It's easy to know and actually reported in the weather news. They give you the rainfall in inches per square foot (or in liters per square meter), and if you know the area affected by rain, you can calculate the volume of the rain.
"Culture" is just a big cover we put over very different things. A physician and a physicist will have a big problem to read each other's scientific papers -- mostly they won't even know what the paper is about. And imagine someone from Switzerland and from Brasil try to talk to each other about their favorite outdoor activity during January, even if they find a language they both are fluent in!
Language is much more than just a communications protocol. Language has connotations, language is malleable by its speakers, language contains concepts of the world, language is even a tool to make a difference between insiders and outsiders. We will never be able to speak one common language. No physicist will ever be able to learn about all the terms a physician needs in his daily work, and most Brazilians will never learn anything about skiing in a certain valley of the Alps. Every generation comes up with new words for old facts just because the parents should not understand everything their children are talking about.
Each language has a big body of texts encoded in this language, which are unique to this language, and most of it was never translated into any other language (you don't believe it? How much of french TV programming was ever translated into English for instance?). The idea that most of the world's knowledge is available in English is completely misguided. It's just most of the knowledge you have that is available in English. But you are no benchmark of what knowledge is. If we switch to only one single language for everyone, all the text in all the other languages will be lost forever. How minuscule the english knowledge about non-english events is, can be easily demonstrated by asking you, how much you know about the events of the Summer of 1989 in Hungary. Nevertheless this is very important for the understanding of today's world, because the talks between Hungary's minister of Foreign Affairs Gyula Horn and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock during the Pan-European Picnic lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. There are hundreds of news paper articles and reports available in Hungarian and German, in Czech and in Romanian, there are scientific papers about the events in those languages, but how much are available in English? In the U.S. there is still the opinion prevalent that Ronald Reagan's speech at the Berlin Wall in 1988 had something to do with it. (Fun fact: It hasn't.)
Making traffic flow better will bring more traffic, even if you use false analogies. Every trip has an associated cost, and if you lower the cost for each trip by better flowing traffic, more trips will become affordable, and yes, making traffic flow better will generate more traffic that was non-existant before because of being too expensive.
Libertarians believe everyone has all the time of the world to do all the work of thousands of people all on his own everytime something is to decide. Somehow doing research and finding out things costs nothing in a libertarian world. No wonder they come up with such a fantastic economic value of a fully free, non regulated market.
But in our modern networked world, it is now possible to do things outside the country you are in. I can now gamble in Macau over the Internet from the comfort of my living room. Physical location is no longer adequate to determine jurisdiction. It hasn't happened yet, but eventually some hacker is going to mess up some hospital's ICU computers in another country and kill someone. This issue needs to be resolved somehow by the International community in a manner which is consistent and reciprocal without being destructive.
The way to handle that is easy: Send a request for administrative assistance to Ireland, and then an irish judge will decide if Microsoft Ireland has to comply.
The uselessness of torture as an interrogation tool was conclusively described about 400 years ago in "Cautio criminalis" by Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld. You are free to ignore 400 years of knowledge though. But then you are just ignorant.
He doesn't provide any evidence at all, just presents the current situation as some kind of natural state, which I doubt because I don't experience it as natural, but as a result of generations of propaganda. You might not notice this particular propaganda, because you grew up within without it ever being called so, but I do. I see U.S. movies, and I see movies produced in Europe, and sometimes I see movies produced in Asia. Only the U.S. movies have this strong accent on girls being princesses, on boys being rock musicians, and only in U.S. movies you will find the father "talking the talk" to his son about those mysterious women, and the mother warning the daughter about the boys only wanting sex. Only in U.S. movies I see those strong and unquestioned clichés how to be a man and how to be a woman. To me, they are a typical part of the U.S. culture. There is no evidence whatsoever that the dichotomy between boys and girls in topics to pursuit as a student is in some way a natural one, which cannot and will never be changed. I've seen the topics to pursuit change when the cultural environment changed. And this is more than "anecdotical" evidence, as it affects hundred of thousands of students. We actually had an experiment, and the experiment showed that within a few years, between 1989 and 1994, the ratio of males to females changed completely from a 50/50 ratio to a 50/1 ratio.
