You capture opponents pieces and remove them from the board. There's a good introduction here (the site is a great resource overall): http://senseis.xmp.net/?RulesO... In addition to playing a stone, passing is always a legal move (if both players pass the game ends).
Because of this, "infinite loop" positions occur frequently and there's a rule called ko to address that. If your move would repeat the previous board position, you must play somewhere else. (Again, a good explanation is http://senseis.xmp.net/?Ko )
At any rate, for any given board state, there are a huge (but finite) number of different sequences of moves that might have led to that board state.
And what exactly is improbable with having two different species that are genetically equally similar to Homo sapiens sapiens? How in the world would that cause anyone to "scoff at science"?
I completely agree. Scientific publication is an immense racket at present. We pay to submit our articles, review other scientist’s articles for free, and then still get charged to access our own publications and are forbidden from posting them where they're publicly available.
Unfortunately, I think it will still take another generation to "get out from under the thumb of the publishing houses" and move to an open-access model.
The prestige of a publication in Science or Nature is an immense boost to your career. What journal your research gets published in is a very decisive factor in getting a tenure-track position and in getting tenure.
That's why what Princeton is doing is such a great thing. It allows you to still submit and be published in a prestigious journal, but hide behind the university's legal team when it comes to posting your publication where everyone can access it. Google scholar does an amazing job of finding publicly available copies of scientific publications on a researcher's personal website, etc, so this is a big step towards open-access scientific publication without having to sacrifice your career.
While they're at it, it would be awesome to deploy a few more seismometers...
Moonquakes are pretty damn cool from a seismological perspective. Beyond that, some of the ones recorded by Apollo-installed seismometers were >Mw 5. Big enough to be damaging.
The moon isn't tectonically active, of course, but it is seismically active, and the data recorded in the 70's indicates that the moon's lithosphere is a very different beast compared to earth's. At any rate, it would produce some extremely neat data!
There's no income tax in TN, but there's a 9-10% sales tax on _everything_. That includes food and drugs. It's a horribly regressive tax.
If you're wealthy (or just upper middle class) you spend a far lower portion of your income on basic necessities like groceries. Most of your income goes towards untaxable (by the state, anyway) things such a savings, education, healthcare, goods bought online or out of state, lawyers fees, etc.
If you're not wealthy, most of your income is going toward necessities that are taxed at the full 9-10%.
In the end, the lowest income bracket in Tennessee pays ~3x the percentage of their income that the highest income bracket does in state taxes. Partly because of this, TN has the 3rd greatest income inequality in the US (gap between high and low earners).
At any rate, there are a lot of good things about Tennessee, but the lack of an income tax isn't one of them.
Kpdf/Okular is great if you're running KDE as your desktop. With kde4, I think okular will eventually be available for windows as well. (I'm not sure on that...) The main advantage is that it's very quick to load and tightly integrated with Kdesktop. If you don't use kde, it has fewer advantages over the others.
You can annotate and review pdfs in okular just like you do in acroread. It doesn't have editing capability, but neither do the free versions of almost anything else, to my knowledge. (PDFedit is an exception, but it's too clunky for day-to-day use as a reader.)
What Alsee said is correct. However, the industrial revolution will probably not have as great an effect as that of nuclear proliferation in the 1950's.
Nuclear testing roughly doubled the amount of C14 in the atmosphere. This can be used as a dating tool in its own right. A friend of mine uses the spike in C14 in clam shells to look at ocean circulation.
This generally isn't a problem, as few people are dating things that died after 1950. (I'm fairly sure there is a correction for it, but I don't know offhand.) However, it will make life difficult for future archaeologists or quaternary geologists a few hundred or thousand years down the road.
Incidentally, the C14 from nuclear testing would be diluted by "old" CO2 released from burning fossil fuels, as Alsee said. Maybe the two effects would roughly offset each other over time? I don't know.
Oh, by the way, someone else may have already said this earlier, but the article is not talking about carbon dating! It's talking about C13/C12 ratios, which are commonly used to infer global biomass over geologic time. If they were talking about carbon dating it would be a completely moot point (and therefore not publishable), as carbon dating can only be used back to a maximum of 100,000 years. Any older, and the C14 has decayed away to undetectable levels. Carbon dating is used anthropology and quaternary geology, and not much anywhere else. It's used to date organic material, not rocks.
