"Depending on how you measure it, the pace of scientific change is arguably slowing even more rapidly (especially if considered on a per-scientist basis!)"
While you make good points overall, this piece is a bit disingenuous. Why on earth would we measure scientific progress on a "per-scientist basis"?
It is the collective, not individual, work of scientists that brings progress. And so much has been learned in the past 200 years, that it takes longer, and is more work, for new scientists to come up to speed on where we are now.
Human intelligence is partly an individual trait, but partially a collective one. A person growing up in isolation, with their basic pysical needs met but with no access to the intelligence or learning of other human beings is never going to be very intelligent. What has allowed our species to learn so rapidly is our ability to learn from each other, both directly and via indirect means (such as books).
So comparing the "per-scientist" rate of scientific discovery between now and, say, 200 years ago is meaningless.
"We find no luminiferous aether.
Not all scientific predictions are made equal."
that was a very useful prediction.
We predicted luminous aether: it was a logical theory. We had good reason to believe that light was a wave, we had no reason to imagine that a wave could exist without a physical medium (air, water, etc.)
It was a falsifiable theory.
For a long time people tried to prove it, but measurements weren't sensitive enough. Finally, a sensitive enough experiment was developed, and it found-- nothing!
This was far more useful than if they had found something.
On discovering that the theory was wrong, they didn't try to argue that it was really still correct. They puzzled about what it could mean: how can a wave exist without a substance to wave through?
Many incredibly significant scientific advances of the next few decades came out of this enigma. If there had been no luniniferous aether theory, there would have been no enigma, and perhaps many of these discoveries would not yet have come about.
The usefulness of a theory is not in whether it's correct or not. The usefulness of a theory comes from what you learn while trying to discover whether or not it is correct.
"Being able to make 2-D objects would save a lot of space."
Yes-- but heat dissipation would only be able to take place along the 1D perimiter. There would be no way to cool the center of the chip unless it was very small or highly heat-conductive.
Below a certain critical mass, it doesn't matter whether people use Outlook or rely entirely on a calender printed out on an index card, as long as you show up on time.
Above a certain critical mass, people start relying on the times other people are marked as "busy" or "out of office", and if you don't use the system, you're likely to get double or triple booked for meetings.
Of course, how many meetings you have in a week is a big factor as well. Here, we have multiple Agile projects going at once, and try to meet regularly on each for a short (nominally half an hour, but if there's only 10 minuites of content, then we all leave after 10 minuites) meeting on each. Some days I have no meetins, some days I have four; but I spend a weekly average of maybe 45min-1hr in meetings each day.
If I didn't use the Outlook calender at work, I'd constantly be e-mailing people to ask to re-schedule meetings or explain why I can't attend, and then explain why the time wasn't blocked off in my calender if I wasn't going to be available. I'd be making everyone's life more difficult, including my own.
Yet they still won't provide support for *nix in any way shape or form.
I want malware, and viruses for my OSX box. it just isn't fair that the viruses and malware only works on windows. I have animated cursors too. Heck right my ssh port is open go ahead and try to crack it.
This post is a virus that operates on the honor system. Please post your root password and credit card details as a response to this post, wipe your hard-drive, and then spam this message to everyone you know via e-mail and forum/blog postings. Thank you.
"NEVER give a woman a holiday present that has an electrical cord"
The problem wasn't the electrical cord. If you had given her something --with an electrical cord-- that she could actually enjoy using, like say a game system, or an iPod with a base, or a DVD Player, or a computer, or Lego Mindstorms, you'd hve been fine.
A present the receiver associates with something fun and enjoyable says "I want you to enjoy life!" something they associate with drugery says "I love it when you do the drudge-work-- do some more!"
General, non-gender-specific rule of thumb: don't give a gift associated with an unpleasent chore, unless the gift is something the receiver has specifically expressed definite interest in.
PS-- don't give something that you would enjoy using but they wouldn't. That says "I'm using a gift for 'you' as an excuse to buy something that's really for me. Can I borrow it now?")
Last year a big group of people submitted rough drafts to our instructor, they were all run through the system. Then, we submitted our final papers, they were run through the system too, but the second time the class had 30 students that were shown to plagiarize.
