Well, I don't know that climate change will ever itself directly shape the future of politics.
Oddly enough, those liberals at the Pentagon and the various US intelligence agencies rate climate change as one of the most significant threats to the USA for the rest of this century.
(Presumably they're thinking about the social disruptions it will bring, rather than the climate change itself.)
While there are plenty of stupid people out there, not everyone is. The smartest are moving away from these careers in droves because of these outsourcing issues. The final result of outsourcing in the messed-up corporate mind is that *everyone* will become a manager and that's the only job that holds any worth and it is the only job worth doing. It's also the only job, therefore, that deserves a living wage. If we stubbornly follow this as a country then we're is MASSIVE trouble.
We had a problem with that mentality even before outsourcing started. Even 20 years ago, if you wanted top pay and any respect you had to switch from whatever productive thing you did into management.
Unlike Brazil, once prices went back down the US decided to drop all the programs from the 70s because. Hell, fuel was cheap!
An associate who has consulted with the auto industry for several decades says that every time someone gets serious about building fuel-efficient automobiles, the gas prices "miraculously" drop and the program gets cancelled. So much so that getting assigned to lead such a program is top management's way of telling you that your career is dead.
People have already forgotten 2008 and went out buying SUVs once again. Now they're complaining once again.
In the last go-round it really annoyed me that everyone wanted to blame Detroit for all the gas-guzzlers. Detroit just builds what we want to buy.
Not to mention song lyrics, I mean you ever hear a song sung with the word "kilometer"? Thats 4 syllables vs. one, and an unwieldy 4 syllables at that.
Plus you have to say more, since kilometers are shorter than miles:
I can see for kilometers and kilometers (and part of some more kilometers), I can see for kilometers and kilometers (and part of some more kilometers), I can see for kilometers and kilometers and kilometers and kilometers and kilometers (and some more, but I can't do the math while I'm singing, Oh Yeah).
Is that Eastern, Central, Mountain, or Pacific? Standard time? I need to know if I have time for a nice dinner, or if I should just order in.
Best solution is to have an early dinner at the most expensive restaurant in town on your credit card then drop by the jewelry store to stock up on gold before heading for the hills.
Kinda like Noah borrowing money to pay for the construction of his Ark.
What if God and SkyNet picked the same day for Judgement Day? Robots vs. Angels? Everything put on hold until the lawsuits are settled? A cheesy SyFy movie?
Or maybe a collaboration, along the lines of "robots kill them all and let God sort them out".
Although regarding neutrons, some people speculate that the Ark of the Covenant was radioactive since plagues of tumors followed it. and people who looked into it quickly died.
Raiders of the Lost Ark explained it better, and without appealing to hocus-pocus such as gravity and radioactivity.
Not gonna lie, my first thought when I read the article was of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
No surprise. If you read Genesis from a detached perspective, it immediately jumps out that almost everything in the book is an etiology. The ToB story "explains" why the world is full of different languages, just as other parts of the book explain why serpents crawl on their bellies, why weeds grow on your farm, etc.
If you read it with that in mind, it's quite a charming read.
This approach only models the decrease in phonemic diversity due to migration. It does not say anything about how phonemic diversity grows. In essence, it models only half of the system. To me it seems difficult to answer questions of the origin of language without also modeling the growth of phonemic diversity Phonemic variation can be introduced to the region by migration as well (as in the case of the apparent migration of phonemes from Borneo to Madagascar).
There's a serious problem for mapping deep relationships between languages, which someone (Larry Trask?) mentioned on one of the linguistics discussion boards a decade or so ago.
Any pair of languages will have a number of happenstance correspondences that are not indicative of actual relatedness. This is true whether you're considering phonemes, morphemes, syntax - anything. And while the number of such correspondences varies between pairs of languages, and even over time for a given pair, you can think of it as a more-or-less constant level of background noise that you have to filter out when looking for relatedness between languages.
But the genuine signs of relatedness disappear monotonically with time. So it follows inevitably that after some amount of time the "signal" of genuine correspondences will be submerged under the "noise" of happenstance correspondences. So it's inevitable that we will not be able to detect correspondences beyond a certain time depth.
The question is, how much time? I've also read (maybe in the same discussion) that modern historical linguists are almost evenly divided on whether the reconstructed Nostratic family is real or mirage. So that suggests that even if Nostratic is real, it's at the very edge of what can be reliably constructed - the evidence isn't strong enough to convince but about half the experts.
So if those notions are correct, we can conclude that it is not possible to detect genuine linguistic correspondences more than (IIRC) about 15,000 years ago. Anything beyond that is just as likely to be seeing patterns in the noise (a thing which we humans are very good at).
