Re:$ is not the only motive in the universe
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McVoy Strikes Back
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· Score: 1
You're right, of course, about the funding. I was simply making the point that the profit motive was not the factor that drove the developers of UNIX, which has turned out to be a vastly superior product to profit-driven Windows.
Whoa...what happened on November the 9th? Oh... you aren't American.
**retreats in confusion**
$ is not the only motive in the universe
on
McVoy Strikes Back
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
His claim is that the profit motive is required to drive innovation. But a simple fact refutes his claim: UNIX preceded Windows. A large part of the original Unix OS was open source. From the link:
Later, Doug McIlroy would write of this period [McIlroy91]: "Peer pressure and simple pride in workmanship caused gobs of code to be rewritten or discarded as better or more basic ideas emerged. Professional rivalry and protection of turf were practically unknown: so many good things were happening that nobody needed to be proprietary about innovations". But it would take another quarter century for all the implications of that observation to come home.
FTA:
Iomega is working to investigate the commercial feasibility of this format and other nano-structural data encoding formats. One possibility being investigated, termed NG-DVD (Nano-Grating - DVD), uses nano-gratings to encode multi-level information via reflectivity, polarization, phase, and reflective orientation multiplexing.
1) What is the difference between polarization and reflective orientation?
2) How are they measuring reflectivity? From the amplitude of a reflected beam?
Back to the point: while I can readily see a distinction between general "argument from authority" fallacy and the peer-reviewed journal system, I have to say that the GP has a point.
It is one thing for first generation scientists to go out into the field, dig, record, test, and summarize their findings. When done well, that's science.
It's quite another for those scientists to write a book, pass it on to schools, and have teachers who have never done any field research use the book as an "infallible guide to truth" about the origins of man.
That's not science; it's just argument from authority. Whatever reasons the Kansas board may have, they are taking a positive step for science education: they are getting kids past the argument about origins and into the *process* of doing science. Two thumbs up!
The second problem is that keeping water -- essentially any water, to 3 or 4 places -- out of the cooling system will require a higher level of (read: more expensive) engineering. The problem is that small amounts of water will lead to ionic compounds like NaOH, Na2O, etc.... all of which will "slag" the sodium and prevent it from flowing or transferring heat efficiently.
The third problem is containing the molten sodium in a container which will not spontaneously alloy with the hot sodium.
Check out decent reactor cooling discussion here
(note the "fuel can be bonded to container with liquid metal" line!)
Some of the other metals discussed here -- Wood's metal, mercury, etc., have varying levels of these problems. For example, a friend of mine got an unwelcome "addition" to her silver ring when she mishandled some mercury in a chem demo.
I'm a little late to the party, but you indicated interest...
I'm a Christian, meaning that I have faith in Jesus as my savior. I also believe that the Bible is God's Word. I have a modest amount of evidence to support both of those ideas, but I will freely admit that I have no slam-dunk case for them. However, the evidence available to me supports those beliefs much better than it supports other hypotheses, such as "the Bible is a book of made-up stories", or "Jesus is just another religious prophet among the many." So my religious beliefs are not scientific, but neither are they evidence-less. Such is the human situation with regard to religion. I do scrutinize the evidence, and ask the very questions that you raise above. If you are interested in that kind of thing, I recommend works like Carson, Moo, and Morris, "Introduction to the New Testament", which is the tip of the iceberg in terms of Biblical scholarship.
Because I believe that the Bible is God's word to man, I have to confront what He is saying in Genesis 1 and 2. There are certainly multiple possibilities. Within the world of Biblical scholarship (in which I am trained), there are really only four live possibilities:
1) That Genesis 1, 2 are intended as a literal historical account, with "day" meaning "24-hr period".
2) That Genesis 1,2 are intended as a literal historical account, with "day" meaning "long period of time".
3) That Genesis 1 - 3 are intended as a mythological or metaphorical account of the entrance of sin into the world.
4) That Genesis 1 is intended as a literary framework for the rest of Genesis; Genesis 2 is intended as literal history. This is a more recent and highly technical view that is in favor with Hebrew language scholars. The basic idea is to draw on the connections between days 1 and 4, 2 and 5, 3 and 6, and to see days 1 - 3 as a description of God creating different regions, and days 4 - 6 as a description of God filling those same regions. (Google for "Literary Framework Hypothesis" for more details).
