The problem with Google is that they are clearly assuming that US law/mindset should operate worldwide. Google need to get over themselves and make sure their information retention follows the same rehabilitation law that exists already to protect the rights of ex-offenders, for a very good reason.
I don't understand -- how is Google "assuming" this? As far as I can tell, Google's explicit assumptions are as follows: (1) there is an internet, (2) it has information on it, (3) there should be an index of that information.
I don't see how any of this implies that Google is "assuming" anything about US law or anything about the rights of ex-offenders.
If information is so defaming to a person's character that it should be eliminated from an index, shouldn't that information be deleted from the primary sites that are serving the information on the internet in the first place? Why is Google the "evil" thing here? (Obviously Google IS evil, but I'm wondering about this particular case...)
This is like a situation where you have a private "unlisted" telephone number, and the phone company is obligated not to give it out -- that's your "right." But then they DO give it out, and it gets published in some aggregate phone directories, on various web databases, etc. The phone company is violating your "right" (such as it is) by continuing to give out the personal information about you, so why is your only recourse to sue those who catalog the information, rather than those who are giving it out in the first place?
Of course, we would quickly run into a serious problem if we actually targeted the real offenders here -- i.e., the ones who continue to serve up the information you find so offensive. It would require retroactively going around and deleting old media stories online -- and people would rightly find that disturbing because it would really be "rewriting the past" in some significant way.
The reality is that before the internet, it was hard not only to FIND information, but to ACCESS it as well. Google makes it easier to FIND the information, but ultimately it is the online character that makes it easier to ACCESS -- and if Google won't index that information, you can often search an individual media site or something to find it quickly as well. Contrast that with a few decades ago, where simply ACCESSING information in an old newspaper or court record would require a trip across town to a library or archive, and potentially digging through microfilm or something.
You can discuss how Google should change their policies, but ultimately Google isn't the one serving up all the information you're concerned about. I'm not saying search engines shouldn't be regulated in some fashion, but they're only one part of the issue... and not really the root cause.
There still are diffent start points. People talk about the financial year, and the school year, as these follow cycles offset from the regular year.
This is a good point, and it highlights something I should have made clear in my earlier post.
There's a difference between when we celebrate the "new year" (i.e., have a party, and consider a new year to begin) vs. when we increment the "year counter" based on some arbitrary starting point.
Today, these are basically always taken to be the same thing -- we increment the year counter on January 1st, and there is no alternative (unless you don't use the Gregorian calendar). When you have your company's "fiscal year" that might begin in September, for example, you'd say "Fiscal Year 2013/2014" on a report. You wouldn't say "the 37th Fiscal Year since the founding of our company on September 1st" and intend it to span multiple civil calendar years.
But the fusion of the concept of the "new year" holiday with some particular "year counter" is relative modern. It didn't take place in most European countries until the 1500s (and, as previously discussed, not in England until the 1700s, though there were plenty of people who adopted it partially earlier, labeling periods from January through March with two different year dates).
Basically, January 1st has been the date the "new year" begins since very early Roman history. Even in countries that we claim adopted a different date for "new year," we don't really mean that for the most part -- they just had a different date for incrementing the "year counter" (particularly the "anno Domini" year counter). Most countries in Europe still referred to January 1st as the first day of the new year, and if they ever had a calendar or table of dates for the year, it would begin with January, not some other month.
The date when you incremented your "year counter" varied, generally depending on the date you were using as a reference. Prior to the last 500 years or so, chronicles often used regnal years for dating, for example, saying something like "June 6th in the 3rd year of our king Henry," where the "3rd year" would be incremented on the date of Henry's coronation or acceptance of the throne.
The "anno Domini" dating was similar -- it dated to the "year of our Lord," which began when Christ began... generally either on his birthdate Christmas (December 25th) or on the date of his conception (March 25th). Similarly, A.U.C. dating for ancient Rome (which was not often used in ancient times) often incremented the year beginning on April 21st, which was taken to be the legendary date of the founding of Rome.
In any case, none of these different dates for incrementing the "year counter" changed the fact that for the last 2500 years or so, January 1st has been "New Year's Day" in almost all circumstances.
Then was the republic of Rome. Then, several centuries later during the empire of Rome, Emperor Julius added July. Followed a couple of decades later by Emperor Augustus with August. Giving us the current 12 month calendar, with the twelfth month being called "tenth".
Nope. July used to be called Quintilis (the 5th month) and August used to be called Sextilis (the 6th month). The numbering was always from March as the 1st month, even though that numbering became obsolete before the Republic. Julius and Augustus didn't ADD any months -- but the months were renamed in their honor. There was never an "8 month + winter" Roman calendar.
It was the tenth of ten months; the early Romans likely reckoned winter as extracalary.
Yes, the very early Romans. Roman legend has the first king after Romulus added in January and February. While it may not have been that early, it likely predated the Republic. The 10-month calendar was probably obsolete long before 500 BCE.
January and February (and Mercedonius/Intercalaris) were added later, probably when what passed for Roman astronomy became relatively more sophisticated.
Yep -- though, contrary to popular belief, it probably wasn't Julius Caesar who moved the beginning of the year to January. The official year (which was named by the two consuls) was moved to January at least a century before Caesar's calendar reform. And January was basically treated as the first month of the civil year at least a few centuries before that (hence the name January, after Janus, who looked both ways toward the old and new years).
So, we're talking about a VERY old tradition here that was basically obsolete through almost all of historic Rome.
And it wasn't only "pagans" that insisted that March was the first month. The last major hold-out, the United Kingdom of Great Britain, didn't change until AD 1752 (AUC 2505).
It's a bit strange to equate the medieval dating technique putting New Year's on March 25th with the prehistoric Roman New Year's date of March 1st. Basically, after the old Roman tradition had been obsolete for a thousand years or more, some Christians decided that March 25th should be New Year's, since it was the day of the Annunciation, i.e., the conception of Jesus (9 months before Christmas). This kept in line with the idea of "The Year of Our Lord" (anno Domini), where we would date the years back to the time Christ was conceived -- a tradition which was first used at some point in medieval times.
So yeah, while some European countries through the medieval period and renaissance put New Year's at March 25, it wasn't really for anything related to the rationale for the original Roman practice. In fact, England didn't adopt this practice widely UNTIL the 12th century CE or so, which it then kept until the 1700s.
Oh, and by the way, even in countries (like England) where March 25th marked the beginning of some "year," there were often still other civil years that began on January 1st, depending on the legal or religious application involved. At the same time, and in the same country, there could be different "years" numbered beginning on January 1st, March 25th, December 25th, Easter, various points in September or November, and other times. (For some details on the situation in medieval England in this regard, see here.)
Because women aren't going to bleed at a different rate on a different planet.
I'm guessing you were probably making a joke, but this is actually a serious question, with (so far) little evidence to suggest what may happen.
Most spaceflight missions with women have had lengths less than one menstrual cycle. The few women who have spent longer periods on the space station have not been the subject of detailed studies on their cycles, due to privacy concerns. Given that various body chemistry changes take place in space (and possibly in environments with other differences in gravity), it's difficult to predict whether there might be an effect or not. Length of cycles is already known to vary significantly from woman to woman and from cycle to cycle. Variation of up to 8 days in length is considered normal, and only if cycles vary by over 20 days are they considered highly irregular.
So, in case you weren't joking, it seems that designing a calendar off of something with such potential to be irregular would be rather useless... even if we knew for certain that there would be no change in a microgravity environment or on another planet (which we don't).
Basing a calendar on the orbit of a planet when you might not be around the planet would be sort of silly.
Then why are we using base 28 and base 13 to organize the days into larger units? If we're trying to be independent of Earth's natural periods, why not make it all base 10 or base 2 or whatever you want, and be done with it?
The calendar is created to standardize time such that when someone eventually leaves this solar system they have some time to use that isn't based on something they can no longer measure.
Except it's fundamentally based on trying to reconstruct a 365-day-ish year with something close to a lunar cycle month -- otherwise, why use these stupid groupings?
They may be a bit premature but eventually we'll need something like this for the people that (hopefully before we destroy ourselves) leave the solar system.
Just a bit. Ya think?
Look -- in case you are unfamiliar with the long history of calendar reform, there are plenty of VERY similar calendar reform proposals going back hundreds of years. This one is barely different from a number of common ones that have been suggested before, since 13 and 28 are perhaps the easiest way to preserve something close to solar years, lunar months, and also have the cool side-benefit of lining up months with 7-day weeks. Other than the start date, which is just as arbitrary as anything else, it isn't new at all.
This is fun and all, but we're going to be serious about calendar reform and making something simpler and not tied to the Earth, you'd be better off scrapping the whole thing and starting new with something like the metric system. (The French Revolutionary calendar came closest to this.) Otherwise, it's definitely not about independence from Earth -- it's about making a slightly more regular system that still uses weird bases and doesn't actually line up with natural cycles exactly anyway.
On top of that, proper diet is only HALF of the issue, which most ignorant people feel it is the only thing to focus on.
The other half of the problem is an utter refusal to exercise. Our bodies are machines. They need to be worked properly to maintain proper function. Food is merely the fuel for that activity.
While I absolutely agree that proper exercise is important to maintain health, I also definitely disagree that exercise contributes to anything near "HALF of the issue" for weight loss.
Exercising vigorously on a daily basis will burn, for most people, a few hundred calories at best, maybe 10-20% of their calorie intake if they're lucky. Running a mile burns roughly 100 calories: you could undo that with one decent sized cookie, or one extra tablespoon of mayonnaise. If you eat a large dessert most days, that could add up to 300-800 extra calories per day: how many obese people are really going to run 3-8 miles EVERY DAY just to make up for the dessert (forget about other bad snacking choices, etc.)?
The vast majority of calories most people burn everyday is in basic body function, like maintaining your body temperature, digestion, beating your heart, brain function, etc. If you eat significantly in excess of those basic needs, you will gain weight -- unless you become a super athlete and run marathons most days.
And that has been proven time and time again, and does follow "common sense", so again, knock it off with the excuses already.
