It was very nice. The Balylonian exile was certainly the Genesis of modern monotheistic thought in the Judeo/Christian/Islamic traditions.
I do agree that Slashdot is a lousy place to engage in religious debate, although I'd guess the two of us alone could manage religious discussion quite nicely.
As it happens I'm an atheist, and always have been, but I can discuss religious matters without necessarily getting all bent out of shape about it, and the study of religion is the study of human thought. You cannot seperate the two.
In that light I'll reiterate my point though, given that there is a God he is what he is, not what humans wish to concieve him to be.
Just as the American president is who he is, and not as people may, or may not, wish to concieve him.
Well, there is the flip side to that question. What on earth makes you think that a creator and superior being can't itself be perfectly down with anger, hate, revenge, ignorance, etc?
People breed dogs just to fight them.
The concept of superiority does not, in itself, imply perfection, and the very concept of perfection is a bit of a wishy-washy one that needs deep thought. The "perfect" natural balance of the earth's ecosystem depends a good deal on large amounts of hate (or at least antipathy leading to mass violence) and ingnorance (see the behavior of ants alone). This would tend to support the OT concepts of a "perfect" God.
The modern idea of the all loving God, indeed the very idea that being all loving is a sign of perfection, is fairly modern and is derived from certain socio-political needs of The Church, and not anything inherent in the necessary atttributes of God.
I'd go so far as to suggest that man placing demands on what God must or must not be is a rather serious taking of the Lord's name in vain.
Ya ha we. I am what I am, and that's all that I am. Just go tell them, "I am!."
At first glance one might suspect that you'd have better luck seeing the little people in the pubs. Little do you suspect that the really, really good shit is hidden. ..out in the bogs, and only the little people go there. The high mucky mucks don't like to get their wellies all mucky.
Of course your odds of simply seeing petite women is still rather higher in the pubs, so you do have that going for you. Some of them might even be little people, but then slumming's ok, so long as she knows how to fill out an Aran sweater.
Would you believe three skinny little pamphlets? Mine are dated 1974. Hey! That would be thirty years ago. Go figure. Jesus, it's been a long time. The box is in very "used" condition, but the books are nearly mint, despite being well used. I take care of books. Even pamphlets. I gave up on AD&D awhile ago and went back to the orginal rules. Less sophisticated perhaps, but easy to remember, play, and riff off of. To me riffing off the rules is the real essence of the game.
And of course before D&D there was one skinny little book called Chainmail, which I still use for medieval style "Little Wars" (which book, by H.G. Wells, I also have, and used to play by, just for the hoot of using cannon instead of dice. I'm not sure I even have the cannon anymore. I'll have to go dig through some trunks or something, but I'm pretty sure they went the way of all pot metal and tin)from time to time.
I wish Britains Ltd. still made those fantastic plastic knights with all the little removable plastic bits that you could choke on so now they're considered the work of the devil and shit. I'd love a trunkful of those things.
In the case of the machinery of warfare the federal government often takes the place of the Lord, as they stand in much the same relationship to one another.
The government often employs its own patent systems to protect the ideas embodied in its war machines, since those 'secrets' never remain secret very long after a device is actually produced.
Perhaps that's an underlying reason why governments have been so willing to extend the protections of patents beyond all normal reason.
In fact, my experience is that only another genius would recognize that the work of a genius could have flaws that require correcting.
Most people are sheep and blindly follow "the directions," even when those directions result in nonfunctioning items. They blame the nonfunctionality on themselves, rather than on the design.
Hence the notations you'll find on many processed food products these days, "You'll find that this might taste good with a little cheese on it. Or maybe some salt." They have to be told to "think outside the box," as it were. Many people get all weird about the idea of even modifying a published recipe. The published version is the "correct" version in their minds. Perhaps this phemonenon is a good part of why some people get all weird about the idea of open source software. They need to feel that out there, somewhere, is a definatively "correct" version, handed down from the mountain engraved on stone tablets by some programing god or other.
