Actually, my brother had to get a microwave meter, and needed to test it out. As part of his tests, he looked at the microwave output during various conditions of usage (that is, good reception --> bad reception). What he said is that the cell phone does ramp up to dangerous levels when it has bad reception.
Now consider that the skin of (say) a public city bus reflects the microwaves within the chamber, and you have a recipe for being toast.
I don't have more detail than that, but in line with that... yes, I'd say that it is wise to avoid using cell phones.
Even though the articles have been kept out of refereed medical journals, it's no secret.
So basically you draw a conclusion from what amounts to almost anecdotal evidence. Dangerous amounts? According to what exactly? If the output were at truly dangerous levels, we would see some evidence of that since people get crap reception all the time. Even if the output is at supposed dangerous levels (i.e., dangerous enough to cause noticeable damage), all studies thus far indicate that exposure to these dangerous levels in the amounts correlating with typical cell phone usage do not cause any damage. This seems to imply that the moniker "dangerous" is inappropriate.
but there were never any books I wasn't allowed to read while going to a Catholic school. The earth wasn't flat, gays weren't out to get me, and doing a book report on Darwin didn't get me excommunicated. If anything religion was the framework for how one behaved in school and did not control what I learned there.
If anything going to a public school was more of a shocker, stepping back the equivalent of two grades and being bombarded with more ignorance than one can shake a stick at.
Yeah, religion certainly didn't control what I learned in Catholic school, either. Oh, except for the religion class, masses, and ceremonies we had to waste our time with. In reality some non-secular schools can be good. A lot are mediocre, and some teach essentially an anti-science program. Really the issue is that instilling religious belief (more so than ideals) is anathema to critical thinking and free inquiry.
Why? Appealing to the supernatural is more or less the same as giving up the quest to find a natural (and much more probable) explanation for an event. Now plenty of people can exercise fantastic critical thinking abilities while still retaining vestigial belief in a deity, but after a point such belief becomes rather superfluous. There is a reason why the majority of scientists, skeptics, and basically anyone persuaded by rigorous evidence is a non-theist.
Ostensibly the law might look like something talking about "alternative views". But really it is about injecting a dogma into the public school system. You need only look at similar laws passed in states like Florida, and the backers behind such laws. What this basically will amount to is the taxpayers in LA shelling out cash for the inevitable court case which will strike down the law.
I'm not so sure they're being polite. Mathematics has it's share of cranks, and high profile conjectures receive a lot of attention by these woomeisters. While a crackpot proof might appear mystical to the layperson due to the extreme use of technical jargon, a trained mathematician can usually spot a uninformed line of argument.
To draw a more comprehensible analogy, I would liken many of the proofs of longstanding problems to the endless stream of perpetual motion machine patents. Except the latter device, is of course, impossible. Both, however, are sophomoric.
Why yes...I'm talking to my kid who is waiting in line at another ride. You have a problem with that?
Kiss my ass. This sort of mentality always amused me. It's simply people pining about their rights while blithely forgetting that with every right comes a duty. People with the, "Screw it all I can do whatever I want" attitude represent an unfortunately high percentage of adults that never matured much beyond adolescence.
There is always a balance to be achieved. Take basic hygiene. Sure, no one should be forced to clean themselves if they pose no health risk to others, but if you smell like a 12 day old shit that's been fermenting in a plastic bag then you have a basic duty freshen up before you get on a crowded city bus.
If you go to an amusement park with your family, they won't be thrilled if you can't spend more than a few hours without taking a call. Even calls from other family members? Often, a family splits up: half go to one side of the park and half to the other, based on which attractions the different family members prefer. Mobile phones inside the park help family members find each other. Gee, I wonder how separated people found each other before cell phones...
It's sort of interesting to explore the psychology of people who make claims like this. A ubiquitous trait in those who adhere to some Complementary and Alternative (i.e., not evidence based) medicine modality is that they are absolutely fixated on having some ailment. But more to the point, they also steadfastly believe that their preferred modality has the cure for whatever ails them. It's essentially just a mechanism for people to feel like they have some control in their lives.
