> I think you're going to get a lot of people giving you the Kissinger line: "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because so little is at stake"
I think Kissinger might have actually been right about, say, being an English professor and having to defend your Marxist interpretation of some obscure Middle English poem against a rival's Feminist interpretation, but in the natural sciences it seems to be possible to actually do some constructive work.
That's not to say there aren't disputes, office politics, turf battles, administrators on their own agendas, etc., but at least Kissinger's accusation of intrinsic pettiness in the subject matter seems to be off base.
EdinBear may want to visit a library and browse the journals of his chosen field to see what kind of stuff is being published. That should give some idea of how politicized/trivialized/etc the basic subject matter of the field is. The office politics is probably an invariant, whether in academia, industry, politics, or any other field where people are brought together into an organization.
>...costs like helpdesk support, floor support people, etc. UNIX desktops are a lot easier to administer remotely in a lot of cases - I fix them all the time. The Windows boxes involve a lot more interactive help...
Others are making a good case that the price was the HP hardware, but here's an interesting factoid I'll plug in here anyway:
About a decade ago there was supposedly a study saying that it costs companies $15K/desktop/year to run PCs, with the biggest part of that cost being the lost productivity from having low-paid secretaries and clerks constantly running down the hall and interrupting high-paid engineers etc., to get help on some trivial computer task.
> In any of my attempts to get references to or explanations of evidence from creationists about the "science" behind creationism, that is about the best they've given me.
When I tried to get a creationist to spell out the key evidence for creation in another story here a couple of months ago, almost everything he listed was an attempt to refute the theory of evolution rather than an attempt to provide evidence for creation.
I think the vast majority of creationists have difficulties with the concept of evidence.
> Leave it to people to take their "all powerfull, all knowing" God, and place all kinds of restictions on what God is capable....
> What if God, when he created the earth, created not only most of what we see now, but all the evidence of the evolutionary process....
> What if He has a sense of humor, and is laughing his ass off at us right now?
Yeah, when creationists suggest that God faked the evidence for evolution, they should pause to wonder whether an even better joke might have occured to him.
> I bought a "Science for Christian Students" book at the thrift store for laughs.
Anyone curious about the intellectual stature of creationist authors should rush over to the talk.origins newsgroup, find the week-old thread named "Weasel program", and skim down to the point where the published and oft-quoted creationist author Walter ReMine intervened and ended up making himself look like a fool of the first rank (and IMO raised some reasonable question about his basic honesty while he was at it).
Be sure to read all his posts in the thread, because it gets better as it goes.
> Touma and Wisdom, p. 1955. etc etc etc, Google is your friend
Yes, but it's not creationists' friend. It took me about 5 seconds to find five posts to talk.origins that invoke Touman and Wisdom to refute the creationist lunar recession argument. You, sir, are engaging in egregious quote mining.
Or more likely merely quoting some creationist Web page that did the quote mining for you.
> how you geeks stay fit individually in your homes
The "in your homes" part is your first mistake. Sure, do some pushies and sitties, but also get out and walk, swim, ride a bicycle, etc.
And do it in the daytime now and then; sunlight is necessary for proper vitamin D management in humans. Contrary to a myth common among geeks, sunlight doesn't really destroy us.
And eat right and sleep right and take regular showers, while you're at it.
> It's a theory... just like this story. If you begin to automatically take theory for fact, you are a fool.
Too bad the theory exists for the sole purpose of explaining the facts. Creationists like to sing the "It's Just A Theory" hymn, but it's the facts that disprove creationism. The theory replaced creationism because we needed something that actually fit the facts.
> But it's hard to see how a complex culture could develop without speech.
Long before this discovery, some people have speculated that the first 'speech' was sign language.
Also, I'm curious how necessary this mutation actually was. Sure, it made things more facile, but how many vowels and consonants are the absolute minimum for meaningful oral communication? IMO, this article is not actually an "origin of language" issue; it's a "recent improvement in the ability to speak" issue.
