What's with all the science articles lately that are basically investor scams?
This isn't necessarily a scam. The potential energy of the hydrogen gas on recombination with oxygen is claimed to be at best 96% of what it took to extract it from water in the first place. So they pass the first test: they obey the laws of thermodynamics. Which is a big plus, for a/. front-page science article.
These guys knew when attacks were coming cause half the time the Taliban forces and their buddies (Uzbeks, Czechs, etc) would come over the radio and SAY SO.
You know, since we're on the subject of fashion, I want to err the gripe I have about the black suit. It has been making a comeback in business attire, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why.
Even before AdBlock ubiquitous ads (noise) caused my brain to automatically filter the header of websites, the same with the 2 minute blocks between television shows. With AdBlock the topic is invalidated of course, since I never deal with online ads. But with television sometimes my family/friends comment on an ad that was just on, and I have no awareness of what the hell they are talking about.
I used to be like that: totally blind to web ads. The trouble is that after you've been browsing with AdBlock for a while, you lose your mental filters. Then when someday you're on someone else's computer where there is only IE6, you get online and suddenly the whole world is a flashing, screeching hell in which half the screen is urging you to buy stuff you don't want...
In regards to the Linux, I just have to wonder at the utility of it all... I've got some old slot 1 Pentium 3s in my garage that would provide more 'oomph' then the Wii can provide.
It has built-in wireless, comes with a remote control, is small and pretty, and now with a bit of luck hopefully it can run mplayer. That means DVD and stuff from your media server. I have a whole bunch of anime on my PC upstairs which I'd prefer to watch on the big screen from the sofa instead. Linux on Wii will make that possible.
Have you read the Bible (old testament) or Talmud? If not I suggest you look for approval of atrocities and genocide in there - there are plenty of examples.
Why is it that whenever anybody claims that the Koran is full of evil, someone pipes up that the Bible is just as bad? It's not as if there's a large Christian or Jewish majority on/.; I imagine most of us think Jehovah's bumper book of hate is just as loathsome as Allah's, but perhaps redeemed a little by the fact that its worshippers are more willing to retcon out the nasty bits. Find exhortations to mass murder and armed subjugation of the infidel in the Principia Discordia, then you'll expose our hypocrisy in denigrating the Koran.
I prefer to be a suicide bomber. I love playing urbanTerror as you can bumrush a room with a grenade in hand. if they kill you when you enter the room they die as you drop the grenade and it bounces over, if you make it to them they die.
Suicide bombing can be a brilliant tactic, at least in fantasy worlds where death is survivable and you get to respawn immediately afterwards; a bit unrealistic unless you can imagine some fool convinced that that's the case in reality, so not one for those of us who like a simulation more than a fragfest. I remember a Quake map that had a big ol' moat around a central keep. A lot of warren-like tunnels dropped people into that moat, so there were generally quite a few in there. So, the plan: First, find the electric gun. Second, jump in the water. Third, ZZZZZAP!
Sure, I take a penalty for killing myself, but I took a half-dozen guys with me. Oh, how it pissed them off.
A fingerprint seems like a reasonable idea. If she's just trying to keep other family members off of it, rubber-hose cryptanalysis is unlikely to become a problem
I've done this with binoculars, and it works the same way. It's a bit more difficult to find the planet, but once it "pops out" at you its easier to stay on it. I'd start with the naked eye.
I'd finish with the naked eye too. Pointing binoculars anywhere near the Sun and then looking through them is... reckless.
I would envision the threat scenario of the Chinese threatening the US in any significant financial way would go like so...
1. China: We are cancelling all our loans and investments and want our money back now.
2. US: No.
3. China: Ummm...
4. Everyone else in the world who owns US treasury bonds: Um...
5. The US government, next time it wants to borrow some money or get anything at all done on credit: Um...
So there is a constant - and lethal - attack going on on the species as a whole, and this regularly claims lives - except for those of a certain family/"subrace" (a gene obviously propagates in the same way as the species, that is to say in families and races). Would it be fair to say that if people hunted eachother at night, for whatever reason, that black people would be "more protected", for example. I think that would be a fair application of what you say.
