All this big hoo-hoo noise among the astronomers about whether this or that should be called a planet. Or not. I think it is pathetic.
This is a decision concerning celestial nomenclature and ontology that is better left by the astronomers to the philosophical experts in these matters: the astrologers. In particular, the tropical astrologers (or "western" astrologers) have been working on relevant material for about 50 years already. I do not believe that the vedic astrologers (or "eastern" astrologers) have done as much work in this area. So it really should be left to the tropical astrologers to make this determination, and probably especially to the "german school" of astrology which has done more than the others in incorporating the transuranic minor planets into chart erections (their word, not mine) and delineations.
The astronomers can still make useful contributions by locating the remaining three transuranic minor planets. But that Pluto is a planet is an undeniable astrological truth, in the same way that the Sun and Moon are also planets.
So there.
Astronomers should not meddle with things astrological, for their thoughts are Airy and cannot grasp the Celestial Waters. or, for those of you more comfortable with the tarot, you can say If all you you've been trained in is the way of the Sword, steer clear of those things that require the Cup for their measure.
My main issue is what to do with the broken ones. THe 3rd world already has too many gabage disposal problems as it is.
This is an excellent point. It really isn't socially acceptable anymore for an American institution to introduce high tech goods into any market without also paying attention to recycling the end-of-use waste. It will be a long time before volunteer agencies like Free Geek can extend their reach to keep dead laptpop batteries out of third world village middens. It seems to me that 15 million laptop computers equates to more than 15 million pounds of toxic chemicals that will eventually leach into the food chain unless the program is designed from the beginning to keep that from happening.
I hope that these MIT computers have a modular design so that the end users can canibalize parts from the one the elephant stepped on to keep the others going. Minimizing the waste is always the first part of "reduce, re-use, recycle" thinking.
Beyond that, I also hope that MIT is planning an appropriate supporting infrastructure for these laptops. If MIT plans to introduce 15 million laptops at a total cost of more than $1.5 billion, then I think they should also be making a some $1,000 diagnosis and repair kits that could each keep a several dozen of these laptops operational-- and which would function well in the village setting where they would be needed. (With the typical problems of unreliable power, spare parts storage without climate control, technicians who have a limited understanding of the technology, etc.)
And I also hope that MIT is thinking about a buy-back program or some other recycling incentive to keep these great new laptops of tomorrow from becoming one of the toxic waste problems of the next decade.
These are not insurmountable problems. But they do need to be addressed as an integral part of MIT's core program, with solutions developed at MIT. They cannot be foisted off on the hosting countries-- if MIT with all its resources cannot develop an effective way to heal the broken laptop and bury the dead one, then how the hell is a third world government with limited resources and massive immediate social problems going to come up with an effective solution?
So, MIT, does the program you are planning meet these criteria? Or are you developing a $100 disposable gewgaw that has the potential for destroying the quality of the crops and drinking water of the people you want to give it to? It wouldn't cost a whole lot more to do it right and there is all kinds of room for clever engineering in meeting these broader problems. But I do have a concern that the maintenance and waste management issues inherent in your proposal just aren't sexy enough to hold your attention.
The trickster transforms societies into something it wasn't originally. So while you may complain about people like him, he is actually making the world into something better.
Your logic is wrong. And your thinking is grandiose. But before getting into that, let's spend two paragraphs on some background that you apparently missed in your studies:
If you had read up on the trickster archetype with care, you would have noticed that all of the societal changes that Trickster brought about arose from his very basic needs. Often he did his thing because he was hungry, sometimes because he was fearful, more rarely because he was cold and very rarely because he was deathly lonely.
Trickster's effective changes never came about because he needed ego food. Not that he didn't sometimes try to get pats on the head and lots of "oh how clever that trickster is" comments, because he did (and does) (at least when Trickster is Coyote in many native american stories). But whenever he tries to demonstrate just how clever he is, he inevitably gets it screwed up and gets the People mad at him. He comes out stinking of shit rather than smelling like a rose and nothing good comes out of his effort.
Now the error in your logic is that persons who try to behave like Trickster are not Trickster, so there is no reason to think that their behavior is going to lead to making the world a better place even when they are tricking out of strong needs. They are merely carbon copies, not the original archetype. And when their motivation is just to show off how clever they are-- well, even Trickster himself gets it very wrong when he tries to do that. These trickster wannabees are going to end up with a clinging odor about them that future bosses and coworkers will find unpleasant. They will be denied opportunities that their cleverness would otherwise have assured them, because who the hell wants to have somebody who stinks of shit working on their pet project? This other guy who might not be quite as clever (but who knows, he's the quiet type) is probably clever enough to get the job done, and is going to be a whole lot more pleasant to be around in the conference room or if I've got to share a cubicle or car pool with him.
