I'm only going to address one point; namely, your underlying thought seems to be that recognizing racial differences will allow us to "help" people more, or treat people more appropriately.
That is not what would happen.
The reality is that the customized "solutions" for different races would have as many errors as our initial assumptions, yet be equally capable of propagating injustice in the name of "science". At the very best, and it will never be the best because knowledge is imperfect, we could predict the statistical likelihood of certain things for certain groups of people. But those likelihoods are essentially meaningless applied to one individual because an individual is not a statistical sampling.
We treat everyone according to common principles not because it works best for everyone, but to remind ourselves that everyone diverges from the mean and we must always consider how THAT PERSON is different, rather than assuming what they need based on an equally flawed idea of what "species" of human they are.
There's no evidence from this story that the other groups weren't equally likely to pillage, plunder, and rape. That's a poignant and tragic idea, but it's less an evidence-based explanation than just wrapping together the idea of the 'noble savage' with some misanthropy. I'm sure you're fun at parties:)
Seriously though, there's other research showing that we do have an instinct towards teamwork, and that we often only become greedy when prompted to think rationally about our own self interest. It could just as well be that we developed that in response to marauding Neanderthals.
From watching a bit of the C-SPAN coverage, I found it interesting to note that several of the witnesses from law enforcement effectively stated that:
1.) Current regulations had not hampered their ability to pursue criminals 2.) They saw more danger from centralized currency systems based in fringe countries than from "decentralized currencies such as Bitcoin"
My biggest confusion is that you consider that a compelling argument.
So they sold products at a higher rate for people who couldn't get to a discount store... how is that a problem? You don't have to justify your pricing, and this isn't health care, predatory loaning, or anything critical to basic life. You don't get a right to a TV at a low price. If they were muscling competitors out of suppliers then go after that.
I hope this kind of screwed up attitude doesn't become prevalent in the US. You can make a decent argument for things vital to living, but that is an exception, not a model.
Calories are derived from breaking down structured mass to differently structured, lower energy mass. If we know the maximum amount you can get from breaking down the mass, you have an upper limit.
If your body can't get enough from that breakdown, then it will start breaking itself down and removing the remainder.
If your body has excess mass around, it'll reserve parts it can break down later and store as fat.
Your example *doesn't* have a meaningful physical representation, with an emphasis on meaningful. The example you state has zilch to do with the process of converting gasoline to energy, which is the point of the metric.
You're applying a standard of rigor to BMI that it was never intended to meet. Your unit analysis is beside the point. In any physical model, there'd be coefficients with units that would account for that unit mismatch anyway.
It's a rough scaling argument, no more, no less, and *is* correlated with some diseases. When I say that large objects retain heat better than small objects, I compare that the surface losing heat for a sphere goes as the square of r, while its volume goes as the cube. Right there, I can come up with a measure that's just the inverse of an objects size. If that measure is very small compared to another object, I can roughly predict that it retains heat better, even if they aren't necessarily spheres. That's the extent and purpose of BMI.
Your post sounds... strangely dismissive of fact? Calorie counting provides a strict "less than or equals" to your intake. In most situations where acquaintances have failed at it, a pointed audit showed they were eating stuff that they didn't add to their list or didn't realize was so high calorie. You're still responsible, of course, for making sure those calories count for nutrition, but keeping a food journal has worked great for myself, my girlfriend, and several friends with good record keeping skills.
I'm sorry calorie counting is BS to you, but if you hope to convince anyone, mind adding any evidence? My anecdotal evidence is at least as strong as yours.
I mostly agree on BMI, but it can be a potentially useful metric, nothing more, nothing less, in some situations.
Point being, he was saying the same essential thing originally. You misunderstood his post, then proceeded to write a fairly informative summation of the incentives, so honestly I was too confused on how to mod you.:)
That is because of the central limit theorem, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem), which indicated that for a large number of independent samples, it doesn't matter what the original distribution was, and we certainly can reliably use the normal distribution. It is NOT unfounded.
