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Comment Re:Good news everyone (Score 1) 349

The top 1% is based on income, not population.

I misspoke, I meant net worth.

It's based on population and wealth, which may be measured by income, net worth or any of a number of other metrics.

Maybe, maybe not.

If you have 100 people, and 50 of them are worth $1000 and 50 are worth $500. Where is the top 1%? It's not 1, it's 50.

How is 50 1% of anything in your example?

Yet you aren't either. Likely because you don't actually understand how math works. You're using a simplistic equation that assumes everyone is worth different amounts, and thus you get a nice linear vector where you can chop off 1%. That's not likely true at all.

Actually, it is very, very true. Some people own more than others, in other words, "are worth different amounts". There's nothing simplistic about that equation.

Your question is too vague. Do you mean what percentage of people fall within the top 1% of personal wealth? That doesn't have a 1:1 correlation with population.

"top 1%" requires definition of what the 1% applies to specifically, and how it's measured.

For example, suppose you add up all the total wealth, then take 1% of that and figure out how many people are in that category? You will come out with a different number than if you take the wealthiest person and the poorest person, and take 1% of that range and figure out how many people fall in that 1%.

Wow, you either suck at math or... No, you just suck at math.

Here, let me try and spell it out for you. The top 1% refers to population as ranked by wealth, not the "average number of people who own 1% of the wealth" or "the number of people who own an average amount of wealth". That's why the word "top" is there. You have a list of people, sort them by descending wealth, and you take the top 1% of the entries on your list, that's the top 1%. The source of dissatisfaction (of the 99%) comes from the fact that if you total the wealth of the top 1%, you'll find that they own a disproportionate fraction (approximately 40% in the case of the United States). This trend extends across the whole chart, with the bottom 80% of Americans owning just 15% of the wealth.

By the way, in your example with 100 people, your answer (50) is wrong by either method you described. By your first method, since the total wealth is $75,000, 1% of that is $750, and the number of people who own $750 is zero. By your other method, the wealthiest person owns $1,000 and the poorest owns $500 and that covers everyone (it will, every single time), that's 100 people. 1% of that is 1.

Comment Re:MIGHT (Score 1) 103

BZZZT! Arrogant asshole is WRONG.

ice evaporates in a vacuum

Ice doesn't evaporate in a vacuum, it sublimates at pressures below 611 Pa.

the area is permanently dark and therefore extremely cold?

even in persistent shadow,

Oh now you acknowledge the persistent shadow. Whatever happened to

the solar heating of the Lunar day

?

the moon still does not get as cold as a Jovian satellite!

Really now? The Moon's coldest is around 70 K. I think it's a safe assumption that a permanently shadowed portion would be around that temperature, since there's no atmosphere to distribute heat. Of the Jovian satellites, only Europa's coldest is colder than that, at 50 K, and its mean temperature is 102 K. Ganymede's coldest is just as as cold as the Moon, at 70 K, and its mean temperature is 110 K. Callisto's and Io's coldest are both warmer than the Moon's, at 80 K and 90 K, respectively. Metis, ~123 K. Andrasta, ~122 K. Amalthea, ~120 K. Thebe, Themisto, Leda, Himalia, Lysithea, Elara, Carme, Ananke, Pasiphae, Sinope, ~124 K. Carpo, S/2003 J 12, Taygete, Eukelade, S/2003 J 5, Chaldene, Isonoe, Praxidike, Iocaste, Harpalyke, Thyone, Euanthe, Euporie, Callirrhoe, Megaclite, Autonoe, Eurydome, Sponde, S/2003 J 2, no data. Looks like Jovian satellites are a good 50 K warmer than our Moon's cold spots.

Your actual mistake, you pathetic excuse for a ganglion, is that you not actually anywhere as brilliant as you like to think you are, as evidenced by your choice of nickname. As you yourself admitted:

I can't imagine that there can be much anywhere near the surface.

No, you really can't imagine much of anything at all, can you?. Us ambulatory molds, on the other hand, can engineer train and traffic networks.

Comment Re:MIGHT (Score 1) 103

It's in the summary! Was it a failure of reading comprehension or attention span?

Like several craters at the moon's south pole, the small tilt of the lunar spin axis means Shackleton crater's interior is permanently dark and therefore extremely cold.

Comment Re:good luck to google (Score 1) 198

A MiniPad?

SO the 10" will be the ... MAxiPad?

I sure hope that Apple can keep their products .... fresh, Otherwise folks will lose interest - especially that time of the month when they release new products.

I seriously don't think Google will be cramping Apple's style, but considering the tech press, well, you never know what they say on their rags.

Then again, Apple does stay on bleeding edge technology.

