Yep. It would be satisfying to think this was just a particularly Coloradoan thing--"Out here in the West, you know, we look out for each other, and our politicians are just folks like the rest of us"--but actually I think it's common in a lot of places. They may just cynically be trolling for votes, of course, but as long as it gets them to do their jobs better, I don't care that much about their motivations.
According to modern evolutionary theory, mutations create ALL change.
Caveat: this is only true if you define "mutation" very broadly. Usually, when biologists say "mutation," it means a change in the DNA sequence, but we're learning more and more about heritable non-sequence changes (this usually goes under the name "epigenetics") which can also affect phenotype, and thus have an evolutionary impact. It's still true as far as we know that most heritable changes are sequence changes, but by no means all.
At some point we're going to have to adapt our vocabulary to deal with this, perhaps by returning to the old meaning of "gene" as "a unit of inheritance" and expanding the meanings of "mutation," "expression," and related terms accordingly. It hasn't happened yet, because the accepted meanings have served us well for 50+ years, and technical jargon is often, quite reasonably, very resistant to change.
mutations are so rarely beneficial, the majority of evolution comes from sexual inheritance and selection pressure
If mutation weren't in there as a factor as well, we'd all still be single-celled organisms swimming around in the primordial soup. Or we wouldn't be here at all--one of the many mass extinction events in Earth's history would have wiped out whatever life existed, because there'd be no biodiversity to speak of, no variety of forms to survive and adapt to the new environment. For all we know, this did happen several times in the planet's history before the current tree of life took root.
The point is that the mutation (putatively) allowed humans to survive on a vegetarian diet, when they couldn't do so before. This would be very valuable for a nomadic "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle in times and places where there was plenty to gather but not so much to hunt (or fish, as the case may be).
State legislators, particularly Representatives, tend to be a whole lot more responsive to their constituents than do their counterparts at the national level, for the simple reason that they represent a lot fewer people. For example, in Colorado, we have about 5.1 million people and our House of Representatives is 65 people, which means each Rep has about 78,000 constituents, of whom about a third are actual voters (going from turnout figures in recent elections). Those are numbers small enough to get some real attention when a constituent has a problem, and I know several people who have done just that.
No, it won't. A simple javascript program is not representative of a complex system design, and it will, on the contrary, make people think that this new MIS they are requesting from the software development department can't be all that much more complex than a bit of jquery.
This is a really important point, and I'm surprised more people haven't picked up on it. Learning to write short code snippets that do one thing is really easy for most reasonably intelligent people. Learning to understand the scope of a major project takes years of experience.
If you are telling me with a straight face that millions of ballots are counted with no mistakes, I have a bridge to sell you.
You're missing the point. Margin of Error is a statistical concept having to do with what happens when you take a small sample from a large population (e.g., what happens in pre-election polls). Mistakes in counting are a type of measurement error, which is a different beast entirely and can occur whether you're taking a small sample or measuring the entire population (as is the case in elections, where "population" in this sense refers to the set of people who cast ballots). Margin of error can be calculated based on the numbers measured (and if you run the MoE calculations on the "count all ballots" scenario, you will get a result of precisely 0) while measurement error, pretty much by definition, can't. The only way to detect measurement error is by calibration, which in this case means a recount.
At one college and one university that I attended, I was told outright by several professors that Wikipedia won't be accepted as a source.
And I was told in high school, well before Wikipedia existed, that any encyclopedia was unacceptable as a source. The message was, "Read the encyclopedia article to get an overview of the subject if you want. Then go out and find actual citable sources for your paper. If you cite the encyclopedia, you'll fail." It's a whole lot easier to do this in the modern world, since Wikipedia links to sources, and there's always Google (especially Google Scholar, if you're looking for sources of academic quality) for a broader view, so there's really no excuse.
For most of Christian history, the Bible was interpreted metaphorically in areas where a literal interpretation would lead to absurd results. Even St. Augustine, a highly conservative Christian writing in the 4th-5th century, said that Christians should not hold up the faith to ridicule by insisting on a literal interpretation of the Bible: "Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn."
