why should my kids be deprived of a real science education just because someone else indoctrinated their children with specious non-scientific beliefs?
I don't see teaching children about philosophy of science as depriving them of a real science education. Quite the contrary.
if a kid raises creationist objections to evolutionary theory, the teacher should kindly say to him "that is religious mythology, not science," and end the discussion there.
Why not explain why creationism isn't science, thereby giving children a better understanding of what science is and isn't?
The summary here is absurdly slanted. Reiss didn't advocate discussing creationism in science classes; he wrote that, if students bring up creationism, science teachers ought to be in a position to explain why creationism isn't a scientific alternative to evolution, rather than simply refusing to discuss the issue at all. Quote:
"If questions or issues about creationism and intelligent design arise during science lessons they can be used to illustrate a number of aspects of how science works."
Those are funded entirely (at least in the USA) by advertising and/or listener donations.
No, they're not. Both NPR and PBS stations get roughly a third of their funding from government sources of one sort or another (directly from state and local grants, or from the partially-federally-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting), that is, from taxes.
Actually, they didn't. Hitler wasn't elected, he was appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg. People did vote for the Nazis, in large numbers, but the Nazis never won a majority in a contested election.
As resolution goes up, the size of the fonts goes down.
Only if your OS is broken. It knows your resolution, it knows the physical size of the monitor via EDID, so it can calculate your DPI and select the pixel size of the font to give you the physical size of your preference.
The problem is, "model" and "reality" aren't as separate as you suggest. In testing our models, we interact with the objects posited by the models, or that were posited by earlier, now confirmed, models. We need to understand these objects as real, not just "not falsified," in order to make sense of our scientific practice. As Ian Hacking puts it, we use electrons to do things, which means electrons must be real.
In general, the Popperian idea that theories are never confirmed, they are only ever not falsified, is pretty much universally rejected by philosophers of science these days.
Joining "long time users of Perl" and "having successfully used Ruby" with "and" seems jarring to me, although I'm not confident enough in my grammatical knowledge to say it's definitely wrong. Don't the two clauses have different grammatical structures? "Long time users of Perl" is, what, a noun-phrase? Whereas "having successfully used Ruby" is a sentence fragment with a verb in it. At least, you can say "The BBC are long time users of Perl," but you can't say "The BBC are having successfully used Ruby," which makes me think using the two phrases in a parallel construction is questionable.
"Simulating violence against its residents against their wishes should not be allowed."
Resistance: Fall of Man is a game about aliens taking over Europe. Unless you're saying that the Anglicans of Manchester are aliens, it doesn't make much sense to describe the game as "simulating violence" against the residents of the Cathedral.
As the term "curator" implies, and the article pretty clearly says, this is not going to "provide any cartoonist with hosting." It's going to provide cartoonists who Warren Ellis thinks are worth promoting, with hosting. That a big name in paper comics like Ellis is getting involved in webcomics is, perhaps, somewhat interesting; and Ellis has very good taste and a sharp eye for coming trends (as you can see on his blog), so his webcomic picks will probably be of a fairly high standard.
Re:I think it is a good idea not to update quickly
on
Debian 3.0r6 Released
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· Score: 2, Funny
"A big thankyou to all the Debian maintainers. May all your beers be cold."
Hey, some of the Debian maintainers are British, you know. "May all your beers be cold or, if drinking real ale, at slightly below room temperature."
"I'm trying to think about how as US citizens we'd go about convincing.gov to set up something like this."
You have workfare in the US, don't you? It's the same thing.
Re:You might want to have a look at this
on
Opera 8 Released
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· Score: 1
I don't think that's relavent, because the OP's example didn't use XSL-FO, it used XSLT to transform XML to HTML. The article you linked to argues against serving formatting objects, because you lose device independence and semantics. But serving XML and and XSLT transform (particularly a transform to HTML) doesn't have either of those problems (as the article itself acknowledges).
It's the standard position of social constructivists, because that's what social constructivism is. Straightforward social constructivism is widely regarded as too simple; but the idea that we can't talk about reality without that being influence by the way we talk (i.e., society and language) has been recognised for over 200 years (if not longer). Social constructivism is a useful position to consider, because it is the most extreme response to that difficulty.
