What no? That's only a sign that growth is less than exponential, which shouldn't be surprising at all. That doesn't mean the growth rate is half as fast. Say for example you started with the function f(t)=t^2 and looked at starting at t=1. To double f the first time one needs to go to about 1.4. To again double f one needs to go 2, to double again one needs to go to about 3.8. Here the growth rate is increasing, but the doubling time is also increasing. This is a common pattern for functions which grow more slowly than exponential.
Curious, one person replied to the graph claiming that it looks like it is leveling off (correctly noting that the rate of growth is expected to slow down) and someone else then claims the graph is somehow maniuplated. So could you explain what is manipulated in this graph? It isn't using a wonky time scale or a wonky population scale. The most common trick of this sort is to cut off the base and essentially start the y value at some higher level, but that's not the case here. It is also possible to cut off early data (say if one wanted to hide large scale fluctuations) but if you include data before 1800 the prior time looks pretty similar. So that's not. You can't just dismiss any graph as bad just because it is possible to make graphs look bad. It is a reason to actually look carefully at graphs, and if there's no problem with it, actually pay attention to it.
Yes, growth is slowing, especially as per a capita income level goes up, so the growth is substantially less than exponential, but it is still growing at an extremely high rate.
A major part of education is understanding basic forecasting, how to judge when an extrapolation looks reasonable, when to expect correlation v. causation issues, etc. Moreover, in this case, anyone reading Fivethirtyeight is likely already pretty educated, so this isn't really being aimed at the people with no knowledge.
politicians that have been elected so far are against the idea of educating people as this will destroy the system as exist today and they will have to get real jobs
Most people, even politicians, aren't so evil that they would deliberately try to destroy the educational system. Moreover, most people don't have the foresight to do that. Part of the problem with society is a lack of foresight, so no politician is going to say "Let's spend a decade destroying education so I'll have slightly more job security thirty years from now." In order to actually understand people, realize that shortsightedness, incompetence, short-term greed, stupidity, and laziness do a decent job of explaining a lot of bad results. Long-term evil is very rare.
It seems like everyone has as their go-to thing to reboot or add life into old material is to make them darker and grittier. Some cases this goes really well, like the Batman movies. Sometimes less so. I have to wonder what is going to be next? Darker and grittier Carebares where they fight actual drug dealers and pimps? Dark and gritty My Little Pony where Nightmare Moon stomps Twilight Sparkle to death? Maybe a darker and grittier Mario game where the koopahs die violent deaths and at the end you find out exactly what Bowser was doing to the Princess the whole time she was kidnapped? Maybe a dark and gritty live-action He-Man movie? Actually, I'd watch that last one probably. But this really feels like writers and producers have run out of ideas and think that "darker and grittier" are magic words which automatically revive franchises. Maybe instead they could try actually writing good plot lines?
They may have limited their attacks so that they only used attacks on systems where they could get most of their attacks to work. If one wanted the system to stay unnoticed for as long as possible, it makes sense to only target the systems that you have a really good understanding of.
The majority of Germans didn't vote for Hitler. Moreover, well before Dresden, people were in a situation where if they protested at all, even to just distribute leaflets, they would be executed. You are essentially giving innocent people a choice of two ways to die.
There are other large countries, so I don't think that's all that is going on. A major part seems to be that the tail end of science ability is very long. The US does a very good job of encouraging the really talented kids, giving them good educations and lots of resources. So even as the average is bad, the outliers from the fat tail are very good. Unfortunately, for some things (political decisions on science related issues, making informed medical decisions, etc.) the knowledge level of the general population does matter.
Whether someone can "complain" about something doesn't have much to do with whether it is moral. Just because another government is targeting your civilian population doesn't magically make it moral to target their civilians, especially when many of them aren't even in favor of the government in question.
