You miss the same thing the parent does; they have staff that divide it up, read the parts, and can explain the parts. Spending the time to pass all the words briefly in front of your eyes wouldn't prepare you to vote on it, because there will be lots of details that have to be "worked out" by experts in the various areas of civics affected. What is important is that advisors who are experts in specific areas of law or policy have had detailed working discussions with the staff below them that have read those portions, and have examined the portions that are significant or could have multiple readings.
Yep. This is something that you can only understand by serving in a large legislative body the delegates large amounts of work to committees. I've never been a politician, but I have served in a faculty representative body within a large university. The reality is that individual members there simply have to trust the experts on the committees who actually deal with the details. You get the committee on curriculum or whatever that comes and says, "Today I bring forward 172 proposals for new courses." Did you read all of them? Even if you did, would you understand most of them enough to comment knowledgeably on them?
No -- you had a committee who probably spent 2 or 3 months going through all of those proposals and checking to see that they conform to various requirements.
Usually at these big legislative bodies you can see immediately see the futility of most members taking interest in these sorts of complex behind-the-scenes work. Most of the questions which were asked on the floor from general faculty members were completely ridiculous and showed that they often had no clue about what the proposals were really doing. "So, I glanced over the amendment to the graduate handbook and I'm worried this is going to do X." Usually X is vaguely on the same topic of the proposal, but the proposal actually doesn't relate to X at all.
The questions are important, and it would be good for everyone in the legislative body to try to understand these nuances, but the reality is that the representatives in such a situation are just not going to be able to have detailed understanding of everything. That's why parliamentary procedure has committees in the first place -- to have a few people go out, dig into the details, really sort stuff out, and then present it to the body as a whole. And the legislators then have to trust that this committee did its work diligently; otherwise, it shouldn't delegate such work to begin with.
And the delegation of such duties is a practical necessity. Even to run a bureaucracy like a university, there was way too much stuff for any faculty rep to get through alone. The federal government has bureaucratic layers that are hundreds or thousands of times as big.
And before you say, "Well, they shouldn't be passing all this stuff anyway," just keep in mind that for every page of nefarious weird stuff stuck into some random bill, there are probably a dozen pages of random bureaucratic crap that need to go through just to keep everything functioning. You have to wade through all of that bureaucratic crap (which often is just fundamental basic stuff to keep things going in a reasonable fashion, and which you just need to trust your committee members and advisors to look over) in order to get to the controversial stuff.
My question was how do they deal with the constant change? Do they have a standard way to review what has changed from revision to revision?
Yes, you can view the entire legislative history of H.R. 2029, the original bill here, with a list of 215 actions and 83 proposed amendments. All of this happened BEFORE the current amendment incorporating CISA.
If so, then the word "hidden" is beyond shady. If not, then why not? With the way the process seems to work, it seems strictly necessary to not have to start from scratch each time the document is changed.
Except that's basically what they did in this case. There was a 2000-page document just added as a giant omnibus "amendment" to this pre-existing H.R. 2029. You can see its summary, contents, and 18 proposed Amendments to this Amendment here (technically amendments to amendments to amendments to H.R.2029).
Now, of course, the big question I think you have is "But how do we know who inserted Section (N) -- CISA -- into this 2000-page amendment on an amendment on an amendment." And there you'd run into problems, because these omnibus spending bills are often deliberately obfuscated in deliberation and then proposed en masse. That's the whole point of "budget negotiations" and a "last-minute" deal -- they spend months working out the kinks and then slam down a 2000-page (relatively) final document on the table.
Now that the Amendment is officially introduced, any further alterations will be tracked (on those links I gave above). But the whole thing was thrown together first as part of some deal before it was formally presented as a 2000-page omnibus bill. Since the actual writing and compilation of this legislation prior to its formal presentation happened "behind closed doors," we don't have a record of how it all came together.
And if the "problem" as described doesn't really exist and dealing with the differences and voting on them is straightforward and well understood, how does crap like this make it through on unrelated bills?
Easy -- the House leadership clearly wants it there, or at least approves of it. Thus it became part of this "deal" that went into drafting the 2000-page document. There are probably hundreds of little things in there that came about from various compromises -- and now the House Rules Committee presents the whole package together with the hopes that everyone will just vote it up.
And, by the way, before you start complaining about how this is "unrelated" legislation -- this is THE budget omnibus bill of 2016. By definition, the omnibus appropriations bill every year will incorporate at least a dozen different fundamental (and not directly related) things to authorize appropriations for the whole government. It almost always contains hundreds of pages of random other crap that went into the negotiation process.
The point is that Congress in this case doesn't want you to see the "sausage being made". They just want to present the 2000-page thing and get the whole House to vote "yea" or "nay" because presumably they have already secured enough agreement in negotiations to ensure its passage before they officially submitted it.
What individual inserted CISA into the budget bill?
This looks like an action that was undertaken by the committee, so you're unlikely to find a single person named for that particular section.
Why don't all the major news outlets say "Rep. Smith inserted CISA into the budget bill"?
Because it doesn't always work that way. See, this bill used to be H.R. 2029, which was a military appropriations bill. It went through the House a few months ago, then the Senate made a bunch of modifications last month where it passed unanimously. You can read all the sundry details of its history at the link.
What appears to have happened is that the House Appropriations Committee decided they needed a "vehicle" to pass the omnibus spending packages for next year, so they got the Rules Committee to propose a 2000-page amendment. (Actually, there are two amendments; the second is much shorter.)
So, technically, this is a giant amendment proposed by a committee to a bill that had already passed the House and then was amended by the Senate and passed by them.
Anyhow, what generally happens with these huge slates of amendments is that the Chair of the Committee (in this case, the Rules Committee) will just introduce the whole group of amendments, which will then be voted on by the House. Sometimes you can find the details of who exactly proposed which amendments by digging through Committee reports, but in this case with a giant single amendment (with only Section (N) dealing with CISA), it's doubtful that there's going to be anything in the official record to track to a specific individual, other than perhaps the Committee Chair who may officially present it on behalf of the Committee.
If you think this is overly complex and sounds crazy, you'd be right. Welcome to the bureaucratic nightmare that is Congressional legislative practice.
Seriously, even if you don't despise Facebook, let's at least try to make privacy the default.
But isn't privacy antithetical to the very concept of Facebook? I mean, seriously -- if you want to keep something "private," you don't post it online in the first place. If you do, why would you use a website whose founder has openly said that he disagrees with the idea that you should have "multiple online identities," which would be the true online equivalent to having different "private lives" that you share in different ways with different people.
And even if you're willing to go along with that stuff, why would you post "private" information on a website whose very existence and money-making model is based on data collection and profiling by making the most social connections possible? That's their business model -- the more connections you make with friends, the better they can profile you. The more times you click "like," the better they can tailor their profile. The more data points they gather from social connections, the higher the price they can demand for your data. Trying to lock down your information and keep it "private" inhibits all those sharing functions which create the data points that generate your useful profile. Obviously Facebook doesn't want to encourage you to have "privacy by default," because that's completely antithetical to their entire business model.
If you post anything on Facebook, you should treat it as though you're shouting it to the entire world. Many people seem to enjoy shouting random bits of their private lives to the whole world, and that's their choice. But the whole culture of the website is completely anti-privacy, from the ground up. I imagine that any attempt to try to force Facebook to make "privacy by default" will only result in a superficial concept of "privacy" that appears to protect users while actually introducing even more nefarious ways of gathering, using, and connecting your data than before.
A lot of these are clearly "hype" words (amazing, spectacular, etc.), but I'm a little less sure of others. Some clearly could be used to mean specific things regarding the experiments, the data, or descriptions of components (bright, enormous, unique), some have technical meanings that are important (phenomenal, robust), and others just don't seem really "positive" like the others in implying "hype" (assuring, reassuring, supportive -- is this judging hype or how much "self-help" is going on in these articles?).
Anyhow, I would also note that this study began by looking at papers from the 70s. I mean -- come on, you need to treat your data with care. Back then, "hype" words would be different. Why aren't they tracking the use of groovy, far out, outta sight, solid, totally hip, and funkadelic?
You do realize that "resonance" doesn't mean what you think it means, right? There are lots of physics sites which disagree with you - "a resonant frequency is a natural frequency of vibration determined by the physical parameters of the vibrating object..."
Obviously you don't realize that this quotation doesn't mean what you think it means.
"Resonance" is NOT the same as a "resonant frequency." The "resonant frequency" is the natural frequency where a system can experience resonance, but the frequency or the vibration at that frequency is NOT resonance itself.
From the same site you linked, have a look at this graphic, which basically says:
"Resonance involves the existence of natural frequencies which are easy to excite and which a vibrating system picks out from a complex excitation."
Resonance is NOT simply vibrations occurring at a resonant frequency within a system. That's just basic oscillation or vibration or standing waves or whatever. It's not resonance. Resonance is the excitation/driving of vibrations at that frequency by an external force. If the external force isn't selectively driving the oscillation at the resonant frequency in some way, it's not resonance.
If I pluck a guitar string and it sounds at its particular natural frequency ("resonant frequency"), colloquially some people say the string is "resonating." But from a physics standpoint, that's not technically correct -- the string just has standing waves oscillating at a natural mode of vibration. But if I touch a vibrating tuning fork at the same pitch to the guitar string, causing the string to vibrate at the same frequency, THEN I have resonance.
It wasn't resonant with the wind. It was resonant with the aero forces generated by the twisting bridge.
