A group of computational mathematicians have named something after Hilbert? Shocking and newsworthy!
Now, I'm off to take an erdos--it's gauss o'clock already, and I'm still wearing my eulers.
And legalese, much like medical jargon, is a separate language where words mean specific things.
I beg to differ. Almost all intellectual disciplines have their own specialized jargon. Jargon was invented for the purpose of having words mean specific things, so once you make the simple, one-time effort of learning the language, you can make unambiguous sense of that discipline's jargon. That's the theory. In practice, some disciplines (mathematics, computers, medicine, the hard sciences, etc.) really do use jargon this way, while others use it for the opposite purpose: deliberate ambiguity. I'll compare legalese to mathematical reasoning because they are both basically a priori--experts cannot disagree solely because of insufficient empirical data, because there is no empirical data. Now, there are a posteriori legal issues as well--the facts of a case can be in dispute. In criminal trials, the most common defense is to argue that the facts are sufficiently disputable to constitute reasonable doubt. But there are many cases where all sides agree on the facts, and the only issue is the a priori interpretation of the relevant laws and/or contracts. We'll compare mathematics to how these cases are decided.
In mathematics, proofs written in jargon are submitted to peer-reviewed journals. If some, but not all, of the reviewers find an error, simply pointing it out to the others is sufficient to convince them. When papers are rejected, the author accepts that there is an error and works to correct it. Mathematicians who do not accept the decisions of peer review are considered crackpots and tend to have their names legally changed to Archimedes Plutonium.
In the legal system, cases written in jargon are submitted to the Supreme Court. If some, but not all, of the justices find an error in the argument of one side, they will argue until every justice is sure which side they stand on, agree to disagree, and take a vote. The lawyers on the losing side of the case will continue to state their unaltered arguments to anyone who will listen, just as convinced of their correctness as ever. Even in fully a priori cases, experts can disagree because legal jargon is ambiguous, and allows multiple interpretations of the same statements.
This is not necessarily a bad thing--there are ambiguities in the Bill of Rights put in deliberately by the framers to allow culture to change over time. People today and people 200 years ago have very different ideas of what constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment," for example. I'm writing a constitution, purely as an intellectual exercise, and I find myself doing the same thing surprisingly often--I'll think an issue is important enough to address at the constitution level, but not want to permanently force my own opinion on the hypothetical people living under the government I'm defining.
But there are obvious disadvantages as well. A lawyer's job is to relentlessly pursue the client's interests, without regard for any larger issues. To that end, lawyers can and do use jargon so ambiguous as to be confusing, for the express purpose of fooling people into accepting a position they would not accept if they understood. Johnny Cochran's use of the Chewbacca Defense in the O.J. Simpson case is the most famous example of this (thank you South Park), but there are others pervading our daily lives. Renters' and property-owners' insurance policies are each written to pass the buck to the other for most claims--I found this out the hard way a few years ago. Cell phone service contracts that automatically renew when they expire. Adjustable-rate mortgages. In all these cases, the central purpose of using legal jargon is to confuse and intimidate without being forced to be unambiguous.
My guess is that patent applications usually work this way. That's only a guess, and if you have evidence to the contrary, I'm happy to listen, but you can't claim that such tactics are impossible--the purpose of legal jargon is to make them possible.
the difference in auditory quality that the compact disc represented over vinyl or cassette tapes
There has been much argument about whether CDs or vinyl sound better. Here's some actual facts.
Vinyl stores more information than CDs do. Quite a bit more.
CDs are digital. When you convert from digital to analog or vice versa, you lose information. So any recording made on analog equipment (pretty much any recording more than 15 years old) then put on CD is hemorrhaging data when you put it on the disc and again when you listen to it.
Vinyl is analog. When you make an analog copy of an analog master, you lose information. So any recording made on analog equipment leaks data every time one piece of equipment transfers the recording to another piece of equipment. Instead of the two big wounds of a-d-a, there's a bunch of tiny ones with a-a-a-a-a-a-a.
When you start out with digital equipment, every time one digital device conveys the recording to another, the copy is literally perfect. Any and all degredation can be caught by checksums--and even if you don't do error-checking, a bit-flip or two will make far less difference in audio than other kinds of digital data. With digital recording equipment, a CD loses information only once--when you listen to it.
The quality of the equipment you play it on matters. Today's vinyl fanatics talk about how "warm" the sound is, but that's a feature of the player, not the media. There is no market for low-end record players today. Nearly every single record player manufactured and sold today is audiophile-quality. The best hi-fi systems with the best CD players and the best DACs (digital to analog converters) and the best speakers will sound just as much warmer than a $25 boom box from Walmart as an audiophile record player will. One of the biggest wins for any digital format over any analog format is that there's much less room for the player to screw things up. The cheapest CD players are easily ten times as good at conveying the information from the media to the amp as cheap record players were, when there were cheap record players. It's not even mathematically possible to make a digital audio player that sounds as bad as the record players that were mainstream in 1982. In fact, one of the reasons compressed audio has become such a big deal is that even the worst CD players provide better sound quality than low-end amps and speakers can reproduce.
CDs are not degraded by normal use. Vinyl records are.
With basic read-ahead for skip protection, CD players are more or less impervious to being shaken or bounced. Bouncing a record player will not only wreak havoc with playback, but probably even damage the media.
Essentially, the vinyl fanatics are correct that a vinyl record will sound better under ideal circumstances than a CD. But making (and keeping) circumstances ideal takes time, effort, and money. In circumstances any more than marginally below ideal, a CD will sound better. Unless you're in the most extreme two or three percent of audiophiles, you're better off with CDs. That's why CDs won, and that's why they deserved to win. I'll keep my record player and my vinyl collection, and I'll tell you how much better vinyl can be than CDs, but CDs are indisputably the right choice for most usage.
...the current Harry Potter movie is a scathing indictment of the Bush Administration
Actually, this movie in particular and all of the five so far made in general dramatically tone down the political themes of the books. As the series has gone on, it has incrementally progressed from subtle jokes about the idiosyncrasies of the British government to more serious, more general, and more overt discussions of political philosophy.
Although I agree wholeheartedly that the politics of Order of the Phoenix are highly applicable to the Bush administration, it's probably coincidence. The book was written from late 2000 to early 2003, when the major troubles and scandals of the Bush administration had barely started. In the first almost-year of his presidency, before 9/11, he was merely a bumbling incompetent--passively a failure. I point to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, by which time Phoenix was nearly ready for publication (June 2003), as the beginning of his active failure--when he started doing things that were fundamentally wrong, rather than just doing nothing at all or doing the right things the wrong way. Remember that in early 2003, the Democratic Party was still giving him the benefit of the doubt on many issues, including preemptively voting to authorize the invasion because he claimed he only wanted to be able to act more quickly if the action became absolutely necessary. By the time Rowling finished Phoenix, the debate over exactly how imperialist and authoritarian Bush actually was had barely begun even here in the relatively well-informed and strongly libertarian Slashdot community.
We would be in a lot better shape if people could hold the government more accountable for their actions.
