>>Saying I saw a comet explode isn't science. >>Saying, "the comet exploded due to the melting of water ice as it neared the sun, similar comets should explode as they near the sun as water ice appears to be a fundamental structural element"
And this is where the general public would disagree with you, and (I'm guessing), most of the scientific community. Experimentation and observation are key components of what most people would define to be "science". If you go back to the grade school model of the scientific method, what you're focusing on is hypothesis development, to the exclusion of experimentation and observation. However, if this is the first time anyone saw a comet explode, I don't have enough facts to claim that it blew up for whatever reason. I publish a paper on my observation, and, over time, perhaps enough evidence will be collected that a hypothesis can be generated. This is how science actually works. You start with experiments and observations and generate theories from there.
The trouble with Popperism is that by fetishistically focusing on falsifiability as the criterion for scientific statements, this means that claiming "I saw a comet explode" is not a scientific statement, even though, as we just established, it is a critical part of the scientific process. And if it's unusual enough (I saw a burst of gamma rays before the star went supernova!) it is worth a scientific paper on its own.
>>It gets a touch harder with historical sciences like evolution, "the raptor evolved into the chicken," is a scientific statement because I can test it with DNA for example
Right, evolution is also not science, by Popper. It is a verifiable theory (I can see if DNA matches up in ways that would be predicted by evolution), but it is impossible to falsify.
That's why I think that the whole Popper thing is nonsense - I think both verifiability and falsifiability should be used, not just falsifiability.
>>The hallmark of science is the development of models that yield useful information, but the only way to know if the model is right is to test it
>>If Dragon Age was "trivially easy" to you, you need to play the unpatched version of Normal difficulty. Or just set difficulty to Hard.
It started off hard. Before you get Heal, and are limited in the number of healing potions you find and money to buy new ones, you really would have to think through each combat, which I liked.
After you get two mages with Heal and CC through the roof, there's pretty much no combats that can really challenge you.
>>I can't believe you favorably mention Mass Effect 2. Unless you totally suck at shooters, it's *much* easier than DAO.
ME1 has the same problem that DAO has - the crowd control in it is waay too powerful. In the final fight with Saren in ME1, he spent the entire time gently floating above the battlefield getting tossed about by my biotics like a balloon, while he got pepped down by three pistols.
In ME2, you can't use any CC effects on a monster until you've at least blown through their armor and shields, and on Veteran difficulty, the monsters do enough damage to drop you pretty quickly if you're not careful. Heavy Mechs have presented the biggest threat so far, because they can kill you in a couple seconds if you don't have cover, and they walk around cover. If there's two or more of them, this can be problematic to deal with.
Most fights, though, you're right - ME2 is pretty easy. You can one-shot pretty much anyone with a sniper rifle, and my class (Infiltrator) even gives you an easy-mode time dilation effect when you aim, meaning it is trivially easy to get headshots every time. The only limiting factor is the bizarrely low amount of ammo you get.
>>Dragon Age was really fucking hard, even on the normal difficulty.
It can be. Unless you have two mages. Then it's really fucking easy. You can keep enemies crowd controlled for the entire combat. The patch reduced the power of CC effects, but it was still really easy, since there's so much CC in the game.
I played through DAO on normal difficulty, and went through the entire final level without calling in any of the army I'd built up, without dying once. Actually, I take that back. A dispel magic bugged out once and failed to remove a Curse of Mortality from Alistair, and he went down once. But never got TPKed.
Just off the top of my head, a normal combat would go something like: Sleep Wait 9 seconds Waking Nightmares Cone of Cold Mass Paralysis Crushing Prison on any big bad guy, alternated with Force Bubble or whatever it's called...with the fighter and rogue stunning and chewing through the monsters one at a time. By this time, all the cooldowns would have come up again, rinse and repeat.
All my characters were in full plate except my rogue, who was in superior drakeskin leather, and everyone had a Con of at least 20 to avoid burst damage effects.
The only really hard combat in the game was with Flemeth, and that was because I tried it at level 8, without much of any potions on hand. When I tried it again with a party prepped for it, she went down pretty easy.
If you go with that definition, then economics and psychology are science.
In other words, if you're going to admit anyone that uses logic, observation, and rigorous statistics (but no experimentation) into the club of scientific disciplines, then you either have to admit nearly every discipline at a university, or nearly none of them.
As I said in my previous post, our current definitions are severely flawed. People who get a degree in Math at my university, get a Bachelor or Master of Arts, not science. But I'd argue that math guys use logic and, well, rigorous math more than nearly anyone else. Likewise, Philosophy people spend more time studying logic itself as a field than most science degrees, and likewise quite a bit of time making observations about the real world? Why is Philosophy not a science? People in economics do the same sort of modeling work, math, and observation that climate science people do, but they have an advantage in that they can often find natural experiments to prove or disprove their theories, whereas things like climatology, evolution, geology, etc. often have a hard time coming with actual experimental evidence.
No, but neither do astronomers, cosmologists, epidemiologists, paleontologists...
The ability to run experiments is not a necessary condition for a field to be a science.
Alternative explanation: they are not science, but are science-y, and so people label them science. And I wouldn't even give epidemiology that much credit.
Personally, I think our current definitions are insufficient. Perhaps we need a new term, like "Statistical Science" to label things like climate science and epidemiology. There's indistinguishable in practice from what stats-based psychology and sociology people do, if you think about it, but you can't call them "Social Science" because they study the real world, instead of people.
