Now that we finally are looking at the whole system (aquifers too) rather than just surface water, we will be seeing pending droughts in a lot more places than we might think. I am on two planning commissions in Minnesota and we are very aware of the water supplies under ground, the entire state is concerned, and we are the land of 10,000 lakes (or, during flood season, one really big lake"). A new emphasis on sustainability and the ability to estimate water supplies better, coupled with a full "total cost of ownership" for new developments, gives local planners an opportunity to say no to new developments in a way that we did not see during the big boom of the 70's and 80's. Of course, the unintended consequence of careful planning is that we start to see "economic refugees", by which I mean people who move in despite local attempts to remain sustainable.
I posted this on an MPR website discussing one Republican's response to this news. (Rep Bachman, one of my LEAST favorite Congresspeople)
Two comments. First, I expect better of the MPR audience than a bunch of personal attacks on the politicians involved ("crazy", "nut job", etc.). Where is the dialog in that? [They were discussing Rep Bachman]
Second, this Republican agrees that the [Cuban] embargo was a success, but not in the sense that it kept Cuba from profiting from its low wage workers (a form of serfdom?), but rather in the sense that Cuba was able to attempt to build a socialist paradise absent the machinations of the free world and its powerful interests. Did they succeed? If you think that universal health care at the 1950's level is success, with life expectancies comparable to US, and with a thriving black market in access to medical care for those with money (similar to ours, except that our high-payer patients subsidize the entire health industry rather than just the people they bribe), perhaps they did. If you think that a two-level economy is success (the have-nots and the tourists), perhaps they did. If you think a population with low expectations of their government and a high level of self sufficiency, perhaps they did succeed. Certainly their model of socialism is much more benign than, for example, North Korea's alleged communist system (I say alleged because NK is communist only in its choice of friends, not in its actual economic system, which is more a large slave plantation, as near as I can tell). So while I can understand a certain amount of hostility towards Cuba for their oppression of their people's freedoms, I must also acknowledge that, for a Luddite nation, they are doing much better than their Russian handlers did.
Prostitutes:coeds as taxis:uber
brbr
One tries to be sustainable, the other lives outside the economically sustainable boundary by not keeping itself fully accountable for the total cost of operations. The establishment lament is "how can we make a living when the tyros are giving it away below cost"? The tyros retort? Your place or mine?
This is an excellent start at a TCO (total cost of operating/ownership) and ought to be the standard in Slashdot conversations like this one. Thanks! This sort of reasoning ought to prevail over wishful dreamcast fluff every time.
We statisticians refer to anecdotes as non-random samples of size N=1.
Completely and totally worthless. Actually, not worthless (value 0), they are worth-negative, as they actually prevent good decision making.
And as Kahneman and Tversky discussed, the availability heuristic and the ease of remembering the outliers makes for very bad decision making. This is exacerbated by the modern un-filtered news system (aka, "the web" cross the "infotainment industry"). This warped noise delivery system, masquerading as "news you need to know" results in a really bad decision making process. Modern medicine (where I worked as a statistician) is unable to help with this extra-scientific process.
Because in the end, someone has to be as powerful as the most powerful state we might logically fear. Right now that is the Russians (simple tanks and bombs), the Chinese (economic warfare), and the Islamofascists (intent). Of these, we cannot afford to fight the Chinese, we are not the bleeding edge in defending against the Russians, and we might be able to defeat the Islamofascists here at home using ideas, not so sure about in other countries.
But the old days of raising armies only when needed has gone the way of the horse and buggy. Unless you are the Swiss, who count on others to provide defacto long-arm defense, you probably cannot count on an armed population either ("Red Dawn not withstanding)
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed
But in the end, whether it is a Catholic inquisition or a CIA operative is less material than why it is done. We should not simply scream
"do no torture on my behalf",
we should perhaps scream
I am willing to let X=8,143 people a year die from terrorist attacks rather than use torture
The number 8,143 is what we are arguing about.
The CIA thinks X is something small, like 1 child or 3 innocent adults.
The rest of us must think X is closer to 1M.