It's called voting against the offenders. Even in the case of appointees, you can vote against the elected officials who appointed them. The problem is not that we can't, it's that we don't. The general public almost always votes for the incumbent, so once someone is in power, it'll take more than a little incompetence or corruption to get them out. And even among the very, very few people who pay attention to stuff like this at all, most of us vote for the big-name candidate who agrees with us on the greatest number of current hot-button issues. Whether or not those hot-button issues have anything to do with the actual responsibilities of the office in question.
Lots and lots and lots of people voted for Dubya because he is (well, pretends to be) a religious conservative. But his positions on gay marriage and abortion have mysteriously failed to be as relevant to his job of running the Executive Branch and military as the facts that he's a multiple failure as a businessman and he was a National Guard deserter.
One of the power players in the corrupt political machine that was just collectively kicked out of office in my home state of Ohio was a woman named Betty Montgomery (also my last name, but no relation). She was Attorney General for some time, and if you had the same level of disregard for the same parts of the Constitution as her, you could call her a good one. When term limits prevented her from running for re-election, she ran for, and was elected, State Auditor. She had no training or experience in bookkeeping, accounting, or finance whatsoever--she was a criminal prosecutor her entire career. While she was auditor, the state government was victim of several cases of embezzlement and fraud, most uncovered by the press rather than by her office, and none uncovered until months or years after the fact. The nationally reported scandal of Worker's Compensation funds being "invested" in rare coins happened right under her nose. She was elected to a position she had no qualifications for because of party affiliation and name-recognition. Because of her ideology on issues unrelated to that position.
That kind of problem is totally avoidable. It's not always as easy to prevent them entirely as it should have been with Bush and Montgomery--you can never know for certain if an official isn't a screwup at all or simply hasn't screwed up yet--but the people do in fact have the power to stop them from screwing up over and over, by voting them out of office. If being firable isn't accountability, I don't know what is.
Grandparent: IMHO the greatest failing in many Christians is they refuse to accept basic human traits and attempt to suppress them, which will not result in better humans, but in sinners.
Parent: I'm not sure what to do with that. It seems wrong on so many levels that I fear I'm misunderstanding you severely. It's not a "failing" of Christianity to refuse to accept basic human traits. We accept that the nature of man is what it is. And what it is, is sinful.
The miscommunication here is that the original poster was talking about "many Christians," meaning a large number of specific individuals, and you're talking about "Christianity," meaning the the teachings of Christ. It's the difference between what people should do and what they actually do. It has been my experience that most people have no real comprehension of the ideas they claim to belive, and that this is especially prevalent in people who don't interact much with those who belive differently. This is why religious monocultures come up with ideas like "the Qoran says we should crash some planes into buildings" and "let's round up six million German and Polish Jews and gas them." Christianity is the majority religion in the USA, so American Christians are susceptible to this. Thanks to the first amendment, the country isn't a monoculture and isn't likely to make any mistakes as colossal as my examples, but thinking critically about one's own beliefs still takes more effort than most people are willing to put forth unless they're forced to, and members of the majority are rarely forced to.
You're saying that Christianity teaches that even though you're going to slip up now and then you should still keep trying to improve yourself. The original poster said that a lot of Christians either see sin as an all-or-nothing proposition and give up entirely after one mistake or see Jesus as a get-out-of-hell-free card and just do as they please from the start. The two claims are not contradictory, and I have no reservations in agreeing with both. The Bible says that Christians should live their lives as you say, but in practice, a noticeable percentage do not.
Grandparent: Hasn't anyone noticed by now that this year, there was a Friday the 13th in January, which has the exact same digits as today? (01/13/2006 vs 10/13/2006)
Meaning.. this phenomenon has happened within the last year?
Parent: Parent is right: 01/13/2006 was a Friday... this omission further proves that fatalysts and numerologists are quite slow mentally.
Furthermore, 2006-1520 = 486, not 476. Quite slow indeed. It's fun to blame the universe for everything that goes wrong all day when there's a Friday the 13th, but people who take the whole thing seriously should be shot in the face with a bazooka.
So, essentially, they shot themselves in the foot.
Themselves and the theaters. I work at a theater, and R-rated movies marketed to teenagers are a huge pain in the ass. 15 and 16 year olds who don't know they're not allowed to see the movie or "forget" to bring ID, 17+ year olds who actually forget to bring ID, kids buying tickets to other movies and trying to sneak into the wrong auditorium. We have to check ID at the box office and at the door to the auditorium for big-name R-rated movies just to keep uptight parents from suing us.
I often wonder why the studios hate us. We deliver most of their revenue, and they're continually trying to put us out of business. They release films on DVD sooner and sooner, then wonder why fewer people are going to the theater. They take a (frighteningly high) percentage of ticket sales instead of a flat rate per ticket sold, so we have to jack up ticket prices to $8-10 per head, varying by market, just to get anything at all out of ticket sales, and charge an arm and a leg for concessions to make up the difference. If studios charged a flat rate per ticket, let's say $4 because that's the before-noon ticket price where I work, theaters could cover operating expenses with a $6.50 ticket price and make a reasonable profit with moderately priced concessions. More people would go to the movies, and more of them would visit the concession stand. $4 and $6.50 are just my guesses, market forces would determine the ticket price and studio take that maximize profit. I think the problem is that the studios are afraid of the free market. The way things are set up now, there's no room for market forces to determine anything except whether or not the whole system comes crashing down.
When I was in the military I drove tracked vehicles while communicating on a radio net, and also talking on an internal intercom system with a TC and squad leader. Getting in an accident would have been far more catastrophic given the weight and size of the equipment I was operating.
Similarly, Pilots also have to communicate while controlling an expensive piece of equipment - and I've also done that.
There are a number of major, major differences between these examples and everyday driving and cell phone use. As others have pointed out, the structure and content of the conversation are both radically different.
You point out that training is an issue, but it's vehicle training--not cell phone training--that makes the difference. The training given to military, police, and commercial freight drivers, as well as pilots, is orders of magnitude more intense than high school driver's ed, and the testing is much stricter. When you take your test, you're going to be putting your absolute best effort into it. So if you just barely pass your ordinary driving test, all it means is that your absolute best is just barely good enough. Pilots and professional drivers are expected to be perfect to pass their tests. An impairment that leads to a small increase in risk for a well-trained driver means a total risk still far less than an unimpaired barely-trained driver.
The biggest difference, though, is proximity to other vehicles. Driving a military vehicle, you're likely to be pretty isolated, and when you're not, it is mandatory for other vehicles to get out of your way. And aircraft maintain a huge minimum distance from each other, while the widest lanes on roads are only about twice the width of a car. There are actions that can be taken perfectly safely in an aircraft or by a military driver, but would cause a hundred-car pileup with a dozen fatalities on a freeway at rush hour.
Jeezus H. Christ! It was a joke! If I wasn't interested in astronomy, I would have just skimmed past the headline on the front page. I just thought it was funny that the article was essentially giving us a weather report for an uninhabited area.
So were these the same machines used to re-elect George Bush in 2004? Which states used Diebold devices then? I seem to remember some counties in Ohio did.
Much of Ohio used Diebold machines in that election. And initial reports from one precinct in my hometown in suburban Columbus had more votes for Bush than total votes cast. The 2004 election in Ohio was shockingly corrupt. If people around the country knew about everything that went on, it would be regarded as a comparable disaster to 2000 Florida. Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, whose job it is to run a fair election, is a Diebold shareholder, headlined an enormous partisan ad campaign, and advised the Republican-controlled legislature on what ballot issues would generate the heaviest Republican turnout. Blackwell is now the Republican candidate for governor. Yay.
