Perhaps when people who don't have PhDs can't work a remote or leave their keys in their car, you don't notice as much because there's nothing in particular about them that creates the expectation of intelligence? The idea that there's an inverse correlation is a very common defensive reaction on the part of people who don't have much of any kind of intelligence, but there's precious little evidence for it in real life. It's more a matter of selection bias: we notice when smart people do stupid things. When stupid people do stupid things, it's business as usual.
This is a common defensive reaction on the part of people who are just kind of all-around dumb. "Well, I may not have all that book-learning, but at least I've got street smarts!" No, sorry, you really don't.
Japan was already pretty badly beaten by the time the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If the Allies had managed to have the A-bomb ready to go in, say, 1943, to be sure the wars in both the European and Pacific theaters would have been shorter, but there still would have plenty of fighting to do on the ground. Remember, we'd been pounding the Axis flat with conventional bombs for years (the effect of some of the firebombings was certainly comparable to the effect of nukes, just more labor-intensive) and it was far from enough to win the war by itself.
They kind of deliberately broke everything in the series finale. A third season of TTSCC would have been great, but if they were going to make one, the second season would almost surely not have ended the way it did. It's kind of hard to see how the series would go from the season ending they made -- or rather, it could certainly go on, but it would really be a completely different show.
Dollhouse started slow, but I think it's grown steadily more interesting. That's the way a lot of Whedon's work is for me, actually. Buffy hooked me right away, but Angel and Firefly both took a while. (In the case of Firefly, I got really dedicated to the series just about the the cancellation rumors started solidifying...) So at this point I kind of assume that when I tune into a new Whedon project, it will be worth waiting for the good stuff.
Unfortunately, this is not exactly a winning formula in Hollywood.
PE is trying to raise a quarter of a million dollars, which is probably a reasonable goal for a band with their name recognition, and will be enough to produce an album. Raising a thousand or ten thousand times as much, a couple hundred bucks at a time, just for the rights to make a movie or a TV show? It's a nice idea, but I don't think it's likely to happen.
And even if it did happen, what would we do with it? There'd still need to be a guiding force, someone running the project. Good luck getting all the fans who chip in to agree on that.
There was a coherent plot. Or rather, there were several coherent subplots, which wove together in a fascinating and (IMO) very believable way. This took more than five minutes to develop, and didn't involve misplaced Transformers with motorcycles in their legs, so a lot of people might have missed it.
They, um, terminated the excellent Sarah Connor Chronicles to make way for that Transforminators piece of shit. And then they showed they can't even handle that. Way to go, guys.
Well, apparently they're right, for the moment, that that's where the money is. Until it isn't, a couple of big-budget vampire movies that are already in the pipeline flop, and they move on to some other trend.
Me, I like a good vampire movie as much as the next goth, but I haven't seen anything that qualifies for quite a while. Variety is good; I'd love to see more well-done cinematic SF, too. Not holding my breath.
I'm pretty sure the phrase "digital rights management" was invented to describe the kind of thing the RIAA/MPAA/BSA pushes, after people got wise to the fact that "copy protection" meant there was a very good chance that legitimately purchased music, movies, or software wouldn't work on their home machines. I certainly can't remember a case when "DRM" has been used to describe a legitimate computer security practice. And for things like not sharing confidential documents over P2P, "computer security" (or in context, just plain "security") is a perfectly adequate description.
Zombies are fun. They're fun for costumes, they're fun as horror movie bad guys, they're fun to blow away in video games.
Pirates and ninjas and vampires are fun, too, but they've been overexposed. Zombies are about to go the same way, I suspect, and they'll drop off the cultural radar screen for a while. Then they'll come back (they always come back...) after people have gone through a few more cycles of archetype-of-the-week.
That's really all the explanation needed. Trying to read some deep cultural significance into what monsters are popular at the moment is almost always a fool's game. Even Godzilla very quickly outgrew its origins as a nuclear metaphor, and just became a fun monster.
Apparently there's also a gene carried on the Y chromosome of which one common variant makes its carriers unable to notice bad driving in 50% of the population.
It varies by time and place, I suppose. In my high school experience (mid-80's, Denver) "student-athlete" was almost an oxymoron, as a matter of unwritten but well-understood policy. The few students who did excel both academically and athletically ran into just enormous amounts of bullshit from the school and from other students. And from everything I've heard since then, I suspect my experience was a lot more typical than yours, but of course I don't know for sure.
