Otherwise known as Perl.

Wrong.

Mathematics is always done in a fantasy world. For a trivial example, there are no lines extending to infinity, or perfect circles: to work with these you must create a fantasy world in which they exist. A set of axioms and theorems creates a fantasy world. Being able to do proofs requires working within that fantasy world.

Programming, on the other hand, requires interaction with the real world. Programs will run in a certain amount of real time, and take a certain amount of real disk space, and real memory on real machines. It is possible to do experiments, and often necessary to do so ("proving" correctness of real programs is often impractical), and thus we can and must approach programming as a science.

Understanding and working with the real world calls for a very different mindset from that which is required to be a mathematician. For example, a mathematician might claim that it is impossible to determine "in general" whether a program halts, but a programmer knows that all real programs will halt due to entropy. In the fantasy world of the mathematician, thermodynamics does not exist. Further, only the mathematician cares about "in general", the programmer is never looking at "in general" as the mathematician uses that term, but rather is looking at a specific program.

Similarly, in programming, because we are dealing with the real world, we need to manage complexity. Much as the engineer or physicist uses approximations to allow mathematics to be applied to the real world, by simplifying the mathematics, so to does the programmer use abstractions and approximations to simplify his or her work. The goal is not the logical correctness of a proof, but creating something that a) gets the job done, and b) is maintainable and well documented. A proof need be neither maintainable nor well documented, and MUST be logically correct.

We can't use the integers on computers, let alone the real numbers. All we can do is approximate these. In programming, we are constantly juggling approximations, without the luxury of dealing with the "perfect" or "ideal" quantities that are so characteristic of the world of the mathematician.

In programming, as in engineering or physics, mathematics is a tool, a means to an end, not an end in itself. Programming is not math.

Please read a few history books, particularly those that discuss economic issues (commonplace in histories written in the past few decades). Your ignorance concerning this issue is awful. You might try reading Adam Smith as well.

Pay particular attention to histories that describe everyday life for ordinary people, and compare things in the old days to today -- you'll be shocked at the long term progress that industrialization has led to.

As you'll find when you read Adam Smith, capitalism rewards people for specializing in things society needs. Governments can't do that because the world is too complex -- the Communists proved that in Russia and China, and the Socialists proved it in India (all of which are now heavily capitalist).

Even back in the 18th century when Adam Smith was alive the world was far too complex for governments to understand and manage all the details of the economy, and things are exponentially more complex today.

Please read some books on manufacturing and logistics, so you'll have some idea of the complexity of the modern world.

What governments can do is penalize people for doing harm while pursuing profit, and regulate dangerous practices (including reasonable protection of the environment). The vast majority of companies play by the rules: people don't hear about this because it isn't news. We get bombarded with all the bad stuff, and those who are poorly educated assume as a result that everything is bad.

There is NO "spiral to the bottom" and there are a horde of "exceptions" -- you simply haven't bothered to educate yourself.

It doesn't have a be a choice, one or the other. If you study successful instances of socialism, you'll inevitably find that socialism that depends heavily upon capitalism.

For example, socialist medical systems depend upon the "evil" capitalists to fund most of the research that leads to advanced techniques. Socialist medical systems depend upon the "evil" capitalists to build the advanced test equipment (MRI, Ultrasound, etc) needed to diagnose complex medical problems.

Socialist medical systems depend upon capitalism for the information, research, transportation, production, analysis, and logistics infrastructures needed to educate medical specialists, build the medical facilities, get the tools to the facilities, and get the patients to the facilities.

There is a huge difference between being able to produce small quantities of something, and being able to produce large quantities. Similarly, there is a big difference between doing many things on a small scale, and doing them on a large scale. There is no evidence that any socialist system can handle that jump in scale, and considerable evidence to the contrary (such as all the shortages experienced by the former Communist nations). If you don't understand this, educate yourself on the complexities of manufacturing and logistics, plus the Agricultural Revolution.

In short, successful socialism in the real world ALWAYS relies upon a capitalist foundation. You HAVE to have capitalism to build an excess of resources in order for some of those resources to be used in a socialist manner.

