Another salient FACT is the FACT that the next President will be Republican. You keep using that word. I do not think that word means what you think that word means.
Iraq, which is seemingly McCain's only issue, is more or less a resolved issue (the surge is working, native Iraqi security forces are being trained, etc.), The surge is working if you define down 'working' to ignore it's original goal. The whole argument was that an uptick in forces will lead to a decrease in violence, which then allows political reconciliation of the various Iraqi parties, that being needed to prevent continued violence and civil war.
If the surge 'working' means only the first part, then yes it worked. Until troop levels revert to a normal, somewhat sustainable level, then it will have unworked. If the point was to allow a solution that will outlive the troop level increase, I can't see how the surge can be claimed to have worked. What evidence of political progress has there been?
Wow thats a nice bunch of rabid anti-strawman blowhard crap. Way to let belittle a bunch of arguments that weren't made. Of course being slashdot, your anti-fanboyism seems to be winning out over reasonable discussion and argumentation.
Most of them 'just work.'
For some value of 'just work.'
Apple's browser has real limitations too, but a fanboy on your level wouldnt be able to admit to them.
Yes it does. You'll note I never said mobilesafari is the pinnacle of design or perfection of the mobile browser concept. No, apparently when someone suggests anything positive about anything apple, that to you is evidence of irrational thought and a desire to tech-fellate steve jobs. What an idiotic view.
Interfaces are not that difficult anymore. We're not teaching people DOS.
Are you really going to argue that all windowing interfaces are equally good/easy/useful? Seriously? Applying a 'its-not-DOS' heuristic to interfaces is pretty friggin weak.
Just because Apple takes the "show them less" approach doesnt make them better.
Talk about a tired old canard. 'Just shows them less' is about as asinine as you can get.
I always feel like my hands are tied when using OSX until I can open a terminal window. Joe Sixpack isnt opening a terminal window.
So you've just shown that 1. you aren't joe sixpack and 2....well pretty much only #1. That you need a terminal window to interface with a computer says you aren't doing the things that pretty much everyone else in the computer using public is. I love the fact that I can drop down to the terminal when the need arises, but honestly that is pretty rare (and one of the things I didnt really like about linux back in the decade I was using it, a terminal window is pretty much necessary, not a tool that is only rarely needed). And if you need a terminal to feel comfy, what the hell do you do on an XP box? And to counter your assertion with another equally valid (and likely more common) one: I always feel like I'm banging my head on a wall when I have to use XP at work.
unusual idea of not worshiping OSX and Apple and revealing the real limitations they have....Or that the brushed aluminum look isnt the paragon of design....
Rabid belittling of a strawman. OSX has plenty of limitations. Brushed aluminum is not the paragon of design. Happy? Have I (or anybody save your strawman) ever claimed otherwise?
Not to mention I have the "unusual idea" that little UI changes arent revoltionary, they're barely evolutionary.
No, rather you seem unable to accept that a lot of little UI changes that are evolutionary all put together actually make a difference. I don't give a crap if the UI improvements are minor, major, revolutionary, or nearly individually imperceptible, if they make it so I don't have to fight with or search around in my computer, I consider them good and useful.
Or I have the "unsual idea" that showing me less isnt better for me.
People always throw that one out...care to give me some examples of this? What generally useful features from another mainstream OS are so buried or unavailable in OSX?
Or that I prefer a,gasp, real keyboard and not a virtualized one.
So for web browsing (which is where this topic started), you prefer the tradeoff of having a 40% reduction in screen size in order to have a tiny keyboard for the relatively small proportion of time you actually type while browsing? I don't think that is a good trade, even though I often find the virtual keyboard frustrating, It is sucky for emails and other text intensive functions (though most mobile keyboards are all somewhat crappy, physical or not), but browsing is probably one of the better circumstances for the large screen/no physical keyboard trade.
but youre assumptions and apple ass-kissing are far
I'm not sure why people keep using this tired old canard, but lots of things "just work." A lot of things do just work. And a lot of others don't. Particularly high-tech computery type stuff. The reason people keep using the tired old canard is because it provides a simple, clear description (trite as it may sound) of the difference between a lot of apple tech stuff and a lot of non-apple tech stuff. Sure, it would be more accurate to say apple stuff 'tends to more intuitive, simpler, and more likely to produce the desired action with a smaller amount of effort, thought or knowledge than other major brands,' but that's a hell of a mouthful.
My dads old POS cadillac just "worked." It started every time. No one would call that car revolutionary. They would if a lot of other cars didn't start every time. Or if you otherwise had to hold down three buttons and slowly wiggle the gearshift while turning the key back and forth.
My treo "just works." I can make phone calls and surf the web. Except for the websites it doesn't display, or displays in a stilted, distorted way. Either you aren't aware of the difference between the browsing experience on a treo and an iphone, or you have a very unusual sense of what constitutes decent user interface.
Yeah, the big deal is that these analogues are able to be replicated by normal cellular machinery (given some form of the nucleosides as supplements).
I'd be willing to bet that a new codon with the new pair will simply lead to synthesis abortion. As a few commenters have mentioned, joining this work to work from Peter Schultz on unnatural amino acid incorporation is where the really cool progress is going to be. Truly novel, "unnatural" proteins & genes that are stable & expressible in bacteria.
All this is done with in vitro translation, as far as I know. IIRC, they've managed to move beyond this for at least one system. This involves hijacking the amber codon though, so this new result could be very useful in making a combined system that lives in bacteria easily, gets replicated & translated. This work kind of fell out of the Schultz results (ie we just now need an unnatural base pair to mate to our unnatural tRNAs).
