The CDC statistics are from historical data, going back probably less than a century in most cases. Also there appears to be at least one major cause of death that the CDC is ignoring: mortality caused by political action such as war and genocide. That would rank somewhere above Accidents. The CDC chooses to ignore this because, hey, they all know how to sing "I'm a Doctor, not a politician." Thereby excusing themselves from having to express an opinion on the one aspect of human mortality that could be controlled with current technology (such as more appropriate use of forums like the UN, instruments like treaties, etc).
But the more important point is that predictions based on the CDC data presented cannot account for the changes that any young person today is going to see in their lifetime. Anyone with a nodding acquaintance with raising cultures in Petri dishes knows that population growth never simply stabilizes when it approaches the limits of available resources. It always continues exponentially and overshoots the maximum sustainable number, then crashes catastrophically. There is nothing to suggest that human population growth will be any different, and there are all kinds of things that suggest that the human population is rapidly approaching the crash point. Technological advances in food production and distribution have kept postponing the Malthus point for a couple of hundred years, but it is impossible to imagine any new advance that could be put into effect as broadly and rapidly as would be needed to avert the coming crash.
FTFY. Corrected statement now includes fanatics of Islamic and Scientology faiths.
Unfortunately the correction does not include all the word worshipers of any faith. But closet fundamentalists of any stripe are generally tolerable, so long as they keep their self-imposed limitations on where the mind should be allowed to wander to themselves.
The Business Basics I have used are good languages so long as you have no need for objects or complex data structures, and can use a decent external library for regular expression work. For traditional Input - Process - Output paradigms, they have a lot going for them. Event driven paradigms, not so much.
That said, any kid with any internal interest in programming is going to be swimming in the web waters real quick. It makes sense to build their early program training on Javascript in the HTML/CSS environment, possibly with some PHP thrown in. This of course is not an ideal learning environment. Instead it is the real environment they are growing up in, and are going to be involved in no matter what their teachers think is best for them.
Seems to me that if your daughter has a good head for programming, she is going to be messing around with Javascript no matter what you think she should learn before that. A realist would recognize that Javascript is the street lingo all kids will be exposed to. It makes sense to teach them Javascript, and how to avoid its pitfalls and take good advantage of its strengths. Of which there are more than a few.
But of course that would require the teacher to learn how to actually use Javascript, which can be daunting. That could even involve requiring the teacher to face his own blinding prejudices, which of course could be an insurmountable problem. Then again, anyone who confronts their own prejudices with open eyes will emerge the better person for that internal conflict.
My background is an introductory course in Fortran on Hollerith cards, a lot of hobbying around in Applesoft, 6502 Assembly, and Forth, then formal schooling in Cobol, the HP Business Basic of the late 1980s, and some Pascal. My most productive programming years were pretty much in Perl, as its regular expression engine was the best tool available for cracking some tough nuts in parsing/lexing. I do not do much programming any more; my main interest is in 3D modeling now. I can customize off the shelf stuff in Javascript and PHP for my web pages, and that is probably as much as I will need to do from here on out. (Unless I start getting deeper into Blender which uses Python for its scripting... ugly, ugly significant whitespacing raises nightmares of one-column-off Hollerith cards and using Cobol Coding Sheets....)
If you take a long thread and wrap it around some oddly shaped object, changing direction so that you capture some sense of the object's shape, that thread remains a one dimensional thing. No matter how many loops or how intricate the looping, there is still only one path from the beginning to the end.
Literature is the same way: each word has its own distinct place in relation to the beginning and the end; there is no way that you can properly read your way from Point A to Point C without going through Point B. Flashbacks and other techniques can loop the thread, and a good writer can cause you to create in your own mind a multidimensional vision of what he is writing about. But those added dimensions are what you as the reader bring to the process; they can be no more than suggestions in the writing itself, which despite its twists and turns remains a matter of one word following another, always the same order, from beginning to end.
Dickens is an interesting corner case. He wrote much of his work as serializations published monthly, a few dozen pages each month. The primary intent was probably financial but there were some very strong impacts on the art as well.
Financially, this was a very successful ploy as it allowed Dickens to write to the huge and under served market of common laborers who could not easily afford the price of a book, but could set aside a few pennies each month to buy the next installment. It was not uncommon in boarding houses, etc, for several persons to pool resources to make the purchases, with each installment handed down from one to the next. The approach made a lot of sense for the publishers as well, since the big up front costs of printing a run of books was avoided. So this was a tremendous marketing success, as big in its time as the first pocket MP3 players have been in our time. And perhaps the impetus for the "reading groups" we see today, where once everyone has read the next chapter, they all get together over cheap wine and pre-sliced cheese samplers to gossip about the characters.
