Certainly the idea of becoming wealthy for an hour's worth of music that's basically aping what everyone else is doing would never have occurred to any composer you can name.
Sure it did. You evidently don't know anything about Handel, to take one major example. There were composer wars going on in London in the early to mid 1700s where there were new operas every month or even every week, and composers often explicitly STOLE tunes from the opera house across the street to draw in customers. Handel was deeply involved in such things (as were a bunch of other composers who have been forgotten today -- Bononcini, etc.). A good opera production might not be enough to make a composer rich, but a few such hits might.
Of course, you're somewhat right that music history tends to ignore most such composers; music history prefers to focus on the artistic genius working away unnoticed, rather than the composers who were actually writing popular music in their day. But there are some other examples of commonly known composers for example, most any light Italian opera composers (Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, etc.) who were churning out new works every month or so in Italy in the 19th century. These composers often joked about how easy it was to throw together some new music. Plots were recycled again and again with little variations. No equivalent to modern pop music? I think we've found something close....
I agree with you as far as that there aren't good modern equivalents.
But beyond that, you're pretty much wrong. (I have more than one degree in music history.) You've bought into the whole 19th-century romanticized notion of the composer as transcendental genius who creates for the sake of creating.
Bullshit.
There certainly were composers who did what they wanted to do, and after the Beethoven myth had been created, lots more wanted to just "create" as an "artiste" or whatever.
But Bach was hired to practice a craft. So were most musicians of his age, as they had been for generations before. With few exceptions, they were hired by patrons and required to do very specific things, including writing specific kinds of pieces for specific occasions -- it wasn't as though patrons were just generous enough to throw money at composers who were "driven to create" whatever they wanted to.
Yes, there are a few exceptional cases, and composers who accumulated fame often attracted a number of secondary patrons who might just give them money or a pension. But the primary income of the vast majority of composers came from someone who was paying them to do a specific job by writing specific pieces, etc. If Bach didn't provide cantatas, organ music, etc. for services each week, he'd be fired. It's as simple as that.
As for Chopin, he was very competitive when it came to signing up publishers to get his works published. Relationships to publishers were increasingly important in the late 18th and 19th century and beyond. By the mid (and particularly late) 19th century, there was a huge market for upper-middle-class amateurs who wanted to buy the latest songs or transcriptions of orchestral pieces for piano. While many composers fought to have their works performed, just as many were worried about earning money through publication.
I'm not saying that it was equivalent to a modern "commercial endeavor" in every way. But by the time the patronage system (which required composers as employees with specified compositional duties) started dying in the mid-18th century, the music publishing business was ramping up, which is where composers made their money until recordings started appearing in the 20th century.
In sum, though there were exceptions, and we may romanticize the historical picture of it, the vast majority of composers in fact were trying to make it in a kind of "job," either as a craftsman or something akin to a writer trying to sell his wares to a publisher.
As someone with a degree in Music History, I can assure you you're wrong.
As someone who actually knows something about music history beyond what you read in introductory textbooks, I can assure you that you're wrong.
So, I think it's too strong to say Kennedy has only found very approximate correlation". We need to know more about just how he's determining his lines.
I agree we need to know about how Kennedy is determining the lines. And I appreciate your calculations, which do provide some perspective.
On the other hand, it may still be a "very approximate correlation." Searching for hidden order like this is always dangerous, because there are so many possible organizational schemes that might be considered. Why a 12-fold division? Apparently because his estimates of total lines came close to numbers that are easily divisible by 12. All the stuff about the Pythagoreans is interesting, but I've never heard that 12 was a particularly important number to them -- 10 (and the tetraktys) sure, perhaps numbers from 1 to 6 for other symbolism, but 12 is less important number overall.
And then there's the stuff about harmonic theory which appears to be a bunch of junk. He doesn't cite his sources, but I've read a lot of Greek music theory, and I don't remember anyone (definitely not the Pythagoreans) going through and comparing ratios 1:12, 2:12, 3:12, etc. up to 12:12 as Kennedy uses for his "scale" (which is definitely not a scale, whatever it is). The weirdness in that section alone is enough for me to question the rest of his conclusions.
But perhaps more importantly, we need to avoid the "Bible Code" problem. Of course, Kennedy isn't suggesting a code, but he does claim to uncover a hidden order. The problem with the Bible Code is that there are many seemingly improbable patterns that appear to occur in data (even random data) merely due to chance, particularly if you have enough possible types of patterns to look for. Add in the subjective quality of some of Kennedy's other claims in the paper (where important tuning points occur in an argument, sections that are "negative" lining up with unharmonious numbers, etc.), and it becomes even more difficult to evaluate a claim. What determines which points in the text are the most important, the turning points, the "negative" arguments, etc. You find the dialogue that seems to line up to your scheme closest in a more objective way (like the Symposium here), and you present that as the primary evidence. But chances are that at least one of the dialogues would end up with some sort of significant thing occurring at a few points in a 12-fold division.
The only way to test such an ambiguous methodology would be to have someone with nothing invested in the theory try to do a similar thing with a 10-fold division or a 17-fold division or whatever. See if they can come up with some "interesting" correlations for some of the dialogues. Then compare it to Kennedy's work. If the 12-fold division really seems more significant for more works, maybe there is something there.
So perhaps there is a small correlation here. But the question is whether the correlation is statistically significant, and given the ambiguous nature of the methodology, you'd need to test a lot of very broad possibilities before concluding that this breakdown is significant. I don't see any evidence in the article that he considered such issues, apart from the "control group" of the pseudo-Platonic writings. That's the beginning of a case, but even if true that only demonstrates that the total length of the dialogues follows a certain pattern, not evidence for an elaborate internal 12-fold division in each work.
You've gotten so many nasty replies that I just wanted to say that your perspective is refreshing to hear. Is it "bigoted" or not? I'm not going to judge you either way, and shame on the rest of the replies for doing that.
You have a legitimate viewpoint, and I suspect you're absolutely right -- if gay marriage is approved now, it just makes it harder for the next (and probably smaller, less vocal) group to get recognition and get their rights.
When I see the responses to your comment, I'm reminded of people who complain about those who vote for a third party or have an alternative view that isn't part of the mainstream, and they act on it. We're supposedly a country that prides itself on free speech, and it would seem that free thinking would be allowed too.
To all those other hateful judgmental replies -- just because someone has their own agenda and doesn't want to join some popular group-think mentality because of rational (and in this case, perhaps even noble) reasons doesn't make them a bigot. It makes them a free-thinker. Want him to join your cause? Study his arguments and give him a rational reason for setting aside his convictions to join your team.
Just calling anyone a bigot, particularly when they have thought through an issue much more than most people, is not going to win friends or help anyone's cause.
Live in italy or mexico for 6 months, and you'll get some perspective.
Indeed. I second the fact about Italy. People complaining about the USPS have no idea how bad it can be.
I lived in Rome for a while a couple years back. Just once, I went to the Italian post office. It was like the DMV, but worse. There must have been 100 people in there perhaps trying to get to 2-3 mail clerks -- total chaos. If I remember correctly, you had to get in "line" (actually a giant horde of people vaguely pushing in the same direction) to get a ticket, and then you waited about 45 minutes for someone to call your number, and if you had the wrong ticket, you had to start over. (In Italy, this sometimes meant that people got in shouting matches.) Usually when they'd call a number, no one would come up, presumably because they gave up and left.
And this was on a weekday morning. Oh, and even in Rome, all the branches except the central one closed by 2pm, I think.
I gave up after 20 minutes. I talked to a friend who successfully managed to mail a postcard after an hour under similar conditions at a different branch. He got the wrong ticket, because it wasn't clear what the tickets were for, but someone had mercy on him.
Important tip -- If you're ever in Rome and need to send a letter, mail from the Vatican post office. They are relatively efficient and mail seems to get out speedily (sending a postcard from Italy is like mailing something into a black hole). And if you go there in the morning before all the tourists get up, you won't even have to wait in line. (As a bonus, you can see St. Peter's before it's mobbed as well, which is a much more pleasant experience.)