At the moment, it is likely that the alternative bases will prevent (or screw up) protein synthesis from genes where they occur. Having a novel base pair that allows transcription of unnatural amino acids does *not* mean that the bases will be recognized by the protein translation machinery.
What would be cool, and is likely being researched currently, is to mate this base pair with other efforts that have produced bacteria that are able to insert unnatural amino acids into proteins a la Peter Schultz's work. Given that the group leader here, Floyd Romesberg (who, incidentally, taught me enzyme kinetics), used to work for Schultz, and is across the street from the Schultz lab, you can bet they are looking for ways to make a truly unnatural base pair/amino acid system that can survive in bacteria. Once you've done this, you will be able to make all kinds of really cool, novel stuff relatively easily. Will be a huge deal once it happens.
I get the distinct feeling that Tufte understands data visualisation, but not interface design.
Highly related things.
He criticises the stock app for being "cartoony" and "PowerPoint" like, which seems again a mere preference rather than an objective comment, uses words designed to provoke an emotional reaction rather than an intellectual one.
He has a well known article on the the evils of powerpoint, and how it often acts as an obstacle to effective data communication rather than a vehicle of it. He argues in some detail why PP is bad, and his comments here reflect those same arguments. Whether you find them convincing or 'mere preference' will certainly depend on you, but suggesting they are there for emotional response only seems pretty clearly incorrect.
But I don't see how x thousand points of data points in a tiny little graph is of use. First of all, if you fit thousands of data points into a single graph, it's going to need a damn big piece of paper before I'm capable of distinguishing them, combined with a ruler and a set square if I want to get the value for a specific data point.
It is of use in that instead of, say, 52-week high & lows, you get a graphical, easy to digest timeline that shows not only highs and lows, but the trend for an entire year. It's like the major stock graph shown at the bottom of the widget, except for every entry all at the same time. By using some knowledge about perception you've allowed the viewer to obtain a huge amount of information easily, quickly, and in a small space. The point is not to be able to see what a price was on Mar 13th (the big graph at the bottom also fails to do that very well), but to see where the price was in Mar relative to the rest of the year.
Second, why would I want this level of detail on a phone app? Personally, I find the iPhone's red light / green light view combined with percentage points useful - it jumps out at you when e.g. the market crashes as it did recently.
Well first of all, you have it already in the form of the large graph at the bottom. Next, why would you not want that information when it doesnt cost anything. You can still have a current price, can still color it however you'd like, but by adding a small graphic that replaces essentially empty space, you get much more info for free.
The "modest data graphic cartoon" conveys just as much information to the viewer as his "image resolution" with thousands of data points, and is the kind of thing a portable stocker checker would be used for. Tufte is letting his expertise get in the way of understanding the use case
False, the sparkline conveys much more information. And what a stock checker is used for depends entirely on what the stock checker provides. Your notion of what is common 'use' is getting in the way of understanding his point.
He criticises the iPhone browswer for having 10% of the screen used for buttons, but in his own designs he comments "about 90% of the image is substance". Clearly he's happy with that 10% sacrifice when it's his own work. And if you look at the designs, you'll note that in each case there is a navigation bar of some form at the top or bottom of the page. What a hypocrite.
Because clearly an iPhone screen and a web browser share both size, resolution & forms of interaction. So rules for one are bound to be identical to rules for the other.
In particular, his "the information is the interface" comment just betrays his inability to think outside his old area of expertise. Computer applications do not simply present information content, and also go beyond interacting with it -they can take actions, manipulate the content, and work with its metadata. The interface must take that into account.
Firstly he has been involved with computer interface design for a long time, so your accusation is a
14,000 datapoints and assembling them into a graph Trivially solved by having the server generate an image on the fly.
weather widget is going to start displaying complex radar images Or, say, a six-frame animated gif.
I doubt many people will find all 14,000 datapoints of relevance when looking up a stock price on their iPhone. They're probably only interested in a general sense of the trend. Which is *precisely* the point of using sparklines. With a sparkline you can summarize a huge amount of data into a useful little graphic while retaining a huge amount of information.
it's not clear that more information is always more clarity, despite what Mr Tufte says -- at least for me. So, but more information presented clearly, concisely and efficiently will almost always provide more clarity. That's his whole bag.
The plain old Macbook is more portable than the Macbook Air. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
It's the same width, and you're not going to carry your Macbook Air in a manilla envelope, or even a badded jiffy bag, you're going to carry it in a bag, briefcase, or backpack with about an inch of padding... just like any other laptop... and with the optical drive shoved down into another pocket (so you don't scratch up the 'book's shell).
Yes, the optical drive.
No road warrior is going to go out to a customer without the ability to read anything they get handed on a disc. Depends very much on what the road warrior is intending to do. I (as a scientist) take my macbook all over the place, and can count on one hand the # of times I've used the optical drive when on road (and those were mostly just for DVD watching). If I could trade for a mba, I would in a heartbeat. Lots of people go places with a computer where they don't need access to optical drives (and in a pinch, flash drives are like candy these days). Not to mention the student population that just lugs a computer around campus...certainly no need to an optical drive all the time. This is clearly a product aimed for a certain market (and as a secondary computer), but I'm pretty sure the market exists.
making a laptop smaller doesn't increase its performance... it usually decreases it. Unless, like a lot of people, you consider a laptop's "performance" to include its portability.
Apple's continued stance that they know what's best for their customers and that their products are 'perfect' as-is prevents what could be revolutionary products from ever reaching that potential. Um, WTF are you talking about?
That they disavow any damage a firmware update will do to a modified piece of hardware? If that is the case, I would submit that 99.9% of companies are in the exact same class.
