I'd say the starting point of life is up for contention till someone can prove the starting point.
Two points: First, the "starting point" of life is the study of biogenesis. Which has very little to do with the theory of natural selection or the observed fact of evolution. Second, science doesn't "prove" things (in the way that most people think of proof as 100% incontrovertable evidence) but instead seeks to disprove (falsify) things. Science is interested in likely, probably, almost certainly, etc. but always conditional assertions that are awaiting the one piece of evidence that will require restatement, improvement, correction. If you're looking for certainty in scientific statements, you'll still be waiting for it when they're digging your grave.
You've managed to hit both of my pet peeves about the discussion of evolution vs. creationism. 1. the frequent confusion of "evolution", "natural selection", "biogenesis", and "cosmology" by those who argue for creationism. Who cares if natural selection doesn't explain how the universe or life was created? That's not the kind of question that natural selection has anything to do with. Go and ask the experts studying that subject area and leave natural selection to explain how evolution works. 2. the proof/falsifiable statement confusion. More people would be less threatened by science if they actually understood what a scientific theory really was and how to actually go about improving what we humans know about the world around us.
First, I'm a libertarian, not a "L"ibertarian. Though I did vote for Badnarik, and I do want a smaller government involved in fewer aspects of our daily lives, I don't actually buy into the anarchist aspects of the official party platform.
Second, as a registered Republican, I get a chance to vote in Republican primaries. Which means that I can support John McCain, and vote against whichever religious right-winger who tries to get elected where I live. Since this helps the Republicans, I don't feel deceptive to register as one.
I understood his remark to refer to the growing number of people who observe the PATRIOT Act and similar laws, domestic wiretapping, financial surveillance, etc. and see a government increasingly set on being a police state.
Since I don't trust police states to do anything except trample on liberty and freedom, my trust in the US government is declining at a rapid rate.
those protons, neutrons and electrons have only two desires: consume and multiply.
Not to rain on your erudite discussion on the nature of humanity, but sub-atomic particles (in their hadronic nature) neither desire anything nor have the ability to "consume" or to "multiply".
The "bald monkey" level of your taxonomy is the lowest level at which a desire might be meaningfully expressed. As this very mild correction does not interfere with your conclusive statement, please continue with the already established discussion.
Actually, "Nitromethanol" or "Nitrometh" is "a nitro/alcohol mix". You'll have to pardon the gp's misspelling of that as "Nitromethane". We knew what he meant.
So is Aviri. Internal corporate social networking (What are you known to be good at? Who can help me with this kind of problem?). Aviri took the basic social network and added a reputation for expertise in various subjects. Very cool concept and software, but we ran out of money before we could make it scale effectively to larger populations.
And what about people who use apostrophe's to make plural's? That always ticks me off.
That's appropriate when pluralizing acronyms. How many ENIAC's were built?
In most other cases, however, add an "s" or "es". Unless the word comes from old english, where you might instead change a low vowel sound to a high vowel sound (mouse -> mice). Unless the singular form has been corrupted and then there's no difference between singular and plural any more (deer -> deer).
The difficulty is that English is a very successful (read: widely used) and therefore "living" language. It's really three distinct languages (modern english, middle english, old english) with lots of words and syntactic rules borrowed from dozens of other languages (norman french, anglo-saxon, old danish, old norse, etc.). All part of the cost of popularity.
A billion dollars is still a million, million dollars!
Please go back and repeat 5th grade.
Actually, in the UK, he's right.
Add three zeros to a million and you get a thousand million. Add three more and you've got a billion. Not really sure what to say at this point, because the Brits are completely screwed up on this, but at least they're consistently inconsistent with the rest of the world... Kind of like how the US is with SAE units (however, just about all work/industry is done with metric units, it's only street signs and consumer product packaging that still uses SAE units, so we're not even consistent about that).
Actually, it's the ability to defend yourself (and by extension effective self-defense) that is the basic right. Being able to own a gun and be practiced in it's use is arguably* the most effective way to defend yourself.
