You are right, the full original sentence reveals the extent of his soul-crushingly bad sentence. But the opening phrase does have issues by itself. The problem with "It was a dark and stormy night" is not just in the redundancy of "dark" and "night," as some have implied. Certainly different nights have different degrees of darkness, so describing a "night" as "dark" alone is reasonable if put in the right context (which he tries to do after starting things off so badly). But, you have to admit that, as a first phrase of the novel, just to declare matter-of-factly with two adjectives that the night was dark and stormy is pretty weak. By doing this, the author clearly wants to create a certain mysterious atmosphere but utterly fails to do so by reducing the situation to a weather report. This is the classic "telling not showing" problem in creative writing. As an opening moment of a novel, it is very limp.
The other problem that compounds this weakness is starting the sentence with "it". As a pronoun, "it" refers to "night" so the sentence basically states "The night was a dark and stormy night" which is a tautology. Rather, just say, "The night was dark and stormy." This still suffers from the weak-ass weather report problem, but at least gets right to the point.
This google dupe thing on/. is getting downright creepy. Google services and search features are very well docmuented at google.com, thank you very much. We don't need to see it on the front page of/. unless it is absolutely brand-spankin' new (e.g. released that day) or some "secret" undocumented feature.
While the idea and look of the Optimus keyboard seems pretty geek-o-riffic (and
I'm guessing it looks pretty attractive while humming along),
how often do people look at the keyboard while typing anyway? Do you
seriously need to be reminded that the shift key makes
the letters CAPS? Also, at least for me, frequently used
application-dependent function keys and other special
character keys etc. are usually looked up and memorized early on in the
learning curve of an application anyway. Perhaps I'm alone here, but I might prefer the rather elegant
"anti-Optimus"
Das Keyboard instead.
From your response, I'm guessing you don't use special relativity at work (and if you do, you might want to take a refresher course). Also, it's acceleration not "accelartion".
Pay attention and read the parent more carefully. A quantity called jerk is defined as the third derivative of position with time:
x = f(t)
v = dx/dt = f'(t)
a = dv/dt = f''(t)
j = da/dt = f'''(t)
While I can't claim my grammar, punctuation, and spelling are always perfect, I actually find it personally difficult to not at least try and follow the rules to the best of my ability. I find this to be the case for virtually all levels of my writing from formal papers, prose, personal journals, Slashdot posts, and both friendly and formal emails.
For example, I was once on a list where the moderator encouraged us to abbreviate words (copiously) and avoid capital letters. This was in an effort to be "efficient" and succinct. Initially, this basically made sense to me, so I tried this method for a post or two -- and it just drove me nuts. For me, it took more effort to avoid the rules than to just follow them. Since I do quite a bit of writing, my typing-trained hands instinctively reached for the shift key at the beginning of sentences, for a space after commas, and for a double space after semicolons and periods. Perhaps it's a sign I've been well brainwashed.
Nevertheless, I certainly don't look down on people who use informal post or email style in the right context. I actually admire the efficiency (assuming I know what they are talking about). However, that same carefree "efficient" style in a more formal setting just looks awkward and unprofessional.
Often what people call English "rules" are simply "style guidelines", nothing more. This style thing can be taken to an extreme, going beyond the usual games played by grammar and spelling Nazis. I call it "How Modern Editing Practices Destroyed Expressive Writing." This occurs when people come to obsessively enforce their own style pet peeves more than real English rules. For example, even though we are often trained otherwise, it is perfectly ok to start sentences with "And" and end sentences with prepositions. The English language allows for this. In literature, it is ok to have sentence fragments framed as sentences (if it helps with the pacing). Fnord. I had English teachers tell me things like "never use 'it' to start a sentence unless 'it' refers back to something in particular that isn't tautological." For example, the sentence "It is a sunny day" is bad. Why? What does "it" refer to? Well, "day" I guess. So what you are really saying is "the day is a sunny day." Tautology. Just eliminate "it" and write, "the day is sunny." Perhaps this guideline is good style and leads to crisper prose, but is it incorrect? No, not technically. But for some, starting a sentence with "it" becomes a form of Santanism akin to using "should of" to mean "should have".
