Also: insulting Phil Plait's ability to get to the real source and read it makes you look like a fool. Phil is a PhD'ed astronomer and one of the most active and followed astronomy popularizers in the field today. Telling him to go to S&T or Astronomy is insulting.
Yeah, it's doubly silly because Phil wrote both the article which the OP praises, and the submission which the OP insults.
The above response was triggered by the summary, not by the article itself which is pretty good.
Yeah, yet another bogus Slashdot headline.
Make up your mind. Are you talking about the summary or the headline?
Your first post makes sense if you just read the headline and jumped to conclusions about what the alleged exaggeration was.
But the summary exactly spells out what is exaggerated: The claim that this was the first exoplanet directly imaged. It is not. It is the first exoplanet around a sun-like star imaged from ground-based telescopes.
That's all in the summary. The summary is perfectly fine, and the headline is fine assuming you then go on to read the summary instead of fill in the blanks, because the previous Slashdot story was, in fact, exaggerated in exactly the way claimed.
This isn't that surprising since the summary was written by the same person who wrote the article which says exactly the same thing only in more detail.
So no, not another bogus/. headline. I know I'm as surprised as you, but you still can't just assume every/. headline is bad. Though I guess it's fairly safe to play the odds, if that's what you were doing. Heh.
Grammar rules that acknowledge that YouTube is not a singular entity, it is a collection of individuals, are superior.
It is exactly because of that kind of sloppy thinking in the use of language that non-existent entities like YouTube were given the same rights as an actual human being because of a pun.
When I went to click on this link, I told myself "This better not just be another glowing dot". As usual, I was severely disappointed.
Sorry, but expect to be disappointed for a very, very long time.
This is where potential space travel funding is going?
No? It's where telescope funding is going.
Very sad.
Yeah, it's very sad to learn more about the universe, to be able to study other solar systems besides our own, to discover what kinds there are and how they form.
That's sad... in opposite world. Or lack-of-inquisitiveness world, aka boring world.
Those were just the examples already used in the thread. Pick whatever sub-compact econo-car and luxury sedan meet your standards, fact is they're still not competing with each other.
In particle physics there are experiments which seem to prove faster-than-light communication is possible.
No there aren't.
There are experiments which seem to demonstrate that things can appear to happen faster than light if and only if no information whatsoever is transmitted.
The correlation between the collapsed states of entangled particles is such a case. You can interpret the result as meaning that one particle somehow told the other about its' post-collapse state "instantly", but this can't tell you anything you didn't already know -- specifically, that the states were entangled and there is a correlation between their outcomes. You can't affect the outcome, you can't measure it in such a way that it's distinguishable from your measurement causing the collapse of the entanglement.
I personally just say we take the best of both worlds - I want a lunar based observatory with a 25 meter aperture. No need for adaptive optics, and FAR more light gathering capability than our current telescopes. We'll figure out how to pay for it later:)
Use a design like the Hobbey-Eberly or Keck scopes, constructing a very large mirror out of many smaller hexagonal pieces. Launch the hexes and components of the support structure individually into earth orbit, dock and refuel the rockets at the conveniently waiting orbital fuel depots, then send em off to the moon for a fraction of the cost of a rocket capable of lifting a 25-foot telescope. On-site assembly of the telescope is left as an exercise for the space agency who just happens to be newly focused on figuring such things out.:)
(sadly, I'm sure for the price of the Iraq war we COULD have such a piece of hardware).
Yes, but as big a fan as I am of the concept of us hypothetically not having spent all that money, the reality is that even if we hadn't, there's no way most of the proposed alternative uses would have been green-lighted.
Repeat until a. V is dead. b. V gives credible information
Ah, but the key word there is "credible".
See, in the real world, it is extremely rare that the information you are trying to obtain is something concrete and easily verifiable. Usually it's just pieces and clues that can take months to follow up on and even then it won't be clear if the info was wrong or just stale.
Like this case. Okay, you torture the "alleged" spies to find out who their handlers were, and what information they transfered. They say they don't know what you're talking about at first, then they give you names. Maybe different ones. Lies, or did they each have different handlers? Even if they were telling the truth those names could be aliases, so how do you expect to track them down in a foreign country? In a couple days? Ha! Months or years if you're lucky! No, the problem is that you can't just fact-check every statement they make and know for sure if they're lying.
