I don't recall anyone on Slashdot saying they were the only legitimate users of the internet. If they did, I would condemn it as much as I condemn smug academics arrogant attitudes.
Either one makes a weapon or one makes an energy collector. The two design needs are orthogonal. An energy collector, to be usable in Japan, has to be diffuse enough to be safe for a receiving area in Japan (think of possible pointing errors, plane or ship pilot errors... etc), hence not usable as a weapon if directed elsewhere. If they are making a weapon, it would have to have a high intensity beam, which would make it unusable and unsafe as an energy transmitter to a collector.
This is a purely engineering matter independent of what one believes Japan's intentions or future intentions might be.
Now as to my opinion of Japan's intentions, I think there would be more cost effective ways to make weapon delivery systems if that is their aim, like making missiles. They are concerned about attacks from North Korea (and maybe collateral strikes if China and Taiwan go at each other), but South Korea and Los Angeles? "Oh, come on."
The receiving areas on Earth that they typically talk about in space-based solar collectors would be large enough to make transmission safe. I'm sure Japan is more worried about its own safety since the receiving area would be in Japan.
"... But that's a general thing, not specific to the question at hand, which is whether the Catholic Church actively persecuted Galileo for his new method of seeking the truth, or whether the Church simply lacked the moral fiber to stand up to members of the academic community who demanded that the Church shut Galileo's mouth.
I have no argument with this. I would only add, as a balance to your legitimate criticisms and to amplify my previous remarks, that the Church was composed of people with the same faults as those in the scientific community. Both groups have elements that want power, influence, name, fame. Both have members who have falsified data and misrepresented facts for personal gain. But science is a discipline and shouldn't be judged by the faults of people who call themselves scientists, just as religion as a practice shouldn't be judge by hypocritical people who claim to support its ideals but pervert them for personal gain. It is a black-and-white distortion of facts to suggest the Church was monolithic or that the Church was anti-science.
Now on to your other claims.
"A real problem with attempting to work with Goldberg's article is his insistence on describing Galileo's contemporaries as "other scientists". That word did not exist in Galileo's time, nor were there any cognates that were remotely close to what we today call a scientist. With the exception of Galileo and a few others who were forging a new form of acquiring knowledge through empirical methods, most knowledge was acquired and transmitted by scholasticism."
Christoph Scheiner, cited by Goldberg WAS a scientist and WAS a leading force Galileo's persecution. Scheiner was trained in mathematics,, verified Galileo's claims by observation with his own telescope, published books on atmospheric refraction and the optics of the eye. While he was a Jesuit with his own religious beliefs, his principle motivation for stirring up opposition to Galileo appeared to be sheer jealousy.
In Scheiner's Rosa Ursina he made a severe attack on Galileo after the latter published Assayer, also mentioned in the Goldberg article, which strongly hinted that Scheiner stole Galileo's ideas.
"The Church was right in fearing Galileo's ideas, since his approach questioned the authority that the Church had wielded for centuries, and that brought about the fall of the Church as the dominant political and financial power in Europe, with its replacement by nation states that understood how to implement new technologies and were increasingly oriented to improving the mundane situations of its citizenries."
A pretty big and one-sided oversimplification. I won't deny that Galileo started a necessary counterweight to ecclesiastical powers who were threatened by empiricism. But I have to point out for completeness that the Church's decline was also due to a rather long term bad side effect of Rationalism. Maybe I should say *hyper-rationalism* - the kind that invited a backlash of Romanticism. Rationalism focused our attention only on what can be proved unambiguously by the senses. That cuts out 90% of life, which has to go on regardless of how neat and sanitary our thimble-full of exact knowledge is.
My problem is with people who understand a piece of the world and immediately believe they have solved the riddle of the universe and make their hammer a tool for everything. If you want to see how Rationalism has its own pitfalls, read about the Age of Enlightenment and the fanaticism of the French Revolution. Think priests dragged out and killed, street signs named after saints torn down, churches destroyed, and a general bloodbath. Fast forward to today and see how partial knowledge brought us shortsighted treatments like thymus gland removal, lobotomies, emphasis on medical intervention rather than healthy emotions. I'll refrain from criticizing animal experiments. They look like a cruel necessity to save human life. As necessary as they seem, I don't have to like them.
I don't have the link anymore, but here's a cut and paste. The article does cite a book, which in part appears to address old history.
