This is similar to the statement that says correlation does not equal causation.
A statement which is misused far more often than it is used correctly.
Just because I have brown hair and someone across the country also has brown hair and many other similarities doesn't mean both of us are related.
You and every other human being on Earth, regardless of hair color, are far more closely related than 99.9999...(some very large number of 9's)% of living organisms.
At least they called it a "hypothesis" instead of forcing us to accept it as verified fact.
Ah, now you play your hand. You're deliberately ignorant of scientific vocabulary, and of the way science is done; probably a creationist and climate change denialist to boot. Tell you what, why don't you educate yourself on the meanings of the words "hypothesis," "theory," and "fact" -- and why you will pretty much never hear any scientific result described with that last -- and come back when you're ready to play in the big kids' sandbox.
Creationists will be even more confused. If God made everything according to its kind, where does this one fit in?
Not really joking. Modern creationism with its false "microevolution/macroevolution" dichotomy rests on the idea that there are specific boundaries outside which "kinds" of organisms can't go. Organisms like this one show how inane that argument is.
Ego can be measured in non-monetary terms; nobody goes into academia to get rich, and those who tie their egos directly to their paychecks find other, more lucrative careers. In academia, the real currency is publication, and on that scale journal articles count for much more than textbooks do. (Whether this makes sense or not is another debate entirely.) As for "professors are not known for their meekness," this is true, but it's also true that the most egotistical faculty are those who don't want to teach at all, just do research and perhaps mentor a few carefully selected grad students. Accomplished researchers who still want to teach large undergrad classes tend to be very easygoing people, and if they assign their own textbooks it's because they genuinely believe that those textbooks are the best available for the subject.
Agreed completely, of course, about both business and government existing as our servants. The truth is that neither have ever really lived up to this ideal, and both have now grown so far beyond it that I doubt we'll ever see them restricted to that role. It's still a battle worth fighting, though, and in the specific case of academic publication, it's the better type of academics -- the ones who want to create new knowledge by research and to pass that knowledge on by teaching, by whatever method works best -- who are leading the charge. They deserve a lot of credit for that.
Don't make the mistake of assuming that textbook authors get much money from the sales. They don't. If your professors are assigning you their own books, they may be getting a bit of an ego boost, but they're not doing it for financial reasons. (And more likely, it's for the good and sufficient reason that they know the textbook will be in accord with their lesson plans.) The publishers are the ones who make almost all the money from textbook sales, and they're the ones who are constantly pushing new editions for that reason.
I was D.DVORKIN1 on GEnie, since my father already had D.DVORKIN. Kept meaning to change it, since people were always mixing us up, and then of course it wasn't an issue any more.
Alas, GEnie! (And "Genie" was never the same.) Really a great place to get an introduction to the online world. Those endless exchanges on the SFRT taught me a lot, and I think the level of the writing was higher there than in any other online forum I've ever seen. (Of course, the fact that it was the unofficial home of SFWA for a number of years didn't hurt -- when you have a bunch of professional writers posting, other posters tend to follow suit.) Actually, Slashdot is the closest thing I've found since. I'm not sure if this is praise of Slashdot or an indictment of, well, everything else.;)
The days of the pages with the default gray backgrounds are finally gone!
I don't miss the old days of web browsing either -- but I do have my default background in SeaMonkey set to exactly that old shade of gray, and it's pleasant when I get a page that doesn't set the background color for me. (I know I could override it and have my preferred color scheme come up every time, but that seems like overkill.) Black-on-light-gray is a lot easier on the eyes than black-on-white when you're looking at a glowing screen. I'm used to the latter by now, but I do wish that people had kept in mind that screens and paper are not the same thing.
MZB's name was on the cover of all the Darkover books published during her lifetime, IIRC; it's a pretty fair bet that she made at least as much money off the anthologies as the individual authors did. Generally the way it works with anthologies is that the authors get a fixed payment, and the editor gets a (small) advance and the royalties.
You're right, of course, that she encouraged both fanfic and the "official" stories written for the anthologies... until she didn't, because (apparently, and this is all second- or third-hand information) some nutcase submitted a story for one of the anthologies, got a rejection slip, and then threatened to sue when some idea vaguely similar to the story appeared in one of MZB's own novels a few years later. At that point she felt she had no choice but to shut down the anthology line, and although she didn't tell people to stop writing fanfic, she was no longer able to give it her blessing. And I can't blame her. This isn't the usual pattern of a copyright holder being overly aggressive; it's about someone who had always been very generous with her copyrights defending herself against vicious and unwarranted attack.
