...the team found ochre, bladelets and evidence of shellfish -- findings that reveal the earliest dated evidence of modern humans. There is no such thing as "too much ochre and shellfish" in an interior design scheme. It is comforting to know there is at least one common theme running through humanity transcending the ages.
Right on. However, the phrase before said:
Thomas would like to see the reward knocked down three significant digits I suppose this means $222,000 would be rewritten $. (a dollar amount with zero sig figs). That's what I like to see: abstract, fair, AND cutesy.
Remember, the Written Word still matters
on
Blog Action Day
·
· Score: 1
and can influence people's ideas and opinions. I'm assuming anyone posting on slashdot believes this implicitly. If you are posting on slashdot and don't think it has some merit on some level, why bother? Granted, most blogs are pretty annoying. Nevertheless, I think it is generally a good thing to have a forum to express individual ideas. As long as there is a way for the end user to select and filter, I say blogs are a good thing.
Point well taken. However, cases must be forwarded by doctors to researchers somewhere on the planet (like in the case of TFA). I'm just not sure what criteria they use.
I always enjoy reading stories like this where some interesting or subtle medical effect is at work. It evokes images of proactive doctors working closely with patients to really understand their problems and symptoms, delving deep into the pathology of whatever condition they are complaining about. But in my experience, typical doctors in the US are not in the least bit interested in actually studying medical conditions that come across their desk (or, more appropriately, forwarding the situation on to a research pathologist). They usually have a pragmatic "if it hurts when you do that, then don't do that" or "if you are bleeding, I can help you but otherwise you are on your own" attitude. If I came to my doctor and said "hot and cold are reversed after I ate some shellfish," I'm pretty sure the response would be "then don't eat it next time, it just happens to some unlucky people. Drink some water, get some rest, it will go away in a month. That will be $200. Next!" In fact, I'm pretty sure the discussion of shellfish wouldn't even come up because the conversation never seems to get as far as that. I speak with some experience here because I have suffered from a couple of unusual (but not deadly) medical conditions. The response is always the same: "some unlucky people just have that and we don't know why. Have a nice day." Is it something I ate? Something I did? Something in my physiology? Something genetic? "We don't know. Have a nice day." But wouldn't they want to know? I blame this intellectual laziness on HMOs, which tend to put otherwise motivated doctors in a terrible bind. If a doctor wants to do some test to study an unusual condition, they have to justify it to a big business that will determine if the procedure was "necessary." If the procedure is deemed unnecessary but is done anyway, then the patient gets stuck with the bill. If the patient defaults, then the doctor must pay out of pocket. Such procedures are usually very expensive and doctors who do informative procedures that the HMO deems "unnecessary" (even if they are totally legitimate) can easily go bankrupt. In short, there is no motivation for doctors under HMOs to go the extra mile to really understand the cases they are studying in detail.
A XNOR temperature poison would be one that made you and your friend feel both hot or both cold after eating the same fish. Sort of a subtle effect for a poison.
I agree. I wasn't making fun of Shatner. I admire him quite a bit. For the record, I also happen to like the Kirk character too. Nevertheless, I think it is a terrible carreer move for a young actor today to play a very, very established, iconic character (embedded in our culture) like Kirk. Don't get me wrong, I wish the guy all the best. But first, like Shatner, he'll have to do a LOT of work after this (if he's given the chance) to hypercompensate for the typecast. Remember, although he is "in" these days, Shatner himself has spent most of his career after Star Trek trying to be taken seriously as an actor overcoming that Kirk stigma. Second, the Kirk character is so fixed in people's minds, nothing the guy can do will satisfy anyone (fans or casual viewers). He will be very creatively restricted as an actor. One false move and he'll be roasted from every side.
Good points all. But regardless of tastes, the buyer is (usually) assuming the car actually functions and doesn't lock up its transmission every few blocks.
Condolances went out today to Chis Pine, his family, and his career after he formally accepted the offer by Paramount to play James T. Kirk in the upcoming Star Trek movies.
