One question is, what are the women doing? Of course, one answer may be that they're staying at home and being supported by husbands, but I bet that doesn't explain the entire trend. Many of them probably move into other areas. Is there something stopping men from doing that? Is it that they love filling out TPS reports so much that they can't imagine any job other than IT? I think the real answer is that most people don't really think about their choices or try very hard, they just stay wherever they ended up and "suck it up", pretending that this makes them tough.
That's all very macho of you, but has it occurred to you to actually question the working environment that so many men are so obligingly putting up with? The news here could be "women are sensible enough to say no". (For the record, I'm a man, but not an employee.)
So the problem is that women in IT are on call at all hours, which means that cellphones have a lot to do with this. But it goes deeper than that: cellphones are also causing honeybees to disappear. Notice a pattern here?
These women are obviously going wherever the honeybees went: obviously, a peaceful cellphone-free land, populated with women and bees, a land of milk and honey, one might say.
Except for the fact that many people tried to help him all along the way:
You're talking as though he was a perfectly normal guy who just inexplicably, "coldly", ignored you. But it's pretty clear he was mentally ill in some way. He needed help, but apparently almost no-one was able to give it to him.
Maybe he should have tried standing up for himself in middle school, or at the very least had the common sense [...]
I think the recovery mentioned in your nick has a ways to go, if you want to blame someone like this without knowing the details of the situation. For example, it's been reported that Cho had been diagnosed autistic. Expecting an autistic person who hasn't received proper remedial care to "stand up for himself in middle school" or even to "at the very least [have] common sense" is unrealistic.
The simple fact is that he was a complete psycho nutcase that held the world in contempt and had no regard for life. Even his own. The blame lies squarely on his own shoulders.
Judge not lest ye be judged. The responsibility for this particular "complete psycho nutcase" lies as much with his environment as with his own "free will". Attitudes like yours are unlikely to help prevent the next such case from occurring. Interestingly enough, Cho's aunt had a similar reaction to yours. Coincidence?
I didn't miss it, I just didn't think you made your case. Your theory seems to be all about profit in the end, which makes it seem like the PRIMARY issue.
So there..poopoo on it all you want. Not everything in the world is primarily motivated by money and profit.
Um... you're saying that billionaires like Bezos might be funding a company so that their companies can use its product for their businesses, presumably to make more profit. So how is this not primarily motivated by money and profit again?
oh Christ... you obviously have a dramatic personality.
Getting upset over something like this doesn't require a dramatic personality. I'd be disturbed by someone who isn't very upset by it. Something like this should never be allowed to happen. If it does happen, it's cause for serious concern, and it means that the people involved made serious errors in judgement, and should be subject to consequences. The kind of blind and rigid rule-following that seems to have happened in this case is certainly, understandably, comparable to the attitude which Nazis had to law and order, and I wouldn't want the people involved in this debacle in positions of power any more than I'd want Nazis in power.
The way you suggest isn't the way to go about it. If you have preferences or requirements, make them clear up front if possible. Don't negotiate with low-level staff such as nurses, since they may not have the necessary authority, and are less likely to be capable of handling the situation correctly.
But again, maybe I'm wrong.
There's no wrong or right - if you're willing to put up with whatever other people decide on your behalf, that's your choice. However, I can tell you from experience that it isn't necessary to do that. Particularly when it comes to care of a "sensitive personal nature", in the U.S. at least, there's legal precedent and support for a patient's ability to request a specific gender of caregiver, for example.
As far as modesty, hospitals and clinics do not care if you are uncomfortable with a female touching your giblets or a man poking your bajingo (yes I watch Scrubs). The patient has to just get over it.
Nonsense. Being in hospital costs a lot of money. If a hospital refuses to consider my needs, I'll find one that will. The only exception would be an extreme emergency, in which case the patient probably isn't in a condition or position to object to anything. You might be willing to put up with any old crap, but that doesn't mean everyone has to.
Firstly, should this really be posted on/. ? This is a support/hardware forum posting.
Good heavens, yes. Have you read the responses in this thread? Knowledgeable people, posting about things they know something about! It's like Slashdot from 1998! <sniff>
I was referring to the Protestant work ethic, which as the link notes, is sometimes just referred to as "the work ethic". Your mention of "discipline and accepting your fate" means you already have it. You've been thoroughly indoctrinated by your upbringing in a Western capitalist nation.;) It apparently works well for a lot of people, which is why it's spread so widely - it has great survival value - but not everybody adapts to it so well.
