Spirit of Saint Louis was built with one engine because two engines increased the probability of engine failure. Extra engines are safer but only if you can fly with one not functioning. I'm going to guess that continuing the flight across the Atlantic on a single engine wasn't a realistic possibility with the technology of the day.
1. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published.
2. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified.
Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:
3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.
Personally, I suspect he may be right. I fail to see the sorting mechanism in Wikipedia by which good writing and accurate facts rise to float above all the shit and the articles are often of low quality; I'm speaking as a fairly frequent contributor.
It often feels like a fool's errand. Articles frequently seem to become more jumbled, incoherent, and full of extraneous bullshit over time. Articles usually lack any sort of references to primary literature, and it seems that in general (a) it's failed to draw in the experts it needs to produce a really high quality product, and (b)the experts voices don't sound any louder than those of some quasi-literate high school sophomore, so they tend to get lost in the storm, and (c) the result of dozens of different voices working on a text is something which is bland and lacking in life, prose designed by committee and largely stripped of life. In particular I wonder if it will suffer the same fate as many mailing lists: the ignorant idiots with nothing intelligent to say tend to scream loudest. The informed people tend to speak less because they have a better sense of their own ignorance, eventually get fed up, and leave.
Granted, it works a hell of a lot better than I'd expect it to, and it's useful if you want facts in a hurry and are going to check them later, but the idea that it currently stands shoulder-to-shoulder with traditional media and peer-reviewed scientific publications is just ridiculous. I think the project has potential, and I think in its current incarnation it can be a useful alternative to traditional journal articles, texts, and soforth, but I think it's a long way from being a consistently well-written and reliable resource. Can it get there? I wouldn't write it off. It's amazing it got this far and works as well as it does.
so, let's recommend some good books
on
Blink, Take 2
·
· Score: 1
The book is extremely ambiguous, not very helpful, and basically words things most people already know in ways that make it seem like it's new and insightful.
So basically, the book boils down to "Use the Force, Luke."
I'm actually kind of a computer moron, but I'm a bio geek and I was reading some stuff about DNA. DNA can get damaged in a lot of ways. Mutations can get introduced on one of the strands of the helix, strands get broken, bases might match up wrong between the strands, and soforth. So how does life deal with this to achieve a very low error rate of one error per billion base pairs copied?
The interesting thing is that it's not so much that DNA is really well-protected from abuse (though that's part of it), it's that the cells have really sophisticated tools for repairing this damage. Many biological systems take failure as a foregone conclusion, but have evolved some extremely sophisticated ways of functioning while damaged and rapidly repairing them and getting back up to speed (Hell, I broke a toe and hiked down and up the Grand Canyon while it was healing).
Anyhow, there was an article in Scientific American a while back which argued for the same concept for computers. It said that reducing the failure rate wouldn't do nearly as much to reduce total downtime as making systems able to rapidly bounce back from failures.
That's nothing. We used clay tablets to record our binary. It really sucked if you spilled water on your programs and they would just turn into a pile of mud. We transmitted these programs using huge drums made out of mammoth hide which would boom the code out across the frozen hills. You'd sit in your cave (where the cave walls amplified the transmissions) and copy the code down onto your mud tablet and then set it by the fire to dry. Sometimes when you were gathering the mud it would get stuff in it like spiders and ants and you'd have to pick them out and then they'd sting you; and that's how we invented debugging. And once our code got dry we sat around and got really depressed because computers hadn't been invented yet. So we'd go outside and trudge uphill through the snow for six miles. We didn't even trudge to school uphill six miles, because school hadn't been invented yet. We just trudged because that's all there was to do to keep your mind off the fact that computers didn't exist. We once tried to invent a computer. We got a mammoth skull and figured the hardware would go inside the skull and the big hole in the skull where the trunk came out could hold the display, so it would be an all-in-one form factor. But then we didn't get much further than that. We couldn't decide whether to use mud, or sticks, or flint for the CPU. Vinyl disks? You modern, post ice-age geeks just don't know how good you have it.
You are forgetting that China doesn't fit in the traditional Communist model, at least not economically.
Because, as the Economist points out, they are only nominally communist. They're actually fascist- fairly free markets but centralized, authoritarian political control- although the Economist (looking at the glass as half full) says that's a good thing, since fascist countries can make a successful transition to a Western model. Spain made the transition for instance. As awful as it sounds, cracking down on the students may have been necessary. Russia broke down the old system, but with nothing to replace it, oligarchs and crime lords took over and people have generally been worse off than under communism. Likewise, the American attempt to knock down Iraq has proven to be misguided, since they had no plan for what was going to follow it. Destroying the old order is easy. Building the new one is what's hard. China's changing, but in a stepwise evolutionary fashion rather than an all-at-once revolutionary fashion. The result is that freedoms will be slow in coming- but the problems that accompany transition to a more Western style government can be taken one at a time, instead of all at once.