---
Of course, he is referring to the story everyone learns in grade school; a lovable old scientist is condemned to Hell for refusing to deny the truth of the cosmos (in this case the Copernican notion of heliocentricity -- the sun's the center of things rather than the earth). The story is employed to teach children that closed-minded religious people are afraid of science and the truth. Virtually every morally troubling development in science results in a public invocation of this old saw. If Galileo is not called as a central witness for the scientists, then his ghost is surely conjured by the press.
The problem is, it's spin. Ancient, pro-enlightenment, zealot spin.
Robert Nisbet in (probably my favorite book) Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary, writes that the Galileo myth was adopted by the French Enlightenment to discredit the Catholic Church. Their first choice for martyr was Isaac Newton. Unfortunately, Newton was a religious fanatic in their eyes. So they picked Galileo instead and rewrote significant aspects of his biography (like the obvious fact that he was religious) so as to make the Church the darkest of villains.
Western Civilization's love of the individual in pursuit of the truth is perhaps its greatest attribute. So it shouldn't be shocking that we are all very receptive to the idea. "From Diderot to Brecht, the myth of Galileo the rationalist-scientist-martyr dominated Western thought, and even today it shows few signs of abating," wrote Nisbet in 1982.
He was right. Galileo is still the reigning symbol for the idea that religion can't handle the truth and that the Catholic Church as a matter of settled policy punishes those who speak it.
Yes, Galileo was eventually found guilty of heresy. But his problems stemmed first and foremost from jealous fellow-scientists. Galileo's first muzzle was one he put on himself. In 1597 he wrote a letter to Johannes Kepler (the first big Copernican and discoverer of the three laws of moving planet stuff). In the letter, Galileo told Kepler that, yeah Copernicus got things right, but he thought the Aristotelian academic establishment would have a cow if he said so publicly.
Twelve years later he created his own astronomical telescope and confirmed the existence of lunar moons, stars in the Milky Way, and various "planets" revolving around Jupiter. A year later he wrote "The Starry Messenger" and he won piles of awards, a cushy job, and all sorts of junk that they would have had on The Price is Right if it existed back then ("I'd say that Saracen's head costs 12 guineas, Roberto").
Galileo went to Rome to show his findings to the Vatican. Despite the fact that his research couldn't have been more Copernican if it had been titled, "As told by Copernicus," the Church gave him all sorts of attaboys. While in Rome for a couple years he published more Copernican-friendly papers, and the Church green-lighted all of it with nary a word or a restriction on distribution.
After Galileo went back to Padua, the leading scientific mediocrities started complaining. It was the scientists who said that challenging Aristotle was heresy -- not the Church. If Aristotle became obsolete than these guys would lose their prestigious posts and lucrative tutoring gigs. Much like Communist academics in Eastern Europe who invested a lifetime in Marxist theory, they had a lot more to lose from change. So, the tenured guild of professors enlisted the aid of the Dominicans (a rowdy and preachy bunch) to denounce Galileo.
In Tuscany, numerous Church officials and lay nobles supported Galileo during the assault. Still, Galileo had to return to Rome to face his accusers. He went. It was a big fight. The Vatican ordered him to hold off pursuing very specific areas of teaching until some corrections could be made to his last book. Galileo even got a letter from the Vatican hierarchy stating that
Actually, it was his fellow jealous scientists that persuaded the church to try him. Initially inclined to leave Galileo to his own ideas, the church became part of a political football game where vested political interests, including those of the scientific community and more ambitious ecclesiastic authorities, kicked him around for reasons involving disputes over power and influence. The whole affair had little to do with the practice of religion than with position and authority.
That's assuming that the projects they had to pull money from because of SSC haven't contributed in the meanwhile. Yes, if money is unlimited in supply, we should fund every great thing on the planet and we would have a utopia.
I worked at JPL at the time SSC was canceled, and all the senior scientists were relieved. Even my physics profs were relieved that a zillion other small physics experiments would not be cut.
Actually, in this age of computers, I don't see any intrinsic advantage to metric, but I see lots of intrinsic advantages for the Imperial system.
Who can visualize something divided by ten or even worse four tenths? I can easily visualize something half or a third of any given length. Furthermore English units are related to something immediately tangible: I can walk out a floor measurement in feet. Yards are also ultimately related to the length of an arm. But millionths of the arc distance from the pole to the equator? Please.
