Yeah, I recognized the difference when I responded, and hoped you'd see the fallacy you just made before you made it, but it in the event that you didn't, I'd prepared the following thoughts. . .
If you'll re-read my post, I think you'll find that I was careful to frame it in such away as to not make any unwarranted statements of fact beyond that which is generally accepted as valid, (nobody would argue that Quantum strangeness doesn't open numerous doors), or which were not my own opinion.
Which returns us once again to the earlier point: Real scientists don't say, "Bullshit" when somebody suggests an idea. They ask questions. Saying "Bullshit" indicates strong emotional blinders and bias. --Because, honestly, are you really trying to say that you'd give Astrology a fair look and that you do not hold any emotionally biased reaction stored up inside you at all, and that, really, you were only objecting to the manner of my posting, (which so far as I can see, was unobjectionable)? Cuz I'm willing to bet that's not the case at all and that you were hair-splitting so as to avoid the larger question. But in the case I am mistaken, I would encourage you to engage in some of that scientific curiosity for which Humans who possess it should be given the highest respect, and find out more; ask your smart questions and go see what you can learn.
BTW, I'm not attacking you or looking down on you. I'm just pointing stuff out in a way I hope we can both find amusing!
You asked two smart questions, the kind real science is supposed to ask, and then with your last line showed the world that you would ignore any answers which didn't agree with your existing beliefs.
Please don't pretend at science until you figure out the basement level fundamentals. Scientist cannot afford to walk into a lab while snorting, "This whole line of inquiry is bullshit." Only priests do that.
If you manage to put your emotions and ego back in their respective jars, then you can learn a bit more about my efforts and thinking on the subject by reading my response to one of the other posters who also asked a smart question, but who sounded as though he was closer to "thinker" than he was to "believer".
The point you raise, of course, is perhaps the very best of all the points raised against Astrology, and it is indeed the most startling.
Most of the other arguments I've seen to be logically flawed, but that people's behavior patterns are influenced by subtle suggestion and various other factors has been proven over and over again in many areas of life. --That people do not recognize just how true this is, is the startling part. Through television programming and advertising and education, people's behavior is influenced. Further, it is modified through the types of food we eat, the drugs we take and even climate we grow up in, even the ambient sounds in our environment and, (I would argue), the electromagnetic spectrum, and who knows what other influences.
The human being is very easily influenced. --Which brings us full-circle.
There is no doubt in my mind that behavior is shaped and modified by subtle influences all around us, and that some of those behaviors 'bake' into us and become a sort of base-line, as we grow up, which as I argue, a probable basis for astrology. The question is. . , the chicken or the egg, right?
Well, I tend to feel that being told that you are "Neon" (to take your example), only works when you are able to understand language and the complexities of meaning. When you are a baby, or even embryonic, that kind of influence isn't going to work the same way as it does with adults.
But still. ..
How does one tell which influence is which? Are somebody's observed behavior patterns there to begin with or are they "Neon" instructions picked up from glancing at a newspaper horror-scope? (Newspapers are the last place anybody should look for anything of value. Even the comic strips stink these days!)
I started trying this experiment; --I searched around until I found a very well researched book on Chinese astrology, (a translation of a well-respected Chinese text on the subject). The Chinese system bases its primary sign on the Year as opposed to the Month, and it speaks to a different layer of a person's behavioral 'format'. (I have found that Western Astrology seems to measure people's behavior in a short-term kind of way, as they handle themselves in conversations and immediate influences, whereas Eastern Astrology seems to measure one's background long-term behavioral biases; their fundamental beliefs and approaches to life.)
I began measuring the qualities of the various people I knew against the archetypes. It was surprising, in this one text, just how detailed and exact the descriptions were, as well as brief when specific elements were taken into account in conjunction with signs. (A 'metal Ox' vs a 'wooden Ox', for example.) Specific in some cases to the point of describing an individual's passionate and life-consuming primary interests, ("Will operate their own green house or garden" or "Will have their own extensive and highly indexed library"). The brevity was important because it implies that the Astrologer isn't on a 'fishing for hits' expedition. After a long moment of unhappy silence after I read out the description of one engineer I know, he said, "Okay. But now read all the rest of it," to which I was responded, "That's it. There is no more." --We had been having an argument about Astrology and he demanded that I read out the half page under his sign and specific element. It rather back-fired, as the book had him down cold with an exactingly accurate description of his personality and life-defining interests. Not everybody has such a right down the middle set of influences, but in his case, it was painfully apparent.
The really nice thing about Asian astrology, (from a sociological perspective), is that for many years, people in the West knew almost nothing about it. Animal signs didn't appear in newspapers, and to a large degree still do not, and as such, the contamination from incident 'instruction' to behave in a certain way, is much lower than with Western astrology. This helps to address the point
Science, is thus something that can disprove something is is thought to be true. An example would be horoscopes. Science killed them long ago, yet some people (quite irrationally) still swear by them. Quantum Mechanics is strange and counter-intuitive, but none-the-less has mountains of experimental evidence to show its veracity.
Well, science has tried very hard to kill astrology, but after my years of studying the patterns of behavior in people with respect to their times of birth, I believe it is more accurate to say that many would simply really, really LIKE it if science would kill astrology, (for reasons I've never fully understood). --Especially these days. After all, the latter part of your statement above does much to throw into question the former.
There was another Slashdot article a few days ago wherein researchers were baffled to discover that certain radioactive particles decay at different rates depending on the time of year, (or as they assumed, the Earth's distance from the Sun). I wonder what force between the Earth and the Sun could affect the behavior of particles and if that force might not be related to the manner in which people's brains develop as they grow up? It would help to explain things.
Conventional wisdom is always growing for a reason; we don't know everything, and as such we should never be hasty to dismiss observable phenomenon just because we happen to find them objectionable for one reason or another.
But the claim that voting machines were the result of the "Democrat Political Machine" seems far fetched in the extreme. When I looked into the history, it appears that their implementation was a long and complex process, aided in significant ways by many Republicans, and more importantly, built and programmed by companies with staunch Republican allegiances. So. . , what are you basing your assertion on?
