is Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People, which compares and contrasts the mechanical principles behind natural and human mechanisms. One important point is that these principles very often do not scale very well at all. Comparing a swallow with a jet fighter is just silly. A swallow as large as a jet fighter would never hold together at the rotational rates a standard version could achieve, and a wee tiny jet fighter would have a much easier time of spinning faster. The article might have said this, and it's only a misleading summary, but that's the way it goes on slashdot:)
When I saw them comparing pennies for volume and water for weight, I knew there was some funny business afoot. A drop of water weight a damn lot less than a penny, so (even allowing a lot of room for variation in density) this flash thingie is likely a lot smaller than a penny, or a lot heavier than a drop of water, or they would have chosen some smaller familiar item to compare it with. That, combined with the fact that a "drop of water" is not exactly a well defined quantity, and it screams out for a fact check.
A quick google brought up a freshman chemistry lab report, in microsoft word format, even. Not exactly the paragon of authority, but it is well known that freshman chemistry students have a far greater respect for the truth then marketers.
Their value for the mass of a drop of water is.025 grams, which is twenty-four times less than the.6 grams that the mass of the flash memory. I thought so.
It isn't hard to imagine a.6 gram drop of water, actually, just to be fair to those dorks, but I don't think it would resemble the familiar ones that most of us are accumstomed to.
We have altered the mass distribution of the planet to a measurable degree by building big dams that create very large lakes behind them. Presumably, this has an effect on the orbit of the moon, although I don't know if it would be detectable.
What counts as a "measurable" effect depends entirely on the sophistication of your instruments, of course. There is a lot that is measurable that is still negligible.
Furthermore, a monospaced space is wider than a nonmonospaced space, so one would be more likely to use a single vs two with monospaced type. I generally go with what looks best, at least for informal use, for a given typeface. When using fixed-width, that is pretty much always one space.
First of all, the summary (but also the article) refer to "cosmic rays", as if they are all the same. Most, actually, come from the sun. The nature abstract talks about "galactic cosmic rays", which better, but there are thought to be many flavors of these as well, as there are many ways to accelerate charged partcles.
The poster child of uber-freaked out cosmic rays is a crazy bugger detected in 1991 that had an energy of 3.2 x 10^20 eV. One scientist compared it to dropping a brick on your toe! Cosmic rays with this much energy are too enegetic to fit the supernova shock wave model nicely. They might come from gamma ray bursts or black holes on a feeding frenzy.
Actually, it isn't technically "a theory". It is an interpretation of quantum mechanics, of which there are many, which all give the same (in)correct predictions.
Sure, the earth will, find a new equilibrium point. So what? Its the transition between equilibria that sucks. Oh, and you just might not like it when you get there.
How much war, pestilience, and famine would you cheerfully endure in this process? Oh, right, you'll be dead for most of it. I hope your kids enjoy themselves.
I hear this attitude a lot, but it just reflects nihilism and/or a lack of compassion for the rest of us, spatially and temporally. Or perhaps more likely, a lack of careful reflection before adopting these attitudes.
Damn Straight. I read those books only about two years ago, and that is what I came away with. The movie "Bicentennial Man" with Robin Williams is also good reference.
However much scientists have learned from this set of data, gamma ray bursts remain hugely mysterious events. Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and president of the Royal Society said that science was "still flummoxed: by the underlying trigger of the explosions, and why they sometimes emit brief flashes of light.
"Theorists have a lot of tentative ideas, and these observations narrow down the range of options," he added.
Nice of you to summarize the article for everyone, but you left out the informative bits.
A lot of functions in real world programs just don't fit this model. Especially in GUIs. Or functions that manipulate internal data structures. Only the most trivial programs (or contrived exercizes of academics) strictly fit the functional, no-side-effects model for all functions. And if you can't apply this method to your entire program, you are going to find a more flexible way to verify behavior.
Yeah, well nearly so. There is the whole question of where those friggin particles came from that created the slashdot editors. And the rest of the universe. I think the figure I saw was about one extra matter particle created for every ten billion matter/antimatter pairs. Google "CP Violation"
Alice and Bill's The Hard Edge was/is great stuff. I also know somebody who has the issue with an Amiga 500 on the cover. Gosh, was that twenty years ago? cringe.
There was also a column that explored the history of computing. I think Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols did that one.
