Grocery store baggers paid more money than Programmer-Analyst jobs at UC San Diego, but I still preferred doing work related to my major.
There's plenty of juniors and seniors who are quite skilled and willing to work on summer projects for a lot less than full time programmers, since it gives them crunch for their resumes.
>>P.S. I can save you the time/money by letting you know all of Glenn Beck's books are absolute crap. No need to buy them in the first place - unless you like to be frightened by really dumb stuff.
I agree. Except for An Inconvenient Book.
He actually makes a lot of good points in that book that need to enter the national discourse.
>>Except that some of the rules predate the Roman Christian Empire and go back to early Hebrews. Many of our laws are based in the Levitical laws...which really, is not a good place to start. SPQR!
We're talking specifically about polygamy laws here. Levirate marriage is straight up old testament stuff - it's not just permissible, but required for men to be polygamist. It's part of the social welfare system for widows.
Our current system involving monogamy, divorce, mistresses, and prostitution derives instead from the people and senate of Rome.
>>While the ICRP support the LNT as the best practical model, I'll keep using it. When they pick a better one, I (and my colleagues) will move to that.\
There's a big difference between saying that the LNT model is the best we have, and saying that the LNT model is right.
>>Maybe I'm wrong but I'm vastly annoyed with the media, given how they talk you'd think people were losing their hair and growing skin lesions.
You're absolutely right to be annoyed at the media for getting it so wrong.
But even the Slashdot summary is disingenuous: "1 Sievert will make you sick, many more will kill you, however, even small doses cumulatively increase cancer risk."
There's no evidence for the LNT (linear no threshold) model for radiation exposure, other than people doing math and plotting a line down into the low-exposure ranges. All the epidemiological studies have shown much lower cancer incidence rates than the LNT would predict, indicating that there is a thresholding effect at work at low doses.
This actually makes a *huge* difference when it comes to cleanup of radioactive material. Something like $200 billion worth of difference.
"Drop those wives, and come out with your hands up!"
So how does Michigan deal with religions that permit polygamy? Do they have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy? And yes, I would consider posting stuff on Facebook "telling."
Why not try this when making introductions to the new neighbors:
"This woman is my wife. This woman is my housekeeper. This woman is my cook, etc."
While I'm sure you're aware of this, PolygamousRanchKid, this scenario is only illegal in Utah.
Ironically enough.
Basically, they're the only state to outlaw common-law polygamy.
Monogamous relationships seem to be a basic part of stable human societies. Polygamous societies have, by definition, a shortage of suitable mates for young men; young men need to "prove" themselves to have a chance at a mate, which tends to involve violence, aggression, etc. That is oversimplified, but the pattern is clear to see: societies with widespread polygamy tend to be economic disasters with frequent civil wars.
With a broad brush: most of Africa is traditionally polygamous, and most of Africa is a mess. Most of the Middle East is polygamous, and is a mess. Asia is a mixed bag: those countries that are doing well economically are mostly or entirely monogamous (China, Japan, India, etc.); those doing poorly tend to be polygamous (e.g., Bangladesh).
Er, China has a long history of polygamy, and was arguably one of the more stable countries throughout world history. They really only got fucked up under the communists, who were also monogamist-or-die type fellows. The richest guy in Macao (IIRC) has a few wives even still, and in modern Hong Kong the practice remains, though they're simply called mistresses now. It's considered acceptable (by everybody except the Christians) in Hong Kong, though under the don't-ask-don't-tell policy that governs a lot of Chinese public/private life.
To paint a broad brush, every society has always been monogamist for the poor, and polygamous for the rich. Belle Ãpoque France, ancient Israel, whatever. In modern America, we have Tiger Woods, Letterman, and the rest getting money and sleeping around. Not saying it's right, but it is certainly not anything new.
>>And polygamy is illegal why, exactly? (assuming that all involved are ok with it) >>Oh yes, because it's written in that holy book from an ancient goat-herders culture that we somehow think still applies to live in a world that is so radically different.
Monogamy stems from the Roman tradition.
Not from the ancient polygamist goat-herders that you hate so much. You'll find nothing in the holy book outlawing polygamy. To the contrary, really.
But don't let facts get in the way of your good rant.
>>The bible doesn't actually prohibit having multiple wives. However, it does say that monogamy is a prerequisite for certain roles in the church (deacon, bishop, etc).
Right (1 Tim 3:2 and Titus 1:6-9 address this). A lot of people don't know that.
