There is a very interesting article from Harpers Magazine which details many discrepancies between biblical accounts and archaeological findings.
Some tasty excerpts:
The first archaeologists were thus guilty of one of the most elementary of scientific blunders: rather than allowing the facts to speak for themselves, they had tried to fit them into a preconceived theoretical framework...
The enormous ideological edifice that Yigael Yadin and others had erected was weakening at the base. Whereas formerly every pottery fragment or stone tablet appeared to confirm the biblical account, now nothing seemed to fit. Attempting to pinpoint precisely when Abraham had departed the ancient city of Ur, the American scholar William F. Albright, a pillar of the archaeological establishment until his death in 1971, theorized that he had left as part of a great migration of "Amorite" (literally "western") desert nomads sometime between 2100 and 1800 B.C. This was the theory that Paul Johnson would later cite in A History of the Jews. Subsequent research into urban development and nomadic growth patterns indicated that no such mass migration had taken place and that several cities mentioned in the Genesis account did not exist during the time frame Albright had suggested. Efforts to salvage the theory by moving up Abraham's departure to around 1500 B.C. foundered when it was pointed out that, this time around, Genesis failed to mention cities that did dominate the landscape during this period. No matter what time frame was advanced, the biblical text did not accord with what archaeologists were learning about the land of Canaan in the second millennium.
This was not all. As Israel Finkelstein, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University, and Neil Asher Silberman, a journalist who specializes in biblical and religious subjects, point out in their recent book, The Bible Unearthed, the patriarchal tales make frequent mention of camel caravans. When, for example, Abraham sent one of his servants to look for a wife for Abraham's son, Isaac, Genesis 24 says that the emissary "took ten of his master's camels and left, taking with him all kinds of good things from his master." Yet analysis of ancient animal bones confirms that camels were not widely used for transport in the region until well after 1000 B.C. Genesis 26 tells of Isaac seeking help from a certain "Abimelech, king of the Philistines." Yet archaeological research has confirmed that the Philistines were not a presence in the area until after 1200 B.C. The wealth of detail concerning people, goods, and cities that makes the patriarchal tales so vivid and lifelike, archaeologists discovered, were reflective of a period long after the one that Albright had pinpointed. They were reflective of the mid-first millennium, not the early second.
I think you mean to refer to spotted hyenas, not cheetahs? Spotted hyenas do have two genders, but the females have a genetic abnormality that causes them to be born with masculinized genitalia. Technically they are "female pseudo-hermaphrodites" meaning they have internal female reproductive organs but ambiguous external genitalia.
There is more info at: http://sailfish.exis.net/~spook/hyenatxt.html
Re:Strong enough for a man, but meant for a woman
on
Epson's Female Printer
·
· Score: 1
Avoiding all the usual stereotypes, humor and marketing concepts, try as I might, I can't objectively think of a reason why a printer for a woman should be any different than a printer for a man.
Well, to start, they can save money by not having to make the casing kick-proof. Then they can use the savings to add more complex features. (A double-winner, as it increases the functionality of the printer, and makes it too confusing to be used by anyone outside their target demographic!):P
I'm sure this does happen, but I don't think it's a reflection of women having inherently less technical ability than men. I would see it more that women are less likely to feel embarrassed about asking questions, whereas a man might research his purchase beforehand just to avoid looking clueless in the store.
I think that Slashdot suffers from exactly the problem that the OP was pointing out... Women perceive that Slashdot is male-oriented, or that they are being viewed differently here, and find it annoying. And then they leave, perpetuating the problem.
The solution is not to create a simplified, pink-themed version of slashot; I think the solution involves changing the assumption that women are inherently less technical, and making the technical community seem more accepting of them rather than less so.
The human species has survived 2 million years without going the way of the dinosaur. It seems like there are many reasons to not stress out about this.
Except the dinosaurs survived 100 million years before going the way of the dinosaur...
Yes, but in any given car crash, only a few people might die. In any given astroid collision, many people, if not everyone, will be dead.
