one person per building around per 5-6 years. as i said before, you probably didnt read
I did read, and did not think it was germane to the question.
Please re-read my article - you obviously missed the most important points, so I could accuse you of the same thing!
In order to demonstrate the effect you want to prove, you must:
Come up with a study that can assign a specific probability to this event;
Show that the same hypothetical cause has resulted in similar statistical anomalies in other places;
Show that there are no other confounding causes (simply because you can't think of one doesn't mean that there aren't any - this means that professional epidemiologists will almost certainly need to be involved, not lay people or, even worse, reporters); and
Show that the frequency of these observed anomalies is significantly greater that would be expected (It is to be expected that there will be some installations that will show no or very little effect and some will show a large effect - the question is their relative frequency: If the number of installations showing a "large" effect is at about the chance level, we are safe to assume sample error).
If you cannot do this, I would have to conclude that you are simply blowing smoke.
The problem with this story is that it is completely anecdotal. How many would have come down with cancer if the tower had not been built, given their ages, occupations, and prior medical histories? Even if one would have expected fewer than 7 new cases based on purely statistical grounds, what would be the probability of 7 new cases occurring through random chance instead of, say, 4?
Even when reporting studies that are able to assign a statistical probability to a specific event, many (most?) people get it wrong. For example, if the study reports that there is a 95% probability that the results were not due to chance, that still means that there is a 5% probability that the results are due to chance - and the statistically improbable thing will indeed happen with that probability.
That's why in scientific circles there is so much weight placed on corroborating studies - a single study doesn't mean a whole lot, unless for example p <<.01 (much less than 1% probability of the result happening by chance). If the bulk of the studies show an effect, then there's probably a real effect; if not, then there probably isn't.
It's not unlike the lottery: somebody has to win (eventually, anyway), but it probably won't be you. But that won't stop people from thinking that if they just bet their birthday, or wear their lucky hat when they buy the ticket, that it will have some effect on the result. And indeed, they're even likely to get some "confirmation" of that when they win some minor prize - which would probably have been a lot less surprising if they actually worked out the probabilities (there are usually lots of minor prizes given out for exactly that reason - it keeps people playing).
Unfortunately most people's intuitive grasp of statistical probabilities is poor at best.
You're right that searching for 8 digits will only return a subset of the card accounts for a particular bank - however that's still not a problem, you can just search for 4xxx xx00 through 4xxx xx99 to get all of the Visa accounts for a particular bank.
However you're wrong that the last two digits are the card identifier (at least in the sense you imply, allowing for 100 cards on the same account: 00..99) - the last digit is used as a check digit for the card (to guard against data entry errors). Also the second to last digit is usually not a simple enumeration of 0, 1, 2, 3... for the various cards issued for a single account.
Yet again religion is all that protects the march of scientific progress from obliteration at the hands of destructive ignorance.
The fact is that the barbarians are always at the gates. Civilization has never been more than one generation away from a potential new Dark Age, and often less when faced with angry and ignorant - but well-armed - mobs.
And the Roman Empire collapsed when religion became the only thing worth worrying about. You cannot just ignore the effect that christianity had in the collapse of the empire.
And of course the Spanish Empire and the British Empire (both heavily - in fact nearly exclusively - Christianized) never existed.:-)
When a society faces serious difficulties, science only comes into the picture when the society faces threats that can be addressed by scientific means - either through the need to compete with other societies, or against nature. Neither of these were case in ancient Rome.
The primary factors in the collapse of the Roman Empire were economic, not religious or scientific. Oversimplifying only slightly, the privileged classes used the tax revenues from the empire to give the people "bread and circuses" and endless extravagent parties for themselves, and nobody got any real work done other than the overtaxed peoples who had been subjugated. Obviously this arrangement can't go on forever, especially when the subjects start becoming restless or when faced with a formidable external enemy - both of which happened to Rome.
In all seriousness, the modern welfare state as practiced in Europe and North America is a modern and thoroughly secular parallel to conditions that contributed to the collapse of Rome.
