So, the likelihood of scientific research being right or wrong depends on what actions might be taken based on it? Wow.
It's more that the likelihood of someone being willing to believe the research depends on what actions might be taken based on it... most specifically, the personal impact of those action is what counts.
Entropy *is* information. While the entropy of the universe seems to be nondecreasing, it appears that the entropy density is dropping because the universe is expanding at a faster rate.
Information consists of a message that you can't guess from what you already know. After all, if you already know what the message is going to say, what do you learn when it arrives?
I've always had the same problem and only when I got really serious about running (between 35 and 45 miles a week, about 9 miles every other day) have I have something approximating a normal sleep schedule. It may have been exhaustion and exercise addiction, but my body would wake up promptly at 4 or 5 am without an alarm clock. YMMV.
I'm also going to try the white noise thing, but I thought I'd throw out another option for you.
Or someone is going after Dalai Lama in a crudely obsessive way to make you think it's Chinese doing it in a crudely obsessive way so you would think it's the Chinese who are trying to hide it by doing it in a crudely obsessive way.
I think that experienced haskellers often forget to explain that there is a portion of the program that is not strictly functional. The thing is that the programmer is not given access to it. Instead, the programmer is asked to pass around descriptions of the I/O actions to be taken. A monad is a data type that (amongst a vast number of other things) can be used to structure these descriptions so that we can get the order of execution right. (notice that I didn't say 'evaluation')
The next part is a bit sloppy because monads turn out to be even more abstract than described, but it suffices to explain the concepts that give us the ability to be pure and still interact with the outside world.
Every Haskell program is an instance of a function that returns an IO Monad. "Inside" that monad (for the moment, think of it as a box plus a little bit of extra data) is a description of the I/O action to be performed and a new function that takes the result of that I/O (possibly discarding it) and produces another monad. Only the function inside the monad is allowed to refer to the result of performing the execution of that monad, but it is also able to refer to any functions outside of the monad. (Like lexical scoping.)
There's always a impure portion to a program that the programmer never gets to see. It's job is to evaluate just enough of a function to get ahold of an I/O monad, read the description inside that monad, perform the action and then repeat the whole process again by passing the result into the function if found inside the monad. This division of duties is enforced by only allowing the programmer to use the functions with stuff a description and function into a monad, but not the ones to get it out. Only the impure part of the function can
All this so far is interesting, but it seems like it would take an awful lot of discipline just for the sake of purity. However, what really make monads snazzy is that there are some great tricks with syntactic sugar that can help the programmer design these descriptions in much the same way he would write an imperative program. This is Haskell's 'do' syntax. The 'do' syntax doesn't make a purely function Haskell program imperative, but it sure makes it look a lot like it is.
Still, monads are nothing more than a data type with a couple of particular kinds of functions defined on it. In the case of I/O, those functions stuff things into the monad, combine monads and get information out of the monad. If you use monads for other things, it might be worthwhile to think of those functions as serving other purposes. Haskell's monad type class simply abstracts the features of all these so that algorithms used on one can often be used on all the others... even if it does obscure the original interpretation of what's going on.
So the first computers to pass the turing test will do it by convincing some little-old-lady in Peoria that it's a deposed nigerian prince with money flow issues?
Otherwise I reject the idea of income redistribution.
Repeat after me: Progressive taxation is not wealth redistribution.
If the government takes 1% of the income of someone making $20k a year, it has a much greater effect on the lifestyle of that person than than if you were to take 1% of the income of a person making $250k a year. To say that the 1% is "equal taxation" for both people is just plain silly.
Unfortunately your choice of examples shows that you are not arguing what you claim, innocently or not, to be arguing. Instead of arguing about proof, you're arguing about a corner of epistemology (the philosophical study of how we know things) known as empiricism.
One can indeed offer proof of the non-existence of a thing. What one cannot do is offer evidence of its non-existence. Evidence and proof are not the same. "Proof" is a logical idea and "evidence" is an empirical idea.
