Final Fantasy isn't manga. It's a video game. Manga is a Japanese term for comic books.
I don't really feel like I should have to geek out on this, but seriously, is it too much to ask that people actually know what they are talking about before they say they "don't like it"?
P.S. I am not Saudi, but I do have the pleasure to be working with them on this technology, and I am telling you they have some of the best minds on the planet.
Which are foreigners and contract employees:D
Quoted for truth. Native Saudis are not known for their intellectual rigor among the professoriate.
"When people grow up in a culture and with a religion which discourages critical thinking and encourages superstition and persecution of critics they won't become scientists."
They become Engineers. Seriously - I have never met a Saudi in a basic sciences degree program. They seem to gravitate toward Engineering, where all the answers are pre-solved for them and all they have to do is apply the geneal solutions to their problems.
In a way, it's just like their religious training back home. With Math.
"Islam was a young religion when Christians first attacked the Middle East. "
What the hell? Islam as a young religion attacked the Christians of the Middle East in the 7th century AD. Ask the Copts, Mandaeans and Syriacs what happened to their nations during the first Jihad.
The quarks are supposed to be named in pairs thusly:
Up down
Strange Charm
Truth Beauty
But somewhere in the 70's some particle group with little sense of wonder renamed Truth and Beauty to Top and Bottom, thus leaving Strange and Charm as sounding anachronistic.
Lately I've realized how little parent teach their kids. Some, I dare say most, do absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Maybe the teach them to count to ten, but that is all. You're lucky if you get the ABC's as well. I find it shocking when I talk to people who didn't get taught anything as a child, and even more shocking when I see children not being taught.
I was reading fluently and doing basic algebra before I entered kindergarden, and that lead has stuck with me my whole life. (Quite frustrating actually.)
If I had a dime for everyone who said "I was reading fluently before kindergarten" or "I was doing some impressive intellectual feat before 2nd grade" I would have enough money to buy a nice lunch.
Here's a tip: No, you weren't, unless you're a statistical aberration.
I have a four-year-old son who is in a voluntary pre-K program offered by Florida. Amongst his peer group he is (according to his teachers) one of the brightest, most attentive and well-behaved. We read to him as a child, and I did my best to encourage him to enjoy learning.
He can spell simple three and four letter words, though he cannot yet read, He's working on phonics and does basic calculation with non-numeric symbols.
And he's at or near the top of his class.
If you were a child prodigy and able to do basic algebra and read fluently at that age, then bully for you. Not every child can achieve such feats - and many may never actually achieve them. Tossing money at pre-K is not going to create a bunch of prodigies.
What it will create is a well-entrenched bureaucracy that is more involved with making money for itself under the pretense of doing it For The Children(TM).
The verse is not presented in any historical context without an accompanying man-made text. The Othmanic reclension stripped the text of any temporal markings - effectively re-writing the words of your God in a method that the first Caliph found pleasing; and there are Hadith in Bukhari that describe the verses that were not included or lost.
At least modern Christians are not disingenuous about the man-written nature of the Bible. The Koran is not directly unevolved from the lips of your God - it was contaminated during the reclension.
On the other hand, if the Koran is merely a collection of sayings that are Mohammed's (god-claimed) rulings over events in the seventh century, all it is is a collection of the judicial precedent as written by an illiterate (7:157) who claimed to see God. You'd be better off asking a guy with advanced-stage syphilis his thoughts about the modern world. At least he would probably know that the Christian trinity is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, not Allah, Jesus and Mary (5:116) and that sperm doesn't come from the backside (86:6-7)
Well, demanding a retraction of that verse would likely provoke the same reaction against you, King of Bobland, as we saw with the Mohammed cartoons. You'd be trying to alter what Muslims see as the immutable word of their God.
There are more than enough passages in the Koran to justify the killing of non-Mulsims as the following two show:
4:76 Those who believe do battle for the cause of Allah; and those who disbelieve do battle for the cause of idols (unbelief). So fight the minions of the devil. Lo! the devil's strategy is ever weak.
2:193 And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah. But if they desist, then let there be no hostility except against wrong-doers.
The second one sounds good - except that the Koran defines a wrong-doer very broadly. It is a class that includes freethinkers, polytheists, atheists and non-Muslims that preach their own religion. Among other passages:
4:89 They long that ye should disbelieve even as they disbelieve, that ye may be upon a level (with them). So choose not friends from them till they forsake their homes in the way of Allah; if they turn back then take them and kill them wherever ye find them, and choose no friend nor helper from among them.
4:101 And when ye go forth in the land, it is no sin for you to curtail (your) worship if ye fear that those who disbelieve may attack you. In truth the disbelievers are an open enemy to you.