One thing to keep in mind is that just because this palimpset is the only copy that we know about today, doesn't mean that there weren't other copies extant at the time it was reused; and at the time it was probably not such a unique text. Remember that Constantinople (now Istanbul) had just been sacked in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and things were still quite chaotic. At that time (1229) the city would still have been controlled by the Crusaders (it was not retaken by the Byzantines until 1261). In addition the city was sacked again in 1453 when it was conquered by the Turks, after which the Church and Byzantine civilization in general underwent systematic persecution and suppression. All of these disruptions have caused the loss of huge numbers of texts.
The Archimedes manuscript is not the only manuscript reused to make the prayer book - there are several other texts that were also used, including some others which are now also our only remaining copies. These include both pagan writers and other Christian texts. Again, we have little reason to think that any of these would have been considered particularly unique at the time.
Events have not been kind to ancient manuscripts generally; what we have left today is only a relatively small sampling of what was originally a vast ancient literature. The Church has often been blamed, and in the case of pagan religious texts there may be some justice in the charge; but what have doubtless been much bigger culprits for the bulk of the destruction have been marauding armies, fires, floods, and simply the ravages of time as old manuscripts decay without having been copied.
Add in older versions of Linux as well. Mozilla and Firefox no longer support the older versions of Linux, which means that on older systems you're stuck with the older releases - in the worst case, even pre-Firefox releases. Now granted, Linux is free, but upgrading the entire OS (and quite possibly having to upgrade other installed software packages or even your hardware along the lines of the Mac OS 9 users mentioned) is not as simple or as easy as just upgrading a browser. So if you're going to try to force someone to do all that just in order to use your site, it better be a killer site or most people won't bother.
But how are they going to know that if they can't see at least part of it?
But the average temperature in Antarctica is -37C, so the ice there is in no danger of melting. In fact in most parts of the continent it never gets above freezing.
I don't think anyone seriously suggests that the average temperature in Antarctica will rise by 37C so that the ice simply melts.
The concern is that a change in temperature can cause the glaciers there to become more mobile (largely because they wouldn't be blocked at the ocean's edge by pack ice), so that they flow into the ocean and break up sooner than they do now - this might in effect significantly reduce the depth of ice in Antarctica even though the temperatures in the interior wouldn't rise much.
isn't that going to depend on how much of the floating ice is submerged?
The short answer is, no it doesn't matter. If the ice is floating, that means that the part above the water level is supported by the ice below water level - and the volume of ice below the water level will displace a volume of water whose mass is equal to the total mass of the iceberg.
I gave the main caveats in my other post on this thread - namely that this doesn't take into consideration any change in the volume of ocean water caused by changes in average water temperature (this can actually be significant when considered on a global scale), and how much of the ice is not floating - that is, the ice in the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, for example. There is some other ice in the Arctic that isn't floating, but the vast majority of it is locked up in the Greenland ice cap.
Mostly true - the polar ice is for the most part floating in water, so by definition it displaces a volume of water equal to its weight. If it melts, its simply becomes water that will be equal in volume to the amount it displaced before it melted.
There are two other effects to consider however - you alluded to the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica, which would have a much greater effect on sea level if they should melt or even just flow into the ocean faster than they do now. With the polar ice cap gone, the Greenland ice cap would probably move faster and possibly even disintegrate.
The other effect is that once you get above about 4 degrees C, water starts expanding again. So if the entire volume of ocean water becomes warmer on average, you may well get a rise in sea level even without the Greenland or Antarctic ice caps melting (the quibble is whether enough of the water will remain around 4 degrees C where it reaches minimum volume per unit mass - this is going to be difficult to compute because the effect of a melting polar ice cap on ocean currents is hard to predict accurately).
Clearly you have no historical context on the last 5000 years of military history. Military intelligence is the art of guessing the other side's secrets, and at essentially no point has there been a case of any military intelligence organization that knew all of the other side's secrets. Even in World War II when the Allies had cracked the Enigma code, that didn't allow them to discover all of Nazi Germany's military secrets, though it did allow them to find out a treasure trove of operational intelligence (which was the main use of Enigma).
