Re:Source of creation, or evolution?
on
The Los Alamos Bug
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· Score: 3, Insightful
While I am not a creationist, I did see the point of their argument - how simple amino acids and organic chemicals were first formed into cells, I have no idea.
I think this is an important question in biology, and I'm sure no biologist would deny it. The problem comes when the creationists merely assume god must have done anything we can't explain. It's the "god in the gaps" argument that's been popular probbably since we first learned to communicate. The problem of course is that science marches on and when you try to find your god in the gaps of science, science eventually closes those gaps. Religion always fights like mad because they've invested much of their belief structure in the argument. The gaps used to be in evolution. Those gaps have closed and now the gaps have moved to the creation of life itself.
The point that people like you were talking to seem to miss is that assuming the existence of a god to explain current lack of scientific understanding of scientific questions has always been a losing proposition. Where religion always fails is when it gets mixed up with scientific questions. Science adapts, and religion tries to cling to dogma. Religion changes too perhaps.. no one is seriously pissed off about heliocentrism anymore, it just takes about 100 times longer.
You should know that PETA are a bunch of liars that want the whole world to be vegan/vegetarian. They don't care about the truth and will distort and flat out lie at every turn. There was an episode of bullshit about these bastards, and I suggest everyone see it.
But Internet outages are just as menacing -- and indeed, where one can get a battery to power their digital workhorses there is no such analog for Internet power.
And how many companies rely on batteries or generators to continue work when the power goes out? Hardly any. Some ISPs, the various telephone companies, hospitals, other business shuts down and everyone goes home when the power goes out. Some companies rely on phone service for their entire business. I bet they have no backup plan in place in the phones go down. Internet access really isn't all that different from any other mission critical service. Companies that have enough money and rely on it have redundant internet connections. Everyone else just waits until service is restored.
I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life,
he added "Kicked across a room yes, picked it up and thrown it no." Who ever actually throws chairs? I've seen people kick chairs before, but never throw them.
Apple has attracted a group of people that place an inordinate value on aesthetics. This isn't the first grumbling we've heard from the faithfull. Remember the Apple Cube and people complaining about "cracks" (small imperfections in the plastic) in the case? Now it's that the nano can get scratches in the screen. This is the price that Apple pays by attracting people that only seem to care about aesthetics. When something goes wrong with the aesthetics the faithfull scream their heads off.
It is how the detective and intelligence catches these criminal... To psychologically understand who this person maybe and also recognize signs of another possible criminal.
I seriously doubt that Nigerian police are really trying very hard to catch any of these people. Despite what the officials say about "being serious about 419" there were only 12 convictions for this in all of Nigeria in two years. I guess I'll rely on the results of the police rather than their words.
The real question is, why should Nigeria work to stop these scams? They bring in a lot of money for the local economy from foriegn sources. From what I understand, Nigeria is a "kleptocracy". That is the government runs on corruption. The problem with kleptocracy is that theft is rewarded and legitimacy isn't. Economies are largly built on trust. Without trust it becomes impossible to pull a country out of poverty.
Basically, they are saying that there is nothing that size that could possibly be of interest.
I doubt Nasa would ever go quite that far. The thing you have to realize and what I was trying to point out is that there's always tradeoffs in any design. Spacecraft orbiting Mars has even bigger tradeoffs. Do you have the super-duper optics that can read a book in orbit (and blow all your money on it) or do you have multiple instruments, 3 more missions later on with very different goals, and optics that can see a schoolbus? Anything going all the way to Mars has drastic limits on weight. The heavier something is the bigger the rocket you need to get it to Mars. It also needs more propellant to stop the damn thing so it doesn't crash into Mars. All of that is expensive, and Nasa doesn't have blank checks from Uncle Sam. BTW, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched this August will be able to see objects about as large as a dinner plate. They'd like to be able to see rocks that might interfere with future landing sites. Any indication to the contrary is hooted off the stage. And they insure that they won't be contradicted by their own observations because the probes they send are half blind.