Like most social dichotomies, it exists as long as people believe it exists, and clearly a lot of people still do believe that. I blame this on high school. In the adult world, of course you're right that there are plenty of smart social people and dumb asocial ones, and generally speaking, the working world rewards people who are good at both their jobs and shooting the shit with their coworkers. But in high school, the lines are pretty clearly drawn. Kids who are good at math don't get laid, no matter how good-looking they are. Football coaches strongly discourage their star players from taking tough classes to make sure they'll have more time for practice. That kind of thing. It takes a long time for people to get over this, and some never do.
It varies, and I think jock/nerd is pretty well orthogonal to warfighting ability. Eisenhower, famously, was a football coach, and Patton on the battlefield was his star player; on the other hand, a succession of distinctly jockish Union commanders failed against the Confederacy's much better lineup of jocks, and it took nerds like Grant and Sherman to show them how it was done. As far as the front line goes, if you get a bunch of sports-obsessed young men together in an army, making themselves think of themselves as the home team at a the big game is one very effective way to motivate them, but it's not the only way. Going farther back, the Greeks were jocks, the Romans were nerds; look how that turned out.
And while [flat for] "about a decade" is an exaggeration
Nice job of twisting my words; your insertion of "[flat for]" and then citing the change between 1998 and 2008 is a classic straw man maneuver. The reality is that while "about a decade" is an exaggeration, "nearly flat" isn't, if you talk about the last eight years rather than the last ten. I made the distinction very clear; you deliberately blurred it. Have you considered applying for a job with Fox News?
Well, for the NIH, at least, here is a source with much more recent figures. And while "about a decade" is an exaggeration (a decade ago, Clinton still had over a year to go in office) it is undeniably true that the NIH budget was "essentially flat" during the Bush years. The year-over-year increases barely kept pace with inflation in most cases, and sometimes fell behind. I don't know about NSF and other non-DoD scientific funding agencies, but I'm guessing they suffered the same fate.
Yes, war sucks. But sometimes it is very necessary to defend ones life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, no matter what nation they live in.
[sigh] Everyone understands that, except for the most extreme pacifists. What many people don't seem to understand is that just because a particular war is sometimes necessary, it does not follow that every war is always necessary. Specifically, it's been quite a long time since the US or any of the great powers has fought a necessary war, and yet somehow we keep finding wars to fight.
As a medic in Desert Storm, I was quite annoyed that the "video game war" they showed on CNN bore no apparent relation to the bloody mess I saw. If more realistic, modern video games make people think about what war actually looks like on the sharp end, well, good. Unfortunately, as your post makes plain, there will always be people who don't get the message.
What so many evolutionists get hung up on, I believe, is a confusion between microevolution and macroevolution. In a sense, they believe that they can "prove" macroevolution by induction on microevolution.
What/THE FUCK/ are the scare quotes for? Junk DNA is junk because it's content is useless,
You have no idea "What/THE FUCK/" you're talking about. Please stop spreading misinformation that even in the 70's, when the term "junk DNA" was coined, people had a vague idea probably wasn't right, and which we've known with certainty for 20+ years isn't true.
This idea seems to have become embedded in the pop-sci mythos nearly as firmly as the "we only use 10% of our brains" thing, and it's equally false. Absolutely everyone working in genetics these days understands that non-coding DNA has multiple biological functions.
In answer to your question: yes, it's entirely possible. I just really felt the need to get the above out of the way first.
What I meant by "these days" is that for most of the 20th century, executives generally went down with the ship. Sure, the top executives of a failed company were still going to be much better off than the Joe Schmoes who worked for that company, but they were also going to be much worse off than the executives of successful companies. It's only in the last generation or so that the C*O class has learned to insulate itself almost completely from any consequences of failure. I agree with you that this is a return to form; executives are the new nobility, and it took them a while after the fall of the old nobility in the 18th and 19th centuries to figure out all the tricks.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps when people who don't have PhDs can't work a remote or leave their keys in their car, you don't notice as much because there's nothing in particular about them that creates the expectation of intelligence? The idea that there's an inverse correlation is a very common defensive reaction on the part of people who don't have much of any kind of intelligence, but there's precious little evidence for it in real life. It's more a matter of selection bias: we notice when smart people do stupid things. When stupid people do stupid things, it's business as usual.
