I'd need to be convinced that this is relevant to lenses in an animal. It sounds a lot like thermal damage, so we need information about the temperature reached in the chamber and how the thermal conductivity of the chamber compares to the body. If you continually pump microwave energy, no matter how low in intensity, into a sufficiently well insulated chamber, you'll eventually manage to heat it up enough to cook a lens.
There are plenty of physical and mental health benefits involved in studying a martial art, but there is the undeniable fact that I am much more prone to violence now.
If this is really true, it makes me wonder about the attitudes that your instructor is passing on to you. By and large, I've found that martial artists are extremely non-violent people. Once you develop the skill and confidence to deal with violent situations, you don't have anything to prove.
Right on! Ask the average high school senior to do long division with a multiple-digit divisor. They CAN'T do it. They have to break out their calculator for stuff like 675/25.
Right! And hardly any of them can use a buggy whip properly, either!
Manual long division of multi-digit numbers is a fairly useless skill. It is useful to be able to rapidly do simple divisions like 675/25, but most high school students back in the "old days" would waste time doing it by laborious long-division (which is pretty much like reaching for a calculator, only slower). Even back then, most people didn't pick up short-cut math until later on. Although it is faster, and seems simpler once you get the knack, it is actually harder to learn because it doesn't rely on a single all-purpose algorithm; it is a grab bag of tricks (such as recognizing that 675 can be viewed as 6 * 100 + 75, and remembering that 100 = 4* 25 and 75 = 3*25).
There is a difference between being willing to do something and wanting to do something. The choice to "Shoot someone or Die" is vary different from "Actuality stealing a car vs. Pretending to steel a car." I have no problem with killing someone with an adequate reason, but I have no desire to go out and shoot someone for the fun of it.
People forget that kids have always liked playing cops and robbers. The fact that a kid enjoys playing a "robber" in a backyard drama does not as a rule signal a genuine desire for a life of crime.
This is stupid. Why are all you idiots pinning the blame on Clinton, when plenty of other government representatives are involved, including Republicans.
We expected her to be smart enough to know better.
Do you really imagine that the author is trying to get football banned? Rather, he is trying to put videogames in perspective. It is easy to pick on modern videogames because they are novel, and for older adults, unfamiliar. The comparison points out in a humorous way the fact that our society rewards and even celebrates a number of highly aggressive sports that are frequently associated with real, serious injuries up to and including death. So it is stupid to attack videogames merely because they are associated with aggression. To indite videogames, one must show that they are in some sense more likely to yield to aggressive or violent behavior than, for example, watching or participating in a contact sport such as football or boxing.
Altruism is nothing more than emotional hedonism. People are kind to others because they derive pleasure from kindness.
This is one of those statements that sounds profound but is actually rather stupid and trivial. Of course, no human or animal does anything unless that action is rewarding--in the sense of activating the reward pathways in the brain that lead us to do certain things and not to do others. Fundamentally, we all have brains that work in a similar fashion. But so what? Depending upon their personality, religious feelings, and personal philosophy, different people derive pleasure from different things. What distinguishes a good person from an evil person is not that good people don't fell pleasure, but that a good person derives pleasure from altruistic activities. Evil people derive pleasure from activities that yield a positive outcome for themselves at the expense of others. Some philosophies clearly predispose people toward the latter. The notion that there is no meaningful difference between altruism and selfishness because both are based on pleasure is one such example.
Arguing that because the eye has a blind spot therefore it wasn't designed is like saying that my watch isn't designed because it has an analog display and not a digital one.
A better analogy would be to imagine that for some reason, your watch was unable to display any time between 12:00 and 1:00, even though between all other hours it displays minutes and seconds, and even though other watches from the same manufacturer are able to display times like 12:30 just fine.
Why not? You really can't judge the intelligence of the design without knowing the intent of the creator. Plus, you're assuming that design and implementation took place at the same time. Maybe the mammalian eye was an earlier design incorporated into later constructions because it was cheaper and more compatible. It happens in things humans design, don't see why biology should necessarily be any different.
