Funny how all the advertisers of abolishing DST praise the extended daylight in the evening and don't mention the reduced daylight in the morning! Ask people in the street and they will agree that summertime is great, wintertime is dull, so let's abolish wintertime and go for summertime all year round! What is not mentioned often is the fact that the total hours of sunshine is fixed and quite limited in the winter when you live in the north.
Personally, I'm all for abolishing the switching back and forth, but living at a latitude with 8 hours sunshine in the winter and 16 hours in the summer, I must say that I would really hate sunrise at 9:00 am in the winter. So I would rather keep the current standard time and drop the shift in the summer. That, however would mean that nobody gains light in the evening, but instead looses the long, bright evenings in the summer in trade for a ridiculously early sunrise at 4am.
Ultimately, one should not forget that living up north, the lengths of the days changes dramatically through the year and DST has the important effect of reducing the overall fluctuation of the sunrise, which is quite critical in our modern world where the time for getting up in the morning is mostly dictated by the clock.
My personal experience with large projects:
a) flexible index bases may make it easier to write new code but they are a nightmare to maintain code that was written by multiple scientists over time
b) 1-based arrays may seem natural to mathematicians, but they lead to a significanly larger number of "-1"s and "+1"s within the code. Typically, modifying a 1-based array into a 0-based array reduces the clutter of "-1" and "+1" offsets and enhances readability.
Actually, the various personality traits that are sometimes associated with zodiac signs may carry a grain of truth after all:
Psychologists have discussed and studied for ages that there are correlations between the season at the time of birth and the resulting personality traits. The early devopment of a baby follows a precise schedule, where certain phases happen days, weeks and months after the time of birth. It is not surprising at all that the amount of daylight, the temperature and the mood of the parents during a childs first weeks has a significant effect on its development and shows up in various ways throughout life. Obviously, a children born in midwinter would statistically show different traits than children born in late spring, early autumn or high summer.
So, the knowledge of the zodiac may simply be the result of careful observation of typical traits of people born in certain months. Viewed like this, it is clear that astrologers should not adjust to the "revised" zodiac dates. However - when trying to judge a person, it may be helpful to take many more aspects into account than just the month of birth. After all, this is just one of many factors that may allow one to apply statistical correlations to extract information.
I would phrase it this way:
Logic is a branch of mathematics which is a core "tool" of philosophy, similar to calculus being a "tool" of physics.
In general, mathematics simply tells you "if I choose these axioms, what can I deduce?". It is up to philosophy, physics or whoever uses mathematics to describe something to set the right axioms and use mathematics correctly.
It is true, that historically, this took some time to be sorted out, but today, the roles of mathematics, philosophy and logic are pretty well distinct.
Reading again carefully, I have to admit that my harsh words were completely unjustified. Now I'm definitely sorry!
I had just recently read and heard too much about high energy physics, where the smallness of the "Planck length" plays a big role. When you wrote about the smallness of the "Planck constant", I saw red and answered before reading carefully.
Now, even though your words certainly were not wrong enough to justify harsh words, I still don't agree fully: Accusing the Planck length of making interaction between radio waves with chemistry is somewhat misleading: the Planck constant is of the same size for all kinds of electromagnetic radiation. It is actually their *energy* that differs greatly and makes some interact with chemistry (e.g. visible light) and others not (e.g. radio waves).
Sorry the harsh words, but this comment about the smallness of Planck's constant suppressing EM-interaction with chemical reactions is scientifically completely off:
Planck's constant connects *gravity* with electromagnetism. It's smallness is an indicates that gravitational interaction can be neglected in chemical reactions.
Wireless transmission is a purely electromagnetic effect and could - as such - very well mingle with chemistry. It is only the low energy of radio-waves which prevents them to become chemically active: Mobile phones operate around 10 GHz, which is about 0.1 meV. Visible light, which is chemically very active, is around 1 eV, that is a factor of 10e-7, not 10e-34!
