It's a gamble. Some win, most lose, just like in every lottery or stock exchange.
You mean in any stock exchange crash.
For many years, I and most other investors saw the values of our portfolios -- in particular retirement -- rise in value well in excess of inflation. We all "won". It's only in the market crash that most lost and only a few -- who speculated that the crash would occur -- won. However, if the market recovers, then in the long term my retirement fund will likely still have substantially increased value and I'll have still won -- just like people who rode through the 1987 crash.
Your observation may hold true of the subset of speculators and day-traders.
The implication is that BitCoin is 'just like' an unstable crash-prone stock exchange, or a stock exchange where everyone is a speculator like it or not.
I'm getting rather annoyed with everyone who seems to think that because there's no fundamental categorical difference between BitCoin and any other item used for the exchange of goods and services, that there are no quantitative or qualitative differences at all.
You mean Bitcoin is directly comparable to the currency of an unstable currency like Zimbabwe's that I also would never dream of transferring any of my comparatively rock-stable $US to.
How fast can YOU run with your arms held by your side? There's huge benefit in swinging your arms while running, and I'm sure I'd start flapping too if chased by something bigger than me with teeth.
I'm not sure, but I think I could run faster with my arms by my side rather than flapping them out at my sides. I'd hope for your sake that you'd pump your arms, rather than flap them, if pursued by a predator.
But in any case that's us humans.
Birds, on the other hand, can run quite rapidly with their wings at their sides. Not just flightless birds, but birds that can fly but often choose to run -- e.g. roadrunners -- do so with their wings folded. Why would a bird with fully developed wings not use them if they provided an advantage running? Why would birds that had adapted to life on the ground and running from predators lose their flight feathers if they were advantageous?
I would say the reason is that wings are not very effective for running compared to legs. The best way to propel yourself along the ground is to push off of the ground, not off of the air. Wings are for creating lift -- which would be useful for gliding or jumping, but not running.
Well, at least you're comfortable resorting to Ad Hominem attacks instead of debating the validity of the science. Thanks for playing.
Only after you'd already admitted defeat by doing exactly that. Then, the debate concluded with myself as victor, I will happily reply to your insults with my own, you sad sore loser.
Please reply with the rhetorical equivalent of "fap fap fap" soon.
What are the intermediate steps between a penguin adapted to "flying" in water and a penguin-descendent adapted to flying in air?
More to the point: Penguins descended from flighted birds, and adapted to improve swimming. It seems very unlikely based on what we know of bird ancestors that they followed the reverse path, going from the water to the air.
For a bird adapted to gliding the incremental benefit that accrues incremental, but immediate, benefits is a further perfection of gliding adaptations.
You don't think incremental improvements for producing thrust or allowing control would provide incremental benefits for a gliding animal? A little more distance or a little more precision or a little more turning ability to avoid pursuing predators (or capture prey) all sound like immediate benefits to me. Once the distance gets good enough, or the control gets good enough, that the animal is not restricted to short hops then it's suddenly flying and the evolutionary doors are opened up for optimization in multiple directions.
Gliding and powered flight are not antithesis. There are clearly birds with common ancestors that have optimized for both. Tiny birds may not be very good at gliding, but birds like the albatross despite being consummate gliders also have powerful flight muscles -- just with their mass and their insane flight times/distances it's infeasible to rely on them.
That all said, I think there's promise in the idea of wings being used for ground speed improvements. It's not obviously so -- for one thing, look at the ratites like the emu or ostrich. They rely heavily on their running speed for survival, yet their wings are mostly vestigial, and their 'flight' feathers completely useless for generating thrust. This quite possibly didn't happen just once in the ratite line, but multiple times for multiple lineages. Indicating that for them at least the advantages of wings adapted for flying were not transferable to running on the ground.
Again, there's promise in the idea, but I don't think you can rule it superior to the gliding-to-flying path based on the idea of incremental improvements. The simplest incremental improvement for running is to improve the legs for running, as happened with the ratites.
