"But this isn't FTL as we understand in this discussion"
You have a valid point, I was simply emphasising that FTL phenomena do exist in modern physics but the paradoxical effects we would see if we could observe it are "censored" from us by the FTL limit on information.
Luckily I only encountered one totally inept lecturer during my degree, mostly they were intelligent and a few of them were even interesting. After I graduated I taught C at university for a few years and ended up friends with some of the interesting ones. In my lab 'code style' was worth 50% in every assignment much to the dismay of engineering students who invariably ignored my style sheet and wrote their entire assignment inside main(), the teachable portion of those students did not make the same mistake with their second assignment.
You appear to have everything it takes to be "succesfull", which does not not necessarily mean wealthy. I have interviewed and hired quite a few programers in my time, out of a class of fifty CS students there would be maybe five I would consider hiring as junior programmers. They are easy to spot because they go the extra mile to teach themselves all the stuff that won't fit into the lectures. Intellectual curiosity is uncommon and can not be taught after puberty, you either have it by then or you don't, the best any degree can aim for is to teach the intellectually curious how to teach themselves.
As for games, I was a 70's HS dropout, I got into computers almost 30yrs ago via a magazine article describing Conway's Game of Life, I was obsessed with it and went through reams of paper hand drawing the cells, the obsession drove me to buy a second hand AppleII and teach myself how to get it to play Conway's game. Arguments ensude with the wife about TV usage, in the late 80's I enrolled in uni not just because everyone told me there was money in programing but also because it gave me an excuse to lash out on a brand new ACER XT.
Speaking of the game of life, if games are a waste of time then it follows that life is also a waste of time. That's a depressing worldview if you ask me.
In common useage "faith", "conviction" and "belief" are synonyms, Rand is simply playing Humpty Dumpty when she defines them otherwsie. I have read Rand and I'm old enough to remeber when she was a regular talking head on the box, IMHO Rand's "obtectivisim" is a catchy name for a failed attempt to use the scientific method to justify selfish behaviour (ie: realisim with a political agenda).
"Believe whatever you'd like, and so long as you do not cross the line to the point where you are intolerably interfering with my own free will and property, it is none of my concern."
I wholeheartedly agree with that philosophy but Rand was certainly not the first philosopher to subscribe to "freedom of thought". Come to think of it I don't know of anything that Rand said that hadn't been said before, albeit with less venom. As for your suggestion that I should read other philosophers I've been wondering why you thought of Rand rather than (say) Popper when the subject at hand is the philosophy of science?
Quote from the link: "While special relativity constrains objects in the universe from moving faster than the speed of light with respect to each other, there is no such constraint in General Relativity. For example, an object which crosses the event horizon and falls into a black hole can be thought of as moving faster than light from the point of view of an outside observer. An expanding universe generally has a cosmological horizon, and like a black hole event horizon, this marks the boundary to the part of the universe that an observer can see. The horizon is the boundary beyond which objects are moving away too fast to be visible from Earth."
"The idea that people EVER need to make a leap of faith is total BS."
Faith is exaclty what is required everytime you drive through a green light. The very reason you don't think faith is required is because living beings have an unshakeable faith in their own faculties and perceptions.
Belief without evidence is called blind faith, science rests on the faith that the universe is ultimately predictable and will continue to exist even if we don't (in other words it believes that the proverbial tree in a forest does indeed make a noise).
There is no way to "prove" that the universe behaves like this but rational people take it as an indisputable fact because the evidence of ones own perceptions is very difficult to ignore particularly when they match the perceptions of other humans. So yes, science is based on faith as is all knowledge that goes further than "I think therfore I am".
"The bottom line is that you're engaging in fancy footwork trying to get to him to use the word "faith"
No he is not, the "bottom line" is that basic scientific philosophy confuses the hell out of people who subscribe to the popular but incorrect notion that science is in the bussiness of "proof". We wouldn't even be having this discussion if epistemology was taught in modern high schools.
There are two stated assumptions in the principa, one of them is that "time is constant", 20/20 hindsight says this assumption was wrong. However, the fact that he had the insight to recognise that statement was an assumption is testement to his genius.
"a true attempt to create such a simulation would need to factor in the stochasticity of ion channels, branchings in neurons and various other biological phenomena that have a tremendous impact on how our brains work."
If this research is connected to IBM's blue brain project then that is exactly what they have done with their simulation of a mouse neocortex. It is not simply an abstract ANN which any first year CS student should be able to knock up, it is a true simulation based on the brains physical and chemical properties.
