Wow. Political, military, and historical ignorance plus a gratuitous anti-French slur all in four lines! (Not counting whitespace.) You must have worked really hard to pack that much small-mindedness into such a short post. Um, congratulations, I guess.
Amazingly, not all wars are created equal. In fact, not all wars in oil-rich Arab countries are created equal. I know this might be difficult for you to understand.
And again, this does not in any way equate to "the Mediterranean basin cracked open and flooded the desert." That description was absurdly melodramatic and makes it sound much more like the Biblical flood than the real event. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it really screwed things up for the animals (including proto-people) living there, but it's nothing like the story of Noah.
Neither the opening of the Straits of Gibraltar nor the much more recent Black Sea flood come anywhere close to "the Mediterranean basin cracked open and flooded the desert." Like I said, half-remembered sensationalist stories.
Wow, that's a persuasive, well-reasoned argument you've got there.
I read what you wrote and the continued use of generalizations, assumptions and projections on your part continues continues to amaze me.
Your continued use of assertions without any evidence or application is pretty amazing too, I assure you.
And before you write me off as a right-wing conservative religious nut, I am actually a lefty, liberal, non-religious nut.
If so, you're doing your side of the debate a great disservice. By conflating religious belief with creationism, you're falling into one of the fundamentalists' classic traps. You've got a brain; use it.
And if you actually read that article, you'll see that "the Mediterranean basin cracked open and flooded the desert" is an absurd exaggeration. It also happened much longer ago than the Biblical Flood happened (or would have happened, if there were any truth to the story at all.)
Again, exaggeration; the facts reported in the article in no way equate to "The ark was actually found on top a mountain, albeit broken in half." Fundamentalists have a long habit of seizing on to any archaeological evidence that might possibly fit their beliefs, shoehorning it into place, and then proclaiming that it proves all their fairy tales are true. Years ago, someone (I wish I could remember who, so I could give proper credit) satirized this brilliantly:
Two thousand years in the future...
A major religion centers on the saga of a Savior-figure, a little girl -- seemingly normal but destined for greatness -- who ascended into heaven, traveled to a distant and magical land, spoke to animals and inanimate objects, battled monsters, and ultimately defeated a great illusionist (the Prince of Lies, perhaps?) in a battle of wits and willpower. For centuries, adherents of this great faith have searched for evidence of the literal truth of their beliefs, but none has ever been found.
Recently, archaelogists working near the middle of the region once occupied by the great North American empire known from ancient records as "Oosa," in the province of "Kanzs," have discovered the wreckage of a primitive dwelling and a fragmentary sign which linguists have reconstructed as spelling out the partial phrase "othy's House".
And the refutation to the GPs generalization is: No True Scotsman!
Simply invoking the name of a well-known logical fallacy isn't much of an argument. Show how it applies.
Whoa cowboy, like the GP, thats a pretty big brush you are using there. So do you want to take up your areguments with any of these people (or are Nobel Laureates Not Real Scientists (tm) ?? )
I see no reference to creationism anywhere on that list. Did you actually read what I wrote?
The ark was actually found on top a mountain, albeit broken in half.
No it wasn't.
We know that the Mediterranean basin cracked open and flooded the desert a while back, in the area where all that shit happened.
No it didn't.
You may want to argue on the basis of facts, not a half-remembered mishmash of sensationalist stories. Of course, if you're a creationist, you can't do that and still hold on to your beliefs, so never mind.
I can't believe that I am quoting this website.. but I think you should try telling your point of view to these scientists for a start.
(a) All of the scientists on that list are long dead. This is not a coincidence. Science... um... evolves, and what Bacon or Newton believed about a universe about which they knew far less than we do today is irrelevant to the modern practice of science. We take what is useful from their work -- which is a great deal, to be sure -- and discard that which time has shown not to be useful -- which is also a great deal.
(b) In the specific case of Einstein, religion's been trying to claim the guy for a long time, but he made it quite clear in a number of statements toward the end of his life that he wasn't having any. The fact that fundamentalist types have to twist his words and deliberately ignore most of what he said about the subject to make their point is a clear sign of intellectual bankruptcy.
(c) Religion != creationism. There always have been, are, and most likely always will be a great many religious scientists doing good scientific work. In order to do this, they must be willing to accept the logical conclusions of the evidence available to them, and if those conclusions conflict with their beliefs, modify their beliefs accordingly. People who can't do this -- which, given the overwhelming evidence for evolution, means at this point pretty much all creationists -- are incapable of doing actual science.