Most people who play classical music play it as if they were some sort of flawed mechanism in a player piano whose function is to reproduce the markings on the paper as closely, and mechanically, as possible.
The musical genius recognizes that the markings on the paper are one genius talking to another genius, saying, "Hey, look at this idea," and interprets the music.
Particularly smart people before the advent of a patent system.
Once upon a time, in a New World far, far away from it's cultural origins, there arose a new nation, founded by men who thought very hard about what they were doing and, for the most part, got things pretty right (there are always men who think only of their own benefit who muck up the system).
Thomas Jefferson got the patent system pretty right, and while things were under his direct control the system worked very well and Leonardo (had he come to America) would have felt free to publish and comment without fear, and the public would not have had to wait hundreds of years for his ideas to become freely available to them. This system actually stood as a model for the world for 100 years.
But extraordinary men are always replaced by lesser men.
Patents are not the problem. Patents are the solution to a problem that most people have forgotten existed. Except, perhaps, those trying to create corporeal versions of Leonardo's drawings.
The problem is protectionism bolstered by greed. Congress, of course, is supposed to represent the people in creating systems that allow the people to engage in profit making enterprises without abrogating the rights of the people.
But congress, for the most part, is made up of these lesser men, driven by protectionism and greed.
"What if you were an idiot? And what if you were a member of congress? But I repeat myself." --Mark Twain.
I thought we'd been correcting this notion for long enough now for most people to have gotten the hang of it. Maybe we need a FAQ or something.
You are, as the others have already pointed out, thinking of trademarks. As I have pointed out on numerous occasions trademarks, in a sense, do not actually belong to the party holding the mark. The party has certain exclusive rights to use the mark, but public perception is the touchstone. If the public does not perceive the mark as the exclusive signifier of a company/product/person/whatever, the company actually loses its exclusive rights to it. Hence the falling into the public domain of many now generic terms that had their genesis as tradenames, and hence the legal need to defend the mark.
But a patent is property (albiet for a limited duration), much like your house or car. Public perception has nothing to do with your ownership of it. You have title. Thus there is no more need (but no less need either) to defend a patent than there is need to defend your lawn from being walked across. You don't lose title to your property just because some kid chased his ball across your yard.
Yes, there are exceptions that fall into the "no less need" catagory. If you allow a kid to freely walk across your yard every day for years and years and years he may actually aquire certain rights to continue doing so even over your objections. Especially if certain business arangements depend upon his so doing (like to deliver papers or something).
But note that doesn't mean you have lost title to your property and that you can't prevent people other than that kid from cutting across the back lot. Or even in those cases where a public easment is created you can't stop them from further trespass onto your property.
Note that this process requires the willful aquiesence of the title holder. He has to at least tacitly give permission for the violation to occur for any rights to be lost, and over an extended period of time.
So, you can't say to someone, "Yeah, sure, whatever, go ahead and use my patent," suddenly realize ten years later that that someone has built up a lucrative business around it, and then demand compensation for its use. You already gave them free rights.
But that doesn't stop you from going after anyone else who has been infringing upon your rights. Those rights are still yours. You own them. They have not fallen into the public domain.
Japanese is a highly phonetic ( and also highly inflected) language. They have had their own phoentic alpabet for centuries. There is particular resourcfulness in typing this alphabet.
The problem comes in two forms. The first of which is an early resistence by the intelligensia to actually use the Japanese alphabet (which was the invention of mere women). Chinese was the language of culture, and most Japanese works written before and around the time of the invention of the Japanese phonetic alphabet were not written in Japanese using the Chinese Kanji, they were actually written in classical Chinese (sometimes with a certain amount of skill, but often rather crudely). Much as the learned of Europe wrote in Latin, even though Latin was not their native tongue.
With this dissimilarity, many of these people had a language that was either descended from or a close relative of Latin. Chinese and Japanese have no common base. They are very, very dissimilar.
And just as these European scholars, when they did write in their native tongue they couldn't help themselves from sprinkling it liberally with Chinese.