Interestingly, it is the scientific humanists among us who claim X=Inf, even though they do not have a moral compass like the church telling them that. More proof that it does not take a religion to make one moral.
A real analysis of correlations would have to include not only the party of the Executive branch, but also the parties in the House and Senate. At a minimum. But Attila Dimedici's points are still well noted. Another "Inconvenient Truth" kept out of the minds of the people. Not unlike people who would point to Washington DC's abysmal schools and note that it has been a Democratic city since way back. Forbes has an interesting article on this
The most fundamental difference between the data that conservatives prefer—that the 10 poorest cities are longtime Democratic strongholds—and the data that liberals will be more inclined to cite—that the 10 poorest states are predominantly Republican, is that conservatives can point to actual policies that Democrats implemented that contributed to the impoverishment of the cities, while the liberals cannot point to specific GOP policies that have caused the poorer states to lag behind.
The Democratic case is illusory and circumstantial; the Republican case is solid and substantial. However, in a country where so many people are economically and historically illiterate, combined with the human proclivity whereby “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” (Paul Simon, “The Boxer”), the Democrats may be able to score some points with a hollow argument. The Republicans, though, have the facts on their side.
Civilization and civilized behavior has always been more about the social contracts (as in implied) than the legal contracts (as in laws). What makes my small town more comfortable, than the big town I winter in, is the social contract we all share and impose primarily through shame and shun. The Internet and global culture have revealed the weakness in social normative pressures when anonymity meets cultural relativism. The copy-paste examples are more noteworthy for the fact that copy-paste mentality overridesany social normative pressures we might exert. Yes, copy-paste examples abound, but do I just copy them and claim immunity from social pressures? I could copy-paste one word and a time and stand "immune" because I did not pen them myself?
We are in a dark cave, the wumpus is loose, and the only people with lights are lying religious fanatics whose reason is their sacred writings and whose swords are, more rapidly than we might wish, the actual swords they raise against the unbelievers. Chop. Chop.
(Footnote: I believe in the 2nd amendment not because I can expect to win but rather because I can expect to make it a little more expensive for the eventual winners.)
On the other hand, who wants to live under ISIL or similar diversity busting regimes? But one of the first prerequisites for a peaceful society appears to be a shared culture first, at least with respect to how people treat each other. It would be nice if we could use clothing to mark culture, so that when I see someone wearing a hoodie I could KNOW that indicated a peace-monger, but it just is not so, any more than someone wearing a sash with a swastika is identifying themselves as a keeper of the word of gawd.
The question has to be, how to get social capital higher and the science appears to suggest homogeneity. I don't like that answer, any more than I liked it when simulations showed "tit-for-tat" was the preferred strategy in cooperative games. I don't like that I cannot just flap my arms and fly either, but at some level all of these findings are our realities.
It does to people who view the world through a specific jargon. I would prefer to read good cosmology with math to help my understanding, but that market is pretty small compared to simplistic "analogies" that feed and nurture the the public discourse. For an example, run down the virtual particle discussions until you finally get to the one (and it was deep when I found it) that explains that the classical virtual particles as used to explain Hawking radiation are not the virtual particles of the foundational theory, so a lot of effort gets expended trying to explain amateur "what ifs" that are founded on this simplistic analogy. Trust me, I sometime try to express my semi-naive questions knowing that what I really need to do is run down the equations and see if my question is a function of the popularizing analogies, or is it truly answerable (and needing said answer) in the mathematics.?
So, yes, popular jargon sells more books, why oh why are you surprised?
As a statistician, I am seriously annoyed with the usual Left-Right dichotomy we see in most press articles. While I like the Political Compass I am a bit nervous of their clustering algorithm, and the questions they use to feed the analytics. Even more interesting is Johathan Haidt who has achieved some TEDTalk fame describing a five-dimensional feature space (though he does try to reduce to two clusters - liberals and conservatives). So I pose a two part question, (1) do you think the public discourse is hampered by the popular press always reducing politicians and voters to "liberals" and "conservatives"? And if you are concerned, (2) what can we do to push back against such simplifications, especially here on Slashdot?
