Parent poster is saying things true of Scientology but not true of
Landmark Forum. CoS is identified and treated by the U.S. Government
as a religion. That means it pays zero taxes and keeps its finances entirely to itself. Landmark Forum is identified and treated by the U.S. Government as a for-profit corporation. That means it pays taxes and its financial records are subject to audits whenever the IRS sees fit (and they do). These are very significant differences.
The main thing they have in common is that they both ask you to "enroll" your friends & aquaintances. If they were the only two organizations that did that maybe the parent would be right, but of course Amway and many "non-cult" religions ask you to do the same.
One other thing they have in common, but it'll take some explaining. Landmark Forum is essentially a re-naming of 70's/80's organization called Erhard Seminars Training, or EST for short. EST was also a for-profit corporation, founded by a guy born under the name of Jack Rosenberg, who left his wife & family, changed his name to Werner Erhard, and started the organization (yes, I'm leaving out lots more ugly Jack/Werner history; go ahead and google for it). Somewhere along the way, Werner/Jack joined up with Scientology. I'm not sure how long he was involved, but the way the story was told in EST, he tried a whole bunch of those 70s things (sorry, can't find a suitable group adjective) like ROLFing, Esalen, before starting his own thing. Oh, here's a good name: "Large Group Awareness Therapy organizations."
Personal disclosure: I took the EST thing, AKA "the Training" back in the early 80's and volunteered in the organization for about 2 years and took a few less intensive "seminars". "The Training" was very good for me personally though I was lousy at "enrolling" others. I got diminishing returns from the seminars. Part of my agenda in volunteering was to sniff around for the dirt. I didn't find any of that either. Eventually I dropped out. There were one or two phone calls, but once I told them definitely that I no longer wanted to do EST stuff, they let me alone and have done so for 20 years. I don't regret the money I spent; I don't regret the time I spent; all in all I'm glad I did it. But who knows; maybe I'm still brainwashed!!
We live in an old house -- part of it is still on knob & tube wiring with four screw-in fuses (scheduled for renovation in a few years). Many of the fixtures take candlabra base bulbs. There are candelabra base CFLs but they are hard to find & huge in the 9-13 watt range (40-60 equivalent watts). I eventually bought a case of 12 9-watters online for something like $80, and put them in our most frequently used fixtures. But the price of candlabra base CFLs is way too high: see http://www.bulbs.com/products/product.asp?page=pro ducts&class=817 or http://www.bulbman.com/index.php?main_page=index&c Path=4595_4616.
Same thing with dimmables. I bought one to see how it performs and ran it thru my "kill-a-watt" http://www.fadfusion.com/selection.php?product_ite m_number=30183200136&gclid=CMbYwsKph4cCFRskUAod1DU eZQ meter. At max, the bulb draws 25 watts; at min 10 watts. Perceptually it's just not that dim at its minimum setting. Now try finding a dimmable CFL in a candelabra base -- can't be done! I'd like to put more swirls in the house, but many of our most frequently used lights are dimmable and/or candelabra.
I'm a lefty and I prefer to work my mouse with the left hand. But at school
so many machines were set up with the mouse on the right and junk on the left
(i.e. not easy to switch the mouse over) that I learned to be ambidextrous
with the mouse. She should give it a try. Also, make sure all ergonomic
stuff is OK, especially keyboard height. Her wrists should be straight and
her elbows should be at 90 degrees or less.
Memoirs is essentially a satire about a society with too many self-deceptions, and how reality has a way of unraveling even though society refuses to notice or acknowledge any problem. Vacuum is a collection of book reviews -- reviews of books that never existed; in fact some could not possibly exist. These brief descriptions don't do Lem's books credit. Read them yourself; they're devilishly clever.
Crimson brags about its class B address -- MIT has a class A! And if you look at the physical connection, last I heard the Harvard campus was served by a fiber strung along the MBTA Red Line tunnels -- straight from an MIT router!