As Col. Colt said at the beginning of his book:
Have no fear of any man No matter what his size When danger threatens, call on me And I will equalize.
Regards, Ross
* There is a frequently mentioned study which states that your gun is 42x more likely to kill you or someone you know than protect you in self-defense (Kellerman, 1986 NEJM). Oddly, it is very rarely mentioned that the study was done in inner-city Detroit, 36x of the 42x was drug dealers killing other drug dealers (people they knew) and of the remaining 5.9x was suicides (your gun killing you). Very precise wording, but a deliberately disingenuous conclusion.
What percentage of card-carrying NRA members voted against this administration that's been actively working on trampling the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th, and 14th Amendments all so long as they promised to protect the 2nd -- The Only Amendment That Matters (tm).
I did. I voted for Badnarik. Couldn't bring myself to vote for Kerry (Kerry had the state anyway -- California).
Most modern day gun owners are more likely to think that security is freedom and are the most dedicated supporters of everything that is being done to tear the Constitution in half.
Sadly, you're quite right. Almost all of my "gun-nut" friends just don't seem to get why I'm so pissed off Bush's full-on drive towards a police state. When I talk about emigrating to another country, only a very few seem to have the first clue that another country might have more freedoms than the US.
Do you find the amount of flash or ram on your 54GL limiting ? Do you need USB ports ? If "yes", when you should get one of these.
Not based on what I knew the device could do. But the list of things I'm knew about was shaped by the advertised capabilities of DD-WRT. I hadn't even thought of using an extended version as a PXE (network boot) server.
So, a question of "what are you doing with the WRTSL54GS that you can't do with a WRT54GL" was really what I wanted to know (and what I asked). Luckily for me, it led to a discussion of exactly that and I may end up buying one.
I actually use my 54GL as a firewall, a VPN server, and a traffic shaper (QoS bridge) with DD-WRT.
Asterisk would be nice to play with, but I have to have the POTS line to have DSL and my mobile is so cheap for 99% of my calls that it would be just for fun.
Remote admin could be helpful by next year.
As for a backup server, Infrant makes a much more capable NAS, but nobody's hacking the Infrant firmware yet and there are plenty of things on my Infrant wish list (like being a PXE server). Hm. I just found a HOWTO on using OpenWRT as a PXE server.
Thanks for the response. Led to some interesting googling.
The failure rate of CF cards is all about writes. If you disable swap and move all of the log files to a different device (ram drive, network drive, bit bucket, etc.) you've pretty well eliminated OS writes. With linux this is quite easy (put/lib on a network drive and you're 99% done), with Windows, a bit tougher but not impossible.
Also, the Transcend card I bought uses the newer "1,000,000 writes" flash chips that should be even more resistant to flash write fatigue. In order to fail in under two years, I'd have to rewrite the flash about 1300 times per day. I suspect that the computer will be obsolete and the home theater retired long before the flash fails.
until you can PROVE that man is to blame, stop using man's actions as fuel for political attacks.
You, like many who don't understand science, throw the word "prove" around like it's some minimum threshold for accepting a statement as factual or useful.
Clue-bat: scientists don't try to prove things. Scientists have never tried to prove things. People who prove things are called logicians and mathemeticians, usually abstract math.
Instead, what scientists do is provide explanations for observations. If the explanation explains enough observations, the explanation becomes a "theory", defined as "A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena."
(As opposed to a very different meaning of the word theory that is often incorrectly used by anti-science advocates: " An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture.")
Proof is a mathematical concept. It isn't found in the real world. What is found is a quantity of evidence sufficient that it would be foolish to withold agreement. So, Mr. Fairness and Reason, what you're asking for doesn't exist. As such it's not very reasonable or fair to require it as some minimum threshold of something worth learning. But then again, perhaps that's exactly why you are the way you are...
Finally, it doesn't matter all that much if we're to blame. What matters is if we can alter current trends to prevent a forseeable worldwide ecological disaster. Unfortunately, humans lack the political will to prevent disaster (Katrina). Traditionally, we only act collectively to repair disasters. And for ecological disasters on this scale, the only thing that is clear is that by the time global warming really begins to hurt the wealthiest countries on the planet, there will be almost nothing anyone can do about it. As such, things are likely to get very, very bad before any substantive effort is made to change things.