He's not stealing because the theatre chain has agreed to pick up after him if he watches the movie.
Wrong. The theater is not a restaurant, and ushers are not busboys or janitors. When he buys his ticket, nobody says they're going to pick up his trash. There is no prior agreement of any sort to do so. In fact, the pre-screening slide show cheerfully asks guests to dispose of their waste properly--a polite, tactful way of making clear that your trash is your responsibility. Picking up patrons' trash is not in the ushers' job description. It is part of the ushers' and concessionists' job descriptions to clean up messes made by concession items. The wording is clearly chosen to distinguish between waste created by services provided by the theater--paid for by the customer--and waste brought in from outside.
By your argument, it would be appropriate for someone to bring in a Hefty bag full of hazardous waste that he doesn't want to go to the trouble or expense of disposing of properly, stuff it under his seat, and expect that since he paid for a ticket, it becomes the theater's problem. That would certainly be a much bigger deal than leaving chicken bones on the floor, but the lesser magnatude of the action affects the severity of the crime, it doesn't change the nature. It is not our responsibility to provide any side services to the customer that are not necessary, or at least related, to the services we explicitly provide. In selling you a ticket to a movie, the theater agrees to show you the movie. Nothing more, and even that only with certain reasonable limitations, for example the understanding that you may not interfere with other ticketholders' enjoyment of the movie, or create a hazardous situation, or use a video camera to record the movie.
At the beginning, this is true. But the ratio of 1's to 0's asymptotically approaches 0.5 as the length of the sequence increases. The same goes for longer subsequences. Your guess that there's an early bias for 10 over 01 is correct, too, but all biases in the sequence last only finitely long. It's really a pretty interesting sequence from a statastician's perspective.
Creating an extra expense for somebody is NOT stealing. Reducing somebody's income is also NOT stealing. Physically taking something that belongs to somebody without their consent - THAT is stealing.
Your arguments, though maybe a bit overstated, are applicable to situations of "potential" profits, or "projected" profits (are you listening, RIAA/MPAA?). Maybe even to actual profits. Not to income or revenues--this is not a situation where there is a change in the legitimate market value of what is being provided. Even if it were, prior consent of both parties to go on with the transaction would still be required. Yes, what is being stolen here is a service, not goods, but it's theft just the same. Economically, there's not really any such thing as goods--only the service of finding, assembling, or otherwise creating those goods. All money exchanged for anything, traced back, eventually goes to somebody's salary--to services. Even raw materials--you're paying the miners and mine owner. The physical objects themselves are free, so stealing has nothing to do with physical objects.
Chicken-bone-guy is creating a situation which must be altered, costs money to alter, and contributing none of that money, just the same as if he were taking away a needed object without consent or payment. There is no difference on either a moral or economic level from your definition of stealing. He's not stealing much, it takes maybe half a minute at $6.25/hour to clean up after him, but he is stealing.
I work at the AMC Lennox 24 in Columbus, Ohio, and I believe that the open food policy is chain-wide (which now includes Loew's, for those of you who don't live in the midwest). We don't exactly advertise it, because the concession stand is basically the sole source of revenue (as close to 100% as makes no difference of the ticket price goes straight to the studio), but we're open about it to the point of reccommending the coffeehouse next door when people ask if we sell coffee/tea/hot chocolate/other hot beverage.
I think it's a great policy, but it's also the source of the thing that pisses me off more than anything else about my job. I can't stand people who bring in outside food but don't clean up after themselves. Concession revenue pays the ushers' salaries, so creating work for the ushers without buying any concession items is out-and-out theft. Not just rude, but actually stealing. There's a guy who comes in about once a week with half a chicken from Boston Market and just drops the bones on the floor, doesn't even put them in the paper sack his food came in. It disgusts me on so many levels. Now, a lot of inconsiderate stuff that people do, I honestly believe they wouldn't if they put a human face on the people they're taking advantage of. Aggressive driving and leaving messes for other people to clean up come to mind. But the chicken bone thing is such an extreme case that I can't imagine the guy ever showing even basic courtesy to anyone. Nobody with the slightest capacity to identify with other people would ever do such a thing.
There isn't any particularly better definition of randomness than "unpredicability".
That's true not just as a rule of thumb, but in a more formal sense as well. The word "random" is pretty hard to come up with a mathematically formal definition for, and "pretty hard" may mean "impossible" depending on your definition of "definition" (more on that later). To make things simple, let's just talk about sequences of ones and zeros. Take for example the sequence 01101110010111011110001001101010111100110111101111 ... Definitions of randomness from statistics and probability just require a potentially random sequence to have all possible subsequences of a given length appear with the same frequency. That is, 0 appears exactly as often as 1; 00 appears exactly as often as 01, 10, and 11; 000 as often as 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111; and so on. The sequence I gave above passes those tests with flying colors. But it's not random at all. I'll put some spaces in it, and you'll see the pattern: 0 1 10 11 100 101 110 111 1000 1001 1010 1011 1100 1101 1110 1111... It's simply counting in binary. The longer you extend the sequence, the better it does in statistical randomness tests--the first few dozen bits have a pretty strong bias for 1 over 0, but that ends up as noise in the long run.
The relatively young field of information theory introduces the concept of "algorithmic randomness." The randomness of a sequence of bits is defined to be the length of the shortest Universal Turing Machine program which ouputs that sequence. In pseudocode, our example sequence is output by the program:
let i = 0
while (true) do
output i
let i = i + 1
end while
That's a comically short program to generate an arbitrarily long sequence. So the example fails tests for algorithmic randomness miserably. The fun part is that the problem of finding the shortest UTM program to generate a given sequence is provably intractable. Thanks to the the Halting Problem, you can't always tell if a given UTM program will halt or loop infinitely. All you could ever know is whether or not the program has output the desired sequence yet--if it's still running, it may do so eventually and then halt, it may output something else and then halt, or it may keep running forever. So algorithmic randomness plugs the holes in statistical randomness by trading an unreliably solvable problem for a reliably unsolvable one. You can't ever be sure a sequence is random, but you can sometimes be sure it isn't.
I got off on a bit of a tangent there about information theory, but my point is that algorithmic randomness captures what we mean by "random" much better than statistical randomness. And algorithmic randomness is just a mathematically formal way of saying "unpredictable."
But the fact is that no decent music has been written since the Baroque era.
Beg to differ. I'm happy to pledge my undying devotion to Renaissance and Baroque music above all other, and I agree with you completely about Mozart and the rest of the Classic era music--99% of it combines the worst elements of Baroque music with the worst elements of Romantic music. But even beyond that other 1%, there was PLENTY of great music after the Classic era ended (for reference, I consider Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to be the border between the Classic and Romantic eras). I refer you to Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Grieg, Holst, Mussorgsky, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky, to name a few. And that's just taken from traditional Western art music, and just those who were consistently great. There are plenty of mid-level composers who turned out a masterpiece once in a while, too.
