The question isn't "what kind of expensive toys should we launch from our even more expensive toys?". The question is "why do need any of this BS anymore?". It's called the Department of Defence, not the Department of Flying Sorties Over Unsettled Arab Countries. A proper defence review would ask what exactly we're defending these days... and promptly slash the defence budget by about 80%.
It's the 21st century, not the 19th. We're not at war with our neighbors, and never will be in any foreseeable future. There is no credible possibility of invasion (and even if there were, carriers would hardly be relevant). We don't have colonial interests in Africa. We don't have a need (other than ego) to project power in the east. We're not responsible for protecting shipping lanes in the North Atlantic. The Cold War is over. Our entire defence posture is all about propping up vested interests in power, and pandering to the national ego.
The age of large standing armies and navies in Europe is over. Get used to it.
re. your 2nd paragraph: Actually, no. The most recent genetic analyses DO show differences.
There are genetic markers present in everybody EXCEPT Africans that apparently came from Neanderthals and that account for about 2% to 4% of our genetic code (and because these markers are everywhere outside Africa, that interbreeding must have happened very soon after leaving Africa.
Similarly, there's good genetic evidence that the homo sapiens that reached Asia interbred with the Denisovians before continuing on through to south east Asia and the Australias.
And there's even emerging evidence that there might have been other archaic species still living in Africa after homo sapiens began its migration out, and that the homo sapiens left behind interbred with those species in the same way.
As for the rest, well, the concept of species is actually pretty vague and less useful once you accept the reality that populations evolve continuously across time and space.
Yes, literally it means "whore". When used of a person, the closest English equivalent is probably "bitch", in the way it might be used by American rappers: a denigrating, disrespectful term for a woman, and an even more insulting term for a man who is totally "owned" and powerless.
ObTrivia: there was a 1990 anglo-italian-french movie starring Timothy Dalton called "La putain du roi", and although IMDB says otherwise, my memory says that when I saw it, the title was translated as "The King's Bitch".
In case anybody is wondering, when Jacques Martino said "eventual systematic errors" he meant "possible systematic errors". It's a very common mistake when native French speakers speak English as a second language because the French word is "éventuel" (the French call words like that "faux amis" -- false friends).
Yes, there are known processes involving the Weak force that produce a small excess of matter over antimatter, but the resulting imbalance is orders of magnitude too small (maybe 11 orders!) to account for the observed disparity.
@Jim O'Reilly: I was going to type a long reply to your comment, but after getting past the first erroneous claim I came to the conclusion that you're making so little sense, you're not even wrong.
-- relativity has no problem explaining how particles with non-zero mass travel very near the speed of light. If it didn't, we wouldn't even have the LHC or the Tevatron, because that's exactly what they do: accelerate particles to near the speed of light.
-- particles with mass greater than zero never travel *at* the speed of light, and relativity explains why, so the only 'oops' here is your claim
-- "these particles never move slowly"? What does this even mean? Neutrinos move at a variety of speeds depending on their energy.
-- "not rest mass but energy"? Um, obviously what we see is the mass attributable to energy. You may have heard of a little equation that goes E=mc^2?
-- photons *are* fundamental particles. But neutrinos are not remotely like photons since, among other things, they have mass.
-- "All of this confuses the quantum model": The only thing that's confused here, I'm afraid, is your understanding of physics.
When my wife was pregnant she gave up caffeine and alcohol, so I had to drink for two. Honestly, there were some nights I wasn't sure I could finish the whole bottle. And was she grateful?
...watching this think it's really a human player or team with a fake robotic voice (i.e. a mechanical turk, not that non-techies would know that term)? How many of them get what an impressive achievement this is?
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Or a rigged demo."
The normal human reaction against cheating is rooted in the basic evolutionary drive to reproduce, i.e. to propagate our genes. The worst thing that can happen to a man, from that brutal perspective, is to expend his time and energy raising another man's child. If she's cheating with another woman, not only does that fear not arise, it may be even less likely that she would ever cheat with a man.