No they are not. They are Scientific Theories.
A theory is a statement that has been supported by evidence from repeatable experiments and can be used to make accurate predictions that can be borne out by experiment.
Even though it satisfies (to an extent) both of those qualifications, Newton's Theory of Gravity is -wrong-. It is an acceptable approximation for certain local phenomena, however. Einstein's Theory of General Relativity has not yet been shown to be violated, yet it is still a theory.
Do not let the abuse of a word in the vernacular color your perception of its meaning. Even if it is a predictive science, evolutionary biology is based on scientific theories, not 'facts'.
Your comments imply that hippies took over the colleges, which is why universities are perceived to have a left wing bias (aah for the good old 1950's where the world was perfect and people knew their places).
Nowhere do I, or would I support a return to the 1950's-era version of the world. To claim that my post implies that is to not actually have read my post.
This lack of open-mindedness is the biggest hinderance to right-leaning scholars playing a bigger role on campuses. The ideologues have all the answers and simply must find away to make data and evidence fit their ideology; whereas, a credible and open-minded conservative can soundly analyze data, let chips fall where they may.
The right does not have a monopoly on ideologues, and in fact it is disingenuous to say that there are no left-leaning ideologues in positions of power on campuses today for which the preceding quote is not true. Ideologues on every side of a debate manufacture data or claim their opinions as infallible truth. It's not just Bush and Iraq.
A good example of this is in the current climate change debate. Ideologues with little scientific background can blame just about -anything- on global warming and immediately be taken seriously by a large segment of the population. Pollution, clear cutting of forests - both are terrible things, and both have long term implications to the planet. On the other hand, knee-jerk alarmism only hurts the genuine argument, and creates a backlash in which NOTHING gets done at all!
Continuous pollution of the planet and destruction of vital parts of the ecology of Earth is a clear and present danger. "Global Warming" is hucksterism, bad science and quasi-Gaia-religionism that confuses the public about real problems and good (as opposed to feel-good) solutions to those problems.
There were two separate segments of my post - one decrying pushy radicals, and the other pointing out an interesting inversion of what really is 'radical' on campuses these days. Apparently you missed the entire point (or are a successful troll).
I am supportive of the free exchange of ideas - even repugnant ideas. However, there are times and places where it is appropriate to both present those ideas and to protest against them. Shouting down an opposing speaker is not debate, it is intimidation. Disrupting classes because you feel your protest is more important than anything else is not debate, it is narcissism.
If you think you work on a campus where the only available form of dissent is joining the Republicans, what are you doing about it?
I'm surprised that you were able to call my post incoherent, considering this thought process. Let me spell it out in a simple analogy:
If "The Man" is a socialist, radicals are capitalists.
All across the country in the 1950s, colleges stifled leftists - dress codes, speech codes, nothing is new under the sun.
Today, colleges are doing the same thing, only the target is different.
In between, there was a time when there was far more freedom of inquiry. Maybe we'll return to that state at some point during my lifetime.
Oh, that's right, your will is already completely broken by the man. You won't in a million years consider lifting a finger to fix this. You will just break the wills of those younger than you. Ah, the circle of academic life.
You are a sorry jaded little man, aren't you? Cynicism is easy.
There's a difference between the right to protest grievances, and the right to protest wherever you damn well want to and in whatever circumstances you want to. One of these is an actual right.
Full disclosure: I am a 30 year old college professor at a small private school.
Disrupting classes, invited lectures or other campus-wide gatherings is not only rude, but it is nothing less than thuggism. The whole point of the academy is the free and open flow of ideas. You may agree or disagree with those ideas, but to shout them down or disrupt the educational process is beyond the pale. Engagement with those you disagree with is far more constructive than acting like a jackbooted jerk.
Before the late 1960s, hipsters were escorted off of campuses, student radicals were usually expelled. Professors who did not 'fit in' were routinely let go.
Today, the politics on campus has all but reversed itself from the 1950s. "The man" today is the Boomer-aged Administration and Faculty: leftists who promote speech codes and shut down campus debate, harass conservatives, excuse 'favored groups' antisocial activity, etc. There hasn't been a truly progressive bone in the corpse of campus leftism since I was an undergrad in the late 90's. All that is 'left' is a proto-totalitarianist mantra of thoughtcrime and newspeak (oddly enough, that was the name of our campus newspaper whilst I was there!)
To be a real 'campus radical' today is not to be a pot-smoking hippie; it is to be a member of the campus Republicans!
Odd. I know more than a few Muslims who will attest to the fact that the idea that everything occurs because of the "Will of Allah" is not only an accepted belief but also quite common in their homeland.