Standard logic is one system, amongst many, for extending knowledge. We seem to have a large measure of faith in logic because one of its consequences is that no group of true statements will ever lead to a contradiction. In other words it is a system born of our cultural uneasiness with contradictions.
In fact, one way to logically extend our knowledge is to posit (assert) the truth or falsehood of a statement and then show (prove) that the rules of the logical system lead to a contradiction. Since your assumptions lead to a contradiction, logic says that at least one of your assumptions must be false. This is called "proof by contradiction" or, in classical terminology, "reductio ad absurdum."
Empericism is not a method of extending knowledge, but rather a method of determining the truth value of a statement. One of the central tenets of empiricism is that existance of an object that fits into a category can be shown by producing an object, called evidence, and running a set of tests to determine if the evidence fits into that category. Since you can't produce and inspect the nonexistence of an object without cataloging everything in the universe, no observer with limited knowledge can "prove" the nonexistance of an object fitting a category.
Logic and empericism together form a very powerful system that is the foundation of scientific philosophy. Empiricism gives us a very appealing method for determining the truth value of many kinds of statements and logic gives us a very appealing method for extending those facts. One deals with what we can see and the other deals with what we cannot.
Some things you need to google:
epistemology empiricism logic (wikipedia this one) reductio ad absurdum
Karl Popper critical rationalism falsafiability
Wikipedia has excelent articals on each of these topics.
BTW... One of the major problems with your argument is that you assert that a negative statement cannot be proven, which is itself a negative statement. If that's true then your statement cannot be proven and should not form the basis for any argument. But that means that we just proved a negative statement, which means that your statement is false! By your logic,
Google for "Russel's Paradox" for a bit more on that type of logical difficulty. It turns out to be incredibly significant.
Every week, I run "sort ~/.bash_history | less" and take a look at how often I use various commands. I'm not sure if I've managed to save any time, but using the command line has become much easier and less mentally demanding.
I rebound the Ctrl-a binding to Ctrl-z after almost a year of the default binding. I've found to to be immensly easier to use. Having Ctrl-a bound to move-to-beginning-of-line in so many applications just made it a hassle to switch mental modes. Ctrl-z is rarely used in applications, infrequently used on the command line and is generally something that involves a mental pause anyways.
Then, open a web browser in one window and a terminal in the other...
I have a triple-headed system and strongly suggest getting ion3 or ratpoison. I use ion because it's more customizable and also lets one jump in and out of a "normal" window manager mode. Just be sure to rebind the keys right away. The default bindings must have been made by a cracked out baboon. I rebound all of my windows manager functions to chords involving the two windows keys since no linux programs seem to attempt to grab those keys.
Then get firefox, gnu screen, mc or git and your choice of emacs or vim and learn how to use them without the mouse. You'll be amazed at how much this speeds up your ability to work.
I started using ratpoison after I noticed that I tended to jump back and forth between a couple of full-screened apps, or I was spending time with two or three apps tiled on the screen. I figured that it didn't make sense to have all the bling when I never cared about it.
This works particularly well with a multi-headed setup. I keep mail and aim open on one monitor, emacs and other primary applications on the center monitor and web and documentation readers on another. This has made me//much// more effective in getting things done online. I never spend any time futzing with the windows, and instead just do the damn work I intended to accomplish when I sat down at the computer.
That only really becomes a problem when you only sort by number of citations. Perhaps sorting by date and relavance would also be useful.
Personally, I think I'll only ever use Scholar as a jumping off point to real research. While there are people who will believe it's the best thing since sliced bread, I doubt Scholar will ever be widely seen as anything but a place to get started.
Slashdot Mirror
Will fecal matter transplants be the next big diet craze?
The infomercials for that out to be comedy gold.
Mad Sarah Beyond the Palindrome!
Well... In that case, lets all hope they decide to resort to firearms.
So, the likelihood of scientific research being right or wrong depends on what actions might be taken based on it? Wow.
It's more that the likelihood of someone being willing to believe the research depends on what actions might be taken based on it... most specifically, the personal impact of those action is what counts.
Do not try to think outside the box — that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no box.