You seem very certain of Bahrain being Dilmun, despite the fact that it is inconsistent with pretty much all the references to Dilmun in Mesopotamian texts. For example (courtesy of Wiki):
Hymns regarding the Sumerian god Enki of Eridu in Sumer speak of his assaulting and deflowering Dilmun's maidens as they stand by a river bank, he reaching out of nearby marsh to clasp them to his bosom. Of Bahrain, Failaka, and the eastern littoral of Arabia, none possess marshes and a riverbank. Dilmun, furthermore, is said to lie "in the east where the sun rises," a situation that does not apply to the eastern Arabian littoral, Failaka or Bahrain, all of which lie south of Sumer and Eridu.
So, apart from not having marshes and not being to the east of Sumer, Bahrain is a perfect candidate...
Don't overlook the biggest and simplest application
Electricity transmission itself. One of the biggest barriers to renewable generation is that the places that are sunniest (deserts), windiest (Great Plains), waviest (off-shore), etc. are a long way from where the power is needed. With a superconducting grid, all of those technologies become a lot more attractive.
"Regarding MRI's - isn't that kind of thing subconscious?"
The concept of a distinct conscious and subconscious is a false dichotomy, modern brain science is teaching us.
In reality your brain is more akin (WARNING: fallible analogy ahead!) to a computer running a bunch of foreground and background threads, and sometimes the threads interrupt each other, bogart all the resources, or even lock each other, causing a "rollback" and start over. Hmmm, that reminds me of an article I read somewhere recently...
"My brain? That's my second-favorite organ!" -- Woody Allen
Much as we may like to think that we're above/immune to being offended and can take in our stride words that derail others, its just not true. You can put people in a fMRI scanner and see different parts of their brain light up in real time in response to obscenity. Regular words light up the higher language centers primarily, obscenities also light up the emotional centers all the way down to the primitive reptilian stem. Good lay article here: http://people.howstuffworks.com/swearing4.htm
And no, you are not an exception, however much you may think frequent exposure or usage has inured you. No, really you aren't.
Lots of people here seem to be confusing Britons and Celts. According to the Celts' own myths, the British Isles weren't unoccupied when they arrived there. They told stories of a Bronze Age-culture people who called the land Albion. As the Celts occupied the land, these predecessor "ancient britons" were pushed to the margins of the country -- Norfolk, Cornwall, the Scottish Highlands... A diligent researched might find an echo of their genetic contribution there still...
Some historians believe that one of the motivations for the Iceni rebellion was resentment at the Roman's preferential treatment of and trade with Celtic tribes over the Iceni, Boudica's people.
...is that there's a whole crowd of people with certain forms of autism that have a *really* hard time identifying emotions so "pick the angry face" just wouldn't work for them. (There's even people who have trouble recognizing faces *at all* and rely on other cues like movement or voice to identify even people that they know extremely well.)
As for all the other clever ideas with pictures, celebrities, etc., you'll run into the same problem that the clever chaps who invented CAPTCHAs initially overlooked: what do people with vision handicaps who rely on screen readers do? Anything that a screen reader can figure out, a bot can figure out too (by definition). So you'll always need a workaround for those people.
@Ned Ludd: Alternatively, if the hunters are allowed guns, the animals should be too. America would be a better place if the right to bear arms were balanced by a right to arm bears.
You're right. Even more broadly, the perpetuation of a neutral mutation is highly "contingent", as the biologists like to say. For example, if the mutation arose in somebody of high social standing or otherwise highly desirable as a partner, the mutation has a good chance of being passed on despite its strange appearance -- and even perhaps, within a generation or two, becoming interpreted as an indicator of high social standing and hence desirable in its own right. On the other hand, if it arose in some random peasant, it might have been shunned in favor of other random peasants. Of course, a point mutation like this could easily crop up several times before finally catching on.
Once we passed the point, as a species, where social interpretations began to play a major role in our ability to pass on our genes, all kinds of neutral mutations (including secondary sexual characteristics) and even some negative ones can get perpetuated, at least within a given society -- for example, hemophilia in the royal families of Europe. (It's fascinating to watch evolutionary sociologists scramble for explanations of this or that preferred physical characteristic, like long legs, in terms of its ability to "signal" better health, when in fact it may turn out to be purely a neutral mutation that happened to get attached to desirability by chance.)
