Modern scientists look for natural laws because that's what medieval scientists did.
In Plato's philosophy, he thinks that there is another universe of perfect Forms and that imperfect objects (not geomertrically perfect, etc) in our universe are shadows cast from the Forms. But in the Old Testament, God creates and governs his universe by creating laws that govern all the objects in it. So instead of trying to discern what the Forms are, we can go out and collect new data from observations in order to discern what God's laws of the natural world are, and perhaps thereby learn something new about God. Modern Science was born from combining Greek philosophy with Theology.
recommended reading: Foster, M. B. "The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Science," Mind 43 (1934): 446-68.
Plato's approach is presented by a really intersting metaphor of a cave. People are all chained up in a cave with our backs to a big fire behind us, so we see only shadows dancing before our eyes that are cast from the flames. Newton's approach, wanting to discern the thoughts of God, is the culmination of the Scientific Revolution, what we call the Newtonian Synthesis, where laws of motion and laws of everything else are clearly discernable and all we need to do is collect data endlessly and we will be able to constantly perfect our understanding of those laws.
If you want to talk about whether there was a Second Scientific Revolution in the 20th century, read some Thomas Khun.
the Old Testament does meantion Heaven! tons! Hebrew "shamayim" (and greek "tois ouranois" if you prefer to read the septuagint) is in Genesis 1:1 "God created the heavens and the earth." The heavens in plural and in singular mean the same thing and are used interchangeably by both OT and NT authors in the original languages. And it's spoken of plenty; this is the Bible here.
Speeding tickets are more about shaving the sheep (taxing the public) than encouraging public safety, imho. If they made another stupid and arbitrary law that allows police to tax people for doing such simple things as talking on the phone, I'll have to start thinking really hard about what country I'm living in. We give up too many of our simple freedoms to people who enjoy to give themselves new powers.
The internet is for appropriating/distributing information. Universities are for archiving, dissiminating, and perhaps most importantly *generating* knowledge. Information and knowledge are fundamentally different things, too. As for drunken undergraduates, I've known many whose insights and genius have been far greater than mine, requiring only that they learn to focus and make trained use of their potential.
Let's not misrepresent what papers are either. Term papers are not tests in disguise; they are exercises that hone and shape a mind much as lifting weights tones and strengthens muscles. If a university has any greater purpose than the knowledge or information that is churned out, it is the task of producing fine human minds. The kind that direct the course of our civilization. The internet won't do that for us.
That's a good point. Intel Macs don't have a BIOS, they use Intel EFI (The old PPC Macs used OpenFirmware). How does Skype react to running in XP under parallels?
If these coins have imbedded RFID chips, they could be just part of a project by the Canadian Mint to get statistics about currency circulation. Put the chips on 10,000 coins and send them into circulation, then every time they come back to the bank they are noted by the computer and then sent back into circulation again. Partner with just a few major banks like CIBC, Royal, and TD and that would be it. Enough coins would get picked up at one branch or another over the space of a few years to create interesting data to graph. Right now, the only data the mint has about its coins is from examining worn-out coins pulled from circulation after (x) years.
This data might not really be useful for anything, but Canadian government officials are great at coming up with stupid projects to waste tax dollars just so their department can get a bigger budget.
Apple's hardware sells because it's really nice hardware.
(A1) Sun switches to AMD, windows boots natively, hardware sales go up.
(A2) Sun gives Solaris away for free, runs on non-Sun hardware, hardware sales go up more.
(B1) Apple switches to Intel, windows boots natively, hardware sales go up.
(B2)... ?
Apple should let people download MacOS X 10.5 for free from apple.com, and allow it to run unsupported on non-Apple hardware.
Sun Microsystems has been using the same tactic for quite awhile now (in order to compete with Linux) and it has had a hugely positive impact on their hardware sales (even if it seems ironic).
Apple would be ingenious to let windows users switch to MacOS X 10.5 on their existing PCs as an alternative to upgrading to Vista (which many don't want to do). I bet that a large chunk of people who made the switch to Apple software would then switch to Apple hardware as their next purchase.
It may seem illogical at first, but if Apple's hardware sales went up after letting windows boot natively (which logically seemed the death of OSX, but wasn't?), and if Sun's hardware sales went up after letting windows boot natively AND giving Solaris away for free, why wouldn't Apple find the same success?
