Hey thanks for the link! I just checked the coverage map for the digital signal from a couple of the stations in the nearest cities to my parents cabin.
It is as I expected. For one of the stations I checked they are right on the edge of the coverage area for both analog and digital, where the signal is very spotty and faint. For the other, out of a different city, they are right on the very edge for the digital signal, and in range for the analog one (Right about where the coverage map changes from indigo to violet).
I'd check more, but those were the only call signs I could remember. I'm gonna go figure out the latitude and longitude of the cabin and generate a report! Woo!
Exactly right. My parents have a lake cabin that is about half-way between the two nearest television markets, right on the edge of the range for both. In the past, they have been able to get most broadcast channels from one city or the other. Many of them are pretty snowy, but watchable.
This summer I helped my Dad put up a new HD antennae, in preparation for the upcoming switch. The monstrous thing was the size of our driveway, and mounted at the top of a 75 foot pole.
It couldn't pull in a single digital channel.
I'm not against the switch, but this is exactly where people will have issues. . . in the places with poor reception a degraded analog signal is better than a digital signal that is too weak to decode.
Go look up the difference between a majority and a plurality. There are 538 electors. You need 270 to have a majority of them, no matter how many people are running.
I don't think the B supporters would do that. Every voter will maximize the influence of his own vote. I say the following is the smart way for each of the supporters to vote:
So you're relying on voters to be smart now? I'm sorry, but that only works in magical pixie land, and I believe they have a monarchy.
If we can lend credence to psychics in the movies, then what is the reason we can't lend brainwave scans credence in the real world?
Wow. That question hurt my brain. Let me respond to it with another question: If we can lend credence to heroic superpowered mutants in the movies, then what is the reason we can't lend fairy godmothers credence in the real world?
In fact, let me go one step further and generalize it: If we can lend credence to X in the movies, then what is the reason we can't lend Y credence in the real world?
In fact, let me go another step further and answer it for you: Because one is the movies, and the other is the real world!
This was clearly a reference to the LHC scientist who both misquoted the Star Trek tagline "Where no man has gone before" and incorrectly attributed it to Star Wars.
It is the LHC scientist who needs to turn in his dork card, the GP was just making an allusion to that.
Re:Obligatory BTVS Quote
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
You're right, thank you for the correction. I must have muddled it in my head because I hated Riley and couldn't wait for him to leave the show.
Obligatory BTVS Quote
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
Suddenly I find myself needing to know the plural of "apocalypse." --Angel
Indeed, and despite my own beliefs I tried to keep it civil and simply point out how the two beliefs are not equivalent.
I could argue that the logical, philisophical, or historical "proofs" you speak of do not constitute either evidence or proof in a scientific sense, but as you rightly point out, that's a flamewar waiting to happen.
So instead I will simply say this -- whatever scientific evidence you may feel you have for the existence of God, the scientific body of evidence for the existence of the universe is rather more substantial. People will argue about the validity of the evidence for God until long after you and I are dead, but very few people deny the existence of the universe. Thus accepting the existence of a universe that came from nothing is still quite different from accepting the existence of a God that came from nothing.
Here is the crux of the matter. You can either believe that the universe exists but was not created by anything, or you can believe that the universe must have been created by "God," who exists but was not created by anything.
Both beliefs require accepting the existence of something that was not created.
But we know the universe exists, we can directly observe that. Scientists only need to accept that this directly observable known thing called space-time didn't "come from" anywhere -- that it exists is a given.
Theists need to first accept that God exists at all -- for which there is no evidence, except the axiom that the universe had to "come from" somewhere -- and then accept that this unobservable God himself didn't "come from" anywhere.
So one belief is that an observed measurable thing exists but came from nowhere, while the other belief is that an unobserved unprovable thing exists but came from nowhere. Those are quite different.
When the researcher adds the next improvement to these globs of goo that allows them to survive better they will have evolved inside the system of nature which includes the petri dish they may someday live in.
Uh, no. . . I agree with you that it will not be unnatural, but they will also not have "evolved" when the researcher "adds the next improvement." Natural or unnatural, that doesn't fit the definition of evolution, but of genetic engineering. A genetically engineered or altered organism may then go on to evolve from there, but the specific improvement added by the researcher would not be an example of evolving.
