After posting the article linked in the summary, Zimmer followed up by posting the comments of evolutionary biologist David Hillis on his own website. For those that don't want to read the entire post, the basic idea is that we ought not try to define life as a collection of characteristics (i.e. reproduction, inheritance of traits, existence of metabolism, &c.). Any such definition is likely to exclude things that we think of as alive, or include things that we think of as not-alive. Instead, it may make more sense to think of Life (Hillis uses a capital L on purpose) as a biological taxa. We can discuss the history of Life on Earth, and if we ever discover anything "similar" somewhere else in the universe, we can examine the similarities between Life on Earth and Life2 wherever it is.
That said, I'm not a biologist, thus I am sure that my summary misses some important subtleties, thus I would suggest reading the original before tearing me to shreds.;)
I am happy that you live in an idealist paradise, where people don't need food or shelter, and can always make principled stands without fearing the consequences. However, in the real world, one needs a paycheck in order to survive. If the choice is between losing one's home or bending one's ideals, there are a diminishingly small number of people would choose the former, and I see no reason to fault those that choose the latter. This is particularly true if one bends, but continues to lobby for change in other ways.
WTF have you been smoking? Even if 1 and 2 are not completely true, there is enough about us programmed into our genes that it's still a useful thing to know. Human behaviour is part nature part nurture, not exclusively one or the other, and I bet the nature part is more than the 0.00001% figure you cite. Understanding the nature part can help us understand the nurture part better, so it's not a waste of time.
Clearly, the original poster was exaggerating, but I think that you are underestimating the effect of learned behaviour (i.e. culture), epigenetics, and other environmental factors. Even if you fall 100% into the nature camp, DNA doesn't explain everything, and may in fact explain far less than Watson and Crick might have hoped.
The cost of capping carbon emissions is 'low' relative to what?
Relative to the very high costs of coastal flooding, drought, and other effects of the climate changing. You may disagree with the risk assessment or the tallying of costs, but it seemed that the "relatively" in the original post was pretty clear...
Unfortunately, you are not in any of my circles, so I am sure that I will never read it.
Re:Always show your work
on
Happy Tau Day
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· Score: 1
I agree that the "non-mnemonic" is ridiculous, but I don't see how memorizing it is any different than learning (i.e. memorizing) the few exceptions. If you really care about memorizing that shit (rather than relying upon spell check, which I do for most things), then what is wrong with the above?
Re:Always show your work
on
Happy Tau Day
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· Score: 1
Indeed. There are other exceptions, too. "Their," for instance, depending on how liberally you take the second clause.
I think you have it backwards. Tau is somewhat easier to work with, and is (arguably) more intuitive. Beginning students are likely to understand tau better than pi. These would be the kinds of people that might want to figure out the diameter of a pipe or whatever. Mathematicians, physicists, and so on will do okay with any notation, be it pi, tau, or the three-legged symbol that Palais suggests.
Re:Always show your work
on
Happy Tau Day
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· Score: 1
That is my general take on things. I tell my students that they can show as much or as little work as they like. If they get the right answer, great---they get full points.* If they get it wrong, they get only as much credit as their work justifies.
Of course, I still encourage them to show as much of their work as possible. I've done a fair of math in my 30 years (not as much as some, but quite a bit more than most). I have a bachelors in the subject, am certified and have been employed as a high school mathematics instructor, and am currently working on a graduate degree in the field and teaching algebra to pay for it. I say this not to brag, but merely to explain that I have some experience with computation. I can do most of the required computations in my head, and I generally don't type up all of my work when turning in papers. I still write it all out on my whiteboard or scratch paper when I am working through a problem for the first time---this makes it easier to follow my own line of thinking, and easier to find my own mistakes.
* That isn't quite true---if a student gives me a correct answer but shows incorrect work, they will almost always lose a few points on that question. Students need to convince me that they have mastered the skills that I require them to master---if they show me incorrect work, then I am unconvinced. That being said, in most cases where students give right answers and poor work, it is because they are copying off of a neighbor, which can be easily verified.
Re:Always show your work
on
Happy Tau Day
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· Score: 1
That's only because she didn't teach you the entire I before E rule: "I before E, except after C, and when sounded as A as in neighbor and weight, and remember that neither weird foreigner seizes leisure at its height." (That was the poem/rule/whatever that my mother had to learn in elementary school in the 50s.)
There is more to beating Pac-Man than simply knowing the algorithm for evading the ghosts. One must also be able to implement that algorithm, which requires a certain amount of physical skill (i.e. pushing the right buttons in the correct sequence at the appropriate times). Moreover, one actually has to play the game enough learn what the algorithm is (that is, there is no reason to expect a novice player to immediately see the movement patterns of the ghosts). Pac-Man might be easy to someone who has spend hundreds of hours playing it, but will probably be quite difficult for someone who has only played it for 5 or 10 minutes here and there.
