My point is that the humans involved are very important to understanding a field, and having respect for the pioneers in the field just comes with the territory.
You're absolutely right, we don't go around saying "I'm a Darwinist."
However, we (evolutionary biologists) do honor Darwin in certain ways: we're having a birthday party for him tomorrow. However, physicists do the same with Planck and Einstein, and Mathematicians with Gauss and Poincare. It's no different in biology.
We also honor Mendel, Fisher, Wright, Haldane, Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin and many others.
"It's as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge."
That's baloney. Every competent biologist knows that Darwin's ideas were strongly challenged and not fully accepted until the late 1930s. I haven't read Safina's article, but if he's saying stuff like this, his audience is obviously not evolutionary biologists like me.
Don't bother. This is a money-laundering scheme --- I don't mean that the people doing it think of it that way, or that they have malevolent motives. However, stem cell research is basically at the level of "alchemy" and the ads I've seen are all targeted at parents' biggest insecurities. Don't give in to them.
I once had a job interview for one of these blood-banking companies: the job would have been to call doctor's offices and make sure they were placing flyers in prominent places where pregnant women could see them. They rejected me for the job because they didn't like the look on my face --- no joke. I knew there was something morally questionable about it, and this was before I was a parent. Now that I am, I think you'll have plenty of stuff to worry about without another bill for a useless service that is predicated on fear.
Of any fears you should be tackling, you should be dealing with your fears related to birthing.
Joel
Re:This article should be tagged "nostalgia"
on
Slackware 12.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well, although I do use Slackware for what some could call nostalgia, I have to point out that you're wrong about all that: none of it is true anymore. By nostalgia I mean a system that is generic, doesn't get in my face, and is familiar to a user of older UNIX systems. That's the goal of Slackware, and Pat succeeds at providing that.
Furthermore, there are package sites like slacky.eu, Slackbuilds.org and others. Also there's slapt-get and swaret that deal with dependencies for packages downloaded from sites like slacky.eu. You can download a whole Gnome distribution using slapt-get, without compiling anything.
However, if you do want to compile something, Slackware won't get in your way.
These all teach different things, and I've studied each of them with no formal training. I was shell-scripting in UNIX by 14 (minor stuff, and we didn't call it programming, but it was). I would suggest introducing them to Free Software, Emacs and all that without dumbing it down: nothing could be worse for you than telling a bunch of teenagers who very well may know more than you that you're going to take it easy on them. People take what they can get, so give it to them.
Unix (of any flavor) is also a much better platform for young people to learn on: I know that from experience. On Windows everything is far too disconnected from how the computer really works (by accident and by design).
The language that got me going was Perl (this was at 26, I should add), but I quickly moved on to Scheme.
Emacs is also a great way to learn because when using Emacs, people see how using a computer equals programming. If you teach them to make a distinction, they will have a well of powerlessness to draw from.
This is by far the biggest obstacle to using Free Software: people think you have to buy EVERYTHING. That's a sad commentary. Yes, I know stupidity is the real culprit but that's a little broad. Conspicuous consumption (people wanting the newest version of some software, or the newest shiny MacBook) is another huge problem. Obviously people who use Unix-like software have always had other priorities.
On the college note, even though I was a faithful UNIX user during college, I got all the way through college with a degree in _math_ (!) and nobody EVER told me that Linux was available for free. My biggest shock when I really read about GNU and Linux was not that it was free --- that made sense --- but that I was too stupid to have found out about it.
I like the suggestion about showing the teacher Revolution OS; my parents understood much better what I was talking about after they watched it. My dad called me saying that he had just watched it and was trying to boot a LiveCD right after the credits ended!
The most persuasive sentence in the movie is rms saying "...that was a promise to be a bad person." Most people think the opposite, but hearing him say that really hits home with people.
Unix was meant for users to communicate with each other: people just don't understand that's what makes it such a cool system. I tell mac and windows users (who think Facebook is a great way to communicate) what I was doing fifteen years ago on Berkeley Unix, and they are astonished. But then they go back to browsing Facebook.
