I think the activists may have intended the environmental impact as a way of underlining the strain massive numbers of a single species puts on an ecosystem.
No, what we're seeing is that an animal rights activist is not the same thing as an environmentalist. The activists can't claim to be surprised by what's happened, because the exact same thing has happened before.
That is a very good point. Sampling would be taking a short section of text and putting using in quotes, or otherwise acknowledging in your work that you are using something that someone else wrote.
I don't think that there always has to to be a citation. I can think of a couple of situations in which it wouldn't be necessary, at least not morally (I won't touch legal issues).
There's no need to credit a "sample" is brief and of something sufficiently well-known to the intended audience. This is extremely common in poetry and has been since antiquity. For example, if I begin my poem about a romance between two pine borer beetles with the line "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood", I don't need to mention Robert Frost because everyone likely to read it sees what I'm doing. Obviously the line between obvious and not-obvious is a fuzzy one and depends on the audience, but it's a good general guideline.
I also think that a work that is very obviously built of "samples" needn't expressly say what is what. I'm thinking here of The Adventures of Mao on the Long March by Frederic Tuten, which consists in part of passages lifted directly from a wide variety of sources (it's the first place I'd ever seen Nathaniel Hawthorne on the art of sculpture used to discuss Mao). I don't remember if Tuten credits his "samples" or not, so it might be a bad example, but in a work like that, which is clearly and expressly made up in large part of words not originally written by the author, part of the game is in trying to figure out who originally wrote what, and what part is pastiche or parody instead of quotation.
The key is that in neither of the above cases is the author trying to pass of someone else's work as his own. Hegemann pretty clearly was, and now is just making stuff up to try and get away with it.
There's no real dates in the old testament that can be referenced to modern dates.
To be nit-picky, this isn't true. There are plenty of Old Testament references to contemporary events. For example, Isaiah 45 refers to the conquest of the Babylonian Empire by Cyrus the Great, which was ca. 540 B.C.. Solomon can maybe be dated from references in non-Biblical king lists. There are other examples. However (and this is what you're really talking about), through Exodus the references to external events are so fuzzy as to be meaningless.
First of all, we need to keep this in perspective. TFA says that through November there had been 2.1 million vinyl records sold in the US. That's far less than individual albums once sold, so vinyl hasn't staged some glorious comeback, it's just establishing itself as a minor niche.
That said, I'm a vinyl junkie and am happy for its continued survival, if only because it means that I'll be able to get new parts for my turntable for a long time yet. I think that the biggest advantage of vinyl is the physicality of the product. This includes of course the artwork and liner notes, which will be much larger and usually more attractive than with a CD. But there's more than this. Purchasing records often involves flipping through large bins of vinyl, something you sort of get with CDs, but instead of the clack or platic bins you have a nice soft thwap of cardboard album sleeves. Playing vinyl is also a much more physical act than playing a CD. With a CD you open the tray, put the disc on, then press a couple of buttons. With vinyl you have to open the lid, put the record on the turntable, line up the needle and plop it down, then come back and flip it over in twenty minutes or so. Choosing a specific track involves some pretty careful aligning of the needle. It forces you to become more engaged with what you're doing and promotes a more active listening; you can't so easily slap something on and ignore it, and the 6-disc changer (and, god help us, the random button) don't exist. You have to interact with your music because there will be a little bit of physical labor involved in keeping it going for more than 20 minutes at a time.
Of course, playing 7" singles is even better for this, because you're hopping up every three minutes and constantly having to think, "What would sound good with this?" Vinyl is far better for an evening devoted to listening to music because it really encourages you to make the music the central part of the evening. Too much distraction and there's no more music. That contrasts with CDs, and is entirely different from mp3 listening. Banshee tells me that I can start playing my mp3 library and continue for 22.5 days. That sort of thing promotes an extremely passive kind of listening, music as just something that's there.
A final thing to consider: I have a few CDs that have become scratched and are now unplayable. I have a bunch of LPs that have become scratched and now have a little scratch on them when you play them. My LPs are going to outlast my CDs.
There are some nature paintings from color-blind people. Those are very enlightening, they don't look like nature at all for non-color blind people like me.
My parents first discovered my color blindness when I was in kindergarten. I came home with a crayon drawing of my gerbils, in which I had captured them with in yellow-green. To me that looked more or less correct, or the best I could do with the Crayola 64 box. So imagine a world in which gerbils are more or less yellow-green and you've got my variant of color blindness (or color vision deficiency as my ophthalmologist would insist you call it).
Something that people occasionally notice is that all of the artwork I have up in my apartment is overwhelmingly blue and yellow. These are two basic colors that my receptors handle perfectly well, so they appear very bright to me and end up what I want when I'm looking for something to cheer up the room. Red and green just aren't very exciting. I mean, I understand the concept of "fire engine red" intellectually, but when I look at it I see a pretty subdued color. It's red, sure, but red is a pretty relaxed, cool color, right? It sure looks that way to me!
It isn't "openwashing". There is a danger (to Sony) that the market for ebook hardware will be dominated by the big bookstores. Amazon and B&N, because books are their primary business, can provide a huge number of ebook titles, more than Sony's online store could ever hope to. These ebooks can only be read on their own devices (Amazon's ebooks on the Kindle, B&N's on the upcoming Plastic Logic device) and not on the Sony Reader, an Illiad device, or whatever. Well, they work on an iPhone, but that's a different market, not the e-Ink market. There is a danger to Sony that no matter how good or cheap their device is, people won't buy it because there's not a big catalog of books available for it.
