The basic idea of the grand parent poster was that suicidal persons will try to kill themselves with all means they have, and if you remove one, they will look for another. But apparently, it isn't like that. People who try to kill themselves with sleeping pills don't go for guns. And people who have a tendency to kill themselves with guns will not look for sleeping pills (yes, there are also those people who will try both, but they are very rare). It can be shown that there is a statistical correlation of the availability of a gun and the tendency to kill themselves. Now you can argue which one caused what (people who want to commit suicide might be more likely to buy guns, or people, who have guns might become more suicidal in the presence of the weapon, or both might go back to the same cause, e.g. people more afraid of the world in general could be more likely to buy guns and become suicidal at the same time).
To the pro-gun nuts: There is a difference between the absolute suicide rate and the number of suicides that could have been avoided if private gun ownership was limited.
There are countries with traditionally high suicide rates, and there are countries with lower rates. Even if the means available to everyone to commit suicide are the same, you still find differences in the number of suicides depending on the region. And then there is the observation that suicide rates behave similar to infection rates of a contagious disease. If in a region suicide rates increase, there is a high probability that suicide rates will increase in the immediately neighboring regions.
Beside that, it is also known that suicidal people are belonging to different groups which use different means. People who have used for instance sleeping pills in an attempt to kill themselves will usually not throw themselves out of a window at the next opportunity, but rather try to kill themselves with sleeping pills again. And people who would use a gun to kill themselves will not jump in front of a subway train and vice versa. So yes, taking away guns would not have forced the 12,000 people in the U.S. who kill themselves with a gun each year to try to gas themselves or to die by causing a traffic accident. Instead, most of those 12,000 people won't have tried to kill themselves at all.
Statistically speaking, it wasn't the pill itself, it was the society in which the pill got introduced.
While the availability of the pill was at about the same time in most Western countries, the strong decline in birthrates that is often associated with the contraceptive pill was setting in at very different times. In the U.S., birth rates were already declining before the pill got introduced, in West Germany, the birth rates were still rising until about five years after the introduction of the pill.
Currently, he is not convicted, so legally he is only suspected to have tried to frame Brian Krebs for heroin possession. And thus the article said he was thought to be behind the framing. More will be known after trial, when both plaintiff and defense have presented their side of the case, and a jury and then a judge have decided.
This was the proposal of Jean Picard in 1668, but the actual measurement that led to the fabrication of the Metre prototype in 1799 was the distance between Northpole and Equator.
This is plainly wrong. The original definition of the metre was "the 10,000,000st of the distance between Northpole and Equator", because this was the closest one could think of to have it about a yard long. Later, better measurements have shown that the prototype built to represent this distance was about 0.2 millimeters short, thus the actual distance between Northpole and Equator is about 10,002 kilometres.
Ah, the Facebook fallacy: "Because some people share some private information about themselves, it's totally o.k. that some powerful organisation is entitled to all private information of all of us."
No, just because my neighbor shared some vacation pictures of him and is family, no one is entitled to my vacation pictures. And just because I posted my curriculum vitae somewhere online, no one is entitled to all the dates and facts about my neighbor's life.
For a pure traffic simulation game, I prefer Simutrans. It has the most complex supply chain concept I ever encountered in a game yet. It's completely free. And, shameless plug, I even designed some streetcar sets that are included in some graphic packs for the game.
I once tried the Mobility Game, which has the city building aspect too, but focusses more on traffic management and environmental aspects of traffic. I liked the idea of actually planning public transport with lines, stations, numbers of vehicles etc.pp.. It's missing all the public utility aspects though, so no water, electricity and waste management. Also no crime, fires and other disasters. On the other hand, the simulation of the aspects you could actually manage (number of streets, length and type of streets, number of crossings, right-of-way and traffic lights, speed limits, multi-lane roads) seemed to be quite realistically. You were always running out of parking lots near public buildings like super markets, theaters and such like, and you could actually build a purely administrative/commercial town without any industrial zones. Roads with many connections to other roads were much more prone to traffic jams and heavy environmental impacts than a cul-de-sac limited to 10 km/h.