You are possibly assuming there a degree of targeting accuracy which they didn't have. Also, many historical building had military import (such as historic railway stations used for moving supplies). Keep in mind in World War II, the accuracy of bombing was so poor that they sometimes bombed the wrong city. If you had a factory or the like in the middle of an area, that wasn't going to help. The more serious problem with Dresden was that arguably they really were targeting civilians. There is some complexity involved though- it isn't clear that the laws of war had yet reached a consensus at that point. See http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/57jpcl.htm for some relevant points. There's a decent argument also that the presence of factories and the presence of military units stationed in and around Dresden made it a legitimate target. George Marshall made an inquiry that came to that conclusion, but the fact that the US military thought an inquiry was necessary does reflect strongly on the questionable nature of the decision. The argument that the bombing was not justified has been most strongly argued by Alexander McKee who is a historian who has written a fair bit on this subject. Overall, I'd say that McKee's analysis is a strong but not convincing case (although this is also going off my memory of the last time I looked into this subject in detail which was around 5 or 6 years ago).
My first thought was that the Black Chamber might be implementing their own version of SCORPION STARE, but then it occurred to me that they wouldn't be this incompetent about it. So maybe there's some other party involved- it is still possible that these are loaded with basilisk technology.
The data in TFA does show a strong link between education level and acceptance of evolution. But there's still a lot of rejection of evolution by educated Americans. According to the data, 25% of Americans with post-college education are Young Earth Creationists. Now, it is likely that some of those are people who went to Podunk Bible School and then got a masters in theology or ministering or something similar. But even given that, there's a lot of educated YECs in the US.
Possibly relevant, but the data in the above link is for Muslims living in the US. It is possible that they are being influenced by their compatriots outside the US (and of course many are immigrants). And in fact, Muslims in many other countries have much more severe numbers, which suggests that your hypothesis is correct.
For a while I thought this, but then I was pointed out that Muslims have very low acceptance rates of evolution even though Islam doesn't need the details of a creation story in any deep theological way. http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/02/21/acceptance-of-evolution-by-var/. This may be due in part to the general more reactionary and hyper-religious aspects of Islam currently having more sway than in much of Christianity, but at least on its surface this suggests that whatever causes high rates of creationism in Christianity may be more subtle.
Many religious individuals don't want public prayers, and don't want the Ten Commandments in public schools(Catholic, Protestant or Jewish version and which set given that the text is repeated twice in the Bible), and damn well don't want someone else's theology like intelligent design put in their kids' science classrooms. A lot of Jews for example are probably in the 79%. The First Amendment protects everyone, whether religious or not religious.
Yes, and if you read the summary of the article you were commenting on, you would see that that accounted for 33%. C'mon. That didn't even require going TFA but rather just reading the summary before commenting.
Gallup and a few others have consistently gotten numbers between 40-48% for this data, but for reasons I don't fully understand, CBS polls on the same issue get slightly higher results. They get routinely in the 50-55% range http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-965223.html. I'm not sure why this discrepancy exists, but it isn't a single yearly issue and it doesn't seem to be connected to how the questions are phrased, which suggests there's some more subtle issue going on.
The data for both this years Gallup poll and previous years does show some fairly predictable patterns. For example, by most of the previous polls, around 60% of Republicans are Young Earth Creationists while a little under 40% of Democrats are Young Earth Creationists.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/108226/Republicans-Democrats-Differ-Creationism.aspx. This should not however be taken as general evidence that Republicans or conservatives are dumb or uneducated. The GSS as part of their regular survey does a set about general science knowledge, and that data suggests that when not asking questions about evolution or age of the Earth, progressives and conservatives look very similar, and there's some evidence that the people with the least science knowledge are self-identified moderates http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/03/the-republican-fluency-with-science/ although exactly what is going on is not clear. http://religionsetspolitics.blogspot.com/2011/04/political-affiliation-and-scientific.html. This is part of a general trend which suggests that moderates in the US are often not very well informed.
Also, while Gallup says that the fraction of people who reject evolution has stayed roughly constant, there's a potentially more interesting trend in the data, over the last 30 years there's been a steady increase in people who say that evolution occurred with God taking no part in the process. http://www.gallup.com/poll/108226/Republicans-Democrats-Differ-Creationism.aspx. Most of that is movement not from the strict creationists but from a reduction in the size of the group that thinks that evolution happened with God guiding it. This may reflect the general decline of the moderately religious, especially so called "mainline Protestants" or it may be due to other effects such as general increases in partisanship.
