There are many good reasons to be skeptical of BMI (such as the fact that it basically ignores the fact that human bodies are, you know, three-dimensional) but I don't really think this is one of them. Are there people who are "overweight" solely because they have lots of muscle? Sure. But there aren't really that many of them; most people have to work out two or three hours a day to get that kind of muscle. There are a hell of a lot more people telling themselves, "I'm a big guy" (men) or "I'm curvy" (women) as a way of not acknowledging how out of shape they are.
even if you quit smoking, you don't actually reduce your chances of getting lung cancer
Every source I've ever seen on this subject says that although ex-smokers have a higher chance of developing lung cancer than do lifelong nonsmokers, they're still less likely to develop lung cancer than are current smokers (of the same age and smoking history, of course.) If you have a citation to the contrary, please give it.
You may not consider Anglo-Saxons, or Celts, or Slavs, or Jews, to be races; the point is that all of these groups have in fact at various times been considered to be races, and subject to exactly the same sort of division and discrimination based on heritage rather than geography or nationhood, as have those groups which we consider to be distinct races today. Absurd? Of course it's absurd. That doesn't keep people from doing it, and the basis on which they do it is and has always been arbitrary. There is no difference between, say, the attitude of a Norman nobleman toward Saxons in 1100 and the attitude of a Mississippi slaveholder toward black people seven hundred years later. And that Norman would have dealt with an Ethiopian as nobleman his equal, while that Mississippian would quite possibly have been the descendant of the Norman's Saxon villeins. The definitions of what constitutes race change at a whim; the concept remains.
You are simply wrong about serfdom being a form of payable debt. I don't know where you're getting this idea, and if you have any citations I'll be glad to read them, but serfdom throughout medieval Europe (and in eastern Europe, up into the early modern period) was lifelong and heritable, exactly like slavery. Serfs were sometimes set free as payment for a particular service rendered to their masters, sure, but so were slaves. It wasn't a normal or expected part of the institution.
My examples of "race" may have been poorly chosen, since they corresponded to existing nations. Try "the Anglo-Saxon race" (a concept distinct from English, and then British, citizenship) or "the Celtic race" or "the Slavic race" or "the Jewish race" on for size. "Race" has always been a concept distinct from "nation," it has been entirely flexible throughout history, and our current "black/white/yellow/red/brown" breakdown is just as arbitrary and, I suspect, just as temporary as any other. Comparing it to technologies (some of which are a good bit older than you think, BTW) is an absurd red herring.
Really? I didn't know chemistry was illegal. I know certain chemicals are highly regulated, but not any kind of chemistry itself.
I wonder how all those science fair projects and high school chemistry labs sneek by under the nose of these government watchdogs?
See sig. I've been getting good use out of it lately. -- "So, in other words, you're completely fucking wrong, you idiot retard. God bless." - ShakaUVM
High school chemistry labs: the lab equipment is kept, you know, in the high school, not in the students' homes. And in fact high school chemistry has been getting steadily watered down for years. If you're anywhere around my age (40) or older, you may remember in high school working with some fairly dangerous chemicals, staying in the lab after class to finish up an experiment, etc. That doesn't happen any more, as my kid can tell you. High-schoolers are treated like third-graders in chemistry class. Granted, most of this is due to the Think Of The Chiiildren crowd rather than the drug warriors, but the mentality is really much the same.
Science fair projects: again, you may be remembering chemistry sets you could get as a kid that made it possible to do some pretty cool stuff. Try getting comparable sets these days. You can't. Oh, they still sell things called "chemistry sets," but both the chemicals and the equipment are carefully designed to be as useless as possible.
And yes, damn it, if you buy more than a minimal amount of utterly trivial lab equipment for personal use, there is a very good chance that the DEA (or its equivalent in your home country, if you're outside the US) will break down your door and use the presence of the equipment by itself (without having to find any actual drugs or drug precursors) as an excuse to arrest you, seize your property, and make your life hell for years to come.
So in other words... well, really, your.sig says it all. I suggest you sit down, read it carefully several times, burn the words into your brain, and consider carefully how it might apply to you the next time you're planning to make such an aggressively ignorant post.
