Yes it's a bad thing for pilots to sleep longer than they're supposed to because they're overworked, then panic because they just woke up from deep sleep and so can't tell the difference between an airplane and a planet despite being well experienced to tell the difference when awake.
The problem isn't that when the pilot thought he was about to hit another aircraft he took an evasive maneuver.
The problem is the circumstances that resulted in him mistaking Venus for an aircraft he was about to crash into.
What if his evasive actions had caused him to crash into an actual airplane that was at a lower altitude which he didn't notice because, again, he'd just woken from a deep sleep?
The whole point is that his judgment was temporarily impaired because he was fucking groggy, and you're asking "is this a bad thing?" Yes! Yes it is!
Which I can only do because I understand how it works
I don't think you can say "2.10 is not more than 2.9!" only if you understand that this fact is irrelevant. In fact I think it's much more likely that someone would say something like that if they didn't understand.
That aside: It's a notation. It's a useful one. One that shouldn't bother an experienced programmer used to thinking in abstract concepts and arbitrary semantic interfaces for more than the second it takes to understand it.
Fundamental.Major.Minor version numbers convey useful information even to end users as each separate number represents a degree of change to be expected. But you can't equate this with the significant digit of a decimal number because then you run out of significant digits. Changing from 2.9 to 3.0 simply because you ran out of digits is the poor practice. Changing from 2.90 to 2.91 when you added significant new functionality is similarly a poor practice.
Arguing that something that looks kinda like a decimal number must be a decimal number is just silly. We don't do math on version numbers.
Watson's claim was that intelligence testing shows lower intelligence scores in Africa than Europe. Is this or is this not true?
No, idiot, the claim was that IQs are lower in Africa than Europe and that this is due to genetics and thus an unalterable biological fact that social policies cannot address.
The best part is quoting studies of African IQ that list all the social factors in play, almost any one of which has a greater known effect than any known genetic effect which is not a disability. Almost as great was comparing to 1950s african americans -- yeah, what social issues could have possibly affected that?! It must be genetic!
The worst part is finding out that Watson's apology where he admitted there was no scientific basis for his claim (which was correct) was actually just a bunch of weaselling by saying it's only the statement of "inferiority" that is unsupported. So he stands by the statement of "genetically less intelligent" but don't take that to mean inferior!
"Mostly correct in the sense of plotting a course that intersects the ISS as intended, but not correct enough to finish the delicate procedure of docking without incident."
Sounds pretty easy to me, at least if you don't do proper diligence.
I think most researchers got the message after the DNA pioneer James Watson had to retire after suggesting a correlation
Since he had no scientific basis for that "correlation" whatsoever and was instead basing it on his personal interactions with black employees... yeah, the DNA "pioneer" who stole the whole idea from Rosalind Franklin must've forgot that the personal anecdotes of a racist are not exactly Nobel-worthy scientific observations. Is that a bad message for researchers?
Meanwhile, I'm interested to see how many will jump to using a ~1 point effect on IQ to justify statements like Watson's despite there not being any connection, and being less than what you'll get from a solid day of test preparation tutoring.
Just realize that if as they say there are many genetic factors that affect intelligence, it is unlikely that there are enough such factors isolated in certain populations to make a significant difference -- as in enough that Watson and others' casual observations were borne out in fact.
Some links are optical, but at either end is hardware that converts to/from electrical signals. This happens at multiple points across the network in repeaters, switches, routers, etc. The dream of an all-optical network is one where outside of the end points you're manipulating photons the whole way with no conversions.
A cousin of mine worked for a startup back in early 2000s that made an all-optical switch, so this is remembering conversations we had back then. He wasn't working on the photonics part, though.
Please begin distributing and advertising NASA beer immediately. Not being able to buy NASA beer at the grocery store has overtaken every other explanation for NASA's financial woes.
I disagree with that claim, but it certainly is real hard to keep your brain in rational mode.
Indeed. I think it's important for people who value rationality to realize that it's just a trick our brains have learned, not their inherent method of operation. I think more often than "magical thinking", simple emotion gets in the way of rational thought.