So instead, the interrogator has to decide what sounds "credible", which is where their own biases come in, which is why -- as the army manual itself says -- the best thing torture is good for is for getting the suspect to say what you want to hear. Torture is great for getting confessions. Actionable intel? Not so much.
But hey, it works for Jack Bauer, and that's all some people need.
I'm sure that will be a factor for people who already own one when the price of gas starts to shoot up. But I think it's more than "green" is coming along for the ride. Buy a nice luxury car with kick-ass acceleration and be able to make a (barely plausible but hey) claim to being "environmentally conscious"? Take that, Joneses!
And that is precisely what's wrong with England. There's no Supreme Law to stop the Parliament from passing any law they wish, including rounding-up undesirables and sticking them in concentration camps.
I agree, but technically having a constitution is another aspect of government that is orthogonal to the Republic/Monarchy distinction. Not all Republics have constitutions. The UK is called a Constitutional Monarchy because it does have a constitution, just an "uncodified" one, meaning it's not written down in one place but is just a collection of case law and treaties and so forth. It's definitely not a Constitution in the sense we're talking about, which is in the sense of a Supreme Law.
You could describe people who buy Beemers and Mercs as having more money than sense for not buying a Yaris in the first place.
The appeal of the Model S to these folks isn't going to be cost savings on fuel. It's going to be the performance of a high-torque electric motor. It may not beat the other options on the straightaway, but it will beat them out of the gate which is what a lot of people care more about since you rarely get to exercise your max speed what with the po-lice around.
I'm not saying it's a slam dunk or anything, but in as much as I can understand the mentality of BMW owners to begin with, I can see the appeal of the Model S.
Yeah, helicopter footage of the highway out of Houston stuffed with cars fleeing Hurricane Rita that had run out of gas, while Priuses chugged along merrily on the shoulders, was great marketing for the Prius.
Yeah, because that's why people buy Ferraris -- range.
The Roadster handily beats similarly priced Ferraris in acceleration. It's not the greatest sports car ever, but in terms of performance it's quite impressive.
I'm not going to buy one, but that's because I think a Mustang is too ostentatious for me.:P
Nope. Sex selection at birth is weighted towards males (likely because the Y chromosome is lighter so the sperm are faster) by about 1%. Living population is weighted towards females by about 1% because males die earlier.
No it does't, because the problem as stated in the summary DOES NOT EXCLUDE the case that the other child is also a boy born on Tuesday. You are ASSUMING that because one child was "A boy born on Tuesday" the other child is not also a "boy born on Tuesday", a condition that was never set forth in the problem.
Yes it does matter, and no he's not assuming that. Even though it is possible for both children to have the qualification "born on Tuesday" or "born on Feb. 29th", this information does "come close" to specifying a particular child because you're given that one of them has it, and the odds of the other also having it are low (1/7 or 1/1461). That's why he said "comes close to specifying" and not "does specify".
Notice in the solution to the problem in RTFA, how you first assume the oldest child is the Tuesday-boy, then enumerate all cases (including another Tuesday-boy) for the first child. Then you enumerate all cases where the youngest child is the Tuesday-boy, and the oldest isn't, because you already counted that case. That's where the difference from 50% comes from.
Make the case even more rare like a leap-year-boy, and you'll be eliminating one tiny case from thousands, and be very close to 50%.
We're a Representative Democracy, not a Direct Democracy.
Republic means the head of government is not a monarch. It is orthogonal to Democracy. England is not a Republic, but it is a Representative Democracy.
China is a Republic, but it is not a Democracy of any kind.
[/pet peeve]
You're absolutely right in every other sense, though.
For the record I think saying "one of them is a banana" when you have two bananas is correct and unambiguous.
But I would only say "I have two fruits and one of them is a banana" if exactly one of them was a banana (otherwise I'd say "I have two bananas"), so your interpretation that I meant "at least one banana but possibly two" would be wrong.