It makes me sad that the US had the foresight to create a collider that would have produced results for decades but decided to kill it because of short-sighted congressmen.
From a cost/benefit perspective, I think that $18 billion, the cost of the SSC converted into 2009 dollars, probably did better in other science projects. Not that there weren't other wastes of research dollars, such as the ISS.
Not saying it isn't true, but I hadn't heard that many were murdered. I know many died from disease, which the Spaniards doubtless didn't know much about themselves. Can you provide a reference? Truly curious.
Wouldn't it just make more sense to have solar panels in orbit and transmit the power along the space elevator?
Solar panels are great for powering electronics, which only need to move electrons, and small servos, which don't use much power. To lift payloads, I'm afraid sunlight is just too diffuse to do the job.
Your arguments have been answered in many places. Here's one
http://pbjots.blogspot.com/2008/07/electric-vs-combustion-engine.html
As far as pollution goes, power plants are kept under tighter controls and better maintenance than your average automobile engine - comparing barrel of oil to power plant generation versus barrel of oil to refinement to automobile engine.
For conductors like cables, still not correct. It is not electrons "pushing" electrons. It is the electric field propagating through the conductor at near the speed of light that moves the electrons at the other end.
I haven't really seen any stats on the numbers of "qualified scientists and engineers" produced in the world. Not sure how you would measure them anyway. But I am doubtful that India and China produce appreciably different percentages of them than the US or UK.
Smart students generally do well in spite of the education system. I could be wrong, but from my completely unscientific and anecdotal scan of the news, at least, the US and UK still seem to produce approximately the same percentages of breakthroughs in science and technology that they always have.
Achievement is about 20% ability, 30% opportunity, and 50% discipline.
If someone has some relevant stats, it would be interesting to see them.
A sober assessment. I always found RMS's Utopian view a little too unrealistic. Gates was ruthless in his earlier days, but like many people he has matured and mellowed some with age.
I think the payoff won't be hardware sales per se, though many customers would prefer a one-stop solution for hardware and software. Instead, I think it may be largely from the software side.
Current customers of MySQL haven't moved to the enhanced version because many think of Oracle or DB2 for enterprise. Some analysts think that with a big company supporting MySQL it may lure enterprise level customers away from Oracle and IBM.
"The problem is, it's spin. Ancient, pro-enlightenment, zealot spin... the Galileo myth was adopted by the French Enlightenment to discredit the Catholic Church. Their first choice for martyr was Isaac Newton. Unfortunately, Newton was a religious fanatic in their eyes. So they picked Galileo instead and rewrote significant aspects of his biography (like the obvious fact that he was religious) so as to make the Church the darkest of villains."
In principle a non-random strategy can be counteracted, but this assumes there are no constraints on person trying to counteract it.
In particular, a terrorist would presumeably have to recruit someone who doesn't fit the profile: say, someone who isn't Middle Eastern. I'm not saying that isn't doable. Mohammed can perhaps find some blond haired, blue eyed person from Minnesota who wants radical Islam for the world, or a grandmother from Omaha who is willing to blow up babies, but I think it would be a pretty limiting factor, which is worth something in itself.
Sadly, many companies engage in such practices for "insurance" to protect themselves by trading frivolous law suits. "You sue me for using a push button, I'll sue you for using a dial. Now can we both just drop the case?"
The reason language is acquired more easily at an early age is because the brain hasn't been wired fully yet then. Dendrites from nerve cells grow and make connections in response to learning. In a child, there is considerable space between dendrites. When a young person learns a language, he literally wires his brain for it. This occurs to a lesser degree later in life, but by then most dendritic connections are already made.
They did brain studies of song birds and found that the brains had much more dendritic connections when young birds heard songs from their parents. If they were separated from their parents, much fewer connections were found. Sad experiment, BTW:(
You would need a bit of a tweak to make it work. In a zero pressure environment, you wouldn't see the bladder collapse, but you could conceivably pressurize the interior of the tank. Then I would see no reason, the bladder wouldn't collapse.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't recall anyone on Slashdot saying they were the only legitimate users of the internet. If they did, I would condemn it as much as I condemn smug academics arrogant attitudes.
Either one makes a weapon or one makes an energy collector. The two design needs are orthogonal. An energy collector, to be usable in Japan, has to be diffuse enough to be safe for a receiving area in Japan (think of possible pointing errors, plane or ship pilot errors ... etc), hence not usable as a weapon if directed elsewhere. If they are making a weapon, it would have to have a high intensity beam, which would make it unusable and unsafe as an energy transmitter to a collector.
