Deliberately writing obfuscated code can make you a better coder; you can look at the tricks you're using to make it hard to read and think "I have to make sure never to do anything like that in production code." One of the most valuable programming exercises I ever did, suggested as an "on your own time" project by one of my CS professors, was to write some short but moderately functional program (I think I did a scheduling simulator) without comments and with one-letter variable names, and then look at it again a few months later to see if it made sense. The answer: no, it didn't, and I considered the couple of hours I put into it to be time well-spent.
If you are writing code that looks anything like this in a team environment you'll be fired in a week.
Ah, idealism! Such a beautiful thing. Hold onto that for as long as you can, before the cruel world shatters your illusions.
Take all the money we spend on wars and spend it on R&D. We'll get a lot more cool stuff a lot faster. War is not useful. It's good for absolutely nothing.
If the money not spent on war were spent instead on R&D, this would be true -- cut the DoD budget in half and give the money to NIH and NSF, and we'd have a boom in science and technology like none the world has ever seen. But politics doesn't work that way. The military wastes a hell of a lot of money, no question about it. It also spend a lot of money on very worthwhile research, and like it or not, it's easier to get Congress to appropriate that money for wounded soldiers. Who, regardless of your opinion on the way in which they were injured, deserve to have their wounds cared for as well as possible by the same government that sent them out to get injured in the first place.
In the specific area of trauma care, the simple fact is that most of modern emergency and orthopedic medicine is an outgrowth of military medicine. Like it or not, next time you call 911, you'll have a much better chance of survival because of generations of work directed toward keeping wounded soldiers alive.
I'm just surprised to see someone who claims to be a biologist and therefore a member of the science community telling another person "you probably shouldn't waste your time trying to figure it all out."
A great deal of the day-to-day work of science is deciding what's worth figuring out in the time available and what isn't.
Asking denialists to do basic research and understand how science works is futile. They don't know and they don't want to know.
(I know, I fall into the same trap sometimes. As scientists, we tend to believe that if we present enough evidence, sooner or later everyone will acknowledge it. It's baffling and frustrating to argue with people who simply refuse to think that way.)
Saying "older than the oldest known species" is silly, since we can be pretty sure from both fossil and genomic evidence that modern humans have been around for about 200k years, and we're a pretty young species. "The current known oldest organism" would have been better.
OTOH... think about this for a moment. This plant came into existence around the time the first true humans were born. For all of human history, both the few thousand years of which we have records and the much longer span of which we don't, it's just been sitting there under the sea in its little patch of ocean, doing its thing. That's pretty damn cool.
So what word would you suggest using to describe the group of people in question? The word they tend to apply to themselves, "skeptic," is simply inaccurate, unless we're willing to dilute the word until it has basically no meaning at all. "Denier" is accurate because denying the evidence is what they do, and "denialist" is more specific because the act of denial is clearly an ideology with them. Are we supposed to call them just "that group of people over there," or pretend that they don't exist as a group at all?
Someone interested in discussing science would not use words like "denialist" with the obvious intention of provoking an angry response.
Sorry, there's no other word that fits -- and no, "skeptic" doesn't cut it. Rationalwiki has a nice explanation of the difference. There's no reason to play nice with people who have the capacity to understand scientific evidence but refuse to do so.
One of the few other scientific theories that seems to enjoy this distinction is the theory of evolution. However, you'd be hard pressed to find as many slashdotters making the same argument against that theory.
Actually, you will. Check any Slashdot story dealing with evolution, and you'll see a ton of comments pushing creationism (usually in its "intelligent design" guise) very often using the same "we should always question theories" argument. Sadly, almost none of these people seem willing to question the theory of gravity in the most obvious manner.
You know this. I know this. Most people on/. know this. Most people who actually do any meaningful work know this.
But the MBA class, the new nobility, who have thoroughly established their control over the corporate world and are doing their level best to take over other environments as well (the military, medicine, and academia are the places where I've seen it happening; I'm sure there are plenty of others) don't know this, or if they do, they don't care. To them, we're all peasants, and peasants don't have "skills." We're more or less interchangeable, and the only real distinction between us is that younger peasants will work for a smaller portion of scraps and take longer to drop dead in the fields.