Among those options, based on literary considerations only, I find 1) to be the most likely, and 4) the second most likely. From that perspective, I would describe myself as a creationist.
The major issue at stake is the connection between the fall of Adam (Gen. 3) and the work of Christ. In Romans 5, Paul asserts that the sin of Adam, imputed to all his people, is parallel to the righteousness of Christ, imputed to all his people. For that reason, the historicity of Adam seems to be the real non-negotiable to Christians. This is why option 3) seems the least likely.
However, I freely accept the possibility that I could be wrong. If I die today and God tells me "you were wrong. It was none of the above!" then I will shrug it off with a smile.
What about the scientific evidence, then?
To my mind, there are multiple questions at stake:
1) Do all species now existing have a common ancestor?
2) Do humans share ancestry with some subset of animals?
3) How old is life?
4) How reliable are dating methods? (*not* dating services:-)
5) How old is the universe?
6) How did it come into existence?
7) How has it changed over time?
With regard to those questions, I would say that most evidence available points towards an evolutionary answer to those questions. BUT, I would not categorize the evidence as a slam-dunk case [let the flaming begin] for a simple reason, the same reason that Hume refused to be swayed by the cosmological argument for God's existence: we have no way, none whatsoever, of actually going back into the past and verifying our conjectures.
Many will want to rush in and poo-poo this point, as if it leads to complete skepticism about empirical data in general. But that's not my direction. I'm simply saying that the past is unique and non-reproducible, especially under controlled conditions. I'm also saying that if, hypoth
Interestingly, the wikipedia link above suggests that the German team *wanted* Germany to lose and found subtle ways to sabotage the effort. It's plausible, although I'd want to see some evidence before I believed that version of the story.
I was trying to find the source on what I wrote above...I'll get back to you on it.
Not so. The Germans had a program running at roughly the same time as ours (here). The project was headed by Werner Heisenberg. However, he made a fatal calculation error which led him to believe that graphite would be an unsuitable neutron moderator, and he was too arrogant to have people check his work. As a result, the German program used heavy water (D2O) for neutron moderation. As you can image, using a liquid instead of a solid presented many more engineering obstacles. In addition, we managed to destroy one of their major heavy water repositories. As a result, the program never got off the ground.
You could broaden your horizons a bit. It is certainly true that some form of Christianity has been dominant in the west since Constantine. However, Christians worldwide have been persecuted -- meaning tortured and killed, not ridiculed -- in record numbers since 1900. Much of that persecution has been at the hands of atheists. We're not dumb: we look at China and the former Soviet Union and say to ourselves, "It could happen here, too."
All of which is an excellent reason to oppose the PATRIOT act, but I digress...
Christianity has most certainly NOT been the dominant force in western academia since about 1850 or so. The reasons for that are complex, but some of it at least has to do with Christians being forced out or not hired because of their beliefs.
One example: My alma mater (Princeton) has a religion department. The professors that teach New Testament (Diamond) and Intro to Religion (Gager) are anti-Christian in their leanings. By contrast, the professor who teaches Gnosticism (Pagels) was specifically chosen because she enthusiastically embraces Gnosticism in her works.
Don't you think it's odd that the faculty who teach Christianity don't actually believe in it? Would you accept a parallel arrangement in, say, biology?
Christian students (my friends!) who dares to take Gager's class were singled out and ridiculed for their beliefs. That is what $30+/yr buys you. Nothing like that could possibly happen in reverse. If a Christian faculty member humiliated atheist students, (s)he would be sent packing in short order, with or without tenure. Persecution is real.
I would much rather have my science teacher explain clearly the Ptolemaic theory, the Copernican theory, and the history of each. Then (s)he could do a little demo to show how the earth moves around the sun AND the sun moves around the earth, all depending on one's reference frame. Entirely omitted could be the usual cheap shots directed at religious people.
