Hmm, well the web addresses contain simplified Chinese characters, so you may have to have support for that in your browser. I tried the Bing link in your tester and it was fine in Seattle but failed in Shanghai.
One more thing about that google link. It looks like a translation of the Wikipedia page for Tiananmen square into Chinese. Whoever's hosting it has balls, that's for sure. Hats off to him/her.
Left something important out: The first hit for that google link above is a page chronicling the Tiananmen square incident of 1989. The guy who runs it is in Shanghai. I wonder if it's accessible from the mainland.
Yeah I did a search on Bing for "" ('six-four,' a mainland reference to June 4, 1989, the date the army was deployed in Tiananmen Square) in simplified chinese and the tank man picture was still there under images. Though I'm also not in China. For comparison, the same search in google.cn yields a message at the bottom of the page saying something like 'According to local laws and policy, some search results are omitted.'
Citation needed. I'll assume you're referring to Putin (surely not Yeltsin or Gorbachev). But 'Russian policy toward the Middle East is often disjointed and has little in the way of military or economic strength to support it' citation here.
I've always wondered about the possibility that doomsday predictions would be self-fulfilling. For instance, some insane person with an inexplicable amount of power (I'm looking at you, Kim Jong-Il) believes wholeheartedly in some end-of-the-world prophecy, and moreover, believes that they're going to have to be the one to set the events in motion. Then their predictions of terrible things happening on a certain date come true by virtue of the simple fact that they themselves were the initiator. In the case of this movie (and the 2012 prediction in general), I doubt we'd see anything dire, but who knows? We've seen tragedies like Heaven's gate and the Jonestown massacre already, and this one has all the force of a Hollywood endorsement behind it. I know plenty of posters here are ready to pounce all over this and write it off as mass hysteria or stupidity or whatever, but it kind of leaves me with a sick feeling in my stomach.
You fool. Don't you know that the US government has been secretly taking all the tin off the market and replacing it with aluminum? Luckily for you, I've been stockpiling tin and making carefully crafted hats for years. And one can be yours for a nominal fee.
How is intelligent design testable? I really am curious. Keep in mind that 'testable' is equivalent to 'falsifiable.'
Here's a simple example, simplified: DNA analysis shows that human and chimp DNA is about 99% identical. I hypothesize that DNA is the mechanism by which genes are inherited and evolution happens. By this hypothesis, I should be able to look back in the fossil record and see human and chimp ancestors becoming more and more similar until there is no distinction. My hypothesis is falsifiable: If I look at the fossil record and this is not the case, I'd better think of a different explanation. If, however, it is the case, then I'm safe...for now (cue scary music).
This is how science works--it's an unfortunate misconception that scientists simply look at data, make bold pronouncements which all the gullible sheeple swallow, and go home to sleep with their supermodel girlfriends (okay, maybe not that part). But the reality is that any theory is always on the brink of being proven wrong. And I understand that Kuhn said that scientific revolutions take time/are strongly resisted at first, blah, blah, but the fact remains that eventually the falsifiability of an incorrect theory catches up with it. That's the beauty of it.
I'm no expert in intelligent design, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't offer up any simple cases (like the example above) in which statements entailed by the intelligent design hypothesis succeed where modern evolutionary theory fails.
I understand your point. But my point is this: if you put a manual driver behind the wheel of an automatic, what advantage does knowing how to drive stick confer in an emergency? (This isn't a rhetorical question; I really am curious what you think)
Maybe in this situation, you'd throw the car into neutral anyway, but there are a few problems to this: 1) Automatic transmissions don't have a clutch, so it's not clear that simply putting the car into neutral is going to be very good for the transmission, and 2) neutral in an automatic is typically right next to reverse, and throwing the car in reverse when you're suddenly accelerating is probably the last thing you want to do.
Besides, having to 'do all things a [sic] automatic driver does plus more' doesn't seem to me to be a convincing argument for being 'a good thing when in an emergency situation where you need to act fast.'