It is nice to see that you do not believe in any meeting ritual and then describe YOUR meeting ritual. Oh, it was not a standup meeting? It was a simple, informal process for shift change and report. Sounds like a standup-meeting to me.
Sometimes we were standing up. Sometimes we were sitting down. Sometimes some people were standing up and some were sitting down. And nobody threw a medicine ball around or had to sing a ridiculous song. This isn't a ritual, it's the absence of ritual, which was my point. And if civilian businesses feel the need to create ritual while the military does fine without it, something is seriously out of whack.
"Company! Yesterday, I did a lot of pushups! Then I low-crawled! Then I cleaned my weapon and did some more pushups! Today, I'm going to walk a lot! My impediments are the group of people across the wire trying to kill me! Hoooahh!!"
Not everyone's 11B, you know.
When I was a medic, we had a simple, informal process for shift change and report. "Here's what happened on the night shift, here's what's going on with the patients we have in here right now, hope you have an easy day." Once a year or so, the DoD would go through some management-techniques craze sold to the brass by some Senator's brother-in-law, and the word would come down from on high to use whatever the latest buzzword methodology was. We'd play along for a little while, and then when they weren't looking over our shoulders any more, we'd laugh and forget about it and go back to doing what actually worked.
Nothing I've seen in my years in industry and academia since getting out have convinced me that there is any value at all in any kind of meeting ritual. The more "process" you try to ladle onto the job of communicating with your co-workers, the less actual communication takes place. This is true regardless of whether you're trying to take and hold ground, save lives, or just get the damned code out the door.
Anyone who wants to predict how I personally will vote in the 2012 election (or any election, really) will have an easy enough time doing so -- because I talk about politics all the time, in person and online, and I don't make any effort to keep my views a secret. This isn't a violation of my privacy, because I chose to put that information out there. As far as using demographic data to decide where to focus campaign efforts, politicians have been doing that as long as there have been elections. The methods they use now may be more sophisticated than they used to be, but it's silly to pretend this is something new and dangerous.
So you could end up with a government that literally tells you when to pee, for health reasons.
You could, but do you? I haven't seen any evidence that countries with socialized medicine, on the whole, put any more restrictions on people's health habits than those without.
(Short reads * massive coverage) + better sequence assembly algorithms = whole genomes, cheap. I agree that longer reads would be nice to have, but we're reaching the point where as long as read length is "long enough," we can do the rest computationally.
We need people who are big picture people, who can see the forest for the trees. Of course, without knowing about the trees, a forest is something of a mystery. We need both kinds of people.
I think it's a mistake to think that these should be two different groups of people. There are a lot of "forest" people who don't actually know anything at all about trees, and whatever they think they know about forests will be complete nonsense as a result. You see this a lot on Slashdot, actually; it seems to be a common failing among computer scientists to think that just because you can write code to describe a system, in some fashion, that means you actually understand the system. Certainly scientists in a lot of fields tend to overspecialize, but in interdisciplinary fields such as bioinformatics, you just have to start with some of the tree knowledge, or you won't be able to say anything meaningful about the forest at all.
And yes, this means spending a lot of years in school studying many different and not-obviously-related subjects, and no, that blog post you read last week doesn't count.
This. I really loathe science journalism that starts with the premise "this is what's wrong with science today" when they're talking about problems that actual scientists have been working on for a generation or more.
This whole supposed flip-flop on who's racist only happened with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Until then, the Democrats were the party of the KKK. Remember Robert Byrd saying you couldn't be in Democratic politics down South unless you were KKK?
First of all, the defining moment wasn't Nixon's campaign. It was the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; Johnson, who knew whereof he spoke, said as he signed it, "We [the Democrats] have lost the South for a generation" -- as it turned out, he was wrong only in assuming that the damage would be that short-lived. Second, it wasn't a "supposed flip-flop," you moron. The vast majority of Dixiecrats migrated to the Republicans, who welcomed them with open arms, over the next decade and a half or so. Byrd was one of the few who remained with his party, over time recognized how wrong he had been (and his former compatriots, now comfortably nestled in the Republican bosom, still were) and worked for years to undo the damage he had done. The ones who went Republican, in contrast, never changed because they never had any reason to do so, and the attitudes they brought with them largely define the Republican Party today.