So I urge the clever ones out there to think on this before showing off in stupid ways in Wikipedia. It is so easy to slip a bunch of crap into an article that it really doesn't say much about how clever you are. But it does say quite a bit about your attitude toward messing up public resources. And in your apparent cleverness, you might end up stepping barefoot into something soft brown and gushy whose odor will follow you around for a long time.
I think "planet" can be defined in a fairly simple way that would be satisfy nearly everybody
A planet is
a naturally occuring object (exclude Death Star, Ring World, other artificial constructs and/or products of imagination)
with an escape velocity exceeding 333 kph (a bit more than twice as fast as an athlete could throw a baseball)
that doesn't glow from intrinsically produced energy (exclude brown stars while including Earth, Jupiter, etc)
and is not in orbit around a planet (exclude moons, but include the possibility of an interstellar wanderer-- a planet with no sun).
I think the second point is the key one. I think to be called a planet, the object has to obey the "what goes up must come down" rule for the range of human-powered activities. If you set a golf ball on the surface and take a whack at it, there should be no doubt that the ball will follow a suborbital trajectory.
Both Lotus 1-2-3 and Netscape virtually had a monopoly before MS decided to take it away from them.
The fall of Lotus 1-2-3 was due to internal reasons; it would have crashed and burned even if there had been no Microsoft. Too much internal power had gone to its Legal Department. Too much of its resources went into "look and feel" lawsuits and not enough resources and strategizing was given to further product development.
If Microsoft's Excel hadn't been around, Borland's Quattro Pro would have done in Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus got all its priorities mixed up in a very unhealthy way.
Predicting involves extrapolating from a current ** sample** of data to predict the future based on one own interpretation/recognition of patterns.
The better your size and quality of your sample combined with a finely tuned pattern recognition the better your forecast
I think it is quite a bit more complex than that, with the complexity arising from a really simple mechanism: the metadata that is shared among members of the crowd.
For instance, I expect that a "guess the weight of an ox" game played by doing street interviews of strangers in Picadilly Circus next Tuesday morning would show a typical bell shaped curve. But when this same game is played at a english village fair where everybody's guess is public information and many persons know the reputations of other guessers, then not everybody is going to be playing the same guessing game. There will be some who know nothing about oxen but know enough about Butcher John that they think his guess will be near the mark, so they go a pound or two higher or lower.
Another point: I understand that when the sample is unbiased, increasing its size above a certain critical value does nothing to improve its predictive accuracy. If you are wanting a level of confidence of 5% or better, then for most human behavior an unbiased sample of 30 to 50 persons is generally sufficient. If you want greater confidence in the results, it is generally better to obtain and analyze several different samples than to increase the size of a single sample.
However IANAStatistician, though I have sometimes had to develop descriptive statistics in quality control work. Perhaps a statistician will speak up now.
My compliments to the Slashdot group; they've done a very nice job with this. Standards-compliant HTML and CSS complements Slashdot's content in a sweet way.
Perhaps the article could be edited to bring spelling into compliance with english standards?
If you can't answer as a reasonable reader, then your criteria come from an unreasonable reader. Don't bother answering. In fact, don't bother making those statements again, or any others, until you're reasonable.
I think this is the part where I'm supposed to say "Ouch! That stung!" then slink off with my tail between my legs?
heh heh
It appears that my posts bother you excessively and I'm not sure under what conditions I'd want to do anything about that, even if there was something I could do. I'm not keen on climbing into other people's minds to fix their wiring problems. Just the idea of that has a yucky feel to it.
But tell you what. Slashdot has provided a mechanism whereby YOU can actually do something to make your life better in at least one small way! So why don't you click on the little gray button after my name in the "by" field of this message's header, and where it says "Change this?" you can make me a Foe. Then you can go to your "Preferences" screen and adjust your personal point award system so that you would never see anything from me or any of your other foes ever again.
I recognize that I would thus become your first ever Foe. But OTOH, there are about 170 slashdotters who have listed you as a Foe, so you are certainly comfortable with the backside of foeshipness. (IME, that's a very large freakdom you've got, indeed).
If you choose to make me a foe, then by reciprocation you take a place on my short list of freaks. It would be a small honor for me to have you on that list.
Basically it has become very much harder to get a car close to many public buildings than it was in the 1970s, but we tend to think of the posts, massive flowerpots, and the like as ornamentation, not as passive defenses.
I could almost accept the argument that it's much easier to control and direct ground based traffic away from 'secure' areas
That's good, because we've been doing that with passive controls since the Reagan Administration, when fully loaded dump trucks were put in front of the White House until some prettier but equally massive concrete flower pots could be put in their place. If you look, you'll notice that much of the landscaping done around public buildings in the last 20 years incorporates obstacles that would prevent a car bomb from getting close. It is a concern, but it is one that is addressed in a quiet and effective way.
