You can 'see' polarity of sunspots almost directly. In fact, here are some pictures. You can read the strength of the magnetic field by looking how the energy levels of atoms are modified. As an electron falls from one level to another it emits electromagnetic radiation with an energy corresponding to the difference. In particular, certain configurations of atoms which are normally indistinguishable, because the difference between them is simply that electron spins have been flipped, become distinct in the presence of magnetic fields, because a magentic field causes one or other energy level to be 'preferred'. This modifies the frequencies of the emitted radiation which we can then observe. This is known as Zeeman splitting. Additionally, we can read off the polarity of the fields from the polarisation of the radiation.
...there's a problem. Works for us. No need for VMs.
Maybe someone should investigate news stories
on
Fake News Stories Probed
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Not just 'fake' ones.
Every single time I have ever had direct access to the truth of a news story I have found the reporting to be shoddy - ranging from quotes in a newspaper attributed to me from a company I quit two years earlier and claims that the company I work for is Australian (it was based in the US with no Australian office) or an entire article about my employer's partnership with a competitor (with zero basis in reality), to claims that a recent weightwatcher of the month (a friend of mine) used to eat many hamburgers a day (a complete fabrication). I regularly see my own employers making fabricated press releases that are reported as news with zero attempt at verification by reporters. Whatever level, whether it's business reporting or feel good local news, reporting is a web of lies. God knows how much truth there is in reporting from places like Iraq when they can't tell the truth about their own backyard.
Um...why would someone aim a space probe at an asteroid, comet or planet and so demolish a very expensive piece of hardware designed for long term space exploration? Is it really necessary to point out that NASA are typically (but not always!) sensible enough to choose to aim their probes so that they don't crash into asteroids, planets and comets?
The astrologers are very happy about it. See here for example.
But they're failing to use my own much more reliable form of astronomy. They say that discovery of a new planet is always associated with new technology. I claim that finding of a new planet is always associated with new discoveries in the field of astronomy.
Java's like something someone who completed Programming Languages 101 might have invented. It has absolutely nothing original or innovative about it. Nothing. C++ with garbage collection running on a virtual machine. (Don't think VMs were new. 20 years earlier Zork ran on a virtual platform that could be ported to almost any machine.)
Comparing a Java compiler to a Haskell compiler, say, is like comparing a toddler's first steps to running ultramarathons.
Hey! Finally! For the first time in my life I've found someone who understands what democracy is about! Democracy is like the examples given by evolutionary game theorists. Consider stags. They fight over mates. Reproducing is the #1 most important thing that an animal can do, so you'd think this would be a fight to the death. But it's not. Stags engage in what is almost a sybmolic form of fighting which allows them to determine who would win if they did fight to the death, and when they've made that determination, they can back off. As a result of not finishing the fight both parties are better off. All across the animal kingdom there are these kinds of symbolic fights. Sometimes a creature merely has to make the right kind of noise and the other party will deduce that it's not worth a fight. And as a result both parties get to carry on living their lives. And in a similar way, democracy is a way to determine what would happen in the event of a civil war, without actually fighting the war.
What's funny is the way people rationalize this behavour by inventing the "common good" and so on. I guess you have to keep up the lie or else people might be tempted to go back to fighting civil wars again.
Aha! I knew it couldn't be so simple. I have to get a relative to sign up with an ISP and then kil^H^H^Hif they are about to die I can download stuff for free.
Hear hear! Well said! I'm as ardent a supporter of Darwinian evolution as they come. But this kind of poll is nothing but a kind of shibboleth to separate one type of person from another based on which precepts just happened to be popular while they were breing brought up. Of the people polled only a small handful actually understand what is meant by 'evolution by natural selection'. An even smaller proportion have actually considered the evidence. (No! Just finding fossils isn't evidence for evolution by natural selection, just evidence for evolution.)
In fact, I have no idea why it's of interest to anyone other than sociologists what people believe about the origins of humanity. I have no opinion on what's the best type of carburettor, or what's the best way to mix vermillion paint, or what was the cause of the fall of the Roman empire. These are all outside of my domain of experience because I already have plenty of my own stuff to be getting on with.
In fact, why is there such strong opinion about whether or not the public believe the truth of evolution by natural selection? What difference does it make? Scientists don't care that most of the public doesn't know how to solve the Schrodinger wave equation for a hydrogen atom, for example. The reason seems pretty obvious to me. Members of the scientific community care little about how much science the public knows, but care a lot about their religion. They can't stand the idea that the public are religious and use the cloak of public education to disguise this vendetta. I'm sure that if someone found (purported) information about energy levels of atoms in the Bible scientists would suddenly resent the existence of members of the public who don't believe in quantum mechanics whereas currently they don't care. If the anti-Creationist lobby were really motivated by people who want to remove ignorance there'd also be a strong pro-quantum mechanics lobby educating people on that too. But anti-Creationists aren't interested in education, they're interested only in beating down anything they perceive as a threat to their own belief system.
