There is some suggestion that the stimulus may not be so poor and that young infants are sensitive to these structural regularities. Read some of the work of T. Mintz (UCSD) and R. L. Gomez (U. Arizona or John Hopkins?) in the past 4 years if you aren't already familiar with them.
I don't think anyone doubts that McDonald's (and other fast food junk food) is bad. The thing is that many things in life are "bad for you". Alcohol is bad for you. Smoking is bad for you. The question that we should be asking is NOT whether or not something is bad for you BUT RATHER how bad is it? Is eating 1 Extra Value Meal the same as smoking a cigarette in terms of your risk for heart disease? My feeling is that many folks don't consider an Extra Value Meal as bad for you as a cigarette. I don't know if that's true or whether one can even quantify in those terms. But this is the type of questions that we as consumers should be asking.
Putting foods in the health/unhealthy dichotomy is just too black & white. Imagine that you only have 10 minutes to grab lunch. And say that your choices are getting a Big Mac or a cream cheese bagel. Big Macs and cream cheese are both bad for you. Now let's say that you know that a Big Mac is like smoking a pack of cigarettes. How would that affect your decision?
I find that the spam letters that do get through T-Bird's junk mail filter are the ones padded with random strings of letters. My guess is that T-Bird is able to identify the spam words (eg: debt consolidation, enlargement) but the mispelled words (eg: peni5) are unknown to T-bird. So T-Bird makes the conservative decision not to mark the e-mail as spam. I figure a simple filter criteria that requires the correct spellings for at least half the words in the body (for unknown senders) should get rid of this problem. Anyone care to enlighten me if such a rule is in T-bird or is in the works? At the very least, this will have the side effect of encouraging people to at least spellcheck their e-mails before sending.:)
The number of microbes in the world far exceeds the number that can actually get you sick. How many of those 20,961 germs per square inch can actually get us sick? We are swarming with microbes on our skin, in our mouths, etc.
It's not that simple. I believe the cheapest HT processor from Intel is the P4 2.4 Ghz, priced at $161. You can buy one Athlon XP 2400+ for $75. A dual processor Athlon motherboard probably costs more than a single processor Pentium 4 motherboard and you will probably have to pay for a bigger power supply unit. However, I don't think dual logical processors in a single Pentium 4 can beat 2 real Athlon XP 2400+ processors performance wise and in performance-price ratio. (Note: I do not work for NewEgg.)
You're right. It's not absolute bullshit. It's relative bullshit.:) And bullshit does not mean that it's wrong. A bullshitter is one that tends to exaggerate. The Washington Times author was exaggerating with that analogy.
I don't think most consumer of contact lens pay over $100 bucks for their prescriptions. Obviously if you need special prescription, you're going to pay more. Most contact lens users do not need special prescription. (Otherwise they wouldn't be special.)
The author of the Washington Times article made that contact lens analogy to describe a general behavior. I don't believe the general consumers of contact lenses need special prescription such as toric lenses and do not have to pay $320 for prescriptions. It was an exaggerated analogy.
Just out of curiosity, how much do you pay for traditional eye glasses lens anyway? I bet it's fairly expensive as well.
Anyone who wears disposable contact lenses knows how these things evolve: At first, having lived through the days of crawling on hands and knees in shag carpeting looking for a lost contact lens, you cannot immediately adapt to a future in which we now blissfully wash month-old contact lenses down the drain.
After a while it doesn't seem like such a costly tragedy. People now spend a few hundred dollars every other year or so on disposable lenses, but it took a slight mental shift to get there.
That's bullshit. My disposable contacts does not cost a few hundred dollars every other year. I get my contacts from a local optometrist who charges 50 bucks for a year's prescription. Disposable contacts are no more expensive than glasses if you consider the fact that glasses lens cost more than 100 bucks and many people change their prescription every two years.
Absurd. We are still finding Egyptian mummies and artifacts that are several millenia-old buried in the desert. We could find Saddam's weapons 250 years from now buried somewhere.
I'll be interested to learn what Saddam has to say on the matter after intense interrogation.
