non-scientific explainations of things that work just as well as the scientific explaination?
Any cartoon theory that you come up with for electron behavior in semiconductor devices is either going to be the same physical theory with "names changed to protect the innocent", or is going to be seriously deficient in some crucial way.
They DON'T work as well. Separate theories, made up fresh for every application is negative progress. Now you need a theory that works for CRTs, one that works for LCDs, one that works for laser diodes, one that works for transistors, one that works for electric motors, one that works for neon tubes, one that works for incandescent light bulbs, one that works for chemical reactions, one that works for beta decay, and on and on and on.
How about just one theory that works for all of these, and, as far as we can tell, unlimited possible future uses of electrons. Like, for instance, the perfectly good theory that physicists have right now? Because, believe it or not, every one of these electrons is exactly the same as every other electron.
The fundamental scientific revolution Isaac Newton made was to realize that the SAME physical theory could explain BOTH celestial motion as well as the fact that things fall to the ground. See, one theory that explains twice as many phenomena is BETTER than two separate special-purpose theories.
No, the specialization of trade is distinctly different than comparative advantage.
Actually, they are extremely closely related. Comparative advantage means that the *relative local prices* of common products are different for different countries. Not *absolute prices*, but *relative local prices*.
The *result* of this differential is that countries can mutually benefit by shifting local production from one good to another, i.e. specializing in production of certain goods, and using trade to exchange the goods of specialization for even MORE of the goods that were specialized *away from*.
This is the same thing that happens in households. I can grow food in my garden, if I want, and I could raise sheep, shear them, and make my own clothes from the wool, etc., etc., but what I do is specialize in a very narrow field of engineering, and use trade (i.e. buy from my neighbor) to get my food and clothing. Similarly, the farmer depends on someone like me to write the software he uses on his PC, and grows food in exchange.
There is no *essential* difference between the local and global arguments for specialization.
The most compelling analogy I've heard is that there are *two* technologies to make cars for Americans. One is to build them in Detroit, out of steel, rubber, etc. Another is to grow the raw material for automobiles, that is, corn, in Iowa cornfields, ship that across the Pacific Ocean, and a few months later, the ships come back loaded with Toyotas.
The question is not particularly whether Japanese corn growers would get more or less for their crop than American farmers, or whether Japanese auto workers make more or less than American auto makers, but whether it is cheaper to produce cars in Detroit or to *grow cars* in Iowa. This is critically different, and you have not shown any sign of understanding this basic concept.
With everyone else cheaper than us, selling the same goods and services as us, then there is no reason for them to buy from us.
For crying out loud, and for at least the third time, economists have understood this statement is NONSENSE for about two hundred years. Stop repeating it, or you will simply look like an ignoramus.
You missed the point, China didn't have to give up squat. If they wanted more cars they had millions of unemployed people who could have made them.
You misunderstand what causes unemployment. If China "wanted" more cars at the price that was implied by the equivalent in Chinese cars, then they WOULD HAVE BEEN PRODUCING THOSE CARS already, and your original numbers would have to be changed to reflect that.
You are confusing an aggregate change in demand, which affects unemployment, with the changes in allocation of resources in the presence of trade.
It's like arguing that a faster hard drive makes no difference in performance of virtual memory because there is an empty DIMM slot that "could be filled with even faster RAM if we wanted to."
Less suitable silk meant more work had to go into producing shirts from it. Rather than falling behind, more people were hired to keep production up, and afterwards China still had unemployed people. Sorry I didn't make that clear.
This is a completely bizarre notion. There isn't some intrinsic "number of shirts that must be produced, no matter what happens." If silk becomes scarcer, like all the silkworms die, then there will be fewer shirts produced, because the price will go up, and fewer people will buy them.
Also, what the hell is anyone going to do with a fractional shirt?
It's a consequence of your bizarre model of an economy that is roughly the size of a household engaging in international trade. Multiply all the numbers by 10 for Trinidad, so that 100 people are choosing between 20 cars and 60 shirts, and they will be able to get 65 shirts.
The real question is where you came up with the idea that the "proper price" for two cars from Trinidad was 10 shirts from China. Did you just claim that *every* citizen of Trinidad wants a shirt before he'll allow trade, although 4 of them are going naked in autarky? Or can you just not do math?