I can't wait for the New iPad with Wings(tm)

Comment Re:7-inch? (Score 1) 198

Wow, you're being a real smart-ass there. How are Google's servers useful to _anyone_ who doesn't have a computer with them? Anything with a web browser counts. Just as some supercomputers are distributed clusters, you can think of the Internet as a distributed computer. If you have your browser handy, then you "have your computer with you" and it's useful.

Comment Re:You are correct (Score 1) 243

And I was careless. Aristotle believed that knowledge was acquired by sensory experience, unlike Plato who thought that some kind of higher realm was primary and the observed world was, as Yeats put it "a spume that played/upon a ghostly paradigm of things". Aristotle's claim, as I observed in the second half of the sentence, was to have proposed looking at Nature for knowledge; this was quite revolutionary in a world in which people saw a deus in just about every machina. Although his cosmology was pretty strange, he at least had the idea that probably one cause accounted for the movement of things in the sky - his "that which moves without movement", [/. Greek fail]

Agreed. His thoughts on knowledge and observation were quite a leap for the Greeks.

But why cite Wikipedia when there is so much better information on early history of science?

It's rather convenient :) I like Wikipedia mostly as a jumping-off point. It has reasonably good summaries and most articles have citations to follow.

The article you cite describes Alhazen as an "early Islamic scientist" whereas he was pre-scientific,

Ah, there I must disagree. Alhazen, in his Book of Optics , ca. 1020, presents us with one of the earliest descriptions of the scientific method. He built on Aristotle's empiricism, but insisted on experimentation as a means to test hypotheses. He also introduced the ideas of scepticism, criticism and even the concept of Occam's Razor. Unlike Alhazen, Aristotle never bothered to test the obvious (to himself), common-sense ideas he derived from observation. One example of this was the idea that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. It would probably seem intuitive to anyone lacking a foundation in basic, mathematical physics. That idea persisted some 2,000 years, until Galileo disproved it experimentally.

as was Francis Bacon (to whom I am very distantly related, so I have some interest in the subject).

That is very cool! I've been fascinated with him since I was a kid, when I read about him possibly being the real author of Shakespeare's works. Nowadays, I think his verified contributions to science and philosophy are far more interesting.

Descartes described the experimental method but was a long way from following it. You can argue that Aristotle, by proposing the validity of sensory experience as a clue to understanding the world, was the father of experimental method (experience and experiment have a common root) or you can argue that Galileo was (he actually did experiments to test his ideas), but to try and claim that the moment of truth lies somewhere in between ca. 350 BCE and ca 1600 CE is to try and measure accurately using a jelly stick.

I guess there wasn't one moment, one great leap forward. It was an accumulation of thought building upon previous thought that brought us here. But with Aristotle, this is where one of my pet peeves comes in. My exploration into philosophy started with this book called Great Works of Philosophy. The first chapter was Plato, and I found him circuitous, arbitrary and boring. I called it the most tedious thing ever to be written. The second chapter was Aristotle, and when I was done with him, I apologized most profusely to Plato's ghost. Compared to Aristotle, Plato's work was utterly profound. That second chapter was the most pointless, rambling and self-absorbed drivel I have ever encountered. The excerpt was from Poetics, and Aristotle had summarily sucked the life, the beauty and the essence from one of the things I love dearly, poetry.

Your distant relative Francis Bacon despised Aristotelean philosophy, and expressed his disdain:

[A]nother form of induction must be devised than has hitherto been employed, and it must be used for proving and discovering not first principles (as they are called) only, but also the lesser axioms, and the middle, and indeed all. For the induction which proceeds by simple enumeration is childish. (emphasis mine)

Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, says of Aristotle:

There was nothing in his style to indicate that Aristotle was ever one to doubt Aristotle. Phaedrus <the book's narrator> saw Aristotle as tremendously satisfied with this neat little stunt of naming and classifying everything. His world began and ended with this stunt. The reason why, if he were not more than two-thousand years dead, he would have gladly rubbed him out is that he saw him as a prototype for many millions of self-satisfied and truly ignorant teachers throughout history who have smugly and callously killed the creative spirit of their students with this dumb ritual of analysis, this blind, rote, eternal naming of things. Walk into and of a hundred thousand classrooms today and hear the teachers divide and subdivide and interrelate and establish “principles” and study “methods” and what you will hear is the ghost of Aristotle speaking down through the centuries—the desiccating lifeless voice of dualistic reason. (emphasis mine)

Those two quotes summarize why I personally refuse to attribute to Aristotle the scientific method, mankind's greatest tool for thought, learning and discovery. He never doubted himself (Descartes), never gathered more data (Bacon), never experimented (Alhazen/Galileo), and never applied math (Descartes/Newton). Aristotle looked at the world around him, neatly divided, classified and categorized it, but when he wondered "why?" about anything, he'd take whatever was in his head as fact and called it a day.

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