I'd correct you, but I'd have to get into all sorts of subtle stuff like the difference between internal energy/enthalpy and heat in the first and second laws. I liked the answer up above -- heat is disorganized energy -- better.
The question is, can it use its laser to smelt metals and create spare parts, additions, and (one day) rockets? Will it join up with other Mars rovers we might send and recombine their onboard plans and manuals to build new little roverlets equally well equipped?
If so, one day I hope to greet our new Mars Rover overlords!
Jupiter. It simply lost mass as the coalesced to the larger of the pair, with some of it becoming the other planets and most falling into what became the sun. It left Jupiter itself too small to ignite.
Or, of course, their mathematical model could be completely wrong, because the statement that the "only" mathematical model that could explain the data is one where all stars have partners sounds like science-bullshit-fu of the first order. At least they could have the decency to add "of the ones we thought of" or "of the ones we tried". As it is, we're left with proving that the Sun's supposed partner DOESN'T exist, and since it is very difficult to prove that something doesn't exist when it could be "invisible" in any of the countless ways someting can be invisible in space -- too far away, too small, too dark, too much of it made of of dark matter, concealed by invisible fairies, fallen through to the evil companion Universe where everybody is left handed and drinks absinthe and cherry soda cocktails.
If it is Jupiter, of course, that makes it easy. It isn't lit, so we know its mass is less than 1/10 (less than 0.075 if you want to be picky) the mass of the sun (no overt fusion, the companion isn't a red dwarf or we couldn't possibly miss it). It has cooled enough to be invisible, which probably adds close to another zero -- if it had a mass 1/80th of the Sun or larger , it would probably have a surface temperature still hot enough to see as it would be a brown dwarf and might sustain some nuclear reactions capable of generating heat in addition to still giving off heat as it slowly collapses. So it pretty much has to be smaller than roughly 13 Jupiter masses, making it technically not a star no matter what. Well, what do we find when we look for very large non-brown-dwarf objects nearby? Jupiter! And heck, through Saturn in for good measure! Jupiter has 1/1000 the mass of the sun, large enough that it is probably still losing heat via its own gravitational collapse but not enough to ignite any serious sustained fusion process. If the proto-star split early enough into Jupiter and Saturn (and the rest of the planets) then the Sun simply won the war for material by having a lot more gravity and hence sweeping up most of the dust before it lit and fusion drove the rest of the material away.
Which leads us to the remaining problem with their model. They're basing their claim on stellar formation in a dense cloud that created an extended star cluster. Perhaps that isn't a completely general starforming environment, and stars that form from smaller clouds tend to win the race for material and blow the starforming dust away on their newborne light before their smaller companions reach "star" size, even brown dwarf size.
That would explain why a LOT of stars seem to have Jupiter-scale planets (not that our exoplanet search isn't naturally biased towards finding these planets BECAUSE of their size). I'll bet there is an "alternative" model for star formation that would embrace this possibility and still explain the data from their star cluster but no, I'm sure that they have considered EVERY possibility in order to conclude that it is impossible for the sun not to have a star-sized companion, when it simply doesn't, at least not anywhere anyone can see when looking pretty carefully and with good instruments that would be very, very likely to show it up if it was there.
Climate Change, as everybody knows perfectly well, causes EVERYTHING. So yes, it must have caused it. The extra hot day made the shooter hot under the collar. The warmer air generated updrafts that affected how the bullets travelled to their targets. The Republican rejection of the reality of climate change and our collective guilt as being the cause was the source of the outrage expressed in the shooting. The lengthening of the growing season and the "fact" that climate change is affecting the coffee supply, somehow, caused a Serotonin imbalance in the shooter ditto.
In fact, I'm not typing this reply, Climate Change is. Because it is behind all of the evil in the world.
... tubes. TUBES. No, we did not have the technology in the forties. And the US military had hand-set radios in WWII that they tried very hard to use in combat, and they sucked. We didn't have the technology to do them even in principle until the transistor radio came along in 1954, and it took decades to advance transistors into ICs into things that actually have the power requirements and ability to chop up signals and share bandwidth in a way that anybody could afford or that could be broadly deployed.
Portable phones happened when they happened because that is when the technology advanced to the point where they were BARELY feasible -- as devices almost as large as those 40's miltary walkie-talkies, that had to be run on your car battery most of the time.
Next we will hear that personal computers were possible using technology from the 40's. Right. Sure. All they had to do was invent VLSICs and a dozen other things, and we could have had computers in the 40s! Doh!
OK, so there was a shooting. Bad bad. One person was killed (the shooter) and several more injured (two of them pretty seriously. All bad. This has created the usual firestorm of people asserting that gun control would have prevented this and others asserting that if all of the victims were armed it would have prevented this.
Either way it is useful to remember that -- if nobody else dies -- this constitutes 1.2% of the deaths from shootings that will happen (on average) today. If you've actually read any substantial fraction of this (mostly silly) thread, more people died from being shot while you were reading than were killed in this incident (so far). It's also worth remembering that it is better than even odds that one of those two to three deaths wasn't murder, it wasn't self defense, it wasn't even accident, it was somebody using a gun to kill themselves (almost 2/3 of all gun deaths are suicide).
If you've wasted an hour on the article and thread, 1 person and a fraction on average was shot and killed by others as homicide, two killed themselves, and a tiny fraction accidentally shot a friend or their kid or something (or were shot by their child under age six, in one out of 12 cases). A similarly tiny fraction of ordinary citizens actually used a gun to kill somebody "legitimately", that is in self defense.
Don't get me wrong -- I love guns, shot myself accidentally at age 10, defend the right to own guns etc. But the numbers are the numbers. This case is utterly ignorable, except for the small possibility that it was politically motivated instead of motivated by any of the OTHER reasons people use guns to murder people. Politically motivated shootings are, paradoxically enough, more what our founding fathers had in mind when they wrote in our right to bear arms (in a well-regulated militia, which I suppose MIGHT describe a typical drug gang or the Mafia or your local skinhead group). But probably not like this.
You, sir, actually made my lips twitch, briefly, while wading through the morass of shit from the extreme sides of the aisle above (both of them). I momentarily regretted not having mod points. Then my customary level of doom, despair, and depression reasserted itself leaving me ready to close the browser window and return to normal life outside of the/. polirantfest, one where indeed it would be simply lovely to declare murder illegal and decriminalize suicide.
Seems about on the level of, "Doctors claim vaccines don't cause autism, but Jenny McCarthy doesn't agree," which started from and is largely maintained by the left.
Started by "the left"? Say what? "Left" and "Right" have nothing to do with this. "Doctors" are at least as likely to be members of "the left" if by that you mean social liberals as opposed to conservatives. Oh, wait, they are more likely:
The last article is very thoughtful and analyzes trends in political contributions specifically, fractionated by gender, race, and subspeciality. It indicates that left/right even for physicians is more likely to be a question of income, gender, race, speciality, and age than it is of "intelligence" per se, but it is a simple matter of fact that on average liberals are smarter than conservatives.
Now, if you want to get into pseudoscience, we can talk about the "conservatives" in Texas and Kansas and Missouri who are passing legislation to make masturbation a misdemeanor crime (Texas), teach intelligent design on a par with evolution in the schools, rewrite history so that the founding fathers are Good Christians as opposed to deists or atheists and suppress evidence to the contrary to prevent it from being mentioned in school, let alone taught.
Personally, I tend to think of science as mostly being social value neutral, but the glaring exception to this is when science collides (as it so often does!) with religion. This is beautifully reflected in surveys like this:
The more religious a person is, the more conservative he is, and this relationship is strongly mediated by the value placed on tradition — respect for customs and institutions. But even though religiousness and spirituality are highly correlated, the more spiritual a person is, the more liberal he is. This relationship is mediated by the value placed on universalism — social tolerance and concern for everyone’s welfare.
As with previous studies, conservatives were more conscientious (organized and self-disciplined), while liberals were more agreeable and more open to new ideas and experiences. The trend of conservatives being more religious and liberals being more spiritual held even when controlling for these personality factors, and when controlling for age, gender and socioeconomic status.
As a scientist, I interpret this as the more orthodox religious a person is, the more likely they are to accept absolute nonsense as truth just because it is written down in a scriptural text somewhere and hence exempted somehow from the ordinary rules and methods of reason. The more spiritually religious they are, the more likely they are to accept absolute nonsense as truth just because they "feel" like it must be true and their feelings are again exempt from the ordinary rules and methods of reason. You can see the problem -- liberals and conservatives are almost equally likely to accept at least some nonsense as truth if they are religious, and liberals and conservatives who are intelligent enough not to do this are, almost by definition, less likely to accept nonsense as truth whether or not it is religious simply because they apply the rules
want to lie, shipwrecked and comatose, drinking fresh mango juice. Goldfish shoals nibbling at my toes. Fun, fun, fun.
