Oh there is certainly nothing wrong with it. It is a dialect feature that exists. It is interesting principally because it is so extremely localized (unlike, for instance, my own native "might should"), and more specifically localized to the area surrounding the university at which said interest occurs.
You should see my wife's students, though, when she writes "The car needs washed." on the board, and then asks those who feel that such a sentence is natural to raise their hands. Half the class does almost every quarter, and then each half looks at the other half like they've got their heads on backwards. People who don't have the construction think it sounds really really odd, and people who do have it think that everyone else is crazy for thinking it odd.
I know you think you're very smart. But you really don't understand how different clouds are, or you don't understand what a control group is.
Just a bit of advice, as a scientist to a soon-to-be scientist: Try to be a bit more gracious in telling people that they are wrong. Telling people they are wrong is very important, and you should not shy away from it very often, but being even a little bit of jerk about it (and you are really being quite a lot of a jerk here) is not going to help. All that that will do is get you a reputation for being pompous and difficult to work with, which can push collaborators and funding to others.
I'm very glad that you've taken classes, and I'm even more glad that you're taking obviously quite a lot of time to think about this. However, as a working scientist (HEP) myself, I have to assert that you are quite wrong. Take a large number of clouds. Fly a plane through each one of them, half of the time dropping cloud seeding crystals, half of the time not (choose by flipping a coin). Fill two histograms with the integrated radar echo strength, beginning from the moment the pilot reports entering the cloud, and ending with the time the cloud ceases to precipitate, or one hour later, or some such. Obviously, put the data from the seeding runs in one histogram, and the data from the non-seeding runs in the other. At this point, you have obtained approximations to two distributions. You can obtain error bars on each bin of each histogram (poisson statistics), and estimate systematic errors on top (in quadrature) of those. Now, you can do a K-S test, or a Chi-squared test, or an eyeball test, and determine whether the two distributions are commensurate within experimental error or not. Quote Bayesian credibility, or confidence levels, or whatnot. Done. You have a successful experiment and a publication.
The key to the experiment is that the set of all clouds has some (currently unknown, but definitely fixed) distribution of rainfall amounts. As you draw samples from this distribution and fill a histogram, you get an idea (perhaps fairly coarse) of what that distribution is. Then you draw samples from a different distribution (seeded clouds), and get an idea of what that distribution is, too. Do these distributions appear to be different, or are they similar enough that we can't tell? Since what matters is the distribution as a whole, we don't need to worry about matched pairs in control and experimental groups, or what the characteristics of individual clouds are. Trust me, we have exactly the same situation in HEP. No two collisions are ever exactly (or really even close to exactly) alike, so if matched pairs were required, we'd never get anywhere at all.
The kicker is, of course, getting enough samples to populate your histograms sufficiently to get a good enough idea of the distributions. You are asserting that there are too many variables in cloud configuration space (and you're right, there certainly are an awful lot). But we don't care about filling up cloud configuration space. What we care about is filling up integrated radar echo (as an approximation to rainfall amount) space, which is one dimensional, and therefore much, much easier to populate.
FWIW, the Bush family was wealthy long before they were presidents. Not that this implies that they were not corrupt, but neither does the fact that the younger is not "starving or living in poverty" imply that he was corrupt. Just sayin'
Are you from Central Ohio? My wife is a linguist at OSU, and the "needs <verb>ed" construction is a frequent subject of conversation (among linguists here), since it is really only native to a very small area.
No, but I wouldn't presume to tell them that they couldn't. They're probably just as horrified that your city doesn't allow . Why is your value judgement worth more than theirs?
The problem is that complex things are, well, complex. If they were simple, then the surprising conclusions that result from their complexity would not exist. For instance: there are no simple proofs (known) for things like the four-color theorem or Fermat's last theorem. These things are true, but you will never convince people of them by using very simple arguments. Some things are quite stubbornly complex.
Well, if one of the space-fairies happens to exist, and comes here to look around, it might decide that if you don't need it, it doesn't need you. Either it is true or it isn't; this has nothing to do with whether or not it is testable (and the results of that test communicable to you today). Being testable just means that, well, it is testable. If it is not testable, then we probably shouldn't spend a whole lot of time trying to test it, certainly, but you must be careful to distinguish between "wrong" and "not even wrong". Things that are "not even wrong" might still be right (and might still be wrong as well), you'll just never know today.
The ideology of science is that the methodology is a good one. There isn't much ideology, but it is non-zero. In order to conclude that the scientific method is a correct method for ascertaining truth, you first have to postulate that there is a persistent, objective reality, and that our senses bear some consistent relationship to it. That is moderately uncontroversial (at least today), but it is still a precondition to the conclusion that the scientific method is useful.
Similarly, arithmetic is the ideology of two-column accounting, and mechanics is the ideology of, say, mechanical engineering.
