anyone familiar with I.D. (having read only evolutionists' distorted reproduction of I.D. arguments obviously doesn't count) knows that the information argument is not the only one they have that points to some supernatural cause.
They don't have an information argument, for the Nth time. The only thing that points to supernatural cause are false arguments from IDers.
This sounds to me like "change". Things change. That's a little different from saying things "evolve"
That distinction is, as you say, in your mind. That is a strawman model of the theory of evolution by natural selection, not what scientists believe.
You continue to believe that there is some direction of development between humans and (present-day?) apes. There is a direction, but it is a historical one, not a magical increase in some dimension of "development."
It is just as nonsensical to think that you will have children who turn out to be your parents.
Your counter to the concept of niches is also nonsensical; living in vertebrate guts is a niche which vertebrates cannot pursue, because it is an anaerobic environment, for one thing.
You appear to be extremely confused about multiple aspects of biology.
The short answer is there is nothing of substance to refute. You have not stated a coherent objection; instead you said something like "information surely increases, when they have not observed such a thing."
There is no need for "information" in any rigorous sense to increase in biological evolution, and certainly not in any way that would violate physical laws of entropy.
Any argument to that effect would work equally well against the following truth:
"Two parents cannot combine to produce more than two (non-twin) children, because that would cause a net increase in information."
In truth, two parents can combine to make as many children as they have time and health for. My parents had three. Some people have many more. Each of these children has a unique genetic makeup.
Now, you might counter that my argument is a strawman, but you would have to clarify what you mean by "information" enough to distinguish between your statement and my reductio ad absurdam, and I cannot see any way in which you can, without simply spouting more gibberish.
The facts are that you are simply wrong. Your objections against evolution have no substance. That you think they do is *your* problem, not a problem with evolution.
Evolution does not "posit a direction." There is no meaningful distinction between the terms you use "evolve" and "devolve."
It posits a general *mechanism* for speciation and for development of well-adapted structures, which, to previous naturalists, suggested design.
To address your "large animal" vs. "bacteria" example, the answer is that they live in different niches. A vertebrate that was as small as a bacteria would not work, nor would a bacteria as large as a vertebrate. Vertebrates don't have to be better than bacteria at everything bacteria can do, they just have to be able to survive and produce offspring well enough to perpetuate the species.
However, if two life forms have all the same habitat and habits and needs, then one form which is better adapted will tend to drive the other extinct. Which happens all the time when "exotic" species are brought into new habitats, and pretty much wipe out indigenous ones.
Interesting, but the original challenge was against a poster that claimed
There has never been anything proven incorrect about the bible.
Once you start allowing human interpretation in, and admit that the gospels themselves are the result of deliberate human selection and editing of second- and third-hand accounts, then the powerful faith that fundamentalists put in the text itself is pointless (and, BTW, these kind of careful analyses of tense, etc., would require good manuscripts of the koine Greek, and once you get to that point, the whole idea of "good" and "manuscript" sort of falls apart, not to mention "correct" and "incorrect.")
The basic problem is the fundamentalists have a circular logic: the Bible is inerrant and absolutely without contradiction, and ordinary texts (of similar size and complexity) written by humans have errors and contradictions, therefore, the Bible must be EXTRAordinary, i.e., inspired by God, where they leave out the part that because they hold the Bible to be inspired by God that any confusion or apparent contradiction can be explained away with any amount of weak argument, as opposed to chalking even obvious copyist errors and suspiciously self-serving "agreement" with Old Testament prophesies up to human error in a human text.
The Wright brothers didn't just operate on irrational faith. Neither did the pioneers of the space program.
They operated on engineering principles, realizing they could develop aerodynamic control structures, while maintaining lightweight construction, and *most importantly* made important advances in increasing power-to-weight ratios in internal combustion engines.
That's fucking engineering, not "faith." Not a "crazy" idea, but hard work.
You make it sound like all the Wright brothers did is tell themselves "We think we can" while everyone else just gave up.
Darwin rejected God when He didn't do his bidding during a crisis in Darwin's life.
Uh, do you have any concrete evidence to back this assertion?