Add a bit of pineapple and coconut and throw in a dash of rum and I'm there. I can take or leave the straw and little umbrella, although playing with the umbrella is fun when the goldfish get boring...
Which opens the door to infinite evil. Do we have evidence that behaving sinfully won't end up with us cast posthumously into a pit of eternal fire? Well, no, partly because we have no evidence of life after death, pits of eternal fire, and no objective definition of sin. So this means that ANY presentation can be interrupted simply by asserting that thus and such are sinful, etc. Can you prove that it is NOT? Of course not. There simply in no evidence that it is.
Your example of a zombie apocalypse is well taken. Do we have the slightest shred of evidence that zombies or anything zombie-like is really possible? Not just heavily drugged or brain-damaged individuals deliberately harmed by slavers or practicers of voudoin, but actual living dead brain-eating zombies? Well, no, although rabies as a disease does have related effects and might have been part of the origin of zombie legend. So what the heck! Sure, the zombie apocalypse could be unleashed by mutant rabies, GMO foods, stem cells, a disease transported to Earth by meteors or space aliens, biowarfare gone awry, the deliberate act of a vengeful deity, the deliberate act of an evil supernatural demon, prions (a mutant mad cow disease), a new "safe" designer recreational drug anybody can make at home out of clorox and pepto-bismol that has a zombie side effect one year after it is ingested, pods from outer space, slugs that attach to your spinal column from outer space, nanites intended to cure brain cancer, or a mutation of the common cold. Maybe half of these possibilities have formed the basis in whole or in part of science fiction novels over the decades (mutant rabies, alien diseases, pods, and slugs, biowarfare gone awry...)
So, should we allow scientific talks on how stem cells are being used to cure nerve deafness in humans and parkinson's disease to be interrupted at will by whack jobs that want to claim, without evidence, that the individuals cured MIGHT turn into zombies, so all research into stem cells must instantly cease? Seriously? Or, because stem cells are making an end run around the "intelligent design" of the human body by a supernatural deity they are therefore sinful (no need for evidence or a firm definition of sin, remember, it is whatever you want it to be or allege that it is and nobody can prove you wrong) and will cause not the zombie apocalypse but the biblical apocalypse unless we gather up all of the researchers and burn them alive at the stake as a manner of atonement and banish all of their works and threaten all human with torture and death if they ever use the words "stem cells" again? Can you prove that this won't happen (well, except by ignoring the idiots and curing nerve deafness and Parkinson's anyway with no breaking of the seals or unleashing of the four horsemen etc)?
Lack of evidence is not positive evidence of lack. It is, however, something that can legitimately be used to state that lack is more likely the longer evidence is looked for and not found. We cannot positively assert that there are no pink unicorns living somewhere on Earth simply because one has never been seen, captured, found (with or without color) in the fossil record), but we can say that -- given the existing observational evidence -- it is pretty unlikely that any exist and are just lurking somewhere in deepest darkest Africa or Tibet or in a special volcanic cave in the middle of Antarctica. If you assert invisible pink unicorns (whatever color "invisible pink" ends up being) you make it even harder to disprove, as now you can literally look everywhere on Earth and just because you can't see them doesn't mean that they aren't there, because they are invisible! Does this mean that we have to now allow La La Loopsie/My Little Pony followers to disrupt scientific presentations of evolutionary biology?
Note well that I'm not certain legislation is the answer to stuff like this, but providing the idiots with an escort off campus and leaving them there with instructions not to come back (students or not) seems pretty reasonable.
I mostly agree with your remarks, but I think there is a question of scale. I've done several startups, and in a startup, one person is often the CTO (that would have been me, twice), the primary developer of the core software (ditto), and the system manager for the entire network of computers owned by the company, which on occasion have been pretty much my cluster of computers plus eventually a "company owned" server or two when we had enough capital or cash flow to afford them.
From this level of "my basement plus your basement" startup, there are a set of scaling steps that lead through VC incubators to getting actual VC to hiring a skeleton staff (cheap, quite possibly fresh out of school and paid in part with options or the prospect of options) to making money but not as fast as you burn it to making money (one hopes) faster than one burns it and moving on to fame and fortune and early retirement.
At intermediate steps in this process, IT is not the polished gem that it might be for a fully developed and capitalized and profitable company. Backups might have been set up by the original founders (and done correctly) but all it takes is one hire that necessarily is given serious responsibility with little oversight in a tiny startup who doesn't completely understand backup to make a small change that fucks it up without even realizing it. I've been around a long time, and trust me, it happens, and if you are LUCKY you discover it when some tiny unimportant file is overwritten and you try to restore it and can't.
If this was a startup in the stage just past profitability -- small but important database of actual customers and/or their data, team of maybe three or four IT people still wearing many hats, so the database person was also the systems manager and the primary software developer was also the web manager and the original CTO/developer/general factotum was distracted by the demands of sales and corporate politics with a board made up partly of the VC people who want rapid growth to a liquidity event and so on, this scenario isn't that unlikely. DB person says I'm going nuts adding all these new workstations to sales desks, CTO says let's hire a DB person, CEO/COO says we can't afford a $150-200K position right now (duh!) so CTO says we'lll hire some kid straight from college with DB chops, kid comes in, they show kid the DB and sit him or her down, he/she tries a few tentative SQL commands but has no experience with whatever actual DB they are using and has credentials that are more talk than substance, tries to make a copy of DB to play with without breaking original and fucks it up. In the meantime, they have been backing up to a RAID, and the RAID started throwing errors but the same DB person who left the kid to play and orient themselves had JUST STARTED the rebuild or was trying to fix the problem and rerun the failed backup when...
Life is a comedy of errors like that more often than one might think. Most times they are non-fatal, but every now and then the ENT surgeon slashes the carotid the first day of his/hir first surgery and the patient dies on the table, or the kid working on steel 200 feet above the ground loses their balance on their fist day trying to emulate people who have been doing it for years and walk a narrow beam over nothingness. Sometimes people can get back up on the horse that threw them and sometimes they end up living under an overpass or dead at their own hand.
Humans are highly error prone information processing systems. We deliberately design systems that are critical -- as much as we can -- to have multiple levels of mutual auditing to catch and prevent errors before they occur, but it simply isn't possible to idiot-proof every process, and accidents can happen even to those who are not idiots. Few are the people who have root privileges who have NEVER EVER entered rm *.junk in some directory, but accidentally entered an extra space before the ".junk" (blush, been there, done that, done WORSE than that). If you are the only systems man
Hmmm, not mentioned in this article. Reference? Monosodium Glutamate, OTOH, is an almost pure excitotoxin -- Glutamate in the brain being the number one excitotoxin that causes cell death by overstimulation -- and yes, Mickey-D's food is often loaded with MSG (especially their "chicken nuggets"). Nothing in the article suggests that excitotoxins make you feel good, by the way, so this is a bit of a non-sequitor. Are you asserting that they add them to make you feel good and crave it again, and that incidentally they are excitotoxic? How toxic are they on a scale of water to MSG (which is close to ubiquitous and which directly triggers a reaction in a substantial fraction of the non-East Asian population).
Ahhh, but this whole topic reminds me of The Space Merchants, by Pohl and Kornbluth, where they added a harmless alkaloid to all of the foods in a three way loop so that smoking would make you crave something to krunch, which would make you crave something to drink, which would make you crave something to smoke. Or maybe it was a not-so-harmless alkaloid...
Still, sir, I must thank you for the excitotoxin reference. I'd never heard of this, but it explains chinese restaurant syndrome quite nicely, as well as why overstimulation in many contexts can lead to damage. A good motivation for a placid, contemplative life...
...But, did he use a bonferroni correction to compute his p-values, since this is a classic data dredge? Sure, his method will turn up true positives (and did, for at least one known offender) but what remains to be seen is the false positive rate and the lawsuit rate, since skewed distributions could have many causes some of which are benign and this is pretty serious defamation of character if one casts aspersions without secondary supporting evidence of malpractice.
In other words, are his "positives" really malefactors or is he picking out acne-causing green jellybeans: https://xkcd.com/882/
Worse, the study appeals to my own confirmation bias on the matter, as I'm sure that the rate of wrongdoing in the research is if anything higher than he finds it (he "detects" just under 2% possible/probable bad articles -- I would have guessed more like 5% to 10% just from sheer incompetence and inadequate power, but perhaps he corrected somehow for inadequate power although TFA doesn't really say). So I WANT to believe him, but sans bonferroni, I don't know what to to make of his p-threshold of 1/10000 applied to 5000 samples and testing multiple statistics per sample. He really needs bonferroni twice, as he dredges for out-of-bounds statistics PER article as well, for thousands of articles.
