That teacher sounds like an imbecile, and ought to be sued on principle. His counter-argument is for a steady state universe? Wasn't that debunked like, a century ago? And then re-debunked when morons like this guy tried to bring it back by saying that a constant stream of matter was being created from nowhere at just the right rate to keep the universe expanding forever?
He sounds like the worst kind of atheist. The sort that knows absolutely jack shit about philosophy or logic, except what he picked up from internet forums and Dawkins books, and then regurgitates his talking points the exact same way creationists and climate change deniers do.
If you're going to bring up these topics in a classroom, you owe it to your students to actually read a bit and know what the real arguments are. The argument he seems to be trying to debunk here is the "First Cause" argument. The argument goes that all things that are finite in time must have a cause that preceded them. The first cause would have to be something eternal (existing outside of time) and intelligent. The "intelligent" part comes into play because if the first cause was a machine, then it either would have created the universe right away (thus making the universe co-eternal, which we know isn't the case) or else there must have been some cause to make it create the universe when it did.
The correct counter-argument is to point out that the argument equivocates. In the first point, it uses eternal to mean "outside of time". But then it uses the phrase "co-eternal" to mean "exists forever". Once you correct that fallacy, then the "intelligent" part goes away, because we know that time began with the Big Bang and is thus a feature of the universe, meaning that the universe as a whole does "exist outside of time", in the sense that there is no external time line on which it can be placed. At that point, the "god" this argument proves could just be a sort of mindless cosmological law that necessitated the occurrence of the Big Bang.
We've had a bunch of very smart people thinking about this stuff for hundreds of years. You're not going to improve on their arguments with your gut feelings and regurgitated talking points. For most people, it's all a bunch of navel gazing -- they don't care if God exists or not, and that's fine. But if you're going to get in front of a classroom and tell a bunch of young impressionable minds what to think, you damned well better make sure your own thoughts are sorted out and logical.
By that definition, we're all cousins anyway. Humanity has been around far too long for there to be any pair of people left who aren't in some way related. Not to mention the extinction events tens of thousands of years ago that reduced the number of humans in the world to mere thousands.
I own a Kindle (2e) and love it, but I agree with the above sentiment. When it comes down to it, e-ink in general isn't very good for any paper with lots of diagrams or schematics. You want something that can pan and zoom without refreshing the screen, which means you want an LCD screen. So far I haven't heard of any top notch Android tablets, so that leaves the iPad as the frontrunner for this particular application.
Hahaha, could you be more clueless? It was a Roman Catholic priest who originated the Big Bang theory. Scientists at the time believed in a steady state universe, and rejected the theory as religiously inspired. And now you're gonna come out and pretend that the Catholics believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis? Here's another surprise for you: Catholics also believe in evolution, and have for over a hundred years.
So, you have a group of people who believe that the universe came into existence billions of years ago, and that humans evolved from the same primordial goop as every other living thing. They have held these beliefs about as long as anyone else in the world. So please, tell us again how they are a "newcomer to the genesis shouldn't be taken literally crowd".
LCDs work by creating a whole bunch of light, and then filtering out the light that isn't needed. That's why black isn't truly black on LCD screens -- the backlight is still on, the screen is just filtering out as much light as it can. If they have a way to recapture that light, which otherwise goes to waste, then it will provide substantial energy savings, especially considering that the screen often consumes as much energy as the rest of the phone combined.
I know you're thinking that the goal was to get ticket revenues. Sometimes I suspect that myself. But the government would argue, perhaps truthfully, that getting rear-ended will at worst give you a bit of whiplash, whereas getting t-boned by some asshole running a red light can kill. Has there ever been a study on the rate of injuries before and after red light camera installation?
The two are related in that thought experiments related to changing something by measuring it led to the development of the Uncertainty Principle. However, it can be reached from other angles, including deriving it mathematically. It exists independent of any actual measurement. Even if you imagine an omniscient god thinking about the particle, it's impossible to know both the momentum and position simultaneously.
Hyperphysics has an excellent summary showing where the uncertainty arises without any measurements taking place.
As for Wikipedia's part, if you look at the talk page, you'll see what happened. The editors there are making a conscious effort to make the subject approachable. So they focus on "real world" applications, such as measurements affecting the outcome, and gloss over the talk of wave packets and derivations that show the uncertainty exists even without measurements. I don't disagree with their approach. Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a text book. But you have to be careful when turning to it for advanced information.
