Different cultures have been counting in bases other than base-10 for all of human history.
Yes, the actual article discusses that.
The article, however, is remarkably weak in support for the hypothesis that the people of Mangareva (the "tiny Pacific island" mentioned) actually used binary arithmetic, since in fact it doesn't give any evidence at all that they actually used binary arithmetic. What it says is they have number words for three binary powers of ten:paua for 20; tataua for 40; and varu for 80.
The jump from there to "thus clearly they invented binary arithmetic" is speculation. They state that none of the islanders use binary arithmetic now, and there's no record they once did-- just those words for binary-multiples-of-ten.
Of course a gentleman in the 18th century wasn't the first to use binary.... that's preposterous.
I don't know what is "of course" about that statement. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of anybody using binary before then. Maybe somebody did, but it seen they didn't tell anybody.
I'm not from the US, so I never understood why poor people vote conservative?
Liberals don't understand this either, so your lack of understanding doesn't stem from not being from the US.
Liberalism is, overall, the urban and suburban political philosophy; conservatism is typically the rural political philosophy. Rural counties are poorer than urban ones, resulting in the political split you see.
Liberalism is not really marketed to people outside of the urban centers. Most liberals don't seem to have much interest in what people in those areas think, other than making quips like that one: "We have a very very very stupid population". (The people in rural areas think exactly the same thing.)
...Second, as already pointed out on the MacRumors forums, the stored "session" data is merely the URLs of the web pages you have open, which is passed over the wire in plain text anyway when you open or reopen the URL.
along with the password and login.
from the article: "the login and password are not encrypted (see the red oval in the screenshot).
Well planned and executed diversion campaign??????
As a purported diversionary tactic, this fails miserably: (1) Nobody outside of Iceland cares if Iceland's parliament's phones were tapped. (2) Nobody outside of Iceland pays attention what people inside of Iceland care about.
If this is a "diversionary campaign," it's the worst diversion ever. They would have diverted more attention if they planted a story claiming that wikileaks tapped Miley Cyrus's tweets.
I personally think a 20x increase is more than "not much higher".
First, my statement was that it is not that much higher. Eliminating the word "that" changes the meaning of the sentence, since the the topic was the difference between millions and billions.
Second, the infrared absorption of methane is about 21 times higher than that of carbon dioxide. However, the atmospheric lifetime is 12 years, compared to estimates of between 50 and 200 years for carbon dioxide. So it is not true that "methane is about 20x more effective than CO2 at greenhouse warming over the period of 100 years". It is about 20x more effective than CO2 over a period of about 12 years, but drops exponentially to zero after that. (That's expressed per molecule. It's higher if expressed per unit mass emitted, since methane is so much lighter than carbon dioxide.)
That is exactly what we need to terraform Mars! We need to send few tonnes of this stuff to Mars....
A lot more than a "few tonnes", I'm afraid. I'll also point out that the formula for this is C12F27N-- it has a molecular mass of 671-- that's fifteen times more massive than carbon dioxide molecules. So, per unit MASS it's only 460 times more powerful an infrared absorber than carbon dioxide.
SF6 is a better infrared-trapping greenhouse gas for Mars.
millions of tons of methane are being dumped into the atmosphere thanks to Gazoprom's leaking pipelines....
That is undoubtably true. However, billions of tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere.
Yet no one gives a hoot because Russia is good while America and their SUVs continue to be targeted by the rest of the jealous world....
While methane does have a higher infrared cross-section than carbon dioxide, it is not that much higher; it also has a much shorter atmospheric lifetime. While it's useful to address both, it makes to address more attention on the larger factor, and not the smaller.
I like it. With such a high fineness ratio, I wonder a little about stability-- does it stay heat-shield down? Is there an alternate stable mode with the nose down?
I do notice a ballute-- this is probably to stabilize the heat-shield-down attitude when it's too high for a parachute to open. This may work for stability for the relatively low entry velocities needed for suborbital, although I'd be curious about the ballute holding up in hypersonic conditions.
I think the more interesting part is the fact that we have some decent mathematicians (in this case Adi Shamir among others) are setting about pulling the entire bitcoin transaction graph and doing some serious data-mining on it.
