All ideas may have been created equal, but they do not remain so after they've been tested.

Scientific theories are the ideas that you don't have to prove again every time you use them, because they have already been tested very thoroughly. This means a paleontologist is allowed to assume that dinosaur bones are the fossilized remains of extinct animals that lived millions of years ago. He doesn't *have* to waste his time dealing with the opinions of Young Earthers who think the world was created 7000 years ago and that Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs. He can just assume as factual that dinosaur fossils are millions of years old and dismiss the Adam-and-Even-on-a-dinosaur idea without further ado -- until the Young Earthers come up with proof.

And it's not the least unfair, any more than its unfair that a football team that gets the ball on their own ten yard line has more work to do to score a goal than one that gets the ball ten yards from goal. It may seem discriminatory to people who haven't been following the game up to this point, but that's because they aren't aware of the work it took to get the ball where it is.

Heh. That reminds me of a meeting some 15 years ago. Java was gaining a strong foothold as an enterprise app development language at the time (especially in IBM Global Services, which is who I worked for), and at the same time we were living through a seemingly neverending series of Java sandbox security defects. Running code automatically downloaded from random websites in your browser is a devilishly hard thing to make safe, but that's completely irrelevant to enterprise software.

But the fact that the two contexts are completely different didn't prevent a clueless PM from boldly asserting (to the even more clueless customer!) that using Java is a bad idea because "it's insecure". I was the lead architect on the project and I had a hell of a time convincing the customer that the PM was wrong and that Java was, in fact, a good choice for the application. Especially since it would be impolitic to just come out and say the PM was full of shit, since he was ostensibly on my team.

Doubt "Big Bang"?

Well you should.

It can be said that: Under the conditions for which we need a working model, this 'Big Bang' hypothesis behaves in a way that consistently explains our extrapolations from observable phenomena. It also introduces some inconsistencies when take as a factual occurrence, when we introduce additional extrapolations from different phenomenal observations at quantum level. For those, notions such as "time" or "location" seem to be irrelevant, if not non-existent. This demolishes the very concept of actual measurement in any possible way - so let us posit additional models that require among other things, the hypothesizing of multiple, non-observed dimensions that nonetheless allow our maths to be validated and not face the ontological consequences of nothing being real.

Zeno had similar preoccupations, with time and position.

He can grow 'em in tanks, for his personal slave army.

Terrorists? You mean those statistically non-existent threat-actors, largely in the payroll of a US intelligence or law enforcement agency - or one of its allies?

No! The message is "Bargain Cryogenics"!

Hitch a ride, and live forever!

Join "WebEx".

The poor actually WORK. You know. Cook, clean, build, drill, pour, dig, etc.

No, but they may be the kind of people who choose one sort of destination over another.

Try $65. Also, Sundance is small and has slow lifts (I'm told -- haven't been there myself).

You mean Big Cottonwood Canyon. Brighton used to be pretty cheap, but they're $68 now. I used to take my kids there all the time when they allowed kids under 12 to ski free, and an all-day pass was $36 (at the grocery store). Solitude was always more expensive.

The resort in Little Cottonwood Canyon is Alta. It's $79. It used to be somewhat cheaper, more of a "locals" resort, but it was always more expensive than Brighton. And they don't allow snowboarding.

Yes, you can knock $3-4 off the price if you buy at a shop or a grocery store. Doesn't get you to $50, though. If you're traveling you can get better prices by buying multi-day passes, sometimes with even bigger discounts by getting them as part of a package deal with lodging, etc.

Or if you go a lot there are some great season pass deals, especially if you can go on weekdays. I'm building a house 20 minutes from Snow Basin, and I can get a weekdays-only annual pass for $300. I'll be working from home full-time, too, and have a flexible schedule, so I'm planning to buy a weekdays pass and ride from 9-11 AM most weekday mornings. That will be some cheap snowboarding, especially since I'll get enough hours on the slopes to amortize the equipment costs down to nothing.