Probably not, you just learned it from some religious type trying to make you disbelieve the theory of evolution through an argument ad hominem.
The fact that Creationists feel compelled to misrepresent, or utterly distort and lie, about Darwin himself is simply further evidence of their lack of intellectual integrity.
Nah, it's easier for someone to develop the trolling ability to get his submissions moderated higher than it is for moderators to develop the memory of "the likely suspects."
The editors kept falling for Roland Piquepaille far longer than they should have, even though they, theoretically, had much more time and motivation to avoid such abuses than a pool of moderators would have.
If someone gets enough negative reputation to get rejected on sight, well there's probably a damn good reason for it.
Re:C++ : to remove yet another sucky java app.
on
Demise of C++?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
To get scientifically usable results, did you also
1) compare performance to a total rewrite in Java, given the experience gained from the first round. 2) normalize for programmer expertise in the two languages?
the bias towards systems programming: If you don't want a systems's programming language, use Java. Please. I am a systems programmer use C++ in a big ol' kernel for a big ol' propriatary OS. Simply put, you are wrong here. Period. Furthermore, systems programming is more than kernel development. Games a performance critical applications often time use 'systems programming'.
I don't want to claim any particular dispute over your experience in games or OS programming, but I find it quite interesting that C/C++ types seem to emphasize so much the "systems programming" nature of their language. It seems to me they have a very strange view of the term "systems."
Roughly, it seems that when C/C++ people use the term "system" they mean some kind of "low level" programming, and the main attributes the language has to support are
1) ability to specify bit- and byte-wise patterns in memory (e.g., put together some special descriptor for a memory management unit, following some diagram in the MMU programmers' manual, or addressing a section of memory as a char addr[] array without any overhead)
2) ability to create sections of code with controlled stack and memory discipline (e.g., no dynamic memory allocation in an interrupt handler)
Now it's indisputable that you need these attributes to create OS kernels and device drivers, but hey, if that's all you needed, you can always use assembler. So there has to be another attribute
3) syntax at higher level than assembler 3a) no CPU opcodes, just Fortran/Algol style operations 3b) explicit support for abstractions such as arrays and strings
The interesting thing is that C/C++ actually DON'T support many of these things in a standard way. Structure and bit-field layout, for instance, can't standardly deal with endian-ness and alignment restrictions. Your compiler needs to be matched to your architecture, and you need to read the compiler documentation and, typically, check the compiler output, to be sure you get what you need. There's no standard way to disable interrupts, or specify stack layouts. A true "low-level" language would be able to express all this and more, in a standard way.
Really, all C/C++ can claim in this respect is to be "good enough", in that at least one compiler exists for a CPU/architecture combination, with good enough documentation to make things happen. That's not a design attribute, that's a commercial reality.
Surely there is room for improvement here, but none of the developments in C/C++ land really address it.
In the other direction, most people who use the word "system" mean "large structure composed of component parts"; C/C++ is notoriously BAD at supporting the kind of abstraction needed to easily construct these systems.
CPUs of "Lisp machines" were not Lisp interpretes. Their instruction set resembled something like Java or.NET bytecode actually
The CPUs of Lisp machines were generally micro-coded architectures where
1) the micro-instruction set optimized certain Lisp operations like type-safe generic mathematics, using the specially-designed features of the microcode architecture
2) the memory word-width and microinstructions were optimized to allow efficient (for the time) operation on tagged and relocatable/safe-pointer objects. The virtual memory subsystem was also well-matched to the needs of the garbage collector.
Both of these are relatively Lisp-specific, which is why workstations with generic CPUs, doing operations which weren't Lispy (like text or integer-only processing), eventually beat Lisp machines in speed, especially given the huge engineering effort going into general-purpose CPU development (Intel), vs. custom-ASIC-Lisp-processors (Symbolics,...)
Nowadays, we know enough about Lisp compiling to general-purpose CPU instruction sets that special-purpose hardware offers no real advantage, and 64-bit memories give plenty of room for tag bits.
The reason people kept using Lisp machines, even though performance was generally slow, was that the development environment was integrated in ways that todays "IDEs" can only dream of. Plus, you still had the advantages of high robustness from safe pointers, and well-engineered virtual memory systems. Symbolics Genera was a programmer's dream environment.
