Where are they? The last time we had a scientific media darling who was worth his salt was the 80's. Now we're left with *shudder* Neil Degrasse Tyson.
Yes, but software engineers also don't really take engineering courses. They're called software engineers by analogy with regular engineers, but its not really the same thing: they don't take statistics, don't learn how to assess the probability of failure, etc. Engineering isn't just designing, building, and maintaining things, it's using the scientific principles people have developed to do so with the greatest efficiency.
True, engineering is an activity which can have anyone who engages in it be called an engineer, the same way we can call anyone who engages in science a scientist. But what this article is discussing is a decline in professional engineers and scientists, who are formally trained in the principles of those disciplines and are capable of making sweeping and paradigm changing advances in their fields, not train operators with two year degrees. Just because we have an abundance of the latter doesn't make a lack of the former easier to bear
...following this whole thing full circle, when this article talks about engineers, it talks about people with university level training in engineering, i.e., professional engineers. It uses the catchall term "engineers" because it doesn't need to go through the list of all types every time it brings it up. It assumes the "professional tag" because otherwise it's meaningless. No one is bemoaning the fact that there aren't more train operators in government, nor that there aren't more amateur scientists.
Its true, there's a lot of sexual politics involved in the big fat dumb white guy at the center of a lot of sitcoms, but it's not because of "man bashing." Its more likely that intelligence has become feminized. We don't want to watch some swishy ivory tower intellectual thinking he's better than us all day. Much of the main characters of these shows are not despised for their working class dumbfuckery, but lauded for it.
Also: Fred Flinstone, George Jetson, and Ralph Kramden, are all good examples of the working class schmuck that existed before America's scientific decline. America's had a love affair with the working class since forever, it's only recently for more complicated reasons that this has morphed into intellectual mistrust
Is science public policy being dictated by scientists really such a bad thing? Its an attractive idea on some level to say that scientists and engineers should keep their hands clean and leave all the messy politics to...you know, someone else. But at its heart its an extremely destructive sentiment for both science and society to believe that all scientists should think about is science, a sentiment which I'm pretty sure is very close to American perception of science, and the root cause of many things this article discusses.
It seems very strange to me that science maintains the idea that it should focus on nothing besides the laboratory, because what other economic sector maintains such a lunacy? Certainly not business, agriculture, or entertainment.
Maybe not experimental science, but they sure as hell helped to illuminate theoretical principles that make science possible, especially. As people on this board have been mentioning, Newton was a much more prolific theologian than he was a scientist. These were not disciplines whose ends were different, but rather slightly different areas of the same question.
The idea that scientists should keep their heads down and not try to attach any significance to the principles they discover is an extremely dangerous one, and it's certainly not one supported by history. Scientists should have at least a cursory knowledge of the theory behind their discipline, the same way that stockbrokers need to know economic theory. The tradition of scorn for the humanities department was something science could afford during the cold war, but its time to admit that science is a scholarly and intellectual pursuit, that is always has been, and scientists and the scientific community need to justify themselves to a society that looks on them with increasing suspicion.
Does anyone know precisely why software companies continue to do this? The thing with Apple and Quicktime seems to be a pretty blatant attempt to strongarm people into using a terrible media player, but I don't see how junking up a user's computer with annoying add-ons and plugins really helps a product like Skype or McAfee. Why, after a user has already downloaded a product, does the installation of superfluous support applications mean more profit for the people that sell them? If anything, it makes them more likely to consider them too riddled with crapware and switch to something hassle free. Can someone illuminate this for me?
Until about a hundred years ago, the distinction was not made at all. Go see Aristotle, Pythagoras, Leibniz, and about a thousand other "natural philosophers" who felt perfectly comfortable expounding on deeper questions than which direction do balls roll if you hit them with a stick.
Now, I firmly believe in the philosophical soundness of science, and I look with extreme skepticism on hard line constructionists who claim that material truth is somehow subject to social forces, which seems about as sound to me as saying that nightfall is caused by defects in the human eye. Though the comparison of scientists to voodoo priests does tend to overstate the division (since no one who is halfway reasonable will seriously make such a contention, for the reasons the author of this book seems to understand. It smacks slightly of a straw man argument) there indeed runs a real and dangerous constructionist bend to philosophical thinking. And by the same token I disagree with scientists like Feynman (and don't get me started on Feynman) who refuse to justify, to themselves, the theoretical underpinnings of science on the grounds that its none of their business. Science is a car not worth driving if you don't know how the engine is put together.