And, the game is free to play (to save games you need to pay the shareware fee), so I gave it a try. But it doesn't get updated since 2010 anymore.
It's quite low. Trees standing alone are much more dangerous to birds, and especially predatory birds like hawks and eagles are prone to hit branches or trunks of trees and die.
It seems that animals living their whole life within the immediate environment of Chernobyl fare much better than for instance migratory birds. While there seem to be no increased gene defects in the local wolfpacks, with migratory birds raising their young in the Chernobyl area, we see heightened gene defects.
So the jury is still out there. Maybe living from craddle to grave in Chernobyl will be ok, but appearently living abroad and returning once in a while will not.
As a matter of fact, my children are old enough to watch the show and get most of the references. Especially my daughter seems to become an übernerd, taking courses in robotics, writing fan fiction, wearing gaming apparel and reading all the classics like Tolkien, Adams, Gibson and Pratchett.
Basicly you are telling us, that you think forbidding to even tell about a proveable and real property of a thing is something to applaud to. The food is genetically modified. That's a fact. Why not tell it everybody?
If you keep it a secret, it makes people much more nervous about it as if you tell. If there is no problem with it, why not be honest about it? If people realize that they are eating GMO food all the day, and they are still healthy, wouldn't that be much better for proving that GMO food is ok? Everyone thus can see it.
In Afghanistan, there are nearly no Arabs. It's inhabited by Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara, Aimaqs and other ethnic groups, none of them is Arab or speaks a semitic language.
Maybe it's time to actually inform yourself about Afghanistan before making such bold statements?
Especially for DNA comparisation, this shortcut won't work. Moreso, it is antithetic to the task at hand. We want to know the edit distance, or in DNA speak, we want to know how many mutation we need to get from DNA1 to DNA2, for instance to determine relation. The shortcut that we just look if all letters are present and begin and end are ok, and don't care about their sequence in the middle of the word doesn't give us the edit distance, as it hides exactly the answer to the question we asked to begin with. It's ok for determining which words are there, and it speeds up reading, but only if all sequences of letters are actually words we know perfectly well. It would slow down the reading to a crawl if our task was for instance to read a text in a foreign language and translate it with the help of a dictionary. If we then stumble upon scrambled words, it will take ages until we figure out the right sequence of letters to look the word up in the dictionary.
It works in this case, because everyone knows what you are modelling: You are using the english language analog to the language of Westeros, which makes sense for english listeners, because they already associate a scotch accent with "north", and a spanish accent with "south". As the whole series is in english anyway, this works. With this choice, you can control the context, because what you are suggesting with the variation of the accent is equivalent to the setting in the fantasy world.
But using a dying language in a movie just because it's a dying language and you want to preserve it makes no sense in most cases, except you find a language environment, that is a) somehow historically or locally connected to english as the main language used in the movies and b) carries with it all the connotations you want to use. You could for instance have the people of the Southwest of Westeros talk Cornish (Kernowek), if they should have their own language and if it should be distinct from the main language. But using for instance one of the languages once spoken in Tierra del Fuego does not make sense, as the connections to English are so different from anything we get told about Westeros.
In the comments below the interview, there were several comments along the line that Hollywood should not pay someone to invent a new language, but rather revive one of the many languages on the verge of extinction. One answer of one commenter was that exactly those people who invent languages for fun and for a living are also exactly those linguists who preserve those languages destined for extinction.
I would add a second thought: First, it doesn't make sense to have an invented place speak a real language in lieu of an invented one. It just creates a confusing context. Lets say the people of the eastern regions in Game of Thrones would speak a language like the Mansi language. It would somehow place Westernesse into the Ural mountains as Mansi is spoken east of the Ural. People from West Siberia, who might not speak Mansi, but recognize the sound of it would always be somehow reminded of their home land instead of being immersed in a phantasy world, and the Mansi people then would then wonder if the people of Westeros should somehow be identified with the Russians, and why there is no Khanty language (a neighboring language both locally and linguistically) in the series.
