I actually saw The Warriors this last summer at Hollywood Forever Cemetery (they show films at the cemetery as a fundraiser during the summer, projecting them on a mausoleum wall). Everybody's out with picnics. It was pretty great -- Deborah Van Valkenburgh was there, and it was her birthday. She got a big old round of applause.
But the best part was when the 2,000 or so people watching the film all started clinking their bottles just as we got to that scene. It was deafening.
That boggles my mind. Let's see. I was going to do that math, but I got stuck on my assumptions about how many electrons' charges it would take to reliably represent a bit in modern storage devices. Which led me to Google "ferromagnetic density," which got me to Wikipedia on crystallization and atomic stacking modes which took me.... Ah, nevermind...
It was an admirable attempt in its time, but it's pretty clunky. It's also very biased towards the world-view of one man in the 1870s. While it does get updated, you'll find that there are structural issues. The classic example is religion: everything involving Buddhism, Sikhism, or Jainism is lumped together in a number space which is the same size as the number space reserved for Christian "Parish Government And Administration." Christianity itself gets 88 percent of all the top-level numbers set aside for religion.
Anyone who has ever tried to make a meaningful taxonomy knows that it's really, really hard.
Still, it could be a starting point for the inevitable endless committees.
Security is pretty pathetic. If you *really* want to get destructive devices on a plane, you could probably do it (e.g., this.
There's no need to resort to some crazy cell-phone- or ethernet-based attack. In fact, it'd be detrimental to your mission, since it's more complicated and has more possibilities for failure. If you think that the potential terrorists are deterred because they don't want to die, they could much more simply make timer-based triggers than internet activated ones.
Uh... ever read anything about, say, the Thirty Years War?
That's Europe. That certainly qualified for wholesale massacres. Approximately third of the population of Germany was killed during that period, including full-on massacres of civilians like your Jerusalem example (e.g., Magdeburg, etc.).
To quote "The Massacre in History," by Eric Sterling: "Greengrass even points out that the word massacre in its modern meaning derives from the religious cleansing in late sixteenth-century France." Take a look at that book if you want examples through history (admittedly most are more recent, and, weirdly, they include the massacre of wolves in America).
Or, say, if you're willing to look at the Bible as a historical reference. The Israelites pretty much wiped out a bunch of other tribes (under orders from God, of course). Try finding an Amalech today. Or read Matthew in the New Testament on the subject of the massacre of the innocents.
Once every six months, we used to grind up the old stock, recover the silver, do some fancy chemistry to ionize it, and bind it onto a nitrate substrate with an agar-derived emulsion.
OK. I'm bullshitting you. But we could have done. Movie studios did for years, since it was cheaper (and safer) than keeping it around.
I think it's time for all the rational people to go and hide while the rest of 'em slug it out.
Spurious and Unverifiable Scientific Fact #47: In the entire history of the internet, there have been exactly 4 people who have changed their opinions based upon what they read in a discussion forum. And all but one of them changed it back within half an hour.
I would argue that there's also a logic problem that contributes to the rancor of the debate, which is that people who do not believe in anthropogenic GW are being asked to disprove the anthropogenic model.
But, to your point, it's also absolutely true that there are fanatics (on both sides) who are not interested in science or evidence or anything other than beating up on the "enemy." There are elements of both the anthropogenic model and the non-anthropogenic model that naturally fit in with wider world-views that stand in conflict. Throw in people who stand to profit (on either side), and we get the morass we're in. Little wonder it has become a very emotional issue.
Now the question is how do we get out of the swamp?
Higher general atmospheric temperatures (from this CO2) means that the atmosphere can absorb more water vapor (see WATER VAPOR in the CLIMATE SYSTEM, December 1995, the American Geophysical Union).
Upper atmospheric clouding occludes sunlight, resulting in decreased surface warming. However, clouds also trap the longer wavelength radiation.
It can also result in a thinning/cooling of the upper atmosphere, which may or may not affect surface temperatures.
All of the models with which I'm familiar get pretty chaotic.
Scientists don't tend to use words like "truth" for theories that are not readily shown by experimental evidence. And sometimes even when they can be.
For example, general relativity can be experimentally demonstrated in a range of contexts. Most scientists believe that the theory is accurate, but there are still a lot who wouldn't use the word "true," simply because it may not be true on all scales, or it may turn out that GR is a good description of one area of a larger theory (e.g., Newtonian mechanics aren't strictly "true" -- but they're a damn fine approximation in most contexts). You still see some interesting discussion on this stuff in the dark matter debate, although the GR/dark matter side is increasingly looking like it's going to win out on this one.