Even if you call the situation before a non-natural one, there is not a single reason to consider the situation afterwards in any way more natural.
I've grown up in an environment with not so much focus on "girlish" and "boyish" toys, and -- ta da! -- we didn't have this extreme separation of genders. Still today, when I see especially U.S. TV series aimed at children and adolescents, I often have an urge to switch off the TV because the settings seem to be so completely off reality and so loaden with cliché. There are some dogmata deeply ingrained in the plots, which are never questioned, and which play their own role as if they were real objects. Adolescent girls dream of marriage and boys want sex. It's a recurring theme everywhere in U.S. TV and so totally off anything I experienced myself. But I've yet to see the plot where this dogma is actually challenged. Maths and computers are a boy thing. In East Germany, computer science was a topic which had about 50/50 students. After 1989, the female student numbers fell dramatically. But at the mid level of the universities, all those women which started their academical career before 1989, still were present.
So contrary to you, I strongly believe based on the evidence around me, that the U.S. way of predetermining the roles of girls and boys in life in the U.S. culture and especially in toys and stories aimed at children plays a very important role in the roles they actually play in their later life. And it could be different, but in the current environment, where the actual buyers of those toys and story books are already predetermined by their own childhood, there is no business case in challenging the settings. Getting girls interested in being princesses works because the parents (and other grown up relatives) of the girls have the final say what they want their daughters to be interested in, and when they will agree that their daughter is so cute.
I've seen my own daughter playing with toy cars and toy trains as a very little child, because that were the toys her older brother played with. But then a family with two girls of her age moved into the neighborhood, and they had all the pink toys and castles and white play horses, and my daughter played with them and gradually wanted their own princess dolls and horses (she even started a collection of them), but this was several years ago, and now my daughter is in junior highschool. She chosed Robotics as her voluntary topic, she saved money to buy herself a PS4, and she's playing Second Son all the time - turning into a computer nerd like her father and much more than her older brother.
Ok, lets start. The idea of a tabula rasa in the mind of a newborn child is wrong. We know that our minds have preconceived concepts. One example is the narrative. We tend to grasp information better if it is presented as a narrative with exposition, connected events and conclusion. Our intuition for example works narratively. We see incomplete information, and we fill in the gaps with intuitive ideas that complete the information to a rounded narrative. If we have enough narratives already in memory, we tend to be better at filling the gaps - experience makes for better intuition.
Another preconceived concept is the pattern. We tend to see patterns everywhere. If we spot several dots in a row, we tend to see a line. How strong this pattern spotting is, can be easily demonstrated by the well known optical illusions. Patterns allow for a compression of available information, we ignore slight derivations from the regular pattern, and still can mentally reproduce the situation almost completely. Those patterns don't need to have a counterpart in reality, they are mainly a mechanism of our minds. But they are a very powerful one.
Both narrative and pattern allow for inductive reasoning. From a information theory point of view, inductive reasoning never gives a warranty of being right (other than deductive reasoning), nevertheless it's a necessity to us, thus we have the concepts for it ingrained in our minds.
Ayn Rand's epistemology requires thought processes to be rational, but pattern and narrative are non-rational shortcuts, and they are much faster and in general "good enough" for us, and in many cases, they allow for survival, where a rational thought process would be much to slow or can't even yield a result because of incomplete information. Ayn Rand somehow conjures up the idea that an individual can have complete information and enough time for a rational decision. But this is wishful thinking, and she herself admits: wishing won't make it so. Ayn Rand never asks where the time required to gather information and to make decisions comes from.
But we as a group (society, culture...) have means to create a vast library of concepts, patterns and narratives that have proven to work most of the time. We call it education, science, laws, regulations, morality, ethics and knowledge. The library is there to support the individual in decision making, but enough individuals have to support the library for it to not deteriorate. Only because the group has this vast body of knowledge and tradition, the individual is empowered to make informed decisions. The group creates the freedom of the individual. An individual alone is not able to stay free. It needs the group and their preconceived ideas to stay alive, to have enough time to gather necessary information and to rationally decide. If the group doesn't provide this freedom, the individual can't exercise it.
