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Is a free market in ideas a good idea?

A "free market of ideas" is a bad metaphor. In a market, people bargain for commodities. When there is a limited supply of commodity X, and lots of people want it, only the people who are willing to sacrifice the most (time, energy, money, whatever) get to use commodity X. If I give you my supply of commodity X, then I don't have it any more.

Ideas are totally different. If I give you an idea - I still have the idea. In fact, now we BOTH have the idea. Even if you pay me for the idea, I still have the idea too. My knowledge of the idea doesn't vanish when I transfer it to you. Thomas Jefferson said it best: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

The marketplace metaphor is therefore completely inappropriate to ideas. You can't exchange ideas in the same way you can physical goods. It just doesn't work that way.

Your attempt to paint your opposition as anti-child is ludicrous. I'm very much pro-child. I'm so much in favor of children that I'm for deliberately wanted, happy children. Planning to have three little ones ourselves (though we'll stop and see after two if she's up for a third).

Contraception provides help to parents in controlling how many children they have. When we provide health aid and improve infant mortality from 60% to 5%, the same parental strategy (have as many kids as you can cause you don't know how many will live) is a recipe for population explosion and ecological disaster. Like Somalia, like Ethiopia, like...

Being for contraception is being for what is most important about life: quality (for adults and for children), not quantity of living things. The evangelical Christian leaders in the article you quoted have the same bankrupt ethics they've been parroting for tens upon tens of years.

Did you know that legal abortion seems to be responsible for about half of the falling crime rate in the 90's? Suprised me too. But it makes a lot of sense if you take the time to think about it.

Regards,
Ross

One of my buddies is working on this project. He had this to say about how the optics work:

"The basic idea is that under Fourier optics, a wavefront with electric field E that hits a lens with focal length f will produce the Fourier transform of that field E at a distance f from the lens. This location is called the image plane. The location of the lens is called the pupil plane, and the idea is that if you block part of the light at the pupil plane (say with a piece of material in a particular shape, called a mask), it can change the shape of the Fourier transform at the image plane. If we consider the incoming light to be from a star and a planet, we can design the mask so that there is very little light from the star in certain regions of the image plane, and we can see the light from the planet in those regions.

For a more rigorous introduction, I might recommend this paper from our group, which covers the basics of shaped pupils and shows some of our more interesting mask designs. The real challenges in this area now are eliminating the effects of tiny errors in our optics--the best we can get physically is to reduce the error in flatness of the various mirrors in the telescope design to on the order of 0.01 wavelength. (TPF will work in visible light, so that's on the order of a nanometer.) We need 0.0001 wavelength, though, and so we're trying to use adaptive optics (mirrors that we can shape) to cancel these errors. Researchers in this area are very close to achieving the "10 billion times brighter" from the article, we just need to show we can deal with these errors. Very interesting stuff."

Nowhere in that line does it say "live pet bee on a string". It could easily be a dead bee on a string. I don't think that a "pet" necessarily implies that the object is alive: think pet rock, etc.

>How about using a proper source for this study?
How about a link to the study itself? http://primate.uchicago.edu/2006PROC.pdf

That has been done.

15 years ago as a part of my coursework in Mol Biol I had to read a few years worth of issues of the American Journal of Human Genetics http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJHG/. While most of them were the usual polymorphisms, Bayes Statistics and similar stuff, one article struck me as utterly suicidal. Some psychopaths (I would not call them anything else) were reporting preliminary findings on a potential HIV vaccine. They tried to design it my introducing genetic material responsible for one of the HIV proteins into the virus of the live poliomielitis vaccine. To make things most entertaining they were introducing them into the area responsible for the biggest number of "reversions".

Thanks god that "vaccine" was never tried. I would not be surprised if it is sitting in a fridge with a "doomsday weapon" label on it somewhere.

While at it, having conciousness and moral fiber is not a universal treat amidst scientists. People like Einstein, Saharov, etc who have objected to the potential use of their discoveries for mass murder are an exemption. They are definitely not the rule. Especially nowdays when a very small proportion of science is funded "just because" and the majority is funded based on buzzword bingo.

Sad, but true.

very similar here (slightly edited to avoid lameness filter):

harper:~> cat /etc/motd
                                  Sun Microsystems Inc. Solaris 8 (64 bit)

                                        Welcome to harper.uchicago.edu
                    provided by NSIT/NSENSA at the University of Chicago.

        All users must be familiar with NSIT's Eligibility and Acceptable
        Use Policy for Information Technology. It is available by typing
        the command "lynx http://www.uchicago.edu/docs/policies/eaup/".

