Our imagination, the mental images and models that we construct in our minds, these unreal things are not without import. Very often we use them to create reality.
Yes, sure. At the end of the day, what we see as reality is actually just a mental construct created by the synthesis of our sensory input and various cognitive functions. To the extent that we must make models of reality to understand it, yes our mental images affect how our reality is perceived.
That is not the same as saying any fantasy directly informs our reality. In particular when you know it's fantasy. None of my fantasies of unicorns and dragons and such in any way directed my sense of reality. I don't think they exist. I don't go delving into sewers and caves and forests in search of them. It's pure fantasy, and I know it.
When your fantasies -- not mental images of reality, but things that expressly began as fantasies -- begin to inform your reality, then it's because you've started to lose your grip on the difference between reality and fantasy. Which is a psychological disorder, not an ordinary response to day-dreaming.
In most people, though, the reality/fantasy boundary is fairly strong (if hard to pin down precisely as you note). Look at soldiers -- they perform training simulations with the express intent of relating the simulated killing to the real killing that soldiers are asked to do. It's a deliberate attempt to create reality from fantasy. And yet it still frequently fails, and many soldiers still won't fire on live targets, because they know that the fantasy killing and real killing are not the same.
I think the greatest fantasy-based harm of the recent past is actually the big dick Cheney's faith-based war in Iraq.
See, and this is a perfect example of the distinction I think you're missing.
Cheney, from the beginning, believed that neo-con philosophy for the middle east would work in reality. It was never just an idle fantasy he picked up from playing war games that somehow got transmuted into his reality. The neo-con strategy was built from the ground up as something that they should do in reality. The only thing they were missing was the opportunity to actually do it.
Sure you could call it a "fantasy" in the sense that Cheney and the other neo-cons were deeply and deliberately ignorant about the middle east, the Iraqi people, terrorism, military strategy, nation building, and replaced facts with belief. But that's not the same sense as what we're talking about, which is fantasies which the fantasizer explicitly knows are not reality. The real cause behind the Iraq fiasco was not "fantasy", it was a combination of arrogance and ignorance in the seat of power.
To compare this to the sundry topic at hand -- the Cheney-esque version of "fantasy" would be like a guy who believes that some real, live woman deserves to be and secretly wants to be raped in reality. Yes he's completely wrong and thus you could call it a "fantasy", but he wouldn't call it that any more than Cheney called neo-con philosophy a fantasy. As opposed to playing a simulation where the person participating knows it is a fantasy, the 'girl' does not exist she's just pixels on a screen and none of it is real.
The latter type of person could hypothetically become the former type, I'd posit by virtue of being already mentally disturbed or dysfunctional, but they are absolutely not the same thing. And Dick Cheney does not in any way suggest that they are.
However, in recent years I've mostly been wondering about horror-suspense writers who create these super-vicious criminals in their minds--and then skillfully transfer their insane ideas to their readers. I suspect the success of Silence of the Lambs may explain a lot of the bad things that have happened to America and to the world...
Yeah, the rise in cannibalism and people killed to make skin-suits is truly disturbing.
Microsoft: if you want to beat Google, find a way to develop a completely open search ranking system.
Ballmer: What's that? You need a chair flung at your head? I could have sworn you just said something about "open skull". I'll fucking kill you and your little Google too!
The second hypothesis has more assumptions, so it must be less likely than the first, by your reasoning.
No, because Occam's Razor only applies when there is no difference between the theories in terms of predictions made by those theories. It's about deciding which explanation to use when the explanations are essentially interchangable. Not how to decide between two arbitrary theories with completely different implications based not on data but based solely on which is the more complex.
The classic case was ellipsoid orbits vs perfectly circular orbits with epicycles. You can explain the movement of every body in the solar system with the epicycle theory exactly as well as the ellipse theory. They're mathematically indistinguishable. Elliptic orbits are simpler, therefore preferred. Once Newton's Theory of Gravity was developed and gave an explanation for why orbits were elliptical, while no theory existed to explain why heavenly bodies would travel in epicycles, Occam was no longer necessary and simple scientific evidence pointed the correct way.
Your two hypothesis make very different predictions about the world. Occam doesn't apply.
Unfortunately, your reasoning assumes there is some kind of "quantum" of assumption, but there isn't. Practically every assumption can be decomposed into several other assumptions, in arbitrary ways.