There's nothing wrong with science teachers saying "Here's the evidence. You make up your own minds." Heck, that's what they should be doing: training students how to reason scientifically. Unfortunately, many science classrooms devolve into "Here's the evidence that supports evolution. End of story. Any religious nuts wanna argue with me?" The teachers learn that approach from the heavy-handed techniques of people like Dawkins, who asserts that religion is a mental virus.
A responsible teacher will present evidence, acknowledge opposing views, and explain what the issues at stake are.
The site you link to makes some good points, but it treats the Hebrew text in a rather flat manner, and comes to a stronger conclusion than is warranted.
It's true that kol eretz (better: kol ha-aretz) means "all the land", and could conceivably mean anything from the entire planet to a local region. So that point is valid as far as it goes. However, his appeal to tebel as the unused alternative is simply an argument from silence. There may be any number of reasons that Moses did not choose that word, and lack of universality is only one of them.
The author of your link points out that God's wrath was universally directed... if we accept "universal humanity" together with a "local flood", that implies that everyone was living in Mesopotamia at the time of the flood. I don't think archaeology can support that idea.
The argument about the mountains and the dove (8:5 - 8:9) is asking for greater precision on certain phrases ("no place to put her foot", for example: does that mean absolutely no space to put a bird's foot, or is it simply a metaphor for "no place to make a home"?) than Hebrews actually used in their language. Again, any number of explanations are possible: his is one, but perhaps the tops of the mountains were visible but not accessible to the dove, or something else.
All of this is simply to say that the article is ingenious, but it doesn't solve the problem. Certainly, his claim that the text of Genesis demands a local flood is simply too strong. I don't have a solution either, so I can't be too critical here...
Those aren't your choices. Your choices are between students who know how to marshall facts to support an argument (and therefore take the time to learn the relevant facts) and students who let facts fly past them with a whooshing sound.
The former learn their times tables because they figure out really quickly that fractions can't be added unless denominators can be factored -- and that requires knowing the tables. The latter scorn the times tables and start a downward slide in math that persists for the rest of their lives.
The former are equipped to be truly creative and innovative. The latter are mostly equipped to BS their way through life.
And yes, there are also dull ininterested people who try to substitute memorization for real learning, but they actually fall into the latter category. They simply choose to ignore the most relevant facts: the explanation of why something is true.
Your analysis is incomplete. The comparison is not "debt vs. no debt." The correct comparison is paying money to live in your own place or paying money to live in someone else's place. To extend your analogy, it's either
A) I give the bank 10 and I get 2 back in taxes + 1 in equity, or
B) I give the landlord 12 (or even 9) and get nothing in return.
I have to live somewhere, and the landlord isn't going to charge me less rent than his cost of ownership...unless I'm living with my parents.
IF it's possible for me to accumulate a lot of cash in 2 years and make a massive down-payment, then great. But usually, renting is swimming against the tide. If you doubt this, get a calculator and compute mortgage payments on houses in your area, subtract 20% for the tax break, and then compare that to rents for comparable places.
Not quite. He's advising paying massive interest and taxes to live in your own property, because the alternative is to pay someone else's massive interest and taxes in order to live in their property. No-one EVER, except out of charity, charges less rent than the property costs to own outright.
Let's trim the advice a bit: Buy young, in a house that you can afford, or even one that you need to stretch a *little bit* in order to purchase (I did this in 1998 and just sold for 2.5x my purchase price). However, buying a house you really can't afford (more than 3x gross annual income) leaves no room for cash-flow emergencies.
Buying in a nice part of town is usually good. It's better to buy the worst house in the nice neighborhood than to buy the best house in the shabby neighborhood.
Unrelated, unsolicited advice: always get a home inspection contingency when you buy. Our home inspector saved us from a costly mistake on a home with a cracked foundation.
I do burning hydrogen demos every year with my chem students, and I have to work carefully to get around a simple point: hydrogen floats. If you open up a 2L bottle filled with hydrogen with the nozzle pointed up, you will lose all of it in a couple of minutes. Leaking hydrogen at a gas station will float into the atmosphere and thence into space. As a result, the dangers from leaking hydrogen are negligible.
Leaking hydrogen is less dangerous than spilled gasoline.