In short, I believe that science and philosophy are essentially combined endeavors, and that each has a great deal to teach the other. The segregation and aggressive humantization of philosophy in this century notwithstanding, philosophy can be relevant and objective on a level approaching that of physical science (or at least biology!) if it is practiced correctly. It is only the exact nature of this connection that requires probing, and urgently so.
While I believe in the existence of this connection, Ayn Rand is certainly not it. It pains me to see so many scientists and mathematicians fall prey to the tinker-toy Artistotelian phenomenology which Ayn Rand half-heartedly gropes at, because not only does it give philosophy a bad name in science, but it gives science a bad name in philosophy. The arguemtns against the inscrutability of material facts are NOT put forward with any kind of elegance or especial insight, but are rather a frothy-mouthed reduction of the very fringe of objective epistemology. In serious philosophical circles, Rand is looked upon with a great deal of skepticism, and building a scientific philosophy out of her flawed phenomenology is as ludicrous as deriving the scientific method from a Gary Schwartz paper.
I attribute no small amount of the stigma which physicalist thought is accorded to Rand's sloppy philosophy. While philosophers like Foucault present well reasoned foundations for their ideas, and adhere to basic rules of academic decorum, Rand is little more than a jumped-up pamphleteer, and when given the choice between which school to subscribe to, no one with a reasonable philosophical aesthetic would join Rand's cult of amoral ideologues unless they had some ulterior purpose. It is very difficult then, to be an epistemological objectivist and be taken seriously when all the work in that school is done by Randian "objectivists."
In short, I applaud the author's desire to secure a sound fundamental theory for science, since it seems unlikely to me that science should be the one human enterprise devoid of a mature rational analysis, but lament his rather sophomoric choice of Rand as a model. More refined scientific philosophers have made far better arguments for the validity of scientific enterprise than Rand's pigtail-pulling anarchy ever could, and it makes the discussion happening on this board largely moot in that the arguments go deeper than the mere fact that objective epistemology/phenomenology is being posited, something far smarter people than me have ably defended.
See what others have said about Russell's Teapot, Invisible Pink Unicorn, burden of proof, etc.
The large body of "soft evidence" you mention for paranormal phenomena work far worse as soft evidence for the paranormal and more as hard evidence for delusions or fraud. If you can't prove the existence or non-existence of something, don't claim it exists. Looking for proof of the definitive non-existence of something is not a valid use of scientific principle. Common sense might not be the best policy to adopt, but scientific sense certainly should be!
Probably the most scientific response to such claims is to ignore them, and tell your friends politely that they are crackpots, and that that area of discussion should be avoided.
So just make the classroom unable to recieve wireless signals, and if you can't get a room that is thusly configured, don't allow laptops. There are a clear division between classes which need laptops and classes that don't.
Commenters who posted about writing offering better recall have it exactly right, however laptops, (or any electronic notetaking aid) can be incredibly helpful in a lecture which delivers a great deal of content as its primary purpose. Literature courses, whose lectures often deal with conceptual ideas which are elucidated by the professor, have no need of laptops, since I would challenge anyone who claims OneNote-style note organization offers a serious aid to literary pedagogy
However, science courses are often simply professors rattling off facts, and being able to organize those facts according to concept can make all the difference. Math courses are of course, the exception, at least until methods of digitally rendering formulas are radically advanced.
This all wide of the mark in that a professor should get final say what is or is not allowed in the classroom, within reason. It might be unreasonable for a professor to demand their students take notes on wax tablets (depending on the subject) but until pen and paper become so inconvenient to obtain and use, sit down and shut up.
Can someone explain to me why anyone would even bother buying a Kindle? So far, the only advantage to the Kindle is the ability to utilize Amazon's store, whose draconion control of their wares is getting out of hand. As some have commented, yes Amazon has a right to sell their product like this, and I have the right to sell shit in a dixie cup, but neither of us has the right to expect people to buy it and like it.
