our decisions are all caused by something before them
That is the crux of the issue. And I think I see it a little differently than you do. I certainly agree that our decisions are influenced by things that came before them. However, all those things, those experiences and data points, they don't necessarily demand a certain outcome. In a digital world they would, but that's not the kind of world we live in. Analog data can be ambiguous, and our life experiences, and the lessons we draw from them are nearly always ambiguous. So the question becomes how we deal with those cases -- that is what seems free to me. Specifically, the ability to interpret my experiences and reprogram my behavior when there is no clear answer as to what is the best course of action.
On some level we can say "but even in those cases, you were just following what you wanted because of your experiences". But it's just a snake eating it's own tail, because we shape our own experiences too. So where did the want really come from?
In the end all that matters is that I can do things that seem to go against my programming. And I can. I don't know what else to call it but free will.
Chaos theory is part of it, but there is more to it than that. I think that chaotic systems are a prerequisite for a possible free-will, but we also need self-representation, i.e. the system models itself. In any case, I think some chaotic problems are "solved" using perturbative theories, which give very useful results, but not precise results. I'm guessing, from your response that you've read some of Hofstader's work? If you haven't it's some great stuff on the topics of logic, math, and consciousness. Once I wrote in my journal after reading some of his "Metamagical Themas":
You are simply a recursive function, without a strange attractor, filled with arbitrary values. Run run run.
Maybe mental illness is a strange attractor.
That makes it sound like I don't believe in free will, but I do... as much as one can believe in something that can't be meaningfully analyzed yet.
That's a pretty semantic take... and I don't think the ambiguity of language is really the issue. I would call attention to the word "unconstrained". I would agree that there's nothing that is "uninfluenced" by the Big Bang (I don't believe in God), but "unconstrained" is a more absolute term and I don't think the American Heritage Dictionary is discounting influence in their acceptable definition of free will.
I find the "silly myth" take amusing, being how little any of us understand about self-modelling systems make decisions. I mean, decisions are getting made, and we have no idea how. I'm willing to call it an unknown, but free-will is as good a name for the process as any.
I agree that complex behaviors are not free will... I don't think a hurricane has free will, for example:) And what you say about the consequences of self-awareness and how it influences choice (whatever the word means) are pretty much just what I'm getting at. The frost formation is chaotic, but doesn't feed back into itself. The sun, earth, and moon does feed back into itself, but there's no self awareness so I don't think that's free will either. Still we don't even fully understand the complexities of those systems.
Self-awareness... where the system not only chaotic, and not only feeds back into itself, but also models itself, is where it gets really interesting. That's consciousness, and yes it fits into the laws of physics (or they'd need to be modified), but we don't understand it very well... and thus I can't rule out some notion of free will yet.
Before the determinists get all worked up I wanted to just say that I'll believe in free will until someone can explain to me the subtleties of massively complex systems with feedback. That is -- Newton's n-body problem where n = 100 billion (roughly the neural capacity for the human brain).
Why do I think this matters? Because we understand precious little about _any_ feedback system; anything self-referential. Our logical analysis breaks on "this sentence is false". The math of our classical physics fails to give precise results with 3 mutually interacting bodies. And we're ready to claim that we understand the human mind well enough to rule out free will?
Maybe we don't have free will... how should I know? But I think it's a little premature to discount the most pervasive observation across the entire human species without even knowing how these things work.
This premise of this article isn't even talking about all that, though -- they're not considering physical determinism, they're wondering if people can rise above their personality profile. Sure, there are extreme anecdotal examples (like the tumor causing misbehavior) that might say otherwise, but even a small study that looks at people's behavior indicators and their resulting behavior will show that people don't always do what you expect. My guess is it never will. But in any case it is way premature.
To summarize my view -- we don't have nearly enough understanding of anything to discount free will. But if in fact it doesn't exist, the completely pervasive perception that it does is more than enough for me to live and let live as though it does.
