Not that I condone screwing around with interns, but it's sad that lies about selling weapons to Iran get a pass, but lying about blowjobs is worth a removal from office.
Perhaps this could all have been avoided if he had pulled a Karl Rove and just ignored the subpoena altogether. No testimony, no perjury.
Perhaps Clinton would have had more time in his second term to launch even more Tomahawk missiles at bin Laden if he wasn't busy being deposed about his blow jobs. I seem to recall him being criticized about launching attacks at the terrorist training camps as though it were a "wag-the-dog" distraction from the country's real priority: the president's philandering.
This is exactly what I was talking about. Going even farther back, to the American Civil War, and with lines of conscripted soldiers firing barrages into one another, it's a wonder there weren't 100% casualties. It turns out that many of the soldiers didn't fire or intentionally fired over the enemy's heads.
I saw something on the news last week about oil tankers. They aren't even allowed to have a flashlight on deck for fear of creating an electrical arc, let alone a gun.
this is what I was thinking. You wouldn't be able to use it with the fire hoses, since the spray in the air would block the microwaves, but it's something to try.
"It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats. Five guys on it. Headed our way." "Correction. Four guys on it." "Correction. They're not headed our way anymore." "Correction. No boat."
Shooting a rifle is easy. I'm pretty good at it, myself. No paper target is safe from my wrath! Killing is a different matter altogether. That requires a different kind of training that you can't teach in an afternoon, and sometimes not at all.
You don't have to be faster than the predator, just faster than someone else in your group.
This is a funny joke for a t-shirt, but I'm pretty sure this isn't how it worked in primitive human tribes. We're hardwired to help each other, gang up on enemies, and ostracize members of the tribe that screw their neighbors (like, say, by leaving them to be torn apart by predators). One of the defining features of the human species is that if you fuck with one of them, you fuck with all of them.
Unlike other herd animals, humans will kill the thing hunting them, then kill its mate, cubs, and packmates. A few repetitions of that and smart predators start thinking that the gazelle look like safer targets.
I think the grinding in this game is just a small part of the overall game. The Fanucci cards interact with one another in pretty complex ways. Gambits create bigger bonuses than weapon upgrades if you set them up right.
Since it has only been three days, there aren't enough cards out there for anyone to have figured out how the underlying mechanics work. I don't think anyone has a face card yet.
The combat stances interact with one another in a way that no one has figured out yet, either. Unfortunately combat is pretty non-interactive so figuring out the matrix of how the attack/defense/attitude/magic stances interact doesn't do you much good.
Not that the game is great. Multiplayer needs food badly.
There are enough action points that you should be able to "level up" once per day. The cash-for-coconuts is for people who want to continue to grind.
The Double Fanucci cards is where the Game part of this game is going to be found. I'm getting a sense that there is some depth to Double Fanucci, but only three days in, no one has enough cards to have figured it out yet. And the devs aren't revealing how it works.
It's a little off the topic, but do you see a solution to this problem of "social stuff" being hard to make purely scientific?
I agree with you about it having many, impossible-to-control-for variables. This is something I struggle with every day as a social "scientist". What do I do, then, to learn more about the social phenomena that I am interested in? (In my case it isn't child porn.)
I've seen some examples in these comments of, what I consider to be pretty good methodologies for teasing out the boundaries in the gray area between porn and non-porn photos. However, no study on this will reach the level of certainty of an experiment on physical phenomena.
The ambiguity of what I do is what I find interesting about it. I used to be into "hard" science but I switched over because I realized that "soft" science asks harder questions.
The way you have it described, it's a pretty solid methodology. Structure it both ways (most and least pr0nographic out of randomly created sets), have a large number of "experts" rate them independently, and run a Cohen's Kappa.
The problem would be getting the materials and getting the damn study through an IRB ethics review.
> The solution to the "sexting" problem is common sense and prosecutorial > discretion. Hopefully we'll see more of both!
Unlikely, since in many electoral districts neither is likely to get the DA elected to a higher office.
This is exactly why I hate the idea of directly elected judges and prosecutors; too little independence. It was quite a shock to me moving to PA, since I've never lived in a state where judges were elected before.
Isn't this in the same state where private prisons have been giving kickbacks to elected officials for convicting more kids and sending them to prisons?
There's a lot on corporal punishment in the Behavior Analysis literature. Full text of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis is free to the public (up until the most recent 2 issues). http://seab.envmed.rochester.edu/jaba/
My boss at my last job was a hard-core Applied Behavior Analyst. He continually emphasized with our staff to be aware of our use of aversive stimuli with the residents we worked with and be aware of how they were conditioning us as well as vice versa. I'm almost directly quoting him in that last post.
Michael Tomasello at Max Plank Institute http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/ would argue that what is innate is a child's sensitivity to social cues, not the basics of grammar.
