Indeed. I'd be in favor of single-payer, but Obamacare is an abomination. And I mean that word in the old-school sense of some spawn of things that really shouldn't go together.
But that's the U.S. government way. We don't have socialism; he have half-assed versions of regulation that really end up funnelling money into the pockets of rich people and corporations. We did it with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- just enough regulation to claim they were pseudo-government entities, but enough freedom to completely blow up the housing market and be bailed out by taxpayers. We've witnessed it with Obamacare -- enough regulation to improve healthcare a bit, but with increased costs and a completely superfluous layer of private corporations whose sole benefit is to stand in the WAY of actual health care, make claims and overhead by health providers much more complex, and skim ~15% off the top. And now we're seeing it with student loans -- no, we don't want to actually provide higher education for everyone, but we'll create this weird loan structure that flows through young uninformed students with prices set by colleges that act more like corporations than educators every day... is it any wonder tuition is out of control?
That's the great American experiment: see how many ways we can screw over taxpayers by creating "regulation" systems that half-fix problems and provide perverse profit incentives for corporations.
Agree completely. Not everyone cared, but for your favorite albums or favorite band or even an unusual track you might want to know something more about -- the CD booklet, preceded by the LP jacket (sometimes with accompanying booklet) was often really informative. (Oh, and those tiny print things on cassettes too... I don't miss those.)
Like DVD extras that gave fans insight beyond the movie, "liner notes" are going the way of the Dodo. I have a friend who has been trying to write on recently released music, and the basic info you'd often get in liner notes is often hard to come by, if they exist at all.
Where it becomes a problem is if you don't firmly *understand* what you're really doing.
I think your definition of "moving" is different from the definition of "moving" actually being used.
If you were moving "+3 to the other side," according to normal standard English meanings of the word "move," then a "+3" would then appear on the right-hand side of your example.
But it doesn't. Instead a "-3" appears on the other side of the example. Thus, anyone who is actually doing this is cognizant that you're not "moving" as much as performing a sort of "reverse operation" to create a cancellation, which is why the sign changes.
In this case, a person who correctly changes the operation from addition to subtraction or vice versa (or multiplication to division, etc.) and STILL uses the term "moving" clearly intuits the fact that they are moving a NUMBER from one side to the other (which IS accurate), but ALSO changing the operation.
I agree with GP -- you're being overly pedantic here. Anyone who actually can perform the "shortcut" you mention and successfully changes the operations is performing the algorithm correctly and solving the problem, regardless of whether they use the word "moving" or not.
Absolutely agree. I know it's all completely arbitrary. But when month after month goes by and houses in your neighborhood are selling well, but Zillow seems to indicate they're all worth 20-40% less than what they're selling for, then Zillow seems to be a lot more arbitrary.
Just to clarify my last statements, I was skeptical of the Zestimates even as a new buyer -- but I nevertheless expected that they must give SOME rough sense of value. Now I have no confidence in them at all... Maybe within +/-30 or 40%, and at that point, why bother posting them at all? That's probably a greater error in cost than the entire range that most people are even considering.
That seems about as accurate a method as Zillow. I bought a house several years back (well after the big crash) for a bit more than Zillow's supposed "estimate." But the price seemed right given improvements to the interior that Zillow's broad brush algorithm wouldn't know about.
Six months later, out of curiosity I somehow ended up on Zillow's site and looked up my house. The estimate, which was already undervalued, dropped by over 10%. Zillow lets an owner post an alternate estimate of value, so I noted the professional appraisal done before my purchase was significantly higher. A couple years go by, and Zillow keeps dropping the value of the house, even though houses in the neighborhood kept selling for similar $/sqft to what I paid. At the lowest point, Zillow's estimate was about 30% lower than the house was appraised... Even after I had provided that info.
I was so confused about all this that I signed up for an email alert just to see what might happen. Suddenly one day there's a flurry of activity looking at my house (even though it wasn't listed for sale). And suddenly overnight the estimate is bumped up by $50,000, then more. But the weirder thing is that Zillow displays a graph of what it claims were the historical "Zestimates" for the property over the last 5 years or whatever -- and that graph was suddenly altered to erase the inexplicable and continuous drop in value that it had previously registered. So Zillow not only made huge mistakes, but they completely hid them as if they had never happened.
Anyhow, less than a year after Zillow's value went back up inexplicably, I sold the house for quite a bit more than even Zillow's revised estimates (and made a reasonable profit, even though Zillow claimed my home value was going down for the vast majority of my time in the house).
This was an old house in a very established neighborhood, and there were no rapid swings in value there, even when the crash happened. So, given my personal experience, I'd say Zillow deserves this lawsuit -- as a new homebuyer, I definitely paid attention to those estimates, but now I know firsthand that they can be complete BS. And Zillow will clearly hide the fact that they even made a major valuation error.
Thanks for this link! I've never seen it before, but it's hilarious reading AND one of the best compilations of sources that goes through all of this mess.