If you are talking about the fact that an SDK is not out yet, wait a month til it is.
If you are just turned off by Steve Jobs, that seems like a personal issue.
but so long as they keep the snotty outlook on the world at large, they're just another tech company. Apple, you need to stop acting like assholes, and stop treating your customers like every last one is a worthless idiot. What are you *so* bitter about? I really don't understand this somewhat prevalent attitude that because they aren't supporting an unsupported 3rd party modification of one of their products, they are assholes.
And BTW, as just another tech company, their market cap is ~140 billion, have had a stock price increase of 56x in the past 5 years, and have the highest grossing ($/sqft) retail outlet of any retail outlet, bar none. If that is what you consider just another tech company, I guess we have very different standards.
This seems like the exact inverse of an apple fanbois post...ranting with no basis instead of raving with no basis.
I appreciate your response, and especially the reasonable (and atypical for/.) tenor. That being said, we still have a basic disagreement:
So: while, yes, most religions deal with the supernatural, that does not preclude them from trying to be rational about it.
This point is difficult to for me to swallow. Let's _assume_ that dragons exist, but that we just can't see them (the hide from people, live in the clouds, etc etc). We can make many rational statements about them: Everybody knows (since it is written) that they can breathe fire. Rationally, though, we can state that instead of having fire always existing in their bellies, they must have something like a natural flame-thrower built into their snouts. Additionally, we can rationalize their ability to fly and come to some conclusion about weight, bone structure, muscle strength, etc etc. All the logic that goes into this is perfectly rational, but completely and utterly meaningless since we start with an assumption that is not. To change our conclusions we have only to change our original supernatural assumption...and since it is supernatural, it is utterly changeable, and inherently irrational. To build a rational case based upon X when X is irrational and thus unknowable and infinitely changable does still not make sense to me.
One of implicit tenants of Catholic belief is that the world is an inherently rational, knowable place.
And yet catholicism is routinely forced, kicking and screaming, to accept various scientific facts centuries after they are rationally accepted as true (see heliocentrism, evolution, etc etc).
Well, have you read the Bible? It says absolutely nothing about, for example, abortion, or a million other things Catholics oppose.
True, it also provides the basis for 100% conflicting _rational_ belief sets of various religions. Which gets back to my point of the difficulty in trying to apply reason upon a foundation of of irrationality (or at least un-rationality). Since the basic tenets of the belief system are from a rather raggedy incomplete set of translations and embellishments of completely unknown origin, the extravagant cathedral of logic and reason built upon them is little more than a house of cards.
I guess my statement about not understanding religion with rationality wasn't the best formulation (as you have shown). Rational thought can be bolted onto religion very easily, but that does not make it a good fit. Starting out with unknowable (& therefore trivially changable) assumptions and trying to work from there does not seem to be a very useful endeavor.
Islam says straight up that Man's intellect and ability to reason is what sets him apart from everything else.
I would add in imagination to that list, since that is required for aspects of most religions. That isn't meant in a pejorative sense, but it takes more than intellect & reason to come up with the vast array of religious beliefs (and beings).
But then again, quantum mechanics is also not readily apparent to me, so there you have it.
The difference, as I'm sure you well know, is that quantum mechanics could be apparent to you given the right types of education and learning. Many basic religious dictates simply can't. They come from an unknowable, supernatural place (we can't know god's mind). "Because god wants it that way" is the end of discussion, as well and the end-around that can be used against reason and rational thought.
It's reason given a set of assumptions and indications about the world.
I completely agree, and have tried to explain why I have a problem with this when the assumptions & indications are of a supernatural origin.
It's reason based off of a worldview, if you will, and not a worldview based off of reason
That is extremely well put, as well as the basic problem I have.
The public perception in many places is that Richard Dawkins is a spokesperson for scientists (with a position like Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, perhaps the perception is warranted). When such a well-known public figure rags on religion as much as he does, it's no wonder that religious people feel threatened by science. In a very real sense, Dawkins does evangelize for atheism. The public perception in many places is that the Pope is a spokesperson for religious peoples (with a position like spiritual leader of the catholic church, perhaps the perception is warranted). When such a well-known public figure rags on galileo as much as he does, it's no wonder that scientists feel threatened by religion. In a very real sense, the pope does evangelize for theism.
This is one reason why people have started calling it a "religion." Main Entry:
evangelize Listen to the pronunciation of evangelize Pronunciation:
\i-van-j-lz\ Function:
verb Inflected Form(s):
evangelized; evangelizing Date:
14th century
transitive verb 1 : to preach the gospel to 2 : to convert to Christianity
Beyond the pedantic, assuming you mean evangelize in an arguing-for-X sense, I still don't buy that as a reason for labeling X a religion. I can yak someones ear off about how great tivo is, but that doesn't make tivo ownership a religion. It seems to me that calling atheism a religion is a childish attempt to derail the discussion (I'm rubber and you're glue, etc etc). It belittles atheism by making it into exactly what is arguing against.
Think about it for a second; the two actually need each other. Religion (or, at the very least, morality) without rationality (without "science") easily veers towards superstition and sorcery. Science without religion just as easily veers towards the cruel and inhuman. Ideally, each should help guide the other. I call bullshit.
The two need each other no more than a fish needs a bicycle (to quote u2 quoting irina dunn quoting a philosopher). Religion with or without rationality veers towards superstitions & sorcery. A all-knowing being in the clouds, or virgin birth, or a nine-armed elephant god have *absolutely* no more superstitious sorcery than leprechauns, unicorns, evil wizards and the flying spaghetti monster. I actually have a very hard time even imagining what you mean by religion with rationality, as most religions involve, if not focus highly on, the supernatural (defying rationality almost by definition). Morality without rationality makes a bit more sense as a notion at least, but trying to equate morality=religion is a jump I simply don't accept.
