Having seen all the Trek material, you're pretty much right. To be specific...
Research grants are a non-issue since the Federation seems to supply nearly unlimited resources to whoever has worthwhile ideas. (Examples: the Genesis project; EMH's; the M5 computer.)
Lab time is portrayed quite a bit if you include Engineering scenes. If you don't, there's still TNG: Lessons, the Midas project throughout voyager, and the expanding mini universe episode of DS9, to name a few.
Sucking up to the right editors is entirely left out. Whenever publishing is brought up, mostly by The Doctor in Voyager, it's a foregone conclusion that one will indeed publish.
Frustration with other people publishing before you is also entirely absent, I believe.
Really, though, there's a remarkable amount of "scientist" material in the Trek franchise--mostly in the series, not so much in the movies. Bashir in DS9 goes to several conferences. Conferences also appear in Voyager and TNG. The intro of the TNG: Timescape is a great example if you have access. Publishing is brought up to my specific memory in Voyager and DS9, probably also elsewhere. And, TNG: Suspicions is devoted to the issue of bias against an unlikely scientist. I could keep going for quite a while with more examples, but that's plenty I think:).
Spacefarers are imagined as pirates, miners, soldiers, villains, or businessmen, but never scientists.
Star Trek is a pretty good example of scientists in science fiction. Spock, Data, Picard (archaeology), Dax, Janeway, and Phlox are scientists from all 5 (6, including TAS) series. Spock, Data, and Picard have made several movie appearances. Picard's haven't been particularly scientific, but Spock and Data's have been.
In one of my CS classes, the instructors made their own cut-down version of assembly and gave us an interpreter written in Java, for cross-platform compatibility I assume.
I think the parent and grandparent posts are targeting different audiences. The parent is trying to interest people in CS, while the grandparent is dealing with people who are already interested. People who are already interested, realistically, will mostly have computer experience--sometimes very significant experience. Because of that the ground up approach might get a bit pedantic for that audience.
My CS program followed the sequence (in order) of "let's learn Python!", "let's dabble in Java, Scheme, and basic algorithms!", "now let's get serious and do some C++ with lots of data structures", "go learn about the low-level hardware you've been using", "zoom wayyy out and learn about basic hardcore theoretical cs", "*elective time!*". I'd say it was actually pretty effective. It stimulated interest early for a long trek through more tedious low level material later. Then again, it also showed me how much I don't want programming to be my life's work, and how happy I am to also have a math degree.
Maybe you're right (except that dearth means an insufficient number, and you used it in the opposite sense). Maybe not, though: at some point things are just too complex to take in all at once. To take an extreme example, I could give a 5-year-old a very rigorous explanation of what a vector space is in a few minutes, but they'd have no hope of comprehending it. Extending your analogy, you might not be able to teach someone how a spaceship works without working up to it.
I was careful to say "you never had to define your own classes", instead of "VB6 doesn't allow you to define your own classes". I've used class modules (though they suck, compared to other language's classes). By "OOP-lite" I meant the programmer could avoid dealing with most of the complexity of OOP very easily, not that it was entirely absent from the language.
Nasty code was certainly a problem of mine. Some of what I wrote was just awful. I think a whole bunch of that was because I taught myself and had nobody to review my work, which isn't the case in the classroom-style setting of the original question.
My first* programming language was Visual Basic 6. For those who don't know, it used "OOP-lite"--you never had to define your own classes, but you had to use some objects (controls/widgets, for instance). I remember following a short tutorial and teaching myself from there. It wasn't awful for me to learn UI design, basic code blocks, and basic object oriented programming simultaneously by random internet examples and the documentation. (This was back in middle school, and nobody I knew knew how to code so I couldn't ask about it.)
So, I think some level of OOP in a learning language is fine. C# is probably too much. Python in an interpreter might be about right. One thing VB6 encouraged me to do was start my own projects and learn through them. If I was using a simpler but less powerful language I wouldn't have cared enough to get very far.
*I had experimented with MS-DOS batch programming a little bit, including some rudimentary If's and GoTo's. No loops or functions, almost no variables. I'm not sure how much I learned before starting VB6 anymore.