Only if you assume Occam's Razor was meant to be a quantitative measure in the first place, which it obviously was not. It's a mental guideline. And qualitatively, you can reason about the relative amount of assumptions behind two theories without falling into an "assumptions are infinitely decomposable" trap.
BTW, decompose the reflexive axiom if you would please.
You turn your back, and when you look again at your desk you you see a stack of papers. You've been served, Ninja Lawyer style.
Ninja Lawyer does not argue cases with words. Ninja Lawyer is never seen in the courtroom. Ninja Lawyer dismantles the defense's case with poison darts to the necks of the attorneys thrown from a hidden vantage point. On the dart in the lead attorney's neck is a note which says, in beautiful calligraphy, "the defense rests... in peace".
Ninja lawyer is not technically licensed to practice law. Ninja Lawyer has many outstanding arrest warrants. Do not hire Ninja Lawyer.
but I've always assumed that the same could be gained by finding some road-side location out in 'the sticks'.
I can drive about 30 miles out of my city and get a pretty clear view of the sky. Enough to see the Milky Way and, well, thousands and thousands of stars. Enough to be pretty impressive when you're used to living in a city, and to do some decent amateur astronomy. For a truly dark view of the sky with an order of magnitude more visible starts, you really need to head out to the sticks. Like outside some quiet mountain town hundreds of miles from any major city.
Not something your average person will do just to see the sky.
When is light 'pollution', and are we okay with (what I assume is) a situational definition of that word?
Light is "pollution" when it is shone up into the sky, where it bounces off the atmosphere and back down to you, doing next to nothing to actually illuminate your surroundings but preventing you from being able to see the night-time scenery.
It's useless and wasteful. We'd save energy by managing our light pollution by actually directing our light at what it is we are trying to illuminate, and get a more beautiful sky to boot.
What exactly isn't to like about this?
The rest is technology at work, for better or worse.
And this is "or worse". While in terms of 'natural heritage', this is the "for better" part.
I mean you might as well equate forests and trees with our primitive cave-dwelling lives when asking why anyone would try to preserve such things with greenbelts and parks. Because they're beautiful, and our modern life does not and should not have to cost us the ability to see them.
Constellation != all "high-IQ" pursuits. Obama is funding tons of R&D, so unless you consider cancer research to be a "low-IQ" pursuit, you're just plain wrong. Knocking $800 million off NASA's budget, while not something I approve of, hardly defines a trend away from research, when there's $16 billion going the other way.
This is why nobody listened to your warnings. Because your warnings were wrong and stupid, and mouthed by an idiot.
Calling Obama a bolshevik just seals the deal. There's no way you can know what the word means and apply it to him in a meaningful way. You're probably using Bolshevik as a stand-in for Marxist or Communist, which is equally retarded, and is just another stand-in for Socialist, another scare-word people use but don't understand. When you can't tell the difference between the systems of England and post-revolution Russia, randomly spewing words associated with them does not convince anyone of anything but that you are a loon.
Yeah I know, but then someone tried to cut on you by using a deliberately obtuse understanding of what you said. It's become a pet peeve of mine lately: people who use pedantry and "logic" not to illuminate, but as an excuse to not understand plain English.
Obama is following the SOFA agreement Bush put into place. The only difference is in the naming of the remaining forces. The SOFA agreement is the agreement giving the US authority to be on Iraq soil abd was negotiated by Bush before the Obama became president. It appears that it follows McCain's plan pretty close too.
Yep. One thing I agree on with my very pro-war (and McCain) father is that the outcome was largely already decided and who got elected made little difference.
When they put the war spending on budget, it was done to raise the budget ceiling which is used to keep congress's spending somewhat under control Now when the war is done and the spending isn't needed, congress can simply spend the money somewhere else.
Well what on earth do you expect them to do? Relinquish the opportunity to spend money? Haha, fat chance. They've got to press on in the name of bipartisanship.:)
To know that we're "in the earliest stages" rather than "in the last stages", you must already know how it's going to play out in the end.
Yeah, but you can make an educated guess by first assuming that the journey is long, and then humbly admitting that whatever the length of the journey, you have only just begun. We're on a journey of discovery, even if we know little more about the end than that, so for their assessment to be wrong we'd have to be under-estimating the effort required to understand the universe.