Do you know anybody who works in the news media? I do, several guys both in TV and paper news who have been placed all over the spectrum from editing room floors to the administrative level and even teaching positions at media and public relations colleges. They ALL report (privately) that the whole game is a giant crock of malarkey. The most interesting aspect is when the news teams don't even realize they're doing it, but simply re-broadcast biases and falsehoods because they are part of a form of non-deliberate groupthink. But it's worst when suggested stories are simply struck from the record because they don't match up with whatever political beliefs the owner happens to hold.
One of the big problems is the AP Newswire, to which so many large journals subscribe and pull feeds from word for word. --One thin little bottleneck through which major breaking news passes, meaning entire nations uniformly learn about events which are filtered by only a very small number of people.
The intriguing thing about bloggers is that they don't do this; they represent a broad and varied non-uniform message. This does not mean all bloggers are accurate or that there isn't the internet 'echo chamber' effect going on, but it does mean that there is actually a higher probability of actual news coming through the system. Have you ever clicked into democracynow.com? Some of the more prolific blogger sites have their own journalists covering stories and you generally get broader coverage, and people being interviewed in a non-soundbite kind of way.
This is a very impressive article and all, good on yeh Intel and all that. . , but did anybody else notice that one of the most important tests was conspicuously missing?
That of power consumption during the write process. --They measured it on idle and on read but not on write, which is where SSD's fall down hard-core.
One of the things the ASUS eee crowd was surprised to discover was that the difference between the hard-drive and the SSD versions of their little netbooks was that there was virtually NO detectable power-savings in using the SSD over the hard drive.
Power consumption was the thing I was racing through the article for with 'chomping at the bit' anticipation for. What gives? (Not that it actually matters in a practical sense for me, but I would like to know more about this!)
This looks about as cool finding one of those floppy records designed for a needle turntable inside a computer magazine. No. Wait. I actually remember being pretty darn jazzed about that, since that was a period when you had to key programs in by hand and the magazines published miles of BASIC code. It was novel AND useful.
Sorry, big, slick magazine publisher. Nice try, but perhaps you should have waited until your 80th anniversary.
greed, fear & ego are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of yOUR dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes.
Holy smokes! You don't let up!
When are you going to figure out that nobody listens when they are bludgeoned? You won't wear people down, you'll just teach them to grow comfortable in filtering out your white noise. Heck, I find the kinds of topics you spew on about fascinating and worthy of exploration, but I can't even get through the first sentence of your sermon on the mount howling.
You sound like a lunatic, and not because of your concerns or your content. You're scary, and not because you're telling people things they don't want to hear, but because, simply put, you sound like you've done too many drugs and that parts of your brain have been destroyed. This can only lead people to associate your subject matter with brain damage and sickness. It is natural for people, on an instinctive level, to avoid people who show outward displays of disease and by association, the subjects and activities they immerse themselves in. --If you truly want to communicate, you have to stop shouting and start listening. It's a two way street. Until you learn this, you're going to be all alone in the wilderness talking to yourself, which is I suspect all you're really trying to do anyway. I even suspect that you might be doing this specifically to instill fear of inquiry in people. It would certainly not be the first time knowledge was attacked in this way. Question your impulses, because they are NOT helping.
Oooh. One of those sweet Japanese net-books from before the net-book.
I got over that strange sense of manga-inspired culture-envy/regret years ago, but I'll tell you, I still get pangs of 'gaijin' when I happen across one of those beauties. That's some serious tech-cred, dude!
Indeed! It is high time the U.S. exploits off-shore mining along the Florida coast so as to break their dependency on foreign packets! To heck with the Environmental Protection Agency!
has already chosen to turn a blind eye to corporate wrong-doing, so of course the company is going to try to hurt them again in new and creative ways.
Everybody knows that cell phones are a problem for simple physical reasons, but they either don't care, pretend it's not true, or have been successfully lied to. Either way, what better crop of victims could an evil overlord possibly ask for? People who are practically begging for further abuse. And so they will be further abused until they choose not to be victims anymore.
It's entirely possible to get along in life without a cell phone. Heck, with a decent VOIP company and a naked DSL line, it's possible to enjoy unlimited high speed internet and high-quality world-wide communications through any phone system ALL for about $50 a month. That's what I do, and it's awesome. --And I don't have to put up with my own telephone trying to scramble my brain. I encourage everybody to look into this.
Every city has at least one or two. The best are the crack in the wall places with a guy in the back surrounded by parts.
Some of the items you'll buy will be a great deal, others maybe not, and yeah, you'll have to pay tax. --But you won't pay for shipping, (which, if you're buying lots of goodies, will probably cost a fair bit, though probably not 10% of the cost of a well-equipped new machine).
But nothing is nicer than being able to run out on a gut-feeling of inspiration and pick up a stack of parts that same afternoon. Speaking as a geek, I have to say that walking out of a shop with an OEM hard drive packaged in nothing but an anti-static bag is one of the best feelings in the world. --I realized on one of those occasions why my girlfriend loved shopping for clothes so much, and it was with a bit of wistfulness that I recognized I only shopped for computer bits once every few years, whereas for her cruising the used-clothing stores was a weekly fix. Comfort shopping is silly, but it's also human, so when you do end up spending a whack of money, it's nice to jump in and get right into it.
There are other advantages when you buy from a local, private vendor. If you change your mind about a part, or if a stick of memory is faulty or whatever, you can always go back and hash it out with the owner. Either he'll tell you what you did wrong, or replace the part, and he'll nearly always remember you. A human connection is great; you don't have to fill out impersonal forms and take a number or stay on hold or any of that lousy nonsense. You've got a guy right there who wants to help you, partly because he doesn't want to have to give your money back and partly because he's also a geek who instinctively wants stuff to work right. And sometimes you'll meet a really cool person where it's fun just to chat and trade opinions and such; more than once I've gone into a shop with a well-considered shopping list only to have the guy behind the counter say, "Oh, we don't have that mother board, but check it out! We do have this one; it works great and it costs less than the one on your list, plus it has this extra feature which is really cool! The manufacturer just put out the next model, so they're trying to sell off their previous one, which is why it's such a great deal." I've picked up some awesome hardware that way. So I'd say it's well worth the extra expense (if it even adds up to that much when you take shipping into account, and any unexpected in-house deals or whatever), to buy from small vendors.
I will say, however, that buying on-line does generate a sort of Christmas day feeling, where you get to wait in eager anticipation for stuff to arrive, plus you get to build exactly the system you want because you can be really specific about the parts. But I prefer the more adventurous side of going out to find parts yourself. I think it might satisfy some kind of latent hunter/gatherer gene inside us all.
