - 25% of maximum capacity due to variable winds.
Divide any claims about wind power production by four, or five if you're feeling ungenerous.
Unlike nuclear power or hydro or coal, which all produce 90% or more of their maximum capacity for the lifetime of the plant, wind power produces at most 25% on average, and therefore it is dishonest to compare "installed but not used" wind capacity to "installed and used" non-wind capacity. It's as if someone built three or four extra generators beside a hydro dam and then claimed that we should count the capacity of those generators, even though they aren't connected to anything.
From an engineering point of view peak capacity matters a lot. From a social value point of view average capacity is the only thing that matters, and yet for some reason wind power advocates continue to spout misleading peak capacity numbers.
Solar power advocates typically are a bit clearer about this stuff. Dunno what's wrong with the wind people.
Its called the Anthropic Principle, and it can explain a number of things.
The Anthropic Principle can only answer questions like, "Why is the universe suited to human life?" Whether the answer constitutes an "explanation" to the non-brain-damaged human is something that is seriously debated by clever people. In any case it has exactly nothing to say about questions like, "Why is intelligence so rare?"
We have been "watching" the evolution of life on Earth for its entire span, and never once in all that time has anything remotely resembling the kind of intelligence that builds complex machines evolved, whereas other complex systems such as wings, fins and eyes have evolved many, many times.
Why you think the Anthropic Principle or anything like it has any bearing on the relative probability of the evolution of intelligence vs the evolution of eyes is entirely unclear, as our presence simply guarantees that there will be at least one intelligent species about, and puts no limits on the other intelligences or proto-intelligences one might expect to find if the evolution of intelligence weren't orders of magnitude less probable than the evolution of eyes etc.
Your comment doesn't quite win the Weirdest/. Response of the Week, but the judges would like to know that they appreciate the sincerity of your effort.
So you have two entangled streams going in different directions, start interfering with one, and whoever is observing the other will notice it.
Which QM predicts does not happen, if you do the quantum mechanics right. I once got very excited back in the '80's thinking I'd discovered a way to do this, but it turns out I'd made an error in the Dirac algebra that fortunately I found before I told anyone else about it.
The link you supply is to an experiment being done by someone who made the same error I did, and didn't catch it. Or did catch it, and figured it would be a fun way to test certain aspects of QM, which is always worthwhile. In any case, what the experiment is testing is NOT "possible in theory" if the theory is QM, which the best theory we have at the moment.
If the experiment shows that QM is false then we will need a better theory, but there are very good reasons to believe that will not happen.
The 1,000 year thing seems like the weak point of this theory.
Actually, the estimate of the probability of the kind of intelligence that makes complex machines is a bigger problem, and a plausible solution to the paradox.
We have ample evidence that if a thing is possible at all, evolution will reproduce it many times. Wings, fins, eyes... all of these optima have been found many times, across genera and families and whatnot. By one estimate the eye has evolved independently a couple of dozen times, based on the proteins used in the retinal structure.
There was an article here on/. a while back pointing out that two birds previously believed to be related were the result of convergent evolution. Evolution finds the same optima over and over again.
The kind of intelligence that makes complex machines has evolved on Earth exactly once, and that is the only kind that is of interest in Fermi's Paradox.
Furthermore, the current best guess at the evolutionary driver of kind of intelligence that makes complex machines is that it's a peacock's tail, and extravagant sexual display that had relatively little utility outside of attracting a mate or two. Therefore the whole "making complex machines" aspect of our intelligence is more-or-less an accident, not the result of direct selective pressure at all.
Men are very slightly better at some spacial reasoning than women because we hunted more, maybe, but that very slight difference is a measure of how little practical, non-sexual, selective pressure their actually was.
So based on what we know at the moment about the kind of intelligence that makes complex machines it seems likely that the resolution to Fermi's Paradox is that it is unbelievably rare. We may well be the only species to have such an intelligence in our galaxy, although even I have a hard time believing we're the only one in the universe. It could be, though.