By the way, the big clue that you don't know what you're talking about is that you think anyone was defending the Ptolemaic model at Galileo's trial. Nobody was. Galileo was still complaining about it, but the Catholic scientists had moved on to the Tychonic model, endorsed by Kepler's mentor. The argument was between the Copernican (supported by Galileo) and the Tychonic model, which were both ultimately wrong. The correct model had already been developed and explained by Kepler, but Galileo refused to follow various assertions of Kepler's, instead preferring his inaccurate and anti-empirical Copernican system.
A whole lot of original thinkers ended up in prison or burned before they got around to Galileo, so don't give us this "Not this again." bullshit.
Citations, please. You have maybe the persecution of Galileo (which was complex and arguably mostly happened over personal insults to the pope, not the ideas he was promoting) and Bruno (who was tried for heretical doctrinal beliefs mostly, not any of his speculative "scientific" claims). I do NOT defend either one of these, but both were arguably disputes that happened not primarily over science (although the Galileo trial ended up dealing with that as a way of suppressing a guy who had publicly insulted another powerful other guy).
I think you'll have a lot of trouble finding other "scientists" who were persecuted, imprisoned, or burned over the past millennia by the Catholic Church, because they basically don't exist. Did they burn "heretics"? Yes. People who taught stuff like Jesus wasn't the Son of God or whatever. Yes, they persecuted those who had abstract doctrinal disputes over theological matters. Over "science" (or "natural philosophy")? Not really. See the list of prominent Catholic scientists supported by the church historically in my previous links.
Who is "defending the Church's treatment of Galileo"? I certainly did not and am not. But the issue there was one of freedom of speech/censorship (and Galileo was certainly not the only one to whom that applies at that point in history), not primarily an issue of scientific merit.
Galileo is seen as one of the founders of modern science.
I would never dispute Galileo's contributions to science. I would strongly dispute many of his claims about heliocentrism, though, which were based on incorrect assertions. Even a stopped clock is right twice per day. (Actually, that's a reference, which I assume you won't get because you obviously didn't read the links in my previous post where I explain that Galileo's ONLY proof of the earth's motion was a theory of tides that conflicted obviously with empirical evidence. If Galileo actually paid attention to empirical evidence about tides twice per day, he likely would have never promoted his heliocentrism book as strongly as he did.)
by the 17th century and Copernicus's theory and Galileo's observations, there was no excuse at all
READ THE LINKS I ALREADY PROVIDED. There were oodles of reasons to object to heliocentrism during Galileo's lifetime, particularly if you were using the circular models that Copernicus and Galileo advocated which didn't actually make the math that much simpler than the Ptolemaic model.
But if you need more details that I've already provided in the links, here's yet another explanation of several scientific objections people had against Galileo's theories at the time.
science barely existed at the time
Scientific reasoning was quite advanced at the time. Read some actual history of science. There were complex debates going on with Galileo about empirical physical phenomena. It wasn't just Galileo saying, "Well, obviously my model's better -- look!" and everyone else going, "We refuse to look. My Bible tells me different!" That's NOT what happened, no matter what you believe happened.
And the Church has acknowledged its error and unjust way it treated Galileo, so I don't see any need to whitewash the Church's treatment of him.
At no point do I wish to "whitewash" anything. The Church's treatment of Galileo was DEPLORABLE and unforgivable. But it was NOT a simplistic argument about "rational science" vs. "ignorant religious wackos." It was a lot more complicated than that.
But to get back on topic here -- throughout the rest of the past millennia or so, even if you want to target the Galileo affair as a bad mark on Catholic science, the Church has pretty much consistently been promoting scientific research and progress... it's only in the past century or so that its scientific perspective has lagged on some issues.
Ask Galileo how that worked out. Sounds like desperate actions of cult who's way past expiration date.
Not this again. I'm not Catholic, I disagree with a lot of the politics of the Catholic Church, and obviously most of its religious doctrine is hooey.
But anti-science? Nope. And the "Galileo affair" is a red herring, one of the very few episodes in the Catholic Church's long history where it comes across as anti-science -- although actually, it wasn't so much. Galileo himself was spouting off about stuff that didn't actually make sense according to the science of the time. That doesn't justify shutting him down or placing him under house arrest of course, but that's a free speech issue, not a suppression of SCIENCE issue.
Anyhow, I'm not going to bother describing the Catholic Church's long history of support of science, how a few 19th-century anti-Catholic revisionist historians basically trumped up the idea that the Church was anti-science, and how Galileo's case was a LOT more complicated than some stupid inaccurate portrayal you've heard from Neil deGrasse Tyson or whatever. You want to know more? I've explained it before here. You want to know more about the details of Galileo's theories and the problems? I've explained that here. I could go on, but hopefully that's at least enough to prove Pope Francis's point here: the Catholic Church throughout its history has rarely been hostile to science and in fact for most of the past thousand years has probably been the biggest and most consistent institution to support it over the longest period.
Exactly. I don't really understand the need of everyone to continuously vary UI design, add/remove non-core "features," and turn a piece of familiar software into an unfamiliar one every year or two.
Well, I understand the profit motive for proprietary software. But for something like Thunderbird? It's mature. It has had basically all the core email functions the vast majority of people want for many years. Why mess with it?
Core software is often used as a TOOL. People want their tools to keep working the same way they always have, once a reasonably good tool design is achieved.
