I think you are probably right on two points at once. "Assault weapons" look scary because they look like military weapons (which of course are associated more with killing people that the average hunting rifle) and military weapons look the way they do because of ergonomics. It's much easier to effectively use a highly ergonomic weapon in a high pressure situation, be it combat or a mass shooting. That is more than simply a cosmetic difference like some people claim, though.
I don't know why people don't just argue that in fairly close quarters like where many mass shootings take place, a handgun is as effective as an assault rifle, and someone with a couple handguns and a couple pockets full of magazines will in most cases be able to do just as much damage as someone with an AR-15 (read: Virginia Tech vs. Newtown). That's a perfectly good argument against banning assault weapons -- it's not worth it because it won't have a significant effect. To have a significant effect we would have to ban semi auto guns in general, which just isn't going to happen in the US without a massive cultural shift, regardless of the daydreams of a few congresscritters on the left.
It's the gun grabbers who are calling to lock people away in jail for owning a rifle with scary parts
Even though I'm fairly liberal, I see little reason to believe bringing back the assault weapons ban will make a significant difference in gun deaths -- it would probably be somewhere well south of a 1% difference. So I'm not out arguing that the ban should be brought back.
However, every time someone says that the only difference between assault weapons and regular weapons is that the former look scary, I have to ask: Why are such guns so popular if that is the case? Do you realize you are implying that all those people clamoring to buy such guns are doing so simply because they look scary? If that is the only distinction between these guns and others, why else buy them? The sort of person who chooses a gun simply based on how scary it makes them look is exactly the sort of person that shouldn't have a gun.
There are, in fact, functional differences between assault weapons and other guns. How important those differences are with regards to mass shootings seems like a reasonable question, although as I mentioned, I doubt they are huge. Why don't you argue that instead of implying that people who share your politics are just fools who have bought into Bushmaster's marketing that they need an AR-15 to be big scary man?
Obviously in certain configurations it looks like a military rifle, which I could understand some people being spooked by, since military rifles are more closely associated with killing people than a typical hunting rifle. That doesn't necessarily mean that's why people buy it, though. My point was to respond to the rather common argument made by the GP that the only things that make the AR-15 different from other semi-auto rifles are cosmetic factors -- the fact that some people find it to look "dangerous", or scary. It is people on the gun rights side of the debate who are arguing the only reasons to buy the gun is the way it looks, which makes it sound like people buy it to look dangerous.
As you point out, functional differences are, in fact, a part of the gun's appeal. To what extent those differences make it easier to kill lots of people quickly seems like a reasonable subject of debate. It's disingenuous, though, when people dodge that debate by claiming that those differences simply don't exist and that the gun just looks different.
Secondly, "military style assault rifles" are not a problem, as those are fully automatic, and are highly regulated. If you believe that the semi-automatic rifles that look "dangerous" and which were banned for sale by the "assualt weapons" ban can give someone an advantage over a person who is carrying a not-as-dangerous-looking hunting rifle (for long range) or a pump-action shotgun (for close range), then take your own advice and "stop spouting off about things you don't know enough about".
This brings to mind a question I've had since this whole debate exploded after Newtown. If so-called "assault weapons" are effectively no different than other semi-automatic weapons, aside from looking scary, then why are so many people seemingly obsessed with owning such weapons? Every time there's talk of a ban on them, tons of people rush out to buy them. Why not just buy an ordinary looking semi-auto rifle if it would be just as effective? This makes me think that either there is more of a functional difference between "assault weapons" and other guns than gun rights people are willing to admit, or that a sizable portion of gun rights folks are just desperate to look like scary bad-asses. Some of the advertising I've seen points toward the latter (e.g. The AR-15: "Consider your man card reissued"). Are "assault weapons" buyers just really insecure about their manhood? Do they actively want to scare people? Are there other reasons to buy a "scary looking gun" if the only special thing about it is that it looks scary?
Laplace's Equation and Poisson's Equation are examples of elliptic equations. Among other things, Laplace's equation can be used to model irrotational fluid flows, and Poisson's equation can be used to relate spatial electric charge distributions to electric potential, which can in turn be related to an electric field.