You are correct in that it will never be impossible to exclude the notion that life was designed by a creator who for incomprehensible reasons of its own, designed it with exactly those limitations that would be expected in life that evolved. Scientists don't much care--for scientific purposes, the two theories:
A) Live evolved. B) Life was designed just as if it had evolved.
are equivalent, because they predict the same observable outcome. They'll just use the simpler version (A) because it's, well, simpler.
What the biology does exclude is design by a single intelligent creator who designed different organisms individually and cared enough to design each one as well as possible. Because biologists know that while living things resemble the products of design in certain ways, they do not resemble the product of design by an individual craftsman.
The kind of design that biology resembles is design by multiple generations of design teams, working on development of a product line whose original specifications were long ago lost, and which they don't really understand very well, operating on a tight budget and development schedule that makes redesign virtually prohibitive, so that all they can do is try to add tweaks and kludges to the previous year's model.
In other words, biology is not so much like a fine Swiss watch as like the latest version of Microsoft Office.
Even if life is very improbable, it's a very, very big universe out there, so even very improbable things happen occasionally.
And even if conditions suitable for life are very, very rare, it will necessarily be the case that every living observer will discover the it is living in a place where it is possible for life to survive.
Cause, you know, the fact that the people the argument is directed against are being overly stiff in their belief completely excuses the fact that the 'squids have better eyes' example is rather dumb argument based on twisting the definition of 'better' to suit a premade conclusion.
Actually, the argument is not that squids have "better eyes" but that squids' eyes are better "designed" in an obvious way--i.e. the wiring and initial processing circuitry is located behind the light sensors rather than in front of them. I think that if anybody designed a camera in which the wiring ran in front of the sensors and there was a spot in the middle where the camera was unable to photograph anything because that was where the wires were routed through to the back, it would universally be recognized as poorly designed, no matter how good it might be in other respects. The fact that squids have eyes that are more intelligently organized than ours merely demonstrates that there is not some unrecognized constraint on the biological formation of an eye that makes it impossible for an eye to have a more rational design.
Read much? Current gravitational theory is *known* to be wrong. Missing mass, Voyager space probe trajectories, etc. It's already been falsified. Nobody's come up with a better theory yet.
Uh, yes, so what? The question was not, "Is current gravitational theory absolutely correct?" which it obviously is not. Even leaving aside the somewhat questionalbe examples you mention, there is the problem of reconciling General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics.
But that wasn't the question; the question was: how do you falsify gravity? The same answer applies to current gravitational theory as well as whatever future gravitational theories ultimately replace it. You falsify gravitational theory by testing it against observations of motion and force (of which the possible discrepancies you mention are examples).
The trouble is, that given our prediction of the size and age of the universe
Actually, we don't know the size of the universe. Modern theory still allows for the possibility that the universe could contain an infinite number of planets (there is the size of the "accessible" universe, but that is different and not relevant here). Moreover, some physical theories allow for multiple (again, possibly infinite) universes. So the argument from improbability pretty much collapses.
There is one argument that formation of life, at least on a planet such as ours, is probably not wildly improbable--namely, the "waiting time" from the point at which the planet calmed down to become potentially livable to the point at which life appeared was fairly short.
Why should a mutation stop breeding with members who haven't mutated.
Let's suppose that breeding with non-mutants results in decreased fertility. Then mutants with a second mutation that causes them to prefer other mutants will be strongly selected.
in contrast to the claims of Dawkins et al., no evidence exists to support the claim that even the most advanced verted eye is superior to the inverted eye.
Nor does any evidence exist to the contrary. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. They are obviously superior in one way--they have no blind spot.
How the eye evolved from the primitive verted type common to invertebrates into the inverted eye of vertebrates is... an unexplained mystery. No evidence exists of any transitional forms, and all known animals have either verted or inverted eyes.
This is another stupid "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" argument. Do you really expect to find fossil eyes? And in fact, many plausible explanations of the evolution of the eye have been provided. The hard thing is figuring out which of the many possible ways an eye could have evolved is the right one. Indeed, based upon modern knowledge of photochemistry, evolution of vision seems virtually inevitable, and it is not surprising that eyes seem to have evolved multiple times.
