there are as yet no actual (as opposed to theoretical-in-some-darkly-imagined-future) victims of non-neutral network practices.
But there are. There's the email delivery problem, as well as providers which block ports essentially for their convenience, with no oversight (not just SMTP ports but also e.g. web ports). While that would be fine if there were a free market, and you could just pick a competing provider, that's usually not the case when it comes to a high-bandwidth connection. Providing high bandwidth connections to homes requires regulation for various practical reasons, which results in semi-monopolies. What those semi-monopolies are allowed to do with their control over household and business connections needs to be regulated. The only question is exactly how.
Something similar applies as you go further upstream, into the Internet cloud itself: Tier 1 providers are an oligopoly which also benefit from regulation that allows them to do what they do. Once again, the question isn't whether there should be regulation, the question is what the regulation should be, and what rights and protections customers should have.
While I share the trepidation at what new legislation might bring, simply leaving it to the market isn't going work, because the market isn't even close to being "free". The reason this is coming up now is because big corporations are actively looking to consolidate their competitive positions now that the Internet has become so central to the economy, as well as looking for ways to replace profit centers that were undercut by the Internet. Sitting back and hoping that they won't do anything nasty and won't abuse the power that they've been granted by existing laws is hardly rational, either.
That post wasn't written by Xah Lee, he was just reposting someone's blog entry to Usenet as a kind of troll. Xah Lee's own posts aren't nearly as coherent, since he writes in a variety of Engrish. Of course, the submitter of the current article used a pseudonym used by the philosopher Kierkegaard, and could be anyone. However, I would bet against it being Xah Lee just because the English is too good.
They know as well as the rest of us that it will take about 3 days for everyone on the planet to dump Google as soon as a search engine without pages of fake sites filled with ads or just irrelivant sites is all you get
Yes, I'm familiar with that. But there are other things to search for besides porn, you know!
When your daughter does find this, it'll trigger the Internet Child Protection Act of 2012, her computer will automatically notify Homeland Security, and you'll be shipped off to New Guantanamo, located on an artificial island off the coast of California.
Nice try, but no cigar if you just cite the first result from Google Scholar without checking whether it actually contains the quote in question. Which it doesn't, afaict. The Mills autobiography just happens to contain some of the same words. Don't skip those Ritalin doses!
Just for the record (since sigs can change), the quote is "Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views".
A friend of mine once noticed a mains power anomaly being reported on a regular basis by his APC SmartUPS. He reported it and provided the info from the power supply's automated report to power company. Later that day, he got a call from the police wanting to know why he knew so much about the power system - the power company had "turned him in". The police accepted his explanation, but he (and I) were a bit taken aback by the incident.
BTW, where is your sig from? I like it. I'm still trying to learn those virtues, though...
"Paragon of literary merit"? I dunno, depends on who you compare him to. Compared to Melville, Dickens, and Dostoevsky, well sure, he's a paragon. What do the amphetamines have to do with anything, though? Judge the writing on its own merits. PKD's writing was original, edgy for the time, often thought-provoking, enjoyable. I don't like all of his stuff blindly, but I'd definitely say he holds up against many of the "classics", about whom you could say the same thing as far as their indulging of the popular drug of the time goes.
Have we considered, perhaps, taking a more nuanced position?
Various politicians have tried taking nuanced positions, and it has always failed. This tells us that the truth must therefore be either black, or white - the people have spoken. (New Orleans Mayor Nagin's attempt to inject chocolate into the national extremist culture will fail for this reason.)
How can you tell if granny is a terrorist or not before it has been settled by a court of law? You magically know the truth?
Pretty much, yeah. Here's how it works: sweet old granny, not a terrorist. Mean bitchy old granny, suspected of terrorism, probably a terrorist.
This is also how selection of political figures works, and is how we know, for example, the Pres. Bush is a good guy who only has our best interests at heart - he seems like a decent guy, right? (Well, "seemed" would be more accurate at this point: the magic isn't always perfect.)