To the best of my knowledge, Egyptian mummies and their relatives and friends and children and grandchildren and great grandchildren have been long dead and clues to the location of these artifacts died with them. That is the reason we are still finding things in Egypt. People who know the location of the WMDs are still alive. If we don't find anything within the next 10 years, it's unlikely that we'll find anything at all.
All Saddam had to do was comply with inspectors and he'd still be living in palaces built woth the Iraqi people's money, and still torturing and killing dissenters.
Let's say that the IRS accuses you of tax evasion. You initially decided to cooporate because you have the proverbial nothing-to-hide. They decided to search your house of receipts, inquire into your book report grades, medical records, drug-use, and sexual activites. You then decided that you did not want to cooporate anymore so you get a lawyer. This sort of thing happens all the time and you have talking heads in the media always saying: "Well, if she had nothing to hide, she would have cooperated". Can someone really say that you are guilty because you stopped cooperating with the authorities? Putting on my tin-foil hat, it is in the interest of the authorities, who cannot find evidence of wrong-doing but still suspects you of wrong-doing, to get you to stop cooperating. According to Scott Ritter, former-UN weapons inspector who gave a talk at my school a while back, this was one of the scenarios:
U.N. Weapons Inspector: We need a place to look. What does your satellite recon-photos say? U.S. Intelligence: Check the Baath party house.
U.N. weapons inspector checked and found nothing. One week later...
U.N. Weapons Inspector: We need a place to look. Suggestions? U.S. Intelligence: Check the Baath party house again. I think there's something there.
U.N. weapons inspector checked but met with some mild resistance. They found nothing. Two weeks later...
U.N. Weapons Inspector: Leads? U.S. Intelligence: Check the Baath party house again. I'm pretty sure there's something there.
U.N. Weapons Inspector approached the Baath party home of Saddam. They were refused entrance.
Scott Ritter said that the U.N. Weapons inspector was a tool of the U.S. designed to fail.
To those of you who believe that there are WMDs in Iraq, what kind of evidence you like to see to that would convince you otherwise? If there is no set of evidence that would disprove your belief, then your argument is based strictly on faith.
With all that said, any points about WMD are really moot points. US is in Iraq now. Those of you on the left who think we should withdraw immediately, that is a mistake. If we do so, the region will end up a bigger mess than when we entered.
If they have a problem with that then they shouldn't have signed up with the military in the first place.
The issue is not that simple. You make it sound as if the weight decision to join the military is the same for everyone. The fact of the matter is the majority of the people who are in the military are from your lower income bracket. Talk to them without the threat of an dishonorable discharge and most of them will admit to you that they joined primarily because they needed the money (a la Jessica Lynch for college). These people did not have to make the same decision as those in your upper income class.
If you look at the members of current administration (or any adminstration), many of them do not have relatives in the military. Making the decision to go to war is certainly easier if you don't have a family member in the military. Instead of taxation without representation, it's military confrontation without representation. That's why folks like Charles Rangel advocate equal military responsibility to force politicians to think of their position on war.
I think it was Henry David Thoreau who said civil disobedience is the willingness to do the time. He refused to pay taxes and willingly sat in jail for it.
Social cooperation does exist and selfishness is detrimental in some cases. An example are vampire bats.
Vampire bats have notorious energy demands. They can die if they do not feed on a daily basis. Now occasionally there are nights when a vampire bat fails to find food. So what normally happens is that the bat is able to bum food off of a non-related buddy. Obviously, that buddy is losing resources when it gives food away. But the lost in the buddy is trivial compare to the gain in the bat that didn't find food that night.
People who say selfishness is a virtue implicitly assume that resources and need-fulfillment are linear. In nature, the resources and need-fulfillment relationship is asymptotic; if you already have amount of resources, the need that each additional resource fulfill is marginal. In other words, $1 to a person who only has $1 is a big deal but $1 to a person who has $4 is less of a big deal especially if the cost of not have $1 is death.
Going back to our bat example, let's say night two rolls along and the buddy bat fails to find food that night. Let's also say that the bat who didn't find food the first night was successful. Buddy bat tries to bum food off of the latter bat. The latter bat can either give or not give. If the latter bat chooses to give, then all is well for the buddy bat. However, if the latter bat decides not to give, then the buddy bat dies. The latter bat will invariably give. The reason is because the rest of bat community will black-list the latter bat for being selfish. There will come a night where the latter bat will not find food and will not be able to get help from others. On an individual level, selfishness is a bad thing. I leave it up to you to draw the parallels in humans.