You know, even though I am a Microsoft basher I must say that at least Gates is big enough to realize that he was wrong/made a mistake.
I was impressed with this as well. It is such a clear example of rational, scientific, empiricist thinking, and in such stunning contrast to the usual faith-based drivel we hear when people start talking about schools. Even (perhaps especially) non-religious folks seem to have certain fixed ideas about what MUST work in a school, and are completely incapable of bringing data that contradict their faith into their sphere of awareness.
My kids went to private schools up until grade 8, and it was clear from the background study I did in choosing a school that we know perfectly well how to educated kids, and that any time anyone sets out to educate kids they are able to do so (google 'montessori' for one of the known ways to educate kids of all backgrounds with far higher success rates than is common in modern public schools.)
But if you point out the known techniques, including things like the Sudbury Schools and other free school movements, to any of the faithful you'll get a loud earful of purported reasons why such things "can't" work. Even though they do.
We have to stop listening to people mired in pre-Enlightenment, anti-scientific, anti-empirical belief systems, and start basing our actions on things that are known empirically to be effective: non-violence over violence, reason over faith, education over ideology.
Gates is providing an example of what it looks like when a person does this. More power to him.
In the past I've actually been far harder on scientists than journalists with regard to the use of "teleportation" as a term of art, which I consider to be misleading to the point of dishonesty.
But I have also seen too many cases where scientists have done their best to describe their work in fair terms only to see journalists (or their editors) mangle the resulting story almost beyond recognition. A colleague once came into work and said, "There were five stories in the science section of the L.A. Times this weekend. Four of them were on work I am personally familiar with. Three of those were unrecognizable--I only knew it was the work of X, Y or Z because their names were mentioned. The fourth was recognizable but distorted to the point of being meaningless." This is NOT SCIENTIST'S FAULT. Journalists, by trying to "spice things up" are in fact distorting the truth, which can be presented in a competent and interesting way without making a mess of it.
Of course this will cause the advert model to crumble
The major product that advertising sells is advertising, and it does so by creating a belief in advertising's efficacy. One of the reasons why the Web is such a hard ad market is that it is so easy to measure the outcomes of ad placements via click-throughs. Now that online ad revenue is tanking expect to see more people arguing that click-throughs are a bad measure of ad performance, but I think the cat is too far out of the bag for the lying bastards... pardon me, ad execs... to recover.
The first response of ad purchasers to reactive ads of this type is to see how few people ever bother to look at what their ad is showing. The second response should be that every ad everywhere should feature a mostly naked woman and/or man, as that is all that anyone of either sex will look at.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think I'd go so far as to say the evidence is broken.
Yeah, that'll show me for not RTFM'ing before posting. Bent a little, maybe, and I'd really like to see the raw data published for open review--perhaps they already are, but I got the impression from the article that they are not, which is why they have to go back and review things themselves.
This is a good example of why science that is used as a basis for public policy must be subject to public and highly critical scrutiny. Anyone who's done an experiment knows that you get these weird things happening, and a lot of eyes are needed to catch the inconsistencies and problems. If people are going to be asked to trust the data, they need to see the data, all of it, so that it can be independently scrutinized.
Thanks for the links--I wasn't aware of the ESNO connection. It will be very interesting to see what happens to Arctic sea ice in the next few years, one way or the other.
I would be interested to know the criteria and qualifications you use to define "professional scrutiny" in this context
If someone wants to offer a professional opinion on GCM's they certainly need a computational physics background, and if they want to offer a professional opinion on climate data they certainly need an experimental physics background.
We live in the physical world and experience entanglement all the time
Absolutely. This is just a PR stunt, and very bad science if you think that science involves not misleading naive people for the purposes of PR.
The claim that the two human observers would be entangled is problematic at best. Not only wouldn't any entanglement last longer than the coherence time of a human being (~10^27 particles in thermal equilibrium at 310 K!), it is difficult to understand how the researchers would fail to notice that in some reference frames one observer would detect their photons quite a bit sooner than the other observer. In those frames the entanglement of the observation systems never happens, which is why sensible people don't talk about such things.