Atoms are a good example- they're completely mythical, a model. Nobody has ever actually *seen* an atom, they're a consensus construction based on how certain molecules and compounds work-
1) You are using a completely contrived definition for "myth." You might as well call everything humans ever thought of as "myth" but then it means nothing.
Ernst Mach could get away with saying the atomic theory was only a model of chemistry, back before 1900. Statistical mechanics showed that atoms could have actual directly measurable effects (such as observed in Brownian motion), by the time of Einstein, and since then, things have gotten even more clearly in favor of the atomic theory of matter.
You cannot make an nuclear weapon if atoms aren't real particles. The phenomenon of critical mass depends very much on it.
I'm not saying it's better. I'm saying that it is EQUALLY SUFFICIENT and there's no reason to be bigoted about one over the other.
That's just fucking bullshit. Intel can't make microprocessors with your elf theory of electricity; they *can* make microprocessors using 20th century solid-state physics and materials science.
to lie to Parliment to lower tariffs, eventually causing the Recession of 1988.
? What time machine did Ricardo use to do that?
Ricardo lied to you.
Let's see...there are two possibilities here
1) someone calling himself MarxistHacker42 doesn't understand basic economics 2) economics professors all over the western world don't know how to do basic calculus.
However, can the US produce goods and services cheaper than the rest of the world,... NO.
The same red herring, over and over again. This is NOT the criterion for international trade to be beneficial.
First off, our next door neighbors aren't another country. They're part of our country, our economy, under our political rules and laws.
And why is it favorable to give your neighbor money in exchange for his goods? Because he is specialized in something different than you are. If he's a baker and you are a dairy farmer, you trade some of your butter for some of his bread, and you both can make buttered toast. IT IS THE SAME SITUATION, and you missed it, because you don't understand the basic principles of economics.
Trinidad decides that it will forego the pleasure of puttering around its little island, and makes two cars to trade with China for 10 shirts.
NO. 10 shirts is not the price at which these would trade. Your math is faulty. To make two more Chinese cars, China would have to give up 20/3 = 6.66 Chinese-made shirts. Instead, they can give Trinidad 6.5 shirts in exchange for 2 Trinidad-made cars; both sides have more. China gets 100 million + 2 cars, and 1 billion - 6.5 shirts, which is more than they could have made previously, and Trinidad ends up with 6.5 shirts, which is more than they could possibly make in autaurky.
increased shirt demand has roused 150,000,000 of the unemployed from their wistful reverie,
This scenario is bizarre: less silk means more shirt production??
Give me a single fucking example of a myth that has consistent predictive power at all comparable to even Newton's theory of gravity.
Kind of like scientists keep believing in their theories long after subjective evidence shows them to be false?
Uh, I think you meant "objective evidence." Anyway, you were talking about electrons: give me a single fucking piece of evidence that indicates the present-day model of electrons is false, but your "elves inside the CRT" is better.
Believing in unicorns or that Zeus throws lightning bolts from the heavens is not the same as believing that there exist a particle with mass of 9.10938188e-31 kg (known to about one part in 10^-7), charge of 1.602176462e-19 C (known to a few parts in 10^-8), and a gyromagnetic ratio of -2.0023193043737 (known to a few parts in 10^-12).
The essential truth that international trade is mutually beneficial does not depend on details such as the number of countries.
The key insight is that there is a pool of productive factors distributed around countries; by allowing participants in the market to engage in trade with one another, they will choose to do so where it is in their mutual advantage, and will be able to use specialization to increase their own productivity given the larger overall market. Nobody trades to make themselves worse off. Its the same reason that subsistence farmers who make their own clothing are poorer than specialized Westerners, or that you buy a computer from Dell or a white-box vendor, instead of starting with a bunch of chips and a PC board schematic.
Ricardo's argument is simply the clearest explanation around for why the naive statement that "Everything is cheaper in India!" does not mean that trade is bad. The model of two countries, two goods is not necessary for trade to be beneficial.