By the way, if you'd argue that "IT is involved with systems based on clipboards and carbon copies," you might appreciate this, a recreated version of the first "help desk call":
It certainly is an IT problem. Taking a big picture view of IT, it includes such things as data integrity, security, disaster recovery. And it touches on all aspects of the systems architecture, from applications down to the sheet metal.
I'm not arguing that backup isn't an IT problem. I'm saying that if whether you are a high-tech organization with electronic records or a medieval church with paper records vulnerable to fire, you need to deal with backup. In other words, backup isn't a problem unique to IT.
One could even argue that IT is involved with systems based on clipboards and carbon copies.
Well, one could, if one doesn't subscribe to the common definition of IT.
Yes, one could understand "information technology" to mean any technology dealing with information transfer, in which case, you're right. But that's not what IT typically means. Do a Google search on the term -- it generally has to do with computer, network infrastructure, etc. (I can't believe I'm saying this on Slashdot.)
While in this case, the problem may be similar, the fact that you didn't bother to make more than one copy of a microfiche when you created them from the original documents in the first place is not an "IT problem." It's just not considering the basic issue of redundancy -- a problem that has much broader applications than just IT.
'We are one fire, or one flood, or one spilled Starbucks coffee away from some of those records being lost or spoiled.'
This is not an IT problem. This is a basic information storage problem dealing with backup procedure. If you're a major organization and you don't have copies of your records, whether paper copies, microfiche copies (which seems to be the case here), or electronic ones, you're vulnerable.
Similarly, IT doesn't necessarily solve this problem. If you digitize all the records to a single server and don't make proper backups, you could still be one fire or flood (or even a coffee) away from losing the records.
(Btw, I do realize that original paper records may have some value as historical artifacts themselves. But those should be in an archive somewhere protected from floods, fires, and errant cups of coffee, while people accessing these records on a daily basis should be using copies, whether digital or microfiche or whatever.)
Sorry... I know this is carrying on a debate on a thread long dead, but I've been thinking a bit more about your reply.
The fetus's rights did not change. I'm asserting that a woman has a right as well - the right NOT to bear a child that is the result of rape. This right can be considered stronger than the right-to-life of the fetus.
Suppose the mother can't remember the conception. She apparently had sex with a friend, whom she respects and actually had been somewhat attracted to, and she assumes the sex was consensual, though she's a bit "sore." She finds out that she is pregnant, but she figures it's her fault. She also begins having horrible nightmares, but doesn't know the cause. She decides to go ahead and have the child, though it turns out to be a major burden to her and her life. She has also fallen into a depression, though the cause is unclear. Then, five years later, she discovers a video of the entire incident of the conception -- it turns out that her friend actually had drugged her and then forcibly raped her (the video shows her yelling for help, though uncoordinated enough from the drugs to resist). She is shocked, horrified, and now can barely look at her child, the result of a rape -- and all those nightmares she has had for years make sense now because of the internal psychological damage she was suffering.
If she has a "right NOT to bear a child that is the result of rape," does she now have the right kill the five-year-old child if she wishes? If not, why not? Again, assuming a pro-life position, the fetus had the same right to life that it has now. Your right of the mother's trumped that right during pregnancy. Why wouldn't it trump it now? She has clearly suffered psychological damage and will continue to suffer.
Many people say that health care should be a "right", but clearly they can't mean an inalienable right like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. After all, universal healthcare would be provided by the government, and surely rights must exist inherently?
I didn't respond to this before, but just to be clear, most ethicists claim that many rights come about as part of the "social contract" (or some variant thereof) -- that is, as a member of a particular society, you are owed certain things... a respect for your life, your liberty, etc. As part of that society, you may also have the right for the government not to unduly restrict your speech, your right to property, your right to practice your religion freely, your right not to be searched by government agents without cause, etc. Some of these rights only come about through the existence of government. (The very existence of "property" usually requires a government to recognize it, and Locke's original formulation was "life, liberty, and property," which the Declaration of Independence borrowed from.)
Some people also believe that we have a right to a minimal standard of living within a society, and society owes us that, which might involve assistance to provide a minimum amount of food, clothing, and perhaps healthcare. These are indeed thought (by some) to be the same sort of rights owed to us by society (or government or whatever) as a right not to be killed, a right to act freely in most cases, etc.
A right to life or liberty is pretty much meaningless without a society and a government to protect such rights. Some think that society may also owe its citizens a little more, which might include anything from a basic education to a minimal standard of healthcare. I'm not saying I agree with such positions, but those sort of "rights" aren't actually that different.
Her conclusions are perhaps surprising, but they do put an interesting light on the whole issue of granting a "right to life" to the fetus and what that actually means. I suppose if you agree with part of her argument, but reject the rest, you can come up with essentially a pro-life position with an abortion exception.
You have my argument exactly backwards. The fetus's rights did not change. I'm asserting that a woman has a right as well - the right NOT to bear a child that is the result of rape.
Ah, I get what you were saying. But to me this sounds like a very specific "right." Most of the time ethicists talk about "rights," they mean fairly broad concepts -- right to life, liberty, property, freedom of religion, press, etc.
To me, your "right NOT to bear a child that is the result of rape" is much more particular. It's as if a newspaper asserted freedom of the press to publish an article on a secret military base. The government then asserted national security reasons that the article shouldn't be published. But then the newspaper came along and asserted a "right to publish articles on secret military bases." To my mind, most people wouldn't think of that as a separate "right," but rather a specific case of "freedom of the press," which needs to be evaluated in that particular instance.
I guess what this boils down to is -- to me, your "right" should be seen as part of a general set of a mother's rights. What you're asserting is that the mother's rights somehow grow stronger when the fetus she is carrying is the result of rape. Whether or not we consider it a separate "right" is beside the point. The point is that somehow the mother's rights now trump a fetus's rights, whereas they don't in other scenarios.
All I'm saying is it makes me a bit nervous to claim that someone's rights can be overridden by the actions of a third party. Even if you claim the fetus's rights are the same, the mother's have been extended by the action of a third party so that they now trump the fetus's. That, to me, is a bad precedent.
I would probably agree with you if I knew this to be a common position.
If you read the news, every election there's major lobbying to change the Republican platform to include an exception for rape. This has been going on for decades. Clearly someone must think it's a reasonable position... either that, or it's just liberals hoping to gradually chip away at the conservative position.
Rather than casting rights as absolute, I think that most people assign a pecking order to rights. One right can be deemed more important and trump another, in other words. The concept of "rights" might not even really be appropriate.
Yeah, I think perhaps you're looking for a basis more in utilitarian ethics, rather than classical rights theory. Classical rights often do conflict, and there are ways to resolve such conflicts. But they generally conflict because they are dealing with very, very broad categories. Your specific "right" in this instance seems more like a rule to apply in a specific case than a "right."
Sorry to drone on, but it occurs to me that two people can be talking about rights, and yet be talking about two completely different concepts.
Not at all. This is perhaps the most important part of your argument, I think. That's probably the reason for a lot of the polemicism in the abortion debate -- people just talk past each other because their words actually mean different things.
Of course, there are gray areas, but to claim that the distinction between fact and fiction is too vague to achieve a decently neutral point of view in most cases is just pure sophistry.
It's difficult to believe that such a naive position has been modded to +5 insightful.
The problem isn't just about whether a particular atomic fact (person X did action Y on date Z) is true or false. All non-fiction writing of any sort has to choose which facts to report and to put them into a reasonable context.
For example, if a Wikipedia biography consisted solely of 73 factual instances of times that the subject of the article was drunk, they may rightly claim that such "facts" are true and verifiable, perhaps from the person's own diary backed up by a diary of a friend known to be reliable, etc. But then you find out that person is a famous scientist or some other very influential person who was not noteworthy for being a major drinker.
Such a "biography" consisting of solely reported instances of drinking might be "factual," but do you think it accurately portrays that person's life?