It's funny how you seemed like you were making about about being humble and assuming you know too much, but you did it by logically reversing the intended meaning of saying "earliest stages" to mean "ignorance", and end your post by leaving open the possibility that we actually really do know how the universe works. Hm.
Suffice it to say that I too agree that we are in the earliest stages of understanding the universe. We don't know the end goal, but it's nowhere in sight, and I'm willing to bet it's not just over the horizon. That's anything but the same as knowing how the universe works.
Manned exploration would be cost-competitive with robotic exploration if we just sent astronauts on one-way trips! Any volunteers?
ME!
And I'm not even sure I'm joking (ask me again when it's a possibility and we'll see). But really, one of my greatest dreams is to be able to visit see the earth from space some time in my life, even briefly, even at the very end. I'll sign whatever waivers are necessary. To actually be able to visit Mars, to be the first human to touch down on it, and report your discoveries back to an expectantly waiting humanity? Yeah, I'd do that.
Sadly, aside from the fact that no such mission exists or is being planned, it won't happen because willingness to risk my life for the cause of space exploration isn't even close to the biggest thing keeping me from being the next Neil Armstrong.
Intel has finally realized that they own their whole box and they need to get out of that box in order to get growth, especially in a down market.
Yeah, that was the motivation behind a lot of their ill-fated adventures, though some, like graphics, weren't as ill-fated as they first appeared.
I see the need to expand, but that's why embedded systems seems like an odd choice. For a company the size of Intel, there's just not a lot of (profit margin-wise) room for expansion. As a back-up source of income when their main microprocessor markets are down it seems rather paltry. They'll never be able to dominate the market and enjoy monopoly advantages like they have on desktops, it's too wide a field.
But on the other hand, maybe that's all fine as far as they're concerned because it means instead of just having expensive wasted fab capacity, they can make some money off it instead. More money is better than less, obviously.:)
Obama needs to grow a backbone and stand up to the Republicans he is trying to appease by continuing overseas military operations. Instead of diplomatically engaging with the Muslims, keeping a heavy military presence in their countries in order to "stop terrorism" is only pissing away funds that could be better used elsewhere.
Obama is engaging heavily with Muslim leaders, even making overtures to Iran to prevent the next mid-east debacle (which would make Iraq look like Candy Land). So it's not a matter of "instead". As far as the military presence, he's pulling out of Iraq -- not as fast as I'd like by any means, but about as fast as is responsible I must admit. Afghanistan, now that's the conflict that actually made sense, and with an actual enemy and lines and territory won and lost, our military has a prayer in hell of winning. It will still be expensive at a time we don't need it, absolutely, but at the same time we can't let Afghanistan fall to the Taliban again. Hopefully with us focused solely on that, and Pakistan starting to get serious about their Taleban problem now that it's hurting them, we can resolve it soon. Okay, I don't have that much hope, but it will help.
The full budget requested by NASA was 4 billion dollars (As per TFA, Congress reduced it to $3.2 billion). Guess what? We piss away this much amount in Iraq every two weeks!
I hear ya. Really, this pissing around with millions here and there, targeting "earmarks" and such that nobody is going to be able to get rid of anyway, is just a distraction that can ultimately just backfire. You might think the ten million here, half billion there would add up and it does... to a pretty small fraction of the budget. There are bigger issues there. Robbing NASA of $800 million that can be used for doing their special kind of advanced R&D that can benefit us going forward... silly.
So getting back to one of the things that does matter, I wonder how much cheese we will save when at long last we're not more than a token presence in Iraq. I know we're ramping up in Afghanistan, so that offsets any gains. I am willing to bet it'll be enough that scraping that $800 mil off NASA's budget won't seem like it was much use.
Same with the neutron stars, or pulsars allegedly being stars that "rotate faster than dentist drills." The impossible is far more likely than the improbable.
And... what's so improbable about a massive and extremely dense object spinning rapidly, vs an even more massive but much less dense object spinning at a rate that is proportionally slower?
I'd say that the impossible, in this case violating Conservation of Angular Momentum, is usually what is far more improbable.
So the EH should be "weaker" in that one place. I realize the EH is the distance at which things cannot escape by definition, so I suppose wording it as "the EH is not spherical" is better.
