Right, like I'm sure their village hasn't had to relocate in the last two thousand years as a result of climate change.
There's been climate change a lot longer than there have been people, and even in the last two thousand years we've had warmer and cooler cycles.
Of course, this year was a record low, with arctic ice sheets at the thickest they've been in a long time, so they might have trouble pulling off that claim of global warming to begin with.
Yeah, I'm not sure why Valve thought it would be a great idea to let you take screenshots every time you die. Is that *really* what people want to record during a FPS?
Something like 10 or 20 years ago they found that more neurons went into the visual pathway than out of it. And various optical illusions have demonstrated this for decades.
1) Don't require people to take off their shoes. There's nothing people can hide in their shoes that they can't hide elsewhere.
2) Solve pipeline stalls. When one retard is slow or forgets his boarding pass, he blocks the entire pipeline going through security. Move him immediately out of the way and hand-search him, and keep the pipeline moving.
Whew, I'm glad they realized there's no conflict of interest between internet registrars and internet registrars stealing domains from people who go to them to register domains.
My church installed one in the garden outside in order to keep deer from eating the plants, but it's had the upshot that I can't stand to be anywhere outside the church now. Normally there's socializing and coffee outside... now I just run for my car as fast as I can. It's that annoying.
Since British shopkeepers are using this on the exterior of their shops in order to deter loitering, I think they should be fined for disrupting the peace (or whatever it's called) just as if they were playing different audible frequencies. The fact that people with reduced hearing capacity can't hear them shouldn't change the fact that they're blaring highly annoying sound onto a public sidewalk.
>>Vista's explorer has no parent directory button.
This is actually spot-on. The removal of the up-arrow button (and switching backspace from up to back) was by far and away the stupidest design decision they made in Vista. As he says, the directory names will often scroll across the top, and the parent directory is not always listed in the directory names. Try opening up a directory on the desktop -- the folder is listed as the root directory. So you can't go up a level and select the files on your desktop in list or detail mode (useful when you save to your directory -- sort it by date, and all your recent saves are there).
Instead they added a green circle-arrow thing. That does nothing.
That's like the antithesis of good UI design.
While, yeah, he does admit that he's a newb when it comes to Linux, nothing really excuses bad UI decisions, on either
>The idea that an unneeded, disproven creator God should not only exist in spite of all the evidence, but should find me someone worth conversing with, is light-years more unreasonable. And it's a testament to how deep into the delusion you must be that you don't see this.
The trouble is that this means that your test to see if God exists would reject the existence of God, even if God walked up to you and slapped you in the face with a wet fish.
This is the dishonesty I've been talking about all along -- if one's criteria for determining that God exists includes rejecting empirical evidence to one's face, then one has an emotive stance, not a rational one.
He didn't have a laptop, just went to a photolab which copied them onto a DVD for him. He actually made a couple copies, but since they were all together, they all got cracked at once.
Yeah, mailing home SD Cards is probably less likely to result in a break or cracked disc, like what happened to my friend when he mailed home a DVD with all his photos from China. Well, half his photos. He needed the space and, damn, they're gone forever.
I'd say a SD Card in the little plastic boxes they come in should be good enough protection, maybe with a padded liner too.
>>Am I doing that? Or are you doing that, when you say that any single study, regardless of how its contradicted by the rest, that indicates that echinacea works for colds makes it reasonable to act like it works for colds?
You have to remember that one in 20 studies will print complete bullshit as scientific evidence (P 0.05), which is amplified by confirmation bias and the dusty drawer effect. Thus you can't look at one study, but the evidence as a whole.
And, on the contrary, they did a meta-survey of 13 studies and found echinacea was effective. But other large studies have shown the opposite. So like I said, a person can (right now) choose to take it or not without feeling stupid.
In religion, you have millions of people who have reported a variety of religious experiences. I'm enough of a scientist to say that it could all be in their heads, but you also have the general historic accuracy of the Bible (after you get past Genesis), and how archaeologists keep finding evidence the Bible was right about who and where things happened at certain times. I'm not a person who believes in the inerrancy of the Bible, since it was written by humans, but there's a difference between the Bible and the Book of Mormon, for example, which seems to have been literally pulled out of a guy's hat.
Here's a question: if you have a religious experience, and you believe that God has spoken to you, would that make you believe in God, or would you write it off as schizophrenia?
