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There's nothing to support your prediction that Chinese characters will be used in English. China is a great economic and political power, but it hasn't established any kind of cultural hegemony. There are almost no loanwords from Chinese now. Also the Chinese themselves are forgetting how to write many words. Consequently they don't use stroke order for text input, they use Pinyin. It seems to be much easier. If you prefer strokes, isn't it much easier to just draw the character? My guess is, once handwriting recognition has improved, Wubi will be a thing of the past or a fringe phenomenon like stenotypy is here.

The reality is that stroke-based input is REALLY the only way somebody who doesn't know how to speak Chinese CAN enter characters on a keyboard

But why would they WANT to enter characters they don't understand, except for cutesy emoticons? Anyway, I can enter any Unicode character by its code, no need to memorize stroke-key mappings.

Can you imagine the possibilities that could happen if people weren't restricted by copyright?

Dolphins don't use personal names.

See "Dolphin naming?" by Mark Liberman
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003127.html

And "Dolphins using personal names, again" by Geoffrey K. Pullum
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5453

A choice quote:

Now, think about that. If you call out "Geoff Pullum!" in a crowded street, and I'm there within earshot, I'm likely to turn round and look at you. But what I am not likely to do is yell "Geoff Pullum!" back at you.

Why can't dolphins do intelligent and interesting things without people applying unfounded anthropomorphic qualities to their behavior?

Dolphins don't use personal names.

See "Dolphin naming?" by Mark Liberman
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003127.html

And "Dolphins using personal names, again" by Geoffrey K. Pullum
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5453

A choice quote:

Now, think about that. If you call out "Geoff Pullum!" in a crowded street, and I'm there within earshot, I'm likely to turn round and look at you. But what I am not likely to do is yell "Geoff Pullum!" back at you.

Why can't dolphins do intelligent and interesting things without people applying unfounded anthropomorphic qualities to their behavior?

A name is something OTHERS use to identify you.

Exactly. See also this similar criticism of the recent Dolphin "names" story: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5453

Dolphin story debunked (twice):
Dolphin naming?
Dolphins using personal names, again

I'm going to assume that the wolf story is as much nonsense.

Dolphin story debunked (twice):
Dolphin naming?
Dolphins using personal names, again

I'm going to assume that the wolf story is as much nonsense.

Exactly. Regarding the dolphins, Geoffrey Pullum (Prof. Linguistics, U of Edinburgh) covered this here:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5453
" 'The researchers found that individuals only responded to their own calls, by sounding their whistle back.'

Now, think about that. If you call out "Geoff Pullum!" in a crowded street, and I'm there within earshot, I'm likely to turn round and look at you. But what I am not likely to do is yell "Geoff Pullum!" back at you."

Alexander Hamilton never used the word "whilst" but James Madison never used the word "while." This does not imply that either founding father was an ill-programmed android.

What happens if two chatbots start chatting each other up?

Probably something like two Siris conversing, a.k.a. That howling void of thoughtlessness beneath .

An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

I didn't feel like typing it, so I grabbed it from here.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002611.html

Examples from the 1760s, posted by Prof. Ben Zimmer.

At the risk of feeding a troll here...

If you find yourself asking technical questions about dogmatic theological details like this, you are really missing the whole point. Religons are a kind of philosophy, and as such they suffer from the problem that they cannot be simultaniously all-encompassing(complete) and self-consistent. I believe mathematics even has a theorem to that effect.

So trying to pick at a philosiphy to find either incompleteness or inconsistency will work, but it really proves nothing new, and is a waste of time. What's important is if your philosophy(and/or religon) helps you organize your life and the universe around you in productive and rewarding ways.

...and it should just be a help, not a dictation. That means you have to really grok the important basics (eg: The Golden Rule), and let the nitty details be details. That way if someone tries to tell me that I have to treat someone else like crap (a clear violation of the Golden Rule) because that person is X and one passage in the Bible says "Thou shalt not suffer X to live", I have no problem telling Mr. Bible Verse Quoter to go take a hike. I *know* The Golden Rule is more important than Bible Verse X, and if he doesn't know that, he's has totally misunderstood Christianity, no matter how much of my Book he knows by heart, or how many people watch him on TV, or how many people go to his "church".