While I'm being ever so slightly sarcastic above, the real point is that in fact, we as humans do use discretion all the time. This works on both sides: reporters decide not to publish something, police decide not to enforce something, prosecutors decide not to prosecute something, etc. The myth that we are "a nation of laws" and that everything can be made to follow the same set of written rules is right up there with Santa Claus: if everyone suddenly stopped applying discretion and just following the rules to the letter, the nation would implode in a matter of weeks or even days. Scandals often occur when individuals don't use their discretion: people like special prosecutors, for example.
If the photons stopped after one (objective) hour [...] If we instead measure subjectively
Everything in special relativity is "subjective" in the sense you're using here. I think that's the root of our difference: "technically", there is no "objective" frame of reference.
Since you have to ask, "that there is a fundamental difference between subatomic and superatomic reality."
But the knot metaphor is a terrible metaphor for that purpose, certainly no better than the one involving subatomic particles as little balls. Neither metaphor does do anything to show that matter is not made fundamentally of some kind of bits of "solid" stuff.
A good metaphor is not limited to a single subtopic of the area under discussion -- it is as broad as possible, and applies correctly to any permutation of the subtopic. Like, for example, using the metaphor of "masks" to explain how an actor's role works.
The "mask" is not a scientific metaphor. I doubt you can come up with an example of a scientific metaphor which has the characteristics you're talking about. You can use non-scientific metaphors to "explain" whatever you like, but you're back to fairy tales when it comes to relating them to science. There's a basic point here which you can't escape: science depends entirely on theories - to explain science, you must explain theories. To explain a scientific theory via metaphor, the metaphor must have a good connection to the theory. And if you try to beg off explaining scientific theories, then you're no longer explaining science.
I don't find your metaphor "laughable", but I'm telling you that it has no merit as a *scientific* metaphor, such as the rubber sheet model for GR spacetime. It also is highly questionable from a pedagogic perspective. I suggest sticking to more standard metaphors - this one wouldn't pass a peer review.
In your original example, and in an example like "Technically, he won the lottery", it is not grammar that determines the meaning of "technically". It is rather the context, the meaning of the surrounding text, and even precedent for the particular usage. But even in the sense of "Technically, he won the lottery", what "technically" means is something like "strictly speaking" or "according to the rules or laws". In the examples you gave, there is an implication that some other factor detracts from the technical situation, but you can't use that to back into an inverted definition of the word "technically". In the case of the photons, strictly speaking and according to the rules, photons do not travel at a speed of 2c relative to each other, so your usage is still incorrect.
Science is a way of determing the validity of a premise -- to use the modern day popular definitons, it's a way of creating knowledge. Science is not, however, a useful means of propogating knowledge. That task is part of Art, usually the art of writing, and metaphor is an artistic tool. We're not talking about scientific studies -- we are, in fact, talking about fairy tales and which ones are better to get the audience to understand the point.
Understand what point, exactly? The only way to make your fairy tale more meaningful than say, the one about bad monkey spirit juju which I mentioned earlier, is to ground it in some theory ("theory" in the scientific sense). Put another way, the only way we ever learn or understand anything is to express it in terms of something we already understand. The goal in this case is to communicate understanding (albeit partial) of a scientific theory. The only way to do that with a metaphor is if the metaphor is grounded in the theory, i.e. has specific connections to the theory, as I said. That's what scientific metaphors are about - if you disagree, perhaps you could come up with an example of a commonly used or otherwise credible scientific metaphor that doesn't fit this criterion.
If you're saying that you weren't going for a scientific metaphor, then you have to accept that your metaphor may not have any meaning from a scientific perspective, which further means it may not have much meaning at all, except as fiction (like the monkey juju). The idea of general metaphors that enhance one's holistic understanding sounds pretty, but the only way to measure a metaphor's value from a scientific communication perspective is to look at how well it corresponds to some theory.