What the hell are you talking about? Where are "aero forces" coming from except from the, well, AIR -- I.e., the wind??
It all depends on what you define as the 'forcing function'.
I can't seem to figure out what you're talking about except maybe that the bridge reinforced its own standing wave vibrations at its natural frequency. But that isn't resonance, and that's not a "forcing function." That's just an object vibrating at its natural mode of vibration when energy is introduced into the system. If you randomly strum a guitar string in a non-periodic fashion, it will create a standing wave pattern and vibrate at a certain frequency due to its natural modes of vibration. But that isn't resonance, and there's no "forcing function" setting up or reinforcing the standing waves.
None of this is news. Nobody ever said the wind was gusting at the same frequency as the bridge. It's always been understood what happened.
You're right that none of this is news, but there were alternative explanations in the past. You're right that no one said the wind was gusting in an oscillation frequency of some sort with the bridge. What some people did theorize, though, is that the wind was causing eddies to shed off the bridge in such a way that created periodic reinforcement of the bridge's motion, I.e., resonance. In the case, the speed of the wind (constant speed not oscillating) would determine the frequency of eddy shedding, which would therefore cause resonance only at certain wind speeds.
That was the old resonance explanation. That explanation is wrong, because it was the strength of the wind, not its tuned specific speed, which caused the motion. The more energy, the stronger the vibrations -- kind of like strumming the guitar string harder. But without a periodicity, you're not driving the oscillations by lining up with them... and thus it's NOT resonance as classically understood in physics.
You do realize that resonance is a phenomenon caused by two different things vibrating at similar frequencies, right? If you pluck a guitar string (introduce energy) and the string produces a standing wave at a certain frequency, it string is NOT participating in resonance, as is defined in physics. It's just vibrating at a natural frequency. Similarly, if the wind adds a bunch of energy to the bridge in a non-periodic fashion, and the bridge oscillates in a standing wave (natural frequency of vibration, like the guitar string's "pitch"), it isn't "resonance."
The original sentence might be slightly ambiguous but it doesn't explicitly state that the external force needs to drive the motion at the specific frequency. It just says there needs to be an external force, and that it drives another system to oscillate at a specific frequency.
The sentence comes from the Wikipedia article on resonance. Read it in context. It's clear that it's referencing an oscillating driving force. The force's period doesn't have to line up exactly, but the closer it is, the more resonance. That's the point of what a "resonant frequency" is -- it's the frequency you can drive a system with an external oscillating force to produce maximum amplitude response.
This is really fundamental to the definition of resonance. If the driving force has a period very different from the natural vibrational mode of the system!, we say there is "less resonance." If the driving force isn't periodic at all, it isn't periodically reinforcing the motion and is thus not "resonating" with the system at all. It's just providing energy to the system, which will tend to adopt certain modes of natural vibration... but in that case the system isn't really "resonating" with anything else.
To put it another way, if you want to calk flutter "resonance," you could just as well call strumming a guitar string in a haphazard way "resonance." Except that's not resonance -- it's just the string vibrating at a natural frequency when energy is introduced.
Wow. The fact that this AC has been modded up to "+5 Insightful" makes me truly worry about the "nerd" factor at Slashdot these days. Not only do mods believe an AC spouting nonsense, but they aren't even capable of checking that nonsense or knowing enough basic physics to contradict it.
Let's clear this up. It's really quite simple.
Check your own wikipedia references.
Aeroelastic flutter is a type of "Simple harmonic motion" .
"Simple harmonic motion" is a type of "resonance"
You're skipping over a few steps here. Simple harmonic motion is NOT a "type of resonance." Let's explore further. As you say:
Simple harmonic motion
"...The motion is sinusoidal in time and demonstrates a single resonant frequency."
There's a difference between a "resonant frequency" and "resonance." SHM occurs at a specific frequency which is a natural mode of vibration of the system. That specific frequency could be USED to create resonance, but SHM isn't resonance itself.
Resonance is:
"a phenomenon that occurs when a vibrating system or external force drives another system to oscillate with greater amplitude at a specific preferential frequency."
Exactly. Notice the external force part. The external force needs to DRIVE the motion at a specific frequency. THAT is resonance.
Or, let me try to put it in even simpler terms an AC might be able to understand:
Resonance: A system has a natural vibrational frequency of X. An external force also has a periodicity of X. Even a small external force with the same periodicity could drive the system to vibrate significantly. Example: place a tuning fork with pitch "middle C" on a piano string tuned to "middle C." The vibrations of one can drive the other to vibrate, because they both tend to vibrate at THE SAME frequency (both internal frequency and frequency of driving force).
Aeroelastic flutter: A system still has a natural vibrational frequency of X. But the external force is simply LARGE and roughly CONSTANT. The external force does NOT necessarily have a periodicity, and if it does, it isn't equal to X. So why does the "flutter" occur? Basically, there's too much energy flowing into the system and it can't dissipate it naturally. Random perturbations get it moving. Due to the natural characteristics of the system, it will tend to preferentially vibrate at one of its natural frequencies. Think of a flag fluttering in the wind -- you can see certain wavelike patterns happening even if the wind is relatively constant. The bridge is a little more complicated: it's more like a flag that's tethered on both sides. Again, in a strong wind you might see flutter "waves" happening -- that's not due to the periodicity of the wind, but to the natural reinforcement of standing waves in the flag itself when there's too much energy being pushed into it that it can't dissipate.
TL;DR -- Resonance requires a driving force with the same frequency as the system that's vibrating. Even a tiny external force could be potentially catastrophic if it reinforces the natural frequency of the system. Flutter just requires a large external force pushing energy into the system. The remedy in the case of the bridge is completely different -- for resonance, you'd have to worry about a particular windspeed for a particular length of bridge or something like that. Even a gentle wind might be able to set off nasty vibrations when resonance (matching frequencies) occurs. For flutter, you just need more damping material in general.
You may want to know what you're talking about before writing derogatory messages against another post. Lead solder wasn't effectively banned in new construction until the Clean Water Act of 1986. Some local laws may have been in effect earlier, but it's certainly possible to find lead solder in old houses.
Silver solder is not that expensive, it's not pure silver.
Yes, obviously, but lead solder was cheaper, more standard, and more durable than many alternatives for decades. It was still widely used until it was effectively banned -- particularly by low-cost contractors who built cheaper houses or installed cheaper systems.
Further most plumbing has an expected life of 40-50 years. After that it's limed up and has to be replaced. Depends on the local water.
Guess you haven't heard about all the situations with actual lead PIPES still in old houses from a century ago. Small house pipes often need to periodically redone, but the large supply pipes and connectors to city systems often were made with lead pipes years ago, and many cities still have a lot of them in use. They're often very expensive to replace for a whole city, and poorer cities likely can't afford it. Read the water safety standards sometime -- lead concentration safety is usually measured after water has been flowing for a couple minutes, because in many older houses and older cities it takes that long to clear out the water that's been sitting there and leaching lead, copper, and other things... from lead solder, and perhaps even large old lead pipes.
It almost seems like someone/group is doing this because they know that people will overreact, and of course if something did happen people would be screaming bloody murder because they didn't overreact.
Duh. Anyone who remembers 9/11 probably knows someone whose business was interrupted by a random bomb threat or something. They were "a dime a dozen" back then. The vast majority of them were likely somebody either playing a prank or (more likely) somebody just trying to get some time off of work (or school, as in this case).
But the thing is -- they worked in keeping people scared. I had some friends back then who stayed away from any place large numbers of people might congregate for a while -- even things like shopping malls. They had heard so many random bomb threats that they assumed there must be terrorists everywhere. Same thing's going on now.
But we already have laws stating what employers can and cannot do to employees. We have laws detailing how long a shift can be and how long you must have off between shifts. We have laws about what kind of breaks you have to have during your shift. We have laws about the employer not being able to discriminate pay rates or hiring practices based on things like gender or ethnicity. There are laws about minimum wages.
Well, you're right. But most of this is NOT relevant to this particular situation, because Uber has fought to claim that it's employees aren't actually "employees."
Thus, they don't have to conform to most of those laws you mention. Hence people arguing that they may need a union to obtain such basic protections.
Or have you somehow missed the continuous parade of court cases about whether Uber "employees" are actually employed by Uber?
Let's try it again for the slow-minded... from my last post:
I'm NOT arguing against this particular theory, by the way.
I actually agree with this theory. I disagree with the general assertion that the "vast majority" of correlations are also causal. That's just statistical poppycock.
It could also be that 'high quality' is a different standard to him than a simple high r value. As he mentions, the correlation not only holds a high r value at a macro level, but when you start going micro - looking at individual states and and times, the correlation is still there. I remember that they tracked the beginning of the crime spikes as well. So the same time delay was valid from the start of use of TEL, adjusted for amounts, and crime spiking, and the same delay from the cessation of use and crime dropping.
I think you missed the part of my post when I said I was NOT questioning this particular association. Let's try again: I AGREE WITH THE IDEA THAT LEAD AND CRIME SEEM TO BE CAUSALLY RELATED HISTORICALLY.
My argument was about the general assertion that the "vast majority" of "high quality" possible correlations that might exist in the universe are causal. No matter how "high quality" your standard is, I guarantee you that this statement is false. From a practical standpoint, there are an infinite number of possible ways of measuring and dividing up the world into data. And if you test any dataset against another, you'll end up with that practically infinite number times itself of possible correlations.