The math is simply too obvious. Whatever you may think of their appearance, the fact that they're admiring your daughter's assets when those assets are on public display is not sufficient to label them perverts. Just about any young man (and all older men) would qualify under that metric.
I realize that you don't like it, but if your pool isn't protected from prying eyes, you're naive to believe that normal people won't at least slow down and enjoy a nice long look at a pleasant example of nature's beauty...
CF memory is now available in 3GB sizs for about $300;
I just bought 8GB for $180 with similar performance to the laptop hard drive (20MB/sec reads 18MB/sec writes). By the end of the year, 8GB will be under $100.
These are already large enough to support a credible laptop computer, although you'd need ten or so to provide storage for a typical desktop.
Just put the OS installation on the flash (you don't need 8GB for that, 4GB will do for XP or Ubundu with room to spare, be sure to disable swap and have enough RAM to make up for it). For the moment, put the big drives in a NAS enclosure in a different room with a dedicated 100mbit or 1gbit ethernet connection. A single drive NAS enclosure is about $110, 4 drive RAID-5 enclosure is about $700. Depending on the application, either one is a bargain.
By the way, this isn't theory. What I've described is the HTPC I just finished building. 8GB flash primary drive in an obscenely quiet PC, 4 drive NAS with 2.1TB of data in a closet storing more content than I can enjoy in three months. The NAS and drives were the primary expense of the whole home theater (I already had the projector).
What about a broken standard -- for instance span width?
Span tags are inline. Their width should be defined by the block in which they're rendered. Setting the width of a span is equivalent to setting the height of "some water".
Firefox forces you to use tables for formatting
You're simply misinformed. Firefox lets you use div's or tables for formatting (you should use div's if at all possible). And ultimately, setting your spans to display:block will allow the width property to work the way you might want (assuming it's impractical to go back and redesign the page to better match the standard).
span.myclass { display:block; width:200px; }
Don't get me wrong, CSS is frustrating to use for a number of reasons, but it's better than the alternatives and IE makes the problems with CSS worse instead of better.
The problem (from the telco's point of view) is that Google is paying only one company for the bandwidth it uses.
But the fees they pay go towards the provider's upstream bandwidth costs, so Google's fees get split with the upstream provider before you can measure profit. You and I pay into the same sort of a heirarchy, with everyone trying to obtain universal connectivity with everyone else.
What the telcos want is to obtain control over content. But the success of the internet is based on a lack of control over content. Anyone can publish, so (almost) everyone does publish. This results in enormous quantities of useless crap, but also more useful information than has ever been available to the public.
The telcos can get what they say they want already by selling dedicated channels beside the DSL channel. If you want DSL pay-per-view, there's not much preventing them from selling you a channel of that. You'll need some new gear to see your new TV feed, but people are used to that sort of abuse.
But when I agree to lease a 1.5Mbit DSL line, I intend to lease a 1.5Mbit link to the whole internet. If they stop selling me that, I take my business elsewhere. The huge problem arises if there's nowhere else to go.
Couple of points with you experiment - firstly, you'd need to be taking your vitamin/sugar pill for a period of time before switching to the other (eg, two weeks on one, then maybe a week without, then two weeks on the other. Compare weeks, then reveal which was which).
Yah, I'm doing day-length variation and week-length variation in two experiments. The week experiment is over (strong positive correlation - 0.68), the day experiment will be over in mid-July. I'm repeating each day case twenty times for forty total tests (I only did twelve one-week tests for the week-length experiment).
You'd want to keep as many other things constant as possible during the periods, if your diet alters, that could skew your results. Also, when taking dietry suppliments, you're usually better of taking them with food, so your body produces the enzymes required to properly break down and absorb them (doesn't matter how many vitamins you take if your body's not absorbing them). You've probably covered these anyway, but in case not, there ya go.
Mostly covered, not 100%.
