From TFA: "Although it may undermine our immediate goals, mind wandering may enable the parallel operation of diverse brain areas in the service of distal goals that extend beyond the current task."
Obviously. I'm sure they never accounted and corrected for that possibility. After all, it's not like these people are the type who would know anything about basic experimental science or anything.
Sometimes even the researchers think it's contamination, but the story's too good for journalists to pass up. A memorable example:
"Scientists at University of Alabama sequenced a 130-nucleotide long mitochondrial DNA sequence from dinosaur vertebrae, and found that it was 100% homologous to mitochondrial DNA from turkeys. However, the scientists themselves 'remain quite sceptical of our own work' and noted that they had been consuming turkey sandwiches in the laboratory."
Even though the triceratops-turkey 'finding' was never published and eventually dismissed by the researchers, the false result was leaked onto the internet, where it can still be found today.
This RNA synthesis paper, however, has no such caveats.
TFA quotes Neil deGrasse Tyson saying "Pluto is the god of the underworld, a distant place you don't want to go to," and Capt. Freeman saying "Pluto is the prototype of Satan in many minds..."
The Greek underworld is more akin to the entire Christian afterlife. Sure, it had Hell-like Tartarus, but it also had the Heaven-like Elysian Fields (in French: Champs-Elysees), and plenty of places between.
And Pluto/Hades was certainly no Satan! In at least one myth, the brothers Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades drew lots to see who would rule the air, sea, and underworld. Zeus drew first and chose air. Poseidon was thrilled, because he wanted the sea anyway. And poor Hades was stuck with the underworld.
Also from TFA, "...scientists at the Lowell Observatory voted unanimously for Pluto, partly because its first two letters could be interpreted as an homage to Percival Lowell..." Very cool.
What about the plants? Have they seen the hell that a plant goes through before it gets turned into that nasty ass humus shit? The beans are viable organisms right up until they get turned into paste, but no one cares about planets rights.
Jeremy Bentham said it well: "The question is not Can they reason?, nor Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?" I think capacity for suffering goes something like:
Humans > cows > fish > bivalves > chickpeas
But thats just ignorance at its best. I wish people would realize that life is a cycle, it lives and dies, and as a general rule, we as a species depend entirely on the death of other living organisms to survive.
I have nothing against killing animals qua killing. It's the suffering we inflict that I find reprehensible.
A slightly stronger argument against vegetarianism is that animals suffer all the time in the wild - lions eat gazelles, foxes eat rabbits. The response is kinda obvious, though: Suffering may be endemic to all complex life, but that doesn't mean it's okay to torture a kitten. Just because the suffering argument is a slippery slope doesn't mean we should allow every reprehensible behavior. And factory farms are pretty awful.
...it would seem to me that if you are more familiar with one type of face (whites for whites, blacks for blacks) then you would have a faster time of decision with the more familiar...
But in both situations (black/bad white/good vs. white/bad black/good), you're being shown the same faces and words. The only difference is which faces are being binned with which words. So I'm not sure how familiarity would skew the results.
I had something derogatory to say about your gut feeling about the "subjugation of women"...
So did I! That's why I wrote "that's just the uninformed gut reaction of a guy who's never played either game. I don't trust it much at all." That reaction tells you more about me than about the consequences of these games. That's exactly why I want data.
Well, imagine it another way. Pick the names of five people you like and five people you don't like.
Round one. Name of a friend or "good word," hit the left button. Name of a person you don't like or "bad word," hit the right button.
Round two. Friend/bad word, hit the left button. Jerk/good word, hit the right button.
I bet dollars to donuts your reaction times are faster on round one. Why? Because the concepts are already grouped together in your head. You just think "good things, left button." Round two is more mentally taxing because you have to remember "good people OR bad words, left button."
The question is, are the folks who do NOT support "immoral" games adversely affected by their existence?
My gut reaction is that yes, games like GTA and RapeLay, played mostly by men, contribute to the subjugation of women. But that's just the uninformed gut reaction of a guy who's never played either game. I don't trust it much at all. I'd like some data.
There are tests that see how quickly you associate terms. They basically work like this: 1 - A word or person's face will appear on the screen. 2 - If the word has positive connotations or if the person is white, hit the left button. If the word has negative connotations or the person is black, hit the right button. 3 - Your reaction time is measured.
I am, regretfully, faster at reacting when it's good/white vs. bad/black than when it's good/black vs. bad/white. Try it yourself if you like.
You could do the same thing with RapeLay. One group plays RapeLay, one group doesn't. Choose some associations (e.g. submissive and strong words, male and female faces), test the groups before playing... then right after playing, or 1 week after playing, or one year after playing every day for a month, etc.
