The US would be quite entertaining, had it not such an influence on everyone else...
Don't forget that the U.S. "influence on everyone else" is everyone else's choice. Why are they all choosing to be influenced by the U.S. if the U.S. is so uniformly terrible? It's worth thinking about that carefully, because it's not a simple issue.
One part of the answer is that the U.S. is just a country like any other, full of flawed humans who are mostly competing in their own self-interest, just like everywhere else. Which country on Earth, if suddenly propelled into the position of richest & most militarily powerful, would not be "entertaining" in much the same way?
A lot of people knew who she was before that video, but at that time most people who had heard of her would have told you she was "just another heiress". The release of that first sex video was the launching point of her current fame.
Um, what did you do with the roach afterwards? I think I've seen its descendants in Manhattan. Some of them could take your head off with a single bite...
You're thinking of the Punto Banco variety, a.k.a. North American baccarat. The other major two varieties, Banque and Chermin de Fer - the latter being James Bond's preferred game - involve player skill, and game theoretic principles apply.
So British Intelligence's fiendishly clever baccarat-related questioning has already succeeded in weeding out a North American spy! It's off to the Tower with you!
Dude, if you're not already insanely wealthy and just posting on Slashdot for kicks, you should totally get into marketing.
I, for one, welcome our new implied-porn marketing overlord, and look forward to seeing your work during the next Superbowl. And then twice during every show after that.
Then there's the bigotry of "minimum expectations" an issue does not need to be of cosmic dire significance to be a learning opportunity.
No, but it should be worth learning about. There may have been public interest in Pluto's status, but there's also public interest in Paris Hilton and OJ Simpson. Tyson catered to that public interest in exactly the same way as any media whore responds to public attention, with no noticeable attempt to redirect the conversation to anything more substantial. The alleged "learning opportunity" was just an excuse for him to get his face on TV, for a variety of reasons that have little to do with educating anybody.
In any case, regarding the bigotry of minimum expectations, I expect interlocutors to know that irregardless is not a real word. I bet Tyson uses it too.;-P
As he and others have pointed out, the Pluto controversy is an enormous learning opportunity
If it's necessary to use something as irrelevant as this as an excuse to inform the public about science, the battle is already lost. This sort of thing is an example of, if you'll excuse the cliche, "the soft bigotry of low expectations". If you don't challenge your audience and don't expect them to know or want to learn more than they should have learned by fourth grade, you're not achieving anything useful and are actually doing them a disservice. This is increasingly true of mass media in general: it's become dumber as the market grows bigger. Tyson is a perpetuator of this: they're catering to a level so low as to be valueless, except possibly to five-year olds.
It's a hell of an insight on how science, politics, and the public interact on.
That might be great if it were an issue of any significance, and could be considered representative. But in fact, it's nothing like what usually happens between science, politics and the public. Better and more realistic examples would be global warming, or funding for certain projects (space exploration, telescopes, supercolliders...)
They're not baseless, they're based on his body of work. What do *you* think it means when someone is listed last as an author on a paper with 22 authors? When the majority of someone's published output is popular work aimed at children, or adults with absolutely zero knowledge of the subject?
That's not to say science popularism is a bad thing - done well, it can be very useful. And science popularizers are sometimes also serious scientists: Carl Sagan was. But Tyson's science popularization is very low on content (see the comment, not mine, that started this subthread). His scientific career matches that.
Technically, I suppose I have to acknowledge that he qualifies as a scientist, in the same sort of way that George Bush qualifies as a leader. But there comes a point at which quality of performance is so low that you can reasonably say that someone is not a "real" scientist. That is the claim I am making about Tyson.
Not "is" a scientist. "Was" a scientist, briefly. Perhaps we have different definitions of "scientist", but in my book a planetarium director is not ipso facto a scientist, even if he manages to get his named tacked onto the end of some papers presumably as a kind of favor to the PR guy from the real scientists.