It's perhaps common sense that a machine needs to be active to maintain its function. It's not necessarily "common sense" that running the machine harder will cause it to get smaller.
Your body will get smaller with proper exercise AND attention to diet. But between these two things, except for super athletes, it's probably 80-90% about the eating, and only 10-20% about the exercise for weight maintenance.
This article makes an overly simplistic suggestion that sleeping in a darker room will magically help one shed weight.
[Citation needed]
I read TFA and the the abstract to the actual study, and at no point do I see a "suggestion that sleeping in a darker room will magically help one shed weight."
To the contrary, from TFA: "[The researchers] caution there is not enough evidence to advise people to buy thicker curtains or turn off lights." AND "[T]here is not sufficient evidence to know if making your room darker would make any difference to your weight." AND " Dr Matthew Lam, from the charity, commented: 'It's too early to suggest that sleeping in the dark will help prevent obesity, a known risk factor for breast cancer, but the association is certainly interesting.' "
About the closest TFA comes to what you said is: "Prof Derk-Jan Dijk, from the Surrey Sleep Centre, said there would be no harm in trying to make bedrooms darker."
In other words, TFA includes at least THREE explicit disclaimers saying the exact opposite of what you said it suggested, and one suggestion that "Well, it probably wouldn't hurt..."
As someone that has lost over a hundred pounds, I'll tell you this: it is making good food choices, counting calories, and getting physical activity.
Of course. But if you are better rested, for example, there's less chance that fatigue will live to poor judgment, stress, depression, etc., all of which are known to contribute to obesity. Sure, ultimately what you say is true, but that doesn't mean that changing some other environmental factor might not make it easier to make good food choices, count calories, exercise, etc.
Certainly adequate rest is helpful but there is no credible study to suggest that someone that is doing these things yet doesn't get enough sleep is obese.
Well, if you actually read the linked abstract, you'd see there actually ARE animal studies suggesting precisely this in the second sentence:
"In animal studies, there is convincing evidence that light exposure causes weight gain, even when calorie intake and physical activity are held constant."
So, this study is a human study suggesting something that has already been found in animal studies. As the researchers point out, they controlled for a lot of confounding factors, but there might be others -- nevertheless, as they say, it seems like enough evidence to justify further research.
As you say, "The causes of obesity are a multitude of factors" -- why do you insist on arguing so strenuously against the possibility that this might be one factor, even if a minor one?
Yes, because a lack of sleep is the #1 reason why people don't exercise and eat right.
Give me a break.
Maybe it's not the #1 reason, but why couldn't it be a significant reason that we might consider?
People who don't sleep enough or don't get enough "restful" sleep often have all sorts of problems -- increased stress, difficulty in learning and retaining information, impaired judgment -- and it's correlated with all sorts of things from depression to various chronic health problems. If the lack of sleep itself can't lead to obesity, surely some set of these factors (some of which are known to correlate with obesity, like stress and depression) can contribute to it.
Next up, the new diet craze for lazy people. Blackout blinds.
I get you don't think this is useful, but why do you have to make stupid remarks? Obviously obesity rates have been rising significantly in the past few decades. There are a number of fairly obvious likely causes for this trend, but there may be many minor ones that have changed in recent decades that could be contributing -- like, for example, the amount of "light pollution" these days, which probably contributes to ambient light in bedrooms (along with decreased numbers of people in rural areas where light pollution is scarce), coupled with increased tendencies to leave various electronic devices on all the time.
Who cares if it's the "#1 reason why people don't exercise and eat right"? If it's in the top 20, it can probably be helpful to know it, and for some people, it could actually be leading to other health problems, including obesity.
I know there's this common assumption that diet and exercise is only about willpower, but the reality of life is that there are all sorts of psychological and physical factors which can make it easier or harder to pursue healthy habits. And being exhausted a lot of the time is not generally conducive to such habits. Obviously for many people blackout blinds are not the magic ticket to a thin body -- but combined with some other things, better rest could make it easier for some people to live in a more healthy manner.
km/L cannot be compared to MPG. You need to convert it first.
Umm, duh. You think we're all idiots around here? However -- you can make the same TYPES of comparisons using km/L and MPG. You can't make the same TYPES of comparisons between MPG and L/100km. In this sense, MPG and km/L are SIMILAR kinds of measurements, and thus are COMPARABLE for similar types of questions. If you're trying to come up with a measurement that tells you the same information as MPG, km/L is it... not the alternative.
And L/100km is more correct than a reciprocal unit. Just because you can find one use case for contaminated milk, it doesn't make it equal to normal milk.
Hilarious. Your linked article could just as well be used an example of the contrived use case. See my comment on an old article here.
Newton's primary insight is the gravitational field, ie: two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to the combined masses and the distance between them.
It's worth noting that this insight was not at all unique to Newton. There was, in fact, a major dispute in the scientific community about who came up with this idea at the time, since Robert Hooke had already published on this notion. Other scientists had basically also postulated similar ideas in the decades before the Principia.
That he invented calculus to prove it and wrote it all down in his "Principia" is why he is remembered.
Yes -- Newton may have been the first to explicitly identify the specific inverse square relationship (rather than a general form relationship mentioned in the first quotation above), and he had the mathematical apparatus to prove how it all worked.
But it's also important to be clear that the idea of a "gravitational field" or an "unseen force acting at a distance" was a very spooky and strange notion to contemporary scientists in Newton's era. In fact, such ideas were commonly associated with occult ideas; they didn't fit in with the conception of a simple mechanistic universe. Thus, Newton's idea of some strange unseen "force" acting across vast distances would seem like invoking the power of God or angels or some mystical astrological "force" today.
Because of that, many scientists were initially very suspicious of Newton's methodology. Newton therefore wrote a clarification as an appendix to the second edition of the Principia explicitly saying he was NOT assuming the existence of unseen forces and fields. Instead, he claimed his model was valuable simply because the mathematics were an accurate model. (Some historians have argued that this was in fact the most important element of Newton's revolution in thought: he argued for the acceptance of a mathematical model as a scientific explanation, even if we can't explain the underlying causes of that model.) Of course, Newton was a pretty weird guy and believed in all sorts of things that modern science would think weird, so obviously he thought the unseen forces were real. But it's interesting that he worked so hard to distance himself from such ideas at the time -- to be in accord with science of the time, the "force" in his model was thus to be considered a mere mathematical contrivance, rather than how the universe actually worked.
Scientific Theory: A set of equations with associated explanation in words, stating in mathematics and natural language how something works, able to make predictions supported by observation.
Please state the basics of the "Theory of Evolution" using a "set of equations." Also, I'd like something better than "all animals - crappy animals = surviving animals."
Difficult?
Many scientific theories are quantifiable, particularly in the "hard sciences." Others are best expressed in words, statements, and principles -- and their mathematical basis is shown through correlations or other statistical properties, NOT necessarily a "set of equations."
Scientific Law: Outdated term for a particularly well-tested Theory. Not used outside of historical naming due to the difficulty in defining "particularly well-tested".
Wrong again. The GP was a little better on this one. A scientific law is often (though not always) a mathematical statement. In many cases, those mathematical statements don't accord well with reality at all, but they are useful mathematical approximations making common assumptions. For example, Hooke's law actually doesn't according with empirical data very well out at all outside of a number of a very constrained system (specific types of materials, not overloaded or stretched beyond elastic limit, etc.). And even then, it's generally a first-order approximation that can be more accurately expressed with more empirically-derived factors about the specific case.
So, more accurately, a "law" is an old-fashioned term usually used for a principle that is generally formalized mathematically. In some cases, the law is an exact mathematical representation of reality, but in many cases it is only an approximation or estimate for the behavior of a system under ideal conditions. In essence, further "testing" has determined many "laws" are pretty much false in their details (often the original rationale behind the law has definitely been shown to be inexact or even a complete misconception), but they work well enough for a quick and dirty approximation of the behavior of a common system.
Scientific Hypothesis: An idea of how something might work, with a way to make or test predictions. If its predictions are tested and shown to be correct it will become a theory, otherwise it will be revised or abandoned.
Nah. Not true. Most hypotheses will never be called "theories," even if they are successfully tested. Most hypotheses are nowhere near that important -- within standard scientific paradigms they usually involve some specialized tests on some extremely specialized components within much, much broader theories. Your average scientific paper will put forth a hypothesis that is likely given supporting evidence (or sometimes disproved) by the end of the paper. Only if that hypothesis turns out to have broader ramifications for the field and probably be coupled with other related hypotheses to turn into something more interesting will it ever be called a "theory."
We talk about "Einstein's theory of relativity" or "String theory" or whatever, i.e., major complex categories of related findings generally involving numerous separate hypotheses and varieties of evidence. We don't talk about how "Bob's random hypothesis about the way puppies aged 3-6 months would react to small doses of arsenic administered according to a complex regime different from previous ones in X, Y, and Z ways" turns into "The GRAND THEORY of how puppies aged 3-6 months react to small doses of arsenic administered to a protocol X, Y, and Z."
Just because you learned some crappy simplified model of the scientific method in high school doesn't mean that's actually what the terms mean in actual use.
If someone says, "1+1=2," you say, "Yes, that is true." What you really mean is, "Yes, I believe that to be true."
No, I imagine four marbles. Over here, we have two marbles. Over here is one marble and over here is also one marble. The numbers one and two are defined as such, thus are not open for discussion (you could call them "uno" and "zwei" and it would still work the same). Now, the definition of plus is... moving one marble next to the other one marble. And guess what, the result of moving one marble next to the other one marble is the exact same number of marbles as the two marbles over there.
quod erat demonstrandum.
That's hilarious. When you say things like definitions are "not open for discussion," what you really mean is that you are packing huge amounts of assumptions into each of your concepts of numbers and operators. It took Russell and Whitehead some 350 pages of formal logic to get to the point where they felt that they could assert something close to "1+1=2," and it wasn't until the second volume that they formally proved it.
But an AC did it in a couple sentences. Sure, I'll believe your "proof."
Or, we could play another game. I imagine four LEGS, belonging to two people (two apiece). I tie two legs together. I then have them run a "three-legged race." 2+2=3, or more relevant to the present discussion, 1+1=1... apparently.
