The currently popular theory of planet formation says that everything is formed by collisions. That there were a couple of biggies late in the day is hardly that surprising, right?
(I've even seen Usenet discussions used in FORMAL compsci papers, usually quoting Gutmann)
I've seen this too. One example is reference ten in the following:
Johnson, S.G., Frigo, M., "A Modified Split-Radix FFT with Fewer Arithmetic Operations", IEEE Trans. Sig. Proc.55, 111-119 (2007).
It was used there to establish a time line as much as anything, but I was still surprised to see it in an IEEE journal.
One of the best 'questions' I've heard suggested is from the dialogue between Marvin and Zem, a mattress, in Life, the Universe, and Everything:
"I gave a speech once," he said suddenly and apparently unconnectedly. "You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."
"Er, five," said the mattress.
"Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?"
Just on the title of your post, "Pope's cult", the Anglican Church doesn't recognise the authority of il Papa, having been set up by Henry VIII when a former holder of that office refused to annul a marriage for him so he could marry the latest.
The real horseshit is that a year or two working for one of those companies will open so many doors...You deserve to be put through the wringer if you get to fricking start with an industry leader.
Where are all the dead end jobs that pay less, and demand more work? People don't really consider this stuff hard do they? I don't know. I suspect a year or two doing tech support for myspace would classify you as mentally ill. Tech support is generally bad, but myspace users are some of the most spectacularly stupid people on earth.
No, the height of the orbit won't change unless they slow down. The way an orbit works is that the station is going at some speed tangental to the Earth's surface, and that the gravitational pull is just enough to make it fall at the right speed to form the curve that is its orbit. To go up or down, you change this speed. I suspect though that the Earth turning into a pea-sized black hole would be violent enough to vapourise everything in orbit!
Re:Excession and Look to Windward?
on
Matter
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· Score: 1
Yes, that's fair. I tend to think of him as two separate authors though, purely for mental convenience. I hesitate to use the word liked, but I was engrossed by The Wasp Factory, but I suspect the different streams of books will appeal to somewhat different readerships. It would be interesting to see what the crossover is like.
Re:Banks is not a good author
on
Matter
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· Score: 1
His books fail to give any real backstory or context
This is the biggest problem, in my estimation. I'd love to read his Culture books (have heard fantastic things about them) but have no idea where to start. I did pick up one (forget the title offhand) and got about halfway through before I had to put it down. Brilliantly written, incredible scifi, but completely out of my depth and unable to parse it due to a lack of background. Much as I revile the numbered series fad that sweeps scifi and fantasy, in this case it would be incredibly helpful to have something of a starting point. The books just don't seem well suited to picking up whatever one hits your fancy.
For stand alone books, however, I found Feersum Endjin to be incredible.
Banks can be a bit tough to follow - Use of Weapons has two threads, one going forwards in time and one going backwards, in alternating chapters. Feersum Endjin has four threads, alternating chapters, written in various voices, one of them the diary of someone who writes in the densest txtspk I've ever seen. Banks is rarely straightforward, and I've generally found that a little perseverance is required before it becomes clear what the hell is going on, but this is true to varying extents of a lot of sci-fi. Frankly though, if you followed and enjoyed Feersum Endjin, you'll have no trouble with his other books.
Maybe the gentlest start then would be State of the Art, a hundred page novella about a Culture ship in orbit over modern earth, and its crew, as they decide whether to meddle with us, and if so, how much. Starting at the beginning with Consider Phlebas isn't a bad idea, though some people argue that The Player of Games is best - probably it's the easiest to follow from the beginning, and it's fairly expository about the Culture too.
How so? Are you suggesting that Matter is lacking in Gravitas?
I'm suggesting the article title is misleading to people interested in science, not science fiction...
Though, this is slashdot. I should of expected a slightly misleading headline.
Do you really mean to say that you looked at a story called "Book Reviews: Matter" and thought, "Hey, a nice science story. I wonder if it has any string theory or zombie Feynman?"
Re:Excession and Look to Windward?
on
Matter
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'd have to completely disagree with the claim that these two are the best Culture novels to start with. I've read Look to Windward 3 times and I still can't work out why they go to the airsphere, and Excession all too often bears the signs of the sad sight of a grown man left to masturbate in his own literary devices.
If you haven't read a Culture book before, do yourself a favour and grab a copy of the The Player of Games, Matter (which is probably the most straightforward novel he's done) or Consider Phlebas. I would have to agree that Excession isn't a good introduction. I don't quite recall what you're referring to in Look to Windward, but it's certainly a better start than Excession. Ultimately, I think the best introduction to Banks is to start at the beginning, with Consider Phlebas.
Somehow I think that number you gave is wrong. If there were 1 molecule per body of water QUADRILLIONS of times the size of the earth, what are the odds these scientists just happened to find it? I was talking about homoeopathic remedies which are often diluted 1:100 30 times (that's 1:10^60) (so-called 30C remedies), not about the drinking water pollution in the article above, which, as you say, is about much more reasonable concentrations (orders of 1:10^6 to 1:10^9, if memory serves).
