This effect is real and well-known, but consequences are just beginning to be studied. It will be, after all, the first reversal during human history (self-written, at least). The field magnitude is believed to have dropped about a factor of two since biblical times, based on records of auroral observations, so it appears to be well under way at present. I don't have a handy reference, but I believe there was an article this past year in the Eos Transactions of the American Geophysical Union ( a weekly newsletter that can be found in most technical libraries).
Some cynical views are expressed here, but it does seem prudent to investigate what our current knowledge would actually predict for effects. One thing sure is that the solar wind is not powerful enough to carry off a significant amount of atmosphere during the short duration (on a geologic time scale) of a reversal. But there may be many other effects, including disturbances of the upper atmosphere, possibly the ozone layer.
To counterbalance the claims about Mars, it's important to note that Venus has no magnetic field at all, but has retained a very dense atmosphere. On the other hand there is almost no water present (left?) in the Venusian atmosphere.
It does take human effort (i.e. funding) to look at these things seriously rather than speculatively.
Interesting article, but it misses the point raised by the 2000 election in Florida, by failing to deal with the mathematics of our electoral college system. In principle, a vote is taken by all voting members of a population, but in reality the vote represents a representative sample of the full population, similar to a poll, where we are used to having the statistical margin of error quoted. That means that there is a statistical margin of error in the real vote as well, normally estimated as the square root of the number of individuals polled or voting.
In Florida 2000 the "margin of error" on a vote of 6 million individuals was about 2400 votes. The final majority of a few hundred votes is an indecisive victory in that election. But we awarded all 25 electoral votes on that basis.
In contrast, the national popular vote had a sample of 100 million voters, for a margin of error of about 10,000. The actual majority of 300,000 was thus a very decisive majority, about which there should be no mathematical-statistical doubt.
There is a big problem with a system that awards a victory on the basis of an indecisive vote. The solution would be to award state electoral votes on a proportional basis (splitting them) in cases where the vote is indecisive, and to only award the full state electoral vote in cases with a decisive majority.
NASA spends about 1-2% of it's budget in an effort to communicate its activities to the general public or students. This is considered money well-spent, since it is the public that has paid for exploration of space.
Just as we cannot see outside the visible spectrum, we cannot hear plasma sound waves, which are mainly detected by electromagnetic antennae. But these sounds are just as informative about what is going on in our solar system as the Gamma, Xray or UV images that are brought back from space.
For example, there is a steady rumble from the roiling solar atmosphere, which expands supersonically throughout the solar system. And when a spacecraft crosses a shock wave (upstream of all the planets), there is a huge sonic boom. Lightening and auroras produce a wide variety of sounds.
So try to think of these sounds as having been recorded in the GREAT outdoors, and ask yourself what you might be hearing. One person's noise is another person's signal!
Apart from the advantage of being a minority OS, OS X also enjoys automated updates for security. The latest patches are just a matter of saying yes when the reminder comes up, and letting the installer run. Seems like this is something that could be emulated by other OS vendors, and the free software community could also set something like this up for Linux, couldn't it? Might be a good money making service for some enterprising soul to offer to one and all.
Relative to the point being made, Appleworks native formats aren't any better (or ThinkFree office or AbiWord, which just says there is no real improvement since XYwrite and Wordstar). MS AND its imitators are the problem, or most of the industry, which has failed to give us a working document format for the WWW.
Seeing the value in open formats is not a toilet training issue. Its the *default* format of a word processor that should be an open format.
The point is not to encode things digitally and then keep the code a secret (and the users hostages). Any code can be opened when the key is published, which is all one can ask of public domain documents.
File formats are the core problem
on
Digital Dark Ages?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Hardware isn't really a problem. Anything important can be put on a CD-ROM and preserved for eternity with some confidence; except that today the files may largely be in proprietary unpublished formats (e.g., just about any common format you use) that will take significant effort to read fully at an arbitrary point in the future.
The solution is straightforward and well underway, courtesy of the internet and WWW: published open data formats. The only reason for using a proprietary format these days is the effort that software makers put us through to do otherwise. Have you gotten tired of dismissing MS Word's objections to the use of RTF yet?
When we just say no to software that uses anything but open published formats, we'll get the software we need.
The fact that most of the world is on the dumb kick of driving trucks dressed up like cars does not make everyone want to own one of them, either. Times will change as things change. It's fun, and yes, cool, to try to look past the present to something better in the future. As Apple says, think different! Live a little! Enjoy the arts! Computers have become "communicators".