The reality is that we need to judge the validity of a correlation by looking at other factors that can establish causality. Part of it is the sort of robustness that you mention, but that robustness often only can come out of the introduction of many other variables (often not a strict "correlation" that you could create a valid test for how "high quality" it is -- it becomes a judgment call). And, more importantly, at some point you usually need to start dealing with a causal mechanism actually potentially connecting the two things.
If you demand larger datasets with more robust correlations, that just makes the pool of potentially large datasets that could exist in the universe even larger. There's basically no situation possible where the "vast majority" of possible correlations to any normally understood mathematical standard are also causal. There's just too much data in the universe.
There are 10 data points in most of those. They are not high quality correlations. Give me something with a few hundred data points at least.
You completely miss the point. Those "correlations" are jokes, of course. The point is that you can choose an arbitrarily high threshold, and you can always find random correlations to meet it. There's just too much possible data in the universe.
Think about it this way. Take a million random datasets. You could easily generate a million sets of data from all sorts of everyday measurements or combinations of measurements. Heck, you could even just generate a million RANDOM datasets. If you check correlation between any two of those, that's a trillion different possible places for correlation. If you say that you want a p value of 0.001, that's a BILLION correlations that hit that threshold, just by random chance.
And you say, but that's not a "high quality" one -- well, ya got a billion to pick from, and I'll bet that you can find plenty which will satisfy your threshold.
Remember that you originally stated ONLY correlation would imply causation in the "vast majority" of cases. But it seems when you want "high quality," what you really mean is additional evidence of causation that goes beyond a basic correlation -- that is, introducing additional variables, additional datasets, explanation of mechanism that correlates with extra variables, etc. That's all well and good, and I completely agreed with you that that should be the standard.
That is -- you need evidence of causation or possible explanation of mechanism or something like that. Then, in addition to a strong correlation, you can begin establishing causality. If you only have correlation and not those other things, the vast majority of random correlations between any two datasets will be meaningless. That's a simple fact... there's too many possible ways of dividing up the world into data for there to be any other possible outcome.
And if you don't believe what I'm saying, for gosh sake, please don't do any scientific research or anything else involving stats. Misunderstanding of how often seeming "high quality" correlations can occur is the fundamental reason for so many of those metastudies recently that say, "Gee, so we tried to replicate 100 of the top studies in field X, and most of them failed to replicate."
The vast majority of high quality correlations are also causations. Sometimes a common cause for both can confuse matters, but in the vast majority of cases you can trust a correlation to be a causation.
That is ABSOLUTELY false.
I mean, seriously -- just think about what you said for a minute. There is an insanely large number of possible datasets in the world. And if you can match up any dataset with any other dataset, you'll have a similarly insanely large number of high correlations that just happen by random chance.
That vast majority of such "correlations" are absolutely meaningless.
If we take your statement to be true, we'd have to conclude that most of the correlations "discovered" here are likely to be causal: US spending on science causes suicides by suffocation (or the reverse, r=0.9979), per capita margarine consumption causes variations in the divorce rate in Maine (r=0.9926), annual number of drownings by falling out of a fishing boat causes the marriage rate in Kentucky to go up and down (r=0.95), per capita consumption of mozzarella cheese causes more civil engineering doctorates to be awarded (r=0.96), etc., etc.
The correlation between phasing out leaded petrol and falling crime holds in many countries which banned lead at different times. It is highly unlikely that some other cause happened at the right time in all the countries.
See, now you're starting to get there. When we can track a correlation and match it up with the cause in time or using some other variable which influences both, the causality likelihood starts to increase.
The causality itself is also quite uncontroversial: It is known that exposure to lead means lower average IQ, and lower average IQ means more violence.
And now we get even further along -- the causality mechanism might actually make sense.
I'm NOT arguing against this particular theory, by the way. I'm just pointing out that your assertion that the "vast majority" of "high quality" correlations imply causation is ridiculous. If you just allow any dataset to be matched with any other dataset in the world, the vast majority of correlations will be stupid random nonsense. That's the reason the "p-hacking" is a useless statistical practice that will inevitably result in false relationships.
It's only when you start tracking other variables related to the correlation and establish likely causality through other reasonable mechanisms and data in other variables that you can start proving something.
Blah, blah, blah. You're more interested in having a fruitless argument than recognizing the broader points. Of course she was presented at court because she was a noblewoman, and her mind was only THEN admired because she happened to be thus presented (because she was rich). If she weren't rich, she wouldn't have been admired for her mind, because she likely wouldn't have even have had the opportunity to pursue such things... and even if she had, no one would have paid much attention to her.
And as for your point about wealth and freedom, again you miss the point. You completely glossed over all of my examples of how women's freedoms were severely curtailed in that society compared to today and how Lovelace was only allowed to do what she did because it was considered relatively useless (like what most aristocrats did in their leisure pursuits). If Lovelace wanted to do anything that actually would EXERCISE ANY RIGHTS (usually the domain of "freedom"), like -- I don't know -- work in a practical job doing something related to these intellectual pursuits, vote, choose to dissolve a marriage (even an abusive one, one where she had been abandoned, etc.), choose the disposition of her own property, choose her own career path, etc.... well, then she'd be out of luck.
So, if the point of your original post was that women had "freedom" to do USELESS things, well that's hardly surprising in any society. But that wasn't the point of the post you were replying to, and the rhetoric of your posts ("FREEDOM!!!" a la Mel Gibson) implies that women in general had a lot of opportunities to do all sorts of things... just not "the means." And that's simply not true. If it were, why the heck were philosophers in the UK around this exact time writing things about the rights of women and how they could/should be advanced?
TL;DR -- Poor women at this time were treated mostly as child-bearing and child-rearing machines, legally. Rich women who didn't have to worry about child-rearing and managing a household were still child-bearing machines, but after that, rich women could live a life of leisure doing whatever random crap they wanted, as long as it didn't impinge on the "real world' of what men actually DID and MATTERED. In most areas of law, they had no rights (their rights were instead deferred to their husbands); in the few areas were they did have rights, they were generally inferior to the rights of men. If that's what you call "freedom," well... I just don't know what to say.
This article is good because Ada is the most controversial person in computer science. Some people claim she was a genius who invented computer programming, and others claim she was a fraud (Babbage told her what to write), gambler, and opium addict.
As another post said, why couldn't she be both? And in fact, she sort of was both -- though perhaps not really a "genius" nor exactly a "fraud."
Ada comes out looking really good. She was not a fraud, and she did understand what she was doing.
Yeah, she comes out looking a little TOO good. Wolfram was pretty fair, but he didn't really get into the more controversial stuff and the reasons why many historians say she is massively overrated. She wasn't a fraud, but she is often given too much credit for work that was derivative or which was likely developed together with Babbage.
Wolfram is not a historian, and unfortunately you can see some of the problems when you just go digging through the primary sources. There are lots of things that may be influencing the way things "look" in those documents, mostly prominently the issue of social class. For example, much is sometimes made of her correspondence with Michael Faraday, and his apparent admiration (or at least approval) of her. But Faraday was from a lower-class background, and in the strict class-based structures of the time, it would potentially be useful for him to "be on the good side" of a noblewoman. I'm not saying Faraday "lied": I'm just saying he had a motivation to try to cultivate patrons and thus be a bit flattering to aristocrats.
There are other such issues that are important in interpreting the kind of relationships implied by the documents and what they mean about Ada Lovelace's roles and contributions. And frankly Wolfram just seems to be missing a lot of historical perspective. He makes a big deal out of Lovelace's seemingly poetic evocation of weaving and Jacquard punch cards (citing two quotations), but this wasn't poetry and musings about the "fabric of algebra" in some philosophical universe -- it was a practical mechanical connection to previous technology. And later he implies Lovelace was forward-thinking because she imagined possible larger applications for such programming, as in:
Ada seems to have understood, though, that the "science of operations" implemented by the engine would not only apply to traditional mathematical operations. For example, she notes that if "the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony" were amenable to abstract operations, then the engine could use them to "compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent". Not a bad level of understanding for 1843.
Actually, it was a pretty old idea by that time. The science of harmony goes back to the Greeks, mathematicians had been trying to use math algorithms to generate pieces of music since the 1600s, Athanasius Kircher (ahem) had actually produced a device to generate musical compositions automatically by 1650 (it had a bunch of wooden pieces with mathematical tables written on them, which could be rapidly arranged and then translated into pieces of music), and the 1700s saw numerous attempts to continue this line of reasoning further and to propose various mathematical attempts at musical composition.
So yeah, this is a fun idea, but it was hardly an original one at that time. Same goes for a lot of stuff Wolfram brings up.
Unfortunately, you can't really call her the "first programmer," or the "first person to write a paper on Computer Science," but that's ok.
No, but you might actually claim that she was the first debugger. She may or may not have been instrumental in developing a serious set of "programming instructions" to solve a major problem -- but even Babbage admits that she found a major error in his proposed algorithm.
Engaging in an activity typically pursued by men and risking the wrath of the sperglords for doing so?
Nonsense and bullshit. Wikipedia cites her biography thus, for example (emphasis mine):
She was presented at Court at the age of seventeen "and became a popular belle of the season" in part because of her "brilliant mind."
Somebody lied to you, honey. The "Victorian Britain", however much it is hated by the "progressive" teachers of yours, was not as bad as they were telling you.
Actually, you're really overstating your case. And you're overlooking important hints about what was really going on here. She was admired for her "brilliant mind" not just as a woman, but because she was presented at Court.