The very notion of assigning "an instant" to an "event" that is by its nature nonlocal is simply incoherent. This is what makes the whole business spooky: it cannot be described using the relativistic physics that necessarily describes the world of human experience.
"They"
Yeah, it's "them", "they" are causing the problems!
Listen to yourself. Alternative explanations for climate observations are all testable, and many have been tested. They are NOTHING like creationism or intelligent design, which are anti-scientific nonsense.
Saying things like "variations in cosmic ray flux may result in long-term changes to Earth's albedo which could explain observed climate variations" is not anti-scientific nonsense. It is a perfectly plausible, testable hypothesis of the best scientific kind (I believe, in fact, that it has been tested and found wanting.)
Looking at the new graph it's still pretty obvious that the trend is "downwards",
Err... no. What I see looking at the data is two very low years: 2007 and to a lesser extent 2008. Calling that a "pretty obvious trend" nicely reveals your bias, but not much else. I could as easily say it is a "pretty obvious oscillation", as 2008 is "clearly" recovering from the 2007 perturbation.
I can see why the guys doing this aren't using the new data, as there is no way that there is adequate statistical power here to make a judgement about trends. Unfortunately, now that the old data have been shown to be badly flawed, the dire predictions of an imminently ice-free Arctic no longer have any very robust empirical support.
THIS is the way science works: you look at the evidence, squeeze it hard and see if it breaks. There is no doubt that the evidence for a soon-to-be-ice-free Arctic is broken. Ergo, the plausibility of dramatic climate change effects in our near future has gone down, no matter what anyone's politics drives them to prefer.
The only robust signal for global climate change I'm aware of is global ocean heat content, which seems to be increasing. However, given the number of reversals of supposedly robust results in the field of climate science I want to take a much closer look at those data before being convinced by them.
I used to be very concerned about global climate change, and in open-minded arguing with "deniers" I took a hard, critical look at the data and the models, because I wanted to find a compelling, unproblematic argument to convince my opponents, whom I credit with being able to change their minds when faced with the evidence. What I found was that neither the data nor especially the models stood up to professional scrutiny. There is good science being done, but it is not the kind of stuff you'd want to base public policy on.
There are good arguments for environmental policy that do not depend on the risk of global climate change, and the environmental movement is doing itself no good by linking policy and science together they way they have, so that people think "if there is no risk of global climate change then driving my SUV must be ok."
insert obligatory whooshing sound here
Yeah, I heard the whooshing sound--I'm just reflexively correcting ignorant Americans these days about the use of the word "socialism", which has been watered down to the point where it means almost nothing beyond a generic slur.
I think you'll find most Canadians know what socialism is, and know that we have less of it now than any time in the past several decades. The very examples you cite require reaching back a decade or more and don't have much to do with contemporary Canada.
Here in Ontario OPG is no longer strictly government owned, and the Canada Health Act doesn't actually ban private hospitals, it just makes most of them uneconomical. Private hospitals do exist, and are likely to become more common in the future as Canadians get increasingly fed up with being told what they can and cannot do by self-righteous hypocrites like Jack Layton, who got his hernia repaired at Shouldice, a private hospital in Toronto.
Canada is a social/liberal democracy. It is not socialist in the meaning of the term that has been, until recently at least, widely accepted.
Hey, hey now. It's called "Canada", not "Socialist America".
Canada is somewhere in between a liberal democracy and a social democracy. Socialism is government ownership of the means of production, which Canada has less of than the US, particularly after the Bush national socialist spree.
The punishment must fit the crime. Clearly, for the aggregate theft of life from children, these judges deserve death.
Other than your deep and deranged feelings, can you articulate why you think that killing these people would constitute "justice"? Or what dimensions you are measuring "fit" along such that somehow locking innocent kids up "fits" with being killed?
Just to get one thing out of the way, killing people does not reduce the crime rate. For example, North Dakota has never had the death penalty and has one of the lowest murder rates in the US, whereas Texas has the death penalty and kills people pretty regularly, and has one of the highest murder rates in the US.