"So even if that guy succeeded in making something that acts like a cat brain according to some reductionist analysis of what a cat brain "does" (do brains do anything?), he hasn't done anything significant"
Modeling a brain with realistic behaviour is insignificant? - What planet are you from?
"do brains do anything?" - Apparently yours does very little.
"The main collections are at the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum thanks to our pillaging of the colonies in the last centuries"
That reminds me, there is an egyptian statue of a baboon god made of red granite in the Britsh museam, it's in excellent condition except that it's genitials are missing, apparently chiseled of by prudish victorian officials. A freind of mine who has been to the Louve and also revels in oddball history has confirmed the French have a matching (unmutilated) statue.
"And the best piece of advice is DO NOT SAY YOU ARE AN AMERICAN. Remember - you are a CANADIAN. This will serve you well to avoid problems.:)"
I spent five weeks driving 3500km around the UK staying at pubs and B&B's, from London to Orkney to the west coast of Ireland it was a great experience and the people were with few exceptions warm and friendly, that is after I explained my accent is Australian not American.
However I did see an american tourist walk away unharmed after getting up and doing a riverdance in an Irish pub, he was very, very good and earned a round of applause for being brave enough to admit he was american. Great pub, held about 100 people, the owner spent most the night playing the accordian and calling locals up on stage to do their thing. Spending a few hours in a pub like that it's easy to see why such a small island has produced more than it's fair share of great musicians.
Oh and the scenery down the west coast of Scotland is some of the most spectacular I have ever seen. The road trip from John-O-Groats to the Isle of Sky is not a particularly long distance trip by Aussie standards but it took me two days, you've got to watch out for the sheep because there are no fences and I can only assume that two way traffic was a novelty when the road was built. Having said that replacing it with a modern road would be akin to vandalisim.
Yes, the buildings themselves are fascinating. Westminster blew me away and no geek should visit London without paying respects to Newton who is burried under it's floor. As others have mentioned the British museam is awsome and will easily cost you a full day. The Rossetta stone is just the tip of the iceberg, you cannot look at the greek/egyptian stonework and fail to be impressed with such skill and precision from bronze age and earlier tools. The hyroglyphs(sic) in particular look like they've been carved into the red granite with a laser beam.
Frequenting the pubs is a key survival tip, it's the only place where you have any chance of getting something edible for a reasonable price.
I don't see a problem with spending money on Earth sciences, matter of fact I think it's a benifit to understand the planet I find myself living on. I do however see a problem with people deliberately peddling dangerous disinformation for profit, I don't care if the disinformation relates to medicine, evolution or climate science. The trend toward "wishfull thinking" and "equal weight to unequal sources" over the last decade reminds me of Sagan's nightmare...
"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir" - Sagan, Demon haunted world (Science as a candle in the dark).
"Wow, you assign him so much credit. Do you think he actually has any technical people in his inner circle who dare tell him he's acting like a buffoon?"
Yes, you don't get that rich by surrounding yourself with sicophants but you might keep a few of them around for when you want to demonstrate who's in charge. I'm also pretty sure Murdoch is not above playing the old fool card when it's convienient to do so. Having said that I agree the story he is currently telling everyone is that he will cut off his nose to spite his face.
"Even while different parts of both antarctic and arctic icepack are thickening."
Yes, the ice is thickening anywhere around the poles with an altitude greater that 3000 meters, ie: central Greenland and the Antartic ridge. Everywhere else the ice is shrinking in both area and volume (including temprate glaciers above 3000 meters such as those that feed the great river systems of India and southern china). this is inline with model predictions going back to the late 80's. Another phenomena that was predicted by models in the 80's and has since been observed is a phenomena called "polar amplification", ie: the poles warm up faster than the rest of the planet.
"To diverage off topic a bit --several small islands around Greenland in 1950 were not connected to the mainland via ice. Between 1960 and 2003(?) the islands were covered and connected by ice. Now once again they are not covered by ice and that is evidence of DOOM? No."
Of course not but that's because your story is an irrelevant anecdote, NASA (the organisation, not just one of it's scientists) are now predicting an ice free artic sea to occur in summer of 2012-13, so we don't have to wait long to find out. If as I suspect NASA's observations and models are correct then an ice free Artic goes hand in hand with dustbowl conditions in the midwest.
Saltwater aquicultures for raising southern bluefin Tuna are used widely in here in Australia a single high quality fish will sell for thousands of dollars on the Japanese market, consequently there are now millions of dollars tied up in this industry. They farms are basically large nets with a cirular bouy to float one end of the net.