Also... what does the 1/100,000 statistic mean? That I have a 1/100,000 chance of dying from being hit by an astroid during my lifetime? (Seems rather high to me!)
The presence/absence of an atmosphere is not as clear-cut as you might think... Both the moon and Mercury have comparably thin atmospheres. Are they both planets or both asteroids? Pluto may currently have an atmosphere, but it may freeze to the surface as the planet moves away from the sun. Will it cease to be a planet?
I think this story is kind of misleading. There was no error in the electronic voting machines, there was no programming error, no hacked results. As far as I can tell, it seems like the problems came entirely from the people running the polling booths, who hadn't recieved adquate training/instruction. This kind of screw-up could have happened regardless of the method being used to tally the votes! The REAL problem is not that the electronic voting machines are unreliable, it's that humans are, and without the paper trail that normal procedures generate, there's no way to go back and fix mistakes. If people want to implement electronic voting on a wider basis, I think traceability is a key issue. (Provided, of course, that voter anonymity is preserved, but this shouldn't be any more of an obstacle than it is with paper ballots.)
If you read the story, the errors weren't a programming problem, they originated with the people running the booths. Some of them gave voters the wrong access code (not realizing that some of the polling stations served more than one precinct), and so the person's vote was cast for the wrong precinct.
Perhaps you mean the numbers "googol" and "googolplex"?
And anyway, the quote doesn't say the number Google [sic] is "close to infinity", just that it's >> than most numbers one encounters in real life, thus "infinite for all practical purposes".
I think there are enough amateur astronomers who keep keep track of astroids that even if the government attempted to hide the discovery, the news would quickly spread. And there's a significant chance such an astroid would be discovered by an amateur or academic astronomer to begin with, and the details would be public knowledge almost instantly. But even supposing the government has the power to keep it secret, wouldn't they prefer to have every available person working on possible solutions?
Good questions. For the first, I think the US would be morally bound to save other's lives... but that's just me, and I don't run the place. I imagine though that *if* the US ever found itself in that position and *if* that knowledge was made public, there would be enough public pressure to make the powers-that-be do the right thing. I hope.
The second one is a scary thought. But I don't actually think it would be possible. It's hard enough to nudge an astroid just a few degrees from its path, so that it bypasses the earth. It would be immensely harder to actually aim it somewhere in particular, and to calculate the trajectory accurately enough to know that it is going to hit your neighbour, and not you...
Thanks for the link. That's a fascinating read. The one thing that it calls to my mind, though, is not the inherent risks of flammable materials, but the way in which small problems, ignored by people in charge, can accumulate until the conditions for a disaster are reached... Not so much a lapse in the chain of safety, but a combined weakening of many links...
Yes, according to the article: The Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota is the main launch base of the Indian Space Research Organisation...Several craft carrying telecommunications and imaging satellites for a number of countries have been put into orbit from the site.
However, if an accident like this was going to happen (and it seems like many accidents of this type were often "waiting to happen") I think it is better for their space program to have it happen earlier rather than later... hopefully when they begin manned spaceflight it will be safer because of the people who died today.
Part of the problem with the idea that the red shift is a doppler effect is that the observed quasars are apparently all in a relatively spherical arrangement about the Earth, thus implying that the Earth must be the center of the observed universe
Nonsense. The observed quasars appear isotropic for the same reason the cosmic microwave background is isotropic: we are looking back at a fairly homogeneous early universe. It is more reasonable to infer that quasars appear roughly equidistant because they were common during some point in the evolution of the universe; it is the separation in time, not distance, that matters.
At some times of the year, both the Earth and the cloud 'lens' are moving in the same direction, and the observed variations are slow, but six months later they are moving in opposite directions and the variations are fast.
while the illustrations clearly shows a a wave which is of constant frequency but of varying amplitude. I believe the caption is correct...
And a related complaint: what is the point of including a picture of the ring nebula with the caption:
The Ring Nebula, although not useful imaging through, has the suggestive look of a far-away telescope lens.