However, in terms of cars being used as weapons, they've been killing upwards of 40k+ a year which puts them in the top 10 leading killers
I disagree that cars are being used as weapons in these homicides. I think it more appropriate to regard them as dangerous tools that are being used in grossly negligent and reckless ways. Unless for some reason I'm his target, I'm pretty safe against the murderer with a rifle, gun or other weapon. But the soccer mom who is hurtling about town in her two ton SUV poses a greater risk to all of us, because she has much less control over much more potentially lethal force.
But this rather beside the point. Road vehicles have been used as bombs in the US and elsewhere. There can be no question that flying cars or other aircraft would also be used the same way, if they were as available. And it would be a lot more difficult to protect against them.
What we do have are gates, chains, steel posts, five ton flower pots and the like between public access roads and sensitive buildings. It would be very hard to provide those kinds of inexpensive (and often good looking) passive defenses against aircraft.
...even with today's tech we could implement an autopilot for a flying car. The problem *is* the power source.
Being in the process of writing an SF piece involving a kind of flying car, I claim a little expertise in the matter.
We don't have good enough autopilots at the moment but they are within reach of our current technologies.
We do have power sources for a flying car, and in fact aerodynamics dictates that a flying car will be much more efficient and less damaging to the environment than an American SUV.
We don't yet have enough experience with fly by wire aeronautic design but this is within our reach.
What we lack are the needed social controls. Before flying cars become a reality, we need a way to keep a fanatic from loading the passenger seat with plastic explosives and flying it into a school building.
What seems to be the case is that we won't have flying cars until we can make them behave like Mr. Data of ST:TNG. There are times when the flying car will have to be able to just say no to its driver, and it is going to have to be very, very bright to figure out when those times are.
Has anyone else at all thought about how a space elevator might be economically viable?
Yes. I can think of three ways.
First, when we get to the point where we are moving more mass down the elevator than we are moving up it. Regenerative braking on the downtrips would offset the cost of uptrips-- the elevator could even become a net power producer. But this depends on developing the technology for bulk lunar mining or something like that to the point where the economics are competitive with earth mining operations. Imagine capturing a comet in a stable earth orbit and downloading tonnes/hour of irrigation water from it to an equatorial desert for half a century. Imagine 22,000 miles of generating turbines. A space elevator would be a great way to exploit Earth's gravity well. (Hmm, there are some rich desert nations that might become venture capitalists for something like this...)
Second, if we find that there is enough electrical potential between space and the earth's surface, then a copper wire grounded at the bottom and attached to an antenna at the top could generate enough electricity to power the crawlers. Possibly there would be energy to sell, too. Maybe a geophysicist will speak up about the voltage difference between ground and sky. I've no idea how realistic this possibility is.
Third, but IMO more likely to happen first, imagine a hybrid approach where rockets are used for unmanned cargo lifts, products are returned from orbital operations by space elevator with regenerative braking, and people go up and down the elevator. All the energy that we now lose in burning up heat shields would be recovered and we wouldn't have the overheads of launching those heat shields, or the hassles of designing reentry vehicles.
What can a reasonable reader make of your [statements]...?
I've been puzzling out how to respond to all your questions. I give up. I just can't find answers for you that fit the context you have provided but meet my criteria for reasoned discourse.
So perhaps you could find a reasonable reader and ask him your questions? Surely there is one such person in your circle of acquaintances?
If I'd meant astronomy I would have said that. I said astrology because it has a very long history and ties in with the transmutation of lead into gold (self improvement, Plato style) and squaring the circle (making theoretical perfection manifest in practice).
I took that to mean that the goal was to fail to obtain copyright... perhaps I was reading too much into the OP's words, and (and perhaps missing some nuances in the original article). Clearly a case of an insufficient blood caffeine level.
Judging from the title of his work, and a quick look at his first chapter, I think what you are missing is that he is developing a trigonometric system that does not involve Pi.
That, I'm sure, is why it is being called rational trig: it makes no use of transcendental, irrational numbers like Pi. It is a trig without the unit circle and without radians (radiians?).
I'm bemused by the idea. This is possibly the first advance in squaring the circle since the alchemists. It could have wide ranging implications from communications theory to astrology...
Erm, I actually read the sample chapter, and one thing I don't get: What did he do that is so revolutionary?
I read it too, and I think I've got a glimmer of an idea about why he and his publishers think this could be revolutionary stuff.
He redefined a side of a triangle with a Quadrance - a square of distance. He claims this removes the square root, but guess what? d^2 has the same effect.