To get an explosion from hydrogen, you need to have a contained H2/O2 mixture*, and no one is proposing that.
*Or, like the Hindenburg, a flammable magnesium-based skin.
Darn it all!!! I had successfully avoided posting (except for one brief episode) for over TWO MONTHS. And now, all because of you, I've been entangled in a moral obligation to let you know that your idea of moral obligations is all wet.
People have the right to be wrong. Therefore, I do not have the obligation to correct them all the time. Hence, your main contention is entirely incorrect. However, operating within your system, I *do* have the obligation to let you know that _you_ are wrong. Hope it helps!
You make a fair point; I would believe it if the whole story was that a journalist happened to purchase an al-Qaeda computer. I may still believe it, if it can be confirmed independently. But that the computer would belong to a famous al-Qaeda person in the news (al-Zawahiri), having spent all its time in a room belonging to another famous al-Qaeda person in the news (Atef), and the looter just happened to know that Atef personally carried that computer in and out every day from that room... that's stretching my credulence.
To add to that, why would any of the documents be unencrypted? I would -- a smart terrorist would -- certainly have encrypted them as standard practice.
Again, it may all be true. But if you asked me to bet on it, I would bet against.
I agree, generally speaking. It wasn't just Bush, but *everyone*, including Chirac and Schroeder, who believed that Iraq had WMD. Everyone, that is, except for Hans Blix (UN Weapons Inspector) and ElBaradei (UN Nuclear Programs Inspector). In the end, Bush chose to believe Chalabi and gadget-driven evidence over the UN Inspectors on the ground. Wise? Probably not. Sinister? No way.
Actually, reaction with moisture is an issue with hydrides. If you get a leak in the tank in a humid environoment, you get reactions like
2LiH + H20 --> 2H2 + Li2O
The reaction rate can range from mild to dangerous, but my major point is that you have to guarantee a moisture-free environment for the hydrides, which is hard to do.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, of course, about the funding. I was simply making the point that the profit motive was not the factor that drove the developers of UNIX, which has turned out to be a vastly superior product to profit-driven Windows.
Whoa...what happened on November the 9th? Oh ... you aren't American.
**retreats in confusion**
His claim is that the profit motive is required to drive innovation. But a simple fact refutes his claim: UNIX preceded Windows. A large part of the original Unix OS was open source. From the link:
Later, Doug McIlroy would write of this period [McIlroy91]: "Peer pressure and simple pride in workmanship caused gobs of code to be rewritten or discarded as better or more basic ideas emerged. Professional rivalry and protection of turf were practically unknown: so many good things were happening that nobody needed to be proprietary about innovations". But it would take another quarter century for all the implications of that observation to come home.
There really are other motives besides money!
FTA: Iomega is working to investigate the commercial feasibility of this format and other nano-structural data encoding formats. One possibility being investigated, termed NG-DVD (Nano-Grating - DVD), uses nano-gratings to encode multi-level information via reflectivity, polarization, phase, and reflective orientation multiplexing.
1) What is the difference between polarization and reflective orientation?
2) How are they measuring reflectivity? From the amplitude of a reflected beam?
This is some impressive technology.
Why yes, I have.
Back to the point: while I can readily see a distinction between general "argument from authority" fallacy and the peer-reviewed journal system, I have to say that the GP has a point.
It is one thing for first generation scientists to go out into the field, dig, record, test, and summarize their findings. When done well, that's science.
It's quite another for those scientists to write a book, pass it on to schools, and have teachers who have never done any field research use the book as an "infallible guide to truth" about the origins of man.
That's not science; it's just argument from authority. Whatever reasons the Kansas board may have, they are taking a positive step for science education: they are getting kids past the argument about origins and into the *process* of doing science. Two thumbs up!
The second problem is that keeping water -- essentially any water, to 3 or 4 places -- out of the cooling system will require a higher level of (read: more expensive) engineering. The problem is that small amounts of water will lead to ionic compounds like NaOH, Na2O, etc. ... all of which will "slag" the sodium and prevent it from flowing or transferring heat efficiently.
The third problem is containing the molten sodium in a container which will not spontaneously alloy with the hot sodium.