                                    For help, type the command "help".

****
NSIT Electronic Mail services are generally unavailable during the early
morning hours (around 4 a.m.) every Wednesday and Sunday.
****

Many of these pictures even show other people photographing the sculpture, hehe.

If indeed it's forbidden to photograph that huge hunk of metal, that's one heck of a toothless law if I ever saw one ;)

"Whether these advances are truly happening at a faster pace than in the past, or said advances are merely being perceived as such due to the increased attention evolution has been getting of late, is difficult to say..."

Actually, it isn't that difficult to say. As a researcher in the field, no, I don't think discoveries like this are occurring at a faster pace. There have always been ongoing, interesting fossil discoveries like this one or the recent Tiktaalik fish discovery, but you wouldn't usually hear about them in the popular press, because they (apparently) weren't considered as newsworthy. There are also plenty of important discoveries made that still get no press at all, because they involve fossils or other topics in evolutionary biology that are too obsure -- weird things, like transitions between various invertebrate fossil groups that are hard to explain when all the creatures involved are unfamiliar to most people. At least with fish and tetrapods or various primates, people have some ideas in mind already.

I'm glad some things get more press, though I'm still thoroughly unimpressed with the quality of the reporting that occurs most of the time (the inevitable use of confusing terms like "missing link" are a good example). I guess it is progress, of a sort.

I got Windows Server 2003 to run on my machine:

http://driveway.uchicago.edu/

This really applies to just about anything that is going on in the US with the gov't lately. It just reflects the principle of how easy it is to erode rights with slowly boiling frog process, overreaching on some measures to achieve a much smaller erosion of rights, knowing that the entrenched power will give time to achieve an overall enslavement of a people.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928. html

In fact, I think this should become a constitutional amendment the way things are going these days.

Studies have indeed shown a causal relationship between video games and hyperactivity, attention deficit, and violence.

You know, I get really, really tired of people pulling the "studies have shown" card. It would be nice (better than nice, it would decrease the flow of FUD on the internet and IRL) if people were held to the same standards that people publishing scholarly papers were held to; namely, publishing your sources. Watch and learn, kids:

Most studies found a correlation, not a causal relationship, which means the research could simply show that aggressive people like aggressive entertainment.

Yes, I'm drumming the words of Henry Jenkins. But perhaps this will help? Or this? I mean, try these phrases on for size:

Even if we accept that there is a correlation between amount of time spent playing (violent) video games and aggressive behavior, there is no reason to think that games are the cause of aggression.

However, the correlational nature of Study 1 means that causal statements are risky at best. It could be that obtained video game game violence links to aggressive and nonaggressive delinquency are wholly due to the fact that highly aggressive individuals are especially are especially attracted to violent video games.

Now, I could attack your argument (and in a way, at least, I have) but I take issue mostly with the bandying of the phrase "studies have shown" without so much as a reference to the studies in question. It is the worst kind of sloppy intellectualism that presumes all people everywhere are aware of these studies and that their validity is a foregone conclusion; indeed, it smacks of my mother-in-law forwarding her latest round of AOL-Microsoft mergers and get-rich-quick email forwarding scams.

If you're going to get all Grammar Nazi, you should at least be correct. You have confused the rule for 'which' vs. 'that.' You are correct that the comma after crustacean is unnecessary (and the word itself doesn't need to be capitalized). However, what follows is a restrictive clause so you would use 'that.' 'Which' is almost always offest by commas, 'that' is not.

See here or here.

First off, I want to say a few words about dark matter. I think it's kind of irritating when people rant on about how dark matter is ad hoc fudging, etc. etc. Well, "fiddling around with the laws of gravity" isn't any better on that account. The fact of the matter is that all of theoretical physics is creating new models that fit our observations, and both dark matter and MOND fall into that category. The very existence of MOND as a theory shows that it is not easy to distinguish "matter that primarily interacts gravitationally" from "modifications to the laws of gravity". Historically, both "unseen matter" and "modifications to gravity" have been valid solutions to anomalous gravitational behavior (in the cases of Neptune's orbit and the perihelion precession of Mercury, respectively).

As it stands, dark matter models can pass many experimental tests, and they're still the way to bet. That being said, MOND is not a bad idea either. It's not as well supported by dark matter, and it has serious problems with galaxy clusters, but it can still account for a surprising amount of data (for a nonrelativistic theory!). The flaw of non-relativistic has been "corrected" by Bekenstein's TeVeS theory (the one that Zhao and Famaey's work is based on).