Part of this issue here is that we are viewing Bismarck's observation "people who enjoy sausage and respect the law should not watch either being made" as applied to Encyclopedia. With most everyday (non wiki) documentation, we are simply handed a final product with little insight into the details of what went into it. It appears as a "static" object with dry, systematic, minor adjustments in time. For example, for a fascinating look into how the OED was created (brace yourself: are you sure you really want to know?), check out the book "The Professor and the Madman." With Wikipedia, because of its very nature, we are seeing the process unfold before us and the picture doesn't jive with expectation. Should the number of entries and participation scale forever? Shouldn't it be a clean and civil affair? I'm fairly sure the answer is "no" to both questions. I'm pretty sure that as a "-pedia" of any sort, this saturation effect is exactly the behavior one expects: a rapid growth as bread-and-butter topics get filled up, more expansion as obscuria information is added, then saturation as the knowledge-base reaches some intermediate steady state with details filling in constantly. There will be gradual growth as new topics are added, but this will be a small percentage of what already exists. I'm pretty sure the same things happen to any documentation, especially "-pedias" which are simply trying to outline existing knowledge (which is large, but finite). For example, if you plot the number of entries in Encyclopedia Britannica versus time, it also probably displays the same trend. Basically, the measure to determine if a "-pedia" has "peaked" isn't growth but completeness and accuracy.
Irregular verbs with lower frequencies of use -- such as "shrive" and "smite," with half-lives of 300 and 700 years, respectively -- are much more likely to succumb to regularization.
I'm not sure what fancy-pants sources these guys are using, but 'shirve' and 'smite' are definitely not low frequency verbs in my crowd. I say keep the 'mote' in smote. They will rue the day when 'smitted' crosses my lips!
Very well stated. Wick rotations are usually just a calculational tool in QFT (or in lattice QCD/QED, you can use it to model temperature dependence); nevertheless, I do think it is interesting to ask what the real physical consequences of a Euclidan space-time might be.
Spam, botnets and phishing all provide good opportunities to mislead voters and attack rivals with little risk of being caught, they say. So what you are saying is that, although they will use modern methods, they will try to make it like just about every other election in history.
Ok, as others have pointed out, this "paper" is not peer reviewed. I want to make it clear that I don't personally feel slashdot is the place to debate random physics papers on the arXiv. But, being slashdot, I will ignore my own pleas for sanity. What would be the physical consequences of time suddenly becoming space-like? First, on most mesoscopic scales in our everyday life, time already appears like a spatial dimension. Newton certainly thought so and our (incorrect) intuition tells us this is the case. The degree to which special and general relativity play a role in your everyday life is a measure of how "time-like" time feels. Probably not much. Nevertheless, if time suddenly physically became space-like, physicists all over the world would know it right away. All the weird stuff in relativity like time dilation and space contraction and so on, comes from time having an opposite metric sign as space. These effects all go away if time is space-like. For example, in a typical advanced undergraduate physics lab, you might measure the lifetime of a muon that is sitting in the lab as opposed to one that is crashing down from the sky. The one coming from above (at a large fraction the speed of light) lives longer in the frame of the ground because of time dilation. Easily verified in an afternoon. But I guess no more (at least after next Thursday or whenever this is supposed to happen). Similarly, all the special relativity equations required to perform basic momentum, energy, and lifetime calculations at colliders like Fermilab, CERN, and Brookhaven would suddenly stop working. That would be a big deal and it wouldn't be a subtle thing. IMHO, it makes for great science fiction, but I'm not sure where these guys are going with it.
Lets say I told you we had two spatial dimensions. You would imagine a plane with perpendicular x-y axes everyone knows and loves. If I asked you to draw the set of points that were equidistant from the origin, you would probably assume the geometry was Euclidian and would probably instinctively draw a circle (a good guess!). It is commonplace to hear "time is the fourth dimension." As first pass to visualize this, you might try to draw a two dimensional space-time plot: an x axis and a perpendicular time axis in a plane. If I then asked you to draw all the points equidistant from the origin, you would probably again draw a circle in this x-t plane. It seems to make sense, but is only true of time is a "space-like" dimension like "y" in the x-y plane. This is way Newton thought of things and it seems to be what the authors of the paper are advocating. But, unbeknownst to some people who cite "time as the fourth dimension," according to the theory of relativity, the set of equidistant points from the origin on a x-t graph would actually be hyperbole, not circles. This is because in relativity space-time is a Minkowski geometry, not Euclidian. All the weird stuff in special relativity like time dilation and length contraction come about because of this weird geometry. In fancier language, time has an opposite sign than space in the metric. The metric determines how distances are calculated in a given geometry. If time has the same sign as space in the metric, then space-time becomes Euclidian and one would say that time was a space-like. The article is probably extra confusing to non-physics people because most probably didn't know time wasn't space-like to begin with.
