Sorry, but you won't find that in Eastern Canada. I spent Christmas in Montreal and we didn't get any snow until boxing day (and even that had all melted away by the new year, when we expericened a week of spring-like weather). In Toronto, where I now live, we've seen maybe 3 days of light flurries since the beginning of winter, and temperatures haven't been cold enough for snow to stay on the ground for more than a day.
Especially when it comes to the point that we *need* to get off this rock. At that point all the AIDS vaccines, wells and roads all over the world become worth squat.
I would imagine people with AIDS would respectfully disagree with you.
According to General Relativity, the passage of time at a location depends on the gravitational field there. So, for instance, if the sun were to collapse into a black hole, there would be no change in the passage of time here. You would have to pass within a few Schwarzschild radii to see an effect (The Schwarzschild radius for the sun is about 3 kilometers, while Earth is 150 million km from the sum)
. I suppose I could get into the issue of the Iran/Iraq war which we tried to fix our mistake by arming another which we had to fix ourselves 20 years later.
I'm sorry, is the parent suggesting that the US fixed Iraq?
As to what this soccer ball universe could floating in, well, the question itself is probably the largest issue. We don't know the answer, but the it could very well be that there is no "outside of the soccer ball". The universe could be all that there is. There could be no "beyond" the universe or "outside" of the universe. It is hard concept to visualize, but that is pretty much true of any concept that outside of the traditional Newtonian world.
One of the most confusing aspects of general relativity comes from the discussion of the expansion and curvature of the universe. To almost everyone, a curved surface can only be understood as such by treating it as being embedded in a higher dimensional space. But in reality, we don't have to think of it this way. Curvature is an intrinsic property of a manifold. That means that I can measure the curvature of the earth without ever leaving its surface or even walking all the way around. In fact, according to the gauss bonnet formula, all I need to do to measure the local curvature of the earth is measure (extremely precisely) the area of a triangle I draw on the ground. The field of differential geometry contains all the mathematical tools we need to describe the curvature of the universe, the metric (which lets us measure distances over curved surfaces) and it's evolution in time and space, and any other properties which you might think could only be understood if the universe was contained in something, but which actually make perfect mathematical sense if the universe is all that there is!
It really has to do with what parts of the bible you choose to quote. There are plenty of contradictions in there. You can see the biggest differences by looking at the old and new testament side by side. While the new testament takes a softer, inclusive side towards religion, the old testament is full of stories fo the wrath of god. Of course, I should mention, as a jew, that jewish people don't really interpret the old testament as is. There has been plenty of discussion and reinterpretation of the laws, so that, for instance, it is practically impossible under rabbinical law to condemn a man to death for breaking a commandment. No one in mainstream judaism honestly suggests death for homosexuality. Compare this to some of the (let's be honest) hate speech coming from the Christian Right.
The IPCC has been forced to halve its predictions for sea-level rise by 2100, one of the key threats from climate change. It says improved data have reduced the upper estimate from 34 in to 17 in.
Once again, newpapers show that they have absolutely zero knowledge of science or statistics. Tell me, if I do two experiments to try and find the radius of the earth, and find the first time that my results are 6,370 +/- 3210 km, and the second time that my results are 6370 +/- 10km , is this 'junk science' because my upper bound has dropped by 33%? Of course not. All this quote shows is that their calculations are getting more precise. If you want to show that they were wrong in their last report you'd have to show a large change in their AVERAGE value, and since the sensationalist reporter here didn't bother to even quote it, there's nothing we can say.
By the way, if you want to, you can see projections of sea level from the 2001 report online. The sea level rise for several different scenarios is given in the graph on the right. The overall error bounds are larger because they combine all the data for these scenarios, which are vastly different in their assumptions about economic, technological and population growth in the next century.
However, Julian Morris, executive director of the International Policy Network, urged governments to be cautious. "There needs to be better data before billions of pounds are spent on policy measures that may have little impact," he said.
Of course, they don't bother to say who these people are, or the fringe views they hold. From
wikipedia
In November 2004, IPN released a report claiming that "climate change is 'a myth', sea levels are not rising and Britain's chief scientist is 'an embarrassment' for believing catastrophe is inevitable." It called "the science warning of an environmental disaster caused by climate change... 'fatally flawed'" and contested predictions that the global sea level would increase by a meter over the next century, saying that "sea level rises will reach a maximum of just 20cms." Moreover, the report listed some benefits of global warming, including "increasing fish stocks in the north Atlantic and reducing the incidence of temperature-related deaths among vulnerable people." The British newspaper The Guardian claimed that IPN had received $50,000 from ExxonMobil, which "list[ed] the donation as part of its 'climate change outreach' programme."