And I don't care who you are or how rational you think you are, your emotions affect -- or even effect -- your thoughts. Emotions are how evolution got us to go after the things we need for survival. We eat and screw not to sustain ourselves and the species, but because we are hungry and horny. Loneliness encourages us to form group bonds which improve survival -- but survival is not the thought on our minds when we do it. It is our emotional needs that we are seeking to satisfy.
And when your sense of identity is based around being rational, then one of your emotional needs is to feel you are rational. Which you may end up doing even when you're not being rational.
The point is that for anyone who values rationality, it's very important to understand the difference between being rational -- you aren't -- and being capable of rationality -- you are! But it takes effort.
Therefore the Drake Equation (or rather, think "Drake Test") hasn't been successfully negotiated in the past million years or so. It appears that "early hurdles" + "late hurdles" have been impossible, at least so far.
APPEARS. As in, to our extremely small view of the universe there aren't obvious and unmistakable signs of intelligent life out there. To from this conclude that it doesn't exist and the hurdles for development are too great is completely unsupported.
It's been just over two decades since the first exoplanet was detected. Now we know of hundreds, and we've even done spectroscopy on some, but right now we can't possibly say that these planets aren't home to advanced civilizations. It is completely unrealistic to extrapolate from our own lack of observation to the lack of aliens.
And then let's turn it around -- what about the aliens contacting us?
Again, how do we know this hasn't happened? The galaxy is big, and old. If we aren't going to engage in pure fantasy and speculate about FTL, then it's going to take a long time to explore. How do we know if 1) Aliens are exploring the galaxy via generation ship or Von Neumann probe, and the 'front' of the probes is 1 or 10 million years from reaching us 2) Aliens already arrived in our solar system 1 or 10 million or years ago and found complex life but no civilizations, so they shrugged and moved on. 3) Aliens are studying our solar system right now with a probe dozens of times bigger than all our telescopes put together, orbiting the sun at around the distance of Neptune.
We don't.
"We can't see it, therefore it doesn't exist" is a completely unsupported conclusion.
Any speculation then on the difficulty of overcoming the 'late hurdles' of an advanced civilization, or the existence of an alien Prime Directive, is fine and dandy but not something you can say current non-evidence of aliens supports in any way.
No, because someone could say that the amino acids in clouds were created by God or The Gods
They could also say the results of Miller-Urey are the result of God.:P
They could -- and have -- also said that since Miller-Urey was an experiment performed by humans it is still a sign that a creator is needed, its similarity to hypothetical natural processes notwithstanding.
Convincing Creationists is not the goal here. Which is good, because it's futile.
alternately point out that the concentration in galactic clouds are too low, and that the amino acids would probably break up in the heat of initial planetary formation, ignoring any planetoid strikes like supposedly produced the Moon.
The point isn't that nebulae are the source of amino acids on earth. The point is that amino acids are a common organic molecule that appears in a variety of natural locations in space. The point is that finding amino acids forming naturally in the absence of biological processes is quite possible, even normal.
They may land cold, but they sure get hot as they go through the atmosphere, where most of them burn up before ever reaching ground. Look at it this way, the space shuttle also landed "cold" but as we we tragically found out, it got pretty hot before the actual landing.
Yes and those are small. A large meteor will have some of its surface ablated, but most of the meteor, particularly the interior, will be cool. There simply isn't enough time as the meteor falls for the heat to spread. That which survives to the ground will be cool enough to touch in most cases.
Similarly, in a normal space shuttle re-entry only the leading surface (the ceramic as in stone tiles) was heated, while the rest of the shuttle remained a comfortable temperature. It was only when that leading surface was compromised and the pressure-heated air was able to enter the interior structure which was fragile that it caused a problem.
So unless the meteor is a ceramic shell with a fragile interior, this isn't a problem.
We have an autistic member of our family. While anecdotal, it was only after the vaccines that our young family member exhibited symptoms and was eventually diagnosed.
Sorry to hear this, but autism is a developmental disorder. By the time you noticed symptoms -- and untrained parents won't notice nearly as soon as trained professionals would -- the disease had been messing with your child's brain for a long time. It cannot possibly be that autism began at the moment of vaccination and was evident only a short time later -- or as some stories go, the same day as the vaccine.
