Yes, but this comes down to the constant issue with any scientific literiture. There are several versions of every story:
1. What the scientists actually think (what I was addressing in my post). 2. What they tell the people they get their grant money from (to make it sound more profitable) 3. What the damned journalists say when they get ahold of it.
For example, take last week's discovery of sediments on Mars precipitated from salt water:
1. What NASA thinks: "Well, there's the proof of the sea we were looking for. Pity it's not there anymore" 2. What NASA says: "Hey look at this, there used to be water on Mars! And water doesn't just disappear, you know. Imagine what could be done with that much water!" 3. What the journalists say: "OMG OMG OMG TEHER WERE LIFE ON MARZ OMFG!!!111oneone"
I'm pretty sure I've posted this exact reply to the exact parent a dozen times over.
In science, Theory is the highest level of understanding. Law and observation are, in fact, much lower on the heirarchy.
Observation is dumb: It's just what you see. "Oh, the sky is blue." "It hurts when I hit myself with this rock." "Look, there's another rat." That's observation.
Law is also pretty dumb. It's just a set of rules derived from observation. e=mc^2 fits observation, and it has some interesting connotations, but it doesn't say anything about WHY the equation works, and it says even less about HOW matter and energy are interchangeable.
Theory is an overarching collections of observations, laws derived from observation, and principles deduced from laws.
Theory explains why laws work, and why observations are as they are.
To be granted the distinction of 'theory' an idea must: 1. Explain any and all laws and observations already explained by a previous theory (example: to be valid, Relativity had to encompas Newtonian mechanics); 2. Explain such in an imperical manner (any forces involved must be identified and observed. This is why there is no theory regarding dark energy and dark matter - they have yet to be identified, observed, or quantified); 3.a. Explain something not covered in the existing theory (Darwin's theory explained why rats with their tails cut off did not have tailless offspring, as Lamarck's theory said they shoudl); OR 3.b. Explain the existing theory in simpler terms (such as the replacement of phlogiston theory and epicycle theory by their more advanced, but much simpler, successors).
Now, by calling an observation a Theory, you are, in your misguided attempt to discredit it, in fact exaulting it to a much higher status than it claims to hold already.
It doesn't really its responsible for the divergence of humans and apes. Obviously, no amount of related rates of growth will make our thumbs opposable by weakening our jaws, and many other differences that are probably more important towards speciation than our brain size (as conceited as we like to be about our intellect).
It said that this mutation allowed our brains to grow bigger. This is a much less significant suggestion than tagging this muation as the speciation event, and it also makes logical sense. A gorrila has a very large head, but it's mostly jaw muscle. The ridge on the top of the skull is the attachment point for the muscles, and shows just how much of their head is muscle. Humans, on the other hand, have their jaw muscles attached lower down their head, at the top of the temples, and are much thinner. Despite having smaller heads, there's much more room for the brain case to expand from subsequent (or likely simultaneous) mutations.
2.4 million years is also more in line with the progress from man-like-ape to ape-like-man than with the original divergence, since that divergence probably lies furthur back in history.
Does TNN/Spike still act on their Robot Wars license?
I didn't like it when they did. They tied it too close to wrestling. Even stuck Mick Foley in there. Yeah, I guess he's cool in his way, but it just seemed WRONG to have him on the show.
Personally, I liked Battle Bots more than Robot Wars, but Comedy Central seems to have abandoned the show in favor of reaping royalties off merchandising.
Ok, Adam, yes. He acts like he's stoned, drunk, and/or dizzy all the time.
But Martin? Come on, you can't get rid of him. What would a channel about the internet be without a show that mostly just talks about porno?
I think it would be even funnier to do it like Monster House on Discovery. Take a family of non-geeks, lock them in an RV in the driveway, unleash a few techies on their electronics, and let them all freak out when they see important and expensive looking components tossed out of windows for a week before being let back in the house to see what they did to it.
Is that Tech TV is basic cable here (Channel 18 in the Saginaw area). They had it splitting time with some lame government access channel going all the way back to when it was ZD-TV, but about a year ago maybe, they stopped cutting it out, and it's full time now.
The Computer Science and Engineering departments are abandoning their students. CSC enrollment is up something like 15% this year, while the school's entire enrollment is down about the same proportion.
