An educated public would realize that voting for who you want is today's only way to ever break the rep-dem-oligopoly. If you vote tactically, all you do is playing into the hands of the strategists. They plan. They are strategic. You react. You stay tactical. Start local. Vote people into office you trust, independently of any party affiliation. Be a candidate people can trust, independently of any party affiliation. Focus on issues, not on ideologies. Get things done instead of paying lip service on things that ought to be done. If a solution really solves a problem, go for the solution even if it collides with some grand ideals you might bear. Keep an eye on other regions and their ways to deal with problems to get ideas how to solve your own. Be stubbornly pragmatic.
Re:Which book would you memorize before it's torch
on
Ray Bradbury Has Died
·
· Score: 1
Mine are Solaris and The Flop, both by Stanislaw Lem.
Actually, the commutative property can either be proven from axioms (if we talk about natural numbers), or it is an axiom itself (if we are talking number fields).
If you want to prove the commutative property within natural numbers, you start out proving, that 1 + a = a + 1 (e.g. the a-th successor of 1 is the successor of a), then you can argue, that a + b = 1 + a + b - 1, and then you iterate that b times, and get to a + b = (b*1) + a + (b-b) = b + a.
Why is that bad? It's what all the european rulers did in the 18th century with chinese towns, when Asia was a big thing to have, and everyone had to have something chinese. Europeans even copied china (the material), first as fayence, later one with a similar recipe as porcelain. Europeans copied the fireworks, the drinking of tea, and about every larger park had a chinese style pagode. The U.S. copied the chinese sauces in the 19th century, calling them "ketchup", and went on to reinvent chinese food a.k.a. chop suey. Did we hear the Chinese complain how Europeans and the U.S. were stealing chinese intellectual property then?
As I wrote: "five fingers and toes per hand, as today's vertebrae have at least in their embryonic phase".
If you do an ultrasound of an embryonic cat or dog, you will see that they develop five digits per hand. Later in the development, some of their digits don't grow any further and stay in their embryonic form.
I know, it has. But "holes in the theory" was never a reason to dismiss it. It's not as if there was a better theory around the corner, we could use.
For a long time it was believed that the landliving vertebrae always had five fingers and toes per hand, as today's vertebrae have at least in their embryonic phase, and there was a big hole in the theory of evolution because why exactly five? Today we know that the first landgoing vertebrae actually had more digits, they started out with eight, later we got seven, then six, and finally five. It seems that five digits is a local optimum for digits, as all subsequent vertebrae stayed with five - evolution slowly converged to it. So this hole was filled.
And so it goes with every hole that one points at. We know the process of coagulation pretty well, and we can see right now how it has evolved: the basic mechanisms are controlled by more complicated mechanisms, whose in turn have another layer of control upon them. Each layer evolved because the lower layer was prone to (deadly) errors. We know that the flagellum of Escheria coli is based on 40 proteins, and if one is missing, it won't work. But if we look at all flagellae in all bacteria, only 23 of the proteins are shared between them. So at first, we have literally hundreds and thousands of different flagellum recipes out there, which strongly hints at a random process with lots of possible outcomes. And further we know that if we throw out some proteins, we get the Type III secretion system. So even an "incomplete" flagellum was an evolutionary advantage - another hole is filled.
And so it goes - whatever hole you point at, it is already filled with some good research.
