>>You're hiring a someone to be a computer scientist
No, he wants to work as a statistician. A biology degree is completely appropriate, as you basically have to be a SPSS whiz to do any research in biology these days. Undergrads actually handle the test tubes and mice, overseen by grad students. PIs get everything set up and then work mainly on the data analysis level. A lot also get involved in computer science for modelling and related reasons.
That said, if I was hiring a computer science computer science position (you know, to have someone refactor code for me or whatever), I'd definitely hire a person with a CS doctorate over a biology one (or a CS person without a doctorate over a bio person), because I can basically guarantee you that no Biology single-subject major will have the necessary classes in software engineering. As someone who spent years working with the code created by biology people... well, that's why they hired me and other CS grad students to do the actual software engineering side of things for them.
So, yeah. Basically it depends on what the ultimate nature of the job is. I'd hire a PhD in biology to do stats over a computer science guy, but I'd hire a computer science guy over a bio PhD for a software engineering job.
>>For example, no brokerage house is going to hire a biology PhD to do statistical analysis research. They're going to hire someone with a PhD in math/statistics.
Given that some of the best stats guys I know where biology researchers, that's a bit of a stretch. (What do you think biology research IS, mostly? You have undergrads to actually work with the test tubes and mice, and grad students to oversee them.)
Brokerage houses have been known to hire anyone, in the past, who are whizzes at math, and the guy in TFA should be able to do so. Especially if he takes advantage of the networking opportunities Ivy League schools offer.
This home-spun shit really gets on my tits. It ignores the enormous scale effects which differentiate national economics from household economics. It's the same category of error as not understanding the cube-square law in biology. A national economy in which everyone, including the government, pays down debt and stops spending is an economy that is shrinking. When economies shrink, demand for goods and services shrink, tax take falls, and companies are forced to lay off workers... there's no point in ignoring this reality just because it doesn't fit your homely philosophising.
By such Keynesian reasoning, the drunken-sailor spending spree the government has been on should have been just full of awesomesauce for our economy. Remember? "Without stimulus, unemployment might reach as high as 8%"?
When Keynesian predictions fail so badly, only idiots and Paul Krugman (but I repeat myself) continue to tow such a line.
>>Nevermind the fact that taxes on the rich are lower than they've been since the Truman administration
Typical misguided talking point. Nobody ever paid the 80% or 90% or whatever top marginal tax rate back in the day. We used to have a much easier time creating tax shelters and protecting income from taxation than today - if you look at the actual percentage of taxes paid, it's remained remarkably constant across the last 60 years (within 5% or so).
Part of Reagan's tax reforms was to eliminate loopholes and lower the top marginal rates at the same time, which worked out pretty well both for the economy and for tax revenues. Turns out when you get people to not hide their money, more of it gets spent, and your acceleration increases. See for example Microsoft hiding $50B in Ireland right now, waiting for a tax holiday to take it back into the US to spend.
>>Unfortunately, Android doesn't work great with physical keyboards yet (all kinds of focus issues, and the Ctrl key annoyingly doesn't work in ConnectBot).
Yeah, I have a transformer, which bakes the keyboard into the design of the tablet, and it's amazing how few apps support keyboards. You know, things like PDF readers not allowing pageup/pagedown/home/end keys to work, things which are, you know, actually useful to improving the PDF reading experience.
Richard Nixon was denounced as a fascist by the baby boomers in the late 60s. What's he remembered for now other than Watergate? He opened diplomatic relations with Chinese Communists, instituted wage and price controls by the government to check inflation, and ended the war in Vietnam. He would be thrown out of the Republican Party today for being more liberal than Bill Clinton.
It is amazing how much the Republicans, and those same boomers, have shifted to the right.
Contrawise, if you ever watched the JFK/Nixon debates, they were constantly trying to one-up each other on how anti-communist they were, and how much more hardcore they'd be to the Soviet Union if they were elected president.
It's amazing how far to the left the Democrat party has shifted as well.