Now, you object and say, "BUT... but! There are still four legs. You've just tied two of them together to make one 'leg' which isn't really just one leg."
Yes, but it functions as one leg in the race. If we belonged to a bipedal alien species which commonly joined legs together in this way for some reason, we might even have occasion to think that "2+2=3" was sometimes a useful statement, even though "2+2=4" appears to be more useful in most circumstances.
As it stands, "2+2=3" doesn't have a lot of applicability outside of my "three-legged race" example, so we exclude it from the status of "truth." Instead, we accept that in the vast majority of scenarios, "2+2=4" and "1+1=2" for adequate definitions of the numbers and the operators.
The problem is that it's REALLY hard to define those abstract things precisely AND make a precise definition that relates them to the material world.
But... whatever. You've shown us how to do it in a few sentences, so I'll just believe you. Just like most kids believe their math teacher when they do something similar.
I can walk outside and prove gravity. I cannot do the same with evolution.
Well, you can do it with parts of the theory. Gardeners do it all the time when they see an interesting mutation in plants and selectively breed for it. I know some people's reaction might be, "Well, that requires a gardener -- an intelligence to do it." Okay, but the first step is accepting that animals and plants can change over time in response to selection pressures. I don't think anyone seriously doubts this happens, since humans have used this to their advantage for thousands of years.
The basic fact of most information we receive on a daily basis is that we trust it until we have a reason to question it. Evolution has zero effect on the daily lives of anybody outside of investigative curiosity.
What about the fact that bacteria and viruses are continually mutating to become more effective -- to resist antibiotics or previous treatments? On the level of a microorganism, we observe unintentional selection pressure giving rise to "evolved" forms of those organisms all the time. Happens with insects and other pests as well -- those which are resistant to our "treatments" survive and reproduce.
This is the second important observed data point, which is hugely relevant to people's lives today as we confront emerging strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Even if an intelligence doesn't actively select for something, a change in environmental conditions can still lead to the emergences of significant new abilities.
Now, the problem for religious folks generally occurs in the next stage of logic: can we extrapolate a process we've seen occurring in smaller levels over years or decades or even millennia during the history of human civilization over millions of years to explain the evolution of all life? The chain of logic here is harder to accept, and you're right: you can't just walk outside and "test" it immediately.
Try to wrap your mind around this and see it from another perspective. If you KNOW God is very real (not believe; God has directly impacted your life in a tangible way...you KNOW) then come at the question from that side. If you know God is real your entire perspective on the Bible and everything in it changes specifically because any questions you may be able to have about it to try to cast doubt on its text go out the window...because ultimately you know the most important part of it is very real and that changes your entire perspective on it.
I really appreciate your perspective on this, and I think your post should be modded up -- because I agree that atheists often bully theists and assume they are all mindless idiots blindly following their faith. It's much more complex than this for most people, and your point deserves to be heard.
On the other hand, it's a little disingenuous to say we can't actually test or observe evolution first-hand. We do, and we have. The question is merely one of extrapolation of that explanation back in time to explain much bigger changes. We do that with other scientific and historical theories, and people are generally accepting of them. This one just happens to conflict with some dogma of some religions, though, which makes it a bigger sticking point.
Statistics are very dependent on how you ask, what you ask, and what ELSE you ask. If they really asked the whole bunch in the same survey (i.e. UFOs, miracles, astrology, witchcraft, etc), I don't doubt that you'd get a higher turnout of people believing in god than when simply only asking that question.
I agree that polls results can be significantly skewed by the structure of the survey, but this is one of the standard polls that has been used for years to track American's belief in the supernatural.
If anything, this poll tends to get some results that are LOWER than generic polls that only ask about common things like, "Do you believe in God?" or "Do you believe in an afterlife?" That might suggest that putting a belief in random supernatural things (witches, UFOs, etc.) against common supernatural beliefs makes people somewhat more critical in thinking about what they really "believe" in. ("Well, witches are stupid... but I don't really have much evidence of God either... maybe i'll check 'not sure.'")
This is due to some psychological effect where people don't want to give one "kind" of answer to a whole survey (people don't like to say "yes" or "no" to every question asked).
Yeah, I know what you're talking about. But the possible responses in this survey were "yes," "no," and "not sure." If they didn't want to say "no" to everything, they could have checked "not sure" -- and a significant number did on most questions.
I'd take that whole thing with a unhealthy dose of salt.
Lots and lots of polls with different designs have consistently found belief in God and miracles at least 70-75% among Americans. Don't you think that the Harris polling, a major market research firm, would be competent enough to consider altering their poll if it came up with significant different numbers from every other survey? And it doesn't... so I'm going to take everything you say with an "unhealthy dose of salt."
They've concluded it's measuring people's inclination to believe in religion, presumably over science.
Nope -- they didn't conclude that at all. They concluded that it is correlated with people's "religiosity." Specifically, their measures of "religiosity" were self-reported "frequency of church attendance, frequency of prayer, and importance of God."
They didn't say it was an accurate measure of religious belief, nor does it specifically target the willingness of people to accept supernatural explanations for things. (Statistics on how many Americans believe in God or miracles or whatever are always higher than those who don't believe in evolution in polls -- so clearly this isn't a good measure for whether people are willing to accept non-scientific explanations.)
That would seem to be an important factor in scientific literacy, so the evolution question is actually capturing something that is missed by the other questions.
I think the typical religious arguments against evolution are pretty stupid, but I have mixed feelings about this. I understand what you're saying. And I'll admit that much of the science education taught in primary and secondary schools is about making kids memorize facts handed down from scientists without questioning them.
But is "scientific literacy" really about measuring how much people trust their science teacher vs. their priest? If so, and we wanted to really measure this, we need the priest to start proposing alternative theories of gravity or chemistry or whatever, and then see which kids choose. Because right now this question is only measuring the role of faith or religion (if it's measuring that at all) in reference to one specific element of historical truth, namely a creation myth, which is of primary importance to many religions. I'm not sure that it would be an accurate measure of whether a person would be more likely to believe a science teacher vs. a priest who proposed an alternative theory of gravity, for example. So, is this really that relevant to "scientific literacy," or just a weird measurement of an outlier data point where scientific explanation comes in conflict with other things?
But it sure measures the amount of faith people want to put into "a wizard did it" as a valid explanation of something.
No it doesn't. If you want to measure something like that, you take a poll on something like that. Here are some recent figures:
74% of Americans say they believe in God, 72% believe in miracles, 68% believe in heaven and angels, 65% believe in the resurrection of Jesus, 58% believe in the devil, 57% believe in the Virgin birth, etc.
Meanwhile, the same poll found only 29% say they "don't believe in" evolution, and 25% "aren't sure." If you combine those responses, you still only get to 54%, which is less than all of the findings above. Specifically, it is MUCH less than the 72% who believe in miracles, which is, I assume, what you were getting at.
So -- if you want to find out about whether people accept non-scientific explanations for things, it would be more accurate to do a poll actually asking that -- since it's clear that the evolution question doesn't adequately assess that.
In other words: the evolution question is neither a good measure of science literacy overall, nor a good measure of whether people accept religious or other alternative explanations.
(For the record, the poll also asked how many people believed in witches, and only 24% said yes -- so that's perhaps a more valid measurement of your specific question of specifically how many people might believe in "a wizard did it" as an explanation.)
I have also seen articles decline in quality, but I wonder how big a problem this is. What fraction of articles does this apply to? And what fraction of articles are getting better at the same time?
The problem is not necessarily an overall decline in quality. The problem is policies that allow errors to creep in -- even by random vandals -- at any time. Thus, you can never know if some random element of a page has been changed minutes before you viewed it... unless you bother to check the edit history (and very few people do that, unless they're already Wikipedia editors and conscious of what goes on there).
You may think this is not a huge issue, but it absolutely is. I can guarantee you that there are millions of pageviews every day of vandalized articles, some with vandalism so subtle that it might not be picked up for hours, days, or even months. This is particularly true once you get away from standard well-known topics that are more regularly policed.
I think it's also the reason for Wikipedia's success: More articles recruit more editors, which leads to more articles, etc.. Its predecessor, Nupedia, was written more according to your wishes, but because of its strict focus on experts and quality, it never got the network effects going that have driven Wikipedia's enormous growth.
Absolutely. I agree 100%. But just because a strategy worked well for the Mom and Pop grocery store doesn't mean it will work well for the national chain. And just because the national chain was successful in building itself over a few years, it doesn't mean the same strategy will be useful for maintaining itself for the next few decades.
Wikipedia has reached a point where many article are high quality. Why still allow random vandalism, then? Is it really worth it to sustain the kind of incremental improvements you mention? Isn't there some point at which you get diminishing returns, and the vandalism threat is the bigger issue.
Clearly, Wikipedia already thinks so. It will "lock" pages from editing (or from anonymous editors) for periods of time, particularly when there has been a lot of media attention to a topic or lots of vandalism.
Shouldn't we try to move articles to that kind of state as DEFAULT? Get a couple expert editors to review the good articles, and then lock them. New edits could still be suggested, but they'll require approval from experts (or at least admins) to take effect. Or, have a "sandbox" version of the page that can be edited, but isn't the default link to the topic. If you want to see the "bleeding edge" of edits and recommendations, you can, but the default is to see a stable, approved article that has been checked by someone for accuracy.
Until Wikipedia moves to something like that, there's is ABSOLUTELY no way I'd ever consider it a reliable source for anything. I've personally witnessed too many actions of vandalism, including stuff as crazy as changing random digits in random numbers within some articles, that I just cannot trust that some random dude hasn't tampered with this article a few minutes ago, or last week, or last year.
Lately, Wikipedia's balance seems to have shifted away from the initial inclusionism ("allow imperfect and incomplete articles, someone (not necessarily the same person) will improve them and add sources later") towards deletionism ("if an article isn't good enough (yet), delete it; if information isn't sourced (yet), delete it").