I am going to go out on a limb here and perhaps make a poor analogy, but let's try to get into MADD's heads. Consider two journals: the Answers Research Journal (1) and Nature (2). (1) is merely a facade to lend superficial credibility to a fanatical religious movement, while (2) publishes some of the best science articles in the world. You might say why not let anyone have a journal. The issue though is with the intent of the journal and moreover, how it is viewed by the public. Something like (1) is dangerous simply because the general populous might not understand what a ploy it is.
So in any situation you have to look at some context. MADD probably figures GTA drunk driving is making the activity appear cool to young drivers, while the simulator is presumably for educational purposes.
Whether you know if someone is lying or not does not necessarily bring you closer to the truth. Fortunately, reality is not so simplistic. Here is an article from 2007 about distinguishing the brainwaves associated with false memories from those of true memories. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071023163853.htm
This is not to say that the sweat-gland technology gets you closer to the truth, just that a person can be convinced they are telling the truth but still "lying" in the sense that they are reporting as true something that never occurred. That is, lying need not be a conscious act.
This really does amount to trespass and invasion of privacy. Any individual is free to walk the streets of their neighborhood and take photographs, so long as they don't enter private property. But as soon as they wander into their neighbors driveways and gardens, neighbors would be justified in calling the Police, and getting them to be given a warning or to be arrested.
I think you are more or less correct here, however, different countries have different private property rights. In Sweden, for example, you are free to pretty much roam on private property as long as you more or less keep out of sight and do not cause a disturbance.
What is the context of demanding that "they find something that's 100% unique and fast and accurate"? Nothing will ever fit that bill. You can steal/counterfeit plastic cards, guess passwords, pick locks, etc. It's simply unreasonable to demand the things you do, and moreover it's a logical fallacy (akin to what anti-evolutionists or conspiracy theorists do when they anomaly hunt).
I note three things that appear to be grossly overlooked in all the crowing from our community of armchair experts. 1) There there is such a thing as a hierarchy of security needs. Some things just don't need extreme security. For a lot of security needs, mere deterrence is sufficient (look at bike locking strategies for example). 2) Technologies can be used in tandem to create more robust security. 3) Further development of technologies may lead to individual robustness for particular security measures. The first locks, for instance, were extremely crude.
Suppose that Co$ was one of those pig-nosed trouble makers, and you caught them stealing some school bake-sale money. Now let's say you cry out, "Hey, look! That asshole is stealing our bake sale money!". Saying Co$ is "defending" themselves is like saying the trouble maker is defending themselves when they then proceed to beat the living shit out of you for pointing out their shady behavior.
You proffer a rather hasty generalization. Supposing that there was some sort of universal notion of beauty, it is not immediate (and probably not very likely) that the genetic diversity of the human species would suffer much. Moreover, under these assumptions, beauty just becomes another selection pressure. Just look at the abundance of species which have evolved some feature that has no function outside of attracting mates.
You are not distrusting the gods of research so much as conflating two somewhat opposite notions of faith. Religious faith is absolutely nothing like scientific acceptance. It's a rather disingenuous (or purely ignorant) to try and see parallels between the scientific method and religious credulity. So yes, if you're being disingenuous, you should be modded flamebait. If you are purely ignorant, why the hell even bother with making inane comments? (I know, I know...this is Slashdot).
This reminds me a bit of the so-called Mozart effect claimed by Shaw and Rauscher that has been accepted as true by the general public. Their studies were not reproduced and had pretty shoddy methodology. Consult http://skepdic.com/mozart.html.