But the impact on the art was also incredible. Dickens was getting feedback from his readers, and was clearly paying attention to it: minor characters that had struck a chord were given larger parts in later installments; some of the subplots were almost certainly proposed by readers. Dickens was perhaps the first to write an interactive novel.
He was also one of the first creative writers to run into the problem of deadlines. I don't think that anyone who has studied his works would disagree that he sometimes inserted fillers to round out his monthly quota. When he needed 2,000 words to properly handle the next plot twist but there was only room for 1,000 more words in the next installment, he would pad things out, sometimes with brilliantly detailed descriptions, sometimes the padding was not so brilliant, doing whatever it took to end up with an installment that ends properly with some kind of cliff-hanger. Some of that padding would definitely be better put in hypertext footnotes, or better yet, deleted entirely. But then you end up with a Readers Digest Condensed version, and not the real thing.
Even so, Dickens told his tales one word at a time, one sentence after the next, never side by each. There is never a time when he required the reader to absorb two different threads at once before going on to the next thing. Nor can you do that in literature-- the closest you can get is the use of flashbacks, etc, to loop the reader back through a sequence. But a tangled thread is still a linear thing.
It is really hard to write fiction with multiple hyperlinked threads. It is also not very pleasant to read
Oh yeah, with this there can be no disagreement. As to that part of fiction that is called literature, I do not think that it is even possible to write it as hypertext.
Literature is a one dimensional thing: one word follows another, one sentence has meaning because of the sequence of sentences that came before it, each chapter or verse can be uniquely identified by a single number: its distance from the beginning. Other uses of language are not so limited: think of organizational charts, flow diagrams, and the like: you can jump in anywhere and have multiple choices of directions to folllow. But these are not literature.
A Euclidean definition of literature could start by saying that a piece of literature has no color, no taste, and no branches. It has only one point of entry, only one place of ending, and only one route between the two. Anything else, like fiction written in hypertext, might be good or bad art, but it is not literature.
We are going to need a new category for the emerging art of constructing pieces of fiction like the blueprints for the Starship Enterprise, the dictionaries and grammar of the Klingon language, and so on. Many of these works are essentially hypertext constructions, and some are quite elegant, definitely pieces of art. But they are not literature; they are representatives of a genre that we have not needed to name before now.
I'm guessing that the theory is probably right. We've seen this kind of problem in poorly implementing good theory before.
The most obvious example I am aware of is the nuclear power industry. In theory, we should be able to build and operate plants that use fission power in an entirely safe manner. In practice, we have found that the human beings involved in any such endeavor are seriously flawed and will screw it up. For instance, we now have about half a century of experience with this, and we still do not have any permanent safe process for storing the waste; the best we have come up with are better efficiencies in stacking the caskets that remain in temporary storage.
Fracking might well be like this: safe in theory, but you need a better breed of human to ensure that the actual process is done in good accord with the theory. Fat chance that you are going to be able to get any of the theoreticians to do the daily management of the drilling rigs.
s/ false negatives would be lost opportunities but would impact the bottom line / false negatives would be lost opportunities but would NOT impact the bottom line /
A lot depends on the relative cost of errors in the spreadsheets compared to the often much greater cost of maintaining the database.
Business decisions are not driven by accuracy. They are driven by assessments of likely costs and opportunities. The answers the spreadsheets provide do not have to be right; they just have to be close enough to make good decisions.
Often there is sound business logic behind using (and abusing) spreadsheets where a database would be the technically better answer. Two cases come to mind immediately:
First, businesses often use spreadsheets to handle one-off situations where the cost of doing things properly by database cannot be justified. This works, if the strategy allows for the possibility of getting it wrong. A first estimate for the cost of taking on a job only needs to be close enough to decide whether it might be worthwhile to do a more thorough analysis. It does not have to be accurate: false positives would be weeded out later; false negatives would be lost opportunities but would impact the bottom line.
The second case is when you have low skilled employees with time on their hands, such as receptionists. Who are capable of doing some data entry, but giving them any kind of access to the business' data systems is out of the question. Spreadsheets can serve as a good intermediary.
But arguably the most common and critical use of spreadsheets today is as a form of output from the company databases that is sufficiently limited that it can be given to outsiders while containing enough pertinent details for a prospective customer to figure out exactly what he wants.
There will always be strong business reasons for spreadsheets.
That said, I cannot imaging any need for 10,000 sheets in a single spreadsheet wrapper. I'm guessing it was one of those cases where it was as easy to do a 10,000 sheet limit as to do something more reasonable, that would still fill the needs of volunteer groups that do surveys involving dozens of members (think about an Audubon Christmas bird count), but cannot afford to hire a database guru.
I think yours is a criticism of my rhetoric, not the content.
