A lot of physicists are characters. I remember a story about Niels Bohr answering the question "how would you use a barometer to measure the height of the empire state-building?" as an undergraduate, it cracked me up. Especially when it got to the part about offering the building's janitor a shiny new barometer in exchange for being told the height of the building.
Everyone always brings up Franklin when talking about DNA. Why? Wow, she was a crystallographer that collected data. You know what? Wow! She wasn't part of the group that finally pieced together the interpretation that earned the nobel prize. Not part of the interpretation, no credit for you.
This is how it works in the world of research. The grad student sent by the professor to take the photos of the fungus or whatever doesn't get his name on the paper unless he also came up with the ideas that form the core of the paper. I'm not exactly a fan of Crick and his drinking buddy, but it's because I think their discovery wasn't that impressive in the first place (the award should have gone to the guys that figured out that DNA was the primary genetic material, not the guys that figured out the structure: the structure wasn't that hard, and in fact Crick + Watson barely finished modeling it before half a dozen other labs). However, to claim that Franklin should recieve credit for the interpretation of a set of data just because she supplied a subset of the data is kind of ridiculous.
I really just don't get it. I guess I just never really caught on to the revisionist "everything important was actually done by a woman(gasp)" meme that's alternated with the revisionist "everyone that ever did anything noteworthy was actually homosexual(gasp)" meme throughout my gradeschool education. I think that they melded in my head at some point with the "white people never made a positive contribution to the society of the world" and "the american civil war was all about wether some dark-colored losers could vote" memes to form the giant killer-robot "historians are full of bullshit and starved for attention" meme that's stuck with me ever since.
Ok, I'm done wandering way the hell off topic. Going to go refill my gin+tonic and complain about politics to the wall mirror now.
If you use a fourth dimension, then you're moving a square peg _around_ a round hole, because you're displacing it from the space in which the hole exists.
Sorry, kid, your brilliant physics was trumped by your incorrect use of basic vocabulary. Don't get too hopeful about that philosophy degree, eh.
The shape of ships' hulls had nothing at all to do with physics predictions. Ideal shapes were determined by a fellow named Froud(sp) in Britain several centuries ago by carving wooden models and putting them through the liquid equivalent of a wind tunnel. Completely empirical process, no mathematical modelling whatsoever beforehand (though one result, the dimensionless Froud number, is one of the most important dimensionless numbers in engineering, right up there with the Reynold's number).
So, yeah, as another fellow stated, it was an engineering problem, not a physics problem. Even today, the use of physics directly applied to the problem of ship's hulls will break your computer if you attempt to solve for a limit on something like speed or overall drag resistance. (Not that it can't be solved, in a way, but it imvolves what my professors call "engineering approximations", i.e. assumptions that are maybe true in limited circumstances).
Ballistics, I'm told, was similarly empirical, though I don't know anyone specializing in Aero so verifying your assertion regarding airplane wings would take more work than I'm willing to exert.
According to your reference, the error rate of wikipedia is larger on a per-article basis. The counterargument was that the error-rate was smaller on a per-word basis, which means precisely jack. Any high-school sophomore can turn a one-line thesis into a five page paper without adding any actual information, whereas a professional encyclopaedia writer's job is to take as much information as possible and fit it into as small a space as possible. Of course, it doesn't matter because the sample space of the 'study' cited was way too damned small for the cited figures to mean anything anyhow.
I'd like to point out here that the popularity-contest thing in no way changes with alterations to the manner in which the votes are treated. Even proportional-representation systems suffer the same problem, they just give the appointment of a few hundred lawmaking posts to the leadership with the prettiest wives and cutest adopted orphans instead of allowing it to control the appointment of a single man to a single post.
What you're observing is a result of the fact that the US is not a single nation, but a confederation of semi-independent states. As I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you know that only one election in the US works as you describe (the presidential election: Senators and representatives are generally elected independently in smaller districts), the way that election is handled actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
The individual states choose the electors. They could theoretically choose the electors any way they wanted: governor appointment, party line, independent elections. The states choose to ensure that all of their electors vote for one candidate because it gives the state a lot more weight in the election, forcing the candidates to campaign in each state and grant them favors, etc to try to secure the voting blocs. As it's been said, all politics are local.
