I've just read the decree in question from the website of the french ministry of agriculture (to which no articles ever link btw), and found ONE mention of ketchup, between parentheses, cited as an example of a sauce, along with vinaigrette and mayonnaise. The decree states that SAUCES will no longer be available in self-service, but will be served in accordance with the dish.
Knowing that, read the LA Times article again, and try to quantify the stupidity of its author. This is not the french government blaming America, it's american media trying to appeal to some anti-french sentiment that I've become increasingly aware of since expatriating myself.
If I understand what he's explaining on his blog, a "match" is a string of 9 characters (spaces and punctuation not included) that can be found in any of the works of Shakespeare. So yes, with this method of selection I'd expect the memoirs of Paris Hilton to be written and improved in about 15 seconds.
Actually doing it with a computer program is more in tune with the true meaning of the theorem. The "monkeys" are used as a metaphor for a random generator. And it turns out monkeys aren't very good at typing random stuff on a keyboard, as some students have apparently found useful to test: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3013959.stm
Excerpt: "after a month, the Sulawesi crested macaques had only succeeded in partially destroying the machine, using it as a lavatory, and mostly typing the letter "s"."
If that's a screenshot of the actual software, they've been using it in amsterdam for a while and I'm not quite convinced by it... last time I went through it, it interpreted the snaps closing my trouser pockets as about 36 concealed weapons.
"29. I’m a Brit living in New York. The one that always gets me is the American need to use the word bi-weekly when fortnightly would suffice just fine. Ami Grewal, New York"
I'm not a native english speaker, but "suffice just fine" doesn't sound very good to me.. which for someone making quite a pedantic remark seems ironic.
Varicose veins (which are what you see there) are not caused by cycling. He is just a cyclist who happens to have varicose veins, probably because of genetic predispositions. In fact cycling is considered a way to prevent them from appearing (although maybe doing the Tour de France would be a bit excessive)
Dave - The interesting thing about this isn't that it uses propellers.. the interesting bit is the fact that it's flying, unlike the train in your video, which is, you know.. rolling.
I'm all for skepticism, but there are a few problems with it in this case. The first one is that the climate is a very chaotic thing to study. It's a bit more like human psychology than the nice (almost) mechanistic field of, say, astronomy. Therefore, proving a trend like global warming in such a way that no one will find anything say about it seems to be extremely difficult. There IS good evidence that global temperatures are rising unnaturally, and this rise coincides pretty neatly with the rise in CO2 concentrations due to the industrial revolution.
As Ryan S pointed out "The Scientific Consensus represents the position generally agreed upon at a given time by most scientists specialized in a given field." So for the time being, most people who specialize in the study of climatology agree that global warming is a real issue. They also generally agree that drastic actions have to be taken, and they need to be taken yesterday. True, that is a huge investment, but in my sense investing in clean energy and clean industry can not be detrimential in the long run. NOT taking action however, according again to the "scientific consensus", could be a bit disastrous.
"Sending sulfur into the air isn’t helpful, though. In addition to causing respiratory problems, sulfur aerosols combine with water vapor to form acid rain, which harms ecosystems and damages buildings. “You wouldn’t want to increase the amount of junk in the air to decrease the effects of global warming,” cautions climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York."
I think that's also quite an important part of the article. You know, like shooting yourself in the face cures your headache.
Well it's true that I NEVER get any aquaplanning problems while walking on my fingertips on wet surfaces. I can imagine all the death and suffering that would result otherwise, so I can clearly see why evolution would favour that trait.
The decree states that SAUCES will no longer be available in self-service, but will be served in accordance with the dish.
Knowing that, read the LA Times article again, and try to quantify the stupidity of its author. This is not the french government blaming America, it's american media trying to appeal to some anti-french sentiment that I've become increasingly aware of since expatriating myself.
So yes, with this method of selection I'd expect the memoirs of Paris Hilton to be written and improved in about 15 seconds.
The "monkeys" are used as a metaphor for a random generator. And it turns out monkeys aren't very good at typing random stuff on a keyboard, as some students have apparently found useful to test:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3013959.stm
Excerpt: "after a month, the Sulawesi crested macaques had only succeeded in partially destroying the machine, using it as a lavatory, and mostly typing the letter "s"."
I don't have the same sense of humor as the judges I suppose.
I'm not a native english speaker, but "suffice just fine" doesn't sound very good to me.. which for someone making quite a pedantic remark seems ironic.
But I may be wrong.
In fact cycling is considered a way to prevent them from appearing (although maybe doing the Tour de France would be a bit excessive)
The first one is that the climate is a very chaotic thing to study. It's a bit more like human psychology than the nice (almost) mechanistic field of, say, astronomy. Therefore, proving a trend like global warming in such a way that no one will find anything say about it seems to be extremely difficult.
There IS good evidence that global temperatures are rising unnaturally, and this rise coincides pretty neatly with the rise in CO2 concentrations due to the industrial revolution.
As Ryan S pointed out "The Scientific Consensus represents the position generally agreed upon at a given time by most scientists specialized in a given field."
So for the time being, most people who specialize in the study of climatology agree that global warming is a real issue. They also generally agree that drastic actions have to be taken, and they need to be taken yesterday.
True, that is a huge investment, but in my sense investing in clean energy and clean industry can not be detrimential in the long run. NOT taking action however, according again to the "scientific consensus", could be a bit disastrous.
I think that's also quite an important part of the article. You know, like shooting yourself in the face cures your headache.
I can imagine all the death and suffering that would result otherwise, so I can clearly see why evolution would favour that trait.