Meanwhile, they laid off three professors in engineering and computer science to help pay for four new english professors. The college already has over 50 english professors, and now under 20 computer science and engineering professors - and most of the engineering professors are just physics and chemistry professors who signed up an extra class.
To make it worse, there's at least three CSC professors who are just teaching one or two 100-level intro courses that hardly anybody takes so they get their paycheck.
I'm in my third year, and it'll take a minimum of 2 more for me to finish my CSC major, and that's if they actually start to offer 401 again (highest *REQUIRED* class in the major, hasn't been offered in four semesters).
Final Fantasy IX, Valkyrie Profile, so on and so forth. All PS1 games, but released during the PS2 era. PS1-compatible games were released well into 2003 (could even be ones this year, but I don't know). In fact, at least a few games that are marketed as PS2 and carry the PS2 mark on the package have been found to be PS1 compatible.
Also, PS1 games still sell quite well. They can't get a PS1 console as cheap as you say they can, it's hard to find in the stores, and you can't play PS2 games with it.
Sony still makes money from PS1 game sales, but PS1 console sales are pretty much done with. SNES games continued being produced until 1999. Playstation games date back to, what, 1995? Thusly:
I challenge you to find a single SNES game from 1996 (pretty much the last year they were produced in the US) in a retail store (new, not used). While you're at it, go to the developers and try to order one. Can't do it, eh? Now, try to find a PS1 game from that year. Quite easy. You can probably buy thirty of them just by driving around a few retail stores.
Hell, the Target here in Saginaw has an entire isle still dedicated to PS1 games (more shelf space than for PS2), and this isn't a big town for game sales. They dedicate an enitre end-of-isle rack to GB/GBC games as well, and they sell.
The games are cheap to produce. The games that will turn a profit already have, so it's basically just covering the cost of production (what, 14 cents for the disk, maybe 50 for the case? Sell for a dollar and you make a profit, and they usually sell for $5 to $20).
Never going to happen. You can have more intuitive controllers, but they'll have to be more complex hardware- and software-wise. A mouse will always be cheaper.
The more I hear about it, the more I think you're pretty much wrong. A new WoW character can kill fairly impressive LOOKING things like bears, but that's because bears have stat setups just like the bunnies you have to kill at level 1 in any other MMORPG - they just look bigger, which in turn makes the really strong monsters fairly undifferentiated.
What do you do when you discover that the star you bought from the National Star Naming Association or whatever other scam company happens to be named a rather mundane Ursa Majoris B by the people who actually have the AUTHORITY to name stars?
Originally, orbit was all that mattered. There is even an equation that says how far each successive planet would be from the sun, since things too far from those "slots" would tend to have unstable orbits and would be deflected into elliptical paths.
Mercury through Mars fit these slots exactly, the asteroid belt occupies the fourth, but failed to form a planet due to gravitational interactions between the Sun and Jupiter.
Jupiter and Saturn fit the next two exactly.
When they were discovered, Uranus and Neptune were believed to be slightly off, although it's been determined that Neptune's orbit wasn't as irregular as had been thought (somebody forgot that Uranus effects Neptune as well, and only determined Neptune's effect on Uranus).
Pluto is not only about half a billion miles off from it's slot, it's also tilted 30 degrees off - most of the planets have negligible orbital tilt, none of them over about 3 degrees. Sedna has a wildly elliptical and highly tilted orbit.
Both of them have classical long-period cometary orbits, are of classical cometary composition.
Somewhere along the line, after they realized Pluto didn't fit the planetary bill, they discovered Charon, which has been Pluto's only clinging thread to planethood ever since. However, that was then. Now, we know of multiple asteroids with their own moons, and I remember some evidence that the larger moons around Jupiter and Saturn appeared to have their own tiny satellites.
Anyway, the planetary requirements, as I learned them in college:
1. A relatively circular orbit (Pluto and Sedna fail miserably).
2. A relatively "flat" orbit (failed again)
3. The dominant object in their orbit (Pluto looses, as Charon has a major effect on it. The Earth stretches this one, too, and sometimes both get the term "Double planet" attached to them. The large moons around the gas giants are far smaller than their parent planets, so the planets dominate).
