The point is that it is rather impossible with thinking people in a democracy to create such an organization. You see there are things called laws. Movies are merely delusional attempts to create what some want to believe and force as an agenda. </BLOCKQUOTE> <P> You think you're being cynical and realistic, but you're not nearly cynical enough. You do realize that the movie is based on real events, right? That the author of the book was the teacher of the class in question? Now, that still leaves room for all sorts of distortions, as you'd probably point out, and you are right. But what are you offering as an alternative? That it is "impossible in a democracy" - sounds like a solid bedrock principle. Sticking with your principles over public opinion is idealism, but favoring your principles over fact is delusion. <P> The question you need to ask is, where did that principle come from? What do THEY want you to believe? <P> As for happening in a democracy, I have to point out yet again: Hitler was chosen by the voters in a democratic election. <P> Pardon me if I'm flaming, but I couldn't think of a delicate way to put this. <P> <I>GEORGE HEBERT WALKER BUSH is an anagram for HUGE BESERK REBEL WARTHOG</I>
the statistical properties of the quantum systems ensure that those macroscopic systems will behave classically. </snip>
You can't really mean this. If quantum mechanics had no observable macroscopic effects then you couldn't run an experiment to prove the theory.
If this makes no sense, go listen to some white noise. Not only is it a quantum phenomena, but it's also intrinsically random and can be directly sensed.
We're dancing around the Schrodinger's cat paradox here. The truth is, nobody has a real solution to that yet.
No library I've ever patronized has worked on this principle, and their collections will be a lot more limited if they were. Using a 'community standards' test for book purchases is a huge can of worms. Every book has an enemy somewhere, unless it's as bland as an almanac. No library can satisfy the needs of its community if it plays to the lowest common denominator.
Yes, I know some communities try to do this to their libraries, with varying degrees of success. That does not make it the right thing to do, though. It also doesn't make it legal under the 1st amendment.
This is a serious design issue, but it also misses the point. This argument crops up whenever usability gets discussed and usually derails the discussion.
The number one cause of bad interface design is bad interface designers. Legitimate design tradeoffs are down at #3 or #4 on the list.
If we get a clue we can provide 90% of the ease of use that Microsoft and AOL provide.
I'm an old xBase programmer from way back, so trust me: the date format is fine. It doesn't store the year at all. Dates are integers, the number of days since a start date (that I can't remember off the top of my head.)
The Naked Truth about First Causes
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Planet Gattaca
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· Score: 1
Nothing in the laws of physics as we now know them say that every event must have a cause. In fact, quantum mechanics holds that first causes are cropping up around us all the time. Certain subatomic events are not triggered by an outside interaction, but rather happen at random times. Every time a radioactive atom decays it becomes a first cause.
Logically, all conditions must be proven. I cannot disprove the existence of a shoe, because a shoe may exist outside my perception. Therefore, for logic to work at all, the person claiming the existence of a shoe must show me the shoe!
First of all, your argument above is invalid. Just because you see a shoe doesn't mean it is really there. You could be hallucinating, it could be a hologram, it could be a well-made fake.
'All conditions must be proven' = philosophic/mathematical method
'All conditions must not be disproven' = scientific method
The thing about philosophic/mathematical systems is that they all have axioms. Without first principles from which to reason they can't find any conclusions. Those axioms must be taken on faith. Attempts have been made to get around this, most famously Descartes' 'I think therefore I am', but they all failed miserably.
Poorly constructed logic is one thing, but everyone has first principles based on faith. If you dig through yours far enough you will find them. The only exception I'd grant would be people who truly accept the scientific method, and the best they can say is that the existence of God is unproven.
general relativity, yadda yadda
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Planet Gattaca
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· Score: 1
(Disclaimer: I'm not an physicist)
Let me clarify what I was thinking. General relativity allows for time as a radial measurement; that is, the time of an event is the 4-D distance between that event and the Big Bang. (I don't know if this is required or just a possible geometry for the universe.) Thus there would be no 'time before the Big Bang'; that would require a negative distance. Something on the other side of the B.B. would still have a positive time; it would just be really far away.
I think you can get around the energy problem by rephrasing the law of conservation of energy:
The sum of the energy in the universe is invariant over the dimension of time.
As long as the total energy at the Bang equals the total energy later, you're fine. You don't have to worry about what came before, because there is no 'before.'
Under this scheme, the laws of physics cannot explain why the Big Bang happened, or why the universe exists, because physics (a.k.a. general relativity) only describes what happens in the space/time manifold. If there is an explanation it must lie outside time, in the realm of the eternal.