The Chomskians like to pretend like they're the only game in town, but they're far from it.
The joke among linguists is that belief in Chomsky's views are inversely proportional to the distance the linguist lives from MIT.
For me, the big problems with Chomsky's approach is that (a) they try to cramp a complex, "soft" pattern of behavior into an E=mc^2 of linguistics, and (b) they aren't seriously interested in evidence-based theories.
Regarding the latter, they're really bad about drawing big conclusions on a handful of examples, or (worse), the linguist relies on his/her own intuition about what's gramatically correct.
Unless you want to hypothesize that language was not invented until after our ancestors left Africa, it's obvious that all languages stem from a source in Africa.
But his use of phonemes is ludicrous. Related languages often have very different phoneme sets. Take French and Hindi, for example. (And those are *closely* related, when considering all of the world's languages.)
This is as bad as Greenberg's mass comparison method; maybe worse.
The secular "you're only a human being after birth" argument seems like more magical thinking than the religious argument
I've never heard anyone espouse that view.
I and a lot of other people hold the view that a fertilized egg is not a person, and a baby ready for the exit is. The difficulty lies in defining a point where the change occurs, which of course does not happen suddenly.
Are there any published statistics on how far into the process the typical elective abortion occurs?
in a nation that started out valuing freedom and a limited government above all other considerations.
We started out with our Articles of Confederation, then ditched them within a decade because we found that it authorized a government too limited to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Roguelikes are about using an unpredictable toolkit with complex interactions in order to overcome unpredictable challenges
I thought rouguelikes were for proving I had more of Teh Nerd than the next guy.
All we need is about a quadrillion of them for a brain.
Can they get back to us with a time & cost estimate?
I always thought it mainly measured the ability to solve problems.
I always thought it measured the ability to do well on IQ tests.
would be, IMHO, a large black rectangular monolith in orbit against one of the outer planets...
Or when the little green men get off their silvery saucer-shaped craft and "have us for dinner".
Well, I don't know that climate change will ever itself directly shape the future of politics.
Oddly enough, those liberals at the Pentagon and the various US intelligence agencies rate climate change as one of the most significant threats to the USA for the rest of this century.
(Presumably they're thinking about the social disruptions it will bring, rather than the climate change itself.)
Respect is not given, but earned. This is also true for IT people.
The problem is, sometimes people earn it and still don't get it. This seems to be a frequent problem in IT.
While there are plenty of stupid people out there, not everyone is. The smartest are moving away from these careers in droves because of these outsourcing issues. The final result of outsourcing in the messed-up corporate mind is that *everyone* will become a manager and that's the only job that holds any worth and it is the only job worth doing. It's also the only job, therefore, that deserves a living wage. If we stubbornly follow this as a country then we're is MASSIVE trouble.
We had a problem with that mentality even before outsourcing started. Even 20 years ago, if you wanted top pay and any respect you had to switch from whatever productive thing you did into management.
long hours, potentially hazardous working conditions (get splashed with 1 mol sulfuric acid.), and heavy work loads.
Yeah, there is a reason I gave up my career and degree in chemistry for IT.
Presumably that reason is the hazardous conditions; surely you still get the long hours and heavy work load. And no respect.
Seriously though this is pathetic. $130million isn't shit It's a laughable sum for any kind of major research project ...
Especially when you consider how much we "invest" in welfare for the oil giants.
Unlike Brazil, once prices went back down the US decided to drop all the programs from the 70s because. Hell, fuel was cheap!
An associate who has consulted with the auto industry for several decades says that every time someone gets serious about building fuel-efficient automobiles, the gas prices "miraculously" drop and the program gets cancelled. So much so that getting assigned to lead such a program is top management's way of telling you that your career is dead.
People have already forgotten 2008 and went out buying SUVs once again. Now they're complaining once again.
In the last go-round it really annoyed me that everyone wanted to blame Detroit for all the gas-guzzlers. Detroit just builds what we want to buy.
People who have money put in solar panels. People who have money ALSO live in rich neighborhoods. Who knew?
That's what I was wondering. Do these tend to be in newer houses? Houses that have had other improvements?
Did the study correct for such effects?
(except for Liberia & Burma, the only other two countries that don't use the metric system)
Maybe we just like the sophisticated company.
My leading theory is that the reason is one of language. Miles, inches and gallons rolls off the English tongue
We didn't have much trouble adapting the Latin "thousand (double) paces", why not the Greek "thousand measures"?
