There are NO uses of electricity that do not dissipate with 100% efficiency to heat eventually.
That's true for silly definitions of "eventually" that have no bearing on the net amount of energy in the atmosphere because the atmosphere would be long gone by the time the heat is released...
Certainly the majority of uses of electricity result in the energy being converted into heat in a reasonably short period of time. But we spend a lot of electricity creating aluminum and plastic, so unless you go burning it, it's going to be stable for quite a while.
The production of aluminum from aluminum oxide, or plenty of other chemical reactions moving something from a lower to higher energy state. Granted many of those result in some kind of use (synthetic fuels are designed to be burned, or if it's a pharmaceutical by metabolism and so on) that would release the stored energy as heat, but it isn't necessarily so. Like all that aluminum around you that you aren't using as a fuel source.
What you create here is a giantic tornado, so how is it guaranteed that this tornado won't suddenly rip off the base and start wandering around?!
The fact that the base is where the tornado's energy comes from. Tornadoes aren't self-sustaining. As soon as it left the base, it'd start to dissipate, from the bottom up I would think.
Imagine a vortex/tornado 2,400 feet high. What could possibly go wrong?
Uh... nothing? I mean I guess a poorly informed amateur pilot could fly into it...
A tornado is not self-sustaining. They exist by virtue of the massive amount of energy contained in the storm which creates them. If you were to magically remove the colliding fronts, the tornado would vanish fairly quickly. The vortex in this idea would be powered by the heat injected into it at the base station. If, as I assume you're imagining, it jumped the wall of the generator and started moving towards the quiet and unsuspecting town just down the road, it'd run out of energy very quickly.
No, the problem I have with the idea is that, unlike the solar updraft tower, it isn't immediately obvious to me where the energy to heat the air going into the base is coming from. The picture shows "warm water" being drizzled through the inlet vent and becoming "cool water" with the heat obviously going into the air, but where is the warm water coming from? Solar heating tanks, I guess?
Well, I'm skeptical, probably because I'm missing something... How was the water supposed to get to the top? Solar-powered pumps? How do you get more energy from the downdraft than it took to pump up the water?
This tower idea may not go anywhere, but it is immediately obvious to me how it converts solar energy into mechanical.
You fool! Do you know what happens when Ballmer wants to throw a chair and can't find one? It only increases his rage, and like the Hulk, the angrier he gets the stronger he gets. He'll start picking up people and throwing them through walls. It'll be a disaster!
Quake 2 did, but Quake did not. This was quite apparent when making custom models that made too large a sweep of motion between frames -- the engine did nothing to interpolate, and your brain couldn't do the job either. Part of the reason for this is that the quake model format/object did not have a concept of animations. Animation was coded by manually changing frames in the quake-c game logic. Each 100 ms tick the game entity's think() function would be called, and it could set the current frame for the model as it chose, including randomly. So the engine didn't know what the 'next' frame was supposed to be until it was already supposed to be displaying it.
Quake 2 added in the animation concept. I think they also upped the basic logic/animation framerate to 20fps.
This is what nitpicking nothing does to brains
on
Framerates Matter
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· Score: 1
Otherwise, he would have simply said "designed." To put "evolutionary" in front of it seems to imply that this thought process, to me:
1. The brain appears to function according to a design. It works well together and appears to show evidence that it was planned/thought out/designed.
2. Having a design implies that something or someone intelligent planned out that design.
3. I don't believe in God, therefore I will attribute this design to evolution.
Actually, the reason he put "evolutionary" in front of "designed" was to make it explicitly clear that he was not using the definition of "design" that necessarily implies an intelligent designer. He was not saying that the functioning of the human brain could have only arisen from a series of deliberate steps.
The definition of "design" he was using is more like when someone says "those rocks on the ground form a neat design."
You see, regardless of what the truth behind the idea of the Creator is, our bodies do have a "design". They have a plan, a blueprint if you will. That's your DNA (and other things since it turns out biology is even more complicated than that). It guides how your body develops and how your brain works. It is a "design". However just because those words can often imply an intellect or a deliberate purpose behind them, they don't have to. For example, if someone said "the grooves in the limestone formed the blueprint for the subsequent quartz crystal growth", you would understand that they aren't saying that some civil engineer came by and carved the grooves in an intentional bid to achieve the result.
