Re:The author is wrong about accupuncture
on
Trick or Treatment
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· Score: 1
However, as long as a god isn't detectable using scientific means, he might as well not exist.
I don't follow. Just because something is unknown and unobserved doesn't mean it isn't having an effect on us.
I would guess that Chi isn't real, and only feels real to some people because it resonates with an instinctive mental model for vitality. I don't have a strong opinion about that, not having researced it much. This idea, that something "might as well not exist" for as long as it remains undetectable by scientific means, strikes me as a rather remarkable and unfortunate position though. Things that are easily controllable, and which have directly obvious effects on human scales, are easy to study scientifically. Things which are less easily controllable, or which act subtly or on very small or very large scales, can be much, much, more difficult to study. I guess its OK if some people want to confine their own mental models to topics that are currently on scientifically firm ground. Its and attitude that banishes the discomfort of ambiguity. But its still a kind of ignorance.
Re:The author is wrong about accupuncture
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 1
I think an issue here is the assumption that if X has not been validated by the scientific method, then people who believe in X are necessarily deluded. No doubt much or even most alternative medicine is BS, maybe including acupuncture. But it is way over-reaching to assume that because there's no Chi in modern scientific models, then its unreal. Its quite reasonable for doctors to professionally shun acupuncture because of its lack of scientific support. But that doesn't mean that acupuncture is bogus, which seems to be the claim of the original post.
I have auto-updates turned off because I've found that Windows updates can be performance downgrades, or cause other problems at a bad time. In the worst experience I had with an automatic update, the registry got screwed up. Not updating is not an ideal solution of course.
Korean DRAM makers were bailed out before, at a time when they had a huge share of the market. This was also subsidized indirectly by the US through the world bank.
Maybe I should have been clearer....I'm talking about people who are getting paid, but BS all day, and never accomplish anything, ever. Maybe your part of NASA is better than that.
I agree JPL has some good, worthwhile programs. I think most people haven't a clue how corrupt much of the rest of NASA is, employing many people who do no real work. Try telling people the truth about it, and they think you're being unpatriotic. I had to get out of there quickly while I still had a few skills. If I were president I would cut most of it.
In an earlier thread, an expert told us that the expected rate of expansion is based on a solution of Einstein's equations that includes a homogeneity assumption. That assumed homogeneity in the distribution of matter is now observed to be false, which invalidates the expansion rate prediction. Furthermore, a solution consistent with the observed distribution of matter, which is yet to be worked out, is plausibly expected to yield a result like the observed expansion rate. So it would seem that currently there's no known "problem" requiring "dark matter", or bubbles, or other devices.
This is right, based on my experience with my congressional office. I think congress in general is pretty corrupt in some ways, but when they receive a clear message, they do listen.
Now the agenda of the DHS should be clear for everyone. It isn't about catching terrorists, its about tracking every citizen.
Actually, the agenda of the DHS is for DHS bureaucrats to climb the GS pay scale. And the agenda of the contractors that support them is also acquiring money. Worry about terrorists is a means, and the enslavement of mankind is merely a side-effect. There's no orwellian conspiracy, just blind greed.
Of course, we're just as fvcked either way.
Oh, and for those of you who think that Obama and his friends would fix any of this, I have a short message from Satan....
BWAH HA HA HA HA HA HA
Its not Bush or Carl Rove who hold the security agency purse strings in the Democratic controlled house.
If you go to a group of Christians, and ask questions about their beliefs, they may engage you in a debate on Christian theology, they may give you a Bible to read, and so forth, but you can generally access these materials for free. If you go a group of Muslims and do the same thing, you will likely get the same results. Same goes for the Jewish religion, or Mormonism, or Hinduism.
Minor nitpick - The Mormon church has fairly significant secret doctrine that you have to join and climb the heirarchy to find out about. Mormons I've talked to who are still members of the church will generally deny this, many of them sincerely because they aren't 'initiated' enough to know about it. But many ex-Mormons left the church over secret doctrines and ceremonies that disturbed them.
Not to say that Mormonism is as poisonous as Scientology though.