Personal responsibility is a pure fiction in a deterministic universe.
Many philosophers would disagree with you. It may be elucidative to look into the literature on compatibilism. It takes the position that you seem to just sweep under the rug, namely that normative question of moral responsibility is independent of the metaphysical question of determinism vs. free will. Check out P.F. Strawson's paper "Freedom and Resentment."
Also, there's been a lot of talk here about how a quantum mechanical universe isn't deterministic. I just want to go ahead and set the record straight: given a set of initial conditions (boundary conditions + initial wavefunction), the Schrodinger equation (or Dirac or any other variation you like) will evolve the wavefunction in time exactly the same way every time you use it. Quantum mechanics is completely deterministic with respect to the behavior of the wavefunction. Just because the square modulus of the wavefunction represents a probability density doesn't mean determinism doesn't hold. Determinism is a statement about causality, not predictability. Simply because we don't know exactly where a particle is at any given moment doesn't mean its influence isn't dictated by its exact position.
Essentially anyone who has driven manual has practiced the solution to this problem. Anyone in a automatic has not. In a automatic cars you can just hit the breaks and forget about what that meant the car had to do.
First off, I think you're conflating manual brakes and manual transmission. Second, essentially anyone who has piloted a horse-driven carriage has practiced the solution to 'my horse crapped in the street' several times a year. Anyone in a horseless carriage has not.
Probably what you meant to say is that manual transmission drivers are better equipped to handle situations pertaining to manual transmissions. In which case I'd wholeheartedly agree with you. But in situations that occur in generic 'transmission-blind' driving, I'd be hard-pressed to buy your argument. In fact, one could--I'm not saying I will, but one could--argue that this kind of overconfidence in manual drivers leads them into more dangerous situations.
...should never have been patentable was patented.
This makes me wonder what types of innovations you think should be patentable. If not methods of production and/or products of those methods, then what?
You're onto something. I'm a chemist, so I can understand the patents without a tl;dr. What they've patented is a method for making high-quality crystals of ribosomes for x-ray analysis and the crystals (and this is key) produced by that method. Here's an analogy. I invent a new type of generator and I patent it and its products (electricity from that generator). Nothing wrong with that. Two days later,/. runs a story with the headline 'Crazy man patents electricity.' Aaaaaand scene. But in all seriousness, I do have to take/. to task for only having this story up about the Nobel Chem prize. Kind of spoils the importance of the discovery, guys.
In other words, do they do stuff that actually matters?
In a word, yes. Nate Silver manages the blog FiveThirtyEight and is well-known as a statistical analyst from the 2008 US election (among other things). Strategic Vision has released quite a few polls. In Silver's words,
...Strategic Vision's polls cover a wide array of topics: Presidential horse race numbers in any of a dozen or so states, senate and gubernatorial polling, primary polling, approval ratings of various kinds, polling on issues like the war in Iraq, and more abstract questions such as whether voters think that 'experience' or 'change' is the more important quality in a Presidential candidate.
So yes, this is pretty big news, should it turn out that Strategic Vision's behavior is in fact illicit. They're influential enough that news agencies may pick up their polling results. This is bad enough, but when you factor in the fact that polling results can be very effective propaganda in something like a presidential race, fraudulent polling can have significant consequences.
Well, since the introduction of CUDA by Nvidia, using GPUs for accelerated physical simulations has started to catch on. I've heard of people using PS3 and XBox occasionally, but usually for this sort of work, they'll take a half-dozen or so GeForce cards and use CUDA to parallelize the code. I'm not too familiar with all the ins and outs myself, but as a part of the chemistry community, I get to see a lot of neat applications of the stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
And which nasty bacteria, exactly, are in second hand smoke, that aren't in second hand breathing?
The kind that cause premature failure, of course.
Hmm, well the web addresses contain simplified Chinese characters, so you may have to have support for that in your browser. I tried the Bing link in your tester and it was fine in Seattle but failed in Shanghai.