When I got back onto a real time-sharing system at my new University, I was sad to see that nobody was logged on just to chat: they were all doing actual work! Everybody had "not accepting messages" and no plan. I'm the only on that machine with a.plan. That's depressing.
Windows is pretty hard to use for average computer users. I always laugh when I see people talking about how "Linux is hard" and "Windows is easy." Guess what? These people at my office slamming their fists into their keyboards and screaming at their monitors are using (anyone? anyone?) Windows and Mac OS X.
Their problems would not be solved by Linux, but mine are. Every Windows system I have worked on has been a rip-off for everyone except Microsoft; with Linux, if it sucks, at least it's not a rip-off and I can switch to another distro. This is why you see distro-bashing. People find their favorites and stick to them. Pretty often they're bashing my favorite distro. But I know how to use my favorite, so it doesn't suck. It even surprises me with how efficient it is.
Computers are hard to use: it's a fact of life, and "user-friendly" is a marketing scam.
There were no books or movies that turned me on to math; for me it was simply wanting to do better at the things I needed to do better --- and a bunch of people who told me I'd never be good at math, however I advise against applying that approach generally.
What I have found to be generally good at getting people interested is the history of mathematics: there are some really good dramatic stories in there. Consider Evariste Galois, who was killed in a duel with a political rival (although something much more interesting to adolescents was actually involved). Before he was killed, he was busily getting rejected from every academy in France, much to the dismay of his mentor Liouville. Liouville helped to preserve his memory by publishing much of his work, and I've heard it said that Galois laid the groundwork for over 500 years of mathematics. Pretty freakin' cool.
Also, as already suggested, Lewis Carroll's (mathematician and photographer Charles Dodgson) books are riddled with logic puzzles.
Slashdot Mirror
Tinbergen, Lorenz, Mayr, ..., Kimura, Gould,...
My point is that the humans involved are very important to understanding a field, and having respect for the pioneers in the field just comes with the territory.
Joel
You're absolutely right, we don't go around saying "I'm a Darwinist."
However, we (evolutionary biologists) do honor Darwin in certain ways: we're having a birthday party for him tomorrow. However, physicists do the same with Planck and Einstein, and Mathematicians with Gauss and Poincare. It's no different in biology.
We also honor Mendel, Fisher, Wright, Haldane, Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin and many others.
Joel
"It's as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and
testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge."
That's baloney. Every competent biologist knows that Darwin's ideas were strongly challenged and not fully accepted until the late 1930s. I haven't read Safina's article, but if he's saying stuff like this, his audience is obviously not evolutionary biologists like me.
Joel
Don't bother. This is a money-laundering scheme --- I don't mean that the people doing it think of it that way, or that they have malevolent motives. However, stem cell research is basically at the level of "alchemy" and the ads I've seen are all targeted at parents' biggest insecurities. Don't give in to them.
I once had a job interview for one of these blood-banking companies: the job would have been to call doctor's offices and make sure they were placing flyers in prominent places where pregnant women could see them. They rejected me for the job because they didn't like the look on my face --- no joke. I knew there was something morally questionable about it, and this was before I was a parent. Now that I am, I think you'll have plenty of stuff to worry about without another bill for a useless service that is predicated on fear.
Of any fears you should be tackling, you should be dealing with your fears related to birthing.
Joel
Well, although I do use Slackware for what some could call nostalgia, I have to point out that you're wrong about all that: none of it is true anymore. By nostalgia I mean a system that is generic, doesn't get in my face, and is familiar to a user of older UNIX systems. That's the goal of Slackware, and Pat succeeds at providing that.
Furthermore, there are package sites like slacky.eu, Slackbuilds.org and others. Also there's slapt-get and swaret that deal with dependencies for packages downloaded from sites like slacky.eu. You can download a whole Gnome distribution using slapt-get, without compiling anything.
However, if you do want to compile something, Slackware won't get in your way.
