No, I noticed that (Having read an actual copy, contrary to what my sibling post suggested). However, the "power of love" thing also sat badly with me for several reasons.
Notably, what's so special about Harry? Literally dozens of people selflessly gave their lives in the hour or so before his encounter with Voldemort, and countless more throughout the longer leadup, yet no magical protection was forthcoming. Were they not special because they bothered to put up a bit of a struggle? A rather baffling message given the tone of the rest of the books. Moreoever, it didn't actually advance Voldermort's defeat in any meaningful fashion - the rest of the wizards seemed to be incapable of stopping him even with the protection, so Harry had to step up and do the Saving the Day thing again, this time based off Voldemort being sloppy.
Simple solution to this and similar question: Everywhere in the book the phrase "Hallows" appears, replace it with "McGuffin". The entire focus of this book seemed rather contrived to me.
I dunno, I have to disagree (I'm not the biggest fan, but grabbed it on Saturday and read it to get a sense of completion - and so I didn't need to avoid all the spoilers)
I thought the book was rather weak - notably because of the fact that the title objects were just one great big McGuffin. Despite all the attendant lore they went through to introduce them, and the fact that the hideously slow middle section of the book was increasingly focused on them, they made effectively no unique contribution to the plot at all - and indeed, the whole wand plotline served to weaken the ending. After all the talk about remorse and courage and love and all that malarky throughout the books, the villain lost the final battle not because he was a cruel heartless evil who didn't understand the true Power of Good (tm), but simply because he didn't doublecheck events well enough with his minions and killed the wrong person.
by the way, good luck getting kids to read either The Iliad or Odyssey; I know adults educated to doctorate level who struggle with those This reeks of hyperbole - while there are some versions of these books which are inaccessible due to a translator who feels that because it was written a long time ago it's perfectly acceptable to use archaic language, there are numerous more modern translations which are perfectly readable. And if your friends struggled with the basic content of the story rather than the way it was presented, I would have to suspect their doctorates arrived in the mail one day...
Ironically though, kids aren't reading. Yes, they're reading Harry Potter, but various reports on the topic of reading in the generation who have grown up with it suggest that it isn't translating that into a general interest in books (One random article on the topic grabbed from a quick look at google). I'd be very interested to see what happens in 5 or 10 years, once the craze really goes away - will there be any lasting change, or will the whole "reading" malarky vanish into the night?
This line of reasoning (specifically, that all processes are in fact determined by some obfuscated "hidden variables" which are unobservable in a conventional sense) suffered a pretty big setback after some of the experimental tests of Bell's Inequality - without going into too much detail, if these processes did indeed depend on some hidden values which decide the result of an interaction in a deterministic fashion, you would expect to see certain correlations between entangled particles in various situations, which can differ quite significantly from that expected by the probabilistic approach.
Tests of this theorem indicate that the particles are not carrying along these hidden variables, but that the results of their interactions do indeed correspond to the probabilistic case. (To be fair, a theory can be constructed which retains hidden variables as a factor and matches these observations, but these tend to be something of a stretch and involve abandoning some fairly basic concepts)
It's 50/50. Either it happens, or it doesn't. Saying this is "50/50" is like saying you have a 50-50 chance of getting struck by lightning every time you go out. I mean, either you can get struck by lightning or not, right?
(At least, that's the reason I've been using for hiding in this basement...)
What needs to happen first is that the world moves towards libertarianism, meaning strictly limited government (in terms of both revenue and power). The less revenue, the less destruction they are capable of, and at some point the voluntary society will become possible. Isn't that exactly the problem I cited earlier though? For such a plan to become viable, everyone needs to embrace it - there are benefits to having a central government with some degree of power at present (not being dominated by larger powers), but if the majority of society moved to a decentralised approach, the benefits are even larger (the potential to crush others, largely with impunity) if they're willing to exploit them. It's probably possible to formulate it as some sort of game theory problem - we're at an equilibrium now with lots of centralised powers, and there is an equilibrium where everything is decentralised, but while the present one is a relatively stable equilibrium (as you said, arguably thousands of years old), the latter seems unstable against the introduction of a reasonable centralised power.
The idea is interesting, but unfortunately it seems to me to fall into the same boat as communism and similar concepts: a nice idea, but hideously impractical when people are added to the equation. Perhaps in the distant future, as you say.
