Actually, no. The paper manuscript or the digital file belongs to you. The content, i.e., the copyright, belongs to the letter writer. If you publish a letter or email (or even show it to someone else), the letter sender can sue you for copyright violation. Granted, there are fair use exceptions, but you cannot publish, in whole or in substantial part, any letter you receive without the author's permission. http://www.publaw.com/biography.html
When a bacteria gets in your bloodstream your don't consciously perceive it, but still your brains sends those white cells to the battle. So there you have a brain connection to reality that conscious can't perceive.
In addition, this process was undocumented & "unknown" for almost all know human history, but it always existed. How many brain processes do you think are still undocumented & unmeasured - but exist?
The brain is not involved in immune responses.
As for your second point, who cares what scientists didn't know centuries ago? We know a great deal right now!
For brain science: V.S. Ramachandran. He works with the weirdest neurological disorders. Phantom limbs, split brains, and people who feel that they have one limb too many.
Not being pedantic really helps one to not be ignored. You could have read GP's comment as {less stupid} people instead of less {stupid people}. Or, you could realize that there is no lack of precision in GP's post. See: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html
And finally, just to annoy you some more, there's a split infinitive in the first sentence of this post.
You've missed the point. Ads like these aren't aiming for clarity. It's about feeling and emotional response. All of nine-times' comments are about things that the viewer should only be thinking about subconsciously.
If the majority of people can dissect an ad in this way, then the ad is a failure.
Ubuntu's Update Manager handles the updates for all applications, including Firefox. The apt repositories are generally a day behind the official releases.
Re:Not CMYK, Something Simpler
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Those are some awful, needlessly complicated directions directions for drawing a circle.
1) Use the ellipse drawing tool while holding down Shift to define the circle. 2) Under the Select menu, choose "To Path" 3) Under the Edit menu choose "Stroke Path..." where you can define line width, brush style, etc.
You could replace steps 2 and 3 with Edit -> Stroke Selection, but converting to a path results in a smoother line.
Still to complex? You only need to get the location and size of the circle right once. Then you can experiment with line, color, etc. with the stroke menu.
These elements aren't useful in the commercial or industrial sense. At the moment, only a handful of atoms can be created at a time.
The creation of these elements is more useful for testing our theories of the structure of the nucleus (finding the Island of Stability) and of the periodicity of the chemical elements (if the chemical properties of these rather unnatural elements correspond to their positions on the Periodic Table).
Of course consensus is not proof. NOTHING is proof in science. There is only evidence from observation and experiment. If Theory A has more supporting evidence than Theory B, then Theory B is discarded in favor of Theory A. No disclaimers needed. Who cares what anyone believes? Ask what evidence they have.
It is illogical to conclude anything about religion or spirituality from evolution. You say the soul is superfluous. As far as evolution and the rest of science is concerned, so is art, literature, philosophy, politics, friendship, and all the other illogical things we do that have no survival value, but which lend value to survival.
As for chemical evolution, this makes no sense as most chemicals do not reproduce, do not have heritable traits, and do not mutate. Hydrogen is the most abundant substance in the universe (leaving dark matter and energy aside for a moment). So, it should be the most "fit" according to chemical evolution, but this is nonsense. Those atoms form spontaneously from the union of protons and electrons and are not subject to population dynamics of living organisms. Biology is not merely complicated chemistry. Abiogenetic researchers seek those chemicals which could have been the first to act like life and the processes that gave rise to those chemicals. In effect, these researchers are examining the border between chemistry and biology.
Is there really a well-defined line between living and non-living things?
Not really. Viruses are borderline, but to those who study them, that distinction is rather academic. Anyway, I guess it depends on whether you consider a molecule that catalyzes the formation of other molecules like it to be alive.
Evolution also explains the creation of "life" from "non-life".
No, it doesn't. Abiogenesis seeks to explain the emergence of life from non-life and is still largely hypothetical in its details, though experiments are forthcoming to test these hypotheses.
even evolutionists kind of hold back when they argue with creationists because they know that getting the general public to go with the idea of there being no "soul" is impossible.
Only an ignorant asshole would say that science "proves" that there is no such thing as a soul. The concept of a soul is as much outside the purview of science as economics is outside the scope of evolution. In fact, creationists try to make this same link in order to scare Christians into believing that evolution contradicts God. I think the people who wrote this letter and the 10,000 undersigned clergy would agree with me.