>>I did not say they didn't study drugs. I said they -overstudied- drugs. Total opposite.
They don't have any longitudinal studies on ADD meds, so I have to disagree. How amphetamines affect developing brains is something I'd be worried about if I was: the FDA, the American Psychiatric Association, or the Industry (who stands to be sued for billions when lots of little Timmys become suicidal or whatever because they fucked with his brain chemistry).
Reading about the K-P Diet has made me kind of wonder if there might be something to it.
Hmm, in my college physics class, we always used V for Voltages.
Kinda weird, I know.
But yeah, even anyone who doesn't understand Ohm's law but tinkers with computers should know that lower voltage = less power, and higher voltage = 0vercl0ck. Or something like that.
Uh, psychiatrists actually do study drugs. My fiancee is finishing up her doctorate in pharmacy right now, and while she is the clinical drug expert in her hospital, doctors and psychiatrists do actually know quite a lot about drugs, especially in their field of interest.
The problem isn't lack of drugs on their part, per se, but rather the industry's lack of knowledge about the drugs. Proscribing amphetamines to kids without any longitudinal studies on how it affects their development would seem to be an incredibly stupid idea, but there's a lot of money at stake, so they prescribe them anyway. The real scandal, in my opinion, is that the psychiatrist association (whatever it is) rolled over for the industry on this issue.
And, yes, ADD meds are over-prescribed (by a huge margin), but a lot of that has to do with the design of the diagnosis formula in DSM-IV... reading it over, I'd have been certainly diagnosed as ADHD as a kid if it had been around back then, but I had no problem focusing (quite the opposite, really). I'd have mistakenly been put on Ritalin. Essentially, the DSM-IV guidelines are so broad, that any high-energy kid can get lumped into the category of ADHD.
The final bit of the scandal that really pisses me off is that schools get about 4x the money for a special ed kid as they do for normal kids, and school counselors and psych people can nominate kids for ADD diagnosis. If the parents roll over on the diagnosis (or worse, are tired of dealing with an energetic kid), then they drug the kid out of his mind and get a pet walking zombie.
Not to say that ADD/ADHD isn't real, but it is very overdiagnosed, especially when they confuse simple high-energy behavior with ADHD.
My old landlord had arthritis of the spine (and diabetes and a lot of other stuff I got to hear all about). Vioxx was basically the only drug that had the right combination of effects that worked for him. After they pulled it from the market, he was pretty pissed off, since he couldn't find any of it, and so he was forced onto morphine for the pain instead, so he was sleeping like 16 hours a day.
His quote: "I'll take an increased risk of heart attack if it means I don't sleep all day long, and actually have a life."
IMO, informed consent is the governing model we should be using.
Skepticism is hard to prove to be the more logical case. Just today, an article came out saying that a quarter of Briton's think that Churchill never existed. Sound familiar?
>>therefore the decision to spend $10 on echinacea is inherently unreasonable, because it's known to be a waste of money
You're arguing that that it has been proven to be ineffective, so it would be illogical to take it. I agree.
However, I've actually read the Alt-Med bible they use in medical schools (my fiancee is at UC San Francisco, the top pharmacy school in the world), and so I've looked at the references for the effectiveness of Echinacea. The studies are indeed conflicted, with some finding no evidence it works, others finding there is evidence it works.
Therefore, since it remains an open question, both stances are reasonable.
I think the mistake you're making is conflating some evidence for a belief with sufficient evidence for a belief. This of course would make one omniscient (omniscience simply means knowing the truth value of all propositions), which is an ironic stance for an atheist to take.
Slashdot Mirror
>>I like TED as much as the next guy, but more and more of it seems like a whitewash, style-over-substance dog and pony show.
Welcome to academia. =)
Also, TED's a little too self-congratulatory for my taste, but they do have some fun talks.
Wow, what a great way to teach kids about resonance. That's amazingly awesome. =)
Consensus is a herd effect. Statistical analysis rather depressingly shows how powerful the bandwagon effect is.
It is interesting to look at, but it doesn't mean as much as looking at the numeric data itself.
Right, like I'm sure their village hasn't had to relocate in the last two thousand years as a result of climate change.
There's been climate change a lot longer than there have been people, and even in the last two thousand years we've had warmer and cooler cycles.