So they hit on the idea of focusing on the ePub format, trying to make it the standard for sales of ebooks. If enough sellers go along with it, if most every non-Amazon and B&N seller goes along with it, then eventually there will be enough content usable on the Reader that Sony can compete with Amazon and B&N on things like hardware and price. They're trying to eliminate the big bookstores' inherent advantage, that's it. If a few people see this news and say, "Open formats, gee whiz, now I'll buy a Sony Reader" the so much the better (for Sony), but that's not their intention.
That said, the Sony Reader is also not really in need of "openwashing", because it's very good with open formats. This is strange to say about a Sony device, but it's true. The Reader already supports epub, which the Kindle doesn't. The Reader has always been better for open formats, even pdf (if you don't mind slow and cramped). You don't even need to use Sony's software. Just plug the thing in to a USB port and drag your ebooks over, like its an external flash drive. I've had a Reader (a PRS-505) since last fall and have read 60-70 full books on it. The only DRM that's gotten onto the machine was attached to a couple of pdf ebooks I checked out of the Chicago Public Library. The Reader has been quite happy with free and open files from Project Gutenberg, from Mobileread, what I've bought from a few small presses, and from what the excellent (free and open) Calibre software has pulled from the web for me.
They are Akula class attack submarines, which in a war would primarily be used against submarines and ships. They are quite possibly armed with nuclear weapons, but not ICBMS. The big nuclear missiles are on Typhoon class subs that are, presumably, drifting around undetected somewhere in the Barents Sea.
Other companies have been in the facsimile/reprint business for a while. The best known (at least in the U.S.) is probably Dover Press, but there are others. What makes it interesting is that this is Amazon doing the publishing, meaning that there will be an order of magnitude more titles available than what places like Dover can manage.
My partner has ordered a few facsimile reprints of 17th century theological and philosophical works from Kessinger Publishing, works she wasn't able to get anywhere else. They're just poor facsimiles, almost photocopies, of old works, but even then manage to work in a little incompetence. Their printing of Sir Kenelm Digby's Of Bodies and of Man's Soul to Discover the Immortality of Reasonable Souls has on its cover (and as the title on the Amazon page!) one of the best editorial screw-ups ever.
I'll preface this by saying that I'm more or less an atheist (formally I'm an agnostic because I've never felt the whole thing worth investing much mental effort on, but I can't imagine myself ever being a believer).
I think we can look at the death of Pope John Paul II as illustrative. John Paul had staked a lot of his papacy on what he saw as the inviolability of life, arguing ultimately, as we all remember, that life is the gift of God and therefore we need to do everything we can to preserve it. So, when he was at his own end, hopelessly and obviously terminal, he had his doctors do everything in their power to preserve his own life as long as possible, with the idea that if this life is indeed God's gift then everything possible must be done to preserve every second of it. This was widely reported at the time.
Now, we can argue all day about what life is and when it begins and ends, about whether or not John Paul's papacy did anything to preserve life in the world, and so on. But his death and the way he handled it demonstrate that if you accept the premises of Christianity then there are very good reasons to do everything possible to stave off death, beyond the various forms of hypocrisy, fear, self-delusion, and so forth that the average Slashdot responder is so quick to cite.
A more serious problem is that if this were to pass the best national campaign strategy for dealing with Iowa voters would be to ignore them in favor of wooing voters from swing states as it would give candidates a sort of Iowa multiplier. There are arguments for and against the electoral college but this is a bad plan for Iowa.
You're missing the most important part of the plan: if they pass this resolution it takes effect only when enough states to award 270 electoral votes do the same. It's in the summary! IOW, things go on as normal until a bunch of other states have made the same pledge. Until then Iowa still gets to be a swing state. Afterwords, every vote in the US is equal, because a bunch of states have done an end run around the Constitution.
This sort of controlled perception -- we are telling the mind what to pay attention to -- takes energy and effort. Natural settings don't require the same amount of cognitive effort.
Anecdotally, I've noticed that the extra cognitive effort required to get by in cities can be useful. I grew up in a fairly small town (pop. ~8000) and now live in Chicago. My friends back home who haven't moved away have for the most part seemed to me to go a bit soft, meaning I feel in conversation that I think a lot faster than they do, even with people who I once considered smarter than me. I know that some of this is self-selection (the less ambitious are less likely to move and more likely to go soft, etc.), but a lot of it seems to be that I am more often challenged intellectually and don't have the opportunity to become spacey, and spaciness is the main difficulty I'm describing. I see it especially in grocery stores, where there are far more people wandering confusedly through the aisles and being baffled by the oatmeal than there are here.
What I'm saying here is that I fully accept that an urban environment is more stressful than a rural or semi-rural one. I would just dispute the idea that that is always a bad thing. Sometimes stress can force you to stay on your toes.
At work I use elinks for all of my web browsing, because the black and white text box it's in looks from a distance a lot like the sorts of windows that I am supposed to be working in. Elinks is great, it works brilliantly on almost every site. (Except, of course, Slashdot, which generally stops loading and freezes the program.)
The great thing about the growth of web browsing on mobile phones is the increase in web sites with versions adapted for mobile users. Plainer interfaces, less scripts, no flash, fewer pictures -- everything the user of a text-based browser could possibly want! It's made elinks a lot more useful for me, both at work and at home when I'm using my ancient Thinkpad X21 (running Debian) and don't want to slow it down by starting X.
