>>The uproar over what he said appears to be rather unscientific.
Right. The lesson learned from this is that if you want to get someone kicked out of the Royal Society, you just need to accuse him of being sympathetic towards religion (sorry, brand him a Creationist) and then gather the pitchforks and torches.
I don't know what the cats were thinking on the inside (did they imagine Zeus was punishing them?), but the point is that the superstition wasn't wrong, per se, but had a real meaning behind it.
While in logic, we like to say that no statement can be both true and false, but I hold that in the case of myth and superstition, you can have things that are both true and false... sometimes myths about Washington chopping down cherry trees or whatever could be completely factually false, but still hold a perhaps greater truth inside of them (if you would agree that Washington was an honest sort of guy).
This is rather ironic, as the one article I read from the Discovery Institute (the big creationism site) was a critique of radiocarbon dating, using the results of new rock formations from Mount St. Helens being tested at (real) labs with an age of millions of years old.
If that cat manages to convince all the other cats to avoid the object, then it becomes superstition, especially if the original cat is still the only one that gets shocked when it goes for the object. I've heard of monkeys actually showing this behavior, but its not something I can verify.
Right, but that's my point. It's not superstition. And especially not in the case where they were shocking cats, since there was actually something to avoid.
I think your example with the tsunami was spot on.
Re:It's Worse than That
on
Review: Spore
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· Score: 1
>>Wright has stated that they designed the game to appeal to the people who like "Sims fashions and furniture"
Well.
I won't be buying the game then. Even my Harvest Moon-loving fiancee hated My Sims ("What's the point of designing furniture??") and I can't think of much I'd like to do less than put a hula-skirt on Spore's Goatse beast.
The problem with this article and other stories is that it's not superstition they're dealing with.
I recall one study where they shocked cats or something if they walked too close to an object, and reported that the cats had developed a "superstitious" aversion to the object, obviously showing how gullible and stupid all of us carbon-based life forms are, and how religion is probably just a complex fraud.
Of course, the problem is that the cats weren't being superstitious. There WAS actually an invisible man in the sky throwing fucking lightning bolts at them, and they learned that correlation.
I know that if I got hit by a lightning bolt every time I climbed to the top of half-dome, I'd damn well stop climbing to the top of Half Dome. I don't need Zeus, or even a working understanding of electromagnetism, to come to that conclusion. I'd avoid it.
I am all for making money and helping the world at the same time.
It's way better than the other options: Making money and fucking over the poor Not making money and becoming poor (or relying on government handouts)
My company worked with poor kids here in San Diego for a long time, while we were designing an educational software game. We turned around the lives of a lot of kids (most of whom were already burnt-out on learning), learned which pedagogical techniques worked with kids like that in an afterschool setting, and then went on to sell it to other school districts 1and made a decent amount of money at it, while also helping their kids.
There's nothing shameful in making money while doing a good thing for the world.
Re:Are Quests in MMOGs doable?
on
Quests
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure HOW to best accomplish this, but that's what casual players really want. They want to play in a world DESIGNED to let them play as casuals, competing and adventuring with other casuals.
Kingdom of Loathing (150k active users) limits the number of turns you can take. Food and rare/valuable items which can be collected by hardcore(r) players increase your turns per day (up to about triple the normal allocation). Works out pretty well. I like it.
>>Unless the ISP is somehow discriminating and blocking in a manner which hinders or advances 3rd party entities I fail to see the basis for your argument.
Because that's how safe harbor works. If they're inspecting each packet, then they lose their safe harbor, and become responsible for knowing which of their people are downloading torrents, which are VOIPing, etc. ISPs don't want that, as it has them on the hook when the RIAA comes sniffing by for information on their clients, and clients would prefer to not have the ISP know which apps they're running as well.
Once you start poking inside of packets you lose safe harbor protections of various sorts, because now the ISPs become responsible for the data. When they act instead as a common carrier, they have various safe harbor protections. Network neutrality is a larger issue than having network companies double charge for services; it essential encapsulates the same situation railroads were in over a hundred years ago -- are they common carriers or not?
>>I would certainly care. Using QoS to lower the priority of downloads is one thing, doing so to the extent that it actually has a visible effect on my download speeds instead of just impacting my latency is not appropriate.
Assuming we want network neutrality, there's no way for an ISP to know which of your data is bulk and which is prioritized, unless you have some means of flagging it as such.