The error that is made in many place is to have more socialism than the capitalist production of resources can support. This leads to huge and unsustainable government debts. It's a problem for the US federal government, and a problem for many US state and local governments. It's also a problem for many other nations.

No. It isn't a religion. Read any economics journal and you'll see lots of articles where hypothesis are discussed in terms of evidence. Why don't you go to a college library, pick out some journals at random, and do some reading?

Examining hypothesis in terms of evidence IS science, and it is completely orthogonal to religion. Again, you are speaking out of ignorance. Presumably you don't like some of the things economists say, or which are attributed to economists, so you're rejecting everything about the science. No intelligent person would reject biology because of the rantings of a few Creationists that don't like evolution, it's just as foolish to reject economics.

Don't see that anywhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Nor does it fit my understanding of American history.

If you see somebody in government or a lobbying organization claiming that, I'd suggest looking carefully to see if it's a pretext hiding something else.

It's really hard in practice to define who "benefits the most" from something.

I am unaware of any evidence that supports that hypothesis.

Transportation systems have played a key role in trade for much of human history. Trade in turn has played a key role in generating wealth.

Further, while it might seem that corporate CEO's high salaries are not directly dependant upon things like roads, those businesses still need supplies and personnel to operate, and these will move in part by road. Without the road network, there's no corporation, and hence no high salary.

This is true not just for production industries, but also for those that work with information, or stocks. The people on top depend on the people below them being able to work. The computers, network equipment, and food these people eat all come by road. Even those that just gain wealth through stock manipulations still depend upon those companies whose stock they are buying being able to function, which means a dependence on the roads.

In other words, we should raise the cost of all consumer goods, effectively taxing sales at a higher rate, which in turn hits the poor harder than everyone else, and also make it really hard for ANYBODY to know exactly how much tax they're paying each year (i.e. yet another hidden tax and thus another way for the government to hide what's really going on from a generally ignorant public).

Also: the higher you raise the tax, the greater the costs of enforcement, yet another burden on a government massively in debt.

No.

We should move in the opposite direction. Get rid of all sales, gas, and registration taxes, all tolls, all property tax, and have the sole source of government income be income tax (including inheritance as income). Have a simple formula, with no exceptions or deductions ("simple" doesn't mean the same thing as "flat"). It's the only sensible way to rationalize a highly defective tax code, and a good first step towards fixing a highly defective legal system.

If you want the short answer, the bombing was not very accurate.

To understand this in detail, it is best to be familiar with a little additional history.

The Luftwaffe had experimented with bombing an urban area during the Spanish Civil War. It was determined that this had little effect, and as a result Luftwaffe policy was to avoid primarily civilian targets. The British pursued a similar policy once WW2 started.

However, in the course of going after the docks and factories of London, some German bombs fell outside the prescribed target area.

This happened after many bombing raids had been going on for a long time, involving many different aircraft and crews, against a strenuous defence, and some kind of mistake along these lines was probably inevitable given the relatively primitive technology of the day and the chaos of war.

The German aircrew involved was immediately arrested after landing, but the damage had been done. The British decided to direct an air raid on Berlin in "retaliation", and even though it did little damage Hitler decided to escalate (one of his dumbest decisions in a career filled with them).

Since the Germans hadn't planned to attack civilian targets, they didn't have weapons, training, or doctrine to do it particularly well. Accuracy, in short, was poor. The British were equally limited. However, when attacking a densely populated city such as London it wasn't necessary to have good accuracy to do significant damage.

Estimates of casualties vary, but about 40k-50k civilian lives were lost during the Battle of Britain, with at least as many being injured. Total deaths for WW2 from all causes is around 55 million.

For both combatant's bomber arms, the attack built slowly enough, and was ineffective enough (in military terms) to give the defenders time to evolve an effective defence. Some of the defensive measures that were developed included the use of civilian shelters, radar, fighters, anti-aircraft guns, balloons, and considerable use of deception.

Defences such as anti-aircraft guns and balloons made bombing even less accurate as the planes had to attack from high up. Fighter interception often caused bombers to drop their bombs before reaching their targets (assuming they could identify those targets in the first place, not always a given). Deceptive measures often prevented bombs from being dropped on militarily significant targets, which probably wasn't much consolation to the people the bombs actually fell upon. In short, defensive measures tended to make inaccurate bombing even more so.