I believe that is already the rule, that if you get hit when the ball is in the strike zone, it is a strike.
That's the rule, but it never gets called that way. A lot of changes that MLB could make are simply based on extant rules: call the high strike in the rulebook, don't allow the leadoff batter to erase the back line of the batter's box (as they all do now) and force him to stay in the box, don't automatically grant the batter timeout if he steps out of the box (as per the rulebook), etc.
If everyone was taking steroids, you'd have to greatly extend the outfield so as to keep the game from becoming even more of a home run contest than it currently is. And, since steroids don't make you that much faster (as compared to how much further you can hit a ball), outfielders wouldn't be able to cover all that extra room, and batting averages would skyrocket.
There are a few problems with this. One is that we really don't know that steroids make everyone a much better baseball player. If you look at the list of players who've been suspended you see a lot of names like Matt Lawton and Mike Morse, and not too many stars. Maybe this just means that the stars can afford untraceable stuff, but we don't really know. But really, and this surprises people, there is very little proof that steroids really help a player become better, and, even if we assume they do, little explanation of how they do it. Is it pure strength? An increase in hand-eye coordination? Some people suggest they improve vision. Can they work with all people equally? If not, why, and who benefits most?
More importantly, baseball can be changed very significantly with fairly small adjustments to the rules that govern it. An adjustment in the height of the pitcher's mound after the 1968 season increased scoring by about a run a game. Juiced balls dramatically increased run scoring for one season in both 1930 and 1987. The Colorado Rockies have radically changed the offensive environment of their ballpark in large part by changing the method in which they store baseballs (they keep them in a humidor now).
There are all sorts of things that could be done to "deaden" the game. Mandate a minimum thickness of bat handles -- whip-handled bats allow incredibly quick swings. Deaden the ball if you want. Raise the mound. Enforce a larger strike zone. Force batters to stay in the batter's box, and don't let them wear Craig Biggio-style body armor so they have to worry about getting hit if they lunge over the plate. Call it a strike if they get hit over the plate, or if they make no effort to get out of the way. Limit the amount of times a pitcher can throw to first with a runner on, encouraging base stealing and making speedy, athletic players more valuable than lumbering sluggers. Etc., etc.
Bill James runs through these ideas and more in his Historical Baseball Abstract. As James says, with only small changes in the equipment and rules, baseball has been a game of 10-9 slugfests and of 3-2 bunt and steal games. It could be either one now, but Major League Baseball thinks that home runs bring profits. So that's what we've got.
The closest current machine is probably the Alphasmart Dana, with a small boxy monochrome display and the same nearly-flat form-factor. The Dana isn't quite instant on, but it's close, and it really does get ~20 hours on a battery charge. It's also used mostly by people wanting mainly a word processing device, but it does run the Palm OS. It's also almost all keyboard, with a really nice big Qwerty setup. It would also be a great reporter's machine.
My older Alphasmart 2000 was just a typing machine, but as such it was amazing. It got, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds of hours of battery life from 3 AAs. I was always shocked when the batteries died, once every eight or ten months.
I agree with your basic point. Christianity happened. Some of the results were good, some bad, and after that it's very difficult to untangle from other things and the intellectual/philosophical/social framework it inherited. That said, a series of quibbles:
But without the Franks converting to Christianity, for example, we wouldn't have had the Holy Roman Empire.
We just don't and can't know that. Sure, we wouldn't have had the HRE in exactly the same form, but some decentralized empire certainly would've been possible. The Franks converted in the 6th century; Charlemagne was crowned in 800. That's a long chunk of time.
We wouldn't have had the Byzantine conflicts with Armenia or with the Syriac churches, which conflict ultimately put it border to border with the Seljuk Turks and thus the disastrous war at Manzikert against Alp Arslan. (The resulting internal conflict is widely recognized as the beginning of the end for the Byzantines.) The Armenians knew how to deal with the turkish troops, Byzantium had no clue. Etc, etc, etc.
The Byzantines expanded westwards into Armenia because they were (in their eyes) reconquering lost territory. Armenia had been Roman, then Byzantine (with some interruptions). There were Armenian emperors. Armenia, they thought, was theirs. And the major disaster of Manzikert was not internal dissension but the loss of Anatolia, which meant a massive population loss.
Eventually the Empire _had_ to adopt this new religion, or be weakened from within by it. There also was at least an internal war in the Roman Empire, east against west, based on it.
No there wasn't. Maybe you are thinking of the wars that brought Constantine to power, which were a feud over the succession and not religious (Constantine converted, he said, because of a vision he had *during* the fighting). Or maybe you are thinking of the reign of Julian the Apostate, who tried to convert the Empire back to paganism through what were more or less peaceful means. Or maybe you're thinking of the squabblings over the Trinity and so forth, but these were theological. Or maybe the division of the Empire into two halves, which was made for administrative and military purposes and was peaceful and more or less cooperative. Or maybe the fighting against the Zoroastrian Sassanids. Or maybe the fighting against the various Germanic barbarians who had adopted Arian Christianity (but who weren't fighting for religious reasons). There was no Christian religious war in ancient Rome.
Would we have still had slavery, for example, if the Roman empire continued as it was?
