The facts that come along rarely change our understanding, more like they refine our understanding. Think of how General Relativity refines our understanding of Newton's Laws of Motion. We understood how things move but not perfectly, presently we are much closer to perfect but maybe not quite all the way there.
[...] The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.
However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts, and I will devote this essay to an explanation of why I think so....When my friend the English literature expert tells me that in every century scientists think they have worked out the universe and are always wrong, what I want to know is how wrong are they? Are they always wrong to the same degree? Let's take an example.
In the early days of civilization, the general feeling was that the earth was flat. This was not because people were stupid, or because they were intent on believing silly things. They felt it was flat on the basis of sound evidence. It was not just a matter of "That's how it looks," because the earth does not look flat. It looks chaotically bumpy, with hills, valleys, ravines, cliffs, and so on.
Of course there are plains where, over limited areas, the earth's surface does look fairly flat. One of those plains is in the Tigris-Euphrates area, where the first historical civilization (one with writing) developed, that of the Sumerians.
Perhaps it was the appearance of the plain that persuaded the clever Sumerians to accept the generalization that the earth was flat; that if you somehow evened out all the elevations and depressions, you would be left with flatness. Contributing to the notion may have been the fact that stretches of water (ponds and lakes) looked pretty flat on quiet days.
Another way of looking at it is to ask what is the "curvature" of the earth's surface Over a considerable length, how much does the surface deviate (on the average) from perfect flatness. The flat-earth theory would make it seem that the surface doesn't deviate from flatness at all, that its curvature is 0 to the mile.
Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long.
There were reasons, to be sure, to find the flat-earth theory unsatisfactory and, about 350 B.C., the Greek philosopher Aristotle summarized them. First, certain stars disappeared beyond the Southern Hemisphere as one traveled north, and beyond the Northern Hemisphere as one traveled south. Second, the earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse was always the arc of a circle. Third, here on the earth itself, ships disappeared beyond the horizon hull-first in whatever direction they were traveling.
All three observations could not be reasonably explained if the earth's surface were flat, but could be explained by assuming the earth to be a sphere.
What's more, Aristotle believed that all solid matter tended to move toward a common center, and if solid matter did this, it would end up as a sphere. A given volume of matter is, on the average, closer to a common center if it is a sphere than if it is any other shape whatever.
About a century after Aristotle, the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes noted that the sun cast a shadow of different lengths at different latitudes (all the shadows would be the same length if the earth's surface were flat). From the difference in shadow length, he calculated the size
Among the same lines:
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Apple boss Steve Jobs offered to equip each of the machines with a gratis copy of Mac OS X. Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT and one of the project's founders, said the scheme had refused Jobs' offer on the grounds that Mac OS X is a proprietary system. Papert told the WSJ: "We declined because it's not open source," adding the $100 laptop creators will only choose an operating system where the source code is open and can be altered. This is what Steve Wozniac had to say a while ago:
I was on a panel with Nicholas in Seoul this year and admired the fact that he'd turned down an offer from Jobs for the Macintosh OS on the OLPC because it wasn't open sourced. I both donated to the program and also bought the give-one get-one and I do have it. I wonder how he feels about the project now that they are going to use XP...
I was hanging a clock in the bathroom while standing on the edge of the toilet when I slipped, fell and hit my head on the sink. Then I came up with this:
Your post reminds me of this short SF story by Ted Chiang, published 3 years ago on Nature:
http://www.concatenation.org/futures/whatsexpected.pdf
(warning: PDF link, but only a single page long)
I guess they built the Predictor after all. They didn't need a time machine and are even 7 seconds ahead instead of just 1.
For example, I have a Safari window next to this SeaMonkey window that I'm typing into. When I click on the Safari window, the usual "Safari" menus appear in the top-of-screen menubar. But the Safari window has a number of bars across the top. One of them (I don't know what it's called) starts with "Google News", and when I click on it, I get a menu. So Safari has at least one menu bar in its window, in addition to the top-of-screen menubar.
This isn't at all unusual. I've seen quite a few windows from Apple apps that use both the top-of-screen menu bar and also a per-window menu bar. I can't tell you offhand exactly which apps do that, but I've noticed a lot of them. It's funny that the mozilla apps don't seem to do this, while the Apple apps do. BICBW (But I could be wrong.)