Unfortunately, TeVeS appears to be rather ad hoc (even compared to dark matter). Z&F's work does not appear to be much better in this regard. In addition, solar system observations appear to place serious constraints on such MOND-like theories, leading to anomalous non-inverse square forces in the outer solar system (and no, it doesn't seem to be of a form that can be attributed to the Pioneer anomaly, though the jury is still out).

The TeVeS/dark matter debate should be definitively resolved by the Planck mission, which will be capable of resolving the third acoustic peak in the the cosmic microwave background radiation power spectrum. TeVeS and dark matter make very different predictions for the structure of this peak. Of course, if TeVeS fails this test, maybe some other MOND-like theory could be put forward (if the entire class of theories hasn't already been ruled out by other means, such as solar system dynamics, by then).

First off, I want to say a few words about dark matter. I think it's kind of irritating when people rant on about how dark matter is ad hoc fudging, etc. etc. Well, "fiddling around with the laws of gravity" isn't any better on that account. The fact of the matter is that all of theoretical physics is creating new models that fit our observations, and both dark matter and MOND fall into that category. The very existence of MOND as a theory shows that it is not easy to distinguish "matter that primarily interacts gravitationally" from "modifications to the laws of gravity". Historically, both "unseen matter" and "modifications to gravity" have been valid solutions to anomalous gravitational behavior (in the cases of Neptune's orbit and the perihelion precession of Mercury, respectively).

As it stands, dark matter models can pass many experimental tests, and they're still the way to bet. That being said, MOND is not a bad idea either. It's not as well supported by dark matter, and it has serious problems with galaxy clusters, but it can still account for a surprising amount of data (for a nonrelativistic theory!). The flaw of non-relativistic has been "corrected" by Bekenstein's TeVeS theory (the one that Zhao and Famaey's work is based on).

Unfortunately, TeVeS appears to be rather ad hoc (even compared to dark matter). Z&F's work does not appear to be much better in this regard. In addition, solar system observations appear to place serious constraints on such MOND-like theories, leading to anomalous non-inverse square forces in the outer solar system (and no, it doesn't seem to be of a form that can be attributed to the Pioneer anomaly, though the jury is still out).

The TeVeS/dark matter debate should be definitively resolved by the Planck mission, which will be capable of resolving the third acoustic peak in the the cosmic microwave background radiation power spectrum. TeVeS and dark matter make very different predictions for the structure of this peak. Of course, if TeVeS fails this test, maybe some other MOND-like theory could be put forward (if the entire class of theories hasn't already been ruled out by other means, such as solar system dynamics, by then).

If you read it you'll find a mistake that showed up in the Wired piece. People in their experiments didn't have the a 50/50 chance of detecting emotional tone -- instead, the chance of picking correctly the intent was no better then random chance. A much more interesting interpretation than 50/50.

There is a long history of academic research substantiating Eply/Kruger thesis that we don't interpret the emotional content (or as they call it, para-linguistic content) of text very well. The first academic paper that I've found that deals with this topic goes back to:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/context/1589611/0 Sproull, L. and Kiesler, S. 1988. Reducing Social Context Clues: Electronic Mail in Organizational Communication. Readings in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 684--712. Los Altos, California: Morgan Kaufmann.

I've written more about this topic and other sources for the cycle of flames in my blog at Flames: Emotional Amplification of Text.

University of Chicago
Graduate School of Business
5807 S. Woodland Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637

Woodland Ave.??? Should be Woodlawn Ave -- it's not like it's some obscure little side street...

University of Chicago
Graduate School of Business
5807 S. Woodland Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637

Woodland Ave.??? Should be Woodlawn Ave -- it's not like it's some obscure little side street...

A work is the property of the author.

The guy that wrote the Constitution of the US (Thomas Jefferson) asserted several times that people did not and could not "own" ideas. Period. I have read his reasoning and I have to say, I agree with him. Maybe this is easy for me to say because I am not a media or software company, but I do write short stories, and I still agree with him.

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/ a1_8_8s12.html

Furthermore, I think people who support the DMCA view of things should consider where we will be as a culture in a few decades. I understand the incentive argument, but the restrictions on reuse have become way more burdensome than is necessary for the promotion of creation. We will lose our creative/technical/cultural lead for this very reason. We currently hold a position very similar to France in the 1700's. Pretty soon we may hold a position very similar to France in the 1900's.