Do a search on google for "vampire bats altruism" for more details. If you are interested on the evolution of altruism, go google for "david sloan wilson". Evolution is not always about being selfish.
Using more of your brain to perform cognitive tasks doesn't necessarily make you good at it. Let's say "brain use" as an increase blood flow/activity to a brain area. Novices show much more activity than experts to the same brain areas. As novices get more experience with the task, their brain activity decrease. So does low brain usage mean low competence? This is one of the many reasons why you must be careful when intepreting fMRI and other brain imaging scans.
If anything it seems that the more brain you use, the more you are struggling. To paraphrase what David Field of Cornell University said a couple of years back at my school:
I use 10% of my brain but on good days, I only use 7%.
In this article at the BBC, a respected psychologist has co-authored a study into people who play games online, which breaks some of the stereotype of online gamers.
.... E-mail addresses composed of short names and initials like bob@ or tse@, or basic combinations like smithj@ or toms@ will probably receive more spam. E-mail addresses need not be incomprehensible, but a user with a common or short name may want to modify or add to it in some way in his or her e-mail address.
For further information, please contact Ari Schwartz at the Center for Democracy & Technology, 202-637-9800, ari@cdt.org.
Throwing out frame-rate numbers on what the brain can perceive without backing up these numbers, apparently, is a good way of milking karma points from gullable moderators.
You can demonstrate, informally, how much framerate you can perceive through monitor refresh rates. Change your refresh rate to 60 hz. If that bothers your eyes like it does for most people, that probably means you can perceive changes that occur greater than 60 times a second (or 60 FPS). Keep upping the refresh rate until you know longer feel a difference between the present one and the previous one. That probably means that your minimum frame-rate threshold is somewhere in between the two refresh rates.
Mod parent up. This is what happens in Canada. Here in the U.S., the price per CDR is $0.10-$0.25 cents. How much do you pay for a CDR media in your country?
Slashdot Mirror
Read the primary sources (e.g., letters from Barton to the Mann et al., their replies) here:
l
http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/bartonletter.htm
Judge on the original sources rather than on editorials or secondary news reports.
Take the case of computers and technology which all of us are familiar with. How many of the main stream information outlets get the facts right?
Those of you who are in research (by that I mean those who read peer reviewed literature) would know all too well how bad the press mix things up.
There is some suggestion that the stimulus may not be so poor and that young infants are sensitive to these structural regularities. Read some of the work of T. Mintz (UCSD) and R. L. Gomez (U. Arizona or John Hopkins?) in the past 4 years if you aren't already familiar with them.
I don't think anyone doubts that McDonald's (and other fast food junk food) is bad. The thing is that many things in life are "bad for you". Alcohol is bad for you. Smoking is bad for you. The question that we should be asking is NOT whether or not something is bad for you BUT RATHER how bad is it? Is eating 1 Extra Value Meal the same as smoking a cigarette in terms of your risk for heart disease? My feeling is that many folks don't consider an Extra Value Meal as bad for you as a cigarette. I don't know if that's true or whether one can even quantify in those terms. But this is the type of questions that we as consumers should be asking.
Putting foods in the health/unhealthy dichotomy is just too black & white. Imagine that you only have 10 minutes to grab lunch. And say that your choices are getting a Big Mac or a cream cheese bagel. Big Macs and cream cheese are both bad for you. Now let's say that you know that a Big Mac is like smoking a pack of cigarettes. How would that affect your decision?
I find that the spam letters that do get through T-Bird's junk mail filter are the ones padded with random strings of letters. My guess is that T-Bird is able to identify the spam words (eg: debt consolidation, enlargement) but the mispelled words (eg: peni5) are unknown to T-bird. So T-Bird makes the conservative decision not to mark the e-mail as spam. I figure a simple filter criteria that requires the correct spellings for at least half the words in the body (for unknown senders) should get rid of this problem. Anyone care to enlighten me if such a rule is in T-bird or is in the works? At the very least, this will have the side effect of encouraging people to at least spellcheck their e-mails before sending. :)
The number of microbes in the world far exceeds the number that can actually get you sick. How many of those 20,961 germs per square inch can actually get us sick? We are swarming with microbes on our skin, in our mouths, etc.
