Religious people claim to know because as of now we don't have any explanations. So they fill in the gap with religion (so yes they think they know).
The "God of gaps" fallacy has been very popular with Christians in the past, and is probably still very common today. Obviously, any true "theory of God" must account for observed physical phenomena, instead of ignoring them.
I'm not sure how a religous scientist could use physics to explain these questions without making stuff up.
Physics is a set of arbitrary rules that accurately describes what happens to systems that follow those rules. For example, a pool table: under the ideal conditions of a thought experiment, a physicist could easily predict the final state of the balls on a pool table, so long as he was given the initial state and some information about the cuestick's impact on the cue ball (velocity, mass, &c.). Hit the ball, and everything proceeds deterministically to the predicted final state.
But what if I lean over the pool table and take a potshot at the cueball while it's in motion? Suddenly, the outcome is nothing like what the physicist predicted! And the rules of physics have no way of predicting what I will do. For that, you'd need a psychologist.
Most physicists, I imagine, understand this limitation of their discipline, and are quite content to let psychologists explain psychological phenomena. There's no "making stuff up" involved. Physics and metaphysics are two separate disciplines. A physicist doesn't need to "make up" explanations for physical things--physics does that already. And a smart physicist won't expect physics to explain non-physical things (like psychological or metaphysical phenomena), which is where "making stuff up" would become necessary.
Since clients want pretty layouts, which includes, necessarily, the use of tables, from time to time absolute pixel widths have to be used.
I think that Nielsen's whole point--the one he ultimately hopes clients will learn--is that "pretty" and "useable" are exclusive attributes of a website, and that "useable" is more profitable.
Just because clients want pretty sites, it doesn't mean they're a good alternative to useable sites, or that people who know better (like their web developer, or Jakob Nielsen), shouldn't try to educate them.
I just organize the site so it makes sense and keep it shallow. It's never more than a few clicks to get where you want to go. Using SSI to keep a link list on the left side, it's very easy to move from one section to another or back to the front page of the site.
Which just goes to show that any sufficiently well-designed site is indistinguishable from a good sitemap.
Thank you! I thought I was the only one who ever though, "It's so much easier to find stuff using the sitemap--why don't they just serve that, and save mad web development dollars?"
Please. By your reasoning, all religious people must be either dupes, madmen, or demagogues. After all, no sane, intelligent person would accept a religion with no good reasons at all.
Since it's trivial to demonstrate that there are religious people who are not dupes, madmen, or demagogues, then it must be true that there are better reasons for faith than simple "blind trust". Find an intelligent religious person, and ask them why they believe.
To be at all useful, a religion must have some relevance to the real world. If it does, then there will be obvious real-world reasons to adopt it. Any religion that can't give even one good, real-world reason to adopt it would be laughably stupid. As many of them seem to be.
But take socialism, for example: people had to believe that it would work out--a violent revolution, a demolishing of the current system, its replacement by a temporary "transitional management", and the ultimate fruition of a worker's paradise--all that had to be taken on faith. But there were some good, solid reasons for making the attempt; real-world reasons that made sense to people, and clearly related to their own experiences of reality. The Bolsheviks didn't rise up because someone said "let's start a revolution and see if it works". They rose up because it made good, practical, sense to do so, even if the ultimate outcome had to be taken on faith.
Mathematics is a formal logic system that is internally consistent. The rules of the logic system were chosen specifically to induce this internal consistency. Conveniently, mathematics also makes accurate predictions of real-world events (which was probably the point of devising it in the first place), but there's no one-to-one correspondence of mathmatical rules and real-world rules. In the end, mathematics is best at talking about itself, and relatively good at talking about other things so long as it's only talking about things that it's good at talking about.
What if the Zendorians had an accurate predictive explanation for real-world phenomena that was internally inconsistent? Before you tell me that's impossible, consider that this has already happened to us, in the field of Quantum Mechanics. The rules we've invented for QE do accurately predict subatomic phenomena, but they're internally inconsistent.
All logic is an artificial tool, confined exclusively to the human mind, for use in explaining whatever things follow its rules. Anything that doesn't follow its rules would make no logical sense, obviously. That doesn't mean that everything out there follows its rules.
Sorta like religion, yea we don't know exactly why we are here and how. To religous people that is proof to scientific minded people that drives them to find those answers.
Not so: Why and how we are here is exactly what religious people claim to know. Also, religion purports to pick up where science leaves off. A religious scientist could claim to know the "why" (metaphysics); and also the "how", to the limits of his science (physics). The two aren't mutually exclusive--they're not even related.