We've got two Rovers currently driving around Mars for the extreme close up stuff. Getting inch resolution on a lot of rocks probbably isn't terribly interesting. Getting microscopic pictures of a few select interesting rocks is probbably a hell of a lot better at finding evidence of water being on Mars at one point.
We have satellites orbiting Earth that can read the numbers on a license plate and they can't get a good shot of the lander? Am I missing something here?
Maybe we don't think there's license plates on Mars?
Seriously though, what's the point of having ultra-high resolution pictures of Mars? Seeing each individual rock probbably isn't terribly usefull compared to other things the money could be used for. The CIA and NSA are obviously interested in high resolution pictures. NASA is interested in a wide range of optical frequencies, sub-surface mapping via radar, etc.
The big limitation however is just the resolution/field of view tradeoff. Usually when you're taking that high a resolution you've got a very narrow field of view. If you wanted to photograph all of Mars it'd take forever with such small swaths. Intelligence agencies don't want to take pictures of everything on the planet at high resolution, just very select things. Also, Mars is further away from the Sun so there's less light reaching Mars.
The most obvious difference of course is simply that US intelligence agencies have far larger budgets than NASA does, and obviously a smaller scope of what they're trying to accomplish.
I think you've missed the point of an accepted standard. No one wants multiple versions of something that accomplish the same thing equally, much less redundant standards that're inferrior. Do you really want an internet that supports every network protocol ever invented? Even if there were some magic way that all OS's could share protocol stacks just maintaining all that garbage would be a nightmare. As a programmer I certainly don't want to learn how to code to 15 different network protocol APIs. SMTP is the standard email delivery protocol now, and I'm quite glad that all that proprietary garbage all died 10 years ago. If it hadn't simply sending email to your friend with a different ISP probbably wouldn't be possible.
You're right that the size of the code is trivial. What costs is supporting the standard. More standards that accomplish the same thing just adds complexity without giving anything back.
I think what the poster meant is the spacecraft was never there to begin with. With limited resolution and enough random dark spots and hills there's bound to be a few that look like they might be a parachute and a lander.
Given how poor the images are I wonder why they ever thought this was the polar lander at all and not just natural features of mars?
Yes, we could spend all day talking about the technicalities of the clock, the politicization of human calendars, and what the odds are of the thing not getting blown up by someone who thinks that only Allah Knows What Time It Is, etc... but the whole point of the project is cultural/philoshopical. It (as the finished project is conceived) is a conversation piece designed to make observers actually think past what they're going to have for lunch, and whether or not Battlestar Galactica is a re-run or not tonight.
And that's exactly what most of the things you just mentioned are about. How do you make a clock that lasts 10,000 years? (we don't tend to make things that last anywhere near that long). The clock getting blown up by fanatics is would require a drastic change in the culture, something that could only happen in maybe a hundred years. It's difficult to talk about the clock without thinking about the timescale it's supposed to exist in.
It's a pretty cool idea. As a culture it seems like we don't tend to make "wonders of the world" anymore. We've recently gotten this notion that new is good, and old is bad. Kind of a messed up idea in many respects. New is anything made in the last 6 months, and old is anything older than 3 years.
Bummer... why couldn't they just fire it off to some random star or something? Like say, the second star on the right?
Money. It's expensive to escape the earths gravitational pull. It's even more expensive to escape the suns gravitational pull. The escape velocity of the earth is 11.2 km/sec at the surface. The escape velocity of the sun on the earths surface is 42.1 km/sec, which is about 95,000 miles an hour. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think the voyager and pioneer probes only managed to escape the suns gravity though planetary gravitational assists.
50-100 years is permanent? Just admit you were wrong instead of trying to skate around word definitions by redefining the word permanent to less than a human lifetime. (or trying to take your misspelling of the word permanent as some strange intentional creation of a new word that no one has ever heard of before a few hours ago)
That's not what the article says, though obviously it could be wrong. Please provide evidence that the orbit isn't just a LEO and will decay in 50-100 years.