They took slaves from other lands they conquered, but not based on race.
"Race" is a flexible concept in human history. These days we usually take it solely to mean skin color, but really it can be any group of people who define themselves, or are defined by others, according to their (real or imagined) heritage. It was not unusual, up to less than a century ago, to hear Europeans talking about "the Swedish race," "the English race," "the French race," etc.
Serf, by the way, means indentured servant,
No it doesn't. Serfdom is distinct from both slavery and indentured servitude, although of course for the people living under any of these systems life is about equally unpleasant. The distinction is that serfs are bound to the land, rather than the owner -- e.g. an antebellum Southern planter who sold his estate took his slaves with him (unless the slaves were explicitly part of the sale) while a Russian boyar who did so left his serfs in place. Both serfdom and slavery are lifelong conditions by default.
False analogy. Rabbits were introduced to Australia from the outside, and they were the product of evolution (in an environment much harsher and more competitive than Australia's) not deliberate genetic engineering. If rabbits had been bred from some native Australian animal, and had then turned into the plague they are today, your point would make more sense.
I wouldn't worry about "DIY biologists" cooking up some terrible superbug that wipes us all out. I would, however, worry about these biologists' personal safety. If they want to crunch data at home, no problem, but if they're trying to set up actual home labs, then there is a pretty good chance that at some point they will find their doors being broken down by armed men who are notorious for their lack of willingness to listen to reasonable explanations as to why there's all this glassware lying around.
Don't we have a some real problems to address, like, oh, we're going to run out of easily available water and energy, and the environment is going to change so much that about a billion people will lose their home over the next 15 years?
Please hand in your geek card immediately.
See, this is what serious geeks do. They think about stuff. Lots of stuff, and they think about it a lot. Some of it is trivial, some of it is important, and a surprising amount of it appears to be trivial and turns out the be very important later. They don't decide whether they'll think about something based on its importance; they decide based on whether it's interesting to them at the moment.
The exact same people who worry about things like the etymology of the names of video game characters are the people who come up with solutions to serious environmental, economic, and technical problems. And the people who whine, "Why are you wasting your time on X when Y is so much more important?!?"... are the people who will never put enough serious, obsessive thought into anything to make any serious, long-lasting impact of any kind.
Kappos is on record as saying that in the U.S., "Trivial patents are being granted. By contrast, the system is better in Europe."
He's saying something in Europe is better than in the US? My God, what kind of monster is this guy? He must be a socialist atheist gay-marrying cheese-eating surrender monkey terrorist lover! The Senate should not only deny his confirmation, they should kick him out of the country!
America, love it or leave it! God's country! U-S-A! U-S-A!
I completely agree. But OP and many of the responders sounded to me like they were uncritically accepting Flynn's thesis, and that's just silly. While it's perfectly reasonable to say, "There's a really cool idea in this story and it would be great if we could make it happen," it's absurd to say, "The way things work in this story provide valid assumptions about the real world." If you're basing your ideas about economics on Atlas Shrugged, your ideas about genetic engineering on Gattaca and Jurassic Park, or your ideas about space travel on Star Trek, you are liable to be deeply, drastically wrong.
You know, Firestar was... um, I'm not sure how to break this to you, so I'll just come right out and say it... fiction.
I enjoyed the novel, and there are a lot of interesting ideas in it (as well as some things Flynn got so wrong it was almost hilarious) but it is not, and should not be taken as, a realistic study of the way large-scale commercialized space flight will eventually work.
If I had a choice of putting my kids through that or a car accident, I would pick the car accident any day.
Then you've never seen a bad car accident.
I was in emergency medicine for nine years, first as a military medic, then as a civilian EMT. I've seen plenty of gunshots and plenty of crashes. There is nothing that happens in a gang war that can make the kind of mess out of a human body that a moment of inattention on the road can. As far as deliberate violence goes, you have to get to bombs and artillery before you see that kind of destruction -- and street criminals don't generally go after each other with howitzers and B-52s.
You think you were traumatized by watching someone getting shot? Try picking up pieces of bodies strewn across half a mile of highway.
