What on earth have you been smoking? Look here. Sea level has been pretty static for a long time. Now it is on the way up again. Just to put current rises in perspective, the steepest part of the rise in that graph comes out to about 15 mm per year. Whereas recent sea level rises show an increase of about 20 mm per year.
Yes I noticed too. I also noticed that the rocks pictured were not random shapes. The front of the rocks looking more like a slidable(?) geometry. Perhaps the rocks are not pushing any mud in front of them but riding over it. Too many ifs. We need some observations.
Oh dear, oh dear. Same old crap. I actually had to force myself to read it. Amazing, I predicted creationist and I now confirm it.
Gee. Um. By the way do you have any you know... what is it again? Evidence. Oh yeah that's it... EVIDENCE. Not quotes. I can quote people telling me the moon is hollow and built by aliens. Doesn't make it true. Where is the peer reviewed evidence?
BTW, when I pick up a book my first reaction is to read and question not just believe. I know this might be a new concept to you but try it. Open a book, eg the Good Book, read a bit then ask "Is that really so?".
Maybe you don't believe the Earth is just 6,000 years old, and I am doing you a disservice. But I don't see that in what you write. As someone said the zircon crystals aren't dated the same way, but I did mention that there are alternatives.
So ok. How old do you consider the Earth to be? Not believe, but based on the evidence.
I am very wary of your argument style. It is heavy on quotes but not much on the measurements themselves. This is very reminiscent of my past arguments with Creationists before I saw the light and realised they were a bunch of losers not deserving of my time.
I will follow my personally approved style on these issues: take the first article and look at it carefully, if it fails.... do not proceed.
Yes the article talks about measurements that indicate a separation of U235 and U238 isotopes therefore skewing age determination using this mechanism. However, this is only in sandstone. It is believed to be due to either water action or microbes. This does not affect igneous rocks. Therefore if the researcher is careful about the environment of the sample and the rock type and backs it up with other methods they should be OK. In fact the oldest rocks are dated using not just any bit of dirt they find but via zircon crystals in the matrix, multiple rocks, different environments similar results.
Thanks for the ref to the "Iron Law of Oligarchies". Never heard of it before but it is brilliantly compelling. Probably haven't heard of it before because neither side wanted even to acknowledge its existence. Seems like we need to do some hard thinking about how to preserve democracies against this process. I'm sure Thomas Jefferson would not have been surprised, hence his suggestion that future revolutions may occur.
And the reason people were so willing to ditch NT 4 was that MS had royally stuffed NT after 3.51. NT 3.51 was great even with the Windows 3 style GUI... rock solid. Well for windows it was.
Mathematics is far older than Science. It was always considered part of the Classic education and was traditionally one of the arts. Although we may consider it the "queen of the sciences" it belongs in neither.
Generally people who believe that God doesn't exist don't hold it as an article of faith.
I'd replace 'generally' with 'many'. Too many people I've met consider atheism an article of faith. Very odd.
The real problem here is 'Faith'. A nonsensical idea that just doesn't compute. Faith in human nature, faith in democracy, faith in communism, faith in capitalism, faith in god, faith in the scientific method, faith in anything. All a delusion. Belief is OK. But faith is a poisonous delusion. I regard myself as a spiritual person, but faith ain't a part of it.
There was nothing worse than to call yourself that
Actually I remember otherwise. I knew very good programmers who were delighted when they were described as 'hackers' or even better 'mega hacker'. But that was, what, almost 20 years ago. The battle for the meaning of hacker has been lost. Probably even within the restricted circles of/. Pity but that's the way it is.
I was lousy at Maths at school. But I wanted to study physics. Started reading some physics stuff after I left school and realised I needed some mathematics to understand it. So I started reading the advanced mathematics school books. I had a lot of motivation. Also because I had a reason, and I was studying at a higher level it was all new with a different viewpoint. I took notes. I had to force myself to get very particular about deriving things, memorising important rules etc. This was to get out my imprecise way of looking at problems. I was starting to actually get quite good at it.