"Ok, let's start from the beginning. Tau equals r cross F..."
Best line of the movie! The smartest people in the world have to remind each other of the torque equation. If you can, watch The Core with a physicist or two.
Yup, I'd say the current population seems too high, and that overpopulation in certain areas is a growing problem. I'm pretty sure we basically agree:).
"the per-pound price has increased significantly" was referring to a specific fishery in Alaska and the article listed an increase in quality as the only explicit factor for that price jump. It implied overfishing is increasingly a problem, though the reason for that is vague (since it wasn't the point of the article you linked). Perhaps it's overpopulation; perhaps it's technology that's just too good at catching fish, paired with an old capitalist-style system--I dunno.
The mercury article is interesting and implies contaminated seafood is a bigger concern than in the past, but it only implies; it's not explicit in saying, say, "mercury levels in this fish species were higher than 15 years ago due to human overpopulation".
The paragraph you quoted from in the soil degradation article is disturbing. I wonder if a decrease in population growth was included, as the world industrializes.
I read the others, which don't directly support your 1960 number or 3 billion number. I suppose it doesn't matter that much. The point is conservation is required to avoid fallout from high human population. I tend to agree with your pessimistic view about fixing overpopulation. Then again, China has been pretty successful in reducing their population growth, so maybe there's hope in extreme fallout.
The Wikipedia page on Ethanol fuel energy balance appears to pretty much agree with the NCGA quote above. The self-serving part of that quote is the omission of the energy balance ratios for other types of ethanol. For instance, the Wikipedia page lists Brazil's sugarcane ethanol ratio as 1 to 8, as opposed to the US's corn ethanol ratio of 1 to1.3.
I find it mildly annoying that you apparently didn't check for corroboration before you questioned the factual accuracy of the above quote. That's basically just as bad as what you accused them of.
It depends on the language. Implementing binary search only takes a few lines as well, so maybe the language didn't have a convenient Sort function (VB6 didn't,/shudder). In that case maybe it didn't have a convenient hash set either. (If it did, of course it's worth the almost 0 effort of changing the class type.)
That's an exaggeration of the GP's point. Being able to implement classes efficiently if you have to is a very good skill. It's also not like programmers have until recently gotten strictly better with time. The early programmers who wrote everything in octal were probably much better at what they did on average than today's average coder.
of course, Slashdot editors and readers have never written any kind of mathematical proof
I've written hundreds, if not thousands. You have too, if the use of WLOG is any indication. (I wouldn't nitpick if your post wasn't nitpicking already.)
Ironic: "characterized by often poignant difference or incongruity between what is expected and what actually is". What is expected is that one line is best; what actually is, is multiple lines. Seems like textbook irony...?
To be fair, the summary only quoted TFA in calling what the FBI did burglary. That's not/. editorializing--I have no idea if the submitter agrees with that statement or not. Computer World is the culprit in sensationalizing the first few paragraphs to entice readers, IMO. The rest of the article was decent enough that I forgave them by the end.
If you're like me and have never heard of Delicious, it lets you "...save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking." (Taken from their learn more page.) It also lets you organize your bookmarks with tags.
You continue to not respond to what I write. I've understood your opinion for several posts. You haven't understood mine, which is that the definition of "science" does not universally require tested hypotheses. Some dictionary definitions require it, some do not.
So far you've ignored what I've written, thought I was too stupid to understand your points, and provided no evidence when asked. That shows pretty poor discussion skills, which I only point out in the hope that you might reevaluate them for more productive discussions in the future. I think it's best to go our separate ways. Again, have a nice life.
Certainly the magnitude of "disrespect" matters--Elrond making a dark pact with Sauron to sink Valinor wouldn't take much screen time, but would be horrific abuse of the source material. My opinion of the dwarf tossing is that it's not very serious, but I suppose you strongly disagree. Length of time matters to me since I can ignore things more easily if they're short, as a rule of thumb.
I don't think the insults were warranted. Your first post sounds like it was meant to be a sound byte. It's short and would make a good quote. I pointed that out and said I disagreed with you and you got angry.