>>I don't see a mention of sports in your post anywhere. How well did you do at physical games? Wait, you're on/. I think I know the answer to that.
As the other poster said, you failed at reading comprehension. I was one of two MVPs in San Diego County for varsity men's volleyball my senior year, and won various other awards as well. So it worked out pretty well, and sort of serves as a counterexample to Gladwell's age thesis (though by high school, the difference between a 12 year old and a 13 year old is perhaps as profound as between a 5 year old and a 6 year old... though in some ways it is). However, my success did correlate with his other thesis about needing to put in many hours of intensive work to get really good at something - I helped coach the women's volleyball team during the fall quarter, our school had an optional volleyball club running during the winter that I signed up for, and then varsity men's volleyball during the spring quarter. We'd also go to various community gyms around the county when they'd host volleyball nights, to get extra practice in, too. I was pretty terrible my freshman year, but all the time I put in got me a starting position on the varsity team my sophomore year, and we won our league every year after that.
I'd have continued playing at UC San Diego, but it would have entailed missing class every Friday, and spending 20 hours a week doing unpaid janitorial service in the school gym. Since my classes had quizzes every Friday, and I wasn't willing to compromise my academics, I ended up just playing club and community volleyball, and still do.
Complete enough response for you? Not every person on Slashdot is a couch potato.
After six or seven rounds of rubberstamping, the new Directive is put before the actual "Parliament", where MEPs can vote yea or nea, or just not show up in the hope that it will pass and they can plead ignorant neutrality. If they vote nea, it goes through the committee system a few more times so that some of the more deliberately egregious clauses can be elided. Honour satisfied, the Directive is duly passed in the form that the lobbyist really wanted, and Member States can begin the process of (mis)implementing it, or in the case of anyone South or East of Belgium, shrugging their shoulders and simply ignoring it.
And that's how democracy works.
Sounds like someone needs to make a new round of Schoolhouse Rocks videos.
>>...that a too small challenge is just as bad as a too big one. They get bored. Exactly like with a game that's too easy. Like those who were bad at school because they were bored.
Exactly. But it depends on personality. While I think the evidence in Outliers is fairly compelling (at least that there's a *bias* toward kids on the upper end of their age brackets), being the youngest in my class (starting 1st grade at the age of 5, started college at 16) I ended up becoming very competitive with older kids, trying to work against their advantage and experience, and ended up doing quite well in high school as a result (a valedictorian and countywide co-MVP in my sport). My whole family is competitive, though... my paternal great-grandmothers were absolutely ruthless at cards, talking trash and never giving quarter, even to small kids... and you can still see that at the family reunions, where their great-great-grandkids are walking around with decks of cards, talking trash and challenging their elders to play hearts with them.
For my sister, though, it sort of had the opposite effect. She, at some point, decided that she couldn't compete, and sort of gave up. So I'm not saying it's a panacea or anything - but I do think healthy competition is good for kids.
>>It is easy for pure hues. We can define them in terms ranges of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation.
There's two problems with that: 1) Sorites - sure, maybe 700nm light is "red", but is 701nm? 702nm? 2) The perception of redness is only tangentially related to the EM wavelength of light being received. In other words, 700nm can be perceived as yellow or orange under various circumstances.
That's why it's hard to equate wavelength with color perception.
>>Too bad you can get permits to drill for oil or mine coal in the BLM (which holds a lot of the potentially useful desert land, which must be above sea level to be worth building a multibillion dollar structure on) but you can't get a permit to do solar.
Yeah, and when they do issue permits, like the Ivanpah plant, the Sierra Club and NIMBYs will fight tooth and nail to shut it down.
It's been a while since I've read a post in which nearly every statement is false. Well, not counting trolls, I guess. Your information might have been true 30 years ago, but it's out of date now.
>>which last at best, 20 years before needing replacement
No, you're thinking of the old PV panels that were only rated for 5 years or so.