> Many animals in fact do have customs and cultures. They may not be as elaborate as the fake business-suit song and dance you are used to but by your logic a tribesman in Africa is not human because their culture is not like your own?
In the future they'll argue whether PowerPoint was necessary for culture, or vice versa.
> 3. and this article could be related to the Biblically documented mutation from the tower of Babel (of course then you'd have to accept the existence and interference of God)
Except that the bible story doesn't call it a mutation, and the people already spoke in the bible story, and if the bible story is true then your god is an incompetent twit, since people still learn each other's languages easily enough to cooperate on large construction projects.
> If you had children, they'd learn to speak as well as you, but that doesn't appear to be the case with gorillas.
One issue is whether gorillas in the wild (or in the zoo) have any motivation to learn to 'talk'. It's not obvious that they should learn to 'talk' well in an experiment like this.
> A great many websites do not function without it. In particular, forms no longer work.... Links in some website depend on javascript, which means that browsing around certain website becomes impossible with javascript disabled. And constant re-enabling/disabling makes it a pain in the ass to do.
Agreed. Solution? I wish Moz would add per-site enabling/disabling of js, just as they do for cookies. If your parameters are set to call for it, prompt you the first time you visit the site and remember the answer thereafter.
> I haven't read the rag since it became a political tool
You may be surprised to learn that SciAm isn't the only science outlet that's becoming politicized. Unfortunately, this seems to be an antibody reaction to the fact that lots of special interest groups are using pretend-science to support their social and political agendas, and real science is pretty much being forced to fight back to keep itself distinct from the pseudosciences. (As the rest of your post shows, you have already lost track of the distinction. Others will surely follow, if we just sit back and let it happen.)
At any rate, other, more respectable science magazines have started covering things like the problems with new-wave creationism, and recently I've even seen a CS article that directly addresses one branch of the pseudoscience being peddled by the Discovery Institute (a neocon group that wants to use religion to control the masses, as they admit in their own writings, and is trying to use pseudoscience to wedge creationism into the public school curriculum). The relevant claims are so silly that scientists have traditionally prefered to simply ignore them, but they are being pushed on the public so vigorously that more and more scientists feel a need to speak up.
So unless your own views are merely political, don't single out Scientific American for participating in a more general cultural phenomenon.
> but the vibe of this/. article is consistent with my gestalt of a general problem with SciAm' new editoral policy of propagandizing scientific materialism, and gives me a great pretext to rip on it. Scientific materialism is an IDEOLOGY.
Actually, science isn't married to materialism; it's married to evidence. We study all manner of phenomena that are invisible to the senses and might well have been considered supernatural if they could have been demonstrated 200 years ago. And if you ever find evidence for your favorite deity, science will gladly study that as well. The concept of "materialism" is irrelevant to science, and serves only as a bogeyman that science-deniers can invoke to justify ignoring the findings of science that they don't like.
> but I cancelled my subscription long ago, when it started bleeding Gaia-worship from the editorial aorta all over my nice clean carpet, so I generally don't see those unless I stop by the library.
Sadly, you don't leave the impression that you spend a lot of time in the library.
And see a doctor about that knee jerk.
ps - Dismissing science as a religion, ideology, philosophy, etc., is a very common practice among groups whose beliefs are contrary to the findings of science. Which group do you belong to? Your reference to "Gaia-worship" suggests that you object to the findings about the influence of pollution on the environment.
> That could provide a cultural insight as to why china would be so open to open source?
IANAChinese, but I would guess that the less cozy a country's relationship with the USA, the quicker that country will adopt OSS and/or non-Made-in-the-USA software, for a variety of reasons.
as a symbol of cultural independence from American hegemony
(for communist countries) as an explicit rejection of US IT companies as symbols of capitalism
for reasons of national security
Regarding that last one, I don't know whether there's any spyware in Windows or not, but I do know that spyware happens, and if I ran a country I don't think I'd rely on any concept of basic human honesty to assure me that MS & the US government weren't in cahoots, systematically shipping software to spy on my country.