NASA probably does have specific goals. Even your hypothetical blue-skying lab technicians have to give some apparently good reason for wasting all that launch mass on space boogers, or two-headed antigravity mice, or whatever.
Two things about corporate space programs ("BASF-style"): First, there are none that even approach the scale of NASA (or any of the other government-run space programs). There never were. Could a corporation have given better ROI than NASA? Obviously not, because they were never even trying. Second, even if they had tried, would it really have been a good thing? Look at the corporate investment in the Internet: sure, the state of the art advanced tremendously under commercial pressure, but the medium became a lot less pleasant in the process. I'm not sure I'd trust BASF to conduct space research, even if they did invent petrochemical dyes and the magnetic cassette tape.
If by "credentialism" you mean "trusting an entity because of its credentials, rather than your own empirical proof of their trustworthiness, it depends. If the accrediting agency is known to be trustworthy, then entities bearing their credentials will, on the whole, be more reliable than non-accredited entities.
For example: the Underwriters Laboratory. That "UL" tag on your microwave saves you the trouble of having to do your own exhaustive research on the manufacturer, plus thousands of man-hours testing each and every component many times over, just to make sure you're not buying a Deadly Microwave Oven Of Death.
Of course, if you feel that credentialism is always bad, then you should probably evacuate your home, spend 20 or 30 years teaching yourself how to properly test home appliances (don't forget to start from fundamental principles, since you can't rely on anybody else's knowledge or expertise to help you speed up the learning process), and then go in and personally validate every electrical device you own. And you can give up selling your expertise to anybody else, since we have no reason to trust your own self-accreditation.
I find it easier to research the trustworthiness of a few accrediting authorities, than to personally confirm the trustworthiness of everything around me. If the UL says it's safe, then those credentials are good enough for me. If the Elbonian Toursim Agency says it's safe, I'll want second opinion, though.
The vast majority? Do you have figures? And aren't universities and colleges real-world entities? Isn't what goes on there just as "real" as what goes on in your office? Might as well say that the vast majority of [nurses|cab drivers|sysadmins|whatever] have no clue about the "real world". Perhaps you meant to say that your own experiences and context are the only "real" ones, and that other experiences and contexts are fantasies constructed by the less observant. Which suggests that your own grasp of reality is as tenuous as any academic's.
The government doesn't "own" the radio spectrum; it regulates it.
In theory, the government's power to control the "airwaves" was granted by the people, by way of their elected representatives--you and me, that is (or in this case, our parents and grandparents). In practice, of course, giving and taking power from the government is much more complicated and frustrating.
The reasons for having a regulatory body for the radio spectrum should be obvious. The best reason I can think of offhand is airplanes. Airplanes rely heavily on communication via radio waves for safe and accurate travel. If there is no regulation (which might be though of as standards + enforcement), then no airplane can know with any certainty any of the important information:
What band to use to communicate with air traffic control?
What band to use to communicate with guidance beacons?
What band to use to communicate in an emergency?
Assuming you've got a good idea of which band to use, how can you guarantee that any of these bands will be available?
Will the guidance beacon band be overridden by a nearby private transmitter?
Will pranksters or malefactors transmit false traffic control instructions over the air traffic control band?
Will high-powered transmissions from nearby (unregulated) transmitters inadvertently disrupt the plane's avionics during takeoff or landing?
Without standards that everybody agrees on, and without proper enforcement of these standards, air travel would involve crashing planes into buildings on a regular basis. And that's just one of the many reasons why regulation is a good thing.
Transmittors who think that regulation is an "opt-in" thing, and that they're somehow entitled to ignore it if they want to, ruin it for everybody else. Every use of the radio spectrum that you enjoy in your daily life is made possible by regulation. It's why your cellphone doesn't pick up Mexican radio stations. It's why your radio-dispatched taxi arrives on time to pick you up. It's why your satellite TV gives you a clear image, without static from nearby 802.11b nodes.
Nobody "owns" the radio spectrum, but we all use it. Regulation helps make sure that it remains useful. You and I probably agree that the regulations aren't always beneficial to citizens, but ignoring them won't make things any better for anyone.
If none of this is obvious to you, then how can we possibly trust you to voluntarily play nice with others? And if we can't trust you to play nice, then we're left with two options: abandon any hope of ever using the radio spectrum for anything at all, or else enforce the standards and keep the spoilers out of the spectrum.
The jet engine is listed, along with its provenance as a British invention.
Babbage's computer is more that 85 years old, and therefore outside the scope of the article.