I don't get this. There was slavery in ancient Rome (it increased over the centuries). There was slavery afterwards. In the Middle Ages there were forms of villeinage and serfdom that were very similar to slavery. Slavery is an ancient institution. The idea of completely getting rid of it is very modern.
By contrast, Christianity never had that tight a grip on everything, and had to find some way to accomodate different scientific approaches. E.g., before it could pick on Galileo in the name of the Aristotelian system, it had to accept the Aristotelian system and let universities teach it in the first place, mostly because it couldn't do much about it.
First of all, the Aristotelian system was adopted by the Church mainly because Church figures, notably Aquinas, thought it was useful for looking at the world in a Christian framework. Late Medieval Aristotelianism was Christian. The difference with China is not Church control but rather centralization. Centralized China could impose Confuciansim. The Church was never centralized to such a degree. It's not obvious that this is inherent to Christianity and not a relic of its time and place. I mean, maybe it is inherent, but that would require a lot of arguing. So the point is that the Church had learned divines who could argue new versions of the system and influence the power brokers (the Papacy, the Universities after the 11th century) into changing their ideas.
nope. it will never happen. Professors and their desire to rape the students by publishing slight revisions of their drivel year after year for insane prices are what keeps ebooks from being common.
FWIW, the textbook "upgrade treadmill" of constant small revisions is driven by publishers, not professors. The majority of professors are not textbook authors, and my experience working in university libraries is that a lot of them work pretty hard to keep the costs to their students down.
But the publishers want to put out a new version every year or two, and I can't exactly blame them. Otherwise, their new sales would be completely overwhelmed by the used market. If the majority of students resell their Econ 10 textbooks it doesn't take too many years until there aren't any sales of new textbooks. So the constant small changes. I don't like the effect of it, but the reasoning is absolutely clear. Just another small miracle of capitalism!
Just like people who comment on slashdot, vegans have a wider variety of opinions & reasons to arrive at their dietary choice. Trying to ask them collectively what they think about something like this is useless.
Precisely. For example, I've been a vegetarian for 18 years (since I left home after high school) and a vegan for 12. I started as what I've heard called an "aesthetic vegetarian", i.e., I thought meat was gross and I had since I was a kid. It had nothing to do with animal rights or anything like that, purely a matter of taste. In fact, before I decided to call myself a vegetarian I had effectively been one for several months, simply because as soon as I was away from home I could stop eating things I thought were gross. Since then I've developed some ideas about factory farming, etc, but my concern there is more with limiting animal suffering rather than eliminating the eating of animals (and is one shared by many carnivores).
So in answer to the question at the top, this vegan would not eat cloned meat. Unless they could make it taste like tempeh, in which case he'd dig right in.
The shaking woke me up. At first I thought the upstairs neighbors were being obnoxious again. The misses thought it was a ghost. Then our heads cleared and we realized, "Earthquake!"
Our first thought was that animals are supposed to behave strangely during earthquakes, or after them, or before them, some time around earthquakes. It was 4:40 in the morning so we were hazy on the specifics. Anyway, eager to experiment we leaped out of bed and ran into the front room to where our cat Geoffrey sleeps on the couch. We yelped at him, "Geoffrey! Geoffrey! Earthquake! Do something!"
Geoffrey looked at us with an expression that said, "Who the hell are you?" Then it changed to, "Leave me the #$#! alone." And finally it went to, "As long as we're all up you might as well feed me."
Our conclusion is that animals don't give a crap about earthquakes.
If you're smarter than the other people in class you can usually pass without paying much attention. If you know the subject a little already you can pass without paying much attention. If you are sharing notes with someone else you can pass without paying much attention. If you're buying notes you can pass without paying much attention. If you're buying your papers you can pass without paying much attention. So you can pass and be a nuisance as well.
And even if they do just fail, they've possibly disrupted the class for everyone else for the whole quarter. The other students don't get that quarter of school back.
Has America gotten so fat and lazy that 6 to 8 lbs is considered a huge burden?
I get around on foot. I walk 1.5 miles to work and 1.5 miles back (I would say "Uphill both ways", but this is Chicago and there aren't any hills). The grocery store is about a mile from work and 2 miles from home. In July it's often 95 degrees and sunny and I still have to bring home the groceries after work, and then that extra 4-6 pounds and the few inches of width and depth are a huge burden. That's why my "laptop" is a Nokia 770 with a bluetooth keyboard.
The little irony here is that if I were lazier (and likely fatter) and drove everywhere then the 6-8 pound notebook computer wouldn't be an issue at all.
The Mini-Note was called the HP 2133 in the advanced press and has been expected for a while. I've had high hopes for it as a notebook for word processing, because the advance press has always talked about it having a 95% full keyboard (unlike the tiny Eee).
Anyway, after looking at some of the early reviews you can see that the Linux model is almost the perfect machine for a writer. It's small and under 3 pounds. It has a nearly full-size keyboard so you should be able to type for hours on it with no problems. The 1280x768 screen lets you see how things look on a full page and do some editing work (which is why something like an Alphasmart doesn't fit here). It seems likely to be fairly rugged and has a solid state drive of some sort, meaning drops won't kill your work. The performance of the poky VIA processor is almost irrelevant; all you need to be able to do is type in Open Office without noticeable lag. (Or fire up a tty session with vi or emacs if you want to totally minimize distractions.) $500 isn't as nice as $400, but it won't kill you either.
