Re:Solstice, Christians, Pagans, and good music
on
Merry Christmas
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· Score: 1
We sing "here comes the sun" and "christians and pagans". I'm sure any serious pagan would laugh at us, but it's our little chance to do things a little bit differently, remember there's other cultures and traditions in the world, and perhaps find magic/life/spirit in an unexpected place or two.
No need to be pagan, the solstice is REAL. One needs no faith to check their almanac, and see that it really is the true new year, where the darkness turns around and things get nicer. (OB international, southern hemisphere may want to hold a summer solstice mourning of some sort and dead equatorial couldn't care less).
I always start planning my winter solstice party and mentioning it to friends around the time Daylight savings time ends.;-> Nothing like that extra hour of darkness falling on your head to get you in an astromonical mood...
Happy late sostice and happy present opening to those of you who are...
... he only got 7 knives through at the checkpoint. The crack security staff confiscated 2 from him. The other 7 and the stun gun and mace were discovered during a random (yeah, right) carry-on check.
So what you're saying is that he didn't actually get any of it onto the plane. By 'yeah right'ing on the randomness of the second check, you also seem to be implying that it wasn't mere coincidence, either. So how exactly does this reflect badly on the overall security level?
So really it's like, you're paying a ton of money to replicat what you can do with a disposable camera and 1 hour film developing.
except of course that there are things you CAN'T do with one hour film developing, or a digital camera and printer. A political group I work with has a fantastic media project called the Faces of Family. It is entirely based on having either
1) a digital camera, laptop, decent printer, photo printing paper, portable power source and safe place to set it up out outdoors for 9 hours at a time, OR
2) Couple of low end polaroids and a bunch of film, that you can get in bulk from the company if you work at it.
Or for the costume comtest I was thinking of having for a pet halloween celebration. take a picture, have someone write down all their info cross checked to which number photo it is (which crappy cameras don't always count accurately), run off to a photo place which always takes more than an hour and often aren't open late, come back and stick the photos to cards cause theres no place to write on them.. OR
Take the polaroid and hand it to the person to write on, they see the results right away and can tell you if the want to pay for another shot of fluffy.
No, if you're taking pictures for your web page or a project you have plenty of time to work on, polaroids won't work for you. But that's not what they're designed for. They have a definite niche they fill, and I doubt that they would ever fully disapear, just because one of their functions has been taken over. If they did, that would be yet another failure of the market, not a sign they were a bad product.
One note here: copyright doesn't exist until a paper is published.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. When you print a paper out of your computer and put your name on it, its your paper. If you signed something in you admissions forms that say that everything you turn in to a professor belongs to the university, then it's theirs. But it belongs to you until you give it away.
Are you trying to say that plagerism is not really plagerism unless the work was in some fancy form with a little copyright date on the bottom? That seems pretty doubtful as well. Please clarify this if you get a moment.
No! The peer reviewers, ie the editors, are not the middlemen - the people who own and publish the journals are.
yes, they are A middleman. They come in between the people trying to get their ideas out, and act as gatekeepers, saying what will get their stamp of aproval to be read by more people in the "good" journal. They are a useful middleman, but a middle man nonetheless.
And my post (including the part you quoted, for dog's sake) said that I was aware of the actual status of the change and what was being celebrated, but felt that the/. article had not been clear on this point. And that endorsement plans very similar to peer review had been attacked here before.
Hope that makes it clearer...
Since it was crystal clear to begin with, that would have been difficult. Thanks anyway, though.
Since anyone who has read Slash for a while realises what a fiasco it can be sometimes.
Oh I understand that completely. I was simply saying that no matter how bad it can possibly get here, the "stuff that matters" doesn't matter nearly as much as accurate information on some scientific subjects. It does get pretty awful here, but no one's gone to the emergency room for pouring hot grits down their pants. Its crazy, egotistical, noisy, petty ENTERTAINMENT.
yes - what goes on here is unlikely to kill anyone. A "peer reviewed" paper in a formerly respectable (and still respected) journal telling parents that vaccines will kill their kids, or germs don't really exist and antibiotics are poison, or use homeopathy for your kid with luekemia instead of actual treatment... The need for truth is not some abstract good, that we can ballance out in the end cause more truth got through than BS. In some fields, its a matter of public safety.
Physicists have actually started bypassing the reviewing/printing system by putting up arXiv.org [arxiv.org] long ago.
If they're bybassing the review system, I look forward to the publication of lots of perpetual motion/cold fusion papers given exactly the same weight as good science. I'll remember to ignore any study cited from that source....
Unless of course there is still a review system, and you misrepresented the page.