...or at least something about it? The twirl filter is a canned algorithm in photoshop so, as others have pointed out, it doesn't seem so shocking that one could untwirl it post hoc if just handed the image. However, given an arbitrary home grown distortion or filter, I'm not so sure it would be so straightforward. I supose if you knew the initial state was a face, perhaps that alone would help leverage some information about the mapping.
of people you've never heard of who claim to be Writers who write about writing. Like musicians who write songs about being on the road doing gigs or business people who spend all their time attending effectiveness training seminars, it demonstrates a certain loss of perspective in the craft. Isn't it interesting how most people who write these "how to publish a novel" books are either obscure or unpublished themselves? That snippy comment aside, I think the hubris-ridden article raises some good points. Writing well is a craft, but like any craft it takes place within constraints. Those constraints are dynamic and writers should be judged within their appropriate local conditions. However, if the constraints on your craft are rapidly expanding (e.g. in the case of writing and the internet) and you don't acknowledge the adjustment, your rigidity sounds about as silly as a Sumerian high priest bitching about how no one seems to do cuneiform right anymore.
Well stated. I defintely see your point. However, as an academic I take some issue with your last paragraph. In my experience, academics are not much different than everyone else. There is a spectrum of drones and people willing to sell their ideals (and those of others) to get ahead. But there are also plenty of iconoclasts and people with strong ideals. You are correct in that a large part of the selection process hinges on the ability to obtain external funding. But being able to get funding for your work is not mutually exculsive with challenging authority or thinking freely.
I'm not sure why this is considered controversial. I do personally think it is sort of interesting, but I'm not sure where the "real" story is. It would be like if someone who just discovered the internet posted "did you know that the suffix.org is meant to be for non-profit organizations but in reality anyone can use it?" Shocking! Must be a conspiracy. This strikes me as the same kind of thing. It is a bit of common trivia not generally known by people who don't write research grants. But its not a whistle-blower revelation regarding a large scale breach of ethics. Is it really surprising that academics who get NSA funding want to keep a little quiet about it? I can think of a lot of practical reasons this might be the case. What bugs me is that the article makes it sounds like chagrin is the motivator: they are ashamed of their funding source because academics are suppose to be free thinking anti-establishment types. But I think the reality is much simpler: academics have a spectrum of beliefs like everyone else and moreover are happy to get funding where they can get it. Although I may not agree with everything the NSA does, taking money from them in the form of formal research grants does not constitute a breach of ethics of any kind (as this wikileak thing implies). Besides, a research grant probably created this really cool kids page (its sort of psychotic if you think about it). Another interesting thing is that a huge amount of computing the NSA does has to do with linux-based security issues. Perhaps this whole story is just an NSA cover to get a mildly amusing NSA story on the front pages of slashdot. Come on, Dr. Malda and reveal your true funding sources.
No, obviously, you should only index the when it is used as a noun, not as an article. So the band "The The" should be indexed under "The, The" by moving the article to the end. I always thought the first "The" was being used as an adjective...
To compare a James Randi skeptics conference (or skepticism/atheism in general) to a cult or religion is absurd. I agree with the grandparent post that skeptics and atheist societies do tend to suffer from a form of hero worship coupled to avid consumerism. Most of the hero worship is used to drive various skeptic product lines, which is annoying but transparently obvious. There is nothing covert or subtle about it. Sort of like the old Monty Python gag of "we're all individuals!" (Ayn Rand's Objectivism suffered from the same effect). However, one shouldn't confuse blind hero worship and actually acknowledging someone's legitimate skill-based accomplishments. In my experience, a healthy portion of the enthusiasm at a skeptics conference comes from the latter.
Sorry if my comment came accross as rude humor. Your point is well taken. However, I was trying to indicate an irony: the Book of Mormon and indeed other holy books (which claim to have a fair amount of information in them about how the universe functions) have plenty of references to non-existent creatures. Yet, they somehow fail to mention the dinosaurs (real "mythological" creatures we know existed). In or out of context, in the form of quotes or bad humor, it is a perfectly legitimate thing to point out. To a *literalist* of any religion (and there are many), literary symbology is not possible in a holy book. Context still plays a role, but to a literalist, if a dragon is used in a simile, then clearly it must be real for the simile to hold true. Why compare something real (the fighting power of men) to something imaginary (dragons)? The Christian bible also speaks of unicorns. A biblical literalist must therefore also believe in actual unicorns. But on the other side, if you discard unicorns, dragons, satyrs, or cockatrice as being poetic flights of fancy, then where does it stop?