Polygamy is never outlawed in the OT; in fact, Levirate marriage (basis for the ancient Jewish social welfare program) completely doesn't work in a monogamous society. Jesus uses Levirate marriage as an example in one of his parables on the afterlife (and doesn't say anything bad about it at all, to the contrary he treats it as a norm), and Paul said that you could be a polygamist and a Christian at the same time, even though he kind of hated sex in all forms. So people like Luther have grudgingly accepted polygamy as being Christian.
In a nutshell, the RCC reads the requirement for a bishop to be faithful to his wife to *really* be talking about them being celibate and married to the church. Which is quite ridiculous, since those same passages talk about the bishop also needing to be a good father to his children (http://bible.cc/1_timothy/3-4.htm), but I guess once you start in on a metaphor, you can ride that train as long as you want to.
St. Augustine, who is usually pretty good at theology, tried to explain why polygamy was fine *then* and not *now* with the following: "As the many wives of the ancient Fathers symbolized our future churches of all nations, subject to the one man, Christ, so the bishop, who is the husband of one wife (unius uxoris vir) signifies the union of all nations, subject to the one man, Christ." Which is certainly an interesting, though not particularly compelling explanation.
I listen very closely to music, especially when listening to classical when there's a lot of different instruments playing at once.
Between my 2.1 speaker setup on my computer, 9-speaker system in one car, and the new system I had put in, all of them are comparable though differences are indeed noticeable. I haven't noticed any of the specific complaints you made about the three-axis speakers, but I *have* heard lots of problems with two-axis speakers (I spent hours at a specialty audio store listening to my sample music) - if you don't have a crossovered woofer, their frequency response suffers either in the mids or lows.
The speakers I bought actually sound very good in the mids and highs, but they get breathy in the lows. Some people like having big kicky lows, but I care more about sound quality, so I leave my bass unboosted in the EQ.
All I can say is that I listened to all the speakers they had there, and picked the one that sounded the best across Dvorak, Metallica and Juno Reactor.
Yeah, as soon as the GP made his strawman racist app, I immediately thought, "Yeah. You know, there's a lot of people that could benefit from learning how to speak words correctly."
Maybe we could do one for grammar and punctuation as well...
If teh gay affects their life and they want to change it, who the hell are you to tell them they can't?
If they're being pressured by outside parties, of course, it is a different story, but I find it kind of hypocritical of the lgbTqa that they support men who want to be women, but not gay men that honestly want to be straight.
Food for thought.
We live in a free society, so let people be free, even when they disagree with you.
>>I'm not sure that a statistical comparison is a good enough test of failure for a theory. Otherwise every theory could be amend with degree of accuracy "Gravity sucks 95% of the time"
Remember that evolution (well, the mutations underlying evolution) is a stochastic process. So probabilistic arguments are all you're ever going to be able to make.
Wouldn't a more acceptable test be to grab hundreds of batches of rapidly reproducing micro organism that are mortally susceptible to a given compound and give each batch the same regular dose of the poison over a long period of time: If the ID theory is correct, each batch should show the same types and rates of mutation as the 'invisible hand' does its work - whereas natural selection should result in a more random rates and types of mutations across our batches (or even extinction events in some of them).
You're confusing the distribution of alleles within a genome with the mechanism causing mutations in the first place. Unless the poison is also a mutagen, there should be no difference in the mutation rates. But the allele frequency should change radically in response to a high dose of a poison.
Remember, IDers don't have any problem with that, distinguishing between "microevolution" and "macroevolution", apparently having no problem with the first but claiming impossibility with the second.
True but, as I tried to point out in my first post, evolution happening quickly (interference) does not prove ID. There are any number of things that could cause perceived 'interference'. For ID to be right though, God must be the source of that interference and I guess I don't see how you are going to prove or disprove that. I approach the argument from this angle because there are already known periods of 'interference' such as the Cambrian Explosion, so the likelihood of your statistical analysis showing no interference at moderate confidence levels is fairly slim.
Again, it has nothing to do with the speed of evolution, but rather the distribution of mutations across a section of DNA. If the distribution was radically different during the Cambrian Explosion (which I rather doubt), then you can claim that is evidence for interference. But if you can show that the normal distribution of mutations could have resulted in it, then ID is false.
Remember, the Strong ID hypothesis is that evolution of interesting creatures is impossible without interference.
If we had a complete DNA record from the time period, we could prove or disprove ID tomorrow.
>>We may be able to tell if a virus is engineered by humans, but only by comparing it to what we see happening in nature. If what is happening in nature is subtly influenced by God, then we have nothing to compare it to to tell the difference.