These all teach different things, and I've studied each of them with no formal training. I was shell-scripting in UNIX by 14 (minor stuff, and we didn't call it programming, but it was). I would suggest introducing them to Free Software, Emacs and all that without dumbing it down: nothing could be worse for you than telling a bunch of teenagers who very well may know more than you that you're going to take it easy on them. People take what they can get, so give it to them.
Unix (of any flavor) is also a much better platform for young people to learn on: I know that from experience. On Windows everything is far too disconnected from how the computer really works (by accident and by design).
The language that got me going was Perl (this was at 26, I should add), but I quickly moved on to Scheme.
Emacs is also a great way to learn because when using Emacs, people see how using a computer equals programming. If you teach them to make a distinction, they will have a well of powerlessness to draw from.
This is by far the biggest obstacle to using Free Software: people think you have to buy EVERYTHING. That's a sad commentary. Yes, I know stupidity is the real culprit but that's a little broad. Conspicuous consumption (people wanting the newest version of some software, or the newest shiny MacBook) is another huge problem. Obviously people who use Unix-like software have always had other priorities.
On the college note, even though I was a faithful UNIX user during college, I got all the way through college with a degree in _math_ (!) and nobody EVER told me that Linux was available for free. My biggest shock when I really read about GNU and Linux was not that it was free --- that made sense --- but that I was too stupid to have found out about it.
I like the suggestion about showing the teacher Revolution OS; my parents understood much better what I was talking about after they watched it. My dad called me saying that he had just watched it and was trying to boot a LiveCD right after the credits ended!
The most persuasive sentence in the movie is rms saying "...that was a promise to be a bad person." Most people think the opposite, but hearing him say that really hits home with people.
Hmmm...let's see, where should I start?
write
ytalk
mesg
mail
Unix was meant for users to communicate with each other: people just don't understand that's what makes it such a cool system. I tell mac and windows users (who think Facebook is a great way to communicate) what I was doing fifteen years ago on Berkeley Unix, and they are astonished. But then they go back to browsing Facebook.
When I got back onto a real time-sharing system at my new University, I was sad to see that nobody was logged on just to chat: they were all doing actual work! Everybody had "not accepting messages" and no plan. I'm the only on that machine with a .plan. That's depressing.
Aren't ridiculous comments like this intercepted by the staff at Slashdot? Come on! I'm depending on you guys!
No, he's thinking of a Snow Crash-inspired self-defense device: a vaginally-mounted katana, the dentana.
None of that was Gregorian chanting. Does anyone know of a dojo where I can learn that robe-fighting technique?
Windows is pretty hard to use for average computer users. I always laugh when I see people talking about how "Linux is hard" and "Windows is easy." Guess what? These people at my office slamming their fists into their keyboards and screaming at their monitors are using (anyone? anyone?) Windows and Mac OS X.
Their problems would not be solved by Linux, but mine are. Every Windows system I have worked on has been a rip-off for everyone except Microsoft; with Linux, if it sucks, at least it's not a rip-off and I can switch to another distro. This is why you see distro-bashing. People find their favorites and stick to them. Pretty often they're bashing my favorite distro. But I know how to use my favorite, so it doesn't suck. It even surprises me with how efficient it is.
Computers are hard to use: it's a fact of life, and "user-friendly" is a marketing scam.
There were no books or movies that turned me on to math; for me it was
simply wanting to do better at the things I needed to do better ---
and a bunch of people who told me I'd never be good at math, however I
advise against applying that approach generally.
What I have found to be generally good at getting people interested is
the history of mathematics: there are some really good dramatic
stories in there. Consider Evariste Galois, who was killed in a duel
with a political rival (although something much more interesting to
adolescents was actually involved). Before he was killed, he was
busily getting rejected from every academy in France, much to the
dismay of his mentor Liouville. Liouville helped to preserve his
memory by publishing much of his work, and I've heard it said that
Galois laid the groundwork for over 500 years of mathematics. Pretty
freakin' cool.
Also, as already suggested, Lewis Carroll's (mathematician and
photographer Charles Dodgson) books are riddled with logic puzzles.
You're not doomed.
Joel