Because you can't know whether the person uses the sentence in your way or my way without them explicitly telling you (i.e. providing extra information not in the original sentence), the sentence is inherently ambiguous.
The vast majority of English sentences are ambiguous, and it takes quite a bit of care to craft them so they aren't. Most of the time, we need context to distinguish. For example, was the person given a bag with two random fruits in it, and they've only looked at one of them so far? Did you ask them if they had a banana you could have, and saying "I have one banana" would imply that your request would deprive them entirely of bananas? Are they the kind of jerk who uses ambiguous language to trick people?
Without context, you can't resolve the ambiguity. Acting like there is exactly one "correct" interpretation of an ambiguous sentence is foolhardy.
Yeah, say what you will about the Monty Hall problem, but at least it is stated clearly and is actually trying to trip up your intuitive understanding of probability, not your intuitive understanding of English.:P
Though of course, the Monty Hall problem as given could be considered wrong because Monty later said he would usually only offer the contestant the chance to switch their choice if their first guess was correct. But hey, that's just funny.
This gives one general fact: "I have two children" It gives a specific fact about one of them, which may or may not have anything to do with the other: "one of whom is a boy"
As you interpret it, the question is not equivalent to "what's the probability that any given child is a boy?" The answer is actually the one given in the article. Based solely on knowing that at least one child is a boy born on a Tuesday -- "at least" coming from your interpretation that the fact about the one boy doesn't imply anything about the other like "not a boy born on tuesday" -- then you can calculate that out of the potential families of that type, there are more where the second child is a girl.
However, the reason why the statement of the problem sucks and trying to language-lawyer it down sucks is because there's no particular reason to assume "one of whom is a boy born on Tuesday" doesn't mean exactly one Tuesday-boy, yet at the same time assume "I have two children" does mean exactly two children.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a really stupid joke, so I'll take the blame for this "whoosh".
Also: insulting Phil Plait's ability to get to the real source and read it makes you look like a fool. Phil is a PhD'ed astronomer and one of the most active and followed astronomy popularizers in the field today. Telling him to go to S&T or Astronomy is insulting.
Yeah, it's doubly silly because Phil wrote both the article which the OP praises, and the submission which the OP insults.
The above response was triggered by the summary, not by the article itself which is pretty good.
Yeah, yet another bogus Slashdot headline.
Make up your mind. Are you talking about the summary or the headline?
Your first post makes sense if you just read the headline and jumped to conclusions about what the alleged exaggeration was.
But the summary exactly spells out what is exaggerated: The claim that this was the first exoplanet directly imaged. It is not. It is the first exoplanet around a sun-like star imaged from ground-based telescopes.
That's all in the summary. The summary is perfectly fine, and the headline is fine assuming you then go on to read the summary instead of fill in the blanks, because the previous Slashdot story was, in fact, exaggerated in exactly the way claimed.
This isn't that surprising since the summary was written by the same person who wrote the article which says exactly the same thing only in more detail.
So no, not another bogus /. headline. I know I'm as surprised as you, but you still can't just assume every /. headline is bad. Though I guess it's fairly safe to play the odds, if that's what you were doing. Heh.
Hmmm, she looks kind familiar.
I didn't realize the Nazis had concentration camps in Sweden!
But then I googled it, and what do you know, there were!
It doesn't list any in Stockholm though.
Grammar rules that acknowledge that YouTube is not a singular entity, it is a collection of individuals, are superior.
It is exactly because of that kind of sloppy thinking in the use of language that non-existent entities like YouTube were given the same rights as an actual human being because of a pun.
When I went to click on this link, I told myself "This better not just be another glowing dot". As usual, I was severely disappointed.
Sorry, but expect to be disappointed for a very, very long time.
This is where potential space travel funding is going?
No? It's where telescope funding is going.
Very sad.
Yeah, it's very sad to learn more about the universe, to be able to study other solar systems besides our own, to discover what kinds there are and how they form.
That's sad... in opposite world. Or lack-of-inquisitiveness world, aka boring world.
What are you talking about? The planet, which is 8 Jupiter masses and nothing like a star, is orbiting a sun-like star.