That, for me, is the best proof of the existence of a higher power that I've seen yet.
No, antimatter isn't speculative - it gets made in the lab all the time. It's as certain as anything else in particle physics. That is, it's as certain as anything we can't sense directly will ever be.
Or how about a microbe that binds carbon out of the atmosphere? Convert CO2 to O2 with super efficient microbes - poof! space travel just got a whole lot easier
Actually we have these. They're called plants. The problem is that the reaction is endothermic, so they need light to pull it off. Nice try, though.
Moderate this down as flamebait, please
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Planet Gattaca
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· Score: 1
We're talking about two millenia worth of thought and reflection on life and morality here, Jon, not some Johnny-come-lately spawn of the so-called Enlightenment.
So, four centuries since the Enlightenment aren't enough? Christianity was starting to go mainstream after four centuries, and had already laid down all of its fundamental doctrine and philosophy. IMHO it hasn't produced anything interesting since.
As far as bodycounts, I think you're falling victim to ahistoricism. The 20th century has been bloody but there was lots of violence and genocide before - and for the last two millenia most of it has had a religious element. When you mentioned Communism you hit on the only ideology which can compete with Monotheism in terms of bodycount, but religion has too big a head start to overcome (I think - I haven't totaled the numbers, either.) Stalin's purges? Thirty Year's War. Great Leap Forward? Conquest of America. Cultural Revolution? Pogroms and the Holocaust. We can play this game all day, but ultimately there's no point.
Whoops, I implicitly made a Nazi reference. Now the flames really start...
Technology has advanced to the point (or more specifically, is now advancing at a such a rate) that we've lost "control" of it
I've seen a lot of smart people express this same vague feeling that technology is out of control. None of them can back up that assertion to my satisfaction. I think this goes back to C.P. Snow's 'two cultures' concept - that our society is split between the scientifically literate and those who concentrate on non-scientific matters, and the two sides are not talking to each other much. The non-scientific side really HAS lost control of technology, because the other half of the culture - us - have it in our grasp.
Here we have a common misconception. There need not be anything before the Big Bang, because there is no 'before the Big Bang.' Time is not something which governs the reasons behind the Big Bang. Time is of necessity a dimension within the space/time continuum. Hence Time only affects those things which are within that continuum. Our entire existence, the entire existence of the universe, everything is simply one slice of that continuum.
You're right about the WTO being a voluntary ceding of sovereignty. People are upset, though, because we signed that treaty (GATT) without most people knowing what we were giving up; if they had known, they probably would have objected.
Personally I'm not against world government, as long as it is a democracy and has limited powers (say, on a federal model.) The WTO, though, is the worst of all possible systems - a corrupt autocratic oligarchy which isn't answerable to anyone.
Hm, Poland 1939, Russia 1941, Hawaii 1941, Korea 1949
More importantly, three of these examples were military failures. Only the invasion of Poland was ultimately successful. The U.S. is much bigger; the Russian example is probably the best parallel.
This kind of sneak attack might work for a day or two, but then it would be crushed. You can land enough troops to take an airfield, but not enough to assault the neighboring military bases. More importantly, you cannot resupply them. Once surprise is lost you won't get any airplanes through. Light infantry don't require a great deal of supplies, true, but then again they would be carrying the same sorts of weapons as the police / national guard / hastily organized militias / etc.
They won't have tanks because they're too darned heavy. Even a 747 can only carry one or two main battle tanks. Remember the multi-month buildup to Operation Desert Storm? That was because they had to move the tanks by ship.
Sea transport will also be cut off pretty quickly once surprise is lost. Mr. Hagar did mention "you might even nuke pearl/guam in the first 24 hours of your attack." That IS what it would take - you'd have to knock out the U.S. Navy altogether. The reason we pay mongo $$$ for a huge navy is to prevent this sort of invasion. The problem with nuking the fleet in harbor: it's more or less been tried already:
"In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success."
Admiral Yamamoto in an interview with Shigeharu Matsumoto, a member of the Japanese Cabinet, 1940
The Japanese at the time had the world's third largest navy. They were at least an even match for the U.S. Pacific fleet. Currently the Chinese have pretty close to squat for a navy.
Probably the only reason we can see O, Si, and Mg is that that is extremely unlikely stuff to find in a star.
I hear you. I don't place too much stock in these results either BTW. Those three elements should be relatively easy to detect. Nitrogen shouldn't be harder to detect than oxygen, though. It's not much more common in stars.
I'll grant you the point about hydrogen and helium, but why no carbon? Why no nitrogen? If it were a gas giant it would have appreciable amounts of methane and ammonia in its atmosphere. Nitrogen has about the same atomic weight as oxygen. It should be present in similar amounts.