The US is not great. The US does things like seizing domain names based on minimal cause and then spending years before they give them back. A lot of those seized have been over copyright issues and in some cases they haven't even been clearly infringing. This is similar to how many states in the US have assert forfeiture laws which allow police to confiscate large sums of money or cars under minimal suspicion of involvement with illegal drug dealing, and getting them back is difficult.
But the UN would be worse. The UN contains many countries with little conception of free speech. Even allies of the US like Canada and Britain have substantially less free speech than the US does. In the case of Britain libel although being reformed is still very much a danger. In Canada, speech which specifically targets minorities or criticizes religions can be labeled as hate speech with fines given. And most of the world, is much much worse. Consistently a large fraction of the Islamic countries have tried to push through anti-blasphemy regulations in the UN. So far they've failed. But it is easy to imagine what would happen if they could actually block pictures of Muhammad. Similarly. China would slaver at the thought of not having to do its own censorship but simply have no websites discussing Tiananmen Square at all. Letting even weak internet control get in the hands of the UN is a recipe for disaster. Maybe in 20 or 30 years when the free speech situation has improved. But not right now.
Ugh, Slashdot is unhappy with Hebrew again it looks like. Ok, spelling phonetically- the word used in the 10 commandments is "Tierztach" while the phrase used for the death penalty is "mot yumat".
Do you have an example? In the 10 commandments the the word used is while in the next two chapters of Exodus the phrasing used is ? There may be other examples where is used to mean a lawful killing, but I'm not aware of them.
The word used in the Hebrew translates much closer to murder than kill. That's also obvious from context because the next few chapters in the text include various death penalties, including a death penalty for murder. But never mind that, the thing is those who are murdering doctors who perform abortion are actually being logically consistent, in that they are trying to stop what they see as mass-murder, and killing a few to save many is a rational course of action. The really inconsistent anti-abortion people are the many who shout about how abortion is murder and then aren't willing to kill doctors. Those people are either liers. hypocrites, or cowards. Frankly, though I'm pretty damn happy that those people are all hypocrites. I really don't want them to find consistency or a spine.
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What no? That's only a sign that growth is less than exponential, which shouldn't be surprising at all. That doesn't mean the growth rate is half as fast. Say for example you started with the function f(t)=t^2 and looked at starting at t=1. To double f the first time one needs to go to about 1.4. To again double f one needs to go 2, to double again one needs to go to about 3.8. Here the growth rate is increasing, but the doubling time is also increasing. This is a common pattern for functions which grow more slowly than exponential.
Curious, one person replied to the graph claiming that it looks like it is leveling off (correctly noting that the rate of growth is expected to slow down) and someone else then claims the graph is somehow maniuplated. So could you explain what is manipulated in this graph? It isn't using a wonky time scale or a wonky population scale. The most common trick of this sort is to cut off the base and essentially start the y value at some higher level, but that's not the case here. It is also possible to cut off early data (say if one wanted to hide large scale fluctuations) but if you include data before 1800 the prior time looks pretty similar. So that's not. You can't just dismiss any graph as bad just because it is possible to make graphs look bad. It is a reason to actually look carefully at graphs, and if there's no problem with it, actually pay attention to it.
Yes, growth is slowing, especially as per a capita income level goes up, so the growth is substantially less than exponential, but it is still growing at an extremely high rate.
politicians that have been elected so far are against the idea of educating people as this will destroy the system as exist today and they will have to get real jobs
Most people, even politicians, aren't so evil that they would deliberately try to destroy the educational system. Moreover, most people don't have the foresight to do that. Part of the problem with society is a lack of foresight, so no politician is going to say "Let's spend a decade destroying education so I'll have slightly more job security thirty years from now." In order to actually understand people, realize that shortsightedness, incompetence, short-term greed, stupidity, and laziness do a decent job of explaining a lot of bad results. Long-term evil is very rare.
The report cites "explosive population growth" [citation needed]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-Population-1800-2100.png would be a start. For your other claims, maybe actually read TFA?
The term chaotic has a variety of different meanings, but this seems to be closer to what one would call a noisy system than a chaotic system.