I am concerned that's a terrible solution. Largely because if the fish comes into demand, and the cost to farm them drops below the catch and transport cost from where they already are invading, you could just get introductions to new places.
It would seem to work as long as they are incredibly plentiful, but we certainly haven't eliminated chickens by eating them.
And as a driver, he's supposed to be driving responsibly and not create a hazard. Even more so if he *knows* that people aren't expecting him at that speed.
You must be awfully disappointed with the frail humans around you that don't have a 0% error rate. Losers.
You don't want to pick this champion for that cause. You could probably show ranging it from 60-80 doesn't matter much.
This guy was AVERAGING 100mph and probably going 120mph in stretches with other cars. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he was only going 150mph on an isolated road (and even then, God help a poor guy turning onto the highway not realizing the car could possibly be going at that speed).
From 60mph to 80mph is only a 50% increase in energy. From 60mph to 120mph is quadruple the energy that has to be dissipated. At 150mph you're hitting a factor of eight.
And you've halved the reaction time available to anyone dealing with you.
Because it's so much worse for the bodies inside a car getting hit by another traveling 105 MPH than 55.
Yes. Yes it is. It's quadruple the energy for starters.
For another you've immediately given everyone else less reaction time, since they are logically expecting cars at a maximum of 10 mph over the speed limit.
And don't give me that crap about how "they should be ready for anything." That doesn't give you license to be the anything and generate the risky situation.
I am not what one would call a Diablo or Warcraft fan, but this seems an odd reason to avoid a game. We still read poetry with iambic pentameter or purchase phones that are just "Newtons with network access". Derivative doesn't necessarily mean boring.
I'm going to disagree on one metric. While they may make a much smaller proportion of games released nowadays, I honestly feel that there are more of these games around. Not to mention, the older games are still here, and more accessible than ever through GOG.com or even re-released classics on Steam.
They may not have a clue what you like, but that's because they definitely have a clue where the most money comes from and don't really care what you like. And unfortunately for those of who were early gamers, we are now a niche in an industry that expanded well past us.
Although to be fair, that's mostly speaking of big budget games. Indie gaming has almost never been better. If you can't find something you like there, I daresay you aren't looking beyond the big budget marketing.
Honestly in the course of many upgrades to systems (this is at a personal level, not business), I've almost never upgraded these independently. I don't know that the socket lifespan has significantly shortened; it feels more like the timespan a particular CPU is acceptable has lengthened to the socket architecture lifetime.
The major immediate effect, as someone on your link pointed out, might be the coupling of the hardware signatures for OS activation.
It's in Google's interest to make this happen. Apple, and by extension iOS, is supported by these high margin phones, and they would be hugely damaged if the same "assembled-to-order" transition that hit PCs early on became commonplace for phones. Apple probably isn't structured to support a huge number of configurations for iOS.
Granted, Apple still survives in laptops, etc. as a premium, standardized version. However, the phenomenon would be a huge boon for Android in high performance phones.
I like my hair. It's really just about as simple as that. I use Rogaine for that, and it seems to have stalled the loss for a while. It won't work in the long term. If the cost becomes unreasonable, I would stop.
To me, it's exactly the same as paying to keep/obtain other things I like, such as pets or clothing. I don't understand why wanting to keep it is necessarily a proxy for my insecurity. I'd like to keep my fitness level too, but that also will inevitably decline.
All is vanity in the end anyway, so I guess you just hang out with hermits?
I like my hair. What more reason do I need? I'm pretty open about using Rogaine; I just would rather be non-bald than bald. It's not the end of the world if I were, but for a reasonable price, I'm willing to take measures.
Not that you did so, but I get a little annoyed that people that want to keep their hair are always portrayed as insecure and desperate. I view it as no different than paying to keep other things I like, such as pets or a PC gaming habit.
The assumption you're making is that I would be flat out terrified or anxious, day in, day out, of my tragic diagnosis.