This I cannot do as there are no theories of abiogenesis (life from non-life) at the moment. The origin of life is a very open question, with lots of hypotheses being thrown around. From what I read in popular science magazines, experiments to test various ideas are only a decade or two away and biologists seem optimistic, though I can't be sure as I am a physicist.
This is as good a source as I can come up with at the moment.
I'd like an answer to such things as to how inorganic matter became living or even how matter came to exist in the first place. I'm pretty sure evolution can't answer these questions. And if it can't, it really is not a general theory of the origins of life but just a way to explain specific biological processes.
This is absolutely correct. Evolution is a theory of speciation (the emergence of species from other species), not of origins.
Theories of Abiogenesis (life emerging from non-life) I've heard are within a decade or two of being experimentally tested. I'm a physicist by training and don't know the details, but from what I've read in popular science magazines, biologists are optimistic.
You are right in everything you say except for the word 'absolute'. Absolute implies a universal coordinate system that can be used to locate everything in the universe like a huge-scale set of axes.
In your example, you are right that the truck's velocity does not slow down the train, but you still implicitly define the train's velocity with respect to the railroad tracks. The truck can be just as valid a reference point as long as it travels at a constant velocity. Train A is moving westward of the truck at 10mph and Train B is moving westward of the truck at 160mph. An observer on the truck still calculates the distance between the trains to be increasing at the difference of their velocities--150mph--just like someone standing on the ground. Thus, this is no less valid a coordinate system (even if it does specify that the tracks move at 85mph westward of the truck). It is only by definition that the tracks are assigned a velocity of zero so that you can say that the trains move at 75mph past them. It is an extremely convenient--one might even say natural--definition, but arbitrary nonetheless.
That arbitrariness is relativity at its most basic. This is why, in TFA, it is ambiguous (if not nonsensical) to talk about a mass travelling at.577c. There is no absolute coordinate system by which to measure this speed, only convenient local ones. Since we are talking about interstellar near light-speed travel, there are no convenient reference points (no tracks or ground or planets). All we can talk about is the relative velocity of different observers as they are related by Lorentz transformations (relativistic relationships between observers moving at different velocities). By this reasoning, it would seem that only objects that see the mass approaching at >.577c would feel this repulsion. If the ship flew in front of the repulsive mass, the relative velocity between the ship and the mass would be less than that critical velocity, and no force would be felt. This is why some have asked ".557c with respect to what?"
Relative to it's fixed point of ORIGIN a photon travels at C
Relative to *any* observer, a photon travels at c. This is one of the fundamental postulates of Einstein's General Relativity theory and confirmed by experiment (specifically, the Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment). Since every observer will observe photons travelling at c relative to themselves irrespective of the observer's velocity, it is impossible to determine a fixed point of origin that all observers will agree on. Thus, the only way to measure velocity is relative to something else which is *defined* as fixed.
If someone invents a space ship capable of travelling at 0.57c, and it does so, then that is its speed.
It is nonsensical to talk about a spaceship with a maximum speed. It's engines have a maximum power output, and thus a maximum acceleration, but once it reaches 0.57c (or any arbitrary velocity), all it has to do to maintain that velocity is switch off it's engines. The design of the ship is rather irrelevant since it can always increase it's velocity if it has fuel. Then again, in interstellar space, with no reference points, it is impossible to determine your velocity in the first place. You may say that velocity = acceleration * time, but then you have to pick a point at which your velocity was zero. Earth may be convenient, or the sun for farther distances. This choice for the point of origin is arbitrary and either one leads to different conclusions about what your "true" velocity is since the Earth moves with respect to the sun.
Hypothetical sitation: Due to some catastrophic coincidence, both of us get thrown from different spaceships when they both explode and we happen to be propelled towards one another. Being an inquisitive astronaut, you wonder how fast I'm travelling through space. You pull out the radar gun you happen to be holding and point it at me. You measure my velocity to be 250mph.
Coincidentally, I also happen to be carrying a radar gun and I, also an inquisite astronaut, point it at you to find out how fast you're going. I measure your velocity to be 250mph.
