I've seen a photo of my uncle with the Pope so I'm sure he exists. Hmmm...it was actually the previous Pope so maybe the current one doesn't exist. And the photo could have been faked. OK, you're right, I have no proof the Pope exists.
There are no 'chinese whisper' type effects introduced if you always translate from the base language.
You are simply defining things for your own convenience. Someone who reads Hebrew or Koine Greek will say that you get a 'chinese whisper' effect the moment you translate. I guess you read neither of these languages so you say the effect doesn't happen with one translation. I suppose a convert who only knows the Bible through a translation of a translation will claim it takes three translations to cause a 'chinese whisper' effect.
We could have systems where we have a ton of bureaucracy to decide whether or not the particular combination of you and your car qualifies for traveling at this or that speed. You decide to use performance tires on your car and now you have to send a document to the DMV or DVLA and wait 6 months as they process the application to allow you to travel 3.5mph faster by which time you've reached an age of 40 and you no longer qualify for that 2.5mph bonus you had for being old enough to drive wisely but not old enough that your reflexes have started slowing.
I think I'll stick with a global speed limit for all.
Are good crash test results toys? Is being able to accelerate out of trouble a toy? Are high performance brakes a toy? Are countless other safety features, some of which are pretty expensive, toys?
SInce when has Baye's Theorem been called "Occam's Razor"?
Everyone I know that actually deals with disease..
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A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 1
It's well know that people close to a a field of research are poor at making judgements about it's wider impact. Many aircraft engineers refuse to fly or express surprise that aircraft fly reliably given what they have seen take place in their workplaces. And yet many millions of people fly happily every year. In any kind of situation where professionals assess risk they are likely to exaggerate the importance of risks in their own area. Yet if we were to add up all of the risk from all of the professionals predicting hazards in our lives we'd appear to be doomed to death every few minutes.
...people already associate Nintendo with lower cost and better games so I don't see how it can backfire unless they actually fail to get developers to produce good games.
This really is a case of theorists managing to pull the wool over people's eyes to convince them that the emperor has clothes. Quantum computing power is minimal. The largest quantum computer is a few bits in size. When I say 'few bits' I don't mean it has a few bits for its address bus. I mean it has a few bits of total state. Memory, "ALU", everything, adds up to a few bits. And unlike classical computers, simply sticking two-N bit quantum computers together doesn't give you a 2N-bit computer. They need to be stuck together in such a way that every single bit of the first computer can become entangled with every single bit of the second computer without become entangled with their common environment - and this is true whether or not you use quantum error correction. So building quantum computers is exponentially harder than classical computers meaning that the total number of bits in quantum computers is probably going to grow linearly as opposed to growing with a Moore-like law. Just look at the development of quantum computers over the last decade and compare with the early years of classical digital computers to see how true this is.
So...while quantum computers are cool, and they may eventually do interesting stuff, they're really not an export risk, and probably won't be for at least half a century. But getting status as an export risk can't help but allow researchers in the field to direct more money their way as it makes quantum computing look like a national security issue.
...entering freely into agreements to give, receive and exchange goods called 'socialism'?
What's the big deal
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Space Lichens
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· Score: 3, Funny
My biology teacher told me that life was designed by an intelligent designer who can do anything. If he wanted lichen to sprout rocket engines and fly between the stars he could do that too. That's why science is a pointless subject to study and I'll just get back to my cow tipping here in Kansas...
Re:Just goes to show that even smart people can be
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Cow Tipping is a Myth
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Re:Just goes to show that even smart people can be
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Cow Tipping is a Myth
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You probably know the old joke with the line "First, we approximate the Cow as a sphere of radius r...". There are two parts to being a physicist - knowing the theory and knowing how to apply it. There are times when it's fine to make an approximation like that nd there are times when it's not. But if you know the theory and can't figure out how to apply it then you're as good as useless when it comes to solving real world problems.
Just goes to show that even smart people can be...
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Cow Tipping is a Myth
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· Score: 4, Insightful
...idiots. People who think that armed with some basic knowledge of statics think they can actually figure out what happens when you do complex things to complex objects. Cows can stand in a variety of poses allowing their center of mass to be in a variety of position with respect to their hooves and their legs will tend to buckle if pressure is applied suddenly from one side. I can see an armchair physicist maybe getting an estimate to within a factor of 2 or 3 of what force is required to tip a cow using the naive methods described, but not much better. I wonder if these are the same people who told us bees can't fly.