Right. And I was trying to make the point [apologies for the sarcasm] that the best way to share documents is not really related to the best way to create documents. We should be able to share electronic documents no matter what tool we used to create them. Paper worked find, and we were all willing to print to it. Now we have Word users thinking that the dominance of their solution excuses them from making their documents presentable to others. That isn't going to cut it, no matter how popular Word may get. Word users need to be as considerate as TeX users!
There are nearly 1000 comments at this point, so this must be important, right?
Isn't this about alternatives to paper documents? Is putting documents in a code that can only be fully decoded by the product of single vendor a smart thing to do? Well, maybe if you're that special vendor! Luckily, ascii text is too simple to keep secret, or we'd really be in trouble. But why is there no format for text and graphical electronic information exchange that is as universal as paper and typography? Because no one has yet developed it or established it as an open standard.
Well, we have HTML, but it is too limited, and we have PDF, but it is too complex to edit and is too much like paper. But there must be something that could be developed that would be JUST RIGHT! And when there is, it could be that it will catch on as quickly as HTML did for web documents. But only if there are good editing tools that will make it a pleasure to use. Notice how quickly all the favorite word processors had to acquire HTML save capability when that became the open standard for web documents!? It could happen again, if the open software world comes up with something so compelling that even M$ has to adopt it. Perhaps XML is that thing?
This is something the free/open software community is doing. An open XML standard is native for Star Office (but it isn't available for my Mac yet, dammit). And M$ seems to be taking notice that this is the wave of the future. Until this hope is realized, it seems we need mainly to have some "etiquette manuals" written to help educate business users that internet standards are applicable to all the email that travels on the internet.
It's not. But it is a published open format based on the postscript printing language. That means anyone can develop a pdf viewer without having to reverse-engineer it. And several pdf viewers are available for free. AND, pdf writers can be obtained for most computers that will put virtually anything that can be printed into a pdf file.
Since a pdf file is not readily edited by ANY word processor, it is the closest thing to paper for electronic documents. Once you commit to pdf, you are saying the document is "read-only". This is a FEATURE! When you want someone to reuse your documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, send them in any editor format that you mutually agree upon, but don't count on those documents being readable by everyone, and don't count on them remaining the way you sent them out.
When you want someone to review (and perhaps comment) on your document, or file it for reference, use pdf.
Oh sure. Wouldn't it be great to get LaTeX files as email attachments!? Those files are SO attractively formatted [sarcasm].
When are we going to get over our word processing preferences and start thinking about how to email documents that are universally readable. Oh wait, there is always printing on paper. What a concept.!
Slashdot Mirror
This effect is real and well-known, but consequences are just beginning to be studied. It will be, after all, the first reversal during human history (self-written, at least). The field magnitude is believed to have dropped about a factor of two since biblical times, based on records of auroral observations, so it appears to be well under way at present. I don't have a handy reference, but I believe there was an article this past year in the Eos Transactions of the American Geophysical Union ( a weekly newsletter that can be found in most technical libraries).
Some cynical views are expressed here, but it does seem prudent to investigate what our current knowledge would actually predict for effects. One thing sure is that the solar wind is not powerful enough to carry off a significant amount of atmosphere during the short duration (on a geologic time scale) of a reversal. But there may be many other effects, including disturbances of the upper atmosphere, possibly the ozone layer.
To counterbalance the claims about Mars, it's important to note that Venus has no magnetic field at all, but has retained a very dense atmosphere. On the other hand there is almost no water present (left?) in the Venusian atmosphere.
It does take human effort (i.e. funding) to look at these things seriously rather than speculatively.
Interesting article, but it misses the point raised by the 2000 election in Florida, by failing to deal with the mathematics of our electoral college system. In principle, a vote is taken by all voting members of a population, but in reality the vote represents a representative sample of the full population, similar to a poll, where we are used to having the statistical margin of error quoted. That means that there is a statistical margin of error in the real vote as well, normally estimated as the square root of the number of individuals polled or voting.
In Florida 2000 the "margin of error" on a vote of 6 million individuals was about 2400 votes. The final majority of a few hundred votes is an indecisive victory in that election. But we awarded all 25 electoral votes on that basis.
In contrast, the national popular vote had a sample of 100 million voters, for a margin of error of about 10,000. The actual majority of 300,000 was thus a very decisive majority, about which there should be no mathematical-statistical doubt.
There is a big problem with a system that awards a victory on the basis of an indecisive vote. The solution would be to award state electoral votes on a proportional basis (splitting them) in cases where the vote is indecisive, and to only award the full state electoral vote in cases with a decisive majority.
"Re-elect Gore in 2004!"
NASA spends about 1-2% of it's budget in an effort to communicate its activities to the general public or students. This is considered money well-spent, since it is the public that has paid for exploration of space.
