> I sat in a meeting yesterday with "developers" who had never heard of Bachus-Naur form. I routinely confer with "programmers" who have never heard of a finite state machine. I work daily with "data architects" who have never heard of Dr. Codd or of normalization. [...] THIS, my fellow cognoscenti, is the extent to which our society is infested with charlatans and ignorami.
Sorry, I've never heard of cognoscenti, charlatans, and ignorami.
> Kronos was the ruler of the elder gods in Greek religion. He had a habit of swallowing his children whole because it had been predicted that one of them would overthrow him. The anti-malware companies are the children of Microsoft. Is it really surprising that they would rather not be eaten?
> It seems a little odd that these guys have such a vested financial interest in finding "something" every month. I'm sure it's just a method of weeding out the slackers who just want to sleep on all the flights and say 'everything was fine'.
I think it's just a symptom of the fact that the DoHS (indeed, the entire executive branch of our government) has adopted a CYA approach to defending against terrorism. The goal of preventing it has become lost among the more immediate goals of making sure you're not the one who takes the fall when it does happen.
> Wolfram's fundamental premise (so far -- it's a huge book that i've barely gotten into) is that science, and observational knowledge in general, seems to be filled with the idea that apparently complex behavior requires complexity in the underlying rules.
Wolfram doesn't seem to understand science. The whole history of science has been an attempt to explain complex phenomena by means of relatively simple rules.
> Just because something might be explicable, doesn't preclude it being of divine origin.
And that's precisely the problem with supernatural "explanations".
I dropped my pen and gravity drew it down to the floor, accelerating it along the way. No, wait - pixies pulled it down, and the acceleration was the result of more pixies joining in as it fell.
When you start invoking supernatural "explanations", evidence becomes irrelevant, and one claim is just as good as any other. Any other.
> there's a surge of morons shoving the word "god"...not to mention the morons that go around calling other people morons for their religious beliefs...
I don't think it was a dig at religious beliefs per se, but at the foolish notion that this or that discovery is evidence for a religious belief.
> Just so you know, belief in "god" is a matter of faith, since his existence can neither be proved nor disproved.
> I stumbled on a report that we're "returning" 42 cartons of dinosaur eggs to China. Is that propoganda?
It's a subtext metaphor: we are giving them "42" - the secret of Life, the Universe, and Everything - which is symbolic of the continual flow of our technology and military secrets to them.
Now you try it: what would the subtext be if the report had said 69 cartons of dinosaur eggs?
> You have to be kidding me. I LOVE the self-checkout.
I'd love it if it frikkin' worked. About 3/4 of the time I use it, it gets confused and I have to wait for a clerk to come fix it (if I don't just walk out mad, without a sale).
> I can't source this for you, having learned it in a linguistics class, but most cultures actually do seem to perceive colors pretty much the same. If you lay out a palette with say, 50 shades of red, almost everyone picks a color within a small range of shades as being the "true" or "pure" red. There are a whole bunch of nifty things about the way we all see colors. Search for "basic color terms" if you're interested.
Actually, what linguists have discovered is that there are regularities in the way cultures divide up the spectrum into colors. I.e., if they only have two color names they will be u and v, if they have three they will be u, v, and w, if they have four they will be u, v, w, and x, etc.
The system forms an implicature: "if a language has a color for z, it will also have a color for y", for lots of instances of z and y. (Sorry, I can't remember the details.)
> > Apparently we may also have a 4th (or 5th, depending on pt 2) receptor in the ultraviolet range.
> If so, it'll only be a matter of time before the special forces of some army will make this procedure manditory, particularly since camalflouge would be a lot less effective and since there's a lot more ultraviolet than visible light at twilight.
There are anecdotes from WWII suggesting that camoflage is less effective against people who are color blind. I remember reading one about a color-blind guy in an aircrew who could see an enemy ship as plain as day, yet none of the rest of the crew could see it even after he pointed it out.
All we ever seem to see about the soft tissue claim is references back to the original press release. What claims have been published in the peer reviewed literature, and how have those claims been received?
As I understand it, what actually happened is that there was some "stuff" in the holes where blood vessels formerly flowed through the leg bones, and it came out when a solvent was applied. Then came the press release; I haven't seen any stories about the eventual analysis of the material, and the lengthening silence makes me wonder whether the press release was a jumped conclusion.
> Why would losing a color receptor constitute an evolutionary advantage?
Possibly it wasn't so much an advantage as happenstance, not selected against because the early mammal lifestyle didn't much need the extra colors. (Because they were nocturnal, IIRC, but I haven't got time to dig out the article right now to verify that.)
Also, there may be an advantage in losing stuff that isn't needed, if it reduces the energy cost of building/maintaining/operating the organism.