Yes, it is true that d^2 is the value of the quadrance that Wildberger is working with. As I understand it, the quadrance itself is the geometric square that this number represents. IAC, what is significant is that he shows a way to develop a trigonometric system working only with these quadrances, and that is something new to us today.
Classic greek geometry was a game of discovery about how the universe was put together where the only tools allowed were the straight edge and compass. Classic trigonometry built on this by using the compass to make a unit circle about the point of an angle and then define the angle's uniqueness in terms of that circle: the sine and tangent relationships.
Wildberger now shows that it is easy to get to the same ratios using only the straight edge; no need for the compass[note below]. That is a revolutionary idea-- probably not a new one but certainly one that has been ignored by trigonometry for roughly 2500 years. One advantage of Wildberger's method is that Pi is not involved in the process, so it is possible to work with absolute precision.
Wildberger can call this a rational trigonometry because he has found a way around introducing the irrational number Pi. This seems pretty slick to me.
[note]: A classic Greek would construct the altitude between the rays with a compass to find the perpendicular, and I simplified the above by ignoring this. Bu the point is that Wildberger's method doesn't rely on any of the qualities of a circle, while classical trigonometry is dependent on the unit circle.
I'm certain that many publishers of "anti-evolution books" have spent a few dollars to assure that the work is an accurate portrayal of the belief system it purports to represent. Can't afford to put out a book that insults the intelligence of its readers-- that would be a bad design wouldn't it?
Which demonstrates that there is a big difference between accuracy and truth in many areas. This borders on a pet peeve of mine, where "authoritative" is mistaken for "scientific".
A mild suggestion: your posts would seem more authoritative if you used a spell checker on words like "authorative". Traditional desktop dictionaries still work quite well for this, and can be found in used book stores at very low cost.:-)
This response did not bother LMI. They were basically protecting the name from abusers by claiming it first. If they can't restrict use of the term, neither can anyone else.
This is an excellent point, and one not mentioned in the article. Did the LMI construct their case with deliberate weaknesses to assure this result? A problem with FOSS is that institutions governing ownership of IP are designed to establish and protect specific property rights; they have no mechanism for assuring that a specific property is to be free of any such encumbrances. So it almost seems like the best way of assuring no one can trademark "Linux" is to use a kind of null hypothesis approach: argue before the court that it can be trademarked in such a way that the court has to look at evidence that shows a trademark should be denied.
[GP]:Wikipedia is an interesting concept, but why oh why do people insist on treating it as some kind of authoritative source??
Because it's more authorative & acurate than anything else out there, including print? Just because it's in a book it doesn't mean it's inherently more acurate. Besides, if you are doing anything important and you get info from any source (especially the web), you should ALWAYS double check it.
Please re-evaluate your criteria for evaluating authorities.
One often useful criterion is to apply a simple cost - benefit analysis done from the publisher's point of view. A hardcopy publisher invests quite a bit of money in printing, storing, and delivering books, so it often makes sense for him to verify the book's accuracy to protect his investment. There is no cost at all for publishing something through Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a valuable tool that I use almost daily and I love it. But it is not an authoritative source. (Its better articles do point to authoritative material though. It is a great time saver, but it is the first stop, not the last stop, when doing research.)
"(Google has) this slogan that they are going to organize the world's information. Our slogan is that we are going to give people tools to let them organize the world's information."
Well, that isn't Google's 'slogan'. It's a badly done rephrasing of Google's mission statement. Surprising that Bill Gates got that wrong; you'd think he'd still bone up on that kind of thing before an interview, the way he used to before he became such a big shot. But anyway:
What earthly good is it to me if MS is going to provide me with the tools to organize the world's information? I'd still need to arrange bandwidth to access it all, and of course enough CPU power, RAM, and storage to handle the job. Even if I could justify the cost of Vista and all the new hardware it requires just to run marginally, there is no way I could duplicate what Google does. I'm going to let Google's beowulf clusters continue to do that information organization work for me.
In addition to Parent's good advice, I'd suggest looking at the Munich strategy for Win -> Linux conversion. As I understand it, they are basically moving a lot of their folks from MS Office and MSIE to FOSS equivalents, but holding off on changing the OS itself until employees are up to speed with the applications. I think that would be a good strategy for a lot businesses.
Nuclear power is a short-term solution... the nuclear/hydrogen combo is pretty clean compared to the double whammy of coal/gasoline. And soon to be much cheaper in comparison.
Nuclear power is only cheap if you measure its cost with an archaic accounting system that cannot apply a major future expense to the period of production that brings that expense about. Most of the cost in the current technology is in handling the waste products over a very long future period. An appropriate solution to recycling or permanently storing nuclear waste is no closer today than it was in 1960.