You're also a republican, in a 19th century sense: "each man must somehow be persuaded to submerge his personal wants into the greater good of the whole" (attributed to Gordon Wood). If your personal wants are not to wake up early, but you've somehow been persuaded to do it anyway (money? belief in public virtue?), you're a good republican. That's a pretty noble thing, but I can't help feeling that it might be possible to arrange things to better take our biological differences into account. We're still living 19th century lives in many ways.
Your thought experiment would have more credibility if you actually succeeded in doing what you suggested for any length of time: "If I stayed on West coast time on the east coast, I'd no longer 'be a morning person.'" But I think the flaw in your theory is that the factors that go into preferences for sleep timing are more complex than just the binary one of whether it's dark or light. The interaction between your hormone cycles, other biochemical issues, your mood, exactly when it becomes dark or light relative to those factors, etc. all seem to affect it.
This article suggests a genetic basis for the preference in some people (apparently about 30 percent of people have an extreme preference one way or the other).
There's also plenty of work on the subject of productivity at different times of day, with some people being markedly more productive in the mornings, others in the evenings, others at other times. Your theory could actually be tested quite nicely that way, since it would abstract out preference to some extent: measure someone's productivity at different times of the day on each coast. My bet, based on my own experience and observations, is that this would bear out the idea that some people have fairly hardwired preferences.
That is an exceptionally asinine comment. Writing a book explaining a subject in physics to laymen is not the same thing as catering to pseudoscience. And Greene is not "marketing string theory first to laypeople". He is a string theorist first, and publishes string theory papers for any physicist to critique.
I think you misunderstood my point.
First, re the pseudoscience issue, Greene comes in for that criticism because his books and video presentations rely quite heavily for their impact on emotional, aesthetic and even spiritual appeals. If he doesn't want to be confused with Deepak, he shouldn't write like Deepak. However, my suspicion is that Greene is in fact consciously emulating people like Deepak, to achieve similar broad appeal. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Second, I wasn't complaining that Greene isn't publishing papers. Let me put it like this: Greene's pop efforts certainly seem like marketing efforts. I'm saying I think that he, or string theory in general, might be better served targeting those marketing efforts at a slightly less broad audience: not just at peers who might read the latest papers on the subject, but at people who might want to get into the subject in more depth than books like The Elegant Universe can support. The problem as it stands now is that the perspective I've been arguing is hardly a unique one -- in fact, it's a common one for which there doesn't seem to be much of a counterargument at any level outside the string theory community itself. Put another way, Greene's popularization is perhaps a few decades too early. He's talking the talk, but can the theory walk the walk? You're making the case that it can, and for all I know you might be right, but unfortunately most of the material I come across reinforces the perspective I've been describing.
By your criteria I could turn around and attack any scientist writing any popularization of science as "catering to the gullible masses instead of to his peers".
Absolutely not. The difference with popularization of most other scientific fields is that what's usually being popularized is established, widely used theory. As such, there's material available that covers the theories at all sorts of levels. String theory seems to have jumped the gun and gone straight to the public, much like an attorney attempting to try a case in the court of public opinion. If I think of examples like that in science, the first one that comes to mind is Pons and Fleishman's cold fusion, which is not an example to aspire to. I'm not saying string theory is in the same position technically, but from a PR perspective, there are similarities.
String theory is not "untestable". There are many string models which can be tested (and many of them have in fact already been ruled out).
My qualification "essentially untestable" was intended to address this. Sure, there are version of string theory that can be rejected. But positive confirmation of many of the artifacts of string theory seems elusive. Since the margins of this Slashdot comment are small, I'll let Sheldon Glashow respond on my behalf.
On the subject of "elegance", in the end, that's largely in the eye of the beholder. One of the reviews of Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell says that "it is for anyone who wishes to experience the sheer beauty and elegance of quantum field theory". I suspect if someone were putting out string theory books more like this than like Greene's, string theory might have better PR. Marketing the theory first to the same laypeople who enjoy Deepak Chopra, and only second worrying about people who might actually be able to understand and critique the theory, is not a good sign.
Besides, even if QFT is conceded to be ugly, it's useful. String theory still can't compete on that level. Having better theories to replace or augment quantum theory would be fantastic. String theory has had a long time to achieve that, but the results haven't been very good, and we have to consider that maybe other approaches deserve more attention. Since Greene opened the door to trial by populism, I'll defer to USA Today on this point.
The real lesson is that people do differ in their characteristics and predisposition, and extrapolating from your own experience is often much less reliable than you might imagine. "Discipline and accepting your fate" is very Protestant and all that, but it doesn't necessarily alter your biological responses. Your simple prescription of just going to sleep 8 hours before you need to wake up isn't always that simple, either.
