bascule

I'm just wondering when the authorities will stop going nuclear and screaming TERRORIST over benign instruments of science like petri dishes and breadboards (with bare wires. Bare wires mean terrorism) I'm surprised this incident wasn't branded a bioterrorism hoax

He ended up being convicted for "mail fraud" and "wire fraud" for $256 of bacteria he obtained They ended up completing all of the projects he was attempting He was doing the prep work for several of the projects at home. Some were meant to be taken on the road, like a GMO testing kit

http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/09/26/art-or-bioterrorism-who-cares/ Some of you might remember the case of Steve Kurtz. When emergency responders arrived at his home to treat his wife for heart failure (which she ended up dying of), they saw lots of scary things: sciency stuff like petri dishes with bacteria cultures. Being reasonably minded, level headed people, the emergency responders jumped to the only conclusion for the possible use of this sort of thing: BIOTERROR Kurtz's wife's body was confiscated and his block quarantined, his house ransacked and anything that could give a potential clue to his activities confiscated. Kurtz was detained and questioned for 22 hours. A public health commissioner and FBI field and lab tests showed everything in Kurtz's possession was harmless. But of course, that didn't stop the Justice Department for attempting to prosecute him for BIOTERROR What kind of world are we living in? Breadboards are bombs. Petri dishes are bioterror weapons. Should we be afraid of science, because terrorists could use it too?

Nope, I've never used Ruby on Windows. Supposed to work quite well though, completely native and everything.

Should colleges teach the facts or superstition? I guess that depends on what college you go to...

http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/necromancer.htm

I challenge what high end audio hardware is shipping without Mac drivers. In most of the pro software I've used (e.g. Reason, Ableton Live) the Windows and Mac versions are released simultaneously or the Mac version is released first. Mac's CoreAudio has lower latency than ASIO, especially with multichannel audio interfaces. CoreAudio allows hardware sync with 4+ channels, compared with ASIO that requires software sync (raising the latency further) Plus there's all sorts of software that you just can't get on PC, like Logic. I tend to WTF if I go into someone's "studio" and see they have an MBox hooked up over USB to their Windows machine running ProTools LE...

There's a few ways to do that, for example: >> list = [] => [] >> list.push :foo => [:foo] >> list += [:bar] => [:foo, :bar] >> list << :baz => [:foo, :bar, :baz] (in this case :foo, :bar, and :baz are symbols, also known as atoms. you can think of them like a big global enum) Testing helps with that sort of thing

That's how Thomas Jefferson interpreted the idea. However, the phrase came from his personal writing, which didn't pertain to the First Amendment which James Madison authored anyway. The phrase "separation of church and state" was purloined by Thomas Jefferson's writing by SCOTUS in their verdict on Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing. This is the first amendment case which brought "separation of church and state" into the political dialog. The relevant part of the verdict is as follows: That's what separation of church and state means. Now which of the above examples from Everson v. Board of Education does that violate? Science contradicts religion in many areas. How are these conflicts to be resolved? In the classroom, should science take precedence, or religion? I'm certainly on the side of science.

If you're coming from a VB.NET background you'll find Ruby has an imperative syntax much like BASIC. Things like for loops and while loops behave similarly. No variable or type declarations are required. Of course, most Rubyists never use Ruby's imperative syntax and prefer to do everything with blocks, which takes a bit of getting used to. If your background is C# it's quite a bit different. Dynamic typing might take awhile to get used to, and the syntax is going to be quite a bit different. You might have a look at IronPython or IronRuby. These projects both work on the .NET CLR runtime and interoperate with the .NET framework. Well, Rails is definitely great for that sort of thing

I have no problem with that when people post long pseudoscientific rants in science-specific forums, especially when those rants are on a completely unrelated topic to the actual forum it's posted in. If someone goes into the quantum mechanics forum and asks how waveform collapse works, that's not your lead in to post your own totally contrived and unscientific conjectures. I really appreciate him doing that when the admins don't bother to prune the pseudoscience into the pseudoscience forum *hint* *hint* The politics forum, not so much...

Yes, Ruby relies on infix notation almost exclusively (one of the sad few places it doesn't are Rails views), but generally, Ruby prefers: subject.verb object which is what I meant when I said Ruby reads like English. For example, a Ruby testing framework (RSpec) lets you write your tests like: should have_fewer_than(5).records

How many members of MoveOn do you want to bet are registered Green? This ad is pretty much at the behest of progressives in general, which last I checked isn't represented by a particular political party...