Question: Who's right? The distance between us is closing at a rate of 250mph, but how do you determine who is actually moving? Are we both moving at 125mph? Does it matter? Relativity (all versions from Galileo's to Einstein's) says no.
You are right that an objects speed does not change due to the motion of another object. But, no two observers will agree on what that speed actually is. This is the problem with Dr. Felber's conclusions.
From TFA:
Felber's research shows that any mass moving faster than 57.7 percent of the speed of light will gravitationally repel other masses lying within a narrow 'antigravity beam' in front of it. The closer a mass gets to the speed of light, the stronger its 'antigravity beam' becomes.
Let's say we're watching three objects: (1) The mass travelling at.577c (2) a mass we measure to have zero velocity in the path of mass 1 and (3) a mass also in the path of mass 1 but travelling at.577c in the same direction as mass 1. If Dr. Felber is right, then both mass 2 and mass 3 should be repelled by the oncoming mass 1. Now think of an observer on mass 2. He sees the oncoming mass 1 approaching him at.577c and, believing Dr. Felber, would expect to feel a repulsion from it. No problem here. Now imagine a final observer on mass 3. She would measure the velocity of mass 1 to be zero and thus would not expect to feel any repulsive force. In fact, she would expect to be drawn to mass 1 due to normal gravitational attraction.
Thus, we have a contradiction: Dr. Felber would predict that masses 1 and 3 should get further apart, but the observer on mass 3 would expect to get closer to mass 1. Both cannot be right.
This problem may be due to sloppy wording in the article, but as it stands, it shouldn't work.
You're right, there is a difference between speed and relative speed, namely, that speed as you define it does not exist. The whole point of relativity--even going as far back as Galilean relativity--is that there is that the only way to measure speed is to compare it with something else. Your car's speedometer says 75mph because you are travelling 75mph with respect to the ground. Speed is not an inherent property of an object. The earth moves at a certain speed with respect to the sun, another with respect to the center of the galaxy, and another with respect to the Andromeda Galaxy.
There is NO SUCH THING as "Proof" in science, or real life for that matter. Proofs only exist in mathematics where everyone agrees on the postulates. This is not the case any where else. We can only say what is likely or impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no. The paper manuscript or the digital file belongs to you. The content, i.e., the copyright, belongs to the letter writer. If you publish a letter or email (or even show it to someone else), the letter sender can sue you for copyright violation. Granted, there are fair use exceptions, but you cannot publish, in whole or in substantial part, any letter you receive without the author's permission. http://www.publaw.com/biography.html
When a bacteria gets in your bloodstream your don't consciously perceive it, but still your brains sends those white cells to the battle. So there you have a brain connection to reality that conscious can't perceive.
In addition, this process was undocumented & "unknown" for almost all know human history, but it always existed. How many brain processes do you think are still undocumented & unmeasured - but exist?
The brain is not involved in immune responses.
As for your second point, who cares what scientists didn't know centuries ago? We know a great deal right now!
For physics and astronomy, nobody better demonstrates the excitement to be found in science than Neil deGrasse Tyson.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ai-VvboPnA
For brain science: V.S. Ramachandran. He works with the weirdest neurological disorders. Phantom limbs, split brains, and people who feel that they have one limb too many.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl2LwnaUA-k
Not being pedantic really helps one to not be ignored. You could have read GP's comment as {less stupid} people instead of less {stupid people}. Or, you could realize that there is no lack of precision in GP's post. See: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html
And finally, just to annoy you some more, there's a split infinitive in the first sentence of this post.
You've missed the point. Ads like these aren't aiming for clarity. It's about feeling and emotional response. All of nine-times' comments are about things that the viewer should only be thinking about subconsciously.
If the majority of people can dissect an ad in this way, then the ad is a failure.
Ubuntu's Update Manager handles the updates for all applications, including Firefox. The apt repositories are generally a day behind the official releases.
Those are some awful, needlessly complicated directions directions for drawing a circle.
1) Use the ellipse drawing tool while holding down Shift to define the circle.
2) Under the Select menu, choose "To Path"
3) Under the Edit menu choose "Stroke Path..." where you can define line width, brush style, etc.
You could replace steps 2 and 3 with Edit -> Stroke Selection, but converting to a path results in a smoother line.
