A buddy of mine once got detention because he took a teacher's documents folder and placed it about five layers deep inside a set of folders with names like "look inside" "click me" and "keep going". The top level folder was put exactly where the old documents folder was, and other than being nested nothing was renamed, harmed, or anything else. The teacher still went ballistic when she couldn't figure out how to click through a couple of extra folders to find her documents.
I once got a stern talking-to by the journalism teacher when I replaced the standard Mac OS startup screen with a custom image of a badly-drawn bomb (we're talking paintshop in the early 90's here) and the message "this system will self destruct in 10 seconds." Someone outside the department had sat down to use the computer for a minute and apparently panicked when they thought the computer had been turned into an actual bomb.
Forget the conspiracy, the actual story of New Coke and Coke Classic is interesting enough. New Coke was inspired by panic created by the Pepsi challenge - in small sips, the sweeter Pepsi was clobbering Coke in taste tests. What was realized later was the taste test skewed things; over the course of a full beverage, the less-sweet Coke left consumers just as satisfied or more satisfied. But first Coke panicked and created a newer, sweeter mix to compete with Pepsi in the challenge. Only later when customers became dissatisfied in droves (because that little sip of sweeter drink tested well, but the full bottle of sweet wasn't as satisfying) did Coke panic again and revert the recipe.
Newcastle, several new Belgium beers, Stella Artois - there's a lot of them now. At least out west beer in cans has become a popular thing, in part because it's easier to go camping with light, crushable aluminum containers rather than glass bottles.
Assuming he already has all of those things coming out of his paycheck, the 10% remains proportional: +10% is still +10%. It seems silly to handwave that away needlessly. I'd be pretty excited to get a couple of years ahead on the income curve (5% annual raises are common where I work), and at a lot of places which have lower raise scales that could be quite a few years of gains.
That said, I don't argue your point that an increase in money isn't worth if if the other satisfactions drop too much. It's just often hard to know ahead of time what the new environment will be like until you've committed to it.
I once dropped a coin (not flipped, but it fell a good six inches out of a pile of coins in my hand) that landed on edge and stuck without rolling or falling over. It was very disconcerting to see it sitting there solidly immobile. I actually looked around for a moment to see if anything else weird was going on, like this was a prank with magnets or alien gravity rays or something.
Fair point. It took me two days to drop the phone from a great enough height (2 feet, onto asphalt) to severely crack the back screen. After that I put it in an Otterbox case and that's saved it from several much worse falls. One perk of thinner and lighter, though, is it's still thinner and lighter even after you strap in in a case, so it's still a bit of a win.
Of course, you are now stymied by trying to get your "in print" book into a reader's hands. After all, you're just one person in a sea of about twenty times as many authors as there used to be. Nobody's heard of you, nobody has any reason to find your book and try reading it in the first place. You've not only committed the huge amount of time it takes to write, but you now also need to commit money for editing and other services, or you have to skip those pieces and suffer from inferior quality. (Unless you're a very rare master who is good at all of those things.)
It's not insurmountable, but you basically now have to be a skilled marketer or salesman to get your work read at all, and you either have to have the money or the skills to make sure the quality is high enough that anybody would bother giving it a good review or recommendation to keep the momentum going. All told I'd guess it's basically just as difficult to get any recognition as before, it's just changing the specific obstacles that must be met.
1. When the average person imagines a philosopher doing their work, they're mostly imagining someone sitting there, not (visibly) doing anything. It's hard to generate a lot of respect for what doesn't look like anything.
2. The output of philosophy is words, often phrased as suggestions, imperatives, or instructions - perceived by people as being told what to do. Nobody likes being told what to do, especially by someone who (per #1 above) just sits around all day not doing anything but telling other people what to do. Even worse, everyone and their mother runs around telling everyone else what to do all the time, despite nobody else appreciating the advice, and most of that advice is minimally thought-out junk. There's little to no appreciation that someone trained in logic and analysis might have slightly more valuable advice than average.
3. A shallow introduction to logic reveals a lot of old philosophy is dense, convoluted, generally discredited, and/or far removed from the concerns of daily life. (I haven't read enough modern philosophy to know that's still the case, but I know for certain a lot of old physics texts struck me as pretty indecipherable compared to modern ones - whereas physics can get by with new texts and classic equations, the study of philosophy necessarily keeps returning to the older materials.)