Which is a damned shame, because some of the anthology stories -- and the fanfic, for that matter -- were very very good, and helped launch the careers of some authors who are well-recognized names today. MZB's free-and-easy attitude also, no doubt, had a lot to do with the enduring popularity of the series. But I'm really not sure what else she could have done.
If you want stirling examples of angry defensiveness and pomposity, take a look at your own post. Clearly you'd rather just fling poo than engage in anything like a constructive debate. Just be aware that you're not likely to influence anyone's opinion with the attitude -- if you're happy with just ranting for no real reason, then hey, have fun with that.
I'm not really kidding. Your anti-Wikipedia rant is entertaining, but it doesn't provide any substance. Speaking for myself, when I go to Wikipedia for a refresher on something I already know about, I'm generally pleased with the quality of the results, which makes me think that the articles on subjects I don't know much about are likely to be pretty good too.
Your line about "political correctness and facts washed out of existence by human insecurities" provides a clue as to what really bothers you about Wikipedia: reality's well-known liberal bias. Unless you can provide specific examples, with citations, it's reasonable to assume that the Wikipedia groupmind knows more about the way things really work than some random dude on/.
Regardless that it would be more effective and less dangerous than most NSAIDs
No. It's not. That's the point.
Aspirin is safer than acetaminophen. Ibuprofen is safer than acetaminophen. For that matter, narcotics are safer than acetaminophen -- you are, no shit, better off with a lifelong narc dependency than you are poisoning yourself with this crap. And it's been pushed on us for years, in various ways, by a well-funded lobby which has all the compassion of the Mafia and all the ethics of your typical sewer rat.
Well, if you're really out in the boonies, you might have to drive some distance. But I'm pretty sure there is nowhere in the lower 48 states of the US (except maybe parts of Utah?) where you're more than ten or fifteen minutes from a bar -- half an hour, tops -- and most people are a lot closer than that. And there are some things you can do that are pretty much guaranteed to start a brawl in any bar you're in.
I'm not recommending this, of course, just noting that it's possible.
50 years ago, you had an urge to fight, you went to the bar... now-a-days most people don't really have any exciting in their lives, nor are they really allowed to
If you still want a real live bar fight, I guarantee you that you can find a bar that will meet your needs. Probably within walking distance of wherever you happen to live.
The solution is simple. You need to educate children about the difference between fiction and reality. It's really not that hard.
Maybe you should RTFA? (Or even RTFS?) The author's whole point is the effect that games have on adults, not on kids. Agree or disagree with his conclusions as you will, but don't argue against a straw man.
Admins have to work so much harder to protect a Windows network than they do to protect a *nix network that the two aren't really comparable. It's like looking at two patients, one who has a papercut and one who has brain cancer, and saying, "Their chances for recovery only depend on the skills of the doctor."
well yeah, but i dont do anything illegal so i am not attracting the attention of the authorities, it is the identity thieves and trolls that would like to cause harm to people is what i am concerned with
Wow, you are really, spectacularly missing the point.
All those measures you take to protect your privacy? As of now, they apparently mean absolutely nothing if you live in Canada. Maybe you'd like to believe it's only the "identity thieves and trolls" who have to worry about official attention, and hell, maybe you're even right. But if you have no right to privacy online, then your life is as much an open book as if you appended your full name, date of birth, and credit card numbers to every post you made.
I read about it in books which must have been published 30 years ago, though I think the theory than was than the gravitational field of passing stars was changing the orbit of comets in the Oort cloud and causing comet impacts.
Which was, as it happens, a completely different idea from the one discussed in TFA.
Do you have any idea how different the scales involved are -- the movements of a few local stars in the scenario you're discussing, vs. the movements of galaxies and clusters of galaxies in this case? Do you have any understanding that comets, planets, stars, and galaxies are not the same thing? Or are astronomical terms just so jumbled up in your head that any idea regarding mass extinctions and the movements of anything beyond Earth's atmosphere just kind of seems the same to you?
I really despise the/. meme that dictates, whenever pretty much any science story is published, that a bunch of posters feel the need to say, "Oh, I heard about that X years ago." Almost always, they're dead wrong, and their wrongness is based on profound and nigh-aggressive ignorance. Everyone, before you post that comment or some variant of it, please think for a moment, okay?
You know, it wasn't tanks and bombers that brought down the Iron Curtain. It was blue jeans and rock'n'roll. Western consumer society may be easy to sneer at, but in the long run it's proven to be one of the most powerful forces for liberalization the world has ever known.