Science without religion, is still just science. It is a process for rationally understanding the natural, and has no requirement, need, nor even desire for religion (or frankly even morals). I fail to see any reason that science should be guided by religion. Morality ought to guide people in everything they do, but that is unrelated to either religion or science. Trying to join together something used for understanding the natural world and something intimately related to the supernatural is bound for failure.
Also, regarding the
You see, the vast majority of catholics in the world are poor, uneducated people for whom religion is a refuge from the usually harsh reality of existence.
I'm going to have to ask you to prove that one to me
It is a pretty well established fact that as a country becomes more industrialized, wealthier & more educated, the religiosity of its citizens decreases (the US is a huge outlier in this trend). So while the gp's statement is probably a bit strong to be totally accurate, there is a verifiable basis for it.
That is so funny that I almost fell out of my seat. Corn prices have stayed fairly constant for the past three decades. If the corn farmers have a powerful lobby then that must mean that lobbiest truly have no power at all. Right, if only those lobbyists could figure out a way to get the government to pay farmers for growing corn, ignoring market forces & rewarding particularly big corporate farms. Maybe even figure out a way to have the gov't spend billions of dollars supporting a crop that is overgrown relative to demand. Like maybe some kind of farm subsidy. If only those lobbyists were powerful enough to get thatdone.
The only reason corn is being used now is because it is plentiful and doesnt take any major changes to the current agricultural industry to start using for ethanol. And the only reason it is plentiful is because the federal gov't has been paying farmers to grow more corn than needed. Corn is energetically a horrible crop to use for ethanol production (as TFA points out).
While I don't necessarily disagree with you, do you think having a House of Representatives with 10,000 members would work? While there is a lot to be said for having smaller districts, and having a conservative government (in the sense of making changes difficult, not in the sense of right-leaning) is probably a good thing, I can't see how a legislative body an order of magnitude larger would really work.
who says artificial life needs to be based on DNA? No one, except for expediency. We've got a huge set of tools that nature provided for us to use on DNA & RNA, and essentially none for any other NA. If I'm going to build a house, I'm going to start by buying a hammer and saw down at the hardware store rather than fashioning new ones myself.
Pretty much every definition of life I've ever seen included reproduction. Which is why viruses are such a quandary. They replicate, but only through the use of a hosts' machinery. Like tractors with humans.
Even with survival constraints as the basis for a successful design, it can't be denied that an intelligent designer could have come up with much better designs than the ones you see. Attributing evolutionary designs to an intelligent being is practically an insult when you look at some of the shoddy work evolution has come up with. I marvel at your belief in human knowledge and our ability to design. The huge fly in the ointment, though, is that to design things we need to know an awful lot about the topic, in detail and with regards to its interaction with everything else.
Why do balls hang low? Hell if I know, but I'm quite certain there is a complicated set of situational requirements that led to it. Is it that one protein hasn't been evolved for a higher temperature stability, or is that a whole range of cascades involved in sperm production are also involved in other bodily processes, or that sperm with high temperature stability have some other defects that we don't know about?
To think that we will be able to rationally design biomolecules of any size requires a level of knowledge we aren't even close to. Take, for example, drug design. We are able to chemically make nearly any kind of small molecule drug that we want. We have structural information about a huge number of drug targets, and have had for quite a few years now. And how do we find most of the drug candidates still? By picking up a handful of dirt or sticking some sea creatures into a blender and throwing the mixture into a wide range of testing panels. Rational drug design was a hot topic last decade, with the promise that once we have crystal or NMR structures of proteins, we can just rationally design a nice perfect inhibitor in silico and synthesize it in a chem lab. That promise fizzled and we moved on to the next hot topic and the next and so on until we reached _synthetic biology_.
Will we one day be able to rationally design things that are better than nature....sure, for certain well defined systems about which we have an extensive understanding, and for certain values of 'better.' However, you are going to have to wait a *long* damn time until you get your photosynthesizing nipple car, and when you do it will be something we adapt from nature, not create de novo.
Boy, you're sure doing your part to live up to the stereotypes aren't you?
anywhere else that has not yet been completely overrun by foreign cultures and Northern immigrants
Only metrosexuals and old women do not recognize that violence is indeed an acceptable solution to some problems
it's because some smart ass kid whose parents spoilt him and never whipped him said some shit he shouldn't have said
In recognition that women and effeminate men like yourself
Very pleasant and courteous indeed, with a big helping of open-mindedness and not sexist or homophobic in the slightest.
On to your points:
that violence is indeed an acceptable solution to some problems.
It sure is, just none of the ones you find in schools.
Oh, please. It's called negative reinforcement. If a student refuses to follow the rules, then he goes out in the hallway, and comes back in a moment later with a sore ass and a renewed sense of respect for the consequences which inevitably follow his actions. The rest of the students, in witnessing this event, are demonstrated that this type of behavior is not tolerated, and as such gain the same benefit without actually having to be paddled themselves.
And why do you think beating is the only form of negative reinforcement?
Yes, because a better solution is to put them away in jails and prisons for years at taxpayer expense
Depends on the offense. Usually it is a simple revocation of some rights or financial punishment. Are you suggesting that prison time be replaced with beatings?
When you're in school and that bully keeps picking on you and won't leave you alone, the solution is knock him on his ass in front of everyone, and I guarantee he won't fuck with you any more--AND neither will anyone else. You'll gain the respect of everyone.
