Cap'n Refsmmat

I'd suggest picking up an easy language like Python to learn some of the basics. They have a Beginner's Guide online: http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide And a list of good resources and books for non-programmers who want to get into Python: http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/NonProgrammers Python isn't just some easy beginner's language, though -- it's powerful and used for real-world software. It's a useful language.

Incidentally, I'm glad to see productive work being done. Here's a column by the high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7149459.ece There's more in the article. Good to see people making an effort.

There's a rule that [imath]\sin \alpha \sin \beta = \frac{1}{2} (\cos(\alpha-\beta)-\cos(\alpha+\beta))[/imath]. That may help. Also, [imath]\cos \alpha \cos \beta = \frac{1}{2} (\cos(\alpha-\beta)+\cos(\alpha+\beta))[/imath], I think. I hate trig identities.

Having watched more than one Pat Condell video, including iNow's first video, and being familiar with his views, I can safely say this: He's a first class bigot. He may be on the other side of the problem but he's still part of it. It's like having genuine concern about crime rates, and then blaming "the jews and the blacks" in some intolerant tirade.* He picks acts he does not like -- homophobia, violence, censorship, and so on -- and decides that every religious believer is a supporter of all those things, then uses that excuse to accuse them of having tiny, immature minds that are stuck in the Stone Age. He even misrepresents their beliefs while he does so -- for example, the idea that evidence for faith is totally unwelcome certainly isn't true in a lot of Christian theology. It's like he got stuck in an internal feedback loop: he sees a few bad actions committed in the name of religion, gets annoyed, learns about some more, gets angrier, and starts actively seeking out new reasons to hate religion, in a never-ending cycle that ends with his conclusion that every single religious believer on the planet is a homophobic cowardly intolerant ignorant caveman. Perhaps he's right that we shouldn't tolerate some of the acts perpetrated in the name of religion, but he seems positively dripping with anger and self-righteousness while he says it. * Sorry to steal, but padren said it well.

What exactly was the government supposed to do in response? Send in a carrier battle group to bomb the oil spill?

Generally I don't get more than halfway through a Pat Condell video before giving up and stopping. It seems to me he's got as much pent-up hatred in him as the people he hates.

Don't give me quite so much credit... I'm currently pursuing my undergraduate degree, while dave is just short of his PhD.

If your computer has multiple port locations (i.e. some on the front and some on the back) you might try plugging things into different locations. Sometimes each has its own power supply, and splitting up the load can keep them from running out of power.

I'm not surprised. Autism is such a broad condition that I'm sure there are numerous different ways to be diagnosed with it. However, understanding what leads to it will certainly help provide cures. Now that research like this has turned up, why aren't anti-MMR campaigners driving donations to support further research along these lines? Unlike the assorted weird untested remedies that have popped up for autism, this shows genuine progress in understanding the disorder, and real potential in stopping it. Or is it not worth fighting for something when the Big Evil Pharmaceutical Companies aren't out to stop you?

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One of the nifty advances of modern science is that radio waves and light waves are the same thing. Also, they travel at a constant speed that never varies. We can measure that too -- measure it multiple times using different methods and you get the same answer. But that's not the point of this discussion. Electromagnetism is entirely separate from gravitation, but I digress... It's not about qualifications. Qualifications do not make you automatically think in terms of scientific theories, as opposed to nonscientific ideas. You've missed the point entirely. The point is not whether hypotheses are silly. There are lots of accepted scientific theories that were thought to be silly when first thought up. The problem is some things are not scientifically useful. The point of science is to describe how the universe works. If I have an idea that makes no predictions about the universe -- it doesn't say "when x happens, y will happen" or anything -- it is useless to describe the universe. It gives me no information about it. Similarly, statements like "a black hole will swallow the universe" isn't helpful unless you can make predictions. Under what situation would that occur? What mechanism would let it happen? If you don't know, but you want to find out, that's great. It's a learning experience. But so many people don't know and actively resist finding out. They refuse to listen to others or learn about other science. That's when we step in and close the discussion. I believe a few of our moderators work in labs or in doing research. Actually, counting through our staff list (including resident experts), at least thirteen are actively involved in research, development, or other scientific pursuits. This is a science forum, not an everything-else forum.

Because I can put a radio transmitter in one place, a receiver at another place, and measure the time it takes for the radio waves (which are light waves) to travel between the two. Heck, mailservers can demonstrate the speed of light: http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html Because science, by definition, is the investigation of how the universe works. What relevance does this have to science and speculation? Sure, perhaps scientists have not yet imagined hypotheses that could explain many facets of the universe. But that doesn't mean that any random idea you can imagine should be taken seriously. An idea has merit if it can be tested. Do you dispute that scientific theories need to be testable?

All of those hypotheses are testable. An untestable hypothesis would be "the moon is made of cheese that looks exactly like rock to any sensor we might use." Or perhaps "the moon is made of cheese, but it's really weird cheese, and I don't know anything else about it, so don't bother trying to find the cheese." I believe the word you are looking for is "hypothesis," not "theory." In general, we dismiss things as drivel when they clearly contradict evidence, not when they are untested. If they are untested, we ask for predictions that could be tested. If there are none, we see no point in the venture, since the idea cannot be tested or falsified. Evidence. Special and general relativity are among the most tested scientific theories currently in existence, and they have consistently matched experiments. It'd be more appropriate to say "e=mc2 matches experiment" rather than "is correct" though.