I like the bumblebee reference, because it is one of the most misquoted sentences in discussing science. The actually quote is, that the flight of the bumblebee can't be explained with the aerodynamics of the fixed wing. This is a thoroughly correct observation. The bumblebee can't sail like a plane with fixed wings. And the science of aerodynamics correctly predicts that it can't. And Alfred Wegener in a way got it wrong - the continents don't drift. They sit fixed on the tectonic plates. Alfred Wegener speculated about a similar mechanism, but also about several others. And this was pure speculation, he actually had no idea how the continents move. It took about 50 years to find that mechanism, and until then it was sane to take the continents as fixed. It was similar with the constant speed of light. When James Clerk Maxwell in 1879 published his wellknown equations, he introduced the speed of light as the constant c, but he was not sure if this holds true for large distances. At the time it was sane to assume the speed of light to be depending on the observer's position. Thus it was also sane for Albert Abraham Michelson to try to find the drift in the speed of light in his series of experiments starting in 1881, and it was sane for Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Antoon Lorentz to propose a world with a constant speed of light as a purely mathematical speculation in 1893. At the turn of the century, the idea of a constant speed of light already had some experimental evidence pointing to it, and thus Albert Einstein and his both Theories of Relativity had it more easy to be accepted - there were no viable alternative theories available.
Moreso, I always thought it was an odd idea that the way science was founded would somehow changes reality. There seems some magical thinking going on that the result of a measurement of a phenomenon is influenced by the entity that paid for the instrument. Of course there is bias in the interpretation of the measurement (and even in the way it gets rounded), but all that's changed by the bias is our interpretation, not the reality we try to understand. And of course geology arised from the large body of knowledge miners and prospectors amassed during the ages, starting with the first explorers looking for flintstone and obsidian in the Stone Age. So one can safely say that much of our geological knowledge is paid for by mining. But so what? Even if you pour billions into research, you won't change the observationable fact that silicon and aluminium are the most abundant metals in the outer crust of the Earth. And many years of research in the mining companies' labs won't change the ratio of water vapour and carbondioxide in the volcanic exhaust (about five to one). But somehow there seems to be a general emotion that either you can change reality by vigorously researching it, or that there are people out there with a research agenda whose primary goal it is to research the world in a way that the world gives in and changes itself to fit the ideology.
Actually, about 10% of the human race like it. That's the actual number of accounts compared with the size of the human population. That means that 90% of the world still doesn't have an account with facebook.
No. Definitely no. There are works which only shine in translation. A notable example would be the TV series The Persuaders!, which was o.k. in the original English, but hilariously great in the dubbed German version.
No, fembots and virtual sex you find already in the pulp fiction magazines of the 1920ies. I also remember the 1960ies short story "the revolution of the washing machines" from Stanislaw Lem (I don't know if this one ever was translated to english though, it was published together with the Dzienniki gwiazdowe [Star Diaries]).
The most of the large geothermal energy projects have been abandoned - because of the increasing number of local earthquakes. Geothermal energy obviously comes not free. The energy you withdraw from the soil seems to cause the underground to change dynamics.
This argument goes against all economical theory. If I can't recoup the cost of development with the prices I get from the market, I won't be marketing at all, or I would only market stuff whose R&D is already paid for. There is absolutely no reason for me to go into markets where I will not see a profit, and if the healthcare is so heavily regulated that I will never recoup my development costs there, why dump my products cheaply? It won't buy me any market advantages in the future, because the market will still be heavily regulated in the future too, and I will still not be able to sell my products with enough profits. So this market in general will be a generics only market, and almost no drugs whose patents are not expired yet will be ever marketed there. We would see a healthcare system with low survival rates for a lot of ailments other markets have better cures for and in general we will see a lower life expectancy. In fact,all of the socialist healthcare systems are in countries with higher life expectancy than countries with comparable wealth but less socialist healthcare systems. Even the U.S., which has the highest survival rates for cancer and heart strokes in the world, still has a lower life expectancy than most other developed nations. So either cancer and heart stroke rates are higher in the U.S. than everywhere else (why would that be?), or the U.S. healthcare systems fail in about every other aspect of healthcare. It could just mean that the U.S. spends lots of money to threat cancer and heart strokes and puts lots of money into research of cancer and heart stroke drugs, but is not able to manage health in general. It seems like the U.S. car industry of the mid-1970ies and early 1980ies complaining that the japanese carmakers can only sell cars that cheaply because the U.S. car industry does all the research and japanese carmakers just copy. It is a similar irrational argument.