Which, I maintain, does not make sense. If the evidence of a design supports the idea of an intelligence behind it,
Design does not imply a creator. At least, not in all definitions or all contexts. "Design" the noun does not always imply "design" the verb on behalf of a "designer".
Thus your basic was make that most common of errors of/. pedants: First, assume that a common English word has one extremely precise definition from which all sorts of necessary implications arise, and then continue on without ever questioning that initial bad assumption. And thus your argument is the one that does not make sense.
It's like this: Your brain has all sorts of natural facilities, including the ability to learn new facilities. It is "designed" this way in the sense that your DNA creates the proteins that through a bunch of biochemistry end up creating your brain so that it has those facilities. Some of them are quite specific and serve obviously useful purposes for survival. When you brain does not work according to this design due to some issue, serious problems can result.
Where did the "design" come from? From natural selection. That's all.
I think it's pretty obvious what he really wanted to say. He wanted to say that the human mind evidences a design and he wanted to argue from that design and yet deny the existence of God.
I think it's pretty obvious that has nothing to do with what he was saying, but that is what your own beliefs and prejudices tell you he must have been saying.
Which is interesting, because that aspect of "design" and the idea that there must be someone or something that designed it or planned it or is sustaining it, therefore we can extrapolate from it and assume that laws of nature/physics will continue to be the way they are is an argument for the existence of a Deity that many scientists in the past used...
As someone who believes in God (and Jesus and all that)... No, that does not follow. The "something" that "designed or planned" the "design" was random chance combined with natural selection, and what sustains it is also natural selection. That is all that is required.
You can see the potency of this kind of "design" in genetic algorithms. There, random processes still play the role
The 30-fps-is-all-you-can-see myth was probably born of the notion that the illusion of continuous movement starts to set in around 25-30fps (in film for example). Therefore actually 30fps is the minimum you need rather than the maximum you can perceive.
I think it's more likely born of the notion that film gives a completely convincing illusion of motion that is not greatly improved by higher frame rates, because the process by which it is created automatically includes motion blur because it's recording continuous data, just broken up into 24 fps. Computer games display discreet moments in time, not many moments blurred together into one picture. That's why film looks smoother than computer games with 3 times the framerate.
Nevertheless, the illusion of continuous movement is apparent at much lower framerates than even film, even in a computer game. Quake's models were animated at 10 fps, and they gave a convincing illusion of movement, and you can probably make due with a lot less since the brain fills in so much. But it's not a completely convincing illusion, and neither is 30, 60, or even 100 when using static instants in time.
But the basic myth comes from the fact that film is so convincing and thus you don't "need" more... as long as each frame is a blurred representation of the full period of time it is displayed for.
Naw, their society is an autonomous collective, specifically an anarcho-syndicalist commune. They take it in turns to act as sort-of-executive officer for the week but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting by a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs but by a two thirds majority, in the case of more major issues.
By "oppressing", you mean "badmouthing them in -private- emails, and arguing against their papers (which they think are unsound) in public review". Contrast with, say, the Bush administration actively blocking global warming materials from being mentioned in reports and threatening to fire scientists who go public.
Also administration bureaucrats edited the report that did end up getting published to modify and weaken the conclusions. It was direct political manipulation of scientific results.
It's funny that in order to explain why so many climatologists are all supporting something that is so obviously untrue, the deniers say that scientists always come to the conclusions that whoever is funding their research pays them to.
That may be true for the kind of "scientists" who work in the think tanks publishing studies like "Is Oracle really the best database?" funded by Oracle, or "Which has lower TCO, Windows or Linux?" funded by Microsoft. But it's not true for science in general.
And here's a direct counter example. Scientists in the direct employ of an administration who had every political motivation to want a certain result -- and was demonstrably willing to use their authority to get it -- actually arrived at the result their paymasters didn't want!
I'm sure the deniers have a great explanation for that. I'm guessing it's that scientists only obediently do what their told by their masters if their masters are also liberals.:P
Yeah, that's not how peer review is supposed to work.
Where was your "that's not how peer review is supposed to work" outrage when the reviewers said these papers were not fit for publication, but the journal wanted to publish them anyway?