There have been some great musicians in popular music of the past century or so as well. Most modern popular music is crap, yes, but the same is true of any era--crap from the past has just had time to be forgotten. The jazz tradition has Scott Joplin and Duke Ellington. As far as rock goes, the more I learn about music theory, the more I appreciate the Beatles. Procol Harum and Queen also put out top-notch music by any standards. And over the past 15 years, there's been some really good stuff coming out of the progressive/melodic metal genre. I'm not saying most of it is truly all-time great, but some of it is, and a lot of it is more than adequate even by the highest standards. Stratovarius, Nightwish, Kamelot (only after Roy Khan became the lead singer), Him, and to a lesser extent, Hammerfall (talking about the music, not the lyrics, in this case) and Sonata Arctica, are metal bands that have songwriters who can legitimately be called composers and performers who could be professional musicians even if their chosen genre was not rock.
If it's not just any Baroque music, but actually J.S. Bach you're using as your standard for "decent music," then no, I'm not claiming any of that music is as good as his. But none of his contemporaries or predecessors were as good either. The fact that the greatest genius in human history happened to be a musician and happened to live during the Baroque era does not mean that that the Baroque era produced the world's only good music.
What you've hit on here is the central problem in trying to make mainstream products accessible to people with disabilities--which particular disabilities do you optimize for? My roommate is legally blind, and has difficulty with games that have small maps in the corner of the screen (GTA for example). Bright colors would make those maps much easier for him to see. But if all the colors were the same brigtness, a color-blind person would have a much harder time with it. Or if you make the game rely more on sound, that makes it better for all sorts of visual impairments, but worse for the hearing impaired.
No matter what you do, you can't change the fact that disabilities are disadvantages. They're the most extreme examples of different people having different strengths and weaknesses. Optimizing for one group of people with nonstandard abilities will be highly suboptimal for another group. It's unfortunate, but the only way to make everything accessible to everyone is to eliminate anything with any complexity at all. Only the simplest things are be usable by both the blind and the deaf. Basically nothing is usable by people without functioning legs and people without functioning arms. It's important to make products available to each disability group, but it's idiocy to pretend that they can be equivalent to each other, much less equivalent to the products available to the nondisabled. In most cases, you can't take a mainstream product, slap a different frontend on it for each nonmainstream group, and expect it to work for everyone.
At first glance, the amazing flexibility of the Revolution controller makes it look like it might be an exception to that rule. And for the first generation of games, it might be. But before long, developers will start making games that use the full range of that flexibility. Should those games be eliminated? If not everyone can use something, no one can? That's ridiculous. It's a problem, but pretending a solution exists will only reduce what's available to the majority. Anyone who can't do something I can has my genuine sympathy, and as much of my help as they want and I can give. But I'm not going to pretend I can't just so they can pretend they can.
Keep in mind that I explicitly favored strict restrictions on public use of all drugs, particularly tobacco and marijuana.
Even if tobacco does have a contact high, nicotine doesn't interfere with operating cars or other machinery the way alcohol and d9THC do because unlike alcohol and d9THC, nicotine is a stimulant.
First, I didn't make it as clear as I could have that I was directly comparing nicotine's health effects to THC's psychological effects. Because of the way nicotine and THC are taken, both are examples of ways individuals can infringe on the rights of other individuals. I insist that the government must work hard to prevent that. But by (implicitly) supporting both the legality of tobacco and the illegality of marijuana, you're saying that psychological effects are more important than health effects. It's your right to make that decision--for yourself. And it's my right to make a different decision for myself if I so choose. It's not the government's right to make that decision for either of us.
Second, having one lungful of marijuana smoke blown in your face would not make any noticable difference in your basic functioning. An equivalent dosage of alcohol would be a teaspoon of imitation vanilla flavoring. We are not talking about impairing the ability to drive or operate machinery until you're staying in an enclosed space with someone smoking marijuana for at least several minutes. If you're outdoors, it would take a Grateful Dead concert. The health effects of momentary exposure to tobacco smoke are at least comparable to the psychological effects of momentary exposure to marijuana smoke.
Third, it's not the fact that nicotine is a stimulant that is important. I'd rather see a drunk or a stoned driver than one high on a major stimulant like speed. What makes a difference is that nicotine, in the dosage found in cigarettes, is a very mild stimulant. It's the intensity, not the category, of the psychological effect that's important.
Don't both tobacco and marijuana have tar?
Quite the opposite--neither does. Tobacco companies add tar (along with a host of even worse things, like arsenic) to cigarettes for the sole and express purpose of making their products more addictive. Marijuana, on the other hand, is invariably smoked pure. And tar is not the only health issue with tobacco. Aside from the additives, nicotine is a deadly poison--it was a popular murder weapon not that long ago. The obvious smell and taste made it useless when added to food, but it could easily be applied to a knife or sword and dried. Even a small cut with a nicotine-tinged blade would cause an apparant heart attack. It fell out of common usage, along with all other poisons, when medical science learned to detect it in autopsy. But the point is that the drug itself, even without the toxic/carcinogenic additives present in nearly all commercial tobacco, is still a genuine health risk. There has never, on the other hand, been a single case of anyone dying from a THC overdose. It is simply not (directly) harmful. Yes, there is more than just pure THC in marijuana smoke, and there is a great deal of debate among medical professionals about exactly what health risks are associated with marijuana use. I'm not qualified to get into that discussion, but the worst-case scenario is that marijuana is still at least slightly healthier than even pure tobacco, which is itself much healthier than the poisoned tobacco commonly available.
Unlike liquor or tobacco, cannabis allows the smoker to force anybody else to get high by blowing smoke in the victim's face.
Unlike liquor, but EXACTLY like tobacco. Speaking as someone whose nonmedicinal drug use is limited to alcohol and caffine, both moderately and responsibly, I've always felt that adults in a free society have the right to make these kinds of decisions for themselves. Which means drugs should be legal but with heavy restrictions on public use. The government can't force me not to use drugs, but other individuals can't force me to use them, either.
The distinction you've hit on is important, but doesn't even come close to warranting absolute prohibition, especially an inconsistently applied prohibition. The three relevant factors when discussing drugs are addictivity, health effects, and psychological effects. Tobacco carries severe health risks and is severely addictive but has only mild psychological effects. Marijuana, on the other hand, has moderate to strong psychological effects, depending on dosage, but is only mildly addictive and carries (at most) only mild health risks. Saying tobacco is ok but marijuana isn't is precisely the sort of value judgement that MUST be left to the individual, not made by government (or strangers, in the case of secondhand smoke). Making drugs legal in private but restricted in public is the only solution which respects and protects the rights of all individuals.
Is this amazing? Yes and no. Practically every kid developes this skill (except for Cleveland Indian players). Yet it is very amazing, because it is real time processing of information that is quite complex when you try to break it down. Defining the optimal path to the ball requires fast image processing combined with low level calculus.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Small children (and also adults who are not world-class athletes) trying to intercept a slow-moving object are not doing anything even approximating calculus. You simply run as fast as you can at an angle such that the object is stationary or moving backwards in your own visual field. That is how defensive players in football catch ballcarriers, and how infielders in baseball intercept baserunners. Outfielders at the Cleveland Indians level use a fundamentally similar process for catching fly balls, which move in a parabola, not a straight line. Better outfielders have data accumulated over years and years of looking at a very specific class of parabolas--those generated by a downward acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2--and through trial and error, learn to extrapolate the whole parabola from a few data points.