Heck, if I were a petty dictator I would probably try using spyware on my neighbors.
> Most "smart" people i know ( and i include myself:P ) aren't religious at all yet believe in extraterrestrials and other unexplained things. The reason for this in my case is, that there is proof that we didn't come from Adam and Eve, and that jesus could not heal the blind/walk on water/ect.
Actually, Jesus' miracles aren't disproven because they are in their very essence claims that a supernatural agent intervened to disrupt the normal operation of nature. So I would modify your:
> Maybe we just believe everything unless we can prove it wrong?
to say that we believe things that would be the result of the ordinary operations of nature, e.g. abiogenesis and evolution on at least a few other planets, but we reject things that are contrary to the ordinary operations of nature, e.g. walking on water and raising the dead, due to the lack of any tangible evidence that the necessary agents actually exist - or even that the events actually happen.
> Well, that's apparently a myth [physiology.org]. A lot of people (including doctors) have taken it on faith.
Notice that (a) I didn't say the doctors specifically recommend the 8x8 policy that your link reviews [they generally just say "lots of water", though they may be more specific when there's a threat of dehydration], and (b) the cited link reviews the 8x8 policy as normal practice for healthy individuals, which isn't the normal circumstances for visiting the doctor's office.
The point remains that drinking lots of water (or other fluids with a high water content) is important in certain situations, such as when you have a flowing nose or behind, and it's not dismissed as "alternative medicine" even though it doesn't involve synthetic drugs or surgery.
Slashdot Mirror
> The other thing that nobody mentioned is that that $22,000 workstation will probably last 6 or 7 years.
And you will come to think of it as "a dog" before the first two years are up, just as for a PC.
> I think you're going to get a lot of people giving you the Kissinger line: "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because so little is at stake"
I think Kissinger might have actually been right about, say, being an English professor and having to defend your Marxist interpretation of some obscure Middle English poem against a rival's Feminist interpretation, but in the natural sciences it seems to be possible to actually do some constructive work.
That's not to say there aren't disputes, office politics, turf battles, administrators on their own agendas, etc., but at least Kissinger's accusation of intrinsic pettiness in the subject matter seems to be off base.
EdinBear may want to visit a library and browse the journals of his chosen field to see what kind of stuff is being published. That should give some idea of how politicized/trivialized/etc the basic subject matter of the field is. The office politics is probably an invariant, whether in academia, industry, politics, or any other field where people are brought together into an organization.
>
Others are making a good case that the price was the HP hardware, but here's an interesting factoid I'll plug in here anyway:
About a decade ago there was supposedly a study saying that it costs companies $15K/desktop/year to run PCs, with the biggest part of that cost being the lost productivity from having low-paid secretaries and clerks constantly running down the hall and interrupting high-paid engineers etc., to get help on some trivial computer task.
> Now their computers are made of pressed particle-board.
Now they're free, as in beer, speech, and old cardboard boxes.
> In any of my attempts to get references to or explanations of evidence from creationists about the "science" behind creationism, that is about the best they've given me.
When I tried to get a creationist to spell out the key evidence for creation in another story here a couple of months ago, almost everything he listed was an attempt to refute the theory of evolution rather than an attempt to provide evidence for creation.
I think the vast majority of creationists have difficulties with the concept of evidence.
> Leave it to people to take their "all powerfull, all knowing" God, and place all kinds of restictions on what God is capable.
> What if God, when he created the earth, created not only most of what we see now, but all the evidence of the evolutionary process.
> What if He has a sense of humor, and is laughing his ass off at us right now?
Yeah, when creationists suggest that God faked the evidence for evolution, they should pause to wonder whether an even better joke might have occured to him.
> I bought a "Science for Christian Students" book at the thrift store for laughs.
