I might believe that could be their motivation, except that's not what they say. It would be more reasonable to just come clean and say "we want to hurt users to ultimately help them" rather than "hah isn't this funny?".
Sheltering kids from reality has always seemed stupid to me. It builds up a false image of the world in their eyes, just so we can idealize children as innocent. Children are what they are: selfish, thoughtless, loving, needy, playful, energetic, manipulative, and stupid, as a rule. You can replace "stupid" with "ignorant" and then with "innocent", but I find it a conceit to do so, and a harmful one. Don't add to children's ignorance just because you feel uncomfortable describing people's sexual practices and because it's more convenient to idealize their ignorance into innocence. Let them know how the world is and works, so they might navigate through their lives more easily than you did.
Note: I have no kids. If I did, my opinion might well change drastically.
I know what you're getting at, but the biggest effect of defaulting is losing the faith of those who might give you loans. Saying we've "essentially defaulted" when this is not the case is stretching the word "defaulted" pretty thin. The picture is a little nicer if you consider debt as a fraction of GDP, but it's still not rosy. What do you mean by "ever-shrinking" assets?
However, the portion of our political spectrum she represents is pretty vocal along those lines, so while I'd like to suggest if fair to attach her to them in kind, maybe it's not. Thoughts?
I don't know. My analysis of Palin is based on what the major media outlets say and bits of interviews and speeches. To answer that question I would need to have at least read one of her books or listened to a larger number of her speeches. My original analysis pretty much exclusively used observations of Palin as the person she presents to cameras, and it didn't need this type of deeper data. Studying people is a hobby of mine, and it doesn't take that much for me to read them. For instance, your original reply was mostly just trying to be honest. It was infected with a bit of invective which skewed the reasoning, but that was most likely an accident or a force of habit, or both. An honest reply deserved an honest reply, which is what I gave.
On the other hand, I do think it's likewise very sad that the two strongest female personalities in recent political history (think Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton) have essentially been demonized for their entire careers, and it probably suggests a great deal about a certain level of sexism that exists in our political system. I don't know.
Interesting point. It's hard to draw conclusions with only two samples. Maybe Palin and Clinton just have personalities or run campaigns that attract detractors. But in any case, possible sexism in national politics is something I'll pay a little more attention to.
I don't think it's fair to call Palin a hypocrite based on the apparent disconnect between her daughter's actions and Palin's own beliefs. She is also a human being with bills and a kid with Down Syndrome. I can understand her desire to make money through her reality show. I also agree with you that the loss of dignity would be saddening in a serious presidential candidate.
I waffle back and forth on the best way to deal with Palin. Sometimes I think that there's no way she could ever win head-to-head with Obama, in which case I'm fine with her getting continued buzz, since it should make it easier for him to win (and I want Obama to be reelected). Sometimes I think that there's a small chance she might somehow win, in which case I wish everyone would simultaneously agree to stop talking about her. Other times it seems like very little more will come from discussing her, so continued discussion is innocuous enough to just be interesting, like a solar flare or a dog dancing on YouTube is interesting to discuss. Still other times she seems to rile up everyone enough that she should really be ignored. I just don't know.... The first option seems most likely, which is what I usually act according to.
Palin really is an idiot. She's just a political anomaly. Lemme explain what I mean. When someone tells you 3+4 = 8, you have the urge to correct them. If they're very convinced 3+4 = 8, most people will want to correct them all the more. Palin is the same way. She says stupid things with great conviction. People want to correct her, but they can't, so they do the next best thing: they talk to other people about how wrong she is, or how horrible it is that she might be a serious candidate for the presidency, or whatever is cathartic for them. This generates buzz for her, and is why I read this story and these comments in the first place. This effect is an anomaly--an unintended (to her; maybe not to people who run her or related campaigns) side effect of who she is and how she presents herself to the public. To be honest, I think she's deeply insecure and is simply defensive. Defensive people display the traits she displays: digging her heels in on issues; saying nonsensical things with great conviction; making things personal (her vs. the media). If I didn't fear her gaining office, I'd just feel sorry for her.
She also has a large base of support made up of people who relate to her as a pseudo-middle-class working mom with strong Christian beliefs and morals who's fighting against the decay they see in our society. These people tend to believe her (and, as an overt sterotype, anyone they consider authoritative) without question. These two types of people--roughly, those who want to correct her and those who believe her--bring together the traditional fights of liberal vs. conservative and religious vs. not, which is absolutely fantastic fodder for discussions, news reports, and talk radio.