Putting aside the fact that most stuff outside of the public domain isn't worth reading anyway, it seems like a much smarter idea to invest in an off-brand e-reader which would let you do about as much as the Kindle, without the plus-hundo markup.
Is there any sci-fi franchise that has been more maligned than Star Trek? Certainly successful, but mentioning that being a scientist will allow kids to be just like their favorite Star Trek character is a good way to turn a kid off science, at least any kid who wasn't going to land much wider of the STEM fields than the IT department, thoguh that's being a little glib. I would say that Star Trek has done the most for science of any television program, but that that in itself demonstrates that sci-fi is half cause, half effect, and can't really change public attitudes dramatically.
Also, even Star Trek has its fair share of mad scientists which need to be curbed by gallant, no nonsense space cowboys.
Psh. If that. Most movies don't stop at "scientists are socially awkward" and usually make the leap to "scientists are amoral maniacs" or full blown "science and technology are dangerous and evil." which was the short version of the plot to Avatar. The "science fiction" movies this article mentions are overwhelmingly about the triumph of intuition over reason, of physical violence over political action, of Dick Meathead over Doctor McBadguy, and ultimately of scientific ignorance over scientific literacy. Even movies which feature a scientist as the protagonist will usually feature one or more "bad" scientists whose flaws are imagined as some variation of being "too cold and logical" (i.e., not making research decisions based on love) or else just not having a hot chick on their team.
The topics of interest to science are certainly romanticized, but the access to them is always imagined as occuring outside, or even in spite, of science. Spacefarers are imagined as pirates, miners, soldiers, villains, or businessmen, but never scientists. This goes for all "exploration" sci-fi (deep ocean, deep earth, deep space, the interwebs, etc.) Tron: Legacy, with it's use of the hypertousled young protagonist countered by the impotent dithering software engineers, is a good recent example. A similar trope occurs in scourge type sci-fi, where the scientists have GONE TOO FAR and unleased the robots/plague/killer bees/regular bees infected with radiation and it is up to someone on a motorcycle, and probably in a band, to stop them.
I would hesitate to say that this article confirms the hypothesis that movies are to blame for the sad state and ignonymity of the scientific profession, but rather that the sheer abundance of movies which are functionally anti-science propaganda brings into serious question the viability of pro-science entertainment as a business model.
You see this all the time where I work (tech support for a small university): when people don't back stuff up, it's the computer's fault for not being a stone tablet keep in a salt-cavern in Siberia. If his son had been keeping a notebook with said list in it, the loss of that notebook to fire or water wouldn't be "a reminder of a new reality where paper and ink are no match for the whims of nature." People need to realize that expecting your computer never to be lost or to break is as unrealistic as, if not more so than, expecting a sheet of looseleaf to do the same.
First of all, it's pretty obvious that this is a response to The Social Network, because Facebook's been around (and pretty popular) for a good long time now. 2010 is in no way "the year of facebook," it's just the year of the Facebook movie. Christ.
Second of all, what is with this bizarre idea that Zuckerberg is some kind of visionary innovator? Frankly, he isn't even that great of a coder on the basis of FB alone: it isn't a particularly elegant or complex piece of software. And what's more, Facebook is someone else's idea. Social networks existed before facebook. All Zuckerberg did was make them slick and readily monetizeable.
It's not that I think Zuckerberg's the devil, it's that I think he's fast becoming this generation's Bill Gates: a shrewd businessman who an unsavvy public makes into some kind of technological golden boy. Zuckerberg didn't bring anything new into the world, he just found a way to get paid for what already was there. Zuckerberg is basically a mainstream version of 4chan's Moot, with the exception that he pimps other people's information for profit.
This conflation of profit with innovation is a dangerous one, and it seems like instead of getting wiser about it the more potential there is for both, we're getting stupider.
Would you agree that in this case, that doesn't really apply? This is like putting a 65 mph speed limit on a fighter jet: the technology is in a completely different sphere from the management of its use.