"Technically", calling some arbitrary reference frame "the center of the Universe" has no meaning. It's just a reference frame like any other. Once again, you're using "technically" in a sense opposite to its usual meaning. "Technically, the Earth doesn't move" is similarly technically incorrect, since technically, motion is relative, and the Earth moves relative to every other external object in the universe. This is not a question of grammar, it's a question of semantics, i.e. the meaning of the word "technically".
As with the definition of "technically", I think we're working with different ideas of scientific metaphor. You can use the term "knot" as a way to communicate some intuition about a particular perspective on the structure of matter, as long as we're talking in the context of something like string theory, in which the subatomic particles we observe are all 4-dimensional projections of e.g. 11-dimensional strings. However, the issue with using this metaphor more generally is not whether string theory is correct, but rather that the metaphor is only meaningful as a way to understand string theory. Outside of the context of that theory, the metaphor is meaningless.
This is really a question of philosophy of science and epistemology - how do we know things about the world around us, and how do we separate good knowledge from bad. Scientific theories are a large part of the answer to that, but generalizing the knot metaphor as you've suggested loses the specific connection to theory that all good scientific metaphors have, turning it into little more than a fairy tale.
Also, the idea that "knot" communicates more than "blob" is speculation which would have to be tested. Following the loose metaphorical logic you've proposed, knots don't stop you from shrinking the kids, because you could just pull the knots tighter.
OK, so we're disagreeing about the use of the word "technically". To me, in this context, "technically" would imply something that's true with respect to the theories in question, rather than something that sounds true to a layman but doesn't make much sense in theory.
Re your metaphors, such things only make sense in the context of a particular theory, in order to help gain an intuitive grasp of the theory. You seem to be quite freely mixing both theories and metaphors. The standard flat rubber sheet metaphor for spacetime is merely a way to help visualize the relationship between curvature and the resulting potential forces, and doesn't even attempt to capture what a Riemannian hypersphere or the FRW metric looks like. It shouldn't be taken too literally as a model in its own right.
For example, to say that light "is" a ripple in spacetime goes beyond any existing theories - if we really thought that, we wouldn't need to spend billions of dollars building new particle accelerators to determine whether the Higgs boson really exists.
Finally, the business about knots would only make any kind of real sense in the context of something like string theory -- otherwise, it's a completely ungrounded term and you may as well just use "clump" or "blob" for all the explanatory power it has, i.e. not much. Mixing theories and metaphors like that, it's all too easy to cross the line into sheer BS, and laypeople could be forgiven for not being able to tell the difference between your explanations and a New Ager's "we create the universe with our thoughts via quantum reality", or for that matter the witchdoctor warning about the bad juju carried by the monkey spirits.
The reason I'm questioning what you wrote is precisely because I know that all movement is relative. Saying that "the relative speed of either photon from the other was 2c" is quite misleading. That certainly isn't true from the reference frame of either of the photons (see e.g. this comment). What you're saying is that in your example, from your or my reference frame, we can calculate (but not actually observe) that the distance between the two photons is increasing at a rate of 2c. However, "technically", that is not what is meant by relative velocity in special relativity, so it's not technically correct to say that "the relative speed of either photon from the other was 2c".
This is only technical, because light isn't really a wave or a particle -- it's a ripple in the fabric of spacetime, that isn't bound up in one of the knots we call matter.
A poetic effort, but that doesn't have anything to do with the issue at hand, and besides, doesn't correspond to any physical theory I'm aware of (special or general relativity, quantum mechanics, or even string/brane theory).
On a related note I recall reading some of the compiled data from supermarkets and there are some unexpected and oddly detailed correlations, one was if someone buys (IIRC) Ragu pasta sauce there is something like an 80% chance they also own a dog.
Yeah, my dog loves that stuff. But I certainly wouldn't feed it to humans!
Who'dathunk you had to explain money to accountants?
Actually, that's a pretty common requirement. The job of accountants is to record money flows, and partly because of the antiquated way in which they do that, they're often very bad at understanding the relationships between transactions.