One more thing about that google link. It looks like a translation of the Wikipedia page for Tiananmen square into Chinese. Whoever's hosting it has balls, that's for sure. Hats off to him/her.
Left something important out: The first hit for that google link above is a page chronicling the Tiananmen square incident of 1989. The guy who runs it is in Shanghai. I wonder if it's accessible from the mainland.
Yeah I did a search on Bing for "" ('six-four,' a mainland reference to June 4, 1989, the date the army was deployed in Tiananmen Square) in simplified chinese and the tank man picture was still there under images. Though I'm also not in China. For comparison, the same search in google.cn yields a message at the bottom of the page saying something like 'According to local laws and policy, some search results are omitted.'
Citation needed. I'll assume you're referring to Putin (surely not Yeltsin or Gorbachev). But 'Russian policy toward the Middle East is often disjointed and has little in the way of military or economic strength to support it' citation here.
I've always wondered about the possibility that doomsday predictions would be self-fulfilling. For instance, some insane person with an inexplicable amount of power (I'm looking at you, Kim Jong-Il) believes wholeheartedly in some end-of-the-world prophecy, and moreover, believes that they're going to have to be the one to set the events in motion. Then their predictions of terrible things happening on a certain date come true by virtue of the simple fact that they themselves were the initiator. In the case of this movie (and the 2012 prediction in general), I doubt we'd see anything dire, but who knows? We've seen tragedies like Heaven's gate and the Jonestown massacre already, and this one has all the force of a Hollywood endorsement behind it. I know plenty of posters here are ready to pounce all over this and write it off as mass hysteria or stupidity or whatever, but it kind of leaves me with a sick feeling in my stomach.
You fool. Don't you know that the US government has been secretly taking all the tin off the market and replacing it with aluminum? Luckily for you, I've been stockpiling tin and making carefully crafted hats for years. And one can be yours for a nominal fee.
How is intelligent design testable? I really am curious. Keep in mind that 'testable' is equivalent to 'falsifiable.'
Here's a simple example, simplified: DNA analysis shows that human and chimp DNA is about 99% identical. I hypothesize that DNA is the mechanism by which genes are inherited and evolution happens. By this hypothesis, I should be able to look back in the fossil record and see human and chimp ancestors becoming more and more similar until there is no distinction. My hypothesis is falsifiable: If I look at the fossil record and this is not the case, I'd better think of a different explanation. If, however, it is the case, then I'm safe...for now (cue scary music).
This is how science works--it's an unfortunate misconception that scientists simply look at data, make bold pronouncements which all the gullible sheeple swallow, and go home to sleep with their supermodel girlfriends (okay, maybe not that part). But the reality is that any theory is always on the brink of being proven wrong. And I understand that Kuhn said that scientific revolutions take time/are strongly resisted at first, blah, blah, but the fact remains that eventually the falsifiability of an incorrect theory catches up with it. That's the beauty of it.
I'm no expert in intelligent design, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't offer up any simple cases (like the example above) in which statements entailed by the intelligent design hypothesis succeed where modern evolutionary theory fails.
...Glenn Beck has exposed himself...
Couldn't resist.
Shouldn't this be modded informative?
It's a quote from a TV show...I think "Lost."
Also consider the inventor, not an expert in any feild at all related to it but simply the guy that wrote the "Wonder Woman" comics.
The man you're referring to is William Marston, and to be fair, he did get his Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard.
I am aware of all bomb-detecting traditions.
I understand your point. But my point is this: if you put a manual driver behind the wheel of an automatic, what advantage does knowing how to drive stick confer in an emergency? (This isn't a rhetorical question; I really am curious what you think)
Maybe in this situation, you'd throw the car into neutral anyway, but there are a few problems to this: 1) Automatic transmissions don't have a clutch, so it's not clear that simply putting the car into neutral is going to be very good for the transmission, and 2) neutral in an automatic is typically right next to reverse, and throwing the car in reverse when you're suddenly accelerating is probably the last thing you want to do.