Chosing a language always sets a context, and if you want to control the context, you can't chose languages at will.
I have an issue with the notion that something should be allowed because it is possible. Yes, it is possible to collect the data about my buying habits. But should it be allowed? It is also possible for me to ram a knife into your chest, but should that be allowed?
For a long time, we didn't think about the consequences of wholesale collection of all available data of people, because the sheer amount of data meant, that it wasn't done for all people in the most complete manner. There were specialized professions which collected as much data as possible, but only for a certain subset of people: tabloid journalists for celebrities, spies for high profile persons in politics, investigators for people accused of a crime and private eyes for targets the paying customer named. And we thought, that those limits somehow made sense, as most of us are neither celebrities, high profile persons in politics, accused of crimes or in an enduring conflict that makes one side willing to pay large sums of money to private investigators. And we somehow felt, that those persons are special, and thus permitted special care, and we told ourselves, that those persons deserved it because of their life choices.
But with the availability of data storing and processing, we all are now in the role of celebrities, accused, politicians or people in deep conflicts. Suddenly it's not a choice anymore to get your privacy constantly violated. It happens to all of us. And now we see that the old idea, that if something is in the public view, it belongs to the public, and it should be allowed to indiscriminitely record, store and process it, is working against us.
About 300 years ago, we understood that for special types of data, it shouldn't be the case. Works of Art were in the public view, but it was explicitely forbidden in the Statute of Anne in 1710 to record, store and process them without explicit permission, because mostly everyone understood that those works somehow incorporate a value.Now with the advent of big data, we also see that other data, which are not Works of Art, still have an intrinsic value, and if everyone is allowed to siphon it from us, we lose, and someone else who is not us, gains, albeit it's us who created the value in the first place.
The full-coverage satellite data show continued warming in the last 20 years. I don't know which data you are looking at, but of the 20 year period you are talking about, nine out of the ten warmest years are after 2005, and 2015 might set a new all time record. If it wasn't for the extreme outlier 1998, the warming in the last 20 years would have been nearly linear. Actually, one of the Anti-AGW propaganda tricks is to take an ok sounding period like 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, in which 1998 is close to the start. Until 2008, it was always "the last decade doesn't show warming", after that it was "the last 15 years", and now, since 2013 and thus more than 15 years since 1998 are over, it's obviously 20 years. But for some reason, 2013, 2014 and probably also 2015 were pretty hot years globally, and thus the graph, that looked so convincingly anti-warming in 2008 was mildly constant until 2013, but since then, even 1998 does no longer help the argument, as even the graphs that take 1998 as their starting point have a rising trend.
Slashdot Mirror
The basic idea of the grand parent poster was that suicidal persons will try to kill themselves with all means they have, and if you remove one, they will look for another. But apparently, it isn't like that. People who try to kill themselves with sleeping pills don't go for guns. And people who have a tendency to kill themselves with guns will not look for sleeping pills (yes, there are also those people who will try both, but they are very rare). It can be shown that there is a statistical correlation of the availability of a gun and the tendency to kill themselves. Now you can argue which one caused what (people who want to commit suicide might be more likely to buy guns, or people, who have guns might become more suicidal in the presence of the weapon, or both might go back to the same cause, e.g. people more afraid of the world in general could be more likely to buy guns and become suicidal at the same time).
There are countries with traditionally high suicide rates, and there are countries with lower rates. Even if the means available to everyone to commit suicide are the same, you still find differences in the number of suicides depending on the region. And then there is the observation that suicide rates behave similar to infection rates of a contagious disease. If in a region suicide rates increase, there is a high probability that suicide rates will increase in the immediately neighboring regions.