"When the christians were burning roman and greek science (philosophy, medicine, etc) books, the muslims were preserving them in great libraries. Similarly for greek and roman art, the christians destroyed countless statues, the muslims decorated their palaces with them."
Although in much of Europe, the middle ages were not a time of great learning from the Greeks, many Irish monestaries were busy hoarding important works from that era. "How the Irish Saved Civilization" by Thomas Cahill is a pretty good book - and very eye opening for those who have been taught that the Islamic societies were the ONLY cause of the Renaissance.
And half of those "Islamic" scholars weren't Arab anyway. They were Persian - heirs to an immense scientific culture that got forcibly converted by a barbarian invasion in the 600s.
On the other point, I call bullshit. Islam has a prohibition against artistic depictions of living things. Mohammed is credited for smashing every statue in the Kaaba, and during the sack of Constantinople in 1453, every single statue in the Hagia Sophia was smashed, and the frescoes painted over. Wherever Muslims invaded, there was an enormous destruction of artworks.
Will look back at the Bush administration as a complete and utter failure, and those who voted for Bush as complicit in his war crimes, as the German People were complicit in WW2 and the Holocaust.
I certainly hope that this isn't the case, otherwise either the concept of objective truth will be utterly meaningless in 2029, or all the female members of that class will be burkha-clad, if allowed to go to school at all.
Education? Well, let's consider. Here's a test that was actually given to 8th graders in 1895. Can you pass it now? Can you get over 50%? Maybe our current education system isn't working then. Maybe it's time to hold children accountable for what they know, and what they don't know. If they can't pass a test, they don't pass the grade. Period. I don't see what's so hard about that. If more than 50% of the class doesn't pass a test, then fire the teacher. No more teacher's unions and whining about money. There are PLENTY of people out there looking for jobs as teachers that would be more than happy to show you how much children can learn.
I'd actually like to see any modern person pass this test.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
When was the last time you calculated the number of bushels of wheat in a wagon box? Do you even know what a bushel is? I'm a year shy of a PhD in Astrophysics, and I couldn't even begin to tell you the answer to this question without looking up a foot^3 -> bushel conversion.
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs, what is it worth at 50 cts. per bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
Tare? I suppose if you can get through the archaic terminology, you can answer this question, oh, and there's that 'bushel' again.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7% per what? Per year? Per Day? Per Century?
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per m?
$20 per m? Per Meter? Wtf?
Environment? The earth, according to all kinds of scientists, is over 10,000,000,000 years old. Do you REALLY think that us driving SUV's is going to kill the environment?
Wow. I'd love to know who these scientists are. The sun is only 4.5 billion years old, so you are claiming that the Earth is twice that? And you complain about not having competant teachers?
Do you really think using 0.0005% more gasoline to get from point A to point B is REALLY going to make Mother Nature shiver in her boots?
My 2003 Chevy Cavalier gets ~33mpg highway. A 2003 Ford Explorer gets ~21mpg highway. It seems to me that the SUV uses 13.2% more gasoline than my car.
Try actually getting educated before you start making wild claims that the rest of the world isn't.
It's good to know that JonKatz has bought into the myth that Star Wars is some sort of epic drama.
It's not.
It's a saturday morning Sci-Fi serial, nothing more. If you expect the movies to be some soert of life-defining experience,then you are blessedly mistaken.
AoTC was as good as Empire in my opinion, and I am an obsessive SW fanboy. But I never bought into the Power of Myth interpretation. I always saw SW as a 1950's-era space opera/science fantasy, and through those lenses, AoTC rocked.
Lucas didn't rape anyone's childhood.. They raped themselves by building a nostalgia wall around three mediocre, yet genre defining movies of the same caliber as Battlestar Galactica
Slashdot Mirror
"Black holes are thought to form when a star greater than 4 times the mass of the Sun explodes in a supernova and then collapses. "
If a star is greater than _8_ solar masses you get a supernova.
Final Fantasy isn't manga. It's a video game. Manga is a Japanese term for comic books.
I don't really feel like I should have to geek out on this, but seriously, is it too much to ask that people actually know what they are talking about before they say they "don't like it"?
Quoted for truth. Native Saudis are not known for their intellectual rigor among the professoriate.
"When people grow up in a culture and with a religion which discourages critical thinking and encourages superstition and persecution of critics they won't become scientists."
They become Engineers. Seriously - I have never met a Saudi in a basic sciences degree program. They seem to gravitate toward Engineering, where all the answers are pre-solved for them and all they have to do is apply the geneal solutions to their problems.