4. Fitting an orbital slot (This breaks down the farther you get from the gas giants, though, so it would likely be excused for far-flung planets).
Size doesn't matter (a small object may not count, but a large one doesn't count on size alone).
Which is the point of the aritcle. It was written for other players, not for all of us on/. We just happened to snif it out and read it, and a lot of it's babble to us. Just think what a non-slashdotter would think seeing our own posts laden with terms like IANAL, FWIW, RTFA, FWIK, FUD, and so on. A lot of it doesn't make sense in the context unless you know the meaning.
Actually, Christianity had a hard problem a century or two ago explaining exactly why the planets and moon appeared to be made out of rock. Finding water makes things worse. It's also not as far from finding life as you may think. No, it doesn't mean there was life, but it's the holster where we're likely to find the smoking gun - there may not be a gun at all, but if it's there, we know where it is now.
As was said above, salty sea != life bearing sea. It could have been highly acidic (or highly alkaline), and not been able to support life (as we know it anyway).
However, it's a major boon to people looking for evidence of biological process on Mars. Sedementary rocks are by far the best ones for preserving that sort of evidence, as well as forming in the most likely place to find life. If we don't find it there, we probably won't find it elsewhere.
It needs to be better, but exactly: It has to sell 40x better, not be 40x better.
Gaming has always been full of clones following the pack (I've seen a lot of people say, "games these days..." but they've always been that way - we just forget about the clones after a couple years).
It only takes a slightly greater effort (and some risk that it'll be rejected) to make a game *very slightly* better than the rest, and it'll sell far better.
RPGs especially could be helped by this. The fifteenth time I kill an identical Nord male in Morrowind, I stop caring that I'm slaughtering a town, because they're obviously all some sort of vile zombie clones.
I've heard the same, which is a sad letdown after all the hype.
The premise Blizzard's been harping on was that we wouldn't have to go through the leveling treadmill killing rats and bunnies for hours until we're able to handle real prey, but in fact, we're still spending our time getting bunnyraped because our n00b characters are stupidly weak.
Frankly, I'm going to keep playing Ashen Empires. Granted, the level treadmill is pretty steep after level 25 to 30, but by that time (about a month's work for an inexperienced player. With some help from a friend, or even a few good playguides (several of which I've helped write), you can make it there in a few days) you can kill more than half of the major drop monsters in the game (accounting for most of the high end items, as well - albeit at lower rates than more powerful monsters). Beyond 50 or so, leveling is mostly for a pvp edge, since pvm is more equipment dependent than level dependent.
I've always enjoyed playing the "bad guys" in historical war games like this. It's usually more fun to play as the weaker side and see if you can do better than the real generals did.
Yeah, but the game would lead to a real war eventually.
You see, Pakistan would lose the first match in game, and accuse Bangladesh of speedhacking. In the rematch, Pakistan wins and is accused of aimbotting, and they decide to go best two out of three. In the thid match, Bangladesh wins, and Pakistan accuses them of wallhacking this time, and launches their nuclear weapons at them, saying, "Ha! Hack THAT n00b!"
But all the combined moons of, say, Jupiter or Satrn won't displace the center of gravity a fraction of the planet's radius, and they can be accurately modeled over fairly long-term projections by assuming the moons have 0 gravity/mass. However, if you put a second moon around the earth with, say, 1/3 lunar gravity (about 1/18g, if I remember my high school earth science right), it would have a considerable effect.
You already can't model the Earth/Moon system with any accuracy without taking lunar gravity into effect. Add in another object with significant gravity, and you wouldn't have a planet with two moons, you'd have the infamous Three Body System. It's incredibly unlikely the three objects would even settle into a stable orbit. It would probably fall apart in short order when two or more of the objects collide, or one of them is ejected from the system.
(For that matter, Astronomy magazine had an article a few years back that the solar system itself would eventually decay in the same manner, although with the much larger scale involved, a collision is pretty unlikely - odds are the four terrestrial planets would be ejected from repeated interactions with Jupiter.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but this comes down to the constant issue with any scientific literiture. There are several versions of every story:
1. What the scientists actually think (what I was addressing in my post).
2. What they tell the people they get their grant money from (to make it sound more profitable)
3. What the damned journalists say when they get ahold of it.
For example, take last week's discovery of sediments on Mars precipitated from salt water:
1. What NASA thinks: "Well, there's the proof of the sea we were looking for. Pity it's not there anymore"
2. What NASA says: "Hey look at this, there used to be water on Mars! And water doesn't just disappear, you know. Imagine what could be done with that much water!"