Of course, my making that very decision brings up the question of free will, I suppose:)
I don't know... but it doesn't under the current patent system either, right? It's just structured so that a patent results in some large amount of money that may or may not cover your other R&D. And I did say you might want to include interest... i.e. 110%. maybe 200%. I don't know... but I'm thinking there should be some way to keep the first person who thinks of a easy-to-implement idea from holding the market hostage for a couple decades when someone else might have thought of it the next day. Those kind of things don't need protection.
I think the largest flaw with my idea is that it would be nearly impossible to properly guage the R&D costs. You'd need some kind of patent tribunal that estimated the value of the patent to the public, and thus the amount of money the creator should be able to recoup. That's way too visible-hand I think. If there was a way to let the market decide how much each patent was worth; so that the length of protection was related to how hard it was for the creator to come up with it.
Again, thinking aloud. Don't have the time today to carefully consider:)
What if patents only allowed the bearer to hold the patent as long as it took to cover their R&D costs? So if I come up with a clever idea which I can implement overnight (like one click shopping) I get basically no protection. But if I spend a million dollars working out a flying car or a new cancer drug, I am covered by the patent until I recoup my losses, then it's fair game. It could be "recoup losses + 10% too" or something.
I think my post was pretty relevant since the "current discussion" was about stability. That's why I included the reliability metric. I included the speed metric as another positive which is, despite your saying otherwise, at least partly due to the good database performance. In any case the two taken together do much to rebuff the original poster's claim that MySQL dies under heavy load.
So you do it in multiple transactions then. Transaction 1 inserts the order data, transaction 2 processes the payment, transaction 3 updates statistics, with each saving a note somewhere of how far it got.
Well sure... though at that point the "transactions" are just single insert statements, so I'm not sure what benefit you get since those are atomic for all intents and purposes anyways.
That's easy, in my application I just log all of the requests headers and POST data.
A good idea, but that doesn't tell you necessarily when something went wrong. A dangling charge record sure does. Then you can check out the POST log to see if it was something in the request that caused it.
Why? In a well designed database, things don't just vanish.
True. But lets say you have an inventory system where an item gets scanned to a location. Normally you have a table in the DB for each. But lets say the user scans an item into a non-existent location -- perhaps a barcode was created that isn't valid for some reason. You're still better off recording the bad scan. Sure you can give the user an error (and I would) but 9 times out of 10 in a high-volume distributed user base the user doesn't really care about the error. They'll shrug and walk away and you're left with no data at all.
Note the above isn't really a hypothetical (though it's simplified) -- I've had to deal with this in reality in many cases in our warehouse. Someone can always easily say "don't allow xyz" but you can't stop people from doing xyz, so you might as well record it. Then they say "well, fire someone if they do xyz", that's not always practical, but even if it is, you have to record it to know who did it.
Are there clean transactional ways to do all the things I'm talking about? Sure, to a large degree. But partially inserted records aren't "wrong" if the process was really partially complete. I get that datbases should be "clean", but there are exceptions to every rule. For me, the exception is when being "clean" means being less representative of reality.
Any DB misconfigured is going to die under load. MySQL can be configured to be extremely stable -- we've been running the fastest & most reliable retail site online for the past year now with MySQL as the DB.
I've got nothing against PostgreSQL -- just never used it. I'm sure it's a fine piece of software, but please don't spread falsehoods about MySQL just because people don't know how to configure it. That would be like me claiming PostgreSQL sucks because I couldn't get it working easily. It's all about knowing what you're doing in any case.
Specifically, most of the errors you're seeing are because they've got it configured to use more memory than their 32 bit arcitecture supports. It's fairly easy to misconfiure so that in a high traffic situation the MySQL process will use over 2GB and then the OS shuts it down. The options are to go 64 bit or to configure it to use less memory for performance or limit the connections -- just like with Apache's MaxClients option.
Having worked on a "serious" app or two, I'm not 100% sure I agree with the logic. I actually like to allow certain types of crap in my DB -- let me tell you why: because it provides a trail. For example, in an order processing system lets say you have to insert the order, the items, and the credit card charge. DBA 101 would say this should be a transaction so that all or nothing goes through, right? That way you've got your "clean" database.
