Interesting to think of these timelines, regarding common perception. Cleopatra lived and died closer in time to the era of Moon landings than she did to the building of the great pyramid at Giza.
Technologically that's not really the case. I think that may be the cause of this perception.
I don't believe there is any generally agreed-upon definition of what actually constitutes a "study", so: caveat lector. (Of course the media just want your attention, so they'll usually publish this kind of crap without scrutiny, but I digress...)
There are no general (legal) standards for what consistutes a "study". A study can mean anything from "we gave people carefully worded questionnaires designed to weed out intentional/unintentional bias for every week over several years" to "I thought about it for 5 minutes."
So, that's why you should never just trust anyone backing up their claims with "a study".
Jenny McCarthy's son is an anecdote. (Obviously not in human terms or anything, but in terms of "evidential quality" if you like.)
Even if you accept the premise that her son is actually better from whatever JM is doing/not doing (rather than incorrect/biased perception by JM, placebo effect, whatnot), a single data point is not very convincing in statistical terms.
That's why people who care about efficacy, safety, etc. carry out double-blind controlled trials. Once JM does that she can start talking about how "treatment X" helps against "malady Y". Until then she can fuck off.
Just like all the religious folks are doing. Oh wait...
Humility is exactly what scientists are practising: If you don't know the answer to some question, ask "why?" rather than pointing to some empty "explanation" that doesn't actually explain anything (i.e. "god").
Besides, to paraphrase somebody: Solopsism can be fun, but it's hard to keep it up as a serious occupation.
I really don't get it. What's supposed to be funny about it?
Most (all?) jokes are based on setting up a premise and then surprising the reader/listener by somehow violating that premise. What the premise and the surprise supposed to be with the "PMITA prison" and rape "jokes"?
Additionally, there's the issue that people who are in extreme pain/discomfort/etc. are not exactly necessarily able to evaluate the evidence and the claims of the people who are peddling $WONDER_PILL objectively -- it's hard enough for people who aren't in distress to do that with all the biased and outright misinformation that's put out there by companies with varying interests. It's fairly typical that drug company that wants to sell $WONDER_PILL heavily promotes any and all studies(*)/trials in their favor while downplaying studies/trials that are not in their favor. That's your "market forces" at work, right there. If you are interested in a pretty good review of this, I can recommend the short(!) book "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre. It's simple, clear and the point on this issue.
(*) Oh, and, btw, "studies" can mean anything from "double-blind randomized trials" to "I sat and thought about it for 5 minutes this morning".
Have you reported this as a bug? It certainly sounds like one.
Unfortunately, very few developers actually test their stuff with ~ on NFS. Firefox is another program which fails hideously with ~ on NFS -- the bookmark toolbar would fail to load, misc. random errors upon loading pages, etc. (I think it was because of Sqlite, but I'm not sure.).
What with XDG (I think) now also encouraging the use of ~/.local, I fear it's only got to get worse.:(
I ended up just having a truly local ~ and just rsyncing it to the server every night for backup. (But I don't actually have to access my ~ from mulitple locations, so YMMV.)
So what you're saying is that those people who have faith would go around murdering their neighbors, raping and pillaging, etc. if they didn't have "faith"?
That's complete bollocks and you know it.
Good people are good and bad people are bad. Religion is a system of control which can be (and has been) leveraged for both good and bad.
Like never ahving observed inorganic chemical spotaneously form anything definable as "life"?
Evolution has nothing to say on how life originated. It does say that every known living organism has a single-celled common anscestor.
Or never having observed matter coming from nothing.
... nor does evolution have anything to say about that. For a scientific approach to this subject you might try Cosmology.
I'm not trying to troll here. Promise
... and yet you've trotted out all the usual canards which the Creationists/ID folks like to trot out of confuse the uneducated. I guess their campaign of bullshit must be working then. Depressing.
Macroevolution = Lots of microevolution over time. And there's mountains (almost literally) of evidence for species "branching" -- People keep finding missing links (note: plural) all over the place. Tiktaalik is a recent example. Go read "Your Inner Fish" (Neil Shubin) or "The Greatest Show On Earth" (Dawkins) if you want a lengthy discussion of just how good the evidence is.
Ruling an idea out because it sounds crazy is crazy. Quantum mechanics is the craziest thing humans have come up with, well, outside of Steve Ballmer.
QM may seem "crazy", but it's not like someone just said, "Look, I've got this crazy idea that just might work...". There were lots of experimental results that showed that reality actually is crazy (in the sense of QM) before physicists began to formulate and later accept QM. Also, QM didn't just "pop out of nothing", it coalesced from lots of different ideas that were around at the time. (Not that it isn't a great achievement.)
Crazy ideas are a dime a dozen, so rejecting crazy-sounding ideas is the rational thing to do... unless someone can back it up with the necessary amount of evidence. The necessary amount of evidence scales according the perceived craziness of the idea.
Slashdot Mirror
A beautiful response... though you should perhaps have added "You ignorant dick." at the end.
What a huge surprise.