The EH is often non-spherical, mostly due to the rotation of the black hole if I understand. But I realize what you're saying, an egg or teardrop shape favoring the trailing side.
Suppose that the black hole is moving fast enough, wouldn't it be possible for this momentum to counteract the force of gravity enough for objects to escape?
Momentum is mass times velocity. Gravity is a force, mass times acceleration. Once the object is so close that the gravitational acceleration is so great that even photons, which naturally have a velocity of c, cannot escape then no other matter has a hope either, regardless of what the momentum of the black hole is.
About the only difference the black hole's velocity would make is to make it less likely that an object would get close enough to be drawn in by the hole's gravity from the trailing side. Like if you were trying to fly your spaceship into it, you'd have to match or exceed its velocity to get close enough for its gravity to drag you in. Once you were close enough, though, that'd be it.
You bring up a good point. Monkeys and chimps share up to 90% of their DNA with humans, and yet the last time I tried to teach my capuchin sign language, I got beaned with a fecal fast-ball.
Sounds like it got its message across! Score one for inter-species communication. I'm sure that's one message the aliens won't misinterpret if we used it with them.
Palm did already have a "software stack" supporting a full touchscreen. That was the whole basis of the Palm OS. And it had a perfectly workable on-screen keyboard, too, much like the one everybody seems to love on the iPhone. But rather than building on those strengths, they dumped them on the Treo in order to make it a blackberry clone.
By "full touchscreen" I meant designed around that being the sole form of input, and no Palm OS was never based on that. It was based on having both the touch screen and grafiti input (and some buttons). The iphone (and others) are designed from the ground up around solely having a large touch screen and it shows. Palm OS has always carried a legacy from the first palm devices with no power and low res screens, and that shows too.
Which is just plain false. As I have already pointed out, they DID already have a full touchscreen. They already had on on-screen keyboard. And they already had some very capable apps (more so, and more mature, than what came on the first iPhone). So no... they were not far off. All they would have had to do was leave everything else alone and add a phone.
For what I meant, it is just plain true. And this is just my opinion but speaking as a current (and past, having gone through the grafiti->qwerty transition) Treo user, their software is not nearly as good from a user interface standpoint as what came out on the very first iPhones. Certainly not with regards to using just the screen. There's more to it than just tacking on a touch-keyboard applet. I like my Treo, I have no reason to rip on it. But if you took away the keyboard, I would be dumping the thing, perhaps at a high velocity towards a solid vertical surface, for a different phone.
How does Intel plan to compete against $6 Arm chips? A smart meter has no need for a 64bit, fat, power hungry, hot 3Ghz pc type chip with no peripherals builtin.
The tie-in to Intel hardware would obviously be through Atom. Though at ~2W, it's not positioned to take over the majority of segments Wind River went into I don't think (if Atom was an atom, most embedded processors/microcontrollers would be electrons or quarks). However it may get embedded customers used to dealing with Intel, could easily get them some significant Atom design wins, and overall help pave the way for future Intel incursions into the embedded space.
Why they want to expand into such a low-margin market I'm not exactly sure, but I won't question their wisdom. I'm assuming they've run numbers that make it look like a good use of fab space. Not like that always has worked out for them (to put it mildly) and I doubt they can push out Arm by any means, but it could still work out profitably for them in the end.
Definitely true. Palm should have had an iPhone, 2 years before iPhone. Instead they gave up much of their touch-screen real estate to a chicklet keyboard, and other established advantages, to build a blackberry clone. Big mistake on their part.
Making something like an iPhone that relies entirely on a touch screen means having a software stack that supports it. Once Palm had already made the big mistake of going with a more or less unchanged PalmOS for the Treo, replacing Grafiti with a qwerty pad was probably a better usability decision than going full touch screen. Which just goes to show how far off from making an 'iphone' they were, despite having the technical capability.
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Our imagination, the mental images and models that we construct in our minds, these unreal things are not without import. Very often we use them to create reality.
Yes, sure. At the end of the day, what we see as reality is actually just a mental construct created by the synthesis of our sensory input and various cognitive functions. To the extent that we must make models of reality to understand it, yes our mental images affect how our reality is perceived.
That is not the same as saying any fantasy directly informs our reality. In particular when you know it's fantasy. None of my fantasies of unicorns and dragons and such in any way directed my sense of reality. I don't think they exist. I don't go delving into sewers and caves and forests in search of them. It's pure fantasy, and I know it.
