As a final note, if you're a guy, your job while dancing is to make *her* look good.
Nope. Your job is to make an interesting story out of the music and have a good dialogue with your partner about it.
That's an AND not an OR! Making an interesting story, and having a dialogue ARE making her look good.
If she needs you to look good, something is very, very wrong with her balance.
Read up about balance in the judging guidelines. First and foremost, both partners must be balanced on their own. Then, the couple must be able to interact with each other in a balanced manner, and use this to express themselves better.
Dude, there is so much more to "making her look good" than keeping her balanced. You have to engage her, engage the audience to focus on her, craft the moves to frame her doing what you're leading her to do, and make sure she has fun so that she *does* look good. Her balance is her own problem. Not unbalancing her is one of yours.
Sure, I agree, if you redefine "communicate" to mean "convince a non-expert audience using means other than demonstrating a pattern, inference, or deduction concerning observations of the natural world". Any expert at that subset of communication is going to beat someone whose primary expertise is elsewhere - be that second person a scientist, a sports person, an artist, an accountant or whatever. Equally, the scientist is going to be much better able to convince a competent-or-better scientifically-literate audience than someone whose expertise is demagoguery or deception.
Both of those are a long way from "scientists can't communicate anything to anyone":-)
Exactly opposite. What I'm saying is that organizing different kinds of knowledge for the purposes of communications is a discipline in and of itself and frankly, it's the job of writers and they've all bailed. Scientists famously can't communicate anything to anyone, even each other, that's why the emphasis is on experiment.
Get off it... scientists stereotypically can't communicate with anyone - which is the impression you'd have if your only contact with them was cartoons for grade-school kids.
Communication is intrinsic to the scientific method. You have to make observations, hypothesize, test, rework the hypothesis, find it proved, and to actually get paid you have to publish. That's right - communicate. The work's of no value if you don't.
Even further, there are quite few disciplines left where one individual can do useful work in isolation. There are quite a few areas in biology where any worthwhile discovery will have dozens of names on the journal article. Can you really suppose none of them communicated with each other?:-)
Look at what we have today : A drooling stinkoid shows up babbling about a ton of equations is nothing, but, then he shoots a dog, gives it a needle and it comes back to life. The scientist apologizes that you might have to change the brand of dog food because bringing them back from the dead alters some [insert physics here] and therefor, they must eat Alpo instead of Dog Chow.
Now, a good salesman will look at that, and say "you know, that's a decent piece of work but that Alpo issue is going to make it harder, but, if you can agree to say, 20%, I can sell it if I get to keep 80%. You know, I'll go and be in front of all the people and get them to give us money..." and the scientist says, "my god, people", and says, "you know, I feel bad about the Alpo thing and if you sell it I'll be happy with 17%"...
Cartoons anyone?:-)
But I digress...the moral of the story is, the taxonomy of human scientific knowledge is so screwed up that not even scientists themselves can assess the value of their work.... it's just, the organization of our knowledge is draining everything, its not the job of scientists to do, its the job of writers.
The taxonomy is fine - and changing it wouldn't serve a real purpose. The applicability of the taxonomy to describe the work people are doing is more often in question these days. As we know and learn more, you can effectively work on the cross-disciplinary boundaries in a way that you couldn't do back when physics was physics and everything else was stamp-collecting.
I should know - for my PhD I'm doing simulations on chemical molecules, but they're prion proteins (so there's wads of biochemistry and medical science to manage). The calculations are frigging expensive, so I have to be on top of the mathematical algorithms and physical models being used, and they have to be effectively implemented on a high-performance computer using well-optimized code. Try doing that 50 years ago!