I am intrigued - how well armed, and how decentralised?
From other posts it looks like you're in favour of a completely decentralised society, but this raises an interesting question: Even assuming sufficient resources, how far would you travel to support your fellow man? If an invader could simply hit up one town, province or what have you at a time, I'd be surprised if sufficient force could be mustered to have any significant effect. So many sayings about this sort of thing, I'll not bother to quote one.
Similarly, how well armed? Moving to a decentralised society would seem to me to preclude all but the lowest types of military hardware - or do you conceive of local tank garages and aircraft strips maintained by the community? If the aggressor's aim is not to invade but simply to use force to coerce, it's very hard to mount a local defense against bombing runs.
Your reasoning is quite sound - but only if you could get everyone to subscribe to it. If a nation stood down its military and made a commitment never to form one except in the case of responding to invaders on their own soil, any aggressor could probably claim the entire country in hours. While the concept does certainly seem a bit of a remote idea to most people living in the western world these days, it's not completely inconceivable, and I certainly wouldn't be filled with joy if nations started removing their militaries entirely.
(As an addendum: This is an endorsement of the -concept- of a standing army, not of any given application of said armies. Wouldn't touch that flame-fest with a ten-foot pole)
You could always just take a look at the population statistics, which list the number of people logging on over the previous week, fortnight, month and 2 month periods.
Quick breakdown: About half a million weekly users. About half a million more who logged on over the previous month. About another half million who log on bi-monthly. The last two are obviously going to represent a much larger chunk of people who showed up once or twice and then decided it wasn't for them, but it's not a bad measure all the same.
Most of the references to such things I've seen have regarded disputes between players - what about disputes between players and Linden themselves? I'm not familiar with it myself, but I assume Linden must have at least some sort of clauses in the various agreements which gives them some degree of impunity to, say, remove some feature which has the effect of wiping out huge amounts of player 'wealth' or covers themselves if all the servers melted down and all these assets disappeared forever. Given the degree of control Linden have (even if they choose not to exert it at present), I wouldn't be -too- hasty about claiming complete ownership over this property, even if Linden claim it's all yours.
Even more fun... I did some more research, and found out that they're apparently exploiting some inherent time variation in the strength of something over time - it's not clear exactly what, though. Initially I thought it was the strength of a given magnetic interaction, which was sort of feasible, but then he went on a bit more...
He gave a talk in UCD the other week, this blog has links to the youtube videos. Check out the second video. About 4 or 5 minutes in, he switches over to talking about some unsolved questions in physics. Turns out, there is no dark matter or dark energy. Apparently it's trivial to fix this problem by incorporating "time variance" in Newtonian Mechanics, which is what they had done with their Orbo deviece. What exactly the nature of this time variance is, or what the nature of the solution is is unfortunately not forthcoming though.
Blog post with a series of videos of a talk the CEO gave at UCD. The key premise of "fluctuations" does not, as I mistakenly suspected, seem to be the fluctuations of the earth's magnetic field after all, but rather the fact that the response time of magnetic domains is non-zero (they claim millisecond +) and that, by changing their system faster than the universe can notice, they can get around this whole pesky conservative field thing which does on in magnets.
So yes, magnets pushing on magnets, but VERY QUICKLY. That makes it more believable, right?
Well, like any good crank, they seem to have busily covered all manner of bases while talking about their invention, so that its very hard to interpret what the hell they're actually saying.
The only clear claim is that it's "magnetic" in nature. They have stated that they've created magnetic fields such that you can traverse them and arrive back at the same point with more energy, which is provably impossible in a static magnetic field. So they need a dynamic field - either through their own creation (which, I'm pretty sure, would still leave you in a zero-sum game at best), or through an external field changing like, say, the earth. They have played up the earth angle at times, speaking about fluctuations and comparing it to gravity in an article linked from TFA.
But a big argument against this line of reasoning is that they keep playing up how it breaks physical laws, and if this was the case it would be an extremely easy to understand concept, well in keeping with physical laws. The only catch is that the effect would likely be incredibly tiny, and they probably wouldn't get on the front page of slashdot with such a claim.
Still, it's possible we're all wrong and there'll be egg on our faces tomorrow. But I don't think I'll be putting my bets on that just yet.
