Unfortunately, your dictionary quote undermines your point. For the sense in question, it says "plural usually geniuses". "Usually" implies to me that genii, while not preferred, is not necessarily invalid in this context - at least, I'd need to see some other sources.
In particular, since the author's meaning can be inferred from the context, it's not clear to me, based on the definition you quoted, that the author is wrong - in which case, you're berating him for simply not following a preferred usage, which seems a little extreme.
In addition, to draw conclusions about the validity of someone's argument based on a single grammatical error seems intolerant at best.
But more importantly, people should question everything, including stuff that "sounds" correct or more correct.
Maybe it is as much of a scam as we think - otherwise, why did Verisign issue "two certificates to an individual fraudulently claiming to be an employee of Microsoft Corporation"? (CERT Advisory CA-2001-04)
This article in The Register is about the tech industry, but applies equally well to other industries. From the article:
"Put simply, Wall Street celebrates efficient distribution [
and marketing?]: it doesn't reward innovation. The reasons for this are fairly simple, even though they sound a mite portentous.
"Capital went digital, fast and first, in the mid-1980s, and logically, it seeks rapid rewards. That's all that money wants to do. Financiers are now under greater pressure than ever to get return on investments, faster than ever, because now they get their asses kicked in real time. That, in a nutshell, is why the world seems poorer and more reductive than ever. Dumb money makes for a dumb culture, and tech [or medical] is no exception.
"Add to the mix the devious financial instruments, such as hedge funds, that were created in the 1980s, and you really have a new generation of finance capitalists that can't, or won't understand the fact that technology innovation requires a long pregnancy. Hey, they got the Internet for free remember, and that was paid for by the US government, so why can't all innovation come for free? Don't the Universities provide a tap, so rich that we can't turn it off? So in turn the young genii celebrate what they know brings rapid returns: commoditized distribution models, such as Dell."
A couple of my clients had Iridium phones. It couldn't have been that hard to get them. Or were you trying to buy from outside the US? In that case, you probably just ran into the typical ramp-up issues, where the domestic market gets first priority.
The Iridium technology and pricing were both a little on the iffy side. There were a lot of things wrong with the model, afaict.
This "trend" for geek influence is actually a good thing, certainly better than the tyranny of political correctness that the "Moral Majority" had previously attempted to impose on the "Real Majority"
Actually, political correctness is a way for an intelligent minority to communicate values to the masses, values which said masses seem incapable of understanding for themselves, such as "do not harrass or discriminate against people of a different race from yourself just because they're a different race".
...who saw them as a bunch of self-important pig-fucking hypocrites.
I'd rather be that, than a Bud-swilling, Survivor-watching, fat-assed moron. Oops, gotta watch my correctness...
I apologize, as you guessed, I was reading at a higher threshold - I thought you had posted a top-level reply to the article. You have restored my faith in Canadians. I won't admit my nationality, since my countrymen don't deserve the bad rap I would give them!
Should we ask people "Welcome to Canada. Do you plan on committing atrocities in America? No? Good. Business or Pleasure?"
you touch on an area of Epistemology, which says (summarizing you) "through abstration, will I (or, sentient beings in general) have infinite knowledge?"
That's not actually what I said, or meant. I specifically qualified with "given time and access to sufficient information". Clearly, we can never have infinite knowledge.
so... point being -- don't bank on the fact that we are able to (within these 3-lb bundles of fat) develop theories that encapsulate the entire cosmos, through abstration or otherwise.
I'm saying that given time, we are able to develop theories about anything for which we have access to sufficient information. Those theories are by definition and by necessity imperfect.
We already have theories which "encapsulate the entire cosmos"; however, there's certainly infinite room for improvement and extension of those theories. I've agreed we can't have infinite knowledge, which is why I said "we aren't capable of understanding it in any complete sense".
Nevertheless, we seem to be capable of developing some kind of understanding of any phenomenon we come across. You'll note I didn't rule out the possibility of coming across something that we cannot thus understand; I simply said it didn't seem likely, or that it was difficult to imagine. This is based on evidence to date, as any theory must be.
Any epistemology is necessarily a hypothesis or theory itself. From a fallibilist perspective (e.g. Lakatos, Popper), theories are considered sound if they can in principle be refuted, but have not yet been refuted despite many attempts to do so. In that sense, the epistemology I have laid out is sound. Like all theories, it has to compete against other theories, but an epistemology that claims that there are things we cannot develop theories about, because of the cognitive limitations of our brains, is simply speculating, since it has no evidence of such a situation. I therefore claim that my epistemology is more the stronger theory, based on the evidence available to us.
