But if you accept different idiosyncratic criteria for 'better' depending on the driver, we could have 100% of the people driving 'better' than average, and it could still be true. That seems to be just my point, only more extremely put...
(Yes, I love to write idiosyncratic whenever I can)
Not really, that would be true for 'better than median'. When only a minority of people is responsible for traffic accidents, the majority is indeed better than average. 'nearly everybody' may be completely right about being a better than average driver...
Wouldn't work, he would also have to start a war on some dumb pretext to keep the population subdued by clamp-down laws and remain in power long enough to strip all the assets of the country for his friends. The Amercians would never fall for such a transparent ploy.
This sounds like a mathematical statement, but it isn't (there is no meaningful inner product space; see any math book or even wikipedia for the definitions). That is not necessarily a problem, we can take it as a metaphor. But a metaphor for what? That all religious behaviour is exempt from scientific study? That religiously inspired statements cannot be proven false?
The set of axioms that runs:
1. Science deals in falsifiable statements.
2. 'God' cannot be falsified.
3. Science disproves (falsifies) 'God'
wouldn't last five minutes in Introduction to Logic 101.
1. and 2. are somewhat simplistic versions of Popper's arguments, but 3. is a complete straw-man. Like anybody the simple Popperian would conclude from 1. and 2. that '3. 'God' is not Science'. So what's the big deal?
Science deals largely with the study of symmetries.. things that allow us to ignore some kind of change. The laws of projectile motion remain the same (are symmetric) regardless of whether you're facing north or south; whether you're standing in Boston or Beijing.
This is an extremely narrow description of science. My instinctive reaction: Probably created to make a point later on, but we'll see. The example appears to be poorly chosen as Boston and Beijing are located on a rotating planet thereby making the trajectories different when facing in different directions, even with the same 'laws of projectile motion'.
One thing that's extremely easy to ignore is 'agency'. You can write a doctoral thesis on the kinetics and aerodynamics of a curveball, but you can't use any of it to 'prove' or 'disprove' the existence of Nolan Ryan. Science only allows us to talk about how the ball behaves subsequent to a given set of initial conditions. It doesn't allow us to extrapolate that behavior back to the agent which imposed those original conditions.
The proof that 'Nolan Ryan' exists, or that he doesn't exist has nothing to do with 'agency'. Postulating 'Agency' is an old-fashioned trick used by philosophers to pull a 'Supernatural' cause out of their hats (because it is always contrasted with 'Natural Force'). Hence my remarks about medieval proofs (where God is, by definition of course, the supreme 'Agent').
Besides, science doesn't have all that much going for it in the Universal Truths department. It has a tendency to paper over difficult fundamental questions by slapping a name on what happens, and sweeping the rest of the mess under the rug of combinatorial complexity.
Not very consistent; In the previous paragraph science was dealing with symmetries, now it is failing in the Universal Truths department. That sounds more like a disillusioned priest than like a mathematician trying to prove something relevant.
When Newton published his theory of gravity, it was denounced as mysticism by his peers. They considered the idea of 'action at a distance' tantamount to saying, "God did it." General relativity papered over the problem by calling it 'curved space/time'. We still don't really have any solid answers on what 'space' or 'time' are, and the mechanism of 'gravity' is still an open question, but GR has great predictive power, and tons of experimental validation.
Newton was indeed a kind of mystic (alchemist), and 'action at a distance' was therefore possibly easier for him to accept as a mathematical concept. Btw, you are aware that Newtonian physics is an approximation and that there has been a little progress not just 'papering over' in our knowledge since the 17th century?
In 1909, Rutherford discovered 'the hand of God' when he proved that electrons don't fall to the lowest possible energy state as predicted by the most basic laws of electrodynamics. Quantum theory papered over that problem by calling it 'uncertainty'. The fact that we can't explain 'unce
Well yes, the whole posting consists of the same hand-waving that has gone one since the first medieval proofs of the existence of god. The final remark about feeling offended was the only novel argument in the story.
Printing your profession in bold and regurgitating extensively refuted special pleading for the status of religion on the basis of pseudo-mathematical assertions warrants a lot more than just snide remarks, but I was feeling mild today.
As a non-mathematician I am always interested in new insights, for instance that 'disproof by feeling offended' is now an acceptable mathematical technique.
've already had words like 'Alau' and '45-618' in the few I've done, and since there's an ugly line through them, I can't be close to sure it's right... They make no sense, but they look like that.
Congratulations, you managed to fail the Turing test.