The main difference is "being subtly influenced" (which I call Weak ID) and "evolution is impossible unless something interferes" (which I call Strong ID). In the latter case, a statistical test should be able to reveal interference. In the first, it won't. But since it's not significantly different from evolution anyway, it doesn't matter.
>>Humans do not know enough to get statistical models right 100% of the time; hence, the phrase "margin of error".
Which is entirely acceptable in science.
>>As such, i.d. can make no predictions distinguishable from, "Whoops, the model used needs a slight tweak to account for all the data available"
As I said elsewhere, there's a difference between Weak ID (God is behind evolution) and Strong ID (God interfered with evolution). I'm only interested in the latter case, because as you say, the first is indistinguishable from, well, evolution.
>>ID is creationism. >>Intelligent design has a very specific meaning based on its history
If you're limiting your definition just to people that rebranded YEC to ID, then sure, ID is nothing but YEC.
I first heard about ID from a lecture from an atheist researcher at Scripps, so your blanket statement is quite simply not true.
>>You're seriously attempting to conflate ID with genetic engineering?
ID *is* genetic engineering on the part of God or aliens or whatever. If we have a tool to detect genetic engineering in an organism, we have a tool to detect ID.
I wish, but I really don't think that their claim is quantifiable in a useful way because random chance is exactly that, random. To use your slot machine analogy, it is entirely possible for every (fair) slot machine in the world to hit the jackpot at the same time. While this event is extraordinary unlikely, the fact that it happened doesn't lend support either theory because, according to both theories, it is possible. I also don't think that their claim is falsifiable either because even if you do show that beneficial mutations happen at random intervals and form an expected distribution, pro-ID people will just say that it does that because 'thats the way God wanted to do it'. I think an important part of the ID argument that you don't address is that their claim is more than just 'God is messing with the numbers', its really 'God guided evolution to produce humans' and 'features like the eye are too complex to have formed naturally through evolution' (aka. 'Irreducible Complexity). The latter seems to be the one you're trying to address but, to me at least, I don't think you can truly prove that its false without also proving the former is false as well. Richard Dawkins has made several arguments against ID along the lines you are talking about, you should give them a read if you haven't as well as the rebuttals given by the pro-ID folks.
As I said on other threads here, I'm ignoring the Weak ID claim that "God is sorta behind everything" because it's no different than the ToE.
If all the slot machines in a casino hit jackpots at the same time, it's much more likely that they were interfered with than it happening randomly.
Think about it from a Bayesian perspective. Start with priors for "people fucking with a casino", set it as low as "one time in a century people will try to hack a casino" (which seems pretty far on the low end), and you'll see that the posteriors will be so overwhelmingly for interference that you can't help but accept that scenario.
But the way that I put it was as a level of confidence issue. For whatever level of confidence you want to work with, there are scenarios that will exceed it and trigger the claim of interference.
Slashdot Mirror
"Is there nuclear technology that could withstand such a catastrophe? Possibly."
Yeah, as in all other modern designs.
Passive cooling has been the hot new thing since, you know, the 80s.
Grocery store baggers paid more money than Programmer-Analyst jobs at UC San Diego, but I still preferred doing work related to my major.
There's plenty of juniors and seniors who are quite skilled and willing to work on summer projects for a lot less than full time programmers, since it gives them crunch for their resumes.
Because he has a controlling interest in coal gassification companies?
My family has been working toward that goal for years, but Beck's book had the first mainstream recognition of it.
Have you tried hiring college students? Pay them $20/hour and they'll be happy.
>>P.S. I can save you the time/money by letting you know all of Glenn Beck's books are absolute crap. No need to buy them in the first place - unless you like to be frightened by really dumb stuff.
I agree. Except for An Inconvenient Book.
He actually makes a lot of good points in that book that need to enter the national discourse.
>>If it was right, it wouldn't be a _model_.
There's a very important difference between being approximate, and being wrong.
>>Except that some of the rules predate the Roman Christian Empire and go back to early Hebrews. Many of our laws are based in the Levitical laws...which really, is not a good place to start. SPQR!
We're talking specifically about polygamy laws here. Levirate marriage is straight up old testament stuff - it's not just permissible, but required for men to be polygamist. It's part of the social welfare system for widows.
Our current system involving monogamy, divorce, mistresses, and prostitution derives instead from the people and senate of Rome.
>>While the ICRP support the LNT as the best practical model, I'll keep using it. When they pick a better one, I (and my colleagues) will move to that.\
There's a big difference between saying that the LNT model is the best we have, and saying that the LNT model is right.
>>Maybe I'm wrong but I'm vastly annoyed with the media, given how they talk you'd think people were losing their hair and growing skin lesions.