It's not enough to come up with some vague objection "oooh, but fabs are expensive, therefore trade would be bad." Come up with a real fucking model example of trade being bad, then convince me it is relevant to the outsourcing discussion. Instead, you slashbots continue to make illogical statements that fly in the face of basic insights that have been known for two hundred years now.
Do you argue that Silicon Valley residents need trade barriers to protect themselves from the unfair advantage Iowa has in farm products? Why don't we erect trade barriers between ourselves and our next door neighbors?
Perhaps you've heard of this guy named David Ricardo?
Even if, as you claim, EVERYTHING can be made cheaper in India than in the U.S., trade is still MUTUALLY beneficial. Unless everything is made cheaper in India in *exactly* the same ratio, there will be benefits to specialization and trade.
Why does the council have to meet to hash out the fine points of doctrine, if God can just magically make them agree through introspection? Why did the Councils have to fight so hard to wipe out all those heretical beliefs that people kept coming up with all on their own, and all those crazy scriptures that didn't end up being canonical? Why do people have to be excommunicated for holding heretical beliefs? Why doesn't God just speak to them and straighten everything out?
Have you ever taken a chemistry or physics laboratory? Have you ever measured the speed of light? Have you ever done the Millikan oil-drop experiment? Sequenced DNA?
My computer can calculate prime numbers using electronic circuits that just keep working over and over billions of times *every* second, and the prime numbers keep coming out the same way as some guy I've never met put into a book or puts onto the web. Christians can't get their scriptures to avoid saying that Christ is coming within the lifetime of those who were around during his ministry.
Ever read a periodic table? Everybody's has the elements in the same order. They don't meet in councils to know which atomic numbers have what properties. The atoms just *are* that way.
Myths don't respond consistently to input conditions. Otherwise, they'd be science, you dumbfuck.
Religions don't "work" in ANYTHING LIKE the way scientific theories do. Everybody is always praying to God or Allah or the FSM to help everybody they like, and God still randomly fucks with people by giving them terrible cancers, or sending hurricanes, or tsunamis, or letting other religious zealots fly planes into the buildings they happen to work in. Am I supposed to believe God is on the side of terrorists, because their experiment in the name of God succeeded?
God answers your prayers? He's wonderful! Thank you God for letting me win the lottery!! Thank you God for letting me win the Superbowl!! Or he doesn't answer your prayers, so he is testing your faith. Thank you God for testing my faith by letting me lose the lottery!! Thank you God for testing my faith by letting me lose the Superbowl!! Thank you God for wiping out my family in a tsunami, because we all are sinners, although I was away on a trip at the time, so my sinning family was wiped out, but my sinning ass was left behind to marvel at your wonderful, wise, and just ways, O God!
What controlled experiments can you conduct on religious beliefs? That religious believers keep believing in their religion, no matter what happens? That's not a test of religion, its a test of believers.
Dual core being "more efficient" depends very much on the task being considered.
For any sufficiently large task, the bottleneck is the path to main memory. For a given level of package & bus limitations, dual-core must use an amount of bandwidth to main memory to feed two processing units rather than one.
For tasks that fit in on-chip cache, of course, the bottleneck is processing, and dual-core can be a huge improvement, especially where the synchronization overhead would have to go off-chip in the case of dual processors, as you mention.
1) There are at least two *sequences* of creation, coming from the two different sources. One in which man is created before the plants and animals, and one in which man is created after.
2) The issue of a raqiya', which I had heard about long before 1991, and I've never heard of Seely. The article you link to is a whole lot of argument to avoid the simplest possible interpretation: the firmament separating the waters is the same picture that the article admits was a common cosmology. The argument you link to is largely based on the supposition that an ancient Hebrew word is referring to modern concepts such as "atmosphere" and "interstellar space."
The fact is that the ancient Hebrew people were nomads without any significant scientific knowledge. The most likely scenario is that unsophisticated people would have an unsophisticated cosmology. Instead, you literalists twist and contort yourselves to "prove" that Genesis is compatible with modern scientific knowledge.
That makes sense only to people who make the initial assumption that Genesis is literally true. Why? What do you gain from that? Just some kind of comfort that because you can "prove" it 100% accurate, it must be straight from God. But that is only what you assumed in the first place.