Check out decent reactor cooling discussion here (note the "fuel can be bonded to container with liquid metal" line!)
Some of the other metals discussed here -- Wood's metal, mercury, etc., have varying levels of these problems. For example, a friend of mine got an unwelcome "addition" to her silver ring when she mishandled some mercury in a chem demo.
I'm a little late to the party, but you indicated interest...
:-)
I'm a Christian, meaning that I have faith in Jesus as my savior. I also believe that the Bible is God's Word. I have a modest amount of evidence to support both of those ideas, but I will freely admit that I have no slam-dunk case for them. However, the evidence available to me supports those beliefs much better than it supports other hypotheses, such as "the Bible is a book of made-up stories", or "Jesus is just another religious prophet among the many." So my religious beliefs are not scientific, but neither are they evidence-less. Such is the human situation with regard to religion. I do scrutinize the evidence, and ask the very questions that you raise above. If you are interested in that kind of thing, I recommend works like Carson, Moo, and Morris, "Introduction to the New Testament", which is the tip of the iceberg in terms of Biblical scholarship.
Because I believe that the Bible is God's word to man, I have to confront what He is saying in Genesis 1 and 2. There are certainly multiple possibilities. Within the world of Biblical scholarship (in which I am trained), there are really only four live possibilities:
1) That Genesis 1, 2 are intended as a literal historical account, with "day" meaning "24-hr period".
2) That Genesis 1,2 are intended as a literal historical account, with "day" meaning "long period of time".
3) That Genesis 1 - 3 are intended as a mythological or metaphorical account of the entrance of sin into the world.
4) That Genesis 1 is intended as a literary framework for the rest of Genesis; Genesis 2 is intended as literal history. This is a more recent and highly technical view that is in favor with Hebrew language scholars. The basic idea is to draw on the connections between days 1 and 4, 2 and 5, 3 and 6, and to see days 1 - 3 as a description of God creating different regions, and days 4 - 6 as a description of God filling those same regions. (Google for "Literary Framework Hypothesis" for more details).
Among those options, based on literary considerations only, I find 1) to be the most likely, and 4) the second most likely. From that perspective, I would describe myself as a creationist.
The major issue at stake is the connection between the fall of Adam (Gen. 3) and the work of Christ. In Romans 5, Paul asserts that the sin of Adam, imputed to all his people, is parallel to the righteousness of Christ, imputed to all his people. For that reason, the historicity of Adam seems to be the real non-negotiable to Christians. This is why option 3) seems the least likely.
However, I freely accept the possibility that I could be wrong. If I die today and God tells me "you were wrong. It was none of the above!" then I will shrug it off with a smile.
What about the scientific evidence, then?
To my mind, there are multiple questions at stake:
1) Do all species now existing have a common ancestor?
2) Do humans share ancestry with some subset of animals?
3) How old is life?
4) How reliable are dating methods? (*not* dating services
5) How old is the universe?
6) How did it come into existence?
7) How has it changed over time?
With regard to those questions, I would say that most evidence available points towards an evolutionary answer to those questions. BUT, I would not categorize the evidence as a slam-dunk case [let the flaming begin] for a simple reason, the same reason that Hume refused to be swayed by the cosmological argument for God's existence: we have no way, none whatsoever, of actually going back into the past and verifying our conjectures.
Many will want to rush in and poo-poo this point, as if it leads to complete skepticism about empirical data in general. But that's not my direction. I'm simply saying that the past is unique and non-reproducible, especially under controlled conditions. I'm also saying that if, hypoth
Interestingly, the wikipedia link above suggests that the German team *wanted* Germany to lose and found subtle ways to sabotage the effort. It's plausible, although I'd want to see some evidence before I believed that version of the story.
I was trying to find the source on what I wrote above...I'll get back to you on it.
Not so. The Germans had a program running at roughly the same time as ours (here). The project was headed by Werner Heisenberg. However, he made a fatal calculation error which led him to believe that graphite would be an unsuitable neutron moderator, and he was too arrogant to have people check his work. As a result, the German program used heavy water (D2O) for neutron moderation. As you can image, using a liquid instead of a solid presented many more engineering obstacles. In addition, we managed to destroy one of their major heavy water repositories. As a result, the program never got off the ground.