But interestingly, when I researched "Franklin S. Felber", I found conflicting dates for his degrees. At USC it says M.A. Physics, 1973; Ph.D. Physics, 1975. http://physics.usc.edu/Alumni/F.html. But the University of Chicago notes an alumnus Franklin S. Felber, SM'74. http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0304/alumni/works.htm l. Did he really get an MA in California in 1973 then a Masters in Chicago in 1974, then a PhD in 1975 in California?

How many Franklin S. Felbers are there? Perhaps he is well-known in some circles, and I could just be ignorant or mixed up. But I am getting the impression of an ambitious man here, and all that entails. Would someone who knows him well please straighten me out.

"Aren't you actually grossly violating that by attempting to bring forth an untruth because you're too lazy to check the evidence?"

I have checked the evidence.

"Evolution and natural selection is the cause of most, if not all, variation in the biological world."

This is simply false. Natural selection has not been able to explain hardly anything. It is simply invoked. Read some biological papers. Whenever something new is found, it is simply listed as "having evolved" without any discussion about how the evolution could even have taken place.

_Most_ of the variation that takes place is the result of Mendellian inheritance, which, by the way, was discovered by a creationist (who used it to argue _against_ transformism).

The environment induces a large part of variance. Scott Gilbert has written about many of these, include variance resulting from an animal sensing predatory animals in the environment, and specifically changing their morphology to account for it. The process of genetic assimilation will make these changes the default morphology even in absence of the predator after a certain number of generations.

Likewise, microbes can change their genome in response to the environment. They can use transposons to activate latent genes, they can induce a highly regulated mutagenesis which produces almost entirely beneficial mutations.

Natural selection explains almost nothing. All natural selection means is that dead things don't reproduce, and sick things don't reproduce well. This is a conservative, not a creative process. And random mutation has too big of a search space to do anything productive. Perhaps you should take a 21st century view of evolution rather than the 1950's version of it you are looking at now.

Please tell me what the evidence is that (a) everything shares a common ancestor, and that (b) random mutation + natural selection is sufficient for creating the diversity that exists today from that common ancestor. If you want to be really adventurous, you can also show how (c) life could have proceeded from non-life.

Also, while we're at it, you could try showing how choice can arise through material mechanisms. If choice can't arise through material mechanisms, then either (a) choice as a real entity doesn't exist, or (b) a material view of origins is insufficient.

Large voter turnouts lead to "the rule of the dumbest"

NO, it leads to the rule of the AVERAGE.
You have heard of bell curve distribution right?

Also the larger the group, the smarter the outcome:

http://webcast-law.uchicago.edu/levmore-cbi-09-29- 05.mp3
http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/faculty/2005/11/the _wisdom_of_g_1.html

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385503865/002-73 33566-8455228?v=glance&n=283155

"Wise crowds" need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions.

In other words the process of voting will tend to choose the better candidate. The more people you have voting, the more likely this is to happen, regardless of their reasons for voting.

That makes too much sense and it absolves Capitalism and the United States from guilt. There is no room in the Global Climate Change arguement for past climatic shifts or any evidence of the Sun rising in output or cyclical events.

"At least 10 to 30 percent of global warming measured during the past two decades may be due to increased solar output rather than factors such as increased heat-absorbing carbon dioxide gas released by various human activities, two Duke University physicists report.

The physicists said that their findings indicate that climate models of global warming need to be corrected for the effects of changes in solar activity. However, they emphasized that their findings do not argue against the basic theory that significant global warming is occurring because of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gases."

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/issue s/ApJL/v549n1/005748/005748.web.pdf
http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1001-duke.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Solar_ variation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_glaciatio n#Pleistocene_glacial_cycles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

Nope, we can't talk in this arguement about how the planet's climate has shifted in the past, but must blame the US, George W. Bush and/or Capitalism for Global Warming.

Lott has been pretty thoroughly discredited as a researcher.

This is an ineresting article:
http://www.slate.com/id/2078084/

And here is a U Chicago class that actually uses his work as an example of poor research:
http://harrisschool.uchicago.edu/Academic/syllabi/ PP481HS451.pdf (warning PDF)

Finally, the guy is rather nuts - he's admitted to creating an online fan persona to rally supoort for himself online:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8884-200 3Jan31?language=printer

I'd recommend not raising John Lott as an authority, it reflects poorly on your ideas regardless of their merit.