In the case of the Iraq WMD issue, there were a lot of people looking at the same intelligence - including both Republicans and Democrats (including John Kerry BTW), the UN, the major European powers, etc. Everyone who looked at it had some degree of concern that Iraq was interested in WMD's - and Saddam didn't do much to dissuade from that conclusion. Remember that the other side in any conflict isn't just going to let their secrets be an open book - so that interpretation of this kind of evidence is akin to connecting the dots, reading tea leaves, or interpreting Rorschach ink blots. Depending on each person's prior experience, prejudices, and fears, as well as the previous behaviour of the individual or nation in question, different people can look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions. Remember that this isn't a scientific question so clear experiments are rarely possible! The other side is deliberately trying to confuse you, and is often going to great lengths to do so - that is an indisputable fact in such cases.
Nations will of course throw up smokescreens to make it difficult to interpret intelligence on what's going on internally. In this case, Saddam may well have felt that it was to his advantage to have others think he had WMD's - as a way of scaring them off.
The point is that both sides are deliberatly trying to mislead each other. If one side does in fact get misled, does that mean that they are lying or does it mean that they made a mistake in analysis or judgement, or that the other side's ruse was complete? Unless there's clear evidence that all indications were pointing against WMD's, I don't think it's at all a fair characterization that Bush was "lying" - in fact it's a highly partisan statement based entirely on hindsight and indicates that you're most likely incapable of rational thought on this issue.
FWIW I was never particularly in favor of the war, but less because of reservations about the WMD and other issues then because of geopolitical concerns of the possible ramifcations of the war (on which the jury is still out, and will be for at least another 20 years). I don't belong to either of the two major parties, nor do I have much sympathy for either of their platforms (they're both statists, and are themselves the best argument for voting a straight Libertarian ticket), but I do not think that the "Bush was lying" mantra that the Left likes to repeat serves any useful purpose. In fact it just demonstrates the intellectual bankruptcy of the Left and the Democratic Party.
Resolution. Most space cameras work by detecting light falling on a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device); if the camera was full color, then the resolution would be cut by at least 2/3 because you'd have to devote 1/3 of the CCD to each of the primary colors. (It might be even worse than that if your imaging system wasn't 100% efficient at directing the color components to the proper pels on the CCD).
You can obtain the effect of a color camera by using different lens filters and taking multiple pictures and then composing them into a single image - this is what's usually done when a color photograph is desired. By doing that you can produce an image that's exactly what you could obtain with a color camera, but at a higher resolution and without having to use a higher resolution CCD. Also, that way your pictures aren't limited to using a selection of color components that are compatible with those the human eye sees - you can use the filters to "see" parts of the spectrum outside the range that's visible to the human eye.
The term Apocrypha is very often used to refer to a specific set of Jewish writings that are known in the Greek Septuagint but not accepted in the current Jewish Bible. Most Protestant denominations reject the books completely, but they are fully accepted in the Old Testament canon by the Catholic Church and to a somewhat lesser degree by the Orthodox and Anglican (Episcopal) Churches. It is (very nearly) impossible for any more writings to be added to this collection of writings because the contents of the Septuagint are very well attested.
Likewise many - perhaps even most - of the early Christian texts that might have been candidates for inclusion in the canon are fairly well-known, at least in large fragments.
What might be more interesting would be texts that record early Church history without being likely candidates for inclusion as canonical texts. For example, Eusebius (a 4th century Church historian) records a good deal of Church history as it was known to him, but we don't have all of his source material nor do we know whether there were other similar major works which might have existed. Since he was writing after many of the major controversies of the early Church, he naturally presented the view of the winning side - but a different and/or earlier writer might well record events somewhat differently.
I agree that it's unlikely that anything really earth-shaking for Christianity will be found - there's already quite a bit known about the ferment of ideas in the early Church, and it would require something really surprising to turn up to cause a major stir. More likely, more light might be on a confusing situation but not anything that would "get the Bible thumpers in a rage."
Have you checked that the actual number of days that the suspected spam is kept hasn't changed? Even if it's nominally 30 days, it might have been kept somewhat longer. I've noticed that at least some ISPs have become more proactive about deleting "suspected spam" earlier than they used to.
I suspect that the actual spam rate hasn't been increasing as much lately as it did for a while but it still seems pretty high where I've looked at it...
