I think the only saving grace there is that the sentients sending such transmissions would presumably want to be understood, and would ensure a Rosetta Stone of sorts was packed along with the message; the common element of reference probably being the mechanism of the transmission medium itself. Contrast that with the Minoans here, who were just writing for other Minoans. But given how much culture and biology is inevitably encoded into even our human languages, one does sometimes wonder if we're even asking the right questions.
I hope I live long enough to see one of the various SETI initiatives pan out into such an amazing discovery. As a child, I thought it inevitable; pushing fifty, I'm rather less sanguine.
Generally speaking, American PhD programs expect that you'll be spending at least a year (and generally two) on graduate-level courses before engaging in full-time research. European-style undergraduate degrees are much more focussed, with far fewer "gen-ed" requirements, and you're expected to pick up any extra background material en passant, alongside your thesis work.
It's a philosophical difference that doesn't mean a great deal practically. Often, European undergraduate programs are five years in length, although that's been changing as many European institutions now seem to be moving towards four-year programs. I'm not really sure what's driving that shift, but I think it's done partly in an effort to standardise what it means to have a "bachelor's degree" in terms of what employers can expect between Europe and North America, &cet.
The difference comes from the fact that smart Europeans graduate secondary school with the equivalent of an American university grad's education. U.S. universities must therefore offer more coursework in order to bring their postgrads up to snuff with what's expected of a fresh university grad in the rest of the developed world.
Having lived in Europe for almost twenty years, with a spouse teaching in a European secondary school, and with the utmost respect to my European colleagues, please allow me to assure you that this is not even remotely the case.
Having grown up in the USA, gone through the "second high school" USA university system, and heard reports from personal acquaintances and sites like this one on what levels of math German and Russian students graduate with, I'm still gonna press X to doubt the truth of your assurance, as earnest and well-meaning as it may be.
A lot of musicians these days keep their sheet music in digital formats; hands-off page turning is handy when playing. I'm sure there are many other use cases.
In fact the paper explicitly discusses (p. 14-16) potential synergistic effects between zinc and hydroxychloroquine, and provides references to another study suggesting the same. Care to comment, Doctor?
Based on their "risk stratification requirements" it's unclear whether the majority of "non-HCQ" patients were (d) over 60 with pre-existing conditions or (e) under 60 with no symptoms, as those seem to be the two groups excluded from the study. My initial hypothesis, that the paper doesn't mention once anywhere, would be that they were unable to treat significantly more older people with pre-existing conditions, leading to the obvious result of those people being more likely to die.
I looked through their scientific paper and couldn't find any data about the demographics of the declined patients. The only information I can find is the classification of their groups, which seems to exclude the two classes I mentioned above.
If we assume that the majority of "non HCQ" patients were of group (e), young people, then their rate of mortality in this paper would be at least an order of magnitude higher than that of any previous paper, therefor I would expect group (d), old people with complications, to be more likely to have higher representation in their "non HCQ" group.
I didn't conduct this study so I don't have access to the raw data not provided in the paper.
Most of the claims from neovim seem over the top and off from factual i.e. vim base code is so bad it is unreliable.
To be fair, the one example you give is from a person not directly (to my knowledge) associated with the neovim fork. There was more than a bit of discontent, I think, at the slow rate of progress Vim was making compared to more modern options. I've been using Vim about as long as you have, and I have to say that I welcome the options neovim brings to my favourite editor.
I suppose it's impossible to have any fork of such a well-worn, fundamental piece of software without some feeling the need to be partisan. I have to say, though, that Mr Arruda has regularly conducted himself with a great deal of courtesy and professionalism, at least in every instance I have seen. I'm quite happy to be throwing his team a few bucks every month.
Here was Bram Moolenaar (Vim foudner/Maintainer) The guy didn't take money for the job but asked people to donate money to African Orphans and they do a fundraiser to cut the man off?
"It's going to be an awful lot of work, with the result that not all
systems will be supported, new bugs introduced and what's the gain
for the end user exactly?
I have to say, the links you post don't really do much to bolster your case. Was there something particularly damning in the first link that I missed?
I'm also a little unclear on what Ugandan fundraising has to do with this. Does taking money for Vim development preclude charity? After all, Bram himself took donations for his work on Vim for some time. From the Vim.org sponsor page (http://www.vim.org/sponsor):
Fixing bugs and adding new features takes a lot of effort. To show your appreciation for the work and motivate Bram and others to continue working on Vim please send a donation.
Since Bram is back to a paid job the money will now (after March 2006) be used to help children in Uganda. This is the charity recommended by Vim's author. The money is used for a children centre in the south of Uganda, where AIDS has caused many victims. But at the same time donations increase Bram's motivation to keep working on Vim!
So saying Vim is bad because it doesn't do what it was intended and take away potential funding and mindshare with vim to do a "refactoring." They were saying make Vim good like emacs? Vim vs Emacs will never be settled and this is such a waste. Vim works and does great things. If you want to do something else entirely besides keeping vim scripts and the UI call it something else.
To be fair, what they actually said was, "Bytes and octets are the same today". It's a little disingenuous, I think, to quote everything but the last word, especially since the qualifier "today" was kind of their entire point.