As for why we don't do that silly proportional representation crap that's so popular over in europe, it's because we don't believe in allowing external organizations to grab control of the government that we, as the inhabitants of the country, are supposed to hold the final say over. We elect people, you see, none of this voting for a party and allowing the party/organized crime ring to fill positions as it sees fit. If we're going to get screwed over by the bastard party system that we didn't want in the first place (damn you, Tom Jefferson!), we might as well exert enough power over how we get screwed that the parties have to mellow their platforms to something we don't find completely idiotic. It can be a bit lame at times, but at least we can always comfort ourselves by looking at how well the "more fair" system has handled the health care system for our neighbors to the north.
[[For those that don't know, senate and congressional elections are held for each senator or congressman in their own district, again cutting back on the power of national-level politics, to which, as you might have noticed from reading/., a lot of americans have a pronounced aversion.]]
Science had its time before religion started to explain the natural world phenomena. In the beggining humans were primitive tool users, usings empirically derived techniques such as using sticks to fish tasty ants from their mounds, before we came up with language and its children, morality and religion.
Religion has progressed a lot since those times. Since the rise of modern metallurgy, there has been little parallel development in the sciences: we learned to mix some different things together in different ways, and construct new shapes that were a little stronger. Well, we've been mixing things together and fitting them into shapes for thousands of years.
It is because of this that Science has had its time. Of course, our current society structure is not optimal, it is not the best but it is better. Religion might also not explain all behaviors we see in terms of local physical law but instead of going backwards and beginning to attribute them again to this "regular statistical behavior" humans should continue to develop knowledge of the grander, more specific purpose of things.
I do not have a position as neutral as yours about Science. For me, science sucks, all kinds of science are stupid, hubritic vanities and do not have any fundaments of purpose. Science has been used only as means of population control, this can be seen now on your current government (if you are from anywhere that uses fertilizers or rotational agriculture). Your president is seeding terror on you by means of empirically devised weapons. And this is because your politics and your society is deeply rooted on humanist, scientific grounds.
Take a look at your dollar bills "E Pluribus Unum", how can a country be cosmopolite if there is such a dependence on one particular branch of knowledge, namely the scientific/mathematic technique of Addition?
I repeat, science sucks, someone will surely tell me that science does not suck by itself but it is men that use it for their own convenience. But, the way I see it, that has been the role of science since human created it. It is a tool (and very powerful) to create and control large masses of people.
Science should not be in schools or any other place, it should be eradicated, it should be labeled as a thing for non intelligent minds. Clearly, our only salvation is to look away from the gross physical and seek the greater meaning of things.
[[A note from the Satirist: I'm not attacking you because of your anti-religious stance. I'm attacking you because your anti-religious stance appears to be based on one fact that is unverifiable at best (the relative dates of the origins of science and religion) and a string of blind assertions that aren't particularly in tune with reality either. You also make the implicit assumption that religion and science are somehow zero-sum and that destroying one will advance the other, which I find highly unlikely.
So, good sir, don't be offended because I object to your stance, be offended because I don't flinch from calling you a fucking idiot on a public forum, and hoping that you never, ever reproduce.
P.S. I'm not an english major myself, but I imagine your second-term english teacher (I'll be charitable as to your level of education in my language) is probably rolling in her grave right now.]]
Just for the record, WoW has neither spawned nor borne witness to the creation of any original gaming style or piece of gamer dialogue.
"For the win" has been around at least since Dark age of camelot, if not earlier, and so has For the Lose, which another poster also pointed out has also stood for Faster Than Light in SciFi circles for the last sixty years or so.
The thing I've seen in some GNOME distros helps a lot, with the "*name* *function*" in the menu name. Like the difference between asking my mother for a "Phillips" and a "phillips-head screwdriver", I at least have a one in four chance of getting what I need when I'm fixing the sink.
"I decided to stop watching the show when I started cheering for the Cylons to finish the job by exterminating all the humans."
Wow, so by starting cheering the evil mastermind/robot/alien/cthulhu and then only continuing to watch shows that manage to get me to change my mind, I'm actually doing it backward?