Well I am glad that the Boston Globe, pinnacle of science that it is has deemed antibiotics to be a dead field. I would say that this cannot be more wrong. Not only are antibacterials being actively sought I have first hand knowledge of this fact. Private industry and the government have poured millions into finding vaccinations, antimicrobials, and many other biological elements of disease resistance. Your statement is wrong at best and intentionally misleading at worst. The most hilarious part is that the US is by FAR the leading country in this tpye of research. This is why everyone and their mother in the fields of immunology, microbiology, and biotechnology, wants a PhD from a US institution. This is why my boss gets at least 20 emails a week from people outside the US wanting to join our lab, despite the fact that it is very small.

No, I didn't give any supporting links because I wouldn't know where to begin...

We're talking about thousands of scientific papers going back to the 1930's....

Instead, here are some links to some non-technical introductions:
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101matter.html
http://astron.berkeley.edu/~mwhite/darkmatter/dm.h tml
http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/cfcp/primer/d ark.html
http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~dns/MAP/Bahcall/no de2.html#SECTION00020000000000000000
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/text/darkmatter.txt

No, you probably won't find technical details in these sources, but many of them contain links to more detailed information.

Also, as much as I find your dismissive attitude obnoxious, I am happy to help you explore the actual evidence for dark matter. Feel free to reply to this post with any actual questions.

Doug

Ok, so according to this article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/US_election_race/Story/ 0,2763,410902,00.html) the ballots were supposed to be kept under lock and key and never counted. Which is obviously incorrect, as can be seen here (http://www.amstat.org/misc/PresidentialElectionBa llots.pdf), that Florida has a Sunshine law which allows all of its ballots to be examined. The guardian article had other errors.

Quote:
"The more immediate victim however, besides Al Gore and the system, is the supreme court itself. As the liberal lion of the bench, John Paul Stevens, put it in his strident, dissenting opinion: 'Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the law.'"

He was talking about the USSC ruling undermining the Flordia Supreme Court ruling, making it seem like their ruling had been done for partisan reasons. The article makes it seem like he's making the opposite claim, which is deceptive. I've read over the Flordia Supreme Court decision and consider it very reasonable and based on the correct interpretation of the law, so I understand where Justice Stevens was coming from on this.

Here's the results of one newspaper recount:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/media/media_watch/jan- june01/recount_4-3.html

Here's the results of another:
http://www.norc.uchicago.edu/fl/index.asp

Both found that Bush probably would have won if the recounts had gone through anyway (with margins of error, it's impossible to tell, of course). NORC was disingenuous in claiming that 4 methords would have given Bush the victory, and 4 Gore, when the Gore methods mainly involved determining intent on overcounts, which is illegal in every county in America. (I.e. if someone voted for both Buchanan and Gore, then claiming it is a vote for Gore. Sure, it's probably what happened, but it's still illegal.)

Playing the stock market is gambling where you on average get 108 pennies for every dollar you risk.

That's quite an unsupported assertion. How about backing it up. Hint: You won't be able to, because it isn't true.

Our CS department even offers a course called "Free Software Practicum" and its course description is as follows : Students who are already proficient in programming are provided with the experience of working on real software and the opportunity to collaborate with distributed teams of developers. The course work consists entirely of one or more programming tasks, which must produce freely distributed code. Course work may be chosen from the bug lists and to-do lists of well known free software projects, such as Gnome, KDE, Hurd, Mozilla. Students may work individually or in groups. To earn credit the work of the student must be incorporated into the chosen project's distribution.

Even the dorm printservers show some level of commitment to F/OSS. They all run FreeBSD with a WM written by a student for the purpose that can be found in the ports tree.

How to become acclimatised to facism

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928. html

Your assumption, by the way, that harsher sentencing is a direct contributor is likely erroneous.

I don't know why the crime rate is falling and there doesn't appear to be any consensus. It appears to correlate with harsher sentencing and lower unemployment and those are both plausible explanations but it could be something else or some kind of cyclical pattern.

However, the crime rate fell without making the punishment fit the crime, teaching people to evaluate whether laws are just, or applying laws equally, which were your requirements. I can't see any reason to think those will be much help aside the devout hope that people will respond positively to well-intentioned measures. Some views of human nature suggest that criminals will simply treat those measures as a show of weakness.

Take Finland's admirably low crime rates...

Shoplifting, which is the crime specifically under discussion here, is still a big problem in Finland:

Finland's shrinkage is among the highest in Europe, or 1.44 percent of turnover. However, Finland's figure did fall by three percent from the previous survey.

According to the barometer, 48 percent of the shrinkage is a result of shoplifting. Dishonest employees create one third of the losses, and seven percent can be blamed on suppliers. The rest is caused by mistakes in pricing and breakage.