I think Tyson is a pretty good planetarium director, judging by the Rose Center. Although even that, for me, has a feel of style over substance, which matches Tyson's personality (but I don't know to what extent he was directly responsible for the nature of the overhaul). I appreciate the architectural and design elements, but the target audience of both the planetarium and Tyson's science popularization seems to be relentlessly stuck at a low grade-school level.
I think if Tyson were a real scientist, he'd recognize that the fuss over the designation "planet" is too arbitrary to be worth worrying much about, and it's silly to take a strong position on one side or the other *except* for tradition's sake. His position thus makes little sense, and it's telling that this is an issue that he chooses to take a stand on.
I'm neither dumb nor lazy, but I'm critical. Examine the papers at the link you gave. Numbers 13 and 11 have a long list of contributors not listed in alphabetical order, and Tyson is last, implying the least significant contribution. The last paper he's listed as a primary author on is in 1993, two years after he received his PhD. At best, you could say he had a very short career as a scientist of minimal significance, after which he became a planetarium director and moved into science popularization (all his books and TV appearances).
Tyson is horrible. The thing you have to remember is that he's not really a scientist - he's a planetarium director. OK, he has some name-brand degrees (Columbia PhD in Astrophysics), but then George Bush has a degree from Yale, so that's not a good measure of anything. Tyson claims to do research, but someone needs to point me to a paper he's written to demonstrate that he can legitimately be called a scientist.
We need Jason Bourne here. He'd say "This is where it ends!" and then anyone thinking about surveilling anyone else had better watch out, because Bourne will be surveilling them, only harder. Then the camera would start shaking even more wildly than it already was, the scene would get blurry, and the carnage would begin...
Well, yeah, but all this still assumes a 100% probability of an incident.
Yes, I stipulated that up front, which I'll quote again since it's relevant below: "He's wrong, of course. What he probably means is that *if* a nuclear weapon were detonated in a major city (the odds of which we can only guess at), then the probability of you dying as a result is far, far higher than for other kinds of incidents." That's all I'm claiming.
For any incident with a probability of 100% of it happening, only 2.5% victims is, indeed, a rather low rate.
If I read that literally, it's not right - can you give an example of something that, if it had a 100% probability of happening, would give a higher rate? A 100% probability of catastrophic eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, perhaps? But I assume that what you mean is that 2.5% victims might be a low rate given that the actual probability of a nuclear blast occurring is not 100%, but rather is very low. So let's examine that: let's say we expect one nuclear bomb to be detonated in a major U.S. city every 100 years, so there's a 1% chance of that in any given year. This would make the risk of dying in a nuclear blast 0.025%, which is nearly double the risk of dying in a motor vehicle accident (0.015%), which is one of the highest single categories. So even in that context, the nuclear blast compares pretty well. Of course, you can adjust the guesses in all sorts of ways and get different numbers, but hopefully you see the point.
The example of odds of dying of injury is an invalid comparison, as the risk of an incident happening at all is part of that calculation
It's a valid comparison if you have stipulated that you're talking about the probability of dying as a result of a nuclear blast that's actually happened.
It's common to talk about probabilities being very high relative to other similar probabilities. 2.5% is a VERY high probability of dying in a single incident, relative to other such risks. Take a look at the Odds of Dying at the National Safety Council. Your odds of dying of an injury from all external causes in a given year is 0.057% (1/1743). Your 2.5% is about 45 times that. That's VERY high.
As for knowing someone who died, if you live in the U.S., do you know anyone who was directly affected by the 9/11 attack? If not directly, how about at 1 degree of separation? For me, I know a handful of people directly and many more at 1 degree of separation, and I'm not even an American. An event that killed millions of people would have a direct effect, in terms of at least one death, on just about every community in the country.
Still not very shocking, by the numbers.
That probably implies that you haven't really thought about what the numbers mean. If you look at 2.5% and think how much less than 100% it is, then you're kind of missing the point. Rather, look at the next 100 people you see, and imagine 2.5 of them dead as the result of a single incident; extrapolate that to every group of 100 people in the country. Of course, that's not how the deaths would actually be distributed, but it might help get your head around what 2.5% really means in this case.