The thing is that a bandwidth allotment actually IS a limit on speed: 5 GB/month, if you go faster than that, you get a ticket. The whole point of a faster phone is to move long data transfers into a reasonable time frame, the difference between a few seconds of time to download a 100K webpage on 3G vs. the fraction of a second it takes to download the same page at 4G speeds is NOT a justification for 4G speeds. Yes, you can avoid overages by pacing your internet usage, but since that usage is still restricted by a measurement of data-per-unit-time, the speed is the same. It's like being made to drive your car at walking speed: it isn't worth the gas.
And yes, there is something morally wrong with this. Telling me I'm buying one product while restrictions on its use mean it has no more utility than a different (cheaper) product is a supremely fucked up thing for a retailer to do, especially if those are restrictions you put in place. If I buy a Lamborghini, but you tell me I can only use it to shave, you better believe I'm only paying twelve fucking fifty for it and maybe a couple bucks each month for replacement blades. Verizon has basically just made a 3G phone whose use is harder to pace effectively (try checking your data balance for every ten minutes of use). It's an unethical way to conduct business; it's negligent at best, and malicious at worse.
Thhhaatt's a pretty narrow view of gaming, don't you think? I could certainly see that the kind of narrative that drives a book isn't really possible in games, but "pure action" is certainly not the reason all, or even most people play games. There are visual, thematic, and yes even narrative elements to games that draw people to play, and not everyone gets bored if they have to go five minutes without seeing an explosion or Lara Croft's tits.
Giving the example of Tomb Raider, much as the article gives the Mario Brothers movie (which I'd have to say, could have been much worse), is I think indicative of the problem. People making movies out of games for some reason feel possessed to go for barely-explicated platformers, which they then treat as hour and a half resume-ruiners for whatever hack won't leave the studio alone. Tomb Raider wasn't terrible because it "added too much depth" to any preexisting great story, but because it was ACTUALLY a terrible story written to fill the gaps in a game which had almost no story to begin with. The same goes for most game movies: Resident Evil, Final Fantasy (though FF does have deep stories, they decided instead to write a story shittier than all the put together). No one ever uses the narrative arc of a game to create a movie, and instead we're given ludicrous origin stories for puzzlers and platformers. I half expect to see a Pac-Man game where a genetic experiment has to be hunted down by vampires.
This is what is meant by respect: say what you will about the LoTR movies, but they were a legitimate cinematic endeavor that most of the moviegoing public considered perfectly adequate, and did pretty well at the Oscars, as I recall. Harry Potter is in a similar vein, (despite the quality of THOSE movies, eesh).
I know that they are very few games that could stand up to real works of literature. I know that after studying literature, story based gaming was all but ruined for me as it became painful to watch the hackneyed voice acting and ridiculous posturing that most "deep games" include (I haven't picked up a game in years where the male protagonist wasn't doing a 'batman voice' the entire time) but far worse IPs get far better treatment from Hollywood. No one's expecting that Hollywood turn Mass Effect into Casablanca, but it doesn't deserve to be made into a twenty page made-for-TV script that is basically an hourlong excuse for tits. Hollywood should appreciate that gamers have an interest in the stories that go into the games they play; that these stories are deserving of sincere cinematic attention, and that gamers deserve to come out of a game-based movie at LEAST as happy as a Harry Potter fan coming out of a Harry Potter movie, instead of, as the case is now, shocked or nauseous.
This looks like another case of "we wouldn't be having this conversation if it weren't on the internet."
The media have consistently characterized Anonymous as "hackers" and "cyber-terrorists" which are way, WAY more malicious than what they actually are, which many people on slashdot have accurately described. If they are anything, they are picketers: the internet equivalent of teenagers with posterboard: yes they are not fostering delicately managed discourse, and yes they are interfering with the operation of "legitimate businesses" but neither are they unjustified or even transgressing against acceptable protest protocol.
However, the media paints a fantasy of these hardened e-criminals jacking onto the net stream to funnel pure information directly from the cyber vaults into the unsuspecting infosphere. This is another case of an "the intertron will steal your credit cards!" hysteria, which
The beta islet cells are caught in the crossfire when the immune system attacks a triggering infection. People with diabetes can have their islet cells replaced, as evidenced by the utility of pacreas transplants.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are they? The last time we had a scientific media darling who was worth his salt was the 80's. Now we're left with *shudder* Neil Degrasse Tyson.