The more disturbing fact is that bitcoin makes this kind of analysis possible in the first place.
A currency where every transaction can be analyzed and data-mined! Yow.
So, Rose was, notionally, not really Rose here, but the interface to the machine consciousness. Still, it's worth pointing out that we have no way to verify that-- it could be indeed be Rose in her Bad Wolf phase, when she had great power over time, and could plausibly have appeared back at the Time War, and just pretend to be the avitar of the machine.
We'd lose a good portion of our cheap modern food supply because most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock
This the source of the problem, not the effect.
Yes, it does turn out that dosing meat animals with antibiotics even when they are not sick will increase their weight (and hence production) by about 10%, This is a small increase-- but the margin on meat production is low enough that it makes a difference in profitability, and hence if some of the farms do it, pretty much all of them follow.
So, we're losing the ability to use antibiotics because we're spraying them across the landscape, not to cure sickness, but as a fattening agent for cattle.
and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised.
This is actually a much smaller use of antibiotics. But, yes, the idea is that we can save money by not bothering with sanitation and health in cattle, but instead just dose them with antibiotics.
Anonymous wrote:
As ranching employs a significant number of people in some states, and agrobusiness has great clout with Congress, this just isn't going to happen. Plus, the average American is not going to accept such a sudden stop to his high meat intake.
Actually, it's a very small effect-- eliminating antibiotic use on cattle would have only a trivial effect on price. The problem is that the low margin on meat production means that if one cattle-production factory does it, everybody has to do so to keep up.
You ask ANY of the guys that are actually in the streets, or people that live in edge neighborhoods... crime is going up and going up rapidly.
Perception of crime may be going up. Fear of crime may be going up. Actual crime is going down.
--this is probably, however, simply a function of the aging of the population rather than the effects of policies. The largest component of crime is teenagers and early twenties.
99% of what you hear from your local,state or federal government is 100% BS to simply calm you down.
Unfortunately, when you dismiss all data that disagrees with what you have already decided to believe, you can never learn anything.
If crime rates are going down, then why is my local police getting military grade equipment and gear? Cripes for the last sports event here they had M16 machine guns in the open and wearing full military armor.
The equipment used by police departments has no relationship to the amount of crime.
You can't scatter one beam of light with another one!
No, but you can cancel light out with more light.
You can cancel light out in specific directions, but the price of nulling the interference in some directions is increasing the intensity in others. It's that conservation of energy thing. On the average, you make the object brighter
And that really isn't "invisibility"-- you can't see through the object. It's just a complicated way of achieving the same effect as painting the object black. Except it's only "black" for a selected wavelength in a selected direction.
...The trouble is, you could tune it to work in visible light but only if that light were coherent (as in, comes out of a laser). You can't get incoherent light out of phase with itself because it's a wide range of frequencies and all completely incoherent, like snow on an analog TV.
And this isn't even an "invisiblity" shield-- what it is, is a radar-scattering device.
From the article, apparently it scatters an incident radar beam so that the backscattered part (the part that returns to the transmitter) is zero. Specifically, they "then carefully modulated the current on each element to modify the field such that it deflected microwaves aimed at an aluminum cylinder in every direction except back toward the source of the microwaves, where the object could be detected."
So the object isn't invisible at all, except to observers who are looking at it from exactly the direction of the illumination-- in all other directions, it reflects brightly.
Furthermore, who the heck wrote this sentence: "using the ability of electromagnetic fields to redirect or scatter waves of energy." It is a feature of electromagnetic fields that they pass through each other (except in materials of strongly nonlinear index, of which air is not one.) You can't scatter one beam of light with another one!
This particular eclipse happens near perigee, as the Moon nears its closest approach to the Earth. This does make for a king tide, a high tide that is significantly higher than other spring tides. Also the Earth is coming up on perihelion in a few weeks, as parent post states, when it is at its closest approach to the Sun. That will also push the tide higher.
Except that the new moon in December is even closer to lunar perigee. The December new moon is one day away from lunar perigee, while this new moon is three days off.
In January, we get perigee and the new moon at the same time, with perihelion only three days off. This is probably the highest tide of all, although the moon is slightly further inclined off the sun-Earth line. In any case, though, the point is that there really isn't a significance to the eclipse-- an eclipse isn't really much different in tides.