An encyclopedia article is usually about 3-4 times removed from atomic "facts." Those facts are generally collected by someone in some document (a reporter's notebook, someone's diary, data in a lab notebook, whatever) based on observations the writer thinks are worth collecting (there are lots of other facts never recorded, like what most people ate for breakfast on most mornings), then the person or some other person writes up some account based on those facts, which superimposes an interpretation on them. Often a third or even fourth person (often a scholar) comes along and writes a book or article interpreting a bunch of such accounts.
And then Wikipedia attempts to summarize the accepted positions of most scholars and experts in a given field on a particular subject. In order to create an "accurate" picture, you need to evaluate which interpretations are the most widely-accepted, which secondary and tertiary accounts and interpretations of facts are the most reliable, which facts are important enough to mention, which other facts aren't relevant to the topic, etc.
Even if we accept that certain sources are inherently reliable (like your example of a "fact" that is backed up by the New York Times), that doesn't say whether it's appropriate to include that fact in a particular article or what context is necessary for that fact so that a reader won't misinterpret its significance.
The only weighty argument against abortion I can see is that it is killing a person, or at least equivalent to that. So if there aren't grievous medical issues, abortion is then, according to this argument, murder of people who are merely inconvenient. How rape makes any difference to that is completely beyond me - rape may make the child especially inconvenient, but that cannot possibly justify murder.
Yeah, there's a whole lot of hooey surrounding the abortion issue. For the record, I think you're absolutely right that there's basically no logical defense for the pro-life with rape exception position. Either the fetus has rights or it doesn't. And if the fetus's rights allow it to make an assert them against the mother's and thus disallow abortion, those rights shouldn't disappear based on the identity or actions of its father, anymore than our rights should be affected by who our fathers are.
Of course, even if you assert that the fetus is a living person with full rights from conception, it actually doesn't automatically result in a pro-life position. Well-known philosopher Judith Thomson has shown that even if we grant the fetus the full rights of an adult, it doesn't necessarily follow that abortion should be outlawed. Her (pretty famous) article on the subject can be found here:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm
A person could easily see a fetus as a human being with a right to life AND see a woman as having a right to do with her own body as she pleases.
True. Most people do see it this way, and the issue comes down to who gets to assert those rights more strongly.
Forcing a woman to bring a rapist's baby to full-term could be argued to be a violation of her rights, which could be prioritized over those of the fetus.
I agree with the GP that this is crap reasoning. Either a fetus is violating her rights (or at least impinging on them) and thus can be reasonably aborted regardless of where it came from, or its right to live trumps hers in which case it needs to be protected. I don't see who the father is comes into it, unless you're going to assert that our rights depend on who our fathers are.
In a logical approach to the question of rights, we either grant the fetus rights or we don't. Those rights don't change depending on who its parents are. As for the woman's rights, they were violated by the rape itself. The fetus is an innocent. If such an innocent is seen to impinge on the rights of a woman in general, abortion should be allowed in general. But I take exception to the argument that an unwanted fetus somehow violates a woman's rights more because of who its father is or what he did.
What if the father didn't rape the mother, but during the pregnancy tortures the mother and also tortures and murders the mother's entire family. As horrible as rape is, surely we'd consider such actions to perhaps be equally horrible actions taken against the mother. But should such actions also give the mother a greater right to abort the fetus? Even if you say it should, at what point do we draw the line? How much emotional or physical or psychological damage to the mother does it take before she is justified in violating the rights of an innocent because of someone else's actions?
(Don't get me wrong -- I'm not arguing for a pro-life position. I'm questioning the logical validity of allowing an exception to a pro-life position.)
As you rightly conclude, though, these are emotional issues. That's the root of the problem here. But from a rational standpoint and a philosophical position on human rights, I don't see how being pro-life with a rape exception can possibly be considered a consistent position.
I'm also not convinced that you need an expert on a topic to evaluate which perspectives are worthy of inclusion. An encyclopeida is a secondary source; you always have to know who's claiming this-or-that before you can include it. So all you need is someone who can rate the significance of the source.
Yeah, the problem is that the more obscure the topic, the less people understand which sources are "significant," as you put it. This is particularly a problem in the humanities (even in major articles), where I've seen sources that are decades out of date used to support a major argument or pop books on a topic that get everything wrong. And since it's not like science and math articles where you can often point out that something is actually wrong, lengthy debates ensue because you don't have a clear expert.
And by the way, encyclopedias are usually tertiary sources. Primary sources are things like original manuscripts and documents, original research, etc. Secondary sources are written by scholars to sum up and interpret primary sources. Tertiary sources are reference works usually providing brief summaries of large bodies of knowledge. Evaluating primary sources directly is generally considered "original research" on Wikipedia and thus isn't allowed. So Wikipedia by definition is not a secondary source, but an even higher-level one.
Amen to this. Same experience. Haven't edited under an account since 2006, and only correct minor bits as anon these days, always with a comment on the talk page.
Even so, I get reverted frequently for no apparent reason and accused of all sorts of things just for writing polite comments questioning logic or sources or whatever on the talk pages.
Your examples indicate that there is a lot of bullshit going on behind the scenes
Yes there is.
If I wanted to edit articles in the earnest, I would definitely create an account, I would write intelligible comments explaining my edits
Why does one need to create an account to do this? You can make an edit and post an intelligible comment on the talk page explaining why it's necessary. Anyone can see the IP match up between the edit and your comment post. I've done this myself as an anonymous editor and stated my arguments logically with non-inflammatory comments, and yet still have been inexplicably reverted many times for no reason and even once had my IP reported as abusive. (I took it to the admins, and they ruled almost immediately that there was no evidence of abuse, and the user who placed the warning was sanctioned... but still, I don't have time for that crap.)
Back in the early days, I used to have an account. But after too many annoying discussions with the kind of territorial editors the GP talks about, I too abandoned most editing. Now, I only post a comment on a talk page when something's really wrong and occasionally make a minor edit when something is factually wrong, again always backing up edits with a comment on the talk page and even links to reliable sources indicating the error. About a third of the time I have done this (out of a few dozen times over the past 3-4 years), I've been reverted for no apparent reason... almost always by someone with a username.
Just because you have a username doesn't mean that you're a reasonable editor.
and get my way after a proper bureaucratic process. The end result is a better article, so it is totally worth the effort.
Not when the people involved in the bureaucracy are unreasonable. There are a couple admins I know who went around for years policing some subject areas they knew relatively little about and had a skewed perspective on. I know a couple of my friends (who are actually college faculty in those subject areas) who got into spats with the admins over basic facts of the field. In general, the oversight process tended to fail, and usually the articles just ended up with some sort of useless compromise after editors would just give up.
Even these days, there is a lot of information that is only available in physical books, academic articles only accessible for those with institutional accounts, etc. When confronted with such information against some bogus crap put together by an editor or even admin who has been around for a long time guarding his territory, the overseeing admins generally don't know what to do.
So actually for more obscure subjects, particularly ones that amateurs think they know a lot about, the process doesn't work in my experience.
The fundamental problem with a project like Wikipedia is that you don't know who users are, and you don't know how much expertise they have. When I edited actively back around 2004-05, new users (even anon) were welcomed and their contributions were valued. Today, new users and anons are by default assumed to trolls, vandals, or sockpuppets if they try to make any significant contribution. I can't tell you how many times my motivations have been questioned on a talk page just for politely pointing out basic illogical stuff that goes against the grain of the territorial editors. I've been called a sockpuppet and even accused of working for various types of corporations who might have an interest in changing an article.
Personally, I don't have time to deal with the bureaucracy. I still have the research skills to be able to find out things on my own (even in physical sources), so I'd prefer doing that than wasting time wikilawyering with some overzealous editor or admin on Wikipedia.
You know what else there are five of? Wikipedia has scores of examples, from the number of fingers/toes on reptiles, amphibians, and mammals to the number of piano concertos by Beethoven. Do these "five particles" have anything to do with those things as well?
Speculative numerology has no place in science, despite the fact that many scientists seem to find themselves obsessed with finding such wondrous correspondences.
