Yes I saw that. The doco argued that humans had ocean going navigation a long time ago... not surprising considering even homo floriensis had to do something like that 500,000 years ago. Anyway the doco argued that north and south America were occupied by these people but that the people from Mongolia i.e. the current Native Americans came in and made short work of them. Look it wouldn't surprise me. These days we really underestimate how much nomadic peoples move.. even on a continental scale. For instance, people suspiciously like the Celts (as in red hair) lived in Western China 2,000 years ago... and the Celts came from the East. My point is many people have not occupied their current 'homeland' indefinitely, some have been there a very long time (to the point where it doesn't matter) but lots of othe peoples move about with a passion. Don't be surprised if the skeletons you find from 10,000 or 20,000 or more years ago have nothing to do with the current indigenous peoples.
The idea of dragons is very widespread around the world. But I have difficulty about thinking of flying fire breathing lizards as an obvious choice for a mythic creature. Anyone know of any supposed source for the idea ?
Yes Plato does go out of his way to say it is true, but that doesn't mean he hasn't stretched the truth.
I recently researched this stuff in quite a bit of depth just to ease the intense irritation of not knowing whether the story was true or false.
The fact is there were a lot of civilisations that have 'disappeared', which means they didn't leave us readable written records to answer some basic questions we have. So we shouldn't be at all surprised if we bump into ruins in all sorts of places. From what I read my opinion is that there was a real Atlantis, but the story we get from Plato is garbled and probably of mixture of at least two different stories. One of them is likely to be distant memories of the destruction of Thera, and the other is possibly something much closer in time and space such as Helike.
If you go by Plato's somewhat vague description you will end up looking anywhere, especially if you start allowing for inaccuracies in what he knew. For example, the Greeks believed there was only Ocean so beyond the Pillars of Heracles could be anywhere on Earth... though apparently there were more than one set of Pillars so who knows where they could have been talking about.
Possible places I have read which have 'good reasons' include: Cuba, Indonesia, Thera, Spain, Celtic Shelf off England, Turkey. I could add lots more.
If you look at how Plato describes Atlantis though I think there is a resemblance between it and various other cultures at the time so I am sure there is a lot of 'creative' retelling going on by Plato. In fact when I looked closely at what Plato said I found some interesting discrepancies such as
The city has a circular wall and when you calculate the circumference in stades you get a value of almost exactly 400. Assuming 4 gateways into the city that would put them 100 stades apart. But the stadium is a greek unit of measure and units of measure don't survive well over time (Europeans not longer use the megalithic yard or the Roman foot)... seems too much of coincidence that such gates would be such a convenient distance apart. But they aren't the exact distance. If you calculate what the value of PI would need to be to make the calculation exact then you get a value about equal to that known at the time of Plato but less accurate than that known by Archimedes a century or so later. In other words, Plato made up lots of details of the city.
Plato describes the number of sailors in the navy and the number of triremes. The number of sailors per trireme matches the typical trireme complement. So he just wasn't using a word for a warship he knew, he adjusted the size of navy to match his own culture.
The text says that Atlantis traded with many nations. (this does fit Thera BTW) But such levels of trade would show up in the archaeological record. It doesn't show up circa 9,000 BC though.
So be wary when you read what the legend says. Though it has given me a much greater appreciation of what real cultures known and barely known did.
Yep the rm command has its flaws. Undelete would be nice. But if that means I have to use an OS that isn't good enough then there's no point.
Twice I've used a delete with bad consequences, once was in Tru64 and once was in Windows (in fact it was a deltree). In fact it probably wouldn't have mattered if it was in a more recent version of Windows because I probably would have just shift-deleted such a large directory since I can count the times I've needed a restore from the recycle bin in the last 10 years on one hand.
GUIs are nice. And I really like them, but as time goes by I'm less and less impressed by their productivity.
Yes good point. I should say I'm not a newbie with Windows having been an intense user since 3.0 but my complaint about GUI tools in this case is that actually selecting the options, even if you know them, is time consuming. But usually you don't know them and finding them is MUCH harder than glancing at a man page (for simple problems). Also the ability to construct complex actions based on piping between simple tools is one of the things that converted me from Windows (that and the horror of programming direct to the Win32 API... some good things mixed with total crap... but I digress).
Hey, I'm just here for the bright blinking lights.