At the risk of injecting facts into an otherwise perfectly pleasant slashdot discussion, I thought I'd provide a link to the wikiCalk post on Bricklin's blog. Oh, and while we're on the subject, how about the "home page for the wikiCalc Alpha Test." You can download Mac, Windows and Perl versions there, assiming Dan's server can handle the load. Uh oh, I better paste in the text of the page; hopefully most of you will read this rather than crash Bricklin's host...
This is the home page for the wikiCalc Alpha Test
Introduction
The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet. It can be easily set up to publish to basic web server space accessed by FTP and there is no need to set up server-side programs like CGI. It can, though, run on a server and be used with nothing more than a browser on the client.
wikiCalc is currently released in Alpha test. This means that it is largely untested, has bugs, and is missing features that will hopefully be in the 1.0 release (and Beta versions leading up to that). It does, though, implement a large enough subset of the targeted features to get a good idea of what the product is all about. It is also useful in its own right and seems to be able to create, publish, and maintain a wide variety of web pages already. For example, this page and many of the ones it links to about wikiCalc were created with the wikiCalc Alpha. (The graphical design comes from a CSS file and the side bar is in a simple custom template. Much like a blogging tool, you can automatically wrap the output in static nice-looking stuff if you don't want the default.)
The Alpha release is available for use on Windows, Mac, Linux/Unix, and other platforms that can run the Perl language. On Windows you need only download a single.exe file that will install wikiCalc, a Perl runtime, and assorted sample files. Other platforms need to have Perl already installed (but they commonly come with it pre-installed).
The program is written by Dan Bricklin (me) and is available under a GPL 2.0 license. When shipped it will also be available with a dual-license non-GPL proprietary license. You can read my essay explaining a little more about what wikiCalc is and why I created it on the "About wikiCalc 0.1" page on my blog.
Note that this is the 0.2 alpha version which uses AJAX techniques when editing cells. It includes a "Demonstration Setup" option to get you up to speed quickly if you just want to see what a browser-based spreadsheet feels like.
wikiCalc is currently aimed at users who are comfortable figuring out how best to use a new tool. It is very flexible and there are many options to meet many different needs. It should be especially of interest to the DIY (Do It Yourself) and VAR (Value Added Reseller) crowd. Such people can set it up for use by others.
. . . skipping part about downloading and running . ..
News and Reviews
Here are links to some of what others have written about wikiCalc:
I love the judge too. But, according to The Note, "The order gives Justice 20 days as part of the lawsuit, but the Justice Department will probably plead irreparable harm to national security (or something similar) to block the order." It'll most likely die on the vine until the democrats take over.
My hope is this: the avalanche of Republican scandals and screw-ups will result in democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. Then we'll have a real investigation, with subpoena power too. Bush will fight the investigation and it'll probably all wind up in the Supreme Court's lap. That'll be interesting.
Think again. OK, the relativity postulate (local Lorentz invariance) says the measured speed of light is constant for all inertial observers. But so what? The measurement Mayer is talking about isn't the speed of light; he's talking about simultaneity (or lack thereof) and frequency measurements.
Furthermore, parent writes:
The two clocks are in the same frame of reference. They do not see an additional time delay. They are at rest relative to each other. What the author did was to assume that because an inertial observer sees the pulses traveling further, that the moving observers would also see the same. But that could only happen if the speed of light were not constant for all frames of reference which directly contradicts the Special Theory of Relativity and the Michelson-Morley experiment (not to mention a whole lot of later experiments which validate the Special Theory to a very high degree.)
But although Mayer's two clocks are at rest relative to each other, they are in an accelerated frame of referance (his rocket is accelerating). And as we all know, the Special Theory is specialized exactly because it doesn't apply to accelerated frames of reference or to gravitational fields. In those cases, you need instead the General Theory, which assunes "the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and a corresponding acceleration of the reference system." (Einstein, 1907, via wikipedia)
This in no way proves Mayer right, but it's a glaring error in how the parent tried to prove Mayer wrong. What Mayer did is provide a correction to Einstein's spacetime metric for General Relativity. Meyer then inserted that metric into the the rest of the GR machinery, and came out with slightly different results. Mayer claims his metric does a better job of explaining the so far unexplained periodic variations in GPS measurements and several astrophysical anomalies. Meyer's theory also predicts some specific testable effects that aren't even all that expensive to test.