So that's what I think is a typical impression of philosophy. From experience, I know that after my physics and math classes, the philosophy classes I took were among the most difficult. I also know as a programmer I gained at least as much from my symbolic logic philosophy class as I did from my intro C++ programming class.
I disagree vehemently. I think most people don't have an adequate grasp on the basic stuff, and need more math to really get it to sink in. I can't think of many cases where someone was taking math they didn't need, but I can think of numerous cases where people need math they didn't take.
I'm not talking about calculus. I may not even mean trigonometry. But there are a lot of people who need much more algebra and geometry than they have, and MUCH more practice with the basics. In the states probability and statistics are generally treated as optional when they're pretty essential. Basic accounting, too, which is really just fifth grade math, but in a specific framework that most people really should understand and many don't.
Depends where you go to school. I think my biggest class wasn't more than 30 and that was very rare. Most were less than 20. Average was much closer to 15 across my undergraduate experience. I got a lot of good one-on-one or small-group discussion with my professors.
It's not that new games are "easy" and old games are "hard", it's that the business model has changed. In the original arcade games, they had incentive to make you die a lot to get another quarter. With modern games, since they sell the package to you just once up front, there's no reason to make you die every 30 seconds.
Interesting analysis. But I'm curious, given the amount of skepticism you show about human interpretation and fallibility, how you have determined the Christian bible is the reliable starting point for your source of information? What evidence do you use that it was divinely inspired, rather than a human production? Why that book as opposed to some other religious text which might also claim to be divinely inspired?
Yep, that was my point. I chose to play "lefty" because what's considered normal positioning didn't match what I perceived the game's challenges to be. It seemed like a silly waste of my primary hand to put it on a single button and have my weaker hand do the complicated articulating. Then again, even on a real guitar it seems like I'd want my right hand on the fretboard, but I don't know how to play so maybe there are important points I'm overlooking.
I agree with you there. I don't play guitar, but when I started playing Rock Band it only took me a couple of minutes to realize that it made sense to use my left thumb to hit the strum button since there's no precision at all needed there, and to use my right hand for the more complicated multi-key fingering on the neck.
Curious. I'm a righty and use the exact same motion as you describe to open a CD case. It's been a few decades since I learned, but I can't recall ever considering it unnatural to do the holding with my right and the moving with my left. It's such a simple action and doesn't require much precision, so the left is perfectly suitable as far as I'm concerned. Or I struggled in the beginning and I've just forgotten over the intervening years.
I will acknowledge your obscure facts and respond with my own. I'm a righty, but I deal cards left handed because I was taught by my mother, who is a lefty. You might say that makes sense, except she deals like a righty, and when I learned I properly mirror-imaged her teaching like I did with everything else she showed me. I guess we just both share a family proclivity for dealing cards backwards.
I also learned to mouse lefty when I started suffering carpal tunnel effects. I have gotten some very weird reactions from people trying to use my desk, including an absurd number of "oh! I didn't know you were left handed!" comments from people who have no reason to know or care what my primary hand is, but suddenly seemed to think it was a big deal. I've had a couple of other visitors actually move the mouse over to the right side of the keyboard, despite the fact they were standing and only needed to use the mouse for a few seconds (easily could have just used the mouse where it was) and one person who went so far as to comment as he moved it "you've got the mouse on the wrong side" like I didn't know where I'd left it.
Ah, yeah, was trying to remember what this was called. Had this on my previous desktop computer. I was doing a lot of evening work and then having a lot of trouble falling asleep. It really did seem to help a bit when I installed it, though I had to turn it off every time the evening's work involved graphics, where I needed to see color properly. I forgot to reinstall it when I upgraded the system last year.
(Note, 500 years ago was in the dark ages. With immortal people, that becomes a stark reality.)
I'm pretty sure the Renaissance was in full swing 500 years ago, which I think comes after the dark ages. Still, North America had only been known to Europeans for about 20 years, so I'm not really disputing your point about just how long ago it was.
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I'm loathe to pointe out you're being too rationale about this, and the mounting criticism is bad for moral.