He's wrong, of course. What he probably means is that *if* a nuclear weapon were detonated in a major city (the odds of which we can only guess at), then the probability of you dying as a result is far, far higher than for other kinds of incidents, simply because so many more people are killed. And the probability of someone you know dying does indeed become VERY high.
Trash collection is a commodity service; if the company that hauls my trash refused to do it any more, in theory I could find another one and it wouldn't matter much (ignoring side issues like goverment monopolies). Most software is not that commoditized, though. When you're using a software service, you're typically dependent on a single provider for that specific service. So, it makes sense to be cautious about who you depend on, and what your recourse is if things go south.
In the absence of strong assurances from the application provider, it's actually pretty reasonable to decide you'll go it alone and control your servers and software yourself. People who use web services right now are taking a completely unquantifiable risk. It just so happens that so far, not many people have been seriously bitten by that risk. I'm sure that'll happen sooner or later, and then you'll see a flurry of reactions as users and providers try to cover themselves against such things in the future.
All the more reason not to mod jokes up as if they were serious comments.... Treating jokes as serious posts removes that filter.
We're dealing with the law of unintended consequences here. It doesn't help to complain at the people who are choosing the only option they have to get the result they're looking for. The only thing that will change anything is to fix the system so that people won't have a reason to abuse it. If you want posts to be reliably flagged as Funny, then Funny should be treated like any other mod so that there's no incentive to avoid it.
Good karma is supposed to...
If it's "supposed to" achieve something, then it should be designed to achieve that in the real world, not in some little rule-followers heaven in which everyone does exactly what you think they should do.
The point is that it does matter: awarding Funny confers no karma. You're complaining about the people working around the system. Unless you mean to defend the system, you've picked the wrong target.
But really, if I say, "Sani-Flush makes an excellent dentifrice" and someone who doesn't know what Sani-Flush is mods me up as "Informative", you'd have to admit that they're pretty clueless.
Perhaps, but that doesn't seem to be the situation here.
Slashdot Mirror
One part of the answer is that the U.S. is just a country like any other, full of flawed humans who are mostly competing in their own self-interest, just like everywhere else. Which country on Earth, if suddenly propelled into the position of richest & most militarily powerful, would not be "entertaining" in much the same way?
A lot of people knew who she was before that video, but at that time most people who had heard of her would have told you she was "just another heiress". The release of that first sex video was the launching point of her current fame.
Um, what did you do with the roach afterwards? I think I've seen its descendants in Manhattan. Some of them could take your head off with a single bite...
You're thinking of the Punto Banco variety, a.k.a. North American baccarat. The other major two varieties, Banque and Chermin de Fer - the latter being James Bond's preferred game - involve player skill, and game theoretic principles apply.
So British Intelligence's fiendishly clever baccarat-related questioning has already succeeded in weeding out a North American spy! It's off to the Tower with you!
Dude, if you're not already insanely wealthy and just posting on Slashdot for kicks, you should totally get into marketing.
I, for one, welcome our new implied-porn marketing overlord, and look forward to seeing your work during the next Superbowl. And then twice during every show after that.
In any case, regarding the bigotry of minimum expectations, I expect interlocutors to know that irregardless is not a real word. I bet Tyson uses it too.
They're not baseless, they're based on his body of work. What do *you* think it means when someone is listed last as an author on a paper with 22 authors? When the majority of someone's published output is popular work aimed at children, or adults with absolutely zero knowledge of the subject?
That's not to say science popularism is a bad thing - done well, it can be very useful. And science popularizers are sometimes also serious scientists: Carl Sagan was. But Tyson's science popularization is very low on content (see the comment, not mine, that started this subthread). His scientific career matches that.
Technically, I suppose I have to acknowledge that he qualifies as a scientist, in the same sort of way that George Bush qualifies as a leader. But there comes a point at which quality of performance is so low that you can reasonably say that someone is not a "real" scientist. That is the claim I am making about Tyson.