Have you ever worked in fast food? If you're in a college town, what you said may be the case. For what it's worth, this applies mainly to privately-owned franchises. Corporate-owned stores are generally much better places to work, and do usually conform to labor laws.
At least where I've worked (rural interstate exits and one genuine college town) fast food jobs are the sole source of income for the people working there. Generally, at least half of the people I worked with were supporting children, either as single parents or through child support payments. (Working 80+ hours a week is hard on marriages.) Minimum wage is a good job where I grew up. The 3 factories in the county all pay minimum wage. Fast food jobs pay better, but only because it's easier to get overtime.
However, the working conditions are hell. Unless business is slow, you do not get anything other emergency bathroom breaks during an 8-hour shift. Meal breaks are only an option if you're working over 10-hour shifts, where there's a chance that someone will come in before another person leaves, giving you a chance to do something other than take or make orders. Being understaffed is one of the few absolutes in fast food.
Conditions are generally worse for managers, as they don't have the right (literally, you sign it away) to say no if they're asked to come in or work extra at any time. Managers do not get breaks of any sort unless things are slow. If you're a salaried manager, you don't get paid for _any_ time you work over 40 hours, and you're _always_ required to work 60-100 hour weeks. One of our store managers tallied it up over a 6 month period and realized he was making $3.45 an hour if time-and-a-half overtime was taken into account. (Mininum wage was $4.75 at the time)
To give you an example, a friend of mine at Subway (I worked at McD's at the time) had managed to get 4 days off over new-years to go on a trip with her kids. They were 100 miles away when she was called into work. She worked 36 hours straight with only 4 bathroom breaks and one 5 minute meal break. She went home for 4 hours, came back and worked a 24 hour shift. If she had refused, she would have been fired after the holiday rush. There aren't any other jobs in the area. Any job is better than none, and the store owner (not manager) knows it.
Anyway, I'm ranting, obviously. Believe it or not, I wasn't exaggerating much. I got lucky and was able to go to college and I'm now in grad school, so I really can't complain.
My point is that fast-food and other minimum wage jobs are places where unions are desperately needed. Local business owners will not comply with labor laws of any sort, and state agencies will not enforce them. Or at least that's been my experience, anyway.
Just to answer your question, those are 3 band, false-color composites. They're only part of the data the landsat sensors collect (7 bands).
Most of the multispectral data they're talking about is already online, though. This is just a project to get more of it online, and in a centralized place.
The short answer is that what you're seeing in WorldWind (or what you're seeing in a color image, regardless) is only part of the data collected by the landsat satellites. The landsat satellites are multispectral sensors--they collect data over a broad range of the spectrum, not just visible light.
The article doesn't specifically say, but it's referring to releasing the full multispectral images...
3 band false color composites have been available free globally for quite awhile; here they're talking about releasing the full 7 band images. I would assume they'll have multiple date ranges for most locations, as well...
Sites like the GLCF already have a lot of this data available, but this is an effort to get much more of it processed, georeferenced, and online.
Or that's what I gather, anyway... Actually, I'm not quite sure why this is on slashdot. It's just a quick news relase about the project, and it's not really much in the way of news, either. Must be a slow day!
Accidentally modded you as a troll, replying to negate the moderation... Sorry 'bout that!
Back on the topic, I think the primary reason the number of amputees is so "low" is due mainly to the advances in medicine since, say, the Vietnam War, rather than under-reporting of the actual number. A lot of limbs can be saved now that couldn't have been even ten years ago...
On a more gruesome side note, I'd imagine they're not including "minor" extremities such as fingers, toes, etc. in that particular number...
"As for GPS (the most accurate versions) two appliances at opposite ends of a vessel together with suitable calculations would give you the orientation of the vessel. (I have no idea if this is ever done.)"
This is indeed done. In fact, research vessels often have at least 4 GPS recievers--one at each corner of the ship--to give real-time information on not only the direction of the vessel, but its attitude in three dimensions, as well. This is needed to correct data gathered by various instrumentation (i.e. multi-beam bathymetry, etc.) I haven't seen it, as I haven't actually been on any research cruises yet, but I'm told it's quite cool to see a real-time display of the ship's orientation as you feel it roll beneath you!
I wouldn't say there's all that much competition to find "older and older" fossils. The reason the specimen is so interesting is the features it displays and the fact that it was found in northern China, rather than the western US.