If the rhetoric is broken, it cannot deliver the content.
I wrote, and then deleted, three or four paragraphs about what I think you may have been meaning. Upon reflection, I realized that this is one of those cases where less is more.
That may be clear to Christians who have chosen to believe in the Book of Job. It is not at all clear to anyone who has not abdicated his sacred responsibilities to figure out what the right thing to do would be, and then do it.
There are a lot of good Christians out there, who do the WWJD thing as they make the decisions of their daily lives. But those who always know what to do, because the Bible tells them so, are not particularly good Christians in the eyes of the world at large. That kind of abdication of daily responsibility for one's actions, especially when combined with a belief that if you screw up all will be forgiven, leads to some really nasty behaviors.
Yes, I agree with you that what I have said is completely counter to the Nuremberg defense. Which despite your weird spin on it, puts me in thorough agreement with the "Western civilized world" and "common-sense law": that each individual is accountable for every step that he takes in his daily life. He cannot transfer that accountability to anyone else, and a self-imposed blindness to the effects of his daily actions is no excuse.
I take issue with you stating that I am opposed to the Nuremberg defense and then painting my comments as if I were supporting it. Perhaps there is too much second hand marijuana smoke in your room for clear thinking.
This brand of spirituality actually takes personal responsibility for one's actions to a harsher extreme than what is common in Western religions: not only can you not transfer accountability to anyone higher up the social heap (the 'I was just following orders' defense is bogus), but you also cannot transfer it to any Word of God whether that be given to you by some form of sacred text or by the speeches of some charismatic figure. A decision to abdicate your personal sacred authority on these matters will definitely make your life more comfortable, since it is always easier to go to a book or to someone else than to think through the harder choices of your daily life all by your lonesome. But being comfortable with what you do is not the same as doing what is right.
Your last two paragraphs are either trollish or flamebait depending on where one draws the line between those two categories. In any event, they are too childish to address and only serve to make me wonder just what it is you have been smoking.
...the need to define will...[is] a hopeless endeavor, as we witness in the article, since will is but a bunch of norms.
Way to go, nullify your own argument by providing a definition for what you say cannot be defined.
But that's okay, since the rest of the comment has nothing to do with the subject at hand. Nor anything to do with any other subject, really. Post does serve as an example of how good spelling, an adequate vocabulary, and correct grammar can still sum up to something with no semantic value.
This reply is snarky since it is clear that the author of parent post has a strong enough mind that he can write quite well, but has chosen not to use his intellect to actually think about what he is saying. He might be one of the brightest bulbs in the room, but if all he does is attempt to dazzle rather than illuminate, we would be better off if someone jammed a really dark lampshade over him.
There are a lot of spiritual paths built upon the concept of the Great Mystery: that was Zen, this is Tao, several Native American approaches, much of the resurgent neopagan movement.
An underlying theme is that part of the definition of the human experience is that we can never know what our purpose is; that this limitation is a part of who we are just as the amount of water a cup can hold is part of the definition of that cup. Embracing this concept of eternal self-doubt is an early step in recognizing that one can follow a good and righteous path without concern about where it is leading. A common thread among the "mystery religions" is that the appropriate concerns of the moment are THIS moment, and not whatever baggage you have dragged into it, nor whatever fantasy you think might come next.
Short form: You are what you are doing. You are not what you have done, and you certainly are not what you think you might do, sometime, if things are really the way you think they are.
Gratuitous quote from the Sugar Beets: I can't believe I used to think that what I thought was happening was really going on.
Cool. And how well do you relate with persons who do not use the Internet at all?
I'm guessing that in your strong, information-based, conservatism you probably have more views in common with an Obama fan like me than you do with persons who live the same way their grandparents were living back in the 1950s, who haven't a clue what xkcd is, or how Twitter was an integral part of the Arab Spring, etc. Those parts of the country that do not have anything better than dial-up modems are being increasingly disenfranchised as the American Way Of Life goes digital. Seems to me that a true conservative would be very concerned about that kind of disenfranchisement. Being as how it is a culture breaker, and all.
You can make or buy a simple rig to position a digital camera above a desk surface (I use a 1960s era tripod with the post mounted upside down, but it is a little awkward). Unless you need to capture color, you don't have to be very careful about lighting: you can use your camera in its black and white setting (that cuts the size of the files down a lot, too.)
Most of the time you only need to consult the old paperwork and viewing the pages in a slideshow fashion is at least as fast as going through a bunch of PDFs to find what you need. On the rare occasion when you need to copy/paste a big chunk of text, you can run the photo image through any scanning software and get at least as good output as you would from scanning paper. Usually better, since it is easy to clean up a poor original in the Gimp, Photo$hop, or whatever. Even with that extra step, saving the pages as photographic images is a lot faster over all than scanning them with anything less than a commercial grade ($$$) scanner.