In a way, it's just like their religious training back home. With Math.
"Islam was a young religion when Christians first attacked the Middle East. "
What the hell? Islam as a young religion attacked the Christians of the Middle East in the 7th century AD. Ask the Copts, Mandaeans and Syriacs what happened to their nations during the first Jihad.
Oh wait. There's hardly any of them left.
The quarks are supposed to be named in pairs thusly:
Up down
Strange Charm
Truth Beauty
But somewhere in the 70's some particle group with little sense of wonder renamed Truth and Beauty to Top and Bottom, thus leaving Strange and Charm as sounding anachronistic.
If I had a dime for everyone who said "I was reading fluently before kindergarten" or "I was doing some impressive intellectual feat before 2nd grade" I would have enough money to buy a nice lunch.I was reading fluently and doing basic algebra before I entered kindergarden, and that lead has stuck with me my whole life. (Quite frustrating actually.)
Here's a tip: No, you weren't, unless you're a statistical aberration.
I have a four-year-old son who is in a voluntary pre-K program offered by Florida. Amongst his peer group he is (according to his teachers) one of the brightest, most attentive and well-behaved. We read to him as a child, and I did my best to encourage him to enjoy learning.
He can spell simple three and four letter words, though he cannot yet read, He's working on phonics and does basic calculation with non-numeric symbols.
And he's at or near the top of his class.
If you were a child prodigy and able to do basic algebra and read fluently at that age, then bully for you. Not every child can achieve such feats - and many may never actually achieve them. Tossing money at pre-K is not going to create a bunch of prodigies.
What it will create is a well-entrenched bureaucracy that is more involved with making money for itself under the pretense of doing it For The Children(TM).
Well, the original posting was about a type of strategy guide. :)
The verse is not presented in any historical context without an accompanying man-made text. The Othmanic reclension stripped the text of any temporal markings - effectively re-writing the words of your God in a method that the first Caliph found pleasing; and there are Hadith in Bukhari that describe the verses that were not included or lost.
At least modern Christians are not disingenuous about the man-written nature of the Bible. The Koran is not directly unevolved from the lips of your God - it was contaminated during the reclension.
On the other hand, if the Koran is merely a collection of sayings that are Mohammed's (god-claimed) rulings over events in the seventh century, all it is is a collection of the judicial precedent as written by an illiterate (7:157) who claimed to see God. You'd be better off asking a guy with advanced-stage syphilis his thoughts about the modern world. At least he would probably know that the Christian trinity is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, not Allah, Jesus and Mary (5:116) and that sperm doesn't come from the backside (86:6-7)
Well, demanding a retraction of that verse would likely provoke the same reaction against you, King of Bobland, as we saw with the Mohammed cartoons. You'd be trying to alter what Muslims see as the immutable word of their God.
There are more than enough passages in the Koran to justify the killing of non-Mulsims as the following two show:
4:76 Those who believe do battle for the cause of Allah; and those who disbelieve do battle for the cause of idols (unbelief). So fight the minions of the devil. Lo! the devil's strategy is ever weak.
2:193 And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah. But if they desist, then let there be no hostility except against wrong-doers.
The second one sounds good - except that the Koran defines a wrong-doer very broadly. It is a class that includes freethinkers, polytheists, atheists and non-Muslims that preach their own religion. Among other passages:
4:89 They long that ye should disbelieve even as they disbelieve, that ye may be upon a level (with them). So choose not friends from them till they forsake their homes in the way of Allah; if they turn back then take them and kill them wherever ye find them, and choose no friend nor helper from among them.
4:101 And when ye go forth in the land, it is no sin for you to curtail (your) worship if ye fear that those who disbelieve may attack you. In truth the disbelievers are an open enemy to you.
If it is not testable or predictive, it's hardly scientific.
And if it is disproven, then it is not a theory at all, it is a failed hypothesis.
Put down the mirror, please, and step away from the debate. You're obviously not ready to converse without resort to ad hominem arguments or strawmen.
Thanks for playing!
Nowhere do I, or would I support a return to the 1950's-era version of the world. To claim that my post implies that is to not actually have read my post.
The right does not have a monopoly on ideologues, and in fact it is disingenuous to say that there are no left-leaning ideologues in positions of power on campuses today for which the preceding quote is not true. Ideologues on every side of a debate manufacture data or claim their opinions as infallible truth. It's not just Bush and Iraq.
A good example of this is in the current climate change debate. Ideologues with little scientific background can blame just about -anything- on global warming and immediately be taken seriously by a large segment of the population. Pollution, clear cutting of forests - both are terrible things, and both have long term implications to the planet. On the other hand, knee-jerk alarmism only hurts the genuine argument, and creates a backlash in which NOTHING gets done at all!