3. What the journalists say: "OMG OMG OMG TEHER WERE LIFE ON MARZ OMFG!!!111oneone"
I'm pretty sure I've posted this exact reply to the exact parent a dozen times over.
In science, Theory is the highest level of understanding. Law and observation are, in fact, much lower on the heirarchy.
Observation is dumb: It's just what you see. "Oh, the sky is blue." "It hurts when I hit myself with this rock." "Look, there's another rat." That's observation.
Law is also pretty dumb. It's just a set of rules derived from observation. e=mc^2 fits observation, and it has some interesting connotations, but it doesn't say anything about WHY the equation works, and it says even less about HOW matter and energy are interchangeable.
Theory is an overarching collections of observations, laws derived from observation, and principles deduced from laws.
Theory explains why laws work, and why observations are as they are.
To be granted the distinction of 'theory' an idea must:
1. Explain any and all laws and observations already explained by a previous theory (example: to be valid, Relativity had to encompas Newtonian mechanics);
2. Explain such in an imperical manner (any forces involved must be identified and observed. This is why there is no theory regarding dark energy and dark matter - they have yet to be identified, observed, or quantified);
3.a. Explain something not covered in the existing theory (Darwin's theory explained why rats with their tails cut off did not have tailless offspring, as Lamarck's theory said they shoudl);
OR
3.b. Explain the existing theory in simpler terms (such as the replacement of phlogiston theory and epicycle theory by their more advanced, but much simpler, successors).
Now, by calling an observation a Theory, you are, in your misguided attempt to discredit it, in fact exaulting it to a much higher status than it claims to hold already.
It doesn't really its responsible for the divergence of humans and apes. Obviously, no amount of related rates of growth will make our thumbs opposable by weakening our jaws, and many other differences that are probably more important towards speciation than our brain size (as conceited as we like to be about our intellect).
It said that this mutation allowed our brains to grow bigger. This is a much less significant suggestion than tagging this muation as the speciation event, and it also makes logical sense. A gorrila has a very large head, but it's mostly jaw muscle. The ridge on the top of the skull is the attachment point for the muscles, and shows just how much of their head is muscle. Humans, on the other hand, have their jaw muscles attached lower down their head, at the top of the temples, and are much thinner. Despite having smaller heads, there's much more room for the brain case to expand from subsequent (or likely simultaneous) mutations.
2.4 million years is also more in line with the progress from man-like-ape to ape-like-man than with the original divergence, since that divergence probably lies furthur back in history.
Does TNN/Spike still act on their Robot Wars license? I didn't like it when they did. They tied it too close to wrestling. Even stuck Mick Foley in there. Yeah, I guess he's cool in his way, but it just seemed WRONG to have him on the show. Personally, I liked Battle Bots more than Robot Wars, but Comedy Central seems to have abandoned the show in favor of reaping royalties off merchandising.
Ok, Adam, yes. He acts like he's stoned, drunk, and/or dizzy all the time. But Martin? Come on, you can't get rid of him. What would a channel about the internet be without a show that mostly just talks about porno?
I think it would be even funnier to do it like Monster House on Discovery. Take a family of non-geeks, lock them in an RV in the driveway, unleash a few techies on their electronics, and let them all freak out when they see important and expensive looking components tossed out of windows for a week before being let back in the house to see what they did to it.
Is that Tech TV is basic cable here (Channel 18 in the Saginaw area). They had it splitting time with some lame government access channel going all the way back to when it was ZD-TV, but about a year ago maybe, they stopped cutting it out, and it's full time now.
The Computer Science and Engineering departments are abandoning their students. CSC enrollment is up something like 15% this year, while the school's entire enrollment is down about the same proportion.
Meanwhile, they laid off three professors in engineering and computer science to help pay for four new english professors. The college already has over 50 english professors, and now under 20 computer science and engineering professors - and most of the engineering professors are just physics and chemistry professors who signed up an extra class.