Well, yes, but for most coders older than the dawn the "custom code" starts with a template C application in a build-ready template directory with a pre-built makefile and perhaps a bit of structured shell, so that they are basically cloning fragments to parse this or that kind of data. At one point I had templates for using getopt but, as you say, you end up cloning lines either way and adding one level of indirection doesn't really save you much, even if you don't really have to remember all of the getopt stuff because IT is templated instead of simple CL parsing. Ditto parsing in bash -- I don't even try to remember it, I just copy my superlong bash script template (which also has useful fragments that illustrate loops, conditionals, sed-isms, awkeries, some regex stuff), delete what I don't need, and modify what I do.
This is the way "reusable code" really works a lot of the time. Once you've solved a particular problem, especially the second or third time, the trick goes into your code "library" and from then on you just copy them and hack them to fit, you don't rewrite them from scratch. And thus we spare reliance on memory at the level of detail and instead use our brains efficiently, as lookup engines and problem solving engines.
Is that you, AC? Always good to know what "you" have said.
Atheism isn't a religion, and saying it infinity times won't make it be one. It is the absence of belief in a religion. A (without) -- theism (religion). It's what the word means.
It's also what atheists are. Most atheists require a mix of evidence and consistency with evidence supported belief in order to raise any old notion that somebody throws out there -- such as some incredibly detailed description of how the Universe was created by a mysterious infinite superbeing that is in almost complete contradiction with evidence-supported belief -- to the point where it can be taken seriously as a component of their worldview.
I can assert that on the dark side of the moon there is a rock that is a perfect replica of the head of Abraham Lincoln. I can probably even offer some sort of argument for why this should be so -- estimates of so and so many rocks, probabilities for any given rock to look like Abraham Lincoln -- and there is little doubt that the assertion could be true (and will continue to be at least possible until somebody examines each and every rock on the moon to falsify it) as it contradicts nothing in the Bayesian network of evidence-supported belief that we call "observational knowledge about the real world" -- stuff like the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, cosmology. But there simply isn't any good reason to think that it is true.
To believe that this assertion is true anyway, without consistent evidence to support it, to have faith that it is true in spite of substantial arguments against it, is the hallmark, the defining characteristic of religious belief. To hear the assertion, acknowledge that it is possibly true, and conclude that it is probably not true and that there is plenty of time to believe it -- if true -- once we have direct evidence, is the hallmark of the atheist.
As for "devout atheist" -- this is what we in the business of communicating call an "ironic self-description", not intended to suggest that he is religious, only that you won't convince him to become religious with any of the tired old arguments that carefully avoid confronting the simple fact that there is no even vaguely trustworthy evidence that any of the near-infinity of asserted religions are actually true.
Non-mainstream or deeply religious people that don't simply follow doctrine are excellent fantasy writers, not just Tolkien but for example look at Lewis Carroll and the Chronicles of Narnia,...
Tolkein and C. S. Lewis where both members. G. K. Chesterton was an occasional guest. Charles Williams is probably less well-known at this point (possibly because his prose was more unabashedly Christian -- e.g. "War in Heaven": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R... etc).
I've always found it interesting that both Lewis -- arguably one of the most famous of the Christian Apologists of his time, although Chesterton was no slouch -- and Williams wrote books that were either thinly disguised Christian fantasy or openly fantasies about biblical/apocryphal fantasy, while in the Hobbit and LOTR, the characters (with the exception of the Elves, maybe) HAVE no overt religion. Yes, there is a fantasy connection with the supernatural and magic, but there are no descriptions of worship or prayer -- it is more a matter of "invoking" the protection (or sometime receiving it gratis) of e.g. Elbereth. Elves are immortal (but not unkillable), they don't die they "return" to "the west" (a.k.a. "heaven") through some sort of dimensional barrier. And although there is magic in LOTR, for the most part in the BOOKS (as opposed to the overheated movie) it isn't "telekinetic" magic like battling with wand-based thunderbolts or using a ring to stop the heart of an enemy, it is more "perceptual" magic -- making somebody invisible, generating light, extending life, healing, harming. The closest you come to religion is probably the "resurrection" of Gandalf, "sent back" from death because his work "isn't finished".
This has the effect of making it remarkably uncomplicated and ecumenical. We don't really understand why Sauron is so horribly evil, or how he manages to get killed but come back from the dead to try to take over the world -- again -- or just what he wants to do with the world when he wins that he can't do already. We don't really understand why or how "rings" can be given power (or what power they actually grant, since nobody actually USES a ring to do ANYTHING overt anywhere in the story). We don't understand where Ents come from, we don't understand Bombadil, we don't see why or how barrow-wights could come to be. We don't even understand Saruman -- supposedly good guy turned bad.
We don't need to. It's just a damn good story about a war between cartoon good (so very very good, so very very uncomplicated) and cartoon evil (so horribly unredeemably bad, so very very uncomplicated). Not at all like real life, where evil doesn't come with such a clear label -- and neither does good.
Thus the three short films establishing the character Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2024, after the end of the 95th Gregorian calendar year after the films' first publication. They will enter the public domain in the European Union on January 1, 2037, after the end of the 70th Gregorian calendar year after the death of Walter Elias Disney.
So it isn't until the actual grandchildren are all dead, it is until some imaginary, super-healthy grandchild sired minutes before the author him or herself expires is dead?
This isn't about IP -- patents expire infinitely sooner and nobody worries about the grandchildren of the original patent holder. Nor is the DMCA about protecting the income stream of the author (or the descendants of the author) and never has been. It is about protecting the income stream of the blood-sucking ticks who attach themselves to any author's -- or artist's -- work and razor out a chunk of flesh so that they can feast on 95% of all money every actually generated by it, leaving barely enough for the author to feel like they are being compensated and to provide the illusion that one can write books and get rich from them (which happens, sure, for one book in a thousand or less).
Who does it protect? We can start with 40% markup by the retailer. On top of 25% markup for the "distributor", a middleman with no actual useful purpose in the universe except to take a cut of unearned income. Then the publisher takes their cut, which is at least 25% (depending on what kind of book is being sold -- it can be up to 34% if it is a textbook). The publisher, at least, provides some actual services in the publication of the book and takes some risks, although in recent years they've managed to farm out several of the most useful services back to the authors by generally not considering raw manuscripts but instead requiring books submitted to be represented by an "agent" who is then paid BY THE (actual or would-be author) to pre-screen books for the publisher, effectively cutting a point off of the author's small share.
The author makes the least money of anybody involved in the publication and distribution of a book. Ebook releases of paper-published books have made this disparity even worse, as they are often sold at very near paper prices in spite of having effectively zero-marginal cost distribution.
It's very interesting that this discussion has arisen regarding Tolkein in particular, as his works were thought to have fallen out of copyright in the US in 1965 and an "unauthorized" edition was actually produced and sold before things finally settled down:
My original paperback copies of The Hobbit (obtained in the early 70's) had his appeal to readers not to purchase the unauthorized version whether or not it was "legal" out of respect for him if nothing else.
In summary, if the government actually gave a damn about authors, artists, or musicians instead maintaining the publishing industry, they could always write a law mandating (say) that author royalties be at least 25% of the retail price of the work, and then cut the copyright lifetime in half if not more. Most books -- nearly all of them -- sell for a short while and then vanish without a trace, and extending copyright to a century is a waste of time. Then the authors of those books can leave a much more substantial inheritance to those imaginary "grandchildren" in the form of a lot more money made while the works actually sell (just like everybody else makes money while they are actually alive and working) instead of protecting everybody else's right to make almost all of the money produced by their work almost indefinitely, with protection in law.
Direct dial? What is this direct dial of which you speak? Next think you know, you'll be talking about cradles for old-timey phones in black bakelite and 300 baud, and I'll have to run screaming from the room before the word "teletype" is uttered...
Pardon me, my goose-quill pen is almost dry and my inkwell was emptied by a passing goat. I'll be right back.
I was talking about spiritual karma from putting negative energy into the Universe. Not that I believe in spirituality in any non-metaphorical sense or that ethical action has any energy at all in any non-metaphorical sense, but metaphorically all of that stuff. Not so much/. karma, which AFAICT just adds up to "is not generally a total butt in online discourse".
Of course, being a language nazi could have the positive effect of embarrassing the writer into not writing nonsense, at least as often. It could create an actual behavioral gradient towards self-improvement. It could make the world a better place, and help widows, orphans, and kittens.
I was going to point this out, but you saved me the trouble and the negative karma of being a language nazi. One wonders what exactly they meant. Withstanding blows 70-85% harder without cracking? Offering 70-85% more resistance to certain kinds of stress (and yes, there are multiple kinds of stress -- compressive, extensive, shear)? Or, as you say, too many ohms...?
