Where's the UK electoral college, for one? I think the Queen would object a little if we set about putting together the mechanisms for the election of a president. GP was comparing elections to Parliment with elections to Congress/Senate.
I think you missed my point somewhat - I was not attempting to make a value judgement on how much the iPhone is worth in comparison to other phones, I was trying to point out why making a comparison on just the one-off price was futile. The iPhone may indeed be worth its £270 price tag over a crummy bottom of the line Nokia or the like - but is it worth the £700 or so price tag it bears when you take into account the extra cash you have to put into a contract you won't get any use out of? Or, to look at it another way, is it worth the £270 price tag over the top of the line phones from other manufacturers (which you could get for free or a nominal fee on such a high-cost contract) which have comprable feature sets (in terms of mp3 player, web browser, wifi) and potentially things the iPhone doesn't have?
Both of the above situations are very different to the "Look at this sweet bit of kit you can get for less than £300" scenarios you want to portray, I feel.
You specify "ignoring the contract" in your post, but that's the issue in most people's minds - you have to buy into a fairly hefty contract at a price point where UK operators typically give you the pick of any phone they offer for free to get the iPhone at that 'one-off price'.
I do think the "What about discoveries?" line is just a red herring - since when was the nationality of the discoverer/location of the discovery the sole factor in what nation "owns" a patent? Indeed, patents are not something which are solely restricted by nationality. The rights to any particular discovery will probably resolve to whatever institute or institutes planned and organized the experiment - and working in research in a university, I know how anal most such institutions are about intellectual property, so I'm sure they've got patent ownership sorted out neatly between themselves, regardless of how their governments dither.
I will confess, I've never used any of the social networking sites (beyond being sat down in front of one by a friend to show off some pictures of various things), so while I was aware Facebook was a bit more secure by default, this picture tagging thing is indeed new to me. Just to clarify this functionality though - can you really tag other people's photos as being "of me" and have them submit to your privacy settings? This seems like it would be a very tricky system to manage effectively.
I think one of the big issues with the development of the social networking sites is that it's not always the person's decision to be featured on facebook - I don't have an account on facebook/myspace/etc, and yet I know there are numerous photos of me, labelled as such, on those sites, because I associate with people who do use them. It's not a big deal at the moment (the photos are only linked in the most tenous of ways, and none of them are particularly dodgy), but there is a potential there - even if someone isn't actually actively participating in such sites, there is likely to be information on them there.
There is the potential that, as social networking sites evolve, it may be possible to extract a non-trivial amount of information on a person simply from their associations with others, even if they choose not to add any additional facts to the mix.
I do agree that, at the moment, the majority of the people on these sites are being bitten in the ass by their own stupidity, but I don't think this necessarily holds in the future.
I'm intrigued - what you say is perfectly true in other MMOs which follow on from WoW's lead (and, indeed, WoW itself) in the early levelling stages. But when you reach the end-game, the relatively manageable quest-oriented, experience-based model breaks down and is replaced by gear modifications and grinds for "reputation" and the like. How does Tabula Rasa's end-game compare to the early game (or, indeed, how complete is its implementation at present?)
That's something of a misleading post - while a "one second" black hole would indeed release such a huge amount of energy, the creation of such a black hole is unthinkable in the LHC: The energy the protons collide with is around 14TeV, or about 10^-6 joules. That's more than a billion billion billion times lower than the one second black hole you suggest in your post. The size of black holes produced in CERN would dissipate almost instantly, with a relatively small puff of particles.
I was specifically referring to the naive assumption that sunspots corresponded to a decrease in solar fluence reaching us, which has been demonstrated to not be the case, rather than the actual model by which it interacts with the earth's climate. But your point is also quite correct, and something I omitted - another warning that picking up on any single source to explain any given phenomenon is a perilous path, I suppose.
I don't think there's any evidence that decreased sunspots causes increased solar radiation to hit the Earth There is evidence, but it goes the other way - an increase in sunspot numbers corresponds to an increase in radiation reaching the earth. It's not a huge factor, but it's certainly present.
(I think I'm going to stop making posts along this line. Far too much repetition of this point...)
That the sun is in some way involved in our climate is blindingly obvious. One problem with the polarization over global warming is that sensible research into such a topic is almost immediately politicized by one side or another, often incorrectly: there have already been posts which have implicitly made the link "Sunspots are cold, therefore less sunspots means a warmer sun, thus global warming!", despite the fact that sunspot activity corresponds to an increase in solar temperature and thus radiation reaching us. It is kneejerk reactions like that which make this such a difficult topic to meaningfully research while attempting to retain the appearance of impartiality and keeping an open mind.