By "hard evidence" I meant, for instance, an example of the implication I mentioned in my first post--that physicists were actively discouraging the questioning of string theory. I didn't meant hard evidence for string theory's correctness or incorrectness; that would be stupid to ask for on slashdot.
My view of science is that it must be possible to test something in principle, not in fact. You seem to think the definition of science is universally agreed upon to require existing experimental tests. That isn't the case, which is why I called this debate semantics--we want the word to mean different things. I did look through a dozen or so definitions of the word "science". A number of them are quite clear about requiring experimental knowledge, while a number are vague and leave open merely "systematic" knowledge as science, possibly even including math. A survey of scientists asking whether or not experimental evidence is necessary for something to be considered science would be wonderful input to this debate.
You're getting very emotional. I don't know why. All I said was you didn't back up your claims, and that I didn't believe your definition of the word science. You have to understand definitions can be flexible. If you had just gotten a citation or two supporting your statements the conversation would have been more meaningful. But no, you have to insult my intelligence while espousing your own superiority. I suppose I should have expected from the lack of rigor and excess of passion in your first post that this would happen, and just avoided it all. You're smart and can spin a decent-sounding argument, but you lack perspective. Have a nice life.
Good point about the citation, though I think it's a little stronger than you represented. From the text of the book (which is available on Google Books) the statement 'the Michelson-Morley experiment had a negligible effect on the discovery of relativity' was "approved for publication by Einstein early in 1954", though it's vague what precisely that means. Balazs asked his questions at Polanyi's request as well, so it wasn't like they were random half-remembered tidbits. Balazs wrote a letter describing his impressions of Einstein's responses, which makes the rest at least second-hand.
I believe the contrary, that general relativity was science even before being proven. Then again, I understand the argument you're trying to make, and I think it comes down to semantics that don't matter terribly much outside of stupid debates like this one. That wasn't my main point, though, which was to get hard evidence for your claims (which hasn't been produced, at all).
By that reasoning general relativity was not science when it was proposed, but became science when tested a few years later. So, I reject it. You also didn't provide "hard evidence" (i.e. you pretty much ignored my post, even though you responded to it....).
Slashdot Mirror
Really, though, there's a remarkable amount of "scientist" material in the Trek franchise--mostly in the series, not so much in the movies. Bashir in DS9 goes to several conferences. Conferences also appear in Voyager and TNG. The intro of the TNG: Timescape is a great example if you have access. Publishing is brought up to my specific memory in Voyager and DS9, probably also elsewhere. And, TNG: Suspicions is devoted to the issue of bias against an unlikely scientist. I could keep going for quite a while with more examples, but that's plenty I think :).
(Your sig is missing an i before the "(Alt something)", using the usual interpretation.)
Spacefarers are imagined as pirates, miners, soldiers, villains, or businessmen, but never scientists.
Star Trek is a pretty good example of scientists in science fiction. Spock, Data, Picard (archaeology), Dax, Janeway, and Phlox are scientists from all 5 (6, including TAS) series. Spock, Data, and Picard have made several movie appearances. Picard's haven't been particularly scientific, but Spock and Data's have been.
In one of my CS classes, the instructors made their own cut-down version of assembly and gave us an interpreter written in Java, for cross-platform compatibility I assume.
I think the parent and grandparent posts are targeting different audiences. The parent is trying to interest people in CS, while the grandparent is dealing with people who are already interested. People who are already interested, realistically, will mostly have computer experience--sometimes very significant experience. Because of that the ground up approach might get a bit pedantic for that audience.
My CS program followed the sequence (in order) of "let's learn Python!", "let's dabble in Java, Scheme, and basic algorithms!", "now let's get serious and do some C++ with lots of data structures", "go learn about the low-level hardware you've been using", "zoom wayyy out and learn about basic hardcore theoretical cs", "*elective time!*". I'd say it was actually pretty effective. It stimulated interest early for a long trek through more tedious low level material later. Then again, it also showed me how much I don't want programming to be my life's work, and how happy I am to also have a math degree.