As a practical matter, if we try to cut off exports to Iran, I guaran-goddamn-tee you the Iranian government will still get its hands on all the goodies it needs, but the Iranian people will be SOL, and any chance they have of freeing themselves (how exactly do you think we heard about the election fraud, anyway?) will vanish forever.
Intelligent conservatives know that the "liberal media" is a myth, and that political correctness, while it certainly exists, is far less of a force than the Limbaugh-listening crowd likes to believe it is. Honest, intelligent conservatives don't spend their time whining about such things. And I know more than a few conservatives who are both honest and intelligent. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be many of the on Slashdot, which is how the whole thing is relevant.
Naturally, humans don't live longer than it takes to raise offspring. It is our medicine and technology that enables us to do so.
The natural human lifespan, barring death by disease or violence, seems to be about the Biblical "threescore and ten." Sure, life expectancies used to be a lot shorter than that, but it's not like healthy people routinely dropped dead of heart attacks as soon as their kids were out of the house; people died young for specific reasons, and those who dodged the various bullets (or swords, or rocks...) lived to what we'd consider a decent age even today. Since living past reproductive age is metabolically expensive, there has to be a reason for this. The hypothesis that having older humans (grandparents and great-grandparents) around confers a survival advantage on their descendants is as good an explanation as any.
OP could have made it even better by demonstrating that in addition to knowing more about statistics than statisticians, he also knows more about climate change than climatologists, more about string theory than physicists, and more about evolution than biologists. Spelling out Obama's full name and giving a detailed explanation about types of birth certificates would have been good for bonus points, along with a complaint about the PC liberal media, and of course he could have made the whole thing perfect by leading with, "I know I'll get modded down for this, but..."
That kind of survival statistic is always measured within some specified period of time, usually a year for this kind of study. So if, say, the annual death rate is 100 per 10,000 for people of normal weight (just pulling the number off the top of my head here), 170 per 10,000 for underweight people, and 136 per 10,000 for obese people, then the statement is correct.
Slashdot Mirror
This is similar to the statement that says correlation does not equal causation.
A statement which is misused far more often than it is used correctly.
Just because I have brown hair and someone across the country also has brown hair and many other similarities doesn't mean both of us are related.
You and every other human being on Earth, regardless of hair color, are far more closely related than 99.9999...(some very large number of 9's)% of living organisms.
At least they called it a "hypothesis" instead of forcing us to accept it as verified fact.
Ah, now you play your hand. You're deliberately ignorant of scientific vocabulary, and of the way science is done; probably a creationist and climate change denialist to boot. Tell you what, why don't you educate yourself on the meanings of the words "hypothesis," "theory," and "fact" -- and why you will pretty much never hear any scientific result described with that last -- and come back when you're ready to play in the big kids' sandbox.
Creationists will be even more confused. If God made everything according to its kind, where does this one fit in?
Not really joking. Modern creationism with its false "microevolution/macroevolution" dichotomy rests on the idea that there are specific boundaries outside which "kinds" of organisms can't go. Organisms like this one show how inane that argument is.
Ego can be measured in non-monetary terms; nobody goes into academia to get rich, and those who tie their egos directly to their paychecks find other, more lucrative careers. In academia, the real currency is publication, and on that scale journal articles count for much more than textbooks do. (Whether this makes sense or not is another debate entirely.) As for "professors are not known for their meekness," this is true, but it's also true that the most egotistical faculty are those who don't want to teach at all, just do research and perhaps mentor a few carefully selected grad students. Accomplished researchers who still want to teach large undergrad classes tend to be very easygoing people, and if they assign their own textbooks it's because they genuinely believe that those textbooks are the best available for the subject.
Agreed completely, of course, about both business and government existing as our servants. The truth is that neither have ever really lived up to this ideal, and both have now grown so far beyond it that I doubt we'll ever see them restricted to that role. It's still a battle worth fighting, though, and in the specific case of academic publication, it's the better type of academics -- the ones who want to create new knowledge by research and to pass that knowledge on by teaching, by whatever method works best -- who are leading the charge. They deserve a lot of credit for that.
Don't make the mistake of assuming that textbook authors get much money from the sales. They don't. If your professors are assigning you their own books, they may be getting a bit of an ego boost, but they're not doing it for financial reasons. (And more likely, it's for the good and sufficient reason that they know the textbook will be in accord with their lesson plans.) The publishers are the ones who make almost all the money from textbook sales, and they're the ones who are constantly pushing new editions for that reason.