Could you imagine if the software design folks did the same crap to actual real-world tools? How about Hammer 2.0?
Designer: Welcome to the unveiling of our new carpenter's line, for the modern carpenter! Have a look at our new Hammer 2.0, designed for sleekness and portability. Carpenter: Uh, where's the claw? Designer: We decided to focus on the "core functionality" of the hammer in our new design. Most people use the claw less than the striking surface, so we installed a retractable claw that you access by swiping the base of the head and then pushing this button. Carpenter: [tries button] Woah! Okay. I guess that's cool. But wait, when I let go of the button, the claw retracts again. What if I want to pull a bunch of nails? I don't want to have to swipe and press the button every time. Holding it down is awkward. Designer: We installed an enhanced "safety" mode on all our hammers, to avoid accidents. You never know when you might fall on the claw of a hammer and hurt yourself! Carpenter: But, that basically never happens. I mean, sure it can, but there are loads of other accidents that happen around much worse tools. I just want a hammer that does what my old one did. I mean, what if I want to use the hammer to pry up something or maybe even beat the back of it into some old drywall to tear it down. You're telling me I need to hold down a darn button the whole time? Designer: Well, we have other tools that might be more appropriate for such a task. And our test users found Hammer 2.0 to be excellent for common tasks like hanging pictures and assembling Ikea furniture.
Carpenter: Uh, I'm a carpenter. I use a hammer for a lot more than that. And it was just a simple device that could do a bunch of things. Why can't I just have a non-retractable claw?? Designer: Oh, well, if you really insist, we sell a Legacy Claw Dongle for $19.95 that will allow you to leave the claw facing out without holding the button. Carpenter: That seems pretty pricey for what used to be a standard feature. Okay, well, I guess at least I'll try it. But wait, this thing is way too light. What's it made out of? Designer: It's a blend of components made of proprietary metallic features and some heavy plastic components. Carpenter: But I need a heavier hammer! Designer: Our testing scenarios indicated that people preferred a lighter and more portable product when doing common tasks like hanging pictures. Carpenter: Again with the "hanging pictures"... see, real people actually use hammers to do WORK. Like hammering nails into hard wood or even metal. Even if this material holds up to that sort of stress, I need a certain weight to the hammer to drive nails in efficiently! Designer: Sir, I think if you just try our Hammer 2.0, you'll realize its superiority!
Carpenter: Okay, fine. I'll give it a shot. [Attempts to hammer nail; the hammer flies out of his hand and across the room.] WOAH! What the heck?! Designer: Oh, we forgot to mention -- you need to wear our special Handyman Glove 2.0 accessory or else you won't be able to grip the slick surface of the hammer properly, which we made out of new space-age materials. Carpenter: WHAA?! I can't use my normal work gloves or maybe just my bare hands?
I don't think one should fear the participation of non-PhDs in EPA decision making.
Please re-read the post you replied to. I explicitly said that perhaps there should be a role in discussing and generating environmental policy that could incorporate industry experts. But TFA is talking about SCIENCE advisory boards, i.e., groups of people who are experts in SCIENCE. If they want to have an "industry advisory board" at the EPA too, I'm not necessarily opposed to that, or some sort of joint group. But it seems really odd to claim that we should put people who aren't science experts on a SCIENCE board.
Yeah, I'm always careful not to put too much value in him. Then he'd be overflowing in attention. Of course, don't put zero stock in him, either -- otherwise he can really cause problems in division that he creates.
Yes, exactly. We have many documented cases where lots of people have shared satirical fake news articles without reading them. We had a number of high-level politicians and advisers in the last election sometimes tweeting these as well without reading them.
How do we know they didn't read them? Because many of the articles turned into obvious nonsense or ridiculous crap that often made fun of the audience they were targeting in the 4th paragraph or so. Facebook users (and even public figures who should know better) have been shown to just "Like" things and forward or tweet them without even reading beyond the headline or 1st paragraph. And Facebook expects people to start examining details of URLs, where photos came from, etc.??
Interestingly enough, when a medical committee is looking at brain surgeons, they typically have a few on the committee.
Two things:
(1) As another reply already pointed out, a medical committee on brain surgery invites brain surgeons, Ph.D.s in neurophysiology or whatever, etc. They don't invite patients for their opinions on how best to do the surgery, which is a closer analogue here.
(2) Your idea may have some merit in the sense that having input from industry experts could be useful in formulating the best policy plans if they will require restructuring businesses. Perhaps there is already some sort of committee like that at the EPA, or maybe input is ad-hoc -- or maybe even one could be formed. HOWEVER, it does NOT make sense to appoint industry experts on business policy to the Board of Scientific Counselors or the Science Advisory Board.
Maybe the brain surgeons don't understand the realities of patient care and comfort. Maybe they should have a hospital committee that includes some patients to think about those issues. But the brain surgeons should NOT appoint a bunch of patients to an advisory board on the science and practice of brain surgery itself!
And ironically, that's really the Turing test. Anyone claiming this is a "no true Scotsman" fallacy should read Turing's original 1950 article explaining the imitation game and what sort of dialogue was expected to demonstrate intelligence and actual comprehension by an AI. That's always been my standard, it's 67 years old, and we're nowhere near it in any supposed "AI" existing today.