People do all sorts of things in the expectation of making money. Sometimes this expectation is fulfilled; sometimes it isn't. It's not really a matter of morality in most cases.
No matter how you water it down, you took something that you didn't pay for.
If I "take" something from you, then you no longer have it. That is clearly not what's going on here.
You're only lying to yourself.
The liars are the ones who pretend that intellectual property and real property are the same thing, when any rational person can see that they aren't.
You claim to believe that illegally downloading movies is theft, but that you do it anyway. I have to question the sincerity of your belief. Do you regularly steal other things as well? Probably not, and if not, then it's a pretty good bet that the reason you're willing to "steal" movies but not steal money or cars is because you recognize that there is a fundamental difference between these actions.
It's also a deliberate conflation of two very different issues. The trade in pirated CDs and DVDs -- fly-by-night publishers making physical copies of the discs, packaging them to look like the real thing, and selling them on the street -- has very little in common with people downloading copies onto their personal machines, except that they both involve copyright infringement. The first is clearly a type of organized street crime, with all the dangers that implies; the second involves no physical danger to anyone (except from the cops...) All sorts of people who want to control other people's behavior indulge in this irritating rhetorical trick, but the copyright lobby seems to be among the worst offenders.
[sigh] I know exactly what "sic" means, and if you carefully read my post and the post I responded to, you'll see why I used it.
Your example of the chef doesn't really hold up. You're the only one qualified to decide if you like the way his food tastes; there are no issues of fact to debate. A closer analogy would be one of food safety -- no matter how tasty the food that comes out of the kitchen, would you be comfortable eating at a restaurant where the head chef had gone on record stating that he thought health and safety inspections were a waste of time?
Because you don't want to commit an ad hominim fallacy?
I'll see your "ad hominem [sic] fallacy" and raise you a "credibility of the witness."
In the ideal world of the philosophers, where all parties are equally able to evaluate all the arguments raised, attacks on character are indeed fallacious. 2+2=4, and it doesn't matter if the person telling you that is someone you like, someone you despise, or someone you don't know from Adam. But in the real world, nobody knows everything. Most of the time, most people who are debating any subject don't know nearly enough about it to decide if what they're being told is true. So we fall back on acknowledged experts, because we have to; none of us have time to become experts on every subject that might possibly be of interest. Our evaluation of how credible a particular expert seems to be is how we decide which statements we will accept as fact.
The vast majority of people considering personal genetic testing aren't going to know enough about the science involved to be able to decide, on a purely logical basis, whether they're getting their money's worth. Many of these people will think, quite reasonably, that a prominent geneticist will have more insight than they themselves will. But if the geneticist does things which call his scientific judgement into question, then this information whould be included in evaluating the worth of his statements on the subject.
Whether or not this principle applies to the debate at hand is left as an exercise to the reader.
A fair number of them, I think, have realized that they can't possibly win in an actual debate, so when they get mod points they scan through stories looking for something that presses their political hot buttons.
Well, yeah, there is that. The students might have taken that lesson away (those of us who didn't already know it, anyway.) The prof? Honestly, I don't think he was capable of learning much.
In any case, it certainly didn't meet the stated goal of the course. You know, you can demonstrate that hitting yourself in the head with a hammer really hurts, but it's hard to say how much you learn from putting it to the test.
Either you completely misread my post, or you're deliberately twisting my words. Given your posting history, the first seems more likely. The facts in this case completely support the "liberal," "left-wing" position, in either case... which is usually the way to bet.
I meant exactly what I said. The students, whose goal was to learn more about databases, didn't get that. If the professor's goal was a class full of students who knew more about large database projects than they knew coming in, he didn't get that. If his goal was (as we suspected) a finished project he could clean up a bit and put his own name on, he didn't get that either. Nobody won.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many good reasons to be skeptical of BMI (such as the fact that it basically ignores the fact that human bodies are, you know, three-dimensional) but I don't really think this is one of them. Are there people who are "overweight" solely because they have lots of muscle? Sure. But there aren't really that many of them; most people have to work out two or three hours a day to get that kind of muscle. There are a hell of a lot more people telling themselves, "I'm a big guy" (men) or "I'm curvy" (women) as a way of not acknowledging how out of shape they are.