The point is not that there are passages in Genesis that are 100% incompatible with modern cosmology; the language is too poetic and figurative for that kind of proof. The point is that since the language *is* poetic and figurative, that you should probably consider it *as* poetic and figurative, and the idea that it is 100% scientifically accurate is bizzare.
When you read Genesis, about 90% of modern cosmological knowledge requires some special pleading about the inadequacy of ancient Hebrew to be scientifically precise. Yet you literalists insist it is still 100% accurate. That just isn't persuasive. I prefer the interpretation that the writers of Genesis just didn't have good information on the topic, and if God was involved, being 100% scientifically accurate was not the point. Otherwise, He would have put the scientific terms in ancient Hebrew, and we would be celebrating all the amazing Hebrew astronomers who even knew the Hubble constant.
How about this: that the creation of the universe has basically nothing in common with the description in Genesis? In fact, there are *two* incompatible descriptions *within* Genesis, derived from different sources.
Do you also believe that the sky is a hard dome, with little holes in it? And there is water above the holes, which sometimes comes down as rain, and when it is night, light is shining through the holes to make stars? Because that's what is separating the waters in the Genesis story.
A concrete interpretation of the description in Genesis would work equally well for any sequence of events of the form
1) There was stuff 2) Something happened to the stuff
The fact that this stuff was pretty unlike ordinary water in all respects, and that the event of the big bang seems to have pretty little to do with electromagnetic radiation (which couldn't propagate freely until after the plasma of electrons+nuclei condensed into neutral atoms), means that "water" and "light" hardly count as a solid foundation for literal interpretation.
Well, we use completely different methods to compute these quantities.
"Age of the universe" are based on astronomical measurements. The distance to astronomical objects is generally impossible to determine directly; things are dim for two reasons: being not very bright, or being far away, and you can't tell just by looking which one it is. Instead, we must almost always make some assumptions about the behavior and intrinsic brightness of "standard candles" such as supernovas of various types. There is a lower bound on the age of the universe from "age of a rock" and "age of meteorites" determined pretty accurately by radioactive dating.
"Seconds after the big bang" are determined by calculations involving fundamental particles at high energies. These can be confirmed to some extent by laboratory experiment at facilities like particle colliders.
A simpler description is that our universe was evolving very rapidly at the early stages, so that a 3 minute old universe looks much different from a 10,000 year old universe. While a 15 billion and 16 billion year-old universe looks about the same.
Ever notice how quickly an infant develops, and how gradually adults change appearance? Same idea.
Um, these guys named "Galileo," "Newton," "Laplace," "Mach," "Maxwell," "Einstein," "Heisenberg" made a great deal of contributions to the theory of "cause" and "effect."
The whole concept of "cause" has been revolutionized by physical science. The very idea that we can write down differential equations which accurately describe the things like planetary motion, molecular chemistry, optics, behavior of atoms, microchips, and diode lasers, among countless other things, means that we have developed a much more precise notion of what a causal mechanism could be.
Thomas Aquinas would be absolutely baffled by the mathematical analysis of initial conditions. Yet Netwon's equations are second-order differential equations, the evolution of which are *completely* determined by the positions and velocities of particles at an instant in time, and requires no change in the equations to fully capture the dynamics. Similar boundary conditions suffice to specify the behavior of quantum systems.
Given that kind of precision with which we can analyze physical problems, the vague idea of a "Prime Mover" seems rather primitive, no?
No, cold glass is solid, and molten glass is liquid.
The term "glass" refers to the amorphous nature of the atomic order; the atoms are not arranged into a regular periodic crystalline array, but have only short-range order. That is, each atom has a fixed relationship to its neighbors, but you cannot predict where the neighbors' neighbors will be.
Room temperature SiO2 is quite solid, and has negligible flow.
Slashdot Mirror
non-scientific explainations of things that work just as well as the scientific explaination?
Any cartoon theory that you come up with for electron behavior in semiconductor devices is either going to be the same physical theory with "names changed to protect the innocent", or is going to be seriously deficient in some crucial way.
They DON'T work as well. Separate theories, made up fresh for every application is negative progress. Now you need a theory that works for CRTs, one that works for LCDs, one that works for laser diodes, one that works for transistors, one that works for electric motors, one that works for neon tubes, one that works for incandescent light bulbs, one that works for chemical reactions, one that works for beta decay, and on and on and on.