(Actually there is a lot of debate in evolutionary biology about just how big a role contingency plays in evolution in general, even for "positive" mutations, but that's very long story...)
Ever noticed how when Republicans are caught in a scandal they *never* address the actual issue at hand? They *always* try to divert attention to how the information came to light or how the investigation was conducted or who the accuser is or... anything but the actual issue. Perfect example: the first comment on today's thread. Ironically, the poster is accusing the Democrats of "breaking the rules" for exposing Republicans breaking the law!
Shame on you Republicans for your actions, shame on you for the tactics you use to try to avoid the consequences of your actions, and shame on you all those who would defend either.
The really intriguing element to this idea is its ability to bridge from the existing gasoline economy to the fabled hydrogen economy. One of other big challenges for hydrogen-fuelled vehicles (besides storing enough fuel) is building out the necessary infrastructure and building up the base of fuel cell-powered cars in parallel. This technology could be a big help in accelerating adoption by enabling existing cars to be converted, a much cheaper and faster ramp-up that in turn will make fully electric fuel cell vehicles more attractive. A fascinating idea all round.
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36 posts • joined Monday 21st May 2007 13:21 GMT
Re: What a Falcon ijediot
Except no. He is stealing them to play with them, he's stealing them and selling them on eBay.
Never has the Pedantic Grammar Nazi icon been more deserved
No. The official answer on the Lego website is that neither "Lego" nor "Legos" is the correct plural: "Lego bricks" is.
In reality? My American friends are about equally divided between "Lego" and "Legos".
Missing the point entirely
The question isn't "what kind of expensive toys should we launch from our even more expensive toys?". The question is "why do need any of this BS anymore?". It's called the Department of Defence, not the Department of Flying Sorties Over Unsettled Arab Countries. A proper defence review would ask what exactly we're defending these days... and promptly slash the defence budget by about 80%.
It's the 21st century, not the 19th. We're not at war with our neighbors, and never will be in any foreseeable future. There is no credible possibility of invasion (and even if there were, carriers would hardly be relevant). We don't have colonial interests in Africa. We don't have a need (other than ego) to project power in the east. We're not responsible for protecting shipping lanes in the North Atlantic. The Cold War is over. Our entire defence posture is all about propping up vested interests in power, and pandering to the national ego.
The age of large standing armies and navies in Europe is over. Get used to it.
Re: Species?
re. your 2nd paragraph: Actually, no. The most recent genetic analyses DO show differences.
There are genetic markers present in everybody EXCEPT Africans that apparently came from Neanderthals and that account for about 2% to 4% of our genetic code (and because these markers are everywhere outside Africa, that interbreeding must have happened very soon after leaving Africa.
Similarly, there's good genetic evidence that the homo sapiens that reached Asia interbred with the Denisovians before continuing on through to south east Asia and the Australias.
And there's even emerging evidence that there might have been other archaic species still living in Africa after homo sapiens began its migration out, and that the homo sapiens left behind interbred with those species in the same way.
As for the rest, well, the concept of species is actually pretty vague and less useful once you accept the reality that populations evolve continuously across time and space.
Didn't think their cunning plan all the way through.
Now you can store all your mobile apps and data on a device the TSA won't let you bring on a plane. Brilliant.
slang with more context
Yes, literally it means "whore". When used of a person, the closest English equivalent is probably "bitch", in the way it might be used by American rappers: a denigrating, disrespectful term for a woman, and an even more insulting term for a man who is totally "owned" and powerless.
ObTrivia: there was a 1990 anglo-italian-french movie starring Timothy Dalton called "La putain du roi", and although IMDB says otherwise, my memory says that when I saw it, the title was translated as "The King's Bitch".
Would that be...
...a thundering heard of mammoth?
Eventually...
In case anybody is wondering, when Jacques Martino said "eventual systematic errors" he meant "possible systematic errors". It's a very common mistake when native French speakers speak English as a second language because the French word is "éventuel" (the French call words like that "faux amis" -- false friends).
Bears repeating
Bears
Before anybody asks about CP violation...
Yes, there are known processes involving the Weak force that produce a small excess of matter over antimatter, but the resulting imbalance is orders of magnitude too small (maybe 11 orders!) to account for the observed disparity.
Don't forget...
