Actually, no - if you RTFA, it IS fear mongering. It's not saying that cosmic rays make reproduction difficult or impossible without better shielding...the title of the article is "Why infertility will stop humans colonising space"....you'd think by now people might be a little leery of pronouncing the impossibility of something as far as humanity is concerned. Using the same source logic behind their title, one might have stated unequivocally in 1700 "Why humans will never fly", because, barring technological advance, we couldn't do it then.
Making such a categorical statement is idiotic. Or an exercise in sensationalist headline-writing.
Suddenly the red-light district of any city is going to have the nicest streets, because of so much 'sudden vertical movement' being reported there day after day.
I can't imagine the street workers (on either side) are going to mind.
2005 Saints offensive playbook, as an example. 146 pages. Generally a good 20-50% of these plays get tweaked EVERY WEEK against each opponent, based on the individuals playing on the opposing teams, and their strengths/vulnerabilities. Then those tweaks also have to be adjusted/learned for the probable backups for the players. Many of these plays vary based on the defensive formation that's apparent, and may change at the last second due to a formation switch (defense) or an audible call by the QB.
The quarterback has the toughest job, he basically has to know all the plays, variations, tweaks, and changes for ALL of the RB's and receivers. If the play is a 23 dive, the RB might be originally planned to go to the QB's right, and the QB will need to hand off with his left hand, but if THAT linebacker lines up someplace else, the RB may go to the OTHER side which will require the QB to hand off to the other side with his other hand. QB has to interpret the play, parse that, and apply it.
A lot of armchair enthusiasts who never played football after high school have no comprehension of how complex and involved the game is, even at the college level, and that's NOTHING compared to the pros.
I wish I could score you +1, because you GOT my point.
Perhaps the effort to be amusing camouflaged it, but my comment about 'strings being attached' was not even seriously intended to disparage those 'strings', it was more an ironic comment on the OP's fairly narrow definition of the word 'free'.
Anyone think it was ironic that I was going to read this to my wife, while she was on her computer finishing the month-end reporting for our business (just before she went downstairs to get some housework done)?
If you think about it for a second, perhaps you'll see why more men than women post on Wikipedia.
I'm not even sure why I'm continuing to argue against 'anon', but sure, why not? Mainly, my point is arguing with the "hey man, don't be a spelling nazi" crowd. In a sense, I'm arguing that one can care about spelling and punctuation without being a 'spelling nazi', and that epithet loses its currency when it's flung by someone who, in fact, cannot manage to spell correctly even if they try.
1) the original post to which I was responding didn't simply disagree with their conclusions, it became an ad hominem attack by calling them "stupid". While they would probably agree that their show is PRIMARILY entertainment, it has a reasonable educational value, and I believe that they are fairly intelligent guys.
2) the word "blimp" was misspelled. 5 letters. Misspelled FOUR times. This is not an onerous typographic task, that might commonly be 'cut-n-pasted' like "Polyethylene Terephthalate" that, if slightly misspelled, might be cut-n-pasted to repeat the error without notice.
3) Thus it is with some irony that someone who would make such an error would accuse a widely regarded pair of individuals as "stupid". In fact, it's quite amusing.
Look, you can type, or spell however you like. No amount of denial will change the fact that people will judge you by how you present yourself, and in terms of forum posts, your presentation is based on your spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, etc.
Pardon me for pointing it out, but your assertion that some people "...just don't care about spelling, for the RIGHT reasons..." Really? Because from here it's really hard to distinguish that from simple laziness.
if i wer to rite this hole posst like this i mite be absulotley akurit but this riting styl sez that im vry lickely ithr a moran laze or both sinz i kant be bothrd 2 mak shur sumthin az triviale az speling iz kurect duz it reele sugist thet i spent much tyme makin shur mi arrggumint iz robust coherint end kumplit? knot hardle.
You say that spelling is trivial, and doesn't matter as long as the logic behind the statement is sound. Perhaps that is even occasionally true. However I'd recommend against choosing 'bimp boy' as your advocacy poster child. You might have noticed before your 20-line screed, that after I pointed out the irony of his calling Mythbusters "stupid", I proceeded to show in clear fashion that his logic was badly flawed, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the question/point, and he was quite simply wrong.