Classical (physics) consistency hinges on keeping ALL the initial conditions the same for each trial. At least for me, keeping the same tuning configuration each time I play is only one of my many worries. That said, an automated tuner will still be helpful in my ongoing quest to hit the quantum-limited variations of my performances. Besides, it's cool!
Slashdot Mirror
...the team found ochre, bladelets and evidence of shellfish -- findings that reveal the earliest dated evidence of modern humans. There is no such thing as "too much ochre and shellfish" in an interior design scheme. It is comforting to know there is at least one common theme running through humanity transcending the ages.and can influence people's ideas and opinions. I'm assuming anyone posting on slashdot believes this implicitly. If you are posting on slashdot and don't think it has some merit on some level, why bother? Granted, most blogs are pretty annoying. Nevertheless, I think it is generally a good thing to have a forum to express individual ideas. As long as there is a way for the end user to select and filter, I say blogs are a good thing.
Point well taken. However, cases must be forwarded by doctors to researchers somewhere on the planet (like in the case of TFA). I'm just not sure what criteria they use.
I always enjoy reading stories like this where some interesting or subtle medical effect is at work. It evokes images of proactive doctors working closely with patients to really understand their problems and symptoms, delving deep into the pathology of whatever condition they are complaining about. But in my experience, typical doctors in the US are not in the least bit interested in actually studying medical conditions that come across their desk (or, more appropriately, forwarding the situation on to a research pathologist). They usually have a pragmatic "if it hurts when you do that, then don't do that" or "if you are bleeding, I can help you but otherwise you are on your own" attitude. If I came to my doctor and said "hot and cold are reversed after I ate some shellfish," I'm pretty sure the response would be "then don't eat it next time, it just happens to some unlucky people. Drink some water, get some rest, it will go away in a month. That will be $200. Next!" In fact, I'm pretty sure the discussion of shellfish wouldn't even come up because the conversation never seems to get as far as that. I speak with some experience here because I have suffered from a couple of unusual (but not deadly) medical conditions. The response is always the same: "some unlucky people just have that and we don't know why. Have a nice day." Is it something I ate? Something I did? Something in my physiology? Something genetic? "We don't know. Have a nice day." But wouldn't they want to know? I blame this intellectual laziness on HMOs, which tend to put otherwise motivated doctors in a terrible bind. If a doctor wants to do some test to study an unusual condition, they have to justify it to a big business that will determine if the procedure was "necessary." If the procedure is deemed unnecessary but is done anyway, then the patient gets stuck with the bill. If the patient defaults, then the doctor must pay out of pocket. Such procedures are usually very expensive and doctors who do informative procedures that the HMO deems "unnecessary" (even if they are totally legitimate) can easily go bankrupt. In short, there is no motivation for doctors under HMOs to go the extra mile to really understand the cases they are studying in detail.
A XNOR temperature poison would be one that made you and your friend feel both hot or both cold after eating the same fish. Sort of a subtle effect for a poison.
I agree. I wasn't making fun of Shatner. I admire him quite a bit. For the record, I also happen to like the Kirk character too. Nevertheless, I think it is a terrible carreer move for a young actor today to play a very, very established, iconic character (embedded in our culture) like Kirk. Don't get me wrong, I wish the guy all the best. But first, like Shatner, he'll have to do a LOT of work after this (if he's given the chance) to hypercompensate for the typecast. Remember, although he is "in" these days, Shatner himself has spent most of his career after Star Trek trying to be taken seriously as an actor overcoming that Kirk stigma. Second, the Kirk character is so fixed in people's minds, nothing the guy can do will satisfy anyone (fans or casual viewers). He will be very creatively restricted as an actor. One false move and he'll be roasted from every side.
Good points all. But regardless of tastes, the buyer is (usually) assuming the car actually functions and doesn't lock up its transmission every few blocks.
Condolances went out today to Chis Pine, his family, and his career after he formally accepted the offer by Paramount to play James T. Kirk in the upcoming Star Trek movies.