Modern solar panels are rated at 20 year lifespans. But this doesn't mean they hit 0% production at 20 years out - it means the manufacturer is guaranteeing that they will not drop below a certain efficiency target (80% or 90%) after 20 years.If they degrade too quickly before then, the manufacturer replaces them. Some even have lifetime warranties now.
>>this is without any incidence of weather phenomena (hail, etc.)
Solar panels typically use tempered glass which are rated at withstanding 1-inch hail at 50MPH. If you're going to have hail larger than that, then you're probably not in the right climate for solar anyway.:p
>>Second, they only work in the daytime so to store the energy through the night, batteries are the most viable option for most locations with the least annual cloudiness. Current battery tech also has a pretty short lifespan and also includes the use of many hazardous elements to produce
Irrelevant. Most rooftop solar systems these days are grid-tied, which means they feed power into the grid during the day (building up on-peak kWh credits) and then suck them back out at night (at off-peak rates). The way the math works out, you don't need to even cover all of your energy consumption to zero out your bill, due to the rate arbitrage differences between on-peak and off-peak pricing.
That's for the individual. But the grid benefits from it too, having seasonal increases in power production right when the grid needs it most, which allows you to escape having to buy very expensive new plants which will run at a low capacity factor.
>>The cost balance tips too far into the red to maintain a grid on solar, and that is without even considering the land necessary to locate enough panels to power an area.
Rooftop solar works, if you're worried about running out of land in the desert areas (heh). Also, we have several pumped-storage units in California which are reasonably efficient ways to store energy at nighttime, but really solar with a nuclear backstop is a perfectly workable model. I used to complain about the cost, but give the extortionate rates we're paying to PG&E for natural gas and hydropower, solar+nuclear would clock in at about half the price.
>>The rest of this boils down to word games . I assert concepts are not things. Dillusions of man, redness, distributions...etc are all concepts and not things. Therefore they are not real things.
So you've never experienced redness in your life? That's not "real"? It takes an enormous amount of hypocrisy from an empiricist such as yourself to deny the most primary of empirical observations - seeing with your own eyes. Our internal life are prima facie "real things".
>>The wave function provides universal consistancy... less confusing ways to refine theories to be useful to us than playing word games in spaces that are ultimatly untestable
Dealing with numeric concepts like "700nm light" and claiming this is equivalent to "red" is well and good, except it's wrong. And experiments with our Cartesian Theatre are done all the time.
>>Red is in principle, observable, measurable and quantifiable and hence it is physical.
700nm wavelength electromagnetic radiation is observable, measurable, and quantifiable.
"Red" is a much trickier concept. Even if you have a fMRI hooked up to your visual cortex and can demonstrate you're processing pure 700nm light in exactly the same fashion as your buddy, you have no idea if his experience of red is the same as yours.
If that's too high level, consider instead the fact that the color you experience when viewing 700nm light changes depending on what other sorts of light you absorb in other parts of your retina. For example: http://boingboing.net/2008/02/08/color-tile-optical-i.html
>>"Basic philosophy" is nothing but an ongoing argument between ignorant people over things they know nothing about. For the past three hundred years those people haven't just been ignorant, they've been willfully ignorant. For the past thirty years they haven't just been willfully ignorant, they've been more-or-less criminally ignorant.
You do realize that things like computer science are essentially Applied Philosophy, don't you? Where the fuck do you think that types, classes, etc., came from?
If you want to live in a society without a basis of philosophy, be my guest and move to Antarctica. I'll hang out in my Enlightenment Philosophy based country with its system of natural rights for men.
>>Nothing exists in our minds apart from the information we have been given by our senses or that which is a product of the biological processes of our brain.
The key word there is information. Information has no extension (to use Descartes' terminology - it has no length, width, or height), but it is certainly a real thing in our universe.
>>All thought exists physically within our brain as neurochemical interactions, to say otherwise is to presume that there is some as yet unobserved action that does not depend on physical forces going on inside our heads.