I'm fairly confident our physicist buddies out there will find some way to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics. How much farther we get from there kind of depends on what a unified theory of quantum gravity ends up being, don't you think? Who knows, it could be so inclusive that it ends up being the last scientific statement we can make about reality. Probably not, but we gotta figure that one out first before we can figure out how much else we can figure out

Ruby is the most programmer-friendly language I know of, with a syntax that tries to read like English as much as possible. It has all the features you'd expect of a modern language (strong typing, garbage collection, object orientation) with some nice power features that only language zealots like me seem to care about. If you're interested in learning Ruby you can do it straight from your web browser without installing or configuring any software. Helpful lessons are built straight in, and you can do them all from the web (neato!) http://tryruby.hobix.com/ The guy who made this site has some fun downloadable software aimed at younger students designed to teach them their first language (also using Ruby). It's called Hackety Hack and you can try it out here: http://hacketyhack.net/ Works for adults as well, if you've gotten through Try Ruby and would like to learn more.

History of western civilization describes it pretty aptly Science is an enormous part of western civilization, and its discoveries radically altered the way people went about their daily lives. If you're going to teach it from a religious instead of scientific perspective, you should leave out heliocentrism as well, and Galileo's confrontation with the church. Of course these are important parts of history that teach us valuable lessons like the Earth goes round the Sun despite what the Bible says. Sounds like a little of both.

Martin, I'm sure I've discussed Deutsch before, and several years ago I considered reading the Fabric of Reality after reading an article on Deutsch I'll be interested to hear what you find

I saw this article: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19526223.700-parallel-universes-make-quantum-sense.html Apparently a team of scientists has shown mathematically how waveform collapse can be explained by the continuous branching of the Everett many-worlds model. Unfortunately I can't find their paper. Can someone opine?

Smolin tried another approach: a hybrid of 1 and 2. For awhile he was researching if string theory and loop quantum gravity are both approximations of the same underlying theory. Of course, I get the impression this is what lead him to give up on string theory and write The Trouble with Physics. From my understanding General Relativity provides a more coherent foundation, in that those who research GR have largely the same picture of what GR means. Smolin was describing discussions where himself and other researchers had radically different ideas of what QM actually meant (conceptually), but could put them aside because their calculations didn't depend on particular interpretations, just the underlying math which they agreed on.

Bascule's a character from a book no one has read

At work I use OS X almost exclusively, although I do have an XP box I use primarily for running web browsers. At home I run Kubuntu. OS X is my favorite OS of these three. I'm constantly frustrated by Kubuntu and how things they've tried to automate often just don't work properly. That said OS X is probably the least stable platform of the three... I've had OS X crash more than Windows and Linux combined. When it's not actually giving me the dreaded "Please restart your compiler" kernel crash dialog, the UI is freezing to the point it's unusable. I've had another fun experience where my laptop won't even boot. No startup chime, just a greyish / white screen with no apple which persists no matter how long I wait. Power cycling repeatedly seemed to fix the problem, and oddly enough I was in the room with two other hardcore Mac fiends and they both complained of the same problem. The real problem with Apple is they know they've inspired so much user devotion that they don't need rock solid product stability and haven't really worked on it. For someone who controls all the hardware and software in the system, Apple hasn't exactly done a stellar job building a stable platform.

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007709220333 Specifically, he told his classroom that the Adam and Eve story, which directly contracts the evolutionary concept of all life on earth originating from a common ancestor, should not be interpreted literally. Now granted, this was in a western civilization class and not in a biology classroom, but the result was several students filing a class action lawsuit, resulting in the university's decision to fire the teacher. Should science end in the science classroom? Should teachers be afraid of teaching science when it conflicts with religion? I certainly don't think so. I would certainly argue that the university was in the wrong firing this teacher.

Generally they ask you to run anything that sets off the metal detector through the x-ray I completely agree. Unless she's trying to enter a secure area what's the problem?

So here you're defining "free" with an implicit "from causality" Are free events acausal? If so, what makes them free? What is acausal but non-random? Evolution by natural selection was based on evidence in the form of catalogued observation. What evidence is the quantum mind based on? That's not science Again, as far as science is concerned consciousness doesn't exist. As soon as you can provide a testable definition for what consciousness is, then consciousness can become part of science. So, again: Can you point to one argument for putting quantum cosnciousness on scientific footing which has not been discredited?

That's not what I'm trying to say. The Senate Democrats are divided among whom you might call the "far left" and whom I might call the "Bush enablers". I think the MoveOn.org vote was a good example of that: many Democrats turned out to lambaste the "liberal activist group" who would question the honesty of General Petraeus. Contrast that with the Republican Senators... where's the division there? Spector, Hagel, Lugar, and a handfull of others? The Democrats can't get anything done because they aren't a uniform, resolute group, and sadly there's a wide contention of them who keeps siding with the Republicans and backing down at any confrontation. So as not to look "unpatriotic," "support the troops" and all of that...