Yes, but only if there's no interbreeding. If humans hunt humans at night, and do so in teams of black against white, black may well have the advantage and commit what you'd call a genocide. That's a hell of a special case though.
If instead dragons hunt humans of all kinds at night, then they are more likely to catch white humans because they're easier to spot. But since there is frequent interbreeding among the population, nobody's being exterminated. It's just that in time, there'll be a trend towards darker colours being more successful at survival. Even if I'm as pale as the average basement-dwelling hacker, my great-great-grandchildren might still prosper - because the intervening generations found dark-coloured mates. This is a far more common situation.
Consider another example. Three men go and settle in a new town, Anders, Baker and Collins. Two hundred years later, the census reveals many people called Anders, but no Bakers or Collins. Did the Anders clan murder the other two families? Or did some intervening generation of Bakers and of Collins produce only daughters, leaving those families with many descendants, but under the name of Anders?
That's more like how it normally works. There's a new gene around that helps bearers have more children, by whatever means. If you don't have it, they're not going to round you up and kill you - but your children are going to live in a world more and more full of people with that new gene, and chances are sooner or later they'll find a mate who's a carrier. And then your descendants too have the new gene. Is that genocide? Only if you stretch the term to breaking point.
Day 1, God creates light. Day 3, God makes plant life. Day 4, the sun is created. Plant life needs light to produce energy for the plant to live. Sunlight is nice, but other light sources can work too such as the light that was around since day 1.
Maybe so, but it's a far cry from matching up with science, which you originally claimed. I know of no scientific model of the origins of the Solar System which have the Sun forming [i]after[/i] the evolution of plant life on the Earth.
But, do you, or anyone else out there, admit that it is possible that evolution could possibly be proven wrong?
Oh, absolutely. It's possible. In fact it happens all the time; the general principles are well established, but the details change frequently. Exact timescales, the order of events, importance of individual versus group advantage, it's all a fascinating field of research. That stuff evolves is sure, but the details of how this is directed by different forms of selection are up for grabs.
Similarly with gravity, which you originally clung to as an example of a firmly established scientific law. That stuff falls when dropped? Beyond dispute. The exact magnitude of the force between two objects? We've quite possibly got it wrong on the cosmic scale, and it's looking increasingly like it's a bit off even on the scale of the Solar System - look up the Pioneer Anomaly. And we still don't have a clue how gravity works on the quantum scale - Einstein went to his grave still trying to solve that one.
The point of all this? That evolution is indeed a theory subject to change as new results come in. So is gravity. If you insert disclaimers and stickers to the school textbooks warning kids about evolution, better do the same for the chapter about gravitation too.
Based on the knowledge that we have, can you dispute gravity? Seriously? Like I said, I'm not a scientist. Never have been, and never will be. But can you dispute gravity on what knowledge we have?
Gravity would have it that every particle in the universe attracts every other. Yet the expansion of the universe is accelerating. That's a bloody huge problem with gravity right there. There's much talk of a mysterious Dark Energy, but nobody has much idea what that energy might actually be. It's entirely possible that we'll end up rewriting gravity before this is over.
Evolution basically works due to a constant sequence of genocides.
The error is right here. A common illustration of evolution is the picture of nature red in tooth and claw, of creatures with small advantageous changes prospering at the expense of those less well endowed. Certainly this sometimes happens, but it is not the whole story. Think about what's going on at the gene level.
Creature A has a mutated gene that affects a hormone that affects a muscle that affects running. It's just a bit faster than the rest. Creature A has better odds of escaping from the predators. Creature A therefore has many young before growing old and slow and finally becoming something's dinner.
Creature A's children inherit the gene, and share the same benefits. And so do their children. And so do theirs. What is the picture here? A master race, supplanting the previous population? No. That's not what's happening. Creature A had to find a mate, and so did all its children. What is happening is that the gene is spreading. Creatures that have the gene will have more young on average than creatures that do not, and in time the gene spreads to pretty much the whole population.
Most of evolution tends to happen this way. Incremental, almost invisible improvement spreading out across the gene pool. The spectacular clashes where a new species entirely supplants another are far rarer - but they're plainly visible to palaeontologists, while the more subtle story requires careful genetic study and preferably DNA sequencing, and so they get rather more airtime.