Have to agree here. Salt is incredibly cheap. I can definitely see cooking without salt if you substitute other seasonings or something, but almost any kind of seasoning is more expensive than salt in terms of flavor per dollar added. If GP made a choice to lower salt intake, that's perfectly valid, but the economizing thing makes little sense.
Well, there's historical precedent. A number of nutritionists from the USDA over the years have come out and claimed that various aspects of the "food pyramid" etc. were explicitly modified to suit the interests of various food industries, rather than nutritional guidelines. I don't know that there's direct evidence here of a similar trend, but it would probably be surprising if food lobbyist interests were NOT taken into account, at least somewhat...
People surviving to adulthood had similar lifespans as humans today.
No they didn't. It depends on how far you go back in time, but 130,000 years ago basically no one survived past about 30. That link goes on to note that in Neaderthal culture, you had only about 4 adults past the age of 30 for every 10 young adults. It's only when you get to the early Stone Age that people live long enough to see a significant number of grandparents.
Basically, around the time of the agricultural revolution (where the "paleo" diet supposedly ENDS) is where you start seeing people living longer and actually making it to middle age regularly. Not surprising, since agriculture was probably responsible for making old age feasible, by allowing permanent settlements with more consistent food and nutrition sources and less dangers from hunting and gathering.
People don't like lumps of butter in their whole milk, etc.
Huh? Non-homogenized milk doesn't have "lumps of butter." Non-homogenized milk just will have the cream gradually float to the top. Butter is generally only formed when you concentrate cream and agitate it.
People used to receive non-homogenized milk at home all the time, back when the "milkman" deliveries were common. If you wanted "homogenized" milk texture, you just shook the bottle before drinking. If you wanted an extra-rich cup of milk, you took the first cup from the top of the bottle. (Which often tastes a bit like half-and-half, unless you wait a long time for the cream to float up without any bottle motion.) Without shaking, the remainder of the milk would generally retain a small amount of fat, probably on average a bit more than today's "skim" contains... but it seems to be more flavorful than typical "skim" or "low-fat" milk.
It's not a huge effect, but a lot of people think non-homogenized does have a stronger and more pleasant flavor. The main reason for adopting homogenization was benefits in shelf life and consistent product (e.g., mixing milk from different sources, with no discernable difference). I don't think anyone would agree it was done for taste, since there was strong resistance to it among consumers for decades. For consistent texture? Yes, that's mostly why consumers prefer it these days.
My definition has always been along the lines of the examples Turing himself gave in 1950 when he defined the Turing test. We're nowhere close to anything like the kind of behavior he describes there. (His example of dialogue with a machine that successfully passes his test includes stuff like debating appropriate word substitutions and subtleties of meaning in a Shakespearean sonnet, stuff that demonstrates true understanding and abstraction of concepts and adaptability to input.)
If the AI can "learn," then yes. Learning (and even the realization that one has made a "mistake" and what the actual source of the error was) requires complex pattern-finding and abstraction. We have no AI these days that is anywhere close to such skills. We have algorithms that can develop general "weighting" of possible answers without human intervention when exposed to large datasets, but knowing where a "mistake" occurs and why to make a specific correction is a lot harder. Most of our successful current "AI" is also diffuse and not rule-based, so figuring out exactly how to make a "correction" to any given mistake isn't going to be intuitive even for programmers, let alone the system itself which currently will have no ability to create such abstractions itself.
if I want to go through page of a tech book, I can have a few colored page marker and go very quickly from 1 page to the next, it is far more slower with ebook. And the feeling of paper in hand is.... I dunno , psychologically better ?
One major thing is the reliability of layout, with its effects on navigability. A well-designed book is also helpful in all sorts of more subtle ways, but the biggest issue with reflowing ebooks is that they destroy the sense of "location" that physical books have.
I can pick up a book I haven't looked at in a few years, and I often can locate a passage very quickly just by remembering, "It was about 2/3 of the way through, and there was a diagram on the top of the left page... and some description about X." Doing a full-text search can sometimes get me there quickly too, but it depends on exactly what I'm looking for. Frequently, manually paging through is a lot faster.
Heck, it's not even just navigating books, but also navigating libraries. Years ago I had this experience returning to the small local public library I hadn't been to in a decade. A lot of the same books were still in some of the sections, and I remembered roughly where they were and what to expect. The same happens with my own home library on bookshelves, where I can rapidly locate a book and a passage within it. With a DRMed ebook, I don't have a guarantee I'll even be able to access it in a decade, let alone have it organized in a way that I can find it easily.
Don't get me wrong: the kind of search tools ebooks provide also are extremely helpful and you can do certain kinds of navigation that are much more cumbersome than physical books. But to me at least, the physical book experience is still superior especially for books I plan to go back and consult multiple times. (And for other books where I'm reading for pleasure, the physical book is generally more pleasant from a design perspective, though I admit that difference is more subtle and mostly has to do with my interest in typography and layout design.)