The theories that are currently in favor say that T. Rex was not a predator at all, but a scavenger. I know, I know, it's a big let down for those of us my age, who grew up automatically choosing T. Rex as our favorite dinosaur because it was the biggest, scariest, carnivorous hunter.
But science is always refining our knowledge and correcting its mistakes, and now we know it was just a big vulture. And that is why today's young'uns all love Velociraptor.
Listen, I know this. Your post is informative and explains things well, and so I apologize if I'm being overly reactive -- I'm just a tad annoyed, because I know very well that a black hole that small cannot exist for more than a fraction of a second, and you are the fourth person to reply pointing that out.
The first person was me myself, in response to my own post.
Oh, and this is all ignoring the possibility that a black hole that small would simply dissipate via Hawking radiation within a second of coming into being.
I am not a physicist, and am speculating. But I imagine that a black hole of such a small mass would have an event horizon so small that it could fall all the way through the earth without even striking the nucleus of a single atom. It wouldn't "pull in" much of anything -- besides having very little mass itself, at scales that small the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces between atoms are all far more significant than gravity.
Basically, it would only gain mass when through happenstance a subatomic particle happened to cross its event horizon, and while that would mean that eventually the black hole would grow large enough to matter, the infrequency of it gaining any mass and the insignificance of the mass gained each time would mean that it will still be imperceptible to us long after the sun burns out or goes nova.
I have never had a seizure, but what you describe stuck me as being very much the same as the experience of waking up from a surgery under full anesthesia. In both cases when I was put under, I can very vaguely recall being woken up at the end of it and sent on my way, and I know that I was fully aware and behaving normally -- only to suddenly realize an hour later that I couldn't recall a damn thing about leaving the clinic or the ride home.
That is, I could remember the fact that I had just left the clinic after surgery and had been talking with my friend who was driving me home, but I couldn't actually recall the experience of it. My short-term or working memory had enough "state" in it for me to know where I was, how I got there, and what I was doing, but my brain had completely neglected to record any sensory data for retrospective examination.
I think there would be plenty of other popular choices for class. I'm pretty sure lots of people would choose witch, hyena-person, ex-demon shopkeeper, cyberdemon, goddess, or dude-who-just-wants-to-be-a-big-snake.
What gives you the idea that the percentage change in distance has to equal the percentage change in decay rate? I would expect them to be related in an exponential or logarythmic way, but even if they were related linearly, that wouldn't mean that a 3.2 change in distance should mean a 3.2 change in decay rate.
What if the decay rate increases by.1 percent for every 4.8 million km? What if it increases by the square of the distance times some constant?
What you've pointed out here is kind of meaningless.
If the rate of decay increases with distance from the sun, that would explain the accelleration -- faster decay means more heat being turned into power. The probes could be accelleration because they are overpowered.
It would also explain the better than expected performance of the thermocouple -- it only looks more efficient than it should be because we are starting off with more input heat than we think we are.
All of this is speculation, of course. I'm no physicist, and it's way to early to know what this discovery means.
If I understood correctly, the variance in decay rate between Earth's aphelion and perihelion is.1%. Earth's distance from the sun doesn't change by that much in astronomical terms. If we see a.1% variation over that relatively small distance, how different would the rate be at 100AU, or half-way to the nearest star? How do we know that radioactive isotopes decay at all if you get them far enough away from a star?
It's also not simply a matter of how long the power supply will last. Those generators work by converting the heat from each decay event into electricity, and if the rate of decay is less than it should be, then it will not produce continuous power.
I'm not saying that it's definitely a problem, I just think this raises interesting questions.
This is a good example of how many holes there might be in our theories about the universe. We have been making measurements for a few 1000 years in one solar system (mostly just on one planet) and things that we don't see changing, like radioactive decay rates, we consider constant. It's exciting to think how much more there may still be to discover.
This makes me wonder about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generatorpower sources on board the Voyager spacecraft, as they are based on the decay of radioactive material. Has our earth-centric understanding of the universe led us to build probes designed to push the boundaries of the solar system and continue into interstellar space, that will gradually lose power the further they get from the sun?