Seriously. Five SUVs? we really want to do something serious about curbing emissions and conserving energy, today, we start by legislating higher fuel economy for existing vehicles; that will do something. Maybe in twenty years hydrogen technology will be advanced enough to be a large part of the solution to our energy and pollution woes, but currently, all spending a few bucks on hydrogen technology does is give the automotive and petroleum industries the ability to say, "look, we're really doing something! We're not evil!". Purely cosmetic, nothing more. It reminds me of how Phillip Morris changed its name -which had long been associated with selling death at a high profit margin- to "Altria". They still knowingly kill people to make a buck, but now they kill people with a name which sounds sort of like "altruism", the practice of doing good and getting nothing in return. Likewise I think this is just the auto and petroleum companies trying to say they've changed when they haven't. Like sticking a "save the rainforest" bumper sticker on a Hummer.
I think you are the one who doesn't read much. The parent's point was not the stoning, but rather the selective nature of the quote from Leviticus. If homosexuality and wearing blended fabrics are both sins with the same punishment (nevermind what it is), how do most Christians justify the picking and choosing of the ones that are most convenient or tolerable?
I may not read much, but I read my Bible, and all I need to know is I don't care what you liberal city boy types think about the Word of God: what's wrong is wrong, what's a sin is a sin, and you degenerate sickos better watch yer asses when you see my pickup comin' cos I'm gonna take a 2-by-4 bash in the head of the next GOLLDAMN PREVERT I see wearing a cotton/polyester T-shirt.
Question: what exactly do we need to transport humans for? They're bulky, they don't like vacuums, they have a low tolerance for temperature extremes, they can only function for about half a day at a time, and they need thousands of pounds of things like space suits, artificial atmospheres, airlocks, sleeping bags, toilets, etc. to function with. Meanwhile, robots don't have these disadvantages, and are becoming increasingly capable of doing anything we might want to do up in space.
The budget is finite, and it's not even particularly interesting to send humans up on rockets anymore. I can't remember the last time I heard anyone talk about the space station. I mean, people hang out up there (right?) but they aren't doing much more. All the interesting, exciting science/adventuring is being done by robotic probes like the Mars rovers and the Hubble. Can the humans. We've had our day. If people want to go up in space, great, but let's let the space tourism industry take care of that, because the scientific justification for it is rapidly fading.
I don't dislike conservatives, if by "conservative" you mean people like John McCain and Christie Todd Whitman. I'd vote for McCain in a heartbeat. The guy's sane, credible, honest, capable, and knows what he believes in. But the neocons who are running things today aren't so much conservative as fascist: they're aggressively, recklessly militaristic, hyper-nationalistic, and put loyalty to the State ahead of individual liberties such as the right to criticize the state. It's not "Neoconservative", it's Neofascist.
Yeah, I know Godwin's Law argues that you're reaching the end of sane, intelligent, civil discussion if you're bringing up fascists from WWII. But the scary thing is, I think it's no longer possible to have a sane, civil, intelligent discussion without seeing and bringing up these parallels.
Moore's a blowhard and a bullshit artist. The whole thing about having the Columbine kids go to Wal-Mart just sickened me. I don't think he really gave a shit about their plight, it just made good propaganda; it was pure exploitation.
Likewise, his arguments about Canada are bullshit. They are not as heavily armed as Americans; it is MUCH harder to get guns in Canada and the restrictions are much stronger, especially on handguns. But dealing with the complexities of the issues didn't fit his ideas and it didn't make good entertainment, so he gave people a heavily edited version of the truth.
Now, to give you an idea of my political leanings, a primary goal of my life is to outlive each member of the Bush clan, visit their tombstones, and piss on them. That being said, I think we need to combat the fanatical insanity of the radical right with sincerity, honesty and integrity, not by fielding a liberal Rush Limbaugh, which is all Moore seems to be.
"I do not, for one, think that the problem was that the band was
down. I think that the problem may have been...that there was
a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being
crushed by a dwarf. All right? That tended to understate
the hugeness of the object."
