Unless they disagree with you. Or if they just liked the version of the page they had, and revert edits that you made without reason. I had a completely incontrovertible edit (adding ISBN numbers to the books listed in a bibliography of a person) reverted twice by JayJG (or whatever his name is, some idiot of an admin), each time without comment, and each time with my edits being the only change being reverted.
I posted a note about it on his page after the second time, complaining that he was reverting perfectly valid edits, and his friend of an admin removed the note for him, saying there was no basis for my statement.
So, yeah. Even I, a normal user, just making a routine edit to help improve the encyclopedia (such as it is) ran into the bullshit that pervades Wikipedia. I've had other annoying things happen on numerous other pages as well, from articles on Tae Kwon Do to NPR.
The writer couldn't be farther from truth. 98.3% of users are inactive because rest of the 1.7% users have formed a self-serving "community", and most people who are contributing in their spare time don't have the energy and will to fight their way inside this community.
You don't need to fight your way inside the community per-se, but there's definitely a massive cliquishness to the whole thing that makes it stink like month-old fish.
>>Where were you living, what line of business were your groups of friends in, and are you sure about the year? How much were your cell phone bills back then? $200 a month?
Hmm '96.... between '96 and '97 was when most of my friends got cell phones. Their plans were around $50-$60 a month.
I was a poor college student at the time, so I kept my $20/month landline until I could afford the expense, which was around '98 or '99 or so. My plan then was around $40/month.
I'm now paying ~$120 a month for my cell phone. Ironic, eh? But I need the unlimited roaming and minutes for my job, so there it is.
>>I'm not saying those are bad things, but multiply those flimsy justifications across the nation and it adds up to 25% of the world's gasoline being used by 3% of the world's population.
So what?
It's money. If some lawyer's wife wants an SUV so she doesn't hurt her back unloading it, and she wants to waste the money on it, it's her bloody right to do so. I laugh at non-disabled people that pay bell hops to take their luggage up an elevator for them, because it's a waste of money, but if they want to spend their money that way, it's their fundamental right to do so.
If too many people waste gas, then the price of gas goes up, and people stop wasting gas (demand for oil is semi-elastic, but if the price gets high enough, people will change their buying decisions) or get priced out of the market, both of which drop demand. Alternatively, with a high oil price, alternative oil sources which are normally too expensive to exploit come online (again, eventually, it takes a long time for this to happen), and supply rises.
>>And that ignorant, short-sighted mentality is what keeps us dependent on foreign oil.
We're dependent on foreign oil since it's cheaper than the other options. The only real alternative to it is to extensively develop FT plants to convert coal (which we have plenty of) into oil (instead of using it for energy - switching to nuclear plants for our energy). The senate debated it a while back, but idiots like Feinstein said it was an "unproven" technology, regardless of the fact that it's 75 years old and the primary source of oil for the Nazi's after we cut off their external oil supplies.
>>Without wishing to criticise Baldur's Gate, I think Neverwinter Nights and it's successors are among the best games ever.
The story sucked and it was so buggy in multiplayer that I actually snapped my NWN disc in half after owning it for about two weeks.
My favorite bug was the one where your henchman would turn hostile to you and start running around, hitting you every chance he got. You couldn't attack him back since he was still flagged as an ally, and the damn bug persisted through saves. So basically I'd load the game then my raging half-orc companion would splatter the brains of my poor bard, rinse and repeat. Started the campaign three times with my roommate before finally breaking the disc in two, but I saw enough of the storyline to see that it was utterly without merit.
Those are the photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. In addition to driving the circadian rhythm generators, they also control pupil size in response to light. IIRC, research in cats found that they do connect to the visual cortex, although how the signals are perceived is not yet known.
Yeah, those. The really interesting thing is that people have been dissecting human eyes for many, many years without noticing them before.
While they may connect to the visual cortex, there is no perception of light from them, so people who are born with no cones or rods are still without a sense of vision.
I loved the Baldur's Gate series, and while I rate them among my favorite games of all times (and just bought them again in the D&D collector's edition) they lived in a weird place, where I both wished they were longer and shorter games.
At a certain point, I enjoyed just wandering to some random place in the world, and having some sort of encounter there. HOLY CRAP, there's a red dragon! And then figuring out how to beat it. But some sequences, especially and unfortunately in the main quests, could really drag. In BG II, once you travel to this island, you're basically on a railroad for the next 20 hours of your life. You end up traveling through three full acts of the game until you're allowed to re-emerge on the world map, travelling through a mage's tower (where you lose one of your party members permanently... which bugs the hell out of me when games do that), then underdark adventurers, then a full city of a drow that you have to navigate through before finally being able to emerge, blinking, on the surface, where there's still a few more adventures on rails before you're allowed to travel back home with the 3000 pounds of loot you've been accumulating the whole time.