Doing a scaled rollback of bandwidth is the fairest way for a ISP to run things, IMO. If you're downloading 30TB a month on a $19.95 DSL line, I think you could certainly live with 5 to 15TB a month instead.
The problem with metered accounts is that it breaks the internet. Suddenly users are paying for things like spam and all those unnecessary flash animations. While it probably wouldn't amount to much, it would be like getting spam phone calls on your cell phone all the time that you have to pay for.
I think that instead of metered, your bandwidth should dynamically scale based on the amount of bandwidth consumed over the last 24 hours. Bandwidth and latency. Then, a person who fires up Quake to play a game for an hour or so would have a blazingly fast connection, but the person who is downloading torrents 24/7 get QOSed down to a bulk-transfer rate that gets less precedence than other people on the network, but with some guaranteed minimum. I know several people that run 10 or 20 torrent downloads all the time, 24/7. The won't care if their download takes 5 days instead of 3, but lots of people would care (and in a good way) if their ping time or web page access speed suddenly doubled. Best of all, such a plan is protocol-neutral, meaning ISPs don't need to know if their clients are running torrents, or FTPing ISOs, or just consuming terabytes of porn.
Just scale em down, and everyone wins. After a day of no bandwidth, they get fast service again.
Well, if massive improvements to bandwidth are rolled out, then I could indeed see movies over IP (such as over Itunes) being a decent service. It seems to me, though, that ISPs have been engaging in a race to the bottom in terms of services provided, at least in America.
>>It's not even flash disks. All physical sales will become obsolete with the take-off of digital downloads. With the advent of legal movie downloads and on-demand TV services, most physical media sales will, I predict, be dead within twenty years.
I've been using high speed internet for, oh, about 15 years now. The rate I've gotten has steadily decreased over the years, not gone up. My current DSL line is the slowest bit rate connection I've had since I was on dialup in 1993. It's not slow -- don't get me wrong -- the basic DSL package is fine for most purposes, but it's slower than any of the other services I've ever had, and worse, in my current apartment (which is in the middle of a city) is the highest speed connection available besides a cable modem, and I try not to give cable companies money. (No cable TV for me since the late 90s.)
What makes you think that customers would prefer waiting 2 or 3 days to getting a movie (and being able to do nothing else with their internet connection in the meantime) over heading down to the local Blockbuster, or waiting 2 or 3 days to get a blu-ray disk or three from Netflix?
The long term stability of, say, the Ottoman Empire was certainly the equal of the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire didn't fight in World War I.
Sure, at least by the end, only about 10% of Ottoman families were polygamous, but it was still en vogue for the higher ranking Ottomans to have a harem by the start of WWI.
>>Genetics is becoming the new astrology. Seriously. It's a good analogy too, sure stellar bodies affect our natural worlds, and sure genetics affects our bodies and minds, but I have not seen any proof that theses genetic changes are significant to human behavior on a day to day level.
Yeah, especially evolutionary psychology, which is what this article essentially is.
Basically, the process works like this: 1) Find some social phenomenon 2) Invent some evolutionary explanation for it (you can make up a story for anything, and it's fun!) 3) Survey a bunch of people and find some gene that a majority of them have. 4) Type up a paper, and end it with QED.
A scientist is you!
Personally, I think the entire field is full of bullshit. Everything from road rage being explained as territorial behavior to blondes "having more fun" because lighter hair makes them look more youthful has been proven, in essence, by a guy pulling something out of his ass.
In a nutshell, it's hard to know something, and people who claim they know something without doing the work to prove they know something are just practicing pseudoscience.
>>Most successful empires/expansions of human civilization relied on monogamous culture - after all, you needed an heir to hand a crown to, and the wars between siblings were already bad enough without having to choose which *mother* produced the rightful heir. (Although, that happened regardless).
Mm, I'd disagree with this. Polygamous societies tended to have lots of single, horny, angry young men running around, which provided a great pool for an army led by someone with an expansionist mindset. The various Muslim empires were arguably some of the most successful expansionists of all time, and even the Jews were polygamous. The Romans, of course, were nominally monogamous (with the same sort of double standard we see today), and most modern empires have all been monogamous, mainly due to the expansion of Christian culture, which encourages but does not necessarily require monogamy (cf. Luther or St. Paul).
But I doubt it. You can't control for the "modern concept of marriage for love" in any practical sense, so any conclusion based on the same would essentially be pulled out of his ass.