>>How very unscientific of you. Everything has to do with something. Now put your petty sarcasm away.
I think you're confusing "unscientific" with "everything that annoys syousef". If a scientist gets into an argument with another scientist over priority (and who published first IS related to science, whether you like it or not) annoys syousef, therefore, by definition, it is not science. Even though it is. Scientists working on their own are not scientists! Syousef says so!
Do you realize how uninformed you sound?
>>I'm saying that when all the other facts point to your intutition being wrong, you shouldn't spend half your life refusing to investigate the alternatives. THAT is unscientific.
Your only valid point is when people ignore conclusive evidence in favor of personal beliefs, that is unscientific.
But you are apparently ignorant of the fact that Bell's Theorem was published a decade after Einstein's death, and actual experiments came even later, so your claim that "Einstein argued the last half of his life against it" is completely fucking preposterous. Arguing for a position before conclusive experimental evidence comes in against it is completely scientific, which you'd understand if you understood anything.
>>See Bell's theorum which shows that it can't just be hidden variables.
No, it means there's (probably) no NON-LOCAL hidden variables. Given that nobody really understands what happens during wavefunction collapse (or rather, the mechanism behind it), it's hard to say that he's necessarily wrong. Quantum Mechanics are deeply weird, and science has been getting by describing how they work, rather than why.
I'm not sure why you're trying to claim that scientists can't use intuition in science - if that were the case, nothing would ever get done. He put forth the EPR Paradox, and experimentation eventually proved it wrong. That's how science is supposed to go.
>>Isaac Newton was a horrible little man. Ill tempered, neurotic, and did wild experiments that he was lucky didn't blind him. Let's not forget the nastiness with Leibniz.
Scientists can't get into nasty academic arguments? Really.
>>Galileo had the social skills of a village idiot
Scientists have to have social skills, now? What planet do you live on?
Your claim that these guys were not scientific may be valid (Galileo ignored evidence in favor of his theory), but your arguments against them have nothing to do with anything.
>>Thanks so much for pointing this out. It never ceases to amaze me how many scientists seem to believe blindly in some sort of simplified method taught in middle school or the interesting, but ultimately useless, Popperian epistemology.
Yeah, I've never understood why people prefer Popper's fetishistic focus on falsifiability to define what is "scientific", especially given what a large percentage of our knowledge is not falsifiable.
Consider: I observe a comet through my telescope and I see it explode as it gets near the sun. Nobody else was watching it at the time.
Most people would claim this is a "scientific observation". However, by Popper, it's not falsifiable (there's no way of proving that I'm not just lying about it), so it's not a "scientific" statement.
Therefore, I conclude that Popper's definition is full of shit.
>>But anyway, all of this is to say that this has gotten me thinking about how the scientific process may still be open to some innovation.
The sad fact is, there's a lot of work being done under the name of science that isn't really science, or perhaps, science-lite. Do you think "Climate Scientists" have the ability to run scientific experiments? (Let's start with 1,000 earths, add 100ppm of CO2 to half of them, and measure the difference in average temperature across 100 years.) No, of course not. But everyone calls it science anyway, because they publish papers, do a lot of modeling and data analysis and otherwise appear to be doing the same sort of things that real scientists do.
Of course, when you start getting picky about it, there's very few disciplines outside of physics that actually have the same ability to cleanly hold experimental variables in isolation from each other. People conducting "scientific" studies on education will take a group of 60 teachers, train half of them in some cool new teaching technique, and then study the differences in class test results between the control and experimental groups. But teachers and students are complex things, and so even if you show positive test gains, you can't be certain it was your nifty new teaching method.
In medicine, likewise, people will prove things conclusively (p 0.01!!) only to have another study show the exact opposite. Sometimes they'll go back and forth on a subject for years (consider the cell phone/cancer question, or if echinechea is good for you). And nobody really notices that by the statistics they throw around, it should be relatively impossible to get 10 different high confidence level studies all disagreeing on a subject (as long as we can assume there weren't 1000 studies that were being tossed in the trash to cherry pick the best ones). But people still toss around these high confidence factors as if they're meaningful.
It's actually a very serious problem in science right now. Either the above fields aren't science (or "scientific"), or the mathematical foundations of experimentation are all wrong. However, since we've doing quite well, thank you very much, people don't care very much, even if it floods us with anti-scientific health warnings on our soda cans and places of work, and results in a huge industry for people selling nonsensical "radiation barriers" for cell phones.
>>...Some random loser on Slashdot considers one of the most heralded video games of all time to be a 'failure', because he claims that he only 'reloaded' (wtf?) twice.
Says the Anonymous Coward?
FFVII was indeed a shitty game, in very large part because it was so easy (as well as the annoying linearity of the game). As I said, the only two combats I died were to Wrong Nnumber and Ruby Knight, or whatever the giant robot thing was. I didn't even spend much time leveling my party - I think I finished it somewhere at 30 or 40 hours. Uninstalled it, deleted my save files, and happily went back to better games. If a game can't provide even a basic enough challenge to lose once, then it doesn't interest me.
My wife beat FFVII the smart way - she downloaded all the FMVs and was done with in within an hour.
