It's soul-crushingly boring. All those years ago it had daring content, but now it's just long and tedious.
Try Pride and Prejudice. The great thing about it is that it's hilarious from the opening sentence. Also, it turns out that one of the seemingly odeous characters in part has some social anxiety problems that masquerade as something different, which some people on this website may be able to identify with. There are so many other interesting characters, some with completely obvious flaws, some whose appearances are completely deceptive, and some who are in the middle, straightforward but with issues going on that surprise even themselves.
The contrast between the two books couldn't be greater in terms of the pleasure you will get. And the second has more to teach about life as well, despite being written 100 years earlier.
The cloning is a red herring. Your bill is wrong. Tell them, ask them to fix it. You don't know if it's cloning, and you don't care. By throwing out irrelevant theories, you are just distracting from the real issue.
"Evolution is simply the result of certain genetic traits being selected based upon environmental pressures. It shouldn't be too surprising that evolution still occurs in humans so long as there is a situation where some genetic traits are more likely to be passed on through reproduction than others."
Both sentences are true, but the latter implies we are *no longer* evolving. Sure, we *were* evolving up to very recently. But now or soon, when almost everyone born reaches maturity (so to speak...) and reproduces, the selection pressure is down to zero, and evolution ceases. So long as reproduction is not based upon fitness, natural selection will not be occurring. Perhaps artificial selection (e.g. eugenics) may alter humans for better or worse, and maybe non-genetic interventions (e.g. smart drugs) may alter humans when applied after conception, but otherwise we're not changing, except for the gradual degredation that will occur whenever flaws (say, being slightly less intelligent, having a lousy sense of smell, etc.) are not selected against.
> Kyoto has nothing to do with the environment. It is an attempt to squash North American industry.
Even if you believe the second statement, that statement is independent from the first. Anyway, if the second statement is true, isn't it equally an attempt to squash European industry? Pretty stupid of Europe to go along with it, right? Except it's very clever of Europe, as I'll discuss. ANyway, how could the first statement not be true. Do you know why it's called "the greenhouse effect?" Do you know what a greenhouse is and how one works? Do you know why Venus is 700 degrees F, when if it had the same atmospheric composition as Earth it would be warmer than earth but not that much?
We will solve this problem. The question is how thoroughly we will destroy the environment before we do, how much suffering will be caused along the way. When ocean levels start to rise and we have to build dykes around huge stretches of ocean to protect major and minor cities, when the climate changes and great farmland becomes poor and poor farmland great, how much ECONOMIC expense will the world incur? Kyoto's economic cost is small compared to the cost of NOT doing Kyoto or the equivalent.
When we solve this problem, we will not do so by all riding bicycles. Instead, we'll use non-greenhouse producing energy sources, which are available in abundance, though CURRENTLY at too high a price. Europe and others, but especially Europe, will do the R&D, become experts, get the patents, make the money, etc. The world will be better, richer, and habitable. The US will miss out and be poorer than it would have been, though of course much richer than it would have been if no one did Kyoto and the world became that much more damaged.
Converting from a fossil-fuel based economy probably will not be much more expensive than, say, the war in Iraq. It appears to be very doable, though the R&D is not complete. We'll do it. Let's see how hideous we have to make the planet first.
I use Mozilla because it's very nice to browse to a page of interest and then ^E to edit it. I tried launching NVu from Firefox with Launchy, but the fireup is slower and retains less context.
I almost completely agree that if you're dumb enough to fall for the scam, you deserve it.
I once was asked for my birth city over the telephone and gave it before I realized what was going on. Anyone can be temporarily stupid and no one deserves it. Everyone should be educated, but if 10% of people, or 1%, or 0.1%, fall for a scam, they don't deserve it.
Anyone who commits fraud should have his or her ass nailed to the wall. And the rest of us should be able to live our lives without having our identities stolen if we happen to be thinking about something else for a second when someone tries to steal it.
I read it a while ago, so hopefully my memory is correct.
1. It's a good idea to use an average of today's scale weights and previous measurements to estimate today's weight, and that's an idea I had never seen before reading his book. And it also makes a great deal of sense to weight yourself regularly so that you know if what you are doing is working for you, not an original idea of his, but very sensible.
1a. Minor "hacking" complaint: To estimate today's weight, he uses some sort of formula along the lines of 0.2*weight_today+0.15*weight_yesterday+... going back 20 days. He has a spreadsheet to help you do this. That's a hack, but not an elegant hack. I would expect a hacker to use exponential averaging: today_estimate = 0.2*weight_today + 0.8*yesterday_estimate. That's a beautiful formula that better captures what he was trying to achieve, and without need for spreadsheets at all. And it's trivial to tune if you don't like the 0.2 factor.
Okay, that was trivial. Now onto more weighty matters.