So in this case, one might mention that the misspelling was in fact a clear indication that the poster was so busy getting upset at the 'stupidity' of Mythbusters, that he had failed to logically vet his point. Likewise, one might also point out that subsequent posters, by attacking the 'spelling comment' likewise simply illustrated their inability to catch the main point, being distracted (and apparently, incensed) by trivia not essential to it.
Seriously, while my comment was flippant, but I'd invite you to feel free to dispute the simple fact that sex always* comes with strings attached? *or at least in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Like Charlie Sheen's character said: "I don't pay the hookers for sex, I'm paying them to LEAVE."
Seriously, this is MOST people's experience with government bureaucrats at any level. Have you ever walked into a government service office (federal, state, or local; IRS, DOT, city, county, etc.) and said "wow, this is an impressive bunch of people!"
Generally, the impression is of people who are otherwise nearly unemployable, clearly hired according to a diversity-fulfillment chart.
This is, of course, until you get to the highest levels of government, when you run into extremely bright, driven people who are either absolute narcissists and/or utterly amoral achievement-whores. Usually both.
And THIS is the bunch of people that some people believe should be in charge of nearly every aspect of our lives.
Certainly, there are brilliant people that couldn't spell at all, but as a preliminary immediate judge, yeah, it's one of the best yardsticks I can think of.
Ironic that someone criticizing someone else for being stupid, cannot manage to spell "blimp" repeatedly.
Watch http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/mythbusters-clips-hindenburg.html again. The "myth" that they were testing (remember, this is formulated as a binary pass/fail for their show) is that it wasn't the hydrogen but was the skin that caused the blimp to burn as fast as it did.
Using exactly the results you list: Simple fabric burns. Hydrogen with simple fabric burns. Thermite fabric (no H2) burns faster, but still not to the point of the event. Thermite + H2 = boom.
Ergo, the myth that it was JUST the skin, was in fact busted. Jaimie discusses at the end that the skin clearly was an accelerant, and had a significant impact, but the specific of the myth was shown to be untrue.
Not sure why this was too complicated to understand.
Very well could have been a 110, as we were neither a wealthy district nor near the Cities. I simply thought all the old phone-couplers were 300 - this was long before I cared about hardware, aside from all the essential coolness of "working" on a computer.:)
Yep, it was an old ASR33 with a separate acoustic coupler. Then in 6th grade when we moved up to Bloomington, I remember how in awe I was at their sexy brand-new ASR-43. It was like I was IN a science-fiction movie.
Ah the days. I probably kept several of my old Oregon Trail rolls of paper for a decade or more.
I remember sitting in our Kenyon high school's computer lab (in reality, a single MECC terminal sitting on a closet - maybe a 6'x6' room) as a 2nd grader, dialing in to MECC and sticking the handset into the 300-baud coupler before sitting for what was probably hours of exciting adventure on the Oregon Trail, over and over and over.
That had to be 1975? 1974?
It was by far the coolest thing I'd ever experienced. Not just the honor of getting to use a computer, but the challenge of beating what was in fact a very hard game.
...even Dawkins posited that it may be that there is an evolutionary value to religion, in the sense that a society that BELIEVES that there is 'an invisible watchdog' that's going to punish for 'cheating' has a stronger bias toward not cheating.
And since really any society is based on a set of assumptions and the fewer free-riders/cheaters there are, the better the system works, discouraging cheating by whatever means is a non-negligible advantage.
Today, in the West, where we're seeing an atomization of communities, it could even be that we're situating ourselves to a place where this tendency could actually turn out to be once again useful.
All I can say is that I'm glad that Metric system isn't arbitrary and open to interpretation or change like the Imperial system those stupid Americans use.
A *former* candidate for VICE president, *former* governor has to release her private emails because there's a suspicion that she might have conducted government business on them.
A *sitting* PRESIDENT however, needs no more than "someone" claiming that they've *seen* his birth certificate to satisfy the presidential requirement of citizenship by birth, despite his own grandmother asserting he was born in another country.
I watched her video, because TED talks are often awesome.
However, her assertions are absurd.
She states (around 5:00) that when confronted with problems/obstacles in the real world, we often get anxious, depressed, cynical, etc. And that "this never happens in games".