I'm not singling it out, though. Mass Effect 1 was trivially easy by the end of it, and Dragon Age as well. Why does it matter? Well, I got so annoyed at how easy it was by the end, I have no interest in buying any of the DLCs for it. (Sorry, Bioware.) And I did like all of these three games' stories, so it's not like I was prejudiced against them or anything. I just start rolling my eyes when it becomes apparent the game has a very low expectation of the intelligence or skill of its players. I'm much more of a Braid or Ikaruga person.
I'm playing through ME2 right now on Veteran difficulty, and it's about right on that setting. Every so often I get a combat where I actually have to think a bit about how I'm going to beat it, without the combat being overly ridiculous or impossible, and that's exactly what I want out of a game.
>>I believe this would be a big negative for Sony at a time when they are actually making headway in the console wars
Yeah. I don't think they'd be as suicidal for charging for access to all multiplayer gaming, like the surcharge pirates at Microsoft impose on everyone (want to play Castle Crashers, two at my place, two at your's? Okay, pony up the money for four Gold accounts, chumps).
If it was something like the mentioned "cloud storage space for games"... then it might be worth it. If I could upload saved games to their network, and download it at my friends house, avoiding the annoying of finding my USB drive, plugging it in, copying it, etc., that would be worth some money to me. Especially since it'd provide backup insurance for my saves in case my PS3 dies or gets stolen.
I don't give a rat's ass about early access to demos or the other nonsensical features they test marketed to people in Europe, and I think that cross-game voice chat should be a *core fucking feature*. The state of voice chat on the PS3 is abysmal compared with how easy it is on the Xbox360.
I consider a game to be a failure if I can play through the whole thing the first time through without dying. Final Fantasy VII was this way - I only died and reloaded when taking on the optional challenges like Wrong Number or Ruby.
A problem I've noted more recently is uneven difficulty levels in a game - they're easy hard at the beginning and then trivial by the end (Dragon Age, Mass Effect 1) or games that appear easy in the first couple levels or your first time through so you kick up the difficulty level to give yourself more of a challenge, and they become ridiculous (Halo 3 Legendary Mode).
Some games also conflate higher difficulty settings with "being higher level", and make the game impossible if you think "Difficult" could possibly be played by an experienced player with a 1st level character. Dark Alliance 2 was this way. Sacred 2 and Diablo 2 were as well, but at least they made you beat the game once before you could turn on Nightmare difficulty. While you could still be underleveled for it, at least you couldn't stumble into it with a 1st level character, like you could in DA2. Even still, I hate game mechanics that have a "you must be this tall to play" mechanic in place, like in Diablo 2.
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system
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Review: Mass Effect 2
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· Score: 1
The missions themselves are horribly linear. It essentially puts you into a very long corridor, down which you walk and shoot things.
>>The thing is, I dare the super-bowl to try and attack some of the clients I helped set up a super-bowl party for.
Then I dare you to report him to the NFL, and see what happens.
Or is that a Double Dare? I can't remember the rules.
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system
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Review: Mass Effect 2
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· Score: 1
>>But seriously, the game has very slow combat, annoying ammo problems, incredibly lacking skill/ability trees, horribly tedious resource gathering (that's basically forced on you to get upgrades for your stuff), and almost all missions are very brief compared to ME1 and other games.
Well, ME1 suffered from horribly linear missions (usually you were limited to a single track that you ran down), trivially easy difficulty once you got your barrier skill maxxed out, ugly graphics (though not as bad as Jade Empire's angular robots) and otherwise was quite boring outside of the storyline and world background itself (which I loved - I liked the effort they put into making a future world that was relatively compatible with real-world physics).
ME2 has an amazingly boring leveling system, has ammo, and very limited supplies of bullets too, in a world where guns create their own ammo! Oh, they're "heat clips". So why the fuck can't I pull one out of my pistol and stick it in my sniper rifle so I can shoot it more than 10 times in a row?
It does have beautiful graphics, the ability to hotkey the abilities of allies (which makes up for the relatively simple character design), the ability to do paragon or renegade actions in the middle of conversations, and isn't so bad (yet) that I forget about it. I'm also playing it through on veteran difficulty my first time through, which helps with the fact that Bioware expects the average player to be wearing a bicycle helmet.
I think an 8 sounds about right to me, too. (You hear that, Metacritic?)
>>Someone from Taiwan speaks mandarin natively, but may not understand simplified characters, since they still use the traditional set there (a Taiwanese girl sat next to me in my Beginning Mandarin class, her sole purpose being to learn simplified characters).
It takes a few weeks to learn simplified characters. There's a pattern to how they're done, so it's not very hard. And simplified characters are similar to how Chinese people have been doing shorthand for years, so it's not a bad idea to learn them anyway, since it can speed up note taking (drawing a single line instead of four dots is a lot faster).
>>Similarly, someone from China is almost guaranteed to speak Mandarin, but will not be familiar with traditional characters unless they are highly educated
I learned traditional characters when I took Mandarin myself, but I was fine when I went to the PRC by myself for a month. I hired a couple 20-somethings as a tour guide in Beijing, and they were were actually kind of shocked when I could read the traditional-character inscriptions on some of the older monuments. It is harder to go from simplified to traditional than the other way around (which is why I learned traditional characters, even though it made me irritated sometimes writing 32 strokes for renshi, when it's like 8 in simplified). Traditional characters also make a lot more sense.
>>Many Kanji (Japanese characters) are also simplified, but not in the same way as the Chinese simplified set. Additionally, Japanese is a very different language from Chinese, so while a Japanese person might recognize the characters, the sentence is so grammatically different that it's unintelligible.