Trying to engineer our climate doesn't count as adapting, it is as foolhardy as a little kid trying to cool his bedroom in the summer by breaking out his dad's power tools and cutting holes in the walls.
I'm a historian, and I can tell you for a fact that the earth has been much warmer in the past than it is now, and I really do not think that we are responsible for the climate warming that we're observing now. Applying systems theory to the data doesn't work because our instumentation hasn't been good enough for long enough to really tell us much; we could be looking at a perfectly natural rise in temperature that cycles every few thousand years. The astronomers up the hall from me say that the surface of Mars has been increasing in temperature at the same rate as Earth's for as long as we've been able to observe it. They think that our climate is reflecting a cycle going on in the Sun. It could be so. In any case, a warmer climate is nothing new and nothing to worry about as long we can adapt.
Premise (1): I've noticed that Vista was originally due in 2003 and still hasn't shipped (it's now 2006). It's starting to sound more and more like Copland to me. I think Microsoft is in serious trouble - I think they've lost control of development and need to go shopping for solutions from competitors.
Premise (2): OSX is the best desktop OS that consumers can buy, and the best that developers can have the experience to work with- especially because of the Cocoa API. Notice that OSX inherits OpenStep's ability to break apart into components that can be attached to other OSes (Openstep APIs ran on NT and Solaris as well as Mach unix), even regardless of hardware architecture.
Premise (3): Apple is supporting Windows installs on their hardware. This is a mixed bag for Apple, and it seems to me that Apple was initially against the idea of users installing Windows on the intel macs. They've had an abrupt change of heart.
Thus: I think that Jobs saw MS in trouble with Vista, made a phonecall to Ballmer's office, and offered to liscence some parts of OSX to Microsoft. Especially Cocoa. If MS needs to drop its legacy and move to a new generation of APIs, liscencing Cocoa would be excellent in technical terms - its a very good API - and it already has a bunch of intel-native software on the way for it... I'll bet it would take a 2% rewrite to make a Cocoa OSX app run as a Cocoa Vista app.
This would effectively be a lighter version of the sale that Jobs made when he called Gil Amelio's office to sell NeXT to Apple. If he could pull that kind of a deal to get Apple out of trouble, I bet he could pull a smaller deal to get Microsoft out of trouble. Technologically and economically it would make sense, the only obstacle would be a political one, with Apple entering MS turf... perhaps the political tradeoff was that Apple must allow Windows to be installed on their hardware. Maybe it will become a build-to-order option on the Apple site.
I'm really interested in comments, tell me what you think of this scenario. Could it be?
-apt
"The history of science is cluttered with the relics of conceptual schemes that were once fervently believed and that have since been replaced by incompatible theories." -Thomas S. Kuhn
Historians of science have often postulated that the scientific revolution (or the first scientific revolution, beginning with Copernicus and ending with Newton) happened in the latin west instead of in the greco-christian, islamic or judaic intellectual traditions of the East because the latin scholars put theology at the top of the pyramid of the liberal arts in the university. Intellectuals of the other traditions strongly seperated religion from the liberal arts, and thus didn't develop an instituion quite like a university or the scholastic method. The advantage of putting theology at the top is that it aligns all the other disciplines as methods towards the pursuit of the transcendental; seeking greater knowledge and understanding than what is already available in order to better understand God. This is as opposed to dogmatically assuming the inerrancy of our current model for understanding nature (a HUGE fallacy). As Isaac Newton said, religion without science is blind and science without religion is lame. I think that modern western science is in danger of becoming lame, what with the divisions occuring over the ID/Darwin debate and the increaing secularization of scientific curriculum in public universities. (sorry guys, Darwin was right, and this isn't a theological problem- the Bible is not a biology book- get over it). In order to succeed, our philosophy of science must be the pursuit of the transcendental, pushing the borders of our understanding. If we had dogmatically stuck the the Aristotelian model of the cosmos we'd be in a much different world today; similarly if we had stuck to the mechanized cosmos of the Newtonian synthesis we'd have no understanding of quantum mechanics, no general relativity, and no postmodern philosophy.