To the contrary, you can look at things such as the divorce rate before and after no-fault divorce laws were passed, and observe a spike. This happens across all the states that passed such laws.
Paul A. Nakonezny, Robert D. Shull, Joseph Lee Rodgers. "The Effect of No-Fault Divorce Law on the Divorce Rate Across the 50 States and Its Relation to Income, Education, and Religiosity." _Journal of Marriage and the Family_ (May 1995): 477-488.
>>What is it? It is that I think I have sufficient reason to regard you as a moron. Therefore I am asking you to designate me as your foe so that I can ignore you better. My time is valuable and limited.
It's called the English language. Heard of it? Didn't pay attention in English comprehension class or something?
You didn't answer my question, you just responded with an ad hominem attack.
You said it's not coincidence that two hurricanes are hitting New Orleans in 3 years. Apparently, you don't agree with Moore and the other Democrats' statements that God is on their side.
It's a bit of a misnomer. They can't and don't force you to leave. They sweep the area and strongly suggest you leave, but they won't make you. In Florida at one time they (Charlie) had you list your next of kin so they knew who to contact.
It basically means that if you decide yo stay, you are on your own.
Don't worry, it'll still be Bush's fault when people don't leave, and drown.
>>One might posit that it is just coincidence that we're getting two strong hurricanes in three years slamming into New Orleans.
If it's not coincidence, then what is it??
Of course, Michael Moore said that Gustav is evidence that God hates the Republicans, and some democrat leaders were filmed laughing about it... but still, I'd call it coincidence.
>>What I find funny is that you forget that many hardcore right wing Republicans were not sold on the centralist McCain. So by choosing Palin he not only appeased those voters, but he also pandered "to disgruntled Hillary Clinton voters". Either way so far it is looking like a brilliant move.
Precisely. I think it was a great move on McCain's part, and sufficiently audacious that my respect for him moved up 4 or 5 notches.
I'm still voting for Barr, but my dislike for McCain has dimmed significantly with this move.
Slashdot Mirror
>>The uproar over what he said appears to be rather unscientific.
Right. The lesson learned from this is that if you want to get someone kicked out of the Royal Society, you just need to accuse him of being sympathetic towards religion (sorry, brand him a Creationist) and then gather the pitchforks and torches.
I don't know what the cats were thinking on the inside (did they imagine Zeus was punishing them?), but the point is that the superstition wasn't wrong, per se, but had a real meaning behind it.
While in logic, we like to say that no statement can be both true and false, but I hold that in the case of myth and superstition, you can have things that are both true and false... sometimes myths about Washington chopping down cherry trees or whatever could be completely factually false, but still hold a perhaps greater truth inside of them (if you would agree that Washington was an honest sort of guy).
JUST WAIT for the ID people to jump all over this
This is rather ironic, as the one article I read from the Discovery Institute (the big creationism site) was a critique of radiocarbon dating, using the results of new rock formations from Mount St. Helens being tested at (real) labs with an age of millions of years old.
But, blah blah blah, creationism sucks.
Whatever.
If that cat manages to convince all the other cats to avoid the object, then it becomes superstition, especially if the original cat is still the only one that gets shocked when it goes for the object. I've heard of monkeys actually showing this behavior, but its not something I can verify.
Right, but that's my point. It's not superstition. And especially not in the case where they were shocking cats, since there was actually something to avoid.
I think your example with the tsunami was spot on.
>>Wright has stated that they designed the game to appeal to the people who like "Sims fashions and furniture"
Well.
I won't be buying the game then. Even my Harvest Moon-loving fiancee hated My Sims ("What's the point of designing furniture??") and I can't think of much I'd like to do less than put a hula-skirt on Spore's Goatse beast.
The problem with this article and other stories is that it's not superstition they're dealing with.
I recall one study where they shocked cats or something if they walked too close to an object, and reported that the cats had developed a "superstitious" aversion to the object, obviously showing how gullible and stupid all of us carbon-based life forms are, and how religion is probably just a complex fraud.
Of course, the problem is that the cats weren't being superstitious. There WAS actually an invisible man in the sky throwing fucking lightning bolts at them, and they learned that correlation.
I know that if I got hit by a lightning bolt every time I climbed to the top of half-dome, I'd damn well stop climbing to the top of Half Dome. I don't need Zeus, or even a working understanding of electromagnetism, to come to that conclusion. I'd avoid it.
I am all for making money and helping the world at the same time.