We are more likely to see economical cold fusion power generation sooner than we will see an economical solution to the waste problems of fission technology. In other words, the corporate and governmental inertia involved in developing a controlled nuclear waste stream is orders of magnitude greater than any amount of enthusiasm that could be brought to the task.
Slashdot Mirror
All this big hoo-hoo noise among the astronomers about whether this or that should be called a planet. Or not. I think it is pathetic.
This is a decision concerning celestial nomenclature and ontology that is better left by the astronomers to the philosophical experts in these matters: the astrologers. In particular, the tropical astrologers (or "western" astrologers) have been working on relevant material for about 50 years already. I do not believe that the vedic astrologers (or "eastern" astrologers) have done as much work in this area. So it really should be left to the tropical astrologers to make this determination, and probably especially to the "german school" of astrology which has done more than the others in incorporating the transuranic minor planets into chart erections (their word, not mine) and delineations.
The astronomers can still make useful contributions by locating the remaining three transuranic minor planets. But that Pluto is a planet is an undeniable astrological truth, in the same way that the Sun and Moon are also planets.
So there.
Astronomers should not meddle with things astrological, for their thoughts are Airy and cannot grasp the Celestial Waters.
or, for those of you more comfortable with the tarot, you can say
If all you you've been trained in is the way of the Sword, steer clear of those things that require the Cup for their measure.
My main issue is what to do with the broken ones. THe 3rd world already has too many gabage disposal problems as it is.
This is an excellent point. It really isn't socially acceptable anymore for an American institution to introduce high tech goods into any market without also paying attention to recycling the end-of-use waste. It will be a long time before volunteer agencies like Free Geek can extend their reach to keep dead laptpop batteries out of third world village middens. It seems to me that 15 million laptop computers equates to more than 15 million pounds of toxic chemicals that will eventually leach into the food chain unless the program is designed from the beginning to keep that from happening.
I hope that these MIT computers have a modular design so that the end users can canibalize parts from the one the elephant stepped on to keep the others going. Minimizing the waste is always the first part of "reduce, re-use, recycle" thinking.
Beyond that, I also hope that MIT is planning an appropriate supporting infrastructure for these laptops. If MIT plans to introduce 15 million laptops at a total cost of more than $1.5 billion, then I think they should also be making a some $1,000 diagnosis and repair kits that could each keep a several dozen of these laptops operational-- and which would function well in the village setting where they would be needed. (With the typical problems of unreliable power, spare parts storage without climate control, technicians who have a limited understanding of the technology, etc.)
And I also hope that MIT is thinking about a buy-back program or some other recycling incentive to keep these great new laptops of tomorrow from becoming one of the toxic waste problems of the next decade.
These are not insurmountable problems. But they do need to be addressed as an integral part of MIT's core program, with solutions developed at MIT. They cannot be foisted off on the hosting countries-- if MIT with all its resources cannot develop an effective way to heal the broken laptop and bury the dead one, then how the hell is a third world government with limited resources and massive immediate social problems going to come up with an effective solution?
So, MIT, does the program you are planning meet these criteria? Or are you developing a $100 disposable gewgaw that has the potential for destroying the quality of the crops and drinking water of the people you want to give it to? It wouldn't cost a whole lot more to do it right and there is all kinds of room for clever engineering in meeting these broader problems. But I do have a concern that the maintenance and waste management issues inherent in your proposal just aren't sexy enough to hold your attention.
The trickster transforms societies into something it wasn't originally. So while you may complain about people like him, he is actually making the world into something better.
Your logic is wrong. And your thinking is grandiose. But before getting into that, let's spend two paragraphs on some background that you apparently missed in your studies:
If you had read up on the trickster archetype with care, you would have noticed that all of the societal changes that Trickster brought about arose from his very basic needs. Often he did his thing because he was hungry, sometimes because he was fearful, more rarely because he was cold and very rarely because he was deathly lonely.
Trickster's effective changes never came about because he needed ego food. Not that he didn't sometimes try to get pats on the head and lots of "oh how clever that trickster is" comments, because he did (and does) (at least when Trickster is Coyote in many native american stories). But whenever he tries to demonstrate just how clever he is, he inevitably gets it screwed up and gets the People mad at him. He comes out stinking of shit rather than smelling like a rose and nothing good comes out of his effort.
Now the error in your logic is that persons who try to behave like Trickster are not Trickster, so there is no reason to think that their behavior is going to lead to making the world a better place even when they are tricking out of strong needs. They are merely carbon copies, not the original archetype. And when their motivation is just to show off how clever they are-- well, even Trickster himself gets it very wrong when he tries to do that. These trickster wannabees are going to end up with a clinging odor about them that future bosses and coworkers will find unpleasant. They will be denied opportunities that their cleverness would otherwise have assured them, because who the hell wants to have somebody who stinks of shit working on their pet project? This other guy who might not be quite as clever (but who knows, he's the quiet type) is probably clever enough to get the job done, and is going to be a whole lot more pleasant to be around in the conference room or if I've got to share a cubicle or car pool with him.