Anyone know of studies like this? Data, even with it's caveats and conditionals, beats the pants off gut reactions.
Sorry to sound snooty, but that's my gut reaction to the "this is unsafe!" comments. Unsafe by American/European standards, probably. Unsafe compared to Indian options? Ha.
Some photos of life in Delhi (a bit less "European" than Mumbai), including the inside of a couple homes, here. (Disclosure: that's a link to my old travel blog.)
We should praise improvement, not demand perfection.
Instead of (correctly) complaining that "correlation != causation" or "this won't work!!", could we use examples like these to promote science education?
Will banning paintball cause a decrease in school shootings? Did you know that's a scientifically tractable question?
When a tragedy like this occurs, the public demands a political reaction. More education on the only known way to get at causation - the scientific method - might cause people to demand political reactions that work.
Why do people think meetings must fill the allotted time? The start time is when you meet. The "end" time is the limit, after which you're free to have other engagements. But if you get everything accomplished early, why babble away for the remaining minutes?
You can't demand productivity. If you're not being productive anymore, meeting over.
Does anyone have meetings that actually operate like that? Do they work?
Eh? I have yet to hear a justification for agricultural subsidies that doesn't amount to: "because I'm from Iowa, and I like money." Why don't they do away with the H1B program and institute programmer subsidies instead? (Sarcasm).
Because you don't want to be wholly dependent on other countries for your food.
TFA makes it sound like nobody thought storylines were important initially; but in the days of Donkey Kong, were non-superficial storylines even possible? With such repetitive gameplay, could good storyline exist?
Maybe the more creative out there could enlighten me. Can you make a good storyline for Donkey Kong?
"The system uses radar and infrared technology to 'pre-detect' a collision..."
Normal airbags inflate post-collision, but before you smack into the steering column. These new systems (1) detect imminent collisions and (2) react automatically. Am I stuck in 2004, or is that new?
Euclid's Elements of Geometry (~300BC) is the foundation of mathematical rigor.
He starts with a few definitions and axioms (like "two straight lines cannot enclose a space"), and uses them to prove some simple theorems. By constantly using prior theorems as building blocks, he's proving the Pythagorean Theorem by proposition 47. He proves the infinitude of primes a few chapters later. It's astounding how far he goes on such a modest foundation.
Definitions, axioms, theorems, lemmas -- this is where it all started.
One option involves driving to the store, buying an entire album (name a song by Don McLean that isn't American Pie...), driving home, and ripping the disc onto computer. The other option is click click click.
Exactly: MAD only works if people fear retaliation.
That's one reason why belief in a glorious afterlife gives me the heebie jeebies!
Mortality can lead quite directly to morality.
I'm a vegetarian, and I'd like to respond to your comments.
(You might be like to know this long-time reader just created an account to reply to your post. So... first psot!)
Reason 1: I saw a baby lamb on a farm and I just couldn't bear myself to kill and eat that! Go away. This isn't a reason...
To be precise, that isn't a reason to preach vegetarianism. It's a perfectly fine reason to be a vegetarian. I don't eat raisins because I don't like the taste, but I wouldn't demand the same of you. (I'm just being precise, but I know the OP understands this perfectly. S/he says as much in reason 6.)
Reason 2: In this day and age it's unethical to eat meat when you can easily sustain yourself on plant sources.
This isn't a reason. The core argument here is "its unethical to eat meat".
You're right that "its unethical to eat meat" is at the core of this argument, but if you believe eating meat is unethical, then the ease with which you can avoid meat, I think, augments the culpability.
Reason 3: It's unethical to cause suffering. Thus it is unethical to eat meat.
Now we're getting somewhere!
I can't speak on behalf of all vegetarians, but you hit the nail on the head here. It IS unethical to cause suffering, and yes, we are getting somewhere:)
So if in the future we hooked up newly born cows to a Virtual Reality system ala. the matrix, where there was no suffering, disconnected cows would remain virtually in the world (no percieved death or loss) and execution was done painlessly and with the cow blissfuly unaware, it'd be okay to eat meat? Somehow I don't think a real vegan's going to say yes.
Well, I'm a real vegetarian (and a vegan in my own home), and I say yes.
Reason 4: It's unethical to kill.
I actually have no problem with killing qua killing.
Reason 5: Plants aren't on the same level as human beings.
Then why are cows? Rabbits? Sheep? Birds? Insects? Where is this magical, arbitrary line that says it's okay to eat a pumpkin but not to eat a fish?