Try The Postmodernism Generator [elsewhere.org]. I've showed its products to a couple of academic colleagues who genuinely could not see what was wrong with the text.
I always like to see someone make that claim, because it shows they're either lying or they don't know what they're talking about. Unlike Sokal's paper, the output of the postmodern generator is _obviously_ nonsense, and only someone with no familarity with the works it attempts to mimic could possibly claim otherwise.
Butler's writing style in her academic work is horrible, that's true (her journalistic work, on the other hand, is generally extremely clear; here's a good example). But it's not really all that hard to wade through her subordinate clauses.
There is, indeed, nothing wrong with that extract, bar a slightly irritating use of scare quotes. Could you present an argument, rather than just assuming that it's absurdity is self-evident?
I've read Sokal's paper and, despite his claims, it _isn't_ nonsense. It's a dull recapitulation of fairly standard positions in social constructivism, including some of the more outrageous metaphorical invocations of concepts in maths and physics. It's not a particularly good paper, but it's argument hangs together and, indeed, it's basically right.
The fact that Sokal didn't understand his own paper makes me think the whole affair is basically living proof that the postmodernists are right. The author is dead, after all.
It's true the OP's criticism is a general criticism of text adventures, but it's still a valid one. I remember reading a review once which characterised the puzzles as requiring, "not trying to think logically, because that would be too easy, but trying to think how you think the programmers would think if they were trying to think illogically." The only way to solve classic infocom-style text adventures is to try a load of random shit, and it sucks.
I installed Ubuntu Hoary on my laptop (an old-ish Dell) a couple of days ago, and hibernate works great out of the box. It uses some kind of software suspend, which (I would geuss) means it's likely to work on a lot of different hardware.
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why should my kids be deprived of a real science education just because someone else indoctrinated their children with specious non-scientific beliefs?
I don't see teaching children about philosophy of science as depriving them of a real science education. Quite the contrary.
if a kid raises creationist objections to evolutionary theory, the teacher should kindly say to him "that is religious mythology, not science," and end the discussion there.
Why not explain why creationism isn't science, thereby giving children a better understanding of what science is and isn't?
The summary here is absurdly slanted. Reiss didn't advocate discussing creationism in science classes; he wrote that, if students bring up creationism, science teachers ought to be in a position to explain why creationism isn't a scientific alternative to evolution, rather than simply refusing to discuss the issue at all. Quote:
"If questions or issues about creationism and intelligent design arise during science lessons they can be used to illustrate a number of aspects of how science works."
That's an eminently sensible position.
Those are funded entirely (at least in the USA) by advertising and/or listener donations.
No, they're not. Both NPR and PBS stations get roughly a third of their funding from government sources of one sort or another (directly from state and local grants, or from the partially-federally-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting), that is, from taxes.
Actually, they didn't. Hitler wasn't elected, he was appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg.
People did vote for the Nazis, in large numbers, but the Nazis never won a majority in a contested election.
"This is breach of license, folks. It's explicitly forbidden in the TOU and EULA."
Right. But the point is that it's completely fucked-up that I _need_ a license to load something from my hard drive into my RAM.
As resolution goes up, the size of the fonts goes down.
Only if your OS is broken. It knows your resolution, it knows the physical size of the monitor via EDID, so it can calculate your DPI and select the pixel size of the font to give you the physical size of your preference.
"My 19" monitor does 1600x1200 but i'm running it at 1280x1024 'cause I can't _READ_ anything at that resolution."
You can't read the smoother text you get at a higher resolution? Weird.
"Audio-pimp cables"
My favorite example here is gold-plated USB cables. For when you need really hi-fidelity 1s and 0s, I guess.
The problem is, "model" and "reality" aren't as separate as you suggest. In testing our models, we interact with the objects posited by the models, or that were posited by earlier, now confirmed, models. We need to understand these objects as real, not just "not falsified," in order to make sense of our scientific practice. As Ian Hacking puts it, we use electrons to do things, which means electrons must be real.
In general, the Popperian idea that theories are never confirmed, they are only ever not falsified, is pretty much universally rejected by philosophers of science these days.
"Vista and Office 2007 moving away from word lists (MENUS) is the right direction."
Quite right. The last thing I want in my word processor is words.
this isn't a class struggle. It's Big Business...