You will need to come up with a good naming and folder convention if you want to be able to find anything quickly, but you would have to do that with the scanner output too. The difference is that with the photos, you would probably want to use more folders: one for each multipage document, probably.
On a daily basis, it is easy enough to take photos of tax documents and the like as they come in, with camera in hand. I have a flatbed scanner on my desk, but it is faster for me to snap a photo, and if I had gotten the angle too wrong, take a better one, than to fuss with scanner and its software.
What parent post is describing is a century out of date.
What anyone on any of the up to date Linux distros does when confronted with the need to do something that is not immediately obvious is to Google "How do I do this on Ubuntu [or whatever]? If it has to be done by a command line, some of the replies will say so, and also print exactly what needs to be entered.
All the user needs to do is to learn how to open a terminal window and copy/paste the magic from the browser.
So long as you can get to Google, you do not need the man pages.
More to the point, Can the USA afford to fracture along the digital divide?
A lot of the social and political issues that I now find are important did not exist in my world ten years ago, before we had this level of Internet connectivity, and do not exist in the world of persons who do not use the Internet on a daily basis. This is not just matters of intellectual property, identity theft, and so forth. My exposure through the Internet to a much broader range of opinions on just about every topic has caused me to recognize that every little thing is a lot more complex than it appears to be. But those who lack Internet connectivity are more likely to be comfortable with having strong opinions about all kinds of things that I now realize are not so simple.
It would be interesting to see if there are correlations between Internet connectivity and Tea Party type conservative thinking. Perhaps we are already seeing a political fracture on the digital divide.
You are right that consensus has nothing to do with determining what is true. I never said it did. The definition of consensus is a general agreement among such a large majority of participants on a particular point. In politics it can be a useful indicator of what the scientists in a particular field think they know at this particular moment. That doesn't necessarily mean they are right but they probably will be more often than not.
FTFY.
That the phrase "consensus of scientific opinion" invariably introduces a political assertion and never a scientific truth is a critically important distinction to keep in mind. If you fail to understand that distinction, then your gullibility plays into the hands of anyone who is bringing a hidden agenda into the discussion. Especially so when dealing with AGW denialists who do not give a fig about the facts but only care that the political argument goes in the direction that is best for their future profits, and see smokescreens involving the confusion of scientific proofs with "consensus of scientists" as a useful debating tool. Trying to fight that kind of hidden agenda with factual arguments is going into the fray with one hand tied behind your back. Don't do that.
Most things that fly require a computer to constantly make tiny adjustments. Try throwing a dead duck, and observing its aerodynamic qualities.
The F-117 might well be a "flying brick"-- but that is a term that describes an oversized power plant used to compensate for bad aerodynamics and has nothing to do with management of the control surfaces. There is nothing inherently bricky about fly-by-wire aircraft. Now that we have the capability to build computer controlled aircraft, we can begin to evolve our airplanes beyond the limitations of aerodynamic static stability and consider airplanes that know how to reshape their wings to match current conditions, etc. Birds manage incredibly tight turns because they reduce the stall speed of the inside wing while simultaneously reducing the drag of the outside wing. We should see UAVs that are capable of doing the same RSN.
Very punny. As punishment for that pun, imagine, if you will, the image you will now and forever more associate with "drag strip". Not the place of the loud and fast cars, but the act of a transvestite removing all his clothes.
Ewwwh. Virtual visual pollution, right here on slashdot.
That word, "consensus", does not mean what you think it means.
There is no consensus involved in scientific inquiry. Consensus has nothing to do with determining what is true. Galileo.
Consensus has a lot to do with deciding who should get research grants, whether carbon credits are a good idea, where emission control standards should be set. But all that stuff is politics, not science. The consensus of opinion among scientists about an issue is but one factor in those political arguments, and it has to compete with other factors, such as whether a proposed change would adversely affect import/export balances, or cost of living, or the lifestyles of the rich and the wannabees.
Stop confusing the science of AGW with the politics of AGW. You will never get the denialists to shut up, but they are only a small (but loud) minority. An appropriate way of handling them is to just say "Suppose all these scientists are right. What changes do you think we should make now, so that in 5, 10, or 20 years your lifestyle will be as pleasant as it could possibly be? Would you favor stronger emission standards or many more windmills?"
Move the conversation to that focus, and you will find that denialists will discredit themselves in the eyes of your silent audience. The discussion can move toward where it should be: what deliberate changes can we make now that would be best for us in the future?
Slashdot Mirror
As this is largely American research, parent post is asking the wrong questions.
The right questions are:
1. How can this be made profitable?
What parts of the process can be patented?
This research will not get out of the early clinical trial phase until these important questions have good answers.
