I'm sorry, but Velikovsky spent most of his time attempting to match his own interpretation of various Biblical events to the solar system... and he didn't even match the timeline accepted by biblical scholars, much less the scientific evidence.
Honestly, anybody who actually has read ‘Worlds in Collision’ and compared it with actual historical events is more likely to come up with ‘Wow, isn't it amazing how much people can spend enormous amounts of effort to create patterns even where none exist’ rather than ‘Wow, this is an amazing new description of reality’.
Attempting to bring Velikovsky into a debate about scientific orthodoxy is just torpedoing your own point.
There are perfectly good examples of scientific orthodoxy trying to shut up inconvenient facts. Einstein himself tried to destroy quantum theory, when he'd helped create it with his work on the Photoelectric effect. Continental drift took decades to be accepted, and that was after we had evidence of fossil beds that stretched across multiple continents. The Clovis First hypothesis took many years to mostly shoot down, because the people who had invested their time in it didn't want to accept any dating of evidence that was older than their initial estimates. Mentioning Velikovsky actually works against you, unless you're trying to play the ‘They're ganging up on me!’ card.
To which I just have to quote Carl Sagan:
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
This was Bruce's comment on the matter, back in September: BT, Phorm, and Me. Basically, it boils down to ‘I wasn't working for BT when the decision was made; I'm not involved in the decision; however, as an exec, I cannot comment on the decision.’. I'm fairly certain he disapproves, but can't say anything since BT bought Counterpane.
Maybe, but there's also Douglas Hofstadter's idea of Superrationality. Basically, the concept is that what is rational for a self-centered individual can become irrational when projected to society as a whole. In essence, it's the ‘what if everybody did that’ argument boiled down to a game theoretical principle. It may not be strictly rational for any individual to vote, but if too many people think that way, then the unthinkingly irrational people drive the rest.
Actually, for a significant portion of the market, the lock-in is based on dozens of documents with customized Excel macros implementing business logic.
Welcome to the wonderful of politics, where politicians turn out to be an awful lot like what they seem the most after. I.e. Elliot Spitzer the anti-prostitution governor who gets caught with hookers, Larry Craig the homophobic senator who turns out to solicit gay sex, and so on.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Psychological projection, where people project everything they don't like about themselves onto their assumptions about others. When you're dealing with corrupt individuals, they tend to assume that everybody else is as corrupt as they are.
Of course, the nuclear industry being in limbo means that most of the nuclear research in the U.S. has been done by the government... in particular by the military. From what I understand, the U.S. Navy has actually done some fairly good research work for use by their submarines and aircraft carriers. Small, relatively low-power but constant providing plants that people can live in close proximity to.
Granted, part of the problem as well is that greater regulations become even more counterproductive. Not just that they stop the industry from doing anything, but they keep the industry so second-guessing how things will look that they don't even want to be doing anything. Handling all the regulations means the nuclear industry is at least as bureaucracy-bound as the government itself. One of the issues that caused 3-Mile Island is that while the flaw with the valves that caused the original problem was a known issue, getting the information through all the bureaucracy and into the hands of the people who ran the plant took months.
Well, this was an example of Canadian law from my Law in Engineering class back in 1990:
A contract with a minor is voidable, yes. However, if said minor reaches the age of majority and continues to act as if the contract were in effect, the contract becomes non-voidable. The example given involved a young man playing for a minor hockey tean who attempted to get out of a contract because he signed it as a minor, and he wanted to take a better offer with another team after he'd hit 18. However, he'd played games with his original team after his 18th birthday. As a result, the court ruled that because he had acted upon the contract while no longer a minor, he had re-ratified the contract as an adult, and the normal voidability of contracts with minors no longer applied.
Actually, that's more like Shannon's Law, or at least part of Shannon's Theorrem. Part of his military work on data transmission and jamming ended up proving that the signal system best able to resist jamming is the one that looks the most like other noise.
Sorry, but Gates was born into his wealth... his father was a high-priced patent attorney, and his mother's side of the family had been in the banking industry for some time, his mother on the board for the First Interstate BancSystem. Gates had a million dollar trust fund set up for him by his maternal grandfather. The whole MS-DOS opportunity came about because Gates' mother and an IBM rep worked on the same United Way board.
Perhaps with the right opportunities anybody can be rich and famous... but being rich already makes it a lot easier and less risky to take those opportunities.
I liked the story about the mail that was addressed to ‘James Herriot, It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet, Yorkshire, Scotland’. Apparently, it did arrive, but on it was also written in a different hand, ‘It Shouldn't Happen to a Postman, either.’
Re:What do you call 1 lawyer at the ocean's bottom
on
RIAA Lawyer Jumps Ship
·
· Score: 1
You know, there's a comic out there called Supernatural Law (previously known as “Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre”); the main characters are two laywers, Alanna Wolff and Jeff Byrd, who specialize in being lawyers for movie monsters, witches, and the like.