Based on what you an others have said this entire article should be marked troll. The most interesting comment was that satellite failure isn't unexpected as the people who manage them get information on the health status of the satellites.
But requiring someone to take classes on talking fast and paying $35 does nothing to that end. If your goal is to reduce stolen goods then pass a law requiring assistants to the same requirements pawn shops have.
I hear a lot of people talking about bonding providing some assurance against fraud. I think this actually makes some sense. Instead of trying this auctioneer license nonsense how about just a simple law saying anyone selling something for someone by proxy that normally will sell for over X dollars needs to be bonded? X is something like $200 or $500.
Then people selling trivial things don't require bonding, but anyone selling something valueable (and thus tempted to just steal the thing and walk away) would be required to carry some kind of protection against that kind of fraud. It also protects against crooks simply saying they only use the "buy it now" option, thus avoiding anything that might look like an auction.
The concern is that 4 or 5 satellites will all fail in the same year. The current pace of only replacing 2 a year would cause gaps in the GPS coverage. Just because you allocate the funds doesn't mean you get to launch the replacement satellites tommorow to fix the problem. Not knowing much about satellite launch preparation I'm guessing it might take a month or two to get everything ready for launch.
If you are taking other peoples property and selling it at auction, you are acting as an auctioneer.
I think there's a very good argument that eBay is acting as the auctioneer. The assistant is merely preparing the item to be auctioned. Putting up an initial price and describing an item doesn't take any special skills. There's nothing wrong with requiring bonding for these kinds of businesses to prevent fraud (i.e. seller says item sold for $50 and keeps $10 to cover his 20% fee, when item actually sold for $70). Because this kind of business involves a trust relationship, bonding is called for.
Who needs to trust the seller when the auction results are publically available on eBay? If nothing else a customer could just look at all the auctions of an ebay assistant for the item they were selling. If the ebay assistant says the item sold for $50 and it really sold for $60 then the truth is readily available on the eBay website. This is yet another piece of evidence that the REAL auctioneer is eBay itself.
Step back for just a minute and look at the reasons why it was decided long ago that you needs an auctioneer license. Obviously running an auction takes a bit of skill. Recognizing bid raises, knowing how much to raise the price, knowing how long to wait for the item to be sold, and the whole "talking fast" thing are special skills. The idea of regulating it is to protect the public from unskilled auctioneers who won't get a good price for an item.
Almost all of that crap is handled by Ebay itself. The person selling the item by proxy only has to set an initial price, describe the item, etc. These are all skills that don't normally require regulation in any other context. Why (other than trying to raise more tax revenue) should the states try to regulate trading assistance?
In any case, notebook sales have topped desktops. AMD really dropped the ball on that one -- they have absolutely nothing which remotely compares to the Pentium M, and even Steve Jobs was forced to admit it.
Very true that AMD has crappy crappy mobile chips. I think they intentionally didn't go after this market though because they have a much smaller chip producing capacity than Intel, and a much smaller R&D budget compared to Intel. It's much smarter to go after the desktop and server markets than the mobile market as the chip designs are similar. Mobile designs are all low power, which is a lot different from the desktop/server chips.
Gee, thanks for the high school explanation of evolution, I didn't know what it was.
If you knew a little more about evolution you'd also know that species don't just get any-old advantage, they get the one that requires the least amount of changes but also provides them with the most advantage (bang for buck). The question is obviously why extrodinary physical substances fit that bill so often for insects.
I could see it, but what is it about insects that the thing to go for, the thing that gives them the best bang/buck is substances with excellent physical properties?
Spiders produce super-strong silk, other insects produce this perfect rubber substance. What is it about insects that they produce such desireable materials? Are there more insect substances equally amazing?