The Roman Catholic church has recognized evolution essentially as fact and completely compatible with the bible. So I don't really understand what the problem is with Protestants in this country.
Because the Roman Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon mentioned in Revelation, selling a corrupt, Satanic, pagan blasphemy against true Christianity, and the Pope works for, or possibly actually is, the Antichrist.
Creationists tend towards the lunatic fringe of Protestantism by definition, so unsurprisingly they have some quite colourful opinions about the Catholics.
One of the conflicts I see here is the idea that evolution can be a "fact" and at the same time argue that it purely random. By being random, advocates are admitting that it does not have a pre-defined 'direction'. Evolution and De-evolution can and do both occur and since it is a random causal event, nothing can also occur making any claim of certainty quite bizarre... only that sometimes live things change for the better other times they don't.
Living Thing A changes for the better. Living Thing B changes for the worse. Both creatures pass on these changes to their offspring, and the offspring pass them on again. Fast forward a thousand years. Whose descendants dominate the population?
That's the point of natural selection. It's what defines 'better' and 'worse' in an evolutionary context. A 'good' change is one that helps genes propagate into the future; a 'bad' change is one that hinders this. In time, the descendants of the 'better' creatures vastly outnumber the descendants of the 'worse' ones.
I believe in gravity. I believe that evolution is possible. I do not, however, think that it is a law or is a fact. I believe it to be a theory. The reason is that while scientist think that they've got full evidence of it, they do not have complete evidence. They cannot show 100% proof, that for ALL species, evolution has taken place.
So, because we don't have the whole story for every species, you consider evolution to be a lesser theory than gravitation?
Interesting. Must we now show 100% proof, that for ALL planets, gravitation has taken place? Because right now we've only got direct evidence for gravitation on eight planets. Are we so sure there isn't Bizarro Antigravity World somewhere out there?
The 6 days of Creation match up with science on the ball when they aren't literal days as we know them, but days of God, which are explained to be any length of time in two different places in the Bible.
Day 3: the Earth brings forth plant life.
Day 4: the Sun, Moon and stars are created.
You may be interested in the phenomenon of Anonymous--a sort of movement that has coalesced to fight against the abuses of the Church of Scientology.
That's giving them a little too much credit. Anonymous coalesced to troll, abuse each other, swap hentai, close off the pool, and invade other people's websites as and when the whim strikes. Project Chanology is just the biggest/i/ yet, and as long as it continues to yield lulz in the form of Scientological accusations of terrorism and mainstream media attention (especially where they repeat that 'over 9000' people turned out to protest), then Anonymous will keep it up.
What makes it even more interesting is that it -has no leaders-. Somehow, out of total anarchy, it's managed to coalesce a sort of identity to itself, and has directed attention towards a single goal.
This actually is an interesting phenomenon. Anonymous is nothing but a horde of teens and trolls and perverts, with absolutely no hierarchy. The campaign against Scientology is a self-organising emergent phenomenon arising from a complex chaotic system - a stand-alone complex - and it's actually quite scary. Anonymous can organise thousands of kids in Guy Fawkes masks to flashmob any target, and nobody can be pointed at as the mastermind. It's just a thing that happens. A meme goes critical, and Anonymous invades.
IIRC, one of the Anonymous-sponsored websites is youfoundthecard.com; it's worth looking into.
Anonymous is largely based out of ebaumsworld. If you're looking for the source of the whole thing, that's where you need to be.
The ship is sailing merrily along, when the sailors rescue a man floating on a piece of driftwood. He tells them he's fleeing an island where dreams come true. The sailors want to set a course for this island immediately. "Not daydreams," he tells them, "real dreams!"
The sailors quickly decide they don't want to go there after all.
And then they end up there anyway. Cue a passage of what is basically Lovecraftian horror in a children's story. Fabulous. Many of the best-loved authors were able to give children nightmares - but recursive nightmares? That is a rare gift.
Apple employees in Apple stores say to you when you buy an iPhone (at least, they said it to me): "You HAVE to activate the iPhone with a 2-year contract with AT&T".
As a simple example, what about light outside the VIBGYOR spectrum? What about materials that do not reflect light in the visible spectrum but shine brightly outside of VIBGYOR?