I absolutely agree that this trend is disturbing too. And it seems to be targeting the wrong problem. The problem isn't the influx of new "less notable" information on random topics or stub articles -- the problem is the continuous variability of established articles. I agree that Wikipedia should continue to be inclusionist and should encourage creation of new content. But for established articles, at some point we should consider creating a "stable version" of some sort.
Otherwise, it's just too variable to be really useful. The overall "accuracy" and comprehensiveness of the articles is irrelevant if random errors can creep in at any moment.
Yes, there are loads of studies that claim to show accuracy or content as good as, or as better as, various traditional encylopedias. (We can argue about various flaws, like generally these studies tend to focus on high-profile established articles on common topics, rather than the anything obscure, but let's not quibble.) That's all terrific, and I agree that Wikipedia is a fantastic resource.
The problem is that all of this is trumped by another set of studies. From your link:
A study in late-2007 systematically inserted inaccuracies into Wikipedia entries about the lives of philosophers. Depending on how exactly the data are interpreted, either one third or one half of the inaccuracies were corrected within 48 hours.
A 2007 peer-reviewed study that measured the actual number of page views with "damaged" content, concluded:
42% of damage is repaired almost immediately, i.e., before it can confuse, offend, or mislead anyone. Nonetheless, there are still hundreds of millions of damaged views.
And this was in 2007. I've seen a couple other more recent studies -- both informal and formal -- which examine this same problem. And they come up with similar results.
THIS is the serious problem with Wikipedia. Chances are if you use Wikipedia on a regular basis (at least a few times per week), you have actually viewed articles on occasion with some subtle form of vandalism in them. A few years back, when I spent some time doing editing on Wikipedia, I saw them frequently... but that's because I was looking for these sorts of things.
It can be stupid little things, like randomly changing numbers or dates, sometimes even just altering a few digits here and there. The bots that find vandalism get better all the time, but the vandalism just keeps changing too. Just a few months ago I caught a dozen articles that had random words and numbers altered by a vandal -- and they remained that way for about two days. These weren't medical articles, but some were about history: and if some kid was using these articles for a school report or something, they could have easily gotten a date wrong.
That's the thing that differentiates Britannica or whatever sources from Wikipedia. I can argue about various other minor editing issues, like the tendency of obscure articles to be overly biased with information from weird off-topic sources or editors who "sit" on an article and claim it almost as a personal domain. But those aren't the biggest issue. Britannica may have typographical errors, but they remain relatively stable... they're not going to shift places or spontaneously generate new ones each time you open the book.
And this is why reports of doctors using medical articles there is scary. Unless you are checking into the detailed recent edit history -- and what doctor who admits to using Wikipedia is doing that sort of research on page edits?? -- you simply don't know what random sentence might contain the wrong word or whatever random statistic might have been altered.
That's freaking scary. I don't think there's anything wrong in consulting with Wikipedia informally to look up some thing you don't know much about. But it is EMPHATICALLY *NOT* A RELIABLE SOURCE, because it can be vandalized or altered randomly at any time.
There's a difference between accuracy and reliability. Accuracy is important, and Wikipedia does that well most of the time. Reliability and durability are simply a crapshoot -- thus I would NEVER make use of Wikipedia for professional purposes when the accuracy of the information matters, unless I had verified the information in another more reliable source that couldn't just be edited randomly by anyone.
Amazon is trying to find the sweet spot that is the lowest price at which people will still write books people are willing to read. I don't find that malignant or evil.
There used to be publishers, particularly academic presses, which would publish some quality books at a loss. The specialized well-researched books would be subsidized by the textbooks and the best-selling quotidian nonsense. (A few of these still exist.)
I'm not saying that the romance novel readers should necessarily subsidize the tastes of rich people, but shouldn't we care if quality books, with good research (if non-fiction) and good editing get written? Isn't it important to civilization to have good books sometimes even on obscure topics?
Or should we only care about the lowest common denominator of writing? Because that's ultimately what you're arguing for here. The people who will write books are the ones who have too poor skills to make money elsewhere or the ones who figure out crap that will sell to the masses.
I'm not at all saying that popular books are bad. But often lots of obscure topics -- history books, historical biographies, etc. -- show up on bestseller lists. Those aren't the books that authors will spend a lot of time investing in quality research unless they think there's a chance of getting at least a minimum payout at the end. Publishers can facilitate these things with talented writers, and they can choose to subsidize a lot of quality books with the hope that a few will "make it big."
Individuals can't. I'm not saying that your strategy would doom humanity to stupidity or anything so alarmist, but having some sort of quality selection mechanism can be useful.
Publishers do a lot, actually. All the author has to do is dump the publisher a block of text. That's it.
Unless you're already a famous author publishing with a major press, I sincerely doubt you're getting this sort of attention anymore. If you dump an unformatted blob of crappily edited text on a publisher's text these days, expect to be rejected. If it does get published, expect a boatload of errors.
The publisher's job is to wrangle up an editor to punch that text into something readable (while trying to maintain the author's vision), then wrangle a typesetter to put that text into blocks - properly formatted chapters, section headings, images with captions (and the odd forgotten image that needs to be retrieved).
Yeah, I've dealt with a number of publishers on different types of projects -- sometimes as author, sometimes as a person preparing other elements for a colleague (figures, examples, index, etc.). Their attention to detail varies significantly. Editing? One would hope they make sure there are complete sentences, but if your prose needs too much work, you're probably just going to be rejected. As for typesetting and layout, I've had to catch so many basic errors in proofs -- not to mention simply idiotic layout decisions (like basic inconsistent spacing around punctuation -- not from the original document, or images cut-off because they went so far into the margins rather than simply being resized, images not resized to fit in the textblock correctly, etc.). And some of these I've seen from some of the top publishing houses in the world.
Then there are the extra matter - table of contents, indices, "about the author" bios and other matter that gets added (copyrights, ISBNs, etc). And then cover art needs to be produced by an artist. And try to catch things like low-resolution images that haven't been replaced which come out as pixelated crap in the final output.
Most of the publishers I've dealt with require you to get your own permissions for using images, etc. Sure, they might help out a bit in the negotiation, but it's not like they're taking care of the stuff for you. They'll file the copyright for you, but that's not rocket science. And see my above comments about stupid image errors I've seen in proofs. I've even heard of cases where major problems like this had to go through 3 stages of proofs to be finally corrected properly. As for catching "errors"?! Again, it depends on the publisher. I've seen editors who were very careful and fastidious, making sure literally every "i" was dotted and "t" was crossed. I've also seen cases where all sorts of random formatting changes were made, introducing all sorts of cross-reference and formatting errors... with no seeming acknowledgement or care at all.
All that is then taken and the book is typeset - laying the tables and text in the proper styles and everything. Even ebooks are typeset to ensure that the text generally flows correctly, images line up, etc.
Yeah, I know. Tables still get done, though you often have to correct formatting errors. Any other example material you might want typeset (customized charts, examples including images and text, etc.), you'd better be prepared to do yourself... and be sure what you submit to the publisher is already sized correctly to their specs, or expect poor layout. And the typesetting of ebooks is hilarious. The state of most ereader software is so terrible that I just can't stand to read it, because the typography is so bad. If all they're doing by "typesetting" for an ebook is formatting chapter headings and throwing in some drop caps, well, that's hardly typsetting. Most ebooks I've seen don't give a crap about text flowing correctly.
Publishers do a lot.
Yeah, publishers used to do a lot. Some still have really great editors with an eye for detail. But the editorial staffs at even top publis
If the autonomous car is reliable there should be no need for a drivers' license, for the same reason I wouldn't be required to have one if driven by a chauffeur.
It's even clearer than that, once you consider the bureaucratic and legal implications of it all.
Do you seriously think any manufacturer or government would let a child ride in such an "autonomous car" if it weren't "reliable"? I'm sure before that's the case, any "semi-autonomous car" or whatever will carry strong warnings that it can only be operated by a licensed driver -- and if you don't follow that and let your kid ride in it alone, the company will claim they are not liable. Further, the parents would probably be held liable by law enforcement if anything bad happened -- essentially child endangerment, neglect, negligence, whatever.
Thus, this is an entirely stupid and pointless question. If the car is NOT actually autonomous, there's no way that a kid will be able to "drive," from a legal or liability standpoint. If the car IS autonomous, it will have to be at least as safe as riding with a human parent or whatever (and probably safer), so why should anyone need a license?
Tycho Brahe considered the idea that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe and actually moved. However when he tried to measure stellar parallax he found he couldn't. So given the evidence he had he either had to go with the Earth doesn't move or the stars are really far away.(Apparently he considered the simpler explanation to be the Earth doesn't move.)
Yep -- and scientists of his day didn't just make this decision arbitrarily. Parallax wasn't measured accurately until the 1800s, after over two centuries of looking for it. Other evidence that pointed to a stationary earth:
(1) A rotating earth should have Coriolis forces influencing trajectory of projectiles -- but they were not observed. (Again, not observed until the 1800s.)
(2) Stellar diameters appeared to be fixed. If the stars were just beyond the planets in distance (as they were assumed to be), they should appear to change diameter as the earth gets closer or farther from them. (Again, not explained properly until the 1800s.)
(3) Perhaps most importantly, the motion of the earth required propulsion, according to the physics of the time. The planets and the sun and moon were assumed to be in perpetual motion because of some "aetherial" matter property that was special to celestial bodies. Normal terrestrial matter, since the time of Aristotle, was observed to come to a natural state of rest (Newton's first law was not yet known). Forces acting at a distance, as was later postulated by Newton's theory of universal gravitation -- were considered mystical, "occult," and non-scientific. So there was really no easy mechanism to explain how the earth stayed in continous motion, according to the physics of the time.
So yeah, according to the science of the time, the simpler explanation was that the earth doesn't move.
(By the way, these were critical elements that later came up during the debates that Galileo had with other scientists of the day. He didn't really have good explanations for most of them, and it wasn't until really Newton's theory of gravity that the theoretical apparatus was really present to make the truth of heliocentrism viable within contemporary physics.)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with Google is that they are clearly assuming that US law/mindset should operate worldwide. Google need to get over themselves and make sure their information retention follows the same rehabilitation law that exists already to protect the rights of ex-offenders, for a very good reason.