When your fantasies -- not mental images of reality, but things that expressly began as fantasies -- begin to inform your reality, then it's because you've started to lose your grip on the difference between reality and fantasy. Which is a psychological disorder, not an ordinary response to day-dreaming.
In most people, though, the reality/fantasy boundary is fairly strong (if hard to pin down precisely as you note). Look at soldiers -- they perform training simulations with the express intent of relating the simulated killing to the real killing that soldiers are asked to do. It's a deliberate attempt to create reality from fantasy. And yet it still frequently fails, and many soldiers still won't fire on live targets, because they know that the fantasy killing and real killing are not the same.
I think the greatest fantasy-based harm of the recent past is actually the big dick Cheney's faith-based war in Iraq.
See, and this is a perfect example of the distinction I think you're missing.
Cheney, from the beginning, believed that neo-con philosophy for the middle east would work in reality. It was never just an idle fantasy he picked up from playing war games that somehow got transmuted into his reality. The neo-con strategy was built from the ground up as something that they should do in reality. The only thing they were missing was the opportunity to actually do it.
Sure you could call it a "fantasy" in the sense that Cheney and the other neo-cons were deeply and deliberately ignorant about the middle east, the Iraqi people, terrorism, military strategy, nation building, and replaced facts with belief. But that's not the same sense as what we're talking about, which is fantasies which the fantasizer explicitly knows are not reality. The real cause behind the Iraq fiasco was not "fantasy", it was a combination of arrogance and ignorance in the seat of power.
To compare this to the sundry topic at hand -- the Cheney-esque version of "fantasy" would be like a guy who believes that some real, live woman deserves to be and secretly wants to be raped in reality. Yes he's completely wrong and thus you could call it a "fantasy", but he wouldn't call it that any more than Cheney called neo-con philosophy a fantasy. As opposed to playing a simulation where the person participating knows it is a fantasy, the 'girl' does not exist she's just pixels on a screen and none of it is real.
The latter type of person could hypothetically become the former type, I'd posit by virtue of being already mentally disturbed or dysfunctional, but they are absolutely not the same thing. And Dick Cheney does not in any way suggest that they are.
However, in recent years I've mostly been wondering about horror-suspense writers who create these super-vicious criminals in their minds--and then skillfully transfer their insane ideas to their readers. I suspect the success of Silence of the Lambs may explain a lot of the bad things that have happened to America and to the world...
Yeah, the rise in cannibalism and people killed to make skin-suits is truly disturbing.
Is the
Microsoft: if you want to beat Google, find a way to develop a completely open search ranking system.
Ballmer: What's that? You need a chair flung at your head? I could have sworn you just said something about "open skull". I'll fucking kill you and your little Google too!
The second hypothesis has more assumptions, so it must be less likely than the first, by your reasoning.
No, because Occam's Razor only applies when there is no difference between the theories in terms of predictions made by those theories. It's about deciding which explanation to use when the explanations are essentially interchangable. Not how to decide between two arbitrary theories with completely different implications based not on data but based solely on which is the more complex.
The classic case was ellipsoid orbits vs perfectly circular orbits with epicycles. You can explain the movement of every body in the solar system with the epicycle theory exactly as well as the ellipse theory. They're mathematically indistinguishable. Elliptic orbits are simpler, therefore preferred. Once Newton's Theory of Gravity was developed and gave an explanation for why orbits were elliptical, while no theory existed to explain why heavenly bodies would travel in epicycles, Occam was no longer necessary and simple scientific evidence pointed the correct way.
Your two hypothesis make very different predictions about the world. Occam doesn't apply.
Unfortunately, your reasoning assumes there is some kind of "quantum" of assumption, but there isn't. Practically every assumption can be decomposed into several other assumptions, in arbitrary ways.
Only if you assume Occam's Razor was meant to be a quantitative measure in the first place, which it obviously was not. It's a mental guideline. And qualitatively, you can reason about the relative amount of assumptions behind two theories without falling into an "assumptions are infinitely decomposable" trap.
BTW, decompose the reflexive axiom if you would please.
Ninja Lawyer!
You turn your back, and when you look again at your desk you you see a stack of papers. You've been served, Ninja Lawyer style.