She wasn't just a woman -- she was a rich, aristocratic woman who thus had a bit more freedom to do things she wanted to without raising as many eyebrows. But keep in mind that there were still severe restrictions even on noblewomen -- during her lifetime (1830s), Parliament confirmed that women absolutely did NOT have the right to vote, they were basically unable to get a divorce without applying for an individual Act of Parliament to do so, when married their property rights generally didn't exist individually (this was typical of marriage laws back then), etc., etc. You might benefit from reading a bit of the history of feminism in the UK to get a better sense of how restricted women were at this time.
Sure, educated women in the upper classes were allowed to pursue various intellectual pursuits, basically as long as they weren't seen as having any serious practical consequence. If Ada Lovelace wanted to become a lawyer or a doctor or something like that, she would have faced HUGE obstacles. If she wanted to be taken seriously as a scholar and employed as a professor at a major university, it would have taken serious convincing.
But if she -- as a wealthy lady who supposedly had nothing better to do with her time -- spent time fiddling with random gadgets that weren't understood to have any practical purpose as yet and working with some theoretical mathematics that wasn't really groundbreaking (it was the connection to technology which was novel, not the math itself), then she wouldn't be "stepping on the toes" of any men in any serious practical professions.
So, GP's claim was a bit nonsensical, because wealthy aristocratic women did have freedom to pursue intellectual pursuits to some extent. But your response is equally nonsensical in acting like "Victorian Britain" wasn't that bad for women. For women of the lower and middle classes, they certainly wouldn't have had the option to do anything like this. And for upper-class women, this sort of thing was pretty much limited to women who essentially took on the status of "independent scholars" and were generally admired FIRST for their wealth and social standing. But they could participate in intellectual discourse to some extent, as long as they mostly confined themselves to theoretical works without demanding actual recognition or a practical career.
And all you ed for a nobel is some really surprising proof in a paper, you don't get made automatically right outside that paper's statements from it.
I didn't say anything about Nobel Prizes in the post you're replying to. What are you talking about?
Yassa Arrafat got a Nobel. Would you believe him on science methods?
No, because Yasser Arafat got a Nobel PEACE Prize. If Yasser Arafat had a Nobel Prize in PHYSICS, I would be more likely to be interested in his comments on science methods.
Similarly, I think -- as I hinted in the post you replied to -- that having science degrees (and often advanced science degrees) in fields often indicates that these "philosophers" may at least know SOMETHING about how science works. It does NOT mean they're automatically right. But it does mean that they're not ignorant of science, as the AC I was responding to was talking about.
who holds THREE doctorates: a doctorate in genetics, a Ph.D. in biology, and a Ph.D. in philosophy of science.
As someone who's now supervised and graduated a few PhD students, I'd say that multiple PhDs, especially in related field is kind of a minus point.
As someone who also has advised and has graduated doctoral students, I'd generally agree with you. Except you need to look over the whole CV in most cases to understand what's going on. This is no exception.
A PhD is supposed to teach you how to research and how to get a grounding in the field. The third aspect is actually getting that grounding in the field. You shoudn't need two PhDs in genetics and biology. If you've done one, you ought to be able to pick up the other yourself. Otherwise, you're having someone tell you what to do twice rather than doing your own research the second time.
This is all true, but this specific case is perhaps different. Note that I said the first was a "doctorate," not a Ph.D. That's because it's from Italy. There's two issues there:
(1) Terminology -- Italian "doctorates" sometimes are actually equivalent to American master's degrees, and sometimes to Ph.D.'s. I haven't looked into seeing exactly how this one would qualify, but if you just had one of the ones that would be viewed as equivalent to a U.S. master's degree, you'd want to get a "real" Ph.D. if you wanted to join academia in the U.S.
(2) Even if the Italian "doctorate" is roughly equivalent to an American Ph.D., there are various levels of rigor at Italian universities. Many American academics are a bit skeptical of Italian credentials if they aren't familiar with the specific program. If this guy wanted to get hired in American academia, it would probably be easier to do so with a Ph.D. from an American university.
Sure for philosophy, it's quite different, but even so a taught masters would probably be better.
Except if you actually want to get an academic JOB as a philosopher. Recall that besides all of your stuff about "getting grounding in the field," a Ph.D. is also a credential to get a job. If you decide mid-career that you actually want to teach/do research at an American university in a very different field, a Ph.D. is the most common expected qualification. If you don't have one in that specific field, it's harder to convince a hiring committee to consider you.
But all of this is useless theoretical consideration. My point in bringing up the credentials was not to argue that he took the most normal scientific pathway -- my guess is that he took a few turns in figuring out what he wanted to do with his career.
Rather -- I was just trying to point out that this guy is more than a "philosopher" -- he spent a couple decades doing research in science and was for over a decade was a PROFESSOR in biology, including being tenured at Stony Brook BEFORE he became a full-time "philosopher" in his positions. He's written multiple books published by places like MIT Press and University of Chicago. Look over his CV, if you want more details.
We can argue about the reasons multiple Ph.D.'s are usually bad or unnecessary, but in this specific case, we're clearly talking about a VERY qualified SCIENTIST, who later changed careers and now has an academic position as a philosopher of science.
Jeez. Before bitching about somebody's credentials, take a minute and read the link to his Wikipedia bio I already had put in my previous post.
The most shameful part is how many philosophers never even made it to the first tier of science, much less mathematics or higher.
Did you even bother to look at who the "philosophers" are at this conference?
Go ahead -- look at the bios of the speakers. Visit their websites. Check their CVs and credentials.
You'll find that many of the "philosophers" here hold a bachelor's and/or a master's degree in physics. Those who don't tend to have master's degrees or Ph.D.'s in some other area of science... generally in addition to a Ph.D. in philosophy of science.
You can complain about the scientific ignorance of some philosophers. But those weren't the people at this conference.
You do realize that the quotations you give have to do with a talk by David Gross, a Nobel Prize winning particle physicist, right?
The report you quote is by a philosopher who participated in the conference, but the ideas you mention in the quotation come out of a talk by a PARTICLE PHYSICIST.
You want to complain about them? Fine. Just be clear that the "tripe" you're citing came from a paper by a physicist talking about the scientific method.
Oh, and in case you want to question the credentials of the "philosopher" who is reporting on the physicist, the philosopher who wrote the blog is Massimo Piglucci, who holds THREE doctorates: a doctorate in genetics, a Ph.D. in biology, and a Ph.D. in philosophy of science.
He's hardly an ignorant idiot who knows nothing about how "science" is done.
But science has moved ahead of academic philosophy.
Actually, more accurately, science -- since about 1950 -- tends to ignore a lot of the interesting insights that philosophy of science tends to offer. Hence your citation of a guy who died decades ago, rather than a lot of the stuff that has happened since.
Popper et. al. were, at best, describing how the science of their time and before was practiced, and if they had not been there, science would still have been the most amazingly productive human activity in history.
A few things here:
If Popper's ideas weren't very interesting or innovative, why does his idea of falsificationism get cited on Slashdot as the foundation of science all the time? How precisely do you think scientists formulated this idea before Popper? Answer -- they didn't. If you look at how science was practiced in the late 1800s, you'll see a lot more haphazard theorizing, the nature of mathematical models and statistics in relation to causality and significance was less formalized, and while people spoke in terms of "hypotheses" and "theories," it wasn't discussed in the way people on Slashdot talk about it today.
Popper's falsificationism developed out of a philosophical movement called logical positivism, which had tremendous influence on lots of people in the first half of the 20th century who were looking into the nature of the foundations of mathematics and science, the nature of "proof," etc. Stuff like Godel's incompleteness theorem came out of this.
But the scientific outlook was fundamentally changed as the nature of causality and explanation was invoked, rather than simple description.
With this heavier empirical burden, people like Popper criticized some of these concepts while offering new ideas about formulating hypotheses. If you think scientists just "intuited" the idea of falsifiability before Popper, you obviously haven't read a lot of science writing in the generations before him. Yes, some scientists were basically doing falsificationism, but Popper formalized the idea, and thus it caught on as a standard way of considering the validity of empirical methodology.
Of course, the naive view of falsificationism as usually presented by people on Slashdot isn't actually how science works, and Popper recognized this. He didn't believe that's how science advanced -- his theories were actually quite complex. And others followed in critiquing and coming up with new ways that more accurately reflects how science actually advances -- you get various perspectives from people like Kuhn, Lakatos, and even the wacky Feyerabend. And now we're only up to 1970 or so. Philosophers of science have had a lot more interesting things to say in the past 45 years too.
It's not as if scientists were sitting around waiting for philosophers to figure out how to proceed.
And you may say, "But it's philosophy! Who cares?!"
The thing is -- science doesn't actually work according to the oversimplified "scientific method" or according to pseudo-Popperian naive falsificationism. It's a lot more complicated, and it has a lot of methodological flaws. Philosophers of science identified many of these in the 1950s through 1970s, but scientists by then had stopped reading philosophy journals. Instead, this naive empiricism led to all sorts of abuses and missteps (see medical studies of the mid-20th century for lots of interesting examples).
But there's more. For the past few decades (beginning seriou
Slashdot Mirror
You miss the same thing the parent does; they have staff that divide it up, read the parts, and can explain the parts. Spending the time to pass all the words briefly in front of your eyes wouldn't prepare you to vote on it, because there will be lots of details that have to be "worked out" by experts in the various areas of civics affected. What is important is that advisors who are experts in specific areas of law or policy have had detailed working discussions with the staff below them that have read those portions, and have examined the portions that are significant or could have multiple readings.