It just so happens that the age at which obvious symptoms tend to manifest is also right around the age where kids are getting their vaccines. This makes the situation ripe for the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Not to mention the selection bias of parents who only notice/remember cases where their kid acted "strange" after the vaccines, and don't remember the cases before because they weren't sensitized.
His point regarding vaccines is that he has seen a potential correlation and we should take steps to test that hypothesis.
He didn't see that correlation, he created it. His study that showed this correlation was utterly fraudulent.
If you payed money to see him, then you got scammed.
I find it odd that the/. community so quickly attacks those who are simply questioning the powers that be.
That's the way Wakefield tries to spin it, so it sounds like it's just a about "authorities" vs those who question them.
But it's actually the reality of the demonstrable benefit vaccines have provided to humanity (without even having to trust the "powers that be", just read a history book please), versus a bullshit scam artist who cooked up a study to create a panic he could cash in on (he was planning to sell a variety of detection kits and alternative vaccines).
Question authority all you want -- this should include when Wakefield asks you to trust him. There's many reasonable discussions to be had on improving public health policy. However it's not authority but reality that you're going against when you ask if maybe vaccines cause autism or maybe aren't worth it.
A: if two particles are entangled and to one of them a state is written, does the state of the other 'end' change? My understanding of the discussion so far says yes, but I want to be clear here.
No. "Writing" a new state to one of the two particles breaks the entanglement. The other particle's observed state will no longer be correlated with the one you wrote to.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm picturing something like the steamroller scene in Austin Powers only much, much longer...
Yes it's a bad thing for pilots to sleep longer than they're supposed to because they're overworked, then panic because they just woke up from deep sleep and so can't tell the difference between an airplane and a planet despite being well experienced to tell the difference when awake.
The problem isn't that when the pilot thought he was about to hit another aircraft he took an evasive maneuver.
The problem is the circumstances that resulted in him mistaking Venus for an aircraft he was about to crash into.
What if his evasive actions had caused him to crash into an actual airplane that was at a lower altitude which he didn't notice because, again, he'd just woken from a deep sleep?
The whole point is that his judgment was temporarily impaired because he was fucking groggy, and you're asking "is this a bad thing?" Yes! Yes it is!
I vote Mimas for being no moon.
Which I can only do because I understand how it works
I don't think you can say "2.10 is not more than 2.9!" only if you understand that this fact is irrelevant. In fact I think it's much more likely that someone would say something like that if they didn't understand.
That aside: It's a notation. It's a useful one. One that shouldn't bother an experienced programmer used to thinking in abstract concepts and arbitrary semantic interfaces for more than the second it takes to understand it.
Fundamental.Major.Minor version numbers convey useful information even to end users as each separate number represents a degree of change to be expected. But you can't equate this with the significant digit of a decimal number because then you run out of significant digits. Changing from 2.9 to 3.0 simply because you ran out of digits is the poor practice. Changing from 2.90 to 2.91 when you added significant new functionality is similarly a poor practice.
Arguing that something that looks kinda like a decimal number must be a decimal number is just silly. We don't do math on version numbers.
Other than that though it is a great point.
Thanks for the hilarious demonstration of Poe's Law. I'll be chuckling all week.
If the pissing contests are sorted out via wargames or a 2x2 Arena team in WoW, all the better. Better that than ICBMs.
Whoa, I don't think so! Having the teams on either side of an Arena match with access to ICBMs is a terrible idea for preventing nuclear war.
Watson's claim was that intelligence testing shows lower intelligence scores in Africa than Europe. Is this or is this not true?
No, idiot, the claim was that IQs are lower in Africa than Europe and that this is due to genetics and thus an unalterable biological fact that social policies cannot address.
The best part is quoting studies of African IQ that list all the social factors in play, almost any one of which has a greater known effect than any known genetic effect which is not a disability. Almost as great was comparing to 1950s african americans -- yeah, what social issues could have possibly affected that?! It must be genetic!
The worst part is finding out that Watson's apology where he admitted there was no scientific basis for his claim (which was correct) was actually just a bunch of weaselling by saying it's only the statement of "inferiority" that is unsupported. So he stands by the statement of "genetically less intelligent" but don't take that to mean inferior!