Sure. But they tend to just use Kanji for meanings for specific things (usually places, names, or things like "fire" or "seafood" or whatever), and use hiragana or katakana for the rest, mixing them all together, as you say. The characters aren't actually simplified (Kanji characters are akin to traditional characters), but about 10% are Kanji-specific. However, if you are literate in traditional Characters, you can read pretty much anything in Kanji. My Chinese wife could understand the Japanese in FFXI since there was a lot of Kanji flying around. I was able to navigate around with non-English Tokyo maps because I knew that the mountain-hand line was the main loop around Tokyo, which stopped by xin1su4 zhan4/new night station/Shinjuku Station.
>>I have no direct experience with Korean use of Chinese characters, but my understanding based on conversations with South Korean friends is that it's similar to what the Japanese have done.
Koreans have traditionally studied Chinese characters, but have moved away from it in recent years in a spirit of nationalism, in preference for Hangul. However, even up through about 30-40 years ago, their newspapers were published using Chinese characters, and my Korean friends still recognize a lot of characters, even if they don't have the same level of fluency with them that their parents and grandparents do.
>>This is unambiguously false when measured by utility. Ideogrammatic scripts take longer to learn, are slower to read and write, and mostly convey no information on pronunciation.
Eh, you can usually guess how a Chinese character is pronounced. It doesn't look that way to English speakers, but it's true.
The main difference is if you want your written language to convey how people speak a word, or the word's meaning. Old English is unintelligible to us because spoken language changes over time. However, you can read pretty much anything written after 400AD in Chinese, since the written language has remained the same, with the exception of the abomination that is simplified characters.
There's actually a lot of utility in this. You can travel to areas where there are mutually unintelligible languages or dialects, and still be able to communicate using written language. If I know Mandarin, I can still write down directions for my Cantonese taxi driver, or communicate with Japanese and (to a lesser extent) Korean people due to the fact that the characters are the same across regional and national boundaries.
Characters don't work very well with computers though, meaning you have to go through the process of typing in the pinyin for a word and then picking out the right character that you want (since many characters share pronunciation, though less if you can indicate tone as well). However, you end up getting an entire word with one or two characters, so overall an experienced Chinese typist can probably write at around the same speed as an English one. Probably less typos, too.
The article summary is wrong, though. You don't necessarily have to have a pressure sensitive pad to write characters. My touch input for characters works just fine by figuring out what I'm trying to write, and replacing it with a or whatever instead. Typefaces are pretty much always going to look better than the kindergarten-type scrawl you get from touchpads when trying to enter characters.
My aunt is the opposite, reading DailyKos daily and Rachel Maddow. It doesn't matter whether it's the left or the right - what matters is that with so many news sources today, you can make sure that the news you see, read, and hear, is news that the source knows you'll agree with, and they can take advantage of that.
Which is arguably better than just getting the left-wing perspective as we've had since the 1970s. And only people further left wing than the mainstream media even try to make the laughable claim the media isn't liberal - when news reporters vote 80-90% for Democrats. (Oh, but they keep their biases out of it! Lol.)
Cogsci has long been an interest to me, and studies have actually shown that part of the cause of decline of mental facilities from aging is due to becoming fixed in one's ways and never hearing opposite viewpoints or entertaining notions contrary to our prevailing beliefs.
For that reason, I listen to and read both the most left-wing (Pacifica Radio / our local socialist newspaper) and the most right wing (Glen Beck, WND) on a regular basis. Whenever there's a conflict between them, I go out and do the research myself. Sometimes Fox News is wrong, and sometimes they're right and the liberal sources are wrong.
>>You can't calculate the universe from within itself any more than a VMWare can run a machine faster than the host processor.
What if the universe was made up by nothing but an (intelligent) bowling ball traveling through otherwise empty space? It's pretty easy to figure out where you'll be in 10 years.
That said, the whole computability argument is bunk, since the Halting Problem tells us that there are some things that are just not computable. If we have a universe consisting of nothing but a pool table and some (intelligent) billiard balls, we can predict the future to any arbitrary degree of accuracy. But if these same billiard balls are programmed to never go where they're supposed to go, then the result is indeterminate, as in the halting program.
This is actually the reason why I believe in Free Will. Determinism is provably impossible.
Well, when I wrote a neural net spam filter back in the day, and trained it on thousands of spam emails, I found that the percentage of capital letters in the email was AS GOOD AS ANY OTHER INDICATION THAT A MESSAGE WAS SPAM.
>>How many of us have played J-RPGs that have been "localized" and made terrible either by censorship or by forcing us to listen to sub-par English voice actors?
On the positive side, my friends think that texting "..." is now an acceptable form of communication.
But yeah, it sounds like a pretty weak excuse to me.
Then it just means you're repeating ideas without knowing where they came from. You ought to read him - it'll give you more ammunition for why America sucks and why Pol Pot's Cambodia was such a great country.
>>But the government has long since stopped serving the people.
If you were in the National Guard, you actually would serve the people, in a direct sense, when they do disaster relief. They're a lot better at it than the FEMA folks, who mainly just run around flapping their hands and writing checks.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Saying I saw a comet explode isn't science.