I'm a high energy physicist. We use Linux (mostly on commodity x86 boxes) pretty much exclusively for research (except for a few cases when we were building custom electronics for our experiment and needed some Altera software to program our FPGAs and it only ran on some Windows or other). For software, we use C++ and Python and the ROOT libraries (which are horrible). Additionally, for our quite large data storage needs, we use a stack of enormous tape robots, cached HDD arrays. In order to do initial data reduction on these data sets, we use big batch grid systems. I'm working currently on a beowulf cluster for my research group.
If you actually bothered to RTFA, or even just TFFirstPost, you'd realize that this has nothing to do with any puritanical impulse to censor. The matter at hand is an accusation of sexual harassment, one element of which is the article mentioned in the summary. In fact, the article is the only alleged action which appears to have actually taken place. If you want to get your panties all in a wad about something here, make it be that people are far too quick to punish on allegations of sexual harassment, without stopping to check whether or not any harassment actually occurred first. But no, you jump to the conclusion that this is somehow to do with sexual repression and religion and overbearing moralists. Stop, think, then post (maybe).
Also, someone with knowledge of what words mean should have proofread it, rather than just running it through a spell checker. By "disburse", he means "disperse", by "fractioning column", he means "fractionating column", and by "prophesy", he means "prophecy". For someone who is a supposed expert in this field, he has a surprisingly poor ability to use the relevant jargon (disperse and fractionating column) correctly.
Speaking of prophecy, the Biblical reference is pure fear-mongering. It is not salient to estimates of the amount of oil, nor to the ecological effects of the release of oil. It is unprofessional and weakens his case by causing him to sound like a scared crackpot with an conclusion reached independently of any of the evidence he presents rather than a dispassionate analyst attempting to evaluate things with as much honesty and accuracy as possible. We need more of the latter and fewer of the former.
Finally, I have difficulty believing that the ecological effects will be anywhere near as great as an "Earth extinction event", or even bad enough to register on geologic-timescale extinction event charts. It seems quite likely to me that normal geological processes in the last few billion years must have opened up much larger sudden releases of oil (even under the ocean) many many times. One would think that, if a large underwater oil release had massive effects on the world's ecology, paleontologists would be able to tell us about it. Of course, I could be totally wrong in several assumptions here, and it really could be that bad, but my intuition prevents me from believing it. Of course, since I'm not called upon to make any decisions relating to the spill, it doesn't much matter whether I believe it or not.
Actually, the single entity responsible for the outcome of the war was Archimedes. He used his death ray to take out large numbers of German ships in the harbor at Syracuse, thus singlehandedly reducing the size of the Roman navy below what was necessary to sustain an attack! @ ^*\/.NO CARRIER
You should also check out his new opera/theater/electronica thing called Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings. I recently (warning: shameless bragging ahead) heard him promote it from the stage at Carnegie Hall, where I performed later that evening.
funded one of the greatest private R&D operations ever - but that didn't have much to do with their business model, it was mainly because they could.
IIRC, it wasn't just that they could, it was that they had to. The government mandated monopoly capped their profits (at some still quite high value), and so they had to burn off all their extra revenue somehow. Luckily they decided to burn it on R&D instead of hookers and blow. I suddenly find myself wondering what the world would be like if they had instead spent it on R&B...
I'm guessing that trees grow a lot faster in warmer climates with a _longer growing season_ than they do in Sweden. I've seen trees of many types reach maturity in less than 5 years in Texas and Oklahoma. Furthermore, I expect you can make paper out of not-yet-mature trees pretty easily.
Environmentalism, sure, I'll grant you. But environmentalists, like any large group dedicated to a cause, have a very large proportion of unthinking, true-believer fanatics in their midst. These fanatics can lose all sense of proportion, generally don't understand a bit of the science, and just cling to some particular mantra that they have come to believe is The Right Thing. For instance, the guy who threw molotovs through the windows of people's SUVs, or the guys who let out all those minks.
If anyone other than Sam Ting were running it, I would also find it hard to believe. But Sam Ting gets what he wants, no matter the cost, no matter how stupid.
Next? The idea for this sort of thing has been around since at least 1959.
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
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I presume you're talking about fairly large hardback books. Certainly it's rare for any paperback to mass even half a kilogram, and there are plenty of hardbacks massing less than 1 kg. 2 kg is really quite heavy for a book, even a textbook.
I'm not quite sure exactly what you mean by "Govt. collapses". Surely the country does not become anarchic? I expect what you mean is that the legislature cannot pass any legislation. If this is what you mean, then that is perfectly fine by me, and precisely what our system of checks and balances is for. If the only way to get laws passed is to actually get a large percentage of people (the consituents who elected the representatives who hold certain ideals and sit in office) to agree that the law should be passed, then it means that your democratic republic is working.