So I urge the clever ones out there to think on this before showing off in stupid ways in Wikipedia. It is so easy to slip a bunch of crap into an article that it really doesn't say much about how clever you are. But it does say quite a bit about your attitude toward messing up public resources. And in your apparent cleverness, you might end up stepping barefoot into something soft brown and gushy whose odor will follow you around for a long time.
I'm gonna let out my inner geek on this one.
I think "planet" can be defined in a fairly simple way that would be satisfy nearly everybody
A planet is
I think the second point is the key one. I think to be called a planet, the object has to obey the "what goes up must come down" rule for the range of human-powered activities. If you set a golf ball on the surface and take a whack at it, there should be no doubt that the ball will follow a suborbital trajectory.
Both Lotus 1-2-3 and Netscape virtually had a monopoly before MS decided to take it away from them.
The fall of Lotus 1-2-3 was due to internal reasons; it would have crashed and burned even if there had been no Microsoft. Too much internal power had gone to its Legal Department. Too much of its resources went into "look and feel" lawsuits and not enough resources and strategizing was given to further product development.
If Microsoft's Excel hadn't been around, Borland's Quattro Pro would have done in Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus got all its priorities mixed up in a very unhealthy way.
Predicting involves extrapolating from a current ** sample** of data to predict the future based on one own interpretation /recognition of patterns.
The better your size and quality of your sample combined with a finely tuned pattern recognition the better your forecast
I think it is quite a bit more complex than that, with the complexity arising from a really simple mechanism: the metadata that is shared among members of the crowd.
For instance, I expect that a "guess the weight of an ox" game played by doing street interviews of strangers in Picadilly Circus next Tuesday morning would show a typical bell shaped curve. But when this same game is played at a english village fair where everybody's guess is public information and many persons know the reputations of other guessers, then not everybody is going to be playing the same guessing game. There will be some who know nothing about oxen but know enough about Butcher John that they think his guess will be near the mark, so they go a pound or two higher or lower.
Another point: I understand that when the sample is unbiased, increasing its size above a certain critical value does nothing to improve its predictive accuracy. If you are wanting a level of confidence of 5% or better, then for most human behavior an unbiased sample of 30 to 50 persons is generally sufficient. If you want greater confidence in the results, it is generally better to obtain and analyze several different samples than to increase the size of a single sample.
However IANAStatistician, though I have sometimes had to develop descriptive statistics in quality control work. Perhaps a statistician will speak up now.
This can be summed up by the plaque I once saw on the wall of a manager who had a reputation for making good decisions:
I must hurry and catch up with the others, for I am their leader!
My compliments to the Slashdot group; they've done a very nice job with this. Standards-compliant HTML and CSS complements Slashdot's content in a sweet way.
Perhaps the article could be edited to bring spelling into compliance with english standards?
If you can't answer as a reasonable reader, then your criteria come from an unreasonable reader. Don't bother answering. In fact, don't bother making those statements again, or any others, until you're reasonable.
I think this is the part where I'm supposed to say "Ouch! That stung!" then slink off with my tail between my legs?
heh heh
It appears that my posts bother you excessively and I'm not sure under what conditions I'd want to do anything about that, even if there was something I could do. I'm not keen on climbing into other people's minds to fix their wiring problems. Just the idea of that has a yucky feel to it.
But tell you what. Slashdot has provided a mechanism whereby YOU can actually do something to make your life better in at least one small way! So why don't you click on the little gray button after my name in the "by" field of this message's header, and where it says "Change this?" you can make me a Foe. Then you can go to your "Preferences" screen and adjust your personal point award system so that you would never see anything from me or any of your other foes ever again.
I recognize that I would thus become your first ever Foe. But OTOH, there are about 170 slashdotters who have listed you as a Foe, so you are certainly comfortable with the backside of foeshipness. (IME, that's a very large freakdom you've got, indeed).
If you choose to make me a foe, then by reciprocation you take a place on my short list of freaks. It would be a small honor for me to have you on that list.
Answered in response to another post.
Basically it has become very much harder to get a car close to many public buildings than it was in the 1970s, but we tend to think of the posts, massive flowerpots, and the like as ornamentation, not as passive defenses.
You raise a couple of interesting points.
I could almost accept the argument that it's much easier to control and direct ground based traffic away from 'secure' areas
That's good, because we've been doing that with passive controls since the Reagan Administration, when fully loaded dump trucks were put in front of the White House until some prettier but equally massive concrete flower pots could be put in their place. If you look, you'll notice that much of the landscaping done around public buildings in the last 20 years incorporates obstacles that would prevent a car bomb from getting close. It is a concern, but it is one that is addressed in a quiet and effective way.