Brian Greene has certainly mastered the trick of appealing to lay audiences, with an almost new age message about the beauty of physics. Unfortunately, the string theory he's pushing is unverified, essentially untestable, incomplete, and nowhere near as elegant as he makes out. In many respects, it's the opposite of elegant: introduce enough degrees of freedom into the equations so that you can solve any problem by tweaking the parameters.
String theorists will take these sort of statements as an attack, but they're just a blunt assessment of the situation. GR and QM are well-tested theories. String theory doesn't rise to the same level. It's possible that some version of it will one day -- it's certainly morphed into enough varieties -- but today, it's primarily mathematical speculation.
For that matter, if anyone has that much trouble getting up, wouldn't it be more productive to actually go to bed some 8 hours before having to get up? I dunno, just a crazy idea.
Spoken like a morning person. Trust me, not everyone is like you.
Yes, she's one of my favorite authors. I went through a period where I read everything of hers I could get my hands on. I think I've read most of her books, other than the Martha Quest series. I didn't know that she was up for the prize, thanks for telling me. I'll be rooting for her, but it looks like she's got some stiff competition, like Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth. Of course they're younger and it's a lifetime achievement award given to a living author, so maybe her age will work in her favor.:)
Well, my young fella-me-lad, with your 800K+ uid you may not remember this, but there once was a Slashdot contributor named Jon Katz who would have found a way to make this about geeks, no matter what contortions were necessary. Katz was a master of modern journalism: if a story wouldn't cooperate, he just keep pounding at it until he made it his bitch -- or vice versa, didn't really matter.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot to use the words "mashup" and "Web 2.0".
One question is, what are the women doing? Of course, one answer may be that they're staying at home and being supported by husbands, but I bet that doesn't explain the entire trend. Many of them probably move into other areas. Is there something stopping men from doing that? Is it that they love filling out TPS reports so much that they can't imagine any job other than IT? I think the real answer is that most people don't really think about their choices or try very hard, they just stay wherever they ended up and "suck it up", pretending that this makes them tough.
Newsflash: the ENTIRE WORLD includes more than just the denizens of your dormroom. "Blogosphere" is hardly mainstream, except amongst blogonerds.
That's all very macho of you, but has it occurred to you to actually question the working environment that so many men are so obligingly putting up with? The news here could be "women are sensible enough to say no". (For the record, I'm a man, but not an employee.)
So the problem is that women in IT are on call at all hours, which means that cellphones have a lot to do with this. But it goes deeper than that: cellphones are also causing honeybees to disappear. Notice a pattern here?
These women are obviously going wherever the honeybees went: obviously, a peaceful cellphone-free land, populated with women and bees, a land of milk and honey, one might say.
I didn't miss it, I just didn't think you made your case. Your theory seems to be all about profit in the end, which makes it seem like the PRIMARY issue.
I was referring to the Protestant work ethic, which as the link notes, is sometimes just referred to as "the work ethic". Your mention of "discipline and accepting your fate" means you already have it. You've been thoroughly indoctrinated by your upbringing in a Western capitalist nation. ;) It apparently works well for a lot of people, which is why it's spread so widely - it has great survival value - but not everybody adapts to it so well.
You're also a republican, in a 19th century sense: "each man must somehow be persuaded to submerge his personal wants into the greater good of the whole" (attributed to Gordon Wood). If your personal wants are not to wake up early, but you've somehow been persuaded to do it anyway (money? belief in public virtue?), you're a good republican. That's a pretty noble thing, but I can't help feeling that it might be possible to arrange things to better take our biological differences into account. We're still living 19th century lives in many ways.
Your thought experiment would have more credibility if you actually succeeded in doing what you suggested for any length of time: "If I stayed on West coast time on the east coast, I'd no longer 'be a morning person.'" But I think the flaw in your theory is that the factors that go into preferences for sleep timing are more complex than just the binary one of whether it's dark or light. The interaction between your hormone cycles, other biochemical issues, your mood, exactly when it becomes dark or light relative to those factors, etc. all seem to affect it.
This article suggests a genetic basis for the preference in some people (apparently about 30 percent of people have an extreme preference one way or the other).
There's also plenty of work on the subject of productivity at different times of day, with some people being markedly more productive in the mornings, others in the evenings, others at other times. Your theory could actually be tested quite nicely that way, since it would abstract out preference to some extent: measure someone's productivity at different times of the day on each coast. My bet, based on my own experience and observations, is that this would bear out the idea that some people have fairly hardwired preferences.