I decided to go back to school via what we call TAFE here (Technical And Further Education). I redid my end of school exams going up 2 levels of difficulty in one year for a two year course. I got good passes allowing me to easily get into a number of good universities. Trouble was I liked mathematics so much by this stage it was even more interesting than the physics. Eventually ended with a degree in mathematics and a love of problem solving.
The lesson of the story is a high level of commitment. Motivation. Belief that you can do this. Love of the subject (which comes easier than you would believe). Any additional high level stuff you can come across is good too. I'm sure there are many paths one can take. There are many books that are excellent e.g. Courant's "What is mathematics?", Martin Gardner's stuff to get your head in the right space.
Just stop a moment and consider why this region exists at all. Evolution doesn't make such regions for no reason. There is survival value in them. Now we don't know what that is, but perhaps it triggers a unified world view. And that doesn't mean just God. It also means the higher aspirations of science to integrate knowledge into unified theories. I should add a disclaimer that since I was a child I have had this experience, sometimes very intensely. Do I think it is God? Not quite. But it is a feeling of the profundity of the universe the worth of one's own place as a 'witness' to it. I am sure many of us here have had the same experience. It is what motivated my interest in the sciences.
One other thing. Belief doesn't have much credibility here at times. But we should remember that at each stage of a mathematical proof we exercise belief that the logical connections are correct. Science rests on belief as well as experiment. Human beings really can't get away from it. That doesn't mean it has to be our master though.
From what I have read/seen in docos, a proportion of the population has evolved a strategy where the existence of harmless parasites is used as a 'thermostat' for the immune reaction. The immune sensitivity escalates until the parasites in question start producing some chemical (indicating stress?) which causes the immune system to reduce its activity. No parasites, then no control on the immune system. Result allergies etc. Not sure how much this has been validated at this point though.
Tragically, that was a race the Americans almost matched with the disastrous Apollo fire. Yeah I know it wasn't on a mission, but I'm sure the families weren't picky.
Also we shouldn't forget the Lunokhod rover. Which was an amazing triumph for the time.
I don't think most readers here would understand the Australian slang for root. That is, 'fuck'. Pity we don't have sorority girls here, I'm sure they would be the ones coming out with the things like "you can root that machine but not me".
No what it says is that in a series of repetitive tasks, ie identifying a letter, the liberals were more likely to spot a change in the stimulus than a conservative. Conservatives tended to persist with previous behaviour. What is so hard about that eh? Can't anyone here read. Bunch of maroons.
Pan's Labyrinth is about a lot of things. I found it truly amazing. It is about growing up. About sacrifice... and not the pretend type we often see in movies but pain, torture and death with no guarantees about the outcome. About the monsters we construct in our fantasy to teach about the real monsters that walk in human form. The movies is a bit like the yin-yang, you're never sure if it is a fantasy referring to real events, or a child's escapist delusions during real horrors... there is evidence in the movie for both interpretations.
I found this a disturbing movie. It is fantasy and yet it is a little too real, I just can't bring myself to show it to my teenage sons... and I thought they were too hardened by some movies they have seen. The only other movie that makes me feel that way is "Grave of the Fireflies".
I do agree about the poster. There is a strong theme about growing up, both mentally and sexually. I probably need to see it a few more times because of its complex themes.
According to wikipedia the draft spec for Fortran was completed in 1954. I remember learning both.. ah.. um... some time ago. At the time Algol-60 was new and beautiful and Fortran was entrenched (but the real masochists were learning APL). I remember coming up with the idea of computed gotos and being disappointed it wasn't implemented in either language. Just as well I was never involved in any language design I suppose.
We shouldn't forget that card readers were very slow. And core memory was small. I remember my physics lecturer trying to impress us when she told us they had upgraded the 360 core memory to 100K. So compile times were long. You didn't want your deck of cards to be too big. Just be economical with all those variable names, anyway with Fortran you were limited anyway.
Looking at the actual code of Adventure, it seems to me to be quite well written. Sure it doesn't follow some modern maxims like "do not hard code values, define constants", but that stuff was realised a lot later. And it is well commented. I have seen far, far worse C/C++/java code... and I wont even describe some Basic I have seen.