I guess when you can't come up with any images actually related to the topic, you might as well throw in some pretty Hubble pictures for those who aren't going to read the text anyway.
Actually any technology making it into space is more likely to be 10 years out of date... Getting anything certified for space is a long process. The technology in space isn't more advanced, just much better documented and well-understood.
Two black holes that come too close together will simply merge, becoming a single black hole with the combined mass (or nearly, as some will escape in the form of gravitational radiation during the merger). Such mergers (between stellar-mass black hole binaries, for example) are one of the things LIGO should be able to see in the near future...
One theory of supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies is that they formed by successive mergers of smaller black holes as smaller galaxies collided to form larger ones. There have been observations of binary black holes in some galaxies, and these will eventually merge... It won't look like anything spectacular to the naked eye, though, since the only energy being released is in the form of gravitational waves.
The last paragraph of the press release explains why this is a more convincing observation:
Other dramatic flares have been seen from galaxies, but this is the first studied with the high-spatial resolution of Chandra and the high-spectral resolution of XMM-Newton. Both instruments made a critical advance. Chandra showed the RXJ1242-11 event occurred in the center of a galaxy, where the black hole lurks. The XMM-Newton spectrum revealed the fingerprints expected for the surroundings of a black hole, ruling out other possible astronomical explanations.
Thus, it is not the X-ray variability itself that is news, but the fact that they have enough evidence to back up a specific mechanism.
We don't have to be outside the solar system to see gravitational waves, but even LIGO wouldn't be sensitive enough to see gravitational radiation from something like this. At best, LIGO might be able to see a neuton star spiralling into a super-massive black hole, because it would be able to fall further in before being torn apart by tidal forces.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a very interesting article from Harpers Magazine which details many discrepancies between biblical accounts and archaeological findings.
Some tasty excerpts:
The first archaeologists were thus guilty of one of the most elementary of scientific blunders: rather than allowing the facts to speak for themselves, they had tried to fit them into a preconceived theoretical framework...
The enormous ideological edifice that Yigael Yadin and others had erected was weakening at the base. Whereas formerly every pottery fragment or stone tablet appeared to confirm the biblical account, now nothing seemed to fit. Attempting to pinpoint precisely when Abraham had departed the ancient city of Ur, the American scholar William F. Albright, a pillar of the archaeological establishment until his death in 1971, theorized that he had left as part of a great migration of "Amorite" (literally "western") desert nomads sometime between 2100 and 1800 B.C. This was the theory that Paul Johnson would later cite in A History of the Jews. Subsequent research into urban development and nomadic growth patterns indicated that no such mass migration had taken place and that several cities mentioned in the Genesis account did not exist during the time frame Albright had suggested. Efforts to salvage the theory by moving up Abraham's departure to around 1500 B.C. foundered when it was pointed out that, this time around, Genesis failed to mention cities that did dominate the landscape during this period. No matter what time frame was advanced, the biblical text did not accord with what archaeologists were learning about the land of Canaan in the second millennium.
This was not all. As Israel Finkelstein, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University, and Neil Asher Silberman, a journalist who specializes in biblical and religious subjects, point out in their recent book, The Bible Unearthed, the patriarchal tales make frequent mention of camel caravans. When, for example, Abraham sent one of his servants to look for a wife for Abraham's son, Isaac, Genesis 24 says that the emissary "took ten of his master's camels and left, taking with him all kinds of good things from his master." Yet analysis of ancient animal bones confirms that camels were not widely used for transport in the region until well after 1000 B.C. Genesis 26 tells of Isaac seeking help from a certain "Abimelech, king of the Philistines." Yet archaeological research has confirmed that the Philistines were not a presence in the area until after 1200 B.C. The wealth of detail concerning people, goods, and cities that makes the patriarchal tales so vivid and lifelike, archaeologists discovered, were reflective of a period long after the one that Albright had pinpointed. They were reflective of the mid-first millennium, not the early second.