It's way better than the other options:
Making money and fucking over the poor
Not making money and becoming poor (or relying on government handouts)
My company worked with poor kids here in San Diego for a long time, while we were designing an educational software game. We turned around the lives of a lot of kids (most of whom were already burnt-out on learning), learned which pedagogical techniques worked with kids like that in an afterschool setting, and then went on to sell it to other school districts 1and made a decent amount of money at it, while also helping their kids.
There's nothing shameful in making money while doing a good thing for the world.
I'm not sure HOW to best accomplish this, but that's what casual players really want. They want to play in a world DESIGNED to let them play as casuals, competing and adventuring with other casuals.
Kingdom of Loathing (150k active users) limits the number of turns you can take. Food and rare/valuable items which can be collected by hardcore(r) players increase your turns per day (up to about triple the normal allocation). Works out pretty well. I like it.
>>Unless the ISP is somehow discriminating and blocking in a manner which hinders or advances 3rd party entities I fail to see the basis for your argument.
Because that's how safe harbor works. If they're inspecting each packet, then they lose their safe harbor, and become responsible for knowing which of their people are downloading torrents, which are VOIPing, etc. ISPs don't want that, as it has them on the hook when the RIAA comes sniffing by for information on their clients, and clients would prefer to not have the ISP know which apps they're running as well.
Once you start poking inside of packets you lose safe harbor protections of various sorts, because now the ISPs become responsible for the data. When they act instead as a common carrier, they have various safe harbor protections. Network neutrality is a larger issue than having network companies double charge for services; it essential encapsulates the same situation railroads were in over a hundred years ago -- are they common carriers or not?
>>I would certainly care. Using QoS to lower the priority of downloads is one thing, doing so to the extent that it actually has a visible effect on my download speeds instead of just impacting my latency is not appropriate.
Assuming we want network neutrality, there's no way for an ISP to know which of your data is bulk and which is prioritized, unless you have some means of flagging it as such.
Doing a scaled rollback of bandwidth is the fairest way for a ISP to run things, IMO. If you're downloading 30TB a month on a $19.95 DSL line, I think you could certainly live with 5 to 15TB a month instead.
Huh, I wasn't aware that you could selectively breed a plum into an apricot.
The problem with metered accounts is that it breaks the internet. Suddenly users are paying for things like spam and all those unnecessary flash animations. While it probably wouldn't amount to much, it would be like getting spam phone calls on your cell phone all the time that you have to pay for.
I think that instead of metered, your bandwidth should dynamically scale based on the amount of bandwidth consumed over the last 24 hours. Bandwidth and latency. Then, a person who fires up Quake to play a game for an hour or so would have a blazingly fast connection, but the person who is downloading torrents 24/7 get QOSed down to a bulk-transfer rate that gets less precedence than other people on the network, but with some guaranteed minimum. I know several people that run 10 or 20 torrent downloads all the time, 24/7. The won't care if their download takes 5 days instead of 3, but lots of people would care (and in a good way) if their ping time or web page access speed suddenly doubled. Best of all, such a plan is protocol-neutral, meaning ISPs don't need to know if their clients are running torrents, or FTPing ISOs, or just consuming terabytes of porn.
Just scale em down, and everyone wins. After a day of no bandwidth, they get fast service again.
>>Perhaps selective breeding is a more advances science than I expected?
Sure. 3,500 years ago they developed the Tangelo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangelo
I'm pretty sure the people in Southeast Asia at the time didn't have access to DNA technologies.
I just ate a plumicot the other day, half plum, half apricot. Pretty tasty, and they didn't need to do the GM in a lab at all.
Well, if massive improvements to bandwidth are rolled out, then I could indeed see movies over IP (such as over Itunes) being a decent service. It seems to me, though, that ISPs have been engaging in a race to the bottom in terms of services provided, at least in America.
>>It's not even flash disks. All physical sales will become obsolete with the take-off of digital downloads. With the advent of legal movie downloads and on-demand TV services, most physical media sales will, I predict, be dead within twenty years.
I've been using high speed internet for, oh, about 15 years now. The rate I've gotten has steadily decreased over the years, not gone up. My current DSL line is the slowest bit rate connection I've had since I was on dialup in 1993. It's not slow -- don't get me wrong -- the basic DSL package is fine for most purposes, but it's slower than any of the other services I've ever had, and worse, in my current apartment (which is in the middle of a city) is the highest speed connection available besides a cable modem, and I try not to give cable companies money. (No cable TV for me since the late 90s.)