A) Unethical because the artists don't get paid: Well, they don't get paid when I go down to mall to buy a CD, and they don't get paid when I buy a used CD. Speaking as someone who at one time was under a major-label contract, artists don't get paid from record sales, unless they're already huge.
These are slightly bogus arguments:
The price of a new item effectively has its resale price factored in. A product like a CD (it's more obvious with a car) has the price it has partly because it can be resold. If the resale of CDs was made impossible the price of CDs would probably drop. I don't think that I'm unusual in considering the fact that I can't resell iTunes as one of the factors that counts against buying from the Apple music store. So record companies, and hence artsts, do make money from the resale value of CDs, albeit indirectly.
A similar statement goes for artist fees. If an artist isn't paid per sale the amount that they are offered in their contract, even if only a one time payment, already has the expected sales factored into it. If everyone suddenly decided to buy less music it might not affect people who've already been paid, but future artists (or artists looking to renew a contract) would be paid an amount that reflects that drop in sales. Money spent buying music does go to artists even if they aren't paid a royalty.
...this 20 ton vehicle wouldn't you be better off simply sending the engine up without the 20 tons and have it push the asteroid directly? Even if the asteroid rotated, you could fire the engine in bursts, once per revolution. This is hardly 'complicated', it's elementary physics. You (1) wouldn't have to launch 20 tons and (2) you could get the job done much quicker. If you can spot an asteroid 20 years in advance you wouldn't need to use the thrusters for long to push it out of harm's way.
...happen is that printers would put secret messages into your printouts that can be read by government agents. What kind of world do people think we live in eh?
You say this as if it's unusual. People make all kinds of contracts with their employers. Examples I've seen in recent years among colleagues: two guys who claimed to exclusively own the source code they wrote and deleted it upon leaving the company (leaving only executables) and one who claimed non-exclusive ownership of any code he worked on allowing him to take any source file he touched with him when he left. These were employees not contractors.
Catholics believe man was granted free will by god, but this does not mean that god does not know man's actions.
I'm not even going to touch this one. You say your statement innocently but you know full well (I'm sure) that this is a highly controversial statement and to many people it's an oxymoron.
who is it to say that god didn't predetermine Man (and insect, and rabbit, etc) to be the fittest?
What's going on here is not that Catholics embrace evolution, they just don't want to be seen as backward and so they pay lip service. It's cargo cult science, not the real thing. If we went along with what you suggest we could twist just about anything and claim it's compatible with science. The motion of atoms in a fluid are random so if a message from God were to suddenly appear in a bottle of water you could simply say "yeah, it's random, but God tweaked the initial conditions just right so he predetermined that the message would appear". You're saying anything could happen, regardless of the laws of physics, because God could have made it so, but you're still going to claim that no physical laws are violated. You want to have your cake and eat it too, miracles and science. I'd rather have dealings with the fundamentalists who are far more honest in their beliefs - they'll say things like "God can break the laws of physics whenever he feels like". When you argue with a fundamentalist they don't try to trick you into thinking that they think like you do.
If you could go back in time and introduce some different organism that evolution selects features from, would you be violating natural selection?
I have no idea what you are saying here. Maybe you can elaborate. Time traveling does a lot more than "violating natural selection", whatever that means. Whatever thought experiment you have in mind, I'm sure you don't need time travel to explain it.
Note that I don't think that the fundamentalists are evil
This is like pointing to a caged tiger and saying "look, tigers are perfectly safe". They are as long as they are in the cage, but fundamentally they're not safe to hang out with. The fact is, fundamentalists are not evil only because they lack the power to be evil. They are bound by the laws of the countries that they live in and so they have to behave. But look at almost any place or time in the world where religious fundamentalists have significant political power and you'll see tyranny. As a result, the constitutions of most civilised countries explicitly exclude religious groups from power.
In the US we see religious groups still trying to wield power but as long as the First Amendment is there they are no more evil than cute little tigers in zoos are dangerous.