Even if there is extreme competition for finding the "oldest" example of something, you've badly misunderstood the way things are dated. What actually matters is that it was in the Oxfordian Stage of the Late Jurassic. In geology, we're really interested in relative ages, not absolute ages. In this case, radiometric dating might have been used to constrain the age of the rock units, but the fossil itself isn't what's dated, it's nearby ash beds or intrusions. The relative age of the rocks is based on regional and global correlations of rock units using a number of different methods.
Radiometric dates are solid, nonetheless. There are a number of factors that affect them, and these are accounted for when one uses any of the numerous methods of radiocarbon dating. All measurements have a margin of error, as well, and for most it's a lot more than a few thousand years! If you were to date a mineral grain formed yesterday with any method capable of dating something in the Jurassic, you could expect to get an age of perhaps even a few million years old, and it be still be correct, as it's comfortably within the margin of error. At any rate, the age of something isn't based on a single sample, or when possible, even based on a single method of measurement.
As regards your much larger question of throwing out data that doesn't fit, yes, this is done, both directly and indirectly, and for both real and imagined reasons. If something's obviously been contaminated, it's thrown out. If something doesn't fit with the bulk of the data, it's often disregarded, sometimes in error. There are plenty of examples of "bad science" where conclusions are drawn on laughably shaky data. A conclusion that fits the dominant paradigm will indeed have a much easier time making it through peer review than a challenging idea. The reason for this is simple; the fundamental assumptions of any field have an incredible amount of evidence to back them up. Something than contradicts this needs to be able to explain previous evidence, and have enough supporting data to outweigh whatever paradigm it is opposing.
In general, however, the scientific community is nowhere near as sloppy or close-minded as the general public seems to think they are. You have to assume something to be able to conclude anything. All science is an inverse problem, and as such, there are always an infinite number of "right" answers. To filter through these, we apply whatever paradigms have been established. This doesn't mean that we just conclude whatever we want; it just means that we evaluate things based on what's been observed before. It's impossible to do otherwise.
At any rate, I applaud your critical thinking, but please do consider that people who have devoted their lives to something do stop to consider the obvious.
The shameless plug is well appreciated! Nice site!
I'm more of a geologist than a geographer, but GIS and remote sensing are among my primary tools. At any rate, it's always nice to find a relevant news source.
Slashdot Mirror
You capture opponents pieces and remove them from the board. There's a good introduction here (the site is a great resource overall): http://senseis.xmp.net/?RulesO... In addition to playing a stone, passing is always a legal move (if both players pass the game ends). Because of this, "infinite loop" positions occur frequently and there's a rule called ko to address that. If your move would repeat the previous board position, you must play somewhere else. (Again, a good explanation is http://senseis.xmp.net/?Ko ) At any rate, for any given board state, there are a huge (but finite) number of different sequences of moves that might have led to that board state.
And what exactly is improbable with having two different species that are genetically equally similar to Homo sapiens sapiens? How in the world would that cause anyone to "scoff at science"?
I completely agree. Scientific publication is an immense racket at present. We pay to submit our articles, review other scientist’s articles for free, and then still get charged to access our own publications and are forbidden from posting them where they're publicly available.
Unfortunately, I think it will still take another generation to "get out from under the thumb of the publishing houses" and move to an open-access model.
The prestige of a publication in Science or Nature is an immense boost to your career. What journal your research gets published in is a very decisive factor in getting a tenure-track position and in getting tenure.
That's why what Princeton is doing is such a great thing. It allows you to still submit and be published in a prestigious journal, but hide behind the university's legal team when it comes to posting your publication where everyone can access it. Google scholar does an amazing job of finding publicly available copies of scientific publications on a researcher's personal website, etc, so this is a big step towards open-access scientific publication without having to sacrifice your career.
Well, one big advantage is cheap cooling... Ignoring potential problems with regulations regarding thermal pollution, etc, of course.
Denyhosts isn't security through obscurity in any way.
It just monitors /var/log/messages (or wherever your sshd is configured to log to) and blocks ip addresses with multiple failed logins.
I think you're thinking of port knocking, which is security though obscurity, though it's still damned useful.
While they're at it, it would be awesome to deploy a few more seismometers...
Moonquakes are pretty damn cool from a seismological perspective. Beyond that, some of the ones recorded by Apollo-installed seismometers were >Mw 5. Big enough to be damaging.