If scientists were threatening to publish elsewhere if a journal was ignoring peer review by not publishing skeptic's papers, you'd be all for that.
As we observe objects at greater and greater distances, they have to keep revising their age-estimate of the universe.
And here we have spotted the farthest-away objects ever, and it required no revision of the age of the universe. There has been some adjustment towards 'older', but most of the time these days when the age of the universe is adjusted, it's towards more precision, not increasing age.
x can be UNEQUAL to y. So we can have infinite mass, distributed in an infinite volume, in a universe with neither beginning nor end.
Of course two infinite quantities can be unequal. Integers and real numbers are an obvious example. Unrelated, but the proof is more complicated, since multiplication is undefined for infinity. It's not a number.
while embracing a theory (which is no more than a belief, really, with a different authority appealed to)
Yeah, the authority of experimental evidence and verified predictions. If you think that there's nothing more to cosmological theory than some authority saying so from on high, then you're just not aware of how it came about.
They've changed the details of the story, but for some reason, it seems people just cannot manage to wrap their heads around the idea of there being something without a "before there was".
Actually physicists are quite readily able to wrap their head around something without a "before there was", and in fact a beginning-less universe was one of the leading theories when the Big Bang was first being proposed. It was only after the evidence came out strongly in favor of the Big Bang that the other theories began to fall out of favor. If theory is nothing more than belief from authority, then why was the "belief" du jour (which happens to be closer to your belief) abandoned? It wasn't overnight, either... A lot of scientists didn't like the idea at first.
However this doesn't mean astrophysicists have abandoned the idea of a universe with no beginning. The Big Bang Theory specifically does not make any predictions about what happened at or before the Bang. Some hypothesis are that the Big Bang is just one of many Bangs and the universe is repeatedly created/destroyed. Another is that the Big Bang was really just a collision between higher-order dimensions, and that many universes such as ours could have been created, even infinitely many. Still another is that space-time itself came into existence in the Big Bang, and therefore the concept of "before there was" is meaningless. Try wrapping your head around that!
The problem is there is no evidence for any of these hypothesis. So it is still very much up in the air. No authority is going to come down from the mount with a stone tablet and declare the answer. Whatever experiments you imagine they aren't "allowed" to conduct are being conducted, and the evidence will decide.
Yeah, I have to say I'm surprised anyone would object to CIA involvement. I think it's very important we keep a watch on the climate. After all, the climate has been acting pretty suspicious lately, and has been looking, dare I say it, more swarthy. Plus, I heard that the climate was recently spotted in Yemen.
mdsolar said why they're called blue -- cus that's the color of light they're emitting.
They are extremely red-shifted (in fact astronomers typically talk about such distances/timescales in terms of degree of red-shift). It's not like if you were to peer at these galaxies in a telescope they'd look blue. In fact you probably wouldn't see anything at all; Hubble is almost certainly (huh? rtfa?) using it's near-infrared cameras for this.
the characteristics of which coincide perfectly with the big bag theory.
Blah blah blah. Look, I don't want to hear about how observations matched predictions. That's not science.
It's like this: I don't understand Big Bang Theory, therefore I don't like it, therefore it's nonsense, therefore your "evidence" is really just your prejudice, therefore we're obviously going to find galaxies that are ten billion years older than these ones, and therefore my theory of the Giant Cosmic Bunny Orgy Theory, which is obvious if you even think about it rationally, will be proven correct once and for all and I'll be elected the President of Physics.
That's a good point, though their method of spreading terror is by killing people, the primary objective of this attack was to kill people, and it is only a partial success because the fear caused by the potential for people to die.
So yeah, terrorists are here to spread terror. Nevertheless, the security checkpoint (or many other targets) are targeted because there are places where a large number of people could be killed.
Slashdot Mirror
There are NO uses of electricity that do not dissipate with 100% efficiency to heat eventually.
That's true for silly definitions of "eventually" that have no bearing on the net amount of energy in the atmosphere because the atmosphere would be long gone by the time the heat is released...
Certainly the majority of uses of electricity result in the energy being converted into heat in a reasonably short period of time. But we spend a lot of electricity creating aluminum and plastic, so unless you go burning it, it's going to be stable for quite a while.