By the same logic, pool should be a very simple game. There really isn't much more to it than geometry and a little bit of physics. Unfortunately, knowing how the cue ball should behave, and actually getting it to behave in that manner are two very different tasks.
Animal Farm is very much about the Soviet Union in the era prior to WWII. 1984 less so. The novel highlights the risk of totalitarianism in general, rather than the problems of Soviet era communism. It is very intentionally set in the UK, and many of the institutions and ideologies in 1984 are quite similar to institutions that existed there in the 1940s.
Some human languages derive meaning from order. These are syntactic languages. Other languages derive meaning from changing the forms of words to denote their role. These are flexive languages. English is syntactic. Russian is flexive, and word order doesn't really matter.
When I was in high school a decade and a half ago, a friend and I did something similar with a simple setting of "Dona Nobis Pacem." However, we were a bit lazier than you---we wrote a program which took tuples as input, where the first value was a note (on a 12 note chromatic scale), and the second value was a frequency. The program expanded everything out into frequency and duration (as you indicate above), then issued a ton of BEEP commands.
In general, the fuel-efficiency argument is rather convincing. However, there are other safety issues. In the western US (particularly Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, &c.), there are huge distances between cities. For instance, it is 300 miles from Elko to Reno (a drive that I have made many, many times). There is not much between Reno and Elko (five or six large towns or small cities). At 60 MPH, it is a 5 hour drive. At the current speed limit of 75 MPH, it is 4 hours. The four hour drive gets people safely to their destination significantly faster. This leads to less driver fatigue, which should lead to fewer collisions. I think that the safety concern outweighs the fuel efficiency argument.
Sales taxes are regressive. They disproportionately effect the poor, as it requires a greater percentage of their income in order to pay the tax. I believe that the argument that the GP is making (though he is by no means clear on this) is that it would be better to eliminate sales taxes entirely, and raise revenues using a more progressive form of taxation (such as an income tax).
You need to read the 14th amendment, specifically the portion which states "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." This is understood to mean that all state and local governments, as well as bodies established by those governments (such as public schools) are subject to the same constraints placed upon the federal government.
In short, the 14th amendment does, in fact, prevent states from establishing a religion.
I don't think that he is advocating eliminating the income tax in favor of a sales tax, but rather legalizing narcotics, then imposing a sales tax upon them. While I am generally opposed to sales taxes (for the same reason as you are---they are regressive), narcotics are a luxury. If you have the disposable income to pay for them, you have the disposable income to pay an additional 20% tax on them. This also ensures that the money needed to take care of addicts is provided by the users of the substance in question, which seems a fair system. Similar taxes include fuel taxes to pay for roads, tolls to drive on certain roads and bridges, and tuition to attend public universities.
...but it made me a stickler for honest statistics.
But there is nothing dishonest in saying that half of lawyers are below average. As noted above, "average" is an inexact term, and has ambiguous meaning, particularly in colloquial English (i.e. the English that the original poster was using).
I'm not sure which is more frightening and depressing: the fact that you were modded insightful (rather than funny), or the fact that I agree with that moderation.
I disagree with you! I believe that most people mean "arithmetic mean" when they say "average". It may simply be a product of local math education.
I would not normally cite a dictionary, but we are currently discussing how people use language, and dictionaries are one of the best resources on how language is actually used.
First, Google. Looking over the first several definitions, I see the mathematical definition of the arithmetic mean first, then several definitions that do not mention summing and dividing (i.e. the arithmetic mean). I even see several mentions of both the mode and the mean. Given that list of definitions, I would be forced to assume that most people use average to mean something other than the arithmetic mean.
The OED (I would provide a link, but it is behind an academic paywall---if you have access, just look up "average" in the Oxford English Dictionary) has many definitions for average, though the ones of greatest interest to the current discussion are
Estimated by average; i.e. by equally distributing the aggregate inequalities of a series among all the individuals of which the series is composed.
Equal to what would be the result of taking an average; medium, ordinary; of the usual or prevalent standard.
The first is definitely what you are talking about, while the second is my understanding of how people use the language.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary also agrees---their first definition of average encompasses the mean, the mode, and the median; and definition 2b seems vague enough to encompass the idea that "average=the middle and half of values are below average."
And, just to be clear, my point is not that you are incorrect to say that "average equals the mean," only that this is a highly technical definition of the average, and that most people, when they say average, are not being nearly so precise. They may actually mean arithmetic mean, or they may mean the median, or they may just be referring to some fuzzy idea about "the middle."