Hey, somebody could break into my den and use my typewriter to write ransom notes. Or they could steal my pen and use it to send out advertisements to oh, a dozen other people. Since my front door lock is a zwave device, they could even do this as part of a cyberattack.
This is only half kidding. From times ancient, computer security has been a tradeoff between the risks associated with any given level of security and the benefits obtained by operating at that level. You can run your computer wearing no clothes and having just passed through an x-ray machine and a 2 Tesla magnet, with dual isolation power inside a faraday cage itself inside a locked down secure facility that requires retinal scans and a realtime DNA match to allow you into the room followed by the correct entry of a 240 character random password to login, but you aren't going to get a lot of productive work done with no internet and an icy cold ass. Or you can run an ordinary laptop (like my Lenovo) with a reasonably secure OS (Fedora 25 on a fully encrypted SSD) with moderately aggressive network blocks on all ports but 22 for ssh, use only bidirectionally encrypted channels for all secure traffic, and avoid doing really stupid things (like downloading and running darkweb apps and content) and be pretty reasonably safe AND still be able to get a fair amount of work done when you aren't screwing around replying to things on/.:-) Is my system secure, truly secure? Hell no. But it is, as you say, "pretty secure" and it is STILL USEFUL.
Saving "copper" doesn't even make sense from a security point of view. There is nothing special about copper vs fiber or radio. And what do they mean? Twisted pair? Cat 5 ethernet? Time-Warner (sorry, "Spectrum") coax cable? Uh huh. They mean cable, not twisted pair, not phone lines.
This sounds like legislative rescue for TWCpectum, probably in response to whining about the demise of their near-monopoly on "copper" as fiber ripples through the world replacing the copper with something faster and much, much cheaper.
I don't even understand what they could be asserting regarding the security of "copper" vs alternatives. Copper, fiber, radio all carry encoded signals. Radio is by far the least secure as a transmission medium, with the signal openly available to everybody in range. Copper is easy to tap, and can often be tapped without even breaking the physical medium with an actual insertion via short range near field transducers. Fiber is actually the most difficult to tap, and is the most likely medium to have detectable artifacts from tapping. Intermediate hardware ALL is pretty much equally hackable, although again fiber probably wins the signal reamplification game as one doesn't have to read, then rewrite, every packet to boost fiber signals, where most wire repeaters do, and hence are hackable. And when we get to the network itself, the routers and major switching stations, the core stuff is usually professionally managed and "probably" pretty secure, the end stage stuff (cable modems, WAPs, etc) is probably vulnerable as hell but irrelevantly so as long as you use only secure point to point channels for work, and the BIGGEST vulnerability, proven over and over, is the operating system and applications on your actual computer or personal digital device.
I'm sure that there are official lists somewhere, but my impression after doing this stuff for many decades is that if you run Windows (almost any version, although by the end XP wasn't horribly insecure if you avoided e.g. explorer and outlook) then whether your network is "copper" or "fiber" or "radio" is almost completely irrelevant to your total risk. If you run IOS you are "pretty secure". If you run most versions of Linux and don't do really stupid things you are "prettier securer". If you run any of these -- even Windows -- and know what you are doing, you can boost "prettier securer" to as close as you like to "prettiest securest", completely independent of the networ
Um, I actually said it had an LD50 dose. It's just so incredibly absurdly high that you can't possibly reach it unless you ingest chemically purified THC in massive quantities -- hundreds of grams. Pot is not pure THC, and you'd have to smoke or eat pounds of it to reach it. I won't say it can't be done -- one of my favorite Darwin awards is an idiot who killed himself with a 9 volt transistor radio battery doing exactly what his instructor told him not to do -- but I think you'd have to set out to deliberately try.
People DO die, OTOH, of caffeine poisoning because one CAN buy pure/concentrated caffeine over the counter and swallow a bottle of it. And eating a single cigarette is potentially lethal to a small child and will make a full grown adult cry like a baby as they projectile vomit and go into convulsions -- but hey, even thought nicotine is an insecticide convulsant poison, cigarettes and tobacco products are legal.
I do agree that pot is not a good idea for schizophrenics and bipolars as I have anecdotal experiences of my own where it has triggered psychotic breaks in acquaintances and relatives. I'm not sure they wouldn't have had their breaks eventually anyway, but some people should indeed go through life stone-cold sober as doing ANY mind-altering substance is likely to be bad and/or addictive to them. With that said, a lot of people use it to self-medicate for depression and anxiety, and in that context it probably works as well as a lot of much more expensive antidepressants (and with lower risks).
It's not a vitamin. Judging what is "good for you" is an individual choice, not a global moral statement -- salt isn't "good for me", but on the other hand, it is. Sugar ditto. It's all about balance. But it is, as you say, wrong to pretend that there are no downsides to pot or assert that we should all start our day with a nice fat brownie...:-)
Seriously, anybody who has never used pot and eats loaded brownies is going to feel highly "disoriented" and scared. One of many reasons it is highly unethical to put LSD into the punch at the school prom or set out a tray of pot brownies at a party without clearly warning people. Heck, it isn't terribly ethical to serve a vodka laced punch as "orange juice" to teetotalers, either.
But ASIDE FROM DRIVING or operating heavy machinery etc, individuals who eat a brownie by accident are not at any particular health risk -- from the brownie. If they just go have a good lie down and enjoy the spinning mandalas they'll wake up right as rain.
Plants, like everything else, evolve for the environment they exist in. Increased CO2 only increases plant yields within a fairly narrow band - the same band that's existed for the past twenty million years or so. Outside that band it harms plants, too little harms them obviously but so does too much - just as living in an excessively high oxygen environment is harmful to animals.
Seriously? And you have evidence for this? I thought not, since there isn't any. Greenhouse owners routinely crank greenhouse CO2 levels up to 1000 ppm or more. Why? Because there is an increase in yield that is worth the investment in apparatus and CO2 tanks. And, since I don't want to argue, I'll just post a public document that indicates best practices:
Oh, yes, they DO warn not to crank CO2 above 5000 ppm (0.5% CO2). So you are "right" in a way that is completely, utterly, irrelevant to the conversation, since it has been over a billion years since CO2 levels were up in that ballpark and since CO2 levels are unlikely to ever exceed 600 ppm even if we do "nothing" but utilize the most cost-effective energy technology for the rest of the century as it develops.
There is a lot of actual data on this. Trees are growing faster than they have ever grown. Grass is growing faster than it has ever grown. C3 respiring plants have become more drought tolerant as their stoma (for respiration) are smaller in the 30% increase in CO2 concentration observed over roughly the last century and the world's deserts are greening as a directly observable consequence. On average, plant life on the Earth is growing about 15% faster than it did a century ago, and that makes CO2 directly responsible for feeding roughly 1 billion people every day -- more if you think about the fact that the poorest billion eat a lot less than the wealthiest two billion.
Ice core data indicates that during the minimum associated with the Wisconsin glaciation, CO2 ppm fell to around 180 ppm (as it has in most of the last four or five glacial maxima). With some variation for photosynthesis type (C3, C4, CAM) plants become stunted and die at CO2 concentrations just under this, with 50 ppm being an absolute lower bound where the chemistry can proceed at all. Note well that plants mostly "evolved" to live in CO2 concentrations around 1000 ppm, but they also have evolved to tolerate concentration swings of close to 100% on the SHORT time scales of the glacial cycles of the current ice age. We have no reasonable chance of reaching a CO2 concentration in the atmosphere that would be bad for plants -- it is a simple matter of empirical fact that the increase in CO2 is one of the best things to ever happen to the PLANT part of the ecosystem. Quite frankly, from a plant's point of view the atmosphere has been CO2 starved for several million years if not longer, so starved that CO2 levels periodically drop to the edge of mass extinction for some plant species every glacial cycle.
Sadly, nobody actually uses the billion people kept from starvation and the billions of people whose civilization and livelihood depend on the release of energy derived from burning carbon as compensatory factors when they argue about the "damage" caused by increased CO2 so far -- which is, quite frankly, mostly illusory. In a sane Universe, if we looked at the science and AGREED that increasing CO2 to 400+ ppm would raise sea levels a couple of feet -- eventually, maybe -- we would have STILL deliberately chosen to increase it to 400 ppm at least just to help green the planet and break the cycle of periodic CO2 starvation and make the winters milder and feed a few billion more people on the same land.
At this point it doesn't matter. Solar is already cheaper than coal and is going to get cheaper still with perovskite cells and improved storage. Fusion may at last actually be "just around the corner". In twenty or thirty years, we won't be bu
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I certainly hope you enlightened him with a surprised look and an answer like "Where Malta'd Milk comes from, of course..."
I'd correct you, but I'd have to get into all sorts of subtle stuff like the difference between internal energy/enthalpy and heat in the first and second laws. I liked the answer up above -- heat is disorganized energy -- better.