How about just one theory that works for all of these, and, as far as we can tell, unlimited possible future uses of electrons. Like, for instance, the perfectly good theory that physicists have right now? Because, believe it or not, every one of these electrons is exactly the same as every other electron.
The fundamental scientific revolution Isaac Newton made was to realize that the SAME physical theory could explain BOTH celestial motion as well as the fact that things fall to the ground. See, one theory that explains twice as many phenomena is BETTER than two separate special-purpose theories.
No, the specialization of trade is distinctly different than comparative advantage.
Actually, they are extremely closely related. Comparative advantage means that the *relative local prices* of common products are different for different countries. Not *absolute prices*, but *relative local prices*.
The *result* of this differential is that countries can mutually benefit by shifting local production from one good to another, i.e. specializing in production of certain goods, and using trade to exchange the goods of specialization for even MORE of the goods that were specialized *away from*.
This is the same thing that happens in households. I can grow food in my garden, if I want, and I could raise sheep, shear them, and make my own clothes from the wool, etc., etc., but what I do is specialize in a very narrow field of engineering, and use trade (i.e. buy from my neighbor) to get my food and clothing. Similarly, the farmer depends on someone like me to write the software he uses on his PC, and grows food in exchange.
There is no *essential* difference between the local and global arguments for specialization.
The most compelling analogy I've heard is that there are *two* technologies to make cars for Americans. One is to build them in Detroit, out of steel, rubber, etc. Another is to grow the raw material for automobiles, that is, corn, in Iowa cornfields, ship that across the Pacific Ocean, and a few months later, the ships come back loaded with Toyotas.
The question is not particularly whether Japanese corn growers would get more or less for their crop than American farmers, or whether Japanese auto workers make more or less than American auto makers, but whether it is cheaper to produce cars in Detroit or to *grow cars* in Iowa. This is critically different, and you have not shown any sign of understanding this basic concept.
With everyone else cheaper than us, selling the same goods and services as us, then there is no reason for them to buy from us.
For crying out loud, and for at least the third time, economists have understood this statement is NONSENSE for about two hundred years. Stop repeating it, or you will simply look like an ignoramus.
You missed the point, China didn't have to give up squat. If they wanted more cars they had millions of unemployed people who could have made them.
You misunderstand what causes unemployment. If China "wanted" more cars at the price that was implied by the equivalent in Chinese cars, then they WOULD HAVE BEEN PRODUCING THOSE CARS already, and your original numbers would have to be changed to reflect that.
You are confusing an aggregate change in demand, which affects unemployment, with the changes in allocation of resources in the presence of trade.
It's like arguing that a faster hard drive makes no difference in performance of virtual memory because there is an empty DIMM slot that "could be filled with even faster RAM if we wanted to."
Less suitable silk meant more work had to go into producing shirts from it. Rather than falling behind, more people were hired to keep production up, and afterwards China still had unemployed people. Sorry I didn't make that clear.
This is a completely bizarre notion. There isn't some intrinsic "number of shirts that must be produced, no matter what happens." If silk becomes scarcer, like all the silkworms die, then there will be fewer shirts produced, because the price will go up, and fewer people will buy them.
Also, what the hell is anyone going to do with a fractional shirt?
It's a consequence of your bizarre model of an economy that is roughly the size of a household engaging in international trade. Multiply all the numbers by 10 for Trinidad, so that 100 people are choosing between 20 cars and 60 shirts, and they will be able to get 65 shirts.
The real question is where you came up with the idea that the "proper price" for two cars from Trinidad was 10 shirts from China. Did you just claim that *every* citizen of Trinidad wants a shirt before he'll allow trade, although 4 of them are going naked in autarky? Or can you just not do math?
Atoms are a good example- they're completely mythical, a model. Nobody has ever actually *seen* an atom, they're a consensus construction based on how certain molecules and compounds work-
a tom.html
1) You are using a completely contrived definition for "myth." You might as well call everything humans ever thought of as "myth" but then it means nothing.