I'm sure that's part of it - however it's not simply that end-users are employing more protection. Many companies and ISP's are putting antivirus scanners on their mail servers, which provides a basic level of protection for all of the users of their mail service. So even many of the clueless are getting antivirus scanning without even knowing about it.
I have in fact seen a few viruses get past our ISP's filters only to get caught by the antivirus scanner on the PC - most likely because the ISP only scans the mail when it arrives (and may not yet be looking for that virus signature yet) but the PC only scans it when it's downloaded from the server, which might be some time later and after the virus definitions have been updated on the PC.
So I'm sure there will continue to be some virus circulation - it's like Krupp and the armor plating: make better armor that the existing shells can't penetrate, so then you can sell all the navies of the world better shells, which requires better armor, and so forth. It's a never-ending battle.
Slashdot Mirror
I did read, and did not think it was germane to the question.
Please re-read my article - you obviously missed the most important points, so I could accuse you of the same thing!
In order to demonstrate the effect you want to prove, you must:
- Come up with a study that can assign a specific probability to this event;
- Show that the same hypothetical cause has resulted in similar statistical anomalies in other places;
- Show that there are no other confounding causes (simply because you can't think of one doesn't mean that there aren't any - this means that professional epidemiologists will almost certainly need to be involved, not lay people or, even worse, reporters); and
- Show that the frequency of these observed anomalies is significantly greater that would be expected (It is to be expected that there will be some installations that will show no or very little effect and some will show a large effect - the question is their relative frequency: If the number of installations showing a "large" effect is at about the chance level, we are safe to assume sample error).
If you cannot do this, I would have to conclude that you are simply blowing smoke.Even when reporting studies that are able to assign a statistical probability to a specific event, many (most?) people get it wrong. For example, if the study reports that there is a 95% probability that the results were not due to chance, that still means that there is a 5% probability that the results are due to chance - and the statistically improbable thing will indeed happen with that probability.
That's why in scientific circles there is so much weight placed on corroborating studies - a single study doesn't mean a whole lot, unless for example p << .01 (much less than 1% probability of the result happening by chance). If the bulk of the studies show an effect, then there's probably a real effect; if not, then there probably isn't.
It's not unlike the lottery: somebody has to win (eventually, anyway), but it probably won't be you. But that won't stop people from thinking that if they just bet their birthday, or wear their lucky hat when they buy the ticket, that it will have some effect on the result. And indeed, they're even likely to get some "confirmation" of that when they win some minor prize - which would probably have been a lot less surprising if they actually worked out the probabilities (there are usually lots of minor prizes given out for exactly that reason - it keeps people playing).
Unfortunately most people's intuitive grasp of statistical probabilities is poor at best.
However you're wrong that the last two digits are the card identifier (at least in the sense you imply, allowing for 100 cards on the same account: 00..99) - the last digit is used as a check digit for the card (to guard against data entry errors). Also the second to last digit is usually not a simple enumeration of 0, 1, 2, 3 ... for the various cards issued for a single account.
You sure the headline wasn't that Canada was to build a 40 mW Solar Power Plant?
The fact is that the barbarians are always at the gates. Civilization has never been more than one generation away from a potential new Dark Age, and often less when faced with angry and ignorant - but well-armed - mobs.
And of course the Spanish Empire and the British Empire (both heavily - in fact nearly exclusively - Christianized) never existed. :-)
When a society faces serious difficulties, science only comes into the picture when the society faces threats that can be addressed by scientific means - either through the need to compete with other societies, or against nature. Neither of these were case in ancient Rome.
The primary factors in the collapse of the Roman Empire were economic, not religious or scientific. Oversimplifying only slightly, the privileged classes used the tax revenues from the empire to give the people "bread and circuses" and endless extravagent parties for themselves, and nobody got any real work done other than the overtaxed peoples who had been subjugated. Obviously this arrangement can't go on forever, especially when the subjects start becoming restless or when faced with a formidable external enemy - both of which happened to Rome.
In all seriousness, the modern welfare state as practiced in Europe and North America is a modern and thoroughly secular parallel to conditions that contributed to the collapse of Rome.