This is a common defensive reaction on the part of people who are just kind of all-around dumb. "Well, I may not have all that book-learning, but at least I've got street smarts!" No, sorry, you really don't.
Japan was already pretty badly beaten by the time the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If the Allies had managed to have the A-bomb ready to go in, say, 1943, to be sure the wars in both the European and Pacific theaters would have been shorter, but there still would have plenty of fighting to do on the ground. Remember, we'd been pounding the Axis flat with conventional bombs for years (the effect of some of the firebombings was certainly comparable to the effect of nukes, just more labor-intensive) and it was far from enough to win the war by itself.
They kind of deliberately broke everything in the series finale. A third season of TTSCC would have been great, but if they were going to make one, the second season would almost surely not have ended the way it did. It's kind of hard to see how the series would go from the season ending they made -- or rather, it could certainly go on, but it would really be a completely different show.
Dollhouse started slow, but I think it's grown steadily more interesting. That's the way a lot of Whedon's work is for me, actually. Buffy hooked me right away, but Angel and Firefly both took a while. (In the case of Firefly, I got really dedicated to the series just about the the cancellation rumors started solidifying ...) So at this point I kind of assume that when I tune into a new Whedon project, it will be worth waiting for the good stuff.
Unfortunately, this is not exactly a winning formula in Hollywood.
PE is trying to raise a quarter of a million dollars, which is probably a reasonable goal for a band with their name recognition, and will be enough to produce an album. Raising a thousand or ten thousand times as much, a couple hundred bucks at a time, just for the rights to make a movie or a TV show? It's a nice idea, but I don't think it's likely to happen.
And even if it did happen, what would we do with it? There'd still need to be a guiding force, someone running the project. Good luck getting all the fans who chip in to agree on that.
There was a coherent plot. Or rather, there were several coherent subplots, which wove together in a fascinating and (IMO) very believable way. This took more than five minutes to develop, and didn't involve misplaced Transformers with motorcycles in their legs, so a lot of people might have missed it.
Seriously, that's probably the best thing that could possibly happen to it at this point. Too bad Whedon doesn't have the money for a real offer.
They, um, terminated the excellent Sarah Connor Chronicles to make way for that Transforminators piece of shit. And then they showed they can't even handle that. Way to go, guys.
I think all rational people realize that when someone whips out the Nazi comparison that they're just behaving irrationally
Normally you'd be right, but you know, when the council voted to invade Poland, someone had to dare to speak the truth!
Well, apparently they're right, for the moment, that that's where the money is. Until it isn't, a couple of big-budget vampire movies that are already in the pipeline flop, and they move on to some other trend.
Me, I like a good vampire movie as much as the next goth, but I haven't seen anything that qualifies for quite a while. Variety is good; I'd love to see more well-done cinematic SF, too. Not holding my breath.
Goddamn, I always forget tha -- oh God it's got me! IT'S EATING MY BRAINS!
...
Braaaains ...
I'm pretty sure the phrase "digital rights management" was invented to describe the kind of thing the RIAA/MPAA/BSA pushes, after people got wise to the fact that "copy protection" meant there was a very good chance that legitimately purchased music, movies, or software wouldn't work on their home machines. I certainly can't remember a case when "DRM" has been used to describe a legitimate computer security practice. And for things like not sharing confidential documents over P2P, "computer security" (or in context, just plain "security") is a perfectly adequate description.
Zombies are fun. They're fun for costumes, they're fun as horror movie bad guys, they're fun to blow away in video games.
Pirates and ninjas and vampires are fun, too, but they've been overexposed. Zombies are about to go the same way, I suspect, and they'll drop off the cultural radar screen for a while. Then they'll come back (they always come back ...) after people have gone through a few more cycles of archetype-of-the-week.
That's really all the explanation needed. Trying to read some deep cultural significance into what monsters are popular at the moment is almost always a fool's game. Even Godzilla very quickly outgrew its origins as a nuclear metaphor, and just became a fun monster.
Apparently there's also a gene carried on the Y chromosome of which one common variant makes its carriers unable to notice bad driving in 50% of the population.