I bet you only look at the pictures in nudie mags, too:)
Drat, that inconvenient "context" thing comes in and totally screws the whole story. I suppose I could blame the editors, but we all know how useful that would be. I know, I'll blame our pathetic educational system, yeah:)
You can't get past the first sentence of the summary without having these big questions pop into your head. At least if you have any critical thinking ability whatsoever.
Flash memory is generally rated for 100,000 write cycles. Cache is constantly getting swapped in and out. Did these geniuses optimize things so it only uses the flash sticks for stuff you access frequently and overwrites it less often or something? Flash memory is about the last thing you'd want to use for cache memory!
I don't like being cynical, but it seems like a shiny cool-sounding feature they wanted for marketing.
Which is why the core of science isn't deductive, but inductive reasoning. There's just no way to obtain all the axioms (if they even exist) and deduce all valid statements. You have to observe how things work in real life, make generalizations, then deduce the consequences of your generalizations and verify against real life again. Its usually referred to as the scientific method.
Killing cancer cells in a culture is hardly magic. A nice big dose of (fill in the blank) will do very nicely. Now try it without killing the subtly different noncancerous cells, not just in the short term, but no long term after effects either. This is not automatically a panacea. Maybe it is, but that will take time and testing to determine. You can't escape doing the work, folks.
Sure, it might be a good idea to put terminal patients on an accellerated track, but you can still open yourserlf up for consequences that are worse than the disease.
The bottom line is that your kids are yours to raise
This isn't (just) a battle for control for children betweeb parents and the state, its a question of when do the children get which rights of their own. The parents' rights are already limited in very narrow cases, such as abuse, etc.
Yeah, the summary is bogus (surprise, surprise). The big news is that this is the furthest cluster of stars yet observed, a confusion not encountered in TFA.
Slashdot Mirror
is Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People, which compares and contrasts the mechanical principles behind natural and human mechanisms. One important point is that these principles very often do not scale very well at all. Comparing a swallow with a jet fighter is just silly. A swallow as large as a jet fighter would never hold together at the rotational rates a standard version could achieve, and a wee tiny jet fighter would have a much easier time of spinning faster. The article might have said this, and it's only a misleading summary, but that's the way it goes on slashdot :)
When I saw them comparing pennies for volume and water for weight, I knew there was some funny business afoot. A drop of water weight a damn lot less than a penny, so (even allowing a lot of room for variation in density) this flash thingie is likely a lot smaller than a penny, or a lot heavier than a drop of water, or they would have chosen some smaller familiar item to compare it with. That, combined with the fact that a "drop of water" is not exactly a well defined quantity, and it screams out for a fact check.
.025 grams, which is twenty-four times less than the .6 grams that the mass of the flash memory. I thought so.
.6 gram drop of water, actually, just to be fair to those dorks, but I don't think it would resemble the familiar ones that most of us are accumstomed to.
A quick google brought up a freshman chemistry lab report, in microsoft word format, even. Not exactly the paragon of authority, but it is well known that freshman chemistry students have a far greater respect for the truth then marketers.
Their value for the mass of a drop of water is
It isn't hard to imagine a
We have altered the mass distribution of the planet to a measurable degree by building big dams that create very large lakes behind them. Presumably, this has an effect on the orbit of the moon, although I don't know if it would be detectable.
What counts as a "measurable" effect depends entirely on the sophistication of your instruments, of course. There is a lot that is measurable that is still negligible.
Windows CE
Windows ME
Windows NT
Now transpose the matrix and read the bottom row.
Furthermore, a monospaced space is wider than a nonmonospaced space, so one would be more likely to use a single vs two with monospaced type. I generally go with what looks best, at least for informal use, for a given typeface. When using fixed-width, that is pretty much always one space.
First of all, the summary (but also the article) refer to "cosmic rays", as if they are all the same. Most, actually, come from the sun. The nature abstract talks about "galactic cosmic rays", which better, but there are thought to be many flavors of these as well, as there are many ways to accelerate charged partcles.
The poster child of uber-freaked out cosmic rays is a crazy bugger detected in 1991 that had an energy of 3.2 x 10^20 eV. One scientist compared it to dropping a brick on your toe! Cosmic rays with this much energy are too enegetic to fit the supernova shock wave model nicely. They might come from gamma ray bursts or black holes on a feeding frenzy.