So if you live in the right place, and do a lot of it, then skiing/snowboarding can be an inexpensive hobby. The same is probably true of golf.

Or you can just not do that :-)

I should note that I now live in Colorado (for another month or two, anyway), and I greatly prefer the skiing in Utah. The Colorado resorts are more expensive and much harder to get to.

No, oxygen getting absorbed into your lungs depends on the partial pressure of oxygen in your breathing gas. Partial pressure is the pressure multiplied by the percentage of the gas in question.

At sea level, the partial pressure of oxygen, ppO2 is 0.21, because the pressure is one atmosphere and the air is 21% oxygen. You can obviously survive just fine on a ppO2 of 0.21. If you're in an environment with 0.26 atm ambient pressure and breathing air, you're getting a ppO2 of 0.26 *0.21 = 0.05 atm. Generally, 0.16 atm is considered the minimum safe ppO2, though that's a pretty conservative number. But 0.05 is not enough to keep you alive. If you're breathing pure O2 at that pressure, though, the ppO2 is 0.26, which is higher than the ppO2 of air at sea level, so you'll be just fine (as long as you avoid freezing to death).

Incidentally, SCUBA divers worry about excessively high ppO2 levels, because oxygen is toxic. Generally, divers try to keep their ppO2 below 1.4 atm, which means that breathing air becomes dangerous at depths greater than 220 feet (of course, at those depths the ppN2 of air is generally already having a huge narcotic effect so diving that deep on air is a bad idea for other reasons). For deeper dives, therefore, divers use gas mixtures with less O2.

Such deep, technical, diving is pretty rare, though. What's very common is diving with air that has been enriched with additional O2, usually to 32% or 36% O2, called nitrox. The purpose of this is to lower ppN2 levels during the dive, to reduce nitrogen absorption by the tissues and therefore increase the amount of bottom time without needing decompression stops to safely offgas the N2. Many divers also think the higher O2 levels make them feel better during and after the dive. However, with 36% O2 (EAN36), ppO2 reaches 1.4 atm at only 128 feet so divers breathing nitrox have to be careful to stay shallower. Smart Nitrox divers test their breathing gas O2 percentage before every dive and calculate a floor below which they must not go.

The top of Mount Everest is about 0.33 atm, which means a 100% O2 mixture would provide them with more oxygen than they get at sea level. The reason they have to acclimate first is that carrying enough O2 to breathe 100% O2 is impractical. It would require carrying thousands of cubic feet of compressed gas. By acclimating themselves they increase their bodies' ability to utilize lower ppO2 levels. Depending on their fitness levels and degree of acclimatization, they may be able to get to a point where they don't require supplemental oxygen. Most, though, will need some.

More precisely, although hypothermia and hypoxia will generally kill you, once in a while you'll get lucky and they'll counter each others' fatal effects just enough that you manage not to die.

If it was me, I'd rather ensure that I'm equipped to avoid the effects of both. Or else, you know, travel inside the plane, in the environment designed and regulated for human comfort. There are no little packets of peanuts in the wheel well, for example.

In Utah and Colorado the only resorts with $50 lift tickets are the low-end ones, with short runs, slow lifts, or both.

Gear isn't so bad. Decent rental equipment for a day can generally be had for less than $30, often less than $20. Buying your own gear is cheaper if you use it enough, and if you don't use it enough for it to be cheaper you should stick with renting (financially, at least; some people like having their own and are willing to pay for the privilege).

Travel depends on where you live. I live within easy driving distance of many resorts so it's not an issue. What makes it a really expensive sport for me is my kids. $100 for a day (lift ticket + gear) isn't too bad, but when you multiply it by four or five it gets to be spendy.

179 responses, and this is the best Monty Python reference we can get? Not a single mention of skipping and jumping or pressing wildflowers.

Slashdot is truly dying.