But if they used that as a reason to subscribe, everyone would be signing up... and suddenly it would be false advertising.
I think you mean to refer to spotted hyenas, not cheetahs? Spotted hyenas do have two genders, but the females have a genetic abnormality that causes them to be born with masculinized genitalia. Technically they are "female pseudo-hermaphrodites" meaning they have internal female reproductive organs but ambiguous external genitalia.
There is more info at: http://sailfish.exis.net/~spook/hyenatxt.html
Avoiding all the usual stereotypes, humor and marketing concepts, try as I might, I can't objectively think of a reason why a printer for a woman should be any different than a printer for a man.
:P
Well, to start, they can save money by not having to make the casing kick-proof. Then they can use the savings to add more complex features. (A double-winner, as it increases the functionality of the printer, and makes it too confusing to be used by anyone outside their target demographic!)
I'm sure this does happen, but I don't think it's a reflection of women having inherently less technical ability than men. I would see it more that women are less likely to feel embarrassed about asking questions, whereas a man might research his purchase beforehand just to avoid looking clueless in the store.
I think that Slashdot suffers from exactly the problem that the OP was pointing out... Women perceive that Slashdot is male-oriented, or that they are being viewed differently here, and find it annoying. And then they leave, perpetuating the problem.
The solution is not to create a simplified, pink-themed version of slashot; I think the solution involves changing the assumption that women are inherently less technical, and making the technical community seem more accepting of them rather than less so.
The human species has survived 2 million years without going the way of the dinosaur. It seems like there are many reasons to not stress out about this.
Except the dinosaurs survived 100 million years before going the way of the dinosaur...
Yes, but in any given car crash, only a few people might die. In any given astroid collision, many people, if not everyone, will be dead.
Also... what does the 1/100,000 statistic mean? That I have a 1/100,000 chance of dying from being hit by an astroid during my lifetime? (Seems rather high to me!)
The presence/absence of an atmosphere is not as clear-cut as you might think... Both the moon and Mercury have comparably thin atmospheres. Are they both planets or both asteroids? Pluto may currently have an atmosphere, but it may freeze to the surface as the planet moves away from the sun. Will it cease to be a planet?
I think this story is kind of misleading. There was no error in the electronic voting machines, there was no programming error, no hacked results. As far as I can tell, it seems like the problems came entirely from the people running the polling booths, who hadn't recieved adquate training/instruction. This kind of screw-up could have happened regardless of the method being used to tally the votes! The REAL problem is not that the electronic voting machines are unreliable, it's that humans are, and without the paper trail that normal procedures generate, there's no way to go back and fix mistakes. If people want to implement electronic voting on a wider basis, I think traceability is a key issue. (Provided, of course, that voter anonymity is preserved, but this shouldn't be any more of an obstacle than it is with paper ballots.)
If you read the story, the errors weren't a programming problem, they originated with the people running the booths. Some of them gave voters the wrong access code (not realizing that some of the polling stations served more than one precinct), and so the person's vote was cast for the wrong precinct.
Perhaps you mean the numbers "googol" and "googolplex"?
And anyway, the quote doesn't say the number Google [sic] is "close to infinity", just that it's >> than most numbers one encounters in real life, thus "infinite for all practical purposes".
But isn't that the point? That pain has as much to do with the mind as with the body?
I think there are enough amateur astronomers who keep keep track of astroids that even if the government attempted to hide the discovery, the news would quickly spread. And there's a significant chance such an astroid would be discovered by an amateur or academic astronomer to begin with, and the details would be public knowledge almost instantly. But even supposing the government has the power to keep it secret, wouldn't they prefer to have every available person working on possible solutions?
Good questions. For the first, I think the US would be morally bound to save other's lives... but that's just me, and I don't run the place. I imagine though that *if* the US ever found itself in that position and *if* that knowledge was made public, there would be enough public pressure to make the powers-that-be do the right thing. I hope.