Still, you are right in saying that the problems of developing Lisp-language drivers is a impedance mismatch to UNIX rather than an intrinsic language disadvantage. The C compilers for Symbolics machines worked, but it was a true stretch to make things portable between C written for a typical UNIX box and a computer with very non-C-like pointers.
preprocessor metaprogramming. It's a very powerful tool
"powerful" in the sense of "as powerful as a Turing machine", I suppose.
Template/preprocessor metaprogramming is a horrendous hack. It basically happened by accident because the addition of templates "upgraded" the compiler to have a Turing-complete language embedded within it. Not that anyone realized this while they were actually *designing* templates.
Well-designed "metaprogramming" would use, get this, a programming language, with sane syntax, not the mess that template syntax is; C++ was already so crowded with line-noise operators, they had to separate less-than signs with spaces. It would also have real programming semantics, instead of hijacking the type system to provide flow-control.
Lisp basically got this right, by allowing meta-programming to use the same language and operators that the underlying language has.
So would we get leap seconds if the speed of light were changing?
Almost certainly not. Leap seconds have to do with the rotation of the Earth, compared to very high precision atomic clocks. The Earth's rotation is irregular, on the order of msec per day.
shows multiple plots comparing the observed irregularities compared with physical models for the tidal and atmospheric forces believed to contribute to these irregularities.
There is no reason to believe that the Earth rotation is particularly affected by a change in the free-structure constant, in a way that would not also affect atomic clocks. The idea that some basic change to physical constants is giving us leap seconds is pretty much nonsense.
Presumably, anything that affects the "speed of light" affects *all* electromagnetic and mechanical phenomena. This is basic to the principle of equivalence in relativity. Similarly, it would be linked to gravitational phenomena. General relativity predicts that gravity travels at the speed of light, for instance.
The chocolate-microwave experiment relies on knowledge of the frequency of the microwave radiation for the calculation; your microwave's frequency is not tuned to any kind of metrological accuracy. To satisfy the government regulators, it has to hit the 2.4--2.5 GHz unregulated band, but that's a huge range.
To be precise, what would be changing are dimensionless constants, such as "alpha", the fine-structure constant. Variation in the "speed of light" depends on an arbitrary human choice of units. One can use units where length is in light-years, and time measured in years, and then c is, by definition, always 1.
Even what the article refers to is on a time scale of billions of years; the evidence considered is astrophysical and geophysical, not laboratory.
Did you miss the part where Haensch rules out changes *at the present time* at a level of less than one part in 10^15?
This has nothing to do with centuries-old measurements of the speed of light. Any possible change is miniscule on the time scale of hundreds of years, especially compared to the metrological precision available to scientists in the past.
No widely-recognized data show *any* evidence for variance in the speed of light. Physicists are so certain of this that they have actually *defined* the speed of light as a basis for standards of measurements.
Furthermore, any such idea *still* has nothing to do with leap seconds. That you refuse to acknowledge your mistake shows you are extremely confused about the issue.
It's not just an opinion, goofball. It's a request for you to put up or shut up.
If it *were* true that there were some change in the speed of light over time, the first assumption would have to be that it is some basic effect taking place on a cosmological scale, not irregular and connected to Earth in particular. I.e., it would have NOTHING in particular to do with leap seconds.
To claim otherwise, as you seem to be (more than once in this article), is either complete ignorant foolishness, or a simple troll.
Will you shut the hell up about this alternative research?
It has nothing to do with the leap second, which is due to measurable slowing of the Earth's rotation, and has the same sort of irregularity you would expect from geophysical effects. E.g., when there is a big tsunami or earthquake, it has a measurable effect on the Earth's rotation rate.
The Earth is a freaking lump of rock, some of which is broken into big plates, with water sloshing around on it. It's not going to be as stable a time reference as a single atom. The only reason to care about it is that the people living on the rock like the idea that they can see the Sun and stars when they look up at somewhat the same place at the same time of day shown on their clocks.
And to Caspain's comment. For centuries, modern men of the time thought the world was flat. So much, they dared not venture to the edge.