And so, despite their being a native alphabet, the Chinese Kanji became imbedded in the native style of writing.
No we come to the second issue. Why don't they just, in modern times, simply drop the use of Kanji and write in Japanese? Because Japanese is a highly polyglot language, just like English. It has adopted into itself many foreign words, English, Spanish, Dutch, Portugese (the "Japanese" word for the kimono's (actually a western word in a sense, although composed of a Japanese phrase)undergarment, "Juban," is the Portugese word for "undershirt," gibao,( And the pattern of the garment itself is transformed from its traditional Japanese form into the European form)), and, of course. . . Chinese.
But, as I've already pointed, out Chinese and Japanese have no relation, in particular Chinese is not phonetic, and thus there is no way to spell these Chinese words in the Japanese phonetic alphabet. So they need to use Kanji.
Had the Japanese encountered the Spanish before the Chinese things would have turned out rather differently, as the Latin alphabet is not only a very good fit with the Japanese language, it fits Japanese a bit better than it does the Germanically derived English.
Actually it's antielitism. It's the poet laureate who is practicing elitism. It's a government title that is historically assigned to the sort of mediocre hack that governments find attractive. The attitude isn't even modern, it goes back thousands of years. Yes, I'm aware that antielitism can form it's peculiar elitist quality.
I was lucky enough to not attend high school, and so I got to appreciate poetry on my own. When I was eleven my mother was renting an apartment to an English professor and one day I wandered down the stairs, knocked on her door, and asked if she had a copy of the Iliad I could borrow. She subsequently went to my mother and said something along the lines of, "Who is this kid of yours? I can't force my college students to read the Iliad."
I'm afraid I rather agree with your assesment of the modern class of "poet" though. Shelly seems to have set the modern model for poet as "artiste" and Whitman seems to set the model for there being no "rules." Woody Guthrie once made a marginal note in his notebook warning himself to avoid "the swimmy waters of free verse."
Nothing wrong with free verse, per se, but it takes a master like Whitman to pull it off with success. When you break the "rules" you really have to know what the hell you're doing. Just because you've managed to scribble a few words on paper doesn't make it poetry, no matter how profound you think it is. (Hence the observation that there ought to be a law that poets not be allowed to perform their own works. At least one other person should be shown to appreciate it enough to perform it).
I'd love to see a return of the popularity of metrical verse. One has to play with a net, but still has broad range of expression. See any soliloquy in Shakespeare.
Well, you understand, don't you, that Poet Laureate is a position that most poets hold in derision? So much so that a while ago California was begging for applicants and couldn't find one.
The title is bestowed as a curse, not a blessing, like a white elephant.
Even given that, Malvina was a lyricist, not a poet, with a special knack for humorous songs, and you really have to hear that one performed. It's quite funny, but just doesn't come across the same in print.
Given even that she could turn a phrase or two. If you want to hear her a bit more poetically inclined check out "Look What They've Done to the Rain." An anti-nuclear testing song that never once mentions nuclear testing or being anti to it.
"Just a little boy, standing in the rain
The gentle rain that falls for years."
That song, unlike "We Don't Need the Men," rhymes though, which as I understand it is not "the in thing" in poetry at the moment.
See Robert Frost's response to the same criticism.
We don't need the men. We don't need to have 'em 'round, except for now and then. They can come to see us, When we need to move the piano, Otherwise they can stay at home and holler at the Yankees.
We don't care about them. We can do without them. They'll look cute in a bathing suit on a billboard in Madagascar
-Malvina Reynolds (who also authored "Little Boxes")
I limited myself to an exception that Newton himself recognized.
Laws are made to be broken.
Which is why "Theory" is now the prefered term for mathmatical models that once upon a time might have been refered to as laws. Experience has driven home to us the point that the "exceptions" are not to be glossed over.
The SLoT seems to hanging tough though, but time will tell. (Had to slip in a little physics joke there).