even if you quit smoking, you don't actually reduce your chances of getting lung cancer
Every source I've ever seen on this subject says that although ex-smokers have a higher chance of developing lung cancer than do lifelong nonsmokers, they're still less likely to develop lung cancer than are current smokers (of the same age and smoking history, of course.) If you have a citation to the contrary, please give it.
the human immune system now is the weakest in the whole animal kingdom
[citation needed]
You may not consider Anglo-Saxons, or Celts, or Slavs, or Jews, to be races; the point is that all of these groups have in fact at various times been considered to be races, and subject to exactly the same sort of division and discrimination based on heritage rather than geography or nationhood, as have those groups which we consider to be distinct races today. Absurd? Of course it's absurd. That doesn't keep people from doing it, and the basis on which they do it is and has always been arbitrary. There is no difference between, say, the attitude of a Norman nobleman toward Saxons in 1100 and the attitude of a Mississippi slaveholder toward black people seven hundred years later. And that Norman would have dealt with an Ethiopian as nobleman his equal, while that Mississippian would quite possibly have been the descendant of the Norman's Saxon villeins. The definitions of what constitutes race change at a whim; the concept remains.
You are simply wrong about serfdom being a form of payable debt. I don't know where you're getting this idea, and if you have any citations I'll be glad to read them, but serfdom throughout medieval Europe (and in eastern Europe, up into the early modern period) was lifelong and heritable, exactly like slavery. Serfs were sometimes set free as payment for a particular service rendered to their masters, sure, but so were slaves. It wasn't a normal or expected part of the institution.
My examples of "race" may have been poorly chosen, since they corresponded to existing nations. Try "the Anglo-Saxon race" (a concept distinct from English, and then British, citizenship) or "the Celtic race" or "the Slavic race" or "the Jewish race" on for size. "Race" has always been a concept distinct from "nation," it has been entirely flexible throughout history, and our current "black/white/yellow/red/brown" breakdown is just as arbitrary and, I suspect, just as temporary as any other. Comparing it to technologies (some of which are a good bit older than you think, BTW) is an absurd red herring.
universities ignore "research" done by any person w/o a Ph.D
Academic researchers tend to ignore "research" which is not published in peer-reviewed journals. I've never had a journal ask to see my degrees.
Really? I didn't know chemistry was illegal. I know certain chemicals are highly regulated, but not any kind of chemistry itself.
I wonder how all those science fair projects and high school chemistry labs sneek by under the nose of these government watchdogs?
See sig. I've been getting good use out of it lately.
--
"So, in other words, you're completely fucking wrong, you idiot retard. God bless." - ShakaUVM
High school chemistry labs: the lab equipment is kept, you know, in the high school, not in the students' homes. And in fact high school chemistry has been getting steadily watered down for years. If you're anywhere around my age (40) or older, you may remember in high school working with some fairly dangerous chemicals, staying in the lab after class to finish up an experiment, etc. That doesn't happen any more, as my kid can tell you. High-schoolers are treated like third-graders in chemistry class. Granted, most of this is due to the Think Of The Chiiildren crowd rather than the drug warriors, but the mentality is really much the same.
Science fair projects: again, you may be remembering chemistry sets you could get as a kid that made it possible to do some pretty cool stuff. Try getting comparable sets these days. You can't. Oh, they still sell things called "chemistry sets," but both the chemicals and the equipment are carefully designed to be as useless as possible.
And yes, damn it, if you buy more than a minimal amount of utterly trivial lab equipment for personal use, there is a very good chance that the DEA (or its equivalent in your home country, if you're outside the US) will break down your door and use the presence of the equipment by itself (without having to find any actual drugs or drug precursors) as an excuse to arrest you, seize your property, and make your life hell for years to come.
So in other words ... well, really, your .sig says it all. I suggest you sit down, read it carefully several times, burn the words into your brain, and consider carefully how it might apply to you the next time you're planning to make such an aggressively ignorant post.
They took slaves from other lands they conquered, but not based on race.