This implies that literalism was already alive and well in those days, since Augustine took the time to criticize it.
Anyone who thinks their own political party is virtuous while the other guys' party is a hive of scum and villainy is either naive or disingenuous.
This is true. It is also true that virtue vs. scum and villainy is a continuum, not a binary state, and anyone who thinks that the two major parties fall in exactly the same place along that continuum isn't paying attention.
Star Wars was a great movie, but it's not a particularly good guide to understanding how the world actually works.
The majority of airline landings are still done manually, and even the best "auto-land" still requires substantial human input. This is another variant of the "airliners all land themselves these days" myth that seems to be so prevalent, and if it's used as a basis for policy ("Sure we're ready for self-driving cars, just look at airplanes!") a particularly dangerous one.
But I'm pretty sure starting it off by taking a holier-than-thou condescending attitude towards anyone who would sully themselves by being a Windows server admin, and referring to them as a Windows "fan" instead of a Windows professional,
Maybe you missed the part where he called himself a "Unix fan" right at the start of the post? I agree that "fan" is a silly word to use here--operating systems aren't baseball teams--but if he's being condescending toward Windows admins, he's also being condescending toward himself, which is a neat trick.
If I were an astronaut I would want guys in the control room to have the clean-cut NASA-circa-1969 look. I would not trust my life to the guys that were in the control room during the Curiosity landing. I'm sure they are good at their jobs but they just don't look very professional to me.
I have a picture of my father when he was a NASA engineer for Apollo. Ponytail, beard, work shirt and jeans, which was pretty typical for those in his age group (the older engineers did tend toward the crew-cut-and-starched-shirt look). Yeah, the guys in the control room where the TV cameras could see them looked clean-cut and "professional," but a lot of the ones who actually built the machines and made them go didn't bother with that crap, because they knew--as any sensible person should--that real professionalism isn't something you can put on like a costume. This is as true now as it was then.
average looking college students onto campus to randomly proposition people of the opposite sex
"Average looking college students" of both sexes are a pretty attractive group as a whole; they're generally healthy, in their reproductive prime, and have at least enough social status to get into college in the first place. So the experiences of the participants in this study aren't necessarily typical of what people from a demographically broader group would see--and given that the specific ways in which college students are attractive (especially youth and fertility) are generally understood to make up a larger component of women's attractiveness than of men's, I suspect that the results for them female study participants are more biased than those for the male participants.
No. If it's satire, it's very good satire, because it's nearly indistinguishable from many comments I've seen on/. and elsewhere that I'm quite sure were entirely sincere.
This is more about politics. Feminist groups will back anything that takes control away from men. It's incredibly childish.. In this case, it denies men a good percentage of sexual pleasure which, anecdotally anyway, most feminists would cheer for.
Right, because traditional Judaism is soooo feminist. [rolls eyes] Are you actually listening to yourself?
The male equivalent of clitoridectomy or female "circumcision" (more accurately referred to as female genital mutilation, or FGM) would be not removal of the foreskin, but the removal of the head of the penis. There is simply no rational comparison between FGM and circumcision, and anti-circumcision activists make themselves look like fools by claiming that there is. I'm sorry for what you went through, but you have to recognize that your experience is not in any way typical, and was--as another poster has pointed out--the result of malpractice on the part of your pediatrician, not a standard medical procedure which is regularly performed thousands of times per day.
Really? You've never read the bucketloads of comments dismissing entire fields of science (evolutionary biology, climatology, and epidemiology are among the favorites; cosmology and astrophysics are also popular among some groups) because "they can't do controlled experiments, and that means the don't follow The Scientific Method"? You must be reading a better/. than I am.
Slashdot Mirror
it was in low earth orbit NOT space
How do you define "space," exactly?
The Conservative ... does not give a flying tackle about his constituents.
Well, I think you've identified a major part of the problem right there.
Yep. It would be satisfying to think this was just a particularly Coloradoan thing--"Out here in the West, you know, we look out for each other, and our politicians are just folks like the rest of us"--but actually I think it's common in a lot of places. They may just cynically be trolling for votes, of course, but as long as it gets them to do their jobs better, I don't care that much about their motivations.