It is to be regretted that in casual English usage "Theory" is taken to mean something akin to "guess," as opposed to "A model that conforms to the known facts so well that it may even be used to learn confirmable facts that were hitherto unsuspected."
It leads Presidents and such to make really stupid remarks. Not to mention laws.
Who to this day, decades after first encountering it, still finds it a stunningly beautiful theoretical demonstration that gasses must be composed of small particles that obey the laws of motion.
. ..if someone does make such an mistake, he deserves a STFU, as not to influence others with his uninformed opinion.
If someone makes a mistake he deserves to be corrected. As per this very example.
And as per the rules of Slashdot not even the GNAA people deserve to be told to STFU. They deserve to be modded to oblivion and otherwise ignored.
To believe that saying STFU is an argument that counters an uninformed opinion is ignorant. Therefore I have countered it with a more informed and sophisticated one.
That's ok, we're all ignorant of something, and seeing as you're an economist you aren't used to the rules of reasoning, discussion and debate. That doens't mean you can't learn them and relieve yourself of such ignorance though.
Here's a quicky course.
All idea may be expressed.
Not all ideas are equal. Some of them are downright stupid.
It's ok to call a stupid idea stupid and say why.
It is not ok to tell a person he is stupid. Attack the idea, not the person.
Telling someone to STFU violates the first and last rule here expressed.
Now you know. Now we need not give further thought to the idea that just because you're an economist you don't know the basic rules.
As the Ideal Gas Law may be derived from the Kinetic Theory of Gasses. Note that it was the empirical observations that leant credence to the Theory. It conformed to them.
Empirical evidence is always the touchstone.
Note that the very link you provide states that Stefan derived his law experimentally a few years before Boltzman derived it theoretically.
Not that it really matters much. The key point is that it wouldn't have been considered a law until it had been derived empirically.
Then there's Einstein's Law of Absolutes, which is destined to remain the Special Theory of Relativity, even though it has been empirically verfied and show to hold up as well, or better, than the classical "laws" (for instance it rendered Newton's Law of Gravity into a mere special case of itself), but that has more to do with a shift in scientific philosophy in the 20th century. We don't actually hold much truck with laws any more.
We have mathmatical models.
Of course there are those that hold that mathmatics is the only reality.
I have been transfering data at the known limit for nearly my entire life life. It's called "c" for short.
Anyone who can work the on/off switch of a flashlight can do it.
I believe that it is generally acknowledged that this is a true limit that no amount of thinking may resolve (There may be those who disagree, but it is up to them to demonstrate that such is even possible).
I might point out that all natural laws are derived strictly through empirical observation. In fact, that's the very definition of such a law.
Moore's Law is what an engineer would call a "rule of thumb." Something which is understood not to be a law, but within certain constraints can be treated as if it were. This observation is included in the full version of Moore's Law, as actually written by Moore himself.
Like Newton's Law of Gravity, which can be applied as if it were law, so long as you are not Mercury, as was in noted by Newton himself in his original statement of his law.
The writers of laws are not to be held accountable for the misinterpretations of others.
None of this has much of anything to do with the article either (nor does the heading under which the story appears, which is what the OP was responding to, which is perfectly valid). However, I do not believe STFU is an argument, so I will not apply it to myself, or you for that matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Hope you liked my little dissertation.
It was very nice. The Balylonian exile was certainly the Genesis of modern monotheistic thought in the Judeo/Christian/Islamic traditions.
I do agree that Slashdot is a lousy place to engage in religious debate, although I'd guess the two of us alone could manage religious discussion quite nicely.
As it happens I'm an atheist, and always have been, but I can discuss religious matters without necessarily getting all bent out of shape about it, and the study of religion is the study of human thought. You cannot seperate the two.
In that light I'll reiterate my point though, given that there is a God he is what he is, not what humans wish to concieve him to be.
Just as the American president is who he is, and not as people may, or may not, wish to concieve him.
KFG
Exactly. I've always asked people why they're so all fired up to find Noah's Ark.