To make it worse, there's at least three CSC professors who are just teaching one or two 100-level intro courses that hardly anybody takes so they get their paycheck.
I'm in my third year, and it'll take a minimum of 2 more for me to finish my CSC major, and that's if they actually start to offer 401 again (highest *REQUIRED* class in the major, hasn't been offered in four semesters).
Final Fantasy IX, Valkyrie Profile, so on and so forth. All PS1 games, but released during the PS2 era. PS1-compatible games were released well into 2003 (could even be ones this year, but I don't know). In fact, at least a few games that are marketed as PS2 and carry the PS2 mark on the package have been found to be PS1 compatible.
Also, PS1 games still sell quite well. They can't get a PS1 console as cheap as you say they can, it's hard to find in the stores, and you can't play PS2 games with it.
Sony still makes money from PS1 game sales, but PS1 console sales are pretty much done with. SNES games continued being produced until 1999. Playstation games date back to, what, 1995? Thusly:
I challenge you to find a single SNES game from 1996 (pretty much the last year they were produced in the US) in a retail store (new, not used). While you're at it, go to the developers and try to order one. Can't do it, eh? Now, try to find a PS1 game from that year. Quite easy. You can probably buy thirty of them just by driving around a few retail stores.
Hell, the Target here in Saginaw has an entire isle still dedicated to PS1 games (more shelf space than for PS2), and this isn't a big town for game sales. They dedicate an enitre end-of-isle rack to GB/GBC games as well, and they sell.
The games are cheap to produce. The games that will turn a profit already have, so it's basically just covering the cost of production (what, 14 cents for the disk, maybe 50 for the case? Sell for a dollar and you make a profit, and they usually sell for $5 to $20).
more intuative than a mouse, and less expensive
Never going to happen. You can have more intuitive controllers, but they'll have to be more complex hardware- and software-wise. A mouse will always be cheaper.
The more I hear about it, the more I think you're pretty much wrong. A new WoW character can kill fairly impressive LOOKING things like bears, but that's because bears have stat setups just like the bunnies you have to kill at level 1 in any other MMORPG - they just look bigger, which in turn makes the really strong monsters fairly undifferentiated.
What do you do when you discover that the star you bought from the National Star Naming Association or whatever other scam company happens to be named a rather mundane Ursa Majoris B by the people who actually have the AUTHORITY to name stars?
Originally, orbit was all that mattered. There is even an equation that says how far each successive planet would be from the sun, since things too far from those "slots" would tend to have unstable orbits and would be deflected into elliptical paths. Mercury through Mars fit these slots exactly, the asteroid belt occupies the fourth, but failed to form a planet due to gravitational interactions between the Sun and Jupiter. Jupiter and Saturn fit the next two exactly. When they were discovered, Uranus and Neptune were believed to be slightly off, although it's been determined that Neptune's orbit wasn't as irregular as had been thought (somebody forgot that Uranus effects Neptune as well, and only determined Neptune's effect on Uranus). Pluto is not only about half a billion miles off from it's slot, it's also tilted 30 degrees off - most of the planets have negligible orbital tilt, none of them over about 3 degrees. Sedna has a wildly elliptical and highly tilted orbit. Both of them have classical long-period cometary orbits, are of classical cometary composition. Somewhere along the line, after they realized Pluto didn't fit the planetary bill, they discovered Charon, which has been Pluto's only clinging thread to planethood ever since. However, that was then. Now, we know of multiple asteroids with their own moons, and I remember some evidence that the larger moons around Jupiter and Saturn appeared to have their own tiny satellites. Anyway, the planetary requirements, as I learned them in college: 1. A relatively circular orbit (Pluto and Sedna fail miserably). 2. A relatively "flat" orbit (failed again) 3. The dominant object in their orbit (Pluto looses, as Charon has a major effect on it. The Earth stretches this one, too, and sometimes both get the term "Double planet" attached to them. The large moons around the gas giants are far smaller than their parent planets, so the planets dominate). 4. Fitting an orbital slot (This breaks down the farther you get from the gas giants, though, so it would likely be excused for far-flung planets). Size doesn't matter (a small object may not count, but a large one doesn't count on size alone).