Part of this issue here is that we are viewing Bismarck's observation "people who enjoy sausage and respect the law should not watch either being made" as applied to Encyclopedia. With most everyday (non wiki) documentation, we are simply handed a final product with little insight into the details of what went into it. It appears as a "static" object with dry, systematic, minor adjustments in time. For example, for a fascinating look into how the OED was created (brace yourself: are you sure you really want to know?), check out the book "The Professor and the Madman." With Wikipedia, because of its very nature, we are seeing the process unfold before us and the picture doesn't jive with expectation. Should the number of entries and participation scale forever? Shouldn't it be a clean and civil affair? I'm fairly sure the answer is "no" to both questions. I'm pretty sure that as a "-pedia" of any sort, this saturation effect is exactly the behavior one expects: a rapid growth as bread-and-butter topics get filled up, more expansion as obscuria information is added, then saturation as the knowledge-base reaches some intermediate steady state with details filling in constantly. There will be gradual growth as new topics are added, but this will be a small percentage of what already exists. I'm pretty sure the same things happen to any documentation, especially "-pedias" which are simply trying to outline existing knowledge (which is large, but finite). For example, if you plot the number of entries in Encyclopedia Britannica versus time, it also probably displays the same trend. Basically, the measure to determine if a "-pedia" has "peaked" isn't growth but completeness and accuracy.
I'm not sure what fancy-pants sources these guys are using, but 'shirve' and 'smite' are definitely not low frequency verbs in my crowd. I say keep the 'mote' in smote. They will rue the day when 'smitted' crosses my lips!
Very well stated. Wick rotations are usually just a calculational tool in QFT (or in lattice QCD/QED, you can use it to model temperature dependence); nevertheless, I do think it is interesting to ask what the real physical consequences of a Euclidan space-time might be.
Good points. Even if the paper is BS, I think it's still a fun line of inquiry.
Nevertheless, if time suddenly physically became space-like, physicists all over the world would know it right away.
No they wouldn't, because they'd no longer be alive.
Right. That's a reallly good point, actually.Ok, as others have pointed out, this "paper" is not peer reviewed. I want to make it clear that I don't personally feel slashdot is the place to debate random physics papers on the arXiv. But, being slashdot, I will ignore my own pleas for sanity. What would be the physical consequences of time suddenly becoming space-like? First, on most mesoscopic scales in our everyday life, time already appears like a spatial dimension. Newton certainly thought so and our (incorrect) intuition tells us this is the case. The degree to which special and general relativity play a role in your everyday life is a measure of how "time-like" time feels. Probably not much. Nevertheless, if time suddenly physically became space-like, physicists all over the world would know it right away. All the weird stuff in relativity like time dilation and space contraction and so on, comes from time having an opposite metric sign as space. These effects all go away if time is space-like. For example, in a typical advanced undergraduate physics lab, you might measure the lifetime of a muon that is sitting in the lab as opposed to one that is crashing down from the sky. The one coming from above (at a large fraction the speed of light) lives longer in the frame of the ground because of time dilation. Easily verified in an afternoon. But I guess no more (at least after next Thursday or whenever this is supposed to happen). Similarly, all the special relativity equations required to perform basic momentum, energy, and lifetime calculations at colliders like Fermilab, CERN, and Brookhaven would suddenly stop working. That would be a big deal and it wouldn't be a subtle thing. IMHO, it makes for great science fiction, but I'm not sure where these guys are going with it.
Lets say I told you we had two spatial dimensions. You would imagine a plane with perpendicular x-y axes everyone knows and loves. If I asked you to draw the set of points that were equidistant from the origin, you would probably assume the geometry was Euclidian and would probably instinctively draw a circle (a good guess!). It is commonplace to hear "time is the fourth dimension." As first pass to visualize this, you might try to draw a two dimensional space-time plot: an x axis and a perpendicular time axis in a plane. If I then asked you to draw all the points equidistant from the origin, you would probably again draw a circle in this x-t plane. It seems to make sense, but is only true of time is a "space-like" dimension like "y" in the x-y plane. This is way Newton thought of things and it seems to be what the authors of the paper are advocating. But, unbeknownst to some people who cite "time as the fourth dimension," according to the theory of relativity, the set of equidistant points from the origin on a x-t graph would actually be hyperbole, not circles. This is because in relativity space-time is a Minkowski geometry, not Euclidian. All the weird stuff in special relativity like time dilation and length contraction come about because of this weird geometry. In fancier language, time has an opposite sign than space in the metric. The metric determines how distances are calculated in a given geometry. If time has the same sign as space in the metric, then space-time becomes Euclidian and one would say that time was a space-like. The article is probably extra confusing to non-physics people because most probably didn't know time wasn't space-like to begin with.