Exactly what does it take to make people realize that Uranium is a perfectly natural part of the Earth?
Exactly what does it take to make people realize that artificially high local concentrations may have different effects than natural background levels?
Yep. I don't know how many times I've heard people say things like, "Remember, if you go to trial, your case will be heard by twelve people too stupid to get out of jury duty," without even considering how stupid that makes them sound.
If they were successful in un-coupling themselves from any designation as a public entity, then claiming they and their equipment is purely private? They lose public rights-of-way for any stretch of their network that crosses private property (including easements in some cases). That means any property owner with a cable or fiber crossing his or her property can charge rent or cut the thing, and local governments can get real evil and charge massive rent to the private ISPs for easement
You have to know this isn't going to happen -- not to Comcast, at any rate, or Verizon, or Time-Warner, anyway. It might happen to local companies that are trying to provide good service at a reasonable price, of course, but the exact same companies that are buying laws like this will also buy themselves exemptions from any negative consequences of the laws.
It seems to be a fairly common reaction on/. to warn certain groups trying to do evil (giant corporations buying stupid laws, and religious fanatics tearing down the wall of separation between church and state, are the two most common examples I can think of off the top of my head) to beware of unintended consequences. "Well, if they do this, then such-and-such will happen, and they'll be sorry!" But that's not the way it works in the real world. Be assured, they've thought of these consequences already, and they've planned and budgeted for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Other than flexing your geek.
Deliberately writing obfuscated code can make you a better coder; you can look at the tricks you're using to make it hard to read and think "I have to make sure never to do anything like that in production code." One of the most valuable programming exercises I ever did, suggested as an "on your own time" project by one of my CS professors, was to write some short but moderately functional program (I think I did a scheduling simulator) without comments and with one-letter variable names, and then look at it again a few months later to see if it made sense. The answer: no, it didn't, and I considered the couple of hours I put into it to be time well-spent.
If you are writing code that looks anything like this in a team environment you'll be fired in a week.
Ah, idealism! Such a beautiful thing. Hold onto that for as long as you can, before the cruel world shatters your illusions.
Actually, I think that's a pretty good almost-car analogy.
Take all the money we spend on wars and spend it on R&D. We'll get a lot more cool stuff a lot faster. War is not useful. It's good for absolutely nothing.
If the money not spent on war were spent instead on R&D, this would be true -- cut the DoD budget in half and give the money to NIH and NSF, and we'd have a boom in science and technology like none the world has ever seen. But politics doesn't work that way. The military wastes a hell of a lot of money, no question about it. It also spend a lot of money on very worthwhile research, and like it or not, it's easier to get Congress to appropriate that money for wounded soldiers. Who, regardless of your opinion on the way in which they were injured, deserve to have their wounds cared for as well as possible by the same government that sent them out to get injured in the first place.
In the specific area of trauma care, the simple fact is that most of modern emergency and orthopedic medicine is an outgrowth of military medicine. Like it or not, next time you call 911, you'll have a much better chance of survival because of generations of work directed toward keeping wounded soldiers alive.
I'm just surprised to see someone who claims to be a biologist and therefore a member of the science community telling another person "you probably shouldn't waste your time trying to figure it all out."
A great deal of the day-to-day work of science is deciding what's worth figuring out in the time available and what isn't.
Asking denialists to do basic research and understand how science works is futile. They don't know and they don't want to know.
(I know, I fall into the same trap sometimes. As scientists, we tend to believe that if we present enough evidence, sooner or later everyone will acknowledge it. It's baffling and frustrating to argue with people who simply refuse to think that way.)
Saying "older than the oldest known species" is silly, since we can be pretty sure from both fossil and genomic evidence that modern humans have been around for about 200k years, and we're a pretty young species. "The current known oldest organism" would have been better.