That was the impression I got from reading the various blurbs their PR people have put out. I mean...
"The law of conservation of energy has been very reliable for 300 years, however it's missing one variable from the equation, and that's time," said McCarthy. That's just completely incoherent - the law of conservation of energy is that the total energy in a closed system is constant OVER TIME. How can it possibly leave out time?
Didn't you state the reason yourself? I was under the impression (I keep up with cosmology purely on a popular science level, so it's quite possible I'm not up to date) that most theories of the universe involved a finite universe, but one which lacks spatial boundaries in our common 3 dimensions, which would then ruin any attempt to explicitly define a center of mass.
Any definition based on atmosphere isn't very useful, as the ability of a planet to retain an atmosphere is not determined solely by its own properties, but also by its distance from the sun. Indeed, by your definition Pluto and a few other moons are planets while Mercury is not, as although Mercury is significantly larger, it is also significantly hotter.
Except this isn't really science. This is a labeling problem. The only things this definition affects are other labeling issues, and occasional problems of ambiguity in certain forms of casual conversation. I can think of no real technical situation where this would cause an issue, and the whole fuss is rather silly and gives some people a fairly low opinion of science.
As an example I was watching some random evangelical show late one night (I had insomnia) while the main debate was going on. There was a whole segment dedicated to how scientists "didn't know" whether Pluto was a planet or not and how this clearly meant that they couldn't possibly make definitive statements on things like evolution and so forth. Of course to anyone involved in science the flaw in this argument is obvious - and neatly serves to indicate how the "planet" label isn't really that significant from any technical point of view.
Right, I know I said I wasn't going to ask for a reference because of my inability to critique it correctly, but this I have to see. Someone claims to have put together a theory and experimentally proven that you could make the Grand Canyon in a matter of years? I am greatly intrigued by this. Got a citation of some sort?
Have any of you gentle readers ever heard of such distinguished SCIENTISTS as Sir Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Johannes Kepler? These men were not ignorant and uninformed and above all they were certainly no anti-scientific, but they believed that God created the world. Appeal to authority has no place in a scientific debate. If these scientists produced scientific arguments for the existence of God, wonderful, lets see it. If not, their beliefs are just that - beliefs - are not based on any sort of scientific fact, and are as subject to critique as anyone else's.
Having said that, the scientific community is typically quite open to new ideas and concepts when they are put forth in a rational fashion. The issue comes when there is significant disproof of a concept, and yet its proponents insist on being given "fair treatment". A prime example is the current fear of "electrosensitivty", where people are convinced that Wifi/mobile phones etc are giving them headaches and so forth. The idea was actively investigated and it was found that, although many patients suffered real symptoms, they were not correlated to the presence of microwave radiation, and the idea was largely dismissed. However there is still a growing group of 'sufferers' who claim that their problems need to be investigated, that the scientific community is ignoring them, and so forth. People with an entrenched opinion tend to only see the surveys which support their cause, while work which investigates their argument but does not support it often ends up getting dismissed out of hand (often as part of a conspiracy of some sort).
If nothing else, quantum physics teaches us that there are many gray areas, where things are not as cut-and-dried as they seem. How do you come to this conclusion? The uncertainty principle places a limit on direct measurements of certain properties of extremely small particles and quantum mechanics is often seen as deeply unintuitive, but it by no means indicates that at some point the natural order vanishes and there's all sorts of "interpretations" of the laws of nature which are equally valid. Quantum mechanics has made many of the most precise predictions ever verified experimentally, which makes it pretty far from a vague grey area, I would think.
Isn't that exactly the GP's point though? Some people come to the Grand Canyon, and say "Wow, look at this big hole, I wonder how it was made" and try to put together a theory to explain it (and other similar geological features). Creationists then come and say "Wow, look at this big hole, I wonder how it was made in keeping with the idea the earth is 6,000 years old".
This extra condition - made with little or no real reason beyond the Word or what have you - makes a world of difference in the scientific picture. I don't have the knowledge of geology to critique an explanation of the formation of the Grand Canyon in any detail (Well, provided its in any way coherent. But lets assume it's somewhat reasonable), so I won't bother asking for citations or the like, but I would expect that the need for the Grand Canyon to be created in a short time frame featured pretty heavily in the development of the theory.