Unless this is nothing more than a childish troll, you seem to be confused. These iris scanners are being installed at airports in Canada, and will be used to screen passengers entering Canada, to speed up trips through customs.
If it did involve America somehow, "stopping people at the border" would involving shooting down Canadian planes entering American airspace. Based on your post, I'm not so sure that's a bad idea.
(Note: I am neither American nor Canadian. I am, however, against stupidity.)
when you're talking about claiming that life here didn't evolve because it's of alien origin, then how did those aliens come into existence?
We can only develop useful theories about things to which we have access to data. If we found old spaceship parts buried under the ocean somewhere, and other such evidence, we might develop a theory of alien origins for life on earth. We would have no basis on which to develop a theory of the aliens' origins.
BTW, I have to qualify what I said about alien origins being plausible. I was thinking about the idea of aliens having initially seeded early life on Earth, which as I said, is plausible but we have no evidence for it. However, I don't think it's very plausible that aliens might have faked the evolutionary record.
If you give a bit of thought, I think you'll agree that Andy was not saying anything in particular about big or tiny.
Hmmm... Regardless of Warhol's intent, it's easy to come up with a perfectly sensible interpretation of "tiny is the new big". Back before the eighties, big projects ruled: the moon landing, huge buildings, huge bridges. The expression "this is big" is rooted in this kind of mentality. But there seemed to come a time when we ran out of such noticeable big projects, or they became passe, and at about the same time electronics began causing things to shrink. Tiny things became fashionable. Some useful item that had been shrunk significantly was exciting, "big" news. Tiny had become the new big.
If Warhol intended to come up with a ridiculous statement in order to mock fashions, he would have needed to do better than that. But perhaps he was being subtle, or perhaps he was simply ahead of his time, and tiny didn't become the new big until after 1989. I don't really remember.
When you exist in a universe that is so much larger that you or your ego are
The universe is larger than my ego? I think not!!
BTW, the alien origins theory is quite plausible, but the problem is that you would need some little piece of evidence for it. Otherwise, it belongs in the realm of speculation, which is exactly where it has long been.
Re:Random Comments on Biology and Slashdot
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Ready, Steady, Evolve
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I agree with you about the reducibility of most allegedly irreducible complexity. But I'm going to nitpick almost everything else you said to death.
I think it's very wrong to generalize about "engineers" using those who post on Slashdot as a representative sample. On any given topic, including computer-related topics, a large number of/. posts exhibit a surprising degree of ignorance. I think, as with anything else (like TV news), when it's a field you're more familiar with, you're much more likely to notice the errors, as well as more likely to be judgemental about those errors.
Actually, I think it can be a mistake to even label someone "an engineer" and make significant assumptions of their strengths and weaknesses based on that. Most intelligent, thinking people (note I'm excluding well over 50% of the general population here) have multiple interests and strengths, and it's only the most narrow of these who have limited their life's scope to only those topics which directly affect their work.
As for talking monkeys, we are conceptualizing, abstracting, self-aware monkeys. Those qualities tend to make the particular animal family we belong to somewhat irrelevant.
Which brings me to understanding the cosmos - it's easy to prove that we aren't capable of understanding it in any complete sense. However, given time and access to sufficient information, we are capable of developing theories which encapsulate and communicate the essence of what's going on. It's difficult to imagine any rational, detectable process, which does not involve a deity, being impenetrable to the application of analysis and logic, and to the development of appropriate theories.
The idea that "there's no guarantee that it's all accessible to our brand of cognition or any other computation" tends to imply that there's an unknowable deity or equivalent process doing things that we can't possibly understand, and which defy logic. I don't think that's likely to be correct. What will stop us from knowing something are simply physical and logical limitations - we can't know what preceded our universe, or what's outside our universe, or what it's really like inside a black hole, etc. Some of these questions are essentially meaningless, at least to us. Already, at the quantum level, we're reduced to describing particles as clouds of probability - but this doesn't necessarily reflect a gap in our understanding at all. You could argue that the inside of a black hole or the exact nature of an electron are not "accessible to our brand of cognition", but it seems more likely that these things are fundamentally not accessible to three-dimensional creatures occupying four-dimensional spacetime in this particular universe.
Another physical limitation is the degree of complexity our brains are capable of entertaining. Our theories are all compressions of reality, and we never have access to nor time to process all possible relevant information. Our theories are always only simplified models and approximations. So it's a given that our understanding on any particular topic is always limited. But the flip side of that is that we are capable of coming to some understanding, however limited and gross, of any topic that is physically accessible to our inspection.