The 'wrong wiring' acts as a filter, which among other things lets humans see under much brighter conditions than a squid, which lives in the water (where there is less light).
This is dumb. We have an adjustable pupil in our eye as well as photoreceptors that adapt to light. The tiny bit of light absorbed by the layer of cells at the back of the retina does not help at all. All it does is scatter the light a bit and reduce visual acuity.
It also acts as a UV-filter, which squids living under water, don't need.
Wrong again. Those cells are virtually transparent to UV and provide no appreciable protection. As a matter of fact, birds, who have the same eye design as we do, can see UV. Besides, those cells are neurons that are required to see. They are the cells that need to be protected from UV. So having them absorb UV would be exactly the wrong thing to do if you were trying to design an eye.
Furthermore, the blind spot costs us nothing, since we have two eyes(=most of the time the blind spots don't overlap), and (unless we focus them) they are moving constantly, so nothing can hide in the blind spots.
But why have a blind spot at all? Yes, we've adapted so that they are only rarely a problem. But an object coming at you rapidly from your blind spot could put out your eye because you wouldn't see it coming to blink. And if you lose one eye, which is not that uncommon an injury in the wild, you will be even more vulnerable. It provides no conceivable advantage; no intelligently designed light sensor runs the wiring in front of the sensors.
So... how do I falsify gravity? Or thermodynamics?
Both theories make precise quantitative predictions that can be checked--predictions about motion and force in the case of gravity, predictions about such things as heat flow and chemical equilibria in the case of thermodynamics. If the experimental results do not agree with the theory's predictions, then the theory is falsified.
Now that the game has been rated AO, what does Rockstar gain by leaving out the explicit content? Why not make "Hot Coffee" an official configuration option (maybe after completing the game once)? Or they could provide an option for Sims-style pixelation.
So now you're claiming that "centrifugal force" is the force of the object on the string it's attached to?
As I was all along. It is an outward force vector, which makes it a "centrifugal" (outward directed) force by definition.
Again, the fictional centrifugal force, if it existed, would operate on the object doing the orbiting, not the object being orbited or the connecting medium. Those are the only things experiencing outward force.
This is the sort of confusion that results from thinking exclusively about idealized point masses and not about real objects. Real objects that have size as well as mass partake of the properties of the string as well as the mass. Let's imagine that the object on the end of a string is a rubber ball, attached to a string at one pole. Do you doubt that the rubber ball, when being spun, would be elongated as if experiencing an outward force? In other words, real, macroscopic objects being spun behave as though they are experiencing an outward force.
Generations of high school physics teachers to the contrary, one force is not any more "fictional" than the other--they are merely different interpretations based upon observing the same forces from different frames of reference.
I haven't read the Doctorow, but I'm nearly finished with Stross's Accelerando. I think Stross is one of the most original modern SF writers, and a very good writer to boot. I think Accelerando is the best thing he has done to date (although the Hidden Family series and The Atrocity Archives are arguably more fun). I'll be amazed if Accelerando is not in the running for the Hugo this year.
DRM does work. It doesn't have to work all the time. As long as it is still easier to purchased DRM'd stuff than search for cracked stuff on the internet there will still be sales of it and people will make money.
I don't pay because the stuff isn't available otherwise--I pay for the service of providing the material in a convenient, readily available format guaranteed by the originator to be complete as he intended to present it. I'm carrying Stross's book around with me at the moment. The fact that it is available online and I could print out a copy doesn't make any difference to me; the book is more convenient.
Maybe you should Ask a Scientist [anl.gov]. The equal-and-opposite force when gravity is involved is the reciprocal gravitational attraction.
The terms centripetal and centrifugal are use when talking about circular motion in general, and are not limited to the special case where gravitational attraction is the centripetal force. You can hardly call the equal-and-opposite force of a rock on a string "reciprocal gravitational attraction."