Timing of taking the pill has been controlled since I have a very consistent breakfast, but the rest of my diet has not been so tightly controlled. I expect variations in daily diet to dilute any correlation slightly, but since one of my subjective observations is in the morning (before I have any daily dietary variation), there's a partial control for that, too.
Is "the sugar thing" is in reference to my "sugar pills"? Those are the control in the experiment, and they're simple placebos made up of starches and sugars (don't know how much of each ingredient or how much is digestable or not) that weigh the same amount as the multivitamin. They have almost no effect on me, and I'm fairly sensitive to refined sugar, so there's not much sugar in them...
It's the multivitamins that appear to have a substantive effect on my day to day energy level, and now I'm really curious if I can isolate the effect down to the iodine and it's effect on thyroid. I may have to enlist my doctor's help and get regular blood tests to see if my thyroid activity correlates with taking only an iodine supplement to show causation...
You weren't flamebait, though I thought you might be (which is why I checked on your assertion).
Slashdot Mirror
You've managed to hit both of my pet peeves about the discussion of evolution vs. creationism. 1. the frequent confusion of "evolution", "natural selection", "biogenesis", and "cosmology" by those who argue for creationism. Who cares if natural selection doesn't explain how the universe or life was created? That's not the kind of question that natural selection has anything to do with. Go and ask the experts studying that subject area and leave natural selection to explain how evolution works. 2. the proof/falsifiable statement confusion. More people would be less threatened by science if they actually understood what a scientific theory really was and how to actually go about improving what we humans know about the world around us.
Regards,
Ross
Two reasons I'm a registered Republican.
First, I'm a libertarian, not a "L"ibertarian. Though I did vote for Badnarik, and I do want a smaller government involved in fewer aspects of our daily lives, I don't actually buy into the anarchist aspects of the official party platform.
Second, as a registered Republican, I get a chance to vote in Republican primaries. Which means that I can support John McCain, and vote against whichever religious right-winger who tries to get elected where I live. Since this helps the Republicans, I don't feel deceptive to register as one.
Ross
I understood his remark to refer to the growing number of people who observe the PATRIOT Act and similar laws, domestic wiretapping, financial surveillance, etc. and see a government increasingly set on being a police state.
Since I don't trust police states to do anything except trample on liberty and freedom, my trust in the US government is declining at a rapid rate.
(I am a Registered Republican and a libertarian)
Regards,
Ross
The "bald monkey" level of your taxonomy is the lowest level at which a desire might be meaningfully expressed. As this very mild correction does not interfere with your conclusive statement, please continue with the already established discussion.
Your Pardon,
Ross
(apologies to Janeane Garofolo)
Ross
Actually, "Nitromethanol" or "Nitrometh" is "a nitro/alcohol mix". You'll have to pardon the gp's misspelling of that as "Nitromethane". We knew what he meant.
Regards,
Ross
So is Aviri. Internal corporate social networking (What are you known to be good at? Who can help me with this kind of problem?). Aviri took the basic social network and added a reputation for expertise in various subjects. Very cool concept and software, but we ran out of money before we could make it scale effectively to larger populations.
Regards,
Ross
In most other cases, however, add an "s" or "es". Unless the word comes from old english, where you might instead change a low vowel sound to a high vowel sound (mouse -> mice). Unless the singular form has been corrupted and then there's no difference between singular and plural any more (deer -> deer).
The difficulty is that English is a very successful (read: widely used) and therefore "living" language. It's really three distinct languages (modern english, middle english, old english) with lots of words and syntactic rules borrowed from dozens of other languages (norman french, anglo-saxon, old danish, old norse, etc.). All part of the cost of popularity.
Regards,
Ross
Add three zeros to a million and you get a thousand million. Add three more and you've got a billion. Not really sure what to say at this point, because the Brits are completely screwed up on this, but at least they're consistently inconsistent with the rest of the world... Kind of like how the US is with SAE units (however, just about all work/industry is done with metric units, it's only street signs and consumer product packaging that still uses SAE units, so we're not even consistent about that).