In 800 BCE, before the Greeks began to write things down, Homer (or another man by the same name:-)) could compose and recite two vast epic tales - the Iliad and the Odyssey - purely from memory.
There is absolutely no evidence for this.
The general view among classicists, based on the work of Milman Parry, is that bards would synthesize the tale on the fly from a tradition of stories and a grab-bag of phrases that fit the meter.
I am skeptical of even that much
I tend to agree with Parry as well. On the other hand, I think we do have evidence that memory techniques were developed to a rather high level in medieval Europe. For example, accounts of Thomas Aquinas dictating multiple books to multiple scribes at the same time, because he had composed the texts in his mind previously. I don't quite believe this account, but I can believe that something close to that happened. Again, there was probably some extemporizing. Check out Mary Carruthers "The Book of Memory" and related work.
Anyhow, while you're probably right about Homer, in general the GP's point about oral culture stands. People specialized in different sorts of tasks and developed specific mental techniques to facilitate them.
The point I was making is that in those areas, it seems that you are generally expected to be constantly reading and analyzing the works of others.
Yes, that's part of what it means to be a researcher. Such people (many in academia) are trying to create something new in their field, and it usually helps to know what else is going on or has gone on in that field. For fields like philosophy, you might be reading texts from long ago or articles in the latest journal.
That doesn't happen in a field like Computer Science, for example. Nobody tells you to go read the Linux kernel.
No -- not if you're a codemonkey. But if you're actually a researcher trying to develop new algorithms dealing with a particular type of data or something, someone might tell you to go read a relevant article that was published in some journal. Admittedly, those scenarios aren't quite as common in CS research as they are in science or engineering research, but most people doing research spend at least some significant time reading articles about what other people have done. Otherwise, how do you know if someone has done what you're trying to do before, or if someone else's experiments or research might shed some light on your project?
But if you're a normal programmer, you don't read such things... anymore than a plant engineer tends to read lots of chemical engineering journals or a lab tech working in an environmental lab would read the latest journals in organic chemistry. Philosophy is not that different -- most academics tend to react more to recent articles and books than the older sources themselves.
I know some people are opposed to every new word, but personally I think tweet is one of the better. It was obviously established as a word long before Twitter, at least as far back as 1942.
What?! You've never heard of the word "twitter" before... referring to birds flying around, etc.? It's a fairly common English word. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest usage from Chaucer in 1374:
The Iangelynge bryd..enclosed in a streyht cage..twiterith desyrynge the wode with her swete voys.
On the other hand, "tweet" was first used in 1845. "Twitter" is almost 500 years older.
It works in Norwegian too, we have translated to tweet (birds) which is to "kvitre" and people use either that or "tvitre" to be more similar to English. I'm fairly sure this one is here to stay just as "to chat" or "to text"
By the way, "twitter" has meant "chattering" among people for almost 200 years. Futhermore, "kvitre" is etymologically related to "twitter," not "tweet"! Can't you hear the similarity to "twitter"?
Up here in Dallas, they seem to set speed limits based on driving revenue. Central Expressway, I-35(E/W), and 635 are all 60 MPH. Dallas North Tollway, 121, and PGBT are 70.
Well, it might be worth noting that Central and I-35E flow through downtown Dallas (as well as I-30), and 635 flows through the traffic-heavy interchanges north of downtown. Most of the North Tollway, 121, and PGBT are further out north from downtown -- also, particularly PGBT was designed more recently with better interchanges.
All I'm saying is that the original reasons speed limits were dropped around Dallas about a decade ago (if I recall correctly) were (1) to improve air quality by decreasing the higher emissions produced by cars going faster, and (2) to assist traffic flow through downtown. (Slower traffic overall can increase traffic throughput during hours of dense traffic by avoiding sudden breaking and stop-and-go situations; hence variable speed limits in some cities.)
The recent limit increases may have to do with revenue, but the original reasons for the decreases weren't actually for safety in the first place -- they were for environmental reasons and traffic flow.
And usually that reason is arbitrary zoning, not how fast you can drive safely.
While this is often true, the object of speed limits is not always just how fast you can drive safely. The next most common reason for speed limits is traffic control -- for example, either setting a low limit discouraging people from taking a particular route (for example, a shortcut through a residential area that could connect two highways) or lowering speed to allow for a greater traffic density.
The latter is particularly important on densely traveled highways at rush hour, which is the reason behind those variable speed limit signs you sometimes see. If everyone is traveling at 30 mph through a zone with things like merges, lots of exits and entrances, etc., they can travel closer together safely and thereby increase the effective throughput. If you decide that it's "safe" to travel 50 mph there during heavy traffic, and then end up slamming on the breaks when someone merges, you can create a traffic wave that ultimately grows and slows traffic to "stop-and-go." Basically, a 30 mph traffic flow may be stable, while a 50 mph one is not for that traffic density.
In that circumstance, the people traveling 20 mph above the posted speed limit actually make the traffic worse for everyone.
Anyhow, this may not be relevant to your particular examples, but it's important to realize that speed limits aren't always just about safety. Most people don't think about this, and we all suffer through traffic jams because of it.
Thanks for this note. It is interesting. I did try to do a little digging and find out more about the "-ed" forms in the Southern US, but didn't find anything quickly through online searches.
In any case, it wasn't so much that I was arguing that the "sinked" was never a common form anywhere, merely that it isn't considered common or proper today, and its historical importance was limited to perhaps a few specific periods and places. English in 1840 was still not as completely regularized as it is today, so it's not surprising that we might find variant spellings and forms in some regions.
Interestingly, "swim" would have been a better example for the GGP's case. The OED's historical forms for that:
Note here that there are entire "strong" and "weak" categories over prolonged periods, suggesting that there was a common historical tendency to use "-ed" forms, as well as a strong form (i.e., a verb that doesn't follow the normal English pattern of "-ed" for past tense). "Sinked" on the other hand is clearly a historical aberration (though perhaps one that was common in some places during some periods), rather than the original historical form that the GGP claimed.
As a response already said to you, the "harm" is that you might be prolonging suffering in birds who don't actually have a reasonable chance at survival. Did you read the rest of my post? Are you the kind of pet owner who would keep his pet alive at all costs, including costly operations where the animal suffers a lot, just so you can say, "But I tried everything"? Sometimes euthanasia is a rational and humane (i.e., moral) choice.
Oh, right, you're really just worried about the cost. Of course. But hey, if you add "or moral" in there, it makes it seem like you really thought this out and that you're not really just a greedy miser.
Well, those issues are never separable in the real world. In the real world, all of our actions have consequences. All of our choices may result in the deaths of people and animals.
Do you choose to drive a car? Forget about the environmental issues for a second. If you choose to drive, that choice could result in an accident that might kill someone (or, more likely, some animal). It's much more unlikely that walking to work or the store or whatever could result in someone's (or some animal's) death. Yet, people choose all the time to drive because it's convenient or it allows them to take a better job or to live someone nicer, etc. It's a choice, one that probably has both economic and moral consequences, but people rarely think about such things because the chance of them causing a fatal accident seems to be below their "moral threshold."
What we need to decide here is the appropriate "moral threshold" to deal with the birds. Like TFA, I agree that euthanasia for all of them is extreme (as I clearly stated in my previous post). But at some point in trying to save more birds, you'll end up both spending an outrageous amount of time, money, and effort that could be better allocated, and also be causing unnecessary pain and suffering for animals. Is that really that contentious to say?
You should (do?) work for BP, it's great thinking like yours that got them where they are now.
And to think, I'm the one modded "flamebait" here for pointing out both rational elements of TFA's argument (which I agree with) and irrational ones, which I admittedly made a little fun of. You're get modded "insightful" for being deliberately mean.
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Certainly the idea of becoming wealthy for an hour's worth of music that's basically aping what everyone else is doing would never have occurred to any composer you can name.
Sure it did. You evidently don't know anything about Handel, to take one major example. There were composer wars going on in London in the early to mid 1700s where there were new operas every month or even every week, and composers often explicitly STOLE tunes from the opera house across the street to draw in customers. Handel was deeply involved in such things (as were a bunch of other composers who have been forgotten today -- Bononcini, etc.). A good opera production might not be enough to make a composer rich, but a few such hits might.