By comparison, consider that not so long ago, suggesting the world was "old" was breaking the status quo in a massive way, going against both the religious and scientific establishments. People did not do this without a reason, and it took a significant amount of evidence from many fields to build a convincing argument for the case. It begs the question - why would people do this if there was a "simpler" young earth explanation? It can't have been the vast old-earth athiest conspiracy, since such a thing presumably didn't exist before people considered the idea of an old earth in much detail.
Preconceived notions are a significant weakness if anyone is serious about the scientific method, and any theory based around them should, I feel, be viewed with at least a touch of skepticism
Slashdot Mirror
Notably, what's so special about Harry? Literally dozens of people selflessly gave their lives in the hour or so before his encounter with Voldemort, and countless more throughout the longer leadup, yet no magical protection was forthcoming. Were they not special because they bothered to put up a bit of a struggle? A rather baffling message given the tone of the rest of the books. Moreoever, it didn't actually advance Voldermort's defeat in any meaningful fashion - the rest of the wizards seemed to be incapable of stopping him even with the protection, so Harry had to step up and do the Saving the Day thing again, this time based off Voldemort being sloppy.
Simple solution to this and similar question: Everywhere in the book the phrase "Hallows" appears, replace it with "McGuffin". The entire focus of this book seemed rather contrived to me.
I thought the book was rather weak - notably because of the fact that the title objects were just one great big McGuffin. Despite all the attendant lore they went through to introduce them, and the fact that the hideously slow middle section of the book was increasingly focused on them, they made effectively no unique contribution to the plot at all - and indeed, the whole wand plotline served to weaken the ending. After all the talk about remorse and courage and love and all that malarky throughout the books, the villain lost the final battle not because he was a cruel heartless evil who didn't understand the true Power of Good (tm), but simply because he didn't doublecheck events well enough with his minions and killed the wrong person.
Ironically though, kids aren't reading. Yes, they're reading Harry Potter, but various reports on the topic of reading in the generation who have grown up with it suggest that it isn't translating that into a general interest in books (One random article on the topic grabbed from a quick look at google). I'd be very interested to see what happens in 5 or 10 years, once the craze really goes away - will there be any lasting change, or will the whole "reading" malarky vanish into the night?
Close enough. Give or take a few page numbers (which may be down to editions) and a typo in the quote of the final sentences.
Tests of this theorem indicate that the particles are not carrying along these hidden variables, but that the results of their interactions do indeed correspond to the probabilistic case. (To be fair, a theory can be constructed which retains hidden variables as a factor and matches these observations, but these tend to be something of a stretch and involve abandoning some fairly basic concepts)
(At least, that's the reason I've been using for hiding in this basement...)
The idea is interesting, but unfortunately it seems to me to fall into the same boat as communism and similar concepts: a nice idea, but hideously impractical when people are added to the equation. Perhaps in the distant future, as you say.
From other posts it looks like you're in favour of a completely decentralised society, but this raises an interesting question: Even assuming sufficient resources, how far would you travel to support your fellow man? If an invader could simply hit up one town, province or what have you at a time, I'd be surprised if sufficient force could be mustered to have any significant effect. So many sayings about this sort of thing, I'll not bother to quote one.
Similarly, how well armed? Moving to a decentralised society would seem to me to preclude all but the lowest types of military hardware - or do you conceive of local tank garages and aircraft strips maintained by the community? If the aggressor's aim is not to invade but simply to use force to coerce, it's very hard to mount a local defense against bombing runs.
(As an addendum: This is an endorsement of the -concept- of a standing army, not of any given application of said armies. Wouldn't touch that flame-fest with a ten-foot pole)
Quick breakdown: About half a million weekly users. About half a million more who logged on over the previous month. About another half million who log on bi-monthly. The last two are obviously going to represent a much larger chunk of people who showed up once or twice and then decided it wasn't for them, but it's not a bad measure all the same.
http://quthoughts.blogspot.com/2007/06/steorn-it-j ust-keeps-going-and-going.html
He gave a talk in UCD the other week, this blog has links to the youtube videos. Check out the second video. About 4 or 5 minutes in, he switches over to talking about some unsolved questions in physics. Turns out, there is no dark matter or dark energy. Apparently it's trivial to fix this problem by incorporating "time variance" in Newtonian Mechanics, which is what they had done with their Orbo deviece. What exactly the nature of this time variance is, or what the nature of the solution is is unfortunately not forthcoming though.
http://quthoughts.blogspot.com/2007/06/steorn-it-j ust-keeps-going-and-going.html
Blog post with a series of videos of a talk the CEO gave at UCD. The key premise of "fluctuations" does not, as I mistakenly suspected, seem to be the fluctuations of the earth's magnetic field after all, but rather the fact that the response time of magnetic domains is non-zero (they claim millisecond +) and that, by changing their system faster than the universe can notice, they can get around this whole pesky conservative field thing which does on in magnets.