The reality is that anybody making any confident statement about fluoride - positive or negative - is speaking way beyond the evidence. Fluridisation is a very contentious issue, and tends to be debated in a highly polarised, politicised manner, with possibilities stated as certainties and much wailing and gnashing of mottled, slightly less caried teeth. In 1999 the UK Department of Health had the York University Centre for Reviews and Dissemination do a systematic review of the evidence on the benefits and/or harm of fluridisation. There's not much of significance since.
Their most important result wasn't about fluride, it was about the studies - almost to the last one, they were methodologically flawed. The ones which met the minimum quality threshold suggested that there was maybe, possibly, something like a 14% increase in the number of children without dental caries in areas with fluoridated water, but the variance was enormous (some studies even had negative results). So if someone says there's overwhelming evidence that fluridation works, they're talking out of their ass. There may be a small gain to be had, but this isn't established scientifically.
Then there's the potential negatives. Fluoridation gives about one eigth of people fluorosis (discoloured teeth). There are other factors too, though these are less well established, such as a Taiwanese study which found a high incidence of bladder cancer in women from areas where the natural fluoride content in water was high. It's an early result, and the authors of the study even note that there's potentially a statisitcal problem with the study, but the possibility remains. I've heard this result stated as fact.
Ben Goldacre once gave a nice example of what such concentrations actually mean: in a sphere of water with the same radius as the distance from the Earth to the Sun, there's a molecule.
I'm not American, so I'll ask that you forgive my ignorance of this chicken pox vaccine story. However, it sounds interesting. Could I ask two questions:
1) is there now a known lifetime vaccine for chicken pox?
2) do you happen to have a good reference on this story to hand?
It's not that I don't believe you, but it's difficult to sort through the vaccine scares to find true examples of bad vaccines. For instance, there's been what Ben Goldacre calls "the MMR vaccine hoax" in the UK. As an aside, if you're not familiar with him, I recommend you try Goldacre's Bad Science blog. It's fascinating reading. He's a practising medical doctor who writes a weekly column for a UK newspaper about misleading and incorrect media coverage of science, and false claims made by practitioners of alternative medicine and nutritionists.
I believe it was Brecht who remarked (paraphrased from memory) that science is not a gateway to infinite wisdom, but rather a guard against infinite folly. That's the best summary of the scientific method I've ever run across. There's another Brecht quote I think is interesting here. Replace "theatre" with "science" in the following:
"It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality."
The return trip would require just as much effort. Going towards the sun is no easier than away from it; that's why the Mercury probe is taking almost a decade to reach its destination.
No, it's taking a decade because we want it to enter orbit around Mercury, so it's taking a very, very convoluted route. We can get a rocket to do a flyby of Mercury in a matter of months.
Any type of way to fire unions is a good way to me... Life before unions sucked royally. They've little enough to to at the moment as the labour laws are okay, but they serve a purpose. In this particular case, they were dead right. They'll continue to be relevant because employers are unionised, and are continually looking for ways to return to the days when the employer was king.
Slashdot Mirror
The currently popular theory of planet formation says that everything is formed by collisions. That there were a couple of biggies late in the day is hardly that surprising, right?
Just on the Venus-flipping collision thing, wouldn't that make Venus' orbit pop out of the plane of the solar system?
I've seen this too. One example is reference ten in the following:
Johnson, S.G., Frigo, M., "A Modified Split-Radix FFT with Fewer Arithmetic Operations", IEEE Trans. Sig. Proc. 55, 111-119 (2007).
It was used there to establish a time line as much as anything, but I was still surprised to see it in an IEEE journal.
One of the best 'questions' I've heard suggested is from the dialogue between Marvin and Zem, a mattress, in Life, the Universe, and Everything: "I gave a speech once," he said suddenly and apparently unconnectedly. "You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number." "Er, five," said the mattress. "Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?"
Just on the title of your post, "Pope's cult", the Anglican Church doesn't recognise the authority of il Papa, having been set up by Henry VIII when a former holder of that office refused to annul a marriage for him so he could marry the latest.
That's the most interesting comment I've read on slashdot in a week. Would you be so good as to submit it as an Ask Slashdot? I'd like to read that.
No, the height of the orbit won't change unless they slow down. The way an orbit works is that the station is going at some speed tangental to the Earth's surface, and that the gravitational pull is just enough to make it fall at the right speed to form the curve that is its orbit. To go up or down, you change this speed. I suspect though that the Earth turning into a pea-sized black hole would be violent enough to vapourise everything in orbit!
Yes, that's fair. I tend to think of him as two separate authors though, purely for mental convenience. I hesitate to use the word liked, but I was engrossed by The Wasp Factory, but I suspect the different streams of books will appeal to somewhat different readerships. It would be interesting to see what the crossover is like.