By far, however, the absolute worst way to spend money on computer parts is to go to a big, corporate, well-lit box store where the guys have little name tags and same-color shirts. Ugh! --I mean, that's fine for laptops and big screens and such, but for hard drives and mother boards and video cards and bags of little screws? What a waste of an experience! I'd rather use an abacus than build a computer from parts obtained in a damned box store. Not to mention that it's nearly always a LOT more expensive that way. Nobody can beat them on price for big items which they order by the shipping palate, but for smaller parts. . , there's simply too many to choose from, so they stream-line their stock and charge you up the wazoo for them. And anyway box stores, you know, have no soul.
Anyway, I hope everything works out for. Enjoy!
-FL
Re:Holy smokes. I feel like a grandparent!
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Google Turns 10
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· Score: 1
You're old, we get it.
Hm. Uncalled for snark. Did I fail to recognize somebody's brilliance or was that just general bitterness?
Ah well. Everybody gets to try again tomorrow.
Cheers!
-FL
Holy smokes. I feel like a grandparent!
on
Google Turns 10
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I can't believe how you've grown! Why it seems like only yesterday. . .
Literally. This internet thing is growing up so fast!
Dang. There are actually net-savvy kids out there now who never lived in a world without Google. Think about that!
When did years start to fly by like this? I'm amazed.
There was something about the article which I found really infuriating, but could not pin down. All I could think was, "This is so totally misleading, but I have absolutely no idea why I'm reacting this way. I just have this intense sensation that I'm being offered a total crock, maybe not on purpose, but still! Grr."
Sooner or later you'll grow up and realize you were blowing things way out of proportion.
Just thinking out loud and at length; I'm in the middle of dealing with a variation of this in some difficult friends, and so all these patterns are at the top of my mind at the moment and need processing. Slashdot happens to be my think-pad of the moment despite the fact that it may not be entirely appropriate. I don't usually let this happen, but things got away from me this week. I appreciate everybody's indulgence.
If I absolutely had to choose one, it certainly wouldn't be a Buffyverse. I don't even see how you could populate the game world realistically. I mean, how many Slayers can you really have? Does everybody have to be some red-shirt vampire? What is there to do? Do you need to collect money? Why? To pay for bigger stakes? Everybody but Cordelia was broke most of the time and that worked out just fine. And Sunnyvale is pretty small. . . In the first episode, it was put plainly that there was only one club in town and that things were pretty limited. Do you get points for doing homework and being bored?
Whereas the Firefly universe is. . , well, it seems like the hands down most logical choice for a multi-player game universe. Spaceships, collecting money for vital supplies, lots of different and fascinating character classes, goods trading, shoot outs, futuristic cities, floating cities, desert towns, reavers and evil empires. . , I mean, jeez! It has absolutely everything!
This silly decision sounds like it has one of two sources. . .
1. The marketing gurus are simply counting heads and trends in terms of disposable income dollars and goth-girls with free time, (which frankly is silly since the fan base has all grown up since Buffy was a hit, and are probably less likely to be such huge fans).
2. (And this is my personal opinion). The same forces over at Fox which deliberately deep-sixed Firefly for its anti-government, pro-revolutionist sentiment, (again, my opinion), aren't about to allow the same to get another toe-hold with some potentially massively popular game.
Whatever. I don't play video games, and thank goodness, because the people who got these properties sound deeply uninspired and planning-impaired. What a shame.
You've got this. . , I don't know, say a city, right? Picture it as some kind of SIM City kind of arrangement for now. We'll let the art and design departments bring it up to today's standards. You know, so that it looks cool. Okay. ..
So you've got this digital city. And it's set in, say 1920 America. Okay, and you have control over it in some way. Either you are a character walking around in it affecting things, or you're a hovering cursor playing civic engineer. I'll leave that up to the game play department. I'm not to the NEW idea yet. Hang with me. ..
So you build some buildings and do some city maintenance, and you have to stop crooks and gangsters, right? Okay. So you play around in this environment for a while and then the game shifts. You're no longer in 1920. Now it's 1950. Same city, but different decade. And all the stuff you did to the city 30 years ago is still there, but older. If you built a school, or a group of office buildings, then they'll have affected the way the city grew. We'll have to get the guys in the programming department to come up with some kind of fractal math or something. That'll win the game the smart awards, and you'll see why in a minute. ..
So there you've got the same city in 1950, and you keep going. You build stuff and catch crooks or whatever, and you do that for a while. Then the time frame flips again. Cue the award-winning fractal programming, and now you're in the year 2010. Awesome! Same effect. Buildings you put up are still there, or have been added to, or they've been torn down, and there's new highways and stuff. Whatever. It's totally impressive.
Now the player is feeling confident, right? They think they know what the game's about. But they don't, because right when they're beginning to say, "Oh, I get it. SIM City but like 3D with Time." Except they're not seeing the whole picture yet.
So it's 2010, and now you're in charge of this big city. And you've got to deal with crime and such, so you have a SWAT team or something, which has also been evolving over the years. What started as your little division of special cops is now a tricked out special unit. Anyway, you get increasingly difficult tasks, until you run into some bad guys who appear to be using alien technology. What. . ? Yeah, I didn't mention that yet. There's aliens. Anyway, the battle is really hard to win, but with some major effort, the playing defeats them. Except more aliens come and it starts getting bad. Like whole buildings start crashing down, -the ones the player took special care to build just so, those ones get wrecked in the battle. You know, to hook them emotionally. Then suddenly there's this huge boom and a warp gate opens up right in the middle of the city, and aliens start piling through it, see. It's like the end of the world, right?
What's that? Like Half Life? No, no, no. Well, yeah. But it's totally not like that. Just keep listening. ..
So right when things are going really bad, your team discovers the presence of a time-travel unit. And maybe there's this whole mission where you have to go get it. Anyway, you end up getting the ability to send your command unit to one of the other two time frames. Like 1920, or 1950. You get to choose where you want to play. And whatever you do to your city in the past affects what's happening in the future. So that fractal programming is now really the core of the game, see? Because the aliens can travel in time as well, right?
Ahh. Your face is lighting up. You're beginning to get it. Cool.