I'm a grad student in molecular dynamics, and I know Klaus, his code and his work. While you do want good scaling performance with respect to the number of processors, that's not a useful measure of the quality of the implementation compared with other programs. Total throughput of a given system on a given number of processors is a much better indicator. Why? Well if I write code that sucks on one processor, but which gets less-sucky fast when I add more processors to the problem (why this can happen is a technical thing), then my scaling is going to look pretty damn fine. It's still missing the point where you want each processor working optimally to maximise throughput. GROMACS (www.gromacs.org) is widely regarded as the fastest molecular dynamics code because of its heavy use of assembler-optimized inner loops. The glue is written in C, and this is comparable with NAMD's C++. The parallel decomposition is not the rate-limiting step in parallel MD - it's still heavily compute-bound, and that's where GROMACS still wins.
A company like Sun or IBM eventually does get paid to make a fast computer... the body that won the grant just gets the right to make the nuts and bolts decisions about what sort of computer, how big, where it lives, etc. They're the one with the experts on these topics on their payroll, not the granting agency or the manufacturers.
The reason there's a big grant up for grabs is that the sort of work that gets done on these machines is all paid for through government research grants. For buying computers, rather than parcel out a million bucks here and there to indivdual researchers (whose primary expertise is doing their research, not maintaining computing facilities), they opt for funding several large central computing resources and tell researchers to apply for time there. A decentralized high-performance computing model sucks because if one machine is sitting empty for whatever reason, other people can't jump in and use the valuable CPU cycles. On a central machine, they can, and the issue is how to resolve scheduling issues to give everyone a fair go:-)
"see if the modified second law works for a very small absolute acceleration"
The whole point of Galilean relativity is that there is no sense in which you can measure an absolute acceleration. All you can do is measure one relative to a frame of reference.
Well if it were a diagnostic process, then that might make some sense.
The problem with radiation therapy is that you are trying to hurt the patient. In the case of a cancer treatment, you are just trying to kill the cancer faster than you kill the patient.
Additionally, there is no such thing as a uniformly non-lethal dose. It's critically dependent on the age of the patient, type of tissue involved, type of (for example) cancer and the type of radiation involved. Making this type of judgement is one reason doctors get the big bucks. It's similar to the reason anestheologists get bigger bucks... they are pretending to kill you for a bit!
You are right if Monty was showing you a random door, and he happened to get a goat, but he is not. He is always showing you a goat because he knows what is where.
When you chose a goat, Monty's choice is restricted to the door he showed you.
When you chose the car, Monty could have shown you either door, but he'd only show you the one he did show you half of the time.
Thus after you make your choice, you'd only see Monty choose the door he chose half the time if you were already right, and all the time if you should switch. Thus 2:1 in favour of switching.
The fact is, each salesman initially lays out $10. Thus there is $30 in existence.
Yup
Fact 2, each man recieves $1 back in to their pockets. $9.00 x 3 = $27.
Yup
Fact 3, the bellhop has 2 dollars in his pocket.
Yup
$27 + $2 = $29.
Yup, but irrelevant.
Looking at this in any manner of math you want, it is indisputable that there was initially $30 and one dollar seems to have dissapeared.
I dispute this. The hotel has kept $25, the men have kept $1 and the bellboy has kept $2. Total is $30.
The other way to look at this is that the men paid $9 each for the room, and the bellboy paid -$2 for the room, which when added, totals $25 which is the cost of the room.
The trick is that 27+2 is irrelevant - 27-2 is relevant.
The lowest point on the Earth's surface is in the Marianas Trench, which is much deeper (2x maybe 3x?) below sea level than Everest is higher than sea level. That starts making Everest comparable with the Martian hills.
As a 13-year-old I noticed that a heavy majority of French nouns ending in "e" were feminine and a heavy majority of those not ending in "e" were masculine. There are plenty of exceptions, but this will get you a long, long way down the track.
I'm doing a PhD on structure of the disorderd part of the normal form of human prion protein.
Infectious prion particles are amalgamations of all sorts of gunk, but a chief component is a structural isoform of the normal cellular prion protein. That means a form of the protein that has a fundamentally different structure. A protein that has multiple different structures is basically not observed anywhere else, which makes them weird to start with. It also turns out the the form has the property that it is able to promote the transformation from the normal form to the abnormal form. Hence, the description of the abnormal form as "autocatalytic". There is no genetic information involved here, beyond the normal cells continuing to make the normal form because they keep thinking they need more when it keeps disappearing. Stanley Prusiner got the Nobel Prize in 1997 for three decades of work proving the so-called "prion hypothesis" that these diseases were caused by infectious protein particles from which DNA & RNA were absent.