Biologists aren't late, they're concerned with not making their community a complete laughing stock. There is a small but motivated horde of people out there waiting to pour out their papers on how evolution is impossible, homeopathy works, germs don't exist, vaccines kill children and do nothing to stop disease and a dozen other piles of bullshit that range from annoying to dangerous. Any sort of open review or non review journal will become a quack journal in two months max. Why would anyone want to do that to themselves?
Uh, I think folks are missing some fundamental points. The Scientific Method completely negates any need for Peer Review.
[flame on]its hard to "miss" a point thats completely wrong, now isn't it. [flame off]
The point of peer review is to confirm that the scientific method was actually followed. Anyone can say that their methodology was sound, and some of them will lie. SM on an honor system is pretty well as useless as no SM.
Hacking academia is not entirely unknown to happen, even *with* peer review...
And people dying in fires is not unknown even with fire departments. Therefore fire depatrments are bad/unneccassary. Think about it.
Peer review is totally neccassary, unless you want to push voodoo science. Then its bad.
There should be some kind of registration process so some 12 year old kiddy can't submit a journel on UFO study and get all his friends to rate it up. The registration won't stop that, but most kiddies won't bother going through a registration to screw with a website.
But a bunch of creationist adults will devote 5 hours a day every day to doing just that, but with papers sufficiently well written that they seem scientific to a casual reader. And all the sudden, you have a bunch of "peer reviewed" highly rated anti evolution creationist BS* sitting on a respected journals lap. NO WAY!
And don't even tell me that the negitive ratings from all the good scientists will ballance it out. Even if they suspect its BS, a decent scientist will not moderate something down until she has taken the time to look it over and check the methodology to make sure she isn't rejecting it out of hand because she has tons of experience that the end result has to be wrong. As for "peer reviewers are biased against some conclusions", sure you get biased after the 20th time the same conclusion turns out to be supported by sloppy work, wishful thinking and all out lies, but you still check the methodology to see which one it was this time.
But the point is that honest work takes longer than lies. Debunking lies takes more time and effort than presenting them. Moderating down conclusions that contridict your holy book takes less time than the propperly designed research it took to come to them. And the people who care the most about spreading lies are often devoting most of their lives to it, while the people most motivated and qualified to correct those lies are doing other possitive research and don't have the luxury of playing wack-a-mole with the latest psuedoscientific voodoo all day.
Nutshell: TRUTH IS HARDER. In an open marketplace of ideas managed by libertarian principles and voted on democratically, the truth will get its ass kicked. I'm sorry that we don't live in that perfect world where "the solution to bad information is good information, not supression" or "the truth will out" or any of those other nice thoughts with no basis in reality. Really sorry.
*and just to not pick only on the biggest target, lets not forget perpetual motion, psychic healing, ESP, alien visitation, racial infer/super-iority, gender work from both sides of the fence, conspiracy theories, power lines cause cancer, soil theory, homeopathy, dowsing, ok just put "Flim Flam" table of contents here....
Well, no, not really. The whole idea in a peer-reviewed scientific journal is that the people performing the editing are experts in the field (ie peers of the person/people submitting the article for publication), not employees of the company which publishes the journal.
There's no suggestion of doing away with peer review.
well, except that the opening blurb distinctly talks about a bunch of peer reviewers quiting. The implication that they are "the middleman" is obviously wrong if you apply outside knowlege to what's said, but not from a plain reading.
The article could have been far more clear about what the good thing about this is (putting pressure on the journal to provide free downloads through their resignations) instead of implying that lossing the peer review staff of a major journal is a good thing.
The final problem of course, is that peer review IS a middleman coming between scientists and their readers. It's a GOOD middleman for just about everyone involved in science education and advocacy, but similar review/endorsement plans (such as the WHO proposal for a approval based.health domain) have been lambasted here as "censorship". So the idea that/. is attacking the important process of peer review is not unprecedented.
What I feel we need here in our town is not more cameras, they haven't done a bloody damn thing.
Except of course that you said yourself that you moved to the area AFTER they were installed. And since you are citing purely annecdotal expereince, this conclusion is quite simply pulled out of your ass.
Crimes happen, so the anticrime action has failed! Guess we better get rid of all police, cause they haven't elliminated all crime either! And screw Ralph Nader, everything he's ever done in consumer protection is useless, cause I still know someone who got badly hurt in a car crash!
Look, I don't know what effect cameras have had on crime, and from the looks of it, neither does anyone else here. If someone knows of an actual, scientificly and statistically valid study, PLEASE post it and maybe we can have some idea what we're talking about. But this post tells us absolutely nothing about the overall effect of public survelience on crime rates. Nothing.