I'd think a being consisting of self-refining computer code would probably be able to walk around a firewall several thousand generations back up the ladder with relative ease. I mean, I generally expect a crew of fully-equipped, professional demolition engineers to be able to get through an adobe wall constructed by a pre-metallurgy human. By the same token, I'd probably be using a ballistic weapon against an enemy capable of sabotaging anything electronically regulated...
As far as the organ-squeezing thing is concerned, though, that one stumped me, too.
It's true that they have depth, but they do seem to lack the fourth dimension... in a show with a continuing plot, you expect the occasional aspect of the occasional character to change. We are talking mostly relatively young people and a period of several years here, after all...
Well, yeah, but from the 'cheeseball attempt at drama' and the 'formulaic/recycled' perspectives, Stargate is much worse on both counts-- that is, it's cheesier and makes more empty attempts at meaning that fall flat on their faces, and they've reached the point where a good fan (i know a couple) can watch a new episode and quote the episode number of the original bit from which each scene is ripped. So, yeah, to tie your point back into the BSG/SG comparison, BSG still wins.
Not that I don't like SG, because I do, I just acknowledge that it has little to no literary value, and probably won't be worth showing my grandchildren, whereas BSG might.
... is still considered quite criminal by US law. Even by the slashdot crowd agrees that it's criminal (golly gee, it's physical property of which the victim is actually deprived!). I doubt that it's any different in Britain.
Just because we don't send people to Australia for it doesn't make it not a crime. We don't send people to Australia for a lot of things these days.
Actually, if I was sure the information would remain out of reach of employers, family, enemies, etc, then I'd have no problem. However, I do not have that much faith in the competence of our government regarding information security.
This is wicked funny if you're being sarcastic, and... well, also funny if you think it's true, in the way that watching a retarded child fall down a ladder might be funny.
Eh, it's a side-effect of the corruption inherent in the party system. In some ways our system inhibits the parties from exercising too much control, and in other ways it encourages or rewards it. Yours, frankly, is about the same overall, though the specific wrongs prevented and encouraged are slightly different. As with all government and most politics, it's more about balance than perfection.
If governments of other nations having flaws really bothers you that much, though, you might take comfort in the fact that the effort to reform the process is actually pretty widespread (my current state, California, had a ballot initiative on the issue last november, prop 77 or something I think). Most likely, it will grow as general dissatisfaction with the government does, and will thus eventually pass in the states with particularly bothersome local governments or anti-whatever-party-has-51% populations (california, etc), and then will be picked up later by the states that are generally pretty satisfied with or apathetic toward their governments (texas. the state government there is actually remarkably unintrusive compared to many states) as a matter of conformist habit. This is the way most reform occurs over here (with the exception of federalist reform, which we had a war over), so, frankly, unless you're watching the american news really closely you probably won't even notice it happen. And there's always the possibility that enough people will never care enough to make it happen at all.
Seriously, man. If you use phrases like "who's Islam" when you mean "whose Islam" then no one is going to believe you're literate enough to have done the research required to have a meaninful opinion on the subject. I know I don't.
Some fellows at Berkeley attempted to quantify cycles of diversification and pruning in the species history of the planet. I think they found a regular cycle for the planet on the order of a hundred million years or so, and some shorter cycles for individual species (a cycle being a diversification or increase in the number of species followed by the extinction of the unnecessary lines to leave a small fraction of the diversity in place). As of the last time I checked, they were unsure if external factors just pressured regularly by coincedence ofr if the excess diversity was actually self-regulating.
So in short, yeah, cycles of diversification and extinction are quite capable of occuring outside of civillized human influence, if that's what you mean by 'nature'.
And even high-school level biology will tell you that if a species goes extinct, a branch of another will move to fill the niche, if it still exists.
Being sarcastic about something does not make it untrue.
"sued the federal government"... which is constitutionally impossible in the US. I really don't have a point here, except that journalists seem to be getting even stupider as I age.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of physicists are characters. I remember a story about Niels Bohr answering the question "how would you use a barometer to measure the height of the empire state-building?" as an undergraduate, it cracked me up. Especially when it got to the part about offering the building's janitor a shiny new barometer in exchange for being told the height of the building.