One year as part of the Amazing Heroes Swimsuit Special, Batton Lash did a picture of Wolff and Byrd walking down toward a gigantic sea monster at the beach, while the narrator was going, “Who are these two lawyers? Why are they unafraid? Could it be...” followed by an off-panel scream. The punchline in the last panel had Alanna Wolff glaring at the rest of the crowd on the beach, the monster looking a little confused, and Jeff Byrd leanint in to say to the monster, “Sorry about my partner there, but she always swore she'd scream of anybody dragged out that chestnut about ‘Professional Courtesy’ again.”
And, when you get right down to it, a lot of people simply will not allow themselves to be wrong; the more you try to press them on it, the harder they'll fight back. See pretty much any religious argument in history.
The problem is, people who have that sort of surety tend to attract followers, especially amongst people who aren't sure of themselves. So people who have this utter assurance tend to become leaders, even when they're headed straight for a cliff they refuse to admit exists...
Oh, and it got worse... the ISA version of the NE2000 was annoying enough, that was just Novell being cheap when they did the original design, since they were more interested in the software end of networking anyway. But whoever thought it was a bright idea to create a PCI clone of the NE2000 should be shot, as there were far better ways of handling things on PCI. The cheap network card I got when signing up for my ADSL line was a RealTek 8390, which is a PCI NE2000 clone with just enough differences to make life interesting.
Damn, wish I could find Donald Becker's original comments on that, but www.scyld.com seems to redirect to Penguin Computing now.
There's this story from a while back, which pointed to at least one case where the non-baryonic dark matter reacted differently from the baryonic matter. There was a galactic collision, and the non-baryonic matter sort of coasted on while much of the baryonic gas slammed together in the middle. Since non-baryonic dark matter reacts only to gravity, there are ways to distinguish between the two...
Several years ago, back in University when I got involved in the Engineering Society and was one of the student reps on the Academic Committee one term, I came to what I consider a very simple realization that is part of this. Time dealing with SF Fandom politics just drove it home.
There are a great many people out there whose primary purpose in life is to find a small enough pond that they can be a big fish in it.
Once they have found and taken such a pond, they will defend it far out of proportion to its actual worth because (in the backs of their minds where they don't admit it to themselves) they know this might be a fluke and don't want anybody more valid taking their pool away from them.
Never used the Amiga myself, but I was a CoCo user from way back, including both Flex/OS and OS-9. It also was ahead of its time... just that its time was a few years before the Amiga.
Really, Tandy didn't have any idea what to do with it once it started to grow out from being the ‘toy’ semi-console system it was originally designed as. The CoCo 3 had some great potential, though it was brought out because the CoCo II had already fallen behind; it was designed to compete with the Amiga and the Atari ST systems. Support up to 512K of memory, better graphics modes... but it got hobbled so it wouldn't compete with the Tandy 1000 line, and Tandy simply didn't bother marketing it, after having gone through the work to actually get games like Kings Quest III and Leisure Suit Larry ported to it. Heck, I've still got the Robot Odyssey port for the CoCo downstairs, though it's doubtful that the diskette is still readable.
Tandy killed it through sheer neglect, and went on to spend their effort on building the least compatible IBM-‘compatibles’ that existed on the market at the time. Which is why Tandy/Radio Shack doesn't sell any of their own computers anymore...
Guess what... all reference to their mistake had been censored, new pages substituted.
Whenever something like this comes up, I'm reminded of one of the comments made in my Ethics course. (I was an engineering student, Ethics is part of the curriculum.) The professor pointed out that when you get right down to it, in the U.S. where many HMOs are owned by insurance companies, in many cases the insurer that insures the doctor against malpractice is also the doctor's superior in the hierarchy, and can tell the doctor, “We can't allow you to perform that surgery because it would cost us too much if you screwed up.”
It was brought up as a textbook case of conflict of interest.
Could it be that BuSab is already operating here and we don't know it?
Of course, from what I recall of Frank Herbert's stories, BuSab was created because the government was getting too efficient, and changing things too fast for society to acclimate to the changes...
In any case, that was a reference that I haven't heard in a while. Now I've got to go read Whipping Star again.
Yeah, that was Chretien that pushed that through, for the most part. Partly, I suspect, a matter of 'I can't run again anyway, and I hate the guy who's replacing me, so I have no problems with making it difficult for anybody else after me to do what I did.'
Cheviot: "It seems I have little choice but to back you against the police... provided, of course, the charges against Carter are completely unfounded. What exactly are they?" Murray: "Credit fraud." Cheviot: "Credit fraud... my god, that's worse than murder!"