Water quality is not a problem because the farms are in the same part of the ocean where the tuna naturally occur, however other wild creatures such as killer whales, seals, sharks, etc, are a major hassle. These natural predators are large enough to destroy entire farms, often killing themselves and the tuna in the process.
Since scientists are paid a wage then technically that's true but it's a red-herring, the point is research should be independent and IMHO you are being deliberately obtuse by ignoring the obvious distinction between paying for a study (science) and paying for a conclusion (marketing).
Disclaimer: I have no problems with corporates supporting science, in fact I would like to see more of it, for example Shell have been very generous sharing their data with scientists as well as regularly loaning their deep sea submersibles to oceanographers.
Watt's is a TV weatherman who runs the WUWT (Watts Up With That) web site mentioned in TFA. He is also mentioned in the RC response, have you actully read the RC response?
+5 informative? - When did the average slashdotter lose the ability to read a graph?
Those charts do not show what the GP is claiming. In fact 20th century tempratures do not even appear on the chart!!! For one thing 100/500,000,000 is way too small to discern on the graph but the real reason is that the nature of moving averages is such that the last 100yrs is statistically unknowable on such a long timescale. Further, according to the text of these well known graphs the intervals used for the short and long term moving averages are 3Myr and 15Myr, in other words not only does it not show the 20th century, mathematically it CANNOT say anything about the trend over the last 3 million years!
I don't know if the GP pulled his conclusion out of his own arse or that of a lobbyist but the style of misdirection is typical of the disinformation that flows like sewage across the internet.
"Face it: if the world is in danger and we're looking to our leaders to save the day, we're screwed. The best bet on climate change is to alter the individual consumer's behavior."
Yes, whenever I see a coal fired plant I'm reminded of the statues on Easter Island.
Slashdot Mirror
"But this isn't FTL as we understand in this discussion"
You have a valid point, I was simply emphasising that FTL phenomena do exist in modern physics but the paradoxical effects we would see if we could observe it are "censored" from us by the FTL limit on information.
Luckily I only encountered one totally inept lecturer during my degree, mostly they were intelligent and a few of them were even interesting. After I graduated I taught C at university for a few years and ended up friends with some of the interesting ones. In my lab 'code style' was worth 50% in every assignment much to the dismay of engineering students who invariably ignored my style sheet and wrote their entire assignment inside main(), the teachable portion of those students did not make the same mistake with their second assignment.
You appear to have everything it takes to be "succesfull", which does not not necessarily mean wealthy. I have interviewed and hired quite a few programers in my time, out of a class of fifty CS students there would be maybe five I would consider hiring as junior programmers. They are easy to spot because they go the extra mile to teach themselves all the stuff that won't fit into the lectures. Intellectual curiosity is uncommon and can not be taught after puberty, you either have it by then or you don't, the best any degree can aim for is to teach the intellectually curious how to teach themselves.
As for games, I was a 70's HS dropout, I got into computers almost 30yrs ago via a magazine article describing Conway's Game of Life, I was obsessed with it and went through reams of paper hand drawing the cells, the obsession drove me to buy a second hand AppleII and teach myself how to get it to play Conway's game. Arguments ensude with the wife about TV usage, in the late 80's I enrolled in uni not just because everyone told me there was money in programing but also because it gave me an excuse to lash out on a brand new ACER XT.
Speaking of the game of life, if games are a waste of time then it follows that life is also a waste of time. That's a depressing worldview if you ask me.
In common useage "faith", "conviction" and "belief" are synonyms, Rand is simply playing Humpty Dumpty when she defines them otherwsie. I have read Rand and I'm old enough to remeber when she was a regular talking head on the box, IMHO Rand's "obtectivisim" is a catchy name for a failed attempt to use the scientific method to justify selfish behaviour (ie: realisim with a political agenda).
"Believe whatever you'd like, and so long as you do not cross the line to the point where you are intolerably interfering with my own free will and property, it is none of my concern."
I wholeheartedly agree with that philosophy but Rand was certainly not the first philosopher to subscribe to "freedom of thought". Come to think of it I don't know of anything that Rand said that hadn't been said before, albeit with less venom. As for your suggestion that I should read other philosophers I've been wondering why you thought of Rand rather than (say) Popper when the subject at hand is the philosophy of science?
BTW: I like your sig.
My own modest hypothesis is that your bullshit detector is broken.
"We should stop dismissing ideas of science simply because they don't fit with what we believe should happen."