In Finland, shoplifting costs the retail sector some 448 million euros annually. Combined with the anti-theft investments of 118 million, the annual total rises to 566 million euros.

In any case, I doubt if Finland has any lessons to teach the U.S. about crime fighting without first reorganizing the whole society around a huge social support structure, the way Finland has done, with the accompanying high taxes and big government that Americans traditionally resist.

You're off by a factor of a million.
1km^2 = 1,000,000m^2

Your results also disagree with this.

Hope that helps.

There seem to be a few things missing in this discussion:

1. The fact that most of the warming associated
      with global warming is directly forced by water
      vapor is well established, going back at least
      as far as Arrhenius's 1895 paper often credited
      with "discovering" global warming.
      (original paper at:
            http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/PS134/arrhenius .1896.climate.pdf
        )
        i.e. this result is CONSISTENT with our understanding
        of global warming.

2. Increases in atmospheric water vapor are tightly tied
      to temperature. The saturation specific humidity
      (the amount of water air will hold) increases
      exponentially with temperature (an implication of the
      Clasius-Claperyon relationship). Thus when you increase the
      temperature of the atmosphere by dT (by, for example, adding
      some CO2), more water vapor evaporates into the atmosphere,
      amplifying the warming.

3. This effect, known as the water vapor feedback, has been in
      our climate models from the beginning (at least as far back
      as 1895), and produces results consitent with observations.

4. The cited Geophysical Research Letters paper uses observations
      to estimate the strength of the water vapor feedback and
      finds that it is strong (even stronger than most models
      predict). It is also a step in the process
      of understanding climate change on a regional level.

Z

The studies do *not* show, naturally enough, that video violence causes *violent* behavior, because such studies would be prohibited. Nevertheless, there are studies that show strong correlations between video violence and violent behavior.[1]

Links here and here.

The evidence is compelling enough that the American Academy of Pediatrics has made a policy statement.

[1]"aggressive" behavior is pulling hair, biting, hitting; "violent" behavior is causing real damage to someone.

Universal Common Ancestry was widely believed even before Darwin's grandfather. Darwin's was not bold in saying that there was common ancestry, but instead that all the transformations that were accomplished happened without any notion of purpose or looking ahead.

Darwin did hold some Lamarckian ideas, but still beleived that the direction that the change took place was not purposed either by the organism nor by a creator, but instead that many directions were taken within a population, and the successful ones were kept.

What's really interesting is that Mendel actually used his experiments as a refutation of transformism.

Current biology is actually moving away from both Darwin and the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Shapiro has a good overview:

http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/21st_Cent_View_Evo l.html

Basically, the idea of a passive cell and a passive genome is going towards a much more Lamarckian idea of an active cell and active genome, making purposeful changes. Another good read on the subject is Evolution in Four Dimensions:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262101076/ freeeducation-20/

Now, I don't mean to imply that the authors are cranks or similar; I'm not in the GR community, and I've no reason to believe that they're anything but sincere and competent. But it does add fuel to the fire, and something for the "I've always known dark matter is a crock"/"those scientists don't know what they're doing"/"they're repressing alternative ideas" folks to consider.

The paper only concerns itself with the observed rotation speeds of galaxies, for which "maybe there's something we don't understad about gravity" has always been just as convincing an explanation as dark matter. However, the recent cosmic microwave background radiation data *also* implies dark matter, and doesn't have such an easy alternative explanation. The data tells us that (at least, at the moment the univers first became transparant) baryons only account for 20% or so of mass.

The problem is, that there is already judicial precedence on the issue.

Kendrick, Teri, et al. v. American Amusement Machine Association (docket no. 00-3643)
Appeal: Cert. denied, Oct. 29, 2001.

Issues: Does an Indianapolis, Ind., law against minors playing violent video games in video parlors violate the First Amendment?

Summary: The ordinance forbids any operator of five or more video-game machines in one place to allow a minor unaccompanied by a parent, guardian, or other custodian to use "an amusement machine that is harmful to minors," requires appropriate warning signs, and requires that such machines be separated by a partition from the other machines in the location and that their viewing areas be concealed from persons who are on the other side of the partition. The U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the ordinance does violate the rights of those under 18 years of age. Judge Posner wrote the decision.

Decision: In denying the appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court makes no ruling on the merits of the law or the challenge to it. It merely means that the case could not get the minimum vote of four justices needed to hear the appeal. It also means that all similar laws in the jurisdiction of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals are void under that court's ruling.

