Here's the average of the temperatures for July for the data set. (In Kelvins- possibly the first time I've seen Kelvins used for weather data!)
For the July portion, parts with no data are quite far north- they claim that they sample 90% of Earth's land area during July and 65% during January. I'm somewhat surprised that they show data averages for the Andes regions of southern Chile and Argentina in the middle of the winter- how many non-snowy days in any of 18 years was considered enough to give them a data point and thus show up as part of the "90%"? It looks like the coldest average temp for which they could obtain data was around freezing (medium blue, 270-275 range) which probably is related to snow cover. I suspect those areas actually averaged cooler than that but the only times they could get a reading was on occasions when the temperature had been unseasonably warm for long enough to melt the snow...
Plus, how do you figure averages if the locations able to be sampled change over time? Did they only use the areas for which they had complete data? A partial data set from which you can only get readings if the temperature has been above average is a troublesome one to justify the use of. This could skew the results either way... real warming might make more of the cooler land testable and thus make the average temperature of the available observations decrease, or vice versa.
I suspect they've thought this through a fair bit, but until they address these issues it's hard to judge the validity of their results.
I know someone (doing quantum chemistry) who bought a dual Xeon three years ago with 3.5 GB RDRAM- that was in that price range. Had a bigger hard drive than 20MB though...
Admittedly, if you bought the RAM separately it'd be cheaper- but 8 sticks of the cheapest available on pricewatch would be about 4k, still more expensive than the computer.
You're mixing lists, the first three are the correct full names and the second three are commonly used abbreviations. An 'apples to apples' comparison of shorthand common names would be:
Star Wars
Empire
Jedi
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
I guess this is a bit strange. I think it's partly due to neither "Phantom" nor "Menace" being a good abbreviation for a film... though I suppose "Empire" isn't the least ambiguous nickname either. Of course, none of the first three have the word "Episode" in their titles, so that nickname possibility was out- their proper names are:
Lucas has sown confusion about this by releasing different movies (deceptively labelling them as "reissues") which reuse some of the footage from the classic trilogy- these were named Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back, and Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi. I suppose the shorthand names "Episode 4" through "Episode 6" would refer to these films, but the quality of these zombies (which were composed of edited cuts from the classic films interspersed with random crap) was very poor so there's rarely a reason to mention them.
Notice that nobody dares mention that this is "cold" (or at least "cool") fusion.
From the article:
Moving at about the speed of sound, the internal shock waves impacted at the center of the bubbles causing very high compression and accompanying temperatures of about 100 million Kelvin.
If 100 million Kelvin is "cold" or "cool", I do not think that means what you think it means.
Energy(1) is exactly equal to Energy(2), as a direct consequence of the First Law of Thermodynamics.
We can't convert heat back to useful energy with 100% efficiency due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but your original statement that the amounts of heat involved were different does not involve such a process!
There's a little wiggle room here in different forms of energy... I suppose that if some of the energy from combustion is in a form other than heat (photons?) you might be technically correct, but I'd be more inclined to believe that the cracking step was photonic than the combustion step.
It must require more heat to actually crack the water than you obtain from burining the resulting hydrogen and oxygen, otherwise you're violating the laws of thermodynamics.
This is false. It must require precisely the same amount of heat to crack the water(if what is meant by 'cracking' is the conversion of water to molecular hydrogen and oxygen) than is produced in conversion of molecular hydrogen and oxygen to water. If it required more you'd be making energy magically disappear and thus violating the laws of thermodynamics.
A problem is that you're assuming the number is a perfect cube- this was not stated in the question. In fact, if I were designing a test of estimation I'd avoid perfect cubes like the plague...
Had the question been: "What is the cube root of 53,582,632 ?"
Your method would generate the response: "The answer is 318" or:
"What is the cube root of 53,582,631?"
"The answer is 311"
In both cases you'd be way, way off.