As far as it being vapor: you may know more about this than I do. I just have a general science education. However, consider this. When you see the Earth from space, almost all of its light is reflected from the sun. It's white light when it strikes the earth. The image you see, though, isn't white. The oceans are distinctly blue-ish and the land is various shades of brown. The color of the light changes because of the absorption lines of the stuff on the ground.
AFAIK, scientists do surface spectoscopy by scattering light off solids all the time.
I understand what you're trying to say about spectroscopy, but you're wrong. There are two types of spectral lines: emission lines, from something that's hot enough to glow, and absorption lines, from every other type of matter. If the light really is reflected, then they must be measuring absorption lines. On the other hand, if parts of the planet are hot enough to glow (seems plausible) it could be rock just as easily as gas. Hot lava glows nicely in the dark.
It can't be a gas giant for a few reasons: 1. No Hydrogen 2. No Carbon 3. No Nitrogen
The nitrogen is most telling. It has about the same atomic weight as oxygen, so it should be present in similar amounts, regardless of the planet's temperature or gravitational pull. It's not there because it does not react strongly with metals to form minerals.
Actually a free oxygen atmosphere is pretty fishy to start with. Oxygen is extremely reactive - almost as corrosive as chlorine gas. The only reason the Earth has free oxygen is because the plants keep dumping it there. On the other planets in our solar system it is always seen in a compound - carbon dioxide, water vapor, etc. Since we don't see hydrogen or carbon, it is probably in rock form.
Three elements detected by astronomers: Oxygen, Silicon, Magnesium
Three most common elements in the Earth's crust: Oxygen, Silicon, Aluminum (Mg in top ten)
Various people below made the right points; the oxygen can't be atmospheric; the planet can't be a gas giant that close to the sun; the lack of hydrogen and helium is significant.
The planet is a big ball of rock with no atmosphere. That's pretty remarkable; AFAIK astronomers didn't think a rocky planet that size could form. That may be what the astronomers won't talk about yet.
We're all dancing around the answer here. It's not a gas giant, because of the solar wind, high temperature, yadda yadda. Besides, how many gasses can you think of that contain magnesium? The article is a bit vague on just what the spectra showed, but it's probably the three elements in plasma, or else in solid form.
Quick quiz: what are the three most common elements in the earth's crust?
Answer: Oxygen, Silicon, Aluminum
(Note that aluminum is right next to magnesium on the periodic table, and magnesium is in the top ten elements for the earth.)
The planet is made out of MgSiO3 and related minerals. It's a big ball of rock with little or no atmosphere (it would boil off at those temperatures.)
I think THIS is the big news they won't discuss yet. AFAIK, astronomers didn't think it was possible to have a rocky planet that big - they were guessing the limit was a bit larger than the Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
the statistical properties of the quantum systems ensure that those macroscopic systems will behave classically.
</snip>
You can't really mean this. If quantum mechanics had no observable macroscopic effects then you couldn't run an experiment to prove the theory.
If this makes no sense, go listen to some white noise. Not only is it a quantum phenomena, but it's also intrinsically random and can be directly sensed.
We're dancing around the Schrodinger's cat paradox here. The truth is, nobody has a real solution to that yet.
Your first premise is just plain wrong.
No library I've ever patronized has worked on this principle, and their collections will be a lot more limited if they were. Using a 'community standards' test for book purchases is a huge can of worms. Every book has an enemy somewhere, unless it's as bland as an almanac. No library can satisfy the needs of its community if it plays to the lowest common denominator.
Yes, I know some communities try to do this to their libraries, with varying degrees of success. That does not make it the right thing to do, though. It also doesn't make it legal under the 1st amendment.
This is actually a good idea.
This is a serious design issue, but it also misses the point. This argument crops up whenever usability gets discussed and usually derails the discussion.
The number one cause of bad interface design is bad interface designers. Legitimate design tradeoffs are down at #3 or #4 on the list.
If we get a clue we can provide 90% of the ease of use that Microsoft and AOL provide.
Never mind, what you said didn't penetrate my brain before I hit submit.
You're right, some systems will need to have CENTURY put ON to make the data entry work properly.
No.
I'm an old xBase programmer from way back, so trust me: the date format is fine. It doesn't store the year at all. Dates are integers, the number of days since a start date (that I can't remember off the top of my head.)
Nothing in the laws of physics as we now know them say that every event must have a cause. In fact, quantum mechanics holds that first causes are cropping up around us all the time. Certain subatomic events are not triggered by an outside interaction, but rather happen at random times. Every time a radioactive atom decays it becomes a first cause.
