Comment Re:Cubic litres (Score 1) 268
I'm going to claim there's prior art on that cubic water thing. I have several copies of a device that produces cubic water in dozen lots, in the bottom of my refrigerator.
I'm going to claim there's prior art on that cubic water thing. I have several copies of a device that produces cubic water in dozen lots, in the bottom of my refrigerator.
IMO our whole monetary system has evolved to promote convenience so much that we're losing basic security.
I just now cancelled a debit card because I'm tired of cleaning up after fraudulent transactions. The world is full of criminal organizations working full time to defraud anybody and everybody. I just can't see it as sustainable.
I'm guessing that this is the outbreak that will break out of sub-Saharan Africa. Rich countries probably have the infrastructure to control it when it reaches their shores, but the rest of the world may be stuck with a pandemic.
Probably, it's more like the reason Kurt Vonnegut did the same thing. Slaughterhouse Five, for just one of his works, really needs to be read like the reader isn't allowed to be sure whether Billy Pilgrim is objectively experiencing being unstuck in time and meeting Tralfamadorians and such, or has become a trifle unglued coping with tremendous shell-shock from WW2. If it comes prelabeled as SF, the deliberate ambiguity is ruined. Wondering if Tralfamadorian anatomy makes sense for a realistic alien is not even close to the biggest points Vonnegut hoped people would take away from Slaughterhouse Five.
Even Heinlein, who didn't usually mind being called things like the "number one Science Fiction author ever" and such, had cases like this - Glory Road deliberately switches at the very end from Fantasy tropes to SF, and Stranger in a Strange Land exists in two published forms, one more clearly SF, one deliberately deemphasizing those elements.
So, whether something is supernatural depends on your frame of reference? In our universe it's supernatural, but in its universe it's just that dork that's wasting its life creating universes in its mother's basement?
And if we manage to create a sentient artificial intelligence in a virtual environment, to it we'll be supernatural and that other hypothetical being will be supersupernatural?
He's not losing a tenured job, nor failing to make tenure. He was offered a job that happened to include tenure, and then the offer was revoked.
The only relevance of tenure to this story is as part of the value of the job offer that was revoked.
Geez, you could probably hire an assistant vollyball coach for that much money.
If he had a case, it would be against the people who retracted the job offer.
Lawsuits are generally an unreliable alternative to income earned by full time employment.
In the unlikely event that he wins, the lawyers should do OK out of it. He'll be left holding what little the lawyers don't take, and be unemployable for life.
It doesn't matter how prestigious the publication is, if it doesn't actually support what you want to think it does.
Last sentence of first paragraph:
The subjective nature and absence of a frame of reference for this experience lead to individual, cultural, and religious factors determining the vocabulary used to describe and interpret the experience.
Did you actually read that far? Or are you just citing it because some authority figure told you it supports your religious beliefs?
They apparently used it in the Crimea. (Some sources say Sevastopol, others Kerch.)
According to Wikipedia, when they interrogated Goering after the war, he told them the reason they didn't use their nerve gas to repulse the landings at Normandy was that they hadn't been able to make an effective gas mask for horses. The german army still relied primarily on horses for transport, and everyone learned in WWI that gas doesn't always go where you want it to.
At the end, Hitler didn't care a fig what happened to Germany. He said they had failed their destiny, and he ordered destruction of their own infrastructure. He also dragged the war on for months after it was obviously lost, to the great harm of the Geman people.
If deterrence worked, we wouldn't have had two world wars.
Bullshit. The red shift is because the low-frequency visual rays projected by the human eye has a longer range than the high-frequency ones. (The range is a limit on the number of wavelengths the rays can extend.)
A dog would see the universe entirely differently. (Who ever met a dog that believed in a cosmic red shift?)
Sure. Go ahead and send me the dollar in case one of us dies unexpectedly.
And while it's in the mail... even if there was reason to doubt the big bang, why the heck do you think we would go back to a steady state universe? The universal trend in science is to discover that the universe and all its workings are far stranger than we thought, not more intuitive.
Intuition comes from brains that evolved to operate on a certain scale of space and time. When we start getting away from that in any direction (larger or smaller scales), our intuitions become utterly useless as a guide to what we will find.
Just so it's completely clear (the parent is probably aware of this): The dust levels do not cast the Big Bang into doubt.
I was surprised, and even mildly offended, that the recent discovery was being hyped as "proof of the big bang". The long-ago discovery of the CMB is one of the handful of science's greatest achievements.
What is algebra, exactly? Is it one of those three-cornered things? -- J.M. Barrie