This obsession with arbitrary style rules can get quite obscene. Modern fiction editors, upon receiving a fresh manuscript, will often flip to an author's first dialog. If the author uses verbs or adverbs to describe exchanges, the entire manuscript is placed in jeopardy. Using such a style apparently shows heightened levels of amateurism that will not be tolerated. For example, "'Hi,' Bob said glibly" (thanks to the adverb "glibly") is right out. "'You are a grammar Nazi!' Eunice retorted" is considered amateurish (because of the verb "retorted"). In fact, adverbs in general are considered passe. As is the passive voice. All of these little "violations" can mean the difference between getting published and not. Ironically, some modern writing books actually use classics (like The Great Gadsby and Moby Dick, to name a couple) to demonstrate how not to write.
Once you start collecting little "rules" like this in your head, you start noticing violations more and thus become more obsessive about enforcing them, even if they are only arbitrary style issues. My advice is to chill. The English language is such a crazy, beautiful, and malleable system. And the essential rules are basically pretty easy. It seems a shame to try and asphyxiate it with arbitrary constraints.
First of all you're only referring to special relativity here, which
ignores acceleration and gravity.
I agree with the central message in your post. However, SR does
include acceleration, jerk (the third derivative of
position with time), and in principle all orders of positional change
with time. You can also apply gravity as "just another force" in
Newton's Second Law F=dp/dt, where F is the net force and dp/dt is the
instantaneous rate of change of the momentum in time. Relativistically,
p=gamma*m*v where gamma=1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). SR is an essentially
complete package of kinematics and dynamics just like Newton's Laws. You
can do (highly) accurate rocket science with it and certainly don't have to
stop with
velocity!
What SR does not develop fully is the
"equivalence principle" which says, in brief, that gravitational
acceleration and "kinematic" acceleration
(e.g. sitting in an accelerating frame) are indistinguishable. When fully
developed, this
concept intimately links space-time to the gravitational force in a
non-trivial way -- and is what makes GR fundamentally different than
Newton's Laws and SR.
Water to wine? I'll leave that to Jedi and other mythological creatures.
But give me fresh-from-the-spring U-238 and I'll (eventually) turn some of it into a fine vintage Cabernet Pb-206.
Clearly the only objective thing to do is to conduct scientific experiments and force 6!=720 younglings to each watch a unique permutation of all the STAR WARS movies.
Charlie Kaufman created the two finest science fiction films of all time so far: "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."
Are these movies really generally regarded as science fiction? "Imaginative fiction", yes, I would say. But this is not the same as science fiction, is it? Perhaps the definition of SF has expanded so far as to include all forms of imaginative fiction of any kind. If so, why not include Citizen Kane and Shakes the Clown as well?
After reading OSC's book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (1990), it is clear he believes SF to be the most general form of literature possible (a point with which I disagree). This may partly explain why he includes Being John Malkovich as SF and categorically dismisses Star Trek as absolute tripe.
Measured on such a vast literary scale, Star Trek simply cannot compete. To compare it that way is a slippery slope. The work has to be put in context. It is a space opera exploration TV show done in the spirit of old school science fiction like Forbidden Planet. People like it. It is popular. It had some great moments -- and some not so great moments. Such is the nature of entertainment.
But next he'll explain how brilliant new SF like The Office or Arrested Development should be embraced in place of SF trash like The Matrix. A slippery slope indeed.
I am both an atheist and a scientist and give no credence to ID, Creationism, or other pseudoscientific philosophies. However, for the moment setting aside the skewed political and philosophical agendas being pursued by these groups [and my own biases], I do think that there is an interesting teleological question underlying the issue: "is it possible to objectively and reliably determine a priori if something was actively created or not?"
Currently, I think the he answer is a very murky "sometimes." This "sometimes" usually involves essentially knowing the answer - and usually knowing something about the path of the system to the final observed state. Nevertheless, one has to wonder if there isn't some clean scientific measure of this "property" of objects.