2) Ever heard of an atomic-force microscope?
http://www.rso.cornell.edu/scitech/archive/95spr/
http://focus.aps.org/story/v11/st19
Ernst Mach could get away with saying the atomic theory was only a model of chemistry, back before 1900. Statistical mechanics showed that atoms could have actual directly measurable effects (such as observed in Brownian motion), by the time of Einstein, and since then, things have gotten even more clearly in favor of the atomic theory of matter.
You cannot make an nuclear weapon if atoms aren't real particles. The phenomenon of critical mass depends very much on it.
I'm not saying it's better. I'm saying that it is EQUALLY SUFFICIENT and there's no reason to be bigoted about one over the other.
That's just fucking bullshit. Intel can't make microprocessors with your elf theory of electricity; they *can* make microprocessors using 20th century solid-state physics and materials science.
to lie to Parliment to lower tariffs, eventually causing the Recession of 1988.
? What time machine did Ricardo use to do that?
Ricardo lied to you.
Let's see...there are two possibilities here
1) someone calling himself MarxistHacker42 doesn't understand basic economics
2) economics professors all over the western world don't know how to do basic calculus.
Alex, I'm going to pick option #1.
However, can the US produce goods and services cheaper than the rest of the world,... NO.
The same red herring, over and over again. This is NOT the criterion for international trade to be beneficial.
First off, our next door neighbors aren't another country. They're part of our country, our economy, under our political rules and laws.
And why is it favorable to give your neighbor money in exchange for his goods? Because he is specialized in something different than you are. If he's a baker and you are a dairy farmer, you trade some of your butter for some of his bread, and you both can make buttered toast. IT IS THE SAME SITUATION, and you missed it, because you don't understand the basic principles of economics.
Trinidad decides that it will forego the pleasure of puttering around its little island, and makes two cars to trade with China for 10 shirts.
NO. 10 shirts is not the price at which these would trade. Your math is faulty. To make two more Chinese cars, China would have to give up 20/3 = 6.66 Chinese-made shirts. Instead, they can give Trinidad 6.5 shirts in exchange for 2 Trinidad-made cars; both sides have more. China gets 100 million + 2 cars, and 1 billion - 6.5 shirts, which is more than they could have made previously, and Trinidad ends up with 6.5 shirts, which is more than they could possibly make in autaurky.
increased shirt demand has roused 150,000,000 of the unemployed from their wistful reverie,
This scenario is bizarre: less silk means more shirt production??
Myths are far more scientific than you think
Give me a single fucking example of a myth that has consistent predictive power at all comparable to even Newton's theory of gravity.
Kind of like scientists keep believing in their theories long after subjective evidence shows them to be false?
Uh, I think you meant "objective evidence." Anyway, you were talking about electrons: give me a single fucking piece of evidence that indicates the present-day model of electrons is false, but your "elves inside the CRT" is better.
Believing in unicorns or that Zeus throws lightning bolts from the heavens is not the same as believing that there exist a particle with mass of 9.10938188e-31 kg (known to about one part in 10^-7), charge of 1.602176462e-19 C (known to a few parts in 10^-8), and a gyromagnetic ratio of -2.0023193043737 (known to a few parts in 10^-12).
The essential truth that international trade is mutually beneficial does not depend on details such as the number of countries.
The key insight is that there is a pool of productive factors distributed around countries; by allowing participants in the market to engage in trade with one another, they will choose to do so where it is in their mutual advantage, and will be able to use specialization to increase their own productivity given the larger overall market. Nobody trades to make themselves worse off. Its the same reason that subsistence farmers who make their own clothing are poorer than specialized Westerners, or that you buy a computer from Dell or a white-box vendor, instead of starting with a bunch of chips and a PC board schematic.
Ricardo's argument is simply the clearest explanation around for why the naive statement that "Everything is cheaper in India!" does not mean that trade is bad. The model of two countries, two goods is not necessary for trade to be beneficial.
It's not enough to come up with some vague objection "oooh, but fabs are expensive, therefore trade would be bad." Come up with a real fucking model example of trade being bad, then convince me it is relevant to the outsourcing discussion. Instead, you slashbots continue to make illogical statements that fly in the face of basic insights that have been known for two hundred years now.