Generally speaking I am against GMO's especially as they do tend to cross-breed with non-GMO's and if they are a strong enough breed will take over like GMO corn has done
All organisms are genetically modified in one fashion or another. Humans have been selectively breeding crops for growth rate, productivity and so on for thousands of years. So should we only eat wild plants? Before that, the plants were bred by the environment. Plus, natural hybridization is responsible for gene exchange in wild plants, while gene uptake from other organisms such as viruses is responsible for foreign DNA getting into plants. That's been going on for hundreds of millions of years. To an evolutionary biologist, the idea of keeping the genes pure is nonsense. Think about it. You have the nucleic acid sequence
actgtagccgat
in a plant. So it's automatically safe and OK and doesn't need testing if it got inserted naturally from a virus or mutation, but it's automatically dangerous and not-OK if humans put it there? That's the assumption a lot of anti-GMO people make. I'm not saying there aren't risks, but there are also risks with organic organisms. Rattlesnake venom, the HIV virus and cocaine are all organic, that doesn't make them good for you. It's all a question of carefully weighing the risks against the rewards.
That said, hydroelectric is also *very* well-tested mature technology, wind and solar less so.
Norway, for example, have produced like 98% of the electricity needed (including the humongous amounts needed for large aluminium-plants) by hydroelectric since a century. That should count as well-tested I think.
Was anyone else disturbed by the announcement that research into hydro is being cut back? I mean, sure we've got it to a point where it's working, but it seems like more efficient turbines or research into low-impact hydro power would be useful ways to help reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But shit, what do you expect. This is the crap you get from the Bush administration, whose idea of "alternative energy" is ANWR.
No problem. Ships these days use a computerized course plotter (Windows... how's that for peril at sea) with a GPS so they can be within a couple hundred feet of where they want to be; the wave farms would just be programmed into the charts. Plus, the lights would be visible for quite a ways off, and finally the generators would look like a fleet of small islands on the radar. Driving ships around obstacles is easy. Shit, even stoned Alaskan fisherman can do it. So that part's not a problem. Not to say wave farms are a good idea.
Effects on marine life.. Imagine dolphins or whales getting caught in this
Don't worry about effects on marine life. Quite the contrary: these wave thingies will be fantastic places for barnacles, mussels, kelp, sea anenomes and soforth to grow. They'll be all over these generators in a matter of months. They don't mention that aspect. For these reasons, ships have to be hauled out of the water every couple of years and extensively serviced- crap scraped off the bottom, new antifouling paint put on, and soforth. Since these are stationary, there's not too much concern if they get a bit slimy on the outside, but what about the inside of the wave generators? Not to mention that saltwater is incredibly corrosive and just eats through metal. Periodic servicing can easily address these issues. The question is how much it will cost to keep hundreds or thousands of these machines in working order, and what their practical lifespan will be, and whether after all that is factored in, it's still cost effective.
Another issue is that the wave energy is greatest where the power need is the least- Hawaii and Alaska. The Pacific and Pacific Northwest regions are well situated to take advantage of this technology, but the Atlantic just isn't as rough.
That would be orbital space platforms harvesting the energy of the sun, or fusion reactors. Perhaps one day, those technologies would be feasible.
My idea is a massive cluster of 100 million generators each hooked up to a giant hamster wheel. And each hamster wheel with like, five hundred hamsters inside of it. Or one capybara, because that's a rodent, but really big so it weighs like, five hundred hamsters.
I haven't figured out what the hamsters (or capybaras) eat yet, but you can't expect me to do all the thinking here.
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Spirit of Saint Louis was built with one engine because two engines increased the probability of engine failure. Extra engines are safer but only if you can fly with one not functioning. I'm going to guess that continuing the flight across the Atlantic on a single engine wasn't a realistic possibility with the technology of the day.
Hel-LO, but isn't that exactly what Batman does? And Batman's cool!
1. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published.
2. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified.
Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:
3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.
Personally, I suspect he may be right. I fail to see the sorting mechanism in Wikipedia by which good writing and accurate facts rise to float above all the shit and the articles are often of low quality; I'm speaking as a fairly frequent contributor.
It often feels like a fool's errand. Articles frequently seem to become more jumbled, incoherent, and full of extraneous bullshit over time. Articles usually lack any sort of references to primary literature, and it seems that in general (a) it's failed to draw in the experts it needs to produce a really high quality product, and (b)the experts voices don't sound any louder than those of some quasi-literate high school sophomore, so they tend to get lost in the storm, and (c) the result of dozens of different voices working on a text is something which is bland and lacking in life, prose designed by committee and largely stripped of life. In particular I wonder if it will suffer the same fate as many mailing lists: the ignorant idiots with nothing intelligent to say tend to scream loudest. The informed people tend to speak less because they have a better sense of their own ignorance, eventually get fed up, and leave.