Wouldn't it be much easier to just go find Jerusalem?
The finds are exactly equal in their significance.
KFG
Well, there is the flip side to that question. What on earth makes you think that a creator and superior being can't itself be perfectly down with anger, hate, revenge, ignorance, etc?
People breed dogs just to fight them.
The concept of superiority does not, in itself, imply perfection, and the very concept of perfection is a bit of a wishy-washy one that needs deep thought. The "perfect" natural balance of the earth's ecosystem depends a good deal on large amounts of hate (or at least antipathy leading to mass violence) and ingnorance (see the behavior of ants alone). This would tend to support the OT concepts of a "perfect" God.
The modern idea of the all loving God, indeed the very idea that being all loving is a sign of perfection, is fairly modern and is derived from certain socio-political needs of The Church, and not anything inherent in the necessary atttributes of God.
I'd go so far as to suggest that man placing demands on what God must or must not be is a rather serious taking of the Lord's name in vain.
Ya ha we. I am what I am, and that's all that I am. Just go tell them, "I am!."
KFG
At first glance one might suspect that you'd have better luck seeing the little people in the pubs. Little do you suspect that the really, really good shit is hidden. . .out in the bogs, and only the little people go there. The high mucky mucks don't like to get their wellies all mucky.
Of course your odds of simply seeing petite women is still rather higher in the pubs, so you do have that going for you. Some of them might even be little people, but then slumming's ok, so long as she knows how to fill out an Aran sweater.
KFG
Hey, it's a very nice basement over 100 years old and made of irregularly sized hand hewn stone, like a castle, or. . . a dungeon.
The giant rats seem to scare the piss out of the meter man though. Just wait until he goes up a couple of levels and gets to meet the balrog.
KFG
Would you believe three skinny little pamphlets? Mine are dated 1974. Hey! That would be thirty years ago. Go figure. Jesus, it's been a long time. The box is in very "used" condition, but the books are nearly mint, despite being well used. I take care of books. Even pamphlets. I gave up on AD&D awhile ago and went back to the orginal rules. Less sophisticated perhaps, but easy to remember, play, and riff off of. To me riffing off the rules is the real essence of the game.
And of course before D&D there was one skinny little book called Chainmail, which I still use for medieval style "Little Wars" (which book, by H.G. Wells, I also have, and used to play by, just for the hoot of using cannon instead of dice. I'm not sure I even have the cannon anymore. I'll have to go dig through some trunks or something, but I'm pretty sure they went the way of all pot metal and tin)from time to time.
I wish Britains Ltd. still made those fantastic plastic knights with all the little removable plastic bits that you could choke on so now they're considered the work of the devil and shit. I'd love a trunkful of those things.
KFG
Wife is the modern term for patron.
Or sometimes "mother," should her basement prove to be suitable.
KFG
And the modern term for "patron" is "employer."
In the case of the machinery of warfare the federal government often takes the place of the Lord, as they stand in much the same relationship to one another.
The government often employs its own patent systems to protect the ideas embodied in its war machines, since those 'secrets' never remain secret very long after a device is actually produced.
Perhaps that's an underlying reason why governments have been so willing to extend the protections of patents beyond all normal reason.
KFG
In fact, my experience is that only another genius would recognize that the work of a genius could have flaws that require correcting.
Most people are sheep and blindly follow "the directions," even when those directions result in nonfunctioning items. They blame the nonfunctionality on themselves, rather than on the design.
Hence the notations you'll find on many processed food products these days, "You'll find that this might taste good with a little cheese on it. Or maybe some salt." They have to be told to "think outside the box," as it were. Many people get all weird about the idea of even modifying a published recipe. The published version is the "correct" version in their minds. Perhaps this phemonenon is a good part of why some people get all weird about the idea of open source software. They need to feel that out there, somewhere, is a definatively "correct" version, handed down from the mountain engraved on stone tablets by some programing god or other.
Most people who play classical music play it as if they were some sort of flawed mechanism in a player piano whose function is to reproduce the markings on the paper as closely, and mechanically, as possible.