So my suggestion to you is to quit worrying about what precisely it means to be the "only begotten son of God", or weather the Monephyistites or Arayans had a better conception of the Trinity that we do today, or whatever. Your time is far better spent reading Augustine's The City of God, The Cost of Discipleship, or Letter from a Birmingham Jail

It's interesting to see a discussion of my op-ed on Slashdot, it's been a while since I've had my work critiqued here. The last thread I remember on one of my pieces was the text of a speech I gave on net neutrality in 2008 that ended up being the second most read piece on CircleID for the year, http://www.circleid.com/posts/86147_net_neutrality_innovation_081/ Slashdot effect. . Many of the claims in the op-ed are controversial because they're contrary to conventional wisdom, but they're all based on empirical data. You can see the research here: http://www.itif.org/publications/whole-picture-where-america-s-broadband-networks-really-stand and view a panel discussion with members of the FCC's National Broadband Plan team. . The op-ed doesn't address the specific problems with rural broadband, of course. The approach that most policy analysts support is to re-purpose the Universal Service Fund that presently supports telephone service in rural areas for broadband, but the costs need to be brought under control. Subsidies can be as high as $50,000 per line per year, and that's obviously neither sustainable nor fair to the urban telephone users who pay for the subsidies. If it's any comfort, rural broadband is better in the US than it is in most countries, even if it's not as good as it is in the suburbs and cities where the market works. In general, 94% of Americans have some sort of wireline broadband option, 4G/LTE will be available to 98% by 2015, and satellite is available to the rest at ever-improving speeds; currently two carriers provide speeds > 10 Mbps by satellite, and it's much better than most people think. . Publicly financed broadband isn't really an option for competitive markets because the higher speed networks are not shareable in the same way that ADSL networks are. Cable, xPON, and even Vectored DSL require exclusive use of the wires at layer one, so the days of attaching your own DSLAM in a CO are in the past. . The US is installing more fiber every year than Europe, despite having less population, land mass, and population density, and more Americans use broadband per capita than Europeans, so the complaints about the U. S. market system don't seem to reflect any legitimate issues. . I notice that the usual critics have denounced ITIF here, as they usually do. So let me point out that the University of Pennsylvania's Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program ranks ITIF as the fifth most important science and technology think tank in the world: http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=think_tanks . Carry on.

You seem unfamiliar with scientific polling and the problems that can be cause by large samples.

You may find this helpful: Case Study I: The 1936 Literary Digest Poll

job based health care hurts having older people work for companies.

Technically true, but it's a incomplete argument being used to prop up an incorrect implication as it doesn't take into account one of the largest consumers of healthcare: Dependents.

While an older worker, meaning any worker over 50, may begin to use more healthcare themselves, they have far fewer dependents using that healthcare actively, specifically pregnancies, infants and young children. A worker who has their last child at 35 may begin using more health care at 50, but their 15 year old child would begin using far less. According to Peter Capelli of the Wharton Center for Human Resources, this shift in who is actually using the healthcare balances out any increased usage by older workers and, in fact, may sometimes actually save the company money.

Couple this wash of healthcare cost usage with the fact that older workers generally outperform younger workers and any company using this incorrect notion to trim their books of older worker salaries for younger worker/H-1Bs short term profit games is setting themselves up for IP failure in a few short years.

> Squandering the potential of MiniDisc through over-zealous DRM, self-interest (and conflict of interest) as well as Sony's general arrogance seems to be its story in a nutshell.

You've hit the nail right on the head! Sony's arrogance will be their down fall. They still haven't gotten over their Apple envy -- here Sony invents one of the most popular music devices -- the Walkman -- and completely fumbles the ball with digital music by allowing Apple to disrupt them! Due to greed one division of Sony was suing another division of Sony!?!? The music division sued the storage division back in 2002! WTF? http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=569 . That article also sums up the problem:

"The industries are in a dysfunctional relationship," says Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff. "They're codependent; they need each other. There is no consumer electronics industry without content, and there is no content industry without devices to play it on."

DVD-Audio failed big time because people couldn't rip and backup their music like they can with CDs.