I don't understand -- how is Google "assuming" this? As far as I can tell, Google's explicit assumptions are as follows: (1) there is an internet, (2) it has information on it, (3) there should be an index of that information.
I don't see how any of this implies that Google is "assuming" anything about US law or anything about the rights of ex-offenders.
If information is so defaming to a person's character that it should be eliminated from an index, shouldn't that information be deleted from the primary sites that are serving the information on the internet in the first place? Why is Google the "evil" thing here? (Obviously Google IS evil, but I'm wondering about this particular case...)
This is like a situation where you have a private "unlisted" telephone number, and the phone company is obligated not to give it out -- that's your "right." But then they DO give it out, and it gets published in some aggregate phone directories, on various web databases, etc. The phone company is violating your "right" (such as it is) by continuing to give out the personal information about you, so why is your only recourse to sue those who catalog the information, rather than those who are giving it out in the first place?
Of course, we would quickly run into a serious problem if we actually targeted the real offenders here -- i.e., the ones who continue to serve up the information you find so offensive. It would require retroactively going around and deleting old media stories online -- and people would rightly find that disturbing because it would really be "rewriting the past" in some significant way.
The reality is that before the internet, it was hard not only to FIND information, but to ACCESS it as well. Google makes it easier to FIND the information, but ultimately it is the online character that makes it easier to ACCESS -- and if Google won't index that information, you can often search an individual media site or something to find it quickly as well. Contrast that with a few decades ago, where simply ACCESSING information in an old newspaper or court record would require a trip across town to a library or archive, and potentially digging through microfilm or something.
You can discuss how Google should change their policies, but ultimately Google isn't the one serving up all the information you're concerned about. I'm not saying search engines shouldn't be regulated in some fashion, but they're only one part of the issue... and not really the root cause.
There still are diffent start points. People talk about the financial year, and the school year, as these follow cycles offset from the regular year.
This is a good point, and it highlights something I should have made clear in my earlier post.
There's a difference between when we celebrate the "new year" (i.e., have a party, and consider a new year to begin) vs. when we increment the "year counter" based on some arbitrary starting point.
Today, these are basically always taken to be the same thing -- we increment the year counter on January 1st, and there is no alternative (unless you don't use the Gregorian calendar). When you have your company's "fiscal year" that might begin in September, for example, you'd say "Fiscal Year 2013/2014" on a report. You wouldn't say "the 37th Fiscal Year since the founding of our company on September 1st" and intend it to span multiple civil calendar years.
But the fusion of the concept of the "new year" holiday with some particular "year counter" is relative modern. It didn't take place in most European countries until the 1500s (and, as previously discussed, not in England until the 1700s, though there were plenty of people who adopted it partially earlier, labeling periods from January through March with two different year dates).
Basically, January 1st has been the date the "new year" begins since very early Roman history. Even in countries that we claim adopted a different date for "new year," we don't really mean that for the most part -- they just had a different date for incrementing the "year counter" (particularly the "anno Domini" year counter). Most countries in Europe still referred to January 1st as the first day of the new year, and if they ever had a calendar or table of dates for the year, it would begin with January, not some other month.
The date when you incremented your "year counter" varied, generally depending on the date you were using as a reference. Prior to the last 500 years or so, chronicles often used regnal years for dating, for example, saying something like "June 6th in the 3rd year of our king Henry," where the "3rd year" would be incremented on the date of Henry's coronation or acceptance of the throne.
The "anno Domini" dating was similar -- it dated to the "year of our Lord," which began when Christ began... generally either on his birthdate Christmas (December 25th) or on the date of his conception (March 25th). Similarly, A.U.C. dating for ancient Rome (which was not often used in ancient times) often incremented the year beginning on April 21st, which was taken to be the legendary date of the founding of Rome.
In any case, none of these different dates for incrementing the "year counter" changed the fact that for the last 2500 years or so, January 1st has been "New Year's Day" in almost all circumstances.
Then was the republic of Rome. Then, several centuries later during the empire of Rome, Emperor Julius added July. Followed a couple of decades later by Emperor Augustus with August. Giving us the current 12 month calendar, with the twelfth month being called "tenth".
Nope. July used to be called Quintilis (the 5th month) and August used to be called Sextilis (the 6th month). The numbering was always from March as the 1st month, even though that numbering became obsolete before the Republic. Julius and Augustus didn't ADD any months -- but the months were renamed in their honor. There was never an "8 month + winter" Roman calendar.
It was the tenth of ten months; the early Romans likely reckoned winter as extracalary.
Yes, the very early Romans. Roman legend has the first king after Romulus added in January and February. While it may not have been that early, it likely predated the Republic. The 10-month calendar was probably obsolete long before 500 BCE.
January and February (and Mercedonius/Intercalaris) were added later, probably when what passed for Roman astronomy became relatively more sophisticated.
Yep -- though, contrary to popular belief, it probably wasn't Julius Caesar who moved the beginning of the year to January. The official year (which was named by the two consuls) was moved to January at least a century before Caesar's calendar reform. And January was basically treated as the first month of the civil year at least a few centuries before that (hence the name January, after Janus, who looked both ways toward the old and new years).
So, we're talking about a VERY old tradition here that was basically obsolete through almost all of historic Rome.
And it wasn't only "pagans" that insisted that March was the first month. The last major hold-out, the United Kingdom of Great Britain, didn't change until AD 1752 (AUC 2505).
It's a bit strange to equate the medieval dating technique putting New Year's on March 25th with the prehistoric Roman New Year's date of March 1st. Basically, after the old Roman tradition had been obsolete for a thousand years or more, some Christians decided that March 25th should be New Year's, since it was the day of the Annunciation, i.e., the conception of Jesus (9 months before Christmas). This kept in line with the idea of "The Year of Our Lord" (anno Domini), where we would date the years back to the time Christ was conceived -- a tradition which was first used at some point in medieval times.
So yeah, while some European countries through the medieval period and renaissance put New Year's at March 25, it wasn't really for anything related to the rationale for the original Roman practice. In fact, England didn't adopt this practice widely UNTIL the 12th century CE or so, which it then kept until the 1700s.
Oh, and by the way, even in countries (like England) where March 25th marked the beginning of some "year," there were often still other civil years that began on January 1st, depending on the legal or religious application involved. At the same time, and in the same country, there could be different "years" numbered beginning on January 1st, March 25th, December 25th, Easter, various points in September or November, and other times. (For some details on the situation in medieval England in this regard, see here.)
Because women aren't going to bleed at a different rate on a different planet.
I'm guessing you were probably making a joke, but this is actually a serious question, with (so far) little evidence to suggest what may happen.
Most spaceflight missions with women have had lengths less than one menstrual cycle. The few women who have spent longer periods on the space station have not been the subject of detailed studies on their cycles, due to privacy concerns. Given that various body chemistry changes take place in space (and possibly in environments with other differences in gravity), it's difficult to predict whether there might be an effect or not. Length of cycles is already known to vary significantly from woman to woman and from cycle to cycle. Variation of up to 8 days in length is considered normal, and only if cycles vary by over 20 days are they considered highly irregular.
So, in case you weren't joking, it seems that designing a calendar off of something with such potential to be irregular would be rather useless... even if we knew for certain that there would be no change in a microgravity environment or on another planet (which we don't).
Basing a calendar on the orbit of a planet when you might not be around the planet would be sort of silly.
Then why are we using base 28 and base 13 to organize the days into larger units? If we're trying to be independent of Earth's natural periods, why not make it all base 10 or base 2 or whatever you want, and be done with it?
The calendar is created to standardize time such that when someone eventually leaves this solar system they have some time to use that isn't based on something they can no longer measure.
Except it's fundamentally based on trying to reconstruct a 365-day-ish year with something close to a lunar cycle month -- otherwise, why use these stupid groupings?
They may be a bit premature but eventually we'll need something like this for the people that (hopefully before we destroy ourselves) leave the solar system.
Just a bit. Ya think?
Look -- in case you are unfamiliar with the long history of calendar reform, there are plenty of VERY similar calendar reform proposals going back hundreds of years. This one is barely different from a number of common ones that have been suggested before, since 13 and 28 are perhaps the easiest way to preserve something close to solar years, lunar months, and also have the cool side-benefit of lining up months with 7-day weeks. Other than the start date, which is just as arbitrary as anything else, it isn't new at all.
This is fun and all, but we're going to be serious about calendar reform and making something simpler and not tied to the Earth, you'd be better off scrapping the whole thing and starting new with something like the metric system. (The French Revolutionary calendar came closest to this.) Otherwise, it's definitely not about independence from Earth -- it's about making a slightly more regular system that still uses weird bases and doesn't actually line up with natural cycles exactly anyway.
On top of that, proper diet is only HALF of the issue, which most ignorant people feel it is the only thing to focus on.
The other half of the problem is an utter refusal to exercise. Our bodies are machines. They need to be worked properly to maintain proper function. Food is merely the fuel for that activity.
While I absolutely agree that proper exercise is important to maintain health, I also definitely disagree that exercise contributes to anything near "HALF of the issue" for weight loss.
Exercising vigorously on a daily basis will burn, for most people, a few hundred calories at best, maybe 10-20% of their calorie intake if they're lucky. Running a mile burns roughly 100 calories: you could undo that with one decent sized cookie, or one extra tablespoon of mayonnaise. If you eat a large dessert most days, that could add up to 300-800 extra calories per day: how many obese people are really going to run 3-8 miles EVERY DAY just to make up for the dessert (forget about other bad snacking choices, etc.)?
The vast majority of calories most people burn everyday is in basic body function, like maintaining your body temperature, digestion, beating your heart, brain function, etc. If you eat significantly in excess of those basic needs, you will gain weight -- unless you become a super athlete and run marathons most days.
And that has been proven time and time again, and does follow "common sense", so again, knock it off with the excuses already.
It's perhaps common sense that a machine needs to be active to maintain its function. It's not necessarily "common sense" that running the machine harder will cause it to get smaller.