In any case, it is not inappropriate to say that "half of all lawyers are below average," unless you have previously specified a more technical context for the conversation, by either stating that you are referring to the arithmetic mean, or by discussing the actual distribution of lawyer quality and noting that it is not normal. In other contexts, the original poster's phrasing was perfectly understandable, and perfectly in-line with the way that most people use the language (i.e. colloquial usage).
Slashdot Mirror
After posting the article linked in the summary, Zimmer followed up by posting the comments of evolutionary biologist David Hillis on his own website. For those that don't want to read the entire post, the basic idea is that we ought not try to define life as a collection of characteristics (i.e. reproduction, inheritance of traits, existence of metabolism, &c.). Any such definition is likely to exclude things that we think of as alive, or include things that we think of as not-alive. Instead, it may make more sense to think of Life (Hillis uses a capital L on purpose) as a biological taxa. We can discuss the history of Life on Earth, and if we ever discover anything "similar" somewhere else in the universe, we can examine the similarities between Life on Earth and Life2 wherever it is.
That said, I'm not a biologist, thus I am sure that my summary misses some important subtleties, thus I would suggest reading the original before tearing me to shreds. ;)
I am happy that you live in an idealist paradise, where people don't need food or shelter, and can always make principled stands without fearing the consequences. However, in the real world, one needs a paycheck in order to survive. If the choice is between losing one's home or bending one's ideals, there are a diminishingly small number of people would choose the former, and I see no reason to fault those that choose the latter. This is particularly true if one bends, but continues to lobby for change in other ways.
No kidding...
Clearly, the original poster was exaggerating, but I think that you are underestimating the effect of learned behaviour (i.e. culture), epigenetics, and other environmental factors. Even if you fall 100% into the nature camp, DNA doesn't explain everything, and may in fact explain far less than Watson and Crick might have hoped.
Relative to the very high costs of coastal flooding, drought, and other effects of the climate changing. You may disagree with the risk assessment or the tallying of costs, but it seemed that the "relatively" in the original post was pretty clear...
Unfortunately, you are not in any of my circles, so I am sure that I will never read it.
I agree that the "non-mnemonic" is ridiculous, but I don't see how memorizing it is any different than learning (i.e. memorizing) the few exceptions. If you really care about memorizing that shit (rather than relying upon spell check, which I do for most things), then what is wrong with the above?
Indeed. There are other exceptions, too. "Their," for instance, depending on how liberally you take the second clause.
I think you have it backwards. Tau is somewhat easier to work with, and is (arguably) more intuitive. Beginning students are likely to understand tau better than pi. These would be the kinds of people that might want to figure out the diameter of a pipe or whatever. Mathematicians, physicists, and so on will do okay with any notation, be it pi, tau, or the three-legged symbol that Palais suggests.
That is my general take on things. I tell my students that they can show as much or as little work as they like. If they get the right answer, great---they get full points.* If they get it wrong, they get only as much credit as their work justifies.
Of course, I still encourage them to show as much of their work as possible. I've done a fair of math in my 30 years (not as much as some, but quite a bit more than most). I have a bachelors in the subject, am certified and have been employed as a high school mathematics instructor, and am currently working on a graduate degree in the field and teaching algebra to pay for it. I say this not to brag, but merely to explain that I have some experience with computation. I can do most of the required computations in my head, and I generally don't type up all of my work when turning in papers. I still write it all out on my whiteboard or scratch paper when I am working through a problem for the first time---this makes it easier to follow my own line of thinking, and easier to find my own mistakes.
* That isn't quite true---if a student gives me a correct answer but shows incorrect work, they will almost always lose a few points on that question. Students need to convince me that they have mastered the skills that I require them to master---if they show me incorrect work, then I am unconvinced. That being said, in most cases where students give right answers and poor work, it is because they are copying off of a neighbor, which can be easily verified.
That's only because she didn't teach you the entire I before E rule: "I before E, except after C, and when sounded as A as in neighbor and weight, and remember that neither weird foreigner seizes leisure at its height." (That was the poem/rule/whatever that my mother had to learn in elementary school in the 50s.)
;)
Holy shit! Did you warn them about 9/11?
There is more to beating Pac-Man than simply knowing the algorithm for evading the ghosts. One must also be able to implement that algorithm, which requires a certain amount of physical skill (i.e. pushing the right buttons in the correct sequence at the appropriate times). Moreover, one actually has to play the game enough learn what the algorithm is (that is, there is no reason to expect a novice player to immediately see the movement patterns of the ghosts). Pac-Man might be easy to someone who has spend hundreds of hours playing it, but will probably be quite difficult for someone who has only played it for 5 or 10 minutes here and there.