However, I'd absolutely rather have messy data: imagine some type of glitch occurs (yes, unavoidable when working on anything with "serious" volume) and you end up performing the credit card charge but some part of the insert fails. In that case I want a partial transaction because there really was a partial transaction. It will aid in identifiying that something happened, and also in figuring out what it was.
Yes, I do log errors elsewhere. But if you've worked on anything "serious" you'll know that there's always an error case that can come up aside from what you're able to log well.
I've come accross other examples, like making inventory records that don't have a foreign key because it's better than having no record at all.
I guess it comes down to this philosophy: I use the database to record a reality. Reality can have messy stuff. I'd rather record that messiness and then identify it and work to improve the processes than to ignore the messiness and have a pure but inaccurate database.
Oh -- very good point. Actually I did grow up in the Boston Area and so I did my share of sledding. For whatever reason I never sustained a serious injury, nor did my friends, so I didn't really consider it. But I remember a hill in Sharon Massachusetts called "Chemung". It was the ultimate sledding hill in the area -- long steep and wide. Kids would flock to it by the hundreds each weekend. At some point the authorities built large hill-like "barriers" at the bottom in an effort to discourage sledding. This only made it more fun as they worked as jumps. Later they planted some trees, which just provided for fun obsticles. I moved away before they did anything else, but I remember them running articles in the paper each weekend, warning of the dangers and listing the serious injuries, like broken finger and facial bones, and dislocated shoulders and such. I think they used to get 50 or so emergency room visits a week.
It has to be the bicycle, no? I distinctly remember my friends and I doing head on collisions on purpose on our bicycles. It was a form of jousting without the lances, I think. Man, the things you can get away with when you're under 100 lbs.
I remember a toy that I had around 9 years old... it was called Mr. Football (and had a catchy jingle) and it was basically a device that threw football passes. Unlike some modern air gun versions that work only with soft foam footballs, Mr. Football was simply a timer and high-powered spring catapult. I begged for it, and my parents got it for me. But they realized it was dangerous and kept it locked up in the shed, only allowing my friends and I to use it while they were around. So of course I had to steal the key.
This took only a day or two, and soon my friends and I had Mr. Football out and operating without any adults around. This was wonderful because we knew well that a football was about the least interesting thing you could load into a catapult. We started with rocks, then open soda cans, and eventually insects. It was extrodinarily fun. Until the accident.
While trying to launch a caterpillar, we were waiting for the catapult to go off, when the little creature managed to get to the edge of Mr. Football's powerful plastic hand. With the timer only a couple seconds from going off, one of my friends went over to make sure the caterpillar didn't escape. I warned him to get away from the thing, but too late -- it went off and smacked him right in the face. He fell to the ground and was crying. We went over to check him out. He had a bright red abrasion on his cheekbone and brow, but he seemed okay at first. Then we noticed that his eye was filling with blood. Specifically the iris; the white was normal save for being a bit bloodshot, but the bottom half of the iris was filled with blood. He said he could see but that it was blurry. We sent him home and told him not to tell his mother or we'd all get in trouble.
Of course we all got in trouble. He had to go and get several surgeries on his eye to correct the damage, and I was told it wouldn't ever be 100% again. He moved away a year later so I don't really know. A lawyer or someone like that came by once later to pick up the device, because I think there was a class action suit, though my family wasn't involved in that. I don't think the item was on store shelves a year later. Not sure how much my friend's injury had to do with that.
Anyways, I was sort of hoping to see it on the list, but no dice.
A 'hydrogen ecomony' makes little more sense than a 'battery economy'. The world needs energy? Just get batteries! Problem solved!
I think this mis-thinking actually indicates a more general problem with the public's thinking -- we accept most of what we can buy as manna from heaven. We don't realize how much goes into every little modern convenience we have, from water and food to electricity to clothing to whatever. If I can get it delivered or it's on the shelf at wal-mart then there's an endless supply and it should be cheap.
I think there is an advantage to abstracting our portable energy container/transmission technology. In other words, a way to split the means of energy production (coal, nuclear, sun, geothermal, etc.) from how and where it is used. Hydrogen is a candidate for that. Modern batteries suck. Flywheels are interesting but seem unfeasable. The main problem I see with hydrogen is how difficult it is to transport, though there may be other bigger challenges. Biodiesel is interesting, but isn't as flexible in production methods, and may be a net loss at this point.