Maybe you're right (except that dearth means an insufficient number, and you used it in the opposite sense). Maybe not, though: at some point things are just too complex to take in all at once. To take an extreme example, I could give a 5-year-old a very rigorous explanation of what a vector space is in a few minutes, but they'd have no hope of comprehending it. Extending your analogy, you might not be able to teach someone how a spaceship works without working up to it.
I was careful to say "you never had to define your own classes", instead of "VB6 doesn't allow you to define your own classes". I've used class modules (though they suck, compared to other language's classes). By "OOP-lite" I meant the programmer could avoid dealing with most of the complexity of OOP very easily, not that it was entirely absent from the language.
Nasty code was certainly a problem of mine. Some of what I wrote was just awful. I think a whole bunch of that was because I taught myself and had nobody to review my work, which isn't the case in the classroom-style setting of the original question.
My first* programming language was Visual Basic 6. For those who don't know, it used "OOP-lite"--you never had to define your own classes, but you had to use some objects (controls/widgets, for instance). I remember following a short tutorial and teaching myself from there. It wasn't awful for me to learn UI design, basic code blocks, and basic object oriented programming simultaneously by random internet examples and the documentation. (This was back in middle school, and nobody I knew knew how to code so I couldn't ask about it.)
So, I think some level of OOP in a learning language is fine. C# is probably too much. Python in an interpreter might be about right. One thing VB6 encouraged me to do was start my own projects and learn through them. If I was using a simpler but less powerful language I wouldn't have cared enough to get very far.
*I had experimented with MS-DOS batch programming a little bit, including some rudimentary If's and GoTo's. No loops or functions, almost no variables. I'm not sure how much I learned before starting VB6 anymore.
VB.NET is a dialect of BASIC in much the same way English is a dialect of Old English--that is, the names are similar.
"Ok, let's start from the beginning. Tau equals r cross F..."
Best line of the movie! The smartest people in the world have to remind each other of the torque equation. If you can, watch The Core with a physicist or two.
Yup, I'd say the current population seems too high, and that overpopulation in certain areas is a growing problem. I'm pretty sure we basically agree :).
"the per-pound price has increased significantly" was referring to a specific fishery in Alaska and the article listed an increase in quality as the only explicit factor for that price jump. It implied overfishing is increasingly a problem, though the reason for that is vague (since it wasn't the point of the article you linked). Perhaps it's overpopulation; perhaps it's technology that's just too good at catching fish, paired with an old capitalist-style system--I dunno.
The mercury article is interesting and implies contaminated seafood is a bigger concern than in the past, but it only implies; it's not explicit in saying, say, "mercury levels in this fish species were higher than 15 years ago due to human overpopulation".
The paragraph you quoted from in the soil degradation article is disturbing. I wonder if a decrease in population growth was included, as the world industrializes.
I read the others, which don't directly support your 1960 number or 3 billion number. I suppose it doesn't matter that much. The point is conservation is required to avoid fallout from high human population. I tend to agree with your pessimistic view about fixing overpopulation. Then again, China has been pretty successful in reducing their population growth, so maybe there's hope in extreme fallout.
The Wikipedia page on Ethanol fuel energy balance appears to pretty much agree with the NCGA quote above. The self-serving part of that quote is the omission of the energy balance ratios for other types of ethanol. For instance, the Wikipedia page lists Brazil's sugarcane ethanol ratio as 1 to 8, as opposed to the US's corn ethanol ratio of 1 to1.3.
I find it mildly annoying that you apparently didn't check for corroboration before you questioned the factual accuracy of the above quote. That's basically just as bad as what you accused them of.
The breakdown of multiple global systems is evidence for this fact.
[citation needed] (It would just be evidence that the earth is past its healthy carrying capacity, not 3 billion past.)
It depends on the language. Implementing binary search only takes a few lines as well, so maybe the language didn't have a convenient Sort function (VB6 didn't, /shudder). In that case maybe it didn't have a convenient hash set either. (If it did, of course it's worth the almost 0 effort of changing the class type.)