A) read what you quoted again. Most people don't want to go to jail. In the heat of the moment, or when putting your own convinience before public saftey, there are things you might do if you could get away with it that the very fact of a watcher will prevent. Stop light cameras don't stop people from running red lights because they think a cop wil zip out of nowhere and block the intersection, they stop them the same way a cop on the corner would - they know they'll get in trouble.
B) In terms of terrorism (which I believe the poster you were addressing was not talking about), the situation is different. If its a suicide bombing, going to jail is no big deal. But there are plenty of ways that cameras can still help. Quite a while ago we discussed a technology right here that tracked people as unique dots and found reliable patterns for such things as shoplifting, robbing a car in a garage, OR leaving a bomb someplace. At the time, typical/. egotistical paranoia jumped on it. (oh, I'm so amazingly unique and special, and I think this is looking for anything outside a norm (cause I didn't read the damn article) so it will pick me out as special and arrest me. Its trying to induce conformity!)
In fact, it was a fairly logical theory that had nothing to do with conformity, AND has the advantage over human observers of judging people by their actual actions instead of focusing on ethnicity or dress.
I like it, too. But, I think that the biggest problem is how close the Klingon homeworld is. If it's 4 days (!) away at warp 4, then it's just hours away with "modern" (TNG) warp technology.
Is it REALLY their homeworld? I didn't see the show in question, so I don't know how readily it can be said that this was their homeworld in reality, rather than this being put forth to the crew.
I'm also kinda annoyed that the doctor has to be a brand-new species--- could have used one of the throwaways from earlier shows. (Or did they?)
If its a "brand new" species, its possible that by the end of the show it culd well be an "extinct" species. If they were planning an extinction storyline (ala the ?macaw? episode in B5) they couldn't very well use a known one.
Its realisticly possible for species to show up in "earlier" episodes before the finalization of the federation who eventual die, who are represented only by explorers who go back home with negitive reports and never come back, or even whose race makes a decision to remove themselves from the federation and the greater interstellar community - voluntarily planet bound isolationism would not be interfered with once the prime directive was in place.
Putting Mr. Nimoy aside for a moment...what about the actual Spock character? Is he old enough to fit into the time frame of this new show? Sure, he'd be younger...I'd recommend the guy who played Methos on the Highlander series to play a younger Mr. Spock.
Given that Spock's human mother was still arround and relitively healthy in TOS, I doubt Spock could be that old. The charecter of his father could appear as a young abassodor or staff to one, in all likelyhood...
And while theoretically there is always Q, any episode with him would ahve to end with wiped minds, etc, to maintain any continuity.
Of course, there is one more charecter we know has the capacity to appear... Guinan.
Mark Lenard (1927-1996) isn't just too old, he's too dead. Were you thinking of somebody else?
If thats the actor who played Sarek, no. In 1996 I was graduating college and rarely read the paper and didn't have a TV. He wasn't enough of an icon for me to have heard through the grapevine.
My question is this: since Vulcans live so long, is there any chance that Mr. Spock could make a cameo appearance on Enterprise? I have no idea how old Mr. Spock is, so I could be way off base.
The actor is WAY too old now. They had to do a lot of stuff to explain the fact that the actor aged at the same rate as the rest of the crew, remmeber ST III? He would have been a teenager in that time if alive at all. The actor who plays Sarek is probably to old to appear as a young vulcan ambassedor as well. Sorry.
Mmm, apart from the episode where beardy Riker pulls some some deviant "chick" from an androgynous culture. Who then, admittedly, gets brainwashed back into compliance (much like the Federation do with their sinister sounding "re-education camps").
I think thats kinda the poit. there were some deviant individuals, to one overarcing planetwide culture. Its not like there were other cultures on the planet which accepted male/female roles to a greater or lesser extent - the idea that she could go elsewhere amoung her own kind was never brought up.
To some extent, I see this as lazy but resonable when dealing with highly advanced worlds. If everyone can go half way around the world for work in the morning, there will likely be a homogenizing effect by the time they have spaceflight and such. (note that in B5, the "older" races were much more homoginous than the upstart humans). When they do this with non spacefaring worlds, I think its just plain lazy.
Would I love to see a B5-style story done in the Star Trek universe? Hell yeah. I'd love to see a B5-style story run in any universe -- it was a great example of a style of storytelling which we're drastically lacking.
Funny thing is, now that the 4 season arc* is over, I'd now like to see a star trek or even outer limits type story in the B5 universe. The grand theme was great, now lets see an anthology type show delving into the little moments in the less explored areas, organizations and charecters.
*don't even try to tell me there were five seasons, I can't HEAR YOU LALALALA!
Who says? We know the US wasn't completely destroyed, and in "The Voyage Home" Kirk doesn't say "I'm from North America", he says "I'm from Iowa."