Who's the "we" in your statement?
"I don't think we've ever stumbled upon a phenomena that suggests FTL in our universe. I'd say that's a good hint..."
We certainly haven't observed anything FTL as such an observation would be paradoxical however the inflationary part of the standard cosmological model assumes it exists.
Quote from the link: "While special relativity constrains objects in the universe from moving faster than the speed of light with respect to each other, there is no such constraint in General Relativity. For example, an object which crosses the event horizon and falls into a black hole can be thought of as moving faster than light from the point of view of an outside observer. An expanding universe generally has a cosmological horizon, and like a black hole event horizon, this marks the boundary to the part of the universe that an observer can see. The horizon is the boundary beyond which objects are moving away too fast to be visible from Earth."
"so, even Einstein fell prey to conventional wisdom and thinking."
And then had the insight and humilty to call it his "greatest mistake".
"The idea that people EVER need to make a leap of faith is total BS."
Faith is exaclty what is required everytime you drive through a green light. The very reason you don't think faith is required is because living beings have an unshakeable faith in their own faculties and perceptions.
Rand wrote a mountain of twaddle. If you think that is unfair then please explain how one can have a conviction and yet not any have faith in it?
"Faith is belief without proof."
Belief without evidence is called blind faith, science rests on the faith that the universe is ultimately predictable and will continue to exist even if we don't (in other words it believes that the proverbial tree in a forest does indeed make a noise).
There is no way to "prove" that the universe behaves like this but rational people take it as an indisputable fact because the evidence of ones own perceptions is very difficult to ignore particularly when they match the perceptions of other humans. So yes, science is based on faith as is all knowledge that goes further than "I think therfore I am".
"The bottom line is that you're engaging in fancy footwork trying to get to him to use the word "faith"
No he is not, the "bottom line" is that basic scientific philosophy confuses the hell out of people who subscribe to the popular but incorrect notion that science is in the bussiness of "proof". We wouldn't even be having this discussion if epistemology was taught in modern high schools.
There are two stated assumptions in the principa, one of them is that "time is constant", 20/20 hindsight says this assumption was wrong. However, the fact that he had the insight to recognise that statement was an assumption is testement to his genius.
"a true attempt to create such a simulation would need to factor in the stochasticity of ion channels, branchings in neurons and various other biological phenomena that have a tremendous impact on how our brains work."
If this research is connected to IBM's blue brain project then that is exactly what they have done with their simulation of a mouse neocortex. It is not simply an abstract ANN which any first year CS student should be able to knock up, it is a true simulation based on the brains physical and chemical properties.
"So even if that guy succeeded in making something that acts like a cat brain according to some reductionist analysis of what a cat brain "does" (do brains do anything?), he hasn't done anything significant"
Modeling a brain with realistic behaviour is insignificant? - What planet are you from?
"do brains do anything?" - Apparently yours does very little.
"The main collections are at the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum thanks to our pillaging of the colonies in the last centuries"
That reminds me, there is an egyptian statue of a baboon god made of red granite in the Britsh museam, it's in excellent condition except that it's genitials are missing, apparently chiseled of by prudish victorian officials. A freind of mine who has been to the Louve and also revels in oddball history has confirmed the French have a matching (unmutilated) statue.
"And the best piece of advice is DO NOT SAY YOU ARE AN AMERICAN. Remember - you are a CANADIAN. This will serve you well to avoid problems. :)"
I spent five weeks driving 3500km around the UK staying at pubs and B&B's, from London to Orkney to the west coast of Ireland it was a great experience and the people were with few exceptions warm and friendly, that is after I explained my accent is Australian not American.
However I did see an american tourist walk away unharmed after getting up and doing a riverdance in an Irish pub, he was very, very good and earned a round of applause for being brave enough to admit he was american. Great pub, held about 100 people, the owner spent most the night playing the accordian and calling locals up on stage to do their thing. Spending a few hours in a pub like that it's easy to see why such a small island has produced more than it's fair share of great musicians.
Oh and the scenery down the west coast of Scotland is some of the most spectacular I have ever seen. The road trip from John-O-Groats to the Isle of Sky is not a particularly long distance trip by Aussie standards but it took me two days, you've got to watch out for the sheep because there are no fences and I can only assume that two way traffic was a novelty when the road was built. Having said that replacing it with a modern road would be akin to vandalisim.