What TFA is talking about is the same as the laser broom in the same way a street-sweeping machine is the same as a guy with a pushbroom. The goal is similar, but there's a vast difference in scale.
that sort of thing is a bit more obviously wrong to the average viewer than a surgeon in the movie asking a nurse to increase the drug dosage for a patient way too much, the latter being the sort of thing that even a medical professional who's not specialized in heart/brain/whatever surgery may not pick up on (or would have to look up before stating that the dosage was wrong)...
Except when it's a common drug with a well-known dosage range and the amount they're talking about giving would either (a) have no clinical effect, or (b) kill the patient, no matter what he's being treated for. Which happens in movies and TV a lot.
It's even handled badly in the case of made-up drugs. "He's crashing -- give him 50 milliliters of Fakeanol!" Except that drugs as a rule are measured in units of mass, not volume (with the obvious exception of IV fluids.) So even if you have no idea what Fakeanol is supposed to do, it still sounds absurd to anyone with experience in any aspect of medicine.
I've been an infantryman, a medic, a civilian EMT, a programmer, and now a scientist. It's almost always that bad. The military in general, and the infantry in particular? Rarely done well, although it's probably got a higher hit-to-miss ratio in general than most of the others. Medicine? I don't know about House, since I don't watch it, but I've seen one and only one really good screen portrayal: the early seasons of ER, before it started focusing more on the personal lives of the (mostly unlikeable) characters than on their titular job. Programming? Well, we all know how badly Hollywood mangles that. Science, of any kind? Meaningless technobabble that sounds nothing like the way real scientists talk to each other, mouthed by characters who are nothing like real scientists. And I know lawyers, cops, airline pilots and flight attendants, and... wait for it... people who work in the movie industry who assure me that movie and TV portrayals of their working lives are just as bad.
Yeah, a certain amount of dramatic license is necessary, because most of what people do for a living all day, even those who work in kind of exciting jobs, is pretty boring and would make for lousy entertainment. But there's dramatic license in service of the story, and then there's screwing things up for no reason, and it's the latter that's on display here.
One of the things that makes interesting people interesting is that there are lots of things that are important in their lives, and you find out about these things through extended conversation. The stereotypical "Jesus is everything to me" true believers and "Britney Spears' music changed my life" uberfans are monomaniacs, and monomania is boring. It also tends to reveal itself very quickly, since you can't exchange more than a few words with such people without hearing about their particular obsesssion. OTOH, if religion or music comes up as part of the natural flow of conversation, then it's usually worth a listen even if what the other person is talking about isn't your particular thing. Smart people recognize this, and may have knee-jerk reactions to fanaticism -- because the only appropriate reaction to fanaticism is pretty knee-jerk: "Get the hell away from me!" -- but not to any particular interest or subject in and of itself, as long as the person talking about it is thoughtful and polite.
I don't need short sight knee jerk reactionary bozos like you in my life.
This.
Protecting professional interests is one thing; almost everyone has to disguise themselves a little bit for work. If you're lucky, you don't have to disguise yourself very much; e.g., after years in the military and industry, I'm very happy to be in academia now, where I can be more myself on the job than I ever could before. But we all have things we don't talk to our coworkers about, unless they happen to also be genuine friends.
But socially? If you can't handle my nerdiness, then to hell with you. I've got good friends, a loving fiancee, and a kid who's being aggressively recruited on purely academic grounds by some of the most prestigious colleges in the country. I'm always happy to meet new people, but the world is big enough that I've managed to surround myself with plenty of good ones already. No time for prejudiced morons.
Oh, I agree with your overall idea. Just saying I would be very surprised if the distribution were at all Gaussian. It's almost surely some heavily right-skewed distribution: if not exponential, then probably best modeled by one of the generalizations of the exponential distribution like the gamma or Weibull. If you're making the entropic argument, then the exponential makes the most sense -- Gaussian is maximum entropy on the real number line, but exponential is maximum entropy on the half-open interval between 0 and infinity, which is where the possible stellar masses fall. It's impossible to be sure until we have much better technology, of course, since the right tails of all of these distributions look much alike.
i mean, star creation should assume a gaussian distribution in terms of star size, right? doesn't that just make simple entropic sense?
Since you can't have negative mass, an exponential distribution makes more sense (and is the maximum entropy distribution.) AFAIK, and someone please tell me if I'm wrong, the mass distribution of observed, ignited stars is approximately exponential. This would fit your hypothesis since the exponential distribution is "memoryless," i.e. if you chop off the lower portion of the curve you still have the same distribution.
Amazing. The market share argument has been shown to be utter crap, over and over again, and you people just keep repeating it. Is it some kind of religious belief with you? Mac users get accused of fanaticism a lot, and not without justification, but I swear there's nobody more fanatical in the computer world than a Mac hater on a roll.
