If there is no difference then why does one make you feel bad, and the other not?
Because my momma taught me so. That's really all there is to it. We learn right and wrong when we're little because adults punish us when we do wrong and reward us otherwise. The definition of right and wrong is really up to the adults. If I had been encouraged to beat up other kids when I was little, I would assuredly believe that that is normal.
I simply say that there are things that have intrinsic value, above and beyond their material composition, and that recognition and appreciation of that value is something that is important in a human being.
I see value in things as well. I just don't delude myself that it's anything more than the way I happen to feel about it.
In a nutshell, I think that a society that is purely physicalist in its view of living things is...problematical. By those standards stomping on an alarm clock, a flower, and a puppy are all pretty much the same thing, because living things are no different from non-living things.
I believe there's no intrinsic difference in smashing a puppy vs. smashing an alarm clock. But there is a very good reason why I wouldn't do the former: if I did, I would feel AWFUL.
You can attribute that awful feeling to morality, a sense of philosophical ethics, a fear of God, or whatever. It doesn't matter. The FACT is I would never do such a thing because it would make be FEEL BAD, similar to how I avoid touching hot stoves because it HURTS. You can assign a spiritual basis to this particular trait of mine, but I don't.
Otherwise, python seems ok. I just wish it had a whitespace-agnostic mode.
It could be hacked in rather easily. The Python parser, internally, uses two tokens to represent indentation: INDENT and DEDENT. When it sees that a line is indented farther than the previous line, the lexer generates an INDENT, and when it sees a line indented less than the previous line, it generates a series of DEDENT. In this way these two tokens function almost identically to the '{' and '}' braces of C.
At first I thought there might be an ambiguity in the syntax (since the curly braces are already used in Python for constructing dictionaries). But since dict construction is an expression context and the opening of a control structure looks nothing like an expression context, there would probably be no ambiguity. An interesting little project for somebody with the hots for compilers (which is practically nobody except for maybe me).
Take a lesson from Scotty. You should have said "an hour," which would have probably blown him away just as much. Then when you deliver in 10 minutes he thinks you're God.
I always love this comment. Are you saying you want to be free to code with no indentation if you wish? Go right ahead, but don't do it in Python. At least when I look at a Python program I don't have to worry that I'm being deceived by indentation that makes it LOOK like the code does one thing, and braces that CAUSE it to do something else.
Haven't you ever heard of the problems of double-dimensioning? In the case of braced, loosely-indented language, the indentation is a pathetic surrogate of the true control operators -- the braces themselves. When these two things get out of sync with each other, the problems can be severe. Similar problems arise when somebody changes a piece of code, but fails to update the comment which explains that code. Somebody looking at this code in the future now has to guess: is the comment wrong, or is the code wrong?
Python, on the other hand, forces the indentation to match the intended control structure of the program. It removes the conceptual double-dimensioning and makes code much easier to read.
So really it must come down to laziness on your part. You don't WANT to get the indentation right. This is a ridiculous gripe in a world with a zillion programming editors which will handle the indentation for you.
Maybe if you are forced to indent properly you'll find yourself spending less time lost in your own control flows.
Steve Wilhite also tells us that "GIF" should be pronounced like "JIF".
Which is exactly how everybody I know pronounces it.
Let me guess: when you say the word "laser," you pronounce the s with a "zzz" sound, right? Except the "S" in laser means "stimulated," not "ztimulated!" See, you're pronouncing laser wrong!
A more reasonable conclusion would be to say that the sound of a letter in the pronunciation of an acronym need not relate to the sound of that letter in the word from which it derives.
Actually acting is all about trying to convince people that you are someone that you aren't.
Do you gain no pleasure at all from watching a fellow human being pull off a great acting performance? What is the point in being a good actor when all your mistakes can be fixed?
I enjoy watching certain actors in films because I respect their abilities as performers. A movie isn't just a sequence of images blended together. If you remove or distort the human aspects of performances you might as well be making video games.
Don't confuse the uncertainty of quantum collapse with the uncertainty of the Uncertainty Principle. They are two different concepts. The uncertainty principle derives from a mathematical truth (it would be true even if the world was not governed by quantum physics), whereas the uncertainty associated with wavefunction collapse is a true quantum effect unrelated to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
(The Uncertainty Principle is a consequence of the fact that momentum and position are dual-spaces of each other -- similar "uncertainty" principles arise, for the same reasons, in more mundane fields such as signal processing)
Yep- I was slow to move to GUIs and never could see the point of moving beyond a 33.6kbaud modem back then. My connection (to my UNIX command line account at the college) with Pine and Lynx was plenty for me- and worked just as well on my (then) 12 year old TI-99/4a or my 6 year old Geneve 9640 as it did on my homebrewed '386 running DOS.