I was D.DVORKIN1 on GEnie, since my father already had D.DVORKIN. Kept meaning to change it, since people were always mixing us up, and then of course it wasn't an issue any more.
Alas, GEnie! (And "Genie" was never the same.) Really a great place to get an introduction to the online world. Those endless exchanges on the SFRT taught me a lot, and I think the level of the writing was higher there than in any other online forum I've ever seen. (Of course, the fact that it was the unofficial home of SFWA for a number of years didn't hurt -- when you have a bunch of professional writers posting, other posters tend to follow suit.) Actually, Slashdot is the closest thing I've found since. I'm not sure if this is praise of Slashdot or an indictment of, well, everything else. ;)
The days of the pages with the default gray backgrounds are finally gone!
I don't miss the old days of web browsing either -- but I do have my default background in SeaMonkey set to exactly that old shade of gray, and it's pleasant when I get a page that doesn't set the background color for me. (I know I could override it and have my preferred color scheme come up every time, but that seems like overkill.) Black-on-light-gray is a lot easier on the eyes than black-on-white when you're looking at a glowing screen. I'm used to the latter by now, but I do wish that people had kept in mind that screens and paper are not the same thing.
MZB's name was on the cover of all the Darkover books published during her lifetime, IIRC; it's a pretty fair bet that she made at least as much money off the anthologies as the individual authors did. Generally the way it works with anthologies is that the authors get a fixed payment, and the editor gets a (small) advance and the royalties.
You're right, of course, that she encouraged both fanfic and the "official" stories written for the anthologies ... until she didn't, because (apparently, and this is all second- or third-hand information) some nutcase submitted a story for one of the anthologies, got a rejection slip, and then threatened to sue when some idea vaguely similar to the story appeared in one of MZB's own novels a few years later. At that point she felt she had no choice but to shut down the anthology line, and although she didn't tell people to stop writing fanfic, she was no longer able to give it her blessing. And I can't blame her. This isn't the usual pattern of a copyright holder being overly aggressive; it's about someone who had always been very generous with her copyrights defending herself against vicious and unwarranted attack.
Which is a damned shame, because some of the anthology stories -- and the fanfic, for that matter -- were very very good, and helped launch the careers of some authors who are well-recognized names today. MZB's free-and-easy attitude also, no doubt, had a lot to do with the enduring popularity of the series. But I'm really not sure what else she could have done.
If you want stirling examples of angry defensiveness and pomposity, take a look at your own post. Clearly you'd rather just fling poo than engage in anything like a constructive debate. Just be aware that you're not likely to influence anyone's opinion with the attitude -- if you're happy with just ranting for no real reason, then hey, have fun with that.
"reality's well-known liberal bias"
[citation needed]
Hmmm, good point. Here's an edit:
"reality's well-known liberal bias [January 20, 2001 - January 20, 2009]"
[citation needed]
I'm not really kidding. Your anti-Wikipedia rant is entertaining, but it doesn't provide any substance. Speaking for myself, when I go to Wikipedia for a refresher on something I already know about, I'm generally pleased with the quality of the results, which makes me think that the articles on subjects I don't know much about are likely to be pretty good too.
Your line about "political correctness and facts washed out of existence by human insecurities" provides a clue as to what really bothers you about Wikipedia: reality's well-known liberal bias. Unless you can provide specific examples, with citations, it's reasonable to assume that the Wikipedia groupmind knows more about the way things really work than some random dude on /.
... so clearly this app will never make it through Apple's review process.
Regardless that it would be more effective and less dangerous than most NSAIDs
No. It's not. That's the point.
Aspirin is safer than acetaminophen. Ibuprofen is safer than acetaminophen. For that matter, narcotics are safer than acetaminophen -- you are, no shit, better off with a lifelong narc dependency than you are poisoning yourself with this crap. And it's been pushed on us for years, in various ways, by a well-funded lobby which has all the compassion of the Mafia and all the ethics of your typical sewer rat.
Well, if you're really out in the boonies, you might have to drive some distance. But I'm pretty sure there is nowhere in the lower 48 states of the US (except maybe parts of Utah?) where you're more than ten or fifteen minutes from a bar -- half an hour, tops -- and most people are a lot closer than that. And there are some things you can do that are pretty much guaranteed to start a brawl in any bar you're in.
I'm not recommending this, of course, just noting that it's possible.
If you're going to be pedantic and legalistic, you might want to try proofreading your post before hitting the "Submit" button.