(For the record, I am not a physicist, but I did take multiple courses in quantum mechanics in college before turning to a far more lucrative career in engineering. I'm also close friends with a particle physicist who gives me crap about turning to the dark side to this day.)
It's only the gamblers' fallacy if you're sure the odds really are even. If I flip a coin twenty times, and it comes up heads every time, you'd be a fool to think that the odds on the next flip are 50-50. It's far more likely that I'm using a trick coin.
How is that different from what they are able to do now? Check for cops before committing a crime. Whether the cops are there because of an algorithm or by random chance is irrelevant.
You assume the average criminal is going to know what the policemen's daily patrol routes will be. If they have access to that knowledge, then why aren't the already using it? All that's changing here is how the routes are set.
We have a nation unwilling to raise taxes above historic lows, with one party trying to push taxes even lower. We're being forced to lay off cops by the thousands. Hiring enough to properly cover cities isn't an option. Technology that helps that be a bit more efficient is welcome.
Just FYI, that's not the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You're thinking of wave function collapse, in which the act of measuring a particle determines its state. Heisenberg uncertainty is a mathematical proof that shows that the uncertainty in a particle's location and the uncertainty of its momentum have a non-zero product. It also applies to other pairs of properties, such as energy and time.
People get the two confused all the time, probably because the one that's more useful to talk about doesn't have a cool sounding name (that I know of).
They already have to schedule where the cops will and won't be. If we could afford to have cops everywhere all the time, there would be no need for this tech. The only difference made by this technology is that the cops will now be positioned more intelligently. It's like how fielders in baseball shift based on the batter's spray chart. It doesn't guarantee that they'll be where the ball goes, but it does tilt the odds a bit more in their favor.
Enough that you'd leave a trail of evidence a mile wide before you even got to the big one. If you really, really want to commit a crime, do the big one first, and then be a model citizen forever after. Repeat offenders eventually get caught.
Alternatively, pursue a career in finance and/or politics. You know what they say... the best way to rob a bank is to own it.
But you can't always enjoy the journey if you know what will happen. In some books, you know what will happen without spoilers - most authors are very kind to their protagonists. This is especially true of television, or serialized short stories, where the protagonists must always live to fight another day.
But in many cases, stories are more realistic. Unforeseen troubles dash the hopes of the heroes. It's a lot more fun if your hopes are dashed along with them, and if you are led to feel a bit of the same despair that the characters feel, wondering if perhaps this story has a tragic ending. And it is that much more joyful when they find a way to come out on top.
The funny thing is, Columbo mysteries can be ruined by spoilers as well. Traditional mysteries are in the "whodunit" format. With Columbo, you know who did it, and that they'll be caught (this is Columbo, after all!), but what you don't know is how they will be caught. If someone tells you, "Hey, in Suitable for Framing, Columbo touches the painting while in the murderer's apartment, placing his fingerprints on it to later prove the painting was there", then that episode won't be nearly as much fun.
3) That's one theory, but it's intentionally ambiguous. It could be the apartment owners covered it up to avoid losing property value, and as for what's-his-name being alive in Europe, the whole book/movie makes a point of how often these people confuse each other for someone else. 6) Again, that's one theory. An alternate theory is that the Wachowski brothers are frickin abysmal writers who just got lucky the first time.
And screw you for posting #8! It's one thing to post spoilers for old movies, but that one spoils, like, half the scifi movies to come out over the next twenty years!
I can think of numerous times where not knowing what would happen in a book gave me an actual rush as I read it. Whether it's not knowing if a character will live or die (such as the mom in "Room"), or the gut-churning shock of a surprise heartbreak (such as in the short story "The Girlfriend"), surprises add greatly to the emotion conveyed by a good story.
Stories can be good without such surprises... I know from the start that Sam Vimes will always come out okay in Discworld, and I can still enjoy the journey. And some people might not like surprises, and may prefer to stick to stories in which the good guys always win. But anyone making the claim that spoilers never hurt a story either needs to spend more time reading, or, more likely, is just looking for an inflammatory headline to draw eyeballs.