Best bug in BG II - an unsigned short underflow on magic item charges when fighting those monsters which eat magic. A sword with 32k charges of haste? Yes please. Especially since the price of an item is proportional to how many charges are left in it. =)
I kind of wish that they'd have gone the extra mile and done a BG III instead of devolving into the pit of crap that is Neverwinter Nights and related games and expansions.
This is hardly the first time blindsight has been demonstrated. I recall Ramachandran at UCSD doing experiments on it a while back.
One of the more mind blowing things I read in 2008 was the discovery of a third type of visual receptor besides rods and cones. Essentially there's a third type of receptor that only detects sort of gross levels of light, and feeds directly into the system which regulates your circadian rhythm and is used for some other purposes. People that were completely blind were able to tell when light levels were fluctuated in a large way, like walking in front of a TV, and be totally puzzled how they knew that, since it didn't register as sight at all for them.
The fact that these neuroscientists would call it the first evidence for blindsight means that either they really didn't read their papers very well, or it was a bad article summary on Slashdot.
>Kenneth Blackwell's office >had routed Internet traffic >from county election offices >through out-of-state servers >based at SMARTech in >Chattanooga, Tenn. >SMARTech hosts dozens of GOP Web domains.
I can't see any positive way to spin this.
We're talking about the same Ohio that voted for Obama, right?
In its original form (do not multiply entities without necessity), it's a reasonable enough guideline to try to not add extra explanations to an answer unless there's a reason for it.
Somehow though, and perhaps Contact is to blame for this, it has metasticized into a decision making guideline whereby some (/hand-waving) simpler explanation is considered to be more correct, or more probable, than a more complicated explanation, which is a fallacy of the highest severity, since scientifically minded people use this ridiculous guideline, and call it science!
>>This is the same organization that well into the mid 1900's still refused to accept black doctors. >>there is plenty of data to suggest their real purpose is to limit the number of doctors
Oh, they had black and women doctors in America before 1900. And the limitation of the number of doctors was quite intentional - it was (purportedly) to raise the quality of doctors coming out of medical school.
>>This is the same reason that doctors are now taught that sugar pills and other placebos are ethical only in medical trials
That is the official stance of the AMA.
Also, 50% of doctors prescribe placebos and don't tell their patients.
In order to avoid prescribing obecalp, or exposing themselves to lawsuits, they will prescribe meds which are peripherally related to the disease they want to treat. So if Big Bob comes in for this Irritable Bowel Syndrome that just won't go away, and Dr. Tim gives him a very low dose of some anti-diarrheal, and tells him it's the strongest medicine he can take -- and it cures his IBS, everyone's a winner, right?
This happens all the time, according to the medical industry's own polls.
>>So alternative medicine exploits placebo effect and gullibility.
1) Placebo effects actually work, especially for a lot of psychological disorders. Hell, just having a doctor pretend to care (or actually care) and talk to you sympathetically has been shown to result in statistically significant improved outcomes in a lot of these cases. Placebos actually work quite well on a lot of psychosomatic diseases as well, and even things like IBS or muscle cramps.
2) Alternative medicine is not all hogwash. When my wife was at UCSF Pharmacy School (the top school in the nation), they all took a class on alt med, and read about the pharmacological effects various herbs and substances had (St. John's Wort, in particular can cause serious drug-drug interactions), and learned which were bullshit, and which worked. She checked out the Alt Med Bible from the UCSF library, which is essentially a massive tome which has pretty much every peer reviewed study on all the major alt med remedies, and summarizes their effects or lack thereof. There was something like 300 or 400 studies on the effects of green tea alone. Summary: weak antifungal, weak antibacterial, weak antiviral, possible cancer prevention, etc., etc.
This isn't bullshit - what's bullshit is idiots who think that because something comes in a non-pill form, that it's automatically hokum, regardless of what the peer-reviewed literature says. And yes, this includes the majority of doctors.
>>If you did, you'd know that pneumatic mail delivery was widely used in Europe from the late 19th century well into the 20th. (The Paris system didn't shut down until 1984!)
Yeah, and various Eastern European cities also had extensive pneumatic tube systems. All things considered, it's not actually that bad an idea. Heinlein had a couple different books where you could buy CDs, or hot food, or whatever, and have it delivered through a tube system, and I don't think the idea was really all that impractical.