This is cute, but the difference in tidal forces between an eclipse and any other full moon is not very much-- the moon and sun are still pretty closely lined up. If it's within a few months of an eclipse, the difference is trivial. Or, for that matter, a lunar eclipse would also be as good. Next month's full moon will have (very slightly) higher tides-- the Earth is a month closer to perihelion.
OK, let me get this right. Buddy wants to work with high explosives in his garage, and can't understand why the people in his neighbourhood might think that "red tape" like zoning, safety, and fire regulations might be a good thing?
To the contrary, he said he was puzzled why the red tape covers a few grams of gunpowder, which is pretty much harmless, and not a few tons of liquid oxygen and kerosene, which is not harmless.
Slashdot Mirror
Different cultures have been counting in bases other than base-10 for all of human history.
Yes, the actual article discusses that.
The article, however, is remarkably weak in support for the hypothesis that the people of Mangareva (the "tiny Pacific island" mentioned) actually used binary arithmetic, since in fact it doesn't give any evidence at all that they actually used binary arithmetic. What it says is they have number words for three binary powers of ten:paua for 20; tataua for 40; and varu for 80.
The jump from there to "thus clearly they invented binary arithmetic" is speculation. They state that none of the islanders use binary arithmetic now, and there's no record they once did-- just those words for binary-multiples-of-ten.
Of course a gentleman in the 18th century wasn't the first to use binary.... that's preposterous.
I don't know what is "of course" about that statement. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of anybody using binary before then. Maybe somebody did, but it seen they didn't tell anybody.
I'm not from the US, so I never understood why poor people vote conservative?
Liberals don't understand this either, so your lack of understanding doesn't stem from not being from the US.
Liberalism is, overall, the urban and suburban political philosophy; conservatism is typically the rural political philosophy. Rural counties are poorer than urban ones, resulting in the political split you see.
Liberalism is not really marketed to people outside of the urban centers. Most liberals don't seem to have much interest in what people in those areas think, other than making quips like that one: "We have a very very very stupid population". (The people in rural areas think exactly the same thing.)
...Second, as already pointed out on the MacRumors forums, the stored "session" data is merely the URLs of the web pages you have open, which is passed over the wire in plain text anyway when you open or reopen the URL.
along with the password and login.
from the article: "the login and password are not encrypted (see the red oval in the screenshot).
This salvo is very well planned and executed
Well planned and executed diversion campaign??????
As a purported diversionary tactic, this fails miserably:
(1) Nobody outside of Iceland cares if Iceland's parliament's phones were tapped.
(2) Nobody outside of Iceland pays attention what people inside of Iceland care about.
If this is a "diversionary campaign," it's the worst diversion ever. They would have diverted more attention if they planted a story claiming that wikileaks tapped Miley Cyrus's tweets.
Millions of tons of various gas are dumped into the atmosphere daily as they rise from the crust of the Earth.
Once again, we see that slashdot aonymous cowards confuse millions with billions.
Volcanoes emit millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Humans emit billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2007/07_02_15.html
http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/volcanoes-co2-people-emissions-climate-110627.htm
I personally think a 20x increase is more than "not much higher".
First, my statement was that it is not that much higher. Eliminating the word "that" changes the meaning of the sentence, since the the topic was the difference between millions and billions.
Second, the infrared absorption of methane is about 21 times higher than that of carbon dioxide. However, the atmospheric lifetime is 12 years, compared to estimates of between 50 and 200 years for carbon dioxide. So it is not true that "methane is about 20x more effective than CO2 at greenhouse warming over the period of 100 years". It is about 20x more effective than CO2 over a period of about 12 years, but drops exponentially to zero after that. (That's expressed per molecule. It's higher if expressed per unit mass emitted, since methane is so much lighter than carbon dioxide.)
That is exactly what we need to terraform Mars! We need to send few tonnes of this stuff to Mars....
A lot more than a "few tonnes", I'm afraid. I'll also point out that the formula for this is C12F27N-- it has a molecular mass of 671-- that's fifteen times more massive than carbon dioxide molecules. So, per unit MASS it's only 460 times more powerful an infrared absorber than carbon dioxide.