>>Saying, "the comet exploded due to the melting of water ice as it neared the sun, similar comets should explode as they near the sun as water ice appears to be a fundamental structural element"
And this is where the general public would disagree with you, and (I'm guessing), most of the scientific community. Experimentation and observation are key components of what most people would define to be "science". If you go back to the grade school model of the scientific method, what you're focusing on is hypothesis development, to the exclusion of experimentation and observation. However, if this is the first time anyone saw a comet explode, I don't have enough facts to claim that it blew up for whatever reason. I publish a paper on my observation, and, over time, perhaps enough evidence will be collected that a hypothesis can be generated. This is how science actually works. You start with experiments and observations and generate theories from there.
The trouble with Popperism is that by fetishistically focusing on falsifiability as the criterion for scientific statements, this means that claiming "I saw a comet explode" is not a scientific statement, even though, as we just established, it is a critical part of the scientific process. And if it's unusual enough (I saw a burst of gamma rays before the star went supernova!) it is worth a scientific paper on its own.
>>It gets a touch harder with historical sciences like evolution, "the raptor evolved into the chicken," is a scientific statement because I can test it with DNA for example
Right, evolution is also not science, by Popper. It is a verifiable theory (I can see if DNA matches up in ways that would be predicted by evolution), but it is impossible to falsify.
That's why I think that the whole Popper thing is nonsense - I think both verifiability and falsifiability should be used, not just falsifiability.
>>The hallmark of science is the development of models that yield useful information, but the only way to know if the model is right is to test it
And by this statement, I think you agree with me.
>>If Dragon Age was "trivially easy" to you, you need to play the unpatched version of Normal difficulty. Or just set difficulty to Hard.
It started off hard. Before you get Heal, and are limited in the number of healing potions you find and money to buy new ones, you really would have to think through each combat, which I liked.
After you get two mages with Heal and CC through the roof, there's pretty much no combats that can really challenge you.
>>I can't believe you favorably mention Mass Effect 2. Unless you totally suck at shooters, it's *much* easier than DAO.
ME1 has the same problem that DAO has - the crowd control in it is waay too powerful. In the final fight with Saren in ME1, he spent the entire time gently floating above the battlefield getting tossed about by my biotics like a balloon, while he got pepped down by three pistols.
In ME2, you can't use any CC effects on a monster until you've at least blown through their armor and shields, and on Veteran difficulty, the monsters do enough damage to drop you pretty quickly if you're not careful. Heavy Mechs have presented the biggest threat so far, because they can kill you in a couple seconds if you don't have cover, and they walk around cover. If there's two or more of them, this can be problematic to deal with.
Most fights, though, you're right - ME2 is pretty easy. You can one-shot pretty much anyone with a sniper rifle, and my class (Infiltrator) even gives you an easy-mode time dilation effect when you aim, meaning it is trivially easy to get headshots every time. The only limiting factor is the bizarrely low amount of ammo you get.
>>Dragon Age was really fucking hard, even on the normal difficulty.
It can be. Unless you have two mages. Then it's really fucking easy. You can keep enemies crowd controlled for the entire combat. The patch reduced the power of CC effects, but it was still really easy, since there's so much CC in the game.
I played through DAO on normal difficulty, and went through the entire final level without calling in any of the army I'd built up, without dying once. Actually, I take that back. A dispel magic bugged out once and failed to remove a Curse of Mortality from Alistair, and he went down once. But never got TPKed.
Just off the top of my head, a normal combat would go something like: ...with the fighter and rogue stunning and chewing through the monsters one at a time. By this time, all the cooldowns would have come up again, rinse and repeat.
Sleep
Wait 9 seconds
Waking Nightmares
Cone of Cold
Mass Paralysis
Crushing Prison on any big bad guy, alternated with Force Bubble or whatever it's called
All my characters were in full plate except my rogue, who was in superior drakeskin leather, and everyone had a Con of at least 20 to avoid burst damage effects.
The only really hard combat in the game was with Flemeth, and that was because I tried it at level 8, without much of any potions on hand. When I tried it again with a party prepped for it, she went down pretty easy.
If you go with that definition, then economics and psychology are science.
In other words, if you're going to admit anyone that uses logic, observation, and rigorous statistics (but no experimentation) into the club of scientific disciplines, then you either have to admit nearly every discipline at a university, or nearly none of them.
As I said in my previous post, our current definitions are severely flawed. People who get a degree in Math at my university, get a Bachelor or Master of Arts, not science. But I'd argue that math guys use logic and, well, rigorous math more than nearly anyone else. Likewise, Philosophy people spend more time studying logic itself as a field than most science degrees, and likewise quite a bit of time making observations about the real world? Why is Philosophy not a science? People in economics do the same sort of modeling work, math, and observation that climate science people do, but they have an advantage in that they can often find natural experiments to prove or disprove their theories, whereas things like climatology, evolution, geology, etc. often have a hard time coming with actual experimental evidence.
No, but neither do astronomers, cosmologists, epidemiologists, paleontologists...
The ability to run experiments is not a necessary condition for a field to be a science.
Alternative explanation: they are not science, but are science-y, and so people label them science. And I wouldn't even give epidemiology that much credit.
Personally, I think our current definitions are insufficient. Perhaps we need a new term, like "Statistical Science" to label things like climate science and epidemiology. There's indistinguishable in practice from what stats-based psychology and sociology people do, if you think about it, but you can't call them "Social Science" because they study the real world, instead of people.
>>How very unscientific of you. Everything has to do with something. Now put your petty sarcasm away.