Tossing out the case and giving a lecture will never make them stop. They'll just keep trying, and occasionally get lucky with an authoritarian judge. The right way to handle this is disbarment for any prosecutor who files such clearly retaliatory charges. Just watch how fast this bullshit stops after a few DAs find themselves on the streets.
Obama was crucified for merely making the offhand statement that the police acted stupidly in arresting a man in his own home on suspicion of being a burglar. What do you think would happen to anyone who actually tried to push for real change? There's no hope for turning back at this point.
No business sells a product at some fixed profit margin above the cost to manufacture. What companies do is they first determine their the lowest price they'd be willing to accept, their WTA, for a product. Due to economics of scale, the WTA goes down as the number of goods sold goes up. Imagine a graph where the x-axis is the number of units sold, and the y-axis is the lowest price they'd be willing to accept for that number of sales.
Meanwhile, they gauge what customers would be willing to pay (WTP) for the product. Obviously, the lower the price, the more people will be willing to pay. So you get another graph, where the x-axis is the number of buyers, and the y-axis is how much they're willing to pay.
It is mathematically provable that the maximum utility exists when you overlay the two graphs and set the price at the intersect point. However, this leaves some money on the table, as there are some customers whose WTP is less than the price point. You can't just lower your price, because you're already at the optimum price -- you'd lose out on all the additional money that most of your customers are willing to pay. So you have two options. You can have periodic sales, but this only gets those customers who pay close attention, and also loses money on customers with a higher WTP who happen to be lucky or thrifty. Or, you can create a product with reduced functionality and sell it at a reduced price.
You may wish with all your heart that this wasn't so. You may want companies to give away their best products at the lowest possible price, with no thought of securing funds to invest in future development. But this is how the world works. This is how prices are set. And, as I said, it is mathematically provable as the best method for everyone, consumers included. Incidentally, this system breaks down when a monopoly exists -- that's where consumers really start getting screwed, and that's what you should save your outrage for.
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That teacher sounds like an imbecile, and ought to be sued on principle. His counter-argument is for a steady state universe? Wasn't that debunked like, a century ago? And then re-debunked when morons like this guy tried to bring it back by saying that a constant stream of matter was being created from nowhere at just the right rate to keep the universe expanding forever?
He sounds like the worst kind of atheist. The sort that knows absolutely jack shit about philosophy or logic, except what he picked up from internet forums and Dawkins books, and then regurgitates his talking points the exact same way creationists and climate change deniers do.
If you're going to bring up these topics in a classroom, you owe it to your students to actually read a bit and know what the real arguments are. The argument he seems to be trying to debunk here is the "First Cause" argument. The argument goes that all things that are finite in time must have a cause that preceded them. The first cause would have to be something eternal (existing outside of time) and intelligent. The "intelligent" part comes into play because if the first cause was a machine, then it either would have created the universe right away (thus making the universe co-eternal, which we know isn't the case) or else there must have been some cause to make it create the universe when it did.
The correct counter-argument is to point out that the argument equivocates. In the first point, it uses eternal to mean "outside of time". But then it uses the phrase "co-eternal" to mean "exists forever". Once you correct that fallacy, then the "intelligent" part goes away, because we know that time began with the Big Bang and is thus a feature of the universe, meaning that the universe as a whole does "exist outside of time", in the sense that there is no external time line on which it can be placed. At that point, the "god" this argument proves could just be a sort of mindless cosmological law that necessitated the occurrence of the Big Bang.
We've had a bunch of very smart people thinking about this stuff for hundreds of years. You're not going to improve on their arguments with your gut feelings and regurgitated talking points. For most people, it's all a bunch of navel gazing -- they don't care if God exists or not, and that's fine. But if you're going to get in front of a classroom and tell a bunch of young impressionable minds what to think, you damned well better make sure your own thoughts are sorted out and logical.
By that definition, we're all cousins anyway. Humanity has been around far too long for there to be any pair of people left who aren't in some way related. Not to mention the extinction events tens of thousands of years ago that reduced the number of humans in the world to mere thousands.
I own a Kindle (2e) and love it, but I agree with the above sentiment. When it comes down to it, e-ink in general isn't very good for any paper with lots of diagrams or schematics. You want something that can pan and zoom without refreshing the screen, which means you want an LCD screen. So far I haven't heard of any top notch Android tablets, so that leaves the iPad as the frontrunner for this particular application.