You could broaden your horizons a bit. It is certainly true that some form of Christianity has been dominant in the west since Constantine. However, Christians worldwide have been persecuted -- meaning tortured and killed, not ridiculed -- in record numbers since 1900. Much of that persecution has been at the hands of atheists. We're not dumb: we look at China and the former Soviet Union and say to ourselves, "It could happen here, too."
All of which is an excellent reason to oppose the PATRIOT act, but I digress...
Christianity has most certainly NOT been the dominant force in western academia since about 1850 or so. The reasons for that are complex, but some of it at least has to do with Christians being forced out or not hired because of their beliefs.
One example: My alma mater (Princeton) has a religion department. The professors that teach New Testament (Diamond) and Intro to Religion (Gager) are anti-Christian in their leanings. By contrast, the professor who teaches Gnosticism (Pagels) was specifically chosen because she enthusiastically embraces Gnosticism in her works.
Don't you think it's odd that the faculty who teach Christianity don't actually believe in it? Would you accept a parallel arrangement in, say, biology?
Christian students (my friends!) who dares to take Gager's class were singled out and ridiculed for their beliefs. That is what $30+/yr buys you. Nothing like that could possibly happen in reverse. If a Christian faculty member humiliated atheist students, (s)he would be sent packing in short order, with or without tenure. Persecution is real.
I would much rather have my science teacher explain clearly the Ptolemaic theory, the Copernican theory, and the history of each. Then (s)he could do a little demo to show how the earth moves around the sun AND the sun moves around the earth, all depending on one's reference frame. Entirely omitted could be the usual cheap shots directed at religious people.
There's nothing wrong with science teachers saying "Here's the evidence. You make up your own minds." Heck, that's what they should be doing: training students how to reason scientifically. Unfortunately, many science classrooms devolve into "Here's the evidence that supports evolution. End of story. Any religious nuts wanna argue with me?" The teachers learn that approach from the heavy-handed techniques of people like Dawkins, who asserts that religion is a mental virus.
A responsible teacher will present evidence, acknowledge opposing views, and explain what the issues at stake are.
Hey Micah,
... if we accept "universal humanity" together with a "local flood", that implies that everyone was living in Mesopotamia at the time of the flood. I don't think archaeology can support that idea.
The site you link to makes some good points, but it treats the Hebrew text in a rather flat manner, and comes to a stronger conclusion than is warranted.
It's true that kol eretz (better: kol ha-aretz) means "all the land", and could conceivably mean anything from the entire planet to a local region. So that point is valid as far as it goes. However, his appeal to tebel as the unused alternative is simply an argument from silence. There may be any number of reasons that Moses did not choose that word, and lack of universality is only one of them.
The author of your link points out that God's wrath was universally directed
The argument about the mountains and the dove (8:5 - 8:9) is asking for greater precision on certain phrases ("no place to put her foot", for example: does that mean absolutely no space to put a bird's foot, or is it simply a metaphor for "no place to make a home"?) than Hebrews actually used in their language. Again, any number of explanations are possible: his is one, but perhaps the tops of the mountains were visible but not accessible to the dove, or something else.
All of this is simply to say that the article is ingenious, but it doesn't solve the problem. Certainly, his claim that the text of Genesis demands a local flood is simply too strong. I don't have a solution either, so I can't be too critical here...
Grace and peace,
Jeff Cagle
Those aren't your choices. Your choices are between students who know how to marshall facts to support an argument (and therefore take the time to learn the relevant facts) and students who let facts fly past them with a whooshing sound.
The former learn their times tables because they figure out really quickly that fractions can't be added unless denominators can be factored -- and that requires knowing the tables. The latter scorn the times tables and start a downward slide in math that persists for the rest of their lives.
The former are equipped to be truly creative and innovative. The latter are mostly equipped to BS their way through life.
And yes, there are also dull ininterested people who try to substitute memorization for real learning, but they actually fall into the latter category. They simply choose to ignore the most relevant facts: the explanation of why something is true.