The question is, can it use its laser to smelt metals and create spare parts, additions, and (one day) rockets? Will it join up with other Mars rovers we might send and recombine their onboard plans and manuals to build new little roverlets equally well equipped?
If so, one day I hope to greet our new Mars Rover overlords!
Jupiter. It simply lost mass as the coalesced to the larger of the pair, with some of it becoming the other planets and most falling into what became the sun. It left Jupiter itself too small to ignite.
Or, of course, their mathematical model could be completely wrong, because the statement that the "only" mathematical model that could explain the data is one where all stars have partners sounds like science-bullshit-fu of the first order. At least they could have the decency to add "of the ones we thought of" or "of the ones we tried". As it is, we're left with proving that the Sun's supposed partner DOESN'T exist, and since it is very difficult to prove that something doesn't exist when it could be "invisible" in any of the countless ways someting can be invisible in space -- too far away, too small, too dark, too much of it made of of dark matter, concealed by invisible fairies, fallen through to the evil companion Universe where everybody is left handed and drinks absinthe and cherry soda cocktails.
If it is Jupiter, of course, that makes it easy. It isn't lit, so we know its mass is less than 1/10 (less than 0.075 if you want to be picky) the mass of the sun (no overt fusion, the companion isn't a red dwarf or we couldn't possibly miss it). It has cooled enough to be invisible, which probably adds close to another zero -- if it had a mass 1/80th of the Sun or larger , it would probably have a surface temperature still hot enough to see as it would be a brown dwarf and might sustain some nuclear reactions capable of generating heat in addition to still giving off heat as it slowly collapses. So it pretty much has to be smaller than roughly 13 Jupiter masses, making it technically not a star no matter what. Well, what do we find when we look for very large non-brown-dwarf objects nearby? Jupiter! And heck, through Saturn in for good measure! Jupiter has 1/1000 the mass of the sun, large enough that it is probably still losing heat via its own gravitational collapse but not enough to ignite any serious sustained fusion process. If the proto-star split early enough into Jupiter and Saturn (and the rest of the planets) then the Sun simply won the war for material by having a lot more gravity and hence sweeping up most of the dust before it lit and fusion drove the rest of the material away.
Which leads us to the remaining problem with their model. They're basing their claim on stellar formation in a dense cloud that created an extended star cluster. Perhaps that isn't a completely general starforming environment, and stars that form from smaller clouds tend to win the race for material and blow the starforming dust away on their newborne light before their smaller companions reach "star" size, even brown dwarf size.
That would explain why a LOT of stars seem to have Jupiter-scale planets (not that our exoplanet search isn't naturally biased towards finding these planets BECAUSE of their size). I'll bet there is an "alternative" model for star formation that would embrace this possibility and still explain the data from their star cluster but no, I'm sure that they have considered EVERY possibility in order to conclude that it is impossible for the sun not to have a star-sized companion, when it simply doesn't, at least not anywhere anyone can see when looking pretty carefully and with good instruments that would be very, very likely to show it up if it was there.
Climate Change, as everybody knows perfectly well, causes EVERYTHING. So yes, it must have caused it. The extra hot day made the shooter hot under the collar. The warmer air generated updrafts that affected how the bullets travelled to their targets. The Republican rejection of the reality of climate change and our collective guilt as being the cause was the source of the outrage expressed in the shooting. The lengthening of the growing season and the "fact" that climate change is affecting the coffee supply, somehow, caused a Serotonin imbalance in the shooter ditto.
In fact, I'm not typing this reply, Climate Change is. Because it is behind all of the evil in the world.
... tubes. TUBES. No, we did not have the technology in the forties. And the US military had hand-set radios in WWII that they tried very hard to use in combat, and they sucked. We didn't have the technology to do them even in principle until the transistor radio came along in 1954, and it took decades to advance transistors into ICs into things that actually have the power requirements and ability to chop up signals and share bandwidth in a way that anybody could afford or that could be broadly deployed.
Portable phones happened when they happened because that is when the technology advanced to the point where they were BARELY feasible -- as devices almost as large as those 40's miltary walkie-talkies, that had to be run on your car battery most of the time.
Next we will hear that personal computers were possible using technology from the 40's. Right. Sure. All they had to do was invent VLSICs and a dozen other things, and we could have had computers in the 40s! Doh!
OK, so there was a shooting. Bad bad. One person was killed (the shooter) and several more injured (two of them pretty seriously. All bad. This has created the usual firestorm of people asserting that gun control would have prevented this and others asserting that if all of the victims were armed it would have prevented this.
Either way it is useful to remember that -- if nobody else dies -- this constitutes 1.2% of the deaths from shootings that will happen (on average) today. If you've actually read any substantial fraction of this (mostly silly) thread, more people died from being shot while you were reading than were killed in this incident (so far). It's also worth remembering that it is better than even odds that one of those two to three deaths wasn't murder, it wasn't self defense, it wasn't even accident, it was somebody using a gun to kill themselves (almost 2/3 of all gun deaths are suicide).
If you've wasted an hour on the article and thread, 1 person and a fraction on average was shot and killed by others as homicide, two killed themselves, and a tiny fraction accidentally shot a friend or their kid or something (or were shot by their child under age six, in one out of 12 cases). A similarly tiny fraction of ordinary citizens actually used a gun to kill somebody "legitimately", that is in self defense.
Don't get me wrong -- I love guns, shot myself accidentally at age 10, defend the right to own guns etc. But the numbers are the numbers. This case is utterly ignorable, except for the small possibility that it was politically motivated instead of motivated by any of the OTHER reasons people use guns to murder people. Politically motivated shootings are, paradoxically enough, more what our founding fathers had in mind when they wrote in our right to bear arms (in a well-regulated militia, which I suppose MIGHT describe a typical drug gang or the Mafia or your local skinhead group). But probably not like this.
You, sir, actually made my lips twitch, briefly, while wading through the morass of shit from the extreme sides of the aisle above (both of them). I momentarily regretted not having mod points. Then my customary level of doom, despair, and depression reasserted itself leaving me ready to close the browser window and return to normal life outside of the /. polirantfest, one where indeed it would be simply lovely to declare murder illegal and decriminalize suicide.
Seems about on the level of, "Doctors claim vaccines don't cause autism, but Jenny McCarthy doesn't agree," which started from and is largely maintained by the left.
Started by "the left"? Say what? "Left" and "Right" have nothing to do with this. "Doctors" are at least as likely to be members of "the left" if by that you mean social liberals as opposed to conservatives. Oh, wait, they are more likely:
https://www.psychologytoday.co...
http://www.reuters.com/article...
http://jamanetwork.com/journal...
The last article is very thoughtful and analyzes trends in political contributions specifically, fractionated by gender, race, and subspeciality. It indicates that left/right even for physicians is more likely to be a question of income, gender, race, speciality, and age than it is of "intelligence" per se, but it is a simple matter of fact that on average liberals are smarter than conservatives.
Now, if you want to get into pseudoscience, we can talk about the "conservatives" in Texas and Kansas and Missouri who are passing legislation to make masturbation a misdemeanor crime (Texas), teach intelligent design on a par with evolution in the schools, rewrite history so that the founding fathers are Good Christians as opposed to deists or atheists and suppress evidence to the contrary to prevent it from being mentioned in school, let alone taught.
Personally, I tend to think of science as mostly being social value neutral, but the glaring exception to this is when science collides (as it so often does!) with religion. This is beautifully reflected in surveys like this:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
although it is perhaps better summarized by this piece:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
To quote:
The more religious a person is, the more conservative he is, and this relationship is strongly mediated by the value placed on tradition — respect for customs and institutions. But even though religiousness and spirituality are highly correlated, the more spiritual a person is, the more liberal he is. This relationship is mediated by the value placed on universalism — social tolerance and concern for everyone’s welfare.
As with previous studies, conservatives were more conscientious (organized and self-disciplined), while liberals were more agreeable and more open to new ideas and experiences. The trend of conservatives being more religious and liberals being more spiritual held even when controlling for these personality factors, and when controlling for age, gender and socioeconomic status.
As a scientist, I interpret this as the more orthodox religious a person is, the more likely they are to accept absolute nonsense as truth just because it is written down in a scriptural text somewhere and hence exempted somehow from the ordinary rules and methods of reason. The more spiritually religious they are, the more likely they are to accept absolute nonsense as truth just because they "feel" like it must be true and their feelings are again exempt from the ordinary rules and methods of reason. You can see the problem -- liberals and conservatives are almost equally likely to accept at least some nonsense as truth if they are religious, and liberals and conservatives who are intelligent enough not to do this are, almost by definition, less likely to accept nonsense as truth whether or not it is religious simply because they apply the rules
want to lie, shipwrecked and comatose, drinking fresh mango juice. Goldfish shoals nibbling at my toes. Fun, fun, fun.