In both cases, the bombing effort eventually took such tremendous losses that each side concluded that they had to bomb at night, with huge losses in accuracy, if they were going to bomb at all (the Americans, in contrast, chose to bomb in the daylight, trusting to their Norden Bombsight to give them accuracy, a hope that was often foiled by the Northern European weather).

Some attempts were made by the Germans to use radio beams to guide planes to their targets, but these were quickly countered by the British.

The net effect of night bombing against defended targets was heavy civilian casualties. Over the course of the war the numbers of deaths from the inaccurate dropping of conventional bombs would dwarf the number of deaths resulting from the atomic bombs (well under 1% of the total wartime deaths resulted from the atomic weapons).

Recent books such as "The Bomber War" provide more detail, if you want it. Older books tend to have a lot of errors which have been corrected by modern scholarship, so while they sometimes provide useful data you have to be careful working with them.

A popular myth, but long since corrected by modern research (which you can readily find in references published in the last ten or so years).

In reality, the Germans were taking unsustainable losses and failing to inflict proportionate damage well before the decision to attack London was made. A lot of craters were made in runways, but these were easily filled. The "Home Team" advantage was decisive, given the relative parity of the fighters, and the limited range of the German fighters.

In short, the Germans had very poor intelligence regarding the location of key British facilities, and didn't understand what was necessary to knock them out. Like the Allies (both at that point, and later in the war), they massively underestimated the effectiveness of strategic air attack given the primitive equipment and training available.

In the short run, provided the British didn't let internal politics hamstring them, there was no real chance of a German victory from the air.

In the long run, of course, the Germans would have had to confront the same problem that the Allies would eventually have to deal with, namely the need for a long range fighter escort and appropriate doctrine. They were never given the opportunity to do this.

Specialization is a reality of the modern economic world, and has been for over a century. Few nations make everything needed to build the tools to build the tools to build the weapons, and even fewer have all the raw materials needed. This was true even when the weapon systems were much simpler.

Also, even when a nation can produce things in small quantities, it can't necessarily produce them in large enough quantities needed to make up for the attrition of war.

During WW2, for example, Russian manufacturing and logistics depending upon foreign aid for the vast majority of the supply of ball bearings, most of the machine tools, the vast majority of the rail and truck stock, the chemicals and chemical processing tools needed to produce high grade aviation fuel, enormous quantities of food and winter clothing, and lots of other stuff.

Many references exist if you're curious about this, such as the books by Weeks and Van Tuyll.

In short, without the aid of their capitalist rivals, the Russian armies would have gone into battle starving and freezing, and massively under-equipped in tanks, planes, artillery, and ammunition.

Dependence on other nations was by no means a solely Soviet phenomenon:

"The bleak historical truth is that those great symbols of British myth, the Battle of Britain Spitfire and Hurricane, and their Merlin engine, were largely fabricated on foreign machine tools; more, their armaments and much of their instrumentation too were foreign in design, and, in the case of their earlier production batches, foreign in manufacture as well." Correlli Barnett, "The Audit of War", pp 134.

In general, only a long lasting war, or the immanent threat of such a war, can force a nation to develop its internal resources towards self-sufficiency.

Nobody in science suggests that animals have magical abilities.

They do, however, have many remarkable abilities that human beings lack. There is evidence to support all of the following:

1. Some snakes, for example, can "see" heat (infra-red vision), allowing incredible resolution in targeting their attacks.
2. Bats and several other types of animal can use sound waves to navigate in the dark (echolocation).
3. Sharks, skates, and rays can sense electric fields (electroreception).
4. Some animals that are capable of long distance migration are able to sense magnetic fields (including sharks).
5. Some fish can communicate using electric fields (electrocommunication).
6. Bees have an interesting ability to detect electric charge on flowers.
7. Scorpions have vibration sensors tuned to the bands of vibration frequencies carried through sand by their usual prey.