This is the biggest problem, in my estimation. I'd love to read his Culture books (have heard fantastic things about them) but have no idea where to start. I did pick up one (forget the title offhand) and got about halfway through before I had to put it down. Brilliantly written, incredible scifi, but completely out of my depth and unable to parse it due to a lack of background. Much as I revile the numbered series fad that sweeps scifi and fantasy, in this case it would be incredibly helpful to have something of a starting point. The books just don't seem well suited to picking up whatever one hits your fancy.
For stand alone books, however, I found Feersum Endjin to be incredible.
Banks can be a bit tough to follow - Use of Weapons has two threads, one going forwards in time and one going backwards, in alternating chapters. Feersum Endjin has four threads, alternating chapters, written in various voices, one of them the diary of someone who writes in the densest txtspk I've ever seen. Banks is rarely straightforward, and I've generally found that a little perseverance is required before it becomes clear what the hell is going on, but this is true to varying extents of a lot of sci-fi. Frankly though, if you followed and enjoyed Feersum Endjin, you'll have no trouble with his other books.
Maybe the gentlest start then would be State of the Art, a hundred page novella about a Culture ship in orbit over modern earth, and its crew, as they decide whether to meddle with us, and if so, how much. Starting at the beginning with Consider Phlebas isn't a bad idea, though some people argue that The Player of Games is best - probably it's the easiest to follow from the beginning, and it's fairly expository about the Culture too.
Though, this is slashdot. I should of expected a slightly misleading headline.
Do you really mean to say that you looked at a story called "Book Reviews: Matter" and thought, "Hey, a nice science story. I wonder if it has any string theory or zombie Feynman?"
If you haven't read a Culture book before, do yourself a favour and grab a copy of the The Player of Games, Matter (which is probably the most straightforward novel he's done) or Consider Phlebas. I would have to agree that Excession isn't a good introduction. I don't quite recall what you're referring to in Look to Windward, but it's certainly a better start than Excession. Ultimately, I think the best introduction to Banks is to start at the beginning, with Consider Phlebas.
Dextre, eh? Let's hope it follows Harry's code.
The reality is that anybody making any confident statement about fluoride - positive or negative - is speaking way beyond the evidence. Fluridisation is a very contentious issue, and tends to be debated in a highly polarised, politicised manner, with possibilities stated as certainties and much wailing and gnashing of mottled, slightly less caried teeth. In 1999 the UK Department of Health had the York University Centre for Reviews and Dissemination do a systematic review of the evidence on the benefits and/or harm of fluridisation. There's not much of significance since.
Their most important result wasn't about fluride, it was about the studies - almost to the last one, they were methodologically flawed. The ones which met the minimum quality threshold suggested that there was maybe, possibly, something like a 14% increase in the number of children without dental caries in areas with fluoridated water, but the variance was enormous (some studies even had negative results). So if someone says there's overwhelming evidence that fluridation works, they're talking out of their ass. There may be a small gain to be had, but this isn't established scientifically.
Then there's the potential negatives. Fluoridation gives about one eigth of people fluorosis (discoloured teeth). There are other factors too, though these are less well established, such as a Taiwanese study which found a high incidence of bladder cancer in women from areas where the natural fluoride content in water was high. It's an early result, and the authors of the study even note that there's potentially a statisitcal problem with the study, but the possibility remains. I've heard this result stated as fact.
Ben Goldacre once gave a nice example of what such concentrations actually mean: in a sphere of water with the same radius as the distance from the Earth to the Sun, there's a molecule.
...safety grenade... That's my new favourite phrase ever.That's how it went in original British version of the book. American audiences are, or at least are thought to be, more squeamish.
I'm not American, so I'll ask that you forgive my ignorance of this chicken pox vaccine story. However, it sounds interesting. Could I ask two questions:
1) is there now a known lifetime vaccine for chicken pox?
2) do you happen to have a good reference on this story to hand?
It's not that I don't believe you, but it's difficult to sort through the vaccine scares to find true examples of bad vaccines. For instance, there's been what Ben Goldacre calls "the MMR vaccine hoax" in the UK. As an aside, if you're not familiar with him, I recommend you try Goldacre's Bad Science blog. It's fascinating reading. He's a practising medical doctor who writes a weekly column for a UK newspaper about misleading and incorrect media coverage of science, and false claims made by practitioners of alternative medicine and nutritionists.
There's another Brecht quote I think is interesting here. Replace "theatre" with "science" in the following: "It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality."
The return trip would require just as much effort. Going towards the sun is no easier than away from it; that's why the Mercury probe is taking almost a decade to reach its destination.
No, it's taking a decade because we want it to enter orbit around Mercury, so it's taking a very, very convoluted route. We can get a rocket to do a flyby of Mercury in a matter of months.