Besides, having to 'do all things a [sic] automatic driver does plus more' doesn't seem to me to be a convincing argument for being 'a good thing when in an emergency situation where you need to act fast.'
Personal responsibility is a pure fiction in a deterministic universe.
Many philosophers would disagree with you. It may be elucidative to look into the literature on compatibilism. It takes the position that you seem to just sweep under the rug, namely that normative question of moral responsibility is independent of the metaphysical question of determinism vs. free will. Check out P.F. Strawson's paper "Freedom and Resentment."
Also, there's been a lot of talk here about how a quantum mechanical universe isn't deterministic. I just want to go ahead and set the record straight: given a set of initial conditions (boundary conditions + initial wavefunction), the Schrodinger equation (or Dirac or any other variation you like) will evolve the wavefunction in time exactly the same way every time you use it. Quantum mechanics is completely deterministic with respect to the behavior of the wavefunction. Just because the square modulus of the wavefunction represents a probability density doesn't mean determinism doesn't hold. Determinism is a statement about causality, not predictability. Simply because we don't know exactly where a particle is at any given moment doesn't mean its influence isn't dictated by its exact position.
Essentially anyone who has driven manual has practiced the solution to this problem. Anyone in a automatic has not. In a automatic cars you can just hit the breaks and forget about what that meant the car had to do.
First off, I think you're conflating manual brakes and manual transmission. Second, essentially anyone who has piloted a horse-driven carriage has practiced the solution to 'my horse crapped in the street' several times a year. Anyone in a horseless carriage has not.
Probably what you meant to say is that manual transmission drivers are better equipped to handle situations pertaining to manual transmissions. In which case I'd wholeheartedly agree with you. But in situations that occur in generic 'transmission-blind' driving, I'd be hard-pressed to buy your argument. In fact, one could--I'm not saying I will, but one could--argue that this kind of overconfidence in manual drivers leads them into more dangerous situations.
For those of us who have a subscription to Nature but not to NYT for whatever reason: Here's the original article.
The really funny thing is that Cage actually composed several silent pieces. How do you decide which one you're going to claim infringement on?
...the estate of John Cage to sue everyone all the time for unlicensed performance of 4'33"
Someone's clearly never owned a fish tank.
...should never have been patentable was patented.
This makes me wonder what types of innovations you think should be patentable. If not methods of production and/or products of those methods, then what?
You're onto something. I'm a chemist, so I can understand the patents without a tl;dr. What they've patented is a method for making high-quality crystals of ribosomes for x-ray analysis and the crystals (and this is key) produced by that method. Here's an analogy. I invent a new type of generator and I patent it and its products (electricity from that generator). Nothing wrong with that. Two days later, /. runs a story with the headline 'Crazy man patents electricity.' Aaaaaand scene. But in all seriousness, I do have to take /. to task for only having this story up about the Nobel Chem prize. Kind of spoils the importance of the discovery, guys.
In other words, do they do stuff that actually matters?
In a word, yes. Nate Silver manages the blog FiveThirtyEight and is well-known as a statistical analyst from the 2008 US election (among other things). Strategic Vision has released quite a few polls. In Silver's words,
So yes, this is pretty big news, should it turn out that Strategic Vision's behavior is in fact illicit. They're influential enough that news agencies may pick up their polling results. This is bad enough, but when you factor in the fact that polling results can be very effective propaganda in something like a presidential race, fraudulent polling can have significant consequences.
We should be teaching kids to emulate computerized type in penmanship to the extent possible. Make your letters as clear as possible, not frilly.
I take it you're not a fan of the serif.
Well, since the introduction of CUDA by Nvidia, using GPUs for accelerated physical simulations has started to catch on. I've heard of people using PS3 and XBox occasionally, but usually for this sort of work, they'll take a half-dozen or so GeForce cards and use CUDA to parallelize the code. I'm not too familiar with all the ins and outs myself, but as a part of the chemistry community, I get to see a lot of neat applications of the stuff.