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Domain: sabian.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to sabian.org.
Comments · 7
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Re:If advertised as a laptop in the UK
While I agree with you Google isn't authoritative and can see an argument to the contrary.
Google may not be authoritive, and neither may be a dictionary (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/laptop), but it at the very least is a reasonable representation of public opinion.
I can also imagine somebody trying to make an argument to the contrary. That person would probably be egg-shaped. http://sabian.org/looking_glas...
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Re:Well its not a good time for pyramids
So everyone else thinks you're an ill educated moron?
Considering that his post is a quote from Humpty Dumpty...
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Re:Sudden breakout of common senseOK, they've finally recognized the problem. But instead of dealing with it, they're trying to kludge around it — and failing miserably. For example, here's the way they render the mailing label at the opening to chapter 2:
ALICE'S RIGHT FOOT, ESQ.
HEARTHRUG,
NEAR THE FENDER,
(WITH ALICE'S LOVE).
For the way it's supposed to look, check out this page Notice that the Gutenberg version is in all caps, even though the original is in mixed case. The ASCII version spaces out the lines correctly, but uses all caps to indicate italics. Obviously the HTML version was created by taking the ASCII version and feeding it through a filter that tries to guess what tags correspond to the Gutenberg text idioms it sees. It can handle simple conventions like the one you pointed out, where "'How CAN I have done that?'" stands for "'How can I have done that?'" But it can't handle ambiguity (sometimes all caps stands for bold or all caps!) or complicated formatting.
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Re:You keep using that word...
`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'
Lewis Carol had it right, and George Orwell agreed with him: "Which is to be master" is the question that matters.
In free societies, everyone is master, and our language is conditioned only by the minimal need to communicate approximately with others. Beyond that, we are free to impose whatever semantics we want, and we do this to a far greater extent than most people realize. As a friend who works in GIS once said, "If I send out a bunch of geologists to map a site and collate their data at the end of the day, I can tell you who mapped where, but not what anyone mapped." Individual meanings of terms as simple as "granite" or "schist" are sufficiently variable that even extremely concrete tasks are very difficult.
Imposing uniform ontologies on any but the most narrowly defined fields is impossible, and even within those fields nominally standard vocabularies will be used differently by rapidly-dividing "cultural" subgroups within the workers in the field.
The semantic web is doomed to fail because language is far more highly personalized than anyone wants to believe. I think this is a good thing, because the only way to impose standardized meanings on terms would be to impose standardized thinking on people, and if that were possible someone would have done it by now. Whereas we know, despite millennia of attempts, no such standardization is possible, except in very small groups over a very specialized range of concepts. -
90,000 articles on "evolution" in the last 10 year
PubMed has 90,000 articles which mention the keyword "evolution" in the last 10 years. Search http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD
= search&DB=pubmed for "evolution" with limits of 10 years. There are ~150,000 articles, all told indexed. And PubMed doesn't cover all biological journals.
All I'm saying is `You're nothing but a pack of cards!'. http://www.sabian.org/alicech12.htm -
Re:What ID is actually about
"Prediction CAN be a useful aspect of science (say, for engineering purposes), but it is not a necessary one."
It's sad that there are so many people posting to a geek site who do not understand the scientific method, the whole thing dissapears down a rabbit hole if you dont make and test predictions. The obvious answer to your senario is exactly the method by wich science moves forward. Science does not find absolute answers and never will (unless the ID types manage to get their own way). Science simply holds up the simplist and most complete explanations known to man, truth, as any scientist will tell you, belongs to the Gods
Scientists as a whole are not opposed to the teaching of ID but they are opposed to teaching it as science, as the GP post stated, "ID is 100% non-verifiable and is useless for precition". It is the same reasoning that ensures atheism is not taught as science.
To sum up, you can call ID anything you like, religion, philosophy, fiction, god of the gaps, debate by loophole.... Scientists are understandably pissed off because calling it science involves either...
a. Fibbing.
b. A redefinition of science that puts a religious trump card (sticker) back into the scientific method.
The dark age of Europe: A triumph of religion over reason.
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ExposureI'm 21. I've had computers since I was 8, regular internet since about 12. I assume most people do.
In your age bracket, probably. In higher age brackets (especially those who graduated college before September Never Ended), this is much less likely. It's also probably correlated to economic bracket. And frankly, a depressingly large lot of college students have trouble with constructing a basic Google keyword search.
Explaining the basics in clear language (including why we need such weird jargon) might help get people started on the right track instead of confusing themselves into a frenzy.
The most essential reason for regular expressions as opposed to fuzzy language ties fairly fundamentally into the Choamsky language heirarchy. I really don't think you want to inflict that on someone who hated algebra in high school. There are similar problems with explaining the need basis for other forms of jargon, and I don't know how much linguistic research has been done to explain why field-specific jargons develop, much less the hackish glee in developing it. Pointing them to Humpty Dumpty might give some insight into the hacker attitude towards words, and if nothing else is "Classic Literature" with entertaining properties.
I've found that people who can tolerate neither algebra nor Lewis Carroll generally make for a waste of time for anyone to try and explain much of anything to; they are generally incapable of either rational or irrational thought, and are of little more use than machines for turning food into feces.