Anyways, it's a super interesting field, but it doesn't seem like people are even asking the right questions yet about these technologies.
Sure, but since the grandparent poster hadn't done a double-blind study on this it is valid to counter their anecdotes with the same, to at least provide alternative views.
Strongly disagree. I have a Christian theist family on my mother's side and an atheist family on my father's side. My mother's side distinctly dislikes science. Whenever I talk curiousity about anything in the way the world works, their interest quickly bottoms out with something like "God made it that way and we can't understand with our little human brains". They are completely satisfied with knowing nothing. They also directly fear science because they think science is responsible for the decline in Christianity. What decline? The US is more Christian now than ever. Of course that's a factual point so even bringing that up is too scientific, they want to go by their guestimation.
I'm not saying all theistic people are like that. I understand that a large part of early science was motivated by the desire to understand the mind of God. I understand that most scientists are theists (because most humans are theist). But I have witnessed theism hamper people's interest in science as well, something I've never seen atheism do.
That's quite a bold prediction. Have you ever actually read a detailed account of what happened? You should. I strongly recommend Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present. Your comment sounds particularly uniformed.
Could the officers have cuffed him and physically carried him out of the building? Yeah? Then they didn't need to taser him. They were just playing with their toys. It's wrong and offensive. It reminds me of when they swab pepper into the eyes of peaceful proesters. It's a mild form of torture and it is absurd that it is allowed. Either of those things would be considerd a serious assault if a civilian undertook them. Law enforcement officers should not escalate situations to assault like that; they're supposed to be keeping peace.
The current taser models override the voluntary muscle nerve impulses and cause the body to tense for the duration it's firing. Once it's off you're back to normal within a few seconds, with the exception of the adrenaline rush.
This isn't what I've seen. Just last month an acquaintance of mine, a police officer in Indiana, offered to dress like Keith Richards and be tasered on stage for five seconds while "Start Me Up" played. No, I'm serious... it was a contest put on by a radio station to give away backstage passes for the Stones concert: whoever did the craziest thing, determined by judges and crowd reaction, got the tickets.
Anyways, he had been tasered before as part of his training, so this was his second time. The MC shot him across stage with the electrodes (they go quite far) and then juiced him for five seconds straight. He stiffened like a board and two bouncers helped him to fall safely face down on the ground. And there he lay for at least 30 seconds wihout moving: despite his best efforts, he could not get up. In fact, the crowd was mostly silent and occasionally gasping as we thought he might be dead. Eventually, with the help of the bouncers he was able to regain his feet. He won the tickets. But he was moving in slow motion for another 15-30 minutes and complained that he felt like shit for the rest of the night.
In any case, I'm just saying that when they turn off the taser, at least some of the time, the victim cannot get right back up as you claim. So telling someone "get up or I'll taser you again" is absolutely moronic.
I'm going to visit Easter Island next week as part of a trip to Chile. I've always felt that it was a great little microcosm of mankinds tendancies. Specifically, the confusion between what's important vs. what's not (trees vs. Moai), the mistaken idea that lots and lots means infinite, and the illusion that we are not tied to the ecosystem. I'm sure anyone who could benefit from thinking differently about these things has already labeled me a fool and tuned me out, which is apropos and sad.
The fact is we live in a finite world on which our continued success is dependent. The world does have a capacity to deal with our exploitation, and as long as we don't overdo it we'll be fine. We can cut down trees and eat fish and beef. But we do need to understand the balance and take care not to overdo it. We absoultely have the power to irreversibly destroy things, as some of the human driven extinctions can testify. As Easter Island can testify. I don't know where the limits are, but anyone who doesn't at least recognize that there is a limit to the damage we can safely inflict on the planet is simply lying to themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
our decisions are all caused by something before them
That is the crux of the issue. And I think I see it a little differently than you do. I certainly agree that our decisions are influenced by things that came before them. However, all those things, those experiences and data points, they don't necessarily demand a certain outcome. In a digital world they would, but that's not the kind of world we live in. Analog data can be ambiguous, and our life experiences, and the lessons we draw from them are nearly always ambiguous. So the question becomes how we deal with those cases -- that is what seems free to me. Specifically, the ability to interpret my experiences and reprogram my behavior when there is no clear answer as to what is the best course of action.