Isn't it made with coconut milk which is full of saturated fats?
I guess nice guys/gals finish last on help desk queues?
There are reports of people using Athlon XPs in dual configurations.
It's not that simple. I believe the cheapest HT processor from Intel is the P4 2.4 Ghz, priced at $161. You can buy one Athlon XP 2400+ for $75. A dual processor Athlon motherboard probably costs more than a single processor Pentium 4 motherboard and you will probably have to pay for a bigger power supply unit. However, I don't think dual logical processors in a single Pentium 4 can beat 2 real Athlon XP 2400+ processors performance wise and in performance-price ratio. (Note: I do not work for NewEgg.)
You're right. It's not absolute bullshit. It's relative bullshit. :) And bullshit does not mean that it's wrong. A bullshitter is one that tends to exaggerate. The Washington Times author was exaggerating with that analogy.
I don't think most consumer of contact lens pay over $100 bucks for their prescriptions. Obviously if you need special prescription, you're going to pay more. Most contact lens users do not need special prescription. (Otherwise they wouldn't be special.)
The author of the Washington Times article made that contact lens analogy to describe a general behavior. I don't believe the general consumers of contact lenses need special prescription such as toric lenses and do not have to pay $320 for prescriptions. It was an exaggerated analogy.
Just out of curiosity, how much do you pay for traditional eye glasses lens anyway? I bet it's fairly expensive as well.
That's bullshit. My disposable contacts does not cost a few hundred dollars every other year. I get my contacts from a local optometrist who charges 50 bucks for a year's prescription. Disposable contacts are no more expensive than glasses if you consider the fact that glasses lens cost more than 100 bucks and many people change their prescription every two years.
I'll be interested to learn what Saddam has to say on the matter after intense interrogation.
To the best of my knowledge, Egyptian mummies and their relatives and friends and children and grandchildren and great grandchildren have been long dead and clues to the location of these artifacts died with them. That is the reason we are still finding things in Egypt. People who know the location of the WMDs are still alive. If we don't find anything within the next 10 years, it's unlikely that we'll find anything at all.
All Saddam had to do was comply with inspectors and he'd still be living in palaces built woth the Iraqi people's money, and still torturing and killing dissenters.
Let's say that the IRS accuses you of tax evasion. You initially decided to cooporate because you have the proverbial nothing-to-hide. They decided to search your house of receipts, inquire into your book report grades, medical records, drug-use, and sexual activites. You then decided that you did not want to cooporate anymore so you get a lawyer. This sort of thing happens all the time and you have talking heads in the media always saying: "Well, if she had nothing to hide, she would have cooperated". Can someone really say that you are guilty because you stopped cooperating with the authorities? Putting on my tin-foil hat, it is in the interest of the authorities, who cannot find evidence of wrong-doing but still suspects you of wrong-doing, to get you to stop cooperating. According to Scott Ritter, former-UN weapons inspector who gave a talk at my school a while back, this was one of the scenarios:
Scott Ritter said that the U.N. Weapons inspector was a tool of the U.S. designed to fail.
To those of you who believe that there are WMDs in Iraq, what kind of evidence you like to see to that would convince you otherwise? If there is no set of evidence that would disprove your belief, then your argument is based strictly on faith.
With all that said, any points about WMD are really moot points. US is in Iraq now. Those of you on the left who think we should withdraw immediately, that is a mistake. If we do so, the region will end up a bigger mess than when we entered.
If they have a problem with that then they shouldn't have signed up with the military in the first place.
The issue is not that simple. You make it sound as if the weight decision to join the military is the same for everyone. The fact of the matter is the majority of the people who are in the military are from your lower income bracket. Talk to them without the threat of an dishonorable discharge and most of them will admit to you that they joined primarily because they needed the money (a la Jessica Lynch for college). These people did not have to make the same decision as those in your upper income class.