Beside that, it is also known that suicidal people are belonging to different groups which use different means. People who have used for instance sleeping pills in an attempt to kill themselves will usually not throw themselves out of a window at the next opportunity, but rather try to kill themselves with sleeping pills again. And people who would use a gun to kill themselves will not jump in front of a subway train and vice versa. So yes, taking away guns would not have forced the 12,000 people in the U.S. who kill themselves with a gun each year to try to gas themselves or to die by causing a traffic accident. Instead, most of those 12,000 people won't have tried to kill themselves at all.
Near the equator, the sun goes up pretty close to 6am in the morning and sets at 6pm in the evening, without much variation during the year.
While the availability of the pill was at about the same time in most Western countries, the strong decline in birthrates that is often associated with the contraceptive pill was setting in at very different times. In the U.S., birth rates were already declining before the pill got introduced, in West Germany, the birth rates were still rising until about five years after the introduction of the pill.
Currently, he is not convicted, so legally he is only suspected to have tried to frame Brian Krebs for heroin possession. And thus the article said he was thought to be behind the framing. More will be known after trial, when both plaintiff and defense have presented their side of the case, and a jury and then a judge have decided.
This was the proposal of Jean Picard in 1668, but the actual measurement that led to the fabrication of the Metre prototype in 1799 was the distance between Northpole and Equator.
This is plainly wrong. The original definition of the metre was "the 10,000,000st of the distance between Northpole and Equator", because this was the closest one could think of to have it about a yard long. Later, better measurements have shown that the prototype built to represent this distance was about 0.2 millimeters short, thus the actual distance between Northpole and Equator is about 10,002 kilometres.
So I would go for the lone white suprematist, as the mayority of all terroristic attacks on American soil were performed by white suprematists.
No, just because my neighbor shared some vacation pictures of him and is family, no one is entitled to my vacation pictures. And just because I posted my curriculum vitae somewhere online, no one is entitled to all the dates and facts about my neighbor's life.
For a pure traffic simulation game, I prefer Simutrans. It has the most complex supply chain concept I ever encountered in a game yet. It's completely free. And, shameless plug, I even designed some streetcar sets that are included in some graphic packs for the game.
And, the game is free to play (to save games you need to pay the shareware fee), so I gave it a try. But it doesn't get updated since 2010 anymore.
I remember playing Hamurabi on the C64, and trying to build my own economic simulation game, which never went past much after the startup screen.
It's quite low. Trees standing alone are much more dangerous to birds, and especially predatory birds like hawks and eagles are prone to hit branches or trunks of trees and die.
So the jury is still out there. Maybe living from craddle to grave in Chernobyl will be ok, but appearently living abroad and returning once in a while will not.
As a matter of fact, my children are old enough to watch the show and get most of the references. Especially my daughter seems to become an übernerd, taking courses in robotics, writing fan fiction, wearing gaming apparel and reading all the classics like Tolkien, Adams, Gibson and Pratchett.
So here I present you a geek who enjoys watching the show: Me.
If you keep it a secret, it makes people much more nervous about it as if you tell. If there is no problem with it, why not be honest about it? If people realize that they are eating GMO food all the day, and they are still healthy, wouldn't that be much better for proving that GMO food is ok? Everyone thus can see it.
There is a german children rhyme: "Eine Kuh macht Muh, viele Kühe machen Mühe", which translates to "A cow says moo, many cows make tedious work."
It would be more like "Ihr alle seid Kühe", as "alles" means "the whole" and not "everyone".
Maybe it's time to actually inform yourself about Afghanistan before making such bold statements?