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. I'd be in favor of single-payer, but Obamacare is an abomination. And I mean that word in the old-school sense of some spawn of things that really shouldn't go together.
But that's the U.S. government way. We don't have socialism; he have half-assed versions of regulation that really end up funnelling money into the pockets of rich people and corporations. We did it with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- just enough regulation to claim they were pseudo-government entities, but enough freedom to completely blow up the housing market and be bailed out by taxpayers. We've witnessed it with Obamacare -- enough regulation to improve healthcare a bit, but with increased costs and a completely superfluous layer of private corporations whose sole benefit is to stand in the WAY of actual health care, make claims and overhead by health providers much more complex, and skim ~15% off the top. And now we're seeing it with student loans -- no, we don't want to actually provide higher education for everyone, but we'll create this weird loan structure that flows through young uninformed students with prices set by colleges that act more like corporations than educators every day... is it any wonder tuition is out of control?
That's the great American experiment: see how many ways we can screw over taxpayers by creating "regulation" systems that half-fix problems and provide perverse profit incentives for corporations.
Agree completely. Not everyone cared, but for your favorite albums or favorite band or even an unusual track you might want to know something more about -- the CD booklet, preceded by the LP jacket (sometimes with accompanying booklet) was often really informative. (Oh, and those tiny print things on cassettes too... I don't miss those.)
Like DVD extras that gave fans insight beyond the movie, "liner notes" are going the way of the Dodo. I have a friend who has been trying to write on recently released music, and the basic info you'd often get in liner notes is often hard to come by, if they exist at all.
It's all waggling our butts now, like bees.
I'm not sure I understand. Is there an emoji for that?
Where it becomes a problem is if you don't firmly *understand* what you're really doing.
I think your definition of "moving" is different from the definition of "moving" actually being used.
If you were moving "+3 to the other side," according to normal standard English meanings of the word "move," then a "+3" would then appear on the right-hand side of your example.
But it doesn't. Instead a "-3" appears on the other side of the example. Thus, anyone who is actually doing this is cognizant that you're not "moving" as much as performing a sort of "reverse operation" to create a cancellation, which is why the sign changes.
In this case, a person who correctly changes the operation from addition to subtraction or vice versa (or multiplication to division, etc.) and STILL uses the term "moving" clearly intuits the fact that they are moving a NUMBER from one side to the other (which IS accurate), but ALSO changing the operation.
I agree with GP -- you're being overly pedantic here. Anyone who actually can perform the "shortcut" you mention and successfully changes the operations is performing the algorithm correctly and solving the problem, regardless of whether they use the word "moving" or not.
Absolutely agree. I know it's all completely arbitrary. But when month after month goes by and houses in your neighborhood are selling well, but Zillow seems to indicate they're all worth 20-40% less than what they're selling for, then Zillow seems to be a lot more arbitrary.
Just to clarify my last statements, I was skeptical of the Zestimates even as a new buyer -- but I nevertheless expected that they must give SOME rough sense of value. Now I have no confidence in them at all... Maybe within +/-30 or 40%, and at that point, why bother posting them at all? That's probably a greater error in cost than the entire range that most people are even considering.
That seems about as accurate a method as Zillow. I bought a house several years back (well after the big crash) for a bit more than Zillow's supposed "estimate." But the price seemed right given improvements to the interior that Zillow's broad brush algorithm wouldn't know about.
Six months later, out of curiosity I somehow ended up on Zillow's site and looked up my house. The estimate, which was already undervalued, dropped by over 10%. Zillow lets an owner post an alternate estimate of value, so I noted the professional appraisal done before my purchase was significantly higher. A couple years go by, and Zillow keeps dropping the value of the house, even though houses in the neighborhood kept selling for similar $/sqft to what I paid. At the lowest point, Zillow's estimate was about 30% lower than the house was appraised... Even after I had provided that info.
I was so confused about all this that I signed up for an email alert just to see what might happen. Suddenly one day there's a flurry of activity looking at my house (even though it wasn't listed for sale). And suddenly overnight the estimate is bumped up by $50,000, then more. But the weirder thing is that Zillow displays a graph of what it claims were the historical "Zestimates" for the property over the last 5 years or whatever -- and that graph was suddenly altered to erase the inexplicable and continuous drop in value that it had previously registered. So Zillow not only made huge mistakes, but they completely hid them as if they had never happened.
Anyhow, less than a year after Zillow's value went back up inexplicably, I sold the house for quite a bit more than even Zillow's revised estimates (and made a reasonable profit, even though Zillow claimed my home value was going down for the vast majority of my time in the house).
This was an old house in a very established neighborhood, and there were no rapid swings in value there, even when the crash happened. So, given my personal experience, I'd say Zillow deserves this lawsuit -- as a new homebuyer, I definitely paid attention to those estimates, but now I know firsthand that they can be complete BS. And Zillow will clearly hide the fact that they even made a major valuation error.
Thanks for this link! I've never seen it before, but it's hilarious reading AND one of the best compilations of sources that goes through all of this mess.
