111–119 of 119 posts
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Nope, assuming they designed it for scientific rigour. Without observation, it would be impossible to say, for instance, that some external force (vibration, wind, mischievous students) hadn't caused the drip to form or fall/break off. The experiment didn't reach a firm conclusion (to some level of certainty) without observation.
What if it's quantum-dripping and only dripped because of the camera :P
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Mathematician here. Yes, this is about to be a nitpick, and I apologize in advance. However: > No, all suspensions are not fluids. I think what you mean is "No, not all suspensions are fluids." Interpreting what you said literally would imply that anything that is a suspension is definitely not a fluid. And I know one can interpret what you said according to common sense to deduce that you didn't mean that, and that…
The question was "are all suspensions fluids"? My answer was "No, all suspensions are not fluids". The structure depended from the phrasing of the question.
Not all X are Y.
Some X are not Y.
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Nope, assuming they designed it for scientific rigour. Without observation, it would be impossible to say, for instance, that some external force (vibration, wind, mischievous students) hadn't caused the drip to form or fall/break off. The experiment didn't reach a firm conclusion (to some level of certainty) without observation.
That's what the parent said: there were previous chances to definitively end the experiment by observing drips, but no-one thought to monitor it with a video camera until recently. There was no need to wait 69 years.
Maybe it was a badly planned experiment (or more likely, the cost/availability of cameras in those days prohibited their inclusion in the plans). Nevertheless, no firm conclusion can be drawn that the experiment could have been ended early, those previous "drips" may not have happened without external forces applied and so even if cameras had been used it may not have ended until now. Its probably likely that it would have ended had cameras been available, but the scientific method generally calls for a greater degree of certainty than "probably likely" before calling an experiment a success.
And of course, it is called an "experiment", not a "certainty". Mistakes happen and they're not always optimal, that’s all part of the fun of science!
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Linguist here.[0] Yes, this is a nitpick, but no apologies, because this is Hacker News. :) Unfortunately, languages don't always work the way that logicians would like them to do. Yes, we can read that sentence as the English-language summary of a logical formula (something like ∀x [Sx -> ¬Fx]), but English (and many other languages) treat the scope of the "not" as ambiguous. It's not a matter of "interpreting what…
IMO, if "all these speakers" collectively make the language ambiguous, then clearly someone is in error, because unambiguity[0] is essential to the primary purpose of language: communication. This has nothing to do with whether one is a logician or mathematician. A sentence like "all X are not Y" naturally associates like "all X are (not Y)". Usually modifiers attach to the closest thing they can, as a matter of well…
Unfortunately, technically inclined people like to apply their domain specific "knowledge" (compiler cosntruction?) to everything and come to incredibly bad conclusions. Ex falso quodlibet.
It gets especially bad when technical guys talk about law and juristic methodology. Demonstrated daily here on HN.
[1] BTW, linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. You immediately disqualify yourself from any linguistic discussion when you claim that native speakers are in error.
I sort of take issue with "experiment succeeds". You don't (shouldn't) set up an experiment to prove or disprove something, merely to discover. I'm sure the issue, if indeed there is one, is with the reporting not the scientists though.
"The experiment was begun by a colleague of Nobel Prize winner Ernest Walton in the physics department of Trinity in 1944." Am I the only one who finds this insulting? They could at least name the guy!!!
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OK, had a break so I looked around a little to see what I could learn [1], [2], [3] and [4] are my launching points. So I read that asphalt is actually a colloid and that pitch is not the same as asphalt. The Wikipedia page on pitch [3] says it is a "viscoelastic polymer". So I have to ask. Can a polymer be a suspension or a colloid on its own or is pitch a polymer colloid in another "host" substance? [1] http://en.w…
Pitch is also a colloidal suspension, or colloid. The various polymers that make it up are not of equal weight, and there are little bits of graphite in there too. The chemistry of pitch is by no means simple, destructive distillation can go in many directions.
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How are they different? Both the article and the wikipedia link you gave mention they are similar experiments. It seems they are the same experiment to me.
Same experiment, but I for one was interested to know it was not the Queensland one, because that one has a great Radiolab episode about all the times they missed the drop (webcams failing, etc.). Their pitch is due to drop soon too, so it's sort of sad someone else beat them to finally filming it.
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Linguist here.[0] Yes, this is a nitpick, but no apologies, because this is Hacker News. :) Unfortunately, languages don't always work the way that logicians would like them to do. Yes, we can read that sentence as the English-language summary of a logical formula (something like ∀x [Sx -> ¬Fx]), but English (and many other languages) treat the scope of the "not" as ambiguous. It's not a matter of "interpreting what…
IMO, if "all these speakers" collectively make the language ambiguous, then clearly someone is in error, because unambiguity[0] is essential to the primary purpose of language: communication. This has nothing to do with whether one is a logician or mathematician. A sentence like "all X are not Y" naturally associates like "all X are (not Y)". Usually modifiers attach to the closest thing they can, as a matter of well…
Note: science is not about your opinion.
> unambiguity is essential
Is it? We function in the presence of ambiguity all the time. Sometimes, we let the ambiguity ride. Sometimes, we take a sentence that is (by itself) ambiguous and let the context disambiguate it. Sometimes, we use the ambiguity for some rhetorical purpose and then resolve it later. There are many sources of ambiguity in natural language---it's one of the things that makes NLP so damn hard---and you can't wave that away by saying that everybody is doing it wrong. (Not that generations of prescriptivist grammarians haven't tried.)
> Usually modifiers attach to the closest thing they can, as a matter of well-established convention.
First of all, attachment ambiguity is a difficult NLP problem specifically because modifiers don't always attach to "the closest thing they can". Second, to the extent that the statement is true (that low, i.e. "closer", attachment has a higher prior probability than high attachment), it is not a matter of "convention" but a fact about the grammar of a language. Third, "not" is special in all sorts of ways (as is negation in general, in many languages, not just English), and as I mentioned before, this specific kind of ambiguity is well-known, and interesting because it seems so strange, and once again you can't just wave the logic stick and declare that it ought not to be so.