However, in terms of cars being used as weapons, they've been killing upwards of 40k+ a year which puts them in the top 10 leading killers
I disagree that cars are being used as weapons in these homicides. I think it more appropriate to regard them as dangerous tools that are being used in grossly negligent and reckless ways. Unless for some reason I'm his target, I'm pretty safe against the murderer with a rifle, gun or other weapon. But the soccer mom who is hurtling about town in her two ton SUV poses a greater risk to all of us, because she has much less control over much more potentially lethal force.
But this rather beside the point. Road vehicles have been used as bombs in the US and elsewhere. There can be no question that flying cars or other aircraft would also be used the same way, if they were as available. And it would be a lot more difficult to protect against them.
What we do have are gates, chains, steel posts, five ton flower pots and the like between public access roads and sensitive buildings. It would be very hard to provide those kinds of inexpensive (and often good looking) passive defenses against aircraft.
Being in the process of writing an SF piece involving a kind of flying car, I claim a little expertise in the matter.
What we lack are the needed social controls. Before flying cars become a reality, we need a way to keep a fanatic from loading the passenger seat with plastic explosives and flying it into a school building.
What seems to be the case is that we won't have flying cars until we can make them behave like Mr. Data of ST:TNG. There are times when the flying car will have to be able to just say no to its driver, and it is going to have to be very, very bright to figure out when those times are.
Has anyone else at all thought about how a space elevator might be economically viable?
Yes. I can think of three ways.
First, when we get to the point where we are moving more mass down the elevator than we are moving up it. Regenerative braking on the downtrips would offset the cost of uptrips-- the elevator could even become a net power producer. But this depends on developing the technology for bulk lunar mining or something like that to the point where the economics are competitive with earth mining operations. Imagine capturing a comet in a stable earth orbit and downloading tonnes/hour of irrigation water from it to an equatorial desert for half a century. Imagine 22,000 miles of generating turbines. A space elevator would be a great way to exploit Earth's gravity well. (Hmm, there are some rich desert nations that might become venture capitalists for something like this...)
Second, if we find that there is enough electrical potential between space and the earth's surface, then a copper wire grounded at the bottom and attached to an antenna at the top could generate enough electricity to power the crawlers. Possibly there would be energy to sell, too. Maybe a geophysicist will speak up about the voltage difference between ground and sky. I've no idea how realistic this possibility is.
Third, but IMO more likely to happen first, imagine a hybrid approach where rockets are used for unmanned cargo lifts, products are returned from orbital operations by space elevator with regenerative braking, and people go up and down the elevator. All the energy that we now lose in burning up heat shields would be recovered and we wouldn't have the overheads of launching those heat shields, or the hassles of designing reentry vehicles.
What can a reasonable reader make of your [statements]...?
I've been puzzling out how to respond to all your questions. I give up. I just can't find answers for you that fit the context you have provided but meet my criteria for reasoned discourse.
So perhaps you could find a reasonable reader and ask him your questions? Surely there is one such person in your circle of acquaintances?
If I'd meant astronomy I would have said that. I said astrology because it has a very long history and ties in with the transmutation of lead into gold (self improvement, Plato style) and squaring the circle (making theoretical perfection manifest in practice).
And I said it because I thought it was amusing.
I took that to mean that the goal was to fail to obtain copyright... perhaps I was reading too much into the OP's words, and (and perhaps missing some nuances in the original article). Clearly a case of an insufficient blood caffeine level.
IAC, I appreciate your clarification.
Judging from the title of his work, and a quick look at his first chapter, I think what you are missing is that he is developing a trigonometric system that does not involve Pi.
That, I'm sure, is why it is being called rational trig: it makes no use of transcendental, irrational numbers like Pi. It is a trig without the unit circle and without radians (radiians?).
I'm bemused by the idea. This is possibly the first advance in squaring the circle since the alchemists. It could have wide ranging implications from communications theory to astrology...
or not.
Erm, I actually read the sample chapter, and one thing I don't get: What did he do that is so revolutionary?
I read it too, and I think I've got a glimmer of an idea about why he and his publishers think this could be revolutionary stuff.
He redefined a side of a triangle with a Quadrance - a square of distance. He claims this removes the square root, but guess what? d^2 has the same effect.
Yes, it is true that d^2 is the value of the quadrance that Wildberger is working with. As I understand it, the quadrance itself is the geometric square that this number represents. IAC, what is significant is that he shows a way to develop a trigonometric system working only with these quadrances, and that is something new to us today.