Also check here http://www.constitutioncenter.org/education/ForEdu cators/DiscussionStarters/BanningViolentVideoGames .shtml

and here http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/conf2001/papers /walsh.html

So this is nothing new people. Ever since the ID brought us a world where we could literally kill and watch Nazi's die (even before that really). This has been an ongoing debate.

The one thing you MUST realize is that this is not a bill being pushed by the Right-Wing Conservative Nut Jobs (granted they aren't really all against it), this is being pushed by DEMOCRATS. You want to know who hates freedom of speech? Hillary Clinton, after the Columbine murders ordered the surgeon general to find a link between school shooting tragedies and Quake. He found no conclusive link, but that didn't stop her, Lieberman, and the rest of the gang from going hog wild trying to censor video games. I lean left politically, but you can bet your ass I don't agree with censorship.

Do what I did, I joined the EFF http://www.eff.org/ and joined the ACLU http://www.aclu.org/

Here is a graphical simulation of a game that was played. The red guy is the robber, and the blue guys are the cops. There's a key available if you want a better idea of what's going on.

There was no requirement to program in a functional programming language. One guy wrote his cop & robber as shell scripts, although it failed in both rounds.

I see I've been modded "Troll," and not "flamebait." Oh well -- let's take this opportunity to add another liberal Jew to the list of folks saying that the internet is bad (because it threatents old media's hegemony): Cass Sunstein.

This guy apparently wrote a book saying that the internet is bad for democracy. Not "old media", with its deathgrip on American political thought -- the internet. Thanks Cassy!

Oh, and thanks, dear moderator, for modding me "troll" and not flamebait. [and if you want, you can mod this "off topic"]

You can read the abstract; if you have an institutional subscription to Astrophys.J., you can also view the full text.

"Does anybody have some links?"

Sure, here's a few after a quick Googling. I'm sure there are better ones, but I don't have time to find them right now.
http://my.webmd.com/content/article/23/1728_56903. htm
http://my.webmd.com/content/article/54/65223.htm
http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/caa/Vide o_Game_FAQs.html
http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/conf2001/papers /walsh.html
http://www.apa.org/science/psa/sb-anderson.html

• Railways were early drivers of major parts of business culture; JoAnne Yates developed this idea in her landmark book "Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management". According to Yates, railroad industry was the first geographically disperse industry, and this developed the accoutrements of modern business culture, starting with hierarchical organization and its assets (top-down communication: the memorandom; bottom-up communication: the report, the filing cabinet, and alphabetic filing, which superseded the pigeonhole and various numerical systems). Here is a free critique of some of Yates's work, if you don't want to buy the book.
  
  
• Finally, the business needs of the railroads drove the development of the telegraph, to satisfy their need to communicate. Telegraphers were among the first business employees to develop repetitive stress injuries, from their morse code keys. The Vibroplex Bug was invented by Horace Martin in 1890 to compensate for the RSI injury of telegraphers, which as called "glass arm."

"For driving evolution, only natural selection is necessary."

Actually, natural selection is becoming increasingly less relevant for biochemists. Please at least look at a modern views of evolution.

For traditional evolutionists, chance is in fact a driving factor of evolution. Remember, natural selection cannot in principle create anything new. The _driver_ of neo-Darwinistic evolution was in fact chance -- natural selection was merely a step-by-step filter. But modern looks at evolution as outlined above are showing that really the driving force is the organism/genome itself, which is capable of reorganizing itself in response to environmental stresses. This is a design quality.

Well, it's not so doom if you are carrying your own software around, as well - to compromise, they'd need to actively scan a program that wasn't on the machine before for a decrypted private key.

I suppose it depends on your level of paranoia and how important the machine is to you. The terminal you use doesn't need anything nearly that complex. It just needs to have a keylogger to catch your passphrase, and it needs to save any files you access on your flash drive.

Also, it strikes me that it wouldn't be horrendous to construct yourself a script that would create a new keypair for you, encrypt it with a password that you only use for those (because the computer would need to have it stored), and put the private on the thumb drive and the public into authorized_keys, replacing the old one. Have it run every time that hotplug detects that particular thumb drive, and you're good. A new keypair to use from untrusted computers within by just having your thumb drive plugged in for a bit. If I didn't have a laptop to keep my keys, programs, etc. on, I'd probably go ahead and implement that now...