I'm not extremely experienced with the details of numerically solving these equations numerically in parallel, but generally the solution of an elliptic equation at a given grid point depends on values at surrounding grid points. Since spatial domains are often broken into smaller tiles for parallel computing, this may complicate matters somewhat compared to a problem that solely depends on values at the previous time step.
Sounds like a good idea, but a law that cuts into the profits of those multinational financial institutions? This is the US we are talking about. Who wants to grow balls when it could have a negative effect on their campaign funding and/or future job as a lobbyist?
Consumers in ten states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma, Texas) won't be affected, since laws in those states forbid the practice
In Oklahoma and Kansas, at least, there is a law forbidding the practice, but the states themselves are exempt from it, and are instead actually required to pass surcharges on to customers. They get me almost every time on my vehicle registration. It's hard to remember to carry a lot of cash or my checkbook on one single day each year, and I usually forget until I'm at the DMV and see the sign about the charges while in line waiting to pay. I suppose the point is to keep non-driving taxpayers to have to cover the cost of the surcharges. That makes sense, but it's pretty annoying nonetheless.
I'll also toss in "Roswell That Ends Well" from Futurama -- you don't see too many comedic time travel stories, and it has a great twist on the Grandfather Paradox.
Ah, so you are saying it's criminal every time a server gets overloaded because someone or some group of people were using it more heavily than it was able to handle. After all, once the server slows dramatically or goes down, service is being denied whether that was your intent or not. I hope you have never been a part of a slashdotting -- it'd be a shame if you had to go and turn yourself into the police for your crime now.
Seems rather absurd to treat a temporary and reversible depletion of limited resources, that can easily be caused by legitimate use of said resources, the same as we do something like homicide. When it comes to something like DoS, intent would obviously bear on whether or not a crime was committed.
Good point. Seems to me the biggest issue with the whole idea of cell phones causing brain tumors is simply the fact that while cell phone use has increased dramatically in the last 20 years, there hasn't been any corresponding increase in brain tumor occurrence. If those two things aren't even correlated, how can anyone conclude that cell phones actually cause brain tumors?
Someone could claim there is a time lag for tumor development, but these sporadic cases of supposedly cell-phone-linked tumors have been popping up for years and years now, while the overall tumor rate has stayed mysteriously constant.
Funny you should mention the possibility of a right brain / left brain influence on religious belief. My cognitive abilities are tilted heavily enough towards what are considered left-brain abilities that I've been diagnosed with a (non-verbal) learning disorder. Does that play a role in my inability to believe? Hard to say. I spent years trying to make myself regain the faith of my childhood, though, so I think it is indeed an inability. However, I look at it like this -- if I can't believe simply because of the way my brain is wired, that by itself contradicts Christianity enough that I would seriously doubt it's truth. I suppose it may not contradict a strict Calvinist interpretation of Christianity, but I find Calvinism disturbing enough that I wouldn't be interested in worshiping its God even if he existed. Any other religion that requires belief for a positive afterlife would fall into the same boat as Christianity.
All very true. I've had numerous conversations where I ended up wishing I could go back to the beginning and say "okay, before we go any further, we need to precisely define a few words". Personally, I think the proper understanding of 'atheist' and 'agnostic' are as orthogonal descriptors. Atheism/Theism is and ontological question, while agnosticism/gnosticism is and epistemological question. In the end, I consider myself both agnostic and atheist. Unfortunately, it seems few people I have met categorize the terms in the same way. Although Russell doesn't explicitly define things in such terms in the essay I referred to, he describes what is ultimately my viewpoint: There are some things where it is impossible for us to know if they exist for sure, but we can consider their existence to have greater or lesser probability. Furthermore, although actually quantifying the probabilities can be quite difficult or even impossible, such an approach is definitely not limited to considering uncertain things to have a 50/50 chance of being true as some people seem to see agnostics as believing.
A few years back I saw on C-Span a talk that you gave at (IIRC) Liberty University. Afterwards, an audience member asked you a question along the lines of "Could you imagine any event that you would construe as evidence of God's existence?" Unfortunately, I remember feeling that your answer at the time didn't really address the substance of the question, and I'd be interested to hear your answer to the same question without the pressure of having to come up with something immediately. I'm already an agnostic/atheist myself, but I'm curious as to how you deal with the fact that supernatural causes are ruled out axiomatically in a naturalistic philosophy -- any unexplained event is assumed to be due to an as of yet undiscovered natural cause. If a supernatural cause existed, could we ever know, even in principle?