Yeah, 'cause I respect only the violent and imposing. It would seem this is the key difference, I don't find personal violence appealing and you apparently do.
But when the situation demands it, you need to be prepared to use violence to protect yourself and others.
I agree. I just don't think some kid being a dick is such a situation.
All this is completely beside the point--this discussion is not even *about* violence.
When you are arguing for the use of corporal punishment, then the discussion is very much about violence, and the normative effects of school-sanctioned violence. If your teacher or principal (or parent, or coach or whichever authority figure you choose) does it, that tells you it is ok.
he refuses to show and everyone calls him a pussy and ostracizes him.
Again with the insistence that physical brutality is to be respected.
The kids who get paddled in school come out of high school squared away, respectful, and never have a problem in life.
I don't know of studies on corporal punishment in schools, but there is a wealth of information about parental corporal punishment. It leads to higher rates of spousal abuse, depression, alcoholism & substance abuse, increased levels of aggression, and lesser degrees of long term obedience. This is a pretty well studied area and is why pretty much all major psychological & pediactric organizations oppose corporal punishment.
The kids whose parents sheltered and coddled them and taught them how wrong violence is and how it's A-OK for you to run your mouth and talk as much shit as you want because we're not gonna stand for our little cuddly-bumpkins to be hurt or threatened
So you really think the only option for dealing with misbehavior is to slap the kid around? Otherwise your statement does not really have any value. Sheltered & coddled to you is apparently only equal to not letting them be physically abused.
Yeah, "corporal punishment" is an every day reality of Southern schools, not sure about elsewhere. Not anywhere I've gone to school or been in contact with kids in school.
If you pick fights, don't listen to the teacher, cause trouble, be disrespectful to authority figures, or otherwise show your ass, then you get taken out into the hall or into the vice principals office and get a few licks from the paddle to straighten your ass out. So you want schools to instill a belief system that says violence is the solution to problems? I don't. I would be furious if I found out a teacher beat my kid. That is not the type of solution I find acceptable, and fortunately, neither do most public institutions. You don't see our justice system sentence people to few licks from the paddle, and for damn good reason. Do you really think the solution to picking fights (violence) is paddling (school sanctioned violence)? That is just as hypocritical as the dad who says "don't hit your sister, *smack*."
The more stubborn ones learn eventually. What they learn though is the problem...violence is an acceptable solution to problems, might makes right, etc etc. Other criticisms.
#1 in Forcible rape #1 in Gonorrhea Cases #1 in Suicides #2 in Cumulative AIDS Cases All Ages #2 in Syphilis Cases #3 in Deaths due to HIV #3 in New AIDS Cases All Ages #4 All those reflect the fact that CA has more people than any other state. Look at the per capita ranks:
#37 Foricble rape
#32 Gonorrhea
#42 Suicide
#8 AIDS cases (which correlates highly with %urban areas)
#13 Syphilis Rate (AL is #12)
No rate data for total HIV deaths.
Poor Mental Health is a self-report statistic (AL is #12) & CA is #43 in serious mental illness per capita (AL is #16).
2) Teacher's unions. Do you have any actual evidence of this being a major problem? I know it's a lovely scape-goat particularly for political opponents of unions, but that doesn't give the argument any validity. In fact the researcher's who've tried to look at this say there really isn't enough data to make a conclusion one way or another. Further, charter schools (sans unions) have shown no improvement [warning:PDF link] in student performance.
3) School policies that don't allow proper discipline for disruptive students. 4) A legal system that actually listens to parents who sue when schools properly punish their kids for misbehaving. Not sure, but it sounds like you are suggesting corporal punishment?
5) Government monopolies that make it financially impossible for most parents to afford to send their kids to private schools or homeschool them. I'm not sure I understand how Gov't provided education makes private schools charge prohibitively expensive rates.
Slashdot Mirror
-Ted
If the surge 'working' means only the first part, then yes it worked. Until troop levels revert to a normal, somewhat sustainable level, then it will have unworked. If the point was to allow a solution that will outlive the troop level increase, I can't see how the surge can be claimed to have worked. What evidence of political progress has there been?
-Ted
Most of them 'just work.'
For some value of 'just work.'
Apple's browser has real limitations too, but a fanboy on your level wouldnt be able to admit to them.
Yes it does. You'll note I never said mobilesafari is the pinnacle of design or perfection of the mobile browser concept. No, apparently when someone suggests anything positive about anything apple, that to you is evidence of irrational thought and a desire to tech-fellate steve jobs. What an idiotic view.
Interfaces are not that difficult anymore. We're not teaching people DOS.
Are you really going to argue that all windowing interfaces are equally good/easy/useful? Seriously? Applying a 'its-not-DOS' heuristic to interfaces is pretty friggin weak.
Just because Apple takes the "show them less" approach doesnt make them better.
Talk about a tired old canard. 'Just shows them less' is about as asinine as you can get.
I always feel like my hands are tied when using OSX until I can open a terminal window. Joe Sixpack isnt opening a terminal window.
So you've just shown that 1. you aren't joe sixpack and 2....well pretty much only #1. That you need a terminal window to interface with a computer says you aren't doing the things that pretty much everyone else in the computer using public is. I love the fact that I can drop down to the terminal when the need arises, but honestly that is pretty rare (and one of the things I didnt really like about linux back in the decade I was using it, a terminal window is pretty much necessary, not a tool that is only rarely needed). And if you need a terminal to feel comfy, what the hell do you do on an XP box? And to counter your assertion with another equally valid (and likely more common) one: I always feel like I'm banging my head on a wall when I have to use XP at work.
unusual idea of not worshiping OSX and Apple and revealing the real limitations they have....Or that the brushed aluminum look isnt the paragon of design....