OTOH ... think about this for a moment. This plant came into existence around the time the first true humans were born. For all of human history, both the few thousand years of which we have records and the much longer span of which we don't, it's just been sitting there under the sea in its little patch of ocean, doing its thing. That's pretty damn cool.
So what word would you suggest using to describe the group of people in question? The word they tend to apply to themselves, "skeptic," is simply inaccurate, unless we're willing to dilute the word until it has basically no meaning at all. "Denier" is accurate because denying the evidence is what they do, and "denialist" is more specific because the act of denial is clearly an ideology with them. Are we supposed to call them just "that group of people over there," or pretend that they don't exist as a group at all?
Someone interested in discussing science would not use words like "denialist" with the obvious intention of provoking an angry response.
Sorry, there's no other word that fits -- and no, "skeptic" doesn't cut it. Rationalwiki has a nice explanation of the difference. There's no reason to play nice with people who have the capacity to understand scientific evidence but refuse to do so.
One of the few other scientific theories that seems to enjoy this distinction is the theory of evolution. However, you'd be hard pressed to find as many slashdotters making the same argument against that theory.
Actually, you will. Check any Slashdot story dealing with evolution, and you'll see a ton of comments pushing creationism (usually in its "intelligent design" guise) very often using the same "we should always question theories" argument. Sadly, almost none of these people seem willing to question the theory of gravity in the most obvious manner.
Superposition is nonsense on the face of it since any child can tell you that nothing can be its own opposite.
Any adult can tell you that "any child can tell you" is a really, really bad guide to understanding how the world works.
You know this. I know this. Most people on /. know this. Most people who actually do any meaningful work know this.
But the MBA class, the new nobility, who have thoroughly established their control over the corporate world and are doing their level best to take over other environments as well (the military, medicine, and academia are the places where I've seen it happening; I'm sure there are plenty of others) don't know this, or if they do, they don't care. To them, we're all peasants, and peasants don't have "skills." We're more or less interchangeable, and the only real distinction between us is that younger peasants will work for a smaller portion of scraps and take longer to drop dead in the fields.
It is nice to see that you do not believe in any meeting ritual and then describe YOUR meeting ritual.
Oh, it was not a standup meeting? It was a simple, informal process for shift change and report. Sounds like a standup-meeting to me.
Sometimes we were standing up. Sometimes we were sitting down. Sometimes some people were standing up and some were sitting down. And nobody threw a medicine ball around or had to sing a ridiculous song. This isn't a ritual, it's the absence of ritual, which was my point. And if civilian businesses feel the need to create ritual while the military does fine without it, something is seriously out of whack.
Wow, you've really synergized your paradigms for maximum best-of-breed stakeholder network impact, haven't you?
"Company! Yesterday, I did a lot of pushups! Then I low-crawled! Then I cleaned my weapon and did some more pushups! Today, I'm going to walk a lot! My impediments are the group of people across the wire trying to kill me! Hoooahh!!"
Not everyone's 11B, you know.
When I was a medic, we had a simple, informal process for shift change and report. "Here's what happened on the night shift, here's what's going on with the patients we have in here right now, hope you have an easy day." Once a year or so, the DoD would go through some management-techniques craze sold to the brass by some Senator's brother-in-law, and the word would come down from on high to use whatever the latest buzzword methodology was. We'd play along for a little while, and then when they weren't looking over our shoulders any more, we'd laugh and forget about it and go back to doing what actually worked.
Nothing I've seen in my years in industry and academia since getting out have convinced me that there is any value at all in any kind of meeting ritual. The more "process" you try to ladle onto the job of communicating with your co-workers, the less actual communication takes place. This is true regardless of whether you're trying to take and hold ground, save lives, or just get the damned code out the door.
Anyone who wants to predict how I personally will vote in the 2012 election (or any election, really) will have an easy enough time doing so -- because I talk about politics all the time, in person and online, and I don't make any effort to keep my views a secret. This isn't a violation of my privacy, because I chose to put that information out there. As far as using demographic data to decide where to focus campaign efforts, politicians have been doing that as long as there have been elections. The methods they use now may be more sophisticated than they used to be, but it's silly to pretend this is something new and dangerous.