Yep. This is something that you can only understand by serving in a large legislative body the delegates large amounts of work to committees. I've never been a politician, but I have served in a faculty representative body within a large university. The reality is that individual members there simply have to trust the experts on the committees who actually deal with the details. You get the committee on curriculum or whatever that comes and says, "Today I bring forward 172 proposals for new courses." Did you read all of them? Even if you did, would you understand most of them enough to comment knowledgeably on them?
No -- you had a committee who probably spent 2 or 3 months going through all of those proposals and checking to see that they conform to various requirements.
Usually at these big legislative bodies you can see immediately see the futility of most members taking interest in these sorts of complex behind-the-scenes work. Most of the questions which were asked on the floor from general faculty members were completely ridiculous and showed that they often had no clue about what the proposals were really doing. "So, I glanced over the amendment to the graduate handbook and I'm worried this is going to do X." Usually X is vaguely on the same topic of the proposal, but the proposal actually doesn't relate to X at all.
The questions are important, and it would be good for everyone in the legislative body to try to understand these nuances, but the reality is that the representatives in such a situation are just not going to be able to have detailed understanding of everything. That's why parliamentary procedure has committees in the first place -- to have a few people go out, dig into the details, really sort stuff out, and then present it to the body as a whole. And the legislators then have to trust that this committee did its work diligently; otherwise, it shouldn't delegate such work to begin with.
And the delegation of such duties is a practical necessity. Even to run a bureaucracy like a university, there was way too much stuff for any faculty rep to get through alone. The federal government has bureaucratic layers that are hundreds or thousands of times as big.
And before you say, "Well, they shouldn't be passing all this stuff anyway," just keep in mind that for every page of nefarious weird stuff stuck into some random bill, there are probably a dozen pages of random bureaucratic crap that need to go through just to keep everything functioning. You have to wade through all of that bureaucratic crap (which often is just fundamental basic stuff to keep things going in a reasonable fashion, and which you just need to trust your committee members and advisors to look over) in order to get to the controversial stuff.
My question was how do they deal with the constant change? Do they have a standard way to review what has changed from revision to revision?
Yes, you can view the entire legislative history of H.R. 2029, the original bill here, with a list of 215 actions and 83 proposed amendments. All of this happened BEFORE the current amendment incorporating CISA.
If so, then the word "hidden" is beyond shady. If not, then why not? With the way the process seems to work, it seems strictly necessary to not have to start from scratch each time the document is changed.
Except that's basically what they did in this case. There was a 2000-page document just added as a giant omnibus "amendment" to this pre-existing H.R. 2029. You can see its summary, contents, and 18 proposed Amendments to this Amendment here (technically amendments to amendments to amendments to H.R.2029).
Now, of course, the big question I think you have is "But how do we know who inserted Section (N) -- CISA -- into this 2000-page amendment on an amendment on an amendment." And there you'd run into problems, because these omnibus spending bills are often deliberately obfuscated in deliberation and then proposed en masse. That's the whole point of "budget negotiations" and a "last-minute" deal -- they spend months working out the kinks and then slam down a 2000-page (relatively) final document on the table.
Now that the Amendment is officially introduced, any further alterations will be tracked (on those links I gave above). But the whole thing was thrown together first as part of some deal before it was formally presented as a 2000-page omnibus bill. Since the actual writing and compilation of this legislation prior to its formal presentation happened "behind closed doors," we don't have a record of how it all came together.
And if the "problem" as described doesn't really exist and dealing with the differences and voting on them is straightforward and well understood, how does crap like this make it through on unrelated bills?
Easy -- the House leadership clearly wants it there, or at least approves of it. Thus it became part of this "deal" that went into drafting the 2000-page document. There are probably hundreds of little things in there that came about from various compromises -- and now the House Rules Committee presents the whole package together with the hopes that everyone will just vote it up.
And, by the way, before you start complaining about how this is "unrelated" legislation -- this is THE budget omnibus bill of 2016. By definition, the omnibus appropriations bill every year will incorporate at least a dozen different fundamental (and not directly related) things to authorize appropriations for the whole government. It almost always contains hundreds of pages of random other crap that went into the negotiation process.
The point is that Congress in this case doesn't want you to see the "sausage being made". They just want to present the 2000-page thing and get the whole House to vote "yea" or "nay" because presumably they have already secured enough agreement in negotiations to ensure its passage before they officially submitted it.
When something bad happens, we normally look for the guilty party or at least a scapegoat. Now we get "was hidden". Who hid it?
The House Rules Committee.
What individual inserted CISA into the budget bill?
This looks like an action that was undertaken by the committee, so you're unlikely to find a single person named for that particular section.
Why don't all the major news outlets say "Rep. Smith inserted CISA into the budget bill"?
Because it doesn't always work that way. See, this bill used to be H.R. 2029, which was a military appropriations bill. It went through the House a few months ago, then the Senate made a bunch of modifications last month where it passed unanimously. You can read all the sundry details of its history at the link.
What appears to have happened is that the House Appropriations Committee decided they needed a "vehicle" to pass the omnibus spending packages for next year, so they got the Rules Committee to propose a 2000-page amendment. (Actually, there are two amendments; the second is much shorter.)
So, technically, this is a giant amendment proposed by a committee to a bill that had already passed the House and then was amended by the Senate and passed by them.
Anyhow, what generally happens with these huge slates of amendments is that the Chair of the Committee (in this case, the Rules Committee) will just introduce the whole group of amendments, which will then be voted on by the House. Sometimes you can find the details of who exactly proposed which amendments by digging through Committee reports, but in this case with a giant single amendment (with only Section (N) dealing with CISA), it's doubtful that there's going to be anything in the official record to track to a specific individual, other than perhaps the Committee Chair who may officially present it on behalf of the Committee.
If you think this is overly complex and sounds crazy, you'd be right. Welcome to the bureaucratic nightmare that is Congressional legislative practice.
Seriously, even if you don't despise Facebook, let's at least try to make privacy the default.
But isn't privacy antithetical to the very concept of Facebook? I mean, seriously -- if you want to keep something "private," you don't post it online in the first place. If you do, why would you use a website whose founder has openly said that he disagrees with the idea that you should have "multiple online identities," which would be the true online equivalent to having different "private lives" that you share in different ways with different people.
And even if you're willing to go along with that stuff, why would you post "private" information on a website whose very existence and money-making model is based on data collection and profiling by making the most social connections possible? That's their business model -- the more connections you make with friends, the better they can profile you. The more times you click "like," the better they can tailor their profile. The more data points they gather from social connections, the higher the price they can demand for your data. Trying to lock down your information and keep it "private" inhibits all those sharing functions which create the data points that generate your useful profile. Obviously Facebook doesn't want to encourage you to have "privacy by default," because that's completely antithetical to their entire business model.
If you post anything on Facebook, you should treat it as though you're shouting it to the entire world. Many people seem to enjoy shouting random bits of their private lives to the whole world, and that's their choice. But the whole culture of the website is completely anti-privacy, from the ground up. I imagine that any attempt to try to force Facebook to make "privacy by default" will only result in a superficial concept of "privacy" that appears to protect users while actually introducing even more nefarious ways of gathering, using, and connecting your data than before.
And that means up-selling the papers, which means hype.
Indeed. The list of positive words tracked in TFA is:
amazing, assuring, astonishing, bright, creative, encouraging, enormous, excellent, favourable, groundbreaking, hopeful, innovative, inspiring, inventive, novel, phenomenal, prominent, promising, reassuring, remarkable, robust, spectacular, supportive, unique, unprecedented
A lot of these are clearly "hype" words (amazing, spectacular, etc.), but I'm a little less sure of others. Some clearly could be used to mean specific things regarding the experiments, the data, or descriptions of components (bright, enormous, unique), some have technical meanings that are important (phenomenal, robust), and others just don't seem really "positive" like the others in implying "hype" (assuring, reassuring, supportive -- is this judging hype or how much "self-help" is going on in these articles?).
Anyhow, I would also note that this study began by looking at papers from the 70s. I mean -- come on, you need to treat your data with care. Back then, "hype" words would be different. Why aren't they tracking the use of groovy, far out, outta sight, solid, totally hip, and funkadelic?
You do realize that "resonance" doesn't mean what you think it means, right? There are lots of physics sites which disagree with you - "a resonant frequency is a natural frequency of vibration determined by the physical parameters of the vibrating object..."
Obviously you don't realize that this quotation doesn't mean what you think it means.
"Resonance" is NOT the same as a "resonant frequency." The "resonant frequency" is the natural frequency where a system can experience resonance, but the frequency or the vibration at that frequency is NOT resonance itself.
From the same site you linked, have a look at this graphic, which basically says:
"Resonance involves the existence of natural frequencies which are easy to excite and which a vibrating system picks out from a complex excitation."
Resonance is NOT simply vibrations occurring at a resonant frequency within a system. That's just basic oscillation or vibration or standing waves or whatever. It's not resonance. Resonance is the excitation/driving of vibrations at that frequency by an external force. If the external force isn't selectively driving the oscillation at the resonant frequency in some way, it's not resonance.
If I pluck a guitar string and it sounds at its particular natural frequency ("resonant frequency"), colloquially some people say the string is "resonating." But from a physics standpoint, that's not technically correct -- the string just has standing waves oscillating at a natural mode of vibration. But if I touch a vibrating tuning fork at the same pitch to the guitar string, causing the string to vibrate at the same frequency, THEN I have resonance.