This is why we keep launching infrared, ultraviolet and X-ray observatories, and why the ground is littered with giant radio dishes.
Our galaxy is 50000 ly in radius, which comes out to 1.4e37 m2. Our solar system, taken to the orbit of Pluto, is 40 au in radius, or 2.8e24 m2. The ratio between the two is 5e12.
Remember that the Galaxy is a three-dimensional volume, while Saudi Arabia is flattish. According to Idle et. al (Significat Vitae Carmen Galactica, 1983), our Galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars and is a hundred thousand lightyears side to side; it bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand lightyears thick, but out by us it's just three thousand lightyears wide. Taking the lower thickness, that gives a Galactic volume of pi * (50000^2) * 3000 = 2.34x10^14 cubic lightyears = 2.00x10^61 cubic metres. Taking the Solar System to the orbit of Pluto, that's 2.86x10^5 cubic AU = 8.97x10^38 cubic metres. Ratio of the two, that's about 2.2*10^22. Allowing that Saudi Arabia is on average covered by one metre's thickness of sand, we get a grain of sand about half a millimetre on a side.
Imagine we discover:
That the chance of a star to have planets is one in a million. Doesn't seem impossible, does it?
The chance of a star with planets to have one at the correct distance (taking star heat in consideration) to be between 0 and 100 C, one in a billion.
The chance of a planet in the correct position to have water. One in a million.
Point 1: very long odds, given the number of extrasolar planets we've already discovered.
Point 2: extremely long odds. It's a reasonably wide zone for the Sun, from about halfway between Earth and Venus out to Mars - which would probably be inhabitable if it were larger and could hold a thick atmosphere. Moreover the zone will shift as the star evolves and brightens, so a planet that starts out frozen may spring to life in later years. Come the red giant phase even Titan might bear life.
Point 3: totally redundant. It just repeats point 2, but for some reason does so with a probability greater by a factor of one thousand. Counting the same criterion twice just to get the numbers down by a factor of a million is cheating.
So, we still have nine planets. Now, cross your fingers that one of those is not radioactive, doesn't show the same side to the star (that happens quite often), is big enough to have enough gravity to hold an atmosphere, etc.
How do you know that tidally locked planets are commonplace? There are none in our system.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't necessarily a scam. The potential energy of the hydrogen gas on recombination with oxygen is claimed to be at best 96% of what it took to extract it from water in the first place. So they pass the first test: they obey the laws of thermodynamics. Which is a big plus, for a /. front-page science article.
Czechs in the Taliban? As in Budvar and Skoda?
Reservoir Dogs.
I used to be like that: totally blind to web ads. The trouble is that after you've been browsing with AdBlock for a while, you lose your mental filters. Then when someday you're on someone else's computer where there is only IE6, you get online and suddenly the whole world is a flashing, screeching hell in which half the screen is urging you to buy stuff you don't want...
It has built-in wireless, comes with a remote control, is small and pretty, and now with a bit of luck hopefully it can run mplayer. That means DVD and stuff from your media server. I have a whole bunch of anime on my PC upstairs which I'd prefer to watch on the big screen from the sofa instead. Linux on Wii will make that possible.
Why is it that whenever anybody claims that the Koran is full of evil, someone pipes up that the Bible is just as bad? It's not as if there's a large Christian or Jewish majority on /.; I imagine most of us think Jehovah's bumper book of hate is just as loathsome as Allah's, but perhaps redeemed a little by the fact that its worshippers are more willing to retcon out the nasty bits. Find exhortations to mass murder and armed subjugation of the infidel in the Principia Discordia, then you'll expose our hypocrisy in denigrating the Koran.
Suicide bombing can be a brilliant tactic, at least in fantasy worlds where death is survivable and you get to respawn immediately afterwards; a bit unrealistic unless you can imagine some fool convinced that that's the case in reality, so not one for those of us who like a simulation more than a fragfest. I remember a Quake map that had a big ol' moat around a central keep. A lot of warren-like tunnels dropped people into that moat, so there were generally quite a few in there. So, the plan: First, find the electric gun. Second, jump in the water. Third, ZZZZZAP!