I find your characterization of useful to be somewhat amusing, in the face of the broad applicability of a minor subset of algebra: linear algebra . The truth is that since the early 1900's, huge portions of mathematics have seen influence from algebra. There is algebraic geometry, algebraic topology, algebraic number theory, algebraic logic, topological algebra, Banach algebras, von Neumann algebras, Lie groups, normed rings, etc. This algebraization of modern mathematics has to due in large part to the fact that algebraic methods are really methods of "working and thinking", to quote the great algebraist Emmy Noether.
I suspect the parent is projecting their poor public school experience into the public school system. The system has it's negative points, but the parent is basically calling it a conspiracy to beat down individuality and creativity.
In all honesty, I suspect many geeks are libertarians because it sounds sexy. There are some industries where heavy regulation is definitely preferred over market forces. Namely I am thinking of drug testing and the FDA. I know a lot of conspiracy weenies like to piss their pants when one brings up drug companies, but robust, long duration studies of new drugs are a good thing. This is not to say, of course, the current system is without problems.
No, but it means that something else (of potential scientific or utilitarian use) will be left behind.
Saying a lightsaber doesn't add an extra cost to a shuttle is like saying you should ride the bus free because the bus is driving anyways, and 1 more person won't change the cost of paying for the gas or the driver's salary. But that either means someone else won't be able to get on, or the bus generates less revenue which will simply rollover to either less bus service in the future or higher ticket costs for the rest, to cover for that loss.
There's a REASON there's such a huge pricetag on lifting anything in orbit, and you can't say "well the shuttle's gonna fly anyways so I might as well throw this trinket in", especially when there are a ton of legitimate things waiting YEARS for a chance of being lifted into space.
How did this get a +5 insightful? It's a gigantic fallacious argument, namely a slippery slope.
One person not paying for a bus ride doesn't matter at all. It's like removing a single point from a real interval. The Lesbegue measure of that interval is still the same.
What you're doing is equating that one person not paying for the bus, or that single point, to no one paying and removing the entire interval, respectively. These are two very different situations, and it's just intellectually dishonest to equate them.
I called myself agnostic until someone posed the question if I was agnostic in my the belief in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and the flying spaghetti monster.
At that point I realized that calling oneself agnostic because there is a very tiny possibility that a god exists is just playing with the definition of the word agnostic. For all practical purposes I am an atheist.
Othwerwise, I agree with what you said.
One thing to consider is that atheist and agnostic are not mutually exclusive, nor even are they talking about the same thing. Agnosticism concerns itself with knowledge and explicitly what we can know, whereas atheism deals with belief. You can be an agnostic atheist in that you maintain no positive belief in supernatural entities, yet also think that one can never know truly whether these entities exist.
And of course there are scales of agnosticism. Only within mathematics can you ever prove something, and so if you were really hard-nosed, you could maintain that humans are actually incapable of knowing anything within the realm of science. As empirical evidence mounts, though, the veracity and power of a particular model or claim gains some substance. This is why scientific models, like evolution and gravity, are accepted rather than believed in.
Many Christians interpret that as being made in God's spiritual image and have for years. Not all people of religion are cooks. It is not so fashionable today to mention it due to the preponderance of New Agey philosophy and junk evocation of quantum physics, but there is about as much evidence for Duality as for young earth creationism. That is to say, none outside of gaps in scientific knowledge.
"Yet another example of science failing in light of overwhelming religous evidence!"
don't laugh too much... there's people out their who really think this way. The sad thing.. even if you somehow could bring the hard evidence to prove that the human race came from apes... People that followed tomes of old would still not believe it. It's so hard to understand why people can't see what is right in front of their faces. Buddy, that's what the theory of evolution IS. The problem is roughly this:
A: The vast majority of anti-evolutionists have almost no understanding of what evolution entails, or the actual evidence for it.
B: Most people in general are scientifically illiterate, and have no understanding of the scientific method. Scientific literacy in a society roughly correlates with the percentage of working scientists.
C: You have a few people that hold Ph.D's yet are still just plain stupid, because they cannot stop applying the logical fallacy of personal incredulity.