It varies by time and place, I suppose. In my high school experience (mid-80's, Denver) "student-athlete" was almost an oxymoron, as a matter of unwritten but well-understood policy. The few students who did excel both academically and athletically ran into just enormous amounts of bullshit from the school and from other students. And from everything I've heard since then, I suspect my experience was a lot more typical than yours, but of course I don't know for sure.
Like most social dichotomies, it exists as long as people believe it exists, and clearly a lot of people still do believe that. I blame this on high school. In the adult world, of course you're right that there are plenty of smart social people and dumb asocial ones, and generally speaking, the working world rewards people who are good at both their jobs and shooting the shit with their coworkers. But in high school, the lines are pretty clearly drawn. Kids who are good at math don't get laid, no matter how good-looking they are. Football coaches strongly discourage their star players from taking tough classes to make sure they'll have more time for practice. That kind of thing. It takes a long time for people to get over this, and some never do.
Yeah, I was kind of thinking that too.
It varies, and I think jock/nerd is pretty well orthogonal to warfighting ability. Eisenhower, famously, was a football coach, and Patton on the battlefield was his star player; on the other hand, a succession of distinctly jockish Union commanders failed against the Confederacy's much better lineup of jocks, and it took nerds like Grant and Sherman to show them how it was done. As far as the front line goes, if you get a bunch of sports-obsessed young men together in an army, making themselves think of themselves as the home team at a the big game is one very effective way to motivate them, but it's not the only way. Going farther back, the Greeks were jocks, the Romans were nerds; look how that turned out.
And while [flat for] "about a decade" is an exaggeration
Nice job of twisting my words; your insertion of "[flat for]" and then citing the change between 1998 and 2008 is a classic straw man maneuver. The reality is that while "about a decade" is an exaggeration, "nearly flat" isn't, if you talk about the last eight years rather than the last ten. I made the distinction very clear; you deliberately blurred it. Have you considered applying for a job with Fox News?
Well, for the NIH, at least, here is a source with much more recent figures. And while "about a decade" is an exaggeration (a decade ago, Clinton still had over a year to go in office) it is undeniably true that the NIH budget was "essentially flat" during the Bush years. The year-over-year increases barely kept pace with inflation in most cases, and sometimes fell behind. I don't know about NSF and other non-DoD scientific funding agencies, but I'm guessing they suffered the same fate.
Yes, war sucks. But sometimes it is very necessary to defend ones life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, no matter what nation they live in.
[sigh] Everyone understands that, except for the most extreme pacifists. What many people don't seem to understand is that just because a particular war is sometimes necessary, it does not follow that every war is always necessary. Specifically, it's been quite a long time since the US or any of the great powers has fought a necessary war, and yet somehow we keep finding wars to fight.
As a medic in Desert Storm, I was quite annoyed that the "video game war" they showed on CNN bore no apparent relation to the bloody mess I saw. If more realistic, modern video games make people think about what war actually looks like on the sharp end, well, good. Unfortunately, as your post makes plain, there will always be people who don't get the message.
What so many evolutionists get hung up on, I believe, is a confusion between microevolution and macroevolution. In a sense, they believe that they can "prove" macroevolution by induction on microevolution.
So, how do you feel about macrogravity?
What /THE FUCK/ are the scare quotes for? Junk DNA is junk because it's content is useless,
You have no idea "What /THE FUCK/" you're talking about. Please stop spreading misinformation that even in the 70's, when the term "junk DNA" was coined, people had a vague idea probably wasn't right, and which we've known with certainty for 20+ years isn't true.
the "junk" DNA that we supposedly don't use
This idea seems to have become embedded in the pop-sci mythos nearly as firmly as the "we only use 10% of our brains" thing, and it's equally false. Absolutely everyone working in genetics these days understands that non-coding DNA has multiple biological functions.
In answer to your question: yes, it's entirely possible. I just really felt the need to get the above out of the way first.
What I meant by "these days" is that for most of the 20th century, executives generally went down with the ship. Sure, the top executives of a failed company were still going to be much better off than the Joe Schmoes who worked for that company, but they were also going to be much worse off than the executives of successful companies. It's only in the last generation or so that the C*O class has learned to insulate itself almost completely from any consequences of failure. I agree with you that this is a return to form; executives are the new nobility, and it took them a while after the fall of the old nobility in the 18th and 19th centuries to figure out all the tricks.