Hahaha, could you be more clueless? It was a Roman Catholic priest who originated the Big Bang theory. Scientists at the time believed in a steady state universe, and rejected the theory as religiously inspired. And now you're gonna come out and pretend that the Catholics believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis? Here's another surprise for you: Catholics also believe in evolution, and have for over a hundred years.
So, you have a group of people who believe that the universe came into existence billions of years ago, and that humans evolved from the same primordial goop as every other living thing. They have held these beliefs about as long as anyone else in the world. So please, tell us again how they are a "newcomer to the genesis shouldn't be taken literally crowd".
LCDs work by creating a whole bunch of light, and then filtering out the light that isn't needed. That's why black isn't truly black on LCD screens -- the backlight is still on, the screen is just filtering out as much light as it can. If they have a way to recapture that light, which otherwise goes to waste, then it will provide substantial energy savings, especially considering that the screen often consumes as much energy as the rest of the phone combined.
I know you're thinking that the goal was to get ticket revenues. Sometimes I suspect that myself. But the government would argue, perhaps truthfully, that getting rear-ended will at worst give you a bit of whiplash, whereas getting t-boned by some asshole running a red light can kill. Has there ever been a study on the rate of injuries before and after red light camera installation?
The two are related in that thought experiments related to changing something by measuring it led to the development of the Uncertainty Principle. However, it can be reached from other angles, including deriving it mathematically. It exists independent of any actual measurement. Even if you imagine an omniscient god thinking about the particle, it's impossible to know both the momentum and position simultaneously.
Hyperphysics has an excellent summary showing where the uncertainty arises without any measurements taking place.
As for Wikipedia's part, if you look at the talk page, you'll see what happened. The editors there are making a conscious effort to make the subject approachable. So they focus on "real world" applications, such as measurements affecting the outcome, and gloss over the talk of wave packets and derivations that show the uncertainty exists even without measurements. I don't disagree with their approach. Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a text book. But you have to be careful when turning to it for advanced information.
(For the record, I am not a physicist, but I did take multiple courses in quantum mechanics in college before turning to a far more lucrative career in engineering. I'm also close friends with a particle physicist who gives me crap about turning to the dark side to this day.)
*This picture brought to you by Cuil*
It's only the gamblers' fallacy if you're sure the odds really are even. If I flip a coin twenty times, and it comes up heads every time, you'd be a fool to think that the odds on the next flip are 50-50. It's far more likely that I'm using a trick coin.
See also: Bayesian inference
How is that different from what they are able to do now? Check for cops before committing a crime. Whether the cops are there because of an algorithm or by random chance is irrelevant.
You assume the average criminal is going to know what the policemen's daily patrol routes will be. If they have access to that knowledge, then why aren't the already using it? All that's changing here is how the routes are set.
We have a nation unwilling to raise taxes above historic lows, with one party trying to push taxes even lower. We're being forced to lay off cops by the thousands. Hiring enough to properly cover cities isn't an option. Technology that helps that be a bit more efficient is welcome.
People are really bad at being random. I'm sure many criminals already think they're picking random targets.
Just FYI, that's not the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You're thinking of wave function collapse, in which the act of measuring a particle determines its state. Heisenberg uncertainty is a mathematical proof that shows that the uncertainty in a particle's location and the uncertainty of its momentum have a non-zero product. It also applies to other pairs of properties, such as energy and time.
People get the two confused all the time, probably because the one that's more useful to talk about doesn't have a cool sounding name (that I know of).
They already have to schedule where the cops will and won't be. If we could afford to have cops everywhere all the time, there would be no need for this tech. The only difference made by this technology is that the cops will now be positioned more intelligently. It's like how fielders in baseball shift based on the batter's spray chart. It doesn't guarantee that they'll be where the ball goes, but it does tilt the odds a bit more in their favor.
Enough that you'd leave a trail of evidence a mile wide before you even got to the big one. If you really, really want to commit a crime, do the big one first, and then be a model citizen forever after. Repeat offenders eventually get caught.
Alternatively, pursue a career in finance and/or politics. You know what they say... the best way to rob a bank is to own it.
Ooh, let me try: "Hamlet is a melodramatic twit whose indecisiveness leads to the deaths of everyone he loves!"