Ninja Lawyer does not argue cases with words. Ninja Lawyer is never seen in the courtroom. Ninja Lawyer dismantles the defense's case with poison darts to the necks of the attorneys thrown from a hidden vantage point. On the dart in the lead attorney's neck is a note which says, in beautiful calligraphy, "the defense rests... in peace".
Ninja lawyer is not technically licensed to practice law. Ninja Lawyer has many outstanding arrest warrants. Do not hire Ninja Lawyer.
Ninja Lawyer!
In case my daughter is reading this, you know Daddy's a kidder, right?
Yeah, I bet Daddy really got tons of good ideas while baked. :)
Yep, he's still dead.
But that measurement is only accurate to within 10%.
Yahtzee with a story behind it only works for so long before you have to change something other than just the story.
So I take it you weren't a big fan of Yahtzee Warriors Online: Ivory Tales then?
but I've always assumed that the same could be gained by finding some road-side location out in 'the sticks'.
I can drive about 30 miles out of my city and get a pretty clear view of the sky. Enough to see the Milky Way and, well, thousands and thousands of stars. Enough to be pretty impressive when you're used to living in a city, and to do some decent amateur astronomy. For a truly dark view of the sky with an order of magnitude more visible starts, you really need to head out to the sticks. Like outside some quiet mountain town hundreds of miles from any major city.
Not something your average person will do just to see the sky.
When is light 'pollution', and are we okay with (what I assume is) a situational definition of that word?
Light is "pollution" when it is shone up into the sky, where it bounces off the atmosphere and back down to you, doing next to nothing to actually illuminate your surroundings but preventing you from being able to see the night-time scenery.
It's useless and wasteful. We'd save energy by managing our light pollution by actually directing our light at what it is we are trying to illuminate, and get a more beautiful sky to boot.
What exactly isn't to like about this?
The rest is technology at work, for better or worse.
And this is "or worse". While in terms of 'natural heritage', this is the "for better" part.
I mean you might as well equate forests and trees with our primitive cave-dwelling lives when asking why anyone would try to preserve such things with greenbelts and parks. Because they're beautiful, and our modern life does not and should not have to cost us the ability to see them.
Constellation != all "high-IQ" pursuits. Obama is funding tons of R&D, so unless you consider cancer research to be a "low-IQ" pursuit, you're just plain wrong. Knocking $800 million off NASA's budget, while not something I approve of, hardly defines a trend away from research, when there's $16 billion going the other way.
This is why nobody listened to your warnings. Because your warnings were wrong and stupid, and mouthed by an idiot.
Calling Obama a bolshevik just seals the deal. There's no way you can know what the word means and apply it to him in a meaningful way. You're probably using Bolshevik as a stand-in for Marxist or Communist, which is equally retarded, and is just another stand-in for Socialist, another scare-word people use but don't understand. When you can't tell the difference between the systems of England and post-revolution Russia, randomly spewing words associated with them does not convince anyone of anything but that you are a loon.
Yeah I know, but then someone tried to cut on you by using a deliberately obtuse understanding of what you said. It's become a pet peeve of mine lately: people who use pedantry and "logic" not to illuminate, but as an excuse to not understand plain English.
Obama is following the SOFA agreement Bush put into place. The only difference is in the naming of the remaining forces. The SOFA agreement is the agreement giving the US authority to be on Iraq soil abd was negotiated by Bush before the Obama became president. It appears that it follows McCain's plan pretty close too.
Yep. One thing I agree on with my very pro-war (and McCain) father is that the outcome was largely already decided and who got elected made little difference.
When they put the war spending on budget, it was done to raise the budget ceiling which is used to keep congress's spending somewhat under control Now when the war is done and the spending isn't needed, congress can simply spend the money somewhere else.
Well what on earth do you expect them to do? Relinquish the opportunity to spend money? Haha, fat chance. They've got to press on in the name of bipartisanship. :)
Wow! You already know how the universe works?
To know that we're "in the earliest stages" rather than "in the last stages", you must already know how it's going to play out in the end.
Yeah, but you can make an educated guess by first assuming that the journey is long, and then humbly admitting that whatever the length of the journey, you have only just begun. We're on a journey of discovery, even if we know little more about the end than that, so for their assessment to be wrong we'd have to be under-estimating the effort required to understand the universe.