This is a purely engineering matter independent of what one believes Japan's intentions or future intentions might be.
Now as to my opinion of Japan's intentions, I think there would be more cost effective ways to make weapon delivery systems if that is their aim, like making missiles. They are concerned about attacks from North Korea (and maybe collateral strikes if China and Taiwan go at each other), but South Korea and Los Angeles? "Oh, come on."
See http://www.nss.org/settlement/ssp/spacepower/spacepower01.html for example.
The receiving areas on Earth that they typically talk about in space-based solar collectors would be large enough to make transmission safe. I'm sure Japan is more worried about its own safety since the receiving area would be in Japan.
[snip]
" ... But that's a general thing, not specific to the question at hand, which is whether the Catholic Church actively persecuted Galileo for his new method of seeking the truth, or whether the Church simply lacked the moral fiber to stand up to members of the academic community who demanded that the Church shut Galileo's mouth.
I have no argument with this. I would only add, as a balance to your legitimate criticisms and to amplify my previous remarks, that the Church was composed of people with the same faults as those in the scientific community. Both groups have elements that want power, influence, name, fame. Both have members who have falsified data and misrepresented facts for personal gain. But science is a discipline and shouldn't be judged by the faults of people who call themselves scientists, just as religion as a practice shouldn't be judge by hypocritical people who claim to support its ideals but pervert them for personal gain. It is a black-and-white distortion of facts to suggest the Church was monolithic or that the Church was anti-science.
Now on to your other claims.
"A real problem with attempting to work with Goldberg's article is his insistence on describing Galileo's contemporaries as "other scientists". That word did not exist in Galileo's time, nor were there any cognates that were remotely close to what we today call a scientist. With the exception of Galileo and a few others who were forging a new form of acquiring knowledge through empirical methods, most knowledge was acquired and transmitted by scholasticism."
Christoph Scheiner, cited by Goldberg WAS a scientist and WAS a leading force Galileo's persecution. Scheiner was trained in mathematics,, verified Galileo's claims by observation with his own telescope, published books on atmospheric refraction and the optics of the eye. While he was a Jesuit with his own religious beliefs, his principle motivation for stirring up opposition to Galileo appeared to be sheer jealousy.
In Scheiner's Rosa Ursina he made a severe attack on Galileo after the latter published Assayer, also mentioned in the Goldberg article, which strongly hinted that Scheiner stole Galileo's ideas.
"The Church was right in fearing Galileo's ideas, since his approach questioned the authority that the Church had wielded for centuries, and that brought about the fall of the Church as the dominant political and financial power in Europe, with its replacement by nation states that understood how to implement new technologies and were increasingly oriented to improving the mundane situations of its citizenries."
A pretty big and one-sided oversimplification. I won't deny that Galileo started a necessary counterweight to ecclesiastical powers who were threatened by empiricism. But I have to point out for completeness that the Church's decline was also due to a rather long term bad side effect of Rationalism. Maybe I should say *hyper-rationalism* - the kind that invited a backlash of Romanticism. Rationalism focused our attention only on what can be proved unambiguously by the senses. That cuts out 90% of life, which has to go on regardless of how neat and sanitary our thimble-full of exact knowledge is.
My problem is with people who understand a piece of the world and immediately believe they have solved the riddle of the universe and make their hammer a tool for everything. If you want to see how Rationalism has its own pitfalls, read about the Age of Enlightenment and the fanaticism of the French Revolution. Think priests dragged out and killed, street signs named after saints torn down, churches destroyed, and a general bloodbath. Fast forward to today and see how partial knowledge brought us shortsighted treatments like thymus gland removal, lobotomies, emphasis on medical intervention rather than healthy emotions. I'll refrain from criticizing animal experiments. They look like a cruel necessity to save human life. As necessary as they seem, I don't have to like them.
I don't have the link anymore, but here's a cut and paste. The article does cite a book, which in part appears to address old history.
---
Of course, he is referring to the story everyone learns in grade school; a lovable old scientist is condemned to Hell for refusing to deny the truth of the cosmos (in this case the Copernican notion of heliocentricity -- the sun's the center of things rather than the earth). The story is employed to teach children that closed-minded religious people are afraid of science and the truth. Virtually every morally troubling development in science results in a public invocation of this old saw. If Galileo is not called as a central witness for the scientists, then his ghost is surely conjured by the press.