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While I am not a creationist, I did see the point of their argument - how simple amino acids and organic chemicals were first formed into cells, I have no idea.
I think this is an important question in biology, and I'm sure no biologist would deny it. The problem comes when the creationists merely assume god must have done anything we can't explain. It's the "god in the gaps" argument that's been popular probbably since we first learned to communicate. The problem of course is that science marches on and when you try to find your god in the gaps of science, science eventually closes those gaps. Religion always fights like mad because they've invested much of their belief structure in the argument. The gaps used to be in evolution. Those gaps have closed and now the gaps have moved to the creation of life itself.
The point that people like you were talking to seem to miss is that assuming the existence of a god to explain current lack of scientific understanding of scientific questions has always been a losing proposition. Where religion always fails is when it gets mixed up with scientific questions. Science adapts, and religion tries to cling to dogma. Religion changes too perhaps.. no one is seriously pissed off about heliocentrism anymore, it just takes about 100 times longer.
Beyond some undefinable religious aspect I suspect you're hinting at, what's the difference between the two words?
You should know that PETA are a bunch of liars that want the whole world to be vegan/vegetarian. They don't care about the truth and will distort and flat out lie at every turn. There was an episode of bullshit about these bastards, and I suggest everyone see it.
But Internet outages are just as menacing -- and indeed, where one can get a battery to power their digital workhorses there is no such analog for Internet power.
And how many companies rely on batteries or generators to continue work when the power goes out? Hardly any. Some ISPs, the various telephone companies, hospitals, other business shuts down and everyone goes home when the power goes out. Some companies rely on phone service for their entire business. I bet they have no backup plan in place in the phones go down. Internet access really isn't all that different from any other mission critical service. Companies that have enough money and rely on it have redundant internet connections. Everyone else just waits until service is restored.
I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life,
he added "Kicked across a room yes, picked it up and thrown it no." Who ever actually throws chairs? I've seen people kick chairs before, but never throw them.
Apple has attracted a group of people that place an inordinate value on aesthetics. This isn't the first grumbling we've heard from the faithfull. Remember the Apple Cube and people complaining about "cracks" (small imperfections in the plastic) in the case? Now it's that the nano can get scratches in the screen. This is the price that Apple pays by attracting people that only seem to care about aesthetics. When something goes wrong with the aesthetics the faithfull scream their heads off.
It is how the detective and intelligence catches these criminal... To psychologically understand who this person maybe and also recognize signs of another possible criminal.
I seriously doubt that Nigerian police are really trying very hard to catch any of these people. Despite what the officials say about "being serious about 419" there were only 12 convictions for this in all of Nigeria in two years. I guess I'll rely on the results of the police rather than their words.
The real question is, why should Nigeria work to stop these scams? They bring in a lot of money for the local economy from foriegn sources. From what I understand, Nigeria is a "kleptocracy". That is the government runs on corruption. The problem with kleptocracy is that theft is rewarded and legitimacy isn't. Economies are largly built on trust. Without trust it becomes impossible to pull a country out of poverty.
Basically, they are saying that there is nothing that size that could possibly be of interest.
I doubt Nasa would ever go quite that far. The thing you have to realize and what I was trying to point out is that there's always tradeoffs in any design. Spacecraft orbiting Mars has even bigger tradeoffs. Do you have the super-duper optics that can read a book in orbit (and blow all your money on it) or do you have multiple instruments, 3 more missions later on with very different goals, and optics that can see a schoolbus? Anything going all the way to Mars has drastic limits on weight. The heavier something is the bigger the rocket you need to get it to Mars. It also needs more propellant to stop the damn thing so it doesn't crash into Mars. All of that is expensive, and Nasa doesn't have blank checks from Uncle Sam. BTW, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched this August will be able to see objects about as large as a dinner plate. They'd like to be able to see rocks that might interfere with future landing sites.