And just for the record - I'm an atheist (not agnostic) Darwinian. And if you don't have the time to examine the evidence for evolution by natural selection and have instead defaulted with the beliefs of your parents, good luck to you. (But if you do get a spare moment, check evolution out because, among other things, it's quite a beautiful theory with lots of evidence.)
Science and religion don't have to be mutually exclusive things.
Sure. And you can go around believing that 1+1=2 and 1+1=3 at the same time. As long as you live the unexamined life and don't ever think too hard, these two beliefs will never come into conflict.
It showed how you could make a successful news web site by shamelessly stealing stories from other websites and without even carrying out the most basic form of editing. Slashdot is probably more widely read than any other geek news outlet, including all those that have their own reporters and editors. Demonstrating that you can run a news web site without what were previously perceived to be two of the key ingredients of a news outlet has significantly changed the news reporting landscape.
He he! I was wondering if my views of Asimov were a little extreme so I googled for shaggy dog stories. The first example I found was by Asimov.
Asimov's three laws were nothing more than a formal device which he could use to form loopholes that served as his punch lines. They didn't actually mean anything. From a scientific perspective they were completely unmotivated and, as you point out, they never really worked very well.
Yes. You impute to Asimov a sophistication that his writing clearly indicates he didn't have. His storytelling was always very plain and direct and all of the subtlety he could muster was usually reserved for the punch lines of his fiction, most of which were nothing more than shaggy dog stories.
Pray tell me, what does the prehistory of the human race have to do with ethics? Are we all supposed to behave differently because Darwin discovered we have non-human ancestors? When I'm trying to decide how to treat my neighbor, or who to vote for, the antics of a bunch of apes living a few million years ago are far from my mind.
"Oh, look at this old skull I just dug up in Africa, this showed humans used rocks to beat each other over the head, I think I'd better go and kick my neighbor's head in now."
Or to put it another way, your views on ethics are a shade below moronic.
'face' is a datastructure representing the face of the person being queried. Whatever 'arab' is, it's certainly not a datastructure representing a face. And one branch of your if statement returns a value while the other doesn't. Maybe what you meant was something like
...85% of role-players were able to convince this thing that they were terrorists despite the fact that they weren't? And this is newsworthy? The I Ching is more reliable. Except in this case I'm not exaggerating. The I Ching really is more reliable.
When someone says that a species is not "meant" to survive (as the person I initially replied to did), what they're doing is assuming intent on the part of evolution
This is nothing other than the naturalistic fallacy. Nature doesn't 'mean' anything.
But I've nothing against anthropomorphization if you are aware of what you are doing. I find it quite useful to treat nature as if it has 'intent' because I can make predictions based on it. For example, if I buy a machine and see it has a complex piece of engineering within it it's probably reasonable to assume that this piece of engineering serves a purpose because it would be weird for a designer to put all that effort into designing something useless. I can use similar forms of reasoning if I find a bizarre but complex organ within an organism that I don't understand. Despite my lack of understanding it's still reasonable for me to think "nature wouldn't create something like this without a purpose". In fact, almost every discovery of an apparently useless organ has eventually led to a discovery of its purpose, so this form of reasoning is valid. Hence I use intentional language when discussing evolution by natural selection.
Nonetheless, I'd still never say "this creature is not meant to survive". That's not a prediction of anything. It's just a value judgement.
It's a blind proccess based on probability, not some infallable mechanism for ensuring the correct changes occur.
The two are not mutually incompatible. That two containers of gas equalise pressure when connected is also a blind process based on probability. And yet the outcome is almost inevitable. There are non-trivial things we can say about evolution by natural selection despite it being a random process.
Slashdot Mirror
You can 'see' polarity of sunspots almost directly. In fact, here are some pictures. You can read the strength of the magnetic field by looking how the energy levels of atoms are modified. As an electron falls from one level to another it emits electromagnetic radiation with an energy corresponding to the difference. In particular, certain configurations of atoms which are normally indistinguishable, because the difference between them is simply that electron spins have been flipped, become distinct in the presence of magnetic fields, because a magentic field causes one or other energy level to be 'preferred'. This modifies the frequencies of the emitted radiation which we can then observe. This is known as Zeeman splitting. Additionally, we can read off the polarity of the fields from the polarisation of the radiation.
...there's a problem. Works for us. No need for VMs.
Every single time I have ever had direct access to the truth of a news story I have found the reporting to be shoddy - ranging from quotes in a newspaper attributed to me from a company I quit two years earlier and claims that the company I work for is Australian (it was based in the US with no Australian office) or an entire article about my employer's partnership with a competitor (with zero basis in reality), to claims that a recent weightwatcher of the month (a friend of mine) used to eat many hamburgers a day (a complete fabrication). I regularly see my own employers making fabricated press releases that are reported as news with zero attempt at verification by reporters. Whatever level, whether it's business reporting or feel good local news, reporting is a web of lies. God knows how much truth there is in reporting from places like Iraq when they can't tell the truth about their own backyard.