Still to complex? You only need to get the location and size of the circle right once. Then you can experiment with line, color, etc. with the stroke menu.
Don't know. I found it useful for about 20 seconds then uninstalled it.
I'll just use rot13.com
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q= rot13&status=4
And scientific "research" is different how?
Other than the guns, I mean. Usually.
These elements aren't useful in the commercial or industrial sense. At the moment, only a handful of atoms can be created at a time.
The creation of these elements is more useful for testing our theories of the structure of the nucleus (finding the Island of Stability) and of the periodicity of the chemical elements (if the chemical properties of these rather unnatural elements correspond to their positions on the Periodic Table).
Sorry, you're wrong. The gravitational force due to a hollow sphere is exactly zero everywhere inside that sphere.
Proof
Great, now men will be even more adamant about not asking for directions.
..." *waves hand around* "... that way!"
"Dammit! I know where we are! We just need to head north, which is
Third Base!
consensus is NOT proof
Of course consensus is not proof. NOTHING is proof in science. There is only evidence from observation and experiment. If Theory A has more supporting evidence than Theory B, then Theory B is discarded in favor of Theory A. No disclaimers needed. Who cares what anyone believes? Ask what evidence they have.
If you want proofs, go study math.
It is illogical to conclude anything about religion or spirituality from evolution. You say the soul is superfluous. As far as evolution and the rest of science is concerned, so is art, literature, philosophy, politics, friendship, and all the other illogical things we do that have no survival value, but which lend value to survival.
As for chemical evolution, this makes no sense as most chemicals do not reproduce, do not have heritable traits, and do not mutate. Hydrogen is the most abundant substance in the universe (leaving dark matter and energy aside for a moment). So, it should be the most "fit" according to chemical evolution, but this is nonsense. Those atoms form spontaneously from the union of protons and electrons and are not subject to population dynamics of living organisms. Biology is not merely complicated chemistry. Abiogenetic researchers seek those chemicals which could have been the first to act like life and the processes that gave rise to those chemicals. In effect, these researchers are examining the border between chemistry and biology.
Is there really a well-defined line between living and non-living things?
Not really. Viruses are borderline, but to those who study them, that distinction is rather academic. Anyway, I guess it depends on whether you consider a molecule that catalyzes the formation of other molecules like it to be alive.
Evolution also explains the creation of "life" from "non-life".
No, it doesn't. Abiogenesis seeks to explain the emergence of life from non-life and is still largely hypothetical in its details, though experiments are forthcoming to test these hypotheses.
even evolutionists kind of hold back when they argue with creationists because they know that getting the general public to go with the idea of there being no "soul" is impossible.
Only an ignorant asshole would say that science "proves" that there is no such thing as a soul. The concept of a soul is as much outside the purview of science as economics is outside the scope of evolution. In fact, creationists try to make this same link in order to scare Christians into believing that evolution contradicts God. I think the people who wrote this letter and the 10,000 undersigned clergy would agree with me.
Nothing but FUD and I'm getting sick of it.
This I cannot do as there are no theories of abiogenesis (life from non-life) at the moment. The origin of life is a very open question, with lots of hypotheses being thrown around. From what I read in popular science magazines, experiments to test various ideas are only a decade or two away and biologists seem optimistic, though I can't be sure as I am a physicist.
This is as good a source as I can come up with at the moment.
Two rebuttals:
bacterial flagellum
blood clotting
However, rebutting each claim of irreducible complexity is rather pointless since irreducible complexity can arise from evolution!
I'd like an answer to such things as to how inorganic matter became living or even how matter came to exist in the first place. I'm pretty sure evolution can't answer these questions. And if it can't, it really is not a general theory of the origins of life but just a way to explain specific biological processes.
This is absolutely correct. Evolution is a theory of speciation (the emergence of species from other species), not of origins.
Theories of Abiogenesis (life emerging from non-life) I've heard are within a decade or two of being experimentally tested. I'm a physicist by training and don't know the details, but from what I've read in popular science magazines, biologists are optimistic.
You are right in everything you say except for the word 'absolute'. Absolute implies a universal coordinate system that can be used to locate everything in the universe like a huge-scale set of axes.