The CDC statistics are from historical data, going back probably less than a century in most cases. Also there appears to be at least one major cause of death that the CDC is ignoring: mortality caused by political action such as war and genocide. That would rank somewhere above Accidents. The CDC chooses to ignore this because, hey, they all know how to sing "I'm a Doctor, not a politician." Thereby excusing themselves from having to express an opinion on the one aspect of human mortality that could be controlled with current technology (such as more appropriate use of forums like the UN, instruments like treaties, etc).
But the more important point is that predictions based on the CDC data presented cannot account for the changes that any young person today is going to see in their lifetime. Anyone with a nodding acquaintance with raising cultures in Petri dishes knows that population growth never simply stabilizes when it approaches the limits of available resources. It always continues exponentially and overshoots the maximum sustainable number, then crashes catastrophically. There is nothing to suggest that human population growth will be any different, and there are all kinds of things that suggest that the human population is rapidly approaching the crash point. Technological advances in food production and distribution have kept postponing the Malthus point for a couple of hundred years, but it is impossible to imagine any new advance that could be put into effect as broadly and rapidly as would be needed to avert the coming crash.
Doom. Doom. Dismal doom. Just saying.
P.S.: Have a nice day.
s/Christians/evangelicals/
FTFY. Corrected statement now includes fanatics of Islamic and Scientology faiths.
Unfortunately the correction does not include all the word worshipers of any faith. But closet fundamentalists of any stripe are generally tolerable, so long as they keep their self-imposed limitations on where the mind should be allowed to wander to themselves.
The Business Basics I have used are good languages so long as you have no need for objects or complex data structures, and can use a decent external library for regular expression work. For traditional Input - Process - Output paradigms, they have a lot going for them. Event driven paradigms, not so much.
That said, any kid with any internal interest in programming is going to be swimming in the web waters real quick. It makes sense to build their early program training on Javascript in the HTML/CSS environment, possibly with some PHP thrown in. This of course is not an ideal learning environment. Instead it is the real environment they are growing up in, and are going to be involved in no matter what their teachers think is best for them.
Seems to me that if your daughter has a good head for programming, she is going to be messing around with Javascript no matter what you think she should learn before that. A realist would recognize that Javascript is the street lingo all kids will be exposed to. It makes sense to teach them Javascript, and how to avoid its pitfalls and take good advantage of its strengths. Of which there are more than a few.
But of course that would require the teacher to learn how to actually use Javascript, which can be daunting. That could even involve requiring the teacher to face his own blinding prejudices, which of course could be an insurmountable problem. Then again, anyone who confronts their own prejudices with open eyes will emerge the better person for that internal conflict.
My background is an introductory course in Fortran on Hollerith cards, a lot of hobbying around in Applesoft, 6502 Assembly, and Forth, then formal schooling in Cobol, the HP Business Basic of the late 1980s, and some Pascal. My most productive programming years were pretty much in Perl, as its regular expression engine was the best tool available for cracking some tough nuts in parsing/lexing. I do not do much programming any more; my main interest is in 3D modeling now. I can customize off the shelf stuff in Javascript and PHP for my web pages, and that is probably as much as I will need to do from here on out. (Unless I start getting deeper into Blender which uses Python for its scripting... ugly, ugly significant whitespacing raises nightmares of one-column-off Hollerith cards and using Cobol Coding Sheets....)
If you take a long thread and wrap it around some oddly shaped object, changing direction so that you capture some sense of the object's shape, that thread remains a one dimensional thing. No matter how many loops or how intricate the looping, there is still only one path from the beginning to the end.
Literature is the same way: each word has its own distinct place in relation to the beginning and the end; there is no way that you can properly read your way from Point A to Point C without going through Point B. Flashbacks and other techniques can loop the thread, and a good writer can cause you to create in your own mind a multidimensional vision of what he is writing about. But those added dimensions are what you as the reader bring to the process; they can be no more than suggestions in the writing itself, which despite its twists and turns remains a matter of one word following another, always the same order, from beginning to end.
Dickens is an interesting corner case. He wrote much of his work as serializations published monthly, a few dozen pages each month. The primary intent was probably financial but there were some very strong impacts on the art as well.
Financially, this was a very successful ploy as it allowed Dickens to write to the huge and under served market of common laborers who could not easily afford the price of a book, but could set aside a few pennies each month to buy the next installment. It was not uncommon in boarding houses, etc, for several persons to pool resources to make the purchases, with each installment handed down from one to the next. The approach made a lot of sense for the publishers as well, since the big up front costs of printing a run of books was avoided. So this was a tremendous marketing success, as big in its time as the first pocket MP3 players have been in our time. And perhaps the impetus for the "reading groups" we see today, where once everyone has read the next chapter, they all get together over cheap wine and pre-sliced cheese samplers to gossip about the characters.