Your divisive and dismissive language ("pseudo-skeptics") doesn't actually get us anywhere. Setting yourself up as judge over which skepticism is warranted and which is not a scientific approach -- this is the model of a Religion, where there is acceptable dogma and unacceptable dogma. Show me the errors in their logic or explain why their experiments are inaccurate, don't call them names.
Disclaimer: I am a scientist by training, even if I don't work as one now. I am an environmentalist. I'm a skeptic. I've seen evidence that supports the theory that there is global warming. I haven't seen compelling evidence in either direction on the anthropogenic question. Having done computer modeling of physical systems, I don't have deep trust of computer models of chaotic systems.
Many, many years ago, when I was looking for a job in high school, I went to the local Radio Shack.
Heck, I knew their TRS-80 computers. I knew some basic electronics. I figured I could be an ideal employee.
So they gave me a two page test. After I gave it to them, they said they were sorry, and couldn't hire me. I had tried really hard, so, almost crying, I asked if I had really done that badly.
Nope, was the answer. I had gotten too many right. I just wasn't gonna make it as a salesman.
My dad used to keep bees when I was a kid. We had citrus -- mostly orange trees, but some lemons, limes, and tangerines, and there's seasonally wild buckwheat, mustard, and lupine in the area.
The honey from our hives was thick, and very dark in color.
As a kid, I wasn't much into it. Today, I miss honey that's really rich and has that weird protein-y propalis smell.
There's one guy in the local farmer's market that has something close, but even his darkest is more amber than dark.
And as for a porter... why not a really kick-ass dark mead?
Maybe I'm just not jaded enough, but I've never understood the implied disconnect between these two statements.
I think that's not necessarily because you're insufficiently jaded, but that you're more perceptive. The fact that you are special and unique and the fact that other people are special and unique are orthogonal.
But the original post seems to be trying to make a declaration of nonconformity, wrapped in an ironic defense. I see a lot of people who have invested a great deal of their identity in nonconformity railing against "conventional nonconformity."
Somerset Maugham wrote that the true nonconformists weren't even really all that conscious of their nonconformity. They just don't care what other people think. After all, a conscious decision to be a non-conformist is merely conforming in inverse -- if the crowd thinks X is cool, to preserve your nonconformist cred you must believe X is not cool, thus you're still a slave to popular belief. Of course, Maugham's nonconformists are all basically sociopaths.
Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland have shown that conventions of nonconformity are outstanding marketing tools. It's an interesting problem.
If you know that giving your starving brother money will result in him buying drugs instead of food, it is immoral to give him money.
Or, perhaps, it will solve the problem of having a starving brother. I mean, if he's so far gone that he'll forgo needed nourishment for his drugs, giving him that last dose may push him over the edge. Problem solved.
Don't they know they'll end up cooling off the inside of the earth???
Then what will we do?
We'll have to have giant heat-exchanger space elevators circulating water/ice to cool the atmosphere back down, and we'll pump all our radioactive waste down deep to warm it back up in there.
Rails needs it. So they write a module to support Unicode. Yes, in a year, that module will be obsolete. But then, presumably, the module will then become a pass-through to the native Ruby support.
No code will need to be changed.
That's encapsulation. That's Good Engineering[tm].
Or I could be confused and totally missing the point:)
So when I learn that a significant number of ancestors on one branch of my family died of pernicious anemia, I should say "ah, fuck it. Doesn't matter, just so long as they shagged and procreated?"
Or when I notice that those who stayed in certain Eastern European countries all died young due to murderous neighboring communities, while those who fled to places like the US lived into their 90s, I should just say "aw, fuck it. Weird how the dire dice of destiny roll, eh?"
Do the names matter? Probably not -- except for helping unravel various genetic intertwinings. A name and a birth date can tell you a great deal. It can sometimes tell you regions of origin or religion.
If you claim to believe that only the genetic component matters at all, this is still relevant (as theory indicates that genetics and health are tightly coupled).
I, on the other hand, believe that the point of life is to live and gather stories to tell. Stories have more immediacy when you can say "this happened to me" or "this happened to my grandfather." The richness of the story comes from the detail, and the detail can come from familiarity.
Slashdot Mirror
One ought not attribute to malice or stupidity what one can attribute to malice *and* stupidity.
Damn. Called out and shamed.
Take away the sun's effect on the earth...
Take away the sun's effect on the earth, and it'll get very dark and very cold.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say this would be a very bad idea.
remember the one about malice vs. stupidity
I've always phrased it slightly differently: never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by malice *and* stupidity.
Can you dig it?
I actually saw The Warriors this last summer at Hollywood Forever Cemetery (they show films at the cemetery as a fundraiser during the summer, projecting them on a mausoleum wall). Everybody's out with picnics. It was pretty great -- Deborah Van Valkenburgh was there, and it was her birthday. She got a big old round of applause.