On some level we can say "but even in those cases, you were just following what you wanted because of your experiences". But it's just a snake eating it's own tail, because we shape our own experiences too. So where did the want really come from?
In the end all that matters is that I can do things that seem to go against my programming. And I can. I don't know what else to call it but free will.
Cheers.
That makes it sound like I don't believe in free will, but I do... as much as one can believe in something that can't be meaningfully analyzed yet.
Cheers.
That's a pretty semantic take... and I don't think the ambiguity of language is really the issue. I would call attention to the word "unconstrained". I would agree that there's nothing that is "uninfluenced" by the Big Bang (I don't believe in God), but "unconstrained" is a more absolute term and I don't think the American Heritage Dictionary is discounting influence in their acceptable definition of free will.
I find the "silly myth" take amusing, being how little any of us understand about self-modelling systems make decisions. I mean, decisions are getting made, and we have no idea how. I'm willing to call it an unknown, but free-will is as good a name for the process as any.
Cheers.
I agree that complex behaviors are not free will... I don't think a hurricane has free will, for example :) And what you say about the consequences of self-awareness and how it influences choice (whatever the word means) are pretty much just what I'm getting at. The frost formation is chaotic, but doesn't feed back into itself. The sun, earth, and moon does feed back into itself, but there's no self awareness so I don't think that's free will either. Still we don't even fully understand the complexities of those systems.
... where the system not only chaotic, and not only feeds back into itself, but also models itself, is where it gets really interesting. That's consciousness, and yes it fits into the laws of physics (or they'd need to be modified), but we don't understand it very well... and thus I can't rule out some notion of free will yet.
Self-awareness
Cheers.
Before the determinists get all worked up I wanted to just say that I'll believe in free will until someone can explain to me the subtleties of massively complex systems with feedback. That is -- Newton's n-body problem where n = 100 billion (roughly the neural capacity for the human brain).
:)
Why do I think this matters? Because we understand precious little about _any_ feedback system; anything self-referential. Our logical analysis breaks on "this sentence is false". The math of our classical physics fails to give precise results with 3 mutually interacting bodies. And we're ready to claim that we understand the human mind well enough to rule out free will?
Maybe we don't have free will... how should I know? But I think it's a little premature to discount the most pervasive observation across the entire human species without even knowing how these things work.
This premise of this article isn't even talking about all that, though -- they're not considering physical determinism, they're wondering if people can rise above their personality profile. Sure, there are extreme anecdotal examples (like the tumor causing misbehavior) that might say otherwise, but even a small study that looks at people's behavior indicators and their resulting behavior will show that people don't always do what you expect. My guess is it never will. But in any case it is way premature.
To summarize my view -- we don't have nearly enough understanding of anything to discount free will. But if in fact it doesn't exist, the completely pervasive perception that it does is more than enough for me to live and let live as though it does.
Of course, my making that very decision brings up the question of free will, I suppose
Cheers.
I don't know... but it doesn't under the current patent system either, right? It's just structured so that a patent results in some large amount of money that may or may not cover your other R&D. And I did say you might want to include interest... i.e. 110%. maybe 200%. I don't know... but I'm thinking there should be some way to keep the first person who thinks of a easy-to-implement idea from holding the market hostage for a couple decades when someone else might have thought of it the next day. Those kind of things don't need protection.
:)
I think the largest flaw with my idea is that it would be nearly impossible to properly guage the R&D costs. You'd need some kind of patent tribunal that estimated the value of the patent to the public, and thus the amount of money the creator should be able to recoup. That's way too visible-hand I think. If there was a way to let the market decide how much each patent was worth; so that the length of protection was related to how hard it was for the creator to come up with it.