250K on wallstreet? Try >1M. 250K is what the PRESIDENT makes.
Yes, but software engineers also don't really take engineering courses. They're called software engineers by analogy with regular engineers, but its not really the same thing: they don't take statistics, don't learn how to assess the probability of failure, etc. Engineering isn't just designing, building, and maintaining things, it's using the scientific principles people have developed to do so with the greatest efficiency.
True, engineering is an activity which can have anyone who engages in it be called an engineer, the same way we can call anyone who engages in science a scientist. But what this article is discussing is a decline in professional engineers and scientists, who are formally trained in the principles of those disciplines and are capable of making sweeping and paradigm changing advances in their fields, not train operators with two year degrees. Just because we have an abundance of the latter doesn't make a lack of the former easier to bear
...following this whole thing full circle, when this article talks about engineers, it talks about people with university level training in engineering, i.e., professional engineers. It uses the catchall term "engineers" because it doesn't need to go through the list of all types every time it brings it up. It assumes the "professional tag" because otherwise it's meaningless. No one is bemoaning the fact that there aren't more train operators in government, nor that there aren't more amateur scientists.
Its true, there's a lot of sexual politics involved in the big fat dumb white guy at the center of a lot of sitcoms, but it's not because of "man bashing." Its more likely that intelligence has become feminized. We don't want to watch some swishy ivory tower intellectual thinking he's better than us all day. Much of the main characters of these shows are not despised for their working class dumbfuckery, but lauded for it.
Also: Fred Flinstone, George Jetson, and Ralph Kramden, are all good examples of the working class schmuck that existed before America's scientific decline. America's had a love affair with the working class since forever, it's only recently for more complicated reasons that this has morphed into intellectual mistrust
And they wonder why technically capable people aren't taken more seriously
Is science public policy being dictated by scientists really such a bad thing? Its an attractive idea on some level to say that scientists and engineers should keep their hands clean and leave all the messy politics to...you know, someone else. But at its heart its an extremely destructive sentiment for both science and society to believe that all scientists should think about is science, a sentiment which I'm pretty sure is very close to American perception of science, and the root cause of many things this article discusses.
It seems very strange to me that science maintains the idea that it should focus on nothing besides the laboratory, because what other economic sector maintains such a lunacy? Certainly not business, agriculture, or entertainment.
Maybe not experimental science, but they sure as hell helped to illuminate theoretical principles that make science possible, especially. As people on this board have been mentioning, Newton was a much more prolific theologian than he was a scientist. These were not disciplines whose ends were different, but rather slightly different areas of the same question.
The idea that scientists should keep their heads down and not try to attach any significance to the principles they discover is an extremely dangerous one, and it's certainly not one supported by history. Scientists should have at least a cursory knowledge of the theory behind their discipline, the same way that stockbrokers need to know economic theory. The tradition of scorn for the humanities department was something science could afford during the cold war, but its time to admit that science is a scholarly and intellectual pursuit, that is always has been, and scientists and the scientific community need to justify themselves to a society that looks on them with increasing suspicion.
Does anyone know precisely why software companies continue to do this? The thing with Apple and Quicktime seems to be a pretty blatant attempt to strongarm people into using a terrible media player, but I don't see how junking up a user's computer with annoying add-ons and plugins really helps a product like Skype or McAfee. Why, after a user has already downloaded a product, does the installation of superfluous support applications mean more profit for the people that sell them? If anything, it makes them more likely to consider them too riddled with crapware and switch to something hassle free. Can someone illuminate this for me?
Until about a hundred years ago, the distinction was not made at all. Go see Aristotle, Pythagoras, Leibniz, and about a thousand other "natural philosophers" who felt perfectly comfortable expounding on deeper questions than which direction do balls roll if you hit them with a stick.
Now, I firmly believe in the philosophical soundness of science, and I look with extreme skepticism on hard line constructionists who claim that material truth is somehow subject to social forces, which seems about as sound to me as saying that nightfall is caused by defects in the human eye. Though the comparison of scientists to voodoo priests does tend to overstate the division (since no one who is halfway reasonable will seriously make such a contention, for the reasons the author of this book seems to understand. It smacks slightly of a straw man argument) there indeed runs a real and dangerous constructionist bend to philosophical thinking. And by the same token I disagree with scientists like Feynman (and don't get me started on Feynman) who refuse to justify, to themselves, the theoretical underpinnings of science on the grounds that its none of their business. Science is a car not worth driving if you don't know how the engine is put together.