But that doesn't nessaccarily mean anything. A united Germany citizen, a soviet East German, a pre WWII german citizen and a pre german unification Prussian could have all said "I'm from Berlin". It wouldn't mean the idea of prussian nationality would be relevant in 2001.
There may be a United Earth, but the US would certainly have been a major player in creating it, and a major source of it's early funding.
Thats just ego talking. The US could have been shattered into multiple warring states and had several of them break and reunite between the start of the alternate Star Trek time line and the start of the federation. Its like a British citizen durring colonial times contemplating the idea of a future UN like body and saying "The British Empire would certainly be a major player in creating it and a major source of its funding...." not thinking that by the time such a thing came to pass, large chunks of what they now think of as the British Empire would never dream of calling themselves Brits. (though they would still say "I'm from Pennsylvania".:> )
I should really be doing something more constructive with my brain....
Amongst the numerous inflammatory examples used in the editorial was this:
frankly the rest are pretty bad too. A museum near to one of the attacks takes a piece of art off the walls with full intent to put it back later. Oh no, thats so evil. A school has the guts to stick with its policy against religious prostylization on school grounds and thats a new scarey restriction on rights? The Flag Desecration ammendment has been on the table since I was in high school.
And funny how no news network I have heard has had anything to say about the "confiscation" of film. They take those things pretty seriously. An exageration of a specific incident? Putting the ol evil spin on authorities taking film so they could have as much of a record for their investigation as possible?
No example or even combination of examples given in this little rant actually justifies the appocolyptic tone. So if he tries to talk about some future truely disturbing developments, it will be hard not to assume that he is exagerating and embellishing them as well. Haven't these guys ever heard of the boy who cried "wolf"?
Most folks first got an idea as to how gruesome war can be by seeing actual battle footage on the Nightly News. Their reactions and protests were natural as far as not wanting things to be so gruesome. Also in this regard, alot of folks grow up never really making a connection between the meat in the supermarkets and the limbs and bodies of creatures they see on the farm.
hmmm... Americans were pretty insulated from the reality of war as other generations or countries haven't been, prior to TV images, I guess. I know what you mean about the cow vs beef thing too, though I didn't suffer from it as much as many of my peers. Point taken.
Digitally tracing cash? How bout we just get rid of cash and everyone use credit cards? That's what George Orwell wrote about in 1984...
There was a black market in 1984 and Smith paid for a rental room in cash (IIRC). If you could quote a section of the book that speaks of the elimination of cash I'd love to hear it, I admit I haven't read it in a while.
And yes, frankly you sound completely paranoid to me. If there is an actual proposal, and you have a rational objection to it, just give it. Exagerating a proposal and then dismissing it because it reminds you of an old sci fi book is not compelling. They used the metric system in 1984, is that evil too?
In the last half of the 20th Century, with the introduction of TV, etc, we got into the idea of being moral in our actions in a war.
Got into? Funny, I didn't think that The History of the Peloponisian(sp) War was written in or about the second half of the 20th century, but hey, who knows....
There have been codes of moral war actions probably as long as there have been wars, and "realistic" thinkers trying to tear them down just as long. It failed in ancient Athens, you aren't going to convince us just by pretending its a new idea you're going against.
What I would really like is some context to this quote. Does anyone know of a link to a web page with something more than just this quote and no context?
Well, considering that we're talking about one of the guys who formed a government, clearly it cannot be as absolute as its treated here. Living in a society is all about giving up freedoms for safety. More importantly, its about giving up some freedoms for other freedoms. most people I've seen slinging that tired old franklin quote leave off both "essential" before liberty and "temporary" before freedom. They confound our basic civil and human rights with their ability to drive as fast as they want or never ever be recorded even in a public place. Calling limits on encrypted email or traffic light cameras that are only triggered by you breaking the law an assualt on "essential liberties" is a slap in the face for those who are still fighting for truely essential rights and freedoms, and just makes the speaker look like an overprivileged american with no sense of history.
And for the record on this topic, I've never understood why so many folks see freedom and safety as opposites that must somehow ballance off each other in a zero sum game. If you are unsafe, you have no meaningful freedom - if you have no freedom, your safety is illusionary and at another's whim. We are not safe in a police state OR free in one overwhellemed by terrorist attack.
The only people in this country right now in danger of losing essential freedoms are those of arab descent and arabic imigrants. (who were given a bit of lip service before you focused on the all important email encryption. sheesh) The rest of us run risks (based on current proposals) that range between being inconvienieced and making trades between different kinds of freedom. Ben Franklin is not in need of invocation.
Feel free to let us know about actual proposals that threaten our essential liberties if any come up.
Slashdot Mirror
We sing "here comes the sun" and "christians and pagans". I'm sure any serious pagan would laugh at us, but it's our little chance to do things a little bit differently, remember there's other cultures and traditions in the world, and perhaps find magic/life/spirit in an unexpected place or two.