Continuous pollution of the planet and destruction of vital parts of the ecology of Earth is a clear and present danger. "Global Warming" is hucksterism, bad science and quasi-Gaia-religionism that confuses the public about real problems and good (as opposed to feel-good) solutions to those problems.
There's a difference between the right to protest grievances, and the right to protest wherever you damn well want to and in whatever circumstances you want to. One of these is an actual right.
Full disclosure: I am a 30 year old college professor at a small private school.
Disrupting classes, invited lectures or other campus-wide gatherings is not only rude, but it is nothing less than thuggism. The whole point of the academy is the free and open flow of ideas. You may agree or disagree with those ideas, but to shout them down or disrupt the educational process is beyond the pale. Engagement with those you disagree with is far more constructive than acting like a jackbooted jerk.
Before the late 1960s, hipsters were escorted off of campuses, student radicals were usually expelled. Professors who did not 'fit in' were routinely let go.
Today, the politics on campus has all but reversed itself from the 1950s. "The man" today is the Boomer-aged Administration and Faculty: leftists who promote speech codes and shut down campus debate, harass conservatives, excuse 'favored groups' antisocial activity, etc. There hasn't been a truly progressive bone in the corpse of campus leftism since I was an undergrad in the late 90's. All that is 'left' is a proto-totalitarianist mantra of thoughtcrime and newspeak (oddly enough, that was the name of our campus newspaper whilst I was there!)
To be a real 'campus radical' today is not to be a pot-smoking hippie; it is to be a member of the campus Republicans!
Odd. I know more than a few Muslims who will attest to the fact that the idea that everything occurs because of the "Will of Allah" is not only an accepted belief but also quite common in their homeland.
"When the christians were burning roman and greek science (philosophy, medicine, etc) books, the muslims were preserving them in great libraries. Similarly for greek and roman art, the christians destroyed countless statues, the muslims decorated their palaces with them." Although in much of Europe, the middle ages were not a time of great learning from the Greeks, many Irish monestaries were busy hoarding important works from that era. "How the Irish Saved Civilization" by Thomas Cahill is a pretty good book - and very eye opening for those who have been taught that the Islamic societies were the ONLY cause of the Renaissance. And half of those "Islamic" scholars weren't Arab anyway. They were Persian - heirs to an immense scientific culture that got forcibly converted by a barbarian invasion in the 600s. On the other point, I call bullshit. Islam has a prohibition against artistic depictions of living things. Mohammed is credited for smashing every statue in the Kaaba, and during the sack of Constantinople in 1453, every single statue in the Hagia Sophia was smashed, and the frescoes painted over. Wherever Muslims invaded, there was an enormous destruction of artworks.
Sure, if you're a private citizen.
On the other hand, you would be hard pressed to find a government with a suitably clean track record.
Oppenheimer wasn't Jewish.
I'd actually like to see any modern person pass this test.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
When was the last time you calculated the number of bushels of wheat in a wagon box? Do you even know what a bushel is? I'm a year shy of a PhD in Astrophysics, and I couldn't even begin to tell you the answer to this question without looking up a foot^3 -> bushel conversion.3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs, what is it worth at 50 cts. per bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
Tare? I suppose if you can get through the archaic terminology, you can answer this question, oh, and there's that 'bushel' again.6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7% per what? Per year? Per Day? Per Century?7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per m?
$20 per m? Per Meter? Wtf?Wow. I'd love to know who these scientists are. The sun is only 4.5 billion years old, so you are claiming that the Earth is twice that? And you complain about not having competant teachers?
My 2003 Chevy Cavalier gets ~33mpg highway. A 2003 Ford Explorer gets ~21mpg highway. It seems to me that the SUV uses 13.2% more gasoline than my car.Try actually getting educated before you start making wild claims that the rest of the world isn't.
>>I saw Star Wars for $1.50 in 1976
Which is amazingly impressive since it didn't come out until Summer 1977.
It's good to know that JonKatz has bought into the myth that Star Wars is some sort of epic drama. It's not. It's a saturday morning Sci-Fi serial, nothing more. If you expect the movies to be some soert of life-defining experience,then you are blessedly mistaken. AoTC was as good as Empire in my opinion, and I am an obsessive SW fanboy. But I never bought into the Power of Myth interpretation. I always saw SW as a 1950's-era space opera/science fantasy, and through those lenses, AoTC rocked. Lucas didn't rape anyone's childhood.. They raped themselves by building a nostalgia wall around three mediocre, yet genre defining movies of the same caliber as Battlestar Galactica