I made myself a standing treadmill desk for my faculty job, and generally liked it. I got a normal treadmill from Craigslist and a desk from IKEA. I tended to walk a good deal when I had typing to do and the work did not require a full mental effort. I could never get writing to go easily while walking, and there was something about the walking process on the treadmill that required some of my CPU cycles (in contrast to regular walking outside, which does not). So: marking papers using MS Word - yes, marking papers with pen - no, thinking hard about a research problem - no.
I tended to walk about 1-4 miles a day, depending on the type of work I had to do, and how much of it was in the office vs. lab vs. lecture room.
The main drawback with a cheap, regular (not designed for office use), used treadmill was the noise. It was pretty loud. I put some rubber mats under the base to deaden the noise a bit, which was sufficient for my downstairs neighbor, but it was still too loud for me next-door neighbor. That would be the main driver to get a "real" office walking treadmill, which are quieter, and are optimized for walking, not running speeds.
Is somebody claiming that some of the cometary material is less than 1Ka (kilo-annum) old? I doubt that any of that material is younger than 3Ga, and probably older than 5Ga. Perhaps they mean that the material was mostly dislodged from the comet over 1000 years ago. Fine, but that's not the age of the material, which is generally taken to mean the age at which the material came to be in its present state (vs. location).
Here is the letter I just sent my representative (Rick Larsen). You might consider doing the same.
Hello, Rick. I am a Democrat and an Associate Professor of Geology at Western WA University and I just found out about HR 6845, introduced by John Conyers. This is a bad bill, because it takes a dramatic step backwards on the issue of scientific publication. Please take a stand against it.
The current state of science publication is untenable. Every year, journal costs rise faster than library budgets and we must cut our access to valuable journals, which hampers scientific research. Authors are not paid for their work, nor are peer reviewers, and yet the journals are making money hand over fist. Everybody knows that the ultimate solution lies in free and open internet-based publication, but getting there is tricky.
The government made a remarkable step forward a few years ago when the National Institutes of Health required that the results of any NIH-funded research be freely available to the public online at PubMedCentral after a one-year delay (to allow the publication in a print journal). This set a valuable precedent and was obviously fair: if the US taxpayers are funding the research, they should be able to see the results without paying again! The Conyers bill (HR 6845) would reverse this positive step.
I urge you to instead come out in favor of expanding this principle to the National Science Foundation. The progress of science will be dramatically enhanced if all NSF-funded research is also subject to the same free-access rule.
I would welcome further discussions with you on this topic if you wish.
The posting states "all the primordial biochemistry took place in phyllosilicates, some kind of mineral that is a good matrix for preserving organic matter". This is partially wrong, partially misleading, and partially speculative.
First, phyllosilicates are minerals whose structure is built out of SiO4 tetrahedra polymerized into 2-D sheets at the atomic scale. Examples are clay minerals and micas (biotite and muscovite, principally).
Second, the "life began on phyllosilicates" is merely an interesting hypothesis, and has not made it to the stage of theory. The basis for this is that phyllosilicates have those sheets stacked up in a periodic structure, and the spacing can be on the order of the spacing in RNA (disclaimer: I'm no expert on this hypothesis, and I don't have the paper in front of me now).
Finally, there's no way that phyllosilicates, or any mineral, are going to "preserve organic matter". Organic matter preservation is simply related to the history of the material (e.g., temperature, pressure, time).
-Dave Hirsch
Assoc. Prof. of Geology
Western WA Univ.
Perhaps you should do some research before you post. I clearly stated:
Perhaps they are honest now, while they are trying to compete for the search market (although I doubt it), but can you imagine them being just as honest in a world where they are the search leader (i.e., they've killed Google)?
So, sure they're perhaps honest now, but I doubt they would stay honest if they won the search engine battle.
Thanks very much for you insightful comments.