Rabid belittling of a strawman. OSX has plenty of limitations. Brushed aluminum is not the paragon of design. Happy? Have I (or anybody save your strawman) ever claimed otherwise?
Not to mention I have the "unusual idea" that little UI changes arent revoltionary, they're barely evolutionary.
No, rather you seem unable to accept that a lot of little UI changes that are evolutionary all put together actually make a difference. I don't give a crap if the UI improvements are minor, major, revolutionary, or nearly individually imperceptible, if they make it so I don't have to fight with or search around in my computer, I consider them good and useful.
Or I have the "unsual idea" that showing me less isnt better for me.
People always throw that one out...care to give me some examples of this? What generally useful features from another mainstream OS are so buried or unavailable in OSX?
Or that I prefer a ,gasp, real keyboard and not a virtualized one.
So for web browsing (which is where this topic started), you prefer the tradeoff of having a 40% reduction in screen size in order to have a tiny keyboard for the relatively small proportion of time you actually type while browsing? I don't think that is a good trade, even though I often find the virtual keyboard frustrating, It is sucky for emails and other text intensive functions (though most mobile keyboards are all somewhat crappy, physical or not), but browsing is probably one of the better circumstances for the large screen/no physical keyboard trade.
but youre assumptions and apple ass-kissing are far
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Yeah, the big deal is that these analogues are able to be replicated by normal cellular machinery (given some form of the nucleosides as supplements).
I'd be willing to bet that a new codon with the new pair will simply lead to synthesis abortion. As a few commenters have mentioned, joining this work to work from Peter Schultz on unnatural amino acid incorporation is where the really cool progress is going to be. Truly novel, "unnatural" proteins & genes that are stable & expressible in bacteria.
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At the moment, it is likely that the alternative bases will prevent (or screw up) protein synthesis from genes where they occur. Having a novel base pair that allows transcription of unnatural amino acids does *not* mean that the bases will be recognized by the protein translation machinery.
What would be cool, and is likely being researched currently, is to mate this base pair with other efforts that have produced bacteria that are able to insert unnatural amino acids into proteins a la Peter Schultz's work. Given that the group leader here, Floyd Romesberg (who, incidentally, taught me enzyme kinetics), used to work for Schultz, and is across the street from the Schultz lab, you can bet they are looking for ways to make a truly unnatural base pair/amino acid system that can survive in bacteria. Once you've done this, you will be able to make all kinds of really cool, novel stuff relatively easily. Will be a huge deal once it happens.
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I get the distinct feeling that Tufte understands data visualisation, but not interface design.
Highly related things.
He criticises the stock app for being "cartoony" and "PowerPoint" like, which seems again a mere preference rather than an objective comment, uses words designed to provoke an emotional reaction rather than an intellectual one.
He has a well known article on the the evils of powerpoint, and how it often acts as an obstacle to effective data communication rather than a vehicle of it. He argues in some detail why PP is bad, and his comments here reflect those same arguments. Whether you find them convincing or 'mere preference' will certainly depend on you, but suggesting they are there for emotional response only seems pretty clearly incorrect.
But I don't see how x thousand points of data points in a tiny little graph is of use. First of all, if you fit thousands of data points into a single graph, it's going to need a damn big piece of paper before I'm capable of distinguishing them, combined with a ruler and a set square if I want to get the value for a specific data point.
It is of use in that instead of, say, 52-week high & lows, you get a graphical, easy to digest timeline that shows not only highs and lows, but the trend for an entire year. It's like the major stock graph shown at the bottom of the widget, except for every entry all at the same time. By using some knowledge about perception you've allowed the viewer to obtain a huge amount of information easily, quickly, and in a small space. The point is not to be able to see what a price was on Mar 13th (the big graph at the bottom also fails to do that very well), but to see where the price was in Mar relative to the rest of the year.
Second, why would I want this level of detail on a phone app? Personally, I find the iPhone's red light / green light view combined with percentage points useful - it jumps out at you when e.g. the market crashes as it did recently.
Well first of all, you have it already in the form of the large graph at the bottom. Next, why would you not want that information when it doesnt cost anything. You can still have a current price, can still color it however you'd like, but by adding a small graphic that replaces essentially empty space, you get much more info for free.
The "modest data graphic cartoon" conveys just as much information to the viewer as his "image resolution" with thousands of data points, and is the kind of thing a portable stocker checker would be used for. Tufte is letting his expertise get in the way of understanding the use case
False, the sparkline conveys much more information. And what a stock checker is used for depends entirely on what the stock checker provides. Your notion of what is common 'use' is getting in the way of understanding his point.
He criticises the iPhone browswer for having 10% of the screen used for buttons, but in his own designs he comments "about 90% of the image is substance". Clearly he's happy with that 10% sacrifice when it's his own work. And if you look at the designs, you'll note that in each case there is a navigation bar of some form at the top or bottom of the page. What a hypocrite.
Because clearly an iPhone screen and a web browser share both size, resolution & forms of interaction. So rules for one are bound to be identical to rules for the other.
In particular, his "the information is the interface" comment just betrays his inability to think outside his old area of expertise. Computer applications do not simply present information content, and also go beyond interacting with it -they can take actions, manipulate the content, and work with its metadata. The interface must take that into account.
Firstly he has been involved with computer interface design for a long time, so your accusation is a
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Yes, the optical drive.