Viruses are genetic information packaged up inside a protein case. That genetic information hijacks a normal cell, and forces it to make more viruses.
Totally different and about as related as a go-kart and a 747.
Off the top of my head, nanotubes would have about the same relationship to graphite that a cylinder has to an large plane. Bucky-balls to graphite is definitely like a sphere to an large plane.
As a chemist, I'd expect that the reason compressing bucky-balls can produce nanotubes is that the kinetics of the process is going to be restricted by the initial C^60 configurations. It would seem that adjacent C^60 groups can go to a C^120 tube under cunningly chosen conditions. It isn't that there's anything magical about C^60!
It's made of the same stuff as diamond - carbon-60 - but...
"Carbon", not carbon-60. If it's isotopically pure, carbon-14 or carbon-13 or whatever. Carbon-60 refers to buckminsterfullerene, one of many structural forms of carbon, which is properly written C-subscript-60. The isotopes of carbon are written with superscripts, thus C-superscript-14 refers to an atom of that isotope.
BioDiesel also comes close to closing the carbon cycle, since the carbon in the fuel came from the air to begin with. Because it doesn't come from the ground, there's no sulphur or metals in it.
Dude, the carbon in fossil fuels comes from biomass that's been heated under pressure over geological time... it's been through the atmosphere too. The cycle is just a heck of a lot longer. Your point about metals and sulfur probably has merit though.
Science observes the creation of new information all the time, after it happens. You can't see it as it occurs, you can only see its effects, just like gravity, for example.
Penicillin and its derivatives has been in widespread use by humans to treat bacterial infections for most of the last century. Initially bacteria were almost exclusively susceptible to it. Now we are running a constant battle between bacteria's ability to adapt to our latest antibacterial compounds and our ability to find new ones.
Why? Because they've found ways to circumvent the effects of the earlier ones. They've created new information in response to a change in their environment. That information would not have been created if there were no antibacterial compounds in their environment they'd had to overcome to survive.
Try reading something about a topic before you post generalizations of this sort. Richard Dawkins' book "The Blind Watchmaker" would be an excellent start.
I said "commonly used", not "correctly used according to delineations in elementary discussions of the scientific method".
The whole hypothesis/theory/law gradation is nothing like as clear-cut as they teach you in 8th grade. You have a continuous gradation of theories according to their explanatory and predictive power. A "law" is really an honorary title to theories that work very well. However the "laws" of gravitation and motion (for example) are known to only apply for middle-range masses moving much slower than the speed of light... but we still call them laws.
In a petrie dish, sure. The environment is constant and there's only thing to outcompete is the rest of your species of bacteria. Not a good climate for speciation.
Now try a constantly-changing environment with location inhomogeneity. You can't avoid speciation now, because at different times and places, different solutions to the "survival problem" will be optimal. Locally, evolutionary processes will converge to those optima, but the targets are moving...
"These bacteria remain bacteria..."
but they go on changing and eventually reach a point where the population no longer resembles the original population. Now they are different from bacteria. Come back in a few billion years time and see what you've got.
New genetic information is being created all the time. The fact that you can't see evidence of design in that creation is irrelevant. Random mutations are occurring every time cells replicate. In the case of bacteria, those that a deleterious for the current environment cause their host organism to be outcompeted by the normal strain. Occasionally one of them will cause a slight advantage to the host. Over time that advantage will lead to a dominant position in the population for that mutation... and it is no longer a mutation, but is the normal type.
Random mutation is not creative. Random mutation followed by selection pressure can certainly be.
Darwinian evolution is the only theory that accounts for all the known facts, and there are no known facts that contradict it. That's an impressive theory boys and girls.