Palin is an accident. She happened to tap some nerves in our society through how she behaves without her intending to. Sometimes people notice the level of emotion Palin seems to generate. That's backwards. It's actually emotion that generates Palin, politically.
We would love to work with every email account in the world. But we don't want to store passwords. That's what it comes down to. Gmail has an infrastructure that allows courteous.ly to work without ever knowing or storing anybody's password.
I dunno how it works, but security may not be that big a deal.
I don't run AdBlock. Ads are annoying, but I feel bad if I disable them on an ad-supported site. It feels like a nice way to strangle sites I like if I do.
That is one of the most hilarious Wikipedia pages I've ever seen. Another that comes to mind is the list of films considered the worst. Lists seem to be a good holdout for ridiculous content.
I suppose my issue is that pretty much every day someone somewhere comes up with a "proof" of a famous conjecture. Most of these are patently nuts, but some are (on the surface, at least) reasonably serious. It seems a bit strange to single out some of these for special attention. It's also almost always a letdown to read these types of stories. "Oh, cool, it was solved? I wonder how they did--oh wait, the first high rated comment says there's a big hole." In this headline I disliked the subtitle, "Hailstone Sequences End In 1". It seems like it should have ended in a question mark. As it is, it's a statement equivalent to saying the proof is correct, which I initially took to mean that the proof was very likely correct (as opposed to some preprint that doesn't seem to have been reviewed very well).
That said, I can understand people enjoying these types of articles even if they're based on something completely wrong. I suppose I just want something a little different and more rigorous out of/. news.
Oh, I think I misconstrued the person I was replying to. They were probably referring to applications of this purported proof (which I don't believe is correct) while I was referring to mathematicians' work on the Collatz conjecture, or the conjecture itself and numerous related topics and generalizations.
"Hailstone" doesn't seem to have anything whatsoever to do with actual weather or geology. MathWorld's take on it:
Such sequences are called hailstone sequences because the values typically rise and fall, somewhat analogously to a hailstone inside a cloud.
While a hailstone eventually becomes so heavy that it falls to ground, every starting positive integer ever tested has produced a hailstone sequence that eventually drops down to the number 1 and then "bounces" into the small loop 4, 2, 1,....
It lists as one of its sources this book on the etymology of math terms in English. It looks interesting. Maybe I'll get a copy myself....
I don't think it's remotely fair to compare this paper to the FLT proof. For one thing, the content of this one is around 11 pages (the PDF includes many pages of tables at the end) while Wiles' final proof is over 100 pages. This is much more "elementary", as well. I don't remember the source, but I remember hearing that at the time it was made the number of people qualified to comment on Wiles' proof could fit in a small room, which is certainly not true of this proof. Wiles invented a graduate course where he secretly presented his proof before announcing it publicly, whereas this doesn't have nearly that amount of content. [That's not to say this proof can't possibly be correct, just that it's a vastly different case than FLT.]
There's a difference between types of incompleteness in proofs. The first type is when details are left to the reader, which can occur for a variety of reasons: it's too tedious to completely write up; they needed the paper to be shorter; they didn't want to lose sight of their main goal by getting lost in details; etc. This type is pretty innocuous, though it can make papers denser than they otherwise need to be. The second type is when the author doesn't notice the source of incompleteness. A good classical example of this case is Gauss' first proof of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. He essentially used the Jordan curve theorem in his proof. That theorem happens to be intuitively obvious but wasn't proved for decades after Gauss' proof. This gap wasn't spotted for years, though it wasn't horrific as far as gaps go.
My guess (from reading a few independent sources that point out the same issue) is that this assertion falls into the second type of incompleteness, and that it's a particularly horrible form of it in that it assumes a reformulated version of the desired conclusion.
In any case, let's stop making stories about preprints proving/falsifying famous conjectures. After they've been reviewed by some experts, great, make a story--just not until then.
The word itself seems to have a well-defined meaning akin to "backpack, but one that makes me fly". It almost seems to me this thing should have another name, unless they're planning on making it much smaller and just can't or haven't quite yet.