On a related note... how many of you whom are getting on the RIAA's case about trying to reduce royalties are also big fans of allofmp3.com? Raise your hands! Yup, thought so. I think the mantra can be amended to "screwing the musicians is OK when I do it, but not when others do."
Not that file-sharers aren't screwing the musicians, but don't you think it's a bigger crime when the RIAA does it to ALL the artists under their control? I mean, after all, there's only so much money that one person can deprive a band of (say, the cost of their entire discography). Plus, some of that saved money goes back to the band in the form of concert sales. When the labels take money from the artists, it goes into their pockets.
The problem is that there's no reason one of your 'one in ten' couldn't be '1 in a billion', in which case, you only have a one in a million chance of developing an advanced civilization per galaxy. For starters, there's no reason to believe that 10% of planets in stars habitable zones will have an adequate amount of water. In fact, we don't even know what a reasonable estimate of an adequate amount of water IS (certainly nothing more specific than "no more than what we have"). We have no way of knowing how likely it is that any kind of complex life forms from simple life, or intelligent life forms from complex life, simply because we've only had our own planet to study, and we're the only intelligent life on it.
And then there's the problem of coexistance. If advanced civilizations live only on average for a million years (still ~100 times longer than us, depending on your definition of 'advanced'), than the probability that two such civilizations would overlap is extremely tiny. Remember, our earth is over 4.5 billion years old, and life giving stars have been around for even longer.
Personally, I think the chances of finding other life in the galaxy are very low.
And on the political front, the only major ally for Pres. Bush's stand on global warming, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, is now willing to look at carbon trading.
Not true. Stephen Harper has also taken Bush's stance of ignoring the problem, bringing shame and ridicule on Canada.
I don't understand why people go on and on so much about diseases like Aids in Africa when there is a disease killing millions here in America also, the only difference being it is caused by lack of self-control rather than a virus.
The reason is because one is caused by a lack of self control and the other is caused by a virus.
I would suspect that they are celebrating the 30 year anniversary of PKC being available to the general public. Still, it is only fair to credit the original inventors.
...funny how hard they're trying to come up with one, them.:)
They aren't, as far as I know. Perhaps you're thinking of theories which attempt to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics. These are theories that are problematic at high energies and small length scales, not macroscopic scales. Like I said, quantum mechanics works perfectly well at the macroscopic scale.
I said "come about": That means, the conditions that led to it (big bang), not how it progressed once it was under way.
Perhaps you haven't studied this, but inflation does not only solve the problems of Big Bang theory (and in case you didn't know, the prediction of all of space reducing to a point at zero-time is understood to be false, a result of the failure of general relativity at high energies), but does correctly bring about a universe which resembles that of a FRW universe at early time.
I suspect you see it because it is a valid argument.
I see it only as an attempt to portray scientists as being as corrupt as the politicians and businessmen who try and put their pseudo-science out into the public and pass it off as real science for their own economic benefit.
Tenure, funding, pride of place at cocktail parties, self-respect...Your argument of funding from oil companies is pitiful. No serious scientist wants that.
No serious scientist would consider 'pride of place at cocktail parties' to be a deciding factor in what they research either. Maybe you are unaware of how much scientists are paid, but they could earn much more in any other position. most do it for the love of research, and no SERIOUS scientist would consider 'going with the herd' on any issue. They're convinced of climate change because they recognize that the results of their experiments are scientifically sound.
You caught me on 'tow' though. Seriously, though, who expected its origins to be from a foot race?
There is no validated theory connecting quantum and macro level activity, either, but that doesn't mean it isn't connected
There is no need for such a theory because quantum mechanics applies in macroscopic situations as well.You can easily show that for systems where the scales are macroscopic the quantum equations reduce to their classical counterparts (mathematically, you just take the limit of h --> 0). I suggest you look at Ehrenfest's theorem, which gives back the newton's laws.
There is no theory that definitively explains how a "big bang" could come about
Actually, there is. It's called inflation, and is generally accepted as describing what actually happened in the early universe.
And then there's the whole "politically correct" factor; there is no question that speaking against the climate change faction is not any way to get funding, to get published, or even to get invited to a party.
Why is it I always see this argument brought up? Do you really think that oil companies and republican think tanks aren't paying as well universities? That the only way to make a living as a climate scientist is to tow some kind of party line? That there's some secret pact among 2000 scientists to lie about climate chage? To what end? For what reason? What do they have to gain? They could make a lot more playing for the other side.