It seems like everyone has as their go-to thing to reboot or add life into old material is to make them darker and grittier. Some cases this goes really well, like the Batman movies. Sometimes less so. I have to wonder what is going to be next? Darker and grittier Carebares where they fight actual drug dealers and pimps? Dark and gritty My Little Pony where Nightmare Moon stomps Twilight Sparkle to death? Maybe a darker and grittier Mario game where the koopahs die violent deaths and at the end you find out exactly what Bowser was doing to the Princess the whole time she was kidnapped? Maybe a dark and gritty live-action He-Man movie? Actually, I'd watch that last one probably. But this really feels like writers and producers have run out of ideas and think that "darker and grittier" are magic words which automatically revive franchises. Maybe instead they could try actually writing good plot lines?
They may have limited their attacks so that they only used attacks on systems where they could get most of their attacks to work. If one wanted the system to stay unnoticed for as long as possible, it makes sense to only target the systems that you have a really good understanding of.
The majority of Germans didn't vote for Hitler. Moreover, well before Dresden, people were in a situation where if they protested at all, even to just distribute leaflets, they would be executed. You are essentially giving innocent people a choice of two ways to die.
There are other large countries, so I don't think that's all that is going on. A major part seems to be that the tail end of science ability is very long. The US does a very good job of encouraging the really talented kids, giving them good educations and lots of resources. So even as the average is bad, the outliers from the fat tail are very good. Unfortunately, for some things (political decisions on science related issues, making informed medical decisions, etc.) the knowledge level of the general population does matter.
Whether someone can "complain" about something doesn't have much to do with whether it is moral. Just because another government is targeting your civilian population doesn't magically make it moral to target their civilians, especially when many of them aren't even in favor of the government in question.
You are possibly assuming there a degree of targeting accuracy which they didn't have. Also, many historical building had military import (such as historic railway stations used for moving supplies). Keep in mind in World War II, the accuracy of bombing was so poor that they sometimes bombed the wrong city. If you had a factory or the like in the middle of an area, that wasn't going to help. The more serious problem with Dresden was that arguably they really were targeting civilians. There is some complexity involved though- it isn't clear that the laws of war had yet reached a consensus at that point. See http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/57jpcl.htm for some relevant points. There's a decent argument also that the presence of factories and the presence of military units stationed in and around Dresden made it a legitimate target. George Marshall made an inquiry that came to that conclusion, but the fact that the US military thought an inquiry was necessary does reflect strongly on the questionable nature of the decision. The argument that the bombing was not justified has been most strongly argued by Alexander McKee who is a historian who has written a fair bit on this subject. Overall, I'd say that McKee's analysis is a strong but not convincing case (although this is also going off my memory of the last time I looked into this subject in detail which was around 5 or 6 years ago).
Most states have their own versions of FOIA, including New York. See http://sunshinereview.org/index.php/New_York_FOIA_procedures.
My first thought was that the Black Chamber might be implementing their own version of SCORPION STARE, but then it occurred to me that they wouldn't be this incompetent about it. So maybe there's some other party involved- it is still possible that these are loaded with basilisk technology.
The data in TFA does show a strong link between education level and acceptance of evolution. But there's still a lot of rejection of evolution by educated Americans. According to the data, 25% of Americans with post-college education are Young Earth Creationists. Now, it is likely that some of those are people who went to Podunk Bible School and then got a masters in theology or ministering or something similar. But even given that, there's a lot of educated YECs in the US.
The problem is the behavior of the CHRC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Human_Rights_Commission_free_speech_controversy which falls under Section 13(1) of the CHRA. Different legislation. The relevant penalties are civil not criminal.
Possibly relevant, but the data in the above link is for Muslims living in the US. It is possible that they are being influenced by their compatriots outside the US (and of course many are immigrants). And in fact, Muslims in many other countries have much more severe numbers, which suggests that your hypothesis is correct.
For a while I thought this, but then I was pointed out that Muslims have very low acceptance rates of evolution even though Islam doesn't need the details of a creation story in any deep theological way. http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/02/21/acceptance-of-evolution-by-var/. This may be due in part to the general more reactionary and hyper-religious aspects of Islam currently having more sway than in much of Christianity, but at least on its surface this suggests that whatever causes high rates of creationism in Christianity may be more subtle.