A buddy of mine once got detention because he took a teacher's documents folder and placed it about five layers deep inside a set of folders with names like "look inside" "click me" and "keep going". The top level folder was put exactly where the old documents folder was, and other than being nested nothing was renamed, harmed, or anything else. The teacher still went ballistic when she couldn't figure out how to click through a couple of extra folders to find her documents.
I once got a stern talking-to by the journalism teacher when I replaced the standard Mac OS startup screen with a custom image of a badly-drawn bomb (we're talking paintshop in the early 90's here) and the message "this system will self destruct in 10 seconds." Someone outside the department had sat down to use the computer for a minute and apparently panicked when they thought the computer had been turned into an actual bomb.
Forget the conspiracy, the actual story of New Coke and Coke Classic is interesting enough. New Coke was inspired by panic created by the Pepsi challenge - in small sips, the sweeter Pepsi was clobbering Coke in taste tests. What was realized later was the taste test skewed things; over the course of a full beverage, the less-sweet Coke left consumers just as satisfied or more satisfied. But first Coke panicked and created a newer, sweeter mix to compete with Pepsi in the challenge. Only later when customers became dissatisfied in droves (because that little sip of sweeter drink tested well, but the full bottle of sweet wasn't as satisfying) did Coke panic again and revert the recipe.
So no goat-kebab for you then?
Newcastle, several new Belgium beers, Stella Artois - there's a lot of them now. At least out west beer in cans has become a popular thing, in part because it's easier to go camping with light, crushable aluminum containers rather than glass bottles.
There were also times where wine was heated in lead pots, because it added a sweetness to the drink.
Assuming he already has all of those things coming out of his paycheck, the 10% remains proportional: +10% is still +10%. It seems silly to handwave that away needlessly. I'd be pretty excited to get a couple of years ahead on the income curve (5% annual raises are common where I work), and at a lot of places which have lower raise scales that could be quite a few years of gains.
That said, I don't argue your point that an increase in money isn't worth if if the other satisfactions drop too much. It's just often hard to know ahead of time what the new environment will be like until you've committed to it.
I once dropped a coin (not flipped, but it fell a good six inches out of a pile of coins in my hand) that landed on edge and stuck without rolling or falling over. It was very disconcerting to see it sitting there solidly immobile. I actually looked around for a moment to see if anything else weird was going on, like this was a prank with magnets or alien gravity rays or something.
Fair point. It took me two days to drop the phone from a great enough height (2 feet, onto asphalt) to severely crack the back screen. After that I put it in an Otterbox case and that's saved it from several much worse falls. One perk of thinner and lighter, though, is it's still thinner and lighter even after you strap in in a case, so it's still a bit of a win.
Ha! I look forward to the inevitable 'mamamia' port!. After that, I feel like 'figaro' has actually been a code name for something, though.
You're looking for gamification, then. There's stuff out there about that, too.
McDonalds has a trademark on the word "smile." You sure you can't trademark terms widely in use?
Of course, you are now stymied by trying to get your "in print" book into a reader's hands. After all, you're just one person in a sea of about twenty times as many authors as there used to be. Nobody's heard of you, nobody has any reason to find your book and try reading it in the first place. You've not only committed the huge amount of time it takes to write, but you now also need to commit money for editing and other services, or you have to skip those pieces and suffer from inferior quality. (Unless you're a very rare master who is good at all of those things.)
It's not insurmountable, but you basically now have to be a skilled marketer or salesman to get your work read at all, and you either have to have the money or the skills to make sure the quality is high enough that anybody would bother giving it a good review or recommendation to keep the momentum going. All told I'd guess it's basically just as difficult to get any recognition as before, it's just changing the specific obstacles that must be met.
I think there's a couple of things.
1. When the average person imagines a philosopher doing their work, they're mostly imagining someone sitting there, not (visibly) doing anything. It's hard to generate a lot of respect for what doesn't look like anything.
2. The output of philosophy is words, often phrased as suggestions, imperatives, or instructions - perceived by people as being told what to do. Nobody likes being told what to do, especially by someone who (per #1 above) just sits around all day not doing anything but telling other people what to do. Even worse, everyone and their mother runs around telling everyone else what to do all the time, despite nobody else appreciating the advice, and most of that advice is minimally thought-out junk. There's little to no appreciation that someone trained in logic and analysis might have slightly more valuable advice than average.