Has anyone wondered what relationship Apple may now have with the Itanium? I understand they're liscensing some nice semiconductor IP from the now-defunct PowerPC G6 to Intel for future designs? Could this relationship be the breath of fresh air that the Itanic needs to float?
"The history of science is cluttered with the relics of conceptual schemes that were once fervently believed and that have since been replaced by incompatible theories." -Thomas S. Kuhn
Please, I beg you all, stop making sarcastic remarks about the healthful benefits of alluminum foil headwear. Such devices are proven to be effective protection against a variety of stressors - both theoretical and non - which could cause irreversible damage to our inner cortexes, including but not limited to: electrostatic radiation, photonic radiation (both below and above the visible spectrum), direct sunlight, sonic intonations, unvoiced alveolar fricatives, exosolar radiation, sublunar electrostaticity, supraterrestrial automotive frustration, undefined free radicals, affective spherical earth rhetoric, ectoplasmic goo, artificial nonterrestrial mental affectae, habeus corpus, quantum relativity, venetian sausage, psychological longitudinal surveys, cathode ray tube emissions (both dynamic and static), retrograde motion, reversed cognitive flotation, vulcan mind melds, social mobility, dyslexic antithetical mythology, imablance of the four humors, dentistry, meeting the love of your life, recieving a darwin award, overseasonned exotic foods, strongbad's email, end-user liscence aggreements, and ketchup.
Please take the time to consider these and other reasons to treat alluminum foil as a reasonable, effective form of alternative preventitive medicine for everyone's mental well-being.
-apt
"medieval students were no less manic-depressive, riot-prone, or financially indignant than their modern counterparts"
If they tried, too few would stay on their side of the divide. Microsoft is too predatory this way; looks like a coy maneuver to get Yahoo out of the way of MSN messenger. Maybe Yahoo thought that their messanger was doomed anyway and Redmond made it worth their while?
In the medieval university, everything we call 'sciences' today were simply the physical arts, as outlined in the trivium and quadrivium. That's why doctorates in science disciplines are called Ph.D.'s (Doctor of Philosophy).
A space elevator needs more than just one tower, it needs a series of at least 3 towers around the globe connected by a ring in order to be a stable structure. In the 19th century this might have been possible, had victorians had the knowledge and technology that we have now, because the ring could have had all of its foundations in British territory. Today there would be too many different claims of ownership to the structure. Would we really want to put a foundation in the middle east, africa, or even the himalayas?
Or here's a more frightening angle: could a space elevator project be used as a rhetorical basis for a new imperialism?
From the article: "The report doesn't consider expenses related to design or marketing, or the fact that high-end chips can sell for more because fewer off the production line can actually run at top speed"
Design is probably *the most expensive* part of the chip design, and I wouldn't be surprised if that raises the number by $300 per chip. Intel has a very aggressive marketing budget as well, so add another $100 per chip to pay for that. After that, ventures into other products besides CPUs cost money, failed products especially so, and I can't imagine what that costs, but their bread & butter product will have to pick up the tab. Then of course Intel will have pensions to pay for, and the list goes on. It's amazing, but any corporation I can think of has expenses that are way above and beyond the basic cost of manufacture of their product.
This can only be a maneuver to prevent microsoft from buying either one of the two companies. Combined they dont necessarily stand to make more money than they would alone, but it creates a united front to keep microsoft out of their media software niche.
At my university it's not uncommon for retiring professors to donate large portions of their personal libraries to the campus library. The basement is full of books that have been waiting 15 years to be catalogued. Many of the books that are in circulation are anywhere from brand new to over 100 years old... many also out of print, published in another country, irreplaceable, and you can BET that no one has had either the time or the opportunity to convert these books to electronic format. These volumes would simply be lost, delegated to the basement with all the other books the university doesn't have the time to even label.
You can't blame the west's decline in science and technology on right-wing politics. Quite the opposite, actually. America and the rest of the western world are showing a stagnation now because the Cold War is over; we don't need to rush to out-innovate the Soviets anymore. Furthermore, we're presently in a period of declining indistrialization. Major industries are now contending with the heavy burden of index pensions, and government has much of its funding tied up in socialist-style programs that never really worked, and prevent from reinvesting in high research spending industries like private industry, the military or space programs (this is far more true here in Canada than in the states).