>>The Romans certainly had the engineering ability to connect their empire with a series of semaphore towers; the only thing wanting was the idea.
Huh? The Romans used towers with a series of mirrors to transmit messages and orders. Their communication problems across the Empire were still some of the most important reasons why it eventually fell apart, though.
My LCD TV handles 1080p over component inputs, so it was running at whatever the highest output the PS3 was running on that setting. While it still looked not bad (especially when playing non-blu ray DVDs - the difference was insignificant), when running games like Tekken with long straight lines, with HDMI, the lines precisely followed the pixels on the LCD TV, but on component they bleeded a bit, and looked a lot less precise.
For TV maybe, but for games with a lot of straight edges, the difference is noticeable. At least it was when I switched my PS3 back and forth between component and HDMI to test it out.
Component was a lot better than the other analog options, but still not as good as HDMI.
>>In general the number of single author papers has declined.
So? This doesn't mean anything except that the number of single author papers has declined. From my experience, this means that the PI is more gracious in noting the contributions from more people, no matter how minor. I wrote source code for one guy's paper, didn't write any of the paper itself, and was third author on it.
In Edison's day, Edison simply took (stole) credit for everything everyone else did. Big lab generates an exciting result? Edison did it, claims Edison.
Frankly, I prefer the modern way more, even though it gets a bit ridiculous with 20+ author papers.
>>Yet can't push out graphics that look any better than the 360.
I've played the same games on my TV with both a 360 and a PS3, and the PS3 is hands-down superior, though that's probably because the 360 I have access to (my buddy brings it over sometimes on weekends) isn't the Elite version, and thus doesn't have HDMI.
Slashdot Mirror
This is oldnews. I think they mentioned wanting cell phone apps for Eve since, well, it launched.
I think the ideas I heard were: ability to switch skill training without needing to log on, and updating your auctions.
So, yeah.
Personally, I'd just love an EVE plugin for Excel. "Ooh, I just killed 2 space pirates! See! Rows AA1 through AA7 confirm it!"
Unless they disagree with you. Or if they just liked the version of the page they had, and revert edits that you made without reason. I had a completely incontrovertible edit (adding ISBN numbers to the books listed in a bibliography of a person) reverted twice by JayJG (or whatever his name is, some idiot of an admin), each time without comment, and each time with my edits being the only change being reverted.
I posted a note about it on his page after the second time, complaining that he was reverting perfectly valid edits, and his friend of an admin removed the note for him, saying there was no basis for my statement.
So, yeah. Even I, a normal user, just making a routine edit to help improve the encyclopedia (such as it is) ran into the bullshit that pervades Wikipedia. I've had other annoying things happen on numerous other pages as well, from articles on Tae Kwon Do to NPR.
The writer couldn't be farther from truth. 98.3% of users are inactive because rest of the 1.7% users have formed a self-serving "community", and most people who are contributing in their spare time don't have the energy and will to fight their way inside this community.
You don't need to fight your way inside the community per-se, but there's definitely a massive cliquishness to the whole thing that makes it stink like month-old fish.
>>Where were you living, what line of business were your groups of friends in, and are you sure about the year? How much were your cell phone bills back then? $200 a month?
Hmm '96.... between '96 and '97 was when most of my friends got cell phones. Their plans were around $50-$60 a month.
I was a poor college student at the time, so I kept my $20/month landline until I could afford the expense, which was around '98 or '99 or so. My plan then was around $40/month.
I'm now paying ~$120 a month for my cell phone. Ironic, eh? But I need the unlimited roaming and minutes for my job, so there it is.
>>I'm not saying those are bad things, but multiply those flimsy justifications across the nation and it adds up to 25% of the world's gasoline being used by 3% of the world's population.
So what?
It's money. If some lawyer's wife wants an SUV so she doesn't hurt her back unloading it, and she wants to waste the money on it, it's her bloody right to do so. I laugh at non-disabled people that pay bell hops to take their luggage up an elevator for them, because it's a waste of money, but if they want to spend their money that way, it's their fundamental right to do so.
If too many people waste gas, then the price of gas goes up, and people stop wasting gas (demand for oil is semi-elastic, but if the price gets high enough, people will change their buying decisions) or get priced out of the market, both of which drop demand. Alternatively, with a high oil price, alternative oil sources which are normally too expensive to exploit come online (again, eventually, it takes a long time for this to happen), and supply rises.
>>And that ignorant, short-sighted mentality is what keeps us dependent on foreign oil.