Slashdotters sarcastically refer to humans as "sheeple" sometimes, but it isn't so far off the mark. We're very sensitive to herd behavior from birth, and talking is one of those things that the herd does. The diaper change that your baby displayed early communication during was a routine social event that provided a lot of repetition, making it rich for doing an analysis of repeated patterns.
They learn faster when you punctuate their lessons with the back of your hand.
It only subjectively seems like this is true. Objective data indicates otherwise.
Punishment is a strong negative reinforcer to the person doing the punishing (it makes the aversive stimulus stop). This reinforcement influences the punisher's perceptions and makes the punisher feel like the punishment action is being effective. Objectively, however, the punisher is just conditioning him- or herself to hit the kid more.
I think it's important to remember all of the popular, positive attention Stephen Colbert has given to NASA over the years and science in general. He well deserves the name if for nothing else than for the great PR he brings NASA.
Did you even know there was an addition to the space station before it was on The Colbert Report? I didn't.
Yeah, actually. I heard about it two weeks before Colbert mentioned it on his show from Firefly fans.
Pullman's description of Dust reminded me of Pirsig's subatomic particles in Lila. Short version is that electrons (and other matter) have "values" and their behavior is in accordance with those values. On a quantum scale, there is some randomness, but not completely free choice, because the electron will still always make its "decisions" based on its values as an electron. It seems to allow for choice, but it doesn't imply free will exactly.
One idea I saw was to use an aerogel, that really sparse foam, to catch things. Well, set them closer to the deorbital path.
The idea is that the foam is so light that the wrench or whatever that hits it doesn't break up, the foam doesn't break up, so there's no additional fragments. Meanwhile, if you've set the orbit up right, the foam slows the debris down a tad, speeding up the time it'll take to hit atmosphere.
Didn't we use something like this to catch dust from a comet tail?
On a larger scale, it might clean part of an orbit. (I hope it is possible to clean out an orbit, because just waiting for junk to deorbit is going to be really impractical once space travel and the debris it will inevitably produce increase.)
And why doesn't Netflix have Planetes? I've been interested in watching it for years.
Slashdot Mirror
But it wasn't about the sex act, remember? It was about the perjury.
Not that I condone screwing around with interns, but it's sad that lies about selling weapons to Iran get a pass, but lying about blowjobs is worth a removal from office.
Perhaps this could all have been avoided if he had pulled a Karl Rove and just ignored the subpoena altogether. No testimony, no perjury.
Perhaps Clinton would have had more time in his second term to launch even more Tomahawk missiles at bin Laden if he wasn't busy being deposed about his blow jobs. I seem to recall him being criticized about launching attacks at the terrorist training camps as though it were a "wag-the-dog" distraction from the country's real priority: the president's philandering.
This is exactly what I was talking about. Going even farther back, to the American Civil War, and with lines of conscripted soldiers firing barrages into one another, it's a wonder there weren't 100% casualties. It turns out that many of the soldiers didn't fire or intentionally fired over the enemy's heads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Killing:_The_Psychological_Cost_of_Learning_to_Kill_in_War_and_Society
I saw something on the news last week about oil tankers. They aren't even allowed to have a flashlight on deck for fear of creating an electrical arc, let alone a gun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/v-mads.htm
this is what I was thinking. You wouldn't be able to use it with the fire hoses, since the spray in the air would block the microwaves, but it's something to try.
"It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats. Five guys on it. Headed our way."
"Correction. Four guys on it."
"Correction. They're not headed our way anymore."
"Correction. No boat."
Everyone listens to Reason.
Shooting a rifle is easy. I'm pretty good at it, myself. No paper target is safe from my wrath!
Killing is a different matter altogether. That requires a different kind of training that you can't teach in an afternoon, and sometimes not at all.
Great. We get an actual car thread and everyone is making computer analogies.
You don't have to be faster than the predator, just faster than someone else in your group.
This is a funny joke for a t-shirt, but I'm pretty sure this isn't how it worked in primitive human tribes. We're hardwired to help each other, gang up on enemies, and ostracize members of the tribe that screw their neighbors (like, say, by leaving them to be torn apart by predators). One of the defining features of the human species is that if you fuck with one of them, you fuck with all of them.
Unlike other herd animals, humans will kill the thing hunting them, then kill its mate, cubs, and packmates. A few repetitions of that and smart predators start thinking that the gazelle look like safer targets.
I think the grinding in this game is just a small part of the overall game. The Fanucci cards interact with one another in pretty complex ways. Gambits create bigger bonuses than weapon upgrades if you set them up right.
Since it has only been three days, there aren't enough cards out there for anyone to have figured out how the underlying mechanics work. I don't think anyone has a face card yet.
The combat stances interact with one another in a way that no one has figured out yet, either. Unfortunately combat is pretty non-interactive so figuring out the matrix of how the attack/defense/attitude/magic stances interact doesn't do you much good.