Childhood's End would make a stunning movie... if it is filmable. In spite of the small number of pages it is pretty epic. And it is perhaps too deep for Hollywood to take on without stuffing up badly. A lot of Clarke's stories went for the final bitter twist of fate: "The Star", "9 Billion Names of God", the one about the one man in a spacesuit outwitting an space cruiser, etc. CE is the same, Karellen's final thoughts about the status of the Overlords as compared to Humans is the exact reverse of the impression when the ships first arrived. I'm not sure that crucial aspect would be conveyed. And I'm sure the religious right would have something to say about such a sympathetic story about devils.
I used to read a lot of Clarke I liked his philosophical view of the scale and exploration of space and some of the amazing and disturbing things that might confront us. The stories which stick in my mind include the one that is planned to be made into a film. I have never been able to remember its name but the image of the astronaut in an elliptical orbit about the moon where the perigee (replace gee with whatever the correct term is for the moon) will make him intersect a lunar mountain range has stayed in my mind ever since. At least this one is simple enough to get right.
Anyone remember the hype of the i860? Great on paper, but not so great in reality. I really hope this works though, von Neuman architecture was always supposed to be a stop-gap (even vN said so I think).
OR. We could adapt ourselves to space biologically. Just as sea animals adapted to the land... not the same of course, genetic engineering would be many orders of magnitude faster than dumb evolution. Vacuum resistant, long distance communication via lasing organs and detectors, sensors for radiation, etc etc. What you would have at the end wouldn't be human but it would be the direct descendant of humanity and it could tolerate a centuries long trip to the stars, perhaps even enjoy it... though whether they'd actually be interested in planets at all at the other end is an interesting conundrum.
br.
Obviously, the long sought after Cascade Bitter particle. I guess physicists must be pretty desperate to find a good beer these days. Though shelling out for a particle accelerator just so you can get some beer money seems pretty inefficient.
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What on earth have you been smoking? Look here. Sea level has been pretty static for a long time. Now it is on the way up again. Just to put current rises in perspective, the steepest part of the rise in that graph comes out to about 15 mm per year. Whereas recent sea level rises show an increase of about 20 mm per year.
Yes I noticed too. I also noticed that the rocks pictured were not random shapes. The front of the rocks looking more like a slidable(?) geometry. Perhaps the rocks are not pushing any mud in front of them but riding over it. Too many ifs. We need some observations.
I would suggest using the thermite algorithm which should be cryptographically secure.
I don't see what the problem is, all you have to do is power off the .... Oh wait.
Oh dear, oh dear. Same old crap. I actually had to force myself to read it. Amazing, I predicted creationist and I now confirm it.
Gee. Um. By the way do you have any you know ... what is it again? Evidence. Oh yeah that's it ... EVIDENCE. Not quotes. I can quote people telling me the moon is hollow and built by aliens. Doesn't make it true. Where is the peer reviewed evidence?
BTW, when I pick up a book my first reaction is to read and question not just believe. I know this might be a new concept to you but try it. Open a book, eg the Good Book, read a bit then ask "Is that really so?".
Maybe you don't believe the Earth is just 6,000 years old, and I am doing you a disservice. But I don't see that in what you write. As someone said the zircon crystals aren't dated the same way, but I did mention that there are alternatives.
So ok. How old do you consider the Earth to be? Not believe, but based on the evidence.
I am very wary of your argument style. It is heavy on quotes but not much on the measurements themselves. This is very reminiscent of my past arguments with Creationists before I saw the light and realised they were a bunch of losers not deserving of my time.
I will follow my personally approved style on these issues: take the first article and look at it carefully, if it fails .... do not proceed.
Yes the article talks about measurements that indicate a separation of U235 and U238 isotopes therefore skewing age determination using this mechanism. However, this is only in sandstone. It is believed to be due to either water action or microbes. This does not affect igneous rocks. Therefore if the researcher is careful about the environment of the sample and the rock type and backs it up with other methods they should be OK. In fact the oldest rocks are dated using not just any bit of dirt they find but via zircon crystals in the matrix, multiple rocks, different environments similar results.
Conclusion, nothing to see here. Move on.