How do you win? Okay, I'm getting to that. There's a whole story unfolding, see. So to win certain adventures, you have to bring future technology to your squad in 1920, which instantly updates all the powers and secret weapons of your teams in the future. There could be whole adventures surrounding that. You'd have to make it difficult to bring technology back through time. Limit it somehow so you don't w
In our case, it was considered an engineering problem, so there were certain inviolable constraints, but as long as we satisfied those we were free to do whatever we pleased.
That's really the key. In our current society, engineering problems are efficiently solved when the team is content to work happily within limited rule sets. "You have X materials and Y time. Go!" --And so people agree to work and learn within an artificial set of constraints, knowing full well that the limits are artificial. --And under the best of circumstances, this is an entirely valid choice. But the truth must not be forgotten that in this world, nothing is ever entirely limited. I've known people who are very good at saying, "Okay. But if you don't mind, I'll just tweak reality so that X materials becomes X + something; I know a guy who is willing to trade that for this, and there's a woman who is dumping a whole bunch of something we could use if we altered our designs slightly, and if we ask nicely, there's this awesome facility we can use for the whole month free of charge. . , etc."
Such people are best placed in management roles. And that's interesting, isn't it? Power comes directly from refusing to accept arbitrary limits. But there is a time and a place; there are fun lessons to learn in deliberately working within artificial limits while somebody else is in charge of keeping the heat on and the paychecks coming. After all, in our society, it's important to have people excited and willing to work beneath management directives. So there's a place for everybody, and that's wonderful.
The thing about the school systems I was fighting against however, (particularly during pre-secondary education, where I did my bridge-building thing), was that this choice was never offered. That all students would be willing followers was not just assumed, it was enforced. The only way to cast yourself into a different role was to A) recognize the nature of the limitations and, B) fight against them. Problems arise because teachers and administrators sometimes have egos which are easily bruised. Saying, "No" is sometimes seen as saying, "You are personally inferior." It doesn't help when the student doesn't fully understand the problem and is pissed off and frustrated. Thus you end up with the sad scenario where you have grown adults trying with all their might and resources to crush the will of certain kids.
It becomes a further problem in that the pattern of obedience extends far beyond practical engineering problems; into every other aspect of life.
I've known and worked with people in areas where conservative obedience held no rational advantage, (which I would argue is the case more often than not), and it was common for people to get very upset when I pursued alternative methods to achieve goals, who even upon achieving results far beyond expectations, had a lot of trouble dealing with the fact that we'd left the beaten path. Comfort didn't come until they found some sort of perceived authority figure to pat them on the heads and praise them for their efforts, thus making the new approach socially acceptable.
It goes back to how we approach life. More than once I've heard people complain in some manner. ..
"But I did everything they asked! I was good! But look at where it has brought me!" Or. . , "HE didn't do as he was told! It's not fair that he should gain respect and reward while I haven't!"
It's a tough lesson, it hurts terribly when you realize you've been duped, and the first natural instinct is to deny the true shape of things, to cast the disobedient one/s as villain/s who must be punished so that your own obedience is validated. "See! See what happens if you break the rules and think too highly of yourself? (People like me will attack you because we are scared to dare ourselves.)" --I've been through it on that side and I remember being royally pissed off for ages, but luckily I was just a young kid when I figured it out and ha
I think someone pulled the same stunt on our professor in the past, which is why we were given 6 36" sticks to build a 20" x 2" span. That enforced a somewhat more conventional approach. It's rather difficult to drive a car across a rope.
Suspension bridges are essentially made of rope. --It would take a lot of work, (and probably earn one of those dreaded high marks I routinely tried to avoid), but my immediate thought given the scenario you describe would be to game the system by building a suspension bridge using ropes made out of lines of glue strengthened with fibers from crushed up sticks. I'd probably find some way to lock my bridge the to table as well, even going to far as to drill holes beforehand, because I bet the rules didn't say you weren't allowed to modify the testing apparatus itself. That would raise some eyebrows, and that's the point.
Anything to avoid thinking as instructed. --The unspoken prime directive of the school system is to make people willing to limit themselves within authority structures. (You can only use X number of beams, because those are the RULES, despite what the real world might be like, you WILL get used to there being absolute definitions of reality so that when you do enter the real world, you will be pre-conditioned for easy control. You will ASK to go to the washroom and you will believe your text books!) --And this absolutely infuriated me on a fundamental level. It's the reason Slashdot is so incredible; these pages contain posts from literally hundreds upon hundreds of very smart people who nonetheless think in nonsensical absolutes without even being aware that they have been trained into a kind of blindness; all while truly believing that they have a superior level of awareness even while reality orbits in the most astonishing of ways few of them are able to see. It breaks my heart some days. But it is changing. I see a lot more people around here these days who question things.
My objective in school was to force the system to fail me even while completing the tasks assigned with more grace and skill than the 'good' students, thus demonstrating the fact that the objective of schooling is NOT the cultivation of creativity or intelligence, but rather the instilling an underlying and nearly-invisible level of social obedience at all costs.
I proved my point with flying colors, and despite being bounced from the system, (resulting in some very pissed off teachers and professors and zero student debt; I gamed that system as well), went on to be successful in life and even asked to return to lecture in a few cases. My only regret, (and it is a big one), is that I wish I could have done all of this without giving into anger and arrogance during the process. Because while I did find it funny, it was an angry kind of funny. If I had the chance to do it all again, I'd make one of my objectives to hold a sense of love and compassion throughout. It would have been a thousand times more effective than the combative route I chose.
In twenty years, we'll all look back on this and laugh, like we do now when we read old articles about how Africanized killer bees are going to kill everybody in the US.
There's nothing wrong with projecting possible outcomes given known quantities. It's one of our strengths as a species, but untoward fear is certainly unnecessary. Ice ages happen like clock-work, so yeah, 'weather' does cover it, I suppose.
It's a shame those Africanized killer bees weren't up to the job of resisting the various causes of colony collapse disorder which is currently killing farms. I guess that IS sort of funny, albeit in an ironic kind of way.
Slashdot Mirror
Big difference.
Yeah, I recognized the difference when I responded, and hoped you'd see the fallacy you just made before you made it, but it in the event that you didn't, I'd prepared the following thoughts. . .