Yes, the buildings themselves are fascinating. Westminster blew me away and no geek should visit London without paying respects to Newton who is burried under it's floor. As others have mentioned the British museam is awsome and will easily cost you a full day. The Rossetta stone is just the tip of the iceberg, you cannot look at the greek/egyptian stonework and fail to be impressed with such skill and precision from bronze age and earlier tools. The hyroglyphs(sic) in particular look like they've been carved into the red granite with a laser beam.
Frequenting the pubs is a key survival tip, it's the only place where you have any chance of getting something edible for a reasonable price.
I don't see a problem with spending money on Earth sciences, matter of fact I think it's a benifit to understand the planet I find myself living on. I do however see a problem with people deliberately peddling dangerous disinformation for profit, I don't care if the disinformation relates to medicine, evolution or climate science. The trend toward "wishfull thinking" and "equal weight to unequal sources" over the last decade reminds me of Sagan's nightmare...
"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir" - Sagan, Demon haunted world (Science as a candle in the dark).
"Wow, you assign him so much credit. Do you think he actually has any technical people in his inner circle who dare tell him he's acting like a buffoon?"
Yes, you don't get that rich by surrounding yourself with sicophants but you might keep a few of them around for when you want to demonstrate who's in charge. I'm also pretty sure Murdoch is not above playing the old fool card when it's convienient to do so. Having said that I agree the story he is currently telling everyone is that he will cut off his nose to spite his face.
"Even while different parts of both antarctic and arctic icepack are thickening."
Yes, the ice is thickening anywhere around the poles with an altitude greater that 3000 meters, ie: central Greenland and the Antartic ridge. Everywhere else the ice is shrinking in both area and volume (including temprate glaciers above 3000 meters such as those that feed the great river systems of India and southern china). this is inline with model predictions going back to the late 80's. Another phenomena that was predicted by models in the 80's and has since been observed is a phenomena called "polar amplification", ie: the poles warm up faster than the rest of the planet.
"To diverage off topic a bit --several small islands around Greenland in 1950 were not connected to the mainland via ice. Between 1960 and 2003(?) the islands were covered and connected by ice. Now once again they are not covered by ice and that is evidence of DOOM? No."
Of course not but that's because your story is an irrelevant anecdote, NASA (the organisation, not just one of it's scientists) are now predicting an ice free artic sea to occur in summer of 2012-13, so we don't have to wait long to find out. If as I suspect NASA's observations and models are correct then an ice free Artic goes hand in hand with dustbowl conditions in the midwest.
My bad, I missed the context of the tread, the heartland institute are indeed akin to the discovery institute.
Saltwater aquicultures for raising southern bluefin Tuna are used widely in here in Australia a single high quality fish will sell for thousands of dollars on the Japanese market, consequently there are now millions of dollars tied up in this industry. They farms are basically large nets with a cirular bouy to float one end of the net.
Water quality is not a problem because the farms are in the same part of the ocean where the tuna naturally occur, however other wild creatures such as killer whales, seals, sharks, etc, are a major hassle. These natural predators are large enough to destroy entire farms, often killing themselves and the tuna in the process.
Since scientists are paid a wage then technically that's true but it's a red-herring, the point is research should be independent and IMHO you are being deliberately obtuse by ignoring the obvious distinction between paying for a study (science) and paying for a conclusion (marketing).
Disclaimer: I have no problems with corporates supporting science, in fact I would like to see more of it, for example Shell have been very generous sharing their data with scientists as well as regularly loaning their deep sea submersibles to oceanographers.
Watt's is a TV weatherman who runs the WUWT (Watts Up With That) web site mentioned in TFA. He is also mentioned in the RC response, have you actully read the RC response?
+5 informative? - When did the average slashdotter lose the ability to read a graph?
Those charts do not show what the GP is claiming. In fact 20th century tempratures do not even appear on the chart!!! For one thing 100/500,000,000 is way too small to discern on the graph but the real reason is that the nature of moving averages is such that the last 100yrs is statistically unknowable on such a long timescale. Further, according to the text of these well known graphs the intervals used for the short and long term moving averages are 3Myr and 15Myr, in other words not only does it not show the 20th century, mathematically it CANNOT say anything about the trend over the last 3 million years!
I don't know if the GP pulled his conclusion out of his own arse or that of a lobbyist but the style of misdirection is typical of the disinformation that flows like sewage across the internet.
"Face it: if the world is in danger and we're looking to our leaders to save the day, we're screwed. The best bet on climate change is to alter the individual consumer's behavior."
Yes, whenever I see a coal fired plant I'm reminded of the statues on Easter Island.