Add a bit of pineapple and coconut and throw in a dash of rum and I'm there. I can take or leave the straw and little umbrella, although playing with the umbrella is fun when the goldfish get boring...
Which opens the door to infinite evil. Do we have evidence that behaving sinfully won't end up with us cast posthumously into a pit of eternal fire? Well, no, partly because we have no evidence of life after death, pits of eternal fire, and no objective definition of sin. So this means that ANY presentation can be interrupted simply by asserting that thus and such are sinful, etc. Can you prove that it is NOT? Of course not. There simply in no evidence that it is.
Your example of a zombie apocalypse is well taken. Do we have the slightest shred of evidence that zombies or anything zombie-like is really possible? Not just heavily drugged or brain-damaged individuals deliberately harmed by slavers or practicers of voudoin, but actual living dead brain-eating zombies? Well, no, although rabies as a disease does have related effects and might have been part of the origin of zombie legend. So what the heck! Sure, the zombie apocalypse could be unleashed by mutant rabies, GMO foods, stem cells, a disease transported to Earth by meteors or space aliens, biowarfare gone awry, the deliberate act of a vengeful deity, the deliberate act of an evil supernatural demon, prions (a mutant mad cow disease), a new "safe" designer recreational drug anybody can make at home out of clorox and pepto-bismol that has a zombie side effect one year after it is ingested, pods from outer space, slugs that attach to your spinal column from outer space, nanites intended to cure brain cancer, or a mutation of the common cold. Maybe half of these possibilities have formed the basis in whole or in part of science fiction novels over the decades (mutant rabies, alien diseases, pods, and slugs, biowarfare gone awry...)
So, should we allow scientific talks on how stem cells are being used to cure nerve deafness in humans and parkinson's disease to be interrupted at will by whack jobs that want to claim, without evidence, that the individuals cured MIGHT turn into zombies, so all research into stem cells must instantly cease? Seriously? Or, because stem cells are making an end run around the "intelligent design" of the human body by a supernatural deity they are therefore sinful (no need for evidence or a firm definition of sin, remember, it is whatever you want it to be or allege that it is and nobody can prove you wrong) and will cause not the zombie apocalypse but the biblical apocalypse unless we gather up all of the researchers and burn them alive at the stake as a manner of atonement and banish all of their works and threaten all human with torture and death if they ever use the words "stem cells" again? Can you prove that this won't happen (well, except by ignoring the idiots and curing nerve deafness and Parkinson's anyway with no breaking of the seals or unleashing of the four horsemen etc)?
Lack of evidence is not positive evidence of lack. It is, however, something that can legitimately be used to state that lack is more likely the longer evidence is looked for and not found. We cannot positively assert that there are no pink unicorns living somewhere on Earth simply because one has never been seen, captured, found (with or without color) in the fossil record), but we can say that -- given the existing observational evidence -- it is pretty unlikely that any exist and are just lurking somewhere in deepest darkest Africa or Tibet or in a special volcanic cave in the middle of Antarctica. If you assert invisible pink unicorns (whatever color "invisible pink" ends up being) you make it even harder to disprove, as now you can literally look everywhere on Earth and just because you can't see them doesn't mean that they aren't there, because they are invisible! Does this mean that we have to now allow La La Loopsie/My Little Pony followers to disrupt scientific presentations of evolutionary biology?
Note well that I'm not certain legislation is the answer to stuff like this, but providing the idiots with an escort off campus and leaving them there with instructions not to come back (students or not) seems pretty reasonable.
I mostly agree with your remarks, but I think there is a question of scale. I've done several startups, and in a startup, one person is often the CTO (that would have been me, twice), the primary developer of the core software (ditto), and the system manager for the entire network of computers owned by the company, which on occasion have been pretty much my cluster of computers plus eventually a "company owned" server or two when we had enough capital or cash flow to afford them.
From this level of "my basement plus your basement" startup, there are a set of scaling steps that lead through VC incubators to getting actual VC to hiring a skeleton staff (cheap, quite possibly fresh out of school and paid in part with options or the prospect of options) to making money but not as fast as you burn it to making money (one hopes) faster than one burns it and moving on to fame and fortune and early retirement.
At intermediate steps in this process, IT is not the polished gem that it might be for a fully developed and capitalized and profitable company. Backups might have been set up by the original founders (and done correctly) but all it takes is one hire that necessarily is given serious responsibility with little oversight in a tiny startup who doesn't completely understand backup to make a small change that fucks it up without even realizing it. I've been around a long time, and trust me, it happens, and if you are LUCKY you discover it when some tiny unimportant file is overwritten and you try to restore it and can't.
If this was a startup in the stage just past profitability -- small but important database of actual customers and/or their data, team of maybe three or four IT people still wearing many hats, so the database person was also the systems manager and the primary software developer was also the web manager and the original CTO/developer/general factotum was distracted by the demands of sales and corporate politics with a board made up partly of the VC people who want rapid growth to a liquidity event and so on, this scenario isn't that unlikely. DB person says I'm going nuts adding all these new workstations to sales desks, CTO says let's hire a DB person, CEO/COO says we can't afford a $150-200K position right now (duh!) so CTO says we'lll hire some kid straight from college with DB chops, kid comes in, they show kid the DB and sit him or her down, he/she tries a few tentative SQL commands but has no experience with whatever actual DB they are using and has credentials that are more talk than substance, tries to make a copy of DB to play with without breaking original and fucks it up. In the meantime, they have been backing up to a RAID, and the RAID started throwing errors but the same DB person who left the kid to play and orient themselves had JUST STARTED the rebuild or was trying to fix the problem and rerun the failed backup when...
Life is a comedy of errors like that more often than one might think. Most times they are non-fatal, but every now and then the ENT surgeon slashes the carotid the first day of his/hir first surgery and the patient dies on the table, or the kid working on steel 200 feet above the ground loses their balance on their fist day trying to emulate people who have been doing it for years and walk a narrow beam over nothingness. Sometimes people can get back up on the horse that threw them and sometimes they end up living under an overpass or dead at their own hand.
Humans are highly error prone information processing systems. We deliberately design systems that are critical -- as much as we can -- to have multiple levels of mutual auditing to catch and prevent errors before they occur, but it simply isn't possible to idiot-proof every process, and accidents can happen even to those who are not idiots. Few are the people who have root privileges who have NEVER EVER entered rm *.junk in some directory, but accidentally entered an extra space before the ".junk" (blush, been there, done that, done WORSE than that). If you are the only systems man
Yeast extracts and hydrolyzed proteins are considered excitotoxins, and are added to create that feel-good effect, and also make you crave it again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Hmmm, not mentioned in this article. Reference? Monosodium Glutamate, OTOH, is an almost pure excitotoxin -- Glutamate in the brain being the number one excitotoxin that causes cell death by overstimulation -- and yes, Mickey-D's food is often loaded with MSG (especially their "chicken nuggets"). Nothing in the article suggests that excitotoxins make you feel good, by the way, so this is a bit of a non-sequitor. Are you asserting that they add them to make you feel good and crave it again, and that incidentally they are excitotoxic? How toxic are they on a scale of water to MSG (which is close to ubiquitous and which directly triggers a reaction in a substantial fraction of the non-East Asian population).
Ahhh, but this whole topic reminds me of The Space Merchants, by Pohl and Kornbluth, where they added a harmless alkaloid to all of the foods in a three way loop so that smoking would make you crave something to krunch, which would make you crave something to drink, which would make you crave something to smoke. Or maybe it was a not-so-harmless alkaloid...
Still, sir, I must thank you for the excitotoxin reference. I'd never heard of this, but it explains chinese restaurant syndrome quite nicely, as well as why overstimulation in many contexts can lead to damage. A good motivation for a placid, contemplative life...
...But, did he use a bonferroni correction to compute his p-values, since this is a classic data dredge? Sure, his method will turn up true positives (and did, for at least one known offender) but what remains to be seen is the false positive rate and the lawsuit rate, since skewed distributions could have many causes some of which are benign and this is pretty serious defamation of character if one casts aspersions without secondary supporting evidence of malpractice.
In other words, are his "positives" really malefactors or is he picking out acne-causing green jellybeans: https://xkcd.com/882/
Worse, the study appeals to my own confirmation bias on the matter, as I'm sure that the rate of wrongdoing in the research is if anything higher than he finds it (he "detects" just under 2% possible/probable bad articles -- I would have guessed more like 5% to 10% just from sheer incompetence and inadequate power, but perhaps he corrected somehow for inadequate power although TFA doesn't really say). So I WANT to believe him, but sans bonferroni, I don't know what to to make of his p-threshold of 1/10000 applied to 5000 samples and testing multiple statistics per sample. He really needs bonferroni twice, as he dredges for out-of-bounds statistics PER article as well, for thousands of articles.