I don't think anyone even remotely considers the 11-year cycle to be the be-all and end-all of sunspot measurement any more - it's sufficient for projects which won't last much longer than that timeframe, but there are myriad cycles which are potentially demonstrated by the data (Wikipedia lists more than a dozen purported cycles with citations to various bits of scientific literature, and I'm sure the list is far from exhaustive).
The problem is, of course, trying to model this in a meaningful way - thanks to Fourier transforms we know that you can build any given pattern out of a sufficiently large collection of cyclic processes, which makes these cycles upon cycles upon cycles feel a bit iffy to me. Feels much more like a chaotic process with long periods of stable equilibrium, which means that while cycles may be useful for general short-term work, their predictive power is always hampered by the fact that the system may abruptly change in unpredictable ways.
Sunspots are local areas of cooling on the solar surface. However, a less immediately obvious but highly significant factor is that the area around sunspots is warmer than the natural solar temperature. The net result is an increase in total solar output during times of high sunspot activity. Thus there is a positive correlation between sunspot activity and the energy which is delivered to earth. I'm lazy and can't immediately find a better reference than the relevant Wikipedia page, but I'm sure someone with more diligence could dig up something better.
Interestingly, the game you describe was played, almost exactly. Kasparov played the MSN chess community, and beat them after a rather long game. The fact that it was a rather long game is less surprising when you realise that the game was in no way mob rule, but was in fact guided on what moves to vote for by four or five officially appointed chess masters. Other similar projects which lacked this fudge factor ended rather earlier, it seems.
While I'm not sure the effect you were going for, the list presented in your post would be a fascinating study into real and perceived risk factors - some things which are provably dangerous which people will in general simply shrug off as being unimportant, some which are laughably tiny risks which somehow get people all riled up, and a few in between.
Really, it's why good epidemiology is very necessary - people are simply awful at judging the risks presented by almost everything, and it can often be a massive undertaking to determine the truth (even if people are often not inclined to pay that much attention to it).
You do realise that "surveys" of this sort are really the only decent method for gathering data on ailments such as RSI which display such a low incidence rate and low correlation with workplace factors, yes? It's not like you can meaningfully do an "experiment" where you assign sufficiently large groups distinct jobs and computer usage time over a period of years to get rigorous results. And they did apply some slightly more rigorous tests to determine how many reported cases of RSI were indeed valid.
Moreover, I suspect you didn't even read the study in any detail, since in this rant:
I want a real study that looks at the amount of time in front of the computer and the activities engaged in and the amount of time spent in each activity! I want to know about posture, position of keyboard, mouse in relation to the monitor and the user. You almost perfectly describe the data presented in this study. It broke down users by time in front of PC (and further by time spent on keyboard, mouse, and keyboard&mouse tasks, as well as low input tasks) as well as by general job description, and asked numerous questions on posture and other factors which may affect how one uses a pc - indeed, the majority of the data presented in the actual risk factor tables (3&4) deals with posture.
If you want to criticise a study, please at least look it over before ranting.
What sort of hotels were you staying in that didn't have AC? It's largely standard across most of Europe (hell, I've stayed in Travel Inns in the north of England which have had it, despite it probably never, ever being necessary). Considering your example of Bordeaux, a quick Expedia search yields about 60 hotels, more than two thirds of which have air conditioning. If you're staying in the cheapest hotels, maybe you should move your own budget up a notch and give those poor poverty-stricken Europeans some of your big American tourist capital.
I like how the alleged percentage of scientists who believe in global warming according to your posts seems to be decreasing as I move down this thread. Will it get into negative numbers by the end of the discussion, I wonder?
Nitpick: Not all of the hidden variable models have been eliminated. Experiments like those investigating Bell's inequality only rule out local hidden variable theories - that is, ones where any two given particles cannot interact faster than the speed of light (i.e. through photon exchange). While theories which throw away locality aren't particularly intuitive and aren't adhered to by many, they can be constructed such that they don't interfere with other principles such as the restriction on the speed of transfer of information and so forth. Indeed, if you really don't care about elegance, you can create a sufficiently complex set of hidden variables to explain any experimental observation.
The goal of a science journalist is to communicate information. "Human-animal hybrid" pretty much perfectly describes what is going on here to the majority of people, and I'm sure nobody who isn't trying damn hard to be pedantic would bat an eye at the slightly non-technical definition.