I think you're confusing "unscientific" with "everything that annoys syousef". If a scientist gets into an argument with another scientist over priority (and who published first IS related to science, whether you like it or not) annoys syousef, therefore, by definition, it is not science. Even though it is. Scientists working on their own are not scientists! Syousef says so!
Do you realize how uninformed you sound?
>>I'm saying that when all the other facts point to your intutition being wrong, you shouldn't spend half your life refusing to investigate the alternatives. THAT is unscientific.
Your only valid point is when people ignore conclusive evidence in favor of personal beliefs, that is unscientific.
But you are apparently ignorant of the fact that Bell's Theorem was published a decade after Einstein's death, and actual experiments came even later, so your claim that "Einstein argued the last half of his life against it" is completely fucking preposterous. Arguing for a position before conclusive experimental evidence comes in against it is completely scientific, which you'd understand if you understood anything.
>>See Bell's theorum which shows that it can't just be hidden variables.
No, it means there's (probably) no NON-LOCAL hidden variables. Given that nobody really understands what happens during wavefunction collapse (or rather, the mechanism behind it), it's hard to say that he's necessarily wrong. Quantum Mechanics are deeply weird, and science has been getting by describing how they work, rather than why.
I'm not sure why you're trying to claim that scientists can't use intuition in science - if that were the case, nothing would ever get done. He put forth the EPR Paradox, and experimentation eventually proved it wrong. That's how science is supposed to go.
On the other side, Hoyle famously rejected the notion of the Big Bang because he believed it would imply God existed, and he fought tooth and nail against it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_the_Big_Bang
>>Isaac Newton was a horrible little man. Ill tempered, neurotic, and did wild experiments that he was lucky didn't blind him. Let's not forget the nastiness with Leibniz.
Scientists can't get into nasty academic arguments? Really.
>>Galileo had the social skills of a village idiot
Scientists have to have social skills, now? What planet do you live on?
Your claim that these guys were not scientific may be valid (Galileo ignored evidence in favor of his theory), but your arguments against them have nothing to do with anything.
>>Thanks so much for pointing this out. It never ceases to amaze me how many scientists seem to believe blindly in some sort of simplified method taught in middle school or the interesting, but ultimately useless, Popperian epistemology.
Yeah, I've never understood why people prefer Popper's fetishistic focus on falsifiability to define what is "scientific", especially given what a large percentage of our knowledge is not falsifiable.
Consider:
I observe a comet through my telescope and I see it explode as it gets near the sun. Nobody else was watching it at the time.
Most people would claim this is a "scientific observation". However, by Popper, it's not falsifiable (there's no way of proving that I'm not just lying about it), so it's not a "scientific" statement.
Therefore, I conclude that Popper's definition is full of shit.
>>But anyway, all of this is to say that this has gotten me thinking about how the scientific process may still be open to some innovation.
The sad fact is, there's a lot of work being done under the name of science that isn't really science, or perhaps, science-lite. Do you think "Climate Scientists" have the ability to run scientific experiments? (Let's start with 1,000 earths, add 100ppm of CO2 to half of them, and measure the difference in average temperature across 100 years.) No, of course not. But everyone calls it science anyway, because they publish papers, do a lot of modeling and data analysis and otherwise appear to be doing the same sort of things that real scientists do.
Of course, when you start getting picky about it, there's very few disciplines outside of physics that actually have the same ability to cleanly hold experimental variables in isolation from each other. People conducting "scientific" studies on education will take a group of 60 teachers, train half of them in some cool new teaching technique, and then study the differences in class test results between the control and experimental groups. But teachers and students are complex things, and so even if you show positive test gains, you can't be certain it was your nifty new teaching method.
In medicine, likewise, people will prove things conclusively (p 0.01!!) only to have another study show the exact opposite. Sometimes they'll go back and forth on a subject for years (consider the cell phone/cancer question, or if echinechea is good for you). And nobody really notices that by the statistics they throw around, it should be relatively impossible to get 10 different high confidence level studies all disagreeing on a subject (as long as we can assume there weren't 1000 studies that were being tossed in the trash to cherry pick the best ones). But people still toss around these high confidence factors as if they're meaningful.
It's actually a very serious problem in science right now. Either the above fields aren't science (or "scientific"), or the mathematical foundations of experimentation are all wrong. However, since we've doing quite well, thank you very much, people don't care very much, even if it floods us with anti-scientific health warnings on our soda cans and places of work, and results in a huge industry for people selling nonsensical "radiation barriers" for cell phones.
>>...Some random loser on Slashdot considers one of the most heralded video games of all time to be a 'failure', because he claims that he only 'reloaded' (wtf?) twice.
Says the Anonymous Coward?
FFVII was indeed a shitty game, in very large part because it was so easy (as well as the annoying linearity of the game). As I said, the only two combats I died were to Wrong Nnumber and Ruby Knight, or whatever the giant robot thing was. I didn't even spend much time leveling my party - I think I finished it somewhere at 30 or 40 hours. Uninstalled it, deleted my save files, and happily went back to better games. If a game can't provide even a basic enough challenge to lose once, then it doesn't interest me.
My wife beat FFVII the smart way - she downloaded all the FMVs and was done with in within an hour.