Okay, well then the real question, is what is REALLY so adventageous about higher motor skills, communication, etc.?
I should think the advantages of these things in out-competing and out-reproducing other species of primates would be apparent, but it is a valid question. A lot of evolutionary biologists and psychologists spend a lot of time theorizing about how particular behaviors would have construed an evolutionary advantage. Just as a good place to start, I would recommend The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker. There are probably other texts that focus on the issue more specifically, but those happen to ones I've read that came to mind.
And why were they adventageous for primates and not adventageous for dinosaurs or hermit crabs?
You are still thinking of this in the wrong way -- your question assumes that because a trait like complex language is advantageous, it should have arisen in hermit crabs. That is just a rephrased way of thinking that evolution is driven by necessity, that somehow because the trait is good, every species ought to have "decided" to evolve it or something. Again, the traits arise by chance, and will be kept if they happen to be helpful. In dinosaurs and hermit crabs, they just didn't happen to arise.
You might just as well ask why humans didn't evolve a chitinous exoskeleton, or an abdomen shaped to inhabit the empty shell of a sea snail. Those things, after all, must be advantageous, or they would not have evolved in hermit crabs, right? It is the differences in which random mutations happen to come along and prove advantageous in different populations that makes those populations grow into different species.
Furthermore, of the random traits that arise, the advantages or disadvantages of any of them will be affected by which traits that species already has -- a gene that causes your saliva to dissolve clam shells is great if you are a starfish. If the same trait arose in a clam, however, it would likely not be passed on.
The point is that just because something is beneficial doesn't mean it will automatically evolve. Evolution doesn't say anything like that. It simply says that random mutations occur, and those that happen to make the mutant more likely to reproduce will be passed on to its decedents.
Evolution does not come out of necessity. There isn't some guiding force to decide that a trait is "needed" and then insert it into the genome.
The traits arise completely at random through mutations, and when one of them happens to be advantageous simple statistics dictate that it will proliferate and become common.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey thanks for the link! I just checked the coverage map for the digital signal from a couple of the stations in the nearest cities to my parents cabin.
It is as I expected. For one of the stations I checked they are right on the edge of the coverage area for both analog and digital, where the signal is very spotty and faint. For the other, out of a different city, they are right on the very edge for the digital signal, and in range for the analog one (Right about where the coverage map changes from indigo to violet).
I'd check more, but those were the only call signs I could remember. I'm gonna go figure out the latitude and longitude of the cabin and generate a report! Woo!
Exactly right. My parents have a lake cabin that is about half-way between the two nearest television markets, right on the edge of the range for both. In the past, they have been able to get most broadcast channels from one city or the other. Many of them are pretty snowy, but watchable.
This summer I helped my Dad put up a new HD antennae, in preparation for the upcoming switch. The monstrous thing was the size of our driveway, and mounted at the top of a 75 foot pole.
It couldn't pull in a single digital channel.
I'm not against the switch, but this is exactly where people will have issues. . . in the places with poor reception a degraded analog signal is better than a digital signal that is too weak to decode.
You need a majority of electoral votes, not 270.
Go look up the difference between a majority and a plurality. There are 538 electors. You need 270 to have a majority of them, no matter how many people are running.
I don't think the B supporters would do that. Every voter will maximize the influence of his own vote. I say the following is the smart way for each of the supporters to vote:
So you're relying on voters to be smart now? I'm sorry, but that only works in magical pixie land, and I believe they have a monarchy.
In what sense does paying to produce and air commercial advertisements constitute "free" marketing?
If we can lend credence to psychics in the movies, then what is the reason we can't lend brainwave scans credence in the real world?
Wow. That question hurt my brain. Let me respond to it with another question: If we can lend credence to heroic superpowered mutants in the movies, then what is the reason we can't lend fairy godmothers credence in the real world?
In fact, let me go one step further and generalize it: If we can lend credence to X in the movies, then what is the reason we can't lend Y credence in the real world?
In fact, let me go another step further and answer it for you: Because one is the movies, and the other is the real world!
Whoosh.