You'd possibly use OPIE instead, like I suggested to Basje. I am not using it myself, so there may be security implications I am currently unaware of with it. There is an OPIE password generator for Palm OS, Windows, and Unix, so you can store those on your flash drive. It is safe to use them since the password is only good once.

Or you could try the low-tech route and write a bunch of passwords down and keep changing your password in your bash_logout :). I'd rather give Opie a shot first though, since it seemed to be stable and secure already.

Is there a way to implement one time passwords with ssh?

There is an OTP package called OPIE. I toyed with it a year or so ago, it seemed to work OK. I have not used it in production, so be sure to research it first.

There is a password generator for Palm OS called pilOTP. I played around with both OPIE and pilOTP and they seemed to work quite well.

I wouldn't mind carrying around a slip of paper with 50 or so generated passwords, to login to my server. I'd cross off one at a time, each time only allowing the next one to be able to login some maintenance account.

Neat idea, but I don't think it will work with OPIE. OPIE is a challenge/response system I believe. If you do find a system that will let you do it with paper, be sure to obfuscate it somehow. If you lose the paper you want to have time to revoke those passwords.

I do not know how secure it would be but you could probably rig up your idea with a list of passwords and some trickery in your bash_logout. I do not know if I would trust it, but it might be a fun project :)

Chess, a small-scale tactical turn-based strategy game, attempts to adopt the age-old "easy to learn, difficult to master" parameter made popular by Tetris. But the game's cumbersome play mechanics and superficial depth and detail all add up to a game that won't keep you busy for long.

I have a set of the Harvard Classics on my bookshelf, the "five-foot-shelf" that is a very good collection of Great Books. (http://www.bartleby.com/hc/). Biography, history, drama, literature, fiction, philosophy, science, politics, religion... it's all there. I've been working my way through it for almost twenty years. Well worth having around, as it means you will never lack for high-quality reading material.

My alma mater, the University of Chicago (http://www.uchicago.edu/), is very much a Great Books kind of place. Here's a good list to start with (from "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, 1972):

1. Homer (9th Century B.C.?)
Iliad
Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus (c.525-456 B.C.)
Tragedies
4. Sophocles (c.495-406 B.C.)
Tragedies
5. Herodotus (c.484-425 B.C.)
History
6. Euripides (c.485-406 B.C.)
Tragedies
(esp. Medea, Hippolytus, The Bacchae)
7. Thucydides (c.460-400 B.C.)
History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates (c.460-377? B.C.)
Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes (c.448-380 B.C.)
Comedies
(esp. The Clouds, The Birds, The Frogs)
10. Plato (c.427-347 B.C.)
Dialogues
(esp. The Republic, Symposium, Phaedo, Meno, Apology, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Sophist, Theaetetus)
11. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Works
(esp. Organon, Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, The Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics)
12. Epicurus (c.341-270 B.C.)
Letter to Herodotus
Letter to Menoeceus
13. Euclid (fl.c. 300 B.C.)
Elements
14. Archimedes (c.287-212 B.C.)
Works
(esp. On the Equilibrium of Planes, On Floating Bodies, The Sand-Reckoner)
15. Apollonius of Perga (fl.c.240 B.C.)
Conic Sections
16. Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
Works
(esp. Orations, On Friendship, On Old Age)
17. Lucretius (c.95-55 B.C.)
On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil (70-19 B.C.)
Works
19. Horace (65-8 B.C.)
Works
(esp. Odes and Epodes, The Art of Poetry)
20. Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17)
History of Rome
21. Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 17)
Works
(esp. Metamorphoses)
22. Plutarch (c.45-120)
Parallel Lives
Moralia
23. Tacitus (c.55-117)
Histories
Annals
Agricola
Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa (fl.c. 100 A.D.)
Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus (c.60-120)
Discourses
Encheiridion (Handbook)
26. Ptolemy (c.100-170; fl. 127-151)
Almagest
27. Lucian (c.120-c.190)
Works
(esp. The True Way to Write History, The True History, The Sale of Creeds)
28. Marcus Aurelius (121-180)
Meditations
29. Galen (c. 130-200)
On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus (205-270)
The Enneads
32. St. Augustine (354-430)
Works
(esp. On the Teacher, Confessions, City of God, On Christian Doctrine)
33. The Song of Roland (12th century?)
34. The Nibelungenlied (13th century?)
(Völsunga Saga is the Scandinavian version of the same legend)
35. The Saga of Burnt Njal
36. St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274)
Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
Works
(esp. The New Life, On Monarchy, The Divine Comedy)
38. Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400)
Works
(esp. Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales)
39. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)
The Prince
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus (c.1