It's not a menu bar. It's a bookmarks bar, and Firefox and every other browser have it. The "Google News" item is an RSS feed.
Consistent indentation and meaningful constant/variable names are the two main things I appreciate in other people's code. Finding code that looks like this is far more annoying than the lack or excess of comments:
if (krh == 3516) {
if (tr3 == 'g') check(tt); else
return false; }
Now imagine misleading bits like that all over the code.
Why was I moded troll?? He wondered (sarcastically) what would it be like, I just pointed out that there was a webmail from Apple already, and just by looking at it you can see that it is very much ok. Troll? Hmm, ok... (?)
And I guess you think that since nothing serious happened on the change of the century, Y2K was all talk too? It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that all the warnings made people take at least some corrective actions, obviously...
[...]The US banned CFC's in aerosol sprays in 1978 [...] The original Montreal Protocol was signed in the fall of 1987, based on negotiations started between european-scandinavian countries and the US over CFC's in aerosol sprays in 1983.[...] The latest one, held in Copenhagan in November of 1992, laid down the most stringent CFC phase-out schedule for CFC's for the world to date; and was signed by over 100 nations representing 95% of the world's current CFC consumption. Trade sanctions on CFC's, Halons and products that contain them, were imposed as of April 1993 on nations not signing the protocol
OK, if it is solved, then my question is: what is/are the starting move(s) (just the first move and, blacks or whites?) that guarantee I'll win, assuming perfect plays by both sides? If there are none, which one(s) would guarantee I draw?
Of course, that's why I used quotes when replying to the OP (and the same is true for the book title, it's just a short way to summarize certain characteristics, imperfect but "good enough")
evolution doesn't care about the individual, only the species.
Neither. Evolution "cares" most of all about genes. An extremely interesting view of "altruism" from evolution's point of view can be found on Richard Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene".
You don't think your government should care. I am glad mine does.
From the (amended in 1994) Argentinian Constitution: "Any person shall file this action to obtain information on the data about himself and their purpose, registered in public records or data bases, or in private ones intended to supply information; and in case of false data or discrimination, this action may be filed to request the suppression, rectification, confidentiality or updating of said data."
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)
Do you *want* realtime Google Earth?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPgV6-gnQaE
Er... that first paragraph was supposed to have quote tags :/
The facts that come along rarely change our understanding, more like they refine our understanding. Think of how General Relativity refines our understanding of Newton's Laws of Motion. We understood how things move but not perfectly, presently we are much closer to perfect but maybe not quite all the way there.
I think this letter from Isaac Asimov sums it up pretty well:
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
[...] The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.
However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts, and I will devote this essay to an explanation of why I think so. ...When my friend the English literature expert tells me that in every century scientists think they have worked out the universe and are always wrong, what I want to know is how wrong are they? Are they always wrong to the same degree? Let's take an example.
In the early days of civilization, the general feeling was that the earth was flat. This was not because people were stupid, or because they were intent on believing silly things. They felt it was flat on the basis of sound evidence. It was not just a matter of "That's how it looks," because the earth does not look flat. It looks chaotically bumpy, with hills, valleys, ravines, cliffs, and so on.
Of course there are plains where, over limited areas, the earth's surface does look fairly flat. One of those plains is in the Tigris-Euphrates area, where the first historical civilization (one with writing) developed, that of the Sumerians.
Perhaps it was the appearance of the plain that persuaded the clever Sumerians to accept the generalization that the earth was flat; that if you somehow evened out all the elevations and depressions, you would be left with flatness. Contributing to the notion may have been the fact that stretches of water (ponds and lakes) looked pretty flat on quiet days.
Another way of looking at it is to ask what is the "curvature" of the earth's surface Over a considerable length, how much does the surface deviate (on the average) from perfect flatness. The flat-earth theory would make it seem that the surface doesn't deviate from flatness at all, that its curvature is 0 to the mile.
Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long.
There were reasons, to be sure, to find the flat-earth theory unsatisfactory and, about 350 B.C., the Greek philosopher Aristotle summarized them. First, certain stars disappeared beyond the Southern Hemisphere as one traveled north, and beyond the Northern Hemisphere as one traveled south. Second, the earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse was always the arc of a circle. Third, here on the earth itself, ships disappeared beyond the horizon hull-first in whatever direction they were traveling.