Anyone with a shred of humanity would look at this and say, "Obviously we need to figure out how to make Texas more like North Dakota in some non-facetious way." But I see no end of people who seem to think that it means Texas isn't killing enough people, although they are never able to explain why this will help other than to mutter violently that murderers, corrupt judges, or whatever "deserve" to die.
No one has ever been able to explain to me what "deserve" means, other than "I really strongly feel it should be so."
A class action lawsuit being brought against the judges
The class action ought to be broader than that, although sovereign immunity makes it tough.
Anyone who knows anything about legal history knows that mixing private and public sector functions in this way creates a certainty of such kick-back schemes. The system has conflict of interest designed in, making it inevitable that someone will take advantage of it, people being what they demonstrably, empirically are.
When you pay a private company to supply a public service to deal with a social problem, you create a pecuniary interest in having more of that social problem, or at least the appearance of it.
For example, back in the days when the Poor Law was administered at the parish level in England there was a system of private coaches that was used to transport indigent people back to their home parish. This immediately resulted in a scam whereby poor people colluded with coachmen by declaring themselves to be indigent and from a distant parish, and then splitting the prescribed fee with the coaching company.
These kinds of scams are incredibly common throughout history, and anyone creating policy for such government services ought to be aware of that, unless they are wilfully dedicated to remaining ignorant of any and all empirical facts that are relevant to doing their job.
Most people are missing the point of this.
I wonder if the headline being a typically stupid /. falsehood might have something to with that.
Yeah, typical /. headline: so misleading that you have to read the article to figure out what they're talking about, and 90% of the discussion is focused on either annoyance about or misapprehension of the false headline.
There's a story below that has a headline about the odds of finding an Earth-like planet within a few dozen lightyears of Earth, but I'm pretty sure the actual story is about a new way to bake pastry. With a /. headline, why would anyone assume otherwise?
Thanks for making this point--I was scanning the thread to see if I was going to have to make it (again) myself.
Every proprietary app uses its own unique license. There are thousands, possibly tens of thousands of them. Anyone who says, "There are too many open source licenses, I'm so confused, I can't handle it, let's buy from Microsoft" is either an idiot or hiding an ulterior motive the size of as small spacecraft. Maybe even a large one.
It also says the change is not permanent - it only lasts a few months. I didn't notice any mention of whether the mother rat still functions at a high level when she's pregnant. If she does, the change could be due to the environment in utero, which would be consistent with the effect fading over time.
All of which makes the use of the term "inheritable" misleading to the point of being wrong, in a typical sensationalist /. headline that is not at all justified by the article. There have been minor violations of the central dogma known for decades, mostly in bacteria but more recently in other organisms, in which environmental conditions trigger pathways that result in alternations in DNA which can be inherited by offspring and, like all inheritable characteristics, then passed on to the next generation after that and so on.
However, "an effect on the parent that results in an effect on the first few months of life of the first generation of descendants" is not "inheritance" in the usual biological sense of the term. The "inheritance" being described here is more plausibly explained as a change in the biochemical environment of the mother's body that results in the same kind of "inheritance" that one sees in some babies born to crack addicts.
This is entirely different from Lamarkian theory, which posited true, multi-generational inheritance of acquired characteristics, and which IS observed in cases where the genetic material of inheritance (which includes but is not limited to DNA) is altered by the organism's evolved biochemical response to the environment.
Let's face it -- ANY comment made online could be considered actionable!
Only if you're an idiot, ignorant of law and incapable of acts of discrimination that ordinary people perform every single day without confusion or undue difficulty.
There are well-known, well-developed legal standards as to what is and is not actionable. Truth, for example, is a defence. Stating an opinion is in many cases adequate defence, rather than stating a fact. If you can't distinguish between those please consult a psychologist.
Finally: your last example doesn't make any sense. What is wrong with being a faggot?
I'm sure that will be a great comfort to the people who are subject to identity theft because of this breach.
Today there is no supersonic passenger aircraft in service.