Not "is" a scientist. "Was" a scientist, briefly. Perhaps we have different definitions of "scientist", but in my book a planetarium director is not ipso facto a scientist, even if he manages to get his named tacked onto the end of some papers presumably as a kind of favor to the PR guy from the real scientists.
I think Tyson is a pretty good planetarium director, judging by the Rose Center. Although even that, for me, has a feel of style over substance, which matches Tyson's personality (but I don't know to what extent he was directly responsible for the nature of the overhaul). I appreciate the architectural and design elements, but the target audience of both the planetarium and Tyson's science popularization seems to be relentlessly stuck at a low grade-school level.
I think if Tyson were a real scientist, he'd recognize that the fuss over the designation "planet" is too arbitrary to be worth worrying much about, and it's silly to take a strong position on one side or the other *except* for tradition's sake. His position thus makes little sense, and it's telling that this is an issue that he chooses to take a stand on.
I'm neither dumb nor lazy, but I'm critical. Examine the papers at the link you gave. Numbers 13 and 11 have a long list of contributors not listed in alphabetical order, and Tyson is last, implying the least significant contribution. The last paper he's listed as a primary author on is in 1993, two years after he received his PhD. At best, you could say he had a very short career as a scientist of minimal significance, after which he became a planetarium director and moved into science popularization (all his books and TV appearances).
Tyson is horrible. The thing you have to remember is that he's not really a scientist - he's a planetarium director. OK, he has some name-brand degrees (Columbia PhD in Astrophysics), but then George Bush has a degree from Yale, so that's not a good measure of anything. Tyson claims to do research, but someone needs to point me to a paper he's written to demonstrate that he can legitimately be called a scientist.
R2D2 denies being self-excited, and says he only keeps replaying that hologram of Leia for sentimental reasons.
And what lesson did he/you learn from that?
You win Slashdot.
We need Jason Bourne here. He'd say "This is where it ends!" and then anyone thinking about surveilling anyone else had better watch out, because Bourne will be surveilling them, only harder. Then the camera would start shaking even more wildly than it already was, the scene would get blurry, and the carnage would begin...
I, along with xkcd, knew that if we waited long enough, the day would come when this sentence would be on topic:
Somebody set up us the bomb!
Don't forget that it was a French military team that saved New York in the remake of Godzilla. You should be grateful!
As for knowing someone who died, if you live in the U.S., do you know anyone who was directly affected by the 9/11 attack? If not directly, how about at 1 degree of separation? For me, I know a handful of people directly and many more at 1 degree of separation, and I'm not even an American. An event that killed millions of people would have a direct effect, in terms of at least one death, on just about every community in the country.That probably implies that you haven't really thought about what the numbers mean. If you look at 2.5% and think how much less than 100% it is, then you're kind of missing the point. Rather, look at the next 100 people you see, and imagine 2.5 of them dead as the result of a single incident; extrapolate that to every group of 100 people in the country. Of course, that's not how the deaths would actually be distributed, but it might help get your head around what 2.5% really means in this case.
He's wrong, of course. What he probably means is that *if* a nuclear weapon were detonated in a major city (the odds of which we can only guess at), then the probability of you dying as a result is far, far higher than for other kinds of incidents, simply because so many more people are killed. And the probability of someone you know dying does indeed become VERY high.
Trash collection is a commodity service; if the company that hauls my trash refused to do it any more, in theory I could find another one and it wouldn't matter much (ignoring side issues like goverment monopolies). Most software is not that commoditized, though. When you're using a software service, you're typically dependent on a single provider for that specific service. So, it makes sense to be cautious about who you depend on, and what your recourse is if things go south.
In the absence of strong assurances from the application provider, it's actually pretty reasonable to decide you'll go it alone and control your servers and software yourself. People who use web services right now are taking a completely unquantifiable risk. It just so happens that so far, not many people have been seriously bitten by that risk. I'm sure that'll happen sooner or later, and then you'll see a flurry of reactions as users and providers try to cover themselves against such things in the future.