Slashdot Mirror
I'd need to be convinced that this is relevant to lenses in an animal. It sounds a lot like thermal damage, so we need information about the temperature reached in the chamber and how the thermal conductivity of the chamber compares to the body. If you continually pump microwave energy, no matter how low in intensity, into a sufficiently well insulated chamber, you'll eventually manage to heat it up enough to cook a lens.
There are plenty of physical and mental health benefits involved in studying a martial art, but there is the undeniable fact that I am much more prone to violence now.
If this is really true, it makes me wonder about the attitudes that your instructor is passing on to you. By and large, I've found that martial artists are extremely non-violent people. Once you develop the skill and confidence to deal with violent situations, you don't have anything to prove.
Right on! Ask the average high school senior to do long division with a multiple-digit divisor. They CAN'T do it. They have to break out their calculator for stuff like 675/25.
Right! And hardly any of them can use a buggy whip properly, either!
Manual long division of multi-digit numbers is a fairly useless skill. It is useful to be able to rapidly do simple divisions like 675/25, but most high school students back in the "old days" would waste time doing it by laborious long-division (which is pretty much like reaching for a calculator, only slower). Even back then, most people didn't pick up short-cut math until later on. Although it is faster, and seems simpler once you get the knack, it is actually harder to learn because it doesn't rely on a single all-purpose algorithm; it is a grab bag of tricks (such as recognizing that 675 can be viewed as 6 * 100 + 75, and remembering that 100 = 4* 25 and 75 = 3*25).
There is a difference between being willing to do something and wanting to do something. The choice to "Shoot someone or Die" is vary different from "Actuality stealing a car vs. Pretending to steel a car." I have no problem with killing someone with an adequate reason, but I have no desire to go out and shoot someone for the fun of it.
People forget that kids have always liked playing cops and robbers. The fact that a kid enjoys playing a "robber" in a backyard drama does not as a rule signal a genuine desire for a life of crime.
This is stupid. Why are all you idiots pinning the blame on Clinton, when plenty of other government representatives are involved, including Republicans.
We expected her to be smart enough to know better.
You do realize that determinism (which is the basis for the position you are advocating) is a self-refuting concept.
Nonsense. The position that I am expressing has plenty of room for random (non-deterministic) outcomes.
Do you really imagine that the author is trying to get football banned? Rather, he is trying to put videogames in perspective. It is easy to pick on modern videogames because they are novel, and for older adults, unfamiliar. The comparison points out in a humorous way the fact that our society rewards and even celebrates a number of highly aggressive sports that are frequently associated with real, serious injuries up to and including death. So it is stupid to attack videogames merely because they are associated with aggression. To indite videogames, one must show that they are in some sense more likely to yield to aggressive or violent behavior than, for example, watching or participating in a contact sport such as football or boxing.
Altruism is nothing more than emotional hedonism. People are kind to others because they derive pleasure from kindness.
This is one of those statements that sounds profound but is actually rather stupid and trivial. Of course, no human or animal does anything unless that action is rewarding--in the sense of activating the reward pathways in the brain that lead us to do certain things and not to do others. Fundamentally, we all have brains that work in a similar fashion. But so what? Depending upon their personality, religious feelings, and personal philosophy, different people derive pleasure from different things. What distinguishes a good person from an evil person is not that good people don't fell pleasure, but that a good person derives pleasure from altruistic activities. Evil people derive pleasure from activities that yield a positive outcome for themselves at the expense of others. Some philosophies clearly predispose people toward the latter. The notion that there is no meaningful difference between altruism and selfishness because both are based on pleasure is one such example.
Arguing that because the eye has a blind spot therefore it wasn't designed is like saying that my watch isn't designed because it has an analog display and not a digital one.
A better analogy would be to imagine that for some reason, your watch was unable to display any time between 12:00 and 1:00, even though between all other hours it displays minutes and seconds, and even though other watches from the same manufacturer are able to display times like 12:30 just fine.
Why not? You really can't judge the intelligence of the design without knowing the intent of the creator. Plus, you're assuming that design and implementation took place at the same time. Maybe the mammalian eye was an earlier design incorporated into later constructions because it was cheaper and more compatible. It happens in things humans design, don't see why biology should necessarily be any different.