But the best part was when the 2,000 or so people watching the film all started clinking their bottles just as we got to that scene. It was deafening.
A ton?
.... Ah, nevermind ...
That boggles my mind. Let's see. I was going to do that math, but I got stuck on my assumptions about how many electrons' charges it would take to reliably represent a bit in modern storage devices. Which led me to Google "ferromagnetic density," which got me to Wikipedia on crystallization and atomic stacking modes which took me
In any case, them's lots of mp3s!
It was an admirable attempt in its time, but it's pretty clunky. It's also very biased towards the world-view of one man in the 1870s. While it does get updated, you'll find that there are structural issues. The classic example is religion: everything involving Buddhism, Sikhism, or Jainism is lumped together in a number space which is the same size as the number space reserved for Christian "Parish Government And Administration." Christianity itself gets 88 percent of all the top-level numbers set aside for religion.
Anyone who has ever tried to make a meaningful taxonomy knows that it's really, really hard.
Still, it could be a starting point for the inevitable endless committees.
Evidently, you don't think EFS3 is the right database?
I mean, it's not relational, but it's pretty damn powerful.
I think you've answered your own question.
Security is pretty pathetic. If you *really* want to get destructive devices on a plane, you could probably do it (e.g., this.
There's no need to resort to some crazy cell-phone- or ethernet-based attack. In fact, it'd be detrimental to your mission, since it's more complicated and has more possibilities for failure. If you think that the potential terrorists are deterred because they don't want to die, they could much more simply make timer-based triggers than internet activated ones.
Uh... ever read anything about, say, the Thirty Years War?
That's Europe. That certainly qualified for wholesale massacres. Approximately third of the population of Germany was killed during that period, including full-on massacres of civilians like your Jerusalem example (e.g., Magdeburg, etc.).
To quote "The Massacre in History," by Eric Sterling: "Greengrass even points out that the word massacre in its modern meaning derives from the religious cleansing in late sixteenth-century France." Take a look at that book if you want examples through history (admittedly most are more recent, and, weirdly, they include the massacre of wolves in America).
Or, say, if you're willing to look at the Bible as a historical reference. The Israelites pretty much wiped out a bunch of other tribes (under orders from God, of course). Try finding an Amalech today. Or read Matthew in the New Testament on the subject of the massacre of the innocents.
if film is now reausable
Uh, film's *always* been reusable.
Once every six months, we used to grind up the old stock, recover the silver, do some fancy chemistry to ionize it, and bind it onto a nitrate substrate with an agar-derived emulsion.
OK. I'm bullshitting you. But we could have done. Movie studios did for years, since it was cheaper (and safer) than keeping it around.
That's it. I'm outta here. Take over for me?
:)
No thanks
I think it's time for all the rational people to go and hide while the rest of 'em slug it out.
Spurious and Unverifiable Scientific Fact #47:
In the entire history of the internet, there have been exactly 4 people who have changed their opinions based upon what they read in a discussion forum. And all but one of them changed it back within half an hour.
I would argue that there's also a logic problem that contributes to the rancor of the debate, which is that people who do not believe in anthropogenic GW are being asked to disprove the anthropogenic model.
But, to your point, it's also absolutely true that there are fanatics (on both sides) who are not interested in science or evidence or anything other than beating up on the "enemy." There are elements of both the anthropogenic model and the non-anthropogenic model that naturally fit in with wider world-views that stand in conflict. Throw in people who stand to profit (on either side), and we get the morass we're in. Little wonder it has become a very emotional issue.
Now the question is how do we get out of the swamp?
Uh, yes, but you can't decouple these effects:
Higher general atmospheric temperatures (from this CO2) means that the atmosphere can absorb more water vapor (see WATER VAPOR in the CLIMATE SYSTEM, December 1995, the American Geophysical Union).
Upper atmospheric clouding occludes sunlight, resulting in decreased surface warming. However, clouds also trap the longer wavelength radiation.
It can also result in a thinning/cooling of the upper atmosphere, which may or may not affect surface temperatures.
All of the models with which I'm familiar get pretty chaotic.
OK, I'll bite.
They deny the truth.
Scientists don't tend to use words like "truth" for theories that are not readily shown by experimental evidence. And sometimes even when they can be.
For example, general relativity can be experimentally demonstrated in a range of contexts. Most scientists believe that the theory is accurate, but there are still a lot who wouldn't use the word "true," simply because it may not be true on all scales, or it may turn out that GR is a good description of one area of a larger theory (e.g., Newtonian mechanics aren't strictly "true" -- but they're a damn fine approximation in most contexts). You still see some interesting discussion on this stuff in the dark matter debate, although the GR/dark matter side is increasingly looking like it's going to win out on this one.