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but Velikovsky spent most of his time attempting to match his own interpretation of various Biblical events to the solar system... and he didn't even match the timeline accepted by biblical scholars, much less the scientific evidence.
Honestly, anybody who actually has read ‘Worlds in Collision’ and compared it with actual historical events is more likely to come up with ‘Wow, isn't it amazing how much people can spend enormous amounts of effort to create patterns even where none exist’ rather than ‘Wow, this is an amazing new description of reality’.
Attempting to bring Velikovsky into a debate about scientific orthodoxy is just torpedoing your own point.
There are perfectly good examples of scientific orthodoxy trying to shut up inconvenient facts. Einstein himself tried to destroy quantum theory, when he'd helped create it with his work on the Photoelectric effect. Continental drift took decades to be accepted, and that was after we had evidence of fossil beds that stretched across multiple continents. The Clovis First hypothesis took many years to mostly shoot down, because the people who had invested their time in it didn't want to accept any dating of evidence that was older than their initial estimates. Mentioning Velikovsky actually works against you, unless you're trying to play the ‘They're ganging up on me!’ card.
To which I just have to quote Carl Sagan:
This was Bruce's comment on the matter, back in September: BT, Phorm, and Me. Basically, it boils down to ‘I wasn't working for BT when the decision was made; I'm not involved in the decision; however, as an exec, I cannot comment on the decision.’. I'm fairly certain he disapproves, but can't say anything since BT bought Counterpane.
Maybe, but there's also Douglas Hofstadter's idea of Superrationality. Basically, the concept is that what is rational for a self-centered individual can become irrational when projected to society as a whole. In essence, it's the ‘what if everybody did that’ argument boiled down to a game theoretical principle. It may not be strictly rational for any individual to vote, but if too many people think that way, then the unthinkingly irrational people drive the rest.
Actually, for a significant portion of the market, the lock-in is based on dozens of documents with customized Excel macros implementing business logic.
Should they have consulted all the sages they could find in Yellow Pages first?
But there aren't many of them!
-- And the Mayan panoramas on my pyramid pyjamas haven't helped my little problem... ...
Sorry, I just had to.
Can you give yourself an off-topic moderation?
Welcome to the wonderful world of Psychological projection, where people project everything they don't like about themselves onto their assumptions about others. When you're dealing with corrupt individuals, they tend to assume that everybody else is as corrupt as they are.
Of course, the nuclear industry being in limbo means that most of the nuclear research in the U.S. has been done by the government... in particular by the military. From what I understand, the U.S. Navy has actually done some fairly good research work for use by their submarines and aircraft carriers. Small, relatively low-power but constant providing plants that people can live in close proximity to.
Granted, part of the problem as well is that greater regulations become even more counterproductive. Not just that they stop the industry from doing anything, but they keep the industry so second-guessing how things will look that they don't even want to be doing anything. Handling all the regulations means the nuclear industry is at least as bureaucracy-bound as the government itself. One of the issues that caused 3-Mile Island is that while the flaw with the valves that caused the original problem was a known issue, getting the information through all the bureaucracy and into the hands of the people who ran the plant took months.
Well, this was an example of Canadian law from my Law in Engineering class back in 1990:
A contract with a minor is voidable, yes. However, if said minor reaches the age of majority and continues to act as if the contract were in effect, the contract becomes non-voidable. The example given involved a young man playing for a minor hockey tean who attempted to get out of a contract because he signed it as a minor, and he wanted to take a better offer with another team after he'd hit 18. However, he'd played games with his original team after his 18th birthday. As a result, the court ruled that because he had acted upon the contract while no longer a minor, he had re-ratified the contract as an adult, and the normal voidability of contracts with minors no longer applied.
Here in Canada, for our GST, one of the rules is that restaurant food is taxed, but groceries aren't.
The side effect of this is that if you buy one muffin/donut, you get taxed on it... but if you buy half a dozen or more at a time, you don't.
Actually, that's more like Shannon's Law, or at least part of Shannon's Theorrem. Part of his military work on data transmission and jamming ended up proving that the signal system best able to resist jamming is the one that looks the most like other noise.
Sorry, but Gates was born into his wealth... his father was a high-priced patent attorney, and his mother's side of the family had been in the banking industry for some time, his mother on the board for the First Interstate BancSystem. Gates had a million dollar trust fund set up for him by his maternal grandfather. The whole MS-DOS opportunity came about because Gates' mother and an IBM rep worked on the same United Way board.
Perhaps with the right opportunities anybody can be rich and famous... but being rich already makes it a lot easier and less risky to take those opportunities.
I liked the story about the mail that was addressed to ‘James Herriot, It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet, Yorkshire, Scotland’. Apparently, it did arrive, but on it was also written in a different hand, ‘It Shouldn't Happen to a Postman, either.’