Bugs are for the most part bad... and NSA is probably quite happy keeping us all on a path we feel is safe. If they left the bugs in, they would face a combinatorially expanding complexity of problems to solve.
Meanwhile, I am toying with creating a pre-browser or embedded filter that removes all tags beyond what Slashdot permits, then feeds that reduced set to the display functions. I am sick and tired of trying to throttle back wacko behavior one fekking feature at a time. Or does such already exist (for Firefox or Chrome?)
The sorts of analyses that can be conducted using game-theoretic formulations can be used to see what happens when a population is unable to defend itself because it swears off retribution in kind. The numbers are pretty dismal, without strong cooperation by the good people there is a sort of inevitability that the nice go extinct. Until the mid 1800's outlier antisocial behavior ran a high risk of being met by termination, which might not be a deterrent, but it sure reduces recividism. Once we became too civil to retaliate in kind (or stronger) we run the risk of losing to the trolls.
The ability to be anonymous just makes it harder to stop trolls, and any strong efforts to prevent anonymity are met by claims that the internet needs to support anonymity if it is to deliver freedom in the lands of tyranny.
All of this is fodder for great movies (where the bad guys are pursued by the good) but only if the bad guys hit equally evil players will they find meaningful retribution. If the trolls were to accidentally cost the Russian mafie some serious coin, they might find a knock at their door that would be much worse than having the FBI come a-knocking. (This is the plot of one of my tech-fi stories).
A good part of how you get a Nobel is similar to how you get an Oscar. Someone works very hard to publicize your work to a voting committee. They vote.
So a Nobel prize, like an Oscar, is a function of two strong independent variables.
Computing coefficients is left as an exercise to the interested student.
Multi-stage heat to electricity systems can help minimize the local heat effect, though to the extent the earth is a closed system, if we are adding heat it might be like sticking burning candles into an oven.
Solution? MASERs tuned to frequencies that the atmosphere is transparent to, to pump excess heat out into space. I envision roof-top masers as the final stage of a buildings HVAC system (replacing the current simple heat exchangers). We could mandate that all AC units over a certain size must use same, just don't fly over them. Did Clarke get patent credit for his suggestion that satellites would be useful in telecommunications?
Slashdot Mirror
I saw the trailer, not sure if this is a big loss to the free world.
Now that we finally are looking at the whole system (aquifers too) rather than just surface water, we will be seeing pending droughts in a lot more places than we might think. I am on two planning commissions in Minnesota and we are very aware of the water supplies under ground, the entire state is concerned, and we are the land of 10,000 lakes (or, during flood season, one really big lake"). A new emphasis on sustainability and the ability to estimate water supplies better, coupled with a full "total cost of ownership" for new developments, gives local planners an opportunity to say no to new developments in a way that we did not see during the big boom of the 70's and 80's. Of course, the unintended consequence of careful planning is that we start to see "economic refugees", by which I mean people who move in despite local attempts to remain sustainable.
Two comments. First, I expect better of the MPR audience than a bunch of personal attacks on the politicians involved ("crazy", "nut job", etc.). Where is the dialog in that? [They were discussing Rep Bachman]
Second, this Republican agrees that the [Cuban] embargo was a success, but not in the sense that it kept Cuba from profiting from its low wage workers (a form of serfdom?), but rather in the sense that Cuba was able to attempt to build a socialist paradise absent the machinations of the free world and its powerful interests. Did they succeed? If you think that universal health care at the 1950's level is success, with life expectancies comparable to US, and with a thriving black market in access to medical care for those with money (similar to ours, except that our high-payer patients subsidize the entire health industry rather than just the people they bribe), perhaps they did. If you think that a two-level economy is success (the have-nots and the tourists), perhaps they did. If you think a population with low expectations of their government and a high level of self sufficiency, perhaps they did succeed. Certainly their model of socialism is much more benign than, for example, North Korea's alleged communist system (I say alleged because NK is communist only in its choice of friends, not in its actual economic system, which is more a large slave plantation, as near as I can tell). So while I can understand a certain amount of hostility towards Cuba for their oppression of their people's freedoms, I must also acknowledge that, for a Luddite nation, they are doing much better than their Russian handlers did.