Incredible variation exists from one animal species to the next in the sense we human beings think of as touch, smell/taste, hearing, and vision, which can take very exotic forms in animals.

In many cases, the sensory systems of animals greatly exceeds what human beings can do without the aid of tools (or even with the aid of tools!).

None of this is magic.

In the case of the sharks, for example, a specialization of the hair cell that works as an antenna has been evolved. Since the shark has lots of these antennas, it also has a sophisticated signal processing mechanism in the nervous system to allow the shark to resolve direction. Since all living creatures generate electric fields, this provides a guide for the shark in the final moments of its attack, permitting attack in murky waters or at night.

There are many chemicals that are responsive to electromagnetic stimuli, and biological entities have evolved a variety to mechanisms to produce and use these chemicals. Human eyes, for example, have chemicals that respond to visual light (a form of electromagnetic radiation), allowing vision. Similarly, plants have chemicals that respond to light, this permits photosynthesis. The idea that a chemical can be used as part of a sensory receptor for an electric field is simply another application of this idea: not all that strange when you think about it.

Magnetic sensing is still not well understood, but you can read about the current ideas on how this might work by doing a search on "magnetoception". Once you allow the ability to sense a magnetic field, you essentially have a tool for navigation relative to the Earth's magnetic field (a primitive version of which is the compass).

Similarly, there are many chemical receptors that can be used to sense the presence of other chemicals. Often these involve complex organic molecules with a three dimensional shape that responds to the shape of other molecules on contact, much like a lock responds to a particular key. Many variations of this idea exist, allowing huge variation in the ability to sense chemicals (which human beings call "smell") from one creature to the next.

The usual search engines will provide lots of information on this topic, or you might get a book on animal physiology.

The full limits of the capabilities of animal sensory systems are something we're not even close to understanding at this point, and there's a lot of active research going on. Since most people know there's a lot we still don't understand, there's a lot of speculation concerning what these different sensory systems (and doubtless others we haven't discovered yet) might be capable of.

Even within the human species, considerable variation exists from one person to the next with respect to the ability to use the standard human senses. Some of this is biological, some of this is a function of environment and habit.

You make some excellent points. An additional point comes to mind, and I apologize if it seems like hand waving ...

In the study of frequency dependent systems we often don't understand all the possible non-linear ways in which a given system can respond. As you mention, any system interaction with electro-magnetics is necessarily frequency dependent. It isn't clear to me how one would construct a medical study to take possible non-linearity of response into account.

In other words, a study might inject a signal at a particular frequency (yes, we can only approximately generate particular frequencies, but let's neglect that point) into living tissue, then vary the frequency to observe penetration depth as a function of frequency. But what if multiple frequencies are present at the same time? Might the system behave differently under some combination of signals than we would expect from the superposition of responses to the individual inputs?

It would seem that it would have to, since no real system is actually linear.

In medical studies of exposure to electro-magnetics, they are certainly exposing living tissue to some signal or combination of signals.

The question that then comes to mind is, what if the studies aren't generating the right combination of input signals to see a response that might indicate a problem? One could potentially do a lot of population studies without realizing that the inputs are wrong in every one, because we've made an unwarranted assumption regarding system linearity.

I think it's unlikely that any combination of low amplitude inputs would pose a problem, but who can be certain?

It seems like we would want some way of proving that any possible non-linear effect that can result is necessarily non-harmful.

Incorrect. There is no limitation on laws regarding slavery in general in Article 5 (where the 1808 reference is found) or Article 1 Section 9 (where the importation reference is).

What is ACTUALLY said is that amendments can not prevent migration or importation of persons under state law until after this date. This is very specific. NOTHING is said about what new amendments can do with respect to limiting slavery AFTER a person has been imported or has migrated. In other words, laws concerning slavery COULD be passed both before and after 1808.

With the wording given, the federal government could simply allow slaves to be imported, then require they be set free at some point after landing. This would, after all, not constitute interference with the "import" process, which is complete once the ship arrives.