By the way, the big clue that you don't know what you're talking about is that you think anyone was defending the Ptolemaic model at Galileo's trial. Nobody was. Galileo was still complaining about it, but the Catholic scientists had moved on to the Tychonic model, endorsed by Kepler's mentor. The argument was between the Copernican (supported by Galileo) and the Tychonic model, which were both ultimately wrong. The correct model had already been developed and explained by Kepler, but Galileo refused to follow various assertions of Kepler's, instead preferring his inaccurate and anti-empirical Copernican system.
A whole lot of original thinkers ended up in prison or burned before they got around to Galileo, so don't give us this "Not this again." bullshit.
Citations, please. You have maybe the persecution of Galileo (which was complex and arguably mostly happened over personal insults to the pope, not the ideas he was promoting) and Bruno (who was tried for heretical doctrinal beliefs mostly, not any of his speculative "scientific" claims). I do NOT defend either one of these, but both were arguably disputes that happened not primarily over science (although the Galileo trial ended up dealing with that as a way of suppressing a guy who had publicly insulted another powerful other guy).
I think you'll have a lot of trouble finding other "scientists" who were persecuted, imprisoned, or burned over the past millennia by the Catholic Church, because they basically don't exist. Did they burn "heretics"? Yes. People who taught stuff like Jesus wasn't the Son of God or whatever. Yes, they persecuted those who had abstract doctrinal disputes over theological matters. Over "science" (or "natural philosophy")? Not really. See the list of prominent Catholic scientists supported by the church historically in my previous links.
Who is "defending the Church's treatment of Galileo"? I certainly did not and am not. But the issue there was one of freedom of speech/censorship (and Galileo was certainly not the only one to whom that applies at that point in history), not primarily an issue of scientific merit.
Galileo is seen as one of the founders of modern science.
I would never dispute Galileo's contributions to science. I would strongly dispute many of his claims about heliocentrism, though, which were based on incorrect assertions. Even a stopped clock is right twice per day. (Actually, that's a reference, which I assume you won't get because you obviously didn't read the links in my previous post where I explain that Galileo's ONLY proof of the earth's motion was a theory of tides that conflicted obviously with empirical evidence. If Galileo actually paid attention to empirical evidence about tides twice per day, he likely would have never promoted his heliocentrism book as strongly as he did.)
by the 17th century and Copernicus's theory and Galileo's observations, there was no excuse at all
READ THE LINKS I ALREADY PROVIDED. There were oodles of reasons to object to heliocentrism during Galileo's lifetime, particularly if you were using the circular models that Copernicus and Galileo advocated which didn't actually make the math that much simpler than the Ptolemaic model.
But if you need more details that I've already provided in the links, here's yet another explanation of several scientific objections people had against Galileo's theories at the time.
science barely existed at the time
Scientific reasoning was quite advanced at the time. Read some actual history of science. There were complex debates going on with Galileo about empirical physical phenomena. It wasn't just Galileo saying, "Well, obviously my model's better -- look!" and everyone else going, "We refuse to look. My Bible tells me different!" That's NOT what happened, no matter what you believe happened.
And the Church has acknowledged its error and unjust way it treated Galileo, so I don't see any need to whitewash the Church's treatment of him.
At no point do I wish to "whitewash" anything. The Church's treatment of Galileo was DEPLORABLE and unforgivable. But it was NOT a simplistic argument about "rational science" vs. "ignorant religious wackos." It was a lot more complicated than that.
But to get back on topic here -- throughout the rest of the past millennia or so, even if you want to target the Galileo affair as a bad mark on Catholic science, the Church has pretty much consistently been promoting scientific research and progress... it's only in the past century or so that its scientific perspective has lagged on some issues.
Ask Galileo how that worked out. Sounds like desperate actions of cult who's way past expiration date.
Not this again. I'm not Catholic, I disagree with a lot of the politics of the Catholic Church, and obviously most of its religious doctrine is hooey.
But anti-science? Nope. And the "Galileo affair" is a red herring, one of the very few episodes in the Catholic Church's long history where it comes across as anti-science -- although actually, it wasn't so much. Galileo himself was spouting off about stuff that didn't actually make sense according to the science of the time. That doesn't justify shutting him down or placing him under house arrest of course, but that's a free speech issue, not a suppression of SCIENCE issue.
Anyhow, I'm not going to bother describing the Catholic Church's long history of support of science, how a few 19th-century anti-Catholic revisionist historians basically trumped up the idea that the Church was anti-science, and how Galileo's case was a LOT more complicated than some stupid inaccurate portrayal you've heard from Neil deGrasse Tyson or whatever. You want to know more? I've explained it before here. You want to know more about the details of Galileo's theories and the problems? I've explained that here. I could go on, but hopefully that's at least enough to prove Pope Francis's point here: the Catholic Church throughout its history has rarely been hostile to science and in fact for most of the past thousand years has probably been the biggest and most consistent institution to support it over the longest period.
Exactly. I don't really understand the need of everyone to continuously vary UI design, add/remove non-core "features," and turn a piece of familiar software into an unfamiliar one every year or two.
Well, I understand the profit motive for proprietary software. But for something like Thunderbird? It's mature. It has had basically all the core email functions the vast majority of people want for many years. Why mess with it?
Core software is often used as a TOOL. People want their tools to keep working the same way they always have, once a reasonably good tool design is achieved.