The only problem I've seen is that at least one of the reviews goes on about the heat the thing generates and the accompanying fan noise. A small quiet computer is the scribbler's holy grail. There's some hope for the HP, as the reviews have all been of the $750 model running Vista off a spinning hard drive. Maybe, hopefully, the slower processor being taxed less by a lighter OS combined with a solid state drive will make the Linux model quieter. Still, if not, we've almost got a writer's computer. And hopefully someone else will come out with a perfect one soon.
Just make up your fucking minds already, every other week coffee is bad, then good, then bad again.
There are a lot of things out there that are both good and bad for you. Running is good for you. Running can wreck your knees. Red wine is good for your heart. Red wine is bad for your liver.
Everyone has to make his own personal risk assessment decisions. Or decide to just say, "Screw it!"
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I think the activists may have intended the environmental impact as a way of underlining the strain massive numbers of a single species puts on an ecosystem.
No, what we're seeing is that an animal rights activist is not the same thing as an environmentalist. The activists can't claim to be surprised by what's happened, because the exact same thing has happened before.
That is a very good point. Sampling would be taking a short section of text and putting using in quotes, or otherwise acknowledging in your work that you are using something that someone else wrote.
I don't think that there always has to to be a citation. I can think of a couple of situations in which it wouldn't be necessary, at least not morally (I won't touch legal issues).
There's no need to credit a "sample" is brief and of something sufficiently well-known to the intended audience. This is extremely common in poetry and has been since antiquity. For example, if I begin my poem about a romance between two pine borer beetles with the line "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood", I don't need to mention Robert Frost because everyone likely to read it sees what I'm doing. Obviously the line between obvious and not-obvious is a fuzzy one and depends on the audience, but it's a good general guideline.
I also think that a work that is very obviously built of "samples" needn't expressly say what is what. I'm thinking here of The Adventures of Mao on the Long March by Frederic Tuten, which consists in part of passages lifted directly from a wide variety of sources (it's the first place I'd ever seen Nathaniel Hawthorne on the art of sculpture used to discuss Mao). I don't remember if Tuten credits his "samples" or not, so it might be a bad example, but in a work like that, which is clearly and expressly made up in large part of words not originally written by the author, part of the game is in trying to figure out who originally wrote what, and what part is pastiche or parody instead of quotation.
The key is that in neither of the above cases is the author trying to pass of someone else's work as his own. Hegemann pretty clearly was, and now is just making stuff up to try and get away with it.
he is a wonderful down to Earth man.
Except when he's in a Russian spacecraft.
There's no real dates in the old testament that can be referenced to modern dates.
To be nit-picky, this isn't true. There are plenty of Old Testament references to contemporary events. For example, Isaiah 45 refers to the conquest of the Babylonian Empire by Cyrus the Great, which was ca. 540 B.C.. Solomon can maybe be dated from references in non-Biblical king lists. There are other examples. However (and this is what you're really talking about), through Exodus the references to external events are so fuzzy as to be meaningless.
First of all, we need to keep this in perspective. TFA says that through November there had been 2.1 million vinyl records sold in the US. That's far less than individual albums once sold, so vinyl hasn't staged some glorious comeback, it's just establishing itself as a minor niche.
That said, I'm a vinyl junkie and am happy for its continued survival, if only because it means that I'll be able to get new parts for my turntable for a long time yet. I think that the biggest advantage of vinyl is the physicality of the product. This includes of course the artwork and liner notes, which will be much larger and usually more attractive than with a CD. But there's more than this. Purchasing records often involves flipping through large bins of vinyl, something you sort of get with CDs, but instead of the clack or platic bins you have a nice soft thwap of cardboard album sleeves. Playing vinyl is also a much more physical act than playing a CD. With a CD you open the tray, put the disc on, then press a couple of buttons. With vinyl you have to open the lid, put the record on the turntable, line up the needle and plop it down, then come back and flip it over in twenty minutes or so. Choosing a specific track involves some pretty careful aligning of the needle. It forces you to become more engaged with what you're doing and promotes a more active listening; you can't so easily slap something on and ignore it, and the 6-disc changer (and, god help us, the random button) don't exist. You have to interact with your music because there will be a little bit of physical labor involved in keeping it going for more than 20 minutes at a time.
Of course, playing 7" singles is even better for this, because you're hopping up every three minutes and constantly having to think, "What would sound good with this?" Vinyl is far better for an evening devoted to listening to music because it really encourages you to make the music the central part of the evening. Too much distraction and there's no more music. That contrasts with CDs, and is entirely different from mp3 listening. Banshee tells me that I can start playing my mp3 library and continue for 22.5 days. That sort of thing promotes an extremely passive kind of listening, music as just something that's there.
A final thing to consider: I have a few CDs that have become scratched and are now unplayable. I have a bunch of LPs that have become scratched and now have a little scratch on them when you play them. My LPs are going to outlast my CDs.
There are some nature paintings from color-blind people. Those are very enlightening, they don't look like nature at all for non-color blind people like me.
My parents first discovered my color blindness when I was in kindergarten. I came home with a crayon drawing of my gerbils, in which I had captured them with in yellow-green. To me that looked more or less correct, or the best I could do with the Crayola 64 box. So imagine a world in which gerbils are more or less yellow-green and you've got my variant of color blindness (or color vision deficiency as my ophthalmologist would insist you call it).