One thing to keep in mind is that just because this palimpset is the only copy that we know about today, doesn't mean that there weren't other copies extant at the time it was reused; and at the time it was probably not such a unique text. Remember that Constantinople (now Istanbul) had just been sacked in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and things were still quite chaotic. At that time (1229) the city would still have been controlled by the Crusaders (it was not retaken by the Byzantines until 1261). In addition the city was sacked again in 1453 when it was conquered by the Turks, after which the Church and Byzantine civilization in general underwent systematic persecution and suppression. All of these disruptions have caused the loss of huge numbers of texts.
The Archimedes manuscript is not the only manuscript reused to make the prayer book - there are several other texts that were also used, including some others which are now also our only remaining copies. These include both pagan writers and other Christian texts. Again, we have little reason to think that any of these would have been considered particularly unique at the time.
Events have not been kind to ancient manuscripts generally; what we have left today is only a relatively small sampling of what was originally a vast ancient literature. The Church has often been blamed, and in the case of pagan religious texts there may be some justice in the charge; but what have doubtless been much bigger culprits for the bulk of the destruction have been marauding armies, fires, floods, and simply the ravages of time as old manuscripts decay without having been copied.
But how are they going to know that if they can't see at least part of it?
... and IE, no doubt.
I don't think anyone seriously suggests that the average temperature in Antarctica will rise by 37C so that the ice simply melts.
The concern is that a change in temperature can cause the glaciers there to become more mobile (largely because they wouldn't be blocked at the ocean's edge by pack ice), so that they flow into the ocean and break up sooner than they do now - this might in effect significantly reduce the depth of ice in Antarctica even though the temperatures in the interior wouldn't rise much.
The short answer is, no it doesn't matter. If the ice is floating, that means that the part above the water level is supported by the ice below water level - and the volume of ice below the water level will displace a volume of water whose mass is equal to the total mass of the iceberg.
I gave the main caveats in my other post on this thread - namely that this doesn't take into consideration any change in the volume of ocean water caused by changes in average water temperature (this can actually be significant when considered on a global scale), and how much of the ice is not floating - that is, the ice in the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, for example. There is some other ice in the Arctic that isn't floating, but the vast majority of it is locked up in the Greenland ice cap.
There are two other effects to consider however - you alluded to the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica, which would have a much greater effect on sea level if they should melt or even just flow into the ocean faster than they do now. With the polar ice cap gone, the Greenland ice cap would probably move faster and possibly even disintegrate.
The other effect is that once you get above about 4 degrees C, water starts expanding again. So if the entire volume of ocean water becomes warmer on average, you may well get a rise in sea level even without the Greenland or Antarctic ice caps melting (the quibble is whether enough of the water will remain around 4 degrees C where it reaches minimum volume per unit mass - this is going to be difficult to compute because the effect of a melting polar ice cap on ocean currents is hard to predict accurately).
Clearly you have no historical context on the last 5000 years of military history. Military intelligence is the art of guessing the other side's secrets, and at essentially no point has there been a case of any military intelligence organization that knew all of the other side's secrets. Even in World War II when the Allies had cracked the Enigma code, that didn't allow them to discover all of Nazi Germany's military secrets, though it did allow them to find out a treasure trove of operational intelligence (which was the main use of Enigma). In the case of the Iraq WMD issue, there were a lot of people looking at the same intelligence - including both Republicans and Democrats (including John Kerry BTW), the UN, the major European powers, etc. Everyone who looked at it had some degree of concern that Iraq was interested in WMD's - and Saddam didn't do much to dissuade from that conclusion. Remember that the other side in any conflict isn't just going to let their secrets be an open book - so that interpretation of this kind of evidence is akin to connecting the dots, reading tea leaves, or interpreting Rorschach ink blots. Depending on each person's prior experience, prejudices, and fears, as well as the previous behaviour of the individual or nation in question, different people can look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions. Remember that this isn't a scientific question so clear experiments are rarely possible! The other side is deliberately trying to confuse you, and is often going to great lengths to do so - that is an indisputable fact in such cases. Nations will of course throw up smokescreens to make it difficult to interpret intelligence on what's going on internally. In this case, Saddam may well have felt that it was to his advantage to have others think he had WMD's - as a way of scaring them off. The point is that both sides are deliberatly trying to mislead each other. If one side does in fact get misled, does that mean that they are lying or does it mean that they made a mistake in analysis or judgement, or that the other side's ruse was complete? Unless there's clear evidence that all indications were pointing against WMD's, I don't think it's at all a fair characterization that Bush was "lying" - in fact it's a highly partisan statement based entirely on hindsight and indicates that you're most likely incapable of rational thought on this issue. FWIW I was never particularly in favor of the war, but less because of reservations about the WMD and other issues then because of geopolitical concerns of the possible ramifcations of the war (on which the jury is still out, and will be for at least another 20 years). I don't belong to either of the two major parties, nor do I have much sympathy for either of their platforms (they're both statists, and are themselves the best argument for voting a straight Libertarian ticket), but I do not think that the "Bush was lying" mantra that the Left likes to repeat serves any useful purpose. In fact it just demonstrates the intellectual bankruptcy of the Left and the Democratic Party.