"Race" is a flexible concept in human history. These days we usually take it solely to mean skin color, but really it can be any group of people who define themselves, or are defined by others, according to their (real or imagined) heritage. It was not unusual, up to less than a century ago, to hear Europeans talking about "the Swedish race," "the English race," "the French race," etc.
Serf, by the way, means indentured servant,
No it doesn't. Serfdom is distinct from both slavery and indentured servitude, although of course for the people living under any of these systems life is about equally unpleasant. The distinction is that serfs are bound to the land, rather than the owner -- e.g. an antebellum Southern planter who sold his estate took his slaves with him (unless the slaves were explicitly part of the sale) while a Russian boyar who did so left his serfs in place. Both serfdom and slavery are lifelong conditions by default.
False analogy. Rabbits were introduced to Australia from the outside, and they were the product of evolution (in an environment much harsher and more competitive than Australia's) not deliberate genetic engineering. If rabbits had been bred from some native Australian animal, and had then turned into the plague they are today, your point would make more sense.
I wouldn't worry about "DIY biologists" cooking up some terrible superbug that wipes us all out. I would, however, worry about these biologists' personal safety. If they want to crunch data at home, no problem, but if they're trying to set up actual home labs, then there is a pretty good chance that at some point they will find their doors being broken down by armed men who are notorious for their lack of willingness to listen to reasonable explanations as to why there's all this glassware lying around.
Don't we have a some real problems to address, like, oh, we're going to run out of easily available water and energy, and the environment is going to change so much that about a billion people will lose their home over the next 15 years?
Please hand in your geek card immediately.
See, this is what serious geeks do. They think about stuff. Lots of stuff, and they think about it a lot. Some of it is trivial, some of it is important, and a surprising amount of it appears to be trivial and turns out the be very important later. They don't decide whether they'll think about something based on its importance; they decide based on whether it's interesting to them at the moment.
The exact same people who worry about things like the etymology of the names of video game characters are the people who come up with solutions to serious environmental, economic, and technical problems. And the people who whine, "Why are you wasting your time on X when Y is so much more important?!?" ... are the people who will never put enough serious, obsessive thought into anything to make any serious, long-lasting impact of any kind.
It will be spun as a negative because:
(1) 0P3N 50R3Z 1Z F0R C0MMI3Z!!!
(2) He once said that the patent system is better in Europe than in the US. Why does this man hate America?!?
(3) He's an Obama nominee, and everything Obama does is evil, because Obama is a non-natural-born-citizen secret Muslim terrorist-loving socialist.
That about covers it. Of course, the "liberal MSM" will lap this shit up.
Kappos is on record as saying that in the U.S., "Trivial patents are being granted. By contrast, the system is better in Europe."
He's saying something in Europe is better than in the US? My God, what kind of monster is this guy? He must be a socialist atheist gay-marrying cheese-eating surrender monkey terrorist lover! The Senate should not only deny his confirmation, they should kick him out of the country!
America, love it or leave it! God's country! U-S-A! U-S-A!
I completely agree. But OP and many of the responders sounded to me like they were uncritically accepting Flynn's thesis, and that's just silly. While it's perfectly reasonable to say, "There's a really cool idea in this story and it would be great if we could make it happen," it's absurd to say, "The way things work in this story provide valid assumptions about the real world." If you're basing your ideas about economics on Atlas Shrugged, your ideas about genetic engineering on Gattaca and Jurassic Park, or your ideas about space travel on Star Trek, you are liable to be deeply, drastically wrong.
You know, Firestar was ... um, I'm not sure how to break this to you, so I'll just come right out and say it ... fiction.
I enjoyed the novel, and there are a lot of interesting ideas in it (as well as some things Flynn got so wrong it was almost hilarious) but it is not, and should not be taken as, a realistic study of the way large-scale commercialized space flight will eventually work.
If I had a choice of putting my kids through that or a car accident, I would pick the car accident any day.
Then you've never seen a bad car accident.
I was in emergency medicine for nine years, first as a military medic, then as a civilian EMT. I've seen plenty of gunshots and plenty of crashes. There is nothing that happens in a gang war that can make the kind of mess out of a human body that a moment of inattention on the road can. As far as deliberate violence goes, you have to get to bombs and artillery before you see that kind of destruction -- and street criminals don't generally go after each other with howitzers and B-52s.