Your body will get smaller with proper exercise AND attention to diet. But between these two things, except for super athletes, it's probably 80-90% about the eating, and only 10-20% about the exercise for weight maintenance.
This article makes an overly simplistic suggestion that sleeping in a darker room will magically help one shed weight.
[Citation needed]
I read TFA and the the abstract to the actual study, and at no point do I see a "suggestion that sleeping in a darker room will magically help one shed weight."
To the contrary, from TFA: "[The researchers] caution there is not enough evidence to advise people to buy thicker curtains or turn off lights." AND "[T]here is not sufficient evidence to know if making your room darker would make any difference to your weight." AND " Dr Matthew Lam, from the charity, commented: 'It's too early to suggest that sleeping in the dark will help prevent obesity, a known risk factor for breast cancer, but the association is certainly interesting.' "
About the closest TFA comes to what you said is: "Prof Derk-Jan Dijk, from the Surrey Sleep Centre, said there would be no harm in trying to make bedrooms darker."
In other words, TFA includes at least THREE explicit disclaimers saying the exact opposite of what you said it suggested, and one suggestion that "Well, it probably wouldn't hurt..."
As someone that has lost over a hundred pounds, I'll tell you this: it is making good food choices, counting calories, and getting physical activity.
Of course. But if you are better rested, for example, there's less chance that fatigue will live to poor judgment, stress, depression, etc., all of which are known to contribute to obesity. Sure, ultimately what you say is true, but that doesn't mean that changing some other environmental factor might not make it easier to make good food choices, count calories, exercise, etc.
Certainly adequate rest is helpful but there is no credible study to suggest that someone that is doing these things yet doesn't get enough sleep is obese.
Well, if you actually read the linked abstract, you'd see there actually ARE animal studies suggesting precisely this in the second sentence: "In animal studies, there is convincing evidence that light exposure causes weight gain, even when calorie intake and physical activity are held constant."
So, this study is a human study suggesting something that has already been found in animal studies. As the researchers point out, they controlled for a lot of confounding factors, but there might be others -- nevertheless, as they say, it seems like enough evidence to justify further research.
As you say, "The causes of obesity are a multitude of factors" -- why do you insist on arguing so strenuously against the possibility that this might be one factor, even if a minor one?
Yes, because a lack of sleep is the #1 reason why people don't exercise and eat right.
Give me a break.
Maybe it's not the #1 reason, but why couldn't it be a significant reason that we might consider?
People who don't sleep enough or don't get enough "restful" sleep often have all sorts of problems -- increased stress, difficulty in learning and retaining information, impaired judgment -- and it's correlated with all sorts of things from depression to various chronic health problems. If the lack of sleep itself can't lead to obesity, surely some set of these factors (some of which are known to correlate with obesity, like stress and depression) can contribute to it.
Next up, the new diet craze for lazy people. Blackout blinds.
I get you don't think this is useful, but why do you have to make stupid remarks? Obviously obesity rates have been rising significantly in the past few decades. There are a number of fairly obvious likely causes for this trend, but there may be many minor ones that have changed in recent decades that could be contributing -- like, for example, the amount of "light pollution" these days, which probably contributes to ambient light in bedrooms (along with decreased numbers of people in rural areas where light pollution is scarce), coupled with increased tendencies to leave various electronic devices on all the time.
Who cares if it's the "#1 reason why people don't exercise and eat right"? If it's in the top 20, it can probably be helpful to know it, and for some people, it could actually be leading to other health problems, including obesity.
I know there's this common assumption that diet and exercise is only about willpower, but the reality of life is that there are all sorts of psychological and physical factors which can make it easier or harder to pursue healthy habits. And being exhausted a lot of the time is not generally conducive to such habits. Obviously for many people blackout blinds are not the magic ticket to a thin body -- but combined with some other things, better rest could make it easier for some people to live in a more healthy manner.
km/L cannot be compared to MPG. You need to convert it first.
Umm, duh. You think we're all idiots around here? However -- you can make the same TYPES of comparisons using km/L and MPG. You can't make the same TYPES of comparisons between MPG and L/100km. In this sense, MPG and km/L are SIMILAR kinds of measurements, and thus are COMPARABLE for similar types of questions. If you're trying to come up with a measurement that tells you the same information as MPG, km/L is it... not the alternative.
And L/100km is more correct than a reciprocal unit. Just because you can find one use case for contaminated milk, it doesn't make it equal to normal milk.
Hilarious. Your linked article could just as well be used an example of the contrived use case. See my comment on an old article here.
Newton's primary insight is the gravitational field, ie: two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to the combined masses and the distance between them.
It's worth noting that this insight was not at all unique to Newton. There was, in fact, a major dispute in the scientific community about who came up with this idea at the time, since Robert Hooke had already published on this notion. Other scientists had basically also postulated similar ideas in the decades before the Principia.
That he invented calculus to prove it and wrote it all down in his "Principia" is why he is remembered.
Yes -- Newton may have been the first to explicitly identify the specific inverse square relationship (rather than a general form relationship mentioned in the first quotation above), and he had the mathematical apparatus to prove how it all worked.
But it's also important to be clear that the idea of a "gravitational field" or an "unseen force acting at a distance" was a very spooky and strange notion to contemporary scientists in Newton's era. In fact, such ideas were commonly associated with occult ideas; they didn't fit in with the conception of a simple mechanistic universe. Thus, Newton's idea of some strange unseen "force" acting across vast distances would seem like invoking the power of God or angels or some mystical astrological "force" today.
Because of that, many scientists were initially very suspicious of Newton's methodology. Newton therefore wrote a clarification as an appendix to the second edition of the Principia explicitly saying he was NOT assuming the existence of unseen forces and fields. Instead, he claimed his model was valuable simply because the mathematics were an accurate model. (Some historians have argued that this was in fact the most important element of Newton's revolution in thought: he argued for the acceptance of a mathematical model as a scientific explanation, even if we can't explain the underlying causes of that model.) Of course, Newton was a pretty weird guy and believed in all sorts of things that modern science would think weird, so obviously he thought the unseen forces were real. But it's interesting that he worked so hard to distance himself from such ideas at the time -- to be in accord with science of the time, the "force" in his model was thus to be considered a mere mathematical contrivance, rather than how the universe actually worked.
Just about all studies are crap anyway. Why would this one be any different?
Nope.
Scientific Theory: A set of equations with associated explanation in words, stating in mathematics and natural language how something works, able to make predictions supported by observation.
Please state the basics of the "Theory of Evolution" using a "set of equations." Also, I'd like something better than "all animals - crappy animals = surviving animals."
Difficult?
Many scientific theories are quantifiable, particularly in the "hard sciences." Others are best expressed in words, statements, and principles -- and their mathematical basis is shown through correlations or other statistical properties, NOT necessarily a "set of equations."
Scientific Law: Outdated term for a particularly well-tested Theory. Not used outside of historical naming due to the difficulty in defining "particularly well-tested".
Wrong again. The GP was a little better on this one. A scientific law is often (though not always) a mathematical statement. In many cases, those mathematical statements don't accord well with reality at all, but they are useful mathematical approximations making common assumptions. For example, Hooke's law actually doesn't according with empirical data very well out at all outside of a number of a very constrained system (specific types of materials, not overloaded or stretched beyond elastic limit, etc.). And even then, it's generally a first-order approximation that can be more accurately expressed with more empirically-derived factors about the specific case.
So, more accurately, a "law" is an old-fashioned term usually used for a principle that is generally formalized mathematically. In some cases, the law is an exact mathematical representation of reality, but in many cases it is only an approximation or estimate for the behavior of a system under ideal conditions. In essence, further "testing" has determined many "laws" are pretty much false in their details (often the original rationale behind the law has definitely been shown to be inexact or even a complete misconception), but they work well enough for a quick and dirty approximation of the behavior of a common system.
Scientific Hypothesis: An idea of how something might work, with a way to make or test predictions. If its predictions are tested and shown to be correct it will become a theory, otherwise it will be revised or abandoned.
Nah. Not true. Most hypotheses will never be called "theories," even if they are successfully tested. Most hypotheses are nowhere near that important -- within standard scientific paradigms they usually involve some specialized tests on some extremely specialized components within much, much broader theories. Your average scientific paper will put forth a hypothesis that is likely given supporting evidence (or sometimes disproved) by the end of the paper. Only if that hypothesis turns out to have broader ramifications for the field and probably be coupled with other related hypotheses to turn into something more interesting will it ever be called a "theory."
We talk about "Einstein's theory of relativity" or "String theory" or whatever, i.e., major complex categories of related findings generally involving numerous separate hypotheses and varieties of evidence. We don't talk about how "Bob's random hypothesis about the way puppies aged 3-6 months would react to small doses of arsenic administered according to a complex regime different from previous ones in X, Y, and Z ways" turns into "The GRAND THEORY of how puppies aged 3-6 months react to small doses of arsenic administered to a protocol X, Y, and Z."
Just because you learned some crappy simplified model of the scientific method in high school doesn't mean that's actually what the terms mean in actual use.
If someone says, "1+1=2," you say, "Yes, that is true." What you really mean is, "Yes, I believe that to be true."
No, I imagine four marbles. Over here, we have two marbles. Over here is one marble and over here is also one marble. The numbers one and two are defined as such, thus are not open for discussion (you could call them "uno" and "zwei" and it would still work the same). Now, the definition of plus is... moving one marble next to the other one marble. And guess what, the result of moving one marble next to the other one marble is the exact same number of marbles as the two marbles over there.
quod erat demonstrandum.
That's hilarious. When you say things like definitions are "not open for discussion," what you really mean is that you are packing huge amounts of assumptions into each of your concepts of numbers and operators. It took Russell and Whitehead some 350 pages of formal logic to get to the point where they felt that they could assert something close to "1+1=2," and it wasn't until the second volume that they formally proved it.
But an AC did it in a couple sentences. Sure, I'll believe your "proof."
Or, we could play another game. I imagine four LEGS, belonging to two people (two apiece). I tie two legs together. I then have them run a "three-legged race." 2+2=3, or more relevant to the present discussion, 1+1=1... apparently.