Slashdot Mirror
Funny how all the advertisers of abolishing DST praise the extended daylight in the evening and don't mention the reduced daylight in the morning! Ask people in the street and they will agree that summertime is great, wintertime is dull, so let's abolish wintertime and go for summertime all year round! What is not mentioned often is the fact that the total hours of sunshine is fixed and quite limited in the winter when you live in the north.
Personally, I'm all for abolishing the switching back and forth, but living at a latitude with 8 hours sunshine in the winter and 16 hours in the summer, I must say that I would really hate sunrise at 9:00 am in the winter. So I would rather keep the current standard time and drop the shift in the summer. That, however would mean that nobody gains light in the evening, but instead looses the long, bright evenings in the summer in trade for a ridiculously early sunrise at 4am.
Ultimately, one should not forget that living up north, the lengths of the days changes dramatically through the year and DST has the important effect of reducing the overall fluctuation of the sunrise, which is quite critical in our modern world where the time for getting up in the morning is mostly dictated by the clock.
My personal experience with large projects:
a) flexible index bases may make it easier to write new code but they are a nightmare to maintain code that was written by multiple scientists over time
b) 1-based arrays may seem natural to mathematicians, but they lead to a significanly larger number of "-1"s and "+1"s within the code. Typically, modifying a 1-based array into a 0-based array reduces the clutter of "-1" and "+1" offsets and enhances readability.
Actually, the various personality traits that are sometimes associated with zodiac signs may carry a grain of truth after all: Psychologists have discussed and studied for ages that there are correlations between the season at the time of birth and the resulting personality traits. The early devopment of a baby follows a precise schedule, where certain phases happen days, weeks and months after the time of birth. It is not surprising at all that the amount of daylight, the temperature and the mood of the parents during a childs first weeks has a significant effect on its development and shows up in various ways throughout life. Obviously, a children born in midwinter would statistically show different traits than children born in late spring, early autumn or high summer. So, the knowledge of the zodiac may simply be the result of careful observation of typical traits of people born in certain months. Viewed like this, it is clear that astrologers should not adjust to the "revised" zodiac dates. However - when trying to judge a person, it may be helpful to take many more aspects into account than just the month of birth. After all, this is just one of many factors that may allow one to apply statistical correlations to extract information.
I would phrase it this way: Logic is a branch of mathematics which is a core "tool" of philosophy, similar to calculus being a "tool" of physics. In general, mathematics simply tells you "if I choose these axioms, what can I deduce?". It is up to philosophy, physics or whoever uses mathematics to describe something to set the right axioms and use mathematics correctly. It is true, that historically, this took some time to be sorted out, but today, the roles of mathematics, philosophy and logic are pretty well distinct.
Reading again carefully, I have to admit that my harsh words were completely unjustified. Now I'm definitely sorry! I had just recently read and heard too much about high energy physics, where the smallness of the "Planck length" plays a big role. When you wrote about the smallness of the "Planck constant", I saw red and answered before reading carefully. Now, even though your words certainly were not wrong enough to justify harsh words, I still don't agree fully: Accusing the Planck length of making interaction between radio waves with chemistry is somewhat misleading: the Planck constant is of the same size for all kinds of electromagnetic radiation. It is actually their *energy* that differs greatly and makes some interact with chemistry (e.g. visible light) and others not (e.g. radio waves).
Sorry the harsh words, but this comment about the smallness of Planck's constant suppressing EM-interaction with chemical reactions is scientifically completely off: Planck's constant connects *gravity* with electromagnetism. It's smallness is an indicates that gravitational interaction can be neglected in chemical reactions. Wireless transmission is a purely electromagnetic effect and could - as such - very well mingle with chemistry. It is only the low energy of radio-waves which prevents them to become chemically active: Mobile phones operate around 10 GHz, which is about 0.1 meV. Visible light, which is chemically very active, is around 1 eV, that is a factor of 10e-7, not 10e-34!