Granted, it works a hell of a lot better than I'd expect it to, and it's useful if you want facts in a hurry and are going to check them later, but the idea that it currently stands shoulder-to-shoulder with traditional media and peer-reviewed scientific publications is just ridiculous. I think the project has potential, and I think in its current incarnation it can be a useful alternative to traditional journal articles, texts, and soforth, but I think it's a long way from being a consistently well-written and reliable resource. Can it get there? I wouldn't write it off. It's amazing it got this far and works as well as it does.
Anybody else? Reading suggestions?
It's about how snap judgements are often, but not always, correct.
In bed.
So basically, the book boils down to "Use the Force, Luke."
The interesting thing is that it's not so much that DNA is really well-protected from abuse (though that's part of it), it's that the cells have really sophisticated tools for repairing this damage. Many biological systems take failure as a foregone conclusion, but have evolved some extremely sophisticated ways of functioning while damaged and rapidly repairing them and getting back up to speed (Hell, I broke a toe and hiked down and up the Grand Canyon while it was healing).
Anyhow, there was an article in Scientific American a while back which argued for the same concept for computers. It said that reducing the failure rate wouldn't do nearly as much to reduce total downtime as making systems able to rapidly bounce back from failures.
That's nothing. We used clay tablets to record our binary. It really sucked if you spilled water on your programs and they would just turn into a pile of mud. We transmitted these programs using huge drums made out of mammoth hide which would boom the code out across the frozen hills. You'd sit in your cave (where the cave walls amplified the transmissions) and copy the code down onto your mud tablet and then set it by the fire to dry. Sometimes when you were gathering the mud it would get stuff in it like spiders and ants and you'd have to pick them out and then they'd sting you; and that's how we invented debugging. And once our code got dry we sat around and got really depressed because computers hadn't been invented yet. So we'd go outside and trudge uphill through the snow for six miles. We didn't even trudge to school uphill six miles, because school hadn't been invented yet. We just trudged because that's all there was to do to keep your mind off the fact that computers didn't exist. We once tried to invent a computer. We got a mammoth skull and figured the hardware would go inside the skull and the big hole in the skull where the trunk came out could hold the display, so it would be an all-in-one form factor. But then we didn't get much further than that. We couldn't decide whether to use mud, or sticks, or flint for the CPU. Vinyl disks? You modern, post ice-age geeks just don't know how good you have it.
Because, as the Economist points out, they are only nominally communist. They're actually fascist- fairly free markets but centralized, authoritarian political control- although the Economist (looking at the glass as half full) says that's a good thing, since fascist countries can make a successful transition to a Western model. Spain made the transition for instance. As awful as it sounds, cracking down on the students may have been necessary. Russia broke down the old system, but with nothing to replace it, oligarchs and crime lords took over and people have generally been worse off than under communism. Likewise, the American attempt to knock down Iraq has proven to be misguided, since they had no plan for what was going to follow it. Destroying the old order is easy. Building the new one is what's hard. China's changing, but in a stepwise evolutionary fashion rather than an all-at-once revolutionary fashion. The result is that freedoms will be slow in coming- but the problems that accompany transition to a more Western style government can be taken one at a time, instead of all at once.
Simple and inexpensive, yet many people overlook this option!
Seriously. Five SUVs? we really want to do something serious about curbing emissions and conserving energy, today, we start by legislating higher fuel economy for existing vehicles; that will do something. Maybe in twenty years hydrogen technology will be advanced enough to be a large part of the solution to our energy and pollution woes, but currently, all spending a few bucks on hydrogen technology does is give the automotive and petroleum industries the ability to say, "look, we're really doing something! We're not evil!". Purely cosmetic, nothing more. It reminds me of how Phillip Morris changed its name -which had long been associated with selling death at a high profit margin- to "Altria". They still knowingly kill people to make a buck, but now they kill people with a name which sounds sort of like "altruism", the practice of doing good and getting nothing in return. Likewise I think this is just the auto and petroleum companies trying to say they've changed when they haven't. Like sticking a "save the rainforest" bumper sticker on a Hummer.
I may not read much, but I read my Bible, and all I need to know is I don't care what you liberal city boy types think about the Word of God: what's wrong is wrong, what's a sin is a sin, and you degenerate sickos better watch yer asses when you see my pickup comin' cos I'm gonna take a 2-by-4 bash in the head of the next GOLLDAMN PREVERT I see wearing a cotton/polyester T-shirt.
Great, now instead of shooting at our troops, our enemies can simply attack them with viruses and spyware!