That's a rare skill, learned not hardwired, and still not calculus. Even with only three data points, that's only a high-school algebra problem. Knowing that Earth's gravity is (close enough to) the same in every ballpark reduces the needed data points to two--one of which is always home plate. Throw in strong enough winds to make a difference, that would be calculus. But under those conditions, even the professionals have only as much success as you would expect from the assumption that the wind's effect is linear. Outfielders in baseball, placekickers in football, and golfers--those athletes who would be most helped by the ability to do mental calculus--have the least success in the windiest conditions.
Human beings can not do subconscious calculus. Seeming examples to the contrary are actually just clever, but computationally trivial, shortcuts.
Slashdot Mirror
A group of computational mathematicians have named something after Hilbert? Shocking and newsworthy! Now, I'm off to take an erdos--it's gauss o'clock already, and I'm still wearing my eulers.
And legalese, much like medical jargon, is a separate language where words mean specific things.
I beg to differ. Almost all intellectual disciplines have their own specialized jargon. Jargon was invented for the purpose of having words mean specific things, so once you make the simple, one-time effort of learning the language, you can make unambiguous sense of that discipline's jargon. That's the theory. In practice, some disciplines (mathematics, computers, medicine, the hard sciences, etc.) really do use jargon this way, while others use it for the opposite purpose: deliberate ambiguity. I'll compare legalese to mathematical reasoning because they are both basically a priori--experts cannot disagree solely because of insufficient empirical data, because there is no empirical data. Now, there are a posteriori legal issues as well--the facts of a case can be in dispute. In criminal trials, the most common defense is to argue that the facts are sufficiently disputable to constitute reasonable doubt. But there are many cases where all sides agree on the facts, and the only issue is the a priori interpretation of the relevant laws and/or contracts. We'll compare mathematics to how these cases are decided.
In mathematics, proofs written in jargon are submitted to peer-reviewed journals. If some, but not all, of the reviewers find an error, simply pointing it out to the others is sufficient to convince them. When papers are rejected, the author accepts that there is an error and works to correct it. Mathematicians who do not accept the decisions of peer review are considered crackpots and tend to have their names legally changed to Archimedes Plutonium.
In the legal system, cases written in jargon are submitted to the Supreme Court. If some, but not all, of the justices find an error in the argument of one side, they will argue until every justice is sure which side they stand on, agree to disagree, and take a vote. The lawyers on the losing side of the case will continue to state their unaltered arguments to anyone who will listen, just as convinced of their correctness as ever. Even in fully a priori cases, experts can disagree because legal jargon is ambiguous, and allows multiple interpretations of the same statements.
This is not necessarily a bad thing--there are ambiguities in the Bill of Rights put in deliberately by the framers to allow culture to change over time. People today and people 200 years ago have very different ideas of what constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment," for example. I'm writing a constitution, purely as an intellectual exercise, and I find myself doing the same thing surprisingly often--I'll think an issue is important enough to address at the constitution level, but not want to permanently force my own opinion on the hypothetical people living under the government I'm defining.
But there are obvious disadvantages as well. A lawyer's job is to relentlessly pursue the client's interests, without regard for any larger issues. To that end, lawyers can and do use jargon so ambiguous as to be confusing, for the express purpose of fooling people into accepting a position they would not accept if they understood. Johnny Cochran's use of the Chewbacca Defense in the O.J. Simpson case is the most famous example of this (thank you South Park), but there are others pervading our daily lives. Renters' and property-owners' insurance policies are each written to pass the buck to the other for most claims--I found this out the hard way a few years ago. Cell phone service contracts that automatically renew when they expire. Adjustable-rate mortgages. In all these cases, the central purpose of using legal jargon is to confuse and intimidate without being forced to be unambiguous.
My guess is that patent applications usually work this way. That's only a guess, and if you have evidence to the contrary, I'm happy to listen, but you can't claim that such tactics are impossible--the purpose of legal jargon is to make them possible.
the difference in auditory quality that the compact disc represented over vinyl or cassette tapes
There has been much argument about whether CDs or vinyl sound better. Here's some actual facts.
Essentially, the vinyl fanatics are correct that a vinyl record will sound better under ideal circumstances than a CD. But making (and keeping) circumstances ideal takes time, effort, and money. In circumstances any more than marginally below ideal, a CD will sound better. Unless you're in the most extreme two or three percent of audiophiles, you're better off with CDs. That's why CDs won, and that's why they deserved to win. I'll keep my record player and my vinyl collection, and I'll tell you how much better vinyl can be than CDs, but CDs are indisputably the right choice for most usage.
Actually, this movie in particular and all of the five so far made in general dramatically tone down the political themes of the books. As the series has gone on, it has incrementally progressed from subtle jokes about the idiosyncrasies of the British government to more serious, more general, and more overt discussions of political philosophy.
Although I agree wholeheartedly that the politics of Order of the Phoenix are highly applicable to the Bush administration, it's probably coincidence. The book was written from late 2000 to early 2003, when the major troubles and scandals of the Bush administration had barely started. In the first almost-year of his presidency, before 9/11, he was merely a bumbling incompetent--passively a failure. I point to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, by which time Phoenix was nearly ready for publication (June 2003), as the beginning of his active failure--when he started doing things that were fundamentally wrong, rather than just doing nothing at all or doing the right things the wrong way. Remember that in early 2003, the Democratic Party was still giving him the benefit of the doubt on many issues, including preemptively voting to authorize the invasion because he claimed he only wanted to be able to act more quickly if the action became absolutely necessary. By the time Rowling finished Phoenix, the debate over exactly how imperialist and authoritarian Bush actually was had barely begun even here in the relatively well-informed and strongly libertarian Slashdot community.
We would be in a lot better shape if people could hold the government more accountable for their actions.
It's called voting against the offenders. Even in the case of appointees, you can vote against the elected officials who appointed them. The problem is not that we can't, it's that we don't. The general public almost always votes for the incumbent, so once someone is in power, it'll take more than a little incompetence or corruption to get them out. And even among the very, very few people who pay attention to stuff like this at all, most of us vote for the big-name candidate who agrees with us on the greatest number of current hot-button issues. Whether or not those hot-button issues have anything to do with the actual responsibilities of the office in question.
Lots and lots and lots of people voted for Dubya because he is (well, pretends to be) a religious conservative. But his positions on gay marriage and abortion have mysteriously failed to be as relevant to his job of running the Executive Branch and military as the facts that he's a multiple failure as a businessman and he was a National Guard deserter.
One of the power players in the corrupt political machine that was just collectively kicked out of office in my home state of Ohio was a woman named Betty Montgomery (also my last name, but no relation). She was Attorney General for some time, and if you had the same level of disregard for the same parts of the Constitution as her, you could call her a good one. When term limits prevented her from running for re-election, she ran for, and was elected, State Auditor. She had no training or experience in bookkeeping, accounting, or finance whatsoever--she was a criminal prosecutor her entire career. While she was auditor, the state government was victim of several cases of embezzlement and fraud, most uncovered by the press rather than by her office, and none uncovered until months or years after the fact. The nationally reported scandal of Worker's Compensation funds being "invested" in rare coins happened right under her nose. She was elected to a position she had no qualifications for because of party affiliation and name-recognition. Because of her ideology on issues unrelated to that position.