That's an exaggeration of the GP's point. Being able to implement classes efficiently if you have to is a very good skill. It's also not like programmers have until recently gotten strictly better with time. The early programmers who wrote everything in octal were probably much better at what they did on average than today's average coder.
of course, Slashdot editors and readers have never written any kind of mathematical proof
I've written hundreds, if not thousands. You have too, if the use of WLOG is any indication. (I wouldn't nitpick if your post wasn't nitpicking already.)
Ironic: "characterized by often poignant difference or incongruity between what is expected and what actually is". What is expected is that one line is best; what actually is, is multiple lines. Seems like textbook irony...?
To be fair, the summary only quoted TFA in calling what the FBI did burglary. That's not /. editorializing--I have no idea if the submitter agrees with that statement or not. Computer World is the culprit in sensationalizing the first few paragraphs to entice readers, IMO. The rest of the article was decent enough that I forgave them by the end.
If you're like me and have never heard of Delicious, it lets you "...save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking." (Taken from their learn more page.) It also lets you organize your bookmarks with tags.
You continue to not respond to what I write. I've understood your opinion for several posts. You haven't understood mine, which is that the definition of "science" does not universally require tested hypotheses. Some dictionary definitions require it, some do not.
So far you've ignored what I've written, thought I was too stupid to understand your points, and provided no evidence when asked. That shows pretty poor discussion skills, which I only point out in the hope that you might reevaluate them for more productive discussions in the future. I think it's best to go our separate ways. Again, have a nice life.
Certainly the magnitude of "disrespect" matters--Elrond making a dark pact with Sauron to sink Valinor wouldn't take much screen time, but would be horrific abuse of the source material. My opinion of the dwarf tossing is that it's not very serious, but I suppose you strongly disagree. Length of time matters to me since I can ignore things more easily if they're short, as a rule of thumb.
I don't think the insults were warranted. Your first post sounds like it was meant to be a sound byte. It's short and would make a good quote. I pointed that out and said I disagreed with you and you got angry.
By "hard evidence" I meant, for instance, an example of the implication I mentioned in my first post--that physicists were actively discouraging the questioning of string theory. I didn't meant hard evidence for string theory's correctness or incorrectness; that would be stupid to ask for on slashdot.
My view of science is that it must be possible to test something in principle, not in fact. You seem to think the definition of science is universally agreed upon to require existing experimental tests. That isn't the case, which is why I called this debate semantics--we want the word to mean different things. I did look through a dozen or so definitions of the word "science". A number of them are quite clear about requiring experimental knowledge, while a number are vague and leave open merely "systematic" knowledge as science, possibly even including math. A survey of scientists asking whether or not experimental evidence is necessary for something to be considered science would be wonderful input to this debate.
You're getting very emotional. I don't know why. All I said was you didn't back up your claims, and that I didn't believe your definition of the word science. You have to understand definitions can be flexible. If you had just gotten a citation or two supporting your statements the conversation would have been more meaningful. But no, you have to insult my intelligence while espousing your own superiority. I suppose I should have expected from the lack of rigor and excess of passion in your first post that this would happen, and just avoided it all. You're smart and can spin a decent-sounding argument, but you lack perspective. Have a nice life.
Good point about the citation, though I think it's a little stronger than you represented. From the text of the book (which is available on Google Books) the statement 'the Michelson-Morley experiment had a negligible effect on the discovery of relativity' was "approved for publication by Einstein early in 1954", though it's vague what precisely that means. Balazs asked his questions at Polanyi's request as well, so it wasn't like they were random half-remembered tidbits. Balazs wrote a letter describing his impressions of Einstein's responses, which makes the rest at least second-hand.
I believe the contrary, that general relativity was science even before being proven. Then again, I understand the argument you're trying to make, and I think it comes down to semantics that don't matter terribly much outside of stupid debates like this one. That wasn't my main point, though, which was to get hard evidence for your claims (which hasn't been produced, at all).
By that reasoning general relativity was not science when it was proposed, but became science when tested a few years later. So, I reject it. You also didn't provide "hard evidence" (i.e. you pretty much ignored my post, even though you responded to it....).