Kinda. Let's say there's just one neuron in my brain (hey, maybe I'm a crayfish) that codes for pain. The faster the neuron fires, the more pain I feel. We can establish under the microscope quite easily in this case the NCC (neural correlate for consciousness) for pain. The real kicker than materialists like yourself have trouble with is the very obvious question: where does the FEELING of pain come from? All you can see under a microscope is a series of action potentials, sometimes triggering more rapidly than others. Unless you are doubting the reality of pain (or other qualia), it's unclear why one specific neuron firing quickly creates a feeling of pain, while other might cause feelings of happiness.
In a nutshell, there's two things that have become quite clear: 1) NCCs exist, and 2) We have absolutely no clue how this creates consciousness, or even have a proposed model by which consciousness could exist under our current understanding of physics. This is why your brand of materialism is not especially popular these days - it needs to posit new forms of elementary particles that cannot be detected by any known means, and hence is functionally equivalent to Descartian Dualism. =)
Like a lot of arguments involving Occam's Razor, it doesn't actually prove anything.
>>All the planets in the solar system travel around the sun in approximately elliptical orbits OR All the planets in the solar system orbit the Earth in a complex arrangement of circles within circles within circles?
Which are completely identical - it just depends on what frame of reference you use. Picking the sun as a frame of reference makes the math more complicated than picking the centre of Andromeda, but it absolutely does NOT prove that the sun is the unmoving centre of the universe (as Galileo claimed).
x = y and x + 1000 = y + 1000...are equivalent. One simply looks more complicated than the other. Where people fail with Occam Razor type arguments is they think the Razor makes one theory more "true" than another, which is a complete misuse of it.
>>>>At the moment, they are claiming a statistical certainty of '3.5 sigma' Ã" suggesting that there is less than a 0.05% chance that the result they see is down to chance. >>Seems legit. I mean how many times would one need to take the chance of the results being down to chance for that chance having a chance of happening?
My plan for runs on the LHC is to run 1000 experiments and then pick the result that most supports some media-attention-grabbing theory that I'll just make up on the spot./sacrasm off
In all honestly, a sigma of 0.05 isn't especially good for experiments like this. You don't have the confounding effects that make social "science" so hard to trust.
>>So you believe that you can have high levels of social inequality, but low government corruption?
What is social inequality? Do you mean income inequality? If so, then yes.
>>In my opinion this is very naive, but I would like to know how you justify that belief.
Because rising income inequality is almost entirely caused by the success of corporations like Google in foreign countries. Needs no tinfoil-hat corruption theories to explain.
>>soccer ball, football, volleyball or even tennis ball >>None of those listed are even hard! What do they consider soft, Nerf?
Having taken a header to a water-soaked soccer ball on a cold January afternoon, I can tell you that they can indeed hit like a bag of rocks. After a while, our coach noticed that nobody was trying to even go for the corner kicks he was lobbing at us. =)
But mostly they're safe. I've cracked a kid full in the face with a hard spike in volleyball, and besides stinging a bit (especially to the pride), he was just fine. The ball bounced off his face and hit the ceiling of the gym.
I'm not really an all-or-nothing sort of fellow. I can think of plenty of people and "people" I'd like to throw mud at for the current mess we're in, and corporations like Goldman-Sachs and Fanny Mae are definitely two of them.
>>First off - If someone's only interest is programming, why the hell would they care about social skills? Why "should" they try to improve them?
Because you'll fail if you don't develop, to at least a certain degree, the ability to read, write, and speak. Listening maybe should be on that list, but a lot of people seemed to have gotten successful without that one.
If you don't know how to learn to communicate with other people, watch and study how other people interact with each other, and then find a group of people unconnected to your normal social network (so that when you fuck up, it doesn't cost you any friends you care about) and start trying. Eventually you'll develop social skills, and maybe even come to enjoy being able to make women laugh, and in a good way.
What's really challenging for certain people to understand is that devout Christians donate a lot more of their time and money to charities than less devout or atheistic folk.