You are correct in that it will never be impossible to exclude the notion that life was designed by a creator who for incomprehensible reasons of its own, designed it with exactly those limitations that would be expected in life that evolved. Scientists don't much care--for scientific purposes, the two theories:
A) Live evolved.
B) Life was designed just as if it had evolved.
are equivalent, because they predict the same observable outcome. They'll just use the simpler version (A) because it's, well, simpler.
What the biology does exclude is design by a single intelligent creator who designed different organisms individually and cared enough to design each one as well as possible. Because biologists know that while living things resemble the products of design in certain ways, they do not resemble the product of design by an individual craftsman.
The kind of design that biology resembles is design by multiple generations of design teams, working on development of a product line whose original specifications were long ago lost, and which they don't really understand very well, operating on a tight budget and development schedule that makes redesign virtually prohibitive, so that all they can do is try to add tweaks and kludges to the previous year's model.
In other words, biology is not so much like a fine Swiss watch as like the latest version of Microsoft Office.
Even if life is very improbable, it's a very, very big universe out there, so even very improbable things happen occasionally.
And even if conditions suitable for life are very, very rare, it will necessarily be the case that every living observer will discover the it is living in a place where it is possible for life to survive.
Cause, you know, the fact that the people the argument is directed against are being overly stiff in their belief completely excuses the fact that the 'squids have better eyes' example is rather dumb argument based on twisting the definition of 'better' to suit a premade conclusion.
Actually, the argument is not that squids have "better eyes" but that squids' eyes are better "designed" in an obvious way--i.e. the wiring and initial processing circuitry is located behind the light sensors rather than in front of them. I think that if anybody designed a camera in which the wiring ran in front of the sensors and there was a spot in the middle where the camera was unable to photograph anything because that was where the wires were routed through to the back, it would universally be recognized as poorly designed, no matter how good it might be in other respects. The fact that squids have eyes that are more intelligently organized than ours merely demonstrates that there is not some unrecognized constraint on the biological formation of an eye that makes it impossible for an eye to have a more rational design.
Read much? Current gravitational theory is *known* to be wrong. Missing mass, Voyager space probe trajectories, etc. It's already been falsified. Nobody's come up with a better theory yet.
Uh, yes, so what? The question was not, "Is current gravitational theory absolutely correct?" which it obviously is not. Even leaving aside the somewhat questionalbe examples you mention, there is the problem of reconciling General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics.
But that wasn't the question; the question was: how do you falsify gravity? The same answer applies to current gravitational theory as well as whatever future gravitational theories ultimately replace it. You falsify gravitational theory by testing it against observations of motion and force (of which the possible discrepancies you mention are examples).
The trouble is, that given our prediction of the size and age of the universe
Actually, we don't know the size of the universe. Modern theory still allows for the possibility that the universe could contain an infinite number of planets (there is the size of the "accessible" universe, but that is different and not relevant here). Moreover, some physical theories allow for multiple (again, possibly infinite) universes. So the argument from improbability pretty much collapses.
There is one argument that formation of life, at least on a planet such as ours, is probably not wildly improbable--namely, the "waiting time" from the point at which the planet calmed down to become potentially livable to the point at which life appeared was fairly short.
Why should a mutation stop breeding with members who haven't mutated.
Let's suppose that breeding with non-mutants results in decreased fertility. Then mutants with a second mutation that causes them to prefer other mutants will be strongly selected.
in contrast to the claims of Dawkins et al., no evidence exists to support the claim that even the most advanced verted eye is superior to the inverted eye.
... an unexplained mystery. No evidence exists of any transitional forms, and all known animals have either verted or inverted eyes.
Nor does any evidence exist to the contrary. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. They are obviously superior in one way--they have no blind spot.
How the eye evolved from the primitive verted type common to invertebrates into the inverted eye of vertebrates is
This is another stupid "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" argument. Do you really expect to find fossil eyes? And in fact, many plausible explanations of the evolution of the eye have been provided. The hard thing is figuring out which of the many possible ways an eye could have evolved is the right one. Indeed, based upon modern knowledge of photochemistry, evolution of vision seems virtually inevitable, and it is not surprising that eyes seem to have evolved multiple times.