I don't know whether Mayer's metric is better than Einstein's or not; Mayer may very well be wrong. But if so, I claim he's wrong in the way of a scientist; not in the way of a crank. Mayer starts with measurements poorly explained by existing theory, proposes a correction to the theory, and predicts specific testable results. This is the way science actually works, even if Mayer turns out to be wrong. Now the question is: who is willing to allocate a few resources and test Mayer's theory.
Thanks for the post. Physics was my undergrad major, but my formal physics ended there, so I'm even less qualified to comment; on the other hand, this is SlashDot!
Given that caveat, I found Mayer worth a serious look. He's got a number of references showing measurements that GR does not explain. The most convincing stuff is from GPS satellite measurements which show an unexplained sawtooth pattern with a period of two cycles per day and an amplitude of several feet (or nanoseconds). GPS satellites and ground stations explicitly correct for the general relativistic effects of the earth's gravity well, so any anomalies would be very interesting. But he's also got anomalies in measurements of hydrogen 21 cm radiation and in the effect of Ganymede on signals sent from the Galileo spacecraft.
If Mayer faked the anomalies (but I believe they're real), he would be shot down in no time. Assuming the anomalies are real, then any theory that can explain them in addition to the rest of the effects explained by GR (precession of Mercury's orbit, redshift of a gravity well, etc) deserves a serious look.
One other point. In grad school, when we students complained about the many annoyances involved in writing and publishing our work, my advisor would say "50% of science is communication." There's alot of wisdom in that. There are plenty of cranks (or not so cranky folk) out there tugging on physicists' sleeves and saying "Einstein was wrong and I have a notebook full of equations to prove it!" I know such a fellow myself, but it would take weeks to examine his equations and maybe months to explain his errors. What he and his ilk lack is the ability to communicate like a scientist. Anyway, where I'm going with all this is that Mayer suffers no such lack. His 'Lecture 1' document is much better than average writing by a scientist. While this doesn't prove his equations are better than Einstein's, it is further reason why he deserves a serious look.
In a sign that public opinion about the trade-offs between national security and individual rights is nuanced and remains highly unresolved, responses to questions about the administration's eavesdropping program varied significantly depending on how the questions were worded, underlining the importance of the effort by the White House this week to define the issue on its terms.
. ..
respondents overwhelmingly supported e-mail and telephone monitoring directed at "Americans that the government is suspicious of;" they overwhelmingly opposed the same kind of surveillance if it was aimed at "ordinary Americans."
The administration is selling the wiretapping now as a "terrorist surveillance program," now who could object to that?
On the other hand, famous conservative activist Grover Norquist says that if new tools are needed to go after terrorists, the President should get a law passed, rather than break the existing laws. Sounds quite reasonable, doesn't it?
I can't find anything on the results from the Verona Project that didn't originate with Ann Coulter. Given what we've learned about her factual errors and misleading endnotes in Slander (see this or this ). The real slam dunk is here, where the writer works his way through almost every footnote in Chapter 2 of Slander, and finds that frequently her assertions are not supported by the article she cites. That's right, 56 footnotes in the chapter (on booknotes she said it was her favorite chapter), but they don't lead to her conclusions. That makes them pretty misleading.
Given that record I'm not going to take her assertions on the Verona Project at face value; only a sucker would. So if the parent can find independent support for the claims about the Verona Project, I'm interested, but if it's all based on Ann Coulter's brand of unsupported claims, forget it,
OK, your point is we should compare disposable incomes. Essentially all Gates' income is disposable; he still endowed his foundation with half his disposable income. According to this Jan 2005 BBC story, the Gates foundation has a $27 billion endowment, and has already given over $7 billion. That makes $34 billion that he could have spent buying major corporations or island nations or something.