Could you imagine if the software design folks did the same crap to actual real-world tools? How about Hammer 2.0?
Designer: Welcome to the unveiling of our new carpenter's line, for the modern carpenter! Have a look at our new Hammer 2.0, designed for sleekness and portability.
Carpenter: Uh, where's the claw?
Designer: We decided to focus on the "core functionality" of the hammer in our new design. Most people use the claw less than the striking surface, so we installed a retractable claw that you access by swiping the base of the head and then pushing this button.
Carpenter: [tries button] Woah! Okay. I guess that's cool. But wait, when I let go of the button, the claw retracts again. What if I want to pull a bunch of nails? I don't want to have to swipe and press the button every time. Holding it down is awkward.
Designer: We installed an enhanced "safety" mode on all our hammers, to avoid accidents. You never know when you might fall on the claw of a hammer and hurt yourself!
Carpenter: But, that basically never happens. I mean, sure it can, but there are loads of other accidents that happen around much worse tools. I just want a hammer that does what my old one did. I mean, what if I want to use the hammer to pry up something or maybe even beat the back of it into some old drywall to tear it down. You're telling me I need to hold down a darn button the whole time?
Designer: Well, we have other tools that might be more appropriate for such a task. And our test users found Hammer 2.0 to be excellent for common tasks like hanging pictures and assembling Ikea furniture.
Carpenter: Uh, I'm a carpenter. I use a hammer for a lot more than that. And it was just a simple device that could do a bunch of things. Why can't I just have a non-retractable claw??
Designer: Oh, well, if you really insist, we sell a Legacy Claw Dongle for $19.95 that will allow you to leave the claw facing out without holding the button.
Carpenter: That seems pretty pricey for what used to be a standard feature. Okay, well, I guess at least I'll try it. But wait, this thing is way too light. What's it made out of?
Designer: It's a blend of components made of proprietary metallic features and some heavy plastic components.
Carpenter: But I need a heavier hammer!
Designer: Our testing scenarios indicated that people preferred a lighter and more portable product when doing common tasks like hanging pictures.
Carpenter: Again with the "hanging pictures"... see, real people actually use hammers to do WORK. Like hammering nails into hard wood or even metal. Even if this material holds up to that sort of stress, I need a certain weight to the hammer to drive nails in efficiently!
Designer: Sir, I think if you just try our Hammer 2.0, you'll realize its superiority!
Carpenter: Okay, fine. I'll give it a shot. [Attempts to hammer nail; the hammer flies out of his hand and across the room.] WOAH! What the heck?!
Designer: Oh, we forgot to mention -- you need to wear our special Handyman Glove 2.0 accessory or else you won't be able to grip the slick surface of the hammer properly, which we made out of new space-age materials.
Carpenter: WHAA?! I can't use my normal work gloves or maybe just my bare hands?
I don't think one should fear the participation of non-PhDs in EPA decision making.
Please re-read the post you replied to. I explicitly said that perhaps there should be a role in discussing and generating environmental policy that could incorporate industry experts. But TFA is talking about SCIENCE advisory boards, i.e., groups of people who are experts in SCIENCE. If they want to have an "industry advisory board" at the EPA too, I'm not necessarily opposed to that, or some sort of joint group. But it seems really odd to claim that we should put people who aren't science experts on a SCIENCE board.
Yeah, I'm always careful not to put too much value in him. Then he'd be overflowing in attention. Of course, don't put zero stock in him, either -- otherwise he can really cause problems in division that he creates.
Yes, exactly. We have many documented cases where lots of people have shared satirical fake news articles without reading them. We had a number of high-level politicians and advisers in the last election sometimes tweeting these as well without reading them.
How do we know they didn't read them? Because many of the articles turned into obvious nonsense or ridiculous crap that often made fun of the audience they were targeting in the 4th paragraph or so. Facebook users (and even public figures who should know better) have been shown to just "Like" things and forward or tweet them without even reading beyond the headline or 1st paragraph. And Facebook expects people to start examining details of URLs, where photos came from, etc.??
LOL.
Interestingly enough, when a medical committee is looking at brain surgeons, they typically have a few on the committee.
Two things:
(1) As another reply already pointed out, a medical committee on brain surgery invites brain surgeons, Ph.D.s in neurophysiology or whatever, etc. They don't invite patients for their opinions on how best to do the surgery, which is a closer analogue here.
(2) Your idea may have some merit in the sense that having input from industry experts could be useful in formulating the best policy plans if they will require restructuring businesses. Perhaps there is already some sort of committee like that at the EPA, or maybe input is ad-hoc -- or maybe even one could be formed. HOWEVER, it does NOT make sense to appoint industry experts on business policy to the Board of Scientific Counselors or the Science Advisory Board.
Maybe the brain surgeons don't understand the realities of patient care and comfort. Maybe they should have a hospital committee that includes some patients to think about those issues. But the brain surgeons should NOT appoint a bunch of patients to an advisory board on the science and practice of brain surgery itself!