Considering that the film just came in at under even and we don't know the exact dvd production or marketing costs, I think it may be that they did not recoup the total costs. But even if they did make 52 million with a production budget of 39 million + 10 million marketing, we're talking about a modest profit (6%). And the studio would know that for any sequal they would be pulling in almost identical numbers. So why would they bother wasting a year filming a sequal when other modest movies are making profits of many times their production costs?(Even throw in 10 million for marketing, and you'd still have more than 300% profit)Serenity was given a chance, and it performed modestly. Good luck to Whedon with his future projects, but I doubt he could come back to the Firefly universe even if he wanted to.
Information surfaced today showing that American officials were aware of terrorists' plans to hijack an airliner as early as 1996. The lengthy document suggests possible counterterrorist measures which were not implemented on Sept 11th. Both Democrats and Repbulicans were quick to pounce on this new evidence as proof that the opposing administration did not do enough to try and prevent a Sept 11th style attack. Said one official "All those lives could have been saved with one phone call to Steven Seagal ".
Actually, while Pluto comes closer to the Sun than Neptune, they are never that close. Pluto's erratic orbit ensures that it is well above the solar system equator when it does cross. The chart here shows how far it really is at the cross (chart is in AU =~ 149 billion meters).
No matter how "Intelligent" artifical or otherwise I manage to code a game, it can't reason out the reasoning behind a non-logical person.
Agreed. But in texas hold em' at least, people who don't play logically can get screwed out of their money easily. It's mostly a game of patience (especially when you're playing cash games), and combining the odds with knowledge of other players betting strategy is the best way to win. In this respect, AI can perform well. Reckless, illogical players, however, will almost always lose. The more you play a bad starting hand, the more likely it is someone will mathc you with a much better hand.
Chapter 6 counters your arguments in a way that I think is quite clear (for a string theory paper, at least).
And while I won't try and claim there's some particle that we can discover at the LHC that string theory can't explain, by not finding light supersymmetric partners of existing particles, the LHC has the possibility to disprove string theory.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but you won't find that in Eastern Canada. I spent Christmas in Montreal and we didn't get any snow until boxing day (and even that had all melted away by the new year, when we expericened a week of spring-like weather). In Toronto, where I now live, we've seen maybe 3 days of light flurries since the beginning of winter, and temperatures haven't been cold enough for snow to stay on the ground for more than a day.
Especially when it comes to the point that we *need* to get off this rock. At that point all the AIDS vaccines, wells and roads all over the world become worth squat.
I would imagine people with AIDS would respectfully disagree with you.
According to General Relativity, the passage of time at a location depends on the gravitational field there. So, for instance, if the sun were to collapse into a black hole, there would be no change in the passage of time here. You would have to pass within a few Schwarzschild radii to see an effect (The Schwarzschild radius for the sun is about 3 kilometers, while Earth is 150 million km from the sum)
. I suppose I could get into the issue of the Iran/Iraq war which we tried to fix our mistake by arming another which we had to fix ourselves 20 years later.
I'm sorry, is the parent suggesting that the US fixed Iraq?
As to what this soccer ball universe could floating in, well, the question itself is probably the largest issue. We don't know the answer, but the it could very well be that there is no "outside of the soccer ball". The universe could be all that there is. There could be no "beyond" the universe or "outside" of the universe. It is hard concept to visualize, but that is pretty much true of any concept that outside of the traditional Newtonian world.
One of the most confusing aspects of general relativity comes from the discussion of the expansion and curvature of the universe. To almost everyone, a curved surface can only be understood as such by treating it as being embedded in a higher dimensional space. But in reality, we don't have to think of it this way. Curvature is an intrinsic property of a manifold. That means that I can measure the curvature of the earth without ever leaving its surface or even walking all the way around. In fact, according to the gauss bonnet formula, all I need to do to measure the local curvature of the earth is measure (extremely precisely) the area of a triangle I draw on the ground. The field of differential geometry contains all the mathematical tools we need to describe the curvature of the universe, the metric (which lets us measure distances over curved surfaces) and it's evolution in time and space, and any other properties which you might think could only be understood if the universe was contained in something, but which actually make perfect mathematical sense if the universe is all that there is!
Uh-oh.
Jack Thompson == Bad
Fundamentalist Christians == Bad
Jack Thompson against Fundamentalist Christians == ??? *pop*
It really has to do with what parts of the bible you choose to quote. There are plenty of contradictions in there. You can see the biggest differences by looking at the old and new testament side by side. While the new testament takes a softer, inclusive side towards religion, the old testament is full of stories fo the wrath of god. Of course, I should mention, as a jew, that jewish people don't really interpret the old testament as is. There has been plenty of discussion and reinterpretation of the laws, so that, for instance, it is practically impossible under rabbinical law to condemn a man to death for breaking a commandment. No one in mainstream judaism honestly suggests death for homosexuality. Compare this to some of the (let's be honest) hate speech coming from the Christian Right.