You think you were traumatized by watching someone getting shot? Try picking up pieces of bodies strewn across half a mile of highway.
The movie was produced to make money.
People do all sorts of things in the expectation of making money. Sometimes this expectation is fulfilled; sometimes it isn't. It's not really a matter of morality in most cases.
No matter how you water it down, you took something that you didn't pay for.
If I "take" something from you, then you no longer have it. That is clearly not what's going on here.
You're only lying to yourself.
The liars are the ones who pretend that intellectual property and real property are the same thing, when any rational person can see that they aren't.
You claim to believe that illegally downloading movies is theft, but that you do it anyway. I have to question the sincerity of your belief. Do you regularly steal other things as well? Probably not, and if not, then it's a pretty good bet that the reason you're willing to "steal" movies but not steal money or cars is because you recognize that there is a fundamental difference between these actions.
It's also a deliberate conflation of two very different issues. The trade in pirated CDs and DVDs -- fly-by-night publishers making physical copies of the discs, packaging them to look like the real thing, and selling them on the street -- has very little in common with people downloading copies onto their personal machines, except that they both involve copyright infringement. The first is clearly a type of organized street crime, with all the dangers that implies; the second involves no physical danger to anyone (except from the cops ...) All sorts of people who want to control other people's behavior indulge in this irritating rhetorical trick, but the copyright lobby seems to be among the worst offenders.
[sigh] I know exactly what "sic" means, and if you carefully read my post and the post I responded to, you'll see why I used it.
Your example of the chef doesn't really hold up. You're the only one qualified to decide if you like the way his food tastes; there are no issues of fact to debate. A closer analogy would be one of food safety -- no matter how tasty the food that comes out of the kitchen, would you be comfortable eating at a restaurant where the head chef had gone on record stating that he thought health and safety inspections were a waste of time?
Because you don't want to commit an ad hominim fallacy?
I'll see your "ad hominem [sic] fallacy" and raise you a "credibility of the witness."
In the ideal world of the philosophers, where all parties are equally able to evaluate all the arguments raised, attacks on character are indeed fallacious. 2+2=4, and it doesn't matter if the person telling you that is someone you like, someone you despise, or someone you don't know from Adam. But in the real world, nobody knows everything. Most of the time, most people who are debating any subject don't know nearly enough about it to decide if what they're being told is true. So we fall back on acknowledged experts, because we have to; none of us have time to become experts on every subject that might possibly be of interest. Our evaluation of how credible a particular expert seems to be is how we decide which statements we will accept as fact.
The vast majority of people considering personal genetic testing aren't going to know enough about the science involved to be able to decide, on a purely logical basis, whether they're getting their money's worth. Many of these people will think, quite reasonably, that a prominent geneticist will have more insight than they themselves will. But if the geneticist does things which call his scientific judgement into question, then this information whould be included in evaluating the worth of his statements on the subject.
Whether or not this principle applies to the debate at hand is left as an exercise to the reader.
There are useful failures, yeah. I'm not convinced this was one of them.
A fair number of them, I think, have realized that they can't possibly win in an actual debate, so when they get mod points they scan through stories looking for something that presses their political hot buttons.
Well, yeah, there is that. The students might have taken that lesson away (those of us who didn't already know it, anyway.) The prof? Honestly, I don't think he was capable of learning much.
In any case, it certainly didn't meet the stated goal of the course. You know, you can demonstrate that hitting yourself in the head with a hammer really hurts, but it's hard to say how much you learn from putting it to the test.
Either you completely misread my post, or you're deliberately twisting my words. Given your posting history, the first seems more likely. The facts in this case completely support the "liberal," "left-wing" position, in either case ... which is usually the way to bet.
I meant exactly what I said. The students, whose goal was to learn more about databases, didn't get that. If the professor's goal was a class full of students who knew more about large database projects than they knew coming in, he didn't get that. If his goal was (as we suspected) a finished project he could clean up a bit and put his own name on, he didn't get that either. Nobody won.