So, what was the outcome of that? Did those 30 students face any penalties (grades, disciplinary, etc) for having a final draft that "plagerized" the rough draft for the same paper?
Also, did the teacher learn from that snafubar, or does s/he still have students submit multiple versions of the same paper to the service?
Wait-- I was supposed to get PAID for writing papers in college? Why didn't anyone tell me this before!? What's the statute of limitations on that-- is it too late for me to claim back wages?
"I'm not blaming the victim, but" ranks up there with "I'm not a racist/sexist, but" for intellectual dishonesty. Just because you claim it's not doesn't mean it isn't.
It sounds like, in all of your occurrences of mortal danger, you either knew who was attacking you or had someone who's job it was to protect you. How does that make you qualified to judge whether not a person who is concerned about anonymous threats of violence -- possibly coming from "A-list bloggers" or their acquaintances, people that she might actually come into contact with -- is overreacting?
If I weren't out of mod points, I'd mod this up myself.
New Hampshire also doesn't have a sales tax. (Or an income tax for that matter. They do everything they can to try to tax the tourists rather than the residents...)
Well, if I'm remembering correctly (and I may not be, so take this number with a grain of salt) the time-frame given for all black holes to evaporate was something on the order of 10^32 years from now-- in an eternally expanding universe, there are mind-boggling long periods of time to work with.
Even if protons never decay, I still think it would be unlikely for a civilization to survive all the stars buring out, let alone the time when all matter has fallen into black holes.
Of course, that's no reason not to try to survive longer than would be possible remaining on this planet alone.
As far as I remember, the universe *could* last forever...
It's kind of another paradox, but it seems it won't collapse....
Well, even by the theory that says the universe will expand forever, any civilization that survived along with it would need to figure out how to survive
All the stars using up their fuel and burning out, leaving complete darkness
All matter eventually being sucked into black holes
All matter eventually evaporating out of the black holes as sub-atomic particles
The decay of all protons, since the conditions to create more haven't existed since very early in the universe's history, and while they last a long time, they don't last forever
I'm having a hard time imagining a civilization managing to last until the time when the universe consists entirely of sparsely scattered electon-positron pairs slowly circling each other...
Yeah, what's up with the Boston police being able to respond more quickly to something in their own city than to something in a city a thousand miles away? The Boston police are *totally* at fault for the Katrina (non-)response!!
Just because we think of the future as being shiney, it does not follow that anything we happen to find shiney is "ascending the ladder of the future".
The first rung of the "Ladder of the future" (to steal your metaphor) is "hey look! We can do this!". This is the origional, pre-commercial web, with hypertext, tables, and maybe images. Also Usenet, Gopher, Archie, e-mail.
The next rung is the "gee wiz nifty shiney!" stage. This started out as animated images, blink tags, frames, and moved onto multi-media and Flash. More people get online, lots of people are playing around to see what the medium can do. This is a very fun and creative stage, the "geek playground" of a technologies development.
The third rung is when people start looking more at what practical things the technology can accomplish, and how best to accomplish those things. Here we have design guidelines urging people that just because they can put colored text on animated textured bacgrounds doesn't mean they should. This is where we begin to get applications of the technology that are practical not just for geeks but for others as well: search engines, amazon, registering for classes, reading the news, seeing how you're representitive voted. We also start thinking about accessibility and maintainability.
The fourth rung is when the new technology improves beyond just copying the rest of the world, and begins to have a profound change on it. This is where the internet is now: the business models of established companies are being forced to change, politicians are finding they need to alter the way they interact with their constituencies (our govener has a podcast) the technology begins shifting from "luxury" to "neccesity"-- like Telephones in the middle of the 20th century.
The fifth rung is when the technology becomes part of "just the way things are", and is taken for granted. We are in this stage with the automobile, the telephone, the television. A hundred years ago, the first two were toys of the rich techno-geeks, and the third didn't exist at all. Now someone stuggling to get by may well have all three.
This is an artificial break-down: the rungs overlap, and there aren't neat clean transitions. Flash still has a place, but it needs to be balanced with the practical issues-- ignorning the practical issues might be forward looking when you're on the first or early on the second rung, but after that, ignoring the practical is looking backwards, not towards the futre.
But democracy is just that, mob rule. What ever the majority of the mob wants, the mob gets.