It wasn't resonant with the wind. It was resonant with the aero forces generated by the twisting bridge.
What the hell are you talking about? Where are "aero forces" coming from except from the, well, AIR -- I.e., the wind??
It all depends on what you define as the 'forcing function'.
I can't seem to figure out what you're talking about except maybe that the bridge reinforced its own standing wave vibrations at its natural frequency. But that isn't resonance, and that's not a "forcing function." That's just an object vibrating at its natural mode of vibration when energy is introduced into the system. If you randomly strum a guitar string in a non-periodic fashion, it will create a standing wave pattern and vibrate at a certain frequency due to its natural modes of vibration. But that isn't resonance, and there's no "forcing function" setting up or reinforcing the standing waves.
None of this is news. Nobody ever said the wind was gusting at the same frequency as the bridge. It's always been understood what happened.
You're right that none of this is news, but there were alternative explanations in the past. You're right that no one said the wind was gusting in an oscillation frequency of some sort with the bridge. What some people did theorize, though, is that the wind was causing eddies to shed off the bridge in such a way that created periodic reinforcement of the bridge's motion, I.e., resonance. In the case, the speed of the wind (constant speed not oscillating) would determine the frequency of eddy shedding, which would therefore cause resonance only at certain wind speeds.
That was the old resonance explanation. That explanation is wrong, because it was the strength of the wind, not its tuned specific speed, which caused the motion. The more energy, the stronger the vibrations -- kind of like strumming the guitar string harder. But without a periodicity, you're not driving the oscillations by lining up with them... and thus it's NOT resonance as classically understood in physics.
Resonance of the bridge, not the wind.
You do realize that resonance is a phenomenon caused by two different things vibrating at similar frequencies, right? If you pluck a guitar string (introduce energy) and the string produces a standing wave at a certain frequency, it string is NOT participating in resonance, as is defined in physics. It's just vibrating at a natural frequency. Similarly, if the wind adds a bunch of energy to the bridge in a non-periodic fashion, and the bridge oscillates in a standing wave (natural frequency of vibration, like the guitar string's "pitch"), it isn't "resonance."
The original sentence might be slightly ambiguous but it doesn't explicitly state that the external force needs to drive the motion at the specific frequency. It just says there needs to be an external force, and that it drives another system to oscillate at a specific frequency.
The sentence comes from the Wikipedia article on resonance. Read it in context. It's clear that it's referencing an oscillating driving force. The force's period doesn't have to line up exactly, but the closer it is, the more resonance. That's the point of what a "resonant frequency" is -- it's the frequency you can drive a system with an external oscillating force to produce maximum amplitude response.
This is really fundamental to the definition of resonance. If the driving force has a period very different from the natural vibrational mode of the system!, we say there is "less resonance." If the driving force isn't periodic at all, it isn't periodically reinforcing the motion and is thus not "resonating" with the system at all. It's just providing energy to the system, which will tend to adopt certain modes of natural vibration... but in that case the system isn't really "resonating" with anything else.
To put it another way, if you want to calk flutter "resonance," you could just as well call strumming a guitar string in a haphazard way "resonance." Except that's not resonance -- it's just the string vibrating at a natural frequency when energy is introduced.
Wow. The fact that this AC has been modded up to "+5 Insightful" makes me truly worry about the "nerd" factor at Slashdot these days. Not only do mods believe an AC spouting nonsense, but they aren't even capable of checking that nonsense or knowing enough basic physics to contradict it.
Let's clear this up. It's really quite simple.
Check your own wikipedia references.
Aeroelastic flutter is a type of "Simple harmonic motion"
. "Simple harmonic motion" is a type of "resonance"
You're skipping over a few steps here. Simple harmonic motion is NOT a "type of resonance." Let's explore further. As you say:
Simple harmonic motion
"...The motion is sinusoidal in time and demonstrates a single resonant frequency."
There's a difference between a "resonant frequency" and "resonance." SHM occurs at a specific frequency which is a natural mode of vibration of the system. That specific frequency could be USED to create resonance, but SHM isn't resonance itself.
Resonance is :
"a phenomenon that occurs when a vibrating system or external force drives another system to oscillate with greater amplitude at a specific preferential frequency."
Exactly. Notice the external force part. The external force needs to DRIVE the motion at a specific frequency. THAT is resonance.
Or, let me try to put it in even simpler terms an AC might be able to understand:
Resonance: A system has a natural vibrational frequency of X. An external force also has a periodicity of X. Even a small external force with the same periodicity could drive the system to vibrate significantly. Example: place a tuning fork with pitch "middle C" on a piano string tuned to "middle C." The vibrations of one can drive the other to vibrate, because they both tend to vibrate at THE SAME frequency (both internal frequency and frequency of driving force).
Aeroelastic flutter: A system still has a natural vibrational frequency of X. But the external force is simply LARGE and roughly CONSTANT. The external force does NOT necessarily have a periodicity, and if it does, it isn't equal to X. So why does the "flutter" occur? Basically, there's too much energy flowing into the system and it can't dissipate it naturally. Random perturbations get it moving. Due to the natural characteristics of the system, it will tend to preferentially vibrate at one of its natural frequencies. Think of a flag fluttering in the wind -- you can see certain wavelike patterns happening even if the wind is relatively constant. The bridge is a little more complicated: it's more like a flag that's tethered on both sides. Again, in a strong wind you might see flutter "waves" happening -- that's not due to the periodicity of the wind, but to the natural reinforcement of standing waves in the flag itself when there's too much energy being pushed into it that it can't dissipate.
TL;DR -- Resonance requires a driving force with the same frequency as the system that's vibrating. Even a tiny external force could be potentially catastrophic if it reinforces the natural frequency of the system. Flutter just requires a large external force pushing energy into the system. The remedy in the case of the bridge is completely different -- for resonance, you'd have to worry about a particular windspeed for a particular length of bridge or something like that. Even a gentle wind might be able to set off nasty vibrations when resonance (matching frequencies) occurs. For flutter, you just need more damping material in general.
Lead solder was not legal for plumbing in 1960.
You may want to know what you're talking about before writing derogatory messages against another post. Lead solder wasn't effectively banned in new construction until the Clean Water Act of 1986. Some local laws may have been in effect earlier, but it's certainly possible to find lead solder in old houses.
Silver solder is not that expensive, it's not pure silver.
Yes, obviously, but lead solder was cheaper, more standard, and more durable than many alternatives for decades. It was still widely used until it was effectively banned -- particularly by low-cost contractors who built cheaper houses or installed cheaper systems.
Further most plumbing has an expected life of 40-50 years. After that it's limed up and has to be replaced. Depends on the local water.
Guess you haven't heard about all the situations with actual lead PIPES still in old houses from a century ago. Small house pipes often need to periodically redone, but the large supply pipes and connectors to city systems often were made with lead pipes years ago, and many cities still have a lot of them in use. They're often very expensive to replace for a whole city, and poorer cities likely can't afford it. Read the water safety standards sometime -- lead concentration safety is usually measured after water has been flowing for a couple minutes, because in many older houses and older cities it takes that long to clear out the water that's been sitting there and leaching lead, copper, and other things... from lead solder, and perhaps even large old lead pipes.
It almost seems like someone/group is doing this because they know that people will overreact, and of course if something did happen people would be screaming bloody murder because they didn't overreact.
Duh. Anyone who remembers 9/11 probably knows someone whose business was interrupted by a random bomb threat or something. They were "a dime a dozen" back then. The vast majority of them were likely somebody either playing a prank or (more likely) somebody just trying to get some time off of work (or school, as in this case).
But the thing is -- they worked in keeping people scared. I had some friends back then who stayed away from any place large numbers of people might congregate for a while -- even things like shopping malls. They had heard so many random bomb threats that they assumed there must be terrorists everywhere. Same thing's going on now.
But we already have laws stating what employers can and cannot do to employees. We have laws detailing how long a shift can be and how long you must have off between shifts. We have laws about what kind of breaks you have to have during your shift. We have laws about the employer not being able to discriminate pay rates or hiring practices based on things like gender or ethnicity. There are laws about minimum wages.
Well, you're right. But most of this is NOT relevant to this particular situation, because Uber has fought to claim that it's employees aren't actually "employees."
Thus, they don't have to conform to most of those laws you mention. Hence people arguing that they may need a union to obtain such basic protections.
Or have you somehow missed the continuous parade of court cases about whether Uber "employees" are actually employed by Uber?
I'm NOT arguing against this particular theory, by the way.
I actually agree with this theory. I disagree with the general assertion that the "vast majority" of correlations are also causal. That's just statistical poppycock.
It could also be that 'high quality' is a different standard to him than a simple high r value. As he mentions, the correlation not only holds a high r value at a macro level, but when you start going micro - looking at individual states and and times, the correlation is still there. I remember that they tracked the beginning of the crime spikes as well. So the same time delay was valid from the start of use of TEL, adjusted for amounts, and crime spiking, and the same delay from the cessation of use and crime dropping.
I think you missed the part of my post when I said I was NOT questioning this particular association. Let's try again: I AGREE WITH THE IDEA THAT LEAD AND CRIME SEEM TO BE CAUSALLY RELATED HISTORICALLY.