You used the plural of "glory", in the following sentence:
I wonder why only First-World Westerners are allowed any glories.
And the point of my post was to say I don't care about your notion of glory or glories, I care about people misstating or overstating facts, and thus misleading others, presumably to make themselves feel better about their heritage, or whatever. You thus begin a pointless contest with the Americans, which I now realize is probably your real goal. You don't care about truth or facts, you care about some notion of nationalistic or even racial pride, and "glories".
I couldn't care less about which of Dumont or the Wrights are more glorious, since I consider that a primitive and highly subjective notion, but I don't think it's accurate to say that either of them are "the real inventor" or "invented the airplane". Anyone who examines history with even the slightest degree of objectivity will realize that these are simplistic and trivial claims.
According to material I have found, the Wright Brother's 1903 flight actually did have a self-powered takeoff. However, they had difficulty repeating this feat (being so far ahead of everyone else!) and so began using a catapult.
Certainly, a repeatable self-powered takeoff was an advance, but that's a separate question from who was "the real inventor" of the airplane and other such claims. I don't think it would be fair to say that the Wright Brothers were the "real inventors" either; they were building on other's concepts, like all inventors. However, the Wright Brothers were the first to design, build and successfully fly an airplane that could be controlled while in the air.
and i never claimed that santos dumont "made the first flight" but that according to that definition of airplane i provided
his flight was the first with such a machine
This is perhaps a language difficulty. In English, we would not usually redefine "airplane" to make such a statement; instead, we would qualify what we mean by "flight", e.g. to say that "Santos Dumont made the first flight with a self-powered takeoff". (Although, as I have noted above, this may not be a true statement.)
No, not OK. Are you saying that the jet fighter planes which are still today catapult-launched off the decks of aircraft carriers are not airplanes?
To claim that Santos Dumont "made the first flight" is sheer delusion. For more detail on where I'm coming from, please read this post.
Re:There have always been 2 types of engineers
on
Engineer in a Box?
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· Score: 1
I was thinking, for example, of having attended Dean Kamen's showing of the Segway at Boston's Museum of Science. The crowd there could be described as adoring.
But you're right, you don't get much adoration the second you sell the rights to your inventions, whether as an employee or whatever.
I wonder why only First-World Westerners are allowed any glories. Even former Pres. Clinton admitted to Santos-Dumont's merits. Your aggressiveness and arrogance shows you are a mostly insecure person.
I'm not the person you were responding to, but having been born and raised in Africa, I'd like to point out that for me, the issue is not a nationalistic desire to see my own countrymen "glorified" (what a primitive notion!), but rather that when facts are presented, that they be as accurate as possible. This whole thread started with the claim that Dumont was "the real inventor" of the airplane, which clearly is an untrue claim, and also quite clearly provocative, so it's no surprise that it provoked a response from others.
It is no "glory" to anybody if something is claimed for Dumont that is not true. If you wish to promote Dumont, do so with accurate facts and claims.
thanks to this flight the "Archdecon Prize" was awarded to Santos Dumont, who had thus, solved the problem of making a heavier-than-air machine take off by its own means."
so, why would they write this if he wasn't the first to fly?
I've replied to you elsewhere, but for the benefit of others reading:
The Wright Brothers were the first to achieve sustained, controlled, powered flight (with an engine), in December of 1903. It's true that they launched by catapult, so possibly Santos Dumont was the first to perform a self-powered takeoff. However, you claimed Dumont as "the real inventor" who "invented the airplane". That's misleading, at best.
"Santos Dumont...solved the problem of making a heavier-than-air machine take off by its own means."
The Wright Brothers were the first to achieve sustained, controlled, powered flight (with an engine), in December of 1903. It's true that they launched by catapult, so possibly Santos Dumont was the first to perform a self-powered takeoff. However, you claimed Dumont as "the real inventor" who "invented the airplane". That's misleading, at best.
Slashdot Mirror
In particular, since the author's meaning can be inferred from the context, it's not clear to me, based on the definition you quoted, that the author is wrong - in which case, you're berating him for simply not following a preferred usage, which seems a little extreme.
In addition, to draw conclusions about the validity of someone's argument based on a single grammatical error seems intolerant at best.
But more importantly, people should question everything, including stuff that "sounds" correct or more correct.
Yes, I do like to do that! ;)
Maybe it is as much of a scam as we think - otherwise, why did Verisign issue "two certificates to an individual fraudulently claiming to be an employee of Microsoft Corporation"? (CERT Advisory CA-2001-04)
Nope. McCaw's a billionaire whose net worth goes way beyond Teledesic.