Well, yes, but for most coders older than the dawn the "custom code" starts with a template C application in a build-ready template directory with a pre-built makefile and perhaps a bit of structured shell, so that they are basically cloning fragments to parse this or that kind of data. At one point I had templates for using getopt but, as you say, you end up cloning lines either way and adding one level of indirection doesn't really save you much, even if you don't really have to remember all of the getopt stuff because IT is templated instead of simple CL parsing. Ditto parsing in bash -- I don't even try to remember it, I just copy my superlong bash script template (which also has useful fragments that illustrate loops, conditionals, sed-isms, awkeries, some regex stuff), delete what I don't need, and modify what I do.
This is the way "reusable code" really works a lot of the time. Once you've solved a particular problem, especially the second or third time, the trick goes into your code "library" and from then on you just copy them and hack them to fit, you don't rewrite them from scratch. And thus we spare reliance on memory at the level of detail and instead use our brains efficiently, as lookup engines and problem solving engines.
rgb
Is that you, AC? Always good to know what "you" have said.
Atheism isn't a religion, and saying it infinity times won't make it be one. It is the absence of belief in a religion. A (without) -- theism (religion). It's what the word means.
It's also what atheists are. Most atheists require a mix of evidence and consistency with evidence supported belief in order to raise any old notion that somebody throws out there -- such as some incredibly detailed description of how the Universe was created by a mysterious infinite superbeing that is in almost complete contradiction with evidence-supported belief -- to the point where it can be taken seriously as a component of their worldview.
I can assert that on the dark side of the moon there is a rock that is a perfect replica of the head of Abraham Lincoln. I can probably even offer some sort of argument for why this should be so -- estimates of so and so many rocks, probabilities for any given rock to look like Abraham Lincoln -- and there is little doubt that the assertion could be true (and will continue to be at least possible until somebody examines each and every rock on the moon to falsify it) as it contradicts nothing in the Bayesian network of evidence-supported belief that we call "observational knowledge about the real world" -- stuff like the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, cosmology. But there simply isn't any good reason to think that it is true.
To believe that this assertion is true anyway, without consistent evidence to support it, to have faith that it is true in spite of substantial arguments against it, is the hallmark, the defining characteristic of religious belief. To hear the assertion, acknowledge that it is possibly true, and conclude that it is probably not true and that there is plenty of time to believe it -- if true -- once we have direct evidence, is the hallmark of the atheist.
As for "devout atheist" -- this is what we in the business of communicating call an "ironic self-description", not intended to suggest that he is religious, only that you won't convince him to become religious with any of the tired old arguments that carefully avoid confronting the simple fact that there is no even vaguely trustworthy evidence that any of the near-infinity of asserted religions are actually true.
rgb
Non-mainstream or deeply religious people that don't simply follow doctrine are excellent fantasy writers, not just Tolkien but for example look at Lewis Carroll and the Chronicles of Narnia,...
Read about The Inklings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Tolkein and C. S. Lewis where both members. G. K. Chesterton was an occasional guest. Charles Williams is probably less well-known at this point (possibly because his prose was more unabashedly Christian -- e.g. "War in Heaven": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R... etc).
I've always found it interesting that both Lewis -- arguably one of the most famous of the Christian Apologists of his time, although Chesterton was no slouch -- and Williams wrote books that were either thinly disguised Christian fantasy or openly fantasies about biblical/apocryphal fantasy, while in the Hobbit and LOTR, the characters (with the exception of the Elves, maybe) HAVE no overt religion. Yes, there is a fantasy connection with the supernatural and magic, but there are no descriptions of worship or prayer -- it is more a matter of "invoking" the protection (or sometime receiving it gratis) of e.g. Elbereth. Elves are immortal (but not unkillable), they don't die they "return" to "the west" (a.k.a. "heaven") through some sort of dimensional barrier. And although there is magic in LOTR, for the most part in the BOOKS (as opposed to the overheated movie) it isn't "telekinetic" magic like battling with wand-based thunderbolts or using a ring to stop the heart of an enemy, it is more "perceptual" magic -- making somebody invisible, generating light, extending life, healing, harming. The closest you come to religion is probably the "resurrection" of Gandalf, "sent back" from death because his work "isn't finished".
This has the effect of making it remarkably uncomplicated and ecumenical. We don't really understand why Sauron is so horribly evil, or how he manages to get killed but come back from the dead to try to take over the world -- again -- or just what he wants to do with the world when he wins that he can't do already. We don't really understand why or how "rings" can be given power (or what power they actually grant, since nobody actually USES a ring to do ANYTHING overt anywhere in the story). We don't understand where Ents come from, we don't understand Bombadil, we don't see why or how barrow-wights could come to be. We don't even understand Saruman -- supposedly good guy turned bad.
We don't need to. It's just a damn good story about a war between cartoon good (so very very good, so very very uncomplicated) and cartoon evil (so horribly unredeemably bad, so very very uncomplicated). Not at all like real life, where evil doesn't come with such a clear label -- and neither does good.
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Thus the three short films establishing the character Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2024, after the end of the 95th Gregorian calendar year after the films' first publication. They will enter the public domain in the European Union on January 1, 2037, after the end of the 70th Gregorian calendar year after the death of Walter Elias Disney.
So it isn't until the actual grandchildren are all dead, it is until some imaginary, super-healthy grandchild sired minutes before the author him or herself expires is dead?
This isn't about IP -- patents expire infinitely sooner and nobody worries about the grandchildren of the original patent holder. Nor is the DMCA about protecting the income stream of the author (or the descendants of the author) and never has been. It is about protecting the income stream of the blood-sucking ticks who attach themselves to any author's -- or artist's -- work and razor out a chunk of flesh so that they can feast on 95% of all money every actually generated by it, leaving barely enough for the author to feel like they are being compensated and to provide the illusion that one can write books and get rich from them (which happens, sure, for one book in a thousand or less).
Who does it protect? We can start with 40% markup by the retailer. On top of 25% markup for the "distributor", a middleman with no actual useful purpose in the universe except to take a cut of unearned income. Then the publisher takes their cut, which is at least 25% (depending on what kind of book is being sold -- it can be up to 34% if it is a textbook). The publisher, at least, provides some actual services in the publication of the book and takes some risks, although in recent years they've managed to farm out several of the most useful services back to the authors by generally not considering raw manuscripts but instead requiring books submitted to be represented by an "agent" who is then paid BY THE (actual or would-be author) to pre-screen books for the publisher, effectively cutting a point off of the author's small share.
The author makes the least money of anybody involved in the publication and distribution of a book. Ebook releases of paper-published books have made this disparity even worse, as they are often sold at very near paper prices in spite of having effectively zero-marginal cost distribution.
It's very interesting that this discussion has arisen regarding Tolkein in particular, as his works were thought to have fallen out of copyright in the US in 1965 and an "unauthorized" edition was actually produced and sold before things finally settled down:
https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2014...
My original paperback copies of The Hobbit (obtained in the early 70's) had his appeal to readers not to purchase the unauthorized version whether or not it was "legal" out of respect for him if nothing else.
In summary, if the government actually gave a damn about authors, artists, or musicians instead maintaining the publishing industry, they could always write a law mandating (say) that author royalties be at least 25% of the retail price of the work, and then cut the copyright lifetime in half if not more. Most books -- nearly all of them -- sell for a short while and then vanish without a trace, and extending copyright to a century is a waste of time. Then the authors of those books can leave a much more substantial inheritance to those imaginary "grandchildren" in the form of a lot more money made while the works actually sell (just like everybody else makes money while they are actually alive and working) instead of protecting everybody else's right to make almost all of the money produced by their work almost indefinitely, with protection in law.
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Direct dial? What is this direct dial of which you speak? Next think you know, you'll be talking about cradles for old-timey phones in black bakelite and 300 baud, and I'll have to run screaming from the room before the word "teletype" is uttered...
Pardon me, my goose-quill pen is almost dry and my inkwell was emptied by a passing goat. I'll be right back.
I was talking about spiritual karma from putting negative energy into the Universe. Not that I believe in spirituality in any non-metaphorical sense or that ethical action has any energy at all in any non-metaphorical sense, but metaphorically all of that stuff. Not so much /. karma, which AFAICT just adds up to "is not generally a total butt in online discourse".
Of course, being a language nazi could have the positive effect of embarrassing the writer into not writing nonsense, at least as often. It could create an actual behavioral gradient towards self-improvement. It could make the world a better place, and help widows, orphans, and kittens.
Naaaaaa.... probably not.