This was clearly a reference to the LHC scientist who both misquoted the Star Trek tagline "Where no man has gone before" and incorrectly attributed it to Star Wars.
It is the LHC scientist who needs to turn in his dork card, the GP was just making an allusion to that.
You're right, thank you for the correction. I must have muddled it in my head because I hated Riley and couldn't wait for him to leave the show.
Suddenly I find myself needing to know the plural of "apocalypse."
--Angel
Indeed, and despite my own beliefs I tried to keep it civil and simply point out how the two beliefs are not equivalent.
I could argue that the logical, philisophical, or historical "proofs" you speak of do not constitute either evidence or proof in a scientific sense, but as you rightly point out, that's a flamewar waiting to happen.
So instead I will simply say this -- whatever scientific evidence you may feel you have for the existence of God, the scientific body of evidence for the existence of the universe is rather more substantial. People will argue about the validity of the evidence for God until long after you and I are dead, but very few people deny the existence of the universe. Thus accepting the existence of a universe that came from nothing is still quite different from accepting the existence of a God that came from nothing.
Here is the crux of the matter. You can either believe that the universe exists but was not created by anything, or you can believe that the universe must have been created by "God," who exists but was not created by anything.
Both beliefs require accepting the existence of something that was not created.
But we know the universe exists, we can directly observe that. Scientists only need to accept that this directly observable known thing called space-time didn't "come from" anywhere -- that it exists is a given.
Theists need to first accept that God exists at all -- for which there is no evidence, except the axiom that the universe had to "come from" somewhere -- and then accept that this unobservable God himself didn't "come from" anywhere.
So one belief is that an observed measurable thing exists but came from nowhere, while the other belief is that an unobserved unprovable thing exists but came from nowhere. Those are quite different.
When the researcher adds the next improvement to these globs of goo that allows them to survive better they will have evolved inside the system of nature which includes the petri dish they may someday live in.
Uh, no. . . I agree with you that it will not be unnatural, but they will also not have "evolved" when the researcher "adds the next improvement." Natural or unnatural, that doesn't fit the definition of evolution, but of genetic engineering. A genetically engineered or altered organism may then go on to evolve from there, but the specific improvement added by the researcher would not be an example of evolving.
The theories that are currently in favor say that T. Rex was not a predator at all, but a scavenger. I know, I know, it's a big let down for those of us my age, who grew up automatically choosing T. Rex as our favorite dinosaur because it was the biggest, scariest, carnivorous hunter.
But science is always refining our knowledge and correcting its mistakes, and now we know it was just a big vulture. And that is why today's young'uns all love Velociraptor.
Listen, I know this. Your post is informative and explains things well, and so I apologize if I'm being overly reactive -- I'm just a tad annoyed, because I know very well that a black hole that small cannot exist for more than a fraction of a second, and you are the fourth person to reply pointing that out.
The first person was me myself, in response to my own post.
Oh, and this is all ignoring the possibility that a black hole that small would simply dissipate via Hawking radiation within a second of coming into being.
I am not a physicist, and am speculating. But I imagine that a black hole of such a small mass would have an event horizon so small that it could fall all the way through the earth without even striking the nucleus of a single atom. It wouldn't "pull in" much of anything -- besides having very little mass itself, at scales that small the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces between atoms are all far more significant than gravity.
Basically, it would only gain mass when through happenstance a subatomic particle happened to cross its event horizon, and while that would mean that eventually the black hole would grow large enough to matter, the infrequency of it gaining any mass and the insignificance of the mass gained each time would mean that it will still be imperceptible to us long after the sun burns out or goes nova.
I have never had a seizure, but what you describe stuck me as being very much the same as the experience of waking up from a surgery under full anesthesia. In both cases when I was put under, I can very vaguely recall being woken up at the end of it and sent on my way, and I know that I was fully aware and behaving normally -- only to suddenly realize an hour later that I couldn't recall a damn thing about leaving the clinic or the ride home.
That is, I could remember the fact that I had just left the clinic after surgery and had been talking with my friend who was driving me home, but I couldn't actually recall the experience of it. My short-term or working memory had enough "state" in it for me to know where I was, how I got there, and what I was doing, but my brain had completely neglected to record any sensory data for retrospective examination.