Heh. You don't happen to remember something called RIP (remote imaging protocol), do you? That was supposed to be the wave of the future for BBSes! Man, that SMOKED at 9600 bps! I can't imagine the performance at 33.6.
Remember watching a screenful of text come down? I tended to measure modem performance in terms of "read factor," i.e. how many times faster did it send text, compared to how fast I could read it:-)
Bandwidth cannot be meaningfully traded/exported etc like, say, oil.
What a deliciously accurate statement. Remember back at the turn of the millenium when Enron (an ENERGY and company, remember!) starting entering all kinds of wacky markets... One television commercial I remember quite well was for Enron's new "bandwidth market" concept, where companies could buy and sell shares of Internet bandwidth like other commodities. Of course, we all know what happened to Enron.
So you're saying I shouldn't find out about things on Slashdot because I could just look in one of a billion scientific journals? Oddly enough, I think most Slashdot readers aren't hardcore scientists and don't spend their time reading scientific journals (seeing as WE CAN'T without paying subscriptions). So if we don't read it here, where SHOULD we read about it? I haven't seen this in the mainstream news.
The evil genius of Osama bin Laden was to realize that there is a "critical switch" in American psychology that he could flip. He doesn't have to take us down himself, just set the process in motion and watch as the government and society slowly destroy themselves.
Maybe I'm not up to date on my scientific theories, but isn't petroleum generally considered to be bio-derived?
It was bio-derived hundreds of millions of years ago. That's hundreds of millions of years where that CO2 was NOT part of the atmosphere. We're not talking about putting back what we took out 6 months ago, we're talking about a serious shift of equilibrium.
do wonder though: How did the very first one occur? If this universe is from the last one, then there must have been a first one somewhere.
Whaa? That makes no sense. Define a function F on the integers such that F(x) = x + 1. Therefore we can say that the value x + 1 is "created", by the function F, from the value x. Comparing with your statement, this must imply that there is some value x + 1 for which F(x) does not exist (in other words, there is a "first element.") But this DOES NOT FOLLOW. There are in fact an infinite number of integers x, and for EACH OF THEM there is a y such that F(y) = x.
The fact that we are talking about universes instead of integers doesn't really matter. Maybe the chain is infinite. Just because YOU don't want to accept that doesn't make it any less possible.
The easiest way to remove billions of tons of CO2 would be to have a billion people or so stop breathing. Perhaps these global warming fear mongers can lead the way.
Great idea! All those dead human corpses will just rot and all the carbon of their bodies will be released as CO2! Wait a second...
The CO2 that humans breathe out is not part of the problem. That CO2 comes from carbon you ingested in the form of food, which came from animals/plants, which ultimately came from the air. So when you breathe out CO2, you are just putting back the CO2 that was there only a few months ago. So there is no net impact. The same goes for ANY carbon dioxide that is bio-derived. Only the CO2 released from burning petroleum fuel matters. Period.
You do know that the propaganda machine re-designed children's board games to teach hatred of the Jews? That paramilitary training for boys in the Hitler Youth began at around age ten? If Hitler had the tech he would have used the tech.
So you're arguing that not only video games, but board games, should also be banned? Just so we're clear.
That said I still miss Windows for a few applications and MOSTLY for the keyboard commands (in the OS GUI). Window Key + R + cmd = CLI. On the Mac it's click or Apple + Space + Term + Click.
Lame.
Why do people buy a cat and then complain that it doesn't act like a dog? I don't get it.
Well, to be fair, it's entirely possible that this fourth dimension is expanding relative to some other metric which is not temporal, but that merely shifts the mystery to this new dimension. What point is there in "explaining" the flow of time if we can only do so in terms of another concept which is equally mysterious?
Unfortunately, the poor guy has been misguided by the "Whoo, mystical" style of Greene's writing. It's a good style if you want to sell books, I guess... Greene is talking about basic concepts in Minkowski space, none of which are particularly hard to deal with, and none of which address the true nature of time.