Actually, it isn't technically "a theory". It is an interpretation of quantum mechanics, of which there are many, which all give the same (in)correct predictions.
Cheers!
Sure, the earth will, find a new equilibrium point. So what? Its the transition between equilibria that sucks. Oh, and you just might not like it when you get there.
How much war, pestilience, and famine would you cheerfully endure in this process? Oh, right, you'll be dead for most of it. I hope your kids enjoy themselves.
I hear this attitude a lot, but it just reflects nihilism and/or a lack of compassion for the rest of us, spatially and temporally. Or perhaps more likely, a lack of careful reflection before adopting these attitudes.
Damn Straight. I read those books only about two years ago, and that is what I came away with. The movie "Bicentennial Man" with Robin Williams is also good reference.
However much scientists have learned from this set of data, gamma ray bursts remain hugely mysterious events. Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and president of the Royal Society said that science was "still flummoxed: by the underlying trigger of the explosions, and why they sometimes emit brief flashes of light. "Theorists have a lot of tentative ideas, and these observations narrow down the range of options," he added. Nice of you to summarize the article for everyone, but you left out the informative bits.
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
-- Winston Churchill
Unix is the worst operating system; except for all others.
-- Berry Kercheval
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.
-- Errol Morris
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer
It isn't so much the size of the bodies, but the distance scales invoved. You need GR when the expansion of the universe becomes significant.
A lot of functions in real world programs just don't fit this model. Especially in GUIs. Or functions that manipulate internal data structures. Only the most trivial programs (or contrived exercizes of academics) strictly fit the functional, no-side-effects model for all functions. And if you can't apply this method to your entire program, you are going to find a more flexible way to verify behavior.
Yeah, well nearly so. There is the whole question of where those friggin particles came from that created the slashdot editors. And the rest of the universe. I think the figure I saw was about one extra matter particle created for every ten billion matter/antimatter pairs. Google "CP Violation"
Alice and Bill's The Hard Edge was/is great stuff. I also know somebody who has the issue with an Amiga 500 on the cover. Gosh, was that twenty years ago? cringe. There was also a column that explored the history of computing. I think Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols did that one. I bet you only look at the pictures in nudie mags, too :)
Drat, that inconvenient "context" thing comes in and totally screws the whole story. I suppose I could blame the editors, but we all know how useful that would be. I know, I'll blame our pathetic educational system, yeah :)
You can't get past the first sentence of the summary without having these big questions pop into your head. At least if you have any critical thinking ability whatsoever.
Technically, I think he's still just "exploring", and not "declared" but his site does run linux!
Bill Richardson for President Exploratory Committee
He's got a few validation errors. Dunno about the javascript.
Flash memory is generally rated for 100,000 write cycles. Cache is constantly getting swapped in and out. Did these geniuses optimize things so it only uses the flash sticks for stuff you access frequently and overwrites it less often or something? Flash memory is about the last thing you'd want to use for cache memory!
I don't like being cynical, but it seems like a shiny cool-sounding feature they wanted for marketing.
Which is why the core of science isn't deductive, but inductive reasoning. There's just no way to obtain all the axioms (if they even exist) and deduce all valid statements. You have to observe how things work in real life, make generalizations, then deduce the consequences of your generalizations and verify against real life again. Its usually referred to as the scientific method.
Killing cancer cells in a culture is hardly magic. A nice big dose of (fill in the blank) will do very nicely. Now try it without killing the subtly different noncancerous cells, not just in the short term, but no long term after effects either. This is not automatically a panacea. Maybe it is, but that will take time and testing to determine. You can't escape doing the work, folks.
Sure, it might be a good idea to put terminal patients on an accellerated track, but you can still open yourserlf up for consequences that are worse than the disease.
The bottom line is that your kids are yours to raise
This isn't (just) a battle for control for children betweeb parents and the state, its a question of when do the children get which rights of their own. The parents' rights are already limited in very narrow cases, such as abuse, etc.
Bzzzt. Fat Man and Little Boy were tiggered using high powered nitrogen based (TNT or similar) explosives.
Perhaps you had some others in mind, but these are what will pop into people's minds.
Yeah, the summary is bogus (surprise, surprise). The big news is that this is the furthest cluster of stars yet observed, a confusion not encountered in TFA.
http://www.comminit.com/trends/st2005/thinking-105 1.html
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/12/ 12/long_distance_house_calls/