10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang, today's universe's physical laws were in place and have never changed since. That means that God lost interest in his creation about 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,1 seconds after he started to create. Talk about ADS! Or to put it mildly: One can talk about his moral flexibility, jealousy, short tempered manner, righteousness, self aggrandising and recklessness, but the real complaint is that he wasted so much of his talent.
The corporate laptop I use is still running Windows XP, and then there is a Windows XP system in the house, which my children use to play - mainly minecraft and some browser games. So this one doesn't need to be Windows at all, but it is out of historical reasons (e.g. never reinstalled). All other computers are running some Linux variant, even the netbook I plan to give my son tomorrow for his birthday, which has a vanilla ubuntu install.
Which is also the point made about socialist medical care: it works fine, while someone else is willing to foot the bill for it. Europe should be paying lobbyists in Washington to keep the US well away from national health care and price controls on drugs. Once the US stops paying for the drugs, good luck maintaining your cheap supply.
Another one of the "we pay for everyone else" misconceptions. The same complaint you can read in german newspapers, in french newspapers, in about every country that has some biochemical or medical enterprises. "Our health system has to pay for the research, and then the drugs get marketed cheaply everywhere else."
Wrong. A medicamentation will be sold for exactly that price the market in the country will bear. Why should an american company sell a drug more cheaply in a "socialist healthcare" country? Because they want to support socialist medicine? Because they care for the poor downtrodden masses in an oppressive socialist country? There is only one reason: the market there is competitive enough that higher prices can't be realized. If you pay more in the U.S. for healthcare, it's because the healthcare market is not efficient enough.
Slashdot Mirror
An educated public would realize that voting for who you want is today's only way to ever break the rep-dem-oligopoly. If you vote tactically, all you do is playing into the hands of the strategists. They plan. They are strategic. You react. You stay tactical.
Start local. Vote people into office you trust, independently of any party affiliation. Be a candidate people can trust, independently of any party affiliation. Focus on issues, not on ideologies. Get things done instead of paying lip service on things that ought to be done. If a solution really solves a problem, go for the solution even if it collides with some grand ideals you might bear. Keep an eye on other regions and their ways to deal with problems to get ideas how to solve your own. Be stubbornly pragmatic.
Mine are Solaris and The Flop, both by Stanislaw Lem.
Actually, the commutative property can either be proven from axioms (if we talk about natural numbers), or it is an axiom itself (if we are talking number fields).
If you want to prove the commutative property within natural numbers, you start out proving, that 1 + a = a + 1 (e.g. the a-th successor of 1 is the successor of a), then you can argue, that a + b = 1 + a + b - 1, and then you iterate that b times, and get to a + b = (b*1) + a + (b-b) = b + a.
Why is that bad? It's what all the european rulers did in the 18th century with chinese towns, when Asia was a big thing to have, and everyone had to have something chinese. Europeans even copied china (the material), first as fayence, later one with a similar recipe as porcelain. Europeans copied the fireworks, the drinking of tea, and about every larger park had a chinese style pagode. The U.S. copied the chinese sauces in the 19th century, calling them "ketchup", and went on to reinvent chinese food a.k.a. chop suey. Did we hear the Chinese complain how Europeans and the U.S. were stealing chinese intellectual property then?
As I wrote: "five fingers and toes per hand, as today's vertebrae have at least in their embryonic phase".
If you do an ultrasound of an embryonic cat or dog, you will see that they develop five digits per hand. Later in the development, some of their digits don't grow any further and stay in their embryonic form.
I know, it has. But "holes in the theory" was never a reason to dismiss it. It's not as if there was a better theory around the corner, we could use.
For a long time it was believed that the landliving vertebrae always had five fingers and toes per hand, as today's vertebrae have at least in their embryonic phase, and there was a big hole in the theory of evolution because why exactly five? Today we know that the first landgoing vertebrae actually had more digits, they started out with eight, later we got seven, then six, and finally five. It seems that five digits is a local optimum for digits, as all subsequent vertebrae stayed with five - evolution slowly converged to it. So this hole was filled.