No road warrior is going to go out to a customer without the ability to read anything they get handed on a disc. Depends very much on what the road warrior is intending to do. I (as a scientist) take my macbook all over the place, and can count on one hand the # of times I've used the optical drive when on road (and those were mostly just for DVD watching). If I could trade for a mba, I would in a heartbeat. Lots of people go places with a computer where they don't need access to optical drives (and in a pinch, flash drives are like candy these days). Not to mention the student population that just lugs a computer around campus...certainly no need to an optical drive all the time. This is clearly a product aimed for a certain market (and as a secondary computer), but I'm pretty sure the market exists.
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That they disavow any damage a firmware update will do to a modified piece of hardware? If that is the case, I would submit that 99.9% of companies are in the exact same class.
If you are talking about the fact that an SDK is not out yet, wait a month til it is.
If you are just turned off by Steve Jobs, that seems like a personal issue. but so long as they keep the snotty outlook on the world at large, they're just another tech company. Apple, you need to stop acting like assholes, and stop treating your customers like every last one is a worthless idiot. What are you *so* bitter about? I really don't understand this somewhat prevalent attitude that because they aren't supporting an unsupported 3rd party modification of one of their products, they are assholes.
And BTW, as just another tech company, their market cap is ~140 billion, have had a stock price increase of 56x in the past 5 years, and have the highest grossing ($/sqft) retail outlet of any retail outlet, bar none. If that is what you consider just another tech company, I guess we have very different standards.
This seems like the exact inverse of an apple fanbois post...ranting with no basis instead of raving with no basis.
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"Verbing weirds language"
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So: while, yes, most religions deal with the supernatural, that does not preclude them from trying to be rational about it.
This point is difficult to for me to swallow. Let's _assume_ that dragons exist, but that we just can't see them (the hide from people, live in the clouds, etc etc). We can make many rational statements about them: Everybody knows (since it is written) that they can breathe fire. Rationally, though, we can state that instead of having fire always existing in their bellies, they must have something like a natural flame-thrower built into their snouts. Additionally, we can rationalize their ability to fly and come to some conclusion about weight, bone structure, muscle strength, etc etc. All the logic that goes into this is perfectly rational, but completely and utterly meaningless since we start with an assumption that is not. To change our conclusions we have only to change our original supernatural assumption...and since it is supernatural, it is utterly changeable, and inherently irrational. To build a rational case based upon X when X is irrational and thus unknowable and infinitely changable does still not make sense to me.
One of implicit tenants of Catholic belief is that the world is an inherently rational, knowable place.
And yet catholicism is routinely forced, kicking and screaming, to accept various scientific facts centuries after they are rationally accepted as true (see heliocentrism, evolution, etc etc).
Well, have you read the Bible? It says absolutely nothing about, for example, abortion, or a million other things Catholics oppose.
True, it also provides the basis for 100% conflicting _rational_ belief sets of various religions. Which gets back to my point of the difficulty in trying to apply reason upon a foundation of of irrationality (or at least un-rationality). Since the basic tenets of the belief system are from a rather raggedy incomplete set of translations and embellishments of completely unknown origin, the extravagant cathedral of logic and reason built upon them is little more than a house of cards.
I guess my statement about not understanding religion with rationality wasn't the best formulation (as you have shown). Rational thought can be bolted onto religion very easily, but that does not make it a good fit. Starting out with unknowable (& therefore trivially changable) assumptions and trying to work from there does not seem to be a very useful endeavor.
Islam says straight up that Man's intellect and ability to reason is what sets him apart from everything else.
I would add in imagination to that list, since that is required for aspects of most religions. That isn't meant in a pejorative sense, but it takes more than intellect & reason to come up with the vast array of religious beliefs (and beings).
But then again, quantum mechanics is also not readily apparent to me, so there you have it.
The difference, as I'm sure you well know, is that quantum mechanics could be apparent to you given the right types of education and learning. Many basic religious dictates simply can't. They come from an unknowable, supernatural place (we can't know god's mind). "Because god wants it that way" is the end of discussion, as well and the end-around that can be used against reason and rational thought.
It's reason given a set of assumptions and indications about the world.
I completely agree, and have tried to explain why I have a problem with this when the assumptions & indications are of a supernatural origin.
It's reason based off of a worldview, if you will, and not a worldview based off of reason
That is extremely well put, as well as the basic problem I have.
that this worldview s
evangelize Listen to the pronunciation of evangelize
Pronunciation:
\i-van-j-lz\
Function:
verb
Inflected Form(s):
evangelized; evangelizing
Date:
14th century
transitive verb
1 : to preach the gospel to
2 : to convert to Christianity
Beyond the pedantic, assuming you mean evangelize in an arguing-for-X sense, I still don't buy that as a reason for labeling X a religion. I can yak someones ear off about how great tivo is, but that doesn't make tivo ownership a religion. It seems to me that calling atheism a religion is a childish attempt to derail the discussion (I'm rubber and you're glue, etc etc). It belittles atheism by making it into exactly what is arguing against.
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The two need each other no more than a fish needs a bicycle (to quote u2 quoting irina dunn quoting a philosopher). Religion with or without rationality veers towards superstitions & sorcery. A all-knowing being in the clouds, or virgin birth, or a nine-armed elephant god have *absolutely* no more superstitious sorcery than leprechauns, unicorns, evil wizards and the flying spaghetti monster. I actually have a very hard time even imagining what you mean by religion with rationality, as most religions involve, if not focus highly on, the supernatural (defying rationality almost by definition). Morality without rationality makes a bit more sense as a notion at least, but trying to equate morality=religion is a jump I simply don't accept.
Science without religion, is still just science. It is a process for rationally understanding the natural, and has no requirement, need, nor even desire for religion (or frankly even morals). I fail to see any reason that science should be guided by religion. Morality ought to guide people in everything they do, but that is unrelated to either religion or science. Trying to join together something used for understanding the natural world and something intimately related to the supernatural is bound for failure.