So, for a photon, there is no time (the gamma becomes infinite). Big deal. It's weird, but accept it and move on, so you can do some actual physics.
I'd mod your troll to something else if it wasn't for the "You are stupid" comment at the end. It's interesting, though, to see such careless disregard for other people's feelings.
As a followup to this comment, the continued spamming behavior of this user (who has now posted the same crap about 5 times) coupled with his inability to grasp the concept that a "expansion" necessarily must be described in terms of a TEMPORAL VARIABLE, puts him firmly in the set of people who's feelings I feel justified in disregarding.
As Brian Greene points out in the Appendix to Chapter 2 of The Elegant
Universe, we note that from the space-time position 4-vector
x=(ct,x1,x2,x3), we can create the velocity 4-vector u=dx/d(tau), where
tau is the proper time defined by
d(tau)^2=dt^2-c^-2(dx1^2+dx2^2+dx3^2). Then the "speed through
space-time" is the magnitude of the 4-vector u,
((c^2dt^2-dx^2)/(dt^2-c^-2dx^2))^(1/2), which is identically the speed
of light c. Now, we can rearrange the equation
c^2(dt/d(tau))^2-(dx/d(tau))^2=c^2 to be
c^2(d(tau)/dt))^2+(dx/d(tau))^2=c^2. This shows that an increase of an
object's speed through space, (dx/d(tau))^2)^(1/2)= dx/d(tau) must be
accompanied by a decrease in d(tau)/dt which is the object's speed
through time, which also may be considered the rate at which time
elapses on its own clock d(tau) or the proper time, as compared with
that on our stationary clock dt."
Yawn. This is undergraduate level. Notice that the argument relies on the concept of "tau" which is the "proper time." So we are describing measured time in terms of proper time. Who cares -- Einstein figured this out almost a century ago. Just because Greene writes it in a book doesn't make it new, and it is not saying what you seem to think it's saying. Now you get to explain what "tau" is, in terms that do not include the notion of time. Good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
If there is no difference then why does one make you feel bad, and the other not?
Because my momma taught me so. That's really all there is to it. We learn right and wrong when we're little because adults punish us when we do wrong and reward us otherwise. The definition of right and wrong is really up to the adults. If I had been encouraged to beat up other kids when I was little, I would assuredly believe that that is normal.
I simply say that there are things that have intrinsic value, above and beyond their material composition, and that recognition and appreciation of that value is something that is important in a human being.
I see value in things as well. I just don't delude myself that it's anything more than the way I happen to feel about it.
In a nutshell, I think that a society that is purely physicalist in its view of living things is...problematical. By those standards stomping on an alarm clock, a flower, and a puppy are all pretty much the same thing, because living things are no different from non-living things.
I believe there's no intrinsic difference in smashing a puppy vs. smashing an alarm clock. But there is a very good reason why I wouldn't do the former: if I did, I would feel AWFUL.
You can attribute that awful feeling to morality, a sense of philosophical ethics, a fear of God, or whatever. It doesn't matter. The FACT is I would never do such a thing because it would make be FEEL BAD, similar to how I avoid touching hot stoves because it HURTS. You can assign a spiritual basis to this particular trait of mine, but I don't.
Otherwise, python seems ok. I just wish it had a whitespace-agnostic mode.
It could be hacked in rather easily. The Python parser, internally, uses two tokens to represent indentation: INDENT and DEDENT. When it sees that a line is indented farther than the previous line, the lexer generates an INDENT, and when it sees a line indented less than the previous line, it generates a series of DEDENT. In this way these two tokens function almost identically to the '{' and '}' braces of C.
At first I thought there might be an ambiguity in the syntax (since the curly braces are already used in Python for constructing dictionaries). But since dict construction is an expression context and the opening of a control structure looks nothing like an expression context, there would probably be no ambiguity. An interesting little project for somebody with the hots for compilers (which is practically nobody except for maybe me).
Take a lesson from Scotty. You should have said "an hour," which would have probably blown him away just as much. Then when you deliver in 10 minutes he thinks you're God.
I always love this comment. Are you saying you want to be free to code with no indentation if you wish? Go right ahead, but don't do it in Python. At least when I look at a Python program I don't have to worry that I'm being deceived by indentation that makes it LOOK like the code does one thing, and braces that CAUSE it to do something else.