...the Irish, too. Irish monasteries played a large part in preserving written knowledge through the Dark Ages.
Wrong name
Surely it should be LePlug? Plugs are male.
Not even wrong
@Jim O'Reilly: I was going to type a long reply to your comment, but after getting past the first erroneous claim I came to the conclusion that you're making so little sense, you're not even wrong.
-- relativity has no problem explaining how particles with non-zero mass travel very near the speed of light. If it didn't, we wouldn't even have the LHC or the Tevatron, because that's exactly what they do: accelerate particles to near the speed of light.
-- particles with mass greater than zero never travel *at* the speed of light, and relativity explains why, so the only 'oops' here is your claim
-- "these particles never move slowly"? What does this even mean? Neutrinos move at a variety of speeds depending on their energy.
-- "not rest mass but energy"? Um, obviously what we see is the mass attributable to energy. You may have heard of a little equation that goes E=mc^2?
-- photons *are* fundamental particles. But neutrinos are not remotely like photons since, among other things, they have mass.
-- "All of this confuses the quantum model": The only thing that's confused here, I'm afraid, is your understanding of physics.
Eating for two?
When my wife was pregnant she gave up caffeine and alcohol, so I had to drink for two. Honestly, there were some nights I wasn't sure I could finish the whole bottle. And was she grateful?
I wonder how many non-techies...
...watching this think it's really a human player or team with a fake robotic voice (i.e. a mechanical turk, not that non-techies would know that term)? How many of them get what an impressive achievement this is?
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Or a rigged demo."
Bollox
The normal human reaction against cheating is rooted in the basic evolutionary drive to reproduce, i.e. to propagate our genes. The worst thing that can happen to a man, from that brutal perspective, is to expend his time and energy raising another man's child. If she's cheating with another woman, not only does that fear not arise, it may be even less likely that she would ever cheat with a man.
"We need our best minds on this!"
"Get India on the phone!"
Bahrain is not Dilmun
You seem very certain of Bahrain being Dilmun, despite the fact that it is inconsistent with pretty much all the references to Dilmun in Mesopotamian texts. For example (courtesy of Wiki):
Hymns regarding the Sumerian god Enki of Eridu in Sumer speak of his assaulting and deflowering Dilmun's maidens as they stand by a river bank, he reaching out of nearby marsh to clasp them to his bosom. Of Bahrain, Failaka, and the eastern littoral of Arabia, none possess marshes and a riverbank. Dilmun, furthermore, is said to lie "in the east where the sun rises," a situation that does not apply to the eastern Arabian littoral, Failaka or Bahrain, all of which lie south of Sumer and Eridu.
So, apart from not having marshes and not being to the east of Sumer, Bahrain is a perfect candidate...
A currant lawmaker wouldn't give a fig
Presumably this is the source of the various Arab Sultanates?
+1 headline
Props for the F. Scott Fitzgerald reference
Oh, great
Now I've got that song stuck in my head for the rest of the day.
Surely
you can't be serious?
I think Dan Brown's villain...
...was trying to make an Antipope
Apparently they needed help...
...getting their money out of Nigeria.
Don't overlook the biggest and simplest application
Electricity transmission itself. One of the biggest barriers to renewable generation is that the places that are sunniest (deserts), windiest (Great Plains), waviest (off-shore), etc. are a long way from where the power is needed. With a superconducting grid, all of those technologies become a lot more attractive.
A computer on top of a nuclear warhead?
So that would be fission chips?
@overlooked
"Regarding MRI's - isn't that kind of thing subconscious?"
The concept of a distinct conscious and subconscious is a false dichotomy, modern brain science is teaching us.
In reality your brain is more akin (WARNING: fallible analogy ahead!) to a computer running a bunch of foreground and background threads, and sometimes the threads interrupt each other, bogart all the resources, or even lock each other, causing a "rollback" and start over. Hmmm, that reminds me of an article I read somewhere recently...
"My brain? That's my second-favorite organ!" -- Woody Allen
@language
"To me, words are words so I could care less."
Your brain disagrees with you on this.
