Well... there's the trick. That's when keeping up a strong face is the most important. I really feel like Slashdot is considered a sanitized version of 4chan these days as far as social forums go: poisonous, but not miserable enough to descend to the point that clever and ridiculous trolls are its life's blood. If the staff cared about anything long-term I have a feeling more care would've been taken. There was a time when the site was ranked higher than #1,734 by Alexa!
There was a paper about a year or so ago that posited that cancer was actually a different strategy for multicellular life, a default state of being that more structured organisms evolved from by taming it and poking with developmental genes to direct what happens. I believe the notion came out of analysing fossils of the earliest known (and definitely unstructured) multicellular life and deciding that the organisation in it resembled a tumour. It's funny—we name so many oncogenes tumour suppressors because that's the function they appear to provide in a medical context—and lo and behold, that's not only their function, but actually their purpose, a label that's rarely usable in genome-wide studies.
It's a bit of a downer to the idea of eliminating cancer from the genome forever, though, if you take the mindset that we're actually tamed cancer and not fundamentally structured organisms.
There is a plus side, however. The defects we experience during cancer can't actually evolve to keep pace with us—everything they do is deleterious to survival, and there's no way to place a positive selection pressure on it unless you breed for it. Once we figure out a good set of techniques to tackle cancers in a general sense, it'll probably be millions of years of evolution (or at least a few dozen horrible chemical contaminants) before the genome has drifted enough that novel mutations can arise that are sufficiently different from the ones we experience now to actually manifest.
There is! We call it the big blue room. Some people say it has no ceiling. I scoff at them.
...personally, I vote for mandatory rural daycare, followed by kindergarten in an industrial district, and so on. By retirement you may live in a glass bubble.
I did think about making the (extremely obvious) remark that if one is capable of handling that question, one already has access to Nature and is well-acquainted with why there's a "paywall", and why the Ottawa Citizen is not even remotely the appropriate venue for discussing hypoxia pathways or translation initiation factors—but that does look slightly worse on one's permanent record, and it burns up the opportunity for someone else to come along and have the question answered in a more serious light.
And to be honest, Slashdot doesn't need more snarkery. One of its greatest assets is its plenitude of technically intelligent and experienced comment-posters, and that's a really wonderful resource for a community to have. Cynicism can do little but poison the site's ability to attract new users—and there have been lots of times I wish I could hit someone on the head (often myself) for unnecessary posturing, taking up a position of authority obviously beyond the extent of his or her knowledge, or responding to sloppy critique with an outright attack. Being unexpectedly kind can get jerkwads to shut up, too—and it's more likely to make the impressionable newbie or lurker contribute positively in the future, rather than emulating (limp-wristedly) the venom of others.
It's actually described rather well in the abstract of the journal article. What level of detail were you hoping for? I might be able to quench your curiosity.
I think the obvious correlation between piracy and global warming is clearly the bigger issue here. It has not been proven conclusively that there has been a causal relation between piracy and the music industry!
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with anything of Riemann's work beyond his sums, so I can't really comment on the subject matter from the position of an expert. What cursory research I have done on Barbour suggests his theories are now getting more attention. (Still, I'm a little troubled by the statement that you felt reading Einstein was unproductive—one of the few things I do definitely know about theoretical physics is that his work is considered absolutely essential.)
You're correct there's a distinction between a decision to leave academia and trouble getting published, but it still means that the theory hasn't been subjected to criticism with the same rigour as one that has been published.
Somehow I don't think we're exhaustively on the same page here. That's just a summary of the article—in practice the web is as full of bugs and dirt as anything else. Wikipedia notes that Dr. Barbour's theory of timeless physics is considered controversial, and the fact that he stopped publishing academically in the late sixties suggests that his work may not have been put through rigorous critique. If anything what you're saying highlights the greatest danger of the web: it becomes trivial to avoid critical analysis of what you're looking at if it makes you uncomfortable, and it's hard to be certain of the authoritativeness of a given statement.