The problem is GOP panders to their base, and the Democrats pander...to the GOP's base.
The IPCC has been forced to halve its predictions for sea-level rise by 2100, one of the key threats from climate change. It says improved data have reduced the upper estimate from 34 in to 17 in.
Once again, newpapers show that they have absolutely zero knowledge of science or statistics. Tell me, if I do two experiments to try and find the radius of the earth, and find the first time that my results are 6,370 +/- 3210 km, and the second time that my results are 6370 +/- 10km , is this 'junk science' because my upper bound has dropped by 33%? Of course not. All this quote shows is that their calculations are getting more precise. If you want to show that they were wrong in their last report you'd have to show a large change in their AVERAGE value, and since the sensationalist reporter here didn't bother to even quote it, there's nothing we can say.
By the way, if you want to, you can see projections of sea level from the 2001 report online. The sea level rise for several different scenarios is given in the graph on the right. The overall error bounds are larger because they combine all the data for these scenarios, which are vastly different in their assumptions about economic, technological and population growth in the next century.
And unsurprisingly, the article ends with this:
... 'fatally flawed'" and contested predictions that the global sea level would increase by a meter over the next century, saying that "sea level rises will reach a maximum of just 20cms." Moreover, the report listed some benefits of global warming, including "increasing fish stocks in the north Atlantic and reducing the incidence of temperature-related deaths among vulnerable people." The British newspaper The Guardian claimed that IPN had received $50,000 from ExxonMobil, which "list[ed] the donation as part of its 'climate change outreach' programme."
However, Julian Morris, executive director of the International Policy Network, urged governments to be cautious. "There needs to be better data before billions of pounds are spent on policy measures that may have little impact," he said.
Of course, they don't bother to say who these people are, or the fringe views they hold. From wikipedia
In November 2004, IPN released a report claiming that "climate change is 'a myth', sea levels are not rising and Britain's chief scientist is 'an embarrassment' for believing catastrophe is inevitable." It called "the science warning of an environmental disaster caused by climate change
On a related note... how many of you whom are getting on the RIAA's case about trying to reduce royalties are also big fans of allofmp3.com? Raise your hands! Yup, thought so. I think the mantra can be amended to "screwing the musicians is OK when I do it, but not when others do."
Not that file-sharers aren't screwing the musicians, but don't you think it's a bigger crime when the RIAA does it to ALL the artists under their control? I mean, after all, there's only so much money that one person can deprive a band of (say, the cost of their entire discography). Plus, some of that saved money goes back to the band in the form of concert sales. When the labels take money from the artists, it goes into their pockets.
The problem is that there's no reason one of your 'one in ten' couldn't be '1 in a billion', in which case, you only have a one in a million chance of developing an advanced civilization per galaxy. For starters, there's no reason to believe that 10% of planets in stars habitable zones will have an adequate amount of water. In fact, we don't even know what a reasonable estimate of an adequate amount of water IS (certainly nothing more specific than "no more than what we have"). We have no way of knowing how likely it is that any kind of complex life forms from simple life, or intelligent life forms from complex life, simply because we've only had our own planet to study, and we're the only intelligent life on it.
And then there's the problem of coexistance. If advanced civilizations live only on average for a million years (still ~100 times longer than us, depending on your definition of 'advanced'), than the probability that two such civilizations would overlap is extremely tiny. Remember, our earth is over 4.5 billion years old, and life giving stars have been around for even longer.
Personally, I think the chances of finding other life in the galaxy are very low.
And on the political front, the only major ally for Pres. Bush's stand on global warming, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, is now willing to look at carbon trading.
Not true. Stephen Harper has also taken Bush's stance of ignoring the problem, bringing shame and ridicule on Canada.
I don't understand why people go on and on so much about diseases like Aids in Africa when there is a disease killing millions here in America also, the only difference being it is caused by lack of self-control rather than a virus.
The reason is because one is caused by a lack of self control and the other is caused by a virus.
I would suspect that they are celebrating the 30 year anniversary of PKC being available to the general public. Still, it is only fair to credit the original inventors.
Really, there's worse things that you can earn a badge for.