First of all, your argument above is invalid. Just because you see a shoe doesn't mean it is really there. You could be hallucinating, it could be a hologram, it could be a well-made fake.
'All conditions must be proven' = philosophic/mathematical method
'All conditions must not be disproven' = scientific method
The thing about philosophic/mathematical systems is that they all have axioms. Without first principles from which to reason they can't find any conclusions. Those axioms must be taken on faith. Attempts have been made to get around this, most famously Descartes' 'I think therefore I am', but they all failed miserably.
Poorly constructed logic is one thing, but everyone has first principles based on faith. If you dig through yours far enough you will find them. The only exception I'd grant would be people who truly accept the scientific method, and the best they can say is that the existence of God is unproven.
(Disclaimer: I'm not an physicist)
Let me clarify what I was thinking. General relativity allows for time as a radial measurement; that is, the time of an event is the 4-D distance between that event and the Big Bang. (I don't know if this is required or just a possible geometry for the universe.) Thus there would be no 'time before the Big Bang'; that would require a negative distance. Something on the other side of the B.B. would still have a positive time; it would just be really far away.
I think you can get around the energy problem by rephrasing the law of conservation of energy:
The sum of the energy in the universe is invariant over the dimension of time.
As long as the total energy at the Bang equals the total energy later, you're fine. You don't have to worry about what came before, because there is no 'before.'
Under this scheme, the laws of physics cannot explain why the Big Bang happened, or why the universe exists, because physics (a.k.a. general relativity) only describes what happens in the space/time manifold. If there is an explanation it must lie outside time, in the realm of the eternal.
That, for me, is the best proof of the existence of a higher power that I've seen yet.
No, antimatter isn't speculative - it gets made in the lab all the time. It's as certain as anything else in particle physics. That is, it's as certain as anything we can't sense directly will ever be.
Or how about a microbe that binds carbon out of the atmosphere? Convert CO2 to O2 with super efficient microbes - poof! space travel just got a whole lot easier
Actually we have these. They're called plants. The problem is that the reaction is endothermic, so they need light to pull it off. Nice try, though.
We're talking about two millenia worth of thought and reflection on life and morality here, Jon, not some Johnny-come-lately spawn of the so-called Enlightenment.
...
So, four centuries since the Enlightenment aren't enough? Christianity was starting to go mainstream after four centuries, and had already laid down all of its fundamental doctrine and philosophy. IMHO it hasn't produced anything interesting since.
As far as bodycounts, I think you're falling victim to ahistoricism. The 20th century has been bloody but there was lots of violence and genocide before - and for the last two millenia most of it has had a religious element. When you mentioned Communism you hit on the only ideology which can compete with Monotheism in terms of bodycount, but religion has too big a head start to overcome (I think - I haven't totaled the numbers, either.) Stalin's purges? Thirty Year's War. Great Leap Forward? Conquest of America. Cultural Revolution? Pogroms and the Holocaust. We can play this game all day, but ultimately there's no point.
Whoops, I implicitly made a Nazi reference. Now the flames really start
Technology has advanced to the point (or more specifically, is now advancing at a such a rate) that we've lost "control" of it
I've seen a lot of smart people express this same vague feeling that technology is out of control. None of them can back up that assertion to my satisfaction. I think this goes back to C.P. Snow's 'two cultures' concept - that our society is split between the scientifically literate and those who concentrate on non-scientific matters, and the two sides are not talking to each other much. The non-scientific side really HAS lost control of technology, because the other half of the culture - us - have it in our grasp.
Here we have a common misconception. There need not be anything before the Big Bang, because there is no 'before the Big Bang.' Time is not something which governs the reasons behind the Big Bang. Time is of necessity a dimension within the space/time continuum. Hence Time only affects those things which are within that continuum. Our entire existence, the entire existence of the universe, everything is simply one slice of that continuum.
Are you thinking of Christian Scientists, dude?
Good points.
You're right about the WTO being a voluntary ceding of sovereignty. People are upset, though, because we signed that treaty (GATT) without most people knowing what we were giving up; if they had known, they probably would have objected.
Personally I'm not against world government, as long as it is a democracy and has limited powers (say, on a federal model.) The WTO, though, is the worst of all possible systems - a corrupt autocratic oligarchy which isn't answerable to anyone.
Hm, Poland 1939, Russia 1941, Hawaii 1941, Korea 1949
More importantly, three of these examples were military failures. Only the invasion of Poland was ultimately successful. The U.S. is much bigger; the Russian example is probably the best parallel.