The production of aluminum from aluminum oxide, or plenty of other chemical reactions moving something from a lower to higher energy state. Granted many of those result in some kind of use (synthetic fuels are designed to be burned, or if it's a pharmaceutical by metabolism and so on) that would release the stored energy as heat, but it isn't necessarily so. Like all that aluminum around you that you aren't using as a fuel source.
What you create here is a giantic tornado, so how is it guaranteed that this tornado won't suddenly rip off the base and start wandering around?!
The fact that the base is where the tornado's energy comes from. Tornadoes aren't self-sustaining. As soon as it left the base, it'd start to dissipate, from the bottom up I would think.
Imagine a vortex/tornado 2,400 feet high. What could possibly go wrong?
Uh... nothing? I mean I guess a poorly informed amateur pilot could fly into it...
A tornado is not self-sustaining. They exist by virtue of the massive amount of energy contained in the storm which creates them. If you were to magically remove the colliding fronts, the tornado would vanish fairly quickly. The vortex in this idea would be powered by the heat injected into it at the base station. If, as I assume you're imagining, it jumped the wall of the generator and started moving towards the quiet and unsuspecting town just down the road, it'd run out of energy very quickly.
No, the problem I have with the idea is that, unlike the solar updraft tower, it isn't immediately obvious to me where the energy to heat the air going into the base is coming from. The picture shows "warm water" being drizzled through the inlet vent and becoming "cool water" with the heat obviously going into the air, but where is the warm water coming from? Solar heating tanks, I guess?
Land use is not exactly a big issue in Arizona...
Well, I'm skeptical, probably because I'm missing something... How was the water supposed to get to the top? Solar-powered pumps? How do you get more energy from the downdraft than it took to pump up the water?
This tower idea may not go anywhere, but it is immediately obvious to me how it converts solar energy into mechanical.
You fool! Do you know what happens when Ballmer wants to throw a chair and can't find one? It only increases his rage, and like the Hulk, the angrier he gets the stronger he gets. He'll start picking up people and throwing them through walls. It'll be a disaster!
There's nothing that equals the experience of using a Tablet PC
Yeah, and there's nothing that equals the experience of having river parasites swim up your pee-stream into your urethra.
I don't like tablets made by MS or otherwise (in case you couldn't tell by my analogy).
Quake 2 did, but Quake did not. This was quite apparent when making custom models that made too large a sweep of motion between frames -- the engine did nothing to interpolate, and your brain couldn't do the job either. Part of the reason for this is that the quake model format/object did not have a concept of animations. Animation was coded by manually changing frames in the quake-c game logic. Each 100 ms tick the game entity's think() function would be called, and it could set the current frame for the model as it chose, including randomly. So the engine didn't know what the 'next' frame was supposed to be until it was already supposed to be displaying it.
Quake 2 added in the animation concept. I think they also upped the basic logic/animation framerate to 20fps.
Otherwise, he would have simply said "designed." To put "evolutionary" in front of it seems to imply that this thought process, to me:
1. The brain appears to function according to a design. It works well together and appears to show evidence that it was planned/thought out/designed.
2. Having a design implies that something or someone intelligent planned out that design.
3. I don't believe in God, therefore I will attribute this design to evolution.
Actually, the reason he put "evolutionary" in front of "designed" was to make it explicitly clear that he was not using the definition of "design" that necessarily implies an intelligent designer. He was not saying that the functioning of the human brain could have only arisen from a series of deliberate steps.
The definition of "design" he was using is more like when someone says "those rocks on the ground form a neat design."
You see, regardless of what the truth behind the idea of the Creator is, our bodies do have a "design". They have a plan, a blueprint if you will. That's your DNA (and other things since it turns out biology is even more complicated than that). It guides how your body develops and how your brain works. It is a "design". However just because those words can often imply an intellect or a deliberate purpose behind them, they don't have to. For example, if someone said "the grooves in the limestone formed the blueprint for the subsequent quartz crystal growth", you would understand that they aren't saying that some civil engineer came by and carved the grooves in an intentional bid to achieve the result.
Which, I maintain, does not make sense. If the evidence of a design supports the idea of an intelligence behind it,
Design does not imply a creator. At least, not in all definitions or all contexts. "Design" the noun does not always imply "design" the verb on behalf of a "designer".