We're dependent on foreign oil since it's cheaper than the other options. The only real alternative to it is to extensively develop FT plants to convert coal (which we have plenty of) into oil (instead of using it for energy - switching to nuclear plants for our energy). The senate debated it a while back, but idiots like Feinstein said it was an "unproven" technology, regardless of the fact that it's 75 years old and the primary source of oil for the Nazi's after we cut off their external oil supplies.
>>Without wishing to criticise Baldur's Gate, I think Neverwinter Nights and it's successors are among the best games ever.
The story sucked and it was so buggy in multiplayer that I actually snapped my NWN disc in half after owning it for about two weeks.
My favorite bug was the one where your henchman would turn hostile to you and start running around, hitting you every chance he got. You couldn't attack him back since he was still flagged as an ally, and the damn bug persisted through saves. So basically I'd load the game then my raging half-orc companion would splatter the brains of my poor bard, rinse and repeat. Started the campaign three times with my roommate before finally breaking the disc in two, but I saw enough of the storyline to see that it was utterly without merit.
Those are the photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. In addition to driving the circadian rhythm generators, they also control pupil size in response to light. IIRC, research in cats found that they do connect to the visual cortex, although how the signals are perceived is not yet known.
Yeah, those. The really interesting thing is that people have been dissecting human eyes for many, many years without noticing them before.
While they may connect to the visual cortex, there is no perception of light from them, so people who are born with no cones or rods are still without a sense of vision.
I loved the Baldur's Gate series, and while I rate them among my favorite games of all times (and just bought them again in the D&D collector's edition) they lived in a weird place, where I both wished they were longer and shorter games.
At a certain point, I enjoyed just wandering to some random place in the world, and having some sort of encounter there. HOLY CRAP, there's a red dragon! And then figuring out how to beat it. But some sequences, especially and unfortunately in the main quests, could really drag. In BG II, once you travel to this island, you're basically on a railroad for the next 20 hours of your life. You end up traveling through three full acts of the game until you're allowed to re-emerge on the world map, travelling through a mage's tower (where you lose one of your party members permanently... which bugs the hell out of me when games do that), then underdark adventurers, then a full city of a drow that you have to navigate through before finally being able to emerge, blinking, on the surface, where there's still a few more adventures on rails before you're allowed to travel back home with the 3000 pounds of loot you've been accumulating the whole time.
Best bug in BG II - an unsigned short underflow on magic item charges when fighting those monsters which eat magic. A sword with 32k charges of haste? Yes please. Especially since the price of an item is proportional to how many charges are left in it. =)
I kind of wish that they'd have gone the extra mile and done a BG III instead of devolving into the pit of crap that is Neverwinter Nights and related games and expansions.
This is hardly the first time blindsight has been demonstrated. I recall Ramachandran at UCSD doing experiments on it a while back.
One of the more mind blowing things I read in 2008 was the discovery of a third type of visual receptor besides rods and cones. Essentially there's a third type of receptor that only detects sort of gross levels of light, and feeds directly into the system which regulates your circadian rhythm and is used for some other purposes. People that were completely blind were able to tell when light levels were fluctuated in a large way, like walking in front of a TV, and be totally puzzled how they knew that, since it didn't register as sight at all for them.
The fact that these neuroscientists would call it the first evidence for blindsight means that either they really didn't read their papers very well, or it was a bad article summary on Slashdot.
>Kenneth Blackwell's office
>had routed Internet traffic
>from county election offices
>through out-of-state servers
>based at SMARTech in
>Chattanooga, Tenn.
>SMARTech hosts dozens of GOP Web domains.
I can't see any positive way to spin this.
We're talking about the same Ohio that voted for Obama, right?
Occams razor it's a tool for logical thinking.
It's a tool for sloppy thinking.
In its original form (do not multiply entities without necessity), it's a reasonable enough guideline to try to not add extra explanations to an answer unless there's a reason for it.
Somehow though, and perhaps Contact is to blame for this, it has metasticized into a decision making guideline whereby some (/hand-waving) simpler explanation is considered to be more correct, or more probable, than a more complicated explanation, which is a fallacy of the highest severity, since scientifically minded people use this ridiculous guideline, and call it science!
Amen.
And it really bugs me when people use the Razor to "prove" things. /facepalm
And no, I'm not kidding. "This explanation is simpler, therefore it must be the right one..."
>>This is the same organization that well into the mid 1900's still refused to accept black doctors.
>>there is plenty of data to suggest their real purpose is to limit the number of doctors
Oh, they had black and women doctors in America before 1900. And the limitation of the number of doctors was quite intentional - it was (purportedly) to raise the quality of doctors coming out of medical school.