Sony: If at first you can't get the the masses to literally buy into your proprietary vendor lock in, you try, and try, and try again...

I can't take credit for the following list. ( http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2559450&cid=38276024 )

Failed Sony Formats...
* Betamax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax
* MiniDisc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc
* HiFD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_HiFD
* SSDS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDDS
* BroadBand eBook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Reader
* Memory Stick http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Stick (almost dead)
* HDV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDV dying
* Super Audio CD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD
* Universal Media Disc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Media_Disc (dying)

Successful Sony Formats...
* CD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc
* Blu-ray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc

When you have a hardware company that doesn't understand the first clue about "How the frick can a consumer even brick their TV via firmware upgrades in the first place???" it is not hard to see the writing on the wall. Only by understanding the holy trinity: Hardware, Software, User Experience, will Tech companies survive in the 21st century.

Sony constantly refuses to respect its customers.

--
Only cowards use censorship.

1) YOUR devices are the seeders. If they're offline ... well, you fix them.

2) YOUR devices are the seeders. Your stuff holds the data. If you don't trust your own devices with the data ... well, not sure what to do about that. Secure them better?

This looks like Bittorrent's version of something like Unison -- i.e. personal, synchronized, multi-device backups with Bittorrent as the transfer protocol rather than using rsync. This sounds ... potentially awesome. And exactly what I've wanted for years. Obviously "pre-alpha" is a bit scary at this point for anything important, but it looks like it has potential.

Absolutely this. In fact, when Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote from the Birmingham Jail, he said:

"I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."

(Source: http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html)

How about we put bad guys in jail, instead of punishing the millions of gun owners who haven't done anything wrong? A dramatic, double digit drop in murder rates for "Project Exile", vs. "challenges in discerning the effects of the ban"? Richmond, Virginia, had a program in the 1990s. "Project Exile". Short version: Mandatory additional 5 years in jail if you use a gun in a crime, or if you're a felon found possessing a gun or ammunition. Crime went down 40%.
https://house.resource.org/106/org.c-span.153371-1.pdf
From page 2 of this report, "Since the project began, the results have been evident. More than 200 armed criminals were removed from Richmond streets during the first year of Project Exile alone. An entire gang responsible for multiple murders has been dismantled. In 1998, murders were 33 percent below 1997, the lowest number since 1987. In 1999, murders are down yet another 29 percent."

Compare this with the Assault Weapons Ban, which accomplished nothing. Here's the National Institute of Justice's report, describing how it had no effect in reducing crime:
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/jerrylee/research/aw_brief1999.pdf
"A number of factors—including the fact that the banned weapons and magazines were rarely used to commit murders in this country, the limited availability of data on the weapons, other components of the Crime Control Act of 1994, and State and local initiatives implemented at the same time—posed challenges in discerning the effects of the ban."

Got a Sony PRS-505 through work back when they first came out, but couldn't bring myself to purchase any books for it (and given how the copy of _Space Cadet_ which I got w/ a gift certificate was _rife_ w/ errors to the point of being unreadable and resulting in my spending the weekend proofreading the book, no big loss), and instead have been reading through public domain and (legitimately) freely available books as listed at the Online Books Page:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/new.html

I just wish there were better sorting options available --- in particular, I'd like to be able to filter out just biographies, then order them chronologically by date (of the lifetime of the subject).

Language Log has discussed this a number of times.

Apparently soldiers in the marine corps are easily offended

Which Sony? They are so schizophrenic they frequently sue themselves.

What's the end game for this type of treatment

It's hard to say, but there's much potential here. Next antigen targets on their list include MAGE-A3 (melanomas, and some lung and other cancers), NY-ESO-1 (some testicular and other cancers), and Mesothelin (mesothelioma, and some ovarian and pancreatic cancers).

It may also be possible to apply this technique to some diseases other than cancer -- AIDS is on the list as well. While HIV normally generates a robust (but ultimately futile) immune response, it may be possible to enhance that normal defense, by using this technique to direct it into a more cell-mediated (as opposed to humoral) response, and also engineering the modfied T-cells to be resistant to HIV infection.