Thanks for the ref to the "Iron Law of Oligarchies". Never heard of it before but it is brilliantly compelling. Probably haven't heard of it before because neither side wanted even to acknowledge its existence. Seems like we need to do some hard thinking about how to preserve democracies against this process. I'm sure Thomas Jefferson would not have been surprised, hence his suggestion that future revolutions may occur.
And the reason people were so willing to ditch NT 4 was that MS had royally stuffed NT after 3.51. NT 3.51 was great even with the Windows 3 style GUI ... rock solid. Well for windows it was.
Mathematics is far older than Science. It was always considered part of the Classic education and was traditionally one of the arts. Although we may consider it the "queen of the sciences" it belongs in neither.
Generally people who believe that God doesn't exist don't hold it as an article of faith.
I'd replace 'generally' with 'many'. Too many people I've met consider atheism an article of faith. Very odd.
The real problem here is 'Faith'. A nonsensical idea that just doesn't compute. Faith in human nature, faith in democracy, faith in communism, faith in capitalism, faith in god, faith in the scientific method, faith in anything. All a delusion. Belief is OK. But faith is a poisonous delusion. I regard myself as a spiritual person, but faith ain't a part of it.
By a nice coincidence, ok someone was likely to see it on this topic, the quote of the day on the bottom of the page is:
There was nothing worse than to call yourself that
Actually I remember otherwise. I knew very good programmers who were delighted when they were described as 'hackers' or even better 'mega hacker'. But that was, what, almost 20 years ago. The battle for the meaning of hacker has been lost. Probably even within the restricted circles of /. Pity but that's the way it is.
I was lousy at Maths at school. But I wanted to study physics. Started reading some physics stuff after I left school and realised I needed some mathematics to understand it. So I started reading the advanced mathematics school books. I had a lot of motivation. Also because I had a reason, and I was studying at a higher level it was all new with a different viewpoint. I took notes. I had to force myself to get very particular about deriving things, memorising important rules etc. This was to get out my imprecise way of looking at problems. I was starting to actually get quite good at it.
I decided to go back to school via what we call TAFE here (Technical And Further Education). I redid my end of school exams going up 2 levels of difficulty in one year for a two year course. I got good passes allowing me to easily get into a number of good universities. Trouble was I liked mathematics so much by this stage it was even more interesting than the physics. Eventually ended with a degree in mathematics and a love of problem solving.
The lesson of the story is a high level of commitment. Motivation. Belief that you can do this. Love of the subject (which comes easier than you would believe). Any additional high level stuff you can come across is good too. I'm sure there are many paths one can take. There are many books that are excellent e.g. Courant's "What is mathematics?", Martin Gardner's stuff to get your head in the right space.
To the original poster: Best of luck.
Just stop a moment and consider why this region exists at all. Evolution doesn't make such regions for no reason. There is survival value in them. Now we don't know what that is, but perhaps it triggers a unified world view. And that doesn't mean just God. It also means the higher aspirations of science to integrate knowledge into unified theories. I should add a disclaimer that since I was a child I have had this experience, sometimes very intensely. Do I think it is God? Not quite. But it is a feeling of the profundity of the universe the worth of one's own place as a 'witness' to it. I am sure many of us here have had the same experience. It is what motivated my interest in the sciences.
One other thing. Belief doesn't have much credibility here at times. But we should remember that at each stage of a mathematical proof we exercise belief that the logical connections are correct. Science rests on belief as well as experiment. Human beings really can't get away from it. That doesn't mean it has to be our master though.
From what I have read/seen in docos, a proportion of the population has evolved a strategy where the existence of harmless parasites is used as a 'thermostat' for the immune reaction. The immune sensitivity escalates until the parasites in question start producing some chemical (indicating stress?) which causes the immune system to reduce its activity. No parasites, then no control on the immune system. Result allergies etc. Not sure how much this has been validated at this point though.
"Vote for the gorillas. 25 grand and fame that id probably just piss away anyway is not worth a specie.".
Just so long as he didn't mention the 800 lb gorilla. Being a linux advocate and all.
Tragically, that was a race the Americans almost matched with the disastrous Apollo fire. Yeah I know it wasn't on a mission, but I'm sure the families weren't picky.