If you look at the members of current administration (or any adminstration), many of them do not have relatives in the military. Making the decision to go to war is certainly easier if you don't have a family member in the military. Instead of taxation without representation, it's military confrontation without representation. That's why folks like Charles Rangel advocate equal military responsibility to force politicians to think of their position on war.
I think it was Henry David Thoreau who said civil disobedience is the willingness to do the time. He refused to pay taxes and willingly sat in jail for it.
Social cooperation does exist and selfishness is detrimental in some cases. An example are vampire bats.
Vampire bats have notorious energy demands. They can die if they do not feed on a daily basis. Now occasionally there are nights when a vampire bat fails to find food. So what normally happens is that the bat is able to bum food off of a non-related buddy. Obviously, that buddy is losing resources when it gives food away. But the lost in the buddy is trivial compare to the gain in the bat that didn't find food that night.
People who say selfishness is a virtue implicitly assume that resources and need-fulfillment are linear. In nature, the resources and need-fulfillment relationship is asymptotic; if you already have amount of resources, the need that each additional resource fulfill is marginal. In other words, $1 to a person who only has $1 is a big deal but $1 to a person who has $4 is less of a big deal especially if the cost of not have $1 is death.
Going back to our bat example, let's say night two rolls along and the buddy bat fails to find food that night. Let's also say that the bat who didn't find food the first night was successful. Buddy bat tries to bum food off of the latter bat. The latter bat can either give or not give. If the latter bat chooses to give, then all is well for the buddy bat. However, if the latter bat decides not to give, then the buddy bat dies. The latter bat will invariably give. The reason is because the rest of bat community will black-list the latter bat for being selfish. There will come a night where the latter bat will not find food and will not be able to get help from others. On an individual level, selfishness is a bad thing. I leave it up to you to draw the parallels in humans.
Do a search on google for "vampire bats altruism" for more details. If you are interested on the evolution of altruism, go google for "david sloan wilson". Evolution is not always about being selfish.
Where do I sign up?
Go to Soviet Russia and sign -- because in Soviet Russia, SCO will pay YOU!
How long before someone decides to sue Apple for making them fat?
I usually don't say nice things about telcos.
I, for one, will start welcoming our telco overlords.
Using more of your brain to perform cognitive tasks doesn't necessarily make you good at it. Let's say "brain use" as an increase blood flow/activity to a brain area. Novices show much more activity than experts to the same brain areas. As novices get more experience with the task, their brain activity decrease. So does low brain usage mean low competence? This is one of the many reasons why you must be careful when intepreting fMRI and other brain imaging scans.
If anything it seems that the more brain you use, the more you are struggling. To paraphrase what David Field of Cornell University said a couple of years back at my school:
I use 10% of my brain but on good days, I only use 7%.
In this article at the BBC, a respected psychologist has co-authored a study into people who play games online, which breaks some of the stereotype of online gamers.
Respected no more.
1. Create website
2. Submit it to slashdot
3. Respond to comments on slashdot for karma
4. ???
5. Profit!
.... E-mail addresses composed of short names and initials like bob@ or tse@, or basic combinations like smithj@ or toms@ will probably receive more spam. E-mail addresses need not be incomprehensible, but a user with a common or short name may want to modify or add to it in some way in his or her e-mail address.
For further information, please contact Ari Schwartz at the Center for Democracy & Technology, 202-637-9800, ari@cdt.org.
Anybody see the irony in that?
Throwing out frame-rate numbers on what the brain can perceive without backing up these numbers, apparently, is a good way of milking karma points from gullable moderators.
You can demonstrate, informally, how much framerate you can perceive through monitor refresh rates. Change your refresh rate to 60 hz. If that bothers your eyes like it does for most people, that probably means you can perceive changes that occur greater than 60 times a second (or 60 FPS). Keep upping the refresh rate until you know longer feel a difference between the present one and the previous one. That probably means that your minimum frame-rate threshold is somewhere in between the two refresh rates.
Mod parent up. This is what happens in Canada. Here in the U.S., the price per CDR is $0.10-$0.25 cents. How much do you pay for a CDR media in your country?