So when you hear the same people arguing against government run charities, you shouldn't think, "OMG! They're hypocrites!" (because, after all, they've placed their money where their mouth is) but rather that they think that there's better ways of running charity than having the government overseeing everything.
Now, you may disagree with them, especially groups like the Salvation Army that I've developed quite a few issues with, but it's inaccurate to call them hypocrites, as your comic does.
Slashdot Mirror
>>You're hiring a someone to be a computer scientist
No, he wants to work as a statistician. A biology degree is completely appropriate, as you basically have to be a SPSS whiz to do any research in biology these days. Undergrads actually handle the test tubes and mice, overseen by grad students. PIs get everything set up and then work mainly on the data analysis level. A lot also get involved in computer science for modelling and related reasons.
That said, if I was hiring a computer science computer science position (you know, to have someone refactor code for me or whatever), I'd definitely hire a person with a CS doctorate over a biology one (or a CS person without a doctorate over a bio person), because I can basically guarantee you that no Biology single-subject major will have the necessary classes in software engineering. As someone who spent years working with the code created by biology people... well, that's why they hired me and other CS grad students to do the actual software engineering side of things for them.
So, yeah. Basically it depends on what the ultimate nature of the job is. I'd hire a PhD in biology to do stats over a computer science guy, but I'd hire a computer science guy over a bio PhD for a software engineering job.
>>For example, no brokerage house is going to hire a biology PhD to do statistical analysis research. They're going to hire someone with a PhD in math/statistics.
Given that some of the best stats guys I know where biology researchers, that's a bit of a stretch. (What do you think biology research IS, mostly? You have undergrads to actually work with the test tubes and mice, and grad students to oversee them.)
Brokerage houses have been known to hire anyone, in the past, who are whizzes at math, and the guy in TFA should be able to do so. Especially if he takes advantage of the networking opportunities Ivy League schools offer.
By such Keynesian reasoning, the drunken-sailor spending spree the government has been on should have been just full of awesomesauce for our economy. Remember? "Without stimulus, unemployment might reach as high as 8%"?
When Keynesian predictions fail so badly, only idiots and Paul Krugman (but I repeat myself) continue to tow such a line.
>>Nevermind the fact that taxes on the rich are lower than they've been since the Truman administration
Typical misguided talking point. Nobody ever paid the 80% or 90% or whatever top marginal tax rate back in the day. We used to have a much easier time creating tax shelters and protecting income from taxation than today - if you look at the actual percentage of taxes paid, it's remained remarkably constant across the last 60 years (within 5% or so).
Part of Reagan's tax reforms was to eliminate loopholes and lower the top marginal rates at the same time, which worked out pretty well both for the economy and for tax revenues. Turns out when you get people to not hide their money, more of it gets spent, and your acceleration increases. See for example Microsoft hiding $50B in Ireland right now, waiting for a tax holiday to take it back into the US to spend.
>>Unfortunately, Android doesn't work great with physical keyboards yet (all kinds of focus issues, and the Ctrl key annoyingly doesn't work in ConnectBot).
Yeah, I have a transformer, which bakes the keyboard into the design of the tablet, and it's amazing how few apps support keyboards. You know, things like PDF readers not allowing pageup/pagedown/home/end keys to work, things which are, you know, actually useful to improving the PDF reading experience.
Contrawise, if you ever watched the JFK/Nixon debates, they were constantly trying to one-up each other on how anti-communist they were, and how much more hardcore they'd be to the Soviet Union if they were elected president.
It's amazing how far to the left the Democrat party has shifted as well.
Our society is a lot more polarized these days.
>>I don't see a mention of sports in your post anywhere. How well did you do at physical games? Wait, you're on /. I think I know the answer to that.