You've been described as a 'militant atheist', but do you consider yourself to be certainly atheist or rather technically agnostic, in the same sense that Bertrand Russell described himself as in his essay "Am I Atheist or Agnostic?"
A small addendum: There is actually one logical way that an all-knowing, all-good God could be influenced by prayer: If what is prayed for is strictly neutral morally. I don't know if many prayers asking for things fit that criteria, though.
1. You presuppose that if God acts on a prayer, it indicates that he was previously unaware of something.
Umm, no, he didn't. He simply said if God is unaware of something until someone prays, he is not all knowing. If God is ever unaware of anything, he is not omniscient. That seems pretty basic. To say otherwise is to render the words all-knowing and omniscient meaningless.
2. You presuppose that if God is all-knowing and good that he must necessarily enforce what is best for people.
Where did he imply any such thing? If God is all-good, he must only do good, whether or not anyone asks him to. How such actions relate to people isn't necessarily relevant to whether or not they are good.
3. You presuppose that, as a finite, relatively insignificant human being, you could possibly know whether and when God intercedes in our world and to what ends.
No, he just used basic logic. If God is not bound by that, he is incomprehensible in a way that would leave us unable to know anything at all about him, so any argument about God would be as silly as an argument about whether or not 1 is the same as 2. Also, if God is not bound by logic, I'm curious how you resolve the question of whether or not God can create a mountain so heavy that he cannot move it. The traditional resolution of that paradox is to say that such a thing is logically impossible, and while omnipotence would allow God to do anything that is possible, it would not allow him to do the impossible. Do you have a resolution every other philosopher and theologian has missed?
4. You presuppose that you could even know what is "good" or "best" from the perspective of an all-knowing, all-powerful, universe-creating, life-breathing entity beyond our comprehension.
Once again, he neither said nor implied any such thing.
The GP poster never claimed his argument disproved the existence of God in general, just a God with very specific characteristics. He didn't even imply that prayer was useless -- he explicitly allowed for the possibility of it having psychological effects on the person praying, a la meditation.
His argument showed one thing, and one thing only: That if God is all-knowing and all-good then his will and his actions cannot be influenced by prayer. That doesn't mean God is nonexistent, and it doesn't mean prayer can't have effects on the person praying, it just means that if someone can influence God's actions via prayer,
either God is not all-knowing, or he is not all-good. His point was this: Since religions such as Christianity teach that God is, in fact, both all-knowing and all-good, people who believe that such a God both has those characteristics and can be influenced by prayer are misunderstanding their own religion.
Considering the drugs typically used to treat ADHD, and in light the sort of horrors the same drugs are described as being by the likes of DARE and the DEA, it seems our society is adopting a Trix-inspired motto: Silly adults, speed is for kids!
Of course, there is a difference between using drugs and abusing drugs, but good luck getting drug warriors to admit that. As unhelpful as DARE has been since it's start, it reaches a new level of absurd when police officers come to schools to teach classrooms full of children on amphetamines that even the lightest use of the very same drugs as teens or adults will ruin there lives.
Heh, no, I didn't personally -- when Doom came out I was in middle school and there were only Macs there. However, when I installed Quake on a couple of the PCs on the network at my high school, I had used the box copy since I lacked a CD writer at the time. Playing that on a network instead of the slow dialup I had at home was a lot of fun for a little while, until I got detention for my efforts.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are probably right on two points at once. "Assault weapons" look scary because they look like military weapons (which of course are associated more with killing people that the average hunting rifle) and military weapons look the way they do because of ergonomics. It's much easier to effectively use a highly ergonomic weapon in a high pressure situation, be it combat or a mass shooting. That is more than simply a cosmetic difference like some people claim, though.