I'd be interested to know who, if not Philo Farnsworth, submitted a concept paper on the subject of television to his high school teacher (assuming they had high schools in the homeland of whoever the true inventor was). Did Farnsworth plagiarize previous work? Did he come by his idea independently of the true inventor? Did the revolutionary implementation build on Farnsworth's work or the other guy's? If the world-changing television was developed based on Farnsworth's work, in ignorance or disregard of the other guy, then I see no problem with crediting Farnsworth with the world-change.
Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian inventor living in Paris, flew a heavier-than-air craft (the 14-Bis) years before the Wright Flyer left the ground. Shortly afterwards, he successfully flew the Demoiselle, another HTA craft.
Sadly, lack of proper marketing, combined with Santos-Dumont's lifelong obsession with dirigibles (the 14-Bis and the Demoiselle were side projects), left him as a footnote in history, and the Wright brothers are not only credited with the first HTA flight (wrongly), but also credited with revolutionizing travel (rightly, I think--but that's a matter of opinion).
Literacy may not be creativity, but it's not memorization, either. At least, not the way I would normally use the word.
An example of memorized knowledge would be the multiplication tables.
The way we internalize and retrieve language information is a very different thing.
Analogies are tricky things, but perhaps it's like the difference between retrieving information from a database and having the information included in the software itself. Then again, perhaps not.
But it still seems that a compiler could trivially notify you that "you're reading data into a buffer without checking the bounds, is this what you meant to do?" or something.
I am not, of course, a software developer, so I really don't know if it's trivial.
The reason exploits like this keep showing up is there's a hell of a lot of buffers in any program, and it's pretty easy to forget to bounds check one of them.
And there's no way to automate this? Maybe have a compiler that alerts you when it's compiling a piece of code with an unchecked bound?
Re:could be safer than rolercoaster
on
Robocoaster
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Nitpick:
Raises 'blue screen of death' to a whole new level of meaning.
Actually, it doesn't. This "new" level of meaning is brought up every single time human lives and computer controls intersect in a/. story, and isn't actually very new at all.
Probably because either the cars you're finding don't fit the legal definition of "abandoned", or the owner of the parking lot has no grounds to take possession of the cars (say, for unauthorized parking)--and anyway the owner of the lot isn't you.
In general terms, salvage law works exactly the same way: if you have jurisdiction of the body of water in which the wreck is located, or if you can establish a stronger legal claim to the wreck than anybody else, then you get to keep it. And just like the cars, there's a lot of rules about what constitutes a strong legal claim.
So, as a generalization, the comparison seems fairly apt.
Well, the good news is that I don't seem to be looking wrong. I also don't seem to be too picky. Sadly, I'm up to date on every author you suggested, with the exception of Donaldson. Maybe it's time to get over my wariness of him...
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The "God of gaps" fallacy has been very popular with Christians in the past, and is probably still very common today. Obviously, any true "theory of God" must account for observed physical phenomena, instead of ignoring them.
I'm not sure how a religous scientist could use physics to explain these questions without making stuff up.
Physics is a set of arbitrary rules that accurately describes what happens to systems that follow those rules. For example, a pool table: under the ideal conditions of a thought experiment, a physicist could easily predict the final state of the balls on a pool table, so long as he was given the initial state and some information about the cuestick's impact on the cue ball (velocity, mass, &c.). Hit the ball, and everything proceeds deterministically to the predicted final state.
But what if I lean over the pool table and take a potshot at the cueball while it's in motion? Suddenly, the outcome is nothing like what the physicist predicted! And the rules of physics have no way of predicting what I will do. For that, you'd need a psychologist.
Most physicists, I imagine, understand this limitation of their discipline, and are quite content to let psychologists explain psychological phenomena. There's no "making stuff up" involved. Physics and metaphysics are two separate disciplines. A physicist doesn't need to "make up" explanations for physical things--physics does that already. And a smart physicist won't expect physics to explain non-physical things (like psychological or metaphysical phenomena), which is where "making stuff up" would become necessary.
I think that Nielsen's whole point--the one he ultimately hopes clients will learn--is that "pretty" and "useable" are exclusive attributes of a website, and that "useable" is more profitable.
Just because clients want pretty sites, it doesn't mean they're a good alternative to useable sites, or that people who know better (like their web developer, or Jakob Nielsen), shouldn't try to educate them.
Which just goes to show that any sufficiently well-designed site is indistinguishable from a good sitemap.
Thank you! I thought I was the only one who ever though, "It's so much easier to find stuff using the sitemap--why don't they just serve that, and save mad web development dollars?"
Did you want the home, small business, or enterprise model?