And there's one actual virus on that list... which, if you read the description, you'll see is a proof of concept. Wow, OS X is just as insecure as Windows!
GMAFB. You can talk about pwn2own all you want, but in the real world, no rational person doubts that OS X users are much, much safer from malware of all kinds than Windows users are. The market share argument doesn't hold water either, because in the "Classic" Mac OS days, there were in fact large numbers of genuinely dangerous Mac viruses in the wild -- not as many as PC (Windows and DOS) viruses to be sure, but a hell of a lot of them, as opposed to the effectively zero there are now. The millions of installed OS X machines running with default out-of-the-box setups would be a juicy target for malware authors, precisely because of the casual attitude most OS X users take toward security. If you're going to come up with a reason why this hasn't happened yet, other than just admitting OS X is inherently more secure than Windows, you're going to have to do better than a link to a Symantec list or a contest that represents security threats very different from those most users of all OSs face in everyday use.
If it weren't for the belief that the amount of wealth is fixed and you can only benefit at the expense of others, there wouldn't be a political left-wing. In spite of the fact that it's the economic equivalent of believing in a flat earth, it is a fundamental tenet of modern liberalism.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I could say "Eating live puppies for breakfast is a fundamental tenet of modern conservatism" and it would make just as much sense as your post.
Inhofe and his ilk feed off exactly the same kind of anti-intellectualism that leads people to react with bafflement or mockery to any sentence that's more than a few words long. When everything has to be a sound bite, serious debate becomes impossible.
I've spent some time around Psy-Ops too, and whether it's actually "some jedi mind trick bullshit" or not is kind of irrelevant -- a lot of the guys involved with it certainly seem to believe that it is, or at least their bosses do. A lot of what they do is absurdly overrated, but the brass keeps throwing money at them. If I pick up a gun I think is loaded, point it at you, and pull the trigger, I'm still guilty of attempted murder, even if there's no round actually in the chamber.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Political, military, and historical ignorance plus a gratuitous anti-French slur all in four lines! (Not counting whitespace.) You must have worked really hard to pack that much small-mindedness into such a short post. Um, congratulations, I guess.
Amazingly, not all wars are created equal. In fact, not all wars in oil-rich Arab countries are created equal. I know this might be difficult for you to understand.
And again, this does not in any way equate to "the Mediterranean basin cracked open and flooded the desert." That description was absurdly melodramatic and makes it sound much more like the Biblical flood than the real event. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it really screwed things up for the animals (including proto-people) living there, but it's nothing like the story of Noah.
Neither the opening of the Straits of Gibraltar nor the much more recent Black Sea flood come anywhere close to "the Mediterranean basin cracked open and flooded the desert." Like I said, half-remembered sensationalist stories.
No
Wow, that's a persuasive, well-reasoned argument you've got there.
I read what you wrote and the continued use of generalizations, assumptions and projections on your part continues continues to amaze me.
Your continued use of assertions without any evidence or application is pretty amazing too, I assure you.
And before you write me off as a right-wing conservative religious nut, I am actually a lefty, liberal, non-religious nut.
If so, you're doing your side of the debate a great disservice. By conflating religious belief with creationism, you're falling into one of the fundamentalists' classic traps. You've got a brain; use it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_theory
And if you actually read that article, you'll see that "the Mediterranean basin cracked open and flooded the desert" is an absurd exaggeration. It also happened much longer ago than the Biblical Flood happened (or would have happened, if there were any truth to the story at all.)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100428-noahs-ark-found-in-turkey-science-religion-culture/
Again, exaggeration; the facts reported in the article in no way equate to "The ark was actually found on top a mountain, albeit broken in half." Fundamentalists have a long habit of seizing on to any archaeological evidence that might possibly fit their beliefs, shoehorning it into place, and then proclaiming that it proves all their fairy tales are true. Years ago, someone (I wish I could remember who, so I could give proper credit) satirized this brilliantly:
Two thousand years in the future ...
A major religion centers on the saga of a Savior-figure, a little girl -- seemingly normal but destined for greatness -- who ascended into heaven, traveled to a distant and magical land, spoke to animals and inanimate objects, battled monsters, and ultimately defeated a great illusionist (the Prince of Lies, perhaps?) in a battle of wits and willpower. For centuries, adherents of this great faith have searched for evidence of the literal truth of their beliefs, but none has ever been found.
Recently, archaelogists working near the middle of the region once occupied by the great North American empire known from ancient records as "Oosa," in the province of "Kanzs," have discovered the wreckage of a primitive dwelling and a fragmentary sign which linguists have reconstructed as spelling out the partial phrase "othy's House".