The problem is, it's spin. Ancient, pro-enlightenment, zealot spin.
Robert Nisbet in (probably my favorite book) Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary, writes that the Galileo myth was adopted by the French Enlightenment to discredit the Catholic Church. Their first choice for martyr was Isaac Newton. Unfortunately, Newton was a religious fanatic in their eyes. So they picked Galileo instead and rewrote significant aspects of his biography (like the obvious fact that he was religious) so as to make the Church the darkest of villains.
Western Civilization's love of the individual in pursuit of the truth is perhaps its greatest attribute. So it shouldn't be shocking that we are all very receptive to the idea. "From Diderot to Brecht, the myth of Galileo the rationalist-scientist-martyr dominated Western thought, and even today it shows few signs of abating," wrote Nisbet in 1982.
He was right. Galileo is still the reigning symbol for the idea that religion can't handle the truth and that the Catholic Church as a matter of settled policy punishes those who speak it.
Yes, Galileo was eventually found guilty of heresy. But his problems stemmed first and foremost from jealous fellow-scientists. Galileo's first muzzle was one he put on himself. In 1597 he wrote a letter to Johannes Kepler (the first big Copernican and discoverer of the three laws of moving planet stuff). In the letter, Galileo told Kepler that, yeah Copernicus got things right, but he thought the Aristotelian academic establishment would have a cow if he said so publicly.
Twelve years later he created his own astronomical telescope and confirmed the existence of lunar moons, stars in the Milky Way, and various "planets" revolving around Jupiter. A year later he wrote "The Starry Messenger" and he won piles of awards, a cushy job, and all sorts of junk that they would have had on The Price is Right if it existed back then ("I'd say that Saracen's head costs 12 guineas, Roberto").
Galileo went to Rome to show his findings to the Vatican. Despite the fact that his research couldn't have been more Copernican if it had been titled, "As told by Copernicus," the Church gave him all sorts of attaboys. While in Rome for a couple years he published more Copernican-friendly papers, and the Church green-lighted all of it with nary a word or a restriction on distribution.
After Galileo went back to Padua, the leading scientific mediocrities started complaining. It was the scientists who said that challenging Aristotle was heresy -- not the Church. If Aristotle became obsolete than these guys would lose their prestigious posts and lucrative tutoring gigs. Much like Communist academics in Eastern Europe who invested a lifetime in Marxist theory, they had a lot more to lose from change. So, the tenured guild of professors enlisted the aid of the Dominicans (a rowdy and preachy bunch) to denounce Galileo.
In Tuscany, numerous Church officials and lay nobles supported Galileo during the assault. Still, Galileo had to return to Rome to face his accusers. He went. It was a big fight. The Vatican ordered him to hold off pursuing very specific areas of teaching until some corrections could be made to his last book. Galileo even got a letter from the Vatican hierarchy stating that
Actually, it was his fellow jealous scientists that persuaded the church to try him. Initially inclined to leave Galileo to his own ideas, the church became part of a political football game where vested political interests, including those of the scientific community and more ambitious ecclesiastic authorities, kicked him around for reasons involving disputes over power and influence. The whole affair had little to do with the practice of religion than with position and authority.
That's assuming that the projects they had to pull money from because of SSC haven't contributed in the meanwhile. Yes, if money is unlimited in supply, we should fund every great thing on the planet and we would have a utopia. I worked at JPL at the time SSC was canceled, and all the senior scientists were relieved. Even my physics profs were relieved that a zillion other small physics experiments would not be cut.
Actually, in this age of computers, I don't see any intrinsic advantage to metric, but I see lots of intrinsic advantages for the Imperial system.
Who can visualize something divided by ten or even worse four tenths? I can easily visualize something half or a third of any given length. Furthermore English units are related to something immediately tangible: I can walk out a floor measurement in feet. Yards are also ultimately related to the length of an arm. But millionths of the arc distance from the pole to the equator? Please.
It has been 25 years since working with anything astronomical, but ...
I googled for the Leonid meteor shower and found that most of the objects in that shower enter from around RA=153 , DECL=+22.
Coming from the north (22 degrees), a meteor has a greater chance of hitting land as most of the land masses are in the northern hemisphere.