Again, thinking aloud. Don't have the time today to carefully consider
What if patents only allowed the bearer to hold the patent as long as it took to cover their R&D costs? So if I come up with a clever idea which I can implement overnight (like one click shopping) I get basically no protection. But if I spend a million dollars working out a flying car or a new cancer drug, I am covered by the patent until I recoup my losses, then it's fair game. It could be "recoup losses + 10% too" or something.
:)
Just thinking out loud
I think my post was pretty relevant since the "current discussion" was about stability. That's why I included the reliability metric. I included the speed metric as another positive which is, despite your saying otherwise, at least partly due to the good database performance. In any case the two taken together do much to rebuff the original poster's claim that MySQL dies under heavy load.
Cheers.
So you do it in multiple transactions then. Transaction 1 inserts the order data, transaction 2 processes the payment, transaction 3 updates statistics, with each saving a note somewhere of how far it got.
Well sure... though at that point the "transactions" are just single insert statements, so I'm not sure what benefit you get since those are atomic for all intents and purposes anyways.
That's easy, in my application I just log all of the requests headers and POST data.
A good idea, but that doesn't tell you necessarily when something went wrong. A dangling charge record sure does. Then you can check out the POST log to see if it was something in the request that caused it.
Why? In a well designed database, things don't just vanish.
True. But lets say you have an inventory system where an item gets scanned to a location. Normally you have a table in the DB for each. But lets say the user scans an item into a non-existent location -- perhaps a barcode was created that isn't valid for some reason. You're still better off recording the bad scan. Sure you can give the user an error (and I would) but 9 times out of 10 in a high-volume distributed user base the user doesn't really care about the error. They'll shrug and walk away and you're left with no data at all.
Note the above isn't really a hypothetical (though it's simplified) -- I've had to deal with this in reality in many cases in our warehouse. Someone can always easily say "don't allow xyz" but you can't stop people from doing xyz, so you might as well record it. Then they say "well, fire someone if they do xyz", that's not always practical, but even if it is, you have to record it to know who did it.
Are there clean transactional ways to do all the things I'm talking about? Sure, to a large degree. But partially inserted records aren't "wrong" if the process was really partially complete. I get that datbases should be "clean", but there are exceptions to every rule. For me, the exception is when being "clean" means being less representative of reality.
Cheers.
Any DB misconfigured is going to die under load. MySQL can be configured to be extremely stable -- we've been running the fastest & most reliable retail site online for the past year now with MySQL as the DB.
I've got nothing against PostgreSQL -- just never used it. I'm sure it's a fine piece of software, but please don't spread falsehoods about MySQL just because people don't know how to configure it. That would be like me claiming PostgreSQL sucks because I couldn't get it working easily. It's all about knowing what you're doing in any case.
Specifically, most of the errors you're seeing are because they've got it configured to use more memory than their 32 bit arcitecture supports. It's fairly easy to misconfiure so that in a high traffic situation the MySQL process will use over 2GB and then the OS shuts it down. The options are to go 64 bit or to configure it to use less memory for performance or limit the connections -- just like with Apache's MaxClients option.
Cheers.
That webforum example is funny and sad... but what does that have to do with MySQL?
Cheers.
Having worked on a "serious" app or two, I'm not 100% sure I agree with the logic. I actually like to allow certain types of crap in my DB -- let me tell you why: because it provides a trail. For example, in an order processing system lets say you have to insert the order, the items, and the credit card charge. DBA 101 would say this should be a transaction so that all or nothing goes through, right? That way you've got your "clean" database.
However, I'd absolutely rather have messy data: imagine some type of glitch occurs (yes, unavoidable when working on anything with "serious" volume) and you end up performing the credit card charge but some part of the insert fails. In that case I want a partial transaction because there really was a partial transaction. It will aid in identifiying that something happened, and also in figuring out what it was.
Yes, I do log errors elsewhere. But if you've worked on anything "serious" you'll know that there's always an error case that can come up aside from what you're able to log well.
I've come accross other examples, like making inventory records that don't have a foreign key because it's better than having no record at all.