You know, there's a comic out there called Supernatural Law (previously known as “Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre”); the main characters are two laywers, Alanna Wolff and Jeff Byrd, who specialize in being lawyers for movie monsters, witches, and the like.
One year as part of the Amazing Heroes Swimsuit Special, Batton Lash did a picture of Wolff and Byrd walking down toward a gigantic sea monster at the beach, while the narrator was going, “Who are these two lawyers? Why are they unafraid? Could it be...” followed by an off-panel scream. The punchline in the last panel had Alanna Wolff glaring at the rest of the crowd on the beach, the monster looking a little confused, and Jeff Byrd leanint in to say to the monster, “Sorry about my partner there, but she always swore she'd scream of anybody dragged out that chestnut about ‘Professional Courtesy’ again.”
And, when you get right down to it, a lot of people simply will not allow themselves to be wrong; the more you try to press them on it, the harder they'll fight back. See pretty much any religious argument in history.
The problem is, people who have that sort of surety tend to attract followers, especially amongst people who aren't sure of themselves. So people who have this utter assurance tend to become leaders, even when they're headed straight for a cliff they refuse to admit exists...
Oh, I was into programming already when I ran into that game, but it certainly accelerated my interest...
Oh, and it got worse... the ISA version of the NE2000 was annoying enough, that was just Novell being cheap when they did the original design, since they were more interested in the software end of networking anyway. But whoever thought it was a bright idea to create a PCI clone of the NE2000 should be shot, as there were far better ways of handling things on PCI. The cheap network card I got when signing up for my ADSL line was a RealTek 8390, which is a PCI NE2000 clone with just enough differences to make life interesting.
Damn, wish I could find Donald Becker's original comments on that, but www.scyld.com seems to redirect to Penguin Computing now.
There's this story from a while back, which pointed to at least one case where the non-baryonic dark matter reacted differently from the baryonic matter. There was a galactic collision, and the non-baryonic matter sort of coasted on while much of the baryonic gas slammed together in the middle. Since non-baryonic dark matter reacts only to gravity, there are ways to distinguish between the two...
Several years ago, back in University when I got involved in the Engineering Society and was one of the student reps on the Academic Committee one term, I came to what I consider a very simple realization that is part of this. Time dealing with SF Fandom politics just drove it home.
There are a great many people out there whose primary purpose in life is to find a small enough pond that they can be a big fish in it.
Once they have found and taken such a pond, they will defend it far out of proportion to its actual worth because (in the backs of their minds where they don't admit it to themselves) they know this might be a fluke and don't want anybody more valid taking their pool away from them.
Look up James Alan Gardner's short story ‘Muffin Explains Teleology to the World at Large’. It's actually not far from that thought...
I don't know, I prefer this one: http://xkcd.com/195/.
Never used the Amiga myself, but I was a CoCo user from way back, including both Flex/OS and OS-9. It also was ahead of its time... just that its time was a few years before the Amiga.
Really, Tandy didn't have any idea what to do with it once it started to grow out from being the ‘toy’ semi-console system it was originally designed as. The CoCo 3 had some great potential, though it was brought out because the CoCo II had already fallen behind; it was designed to compete with the Amiga and the Atari ST systems. Support up to 512K of memory, better graphics modes... but it got hobbled so it wouldn't compete with the Tandy 1000 line, and Tandy simply didn't bother marketing it, after having gone through the work to actually get games like Kings Quest III and Leisure Suit Larry ported to it. Heck, I've still got the Robot Odyssey port for the CoCo downstairs, though it's doubtful that the diskette is still readable.
Tandy killed it through sheer neglect, and went on to spend their effort on building the least compatible IBM-‘compatibles’ that existed on the market at the time. Which is why Tandy/Radio Shack doesn't sell any of their own computers anymore...
Whenever something like this comes up, I'm reminded of one of the comments made in my Ethics course. (I was an engineering student, Ethics is part of the curriculum.) The professor pointed out that when you get right down to it, in the U.S. where many HMOs are owned by insurance companies, in many cases the insurer that insures the doctor against malpractice is also the doctor's superior in the hierarchy, and can tell the doctor, “We can't allow you to perform that surgery because it would cost us too much if you screwed up.”
It was brought up as a textbook case of conflict of interest.
Of course, from what I recall of Frank Herbert's stories, BuSab was created because the government was getting too efficient, and changing things too fast for society to acclimate to the changes...
In any case, that was a reference that I haven't heard in a while. Now I've got to go read Whipping Star again.
Yeah, that was Chretien that pushed that through, for the most part. Partly, I suspect, a matter of 'I can't run again anyway, and I hate the guy who's replacing me, so I have no problems with making it difficult for anybody else after me to do what I did.'
Reminds me of this scene:
Max Headroom: Security Systems