Prostitutes:coeds as taxis:uber brbr One tries to be sustainable, the other lives outside the economically sustainable boundary by not keeping itself fully accountable for the total cost of operations. The establishment lament is "how can we make a living when the tyros are giving it away below cost"? The tyros retort? Your place or mine?
This is an excellent start at a TCO (total cost of operating/ownership) and ought to be the standard in Slashdot conversations like this one. Thanks! This sort of reasoning ought to prevail over wishful dreamcast fluff every time.
We statisticians refer to anecdotes as non-random samples of size N=1.
Completely and totally worthless. Actually, not worthless (value 0), they are worth-negative, as they actually prevent good decision making.
And as Kahneman and Tversky discussed, the availability heuristic and the ease of remembering the outliers makes for very bad decision making. This is exacerbated by the modern un-filtered news system (aka, "the web" cross the "infotainment industry"). This warped noise delivery system, masquerading as "news you need to know" results in a really bad decision making process. Modern medicine (where I worked as a statistician) is unable to help with this extra-scientific process.
Because in the end, someone has to be as powerful as the most powerful state we might logically fear. Right now that is the Russians (simple tanks and bombs), the Chinese (economic warfare), and the Islamofascists (intent). Of these, we cannot afford to fight the Chinese, we are not the bleeding edge in defending against the Russians, and we might be able to defeat the Islamofascists here at home using ideas, not so sure about in other countries.
But the old days of raising armies only when needed has gone the way of the horse and buggy. Unless you are the Swiss, who count on others to provide defacto long-arm defense, you probably cannot count on an armed population either ("Red Dawn not withstanding)
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed
Nice platitude. Prove it.
"do no torture on my behalf",
we should perhaps scream
I am willing to let X=8,143 people a year die from terrorist attacks rather than use torture
The number 8,143 is what we are arguing about.
The CIA thinks X is something small, like 1 child or 3 innocent adults.
The rest of us must think X is closer to 1M. Interestingly, it is the scientific humanists among us who claim X=Inf, even though they do not have a moral compass like the church telling them that. More proof that it does not take a religion to make one moral.
My outrage over failures of the Obama administration pales in comparison to my outrage over the war crimes of the GWB administration.
Then the second generation of guards at Nazi camps is exonerated because they did not start it?
The most fundamental difference between the data that conservatives prefer—that the 10 poorest cities are longtime Democratic strongholds—and the data that liberals will be more inclined to cite—that the 10 poorest states are predominantly Republican, is that conservatives can point to actual policies that Democrats implemented that contributed to the impoverishment of the cities, while the liberals cannot point to specific GOP policies that have caused the poorer states to lag behind.
The Democratic case is illusory and circumstantial; the Republican case is solid and substantial. However, in a country where so many people are economically and historically illiterate, combined with the human proclivity whereby “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” (Paul Simon, “The Boxer”), the Democrats may be able to score some points with a hollow argument. The Republicans, though, have the facts on their side.
Ref: Are the 10 Poorest States Really Republican
How can we argue with an author who quotes Paul Simon?
We are in a dark cave, the wumpus is loose, and the only people with lights are lying religious fanatics whose reason is their sacred writings and whose swords are, more rapidly than we might wish, the actual swords they raise against the unbelievers. Chop. Chop.
(Footnote: I believe in the 2nd amendment not because I can expect to win but rather because I can expect to make it a little more expensive for the eventual winners.)
Why apartheid "worked", why the Shah "worked", why Christianity "worked".
It is really too bad when science comes down on the side of the iron fist, but the studies show over and over that justice requires peace, and peace requires trust, and diversity reduces the social capital necessary to assure trust.
On the other hand, who wants to live under ISIL or similar diversity busting regimes? But one of the first prerequisites for a peaceful society appears to be a shared culture first, at least with respect to how people treat each other. It would be nice if we could use clothing to mark culture, so that when I see someone wearing a hoodie I could KNOW that indicated a peace-monger, but it just is not so, any more than someone wearing a sash with a swastika is identifying themselves as a keeper of the word of gawd.