-Dave
...because they just can't help themselves: they must always leverage one aspect of their business to support the others (Apple does this, too, with the iPod). Can you really imagine a Microsoft search that doesn't, subtly, try to "enhance" the Microsoft brand? Can you really imagine a Microsoft search that would allow a "Windows sucks" site to have the top rank in a search for the term "windows", even if the ranking system dictated it? Can you really imagine a Microsoft search that wouldn't subtly skew search results in some industry they are competing for? Perhaps they are honest now, while they are trying to compete for the search market (although I doubt it), but can you imagine them being just as honest in a world where they are the search leader (i.e., they've killed Google)?
Microsoft will never be an honest broker. They're too evil.
I have used these for a couple of years in some of my intro geology courses. The companies want you to use them for quizzing/testing, but I haven't found that to be feasible in my large (120-150 student) courses. In my smaller courses I don't see a real benefit to them, because I have enough direct responses in the small-group setting. In order to use them for quizzing, you have to either: 1) Hand them out once at the beginning of the course, record who has which one, hope they bring them daily, hope they haven't been destroyed in the bottom of a backpack, and hope they haven't switched with a friend; or 2) Hand them out at the beginning of each class session you want to use them for, and somehow record who has each one. This would likely take most of the class time just recording who has each gadget!
I have found them to be mostly useful in terms of the "gee-whiz" factor. Students respond positively on evaluations, but I've found no correlation between the use of these gadgets and student learning. I still use them in about 20% of my class sessions for the intro class.
I forget who it was who said, when asked what observations would disprove evolution, "Rabbit bones in Precambrian strata." Can anybody come up with similarly clear potential observations that would disprove ID? I doubt it.
It is this type of thing that distinguishes science from non-science. Potentially observable data that would disprove the hypothesis.
I don't know if the problem is the page not being really standards-compliant or if the page is truly standards-compliant but Safari is not, or if it's Slashdotted, but it doesn't fully display for me.
I'll refine last night's comment by the following: there is no reason to expect a large (1980-style) event in the near future (as reckoned on a human time scale). Of course, on the geological time scale, 1980 was hardly worth noticing, and events of that size are happening almost constantly (on the geological time scale).
Again, expect to see ash plumes intermittently (not "periodically") as the edifice builds up again. Worth keeping an eye on, but remember that this activity indicates release of pressure, not build-up of pressure. It's the build-up that will get you.
-Dave
Months after the preliminary signs starting showing, Washington State's Mount St. Helens is sending a plume of steam and ash 7,600 metres into the air.
It's incorrect to imply, as the posting does, that the earlier activity is "preliminary", and that now the real action is going to get going. We are, in all likelihood, in a dome-building phase. It will have natural variation, times of activity and times of quiescence, just as the volcanic system has on a geologic time scale. There is no reason to expect a large explosive event in the near future.
Hey, I'm not saying that there's no problem, all I'm asking for is a little more accuracy in the language we use to talk about the issue. Actually, I think it's more visceral to hear "The earth will become unfit for human habitation" than "The earth will be destroyed"?
-Dave Hirsch,
Asst. Professor of Geology
No self-respecting geologist would ever claim that the earth is in danger of anything short of a truly enormous bolide (comet/meteor). We can do nothing to harm the earth; we can only make it inhospitable for various life forms. Even these changes are temporary, fleeting alterations on a planet that has survived much much worse.
A safer, better type of nuclear reactor design, one cooled by liquid metal, was covered in the recent issue of American Scientist (the journal of Sigma Xi). Such a design could also burn the type of nuclear waste destined for Yucca Mountain.
An abstract of the article is here.
But the beauty of this scheme, is that you comply with any cease-and-desist you get. No lawyers necessary, right? It's just that the randomly rotating mirrors move too fast for the lawyers to keep up with. Well, that's the idea, anyway.
It seems that the response time of lawyers to this stuff is much slower than computer-based solutions. Here an idea:
Set up a ring of mirrors, which would rotate on a random basis. Every time a server start mirroring the Scientology material, it would register with Google and the other search engines that it had the material.
Lawyers would send a letter to Google requesting they take down the link, which Google would do, but...