It should be pretty easy to calculate that bigger sea walls are worth it to protect one of the nation's biggest ports -- you know, the reason why such a large fraction of the world's population is on coasts, especially near the mouths of large rivers?
Ugh. I love The Register as a tech news site, even after the better part of the staff left to form The Inquirer. But sometimes when they report on science stories like this I want to fly to London, find the punter responsible, and shove a two liter bottle up their ass while shouting "Your anus has always been open to the passage of objects, therefore this represents no change!"
It's true that the passage was not completely closed, yet it's also true that it is much more open than before (and this could be, probably is, related to AGW), and that this does have substantial implications for trade routes.
I'll cut them a lot of slack for basically just making fun of a Times advertisement that makes a factual error, though I admit I'm only cutting them this slack because I love them.
It means "human caused". And the "A" in "AGW" is referring to the current warming trend. Not all warming trends ever. Not denying the existence of any warming trend other than the current one.
Did you have a point, or were you just encouraging dictionary use in a case where it was probably not needed? If the latter I commend you despite your over-zealousness.
The universe only seems left handed. If it ever gets into a sword fight with another universe, it will wait for a dramatically opportune time and then announce, "I am not left handed!" (You'll know this has happened when suddenly you are inside-out.)
BTW, the science is quite arguable however the actual arguments are taking place nowhere near where you think they are. Turns out to argue the science you have to know the science. Arguing about fantasies of what the science might be and what 1970 popular magazines led you to believe it might be is great and fun in the same sense that masturbation is great fun -- just please do it in private, because it's useless to everyone else.
What I don't understand is how they define the top and the bottom of the galaxy (or positive axis/negative axis), in order to determine clockwise/anti-clockwise rotation. Otherwise everything is going to be spinning in one direction or the other.
Does that matter? If you define the axis one way you get a positive angular momentum, define it the other way you get a negative angular momentum.
I thought the implication of this study was that if you summed all the angular momentum vectors for the galaxies in question you ended up getting a vector with significant magnitude, i.e. the angular momentums of all the galaxies don't cancel out, they aren't essentially random as one would expect if there was no net angular momentum in the universe, and there is a preferred axis of rotation.
At that point it wouldn't matter which way you defined 'up' or 'down' with respect to that axis. It would just be a convention.
Actually it was the Bush Administration that decided to use Climate Change instead of Global Warming, exactly because people who know literally nothing about the phenomenon except what it is called would be free to infer "But the climate has always been changing so this means nothing! Derp!" even though that is not the actual prediction being made*.
And you're free to continue to think that, but don't claim science agrees that 1.4F change in 100 years is remarkably stable and not statistically significant when actual science says the opposite. Just dismiss the science that says what you don't want to hear; at least then you're in reality.
* Of course once the U.S. government started talking about "Climate Change" many others followed suit at least when speaking to the public about it. I think they were maybe frustrated that the know-nothing-but-the-name folks didn't seem to understand that it didn't mean monotonically increasing warmth everywhere, but fat lot of good that did, obviously.
The sun's solar output is increasing rapidly, because it's a few billion years in the future and the sun is getting close to entering it's Red Giant phase, and soon the earth's oceans will boil off.
The upside? People who said we should have put more effort into our space program can say "I told you so" prior to burning to a crisp along with everyone else.
There may always be an upside, but some silver linings are pretty thin.:P
I know this is a semantically pedantic rant, but when I see comments like that, it just makes me want to face palm.
Go ahead. Maybe you'll smack some sense into yourself.
Whether we're happy (as in this study)
You mean as in this study where the genetic factor was 30%, leaving 70% non-genetic?
it is our genes that, almost without exception, determine who we are. To say otherwise, or feign surprise, is just stupid.
Yeah, almost without exception, except the myriad exceptions that you yourself could probably spend all day reciting if you weren't determined to pursue the "Yawn, I am not surprised at this outcome" line even though your feigned non-surprise is completely stupid in this case.