Not to mention song lyrics, I mean you ever hear a song sung with the word "kilometer"? Thats 4 syllables vs. one, and an unwieldy 4 syllables at that.
Plus you have to say more, since kilometers are shorter than miles:
Now we're replacing politicians with soulless automatons?
Is that Eastern, Central, Mountain, or Pacific? Standard time? I need to know if I have time for a nice dinner, or if I should just order in.
Best solution is to have an early dinner at the most expensive restaurant in town on your credit card then drop by the jewelry store to stock up on gold before heading for the hills.
Kinda like Noah borrowing money to pay for the construction of his Ark.
yea, who's judging who exactly.
What if God and SkyNet picked the same day for Judgement Day? Robots vs. Angels? Everything put on hold until the lawsuits are settled? A cheesy SyFy movie?
Or maybe a collaboration, along the lines of "robots kill them all and let God sort them out".
Although regarding neutrons, some people speculate that the Ark of the Covenant was radioactive since plagues of tumors followed it. and people who looked into it quickly died.
Raiders of the Lost Ark explained it better, and without appealing to hocus-pocus such as gravity and radioactivity.
the bible doesn't talk about neutrons
Try searching with the Bible Codes program.
Not gonna lie, my first thought when I read the article was of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
No surprise. If you read Genesis from a detached perspective, it immediately jumps out that almost everything in the book is an etiology. The ToB story "explains" why the world is full of different languages, just as other parts of the book explain why serpents crawl on their bellies, why weeds grow on your farm, etc.
If you read it with that in mind, it's quite a charming read.
This approach only models the decrease in phonemic diversity due to migration. It does not say anything about how phonemic diversity grows. In essence, it models only half of the system. To me it seems difficult to answer questions of the origin of language without also modeling the growth of phonemic diversity Phonemic variation can be introduced to the region by migration as well (as in the case of the apparent migration of phonemes from Borneo to Madagascar).
There's a serious problem for mapping deep relationships between languages, which someone (Larry Trask?) mentioned on one of the linguistics discussion boards a decade or so ago.
Any pair of languages will have a number of happenstance correspondences that are not indicative of actual relatedness. This is true whether you're considering phonemes, morphemes, syntax - anything. And while the number of such correspondences varies between pairs of languages, and even over time for a given pair, you can think of it as a more-or-less constant level of background noise that you have to filter out when looking for relatedness between languages.
But the genuine signs of relatedness disappear monotonically with time. So it follows inevitably that after some amount of time the "signal" of genuine correspondences will be submerged under the "noise" of happenstance correspondences. So it's inevitable that we will not be able to detect correspondences beyond a certain time depth.
The question is, how much time? I've also read (maybe in the same discussion) that modern historical linguists are almost evenly divided on whether the reconstructed Nostratic family is real or mirage. So that suggests that even if Nostratic is real, it's at the very edge of what can be reliably constructed - the evidence isn't strong enough to convince but about half the experts.
So if those notions are correct, we can conclude that it is not possible to detect genuine linguistic correspondences more than (IIRC) about 15,000 years ago. Anything beyond that is just as likely to be seeing patterns in the noise (a thing which we humans are very good at).
The Chomskians like to pretend like they're the only game in town, but they're far from it.
The joke among linguists is that belief in Chomsky's views are inversely proportional to the distance the linguist lives from MIT.
For me, the big problems with Chomsky's approach is that (a) they try to cramp a complex, "soft" pattern of behavior into an E=mc^2 of linguistics, and (b) they aren't seriously interested in evidence-based theories.
Regarding the latter, they're really bad about drawing big conclusions on a handful of examples, or (worse), the linguist relies on his/her own intuition about what's gramatically correct.
Unless you want to hypothesize that language was not invented until after our ancestors left Africa, it's obvious that all languages stem from a source in Africa.
But his use of phonemes is ludicrous. Related languages often have very different phoneme sets. Take French and Hindi, for example. (And those are *closely* related, when considering all of the world's languages.)
This is as bad as Greenberg's mass comparison method; maybe worse.
The secular "you're only a human being after birth" argument seems like more magical thinking than the religious argument
I've never heard anyone espouse that view.
I and a lot of other people hold the view that a fertilized egg is not a person, and a baby ready for the exit is. The difficulty lies in defining a point where the change occurs, which of course does not happen suddenly.
Are there any published statistics on how far into the process the typical elective abortion occurs?
in a nation that started out valuing freedom and a limited government above all other considerations.
We started out with our Articles of Confederation, then ditched them within a decade because we found that it authorized a government too limited to work.