Also we shouldn't forget the Lunokhod rover. Which was an amazing triumph for the time.
I don't think most readers here would understand the Australian slang for root. That is, 'fuck'. Pity we don't have sorority girls here, I'm sure they would be the ones coming out with the things like "you can root that machine but not me".
No what it says is that in a series of repetitive tasks, ie identifying a letter, the liberals were more likely to spot a change in the stimulus than a conservative. Conservatives tended to persist with previous behaviour. What is so hard about that eh? Can't anyone here read. Bunch of maroons.
Pan's Labyrinth is about a lot of things. I found it truly amazing. It is about growing up. About sacrifice ... and not the pretend type we often see in movies but pain, torture and death with no guarantees about the outcome. About the monsters we construct in our fantasy to teach about the real monsters that walk in human form. The movies is a bit like the yin-yang, you're never sure if it is a fantasy referring to real events, or a child's escapist delusions during real horrors ... there is evidence in the movie for both interpretations.
I found this a disturbing movie. It is fantasy and yet it is a little too real, I just can't bring myself to show it to my teenage sons ... and I thought they were too hardened by some movies they have seen. The only other movie that makes me feel that way is "Grave of the Fireflies".
I do agree about the poster. There is a strong theme about growing up, both mentally and sexually. I probably need to see it a few more times because of its complex themes.
According to wikipedia the draft spec for Fortran was completed in 1954. I remember learning both .. ah .. um ... some time ago. At the time Algol-60 was new and beautiful and Fortran was entrenched (but the real masochists were learning APL). I remember coming up with the idea of computed gotos and being disappointed it wasn't implemented in either language. Just as well I was never involved in any language design I suppose.
We shouldn't forget that card readers were very slow. And core memory was small. I remember my physics lecturer trying to impress us when she told us they had upgraded the 360 core memory to 100K. So compile times were long. You didn't want your deck of cards to be too big. Just be economical with all those variable names, anyway with Fortran you were limited anyway.
Looking at the actual code of Adventure, it seems to me to be quite well written. Sure it doesn't follow some modern maxims like "do not hard code values, define constants", but that stuff was realised a lot later. And it is well commented. I have seen far, far worse C/C++/java code ... and I wont even describe some Basic I have seen.
Childhood's End would make a stunning movie ... if it is filmable. In spite of the small number of pages it is pretty epic. And it is perhaps too deep for Hollywood to take on without stuffing up badly. A lot of Clarke's stories went for the final bitter twist of fate: "The Star", "9 Billion Names of God", the one about the one man in a spacesuit outwitting an space cruiser, etc. CE is the same, Karellen's final thoughts about the status of the Overlords as compared to Humans is the exact reverse of the impression when the ships first arrived. I'm not sure that crucial aspect would be conveyed. And I'm sure the religious right would have something to say about such a sympathetic story about devils.
I used to read a lot of Clarke I liked his philosophical view of the scale and exploration of space and some of the amazing and disturbing things that might confront us. The stories which stick in my mind include the one that is planned to be made into a film. I have never been able to remember its name but the image of the astronaut in an elliptical orbit about the moon where the perigee (replace gee with whatever the correct term is for the moon) will make him intersect a lunar mountain range has stayed in my mind ever since. At least this one is simple enough to get right.
Anyone remember the hype of the i860? Great on paper, but not so great in reality. I really hope this works though, von Neuman architecture was always supposed to be a stop-gap (even vN said so I think).
And that implies ... the Fermi Non-Paradox.
OR. We could adapt ourselves to space biologically. Just as sea animals adapted to the land ... not the same of course, genetic engineering would be many orders of magnitude faster than dumb evolution. Vacuum resistant, long distance communication via lasing organs and detectors, sensors for radiation, etc etc. What you would have at the end wouldn't be human but it would be the direct descendant of humanity and it could tolerate a centuries long trip to the stars, perhaps even enjoy it ... though whether they'd actually be interested in planets at all at the other end is an interesting conundrum.
br.
Obviously, the long sought after Cascade Bitter particle. I guess physicists must be pretty desperate to find a good beer these days. Though shelling out for a particle accelerator just so you can get some beer money seems pretty inefficient.