By the same logic, pool should be a very simple game. There really isn't much more to it than geometry and a little bit of physics. Unfortunately, knowing how the cue ball should behave, and actually getting it to behave in that manner are two very different tasks.
Animal Farm is very much about the Soviet Union in the era prior to WWII. 1984 less so. The novel highlights the risk of totalitarianism in general, rather than the problems of Soviet era communism. It is very intentionally set in the UK, and many of the institutions and ideologies in 1984 are quite similar to institutions that existed there in the 1940s.
Some human languages derive meaning from order. These are syntactic languages. Other languages derive meaning from changing the forms of words to denote their role. These are flexive languages. English is syntactic. Russian is flexive, and word order doesn't really matter.
When I was in high school a decade and a half ago, a friend and I did something similar with a simple setting of "Dona Nobis Pacem." However, we were a bit lazier than you---we wrote a program which took tuples as input, where the first value was a note (on a 12 note chromatic scale), and the second value was a frequency. The program expanded everything out into frequency and duration (as you indicate above), then issued a ton of BEEP commands.
In general, the fuel-efficiency argument is rather convincing. However, there are other safety issues. In the western US (particularly Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, &c.), there are huge distances between cities. For instance, it is 300 miles from Elko to Reno (a drive that I have made many, many times). There is not much between Reno and Elko (five or six large towns or small cities). At 60 MPH, it is a 5 hour drive. At the current speed limit of 75 MPH, it is 4 hours. The four hour drive gets people safely to their destination significantly faster. This leads to less driver fatigue, which should lead to fewer collisions. I think that the safety concern outweighs the fuel efficiency argument.
Sales taxes are regressive. They disproportionately effect the poor, as it requires a greater percentage of their income in order to pay the tax. I believe that the argument that the GP is making (though he is by no means clear on this) is that it would be better to eliminate sales taxes entirely, and raise revenues using a more progressive form of taxation (such as an income tax).
You need to read the 14th amendment, specifically the portion which states "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." This is understood to mean that all state and local governments, as well as bodies established by those governments (such as public schools) are subject to the same constraints placed upon the federal government.
In short, the 14th amendment does, in fact, prevent states from establishing a religion.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Courtier's_Reply
I don't think that he is advocating eliminating the income tax in favor of a sales tax, but rather legalizing narcotics, then imposing a sales tax upon them. While I am generally opposed to sales taxes (for the same reason as you are---they are regressive), narcotics are a luxury. If you have the disposable income to pay for them, you have the disposable income to pay an additional 20% tax on them. This also ensures that the money needed to take care of addicts is provided by the users of the substance in question, which seems a fair system. Similar taxes include fuel taxes to pay for roads, tolls to drive on certain roads and bridges, and tuition to attend public universities.
But there is nothing dishonest in saying that half of lawyers are below average. As noted above, "average" is an inexact term, and has ambiguous meaning, particularly in colloquial English (i.e. the English that the original poster was using).
I'm not sure which is more frightening and depressing: the fact that you were modded insightful (rather than funny), or the fact that I agree with that moderation.
Ah! Thank you.
I would not normally cite a dictionary, but we are currently discussing how people use language, and dictionaries are one of the best resources on how language is actually used.
First, Google. Looking over the first several definitions, I see the mathematical definition of the arithmetic mean first, then several definitions that do not mention summing and dividing (i.e. the arithmetic mean). I even see several mentions of both the mode and the mean. Given that list of definitions, I would be forced to assume that most people use average to mean something other than the arithmetic mean.
The OED (I would provide a link, but it is behind an academic paywall---if you have access, just look up "average" in the Oxford English Dictionary) has many definitions for average, though the ones of greatest interest to the current discussion are
The first is definitely what you are talking about, while the second is my understanding of how people use the language.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary also agrees---their first definition of average encompasses the mean, the mode, and the median; and definition 2b seems vague enough to encompass the idea that "average=the middle and half of values are below average."
And, just to be clear, my point is not that you are incorrect to say that "average equals the mean," only that this is a highly technical definition of the average, and that most people, when they say average, are not being nearly so precise. They may actually mean arithmetic mean, or they may mean the median, or they may just be referring to some fuzzy idea about "the middle."
In any case, it is not inappropriate to say that "half of all lawyers are below average," unless you have previously specified a more technical context for the conversation, by either stating that you are referring to the arithmetic mean, or by discussing the actual distribution of lawyer quality and noting that it is not normal. In other contexts, the original poster's phrasing was perfectly understandable, and perfectly in-line with the way that most people use the language (i.e. colloquial usage).