The Iridium technology and pricing were both a little on the iffy side. There were a lot of things wrong with the model, afaict.
One assumes you are not a professor of wireless networking! ;)
This post gives a decent capsule summary of what's going on here.
Actually, political correctness is a way for an intelligent minority to communicate values to the masses, values which said masses seem incapable of understanding for themselves, such as "do not harrass or discriminate against people of a different race from yourself just because they're a different race".
I'd rather be that, than a Bud-swilling, Survivor-watching, fat-assed moron. Oops, gotta watch my correctness...
Should we ask people "Welcome to Canada. Do you plan on committing atrocities in America? No? Good. Business or Pleasure?"
That would be the American thing to do, anyway...
That's not actually what I said, or meant. I specifically qualified with "given time and access to sufficient information". Clearly, we can never have infinite knowledge.
so... point being -- don't bank on the fact that we are able to (within these 3-lb bundles of fat) develop theories that encapsulate the entire cosmos, through abstration or otherwise.
I'm saying that given time, we are able to develop theories about anything for which we have access to sufficient information. Those theories are by definition and by necessity imperfect.
We already have theories which "encapsulate the entire cosmos"; however, there's certainly infinite room for improvement and extension of those theories. I've agreed we can't have infinite knowledge, which is why I said "we aren't capable of understanding it in any complete sense".
Nevertheless, we seem to be capable of developing some kind of understanding of any phenomenon we come across. You'll note I didn't rule out the possibility of coming across something that we cannot thus understand; I simply said it didn't seem likely, or that it was difficult to imagine. This is based on evidence to date, as any theory must be.
Any epistemology is necessarily a hypothesis or theory itself. From a fallibilist perspective (e.g. Lakatos, Popper), theories are considered sound if they can in principle be refuted, but have not yet been refuted despite many attempts to do so. In that sense, the epistemology I have laid out is sound. Like all theories, it has to compete against other theories, but an epistemology that claims that there are things we cannot develop theories about, because of the cognitive limitations of our brains, is simply speculating, since it has no evidence of such a situation. I therefore claim that my epistemology is more the stronger theory, based on the evidence available to us.
If it did involve America somehow, "stopping people at the border" would involving shooting down Canadian planes entering American airspace. Based on your post, I'm not so sure that's a bad idea.
(Note: I am neither American nor Canadian. I am, however, against stupidity.)
(And don't try to tell me that your .nu domain means that you're a native Niuean! :)
We can only develop useful theories about things to which we have access to data. If we found old spaceship parts buried under the ocean somewhere, and other such evidence, we might develop a theory of alien origins for life on earth. We would have no basis on which to develop a theory of the aliens' origins.
BTW, I have to qualify what I said about alien origins being plausible. I was thinking about the idea of aliens having initially seeded early life on Earth, which as I said, is plausible but we have no evidence for it. However, I don't think it's very plausible that aliens might have faked the evolutionary record.
Hmmm... Regardless of Warhol's intent, it's easy to come up with a perfectly sensible interpretation of "tiny is the new big". Back before the eighties, big projects ruled: the moon landing, huge buildings, huge bridges. The expression "this is big" is rooted in this kind of mentality. But there seemed to come a time when we ran out of such noticeable big projects, or they became passe, and at about the same time electronics began causing things to shrink. Tiny things became fashionable. Some useful item that had been shrunk significantly was exciting, "big" news. Tiny had become the new big.
If Warhol intended to come up with a ridiculous statement in order to mock fashions, he would have needed to do better than that. But perhaps he was being subtle, or perhaps he was simply ahead of his time, and tiny didn't become the new big until after 1989. I don't really remember.
The universe is larger than my ego? I think not!!
BTW, the alien origins theory is quite plausible, but the problem is that you would need some little piece of evidence for it. Otherwise, it belongs in the realm of speculation, which is exactly where it has long been.
I think it's very wrong to generalize about "engineers" using those who post on Slashdot as a representative sample. On any given topic, including computer-related topics, a large number of /. posts exhibit a surprising degree of ignorance. I think, as with anything else (like TV news), when it's a field you're more familiar with, you're much more likely to notice the errors, as well as more likely to be judgemental about those errors.
Actually, I think it can be a mistake to even label someone "an engineer" and make significant assumptions of their strengths and weaknesses based on that. Most intelligent, thinking people (note I'm excluding well over 50% of the general population here) have multiple interests and strengths, and it's only the most narrow of these who have limited their life's scope to only those topics which directly affect their work.