Evolution is one of the best supported theories we have, and the only reason it is attacked as being "just a theory" instead of, say, General Relativity, is that evolution is easier to understand but also it directly contradicts literal interpretations of some religious canon, and shows that, indeed, man is just an animal afterall.
Why yes, he must most definitely be utterly full of BS.
And by that logic, so is Newton. He was nutty enough to actually engage in personal undertakings in alchemy and numerology.
What a crack-pot psuedo scientist, whose entire body of work should be thrown out as BS.
You sir have shown a remarkable skill in exposing your utter lack of understanding the workings of the creative mind.
Perhaps, because you are completely lacking this thing known as "creativity". Your analogy is unjust and belies a certain disdain for scientific inquiry. First is an error about magnitude. In Newton's time, alchemy was not as ridiculous as it is today. Second, is the relation between the personal beliefs and one's scientific findings. I, being a mathematician, mostly think of Newton as doing great service to the calculus. Since one can engage in mathematical inquiry without knowing a lick about the natural world, one's personal beliefs regarding the natural world are moot.
You seem to be suggesting that we shouldn't be leery of a homeopath that conducts research regarding the efficacy of his so-called medicine. Creative is not the word we use in this case. It's quack.
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Actually, my brother had to get a microwave meter, and needed to test it out. As part of his tests, he looked at the microwave output during various conditions of usage (that is, good reception --> bad reception). What he said is that the cell phone does ramp up to dangerous levels when it has bad reception.
Now consider that the skin of (say) a public city bus reflects the microwaves within the chamber, and you have a recipe for being toast.
I don't have more detail than that, but in line with that... yes, I'd say that it is wise to avoid using cell phones.
Even though the articles have been kept out of refereed medical journals, it's no secret.
So basically you draw a conclusion from what amounts to almost anecdotal evidence. Dangerous amounts? According to what exactly? If the output were at truly dangerous levels, we would see some evidence of that since people get crap reception all the time. Even if the output is at supposed dangerous levels (i.e., dangerous enough to cause noticeable damage), all studies thus far indicate that exposure to these dangerous levels in the amounts correlating with typical cell phone usage do not cause any damage. This seems to imply that the moniker "dangerous" is inappropriate.
but there were never any books I wasn't allowed to read while going to a Catholic school. The earth wasn't flat, gays weren't out to get me, and doing a book report on Darwin didn't get me excommunicated. If anything religion was the framework for how one behaved in school and did not control what I learned there.
If anything going to a public school was more of a shocker, stepping back the equivalent of two grades and being bombarded with more ignorance than one can shake a stick at.
Yeah, religion certainly didn't control what I learned in Catholic school, either. Oh, except for the religion class, masses, and ceremonies we had to waste our time with. In reality some non-secular schools can be good. A lot are mediocre, and some teach essentially an anti-science program. Really the issue is that instilling religious belief (more so than ideals) is anathema to critical thinking and free inquiry.
Why? Appealing to the supernatural is more or less the same as giving up the quest to find a natural (and much more probable) explanation for an event. Now plenty of people can exercise fantastic critical thinking abilities while still retaining vestigial belief in a deity, but after a point such belief becomes rather superfluous. There is a reason why the majority of scientists, skeptics, and basically anyone persuaded by rigorous evidence is a non-theist.
Ostensibly the law might look like something talking about "alternative views". But really it is about injecting a dogma into the public school system. You need only look at similar laws passed in states like Florida, and the backers behind such laws. What this basically will amount to is the taxpayers in LA shelling out cash for the inevitable court case which will strike down the law.
I'm not so sure they're being polite. Mathematics has it's share of cranks, and high profile conjectures receive a lot of attention by these woomeisters. While a crackpot proof might appear mystical to the layperson due to the extreme use of technical jargon, a trained mathematician can usually spot a uninformed line of argument. To draw a more comprehensible analogy, I would liken many of the proofs of longstanding problems to the endless stream of perpetual motion machine patents. Except the latter device, is of course, impossible. Both, however, are sophomoric.