What I'm really arguing that our twentieth-century boom in science is planing out right now as a result of lack of motivation and because of experimentation with socialist models of economic development that have been proven not to work.
From my high arctic perspective, I'd say that Bush's government is actually doing quite well in bringing about a resurge in R&D and industrialization before the end of the decade. There is new competition in the Far East to keep up with (though thankfully, much more peaceful competition than the Soviets), and the American public seem to be sophisticated enough to not become dogmatic about their philosophy (eg: science need not be atheistic, it need only have merit).
Veritas totam superavit
Canadians hate their cell phone companies. Macleans' reported last year that cell companies are tied for 2nd place among the most hated corporations in Canada. People just don't like the services, but buy the product anyway because of the sheer advantage of a portable phone, no matter how badly it works. The average life expectancy of a cell phone, furthermore, is only 18 months.
How does Microsoft expect to make an iPod-killer in an industry that works this poorly? I don't see it.
The ultimate cell phone isn't an Mp3 player combo, or a waffle-maker combo, or any other combination device. People just want a phone that they can make calls on. Why has no one made a long-lasting durable cell phone that simply makes calls?
Space telescopes are obsolete
on
Hope for Hubble
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My physics professor said in a lecture two years ago that the Hubble is long obsolete; in fact it's nothing but a toy now. Ground telescopes have advanced their techniques for correcting atmospheric distortion of the image to the point that taking a picture with a telescope in space is less desireable. In fact, he suggests that putting telescopes in space is not even a worthwhile venture anymore, because updates in technology can be rolled out on the ground so much faster than in space that it doesn't make sense to invest your funding in a space launch. The same cost of putting a telescope in space is the same as putting a 2x-10x better telescope on the ground, which can be more easily upgraded in years following. In fact, the technology improves so fast that a telescope in space becomes essentially useless for research purposes within a fraction of its operational lifetime. It looks awfully silly when you've spent millions on putting a tool way up in orbit when it becomes a toy in less than twelve months.
Slashdot Mirror
This is worse than property tax. It's worse than income tax. This is taxing your ideas.
In Plato's philosophy, he thinks that there is another universe of perfect Forms and that imperfect objects (not geomertrically perfect, etc) in our universe are shadows cast from the Forms. But in the Old Testament, God creates and governs his universe by creating laws that govern all the objects in it. So instead of trying to discern what the Forms are, we can go out and collect new data from observations in order to discern what God's laws of the natural world are, and perhaps thereby learn something new about God. Modern Science was born from combining Greek philosophy with Theology.
recommended reading: Foster, M. B. "The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Science," Mind 43 (1934): 446-68.
Plato's approach is presented by a really intersting metaphor of a cave. People are all chained up in a cave with our backs to a big fire behind us, so we see only shadows dancing before our eyes that are cast from the flames. Newton's approach, wanting to discern the thoughts of God, is the culmination of the Scientific Revolution, what we call the Newtonian Synthesis, where laws of motion and laws of everything else are clearly discernable and all we need to do is collect data endlessly and we will be able to constantly perfect our understanding of those laws.
If you want to talk about whether there was a Second Scientific Revolution in the 20th century, read some Thomas Khun.
the Old Testament does meantion Heaven! tons! Hebrew "shamayim" (and greek "tois ouranois" if you prefer to read the septuagint) is in Genesis 1:1 "God created the heavens and the earth." The heavens in plural and in singular mean the same thing and are used interchangeably by both OT and NT authors in the original languages. And it's spoken of plenty; this is the Bible here.
Speeding tickets are more about shaving the sheep (taxing the public) than encouraging public safety, imho. If they made another stupid and arbitrary law that allows police to tax people for doing such simple things as talking on the phone, I'll have to start thinking really hard about what country I'm living in. We give up too many of our simple freedoms to people who enjoy to give themselves new powers.
Let's not misrepresent what papers are either. Term papers are not tests in disguise; they are exercises that hone and shape a mind much as lifting weights tones and strengthens muscles. If a university has any greater purpose than the knowledge or information that is churned out, it is the task of producing fine human minds. The kind that direct the course of our civilization. The internet won't do that for us.
My answer to buggy/unfinished products has always been to take a pair of nunchucks to them. I think of it as an alternative way of 'finishing' them.