You eliminate the tumor. That doesn't mean it eliminates every possible cancer for the rest of your life - people who get cancer will probably end up needing multiple treatments over their 80 year lifespan.

That was the entire point of this therapy - self-replicating T-cells. One treatment theoretically should end that particular type of cancer forever. That's always been the problem with all cancer treatments - did you get all the cells? One surviving cell can cause a whole new set of tumors... This treatment, when effective, would seem to provide a good answer to that particular question - plus you're not poisoning your body to kill them in the first place. That last piece alone is a huge step forward in many ways.

And $5k per treatment? Never gonna happen.

And sequencing the entire human genome wasn't going to happen until 2030, and would never be practical for medicine at millions or billions of dollars. So they said in the 90s when they started the Human Genome project. Now it's 2012 and genetic maps cost roughly $3000, soon to be $1000 or less News flash - technology advances are making many things cheaper very very fast. Once the process is known, mapping the genome and inserting the proper trigger genes will easily be a sub-$5K process, and I could see it eventually being automated and resting in the sub $1K range. Now, you may still need to be in the hospital for a couple of days if your cancer is relatively far along, I won't argue that one.

Yeah, nothing at all - except about 3 months ago, they formed a partnership with Novartis to expand the research. And how, exactly, do you imagine the research was funded to begin with?

Well, I somehow missed that - must have been on vacation when it was announced. Thanks for pulling up a reference. Novartis is interesting - I know them from animal medicine, and from a brief overview, they don't seem to have a vested interest in current cancer treatments (I could be wrong on this). That makes them a perfect candidate to support this new research.

As for who funded this - it was a private angel fund set up in memory of a cancer victim by her family that paid for the development and trial of the treatment. That was why the first trial was so minuscule, funding was a major issue. No one else would touch it at the time.

Question 1: which is more profitable? A 50K per month treatment that goes on anywhere from 3-12 months, and, if you a lucky one, you get to repeat 2-3 times in your shortened lifespan, or a one-time shot costing less than 5K (once the procedure gets down to daily prescriptions) where the patient walks away?

You eliminate the tumor. That doesn't mean it eliminates every possible cancer for the rest of your life - people who get cancer will probably end up needing multiple treatments over their 80 year lifespan. Or treatment for other chronic diseases that they will have the ability to develop since they'll have a much longer lifespan. And $5k per treatment? Never gonna happen. I racked up $3k in hospital costs by stepping on a fucking nail on the street - nurse & doctor's time, cleaning the wound, an MRI to make sure there wasn't debris embedded in my foot, tetanus booster, and some standard antibiotics. I saw the bill afterward. If you think culturing and engineering the patient's T-cells to attack a specific tumor in a patient's body is going to be as low as $5k, you're smoking crack.

Question 2: Where's the news that some big pharma has gotten behind this promising research? It's been a year. I've heard nada. You'd think it'd be big news.

Yeah, nothing at all - except about 3 months ago, they formed a partnership with Novartis to expand the research. And how, exactly, do you imagine the research was funded to begin with? Government grants, private research partnerships, and organizational funding provided by licensing of discoveries to private companies for commercial exploitation. Yes, it's clear that big pharmaceuticals and the government are trying to suppress this! That must be the dastardly reason they're supporting it and funding it.

See CCNV v. Reid [wikipedia.org].

If you are in the US, or are just interested in this sort of issue and are happy with a US perspective, there's an interesting discussion in Mattioli's "The Impact of Open Source on Pre-Invention Assignment Contracts."

There are hundreds of free college textbooks out there on the web -- see my sig for a catalog.

There are basically two models that have been proved to work. (1) Do it yourself. (2) Set up nonprofit online collaborations so people can cooperate on producing high-quality free books.

#1 is actually the most successful model by far. Just do it. Bite the bullet. Write the damn book and put it online for free. Here are some very high quality examples of DIY textbook projects: Hefferon, Linear Algebra, Carroll, Lecture Notes on General Relativity, Petkovsek et al., A=B.

The best example of an organization doing #2 is the Connexions project, which is run by Rice University. Other examples are Curriki and CK-12. These folks all use permissive licenses such as CC-BY, which encourages people to cooperate and view their work as contributing to a commons.