Haven't you ever heard of the problems of double-dimensioning? In the case of braced, loosely-indented language, the indentation is a pathetic surrogate of the true control operators -- the braces themselves. When these two things get out of sync with each other, the problems can be severe. Similar problems arise when somebody changes a piece of code, but fails to update the comment which explains that code. Somebody looking at this code in the future now has to guess: is the comment wrong, or is the code wrong?
Python, on the other hand, forces the indentation to match the intended control structure of the program. It removes the conceptual double-dimensioning and makes code much easier to read.
So really it must come down to laziness on your part. You don't WANT to get the indentation right. This is a ridiculous gripe in a world with a zillion programming editors which will handle the indentation for you.
Maybe if you are forced to indent properly you'll find yourself spending less time lost in your own control flows.
Steve Wilhite also tells us that "GIF" should be pronounced like "JIF".
Which is exactly how everybody I know pronounces it.
Let me guess: when you say the word "laser," you pronounce the s with a "zzz" sound, right? Except the "S" in laser means "stimulated," not "ztimulated!" See, you're pronouncing laser wrong!
A more reasonable conclusion would be to say that the sound of a letter in the pronunciation of an acronym need not relate to the sound of that letter in the word from which it derives.
Actually acting is all about trying to convince people that you are someone that you aren't.
Do you gain no pleasure at all from watching a fellow human being pull off a great acting performance? What is the point in being a good actor when all your mistakes can be fixed?
I enjoy watching certain actors in films because I respect their abilities as performers. A movie isn't just a sequence of images blended together. If you remove or distort the human aspects of performances you might as well be making video games.
Don't confuse the uncertainty of quantum collapse with the uncertainty of the Uncertainty Principle. They are two different concepts. The uncertainty principle derives from a mathematical truth (it would be true even if the world was not governed by quantum physics), whereas the uncertainty associated with wavefunction collapse is a true quantum effect unrelated to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
(The Uncertainty Principle is a consequence of the fact that momentum and position are dual-spaces of each other -- similar "uncertainty" principles arise, for the same reasons, in more mundane fields such as signal processing)
Why... why... why...
Yep- I was slow to move to GUIs and never could see the point of moving beyond a 33.6kbaud modem back then. My connection (to my UNIX command line account at the college) with Pine and Lynx was plenty for me- and worked just as well on my (then) 12 year old TI-99/4a or my 6 year old Geneve 9640 as it did on my homebrewed '386 running DOS.
Heh. You don't happen to remember something called RIP (remote imaging protocol), do you? That was supposed to be the wave of the future for BBSes! Man, that SMOKED at 9600 bps! I can't imagine the performance at 33.6.
Remember watching a screenful of text come down? I tended to measure modem performance in terms of "read factor," i.e. how many times faster did it send text, compared to how fast I could read it :-)
Bandwidth cannot be meaningfully traded/exported etc like, say, oil.
What a deliciously accurate statement. Remember back at the turn of the millenium when Enron (an ENERGY and company, remember!) starting entering all kinds of wacky markets... One television commercial I remember quite well was for Enron's new "bandwidth market" concept, where companies could buy and sell shares of Internet bandwidth like other commodities. Of course, we all know what happened to Enron.
So you're saying I shouldn't find out about things on Slashdot because I could just look in one of a billion scientific journals? Oddly enough, I think most Slashdot readers aren't hardcore scientists and don't spend their time reading scientific journals (seeing as WE CAN'T without paying subscriptions). So if we don't read it here, where SHOULD we read about it? I haven't seen this in the mainstream news.
Quit being an elitist asshole.
The evil genius of Osama bin Laden was to realize that there is a "critical switch" in American psychology that he could flip. He doesn't have to take us down himself, just set the process in motion and watch as the government and society slowly destroy themselves.
Maybe I'm not up to date on my scientific theories, but isn't petroleum generally considered to be bio-derived?
It was bio-derived hundreds of millions of years ago. That's hundreds of millions of years where that CO2 was NOT part of the atmosphere. We're not talking about putting back what we took out 6 months ago, we're talking about a serious shift of equilibrium.
But you're right, I should have been clearer.
It can't be "turtles all the way down"
Uh, why not? So you have trouble envisioning the infinite. That's entirely your problem.
do wonder though: How did the very first one occur? If this universe is from the last one, then there must have been a first one somewhere.