As for talking monkeys, we are conceptualizing, abstracting, self-aware monkeys. Those qualities tend to make the particular animal family we belong to somewhat irrelevant.
Which brings me to understanding the cosmos - it's easy to prove that we aren't capable of understanding it in any complete sense. However, given time and access to sufficient information, we are capable of developing theories which encapsulate and communicate the essence of what's going on. It's difficult to imagine any rational, detectable process, which does not involve a deity, being impenetrable to the application of analysis and logic, and to the development of appropriate theories.
The idea that "there's no guarantee that it's all accessible to our brand of cognition or any other computation" tends to imply that there's an unknowable deity or equivalent process doing things that we can't possibly understand, and which defy logic. I don't think that's likely to be correct. What will stop us from knowing something are simply physical and logical limitations - we can't know what preceded our universe, or what's outside our universe, or what it's really like inside a black hole, etc. Some of these questions are essentially meaningless, at least to us. Already, at the quantum level, we're reduced to describing particles as clouds of probability - but this doesn't necessarily reflect a gap in our understanding at all. You could argue that the inside of a black hole or the exact nature of an electron are not "accessible to our brand of cognition", but it seems more likely that these things are fundamentally not accessible to three-dimensional creatures occupying four-dimensional spacetime in this particular universe.
Another physical limitation is the degree of complexity our brains are capable of entertaining. Our theories are all compressions of reality, and we never have access to nor time to process all possible relevant information. Our theories are always only simplified models and approximations. So it's a given that our understanding on any particular topic is always limited. But the flip side of that is that we are capable of coming to some understanding, however limited and gross, of any topic that is physically accessible to our inspection.
You used the plural of "glory", in the following sentence:
And the point of my post was to say I don't care about your notion of glory or glories, I care about people misstating or overstating facts, and thus misleading others, presumably to make themselves feel better about their heritage, or whatever. You thus begin a pointless contest with the Americans, which I now realize is probably your real goal. You don't care about truth or facts, you care about some notion of nationalistic or even racial pride, and "glories".
I couldn't care less about which of Dumont or the Wrights are more glorious, since I consider that a primitive and highly subjective notion, but I don't think it's accurate to say that either of them are "the real inventor" or "invented the airplane". Anyone who examines history with even the slightest degree of objectivity will realize that these are simplistic and trivial claims.
Why have they departed from the industry standard spherical cow?
I just hope we never have to deal with quark aliens, whose bodies are made up of atoms made of hadrons which are actually quark stars...
Certainly, a repeatable self-powered takeoff was an advance, but that's a separate question from who was "the real inventor" of the airplane and other such claims. I don't think it would be fair to say that the Wright Brothers were the "real inventors" either; they were building on other's concepts, like all inventors. However, the Wright Brothers were the first to design, build and successfully fly an airplane that could be controlled while in the air.
and i never claimed that santos dumont "made the first flight" but that according to that definition of airplane i provided his flight was the first with such a machine
This is perhaps a language difficulty. In English, we would not usually redefine "airplane" to make such a statement; instead, we would qualify what we mean by "flight", e.g. to say that "Santos Dumont made the first flight with a self-powered takeoff". (Although, as I have noted above, this may not be a true statement.)
To claim that Santos Dumont "made the first flight" is sheer delusion. For more detail on where I'm coming from, please read this post.
But you're right, you don't get much adoration the second you sell the rights to your inventions, whether as an employee or whatever.
I'm not the person you were responding to, but having been born and raised in Africa, I'd like to point out that for me, the issue is not a nationalistic desire to see my own countrymen "glorified" (what a primitive notion!), but rather that when facts are presented, that they be as accurate as possible. This whole thread started with the claim that Dumont was "the real inventor" of the airplane, which clearly is an untrue claim, and also quite clearly provocative, so it's no surprise that it provoked a response from others.
It is no "glory" to anybody if something is claimed for Dumont that is not true. If you wish to promote Dumont, do so with accurate facts and claims.
so, why would they write this if he wasn't the first to fly?
I've replied to you elsewhere, but for the benefit of others reading:
The Wright Brothers were the first to achieve sustained, controlled, powered flight (with an engine), in December of 1903. It's true that they launched by catapult, so possibly Santos Dumont was the first to perform a self-powered takeoff. However, you claimed Dumont as "the real inventor" who "invented the airplane". That's misleading, at best.
The Wright Brothers were the first to achieve sustained, controlled, powered flight (with an engine), in December of 1903. It's true that they launched by catapult, so possibly Santos Dumont was the first to perform a self-powered takeoff. However, you claimed Dumont as "the real inventor" who "invented the airplane". That's misleading, at best.