I first heard about Flat World Knowledge in 2008. What was never clear to me was what they were bringing to the table that was worthwhile or interesting. I doubt that they can afford to provide any of the services a traditional publisher would provide, such as professional copyediting or professional illustrations. Flat World Knowledge uses CC-BY-NC licensing, which is not free. That means that their authors know they're not contributing to a commons. At most they may hope to make some insignificant amount of money. What's the point?

iPhone Interface For Ham Radio Mates Old With New

Who says Ham Radio is old? It started in 1909, six years after the electrical outlet was patented, which the iPhone already utilized. The iPhone is just catching up with latter-day interfaces.

The courts established a long time ago that you don't have the same property rights under the 4th amendment when it's stored with a third party.

I've raised this issue whenever I hear that a legal office has outsourced their mail service (do they still have attorney-client privilege if the information has been 'shared' with the ISP?)

There are two issues -- (1) does it require a warrant and (2) do they have to notify you of the warrant (so that you can contest it) or only the party holding the information?

There was an article on the topic in the Journal of Consitutional Law a couple of years ago. One of the key things -- ECPA considers any email stored for 180 days can be obtained from an ISP without notifying the user. There was a case in 2008 that found that argued against it and the court agreed, but the case was overturned on other issues so the decision never stood as a precident. It has some interesting things to consider, such as the issues with using a cloud-based thing client without knowing it (in the example, a kid setting up a computer for his uncle), and losing their fourth amendment rights.

The title is also a great example of Syllepsis

You're called DirtyLiar, so probably a troll. I'll make this short.

Ah, I see you are easily distracted by appearances. Not a trait I'd brag about.

And it's not what "I'm called" it's what I call myself in a bit of self-deprecating humor. A trait you seem unacquainted with.

But I also see that YOU call YOURSELF the "Cold hard reality". Which is indicative of low self-worth, and low self-confidence, while at the same time being a bit (not really a bit) of a blow-hard that's trying to fool people into giving himself unearned credibility.

Otherwise, what's with the name?

Computers were invented in WWII.

Ah, you got me. It's true, they had single purpose electronic calculating machines that used thermionic valves and filled entire rooms towards the end of WWII. Even though the ENIAC is considered the first generation of modern computers.

No chance of one ever seeing the inside of a rocket, but nonetheless they existed.

Transistors were invented in 1947.

Transistor, not transistors. The first transistor was invented in 1947, but I will concede your point.

Integrated circuits were invented in 1949, but not used on the Saturn V.

Can you back that up with data? Everything I find says that they were invented in 1958.
There is mention on Wikipedia of an "integrated-circuit-like semiconductor amplifying device" from 1949, but that article also points to 1958 as the year they were invented, with a first practical demonstration on September 12th of that year. Besides, I thought you considered Wikipedia to be a bad source of information.

That NASA doesn't use a technology immediately after it's discovery is irrelevant to the question of what prompted their development.

How about the convenience of microwave ovens,

Available since 1947.

To quote you: "Wrong. Just Wrong."
In 1945 it was discovered that microwaves could heat food (A melted candy bar in a man's pocket, does not an oven make.) But the first microwave oven wasn't commercially available until 1954.

That discovery is no more a microwave oven than an open fire is an oven. Hardly "Available since 1947".

Besides, the first microwave ovens weighed 750 pounds and stood five feet, six inches. Again not likely usable in space.

or freeze dried food?

WWII tech.

They freeze-dried blood plasma and medications like penicillin. Not food. Too many nutrients were lost in the process to make it attractive in WWII.
It wasn't until 1938 that Nestle invented a viable process for Freeze Drying food, specifically for NASA.

'll stop now.

Perhaps you should, your track record (40%) isn't that good.

It is probably best that you do stop here and ignore the other 99 examples I gave. Or is it that you realize that your percentage can only go down from this point?

Let me help you out though: Apparently NASA was unrelated to the development of GPS, though that is not true for IGDG. And I was SURE you were going to nail me for international phone calls, at which time I'd point out that oceanic cables are fragile, difficult to repair, and laid over volcanicly active regions so have a short life span.

