Re: Announcing New Blog

"Jay Dee" <ais01479_at_aeneas.net> wrote

> Think of it as you do our understanding of gravity; once you get it
> right, there's no need to change it.

Until you get more data.

Consider the anomalous precession of mercury. The orbit of Mercury precesses for two reasons:
the first is the grvitational attraction of the other planets. The second is the operation of gravity as theorized by Einstein, which differs slightly from that of Newton.

Somebody came into this forum a while back, with a PhD in chemistry, and tried to tell the rest of us that Newton "got it wrong". Actually, the Phd got it wrong.

Newton didn't err. The anomalous precession of mercury wasn't discovered until after Newton was dead. The discovery of this anomalous precession, among other discoveries, was what led to a radical upheaval in classical physics. The classical precession of Mercury, which is something like 99% of the precession, is explained perfectly well with Newton's laws.

Back to the subject at hand.

What Dawn is doing is to try to gather the available data to try to explain what she sees as a disconnect between theory and practice in the comparison between database services centered around the RDM and parallel services centered around alternative formulations.

I'm very critical of Dawn's writings, but that's because I don't perceive the same disconnect as she does, and I regard my own background as extensive enough so that I don't feel compelled to take her word for it that there is such a disconnect. In other words, Dawn and I disagree at the level of raw data, or at least personal experience.

Dawn is proceeding on the assumption that the raw data of which her own experience is illustrative will eventually lead to a theory of software development that will explain what she perceives as a demonstrated fact, one that I don't accept as given. Received on Tue Jan 17 2006 - 15:10:58 CET