Something that people occasionally notice is that all of the artwork I have up in my apartment is overwhelmingly blue and yellow. These are two basic colors that my receptors handle perfectly well, so they appear very bright to me and end up what I want when I'm looking for something to cheer up the room. Red and green just aren't very exciting. I mean, I understand the concept of "fire engine red" intellectually, but when I look at it I see a pretty subdued color. It's red, sure, but red is a pretty relaxed, cool color, right? It sure looks that way to me!
It isn't "openwashing". There is a danger (to Sony) that the market for ebook hardware will be dominated by the big bookstores. Amazon and B&N, because books are their primary business, can provide a huge number of ebook titles, more than Sony's online store could ever hope to. These ebooks can only be read on their own devices (Amazon's ebooks on the Kindle, B&N's on the upcoming Plastic Logic device) and not on the Sony Reader, an Illiad device, or whatever. Well, they work on an iPhone, but that's a different market, not the e-Ink market. There is a danger to Sony that no matter how good or cheap their device is, people won't buy it because there's not a big catalog of books available for it.
So they hit on the idea of focusing on the ePub format, trying to make it the standard for sales of ebooks. If enough sellers go along with it, if most every non-Amazon and B&N seller goes along with it, then eventually there will be enough content usable on the Reader that Sony can compete with Amazon and B&N on things like hardware and price. They're trying to eliminate the big bookstores' inherent advantage, that's it. If a few people see this news and say, "Open formats, gee whiz, now I'll buy a Sony Reader" the so much the better (for Sony), but that's not their intention.
That said, the Sony Reader is also not really in need of "openwashing", because it's very good with open formats. This is strange to say about a Sony device, but it's true. The Reader already supports epub, which the Kindle doesn't. The Reader has always been better for open formats, even pdf (if you don't mind slow and cramped). You don't even need to use Sony's software. Just plug the thing in to a USB port and drag your ebooks over, like its an external flash drive. I've had a Reader (a PRS-505) since last fall and have read 60-70 full books on it. The only DRM that's gotten onto the machine was attached to a couple of pdf ebooks I checked out of the Chicago Public Library. The Reader has been quite happy with free and open files from Project Gutenberg, from Mobileread, what I've bought from a few small presses, and from what the excellent (free and open) Calibre software has pulled from the web for me.
They are Akula class attack submarines, which in a war would primarily be used against submarines and ships. They are quite possibly armed with nuclear weapons, but not ICBMS. The big nuclear missiles are on Typhoon class subs that are, presumably, drifting around undetected somewhere in the Barents Sea.
Other companies have been in the facsimile/reprint business for a while. The best known (at least in the U.S.) is probably Dover Press, but there are others. What makes it interesting is that this is Amazon doing the publishing, meaning that there will be an order of magnitude more titles available than what places like Dover can manage.
My partner has ordered a few facsimile reprints of 17th century theological and philosophical works from Kessinger Publishing, works she wasn't able to get anywhere else. They're just poor facsimiles, almost photocopies, of old works, but even then manage to work in a little incompetence. Their printing of Sir Kenelm Digby's Of Bodies and of Man's Soul to Discover the Immortality of Reasonable Souls has on its cover (and as the title on the Amazon page!) one of the best editorial screw-ups ever.
I'll preface this by saying that I'm more or less an atheist (formally I'm an agnostic because I've never felt the whole thing worth investing much mental effort on, but I can't imagine myself ever being a believer).
I think we can look at the death of Pope John Paul II as illustrative. John Paul had staked a lot of his papacy on what he saw as the inviolability of life, arguing ultimately, as we all remember, that life is the gift of God and therefore we need to do everything we can to preserve it. So, when he was at his own end, hopelessly and obviously terminal, he had his doctors do everything in their power to preserve his own life as long as possible, with the idea that if this life is indeed God's gift then everything possible must be done to preserve every second of it. This was widely reported at the time.
Now, we can argue all day about what life is and when it begins and ends, about whether or not John Paul's papacy did anything to preserve life in the world, and so on. But his death and the way he handled it demonstrate that if you accept the premises of Christianity then there are very good reasons to do everything possible to stave off death, beyond the various forms of hypocrisy, fear, self-delusion, and so forth that the average Slashdot responder is so quick to cite.
A more serious problem is that if this were to pass the best national campaign strategy for dealing with Iowa voters would be to ignore them in favor of wooing voters from swing states as it would give candidates a sort of Iowa multiplier. There are arguments for and against the electoral college but this is a bad plan for Iowa.
You're missing the most important part of the plan: if they pass this resolution it takes effect only when enough states to award 270 electoral votes do the same. It's in the summary! IOW, things go on as normal until a bunch of other states have made the same pledge. Until then Iowa still gets to be a swing state. Afterwords, every vote in the US is equal, because a bunch of states have done an end run around the Constitution.
It's hoard, not horde.
I whored my digital media! People. Do. Not. Touch. My. Stuff. Because you have no idea where it's been.
This sort of controlled perception -- we are telling the mind what to pay attention to -- takes energy and effort. Natural settings don't require the same amount of cognitive effort.