The question has to be, how to get social capital higher and the science appears to suggest homogeneity. I don't like that answer, any more than I liked it when simulations showed "tit-for-tat" was the preferred strategy in cooperative games. I don't like that I cannot just flap my arms and fly either, but at some level all of these findings are our realities.
Go away.
Come back if/when you grow up.
It does to people who view the world through a specific jargon. I would prefer to read good cosmology with math to help my understanding, but that market is pretty small compared to simplistic "analogies" that feed and nurture the the public discourse. For an example, run down the virtual particle discussions until you finally get to the one (and it was deep when I found it) that explains that the classical virtual particles as used to explain Hawking radiation are not the virtual particles of the foundational theory, so a lot of effort gets expended trying to explain amateur "what ifs" that are founded on this simplistic analogy. Trust me, I sometime try to express my semi-naive questions knowing that what I really need to do is run down the equations and see if my question is a function of the popularizing analogies, or is it truly answerable (and needing said answer) in the mathematics.?
So, yes, popular jargon sells more books, why oh why are you surprised?
As a statistician, I am seriously annoyed with the usual Left-Right dichotomy we see in most press articles. While I like the Political Compass I am a bit nervous of their clustering algorithm, and the questions they use to feed the analytics. Even more interesting is Johathan Haidt who has achieved some TEDTalk fame describing a five-dimensional feature space (though he does try to reduce to two clusters - liberals and conservatives). So I pose a two part question, (1) do you think the public discourse is hampered by the popular press always reducing politicians and voters to "liberals" and "conservatives"? And if you are concerned, (2) what can we do to push back against such simplifications, especially here on Slashdot?
Collides particles we call "pool balls" because they are so large.
You must be experiencing Lorentz-contractions, and if you aren't careful she will experience contractions too!
Bugs are for the most part bad ... and NSA is probably quite happy keeping us all on a path we feel is safe. If they left the bugs in, they would face a combinatorially expanding complexity of problems to solve.
Meanwhile, I am toying with creating a pre-browser or embedded filter that removes all tags beyond what Slashdot permits, then feeds that reduced set to the display functions. I am sick and tired of trying to throttle back wacko behavior one fekking feature at a time. Or does such already exist (for Firefox or Chrome?)
Sheeze. I bet you thought that electric typewriters were for lazy bums too!
The sorts of analyses that can be conducted using game-theoretic formulations can be used to see what happens when a population is unable to defend itself because it swears off retribution in kind. The numbers are pretty dismal, without strong cooperation by the good people there is a sort of inevitability that the nice go extinct. Until the mid 1800's outlier antisocial behavior ran a high risk of being met by termination, which might not be a deterrent, but it sure reduces recividism. Once we became too civil to retaliate in kind (or stronger) we run the risk of losing to the trolls.
The ability to be anonymous just makes it harder to stop trolls, and any strong efforts to prevent anonymity are met by claims that the internet needs to support anonymity if it is to deliver freedom in the lands of tyranny.
All of this is fodder for great movies (where the bad guys are pursued by the good) but only if the bad guys hit equally evil players will they find meaningful retribution. If the trolls were to accidentally cost the Russian mafie some serious coin, they might find a knock at their door that would be much worse than having the FBI come a-knocking. (This is the plot of one of my tech-fi stories).
A good part of how you get a Nobel is similar to how you get an Oscar. Someone works very hard to publicize your work to a voting committee. They vote.
So a Nobel prize, like an Oscar, is a function of two strong independent variables.
Computing coefficients is left as an exercise to the interested student.
Multi-stage heat to electricity systems can help minimize the local heat effect, though to the extent the earth is a closed system, if we are adding heat it might be like sticking burning candles into an oven.
Solution? MASERs tuned to frequencies that the atmosphere is transparent to, to pump excess heat out into space. I envision roof-top masers as the final stage of a buildings HVAC system (replacing the current simple heat exchangers). We could mandate that all AC units over a certain size must use same, just don't fly over them. Did Clarke get patent credit for his suggestion that satellites would be useful in telecommunications?
Early in the technology cycles of fax and copiers, totalitarian governments tried to regulate or ban them. Fascists gotta be fascists.