Many religious individuals don't want public prayers, and don't want the Ten Commandments in public schools(Catholic, Protestant or Jewish version and which set given that the text is repeated twice in the Bible), and damn well don't want someone else's theology like intelligent design put in their kids' science classrooms. A lot of Jews for example are probably in the 79%. The First Amendment protects everyone, whether religious or not religious.
Yes, and if you read the summary of the article you were commenting on, you would see that that accounted for 33%. C'mon. That didn't even require going TFA but rather just reading the summary before commenting.
Gallup and a few others have consistently gotten numbers between 40-48% for this data, but for reasons I don't fully understand, CBS polls on the same issue get slightly higher results. They get routinely in the 50-55% range http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-965223.html. I'm not sure why this discrepancy exists, but it isn't a single yearly issue and it doesn't seem to be connected to how the questions are phrased, which suggests there's some more subtle issue going on.
The data for both this years Gallup poll and previous years does show some fairly predictable patterns. For example, by most of the previous polls, around 60% of Republicans are Young Earth Creationists while a little under 40% of Democrats are Young Earth Creationists. http://www.gallup.com/poll/108226/Republicans-Democrats-Differ-Creationism.aspx. This should not however be taken as general evidence that Republicans or conservatives are dumb or uneducated. The GSS as part of their regular survey does a set about general science knowledge, and that data suggests that when not asking questions about evolution or age of the Earth, progressives and conservatives look very similar, and there's some evidence that the people with the least science knowledge are self-identified moderates http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/03/the-republican-fluency-with-science/ although exactly what is going on is not clear. http://religionsetspolitics.blogspot.com/2011/04/political-affiliation-and-scientific.html. This is part of a general trend which suggests that moderates in the US are often not very well informed.
Also, while Gallup says that the fraction of people who reject evolution has stayed roughly constant, there's a potentially more interesting trend in the data, over the last 30 years there's been a steady increase in people who say that evolution occurred with God taking no part in the process. http://www.gallup.com/poll/108226/Republicans-Democrats-Differ-Creationism.aspx. Most of that is movement not from the strict creationists but from a reduction in the size of the group that thinks that evolution happened with God guiding it. This may reflect the general decline of the moderately religious, especially so called "mainline Protestants" or it may be due to other effects such as general increases in partisanship.
The US is not great. The US does things like seizing domain names based on minimal cause and then spending years before they give them back. A lot of those seized have been over copyright issues and in some cases they haven't even been clearly infringing. This is similar to how many states in the US have assert forfeiture laws which allow police to confiscate large sums of money or cars under minimal suspicion of involvement with illegal drug dealing, and getting them back is difficult.
But the UN would be worse. The UN contains many countries with little conception of free speech. Even allies of the US like Canada and Britain have substantially less free speech than the US does. In the case of Britain libel although being reformed is still very much a danger. In Canada, speech which specifically targets minorities or criticizes religions can be labeled as hate speech with fines given. And most of the world, is much much worse. Consistently a large fraction of the Islamic countries have tried to push through anti-blasphemy regulations in the UN. So far they've failed. But it is easy to imagine what would happen if they could actually block pictures of Muhammad. Similarly. China would slaver at the thought of not having to do its own censorship but simply have no websites discussing Tiananmen Square at all. Letting even weak internet control get in the hands of the UN is a recipe for disaster. Maybe in 20 or 30 years when the free speech situation has improved. But not right now.
Ugh, Slashdot is unhappy with Hebrew again it looks like. Ok, spelling phonetically- the word used in the 10 commandments is "Tierztach" while the phrase used for the death penalty is "mot yumat".
Do you have an example? In the 10 commandments the the word used is while in the next two chapters of Exodus the phrasing used is ? There may be other examples where is used to mean a lawful killing, but I'm not aware of them.
The word used in the Hebrew translates much closer to murder than kill. That's also obvious from context because the next few chapters in the text include various death penalties, including a death penalty for murder. But never mind that, the thing is those who are murdering doctors who perform abortion are actually being logically consistent, in that they are trying to stop what they see as mass-murder, and killing a few to save many is a rational course of action. The really inconsistent anti-abortion people are the many who shout about how abortion is murder and then aren't willing to kill doctors. Those people are either liers. hypocrites, or cowards. Frankly, though I'm pretty damn happy that those people are all hypocrites. I really don't want them to find consistency or a spine.