Any indication to the contrary is hooted off the stage. And they insure that they won't be contradicted by their own observations because the probes they send are half blind.
We've got two Rovers currently driving around Mars for the extreme close up stuff. Getting inch resolution on a lot of rocks probbably isn't terribly interesting. Getting microscopic pictures of a few select interesting rocks is probbably a hell of a lot better at finding evidence of water being on Mars at one point.
We have satellites orbiting Earth that can read the numbers on a license plate and they can't get a good shot of the lander? Am I missing something here?
Maybe we don't think there's license plates on Mars?
Seriously though, what's the point of having ultra-high resolution pictures of Mars? Seeing each individual rock probbably isn't terribly usefull compared to other things the money could be used for. The CIA and NSA are obviously interested in high resolution pictures. NASA is interested in a wide range of optical frequencies, sub-surface mapping via radar, etc.
The big limitation however is just the resolution/field of view tradeoff. Usually when you're taking that high a resolution you've got a very narrow field of view. If you wanted to photograph all of Mars it'd take forever with such small swaths. Intelligence agencies don't want to take pictures of everything on the planet at high resolution, just very select things. Also, Mars is further away from the Sun so there's less light reaching Mars.
The most obvious difference of course is simply that US intelligence agencies have far larger budgets than NASA does, and obviously a smaller scope of what they're trying to accomplish.
I think you've missed the point of an accepted standard. No one wants multiple versions of something that accomplish the same thing equally, much less redundant standards that're inferrior. Do you really want an internet that supports every network protocol ever invented? Even if there were some magic way that all OS's could share protocol stacks just maintaining all that garbage would be a nightmare. As a programmer I certainly don't want to learn how to code to 15 different network protocol APIs. SMTP is the standard email delivery protocol now, and I'm quite glad that all that proprietary garbage all died 10 years ago. If it hadn't simply sending email to your friend with a different ISP probbably wouldn't be possible.
You're right that the size of the code is trivial. What costs is supporting the standard. More standards that accomplish the same thing just adds complexity without giving anything back.
the spacecraft is no longer there!
I think what the poster meant is the spacecraft was never there to begin with. With limited resolution and enough random dark spots and hills there's bound to be a few that look like they might be a parachute and a lander.
Given how poor the images are I wonder why they ever thought this was the polar lander at all and not just natural features of mars?
Yes, we could spend all day talking about the technicalities of the clock, the politicization of human calendars, and what the odds are of the thing not getting blown up by someone who thinks that only Allah Knows What Time It Is, etc... but the whole point of the project is cultural/philoshopical. It (as the finished project is conceived) is a conversation piece designed to make observers actually think past what they're going to have for lunch, and whether or not Battlestar Galactica is a re-run or not tonight.
And that's exactly what most of the things you just mentioned are about. How do you make a clock that lasts 10,000 years? (we don't tend to make things that last anywhere near that long). The clock getting blown up by fanatics is would require a drastic change in the culture, something that could only happen in maybe a hundred years. It's difficult to talk about the clock without thinking about the timescale it's supposed to exist in.
It's a pretty cool idea. As a culture it seems like we don't tend to make "wonders of the world" anymore. We've recently gotten this notion that new is good, and old is bad. Kind of a messed up idea in many respects. New is anything made in the last 6 months, and old is anything older than 3 years.
Bummer... why couldn't they just fire it off to some random star or something? Like say, the second star on the right?
Money. It's expensive to escape the earths gravitational pull. It's even more expensive to escape the suns gravitational pull. The escape velocity of the earth is 11.2 km/sec at the surface. The escape velocity of the sun on the earths surface is 42.1 km/sec, which is about 95,000 miles an hour. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think the voyager and pioneer probes only managed to escape the suns gravity though planetary gravitational assists.