OOGG not hear of flat-earthers in very long time; certainly not since men "modern" in any sense.
Flat earth not believed by any people observing in any way scientifically. Some cave people think Earth flat, but these people not sophisticated enough to build sea-faring vessels, not care if Earth actually flat or not. Also, not interested in scientific understanding of world. More worried about where find food.
Sea-farers who know enough navigation to go away from sight of land generally know enough astronomy to believe Earth round. Ancient Greeks have enough knowledge to believe Earth spherical, have good idea of size. Even earlier, people see that sailing vessel disappear hull first, sails last; could see Earth curve away toward horizon.
On other hand, writers of 19th century like to believe Dark Ages more backward than actually were; liked to ridicule supposed backwardness of Catholic church, invent myth that Columbus contemporaries thought Earth flat, for instance.
In other words, idea of "people once believe Earth flat" is irrelevant to issues of science.
OOGG value your input as concerned slashdot reader. OOGG consider carefully future posting style. For example, OOGG recently upgrade hardware to improve use of lowercase in response to other comment. Perhaps OOGG leave this kind of discussion to non-caveman, although OOGG concerned much knowledge from stone age in danger be lost to modern slashdot readers.
OOG very hard act to follow. However, OOG not heard from in many months, perhaps from exhaustion of creative juices, or bad batch of cave weed. OOGG like to think some past postings of own quite witty, nonetheless.
On other hand, PERHAPS OOGG BREAK CRITIC HEAD WITH OPEN SOURCE CD!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
anyone familiar with I.D. (having read only evolutionists' distorted reproduction of I.D. arguments obviously doesn't count) knows that the information argument is not the only one they have that points to some supernatural cause.
They don't have an information argument, for the Nth time. The only thing that points to supernatural cause are false arguments from IDers.
Get a clue.
This sounds to me like "change". Things change. That's a little different from saying things "evolve"
That distinction is, as you say, in your mind. That is a strawman model of the theory of evolution by natural selection, not what scientists believe.
You continue to believe that there is some direction of development between humans and (present-day?) apes. There is a direction, but it is a historical one, not a magical increase in some dimension of "development."
It is just as nonsensical to think that you will have children who turn out to be your parents.
Your counter to the concept of niches is also nonsensical; living in vertebrate guts is a niche which vertebrates cannot pursue, because it is an anaerobic environment, for one thing.
You appear to be extremely confused about multiple aspects of biology.
The short answer is there is nothing of substance to refute. You have not stated a coherent objection; instead you said something like "information surely increases, when they have not observed such a thing."
There is no need for "information" in any rigorous sense to increase in biological evolution, and certainly not in any way that would violate physical laws of entropy.
Any argument to that effect would work equally well against the following truth:
"Two parents cannot combine to produce more than two (non-twin) children, because that would cause a net increase in information."
In truth, two parents can combine to make as many children as they have time and health for. My parents had three. Some people have many more. Each of these children has a unique genetic makeup.
Now, you might counter that my argument is a strawman, but you would have to clarify what you mean by "information" enough to distinguish between your statement and my reductio ad absurdam, and I cannot see any way in which you can, without simply spouting more gibberish.
The facts are that you are simply wrong. Your objections against evolution have no substance. That you think they do is *your* problem, not a problem with evolution.
Just because you're too thick to understand something doesn't mean it's meaningless.
Au contraire. I know enough thermodynamics and statistical mechanics to recognize specious argumentation when I see it. And your post had it.
Just because you are too thick to see through the flaws of ID reasoning, doesn't make it correct.
Evolution does not "posit a direction." There is no meaningful distinction between the terms you use "evolve" and "devolve."
It posits a general *mechanism* for speciation and for development of well-adapted structures, which, to previous naturalists, suggested design.
To address your "large animal" vs. "bacteria" example, the answer is that they live in different niches. A vertebrate that was as small as a bacteria would not work, nor would a bacteria as large as a vertebrate. Vertebrates don't have to be better than bacteria at everything bacteria can do, they just have to be able to survive and produce offspring well enough to perpetuate the species.