The musical genius recognizes that the markings on the paper are one genius talking to another genius, saying, "Hey, look at this idea," and interprets the music.
KFG
Particularly smart people before the advent of a patent system.
Once upon a time, in a New World far, far away from it's cultural origins, there arose a new nation, founded by men who thought very hard about what they were doing and, for the most part, got things pretty right (there are always men who think only of their own benefit who muck up the system).
Thomas Jefferson got the patent system pretty right, and while things were under his direct control the system worked very well and Leonardo (had he come to America) would have felt free to publish and comment without fear, and the public would not have had to wait hundreds of years for his ideas to become freely available to them. This system actually stood as a model for the world for 100 years.
But extraordinary men are always replaced by lesser men.
Patents are not the problem. Patents are the solution to a problem that most people have forgotten existed. Except, perhaps, those trying to create corporeal versions of Leonardo's drawings.
The problem is protectionism bolstered by greed. Congress, of course, is supposed to represent the people in creating systems that allow the people to engage in profit making enterprises without abrogating the rights of the people.
But congress, for the most part, is made up of these lesser men, driven by protectionism and greed.
"What if you were an idiot? And what if you were a member of congress? But I repeat myself." --Mark Twain.
KFG
. . .unless the US is planning to have many planes airborne, around the clock, which does seem somewhat wasteful.
And something we have habitually done. Look into the Strategic Air Command, or just watch Dr. Strangelove.
KFG
Ahhhhhh, here we go again. :)
I thought we'd been correcting this notion for long enough now for most people to have gotten the hang of it. Maybe we need a FAQ or something.
You are, as the others have already pointed out, thinking of trademarks. As I have pointed out on numerous occasions trademarks, in a sense, do not actually belong to the party holding the mark. The party has certain exclusive rights to use the mark, but public perception is the touchstone. If the public does not perceive the mark as the exclusive signifier of a company/product/person/whatever, the company actually loses its exclusive rights to it. Hence the falling into the public domain of many now generic terms that had their genesis as tradenames, and hence the legal need to defend the mark.
But a patent is property (albiet for a limited duration), much like your house or car. Public perception has nothing to do with your ownership of it. You have title. Thus there is no more need (but no less need either) to defend a patent than there is need to defend your lawn from being walked across. You don't lose title to your property just because some kid chased his ball across your yard.
Yes, there are exceptions that fall into the "no less need" catagory. If you allow a kid to freely walk across your yard every day for years and years and years he may actually aquire certain rights to continue doing so even over your objections. Especially if certain business arangements depend upon his so doing (like to deliver papers or something).
But note that doesn't mean you have lost title to your property and that you can't prevent people other than that kid from cutting across the back lot. Or even in those cases where a public easment is created you can't stop them from further trespass onto your property.
Note that this process requires the willful aquiesence of the title holder. He has to at least tacitly give permission for the violation to occur for any rights to be lost, and over an extended period of time.
So, you can't say to someone, "Yeah, sure, whatever, go ahead and use my patent," suddenly realize ten years later that that someone has built up a lucrative business around it, and then demand compensation for its use. You already gave them free rights.
But that doesn't stop you from going after anyone else who has been infringing upon your rights. Those rights are still yours. You own them. They have not fallen into the public domain.
KFG
Japanese is a highly phonetic ( and also highly inflected) language. They have had their own phoentic alpabet for centuries. There is particular resourcfulness in typing this alphabet.
The problem comes in two forms. The first of which is an early resistence by the intelligensia to actually use the Japanese alphabet (which was the invention of mere women). Chinese was the language of culture, and most Japanese works written before and around the time of the invention of the Japanese phonetic alphabet were not written in Japanese using the Chinese Kanji, they were actually written in classical Chinese (sometimes with a certain amount of skill, but often rather crudely). Much as the learned of Europe wrote in Latin, even though Latin was not their native tongue.