But the impact on the art was also incredible. Dickens was getting feedback from his readers, and was clearly paying attention to it: minor characters that had struck a chord were given larger parts in later installments; some of the subplots were almost certainly proposed by readers. Dickens was perhaps the first to write an interactive novel.
He was also one of the first creative writers to run into the problem of deadlines. I don't think that anyone who has studied his works would disagree that he sometimes inserted fillers to round out his monthly quota. When he needed 2,000 words to properly handle the next plot twist but there was only room for 1,000 more words in the next installment, he would pad things out, sometimes with brilliantly detailed descriptions, sometimes the padding was not so brilliant, doing whatever it took to end up with an installment that ends properly with some kind of cliff-hanger. Some of that padding would definitely be better put in hypertext footnotes, or better yet, deleted entirely. But then you end up with a Readers Digest Condensed version, and not the real thing.
Even so, Dickens told his tales one word at a time, one sentence after the next, never side by each. There is never a time when he required the reader to absorb two different threads at once before going on to the next thing. Nor can you do that in literature-- the closest you can get is the use of flashbacks, etc, to loop the reader back through a sequence. But a tangled thread is still a linear thing.
It is really hard to write fiction with multiple hyperlinked threads. It is also not very pleasant to read
Oh yeah, with this there can be no disagreement. As to that part of fiction that is called literature, I do not think that it is even possible to write it as hypertext.
Literature is a one dimensional thing: one word follows another, one sentence has meaning because of the sequence of sentences that came before it, each chapter or verse can be uniquely identified by a single number: its distance from the beginning. Other uses of language are not so limited: think of organizational charts, flow diagrams, and the like: you can jump in anywhere and have multiple choices of directions to folllow. But these are not literature.
A Euclidean definition of literature could start by saying that a piece of literature has no color, no taste, and no branches. It has only one point of entry, only one place of ending, and only one route between the two. Anything else, like fiction written in hypertext, might be good or bad art, but it is not literature.
We are going to need a new category for the emerging art of constructing pieces of fiction like the blueprints for the Starship Enterprise, the dictionaries and grammar of the Klingon language, and so on. Many of these works are essentially hypertext constructions, and some are quite elegant, definitely pieces of art. But they are not literature; they are representatives of a genre that we have not needed to name before now.
I'm guessing that the theory is probably right. We've seen this kind of problem in poorly implementing good theory before.
The most obvious example I am aware of is the nuclear power industry. In theory, we should be able to build and operate plants that use fission power in an entirely safe manner. In practice, we have found that the human beings involved in any such endeavor are seriously flawed and will screw it up. For instance, we now have about half a century of experience with this, and we still do not have any permanent safe process for storing the waste; the best we have come up with are better efficiencies in stacking the caskets that remain in temporary storage.
Fracking might well be like this: safe in theory, but you need a better breed of human to ensure that the actual process is done in good accord with the theory. Fat chance that you are going to be able to get any of the theoreticians to do the daily management of the drilling rigs.
Oops. Dropped a word:
s/ false negatives would be lost opportunities but would impact the bottom line / false negatives would be lost opportunities but would NOT impact the bottom line /
A lot depends on the relative cost of errors in the spreadsheets compared to the often much greater cost of maintaining the database.
Business decisions are not driven by accuracy. They are driven by assessments of likely costs and opportunities. The answers the spreadsheets provide do not have to be right; they just have to be close enough to make good decisions.
Often there is sound business logic behind using (and abusing) spreadsheets where a database would be the technically better answer. Two cases come to mind immediately:
First, businesses often use spreadsheets to handle one-off situations where the cost of doing things properly by database cannot be justified. This works, if the strategy allows for the possibility of getting it wrong. A first estimate for the cost of taking on a job only needs to be close enough to decide whether it might be worthwhile to do a more thorough analysis. It does not have to be accurate: false positives would be weeded out later; false negatives would be lost opportunities but would impact the bottom line.
The second case is when you have low skilled employees with time on their hands, such as receptionists. Who are capable of doing some data entry, but giving them any kind of access to the business' data systems is out of the question. Spreadsheets can serve as a good intermediary.
But arguably the most common and critical use of spreadsheets today is as a form of output from the company databases that is sufficiently limited that it can be given to outsiders while containing enough pertinent details for a prospective customer to figure out exactly what he wants.
There will always be strong business reasons for spreadsheets.
That said, I cannot imaging any need for 10,000 sheets in a single spreadsheet wrapper. I'm guessing it was one of those cases where it was as easy to do a 10,000 sheet limit as to do something more reasonable, that would still fill the needs of volunteer groups that do surveys involving dozens of members (think about an Audubon Christmas bird count), but cannot afford to hire a database guru.