That's a good point. Intel Macs don't have a BIOS, they use Intel EFI (The old PPC Macs used OpenFirmware). How does Skype react to running in XP under parallels?
This data might not really be useful for anything, but Canadian government officials are great at coming up with stupid projects to waste tax dollars just so their department can get a bigger budget.
(A1) Sun switches to AMD, windows boots natively, hardware sales go up.
(A2) Sun gives Solaris away for free, runs on non-Sun hardware, hardware sales go up more.
(B1) Apple switches to Intel, windows boots natively, hardware sales go up.
(B2) ... ?
Apple should let people download MacOS X 10.5 for free from apple.com, and allow it to run unsupported on non-Apple hardware. Sun Microsystems has been using the same tactic for quite awhile now (in order to compete with Linux) and it has had a hugely positive impact on their hardware sales (even if it seems ironic).
Apple would be ingenious to let windows users switch to MacOS X 10.5 on their existing PCs as an alternative to upgrading to Vista (which many don't want to do). I bet that a large chunk of people who made the switch to Apple software would then switch to Apple hardware as their next purchase.
It may seem illogical at first, but if Apple's hardware sales went up after letting windows boot natively (which logically seemed the death of OSX, but wasn't?), and if Sun's hardware sales went up after letting windows boot natively AND giving Solaris away for free, why wouldn't Apple find the same success?
Seems simple to me.
-Apt
Trying to engineer our climate doesn't count as adapting, it is as foolhardy as a little kid trying to cool his bedroom in the summer by breaking out his dad's power tools and cutting holes in the walls.
I'm a historian, and I can tell you for a fact that the earth has been much warmer in the past than it is now, and I really do not think that we are responsible for the climate warming that we're observing now. Applying systems theory to the data doesn't work because our instumentation hasn't been good enough for long enough to really tell us much; we could be looking at a perfectly natural rise in temperature that cycles every few thousand years. The astronomers up the hall from me say that the surface of Mars has been increasing in temperature at the same rate as Earth's for as long as we've been able to observe it. They think that our climate is reflecting a cycle going on in the Sun. It could be so. In any case, a warmer climate is nothing new and nothing to worry about as long we can adapt.
Premise (1): I've noticed that Vista was originally due in 2003 and still hasn't shipped (it's now 2006). It's starting to sound more and more like Copland to me. I think Microsoft is in serious trouble - I think they've lost control of development and need to go shopping for solutions from competitors.
Premise (2): OSX is the best desktop OS that consumers can buy, and the best that developers can have the experience to work with- especially because of the Cocoa API. Notice that OSX inherits OpenStep's ability to break apart into components that can be attached to other OSes (Openstep APIs ran on NT and Solaris as well as Mach unix), even regardless of hardware architecture.
Premise (3): Apple is supporting Windows installs on their hardware. This is a mixed bag for Apple, and it seems to me that Apple was initially against the idea of users installing Windows on the intel macs. They've had an abrupt change of heart.
Thus: I think that Jobs saw MS in trouble with Vista, made a phonecall to Ballmer's office, and offered to liscence some parts of OSX to Microsoft. Especially Cocoa. If MS needs to drop its legacy and move to a new generation of APIs, liscencing Cocoa would be excellent in technical terms - its a very good API - and it already has a bunch of intel-native software on the way for it... I'll bet it would take a 2% rewrite to make a Cocoa OSX app run as a Cocoa Vista app.
This would effectively be a lighter version of the sale that Jobs made when he called Gil Amelio's office to sell NeXT to Apple. If he could pull that kind of a deal to get Apple out of trouble, I bet he could pull a smaller deal to get Microsoft out of trouble. Technologically and economically it would make sense, the only obstacle would be a political one, with Apple entering MS turf ... perhaps the political tradeoff was that Apple must allow Windows to be installed on their hardware. Maybe it will become a build-to-order option on the Apple site.
I'm really interested in comments, tell me what you think of this scenario. Could it be?
-apt
"The history of science is cluttered with the relics of conceptual schemes that were once fervently believed and that have since been replaced by incompatible theories." -Thomas S. Kuhn
Seek and ye shall find, gentlemen.
"The history of science is cluttered with the relics of conceptual schemes that were once fervently believed and that have since been replaced by incompatible theories." -Thomas S. Kuhn
Please take the time to consider these and other reasons to treat alluminum foil as a reasonable, effective form of alternative preventitive medicine for everyone's mental well-being.