Now, you object and say, "BUT... but! There are still four legs. You've just tied two of them together to make one 'leg' which isn't really just one leg."
Yes, but it functions as one leg in the race. If we belonged to a bipedal alien species which commonly joined legs together in this way for some reason, we might even have occasion to think that "2+2=3" was sometimes a useful statement, even though "2+2=4" appears to be more useful in most circumstances.
As it stands, "2+2=3" doesn't have a lot of applicability outside of my "three-legged race" example, so we exclude it from the status of "truth." Instead, we accept that in the vast majority of scenarios, "2+2=4" and "1+1=2" for adequate definitions of the numbers and the operators.
The problem is that it's REALLY hard to define those abstract things precisely AND make a precise definition that relates them to the material world.
But... whatever. You've shown us how to do it in a few sentences, so I'll just believe you. Just like most kids believe their math teacher when they do something similar.
I can walk outside and prove gravity. I cannot do the same with evolution.
Well, you can do it with parts of the theory. Gardeners do it all the time when they see an interesting mutation in plants and selectively breed for it. I know some people's reaction might be, "Well, that requires a gardener -- an intelligence to do it." Okay, but the first step is accepting that animals and plants can change over time in response to selection pressures. I don't think anyone seriously doubts this happens, since humans have used this to their advantage for thousands of years.
The basic fact of most information we receive on a daily basis is that we trust it until we have a reason to question it. Evolution has zero effect on the daily lives of anybody outside of investigative curiosity.
What about the fact that bacteria and viruses are continually mutating to become more effective -- to resist antibiotics or previous treatments? On the level of a microorganism, we observe unintentional selection pressure giving rise to "evolved" forms of those organisms all the time. Happens with insects and other pests as well -- those which are resistant to our "treatments" survive and reproduce.
This is the second important observed data point, which is hugely relevant to people's lives today as we confront emerging strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Even if an intelligence doesn't actively select for something, a change in environmental conditions can still lead to the emergences of significant new abilities.
Now, the problem for religious folks generally occurs in the next stage of logic: can we extrapolate a process we've seen occurring in smaller levels over years or decades or even millennia during the history of human civilization over millions of years to explain the evolution of all life? The chain of logic here is harder to accept, and you're right: you can't just walk outside and "test" it immediately.
Try to wrap your mind around this and see it from another perspective. If you KNOW God is very real (not believe; God has directly impacted your life in a tangible way...you KNOW) then come at the question from that side. If you know God is real your entire perspective on the Bible and everything in it changes specifically because any questions you may be able to have about it to try to cast doubt on its text go out the window...because ultimately you know the most important part of it is very real and that changes your entire perspective on it.
I really appreciate your perspective on this, and I think your post should be modded up -- because I agree that atheists often bully theists and assume they are all mindless idiots blindly following their faith. It's much more complex than this for most people, and your point deserves to be heard.
On the other hand, it's a little disingenuous to say we can't actually test or observe evolution first-hand. We do, and we have. The question is merely one of extrapolation of that explanation back in time to explain much bigger changes. We do that with other scientific and historical theories, and people are generally accepting of them. This one just happens to conflict with some dogma of some religions, though, which makes it a bigger sticking point.
Statistics are very dependent on how you ask, what you ask, and what ELSE you ask. If they really asked the whole bunch in the same survey (i.e. UFOs, miracles, astrology, witchcraft, etc), I don't doubt that you'd get a higher turnout of people believing in god than when simply only asking that question.
I agree that polls results can be significantly skewed by the structure of the survey, but this is one of the standard polls that has been used for years to track American's belief in the supernatural.
If anything, this poll tends to get some results that are LOWER than generic polls that only ask about common things like, "Do you believe in God?" or "Do you believe in an afterlife?" That might suggest that putting a belief in random supernatural things (witches, UFOs, etc.) against common supernatural beliefs makes people somewhat more critical in thinking about what they really "believe" in. ("Well, witches are stupid... but I don't really have much evidence of God either... maybe i'll check 'not sure.'")
This is due to some psychological effect where people don't want to give one "kind" of answer to a whole survey (people don't like to say "yes" or "no" to every question asked).
Yeah, I know what you're talking about. But the possible responses in this survey were "yes," "no," and "not sure." If they didn't want to say "no" to everything, they could have checked "not sure" -- and a significant number did on most questions.
I'd take that whole thing with a unhealthy dose of salt.
Lots and lots of polls with different designs have consistently found belief in God and miracles at least 70-75% among Americans. Don't you think that the Harris polling, a major market research firm, would be competent enough to consider altering their poll if it came up with significant different numbers from every other survey? And it doesn't... so I'm going to take everything you say with an "unhealthy dose of salt."
They've concluded it's measuring people's inclination to believe in religion, presumably over science.
Nope -- they didn't conclude that at all. They concluded that it is correlated with people's "religiosity." Specifically, their measures of "religiosity" were self-reported "frequency of church attendance, frequency of prayer, and importance of God."
They didn't say it was an accurate measure of religious belief, nor does it specifically target the willingness of people to accept supernatural explanations for things. (Statistics on how many Americans believe in God or miracles or whatever are always higher than those who don't believe in evolution in polls -- so clearly this isn't a good measure for whether people are willing to accept non-scientific explanations.)
That would seem to be an important factor in scientific literacy, so the evolution question is actually capturing something that is missed by the other questions.
I think the typical religious arguments against evolution are pretty stupid, but I have mixed feelings about this. I understand what you're saying. And I'll admit that much of the science education taught in primary and secondary schools is about making kids memorize facts handed down from scientists without questioning them.
But is "scientific literacy" really about measuring how much people trust their science teacher vs. their priest? If so, and we wanted to really measure this, we need the priest to start proposing alternative theories of gravity or chemistry or whatever, and then see which kids choose. Because right now this question is only measuring the role of faith or religion (if it's measuring that at all) in reference to one specific element of historical truth, namely a creation myth, which is of primary importance to many religions. I'm not sure that it would be an accurate measure of whether a person would be more likely to believe a science teacher vs. a priest who proposed an alternative theory of gravity, for example. So, is this really that relevant to "scientific literacy," or just a weird measurement of an outlier data point where scientific explanation comes in conflict with other things?
Sorry, typo -- 26% (not 24%) believe in witches... not that it matters much.
But it sure measures the amount of faith people want to put into "a wizard did it" as a valid explanation of something.
No it doesn't. If you want to measure something like that, you take a poll on something like that. Here are some recent figures:
74% of Americans say they believe in God, 72% believe in miracles, 68% believe in heaven and angels, 65% believe in the resurrection of Jesus, 58% believe in the devil, 57% believe in the Virgin birth, etc.
Meanwhile, the same poll found only 29% say they "don't believe in" evolution, and 25% "aren't sure." If you combine those responses, you still only get to 54%, which is less than all of the findings above. Specifically, it is MUCH less than the 72% who believe in miracles, which is, I assume, what you were getting at.
So -- if you want to find out about whether people accept non-scientific explanations for things, it would be more accurate to do a poll actually asking that -- since it's clear that the evolution question doesn't adequately assess that.
In other words: the evolution question is neither a good measure of science literacy overall, nor a good measure of whether people accept religious or other alternative explanations.
(For the record, the poll also asked how many people believed in witches, and only 24% said yes -- so that's perhaps a more valid measurement of your specific question of specifically how many people might believe in "a wizard did it" as an explanation.)
I have also seen articles decline in quality, but I wonder how big a problem this is. What fraction of articles does this apply to? And what fraction of articles are getting better at the same time?
The problem is not necessarily an overall decline in quality. The problem is policies that allow errors to creep in -- even by random vandals -- at any time. Thus, you can never know if some random element of a page has been changed minutes before you viewed it... unless you bother to check the edit history (and very few people do that, unless they're already Wikipedia editors and conscious of what goes on there).
You may think this is not a huge issue, but it absolutely is. I can guarantee you that there are millions of pageviews every day of vandalized articles, some with vandalism so subtle that it might not be picked up for hours, days, or even months. This is particularly true once you get away from standard well-known topics that are more regularly policed.
I think it's also the reason for Wikipedia's success: More articles recruit more editors, which leads to more articles, etc.. Its predecessor, Nupedia, was written more according to your wishes, but because of its strict focus on experts and quality, it never got the network effects going that have driven Wikipedia's enormous growth.
Absolutely. I agree 100%. But just because a strategy worked well for the Mom and Pop grocery store doesn't mean it will work well for the national chain. And just because the national chain was successful in building itself over a few years, it doesn't mean the same strategy will be useful for maintaining itself for the next few decades.
Wikipedia has reached a point where many article are high quality. Why still allow random vandalism, then? Is it really worth it to sustain the kind of incremental improvements you mention? Isn't there some point at which you get diminishing returns, and the vandalism threat is the bigger issue.
Clearly, Wikipedia already thinks so. It will "lock" pages from editing (or from anonymous editors) for periods of time, particularly when there has been a lot of media attention to a topic or lots of vandalism.
Shouldn't we try to move articles to that kind of state as DEFAULT? Get a couple expert editors to review the good articles, and then lock them. New edits could still be suggested, but they'll require approval from experts (or at least admins) to take effect. Or, have a "sandbox" version of the page that can be edited, but isn't the default link to the topic. If you want to see the "bleeding edge" of edits and recommendations, you can, but the default is to see a stable, approved article that has been checked by someone for accuracy.
Until Wikipedia moves to something like that, there's is ABSOLUTELY no way I'd ever consider it a reliable source for anything. I've personally witnessed too many actions of vandalism, including stuff as crazy as changing random digits in random numbers within some articles, that I just cannot trust that some random dude hasn't tampered with this article a few minutes ago, or last week, or last year.
Lately, Wikipedia's balance seems to have shifted away from the initial inclusionism ("allow imperfect and incomplete articles, someone (not necessarily the same person) will improve them and add sources later") towards deletionism ("if an article isn't good enough (yet), delete it; if information isn't sourced (yet), delete it").