If you'll re-read my post, I think you'll find that I was careful to frame it in such away as to not make any unwarranted statements of fact beyond that which is generally accepted as valid, (nobody would argue that Quantum strangeness doesn't open numerous doors), or which were not my own opinion.
Which returns us once again to the earlier point: Real scientists don't say, "Bullshit" when somebody suggests an idea. They ask questions. Saying "Bullshit" indicates strong emotional blinders and bias. --Because, honestly, are you really trying to say that you'd give Astrology a fair look and that you do not hold any emotionally biased reaction stored up inside you at all, and that, really, you were only objecting to the manner of my posting, (which so far as I can see, was unobjectionable)? Cuz I'm willing to bet that's not the case at all and that you were hair-splitting so as to avoid the larger question. But in the case I am mistaken, I would encourage you to engage in some of that scientific curiosity for which Humans who possess it should be given the highest respect, and find out more; ask your smart questions and go see what you can learn.
BTW, I'm not attacking you or looking down on you. I'm just pointing stuff out in a way I hope we can both find amusing!
-FL
Wow! You just summed it all up, right there.
You asked two smart questions, the kind real science is supposed to ask, and then with your last line showed the world that you would ignore any answers which didn't agree with your existing beliefs.
Please don't pretend at science until you figure out the basement level fundamentals. Scientist cannot afford to walk into a lab while snorting, "This whole line of inquiry is bullshit." Only priests do that.
If you manage to put your emotions and ego back in their respective jars, then you can learn a bit more about my efforts and thinking on the subject by reading my response to one of the other posters who also asked a smart question, but who sounded as though he was closer to "thinker" than he was to "believer".
-FL
The point you raise, of course, is perhaps the very best of all the points raised against Astrology, and it is indeed the most startling.
Most of the other arguments I've seen to be logically flawed, but that people's behavior patterns are influenced by subtle suggestion and various other factors has been proven over and over again in many areas of life. --That people do not recognize just how true this is, is the startling part. Through television programming and advertising and education, people's behavior is influenced. Further, it is modified through the types of food we eat, the drugs we take and even climate we grow up in, even the ambient sounds in our environment and, (I would argue), the electromagnetic spectrum, and who knows what other influences.
The human being is very easily influenced. --Which brings us full-circle.
There is no doubt in my mind that behavior is shaped and modified by subtle influences all around us, and that some of those behaviors 'bake' into us and become a sort of base-line, as we grow up, which as I argue, a probable basis for astrology. The question is. . , the chicken or the egg, right?
Well, I tend to feel that being told that you are "Neon" (to take your example), only works when you are able to understand language and the complexities of meaning. When you are a baby, or even embryonic, that kind of influence isn't going to work the same way as it does with adults.
But still. . .
How does one tell which influence is which? Are somebody's observed behavior patterns there to begin with or are they "Neon" instructions picked up from glancing at a newspaper horror-scope? (Newspapers are the last place anybody should look for anything of value. Even the comic strips stink these days!)
I started trying this experiment; --I searched around until I found a very well researched book on Chinese astrology, (a translation of a well-respected Chinese text on the subject). The Chinese system bases its primary sign on the Year as opposed to the Month, and it speaks to a different layer of a person's behavioral 'format'. (I have found that Western Astrology seems to measure people's behavior in a short-term kind of way, as they handle themselves in conversations and immediate influences, whereas Eastern Astrology seems to measure one's background long-term behavioral biases; their fundamental beliefs and approaches to life.)
I began measuring the qualities of the various people I knew against the archetypes. It was surprising, in this one text, just how detailed and exact the descriptions were, as well as brief when specific elements were taken into account in conjunction with signs. (A 'metal Ox' vs a 'wooden Ox', for example.) Specific in some cases to the point of describing an individual's passionate and life-consuming primary interests, ("Will operate their own green house or garden" or "Will have their own extensive and highly indexed library"). The brevity was important because it implies that the Astrologer isn't on a 'fishing for hits' expedition. After a long moment of unhappy silence after I read out the description of one engineer I know, he said, "Okay. But now read all the rest of it," to which I was responded, "That's it. There is no more." --We had been having an argument about Astrology and he demanded that I read out the half page under his sign and specific element. It rather back-fired, as the book had him down cold with an exactingly accurate description of his personality and life-defining interests. Not everybody has such a right down the middle set of influences, but in his case, it was painfully apparent.
The really nice thing about Asian astrology, (from a sociological perspective), is that for many years, people in the West knew almost nothing about it. Animal signs didn't appear in newspapers, and to a large degree still do not, and as such, the contamination from incident 'instruction' to behave in a certain way, is much lower than with Western astrology. This helps to address the point
Science, is thus something that can disprove something is is thought to be true. An example would be horoscopes. Science killed them long ago, yet some people (quite irrationally) still swear by them. Quantum Mechanics is strange and counter-intuitive, but none-the-less has mountains of experimental evidence to show its veracity.
Well, science has tried very hard to kill astrology, but after my years of studying the patterns of behavior in people with respect to their times of birth, I believe it is more accurate to say that many would simply really, really LIKE it if science would kill astrology, (for reasons I've never fully understood). --Especially these days. After all, the latter part of your statement above does much to throw into question the former.
There was another Slashdot article a few days ago wherein researchers were baffled to discover that certain radioactive particles decay at different rates depending on the time of year, (or as they assumed, the Earth's distance from the Sun). I wonder what force between the Earth and the Sun could affect the behavior of particles and if that force might not be related to the manner in which people's brains develop as they grow up? It would help to explain things.
Conventional wisdom is always growing for a reason; we don't know everything, and as such we should never be hasty to dismiss observable phenomenon just because we happen to find them objectionable for one reason or another.
-FL
The Florida Panhandle scheme was dirty and wrong.
But the claim that voting machines were the result of the "Democrat Political Machine" seems far fetched in the extreme. When I looked into the history, it appears that their implementation was a long and complex process, aided in significant ways by many Republicans, and more importantly, built and programmed by companies with staunch Republican allegiances. So. . , what are you basing your assertion on?
-FL
Do you know anybody who works in the news media? I do, several guys both in TV and paper news who have been placed all over the spectrum from editing room floors to the administrative level and even teaching positions at media and public relations colleges. They ALL report (privately) that the whole game is a giant crock of malarkey. The most interesting aspect is when the news teams don't even realize they're doing it, but simply re-broadcast biases and falsehoods because they are part of a form of non-deliberate groupthink. But it's worst when suggested stories are simply struck from the record because they don't match up with whatever political beliefs the owner happens to hold.