... as Enterprise Kissing ('twould be RESTful, I'm sure), you'd be receiving one of those from me right now.) In lieu of that... Kudos!
Clearly this was faked by our martian overlords. Whom I welcome, by the way.
Technologically that's not really the case. I think that may be the cause of this perception.
A patrician is:
Vetinari
Bitch.
The OS is privileged, the browser is not.
You really haven't thought this through, have you?
I love how the only content you can actually see on the MSN page is "meet sexy singles".
I don't believe there is any generally agreed-upon definition of what actually constitutes a "study", so: caveat lector. (Of course the media just want your attention, so they'll usually publish this kind of crap without scrutiny, but I digress...)
There are no general (legal) standards for what consistutes a "study". A study can mean anything from "we gave people carefully worded questionnaires designed to weed out intentional/unintentional bias for every week over several years" to "I thought about it for 5 minutes."
So, that's why you should never just trust anyone backing up their claims with "a study".
Jenny McCarthy's son is an anecdote. (Obviously not in human terms or anything, but in terms of "evidential quality" if you like.)
Even if you accept the premise that her son is actually better from whatever JM is doing/not doing (rather than incorrect/biased perception by JM, placebo effect, whatnot), a single data point is not very convincing in statistical terms.
That's why people who care about efficacy, safety, etc. carry out double-blind controlled trials. Once JM does that she can start talking about how "treatment X" helps against "malady Y". Until then she can fuck off.
Just like all the religious folks are doing. Oh wait...
Humility is exactly what scientists are practising: If you don't know the answer to some question, ask "why?" rather than pointing to some empty "explanation" that doesn't actually explain anything (i.e. "god").
Besides, to paraphrase somebody: Solopsism can be fun, but it's hard to keep it up as a serious occupation.
Intent. The law cares about intent (usually).
I recommend the movie/documentary "Wisconsin Death Trip" if you want to see just how little has changed in 100+ years.
The reason he got into so much trouble is simple: The libel laws in the UK are batshit insane.
I really don't get it. What's supposed to be funny about it?
Most (all?) jokes are based on setting up a premise and then surprising the reader/listener by somehow violating that premise. What the premise and the surprise supposed to be with the "PMITA prison" and rape "jokes"?
Additionally, there's the issue that people who are in extreme pain/discomfort/etc. are not exactly necessarily able to evaluate the evidence and the claims of the people who are peddling $WONDER_PILL objectively -- it's hard enough for people who aren't in distress to do that with all the biased and outright misinformation that's put out there by companies with varying interests. It's fairly typical that drug company that wants to sell $WONDER_PILL heavily promotes any and all studies(*)/trials in their favor while downplaying studies/trials that are not in their favor. That's your "market forces" at work, right there. If you are interested in a pretty good review of this, I can recommend the short(!) book "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre. It's simple, clear and the point on this issue.
(*) Oh, and, btw, "studies" can mean anything from "double-blind randomized trials" to "I sat and thought about it for 5 minutes this morning".
It stands for PeDoFile.
Have you reported this as a bug? It certainly sounds like one.
Unfortunately, very few developers actually test their stuff with ~ on NFS. Firefox is another program which fails hideously with ~ on NFS -- the bookmark toolbar would fail to load, misc. random errors upon loading pages, etc. (I think it was because of Sqlite, but I'm not sure.).
What with XDG (I think) now also encouraging the use of ~/.local, I fear it's only got to get worse. :(
I ended up just having a truly local ~ and just rsyncing it to the server every night for backup. (But I don't actually have to access my ~ from mulitple locations, so YMMV.)
So what you're saying is that those people who have faith would go around murdering their neighbors, raping and pillaging, etc. if they didn't have "faith"?
That's complete bollocks and you know it.
Good people are good and bad people are bad. Religion is a system of control which can be (and has been) leveraged for both good and bad.
- Dinosaur fossils? God put those there to test our faith.
- I think God put you here to test my faith, Dude.
Evolution has nothing to say on how life originated. It does say that every known living organism has a single-celled common anscestor.
Macroevolution = Lots of microevolution over time. And there's mountains (almost literally) of evidence for species "branching" -- People keep finding missing links (note: plural) all over the place. Tiktaalik is a recent example. Go read "Your Inner Fish" (Neil Shubin) or "The Greatest Show On Earth" (Dawkins) if you want a lengthy discussion of just how good the evidence is.
QM may seem "crazy", but it's not like someone just said, "Look, I've got this crazy idea that just might work...". There were lots of experimental results that showed that reality actually is crazy (in the sense of QM) before physicists began to formulate and later accept QM. Also, QM didn't just "pop out of nothing", it coalesced from lots of different ideas that were around at the time. (Not that it isn't a great achievement.)
Crazy ideas are a dime a dozen, so rejecting crazy-sounding ideas is the rational thing to do... unless someone can back it up with the necessary amount of evidence. The necessary amount of evidence scales according the perceived craziness of the idea.
Oh, please.
Type systems eliminate whole classes of errors. What does your unit test do? It eliminates one error. Big fuckin' whoop.