But you can't always enjoy the journey if you know what will happen. In some books, you know what will happen without spoilers - most authors are very kind to their protagonists. This is especially true of television, or serialized short stories, where the protagonists must always live to fight another day.
But in many cases, stories are more realistic. Unforeseen troubles dash the hopes of the heroes. It's a lot more fun if your hopes are dashed along with them, and if you are led to feel a bit of the same despair that the characters feel, wondering if perhaps this story has a tragic ending. And it is that much more joyful when they find a way to come out on top.
The funny thing is, Columbo mysteries can be ruined by spoilers as well. Traditional mysteries are in the "whodunit" format. With Columbo, you know who did it, and that they'll be caught (this is Columbo, after all!), but what you don't know is how they will be caught. If someone tells you, "Hey, in Suitable for Framing, Columbo touches the painting while in the murderer's apartment, placing his fingerprints on it to later prove the painting was there", then that episode won't be nearly as much fun.
Whoops, sorry for the forty year old spoilers.
3) That's one theory, but it's intentionally ambiguous. It could be the apartment owners covered it up to avoid losing property value, and as for what's-his-name being alive in Europe, the whole book/movie makes a point of how often these people confuse each other for someone else.
6) Again, that's one theory. An alternate theory is that the Wachowski brothers are frickin abysmal writers who just got lucky the first time.
And screw you for posting #8! It's one thing to post spoilers for old movies, but that one spoils, like, half the scifi movies to come out over the next twenty years!
I can think of numerous times where not knowing what would happen in a book gave me an actual rush as I read it. Whether it's not knowing if a character will live or die (such as the mom in "Room"), or the gut-churning shock of a surprise heartbreak (such as in the short story "The Girlfriend"), surprises add greatly to the emotion conveyed by a good story.
Stories can be good without such surprises... I know from the start that Sam Vimes will always come out okay in Discworld, and I can still enjoy the journey. And some people might not like surprises, and may prefer to stick to stories in which the good guys always win. But anyone making the claim that spoilers never hurt a story either needs to spend more time reading, or, more likely, is just looking for an inflammatory headline to draw eyeballs.
No, no, no. Don't buy into those lies.
First of all, arresting someone for being "disorderly" in their own home is just another form of contempt of cop.
Secondly, Obama had enough facts to make the right call - that the police were acting stupidly. He only backtracked because the media crucified him.
Tossing out the case and giving a lecture will never make them stop. They'll just keep trying, and occasionally get lucky with an authoritarian judge. The right way to handle this is disbarment for any prosecutor who files such clearly retaliatory charges. Just watch how fast this bullshit stops after a few DAs find themselves on the streets.
Obama was crucified for merely making the offhand statement that the police acted stupidly in arresting a man in his own home on suspicion of being a burglar. What do you think would happen to anyone who actually tried to push for real change? There's no hope for turning back at this point.
Let me explain something to you.
No business sells a product at some fixed profit margin above the cost to manufacture. What companies do is they first determine their the lowest price they'd be willing to accept, their WTA, for a product. Due to economics of scale, the WTA goes down as the number of goods sold goes up. Imagine a graph where the x-axis is the number of units sold, and the y-axis is the lowest price they'd be willing to accept for that number of sales.
Meanwhile, they gauge what customers would be willing to pay (WTP) for the product. Obviously, the lower the price, the more people will be willing to pay. So you get another graph, where the x-axis is the number of buyers, and the y-axis is how much they're willing to pay.
It is mathematically provable that the maximum utility exists when you overlay the two graphs and set the price at the intersect point. However, this leaves some money on the table, as there are some customers whose WTP is less than the price point. You can't just lower your price, because you're already at the optimum price -- you'd lose out on all the additional money that most of your customers are willing to pay. So you have two options. You can have periodic sales, but this only gets those customers who pay close attention, and also loses money on customers with a higher WTP who happen to be lucky or thrifty. Or, you can create a product with reduced functionality and sell it at a reduced price.
You may wish with all your heart that this wasn't so. You may want companies to give away their best products at the lowest possible price, with no thought of securing funds to invest in future development. But this is how the world works. This is how prices are set. And, as I said, it is mathematically provable as the best method for everyone, consumers included. Incidentally, this system breaks down when a monopoly exists -- that's where consumers really start getting screwed, and that's what you should save your outrage for.