You're absolutely right to be annoyed at the media for getting it so wrong.
But even the Slashdot summary is disingenuous:
"1 Sievert will make you sick, many more will kill you, however, even small doses cumulatively increase cancer risk."
There's no evidence for the LNT (linear no threshold) model for radiation exposure, other than people doing math and plotting a line down into the low-exposure ranges. All the epidemiological studies have shown much lower cancer incidence rates than the LNT would predict, indicating that there is a thresholding effect at work at low doses.
This actually makes a *huge* difference when it comes to cleanup of radioactive material. Something like $200 billion worth of difference.
That's why I'm interested in people actually, you know, testing this sort of stuff in the laboratory, like these guys: http://www.orionint.com/projects/ullre.cfm
While I'm sure you're aware of this, PolygamousRanchKid, this scenario is only illegal in Utah.
Ironically enough.
Basically, they're the only state to outlaw common-law polygamy.
Er, China has a long history of polygamy, and was arguably one of the more stable countries throughout world history. They really only got fucked up under the communists, who were also monogamist-or-die type fellows. The richest guy in Macao (IIRC) has a few wives even still, and in modern Hong Kong the practice remains, though they're simply called mistresses now. It's considered acceptable (by everybody except the Christians) in Hong Kong, though under the don't-ask-don't-tell policy that governs a lot of Chinese public/private life.
To paint a broad brush, every society has always been monogamist for the poor, and polygamous for the rich. Belle Ãpoque France, ancient Israel, whatever. In modern America, we have Tiger Woods, Letterman, and the rest getting money and sleeping around. Not saying it's right, but it is certainly not anything new.
>>And polygamy is illegal why, exactly? (assuming that all involved are ok with it)
>>Oh yes, because it's written in that holy book from an ancient goat-herders culture that we somehow think still applies to live in a world that is so radically different.
Monogamy stems from the Roman tradition.
Not from the ancient polygamist goat-herders that you hate so much. You'll find nothing in the holy book outlawing polygamy. To the contrary, really.
But don't let facts get in the way of your good rant.
>>Because most "morality" laws traditionally are based on Judeo-Christian rules and regs.
Yeah, those damn polygamist Jews and early Christians are certainly to blame for our modern laws.
Try again.
If you want to blame the morality laws on anyone, blame the Romans from whom our traditions on monogamy and divorce derive.
>>Even in the 21st century we have to suffer under the hand on the Religious Reich.
Just call it the "Roman Reich". It's just as catchy, and not nearly so ignorant.
>>The bible doesn't actually prohibit having multiple wives. However, it does say that monogamy is a prerequisite for certain roles in the church (deacon, bishop, etc).
Right (1 Tim 3:2 and Titus 1:6-9 address this). A lot of people don't know that.
Polygamy is never outlawed in the OT; in fact, Levirate marriage (basis for the ancient Jewish social welfare program) completely doesn't work in a monogamous society. Jesus uses Levirate marriage as an example in one of his parables on the afterlife (and doesn't say anything bad about it at all, to the contrary he treats it as a norm), and Paul said that you could be a polygamist and a Christian at the same time, even though he kind of hated sex in all forms. So people like Luther have grudgingly accepted polygamy as being Christian.
The bit about a bishop needing to be a husband to "one wife" (unius uxoris vir) appears a few times in the Pauline writings. Which the Roman Catholic Church responds to by plugging their ears and yelling loudly at the top of their lungs. (Read their convoluted explaining-away here: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cclergy/documents/rc_con_cclergy_doc_01011993_bfoun_en.html)
In a nutshell, the RCC reads the requirement for a bishop to be faithful to his wife to *really* be talking about them being celibate and married to the church. Which is quite ridiculous, since those same passages talk about the bishop also needing to be a good father to his children (http://bible.cc/1_timothy/3-4.htm), but I guess once you start in on a metaphor, you can ride that train as long as you want to.
St. Augustine, who is usually pretty good at theology, tried to explain why polygamy was fine *then* and not *now* with the following: "As the many wives of the ancient Fathers symbolized our future churches of all nations, subject to the one man, Christ, so the bishop, who is the husband of one wife (unius uxoris vir) signifies the union of all nations, subject to the one man, Christ." Which is certainly an interesting, though not particularly compelling explanation.
I listen very closely to music, especially when listening to classical when there's a lot of different instruments playing at once.
Between my 2.1 speaker setup on my computer, 9-speaker system in one car, and the new system I had put in, all of them are comparable though differences are indeed noticeable. I haven't noticed any of the specific complaints you made about the three-axis speakers, but I *have* heard lots of problems with two-axis speakers (I spent hours at a specialty audio store listening to my sample music) - if you don't have a crossovered woofer, their frequency response suffers either in the mids or lows.