Especially for DNA comparisation, this shortcut won't work. Moreso, it is antithetic to the task at hand. We want to know the edit distance, or in DNA speak, we want to know how many mutation we need to get from DNA1 to DNA2, for instance to determine relation. The shortcut that we just look if all letters are present and begin and end are ok, and don't care about their sequence in the middle of the word doesn't give us the edit distance, as it hides exactly the answer to the question we asked to begin with. It's ok for determining which words are there, and it speeds up reading, but only if all sequences of letters are actually words we know perfectly well. It would slow down the reading to a crawl if our task was for instance to read a text in a foreign language and translate it with the help of a dictionary. If we then stumble upon scrambled words, it will take ages until we figure out the right sequence of letters to look the word up in the dictionary.
But using a dying language in a movie just because it's a dying language and you want to preserve it makes no sense in most cases, except you find a language environment, that is a) somehow historically or locally connected to english as the main language used in the movies and b) carries with it all the connotations you want to use. You could for instance have the people of the Southwest of Westeros talk Cornish (Kernowek), if they should have their own language and if it should be distinct from the main language. But using for instance one of the languages once spoken in Tierra del Fuego does not make sense, as the connections to English are so different from anything we get told about Westeros.
I would add a second thought: First, it doesn't make sense to have an invented place speak a real language in lieu of an invented one. It just creates a confusing context. Lets say the people of the eastern regions in Game of Thrones would speak a language like the Mansi language. It would somehow place Westernesse into the Ural mountains as Mansi is spoken east of the Ural. People from West Siberia, who might not speak Mansi, but recognize the sound of it would always be somehow reminded of their home land instead of being immersed in a phantasy world, and the Mansi people then would then wonder if the people of Westeros should somehow be identified with the Russians, and why there is no Khanty language (a neighboring language both locally and linguistically) in the series.
Chosing a language always sets a context, and if you want to control the context, you can't chose languages at will.
For a long time, we didn't think about the consequences of wholesale collection of all available data of people, because the sheer amount of data meant, that it wasn't done for all people in the most complete manner. There were specialized professions which collected as much data as possible, but only for a certain subset of people: tabloid journalists for celebrities, spies for high profile persons in politics, investigators for people accused of a crime and private eyes for targets the paying customer named. And we thought, that those limits somehow made sense, as most of us are neither celebrities, high profile persons in politics, accused of crimes or in an enduring conflict that makes one side willing to pay large sums of money to private investigators. And we somehow felt, that those persons are special, and thus permitted special care, and we told ourselves, that those persons deserved it because of their life choices.
But with the availability of data storing and processing, we all are now in the role of celebrities, accused, politicians or people in deep conflicts. Suddenly it's not a choice anymore to get your privacy constantly violated. It happens to all of us. And now we see that the old idea, that if something is in the public view, it belongs to the public, and it should be allowed to indiscriminitely record, store and process it, is working against us.
About 300 years ago, we understood that for special types of data, it shouldn't be the case. Works of Art were in the public view, but it was explicitely forbidden in the Statute of Anne in 1710 to record, store and process them without explicit permission, because mostly everyone understood that those works somehow incorporate a value.Now with the advent of big data, we also see that other data, which are not Works of Art, still have an intrinsic value, and if everyone is allowed to siphon it from us, we lose, and someone else who is not us, gains, albeit it's us who created the value in the first place.
The full-coverage satellite data show continued warming in the last 20 years. I don't know which data you are looking at, but of the 20 year period you are talking about, nine out of the ten warmest years are after 2005, and 2015 might set a new all time record. If it wasn't for the extreme outlier 1998, the warming in the last 20 years would have been nearly linear. Actually, one of the Anti-AGW propaganda tricks is to take an ok sounding period like 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, in which 1998 is close to the start. Until 2008, it was always "the last decade doesn't show warming", after that it was "the last 15 years", and now, since 2013 and thus more than 15 years since 1998 are over, it's obviously 20 years. But for some reason, 2013, 2014 and probably also 2015 were pretty hot years globally, and thus the graph, that looked so convincingly anti-warming in 2008 was mildly constant until 2013, but since then, even 1998 does no longer help the argument, as even the graphs that take 1998 as their starting point have a rising trend.