My argument was about the general assertion that the "vast majority" of "high quality" possible correlations that might exist in the universe are causal. No matter how "high quality" your standard is, I guarantee you that this statement is false. From a practical standpoint, there are an infinite number of possible ways of measuring and dividing up the world into data. And if you test any dataset against another, you'll end up with that practically infinite number times itself of possible correlations.
The reality is that we need to judge the validity of a correlation by looking at other factors that can establish causality. Part of it is the sort of robustness that you mention, but that robustness often only can come out of the introduction of many other variables (often not a strict "correlation" that you could create a valid test for how "high quality" it is -- it becomes a judgment call). And, more importantly, at some point you usually need to start dealing with a causal mechanism actually potentially connecting the two things.
If you demand larger datasets with more robust correlations, that just makes the pool of potentially large datasets that could exist in the universe even larger. There's basically no situation possible where the "vast majority" of possible correlations to any normally understood mathematical standard are also causal. There's just too much data in the universe.
There are 10 data points in most of those. They are not high quality correlations. Give me something with a few hundred data points at least.
You completely miss the point. Those "correlations" are jokes, of course. The point is that you can choose an arbitrarily high threshold, and you can always find random correlations to meet it. There's just too much possible data in the universe.
Think about it this way. Take a million random datasets. You could easily generate a million sets of data from all sorts of everyday measurements or combinations of measurements. Heck, you could even just generate a million RANDOM datasets. If you check correlation between any two of those, that's a trillion different possible places for correlation. If you say that you want a p value of 0.001, that's a BILLION correlations that hit that threshold, just by random chance.
And you say, but that's not a "high quality" one -- well, ya got a billion to pick from, and I'll bet that you can find plenty which will satisfy your threshold.
Remember that you originally stated ONLY correlation would imply causation in the "vast majority" of cases. But it seems when you want "high quality," what you really mean is additional evidence of causation that goes beyond a basic correlation -- that is, introducing additional variables, additional datasets, explanation of mechanism that correlates with extra variables, etc. That's all well and good, and I completely agreed with you that that should be the standard.
That is -- you need evidence of causation or possible explanation of mechanism or something like that. Then, in addition to a strong correlation, you can begin establishing causality. If you only have correlation and not those other things, the vast majority of random correlations between any two datasets will be meaningless. That's a simple fact... there's too many possible ways of dividing up the world into data for there to be any other possible outcome.
And if you don't believe what I'm saying, for gosh sake, please don't do any scientific research or anything else involving stats. Misunderstanding of how often seeming "high quality" correlations can occur is the fundamental reason for so many of those metastudies recently that say, "Gee, so we tried to replicate 100 of the top studies in field X, and most of them failed to replicate."
The vast majority of high quality correlations are also causations. Sometimes a common cause for both can confuse matters, but in the vast majority of cases you can trust a correlation to be a causation.
That is ABSOLUTELY false.
I mean, seriously -- just think about what you said for a minute. There is an insanely large number of possible datasets in the world. And if you can match up any dataset with any other dataset, you'll have a similarly insanely large number of high correlations that just happen by random chance.
That vast majority of such "correlations" are absolutely meaningless.
If we take your statement to be true, we'd have to conclude that most of the correlations "discovered" here are likely to be causal: US spending on science causes suicides by suffocation (or the reverse, r=0.9979), per capita margarine consumption causes variations in the divorce rate in Maine (r=0.9926), annual number of drownings by falling out of a fishing boat causes the marriage rate in Kentucky to go up and down (r=0.95), per capita consumption of mozzarella cheese causes more civil engineering doctorates to be awarded (r=0.96), etc., etc.
The correlation between phasing out leaded petrol and falling crime holds in many countries which banned lead at different times. It is highly unlikely that some other cause happened at the right time in all the countries.
See, now you're starting to get there. When we can track a correlation and match it up with the cause in time or using some other variable which influences both, the causality likelihood starts to increase.
The causality itself is also quite uncontroversial: It is known that exposure to lead means lower average IQ, and lower average IQ means more violence.
And now we get even further along -- the causality mechanism might actually make sense.
I'm NOT arguing against this particular theory, by the way. I'm just pointing out that your assertion that the "vast majority" of "high quality" correlations imply causation is ridiculous. If you just allow any dataset to be matched with any other dataset in the world, the vast majority of correlations will be stupid random nonsense. That's the reason the "p-hacking" is a useless statistical practice that will inevitably result in false relationships.
It's only when you start tracking other variables related to the correlation and establish likely causality through other reasonable mechanisms and data in other variables that you can start proving something.
Blah, blah, blah. You're more interested in having a fruitless argument than recognizing the broader points. Of course she was presented at court because she was a noblewoman, and her mind was only THEN admired because she happened to be thus presented (because she was rich). If she weren't rich, she wouldn't have been admired for her mind, because she likely wouldn't have even have had the opportunity to pursue such things... and even if she had, no one would have paid much attention to her.
And as for your point about wealth and freedom, again you miss the point. You completely glossed over all of my examples of how women's freedoms were severely curtailed in that society compared to today and how Lovelace was only allowed to do what she did because it was considered relatively useless (like what most aristocrats did in their leisure pursuits). If Lovelace wanted to do anything that actually would EXERCISE ANY RIGHTS (usually the domain of "freedom"), like -- I don't know -- work in a practical job doing something related to these intellectual pursuits, vote, choose to dissolve a marriage (even an abusive one, one where she had been abandoned, etc.), choose the disposition of her own property, choose her own career path, etc.... well, then she'd be out of luck.
So, if the point of your original post was that women had "freedom" to do USELESS things, well that's hardly surprising in any society. But that wasn't the point of the post you were replying to, and the rhetoric of your posts ("FREEDOM!!!" a la Mel Gibson) implies that women in general had a lot of opportunities to do all sorts of things... just not "the means." And that's simply not true. If it were, why the heck were philosophers in the UK around this exact time writing things about the rights of women and how they could/should be advanced?
TL;DR -- Poor women at this time were treated mostly as child-bearing and child-rearing machines, legally. Rich women who didn't have to worry about child-rearing and managing a household were still child-bearing machines, but after that, rich women could live a life of leisure doing whatever random crap they wanted, as long as it didn't impinge on the "real world' of what men actually DID and MATTERED. In most areas of law, they had no rights (their rights were instead deferred to their husbands); in the few areas were they did have rights, they were generally inferior to the rights of men. If that's what you call "freedom," well... I just don't know what to say.
This article is good because Ada is the most controversial person in computer science. Some people claim she was a genius who invented computer programming, and others claim she was a fraud (Babbage told her what to write), gambler, and opium addict.
As another post said, why couldn't she be both? And in fact, she sort of was both -- though perhaps not really a "genius" nor exactly a "fraud."
Ada comes out looking really good. She was not a fraud, and she did understand what she was doing.
Yeah, she comes out looking a little TOO good. Wolfram was pretty fair, but he didn't really get into the more controversial stuff and the reasons why many historians say she is massively overrated. She wasn't a fraud, but she is often given too much credit for work that was derivative or which was likely developed together with Babbage.
Wolfram is not a historian, and unfortunately you can see some of the problems when you just go digging through the primary sources. There are lots of things that may be influencing the way things "look" in those documents, mostly prominently the issue of social class. For example, much is sometimes made of her correspondence with Michael Faraday, and his apparent admiration (or at least approval) of her. But Faraday was from a lower-class background, and in the strict class-based structures of the time, it would potentially be useful for him to "be on the good side" of a noblewoman. I'm not saying Faraday "lied": I'm just saying he had a motivation to try to cultivate patrons and thus be a bit flattering to aristocrats.
There are other such issues that are important in interpreting the kind of relationships implied by the documents and what they mean about Ada Lovelace's roles and contributions. And frankly Wolfram just seems to be missing a lot of historical perspective. He makes a big deal out of Lovelace's seemingly poetic evocation of weaving and Jacquard punch cards (citing two quotations), but this wasn't poetry and musings about the "fabric of algebra" in some philosophical universe -- it was a practical mechanical connection to previous technology. And later he implies Lovelace was forward-thinking because she imagined possible larger applications for such programming, as in:
Ada seems to have understood, though, that the "science of operations" implemented by the engine would not only apply to traditional mathematical operations. For example, she notes that if "the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony" were amenable to abstract operations, then the engine could use them to "compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent". Not a bad level of understanding for 1843.
Actually, it was a pretty old idea by that time. The science of harmony goes back to the Greeks, mathematicians had been trying to use math algorithms to generate pieces of music since the 1600s, Athanasius Kircher (ahem) had actually produced a device to generate musical compositions automatically by 1650 (it had a bunch of wooden pieces with mathematical tables written on them, which could be rapidly arranged and then translated into pieces of music), and the 1700s saw numerous attempts to continue this line of reasoning further and to propose various mathematical attempts at musical composition.
So yeah, this is a fun idea, but it was hardly an original one at that time. Same goes for a lot of stuff Wolfram brings up.
Unfortunately, you can't really call her the "first programmer," or the "first person to write a paper on Computer Science," but that's ok.
No, but you might actually claim that she was the first debugger. She may or may not have been instrumental in developing a serious set of "programming instructions" to solve a major problem -- but even Babbage admits that she found a major error in his proposed algorithm.
And she was important in trying
Engaging in an activity typically pursued by men and risking the wrath of the sperglords for doing so?
Nonsense and bullshit. Wikipedia cites her biography thus, for example (emphasis mine):
She was presented at Court at the age of seventeen "and became a popular belle of the season" in part because of her "brilliant mind."