So you could end up with a government that literally tells you when to pee, for health reasons.
You could, but do you? I haven't seen any evidence that countries with socialized medicine, on the whole, put any more restrictions on people's health habits than those without.
(Short reads * massive coverage) + better sequence assembly algorithms = whole genomes, cheap. I agree that longer reads would be nice to have, but we're reaching the point where as long as read length is "long enough," we can do the rest computationally.
Also, job security for bioinformaticists. ;)
We need people who are big picture people, who can see the forest for the trees. Of course, without knowing about the trees, a forest is something of a mystery. We need both kinds of people.
I think it's a mistake to think that these should be two different groups of people. There are a lot of "forest" people who don't actually know anything at all about trees, and whatever they think they know about forests will be complete nonsense as a result. You see this a lot on Slashdot, actually; it seems to be a common failing among computer scientists to think that just because you can write code to describe a system, in some fashion, that means you actually understand the system. Certainly scientists in a lot of fields tend to overspecialize, but in interdisciplinary fields such as bioinformatics, you just have to start with some of the tree knowledge, or you won't be able to say anything meaningful about the forest at all.
And yes, this means spending a lot of years in school studying many different and not-obviously-related subjects, and no, that blog post you read last week doesn't count.
This. I really loathe science journalism that starts with the premise "this is what's wrong with science today" when they're talking about problems that actual scientists have been working on for a generation or more.
This whole supposed flip-flop on who's racist only happened with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Until then, the Democrats were the party of the KKK. Remember Robert Byrd saying you couldn't be in Democratic politics down South unless you were KKK?
First of all, the defining moment wasn't Nixon's campaign. It was the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; Johnson, who knew whereof he spoke, said as he signed it, "We [the Democrats] have lost the South for a generation" -- as it turned out, he was wrong only in assuming that the damage would be that short-lived. Second, it wasn't a "supposed flip-flop," you moron. The vast majority of Dixiecrats migrated to the Republicans, who welcomed them with open arms, over the next decade and a half or so. Byrd was one of the few who remained with his party, over time recognized how wrong he had been (and his former compatriots, now comfortably nestled in the Republican bosom, still were) and worked for years to undo the damage he had done. The ones who went Republican, in contrast, never changed because they never had any reason to do so, and the attitudes they brought with them largely define the Republican Party today.
Exactly what does it take to make people realize that Uranium is a perfectly natural part of the Earth?
Exactly what does it take to make people realize that artificially high local concentrations may have different effects than natural background levels?
Uranium is harmless, it's hardly radioactive at all, it's abundant throughout nature
U-238 yes, U-235 no. And nuclear fuel rods are enriched with a fair amount of the latter.
One is an argument about terminology; the other is an argument about reality. They're not even remotely comparable.
Yep. I don't know how many times I've heard people say things like, "Remember, if you go to trial, your case will be heard by twelve people too stupid to get out of jury duty," without even considering how stupid that makes them sound.
If they were successful in un-coupling themselves from any designation as a public entity, then claiming they and their equipment is purely private? They lose public rights-of-way for any stretch of their network that crosses private property (including easements in some cases). That means any property owner with a cable or fiber crossing his or her property can charge rent or cut the thing, and local governments can get real evil and charge massive rent to the private ISPs for easement
You have to know this isn't going to happen -- not to Comcast, at any rate, or Verizon, or Time-Warner, anyway. It might happen to local companies that are trying to provide good service at a reasonable price, of course, but the exact same companies that are buying laws like this will also buy themselves exemptions from any negative consequences of the laws.
It seems to be a fairly common reaction on /. to warn certain groups trying to do evil (giant corporations buying stupid laws, and religious fanatics tearing down the wall of separation between church and state, are the two most common examples I can think of off the top of my head) to beware of unintended consequences. "Well, if they do this, then such-and-such will happen, and they'll be sorry!" But that's not the way it works in the real world. Be assured, they've thought of these consequences already, and they've planned and budgeted for them.