Thus your basic was make that most common of errors of /. pedants: First, assume that a common English word has one extremely precise definition from which all sorts of necessary implications arise, and then continue on without ever questioning that initial bad assumption. And thus your argument is the one that does not make sense.
It's like this: Your brain has all sorts of natural facilities, including the ability to learn new facilities. It is "designed" this way in the sense that your DNA creates the proteins that through a bunch of biochemistry end up creating your brain so that it has those facilities. Some of them are quite specific and serve obviously useful purposes for survival. When you brain does not work according to this design due to some issue, serious problems can result.
Where did the "design" come from? From natural selection. That's all.
I think it's pretty obvious what he really wanted to say. He wanted to say that the human mind evidences a design and he wanted to argue from that design and yet deny the existence of God.
I think it's pretty obvious that has nothing to do with what he was saying, but that is what your own beliefs and prejudices tell you he must have been saying.
Which is interesting, because that aspect of "design" and the idea that there must be someone or something that designed it or planned it or is sustaining it, therefore we can extrapolate from it and assume that laws of nature/physics will continue to be the way they are is an argument for the existence of a Deity that many scientists in the past used...
As someone who believes in God (and Jesus and all that)... No, that does not follow. The "something" that "designed or planned" the "design" was random chance combined with natural selection, and what sustains it is also natural selection. That is all that is required.
You can see the potency of this kind of "design" in genetic algorithms. There, random processes still play the role
Ah, thanks, I didn't know that.
The 30-fps-is-all-you-can-see myth was probably born of the notion that the illusion of continuous movement starts to set in around 25-30fps (in film for example). Therefore actually 30fps is the minimum you need rather than the maximum you can perceive.
I think it's more likely born of the notion that film gives a completely convincing illusion of motion that is not greatly improved by higher frame rates, because the process by which it is created automatically includes motion blur because it's recording continuous data, just broken up into 24 fps. Computer games display discreet moments in time, not many moments blurred together into one picture. That's why film looks smoother than computer games with 3 times the framerate.
Nevertheless, the illusion of continuous movement is apparent at much lower framerates than even film, even in a computer game. Quake's models were animated at 10 fps, and they gave a convincing illusion of movement, and you can probably make due with a lot less since the brain fills in so much. But it's not a completely convincing illusion, and neither is 30, 60, or even 100 when using static instants in time.
But the basic myth comes from the fact that film is so convincing and thus you don't "need" more... as long as each frame is a blurred representation of the full period of time it is displayed for.
Naw, their society is an autonomous collective, specifically an anarcho-syndicalist commune. They take it in turns to act as sort-of-executive officer for the week but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting by a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs but by a two thirds majority, in the case of more major issues.
Hope that helps!
By "oppressing", you mean "badmouthing them in -private- emails, and arguing against their papers (which they think are unsound) in public review". Contrast with, say, the Bush administration actively blocking global warming materials from being mentioned in reports and threatening to fire scientists who go public.
Also administration bureaucrats edited the report that did end up getting published to modify and weaken the conclusions. It was direct political manipulation of scientific results.
It's funny that in order to explain why so many climatologists are all supporting something that is so obviously untrue, the deniers say that scientists always come to the conclusions that whoever is funding their research pays them to.
That may be true for the kind of "scientists" who work in the think tanks publishing studies like "Is Oracle really the best database?" funded by Oracle, or "Which has lower TCO, Windows or Linux?" funded by Microsoft. But it's not true for science in general.
And here's a direct counter example. Scientists in the direct employ of an administration who had every political motivation to want a certain result -- and was demonstrably willing to use their authority to get it -- actually arrived at the result their paymasters didn't want!
I'm sure the deniers have a great explanation for that. I'm guessing it's that scientists only obediently do what their told by their masters if their masters are also liberals. :P
Yeah, that's not how peer review is supposed to work.
Where was your "that's not how peer review is supposed to work" outrage when the reviewers said these papers were not fit for publication, but the journal wanted to publish them anyway?
If scientists were threatening to publish elsewhere if a journal was ignoring peer review by not publishing skeptic's papers, you'd be all for that.