However, if two life forms have all the same habitat and habits and needs, then one form which is better adapted will tend to drive the other extinct. Which happens all the time when "exotic" species are brought into new habitats, and pretty much wipe out indigenous ones.
Interesting, but the original challenge was against a poster that claimed
There has never been anything proven incorrect about the bible.
Once you start allowing human interpretation in, and admit that the gospels themselves are the result of deliberate human selection and editing of second- and third-hand accounts, then the powerful faith that fundamentalists put in the text itself is pointless (and, BTW, these kind of careful analyses of tense, etc., would require good manuscripts of the koine Greek, and once you get to that point, the whole idea of "good" and "manuscript" sort of falls apart, not to mention "correct" and "incorrect.")
The basic problem is the fundamentalists have a circular logic: the Bible is inerrant and absolutely without contradiction, and ordinary texts (of similar size and complexity) written by humans have errors and contradictions, therefore, the Bible must be EXTRAordinary, i.e., inspired by God, where they leave out the part that because they hold the Bible to be inspired by God that any confusion or apparent contradiction can be explained away with any amount of weak argument, as opposed to chalking even obvious copyist errors and suspiciously self-serving "agreement" with Old Testament prophesies up to human error in a human text.
"I.D.ers" *don't* use scientific methods.
They attack strawmen, and ignore contrary evidence. Or, like you, they spout meaningless gibberish about "information theory" and thermodynamics.
The Wright brothers didn't just operate on irrational faith. Neither did the pioneers of the space program.
They operated on engineering principles, realizing they could develop aerodynamic control structures, while maintaining lightweight construction, and *most importantly* made important advances in increasing power-to-weight ratios in internal combustion engines.
That's fucking engineering, not "faith." Not a "crazy" idea, but hard work.
You make it sound like all the Wright brothers did is tell themselves "We think we can" while everyone else just gave up.
Darwin rejected God when He didn't do his bidding during a crisis in Darwin's life.
Uh, do you have any concrete evidence to back this assertion?
Probably not, you just learned it from some religious type trying to make you disbelieve the theory of evolution through an argument ad hominem.
The fact that Creationists feel compelled to misrepresent, or utterly distort and lie, about Darwin himself is simply further evidence of their lack of intellectual integrity.
Nah, it's easier for someone to develop the trolling ability to get his submissions moderated higher than it is for moderators to develop the memory of "the likely suspects."
The editors kept falling for Roland Piquepaille far longer than they should have, even though they, theoretically, had much more time and motivation to avoid such abuses than a pool of moderators would have.
If someone gets enough negative reputation to get rejected on sight, well there's probably a damn good reason for it.
To get scientifically usable results, did you also
1) compare performance to a total rewrite in Java, given the experience gained from the first round.
2) normalize for programmer expertise in the two languages?
I'm guessing not.
the bias towards systems programming: If you don't want a systems's programming language, use Java. Please. I am a systems programmer use C++ in a big ol' kernel for a big ol' propriatary OS. Simply put, you are wrong here. Period. Furthermore, systems programming is more than kernel development. Games a performance critical applications often time use 'systems programming'.
I don't want to claim any particular dispute over your experience in games or OS programming, but I find it quite interesting that C/C++ types seem to emphasize so much the "systems programming" nature of their language. It seems to me they have a very strange view of the term "systems."
Roughly, it seems that when C/C++ people use the term "system" they mean some kind of "low level" programming, and the main attributes the language has to support are
1) ability to specify bit- and byte-wise patterns in memory (e.g., put together some special descriptor for a memory management unit, following some diagram in the MMU programmers' manual, or addressing a section of memory as a char addr[] array without any overhead)
2) ability to create sections of code with controlled stack and memory discipline (e.g., no dynamic memory allocation in an interrupt handler)
Now it's indisputable that you need these attributes to create OS kernels and device drivers, but hey, if that's all you needed, you can always use assembler. So there has to be another attribute
3) syntax at higher level than assembler
3a) no CPU opcodes, just Fortran/Algol style operations
3b) explicit support for abstractions such as arrays and strings
The interesting thing is that C/C++ actually DON'T support many of these things in a standard way. Structure and bit-field layout, for instance, can't standardly deal with endian-ness and alignment restrictions. Your compiler needs to be matched to your architecture, and you need to read the compiler documentation and, typically, check the compiler output, to be sure you get what you need. There's no standard way to disable interrupts, or specify stack layouts. A true "low-level" language would be able to express all this and more, in a standard way.