It's sort of interesting to explore the psychology of people who make claims like this. A ubiquitous trait in those who adhere to some Complementary and Alternative (i.e., not evidence based) medicine modality is that they are absolutely fixated on having some ailment. But more to the point, they also steadfastly believe that their preferred modality has the cure for whatever ails them. It's essentially just a mechanism for people to feel like they have some control in their lives.
I am going to go out on a limb here and perhaps make a poor analogy, but let's try to get into MADD's heads. Consider two journals: the Answers Research Journal (1) and Nature (2). (1) is merely a facade to lend superficial credibility to a fanatical religious movement, while (2) publishes some of the best science articles in the world. You might say why not let anyone have a journal. The issue though is with the intent of the journal and moreover, how it is viewed by the public. Something like (1) is dangerous simply because the general populous might not understand what a ploy it is. So in any situation you have to look at some context. MADD probably figures GTA drunk driving is making the activity appear cool to young drivers, while the simulator is presumably for educational purposes.
It's not e and it's not pi. Real mathematicians don't talk about numbers at all!
This is not to say that the sweat-gland technology gets you closer to the truth, just that a person can be convinced they are telling the truth but still "lying" in the sense that they are reporting as true something that never occurred. That is, lying need not be a conscious act.
I think you are more or less correct here, however, different countries have different private property rights. In Sweden, for example, you are free to pretty much roam on private property as long as you more or less keep out of sight and do not cause a disturbance.
Oh come on, this article is the PERFECT time to use "But the Earth is only 6000 years old!" comment.
I note three things that appear to be grossly overlooked in all the crowing from our community of armchair experts. 1) There there is such a thing as a hierarchy of security needs. Some things just don't need extreme security. For a lot of security needs, mere deterrence is sufficient (look at bike locking strategies for example). 2) Technologies can be used in tandem to create more robust security. 3) Further development of technologies may lead to individual robustness for particular security measures. The first locks, for instance, were extremely crude.
Suppose that Co$ was one of those pig-nosed trouble makers, and you caught them stealing some school bake-sale money. Now let's say you cry out, "Hey, look! That asshole is stealing our bake sale money!". Saying Co$ is "defending" themselves is like saying the trouble maker is defending themselves when they then proceed to beat the living shit out of you for pointing out their shady behavior.
You proffer a rather hasty generalization. Supposing that there was some sort of universal notion of beauty, it is not immediate (and probably not very likely) that the genetic diversity of the human species would suffer much. Moreover, under these assumptions, beauty just becomes another selection pressure. Just look at the abundance of species which have evolved some feature that has no function outside of attracting mates.
You are not distrusting the gods of research so much as conflating two somewhat opposite notions of faith. Religious faith is absolutely nothing like scientific acceptance. It's a rather disingenuous (or purely ignorant) to try and see parallels between the scientific method and religious credulity. So yes, if you're being disingenuous, you should be modded flamebait. If you are purely ignorant, why the hell even bother with making inane comments? (I know, I know...this is Slashdot).
This reminds me a bit of the so-called Mozart effect claimed by Shaw and Rauscher that has been accepted as true by the general public. Their studies were not reproduced and had pretty shoddy methodology. Consult http://skepdic.com/mozart.html.
I find your characterization of useful to be somewhat amusing, in the face of the broad applicability of a minor subset of algebra: linear algebra . The truth is that since the early 1900's, huge portions of mathematics have seen influence from algebra. There is algebraic geometry, algebraic topology, algebraic number theory, algebraic logic, topological algebra, Banach algebras, von Neumann algebras, Lie groups, normed rings, etc. This algebraization of modern mathematics has to due in large part to the fact that algebraic methods are really methods of "working and thinking", to quote the great algebraist Emmy Noether.
Theoretical computer science, at least, is mathematics.