Ross
As Col. Colt said at the beginning of his book:
Have no fear of any man
No matter what his size
When danger threatens, call on me
And I will equalize.
Regards,
Ross
* There is a frequently mentioned study which states that your gun is 42x more likely to kill you or someone you know than protect you in self-defense (Kellerman, 1986 NEJM). Oddly, it is very rarely mentioned that the study was done in inner-city Detroit, 36x of the 42x was drug dealers killing other drug dealers (people they knew) and of the remaining 5.9x was suicides (your gun killing you). Very precise wording, but a deliberately disingenuous conclusion.
Sadly, you're quite right. Almost all of my "gun-nut" friends just don't seem to get why I'm so pissed off Bush's full-on drive towards a police state. When I talk about emigrating to another country, only a very few seem to have the first clue that another country might have more freedoms than the US.
Regards,
Ross
You're right. I was thinking of /var. (that's a little embarassing)
Regards,
Ross
So, a question of "what are you doing with the WRTSL54GS that you can't do with a WRT54GL" was really what I wanted to know (and what I asked). Luckily for me, it led to a discussion of exactly that and I may end up buying one.
Regards,
Ross
I have a 54GL and I use it for lots of things myself. My question was intended to help me answer: should I get one of these as well?
I actually use my 54GL as a firewall, a VPN server, and a traffic shaper (QoS bridge) with DD-WRT.
- Asterisk would be nice to play with, but I have to have the POTS line to have DSL and my mobile is so cheap for 99% of my calls that it would be just for fun.
- Remote admin could be helpful by next year.
- As for a backup server, Infrant makes a much more capable NAS, but nobody's hacking the Infrant firmware yet and there are plenty of things on my Infrant wish list (like being a PXE server). Hm. I just found a HOWTO on using OpenWRT as a PXE server.
Thanks for the response. Led to some interesting googling.Regards,
Ross
Where can you get DD-WRT style firmware for that? And what additional capabilities over the 54GL can you do with the additional space?
Regards,
Ross
The failure rate of CF cards is all about writes. If you disable swap and move all of the log files to a different device (ram drive, network drive, bit bucket, etc.) you've pretty well eliminated OS writes. With linux this is quite easy (put /lib on a network drive and you're 99% done), with Windows, a bit tougher but not impossible.
Also, the Transcend card I bought uses the newer "1,000,000 writes" flash chips that should be even more resistant to flash write fatigue. In order to fail in under two years, I'd have to rewrite the flash about 1300 times per day. I suspect that the computer will be obsolete and the home theater retired long before the flash fails.
Regards,
Ross
He didn't want evidence, there's plenty of that to be found. He wanted proof. (emphasis in original)
Regards,
Ross
Clue-bat: scientists don't try to prove things. Scientists have never tried to prove things. People who prove things are called logicians and mathemeticians, usually abstract math.
Instead, what scientists do is provide explanations for observations. If the explanation explains enough observations, the explanation becomes a "theory", defined as "A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena."
(As opposed to a very different meaning of the word theory that is often incorrectly used by anti-science advocates: " An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture.")
Proof is a mathematical concept. It isn't found in the real world. What is found is a quantity of evidence sufficient that it would be foolish to withold agreement. So, Mr. Fairness and Reason, what you're asking for doesn't exist. As such it's not very reasonable or fair to require it as some minimum threshold of something worth learning. But then again, perhaps that's exactly why you are the way you are...
Finally, it doesn't matter all that much if we're to blame. What matters is if we can alter current trends to prevent a forseeable worldwide ecological disaster. Unfortunately, humans lack the political will to prevent disaster (Katrina). Traditionally, we only act collectively to repair disasters. And for ecological disasters on this scale, the only thing that is clear is that by the time global warming really begins to hurt the wealthiest countries on the planet, there will be almost nothing anyone can do about it. As such, things are likely to get very, very bad before any substantive effort is made to change things.
Regards,
Ross
The math is simply too obvious. Whatever you may think of their appearance, the fact that they're admiring your daughter's assets when those assets are on public display is not sufficient to label them perverts. Just about any young man (and all older men) would qualify under that metric.