Just quoting from the original so called 'Google' messages
If you've read our previous post Say Cheese! then you know that Google's Picasa registers the picasa:// URI in the Windows registry and it is possible to abuse this registered URI through a Cross-Site Scripting exposure to steal a victim's images.
So that's a windows only exploit? We could not possibly blame that on windows.
...and I have two Nvidia 8800's running in SLI which also is windows only 'Windows' doesn't support Nvidia hardware, Nvidia does, with excellent drivers for Linux and XP (and allegedly less than excellent drivers for Vista...)
I'd say this is a bigger threat than terrorism You mean as bad as drunk driving, smoking, unsafe sex, lax gun-laws, police brutality, alcohol consumption, government corruption, cheap paint on toys, corporate fraud, poor personal hygiene, bad weather, poor infrastructure maintenance, racism, communism, capitalism, and being cruel to small animals for no particular reason?
On the planet where I live, people are obliged to take practical and theoretical exams, to buy insurance for damage they may cause to others, and still the streets are full of armed government officials to make sure none of the hundreds of detailed rules are broken. This is considered a sane precaution to reduce road traffic accidents. Extrapolating that I'm guessing that in a couple of decades the "I don't know what my computer does, so it's not my problem" defense is going to be as acceptable as "of course I ran over your daughter, I cannot drive a car at all".
Most Linux users seem to understand that it is unwise to surf while logged in as root, but at the same time they setup the Windows systems at their friends homes to do so, because "it would be too much of a hassle to use separate accounts for admin and working
You mean it is the evil linux haxors that deliberately sabotage poor Microsoft?
It will cost the space program a lot of support. There goes the 'we can make much better crystals of proteins in zero-G' sales pitch (Anyone dare to guess how many http://www.pdb.org/PDB entries are space-crystals and how much better they are than the flatland versions?)
Slashdot Mirror
check out:
http://flightaware.com/analysis/map_day.rvt
Gives you an idea about the amount of traffic.
But if you accept different idiosyncratic criteria for 'better' depending on the driver, we could have 100% of the people driving 'better' than average, and it could still be true. That seems to be just my point, only more extremely put...
(Yes, I love to write idiosyncratic whenever I can)
Not really, that would be true for 'better than median'.
When only a minority of people is responsible for traffic accidents, the majority is indeed better than average.
'nearly everybody' may be completely right about being a better than average driver...
Wouldn't work, he would also have to start a war on some dumb pretext to keep the population subdued by clamp-down laws and remain in power long enough to strip all the assets of the country for his friends.
The Amercians would never fall for such a transparent ploy.
I second the suspect BS motion.
The article that is being referred to doesn't provide a working link to the alledged hacking story.
Pfff..
I knew you were going to post that.
I suspect this may shed some light on the motivation of any brand-XoverY fanboy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Cognitive_dissonance_theory
I would settle for 3 million turkish lira a year...
http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=3000000&from=TRY&to=USD&submit=Convert
Ok, I'll elaborate
Science and religion are orthogonal to each other
This sounds like a mathematical statement, but it isn't (there is no meaningful inner product space; see any math book or even wikipedia for the definitions). That is not necessarily a problem, we can take it as a metaphor. But a metaphor for what? That all religious behaviour is exempt from scientific study? That religiously inspired statements cannot be proven false?
The set of axioms that runs:
1. Science deals in falsifiable statements.
2. 'God' cannot be falsified.
3. Science disproves (falsifies) 'God'
wouldn't last five minutes in Introduction to Logic 101.
1. and 2. are somewhat simplistic versions of Popper's arguments, but 3. is a complete straw-man.
Like anybody the simple Popperian would conclude from 1. and 2. that '3. 'God' is not Science'. So what's the big deal?
Science deals largely with the study of symmetries.. things that allow us to ignore some kind of change. The laws of projectile motion remain the same (are symmetric) regardless of whether you're facing north or south; whether you're standing in Boston or Beijing.
This is an extremely narrow description of science. My instinctive reaction: Probably created to make a point later on, but we'll see. The example appears to be poorly chosen as Boston and Beijing are located on a rotating planet thereby making the trajectories different when facing in different directions, even with the same 'laws of projectile motion'.
One thing that's extremely easy to ignore is 'agency'. You can write a doctoral thesis on the kinetics and aerodynamics of a curveball, but you can't use any of it to 'prove' or 'disprove' the existence of Nolan Ryan. Science only allows us to talk about how the ball behaves subsequent to a given set of initial conditions. It doesn't allow us to extrapolate that behavior back to the agent which imposed those original conditions.