Do you argue that Silicon Valley residents need trade barriers to protect themselves from the unfair advantage Iowa has in farm products? Why don't we erect trade barriers between ourselves and our next door neighbors?
Perhaps you've heard of this guy named David Ricardo?
Even if, as you claim, EVERYTHING can be made cheaper in India than in the U.S., trade is still MUTUALLY beneficial. Unless everything is made cheaper in India in *exactly* the same ratio, there will be benefits to specialization and trade.
Why does the council have to meet to hash out the fine points of doctrine, if God can just magically make them agree through introspection? Why did the Councils have to fight so hard to wipe out all those heretical beliefs that people kept coming up with all on their own, and all those crazy scriptures that didn't end up being canonical? Why do people have to be excommunicated for holding heretical beliefs? Why doesn't God just speak to them and straighten everything out?
Have you ever taken a chemistry or physics laboratory? Have you ever measured the speed of light? Have you ever done the Millikan oil-drop experiment? Sequenced DNA?
My computer can calculate prime numbers using electronic circuits that just keep working over and over billions of times *every* second, and the prime numbers keep coming out the same way as some guy I've never met put into a book or puts onto the web. Christians can't get their scriptures to avoid saying that Christ is coming within the lifetime of those who were around during his ministry.
Ever read a periodic table? Everybody's has the elements in the same order. They don't meet in councils to know which atomic numbers have what properties. The atoms just *are* that way.
Myths don't respond consistently to input conditions. Otherwise, they'd be science, you dumbfuck.
Religions don't "work" in ANYTHING LIKE the way scientific theories do. Everybody is always praying to God or Allah or the FSM to help everybody they like, and God still randomly fucks with people by giving them terrible cancers, or sending hurricanes, or tsunamis, or letting other religious zealots fly planes into the buildings they happen to work in. Am I supposed to believe God is on the side of terrorists, because their experiment in the name of God succeeded?
God answers your prayers? He's wonderful! Thank you God for letting me win the lottery!! Thank you God for letting me win the Superbowl!! Or he doesn't answer your prayers, so he is testing your faith. Thank you God for testing my faith by letting me lose the lottery!! Thank you God for testing my faith by letting me lose the Superbowl!! Thank you God for wiping out my family in a tsunami, because we all are sinners, although I was away on a trip at the time, so my sinning family was wiped out, but my sinning ass was left behind to marvel at your wonderful, wise, and just ways, O God!
What controlled experiments can you conduct on religious beliefs? That religious believers keep believing in their religion, no matter what happens? That's not a test of religion, its a test of believers.
The key thing is the 1x1GB custom memory configuration.
If you are willing to take the 512 MB (1x512) configuration, you can get it shipped from the Apple Store online in 24 hours.
Dual core being "more efficient" depends very much on the task being considered.
For any sufficiently large task, the bottleneck is the path to main memory. For a given level of package & bus limitations, dual-core must use an amount of bandwidth to main memory to feed two processing units rather than one.
For tasks that fit in on-chip cache, of course, the bottleneck is processing, and dual-core can be a huge improvement, especially where the synchronization overhead would have to go off-chip in the case of dual processors, as you mention.
Hmm. Not sure how your math works out to 30%.
On my calculator (unfortunately, I don't have a G5 to do this calculation), 3.0/2.7 = 1.11 meaning 11% behind.
Still, it's clear someone at IBM was far too optimistic.
Well, I would imagine most universities won't give you tenure *unless* you've shown promising results.
I'm talking about two separate issues.
1) There are at least two *sequences* of creation, coming from the two different sources. One in which man is created before the plants and animals, and one in which man is created after.
2) The issue of a raqiya', which I had heard about long before 1991, and I've never heard of Seely. The article you link to is a whole lot of argument to avoid the simplest possible interpretation: the firmament separating the waters is the same picture that the article admits was a common cosmology. The argument you link to is largely based on the supposition that an ancient Hebrew word is referring to modern concepts such as "atmosphere" and "interstellar space."
The fact is that the ancient Hebrew people were nomads without any significant scientific knowledge. The most likely scenario is that unsophisticated people would have an unsophisticated cosmology. Instead, you literalists twist and contort yourselves to "prove" that Genesis is compatible with modern scientific knowledge.