I realize that you don't like it, but if your pool isn't protected from prying eyes, you're naive to believe that normal people won't at least slow down and enjoy a nice long look at a pleasant example of nature's beauty...
Regards,
Ross
I just bought 8GB for $180 with similar performance to the laptop hard drive (20MB/sec reads 18MB/sec writes). By the end of the year, 8GB will be under $100.
Just put the OS installation on the flash (you don't need 8GB for that, 4GB will do for XP or Ubundu with room to spare, be sure to disable swap and have enough RAM to make up for it). For the moment, put the big drives in a NAS enclosure in a different room with a dedicated 100mbit or 1gbit ethernet connection. A single drive NAS enclosure is about $110, 4 drive RAID-5 enclosure is about $700. Depending on the application, either one is a bargain.
By the way, this isn't theory. What I've described is the HTPC I just finished building. 8GB flash primary drive in an obscenely quiet PC, 4 drive NAS with 2.1TB of data in a closet storing more content than I can enjoy in three months. The NAS and drives were the primary expense of the whole home theater (I already had the projector).
Regards,
Ross
You'll probably enjoy The Opening of Misty Beethoven. The Pygmalion storyline, some very good acting, actual humor, real breasts, sexy women.
Regards,
Ross
You're simply misinformed. Firefox lets you use div's or tables for formatting (you should use div's if at all possible). And ultimately, setting your spans to display:block will allow the width property to work the way you might want (assuming it's impractical to go back and redesign the page to better match the standard).
span.myclass { display:block; width:200px; }
Don't get me wrong, CSS is frustrating to use for a number of reasons, but it's better than the alternatives and IE makes the problems with CSS worse instead of better.
Regards,
Ross
The problem (from the telco's point of view) is that Google is paying only one company for the bandwidth it uses.
But the fees they pay go towards the provider's upstream bandwidth costs, so Google's fees get split with the upstream provider before you can measure profit. You and I pay into the same sort of a heirarchy, with everyone trying to obtain universal connectivity with everyone else.
What the telcos want is to obtain control over content. But the success of the internet is based on a lack of control over content. Anyone can publish, so (almost) everyone does publish. This results in enormous quantities of useless crap, but also more useful information than has ever been available to the public.
The telcos can get what they say they want already by selling dedicated channels beside the DSL channel. If you want DSL pay-per-view, there's not much preventing them from selling you a channel of that. You'll need some new gear to see your new TV feed, but people are used to that sort of abuse.
But when I agree to lease a 1.5Mbit DSL line, I intend to lease a 1.5Mbit link to the whole internet. If they stop selling me that, I take my business elsewhere. The huge problem arises if there's nowhere else to go.
Regards,
Ross
Yah, I'm doing day-length variation and week-length variation in two experiments. The week experiment is over (strong positive correlation - 0.68), the day experiment will be over in mid-July. I'm repeating each day case twenty times for forty total tests (I only did twelve one-week tests for the week-length experiment).
Mostly covered, not 100%.
Timing of taking the pill has been controlled since I have a very consistent breakfast, but the rest of my diet has not been so tightly controlled. I expect variations in daily diet to dilute any correlation slightly, but since one of my subjective observations is in the morning (before I have any daily dietary variation), there's a partial control for that, too.
Regards,
Ross
Is "the sugar thing" is in reference to my "sugar pills"? Those are the control in the experiment, and they're simple placebos made up of starches and sugars (don't know how much of each ingredient or how much is digestable or not) that weigh the same amount as the multivitamin. They have almost no effect on me, and I'm fairly sensitive to refined sugar, so there's not much sugar in them...
It's the multivitamins that appear to have a substantive effect on my day to day energy level, and now I'm really curious if I can isolate the effect down to the iodine and it's effect on thyroid. I may have to enlist my doctor's help and get regular blood tests to see if my thyroid activity correlates with taking only an iodine supplement to show causation...
You weren't flamebait, though I thought you might be (which is why I checked on your assertion).
Regards,
Ross