In short, I believe that science and philosophy are essentially combined endeavors, and that each has a great deal to teach the other. The segregation and aggressive humantization of philosophy in this century notwithstanding, philosophy can be relevant and objective on a level approaching that of physical science (or at least biology!) if it is practiced correctly. It is only the exact nature of this connection that requires probing, and urgently so.
While I believe in the existence of this connection, Ayn Rand is certainly not it. It pains me to see so many scientists and mathematicians fall prey to the tinker-toy Artistotelian phenomenology which Ayn Rand half-heartedly gropes at, because not only does it give philosophy a bad name in science, but it gives science a bad name in philosophy. The arguemtns against the inscrutability of material facts are NOT put forward with any kind of elegance or especial insight, but are rather a frothy-mouthed reduction of the very fringe of objective epistemology. In serious philosophical circles, Rand is looked upon with a great deal of skepticism, and building a scientific philosophy out of her flawed phenomenology is as ludicrous as deriving the scientific method from a Gary Schwartz paper.
I attribute no small amount of the stigma which physicalist thought is accorded to Rand's sloppy philosophy. While philosophers like Foucault present well reasoned foundations for their ideas, and adhere to basic rules of academic decorum, Rand is little more than a jumped-up pamphleteer, and when given the choice between which school to subscribe to, no one with a reasonable philosophical aesthetic would join Rand's cult of amoral ideologues unless they had some ulterior purpose. It is very difficult then, to be an epistemological objectivist and be taken seriously when all the work in that school is done by Randian "objectivists."
In short, I applaud the author's desire to secure a sound fundamental theory for science, since it seems unlikely to me that science should be the one human enterprise devoid of a mature rational analysis, but lament his rather sophomoric choice of Rand as a model. More refined scientific philosophers have made far better arguments for the validity of scientific enterprise than Rand's pigtail-pulling anarchy ever could, and it makes the discussion happening on this board largely moot in that the arguments go deeper than the mere fact that objective epistemology/phenomenology is being posited, something far smarter people than me have ably defended.
See what others have said about Russell's Teapot, Invisible Pink Unicorn, burden of proof, etc.
The large body of "soft evidence" you mention for paranormal phenomena work far worse as soft evidence for the paranormal and more as hard evidence for delusions or fraud. If you can't prove the existence or non-existence of something, don't claim it exists. Looking for proof of the definitive non-existence of something is not a valid use of scientific principle. Common sense might not be the best policy to adopt, but scientific sense certainly should be!
Probably the most scientific response to such claims is to ignore them, and tell your friends politely that they are crackpots, and that that area of discussion should be avoided.
Anyone else catch that?
So just make the classroom unable to recieve wireless signals, and if you can't get a room that is thusly configured, don't allow laptops. There are a clear division between classes which need laptops and classes that don't.
Commenters who posted about writing offering better recall have it exactly right, however laptops, (or any electronic notetaking aid) can be incredibly helpful in a lecture which delivers a great deal of content as its primary purpose. Literature courses, whose lectures often deal with conceptual ideas which are elucidated by the professor, have no need of laptops, since I would challenge anyone who claims OneNote-style note organization offers a serious aid to literary pedagogy
However, science courses are often simply professors rattling off facts, and being able to organize those facts according to concept can make all the difference. Math courses are of course, the exception, at least until methods of digitally rendering formulas are radically advanced.
This all wide of the mark in that a professor should get final say what is or is not allowed in the classroom, within reason. It might be unreasonable for a professor to demand their students take notes on wax tablets (depending on the subject) but until pen and paper become so inconvenient to obtain and use, sit down and shut up.
Can someone explain to me why anyone would even bother buying a Kindle? So far, the only advantage to the Kindle is the ability to utilize Amazon's store, whose draconion control of their wares is getting out of hand. As some have commented, yes Amazon has a right to sell their product like this, and I have the right to sell shit in a dixie cup, but neither of us has the right to expect people to buy it and like it.