The specificity of this wording was probably deliberate: it can be taken as recognizing the current political strength of the pro-slavery faction while setting up the means to overturn slavery at some future date should that faction weaken. Recall that some of the Founding Fathers were strongly opposed to slavery, and these were very intelligent men who could easily have recognized the need to comprise in the present while setting up mechanisms to make sure that things would get corrected over time.

The word slave does not even appear in the Constitution: it is implied by Article 1 Section 2 and Article 4 Section 2, but even here the wording is quite careful. Article 1 Section 2 can be taken as implying, "you can force us to count the slaves for now, but nothing prevents us from removing slavery at a later date" and Article 4 Section 2 can be taken as saying "we won't let one STATE interface with the laws regarding forced servitude of another, but nothing prevents the FEDERAL government from doing this".

It is also interesting to note that Article 5 prevents prevents future Amendments from altering Senate membership, but doesn't say anything about Amendments altering membership in the House of Representatives, essentially providing a wide open invitation to alter Article 1 Section 2 ...

Further, an extremely strong argument can be made that the acceptance of the Constitution was conditional upon a Bill of Rights being added (two states outright rejected the Constitution without a Bill of Rights, in others promises were made by men of honour whose word was trusted to the effect that a Bill of Rights would be added), and as such, the Bill of Rights can and should be viewed as superseding ANYTHING and EVERYTHING in the original document in the event of a conflict.

Also incorrect. The 9th Amendment was added to the Bill of Rights to address the objection of the Anti-Federalists that any Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete. By providing for the assertion of unspecified rights retained by the people, it allows the assertion of rights against government. Note that this is the assertion of rights against government at any level, not just the Federal Government. It is a myth that the Bill of Rights was only intended to limit the Federal Government: we know this 1) from James Madison's personal history, 2) from his original text for the Bill of Rights and 3) from the fact that the 1st Amendment specifically limits only CONGRESS and the other Amendments DON'T.

The Bill of Rights being open-ended, it could readily be argued that it implicitly gave the federal government the right to outlaw slavery. After all, some of the most fundamental rights the people might want to assert as being "retained by" them or "reserved to" them, and thus protected under the 9th and 10th Amendments, are the very same rights found in the Declaration of Independence, which are certainly not consistent with the institution of slavery. The protection of such rights could easily be argued to be a responsibility of the federal government in the event of infringement by the states.

It's more complicated than this. Many opposed slavery, even before the 1800s. Ben Franklin was the head of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery League and once justified the revolution as necessary because he claimed Britain would never end slavery voluntarily. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson freed their slaves (and Jefferson tried repeatedly to end slavery in Virginia). Gouverneur Morris gave a damning indictment of slavery at the Constitutional Convention.

So then, as now, there were people who realized what was going on was wrong and needed to change, but the forces of entrenched corruption were able to keep things going their way for a long time. Then, as now, it was -- as much as anything -- corruption in the legal profession that permitted the long term abuses of fundamental rights. It appears Judges swearing oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights find it inconvenient to acknowledge the open-ended nature of the Bill of Rights (the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights retained by the people, the 10th Amendment for unspecified rights reserved to the people, thus requiring the government to NOT enforce any law that could reasonably be supposed to violate rights the people might want to assert, a check and balance over the system that many people overlook).

Presumably the people involved get offers to support them in their candidacy for higher positions in return for their decisions, though I suppose we shouldn't rule out straight cash payments or blackmail as motivators. The legal profession as a whole has an enormous vested interest in not acknowledging the open ended nature of the Bill of Rights, so that probably plays a role as well.

For some reason, judges and prosecutors are immune to retribution when they uphold laws that violate fundamental human rights, even when doing so is clearly contrary to the oaths that are preconditions for holding these offices (or for that matter, the oaths that are required to engage in the practice of law). One would suppose that a person acting contrary to an oath that is a precondition for office would, by their actions, immediately and permanently be disqualified from holding that office (or any other position of public trust or responsibility).

It is cleat that the lessons of Nuremberg regarding individual responsibility to do no wrong have yet to take hold in the US legal profession.

This one, at least, is easy: look up the work by biochemist George Armelagos on the tetracycline (antibiotic) found in mummies. Now we know why beer was found in all those ancient Egyptian medical texts ...