In a sense, the whole purpose of Wall Street is to be stupid. Analysts encourage herd behavior which creates distortions which the smart people (mostly brokers and other insiders) can profit from. If you read Wall Street analyst reports and take them at face value, you're a mark who's probably already being fleeced. OTOH, if you read the reports and think to yourself "OK, what are all the other marks going to do as a result of this report?", that's a good start towards success in the market.
Explaining to company executives why complex software development takes a long time is often necessary during the development of a system. There's a tendency for management to unwittingly sabotage software development in many ways, such as by not recognizing the true costs of their unplanned-for requests. If management has even a vague understanding of the issues involved, it can help a lot in having a good relationship between developers and management, and ensuring that projects aren't cancelled to early due to unrealistic expectations, or don't end up in "death marches" which burn out programmers and sour management on all software development. As a consultant, I've seen this happen both ways. In all the cases where management "got it", it was only because developers had been successful in communicating to them why the job can be so difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
But there are. There's the email delivery problem, as well as providers which block ports essentially for their convenience, with no oversight (not just SMTP ports but also e.g. web ports). While that would be fine if there were a free market, and you could just pick a competing provider, that's usually not the case when it comes to a high-bandwidth connection. Providing high bandwidth connections to homes requires regulation for various practical reasons, which results in semi-monopolies. What those semi-monopolies are allowed to do with their control over household and business connections needs to be regulated. The only question is exactly how.
Something similar applies as you go further upstream, into the Internet cloud itself: Tier 1 providers are an oligopoly which also benefit from regulation that allows them to do what they do. Once again, the question isn't whether there should be regulation, the question is what the regulation should be, and what rights and protections customers should have.
While I share the trepidation at what new legislation might bring, simply leaving it to the market isn't going work, because the market isn't even close to being "free". The reason this is coming up now is because big corporations are actively looking to consolidate their competitive positions now that the Internet has become so central to the economy, as well as looking for ways to replace profit centers that were undercut by the Internet. Sitting back and hoping that they won't do anything nasty and won't abuse the power that they've been granted by existing laws is hardly rational, either.
Well, yeah, but you primitive humans were dumb. Modern humans have no excuse. Well, other than MTV.
That post wasn't written by Xah Lee, he was just reposting someone's blog entry to Usenet as a kind of troll. Xah Lee's own posts aren't nearly as coherent, since he writes in a variety of Engrish. Of course, the submitter of the current article used a pseudonym used by the philosopher Kierkegaard, and could be anyone. However, I would bet against it being Xah Lee just because the English is too good.
When your daughter does find this, it'll trigger the Internet Child Protection Act of 2012, her computer will automatically notify Homeland Security, and you'll be shipped off to New Guantanamo, located on an artificial island off the coast of California.
You must be new here.
Read all about it.
I sent a terminator unit back in time to kill all the Slashdotters who were about to make an obligatory Skynet joke.
Yeah, it looks like an interesting autobiography. Thanks! :)
Nice try, but no cigar if you just cite the first result from Google Scholar without checking whether it actually contains the quote in question. Which it doesn't, afaict. The Mills autobiography just happens to contain some of the same words. Don't skip those Ritalin doses!
Just for the record (since sigs can change), the quote is "Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views".
A friend of mine once noticed a mains power anomaly being reported on a regular basis by his APC SmartUPS. He reported it and provided the info from the power supply's automated report to power company. Later that day, he got a call from the police wanting to know why he knew so much about the power system - the power company had "turned him in". The police accepted his explanation, but he (and I) were a bit taken aback by the incident.
BTW, where is your sig from? I like it. I'm still trying to learn those virtues, though...
The great thinkers have a name for your conjecture: false dichotomy.
"Paragon of literary merit"? I dunno, depends on who you compare him to. Compared to Melville, Dickens, and Dostoevsky, well sure, he's a paragon. What do the amphetamines have to do with anything, though? Judge the writing on its own merits. PKD's writing was original, edgy for the time, often thought-provoking, enjoyable. I don't like all of his stuff blindly, but I'd definitely say he holds up against many of the "classics", about whom you could say the same thing as far as their indulging of the popular drug of the time goes.