Have you read Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman? In it, amongst many other interesting anecdotes, Feynman tells about doing this sort of thing against a man with an abacus, but on numbers chosen by passersby instead of preselected to be known perfect cubes. If you've memorized log tables you can estimate these things very rapidly, as the cube root is the same as dividing the log by three.
I don't know log tables either, so my logic went something like this.
a) 100^3 = 1000000, so the answer is 100* the cube root of 53...
b) 3^3 = 27, 4^3 = 64, so the answer is between 300 and 400. (Pretty much the same as your logic so far.)
c) 3.5^3 is not tough to do in your head- it's 7^3/2^3 = 343/8 = 42 7/8
d) at this point the answer is looking to be roughly halfway between 350 and 400 (as 53.58 is vaguely centered between 42.875 and 64)
e) If you want more accuracy than that and have time (the above is good for about two digits accuracy) then bite the bullet and figure 3.75^3 = 15^3/4^3 = 3375/2^6 ~=52.75
f) The difference between 375^3 to 376^3 can be estimated to be the first derivative of the (x^3) function- so it's about 3(x^2)... or 3*10000*(15/4)^2... or a bit over 420,000.
g) you know 375^3 ~=52.75 M,so
376^3 ~= 52.75 M+.42 M ~= 53.17 M
377^3 ~= 53.17 M+.42 M ~= 53.59 M ...so the estimate is 377, with all three digits significant, in fact you're so close that you might hazard a guess at the fourth digit at 377.0.
This isn't lightning calculation, but it is doable without paper or calculator.
Joe Spamalot: I'd like to buy a list of all your Gmail addresses.
Google: Our licensing agreement requires me to ask you what the purpose is for your request.(winks)
Joe Spamalot: I'm, uh, just curious. Heh heh. (winks)
Google: All right then, here ya go!
Or even more directly, depending on weaseliness of lawyers:
Google PHB: I read that our list of Gmail addesses would be worth a lot if we sold it to email marketers. Let's do that.
Google tech: But our licensing agreement...
Google PHB: (reads agreement) We're going to sell our list for money, not for marketing purposes. The fact that the people to whom we sell it will use it for marketing purposes is not forbidden by the language of the agreement.
Just the 7% GST sales is applicable in Alberta to the general public.
But GST does not apply at all to the government of the City of Calgary, as the current interpretation of the Canadian Consitution forbids one "order of government" from taxing another.
Randy: [debriefing Gerald and Sheila] And so that's the situation. All the boys are out there somewhere with a... pornographic videotape. Sheila: Oh God, this, this is horrible! Gerald: All right, calm down. Now, just how bad of a porno tape are we talking here? I mean, was it like Crotch Capers 3? Randy: I'm a...afraid it was... Back Door Sluts 9. [he and Sharon hang their heads in shame] Gerald, Chris: Back Door Sluts 9??? Linda: Is that bad? Chris: Back Door Sluts 9 makes Crotch Capers 3 look like Naughty Nurses 2! Gerald: It, it is the single most vile, twisted, dark piece of porn ever made. [Sheila gets angrier by the word] Sheila: [slaps him] How the hell do you know?! Gerald: [shakily] I, uh, I I I read about it in People.
Well, this is an odd forum for this, but I think what I have to say needs saying.
This is precisely the problem. A lot of the non-religious (and some religious) people are deathly sick of every other discussion being dragged into religious topics even when that subject is far, far offtopic.
If you were trying to have a discussion about some tech topic and suddenly the discussion veered into a diatribe of how everyone should rub blue mud on their bellies followed by a heated argument about what the color, consistency, and origin of the mud to be used and of which hand it should be applied with- you'd probably find it strange and a bit annoying.
If that occured frequently, to the point that it seemed that a large fraction of what started as reasonable discussions in interesting topics devolved into detailed discussions of mud application, you'd likely start to get annoyed the moment the subject of blue mud was brought up.