One of the big problems is the AP Newswire, to which so many large journals subscribe and pull feeds from word for word. --One thin little bottleneck through which major breaking news passes, meaning entire nations uniformly learn about events which are filtered by only a very small number of people.
The intriguing thing about bloggers is that they don't do this; they represent a broad and varied non-uniform message. This does not mean all bloggers are accurate or that there isn't the internet 'echo chamber' effect going on, but it does mean that there is actually a higher probability of actual news coming through the system. Have you ever clicked into democracynow.com? Some of the more prolific blogger sites have their own journalists covering stories and you generally get broader coverage, and people being interviewed in a non-soundbite kind of way.
-FL
This is a very impressive article and all, good on yeh Intel and all that. . , but did anybody else notice that one of the most important tests was conspicuously missing?
That of power consumption during the write process. --They measured it on idle and on read but not on write, which is where SSD's fall down hard-core.
One of the things the ASUS eee crowd was surprised to discover was that the difference between the hard-drive and the SSD versions of their little netbooks was that there was virtually NO detectable power-savings in using the SSD over the hard drive.
Power consumption was the thing I was racing through the article for with 'chomping at the bit' anticipation for. What gives? (Not that it actually matters in a practical sense for me, but I would like to know more about this!)
-FL
I was able to get the video working.
This looks about as cool finding one of those floppy records designed for a needle turntable inside a computer magazine. No. Wait. I actually remember being pretty darn jazzed about that, since that was a period when you had to key programs in by hand and the magazines published miles of BASIC code. It was novel AND useful.
Sorry, big, slick magazine publisher. Nice try, but perhaps you should have waited until your 80th anniversary.
-FL
greed, fear & ego are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of yOUR dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes.
Holy smokes! You don't let up!
When are you going to figure out that nobody listens when they are bludgeoned? You won't wear people down, you'll just teach them to grow comfortable in filtering out your white noise. Heck, I find the kinds of topics you spew on about fascinating and worthy of exploration, but I can't even get through the first sentence of your sermon on the mount howling.
You sound like a lunatic, and not because of your concerns or your content. You're scary, and not because you're telling people things they don't want to hear, but because, simply put, you sound like you've done too many drugs and that parts of your brain have been destroyed. This can only lead people to associate your subject matter with brain damage and sickness. It is natural for people, on an instinctive level, to avoid people who show outward displays of disease and by association, the subjects and activities they immerse themselves in. --If you truly want to communicate, you have to stop shouting and start listening. It's a two way street. Until you learn this, you're going to be all alone in the wilderness talking to yourself, which is I suspect all you're really trying to do anyway. I even suspect that you might be doing this specifically to instill fear of inquiry in people. It would certainly not be the first time knowledge was attacked in this way. Question your impulses, because they are NOT helping.
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that batteries may quietly become the toner-cartridge of the laptop?
-FL
Oooh. One of those sweet Japanese net-books from before the net-book.
I got over that strange sense of manga-inspired culture-envy/regret years ago, but I'll tell you, I still get pangs of 'gaijin' when I happen across one of those beauties. That's some serious tech-cred, dude!
-FL
Indeed! It is high time the U.S. exploits off-shore mining along the Florida coast so as to break their dependency on foreign packets! To heck with the Environmental Protection Agency!
U S A! U S A! U S A!
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has already chosen to turn a blind eye to corporate wrong-doing, so of course the company is going to try to hurt them again in new and creative ways.
Everybody knows that cell phones are a problem for simple physical reasons, but they either don't care, pretend it's not true, or have been successfully lied to. Either way, what better crop of victims could an evil overlord possibly ask for? People who are practically begging for further abuse. And so they will be further abused until they choose not to be victims anymore.
It's entirely possible to get along in life without a cell phone. Heck, with a decent VOIP company and a naked DSL line, it's possible to enjoy unlimited high speed internet and high-quality world-wide communications through any phone system ALL for about $50 a month. That's what I do, and it's awesome. --And I don't have to put up with my own telephone trying to scramble my brain. I encourage everybody to look into this.
-FL
Every city has at least one or two. The best are the crack in the wall places with a guy in the back surrounded by parts.
Some of the items you'll buy will be a great deal, others maybe not, and yeah, you'll have to pay tax. --But you won't pay for shipping, (which, if you're buying lots of goodies, will probably cost a fair bit, though probably not 10% of the cost of a well-equipped new machine).
But nothing is nicer than being able to run out on a gut-feeling of inspiration and pick up a stack of parts that same afternoon. Speaking as a geek, I have to say that walking out of a shop with an OEM hard drive packaged in nothing but an anti-static bag is one of the best feelings in the world. --I realized on one of those occasions why my girlfriend loved shopping for clothes so much, and it was with a bit of wistfulness that I recognized I only shopped for computer bits once every few years, whereas for her cruising the used-clothing stores was a weekly fix. Comfort shopping is silly, but it's also human, so when you do end up spending a whack of money, it's nice to jump in and get right into it.
There are other advantages when you buy from a local, private vendor. If you change your mind about a part, or if a stick of memory is faulty or whatever, you can always go back and hash it out with the owner. Either he'll tell you what you did wrong, or replace the part, and he'll nearly always remember you. A human connection is great; you don't have to fill out impersonal forms and take a number or stay on hold or any of that lousy nonsense. You've got a guy right there who wants to help you, partly because he doesn't want to have to give your money back and partly because he's also a geek who instinctively wants stuff to work right. And sometimes you'll meet a really cool person where it's fun just to chat and trade opinions and such; more than once I've gone into a shop with a well-considered shopping list only to have the guy behind the counter say, "Oh, we don't have that mother board, but check it out! We do have this one; it works great and it costs less than the one on your list, plus it has this extra feature which is really cool! The manufacturer just put out the next model, so they're trying to sell off their previous one, which is why it's such a great deal." I've picked up some awesome hardware that way. So I'd say it's well worth the extra expense (if it even adds up to that much when you take shipping into account, and any unexpected in-house deals or whatever), to buy from small vendors.
