http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html
Science vs BS
2015/11/12
Blowing Off the Grid - Samso island
http://m.nautil.us/issue/30/identity/blowing-off-the-grid
Denmark's renewable energy island.
2015/11/11
Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail
Good news to learn that someone was thinking about the non-technical facet of email over thirty years ago. Bad news is that this never seems to have really caught on.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R3283/index1.html#send
This seems to be a pattern is all technologies: really powerful technologies are so easy to get started that people use them before they know what they are doing.
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New maps for a hotter future
A web site [link] that predicts coastal impact of global climate change.
Navigate anywhere on the coastline to see what to expect.
Recommended for home buyers who want ocean views.
I don't know about the accuracy of this web site but it looks credible.
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Navigate anywhere on the coastline to see what to expect.
Recommended for home buyers who want ocean views.
I don't know about the accuracy of this web site but it looks credible.
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Defining a Planet
That astronomy struggles to define what a planet is I find astonishing. I've long suspected that our science and tremendous collected knowledge isn't quite as wonderful and advanced as we always assume it is. Humans judge things quite subjectively, and whether we realize it or not we are hardly as enlightened as we may believe we are. Knowledge we can only compare to the past so it always appears we are at a peak of dizzying heights, especially because we may well simply be ignorant or unable to value what humanity has achieved in the past.
Losing Pluto as a planet (when just about everyone but astronomers knew it was a planet) was a great reminder that science isn't always so omniscient, no matter how much we wish it were. And the Sol-centric definition was so provincial. Anyone who has watched Star Trek knows they call those big round worlds "planets" no matter what star they orbit. Just try imagining Kirk asking to be beamed down to the "exoplanet" they are visiting to see how absurd limiting the definition to our solar system is.
A new definition is proposed now at arrive [PDF] that strikes me as still missing the point. While I cannot say I read and understood the entire paper I don't think that classifying something as a planet based on numerical observations itself is a good idea.
Losing Pluto as a planet (when just about everyone but astronomers knew it was a planet) was a great reminder that science isn't always so omniscient, no matter how much we wish it were. And the Sol-centric definition was so provincial. Anyone who has watched Star Trek knows they call those big round worlds "planets" no matter what star they orbit. Just try imagining Kirk asking to be beamed down to the "exoplanet" they are visiting to see how absurd limiting the definition to our solar system is.
A new definition is proposed now at arrive [PDF] that strikes me as still missing the point. While I cannot say I read and understood the entire paper I don't think that classifying something as a planet based on numerical observations itself is a good idea.
- our observations will always be subject to errors and need revision
- any numerical threshold will be arbitrary
- if astronomers want to make technical classifications of orbital bodies, define new terms instead of hijacking old familiar ones
In conclusion, I say let people call what they will a planet and don't worry about it. That is, I think scientists easily confuse language as being some kind of scientific data, instead of what it is which is just our human tool for communicating. Simply providing observed data about the object is a far better description that relying on nomenclature.
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Hello, World
What: This is where I am going to log interesting stuff from the Web.
Why: I believe that blogs are the best way to extend one's digital memory of useful stuff one finds on the Web. When I find something that I find interesting there is a strong human response to want to share it with someone, yet it's also clear that even good friends may or may not really be interested. Doubtlessly a significant percentage of my past out-of-the-blue emails have not been a good use of friend's time. Even though usually they are too polite to complain the cumulative silence of unreplied emails is getting hard not to notice.
So in order to spare these innocent victims of my own overactive curiosity and abundance of free time I will henceforth send those emails here where anyone is free to stumble upon them (unlikely as that may be) and nobody is ever obligated to ever look unless they so choose. Sending all of this to /dev/null might arguably be a better solution but I'm betting that eventually someone, somewhere, someday will find something useful here.
(What social network can claim to be that considerate of its users? And isn't consideration of others a fundamental of good social behavior?)
Why: I believe that blogs are the best way to extend one's digital memory of useful stuff one finds on the Web. When I find something that I find interesting there is a strong human response to want to share it with someone, yet it's also clear that even good friends may or may not really be interested. Doubtlessly a significant percentage of my past out-of-the-blue emails have not been a good use of friend's time. Even though usually they are too polite to complain the cumulative silence of unreplied emails is getting hard not to notice.
So in order to spare these innocent victims of my own overactive curiosity and abundance of free time I will henceforth send those emails here where anyone is free to stumble upon them (unlikely as that may be) and nobody is ever obligated to ever look unless they so choose. Sending all of this to /dev/null might arguably be a better solution but I'm betting that eventually someone, somewhere, someday will find something useful here.
(What social network can claim to be that considerate of its users? And isn't consideration of others a fundamental of good social behavior?)
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