This kind of sneak attack might work for a day or two, but then it would be crushed. You can land enough troops to take an airfield, but not enough to assault the neighboring military bases. More importantly, you cannot resupply them. Once surprise is lost you won't get any airplanes through. Light infantry don't require a great deal of supplies, true, but then again they would be carrying the same sorts of weapons as the police / national guard / hastily organized militias / etc.
They won't have tanks because they're too darned heavy. Even a 747 can only carry one or two main battle tanks. Remember the multi-month buildup to Operation Desert Storm? That was because they had to move the tanks by ship.
Sea transport will also be cut off pretty quickly once surprise is lost. Mr. Hagar did mention "you might even nuke pearl/guam in the first 24 hours of your attack." That IS what it would take - you'd have to knock out the U.S. Navy altogether. The reason we pay mongo $$$ for a huge navy is to prevent this sort of invasion. The problem with nuking the fleet in harbor: it's more or less been tried already:
"In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success."
Admiral Yamamoto in an interview with Shigeharu Matsumoto, a member of the Japanese Cabinet, 1940
The Japanese at the time had the world's third largest navy. They were at least an even match for the U.S. Pacific fleet. Currently the Chinese have pretty close to squat for a navy.
Probably the only reason we can see O, Si, and Mg is that that is extremely unlikely stuff to find in a star.
I hear you. I don't place too much stock in these results either BTW. Those three elements should be relatively easy to detect. Nitrogen shouldn't be harder to detect than oxygen, though. It's not much more common in stars.
I'll grant you the point about hydrogen and helium, but why no carbon? Why no nitrogen? If it were a gas giant it would have appreciable amounts of methane and ammonia in its atmosphere. Nitrogen has about the same atomic weight as oxygen. It should be present in similar amounts.
As far as it being vapor: you may know more about this than I do. I just have a general science education. However, consider this. When you see the Earth from space, almost all of its light is reflected from the sun. It's white light when it strikes the earth. The image you see, though, isn't white. The oceans are distinctly blue-ish and the land is various shades of brown. The color of the light changes because of the absorption lines of the stuff on the ground.
AFAIK, scientists do surface spectoscopy by scattering light off solids all the time.
I understand what you're trying to say about spectroscopy, but you're wrong. There are two types of spectral lines: emission lines, from something that's hot enough to glow, and absorption lines, from every other type of matter. If the light really is reflected, then they must be measuring absorption lines. On the other hand, if parts of the planet are hot enough to glow (seems plausible) it could be rock just as easily as gas. Hot lava glows nicely in the dark.
It can't be a gas giant for a few reasons:
1. No Hydrogen
2. No Carbon
3. No Nitrogen
The nitrogen is most telling. It has about the same atomic weight as oxygen, so it should be present in similar amounts, regardless of the planet's temperature or gravitational pull. It's not there because it does not react strongly with metals to form minerals.
Actually a free oxygen atmosphere is pretty fishy to start with. Oxygen is extremely reactive - almost as corrosive as chlorine gas. The only reason the Earth has free oxygen is because the plants keep dumping it there. On the other planets in our solar system it is always seen in a compound - carbon dioxide, water vapor, etc. Since we don't see hydrogen or carbon, it is probably in rock form.
Three elements detected by astronomers:
Oxygen, Silicon, Magnesium
Three most common elements in the Earth's crust:
Oxygen, Silicon, Aluminum (Mg in top ten)
Various people below made the right points; the oxygen can't be atmospheric; the planet can't be a gas giant that close to the sun; the lack of hydrogen and helium is significant.
The planet is a big ball of rock with no atmosphere. That's pretty remarkable; AFAIK astronomers didn't think a rocky planet that size could form. That may be what the astronomers won't talk about yet.
We're all dancing around the answer here. It's not a gas giant, because of the solar wind, high temperature, yadda yadda. Besides, how many gasses can you think of that contain magnesium? The article is a bit vague on just what the spectra showed, but it's probably the three elements in plasma, or else in solid form.
Quick quiz: what are the three most common elements in the earth's crust?
Answer: Oxygen, Silicon, Aluminum
(Note that aluminum is right next to magnesium on the periodic table, and magnesium is in the top ten elements for the earth.)
The planet is made out of MgSiO3 and related minerals. It's a big ball of rock with little or no atmosphere (it would boil off at those temperatures.)
I think THIS is the big news they won't discuss yet. AFAIK, astronomers didn't think it was possible to have a rocky planet that big - they were guessing the limit was a bit larger than the Earth.
(patting clothing to extinguish flames)
Good point. ESR doth protest too much. On the other hand, maybe he was just trying to get more press coverage for its own sake.