With this dissimilarity, many of these people had a language that was either descended from or a close relative of Latin. Chinese and Japanese have no common base. They are very, very dissimilar.
And just as these European scholars, when they did write in their native tongue they couldn't help themselves from sprinkling it liberally with Chinese.
And so, despite their being a native alphabet, the Chinese Kanji became imbedded in the native style of writing.
No we come to the second issue. Why don't they just, in modern times, simply drop the use of Kanji and write in Japanese? Because Japanese is a highly polyglot language, just like English. It has adopted into itself many foreign words, English, Spanish, Dutch, Portugese (the "Japanese" word for the kimono's (actually a western word in a sense, although composed of a Japanese phrase)undergarment, "Juban," is the Portugese word for "undershirt," gibao,( And the pattern of the garment itself is transformed from its traditional Japanese form into the European form)), and, of course. . . Chinese.
But, as I've already pointed, out Chinese and Japanese have no relation, in particular Chinese is not phonetic, and thus there is no way to spell these Chinese words in the Japanese phonetic alphabet. So they need to use Kanji.
Had the Japanese encountered the Spanish before the Chinese things would have turned out rather differently, as the Latin alphabet is not only a very good fit with the Japanese language, it fits Japanese a bit better than it does the Germanically derived English.
KFG
In case you haven't noticed I have something of a knack for twisting perspective, and rather enjoy using it.
KFG
Actually it's antielitism. It's the poet laureate who is practicing elitism. It's a government title that is historically assigned to the sort of mediocre hack that governments find attractive. The attitude isn't even modern, it goes back thousands of years. Yes, I'm aware that antielitism can form it's peculiar elitist quality.
I was lucky enough to not attend high school, and so I got to appreciate poetry on my own. When I was eleven my mother was renting an apartment to an English professor and one day I wandered down the stairs, knocked on her door, and asked if she had a copy of the Iliad I could borrow. She subsequently went to my mother and said something along the lines of, "Who is this kid of yours? I can't force my college students to read the Iliad."
I'm afraid I rather agree with your assesment of the modern class of "poet" though. Shelly seems to have set the modern model for poet as "artiste" and Whitman seems to set the model for there being no "rules." Woody Guthrie once made a marginal note in his notebook warning himself to avoid "the swimmy waters of free verse."
Nothing wrong with free verse, per se, but it takes a master like Whitman to pull it off with success. When you break the "rules" you really have to know what the hell you're doing. Just because you've managed to scribble a few words on paper doesn't make it poetry, no matter how profound you think it is. (Hence the observation that there ought to be a law that poets not be allowed to perform their own works. At least one other person should be shown to appreciate it enough to perform it).
I'd love to see a return of the popularity of metrical verse. One has to play with a net, but still has broad range of expression. See any soliloquy in Shakespeare.
KFG
That should be, "What Have They Done to the Rain?"
I'm phase shifting and my brain is fuzzy. Time to go to bed.
KFG
Well, you understand, don't you, that Poet Laureate is a position that most poets hold in derision? So much so that a while ago California was begging for applicants and couldn't find one.
The title is bestowed as a curse, not a blessing, like a white elephant.
Even given that, Malvina was a lyricist, not a poet, with a special knack for humorous songs, and you really have to hear that one performed. It's quite funny, but just doesn't come across the same in print.
Given even that she could turn a phrase or two. If you want to hear her a bit more poetically inclined check out "Look What They've Done to the Rain." An anti-nuclear testing song that never once mentions nuclear testing or being anti to it.
"Just a little boy, standing in the rain
The gentle rain that falls for years."
That song, unlike "We Don't Need the Men," rhymes though, which as I understand it is not "the in thing" in poetry at the moment.
See Robert Frost's response to the same criticism.
KFG
. . .you know what happens next.
Hiding teenage girls in my house?
KFG
We don't need the men.
We don't need to have 'em 'round,
except for now and then.
They can come to see us,
When we need to move the piano,
Otherwise they can stay at home
and holler at the Yankees.
We don't care about them.
We can do without them.