Of course, you're somewhat right that music history tends to ignore most such composers; music history prefers to focus on the artistic genius working away unnoticed, rather than the composers who were actually writing popular music in their day. But there are some other examples of commonly known composers for example, most any light Italian opera composers (Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, etc.) who were churning out new works every month or so in Italy in the 19th century. These composers often joked about how easy it was to throw together some new music. Plots were recycled again and again with little variations. No equivalent to modern pop music? I think we've found something close....
But beyond that, you're pretty much wrong. (I have more than one degree in music history.) You've bought into the whole 19th-century romanticized notion of the composer as transcendental genius who creates for the sake of creating.
Bullshit.
There certainly were composers who did what they wanted to do, and after the Beethoven myth had been created, lots more wanted to just "create" as an "artiste" or whatever.
But Bach was hired to practice a craft. So were most musicians of his age, as they had been for generations before. With few exceptions, they were hired by patrons and required to do very specific things, including writing specific kinds of pieces for specific occasions -- it wasn't as though patrons were just generous enough to throw money at composers who were "driven to create" whatever they wanted to.
Yes, there are a few exceptional cases, and composers who accumulated fame often attracted a number of secondary patrons who might just give them money or a pension. But the primary income of the vast majority of composers came from someone who was paying them to do a specific job by writing specific pieces, etc. If Bach didn't provide cantatas, organ music, etc. for services each week, he'd be fired. It's as simple as that.
As for Chopin, he was very competitive when it came to signing up publishers to get his works published. Relationships to publishers were increasingly important in the late 18th and 19th century and beyond. By the mid (and particularly late) 19th century, there was a huge market for upper-middle-class amateurs who wanted to buy the latest songs or transcriptions of orchestral pieces for piano. While many composers fought to have their works performed, just as many were worried about earning money through publication.
I'm not saying that it was equivalent to a modern "commercial endeavor" in every way. But by the time the patronage system (which required composers as employees with specified compositional duties) started dying in the mid-18th century, the music publishing business was ramping up, which is where composers made their money until recordings started appearing in the 20th century.
In sum, though there were exceptions, and we may romanticize the historical picture of it, the vast majority of composers in fact were trying to make it in a kind of "job," either as a craftsman or something akin to a writer trying to sell his wares to a publisher.
As someone with a degree in Music History, I can assure you you're wrong.
As someone who actually knows something about music history beyond what you read in introductory textbooks, I can assure you that you're wrong.
So, I think it's too strong to say Kennedy has only found very approximate correlation". We need to know more about just how he's determining his lines.
I agree we need to know about how Kennedy is determining the lines. And I appreciate your calculations, which do provide some perspective.
On the other hand, it may still be a "very approximate correlation." Searching for hidden order like this is always dangerous, because there are so many possible organizational schemes that might be considered. Why a 12-fold division? Apparently because his estimates of total lines came close to numbers that are easily divisible by 12. All the stuff about the Pythagoreans is interesting, but I've never heard that 12 was a particularly important number to them -- 10 (and the tetraktys) sure, perhaps numbers from 1 to 6 for other symbolism, but 12 is less important number overall.
And then there's the stuff about harmonic theory which appears to be a bunch of junk. He doesn't cite his sources, but I've read a lot of Greek music theory, and I don't remember anyone (definitely not the Pythagoreans) going through and comparing ratios 1:12, 2:12, 3:12, etc. up to 12:12 as Kennedy uses for his "scale" (which is definitely not a scale, whatever it is). The weirdness in that section alone is enough for me to question the rest of his conclusions.
But perhaps more importantly, we need to avoid the "Bible Code" problem. Of course, Kennedy isn't suggesting a code, but he does claim to uncover a hidden order. The problem with the Bible Code is that there are many seemingly improbable patterns that appear to occur in data (even random data) merely due to chance, particularly if you have enough possible types of patterns to look for. Add in the subjective quality of some of Kennedy's other claims in the paper (where important tuning points occur in an argument, sections that are "negative" lining up with unharmonious numbers, etc.), and it becomes even more difficult to evaluate a claim. What determines which points in the text are the most important, the turning points, the "negative" arguments, etc. You find the dialogue that seems to line up to your scheme closest in a more objective way (like the Symposium here), and you present that as the primary evidence. But chances are that at least one of the dialogues would end up with some sort of significant thing occurring at a few points in a 12-fold division.
The only way to test such an ambiguous methodology would be to have someone with nothing invested in the theory try to do a similar thing with a 10-fold division or a 17-fold division or whatever. See if they can come up with some "interesting" correlations for some of the dialogues. Then compare it to Kennedy's work. If the 12-fold division really seems more significant for more works, maybe there is something there.
So perhaps there is a small correlation here. But the question is whether the correlation is statistically significant, and given the ambiguous nature of the methodology, you'd need to test a lot of very broad possibilities before concluding that this breakdown is significant. I don't see any evidence in the article that he considered such issues, apart from the "control group" of the pseudo-Platonic writings. That's the beginning of a case, but even if true that only demonstrates that the total length of the dialogues follows a certain pattern, not evidence for an elaborate internal 12-fold division in each work.
You've gotten so many nasty replies that I just wanted to say that your perspective is refreshing to hear. Is it "bigoted" or not? I'm not going to judge you either way, and shame on the rest of the replies for doing that.
You have a legitimate viewpoint, and I suspect you're absolutely right -- if gay marriage is approved now, it just makes it harder for the next (and probably smaller, less vocal) group to get recognition and get their rights.
When I see the responses to your comment, I'm reminded of people who complain about those who vote for a third party or have an alternative view that isn't part of the mainstream, and they act on it. We're supposedly a country that prides itself on free speech, and it would seem that free thinking would be allowed too.
To all those other hateful judgmental replies -- just because someone has their own agenda and doesn't want to join some popular group-think mentality because of rational (and in this case, perhaps even noble) reasons doesn't make them a bigot. It makes them a free-thinker. Want him to join your cause? Study his arguments and give him a rational reason for setting aside his convictions to join your team.
Just calling anyone a bigot, particularly when they have thought through an issue much more than most people, is not going to win friends or help anyone's cause.
Live in italy or mexico for 6 months, and you'll get some perspective.
Indeed. I second the fact about Italy. People complaining about the USPS have no idea how bad it can be.
I lived in Rome for a while a couple years back. Just once, I went to the Italian post office. It was like the DMV, but worse. There must have been 100 people in there perhaps trying to get to 2-3 mail clerks -- total chaos. If I remember correctly, you had to get in "line" (actually a giant horde of people vaguely pushing in the same direction) to get a ticket, and then you waited about 45 minutes for someone to call your number, and if you had the wrong ticket, you had to start over. (In Italy, this sometimes meant that people got in shouting matches.) Usually when they'd call a number, no one would come up, presumably because they gave up and left.
And this was on a weekday morning. Oh, and even in Rome, all the branches except the central one closed by 2pm, I think.
I gave up after 20 minutes. I talked to a friend who successfully managed to mail a postcard after an hour under similar conditions at a different branch. He got the wrong ticket, because it wasn't clear what the tickets were for, but someone had mercy on him.
Important tip -- If you're ever in Rome and need to send a letter, mail from the Vatican post office. They are relatively efficient and mail seems to get out speedily (sending a postcard from Italy is like mailing something into a black hole). And if you go there in the morning before all the tourists get up, you won't even have to wait in line. (As a bonus, you can see St. Peter's before it's mobbed as well, which is a much more pleasant experience.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ
It certainly is an IT problem. Taking a big picture view of IT, it includes such things as data integrity, security, disaster recovery. And it touches on all aspects of the systems architecture, from applications down to the sheet metal.
I'm not arguing that backup isn't an IT problem. I'm saying that if whether you are a high-tech organization with electronic records or a medieval church with paper records vulnerable to fire, you need to deal with backup. In other words, backup isn't a problem unique to IT.