There is no magical line. I'd say capacity for suffering goes something like:
Humans > cows > fish > bivalves > trees
This is why I will eat fish on rare occasion*, but I haven't had a hamburger in 14 years.
* - I know, I know, "then you're NOT A VEGETARIAN!" they always scream. I am a vegetarian, but I'm not a social ass. Sometimes they conflict. When my brother and his wife invited me to dinner at their place a few months ago, we compromised with salmon. And you know what happened a decade ago when a kind family invited me to their home in Israel and made me "vegetarian" soup that had bits of chicken in it? I ate it.
Reason 6: Meat is bad for you.
The perfect human diet would include meat. (Though much, much less than the average American eats.) Having said that, I think I'm very healthy, partly because I have to watch what I eat.
On that note, there's another couple things that's always bugged me. Why do some vegetarians eat fish and/or chicken but not duck or lamb, and I'm not talking about the dietary-consideration kind?
I hope this was answered already.
And why do some (ie. vegans) go as far as to not eat animal products like eggs, milk and the like, including from "ethical" sources?
Simple: the animals from which we get our eggs and milk lead wretched lives, and we don't want to support the institutionalization of cruelty to animals.
One last thing I should mention for folks to keep in mind:
Being a vegetarian is NOT 100% consistent, and we know it.
It's not just that I eat fish on occasion. I also can't give a great reason for refusing to
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, it was a joke.
Like what the researchers call 'distal goals' are what we call 'sleeping with hot co-workers'.
From TFA:
"Although it may undermine our immediate goals, mind wandering may enable the parallel operation of diverse brain areas in the service of distal goals that extend beyond the current task."
'Distal goals', eh?
Contamination. 'Nuff said.
Obviously. I'm sure they never accounted and corrected for that possibility. After all, it's not like these people are the type who would know anything about basic experimental science or anything.
Sometimes even the researchers think it's contamination, but the story's too good for journalists to pass up. A memorable example:
"Scientists at University of Alabama sequenced a 130-nucleotide long mitochondrial DNA sequence from dinosaur vertebrae, and found that it was 100% homologous to mitochondrial DNA from turkeys. However, the scientists themselves 'remain quite sceptical of our own work' and noted that they had been consuming turkey sandwiches in the laboratory."
Even though the triceratops-turkey 'finding' was never published and eventually dismissed by the researchers, the false result was leaked onto the internet, where it can still be found today.
This RNA synthesis paper, however, has no such caveats.
Plutonic?
Astrological etymologies:
Mercurial - unpredictable temperment
Venereal - sexually indulgent
Lunatic - crazy
Martial - war-like
Saturnine - gloomy
Jovial - happy
But "nepotism" is from nephew, not Neptune. And "platonic" is from Plato, not Pluto.
TFA quotes Neil deGrasse Tyson saying "Pluto is the god of the underworld, a distant place you don't want to go to," and Capt. Freeman saying "Pluto is the prototype of Satan in many minds..."
The Greek underworld is more akin to the entire Christian afterlife. Sure, it had Hell-like Tartarus, but it also had the Heaven-like Elysian Fields (in French: Champs-Elysees), and plenty of places between.
And Pluto/Hades was certainly no Satan! In at least one myth, the brothers Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades drew lots to see who would rule the air, sea, and underworld. Zeus drew first and chose air. Poseidon was thrilled, because he wanted the sea anyway. And poor Hades was stuck with the underworld.
Also from TFA, "...scientists at the Lowell Observatory voted unanimously for Pluto, partly because its first two letters could be interpreted as an homage to Percival Lowell..." Very cool.
I am a vegetarian.
What about the plants? Have they seen the hell that a plant goes through before it gets turned into that nasty ass humus shit? The beans are viable organisms right up until they get turned into paste, but no one cares about planets rights.
Jeremy Bentham said it well: "The question is not Can they reason?, nor Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?" I think capacity for suffering goes something like:
Humans > cows > fish > bivalves > chickpeas
But thats just ignorance at its best. I wish people would realize that life is a cycle, it lives and dies, and as a general rule, we as a species depend entirely on the death of other living organisms to survive.
I have nothing against killing animals qua killing. It's the suffering we inflict that I find reprehensible.
A slightly stronger argument against vegetarianism is that animals suffer all the time in the wild - lions eat gazelles, foxes eat rabbits. The response is kinda obvious, though: Suffering may be endemic to all complex life, but that doesn't mean it's okay to torture a kitten. Just because the suffering argument is a slippery slope doesn't mean we should allow every reprehensible behavior. And factory farms are pretty awful.