I think yours is a criticism of my rhetoric, not the content.
If the rhetoric is broken, it cannot deliver the content.
I wrote, and then deleted, three or four paragraphs about what I think you may have been meaning. Upon reflection, I realized that this is one of those cases where less is more.
That may be clear to Christians who have chosen to believe in the Book of Job. It is not at all clear to anyone who has not abdicated his sacred responsibilities to figure out what the right thing to do would be, and then do it.
There are a lot of good Christians out there, who do the WWJD thing as they make the decisions of their daily lives. But those who always know what to do, because the Bible tells them so, are not particularly good Christians in the eyes of the world at large. That kind of abdication of daily responsibility for one's actions, especially when combined with a belief that if you screw up all will be forgiven, leads to some really nasty behaviors.
Yes, I agree with you that what I have said is completely counter to the Nuremberg defense. Which despite your weird spin on it, puts me in thorough agreement with the "Western civilized world" and "common-sense law": that each individual is accountable for every step that he takes in his daily life. He cannot transfer that accountability to anyone else, and a self-imposed blindness to the effects of his daily actions is no excuse.
I take issue with you stating that I am opposed to the Nuremberg defense and then painting my comments as if I were supporting it. Perhaps there is too much second hand marijuana smoke in your room for clear thinking.
This brand of spirituality actually takes personal responsibility for one's actions to a harsher extreme than what is common in Western religions: not only can you not transfer accountability to anyone higher up the social heap (the 'I was just following orders' defense is bogus), but you also cannot transfer it to any Word of God whether that be given to you by some form of sacred text or by the speeches of some charismatic figure. A decision to abdicate your personal sacred authority on these matters will definitely make your life more comfortable, since it is always easier to go to a book or to someone else than to think through the harder choices of your daily life all by your lonesome. But being comfortable with what you do is not the same as doing what is right.
Your last two paragraphs are either trollish or flamebait depending on where one draws the line between those two categories. In any event, they are too childish to address and only serve to make me wonder just what it is you have been smoking.
...the need to define will...[is] a hopeless endeavor, as we witness in the article, since will is but a bunch of norms.
Way to go, nullify your own argument by providing a definition for what you say cannot be defined.
But that's okay, since the rest of the comment has nothing to do with the subject at hand. Nor anything to do with any other subject, really. Post does serve as an example of how good spelling, an adequate vocabulary, and correct grammar can still sum up to something with no semantic value.
This reply is snarky since it is clear that the author of parent post has a strong enough mind that he can write quite well, but has chosen not to use his intellect to actually think about what he is saying. He might be one of the brightest bulbs in the room, but if all he does is attempt to dazzle rather than illuminate, we would be better off if someone jammed a really dark lampshade over him.
There are a lot of spiritual paths built upon the concept of the Great Mystery: that was Zen, this is Tao, several Native American approaches, much of the resurgent neopagan movement.
An underlying theme is that part of the definition of the human experience is that we can never know what our purpose is; that this limitation is a part of who we are just as the amount of water a cup can hold is part of the definition of that cup. Embracing this concept of eternal self-doubt is an early step in recognizing that one can follow a good and righteous path without concern about where it is leading. A common thread among the "mystery religions" is that the appropriate concerns of the moment are THIS moment, and not whatever baggage you have dragged into it, nor whatever fantasy you think might come next.
Short form: You are what you are doing. You are not what you have done, and you certainly are not what you think you might do, sometime, if things are really the way you think they are.
Gratuitous quote from the Sugar Beets: I can't believe I used to think that what I thought was happening was really going on.
Cool. And how well do you relate with persons who do not use the Internet at all?
I'm guessing that in your strong, information-based, conservatism you probably have more views in common with an Obama fan like me than you do with persons who live the same way their grandparents were living back in the 1950s, who haven't a clue what xkcd is, or how Twitter was an integral part of the Arab Spring, etc. Those parts of the country that do not have anything better than dial-up modems are being increasingly disenfranchised as the American Way Of Life goes digital. Seems to me that a true conservative would be very concerned about that kind of disenfranchisement. Being as how it is a culture breaker, and all.
You can make or buy a simple rig to position a digital camera above a desk surface (I use a 1960s era tripod with the post mounted upside down, but it is a little awkward). Unless you need to capture color, you don't have to be very careful about lighting: you can use your camera in its black and white setting (that cuts the size of the files down a lot, too.)