Classic greek geometry was a game of discovery about how the universe was put together where the only tools allowed were the straight edge and compass. Classic trigonometry built on this by using the compass to make a unit circle about the point of an angle and then define the angle's uniqueness in terms of that circle: the sine and tangent relationships.
Wildberger now shows that it is easy to get to the same ratios using only the straight edge; no need for the compass[note below]. That is a revolutionary idea-- probably not a new one but certainly one that has been ignored by trigonometry for roughly 2500 years. One advantage of Wildberger's method is that Pi is not involved in the process, so it is possible to work with absolute precision.
Wildberger can call this a rational trigonometry because he has found a way around introducing the irrational number Pi. This seems pretty slick to me.
[note]: A classic Greek would construct the altitude between the rays with a compass to find the perpendicular, and I simplified the above by ignoring this. Bu the point is that Wildberger's method doesn't rely on any of the qualities of a circle, while classical trigonometry is dependent on the unit circle.
I'm certain that many publishers of "anti-evolution books" have spent a few dollars to assure that the work is an accurate portrayal of the belief system it purports to represent. Can't afford to put out a book that insults the intelligence of its readers-- that would be a bad design wouldn't it?
Which demonstrates that there is a big difference between accuracy and truth in many areas. This borders on a pet peeve of mine, where "authoritative" is mistaken for "scientific".
A mild suggestion: your posts would seem more authoritative if you used a spell checker on words like "authorative". Traditional desktop dictionaries still work quite well for this, and can be found in used book stores at very low cost. :-)
This response did not bother LMI. They were basically protecting the name from abusers by claiming it first. If they can't restrict use of the term, neither can anyone else.
This is an excellent point, and one not mentioned in the article. Did the LMI construct their case with deliberate weaknesses to assure this result? A problem with FOSS is that institutions governing ownership of IP are designed to establish and protect specific property rights; they have no mechanism for assuring that a specific property is to be free of any such encumbrances. So it almost seems like the best way of assuring no one can trademark "Linux" is to use a kind of null hypothesis approach: argue before the court that it can be trademarked in such a way that the court has to look at evidence that shows a trademark should be denied.
[GP]:Wikipedia is an interesting concept, but why oh why do people insist on treating it as some kind of authoritative source??
Because it's more authorative & acurate than anything else out there, including print? Just because it's in a book it doesn't mean it's inherently more acurate. Besides, if you are doing anything important and you get info from any source (especially the web), you should ALWAYS double check it.
Please re-evaluate your criteria for evaluating authorities.
One often useful criterion is to apply a simple cost - benefit analysis done from the publisher's point of view. A hardcopy publisher invests quite a bit of money in printing, storing, and delivering books, so it often makes sense for him to verify the book's accuracy to protect his investment. There is no cost at all for publishing something through Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a valuable tool that I use almost daily and I love it. But it is not an authoritative source. (Its better articles do point to authoritative material though. It is a great time saver, but it is the first stop, not the last stop, when doing research.)
"(Google has) this slogan that they are going to organize the world's information. Our slogan is that we are going to give people tools to let them organize the world's information."
Well, that isn't Google's 'slogan'. It's a badly done rephrasing of Google's mission statement. Surprising that Bill Gates got that wrong; you'd think he'd still bone up on that kind of thing before an interview, the way he used to before he became such a big shot. But anyway:
What earthly good is it to me if MS is going to provide me with the tools to organize the world's information? I'd still need to arrange bandwidth to access it all, and of course enough CPU power, RAM, and storage to handle the job. Even if I could justify the cost of Vista and all the new hardware it requires just to run marginally, there is no way I could duplicate what Google does. I'm going to let Google's beowulf clusters continue to do that information organization work for me.
Microsoft, don't be evil.
In addition to Parent's good advice, I'd suggest looking at the Munich strategy for Win -> Linux conversion. As I understand it, they are basically moving a lot of their folks from MS Office and MSIE to FOSS equivalents, but holding off on changing the OS itself until employees are up to speed with the applications. I think that would be a good strategy for a lot businesses.
Nuclear power is a short-term solution... the nuclear/hydrogen combo is pretty clean compared to the double whammy of coal/gasoline. And soon to be much cheaper in comparison.
Nuclear power is only cheap if you measure its cost with an archaic accounting system that cannot apply a major future expense to the period of production that brings that expense about. Most of the cost in the current technology is in handling the waste products over a very long future period. An appropriate solution to recycling or permanently storing nuclear waste is no closer today than it was in 1960.
We are more likely to see economical cold fusion power generation sooner than we will see an economical solution to the waste problems of fission technology. In other words, the corporate and governmental inertia involved in developing a controlled nuclear waste stream is orders of magnitude greater than any amount of enthusiasm that could be brought to the task.