Although it is deterministic it is a tool that can become a world, or many worlds, of its own. Gaming environment, business etc etc. I was initially fascinated with computers because I wanted to do some simulations (for my own interest), but as the tool's sophistication increased dramatically I realised I could use it for many things and that although as a device it was deteriministic its behaviour was not predictable because of its complexity and its complex relationship to the user and the environment especially networks/internet.
I do regard it as magical, in the sense you mean, though I'm finding it difficult to actually work out why. I have the same attitude to a number of things so perhaps it was an attitude that I picked up in childhood and just tagged onto computers or maybe genetic, don't know. I'm old enough to be way way past the gee whiz stage but still find the beasties fascinating.
Yeah sounds about right. I remember when the price of memory came down to $50 per megabyte I thought I was in heaven.
Heh. I remember at Uni in the '70s in a physics lecture our lecturer was talking about hardware glitches preventing her doing her x-ray crystallography calculations on the IBM-360 now that it had a its core memory upgraded to 100K... we thought man that's awesome.
Some things in GUIs are really easy. Some things are very difficult. Using word counting as an example is not good because it is implemented in Word if you bother to look around for a few minutes. And yet searching, in Windows anyway, is a real pain. Yeah sure they've got a nice search dialog but it has no subtlety to tailor it to what you want, it's ok for the plebs but for those of us who know better it just doesn't cut it. Combining tools like 'find', 'grep' and 'wc' does things you can't do on windows... well not easily or maybe not at all. Most people don't care but most here on/. would which is probably why so many install stuff like Cygwin.
For instance, yesterday I wanted to remove all my CVS directories for a code tree I was copying, to do it in Unix (QNX) is just:
find . -type d -name "CVS" | xargs rm -rf
I have no idea how I would have done that in Windows. It took seconds to think of that line and type it... how long would it take me to figure out and select the options to do it. Finding and selecting options takes a lot of time relative to your typing speed if you touch type.
What's more, with previous forays into new fields MS had the advantage that the user didn't have to download or buy/install a large application etc. But google can just be your homepage... where is MS' advantage ?
I'd be surprised if it is a success simply because MS cannot deliver a clear reason to the user to use it.
Look up any reasonable book on mechanics and you will find a formula for the final velocity of rockets that have a empty mass M, mass of fuel m, and have an exhaust velocity v. The final velocity of the vehicle is...
V = v . ln( (M + m)/M )
In other words ion rockets will beat chemical rockets because they eject their exhaust at a reasonable fraction of c, whereas chemical rockets have exhaust velocities more like velocities we see on earth (e.g. bullets). So chemical rockets need lots of mass, but that's ok because they throw out lots of mass. Trouble getting to space is expensive... each kilo of fuel you put in orbit better be wisely used... so in space ion rockets make sense (apart from the fact you can't use them on Earth anyway... wouldn't be able to lift off even).
Always wondered how they could be created. This is the first time I've read a plausible explanation, though to tell the truth it is not an issue I have relentlessly pursued. However, I think I first saw such 'pit chains' on lunar photos. I guess that could just be magma, gasses whatever... probably one thing we will learn from the solar system is that sometimes similar geographical features can be produced by totally different media... something like the way beaches (berms , cusps etc) can be made on Earth of sand, rock, shells, whatever.
But the bit about one hemisphere being so smooth... isn't that one reason why it is hypothesised to be an ocean bed ?
with the radar data there are no peaks of valleys over 50 meters
In hindsight I suppose this should not have been surprising.
a moon therefore little tectonic activity
thick atmosphere, therefore much fewer meteorite craters created
a lot more erosion because of the atmosphere, removing any craters
Still there is still the possibility of glacial deposits and some worn river valleys I guess. But its the dark areas that interest me... they really do look like an ocean or a sea or a really big tar pit. hmmmm. Its going to be interesting.
What's more it is in a language ('J') that is derived from APL ! He gets high geek points for even understanding anything derived from APL much less writing quick solutions in it.
OK. The article is total bollocks here is the New Scientist version. NOTE that it is referring to prenatal levels of hormones not the amounts flowing in peoples bodies when they are adults. Which means that a difference in levels of hormones hardwires the brain for programming, research whatever to a large extent.
Also that the social sciences are where the 'normals' end up.
I read the original article and I thought it was total crap.