Putting aside for a second that human psychology doesn't normally work that way at all, and that people often end up accepting such things - it gives me knowledge and helps me better plan my future. It gives me much greater odds that I will come to the effective end of my life having completed what I wanted to.
The only thing I would have supposedly lost is some blissful sense of invulnerability, which I lost when I hit my 30s anyway.
I understand you want to keep in touch, but I'm at a loss for why this needs to be a mobile device, particularly one that a 4 (!) year old is likely to use, and that's not even approaching the problems with having a 4 year old use a multipurpose device like this.
Perhaps it would help to clarify why this has to be mobile? Why do you need to bug him at school? If he's at a home, why is Skype insufficient? Why is using a mobile device required? He will forget to charge it, lose it, and be unable to use for anything else if you lock it down.
I should have mentioned this in my post above, but I actually do treasure Myst as my first introduction to a deep storyline in a game (I was 10). It was *the* game that got me into serious PC gaming, thinking about gameplay and design, and keeping up with game news. I was so excited for Riven that I had bookmarked this silly webcam that had a view of the offices where it was being developed with a countdown timer.
And yet while it was *a* high water mark, there is no question that it's been surpassed. It had a sense of place and an aura to it, but in the end its gameplay was simply wallpaper over a puzzle. It had nothing on a game like Ultima VII. That is a game that I wish had made a greater splash.
In a lot of ways the move to 3D was a damn shame. In a gridded or hex based world, the number of possible objects is manageable, and you can really do some exciting things in terms of interacting objects and a viable game world. Once 3D gaming took over, it felt like far more development time went towards basic things like collision detection and pathfinding that were trivial in 2D. Even today, something like Skyrim feels clumsy because our ability to interact with the world is so miniscule compared to the open set of 3D object positions and details.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm only going to address one point; namely, your underlying thought seems to be that recognizing racial differences will allow us to "help" people more, or treat people more appropriately.
That is not what would happen.
The reality is that the customized "solutions" for different races would have as many errors as our initial assumptions, yet be equally capable of propagating injustice in the name of "science". At the very best, and it will never be the best because knowledge is imperfect, we could predict the statistical likelihood of certain things for certain groups of people. But those likelihoods are essentially meaningless applied to one individual because an individual is not a statistical sampling.
We treat everyone according to common principles not because it works best for everyone, but to remind ourselves that everyone diverges from the mean and we must always consider how THAT PERSON is different, rather than assuming what they need based on an equally flawed idea of what "species" of human they are.
There's no evidence from this story that the other groups weren't equally likely to pillage, plunder, and rape. That's a poignant and tragic idea, but it's less an evidence-based explanation than just wrapping together the idea of the 'noble savage' with some misanthropy. I'm sure you're fun at parties :)
Seriously though, there's other research showing that we do have an instinct towards teamwork, and that we often only become greedy when prompted to think rationally about our own self interest. It could just as well be that we developed that in response to marauding Neanderthals.
From watching a bit of the C-SPAN coverage, I found it interesting to note that several of the witnesses from law enforcement effectively stated that:
1.) Current regulations had not hampered their ability to pursue criminals
2.) They saw more danger from centralized currency systems based in fringe countries than from "decentralized currencies such as Bitcoin"
My biggest confusion is that you consider that a compelling argument.
So they sold products at a higher rate for people who couldn't get to a discount store... how is that a problem? You don't have to justify your pricing, and this isn't health care, predatory loaning, or anything critical to basic life. You don't get a right to a TV at a low price. If they were muscling competitors out of suppliers then go after that.
I hope this kind of screwed up attitude doesn't become prevalent in the US. You can make a decent argument for things vital to living, but that is an exception, not a model.
Calories are derived from breaking down structured mass to differently structured, lower energy mass. If we know the maximum amount you can get from breaking down the mass, you have an upper limit.
If your body can't get enough from that breakdown, then it will start breaking itself down and removing the remainder.