What makes you think that customers would prefer waiting 2 or 3 days to getting a movie (and being able to do nothing else with their internet connection in the meantime) over heading down to the local Blockbuster, or waiting 2 or 3 days to get a blu-ray disk or three from Netflix?
The long term stability of, say, the Ottoman Empire was certainly the equal of the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire didn't fight in World War I.
Sure, at least by the end, only about 10% of Ottoman families were polygamous, but it was still en vogue for the higher ranking Ottomans to have a harem by the start of WWI.
http://books.google.com/books?id=lxrJn7xIZC4C&pg=PA238&lpg=PA238&dq=ottoman+polygamy&source=web&ots=Qpa7420AK5&sig=XdGbKOIR_fC8G5UKrWWKDCu16zw&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result
>>Genetics is becoming the new astrology. Seriously. It's a good analogy too, sure stellar bodies affect our natural worlds, and sure genetics affects our bodies and minds, but I have not seen any proof that theses genetic changes are significant to human behavior on a day to day level.
Yeah, especially evolutionary psychology, which is what this article essentially is.
Basically, the process works like this:
1) Find some social phenomenon
2) Invent some evolutionary explanation for it (you can make up a story for anything, and it's fun!)
3) Survey a bunch of people and find some gene that a majority of them have.
4) Type up a paper, and end it with QED.
A scientist is you!
Personally, I think the entire field is full of bullshit. Everything from road rage being explained as territorial behavior to blondes "having more fun" because lighter hair makes them look more youthful has been proven, in essence, by a guy pulling something out of his ass.
I think this interview with Feynman explains my opinion of pseudo-scientific nonsense like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EZcpTTjjXY
In a nutshell, it's hard to know something, and people who claim they know something without doing the work to prove they know something are just practicing pseudoscience.
>>Most successful empires/expansions of human civilization relied on monogamous culture - after all, you needed an heir to hand a crown to, and the wars between siblings were already bad enough without having to choose which *mother* produced the rightful heir. (Although, that happened regardless).
Mm, I'd disagree with this. Polygamous societies tended to have lots of single, horny, angry young men running around, which provided a great pool for an army led by someone with an expansionist mindset. The various Muslim empires were arguably some of the most successful expansionists of all time, and even the Jews were polygamous. The Romans, of course, were nominally monogamous (with the same sort of double standard we see today), and most modern empires have all been monogamous, mainly due to the expansion of Christian culture, which encourages but does not necessarily require monogamy (cf. Luther or St. Paul).
Reference?
But I doubt it. You can't control for the "modern concept of marriage for love" in any practical sense, so any conclusion based on the same would essentially be pulled out of his ass.
To the contrary, you can look at things such as the divorce rate before and after no-fault divorce laws were passed, and observe a spike. This happens across all the states that passed such laws.
Paul A. Nakonezny, Robert D. Shull, Joseph Lee Rodgers. "The Effect of No-Fault Divorce Law on the Divorce Rate Across the 50 States and Its Relation to Income, Education, and Religiosity." _Journal of Marriage and the Family_ (May 1995): 477-488.
>>What is it? It is that I think I have sufficient reason to regard you as a moron. Therefore I am asking you to designate me as your foe so that I can ignore you better. My time is valuable and limited.
It's called the English language. Heard of it? Didn't pay attention in English comprehension class or something?
You didn't answer my question, you just responded with an ad hominem attack.
OH! You're a liberal! I get it now.
You said it's not coincidence that two hurricanes are hitting New Orleans in 3 years. Apparently, you don't agree with Moore and the other Democrats' statements that God is on their side.
So... what is it, then?
Don't worry, it'll still be Bush's fault when people don't leave, and drown.
>>One might posit that it is just coincidence that we're getting two strong hurricanes in three years slamming into New Orleans.
If it's not coincidence, then what is it??
Of course, Michael Moore said that Gustav is evidence that God hates the Republicans, and some democrat leaders were filmed laughing about it... but still, I'd call it coincidence.
>>What I find funny is that you forget that many hardcore right wing Republicans were not sold on the centralist McCain. So by choosing Palin he not only appeased those voters, but he also pandered "to disgruntled Hillary Clinton voters". Either way so far it is looking like a brilliant move.
Precisely. I think it was a great move on McCain's part, and sufficiently audacious that my respect for him moved up 4 or 5 notches.
I'm still voting for Barr, but my dislike for McCain has dimmed significantly with this move.