Those were just the examples already used in the thread. Pick whatever sub-compact econo-car and luxury sedan meet your standards, fact is they're still not competing with each other.
In particle physics there are experiments which seem to prove faster-than-light communication is possible.
No there aren't.
There are experiments which seem to demonstrate that things can appear to happen faster than light if and only if no information whatsoever is transmitted.
The correlation between the collapsed states of entangled particles is such a case. You can interpret the result as meaning that one particle somehow told the other about its' post-collapse state "instantly", but this can't tell you anything you didn't already know -- specifically, that the states were entangled and there is a correlation between their outcomes. You can't affect the outcome, you can't measure it in such a way that it's distinguishable from your measurement causing the collapse of the entanglement.
I personally just say we take the best of both worlds - I want a lunar based observatory with a 25 meter aperture. No need for adaptive optics, and FAR more light gathering capability than our current telescopes. We'll figure out how to pay for it later :)
Use a design like the Hobbey-Eberly or Keck scopes, constructing a very large mirror out of many smaller hexagonal pieces. Launch the hexes and components of the support structure individually into earth orbit, dock and refuel the rockets at the conveniently waiting orbital fuel depots, then send em off to the moon for a fraction of the cost of a rocket capable of lifting a 25-foot telescope. On-site assembly of the telescope is left as an exercise for the space agency who just happens to be newly focused on figuring such things out. :)
(sadly, I'm sure for the price of the Iraq war we COULD have such a piece of hardware).
Yes, but as big a fan as I am of the concept of us hypothetically not having spent all that money, the reality is that even if we hadn't, there's no way most of the proposed alternative uses would have been green-lighted.
So... I shouldn't have bragged about how the subject of my experiments into human psychic abilities had been visited by key members of parliament?
Repeat until
a. V is dead.
b. V gives credible information
Ah, but the key word there is "credible".
See, in the real world, it is extremely rare that the information you are trying to obtain is something concrete and easily verifiable. Usually it's just pieces and clues that can take months to follow up on and even then it won't be clear if the info was wrong or just stale.
Like this case. Okay, you torture the "alleged" spies to find out who their handlers were, and what information they transfered. They say they don't know what you're talking about at first, then they give you names. Maybe different ones. Lies, or did they each have different handlers? Even if they were telling the truth those names could be aliases, so how do you expect to track them down in a foreign country? In a couple days? Ha! Months or years if you're lucky! No, the problem is that you can't just fact-check every statement they make and know for sure if they're lying.
So instead, the interrogator has to decide what sounds "credible", which is where their own biases come in, which is why -- as the army manual itself says -- the best thing torture is good for is for getting the suspect to say what you want to hear. Torture is great for getting confessions. Actionable intel? Not so much.
But hey, it works for Jack Bauer, and that's all some people need.
I'm sure that will be a factor for people who already own one when the price of gas starts to shoot up. But I think it's more than "green" is coming along for the ride. Buy a nice luxury car with kick-ass acceleration and be able to make a (barely plausible but hey) claim to being "environmentally conscious"? Take that, Joneses!
And that is precisely what's wrong with England. There's no Supreme Law to stop the Parliament from passing any law they wish, including rounding-up undesirables and sticking them in concentration camps.
I agree, but technically having a constitution is another aspect of government that is orthogonal to the Republic/Monarchy distinction. Not all Republics have constitutions. The UK is called a Constitutional Monarchy because it does have a constitution, just an "uncodified" one, meaning it's not written down in one place but is just a collection of case law and treaties and so forth. It's definitely not a Constitution in the sense we're talking about, which is in the sense of a Supreme Law.
You could describe people who buy Beemers and Mercs as having more money than sense for not buying a Yaris in the first place.
The appeal of the Model S to these folks isn't going to be cost savings on fuel. It's going to be the performance of a high-torque electric motor. It may not beat the other options on the straightaway, but it will beat them out of the gate which is what a lot of people care more about since you rarely get to exercise your max speed what with the po-lice around.
I'm not saying it's a slam dunk or anything, but in as much as I can understand the mentality of BMW owners to begin with, I can see the appeal of the Model S.