I'm not singling it out, though. Mass Effect 1 was trivially easy by the end of it, and Dragon Age as well. Why does it matter? Well, I got so annoyed at how easy it was by the end, I have no interest in buying any of the DLCs for it. (Sorry, Bioware.) And I did like all of these three games' stories, so it's not like I was prejudiced against them or anything. I just start rolling my eyes when it becomes apparent the game has a very low expectation of the intelligence or skill of its players. I'm much more of a Braid or Ikaruga person.
I'm playing through ME2 right now on Veteran difficulty, and it's about right on that setting. Every so often I get a combat where I actually have to think a bit about how I'm going to beat it, without the combat being overly ridiculous or impossible, and that's exactly what I want out of a game.
>>I believe this would be a big negative for Sony at a time when they are actually making headway in the console wars
Yeah. I don't think they'd be as suicidal for charging for access to all multiplayer gaming, like the surcharge pirates at Microsoft impose on everyone (want to play Castle Crashers, two at my place, two at your's? Okay, pony up the money for four Gold accounts, chumps).
If it was something like the mentioned "cloud storage space for games"... then it might be worth it. If I could upload saved games to their network, and download it at my friends house, avoiding the annoying of finding my USB drive, plugging it in, copying it, etc., that would be worth some money to me. Especially since it'd provide backup insurance for my saves in case my PS3 dies or gets stolen.
I don't give a rat's ass about early access to demos or the other nonsensical features they test marketed to people in Europe, and I think that cross-game voice chat should be a *core fucking feature*. The state of voice chat on the PS3 is abysmal compared with how easy it is on the Xbox360.
I consider a game to be a failure if I can play through the whole thing the first time through without dying. Final Fantasy VII was this way - I only died and reloaded when taking on the optional challenges like Wrong Number or Ruby.
A problem I've noted more recently is uneven difficulty levels in a game - they're easy hard at the beginning and then trivial by the end (Dragon Age, Mass Effect 1) or games that appear easy in the first couple levels or your first time through so you kick up the difficulty level to give yourself more of a challenge, and they become ridiculous (Halo 3 Legendary Mode).
Some games also conflate higher difficulty settings with "being higher level", and make the game impossible if you think "Difficult" could possibly be played by an experienced player with a 1st level character. Dark Alliance 2 was this way. Sacred 2 and Diablo 2 were as well, but at least they made you beat the game once before you could turn on Nightmare difficulty. While you could still be underleveled for it, at least you couldn't stumble into it with a 1st level character, like you could in DA2. Even still, I hate game mechanics that have a "you must be this tall to play" mechanic in place, like in Diablo 2.
The missions themselves are horribly linear. It essentially puts you into a very long corridor, down which you walk and shoot things.
>>The thing is, I dare the super-bowl to try and attack some of the clients I helped set up a super-bowl party for.
Then I dare you to report him to the NFL, and see what happens.
Or is that a Double Dare? I can't remember the rules.
>>But seriously, the game has very slow combat, annoying ammo problems, incredibly lacking skill/ability trees, horribly tedious resource gathering (that's basically forced on you to get upgrades for your stuff), and almost all missions are very brief compared to ME1 and other games.
Well, ME1 suffered from horribly linear missions (usually you were limited to a single track that you ran down), trivially easy difficulty once you got your barrier skill maxxed out, ugly graphics (though not as bad as Jade Empire's angular robots) and otherwise was quite boring outside of the storyline and world background itself (which I loved - I liked the effort they put into making a future world that was relatively compatible with real-world physics).
ME2 has an amazingly boring leveling system, has ammo, and very limited supplies of bullets too, in a world where guns create their own ammo! Oh, they're "heat clips". So why the fuck can't I pull one out of my pistol and stick it in my sniper rifle so I can shoot it more than 10 times in a row?
It does have beautiful graphics, the ability to hotkey the abilities of allies (which makes up for the relatively simple character design), the ability to do paragon or renegade actions in the middle of conversations, and isn't so bad (yet) that I forget about it. I'm also playing it through on veteran difficulty my first time through, which helps with the fact that Bioware expects the average player to be wearing a bicycle helmet.
I think an 8 sounds about right to me, too. (You hear that, Metacritic?)
>>Someone from Taiwan speaks mandarin natively, but may not understand simplified characters, since they still use the traditional set there (a Taiwanese girl sat next to me in my Beginning Mandarin class, her sole purpose being to learn simplified characters).
It takes a few weeks to learn simplified characters. There's a pattern to how they're done, so it's not very hard. And simplified characters are similar to how Chinese people have been doing shorthand for years, so it's not a bad idea to learn them anyway, since it can speed up note taking (drawing a single line instead of four dots is a lot faster).
>>Similarly, someone from China is almost guaranteed to speak Mandarin, but will not be familiar with traditional characters unless they are highly educated
I learned traditional characters when I took Mandarin myself, but I was fine when I went to the PRC by myself for a month. I hired a couple 20-somethings as a tour guide in Beijing, and they were were actually kind of shocked when I could read the traditional-character inscriptions on some of the older monuments. It is harder to go from simplified to traditional than the other way around (which is why I learned traditional characters, even though it made me irritated sometimes writing 32 strokes for renshi, when it's like 8 in simplified). Traditional characters also make a lot more sense.
>>Many Kanji (Japanese characters) are also simplified, but not in the same way as the Chinese simplified set. Additionally, Japanese is a very different language from Chinese, so while a Japanese person might recognize the characters, the sentence is so grammatically different that it's unintelligible.