The economics of supersonic flight suck, although it wasn't apparent at the time.
I've read accounts that suggest the 747's raised flight deck was designed that way because it was assumed the primary purpose of the aircraft would be cargo hauling, and they wanted access to the full diameter of the fuselage without hinging the nose, as is often done in cargo aircraft. The reason why cargo was targeted was because everyone believed that supersonics were going to own the passenger transport market "once a few bugs were worked out."
It turns out those bugs--noise, engine sizing and fuel efficiency--are pretty difficult to work around, and cutting an five hour flight to two and a half hours isn't such a big deal when the time spent getting into and out of the airport are added in. It's more like cutting an eight hour experience to a five or six hour one. Not worth the price.
The Sandinista regime in Nicaragua was aligned with Moscow and Havana which was unacceptable to most people in the US.
So what? I mean really, if one wanted to encase American Arrogance in amber and preserve it for posterity one could hardly do better than this statement.
There's this concept called "national sovereignty" that says the internal affairs of one nation are no business of any other. It is frequently violated in this crazy world of ours, and never so often as by the United States.
That anyone would put forward "this was unacceptable to many Americans" as if it were any kind of justification for the deliberate destablization of a sovereign power by funding murderous brigands is terrifying.
What did I get wrong here?
You didn't get anything wrong. Wind power advocates routinely give peak production capacity as if it was actual production capacity, which is typically 20 - 25% of maximum capacity due to variable winds.
Divide any claims about wind power production by four, or five if you're feeling ungenerous.
Unlike nuclear power or hydro or coal, which all produce 90% or more of their maximum capacity for the lifetime of the plant, wind power produces at most 25% on average, and therefore it is dishonest to compare "installed but not used" wind capacity to "installed and used" non-wind capacity. It's as if someone built three or four extra generators beside a hydro dam and then claimed that we should count the capacity of those generators, even though they aren't connected to anything.
From an engineering point of view peak capacity matters a lot. From a social value point of view average capacity is the only thing that matters, and yet for some reason wind power advocates continue to spout misleading peak capacity numbers.
Solar power advocates typically are a bit clearer about this stuff. Dunno what's wrong with the wind people.
Its called the Anthropic Principle, and it can explain a number of things.
The Anthropic Principle can only answer questions like, "Why is the universe suited to human life?" Whether the answer constitutes an "explanation" to the non-brain-damaged human is something that is seriously debated by clever people. In any case it has exactly nothing to say about questions like, "Why is intelligence so rare?"
We have been "watching" the evolution of life on Earth for its entire span, and never once in all that time has anything remotely resembling the kind of intelligence that builds complex machines evolved, whereas other complex systems such as wings, fins and eyes have evolved many, many times.
Why you think the Anthropic Principle or anything like it has any bearing on the relative probability of the evolution of intelligence vs the evolution of eyes is entirely unclear, as our presence simply guarantees that there will be at least one intelligent species about, and puts no limits on the other intelligences or proto-intelligences one might expect to find if the evolution of intelligence weren't orders of magnitude less probable than the evolution of eyes etc.
Your comment doesn't quite win the Weirdest /. Response of the Week, but the judges would like to know that they appreciate the sincerity of your effort.
So you have two entangled streams going in different directions, start interfering with one, and whoever is observing the other will notice it.
Which QM predicts does not happen, if you do the quantum mechanics right. I once got very excited back in the '80's thinking I'd discovered a way to do this, but it turns out I'd made an error in the Dirac algebra that fortunately I found before I told anyone else about it.
The link you supply is to an experiment being done by someone who made the same error I did, and didn't catch it. Or did catch it, and figured it would be a fun way to test certain aspects of QM, which is always worthwhile. In any case, what the experiment is testing is NOT "possible in theory" if the theory is QM, which the best theory we have at the moment.
If the experiment shows that QM is false then we will need a better theory, but there are very good reasons to believe that will not happen.
The 1,000 year thing seems like the weak point of this theory.