This is roughly what a non-religious person feels about the subject of religion. It's injected into conversations frequently, so much so that every religious topic brought up has already been heard and rehashed innumerable times, yet some people are pathologically fixated on discussing it instead of any other topic.
Had the OP been something like "Scientists are [more/less] likely to be religious than [other group]" or even "New Isaac Newton Manuscript found!" then that sig might have been on-topic. As it is, it's just a troll.
The Met requests a freely given donation for which they strongly suggest an amount. Visiting without paying this amount is allowed but discouraged.
There do exist pieces of artwork which are not accessable to the public, but the Met is not a good example of this.
As to classical music, particular performances are frequently copyrighted even though the sheet music is not. A recording of a given performance of, say, the New York Philharmonic playing "Flight of the Valkyries" may be copyrighted and gain legal protections similar to those of a recording of "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix or of "American Woman" by the Guess Who. Orchestras can and do get money from royalties on sales of their copyrighted recordings of public domain music. (On the other hand, in this example the Philharmonic's rights are only to their particular recording and not the score, unlike additional lyrics and score copyrights allowed to creators of original music.)
Speaking as a thoughtful Atheist, I thought I'd point out that Atheism is itself a religion, or at the very least it is distinguishable from religion. Like most religion, Atheism centers on the faith of the Atheist that there are no God(s). Certainly this has not been proven, at least not in the scientific sense.
Do not confuse Atheists with Agnostics.
The two beliefs are not incompatable, nor is Agnosicism incompatable with Theism. Agnosticism is the epistemological position that knowledge of the existence or non-existence of God is impossible. Agnostic thiests (once known as fidests) are those who do not believe there can be proof of a God but nonetheless believe in one based purely on faith. Pop culture, unable to understand the difference between religion and philosophy, seems to have decided that Agnosicism is on a spectrum between Atheism and Theism where in reality it is a position on a different but related issue.
Everyone is an athiest toward at least some of the many theistic faiths. Most people nowadays are athiests with respect to Ra, Zeus, Bumba, A'akuluujjusi, Yingarna, Odin, and Quetzalcoatl... or at the very least are atheistic with respect to some of the gods on that list. Most people identifying themselves as atheist are simply atheistic with respect to one more theistic belief system than their 'theistic' counterparts. Furthering the confusion, people who are theistic with respect to god(s) other than the locally popular one(e.g. Hindus in the United States) are sometimes labelled "athiests" by those believing in different god(s).
Some people label as 'weak atheists' those who lack any faith (I think you're labelling these 'agnostics') and 'strong atheists' those who actively believe that no god exists. I don't really care for those labels, but it is an error to lump all atheists into second category. Calling strong atheists religious is in itself arguable- it seems to me to be a redefinition of the word religious- but a case could be made for it.
Lacking a belief in any theistic belief system does not constitute a religion, and is accurately described as atheism.
I find it strange that you have a Benjamin Franklin quote for your.sig, but your post disparages his scientific work (which was well before Darwin.) If you're being ironic that's an odd choice of a quote.
Benjamin Frankin was the person who decided which pole was the positive one of the two and which was the negative because he was the first to recognize in terminology that they were opposites rather than fundamentally different kinds of electricity (vitreous and resinous)... and that items without electrical properties were in balance rather than lacking electricity. From a letter in 1747:
'Hence have arisen some new terms among us; we say B (and other bodies alike circumstanced) are electrized positively; A negatively. Or rather B is electrized plus and A minus.'
He didn't declare that electricity flowed in a particular direction, he just invented a language to better describe a phenomenon. There was no evidence one way or another to indicate which he should choose as positive and which as negative, and he happened to choose B to be positive and A negative. The actual choice of which type to assign to be positive and which to be negative was nearly irrelevant- it's so close to irrelevant that to this day electrical engineers talk about current flowing in the opposite direction from the direction the electrons actually flow, because the equations work just fine that way!
On the other hand, Sweden censors websites, something the US government doesn't do.