And so it goes with every hole that one points at. We know the process of coagulation pretty well, and we can see right now how it has evolved: the basic mechanisms are controlled by more complicated mechanisms, whose in turn have another layer of control upon them. Each layer evolved because the lower layer was prone to (deadly) errors. We know that the flagellum of Escheria coli is based on 40 proteins, and if one is missing, it won't work. But if we look at all flagellae in all bacteria, only 23 of the proteins are shared between them. So at first, we have literally hundreds and thousands of different flagellum recipes out there, which strongly hints at a random process with lots of possible outcomes. And further we know that if we throw out some proteins, we get the Type III secretion system. So even an "incomplete" flagellum was an evolutionary advantage - another hole is filled.
And so it goes - whatever hole you point at, it is already filled with some good research.
I like the bumblebee reference, because it is one of the most misquoted sentences in discussing science. The actually quote is, that the flight of the bumblebee can't be explained with the aerodynamics of the fixed wing. This is a thoroughly correct observation. The bumblebee can't sail like a plane with fixed wings. And the science of aerodynamics correctly predicts that it can't.
And Alfred Wegener in a way got it wrong - the continents don't drift. They sit fixed on the tectonic plates. Alfred Wegener speculated about a similar mechanism, but also about several others. And this was pure speculation, he actually had no idea how the continents move. It took about 50 years to find that mechanism, and until then it was sane to take the continents as fixed. It was similar with the constant speed of light. When James Clerk Maxwell in 1879 published his wellknown equations, he introduced the speed of light as the constant c, but he was not sure if this holds true for large distances. At the time it was sane to assume the speed of light to be depending on the observer's position. Thus it was also sane for Albert Abraham Michelson to try to find the drift in the speed of light in his series of experiments starting in 1881, and it was sane for Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Antoon Lorentz to propose a world with a constant speed of light as a purely mathematical speculation in 1893. At the turn of the century, the idea of a constant speed of light already had some experimental evidence pointing to it, and thus Albert Einstein and his both Theories of Relativity had it more easy to be accepted - there were no viable alternative theories available.
Moreso, I always thought it was an odd idea that the way science was founded would somehow changes reality. There seems some magical thinking going on that the result of a measurement of a phenomenon is influenced by the entity that paid for the instrument.
Of course there is bias in the interpretation of the measurement (and even in the way it gets rounded), but all that's changed by the bias is our interpretation, not the reality we try to understand. And of course geology arised from the large body of knowledge miners and prospectors amassed during the ages, starting with the first explorers looking for flintstone and obsidian in the Stone Age. So one can safely say that much of our geological knowledge is paid for by mining. But so what? Even if you pour billions into research, you won't change the observationable fact that silicon and aluminium are the most abundant metals in the outer crust of the Earth. And many years of research in the mining companies' labs won't change the ratio of water vapour and carbondioxide in the volcanic exhaust (about five to one).
But somehow there seems to be a general emotion that either you can change reality by vigorously researching it, or that there are people out there with a research agenda whose primary goal it is to research the world in a way that the world gives in and changes itself to fit the ideology.
Actually, about 10% of the human race like it. That's the actual number of accounts compared with the size of the human population. That means that 90% of the world still doesn't have an account with facebook.
No. Definitely no. There are works which only shine in translation. A notable example would be the TV series The Persuaders!, which was o.k. in the original English, but hilariously great in the dubbed German version.
Args... Slashcode ate my exponent.
E = mc^2.
E = mc. How long did it take to find that formula, and how long does it take to describe it to the pupils?
No, fembots and virtual sex you find already in the pulp fiction magazines of the 1920ies. I also remember the 1960ies short story "the revolution of the washing machines" from Stanislaw Lem (I don't know if this one ever was translated to english though, it was published together with the Dzienniki gwiazdowe [Star Diaries]).