The comet doesn't have to come by once a year in order to produce an annual meteor shower. The shower is caused by the earth passing through the trail of debris left in the comet's orbit. For instance the famous Leonids are created by a comet with a 33 year orbit around the sun.
While what you say makes solid sense, I would like to interject that this was a past event during a way different time, when communication were slow. What might now be occurring is that other observatories are going back to those dates to see if anything was documented. I think people in those days kept log books.
That's a fair point, but I'd like to point out that the logs of many of these observatories have already been studied in detail, since despite using more primitive instruments their observations provide important data for astronomy today.
For example, there is known to be extensive documentation of the Leonids meteor shower from those days, in particular a massive instance of the shower from 1833. It was recorded not just by astronomers but by many other sources.
If fifty years later a comet had passed that close to earth then the resulting shower of small comet fragments would have dwarfed the 1833 Leonids and would have been recorded by a great many observatories, plus newspapers and other sources. There wouldn't be a paper saying "Hey, we think what this one guy in Mexico saw was a comet that passed near earth and nobody else saw it", there'd be a paper saying "Hey, we think we found an observation of the comet that was the source of the well-document but heretofore mysterious 1883 Meteor Shower."
In the latter scenario this would start to sound pretty plausible. That's just not the scenario we're dealing with.
Shoemakerâ"Levy 9 didn't look scattered all over the place, pretty much looked like a straight line.
The pieces large enough to be visible from Earth, and where "pretty much" is relative to the size of Jupiter.
If the major remnants of a broken comet had passed that close to earth, then the millions of tiny remnants would have created a meteor shower on earth that would put the Leonids to shame.
Private companies are now launching Satellites and their record is not nearly as good as NASA's but it is getting there, but again riding on the backs of the R&D done by, wait for it..... YOUR TAX MONEY.
So while all of this is happening, are YOU getting a dividend check? Nope.
Nope! Instead, all the tax money I paid into the Shuttle is finally coming close to getting me what the Shuttle was originally supposed to provide: Cost-effective and routine orbital capabilities.
What IS going to happen is that they are going to follow the current Unfettered Capitalism model of paying the least they can, running safety margins razor thin and making a few people really rich and everyone else getting their jobs off-shored as soon as the technology is stable enough.
I think you're underestimating the implications of a disaster on a manned vessel for these companies. While I agree with your point in principle, it isn't clear to me if pushing against prudent safety measures for the sake of making money off a single launch is going to be more prevalent than pushing against prudent safety measures for the sake of politics and the need to secure budgets for the next year. I tend to think not.
When it is time to go to MARS or to the nearest star do you really think that private companies are going to fund that?
No, of course not. Government will do that, and it will be VASTLY easier for them to accomplish it -- both politically and practically -- if commercial ventures can handle the trip to LEO cheaply and effectively. In terms of delta-v, once you're in LEO then you are nearly halfway to the Martian surface. The only sane way to get a Mars mission of decent scope is to boost components to orbit and then start the real mission from there.
Commercial spaceflight is going to be a key enabler for this.
that's a pretty dumb statement, if you classify all those as the same movie then you must have watched 5 different movies of different genres and then never watched another one.
They should apologize for shoving their agenda down your throat by forcing the word "freedom" to cross your lips when referring to the software product that you're benefiting from due to the freedom it provides its users.
They shouldn't change the name exactly so that people can see that "mentioning the existence of freedom" != "RMS-style zealotry".
And people who can't get past that and avoid LibreOffice as a result of their own prejudice can do without. I'm fine with that.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a gamble. Some win, most lose, just like in every lottery or stock exchange.
You mean in any stock exchange crash.
For many years, I and most other investors saw the values of our portfolios -- in particular retirement -- rise in value well in excess of inflation. We all "won". It's only in the market crash that most lost and only a few -- who speculated that the crash would occur -- won. However, if the market recovers, then in the long term my retirement fund will likely still have substantially increased value and I'll have still won -- just like people who rode through the 1987 crash.