The moon isn't tectonically active, of course, but it is seismically active, and the data recorded in the 70's indicates that the moon's lithosphere is a very different beast compared to earth's. At any rate, it would produce some extremely neat data!
There's no income tax in TN, but there's a 9-10% sales tax on _everything_. That includes food and drugs. It's a horribly regressive tax.
If you're wealthy (or just upper middle class) you spend a far lower portion of your income on basic necessities like groceries. Most of your income goes towards untaxable (by the state, anyway) things such a savings, education, healthcare, goods bought online or out of state, lawyers fees, etc.
If you're not wealthy, most of your income is going toward necessities that are taxed at the full 9-10%.
In the end, the lowest income bracket in Tennessee pays ~3x the percentage of their income that the highest income bracket does in state taxes. Partly because of this, TN has the 3rd greatest income inequality in the US (gap between high and low earners).
At any rate, there are a lot of good things about Tennessee, but the lack of an income tax isn't one of them.
Kpdf/Okular is great if you're running KDE as your desktop. With kde4, I think okular will eventually be available for windows as well. (I'm not sure on that...) The main advantage is that it's very quick to load and tightly integrated with Kdesktop. If you don't use kde, it has fewer advantages over the others.
You can annotate and review pdfs in okular just like you do in acroread. It doesn't have editing capability, but neither do the free versions of almost anything else, to my knowledge. (PDFedit is an exception, but it's too clunky for day-to-day use as a reader.)
What Alsee said is correct. However, the industrial revolution will probably not have as great an effect as that of nuclear proliferation in the 1950's.
Nuclear testing roughly doubled the amount of C14 in the atmosphere. This can be used as a dating tool in its own right. A friend of mine uses the spike in C14 in clam shells to look at ocean circulation.
This generally isn't a problem, as few people are dating things that died after 1950. (I'm fairly sure there is a correction for it, but I don't know offhand.) However, it will make life difficult for future archaeologists or quaternary geologists a few hundred or thousand years down the road.
Incidentally, the C14 from nuclear testing would be diluted by "old" CO2 released from burning fossil fuels, as Alsee said. Maybe the two effects would roughly offset each other over time? I don't know.
Oh, by the way, someone else may have already said this earlier, but the article is not talking about carbon dating! It's talking about C13/C12 ratios, which are commonly used to infer global biomass over geologic time. If they were talking about carbon dating it would be a completely moot point (and therefore not publishable), as carbon dating can only be used back to a maximum of 100,000 years. Any older, and the C14 has decayed away to undetectable levels. Carbon dating is used anthropology and quaternary geology, and not much anywhere else. It's used to date organic material, not rocks.
Bullshit.
Have you ever worked in fast food? If you're in a college town, what you said may be the case. For what it's worth, this applies mainly to privately-owned franchises. Corporate-owned stores are generally much better places to work, and do usually conform to labor laws.
At least where I've worked (rural interstate exits and one genuine college town) fast food jobs are the sole source of income for the people working there. Generally, at least half of the people I worked with were supporting children, either as single parents or through child support payments. (Working 80+ hours a week is hard on marriages.) Minimum wage is a good job where I grew up. The 3 factories in the county all pay minimum wage. Fast food jobs pay better, but only because it's easier to get overtime.
However, the working conditions are hell. Unless business is slow, you do not get anything other emergency bathroom breaks during an 8-hour shift. Meal breaks are only an option if you're working over 10-hour shifts, where there's a chance that someone will come in before another person leaves, giving you a chance to do something other than take or make orders. Being understaffed is one of the few absolutes in fast food.
Conditions are generally worse for managers, as they don't have the right (literally, you sign it away) to say no if they're asked to come in or work extra at any time. Managers do not get breaks of any sort unless things are slow. If you're a salaried manager, you don't get paid for _any_ time you work over 40 hours, and you're _always_ required to work 60-100 hour weeks. One of our store managers tallied it up over a 6 month period and realized he was making $3.45 an hour if time-and-a-half overtime was taken into account. (Mininum wage was $4.75 at the time)
To give you an example, a friend of mine at Subway (I worked at McD's at the time) had managed to get 4 days off over new-years to go on a trip with her kids. They were 100 miles away when she was called into work. She worked 36 hours straight with only 4 bathroom breaks and one 5 minute meal break. She went home for 4 hours, came back and worked a 24 hour shift. If she had refused, she would have been fired after the holiday rush. There aren't any other jobs in the area. Any job is better than none, and the store owner (not manager) knows it.