I will say, however, that buying on-line does generate a sort of Christmas day feeling, where you get to wait in eager anticipation for stuff to arrive, plus you get to build exactly the system you want because you can be really specific about the parts. But I prefer the more adventurous side of going out to find parts yourself. I think it might satisfy some kind of latent hunter/gatherer gene inside us all.
By far, however, the absolute worst way to spend money on computer parts is to go to a big, corporate, well-lit box store where the guys have little name tags and same-color shirts. Ugh! --I mean, that's fine for laptops and big screens and such, but for hard drives and mother boards and video cards and bags of little screws? What a waste of an experience! I'd rather use an abacus than build a computer from parts obtained in a damned box store. Not to mention that it's nearly always a LOT more expensive that way. Nobody can beat them on price for big items which they order by the shipping palate, but for smaller parts. . , there's simply too many to choose from, so they stream-line their stock and charge you up the wazoo for them. And anyway box stores, you know, have no soul.
Anyway, I hope everything works out for. Enjoy!
-FL
You're old, we get it.
Hm. Uncalled for snark. Did I fail to recognize somebody's brilliance or was that just general bitterness?
Ah well. Everybody gets to try again tomorrow.
Cheers!
-FL
I can't believe how you've grown! Why it seems like only yesterday. . .
Literally. This internet thing is growing up so fast!
Dang. There are actually net-savvy kids out there now who never lived in a world without Google. Think about that!
When did years start to fly by like this? I'm amazed.
-FL
Thank-you.
There was something about the article which I found really infuriating, but could not pin down. All I could think was, "This is so totally misleading, but I have absolutely no idea why I'm reacting this way. I just have this intense sensation that I'm being offered a total crock, maybe not on purpose, but still! Grr."
I'll have to check out that book.
-FL
Sooner or later you'll grow up and realize you were blowing things way out of proportion.
Just thinking out loud and at length; I'm in the middle of dealing with a variation of this in some difficult friends, and so all these patterns are at the top of my mind at the moment and need processing. Slashdot happens to be my think-pad of the moment despite the fact that it may not be entirely appropriate. I don't usually let this happen, but things got away from me this week. I appreciate everybody's indulgence.
Cheers!
-FL
Well, that shows how much MMO-ing I've done, (none)!
"Shoot-outs" and "Adventure game" seem to be make perfect sense until you describe it like you just did.
I will stop proffering my opinion now. Thank-you!
-FL
If I absolutely had to choose one, it certainly wouldn't be a Buffyverse. I don't even see how you could populate the game world realistically. I mean, how many Slayers can you really have? Does everybody have to be some red-shirt vampire? What is there to do? Do you need to collect money? Why? To pay for bigger stakes? Everybody but Cordelia was broke most of the time and that worked out just fine. And Sunnyvale is pretty small. . . In the first episode, it was put plainly that there was only one club in town and that things were pretty limited. Do you get points for doing homework and being bored?
Whereas the Firefly universe is. . , well, it seems like the hands down most logical choice for a multi-player game universe. Spaceships, collecting money for vital supplies, lots of different and fascinating character classes, goods trading, shoot outs, futuristic cities, floating cities, desert towns, reavers and evil empires. . , I mean, jeez! It has absolutely everything!
This silly decision sounds like it has one of two sources. . .
1. The marketing gurus are simply counting heads and trends in terms of disposable income dollars and goth-girls with free time, (which frankly is silly since the fan base has all grown up since Buffy was a hit, and are probably less likely to be such huge fans).
2. (And this is my personal opinion). The same forces over at Fox which deliberately deep-sixed Firefly for its anti-government, pro-revolutionist sentiment, (again, my opinion), aren't about to allow the same to get another toe-hold with some potentially massively popular game.
Whatever. I don't play video games, and thank goodness, because the people who got these properties sound deeply uninspired and planning-impaired. What a shame.
-FL
Okay. It's like this. . .
You've got this. . , I don't know, say a city, right? Picture it as some kind of SIM City kind of arrangement for now. We'll let the art and design departments bring it up to today's standards. You know, so that it looks cool. Okay. . .
So you've got this digital city. And it's set in, say 1920 America. Okay, and you have control over it in some way. Either you are a character walking around in it affecting things, or you're a hovering cursor playing civic engineer. I'll leave that up to the game play department. I'm not to the NEW idea yet. Hang with me. . .
So you build some buildings and do some city maintenance, and you have to stop crooks and gangsters, right? Okay. So you play around in this environment for a while and then the game shifts. You're no longer in 1920. Now it's 1950. Same city, but different decade. And all the stuff you did to the city 30 years ago is still there, but older. If you built a school, or a group of office buildings, then they'll have affected the way the city grew. We'll have to get the guys in the programming department to come up with some kind of fractal math or something. That'll win the game the smart awards, and you'll see why in a minute. . .
So there you've got the same city in 1950, and you keep going. You build stuff and catch crooks or whatever, and you do that for a while. Then the time frame flips again. Cue the award-winning fractal programming, and now you're in the year 2010. Awesome! Same effect. Buildings you put up are still there, or have been added to, or they've been torn down, and there's new highways and stuff. Whatever. It's totally impressive.
Now the player is feeling confident, right? They think they know what the game's about. But they don't, because right when they're beginning to say, "Oh, I get it. SIM City but like 3D with Time." Except they're not seeing the whole picture yet.
So it's 2010, and now you're in charge of this big city. And you've got to deal with crime and such, so you have a SWAT team or something, which has also been evolving over the years. What started as your little division of special cops is now a tricked out special unit. Anyway, you get increasingly difficult tasks, until you run into some bad guys who appear to be using alien technology. What. . ? Yeah, I didn't mention that yet. There's aliens. Anyway, the battle is really hard to win, but with some major effort, the playing defeats them. Except more aliens come and it starts getting bad. Like whole buildings start crashing down, -the ones the player took special care to build just so, those ones get wrecked in the battle. You know, to hook them emotionally. Then suddenly there's this huge boom and a warp gate opens up right in the middle of the city, and aliens start piling through it, see. It's like the end of the world, right?
What's that? Like Half Life? No, no, no. Well, yeah. But it's totally not like that. Just keep listening. . .
So right when things are going really bad, your team discovers the presence of a time-travel unit. And maybe there's this whole mission where you have to go get it. Anyway, you end up getting the ability to send your command unit to one of the other two time frames. Like 1920, or 1950. You get to choose where you want to play. And whatever you do to your city in the past affects what's happening in the future. So that fractal programming is now really the core of the game, see? Because the aliens can travel in time as well, right?