Of course it was not complimentary to them -- they are exactly the boring, stubborn, bothering people we all like to complain about. But at least they managed to get the human society running, though with all the hickups, misconceptions, errors and catastrophes that are typical for humans.
The argument against Ayn Rand's philosophy is Douglas Adams' story of the people from Golgafrincham as told in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The Class A people try to get rid of all those people that make their life miserable(*) by insisting on rules and procedures and regulations, and to keep only the serfs and drones just like John Galt who withdraws to his island in an attempt to throw out all those pesky socialists out of his life.
The consequence Douglas Adams points out is that an incomplete society based solely on the egoisms of its members will die out from the next triviality -- in his case the infected telephone.
You seem to fail to grasp the difference between criminal law and common law. Innocent until proven guilty is a criminal law concept and doesn't exist in common law. There the general benchmark is preponderance of evidence. And here we have a common law case.
Making paper out of wood pulp became economic in 1843, when Friedrich Gottlob Keller invented a machine to produce groundwood to make paper. The oldest still existing groundwood paper plant was built in 1882 and is located in Verla, Finland.
I wonder what Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; means then. It is probably about Congress giving priviledges to some religions while reigning into the exercise of others and forcing religion down everyone's throat including that of atheists.
The modern image of the angels is a missunderstanding of the greek word angelos, which actually means messenger. An angel surely is not a guardian. While sometimes the Bible mentiones God sending some of his guardians (the seraphim) to earth as messengers, they went there to deliver a message, not to protect someone or fight on your side or whatever. So whoever believes in angels as guardians, his belief is definitely not based on the Bible.
All your gripes might somehow be true, but are they really a problem? About 100 years ago, everyone knew how to grow their own food. About 50 years ago, everyone know how to cook their own food. Today, to many of us, the knowledge has reduced to how to buy your own food -- and even this gets more complicated with all the warning labels, ingredient lists and dietary requirements.
My car has tire pressure sensors, yes. I have no problems with that. It's a leased car anyway, and the tires are part of the leasing contract. Sometimes after a change, I have to reset the pressure sensor after a few hundred miles. And that's all I have to do about tire maintenance. I'm happy with that, I don't like doing tire maintenance.
If the selfdriving cars become affordable, I'll buy one. I drive with as many automatics as possible right now anyway. Cruise control? Speed limiter? Yeah! I really like those. Sometimes I even adjust speed by changing the settings on these rather than using the pedals. Every repetitive task the car can do itself I don't need to do. And keeping the current speed or getting down from 65 mph to 55 mph because of a speed limit is a boring task I don't want to be involved in more than necessary. I know that makes the car very sophisticated, much more sophisticated than I'll be willing to learn -- I have other things to do, which I like more. And weight gained? My car does 50 mpg. That's what the bord computer tells me after 8000 miles. It includes city driving and long distances and many steep mountain roads. The weight went into large glas sheets, into better crash protection features and a few little amenities like air condition. I'm ok with that.
This is was TFA is about - the french version of BuzzFeed didn't get much clicks for cat videos (about 40,000 was mentioned in the article for the BuzzFeed top stories), while articles about politics were shared much more often.
So a clickbait site in France would have to provide those political stories to get enough clicks.
Because there are people out there using some scientific results to further their agenda, it makes sense to deny the scientific results. And because some of the people apparently have stated things of a completely different topic in a way that can be construed to be not fully true, it is more reason to deny the scientific results. Yeah. Makes sense. Don't accept any results, because there might be someone whose political agenda might be furthered by the result. Deny the fact that high speed lead bullets entering the body might be bad for the health because it could be used to ask for gun control! Deny the fact that double speed means four times the length needed for a complete stop because people might use it to ask for speed limits! And because some people have not fully supported views about the role of meat in your metabolism, better deny the economic problems with anti-competitive behavior of monopolistic companies, because some of the vegetarians might as for the enforcement of anti-monopoly legislation!