Definitely not. In that sense, it's very predictably naive. I mean, you can trust me on it or RTFA, your choice.:) If only NYTimes had a non-paywalled, publicly-accessible comments section so we could tell them...
Since you're our resident first-poster for this article you're forgiven for not having RTFAed.:) The article actually sings the praises of comments sections in their ability to dissect evidence more efficiently than one or a handful of time-constrained professionals, points out how similar annotations in old books gave rise to the first dictionaries, argues that we need to treat 'comments' sections more respectfully as a result (and call them perhaps 'glosses', borrowing the term used for said mediaeval–Renaissance marginalia), and then insinuates that the original article was undoubtedly in error, particularly since the bird has been "sighted" very several very convenient times in the past when conservationists' efforts were frustrated.
Sure there is. The best part is that there are so many different standards to choose from—and in practice they're all ignored. Just like any other standard.
Nice guess: "General director of the National Police Frederic Pechenard stated in November 2009 that Hicheur planned to attack a base of the National Defence in Annecy, which harbours the 27eme bataillon de chasseurs alpins, involved in Afghanistan." (Wikipedia.)
In short, it looks like he was a scientist who hated the government, not someone bent on destroying the accomplishments of western civilization.
Interestingly, the BBC article calls CERN "Cern" as though it were a person. To whom do we address our complaints?
In his defence (if you're even making a snide remark at him; I'm not really clear) he's donated millions to public works in the country. I suspect if more of the commentators here had RTFAed, they would be a little kinder.
I hate to break it to you, but that mentality is not evolutionary successful. Humans have evolved to become the dominant organism on this planet. Our ability to balance personal and social needs is what has gotten us here. And because there will always be people who take more than they give, at least some of that social obligation will have to be forced on people through contracts and laws. Making people behave responsibility if they have been trusted with important duties—such as education—is one of the most important demands people should place on their governments and on each other.
So, sure: if you don't want people to interfere with your life, simply stay far, far away from theirs. This solution works equally well for societal and interpersonal dilemmas. It's not all bad; maybe you'll come back later with something more to contribute.
That's not to say laws and policies don't overdo things, but this is not exactly an example of that; it's one of the most basic and important duties of a society to control its governments' representatives. Perhaps this principle doesn't manifest perfectly in the literal text of this policy, but it could've been a lot worse, and now that the regulation is on the books it can be debated and revised to make it a better tool. Save your ire for the really stupid things, like surveillance and oil wars. This is essentially an anti-corruption law, scaled down. Its purpose is to keep some of the most powerful people in our society from affecting some of the most vulnerable. It's exactly the kind of policy that should be applied to politicians to prevent them from interacting with lobbyists.
Huh? Education of children is a social responsibility because without someone being responsible for it, society would collapse. Other social responsibilities include helping those in need, defending from invaders, and keeping living and working areas from overflowing with trash. All of these tasks (well, garbage collection less so) bestow trust on the individuals carrying them out (the ability to warp childrens' minds, resources to distribute to the poor, weapons to fend off enemies, the means to deposit garbage at a given location, etc.) The only alternative to trusting these people to carry out their duties altruistically (or, according to Objectivism, for the benefit of their society) is to mandate that they must not misuse their positions for personal or other reasons.
It's an appeal to evolutionary success—which is a perfectly valid thing to appeal to. Good education is not bread and circuses by any stretch of the imagination; it prevents that.
Generally you need to police behaviour in two cases: (a) when the people being hired have no sense of social responsibility or (b) when the hierarchy over their heads is so oppressive, bureaucratic, and unloved that they resent it and do not believe the importance of its image exceeds their desires. Guess which one is more likely to apply to people who deliberately chose to enter a career that's basically nothing but social responsibility?
Predictably, this describes almost everything in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Well... there's the trick. That's when keeping up a strong face is the most important. I really feel like Slashdot is considered a sanitized version of 4chan these days as far as social forums go: poisonous, but not miserable enough to descend to the point that clever and ridiculous trolls are its life's blood. If the staff cared about anything long-term I have a feeling more care would've been taken. There was a time when the site was ranked higher than #1,734 by Alexa!