Since it's trivial to demonstrate that there are religious people who are not dupes, madmen, or demagogues, then it must be true that there are better reasons for faith than simple "blind trust". Find an intelligent religious person, and ask them why they believe.
To be at all useful, a religion must have some relevance to the real world. If it does, then there will be obvious real-world reasons to adopt it. Any religion that can't give even one good, real-world reason to adopt it would be laughably stupid. As many of them seem to be.
But take socialism, for example: people had to believe that it would work out--a violent revolution, a demolishing of the current system, its replacement by a temporary "transitional management", and the ultimate fruition of a worker's paradise--all that had to be taken on faith. But there were some good, solid reasons for making the attempt; real-world reasons that made sense to people, and clearly related to their own experiences of reality. The Bolsheviks didn't rise up because someone said "let's start a revolution and see if it works". They rose up because it made good, practical, sense to do so, even if the ultimate outcome had to be taken on faith.
What if the Zendorians had an accurate predictive explanation for real-world phenomena that was internally inconsistent? Before you tell me that's impossible, consider that this has already happened to us, in the field of Quantum Mechanics. The rules we've invented for QE do accurately predict subatomic phenomena, but they're internally inconsistent.
All logic is an artificial tool, confined exclusively to the human mind, for use in explaining whatever things follow its rules. Anything that doesn't follow its rules would make no logical sense, obviously. That doesn't mean that everything out there follows its rules.
Not so: Why and how we are here is exactly what religious people claim to know. Also, religion purports to pick up where science leaves off. A religious scientist could claim to know the "why" (metaphysics); and also the "how", to the limits of his science (physics). The two aren't mutually exclusive--they're not even related.
Two things about corporate space programs ("BASF-style"): First, there are none that even approach the scale of NASA (or any of the other government-run space programs). There never were. Could a corporation have given better ROI than NASA? Obviously not, because they were never even trying. Second, even if they had tried, would it really have been a good thing? Look at the corporate investment in the Internet: sure, the state of the art advanced tremendously under commercial pressure, but the medium became a lot less pleasant in the process. I'm not sure I'd trust BASF to conduct space research, even if they did invent petrochemical dyes and the magnetic cassette tape.
What about those who can teach? :p
I don't think my feeble joke was worth the energy of a flame. Does that make us even?
If by "credentialism" you mean "trusting an entity because of its credentials, rather than your own empirical proof of their trustworthiness, it depends. If the accrediting agency is known to be trustworthy, then entities bearing their credentials will, on the whole, be more reliable than non-accredited entities.
For example: the Underwriters Laboratory. That "UL" tag on your microwave saves you the trouble of having to do your own exhaustive research on the manufacturer, plus thousands of man-hours testing each and every component many times over, just to make sure you're not buying a Deadly Microwave Oven Of Death.
Of course, if you feel that credentialism is always bad, then you should probably evacuate your home, spend 20 or 30 years teaching yourself how to properly test home appliances (don't forget to start from fundamental principles, since you can't rely on anybody else's knowledge or expertise to help you speed up the learning process), and then go in and personally validate every electrical device you own. And you can give up selling your expertise to anybody else, since we have no reason to trust your own self-accreditation.
I find it easier to research the trustworthiness of a few accrediting authorities, than to personally confirm the trustworthiness of everything around me. If the UL says it's safe, then those credentials are good enough for me. If the Elbonian Toursim Agency says it's safe, I'll want second opinion, though.
The vast majority? Do you have figures? And aren't universities and colleges real-world entities? Isn't what goes on there just as "real" as what goes on in your office? Might as well say that the vast majority of [nurses|cab drivers|sysadmins|whatever] have no clue about the "real world". Perhaps you meant to say that your own experiences and context are the only "real" ones, and that other experiences and contexts are fantasies constructed by the less observant. Which suggests that your own grasp of reality is as tenuous as any academic's.
The government doesn't "own" the radio spectrum; it regulates it.
In theory, the government's power to control the "airwaves" was granted by the people, by way of their elected representatives--you and me, that is (or in this case, our parents and grandparents). In practice, of course, giving and taking power from the government is much more complicated and frustrating.
The reasons for having a regulatory body for the radio spectrum should be obvious. The best reason I can think of offhand is airplanes. Airplanes rely heavily on communication via radio waves for safe and accurate travel. If there is no regulation (which might be though of as standards + enforcement), then no airplane can know with any certainty any of the important information:
What band to use to communicate with air traffic control?
What band to use to communicate with guidance beacons?
What band to use to communicate in an emergency?