-apt
"medieval students were no less manic-depressive, riot-prone, or financially indignant than their modern counterparts"
If they tried, too few would stay on their side of the divide. Microsoft is too predatory this way; looks like a coy maneuver to get Yahoo out of the way of MSN messenger. Maybe Yahoo thought that their messanger was doomed anyway and Redmond made it worth their while?
Reuniting the arts & sciences is in vogue right now in academia, see the Barber School of Arts & Sciences at UBC http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/ubcreports/2005/05 feb03/barber.html
Or here's a more frightening angle: could a space elevator project be used as a rhetorical basis for a new imperialism?
Design is probably *the most expensive* part of the chip design, and I wouldn't be surprised if that raises the number by $300 per chip. Intel has a very aggressive marketing budget as well, so add another $100 per chip to pay for that. After that, ventures into other products besides CPUs cost money, failed products especially so, and I can't imagine what that costs, but their bread & butter product will have to pick up the tab. Then of course Intel will have pensions to pay for, and the list goes on. It's amazing, but any corporation I can think of has expenses that are way above and beyond the basic cost of manufacture of their product.
This can only be a maneuver to prevent microsoft from buying either one of the two companies. Combined they dont necessarily stand to make more money than they would alone, but it creates a united front to keep microsoft out of their media software niche.
At my university it's not uncommon for retiring professors to donate large portions of their personal libraries to the campus library. The basement is full of books that have been waiting 15 years to be catalogued. Many of the books that are in circulation are anywhere from brand new to over 100 years old... many also out of print, published in another country, irreplaceable, and you can BET that no one has had either the time or the opportunity to convert these books to electronic format. These volumes would simply be lost, delegated to the basement with all the other books the university doesn't have the time to even label.
You can't blame the west's decline in science and technology on right-wing politics. Quite the opposite, actually. America and the rest of the western world are showing a stagnation now because the Cold War is over; we don't need to rush to out-innovate the Soviets anymore. Furthermore, we're presently in a period of declining indistrialization. Major industries are now contending with the heavy burden of index pensions, and government has much of its funding tied up in socialist-style programs that never really worked, and prevent from reinvesting in high research spending industries like private industry, the military or space programs (this is far more true here in Canada than in the states). What I'm really arguing that our twentieth-century boom in science is planing out right now as a result of lack of motivation and because of experimentation with socialist models of economic development that have been proven not to work. From my high arctic perspective, I'd say that Bush's government is actually doing quite well in bringing about a resurge in R&D and industrialization before the end of the decade. There is new competition in the Far East to keep up with (though thankfully, much more peaceful competition than the Soviets), and the American public seem to be sophisticated enough to not become dogmatic about their philosophy (eg: science need not be atheistic, it need only have merit). Veritas totam superavit
Canadians hate their cell phone companies. Macleans' reported last year that cell companies are tied for 2nd place among the most hated corporations in Canada. People just don't like the services, but buy the product anyway because of the sheer advantage of a portable phone, no matter how badly it works. The average life expectancy of a cell phone, furthermore, is only 18 months. How does Microsoft expect to make an iPod-killer in an industry that works this poorly? I don't see it. The ultimate cell phone isn't an Mp3 player combo, or a waffle-maker combo, or any other combination device. People just want a phone that they can make calls on. Why has no one made a long-lasting durable cell phone that simply makes calls?
My physics professor said in a lecture two years ago that the Hubble is long obsolete; in fact it's nothing but a toy now. Ground telescopes have advanced their techniques for correcting atmospheric distortion of the image to the point that taking a picture with a telescope in space is less desireable. In fact, he suggests that putting telescopes in space is not even a worthwhile venture anymore, because updates in technology can be rolled out on the ground so much faster than in space that it doesn't make sense to invest your funding in a space launch. The same cost of putting a telescope in space is the same as putting a 2x-10x better telescope on the ground, which can be more easily upgraded in years following. In fact, the technology improves so fast that a telescope in space becomes essentially useless for research purposes within a fraction of its operational lifetime. It looks awfully silly when you've spent millions on putting a tool way up in orbit when it becomes a toy in less than twelve months.