Whaa? That makes no sense. Define a function F on the integers such that F(x) = x + 1. Therefore we can say that the value x + 1 is "created", by the function F, from the value x. Comparing with your statement, this must imply that there is some value x + 1 for which F(x) does not exist (in other words, there is a "first element.") But this DOES NOT FOLLOW. There are in fact an infinite number of integers x, and for EACH OF THEM there is a y such that F(y) = x.
The fact that we are talking about universes instead of integers doesn't really matter. Maybe the chain is infinite. Just because YOU don't want to accept that doesn't make it any less possible.
The easiest way to remove billions of tons of CO2 would be to have a billion people or so stop breathing. Perhaps these global warming fear mongers can lead the way.
Great idea! All those dead human corpses will just rot and all the carbon of their bodies will be released as CO2! Wait a second...
The CO2 that humans breathe out is not part of the problem. That CO2 comes from carbon you ingested in the form of food, which came from animals/plants, which ultimately came from the air. So when you breathe out CO2, you are just putting back the CO2 that was there only a few months ago. So there is no net impact. The same goes for ANY carbon dioxide that is bio-derived. Only the CO2 released from burning petroleum fuel matters. Period.
Please define.
You do know that the propaganda machine re-designed children's board games to teach hatred of the Jews? That paramilitary training for boys in the Hitler Youth began at around age ten? If Hitler had the tech he would have used the tech.
So you're arguing that not only video games, but board games, should also be banned? Just so we're clear.
That said I still miss Windows for a few applications and MOSTLY for the keyboard commands (in the OS GUI). Window Key + R + cmd = CLI. On the Mac it's click or Apple + Space + Term + Click. Lame.
Why do people buy a cat and then complain that it doesn't act like a dog? I don't get it.
Funny, when configuring a Mac I don't see an option to select an O/S other than Mac OS X, how do I avoid the Apple tax?
This argument is just plain ridiculous. When Microsoft starts making PCs, get back to me.
Well, to be fair, it's entirely possible that this fourth dimension is expanding relative to some other metric which is not temporal, but that merely shifts the mystery to this new dimension. What point is there in "explaining" the flow of time if we can only do so in terms of another concept which is equally mysterious?
Unfortunately, the poor guy has been misguided by the "Whoo, mystical" style of Greene's writing. It's a good style if you want to sell books, I guess... Greene is talking about basic concepts in Minkowski space, none of which are particularly hard to deal with, and none of which address the true nature of time.
So, for a photon, there is no time (the gamma becomes infinite). Big deal. It's weird, but accept it and move on, so you can do some actual physics.
I'd mod your troll to something else if it wasn't for the "You are stupid" comment at the end. It's interesting, though, to see such careless disregard for other people's feelings.
As a followup to this comment, the continued spamming behavior of this user (who has now posted the same crap about 5 times) coupled with his inability to grasp the concept that a "expansion" necessarily must be described in terms of a TEMPORAL VARIABLE, puts him firmly in the set of people who's feelings I feel justified in disregarding.
Consider a 4th dimension expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions in units of the Planck length at the rate of c.
And then you use the word "rate" which blows the whole damn thing out of the water. Please stop spamming us with irrelevant math.
As Brian Greene points out in the Appendix to Chapter 2 of The Elegant Universe, we note that from the space-time position 4-vector x=(ct,x1,x2,x3), we can create the velocity 4-vector u=dx/d(tau), where tau is the proper time defined by d(tau)^2=dt^2-c^-2(dx1^2+dx2^2+dx3^2). Then the "speed through space-time" is the magnitude of the 4-vector u, ((c^2dt^2-dx^2)/(dt^2-c^-2dx^2))^(1/2), which is identically the speed of light c. Now, we can rearrange the equation c^2(dt/d(tau))^2-(dx/d(tau))^2=c^2 to be c^2(d(tau)/dt))^2+(dx/d(tau))^2=c^2. This shows that an increase of an object's speed through space, (dx/d(tau))^2)^(1/2)= dx/d(tau) must be accompanied by a decrease in d(tau)/dt which is the object's speed through time, which also may be considered the rate at which time elapses on its own clock d(tau) or the proper time, as compared with that on our stationary clock dt."
Yawn. This is undergraduate level. Notice that the argument relies on the concept of "tau" which is the "proper time." So we are describing measured time in terms of proper time. Who cares -- Einstein figured this out almost a century ago. Just because Greene writes it in a book doesn't make it new, and it is not saying what you seem to think it's saying. Now you get to explain what "tau" is, in terms that do not include the notion of time. Good luck.