Anecdotally, I've noticed that the extra cognitive effort required to get by in cities can be useful. I grew up in a fairly small town (pop. ~8000) and now live in Chicago. My friends back home who haven't moved away have for the most part seemed to me to go a bit soft, meaning I feel in conversation that I think a lot faster than they do, even with people who I once considered smarter than me. I know that some of this is self-selection (the less ambitious are less likely to move and more likely to go soft, etc.), but a lot of it seems to be that I am more often challenged intellectually and don't have the opportunity to become spacey, and spaciness is the main difficulty I'm describing. I see it especially in grocery stores, where there are far more people wandering confusedly through the aisles and being baffled by the oatmeal than there are here.
What I'm saying here is that I fully accept that an urban environment is more stressful than a rural or semi-rural one. I would just dispute the idea that that is always a bad thing. Sometimes stress can force you to stay on your toes.
At work I use elinks for all of my web browsing, because the black and white text box it's in looks from a distance a lot like the sorts of windows that I am supposed to be working in. Elinks is great, it works brilliantly on almost every site. (Except, of course, Slashdot, which generally stops loading and freezes the program.)
The great thing about the growth of web browsing on mobile phones is the increase in web sites with versions adapted for mobile users. Plainer interfaces, less scripts, no flash, fewer pictures -- everything the user of a text-based browser could possibly want! It's made elinks a lot more useful for me, both at work and at home when I'm using my ancient Thinkpad X21 (running Debian) and don't want to slow it down by starting X.
Call it a strike if they get hit over the plate
I believe that is already the rule, that if you get hit when the ball is in the strike zone, it is a strike.
That's the rule, but it never gets called that way. A lot of changes that MLB could make are simply based on extant rules: call the high strike in the rulebook, don't allow the leadoff batter to erase the back line of the batter's box (as they all do now) and force him to stay in the box, don't automatically grant the batter timeout if he steps out of the box (as per the rulebook), etc.
The problem is that it unbalances the game.
If everyone was taking steroids, you'd have to greatly extend the outfield so as to keep the game from becoming even more of a home run contest than it currently is. And, since steroids don't make you that much faster (as compared to how much further you can hit a ball), outfielders wouldn't be able to cover all that extra room, and batting averages would skyrocket.
There are a few problems with this. One is that we really don't know that steroids make everyone a much better baseball player. If you look at the list of players who've been suspended you see a lot of names like Matt Lawton and Mike Morse, and not too many stars. Maybe this just means that the stars can afford untraceable stuff, but we don't really know. But really, and this surprises people, there is very little proof that steroids really help a player become better, and, even if we assume they do, little explanation of how they do it. Is it pure strength? An increase in hand-eye coordination? Some people suggest they improve vision. Can they work with all people equally? If not, why, and who benefits most?
More importantly, baseball can be changed very significantly with fairly small adjustments to the rules that govern it. An adjustment in the height of the pitcher's mound after the 1968 season increased scoring by about a run a game. Juiced balls dramatically increased run scoring for one season in both 1930 and 1987. The Colorado Rockies have radically changed the offensive environment of their ballpark in large part by changing the method in which they store baseballs (they keep them in a humidor now).
There are all sorts of things that could be done to "deaden" the game. Mandate a minimum thickness of bat handles -- whip-handled bats allow incredibly quick swings. Deaden the ball if you want. Raise the mound. Enforce a larger strike zone. Force batters to stay in the batter's box, and don't let them wear Craig Biggio-style body armor so they have to worry about getting hit if they lunge over the plate. Call it a strike if they get hit over the plate, or if they make no effort to get out of the way. Limit the amount of times a pitcher can throw to first with a runner on, encouraging base stealing and making speedy, athletic players more valuable than lumbering sluggers. Etc., etc.
Bill James runs through these ideas and more in his Historical Baseball Abstract. As James says, with only small changes in the equipment and rules, baseball has been a game of 10-9 slugfests and of 3-2 bunt and steal games. It could be either one now, but Major League Baseball thinks that home runs bring profits. So that's what we've got.
My older Alphasmart 2000 was just a typing machine, but as such it was amazing. It got, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds of hours of battery life from 3 AAs. I was always shocked when the batteries died, once every eight or ten months.
We just don't and can't know that. Sure, we wouldn't have had the HRE in exactly the same form, but some decentralized empire certainly would've been possible. The Franks converted in the 6th century; Charlemagne was crowned in 800. That's a long chunk of time.
We wouldn't have had the Byzantine conflicts with Armenia or with the Syriac churches, which conflict ultimately put it border to border with the Seljuk Turks and thus the disastrous war at Manzikert against Alp Arslan. (The resulting internal conflict is widely recognized as the beginning of the end for the Byzantines.) The Armenians knew how to deal with the turkish troops, Byzantium had no clue. Etc, etc, etc.The Byzantines expanded westwards into Armenia because they were (in their eyes) reconquering lost territory. Armenia had been Roman, then Byzantine (with some interruptions). There were Armenian emperors. Armenia, they thought, was theirs. And the major disaster of Manzikert was not internal dissension but the loss of Anatolia, which meant a massive population loss.
Eventually the Empire _had_ to adopt this new religion, or be weakened from within by it. There also was at least an internal war in the Roman Empire, east against west, based on it.No there wasn't. Maybe you are thinking of the wars that brought Constantine to power, which were a feud over the succession and not religious (Constantine converted, he said, because of a vision he had *during* the fighting). Or maybe you are thinking of the reign of Julian the Apostate, who tried to convert the Empire back to paganism through what were more or less peaceful means. Or maybe you're thinking of the squabblings over the Trinity and so forth, but these were theological. Or maybe the division of the Empire into two halves, which was made for administrative and military purposes and was peaceful and more or less cooperative. Or maybe the fighting against the Zoroastrian Sassanids. Or maybe the fighting against the various Germanic barbarians who had adopted Arian Christianity (but who weren't fighting for religious reasons). There was no Christian religious war in ancient Rome.