Everyone always brings up Franklin when talking about DNA. Why? Wow, she was a crystallographer that collected data. You know what? Wow! She wasn't part of the group that finally pieced together the interpretation that earned the nobel prize. Not part of the interpretation, no credit for you.
This is how it works in the world of research. The grad student sent by the professor to take the photos of the fungus or whatever doesn't get his name on the paper unless he also came up with the ideas that form the core of the paper. I'm not exactly a fan of Crick and his drinking buddy, but it's because I think their discovery wasn't that impressive in the first place (the award should have gone to the guys that figured out that DNA was the primary genetic material, not the guys that figured out the structure: the structure wasn't that hard, and in fact Crick + Watson barely finished modeling it before half a dozen other labs). However, to claim that Franklin should recieve credit for the interpretation of a set of data just because she supplied a subset of the data is kind of ridiculous.
I really just don't get it. I guess I just never really caught on to the revisionist "everything important was actually done by a woman(gasp)" meme that's alternated with the revisionist "everyone that ever did anything noteworthy was actually homosexual(gasp)" meme throughout my gradeschool education. I think that they melded in my head at some point with the "white people never made a positive contribution to the society of the world" and "the american civil war was all about wether some dark-colored losers could vote" memes to form the giant killer-robot "historians are full of bullshit and starved for attention" meme that's stuck with me ever since.
Ok, I'm done wandering way the hell off topic. Going to go refill my gin+tonic and complain about politics to the wall mirror now.
If you use a fourth dimension, then you're moving a square peg _around_ a round hole, because you're displacing it from the space in which the hole exists.
Sorry, kid, your brilliant physics was trumped by your incorrect use of basic vocabulary. Don't get too hopeful about that philosophy degree, eh.
The shape of ships' hulls had nothing at all to do with physics predictions. Ideal shapes were determined by a fellow named Froud(sp) in Britain several centuries ago by carving wooden models and putting them through the liquid equivalent of a wind tunnel. Completely empirical process, no mathematical modelling whatsoever beforehand (though one result, the dimensionless Froud number, is one of the most important dimensionless numbers in engineering, right up there with the Reynold's number).
So, yeah, as another fellow stated, it was an engineering problem, not a physics problem. Even today, the use of physics directly applied to the problem of ship's hulls will break your computer if you attempt to solve for a limit on something like speed or overall drag resistance. (Not that it can't be solved, in a way, but it imvolves what my professors call "engineering approximations", i.e. assumptions that are maybe true in limited circumstances).
Ballistics, I'm told, was similarly empirical, though I don't know anyone specializing in Aero so verifying your assertion regarding airplane wings would take more work than I'm willing to exert.
According to your reference, the error rate of wikipedia is larger on a per-article basis. The counterargument was that the error-rate was smaller on a per-word basis, which means precisely jack. Any high-school sophomore can turn a one-line thesis into a five page paper without adding any actual information, whereas a professional encyclopaedia writer's job is to take as much information as possible and fit it into as small a space as possible. Of course, it doesn't matter because the sample space of the 'study' cited was way too damned small for the cited figures to mean anything anyhow.
I'd like to point out here that the popularity-contest thing in no way changes with alterations to the manner in which the votes are treated. Even proportional-representation systems suffer the same problem, they just give the appointment of a few hundred lawmaking posts to the leadership with the prettiest wives and cutest adopted orphans instead of allowing it to control the appointment of a single man to a single post.
What you're observing is a result of the fact that the US is not a single nation, but a confederation of semi-independent states. As I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you know that only one election in the US works as you describe (the presidential election: Senators and representatives are generally elected independently in smaller districts), the way that election is handled actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
/., a lot of americans have a pronounced aversion.]]
The individual states choose the electors. They could theoretically choose the electors any way they wanted: governor appointment, party line, independent elections. The states choose to ensure that all of their electors vote for one candidate because it gives the state a lot more weight in the election, forcing the candidates to campaign in each state and grant them favors, etc to try to secure the voting blocs. As it's been said, all politics are local.