By the way, you share a misconception shared by many Catholics:
evolution never says there is no God, God could be directing evolution
'Evolution' is usually used as shorthand to mean 'Evolution by natural selection'. This is completely incompatible with the notion of God directing evolution. (OTOH This notion is compatible with wider notions of evolution however, such as those that predated Darwin, but that's not what people are talking about here.)
I've noticed quite a few crackpots getting airtime on Slashdot in recent months. These guys pop up quite frequently. Of course if they were actually onto something they'd be the richest people in the world already. But that's the thing about crackpots, they never let a little thing like reality get in the way of their ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
You can prove it just by deleting your cookies. I doubt they use any other way to identify you.
I think I'll stick with a global speed limit for all.
Clearly your head isn't big enough. Stereo views of distant objects are just more things that are better when your head is the size of a planet.
No
SInce when has Baye's Theorem been called "Occam's Razor"?
It's well know that people close to a a field of research are poor at making judgements about it's wider impact. Many aircraft engineers refuse to fly or express surprise that aircraft fly reliably given what they have seen take place in their workplaces. And yet many millions of people fly happily every year. In any kind of situation where professionals assess risk they are likely to exaggerate the importance of risks in their own area. Yet if we were to add up all of the risk from all of the professionals predicting hazards in our lives we'd appear to be doomed to death every few minutes.
...'oldschool' in the same sentence as a game that uses high resolution graphics.
...people already associate Nintendo with lower cost and better games so I don't see how it can backfire unless they actually fail to get developers to produce good games.
So...while quantum computers are cool, and they may eventually do interesting stuff, they're really not an export risk, and probably won't be for at least half a century. But getting status as an export risk can't help but allow researchers in the field to direct more money their way as it makes quantum computing look like a national security issue.
...entering freely into agreements to give, receive and exchange goods called 'socialism'?
My biology teacher told me that life was designed by an intelligent designer who can do anything. If he wanted lichen to sprout rocket engines and fly between the stars he could do that too. That's why science is a pointless subject to study and I'll just get back to my cow tipping here in Kansas...
Cow Fu!
You probably know the old joke with the line "First, we approximate the Cow as a sphere of radius r...". There are two parts to being a physicist - knowing the theory and knowing how to apply it. There are times when it's fine to make an approximation like that nd there are times when it's not. But if you know the theory and can't figure out how to apply it then you're as good as useless when it comes to solving real world problems.
...idiots. People who think that armed with some basic knowledge of statics think they can actually figure out what happens when you do complex things to complex objects. Cows can stand in a variety of poses allowing their center of mass to be in a variety of position with respect to their hooves and their legs will tend to buckle if pressure is applied suddenly from one side. I can see an armchair physicist maybe getting an estimate to within a factor of 2 or 3 of what force is required to tip a cow using the naive methods described, but not much better. I wonder if these are the same people who told us bees can't fly.
You know, that would have been really funny if you'd applied it to the right comment.
These are slightly bogus arguments:
...this 20 ton vehicle wouldn't you be better off simply sending the engine up without the 20 tons and have it push the asteroid directly? Even if the asteroid rotated, you could fire the engine in bursts, once per revolution. This is hardly 'complicated', it's elementary physics. You (1) wouldn't have to launch 20 tons and (2) you could get the job done much quicker. If you can spot an asteroid 20 years in advance you wouldn't need to use the thrusters for long to push it out of harm's way.
...happen is that printers would put secret messages into your printouts that can be read by government agents. What kind of world do people think we live in eh?
In the US we see religious groups still trying to wield power but as long as the First Amendment is there they are no more evil than cute little tigers in zoos are dangerous.
By the way, you share a misconception shared by many Catholics:
'Evolution' is usually used as shorthand to mean 'Evolution by natural selection'. This is completely incompatible with the notion of God directing evolution. (OTOH This notion is compatible with wider notions of evolution however, such as those that predated Darwin, but that's not what people are talking about here.)I've noticed quite a few crackpots getting airtime on Slashdot in recent months. These guys pop up quite frequently. Of course if they were actually onto something they'd be the richest people in the world already. But that's the thing about crackpots, they never let a little thing like reality get in the way of their ideas.