...funny how hard they're trying to come up with one, them. :)
They aren't, as far as I know. Perhaps you're thinking of theories which attempt to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics. These are theories that are problematic at high energies and small length scales, not macroscopic scales. Like I said, quantum mechanics works perfectly well at the macroscopic scale.
I said "come about": That means, the conditions that led to it (big bang), not how it progressed once it was under way.
Perhaps you haven't studied this, but inflation does not only solve the problems of Big Bang theory (and in case you didn't know, the prediction of all of space reducing to a point at zero-time is understood to be false, a result of the failure of general relativity at high energies), but does correctly bring about a universe which resembles that of a FRW universe at early time.
I suspect you see it because it is a valid argument.
I see it only as an attempt to portray scientists as being as corrupt as the politicians and businessmen who try and put their pseudo-science out into the public and pass it off as real science for their own economic benefit.
Tenure, funding, pride of place at cocktail parties, self-respect...Your argument of funding from oil companies is pitiful. No serious scientist wants that.
No serious scientist would consider 'pride of place at cocktail parties' to be a deciding factor in what they research either. Maybe you are unaware of how much scientists are paid, but they could earn much more in any other position. most do it for the love of research, and no SERIOUS scientist would consider 'going with the herd' on any issue. They're convinced of climate change because they recognize that the results of their experiments are scientifically sound.
You caught me on 'tow' though. Seriously, though, who expected its origins to be from a foot race?
There is no validated theory connecting quantum and macro level activity, either, but that doesn't mean it isn't connected
There is no need for such a theory because quantum mechanics applies in macroscopic situations as well.You can easily show that for systems where the scales are macroscopic the quantum equations reduce to their classical counterparts (mathematically, you just take the limit of h --> 0). I suggest you look at Ehrenfest's theorem, which gives back the newton's laws.
There is no theory that definitively explains how a "big bang" could come about
Actually, there is. It's called inflation, and is generally accepted as describing what actually happened in the early universe.
And then there's the whole "politically correct" factor; there is no question that speaking against the climate change faction is not any way to get funding, to get published, or even to get invited to a party.
Why is it I always see this argument brought up? Do you really think that oil companies and republican think tanks aren't paying as well universities? That the only way to make a living as a climate scientist is to tow some kind of party line? That there's some secret pact among 2000 scientists to lie about climate chage? To what end? For what reason? What do they have to gain? They could make a lot more playing for the other side.
Considering that the film just came in at under even and we don't know the exact dvd production or marketing costs, I think it may be that they did not recoup the total costs. But even if they did make 52 million with a production budget of 39 million + 10 million marketing, we're talking about a modest profit (6%). And the studio would know that for any sequal they would be pulling in almost identical numbers. So why would they bother wasting a year filming a sequal when other modest movies are making profits of many times their production costs?(Even throw in 10 million for marketing, and you'd still have more than 300% profit)Serenity was given a chance, and it performed modestly. Good luck to Whedon with his future projects, but I doubt he could come back to the Firefly universe even if he wanted to.
Information surfaced today showing that American officials were aware of terrorists' plans to hijack an airliner as early as 1996. The lengthy document suggests possible counterterrorist measures which were not implemented on Sept 11th. Both Democrats and Repbulicans were quick to pounce on this new evidence as proof that the opposing administration did not do enough to try and prevent a Sept 11th style attack. Said one official "All those lives could have been saved with one phone call to Steven Seagal ".
I am glad that I live in America,
Don't worry Canadians, he's required under the PATRIOT act to start all posts that way.
Actually, while Pluto comes closer to the Sun than Neptune, they are never that close. Pluto's erratic orbit ensures that it is well above the solar system equator when it does cross. The chart here shows how far it really is at the cross (chart is in AU =~ 149 billion meters).
No matter how "Intelligent" artifical or otherwise I manage to code a game, it can't reason out the reasoning behind a non-logical person.
Agreed. But in texas hold em' at least, people who don't play logically can get screwed out of their money easily. It's mostly a game of patience (especially when you're playing cash games), and combining the odds with knowledge of other players betting strategy is the best way to win. In this respect, AI can perform well. Reckless, illogical players, however, will almost always lose. The more you play a bad starting hand, the more likely it is someone will mathc you with a much better hand.
Nixon was illegally wiretapping to save us from the democrats! The democrats!!! You remember the democrats, don't you?
Yeah, they used to be the opposition in your country.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/9709/9709318. pdf
Chapter 6 counters your arguments in a way that I think is quite clear (for a string theory paper, at least).
And while I won't try and claim there's some particle that we can discover at the LHC that string theory can't explain, by not finding light supersymmetric partners of existing particles, the LHC has the possibility to disprove string theory.