While you clearly understand the scientific method, I think your assertion that ""Just a theory" is a phrase that should never be used in the context of a scientific discussion" is excessively strong. "Just a theory" is commonly used by scientists to describe an idea that is known to explain some of the data known about a phenomenon, but which is either inconsistent with other data or not sufficiently tested to warrant confidence in its predictive power.
As used by the original poster, "Just a theory" is an unjustified derogative. The theories on how matter behaves do have predictive power in many cases that we've tested after formulating the theories. They might have meant "It's just an abstraction" and they have a point there, but one for philosophers to debate, not scientists.
Slashdot Mirror
As a final note, if you're a guy, your job while dancing is to make *her* look good.
Nope. Your job is to make an interesting story out of the music and have a good dialogue with your partner about it.
That's an AND not an OR! Making an interesting story, and having a dialogue ARE making her look good.
If she needs you to look good, something is very, very wrong with her balance.
Read up about balance in the judging guidelines. First and foremost, both partners must be balanced on their own. Then, the couple must be able to interact with each other in a balanced manner, and use this to express themselves better.
Dude, there is so much more to "making her look good" than keeping her balanced. You have to engage her, engage the audience to focus on her, craft the moves to frame her doing what you're leading her to do, and make sure she has fun so that she *does* look good. Her balance is her own problem. Not unbalancing her is one of yours.
Both of those are a long way from "scientists can't communicate anything to anyone" :-)
Exactly opposite. What I'm saying is that organizing different kinds of knowledge for the purposes of communications is a discipline in and of itself and frankly, it's the job of writers and they've all bailed. Scientists famously can't communicate anything to anyone, even each other, that's why the emphasis is on experiment.
Get off it... scientists stereotypically can't communicate with anyone - which is the impression you'd have if your only contact with them was cartoons for grade-school kids. Communication is intrinsic to the scientific method. You have to make observations, hypothesize, test, rework the hypothesis, find it proved, and to actually get paid you have to publish. That's right - communicate. The work's of no value if you don't. Even further, there are quite few disciplines left where one individual can do useful work in isolation. There are quite a few areas in biology where any worthwhile discovery will have dozens of names on the journal article. Can you really suppose none of them communicated with each other? :-)
Look at what we have today : A drooling stinkoid shows up babbling about a ton of equations is nothing, but, then he shoots a dog, gives it a needle and it comes back to life. The scientist apologizes that you might have to change the brand of dog food because bringing them back from the dead alters some [insert physics here] and therefor, they must eat Alpo instead of Dog Chow.
Now, a good salesman will look at that, and say "you know, that's a decent piece of work but that Alpo issue is going to make it harder, but, if you can agree to say, 20%, I can sell it if I get to keep 80%. You know, I'll go and be in front of all the people and get them to give us money..." and the scientist says, "my god, people", and says, "you know, I feel bad about the Alpo thing and if you sell it I'll be happy with 17%"...
Cartoons anyone? :-)
But I digress...the moral of the story is, the taxonomy of human scientific knowledge is so screwed up that not even scientists themselves can assess the value of their work.... it's just, the organization of our knowledge is draining everything, its not the job of scientists to do, its the job of writers.
The taxonomy is fine - and changing it wouldn't serve a real purpose. The applicability of the taxonomy to describe the work people are doing is more often in question these days. As we know and learn more, you can effectively work on the cross-disciplinary boundaries in a way that you couldn't do back when physics was physics and everything else was stamp-collecting. I should know - for my PhD I'm doing simulations on chemical molecules, but they're prion proteins (so there's wads of biochemistry and medical science to manage). The calculations are frigging expensive, so I have to be on top of the mathematical algorithms and physical models being used, and they have to be effectively implemented on a high-performance computer using well-optimized code. Try doing that 50 years ago!