Imagine, if you will, that you have some next generation software and you wish to tell it your detailed requirements. How do you do this ? Why you have to do it in a formal language for requirements, for example Z or whatever they have these days. Ugh! You know what those languages are like... they take more effort than the standard programming languages. So you have to get a Z-or-whatever programmer to specify you app so you can feed it to the programmer-replacing software... result Net loss of programmers = 0.
Just because you can have a way of linking stuff up to do programming, like VB or Ladder only means that you need a different kind of programmer because what doesn't change is the complexity of the requirements, and that has to structured logically by someone who understands the requirements. i.e. a programmer.
There are many things that could add CO2 to the atmosphere as the Earth warms. Of course if the oceans get warm they will stop acting as a CO2 sink and become a CO2 source... CO2 solubility decreases with increasing temperature. But I don't think this would be a factor yet.
But the one thing that did pop into my head when I read this was all those methane hydrates on the ocean floor... just waiting for a small temperature rise to be liberated. Though last I heard the temp would have to rise a another 4 degrees C or so for them to be released... though if that happened then.. we're doomed.. with the release of the methane hydrates the Earth's temp would go up another 5C to a total of about 10C... forget human civilisation under those conditions, we'd be lucky to survive as a species. Ah well, its really too late anyway, might as well get some large supplies of popcorn and watch this really long movie and see if the pesky humans survive.
Both the CO2 levels and average temperature are rising. That's a priori knowledge beyond dispute.
I truly do not understand this. A gas that is well known to trap heat in the atmosphere is increasing dramatically. At the SAME time the temperature is going up. Conclusion ? Uh...it must be the sun. I smell bullshit.
And to me the absolutely most convincing is direct measurements from boreholes into permafrost. The diffusion of heat into the permafrost is a well understood phenomenon... so when it shows a pulse from our time propagating through the ice then it is pretty conclusive.
Never seen anyone refute this stuff. Of course using the obsolete information about the satellite data is ok (as long as you don't mention the refutation announced after it was discovered that it didn't take into account the degradation of the orbit). Total f*cking idiots. Where'd they learn their science on the back of a packet of cereal ?
What people seem to forget is that although we are good at adapting, the new state of things may require a far smaller population. Humans have always played with ecological fire, so to speak. Sometimes we get burnt badly. I think that eventually we will stuff up and get a mighty kick up the arse from nature, we'll probably survive as a species but that doesn't mean things will be pleasant.
Are you a student of Machiavelli, or merely a gifted amateur. [rhetorical question, no need for a question mark]
The scenario you describe is all too likely, the IT/IP mix is like a powderkeg at the moment with software patents. Sounds unethical to me to start such a bloodbath, but one could argue that if it was deliberately started now it would be like "back burning" to prevent bush fires, preventing something even worse later on.
Yep in one of the articles referenced Gates says that their investigations into grid computing are using Beowulf clusters of windows machines. Ugghh! Shudder. The thought of it makes me wanna puke.
OK. Time for my 30 seconds of griping at last! My biggest annoyance is that it seems all programmers apart from me can't spell "separate", they spell it "seperate". (Here's a hint: learn to pronounce the 'a' as an 'a' not an 'er') Really annoying, especially when you find it in the source and can't amend it because it's part of variable or class names... grrrrr.
So yeah I'm a spelling pedant.. but how come developers can learn arcane rules and know the spelling of API calls (even without intellisense) but can't spell. Seems a profound mystery to me.
Although never deployed they did experiment with wire guided smart bombs which did work. I saw this BBC doco years back called "The Secret War" or something similar, about secret weapons etc in WW2. Among the amazing stuff was film of a smart bomb test using a dummy bomb on a target building, direct bulls-eye. Also they had a clip showing that in the Battle of the Bulge the Reich was trying to deploy one of its experimental jet bombers, holy sh*t eh, just as well the weather was no good.
Had some very clever scientists and engineers, those that hadn't been thrown in concentration camps that is. Nothing to do with the Nazis as such since they were really anti high technology... more like neo-barbarians. But I digress.