Anyone curious about the intellectual stature of creationist authors should rush over to the talk.origins newsgroup, find the week-old thread named "Weasel program", and skim down to the point where the published and oft-quoted creationist author Walter ReMine intervened and ended up making himself look like a fool of the first rank (and IMO raised some reasonable question about his basic honesty while he was at it).
Be sure to read all his posts in the thread, because it gets better as it goes.
[blah, blah, blah... snip]
> Touma and Wisdom, p. 1955. etc etc etc, Google is your friend
Yes, but it's not creationists' friend. It took me about 5 seconds to find five posts to talk.origins that invoke Touman and Wisdom to refute the creationist lunar recession argument. You, sir, are engaging in egregious quote mining.
Or more likely merely quoting some creationist Web page that did the quote mining for you.
> It's hard for me to imagine how a fundamentalist Christian can read this passage and accept that it is literally true[From Genesis:]
The part about God using a GOTO is what tipped me off.
> how you geeks stay fit individually in your homes
The "in your homes" part is your first mistake. Sure, do some pushies and sitties, but also get out and walk, swim, ride a bicycle, etc.
And do it in the daytime now and then; sunlight is necessary for proper vitamin D management in humans. Contrary to a myth common among geeks, sunlight doesn't really destroy us.
And eat right and sleep right and take regular showers, while you're at it.
> It's a theory... just like this story. If you begin to automatically take theory for fact, you are a fool.
Too bad the theory exists for the sole purpose of explaining the facts. Creationists like to sing the "It's Just A Theory" hymn, but it's the facts that disprove creationism. The theory replaced creationism because we needed something that actually fit the facts.
> But it's hard to see how a complex culture could develop without speech.
Long before this discovery, some people have speculated that the first 'speech' was sign language.
Also, I'm curious how necessary this mutation actually was. Sure, it made things more facile, but how many vowels and consonants are the absolute minimum for meaningful oral communication? IMO, this article is not actually an "origin of language" issue; it's a "recent improvement in the ability to speak" issue.
> Many animals in fact do have customs and cultures. They may not be as elaborate as the fake business-suit song and dance you are used to but by your logic a tribesman in Africa is not human because their culture is not like your own?
In the future they'll argue whether PowerPoint was necessary for culture, or vice versa.
> 3. and this article could be related to the Biblically documented mutation from the tower of Babel (of course then you'd have to accept the existence and interference of God)
Except that the bible story doesn't call it a mutation, and the people already spoke in the bible story, and if the bible story is true then your god is an incompetent twit, since people still learn each other's languages easily enough to cooperate on large construction projects.
> If you had children, they'd learn to speak as well as you, but that doesn't appear to be the case with gorillas.
One issue is whether gorillas in the wild (or in the zoo) have any motivation to learn to 'talk'. It's not obvious that they should learn to 'talk' well in an experiment like this.
> A great many websites do not function without it. In particular, forms no longer work.
Agreed. Solution? I wish Moz would add per-site enabling/disabling of js, just as they do for cookies. If your parameters are set to call for it, prompt you the first time you visit the site and remember the answer thereafter.
> I haven't read the rag since it became a political tool
You may be surprised to learn that SciAm isn't the only science outlet that's becoming politicized. Unfortunately, this seems to be an antibody reaction to the fact that lots of special interest groups are using pretend-science to support their social and political agendas, and real science is pretty much being forced to fight back to keep itself distinct from the pseudosciences. (As the rest of your post shows, you have already lost track of the distinction. Others will surely follow, if we just sit back and let it happen.)
At any rate, other, more respectable science magazines have started covering things like the problems with new-wave creationism, and recently I've even seen a CS article that directly addresses one branch of the pseudoscience being peddled by the Discovery Institute (a neocon group that wants to use religion to control the masses, as they admit in their own writings, and is trying to use pseudoscience to wedge creationism into the public school curriculum). The relevant claims are so silly that scientists have traditionally prefered to simply ignore them, but they are being pushed on the public so vigorously that more and more scientists feel a need to speak up.
So unless your own views are merely political, don't single out Scientific American for participating in a more general cultural phenomenon.