First, re the pseudoscience issue, Greene comes in for that criticism because his books and video presentations rely quite heavily for their impact on emotional, aesthetic and even spiritual appeals. If he doesn't want to be confused with Deepak, he shouldn't write like Deepak. However, my suspicion is that Greene is in fact consciously emulating people like Deepak, to achieve similar broad appeal. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Second, I wasn't complaining that Greene isn't publishing papers. Let me put it like this: Greene's pop efforts certainly seem like marketing efforts. I'm saying I think that he, or string theory in general, might be better served targeting those marketing efforts at a slightly less broad audience: not just at peers who might read the latest papers on the subject, but at people who might want to get into the subject in more depth than books like The Elegant Universe can support. The problem as it stands now is that the perspective I've been arguing is hardly a unique one -- in fact, it's a common one for which there doesn't seem to be much of a counterargument at any level outside the string theory community itself. Put another way, Greene's popularization is perhaps a few decades too early. He's talking the talk, but can the theory walk the walk? You're making the case that it can, and for all I know you might be right, but unfortunately most of the material I come across reinforces the perspective I've been describing.Absolutely not. The difference with popularization of most other scientific fields is that what's usually being popularized is established, widely used theory. As such, there's material available that covers the theories at all sorts of levels. String theory seems to have jumped the gun and gone straight to the public, much like an attorney attempting to try a case in the court of public opinion. If I think of examples like that in science, the first one that comes to mind is Pons and Fleishman's cold fusion, which is not an example to aspire to. I'm not saying string theory is in the same position technically, but from a PR perspective, there are similarities.
My qualification "essentially untestable" was intended to address this. Sure, there are version of string theory that can be rejected. But positive confirmation of many of the artifacts of string theory seems elusive. Since the margins of this Slashdot comment are small, I'll let Sheldon Glashow respond on my behalf.
On the subject of "elegance", in the end, that's largely in the eye of the beholder. One of the reviews of Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell says that "it is for anyone who wishes to experience the sheer beauty and elegance of quantum field theory". I suspect if someone were putting out string theory books more like this than like Greene's, string theory might have better PR. Marketing the theory first to the same laypeople who enjoy Deepak Chopra, and only second worrying about people who might actually be able to understand and critique the theory, is not a good sign.
Besides, even if QFT is conceded to be ugly, it's useful. String theory still can't compete on that level. Having better theories to replace or augment quantum theory would be fantastic. String theory has had a long time to achieve that, but the results haven't been very good, and we have to consider that maybe other approaches deserve more attention. Since Greene opened the door to trial by populism, I'll defer to USA Today on this point.
The real lesson is that people do differ in their characteristics and predisposition, and extrapolating from your own experience is often much less reliable than you might imagine. "Discipline and accepting your fate" is very Protestant and all that, but it doesn't necessarily alter your biological responses. Your simple prescription of just going to sleep 8 hours before you need to wake up isn't always that simple, either.
Brian Greene has certainly mastered the trick of appealing to lay audiences, with an almost new age message about the beauty of physics. Unfortunately, the string theory he's pushing is unverified, essentially untestable, incomplete, and nowhere near as elegant as he makes out. In many respects, it's the opposite of elegant: introduce enough degrees of freedom into the equations so that you can solve any problem by tweaking the parameters.
String theorists will take these sort of statements as an attack, but they're just a blunt assessment of the situation. GR and QM are well-tested theories. String theory doesn't rise to the same level. It's possible that some version of it will one day -- it's certainly morphed into enough varieties -- but today, it's primarily mathematical speculation.
What, the Stargates aren't good enough for you?
Yes, she's one of my favorite authors. I went through a period where I read everything of hers I could get my hands on. I think I've read most of her books, other than the Martha Quest series. I didn't know that she was up for the prize, thanks for telling me. I'll be rooting for her, but it looks like she's got some stiff competition, like Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth. Of course they're younger and it's a lifetime achievement award given to a living author, so maybe her age will work in her favor. :)
Well, my young fella-me-lad, with your 800K+ uid you may not remember this, but there once was a Slashdot contributor named Jon Katz who would have found a way to make this about geeks, no matter what contortions were necessary. Katz was a master of modern journalism: if a story wouldn't cooperate, he just keep pounding at it until he made it his bitch -- or vice versa, didn't really matter.
No worries, I'm told we're going to be evacuated to a really nice planet, known as Planet 8.