I cannot wait to see the looks on your faces when Judgement Day arrives. Now go love thy brother as yourselves and forgive.
Congratulations, you've just summed up the entire fundamentalist mentality in two sentences. Good job!
According to modern evolutionary theory, mutations create ALL change.
Caveat: this is only true if you define "mutation" very broadly. Usually, when biologists say "mutation," it means a change in the DNA sequence, but we're learning more and more about heritable non-sequence changes (this usually goes under the name "epigenetics") which can also affect phenotype, and thus have an evolutionary impact. It's still true as far as we know that most heritable changes are sequence changes, but by no means all.
At some point we're going to have to adapt our vocabulary to deal with this, perhaps by returning to the old meaning of "gene" as "a unit of inheritance" and expanding the meanings of "mutation," "expression," and related terms accordingly. It hasn't happened yet, because the accepted meanings have served us well for 50+ years, and technical jargon is often, quite reasonably, very resistant to change.
mutations are so rarely beneficial, the majority of evolution comes from sexual inheritance and selection pressure
If mutation weren't in there as a factor as well, we'd all still be single-celled organisms swimming around in the primordial soup. Or we wouldn't be here at all--one of the many mass extinction events in Earth's history would have wiped out whatever life existed, because there'd be no biodiversity to speak of, no variety of forms to survive and adapt to the new environment. For all we know, this did happen several times in the planet's history before the current tree of life took root.
The point is that the mutation (putatively) allowed humans to survive on a vegetarian diet, when they couldn't do so before. This would be very valuable for a nomadic "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle in times and places where there was plenty to gather but not so much to hunt (or fish, as the case may be).
LOL I'm sure they'd get right on it!
State legislators, particularly Representatives, tend to be a whole lot more responsive to their constituents than do their counterparts at the national level, for the simple reason that they represent a lot fewer people. For example, in Colorado, we have about 5.1 million people and our House of Representatives is 65 people, which means each Rep has about 78,000 constituents, of whom about a third are actual voters (going from turnout figures in recent elections). Those are numbers small enough to get some real attention when a constituent has a problem, and I know several people who have done just that.
No, it won't. A simple javascript program is not representative of a complex system design, and it will, on the contrary, make people think that this new MIS they are requesting from the software development department can't be all that much more complex than a bit of jquery.
This is a really important point, and I'm surprised more people haven't picked up on it. Learning to write short code snippets that do one thing is really easy for most reasonably intelligent people. Learning to understand the scope of a major project takes years of experience.
If you are telling me with a straight face that millions of ballots are counted with no mistakes, I have a bridge to sell you.
You're missing the point. Margin of Error is a statistical concept having to do with what happens when you take a small sample from a large population (e.g., what happens in pre-election polls). Mistakes in counting are a type of measurement error, which is a different beast entirely and can occur whether you're taking a small sample or measuring the entire population (as is the case in elections, where "population" in this sense refers to the set of people who cast ballots). Margin of error can be calculated based on the numbers measured (and if you run the MoE calculations on the "count all ballots" scenario, you will get a result of precisely 0) while measurement error, pretty much by definition, can't. The only way to detect measurement error is by calibration, which in this case means a recount.
They may try, but God will just harden the Central Committee's hearts. He does that whenever He wants to make a point.
manaway wins the internet for today.
At one college and one university that I attended, I was told outright by several professors that Wikipedia won't be accepted as a source.
And I was told in high school, well before Wikipedia existed, that any encyclopedia was unacceptable as a source. The message was, "Read the encyclopedia article to get an overview of the subject if you want. Then go out and find actual citable sources for your paper. If you cite the encyclopedia, you'll fail." It's a whole lot easier to do this in the modern world, since Wikipedia links to sources, and there's always Google (especially Google Scholar, if you're looking for sources of academic quality) for a broader view, so there's really no excuse.