The most of the large geothermal energy projects have been abandoned - because of the increasing number of local earthquakes. Geothermal energy obviously comes not free. The energy you withdraw from the soil seems to cause the underground to change dynamics.
See the Basel Geothermal Project as an example.
Your fatal mistake is to assume that everyone having doubts about evolution is a hardboiled creationist.
You forgot that not only the length but also the direction of the resistance vector is changing, depending on the velocity.
Luckily, there is no Global Warming on the horizon.
The Mavericks won the championship last season. This is not exactly nothing.
At least, here I can get a mobile flat data plan for 15€/month. This would make Mark Cuban's point moot.
No, it's not him, it's the law, that is that disconnected. The law thinks that upholding someone's rights is more important than playing a video game.
From the same article:
The discovery of the microphone by Professor Hughes has demonstrated the reason of this failure.
So it was not Alexander Graham Bell, who overcame this problem, but Professor (David Edward) Hughes.
This argument goes against all economical theory. If I can't recoup the cost of development with the prices I get from the market, I won't be marketing at all, or I would only market stuff whose R&D is already paid for. There is absolutely no reason for me to go into markets where I will not see a profit, and if the healthcare is so heavily regulated that I will never recoup my development costs there, why dump my products cheaply? It won't buy me any market advantages in the future, because the market will still be heavily regulated in the future too, and I will still not be able to sell my products with enough profits. So this market in general will be a generics only market, and almost no drugs whose patents are not expired yet will be ever marketed there. We would see a healthcare system with low survival rates for a lot of ailments other markets have better cures for and in general we will see a lower life expectancy.
In fact,all of the socialist healthcare systems are in countries with higher life expectancy than countries with comparable wealth but less socialist healthcare systems. Even the U.S., which has the highest survival rates for cancer and heart strokes in the world, still has a lower life expectancy than most other developed nations. So either cancer and heart stroke rates are higher in the U.S. than everywhere else (why would that be?), or the U.S. healthcare systems fail in about every other aspect of healthcare. It could just mean that the U.S. spends lots of money to threat cancer and heart strokes and puts lots of money into research of cancer and heart stroke drugs, but is not able to manage health in general.
It seems like the U.S. car industry of the mid-1970ies and early 1980ies complaining that the japanese carmakers can only sell cars that cheaply because the U.S. car industry does all the research and japanese carmakers just copy. It is a similar irrational argument.
10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang, today's universe's physical laws were in place and have never changed since. That means that God lost interest in his creation about 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,1 seconds after he started to create. Talk about ADS!
Or to put it mildly: One can talk about his moral flexibility, jealousy, short tempered manner, righteousness, self aggrandising and recklessness, but the real complaint is that he wasted so much of his talent.
(Shamelessly stolen from Vince Ebert.)
The corporate laptop I use is still running Windows XP, and then there is a Windows XP system in the house, which my children use to play - mainly minecraft and some browser games. So this one doesn't need to be Windows at all, but it is out of historical reasons (e.g. never reinstalled). All other computers are running some Linux variant, even the netbook I plan to give my son tomorrow for his birthday, which has a vanilla ubuntu install.
Which is also the point made about socialist medical care: it works fine, while someone else is willing to foot the bill for it. Europe should be paying lobbyists in Washington to keep the US well away from national health care and price controls on drugs. Once the US stops paying for the drugs, good luck maintaining your cheap supply.
Another one of the "we pay for everyone else" misconceptions. The same complaint you can read in german newspapers, in french newspapers, in about every country that has some biochemical or medical enterprises. "Our health system has to pay for the research, and then the drugs get marketed cheaply everywhere else."
Wrong. A medicamentation will be sold for exactly that price the market in the country will bear. Why should an american company sell a drug more cheaply in a "socialist healthcare" country? Because they want to support socialist medicine? Because they care for the poor downtrodden masses in an oppressive socialist country? There is only one reason: the market there is competitive enough that higher prices can't be realized. If you pay more in the U.S. for healthcare, it's because the healthcare market is not efficient enough.