They'll look cute in a bathing suit
on a billboard in Madagascar
-Malvina Reynolds (who also authored "Little Boxes")
I limited myself to an exception that Newton himself recognized.
Laws are made to be broken.
Which is why "Theory" is now the prefered term for mathmatical models that once upon a time might have been refered to as laws. Experience has driven home to us the point that the "exceptions" are not to be glossed over.
The SLoT seems to hanging tough though, but time will tell. (Had to slip in a little physics joke there).
It is to be regretted that in casual English usage "Theory" is taken to mean something akin to "guess," as opposed to "A model that conforms to the known facts so well that it may even be used to learn confirmable facts that were hitherto unsuspected."
It leads Presidents and such to make really stupid remarks. Not to mention laws.
KFG
. . .the parent.
Who to this day, decades after first encountering it, still finds it a stunningly beautiful theoretical demonstration that gasses must be composed of small particles that obey the laws of motion.
KFG
. . .if someone does make such an mistake, he deserves a STFU, as not to influence others with his uninformed opinion.
If someone makes a mistake he deserves to be corrected. As per this very example.
And as per the rules of Slashdot not even the GNAA people deserve to be told to STFU. They deserve to be modded to oblivion and otherwise ignored.
To believe that saying STFU is an argument that counters an uninformed opinion is ignorant. Therefore I have countered it with a more informed and sophisticated one.
That's ok, we're all ignorant of something, and seeing as you're an economist you aren't used to the rules of reasoning, discussion and debate. That doens't mean you can't learn them and relieve yourself of such ignorance though.
Here's a quicky course.
All idea may be expressed.
Not all ideas are equal. Some of them are downright stupid.
It's ok to call a stupid idea stupid and say why.
It is not ok to tell a person he is stupid. Attack the idea, not the person.
Telling someone to STFU violates the first and last rule here expressed.
Now you know. Now we need not give further thought to the idea that just because you're an economist you don't know the basic rules.
PFFTCPWIDYL.
KFG
As the Ideal Gas Law may be derived from the Kinetic Theory of Gasses. Note that it was the empirical observations that leant credence to the Theory. It conformed to them.
Empirical evidence is always the touchstone.
Note that the very link you provide states that Stefan derived his law experimentally a few years before Boltzman derived it theoretically.
Not that it really matters much. The key point is that it wouldn't have been considered a law until it had been derived empirically.
Then there's Einstein's Law of Absolutes, which is destined to remain the Special Theory of Relativity, even though it has been empirically verfied and show to hold up as well, or better, than the classical "laws" (for instance it rendered Newton's Law of Gravity into a mere special case of itself), but that has more to do with a shift in scientific philosophy in the 20th century. We don't actually hold much truck with laws any more.
We have mathmatical models.
Of course there are those that hold that mathmatics is the only reality.
Pythagoras lives!
KFG
Everything has a limit, even data transfer.
I have been transfering data at the known limit for nearly my entire life life. It's called "c" for short.
Anyone who can work the on/off switch of a flashlight can do it.
I believe that it is generally acknowledged that this is a true limit that no amount of thinking may resolve (There may be those who disagree, but it is up to them to demonstrate that such is even possible).
Storing the data is a somewhat different issue.
KFG
I might point out that all natural laws are derived strictly through empirical observation. In fact, that's the very definition of such a law.
Moore's Law is what an engineer would call a "rule of thumb." Something which is understood not to be a law, but within certain constraints can be treated as if it were. This observation is included in the full version of Moore's Law, as actually written by Moore himself.
Like Newton's Law of Gravity, which can be applied as if it were law, so long as you are not Mercury, as was in noted by Newton himself in his original statement of his law.
The writers of laws are not to be held accountable for the misinterpretations of others.
None of this has much of anything to do with the article either (nor does the heading under which the story appears, which is what the OP was responding to, which is perfectly valid). However, I do not believe STFU is an argument, so I will not apply it to myself, or you for that matter.
Post on, McDuff.
KFG