I see this in my classes every year.
You meant "Fibonacci", but your point is substantially correct. :-)
Your analysis is incomplete. The comparison is not "debt vs. no debt." The correct comparison is paying money to live in your own place or paying money to live in someone else's place. To extend your analogy, it's either
A) I give the bank 10 and I get 2 back in taxes + 1 in equity, or
B) I give the landlord 12 (or even 9) and get nothing in return.
I have to live somewhere, and the landlord isn't going to charge me less rent than his cost of ownership...unless I'm living with my parents.
IF it's possible for me to accumulate a lot of cash in 2 years and make a massive down-payment, then great. But usually, renting is swimming against the tide. If you doubt this, get a calculator and compute mortgage payments on houses in your area, subtract 20% for the tax break, and then compare that to rents for comparable places.
Not quite. He's advising paying massive interest and taxes to live in your own property, because the alternative is to pay someone else's massive interest and taxes in order to live in their property. No-one EVER, except out of charity, charges less rent than the property costs to own outright.
Let's trim the advice a bit: Buy young, in a house that you can afford, or even one that you need to stretch a *little bit* in order to purchase (I did this in 1998 and just sold for 2.5x my purchase price). However, buying a house you really can't afford (more than 3x gross annual income) leaves no room for cash-flow emergencies.
Buying in a nice part of town is usually good. It's better to buy the worst house in the nice neighborhood than to buy the best house in the shabby neighborhood.
Unrelated, unsolicited advice: always get a home inspection contingency when you buy. Our home inspector saved us from a costly mistake on a home with a cracked foundation.
You stole my sig!
I do burning hydrogen demos every year with my chem students, and I have to work carefully to get around a simple point: hydrogen floats. If you open up a 2L bottle filled with hydrogen with the nozzle pointed up, you will lose all of it in a couple of minutes. Leaking hydrogen at a gas station will float into the atmosphere and thence into space. As a result, the dangers from leaking hydrogen are negligible.
Leaking hydrogen is less dangerous than spilled gasoline.
To get an explosion from hydrogen, you need to have a contained H2/O2 mixture*, and no one is proposing that.
*Or, like the Hindenburg, a flammable magnesium-based skin.
Darn it all!!! I had successfully avoided posting (except for one brief episode) for over TWO MONTHS. And now, all because of you, I've been entangled in a moral obligation to let you know that your idea of moral obligations is all wet.
People have the right to be wrong. Therefore, I do not have the obligation to correct them all the time. Hence, your main contention is entirely incorrect. However, operating within your system, I *do* have the obligation to let you know that _you_ are wrong. Hope it helps!
Whimsically,
Jeff Cagle
You don't know my wife -- she has contingency plans for everything. :-)
You make a fair point; I would believe it if the whole story was that a journalist happened to purchase an al-Qaeda computer. I may still believe it, if it can be confirmed independently. But that the computer would belong to a famous al-Qaeda person in the news (al-Zawahiri), having spent all its time in a room belonging to another famous al-Qaeda person in the news (Atef), and the looter just happened to know that Atef personally carried that computer in and out every day from that room ... that's stretching my credulence.
To add to that, why would any of the documents be unencrypted? I would -- a smart terrorist would -- certainly have encrypted them as standard practice.
Again, it may all be true. But if you asked me to bet on it, I would bet against.
I agree, generally speaking. It wasn't just Bush, but *everyone*, including Chirac and Schroeder, who believed that Iraq had WMD. Everyone, that is, except for Hans Blix (UN Weapons Inspector) and ElBaradei (UN Nuclear Programs Inspector). In the end, Bush chose to believe Chalabi and gadget-driven evidence over the UN Inspectors on the ground. Wise? Probably not. Sinister? No way.
Actually, reaction with moisture is an issue with hydrides. If you get a leak in the tank in a humid environoment, you get reactions like
2LiH + H20 --> 2H2 + Li2O
The reaction rate can range from mild to dangerous, but my major point is that you have to guarantee a moisture-free environment for the hydrides, which is hard to do.
Don't tell my wife; she'll bust you upside the head with her carbon ring! :-)