Resolution. Most space cameras work by detecting light falling on a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device); if the camera was full color, then the resolution would be cut by at least 2/3 because you'd have to devote 1/3 of the CCD to each of the primary colors. (It might be even worse than that if your imaging system wasn't 100% efficient at directing the color components to the proper pels on the CCD). You can obtain the effect of a color camera by using different lens filters and taking multiple pictures and then composing them into a single image - this is what's usually done when a color photograph is desired. By doing that you can produce an image that's exactly what you could obtain with a color camera, but at a higher resolution and without having to use a higher resolution CCD. Also, that way your pictures aren't limited to using a selection of color components that are compatible with those the human eye sees - you can use the filters to "see" parts of the spectrum outside the range that's visible to the human eye.
The term Apocrypha is very often used to refer to a specific set of Jewish writings that are known in the Greek Septuagint but not accepted in the current Jewish Bible. Most Protestant denominations reject the books completely, but they are fully accepted in the Old Testament canon by the Catholic Church and to a somewhat lesser degree by the Orthodox and Anglican (Episcopal) Churches. It is (very nearly) impossible for any more writings to be added to this collection of writings because the contents of the Septuagint are very well attested. Likewise many - perhaps even most - of the early Christian texts that might have been candidates for inclusion in the canon are fairly well-known, at least in large fragments. What might be more interesting would be texts that record early Church history without being likely candidates for inclusion as canonical texts. For example, Eusebius (a 4th century Church historian) records a good deal of Church history as it was known to him, but we don't have all of his source material nor do we know whether there were other similar major works which might have existed. Since he was writing after many of the major controversies of the early Church, he naturally presented the view of the winning side - but a different and/or earlier writer might well record events somewhat differently. I agree that it's unlikely that anything really earth-shaking for Christianity will be found - there's already quite a bit known about the ferment of ideas in the early Church, and it would require something really surprising to turn up to cause a major stir. More likely, more light might be on a confusing situation but not anything that would "get the Bible thumpers in a rage."
Have you checked that the actual number of days that the suspected spam is kept hasn't changed? Even if it's nominally 30 days, it might have been kept somewhat longer. I've noticed that at least some ISPs have become more proactive about deleting "suspected spam" earlier than they used to. I suspect that the actual spam rate hasn't been increasing as much lately as it did for a while but it still seems pretty high where I've looked at it ...
I'm sure that's part of it - however it's not simply that end-users are employing more protection. Many companies and ISP's are putting antivirus scanners on their mail servers, which provides a basic level of protection for all of the users of their mail service. So even many of the clueless are getting antivirus scanning without even knowing about it.
I have in fact seen a few viruses get past our ISP's filters only to get caught by the antivirus scanner on the PC - most likely because the ISP only scans the mail when it arrives (and may not yet be looking for that virus signature yet) but the PC only scans it when it's downloaded from the server, which might be some time later and after the virus definitions have been updated on the PC.
So I'm sure there will continue to be some virus circulation - it's like Krupp and the armor plating: make better armor that the existing shells can't penetrate, so then you can sell all the navies of the world better shells, which requires better armor, and so forth. It's a never-ending battle.