Pretty much, yeah. Here's how it works: sweet old granny, not a terrorist. Mean bitchy old granny, suspected of terrorism, probably a terrorist.
This is also how selection of political figures works, and is how we know, for example, the Pres. Bush is a good guy who only has our best interests at heart - he seems like a decent guy, right? (Well, "seemed" would be more accurate at this point: the magic isn't always perfect.)
While I'm being ever so slightly sarcastic above, the real point is that in fact, we as humans do use discretion all the time. This works on both sides: reporters decide not to publish something, police decide not to enforce something, prosecutors decide not to prosecute something, etc. The myth that we are "a nation of laws" and that everything can be made to follow the same set of written rules is right up there with Santa Claus: if everyone suddenly stopped applying discretion and just following the rules to the letter, the nation would implode in a matter of weeks or even days. Scandals often occur when individuals don't use their discretion: people like special prosecutors, for example.
Everything in special relativity is "subjective" in the sense you're using here. I think that's the root of our difference: "technically", there is no "objective" frame of reference.
But the knot metaphor is a terrible metaphor for that purpose, certainly no better than the one involving subatomic particles as little balls. Neither metaphor does do anything to show that matter is not made fundamentally of some kind of bits of "solid" stuff.
The "mask" is not a scientific metaphor. I doubt you can come up with an example of a scientific metaphor which has the characteristics you're talking about. You can use non-scientific metaphors to "explain" whatever you like, but you're back to fairy tales when it comes to relating them to science. There's a basic point here which you can't escape: science depends entirely on theories - to explain science, you must explain theories. To explain a scientific theory via metaphor, the metaphor must have a good connection to the theory. And if you try to beg off explaining scientific theories, then you're no longer explaining science.
I don't find your metaphor "laughable", but I'm telling you that it has no merit as a *scientific* metaphor, such as the rubber sheet model for GR spacetime. It also is highly questionable from a pedagogic perspective. I suggest sticking to more standard metaphors - this one wouldn't pass a peer review.
Almost correct. He also shot himself in the back of the head a number of times.
In your original example, and in an example like "Technically, he won the lottery", it is not grammar that determines the meaning of "technically". It is rather the context, the meaning of the surrounding text, and even precedent for the particular usage. But even in the sense of "Technically, he won the lottery", what "technically" means is something like "strictly speaking" or "according to the rules or laws". In the examples you gave, there is an implication that some other factor detracts from the technical situation, but you can't use that to back into an inverted definition of the word "technically". In the case of the photons, strictly speaking and according to the rules, photons do not travel at a speed of 2c relative to each other, so your usage is still incorrect.
Understand what point, exactly? The only way to make your fairy tale more meaningful than say, the one about bad monkey spirit juju which I mentioned earlier, is to ground it in some theory ("theory" in the scientific sense). Put another way, the only way we ever learn or understand anything is to express it in terms of something we already understand. The goal in this case is to communicate understanding (albeit partial) of a scientific theory. The only way to do that with a metaphor is if the metaphor is grounded in the theory, i.e. has specific connections to the theory, as I said. That's what scientific metaphors are about - if you disagree, perhaps you could come up with an example of a commonly used or otherwise credible scientific metaphor that doesn't fit this criterion.
If you're saying that you weren't going for a scientific metaphor, then you have to accept that your metaphor may not have any meaning from a scientific perspective, which further means it may not have much meaning at all, except as fiction (like the monkey juju). The idea of general metaphors that enhance one's holistic understanding sounds pretty, but the only way to measure a metaphor's value from a scientific communication perspective is to look at how well it corresponds to some theory.
"Technically", calling some arbitrary reference frame "the center of the Universe" has no meaning. It's just a reference frame like any other. Once again, you're using "technically" in a sense opposite to its usual meaning. "Technically, the Earth doesn't move" is similarly technically incorrect, since technically, motion is relative, and the Earth moves relative to every other external object in the universe. This is not a question of grammar, it's a question of semantics, i.e. the meaning of the word "technically".