Yeah buddy, know about that. Some time back I went to work at a company located near a good beach, laid back. No pressure. I was miserable and didn't know why. Then got hit by a project that poured it on... happy again. I thought I wanted to be a beach bum doing a low stress job, but the reality was the reverse... I like lots of pressure, it seems because it is the only thing that pushes me beyond my limits. From past projects where it seems I was the only one who enjoyed the experience I would say that if you are under intense pressure and you make the deadline by 1 hour to spare... then the stress is beneficial, if you miss the deadline by 1 hour then the stress is damaging. Ahh the peculiarities of the human mind. *sigh*
Now happily working in a high stress role. But no beach.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes I saw that. The doco argued that humans had ocean going navigation a long time ago ... not surprising considering even homo floriensis had to do something like that 500,000 years ago. Anyway the doco argued that north and south America were occupied by these people but that the people from Mongolia i.e. the current Native Americans came in and made short work of them. Look it wouldn't surprise me. These days we really underestimate how much nomadic peoples move .. even on a continental scale. For instance, people suspiciously like the Celts (as in red hair) lived in Western China 2,000 years ago ... and the Celts came from the East. My point is many people have not occupied their current 'homeland' indefinitely, some have been there a very long time (to the point where it doesn't matter) but lots of othe peoples move about with a passion. Don't be surprised if the skeletons you find from 10,000 or 20,000 or more years ago have nothing to do with the current indigenous peoples.
...um er ...
When will Disney get a clue. They just make crap these days.
This also smells a bit like a dupe.
Oh yeah. um .. first boast or post ... I feel kinda dirty saying that.
The idea of dragons is very widespread around the world. But I have difficulty about thinking of flying fire breathing lizards as an obvious choice for a mythic creature. Anyone know of any supposed source for the idea ?
Yes Plato does go out of his way to say it is true, but that doesn't mean he hasn't stretched the truth.
I recently researched this stuff in quite a bit of depth just to ease the intense irritation of not knowing whether the story was true or false.
The fact is there were a lot of civilisations that have 'disappeared', which means they didn't leave us readable written records to answer some basic questions we have. So we shouldn't be at all surprised if we bump into ruins in all sorts of places. From what I read my opinion is that there was a real Atlantis, but the story we get from Plato is garbled and probably of mixture of at least two different stories. One of them is likely to be distant memories of the destruction of Thera, and the other is possibly something much closer in time and space such as Helike.
If you go by Plato's somewhat vague description you will end up looking anywhere, especially if you start allowing for inaccuracies in what he knew. For example, the Greeks believed there was only Ocean so beyond the Pillars of Heracles could be anywhere on Earth ... though apparently there were more than one set of Pillars so who knows where they could have been talking about.
Possible places I have read which have 'good reasons' include: Cuba, Indonesia, Thera, Spain, Celtic Shelf off England, Turkey. I could add lots more.
If you look at how Plato describes Atlantis though I think there is a resemblance between it and various other cultures at the time so I am sure there is a lot of 'creative' retelling going on by Plato. In fact when I looked closely at what Plato said I found some interesting discrepancies such as
So be wary when you read what the legend says. Though it has given me a much greater appreciation of what real cultures known and barely known did.
True. Which is why my command sequence was:
followed by
So I knew exactly what I was deleting.
Yep the rm command has its flaws. Undelete would be nice. But if that means I have to use an OS that isn't good enough then there's no point.
Twice I've used a delete with bad consequences, once was in Tru64 and once was in Windows (in fact it was a deltree). In fact it probably wouldn't have mattered if it was in a more recent version of Windows because I probably would have just shift-deleted such a large directory since I can count the times I've needed a restore from the recycle bin in the last 10 years on one hand.
GUIs are nice. And I really like them, but as time goes by I'm less and less impressed by their productivity.
Yes good point. I should say I'm not a newbie with Windows having been an intense user since 3.0 but my complaint about GUI tools in this case is that actually selecting the options, even if you know them, is time consuming. But usually you don't know them and finding them is MUCH harder than glancing at a man page (for simple problems). Also the ability to construct complex actions based on piping between simple tools is one of the things that converted me from Windows (that and the horror of programming direct to the Win32 API ... some good things mixed with total crap ... but I digress).
Hey, I'm just here for the bright blinking lights.
Although it is deterministic it is a tool that can become a world, or many worlds, of its own. Gaming environment, business etc etc. I was initially fascinated with computers because I wanted to do some simulations (for my own interest), but as the tool's sophistication increased dramatically I realised I could use it for many things and that although as a device it was deteriministic its behaviour was not predictable because of its complexity and its complex relationship to the user and the environment especially networks/internet.