...or at least something about it? The twirl filter is a canned algorithm in photoshop so, as others have pointed out, it doesn't seem so shocking that one could untwirl it post hoc if just handed the image. However, given an arbitrary home grown distortion or filter, I'm not so sure it would be so straightforward. I supose if you knew the initial state was a face, perhaps that alone would help leverage some information about the mapping.
of people you've never heard of who claim to be Writers who write about writing. Like musicians who write songs about being on the road doing gigs or business people who spend all their time attending effectiveness training seminars, it demonstrates a certain loss of perspective in the craft. Isn't it interesting how most people who write these "how to publish a novel" books are either obscure or unpublished themselves? That snippy comment aside, I think the hubris-ridden article raises some good points. Writing well is a craft, but like any craft it takes place within constraints. Those constraints are dynamic and writers should be judged within their appropriate local conditions. However, if the constraints on your craft are rapidly expanding (e.g. in the case of writing and the internet) and you don't acknowledge the adjustment, your rigidity sounds about as silly as a Sumerian high priest bitching about how no one seems to do cuneiform right anymore.
Well stated. I defintely see your point. However, as an academic I take some issue with your last paragraph. In my experience, academics are not much different than everyone else. There is a spectrum of drones and people willing to sell their ideals (and those of others) to get ahead. But there are also plenty of iconoclasts and people with strong ideals. You are correct in that a large part of the selection process hinges on the ability to obtain external funding. But being able to get funding for your work is not mutually exculsive with challenging authority or thinking freely.
I'm not sure why this is considered controversial. I do personally think it is sort of interesting, but I'm not sure where the "real" story is. It would be like if someone who just discovered the internet posted "did you know that the suffix .org is meant to be for non-profit organizations but in reality anyone can use it?" Shocking! Must be a conspiracy. This strikes me as the same kind of thing. It is a bit of common trivia not generally known by people who don't write research grants. But its not a whistle-blower revelation regarding a large scale breach of ethics. Is it really surprising that academics who get NSA funding want to keep a little quiet about it? I can think of a lot of practical reasons this might be the case. What bugs me is that the article makes it sounds like chagrin is the motivator: they are ashamed of their funding source because academics are suppose to be free thinking anti-establishment types. But I think the reality is much simpler: academics have a spectrum of beliefs like everyone else and moreover are happy to get funding where they can get it. Although I may not agree with everything the NSA does, taking money from them in the form of formal research grants does not constitute a breach of ethics of any kind (as this wikileak thing implies). Besides, a research grant probably created this really cool kids page (its sort of psychotic if you think about it). Another interesting thing is that a huge amount of computing the NSA does has to do with linux-based security issues. Perhaps this whole story is just an NSA cover to get a mildly amusing NSA story on the front pages of slashdot. Come on, Dr. Malda and reveal your true funding sources.
To compare a James Randi skeptics conference (or skepticism/atheism in general) to a cult or religion is absurd. I agree with the grandparent post that skeptics and atheist societies do tend to suffer from a form of hero worship coupled to avid consumerism. Most of the hero worship is used to drive various skeptic product lines, which is annoying but transparently obvious. There is nothing covert or subtle about it. Sort of like the old Monty Python gag of "we're all individuals!" (Ayn Rand's Objectivism suffered from the same effect). However, one shouldn't confuse blind hero worship and actually acknowledging someone's legitimate skill-based accomplishments. In my experience, a healthy portion of the enthusiasm at a skeptics conference comes from the latter.
Sorry if my comment came accross as rude humor. Your point is well taken. However, I was trying to indicate an irony: the Book of Mormon and indeed other holy books (which claim to have a fair amount of information in them about how the universe functions) have plenty of references to non-existent creatures. Yet, they somehow fail to mention the dinosaurs (real "mythological" creatures we know existed). In or out of context, in the form of quotes or bad humor, it is a perfectly legitimate thing to point out. To a *literalist* of any religion (and there are many), literary symbology is not possible in a holy book. Context still plays a role, but to a literalist, if a dragon is used in a simile, then clearly it must be real for the simile to hold true. Why compare something real (the fighting power of men) to something imaginary (dragons)? The Christian bible also speaks of unicorns. A biblical literalist must therefore also believe in actual unicorns. But on the other side, if you discard unicorns, dragons, satyrs, or cockatrice as being poetic flights of fancy, then where does it stop?
Classical (physics) consistency hinges on keeping ALL the initial conditions the same for each trial. At least for me, keeping the same tuning configuration each time I play is only one of my many worries. That said, an automated tuner will still be helpful in my ongoing quest to hit the quantum-limited variations of my performances. Besides, it's cool!