This might interest you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
>>This is the same reason that doctors are now taught that sugar pills and other placebos are ethical only in medical trials
That is the official stance of the AMA.
Also, 50% of doctors prescribe placebos and don't tell their patients.
In order to avoid prescribing obecalp, or exposing themselves to lawsuits, they will prescribe meds which are peripherally related to the disease they want to treat. So if Big Bob comes in for this Irritable Bowel Syndrome that just won't go away, and Dr. Tim gives him a very low dose of some anti-diarrheal, and tells him it's the strongest medicine he can take -- and it cures his IBS, everyone's a winner, right?
This happens all the time, according to the medical industry's own polls.
>>So alternative medicine exploits placebo effect and gullibility.
1) Placebo effects actually work, especially for a lot of psychological disorders. Hell, just having a doctor pretend to care (or actually care) and talk to you sympathetically has been shown to result in statistically significant improved outcomes in a lot of these cases. Placebos actually work quite well on a lot of psychosomatic diseases as well, and even things like IBS or muscle cramps.
2) Alternative medicine is not all hogwash. When my wife was at UCSF Pharmacy School (the top school in the nation), they all took a class on alt med, and read about the pharmacological effects various herbs and substances had (St. John's Wort, in particular can cause serious drug-drug interactions), and learned which were bullshit, and which worked. She checked out the Alt Med Bible from the UCSF library, which is essentially a massive tome which has pretty much every peer reviewed study on all the major alt med remedies, and summarizes their effects or lack thereof. There was something like 300 or 400 studies on the effects of green tea alone. Summary: weak antifungal, weak antibacterial, weak antiviral, possible cancer prevention, etc., etc.
This isn't bullshit - what's bullshit is idiots who think that because something comes in a non-pill form, that it's automatically hokum, regardless of what the peer-reviewed literature says. And yes, this includes the majority of doctors.
I pretty much only play the Wii for party games. Ravid Rabbits and similar games are quite fun.
For actual gaming (by which I mean playing games by myself, like a true gamer), or with 2 player coop, it's PS3 or PC time.
>>If you did, you'd know that pneumatic mail delivery was widely used in Europe from the late 19th century well into the 20th. (The Paris system didn't shut down until 1984!)
Yeah, and various Eastern European cities also had extensive pneumatic tube systems. All things considered, it's not actually that bad an idea. Heinlein had a couple different books where you could buy CDs, or hot food, or whatever, and have it delivered through a tube system, and I don't think the idea was really all that impractical.
>>The Romans certainly had the engineering ability to connect their empire with a series of semaphore towers; the only thing wanting was the idea.
Huh? The Romans used towers with a series of mirrors to transmit messages and orders. Their communication problems across the Empire were still some of the most important reasons why it eventually fell apart, though.
>>Then we could excommunicate people for breaking coding conventions and burn them at the stake for buffer overflows.
Does this include people that space indent?
Because I might sign on to your crusade if we can burn people that check in space-indented code.
My LCD TV handles 1080p over component inputs, so it was running at whatever the highest output the PS3 was running on that setting. While it still looked not bad (especially when playing non-blu ray DVDs - the difference was insignificant), when running games like Tekken with long straight lines, with HDMI, the lines precisely followed the pixels on the LCD TV, but on component they bleeded a bit, and looked a lot less precise.
For TV maybe, but for games with a lot of straight edges, the difference is noticeable. At least it was when I switched my PS3 back and forth between component and HDMI to test it out.
Component was a lot better than the other analog options, but still not as good as HDMI.
>>Still, on the list of ways to kick the bucket, beats slipping in the shower any day.
If you die climbing down from Everest, does that count as an Epic Fail?
>>but the turn based RPG is nowhere to be found.
Fallout 3. VATS. :p
I basically refuse to use it for this reason. I don't want a turn-based RPG fly in my FPS RPG soup.
>>In general the number of single author papers has declined.
So? This doesn't mean anything except that the number of single author papers has declined. From my experience, this means that the PI is more gracious in noting the contributions from more people, no matter how minor. I wrote source code for one guy's paper, didn't write any of the paper itself, and was third author on it.
In Edison's day, Edison simply took (stole) credit for everything everyone else did. Big lab generates an exciting result? Edison did it, claims Edison.
Frankly, I prefer the modern way more, even though it gets a bit ridiculous with 20+ author papers.
>>Yet can't push out graphics that look any better than the 360.
I've played the same games on my TV with both a 360 and a PS3, and the PS3 is hands-down superior, though that's probably because the 360 I have access to (my buddy brings it over sometimes on weekends) isn't the Elite version, and thus doesn't have HDMI.