I do regard it as magical, in the sense you mean, though I'm finding it difficult to actually work out why. I have the same attitude to a number of things so perhaps it was an attitude that I picked up in childhood and just tagged onto computers or maybe genetic, don't know. I'm old enough to be way way past the gee whiz stage but still find the beasties fascinating.
Yeah sounds about right. I remember when the price of memory came down to $50 per megabyte I thought I was in heaven.
Heh. I remember at Uni in the '70s in a physics lecture our lecturer was talking about hardware glitches preventing her doing her x-ray crystallography calculations on the IBM-360 now that it had a its core memory upgraded to 100K ... we thought man that's awesome.
Some things in GUIs are really easy. Some things are very difficult. Using word counting as an example is not good because it is implemented in Word if you bother to look around for a few minutes. And yet searching, in Windows anyway, is a real pain. Yeah sure they've got a nice search dialog but it has no subtlety to tailor it to what you want, it's ok for the plebs but for those of us who know better it just doesn't cut it. Combining tools like 'find', 'grep' and 'wc' does things you can't do on windows ... well not easily or maybe not at all. Most people don't care but most here on /. would which is probably why so many install stuff like Cygwin.
For instance, yesterday I wanted to remove all my CVS directories for a code tree I was copying, to do it in Unix (QNX) is just:
I have no idea how I would have done that in Windows. It took seconds to think of that line and type it ... how long would it take me to figure out and select the options to do it. Finding and selecting options takes a lot of time relative to your typing speed if you touch type.
What's more, with previous forays into new fields MS had the advantage that the user didn't have to download or buy/install a large application etc. But google can just be your homepage ... where is MS' advantage ?
I'd be surprised if it is a success simply because MS cannot deliver a clear reason to the user to use it.
Look up any reasonable book on mechanics and you will find a formula for the final velocity of rockets that have a empty mass M, mass of fuel m, and have an exhaust velocity v. The final velocity of the vehicle is ...
In other words ion rockets will beat chemical rockets because they eject their exhaust at a reasonable fraction of c, whereas chemical rockets have exhaust velocities more like velocities we see on earth (e.g. bullets). So chemical rockets need lots of mass, but that's ok because they throw out lots of mass. Trouble getting to space is expensive ... each kilo of fuel you put in orbit better be wisely used ... so in space ion rockets make sense (apart from the fact you can't use them on Earth anyway ... wouldn't be able to lift off even).
Hope this makes things a bit clearer.
Always wondered how they could be created. This is the first time I've read a plausible explanation, though to tell the truth it is not an issue I have relentlessly pursued. However, I think I first saw such 'pit chains' on lunar photos. I guess that could just be magma, gasses whatever ... probably one thing we will learn from the solar system is that sometimes similar geographical features can be produced by totally different media ... something like the way beaches (berms , cusps etc) can be made on Earth of sand, rock, shells, whatever.
But the bit about one hemisphere being so smooth ... isn't that one reason why it is hypothesised to be an ocean bed ?
with the radar data there are no peaks of valleys over 50 meters
In hindsight I suppose this should not have been surprising.
Still there is still the possibility of glacial deposits and some worn river valleys I guess. But its the dark areas that interest me ... they really do look like an ocean or a sea or a really big tar pit. hmmmm. Its going to be interesting.
What's more it is in a language ('J') that is derived from APL ! He gets high geek points for even understanding anything derived from APL much less writing quick solutions in it.
OK. The article is total bollocks here is the New Scientist version. NOTE that it is referring to prenatal levels of hormones not the amounts flowing in peoples bodies when they are adults. Which means that a difference in levels of hormones hardwires the brain for programming, research whatever to a large extent.
Also that the social sciences are where the 'normals' end up.
I read the original article and I thought it was total crap.
Imagine, if you will, that you have some next generation software and you wish to tell it your detailed requirements. How do you do this ? Why you have to do it in a formal language for requirements, for example Z or whatever they have these days. Ugh! You know what those languages are like ... they take more effort than the standard programming languages. So you have to get a Z-or-whatever programmer to specify you app so you can feed it to the programmer-replacing software ... result Net loss of programmers = 0.