Your observation may hold true of the subset of speculators and day-traders.
The implication is that BitCoin is 'just like' an unstable crash-prone stock exchange, or a stock exchange where everyone is a speculator like it or not.
I'm getting rather annoyed with everyone who seems to think that because there's no fundamental categorical difference between BitCoin and any other item used for the exchange of goods and services, that there are no quantitative or qualitative differences at all.
There are.
Thank you for this breath of fresh, sane, air.
You mean Bitcoin is directly comparable to the currency of an unstable currency like Zimbabwe's that I also would never dream of transferring any of my comparatively rock-stable $US to.
I do believe you are completely correct in that.
How fast can YOU run with your arms held by your side? There's huge benefit in swinging your arms while running, and I'm sure I'd start flapping too if chased by something bigger than me with teeth.
I'm not sure, but I think I could run faster with my arms by my side rather than flapping them out at my sides. I'd hope for your sake that you'd pump your arms, rather than flap them, if pursued by a predator.
But in any case that's us humans.
Birds, on the other hand, can run quite rapidly with their wings at their sides. Not just flightless birds, but birds that can fly but often choose to run -- e.g. roadrunners -- do so with their wings folded. Why would a bird with fully developed wings not use them if they provided an advantage running? Why would birds that had adapted to life on the ground and running from predators lose their flight feathers if they were advantageous?
I would say the reason is that wings are not very effective for running compared to legs. The best way to propel yourself along the ground is to push off of the ground, not off of the air. Wings are for creating lift -- which would be useful for gliding or jumping, but not running.
Well, at least you're comfortable resorting to Ad Hominem attacks instead of debating the validity of the science. Thanks for playing.
Only after you'd already admitted defeat by doing exactly that. Then, the debate concluded with myself as victor, I will happily reply to your insults with my own, you sad sore loser.
Please reply with the rhetorical equivalent of "fap fap fap" soon.
If gliding is faster than walking/running, then isn't using flapping to glide technically increasing running or walking speed?
No, because it's technically not running or walking.
It's the same reason using my legs to run isn't technically increasing my sitting speed. :P
What are the intermediate steps between a penguin adapted to "flying" in water and a penguin-descendent adapted to flying in air?
More to the point: Penguins descended from flighted birds, and adapted to improve swimming. It seems very unlikely based on what we know of bird ancestors that they followed the reverse path, going from the water to the air.
For a bird adapted to gliding the incremental benefit that accrues incremental, but immediate, benefits is a further perfection of gliding adaptations.
You don't think incremental improvements for producing thrust or allowing control would provide incremental benefits for a gliding animal? A little more distance or a little more precision or a little more turning ability to avoid pursuing predators (or capture prey) all sound like immediate benefits to me. Once the distance gets good enough, or the control gets good enough, that the animal is not restricted to short hops then it's suddenly flying and the evolutionary doors are opened up for optimization in multiple directions.
Gliding and powered flight are not antithesis. There are clearly birds with common ancestors that have optimized for both. Tiny birds may not be very good at gliding, but birds like the albatross despite being consummate gliders also have powerful flight muscles -- just with their mass and their insane flight times/distances it's infeasible to rely on them.
That all said, I think there's promise in the idea of wings being used for ground speed improvements. It's not obviously so -- for one thing, look at the ratites like the emu or ostrich. They rely heavily on their running speed for survival, yet their wings are mostly vestigial, and their 'flight' feathers completely useless for generating thrust. This quite possibly didn't happen just once in the ratite line, but multiple times for multiple lineages. Indicating that for them at least the advantages of wings adapted for flying were not transferable to running on the ground.
Again, there's promise in the idea, but I don't think you can rule it superior to the gliding-to-flying path based on the idea of incremental improvements. The simplest incremental improvement for running is to improve the legs for running, as happened with the ratites.
It should be pretty easy to calculate that bigger sea walls are worth it to protect one of the nation's biggest ports -- you know, the reason why such a large fraction of the world's population is on coasts, especially near the mouths of large rivers?