3. A shallow introduction to logic reveals a lot of old philosophy is dense, convoluted, generally discredited, and/or far removed from the concerns of daily life. (I haven't read enough modern philosophy to know that's still the case, but I know for certain a lot of old physics texts struck me as pretty indecipherable compared to modern ones - whereas physics can get by with new texts and classic equations, the study of philosophy necessarily keeps returning to the older materials.)
So that's what I think is a typical impression of philosophy. From experience, I know that after my physics and math classes, the philosophy classes I took were among the most difficult. I also know as a programmer I gained at least as much from my symbolic logic philosophy class as I did from my intro C++ programming class.
I disagree vehemently. I think most people don't have an adequate grasp on the basic stuff, and need more math to really get it to sink in. I can't think of many cases where someone was taking math they didn't need, but I can think of numerous cases where people need math they didn't take.
I'm not talking about calculus. I may not even mean trigonometry. But there are a lot of people who need much more algebra and geometry than they have, and MUCH more practice with the basics. In the states probability and statistics are generally treated as optional when they're pretty essential. Basic accounting, too, which is really just fifth grade math, but in a specific framework that most people really should understand and many don't.
Depends where you go to school. I think my biggest class wasn't more than 30 and that was very rare. Most were less than 20. Average was much closer to 15 across my undergraduate experience. I got a lot of good one-on-one or small-group discussion with my professors.
It's not that new games are "easy" and old games are "hard", it's that the business model has changed. In the original arcade games, they had incentive to make you die a lot to get another quarter. With modern games, since they sell the package to you just once up front, there's no reason to make you die every 30 seconds.
Interesting analysis. But I'm curious, given the amount of skepticism you show about human interpretation and fallibility, how you have determined the Christian bible is the reliable starting point for your source of information? What evidence do you use that it was divinely inspired, rather than a human production? Why that book as opposed to some other religious text which might also claim to be divinely inspired?
Yep, that was my point. I chose to play "lefty" because what's considered normal positioning didn't match what I perceived the game's challenges to be. It seemed like a silly waste of my primary hand to put it on a single button and have my weaker hand do the complicated articulating. Then again, even on a real guitar it seems like I'd want my right hand on the fretboard, but I don't know how to play so maybe there are important points I'm overlooking.
I agree with you there. I don't play guitar, but when I started playing Rock Band it only took me a couple of minutes to realize that it made sense to use my left thumb to hit the strum button since there's no precision at all needed there, and to use my right hand for the more complicated multi-key fingering on the neck.
The other other hand, I suppose.
Curious. I'm a righty and use the exact same motion as you describe to open a CD case. It's been a few decades since I learned, but I can't recall ever considering it unnatural to do the holding with my right and the moving with my left. It's such a simple action and doesn't require much precision, so the left is perfectly suitable as far as I'm concerned. Or I struggled in the beginning and I've just forgotten over the intervening years.
I will acknowledge your obscure facts and respond with my own. I'm a righty, but I deal cards left handed because I was taught by my mother, who is a lefty. You might say that makes sense, except she deals like a righty, and when I learned I properly mirror-imaged her teaching like I did with everything else she showed me. I guess we just both share a family proclivity for dealing cards backwards.
I also learned to mouse lefty when I started suffering carpal tunnel effects. I have gotten some very weird reactions from people trying to use my desk, including an absurd number of "oh! I didn't know you were left handed!" comments from people who have no reason to know or care what my primary hand is, but suddenly seemed to think it was a big deal. I've had a couple of other visitors actually move the mouse over to the right side of the keyboard, despite the fact they were standing and only needed to use the mouse for a few seconds (easily could have just used the mouse where it was) and one person who went so far as to comment as he moved it "you've got the mouse on the wrong side" like I didn't know where I'd left it.
Ah, yeah, was trying to remember what this was called. Had this on my previous desktop computer. I was doing a lot of evening work and then having a lot of trouble falling asleep. It really did seem to help a bit when I installed it, though I had to turn it off every time the evening's work involved graphics, where I needed to see color properly. I forgot to reinstall it when I upgraded the system last year.
(Note, 500 years ago was in the dark ages. With immortal people, that becomes a stark reality.)
I'm pretty sure the Renaissance was in full swing 500 years ago, which I think comes after the dark ages. Still, North America had only been known to Europeans for about 20 years, so I'm not really disputing your point about just how long ago it was.