Sure. But they tend to just use Kanji for meanings for specific things (usually places, names, or things like "fire" or "seafood" or whatever), and use hiragana or katakana for the rest, mixing them all together, as you say. The characters aren't actually simplified (Kanji characters are akin to traditional characters), but about 10% are Kanji-specific. However, if you are literate in traditional Characters, you can read pretty much anything in Kanji. My Chinese wife could understand the Japanese in FFXI since there was a lot of Kanji flying around. I was able to navigate around with non-English Tokyo maps because I knew that the mountain-hand line was the main loop around Tokyo, which stopped by xin1su4 zhan4/new night station/Shinjuku Station.
>>I have no direct experience with Korean use of Chinese characters, but my understanding based on conversations with South Korean friends is that it's similar to what the Japanese have done.
Koreans have traditionally studied Chinese characters, but have moved away from it in recent years in a spirit of nationalism, in preference for Hangul. However, even up through about 30-40 years ago, their newspapers were published using Chinese characters, and my Korean friends still recognize a lot of characters, even if they don't have the same level of fluency with them that their parents and grandparents do.
>>I gotta enter the pin so that I can use my gun to defend myself.
On a wristwatch, no less. Forget about it if you don't have tiny pixie fingers.
At least they could have done all of us Shadowrun players a favor and linked it to an app on our smartphones or something.
Also - why did they list the price in euros? It's not like European governments trust their citizens enough to own wristwatches or anything.
>>This is unambiguously false when measured by utility. Ideogrammatic scripts take longer to learn, are slower to read and write, and mostly convey no information on pronunciation.
Eh, you can usually guess how a Chinese character is pronounced. It doesn't look that way to English speakers, but it's true.
The main difference is if you want your written language to convey how people speak a word, or the word's meaning. Old English is unintelligible to us because spoken language changes over time. However, you can read pretty much anything written after 400AD in Chinese, since the written language has remained the same, with the exception of the abomination that is simplified characters.
There's actually a lot of utility in this. You can travel to areas where there are mutually unintelligible languages or dialects, and still be able to communicate using written language. If I know Mandarin, I can still write down directions for my Cantonese taxi driver, or communicate with Japanese and (to a lesser extent) Korean people due to the fact that the characters are the same across regional and national boundaries.
Characters don't work very well with computers though, meaning you have to go through the process of typing in the pinyin for a word and then picking out the right character that you want (since many characters share pronunciation, though less if you can indicate tone as well). However, you end up getting an entire word with one or two characters, so overall an experienced Chinese typist can probably write at around the same speed as an English one. Probably less typos, too.
The article summary is wrong, though. You don't necessarily have to have a pressure sensitive pad to write characters. My touch input for characters works just fine by figuring out what I'm trying to write, and replacing it with a or whatever instead. Typefaces are pretty much always going to look better than the kindergarten-type scrawl you get from touchpads when trying to enter characters.
Which is arguably better than just getting the left-wing perspective as we've had since the 1970s. And only people further left wing than the mainstream media even try to make the laughable claim the media isn't liberal - when news reporters vote 80-90% for Democrats. (Oh, but they keep their biases out of it! Lol.)
Cogsci has long been an interest to me, and studies have actually shown that part of the cause of decline of mental facilities from aging is due to becoming fixed in one's ways and never hearing opposite viewpoints or entertaining notions contrary to our prevailing beliefs.
For that reason, I listen to and read both the most left-wing (Pacifica Radio / our local socialist newspaper) and the most right wing (Glen Beck, WND) on a regular basis. Whenever there's a conflict between them, I go out and do the research myself. Sometimes Fox News is wrong, and sometimes they're right and the liberal sources are wrong.
>>You can't calculate the universe from within itself any more than a VMWare can run a machine faster than the host processor.
What if the universe was made up by nothing but an (intelligent) bowling ball traveling through otherwise empty space? It's pretty easy to figure out where you'll be in 10 years.
That said, the whole computability argument is bunk, since the Halting Problem tells us that there are some things that are just not computable. If we have a universe consisting of nothing but a pool table and some (intelligent) billiard balls, we can predict the future to any arbitrary degree of accuracy. But if these same billiard balls are programmed to never go where they're supposed to go, then the result is indeterminate, as in the halting program.
This is actually the reason why I believe in Free Will. Determinism is provably impossible.
I chose computer over Ramen noodles. Or having gas.
>>Then I didn't own a computer for a few years
It doesn't usually happen, but in your case, losing your A+ certification and cashing in your geek card happen to be exactly the same thing.
Well, when I wrote a neural net spam filter back in the day, and trained it on thousands of spam emails, I found that the percentage of capital letters in the email was AS GOOD AS ANY OTHER INDICATION THAT A MESSAGE WAS SPAM.
Also, dollar signs.
>>How many of us have played J-RPGs that have been "localized" and made terrible either by censorship or by forcing us to listen to sub-par English voice actors?
On the positive side, my friends think that texting "..." is now an acceptable form of communication.
But yeah, it sounds like a pretty weak excuse to me.
>>I've never read Chomsky.
Then it just means you're repeating ideas without knowing where they came from. You ought to read him - it'll give you more ammunition for why America sucks and why Pol Pot's Cambodia was such a great country.
>>But the government has long since stopped serving the people.
If you were in the National Guard, you actually would serve the people, in a direct sense, when they do disaster relief. They're a lot better at it than the FEMA folks, who mainly just run around flapping their hands and writing checks.