I don't know why people don't just argue that in fairly close quarters like where many mass shootings take place, a handgun is as effective as an assault rifle, and someone with a couple handguns and a couple pockets full of magazines will in most cases be able to do just as much damage as someone with an AR-15 (read: Virginia Tech vs. Newtown). That's a perfectly good argument against banning assault weapons -- it's not worth it because it won't have a significant effect. To have a significant effect we would have to ban semi auto guns in general, which just isn't going to happen in the US without a massive cultural shift, regardless of the daydreams of a few congresscritters on the left.
It's the gun grabbers who are calling to lock people away in jail for owning a rifle with scary parts
Even though I'm fairly liberal, I see little reason to believe bringing back the assault weapons ban will make a significant difference in gun deaths -- it would probably be somewhere well south of a 1% difference. So I'm not out arguing that the ban should be brought back.
However, every time someone says that the only difference between assault weapons and regular weapons is that the former look scary, I have to ask: Why are such guns so popular if that is the case? Do you realize you are implying that all those people clamoring to buy such guns are doing so simply because they look scary? If that is the only distinction between these guns and others, why else buy them? The sort of person who chooses a gun simply based on how scary it makes them look is exactly the sort of person that shouldn't have a gun.
There are, in fact, functional differences between assault weapons and other guns. How important those differences are with regards to mass shootings seems like a reasonable question, although as I mentioned, I doubt they are huge. Why don't you argue that instead of implying that people who share your politics are just fools who have bought into Bushmaster's marketing that they need an AR-15 to be big scary man?
He used a simulator for Mars that accounts for things like the effects of density differences on prop thrust, son.
What exactly are you trying to prove by refusing to read the article?
Obviously in certain configurations it looks like a military rifle, which I could understand some people being spooked by, since military rifles are more closely associated with killing people than a typical hunting rifle. That doesn't necessarily mean that's why people buy it, though. My point was to respond to the rather common argument made by the GP that the only things that make the AR-15 different from other semi-auto rifles are cosmetic factors -- the fact that some people find it to look "dangerous", or scary. It is people on the gun rights side of the debate who are arguing the only reasons to buy the gun is the way it looks, which makes it sound like people buy it to look dangerous.
As you point out, functional differences are, in fact, a part of the gun's appeal. To what extent those differences make it easier to kill lots of people quickly seems like a reasonable subject of debate. It's disingenuous, though, when people dodge that debate by claiming that those differences simply don't exist and that the gun just looks different.
Secondly, "military style assault rifles" are not a problem, as those are fully automatic, and are highly regulated. If you believe that the semi-automatic rifles that look "dangerous" and which were banned for sale by the "assualt weapons" ban can give someone an advantage over a person who is carrying a not-as-dangerous-looking hunting rifle (for long range) or a pump-action shotgun (for close range), then take your own advice and "stop spouting off about things you don't know enough about".
This brings to mind a question I've had since this whole debate exploded after Newtown. If so-called "assault weapons" are effectively no different than other semi-automatic weapons, aside from looking scary, then why are so many people seemingly obsessed with owning such weapons? Every time there's talk of a ban on them, tons of people rush out to buy them. Why not just buy an ordinary looking semi-auto rifle if it would be just as effective? This makes me think that either there is more of a functional difference between "assault weapons" and other guns than gun rights people are willing to admit, or that a sizable portion of gun rights folks are just desperate to look like scary bad-asses. Some of the advertising I've seen points toward the latter (e.g. The AR-15: "Consider your man card reissued"). Are "assault weapons" buyers just really insecure about their manhood? Do they actively want to scare people? Are there other reasons to buy a "scary looking gun" if the only special thing about it is that it looks scary?
Laplace's Equation and Poisson's Equation are examples of elliptic equations. Among other things, Laplace's equation can be used to model irrotational fluid flows, and Poisson's equation can be used to relate spatial electric charge distributions to electric potential, which can in turn be related to an electric field.
I'm not extremely experienced with the details of numerically solving these equations numerically in parallel, but generally the solution of an elliptic equation at a given grid point depends on values at surrounding grid points. Since spatial domains are often broken into smaller tiles for parallel computing, this may complicate matters somewhat compared to a problem that solely depends on values at the previous time step.
Sounds like a good idea, but a law that cuts into the profits of those multinational financial institutions? This is the US we are talking about. Who wants to grow balls when it could have a negative effect on their campaign funding and/or future job as a lobbyist?