The so-called 'primary' world is already secondary. People live and aspire in a mental world where success tends to be productive of survival in the primary world. For example, the objects you see are all secondary cartoon representations of primary things. There are frequencies of light in the primary world, which are represented by different colors in the secondary world, but there is no color in the primary world. Similar things can be said about many or most of people's beliefs about the 'real' world.
The secondary world is of course strongly related to the primary one. If this were not so, it would be eliminated by natural selection. Many of the other secondary worlds, as discussed here, will change or disappear eventually for the same reason.
Yes, it's sad, Yes, it's leading to the decline of the United States. But if you're young and have college loans to pay off, what can you do?
I don't believe that most people have no choice. I went to a relatively expensive state university, and was able to pay my own tuition by working hard in resturaunts and landscaping, without any help from my parents and without borrowing any money. Granted, had I gone to Harvard it would have been more expensive, but a lot of other decent schools like Ohio State would have been a lot cheaper. And a lot of better students could have gotten scholarships. I think its more often a matter of people selling out, and not being willing to work hard during school breaks. People get what they choose. If they choose money over other kinds of value, that's what they get, and the country gets what it deserves also. I think that more tuition support could actually make the problem worse, because people would just be that much more spoiled.
For example, if you read the BBC online, you probably know that Hugo Chavez shook the Spanish King's hand recently after their previous spat. Hardly Earth shattering news. Yet you probably won't be aware that Colombian President Alavaro Uribe is under investigation for possible involvement in the planning of a massacre by right wing paramilitaries. The general trend is that bad stories about allies are either ignored or only reported in passing, whereas those about official enemies such as Chavez are accentuated and repeated ad infinitum.
Funny, I knew about the Uribe investigation, but not about the Chavez hand shaking thing. And I've noticed almost the opposite pattern you describe.
At least we can agree that the picture conveyed through the press is pretty dubious. Every time I have had first-hand information about an event, then read about it in the newspaper, the newspaper account has been fantastically screwed up.
was any 'dogma' really overturned? My understanding was always that the basic chemical rules were first order approximations, not a comprehensive description of how everything must behave. For example, xenon is an 'inert' element, with the outer shell full, but xenon tetra-fluoride (XeF4) is a stable compound. I learned that in high-school in the 1980's.
The Casimir force is the Van der Waals or London's force in bulk, meaning that its the same thing, but studied in relation to conducting surfaces rather than individual molecules. Casimir's original derivation, which is only a couple of pages, makes no reference to quantum vacuum fluctuations, and I think that model and metaphor tends to make the topic seem much more exotic than it really is.
On a side note, there's no way to get free energy out of the Casimir force without using the formula 'stuff-I-don't-understand = magic'. It would be like thinking you can get a free picture window by expressing the window's area as the product of two negative numbers.
Interesting info. This fits with how it looks from this end also.
I think the dynamic you describe is also pretty typical for interactions between departments and branches within the US. There are divisions or headquarters which have power, within which there are a lot of politics and scrambling for position. Then there are divisions or satellite offices where people are relatively powerless and the work is boring, since everything is organized to benefit those who are in control.
I expect that companies which manage to function in a more civilized manner can probably kick ass in their markets, because the feudal way is pretty inefficient.
For non-dark full length novels, I remember liking Rendezvous with Rama by Clarke. And I think lots of Robert Silverberg stories were OK, though none stick in my head.
All of my favorites were dark though. All-time favorite was novella The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe.
Maybe one way to go is short stories - easier to hold their attention than full-length novels, and it gives them a chance to find out what they like. Brian Aldiss had some good short stories, though I suppose a lot of them are somewhat dark. And of course there's lots of treasury collections that have interesting stuff in them.
What really hits a nerve with me is why the scientific community hasn't opened up all their journals for others to read. I imagine many retired and amateur scientists, engineers, hobbyists, etc, would have a lot of insight into many engineering and scientific problems and also make many discoveries as well.
I like your spirit and agree that there's a lot of really smart, creative people who aren't scientists. However...