Which is why a constitutional democracy is preferable to a pure democracy in most cases, and the reason why most modern democracies are, in fact, constitutional. It prevents innocent people from getting "voted off the island" for arbitrary reasons or the philosophical fad of the moment.
Goolgle never was a "democracy", whether constitutional or pure. They use popular opinion as a factor in their ranking algorithm, but that has never been the only factor that they use. If that were their only tool, then it would be unlikely that the results would be better than those the most popular "cool links" pages a la 1997.
"not to pick nits, but if you don't support your nation during time of war, then, yes, you are unpatriotic."
No, it's unjigonistic not to support your nation during a time of war.
What's unpatriotic is to blindly follow and support a decision that's clearly not in your countries best interests.
Whether it's more patriotic to support or protest a war depends on the war. If portions of the US were occupied by a forign power, then saying "don't fight them, just let them take the rest of the country too", that would be unpatriotic. Saying "Um, this war on forign soil is a really bad idea for X, Y, and Z reasons", on the other hand, is patritotic...
...but not jigonistic. Methings you have not yet learned the difference.
Sounds like someone made some poor life choices (marrying someone he wasn't compatible with, having kids he either didn't want or wasn't ready for) and now wants us to feel sorry for him.
Or maybe he wasn't serious, but was just cracking a 60-year old, tired joke that was never that funny to begin with. yawn. Is there a "-1 boring and unorigional" mod?
If your second language is Swahili and you work in Vermont -- well, probably not.
Actually, Burlington VT is a refugee resettlement center. There are small numbers of people speaking so many languages there that the second-most common language (after English) is "other." This makes life interesting for the public library with regard to forign-lagugage collection development and ESL classes-- and I suspect it makes things interesting for municipal servieces as well.
Truth is, in a municipal setting, you never know when Swahili (or any other language) will be very useful to know.
Slashdot Mirror
The (very specific) regulation he claimed was violated applied only to government jobs, not to private sector. So no, it clearly wouldn't have.
"Depending on how you measure it, the pace of scientific change is arguably slowing even more rapidly (especially if considered on a per-scientist basis!)"
While you make good points overall, this piece is a bit disingenuous. Why on earth would we measure scientific progress on a "per-scientist basis"?
It is the collective, not individual, work of scientists that brings progress. And so much has been learned in the past 200 years, that it takes longer, and is more work, for new scientists to come up to speed on where we are now.
Human intelligence is partly an individual trait, but partially a collective one. A person growing up in isolation, with their basic pysical needs met but with no access to the intelligence or learning of other human beings is never going to be very intelligent. What has allowed our species to learn so rapidly is our ability to learn from each other, both directly and via indirect means (such as books).
So comparing the "per-scientist" rate of scientific discovery between now and, say, 200 years ago is meaningless.
"We find no luminiferous aether.
Not all scientific predictions are made equal."
that was a very useful prediction.
We predicted luminous aether: it was a logical theory. We had good reason to believe that light was a wave, we had no reason to imagine that a wave could exist without a physical medium (air, water, etc.)
It was a falsifiable theory.
For a long time people tried to prove it, but measurements weren't sensitive enough. Finally, a sensitive enough experiment was developed, and it found-- nothing!
This was far more useful than if they had found something.
On discovering that the theory was wrong, they didn't try to argue that it was really still correct. They puzzled about what it could mean: how can a wave exist without a substance to wave through?
Many incredibly significant scientific advances of the next few decades came out of this enigma. If there had been no luniniferous aether theory, there would have been no enigma, and perhaps many of these discoveries would not yet have come about.
The usefulness of a theory is not in whether it's correct or not. The usefulness of a theory comes from what you learn while trying to discover whether or not it is correct.
"Cult: small unpopular religeon
Religeon: A large popular cult"
So, your saying that A religion is a "large popular small unpopular large popular small unpopular large popular small unpopular..."
and that a cult is a "small unpopular large popular small unpopular large popular small unpopular large popular..."?
I think I'm experiencing a memory leak. My brain just crashed.
"Being able to make 2-D objects would save a lot of space."
Yes-- but heat dissipation would only be able to take place along the 1D perimiter. There would be no way to cool the center of the chip unless it was very small or highly heat-conductive.