50 years ago, you had an urge to fight, you went to the bar ... now-a-days most people don't really have any exciting in their lives, nor are they really allowed to
If you still want a real live bar fight, I guarantee you that you can find a bar that will meet your needs. Probably within walking distance of wherever you happen to live.
The solution is simple. You need to educate children about the difference between fiction and reality. It's really not that hard.
Maybe you should RTFA? (Or even RTFS?) The author's whole point is the effect that games have on adults, not on kids. Agree or disagree with his conclusions as you will, but don't argue against a straw man.
Admins have to work so much harder to protect a Windows network than they do to protect a *nix network that the two aren't really comparable. It's like looking at two patients, one who has a papercut and one who has brain cancer, and saying, "Their chances for recovery only depend on the skills of the doctor."
well yeah, but i dont do anything illegal so i am not attracting the attention of the authorities, it is the identity thieves and trolls that would like to cause harm to people is what i am concerned with
Wow, you are really, spectacularly missing the point.
All those measures you take to protect your privacy? As of now, they apparently mean absolutely nothing if you live in Canada. Maybe you'd like to believe it's only the "identity thieves and trolls" who have to worry about official attention, and hell, maybe you're even right. But if you have no right to privacy online, then your life is as much an open book as if you appended your full name, date of birth, and credit card numbers to every post you made.
I'm trying to decide if it's funny or terrifying that your post almost immediately got modded up to +5. ;)
I read about it in books which must have been published 30 years ago, though I think the theory than was than the gravitational field of passing stars was changing the orbit of comets in the Oort cloud and causing comet impacts.
Which was, as it happens, a completely different idea from the one discussed in TFA.
Do you have any idea how different the scales involved are -- the movements of a few local stars in the scenario you're discussing, vs. the movements of galaxies and clusters of galaxies in this case? Do you have any understanding that comets, planets, stars, and galaxies are not the same thing? Or are astronomical terms just so jumbled up in your head that any idea regarding mass extinctions and the movements of anything beyond Earth's atmosphere just kind of seems the same to you?
I really despise the /. meme that dictates, whenever pretty much any science story is published, that a bunch of posters feel the need to say, "Oh, I heard about that X years ago." Almost always, they're dead wrong, and their wrongness is based on profound and nigh-aggressive ignorance. Everyone, before you post that comment or some variant of it, please think for a moment, okay?
You know, it wasn't tanks and bombers that brought down the Iron Curtain. It was blue jeans and rock'n'roll. Western consumer society may be easy to sneer at, but in the long run it's proven to be one of the most powerful forces for liberalization the world has ever known.
As a practical matter, if we try to cut off exports to Iran, I guaran-goddamn-tee you the Iranian government will still get its hands on all the goodies it needs, but the Iranian people will be SOL, and any chance they have of freeing themselves (how exactly do you think we heard about the election fraud, anyway?) will vanish forever.
Intelligent conservatives know that the "liberal media" is a myth, and that political correctness, while it certainly exists, is far less of a force than the Limbaugh-listening crowd likes to believe it is. Honest, intelligent conservatives don't spend their time whining about such things. And I know more than a few conservatives who are both honest and intelligent. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be many of the on Slashdot, which is how the whole thing is relevant.
Naturally, humans don't live longer than it takes to raise offspring. It is our medicine and technology that enables us to do so.
The natural human lifespan, barring death by disease or violence, seems to be about the Biblical "threescore and ten." Sure, life expectancies used to be a lot shorter than that, but it's not like healthy people routinely dropped dead of heart attacks as soon as their kids were out of the house; people died young for specific reasons, and those who dodged the various bullets (or swords, or rocks ...) lived to what we'd consider a decent age even today. Since living past reproductive age is metabolically expensive, there has to be a reason for this. The hypothesis that having older humans (grandparents and great-grandparents) around confers a survival advantage on their descendants is as good an explanation as any.
OP could have made it even better by demonstrating that in addition to knowing more about statistics than statisticians, he also knows more about climate change than climatologists, more about string theory than physicists, and more about evolution than biologists. Spelling out Obama's full name and giving a detailed explanation about types of birth certificates would have been good for bonus points, along with a complaint about the PC liberal media, and of course he could have made the whole thing perfect by leading with, "I know I'll get modded down for this, but ..."
That kind of survival statistic is always measured within some specified period of time, usually a year for this kind of study. So if, say, the annual death rate is 100 per 10,000 for people of normal weight (just pulling the number off the top of my head here), 170 per 10,000 for underweight people, and 136 per 10,000 for obese people, then the statement is correct.