I think there would be plenty of other popular choices for class. I'm pretty sure lots of people would choose witch, hyena-person, ex-demon shopkeeper, cyberdemon, goddess, or dude-who-just-wants-to-be-a-big-snake.
I'm a tenth level werewolf guitarist!
Ah, right you are.
What gives you the idea that the percentage change in distance has to equal the percentage change in decay rate? I would expect them to be related in an exponential or logarythmic way, but even if they were related linearly, that wouldn't mean that a 3.2 change in distance should mean a 3.2 change in decay rate.
What if the decay rate increases by .1 percent for every 4.8 million km? What if it increases by the square of the distance times some constant?
What you've pointed out here is kind of meaningless.
If the rate of decay increases with distance from the sun, that would explain the accelleration -- faster decay means more heat being turned into power. The probes could be accelleration because they are overpowered.
It would also explain the better than expected performance of the thermocouple -- it only looks more efficient than it should be because we are starting off with more input heat than we think we are.
All of this is speculation, of course. I'm no physicist, and it's way to early to know what this discovery means.
If I understood correctly, the variance in decay rate between Earth's aphelion and perihelion is .1%. Earth's distance from the sun doesn't change by that much in astronomical terms. If we see a .1% variation over that relatively small distance, how different would the rate be at 100AU, or half-way to the nearest star? How do we know that radioactive isotopes decay at all if you get them far enough away from a star?
It's also not simply a matter of how long the power supply will last. Those generators work by converting the heat from each decay event into electricity, and if the rate of decay is less than it should be, then it will not produce continuous power.
I'm not saying that it's definitely a problem, I just think this raises interesting questions.
This is a good example of how many holes there might be in our theories about the universe. We have been making measurements for a few 1000 years in one solar system (mostly just on one planet) and things that we don't see changing, like radioactive decay rates, we consider constant. It's exciting to think how much more there may still be to discover.
This makes me wonder about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generatorpower sources on board the Voyager spacecraft, as they are based on the decay of radioactive material. Has our earth-centric understanding of the universe led us to build probes designed to push the boundaries of the solar system and continue into interstellar space, that will gradually lose power the further they get from the sun?
Whoops.
Okay, well then the real question, is what is REALLY so adventageous about higher motor skills, communication, etc.?
I should think the advantages of these things in out-competing and out-reproducing other species of primates would be apparent, but it is a valid question. A lot of evolutionary biologists and psychologists spend a lot of time theorizing about how particular behaviors would have construed an evolutionary advantage. Just as a good place to start, I would recommend The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker. There are probably other texts that focus on the issue more specifically, but those happen to ones I've read that came to mind.
And why were they adventageous for primates and not adventageous for dinosaurs or hermit crabs?
You are still thinking of this in the wrong way -- your question assumes that because a trait like complex language is advantageous, it should have arisen in hermit crabs. That is just a rephrased way of thinking that evolution is driven by necessity, that somehow because the trait is good, every species ought to have "decided" to evolve it or something. Again, the traits arise by chance, and will be kept if they happen to be helpful. In dinosaurs and hermit crabs, they just didn't happen to arise.
You might just as well ask why humans didn't evolve a chitinous exoskeleton, or an abdomen shaped to inhabit the empty shell of a sea snail. Those things, after all, must be advantageous, or they would not have evolved in hermit crabs, right? It is the differences in which random mutations happen to come along and prove advantageous in different populations that makes those populations grow into different species.
Furthermore, of the random traits that arise, the advantages or disadvantages of any of them will be affected by which traits that species already has -- a gene that causes your saliva to dissolve clam shells is great if you are a starfish. If the same trait arose in a clam, however, it would likely not be passed on.
The point is that just because something is beneficial doesn't mean it will automatically evolve. Evolution doesn't say anything like that. It simply says that random mutations occur, and those that happen to make the mutant more likely to reproduce will be passed on to its decedents.
Evolution does not come out of necessity. There isn't some guiding force to decide that a trait is "needed" and then insert it into the genome.
The traits arise completely at random through mutations, and when one of them happens to be advantageous simple statistics dictate that it will proliferate and become common.