One of the dispiriting things about science is how specialized most subjects have gotten. If you're not an expert in a field, its almost impossible to do anything. Even being an expert in a closely related field often isn't good enough. I don't think this is anyone's fault, its just the natural course of development. So I think the days of ameteurs accomplishing very much are behind us in a great many fields.
Another issue is that the people who fund scientists often aren't sufficiently literate to distinguish good science from phony science. Scientists are threatened professionally by people who peddle counterfeit knowledge, which has an effect on their fields similar to the effect a flood of counterfeit currency would have on an economy. So they try to protect themselves by controlling the validation of information and the supply of scientists. This legitimate desire is of course twisted by other less honorable inclinations. But there's a legitimate motivation there also.
You could get a job as a Program Manager or similar position. They do more design work than actual programming. Those positions pay about the same as programming positions.
In my experience, a program manager who isn't at least potentially good at programming doesn't make a very good manager. But my sample is limited.
OK, I'm in Ohio now, but I'm from Oregon and Idaho, so I have to pile on. Yes, lots of things in Oregon are stupid, but they're not much trouble to you if you stay out of Oregon. Californians are disliked because they and their money don't stay in California, and wreck life for other westerners. In Idaho, they buy up formerly open riverfront property, and block access for other people who actually live in Idaho (and not just visit a few times a year). Or they buy up rental properties and hike up rents in areas that were previously quite affordable. When I moved to Boise in 1992, before there was as much speculation, a classmate was able to buy a decent house for $60K, and I rented a decent apartment for about $300/month. The culture Californians bring with them is objectionable also, with lots of fences, private sidewalks, and vicious dogs, where before there was a sense of community. No, none of this is your fault personally. And many things in Idaho are screwed up without the help of Californians. (Though if you think the place is filled with white separatists or potato farmers, you obviously haven't been there. Boise is quite liberal, and I think most 'Idaho' Potatos are actually grown in Oregon.)
Defense contractors and Republicans get hype terrorism, environmental scientists and Democrats hype climate change. Both threats are real, but the dialogue is severely distorted and misleading. Its all about power and money.
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However, as long as a god isn't detectable using scientific means, he might as well not exist.
I don't follow. Just because something is unknown and unobserved doesn't mean it isn't having an effect on us.
I would guess that Chi isn't real, and only feels real to some people because it resonates with an instinctive mental model for vitality. I don't have a strong opinion about that, not having researced it much. This idea, that something "might as well not exist" for as long as it remains undetectable by scientific means, strikes me as a rather remarkable and unfortunate position though. Things that are easily controllable, and which have directly obvious effects on human scales, are easy to study scientifically. Things which are less easily controllable, or which act subtly or on very small or very large scales, can be much, much, more difficult to study. I guess its OK if some people want to confine their own mental models to topics that are currently on scientifically firm ground. Its and attitude that banishes the discomfort of ambiguity. But its still a kind of ignorance.
I think an issue here is the assumption that if X has not been validated by the scientific method, then people who believe in X are necessarily deluded. No doubt much or even most alternative medicine is BS, maybe including acupuncture. But it is way over-reaching to assume that because there's no Chi in modern scientific models, then its unreal. Its quite reasonable for doctors to professionally shun acupuncture because of its lack of scientific support. But that doesn't mean that acupuncture is bogus, which seems to be the claim of the original post.
I have auto-updates turned off because I've found that Windows updates can be performance downgrades, or cause other problems at a bad time. In the worst experience I had with an automatic update, the registry got screwed up. Not updating is not an ideal solution of course.
If they'd constructed it out of Sierpinski gasket they would have saved a lot more!
That was awesome.
Korean DRAM makers were bailed out before, at a time when they had a huge share of the market. This was also subsidized indirectly by the US through the world bank.
Cut the very center open, and there is a fly inside. The fly forces the tree to grow the ball out of leaf material.
Maybe I should have been clearer....I'm talking about people who are getting paid, but BS all day, and never accomplish anything, ever. Maybe your part of NASA is better than that.
I agree JPL has some good, worthwhile programs. I think most people haven't a clue how corrupt much of the rest of NASA is, employing many people who do no real work. Try telling people the truth about it, and they think you're being unpatriotic. I had to get out of there quickly while I still had a few skills. If I were president I would cut most of it.