Also, regarding the You see, the vast majority of catholics in the world are poor, uneducated people for whom religion is a refuge from the usually harsh reality of existence.
It is a pretty well established fact that as a country becomes more industrialized, wealthier & more educated, the religiosity of its citizens decreases (the US is a huge outlier in this trend). So while the gp's statement is probably a bit strong to be totally accurate, there is a verifiable basis for it.I'm going to have to ask you to prove that one to me
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While I don't necessarily disagree with you, do you think having a House of Representatives with 10,000 members would work? While there is a lot to be said for having smaller districts, and having a conservative government (in the sense of making changes difficult, not in the sense of right-leaning) is probably a good thing, I can't see how a legislative body an order of magnitude larger would really work.
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Why do balls hang low? Hell if I know, but I'm quite certain there is a complicated set of situational requirements that led to it. Is it that one protein hasn't been evolved for a higher temperature stability, or is that a whole range of cascades involved in sperm production are also involved in other bodily processes, or that sperm with high temperature stability have some other defects that we don't know about?
To think that we will be able to rationally design biomolecules of any size requires a level of knowledge we aren't even close to. Take, for example, drug design. We are able to chemically make nearly any kind of small molecule drug that we want. We have structural information about a huge number of drug targets, and have had for quite a few years now. And how do we find most of the drug candidates still? By picking up a handful of dirt or sticking some sea creatures into a blender and throwing the mixture into a wide range of testing panels. Rational drug design was a hot topic last decade, with the promise that once we have crystal or NMR structures of proteins, we can just rationally design a nice perfect inhibitor in silico and synthesize it in a chem lab. That promise fizzled and we moved on to the next hot topic and the next and so on until we reached _synthetic biology_.
Will we one day be able to rationally design things that are better than nature....sure, for certain well defined systems about which we have an extensive understanding, and for certain values of 'better.' However, you are going to have to wait a *long* damn time until you get your photosynthesizing nipple car, and when you do it will be something we adapt from nature, not create de novo.
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anywhere else that has not yet been completely overrun by foreign cultures and Northern immigrants
Only metrosexuals and old women do not recognize that violence is indeed an acceptable solution to some problems
it's because some smart ass kid whose parents spoilt him and never whipped him said some shit he shouldn't have said
In recognition that women and effeminate men like yourself
Very pleasant and courteous indeed, with a big helping of open-mindedness and not sexist or homophobic in the slightest.
On to your points:
that violence is indeed an acceptable solution to some problems.
It sure is, just none of the ones you find in schools.
Oh, please. It's called negative reinforcement. If a student refuses to follow the rules, then he goes out in the hallway, and comes back in a moment later with a sore ass and a renewed sense of respect for the consequences which inevitably follow his actions. The rest of the students, in witnessing this event, are demonstrated that this type of behavior is not tolerated, and as such gain the same benefit without actually having to be paddled themselves.
And why do you think beating is the only form of negative reinforcement?
Yes, because a better solution is to put them away in jails and prisons for years at taxpayer expense
Depends on the offense. Usually it is a simple revocation of some rights or financial punishment. Are you suggesting that prison time be replaced with beatings?
When you're in school and that bully keeps picking on you and won't leave you alone, the solution is knock him on his ass in front of everyone, and I guarantee he won't fuck with you any more--AND neither will anyone else. You'll gain the respect of everyone.
Yeah, 'cause I respect only the violent and imposing. It would seem this is the key difference, I don't find personal violence appealing and you apparently do.
But when the situation demands it, you need to be prepared to use violence to protect yourself and others.
I agree. I just don't think some kid being a dick is such a situation.
All this is completely beside the point--this discussion is not even *about* violence.
When you are arguing for the use of corporal punishment, then the discussion is very much about violence, and the normative effects of school-sanctioned violence. If your teacher or principal (or parent, or coach or whichever authority figure you choose) does it, that tells you it is ok.
he refuses to show and everyone calls him a pussy and ostracizes him.
Again with the insistence that physical brutality is to be respected.
The kids who get paddled in school come out of high school squared away, respectful, and never have a problem in life.
I don't know of studies on corporal punishment in schools, but there is a wealth of information about parental corporal punishment. It leads to higher rates of spousal abuse, depression, alcoholism & substance abuse, increased levels of aggression, and lesser degrees of long term obedience. This is a pretty well studied area and is why pretty much all major psychological & pediactric organizations oppose corporal punishment.
The kids whose parents sheltered and coddled them and taught them how wrong violence is and how it's A-OK for you to run your mouth and talk as much shit as you want because we're not gonna stand for our little cuddly-bumpkins to be hurt or threatened
So you really think the only option for dealing with misbehavior is to slap the kid around? Otherwise your statement does not really have any value. Sheltered & coddled to you is apparently only equal to not letting them be physically abused.
What you
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#37 Foricble rape
#32 Gonorrhea
#42 Suicide
#8 AIDS cases (which correlates highly with %urban areas)
#13 Syphilis Rate (AL is #12)
No rate data for total HIV deaths.
Poor Mental Health is a self-report statistic (AL is #12) & CA is #43 in serious mental illness per capita (AL is #16).
And, btw I do not live in CA.
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4) A legal system that actually listens to parents who sue when schools properly punish their kids for misbehaving. Not sure, but it sounds like you are suggesting corporal punishment? 5) Government monopolies that make it financially impossible for most parents to afford to send their kids to private schools or homeschool them. I'm not sure I understand how Gov't provided education makes private schools charge prohibitively expensive rates.
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