By this time, two other servers would have mirrored the material and registered with Google.
Slashdot Mirror
I made myself a standing treadmill desk for my faculty job, and generally liked it. I got a normal treadmill from Craigslist and a desk from IKEA. I tended to walk a good deal when I had typing to do and the work did not require a full mental effort. I could never get writing to go easily while walking, and there was something about the walking process on the treadmill that required some of my CPU cycles (in contrast to regular walking outside, which does not). So: marking papers using MS Word - yes, marking papers with pen - no, thinking hard about a research problem - no.
I tended to walk about 1-4 miles a day, depending on the type of work I had to do, and how much of it was in the office vs. lab vs. lecture room.
The main drawback with a cheap, regular (not designed for office use), used treadmill was the noise. It was pretty loud. I put some rubber mats under the base to deaden the noise a bit, which was sufficient for my downstairs neighbor, but it was still too loud for me next-door neighbor. That would be the main driver to get a "real" office walking treadmill, which are quieter, and are optimized for walking, not running speeds.
Pic here.
Is somebody claiming that some of the cometary material is less than 1Ka (kilo-annum) old? I doubt that any of that material is younger than 3Ga, and probably older than 5Ga. Perhaps they mean that the material was mostly dislodged from the comet over 1000 years ago. Fine, but that's not the age of the material, which is generally taken to mean the age at which the material came to be in its present state (vs. location).
Here is the letter I just sent my representative (Rick Larsen). You might consider doing the same.
Hello, Rick. I am a Democrat and an Associate Professor of Geology at Western WA University and I just found out about HR 6845, introduced by John Conyers. This is a bad bill, because it takes a dramatic step backwards on the issue of scientific publication. Please take a stand against it.
The current state of science publication is untenable. Every year, journal costs rise faster than library budgets and we must cut our access to valuable journals, which hampers scientific research. Authors are not paid for their work, nor are peer reviewers, and yet the journals are making money hand over fist. Everybody knows that the ultimate solution lies in free and open internet-based publication, but getting there is tricky.
The government made a remarkable step forward a few years ago when the National Institutes of Health required that the results of any NIH-funded research be freely available to the public online at PubMedCentral after a one-year delay (to allow the publication in a print journal). This set a valuable precedent and was obviously fair: if the US taxpayers are funding the research, they should be able to see the results without paying again! The Conyers bill (HR 6845) would reverse this positive step.
I urge you to instead come out in favor of expanding this principle to the National Science Foundation. The progress of science will be dramatically enhanced if all NSF-funded research is also subject to the same free-access rule. I would welcome further discussions with you on this topic if you wish.
- First, phyllosilicates are minerals whose structure is built out of SiO4 tetrahedra polymerized into 2-D sheets at the atomic scale. Examples are clay minerals and micas (biotite and muscovite, principally).
- Second, the "life began on phyllosilicates" is merely an interesting hypothesis, and has not made it to the stage of theory. The basis for this is that phyllosilicates have those sheets stacked up in a periodic structure, and the spacing can be on the order of the spacing in RNA (disclaimer: I'm no expert on this hypothesis, and I don't have the paper in front of me now).
- Finally, there's no way that phyllosilicates, or any mineral, are going to "preserve organic matter". Organic matter preservation is simply related to the history of the material (e.g., temperature, pressure, time).
-Dave HirschAssoc. Prof. of Geology
Western WA Univ.
I believe that the handwriting technology pioneered for Newton lives on in Inkwell, the handwriting facility built into Mac OSX for use with tablets.
Because ID is not science (it makes no testable predictions), science says absolutely nothing about whether it is true or false. ID may be true, it may be false, it may even use evolution via descent with modification via natural selection as a mechanism. There is no way to know using the tools of science.
Perhaps you should do some research before you post. I clearly stated:
So, sure they're perhaps honest now, but I doubt they would stay honest if they won the search engine battle.
Thanks very much for you insightful comments.