Who else do you know who has given half their disposable income? Let's compare Gates giving with some other billionaires who aren't so unpopular on slashdot. Larry Ellison: According to
this thru Ellison Medical Foundation, Larry is giving $100 million over 5 years for research on aging. That's pocket change for a guy worth $17 billion. Warren Buffet, weighing in at $40 billion, gives away $12 million per year, according to
BusinessWeek. Again, pocket change, though Buffet says he plans to eventually give 99% of his money to his foundation.
Here's an old story from 2001 about silicon valley philanthropy. According to it, only David Packard (foundation gives $500m/year) is in the same class as Gates.
At the bottom of this you'll find a Nov 2005
table listing 18 Americans worth over $10 billion.
Have any of them given as large a percentage as Gates? I can't find any evidence if they have. My conclusion: compared to billionaires or to ordinary folks, Gates have given away an extrordinary proportion of his net worth.
By the way, for those of you unfamiliar with entities like the Gates, Ellison, and Packard foundations, it works like this. You can give away whatever amount of your wealth you want in any given year, and that amount will be deducted from the income on which you are taxed. One way to give it away is to establish a 501C(3) charity, such as these foundations, and endow it with a big chunk of cash. The foundation is required by law to give away at least 5% of its net worth per year. It also needs to be independent of its endower, so it can't be used as a vehicle to manipulate or control e.g. Microsoft. The Gates foundation got a $20 billion block of Microsoft stock from Gates in the late '90s and immediately sold the MS stock for more conservative investments. I assume it continues to invest its endowment and to give away the requisite 5%, which this year tops $1.1 billion. I believe Gates' father directs the foundation. From what I have seen, the foundation has a special interest in eradicating diseases in the developing world; hence their interest in
tuberculosis and malaria. But heck, why listen to me when you cand surf the foundation and read about its priorities.
Weiner was a classic prodigy; spoke Greek and Latin by age 5; he graduated Tufts at age 14, had his PhD from Harvard by 19. Weiner said that the Prodigy syndrome is something a parent, frequently the father, does to a child. It involves bing very demanding, and vary very sparing of praise. Weiner said it got him a 5-year head start in his research, but cost him his whole childhood. He said he would never do that to his own child (though apparently he was a relatively demanding father). Weiner also said he believed the prodigy syndrome could be worked on most kids; that there was nothing exceptional about himself. He also mentions some tragic prodigies he knew personally who burned out and stopped trying.
My first point is this: don't confuse having a pushy parent with being really smart. The difference will not show up until one gets beyond regurgitating book learning and into original research. My second point is this: don't steal anyone's childhood; they are irreplaceable.
I wouldn't be surprised if pop-up blocking browsers also helped end the era of pop-up ads. Personally, I didn't know pop-ups were dying. I've been using Galeon and Firefox, often thru a personal filtering proxy, so I never saw many pop-ups.
I have a 2nd generation Prius and I have exceeded 50MPG on some trips. For example, on labor day weekend, carrying my family of 4 plus weekend luggage and running the AC, on a 358 mile trip I got 51.1MPG. And it wasn't on flat terrain either; the trip included over 200 miles on NY state rural roads and 130 miles on the Mass Pike.
My secret? On uphill stretches of highway I set the cruise control to 58 and stay in the slow lane. Downhill I keep to the speed limit. If you're willing to eschew the fast lane you can get pretty good milage in a Prius. On another similar trip over many of the same roads I got 44mpg because I was behind schedule and needed to go 70-75.
By the way: all you folks who are trying to compare the Prius to a Vespa, remember the key words: "family of four plus luggage." You'd need four Vespas to carry our load; oops, your milage just dropped to 15!
An interesting thing about the Prius is that it has changed my driving style. When I drive our other car, I drive much more agressively (and probably less safely) and play the game of trying to "win traffic". When I drive the Prius, I play a different game: don't hurt the milage. It makes me a safer, friendlier driver. The omninerd analysis fails to register that benefit.