That made me curious. It seems (source) that "on is more prevalent under age 10, both on and by are common between the ages of 10 and 35, and by is overwhelmingly preferred by those over 35." That source also suggests "by accident" will die out and be replaced with "on accident". It mentions some other sources which call "on accident" an error. My impression is that those sources are older and haven't caught up to this change in our use of language. Saying "on accident" to someone who uses "by accident" exclusively is probably equivalent to saying "I'm on bed" instead of "I'm in bed" to me--it sounds wrong. But, if everyone else starts using it, it won't sound wrong to anyone after I'm dead.
Supposing the data hasn't been put online somewhere (and from another comment to your post, it looks like it has), I'm certain the researches themselves could be contacted for the data you seek. Publicly funded research usually requires data release upon request.
There's a fine line between pointless pedantry and useful precision in language. To me this is just over the line on the side of useful precision, since it brings to light an ambiguity (see my example) that can be easily missed. Of course it's off topic, but I didn't feel like discussing a bacterium that lives on caffeine.
Thanks for correcting me. I should not have called them adjectives.
Also, "fifteen minute presentations" is inherently ambiguous unless referring to 15 physically small presentations.
Nitpick: this phrase is ambiguous even if it's referring to 15 physically small presentations. The author's intent and their actual wording are not always the same.
Maybe if I make this message short enough, there won't be anything in it to nitpick:).
Nitpick: it's "newly described species", not "newly-described species". A hyphen is used to separate multiple adjectives when they modify the same noun. The word "newly" is an adverb, so it's clear that it modifies the adjective "described". The hyphen is used to disambiguate: "fifteen minute presentations" could be grouped either as "fifteen (minute presentations)" or "(fifteen minute) presentations". If the latter was meant, "fifteen-minute presentations" makes that clear.
I sometimes add the hyphen myself on accident, but it's not necessary.
So, the news is that Linus is *thinking* of changing the text "2.6.x" to "2.8.0" or "3.0"? That's the news today? "Some numbers may be changed soonish, to maybe follow a more logical pattern"? Moving on....
Slashdot Mirror
I might believe that could be their motivation, except that's not what they say. It would be more reasonable to just come clean and say "we want to hurt users to ultimately help them" rather than "hah isn't this funny?".
Do you have sources? As in, if I got the opinion of 10 "old farts" and they disagreed with yours, why would yours be right?
Sheltering kids from reality has always seemed stupid to me. It builds up a false image of the world in their eyes, just so we can idealize children as innocent. Children are what they are: selfish, thoughtless, loving, needy, playful, energetic, manipulative, and stupid, as a rule. You can replace "stupid" with "ignorant" and then with "innocent", but I find it a conceit to do so, and a harmful one. Don't add to children's ignorance just because you feel uncomfortable describing people's sexual practices and because it's more convenient to idealize their ignorance into innocence. Let them know how the world is and works, so they might navigate through their lives more easily than you did.
Note: I have no kids. If I did, my opinion might well change drastically.
We've essentially defaulted
I know what you're getting at, but the biggest effect of defaulting is losing the faith of those who might give you loans. Saying we've "essentially defaulted" when this is not the case is stretching the word "defaulted" pretty thin. The picture is a little nicer if you consider debt as a fraction of GDP, but it's still not rosy. What do you mean by "ever-shrinking" assets?
However, the portion of our political spectrum she represents is pretty vocal along those lines, so while I'd like to suggest if fair to attach her to them in kind, maybe it's not. Thoughts?
I don't know. My analysis of Palin is based on what the major media outlets say and bits of interviews and speeches. To answer that question I would need to have at least read one of her books or listened to a larger number of her speeches. My original analysis pretty much exclusively used observations of Palin as the person she presents to cameras, and it didn't need this type of deeper data. Studying people is a hobby of mine, and it doesn't take that much for me to read them. For instance, your original reply was mostly just trying to be honest. It was infected with a bit of invective which skewed the reasoning, but that was most likely an accident or a force of habit, or both. An honest reply deserved an honest reply, which is what I gave.
On the other hand, I do think it's likewise very sad that the two strongest female personalities in recent political history (think Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton) have essentially been demonized for their entire careers, and it probably suggests a great deal about a certain level of sexism that exists in our political system. I don't know.
Interesting point. It's hard to draw conclusions with only two samples. Maybe Palin and Clinton just have personalities or run campaigns that attract detractors. But in any case, possible sexism in national politics is something I'll pay a little more attention to.