2. Sure, to first order, the amount of calories you eat is all that's relevant. But this whole thread is discussing something very important. That is, you will be *more hungry* if you eat the wrong foods. So, here are your choices:
a) Eat 1500 cal/day of lean meat, fish, fruits & veggies, nuts, olive oil, etc., exercise the willpower to not cheat too often when you are a little hungry or just feel like eating, and lose weight.
b) Eat 1500 cal/day of cereal, muffins, pasta, rice, bread, etc, be REALLY HUNGRY, exercise the willpower not to cheat too often EVEN THOUGH YOU ARE REALLY HUNGRY, and lose weight.
What is it we are evolved to eat? Remember that our genes have basically not changed in the last 10,000 or even 50,000 years. So what were we eating 100,000 or 1,000,000 years ago?
We weren't farmers.
We're optimized to eat fruit, vegetables, a few nuts, fish and very lean meat. There's just no equivalent to the dense carbs that we mostly eat now. We certainly didn't eat bread, pasta, bran muffins, etc -- just the tiny amount of grain we might gather.
To me, that's compelling. It's not surprising that large amounts of grain-based carbs would be sub-optimal. Exactly how that's suboptimal is a matter of debate and study, but it seems a safe bet that eating the foods we were *designed* to eat is the most healthful.
And note that I did put fruits and vegetables first on the list, and those are carbs. And they're good for you. So it's not so much low carb as low grain, low sugar, etc. Kids aren't getting fat because they've suddenly started eating too many apples.
Linux is complicated, and so is windows. Intelligent, experienced users have windows and linux breaking all the time in thousands of ways.
Less technical users (i.e. normal people) have no hope of dealing with problems: unless things are exactly as they expect and work perfectly, they are completely lost. (This is not a criticism, but rather follows inevitably from the first paragraph.) With windows, they are endlessly frustrated, but they have memorized a few dozen "tricks" that work. With linux, a different set of "tricks" are required and they are completely lost when one of their tricks fails. Linux ends up looking harder simply because it is different.
Had they been raised on linux, then windows would seem impossibly complex.
"Backward compatability" (i.e. desktop behaving like windows) is essential for linux to make headway on the desktop. Perhaps this is a bitter pill. Sorry, that's life.
Slashdot Mirror
It's soul-crushingly boring. All those years ago it had daring content, but now it's just long and tedious.
Try Pride and Prejudice. The great thing about it is that it's hilarious from the opening sentence. Also, it turns out that one of the seemingly odeous characters in part has some social anxiety problems that masquerade as something different, which some people on this website may be able to identify with. There are so many other interesting characters, some with completely obvious flaws, some whose appearances are completely deceptive, and some who are in the middle, straightforward but with issues going on that surprise even themselves.
The contrast between the two books couldn't be greater in terms of the pleasure you will get. And the second has more to teach about life as well, despite being written 100 years earlier.
The cloning is a red herring. Your bill is wrong. Tell them, ask them to fix it. You don't know if it's cloning, and you don't care. By throwing out irrelevant theories, you are just distracting from the real issue.
"Evolution is simply the result of certain genetic traits being selected based upon environmental pressures. It shouldn't be too surprising that evolution still occurs in humans so long as there is a situation where some genetic traits are more likely to be passed on through reproduction than others."
...) and reproduces, the selection pressure is down to zero, and evolution ceases. So long as reproduction is not based upon fitness, natural selection will not be occurring. Perhaps artificial selection (e.g. eugenics) may alter humans for better or worse, and maybe non-genetic interventions (e.g. smart drugs) may alter humans when applied after conception, but otherwise we're not changing, except for the gradual degredation that will occur whenever flaws (say, being slightly less intelligent, having a lousy sense of smell, etc.) are not selected against.
Both sentences are true, but the latter implies we are *no longer* evolving. Sure, we *were* evolving up to very recently. But now or soon, when almost everyone born reaches maturity (so to speak
> Kyoto has nothing to do with the environment. It is an attempt to squash North American industry.
Even if you believe the second statement, that statement is independent from the first. Anyway, if the second statement is true, isn't it equally an attempt to squash European industry? Pretty stupid of Europe to go along with it, right? Except it's very clever of Europe, as I'll discuss. ANyway, how could the first statement not be true. Do you know why it's called "the greenhouse effect?" Do you know what a greenhouse is and how one works? Do you know why Venus is 700 degrees F, when if it had the same atmospheric composition as Earth it would be warmer than earth but not that much?
We will solve this problem. The question is how thoroughly we will destroy the environment before we do, how much suffering will be caused along the way. When ocean levels start to rise and we have to build dykes around huge stretches of ocean to protect major and minor cities, when the climate changes and great farmland becomes poor and poor farmland great, how much ECONOMIC expense will the world incur? Kyoto's economic cost is small compared to the cost of NOT doing Kyoto or the equivalent.