As for why we don't do that silly proportional representation crap that's so popular over in europe, it's because we don't believe in allowing external organizations to grab control of the government that we, as the inhabitants of the country, are supposed to hold the final say over. We elect people, you see, none of this voting for a party and allowing the party/organized crime ring to fill positions as it sees fit. If we're going to get screwed over by the bastard party system that we didn't want in the first place (damn you, Tom Jefferson!), we might as well exert enough power over how we get screwed that the parties have to mellow their platforms to something we don't find completely idiotic. It can be a bit lame at times, but at least we can always comfort ourselves by looking at how well the "more fair" system has handled the health care system for our neighbors to the north.
[[For those that don't know, senate and congressional elections are held for each senator or congressman in their own district, again cutting back on the power of national-level politics, to which, as you might have noticed from reading
Everything has its time and place.
Science had its time before religion started to explain the natural world phenomena. In the beggining humans were primitive tool users, usings empirically derived techniques such as using sticks to fish tasty ants from their mounds, before we came up with language and its children, morality and religion.
Religion has progressed a lot since those times. Since the rise of modern metallurgy, there has been little parallel development in the sciences: we learned to mix some different things together in different ways, and construct new shapes that were a little stronger. Well, we've been mixing things together and fitting them into shapes for thousands of years.
It is because of this that Science has had its time. Of course, our current society structure is not optimal, it is not the best but it is better. Religion might also not explain all behaviors we see in terms of local physical law but instead of going backwards and beginning to attribute them again to this "regular statistical behavior" humans should continue to develop knowledge of the grander, more specific purpose of things.
I do not have a position as neutral as yours about Science. For me, science sucks, all kinds of science are stupid, hubritic vanities and do not have any fundaments of purpose. Science has been used only as means of population control, this can be seen now on your current government (if you are from anywhere that uses fertilizers or rotational agriculture). Your president is seeding terror on you by means of empirically devised weapons. And this is because your politics and your society is deeply rooted on humanist, scientific grounds.
Take a look at your dollar bills "E Pluribus Unum", how can a country be cosmopolite if there is such a dependence on one particular branch of knowledge, namely the scientific/mathematic technique of Addition?
I repeat, science sucks, someone will surely tell me that science does not suck by itself but it is men that use it for their own convenience. But, the way I see it, that has been the role of science since human created it. It is a tool (and very powerful) to create and control large masses of people.
Science should not be in schools or any other place, it should be eradicated, it should be labeled as a thing for non intelligent minds. Clearly, our only salvation is to look away from the gross physical and seek the greater meaning of things.
[[A note from the Satirist: I'm not attacking you because of your anti-religious stance. I'm attacking you because your anti-religious stance appears to be based on one fact that is unverifiable at best (the relative dates of the origins of science and religion) and a string of blind assertions that aren't particularly in tune with reality either. You also make the implicit assumption that religion and science are somehow zero-sum and that destroying one will advance the other, which I find highly unlikely.
So, good sir, don't be offended because I object to your stance, be offended because I don't flinch from calling you a fucking idiot on a public forum, and hoping that you never, ever reproduce.
P.S. I'm not an english major myself, but I imagine your second-term english teacher (I'll be charitable as to your level of education in my language) is probably rolling in her grave right now.]]
Just for the record, WoW has neither spawned nor borne witness to the creation of any original gaming style or piece of gamer dialogue.
"For the win" has been around at least since Dark age of camelot, if not earlier, and so has For the Lose, which another poster also pointed out has also stood for Faster Than Light in SciFi circles for the last sixty years or so.
The thing I've seen in some GNOME distros helps a lot, with the "*name* *function*" in the menu name. Like the difference between asking my mother for a "Phillips" and a "phillips-head screwdriver", I at least have a one in four chance of getting what I need when I'm fixing the sink.
"I decided to stop watching the show when I started cheering for the Cylons to finish the job by exterminating all the humans."
Wow, so by starting cheering the evil mastermind/robot/alien/cthulhu and then only continuing to watch shows that manage to get me to change my mind, I'm actually doing it backward?
I'd think a being consisting of self-refining computer code would probably be able to walk around a firewall several thousand generations back up the ladder with relative ease. I mean, I generally expect a crew of fully-equipped, professional demolition engineers to be able to get through an adobe wall constructed by a pre-metallurgy human. By the same token, I'd probably be using a ballistic weapon against an enemy capable of sabotaging anything electronically regulated...