One could even argue that IT is involved with systems based on clipboards and carbon copies.
Well, one could, if one doesn't subscribe to the common definition of IT.
Yes, one could understand "information technology" to mean any technology dealing with information transfer, in which case, you're right. But that's not what IT typically means. Do a Google search on the term -- it generally has to do with computer, network infrastructure, etc. (I can't believe I'm saying this on Slashdot.)
While in this case, the problem may be similar, the fact that you didn't bother to make more than one copy of a microfiche when you created them from the original documents in the first place is not an "IT problem." It's just not considering the basic issue of redundancy -- a problem that has much broader applications than just IT.
'We are one fire, or one flood, or one spilled Starbucks coffee away from some of those records being lost or spoiled.'
This is not an IT problem. This is a basic information storage problem dealing with backup procedure. If you're a major organization and you don't have copies of your records, whether paper copies, microfiche copies (which seems to be the case here), or electronic ones, you're vulnerable.
Similarly, IT doesn't necessarily solve this problem. If you digitize all the records to a single server and don't make proper backups, you could still be one fire or flood (or even a coffee) away from losing the records.
(Btw, I do realize that original paper records may have some value as historical artifacts themselves. But those should be in an archive somewhere protected from floods, fires, and errant cups of coffee, while people accessing these records on a daily basis should be using copies, whether digital or microfiche or whatever.)
The fetus's rights did not change. I'm asserting that a woman has a right as well - the right NOT to bear a child that is the result of rape. This right can be considered stronger than the right-to-life of the fetus.
Suppose the mother can't remember the conception. She apparently had sex with a friend, whom she respects and actually had been somewhat attracted to, and she assumes the sex was consensual, though she's a bit "sore." She finds out that she is pregnant, but she figures it's her fault. She also begins having horrible nightmares, but doesn't know the cause. She decides to go ahead and have the child, though it turns out to be a major burden to her and her life. She has also fallen into a depression, though the cause is unclear. Then, five years later, she discovers a video of the entire incident of the conception -- it turns out that her friend actually had drugged her and then forcibly raped her (the video shows her yelling for help, though uncoordinated enough from the drugs to resist). She is shocked, horrified, and now can barely look at her child, the result of a rape -- and all those nightmares she has had for years make sense now because of the internal psychological damage she was suffering.
If she has a "right NOT to bear a child that is the result of rape," does she now have the right kill the five-year-old child if she wishes? If not, why not? Again, assuming a pro-life position, the fetus had the same right to life that it has now. Your right of the mother's trumped that right during pregnancy. Why wouldn't it trump it now? She has clearly suffered psychological damage and will continue to suffer.
Many people say that health care should be a "right", but clearly they can't mean an inalienable right like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. After all, universal healthcare would be provided by the government, and surely rights must exist inherently?
I didn't respond to this before, but just to be clear, most ethicists claim that many rights come about as part of the "social contract" (or some variant thereof) -- that is, as a member of a particular society, you are owed certain things... a respect for your life, your liberty, etc. As part of that society, you may also have the right for the government not to unduly restrict your speech, your right to property, your right to practice your religion freely, your right not to be searched by government agents without cause, etc. Some of these rights only come about through the existence of government. (The very existence of "property" usually requires a government to recognize it, and Locke's original formulation was "life, liberty, and property," which the Declaration of Independence borrowed from.)
Some people also believe that we have a right to a minimal standard of living within a society, and society owes us that, which might involve assistance to provide a minimum amount of food, clothing, and perhaps healthcare. These are indeed thought (by some) to be the same sort of rights owed to us by society (or government or whatever) as a right not to be killed, a right to act freely in most cases, etc.
A right to life or liberty is pretty much meaningless without a society and a government to protect such rights. Some think that society may also owe its citizens a little more, which might include anything from a basic education to a minimal standard of healthcare. I'm not saying I agree with such positions, but those sort of "rights" aren't actually that different.
Her conclusions are perhaps surprising, but they do put an interesting light on the whole issue of granting a "right to life" to the fetus and what that actually means. I suppose if you agree with part of her argument, but reject the rest, you can come up with essentially a pro-life position with an abortion exception.
You have my argument exactly backwards. The fetus's rights did not change. I'm asserting that a woman has a right as well - the right NOT to bear a child that is the result of rape.
Ah, I get what you were saying. But to me this sounds like a very specific "right." Most of the time ethicists talk about "rights," they mean fairly broad concepts -- right to life, liberty, property, freedom of religion, press, etc.
To me, your "right NOT to bear a child that is the result of rape" is much more particular. It's as if a newspaper asserted freedom of the press to publish an article on a secret military base. The government then asserted national security reasons that the article shouldn't be published. But then the newspaper came along and asserted a "right to publish articles on secret military bases." To my mind, most people wouldn't think of that as a separate "right," but rather a specific case of "freedom of the press," which needs to be evaluated in that particular instance.
I guess what this boils down to is -- to me, your "right" should be seen as part of a general set of a mother's rights. What you're asserting is that the mother's rights somehow grow stronger when the fetus she is carrying is the result of rape. Whether or not we consider it a separate "right" is beside the point. The point is that somehow the mother's rights now trump a fetus's rights, whereas they don't in other scenarios. All I'm saying is it makes me a bit nervous to claim that someone's rights can be overridden by the actions of a third party. Even if you claim the fetus's rights are the same, the mother's have been extended by the action of a third party so that they now trump the fetus's. That, to me, is a bad precedent.
I would probably agree with you if I knew this to be a common position.
If you read the news, every election there's major lobbying to change the Republican platform to include an exception for rape. This has been going on for decades. Clearly someone must think it's a reasonable position... either that, or it's just liberals hoping to gradually chip away at the conservative position.
Rather than casting rights as absolute, I think that most people assign a pecking order to rights. One right can be deemed more important and trump another, in other words. The concept of "rights" might not even really be appropriate.
Yeah, I think perhaps you're looking for a basis more in utilitarian ethics, rather than classical rights theory. Classical rights often do conflict, and there are ways to resolve such conflicts. But they generally conflict because they are dealing with very, very broad categories. Your specific "right" in this instance seems more like a rule to apply in a specific case than a "right."
Sorry to drone on, but it occurs to me that two people can be talking about rights, and yet be talking about two completely different concepts.
Not at all. This is perhaps the most important part of your argument, I think. That's probably the reason for a lot of the polemicism in the abortion debate -- people just talk past each other because their words actually mean different things.
Of course, there are gray areas, but to claim that the distinction between fact and fiction is too vague to achieve a decently neutral point of view in most cases is just pure sophistry.
It's difficult to believe that such a naive position has been modded to +5 insightful.
The problem isn't just about whether a particular atomic fact (person X did action Y on date Z) is true or false. All non-fiction writing of any sort has to choose which facts to report and to put them into a reasonable context. For example, if a Wikipedia biography consisted solely of 73 factual instances of times that the subject of the article was drunk, they may rightly claim that such "facts" are true and verifiable, perhaps from the person's own diary backed up by a diary of a friend known to be reliable, etc. But then you find out that person is a famous scientist or some other very influential person who was not noteworthy for being a major drinker.
Such a "biography" consisting of solely reported instances of drinking might be "factual," but do you think it accurately portrays that person's life?
An encyclopedia article is usually about 3-4 times removed from atomic "facts." Those facts are generally collected by someone in some document (a reporter's notebook, someone's diary, data in a lab notebook, whatever) based on observations the writer thinks are worth collecting (there are lots of other facts never recorded, like what most people ate for breakfast on most mornings), then the person or some other person writes up some account based on those facts, which superimposes an interpretation on them. Often a third or even fourth person (often a scholar) comes along and writes a book or article interpreting a bunch of such accounts.
And then Wikipedia attempts to summarize the accepted positions of most scholars and experts in a given field on a particular subject. In order to create an "accurate" picture, you need to evaluate which interpretations are the most widely-accepted, which secondary and tertiary accounts and interpretations of facts are the most reliable, which facts are important enough to mention, which other facts aren't relevant to the topic, etc.