The proof that 'Nolan Ryan' exists, or that he doesn't exist has nothing to do with 'agency'. Postulating 'Agency' is an old-fashioned trick used by philosophers to pull a 'Supernatural' cause out of their hats (because it is always contrasted with 'Natural Force'). Hence my remarks about medieval proofs (where God is, by definition of course, the supreme 'Agent').
Besides, science doesn't have all that much going for it in the Universal Truths department. It has a tendency to paper over difficult fundamental questions by slapping a name on what happens, and sweeping the rest of the mess under the rug of combinatorial complexity.
Not very consistent; In the previous paragraph science was dealing with symmetries, now it is failing in the Universal Truths department. That sounds more like a disillusioned priest than like a mathematician trying to prove something relevant.
When Newton published his theory of gravity, it was denounced as mysticism by his peers. They considered the idea of 'action at a distance' tantamount to saying, "God did it." General relativity papered over the problem by calling it 'curved space/time'. We still don't really have any solid answers on what 'space' or 'time' are, and the mechanism of 'gravity' is still an open question, but GR has great predictive power, and tons of experimental validation.
Newton was indeed a kind of mystic (alchemist), and 'action at a distance' was therefore possibly easier for him to accept as a mathematical concept. Btw, you are aware that Newtonian physics is an approximation and that there has been a little progress not just 'papering over' in our knowledge since the 17th century?
In 1909, Rutherford discovered 'the hand of God' when he proved that electrons don't fall to the lowest possible energy state as predicted by the most basic laws of electrodynamics. Quantum theory papered over that problem by calling it 'uncertainty'. The fact that we can't explain 'unce
Well yes, the whole posting consists of the same hand-waving that has gone one since the first medieval proofs of the existence of god. The final remark about feeling offended was the only novel argument in the story.
Printing your profession in bold and regurgitating extensively refuted special pleading for the status of religion on the basis of pseudo-mathematical assertions warrants a lot more than just snide remarks, but I was feeling mild today.
As a non-mathematician I am always interested in new insights, for instance that 'disproof by feeling offended' is now an acceptable mathematical technique.
Because their parents have told them that there is such a thing.
've already had words like 'Alau' and '45-618' in the few I've done, and since there's an ugly line through them, I can't be close to sure it's right... They make no sense, but they look like that.
Congratulations,
you managed to fail the Turing test.
Just quoting from the original so called 'Google' messages
If you've read our previous post Say Cheese! then you know that Google's Picasa registers the picasa:// URI in the Windows registry and it is possible to abuse this registered URI through a Cross-Site Scripting exposure to steal a victim's images.
So that's a windows only exploit?
We could not possibly blame that on windows.
Check again, I provided the link to show how Nvidia says you should configure your Linux box with two cards using SLI.
I guess Microsoft has already paid roughly the same amount in bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H campaign donations to get the penalty dropped in the US.
...and I have two Nvidia 8800's running in SLI which also is windows only
'Windows' doesn't support Nvidia hardware, Nvidia does, with excellent drivers for Linux and XP (and allegedly less than excellent drivers for Vista...)
http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/100.14.11/README/chapter-25.html
I'd say this is a bigger threat than terrorism
You mean as bad as drunk driving, smoking, unsafe sex, lax gun-laws, police brutality, alcohol consumption, government corruption, cheap paint on toys, corporate fraud, poor personal hygiene, bad weather, poor infrastructure maintenance, racism, communism, capitalism, and being cruel to small animals for no particular reason?
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38575
On the planet where I live, people are obliged to take practical and theoretical exams, to buy insurance for damage they may cause to others, and still the streets are full of armed government officials to make sure none of the hundreds of detailed rules are broken. This is considered a sane precaution to reduce road traffic accidents.
Extrapolating that I'm guessing that in a couple of decades the "I don't know what my computer does, so it's not my problem" defense is going to be as acceptable as "of course I ran over your daughter, I cannot drive a car at all".
Most Linux users seem to understand that it is unwise to surf while logged in as root, but at the same time they setup the Windows systems at their friends homes to do so, because "it would be too much of a hassle to use separate accounts for admin and working
You mean it is the evil linux haxors that deliberately sabotage poor Microsoft?
That is hilarious.
Well on SGI-IRIX of course it did for a long time.
http://www.eeggs.com/items/521.html
When it's ready for the desktop.
from the Russian mafia.
It will cost the space program a lot of support.
There goes the 'we can make much better crystals of proteins in zero-G' sales pitch (Anyone dare to guess how many http://www.pdb.org/PDB entries are space-crystals and how much better they are than the flatland versions?)