...for I/O bound applications? Anyone have info on that yet?
I meant "dark energy", not "dark matter".
In an earlier thread, an expert told us that the expected rate of expansion is based on a solution of Einstein's equations that includes a homogeneity assumption. That assumed homogeneity in the distribution of matter is now observed to be false, which invalidates the expansion rate prediction. Furthermore, a solution consistent with the observed distribution of matter, which is yet to be worked out, is plausibly expected to yield a result like the observed expansion rate. So it would seem that currently there's no known "problem" requiring "dark matter", or bubbles, or other devices.
This is right, based on my experience with my congressional office. I think congress in general is pretty corrupt in some ways, but when they receive a clear message, they do listen.
Now the agenda of the DHS should be clear for everyone. It isn't about catching terrorists, its about tracking every citizen.
Actually, the agenda of the DHS is for DHS bureaucrats to climb the GS pay scale. And the agenda of the contractors that support them is also acquiring money. Worry about terrorists is a means, and the enslavement of mankind is merely a side-effect. There's no orwellian conspiracy, just blind greed.
Of course, we're just as fvcked either way.
Oh, and for those of you who think that Obama and his friends would fix any of this, I have a short message from Satan....
BWAH HA HA HA HA HA HA
Its not Bush or Carl Rove who hold the security agency purse strings in the Democratic controlled house.
Here's a short breakdown.
If you go to a group of Christians, and ask questions about their beliefs, they may engage you in a debate on Christian theology, they may give you a Bible to read, and so forth, but you can generally access these materials for free. If you go a group of Muslims and do the same thing, you will likely get the same results. Same goes for the Jewish religion, or Mormonism, or Hinduism.
Minor nitpick - The Mormon church has fairly significant secret doctrine that you have to join and climb the heirarchy to find out about. Mormons I've talked to who are still members of the church will generally deny this, many of them sincerely because they aren't 'initiated' enough to know about it. But many ex-Mormons left the church over secret doctrines and ceremonies that disturbed them.
Not to say that Mormonism is as poisonous as Scientology though.
The so-called 'primary' world is already secondary. People live and aspire in a mental world where success tends to be productive of survival in the primary world. For example, the objects you see are all secondary cartoon representations of primary things. There are frequencies of light in the primary world, which are represented by different colors in the secondary world, but there is no color in the primary world. Similar things can be said about many or most of people's beliefs about the 'real' world.
The secondary world is of course strongly related to the primary one. If this were not so, it would be eliminated by natural selection. Many of the other secondary worlds, as discussed here, will change or disappear eventually for the same reason.
Just an observation.
Yes, it's sad, Yes, it's leading to the decline of the United States. But if you're young and have college loans to pay off, what can you do?
I don't believe that most people have no choice. I went to a relatively expensive state university, and was able to pay my own tuition by working hard in resturaunts and landscaping, without any help from my parents and without borrowing any money. Granted, had I gone to Harvard it would have been more expensive, but a lot of other decent schools like Ohio State would have been a lot cheaper. And a lot of better students could have gotten scholarships. I think its more often a matter of people selling out, and not being willing to work hard during school breaks. People get what they choose. If they choose money over other kinds of value, that's what they get, and the country gets what it deserves also. I think that more tuition support could actually make the problem worse, because people would just be that much more spoiled.
For example, if you read the BBC online, you probably know that Hugo Chavez shook the Spanish King's hand recently after their previous spat. Hardly Earth shattering news. Yet you probably won't be aware that Colombian President Alavaro Uribe is under investigation for possible involvement in the planning of a massacre by right wing paramilitaries. The general trend is that bad stories about allies are either ignored or only reported in passing, whereas those about official enemies such as Chavez are accentuated and repeated ad infinitum.
Funny, I knew about the Uribe investigation, but not about the Chavez hand shaking thing. And I've noticed almost the opposite pattern you describe.