-Dave
...because they just can't help themselves: they must always leverage one aspect of their business to support the others (Apple does this, too, with the iPod). Can you really imagine a Microsoft search that doesn't, subtly, try to "enhance" the Microsoft brand?
Can you really imagine a Microsoft search that would allow a "Windows sucks" site to have the top rank in a search for the term "windows", even if the ranking system dictated it?
Can you really imagine a Microsoft search that wouldn't subtly skew search results in some industry they are competing for?
Perhaps they are honest now, while they are trying to compete for the search market (although I doubt it), but can you imagine them being just as honest in a world where they are the search leader (i.e., they've killed Google)?
Microsoft will never be an honest broker. They're too evil.
I have used these for a couple of years in some of my intro geology courses. The companies want you to use them for quizzing/testing, but I haven't found that to be feasible in my large (120-150 student) courses. In my smaller courses I don't see a real benefit to them, because I have enough direct responses in the small-group setting. In order to use them for quizzing, you have to either:
1) Hand them out once at the beginning of the course, record who has which one, hope they bring them daily, hope they haven't been destroyed in the bottom of a backpack, and hope they haven't switched with a friend; or
2) Hand them out at the beginning of each class session you want to use them for, and somehow record who has each one. This would likely take most of the class time just recording who has each gadget!
I have found them to be mostly useful in terms of the "gee-whiz" factor. Students respond positively on evaluations, but I've found no correlation between the use of these gadgets and student learning. I still use them in about 20% of my class sessions for the intro class.
I forget who it was who said, when asked what observations would disprove evolution, "Rabbit bones in Precambrian strata." Can anybody come up with similarly clear potential observations that would disprove ID? I doubt it.
It is this type of thing that distinguishes science from non-science. Potentially observable data that would disprove the hypothesis.
I don't know if the problem is the page not being really standards-compliant or if the page is truly standards-compliant but Safari is not, or if it's Slashdotted, but it doesn't fully display for me.
I'll refine last night's comment by the following: there is no reason to expect a large (1980-style) event in the near future (as reckoned on a human time scale). Of course, on the geological time scale, 1980 was hardly worth noticing, and events of that size are happening almost constantly (on the geological time scale).
Again, expect to see ash plumes intermittently (not "periodically") as the edifice builds up again. Worth keeping an eye on, but remember that this activity indicates release of pressure, not build-up of pressure. It's the build-up that will get you. -Dave
Months after the preliminary signs starting showing, Washington State's Mount St. Helens is sending a plume of steam and ash 7,600 metres into the air.
It's incorrect to imply, as the posting does, that the earlier activity is "preliminary", and that now the real action is going to get going. We are, in all likelihood, in a dome-building phase. It will have natural variation, times of activity and times of quiescence, just as the volcanic system has on a geologic time scale. There is no reason to expect a large explosive event in the near future.
-David Hirsch Asst. Professor of geology
Hey, I'm not saying that there's no problem, all I'm asking for is a little more accuracy in the language we use to talk about the issue. Actually, I think it's more visceral to hear "The earth will become unfit for human habitation" than "The earth will be destroyed"?
-Dave Hirsch,
Asst. Professor of Geology
No self-respecting geologist would ever claim that the earth is in danger of anything short of a truly enormous bolide (comet/meteor). We can do nothing to harm the earth; we can only make it inhospitable for various life forms. Even these changes are temporary, fleeting alterations on a planet that has survived much much worse.
A safer, better type of nuclear reactor design, one cooled by liquid metal, was covered in the recent issue of American Scientist (the journal of Sigma Xi). Such a design could also burn the type of nuclear waste destined for Yucca Mountain.
An abstract of the article is here.
But the beauty of this scheme, is that you comply with any cease-and-desist you get. No lawyers necessary, right? It's just that the randomly rotating mirrors move too fast for the lawyers to keep up with. Well, that's the idea, anyway.
-Dave
It seems that the response time of lawyers to this stuff is much slower than computer-based solutions. Here an idea:
[Lather, rinse, repeat]
-Dave