You can't try to imply it's not yours while doing it in public.
Ugh. I love The Register as a tech news site, even after the better part of the staff left to form The Inquirer. But sometimes when they report on science stories like this I want to fly to London, find the punter responsible, and shove a two liter bottle up their ass while shouting "Your anus has always been open to the passage of objects, therefore this represents no change!"
It's true that the passage was not completely closed, yet it's also true that it is much more open than before (and this could be, probably is, related to AGW), and that this does have substantial implications for trade routes.
I'll cut them a lot of slack for basically just making fun of a Times advertisement that makes a factual error, though I admit I'm only cutting them this slack because I love them.
It means "human caused". And the "A" in "AGW" is referring to the current warming trend. Not all warming trends ever. Not denying the existence of any warming trend other than the current one.
Did you have a point, or were you just encouraging dictionary use in a case where it was probably not needed? If the latter I commend you despite your over-zealousness.
The universe only seems left handed. If it ever gets into a sword fight with another universe, it will wait for a dramatically opportune time and then announce, "I am not left handed!" (You'll know this has happened when suddenly you are inside-out.)
How do we know it hasn't happened already?!
Heh. Derp indeed.
BTW, the science is quite arguable however the actual arguments are taking place nowhere near where you think they are. Turns out to argue the science you have to know the science. Arguing about fantasies of what the science might be and what 1970 popular magazines led you to believe it might be is great and fun in the same sense that masturbation is great fun -- just please do it in private, because it's useless to everyone else.
What I don't understand is how they define the top and the bottom of the galaxy (or positive axis/negative axis), in order to determine clockwise/anti-clockwise rotation. Otherwise everything is going to be spinning in one direction or the other.
Does that matter? If you define the axis one way you get a positive angular momentum, define it the other way you get a negative angular momentum.
I thought the implication of this study was that if you summed all the angular momentum vectors for the galaxies in question you ended up getting a vector with significant magnitude, i.e. the angular momentums of all the galaxies don't cancel out, they aren't essentially random as one would expect if there was no net angular momentum in the universe, and there is a preferred axis of rotation.
At that point it wouldn't matter which way you defined 'up' or 'down' with respect to that axis. It would just be a convention.
Actually it was the Bush Administration that decided to use Climate Change instead of Global Warming, exactly because people who know literally nothing about the phenomenon except what it is called would be free to infer "But the climate has always been changing so this means nothing! Derp!" even though that is not the actual prediction being made*.
And you're free to continue to think that, but don't claim science agrees that 1.4F change in 100 years is remarkably stable and not statistically significant when actual science says the opposite. Just dismiss the science that says what you don't want to hear; at least then you're in reality.
* Of course once the U.S. government started talking about "Climate Change" many others followed suit at least when speaking to the public about it. I think they were maybe frustrated that the know-nothing-but-the-name folks didn't seem to understand that it didn't mean monotonically increasing warmth everywhere, but fat lot of good that did, obviously.
The sun's solar output is increasing rapidly, because it's a few billion years in the future and the sun is getting close to entering it's Red Giant phase, and soon the earth's oceans will boil off.
The upside? People who said we should have put more effort into our space program can say "I told you so" prior to burning to a crisp along with everyone else.
There may always be an upside, but some silver linings are pretty thin. :P
I know this is a semantically pedantic rant, but when I see comments like that, it just makes me want to face palm.
Go ahead. Maybe you'll smack some sense into yourself.
Whether we're happy (as in this study)
You mean as in this study where the genetic factor was 30%, leaving 70% non-genetic?
it is our genes that, almost without exception, determine who we are. To say otherwise, or feign surprise, is just stupid.
Yeah, almost without exception, except the myriad exceptions that you yourself could probably spend all day reciting if you weren't determined to pursue the "Yawn, I am not surprised at this outcome" line even though your feigned non-surprise is completely stupid in this case.
Um...not every comet comes by once a year?