As the other poster said, you failed at reading comprehension. I was one of two MVPs in San Diego County for varsity men's volleyball my senior year, and won various other awards as well. So it worked out pretty well, and sort of serves as a counterexample to Gladwell's age thesis (though by high school, the difference between a 12 year old and a 13 year old is perhaps as profound as between a 5 year old and a 6 year old... though in some ways it is). However, my success did correlate with his other thesis about needing to put in many hours of intensive work to get really good at something - I helped coach the women's volleyball team during the fall quarter, our school had an optional volleyball club running during the winter that I signed up for, and then varsity men's volleyball during the spring quarter. We'd also go to various community gyms around the county when they'd host volleyball nights, to get extra practice in, too. I was pretty terrible my freshman year, but all the time I put in got me a starting position on the varsity team my sophomore year, and we won our league every year after that.
I'd have continued playing at UC San Diego, but it would have entailed missing class every Friday, and spending 20 hours a week doing unpaid janitorial service in the school gym. Since my classes had quizzes every Friday, and I wasn't willing to compromise my academics, I ended up just playing club and community volleyball, and still do.
Complete enough response for you? Not every person on Slashdot is a couch potato.
Sounds like someone needs to make a new round of Schoolhouse Rocks videos.
>>...that a too small challenge is just as bad as a too big one. They get bored. Exactly like with a game that's too easy. Like those who were bad at school because they were bored.
Exactly. But it depends on personality. While I think the evidence in Outliers is fairly compelling (at least that there's a *bias* toward kids on the upper end of their age brackets), being the youngest in my class (starting 1st grade at the age of 5, started college at 16) I ended up becoming very competitive with older kids, trying to work against their advantage and experience, and ended up doing quite well in high school as a result (a valedictorian and countywide co-MVP in my sport). My whole family is competitive, though... my paternal great-grandmothers were absolutely ruthless at cards, talking trash and never giving quarter, even to small kids... and you can still see that at the family reunions, where their great-great-grandkids are walking around with decks of cards, talking trash and challenging their elders to play hearts with them.
For my sister, though, it sort of had the opposite effect. She, at some point, decided that she couldn't compete, and sort of gave up. So I'm not saying it's a panacea or anything - but I do think healthy competition is good for kids.
>>It is easy for pure hues. We can define them in terms ranges of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation.
There's two problems with that:
1) Sorites - sure, maybe 700nm light is "red", but is 701nm? 702nm?
2) The perception of redness is only tangentially related to the EM wavelength of light being received. In other words, 700nm can be perceived as yellow or orange under various circumstances.
That's why it's hard to equate wavelength with color perception.
>>And if we simply define color optically rather than psychologically?
Sounds easy, please explain. =)
>>Too bad you can get permits to drill for oil or mine coal in the BLM (which holds a lot of the potentially useful desert land, which must be above sea level to be worth building a multibillion dollar structure on) but you can't get a permit to do solar.
Yeah, and when they do issue permits, like the Ivanpah plant, the Sierra Club and NIMBYs will fight tooth and nail to shut it down.
(NIMBYs? In the middle of the desert? Yep.)
It's been a while since I've read a post in which nearly every statement is false. Well, not counting trolls, I guess. Your information might have been true 30 years ago, but it's out of date now.
>>which last at best, 20 years before needing replacement
No, you're thinking of the old PV panels that were only rated for 5 years or so.
Modern solar panels are rated at 20 year lifespans. But this doesn't mean they hit 0% production at 20 years out - it means the manufacturer is guaranteeing that they will not drop below a certain efficiency target (80% or 90%) after 20 years.If they degrade too quickly before then, the manufacturer replaces them. Some even have lifetime warranties now.
>>this is without any incidence of weather phenomena (hail, etc.)
Solar panels typically use tempered glass which are rated at withstanding 1-inch hail at 50MPH. If you're going to have hail larger than that, then you're probably not in the right climate for solar anyway. :p
>>Second, they only work in the daytime so to store the energy through the night, batteries are the most viable option for most locations with the least annual cloudiness. Current battery tech also has a pretty short lifespan and also includes the use of many hazardous elements to produce
Irrelevant. Most rooftop solar systems these days are grid-tied, which means they feed power into the grid during the day (building up on-peak kWh credits) and then suck them back out at night (at off-peak rates). The way the math works out, you don't need to even cover all of your energy consumption to zero out your bill, due to the rate arbitrage differences between on-peak and off-peak pricing.