If your body has excess mass around, it'll reserve parts it can break down later and store as fat.
Is that detailed enough for you?
Your example *doesn't* have a meaningful physical representation, with an emphasis on meaningful. The example you state has zilch to do with the process of converting gasoline to energy, which is the point of the metric.
You're applying a standard of rigor to BMI that it was never intended to meet. Your unit analysis is beside the point. In any physical model, there'd be coefficients with units that would account for that unit mismatch anyway.
It's a rough scaling argument, no more, no less, and *is* correlated with some diseases. When I say that large objects retain heat better than small objects, I compare that the surface losing heat for a sphere goes as the square of r, while its volume goes as the cube. Right there, I can come up with a measure that's just the inverse of an objects size. If that measure is very small compared to another object, I can roughly predict that it retains heat better, even if they aren't necessarily spheres. That's the extent and purpose of BMI.
Your post sounds... strangely dismissive of fact? Calorie counting provides a strict "less than or equals" to your intake. In most situations where acquaintances have failed at it, a pointed audit showed they were eating stuff that they didn't add to their list or didn't realize was so high calorie. You're still responsible, of course, for making sure those calories count for nutrition, but keeping a food journal has worked great for myself, my girlfriend, and several friends with good record keeping skills.
I'm sorry calorie counting is BS to you, but if you hope to convince anyone, mind adding any evidence? My anecdotal evidence is at least as strong as yours.
I mostly agree on BMI, but it can be a potentially useful metric, nothing more, nothing less, in some situations.
Point being, he was saying the same essential thing originally. You misunderstood his post, then proceeded to write a fairly informative summation of the incentives, so honestly I was too confused on how to mod you. :)
That is because of the central limit theorem, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem), which indicated that for a large number of independent samples, it doesn't matter what the original distribution was, and we certainly can reliably use the normal distribution. It is NOT unfounded.
I am concerned that's a terrible solution. Largely because if the fish comes into demand, and the cost to farm them drops below the catch and transport cost from where they already are invading, you could just get introductions to new places.
It would seem to work as long as they are incredibly plentiful, but we certainly haven't eliminated chickens by eating them.
And as a driver, he's supposed to be driving responsibly and not create a hazard. Even more so if he *knows* that people aren't expecting him at that speed.
You must be awfully disappointed with the frail humans around you that don't have a 0% error rate. Losers.
You don't want to pick this champion for that cause. You could probably show ranging it from 60-80 doesn't matter much.
This guy was AVERAGING 100mph and probably going 120mph in stretches with other cars. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he was only going 150mph on an isolated road (and even then, God help a poor guy turning onto the highway not realizing the car could possibly be going at that speed).
From 60mph to 80mph is only a 50% increase in energy. From 60mph to 120mph is quadruple the energy that has to be dissipated. At 150mph you're hitting a factor of eight.
And you've halved the reaction time available to anyone dealing with you.
I have no respect for this guy.
You're drastically reducing someone's reaction window by presenting an unlikely situation.
Ideally a driver should be prepared for anything, sure. That doesn't mean you're not creating danger by being that "anything".
People should lock their doors securely at night. That doesn't mean I don't blame the burglar.
Because it's so much worse for the bodies inside a car getting hit by another traveling 105 MPH than 55.
Yes. Yes it is. It's quadruple the energy for starters.
For another you've immediately given everyone else less reaction time, since they are logically expecting cars at a maximum of 10 mph over the speed limit.
And don't give me that crap about how "they should be ready for anything." That doesn't give you license to be the anything and generate the risky situation.
I am not what one would call a Diablo or Warcraft fan, but this seems an odd reason to avoid a game. We still read poetry with iambic pentameter or purchase phones that are just "Newtons with network access". Derivative doesn't necessarily mean boring.
I'm going to disagree on one metric. While they may make a much smaller proportion of games released nowadays, I honestly feel that there are more of these games around. Not to mention, the older games are still here, and more accessible than ever through GOG.com or even re-released classics on Steam.