Going from 1% to 0.01% is a chance of two (decimal) orders of magnitude. Two powers of ten. As in 100.
I'm not sure how important it was for them to point that out, but it's true.
As we observe objects at greater and greater distances, they have to keep revising their age-estimate of the universe.
And here we have spotted the farthest-away objects ever, and it required no revision of the age of the universe. There has been some adjustment towards 'older', but most of the time these days when the age of the universe is adjusted, it's towards more precision, not increasing age.
x can be UNEQUAL to y. So we can have infinite mass, distributed in an infinite volume, in a universe with neither beginning nor end.
Of course two infinite quantities can be unequal. Integers and real numbers are an obvious example. Unrelated, but the proof is more complicated, since multiplication is undefined for infinity. It's not a number.
while embracing a theory (which is no more than a belief, really, with a different authority appealed to)
Yeah, the authority of experimental evidence and verified predictions. If you think that there's nothing more to cosmological theory than some authority saying so from on high, then you're just not aware of how it came about.
They've changed the details of the story, but for some reason, it seems people just cannot manage to wrap their heads around the idea of there being something without a "before there was".
Actually physicists are quite readily able to wrap their head around something without a "before there was", and in fact a beginning-less universe was one of the leading theories when the Big Bang was first being proposed. It was only after the evidence came out strongly in favor of the Big Bang that the other theories began to fall out of favor. If theory is nothing more than belief from authority, then why was the "belief" du jour (which happens to be closer to your belief) abandoned? It wasn't overnight, either... A lot of scientists didn't like the idea at first.
However this doesn't mean astrophysicists have abandoned the idea of a universe with no beginning. The Big Bang Theory specifically does not make any predictions about what happened at or before the Bang. Some hypothesis are that the Big Bang is just one of many Bangs and the universe is repeatedly created/destroyed. Another is that the Big Bang was really just a collision between higher-order dimensions, and that many universes such as ours could have been created, even infinitely many. Still another is that space-time itself came into existence in the Big Bang, and therefore the concept of "before there was" is meaningless. Try wrapping your head around that!
The problem is there is no evidence for any of these hypothesis. So it is still very much up in the air. No authority is going to come down from the mount with a stone tablet and declare the answer. Whatever experiments you imagine they aren't "allowed" to conduct are being conducted, and the evidence will decide.
This isn't an argument!
*ding* Good Morning!
Yeah, I have to say I'm surprised anyone would object to CIA involvement. I think it's very important we keep a watch on the climate. After all, the climate has been acting pretty suspicious lately, and has been looking, dare I say it, more swarthy. Plus, I heard that the climate was recently spotted in Yemen.
Except, um, that is science.
No it isn't.
And, as we all know, Japanese women are expected to be baby making machines , so *not* having children isn't really seen as an option.
Hey, at least he acknowledged that calling women "machines" may not be appropriate!
Yeah...
even in Canada small-town women get exposed to fewer options
Oh sure, blame Canada!
They're not even a real country anyway.
DUDE! How about a NSFW warning next time?!
mdsolar said why they're called blue -- cus that's the color of light they're emitting.
They are extremely red-shifted (in fact astronomers typically talk about such distances/timescales in terms of degree of red-shift). It's not like if you were to peer at these galaxies in a telescope they'd look blue. In fact you probably wouldn't see anything at all; Hubble is almost certainly (huh? rtfa?) using it's near-infrared cameras for this.
the characteristics of which coincide perfectly with the big bag theory.
Blah blah blah. Look, I don't want to hear about how observations matched predictions. That's not science.
It's like this: I don't understand Big Bang Theory, therefore I don't like it, therefore it's nonsense, therefore your "evidence" is really just your prejudice, therefore we're obviously going to find galaxies that are ten billion years older than these ones, and therefore my theory of the Giant Cosmic Bunny Orgy Theory, which is obvious if you even think about it rationally, will be proven correct once and for all and I'll be elected the President of Physics.
That's a good point, though their method of spreading terror is by killing people, the primary objective of this attack was to kill people, and it is only a partial success because the fear caused by the potential for people to die.
So yeah, terrorists are here to spread terror. Nevertheless, the security checkpoint (or many other targets) are targeted because there are places where a large number of people could be killed.