This proves it! It's all true! Dorothy was real!
And the refutation to the GPs generalization is: No True Scotsman!
Simply invoking the name of a well-known logical fallacy isn't much of an argument. Show how it applies.
Whoa cowboy, like the GP, thats a pretty big brush you are using there. So do you want to take up your areguments with any of these people (or are Nobel Laureates Not Real Scientists (tm) ?? )
I see no reference to creationism anywhere on that list. Did you actually read what I wrote?
The ark was actually found on top a mountain, albeit broken in half.
No it wasn't.
We know that the Mediterranean basin cracked open and flooded the desert a while back, in the area where all that shit happened.
No it didn't.
You may want to argue on the basis of facts, not a half-remembered mishmash of sensationalist stories. Of course, if you're a creationist, you can't do that and still hold on to your beliefs, so never mind.
I can't believe that I am quoting this website .. but I think you should try telling your point of view to these scientists for a start.
(a) All of the scientists on that list are long dead. This is not a coincidence. Science ... um ... evolves, and what Bacon or Newton believed about a universe about which they knew far less than we do today is irrelevant to the modern practice of science. We take what is useful from their work -- which is a great deal, to be sure -- and discard that which time has shown not to be useful -- which is also a great deal.
(b) In the specific case of Einstein, religion's been trying to claim the guy for a long time, but he made it quite clear in a number of statements toward the end of his life that he wasn't having any. The fact that fundamentalist types have to twist his words and deliberately ignore most of what he said about the subject to make their point is a clear sign of intellectual bankruptcy.
(c) Religion != creationism. There always have been, are, and most likely always will be a great many religious scientists doing good scientific work. In order to do this, they must be willing to accept the logical conclusions of the evidence available to them, and if those conclusions conflict with their beliefs, modify their beliefs accordingly. People who can't do this -- which, given the overwhelming evidence for evolution, means at this point pretty much all creationists -- are incapable of doing actual science.
What TFA is talking about is the same as the laser broom in the same way a street-sweeping machine is the same as a guy with a pushbroom. The goal is similar, but there's a vast difference in scale.
that sort of thing is a bit more obviously wrong to the average viewer than a surgeon in the movie asking a nurse to increase the drug dosage for a patient way too much, the latter being the sort of thing that even a medical professional who's not specialized in heart/brain/whatever surgery may not pick up on (or would have to look up before stating that the dosage was wrong)...
Except when it's a common drug with a well-known dosage range and the amount they're talking about giving would either (a) have no clinical effect, or (b) kill the patient, no matter what he's being treated for. Which happens in movies and TV a lot.
It's even handled badly in the case of made-up drugs. "He's crashing -- give him 50 milliliters of Fakeanol!" Except that drugs as a rule are measured in units of mass, not volume (with the obvious exception of IV fluids.) So even if you have no idea what Fakeanol is supposed to do, it still sounds absurd to anyone with experience in any aspect of medicine.
Yeah, it pretty much is that bad.
I've been an infantryman, a medic, a civilian EMT, a programmer, and now a scientist. It's almost always that bad. The military in general, and the infantry in particular? Rarely done well, although it's probably got a higher hit-to-miss ratio in general than most of the others. Medicine? I don't know about House, since I don't watch it, but I've seen one and only one really good screen portrayal: the early seasons of ER, before it started focusing more on the personal lives of the (mostly unlikeable) characters than on their titular job. Programming? Well, we all know how badly Hollywood mangles that. Science, of any kind? Meaningless technobabble that sounds nothing like the way real scientists talk to each other, mouthed by characters who are nothing like real scientists. And I know lawyers, cops, airline pilots and flight attendants, and ... wait for it ... people who work in the movie industry who assure me that movie and TV portrayals of their working lives are just as bad.
Yeah, a certain amount of dramatic license is necessary, because most of what people do for a living all day, even those who work in kind of exciting jobs, is pretty boring and would make for lousy entertainment. But there's dramatic license in service of the story, and then there's screwing things up for no reason, and it's the latter that's on display here.
One of the things that makes interesting people interesting is that there are lots of things that are important in their lives, and you find out about these things through extended conversation. The stereotypical "Jesus is everything to me" true believers and "Britney Spears' music changed my life" uberfans are monomaniacs, and monomania is boring. It also tends to reveal itself very quickly, since you can't exchange more than a few words with such people without hearing about their particular obsesssion. OTOH, if religion or music comes up as part of the natural flow of conversation, then it's usually worth a listen even if what the other person is talking about isn't your particular thing. Smart people recognize this, and may have knee-jerk reactions to fanaticism -- because the only appropriate reaction to fanaticism is pretty knee-jerk: "Get the hell away from me!" -- but not to any particular interest or subject in and of itself, as long as the person talking about it is thoughtful and polite.