Of course, this year was a record low, with arctic ice sheets at the thickest they've been in a long time, so they might have trouble pulling off that claim of global warming to begin with.
Yeah, I'm not sure why Valve thought it would be a great idea to let you take screenshots every time you die. Is that *really* what people want to record during a FPS?
Nah, the Slashdot defense is: I couldn't possibly have had a wife!
Yeah, this is old news.
Something like 10 or 20 years ago they found that more neurons went into the visual pathway than out of it. And various optical illusions have demonstrated this for decades.
You literally do see what you expect to see.
1) Don't require people to take off their shoes. There's nothing people can hide in their shoes that they can't hide elsewhere.
2) Solve pipeline stalls. When one retard is slow or forgets his boarding pass, he blocks the entire pipeline going through security. Move him immediately out of the way and hand-search him, and keep the pipeline moving.
More importantly, we can't make a airplane the size of a swallow that will fly all day without refueling.
Whew, I'm glad they realized there's no conflict of interest between internet registrars and internet registrars stealing domains from people who go to them to register domains.
That's a load off my chest!
I'm 30 and I can hear the damn things just fine.
My church installed one in the garden outside in order to keep deer from eating the plants, but it's had the upshot that I can't stand to be anywhere outside the church now. Normally there's socializing and coffee outside... now I just run for my car as fast as I can. It's that annoying.
Since British shopkeepers are using this on the exterior of their shops in order to deter loitering, I think they should be fined for disrupting the peace (or whatever it's called) just as if they were playing different audible frequencies. The fact that people with reduced hearing capacity can't hear them shouldn't change the fact that they're blaring highly annoying sound onto a public sidewalk.
They just have very powerful spam filters at the FCC.
>>10 years nobody would have thought that google earth has all this easy accessible data.
All this data was available 10 years ago. It was simply a matter of Google buying it from the satellite map people and making it publicly available.
The satellite imagery people have been at trade shows for a long time... it's hardly new stuff.
>>Vista's explorer has no parent directory button.
This is actually spot-on. The removal of the up-arrow button (and switching backspace from up to back) was by far and away the stupidest design decision they made in Vista. As he says, the directory names will often scroll across the top, and the parent directory is not always listed in the directory names. Try opening up a directory on the desktop -- the folder is listed as the root directory. So you can't go up a level and select the files on your desktop in list or detail mode (useful when you save to your directory -- sort it by date, and all your recent saves are there).
Instead they added a green circle-arrow thing. That does nothing.
That's like the antithesis of good UI design.
While, yeah, he does admit that he's a newb when it comes to Linux, nothing really excuses bad UI decisions, on either
>The idea that an unneeded, disproven creator God should not only exist in spite of all the evidence, but should find me someone worth conversing with, is light-years more unreasonable. And it's a testament to how deep into the delusion you must be that you don't see this.
The trouble is that this means that your test to see if God exists would reject the existence of God, even if God walked up to you and slapped you in the face with a wet fish.
This is the dishonesty I've been talking about all along -- if one's criteria for determining that God exists includes rejecting empirical evidence to one's face, then one has an emotive stance, not a rational one.
Plenty of places to shang wang in Shanghai, but I dunno if you'd want to FTP 4GB of data home from one of them.
He didn't have a laptop, just went to a photolab which copied them onto a DVD for him. He actually made a couple copies, but since they were all together, they all got cracked at once.
Un-lucky.
Yeah, mailing home SD Cards is probably less likely to result in a break or cracked disc, like what happened to my friend when he mailed home a DVD with all his photos from China. Well, half his photos. He needed the space and, damn, they're gone forever.
I'd say a SD Card in the little plastic boxes they come in should be good enough protection, maybe with a padded liner too.
>>Am I doing that? Or are you doing that, when you say that any single study, regardless of how its contradicted by the rest, that indicates that echinacea works for colds makes it reasonable to act like it works for colds?
You have to remember that one in 20 studies will print complete bullshit as scientific evidence (P 0.05), which is amplified by confirmation bias and the dusty drawer effect. Thus you can't look at one study, but the evidence as a whole.
And, on the contrary, they did a meta-survey of 13 studies and found echinacea was effective. But other large studies have shown the opposite. So like I said, a person can (right now) choose to take it or not without feeling stupid.