There was a paper about a year or so ago that posited that cancer was actually a different strategy for multicellular life, a default state of being that more structured organisms evolved from by taming it and poking with developmental genes to direct what happens. I believe the notion came out of analysing fossils of the earliest known (and definitely unstructured) multicellular life and deciding that the organisation in it resembled a tumour. It's funny—we name so many oncogenes tumour suppressors because that's the function they appear to provide in a medical context—and lo and behold, that's not only their function, but actually their purpose, a label that's rarely usable in genome-wide studies.
It's a bit of a downer to the idea of eliminating cancer from the genome forever, though, if you take the mindset that we're actually tamed cancer and not fundamentally structured organisms.
There is a plus side, however. The defects we experience during cancer can't actually evolve to keep pace with us—everything they do is deleterious to survival, and there's no way to place a positive selection pressure on it unless you breed for it. Once we figure out a good set of techniques to tackle cancers in a general sense, it'll probably be millions of years of evolution (or at least a few dozen horrible chemical contaminants) before the genome has drifted enough that novel mutations can arise that are sufficiently different from the ones we experience now to actually manifest.
There is! We call it the big blue room. Some people say it has no ceiling. I scoff at them.
...personally, I vote for mandatory rural daycare, followed by kindergarten in an industrial district, and so on. By retirement you may live in a glass bubble.
I did think about making the (extremely obvious) remark that if one is capable of handling that question, one already has access to Nature and is well-acquainted with why there's a "paywall", and why the Ottawa Citizen is not even remotely the appropriate venue for discussing hypoxia pathways or translation initiation factors—but that does look slightly worse on one's permanent record, and it burns up the opportunity for someone else to come along and have the question answered in a more serious light.
And to be honest, Slashdot doesn't need more snarkery. One of its greatest assets is its plenitude of technically intelligent and experienced comment-posters, and that's a really wonderful resource for a community to have. Cynicism can do little but poison the site's ability to attract new users—and there have been lots of times I wish I could hit someone on the head (often myself) for unnecessary posturing, taking up a position of authority obviously beyond the extent of his or her knowledge, or responding to sloppy critique with an outright attack. Being unexpectedly kind can get jerkwads to shut up, too—and it's more likely to make the impressionable newbie or lurker contribute positively in the future, rather than emulating (limp-wristedly) the venom of others.
It's actually described rather well in the abstract of the journal article. What level of detail were you hoping for? I might be able to quench your curiosity.
Having been there, I can say conclusively that you have not answered the grandparent's second question. :)
How about history?
I think the obvious correlation between piracy and global warming is clearly the bigger issue here. It has not been proven conclusively that there has been a causal relation between piracy and the music industry!
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with anything of Riemann's work beyond his sums, so I can't really comment on the subject matter from the position of an expert. What cursory research I have done on Barbour suggests his theories are now getting more attention. (Still, I'm a little troubled by the statement that you felt reading Einstein was unproductive—one of the few things I do definitely know about theoretical physics is that his work is considered absolutely essential.)
You're correct there's a distinction between a decision to leave academia and trouble getting published, but it still means that the theory hasn't been subjected to criticism with the same rigour as one that has been published.
Somehow I don't think we're exhaustively on the same page here. That's just a summary of the article—in practice the web is as full of bugs and dirt as anything else. Wikipedia notes that Dr. Barbour's theory of timeless physics is considered controversial, and the fact that he stopped publishing academically in the late sixties suggests that his work may not have been put through rigorous critique. If anything what you're saying highlights the greatest danger of the web: it becomes trivial to avoid critical analysis of what you're looking at if it makes you uncomfortable, and it's hard to be certain of the authoritativeness of a given statement.
What?
Betteridge's Law of Headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".
For the record, the article concludes that Da Vinci's drawings were better in some respects than the 19th century editions of Gray's Anatomy.
Definitely not. In that sense, it's very predictably naive. I mean, you can trust me on it or RTFA, your choice. :) If only NYTimes had a non-paywalled, publicly-accessible comments section so we could tell them...