First, that's simply wrong. Ever been ganked? Repeatedly? Ever raid for hours and some retard in your group just CAN'T stop 'standing in fire' and killing you all, giving up far too late into the night knowing you've just gifted yourself with a perma-headache all day tomorrow?
Second, what she seems not to recognize is the massive difference in loss-minimizing vs. gain-maximizing behavior. Generally, sane people in real life take loss-minimal choices: we only have one life to risk, one set of kids, one job, as well as fairly strict criteria requiring certain things to stay alive like food, water, and sleep. One of the reasons that games are fun is that we can entirely DISPENSE with this calculus, and the stress behind it.
In many games, there's a discussion of the 'death penalty' - what should it cost a player to lose his in-game character's life? The simple fact the question is asked at all shows how absurd it is to try to rationalize game behavior with real life behavior at such fundamental levels.
Let's imagine a game that gives us more choices like real life: First, you decide what you want. You have a host of choices, but they generally revolve around happiness. You can sit on the couch, and gain +1 happiness an hour. Or, you could go skiing, and get +100 happiness per hour but with a small risk of injury (-1 to -100 happiness) that you can reduce by repeated performance. Sounds like a game calculus so far. But here's the kicker: skiing gives you lots of happines, but there is a >0 chance that you have a FATAL accident, which means that you lose, and the game destroys itself and you have to buy a new copy. Would anyone play such a game? No, because to have such a "stringent" death penalty would stink. How about this? In WoW, if you die, you can't play for a month? Acceptable? No way. A week? An hour? Ten minutes?
On the other hand, think how much your life choices would change if you knew for certain that if you died, you could come back in, say, 50 years.
Games allow us to approach choices a certain way because they're free of consequence. To even suggest that sort of behavior is available in the real world, ever, is ludicrous.
An interesting point that I don't believe has been called out in comments yet: note that they tested some kids as young as THREE.
Not to say that there aren't some things that parents could do to help with self-control, but testing at that early age would lead me to believe that many of the elements of self-control are innate and not learned.
I know a family of four kids, and two of them are meticulous, careful, self-controlled individuals. Two are impulsive, whimsical, and NOT self-controlled at all. Same home environment, one of each gender in each group. Not sure if there's anything that could have been done to 'make' the impulsive pair more likely to be more self-disciplined.
Someone needs to tell the guys that wrote Dragon Age.
In fact, Gamespy's "Top 25 games of the 2000s" http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/114/1145626p1.html (they only have #25-#11 so far) includes the following games that I would consider graphic adventure games: 23. Thief II: The Metal Age 16. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 14. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind...and later columns will most certainly include the Mass Effect games and Dragon Age as AAA titles, but most certainly will miss a whole host of excellent indie titles like Machinarium.
So yes, perhaps the "click all over the still screen looking for the "thing" you can manipulate cryptically" style 'adventure/puzzle' game is gone, replaced by graphically gorgeous, artistic, complex, deep, and engaging interplayable stories.
So? It may be odd, but I don't measure my happiness by relativity.
I also, on average: - pay less taxes - get paid more - have access to more X within 20 miles (X being defined as nearly everything - green space, recreational venues, restaurants, 24-hour stores, movie theaters) - am exposed to more crime - have a more expensive health care plan - work more hours - take less vacation - have more churches - am more likely to have air-conditioning - am more likely to own my home - have a bigger living space...so I pay a little more for internet bandwidth? I'm happy with what I pay, and if I want to access the internet big broadband totally free, I just walk to the public library 2 blocks away.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no - if you RTFA, it IS fear mongering. ...you'd think by now people might be a little leery of pronouncing the impossibility of something as far as humanity is concerned. Using the same source logic behind their title, one might have stated unequivocally in 1700 "Why humans will never fly", because, barring technological advance, we couldn't do it then.
It's not saying that cosmic rays make reproduction difficult or impossible without better shielding...the title of the article is "Why infertility will stop humans colonising space".
Making such a categorical statement is idiotic. Or an exercise in sensationalist headline-writing.
DUDE! You need to compete! Your overaggressive white blood cells would kick ass!
Suddenly the red-light district of any city is going to have the nicest streets, because of so much 'sudden vertical movement' being reported there day after day.