50-100 years is permanent? Just admit you were wrong instead of trying to skate around word definitions by redefining the word permanent to less than a human lifetime. (or trying to take your misspelling of the word permanent as some strange intentional creation of a new word that no one has ever heard of before a few hours ago)
That's not what the article says, though obviously it could be wrong. Please provide evidence that the orbit isn't just a LEO and will decay in 50-100 years.
Based on what you an others have said this entire article should be marked troll. The most interesting comment was that satellite failure isn't unexpected as the people who manage them get information on the health status of the satellites.
But requiring someone to take classes on talking fast and paying $35 does nothing to that end. If your goal is to reduce stolen goods then pass a law requiring assistants to the same requirements pawn shops have.
I hear a lot of people talking about bonding providing some assurance against fraud. I think this actually makes some sense. Instead of trying this auctioneer license nonsense how about just a simple law saying anyone selling something for someone by proxy that normally will sell for over X dollars needs to be bonded? X is something like $200 or $500.
Then people selling trivial things don't require bonding, but anyone selling something valueable (and thus tempted to just steal the thing and walk away) would be required to carry some kind of protection against that kind of fraud. It also protects against crooks simply saying they only use the "buy it now" option, thus avoiding anything that might look like an auction.
The concern is that 4 or 5 satellites will all fail in the same year. The current pace of only replacing 2 a year would cause gaps in the GPS coverage. Just because you allocate the funds doesn't mean you get to launch the replacement satellites tommorow to fix the problem. Not knowing much about satellite launch preparation I'm guessing it might take a month or two to get everything ready for launch.
If you are taking other peoples property and selling it at auction, you are acting as an auctioneer.
I think there's a very good argument that eBay is acting as the auctioneer. The assistant is merely preparing the item to be auctioned. Putting up an initial price and describing an item doesn't take any special skills.
There's nothing wrong with requiring bonding for these kinds of businesses to prevent fraud (i.e. seller says item sold for $50 and keeps $10 to cover his 20% fee, when item actually sold for $70). Because this kind of business involves a trust relationship, bonding is called for.
Who needs to trust the seller when the auction results are publically available on eBay? If nothing else a customer could just look at all the auctions of an ebay assistant for the item they were selling. If the ebay assistant says the item sold for $50 and it really sold for $60 then the truth is readily available on the eBay website. This is yet another piece of evidence that the REAL auctioneer is eBay itself.
Step back for just a minute and look at the reasons why it was decided long ago that you needs an auctioneer license. Obviously running an auction takes a bit of skill. Recognizing bid raises, knowing how much to raise the price, knowing how long to wait for the item to be sold, and the whole "talking fast" thing are special skills. The idea of regulating it is to protect the public from unskilled auctioneers who won't get a good price for an item.
Almost all of that crap is handled by Ebay itself. The person selling the item by proxy only has to set an initial price, describe the item, etc. These are all skills that don't normally require regulation in any other context. Why (other than trying to raise more tax revenue) should the states try to regulate trading assistance?
In any case, notebook sales have topped desktops. AMD really dropped the ball on that one -- they have absolutely nothing which remotely compares to the Pentium M, and even Steve Jobs was forced to admit it.
Very true that AMD has crappy crappy mobile chips. I think they intentionally didn't go after this market though because they have a much smaller chip producing capacity than Intel, and a much smaller R&D budget compared to Intel. It's much smarter to go after the desktop and server markets than the mobile market as the chip designs are similar. Mobile designs are all low power, which is a lot different from the desktop/server chips.
Gee, thanks for the high school explanation of evolution, I didn't know what it was.
If you knew a little more about evolution you'd also know that species don't just get any-old advantage, they get the one that requires the least amount of changes but also provides them with the most advantage (bang for buck). The question is obviously why extrodinary physical substances fit that bill so often for insects.
I could see it, but what is it about insects that the thing to go for, the thing that gives them the best bang/buck is substances with excellent physical properties?
Spiders produce super-strong silk, other insects produce this perfect rubber substance. What is it about insects that they produce such desireable materials? Are there more insect substances equally amazing?