Consumers in ten states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma, Texas) won't be affected, since laws in those states forbid the practice
In Oklahoma and Kansas, at least, there is a law forbidding the practice, but the states themselves are exempt from it, and are instead actually required to pass surcharges on to customers. They get me almost every time on my vehicle registration. It's hard to remember to carry a lot of cash or my checkbook on one single day each year, and I usually forget until I'm at the DMV and see the sign about the charges while in line waiting to pay. I suppose the point is to keep non-driving taxpayers to have to cover the cost of the surcharges. That makes sense, but it's pretty annoying nonetheless.
D'oh, didn't notice you had beaten me to mentioning that episode. I suppose it could use mentioning in multiple posts, though :)
I'll second Babylon 5 and 12 Monkeys.
I'll also toss in "Roswell That Ends Well" from Futurama -- you don't see too many comedic time travel stories, and it has a great twist on the Grandfather Paradox.
Ah, so you are saying it's criminal every time a server gets overloaded because someone or some group of people were using it more heavily than it was able to handle. After all, once the server slows dramatically or goes down, service is being denied whether that was your intent or not. I hope you have never been a part of a slashdotting -- it'd be a shame if you had to go and turn yourself into the police for your crime now.
Seems rather absurd to treat a temporary and reversible depletion of limited resources, that can easily be caused by legitimate use of said resources, the same as we do something like homicide. When it comes to something like DoS, intent would obviously bear on whether or not a crime was committed.
Marv Albert did something like that 20 years ago, except when he did it, it was just satire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amused_to_Death
Apparently, like with with Orwell's work, some people seem to be confusing a warning with an instruction manual.
Less interesting when you factor in the truthfulness of that baseball bat statistic: http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/baseballbats.asp
like, literally, man.
Hmm, the thing on the upper left looks a bit like a camera... I think they've buried the lede: Curiosity has clearly found a big mirror on Mars!
I wonder if there are more of these sorts of papers out there than people realize. Maybe a lot of them just don't get much attention outside the field of the writer. On that note, here's a meteorology one: Case Analysis Of A Historic Killer Tornado Event In Kansas On 10 June 1938
Good point. Seems to me the biggest issue with the whole idea of cell phones causing brain tumors is simply the fact that while cell phone use has increased dramatically in the last 20 years, there hasn't been any corresponding increase in brain tumor occurrence. If those two things aren't even correlated, how can anyone conclude that cell phones actually cause brain tumors?
Someone could claim there is a time lag for tumor development, but these sporadic cases of supposedly cell-phone-linked tumors have been popping up for years and years now, while the overall tumor rate has stayed mysteriously constant.
Funny you should mention the possibility of a right brain / left brain influence on religious belief. My cognitive abilities are tilted heavily enough towards what are considered left-brain abilities that I've been diagnosed with a (non-verbal) learning disorder. Does that play a role in my inability to believe? Hard to say. I spent years trying to make myself regain the faith of my childhood, though, so I think it is indeed an inability. However, I look at it like this -- if I can't believe simply because of the way my brain is wired, that by itself contradicts Christianity enough that I would seriously doubt it's truth. I suppose it may not contradict a strict Calvinist interpretation of Christianity, but I find Calvinism disturbing enough that I wouldn't be interested in worshiping its God even if he existed. Any other religion that requires belief for a positive afterlife would fall into the same boat as Christianity.
All very true. I've had numerous conversations where I ended up wishing I could go back to the beginning and say "okay, before we go any further, we need to precisely define a few words". Personally, I think the proper understanding of 'atheist' and 'agnostic' are as orthogonal descriptors. Atheism/Theism is and ontological question, while agnosticism/gnosticism is and epistemological question. In the end, I consider myself both agnostic and atheist. Unfortunately, it seems few people I have met categorize the terms in the same way. Although Russell doesn't explicitly define things in such terms in the essay I referred to, he describes what is ultimately my viewpoint: There are some things where it is impossible for us to know if they exist for sure, but we can consider their existence to have greater or lesser probability. Furthermore, although actually quantifying the probabilities can be quite difficult or even impossible, such an approach is definitely not limited to considering uncertain things to have a 50/50 chance of being true as some people seem to see agnostics as believing.