At some point, people bandied about
Shannon entropy as a possible measure. The idea being that created objects will have a lower entropy (i.e. fewer microscopic configurations) and thus "more information." Not a bad idea. The problem is that one has to know quite a bit about the nature of the constraints in the system. For example, "water" molecules of arbitrary geometry and arbitrary chemistry may or may not undergo a phase transition to ice when cooled below some critical temperature. But "real" water molecules (of a specific geometry with a special natural chemistry) always undergo such a transition under everyday STP circumstances. If you just applied such an entropy argument to the "arbitrary" water, you might conclude that ice was impossible unless "created." Moreover, one has to have considerable knowledge of the system's degree of isolation and degree of equilibrium (thermodynamic, information, or otherwise). Sub-systems can lower their entropy if another part of the system is dumping energy into it (e.g. earth-sun, etc.). Not to mention applying information theory and thermodynamics to systems out of equilibrium is tricky business, if not impossible. Not surprisingly the ID folks exactly used this information theory argument to try bolster their claims life was indeed created. Another example of how a perfectly reasonable scientific question can be distorted and abused for the sake of a misguided philosophy or agenda.
Nevertheless, I do wonder if a reliable, generic scientific "creation measure" can be constructed (and if it would identify itself as having been created).
The question is a fair one. First, I claim that understanding the universe is probably itself a pretty reasonable pursuit. But philosophy aside, the goal of the RHIC experiments is not primarily to study the early universe (although that is a natural consequence of what they are doing). The main goal is to study bulk nuclear matter under extreme conditions. "Bulk" in this context meaning "whole nuclei" as opposed to just a couple protons or quarks. "Extreme" meaning ultrarelativistic (v~c) collisions. That is, in effect, to study the phase diagram of nuclear matter (as opposed to "atomic matter", the usual stuff we do chemistry with) by heating it with violent collisions (the temperature of this fluid is estimated to be about a trillion degrees C).
In principle, understanding the fundamental nature of nuclear matter could have tremendous technological consequences -- in principle. Direct technology from perfect partonic fluids will probably not happen in five years but perhaps in twenty, fifty, or one hundred years. In the mid-to-late 19th century, people asked the same sorts of question the parent is asking about electricity and magnetism: "what's it all good for anyway." I think we all know where that went. The Department of Energy in the US, the main benefactor of the RHIC project, generally supports this sort of basic research precisely because it often leads to huge technological breakthroughs.
But it isn't just a pipe dream of future technology that drives the DOE. They know that in the process of simply trying to do something as crazy as finding a quark-gluon plasma or a perfect partonic fluid involves learning a lot of new stuff about existing technology and pushing it to its limits. You have to build massive detectors, huge computing facilities, and have ultra-fast electronics to handle the data rates. You also need to educate, train, and employ thousands of Ph.D.'s -- a sure way to ensure some fraction of the population are trained scientists. All of this drives technology in big ways the private sector just can't afford to do -- precisely because there is no profit involved in this kind of dabbling. But in the end everybody wins because even if perfect partonic fluids never become useful, the technology needed to figure that out trickles down perhaps contributing to vastly to future technology.
As the parent suggests, the system created at RHIC not a superfluid. But I don't think this was ever the claim.
The article submitter uses the term "perfect fluid." Indeed the language that is actually used in both the article and the STAR white paper (a technical summary from one of the four RHIC experiments) is, in fact, "perfect fluid" (see p.42 in the link below). In the white paper, the term is also used in quotes and is qualified by the clarification that this means, in this context, a fluid free of of viscosity.
Black hole production at RHIC and the various associated doomsday scenarios were discussed back in 1999 in the
Jaffe Report. The basic message is that production of micro black holes at RHIC is possible, but the cross section is so tiny you would never see a meaningful signal above background. Also, higher energy densities had already been acheived at the Tevetron back in the 90's, so if black holes could be seen at RHIC, they would have already been seen at Fermilab.
Slashdot Mirror
The other problem that compounds this weakness is starting the sentence with "it". As a pronoun, "it" refers to "night" so the sentence basically states "The night was a dark and stormy night" which is a tautology. Rather, just say, "The night was dark and stormy." This still suffers from the weak-ass weather report problem, but at least gets right to the point.
...I saw rapper MC\Delta T perform. He was an engineering student. I guess this was pre-modern-gangsta-rap physics-chemistry-geeksta-rap.