Since you're our resident first-poster for this article you're forgiven for not having RTFAed. :) The article actually sings the praises of comments sections in their ability to dissect evidence more efficiently than one or a handful of time-constrained professionals, points out how similar annotations in old books gave rise to the first dictionaries, argues that we need to treat 'comments' sections more respectfully as a result (and call them perhaps 'glosses', borrowing the term used for said mediaeval–Renaissance marginalia), and then insinuates that the original article was undoubtedly in error, particularly since the bird has been "sighted" very several very convenient times in the past when conservationists' efforts were frustrated.
Sure there is. The best part is that there are so many different standards to choose from—and in practice they're all ignored. Just like any other standard.
Nice guess: "General director of the National Police Frederic Pechenard stated in November 2009 that Hicheur planned to attack a base of the National Defence in Annecy, which harbours the 27eme bataillon de chasseurs alpins, involved in Afghanistan." (Wikipedia.)
In short, it looks like he was a scientist who hated the government, not someone bent on destroying the accomplishments of western civilization.
Interestingly, the BBC article calls CERN "Cern" as though it were a person. To whom do we address our complaints?
"Unreliable" is a dirty word in data mining. You mod yourself down this instant!
In his defence (if you're even making a snide remark at him; I'm not really clear) he's donated millions to public works in the country. I suspect if more of the commentators here had RTFAed, they would be a little kinder.
I hate to break it to you, but that mentality is not evolutionary successful. Humans have evolved to become the dominant organism on this planet. Our ability to balance personal and social needs is what has gotten us here. And because there will always be people who take more than they give, at least some of that social obligation will have to be forced on people through contracts and laws. Making people behave responsibility if they have been trusted with important duties—such as education—is one of the most important demands people should place on their governments and on each other.
So, sure: if you don't want people to interfere with your life, simply stay far, far away from theirs. This solution works equally well for societal and interpersonal dilemmas. It's not all bad; maybe you'll come back later with something more to contribute.
That's not to say laws and policies don't overdo things, but this is not exactly an example of that; it's one of the most basic and important duties of a society to control its governments' representatives. Perhaps this principle doesn't manifest perfectly in the literal text of this policy, but it could've been a lot worse, and now that the regulation is on the books it can be debated and revised to make it a better tool. Save your ire for the really stupid things, like surveillance and oil wars. This is essentially an anti-corruption law, scaled down. Its purpose is to keep some of the most powerful people in our society from affecting some of the most vulnerable. It's exactly the kind of policy that should be applied to politicians to prevent them from interacting with lobbyists.
Okay.
Huh? Education of children is a social responsibility because without someone being responsible for it, society would collapse. Other social responsibilities include helping those in need, defending from invaders, and keeping living and working areas from overflowing with trash. All of these tasks (well, garbage collection less so) bestow trust on the individuals carrying them out (the ability to warp childrens' minds, resources to distribute to the poor, weapons to fend off enemies, the means to deposit garbage at a given location, etc.) The only alternative to trusting these people to carry out their duties altruistically (or, according to Objectivism, for the benefit of their society) is to mandate that they must not misuse their positions for personal or other reasons.
Yeah, there's the trick. Planning includes inviting. Probably a minor cultural difference in there.
It's an appeal to evolutionary success—which is a perfectly valid thing to appeal to. Good education is not bread and circuses by any stretch of the imagination; it prevents that.
...or rather, "oh wait, I can't invite you."
The part you're missing is "Hey, do you want to come to your classmate's birthday? Oh wait, you can't, because I'm a teacher at another school."
Generally you need to police behaviour in two cases: (a) when the people being hired have no sense of social responsibility or (b) when the hierarchy over their heads is so oppressive, bureaucratic, and unloved that they resent it and do not believe the importance of its image exceeds their desires. Guess which one is more likely to apply to people who deliberately chose to enter a career that's basically nothing but social responsibility?
Predictably, this describes almost everything in the US.