US broadcast 'censorship' by the FCC is closely tied in with licensing broadcast bandwidth- the government agencies choose not to license bandwidth to broadcasters they object to. These broadcasts are not technically illegal, but FCC is in essence threatening not to license public frequencies to those who don't comply with the 'rules'. They're nominally not censoring anyone, just selecting who gets access to a public resource (radio/TV bandwidth) As usual, government agencies seek to extend their power any way they can...
Strangely, the words 'the people' seem to be interpreted by the ACLU as referring to only some of the people in the second amendment but to all of the people in all of the others.
The word "organized" does not appear in the second amendment- I'd recommend you read it.
Also, I'll mention that the militia is defined in law, and it doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. The current US law- Title 10, Sec. 311(a) of the US Code reads:
The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
Somehow I doubt that the ACLU is going to come to the defense of an able-bodied 17 year old demanding his right to keep and bear arms on the constitutional basis that he's a member of the militia. But, legally, he is- that's that the second amendment actually says, instead of what you'd like it to say.
It should be clear to most anyone involved in this discussion that the above post was made with the noble intention of helping me out by demonstrating how a master of comic timing and wit would tackle the subject. After all, we all know how much funnier jokes get if they're explained in great detail after the fact. Particularly if no information which has not already been mentioned is included- that's sure to make it funny!
Might I suggest that you flame less? It makes life a lot more fun.
If you mean the 1997 rerelease of "Star Wars" with the Episode 4 title shoehorned in along with the insipid "Greedo shoots first" set of edits, then yes, Lucas made even his masterpiece suck- mostly because of the inevitable comparison to the original. But maybe I'm overdoing my association of this set of edits with the Episode 4 subtitle...
If you think that the 4th movie to be released in the Star Wars franchise(subtitled "Episode 1") didn't suck , then there's no hope for you.
Re:It's Open Mic Night at the Astrophysics Lounge!
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 1
A Virus has been synthesized from chemicals in a lab. Bacteria may follow.
Science never proves anything- it works to find the hypothesis that best fits all the observed data. Proofs are for math.
Watch the featurette. Wil Smith's lines do not match the actual laws as written on the screen. - e.g. "A robot can not harm... instead of "A robot may not injure..."
The trailer mangles them even worse, but they're not even read correctly even in the featurette!
Slashdot Mirror
For the July portion, parts with no data are quite far north- they claim that they sample 90% of Earth's land area during July and 65% during January. I'm somewhat surprised that they show data averages for the Andes regions of southern Chile and Argentina in the middle of the winter- how many non-snowy days in any of 18 years was considered enough to give them a data point and thus show up as part of the "90%"? It looks like the coldest average temp for which they could obtain data was around freezing (medium blue, 270-275 range) which probably is related to snow cover. I suspect those areas actually averaged cooler than that but the only times they could get a reading was on occasions when the temperature had been unseasonably warm for long enough to melt the snow...
Plus, how do you figure averages if the locations able to be sampled change over time? Did they only use the areas for which they had complete data? A partial data set from which you can only get readings if the temperature has been above average is a troublesome one to justify the use of. This could skew the results either way... real warming might make more of the cooler land testable and thus make the average temperature of the available observations decrease, or vice versa.
I suspect they've thought this through a fair bit, but until they address these issues it's hard to judge the validity of their results.
Of course, you can still purchase a $3299 computer and spend an extra $9340 to max out your RAM (at 16 GB).
Admittedly, if you bought the RAM separately it'd be cheaper- but 8 sticks of the cheapest available on pricewatch would be about 4k, still more expensive than the computer.