I can't imagine the street workers (on either side) are going to mind.
I don't know about you, but while I thought the Minority Report UI was *cool*, it would SUCK to work with. Enter text? Copy? Paste?
You basically can't sit at a desk, you'd have to stand so as to wave your arms about.
On the plus side, we couldn't all be stuffed into our little veal-fattening pens, there simply wouldn't be enough room.
So Ariana Huffington collects $315 million for the website that agglomerates snippets dropped to her by leakers and other interested busybodies.
Really, it IS the 'end of days', isn't it?
Then you're underestimating the amount of memorization and mental horsepower needed to be a pro football player. Don't worry, you're in good company.
Look at the playbooks in http://fastandfuriousfootball.com/?page_id=11
2005 Saints offensive playbook, as an example.
146 pages. Generally a good 20-50% of these plays get tweaked EVERY WEEK against each opponent, based on the individuals playing on the opposing teams, and their strengths/vulnerabilities. Then those tweaks also have to be adjusted/learned for the probable backups for the players. Many of these plays vary based on the defensive formation that's apparent, and may change at the last second due to a formation switch (defense) or an audible call by the QB.
The quarterback has the toughest job, he basically has to know all the plays, variations, tweaks, and changes for ALL of the RB's and receivers. If the play is a 23 dive, the RB might be originally planned to go to the QB's right, and the QB will need to hand off with his left hand, but if THAT linebacker lines up someplace else, the RB may go to the OTHER side which will require the QB to hand off to the other side with his other hand. QB has to interpret the play, parse that, and apply it.
A lot of armchair enthusiasts who never played football after high school have no comprehension of how complex and involved the game is, even at the college level, and that's NOTHING compared to the pros.
I wish I could score you +1, because you GOT my point.
Perhaps the effort to be amusing camouflaged it, but my comment about 'strings being attached' was not even seriously intended to disparage those 'strings', it was more an ironic comment on the OP's fairly narrow definition of the word 'free'.
Good post, thank you.
Anyone think it was ironic that I was going to read this to my wife, while she was on her computer finishing the month-end reporting for our business (just before she went downstairs to get some housework done)?
If you think about it for a second, perhaps you'll see why more men than women post on Wikipedia.
I'm not even sure why I'm continuing to argue against 'anon', but sure, why not? Mainly, my point is arguing with the "hey man, don't be a spelling nazi" crowd. In a sense, I'm arguing that one can care about spelling and punctuation without being a 'spelling nazi', and that epithet loses its currency when it's flung by someone who, in fact, cannot manage to spell correctly even if they try.
1) the original post to which I was responding didn't simply disagree with their conclusions, it became an ad hominem attack by calling them "stupid". While they would probably agree that their show is PRIMARILY entertainment, it has a reasonable educational value, and I believe that they are fairly intelligent guys.
2) the word "blimp" was misspelled. 5 letters. Misspelled FOUR times. This is not an onerous typographic task, that might commonly be 'cut-n-pasted' like "Polyethylene Terephthalate" that, if slightly misspelled, might be cut-n-pasted to repeat the error without notice.
3) Thus it is with some irony that someone who would make such an error would accuse a widely regarded pair of individuals as "stupid". In fact, it's quite amusing.
Look, you can type, or spell however you like.
No amount of denial will change the fact that people will judge you by how you present yourself, and in terms of forum posts, your presentation is based on your spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, etc.
Pardon me for pointing it out, but your assertion that some people "...just don't care about spelling, for the RIGHT reasons..." Really? Because from here it's really hard to distinguish that from simple laziness.
if i wer to rite this hole posst like this i mite be absulotley akurit but this riting styl sez that im vry lickely ithr a moran laze or both sinz i kant be bothrd 2 mak shur sumthin az triviale az speling iz kurect duz it reele sugist thet i spent much tyme makin shur mi arrggumint iz robust coherint end kumplit? knot hardle.
You say that spelling is trivial, and doesn't matter as long as the logic behind the statement is sound. Perhaps that is even occasionally true. However I'd recommend against choosing 'bimp boy' as your advocacy poster child. You might have noticed before your 20-line screed, that after I pointed out the irony of his calling Mythbusters "stupid", I proceeded to show in clear fashion that his logic was badly flawed, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the question/point, and he was quite simply wrong.