Not quite the result you were looking for, and it may only have applied to beer found in part of the world ...

There is some reason to suppose that workers in ancient Egypt may have been paid, at least some of the time, in beer and bread ...

As far as the beer vs dirty water question goes, it's probably fair to suppose that many people drank water.

However, consider the following: the locals for a particular area would have some immunity to the diseases caused by micro-organisms found in their local water. We see the same phenomenon today (aka "Montezuma's Revenge"). Traders travelling from other places would not have this immunity, and would likely prefer beer to unfamiliar local water, presumably supplemented by water taken directly from rocky springs whenever possible. Thus, as trade became more important, beer would have become more important as well.

It's also worth considering that many foods contain water, and thus any small amount of dehydration caused by beer would not necessarily be significant in the overall diet. Also, between the time the beer is drunk, and the kidneys secrete urine, presumably much of the water from the beer is available for the body to use. It's not as if the beer instantaneously caused dehydration everywhere in the body.

The absence of a command line is why the software for the original Mac OS was written and tested on systems that DID have a command line. It simply wasn't practical to do this work by bootstrapping a graphical system. Too many tools had to be built and integrated, and wrapping a GUI around the development process would have hugely increased the time it took to get to market.

ResEdit, BTW, has many limitations (it got better over time and many releases), and if you were a Mac programmer in the old days you would have rolled a fair amount of your own code to work around these limitations. It's much easier -- if you need to generate a large number of resources -- to do so programatically than to wander through the same gui windows over, and over, and over, setting each resource individually with lots of mouse clicks and typing. Talk about carpal tunnel! ResEdit is really more a tool for tinkering, or making small changes, or building simple prototypes, than a complete and full-featured tool for low level manipulation of the system.

More generally, integrating a large number of different tools using a GUI is difficult at best, and often a disaster waiting to happen.

There are an enormous number of scientific and engineering tools out there that only solve PART of a problem or accomplish PART of a task. To solve a whole problem, or do the whole task, it is generally necessary to tie together a wide variety of tools. Typically you don't want to have to reinvent the wheel by rewriting all the tools! This integration process is HARD to do within a GUI environment. It's not an accident that tools for scientific computing, such as Matlab and Mathematica, are command line based.

Part of the genius in the design of Unix lies in the recognition of this difficulty: the designers provided very clever mechanisms (by the standard of the time) to support integrating disparate tools.

A classic example of an engineering task is chip design, which in spite of decades of work in developing graphical interfaces to support the design process still requires enormous amounts of automation and scripting.

Even in situations where some available GUI is capable of solving a problem, it's often a lot more efficient to roll your own solution, by integrating individual tools at the command line. The GUI designer might not have the right data structures needed to efficiently to solve any given problem. It's hard for a GUI designer to envision every possible circumstance under which an user might want to do something!

For these reasons is why it is absolutely necessary for developers -- if there's any chance they'll be doing scientific or engineering computing (doing this is the reason computers were invented in the first place) -- to know how to use either a command line or a scripting language to be considered competent and well rounded.

Yes, I do have quite a few expectations regarding control over my vehicle, even when it's parked in a public place. I expect other people not to slash the tires, break the windows, siphon the gas, or key the doors. If I'm dumb enough to park in a heavily trafficked area (or near kids playing ball), I don't have any legitimate basis to complain over minor damage to the vehicle, but there shouldn't be major damage. I expect other people not to steal the engine, the electronics, the license plates, or anything else, even if I foolishly leave the doors unlocked. I expect not to have anybody park too close to me, or to do anything that blocks me from leaving. I expect nobody will "borrow" the car without permission.

There are lots of special cases and exceptions, of course, for some or all of the above.

Decent, competent human beings treat the possessions of others, even in public, with respect.

Many of the expectations we have with respect to the treatment of our possessions in public are protected by laws in many jurisdictions, others rely on the integrity and competence of the public, or on tradition and custom.

In the modern world we have considerable expectation regarding control over our person and physical possessions when in public, and decency with respect to such. This goes even further in those jurisdictions with slander and libel laws, which provide protection not just over physical objects in public, but something intangible, namely one's reputation.