Why don't you focus on the part after the But let's see what a little research turns up.... You know, 90% of my examples?

Me, well, you've shown to me that some of the earliest things I learned about NASA are not quite true, and need to be tweaked a bit to be true, and it's time I update my knowledge about it.

here although it only goes through 2003...but yes it has happened..perhaps 2003 was the last time...

I didn't list the reasons because I had already typed them out, but I accidentally closed the tab and lost all my work. So I just left it at that.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001202.html
http://www.yaelf.com/aueFAQ/mifcouldcareless.shtml

Basically, it appears to be a case of "care less" developing a negative meaning and then dropping the existing redundant negative. The latter link gives examples of other phrases that have had similar transitions. I should also be noted that the French "ne...pas" construction is not an isolated example of a positive word becoming negative and then losing the original negation element. French has a whole host of words in that category: jamais, point, que, personne, rien. English, German and Dutch went through periods of having double (and sometimes triple or quadruple) negatives, similar to the "ne...pas" construction in French, which were later simplified by the removal of the "ne" at the beginning. In German, this kind of change left us with "es sei denn" meaning "unless" and "weder...noch..." meaning "neither...nor...". The negative particle disappeared during the early modern German period, but the negative meaning remained.

You may say "that's all fine and dandy, but it could just be an example of abject stupidity across time and language". However, these types of changes appear to be systematic and logical, taken in the proper context. The transfer from "je ne sai" to "je ne sais pas" to "je sais pas" is fairly reasonable when you consider the semantics. In the first, you have simple negation. In the second, you add an intensifier. That intensifier only ends up showing up with a negative, so it takes on a negative meaning (seems like a reasonable semantic shift). We now have two negative elements in the sentence, so the weaker one is removed, reducing redundancy. Sensible, logical and it leads to clarity and simplification. Maybe the middle steps are a bit weird, but the end point is reasonable.

math is hard

Let's go shopping.

Came for crash blossom post. Leaving satisfied. Mod parent up.

The location of the PIE urheimat has been a bone of contention for over 200 years. The Anatolia hypothesis is rejected by most. The study presented here was done by non-linguists, and there is no evidence that supports their method, let alone their results. There isn't a constant geographical spread velocity of languages that would allow this simplistic kind of calculation. If you're interested in what linguists think of this study (not much), read the discussions on Languagelog and Languagehat from ten days ago, when this was news.

Mod parent up! And here are some good sources: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/455549?uid=3739656&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101147761451 http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/needs-washed.aspx http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3161

The path out of depression has been well documented in Dr. Martin Seligman's book Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. He has spent 30 years of his life in the field of positive psychology and has multiple case studies showing how people can get over "learned helplessness" in all three realms of personal, pervasive and permanent.

http://www.amazon.com/Learned-Optimism-Change-Your-Mind/dp/1400078393/

He has a talk on Ted:
http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psychology.html

And a website with some questionnaires:
http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx

To use Chris Farley, who unfortunately committed suicide due to depression, as an example I provide three typical phrases that he would use in his work:
Personal: I suck!
Pervasive: Everything sucks!
Permanent: It will always suck!

Please note that motivational speakers are typically all optimists and people who are unmotivated go to them for a "motivational fix" which lasts for about two weeks without optimism to back it. See also the typical person who starts a diet, exercise regimen or other self improvement plan.

I would actually say statistics is probably the *most* broadly-applicable branch of mathematics. *Everyone* - scientist, politician, gambler, civic-minded citizen, and commercial watching bumpkin would benefit from a firm grasp of at least the basics of statistics, ... No other field I can think of is as broadly used with as little understanding (how many times have you seen a % today?), which makes it ripe for exploitation. ...

There was an interesting brief article on this topic over at the Language Log blog, which is run by (mostly) professional linguists. It was triggered by the burst of articles about the Piraha, an Amazon-basin tribe whose language lacks words for numbers (but has some general words for sizes).