It's a critical mass sort of thing.
Below a certain critical mass, it doesn't matter whether people use Outlook or rely entirely on a calender printed out on an index card, as long as you show up on time.
Above a certain critical mass, people start relying on the times other people are marked as "busy" or "out of office", and if you don't use the system, you're likely to get double or triple booked for meetings.
Of course, how many meetings you have in a week is a big factor as well. Here, we have multiple Agile projects going at once, and try to meet regularly on each for a short (nominally half an hour, but if there's only 10 minuites of content, then we all leave after 10 minuites) meeting on each. Some days I have no meetins, some days I have four; but I spend a weekly average of maybe 45min-1hr in meetings each day.
If I didn't use the Outlook calender at work, I'd constantly be e-mailing people to ask to re-schedule meetings or explain why I can't attend, and then explain why the time wasn't blocked off in my calender if I wasn't going to be available. I'd be making everyone's life more difficult, including my own.
"We apologise for the inconvenience" ;)
Yet they still won't provide support for *nix in any way shape or form. I want malware, and viruses for my OSX box. it just isn't fair that the viruses and malware only works on windows. I have animated cursors too. Heck right my ssh port is open go ahead and try to crack it.
This post is a virus that operates on the honor system. Please post your root password and credit card details as a response to this post, wipe your hard-drive, and then spam this message to everyone you know via e-mail and forum/blog postings. Thank you.{Obligitory} So have the stairs. {/Obligitory}
"Won't it just level the building?"
Exterminate! Exterminate!"NEVER give a woman a holiday present that has an electrical cord"
The problem wasn't the electrical cord. If you had given her something --with an electrical cord-- that she could actually enjoy using, like say a game system, or an iPod with a base, or a DVD Player, or a computer, or Lego Mindstorms, you'd hve been fine.
A present the receiver associates with something fun and enjoyable says "I want you to enjoy life!" something they associate with drugery says "I love it when you do the drudge-work-- do some more!"
General, non-gender-specific rule of thumb: don't give a gift associated with an unpleasent chore, unless the gift is something the receiver has specifically expressed definite interest in.
PS-- don't give something that you would enjoy using but they wouldn't. That says "I'm using a gift for 'you' as an excuse to buy something that's really for me. Can I borrow it now?")
Last year a big group of people submitted rough drafts to our instructor, they were all run through the system. Then, we submitted our final papers, they were run through the system too, but the second time the class had 30 students that were shown to plagiarize.
So, what was the outcome of that? Did those 30 students face any penalties (grades, disciplinary, etc) for having a final draft that "plagerized" the rough draft for the same paper?
Also, did the teacher learn from that snafubar, or does s/he still have students submit multiple versions of the same paper to the service?
"...work for hire."
Wait-- I was supposed to get PAID for writing papers in college? Why didn't anyone tell me this before!? What's the statute of limitations on that-- is it too late for me to claim back wages?
"I'm not blaming the victim, but" ranks up there with "I'm not a racist/sexist, but" for intellectual dishonesty. Just because you claim it's not doesn't mean it isn't.
It sounds like, in all of your occurrences of mortal danger, you either knew who was attacking you or had someone who's job it was to protect you. How does that make you qualified to judge whether not a person who is concerned about anonymous threats of violence -- possibly coming from "A-list bloggers" or their acquaintances, people that she might actually come into contact with -- is overreacting?
If I weren't out of mod points, I'd mod this up myself.Hey, I never said that "They do everything they can" meant they were actually successful at the strategy :)
New Hampshire also doesn't have a sales tax. (Or an income tax for that matter. They do everything they can to try to tax the tourists rather than the residents...)
Well, if I'm remembering correctly (and I may not be, so take this number with a grain of salt) the time-frame given for all black holes to evaporate was something on the order of 10^32 years from now-- in an eternally expanding universe, there are mind-boggling long periods of time to work with.
Even if protons never decay, I still think it would be unlikely for a civilization to survive all the stars buring out, let alone the time when all matter has fallen into black holes.
Of course, that's no reason not to try to survive longer than would be possible remaining on this planet alone.
As far as I remember, the universe *could* last forever... It's kind of another paradox, but it seems it won't collapse....