The speakers I bought actually sound very good in the mids and highs, but they get breathy in the lows. Some people like having big kicky lows, but I care more about sound quality, so I leave my bass unboosted in the EQ.
All I can say is that I listened to all the speakers they had there, and picked the one that sounded the best across Dvorak, Metallica and Juno Reactor.
>>or to teach them that the hatred was wrong?
That's a mighty normative statement you're making there.
Ignore the dimwits at Exodus who think their counseling works.
You're essentially saying that any gay (or more likely bi-) person who honestly would prefer to be straight is "wrong" for having those feelings.
Yeah, as soon as the GP made his strawman racist app, I immediately thought, "Yeah. You know, there's a lot of people that could benefit from learning how to speak words correctly."
Maybe we could do one for grammar and punctuation as well...
If teh gay affects their life and they want to change it, who the hell are you to tell them they can't?
If they're being pressured by outside parties, of course, it is a different story, but I find it kind of hypocritical of the lgbTqa that they support men who want to be women, but not gay men that honestly want to be straight.
Food for thought.
We live in a free society, so let people be free, even when they disagree with you.
>>I'm not sure that a statistical comparison is a good enough test of failure for a theory. Otherwise every theory could be amend with degree of accuracy "Gravity sucks 95% of the time"
Remember that evolution (well, the mutations underlying evolution) is a stochastic process. So probabilistic arguments are all you're ever going to be able to make.
You're confusing the distribution of alleles within a genome with the mechanism causing mutations in the first place. Unless the poison is also a mutagen, there should be no difference in the mutation rates. But the allele frequency should change radically in response to a high dose of a poison.
Remember, IDers don't have any problem with that, distinguishing between "microevolution" and "macroevolution", apparently having no problem with the first but claiming impossibility with the second.
Again, it has nothing to do with the speed of evolution, but rather the distribution of mutations across a section of DNA. If the distribution was radically different during the Cambrian Explosion (which I rather doubt), then you can claim that is evidence for interference. But if you can show that the normal distribution of mutations could have resulted in it, then ID is false.
Remember, the Strong ID hypothesis is that evolution of interesting creatures is impossible without interference.
If we had a complete DNA record from the time period, we could prove or disprove ID tomorrow.
>>We may be able to tell if a virus is engineered by humans, but only by comparing it to what we see happening in nature. If what is happening in nature is subtly influenced by God, then we have nothing to compare it to to tell the difference.
The main difference is "being subtly influenced" (which I call Weak ID) and "evolution is impossible unless something interferes" (which I call Strong ID). In the latter case, a statistical test should be able to reveal interference. In the first, it won't. But since it's not significantly different from evolution anyway, it doesn't matter.
>>Humans do not know enough to get statistical models right 100% of the time; hence, the phrase "margin of error".
Which is entirely acceptable in science.
>>As such, i.d. can make no predictions distinguishable from, "Whoops, the model used needs a slight tweak to account for all the data available"
As I said elsewhere, there's a difference between Weak ID (God is behind evolution) and Strong ID (God interfered with evolution). I'm only interested in the latter case, because as you say, the first is indistinguishable from, well, evolution.
>>ID is creationism.
>>Intelligent design has a very specific meaning based on its history
If you're limiting your definition just to people that rebranded YEC to ID, then sure, ID is nothing but YEC.
I first heard about ID from a lecture from an atheist researcher at Scripps, so your blanket statement is quite simply not true.
>>You're seriously attempting to conflate ID with genetic engineering?
ID *is* genetic engineering on the part of God or aliens or whatever. If we have a tool to detect genetic engineering in an organism, we have a tool to detect ID.
As I said on other threads here, I'm ignoring the Weak ID claim that "God is sorta behind everything" because it's no different than the ToE.
If all the slot machines in a casino hit jackpots at the same time, it's much more likely that they were interfered with than it happening randomly.
Think about it from a Bayesian perspective. Start with priors for "people fucking with a casino", set it as low as "one time in a century people will try to hack a casino" (which seems pretty far on the low end), and you'll see that the posteriors will be so overwhelmingly for interference that you can't help but accept that scenario.
But the way that I put it was as a level of confidence issue. For whatever level of confidence you want to work with, there are scenarios that will exceed it and trigger the claim of interference.
>>Also, just to clarify we have about $5,000 of budget
FYI, e-clicker software for smartphones exist.
The last time I looked at it, it was something like $15 for the host, and free for the clients.