I don't need short sight knee jerk reactionary bozos like you in my life.
This.
Protecting professional interests is one thing; almost everyone has to disguise themselves a little bit for work. If you're lucky, you don't have to disguise yourself very much; e.g., after years in the military and industry, I'm very happy to be in academia now, where I can be more myself on the job than I ever could before. But we all have things we don't talk to our coworkers about, unless they happen to also be genuine friends.
But socially? If you can't handle my nerdiness, then to hell with you. I've got good friends, a loving fiancee, and a kid who's being aggressively recruited on purely academic grounds by some of the most prestigious colleges in the country. I'm always happy to meet new people, but the world is big enough that I've managed to surround myself with plenty of good ones already. No time for prejudiced morons.
Oh, I agree with your overall idea. Just saying I would be very surprised if the distribution were at all Gaussian. It's almost surely some heavily right-skewed distribution: if not exponential, then probably best modeled by one of the generalizations of the exponential distribution like the gamma or Weibull. If you're making the entropic argument, then the exponential makes the most sense -- Gaussian is maximum entropy on the real number line, but exponential is maximum entropy on the half-open interval between 0 and infinity, which is where the possible stellar masses fall. It's impossible to be sure until we have much better technology, of course, since the right tails of all of these distributions look much alike.
i mean, star creation should assume a gaussian distribution in terms of star size, right? doesn't that just make simple entropic sense?
Since you can't have negative mass, an exponential distribution makes more sense (and is the maximum entropy distribution.) AFAIK, and someone please tell me if I'm wrong, the mass distribution of observed, ignited stars is approximately exponential. This would fit your hypothesis since the exponential distribution is "memoryless," i.e. if you chop off the lower portion of the curve you still have the same distribution.
ClamAV runs as well on Macs as on any Unix system, and if you want a GUI there's ClamXav.
Thank you!
A historical figure is not, and cannot be, anyone's property. End of story.
Amazing. The market share argument has been shown to be utter crap, over and over again, and you people just keep repeating it. Is it some kind of religious belief with you? Mac users get accused of fanaticism a lot, and not without justification, but I swear there's nobody more fanatical in the computer world than a Mac hater on a roll.
And there's one actual virus on that list ... which, if you read the description, you'll see is a proof of concept. Wow, OS X is just as insecure as Windows!
GMAFB. You can talk about pwn2own all you want, but in the real world, no rational person doubts that OS X users are much, much safer from malware of all kinds than Windows users are. The market share argument doesn't hold water either, because in the "Classic" Mac OS days, there were in fact large numbers of genuinely dangerous Mac viruses in the wild -- not as many as PC (Windows and DOS) viruses to be sure, but a hell of a lot of them, as opposed to the effectively zero there are now. The millions of installed OS X machines running with default out-of-the-box setups would be a juicy target for malware authors, precisely because of the casual attitude most OS X users take toward security. If you're going to come up with a reason why this hasn't happened yet, other than just admitting OS X is inherently more secure than Windows, you're going to have to do better than a link to a Symantec list or a contest that represents security threats very different from those most users of all OSs face in everyday use.
If it weren't for the belief that the amount of wealth is fixed and you can only benefit at the expense of others, there wouldn't be a political left-wing. In spite of the fact that it's the economic equivalent of believing in a flat earth, it is a fundamental tenet of modern liberalism.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I could say "Eating live puppies for breakfast is a fundamental tenet of modern conservatism" and it would make just as much sense as your post.
in the last ~100 years we've gone from thinking nothing heavier than air could ever fly
I'm pretty sure people knew before 1911 that birds weren't filled with helium.
(I agree with the overall point of your post, but it bugs me when people assume our ancestors were stupid.)
Inhofe and his ilk feed off exactly the same kind of anti-intellectualism that leads people to react with bafflement or mockery to any sentence that's more than a few words long. When everything has to be a sound bite, serious debate becomes impossible.
I've spent some time around Psy-Ops too, and whether it's actually "some jedi mind trick bullshit" or not is kind of irrelevant -- a lot of the guys involved with it certainly seem to believe that it is, or at least their bosses do. A lot of what they do is absurdly overrated, but the brass keeps throwing money at them. If I pick up a gun I think is loaded, point it at you, and pull the trigger, I'm still guilty of attempted murder, even if there's no round actually in the chamber.