Mebbe they'll discover & invent more great stu
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Ma Bell brought us the transistor. My guess is the fallout from that single invention drives about 30% of our economy. And let's not forget the development of Unix and C, and the discovery of pulsars. Sure, they were a huge slow bureaucracy, but the research arm changed our lives forever. I'll never forget you, Ma Bell. Unfortunately, the landline phone business is a dinosaur, and will never again support anything like Bell Labs. If you have a cable modem and a cell phone, landline phones are completely optional; there's no chance to reassembel the old Bell monopoly.
In this case, it's just Microsoft exploiting the fact that America is a technological backwater compared to the rest of the developed world to push a solution that benefits it.
Well, not quite. If you read the original ars technica article, you'll see that part of Microsoft's decision had to do with DRM. At present, Blu-ray's DRM blocks copying to your computer's hard disk. HD-DVD's DRM explicitly allows "managed copy."
HD DVD implements part of the AACS control mechanism to allow for things such as putting digital copies of a disc on a hard drive, transferring a movie (legally) to a portable player, or streaming content on a home network. Furthermore, HD DVD makes Managed Copy mandatory: all content provided on HD DVD must give users the option of making at least one copy. Jordi Ribas, director of technical strategy for the Windows Digital Media Division, told me that while the feature is mandatory, the studios will have the option of charging for it. Ribas hopes that studios will allow at least a single copy "for free," but it may be market conditions that ultimately determine the cost of such features. The take-away, at least, is that studios have to offer something, and AACS is structured in such a way that the studios can tap into it to offer users more options.
Toshiba yesterday confirmed its next-generation optical disc format, HD DVD, will not launch in the US until "February or March". The technology had previously been expected to hit the market before the end of this year.
According to
this the delay is not for technical reasons: "The consortium behind the disc wants to avoid repeating 1997's slow launch of the DVD, for which only a few titles were initially available."
On the other hand, in 1997 there wasn't a competing DVD format breathing down anyone's neck.
In a country that values freedom, occasionally encouraging illegal behavior is not a sufficient reason to make something illegal. I hear that firearms and automobiles are abused too; even employed in the commission of much more serious crimes than copyright infringement. But I don't hear the RIAA calling for bans on them.
As a practial matter, as long as the internet exists, P2P networks will exist. Get used to it folks.
... In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze...
Now I always thought that the two roles of a leader are to articulate a vision for the future (AKA 'hope for the best') and to prepare plans and resources for the proverbial rainy day (AKA 'plan for the worst'). Bush is certainly good at hoping for the best, but this disaster, like Iraq, demonstrates his incompetence at preparing for the worst.
Finally, I totally agree with the parent's plug for John McPhee's The Control of Nature. The 2nd link is to Amazon's excerpt from the book where McPhee discusses the Atchafalaya.
Often, the difference between 'problem' and 'expense' is a function of your budget. In the case of the Mars mission, the only thing that's funded is a little bit of planning. Everything else is unfunded, so everything else is a problem.
In fact, many things that don't have to do with Mars have become problems, because Mars has been leaching dollars from other programs. So, for example, the Hubble Space Telescope, the single most scientifically valuable instrument in space, has become too expensive to repair, because Mars is getting the bucks.
And at the end of the Bush years, when we know how many hundred billion a Mars mission will cost, and we know how many extra trillion we are in debt, Mars will be cancelled. But not before it's destroyed Hubble and probably a bunch of other science projects. But who cares, they'll be teaching 'intelligent design' in high school as if it were a scientific theory, so we'll have much worse problems than the setbacks in space science.
Slashdot Mirror
The main thing they have in common is that they both ask you to "enroll" your friends & aquaintances. If they were the only two organizations that did that maybe the parent would be right, but of course Amway and many "non-cult" religions ask you to do the same.