That kind of problem is totally avoidable. It's not always as easy to prevent them entirely as it should have been with Bush and Montgomery--you can never know for certain if an official isn't a screwup at all or simply hasn't screwed up yet--but the people do in fact have the power to stop them from screwing up over and over, by voting them out of office. If being firable isn't accountability, I don't know what is.
Grandparent: IMHO the greatest failing in many Christians is they refuse to accept basic human traits and attempt to suppress them, which will not result in better humans, but in sinners.
Parent: I'm not sure what to do with that. It seems wrong on so many levels that I fear I'm misunderstanding you severely. It's not a "failing" of Christianity to refuse to accept basic human traits. We accept that the nature of man is what it is. And what it is, is sinful.
The miscommunication here is that the original poster was talking about "many Christians," meaning a large number of specific individuals, and you're talking about "Christianity," meaning the the teachings of Christ. It's the difference between what people should do and what they actually do. It has been my experience that most people have no real comprehension of the ideas they claim to belive, and that this is especially prevalent in people who don't interact much with those who belive differently. This is why religious monocultures come up with ideas like "the Qoran says we should crash some planes into buildings" and "let's round up six million German and Polish Jews and gas them." Christianity is the majority religion in the USA, so American Christians are susceptible to this. Thanks to the first amendment, the country isn't a monoculture and isn't likely to make any mistakes as colossal as my examples, but thinking critically about one's own beliefs still takes more effort than most people are willing to put forth unless they're forced to, and members of the majority are rarely forced to.
You're saying that Christianity teaches that even though you're going to slip up now and then you should still keep trying to improve yourself. The original poster said that a lot of Christians either see sin as an all-or-nothing proposition and give up entirely after one mistake or see Jesus as a get-out-of-hell-free card and just do as they please from the start. The two claims are not contradictory, and I have no reservations in agreeing with both. The Bible says that Christians should live their lives as you say, but in practice, a noticeable percentage do not.
Grandparent: Hasn't anyone noticed by now that this year, there was a Friday the 13th in January, which has the exact same digits as today? (01/13/2006 vs 10/13/2006) Meaning.. this phenomenon has happened within the last year?
Parent: Parent is right: 01/13/2006 was a Friday... this omission further proves that fatalysts and numerologists are quite slow mentally.
Furthermore, 2006-1520 = 486, not 476. Quite slow indeed. It's fun to blame the universe for everything that goes wrong all day when there's a Friday the 13th, but people who take the whole thing seriously should be shot in the face with a bazooka.
So, essentially, they shot themselves in the foot.
Themselves and the theaters. I work at a theater, and R-rated movies marketed to teenagers are a huge pain in the ass. 15 and 16 year olds who don't know they're not allowed to see the movie or "forget" to bring ID, 17+ year olds who actually forget to bring ID, kids buying tickets to other movies and trying to sneak into the wrong auditorium. We have to check ID at the box office and at the door to the auditorium for big-name R-rated movies just to keep uptight parents from suing us.
I often wonder why the studios hate us. We deliver most of their revenue, and they're continually trying to put us out of business. They release films on DVD sooner and sooner, then wonder why fewer people are going to the theater. They take a (frighteningly high) percentage of ticket sales instead of a flat rate per ticket sold, so we have to jack up ticket prices to $8-10 per head, varying by market, just to get anything at all out of ticket sales, and charge an arm and a leg for concessions to make up the difference. If studios charged a flat rate per ticket, let's say $4 because that's the before-noon ticket price where I work, theaters could cover operating expenses with a $6.50 ticket price and make a reasonable profit with moderately priced concessions. More people would go to the movies, and more of them would visit the concession stand. $4 and $6.50 are just my guesses, market forces would determine the ticket price and studio take that maximize profit. I think the problem is that the studios are afraid of the free market. The way things are set up now, there's no room for market forces to determine anything except whether or not the whole system comes crashing down.
When I was in the military I drove tracked vehicles while communicating on a radio net, and also talking on an internal intercom system with a TC and squad leader. Getting in an accident would have been far more catastrophic given the weight and size of the equipment I was operating.
Similarly, Pilots also have to communicate while controlling an expensive piece of equipment - and I've also done that.
There are a number of major, major differences between these examples and everyday driving and cell phone use. As others have pointed out, the structure and content of the conversation are both radically different.
You point out that training is an issue, but it's vehicle training--not cell phone training--that makes the difference. The training given to military, police, and commercial freight drivers, as well as pilots, is orders of magnitude more intense than high school driver's ed, and the testing is much stricter. When you take your test, you're going to be putting your absolute best effort into it. So if you just barely pass your ordinary driving test, all it means is that your absolute best is just barely good enough. Pilots and professional drivers are expected to be perfect to pass their tests. An impairment that leads to a small increase in risk for a well-trained driver means a total risk still far less than an unimpaired barely-trained driver.
The biggest difference, though, is proximity to other vehicles. Driving a military vehicle, you're likely to be pretty isolated, and when you're not, it is mandatory for other vehicles to get out of your way. And aircraft maintain a huge minimum distance from each other, while the widest lanes on roads are only about twice the width of a car. There are actions that can be taken perfectly safely in an aircraft or by a military driver, but would cause a hundred-car pileup with a dozen fatalities on a freeway at rush hour.
Jeezus H. Christ! It was a joke! If I wasn't interested in astronomy, I would have just skimmed past the headline on the front page. I just thought it was funny that the article was essentially giving us a weather report for an uninhabited area.
Flamebait? It's a joke, people!
I don't care about weather reports for cities 500 miles away, so why should I care about weather reports for a planet 500 million miles away???
So were these the same machines used to re-elect George Bush in 2004? Which states used Diebold devices then? I seem to remember some counties in Ohio did.
Much of Ohio used Diebold machines in that election. And initial reports from one precinct in my hometown in suburban Columbus had more votes for Bush than total votes cast. The 2004 election in Ohio was shockingly corrupt. If people around the country knew about everything that went on, it would be regarded as a comparable disaster to 2000 Florida. Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, whose job it is to run a fair election, is a Diebold shareholder, headlined an enormous partisan ad campaign, and advised the Republican-controlled legislature on what ballot issues would generate the heaviest Republican turnout. Blackwell is now the Republican candidate for governor. Yay.
Ahh, Mario. The man who taught every child in the world that eating mushrooms makes you feel ten feet tall, and strange plants give you super powers.
He's not stealing because the theatre chain has agreed to pick up after him if he watches the movie.
Wrong. The theater is not a restaurant, and ushers are not busboys or janitors. When he buys his ticket, nobody says they're going to pick up his trash. There is no prior agreement of any sort to do so. In fact, the pre-screening slide show cheerfully asks guests to dispose of their waste properly--a polite, tactful way of making clear that your trash is your responsibility. Picking up patrons' trash is not in the ushers' job description. It is part of the ushers' and concessionists' job descriptions to clean up messes made by concession items. The wording is clearly chosen to distinguish between waste created by services provided by the theater--paid for by the customer--and waste brought in from outside.