As far as the organ-squeezing thing is concerned, though, that one stumped me, too.
It's true that they have depth, but they do seem to lack the fourth dimension... in a show with a continuing plot, you expect the occasional aspect of the occasional character to change. We are talking mostly relatively young people and a period of several years here, after all...
If galactica is the biggest piece of shit you've seen on scifi, you obviously weren't watching when they were showing the Earthsea movie.
Well, yeah, but from the 'cheeseball attempt at drama' and the 'formulaic/recycled' perspectives, Stargate is much worse on both counts-- that is, it's cheesier and makes more empty attempts at meaning that fall flat on their faces, and they've reached the point where a good fan (i know a couple) can watch a new episode and quote the episode number of the original bit from which each scene is ripped. So, yeah, to tie your point back into the BSG/SG comparison, BSG still wins.
Not that I don't like SG, because I do, I just acknowledge that it has little to no literary value, and probably won't be worth showing my grandchildren, whereas BSG might.
... is still considered quite criminal by US law. Even by the slashdot crowd agrees that it's criminal (golly gee, it's physical property of which the victim is actually deprived!). I doubt that it's any different in Britain.
Just because we don't send people to Australia for it doesn't make it not a crime. We don't send people to Australia for a lot of things these days.
Just for the record, 'French' is not a race. There are five or six races that comprise the white population alone there. It's a nationality.
Oh, 'Canadian' isn't a race, either.
Actually, if I was sure the information would remain out of reach of employers, family, enemies, etc, then I'd have no problem. However, I do not have that much faith in the competence of our government regarding information security.
Well, if you really want to pull the 'democratically elected' bullshit, here's the score for that particular cycle:
Davis: Democratically elected once, ejected from office by popular vote (democratically unelected) once.
Schwartzenegger: Democratically elected once.
Wow, what do you know, our current governor was significanly more elected than Davis. So go stick your head in a pig.
This is wicked funny if you're being sarcastic, and... well, also funny if you think it's true, in the way that watching a retarded child fall down a ladder might be funny.
Eh, it's a side-effect of the corruption inherent in the party system. In some ways our system inhibits the parties from exercising too much control, and in other ways it encourages or rewards it. Yours, frankly, is about the same overall, though the specific wrongs prevented and encouraged are slightly different. As with all government and most politics, it's more about balance than perfection.
If governments of other nations having flaws really bothers you that much, though, you might take comfort in the fact that the effort to reform the process is actually pretty widespread (my current state, California, had a ballot initiative on the issue last november, prop 77 or something I think). Most likely, it will grow as general dissatisfaction with the government does, and will thus eventually pass in the states with particularly bothersome local governments or anti-whatever-party-has-51% populations (california, etc), and then will be picked up later by the states that are generally pretty satisfied with or apathetic toward their governments (texas. the state government there is actually remarkably unintrusive compared to many states) as a matter of conformist habit. This is the way most reform occurs over here (with the exception of federalist reform, which we had a war over), so, frankly, unless you're watching the american news really closely you probably won't even notice it happen. And there's always the possibility that enough people will never care enough to make it happen at all.
If you get hit with a few rounds while wearing light armor, you won't be fighting again for a while, either.
Seriously, man. If you use phrases like "who's Islam" when you mean "whose Islam" then no one is going to believe you're literate enough to have done the research required to have a meaninful opinion on the subject. I know I don't.
Some fellows at Berkeley attempted to quantify cycles of diversification and pruning in the species history of the planet. I think they found a regular cycle for the planet on the order of a hundred million years or so, and some shorter cycles for individual species (a cycle being a diversification or increase in the number of species followed by the extinction of the unnecessary lines to leave a small fraction of the diversity in place). As of the last time I checked, they were unsure if external factors just pressured regularly by coincedence ofr if the excess diversity was actually self-regulating.
So in short, yeah, cycles of diversification and extinction are quite capable of occuring outside of civillized human influence, if that's what you mean by 'nature'.
And even high-school level biology will tell you that if a species goes extinct, a branch of another will move to fill the niche, if it still exists.
Being sarcastic about something does not make it untrue.
"sued the federal government"... which is constitutionally impossible in the US. I really don't have a point here, except that journalists seem to be getting even stupider as I age.