That's for the individual. But the grid benefits from it too, having seasonal increases in power production right when the grid needs it most, which allows you to escape having to buy very expensive new plants which will run at a low capacity factor.
>>The cost balance tips too far into the red to maintain a grid on solar, and that is without even considering the land necessary to locate enough panels to power an area.
Rooftop solar works, if you're worried about running out of land in the desert areas (heh). Also, we have several pumped-storage units in California which are reasonably efficient ways to store energy at nighttime, but really solar with a nuclear backstop is a perfectly workable model. I used to complain about the cost, but give the extortionate rates we're paying to PG&E for natural gas and hydropower, solar+nuclear would clock in at about half the price.
>>The rest of this boils down to word games . I assert concepts are not things. Dillusions of man, redness, distributions...etc are all concepts and not things. Therefore they are not real things.
So you've never experienced redness in your life? That's not "real"? It takes an enormous amount of hypocrisy from an empiricist such as yourself to deny the most primary of empirical observations - seeing with your own eyes. Our internal life are prima facie "real things".
>>The wave function provides universal consistancy... less confusing ways to refine theories to be useful to us than playing word games in spaces that are ultimatly untestable
Dealing with numeric concepts like "700nm light" and claiming this is equivalent to "red" is well and good, except it's wrong. And experiments with our Cartesian Theatre are done all the time.
>>Red is in principle, observable, measurable and quantifiable and hence it is physical.
700nm wavelength electromagnetic radiation is observable, measurable, and quantifiable.
"Red" is a much trickier concept. Even if you have a fMRI hooked up to your visual cortex and can demonstrate you're processing pure 700nm light in exactly the same fashion as your buddy, you have no idea if his experience of red is the same as yours.
If that's too high level, consider instead the fact that the color you experience when viewing 700nm light changes depending on what other sorts of light you absorb in other parts of your retina. For example: http://boingboing.net/2008/02/08/color-tile-optical-i.html
>>"Basic philosophy" is nothing but an ongoing argument between ignorant people over things they know nothing about. For the past three hundred years those people haven't just been ignorant, they've been willfully ignorant. For the past thirty years they haven't just been willfully ignorant, they've been more-or-less criminally ignorant.
You do realize that things like computer science are essentially Applied Philosophy, don't you? Where the fuck do you think that types, classes, etc., came from?
If you want to live in a society without a basis of philosophy, be my guest and move to Antarctica. I'll hang out in my Enlightenment Philosophy based country with its system of natural rights for men.
>>Nothing exists in our minds apart from the information we have been given by our senses or that which is a product of the biological processes of our brain.
The key word there is information. Information has no extension (to use Descartes' terminology - it has no length, width, or height), but it is certainly a real thing in our universe.
>>All thought exists physically within our brain as neurochemical interactions, to say otherwise is to presume that there is some as yet unobserved action that does not depend on physical forces going on inside our heads.
Kinda. Let's say there's just one neuron in my brain (hey, maybe I'm a crayfish) that codes for pain. The faster the neuron fires, the more pain I feel. We can establish under the microscope quite easily in this case the NCC (neural correlate for consciousness) for pain. The real kicker than materialists like yourself have trouble with is the very obvious question: where does the FEELING of pain come from? All you can see under a microscope is a series of action potentials, sometimes triggering more rapidly than others. Unless you are doubting the reality of pain (or other qualia), it's unclear why one specific neuron firing quickly creates a feeling of pain, while other might cause feelings of happiness.