Thanks for the links. You can find a summary of Washington's views on the dangers of political parties in the appropriately titled section of the Wiki Article you linked us to. He warned us to avoid them, just as the GP says.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh there is certainly nothing wrong with it. It is a dialect feature that exists. It is interesting principally because it is so extremely localized (unlike, for instance, my own native "might should"), and more specifically localized to the area surrounding the university at which said interest occurs.
You should see my wife's students, though, when she writes "The car needs washed." on the board, and then asks those who feel that such a sentence is natural to raise their hands. Half the class does almost every quarter, and then each half looks at the other half like they've got their heads on backwards. People who don't have the construction think it sounds really really odd, and people who do have it think that everyone else is crazy for thinking it odd.
I know you think you're very smart. But you really don't understand how different clouds are, or you don't understand what a control group is.
Just a bit of advice, as a scientist to a soon-to-be scientist: Try to be a bit more gracious in telling people that they are wrong. Telling people they are wrong is very important, and you should not shy away from it very often, but being even a little bit of jerk about it (and you are really being quite a lot of a jerk here) is not going to help. All that that will do is get you a reputation for being pompous and difficult to work with, which can push collaborators and funding to others.
I'm very glad that you've taken classes, and I'm even more glad that you're taking obviously quite a lot of time to think about this. However, as a working scientist (HEP) myself, I have to assert that you are quite wrong. Take a large number of clouds. Fly a plane through each one of them, half of the time dropping cloud seeding crystals, half of the time not (choose by flipping a coin). Fill two histograms with the integrated radar echo strength, beginning from the moment the pilot reports entering the cloud, and ending with the time the cloud ceases to precipitate, or one hour later, or some such. Obviously, put the data from the seeding runs in one histogram, and the data from the non-seeding runs in the other. At this point, you have obtained approximations to two distributions. You can obtain error bars on each bin of each histogram (poisson statistics), and estimate systematic errors on top (in quadrature) of those. Now, you can do a K-S test, or a Chi-squared test, or an eyeball test, and determine whether the two distributions are commensurate within experimental error or not. Quote Bayesian credibility, or confidence levels, or whatnot. Done. You have a successful experiment and a publication.
The key to the experiment is that the set of all clouds has some (currently unknown, but definitely fixed) distribution of rainfall amounts. As you draw samples from this distribution and fill a histogram, you get an idea (perhaps fairly coarse) of what that distribution is. Then you draw samples from a different distribution (seeded clouds), and get an idea of what that distribution is, too. Do these distributions appear to be different, or are they similar enough that we can't tell? Since what matters is the distribution as a whole, we don't need to worry about matched pairs in control and experimental groups, or what the characteristics of individual clouds are. Trust me, we have exactly the same situation in HEP. No two collisions are ever exactly (or really even close to exactly) alike, so if matched pairs were required, we'd never get anywhere at all.
The kicker is, of course, getting enough samples to populate your histograms sufficiently to get a good enough idea of the distributions. You are asserting that there are too many variables in cloud configuration space (and you're right, there certainly are an awful lot). But we don't care about filling up cloud configuration space. What we care about is filling up integrated radar echo (as an approximation to rainfall amount) space, which is one dimensional, and therefore much, much easier to populate.
FWIW, the Bush family was wealthy long before they were presidents. Not that this implies that they were not corrupt, but neither does the fact that the younger is not "starving or living in poverty" imply that he was corrupt. Just sayin'
need updated
Are you from Central Ohio? My wife is a linguist at OSU, and the "needs <verb>ed" construction is a frequent subject of conversation (among linguists here), since it is really only native to a very small area.
Well, since Nuuk has certified that the title is buggy, that absolves me from any obligation to RTFA, right?
No, but I wouldn't presume to tell them that they couldn't. They're probably just as horrified that your city doesn't allow . Why is your value judgement worth more than theirs?
The problem is that complex things are, well, complex. If they were simple, then the surprising conclusions that result from their complexity would not exist. For instance: there are no simple proofs (known) for things like the four-color theorem or Fermat's last theorem. These things are true, but you will never convince people of them by using very simple arguments. Some things are quite stubbornly complex.
Well, if one of the space-fairies happens to exist, and comes here to look around, it might decide that if you don't need it, it doesn't need you. Either it is true or it isn't; this has nothing to do with whether or not it is testable (and the results of that test communicable to you today). Being testable just means that, well, it is testable. If it is not testable, then we probably shouldn't spend a whole lot of time trying to test it, certainly, but you must be careful to distinguish between "wrong" and "not even wrong". Things that are "not even wrong" might still be right (and might still be wrong as well), you'll just never know today.
Similarly, arithmetic is the ideology of two-column accounting, and mechanics is the ideology of, say, mechanical engineering.