;-> Nothing like that extra hour of darkness falling on your head to get you in an astromonical mood...
No need to be pagan, the solstice is REAL. One needs no faith to check their almanac, and see that it really is the true new year, where the darkness turns around and things get nicer. (OB international, southern hemisphere may want to hold a summer solstice mourning of some sort and dead equatorial couldn't care less).
I always start planning my winter solstice party and mentioning it to friends around the time Daylight savings time ends.
Happy late sostice and happy present opening to those of you who are...
Kahuna Burger
... he only got 7 knives through at the checkpoint. The crack security staff confiscated 2 from him. The other 7 and the stun gun and mace were discovered during a random (yeah, right) carry-on check.
So what you're saying is that he didn't actually get any of it onto the plane. By 'yeah right'ing on the randomness of the second check, you also seem to be implying that it wasn't mere coincidence, either. So how exactly does this reflect badly on the overall security level?
Kahuna Burger
So really it's like, you're paying a ton of money to replicat what you can do with a disposable camera and 1 hour film developing.
except of course that there are things you CAN'T do with one hour film developing, or a digital camera and printer. A political group I work with has a fantastic media project called the Faces of Family. It is entirely based on having either
1) a digital camera, laptop, decent printer, photo printing paper, portable power source and safe place to set it up out outdoors for 9 hours at a time, OR
2) Couple of low end polaroids and a bunch of film, that you can get in bulk from the company if you work at it.
Or for the costume comtest I was thinking of having for a pet halloween celebration. take a picture, have someone write down all their info cross checked to which number photo it is (which crappy cameras don't always count accurately), run off to a photo place which always takes more than an hour and often aren't open late, come back and stick the photos to cards cause theres no place to write on them.. OR
Take the polaroid and hand it to the person to write on, they see the results right away and can tell you if the want to pay for another shot of fluffy.
No, if you're taking pictures for your web page or a project you have plenty of time to work on, polaroids won't work for you. But that's not what they're designed for. They have a definite niche they fill, and I doubt that they would ever fully disapear, just because one of their functions has been taken over. If they did, that would be yet another failure of the market, not a sign they were a bad product.
Kahuna Burger
One note here: copyright doesn't exist until a paper is published.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. When you print a paper out of your computer and put your name on it, its your paper. If you signed something in you admissions forms that say that everything you turn in to a professor belongs to the university, then it's theirs. But it belongs to you until you give it away.
Are you trying to say that plagerism is not really plagerism unless the work was in some fancy form with a little copyright date on the bottom? That seems pretty doubtful as well. Please clarify this if you get a moment.
Kahuna Burger
No! The peer reviewers, ie the editors, are not the middlemen - the people who own and publish the journals are.
/. article had not been clear on this point. And that endorsement plans very similar to peer review had been attacked here before.
yes, they are A middleman. They come in between the people trying to get their ideas out, and act as gatekeepers, saying what will get their stamp of aproval to be read by more people in the "good" journal. They are a useful middleman, but a middle man nonetheless.
And my post (including the part you quoted, for dog's sake) said that I was aware of the actual status of the change and what was being celebrated, but felt that the
Hope that makes it clearer...
Since it was crystal clear to begin with, that would have been difficult. Thanks anyway, though.
Kahuna Burger
The humor was a little dry there, I see.
Since anyone who has read Slash for a while realises what a fiasco it can be sometimes.
Oh I understand that completely. I was simply saying that no matter how bad it can possibly get here, the "stuff that matters" doesn't matter nearly as much as accurate information on some scientific subjects. It does get pretty awful here, but no one's gone to the emergency room for pouring hot grits down their pants. Its crazy, egotistical, noisy, petty ENTERTAINMENT.
Kahuna Burger
But can it be any worse than here?
yes - what goes on here is unlikely to kill anyone. A "peer reviewed" paper in a formerly respectable (and still respected) journal telling parents that vaccines will kill their kids, or germs don't really exist and antibiotics are poison, or use homeopathy for your kid with luekemia instead of actual treatment... The need for truth is not some abstract good, that we can ballance out in the end cause more truth got through than BS. In some fields, its a matter of public safety.
Kahuna Burger
Physicists have actually started bypassing the reviewing/printing system by putting up arXiv.org [arxiv.org] long ago.
If they're bybassing the review system, I look forward to the publication of lots of perpetual motion/cold fusion papers given exactly the same weight as good science. I'll remember to ignore any study cited from that source....
Unless of course there is still a review system, and you misrepresented the page.