> Well, the article says that recent research shows that reach-and-grasp did not evolve at the same time as the better vision, which makes it unlikely that they evolved for the same purpose.
I'm not sure that's a good argument. It's not like evolution happens on demand.
Our own upright posture, opposable thumbs, and big brains didn't all evolve at the same time, but we still build our lifestyle around their conjunction.
Conventional wisdom is that our depth perception and improved color vision supported an arboreal fruit-eating lifestyle.
It's not obvious why our lineage would co-evolve with snakes any more than any other mammalian lineage would.
BTW, "improved color vision" is relative. Birds have receptors for four colors rather than three. Early mammals lost two of the four, which is why your dog is "color blind". Our lineage re-gained a third, though not the same as either of the two that our ancestors had lost. There was an article about this in Scientific American a month or two back.
> How many really require a graduate degree? Not that I said "to do," not "to get." The B.A. is slowly supplanting the Diploma as the "price of entry" into the workforce, and the M.A. is becoming the new B.A
I've worked at a place where there was an obvious glass ceiling separating the degree holders from the non-degree-holders. The field of the degree didn't matter. Even though it was an IT department, a BA in art history was sufficient to put you above the ceiling.
> If you really think the majority of professors make $200k, you're nuts. At the school where I work, incoming assistant profs make ~$40k, associate profs with tenure about $55k and the full professors clear about $90k.
Clearly it depends on the school and the professor's field, but those numbers are way low for computer science.
Check out the Taulbee Survey. Scroll down to Table 34, examine the median and mean for tenure track salaries, and take note of the fact that that's a 9-month salary for someone who just put their foot on the stair.
Slashdot Mirror
> I sat in a meeting yesterday with "developers" who had never heard of Bachus-Naur form. I routinely confer with "programmers" who have never heard of a finite state machine. I work daily with "data architects" who have never heard of Dr. Codd or of normalization. [...] THIS, my fellow cognoscenti, is the extent to which our society is infested with charlatans and ignorami.
Sorry, I've never heard of cognoscenti, charlatans, and ignorami.
> Kronos was the ruler of the elder gods in Greek religion. He had a habit of swallowing his children whole because it had been predicted that one of them would overthrow him. The anti-malware companies are the children of Microsoft. Is it really surprising that they would rather not be eaten?
Or that they would be eaten?
> It seems a little odd that these guys have such a vested financial interest in finding "something" every month. I'm sure it's just a method of weeding out the slackers who just want to sleep on all the flights and say 'everything was fine'.
I think it's just a symptom of the fact that the DoHS (indeed, the entire executive branch of our government) has adopted a CYA approach to defending against terrorism. The goal of preventing it has become lost among the more immediate goals of making sure you're not the one who takes the fall when it does happen.
> Yes, this discovery does not hurt the ID movement at all.
No discovery will ever hurt the ID movement, because it's based on bullshit rather than evidence.
> Wolfram's fundamental premise (so far -- it's a huge book that i've barely gotten into) is that science, and observational knowledge in general, seems to be filled with the idea that apparently complex behavior requires complexity in the underlying rules.
Wolfram doesn't seem to understand science. The whole history of science has been an attempt to explain complex phenomena by means of relatively simple rules.
> Just because something might be explicable, doesn't preclude it being of divine origin.
And that's precisely the problem with supernatural "explanations".
I dropped my pen and gravity drew it down to the floor, accelerating it along the way. No, wait - pixies pulled it down, and the acceleration was the result of more pixies joining in as it fell.
When you start invoking supernatural "explanations", evidence becomes irrelevant, and one claim is just as good as any other. Any other.
> there's a surge of morons shoving the word "god" ...not to mention the morons that go around calling other people morons for their religious beliefs...
I don't think it was a dig at religious beliefs per se, but at the foolish notion that this or that discovery is evidence for a religious belief.
> Just so you know, belief in "god" is a matter of faith, since his existence can neither be proved nor disproved.
So you seem to share the same sentiment.
After all, they spent a whole month cleaning up their security problems.
> Stay far away from QT, GTK and alikes. They are a true hell to draw arbitrary stuff
There's a GTK+ add-on called "GTK Extra", which directly supports 2D and 3D plots. It was created as the infrastructure for SciGraphica.
> I stumbled on a report that we're "returning" 42 cartons of dinosaur eggs to China. Is that propoganda?
It's a subtext metaphor: we are giving them "42" - the secret of Life, the Universe, and Everything - which is symbolic of the continual flow of our technology and military secrets to them.
Now you try it: what would the subtext be if the report had said 69 cartons of dinosaur eggs?