I'm a grad student in molecular dynamics, and I know Klaus, his code and his work. While you do want good scaling performance with respect to the number of processors, that's not a useful measure of the quality of the implementation compared with other programs. Total throughput of a given system on a given number of processors is a much better indicator. Why? Well if I write code that sucks on one processor, but which gets less-sucky fast when I add more processors to the problem (why this can happen is a technical thing), then my scaling is going to look pretty damn fine. It's still missing the point where you want each processor working optimally to maximise throughput. GROMACS (www.gromacs.org) is widely regarded as the fastest molecular dynamics code because of its heavy use of assembler-optimized inner loops. The glue is written in C, and this is comparable with NAMD's C++. The parallel decomposition is not the rate-limiting step in parallel MD - it's still heavily compute-bound, and that's where GROMACS still wins.
A company like Sun or IBM eventually does get paid to make a fast computer... the body that won the grant just gets the right to make the nuts and bolts decisions about what sort of computer, how big, where it lives, etc. They're the one with the experts on these topics on their payroll, not the granting agency or the manufacturers. The reason there's a big grant up for grabs is that the sort of work that gets done on these machines is all paid for through government research grants. For buying computers, rather than parcel out a million bucks here and there to indivdual researchers (whose primary expertise is doing their research, not maintaining computing facilities), they opt for funding several large central computing resources and tell researchers to apply for time there. A decentralized high-performance computing model sucks because if one machine is sitting empty for whatever reason, other people can't jump in and use the valuable CPU cycles. On a central machine, they can, and the issue is how to resolve scheduling issues to give everyone a fair go :-)
"see if the modified second law works for a very small absolute acceleration" The whole point of Galilean relativity is that there is no sense in which you can measure an absolute acceleration. All you can do is measure one relative to a frame of reference.
Um, use an OS where file write permissions are enforceable? Like Linux?
Well if it were a diagnostic process, then that might make some sense.
The problem with radiation therapy is that you are trying to hurt the patient. In the case of a cancer treatment, you are just trying to kill the cancer faster than you kill the patient.
Additionally, there is no such thing as a uniformly non-lethal dose. It's critically dependent on the age of the patient, type of tissue involved, type of (for example) cancer and the type of radiation involved. Making this type of judgement is one reason doctors get the big bucks. It's similar to the reason anestheologists get bigger bucks... they are pretending to kill you for a bit!
You are right if Monty was showing you a random door, and he happened to get a goat, but he is not. He is always showing you a goat because he knows what is where.
When you chose a goat, Monty's choice is restricted to the door he showed you.
When you chose the car, Monty could have shown you either door, but he'd only show you the one he did show you half of the time.
Thus after you make your choice, you'd only see Monty choose the door he chose half the time if you were already right, and all the time if you should switch. Thus 2:1 in favour of switching.
Yup
Yup
Yup
Yup, but irrelevant.
I dispute this. The hotel has kept $25, the men have kept $1 and the bellboy has kept $2. Total is $30.
The other way to look at this is that the men paid $9 each for the room, and the bellboy paid -$2 for the room, which when added, totals $25 which is the cost of the room.
The trick is that 27+2 is irrelevant - 27-2 is relevant.
Something gets exponentially harder if for one unit of productivity increase the difficulty increases as an exponential function.
Parent is dead right!
The lowest point on the Earth's surface is in the Marianas Trench, which is much deeper (2x maybe 3x?) below sea level than Everest is higher than sea level. That starts making Everest comparable with the Martian hills.
As a 13-year-old I noticed that a heavy majority of French nouns ending in "e" were feminine and a heavy majority of those not ending in "e" were masculine. There are plenty of exceptions, but this will get you a long, long way down the track.
I'm doing a PhD on structure of the disorderd part of the normal form of human prion protein.
Infectious prion particles are amalgamations of all sorts of gunk, but a chief component is a structural isoform of the normal cellular prion protein. That means a form of the protein that has a fundamentally different structure. A protein that has multiple different structures is basically not observed anywhere else, which makes them weird to start with. It also turns out the the form has the property that it is able to promote the transformation from the normal form to the abnormal form. Hence, the description of the abnormal form as "autocatalytic". There is no genetic information involved here, beyond the normal cells continuing to make the normal form because they keep thinking they need more when it keeps disappearing. Stanley Prusiner got the Nobel Prize in 1997 for three decades of work proving the so-called "prion hypothesis" that these diseases were caused by infectious protein particles from which DNA & RNA were absent.