They may not have a clue what you like, but that's because they definitely have a clue where the most money comes from and don't really care what you like. And unfortunately for those of who were early gamers, we are now a niche in an industry that expanded well past us.
Although to be fair, that's mostly speaking of big budget games. Indie gaming has almost never been better. If you can't find something you like there, I daresay you aren't looking beyond the big budget marketing.
Honestly in the course of many upgrades to systems (this is at a personal level, not business), I've almost never upgraded these independently. I don't know that the socket lifespan has significantly shortened; it feels more like the timespan a particular CPU is acceptable has lengthened to the socket architecture lifetime.
The major immediate effect, as someone on your link pointed out, might be the coupling of the hardware signatures for OS activation.
It's in Google's interest to make this happen. Apple, and by extension iOS, is supported by these high margin phones, and they would be hugely damaged if the same "assembled-to-order" transition that hit PCs early on became commonplace for phones. Apple probably isn't structured to support a huge number of configurations for iOS.
Granted, Apple still survives in laptops, etc. as a premium, standardized version. However, the phenomenon would be a huge boon for Android in high performance phones.
Um, okay.
I like my hair. It's really just about as simple as that. I use Rogaine for that, and it seems to have stalled the loss for a while. It won't work in the long term. If the cost becomes unreasonable, I would stop.
To me, it's exactly the same as paying to keep/obtain other things I like, such as pets or clothing. I don't understand why wanting to keep it is necessarily a proxy for my insecurity. I'd like to keep my fitness level too, but that also will inevitably decline.
All is vanity in the end anyway, so I guess you just hang out with hermits?
I like my hair. What more reason do I need? I'm pretty open about using Rogaine; I just would rather be non-bald than bald. It's not the end of the world if I were, but for a reasonable price, I'm willing to take measures.
Not that you did so, but I get a little annoyed that people that want to keep their hair are always portrayed as insecure and desperate. I view it as no different than paying to keep other things I like, such as pets or a PC gaming habit.
I never understand this reaction.
The assumption you're making is that I would be flat out terrified or anxious, day in, day out, of my tragic diagnosis.
Putting aside for a second that human psychology doesn't normally work that way at all, and that people often end up accepting such things - it gives me knowledge and helps me better plan my future. It gives me much greater odds that I will come to the effective end of my life having completed what I wanted to.
The only thing I would have supposedly lost is some blissful sense of invulnerability, which I lost when I hit my 30s anyway.
I understand you want to keep in touch, but I'm at a loss for why this needs to be a mobile device, particularly one that a 4 (!) year old is likely to use, and that's not even approaching the problems with having a 4 year old use a multipurpose device like this.
Perhaps it would help to clarify why this has to be mobile? Why do you need to bug him at school? If he's at a home, why is Skype insufficient? Why is using a mobile device required? He will forget to charge it, lose it, and be unable to use for anything else if you lock it down.
I should have mentioned this in my post above, but I actually do treasure Myst as my first introduction to a deep storyline in a game (I was 10). It was *the* game that got me into serious PC gaming, thinking about gameplay and design, and keeping up with game news. I was so excited for Riven that I had bookmarked this silly webcam that had a view of the offices where it was being developed with a countdown timer.
And yet while it was *a* high water mark, there is no question that it's been surpassed. It had a sense of place and an aura to it, but in the end its gameplay was simply wallpaper over a puzzle. It had nothing on a game like Ultima VII. That is a game that I wish had made a greater splash.
In a lot of ways the move to 3D was a damn shame. In a gridded or hex based world, the number of possible objects is manageable, and you can really do some exciting things in terms of interacting objects and a viable game world. Once 3D gaming took over, it felt like far more development time went towards basic things like collision detection and pathfinding that were trivial in 2D. Even today, something like Skyrim feels clumsy because our ability to interact with the world is so miniscule compared to the open set of 3D object positions and details.