Define easily.
"Mostly correct in the sense of plotting a course that intersects the ISS as intended, but not correct enough to finish the delicate procedure of docking without incident."
Sounds pretty easy to me, at least if you don't do proper diligence.
I think most researchers got the message after the DNA pioneer James Watson had to retire after suggesting a correlation
Since he had no scientific basis for that "correlation" whatsoever and was instead basing it on his personal interactions with black employees... yeah, the DNA "pioneer" who stole the whole idea from Rosalind Franklin must've forgot that the personal anecdotes of a racist are not exactly Nobel-worthy scientific observations. Is that a bad message for researchers?
Meanwhile, I'm interested to see how many will jump to using a ~1 point effect on IQ to justify statements like Watson's despite there not being any connection, and being less than what you'll get from a solid day of test preparation tutoring.
Just realize that if as they say there are many genetic factors that affect intelligence, it is unlikely that there are enough such factors isolated in certain populations to make a significant difference -- as in enough that Watson and others' casual observations were borne out in fact.
Some links are optical, but at either end is hardware that converts to/from electrical signals. This happens at multiple points across the network in repeaters, switches, routers, etc. The dream of an all-optical network is one where outside of the end points you're manipulating photons the whole way with no conversions.
A cousin of mine worked for a startup back in early 2000s that made an all-optical switch, so this is remembering conversations we had back then. He wasn't working on the photonics part, though.
Please begin distributing and advertising NASA beer immediately. Not being able to buy NASA beer at the grocery store has overtaken every other explanation for NASA's financial woes.
Well I have heard the claim many times from religious folk that Atheism requires just as much faith as any form of Theism
Which is stupid and also belittling to the real faith they value.
I disagree with that claim, but it certainly is real hard to keep your brain in rational mode.
Indeed. I think it's important for people who value rationality to realize that it's just a trick our brains have learned, not their inherent method of operation. I think more often than "magical thinking", simple emotion gets in the way of rational thought.
And I don't care who you are or how rational you think you are, your emotions affect -- or even effect -- your thoughts. Emotions are how evolution got us to go after the things we need for survival. We eat and screw not to sustain ourselves and the species, but because we are hungry and horny. Loneliness encourages us to form group bonds which improve survival -- but survival is not the thought on our minds when we do it. It is our emotional needs that we are seeking to satisfy.
And when your sense of identity is based around being rational, then one of your emotional needs is to feel you are rational. Which you may end up doing even when you're not being rational.
The point is that for anyone who values rationality, it's very important to understand the difference between being rational -- you aren't -- and being capable of rationality -- you are! But it takes effort.
Physicists feel the same way about the universe. :)
Therefore the Drake Equation (or rather, think "Drake Test") hasn't been successfully negotiated in the past million years or so. It appears that "early hurdles" + "late hurdles" have been impossible, at least so far.
APPEARS. As in, to our extremely small view of the universe there aren't obvious and unmistakable signs of intelligent life out there. To from this conclude that it doesn't exist and the hurdles for development are too great is completely unsupported.
It's been just over two decades since the first exoplanet was detected. Now we know of hundreds, and we've even done spectroscopy on some, but right now we can't possibly say that these planets aren't home to advanced civilizations. It is completely unrealistic to extrapolate from our own lack of observation to the lack of aliens.
And then let's turn it around -- what about the aliens contacting us?
Again, how do we know this hasn't happened? The galaxy is big, and old. If we aren't going to engage in pure fantasy and speculate about FTL, then it's going to take a long time to explore. How do we know if
1) Aliens are exploring the galaxy via generation ship or Von Neumann probe, and the 'front' of the probes is 1 or 10 million years from reaching us
2) Aliens already arrived in our solar system 1 or 10 million or years ago and found complex life but no civilizations, so they shrugged and moved on.
3) Aliens are studying our solar system right now with a probe dozens of times bigger than all our telescopes put together, orbiting the sun at around the distance of Neptune.
We don't.
"We can't see it, therefore it doesn't exist" is a completely unsupported conclusion.