The 'wrong wiring' acts as a filter, which among other things lets humans see under much brighter conditions than a squid, which lives in the water (where there is less light).
This is dumb. We have an adjustable pupil in our eye as well as photoreceptors that adapt to light. The tiny bit of light absorbed by the layer of cells at the back of the retina does not help at all. All it does is scatter the light a bit and reduce visual acuity.
It also acts as a UV-filter, which squids living under water, don't need.
Wrong again. Those cells are virtually transparent to UV and provide no appreciable protection. As a matter of fact, birds, who have the same eye design as we do, can see UV. Besides, those cells are neurons that are required to see. They are the cells that need to be protected from UV. So having them absorb UV would be exactly the wrong thing to do if you were trying to design an eye.
Furthermore, the blind spot costs us nothing, since we have two eyes(=most of the time the blind spots don't overlap), and (unless we focus them) they are moving constantly, so nothing can hide in the blind spots.
But why have a blind spot at all? Yes, we've adapted so that they are only rarely a problem. But an object coming at you rapidly from your blind spot could put out your eye because you wouldn't see it coming to blink. And if you lose one eye, which is not that uncommon an injury in the wild, you will be even more vulnerable. It provides no conceivable advantage; no intelligently designed light sensor runs the wiring in front of the sensors.
So... how do I falsify gravity? Or thermodynamics?
Both theories make precise quantitative predictions that can be checked--predictions about motion and force in the case of gravity, predictions about such things as heat flow and chemical equilibria in the case of thermodynamics. If the experimental results do not agree with the theory's predictions, then the theory is falsified.
Is there any way to falsify the evolution theory?
many, many ways
Now that the game has been rated AO, what does Rockstar gain by leaving out the explicit content? Why not make "Hot Coffee" an official configuration option (maybe after completing the game once)? Or they could provide an option for Sims-style pixelation.
As I was all along. It is an outward force vector, which makes it a "centrifugal" (outward directed) force by definition.
Again, the fictional centrifugal force, if it existed, would operate on the object doing the orbiting, not the object being orbited or the connecting medium. Those are the only things experiencing outward force.
This is the sort of confusion that results from thinking exclusively about idealized point masses and not about real objects. Real objects that have size as well as mass partake of the properties of the string as well as the mass. Let's imagine that the object on the end of a string is a rubber ball, attached to a string at one pole. Do you doubt that the rubber ball, when being spun, would be elongated as if experiencing an outward force? In other words, real, macroscopic objects being spun behave as though they are experiencing an outward force.
Generations of high school physics teachers to the contrary, one force is not any more "fictional" than the other--they are merely different interpretations based upon observing the same forces from different frames of reference.
I haven't read the Doctorow, but I'm nearly finished with Stross's Accelerando. I think Stross is one of the most original modern SF writers, and a very good writer to boot. I think Accelerando is the best thing he has done to date (although the Hidden Family series and The Atrocity Archives are arguably more fun). I'll be amazed if Accelerando is not in the running for the Hugo this year.
DRM does work. It doesn't have to work all the time. As long as it is still easier to purchased DRM'd stuff than search for cracked stuff on the internet there will still be sales of it and people will make money.
I don't pay because the stuff isn't available otherwise--I pay for the service of providing the material in a convenient, readily available format guaranteed by the originator to be complete as he intended to present it. I'm carrying Stross's book around with me at the moment. The fact that it is available online and I could print out a copy doesn't make any difference to me; the book is more convenient.
Note again that there's no outward force on the orbitING object, just the orbitED object.
I am referring to the outward force vector F4 that is pulling on the string.
Maybe you should Ask a Scientist [anl.gov]. The equal-and-opposite force when gravity is involved is the reciprocal gravitational attraction.
The terms centripetal and centrifugal are use when talking about circular motion in general, and are not limited to the special case where gravitational attraction is the centripetal force. You can hardly call the equal-and-opposite force of a rock on a string "reciprocal gravitational attraction."