So yes, magnets pushing on magnets, but VERY QUICKLY. That makes it more believable, right?
The only clear claim is that it's "magnetic" in nature. They have stated that they've created magnetic fields such that you can traverse them and arrive back at the same point with more energy, which is provably impossible in a static magnetic field. So they need a dynamic field - either through their own creation (which, I'm pretty sure, would still leave you in a zero-sum game at best), or through an external field changing like, say, the earth. They have played up the earth angle at times, speaking about fluctuations and comparing it to gravity in an article linked from TFA.
But a big argument against this line of reasoning is that they keep playing up how it breaks physical laws, and if this was the case it would be an extremely easy to understand concept, well in keeping with physical laws. The only catch is that the effect would likely be incredibly tiny, and they probably wouldn't get on the front page of slashdot with such a claim.
Still, it's possible we're all wrong and there'll be egg on our faces tomorrow. But I don't think I'll be putting my bets on that just yet.
Didn't you state the reason yourself? I was under the impression (I keep up with cosmology purely on a popular science level, so it's quite possible I'm not up to date) that most theories of the universe involved a finite universe, but one which lacks spatial boundaries in our common 3 dimensions, which would then ruin any attempt to explicitly define a center of mass.
While the basic gist of your comment is correct, I think the mistake in your logic is assuming Pluto is still a planet.
As an example I was watching some random evangelical show late one night (I had insomnia) while the main debate was going on. There was a whole segment dedicated to how scientists "didn't know" whether Pluto was a planet or not and how this clearly meant that they couldn't possibly make definitive statements on things like evolution and so forth. Of course to anyone involved in science the flaw in this argument is obvious - and neatly serves to indicate how the "planet" label isn't really that significant from any technical point of view.
Right, I know I said I wasn't going to ask for a reference because of my inability to critique it correctly, but this I have to see. Someone claims to have put together a theory and experimentally proven that you could make the Grand Canyon in a matter of years? I am greatly intrigued by this. Got a citation of some sort?
Having said that, the scientific community is typically quite open to new ideas and concepts when they are put forth in a rational fashion. The issue comes when there is significant disproof of a concept, and yet its proponents insist on being given "fair treatment". A prime example is the current fear of "electrosensitivty", where people are convinced that Wifi/mobile phones etc are giving them headaches and so forth. The idea was actively investigated and it was found that, although many patients suffered real symptoms, they were not correlated to the presence of microwave radiation, and the idea was largely dismissed. However there is still a growing group of 'sufferers' who claim that their problems need to be investigated, that the scientific community is ignoring them, and so forth. People with an entrenched opinion tend to only see the surveys which support their cause, while work which investigates their argument but does not support it often ends up getting dismissed out of hand (often as part of a conspiracy of some sort).
This extra condition - made with little or no real reason beyond the Word or what have you - makes a world of difference in the scientific picture. I don't have the knowledge of geology to critique an explanation of the formation of the Grand Canyon in any detail (Well, provided its in any way coherent. But lets assume it's somewhat reasonable), so I won't bother asking for citations or the like, but I would expect that the need for the Grand Canyon to be created in a short time frame featured pretty heavily in the development of the theory.
By comparison, consider that not so long ago, suggesting the world was "old" was breaking the status quo in a massive way, going against both the religious and scientific establishments. People did not do this without a reason, and it took a significant amount of evidence from many fields to build a convincing argument for the case. It begs the question - why would people do this if there was a "simpler" young earth explanation? It can't have been the vast old-earth athiest conspiracy, since such a thing presumably didn't exist before people considered the idea of an old earth in much detail.
Preconceived notions are a significant weakness if anyone is serious about the scientific method, and any theory based around them should, I feel, be viewed with at least a touch of skepticism