Michigan's pretty cool if you only look at the universities too. Doesn't make it any more interesting to live here.
Which is the point of the aritcle. It was written for other players, not for all of us on /. We just happened to snif it out and read it, and a lot of it's babble to us. Just think what a non-slashdotter would think seeing our own posts laden with terms like IANAL, FWIW, RTFA, FWIK, FUD, and so on. A lot of it doesn't make sense in the context unless you know the meaning.
Actually, Christianity had a hard problem a century or two ago explaining exactly why the planets and moon appeared to be made out of rock. Finding water makes things worse. It's also not as far from finding life as you may think. No, it doesn't mean there was life, but it's the holster where we're likely to find the smoking gun - there may not be a gun at all, but if it's there, we know where it is now.
As was said above, salty sea != life bearing sea. It could have been highly acidic (or highly alkaline), and not been able to support life (as we know it anyway).
However, it's a major boon to people looking for evidence of biological process on Mars. Sedementary rocks are by far the best ones for preserving that sort of evidence, as well as forming in the most likely place to find life. If we don't find it there, we probably won't find it elsewhere.
Nuclear missiles are the AWP of international relations. C4Mp3r Wh0r3z!
True, but the advantage of being a C4Mp3r Wh0r3 in real life is that the other person is dead, and he can't swear at you anymore.
It needs to be better, but exactly: It has to sell 40x better, not be 40x better.
Gaming has always been full of clones following the pack (I've seen a lot of people say, "games these days..." but they've always been that way - we just forget about the clones after a couple years).
It only takes a slightly greater effort (and some risk that it'll be rejected) to make a game *very slightly* better than the rest, and it'll sell far better.
RPGs especially could be helped by this. The fifteenth time I kill an identical Nord male in Morrowind, I stop caring that I'm slaughtering a town, because they're obviously all some sort of vile zombie clones.
I've heard the same, which is a sad letdown after all the hype.
The premise Blizzard's been harping on was that we wouldn't have to go through the leveling treadmill killing rats and bunnies for hours until we're able to handle real prey, but in fact, we're still spending our time getting bunnyraped because our n00b characters are stupidly weak.
Frankly, I'm going to keep playing Ashen Empires. Granted, the level treadmill is pretty steep after level 25 to 30, but by that time (about a month's work for an inexperienced player. With some help from a friend, or even a few good playguides (several of which I've helped write), you can make it there in a few days) you can kill more than half of the major drop monsters in the game (accounting for most of the high end items, as well - albeit at lower rates than more powerful monsters). Beyond 50 or so, leveling is mostly for a pvp edge, since pvm is more equipment dependent than level dependent.
I could live with all of that if they got rid of the patronizing advertisements (such as those for the aforementioned sidetalking taco).
I've always enjoyed playing the "bad guys" in historical war games like this. It's usually more fun to play as the weaker side and see if you can do better than the real generals did.
Yeah, but the game would lead to a real war eventually.
You see, Pakistan would lose the first match in game, and accuse Bangladesh of speedhacking. In the rematch, Pakistan wins and is accused of aimbotting, and they decide to go best two out of three. In the thid match, Bangladesh wins, and Pakistan accuses them of wallhacking this time, and launches their nuclear weapons at them, saying, "Ha! Hack THAT n00b!"
But all the combined moons of, say, Jupiter or Satrn won't displace the center of gravity a fraction of the planet's radius, and they can be accurately modeled over fairly long-term projections by assuming the moons have 0 gravity/mass. However, if you put a second moon around the earth with, say, 1/3 lunar gravity (about 1/18g, if I remember my high school earth science right), it would have a considerable effect. You already can't model the Earth/Moon system with any accuracy without taking lunar gravity into effect. Add in another object with significant gravity, and you wouldn't have a planet with two moons, you'd have the infamous Three Body System. It's incredibly unlikely the three objects would even settle into a stable orbit. It would probably fall apart in short order when two or more of the objects collide, or one of them is ejected from the system. (For that matter, Astronomy magazine had an article a few years back that the solar system itself would eventually decay in the same manner, although with the much larger scale involved, a collision is pretty unlikely - odds are the four terrestrial planets would be ejected from repeated interactions with Jupiter.