I'm a high energy physicist. We use Linux (mostly on commodity x86 boxes) pretty much exclusively for research (except for a few cases when we were building custom electronics for our experiment and needed some Altera software to program our FPGAs and it only ran on some Windows or other). For software, we use C++ and Python and the ROOT libraries (which are horrible). Additionally, for our quite large data storage needs, we use a stack of enormous tape robots, cached HDD arrays. In order to do initial data reduction on these data sets, we use big batch grid systems. I'm working currently on a beowulf cluster for my research group.
If you actually bothered to RTFA, or even just TFFirstPost, you'd realize that this has nothing to do with any puritanical impulse to censor. The matter at hand is an accusation of sexual harassment, one element of which is the article mentioned in the summary. In fact, the article is the only alleged action which appears to have actually taken place. If you want to get your panties all in a wad about something here, make it be that people are far too quick to punish on allegations of sexual harassment, without stopping to check whether or not any harassment actually occurred first. But no, you jump to the conclusion that this is somehow to do with sexual repression and religion and overbearing moralists. Stop, think, then post (maybe).
Speaking of prophecy, the Biblical reference is pure fear-mongering. It is not salient to estimates of the amount of oil, nor to the ecological effects of the release of oil. It is unprofessional and weakens his case by causing him to sound like a scared crackpot with an conclusion reached independently of any of the evidence he presents rather than a dispassionate analyst attempting to evaluate things with as much honesty and accuracy as possible. We need more of the latter and fewer of the former.
Finally, I have difficulty believing that the ecological effects will be anywhere near as great as an "Earth extinction event", or even bad enough to register on geologic-timescale extinction event charts. It seems quite likely to me that normal geological processes in the last few billion years must have opened up much larger sudden releases of oil (even under the ocean) many many times. One would think that, if a large underwater oil release had massive effects on the world's ecology, paleontologists would be able to tell us about it. Of course, I could be totally wrong in several assumptions here, and it really could be that bad, but my intuition prevents me from believing it. Of course, since I'm not called upon to make any decisions relating to the spill, it doesn't much matter whether I believe it or not.
Actually, the single entity responsible for the outcome of the war was Archimedes. He used his death ray to take out large numbers of German ships in the harbor at Syracuse, thus singlehandedly reducing the size of the Roman navy below what was necessary to sustain an attack! @ ^*\/.NO CARRIER
In Star Wars Soviet Edition, you get punched to see the stars?
You should also check out his new opera/theater/electronica thing called Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings. I recently (warning: shameless bragging ahead) heard him promote it from the stage at Carnegie Hall, where I performed later that evening.
funded one of the greatest private R&D operations ever - but that didn't have much to do with their business model, it was mainly because they could.
IIRC, it wasn't just that they could, it was that they had to. The government mandated monopoly capped their profits (at some still quite high value), and so they had to burn off all their extra revenue somehow. Luckily they decided to burn it on R&D instead of hookers and blow. I suddenly find myself wondering what the world would be like if they had instead spent it on R&B...
I'm guessing that trees grow a lot faster in warmer climates with a _longer growing season_ than they do in Sweden. I've seen trees of many types reach maturity in less than 5 years in Texas and Oklahoma. Furthermore, I expect you can make paper out of not-yet-mature trees pretty easily.
Environmentalism, sure, I'll grant you. But environmentalists, like any large group dedicated to a cause, have a very large proportion of unthinking, true-believer fanatics in their midst. These fanatics can lose all sense of proportion, generally don't understand a bit of the science, and just cling to some particular mantra that they have come to believe is The Right Thing. For instance, the guy who threw molotovs through the windows of people's SUVs, or the guys who let out all those minks.
And the original would be "In America, tcheloviek shave with moon on mirror"? I don't think I get this one.
If anyone other than Sam Ting were running it, I would also find it hard to believe. But Sam Ting gets what he wants, no matter the cost, no matter how stupid.
Next? The idea for this sort of thing has been around since at least 1959.
I presume you're talking about fairly large hardback books. Certainly it's rare for any paperback to mass even half a kilogram, and there are plenty of hardbacks massing less than 1 kg. 2 kg is really quite heavy for a book, even a textbook.
I'm not quite sure exactly what you mean by "Govt. collapses". Surely the country does not become anarchic? I expect what you mean is that the legislature cannot pass any legislation. If this is what you mean, then that is perfectly fine by me, and precisely what our system of checks and balances is for. If the only way to get laws passed is to actually get a large percentage of people (the consituents who elected the representatives who hold certain ideals and sit in office) to agree that the law should be passed, then it means that your democratic republic is working.
Thanks for the links. You can find a summary of Washington's views on the dangers of political parties in the appropriately titled section of the Wiki Article you linked us to. He warned us to avoid them, just as the GP says.