Just because you can have a way of linking stuff up to do programming, like VB or Ladder only means that you need a different kind of programmer because what doesn't change is the complexity of the requirements, and that has to structured logically by someone who understands the requirements. i.e. a programmer.
There are many things that could add CO2 to the atmosphere as the Earth warms. Of course if the oceans get warm they will stop acting as a CO2 sink and become a CO2 source ... CO2 solubility decreases with increasing temperature. But I don't think this would be a factor yet.
But the one thing that did pop into my head when I read this was all those methane hydrates on the ocean floor ... just waiting for a small temperature rise to be liberated. Though last I heard the temp would have to rise a another 4 degrees C or so for them to be released ... though if that happened then .. we're doomed .. with the release of the methane hydrates the Earth's temp would go up another 5C to a total of about 10C ... forget human civilisation under those conditions, we'd be lucky to survive as a species. Ah well, its really too late anyway, might as well get some large supplies of popcorn and watch this really long movie and see if the pesky humans survive.
Both the CO2 levels and average temperature are rising. That's a priori knowledge beyond dispute.
I truly do not understand this. A gas that is well known to trap heat in the atmosphere is increasing dramatically. At the SAME time the temperature is going up. Conclusion ? Uh .. .it must be the sun. I smell bullshit.
And to me the absolutely most convincing is direct measurements from boreholes into permafrost. The diffusion of heat into the permafrost is a well understood phenomenon ... so when it shows a pulse from our time propagating through the ice then it is pretty conclusive.
Never seen anyone refute this stuff. Of course using the obsolete information about the satellite data is ok (as long as you don't mention the refutation announced after it was discovered that it didn't take into account the degradation of the orbit). Total f*cking idiots. Where'd they learn their science on the back of a packet of cereal ?
What people seem to forget is that although we are good at adapting, the new state of things may require a far smaller population. Humans have always played with ecological fire, so to speak. Sometimes we get burnt badly. I think that eventually we will stuff up and get a mighty kick up the arse from nature, we'll probably survive as a species but that doesn't mean things will be pleasant.
Are you a student of Machiavelli, or merely a gifted amateur. [rhetorical question, no need for a question mark]
The scenario you describe is all too likely, the IT/IP mix is like a powderkeg at the moment with software patents. Sounds unethical to me to start such a bloodbath, but one could argue that if it was deliberately started now it would be like "back burning" to prevent bush fires, preventing something even worse later on.
Yep in one of the articles referenced Gates says that their investigations into grid computing are using Beowulf clusters of windows machines. Ugghh! Shudder. The thought of it makes me wanna puke.
OK. Time for my 30 seconds of griping at last! My biggest annoyance is that it seems all programmers apart from me can't spell "separate", they spell it "seperate". (Here's a hint: learn to pronounce the 'a' as an 'a' not an 'er') Really annoying, especially when you find it in the source and can't amend it because it's part of variable or class names ... grrrrr.
So yeah I'm a spelling pedant .. but how come developers can learn arcane rules and know the spelling of API calls (even without intellisense) but can't spell. Seems a profound mystery to me.
Although never deployed they did experiment with wire guided smart bombs which did work. I saw this BBC doco years back called "The Secret War" or something similar, about secret weapons etc in WW2. Among the amazing stuff was film of a smart bomb test using a dummy bomb on a target building, direct bulls-eye. Also they had a clip showing that in the Battle of the Bulge the Reich was trying to deploy one of its experimental jet bombers, holy sh*t eh, just as well the weather was no good.
Had some very clever scientists and engineers, those that hadn't been thrown in concentration camps that is. Nothing to do with the Nazis as such since they were really anti high technology ... more like neo-barbarians. But I digress.
Yeah buddy, know about that. Some time back I went to work at a company located near a good beach, laid back. No pressure. I was miserable and didn't know why. Then got hit by a project that poured it on ... happy again. I thought I wanted to be a beach bum doing a low stress job, but the reality was the reverse ... I like lots of pressure, it seems because it is the only thing that pushes me beyond my limits. From past projects where it seems I was the only one who enjoyed the experience I would say that if you are under intense pressure and you make the deadline by 1 hour to spare ... then the stress is beneficial, if you miss the deadline by 1 hour then the stress is damaging. Ahh the peculiarities of the human mind. *sigh*
Now happily working in a high stress role. But no beach.