Really, all C/C++ can claim in this respect is to be "good enough", in that at least one compiler exists for a CPU/architecture combination, with good enough documentation to make things happen. That's not a design attribute, that's a commercial reality.
Surely there is room for improvement here, but none of the developments in C/C++ land really address it.
In the other direction, most people who use the word "system" mean "large structure composed of component parts"; C/C++ is notoriously BAD at supporting the kind of abstraction needed to easily construct these systems.
CPUs of "Lisp machines" were not Lisp interpretes. Their instruction set resembled something like Java or .NET bytecode actually
The CPUs of Lisp machines were generally micro-coded architectures where
1) the micro-instruction set optimized certain Lisp operations like type-safe generic mathematics, using the specially-designed features of the microcode architecture
2) the memory word-width and microinstructions were optimized to allow efficient (for the time) operation on tagged and relocatable/safe-pointer objects. The virtual memory subsystem was also well-matched to the needs of the garbage collector.
Both of these are relatively Lisp-specific, which is why workstations with generic CPUs, doing operations which weren't Lispy (like text or integer-only processing), eventually beat Lisp machines in speed, especially given the huge engineering effort going into general-purpose CPU development (Intel), vs. custom-ASIC-Lisp-processors (Symbolics,...)
Nowadays, we know enough about Lisp compiling to general-purpose CPU instruction sets that special-purpose hardware offers no real advantage, and 64-bit memories give plenty of room for tag bits.
The reason people kept using Lisp machines, even though performance was generally slow, was that the development environment was integrated in ways that todays "IDEs" can only dream of. Plus, you still had the advantages of high robustness from safe pointers, and well-engineered virtual memory systems. Symbolics Genera was a programmer's dream environment.
Still, you are right in saying that the problems of developing Lisp-language drivers is a impedance mismatch to UNIX rather than an intrinsic language disadvantage. The C compilers for Symbolics machines worked, but it was a true stretch to make things portable between C written for a typical UNIX box and a computer with very non-C-like pointers.
preprocessor metaprogramming. It's a very powerful tool
"powerful" in the sense of "as powerful as a Turing machine", I suppose.
Template/preprocessor metaprogramming is a horrendous hack. It basically happened by accident because the addition of templates "upgraded" the compiler to have a Turing-complete language embedded within it. Not that anyone realized this while they were actually *designing* templates.
Well-designed "metaprogramming" would use, get this, a programming language, with sane syntax, not the mess that template syntax is; C++ was already so crowded with line-noise operators, they had to separate less-than signs with spaces. It would also have real programming semantics, instead of hijacking the type system to provide flow-control.
Lisp basically got this right, by allowing meta-programming to use the same language and operators that the underlying language has.
Do you have any link to information showing that phenomenon for speed of light measurements?
I have only heard of such a thing for Millikan's charge-on-the-electron measurements.
Did you actually read the article that you linked to, you numbskull? Let me quote for you
To see why the confidence in the invariance of the speed of light is so high, we need to look at the history of its measurement,
So would we get leap seconds if the speed of light were changing?
Almost certainly not. Leap seconds have to do with the rotation of the Earth, compared to very high precision atomic clocks. The Earth's rotation is irregular, on the order of msec per day.
http://maia.usno.navy.mil/plot-eop.html
shows multiple plots comparing the observed irregularities compared with physical models for the tidal and atmospheric forces believed to contribute to these irregularities.
http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/systime.html
Has the basic length-of-day variation.
There is no reason to believe that the Earth rotation is particularly affected by a change in the free-structure constant, in a way that would not also affect atomic clocks. The idea that some basic change to physical constants is giving us leap seconds is pretty much nonsense.
Presumably, anything that affects the "speed of light" affects *all* electromagnetic and mechanical phenomena. This is basic to the principle of equivalence in relativity. Similarly, it would be linked to gravitational phenomena. General relativity predicts that gravity travels at the speed of light, for instance.