> but the vibe of this
Actually, science isn't married to materialism; it's married to evidence. We study all manner of phenomena that are invisible to the senses and might well have been considered supernatural if they could have been demonstrated 200 years ago. And if you ever find evidence for your favorite deity, science will gladly study that as well. The concept of "materialism" is irrelevant to science, and serves only as a bogeyman that science-deniers can invoke to justify ignoring the findings of science that they don't like.
> but I cancelled my subscription long ago, when it started bleeding Gaia-worship from the editorial aorta all over my nice clean carpet, so I generally don't see those unless I stop by the library.
Sadly, you don't leave the impression that you spend a lot of time in the library.
And see a doctor about that knee jerk.
ps - Dismissing science as a religion, ideology, philosophy, etc., is a very common practice among groups whose beliefs are contrary to the findings of science. Which group do you belong to? Your reference to "Gaia-worship" suggests that you object to the findings about the influence of pollution on the environment.
> What I would like the goverments to do is to define open fileformats/protocols and only accept/buy software which supports these formats 100%.
I agree wholeheartedly. Letting the public be at the mercy of one company's whims is nothing short of criminal.
We should actually be pushing for the adoption of standards rather than for the adoption of open source per se.
> they do mention that publicly-funded research should steer clear of licenses such as the GPL.
Actually, the GPL is how publicly funded research should be licensed. These people are doing nothing more than lobbying for an entitlement.
> That could provide a cultural insight as to why china would be so open to open source?
IANAChinese, but I would guess that the less cozy a country's relationship with the USA, the quicker that country will adopt OSS and/or non-Made-in-the-USA software, for a variety of reasons.
- as a symbol of cultural independence from American hegemony
- (for communist countries) as an explicit rejection of US IT companies as symbols of capitalism
- for reasons of national security
Regarding that last one, I don't know whether there's any spyware in Windows or not, but I do know that spyware happens, and if I ran a country I don't think I'd rely on any concept of basic human honesty to assure me that MS & the US government weren't in cahoots, systematically shipping software to spy on my country.Heck, if I were a petty dictator I would probably try using spyware on my neighbors.
> I was beginning to think we wouldn't have any stories that invited obligatory porn comments today!
Yep... just add a joystick and all the wankers can be virtual wankers.
You're getting married, and you'r worried that diamonds are a big scam?
> Excuse me, but why the "[sic]"? It actually is Ada. It is not ADA.
That's why I used "[sic]". I was responding to someone who used "ADA", and I wanted to indicate that my change to "Ada" was deliberate.
> And it is a wonderful language, despite all the "designed by committee" crap floating around, posted by people who have never programmed with it.
Such as ESR.
Yes, I agree that it's a wonderful language. I use it for almost everything I do, when the choice is up to me.
> Most "smart" people i know ( and i include myself
Actually, Jesus' miracles aren't disproven because they are in their very essence claims that a supernatural agent intervened to disrupt the normal operation of nature. So I would modify your:
> Maybe we just believe everything unless we can prove it wrong?
to say that we believe things that would be the result of the ordinary operations of nature, e.g. abiogenesis and evolution on at least a few other planets, but we reject things that are contrary to the ordinary operations of nature, e.g. walking on water and raising the dead, due to the lack of any tangible evidence that the necessary agents actually exist - or even that the events actually happen.
> Well, that's apparently a myth [physiology.org]. A lot of people (including doctors) have taken it on faith.
Notice that (a) I didn't say the doctors specifically recommend the 8x8 policy that your link reviews [they generally just say "lots of water", though they may be more specific when there's a threat of dehydration], and (b) the cited link reviews the 8x8 policy as normal practice for healthy individuals, which isn't the normal circumstances for visiting the doctor's office.
The point remains that drinking lots of water (or other fluids with a high water content) is important in certain situations, such as when you have a flowing nose or behind, and it's not dismissed as "alternative medicine" even though it doesn't involve synthetic drugs or surgery.