At least we can agree that the picture conveyed through the press is pretty dubious. Every time I have had first-hand information about an event, then read about it in the newspaper, the newspaper account has been fantastically screwed up.
was any 'dogma' really overturned? My understanding was always that the basic chemical rules were first order approximations, not a comprehensive description of how everything must behave. For example, xenon is an 'inert' element, with the outer shell full, but xenon tetra-fluoride (XeF4) is a stable compound. I learned that in high-school in the 1980's.
The Casimir force is the Van der Waals or London's force in bulk, meaning that its the same thing, but studied in relation to conducting surfaces rather than individual molecules. Casimir's original derivation, which is only a couple of pages, makes no reference to quantum vacuum fluctuations, and I think that model and metaphor tends to make the topic seem much more exotic than it really is.
On a side note, there's no way to get free energy out of the Casimir force without using the formula 'stuff-I-don't-understand = magic'. It would be like thinking you can get a free picture window by expressing the window's area as the product of two negative numbers.
Interesting info. This fits with how it looks from this end also.
I think the dynamic you describe is also pretty typical for interactions between departments and branches within the US. There are divisions or headquarters which have power, within which there are a lot of politics and scrambling for position. Then there are divisions or satellite offices where people are relatively powerless and the work is boring, since everything is organized to benefit those who are in control.
I expect that companies which manage to function in a more civilized manner can probably kick ass in their markets, because the feudal way is pretty inefficient.
For non-dark full length novels, I remember liking Rendezvous with Rama by Clarke. And I think lots of Robert Silverberg stories were OK, though none stick in my head.
All of my favorites were dark though. All-time favorite was novella The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe.
Maybe one way to go is short stories - easier to hold their attention than full-length novels, and it gives them a chance to find out what they like. Brian Aldiss had some good short stories, though I suppose a lot of them are somewhat dark. And of course there's lots of treasury collections that have interesting stuff in them.
What really hits a nerve with me is why the scientific community hasn't opened up all their journals for others to read. I imagine many retired and amateur scientists, engineers, hobbyists, etc, would have a lot of insight into many engineering and scientific problems and also make many discoveries as well.
I like your spirit and agree that there's a lot of really smart, creative people who aren't scientists. However...
One of the dispiriting things about science is how specialized most subjects have gotten. If you're not an expert in a field, its almost impossible to do anything. Even being an expert in a closely related field often isn't good enough. I don't think this is anyone's fault, its just the natural course of development. So I think the days of ameteurs accomplishing very much are behind us in a great many fields.
Another issue is that the people who fund scientists often aren't sufficiently literate to distinguish good science from phony science. Scientists are threatened professionally by people who peddle counterfeit knowledge, which has an effect on their fields similar to the effect a flood of counterfeit currency would have on an economy. So they try to protect themselves by controlling the validation of information and the supply of scientists. This legitimate desire is of course twisted by other less honorable inclinations. But there's a legitimate motivation there also.
You could get a job as a Program Manager or similar position. They do more design work than actual programming. Those positions pay about the same as programming positions.
In my experience, a program manager who isn't at least potentially good at programming doesn't make a very good manager. But my sample is limited.
OK, I'm in Ohio now, but I'm from Oregon and Idaho, so I have to pile on. Yes, lots of things in Oregon are stupid, but they're not much trouble to you if you stay out of Oregon. Californians are disliked because they and their money don't stay in California, and wreck life for other westerners. In Idaho, they buy up formerly open riverfront property, and block access for other people who actually live in Idaho (and not just visit a few times a year). Or they buy up rental properties and hike up rents in areas that were previously quite affordable. When I moved to Boise in 1992, before there was as much speculation, a classmate was able to buy a decent house for $60K, and I rented a decent apartment for about $300/month. The culture Californians bring with them is objectionable also, with lots of fences, private sidewalks, and vicious dogs, where before there was a sense of community. No, none of this is your fault personally. And many things in Idaho are screwed up without the help of Californians. (Though if you think the place is filled with white separatists or potato farmers, you obviously haven't been there. Boise is quite liberal, and I think most 'Idaho' Potatos are actually grown in Oregon.)
This is exactly right.
Defense contractors and Republicans get hype terrorism, environmental scientists and Democrats hype climate change. Both threats are real, but the dialogue is severely distorted and misleading. Its all about power and money.