Many people were amazed by this discovery, because how can you even survive in this world, even as a remnant primitive tribe, without the ability to count things? The author's argument is that, in the modern Western world, it's equally difficult to survive without an understanding of the properties of groups of things, i.e., probability and statistics. But, while English may have appropriate terminology, only a tiny fraction of our population (e.g., well under a million Americans) have any understanding at all of even the simplest statistical words. He argues that this is as surprising as the Pirahas' lack of counting words. The foundations of much of modern technology require such an understanding, implying that most of the population in the "advanced" world have no understanding whatsoever of many of the things that have important in their lives.

The current topic is merely part of the general attitude that we can survive with no understanding of the world that's developing around us. Sensible people wouldn't want their children "educated" by schools that go along with such ideas.

And once you've picked up that most people use what the author calls "distribution talk" words without actually understanding them, a lot of things you read (including here at /.) that contain such words will start to make a lot more sense. For example, the oft-repeated mantra here that "correlation doesn't imply causation" generally signals a lack of comprehension of correlation, causation, or implication. In a statistical setting, correlation very often does imply (some sort of) causation, though ferreting it out often requires further research. But this mantra is used primarily to dismiss a conclusion that the writer just doesn't want to believe, when the writer has no actual evidence on the topic. It's generally a safe way to dismiss someone's conclusion, since so few of the other readers here have any understanding of statistical reasoning.

(One of my other favorite comments on this was that a correlation was the universe's way of whispering "Hey, there's something interesting going on over here that you might want to know more about." ;-)

More the opposite (and not an actual contest), but there is Language Log's Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding. Search for "the Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding" (in quotes) for more instances.

Prescriptivist Poppycock

All that moisture would just help mold and mildew grow.

Mold and mildew isn't a problem where I live; it's a desert here in Arizona, there's barely any humidity in the winter air at all. Humid air from the dryer is a good thing.

There are coils, not there is (there's) coils. But I digress.

Wrong. "There's [plural words]" is perfectly acceptable colloquial speech. I'm not writing a formal dissertation here, this is Slashdot.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002447.html

A good Q&A at the end of the video answers some of the questions asked here. I'm disappointed no one asked him if they're using it for gambling. Although data mining of this complexity may not be needed. Anyone profiting using this simple metric to gamble on games?

Why use cloud service like dropbox when you can do what real men do and build your own using unison -

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

I suggest you take a look at Unison File Synchronizer, which can be configured as a one way rather than two-way sync. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ I've found it to be very good under poor & interrupted communication conditions.

I think this is probably one of better explanations for why "could care less" is generally wrong. In short, all the fancy claims of sarcasm/irony are likely post hoc justifications, what's more important is looking at actual intent. In this case, I don't think tyrione was sarcastically saying anything, he was intending to very directly say Woz didn't give a damn about the aesthetics of the ICs. Also, just for fun, this post has a google ngrams graph for the two phrases showing how couldn't care less looks to have the earlier origin and greater historical weight, current usage notwithstanding.

Proper surge protection, spark gaps, low pass filters, etc provide a high degree of protection. Narrow band antennas of a grounded design such as a yagi, will recieve power within it's passband.

Unshielded electronics such as your clock radio are hard to protect. Shielded equipment with power filtering, metal cases, over voltage protection, etc are relatively safe. Your desk top computer has an antenna wire attached to the keyboard and mouse, so these are vunerable. A traditional RFI metal case tower PC with all external cables removed would make a nice spare that can be quickly deployed after an attack.

A single point ground at the utility power and telcom entry into a building provides high levels of protection against the lower frequency components of an EMP as MOV, Spark Gap, and other protection is fast enough to ground it. A noise filter for the house power will block the higher frequencies so the over voltage devices can protect the load.

http://www.ese.upenn.edu/detkin/instruments/misctutorials/Ground/grd.html

Proper grounding, noise filtering, shielding, and overvoltage protection will provide a high degree of protection to EMP.

I can only say that getting this shit wrong interferes unnecessarily with communication.

It's obvious in context what is meant.

Why I should have to carry more than my own 50% of the load of the task of communication is quite beyond me.

You don't have to, and it's presumptious of you to claim so.

I can sympathize with the principle, and I have my own pet peeves that I grumble about, but language is always under tension between popular usage and conservative, "correct" usage. This particular case I don't care about, and I agree with the viewpoint that the phrase is so prone to being misunderstood that it should be abandoned.