Yeah, helicopter footage of the highway out of Houston stuffed with cars fleeing Hurricane Rita that had run out of gas, while Priuses chugged along merrily on the shoulders, was great marketing for the Prius.
Yeah, because that's why people buy Ferraris -- range.
The Roadster handily beats similarly priced Ferraris in acceleration. It's not the greatest sports car ever, but in terms of performance it's quite impressive.
I'm not going to buy one, but that's because I think a Mustang is too ostentatious for me. :P
I have to admit though I'm a little disappointed they didn't get the stock ticker COIL.
Nope. Sex selection at birth is weighted towards males (likely because the Y chromosome is lighter so the sperm are faster) by about 1%. Living population is weighted towards females by about 1% because males die earlier.
No it does't, because the problem as stated in the summary DOES NOT EXCLUDE the case that the other child is also a boy born on Tuesday. You are ASSUMING that because one child was "A boy born on Tuesday" the other child is not also a "boy born on Tuesday", a condition that was never set forth in the problem.
Yes it does matter, and no he's not assuming that. Even though it is possible for both children to have the qualification "born on Tuesday" or "born on Feb. 29th", this information does "come close" to specifying a particular child because you're given that one of them has it, and the odds of the other also having it are low (1/7 or 1/1461). That's why he said "comes close to specifying" and not "does specify".
Notice in the solution to the problem in RTFA, how you first assume the oldest child is the Tuesday-boy, then enumerate all cases (including another Tuesday-boy) for the first child. Then you enumerate all cases where the youngest child is the Tuesday-boy, and the oldest isn't, because you already counted that case. That's where the difference from 50% comes from.
Make the case even more rare like a leap-year-boy, and you'll be eliminating one tiny case from thousands, and be very close to 50%.
It's a Republic not a democracy.
[pet peeve]
We're a Representative Democracy, not a Direct Democracy.
Republic means the head of government is not a monarch. It is orthogonal to Democracy. England is not a Republic, but it is a Representative Democracy.
China is a Republic, but it is not a Democracy of any kind.
[/pet peeve]
You're absolutely right in every other sense, though.
For the record I think saying "one of them is a banana" when you have two bananas is correct and unambiguous.
But I would only say "I have two fruits and one of them is a banana" if exactly one of them was a banana (otherwise I'd say "I have two bananas"), so your interpretation that I meant "at least one banana but possibly two" would be wrong.
Because you can't know whether the person uses the sentence in your way or my way without them explicitly telling you (i.e. providing extra information not in the original sentence), the sentence is inherently ambiguous.
The vast majority of English sentences are ambiguous, and it takes quite a bit of care to craft them so they aren't. Most of the time, we need context to distinguish. For example, was the person given a bag with two random fruits in it, and they've only looked at one of them so far? Did you ask them if they had a banana you could have, and saying "I have one banana" would imply that your request would deprive them entirely of bananas? Are they the kind of jerk who uses ambiguous language to trick people?
Without context, you can't resolve the ambiguity. Acting like there is exactly one "correct" interpretation of an ambiguous sentence is foolhardy.
Yeah, say what you will about the Monty Hall problem, but at least it is stated clearly and is actually trying to trip up your intuitive understanding of probability, not your intuitive understanding of English. :P
Though of course, the Monty Hall problem as given could be considered wrong because Monty later said he would usually only offer the contestant the chance to switch their choice if their first guess was correct. But hey, that's just funny.
This gives one general fact: "I have two children"
It gives a specific fact about one of them, which may or may not have anything to do with the other: "one of whom is a boy"
As you interpret it, the question is not equivalent to "what's the probability that any given child is a boy?" The answer is actually the one given in the article. Based solely on knowing that at least one child is a boy born on a Tuesday -- "at least" coming from your interpretation that the fact about the one boy doesn't imply anything about the other like "not a boy born on tuesday" -- then you can calculate that out of the potential families of that type, there are more where the second child is a girl.
However, the reason why the statement of the problem sucks and trying to language-lawyer it down sucks is because there's no particular reason to assume "one of whom is a boy born on Tuesday" doesn't mean exactly one Tuesday-boy, yet at the same time assume "I have two children" does mean exactly two children.