The chocolate-microwave experiment relies on knowledge of the frequency of the microwave radiation for the calculation; your microwave's frequency is not tuned to any kind of metrological accuracy. To satisfy the government regulators, it has to hit the 2.4--2.5 GHz unregulated band, but that's a huge range.
To be precise, what would be changing are dimensionless constants, such as "alpha", the fine-structure constant. Variation in the "speed of light" depends on an arbitrary human choice of units. One can use units where length is in light-years, and time measured in years, and then c is, by definition, always 1.
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0208093
Even what the article refers to is on a time scale of billions of years; the evidence considered is astrophysical and geophysical, not laboratory.
Did you miss the part where Haensch rules out changes *at the present time* at a level of less than one part in 10^15?
This has nothing to do with centuries-old measurements of the speed of light. Any possible change is miniscule on the time scale of hundreds of years, especially compared to the metrological precision available to scientists in the past.
No widely-recognized data show *any* evidence for variance in the speed of light. Physicists are so certain of this that they have actually *defined* the speed of light as a basis for standards of measurements.
Furthermore, any such idea *still* has nothing to do with leap seconds. That you refuse to acknowledge your mistake shows you are extremely confused about the issue.
It's not just an opinion, goofball. It's a request for you to put up or shut up.
If it *were* true that there were some change in the speed of light over time, the first assumption would have to be that it is some basic effect taking place on a cosmological scale, not irregular and connected to Earth in particular. I.e., it would have NOTHING in particular to do with leap seconds.
To claim otherwise, as you seem to be (more than once in this article), is either complete ignorant foolishness, or a simple troll.
Will you shut the hell up about this alternative research?
It has nothing to do with the leap second, which is due to measurable slowing of the Earth's rotation, and has the same sort of irregularity you would expect from geophysical effects. E.g., when there is a big tsunami or earthquake, it has a measurable effect on the Earth's rotation rate.
The Earth is a freaking lump of rock, some of which is broken into big plates, with water sloshing around on it. It's not going to be as stable a time reference as a single atom. The only reason to care about it is that the people living on the rock like the idea that they can see the Sun and stars when they look up at somewhat the same place at the same time of day shown on their clocks.
And to Caspain's comment. For centuries, modern men of the time thought the world was flat. So much, they dared not venture to the edge.
OOGG not hear of flat-earthers in very long time; certainly not since men "modern" in any sense.
Flat earth not believed by any people observing in any way scientifically. Some cave people think Earth flat, but these people not sophisticated enough to build sea-faring vessels, not care if Earth actually flat or not. Also, not interested in scientific understanding of world. More worried about where find food.
Sea-farers who know enough navigation to go away from sight of land generally know enough astronomy to believe Earth round. Ancient Greeks have enough knowledge to believe Earth spherical, have good idea of size. Even earlier, people see that sailing vessel disappear hull first, sails last; could see Earth curve away toward horizon.
On other hand, writers of 19th century like to believe Dark Ages more backward than actually were; liked to ridicule supposed backwardness of Catholic church, invent myth that Columbus contemporaries thought Earth flat, for instance.
In other words, idea of "people once believe Earth flat" is irrelevant to issues of science.
OOGG value your input as concerned slashdot reader. OOGG consider carefully future posting style. For example, OOGG recently upgrade hardware to improve use of lowercase in response to other comment. Perhaps OOGG leave this kind of discussion to non-caveman, although OOGG concerned much knowledge from stone age in danger be lost to modern slashdot readers.
OOG very hard act to follow. However, OOG not heard from in many months, perhaps from exhaustion of creative juices, or bad batch of cave weed. OOGG like to think some past postings of own quite witty, nonetheless.
On other hand, PERHAPS OOGG BREAK CRITIC HEAD WITH OPEN SOURCE CD!!!!
Value of pi not depend on coordinate system. pi simply transcendental number with certain value.
Polar coordinate can also use pi: circle of radius pi, arc length of arc subtending angle of pi radians, etc.
OOGG recommend you not change major to math. Otherwise, GPA likely much less than pi.