By your argument, it would be appropriate for someone to bring in a Hefty bag full of hazardous waste that he doesn't want to go to the trouble or expense of disposing of properly, stuff it under his seat, and expect that since he paid for a ticket, it becomes the theater's problem. That would certainly be a much bigger deal than leaving chicken bones on the floor, but the lesser magnatude of the action affects the severity of the crime, it doesn't change the nature. It is not our responsibility to provide any side services to the customer that are not necessary, or at least related, to the services we explicitly provide. In selling you a ticket to a movie, the theater agrees to show you the movie. Nothing more, and even that only with certain reasonable limitations, for example the understanding that you may not interfere with other ticketholders' enjoyment of the movie, or create a hazardous situation, or use a video camera to record the movie.
At the beginning, this is true. But the ratio of 1's to 0's asymptotically approaches 0.5 as the length of the sequence increases. The same goes for longer subsequences. Your guess that there's an early bias for 10 over 01 is correct, too, but all biases in the sequence last only finitely long. It's really a pretty interesting sequence from a statastician's perspective.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong.
Creating an extra expense for somebody is NOT stealing. Reducing somebody's income is also NOT stealing. Physically taking something that belongs to somebody without their consent - THAT is stealing.
Your arguments, though maybe a bit overstated, are applicable to situations of "potential" profits, or "projected" profits (are you listening, RIAA/MPAA?). Maybe even to actual profits. Not to income or revenues--this is not a situation where there is a change in the legitimate market value of what is being provided. Even if it were, prior consent of both parties to go on with the transaction would still be required. Yes, what is being stolen here is a service, not goods, but it's theft just the same. Economically, there's not really any such thing as goods--only the service of finding, assembling, or otherwise creating those goods. All money exchanged for anything, traced back, eventually goes to somebody's salary--to services. Even raw materials--you're paying the miners and mine owner. The physical objects themselves are free, so stealing has nothing to do with physical objects.
Chicken-bone-guy is creating a situation which must be altered, costs money to alter, and contributing none of that money, just the same as if he were taking away a needed object without consent or payment. There is no difference on either a moral or economic level from your definition of stealing. He's not stealing much, it takes maybe half a minute at $6.25/hour to clean up after him, but he is stealing.
I work at the AMC Lennox 24 in Columbus, Ohio, and I believe that the open food policy is chain-wide (which now includes Loew's, for those of you who don't live in the midwest). We don't exactly advertise it, because the concession stand is basically the sole source of revenue (as close to 100% as makes no difference of the ticket price goes straight to the studio), but we're open about it to the point of reccommending the coffeehouse next door when people ask if we sell coffee/tea/hot chocolate/other hot beverage.
I think it's a great policy, but it's also the source of the thing that pisses me off more than anything else about my job. I can't stand people who bring in outside food but don't clean up after themselves. Concession revenue pays the ushers' salaries, so creating work for the ushers without buying any concession items is out-and-out theft. Not just rude, but actually stealing. There's a guy who comes in about once a week with half a chicken from Boston Market and just drops the bones on the floor, doesn't even put them in the paper sack his food came in. It disgusts me on so many levels. Now, a lot of inconsiderate stuff that people do, I honestly believe they wouldn't if they put a human face on the people they're taking advantage of. Aggressive driving and leaving messes for other people to clean up come to mind. But the chicken bone thing is such an extreme case that I can't imagine the guy ever showing even basic courtesy to anyone. Nobody with the slightest capacity to identify with other people would ever do such a thing.
There isn't any particularly better definition of randomness than "unpredicability".
That's true not just as a rule of thumb, but in a more formal sense as well. The word "random" is pretty hard to come up with a mathematically formal definition for, and "pretty hard" may mean "impossible" depending on your definition of "definition" (more on that later). To make things simple, let's just talk about sequences of ones and zeros. Take for example the sequence 01101110010111011110001001101010111100110111101111 ... Definitions of randomness from statistics and probability just require a potentially random sequence to have all possible subsequences of a given length appear with the same frequency. That is, 0 appears exactly as often as 1; 00 appears exactly as often as 01, 10, and 11; 000 as often as 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111; and so on. The sequence I gave above passes those tests with flying colors. But it's not random at all. I'll put some spaces in it, and you'll see the pattern: 0 1 10 11 100 101 110 111 1000 1001 1010 1011 1100 1101 1110 1111... It's simply counting in binary. The longer you extend the sequence, the better it does in statistical randomness tests--the first few dozen bits have a pretty strong bias for 1 over 0, but that ends up as noise in the long run.
The relatively young field of information theory introduces the concept of "algorithmic randomness." The randomness of a sequence of bits is defined to be the length of the shortest Universal Turing Machine program which ouputs that sequence. In pseudocode, our example sequence is output by the program:
let i = 0
while (true) do
output i
let i = i + 1
end while
That's a comically short program to generate an arbitrarily long sequence. So the example fails tests for algorithmic randomness miserably. The fun part is that the problem of finding the shortest UTM program to generate a given sequence is provably intractable. Thanks to the the Halting Problem, you can't always tell if a given UTM program will halt or loop infinitely. All you could ever know is whether or not the program has output the desired sequence yet--if it's still running, it may do so eventually and then halt, it may output something else and then halt, or it may keep running forever. So algorithmic randomness plugs the holes in statistical randomness by trading an unreliably solvable problem for a reliably unsolvable one. You can't ever be sure a sequence is random, but you can sometimes be sure it isn't.
I got off on a bit of a tangent there about information theory, but my point is that algorithmic randomness captures what we mean by "random" much better than statistical randomness. And algorithmic randomness is just a mathematically formal way of saying "unpredictable."
But the fact is that no decent music has been written since the Baroque era.
Beg to differ. I'm happy to pledge my undying devotion to Renaissance and Baroque music above all other, and I agree with you completely about Mozart and the rest of the Classic era music--99% of it combines the worst elements of Baroque music with the worst elements of Romantic music. But even beyond that other 1%, there was PLENTY of great music after the Classic era ended (for reference, I consider Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to be the border between the Classic and Romantic eras). I refer you to Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Grieg, Holst, Mussorgsky, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky, to name a few. And that's just taken from traditional Western art music, and just those who were consistently great. There are plenty of mid-level composers who turned out a masterpiece once in a while, too.
There have been some great musicians in popular music of the past century or so as well. Most modern popular music is crap, yes, but the same is true of any era--crap from the past has just had time to be forgotten. The jazz tradition has Scott Joplin and Duke Ellington. As far as rock goes, the more I learn about music theory, the more I appreciate the Beatles. Procol Harum and Queen also put out top-notch music by any standards. And over the past 15 years, there's been some really good stuff coming out of the progressive/melodic metal genre. I'm not saying most of it is truly all-time great, but some of it is, and a lot of it is more than adequate even by the highest standards. Stratovarius, Nightwish, Kamelot (only after Roy Khan became the lead singer), Him, and to a lesser extent, Hammerfall (talking about the music, not the lyrics, in this case) and Sonata Arctica, are metal bands that have songwriters who can legitimately be called composers and performers who could be professional musicians even if their chosen genre was not rock.