I don't think it's fair to call Palin a hypocrite based on the apparent disconnect between her daughter's actions and Palin's own beliefs. She is also a human being with bills and a kid with Down Syndrome. I can understand her desire to make money through her reality show. I also agree with you that the loss of dignity would be saddening in a serious presidential candidate.
I waffle back and forth on the best way to deal with Palin. Sometimes I think that there's no way she could ever win head-to-head with Obama, in which case I'm fine with her getting continued buzz, since it should make it easier for him to win (and I want Obama to be reelected). Sometimes I think that there's a small chance she might somehow win, in which case I wish everyone would simultaneously agree to stop talking about her. Other times it seems like very little more will come from discussing her, so continued discussion is innocuous enough to just be interesting, like a solar flare or a dog dancing on YouTube is interesting to discuss. Still other times she seems to rile up everyone enough that she should really be ignored. I just don't know.... The first option seems most likely, which is what I usually act according to.
Hah! Good point, and thank you for the laugh.
Palin really is an idiot. She's just a political anomaly. Lemme explain what I mean. When someone tells you 3+4 = 8, you have the urge to correct them. If they're very convinced 3+4 = 8, most people will want to correct them all the more. Palin is the same way. She says stupid things with great conviction. People want to correct her, but they can't, so they do the next best thing: they talk to other people about how wrong she is, or how horrible it is that she might be a serious candidate for the presidency, or whatever is cathartic for them. This generates buzz for her, and is why I read this story and these comments in the first place. This effect is an anomaly--an unintended (to her; maybe not to people who run her or related campaigns) side effect of who she is and how she presents herself to the public. To be honest, I think she's deeply insecure and is simply defensive. Defensive people display the traits she displays: digging her heels in on issues; saying nonsensical things with great conviction; making things personal (her vs. the media). If I didn't fear her gaining office, I'd just feel sorry for her.
She also has a large base of support made up of people who relate to her as a pseudo-middle-class working mom with strong Christian beliefs and morals who's fighting against the decay they see in our society. These people tend to believe her (and, as an overt sterotype, anyone they consider authoritative) without question. These two types of people--roughly, those who want to correct her and those who believe her--bring together the traditional fights of liberal vs. conservative and religious vs. not, which is absolutely fantastic fodder for discussions, news reports, and talk radio.
Palin is an accident. She happened to tap some nerves in our society through how she behaves without her intending to. Sometimes people notice the level of emotion Palin seems to generate. That's backwards. It's actually emotion that generates Palin, politically.
We would love to work with every email account in the world. But we don't want to store passwords. That's what it comes down to. Gmail has an infrastructure that allows courteous.ly to work without ever knowing or storing anybody's password.
I dunno how it works, but security may not be that big a deal.
I don't run AdBlock. Ads are annoying, but I feel bad if I disable them on an ad-supported site. It feels like a nice way to strangle sites I like if I do.
That is one of the most hilarious Wikipedia pages I've ever seen. Another that comes to mind is the list of films considered the worst. Lists seem to be a good holdout for ridiculous content.
I suppose my issue is that pretty much every day someone somewhere comes up with a "proof" of a famous conjecture. Most of these are patently nuts, but some are (on the surface, at least) reasonably serious. It seems a bit strange to single out some of these for special attention. It's also almost always a letdown to read these types of stories. "Oh, cool, it was solved? I wonder how they did--oh wait, the first high rated comment says there's a big hole." In this headline I disliked the subtitle, "Hailstone Sequences End In 1". It seems like it should have ended in a question mark. As it is, it's a statement equivalent to saying the proof is correct, which I initially took to mean that the proof was very likely correct (as opposed to some preprint that doesn't seem to have been reviewed very well).
That said, I can understand people enjoying these types of articles even if they're based on something completely wrong. I suppose I just want something a little different and more rigorous out of /. news.
Oh, I think I misconstrued the person I was replying to. They were probably referring to applications of this purported proof (which I don't believe is correct) while I was referring to mathematicians' work on the Collatz conjecture, or the conjecture itself and numerous related topics and generalizations.
Such sequences are called hailstone sequences because the values typically rise and fall, somewhat analogously to a hailstone inside a cloud. While a hailstone eventually becomes so heavy that it falls to ground, every starting positive integer ever tested has produced a hailstone sequence that eventually drops down to the number 1 and then "bounces" into the small loop 4, 2, 1, ....