So in this case, one might mention that the misspelling was in fact a clear indication that the poster was so busy getting upset at the 'stupidity' of Mythbusters, that he had failed to logically vet his point. Likewise, one might also point out that subsequent posters, by attacking the 'spelling comment' likewise simply illustrated their inability to catch the main point, being distracted (and apparently, incensed) by trivia not essential to it.
Excessive honesty?
Seriously, while my comment was flippant, but I'd invite you to feel free to dispute the simple fact that sex always* comes with strings attached?
*or at least in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Like Charlie Sheen's character said: "I don't pay the hookers for sex, I'm paying them to LEAVE."
But I bet he bothered to spell correctly. (Well, insofar as any spelling was standardized at that time.)
"Typical government bureaucracy in action."
Fixed that for you.
Seriously, this is MOST people's experience with government bureaucrats at any level.
Have you ever walked into a government service office (federal, state, or local; IRS, DOT, city, county, etc.) and said "wow, this is an impressive bunch of people!"
Generally, the impression is of people who are otherwise nearly unemployable, clearly hired according to a diversity-fulfillment chart.
This is, of course, until you get to the highest levels of government, when you run into extremely bright, driven people who are either absolute narcissists and/or utterly amoral achievement-whores. Usually both.
And THIS is the bunch of people that some people believe should be in charge of nearly every aspect of our lives.
If you think she's doing it for "free" you have a very narrow definition of free.
It's NEVER "free".
A prostitute simply allows you to complete the transaction immediately and walk away. That's why women resent them.
Can you think of a simpler, more obvious test?
Certainly, there are brilliant people that couldn't spell at all, but as a preliminary immediate judge, yeah, it's one of the best yardsticks I can think of.
Ironic that someone criticizing someone else for being stupid, cannot manage to spell "blimp" repeatedly.
Watch http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/mythbusters-clips-hindenburg.html again.
The "myth" that they were testing (remember, this is formulated as a binary pass/fail for their show) is that it wasn't the hydrogen but was the skin that caused the blimp to burn as fast as it did.
Using exactly the results you list:
Simple fabric burns.
Hydrogen with simple fabric burns.
Thermite fabric (no H2) burns faster, but still not to the point of the event.
Thermite + H2 = boom.
Ergo, the myth that it was JUST the skin, was in fact busted.
Jaimie discusses at the end that the skin clearly was an accelerant, and had a significant impact, but the specific of the myth was shown to be untrue.
Not sure why this was too complicated to understand.
Very well could have been a 110, as we were neither a wealthy district nor near the Cities. I simply thought all the old phone-couplers were 300 - this was long before I cared about hardware, aside from all the essential coolness of "working" on a computer. :)
Yep, it was an old ASR33 with a separate acoustic coupler.
Then in 6th grade when we moved up to Bloomington, I remember how in awe I was at their sexy brand-new ASR-43. It was like I was IN a science-fiction movie.
Ah the days. I probably kept several of my old Oregon Trail rolls of paper for a decade or more.
I remember sitting in our Kenyon high school's computer lab (in reality, a single MECC terminal sitting on a closet - maybe a 6'x6' room) as a 2nd grader, dialing in to MECC and sticking the handset into the 300-baud coupler before sitting for what was probably hours of exciting adventure on the Oregon Trail, over and over and over.
That had to be 1975? 1974?
It was by far the coolest thing I'd ever experienced. Not just the honor of getting to use a computer, but the challenge of beating what was in fact a very hard game.
...even Dawkins posited that it may be that there is an evolutionary value to religion, in the sense that a society that BELIEVES that there is 'an invisible watchdog' that's going to punish for 'cheating' has a stronger bias toward not cheating.
And since really any society is based on a set of assumptions and the fewer free-riders/cheaters there are, the better the system works, discouraging cheating by whatever means is a non-negligible advantage.
Today, in the West, where we're seeing an atomization of communities, it could even be that we're situating ourselves to a place where this tendency could actually turn out to be once again useful.
All I can say is that I'm glad that Metric system isn't arbitrary and open to interpretation or change like the Imperial system those stupid Americans use.