Would we have still had slavery, for example, if the Roman empire continued as it was?I don't get this. There was slavery in ancient Rome (it increased over the centuries). There was slavery afterwards. In the Middle Ages there were forms of villeinage and serfdom that were very similar to slavery. Slavery is an ancient institution. The idea of completely getting rid of it is very modern.
By contrast, Christianity never had that tight a grip on everything, and had to find some way to accomodate different scientific approaches. E.g., before it could pick on Galileo in the name of the Aristotelian system, it had to accept the Aristotelian system and let universities teach it in the first place, mostly because it couldn't do much about it.First of all, the Aristotelian system was adopted by the Church mainly because Church figures, notably Aquinas, thought it was useful for looking at the world in a Christian framework. Late Medieval Aristotelianism was Christian. The difference with China is not Church control but rather centralization. Centralized China could impose Confuciansim. The Church was never centralized to such a degree. It's not obvious that this is inherent to Christianity and not a relic of its time and place. I mean, maybe it is inherent, but that would require a lot of arguing. So the point is that the Church had learned divines who could argue new versions of the system and influence the power brokers (the Papacy, the Universities after the 11th century) into changing their ideas.
FWIW, the textbook "upgrade treadmill" of constant small revisions is driven by publishers, not professors. The majority of professors are not textbook authors, and my experience working in university libraries is that a lot of them work pretty hard to keep the costs to their students down.
But the publishers want to put out a new version every year or two, and I can't exactly blame them. Otherwise, their new sales would be completely overwhelmed by the used market. If the majority of students resell their Econ 10 textbooks it doesn't take too many years until there aren't any sales of new textbooks. So the constant small changes. I don't like the effect of it, but the reasoning is absolutely clear. Just another small miracle of capitalism!
Precisely. For example, I've been a vegetarian for 18 years (since I left home after high school) and a vegan for 12. I started as what I've heard called an "aesthetic vegetarian", i.e., I thought meat was gross and I had since I was a kid. It had nothing to do with animal rights or anything like that, purely a matter of taste. In fact, before I decided to call myself a vegetarian I had effectively been one for several months, simply because as soon as I was away from home I could stop eating things I thought were gross. Since then I've developed some ideas about factory farming, etc, but my concern there is more with limiting animal suffering rather than eliminating the eating of animals (and is one shared by many carnivores).
So in answer to the question at the top, this vegan would not eat cloned meat. Unless they could make it taste like tempeh, in which case he'd dig right in.
Our first thought was that animals are supposed to behave strangely during earthquakes, or after them, or before them, some time around earthquakes. It was 4:40 in the morning so we were hazy on the specifics. Anyway, eager to experiment we leaped out of bed and ran into the front room to where our cat Geoffrey sleeps on the couch. We yelped at him, "Geoffrey! Geoffrey! Earthquake! Do something!"
Geoffrey looked at us with an expression that said, "Who the hell are you?" Then it changed to, "Leave me the #$#! alone." And finally it went to, "As long as we're all up you might as well feed me."
Our conclusion is that animals don't give a crap about earthquakes.
And even if they do just fail, they've possibly disrupted the class for everyone else for the whole quarter. The other students don't get that quarter of school back.
I get around on foot. I walk 1.5 miles to work and 1.5 miles back (I would say "Uphill both ways", but this is Chicago and there aren't any hills). The grocery store is about a mile from work and 2 miles from home. In July it's often 95 degrees and sunny and I still have to bring home the groceries after work, and then that extra 4-6 pounds and the few inches of width and depth are a huge burden. That's why my "laptop" is a Nokia 770 with a bluetooth keyboard.
The little irony here is that if I were lazier (and likely fatter) and drove everywhere then the 6-8 pound notebook computer wouldn't be an issue at all.
Anyway, after looking at some of the early reviews you can see that the Linux model is almost the perfect machine for a writer. It's small and under 3 pounds. It has a nearly full-size keyboard so you should be able to type for hours on it with no problems. The 1280x768 screen lets you see how things look on a full page and do some editing work (which is why something like an Alphasmart doesn't fit here). It seems likely to be fairly rugged and has a solid state drive of some sort, meaning drops won't kill your work. The performance of the poky VIA processor is almost irrelevant; all you need to be able to do is type in Open Office without noticeable lag. (Or fire up a tty session with vi or emacs if you want to totally minimize distractions.) $500 isn't as nice as $400, but it won't kill you either.
The only problem I've seen is that at least one of the reviews goes on about the heat the thing generates and the accompanying fan noise. A small quiet computer is the scribbler's holy grail. There's some hope for the HP, as the reviews have all been of the $750 model running Vista off a spinning hard drive. Maybe, hopefully, the slower processor being taxed less by a lighter OS combined with a solid state drive will make the Linux model quieter. Still, if not, we've almost got a writer's computer. And hopefully someone else will come out with a perfect one soon.
There are a lot of things out there that are both good and bad for you. Running is good for you. Running can wreck your knees. Red wine is good for your heart. Red wine is bad for your liver.
Everyone has to make his own personal risk assessment decisions. Or decide to just say, "Screw it!"