I was going to point this out, but you saved me the trouble and the negative karma of being a language nazi. One wonders what exactly they meant. Withstanding blows 70-85% harder without cracking? Offering 70-85% more resistance to certain kinds of stress (and yes, there are multiple kinds of stress -- compressive, extensive, shear)? Or, as you say, too many ohms...?
Hey, somebody could break into my den and use my typewriter to write ransom notes. Or they could steal my pen and use it to send out advertisements to oh, a dozen other people. Since my front door lock is a zwave device, they could even do this as part of a cyberattack.
This is only half kidding. From times ancient, computer security has been a tradeoff between the risks associated with any given level of security and the benefits obtained by operating at that level. You can run your computer wearing no clothes and having just passed through an x-ray machine and a 2 Tesla magnet, with dual isolation power inside a faraday cage itself inside a locked down secure facility that requires retinal scans and a realtime DNA match to allow you into the room followed by the correct entry of a 240 character random password to login, but you aren't going to get a lot of productive work done with no internet and an icy cold ass. Or you can run an ordinary laptop (like my Lenovo) with a reasonably secure OS (Fedora 25 on a fully encrypted SSD) with moderately aggressive network blocks on all ports but 22 for ssh, use only bidirectionally encrypted channels for all secure traffic, and avoid doing really stupid things (like downloading and running darkweb apps and content) and be pretty reasonably safe AND still be able to get a fair amount of work done when you aren't screwing around replying to things on /. :-) Is my system secure, truly secure? Hell no. But it is, as you say, "pretty secure" and it is STILL USEFUL.
Saving "copper" doesn't even make sense from a security point of view. There is nothing special about copper vs fiber or radio. And what do they mean? Twisted pair? Cat 5 ethernet? Time-Warner (sorry, "Spectrum") coax cable? Uh huh. They mean cable, not twisted pair, not phone lines.
This sounds like legislative rescue for TWCpectum, probably in response to whining about the demise of their near-monopoly on "copper" as fiber ripples through the world replacing the copper with something faster and much, much cheaper.
I don't even understand what they could be asserting regarding the security of "copper" vs alternatives. Copper, fiber, radio all carry encoded signals. Radio is by far the least secure as a transmission medium, with the signal openly available to everybody in range. Copper is easy to tap, and can often be tapped without even breaking the physical medium with an actual insertion via short range near field transducers. Fiber is actually the most difficult to tap, and is the most likely medium to have detectable artifacts from tapping. Intermediate hardware ALL is pretty much equally hackable, although again fiber probably wins the signal reamplification game as one doesn't have to read, then rewrite, every packet to boost fiber signals, where most wire repeaters do, and hence are hackable. And when we get to the network itself, the routers and major switching stations, the core stuff is usually professionally managed and "probably" pretty secure, the end stage stuff (cable modems, WAPs, etc) is probably vulnerable as hell but irrelevantly so as long as you use only secure point to point channels for work, and the BIGGEST vulnerability, proven over and over, is the operating system and applications on your actual computer or personal digital device.
I'm sure that there are official lists somewhere, but my impression after doing this stuff for many decades is that if you run Windows (almost any version, although by the end XP wasn't horribly insecure if you avoided e.g. explorer and outlook) then whether your network is "copper" or "fiber" or "radio" is almost completely irrelevant to your total risk. If you run IOS you are "pretty secure". If you run most versions of Linux and don't do really stupid things you are "prettier securer". If you run any of these -- even Windows -- and know what you are doing, you can boost "prettier securer" to as close as you like to "prettiest securest", completely independent of the networ
Um, I actually said it had an LD50 dose. It's just so incredibly absurdly high that you can't possibly reach it unless you ingest chemically purified THC in massive quantities -- hundreds of grams. Pot is not pure THC, and you'd have to smoke or eat pounds of it to reach it. I won't say it can't be done -- one of my favorite Darwin awards is an idiot who killed himself with a 9 volt transistor radio battery doing exactly what his instructor told him not to do -- but I think you'd have to set out to deliberately try.
People DO die, OTOH, of caffeine poisoning because one CAN buy pure/concentrated caffeine over the counter and swallow a bottle of it. And eating a single cigarette is potentially lethal to a small child and will make a full grown adult cry like a baby as they projectile vomit and go into convulsions -- but hey, even thought nicotine is an insecticide convulsant poison, cigarettes and tobacco products are legal.
I do agree that pot is not a good idea for schizophrenics and bipolars as I have anecdotal experiences of my own where it has triggered psychotic breaks in acquaintances and relatives. I'm not sure they wouldn't have had their breaks eventually anyway, but some people should indeed go through life stone-cold sober as doing ANY mind-altering substance is likely to be bad and/or addictive to them. With that said, a lot of people use it to self-medicate for depression and anxiety, and in that context it probably works as well as a lot of much more expensive antidepressants (and with lower risks).
It's not a vitamin. Judging what is "good for you" is an individual choice, not a global moral statement -- salt isn't "good for me", but on the other hand, it is. Sugar ditto. It's all about balance. But it is, as you say, wrong to pretend that there are no downsides to pot or assert that we should all start our day with a nice fat brownie...:-)
ROTFL. Yeah, like that.
Seriously, anybody who has never used pot and eats loaded brownies is going to feel highly "disoriented" and scared. One of many reasons it is highly unethical to put LSD into the punch at the school prom or set out a tray of pot brownies at a party without clearly warning people. Heck, it isn't terribly ethical to serve a vodka laced punch as "orange juice" to teetotalers, either.
But ASIDE FROM DRIVING or operating heavy machinery etc, individuals who eat a brownie by accident are not at any particular health risk -- from the brownie. If they just go have a good lie down and enjoy the spinning mandalas they'll wake up right as rain.
Plants, like everything else, evolve for the environment they exist in. Increased CO2 only increases plant yields within a fairly narrow band - the same band that's existed for the past twenty million years or so. Outside that band it harms plants, too little harms them obviously but so does too much - just as living in an excessively high oxygen environment is harmful to animals.
Seriously? And you have evidence for this? I thought not, since there isn't any. Greenhouse owners routinely crank greenhouse CO2 levels up to 1000 ppm or more. Why? Because there is an increase in yield that is worth the investment in apparatus and CO2 tanks. And, since I don't want to argue, I'll just post a public document that indicates best practices:
http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/en...
Oh, yes, they DO warn not to crank CO2 above 5000 ppm (0.5% CO2). So you are "right" in a way that is completely, utterly, irrelevant to the conversation, since it has been over a billion years since CO2 levels were up in that ballpark and since CO2 levels are unlikely to ever exceed 600 ppm even if we do "nothing" but utilize the most cost-effective energy technology for the rest of the century as it develops.
There is a lot of actual data on this. Trees are growing faster than they have ever grown. Grass is growing faster than it has ever grown. C3 respiring plants have become more drought tolerant as their stoma (for respiration) are smaller in the 30% increase in CO2 concentration observed over roughly the last century and the world's deserts are greening as a directly observable consequence. On average, plant life on the Earth is growing about 15% faster than it did a century ago, and that makes CO2 directly responsible for feeding roughly 1 billion people every day -- more if you think about the fact that the poorest billion eat a lot less than the wealthiest two billion.
Ice core data indicates that during the minimum associated with the Wisconsin glaciation, CO2 ppm fell to around 180 ppm (as it has in most of the last four or five glacial maxima). With some variation for photosynthesis type (C3, C4, CAM) plants become stunted and die at CO2 concentrations just under this, with 50 ppm being an absolute lower bound where the chemistry can proceed at all. Note well that plants mostly "evolved" to live in CO2 concentrations around 1000 ppm, but they also have evolved to tolerate concentration swings of close to 100% on the SHORT time scales of the glacial cycles of the current ice age. We have no reasonable chance of reaching a CO2 concentration in the atmosphere that would be bad for plants -- it is a simple matter of empirical fact that the increase in CO2 is one of the best things to ever happen to the PLANT part of the ecosystem. Quite frankly, from a plant's point of view the atmosphere has been CO2 starved for several million years if not longer, so starved that CO2 levels periodically drop to the edge of mass extinction for some plant species every glacial cycle.
Sadly, nobody actually uses the billion people kept from starvation and the billions of people whose civilization and livelihood depend on the release of energy derived from burning carbon as compensatory factors when they argue about the "damage" caused by increased CO2 so far -- which is, quite frankly, mostly illusory. In a sane Universe, if we looked at the science and AGREED that increasing CO2 to 400+ ppm would raise sea levels a couple of feet -- eventually, maybe -- we would have STILL deliberately chosen to increase it to 400 ppm at least just to help green the planet and break the cycle of periodic CO2 starvation and make the winters milder and feed a few billion more people on the same land.
At this point it doesn't matter. Solar is already cheaper than coal and is going to get cheaper still with perovskite cells and improved storage. Fusion may at last actually be "just around the corner". In twenty or thirty years, we won't be bu