2 Euro coins are the largest standard EU coin - larger coins are just special commerative issues which aren't really intended to be used as currency in general (indeed, they don't have status as legal tender across the EU). I've certainly never seen any of them in the wild, as it were.
Also, if you have a pile of change left over, you could always throw it into one of those charity boxes they have in airports.
There's a problem with this concept though - the law only applies if the government wants your keys off you. There is no rule about not having encrypted data, you just have to hand it over as soon as they ask for it, which is why all the nice normal safe people don't have to worry about it.
It's a very Orwellian concept of "privacy", really - private information is defined as the things the government hasn't asked you about yet.
The middle grind is where all the shameful content is - the early zones received massive amounts of polish (particularly the expansion ones) and the 60+ zones are already tuned to a pretty exacting degree (and filled with a much better overall structure). In the middle you have a lot of zones which just aren't as well put together as the early and late zones, so Blizz has apparently decided to hurry everyone through that so they can focus on the "good" content.
As described in this article, the factor they claim to have "proved" does indeed make no sense - I was under the impression that the many worlds theory was defined so that this branching tree structure could describe the probabilistic nature, such that this result is a direct consequence of the theory. But I must admit, I'm more of a practical physicist, the minutiae of the underlying explanations for quantum mechanical processes don't really affect me much - is there any kindly passing mathematician who can explain what might be interesting about this result?
Slashdot Mirror
Both of the above situations are very different to the "Look at this sweet bit of kit you can get for less than £300" scenarios you want to portray, I feel.
You specify "ignoring the contract" in your post, but that's the issue in most people's minds - you have to buy into a fairly hefty contract at a price point where UK operators typically give you the pick of any phone they offer for free to get the iPhone at that 'one-off price'.
I do think the "What about discoveries?" line is just a red herring - since when was the nationality of the discoverer/location of the discovery the sole factor in what nation "owns" a patent? Indeed, patents are not something which are solely restricted by nationality. The rights to any particular discovery will probably resolve to whatever institute or institutes planned and organized the experiment - and working in research in a university, I know how anal most such institutions are about intellectual property, so I'm sure they've got patent ownership sorted out neatly between themselves, regardless of how their governments dither.
I will confess, I've never used any of the social networking sites (beyond being sat down in front of one by a friend to show off some pictures of various things), so while I was aware Facebook was a bit more secure by default, this picture tagging thing is indeed new to me. Just to clarify this functionality though - can you really tag other people's photos as being "of me" and have them submit to your privacy settings? This seems like it would be a very tricky system to manage effectively.
There is the potential that, as social networking sites evolve, it may be possible to extract a non-trivial amount of information on a person simply from their associations with others, even if they choose not to add any additional facts to the mix.
I do agree that, at the moment, the majority of the people on these sites are being bitten in the ass by their own stupidity, but I don't think this necessarily holds in the future.
I'm intrigued - what you say is perfectly true in other MMOs which follow on from WoW's lead (and, indeed, WoW itself) in the early levelling stages. But when you reach the end-game, the relatively manageable quest-oriented, experience-based model breaks down and is replaced by gear modifications and grinds for "reputation" and the like. How does Tabula Rasa's end-game compare to the early game (or, indeed, how complete is its implementation at present?)
That's something of a misleading post - while a "one second" black hole would indeed release such a huge amount of energy, the creation of such a black hole is unthinkable in the LHC: The energy the protons collide with is around 14TeV, or about 10^-6 joules. That's more than a billion billion billion times lower than the one second black hole you suggest in your post. The size of black holes produced in CERN would dissipate almost instantly, with a relatively small puff of particles.
I was specifically referring to the naive assumption that sunspots corresponded to a decrease in solar fluence reaching us, which has been demonstrated to not be the case, rather than the actual model by which it interacts with the earth's climate. But your point is also quite correct, and something I omitted - another warning that picking up on any single source to explain any given phenomenon is a perilous path, I suppose.
(I think I'm going to stop making posts along this line. Far too much repetition of this point...)
That the sun is in some way involved in our climate is blindingly obvious. One problem with the polarization over global warming is that sensible research into such a topic is almost immediately politicized by one side or another, often incorrectly: there have already been posts which have implicitly made the link "Sunspots are cold, therefore less sunspots means a warmer sun, thus global warming!", despite the fact that sunspot activity corresponds to an increase in solar temperature and thus radiation reaching us. It is kneejerk reactions like that which make this such a difficult topic to meaningfully research while attempting to retain the appearance of impartiality and keeping an open mind.