Biologists aren't late, they're concerned with not making their community a complete laughing stock. There is a small but motivated horde of people out there waiting to pour out their papers on how evolution is impossible, homeopathy works, germs don't exist, vaccines kill children and do nothing to stop disease and a dozen other piles of bullshit that range from annoying to dangerous. Any sort of open review or non review journal will become a quack journal in two months max. Why would anyone want to do that to themselves?
Kahuna Burger
Uh, I think folks are missing some fundamental points. The Scientific Method completely negates any need for Peer Review.
[flame on]its hard to "miss" a point thats completely wrong, now isn't it. [flame off]
The point of peer review is to confirm that the scientific method was actually followed. Anyone can say that their methodology was sound, and some of them will lie. SM on an honor system is pretty well as useless as no SM.
Hacking academia is not entirely unknown to happen, even *with* peer review...
And people dying in fires is not unknown even with fire departments. Therefore fire depatrments are bad/unneccassary. Think about it.
Peer review is totally neccassary, unless you want to push voodoo science. Then its bad.
Kahuna Burger
There should be some kind of registration process so some 12 year old kiddy can't submit a journel on UFO study and get all his friends to rate it up. The registration won't stop that, but most kiddies won't bother going through a registration to screw with a website.
But a bunch of creationist adults will devote 5 hours a day every day to doing just that, but with papers sufficiently well written that they seem scientific to a casual reader. And all the sudden, you have a bunch of "peer reviewed" highly rated anti evolution creationist BS* sitting on a respected journals lap. NO WAY!
And don't even tell me that the negitive ratings from all the good scientists will ballance it out. Even if they suspect its BS, a decent scientist will not moderate something down until she has taken the time to look it over and check the methodology to make sure she isn't rejecting it out of hand because she has tons of experience that the end result has to be wrong. As for "peer reviewers are biased against some conclusions", sure you get biased after the 20th time the same conclusion turns out to be supported by sloppy work, wishful thinking and all out lies, but you still check the methodology to see which one it was this time.
But the point is that honest work takes longer than lies. Debunking lies takes more time and effort than presenting them. Moderating down conclusions that contridict your holy book takes less time than the propperly designed research it took to come to them. And the people who care the most about spreading lies are often devoting most of their lives to it, while the people most motivated and qualified to correct those lies are doing other possitive research and don't have the luxury of playing wack-a-mole with the latest psuedoscientific voodoo all day.
Nutshell: TRUTH IS HARDER. In an open marketplace of ideas managed by libertarian principles and voted on democratically, the truth will get its ass kicked. I'm sorry that we don't live in that perfect world where "the solution to bad information is good information, not supression" or "the truth will out" or any of those other nice thoughts with no basis in reality. Really sorry.
*and just to not pick only on the biggest target, lets not forget perpetual motion, psychic healing, ESP, alien visitation, racial infer/super-iority, gender work from both sides of the fence, conspiracy theories, power lines cause cancer, soil theory, homeopathy, dowsing, ok just put "Flim Flam" table of contents here....
Kahuna Burger
Well, no, not really. The whole idea in a peer-reviewed scientific journal is that the people performing the editing are experts in the field (ie peers of the person/people submitting the article for publication), not employees of the company which publishes the journal.
.health domain) have been lambasted here as "censorship". So the idea that /. is attacking the important process of peer review is not unprecedented.
There's no suggestion of doing away with peer review.
well, except that the opening blurb distinctly talks about a bunch of peer reviewers quiting. The implication that they are "the middleman" is obviously wrong if you apply outside knowlege to what's said, but not from a plain reading.
The article could have been far more clear about what the good thing about this is (putting pressure on the journal to provide free downloads through their resignations) instead of implying that lossing the peer review staff of a major journal is a good thing.
The final problem of course, is that peer review IS a middleman coming between scientists and their readers. It's a GOOD middleman for just about everyone involved in science education and advocacy, but similar review/endorsement plans (such as the WHO proposal for a approval based
Kahuna Burger
What I feel we need here in our town is not more cameras, they haven't done a bloody damn thing.
Except of course that you said yourself that you moved to the area AFTER they were installed. And since you are citing purely annecdotal expereince, this conclusion is quite simply pulled out of your ass.
Crimes happen, so the anticrime action has failed! Guess we better get rid of all police, cause they haven't elliminated all crime either! And screw Ralph Nader, everything he's ever done in consumer protection is useless, cause I still know someone who got badly hurt in a car crash!
Look, I don't know what effect cameras have had on crime, and from the looks of it, neither does anyone else here. If someone knows of an actual, scientificly and statistically valid study, PLEASE post it and maybe we can have some idea what we're talking about. But this post tells us absolutely nothing about the overall effect of public survelience on crime rates. Nothing.