I guess it comes down to this philosophy: I use the database to record a reality. Reality can have messy stuff. I'd rather record that messiness and then identify it and work to improve the processes than to ignore the messiness and have a pure but inaccurate database.
Flame away...
Oh -- very good point. Actually I did grow up in the Boston Area and so I did my share of sledding. For whatever reason I never sustained a serious injury, nor did my friends, so I didn't really consider it. But I remember a hill in Sharon Massachusetts called "Chemung". It was the ultimate sledding hill in the area -- long steep and wide. Kids would flock to it by the hundreds each weekend. At some point the authorities built large hill-like "barriers" at the bottom in an effort to discourage sledding. This only made it more fun as they worked as jumps. Later they planted some trees, which just provided for fun obsticles. I moved away before they did anything else, but I remember them running articles in the paper each weekend, warning of the dangers and listing the serious injuries, like broken finger and facial bones, and dislocated shoulders and such. I think they used to get 50 or so emergency room visits a week.
Ah, the joys of childhood!
It has to be the bicycle, no? I distinctly remember my friends and I doing head on collisions on purpose on our bicycles. It was a form of jousting without the lances, I think. Man, the things you can get away with when you're under 100 lbs.
Anyways, I think we should ban bicycles.
Just kidding.
I remember a toy that I had around 9 years old... it was called Mr. Football (and had a catchy jingle) and it was basically a device that threw football passes. Unlike some modern air gun versions that work only with soft foam footballs, Mr. Football was simply a timer and high-powered spring catapult. I begged for it, and my parents got it for me. But they realized it was dangerous and kept it locked up in the shed, only allowing my friends and I to use it while they were around. So of course I had to steal the key.
This took only a day or two, and soon my friends and I had Mr. Football out and operating without any adults around. This was wonderful because we knew well that a football was about the least interesting thing you could load into a catapult. We started with rocks, then open soda cans, and eventually insects. It was extrodinarily fun. Until the accident.
While trying to launch a caterpillar, we were waiting for the catapult to go off, when the little creature managed to get to the edge of Mr. Football's powerful plastic hand. With the timer only a couple seconds from going off, one of my friends went over to make sure the caterpillar didn't escape. I warned him to get away from the thing, but too late -- it went off and smacked him right in the face. He fell to the ground and was crying. We went over to check him out. He had a bright red abrasion on his cheekbone and brow, but he seemed okay at first. Then we noticed that his eye was filling with blood. Specifically the iris; the white was normal save for being a bit bloodshot, but the bottom half of the iris was filled with blood. He said he could see but that it was blurry. We sent him home and told him not to tell his mother or we'd all get in trouble.
Of course we all got in trouble. He had to go and get several surgeries on his eye to correct the damage, and I was told it wouldn't ever be 100% again. He moved away a year later so I don't really know. A lawyer or someone like that came by once later to pick up the device, because I think there was a class action suit, though my family wasn't involved in that. I don't think the item was on store shelves a year later. Not sure how much my friend's injury had to do with that.
Anyways, I was sort of hoping to see it on the list, but no dice.
Cheers.
A 'hydrogen ecomony' makes little more sense than a 'battery economy'. The world needs energy? Just get batteries! Problem solved!
I think this mis-thinking actually indicates a more general problem with the public's thinking -- we accept most of what we can buy as manna from heaven. We don't realize how much goes into every little modern convenience we have, from water and food to electricity to clothing to whatever. If I can get it delivered or it's on the shelf at wal-mart then there's an endless supply and it should be cheap.
I think there is an advantage to abstracting our portable energy container/transmission technology. In other words, a way to split the means of energy production (coal, nuclear, sun, geothermal, etc.) from how and where it is used. Hydrogen is a candidate for that. Modern batteries suck. Flywheels are interesting but seem unfeasable. The main problem I see with hydrogen is how difficult it is to transport, though there may be other bigger challenges. Biodiesel is interesting, but isn't as flexible in production methods, and may be a net loss at this point.
Anyways, it's a super interesting field, but it doesn't seem like people are even asking the right questions yet about these technologies.
Cheers.