Most of the time you only need to consult the old paperwork and viewing the pages in a slideshow fashion is at least as fast as going through a bunch of PDFs to find what you need. On the rare occasion when you need to copy/paste a big chunk of text, you can run the photo image through any scanning software and get at least as good output as you would from scanning paper. Usually better, since it is easy to clean up a poor original in the Gimp, Photo$hop, or whatever. Even with that extra step, saving the pages as photographic images is a lot faster over all than scanning them with anything less than a commercial grade ($$$) scanner.
You will need to come up with a good naming and folder convention if you want to be able to find anything quickly, but you would have to do that with the scanner output too. The difference is that with the photos, you would probably want to use more folders: one for each multipage document, probably.
On a daily basis, it is easy enough to take photos of tax documents and the like as they come in, with camera in hand. I have a flatbed scanner on my desk, but it is faster for me to snap a photo, and if I had gotten the angle too wrong, take a better one, than to fuss with scanner and its software.
What parent post is describing is a century out of date.
What anyone on any of the up to date Linux distros does when confronted with the need to do something that is not immediately obvious is to Google "How do I do this on Ubuntu [or whatever]? If it has to be done by a command line, some of the replies will say so, and also print exactly what needs to be entered.
All the user needs to do is to learn how to open a terminal window and copy/paste the magic from the browser.
So long as you can get to Google, you do not need the man pages.
More to the point, Can the USA afford to fracture along the digital divide?
A lot of the social and political issues that I now find are important did not exist in my world ten years ago, before we had this level of Internet connectivity, and do not exist in the world of persons who do not use the Internet on a daily basis. This is not just matters of intellectual property, identity theft, and so forth. My exposure through the Internet to a much broader range of opinions on just about every topic has caused me to recognize that every little thing is a lot more complex than it appears to be. But those who lack Internet connectivity are more likely to be comfortable with having strong opinions about all kinds of things that I now realize are not so simple.
It would be interesting to see if there are correlations between Internet connectivity and Tea Party type conservative thinking. Perhaps we are already seeing a political fracture on the digital divide.
You are right that consensus has nothing to do with determining what is true. I never said it did. The definition of consensus is a general agreement among such a large majority of participants on a particular point. In politics it can be a useful indicator of what the scientists in a particular field think they know at this particular moment. That doesn't necessarily mean they are right but they probably will be more often than not.
FTFY.
That the phrase "consensus of scientific opinion" invariably introduces a political assertion and never a scientific truth is a critically important distinction to keep in mind. If you fail to understand that distinction, then your gullibility plays into the hands of anyone who is bringing a hidden agenda into the discussion. Especially so when dealing with AGW denialists who do not give a fig about the facts but only care that the political argument goes in the direction that is best for their future profits, and see smokescreens involving the confusion of scientific proofs with "consensus of scientists" as a useful debating tool. Trying to fight that kind of hidden agenda with factual arguments is going into the fray with one hand tied behind your back. Don't do that.
And your point is... what, exactly?
Most things that fly require a computer to constantly make tiny adjustments. Try throwing a dead duck, and observing its aerodynamic qualities.
The F-117 might well be a "flying brick"-- but that is a term that describes an oversized power plant used to compensate for bad aerodynamics and has nothing to do with management of the control surfaces. There is nothing inherently bricky about fly-by-wire aircraft. Now that we have the capability to build computer controlled aircraft, we can begin to evolve our airplanes beyond the limitations of aerodynamic static stability and consider airplanes that know how to reshape their wings to match current conditions, etc. Birds manage incredibly tight turns because they reduce the stall speed of the inside wing while simultaneously reducing the drag of the outside wing. We should see UAVs that are capable of doing the same RSN.
Very punny. As punishment for that pun, imagine, if you will, the image you will now and forever more associate with "drag strip". Not the place of the loud and fast cars, but the act of a transvestite removing all his clothes.
Ewwwh. Virtual visual pollution, right here on slashdot.
That word, "consensus", does not mean what you think it means.
There is no consensus involved in scientific inquiry. Consensus has nothing to do with determining what is true. Galileo.
Consensus has a lot to do with deciding who should get research grants, whether carbon credits are a good idea, where emission control standards should be set. But all that stuff is politics, not science. The consensus of opinion among scientists about an issue is but one factor in those political arguments, and it has to compete with other factors, such as whether a proposed change would adversely affect import/export balances, or cost of living, or the lifestyles of the rich and the wannabees.
Stop confusing the science of AGW with the politics of AGW. You will never get the denialists to shut up, but they are only a small (but loud) minority. An appropriate way of handling them is to just say "Suppose all these scientists are right. What changes do you think we should make now, so that in 5, 10, or 20 years your lifestyle will be as pleasant as it could possibly be? Would you favor stronger emission standards or many more windmills?"
Move the conversation to that focus, and you will find that denialists will discredit themselves in the eyes of your silent audience. The discussion can move toward where it should be: what deliberate changes can we make now that would be best for us in the future?