For most of Christian history, the Bible was interpreted metaphorically in areas where a literal interpretation would lead to absurd results. Even St. Augustine, a highly conservative Christian writing in the 4th-5th century, said that Christians should not hold up the faith to ridicule by insisting on a literal interpretation of the Bible: "Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn."
This implies that literalism was already alive and well in those days, since Augustine took the time to criticize it.
Anyone who thinks their own political party is virtuous while the other guys' party is a hive of scum and villainy is either naive or disingenuous.
This is true. It is also true that virtue vs. scum and villainy is a continuum, not a binary state, and anyone who thinks that the two major parties fall in exactly the same place along that continuum isn't paying attention.
Star Wars was a great movie, but it's not a particularly good guide to understanding how the world actually works.
Oh, that is brilliant. Thanks for the link.
The majority of airline landings are still done manually, and even the best "auto-land" still requires substantial human input. This is another variant of the "airliners all land themselves these days" myth that seems to be so prevalent, and if it's used as a basis for policy ("Sure we're ready for self-driving cars, just look at airplanes!") a particularly dangerous one.
But I'm pretty sure starting it off by taking a holier-than-thou condescending attitude towards anyone who would sully themselves by being a Windows server admin, and referring to them as a Windows "fan" instead of a Windows professional,
Maybe you missed the part where he called himself a "Unix fan" right at the start of the post? I agree that "fan" is a silly word to use here--operating systems aren't baseball teams--but if he's being condescending toward Windows admins, he's also being condescending toward himself, which is a neat trick.
If I were an astronaut I would want guys in the control room to have the clean-cut NASA-circa-1969 look. I would not trust my life to the guys that were in the control room during the Curiosity landing. I'm sure they are good at their jobs but they just don't look very professional to me.
I have a picture of my father when he was a NASA engineer for Apollo. Ponytail, beard, work shirt and jeans, which was pretty typical for those in his age group (the older engineers did tend toward the crew-cut-and-starched-shirt look). Yeah, the guys in the control room where the TV cameras could see them looked clean-cut and "professional," but a lot of the ones who actually built the machines and made them go didn't bother with that crap, because they knew--as any sensible person should--that real professionalism isn't something you can put on like a costume. This is as true now as it was then.
average looking college students onto campus to randomly proposition people of the opposite sex
"Average looking college students" of both sexes are a pretty attractive group as a whole; they're generally healthy, in their reproductive prime, and have at least enough social status to get into college in the first place. So the experiences of the participants in this study aren't necessarily typical of what people from a demographically broader group would see--and given that the specific ways in which college students are attractive (especially youth and fertility) are generally understood to make up a larger component of women's attractiveness than of men's, I suspect that the results for them female study participants are more biased than those for the male participants.
No. If it's satire, it's very good satire, because it's nearly indistinguishable from many comments I've seen on /. and elsewhere that I'm quite sure were entirely sincere.
This is more about politics. Feminist groups will back anything that takes control away from men. It's incredibly childish.. In this case, it denies men a good percentage of sexual pleasure which, anecdotally anyway, most feminists would cheer for.
Right, because traditional Judaism is soooo feminist. [rolls eyes] Are you actually listening to yourself?
I honestly can't tell if you're kidding or not. Poe's Law strikes again.
I just knew someone was going to say this.
The male equivalent of clitoridectomy or female "circumcision" (more accurately referred to as female genital mutilation, or FGM) would be not removal of the foreskin, but the removal of the head of the penis. There is simply no rational comparison between FGM and circumcision, and anti-circumcision activists make themselves look like fools by claiming that there is. I'm sorry for what you went through, but you have to recognize that your experience is not in any way typical, and was--as another poster has pointed out--the result of malpractice on the part of your pediatrician, not a standard medical procedure which is regularly performed thousands of times per day.
Really? You've never read the bucketloads of comments dismissing entire fields of science (evolutionary biology, climatology, and epidemiology are among the favorites; cosmology and astrophysics are also popular among some groups) because "they can't do controlled experiments, and that means the don't follow The Scientific Method"? You must be reading a better /. than I am.