It's funny how you seemed like you were making about about being humble and assuming you know too much, but you did it by logically reversing the intended meaning of saying "earliest stages" to mean "ignorance", and end your post by leaving open the possibility that we actually really do know how the universe works. Hm.
Suffice it to say that I too agree that we are in the earliest stages of understanding the universe. We don't know the end goal, but it's nowhere in sight, and I'm willing to bet it's not just over the horizon. That's anything but the same as knowing how the universe works.
Manned exploration would be cost-competitive with robotic exploration if we just sent astronauts on one-way trips! Any volunteers?
ME!
And I'm not even sure I'm joking (ask me again when it's a possibility and we'll see). But really, one of my greatest dreams is to be able to visit see the earth from space some time in my life, even briefly, even at the very end. I'll sign whatever waivers are necessary. To actually be able to visit Mars, to be the first human to touch down on it, and report your discoveries back to an expectantly waiting humanity? Yeah, I'd do that.
Sadly, aside from the fact that no such mission exists or is being planned, it won't happen because willingness to risk my life for the cause of space exploration isn't even close to the biggest thing keeping me from being the next Neil Armstrong.
Intel has finally realized that they own their whole box and they need to get out of that box in order to get growth, especially in a down market.
Yeah, that was the motivation behind a lot of their ill-fated adventures, though some, like graphics, weren't as ill-fated as they first appeared.
I see the need to expand, but that's why embedded systems seems like an odd choice. For a company the size of Intel, there's just not a lot of (profit margin-wise) room for expansion. As a back-up source of income when their main microprocessor markets are down it seems rather paltry. They'll never be able to dominate the market and enjoy monopoly advantages like they have on desktops, it's too wide a field.
But on the other hand, maybe that's all fine as far as they're concerned because it means instead of just having expensive wasted fab capacity, they can make some money off it instead. More money is better than less, obviously. :)
Obama needs to grow a backbone and stand up to the Republicans he is trying to appease by continuing overseas military operations. Instead of diplomatically engaging with the Muslims, keeping a heavy military presence in their countries in order to "stop terrorism" is only pissing away funds that could be better used elsewhere.
Obama is engaging heavily with Muslim leaders, even making overtures to Iran to prevent the next mid-east debacle (which would make Iraq look like Candy Land). So it's not a matter of "instead". As far as the military presence, he's pulling out of Iraq -- not as fast as I'd like by any means, but about as fast as is responsible I must admit. Afghanistan, now that's the conflict that actually made sense, and with an actual enemy and lines and territory won and lost, our military has a prayer in hell of winning. It will still be expensive at a time we don't need it, absolutely, but at the same time we can't let Afghanistan fall to the Taliban again. Hopefully with us focused solely on that, and Pakistan starting to get serious about their Taleban problem now that it's hurting them, we can resolve it soon. Okay, I don't have that much hope, but it will help.
The full budget requested by NASA was 4 billion dollars (As per TFA, Congress reduced it to $3.2 billion). Guess what? We piss away this much amount in Iraq every two weeks!
I hear ya. Really, this pissing around with millions here and there, targeting "earmarks" and such that nobody is going to be able to get rid of anyway, is just a distraction that can ultimately just backfire. You might think the ten million here, half billion there would add up and it does... to a pretty small fraction of the budget. There are bigger issues there. Robbing NASA of $800 million that can be used for doing their special kind of advanced R&D that can benefit us going forward... silly.
So getting back to one of the things that does matter, I wonder how much cheese we will save when at long last we're not more than a token presence in Iraq. I know we're ramping up in Afghanistan, so that offsets any gains. I am willing to bet it'll be enough that scraping that $800 mil off NASA's budget won't seem like it was much use.
Same with the neutron stars, or pulsars allegedly being stars that "rotate faster than dentist drills." The impossible is far more likely than the improbable.
And... what's so improbable about a massive and extremely dense object spinning rapidly, vs an even more massive but much less dense object spinning at a rate that is proportionally slower?
I'd say that the impossible, in this case violating Conservation of Angular Momentum, is usually what is far more improbable.
So the EH should be "weaker" in that one place. I realize the EH is the distance at which things cannot escape by definition, so I suppose wording it as "the EH is not spherical" is better.