This google dupe thing on /. is getting downright creepy. Google services and search features are very well docmuented at google.com, thank you very much. We don't need to see it on the front page of /. unless it is absolutely brand-spankin' new (e.g. released that day) or some "secret" undocumented feature.
While the idea and look of the Optimus keyboard seems pretty geek-o-riffic (and I'm guessing it looks pretty attractive while humming along), how often do people look at the keyboard while typing anyway? Do you seriously need to be reminded that the shift key makes the letters CAPS? Also, at least for me, frequently used application-dependent function keys and other special character keys etc. are usually looked up and memorized early on in the learning curve of an application anyway. Perhaps I'm alone here, but I might prefer the rather elegant "anti-Optimus" Das Keyboard instead.
Sorry, I think the term "jerk" in my original post was taken out of context. For example, see third derivative/jerk/jolt.
From your response, I'm guessing you don't use special relativity at work (and if you do, you might want to take a refresher course). Also, it's acceleration not "accelartion".
Pay attention and read the parent more carefully. A quantity called jerk is defined as the third derivative of position with time: x = f(t) v = dx/dt = f'(t) a = dv/dt = f''(t) j = da/dt = f'''(t)
For example, I was once on a list where the moderator encouraged us to abbreviate words (copiously) and avoid capital letters. This was in an effort to be "efficient" and succinct. Initially, this basically made sense to me, so I tried this method for a post or two -- and it just drove me nuts. For me, it took more effort to avoid the rules than to just follow them. Since I do quite a bit of writing, my typing-trained hands instinctively reached for the shift key at the beginning of sentences, for a space after commas, and for a double space after semicolons and periods. Perhaps it's a sign I've been well brainwashed.
Nevertheless, I certainly don't look down on people who use informal post or email style in the right context. I actually admire the efficiency (assuming I know what they are talking about). However, that same carefree "efficient" style in a more formal setting just looks awkward and unprofessional.
This obsession with arbitrary style rules can get quite obscene. Modern fiction editors, upon receiving a fresh manuscript, will often flip to an author's first dialog. If the author uses verbs or adverbs to describe exchanges, the entire manuscript is placed in jeopardy. Using such a style apparently shows heightened levels of amateurism that will not be tolerated. For example, "'Hi,' Bob said glibly" (thanks to the adverb "glibly") is right out. "'You are a grammar Nazi!' Eunice retorted" is considered amateurish (because of the verb "retorted"). In fact, adverbs in general are considered passe. As is the passive voice. All of these little "violations" can mean the difference between getting published and not. Ironically, some modern writing books actually use classics (like The Great Gadsby and Moby Dick, to name a couple) to demonstrate how not to write.
Once you start collecting little "rules" like this in your head, you start noticing violations more and thus become more obsessive about enforcing them, even if they are only arbitrary style issues. My advice is to chill. The English language is such a crazy, beautiful, and malleable system. And the essential rules are basically pretty easy. It seems a shame to try and asphyxiate it with arbitrary constraints.
I agree with the central message in your post. However, SR does include acceleration, jerk (the third derivative of position with time), and in principle all orders of positional change with time. You can also apply gravity as "just another force" in Newton's Second Law F=dp/dt, where F is the net force and dp/dt is the instantaneous rate of change of the momentum in time. Relativistically, p=gamma*m*v where gamma=1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). SR is an essentially complete package of kinematics and dynamics just like Newton's Laws. You can do (highly) accurate rocket science with it and certainly don't have to stop with velocity!
What SR does not develop fully is the "equivalence principle" which says, in brief, that gravitational acceleration and "kinematic" acceleration (e.g. sitting in an accelerating frame) are indistinguishable. When fully developed, this concept intimately links space-time to the gravitational force in a non-trivial way -- and is what makes GR fundamentally different than Newton's Laws and SR.
Water to wine? I'll leave that to Jedi and other mythological creatures. But give me fresh-from-the-spring U-238 and I'll (eventually) turn some of it into a fine vintage Cabernet Pb-206.
Clearly the only objective thing to do is to conduct scientific experiments and force 6!=720 younglings to each watch a unique permutation of all the STAR WARS movies.