...it would seem to me that if you are more familiar with one type of face (whites for whites, blacks for blacks) then you would have a faster time of decision with the more familiar...
But in both situations (black/bad white/good vs. white/bad black/good), you're being shown the same faces and words. The only difference is which faces are being binned with which words. So I'm not sure how familiarity would skew the results.
I had something derogatory to say about your gut feeling about the "subjugation of women"...
So did I! That's why I wrote "that's just the uninformed gut reaction of a guy who's never played either game. I don't trust it much at all." That reaction tells you more about me than about the consequences of these games. That's exactly why I want data.
Well, imagine it another way. Pick the names of five people you like and five people you don't like.
Round one. Name of a friend or "good word," hit the left button. Name of a person you don't like or "bad word," hit the right button.
Round two. Friend/bad word, hit the left button. Jerk/good word, hit the right button.
I bet dollars to donuts your reaction times are faster on round one. Why? Because the concepts are already grouped together in your head. You just think "good things, left button." Round two is more mentally taxing because you have to remember "good people OR bad words, left button."
The question is, are the folks who do NOT support "immoral" games adversely affected by their existence?
My gut reaction is that yes, games like GTA and RapeLay, played mostly by men, contribute to the subjugation of women. But that's just the uninformed gut reaction of a guy who's never played either game. I don't trust it much at all. I'd like some data.
There are tests that see how quickly you associate terms. They basically work like this:
1 - A word or person's face will appear on the screen.
2 - If the word has positive connotations or if the person is white, hit the left button. If the word has negative connotations or the person is black, hit the right button.
3 - Your reaction time is measured.
I am, regretfully, faster at reacting when it's good/white vs. bad/black than when it's good/black vs. bad/white. Try it yourself if you like.
You could do the same thing with RapeLay. One group plays RapeLay, one group doesn't. Choose some associations (e.g. submissive and strong words, male and female faces), test the groups before playing... then right after playing, or 1 week after playing, or one year after playing every day for a month, etc.
Anyone know of studies like this? Data, even with it's caveats and conditionals, beats the pants off gut reactions.
Sorry to sound snooty, but that's my gut reaction to the "this is unsafe!" comments. Unsafe by American/European standards, probably. Unsafe compared to Indian options? Ha.
Some photos of life in Delhi (a bit less "European" than Mumbai), including the inside of a couple homes, here. (Disclosure: that's a link to my old travel blog.)
We should praise improvement, not demand perfection.
Instead of (correctly) complaining that "correlation != causation" or "this won't work!!", could we use examples like these to promote science education?
Will banning paintball cause a decrease in school shootings? Did you know that's a scientifically tractable question?
When a tragedy like this occurs, the public demands a political reaction. More education on the only known way to get at causation - the scientific method - might cause people to demand political reactions that work.
Why do people think meetings must fill the allotted time? The start time is when you meet. The "end" time is the limit, after which you're free to have other engagements. But if you get everything accomplished early, why babble away for the remaining minutes?
You can't demand productivity. If you're not being productive anymore, meeting over.
Does anyone have meetings that actually operate like that? Do they work?
Eh? I have yet to hear a justification for agricultural subsidies that doesn't amount to: "because I'm from Iowa, and I like money." Why don't they do away with the H1B program and institute programmer subsidies instead? (Sarcasm).
Because you don't want to be wholly dependent on other countries for your food.
(By and large, though, I agree with you.)
TFA makes it sound like nobody thought storylines were important initially; but in the days of Donkey Kong, were non-superficial storylines even possible? With such repetitive gameplay, could good storyline exist?
Maybe the more creative out there could enlighten me. Can you make a good storyline for Donkey Kong?
(Oh no! Kong found more barrels! Again!)
"The system uses radar and infrared technology to 'pre-detect' a collision..."
Normal airbags inflate post-collision, but before you smack into the steering column. These new systems (1) detect imminent collisions and (2) react automatically. Am I stuck in 2004, or is that new?
and here's why:
Euclid's Elements of Geometry (~300BC) is the foundation of mathematical rigor.
He starts with a few definitions and axioms (like "two straight lines cannot enclose a space"), and uses them to prove some simple theorems. By constantly using prior theorems as building blocks, he's proving the Pythagorean Theorem by proposition 47. He proves the infinitude of primes a few chapters later. It's astounding how far he goes on such a modest foundation.
Definitions, axioms, theorems, lemmas -- this is where it all started.
The Pacific Ocean is older than the Atlantic.
The Atlantic formed when Pangaea split (~130 mya). The Pacific ocean is simply what's left from the ancient Panthalassic Ocean.