Kahuna Burger
A) read what you quoted again. Most people don't want to go to jail. In the heat of the moment, or when putting your own convinience before public saftey, there are things you might do if you could get away with it that the very fact of a watcher will prevent. Stop light cameras don't stop people from running red lights because they think a cop wil zip out of nowhere and block the intersection, they stop them the same way a cop on the corner would - they know they'll get in trouble.
/. egotistical paranoia jumped on it. (oh, I'm so amazingly unique and special, and I think this is looking for anything outside a norm (cause I didn't read the damn article) so it will pick me out as special and arrest me. Its trying to induce conformity!)
B) In terms of terrorism (which I believe the poster you were addressing was not talking about), the situation is different. If its a suicide bombing, going to jail is no big deal. But there are plenty of ways that cameras can still help. Quite a while ago we discussed a technology right here that tracked people as unique dots and found reliable patterns for such things as shoplifting, robbing a car in a garage, OR leaving a bomb someplace. At the time, typical
In fact, it was a fairly logical theory that had nothing to do with conformity, AND has the advantage over human observers of judging people by their actual actions instead of focusing on ethnicity or dress.
Kahuna Burger
I like it, too. But, I think that the biggest problem is how close the Klingon homeworld is. If it's 4 days (!) away at warp 4, then it's just hours away with "modern" (TNG) warp technology.
Is it REALLY their homeworld? I didn't see the show in question, so I don't know how readily it can be said that this was their homeworld in reality, rather than this being put forth to the crew.
I'm also kinda annoyed that the doctor has to be a brand-new species--- could have used one of the throwaways from earlier shows. (Or did they?)
If its a "brand new" species, its possible that by the end of the show it culd well be an "extinct" species. If they were planning an extinction storyline (ala the ?macaw? episode in B5) they couldn't very well use a known one.
Its realisticly possible for species to show up in "earlier" episodes before the finalization of the federation who eventual die, who are represented only by explorers who go back home with negitive reports and never come back, or even whose race makes a decision to remove themselves from the federation and the greater interstellar community - voluntarily planet bound isolationism would not be interfered with once the prime directive was in place.
Anyway, continuity will be fun to watch.
kahuna burger
Putting Mr. Nimoy aside for a moment...what about the actual Spock character? Is he old enough to fit into the time frame of this new show? Sure, he'd be younger...I'd recommend the guy who played Methos on the Highlander series to play a younger Mr. Spock.
Given that Spock's human mother was still arround and relitively healthy in TOS, I doubt Spock could be that old. The charecter of his father could appear as a young abassodor or staff to one, in all likelyhood...
And while theoretically there is always Q, any episode with him would ahve to end with wiped minds, etc, to maintain any continuity.
Of course, there is one more charecter we know has the capacity to appear... Guinan.
Kahuna Burger
Mark Lenard (1927-1996) isn't just too old, he's too dead. Were you thinking of somebody else?
If thats the actor who played Sarek, no. In 1996 I was graduating college and rarely read the paper and didn't have a TV. He wasn't enough of an icon for me to have heard through the grapevine.
Kahuna Burger
My question is this: since Vulcans live so long, is there any chance that Mr. Spock could make a cameo appearance on Enterprise? I have no idea how old Mr. Spock is, so I could be way off base.
The actor is WAY too old now. They had to do a lot of stuff to explain the fact that the actor aged at the same rate as the rest of the crew, remmeber ST III? He would have been a teenager in that time if alive at all. The actor who plays Sarek is probably to old to appear as a young vulcan ambassedor as well. Sorry.
Kahuna Burger
Mmm, apart from the episode where beardy Riker pulls some some deviant "chick" from an androgynous culture. Who then, admittedly, gets brainwashed back into compliance (much like the Federation do with their sinister sounding "re-education camps").
I think thats kinda the poit. there were some deviant individuals, to one overarcing planetwide culture. Its not like there were other cultures on the planet which accepted male/female roles to a greater or lesser extent - the idea that she could go elsewhere amoung her own kind was never brought up.
To some extent, I see this as lazy but resonable when dealing with highly advanced worlds. If everyone can go half way around the world for work in the morning, there will likely be a homogenizing effect by the time they have spaceflight and such. (note that in B5, the "older" races were much more homoginous than the upstart humans). When they do this with non spacefaring worlds, I think its just plain lazy.
Kahuna Burger
Would I love to see a B5-style story done in the Star Trek universe? Hell yeah. I'd love to see a B5-style story run in any universe -- it was a great example of a style of storytelling which we're drastically lacking.
Funny thing is, now that the 4 season arc* is over, I'd now like to see a star trek or even outer limits type story in the B5 universe. The grand theme was great, now lets see an anthology type show delving into the little moments in the less explored areas, organizations and charecters.