And ironically, that's really the Turing test. Anyone claiming this is a "no true Scotsman" fallacy should read Turing's original 1950 article explaining the imitation game and what sort of dialogue was expected to demonstrate intelligence and actual comprehension by an AI. That's always been my standard, it's 67 years old, and we're nowhere near it in any supposed "AI" existing today.
Have to agree here. Salt is incredibly cheap. I can definitely see cooking without salt if you substitute other seasonings or something, but almost any kind of seasoning is more expensive than salt in terms of flavor per dollar added. If GP made a choice to lower salt intake, that's perfectly valid, but the economizing thing makes little sense.
Well, there's historical precedent. A number of nutritionists from the USDA over the years have come out and claimed that various aspects of the "food pyramid" etc. were explicitly modified to suit the interests of various food industries, rather than nutritional guidelines. I don't know that there's direct evidence here of a similar trend, but it would probably be surprising if food lobbyist interests were NOT taken into account, at least somewhat...
People surviving to adulthood had similar lifespans as humans today.
No they didn't. It depends on how far you go back in time, but 130,000 years ago basically no one survived past about 30. That link goes on to note that in Neaderthal culture, you had only about 4 adults past the age of 30 for every 10 young adults. It's only when you get to the early Stone Age that people live long enough to see a significant number of grandparents.
Basically, around the time of the agricultural revolution (where the "paleo" diet supposedly ENDS) is where you start seeing people living longer and actually making it to middle age regularly. Not surprising, since agriculture was probably responsible for making old age feasible, by allowing permanent settlements with more consistent food and nutrition sources and less dangers from hunting and gathering.
People don't like lumps of butter in their whole milk, etc.
Huh? Non-homogenized milk doesn't have "lumps of butter." Non-homogenized milk just will have the cream gradually float to the top. Butter is generally only formed when you concentrate cream and agitate it.
People used to receive non-homogenized milk at home all the time, back when the "milkman" deliveries were common. If you wanted "homogenized" milk texture, you just shook the bottle before drinking. If you wanted an extra-rich cup of milk, you took the first cup from the top of the bottle. (Which often tastes a bit like half-and-half, unless you wait a long time for the cream to float up without any bottle motion.) Without shaking, the remainder of the milk would generally retain a small amount of fat, probably on average a bit more than today's "skim" contains... but it seems to be more flavorful than typical "skim" or "low-fat" milk.
It's not a huge effect, but a lot of people think non-homogenized does have a stronger and more pleasant flavor. The main reason for adopting homogenization was benefits in shelf life and consistent product (e.g., mixing milk from different sources, with no discernable difference). I don't think anyone would agree it was done for taste, since there was strong resistance to it among consumers for decades. For consistent texture? Yes, that's mostly why consumers prefer it these days.
My definition has always been along the lines of the examples Turing himself gave in 1950 when he defined the Turing test. We're nowhere close to anything like the kind of behavior he describes there. (His example of dialogue with a machine that successfully passes his test includes stuff like debating appropriate word substitutions and subtleties of meaning in a Shakespearean sonnet, stuff that demonstrates true understanding and abstraction of concepts and adaptability to input.)
If the AI can "learn," then yes. Learning (and even the realization that one has made a "mistake" and what the actual source of the error was) requires complex pattern-finding and abstraction. We have no AI these days that is anywhere close to such skills. We have algorithms that can develop general "weighting" of possible answers without human intervention when exposed to large datasets, but knowing where a "mistake" occurs and why to make a specific correction is a lot harder. Most of our successful current "AI" is also diffuse and not rule-based, so figuring out exactly how to make a "correction" to any given mistake isn't going to be intuitive even for programmers, let alone the system itself which currently will have no ability to create such abstractions itself.
if I want to go through page of a tech book, I can have a few colored page marker and go very quickly from 1 page to the next, it is far more slower with ebook. And the feeling of paper in hand is.... I dunno , psychologically better ?
One major thing is the reliability of layout, with its effects on navigability. A well-designed book is also helpful in all sorts of more subtle ways, but the biggest issue with reflowing ebooks is that they destroy the sense of "location" that physical books have.
I can pick up a book I haven't looked at in a few years, and I often can locate a passage very quickly just by remembering, "It was about 2/3 of the way through, and there was a diagram on the top of the left page... and some description about X." Doing a full-text search can sometimes get me there quickly too, but it depends on exactly what I'm looking for. Frequently, manually paging through is a lot faster.
Heck, it's not even just navigating books, but also navigating libraries. Years ago I had this experience returning to the small local public library I hadn't been to in a decade. A lot of the same books were still in some of the sections, and I remembered roughly where they were and what to expect. The same happens with my own home library on bookshelves, where I can rapidly locate a book and a passage within it. With a DRMed ebook, I don't have a guarantee I'll even be able to access it in a decade, let alone have it organized in a way that I can find it easily.
Don't get me wrong: the kind of search tools ebooks provide also are extremely helpful and you can do certain kinds of navigation that are much more cumbersome than physical books. But to me at least, the physical book experience is still superior especially for books I plan to go back and consult multiple times. (And for other books where I'm reading for pleasure, the physical book is generally more pleasant from a design perspective, though I admit that difference is more subtle and mostly has to do with my interest in typography and layout design.)