Well, even by the theory that says the universe will expand forever, any civilization that survived along with it would need to figure out how to survive
I'm having a hard time imagining a civilization managing to last until the time when the universe consists entirely of sparsely scattered electon-positron pairs slowly circling each other...
I wish I hadn't have used up all my mod points yesterday.
I hope you get the coveted score of "+5 Troll" =^)
Yeah, what's up with the Boston police being able to respond more quickly to something in their own city than to something in a city a thousand miles away? The Boston police are *totally* at fault for the Katrina (non-)response!!
Just because we think of the future as being shiney, it does not follow that anything we happen to find shiney is "ascending the ladder of the future".
The first rung of the "Ladder of the future" (to steal your metaphor) is "hey look! We can do this!". This is the origional, pre-commercial web, with hypertext, tables, and maybe images. Also Usenet, Gopher, Archie, e-mail.
The next rung is the "gee wiz nifty shiney!" stage. This started out as animated images, blink tags, frames, and moved onto multi-media and Flash. More people get online, lots of people are playing around to see what the medium can do. This is a very fun and creative stage, the "geek playground" of a technologies development.
The third rung is when people start looking more at what practical things the technology can accomplish, and how best to accomplish those things. Here we have design guidelines urging people that just because they can put colored text on animated textured bacgrounds doesn't mean they should. This is where we begin to get applications of the technology that are practical not just for geeks but for others as well: search engines, amazon, registering for classes, reading the news, seeing how you're representitive voted. We also start thinking about accessibility and maintainability.
The fourth rung is when the new technology improves beyond just copying the rest of the world, and begins to have a profound change on it. This is where the internet is now: the business models of established companies are being forced to change, politicians are finding they need to alter the way they interact with their constituencies (our govener has a podcast) the technology begins shifting from "luxury" to "neccesity"-- like Telephones in the middle of the 20th century.
The fifth rung is when the technology becomes part of "just the way things are", and is taken for granted. We are in this stage with the automobile, the telephone, the television. A hundred years ago, the first two were toys of the rich techno-geeks, and the third didn't exist at all. Now someone stuggling to get by may well have all three.
This is an artificial break-down: the rungs overlap, and there aren't neat clean transitions. Flash still has a place, but it needs to be balanced with the practical issues-- ignorning the practical issues might be forward looking when you're on the first or early on the second rung, but after that, ignoring the practical is looking backwards, not towards the futre.
But democracy is just that, mob rule. What ever the majority of the mob wants, the mob gets.
Which is why a constitutional democracy is preferable to a pure democracy in most cases, and the reason why most modern democracies are, in fact, constitutional. It prevents innocent people from getting "voted off the island" for arbitrary reasons or the philosophical fad of the moment.
Goolgle never was a "democracy", whether constitutional or pure. They use popular opinion as a factor in their ranking algorithm, but that has never been the only factor that they use. If that were their only tool, then it would be unlikely that the results would be better than those the most popular "cool links" pages a la 1997.
"not to pick nits, but if you don't support your nation during time of war, then, yes, you are unpatriotic."
No, it's unjigonistic not to support your nation during a time of war.
What's unpatriotic is to blindly follow and support a decision that's clearly not in your countries best interests.
Whether it's more patriotic to support or protest a war depends on the war. If portions of the US were occupied by a forign power, then saying "don't fight them, just let them take the rest of the country too", that would be unpatriotic. Saying "Um, this war on forign soil is a really bad idea for X, Y, and Z reasons", on the other hand, is patritotic...
...but not jigonistic. Methings you have not yet learned the difference.
Sounds like someone made some poor life choices (marrying someone he wasn't compatible with, having kids he either didn't want or wasn't ready for) and now wants us to feel sorry for him.
Or maybe he wasn't serious, but was just cracking a 60-year old, tired joke that was never that funny to begin with. yawn. Is there a "-1 boring and unorigional" mod?
If your second language is Swahili and you work in Vermont -- well, probably not.
Actually, Burlington VT is a refugee resettlement center. There are small numbers of people speaking so many languages there that the second-most common language (after English) is "other." This makes life interesting for the public library with regard to forign-lagugage collection development and ESL classes-- and I suspect it makes things interesting for municipal servieces as well.
Truth is, in a municipal setting, you never know when Swahili (or any other language) will be very useful to know.