The thesis was that after the Great Oxygenation Event 2.1 billion years ago, multicellular life appeared, but when the oxygen levels sank again, it died out without leaving traces. So it was not pressure from future life forms, but from the abiotic conditions that caused the dead-end.
The banches of life appearing during the Franceville era weren't less viable than the ones appearing in the Ediacara fauna. If oxygene levels today would drop below 10%, multicellular life would probably be as endangered than it was 2.1 billion years ago.
What is much more interesting (and widely underreported) is that the Cambrian Explosion was neither an explosion -- we had the Ediacara fauna before --, nor was the Ediacara fauna the first multicellar life on earth.
There have been multicellar livings before, like the Gabonionta, about 2.1 billion years ago, which existed for about 200 million years and have died out again.
You as a Westerner are surely taught: Yes, only the freedom you earn for yourself is true freedom. You might earn it by overthrowing your oppressors or you may earn it by fending off the attempts to take your freedom. And we have seen again and again: Freedom that was brought from somewhere else didn't stay very long. Despite the claims of many ideologues, you can't export freedom. Yes, you can lead by example. Yes, you can overthrow an oppressor. But for a group of people to stay free they have to be able to earn their freedom themselves.
Yes, the U.S. helped very much to make 1989 happen, but not by giving speeches on the safe side of the Wall. They made 1989 possible by being much more successful in economics, building the much better cars, the better computers, creating the better clothing and the better movies and music. They helped by bankrupting the Soviet Union which was awash in oil money in the 1970ies and early 1980ies, by forcing the oil price down and getting the Soviet Union to waste their money in an arms race.
But at the same time, the U.S. made things worse by supporting every dictator who was crying "I'm against communism" loud enough. It made things worse by toppling democratically elected governments if they weren't anti-communist enough. It was easy for the communist propaganda to point at South America or Southeast Asia and say: If you are supporting the U.S., you are supporting Imperialism and suppressing people.
Slashdot Mirror
It's easy to know and actually reported in the weather news. They give you the rainfall in inches per square foot (or in liters per square meter), and if you know the area affected by rain, you can calculate the volume of the rain.
Language is much more than just a communications protocol. Language has connotations, language is malleable by its speakers, language contains concepts of the world, language is even a tool to make a difference between insiders and outsiders. We will never be able to speak one common language. No physicist will ever be able to learn about all the terms a physician needs in his daily work, and most Brazilians will never learn anything about skiing in a certain valley of the Alps. Every generation comes up with new words for old facts just because the parents should not understand everything their children are talking about.
Each language has a big body of texts encoded in this language, which are unique to this language, and most of it was never translated into any other language (you don't believe it? How much of french TV programming was ever translated into English for instance?). The idea that most of the world's knowledge is available in English is completely misguided. It's just most of the knowledge you have that is available in English. But you are no benchmark of what knowledge is. If we switch to only one single language for everyone, all the text in all the other languages will be lost forever. How minuscule the english knowledge about non-english events is, can be easily demonstrated by asking you, how much you know about the events of the Summer of 1989 in Hungary. Nevertheless this is very important for the understanding of today's world, because the talks between Hungary's minister of Foreign Affairs Gyula Horn and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock during the Pan-European Picnic lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. There are hundreds of news paper articles and reports available in Hungarian and German, in Czech and in Romanian, there are scientific papers about the events in those languages, but how much are available in English? In the U.S. there is still the opinion prevalent that Ronald Reagan's speech at the Berlin Wall in 1988 had something to do with it. (Fun fact: It hasn't.)
Making traffic flow better will bring more traffic, even if you use false analogies. Every trip has an associated cost, and if you lower the cost for each trip by better flowing traffic, more trips will become affordable, and yes, making traffic flow better will generate more traffic that was non-existant before because of being too expensive.
Libertarians believe everyone has all the time of the world to do all the work of thousands of people all on his own everytime something is to decide. Somehow doing research and finding out things costs nothing in a libertarian world. No wonder they come up with such a fantastic economic value of a fully free, non regulated market.