I suspect the parent is projecting their poor public school experience into the public school system. The system has it's negative points, but the parent is basically calling it a conspiracy to beat down individuality and creativity.
In all honesty, I suspect many geeks are libertarians because it sounds sexy. There are some industries where heavy regulation is definitely preferred over market forces. Namely I am thinking of drug testing and the FDA. I know a lot of conspiracy weenies like to piss their pants when one brings up drug companies, but robust, long duration studies of new drugs are a good thing. This is not to say, of course, the current system is without problems.
Saying a lightsaber doesn't add an extra cost to a shuttle is like saying you should ride the bus free because the bus is driving anyways, and 1 more person won't change the cost of paying for the gas or the driver's salary. But that either means someone else won't be able to get on, or the bus generates less revenue which will simply rollover to either less bus service in the future or higher ticket costs for the rest, to cover for that loss.
There's a REASON there's such a huge pricetag on lifting anything in orbit, and you can't say "well the shuttle's gonna fly anyways so I might as well throw this trinket in", especially when there are a ton of legitimate things waiting YEARS for a chance of being lifted into space.
How did this get a +5 insightful? It's a gigantic fallacious argument, namely a slippery slope.
One person not paying for a bus ride doesn't matter at all. It's like removing a single point from a real interval. The Lesbegue measure of that interval is still the same.
What you're doing is equating that one person not paying for the bus, or that single point, to no one paying and removing the entire interval, respectively. These are two very different situations, and it's just intellectually dishonest to equate them.
At that point I realized that calling oneself agnostic because there is a very tiny possibility that a god exists is just playing with the definition of the word agnostic. For all practical purposes I am an atheist.
Othwerwise, I agree with what you said.
One thing to consider is that atheist and agnostic are not mutually exclusive, nor even are they talking about the same thing. Agnosticism concerns itself with knowledge and explicitly what we can know, whereas atheism deals with belief. You can be an agnostic atheist in that you maintain no positive belief in supernatural entities, yet also think that one can never know truly whether these entities exist.
And of course there are scales of agnosticism. Only within mathematics can you ever prove something, and so if you were really hard-nosed, you could maintain that humans are actually incapable of knowing anything within the realm of science. As empirical evidence mounts, though, the veracity and power of a particular model or claim gains some substance. This is why scientific models, like evolution and gravity, are accepted rather than believed in.
A: The vast majority of anti-evolutionists have almost no understanding of what evolution entails, or the actual evidence for it.
B: Most people in general are scientifically illiterate, and have no understanding of the scientific method. Scientific literacy in a society roughly correlates with the percentage of working scientists.
C: You have a few people that hold Ph.D's yet are still just plain stupid, because they cannot stop applying the logical fallacy of personal incredulity.
Evolution is one of the best supported theories we have, and the only reason it is attacked as being "just a theory" instead of, say, General Relativity, is that evolution is easier to understand but also it directly contradicts literal interpretations of some religious canon, and shows that, indeed, man is just an animal afterall.
Why yes, he must most definitely be utterly full of BS.
And by that logic, so is Newton. He was nutty enough to actually engage in personal undertakings in alchemy and numerology.
What a crack-pot psuedo scientist, whose entire body of work should be thrown out as BS.
You sir have shown a remarkable skill in exposing your utter lack of understanding the workings of the creative mind.
Perhaps, because you are completely lacking this thing known as "creativity". Your analogy is unjust and belies a certain disdain for scientific inquiry. First is an error about magnitude. In Newton's time, alchemy was not as ridiculous as it is today. Second, is the relation between the personal beliefs and one's scientific findings. I, being a mathematician, mostly think of Newton as doing great service to the calculus. Since one can engage in mathematical inquiry without knowing a lick about the natural world, one's personal beliefs regarding the natural world are moot.
You seem to be suggesting that we shouldn't be leery of a homeopath that conducts research regarding the efficacy of his so-called medicine. Creative is not the word we use in this case. It's quack.