In a nutshell, there's two things that have become quite clear: 1) NCCs exist, and 2) We have absolutely no clue how this creates consciousness, or even have a proposed model by which consciousness could exist under our current understanding of physics. This is why your brand of materialism is not especially popular these days - it needs to posit new forms of elementary particles that cannot be detected by any known means, and hence is functionally equivalent to Descartian Dualism. =)
>>Sure you did, it's called Occam's Razor
Like a lot of arguments involving Occam's Razor, it doesn't actually prove anything.
>>All the planets in the solar system travel around the sun in approximately elliptical orbits OR All the planets in the solar system orbit the Earth in a complex arrangement of circles within circles within circles?
Which are completely identical - it just depends on what frame of reference you use. Picking the sun as a frame of reference makes the math more complicated than picking the centre of Andromeda, but it absolutely does NOT prove that the sun is the unmoving centre of the universe (as Galileo claimed).
x = y ...are equivalent. One simply looks more complicated than the other. Where people fail with Occam Razor type arguments is they think the Razor makes one theory more "true" than another, which is a complete misuse of it.
and
x + 1000 = y + 1000
>>Wind and Nuclear, Nuclear and On-land wind have similar costs (Wind is slightly cheaper according to the DOE estimates),
Wind also has a much higher subsidy rate than nuclear, though that has been decreasing in recent years.
>>>>At the moment, they are claiming a statistical certainty of '3.5 sigma' Ã" suggesting that there is less than a 0.05% chance that the result they see is down to chance.
>>Seems legit. I mean how many times would one need to take the chance of the results being down to chance for that chance having a chance of happening?
My plan for runs on the LHC is to run 1000 experiments and then pick the result that most supports some media-attention-grabbing theory that I'll just make up on the spot. /sacrasm off
In all honestly, a sigma of 0.05 isn't especially good for experiments like this. You don't have the confounding effects that make social "science" so hard to trust.
>>So you believe that you can have high levels of social inequality, but low government corruption?
What is social inequality? Do you mean income inequality? If so, then yes.
>>In my opinion this is very naive, but I would like to know how you justify that belief.
Because rising income inequality is almost entirely caused by the success of corporations like Google in foreign countries. Needs no tinfoil-hat corruption theories to explain.
>>soccer ball, football, volleyball or even tennis ball
>>None of those listed are even hard! What do they consider soft, Nerf?
Having taken a header to a water-soaked soccer ball on a cold January afternoon, I can tell you that they can indeed hit like a bag of rocks. After a while, our coach noticed that nobody was trying to even go for the corner kicks he was lobbing at us. =)
But mostly they're safe. I've cracked a kid full in the face with a hard spike in volleyball, and besides stinging a bit (especially to the pride), he was just fine. The ball bounced off his face and hit the ceiling of the gym.
>>And the corporations have NO blame at all?
I'm not really an all-or-nothing sort of fellow. I can think of plenty of people and "people" I'd like to throw mud at for the current mess we're in, and corporations like Goldman-Sachs and Fanny Mae are definitely two of them.
>>First off - If someone's only interest is programming, why the hell would they care about social skills? Why "should" they try to improve them?
Because you'll fail if you don't develop, to at least a certain degree, the ability to read, write, and speak. Listening maybe should be on that list, but a lot of people seemed to have gotten successful without that one.
If you don't know how to learn to communicate with other people, watch and study how other people interact with each other, and then find a group of people unconnected to your normal social network (so that when you fuck up, it doesn't cost you any friends you care about) and start trying. Eventually you'll develop social skills, and maybe even come to enjoy being able to make women laugh, and in a good way.
What's really challenging for certain people to understand is that devout Christians donate a lot more of their time and money to charities than less devout or atheistic folk.
So when you hear the same people arguing against government run charities, you shouldn't think, "OMG! They're hypocrites!" (because, after all, they've placed their money where their mouth is) but rather that they think that there's better ways of running charity than having the government overseeing everything.
Now, you may disagree with them, especially groups like the Salvation Army that I've developed quite a few issues with, but it's inaccurate to call them hypocrites, as your comic does.