*don't even try to tell me there were five seasons, I can't HEAR YOU LALALALA!
Kahuna Burger
Who says? We know the US wasn't completely destroyed, and in "The Voyage Home" Kirk doesn't say "I'm from North America", he says "I'm from Iowa."
:> )
But that doesn't nessaccarily mean anything. A united Germany citizen, a soviet East German, a pre WWII german citizen and a pre german unification Prussian could have all said "I'm from Berlin". It wouldn't mean the idea of prussian nationality would be relevant in 2001.
There may be a United Earth, but the US would certainly have been a major player in creating it, and a major source of it's early funding.
Thats just ego talking. The US could have been shattered into multiple warring states and had several of them break and reunite between the start of the alternate Star Trek time line and the start of the federation. Its like a British citizen durring colonial times contemplating the idea of a future UN like body and saying "The British Empire would certainly be a major player in creating it and a major source of its funding...." not thinking that by the time such a thing came to pass, large chunks of what they now think of as the British Empire would never dream of calling themselves Brits. (though they would still say "I'm from Pennsylvania".
I should really be doing something more constructive with my brain....
Kahuna Burger
Amongst the numerous inflammatory examples used in the editorial was this:
frankly the rest are pretty bad too. A museum near to one of the attacks takes a piece of art off the walls with full intent to put it back later. Oh no, thats so evil. A school has the guts to stick with its policy against religious prostylization on school grounds and thats a new scarey restriction on rights? The Flag Desecration ammendment has been on the table since I was in high school.
And funny how no news network I have heard has had anything to say about the "confiscation" of film. They take those things pretty seriously. An exageration of a specific incident? Putting the ol evil spin on authorities taking film so they could have as much of a record for their investigation as possible?
No example or even combination of examples given in this little rant actually justifies the appocolyptic tone. So if he tries to talk about some future truely disturbing developments, it will be hard not to assume that he is exagerating and embellishing them as well. Haven't these guys ever heard of the boy who cried "wolf"?
Kahuna Burger
Most folks first got an idea as to how gruesome war can be by seeing actual battle footage on the Nightly News. Their reactions and protests were natural as far as not wanting things to be so gruesome. Also in this regard, alot of folks grow up never really making a connection between the meat in the supermarkets and the limbs and bodies of creatures they see on the farm.
hmmm... Americans were pretty insulated from the reality of war as other generations or countries haven't been, prior to TV images, I guess. I know what you mean about the cow vs beef thing too, though I didn't suffer from it as much as many of my peers. Point taken.
Kahuna Burger
There was a black market in 1984 and Smith paid for a rental room in cash (IIRC). If you could quote a section of the book that speaks of the elimination of cash I'd love to hear it, I admit I haven't read it in a while.
And yes, frankly you sound completely paranoid to me. If there is an actual proposal, and you have a rational objection to it, just give it. Exagerating a proposal and then dismissing it because it reminds you of an old sci fi book is not compelling. They used the metric system in 1984, is that evil too?
Kahuna Burger
Got into? Funny, I didn't think that The History of the Peloponisian(sp) War was written in or about the second half of the 20th century, but hey, who knows....
There have been codes of moral war actions probably as long as there have been wars, and "realistic" thinkers trying to tear them down just as long. It failed in ancient Athens, you aren't going to convince us just by pretending its a new idea you're going against.
Kahuna Burger
Well, considering that we're talking about one of the guys who formed a government, clearly it cannot be as absolute as its treated here. Living in a society is all about giving up freedoms for safety. More importantly, its about giving up some freedoms for other freedoms. most people I've seen slinging that tired old franklin quote leave off both "essential" before liberty and "temporary" before freedom. They confound our basic civil and human rights with their ability to drive as fast as they want or never ever be recorded even in a public place. Calling limits on encrypted email or traffic light cameras that are only triggered by you breaking the law an assualt on "essential liberties" is a slap in the face for those who are still fighting for truely essential rights and freedoms, and just makes the speaker look like an overprivileged american with no sense of history.
And for the record on this topic, I've never understood why so many folks see freedom and safety as opposites that must somehow ballance off each other in a zero sum game. If you are unsafe, you have no meaningful freedom - if you have no freedom, your safety is illusionary and at another's whim. We are not safe in a police state OR free in one overwhellemed by terrorist attack.
The only people in this country right now in danger of losing essential freedoms are those of arab descent and arabic imigrants. (who were given a bit of lip service before you focused on the all important email encryption. sheesh) The rest of us run risks (based on current proposals) that range between being inconvienieced and making trades between different kinds of freedom. Ben Franklin is not in need of invocation.
Feel free to let us know about actual proposals that threaten our essential liberties if any come up.
Kahuna Burger