As with the definition of "technically", I think we're working with different ideas of scientific metaphor. You can use the term "knot" as a way to communicate some intuition about a particular perspective on the structure of matter, as long as we're talking in the context of something like string theory, in which the subatomic particles we observe are all 4-dimensional projections of e.g. 11-dimensional strings. However, the issue with using this metaphor more generally is not whether string theory is correct, but rather that the metaphor is only meaningful as a way to understand string theory. Outside of the context of that theory, the metaphor is meaningless.
This is really a question of philosophy of science and epistemology - how do we know things about the world around us, and how do we separate good knowledge from bad. Scientific theories are a large part of the answer to that, but generalizing the knot metaphor as you've suggested loses the specific connection to theory that all good scientific metaphors have, turning it into little more than a fairy tale.
Also, the idea that "knot" communicates more than "blob" is speculation which would have to be tested. Following the loose metaphorical logic you've proposed, knots don't stop you from shrinking the kids, because you could just pull the knots tighter.
OK, so we're disagreeing about the use of the word "technically". To me, in this context, "technically" would imply something that's true with respect to the theories in question, rather than something that sounds true to a layman but doesn't make much sense in theory.
Re your metaphors, such things only make sense in the context of a particular theory, in order to help gain an intuitive grasp of the theory. You seem to be quite freely mixing both theories and metaphors. The standard flat rubber sheet metaphor for spacetime is merely a way to help visualize the relationship between curvature and the resulting potential forces, and doesn't even attempt to capture what a Riemannian hypersphere or the FRW metric looks like. It shouldn't be taken too literally as a model in its own right.
For example, to say that light "is" a ripple in spacetime goes beyond any existing theories - if we really thought that, we wouldn't need to spend billions of dollars building new particle accelerators to determine whether the Higgs boson really exists.
Finally, the business about knots would only make any kind of real sense in the context of something like string theory -- otherwise, it's a completely ungrounded term and you may as well just use "clump" or "blob" for all the explanatory power it has, i.e. not much. Mixing theories and metaphors like that, it's all too easy to cross the line into sheer BS, and laypeople could be forgiven for not being able to tell the difference between your explanations and a New Ager's "we create the universe with our thoughts via quantum reality", or for that matter the witchdoctor warning about the bad juju carried by the monkey spirits.
The reason I'm questioning what you wrote is precisely because I know that all movement is relative. Saying that "the relative speed of either photon from the other was 2c" is quite misleading. That certainly isn't true from the reference frame of either of the photons (see e.g. this comment). What you're saying is that in your example, from your or my reference frame, we can calculate (but not actually observe) that the distance between the two photons is increasing at a rate of 2c. However, "technically", that is not what is meant by relative velocity in special relativity, so it's not technically correct to say that "the relative speed of either photon from the other was 2c".
A poetic effort, but that doesn't have anything to do with the issue at hand, and besides, doesn't correspond to any physical theory I'm aware of (special or general relativity, quantum mechanics, or even string/brane theory).
In a sense, the whole purpose of Wall Street is to be stupid. Analysts encourage herd behavior which creates distortions which the smart people (mostly brokers and other insiders) can profit from. If you read Wall Street analyst reports and take them at face value, you're a mark who's probably already being fleeced. OTOH, if you read the reports and think to yourself "OK, what are all the other marks going to do as a result of this report?", that's a good start towards success in the market.
Explaining to company executives why complex software development takes a long time is often necessary during the development of a system. There's a tendency for management to unwittingly sabotage software development in many ways, such as by not recognizing the true costs of their unplanned-for requests. If management has even a vague understanding of the issues involved, it can help a lot in having a good relationship between developers and management, and ensuring that projects aren't cancelled to early due to unrealistic expectations, or don't end up in "death marches" which burn out programmers and sour management on all software development. As a consultant, I've seen this happen both ways. In all the cases where management "got it", it was only because developers had been successful in communicating to them why the job can be so difficult.