One other thing they have in common, but it'll take some explaining. Landmark Forum is essentially a re-naming of 70's/80's organization called Erhard Seminars Training, or EST for short. EST was also a for-profit corporation, founded by a guy born under the name of Jack Rosenberg, who left his wife & family, changed his name to Werner Erhard, and started the organization (yes, I'm leaving out lots more ugly Jack/Werner history; go ahead and google for it). Somewhere along the way, Werner/Jack joined up with Scientology. I'm not sure how long he was involved, but the way the story was told in EST, he tried a whole bunch of those 70s things (sorry, can't find a suitable group adjective) like ROLFing, Esalen, before starting his own thing. Oh, here's a good name: "Large Group Awareness Therapy organizations."
Personal disclosure: I took the EST thing, AKA "the Training" back in the early 80's and volunteered in the organization for about 2 years and took a few less intensive "seminars". "The Training" was very good for me personally though I was lousy at "enrolling" others. I got diminishing returns from the seminars. Part of my agenda in volunteering was to sniff around for the dirt. I didn't find any of that either. Eventually I dropped out. There were one or two phone calls, but once I told them definitely that I no longer wanted to do EST stuff, they let me alone and have done so for 20 years. I don't regret the money I spent; I don't regret the time I spent; all in all I'm glad I did it. But who knows; maybe I'm still brainwashed!!
Same thing with dimmables. I bought one to see how it performs and ran it thru my "kill-a-watt" http://www.fadfusion.com/selection.php?product_ite m_number=30183200136&gclid=CMbYwsKph4cCFRskUAod1DU eZQ meter. At max, the bulb draws 25 watts; at min 10 watts. Perceptually it's just not that dim at its minimum setting. Now try finding a dimmable CFL in a candelabra base -- can't be done! I'd like to put more swirls in the house, but many of our most frequently used lights are dimmable and/or candelabra.
By the way: a fun bulb for halloween is this: http://www.bulbman.com/index.php?main_page=product _bulb_info&cPath=4595_8457&products_id=13846. You can be in ultraviolet heaven for much lower prices thanx to these kinds of black light (ultraviolet) bulbs. Makes me wonder: is the black light niche market bigger than the dimmable candelabra niche?
Excellent suggestion, if I do say so myself!
I'm a lefty and I prefer to work my mouse with the left hand. But at school so many machines were set up with the mouse on the right and junk on the left (i.e. not easy to switch the mouse over) that I learned to be ambidextrous with the mouse. She should give it a try. Also, make sure all ergonomic stuff is OK, especially keyboard height. Her wrists should be straight and her elbows should be at 90 degrees or less.
Memoirs is essentially a satire about a society with too many self-deceptions, and how reality has a way of unraveling even though society refuses to notice or acknowledge any problem. Vacuum is a collection of book reviews -- reviews of books that never existed; in fact some could not possibly exist. These brief descriptions don't do Lem's books credit. Read them yourself; they're devilishly clever.
Crimson brags about its class B address -- MIT has a class A! And if you look at the physical connection, last I heard the Harvard campus was served by a fiber strung along the MBTA Red Line tunnels -- straight from an MIT router!
My hope is this: the avalanche of Republican scandals and screw-ups will result in democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. Then we'll have a real investigation, with subpoena power too. Bush will fight the investigation and it'll probably all wind up in the Supreme Court's lap. That'll be interesting.
Furthermore, parent writes:
But although Mayer's two clocks are at rest relative to each other, they are in an accelerated frame of referance (his rocket is accelerating). And as we all know, the Special Theory is specialized exactly because it doesn't apply to accelerated frames of reference or to gravitational fields. In those cases, you need instead the General Theory, which assunes "the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and a corresponding acceleration of the reference system." (Einstein, 1907, via wikipedia)This in no way proves Mayer right, but it's a glaring error in how the parent tried to prove Mayer wrong. What Mayer did is provide a correction to Einstein's spacetime metric for General Relativity. Meyer then inserted that metric into the the rest of the GR machinery, and came out with slightly different results. Mayer claims his metric does a better job of explaining the so far unexplained periodic variations in GPS measurements and several astrophysical anomalies. Meyer's theory also predicts some specific testable effects that aren't even all that expensive to test.