Actually, the estimate of the probability of the kind of intelligence that makes complex machines is a bigger problem, and a plausible solution to the paradox.
We have ample evidence that if a thing is possible at all, evolution will reproduce it many times. Wings, fins, eyes... all of these optima have been found many times, across genera and families and whatnot. By one estimate the eye has evolved independently a couple of dozen times, based on the proteins used in the retinal structure.
There was an article here on /. a while back pointing out that two birds previously believed to be related were the result of convergent evolution. Evolution finds the same optima over and over again.
The kind of intelligence that makes complex machines has evolved on Earth exactly once, and that is the only kind that is of interest in Fermi's Paradox.
Furthermore, the current best guess at the evolutionary driver of kind of intelligence that makes complex machines is that it's a peacock's tail, and extravagant sexual display that had relatively little utility outside of attracting a mate or two. Therefore the whole "making complex machines" aspect of our intelligence is more-or-less an accident, not the result of direct selective pressure at all.
Men are very slightly better at some spacial reasoning than women because we hunted more, maybe, but that very slight difference is a measure of how little practical, non-sexual, selective pressure their actually was.
So based on what we know at the moment about the kind of intelligence that makes complex machines it seems likely that the resolution to Fermi's Paradox is that it is unbelievably rare. We may well be the only species to have such an intelligence in our galaxy, although even I have a hard time believing we're the only one in the universe. It could be, though.
No, we don't like Ayers because he tried to BOMB GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
You know, even though I am a Microsoft basher I must say that at least Gates is big enough to realize that he was wrong/made a mistake.
I was impressed with this as well. It is such a clear example of rational, scientific, empiricist thinking, and in such stunning contrast to the usual faith-based drivel we hear when people start talking about schools. Even (perhaps especially) non-religious folks seem to have certain fixed ideas about what MUST work in a school, and are completely incapable of bringing data that contradict their faith into their sphere of awareness.
My kids went to private schools up until grade 8, and it was clear from the background study I did in choosing a school that we know perfectly well how to educated kids, and that any time anyone sets out to educate kids they are able to do so (google 'montessori' for one of the known ways to educate kids of all backgrounds with far higher success rates than is common in modern public schools.)
But if you point out the known techniques, including things like the Sudbury Schools and other free school movements, to any of the faithful you'll get a loud earful of purported reasons why such things "can't" work. Even though they do.
We have to stop listening to people mired in pre-Enlightenment, anti-scientific, anti-empirical belief systems, and start basing our actions on things that are known empirically to be effective: non-violence over violence, reason over faith, education over ideology.
Gates is providing an example of what it looks like when a person does this. More power to him.
Also, don't blame journalists
In the past I've actually been far harder on scientists than journalists with regard to the use of "teleportation" as a term of art, which I consider to be misleading to the point of dishonesty.
But I have also seen too many cases where scientists have done their best to describe their work in fair terms only to see journalists (or their editors) mangle the resulting story almost beyond recognition. A colleague once came into work and said, "There were five stories in the science section of the L.A. Times this weekend. Four of them were on work I am personally familiar with. Three of those were unrecognizable--I only knew it was the work of X, Y or Z because their names were mentioned. The fourth was recognizable but distorted to the point of being meaningless." This is NOT SCIENTIST'S FAULT. Journalists, by trying to "spice things up" are in fact distorting the truth, which can be presented in a competent and interesting way without making a mess of it.
Of course this will cause the advert model to crumble
The major product that advertising sells is advertising, and it does so by creating a belief in advertising's efficacy. One of the reasons why the Web is such a hard ad market is that it is so easy to measure the outcomes of ad placements via click-throughs. Now that online ad revenue is tanking expect to see more people arguing that click-throughs are a bad measure of ad performance, but I think the cat is too far out of the bag for the lying bastards... pardon me, ad execs... to recover.
The first response of ad purchasers to reactive ads of this type is to see how few people ever bother to look at what their ad is showing. The second response should be that every ad everywhere should feature a mostly naked woman and/or man, as that is all that anyone of either sex will look at.