The EH is often non-spherical, mostly due to the rotation of the black hole if I understand. But I realize what you're saying, an egg or teardrop shape favoring the trailing side.
Suppose that the black hole is moving fast enough, wouldn't it be possible for this momentum to counteract the force of gravity enough for objects to escape?
Momentum is mass times velocity. Gravity is a force, mass times acceleration. Once the object is so close that the gravitational acceleration is so great that even photons, which naturally have a velocity of c, cannot escape then no other matter has a hope either, regardless of what the momentum of the black hole is.
About the only difference the black hole's velocity would make is to make it less likely that an object would get close enough to be drawn in by the hole's gravity from the trailing side. Like if you were trying to fly your spaceship into it, you'd have to match or exceed its velocity to get close enough for its gravity to drag you in. Once you were close enough, though, that'd be it.
In fact, if this excrement was edible, it could sustain an entire village of people for 5 years...
Hmm, it's too late for Planet Earth, but it may not be too late for a truly horrific episode of Man vs Wild.
All they have is gravity (Well, ok. They also have charge and spin.)
Amongst their properties are... I'll come in again.
You bring up a good point. Monkeys and chimps share up to 90% of their DNA with humans, and yet the last time I tried to teach my capuchin sign language, I got beaned with a fecal fast-ball.
Sounds like it got its message across! Score one for inter-species communication. I'm sure that's one message the aliens won't misinterpret if we used it with them.
Palm did already have a "software stack" supporting a full touchscreen. That was the whole basis of the Palm OS. And it had a perfectly workable on-screen keyboard, too, much like the one everybody seems to love on the iPhone. But rather than building on those strengths, they dumped them on the Treo in order to make it a blackberry clone.
By "full touchscreen" I meant designed around that being the sole form of input, and no Palm OS was never based on that. It was based on having both the touch screen and grafiti input (and some buttons). The iphone (and others) are designed from the ground up around solely having a large touch screen and it shows. Palm OS has always carried a legacy from the first palm devices with no power and low res screens, and that shows too.
Which is just plain false. As I have already pointed out, they DID already have a full touchscreen. They already had on on-screen keyboard. And they already had some very capable apps (more so, and more mature, than what came on the first iPhone). So no... they were not far off. All they would have had to do was leave everything else alone and add a phone.
For what I meant, it is just plain true. And this is just my opinion but speaking as a current (and past, having gone through the grafiti->qwerty transition) Treo user, their software is not nearly as good from a user interface standpoint as what came out on the very first iPhones. Certainly not with regards to using just the screen. There's more to it than just tacking on a touch-keyboard applet. I like my Treo, I have no reason to rip on it. But if you took away the keyboard, I would be dumping the thing, perhaps at a high velocity towards a solid vertical surface, for a different phone.
No, I had no idea, it's merely a bizarre coincidence that I talked about them swimming and getting eaten by an orca.
How does Intel plan to compete against $6 Arm chips? A smart meter has no need for a 64bit, fat, power hungry, hot 3Ghz pc type chip with no peripherals builtin.
The tie-in to Intel hardware would obviously be through Atom. Though at ~2W, it's not positioned to take over the majority of segments Wind River went into I don't think (if Atom was an atom, most embedded processors/microcontrollers would be electrons or quarks). However it may get embedded customers used to dealing with Intel, could easily get them some significant Atom design wins, and overall help pave the way for future Intel incursions into the embedded space.
Why they want to expand into such a low-margin market I'm not exactly sure, but I won't question their wisdom. I'm assuming they've run numbers that make it look like a good use of fab space. Not like that always has worked out for them (to put it mildly) and I doubt they can push out Arm by any means, but it could still work out profitably for them in the end.
Definitely true. Palm should have had an iPhone, 2 years before iPhone. Instead they gave up much of their touch-screen real estate to a chicklet keyboard, and other established advantages, to build a blackberry clone. Big mistake on their part.
Making something like an iPhone that relies entirely on a touch screen means having a software stack that supports it. Once Palm had already made the big mistake of going with a more or less unchanged PalmOS for the Treo, replacing Grafiti with a qwerty pad was probably a better usability decision than going full touch screen. Which just goes to show how far off from making an 'iphone' they were, despite having the technical capability.
What Will Dickheads Conceive? IDK.
"I do koalas"? WTF?