In religion, you have millions of people who have reported a variety of religious experiences. I'm enough of a scientist to say that it could all be in their heads, but you also have the general historic accuracy of the Bible (after you get past Genesis), and how archaeologists keep finding evidence the Bible was right about who and where things happened at certain times. I'm not a person who believes in the inerrancy of the Bible, since it was written by humans, but there's a difference between the Bible and the Book of Mormon, for example, which seems to have been literally pulled out of a guy's hat.
Here's a question: if you have a religious experience, and you believe that God has spoken to you, would that make you believe in God, or would you write it off as schizophrenia?
>>I did not say they didn't study drugs. I said they -overstudied- drugs. Total opposite.
They don't have any longitudinal studies on ADD meds, so I have to disagree. How amphetamines affect developing brains is something I'd be worried about if I was: the FDA, the American Psychiatric Association, or the Industry (who stands to be sued for billions when lots of little Timmys become suicidal or whatever because they fucked with his brain chemistry).
Reading about the K-P Diet has made me kind of wonder if there might be something to it.
Hmm, in my college physics class, we always used V for Voltages.
Kinda weird, I know.
But yeah, even anyone who doesn't understand Ohm's law but tinkers with computers should know that lower voltage = less power, and higher voltage = 0vercl0ck. Or something like that.
Well, Freud was a crackpot.
However, there is a significant amount of evidence for non-medicated treatment of schizophrenia. Study how they treat it (classically) in China.
Uh, psychiatrists actually do study drugs. My fiancee is finishing up her doctorate in pharmacy right now, and while she is the clinical drug expert in her hospital, doctors and psychiatrists do actually know quite a lot about drugs, especially in their field of interest.
The problem isn't lack of drugs on their part, per se, but rather the industry's lack of knowledge about the drugs. Proscribing amphetamines to kids without any longitudinal studies on how it affects their development would seem to be an incredibly stupid idea, but there's a lot of money at stake, so they prescribe them anyway. The real scandal, in my opinion, is that the psychiatrist association (whatever it is) rolled over for the industry on this issue.
And, yes, ADD meds are over-prescribed (by a huge margin), but a lot of that has to do with the design of the diagnosis formula in DSM-IV... reading it over, I'd have been certainly diagnosed as ADHD as a kid if it had been around back then, but I had no problem focusing (quite the opposite, really). I'd have mistakenly been put on Ritalin. Essentially, the DSM-IV guidelines are so broad, that any high-energy kid can get lumped into the category of ADHD.
The final bit of the scandal that really pisses me off is that schools get about 4x the money for a special ed kid as they do for normal kids, and school counselors and psych people can nominate kids for ADD diagnosis. If the parents roll over on the diagnosis (or worse, are tired of dealing with an energetic kid), then they drug the kid out of his mind and get a pet walking zombie.
Not to say that ADD/ADHD isn't real, but it is very overdiagnosed, especially when they confuse simple high-energy behavior with ADHD.
Buy any Vioxx recently?
My old landlord had arthritis of the spine (and diabetes and a lot of other stuff I got to hear all about). Vioxx was basically the only drug that had the right combination of effects that worked for him. After they pulled it from the market, he was pretty pissed off, since he couldn't find any of it, and so he was forced onto morphine for the pain instead, so he was sleeping like 16 hours a day.
His quote: "I'll take an increased risk of heart attack if it means I don't sleep all day long, and actually have a life."
IMO, informed consent is the governing model we should be using.
Skepticism is hard to prove to be the more logical case. Just today, an article came out saying that a quarter of Briton's think that Churchill never existed. Sound familiar?
>>therefore the decision to spend $10 on echinacea is inherently unreasonable, because it's known to be a waste of money
You're arguing that that it has been proven to be ineffective, so it would be illogical to take it. I agree.
However, I've actually read the Alt-Med bible they use in medical schools (my fiancee is at UC San Francisco, the top pharmacy school in the world), and so I've looked at the references for the effectiveness of Echinacea. The studies are indeed conflicted, with some finding no evidence it works, others finding there is evidence it works.
Therefore, since it remains an open question, both stances are reasonable.
I think the mistake you're making is conflating some evidence for a belief with sufficient evidence for a belief. This of course would make one omniscient (omniscience simply means knowing the truth value of all propositions), which is an ironic stance for an atheist to take.