The problem is, of course, trying to model this in a meaningful way - thanks to Fourier transforms we know that you can build any given pattern out of a sufficiently large collection of cyclic processes, which makes these cycles upon cycles upon cycles feel a bit iffy to me. Feels much more like a chaotic process with long periods of stable equilibrium, which means that while cycles may be useful for general short-term work, their predictive power is always hampered by the fact that the system may abruptly change in unpredictable ways.
Sunspots are local areas of cooling on the solar surface. However, a less immediately obvious but highly significant factor is that the area around sunspots is warmer than the natural solar temperature. The net result is an increase in total solar output during times of high sunspot activity. Thus there is a positive correlation between sunspot activity and the energy which is delivered to earth. I'm lazy and can't immediately find a better reference than the relevant Wikipedia page, but I'm sure someone with more diligence could dig up something better.
Interestingly, the game you describe was played, almost exactly. Kasparov played the MSN chess community, and beat them after a rather long game. The fact that it was a rather long game is less surprising when you realise that the game was in no way mob rule, but was in fact guided on what moves to vote for by four or five officially appointed chess masters. Other similar projects which lacked this fudge factor ended rather earlier, it seems.
Really, it's why good epidemiology is very necessary - people are simply awful at judging the risks presented by almost everything, and it can often be a massive undertaking to determine the truth (even if people are often not inclined to pay that much attention to it).
Moreover, I suspect you didn't even read the study in any detail, since in this rant:
I want a real study that looks at the amount of time in front of the computer and the activities engaged in and the amount of time spent in each activity! I want to know about posture, position of keyboard, mouse in relation to the monitor and the user. You almost perfectly describe the data presented in this study. It broke down users by time in front of PC (and further by time spent on keyboard, mouse, and keyboard&mouse tasks, as well as low input tasks) as well as by general job description, and asked numerous questions on posture and other factors which may affect how one uses a pc - indeed, the majority of the data presented in the actual risk factor tables (3&4) deals with posture.If you want to criticise a study, please at least look it over before ranting.
What sort of hotels were you staying in that didn't have AC? It's largely standard across most of Europe (hell, I've stayed in Travel Inns in the north of England which have had it, despite it probably never, ever being necessary). Considering your example of Bordeaux, a quick Expedia search yields about 60 hotels, more than two thirds of which have air conditioning. If you're staying in the cheapest hotels, maybe you should move your own budget up a notch and give those poor poverty-stricken Europeans some of your big American tourist capital.
I like how the alleged percentage of scientists who believe in global warming according to your posts seems to be decreasing as I move down this thread. Will it get into negative numbers by the end of the discussion, I wonder?
Nitpick: Not all of the hidden variable models have been eliminated. Experiments like those investigating Bell's inequality only rule out local hidden variable theories - that is, ones where any two given particles cannot interact faster than the speed of light (i.e. through photon exchange). While theories which throw away locality aren't particularly intuitive and aren't adhered to by many, they can be constructed such that they don't interfere with other principles such as the restriction on the speed of transfer of information and so forth. Indeed, if you really don't care about elegance, you can create a sufficiently complex set of hidden variables to explain any experimental observation.
The goal of a science journalist is to communicate information. "Human-animal hybrid" pretty much perfectly describes what is going on here to the majority of people, and I'm sure nobody who isn't trying damn hard to be pedantic would bat an eye at the slightly non-technical definition.
Also, if you have a pile of change left over, you could always throw it into one of those charity boxes they have in airports.
It's a very Orwellian concept of "privacy", really - private information is defined as the things the government hasn't asked you about yet.
The middle grind is where all the shameful content is - the early zones received massive amounts of polish (particularly the expansion ones) and the 60+ zones are already tuned to a pretty exacting degree (and filled with a much better overall structure). In the middle you have a lot of zones which just aren't as well put together as the early and late zones, so Blizz has apparently decided to hurry everyone through that so they can focus on the "good" content.
As described in this article, the factor they claim to have "proved" does indeed make no sense - I was under the impression that the many worlds theory was defined so that this branching tree structure could describe the probabilistic nature, such that this result is a direct consequence of the theory. But I must admit, I'm more of a practical physicist, the minutiae of the underlying explanations for quantum mechanical processes don't really affect me much - is there any kindly passing mathematician who can explain what might be interesting about this result?