Any speculation then on the difficulty of overcoming the 'late hurdles' of an advanced civilization, or the existence of an alien Prime Directive, is fine and dandy but not something you can say current non-evidence of aliens supports in any way.
No, because someone could say that the amino acids in clouds were created by God or The Gods
They could also say the results of Miller-Urey are the result of God. :P
They could -- and have -- also said that since Miller-Urey was an experiment performed by humans it is still a sign that a creator is needed, its similarity to hypothetical natural processes notwithstanding.
Convincing Creationists is not the goal here. Which is good, because it's futile.
alternately point out that the concentration in galactic clouds are too low, and that the amino acids would probably break up in the heat of initial planetary formation, ignoring any planetoid strikes like supposedly produced the Moon.
The point isn't that nebulae are the source of amino acids on earth. The point is that amino acids are a common organic molecule that appears in a variety of natural locations in space. The point is that finding amino acids forming naturally in the absence of biological processes is quite possible, even normal.
Are you sure you aren't confusing them with Spanish Inquisition robots?
God made the dinosaur ninjas invisible to test our faith. In dinosaur ninjas. I believe!
They may land cold, but they sure get hot as they go through the atmosphere, where most of them burn up before ever reaching ground. Look at it this way, the space shuttle also landed "cold" but as we we tragically found out, it got pretty hot before the actual landing.
Yes and those are small. A large meteor will have some of its surface ablated, but most of the meteor, particularly the interior, will be cool. There simply isn't enough time as the meteor falls for the heat to spread. That which survives to the ground will be cool enough to touch in most cases.
Similarly, in a normal space shuttle re-entry only the leading surface (the ceramic as in stone tiles) was heated, while the rest of the shuttle remained a comfortable temperature. It was only when that leading surface was compromised and the pressure-heated air was able to enter the interior structure which was fragile that it caused a problem.
So unless the meteor is a ceramic shell with a fragile interior, this isn't a problem.
That does explain why I was never able to find the Dakotan DMZ.
That would be "below median intelligence".
Which is approximately the same in a near-Gaussian distribution. :)
We have an autistic member of our family. While anecdotal, it was only after the vaccines that our young family member exhibited symptoms and was eventually diagnosed.
Sorry to hear this, but autism is a developmental disorder. By the time you noticed symptoms -- and untrained parents won't notice nearly as soon as trained professionals would -- the disease had been messing with your child's brain for a long time. It cannot possibly be that autism began at the moment of vaccination and was evident only a short time later -- or as some stories go, the same day as the vaccine.
It just so happens that the age at which obvious symptoms tend to manifest is also right around the age where kids are getting their vaccines. This makes the situation ripe for the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Not to mention the selection bias of parents who only notice/remember cases where their kid acted "strange" after the vaccines, and don't remember the cases before because they weren't sensitized.
His point regarding vaccines is that he has seen a potential correlation and we should take steps to test that hypothesis.
He didn't see that correlation, he created it. His study that showed this correlation was utterly fraudulent.
If you payed money to see him, then you got scammed.
I find it odd that the /. community so quickly attacks those who are simply questioning the powers that be.
That's the way Wakefield tries to spin it, so it sounds like it's just a about "authorities" vs those who question them.
But it's actually the reality of the demonstrable benefit vaccines have provided to humanity (without even having to trust the "powers that be", just read a history book please), versus a bullshit scam artist who cooked up a study to create a panic he could cash in on (he was planning to sell a variety of detection kits and alternative vaccines).
Question authority all you want -- this should include when Wakefield asks you to trust him. There's many reasonable discussions to be had on improving public health policy. However it's not authority but reality that you're going against when you ask if maybe vaccines cause autism or maybe aren't worth it.
Actually it involves both, but nobody uses "begging" in that sense anymore.
Well as inheritor of the intellectual property of Genghis Khan, I will be replying to this cease-and-desist with a horde of mounted archers.
A: if two particles are entangled and to one of them a state is written, does the state of the other 'end' change? My understanding of the discussion so far says yes, but I want to be clear here.
No. "Writing" a new state to one of the two particles breaks the entanglement. The other particle's observed state will no longer be correlated with the one you wrote to.