Assuming you've got a good idea of which band to use, how can you guarantee that any of these bands will be available?
Will the guidance beacon band be overridden by a nearby private transmitter?
Will pranksters or malefactors transmit false traffic control instructions over the air traffic control band?
Will high-powered transmissions from nearby (unregulated) transmitters inadvertently disrupt the plane's avionics during takeoff or landing?
Without standards that everybody agrees on, and without proper enforcement of these standards, air travel would involve crashing planes into buildings on a regular basis. And that's just one of the many reasons why regulation is a good thing.
Transmittors who think that regulation is an "opt-in" thing, and that they're somehow entitled to ignore it if they want to, ruin it for everybody else. Every use of the radio spectrum that you enjoy in your daily life is made possible by regulation. It's why your cellphone doesn't pick up Mexican radio stations. It's why your radio-dispatched taxi arrives on time to pick you up. It's why your satellite TV gives you a clear image, without static from nearby 802.11b nodes.
Nobody "owns" the radio spectrum, but we all use it. Regulation helps make sure that it remains useful. You and I probably agree that the regulations aren't always beneficial to citizens, but ignoring them won't make things any better for anyone.
If none of this is obvious to you, then how can we possibly trust you to voluntarily play nice with others? And if we can't trust you to play nice, then we're left with two options: abandon any hope of ever using the radio spectrum for anything at all, or else enforce the standards and keep the spoilers out of the spectrum.
Which option would you vote for?
The canonical placeholder string should be "kwyjibo", obviously.
The jet engine is listed, along with its provenance as a British invention.
Babbage's computer is more that 85 years old, and therefore outside the scope of the article.
I'd be interested to know who, if not Philo Farnsworth, submitted a concept paper on the subject of television to his high school teacher (assuming they had high schools in the homeland of whoever the true inventor was). Did Farnsworth plagiarize previous work? Did he come by his idea independently of the true inventor? Did the revolutionary implementation build on Farnsworth's work or the other guy's? If the world-changing television was developed based on Farnsworth's work, in ignorance or disregard of the other guy, then I see no problem with crediting Farnsworth with the world-change.
Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian inventor living in Paris, flew a heavier-than-air craft (the 14-Bis) years before the Wright Flyer left the ground. Shortly afterwards, he successfully flew the Demoiselle, another HTA craft.
Sadly, lack of proper marketing, combined with Santos-Dumont's lifelong obsession with dirigibles (the 14-Bis and the Demoiselle were side projects), left him as a footnote in history, and the Wright brothers are not only credited with the first HTA flight (wrongly), but also credited with revolutionizing travel (rightly, I think--but that's a matter of opinion).
Literacy may not be creativity, but it's not memorization, either. At least, not the way I would normally use the word.
An example of memorized knowledge would be the multiplication tables.
The way we internalize and retrieve language information is a very different thing.
Analogies are tricky things, but perhaps it's like the difference between retrieving information from a database and having the information included in the software itself. Then again, perhaps not.
How about trial by combat? No tasting of hot coals, plus you get to deliver severe beating to Hilary Rosen.
Or her chosen champion... maybe trial by combat isn't such a good idea.
Isn't it also entirely possible that with nothing but circumstancial evidence, the case might get thrown out long before it gets to trial?
Fair enough.
But it still seems that a compiler could trivially notify you that "you're reading data into a buffer without checking the bounds, is this what you meant to do?" or something.
I am not, of course, a software developer, so I really don't know if it's trivial.
And there's no way to automate this? Maybe have a compiler that alerts you when it's compiling a piece of code with an unchecked bound?
Raises 'blue screen of death' to a whole new level of meaning.
Actually, it doesn't. This "new" level of meaning is brought up every single time human lives and computer controls intersect in a /. story, and isn't actually very new at all.
HTH. HAND!
So they could trade it to us for Polytheism and The Republic?
Probably because either the cars you're finding don't fit the legal definition of "abandoned", or the owner of the parking lot has no grounds to take possession of the cars (say, for unauthorized parking)--and anyway the owner of the lot isn't you.
In general terms, salvage law works exactly the same way: if you have jurisdiction of the body of water in which the wreck is located, or if you can establish a stronger legal claim to the wreck than anybody else, then you get to keep it. And just like the cars, there's a lot of rules about what constitutes a strong legal claim.
So, as a generalization, the comparison seems fairly apt.
Well, the good news is that I don't seem to be looking wrong. I also don't seem to be too picky. Sadly, I'm up to date on every author you suggested, with the exception of Donaldson. Maybe it's time to get over my wariness of him...