Viruses are genetic information packaged up inside a protein case. That genetic information hijacks a normal cell, and forces it to make more viruses.
Totally different and about as related as a go-kart and a 747.
Off the top of my head, nanotubes would have about the same relationship to graphite that a cylinder has to an large plane. Bucky-balls to graphite is definitely like a sphere to an large plane.
As a chemist, I'd expect that the reason compressing bucky-balls can produce nanotubes is that the kinetics of the process is going to be restricted by the initial C^60 configurations. It would seem that adjacent C^60 groups can go to a C^120 tube under cunningly chosen conditions. It isn't that there's anything magical about C^60!
"Carbon", not carbon-60. If it's isotopically pure, carbon-14 or carbon-13 or whatever. Carbon-60 refers to buckminsterfullerene, one of many structural forms of carbon, which is properly written C-subscript-60. The isotopes of carbon are written with superscripts, thus C-superscript-14 refers to an atom of that isotope.
Dude, the carbon in fossil fuels comes from biomass that's been heated under pressure over geological time... it's been through the atmosphere too. The cycle is just a heck of a lot longer. Your point about metals and sulfur probably has merit though.
Science observes the creation of new information all the time, after it happens. You can't see it as it occurs, you can only see its effects, just like gravity, for example.
Penicillin and its derivatives has been in widespread use by humans to treat bacterial infections for most of the last century. Initially bacteria were almost exclusively susceptible to it. Now we are running a constant battle between bacteria's ability to adapt to our latest antibacterial compounds and our ability to find new ones.
Why? Because they've found ways to circumvent the effects of the earlier ones. They've created new information in response to a change in their environment. That information would not have been created if there were no antibacterial compounds in their environment they'd had to overcome to survive.
Try reading something about a topic before you post generalizations of this sort. Richard Dawkins' book "The Blind Watchmaker" would be an excellent start.
The whole hypothesis/theory/law gradation is nothing like as clear-cut as they teach you in 8th grade. You have a continuous gradation of theories according to their explanatory and predictive power. A "law" is really an honorary title to theories that work very well. However the "laws" of gravitation and motion (for example) are known to only apply for middle-range masses moving much slower than the speed of light... but we still call them laws.
Now try a constantly-changing environment with location inhomogeneity. You can't avoid speciation now, because at different times and places, different solutions to the "survival problem" will be optimal. Locally, evolutionary processes will converge to those optima, but the targets are moving...
In Soviet Russia, evolutionary theory modifies YOU!
but they go on changing and eventually reach a point where the population no longer resembles the original population. Now they are different from bacteria. Come back in a few billion years time and see what you've got.
New genetic information is being created all the time. The fact that you can't see evidence of design in that creation is irrelevant. Random mutations are occurring every time cells replicate. In the case of bacteria, those that a deleterious for the current environment cause their host organism to be outcompeted by the normal strain. Occasionally one of them will cause a slight advantage to the host. Over time that advantage will lead to a dominant position in the population for that mutation... and it is no longer a mutation, but is the normal type.
Random mutation is not creative. Random mutation followed by selection pressure can certainly be.
Darwinian evolution is the only theory that accounts for all the known facts, and there are no known facts that contradict it. That's an impressive theory boys and girls.
While you clearly understand the scientific method, I think your assertion that ""Just a theory" is a phrase that should never be used in the context of a scientific discussion" is excessively strong. "Just a theory" is commonly used by scientists to describe an idea that is known to explain some of the data known about a phenomenon, but which is either inconsistent with other data or not sufficiently tested to warrant confidence in its predictive power.
As used by the original poster, "Just a theory" is an unjustified derogative. The theories on how matter behaves do have predictive power in many cases that we've tested after formulating the theories. They might have meant "It's just an abstraction" and they have a point there, but one for philosophers to debate, not scientists.