The Hawai'ian Islands are relatively new, though. They're the newest of a long string of (mostly submerged) peaks, formed as the Pacific plate drags its butt over a hotspot.
Take the public university I went to as an example:
21% of applicants accepted
75% graduate within 5 years
The bottleneck is getting in, not getting out.
Graduates live up to expectation mostly because the school filtered them on the way in, NOT because the school "added value" to the students.
Price is, sadly, a fantastic way to filter. Raise tuition, raise prestige.
So 1913 had 311 sunspot-free days, and in the 95 years since then, we've never had more than 266?
What happened in 1913?
You're comparing apples and oranges.
One option involves driving to the store, buying an entire album (name a song by Don McLean that isn't American Pie...), driving home, and ripping the disc onto computer. The other option is click click click.
Convenience is valuable.
"Discovering a law" ain't the same thing as "defining a term."
Kepler discovered the elliptic nature of the planets' orbits. The orbits were there all along, and Kepler was the first to notice their eccentricity.
Descartes defined the Cartesian coordinate system. The system did not exist until Descartes invented it as a useful heuristic.
Definitions tell us a lot about how our minds works. Discoveries tell us a lot about how the world works.
Exactly: MAD only works if people fear retaliation. That's one reason why belief in a glorious afterlife gives me the heebie jeebies! Mortality can lead quite directly to morality.
There are reasons I don't read Slashdot on 4/1. This is only one of them.
Something about your post is... impossible.
(You might be like to know this long-time reader just created an account to reply to your post. So... first psot!)
Reason 1: I saw a baby lamb on a farm and I just couldn't bear myself to kill and eat that!
Go away. This isn't a reason...
To be precise, that isn't a reason to preach vegetarianism. It's a perfectly fine reason to be a vegetarian. I don't eat raisins because I don't like the taste, but I wouldn't demand the same of you. (I'm just being precise, but I know the OP understands this perfectly. S/he says as much in reason 6.)
Reason 2: In this day and age it's unethical to eat meat when you can easily sustain yourself on plant sources.
This isn't a reason. The core argument here is "its unethical to eat meat".
You're right that "its unethical to eat meat" is at the core of this argument, but if you believe eating meat is unethical, then the ease with which you can avoid meat, I think, augments the culpability.
Reason 3: It's unethical to cause suffering. Thus it is unethical to eat meat.
Now we're getting somewhere!
I can't speak on behalf of all vegetarians, but you hit the nail on the head here. It IS unethical to cause suffering, and yes, we are getting somewhere :)
So if in the future we hooked up newly born cows to a Virtual Reality system ala. the matrix, where there was no suffering, disconnected cows would remain virtually in the world (no percieved death or loss) and execution was done painlessly and with the cow blissfuly unaware, it'd be okay to eat meat? Somehow I don't think a real vegan's going to say yes.
Well, I'm a real vegetarian (and a vegan in my own home), and I say yes.
Reason 4: It's unethical to kill.
I actually have no problem with killing qua killing.
Reason 5: Plants aren't on the same level as human beings.
Then why are cows? Rabbits? Sheep? Birds? Insects? Where is this magical, arbitrary line that says it's okay to eat a pumpkin but not to eat a fish?
There is no magical line. I'd say capacity for suffering goes something like:
Humans > cows > fish > bivalves > trees
This is why I will eat fish on rare occasion*, but I haven't had a hamburger in 14 years.
* - I know, I know, "then you're NOT A VEGETARIAN!" they always scream. I am a vegetarian, but I'm not a social ass. Sometimes they conflict. When my brother and his wife invited me to dinner at their place a few months ago, we compromised with salmon. And you know what happened a decade ago when a kind family invited me to their home in Israel and made me "vegetarian" soup that had bits of chicken in it? I ate it.
Reason 6: Meat is bad for you.
The perfect human diet would include meat. (Though much, much less than the average American eats.) Having said that, I think I'm very healthy, partly because I have to watch what I eat.
On that note, there's another couple things that's always bugged me. Why do some vegetarians eat fish and/or chicken but not duck or lamb, and I'm not talking about the dietary-consideration kind?
I hope this was answered already.
And why do some (ie. vegans) go as far as to not eat animal products like eggs, milk and the like, including from "ethical" sources?
Simple: the animals from which we get our eggs and milk lead wretched lives, and we don't want to support the institutionalization of cruelty to animals.
One last thing I should mention for folks to keep in mind:
Being a vegetarian is NOT 100% consistent, and we know it.
It's not just that I eat fish on occasion. I also can't give a great reason for refusing to