If it's not just any Baroque music, but actually J.S. Bach you're using as your standard for "decent music," then no, I'm not claiming any of that music is as good as his. But none of his contemporaries or predecessors were as good either. The fact that the greatest genius in human history happened to be a musician and happened to live during the Baroque era does not mean that that the Baroque era produced the world's only good music.
Ickyickyickynerfanerlpmphfp
You mean ickyickypaKANGzooOOOwong!
What you've hit on here is the central problem in trying to make mainstream products accessible to people with disabilities--which particular disabilities do you optimize for? My roommate is legally blind, and has difficulty with games that have small maps in the corner of the screen (GTA for example). Bright colors would make those maps much easier for him to see. But if all the colors were the same brigtness, a color-blind person would have a much harder time with it. Or if you make the game rely more on sound, that makes it better for all sorts of visual impairments, but worse for the hearing impaired.
No matter what you do, you can't change the fact that disabilities are disadvantages. They're the most extreme examples of different people having different strengths and weaknesses. Optimizing for one group of people with nonstandard abilities will be highly suboptimal for another group. It's unfortunate, but the only way to make everything accessible to everyone is to eliminate anything with any complexity at all. Only the simplest things are be usable by both the blind and the deaf. Basically nothing is usable by people without functioning legs and people without functioning arms. It's important to make products available to each disability group, but it's idiocy to pretend that they can be equivalent to each other, much less equivalent to the products available to the nondisabled. In most cases, you can't take a mainstream product, slap a different frontend on it for each nonmainstream group, and expect it to work for everyone.
At first glance, the amazing flexibility of the Revolution controller makes it look like it might be an exception to that rule. And for the first generation of games, it might be. But before long, developers will start making games that use the full range of that flexibility. Should those games be eliminated? If not everyone can use something, no one can? That's ridiculous. It's a problem, but pretending a solution exists will only reduce what's available to the majority. Anyone who can't do something I can has my genuine sympathy, and as much of my help as they want and I can give. But I'm not going to pretend I can't just so they can pretend they can.
Keep in mind that I explicitly favored strict restrictions on public use of all drugs, particularly tobacco and marijuana.
Even if tobacco does have a contact high, nicotine doesn't interfere with operating cars or other machinery the way alcohol and d9THC do because unlike alcohol and d9THC, nicotine is a stimulant.
First, I didn't make it as clear as I could have that I was directly comparing nicotine's health effects to THC's psychological effects. Because of the way nicotine and THC are taken, both are examples of ways individuals can infringe on the rights of other individuals. I insist that the government must work hard to prevent that. But by (implicitly) supporting both the legality of tobacco and the illegality of marijuana, you're saying that psychological effects are more important than health effects. It's your right to make that decision--for yourself. And it's my right to make a different decision for myself if I so choose. It's not the government's right to make that decision for either of us.
Second, having one lungful of marijuana smoke blown in your face would not make any noticable difference in your basic functioning. An equivalent dosage of alcohol would be a teaspoon of imitation vanilla flavoring. We are not talking about impairing the ability to drive or operate machinery until you're staying in an enclosed space with someone smoking marijuana for at least several minutes. If you're outdoors, it would take a Grateful Dead concert. The health effects of momentary exposure to tobacco smoke are at least comparable to the psychological effects of momentary exposure to marijuana smoke.
Third, it's not the fact that nicotine is a stimulant that is important. I'd rather see a drunk or a stoned driver than one high on a major stimulant like speed. What makes a difference is that nicotine, in the dosage found in cigarettes, is a very mild stimulant. It's the intensity, not the category, of the psychological effect that's important.
Don't both tobacco and marijuana have tar?
Quite the opposite--neither does. Tobacco companies add tar (along with a host of even worse things, like arsenic) to cigarettes for the sole and express purpose of making their products more addictive. Marijuana, on the other hand, is invariably smoked pure. And tar is not the only health issue with tobacco. Aside from the additives, nicotine is a deadly poison--it was a popular murder weapon not that long ago. The obvious smell and taste made it useless when added to food, but it could easily be applied to a knife or sword and dried. Even a small cut with a nicotine-tinged blade would cause an apparant heart attack. It fell out of common usage, along with all other poisons, when medical science learned to detect it in autopsy. But the point is that the drug itself, even without the toxic/carcinogenic additives present in nearly all commercial tobacco, is still a genuine health risk. There has never, on the other hand, been a single case of anyone dying from a THC overdose. It is simply not (directly) harmful. Yes, there is more than just pure THC in marijuana smoke, and there is a great deal of debate among medical professionals about exactly what health risks are associated with marijuana use. I'm not qualified to get into that discussion, but the worst-case scenario is that marijuana is still at least slightly healthier than even pure tobacco, which is itself much healthier than the poisoned tobacco commonly available.
Unlike liquor or tobacco, cannabis allows the smoker to force anybody else to get high by blowing smoke in the victim's face.
Unlike liquor, but EXACTLY like tobacco. Speaking as someone whose nonmedicinal drug use is limited to alcohol and caffine, both moderately and responsibly, I've always felt that adults in a free society have the right to make these kinds of decisions for themselves. Which means drugs should be legal but with heavy restrictions on public use. The government can't force me not to use drugs, but other individuals can't force me to use them, either.
The distinction you've hit on is important, but doesn't even come close to warranting absolute prohibition, especially an inconsistently applied prohibition. The three relevant factors when discussing drugs are addictivity, health effects, and psychological effects. Tobacco carries severe health risks and is severely addictive but has only mild psychological effects. Marijuana, on the other hand, has moderate to strong psychological effects, depending on dosage, but is only mildly addictive and carries (at most) only mild health risks. Saying tobacco is ok but marijuana isn't is precisely the sort of value judgement that MUST be left to the individual, not made by government (or strangers, in the case of secondhand smoke). Making drugs legal in private but restricted in public is the only solution which respects and protects the rights of all individuals.
Is this amazing? Yes and no. Practically every kid developes this skill (except for Cleveland Indian players). Yet it is very amazing, because it is real time processing of information that is quite complex when you try to break it down. Defining the optimal path to the ball requires fast image processing combined with low level calculus.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Small children (and also adults who are not world-class athletes) trying to intercept a slow-moving object are not doing anything even approximating calculus. You simply run as fast as you can at an angle such that the object is stationary or moving backwards in your own visual field. That is how defensive players in football catch ballcarriers, and how infielders in baseball intercept baserunners. Outfielders at the Cleveland Indians level use a fundamentally similar process for catching fly balls, which move in a parabola, not a straight line. Better outfielders have data accumulated over years and years of looking at a very specific class of parabolas--those generated by a downward acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2--and through trial and error, learn to extrapolate the whole parabola from a few data points.
That's a rare skill, learned not hardwired, and still not calculus. Even with only three data points, that's only a high-school algebra problem. Knowing that Earth's gravity is (close enough to) the same in every ballpark reduces the needed data points to two--one of which is always home plate. Throw in strong enough winds to make a difference, that would be calculus. But under those conditions, even the professionals have only as much success as you would expect from the assumption that the wind's effect is linear. Outfielders in baseball, placekickers in football, and golfers--those athletes who would be most helped by the ability to do mental calculus--have the least success in the windiest conditions.
Human beings can not do subconscious calculus. Seeming examples to the contrary are actually just clever, but computationally trivial, shortcuts.