A few years back I saw on C-Span a talk that you gave at (IIRC) Liberty University. Afterwards, an audience member asked you a question along the lines of "Could you imagine any event that you would construe as evidence of God's existence?" Unfortunately, I remember feeling that your answer at the time didn't really address the substance of the question, and I'd be interested to hear your answer to the same question without the pressure of having to come up with something immediately. I'm already an agnostic/atheist myself, but I'm curious as to how you deal with the fact that supernatural causes are ruled out axiomatically in a naturalistic philosophy -- any unexplained event is assumed to be due to an as of yet undiscovered natural cause. If a supernatural cause existed, could we ever know, even in principle?
You've been described as a 'militant atheist', but do you consider yourself to be certainly atheist or rather technically agnostic, in the same sense that Bertrand Russell described himself as in his essay "Am I Atheist or Agnostic?"
A small addendum: There is actually one logical way that an all-knowing, all-good God could be influenced by prayer: If what is prayed for is strictly neutral morally. I don't know if many prayers asking for things fit that criteria, though.
1. You presuppose that if God acts on a prayer, it indicates that he was previously unaware of something.
Umm, no, he didn't. He simply said if God is unaware of something until someone prays, he is not all knowing. If God is ever unaware of anything, he is not omniscient. That seems pretty basic. To say otherwise is to render the words all-knowing and omniscient meaningless.
2. You presuppose that if God is all-knowing and good that he must necessarily enforce what is best for people.
Where did he imply any such thing? If God is all-good, he must only do good, whether or not anyone asks him to. How such actions relate to people isn't necessarily relevant to whether or not they are good.
3. You presuppose that, as a finite, relatively insignificant human being, you could possibly know whether and when God intercedes in our world and to what ends.
No, he just used basic logic. If God is not bound by that, he is incomprehensible in a way that would leave us unable to know anything at all about him, so any argument about God would be as silly as an argument about whether or not 1 is the same as 2. Also, if God is not bound by logic, I'm curious how you resolve the question of whether or not God can create a mountain so heavy that he cannot move it. The traditional resolution of that paradox is to say that such a thing is logically impossible, and while omnipotence would allow God to do anything that is possible, it would not allow him to do the impossible. Do you have a resolution every other philosopher and theologian has missed?
4. You presuppose that you could even know what is "good" or "best" from the perspective of an all-knowing, all-powerful, universe-creating, life-breathing entity beyond our comprehension.
Once again, he neither said nor implied any such thing.
The GP poster never claimed his argument disproved the existence of God in general, just a God with very specific characteristics. He didn't even imply that prayer was useless -- he explicitly allowed for the possibility of it having psychological effects on the person praying, a la meditation.
His argument showed one thing, and one thing only: That if God is all-knowing and all-good then his will and his actions cannot be influenced by prayer. That doesn't mean God is nonexistent, and it doesn't mean prayer can't have effects on the person praying, it just means that if someone can influence God's actions via prayer, either God is not all-knowing, or he is not all-good. His point was this: Since religions such as Christianity teach that God is, in fact, both all-knowing and all-good, people who believe that such a God both has those characteristics and can be influenced by prayer are misunderstanding their own religion.
Except for atheists and agnostics
Actually, I've found that many atheists and agnostics credit the Bible for being the main reason for their (lack of) belief.
Considering the drugs typically used to treat ADHD, and in light the sort of horrors the same drugs are described as being by the likes of DARE and the DEA, it seems our society is adopting a Trix-inspired motto: Silly adults, speed is for kids!
Of course, there is a difference between using drugs and abusing drugs, but good luck getting drug warriors to admit that. As unhelpful as DARE has been since it's start, it reaches a new level of absurd when police officers come to schools to teach classrooms full of children on amphetamines that even the lightest use of the very same drugs as teens or adults will ruin there lives.
Heh, no, I didn't personally -- when Doom came out I was in middle school and there were only Macs there. However, when I installed Quake on a couple of the PCs on the network at my high school, I had used the box copy since I lacked a CD writer at the time. Playing that on a network instead of the slow dialup I had at home was a lot of fun for a little while, until I got detention for my efforts.