All three observations could not be reasonably explained if the earth's surface were flat, but could be explained by assuming the earth to be a sphere.
What's more, Aristotle believed that all solid matter tended to move toward a common center, and if solid matter did this, it would end up as a sphere. A given volume of matter is, on the average, closer to a common center if it is a sphere than if it is any other shape whatever.
About a century after Aristotle, the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes noted that the sun cast a shadow of different lengths at different latitudes (all the shadows would be the same length if the earth's surface were flat). From the difference in shadow length, he calculated the size
"You are about to make a mistake. Cancel or Allow?"
Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT and one of the project's founders, said the scheme had refused Jobs' offer on the grounds that Mac OS X is a proprietary system.
Papert told the WSJ: "We declined because it's not open source," adding the $100 laptop creators will only choose an operating system where the source code is open and can be altered. This is what Steve Wozniac had to say a while ago: I was on a panel with Nicholas in Seoul this year and admired the fact that he'd turned down an offer from Jobs for the Macintosh OS on the OLPC because it wasn't open sourced. I both donated to the program and also bought the give-one get-one and I do have it. I wonder how he feels about the project now that they are going to use XP...
I was hanging a clock in the bathroom while standing on the edge of the toilet when I slipped, fell and hit my head on the sink. Then I came up with this:
/ \ |
---------
| | |
| | |
| / \ |
|
---------
Your post reminds me of this short SF story by Ted Chiang, published 3 years ago on Nature: http://www.concatenation.org/futures/whatsexpected.pdf (warning: PDF link, but only a single page long) I guess they built the Predictor after all. They didn't need a time machine and are even 7 seconds ahead instead of just 1.
Apple has just posted a new beta (beta 3)
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/
If instead of conspiracy theories you are interested in an answer from one of the co-creators of Firefox and who is currently working at Apple's WebKit team, here it is: http://blog.vlad1.com/2008/02/28/finding-the-os-x-turbo-button/#comment-573
Isaac Asimov's "Breeds There a Man...?"?
Finding code that looks like this is far more annoying than the lack or excess of comments: Now imagine misleading bits like that all over the code.
Why was I moded troll?? He wondered (sarcastically) what would it be like, I just pointed out that there was a webmail from Apple already, and just by looking at it you can see that it is very much ok.
Troll? Hmm, ok... (?)
No need to guess, this is what it would have looked like:
http://www.mac.com/1/webmail.html
Should be Buenos Aires.
Yes
And I guess you think that since nothing serious happened on the change of the century, Y2K was all talk too? It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that all the warnings made people take at least some corrective actions, obviously...
[...]The US banned CFC's in aerosol sprays in 1978 [...] The original Montreal Protocol was signed in the fall of 1987, based on negotiations started between european-scandinavian countries and the US over CFC's in aerosol sprays in 1983.[...] The latest one, held in Copenhagan in November of 1992, laid down the most stringent CFC phase-out schedule for CFC's for the world to date; and was signed by over 100 nations representing 95% of the world's current CFC consumption. Trade sanctions on CFC's, Halons and products that contain them, were imposed as of April 1993 on nations not signing the protocol
OK, if it is solved, then my question is: what is/are the starting move(s) (just the first move and, blacks or whites?) that guarantee I'll win, assuming perfect plays by both sides? If there are none, which one(s) would guarantee I draw?
Isaac Asimov - "The Machine That Won the War"
;)
Enough said.
I'd recommend taking a look at TextWrangler's command line integration.x twrangleradmin.shtml
http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/te
(Yes, TextWrangler is free)
Of course, that's why I used quotes when replying to the OP (and the same is true for the book title, it's just a short way to summarize certain characteristics, imperfect but "good enough")
Neither. Evolution "cares" most of all about genes. An extremely interesting view of "altruism" from evolution's point of view can be found on Richard Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
You don't think your government should care. I am glad mine does.
From the (amended in 1994) Argentinian Constitution:
"Any person shall file this action to obtain information on the data about himself and their purpose, registered in public records or data bases, or in private ones intended to supply information; and in case of false data or discrimination, this action may be filed to request the suppression, rectification, confidentiality or updating of said data."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_Data