SF6 is a better infrared-trapping greenhouse gas for Mars.
Chemical info here, by the way: http://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C311897
http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/content/dam/sigma-aldrich/structure1/050/mfcd00000436.eps/_jcr_content/renditions/large.png
millions of tons of methane are being dumped into the atmosphere thanks to Gazoprom's leaking pipelines....
That is undoubtably true. However, billions of tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere.
Yet no one gives a hoot because Russia is good while America and their SUVs continue to be targeted by the rest of the jealous world....
While methane does have a higher infrared cross-section than carbon dioxide, it is not that much higher; it also has a much shorter atmospheric lifetime. While it's useful to address both, it makes to address more attention on the larger factor, and not the smaller.
I like it. With such a high fineness ratio, I wonder a little about stability-- does it stay heat-shield down? Is there an alternate stable mode with the nose down?
I do notice a ballute-- this is probably to stabilize the heat-shield-down attitude when it's too high for a parachute to open. This may work for stability for the relatively low entry velocities needed for suborbital, although I'd be curious about the ballute holding up in hypersonic conditions.
I do have to say, that was an interesting use of the word "disciplinary" in Jaschik's first sentence.
Grammatically accurate, yes, but I had totally the wrong picture in my mind when he said "disciplinary meetings."
--or, from the rest of the articles, maybe not so inaccurate as all that--
I think the more interesting part is the fact that we have some decent mathematicians (in this case Adi Shamir among others) are setting about pulling the entire bitcoin transaction graph and doing some serious data-mining on it.
The more disturbing fact is that bitcoin makes this kind of analysis possible in the first place.
A currency where every transaction can be analyzed and data-mined! Yow.
NSA must love this.
Worse-- there were "a billion billion Daleks".
Even if 99% of them destroyed each other by accident... even if 99.9% of them destroyed each other...
So, Rose was, notionally, not really Rose here, but the interface to the machine consciousness. Still, it's worth pointing out that we have no way to verify that-- it could be indeed be Rose in her Bad Wolf phase, when she had great power over time, and could plausibly have appeared back at the Time War, and just pretend to be the avitar of the machine.
What is it with the livestock, that would do nothing to solve the problem, doctors give out antibiotics like there f'in candy to anyone and everyone.
It would do something to solve the largest part of the problem
Amount of antibiotics sold by manufacturers for use by food-producing animals: 13.1 million kilograms
Sold for use by people: 3.3 million kilograms
80 percent of antibiotics sold in the US go to increasing meat production from farm animals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/opinion/antibiotics-and-the-meat-we-eat.html
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/15/louise-slaughter/rep-louise-slaughter-says-80-antibiotics-are-fed-l/
http://www.rodalenews.com/antibiotics
Just because you are a vegan doesn't mean you should peddle some false information.
Just because you are an Anonymous Coward doesn't mean you should peddle some false information. There, fixed it for you.
The summary says:
We'd lose a good portion of our cheap modern food supply because most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock
This the source of the problem, not the effect.
Yes, it does turn out that dosing meat animals with antibiotics even when they are not sick will increase their weight (and hence production) by about 10%, This is a small increase-- but the margin on meat production is low enough that it makes a difference in profitability, and hence if some of the farms do it, pretty much all of them follow.
So, we're losing the ability to use antibiotics because we're spraying them across the landscape, not to cure sickness, but as a fattening agent for cattle.
and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised.
This is actually a much smaller use of antibiotics. But, yes, the idea is that we can save money by not bothering with sanitation and health in cattle, but instead just dose them with antibiotics.
Anonymous wrote:
As ranching employs a significant number of people in some states, and agrobusiness has great clout with Congress, this just isn't going to happen. Plus, the average American is not going to accept such a sudden stop to his high meat intake.
Actually, it's a very small effect-- eliminating antibiotic use on cattle would have only a trivial effect on price. The problem is that the low margin on meat production means that if one cattle-production factory does it, everybody has to do so to keep up.
About all I can do is repeat: once you have decided that you can dismiss any and all data that disagrees with you, you can never learn anything.
You've left the realm of facts, except the ones that you make up, and those can't be refuted.
fact is, more people are murdered with hammers than rifles in total.
Sorry, false.