That makes sense only to people who make the initial assumption that Genesis is literally true. Why? What do you gain from that? Just some kind of comfort that because you can "prove" it 100% accurate, it must be straight from God. But that is only what you assumed in the first place.
The point is not that there are passages in Genesis that are 100% incompatible with modern cosmology; the language is too poetic and figurative for that kind of proof. The point is that since the language *is* poetic and figurative, that you should probably consider it *as* poetic and figurative, and the idea that it is 100% scientifically accurate is bizzare.
When you read Genesis, about 90% of modern cosmological knowledge requires some special pleading about the inadequacy of ancient Hebrew to be scientifically precise. Yet you literalists insist it is still 100% accurate. That just isn't persuasive. I prefer the interpretation that the writers of Genesis just didn't have good information on the topic, and if God was involved, being 100% scientifically accurate was not the point. Otherwise, He would have put the scientific terms in ancient Hebrew, and we would be celebrating all the amazing Hebrew astronomers who even knew the Hubble constant.
How about this: that the creation of the universe has basically nothing in common with the description in Genesis? In fact, there are *two* incompatible descriptions *within* Genesis, derived from different sources.
Do you also believe that the sky is a hard dome, with little holes in it? And there is water above the holes, which sometimes comes down as rain, and when it is night, light is shining through the holes to make stars? Because that's what is separating the waters in the Genesis story.
A concrete interpretation of the description in Genesis would work equally well for any sequence of events of the form
1) There was stuff
2) Something happened to the stuff
The fact that this stuff was pretty unlike ordinary water in all respects, and that the event of the big bang seems to have pretty little to do with electromagnetic radiation (which couldn't propagate freely until after the plasma of electrons+nuclei condensed into neutral atoms), means that "water" and "light" hardly count as a solid foundation for literal interpretation.
Well, we use completely different methods to compute these quantities.
"Age of the universe" are based on astronomical measurements. The distance to astronomical objects is generally impossible to determine directly; things are dim for two reasons: being not very bright, or being far away, and you can't tell just by looking which one it is. Instead, we must almost always make some assumptions about the behavior and intrinsic brightness of "standard candles" such as supernovas of various types. There is a lower bound on the age of the universe from "age of a rock" and "age of meteorites" determined pretty accurately by radioactive dating.
"Seconds after the big bang" are determined by calculations involving fundamental particles at high energies. These can be confirmed to some extent by laboratory experiment at facilities like particle colliders.
A simpler description is that our universe was evolving very rapidly at the early stages, so that a 3 minute old universe looks much different from a 10,000 year old universe. While a 15 billion and 16 billion year-old universe looks about the same.
Ever notice how quickly an infant develops, and how gradually adults change appearance? Same idea.
Except LHC only collides protons ("H" for "hadron") with antiprotons, while RHIC collides heavy ions ("HI" for "heavy ion")
Which means there is a whole lot more quark matter concentrated into a small volume.
Um, these guys named "Galileo," "Newton," "Laplace," "Mach," "Maxwell," "Einstein," "Heisenberg" made a great deal of contributions to the theory of "cause" and "effect."
The whole concept of "cause" has been revolutionized by physical science. The very idea that we can write down differential equations which accurately describe the things like planetary motion, molecular chemistry, optics, behavior of atoms, microchips, and diode lasers, among countless other things, means that we have developed a much more precise notion of what a causal mechanism could be.
Thomas Aquinas would be absolutely baffled by the mathematical analysis of initial conditions. Yet Netwon's equations are second-order differential equations, the evolution of which are *completely* determined by the positions and velocities of particles at an instant in time, and requires no change in the equations to fully capture the dynamics. Similar boundary conditions suffice to specify the behavior of quantum systems.
Given that kind of precision with which we can analyze physical problems, the vague idea of a "Prime Mover" seems rather primitive, no?
No, cold glass is solid, and molten glass is liquid.
The term "glass" refers to the amorphous nature of the atomic order; the atoms are not arranged into a regular periodic crystalline array, but have only short-range order. That is, each atom has a fixed relationship to its neighbors, but you cannot predict where the neighbors' neighbors will be.
Room temperature SiO2 is quite solid, and has negligible flow.