Much as we may like to think that we're above/immune to being offended and can take in our stride words that derail others, its just not true. You can put people in a fMRI scanner and see different parts of their brain light up in real time in response to obscenity. Regular words light up the higher language centers primarily, obscenities also light up the emotional centers all the way down to the primitive reptilian stem. Good lay article here: http://people.howstuffworks.com/swearing4.htm
And no, you are not an exception, however much you may think frequent exposure or usage has inured you. No, really you aren't.
Fascinating organ, the brain.
Boudica, Britons and Celts?
Lots of people here seem to be confusing Britons and Celts. According to the Celts' own myths, the British Isles weren't unoccupied when they arrived there. They told stories of a Bronze Age-culture people who called the land Albion. As the Celts occupied the land, these predecessor "ancient britons" were pushed to the margins of the country -- Norfolk, Cornwall, the Scottish Highlands... A diligent researched might find an echo of their genetic contribution there still...
Some historians believe that one of the motivations for the Iceni rebellion was resentment at the Roman's preferential treatment of and trade with Celtic tribes over the Iceni, Boudica's people.
Mixed emotions
Great news that its now easier to donate.
Terrible news that such an important historical site has to rattle the tin in the first place.
Problem with facial expressions...
...is that there's a whole crowd of people with certain forms of autism that have a *really* hard time identifying emotions so "pick the angry face" just wouldn't work for them. (There's even people who have trouble recognizing faces *at all* and rely on other cues like movement or voice to identify even people that they know extremely well.)
As for all the other clever ideas with pictures, celebrities, etc., you'll run into the same problem that the clever chaps who invented CAPTCHAs initially overlooked: what do people with vision handicaps who rely on screen readers do? Anything that a screen reader can figure out, a bot can figure out too (by definition). So you'll always need a workaround for those people.
(Paris, because even a bot can recognize her)
Re: Re: Save the Seals
@Ned Ludd: Alternatively, if the hunters are allowed guns, the animals should be too. America would be a better place if the right to bear arms were balanced by a right to arm bears.
Mine's the blue anorak...
Yes it does RE: Evolution leaps forward...
You're right. Even more broadly, the perpetuation of a neutral mutation is highly "contingent", as the biologists like to say. For example, if the mutation arose in somebody of high social standing or otherwise highly desirable as a partner, the mutation has a good chance of being passed on despite its strange appearance -- and even perhaps, within a generation or two, becoming interpreted as an indicator of high social standing and hence desirable in its own right. On the other hand, if it arose in some random peasant, it might have been shunned in favor of other random peasants. Of course, a point mutation like this could easily crop up several times before finally catching on.
Once we passed the point, as a species, where social interpretations began to play a major role in our ability to pass on our genes, all kinds of neutral mutations (including secondary sexual characteristics) and even some negative ones can get perpetuated, at least within a given society -- for example, hemophilia in the royal families of Europe. (It's fascinating to watch evolutionary sociologists scramble for explanations of this or that preferred physical characteristic, like long legs, in terms of its ability to "signal" better health, when in fact it may turn out to be purely a neutral mutation that happened to get attached to desirability by chance.)
(Actually there is a lot of debate in evolutionary biology about just how big a role contingency plays in evolution in general, even for "positive" mutations, but that's very long story...)
X10 compatible?
Does Ethernet/Power interfere with X10 automation?
Pathetic
Ever noticed how when Republicans are caught in a scandal they *never* address the actual issue at hand? They *always* try to divert attention to how the information came to light or how the investigation was conducted or who the accuser is or... anything but the actual issue. Perfect example: the first comment on today's thread. Ironically, the poster is accusing the Democrats of "breaking the rules" for exposing Republicans breaking the law!
Shame on you Republicans for your actions, shame on you for the tactics you use to try to avoid the consequences of your actions, and shame on you all those who would defend either.
Potential transitional technology?
The really intriguing element to this idea is its ability to bridge from the existing gasoline economy to the fabled hydrogen economy. One of other big challenges for hydrogen-fuelled vehicles (besides storing enough fuel) is building out the necessary infrastructure and building up the base of fuel cell-powered cars in parallel. This technology could be a big help in accelerating adoption by enabling existing cars to be converted, a much cheaper and faster ramp-up that in turn will make fully electric fuel cell vehicles more attractive. A fascinating idea all round.