Just an anecdote, but I've spent far more on TV shows this year on iTunes than I ever did on music.
Of course, I'm a weird nut who thinks it's worth $1.99 an episode to watch TV commercial free whenever I want, but don't own a Tivo.
Cheers.
Sure, but since the grandparent poster hadn't done a double-blind study on this it is valid to counter their anecdotes with the same, to at least provide alternative views.
Cheers.
Strongly disagree. I have a Christian theist family on my mother's side and an atheist family on my father's side. My mother's side distinctly dislikes science. Whenever I talk curiousity about anything in the way the world works, their interest quickly bottoms out with something like "God made it that way and we can't understand with our little human brains". They are completely satisfied with knowing nothing. They also directly fear science because they think science is responsible for the decline in Christianity. What decline? The US is more Christian now than ever. Of course that's a factual point so even bringing that up is too scientific, they want to go by their guestimation.
I'm not saying all theistic people are like that. I understand that a large part of early science was motivated by the desire to understand the mind of God. I understand that most scientists are theists (because most humans are theist). But I have witnessed theism hamper people's interest in science as well, something I've never seen atheism do.
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That's quite a bold prediction. Have you ever actually read a detailed account of what happened? You should. I strongly recommend Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present. Your comment sounds particularly uniformed.
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Could the officers have cuffed him and physically carried him out of the building? Yeah? Then they didn't need to taser him. They were just playing with their toys. It's wrong and offensive. It reminds me of when they swab pepper into the eyes of peaceful proesters. It's a mild form of torture and it is absurd that it is allowed. Either of those things would be considerd a serious assault if a civilian undertook them. Law enforcement officers should not escalate situations to assault like that; they're supposed to be keeping peace.
Cheers.
The current taser models override the voluntary muscle nerve impulses and cause the body to tense for the duration it's firing. Once it's off you're back to normal within a few seconds, with the exception of the adrenaline rush.
This isn't what I've seen. Just last month an acquaintance of mine, a police officer in Indiana, offered to dress like Keith Richards and be tasered on stage for five seconds while "Start Me Up" played. No, I'm serious... it was a contest put on by a radio station to give away backstage passes for the Stones concert: whoever did the craziest thing, determined by judges and crowd reaction, got the tickets.
Anyways, he had been tasered before as part of his training, so this was his second time. The MC shot him across stage with the electrodes (they go quite far) and then juiced him for five seconds straight. He stiffened like a board and two bouncers helped him to fall safely face down on the ground. And there he lay for at least 30 seconds wihout moving: despite his best efforts, he could not get up. In fact, the crowd was mostly silent and occasionally gasping as we thought he might be dead. Eventually, with the help of the bouncers he was able to regain his feet. He won the tickets. But he was moving in slow motion for another 15-30 minutes and complained that he felt like shit for the rest of the night.
In any case, I'm just saying that when they turn off the taser, at least some of the time, the victim cannot get right back up as you claim. So telling someone "get up or I'll taser you again" is absolutely moronic.
Cheers.
Actually, Office Depot pulled it off too, but they were in a different category.
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Yet the only company that actually kept it below 4 seconds was Zappos.com. Yeah, I admit I'm patting my team on the back :)
Cheers.
I'm going to visit Easter Island next week as part of a trip to Chile. I've always felt that it was a great little microcosm of mankinds tendancies. Specifically, the confusion between what's important vs. what's not (trees vs. Moai), the mistaken idea that lots and lots means infinite, and the illusion that we are not tied to the ecosystem. I'm sure anyone who could benefit from thinking differently about these things has already labeled me a fool and tuned me out, which is apropos and sad.
The fact is we live in a finite world on which our continued success is dependent. The world does have a capacity to deal with our exploitation, and as long as we don't overdo it we'll be fine. We can cut down trees and eat fish and beef. But we do need to understand the balance and take care not to overdo it. We absoultely have the power to irreversibly destroy things, as some of the human driven extinctions can testify. As Easter Island can testify. I don't know where the limits are, but anyone who doesn't at least recognize that there is a limit to the damage we can safely inflict on the planet is simply lying to themselves.
Cheers.