tempguy9999

Well, from memory the church believed everything revolved around the earth. Galileo found the moons of jupiter clearly did not. This falsified the church's belief, or would have though they reportedly refused to look through the telescope.

Unfalsifiability of heliocentrism... I'll take your word for it, point accepted.

An actual reply instead of a no-op downvote, thanks.

Ok then, why does it not? I've not read it but this from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species )

"It presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that he had gathered on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation."

There is a further section that presents facts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#Summa...) which is a bit long to quote here.

So, are you saying OTOOTS presents evidence but not the necessary reproducability, in which case I may agree, and the book is not scientific theory but a precursor to one? Or something else?

Opening words are "There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience [...]"

Instantly wrong. Reproducibility and testable predictions are the distinctions.

I partially agree with @notadoc that it's basically not good, but also his criticisms could be fleshed out.

As for faces, well, the very jean clottes mentioned in the article explored chauvet, and the lions there (http://thestorybehindthefaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04...) had such odd faces that clottes (or someone) speculated that they may have represented particular (edit: I meant specific) people. They're surely very odd for lions.

If they showed data for a period where it was unreliable then I'm sure it would be hedged around with strong caveats and error bars.

As you assume it is for reliable for the period, perhaps it's good data. It does seem to be within the last century (earliest 1940s from what I can see) where decent scientific measurements would be valid and direct, rather than from centuries past where it would be necessarily indirect and inferred.

> the Met graph time scales are all cherry picked to

Any evidence for this?

> required beliefs that are not to be questioned

these being?

> When it's really about science

it's about science.

> and you can’t control those allocations

You're totally right. Rather stupidly I hadn't thought of that.

Interesting. First I've heard of it. Well I guess if you can ensure bounded space by limited allocaton, then simply shove manually 'freed' stuff back on a free list, you could do that, sure.

But a quick google gets https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/318 which does say

  Non-Goals
  It is not a goal to introduce manual memory 
  management features to Java language and/or JVM...

but it doesn't say you can't or shouldn't. Game on then.

A novel and valid perspective.

I have simply relied on leaking wildly before, knowing it's a small program that will end soon. It's an acceptable solution in some cases.

Thanks, I think I was confusing that with the 2nd ed, which doesn't seem to exist (in fact there is a 1999 2nd printing of the 1996 book with a different cover but with the same ISBN, just to make things worse, https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/rej/gc.html, so if you want to buy the later one which incorporate the errata from the first printing, check his website first. Publishers do make a mess of things sometimes).

Jones' website https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/rej/gc.html is excellent too.

If you mean the jones/lins book, it's excellent[0]. Fully recommended to all.

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0471941484 I think there's a 2nd edition but I can't find it.

I get frustrated with this attitude which assumes everyone is in a position to do these things.

I've lost many years of my life to physical disability, and pretty well all of my life due to mental problems which mess up my ability to deal with people[0], and without relationships you are nothing.

Reading this feels like someone telling others to "eat, drink and be merry", when those others are have no food or water - but the merry advice-giver has plenty, so what's the problem.

I'd never take away from someone else what I never had and likely never will, but frankly I wish more fortunate people would stop dishing out their insensitive, thoughtless advice.

[0] blah blah poor me with my sob story. Shit happens.

What's wrong with good old-fashioned greed and selfishness?

I answered this before but can't find my post (is there an easy way to search your own comments?)

Basically I said put pressure on your politician. As an individual you can't do much, a politician is the person to make things happen - it's their job! - so pressure them.

I'm currently doing this to my own (in the UK). They seem to be struggling rather pitifully to understand the difference in priorities between Brexit, and a Catastrophe of Human Making aka climate change. Well, FWIW I'll keep pressuring them.

Could any physicist speculate on the viability of using the Wigner energy for energy storage.

Questions are, energy density, ease of 'injecting' the energy, how controlled can the release be, anything else.

You could do this https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=what%20can%20I%20do%20about%20...

Or nothing at all. Whichever suits.

A most interesting statement. If security is reported broken or compromised, it's very actionable, surely?

I don't understand, could you elaborate briefly?

Combustible oil from the ground has been known about since antiquity.

It was not used much as food. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_oil only mentions margarine as an edible product. The rest are lubricants, lighting and soap.

From reading the article, it seems some of the whale products were waxy esters which I guess weren't digestible anyway.

I'm in the UK. Was listening to the radio recently where they were discussing the cause of a large number of mental health problems here. The cause was pretty clear: they labelled it "rotten life syndrome", which sums it up quite well.

> Bring it on

I'm no economist but you getting your wish may be the last thing you want.

HN had a google captcha it subjected me to for a while. It did not need JS[0]

At the same time I have come across captchas that do need JS. I guess google offers both.

[0] if it had, I would have stopped posting here as I never accept browser JS outside of a VM.

Totally not true.

It does limit you somewhat, but a large part of the web, in HN, slashdot, bbc, most news sites, TheRegister, wikipedia, most of stackexchange, and a shedload more all work fine.

Yeah, got me too. Ouss is actually a respondent in the linked StackOverflow article.

> She also claims she used to manually bootstrap a computer using toggle switches to initiate a loader and then feed it punch cards

Not implausible, check http://www.pdp-11.nl/peripherals/how-to-bootstrap.html for booting a PDP11. I suspect it was before even this as I have never heard of a PDP11 with punched cards. Wasn't IBM the big punched card people?

edit: @madengr 0 minutes ago: snap

I've no idea what you mean, but upvoted anyway for making me chuckle

I'm afraid I've still no idea what you mean. I've had plenty of confusion with git, and none that I can ever recall with SVN.

SVN's concepts are straightforward - commit stuff, branch, branches are COW so efficient, history is immutable unlike git (for better or worse) erm, other stuff. Never got confusing.

(cringes)

Yes, I did. Thanks.