The comet doesn't have to come by once a year in order to produce an annual meteor shower. The shower is caused by the earth passing through the trail of debris left in the comet's orbit. For instance the famous Leonids are created by a comet with a 33 year orbit around the sun.
While what you say makes solid sense, I would like to interject that this was a past event during a way different time, when communication were slow.
What might now be occurring is that other observatories are going back to those dates to see if anything was documented. I think people in those days kept log books.
That's a fair point, but I'd like to point out that the logs of many of these observatories have already been studied in detail, since despite using more primitive instruments their observations provide important data for astronomy today.
For example, there is known to be extensive documentation of the Leonids meteor shower from those days, in particular a massive instance of the shower from 1833. It was recorded not just by astronomers but by many other sources.
If fifty years later a comet had passed that close to earth then the resulting shower of small comet fragments would have dwarfed the 1833 Leonids and would have been recorded by a great many observatories, plus newspapers and other sources. There wouldn't be a paper saying "Hey, we think what this one guy in Mexico saw was a comet that passed near earth and nobody else saw it", there'd be a paper saying "Hey, we think we found an observation of the comet that was the source of the well-document but heretofore mysterious 1883 Meteor Shower."
In the latter scenario this would start to sound pretty plausible. That's just not the scenario we're dealing with.
"Debunking" isn't part of his column name. Sorry but I'll ignore the guy until he fixes that.
Thus demonstrating your superior intellect and keen discernment.
Shoemakerâ"Levy 9 didn't look scattered all over the place, pretty much looked like a straight line.
The pieces large enough to be visible from Earth, and where "pretty much" is relative to the size of Jupiter.
If the major remnants of a broken comet had passed that close to earth, then the millions of tiny remnants would have created a meteor shower on earth that would put the Leonids to shame.
Private companies are now launching Satellites and their record is not nearly as good as NASA's but it is getting there, but again riding on the backs of the R&D done by, wait for it..... YOUR TAX MONEY.
So while all of this is happening, are YOU getting a dividend check? Nope.
Nope! Instead, all the tax money I paid into the Shuttle is finally coming close to getting me what the Shuttle was originally supposed to provide: Cost-effective and routine orbital capabilities.
What IS going to happen is that they are going to follow the current Unfettered Capitalism model of paying the least they can, running safety margins razor thin and making a few people really rich and everyone else getting their jobs off-shored as soon as the technology is stable enough.
I think you're underestimating the implications of a disaster on a manned vessel for these companies. While I agree with your point in principle, it isn't clear to me if pushing against prudent safety measures for the sake of making money off a single launch is going to be more prevalent than pushing against prudent safety measures for the sake of politics and the need to secure budgets for the next year. I tend to think not.
When it is time to go to MARS or to the nearest star do you really think that private companies are going to fund that?
No, of course not. Government will do that, and it will be VASTLY easier for them to accomplish it -- both politically and practically -- if commercial ventures can handle the trip to LEO cheaply and effectively. In terms of delta-v, once you're in LEO then you are nearly halfway to the Martian surface. The only sane way to get a Mars mission of decent scope is to boost components to orbit and then start the real mission from there.
Commercial spaceflight is going to be a key enabler for this.
Dilitihium veins, bitches!
Dilithium veins, perhaps... But it seems very implausible that bitches would exist under the mountains or be able to accelerating neutrinos.
that's a pretty dumb statement, if you classify all those as the same movie then you must have watched 5 different movies of different genres and then never watched another one.
Or 7, if you believe Joseph Campbell.
"Aw man, I've already seen Man vs. Nature!"
Ah, so mentioning equals pushing.
They should apologize for shoving their agenda down your throat by forcing the word "freedom" to cross your lips when referring to the software product that you're benefiting from due to the freedom it provides its users.
They shouldn't change the name exactly so that people can see that "mentioning the existence of freedom" != "RMS-style zealotry".
And people who can't get past that and avoid LibreOffice as a result of their own prejudice can do without. I'm fine with that.