Um...why would someone aim a space probe at an asteroid, comet or planet and so demolish a very expensive piece of hardware designed for long term space exploration? Is it really necessary to point out that NASA are typically (but not always!) sensible enough to choose to aim their probes so that they don't crash into asteroids, planets and comets?
But they're failing to use my own much more reliable form of astronomy. They say that discovery of a new planet is always associated with new technology. I claim that finding of a new planet is always associated with new discoveries in the field of astronomy.
Reputedly, there exists a book with a picture of Borromean humans.
Comparing a Java compiler to a Haskell compiler, say, is like comparing a toddler's first steps to running ultramarathons.
What's funny is the way people rationalize this behavour by inventing the "common good" and so on. I guess you have to keep up the lie or else people might be tempted to go back to fighting civil wars again.
Aha! I knew it couldn't be so simple. I have to get a relative to sign up with an ISP and then kil^H^H^Hif they are about to die I can download stuff for free.
Did I understand that correctly?
Muahahah...!
In fact, I have no idea why it's of interest to anyone other than sociologists what people believe about the origins of humanity. I have no opinion on what's the best type of carburettor, or what's the best way to mix vermillion paint, or what was the cause of the fall of the Roman empire. These are all outside of my domain of experience because I already have plenty of my own stuff to be getting on with.
In fact, why is there such strong opinion about whether or not the public believe the truth of evolution by natural selection? What difference does it make? Scientists don't care that most of the public doesn't know how to solve the Schrodinger wave equation for a hydrogen atom, for example. The reason seems pretty obvious to me. Members of the scientific community care little about how much science the public knows, but care a lot about their religion. They can't stand the idea that the public are religious and use the cloak of public education to disguise this vendetta. I'm sure that if someone found (purported) information about energy levels of atoms in the Bible scientists would suddenly resent the existence of members of the public who don't believe in quantum mechanics whereas currently they don't care. If the anti-Creationist lobby were really motivated by people who want to remove ignorance there'd also be a strong pro-quantum mechanics lobby educating people on that too. But anti-Creationists aren't interested in education, they're interested only in beating down anything they perceive as a threat to their own belief system.
And just for the record - I'm an atheist (not agnostic) Darwinian. And if you don't have the time to examine the evidence for evolution by natural selection and have instead defaulted with the beliefs of your parents, good luck to you. (But if you do get a spare moment, check evolution out because, among other things, it's quite a beautiful theory with lots of evidence.)
Hey! Fight like a ma^H^Hmember of whatever sex you're a member of! Don't just give up and say "I suck"!
It showed how you could make a successful news web site by shamelessly stealing stories from other websites and without even carrying out the most basic form of editing. Slashdot is probably more widely read than any other geek news outlet, including all those that have their own reporters and editors. Demonstrating that you can run a news web site without what were previously perceived to be two of the key ingredients of a news outlet has significantly changed the news reporting landscape.
Asimov's three laws were nothing more than a formal device which he could use to form loopholes that served as his punch lines. They didn't actually mean anything. From a scientific perspective they were completely unmotivated and, as you point out, they never really worked very well.
Yes. You impute to Asimov a sophistication that his writing clearly indicates he didn't have. His storytelling was always very plain and direct and all of the subtlety he could muster was usually reserved for the punch lines of his fiction, most of which were nothing more than shaggy dog stories.
"Oh, look at this old skull I just dug up in Africa, this showed humans used rocks to beat each other over the head, I think I'd better go and kick my neighbor's head in now."
Or to put it another way, your views on ethics are a shade below moronic.
'face' is a datastructure representing the face of the person being queried. Whatever 'arab' is, it's certainly not a datastructure representing a face. And one branch of your if statement returns a value while the other doesn't. Maybe what you meant was something like
This is Slashdot. If you're joke isn't funny then at least make it pass type checking....85% of role-players were able to convince this thing that they were terrorists despite the fact that they weren't? And this is newsworthy? The I Ching is more reliable. Except in this case I'm not exaggerating. The I Ching really is more reliable.
But I've nothing against anthropomorphization if you are aware of what you are doing. I find it quite useful to treat nature as if it has 'intent' because I can make predictions based on it. For example, if I buy a machine and see it has a complex piece of engineering within it it's probably reasonable to assume that this piece of engineering serves a purpose because it would be weird for a designer to put all that effort into designing something useless. I can use similar forms of reasoning if I find a bizarre but complex organ within an organism that I don't understand. Despite my lack of understanding it's still reasonable for me to think "nature wouldn't create something like this without a purpose". In fact, almost every discovery of an apparently useless organ has eventually led to a discovery of its purpose, so this form of reasoning is valid. Hence I use intentional language when discussing evolution by natural selection.
Nonetheless, I'd still never say "this creature is not meant to survive". That's not a prediction of anything. It's just a value judgement.
So periodically I use POP to pull down my gmail into Mail.app giving me the best whether I'm online or off.