The second one is a scary thought. But I don't actually think it would be possible. It's hard enough to nudge an astroid just a few degrees from its path, so that it bypasses the earth. It would be immensely harder to actually aim it somewhere in particular, and to calculate the trajectory accurately enough to know that it is going to hit your neighbour, and not you...
Thanks for the link. That's a fascinating read. The one thing that it calls to my mind, though, is not the inherent risks of flammable materials, but the way in which small problems, ignored by people in charge, can accumulate until the conditions for a disaster are reached... Not so much a lapse in the chain of safety, but a combined weakening of many links...
Yes, according to the article: The Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota is the main launch base of the Indian Space Research Organisation...Several craft carrying telecommunications and imaging satellites for a number of countries have been put into orbit from the site.
However, if an accident like this was going to happen (and it seems like many accidents of this type were often "waiting to happen") I think it is better for their space program to have it happen earlier rather than later... hopefully when they begin manned spaceflight it will be safer because of the people who died today.
That is the funniest thing I have ever read on Slashdot. Seriously, my sides hurt from laughing! :)
Thanks
Part of the problem with the idea that the red shift is a doppler effect is that the observed quasars are apparently all in a relatively spherical arrangement about the Earth, thus implying that the Earth must be the center of the observed universe
Nonsense. The observed quasars appear isotropic for the same reason the cosmic microwave background is isotropic: we are looking back at a fairly homogeneous early universe. It is more reasonable to infer that quasars appear roughly equidistant because they were common during some point in the evolution of the universe; it is the separation in time, not distance, that matters.
The caption to one of the illustrations reads:
At some times of the year, both the Earth and the cloud 'lens' are moving in the same direction, and the observed variations are slow, but six months later they are moving in opposite directions and the variations are fast.
while the illustrations clearly shows a a wave which is of constant frequency but of varying amplitude. I believe the caption is correct...
And a related complaint: what is the point of including a picture of the ring nebula with the caption:
The Ring Nebula, although not useful imaging through, has the suggestive look of a far-away telescope lens.
I guess when you can't come up with any images actually related to the topic, you might as well throw in some pretty Hubble pictures for those who aren't going to read the text anyway.
Actually any technology making it into space is more likely to be 10 years out of date... Getting anything certified for space is a long process. The technology in space isn't more advanced, just much better documented and well-understood.
Two black holes that come too close together will simply merge, becoming a single black hole with the combined mass (or nearly, as some will escape in the form of gravitational radiation during the merger). Such mergers (between stellar-mass black hole binaries, for example) are one of the things LIGO should be able to see in the near future...
One theory of supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies is that they formed by successive mergers of smaller black holes as smaller galaxies collided to form larger ones. There have been observations of binary black holes in some galaxies, and these will eventually merge... It won't look like anything spectacular to the naked eye, though, since the only energy being released is in the form of gravitational waves.
This particular one is a supermassive black hole in the centre of the galaxy.
From the press release: The black hole in the center of RXJ1242-11 is estimated to have a mass of about 100 million times Earth's sun.
In general, I think the theory that most galaxies contain supermassive black holes at the centre is widely accepted.
The last paragraph of the press release explains why this is a more convincing observation:
Other dramatic flares have been seen from galaxies, but this is the first studied with the high-spatial resolution of Chandra and the high-spectral resolution of XMM-Newton. Both instruments made a critical advance. Chandra showed the RXJ1242-11 event occurred in the center of a galaxy, where the black hole lurks. The XMM-Newton spectrum revealed the fingerprints expected for the surroundings of a black hole, ruling out other possible astronomical explanations.
Thus, it is not the X-ray variability itself that is news, but the fact that they have enough evidence to back up a specific mechanism.
We don't have to be outside the solar system to see gravitational waves, but even LIGO wouldn't be sensitive enough to see gravitational radiation from something like this. At best, LIGO might be able to see a neuton star spiralling into a super-massive black hole, because it would be able to fall further in before being torn apart by tidal forces.