Are these movies really generally regarded as science fiction? "Imaginative fiction", yes, I would say. But this is not the same as science fiction, is it? Perhaps the definition of SF has expanded so far as to include all forms of imaginative fiction of any kind. If so, why not include Citizen Kane and Shakes the Clown as well?
After reading OSC's book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (1990), it is clear he believes SF to be the most general form of literature possible (a point with which I disagree). This may partly explain why he includes Being John Malkovich as SF and categorically dismisses Star Trek as absolute tripe.
Measured on such a vast literary scale, Star Trek simply cannot compete. To compare it that way is a slippery slope. The work has to be put in context. It is a space opera exploration TV show done in the spirit of old school science fiction like Forbidden Planet. People like it. It is popular. It had some great moments -- and some not so great moments. Such is the nature of entertainment.
But next he'll explain how brilliant new SF like The Office or Arrested Development should be embraced in place of SF trash like The Matrix. A slippery slope indeed.
Currently, I think the he answer is a very murky "sometimes." This "sometimes" usually involves essentially knowing the answer - and usually knowing something about the path of the system to the final observed state. Nevertheless, one has to wonder if there isn't some clean scientific measure of this "property" of objects.
At some point, people bandied about Shannon entropy as a possible measure. The idea being that created objects will have a lower entropy (i.e. fewer microscopic configurations) and thus "more information." Not a bad idea. The problem is that one has to know quite a bit about the nature of the constraints in the system. For example, "water" molecules of arbitrary geometry and arbitrary chemistry may or may not undergo a phase transition to ice when cooled below some critical temperature. But "real" water molecules (of a specific geometry with a special natural chemistry) always undergo such a transition under everyday STP circumstances. If you just applied such an entropy argument to the "arbitrary" water, you might conclude that ice was impossible unless "created." Moreover, one has to have considerable knowledge of the system's degree of isolation and degree of equilibrium (thermodynamic, information, or otherwise). Sub-systems can lower their entropy if another part of the system is dumping energy into it (e.g. earth-sun, etc.). Not to mention applying information theory and thermodynamics to systems out of equilibrium is tricky business, if not impossible. Not surprisingly the ID folks exactly used this information theory argument to try bolster their claims life was indeed created. Another example of how a perfectly reasonable scientific question can be distorted and abused for the sake of a misguided philosophy or agenda.
Nevertheless, I do wonder if a reliable, generic scientific "creation measure" can be constructed (and if it would identify itself as having been created).
In principle, understanding the fundamental nature of nuclear matter could have tremendous technological consequences -- in principle. Direct technology from perfect partonic fluids will probably not happen in five years but perhaps in twenty, fifty, or one hundred years. In the mid-to-late 19th century, people asked the same sorts of question the parent is asking about electricity and magnetism: "what's it all good for anyway." I think we all know where that went. The Department of Energy in the US, the main benefactor of the RHIC project, generally supports this sort of basic research precisely because it often leads to huge technological breakthroughs.
But it isn't just a pipe dream of future technology that drives the DOE. They know that in the process of simply trying to do something as crazy as finding a quark-gluon plasma or a perfect partonic fluid involves learning a lot of new stuff about existing technology and pushing it to its limits. You have to build massive detectors, huge computing facilities, and have ultra-fast electronics to handle the data rates. You also need to educate, train, and employ thousands of Ph.D.'s -- a sure way to ensure some fraction of the population are trained scientists. All of this drives technology in big ways the private sector just can't afford to do -- precisely because there is no profit involved in this kind of dabbling. But in the end everybody wins because even if perfect partonic fluids never become useful, the technology needed to figure that out trickles down perhaps contributing to vastly to future technology.
The article submitter uses the term "perfect fluid." Indeed the language that is actually used in both the article and the STAR white paper (a technical summary from one of the four RHIC experiments) is, in fact, "perfect fluid" (see p.42 in the link below). In the white paper, the term is also used in quotes and is qualified by the clarification that this means, in this context, a fluid free of of viscosity.
STAR white paper
Now, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), that's a different story. Here the energy density and black hole production cross sections are actually high enough, a black hole production signal could actually be measured.
Sadly, in all cases, the black holes evaporate harmlessly.