Somebody lied to you, honey. The "Victorian Britain", however much it is hated by the "progressive" teachers of yours, was not as bad as they were telling you.
Actually, you're really overstating your case. And you're overlooking important hints about what was really going on here. She was admired for her "brilliant mind" not just as a woman, but because she was presented at Court.
She wasn't just a woman -- she was a rich, aristocratic woman who thus had a bit more freedom to do things she wanted to without raising as many eyebrows. But keep in mind that there were still severe restrictions even on noblewomen -- during her lifetime (1830s), Parliament confirmed that women absolutely did NOT have the right to vote, they were basically unable to get a divorce without applying for an individual Act of Parliament to do so, when married their property rights generally didn't exist individually (this was typical of marriage laws back then), etc., etc. You might benefit from reading a bit of the history of feminism in the UK to get a better sense of how restricted women were at this time.
Sure, educated women in the upper classes were allowed to pursue various intellectual pursuits, basically as long as they weren't seen as having any serious practical consequence. If Ada Lovelace wanted to become a lawyer or a doctor or something like that, she would have faced HUGE obstacles. If she wanted to be taken seriously as a scholar and employed as a professor at a major university, it would have taken serious convincing.
But if she -- as a wealthy lady who supposedly had nothing better to do with her time -- spent time fiddling with random gadgets that weren't understood to have any practical purpose as yet and working with some theoretical mathematics that wasn't really groundbreaking (it was the connection to technology which was novel, not the math itself), then she wouldn't be "stepping on the toes" of any men in any serious practical professions.
So, GP's claim was a bit nonsensical, because wealthy aristocratic women did have freedom to pursue intellectual pursuits to some extent. But your response is equally nonsensical in acting like "Victorian Britain" wasn't that bad for women. For women of the lower and middle classes, they certainly wouldn't have had the option to do anything like this. And for upper-class women, this sort of thing was pretty much limited to women who essentially took on the status of "independent scholars" and were generally admired FIRST for their wealth and social standing. But they could participate in intellectual discourse to some extent, as long as they mostly confined themselves to theoretical works without demanding actual recognition or a practical career.
And all you ed for a nobel is some really surprising proof in a paper, you don't get made automatically right outside that paper's statements from it.
I didn't say anything about Nobel Prizes in the post you're replying to. What are you talking about?
Yassa Arrafat got a Nobel. Would you believe him on science methods?
No, because Yasser Arafat got a Nobel PEACE Prize. If Yasser Arafat had a Nobel Prize in PHYSICS, I would be more likely to be interested in his comments on science methods.
Similarly, I think -- as I hinted in the post you replied to -- that having science degrees (and often advanced science degrees) in fields often indicates that these "philosophers" may at least know SOMETHING about how science works. It does NOT mean they're automatically right. But it does mean that they're not ignorant of science, as the AC I was responding to was talking about.
who holds THREE doctorates: a doctorate in genetics, a Ph.D. in biology, and a Ph.D. in philosophy of science.
As someone who's now supervised and graduated a few PhD students, I'd say that multiple PhDs, especially in related field is kind of a minus point.
As someone who also has advised and has graduated doctoral students, I'd generally agree with you. Except you need to look over the whole CV in most cases to understand what's going on. This is no exception.
A PhD is supposed to teach you how to research and how to get a grounding in the field. The third aspect is actually getting that grounding in the field. You shoudn't need two PhDs in genetics and biology. If you've done one, you ought to be able to pick up the other yourself. Otherwise, you're having someone tell you what to do twice rather than doing your own research the second time.
This is all true, but this specific case is perhaps different. Note that I said the first was a "doctorate," not a Ph.D. That's because it's from Italy. There's two issues there:
(1) Terminology -- Italian "doctorates" sometimes are actually equivalent to American master's degrees, and sometimes to Ph.D.'s. I haven't looked into seeing exactly how this one would qualify, but if you just had one of the ones that would be viewed as equivalent to a U.S. master's degree, you'd want to get a "real" Ph.D. if you wanted to join academia in the U.S.
(2) Even if the Italian "doctorate" is roughly equivalent to an American Ph.D., there are various levels of rigor at Italian universities. Many American academics are a bit skeptical of Italian credentials if they aren't familiar with the specific program. If this guy wanted to get hired in American academia, it would probably be easier to do so with a Ph.D. from an American university.
Sure for philosophy, it's quite different, but even so a taught masters would probably be better.
Except if you actually want to get an academic JOB as a philosopher. Recall that besides all of your stuff about "getting grounding in the field," a Ph.D. is also a credential to get a job. If you decide mid-career that you actually want to teach/do research at an American university in a very different field, a Ph.D. is the most common expected qualification. If you don't have one in that specific field, it's harder to convince a hiring committee to consider you.
But all of this is useless theoretical consideration. My point in bringing up the credentials was not to argue that he took the most normal scientific pathway -- my guess is that he took a few turns in figuring out what he wanted to do with his career.
Rather -- I was just trying to point out that this guy is more than a "philosopher" -- he spent a couple decades doing research in science and was for over a decade was a PROFESSOR in biology, including being tenured at Stony Brook BEFORE he became a full-time "philosopher" in his positions. He's written multiple books published by places like MIT Press and University of Chicago. Look over his CV, if you want more details.
We can argue about the reasons multiple Ph.D.'s are usually bad or unnecessary, but in this specific case, we're clearly talking about a VERY qualified SCIENTIST, who later changed careers and now has an academic position as a philosopher of science.
Jeez. Before bitching about somebody's credentials, take a minute and read the link to his Wikipedia bio I already had put in my previous post.
The most shameful part is how many philosophers never even made it to the first tier of science, much less mathematics or higher.
Did you even bother to look at who the "philosophers" are at this conference?
Go ahead -- look at the bios of the speakers. Visit their websites. Check their CVs and credentials.
You'll find that many of the "philosophers" here hold a bachelor's and/or a master's degree in physics. Those who don't tend to have master's degrees or Ph.D.'s in some other area of science... generally in addition to a Ph.D. in philosophy of science.
You can complain about the scientific ignorance of some philosophers. But those weren't the people at this conference.
Yes and it is full of tripe like the following:
You do realize that the quotations you give have to do with a talk by David Gross, a Nobel Prize winning particle physicist, right?
The report you quote is by a philosopher who participated in the conference, but the ideas you mention in the quotation come out of a talk by a PARTICLE PHYSICIST.
You want to complain about them? Fine. Just be clear that the "tripe" you're citing came from a paper by a physicist talking about the scientific method.
Oh, and in case you want to question the credentials of the "philosopher" who is reporting on the physicist, the philosopher who wrote the blog is Massimo Piglucci, who holds THREE doctorates: a doctorate in genetics, a Ph.D. in biology, and a Ph.D. in philosophy of science.
He's hardly an ignorant idiot who knows nothing about how "science" is done.
But science has moved ahead of academic philosophy.
Actually, more accurately, science -- since about 1950 -- tends to ignore a lot of the interesting insights that philosophy of science tends to offer. Hence your citation of a guy who died decades ago, rather than a lot of the stuff that has happened since.
Popper et. al. were, at best, describing how the science of their time and before was practiced, and if they had not been there, science would still have been the most amazingly productive human activity in history.
A few things here:
If Popper's ideas weren't very interesting or innovative, why does his idea of falsificationism get cited on Slashdot as the foundation of science all the time? How precisely do you think scientists formulated this idea before Popper? Answer -- they didn't. If you look at how science was practiced in the late 1800s, you'll see a lot more haphazard theorizing, the nature of mathematical models and statistics in relation to causality and significance was less formalized, and while people spoke in terms of "hypotheses" and "theories," it wasn't discussed in the way people on Slashdot talk about it today.
Popper's falsificationism developed out of a philosophical movement called logical positivism, which had tremendous influence on lots of people in the first half of the 20th century who were looking into the nature of the foundations of mathematics and science, the nature of "proof," etc. Stuff like Godel's incompleteness theorem came out of this.
But the scientific outlook was fundamentally changed as the nature of causality and explanation was invoked, rather than simple description.
With this heavier empirical burden, people like Popper criticized some of these concepts while offering new ideas about formulating hypotheses. If you think scientists just "intuited" the idea of falsifiability before Popper, you obviously haven't read a lot of science writing in the generations before him. Yes, some scientists were basically doing falsificationism, but Popper formalized the idea, and thus it caught on as a standard way of considering the validity of empirical methodology.
Of course, the naive view of falsificationism as usually presented by people on Slashdot isn't actually how science works, and Popper recognized this. He didn't believe that's how science advanced -- his theories were actually quite complex. And others followed in critiquing and coming up with new ways that more accurately reflects how science actually advances -- you get various perspectives from people like Kuhn, Lakatos, and even the wacky Feyerabend. And now we're only up to 1970 or so. Philosophers of science have had a lot more interesting things to say in the past 45 years too.
It's not as if scientists were sitting around waiting for philosophers to figure out how to proceed.
And you may say, "But it's philosophy! Who cares?!"
The thing is -- science doesn't actually work according to the oversimplified "scientific method" or according to pseudo-Popperian naive falsificationism. It's a lot more complicated, and it has a lot of methodological flaws. Philosophers of science identified many of these in the 1950s through 1970s, but scientists by then had stopped reading philosophy journals. Instead, this naive empiricism led to all sorts of abuses and missteps (see medical studies of the mid-20th century for lots of interesting examples).
But there's more. For the past few decades (beginning seriou