I don't know whether Mayer's metric is better than Einstein's or not; Mayer may very well be wrong. But if so, I claim he's wrong in the way of a scientist; not in the way of a crank. Mayer starts with measurements poorly explained by existing theory, proposes a correction to the theory, and predicts specific testable results. This is the way science actually works, even if Mayer turns out to be wrong. Now the question is: who is willing to allocate a few resources and test Mayer's theory.
Given that caveat, I found Mayer worth a serious look. He's got a number of references showing measurements that GR does not explain. The most convincing stuff is from GPS satellite measurements which show an unexplained sawtooth pattern with a period of two cycles per day and an amplitude of several feet (or nanoseconds). GPS satellites and ground stations explicitly correct for the general relativistic effects of the earth's gravity well, so any anomalies would be very interesting. But he's also got anomalies in measurements of hydrogen 21 cm radiation and in the effect of Ganymede on signals sent from the Galileo spacecraft.
If Mayer faked the anomalies (but I believe they're real), he would be shot down in no time. Assuming the anomalies are real, then any theory that can explain them in addition to the rest of the effects explained by GR (precession of Mercury's orbit, redshift of a gravity well, etc) deserves a serious look.
One other point. In grad school, when we students complained about the many annoyances involved in writing and publishing our work, my advisor would say "50% of science is communication." There's alot of wisdom in that. There are plenty of cranks (or not so cranky folk) out there tugging on physicists' sleeves and saying "Einstein was wrong and I have a notebook full of equations to prove it!" I know such a fellow myself, but it would take weeks to examine his equations and maybe months to explain his errors. What he and his ilk lack is the ability to communicate like a scientist. Anyway, where I'm going with all this is that Mayer suffers no such lack. His 'Lecture 1' document is much better than average writing by a scientist. While this doesn't prove his equations are better than Einstein's, it is further reason why he deserves a serious look.
On the other hand, famous conservative activist Grover Norquist says that if new tools are needed to go after terrorists, the President should get a law passed, rather than break the existing laws. Sounds quite reasonable, doesn't it?
So, let the public relations rumble begin!!!
Given that record I'm not going to take her assertions on the Verona Project at face value; only a sucker would. So if the parent can find independent support for the claims about the Verona Project, I'm interested, but if it's all based on Ann Coulter's brand of unsupported claims, forget it,
Who else do you know who has given half their disposable income? Let's compare Gates giving with some other billionaires who aren't so unpopular on slashdot. Larry Ellison: According to this thru Ellison Medical Foundation, Larry is giving $100 million over 5 years for research on aging. That's pocket change for a guy worth $17 billion. Warren Buffet, weighing in at $40 billion, gives away $12 million per year, according to BusinessWeek. Again, pocket change, though Buffet says he plans to eventually give 99% of his money to his foundation.
Here's an old story from 2001 about silicon valley philanthropy. According to it, only David Packard (foundation gives $500m/year) is in the same class as Gates.
At the bottom of this you'll find a Nov 2005 table listing 18 Americans worth over $10 billion. Have any of them given as large a percentage as Gates? I can't find any evidence if they have. My conclusion: compared to billionaires or to ordinary folks, Gates have given away an extrordinary proportion of his net worth.
By the way, for those of you unfamiliar with entities like the Gates, Ellison, and Packard foundations, it works like this. You can give away whatever amount of your wealth you want in any given year, and that amount will be deducted from the income on which you are taxed. One way to give it away is to establish a 501C(3) charity, such as these foundations, and endow it with a big chunk of cash. The foundation is required by law to give away at least 5% of its net worth per year. It also needs to be independent of its endower, so it can't be used as a vehicle to manipulate or control e.g. Microsoft. The Gates foundation got a $20 billion block of Microsoft stock from Gates in the late '90s and immediately sold the MS stock for more conservative investments. I assume it continues to invest its endowment and to give away the requisite 5%, which this year tops $1.1 billion. I believe Gates' father directs the foundation. From what I have seen, the foundation has a special interest in eradicating diseases in the developing world; hence their interest in tuberculosis and malaria. But heck, why listen to me when you cand surf the foundation and read about its priorities.