Not that the game is great. Multiplayer needs food badly.
To be fair, there really aren't a lot of pictures, really.
There are enough action points that you should be able to "level up" once per day. The cash-for-coconuts is for people who want to continue to grind.
The Double Fanucci cards is where the Game part of this game is going to be found. I'm getting a sense that there is some depth to Double Fanucci, but only three days in, no one has enough cards to have figured it out yet. And the devs aren't revealing how it works.
Damn few
It's a little off the topic, but do you see a solution to this problem of "social stuff" being hard to make purely scientific?
I agree with you about it having many, impossible-to-control-for variables. This is something I struggle with every day as a social "scientist". What do I do, then, to learn more about the social phenomena that I am interested in? (In my case it isn't child porn.)
I've seen some examples in these comments of, what I consider to be pretty good methodologies for teasing out the boundaries in the gray area between porn and non-porn photos. However, no study on this will reach the level of certainty of an experiment on physical phenomena.
The ambiguity of what I do is what I find interesting about it. I used to be into "hard" science but I switched over because I realized that "soft" science asks harder questions.
The way you have it described, it's a pretty solid methodology. Structure it both ways (most and least pr0nographic out of randomly created sets), have a large number of "experts" rate them independently, and run a Cohen's Kappa.
The problem would be getting the materials and getting the damn study through an IRB ethics review.
> The solution to the "sexting" problem is common sense and prosecutorial
> discretion. Hopefully we'll see more of both!
Unlikely, since in many electoral districts neither is likely to get the DA elected to a higher office.
This is exactly why I hate the idea of directly elected judges and prosecutors; too little independence. It was quite a shock to me moving to PA, since I've never lived in a state where judges were elected before.
Isn't this in the same state where private prisons have been giving kickbacks to elected officials for convicting more kids and sending them to prisons?
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/23/pennsylvania.corrupt.judges/
Just sayin'... I'm not actually accusing the prosecutor of anything. (I'm just allowing context to do its thing).
There's a lot on corporal punishment in the Behavior Analysis literature. Full text of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis is free to the public (up until the most recent 2 issues).
http://seab.envmed.rochester.edu/jaba/
My boss at my last job was a hard-core Applied Behavior Analyst. He continually emphasized with our staff to be aware of our use of aversive stimuli with the residents we worked with and be aware of how they were conditioning us as well as vice versa. I'm almost directly quoting him in that last post.
Just an alternate view
Michael Tomasello at Max Plank Institute http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/ would argue that what is innate is a child's sensitivity to social cues, not the basics of grammar.
Slashdotters sarcastically refer to humans as "sheeple" sometimes, but it isn't so far off the mark. We're very sensitive to herd behavior from birth, and talking is one of those things that the herd does. The diaper change that your baby displayed early communication during was a routine social event that provided a lot of repetition, making it rich for doing an analysis of repeated patterns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_linguistics
See also:
Elizabeth Bates
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Bates
Brian MacWhinney
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_MacWhinney
They learn faster when you punctuate their lessons with the back of your hand.
It only subjectively seems like this is true. Objective data indicates otherwise.
Punishment is a strong negative reinforcer to the person doing the punishing (it makes the aversive stimulus stop). This reinforcement influences the punisher's perceptions and makes the punisher feel like the punishment action is being effective. Objectively, however, the punisher is just conditioning him- or herself to hit the kid more.
I think it's important to remember all of the popular, positive attention Stephen Colbert has given to NASA over the years and science in general. He well deserves the name if for nothing else than for the great PR he brings NASA.
Did you even know there was an addition to the space station before it was on The Colbert Report? I didn't.
Yeah, actually. I heard about it two weeks before Colbert mentioned it on his show from Firefly fans.
Pullman's description of Dust reminded me of Pirsig's subatomic particles in Lila.
Short version is that electrons (and other matter) have "values" and their behavior is in accordance with those values. On a quantum scale, there is some randomness, but not completely free choice, because the electron will still always make its "decisions" based on its values as an electron.
It seems to allow for choice, but it doesn't imply free will exactly.
Thanks for the link. I wish I could give you a +1 Informative today.
One idea I saw was to use an aerogel, that really sparse foam, to catch things. Well, set them closer to the deorbital path.
The idea is that the foam is so light that the wrench or whatever that hits it doesn't break up, the foam doesn't break up, so there's no additional fragments. Meanwhile, if you've set the orbit up right, the foam slows the debris down a tad, speeding up the time it'll take to hit atmosphere.
Didn't we use something like this to catch dust from a comet tail?
On a larger scale, it might clean part of an orbit. (I hope it is possible to clean out an orbit, because just waiting for junk to deorbit is going to be really impractical once space travel and the debris it will inevitably produce increase.)
And why doesn't Netflix have Planetes? I've been interested in watching it for years.