Entropy *is* information. While the entropy of the universe seems to be nondecreasing, it appears that the entropy density is dropping because the universe is expanding at a faster rate.
Information consists of a message that you can't guess from what you already know. After all, if you already know what the message is going to say, what do you learn when it arrives?
...seriously? Will USB 6.0 be super-hyper-meta-speed USB?
There... fixed that for ya.
I've always had the same problem and only when I got really serious about running (between 35 and 45 miles a week, about 9 miles every other day) have I have something approximating a normal sleep schedule. It may have been exhaustion and exercise addiction, but my body would wake up promptly at 4 or 5 am without an alarm clock. YMMV.
I'm also going to try the white noise thing, but I thought I'd throw out another option for you.
Or someone is going after Dalai Lama in a crudely obsessive way to make you think it's Chinese doing it in a crudely obsessive way so you would think it's the Chinese who are trying to hide it by doing it in a crudely obsessive way.
You have a truly dizzying intellect.
I think that experienced haskellers often forget to explain that there is a portion of the program that is not strictly functional. The thing is that the programmer is not given access to it. Instead, the programmer is asked to pass around descriptions of the I/O actions to be taken. A monad is a data type that (amongst a vast number of other things) can be used to structure these descriptions so that we can get the order of execution right. (notice that I didn't say 'evaluation')
The next part is a bit sloppy because monads turn out to be even more abstract than described, but it suffices to explain the concepts that give us the ability to be pure and still interact with the outside world.
Every Haskell program is an instance of a function that returns an IO Monad. "Inside" that monad (for the moment, think of it as a box plus a little bit of extra data) is a description of the I/O action to be performed and a new function that takes the result of that I/O (possibly discarding it) and produces another monad. Only the function inside the monad is allowed to refer to the result of performing the execution of that monad, but it is also able to refer to any functions outside of the monad. (Like lexical scoping.)
There's always a impure portion to a program that the programmer never gets to see. It's job is to evaluate just enough of a function to get ahold of an I/O monad, read the description inside that monad, perform the action and then repeat the whole process again by passing the result into the function if found inside the monad. This division of duties is enforced by only allowing the programmer to use the functions with stuff a description and function into a monad, but not the ones to get it out. Only the impure part of the function can
All this so far is interesting, but it seems like it would take an awful lot of discipline just for the sake of purity. However, what really make monads snazzy is that there are some great tricks with syntactic sugar that can help the programmer design these descriptions in much the same way he would write an imperative program. This is Haskell's 'do' syntax. The 'do' syntax doesn't make a purely function Haskell program imperative, but it sure makes it look a lot like it is.
Still, monads are nothing more than a data type with a couple of particular kinds of functions defined on it. In the case of I/O, those functions stuff things into the monad, combine monads and get information out of the monad. If you use monads for other things, it might be worthwhile to think of those functions as serving other purposes. Haskell's monad type class simply abstracts the features of all these so that algorithms used on one can often be used on all the others... even if it does obscure the original interpretation of what's going on.
So the first computers to pass the turing test will do it by convincing some little-old-lady in Peoria that it's a deposed nigerian prince with money flow issues?
Otherwise I reject the idea of income redistribution.
Repeat after me: Progressive taxation is not wealth redistribution.
If the government takes 1% of the income of someone making $20k a year, it has a much greater effect on the lifestyle of that person than than if you were to take 1% of the income of a person making $250k a year. To say that the 1% is "equal taxation" for both people is just plain silly.
So... Basically MS has finally created an operating system so freakin' big that it won't fit onto a single computer?
Since when were the presidential debates about honesty?
Unfortunately your choice of examples shows that you are not arguing what you claim, innocently or not, to be arguing. Instead of arguing about proof, you're arguing about a corner of epistemology (the philosophical study of how we know things) known as empiricism.
One can indeed offer proof of the non-existence of a thing. What one cannot do is offer evidence of its non-existence. Evidence and proof are not the same. "Proof" is a logical idea and "evidence" is an empirical idea.