Your divisive and dismissive language ("pseudo-skeptics") doesn't actually get us anywhere. Setting yourself up as judge over which skepticism is warranted and which is not a scientific approach -- this is the model of a Religion, where there is acceptable dogma and unacceptable dogma. Show me the errors in their logic or explain why their experiments are inaccurate, don't call them names.
Disclaimer: I am a scientist by training, even if I don't work as one now. I am an environmentalist. I'm a skeptic. I've seen evidence that supports the theory that there is global warming. I haven't seen compelling evidence in either direction on the anthropogenic question. Having done computer modeling of physical systems, I don't have deep trust of computer models of chaotic systems.
Many, many years ago, when I was looking for a job in high school, I went to the local Radio Shack.
Heck, I knew their TRS-80 computers. I knew some basic electronics. I figured I could be an ideal employee.
So they gave me a two page test. After I gave it to them, they said they were sorry, and couldn't hire me. I had tried really hard, so, almost crying, I asked if I had really done that badly.
Nope, was the answer. I had gotten too many right. I just wasn't gonna make it as a salesman.
I understand Fry's now follows a similar policy.
My dad used to keep bees when I was a kid. We had citrus -- mostly orange trees, but some lemons, limes, and tangerines, and there's seasonally wild buckwheat, mustard, and lupine in the area.
... why not a really kick-ass dark mead?
The honey from our hives was thick, and very dark in color.
As a kid, I wasn't much into it. Today, I miss honey that's really rich and has that weird protein-y propalis smell.
There's one guy in the local farmer's market that has something close, but even his darkest is more amber than dark.
And as for a porter
it's black and white.
Ah, but are we talking Plus-X, Tri-X, AGFAPan? Or maybe one of them newfangled T-Maxes?
It makes a difference, you know!
Having had rats eat the insulation off my spark cables, I can see this as a problem.
My only regret is that I wasn't able to crank the engine over why they were still gnawin'... ain't nothing like the smell of flash-fried rat.
Maybe I'm just not jaded enough, but I've never understood the implied disconnect between these two statements.
I think that's not necessarily because you're insufficiently jaded, but that you're more perceptive. The fact that you are special and unique and the fact that other people are special and unique are orthogonal.
But the original post seems to be trying to make a declaration of nonconformity, wrapped in an ironic defense. I see a lot of people who have invested a great deal of their identity in nonconformity railing against "conventional nonconformity."
Somerset Maugham wrote that the true nonconformists weren't even really all that conscious of their nonconformity. They just don't care what other people think. After all, a conscious decision to be a non-conformist is merely conforming in inverse -- if the crowd thinks X is cool, to preserve your nonconformist cred you must believe X is not cool, thus you're still a slave to popular belief. Of course, Maugham's nonconformists are all basically sociopaths.
Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland have shown that conventions of nonconformity are outstanding marketing tools. It's an interesting problem.
I do agree with you about the difficulty in catching subtle meanings, or things like word-play/puns/etc
I've got one word for you: hapax legomenon. Well, ok, that was two.
If you know that giving your starving brother money will result in him buying drugs instead of food, it is immoral to give him money.
Or, perhaps, it will solve the problem of having a starving brother. I mean, if he's so far gone that he'll forgo needed nourishment for his drugs, giving him that last dose may push him over the edge. Problem solved.
Don't they know they'll end up cooling off the inside of the earth???
:)
Then what will we do?
We'll have to have giant heat-exchanger space elevators circulating water/ice to cool the atmosphere back down, and we'll pump all our radioactive waste down deep to warm it back up in there.
er.
Nevermind
Actually, it's probably Good Engineering.
:)
Ruby (the language) doesn't support Unicode yet.
Rails needs it. So they write a module to support Unicode. Yes, in a year, that module will be obsolete. But then, presumably, the module will then become a pass-through to the native Ruby support.
No code will need to be changed.
That's encapsulation. That's Good Engineering[tm].
Or I could be confused and totally missing the point
Yeah?
So when I learn that a significant number of ancestors on one branch of my family died of pernicious anemia, I should say "ah, fuck it. Doesn't matter, just so long as they shagged and procreated?"
Or when I notice that those who stayed in certain Eastern European countries all died young due to murderous neighboring communities, while those who fled to places like the US lived into their 90s, I should just say "aw, fuck it. Weird how the dire dice of destiny roll, eh?"
Do the names matter? Probably not -- except for helping unravel various genetic intertwinings. A name and a birth date can tell you a great deal. It can sometimes tell you regions of origin or religion.
If you claim to believe that only the genetic component matters at all, this is still relevant (as theory indicates that genetics and health are tightly coupled).
I, on the other hand, believe that the point of life is to live and gather stories to tell. Stories have more immediacy when you can say "this happened to me" or "this happened to my grandfather." The richness of the story comes from the detail, and the detail can come from familiarity.