Even if we accept that certain sources are inherently reliable (like your example of a "fact" that is backed up by the New York Times), that doesn't say whether it's appropriate to include that fact in a particular article or what context is necessary for that fact so that a reader won't misinterpret its significance.
The only weighty argument against abortion I can see is that it is killing a person, or at least equivalent to that. So if there aren't grievous medical issues, abortion is then, according to this argument, murder of people who are merely inconvenient. How rape makes any difference to that is completely beyond me - rape may make the child especially inconvenient, but that cannot possibly justify murder.
Yeah, there's a whole lot of hooey surrounding the abortion issue. For the record, I think you're absolutely right that there's basically no logical defense for the pro-life with rape exception position. Either the fetus has rights or it doesn't. And if the fetus's rights allow it to make an assert them against the mother's and thus disallow abortion, those rights shouldn't disappear based on the identity or actions of its father, anymore than our rights should be affected by who our fathers are.
Of course, even if you assert that the fetus is a living person with full rights from conception, it actually doesn't automatically result in a pro-life position. Well-known philosopher Judith Thomson has shown that even if we grant the fetus the full rights of an adult, it doesn't necessarily follow that abortion should be outlawed. Her (pretty famous) article on the subject can be found here: http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm
A person could easily see a fetus as a human being with a right to life AND see a woman as having a right to do with her own body as she pleases.
True. Most people do see it this way, and the issue comes down to who gets to assert those rights more strongly.
Forcing a woman to bring a rapist's baby to full-term could be argued to be a violation of her rights, which could be prioritized over those of the fetus.
I agree with the GP that this is crap reasoning. Either a fetus is violating her rights (or at least impinging on them) and thus can be reasonably aborted regardless of where it came from, or its right to live trumps hers in which case it needs to be protected. I don't see who the father is comes into it, unless you're going to assert that our rights depend on who our fathers are.
In a logical approach to the question of rights, we either grant the fetus rights or we don't. Those rights don't change depending on who its parents are. As for the woman's rights, they were violated by the rape itself. The fetus is an innocent. If such an innocent is seen to impinge on the rights of a woman in general, abortion should be allowed in general. But I take exception to the argument that an unwanted fetus somehow violates a woman's rights more because of who its father is or what he did.
What if the father didn't rape the mother, but during the pregnancy tortures the mother and also tortures and murders the mother's entire family. As horrible as rape is, surely we'd consider such actions to perhaps be equally horrible actions taken against the mother. But should such actions also give the mother a greater right to abort the fetus? Even if you say it should, at what point do we draw the line? How much emotional or physical or psychological damage to the mother does it take before she is justified in violating the rights of an innocent because of someone else's actions?
(Don't get me wrong -- I'm not arguing for a pro-life position. I'm questioning the logical validity of allowing an exception to a pro-life position.) As you rightly conclude, though, these are emotional issues. That's the root of the problem here. But from a rational standpoint and a philosophical position on human rights, I don't see how being pro-life with a rape exception can possibly be considered a consistent position.
I'm also not convinced that you need an expert on a topic to evaluate which perspectives are worthy of inclusion. An encyclopeida is a secondary source; you always have to know who's claiming this-or-that before you can include it. So all you need is someone who can rate the significance of the source.
Yeah, the problem is that the more obscure the topic, the less people understand which sources are "significant," as you put it. This is particularly a problem in the humanities (even in major articles), where I've seen sources that are decades out of date used to support a major argument or pop books on a topic that get everything wrong. And since it's not like science and math articles where you can often point out that something is actually wrong, lengthy debates ensue because you don't have a clear expert.
And by the way, encyclopedias are usually tertiary sources. Primary sources are things like original manuscripts and documents, original research, etc. Secondary sources are written by scholars to sum up and interpret primary sources. Tertiary sources are reference works usually providing brief summaries of large bodies of knowledge. Evaluating primary sources directly is generally considered "original research" on Wikipedia and thus isn't allowed. So Wikipedia by definition is not a secondary source, but an even higher-level one.
Even so, I get reverted frequently for no apparent reason and accused of all sorts of things just for writing polite comments questioning logic or sources or whatever on the talk pages.
Your examples indicate that there is a lot of bullshit going on behind the scenes
Yes there is.
If I wanted to edit articles in the earnest, I would definitely create an account, I would write intelligible comments explaining my edits
Why does one need to create an account to do this? You can make an edit and post an intelligible comment on the talk page explaining why it's necessary. Anyone can see the IP match up between the edit and your comment post. I've done this myself as an anonymous editor and stated my arguments logically with non-inflammatory comments, and yet still have been inexplicably reverted many times for no reason and even once had my IP reported as abusive. (I took it to the admins, and they ruled almost immediately that there was no evidence of abuse, and the user who placed the warning was sanctioned... but still, I don't have time for that crap.)
Back in the early days, I used to have an account. But after too many annoying discussions with the kind of territorial editors the GP talks about, I too abandoned most editing. Now, I only post a comment on a talk page when something's really wrong and occasionally make a minor edit when something is factually wrong, again always backing up edits with a comment on the talk page and even links to reliable sources indicating the error. About a third of the time I have done this (out of a few dozen times over the past 3-4 years), I've been reverted for no apparent reason... almost always by someone with a username.
Just because you have a username doesn't mean that you're a reasonable editor.
and get my way after a proper bureaucratic process. The end result is a better article, so it is totally worth the effort.
Not when the people involved in the bureaucracy are unreasonable. There are a couple admins I know who went around for years policing some subject areas they knew relatively little about and had a skewed perspective on. I know a couple of my friends (who are actually college faculty in those subject areas) who got into spats with the admins over basic facts of the field. In general, the oversight process tended to fail, and usually the articles just ended up with some sort of useless compromise after editors would just give up.
Even these days, there is a lot of information that is only available in physical books, academic articles only accessible for those with institutional accounts, etc. When confronted with such information against some bogus crap put together by an editor or even admin who has been around for a long time guarding his territory, the overseeing admins generally don't know what to do.
So actually for more obscure subjects, particularly ones that amateurs think they know a lot about, the process doesn't work in my experience.
The fundamental problem with a project like Wikipedia is that you don't know who users are, and you don't know how much expertise they have. When I edited actively back around 2004-05, new users (even anon) were welcomed and their contributions were valued. Today, new users and anons are by default assumed to trolls, vandals, or sockpuppets if they try to make any significant contribution. I can't tell you how many times my motivations have been questioned on a talk page just for politely pointing out basic illogical stuff that goes against the grain of the territorial editors. I've been called a sockpuppet and even accused of working for various types of corporations who might have an interest in changing an article.
Personally, I don't have time to deal with the bureaucracy. I still have the research skills to be able to find out things on my own (even in physical sources), so I'd prefer doing that than wasting time wikilawyering with some overzealous editor or admin on Wikipedia.
Modded "interesting"? Seriously?
You know what else there are five of? Wikipedia has scores of examples, from the number of fingers/toes on reptiles, amphibians, and mammals to the number of piano concertos by Beethoven. Do these "five particles" have anything to do with those things as well?
Speculative numerology has no place in science, despite the fact that many scientists seem to find themselves obsessed with finding such wondrous correspondences.
And besides, as a previous comment already pointed out, there are only four forces, since electricity and magnetism are the same force at a very fundamental level.
In 800 BCE, before the Greeks began to write things down, Homer (or another man by the same name :-)) could compose and recite two vast epic tales - the Iliad and the Odyssey - purely from memory.
There is absolutely no evidence for this.
The general view among classicists, based on the work of Milman Parry, is that bards would synthesize the tale on the fly from a tradition of stories and a grab-bag of phrases that fit the meter.
I am skeptical of even that much
I tend to agree with Parry as well. On the other hand, I think we do have evidence that memory techniques were developed to a rather high level in medieval Europe. For example, accounts of Thomas Aquinas dictating multiple books to multiple scribes at the same time, because he had composed the texts in his mind previously. I don't quite believe this account, but I can believe that something close to that happened. Again, there was probably some extemporizing. Check out Mary Carruthers "The Book of Memory" and related work.