Standard logic is one system, amongst many, for extending knowledge. We seem to have a large measure of faith in logic because one of its consequences is that no group of true statements will ever lead to a contradiction. In other words it is a system born of our cultural uneasiness with contradictions.
In fact, one way to logically extend our knowledge is to posit (assert) the truth or falsehood of a statement and then show (prove) that the rules of the logical system lead to a contradiction. Since your assumptions lead to a contradiction, logic says that at least one of your assumptions must be false. This is called "proof by contradiction" or, in classical terminology, "reductio ad absurdum."
Empericism is not a method of extending knowledge, but rather a method of determining the truth value of a statement. One of the central tenets of empiricism is that existance of an object that fits into a category can be shown by producing an object, called evidence, and running a set of tests to determine if the evidence fits into that category. Since you can't produce and inspect the nonexistence of an object without cataloging everything in the universe, no observer with limited knowledge can "prove" the nonexistance of an object fitting a category.
Logic and empericism together form a very powerful system that is the foundation of scientific philosophy. Empiricism gives us a very appealing method for determining the truth value of many kinds of statements and logic gives us a very appealing method for extending those facts. One deals with what we can see and the other deals with what we cannot.
Some things you need to google:
epistemology
empiricism
logic (wikipedia this one)
reductio ad absurdum
Karl Popper
critical rationalism
falsafiability
Wikipedia has excelent articals on each of these topics.
BTW... One of the major problems with your argument is that you assert that a negative statement cannot be proven, which is itself a negative statement. If that's true then your statement cannot be proven and should not form the basis for any argument. But that means that we just proved a negative statement, which means that your statement is false! By your logic,
Google for "Russel's Paradox" for a bit more on that type of logical difficulty. It turns out to be incredibly significant.
Every week, I run "sort ~/.bash_history | less" and take a look at how often I use various commands. I'm not sure if I've managed to save any time, but using the command line has become much easier and less mentally demanding.
I also just discovered this web page: http://wmii.de/
It's another tiling wm, but this is the first I've ever heard of it. I can't make any comments on it since, well, I know almst nothing about it.
Just a quick note on usability with screen:
I rebound the Ctrl-a binding to Ctrl-z after almost a year of the default binding. I've found to to be immensly easier to use. Having Ctrl-a bound to move-to-beginning-of-line in so many applications just made it a hassle to switch mental modes. Ctrl-z is rarely used in applications, infrequently used on the command line and is generally something that involves a mental pause anyways.
I have a triple-headed system and strongly suggest getting ion3 or ratpoison. I use ion because it's more customizable and also lets one jump in and out of a "normal" window manager mode. Just be sure to rebind the keys right away. The default bindings must have been made by a cracked out baboon. I rebound all of my windows manager functions to chords involving the two windows keys since no linux programs seem to attempt to grab those keys.
Then get firefox, gnu screen, mc or git and your choice of emacs or vim and learn how to use them without the mouse. You'll be amazed at how much this speeds up your ability to work.
I started using ratpoison after I noticed that I tended to jump back and forth between a couple of full-screened apps, or I was spending time with two or three apps tiled on the screen. I figured that it didn't make sense to have all the bling when I never cared about it.
This works particularly well with a multi-headed setup. I keep mail and aim open on one monitor, emacs and other primary applications on the center monitor and web and documentation readers on another. This has made me
HTH
Why would you want admin privelidges on her box?
Tampons and Bleeding and Yeast infections...
Do you really want to have to deal with all that headache?
Surprisingly, the authors of the program were listed as perfect matches for all of the cheerleaders!
That only really becomes a problem when you only sort by number of citations. Perhaps sorting by date and relavance would also be useful.
Personally, I think I'll only ever use Scholar as a jumping off point to real research. While there are people who will believe it's the best thing since sliced bread, I doubt Scholar will ever be widely seen as anything but a place to get started.
Sure! Then, once she turns the television off, your wife might be able to get your attention.
You've just abstracted the NIMBY concept...
(Not In My Back Yard)
Substitute X = Nuclear Waste Dump
etc... etc... etc...