Just as we cannot see outside the visible spectrum, we cannot hear plasma sound waves, which are mainly detected by electromagnetic antennae. But these sounds are just as informative about what is going on in our solar system as the Gamma, Xray or UV images that are brought back from space.
For example, there is a steady rumble from the roiling solar atmosphere, which expands supersonically throughout the solar system. And when a spacecraft crosses a shock wave (upstream of all the planets), there is a huge sonic boom. Lightening and auroras produce a wide variety of sounds.
So try to think of these sounds as having been recorded in the GREAT outdoors, and ask yourself what you might be hearing. One person's noise is another person's signal!
Apart from the advantage of being a minority OS, OS X also enjoys automated updates for security. The latest patches are just a matter of saying yes when the reminder comes up, and letting the installer run. Seems like this is something that could be emulated by other OS vendors, and the free software community could also set something like this up for Linux, couldn't it? Might be a good money making service for some enterprising soul to offer to one and all.
Relative to the point being made, Appleworks native formats aren't any better (or ThinkFree office or AbiWord, which just says there is no real improvement since XYwrite and Wordstar). MS AND its imitators are the problem, or most of the industry, which has failed to give us a working document format for the WWW.
Seeing the value in open formats is not a toilet training issue. Its the *default* format of a word processor that should be an open format.
The point is not to encode things digitally and then keep the code a secret (and the users hostages). Any code can be opened when the key is published, which is all one can ask of public domain documents.
Hardware isn't really a problem. Anything important can be put on a CD-ROM and preserved for eternity with some confidence; except that today the files may largely be in proprietary unpublished formats (e.g., just about any common format you use) that will take significant effort to read fully at an arbitrary point in the future.
The solution is straightforward and well underway, courtesy of the internet and WWW: published open data formats. The only reason for using a proprietary format these days is the effort that software makers put us through to do otherwise. Have you gotten tired of dismissing MS Word's objections to the use of RTF yet?
When we just say no to software that uses anything but open published formats, we'll get the software we need.
The fact that most of the world is on the dumb kick of driving trucks dressed up like cars does not make everyone want to own one of them, either. Times will change as things change. It's fun, and yes, cool, to try to look past the present to something better in the future. As Apple says, think different! Live a little! Enjoy the arts! Computers have become "communicators".
Right. And I was trying to make the point [apologies for the sarcasm] that the best way to share documents is not really related to the best way to create documents. We should be able to share electronic documents no matter what tool we used to create them. Paper worked find, and we were all willing to print to it. Now we have Word users thinking that the dominance of their solution excuses them from making their documents presentable to others. That isn't going to cut it, no matter how popular Word may get. Word users need to be as considerate as TeX users!
Isn't this about alternatives to paper documents? Is putting documents in a code that can only be fully decoded by the product of single vendor a smart thing to do? Well, maybe if you're that special vendor! Luckily, ascii text is too simple to keep secret, or we'd really be in trouble. But why is there no format for text and graphical electronic information exchange that is as universal as paper and typography? Because no one has yet developed it or established it as an open standard.
Well, we have HTML, but it is too limited, and we have PDF, but it is too complex to edit and is too much like paper. But there must be something that could be developed that would be JUST RIGHT! And when there is, it could be that it will catch on as quickly as HTML did for web documents. But only if there are good editing tools that will make it a pleasure to use. Notice how quickly all the favorite word processors had to acquire HTML save capability when that became the open standard for web documents!? It could happen again, if the open software world comes up with something so compelling that even M$ has to adopt it. Perhaps XML is that thing?
This is something the free/open software community is doing. An open XML standard is native for Star Office (but it isn't available for my Mac yet, dammit). And M$ seems to be taking notice that this is the wave of the future. Until this hope is realized, it seems we need mainly to have some "etiquette manuals" written to help educate business users that internet standards are applicable to all the email that travels on the internet.
Since a pdf file is not readily edited by ANY word processor, it is the closest thing to paper for electronic documents. Once you commit to pdf, you are saying the document is "read-only". This is a FEATURE! When you want someone to reuse your documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, send them in any editor format that you mutually agree upon, but don't count on those documents being readable by everyone, and don't count on them remaining the way you sent them out.
When you want someone to review (and perhaps comment) on your document, or file it for reference, use pdf.
Oh sure. Wouldn't it be great to get LaTeX files as email attachments!? Those files are SO attractively formatted [sarcasm].
When are we going to get over our word processing preferences and start thinking about how to email documents that are universally readable. Oh wait, there is always printing on paper. What a concept.!