Sure, I take a penalty for killing myself, but I took a half-dozen guys with me. Oh, how it pissed them off.
You were an only child, right?
I'd finish with the naked eye too. Pointing binoculars anywhere near the Sun and then looking through them is... reckless.
4. Everyone else in the world who owns US treasury bonds: Um...
5. The US government, next time it wants to borrow some money or get anything at all done on credit: Um...
Yes, but only if there's no interbreeding. If humans hunt humans at night, and do so in teams of black against white, black may well have the advantage and commit what you'd call a genocide. That's a hell of a special case though.
If instead dragons hunt humans of all kinds at night, then they are more likely to catch white humans because they're easier to spot. But since there is frequent interbreeding among the population, nobody's being exterminated. It's just that in time, there'll be a trend towards darker colours being more successful at survival. Even if I'm as pale as the average basement-dwelling hacker, my great-great-grandchildren might still prosper - because the intervening generations found dark-coloured mates. This is a far more common situation.
Consider another example. Three men go and settle in a new town, Anders, Baker and Collins. Two hundred years later, the census reveals many people called Anders, but no Bakers or Collins. Did the Anders clan murder the other two families? Or did some intervening generation of Bakers and of Collins produce only daughters, leaving those families with many descendants, but under the name of Anders?
That's more like how it normally works. There's a new gene around that helps bearers have more children, by whatever means. If you don't have it, they're not going to round you up and kill you - but your children are going to live in a world more and more full of people with that new gene, and chances are sooner or later they'll find a mate who's a carrier. And then your descendants too have the new gene. Is that genocide? Only if you stretch the term to breaking point.
Maybe so, but it's a far cry from matching up with science, which you originally claimed. I know of no scientific model of the origins of the Solar System which have the Sun forming [i]after[/i] the evolution of plant life on the Earth.
Oh, absolutely. It's possible. In fact it happens all the time; the general principles are well established, but the details change frequently. Exact timescales, the order of events, importance of individual versus group advantage, it's all a fascinating field of research. That stuff evolves is sure, but the details of how this is directed by different forms of selection are up for grabs.
Similarly with gravity, which you originally clung to as an example of a firmly established scientific law. That stuff falls when dropped? Beyond dispute. The exact magnitude of the force between two objects? We've quite possibly got it wrong on the cosmic scale, and it's looking increasingly like it's a bit off even on the scale of the Solar System - look up the Pioneer Anomaly. And we still don't have a clue how gravity works on the quantum scale - Einstein went to his grave still trying to solve that one.
The point of all this? That evolution is indeed a theory subject to change as new results come in. So is gravity. If you insert disclaimers and stickers to the school textbooks warning kids about evolution, better do the same for the chapter about gravitation too.
Gravity would have it that every particle in the universe attracts every other. Yet the expansion of the universe is accelerating. That's a bloody huge problem with gravity right there. There's much talk of a mysterious Dark Energy, but nobody has much idea what that energy might actually be. It's entirely possible that we'll end up rewriting gravity before this is over.
The error is right here. A common illustration of evolution is the picture of nature red in tooth and claw, of creatures with small advantageous changes prospering at the expense of those less well endowed. Certainly this sometimes happens, but it is not the whole story. Think about what's going on at the gene level.
Creature A has a mutated gene that affects a hormone that affects a muscle that affects running. It's just a bit faster than the rest. Creature A has better odds of escaping from the predators. Creature A therefore has many young before growing old and slow and finally becoming something's dinner.
Creature A's children inherit the gene, and share the same benefits. And so do their children. And so do theirs. What is the picture here? A master race, supplanting the previous population? No. That's not what's happening. Creature A had to find a mate, and so did all its children. What is happening is that the gene is spreading. Creatures that have the gene will have more young on average than creatures that do not, and in time the gene spreads to pretty much the whole population.
Most of evolution tends to happen this way. Incremental, almost invisible improvement spreading out across the gene pool. The spectacular clashes where a new species entirely supplants another are far rarer - but they're plainly visible to palaeontologists, while the more subtle story requires careful genetic study and preferably DNA sequencing, and so they get rather more airtime.