I didn't intend to suggest that the post was by someone who had been pushed into the prodigy syndrome. In fact it sounds like quite the reverse; the poster was able to plot his own course.
Weiner was a classic prodigy; spoke Greek and Latin by age 5; he graduated Tufts at age 14, had his PhD from Harvard by 19. Weiner said that the Prodigy syndrome is something a parent, frequently the father, does to a child. It involves bing very demanding, and vary very sparing of praise. Weiner said it got him a 5-year head start in his research, but cost him his whole childhood. He said he would never do that to his own child (though apparently he was a relatively demanding father). Weiner also said he believed the prodigy syndrome could be worked on most kids; that there was nothing exceptional about himself. He also mentions some tragic prodigies he knew personally who burned out and stopped trying.
My first point is this: don't confuse having a pushy parent with being really smart. The difference will not show up until one gets beyond regurgitating book learning and into original research. My second point is this: don't steal anyone's childhood; they are irreplaceable.
I wouldn't be surprised if pop-up blocking browsers also helped end the era of pop-up ads. Personally, I didn't know pop-ups were dying. I've been using Galeon and Firefox, often thru a personal filtering proxy, so I never saw many pop-ups.
My secret? On uphill stretches of highway I set the cruise control to 58 and stay in the slow lane. Downhill I keep to the speed limit. If you're willing to eschew the fast lane you can get pretty good milage in a Prius. On another similar trip over many of the same roads I got 44mpg because I was behind schedule and needed to go 70-75.
By the way: all you folks who are trying to compare the Prius to a Vespa, remember the key words: "family of four plus luggage." You'd need four Vespas to carry our load; oops, your milage just dropped to 15!
An interesting thing about the Prius is that it has changed my driving style. When I drive our other car, I drive much more agressively (and probably less safely) and play the game of trying to "win traffic". When I drive the Prius, I play a different game: don't hurt the milage. It makes me a safer, friendlier driver. The omninerd analysis fails to register that benefit.
Ma Bell brought us the transistor. My guess is the fallout from that single invention drives about 30% of our economy. And let's not forget the development of Unix and C, and the discovery of pulsars. Sure, they were a huge slow bureaucracy, but the research arm changed our lives forever. I'll never forget you, Ma Bell. Unfortunately, the landline phone business is a dinosaur, and will never again support anything like Bell Labs. If you have a cable modem and a cell phone, landline phones are completely optional; there's no chance to reassembel the old Bell monopoly.
Well, it's not a clone, but Python provides some pretty fine functionality. I'm not at all sure that msh is an improvement on Python...
Well, not quite. If you read the original ars technica article, you'll see that part of Microsoft's decision had to do with DRM. At present, Blu-ray's DRM blocks copying to your computer's hard disk. HD-DVD's DRM explicitly allows "managed copy."
thanx for the pointer!
Unfortunately, according to this article ,
According to this the delay is not for technical reasons: "The consortium behind the disc wants to avoid repeating 1997's slow launch of the DVD, for which only a few titles were initially available."On the other hand, in 1997 there wasn't a competing DVD format breathing down anyone's neck.
As a practial matter, as long as the internet exists, P2P networks will exist. Get used to it folks.
Finally, I totally agree with the parent's plug for John McPhee's The Control of Nature. The 2nd link is to Amazon's excerpt from the book where McPhee discusses the Atchafalaya.
In fact, many things that don't have to do with Mars have become problems, because Mars has been leaching dollars from other programs. So, for example, the Hubble Space Telescope, the single most scientifically valuable instrument in space, has become too expensive to repair, because Mars is getting the bucks.
And at the end of the Bush years, when we know how many hundred billion a Mars mission will cost, and we know how many extra trillion we are in debt, Mars will be cancelled. But not before it's destroyed Hubble and probably a bunch of other science projects. But who cares, they'll be teaching 'intelligent design' in high school as if it were a scientific theory, so we'll have much worse problems than the setbacks in space science.