> You have to be kidding me. I LOVE the self-checkout.
I'd love it if it frikkin' worked. About 3/4 of the time I use it, it gets confused and I have to wait for a clerk to come fix it (if I don't just walk out mad, without a sale).
> If they pass the savings on to me, sure. Food ain't free after all.
There area two grocery stores in my neighborhood. The one with the self-checkout charges an average of 50% more per item than the one that doesn't.
It's also the one that's closing next month due to a lack of profitability.
This is all about a management mentality of squeezing everything you can out of the system before it goes bankrupt.
> I can't source this for you, having learned it in a linguistics class, but most cultures actually do seem to perceive colors pretty much the same. If you lay out a palette with say, 50 shades of red, almost everyone picks a color within a small range of shades as being the "true" or "pure" red. There are a whole bunch of nifty things about the way we all see colors. Search for "basic color terms" if you're interested.
Actually, what linguists have discovered is that there are regularities in the way cultures divide up the spectrum into colors. I.e., if they only have two color names they will be u and v, if they have three they will be u, v, and w, if they have four they will be u, v, w, and x, etc.
The system forms an implicature: "if a language has a color for z, it will also have a color for y", for lots of instances of z and y. (Sorry, I can't remember the details.)
> > Apparently we may also have a 4th (or 5th, depending on pt 2) receptor in the ultraviolet range.
> If so, it'll only be a matter of time before the special forces of some army will make this procedure manditory, particularly since camalflouge would be a lot less effective and since there's a lot more ultraviolet than visible light at twilight.
There are anecdotes from WWII suggesting that camoflage is less effective against people who are color blind. I remember reading one about a color-blind guy in an aircrew who could see an enemy ship as plain as day, yet none of the rest of the crew could see it even after he pointed it out.
500GB is a lot of naughty pictures.
Pale-o-ntologists are welcome to answer as well...
All we ever seem to see about the soft tissue claim is references back to the original press release. What claims have been published in the peer reviewed literature, and how have those claims been received?
As I understand it, what actually happened is that there was some "stuff" in the holes where blood vessels formerly flowed through the leg bones, and it came out when a solvent was applied. Then came the press release; I haven't seen any stories about the eventual analysis of the material, and the lengthening silence makes me wonder whether the press release was a jumped conclusion.
> Why would losing a color receptor constitute an evolutionary advantage?
Possibly it wasn't so much an advantage as happenstance, not selected against because the early mammal lifestyle didn't much need the extra colors. (Because they were nocturnal, IIRC, but I haven't got time to dig out the article right now to verify that.)
Also, there may be an advantage in losing stuff that isn't needed, if it reduces the energy cost of building/maintaining/operating the organism.
> Well, the article says that recent research shows that reach-and-grasp did not evolve at the same time as the better vision, which makes it unlikely that they evolved for the same purpose.
I'm not sure that's a good argument. It's not like evolution happens on demand.
Our own upright posture, opposable thumbs, and big brains didn't all evolve at the same time, but we still build our lifestyle around their conjunction.
Uhmmm... the hypothesis, even if correct, doesn't say that snakes lost their legs due to meddling in the affairs of a couple of innocent humans.
Conventional wisdom is that our depth perception and improved color vision supported an arboreal fruit-eating lifestyle.
It's not obvious why our lineage would co-evolve with snakes any more than any other mammalian lineage would.
BTW, "improved color vision" is relative. Birds have receptors for four colors rather than three. Early mammals lost two of the four, which is why your dog is "color blind". Our lineage re-gained a third, though not the same as either of the two that our ancestors had lost. There was an article about this in Scientific American a month or two back.
> Any information on charges?
We could tell you, but then we'd have to arrest you.
> How many really require a graduate degree? Not that I said "to do," not "to get." The B.A. is slowly supplanting the Diploma as the "price of entry" into the workforce, and the M.A. is becoming the new B.A
I've worked at a place where there was an obvious glass ceiling separating the degree holders from the non-degree-holders. The field of the degree didn't matter. Even though it was an IT department, a BA in art history was sufficient to put you above the ceiling.
> If you really think the majority of professors make $200k, you're nuts. At the school where I work, incoming assistant profs make ~$40k, associate profs with tenure about $55k and the full professors clear about $90k.
Clearly it depends on the school and the professor's field, but those numbers are way low for computer science.
Check out the Taulbee Survey. Scroll down to Table 34, examine the median and mean for tenure track salaries, and take note of the fact that that's a 9-month salary for someone who just put their foot on the stair.
> This is the U.S. government we're talking about. Shouldn't the question be, "How did they manage not to lose 2 of the 700 boxes?"
That would be uncharacteristic thoroughness.