But in our modern networked world, it is now possible to do things outside the country you are in. I can now gamble in Macau over the Internet from the comfort of my living room. Physical location is no longer adequate to determine jurisdiction. It hasn't happened yet, but eventually some hacker is going to mess up some hospital's ICU computers in another country and kill someone. This issue needs to be resolved somehow by the International community in a manner which is consistent and reciprocal without being destructive.
The way to handle that is easy: Send a request for administrative assistance to Ireland, and then an irish judge will decide if Microsoft Ireland has to comply.
The uselessness of torture as an interrogation tool was conclusively described about 400 years ago in "Cautio criminalis" by Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld. You are free to ignore 400 years of knowledge though. But then you are just ignorant.
Voyager 2 made a pass at Uranus in early 1986. That's where we have most of our pictures of Uranus from.
Even if you call the situation before a non-natural one, there is not a single reason to consider the situation afterwards in any way more natural.
So contrary to you, I strongly believe based on the evidence around me, that the U.S. way of predetermining the roles of girls and boys in life in the U.S. culture and especially in toys and stories aimed at children plays a very important role in the roles they actually play in their later life. And it could be different, but in the current environment, where the actual buyers of those toys and story books are already predetermined by their own childhood, there is no business case in challenging the settings. Getting girls interested in being princesses works because the parents (and other grown up relatives) of the girls have the final say what they want their daughters to be interested in, and when they will agree that their daughter is so cute.
I've seen my own daughter playing with toy cars and toy trains as a very little child, because that were the toys her older brother played with. But then a family with two girls of her age moved into the neighborhood, and they had all the pink toys and castles and white play horses, and my daughter played with them and gradually wanted their own princess dolls and horses (she even started a collection of them), but this was several years ago, and now my daughter is in junior highschool. She chosed Robotics as her voluntary topic, she saved money to buy herself a PS4, and she's playing Second Son all the time - turning into a computer nerd like her father and much more than her older brother.
That said, I think if the Surface was 5x less expensive, it would beat the Chromebook in school as the device of choice.
But then you had to slim down the hardware so heavily, that Windows will be nearly unusable, which in turn wouldn't make it into the device of choice.
Another preconceived concept is the pattern. We tend to see patterns everywhere. If we spot several dots in a row, we tend to see a line. How strong this pattern spotting is, can be easily demonstrated by the well known optical illusions. Patterns allow for a compression of available information, we ignore slight derivations from the regular pattern, and still can mentally reproduce the situation almost completely. Those patterns don't need to have a counterpart in reality, they are mainly a mechanism of our minds. But they are a very powerful one.
Both narrative and pattern allow for inductive reasoning. From a information theory point of view, inductive reasoning never gives a warranty of being right (other than deductive reasoning), nevertheless it's a necessity to us, thus we have the concepts for it ingrained in our minds.
Ayn Rand's epistemology requires thought processes to be rational, but pattern and narrative are non-rational shortcuts, and they are much faster and in general "good enough" for us, and in many cases, they allow for survival, where a rational thought process would be much to slow or can't even yield a result because of incomplete information. Ayn Rand somehow conjures up the idea that an individual can have complete information and enough time for a rational decision. But this is wishful thinking, and she herself admits: wishing won't make it so. Ayn Rand never asks where the time required to gather information and to make decisions comes from.
But we as a group (society, culture...) have means to create a vast library of concepts, patterns and narratives that have proven to work most of the time. We call it education, science, laws, regulations, morality, ethics and knowledge. The library is there to support the individual in decision making, but enough individuals have to support the library for it to not deteriorate. Only because the group has this vast body of knowledge and tradition, the individual is empowered to make informed decisions. The group creates the freedom of the individual. An individual alone is not able to stay free. It needs the group and their preconceived ideas to stay alive, to have enough time to gather necessary information and to rationally decide. If the group doesn't provide this freedom, the individual can't exercise it.
Of course it was not complimentary to them -- they are exactly the boring, stubborn, bothering people we all like to complain about. But at least they managed to get the human society running, though with all the hickups, misconceptions, errors and catastrophes that are typical for humans.