.577c. There is no absolute coordinate system by which to measure this speed, only convenient local ones. Since we are talking about interstellar near light-speed travel, there are no convenient reference points (no tracks or ground or planets). All we can talk about is the relative velocity of different observers as they are related by Lorentz transformations (relativistic relationships between observers moving at different velocities). By this reasoning, it would seem that only objects that see the mass approaching at >.577c would feel this repulsion. If the ship flew in front of the repulsive mass, the relative velocity between the ship and the mass would be less than that critical velocity, and no force would be felt. This is why some have asked ".557c with respect to what?"
In your example, you are right that the truck's velocity does not slow down the train, but you still implicitly define the train's velocity with respect to the railroad tracks. The truck can be just as valid a reference point as long as it travels at a constant velocity. Train A is moving westward of the truck at 10mph and Train B is moving westward of the truck at 160mph. An observer on the truck still calculates the distance between the trains to be increasing at the difference of their velocities--150mph--just like someone standing on the ground. Thus, this is no less valid a coordinate system (even if it does specify that the tracks move at 85mph westward of the truck). It is only by definition that the tracks are assigned a velocity of zero so that you can say that the trains move at 75mph past them. It is an extremely convenient--one might even say natural--definition, but arbitrary nonetheless.
That arbitrariness is relativity at its most basic. This is why, in TFA, it is ambiguous (if not nonsensical) to talk about a mass travelling at
Relative to it's fixed point of ORIGIN a photon travels at C
Relative to *any* observer, a photon travels at c. This is one of the fundamental postulates of Einstein's General Relativity theory and confirmed by experiment (specifically, the Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment). Since every observer will observe photons travelling at c relative to themselves irrespective of the observer's velocity, it is impossible to determine a fixed point of origin that all observers will agree on. Thus, the only way to measure velocity is relative to something else which is *defined* as fixed.
It is nonsensical to talk about a spaceship with a maximum speed. It's engines have a maximum power output, and thus a maximum acceleration, but once it reaches 0.57c (or any arbitrary velocity), all it has to do to maintain that velocity is switch off it's engines. The design of the ship is rather irrelevant since it can always increase it's velocity if it has fuel. Then again, in interstellar space, with no reference points, it is impossible to determine your velocity in the first place. You may say that velocity = acceleration * time, but then you have to pick a point at which your velocity was zero. Earth may be convenient, or the sun for farther distances. This choice for the point of origin is arbitrary and either one leads to different conclusions about what your "true" velocity is since the Earth moves with respect to the sun.
Hypothetical sitation: Due to some catastrophic coincidence, both of us get thrown from different spaceships when they both explode and we happen to be propelled towards one another. Being an inquisitive astronaut, you wonder how fast I'm travelling through space. You pull out the radar gun you happen to be holding and point it at me. You measure my velocity to be 250mph.
Coincidentally, I also happen to be carrying a radar gun and I, also an inquisite astronaut, point it at you to find out how fast you're going. I measure your velocity to be 250mph.
Question: Who's right? The distance between us is closing at a rate of 250mph, but how do you determine who is actually moving? Are we both moving at 125mph? Does it matter? Relativity (all versions from Galileo's to Einstein's) says no.
You are right that an objects speed does not change due to the motion of another object. But, no two observers will agree on what that speed actually is. This is the problem with Dr. Felber's conclusions.
From TFA:
Let's say we're watching three objects: (1) The mass travelling at
Thus, we have a contradiction: Dr. Felber would predict that masses 1 and 3 should get further apart, but the observer on mass 3 would expect to get closer to mass 1. Both cannot be right.
This problem may be due to sloppy wording in the article, but as it stands, it shouldn't work.
You're right, there is a difference between speed and relative speed, namely, that speed as you define it does not exist. The whole point of relativity--even going as far back as Galilean relativity--is that there is that the only way to measure speed is to compare it with something else. Your car's speedometer says 75mph because you are travelling 75mph with respect to the ground. Speed is not an inherent property of an object. The earth moves at a certain speed with respect to the sun, another with respect to the center of the galaxy, and another with respect to the Andromeda Galaxy.
There is NO SUCH THING as "Proof" in science, or real life for that matter. Proofs only exist in mathematics where everyone agrees on the postulates. This is not the case any where else. We can only say what is likely or impossible.
Prove the Earth existed before you were born.