Anyhow, while you're probably right about Homer, in general the GP's point about oral culture stands. People specialized in different sorts of tasks and developed specific mental techniques to facilitate them.
The point I was making is that in those areas, it seems that you are generally expected to be constantly reading and analyzing the works of others.
Yes, that's part of what it means to be a researcher. Such people (many in academia) are trying to create something new in their field, and it usually helps to know what else is going on or has gone on in that field. For fields like philosophy, you might be reading texts from long ago or articles in the latest journal.
That doesn't happen in a field like Computer Science, for example. Nobody tells you to go read the Linux kernel.
No -- not if you're a codemonkey. But if you're actually a researcher trying to develop new algorithms dealing with a particular type of data or something, someone might tell you to go read a relevant article that was published in some journal. Admittedly, those scenarios aren't quite as common in CS research as they are in science or engineering research, but most people doing research spend at least some significant time reading articles about what other people have done. Otherwise, how do you know if someone has done what you're trying to do before, or if someone else's experiments or research might shed some light on your project?
But if you're a normal programmer, you don't read such things... anymore than a plant engineer tends to read lots of chemical engineering journals or a lab tech working in an environmental lab would read the latest journals in organic chemistry. Philosophy is not that different -- most academics tend to react more to recent articles and books than the older sources themselves.
I know some people are opposed to every new word, but personally I think tweet is one of the better. It was obviously established as a word long before Twitter, at least as far back as 1942.
What?! You've never heard of the word "twitter" before... referring to birds flying around, etc.? It's a fairly common English word. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest usage from Chaucer in 1374:
The Iangelynge bryd..enclosed in a streyht cage..twiterith desyrynge the wode with her swete voys.
On the other hand, "tweet" was first used in 1845. "Twitter" is almost 500 years older.
It works in Norwegian too, we have translated to tweet (birds) which is to "kvitre" and people use either that or "tvitre" to be more similar to English. I'm fairly sure this one is here to stay just as "to chat" or "to text"
By the way, "twitter" has meant "chattering" among people for almost 200 years. Futhermore, "kvitre" is etymologically related to "twitter," not "tweet"! Can't you hear the similarity to "twitter"?
Sheesh... +5 insightful for that....
Up here in Dallas, they seem to set speed limits based on driving revenue. Central Expressway, I-35(E/W), and 635 are all 60 MPH. Dallas North Tollway, 121, and PGBT are 70.
Well, it might be worth noting that Central and I-35E flow through downtown Dallas (as well as I-30), and 635 flows through the traffic-heavy interchanges north of downtown. Most of the North Tollway, 121, and PGBT are further out north from downtown -- also, particularly PGBT was designed more recently with better interchanges.
All I'm saying is that the original reasons speed limits were dropped around Dallas about a decade ago (if I recall correctly) were (1) to improve air quality by decreasing the higher emissions produced by cars going faster, and (2) to assist traffic flow through downtown. (Slower traffic overall can increase traffic throughput during hours of dense traffic by avoiding sudden breaking and stop-and-go situations; hence variable speed limits in some cities.)
The recent limit increases may have to do with revenue, but the original reasons for the decreases weren't actually for safety in the first place -- they were for environmental reasons and traffic flow.
And usually that reason is arbitrary zoning, not how fast you can drive safely.
While this is often true, the object of speed limits is not always just how fast you can drive safely. The next most common reason for speed limits is traffic control -- for example, either setting a low limit discouraging people from taking a particular route (for example, a shortcut through a residential area that could connect two highways) or lowering speed to allow for a greater traffic density.
The latter is particularly important on densely traveled highways at rush hour, which is the reason behind those variable speed limit signs you sometimes see. If everyone is traveling at 30 mph through a zone with things like merges, lots of exits and entrances, etc., they can travel closer together safely and thereby increase the effective throughput. If you decide that it's "safe" to travel 50 mph there during heavy traffic, and then end up slamming on the breaks when someone merges, you can create a traffic wave that ultimately grows and slows traffic to "stop-and-go." Basically, a 30 mph traffic flow may be stable, while a 50 mph one is not for that traffic density.
In that circumstance, the people traveling 20 mph above the posted speed limit actually make the traffic worse for everyone.
Anyhow, this may not be relevant to your particular examples, but it's important to realize that speed limits aren't always just about safety. Most people don't think about this, and we all suffer through traffic jams because of it.
Thanks for this note. It is interesting. I did try to do a little digging and find out more about the "-ed" forms in the Southern US, but didn't find anything quickly through online searches.
In any case, it wasn't so much that I was arguing that the "sinked" was never a common form anywhere, merely that it isn't considered common or proper today, and its historical importance was limited to perhaps a few specific periods and places. English in 1840 was still not as completely regularized as it is today, so it's not surprising that we might find variant spellings and forms in some regions.
Interestingly, "swim" would have been a better example for the GGP's case. The OED's historical forms for that:
Forms: pa. tense strong 1 swamm, 3-4 suam, (4 squam), 4-6 swame, 5-7 swamme, 1- swam; pl. 1 swummon, 2 swummen, 3 svommen, 3-5 swomme, 4 swumme; 1, 4-7 (9 dial.) swom, 4-7 swomme, 6-7 swumme, swome, (6 swoome, swume, swomm), 6-9 swum; weak 3 swymde, 5 swymyd, 6 swymmed, Sc. swoumit, 6-8 (9 dial.) swimmed, 7 swimed, 9 Sc. soomed. pa. pple. strong 1 ({asg}e)swummen, 4, 7 swommen, 6-7 swom(m)e, (7 swoome, swumme, swom, swimme), 6- swum; 7- (now incorrect) swam; weak 6 swymmed, Sc. swymmit, 6-7 (9 dial.) swimmed, 9 Sc. soomed, sweemed.
Note here that there are entire "strong" and "weak" categories over prolonged periods, suggesting that there was a common historical tendency to use "-ed" forms, as well as a strong form (i.e., a verb that doesn't follow the normal English pattern of "-ed" for past tense). "Sinked" on the other hand is clearly a historical aberration (though perhaps one that was common in some places during some periods), rather than the original historical form that the GGP claimed.
What harm is there in trying?
As a response already said to you, the "harm" is that you might be prolonging suffering in birds who don't actually have a reasonable chance at survival. Did you read the rest of my post? Are you the kind of pet owner who would keep his pet alive at all costs, including costly operations where the animal suffers a lot, just so you can say, "But I tried everything"? Sometimes euthanasia is a rational and humane (i.e., moral) choice.
Oh, right, you're really just worried about the cost. Of course. But hey, if you add "or moral" in there, it makes it seem like you really thought this out and that you're not really just a greedy miser.
Well, those issues are never separable in the real world. In the real world, all of our actions have consequences. All of our choices may result in the deaths of people and animals.
Do you choose to drive a car? Forget about the environmental issues for a second. If you choose to drive, that choice could result in an accident that might kill someone (or, more likely, some animal). It's much more unlikely that walking to work or the store or whatever could result in someone's (or some animal's) death. Yet, people choose all the time to drive because it's convenient or it allows them to take a better job or to live someone nicer, etc. It's a choice, one that probably has both economic and moral consequences, but people rarely think about such things because the chance of them causing a fatal accident seems to be below their "moral threshold."
What we need to decide here is the appropriate "moral threshold" to deal with the birds. Like TFA, I agree that euthanasia for all of them is extreme (as I clearly stated in my previous post). But at some point in trying to save more birds, you'll end up both spending an outrageous amount of time, money, and effort that could be better allocated, and also be causing unnecessary pain and suffering for animals. Is that really that contentious to say?
You should (do?) work for BP, it's great thinking like yours that got them where they are now.
And to think, I'm the one modded "flamebait" here for pointing out both rational elements of TFA's argument (which I agree with) and irrational ones, which I admittedly made a little fun of. You're get modded "insightful" for being deliberately mean.