Would be true if you said hammers, clubs, and other blunt objects.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022129264
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8
even then, it's a very narrowly crafted statistic, specific to rifles only, making sure you leave out shotguns and other kinds of guns.
And as mass-murders with hammers, well, they are pretty rare.
You ask ANY of the guys that are actually in the streets, or people that live in edge neighborhoods... crime is going up and going up rapidly.
Perception of crime may be going up. Fear of crime may be going up. Actual crime is going down.
--this is probably, however, simply a function of the aging of the population rather than the effects of policies. The largest component of crime is teenagers and early twenties.
99% of what you hear from your local,state or federal government is 100% BS to simply calm you down.
Unfortunately, when you dismiss all data that disagrees with what you have already decided to believe, you can never learn anything.
http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/june/crimes_061112/
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0524/US-crime-rate-is-down-six-key-reasons
http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/29/justice/us-violent-crime/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-dimond/crime-reduction_b_2878003.html
If crime rates are going down, then why is my local police getting military grade equipment and gear? Cripes for the last sports event here they had M16 machine guns in the open and wearing full military armor.
The equipment used by police departments has no relationship to the amount of crime.
You can't scatter one beam of light with another one!
No, but you can cancel light out with more light.
You can cancel light out in specific directions, but the price of nulling the interference in some directions is increasing the intensity in others. It's that conservation of energy thing. On the average, you make the object brighter
And that really isn't "invisibility"-- you can't see through the object. It's just a complicated way of achieving the same effect as painting the object black. Except it's only "black" for a selected wavelength in a selected direction.
...The trouble is, you could tune it to work in visible light but only if that light were coherent (as in, comes out of a laser). You can't get incoherent light out of phase with itself because it's a wide range of frequencies and all completely incoherent, like snow on an analog TV.
Right.
And this isn't even an "invisiblity" shield-- what it is, is a radar-scattering device.
From the article, apparently it scatters an incident radar beam so that the backscattered part (the part that returns to the transmitter) is zero. Specifically, they "then carefully modulated the current on each element to modify the field such that it deflected microwaves aimed at an aluminum cylinder in every direction except back toward the source of the microwaves, where the object could be detected."
So the object isn't invisible at all, except to observers who are looking at it from exactly the direction of the illumination-- in all other directions, it reflects brightly.
Furthermore, who the heck wrote this sentence: "using the ability of electromagnetic fields to redirect or scatter waves of energy." It is a feature of electromagnetic fields that they pass through each other (except in materials of strongly nonlinear index, of which air is not one.) You can't scatter one beam of light with another one!
With that kind of thrust, can we just add-on an extra oxygen tank, and convert it into the space-plane we've been promised for so long?
No. Orbital velocity is about Mach 25. This plane cruises at Mach 6. So you have another 19 to go.
Still, it's a step. One small step for a plane...
yes, editing would be nice here...
Strike that. Reverse it.
This particular eclipse happens near perigee, as the Moon nears its closest approach to the Earth. This does make for a king tide, a high tide that is significantly higher than other spring tides. Also the Earth is coming up on perihelion in a few weeks, as parent post states, when it is at its closest approach to the Sun. That will also push the tide higher.
Except that the new moon in December is even closer to lunar perigee. The December new moon is one day away from lunar perigee, while this new moon is three days off.
In January, we get perigee and the new moon at the same time, with perihelion only three days off. This is probably the highest tide of all, although the moon is slightly further inclined off the sun-Earth line. In any case, though, the point is that there really isn't a significance to the eclipse-- an eclipse isn't really much different in tides.
This is cute, but the difference in tidal forces between an eclipse and any other full moon is not very much-- the moon and sun are still pretty closely lined up. If it's within a few months of an eclipse, the difference is trivial. Or, for that matter, a lunar eclipse would also be as good.
Next month's full moon will have (very slightly) higher tides-- the Earth is a month closer to perihelion.
OK, let me get this right. Buddy wants to work with high explosives in his garage, and can't understand why the people in his neighbourhood might think that "red tape" like zoning, safety, and fire regulations might be a good thing?
To the contrary, he said he was puzzled why the red tape covers a few grams of gunpowder, which is pretty much harmless, and not a few tons of liquid oxygen and kerosene, which is not harmless.