When we solve this problem, we will not do so by all riding bicycles. Instead, we'll use non-greenhouse producing energy sources, which are available in abundance, though CURRENTLY at too high a price. Europe and others, but especially Europe, will do the R&D, become experts, get the patents, make the money, etc. The world will be better, richer, and habitable. The US will miss out and be poorer than it would have been, though of course much richer than it would have been if no one did Kyoto and the world became that much more damaged.
Converting from a fossil-fuel based economy probably will not be much more expensive than, say, the war in Iraq. It appears to be very doable, though the R&D is not complete. We'll do it. Let's see how hideous we have to make the planet first.
> They didn't get that artcle for free. They had to buy an ad to get it!
Yea, true, because Microsoft has not spent nearly as much on advertising in the NYT as Firefox has. That posting was modded modded 4, insightful?
I use Mozilla because it's very nice to browse to a page of interest and then ^E to edit it. I tried launching NVu from Firefox with Launchy, but the fireup is slower and retains less context.
I almost completely agree that if you're dumb enough to fall for the scam, you deserve it.
I once was asked for my birth city over the telephone and gave it before I realized what was going on. Anyone can be temporarily stupid and no one deserves it. Everyone should be educated, but if 10% of people, or 1%, or 0.1%, fall for a scam, they don't deserve it.
Anyone who commits fraud should have his or her ass nailed to the wall. And the rest of us should be able to live our lives without having our identities stolen if we happen to be thinking about something else for a second when someone tries to steal it.
I also own a civic hybrid and get 45-50mpg, but I drive pretty conservatively.
Let's not forget this bit of fun. We can banish goto forever now that someone finally invented
comefrom.
I read it a while ago, so hopefully my memory is correct.
1. It's a good idea to use an average of today's scale weights and previous measurements to estimate today's weight, and that's an idea I had never seen before reading his book. And it also makes a great deal of sense to weight yourself regularly so that you know if what you are doing is working for you, not an original idea of his, but very sensible.
1a. Minor "hacking" complaint: To estimate today's weight, he uses some sort of formula along the lines of 0.2*weight_today+0.15*weight_yesterday+... going back 20 days. He has a spreadsheet to help you do this. That's a hack, but not an elegant hack. I would expect a hacker to use exponential averaging: today_estimate = 0.2*weight_today + 0.8*yesterday_estimate. That's a beautiful formula that better captures what he was trying to achieve, and without need for spreadsheets at all. And it's trivial to tune if you don't like the 0.2 factor.
Okay, that was trivial. Now onto more weighty matters.
2. Sure, to first order, the amount of calories you eat is all that's relevant. But this whole thread is discussing something very important. That is, you will be *more hungry* if you eat the wrong foods. So, here are your choices:
a) Eat 1500 cal/day of lean meat, fish, fruits & veggies, nuts, olive oil, etc., exercise the willpower to not cheat too often when you are a little hungry or just feel like eating, and lose weight.
b) Eat 1500 cal/day of cereal, muffins, pasta, rice, bread, etc, be REALLY HUNGRY, exercise the willpower not to cheat too often EVEN THOUGH YOU ARE REALLY HUNGRY, and lose weight.
What is it we are evolved to eat? Remember that our genes have basically not changed in the last 10,000 or even 50,000 years. So what were we eating 100,000 or 1,000,000 years ago?
We weren't farmers.
We're optimized to eat fruit, vegetables, a few nuts, fish and very lean meat. There's just no equivalent to the dense carbs that we mostly eat now. We certainly didn't eat bread, pasta, bran muffins, etc -- just the tiny amount of grain we might gather.
To me, that's compelling. It's not surprising that large amounts of grain-based carbs would be sub-optimal. Exactly how that's suboptimal is a matter of debate and study, but it seems a safe bet that eating the foods we were *designed* to eat is the most healthful.
And note that I did put fruits and vegetables first on the list, and those are carbs. And they're good for you. So it's not so much low carb as low grain, low sugar, etc. Kids aren't getting fat because they've suddenly started eating too many apples.
Linux is complicated, and so is windows. Intelligent, experienced users have windows and linux breaking all the time in thousands of ways.
Less technical users (i.e. normal people) have no hope of dealing with problems: unless things are exactly as they expect and work perfectly, they are completely lost. (This is not a criticism, but rather follows inevitably from the first paragraph.) With windows, they are endlessly frustrated, but they have memorized a few dozen "tricks" that work. With linux, a different set of "tricks" are required and they are completely lost when one of their tricks fails. Linux ends up looking harder simply because it is different.
Had they been raised on linux, then windows would seem impossibly complex.
"Backward compatability" (i.e. desktop behaving like windows) is essential for linux to make headway on the desktop. Perhaps this is a bitter pill. Sorry, that's life.
It's not even listed on Amazon, bn.com, fatbrain. Please, book reviewers, give us rudimentary information about a book's availability.