It lists as one of its sources this book on the etymology of math terms in English. It looks interesting. Maybe I'll get a copy myself....
I get kept up by interesting problems. Maybe you meant "insomnia causer for mathematicians".
I don't think it's remotely fair to compare this paper to the FLT proof. For one thing, the content of this one is around 11 pages (the PDF includes many pages of tables at the end) while Wiles' final proof is over 100 pages. This is much more "elementary", as well. I don't remember the source, but I remember hearing that at the time it was made the number of people qualified to comment on Wiles' proof could fit in a small room, which is certainly not true of this proof. Wiles invented a graduate course where he secretly presented his proof before announcing it publicly, whereas this doesn't have nearly that amount of content. [That's not to say this proof can't possibly be correct, just that it's a vastly different case than FLT.]
There's a difference between types of incompleteness in proofs. The first type is when details are left to the reader, which can occur for a variety of reasons: it's too tedious to completely write up; they needed the paper to be shorter; they didn't want to lose sight of their main goal by getting lost in details; etc. This type is pretty innocuous, though it can make papers denser than they otherwise need to be. The second type is when the author doesn't notice the source of incompleteness. A good classical example of this case is Gauss' first proof of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. He essentially used the Jordan curve theorem in his proof. That theorem happens to be intuitively obvious but wasn't proved for decades after Gauss' proof. This gap wasn't spotted for years, though it wasn't horrific as far as gaps go.
My guess (from reading a few independent sources that point out the same issue) is that this assertion falls into the second type of incompleteness, and that it's a particularly horrible form of it in that it assumes a reformulated version of the desired conclusion.
In any case, let's stop making stories about preprints proving/falsifying famous conjectures. After they've been reviewed by some experts, great, make a story--just not until then.
The word itself seems to have a well-defined meaning akin to "backpack, but one that makes me fly". It almost seems to me this thing should have another name, unless they're planning on making it much smaller and just can't or haven't quite yet.
but it's the tradeoff most users are willing to make for reasonable safety.
I'd bet almost nobody consciously chooses NAT for security. They choose it because the numbers are running out, pure and simple.
That made me curious. It seems (source) that "on is more prevalent under age 10, both on and by are common between the ages of 10 and 35, and by is overwhelmingly preferred by those over 35." That source also suggests "by accident" will die out and be replaced with "on accident". It mentions some other sources which call "on accident" an error. My impression is that those sources are older and haven't caught up to this change in our use of language. Saying "on accident" to someone who uses "by accident" exclusively is probably equivalent to saying "I'm on bed" instead of "I'm in bed" to me--it sounds wrong. But, if everyone else starts using it, it won't sound wrong to anyone after I'm dead.
Supposing the data hasn't been put online somewhere (and from another comment to your post, it looks like it has), I'm certain the researches themselves could be contacted for the data you seek. Publicly funded research usually requires data release upon request.
There's a fine line between pointless pedantry and useful precision in language. To me this is just over the line on the side of useful precision, since it brings to light an ambiguity (see my example) that can be easily missed. Of course it's off topic, but I didn't feel like discussing a bacterium that lives on caffeine.
Thanks for correcting me. I should not have called them adjectives.
Also, "fifteen minute presentations" is inherently ambiguous unless referring to 15 physically small presentations.
Nitpick: this phrase is ambiguous even if it's referring to 15 physically small presentations. The author's intent and their actual wording are not always the same.
Maybe if I make this message short enough, there won't be anything in it to nitpick :).
Nitpick: it's "newly described species", not "newly-described species". A hyphen is used to separate multiple adjectives when they modify the same noun. The word "newly" is an adverb, so it's clear that it modifies the adjective "described". The hyphen is used to disambiguate: "fifteen minute presentations" could be grouped either as "fifteen (minute presentations)" or "(fifteen minute) presentations". If the latter was meant, "fifteen-minute presentations" makes that clear.
I sometimes add the hyphen myself on accident, but it's not necessary.
So, the news is that Linus is *thinking* of changing the text "2.6.x" to "2.8.0" or "3.0"? That's the news today? "Some numbers may be changed soonish, to maybe follow a more logical pattern"? Moving on....