I absolutely agree that this trend is disturbing too. And it seems to be targeting the wrong problem. The problem isn't the influx of new "less notable" information on random topics or stub articles -- the problem is the continuous variability of established articles. I agree that Wikipedia should continue to be inclusionist and should encourage creation of new content. But for established articles, at some point we should consider creating a "stable version" of some sort.
Otherwise, it's just too variable to be really useful. The overall "accuracy" and comprehensiveness of the articles is irrelevant if random errors can creep in at any moment.
For more information, see this page on the reliability of Wikipedia.
Let's actually examine that link, shall we?
Yes, there are loads of studies that claim to show accuracy or content as good as, or as better as, various traditional encylopedias. (We can argue about various flaws, like generally these studies tend to focus on high-profile established articles on common topics, rather than the anything obscure, but let's not quibble.) That's all terrific, and I agree that Wikipedia is a fantastic resource.
The problem is that all of this is trumped by another set of studies. From your link:
A study in late-2007 systematically inserted inaccuracies into Wikipedia entries about the lives of philosophers. Depending on how exactly the data are interpreted, either one third or one half of the inaccuracies were corrected within 48 hours.
A 2007 peer-reviewed study that measured the actual number of page views with "damaged" content, concluded:
42% of damage is repaired almost immediately, i.e., before it can confuse, offend, or mislead anyone. Nonetheless, there are still hundreds of millions of damaged views.
And this was in 2007. I've seen a couple other more recent studies -- both informal and formal -- which examine this same problem. And they come up with similar results.
THIS is the serious problem with Wikipedia. Chances are if you use Wikipedia on a regular basis (at least a few times per week), you have actually viewed articles on occasion with some subtle form of vandalism in them. A few years back, when I spent some time doing editing on Wikipedia, I saw them frequently... but that's because I was looking for these sorts of things.
It can be stupid little things, like randomly changing numbers or dates, sometimes even just altering a few digits here and there. The bots that find vandalism get better all the time, but the vandalism just keeps changing too. Just a few months ago I caught a dozen articles that had random words and numbers altered by a vandal -- and they remained that way for about two days. These weren't medical articles, but some were about history: and if some kid was using these articles for a school report or something, they could have easily gotten a date wrong.
That's the thing that differentiates Britannica or whatever sources from Wikipedia. I can argue about various other minor editing issues, like the tendency of obscure articles to be overly biased with information from weird off-topic sources or editors who "sit" on an article and claim it almost as a personal domain. But those aren't the biggest issue. Britannica may have typographical errors, but they remain relatively stable... they're not going to shift places or spontaneously generate new ones each time you open the book.
And this is why reports of doctors using medical articles there is scary. Unless you are checking into the detailed recent edit history -- and what doctor who admits to using Wikipedia is doing that sort of research on page edits?? -- you simply don't know what random sentence might contain the wrong word or whatever random statistic might have been altered.
That's freaking scary. I don't think there's anything wrong in consulting with Wikipedia informally to look up some thing you don't know much about. But it is EMPHATICALLY *NOT* A RELIABLE SOURCE, because it can be vandalized or altered randomly at any time.
There's a difference between accuracy and reliability. Accuracy is important, and Wikipedia does that well most of the time. Reliability and durability are simply a crapshoot -- thus I would NEVER make use of Wikipedia for professional purposes when the accuracy of the information matters, unless I had verified the information in another more reliable source that couldn't just be edited randomly by anyone.
Amazon is trying to find the sweet spot that is the lowest price at which people will still write books people are willing to read. I don't find that malignant or evil.
There used to be publishers, particularly academic presses, which would publish some quality books at a loss. The specialized well-researched books would be subsidized by the textbooks and the best-selling quotidian nonsense. (A few of these still exist.)
I'm not saying that the romance novel readers should necessarily subsidize the tastes of rich people, but shouldn't we care if quality books, with good research (if non-fiction) and good editing get written? Isn't it important to civilization to have good books sometimes even on obscure topics?
Or should we only care about the lowest common denominator of writing? Because that's ultimately what you're arguing for here. The people who will write books are the ones who have too poor skills to make money elsewhere or the ones who figure out crap that will sell to the masses.
I'm not at all saying that popular books are bad. But often lots of obscure topics -- history books, historical biographies, etc. -- show up on bestseller lists. Those aren't the books that authors will spend a lot of time investing in quality research unless they think there's a chance of getting at least a minimum payout at the end. Publishers can facilitate these things with talented writers, and they can choose to subsidize a lot of quality books with the hope that a few will "make it big."
Individuals can't. I'm not saying that your strategy would doom humanity to stupidity or anything so alarmist, but having some sort of quality selection mechanism can be useful.
Publishers do a lot, actually. All the author has to do is dump the publisher a block of text. That's it.
Unless you're already a famous author publishing with a major press, I sincerely doubt you're getting this sort of attention anymore. If you dump an unformatted blob of crappily edited text on a publisher's text these days, expect to be rejected. If it does get published, expect a boatload of errors.
The publisher's job is to wrangle up an editor to punch that text into something readable (while trying to maintain the author's vision), then wrangle a typesetter to put that text into blocks - properly formatted chapters, section headings, images with captions (and the odd forgotten image that needs to be retrieved).
Yeah, I've dealt with a number of publishers on different types of projects -- sometimes as author, sometimes as a person preparing other elements for a colleague (figures, examples, index, etc.). Their attention to detail varies significantly. Editing? One would hope they make sure there are complete sentences, but if your prose needs too much work, you're probably just going to be rejected. As for typesetting and layout, I've had to catch so many basic errors in proofs -- not to mention simply idiotic layout decisions (like basic inconsistent spacing around punctuation -- not from the original document, or images cut-off because they went so far into the margins rather than simply being resized, images not resized to fit in the textblock correctly, etc.). And some of these I've seen from some of the top publishing houses in the world.
Then there are the extra matter - table of contents, indices, "about the author" bios and other matter that gets added (copyrights, ISBNs, etc). And then cover art needs to be produced by an artist. And try to catch things like low-resolution images that haven't been replaced which come out as pixelated crap in the final output.
Most of the publishers I've dealt with require you to get your own permissions for using images, etc. Sure, they might help out a bit in the negotiation, but it's not like they're taking care of the stuff for you. They'll file the copyright for you, but that's not rocket science. And see my above comments about stupid image errors I've seen in proofs. I've even heard of cases where major problems like this had to go through 3 stages of proofs to be finally corrected properly. As for catching "errors"?! Again, it depends on the publisher. I've seen editors who were very careful and fastidious, making sure literally every "i" was dotted and "t" was crossed. I've also seen cases where all sorts of random formatting changes were made, introducing all sorts of cross-reference and formatting errors... with no seeming acknowledgement or care at all.
All that is then taken and the book is typeset - laying the tables and text in the proper styles and everything. Even ebooks are typeset to ensure that the text generally flows correctly, images line up, etc.
Yeah, I know. Tables still get done, though you often have to correct formatting errors. Any other example material you might want typeset (customized charts, examples including images and text, etc.), you'd better be prepared to do yourself... and be sure what you submit to the publisher is already sized correctly to their specs, or expect poor layout. And the typesetting of ebooks is hilarious. The state of most ereader software is so terrible that I just can't stand to read it, because the typography is so bad. If all they're doing by "typesetting" for an ebook is formatting chapter headings and throwing in some drop caps, well, that's hardly typsetting. Most ebooks I've seen don't give a crap about text flowing correctly.
Publishers do a lot.
Yeah, publishers used to do a lot. Some still have really great editors with an eye for detail. But the editorial staffs at even top publis
If the autonomous car is reliable there should be no need for a drivers' license, for the same reason I wouldn't be required to have one if driven by a chauffeur.
It's even clearer than that, once you consider the bureaucratic and legal implications of it all.
Do you seriously think any manufacturer or government would let a child ride in such an "autonomous car" if it weren't "reliable"? I'm sure before that's the case, any "semi-autonomous car" or whatever will carry strong warnings that it can only be operated by a licensed driver -- and if you don't follow that and let your kid ride in it alone, the company will claim they are not liable. Further, the parents would probably be held liable by law enforcement if anything bad happened -- essentially child endangerment, neglect, negligence, whatever.
Thus, this is an entirely stupid and pointless question. If the car is NOT actually autonomous, there's no way that a kid will be able to "drive," from a legal or liability standpoint. If the car IS autonomous, it will have to be at least as safe as riding with a human parent or whatever (and probably safer), so why should anyone need a license?
Tycho Brahe considered the idea that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe and actually moved. However when he tried to measure stellar parallax he found he couldn't. So given the evidence he had he either had to go with the Earth doesn't move or the stars are really far away.(Apparently he considered the simpler explanation to be the Earth doesn't move.)
Yep -- and scientists of his day didn't just make this decision arbitrarily. Parallax wasn't measured accurately until the 1800s, after over two centuries of looking for it. Other evidence that pointed to a stationary earth:
(1) A rotating earth should have Coriolis forces influencing trajectory of projectiles -- but they were not observed. (Again, not observed until the 1800s.)
(2) Stellar diameters appeared to be fixed. If the stars were just beyond the planets in distance (as they were assumed to be), they should appear to change diameter as the earth gets closer or farther from them. (Again, not explained properly until the 1800s.)
(3) Perhaps most importantly, the motion of the earth required propulsion, according to the physics of the time. The planets and the sun and moon were assumed to be in perpetual motion because of some "aetherial" matter property that was special to celestial bodies. Normal terrestrial matter, since the time of Aristotle, was observed to come to a natural state of rest (Newton's first law was not yet known). Forces acting at a distance, as was later postulated by Newton's theory of universal gravitation -- were considered mystical, "occult," and non-scientific. So there was really no easy mechanism to explain how the earth stayed in continous motion, according to the physics of the time.
So yeah, according to the science of the time, the simpler explanation was that the earth doesn't move.
(By the way, these were critical elements that later came up during the debates that Galileo had with other scientists of the day. He didn't really have good explanations for most of them, and it wasn't until really Newton's theory of gravity that the theoretical apparatus was really present to make the truth of heliocentrism viable within contemporary physics.)