In the words of SLJ, allow me to retort. Bytes and octets are the same today on the hardware the OP is used to working with; I'm guessing whatever the latest generation of commodity x86 derivatives is.
The real crime here isn't lack of knowledge; it's thinking that one's own narrow experience is all-encompassing and that what's true in one part of the programming world is true everywhere.
I'm not disputing your last statement. I'm saying that, if you are going to quote someone, quote the whole sentence, at least, and don't leave out words that are substantial to the point they are making.
Well, cletus, perhaps I can shed some light on this troubling question for you. Generally speaking (and there are naturally many exceptions, humans being the delightfully-flawed creatures that we are), the American government prefers to treat its citizens like competent adults who would rather not die if a suitable alternative presents itself. And so we don't generally have laws that require us to look both ways before crossing a street, or laws against poking angry bears with sticks and such like. America would rather you were smart enough not to do that sort of thing.
Of course, we have laws that all children must be suitably restrained in a motor vehicle because, hey, they're not adults. And we have laws that drivers must wear a seat belt because...well, I blame the insurance companies for that one. But America hopes you'll wear one anyway, because it's the smart thing to do.
The corollary, if you'll forgive my noticing, is that your government doesn't think you're smart enough to wear one on your own.
And so it's not really a "moral stance", but rather a general preference that our government not treat us like a bunch of ignorant monkeys. America wants you to live a long, happy life, but hey, you take your chances. Because you're an adult. And America will be sad if you fuck up and don't wear a seat belt, but life goes on. Mostly.
And now you may point out all the places where this convenant breaks down. The Drug War. The "Broken Windows" model of policing. The (up and coming!) Surveillance War. Well, fair point. Sure, we're flawed, remember? And so we try to make it better, over the long slog of decades. Sometimes it even works.
But the key idea, I think, is that by letting people fail, by letting them do stupid things, by treating them as fallible but sovereign citizens rather than a bunch of ape-men that need to be continually managed, they might become better, all on their own.
Well, that's a fair point, DanBC, but I generally regard laws about jaywalking to be a bit silly, and one of those things that I mentioned we'll need to fix at some point. If you're interested, I encourage you to Google "invention of jaywalking" for some insight into how that became a "crime".
And my thanks for your concern about downvotes, but I'm not very much bothered about them. What's the point of writing for the approval of a largely anonymous group of others? My only concern might be that my words would be construed as disrespectful to the late Dr Nash, but on a second reading I don't really see that. If some folks choose to disagree using some arbitrary points system instead of arguing properly, I guess that's their own affair.
That's the wrong question. It makes an incorrect presumption; Why should we have heard them? Do you think a highly advanced civilization is going to be using something as archaic as "radio signals" to communicate across vast interstellar distances? Due to the inverse square law, it's incredibly inefficient, laughably so. It would be like trying to use smoke signals to communicate across oceans. A beam of light would be more efficient. But the beam would be instant and you could never "listen in" unless you were physically at the location of the target.
A "beam of light" is governed by the inverse-square law every bit as much as
radio signals are, both being propagating electromagnetic waves. It might be
"laughably inefficient" (compared to what, though?), but it seems to be what
we're stuck with. "Perhaps advanced civilisations use magic to communicate",
is what you're basically suggesting. Well, maybe they do. Ultimately, we can
only search for ETIs with the physics we actually know.
So, you're right to say that Fermi's "paradox" (always a bit of a misnomer)
doesn't prove the nonexistence of ETIs, but you can't wave away
fundamental physics because it gives an uncomfortable answer, either.
I also wanted to note in passing that it's a bit funny to obsess about
efficiency and then throw out a statement like "maybe they communicate with
gravitational waves". The state of the art gravitational wave detectors are
targeted at finding signals generated by the merging of pairs of
supermassive black holes at cosmological distances, and possibly neutron
star or black hole mergers at galactic ones. If a civilisation is capable of
smashing black holes together to send signals out a few megaparsecs, I would
submit that efficiency is the very last of their considerations. Gravity is
much, much weaker than electromagnetism.
Indeed, there are a lot of reasons to think that radiofrequency
communication would be preferred. The galaxy is largely transparent to
radiation at the hydrogen hyperfine transition at 21cm, a very useful way to
cut through the crap and dust of the interstellar medium. By contrast, at
optical frequencies the extinction from our environs to the galactic centre
is about thirty-five magnitudes, roughly a loss of 10^14 in signal power.
Radio receivers are relatively inexpensive and cheap to make and operate.
The Arecibo dish itself could communicate with a similar setup thousands of
parsecs away. Probably more now, after the receiver upgrades from a few
years back.
But you're right that we shouldn't focus on radio communication with ETIs to
the exclusion of everything else. Some folks have been discussing "optical
SETI", looking for laser/maser signals whilst piggybacking on other
observations. The SETI folks aren't stupid. But they're not well-funded,
either, and they do what they can.
They're not like radio waves where you can listen in. That's actually the
very reason why they're so inefficient, they're broadcast omnidirectional
and that takes a lot of power - wasted power.
Radio dishes are not in any sense omnidirectional. They have a beam pattern
which dictates the sensitivity of the instrument as a function of distance
off-axis. You're right that broadcasting an omnidirectional signal would be
a tremendous waste of power, which is why no one does that when sending
signals over great distances.