The budget is finite, and it's not even particularly interesting to send humans up on rockets anymore. I can't remember the last time I heard anyone talk about the space station. I mean, people hang out up there (right?) but they aren't doing much more. All the interesting, exciting science/adventuring is being done by robotic probes like the Mars rovers and the Hubble. Can the humans. We've had our day. If people want to go up in space, great, but let's let the space tourism industry take care of that, because the scientific justification for it is rapidly fading.
...so the shopping carts will probably try to discourage you from buying Apples.
Yeah, I know Godwin's Law argues that you're reaching the end of sane, intelligent, civil discussion if you're bringing up fascists from WWII. But the scary thing is, I think it's no longer possible to have a sane, civil, intelligent discussion without seeing and bringing up these parallels.
It's native to South America.
Likewise, his arguments about Canada are bullshit. They are not as heavily armed as Americans; it is MUCH harder to get guns in Canada and the restrictions are much stronger, especially on handguns. But dealing with the complexities of the issues didn't fit his ideas and it didn't make good entertainment, so he gave people a heavily edited version of the truth.
Now, to give you an idea of my political leanings, a primary goal of my life is to outlive each member of the Bush clan, visit their tombstones, and piss on them. That being said, I think we need to combat the fanatical insanity of the radical right with sincerity, honesty and integrity, not by fielding a liberal Rush Limbaugh, which is all Moore seems to be.
"I do not, for one, think that the problem was that the band was down. I think that the problem may have been...that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf. All right? That tended to understate the hugeness of the object."
All organisms are genetically modified in one fashion or another. Humans have been selectively breeding crops for growth rate, productivity and so on for thousands of years. So should we only eat wild plants? Before that, the plants were bred by the environment. Plus, natural hybridization is responsible for gene exchange in wild plants, while gene uptake from other organisms such as viruses is responsible for foreign DNA getting into plants. That's been going on for hundreds of millions of years. To an evolutionary biologist, the idea of keeping the genes pure is nonsense. Think about it. You have the nucleic acid sequence
actgtagccgat
in a plant. So it's automatically safe and OK and doesn't need testing if it got inserted naturally from a virus or mutation, but it's automatically dangerous and not-OK if humans put it there? That's the assumption a lot of anti-GMO people make. I'm not saying there aren't risks, but there are also risks with organic organisms. Rattlesnake venom, the HIV virus and cocaine are all organic, that doesn't make them good for you. It's all a question of carefully weighing the risks against the rewards.
Was anyone else disturbed by the announcement that research into hydro is being cut back? I mean, sure we've got it to a point where it's working, but it seems like more efficient turbines or research into low-impact hydro power would be useful ways to help reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But shit, what do you expect. This is the crap you get from the Bush administration, whose idea of "alternative energy" is ANWR.
But we can use the coal to run giant, coal-fired air conditioners to cool down the earth!
No problem. Ships these days use a computerized course plotter (Windows... how's that for peril at sea) with a GPS so they can be within a couple hundred feet of where they want to be; the wave farms would just be programmed into the charts. Plus, the lights would be visible for quite a ways off, and finally the generators would look like a fleet of small islands on the radar. Driving ships around obstacles is easy. Shit, even stoned Alaskan fisherman can do it. So that part's not a problem. Not to say wave farms are a good idea.
Effects on marine life .. Imagine dolphins or whales getting caught in this
Don't worry about effects on marine life. Quite the contrary: these wave thingies will be fantastic places for barnacles, mussels, kelp, sea anenomes and soforth to grow. They'll be all over these generators in a matter of months. They don't mention that aspect. For these reasons, ships have to be hauled out of the water every couple of years and extensively serviced- crap scraped off the bottom, new antifouling paint put on, and soforth. Since these are stationary, there's not too much concern if they get a bit slimy on the outside, but what about the inside of the wave generators? Not to mention that saltwater is incredibly corrosive and just eats through metal. Periodic servicing can easily address these issues. The question is how much it will cost to keep hundreds or thousands of these machines in working order, and what their practical lifespan will be, and whether after all that is factored in, it's still cost effective.
Another issue is that the wave energy is greatest where the power need is the least- Hawaii and Alaska. The Pacific and Pacific Northwest regions are well situated to take advantage of this technology, but the Atlantic just isn't as rough.
My idea is a massive cluster of 100 million generators each hooked up to a giant hamster wheel. And each hamster wheel with like, five hundred hamsters inside of it. Or one capybara, because that's a rodent, but really big so it weighs like, five hundred hamsters. I haven't figured out what the hamsters (or capybaras) eat yet, but you can't expect me to do all the thinking here.
Random question... how hard would it be to modify this thing to dispense baby food?