A *former* candidate for VICE president, *former* governor has to release her private emails because there's a suspicion that she might have conducted government business on them.
A *sitting* PRESIDENT however, needs no more than "someone" claiming that they've *seen* his birth certificate to satisfy the presidential requirement of citizenship by birth, despite his own grandmother asserting he was born in another country.
Nope, no double standard. Please carry on.
I watched her video, because TED talks are often awesome.
However, her assertions are absurd.
She states (around 5:00) that when confronted with problems/obstacles in the real world, we often get anxious, depressed, cynical, etc. And that "this never happens in games".
First, that's simply wrong. Ever been ganked? Repeatedly? Ever raid for hours and some retard in your group just CAN'T stop 'standing in fire' and killing you all, giving up far too late into the night knowing you've just gifted yourself with a perma-headache all day tomorrow?
Second, what she seems not to recognize is the massive difference in loss-minimizing vs. gain-maximizing behavior. Generally, sane people in real life take loss-minimal choices: we only have one life to risk, one set of kids, one job, as well as fairly strict criteria requiring certain things to stay alive like food, water, and sleep. One of the reasons that games are fun is that we can entirely DISPENSE with this calculus, and the stress behind it.
In many games, there's a discussion of the 'death penalty' - what should it cost a player to lose his in-game character's life? The simple fact the question is asked at all shows how absurd it is to try to rationalize game behavior with real life behavior at such fundamental levels.
Let's imagine a game that gives us more choices like real life:
First, you decide what you want. You have a host of choices, but they generally revolve around happiness. You can sit on the couch, and gain +1 happiness an hour. Or, you could go skiing, and get +100 happiness per hour but with a small risk of injury (-1 to -100 happiness) that you can reduce by repeated performance.
Sounds like a game calculus so far.
But here's the kicker: skiing gives you lots of happines, but there is a >0 chance that you have a FATAL accident, which means that you lose, and the game destroys itself and you have to buy a new copy.
Would anyone play such a game? No, because to have such a "stringent" death penalty would stink. How about this? In WoW, if you die, you can't play for a month? Acceptable? No way. A week? An hour? Ten minutes?
On the other hand, think how much your life choices would change if you knew for certain that if you died, you could come back in, say, 50 years.
Games allow us to approach choices a certain way because they're free of consequence. To even suggest that sort of behavior is available in the real world, ever, is ludicrous.
An interesting point that I don't believe has been called out in comments yet: note that they tested some kids as young as THREE.
Not to say that there aren't some things that parents could do to help with self-control, but testing at that early age would lead me to believe that many of the elements of self-control are innate and not learned.
I know a family of four kids, and two of them are meticulous, careful, self-controlled individuals. Two are impulsive, whimsical, and NOT self-controlled at all. Same home environment, one of each gender in each group. Not sure if there's anything that could have been done to 'make' the impulsive pair more likely to be more self-disciplined.
Someone needs to tell the guys that wrote Dragon Age.
In fact, Gamespy's "Top 25 games of the 2000s" ...and later columns will most certainly include the Mass Effect games and Dragon Age as AAA titles, but most certainly will miss a whole host of excellent indie titles like Machinarium.
http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/114/1145626p1.html
(they only have #25-#11 so far)
includes the following games that I would consider graphic adventure games:
23. Thief II: The Metal Age
16. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
14. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
So yes, perhaps the "click all over the still screen looking for the "thing" you can manipulate cryptically" style 'adventure/puzzle' game is gone, replaced by graphically gorgeous, artistic, complex, deep, and engaging interplayable stories.
I'm cool with that.
He "lives with" autism? What precisely does that mean?
I can't imagine he's a very good roommate.
So?
It may be odd, but I don't measure my happiness by relativity.
I also, on average: ...so I pay a little more for internet bandwidth? I'm happy with what I pay, and if I want to access the internet big broadband totally free, I just walk to the public library 2 blocks away.
- pay less taxes
- get paid more
- have access to more X within 20 miles (X being defined as nearly everything - green space, recreational venues, restaurants, 24-hour stores, movie theaters)
- am exposed to more crime
- have a more expensive health care plan
- work more hours
- take less vacation
- have more churches
- am more likely to have air-conditioning
- am more likely to own my home
- have a bigger living space