The consequence Douglas Adams points out is that an incomplete society based solely on the egoisms of its members will die out from the next triviality -- in his case the infected telephone.
(*) For Class A values of "miserable"
You seem to fail to grasp the difference between criminal law and common law. Innocent until proven guilty is a criminal law concept and doesn't exist in common law. There the general benchmark is preponderance of evidence. And here we have a common law case.
Which is just the same as keeping religion (or church) and state separate. Thanks for supporting.
Making paper out of wood pulp became economic in 1843, when Friedrich Gottlob Keller invented a machine to produce groundwood to make paper. The oldest still existing groundwood paper plant was built in 1882 and is located in Verla, Finland.
I wonder what Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; means then. It is probably about Congress giving priviledges to some religions while reigning into the exercise of others and forcing religion down everyone's throat including that of atheists.
The modern image of the angels is a missunderstanding of the greek word angelos, which actually means messenger. An angel surely is not a guardian. While sometimes the Bible mentiones God sending some of his guardians (the seraphim) to earth as messengers, they went there to deliver a message, not to protect someone or fight on your side or whatever. So whoever believes in angels as guardians, his belief is definitely not based on the Bible.
If ever a fault it's still that of the GOP if they can't get their stuff together that just a few switching democrats can flip their primaries.
My car has tire pressure sensors, yes. I have no problems with that. It's a leased car anyway, and the tires are part of the leasing contract. Sometimes after a change, I have to reset the pressure sensor after a few hundred miles. And that's all I have to do about tire maintenance. I'm happy with that, I don't like doing tire maintenance.
If the selfdriving cars become affordable, I'll buy one. I drive with as many automatics as possible right now anyway. Cruise control? Speed limiter? Yeah! I really like those. Sometimes I even adjust speed by changing the settings on these rather than using the pedals. Every repetitive task the car can do itself I don't need to do. And keeping the current speed or getting down from 65 mph to 55 mph because of a speed limit is a boring task I don't want to be involved in more than necessary. I know that makes the car very sophisticated, much more sophisticated than I'll be willing to learn -- I have other things to do, which I like more. And weight gained? My car does 50 mpg. That's what the bord computer tells me after 8000 miles. It includes city driving and long distances and many steep mountain roads. The weight went into large glas sheets, into better crash protection features and a few little amenities like air condition. I'm ok with that.
So a clickbait site in France would have to provide those political stories to get enough clicks.
Because there are people out there using some scientific results to further their agenda, it makes sense to deny the scientific results. And because some of the people apparently have stated things of a completely different topic in a way that can be construed to be not fully true, it is more reason to deny the scientific results. Yeah. Makes sense. Don't accept any results, because there might be someone whose political agenda might be furthered by the result. Deny the fact that high speed lead bullets entering the body might be bad for the health because it could be used to ask for gun control! Deny the fact that double speed means four times the length needed for a complete stop because people might use it to ask for speed limits! And because some people have not fully supported views about the role of meat in your metabolism, better deny the economic problems with anti-competitive behavior of monopolistic companies, because some of the vegetarians might as for the enforcement of anti-monopoly legislation!
The banches of life appearing during the Franceville era weren't less viable than the ones appearing in the Ediacara fauna. If oxygene levels today would drop below 10%, multicellular life would probably be as endangered than it was 2.1 billion years ago.
There have been multicellar livings before, like the Gabonionta, about 2.1 billion years ago, which existed for about 200 million years and have died out again.
Yes, the U.S. helped very much to make 1989 happen, but not by giving speeches on the safe side of the Wall. They made 1989 possible by being much more successful in economics, building the much better cars, the better computers, creating the better clothing and the better movies and music. They helped by bankrupting the Soviet Union which was awash in oil money in the 1970ies and early 1980ies, by forcing the oil price down and getting the Soviet Union to waste their money in an arms race.
But at the same time, the U.S. made things worse by supporting every dictator who was crying "I'm against communism" loud enough. It made things worse by toppling democratically elected governments if they weren't anti-communist enough. It was easy for the communist propaganda to point at South America or Southeast Asia and say: If you are supporting the U.S., you are supporting Imperialism and suppressing people.