What exactly do you think "class struggle" is?
Joining "long time users of Perl" and "having successfully used Ruby" with "and" seems jarring to me, although I'm not confident enough in my grammatical knowledge to say it's definitely wrong. Don't the two clauses have different grammatical structures? "Long time users of Perl" is, what, a noun-phrase? Whereas "having successfully used Ruby" is a sentence fragment with a verb in it. At least, you can say "The BBC are long time users of Perl," but you can't say "The BBC are having successfully used Ruby," which makes me think using the two phrases in a parallel construction is questionable.
Firefox has an option to only send cookies to the originating site, but, because in this case third-party sites use JavaScript from Facebook's servers, the cookie can still be read. As you say, it would be nice if browsers could block this kind of stuff.
"Simulating violence against its residents against their wishes should not be allowed."
Resistance: Fall of Man is a game about aliens taking over Europe. Unless you're saying that the Anglicans of Manchester are aliens, it doesn't make much sense to describe the game as "simulating violence" against the residents of the Cathedral.
As the term "curator" implies, and the article pretty clearly says, this is not going to "provide any cartoonist with hosting." It's going to provide cartoonists who Warren Ellis thinks are worth promoting, with hosting. That a big name in paper comics like Ellis is getting involved in webcomics is, perhaps, somewhat interesting; and Ellis has very good taste and a sharp eye for coming trends (as you can see on his blog), so his webcomic picks will probably be of a fairly high standard.
"A big thankyou to all the Debian maintainers. May all your beers be cold."
Hey, some of the Debian maintainers are British, you know. "May all your beers be cold or, if drinking real ale, at slightly below room temperature."
"I'm trying to think about how as US citizens we'd go about convincing .gov to set up something like this."
You have workfare in the US, don't you? It's the same thing.
I don't think that's relavent, because the OP's example didn't use XSL-FO, it used XSLT to transform XML to HTML. The article you linked to argues against serving formatting objects, because you lose device independence and semantics. But serving XML and and XSLT transform (particularly a transform to HTML) doesn't have either of those problems (as the article itself acknowledges).
It's the standard position of social constructivists, because that's what social constructivism is. Straightforward social constructivism is widely regarded as too simple; but the idea that we can't talk about reality without that being influence by the way we talk (i.e., society and language) has been recognised for over 200 years (if not longer). Social constructivism is a useful position to consider, because it is the most extreme response to that difficulty.
Try The Postmodernism Generator [elsewhere.org]. I've showed its products to a couple of academic colleagues who genuinely could not see what was wrong with the text.
I always like to see someone make that claim, because it shows they're either lying or they don't know what they're talking about. Unlike Sokal's paper, the output of the postmodern generator is _obviously_ nonsense, and only someone with no familarity with the works it attempts to mimic could possibly claim otherwise.
Butler's writing style in her academic work is horrible, that's true (her journalistic work, on the other hand, is generally extremely clear; here's a good example). But it's not really all that hard to wade through her subordinate clauses.
There is, indeed, nothing wrong with that extract, bar a slightly irritating use of scare quotes. Could you present an argument, rather than just assuming that it's absurdity is self-evident?
I've read Sokal's paper and, despite his claims, it _isn't_ nonsense. It's a dull recapitulation of fairly standard positions in social constructivism, including some of the more outrageous metaphorical invocations of concepts in maths and physics. It's not a particularly good paper, but it's argument hangs together and, indeed, it's basically right.
The fact that Sokal didn't understand his own paper makes me think the whole affair is basically living proof that the postmodernists are right. The author is dead, after all.
It's true the OP's criticism is a general criticism of text adventures, but it's still a valid one. I remember reading a review once which characterised the puzzles as requiring, "not trying to think logically, because that would be too easy, but trying to think how you think the programmers would think if they were trying to think illogically." The only way to solve classic infocom-style text adventures is to try a load of random shit, and it sucks.
Dude... I've heard bad things about American prisons. Are you saying the highschools have the same kind of "Don't pick up the soap" problem too?
I installed Ubuntu Hoary on my laptop (an old-ish Dell) a couple of days ago, and hibernate works great out of the box. It uses some kind of software suspend, which (I would geuss) means it's likely to work on a lot of different hardware.