Putting aside the fact that most stuff outside of the public domain isn't worth reading anyway, it seems like a much smarter idea to invest in an off-brand e-reader which would let you do about as much as the Kindle, without the plus-hundo markup.
Is there any sci-fi franchise that has been more maligned than Star Trek? Certainly successful, but mentioning that being a scientist will allow kids to be just like their favorite Star Trek character is a good way to turn a kid off science, at least any kid who wasn't going to land much wider of the STEM fields than the IT department, thoguh that's being a little glib. I would say that Star Trek has done the most for science of any television program, but that that in itself demonstrates that sci-fi is half cause, half effect, and can't really change public attitudes dramatically.
Also, even Star Trek has its fair share of mad scientists which need to be curbed by gallant, no nonsense space cowboys.
Psh. If that. Most movies don't stop at "scientists are socially awkward" and usually make the leap to "scientists are amoral maniacs" or full blown "science and technology are dangerous and evil." which was the short version of the plot to Avatar. The "science fiction" movies this article mentions are overwhelmingly about the triumph of intuition over reason, of physical violence over political action, of Dick Meathead over Doctor McBadguy, and ultimately of scientific ignorance over scientific literacy. Even movies which feature a scientist as the protagonist will usually feature one or more "bad" scientists whose flaws are imagined as some variation of being "too cold and logical" (i.e., not making research decisions based on love) or else just not having a hot chick on their team.
The topics of interest to science are certainly romanticized, but the access to them is always imagined as occuring outside, or even in spite, of science. Spacefarers are imagined as pirates, miners, soldiers, villains, or businessmen, but never scientists. This goes for all "exploration" sci-fi (deep ocean, deep earth, deep space, the interwebs, etc.) Tron: Legacy, with it's use of the hypertousled young protagonist countered by the impotent dithering software engineers, is a good recent example. A similar trope occurs in scourge type sci-fi, where the scientists have GONE TOO FAR and unleased the robots/plague/killer bees/regular bees infected with radiation and it is up to someone on a motorcycle, and probably in a band, to stop them.
I would hesitate to say that this article confirms the hypothesis that movies are to blame for the sad state and ignonymity of the scientific profession, but rather that the sheer abundance of movies which are functionally anti-science propaganda brings into serious question the viability of pro-science entertainment as a business model.
You see this all the time where I work (tech support for a small university): when people don't back stuff up, it's the computer's fault for not being a stone tablet keep in a salt-cavern in Siberia. If his son had been keeping a notebook with said list in it, the loss of that notebook to fire or water wouldn't be "a reminder of a new reality where paper and ink are no match for the whims of nature." People need to realize that expecting your computer never to be lost or to break is as unrealistic as, if not more so than, expecting a sheet of looseleaf to do the same.
First of all, it's pretty obvious that this is a response to The Social Network, because Facebook's been around (and pretty popular) for a good long time now. 2010 is in no way "the year of facebook," it's just the year of the Facebook movie. Christ. Second of all, what is with this bizarre idea that Zuckerberg is some kind of visionary innovator? Frankly, he isn't even that great of a coder on the basis of FB alone: it isn't a particularly elegant or complex piece of software. And what's more, Facebook is someone else's idea. Social networks existed before facebook. All Zuckerberg did was make them slick and readily monetizeable. It's not that I think Zuckerberg's the devil, it's that I think he's fast becoming this generation's Bill Gates: a shrewd businessman who an unsavvy public makes into some kind of technological golden boy. Zuckerberg didn't bring anything new into the world, he just found a way to get paid for what already was there. Zuckerberg is basically a mainstream version of 4chan's Moot, with the exception that he pimps other people's information for profit. This conflation of profit with innovation is a dangerous one, and it seems like instead of getting wiser about it the more potential there is for both, we're getting stupider.