Anyway, I'm ranting, obviously. Believe it or not, I wasn't exaggerating much. I got lucky and was able to go to college and I'm now in grad school, so I really can't complain.
My point is that fast-food and other minimum wage jobs are places where unions are desperately needed. Local business owners will not comply with labor laws of any sort, and state agencies will not enforce them. Or at least that's been my experience, anyway.
Just to answer your question, those are 3 band, false-color composites. They're only part of the data the landsat sensors collect (7 bands).
Most of the multispectral data they're talking about is already online, though. This is just a project to get more of it online, and in a centralized place.
The short answer is that what you're seeing in WorldWind (or what you're seeing in a color image, regardless) is only part of the data collected by the landsat satellites. The landsat satellites are multispectral sensors--they collect data over a broad range of the spectrum, not just visible light.
The article doesn't specifically say, but it's referring to releasing the full multispectral images...
3 band false color composites have been available free globally for quite awhile; here they're talking about releasing the full 7 band images. I would assume they'll have multiple date ranges for most locations, as well...
Sites like the GLCF already have a lot of this data available, but this is an effort to get much more of it processed, georeferenced, and online.
Or that's what I gather, anyway... Actually, I'm not quite sure why this is on slashdot. It's just a quick news relase about the project, and it's not really much in the way of news, either. Must be a slow day!
Accidentally modded you as a troll, replying to negate the moderation... Sorry 'bout that! Back on the topic, I think the primary reason the number of amputees is so "low" is due mainly to the advances in medicine since, say, the Vietnam War, rather than under-reporting of the actual number. A lot of limbs can be saved now that couldn't have been even ten years ago... On a more gruesome side note, I'd imagine they're not including "minor" extremities such as fingers, toes, etc. in that particular number...
"Just checked google and no one else has said it." Am I the only one who finds this mildly ironic? (That having been said, it's a helluva phrase...)
I wouldn't say there's all that much competition to find "older and older" fossils. The reason the specimen is so interesting is the features it displays and the fact that it was found in northern China, rather than the western US.
Even if there is extreme competition for finding the "oldest" example of something, you've badly misunderstood the way things are dated. What actually matters is that it was in the Oxfordian Stage of the Late Jurassic. In geology, we're really interested in relative ages, not absolute ages. In this case, radiometric dating might have been used to constrain the age of the rock units, but the fossil itself isn't what's dated, it's nearby ash beds or intrusions. The relative age of the rocks is based on regional and global correlations of rock units using a number of different methods.
Radiometric dates are solid, nonetheless. There are a number of factors that affect them, and these are accounted for when one uses any of the numerous methods of radiocarbon dating. All measurements have a margin of error, as well, and for most it's a lot more than a few thousand years! If you were to date a mineral grain formed yesterday with any method capable of dating something in the Jurassic, you could expect to get an age of perhaps even a few million years old, and it be still be correct, as it's comfortably within the margin of error. At any rate, the age of something isn't based on a single sample, or when possible, even based on a single method of measurement.
As regards your much larger question of throwing out data that doesn't fit, yes, this is done, both directly and indirectly, and for both real and imagined reasons. If something's obviously been contaminated, it's thrown out. If something doesn't fit with the bulk of the data, it's often disregarded, sometimes in error. There are plenty of examples of "bad science" where conclusions are drawn on laughably shaky data. A conclusion that fits the dominant paradigm will indeed have a much easier time making it through peer review than a challenging idea. The reason for this is simple; the fundamental assumptions of any field have an incredible amount of evidence to back them up. Something than contradicts this needs to be able to explain previous evidence, and have enough supporting data to outweigh whatever paradigm it is opposing.
In general, however, the scientific community is nowhere near as sloppy or close-minded as the general public seems to think they are. You have to assume something to be able to conclude anything. All science is an inverse problem, and as such, there are always an infinite number of "right" answers. To filter through these, we apply whatever paradigms have been established. This doesn't mean that we just conclude whatever we want; it just means that we evaluate things based on what's been observed before. It's impossible to do otherwise.
At any rate, I applaud your critical thinking, but please do consider that people who have devoted their lives to something do stop to consider the obvious.
The shameless plug is well appreciated! Nice site! I'm more of a geologist than a geographer, but GIS and remote sensing are among my primary tools. At any rate, it's always nice to find a relevant news source.