Because the Roman Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon mentioned in Revelation, selling a corrupt, Satanic, pagan blasphemy against true Christianity, and the Pope works for, or possibly actually is, the Antichrist.
Creationists tend towards the lunatic fringe of Protestantism by definition, so unsurprisingly they have some quite colourful opinions about the Catholics.
Living Thing A changes for the better. Living Thing B changes for the worse. Both creatures pass on these changes to their offspring, and the offspring pass them on again. Fast forward a thousand years. Whose descendants dominate the population?
That's the point of natural selection. It's what defines 'better' and 'worse' in an evolutionary context. A 'good' change is one that helps genes propagate into the future; a 'bad' change is one that hinders this. In time, the descendants of the 'better' creatures vastly outnumber the descendants of the 'worse' ones.
So, because we don't have the whole story for every species, you consider evolution to be a lesser theory than gravitation?
Interesting. Must we now show 100% proof, that for ALL planets, gravitation has taken place? Because right now we've only got direct evidence for gravitation on eight planets. Are we so sure there isn't Bizarro Antigravity World somewhere out there?
Day 3: the Earth brings forth plant life.
Day 4: the Sun, Moon and stars are created.
You were saying?
That's giving them a little too much credit. Anonymous coalesced to troll, abuse each other, swap hentai, close off the pool, and invade other people's websites as and when the whim strikes. Project Chanology is just the biggest /i/ yet, and as long as it continues to yield lulz in the form of Scientological accusations of terrorism and mainstream media attention (especially where they repeat that 'over 9000' people turned out to protest), then Anonymous will keep it up.
What makes it even more interesting is that it -has no leaders-. Somehow, out of total anarchy, it's managed to coalesce a sort of identity to itself, and has directed attention towards a single goal.
This actually is an interesting phenomenon. Anonymous is nothing but a horde of teens and trolls and perverts, with absolutely no hierarchy. The campaign against Scientology is a self-organising emergent phenomenon arising from a complex chaotic system - a stand-alone complex - and it's actually quite scary. Anonymous can organise thousands of kids in Guy Fawkes masks to flashmob any target, and nobody can be pointed at as the mastermind. It's just a thing that happens. A meme goes critical, and Anonymous invades.
IIRC, one of the Anonymous-sponsored websites is youfoundthecard.com; it's worth looking into.
Anonymous is largely based out of ebaumsworld. If you're looking for the source of the whole thing, that's where you need to be.
And then they end up there anyway. Cue a passage of what is basically Lovecraftian horror in a children's story. Fabulous. Many of the best-loved authors were able to give children nightmares - but recursive nightmares? That is a rare gift.
But as it turns out, they're wrong.
This is why we keep launching infrared, ultraviolet and X-ray observatories, and why the ground is littered with giant radio dishes.
Remember that the Galaxy is a three-dimensional volume, while Saudi Arabia is flattish. According to Idle et. al (Significat Vitae Carmen Galactica, 1983), our Galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars and is a hundred thousand lightyears side to side; it bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand lightyears thick, but out by us it's just three thousand lightyears wide. Taking the lower thickness, that gives a Galactic volume of pi * (50000^2) * 3000 = 2.34x10^14 cubic lightyears = 2.00x10^61 cubic metres. Taking the Solar System to the orbit of Pluto, that's 2.86x10^5 cubic AU = 8.97x10^38 cubic metres. Ratio of the two, that's about 2.2*10^22. Allowing that Saudi Arabia is on average covered by one metre's thickness of sand, we get a grain of sand about half a millimetre on a side.
Point 1: very long odds, given the number of extrasolar planets we've already discovered.
Point 2: extremely long odds. It's a reasonably wide zone for the Sun, from about halfway between Earth and Venus out to Mars - which would probably be inhabitable if it were larger and could hold a thick atmosphere. Moreover the zone will shift as the star evolves and brightens, so a planet that starts out frozen may spring to life in later years. Come the red giant phase even Titan might bear life.
Point 3: totally redundant. It just repeats point 2, but for some reason does so with a probability greater by a factor of one thousand. Counting the same criterion twice just to get the numbers down by a factor of a million is cheating.
How do you know that tidally locked planets are commonplace? There are none in our system.