Would you agree that in this case, that doesn't really apply? This is like putting a 65 mph speed limit on a fighter jet: the technology is in a completely different sphere from the management of its use. The thing is that a bandwidth allotment actually IS a limit on speed: 5 GB/month, if you go faster than that, you get a ticket. The whole point of a faster phone is to move long data transfers into a reasonable time frame, the difference between a few seconds of time to download a 100K webpage on 3G vs. the fraction of a second it takes to download the same page at 4G speeds is NOT a justification for 4G speeds. Yes, you can avoid overages by pacing your internet usage, but since that usage is still restricted by a measurement of data-per-unit-time, the speed is the same. It's like being made to drive your car at walking speed: it isn't worth the gas. And yes, there is something morally wrong with this. Telling me I'm buying one product while restrictions on its use mean it has no more utility than a different (cheaper) product is a supremely fucked up thing for a retailer to do, especially if those are restrictions you put in place. If I buy a Lamborghini, but you tell me I can only use it to shave, you better believe I'm only paying twelve fucking fifty for it and maybe a couple bucks each month for replacement blades. Verizon has basically just made a 3G phone whose use is harder to pace effectively (try checking your data balance for every ten minutes of use). It's an unethical way to conduct business; it's negligent at best, and malicious at worse.
Thhhaatt's a pretty narrow view of gaming, don't you think? I could certainly see that the kind of narrative that drives a book isn't really possible in games, but "pure action" is certainly not the reason all, or even most people play games. There are visual, thematic, and yes even narrative elements to games that draw people to play, and not everyone gets bored if they have to go five minutes without seeing an explosion or Lara Croft's tits. Giving the example of Tomb Raider, much as the article gives the Mario Brothers movie (which I'd have to say, could have been much worse), is I think indicative of the problem. People making movies out of games for some reason feel possessed to go for barely-explicated platformers, which they then treat as hour and a half resume-ruiners for whatever hack won't leave the studio alone. Tomb Raider wasn't terrible because it "added too much depth" to any preexisting great story, but because it was ACTUALLY a terrible story written to fill the gaps in a game which had almost no story to begin with. The same goes for most game movies: Resident Evil, Final Fantasy (though FF does have deep stories, they decided instead to write a story shittier than all the put together). No one ever uses the narrative arc of a game to create a movie, and instead we're given ludicrous origin stories for puzzlers and platformers. I half expect to see a Pac-Man game where a genetic experiment has to be hunted down by vampires. This is what is meant by respect: say what you will about the LoTR movies, but they were a legitimate cinematic endeavor that most of the moviegoing public considered perfectly adequate, and did pretty well at the Oscars, as I recall. Harry Potter is in a similar vein, (despite the quality of THOSE movies, eesh). I know that they are very few games that could stand up to real works of literature. I know that after studying literature, story based gaming was all but ruined for me as it became painful to watch the hackneyed voice acting and ridiculous posturing that most "deep games" include (I haven't picked up a game in years where the male protagonist wasn't doing a 'batman voice' the entire time) but far worse IPs get far better treatment from Hollywood. No one's expecting that Hollywood turn Mass Effect into Casablanca, but it doesn't deserve to be made into a twenty page made-for-TV script that is basically an hourlong excuse for tits. Hollywood should appreciate that gamers have an interest in the stories that go into the games they play; that these stories are deserving of sincere cinematic attention, and that gamers deserve to come out of a game-based movie at LEAST as happy as a Harry Potter fan coming out of a Harry Potter movie, instead of, as the case is now, shocked or nauseous.
Pretty pleased with the Stalker tag
This looks like another case of "we wouldn't be having this conversation if it weren't on the internet." The media have consistently characterized Anonymous as "hackers" and "cyber-terrorists" which are way, WAY more malicious than what they actually are, which many people on slashdot have accurately described. If they are anything, they are picketers: the internet equivalent of teenagers with posterboard: yes they are not fostering delicately managed discourse, and yes they are interfering with the operation of "legitimate businesses" but neither are they unjustified or even transgressing against acceptable protest protocol. However, the media paints a fantasy of these hardened e-criminals jacking onto the net stream to funnel pure information directly from the cyber vaults into the unsuspecting infosphere. This is another case of an "the intertron will steal your credit cards!" hysteria, which
See the above post about cyber-picketing. If you do something wrong as a business, don't complain when people can't come into your store.
The beta islet cells are caught in the crossfire when the immune system attacks a triggering infection. People with diabetes can have their islet cells replaced, as evidenced by the utility of pacreas transplants.