Star Wars
Empire
Jedi
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
I guess this is a bit strange. I think it's partly due to neither "Phantom" nor "Menace" being a good abbreviation for a film... though I suppose "Empire" isn't the least ambiguous nickname either. Of course, none of the first three have the word "Episode" in their titles, so that nickname possibility was out- their proper names are:
Star Wars
The Empire Strikes Back
The Return of the Jedi
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
Lucas has sown confusion about this by releasing different movies (deceptively labelling them as "reissues") which reuse some of the footage from the classic trilogy- these were named Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back, and Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi. I suppose the shorthand names "Episode 4" through "Episode 6" would refer to these films, but the quality of these zombies (which were composed of edited cuts from the classic films interspersed with random crap) was very poor so there's rarely a reason to mention them.
We can't convert heat back to useful energy with 100% efficiency due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but your original statement that the amounts of heat involved were different does not involve such a process!
There's a little wiggle room here in different forms of energy... I suppose that if some of the energy from combustion is in a form other than heat (photons?) you might be technically correct, but I'd be more inclined to believe that the cracking step was photonic than the combustion step.
Had the question been: "What is the cube root of 53,582,632 ?"
Your method would generate the response: "The answer is 318" or:
"What is the cube root of 53,582,631?"
"The answer is 311"
In both cases you'd be way, way off.
Have you read Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman? In it, amongst many other interesting anecdotes, Feynman tells about doing this sort of thing against a man with an abacus, but on numbers chosen by passersby instead of preselected to be known perfect cubes. If you've memorized log tables you can estimate these things very rapidly, as the cube root is the same as dividing the log by three.
I don't know log tables either, so my logic went something like this.
a) 100^3 = 1000000, so the answer is 100* the cube root of 53... ... or a bit over 420,000.
...so the estimate is 377, with all three digits significant, in fact you're so close that you might hazard a guess at the fourth digit at 377.0.
b) 3^3 = 27, 4^3 = 64, so the answer is between 300 and 400. (Pretty much the same as your logic so far.)
c) 3.5^3 is not tough to do in your head- it's 7^3/2^3 = 343/8 = 42 7/8
d) at this point the answer is looking to be roughly halfway between 350 and 400 (as 53.58 is vaguely centered between 42.875 and 64)
e) If you want more accuracy than that and have time (the above is good for about two digits accuracy) then bite the bullet and figure 3.75^3 = 15^3/4^3 = 3375/2^6 ~=52.75
f) The difference between 375^3 to 376^3 can be estimated to be the first derivative of the (x^3) function- so it's about 3(x^2)... or 3*10000*(15/4)^2
g) you know 375^3 ~=52.75 M,so
376^3 ~= 52.75 M+.42 M ~= 53.17 M
377^3 ~= 53.17 M+.42 M ~= 53.59 M
This isn't lightning calculation, but it is doable without paper or calculator.
All that was needed was to forbid people who'd legally bought airtime from speaking their minds during their time.
It's just a little bit of freedom, you'll never miss it- though there is a funny loophole for those people who are famous or own media companies.
But GST does not apply at all to the government of the City of Calgary, as the current interpretation of the Canadian Consitution forbids one "order of government" from taxing another.
If you were trying to have a discussion about some tech topic and suddenly the discussion veered into a diatribe of how everyone should rub blue mud on their bellies followed by a heated argument about what the color, consistency, and origin of the mud to be used and of which hand it should be applied with- you'd probably find it strange and a bit annoying.
If that occured frequently, to the point that it seemed that a large fraction of what started as reasonable discussions in interesting topics devolved into detailed discussions of mud application, you'd likely start to get annoyed the moment the subject of blue mud was brought up.
This is roughly what a non-religious person feels about the subject of religion. It's injected into conversations frequently, so much so that every religious topic brought up has already been heard and rehashed innumerable times, yet some people are pathologically fixated on discussing it instead of any other topic.
Had the OP been something like "Scientists are [more/less] likely to be religious than [other group]" or even "New Isaac Newton Manuscript found!" then that sig might have been on-topic. As it is, it's just a troll.
There do exist pieces of artwork which are not accessable to the public, but the Met is not a good example of this.