Orionids also enter from higher DECs. I'm too lazy to check other meteor showers, but there's an hypothesis for you.
The benefit is in the disincentive for a company to engage in unfair business practices. This benefits competing companies like AMD.
To grant your point its due, the money itself probably will be wasted, just like other fine money is probably wasted.
It makes me sad that the US had the foresight to create a collider that would have produced results for decades but decided to kill it because of short-sighted congressmen.
From a cost/benefit perspective, I think that $18 billion, the cost of the SSC converted into 2009 dollars, probably did better in other science projects. Not that there weren't other wastes of research dollars, such as the ISS.
Not saying it isn't true, but I hadn't heard that many were murdered. I know many died from disease, which the Spaniards doubtless didn't know much about themselves. Can you provide a reference? Truly curious.
Solar panels are great for powering electronics, which only need to move electrons, and small servos, which don't use much power. To lift payloads, I'm afraid sunlight is just too diffuse to do the job.
Your arguments have been answered in many places. Here's one http://pbjots.blogspot.com/2008/07/electric-vs-combustion-engine.html As far as pollution goes, power plants are kept under tighter controls and better maintenance than your average automobile engine - comparing barrel of oil to power plant generation versus barrel of oil to refinement to automobile engine.
For conductors like cables, still not correct. It is not electrons "pushing" electrons. It is the electric field propagating through the conductor at near the speed of light that moves the electrons at the other end.
I haven't really seen any stats on the numbers of "qualified scientists and engineers" produced in the world. Not sure how you would measure them anyway. But I am doubtful that India and China produce appreciably different percentages of them than the US or UK. Smart students generally do well in spite of the education system. I could be wrong, but from my completely unscientific and anecdotal scan of the news, at least, the US and UK still seem to produce approximately the same percentages of breakthroughs in science and technology that they always have. Achievement is about 20% ability, 30% opportunity, and 50% discipline. If someone has some relevant stats, it would be interesting to see them.
A sober assessment. I always found RMS's Utopian view a little too unrealistic. Gates was ruthless in his earlier days, but like many people he has matured and mellowed some with age.
Yuck. There has got to be something better, though I don't have any ideas myself that the lowest of the low won't try to exploit.
It seems that remarks about eating cats or cat put-downs have more mod points. Let's do another correlation study here.
I think the payoff won't be hardware sales per se, though many customers would prefer a one-stop solution for hardware and software. Instead, I think it may be largely from the software side. Current customers of MySQL haven't moved to the enhanced version because many think of Oracle or DB2 for enterprise. Some analysts think that with a big company supporting MySQL it may lure enterprise level customers away from Oracle and IBM.
Interesting. One cute section:
... the Galileo myth was adopted by the French Enlightenment to discredit the Catholic Church. Their first choice for martyr was Isaac Newton. Unfortunately, Newton was a religious fanatic in their eyes. So they picked Galileo instead and rewrote significant aspects of his biography (like the obvious fact that he was religious) so as to make the Church the darkest of villains."
"The problem is, it's spin. Ancient, pro-enlightenment, zealot spin
In principle a non-random strategy can be counteracted, but this assumes there are no constraints on person trying to counteract it.
In particular, a terrorist would presumeably have to recruit someone who doesn't fit the profile: say, someone who isn't Middle Eastern. I'm not saying that isn't doable. Mohammed can perhaps find some blond haired, blue eyed person from Minnesota who wants radical Islam for the world, or a grandmother from Omaha who is willing to blow up babies, but I think it would be a pretty limiting factor, which is worth something in itself.
Sadly, many companies engage in such practices for "insurance" to protect themselves by trading frivolous law suits. "You sue me for using a push button, I'll sue you for using a dial. Now can we both just drop the case?"
The reason language is acquired more easily at an early age is because the brain hasn't been wired fully yet then. Dendrites from nerve cells grow and make connections in response to learning. In a child, there is considerable space between dendrites. When a young person learns a language, he literally wires his brain for it. This occurs to a lesser degree later in life, but by then most dendritic connections are already made.
:(
They did brain studies of song birds and found that the brains had much more dendritic connections when young birds heard songs from their parents. If they were separated from their parents, much fewer connections were found. Sad experiment, BTW
You would need a bit of a tweak to make it work. In a zero pressure environment, you wouldn't see the bladder collapse, but you could conceivably pressurize the interior of the tank. Then I would see no reason, the bladder wouldn't collapse.