If you'd prefer, I could change my example to tiny gnomes, which are not supernatural at all. They're just very small living gnomes. It's obvious, you see. Why else would we invent garden gnomes as lawn ornaments? The gnomes that make us up are exerting their influence and making us pay homage to them. ... see? There's an untestable prediction for you that is not supernatural. Another possible untestable speculation is a hypothesis about hyperspace, without providing any clues on how one might access said hyperspace to test the hypothesis. That's a popular one. Or hypothesizing extra dimensions that are impossible to access by any normal means, so equipment can't reach them. Or just hypothesizing "superconductivity works because of x", without ever figuring out how one would prove it. If you can't concoct an experiment for it, there's not much point.

The point is that many speculations cannot be supported with evidence, because they make no testable predictions. I could speculate that quarks are made of tiny fairies who team up to act exactly like quarks, and there's no way you could test my hypothesis -- if they act exactly like quarks, there's no way to distinguish between fairies and normal quarks. So the speculation is pointless. We'd love to discuss new ideas if (a) the author shows he actually understands the applicable physics and (b) the idea makes testable predictions. It doesn't matter if those predictions have been tested yet. This is not a question of who's right and who's wrong. It's a matter of presenting your ideas so we can tell if you're right. Using confusing or incorrect terminology and making no testable predictions does not help that goal. Incidentally, which one of you four is Clipper?

I don't want one. But whenever you go to install Adobe updates or some random software you want, it's always offering to install the Yahoo! toolbar or some random antivirus software I don't want. Not to mention computers coming pre-loaded with free trial versions of a few dozen different software packages that I don't need.

Dunno. I'd take having unneeded support for 4000 CPUs over having unwanted Yahoo! toolbars and antivirus software installed whenever I want to install normal software Interestingly, by the way, I believe there's a few governments that have mandated transitions to Linux systems in their official computers to prevent reliance on proprietary software and to lower costs. The world doesn't have to be a Windows world...

I thought the entire purpose of an operating system was to run what you want how you want pretty efficiently. Now, the software built on it, like the desktop environments, might be sub-optimal, but they're pretty damn good these days. When was the last time you tried a modern desktop Linux distribution?

Here's what we mean when we say "this is not science:" Many speculations we see in the forums here are untestable. That is, they don't make meaningful predictions -- there's no mathematics to say "when I perform this experiment, I should get 47 as the result" and no meaningful framework that lets you guess at results. Oftentimes we ask for testable predictions, and get evasive answers about mathematics not being everything, or predictions that disagree with what has already been observed. "This is not science" does not mean "your idea is wrong." No, untestable predictions could be right or wrong, but there's no way of finding out, so there's not much of a point, is there? The person advancing the idea has to take the time to develop their idea to the point of making predictions. There's another large proportion of speculators who don't know what established science currently says about the subject. Perhaps the current science is wrong, and they could prove it wrong if they tried, but they don't even take the time to learn it. They often misuse existing formulas or terminology, making it difficult to understand what they mean, and when current theories are explained to them they reject them without taking the time to fully understand them. This, naturally, leads to disputes. Now, if someone came to us and said, "Relativity is flawed. Here's why: If you do this calculation, you'll see that the result is 23, when the value observed from these binary pulsars is clearly 74," we'd be glad to consider that relativity is flawed -- after eliminating all the other possibilities (such as other effects altering the results), since relativity has a large amount of evidence behind it. But even if relativity turned out to be valid, the suggestion that it's flawed would be scientific and would be one we'd love to debate, simply because it's specific, testable, and explained by someone who understands what they're talking about. That's all. It's not about what's right or wrong. It's about making testable predictions and understanding the current theories before going off and making your own based on incomplete knowledge and faulty understanding. Incidentally, which one of you four is Clipper?

I have low blood pressure, so I'd at the least black out upon standing back up.

I'd also suggest checking over here: http://ubuntuforums.org/ Incidentally, regarding Linux: the world of the Internet lives on Linux. The majority of webservers run Linux. This one does, in fact. It's well-designed and often of high quality. Sure, a lot of the graphical interfaces haven't been polished to perfection yet; no Linux distribution has yet shown the graphical polish of, say, OS X, but they improve with each release. Each successive release of Ubuntu attracts yet more new users with improved user-friendly features, for example.

Do you have other devices plugged in to your computer's USB ports when using Linux? Any external disks or other stuff? If nothing works, you can always get an externally powered USB hub that uses an AC adapter to supply power to all the USB devices.

What I understand is that the double-hull pipe has hot water in the outer hull, being pumped down to prevent any methane hydrates or ice from forming in the cap in clogging it. I don't know if it's also pushing the oil back up.

No, the surface of the ocean is the top of the pipe, and the leaking well is at the bottom. You'd place the pump at the bottom for the best results.

They pump from the bottom, not the top. You push the water up instead of relying on the pressure from the top. Hard to put a pump 5,000 feet underwater.