As to classical music, particular performances are frequently copyrighted even though the sheet music is not. A recording of a given performance of, say, the New York Philharmonic playing "Flight of the Valkyries" may be copyrighted and gain legal protections similar to those of a recording of "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix or of "American Woman" by the Guess Who. Orchestras can and do get money from royalties on sales of their copyrighted recordings of public domain music. (On the other hand, in this example the Philharmonic's rights are only to their particular recording and not the score, unlike additional lyrics and score copyrights allowed to creators of original music.)
Everyone is an athiest toward at least some of the many theistic faiths. Most people nowadays are athiests with respect to Ra, Zeus, Bumba, A'akuluujjusi, Yingarna, Odin, and Quetzalcoatl... or at the very least are atheistic with respect to some of the gods on that list. Most people identifying themselves as atheist are simply atheistic with respect to one more theistic belief system than their 'theistic' counterparts. Furthering the confusion, people who are theistic with respect to god(s) other than the locally popular one(e.g. Hindus in the United States) are sometimes labelled "athiests" by those believing in different god(s).
Some people label as 'weak atheists' those who lack any faith (I think you're labelling these 'agnostics') and 'strong atheists' those who actively believe that no god exists. I don't really care for those labels, but it is an error to lump all atheists into second category. Calling strong atheists religious is in itself arguable- it seems to me to be a redefinition of the word religious- but a case could be made for it.
Lacking a belief in any theistic belief system does not constitute a religion, and is accurately described as atheism.
No, no, no, "total failure" isn't the correct wording! Surely you meant to say he is a "miserable failure."
Benjamin Frankin was the person who decided which pole was the positive one of the two and which was the negative because he was the first to recognize in terminology that they were opposites rather than fundamentally different kinds of electricity (vitreous and resinous)... and that items without electrical properties were in balance rather than lacking electricity. From a letter in 1747:
He didn't declare that electricity flowed in a particular direction, he just invented a language to better describe a phenomenon. There was no evidence one way or another to indicate which he should choose as positive and which as negative, and he happened to choose B to be positive and A negative. The actual choice of which type to assign to be positive and which to be negative was nearly irrelevant- it's so close to irrelevant that to this day electrical engineers talk about current flowing in the opposite direction from the direction the electrons actually flow, because the equations work just fine that way!US broadcast 'censorship' by the FCC is closely tied in with licensing broadcast bandwidth- the government agencies choose not to license bandwidth to broadcasters they object to. These broadcasts are not technically illegal, but FCC is in essence threatening not to license public frequencies to those who don't comply with the 'rules'. They're nominally not censoring anyone, just selecting who gets access to a public resource (radio/TV bandwidth) As usual, government agencies seek to extend their power any way they can...
The word "organized" does not appear in the second amendment- I'd recommend you read it.
Also, I'll mention that the militia is defined in law, and it doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. The current US law- Title 10, Sec. 311(a) of the US Code reads:
Somehow I doubt that the ACLU is going to come to the defense of an able-bodied 17 year old demanding his right to keep and bear arms on the constitutional basis that he's a member of the militia. But, legally, he is- that's that the second amendment actually says, instead of what you'd like it to say.Might I suggest that you flame less? It makes life a lot more fun.
If you mean the 1997 rerelease of "Star Wars" with the Episode 4 title shoehorned in along with the insipid "Greedo shoots first" set of edits, then yes, Lucas made even his masterpiece suck- mostly because of the inevitable comparison to the original. But maybe I'm overdoing my association of this set of edits with the Episode 4 subtitle...
If you think that the 4th movie to be released in the Star Wars franchise(subtitled "Episode 1") didn't suck , then there's no hope for you.
Science never proves anything- it works to find the hypothesis that best fits all the observed data. Proofs are for math.
nonanol is a fine chemical name, the only problem is that it's taken.
The chemical meaning of the "Non" prefix is nine, not none.
The trailer mangles them even worse, but they're not even read correctly even in the featurette!