Ahh. Your face is lighting up. You're beginning to get it. Cool.
How do you win? Okay, I'm getting to that. There's a whole story unfolding, see. So to win certain adventures, you have to bring future technology to your squad in 1920, which instantly updates all the powers and secret weapons of your teams in the future. There could be whole adventures surrounding that. You'd have to make it difficult to bring technology back through time. Limit it somehow so you don't w
In our case, it was considered an engineering problem, so there were certain inviolable constraints, but as long as we satisfied those we were free to do whatever we pleased.
That's really the key. In our current society, engineering problems are efficiently solved when the team is content to work happily within limited rule sets. "You have X materials and Y time. Go!" --And so people agree to work and learn within an artificial set of constraints, knowing full well that the limits are artificial. --And under the best of circumstances, this is an entirely valid choice. But the truth must not be forgotten that in this world, nothing is ever entirely limited. I've known people who are very good at saying, "Okay. But if you don't mind, I'll just tweak reality so that X materials becomes X + something; I know a guy who is willing to trade that for this, and there's a woman who is dumping a whole bunch of something we could use if we altered our designs slightly, and if we ask nicely, there's this awesome facility we can use for the whole month free of charge. . , etc."
Such people are best placed in management roles. And that's interesting, isn't it? Power comes directly from refusing to accept arbitrary limits. But there is a time and a place; there are fun lessons to learn in deliberately working within artificial limits while somebody else is in charge of keeping the heat on and the paychecks coming. After all, in our society, it's important to have people excited and willing to work beneath management directives. So there's a place for everybody, and that's wonderful.
The thing about the school systems I was fighting against however, (particularly during pre-secondary education, where I did my bridge-building thing), was that this choice was never offered. That all students would be willing followers was not just assumed, it was enforced. The only way to cast yourself into a different role was to A) recognize the nature of the limitations and, B) fight against them. Problems arise because teachers and administrators sometimes have egos which are easily bruised. Saying, "No" is sometimes seen as saying, "You are personally inferior." It doesn't help when the student doesn't fully understand the problem and is pissed off and frustrated. Thus you end up with the sad scenario where you have grown adults trying with all their might and resources to crush the will of certain kids.
It becomes a further problem in that the pattern of obedience extends far beyond practical engineering problems; into every other aspect of life.
I've known and worked with people in areas where conservative obedience held no rational advantage, (which I would argue is the case more often than not), and it was common for people to get very upset when I pursued alternative methods to achieve goals, who even upon achieving results far beyond expectations, had a lot of trouble dealing with the fact that we'd left the beaten path. Comfort didn't come until they found some sort of perceived authority figure to pat them on the heads and praise them for their efforts, thus making the new approach socially acceptable.
It goes back to how we approach life. More than once I've heard people complain in some manner. . .
"But I did everything they asked! I was good! But look at where it has brought me!" Or. . , "HE didn't do as he was told! It's not fair that he should gain respect and reward while I haven't!"
It's a tough lesson, it hurts terribly when you realize you've been duped, and the first natural instinct is to deny the true shape of things, to cast the disobedient one/s as villain/s who must be punished so that your own obedience is validated. "See! See what happens if you break the rules and think too highly of yourself? (People like me will attack you because we are scared to dare ourselves.)" --I've been through it on that side and I remember being royally pissed off for ages, but luckily I was just a young kid when I figured it out and ha
I think someone pulled the same stunt on our professor in the past, which is why we were given 6 36" sticks to build a 20" x 2" span. That enforced a somewhat more conventional approach. It's rather difficult to drive a car across a rope.
Suspension bridges are essentially made of rope. --It would take a lot of work, (and probably earn one of those dreaded high marks I routinely tried to avoid), but my immediate thought given the scenario you describe would be to game the system by building a suspension bridge using ropes made out of lines of glue strengthened with fibers from crushed up sticks. I'd probably find some way to lock my bridge the to table as well, even going to far as to drill holes beforehand, because I bet the rules didn't say you weren't allowed to modify the testing apparatus itself. That would raise some eyebrows, and that's the point.
Anything to avoid thinking as instructed. --The unspoken prime directive of the school system is to make people willing to limit themselves within authority structures. (You can only use X number of beams, because those are the RULES, despite what the real world might be like, you WILL get used to there being absolute definitions of reality so that when you do enter the real world, you will be pre-conditioned for easy control. You will ASK to go to the washroom and you will believe your text books!) --And this absolutely infuriated me on a fundamental level. It's the reason Slashdot is so incredible; these pages contain posts from literally hundreds upon hundreds of very smart people who nonetheless think in nonsensical absolutes without even being aware that they have been trained into a kind of blindness; all while truly believing that they have a superior level of awareness even while reality orbits in the most astonishing of ways few of them are able to see. It breaks my heart some days. But it is changing. I see a lot more people around here these days who question things.
My objective in school was to force the system to fail me even while completing the tasks assigned with more grace and skill than the 'good' students, thus demonstrating the fact that the objective of schooling is NOT the cultivation of creativity or intelligence, but rather the instilling an underlying and nearly-invisible level of social obedience at all costs.
I proved my point with flying colors, and despite being bounced from the system, (resulting in some very pissed off teachers and professors and zero student debt; I gamed that system as well), went on to be successful in life and even asked to return to lecture in a few cases. My only regret, (and it is a big one), is that I wish I could have done all of this without giving into anger and arrogance during the process. Because while I did find it funny, it was an angry kind of funny. If I had the chance to do it all again, I'd make one of my objectives to hold a sense of love and compassion throughout. It would have been a thousand times more effective than the combative route I chose.
-FL
In twenty years, we'll all look back on this and laugh, like we do now when we read old articles about how Africanized killer bees are going to kill everybody in the US.
There's nothing wrong with projecting possible outcomes given known quantities. It's one of our strengths as a species, but untoward fear is certainly unnecessary. Ice ages happen like clock-work, so yeah, 'weather' does cover it, I suppose.
It's a shame those Africanized killer bees weren't up to the job of resisting the various causes of colony collapse disorder which is currently killing farms. I guess that IS sort of funny, albeit in an ironic kind of way.
-FL
Two words:
Lex. Luthor.
-FL