Judging from what I read in your link, it sounds like they just put everyone in a single primary (regardless of party affiliation) and the top two winners of that primary go on the ballot for the main election. I don't see how that would make things harder for third party candidates. Indeed, getting enough supporters to win a primary is probably easier than getting enough supporters to win a main election due to fewer people voting in primaries, and once on the main ballot, any candidate is likely to get about 50% of the vote simply because they aren't affiliated with the one of the two main parties that someone doesn't like.
For example, a republican, a democrat, and a libertarian may be in the primary. If the republican and democrat are the top two, then only they will be on the ballot, but if the libertarian can't beat either of them in the primary, they're probably not going to beat both of them in the main election, and so it doesn't matter. However, if the libertarian did beat one in the primary, then he'll be on the ballot with the other in the main election. In that case, someone may see a republican and a libertarian on the ballot and vote for the libertarian simply because they hate republicans, or see a democrat and a libertarian and vote libertarian simply because they hate democrats. This could easily give any third party candidate about 50% of the vote, allowing their actual supporters to put them over the top.
Thus I fail to see how top two primaries, as described in your link, would do anything but help third party candidates.
I have one of these scripts on my web site. It isn't there to track if people click the links. It's to allow me to link to shady web sites without Google knowing that I'm linking to shady web sites and penalizing me for doing so. (They are useful for discussion sometimes.) The script itself is blocked by robots.txt, and so Google never sees that there's a redirect that points to the web site since it never makes a request to the script, whereas simply using a nofollow tag would still allow Google to know about the link's existence, even if it doesn't follow the link.
I really suspected it wasn't a sphere, but my brain power wasn't able to imagine what the correct shape would be, so I'm happy to finally know.
Still, absent that mistake, the explanation is essentially correct. Second satellite makes the set of possible locations a 2D surface, third satellite reduces it to a line of some sort, fourth cuts that down to two possible points, etc. So three satellites still isn't sufficient for a 3D fix.
First satellite: You know approximately what time it is because the satellite tells you. You know the position of the satellite, and all of the other satellites, because it tells you in its signal. However, you don't know how far away the satellite is because you don't know the difference in time between when it sent its signal and when you received it. Thus, while one satellite tells you a lot, it does nothing at all to narrow down your position.
Second satellite: Now you know the difference in time between when you heard the two satellites, and thus, you know how much further you are from one of them than you are from the other. So in 3D space, you can use this information to narrow down your position to a point that lies on a sphere. This sphere intersects the earth, forming a circle. Thus, you know a lot of place where you might be, but you still really don't know much.
Third satellite: Now you're able to cut that huge sphere down to a circle. Where this circle intersects the earth, are two points. One point is flying around at high speed, the other relatively stationary. Thus, you kind of know where you are now....but only kind of. While the earth is a sphere and we intersected that with a circle to get two points, the places on the earth you might be aren't an infinitely thin mathematical sphere. There's thousands of feet of elevation in which you might exist....and worse than that, even if you don't care to know your elevation, the intersection of that circle with the atmosphere isn't straight up and down -- it's at some bizarre and slowly changing angle -- thus you can't ignore it because it isn't just your elevation you don't know, but rather, you're equally uncertain about your latitude and longitude. You know your position to within a mile or so, but if you want to be more accurate than that, you need to either know your elevation or find another satellite.
Fourth satellite: That circle of possible locations is now narrowed down to two points. One is flying randomly through space, the other is near earth. You don't even need to find an intersection with the surface of the earth, unless by some odd chance you're having difficulty figuring out which of those two points is you.
Fifth satellite: No longer any questions, you know exactly which point is you....but still, the math is only narrowing you down to about a 10 ft. radius...
Sixth satellite:...and so it's nice to have some additional data to average together for a slightly more accurate result.
Seventh satellite:...and it's nice to have some spares for when some become obstructed by trees or tall buildings.
About that photon as waves and particles thing... Maybe someone can tell me something since everyone on Slashdot is an amateur physicist.
Many years ago, for reasons I don't recall, I searched the internet for "science bullshit" and ended up on some web site which mostly talked about things I had no understanding of whatsoever, but there were two items on the list of a hundred or so where I had some idea what the guy was talking about. One of them was the experiment that shows the dual wave and particle nature of photons.
Apparently the experiment involves firing a laser at a small slit and observing the nice smooth pattern that results, then doing the same with two slits and observing an interference pattern, showing that light is a wave. Then you block the laser to the point that only a single photon is able to make it through at a time, and so you get a bunch of single points on the other side, which shows that light can be particles as well, but when you remember the position of all of those single points and sum them all together, you end up with that interference pattern again, indicating that light is simultaneously a particle and a wave.
This guy's response: "Who's to say that the function that collapses a waveform doesn't simply always result in a single point?" In other words, light is always a wave, but in the way that the wave collapses, all of the energy ends up in just one place. It seemed like a wonderfully simple explanation to me.
The other thing on the web site that wasn't way over my head was his own theory on how tornadoes work. In school I'd always been told that a hot air mass meets a cold air mass, one slides over the other, and in doing so creates some twisting motion, and occasionally that twisting motion turns sideways. It'd always seemed like an incredibly stupid explanation to me. This guy's theory was that cold air moves into a place where hot air used to be, and trough contact with the much warmer ground, the air heats up quickly, which then causes the now warmer air to rise, creating a vacuum underneath it into which more of the cold air is drawn into and heated, which, as the process continues, the momentum of the air flow increases until it's a violent wind storm. I think that makes a hell of a lot more sense since it provides and explanation for where the energy of a tornado comes from, whereas what I learned in school would have me believe it's just the momentum of the air masses, which makes no sense at all since they weren't tornado force winds before they met and so the energy just isn't there in the form of momentum.
Unfortunately I've never been able to find the web site again, despite looking many times over the years.
I should probably post this anonymously, to avoid all the bad karma......but fuck it. Getting bad karma for this would just make me feel good as I'd know I've forced some people to think about the issue.
I agree entirely with what you've said. In fact, I wrote my own open source license, The Antiviral License. The section "Lack of Silly Distinctions" is especially relevant to this discussion.
I'd thought about writing such a license for quite some time, but finally decided to do it after needing a function to calculate MD5 hashes for a Minecraft classic server I was working on. I didn't specifically need a non-GPL function, as I had no intention of distributing the code, but I like to leave my options open....but every freely available implementation I could find was GPL.
So I set about writing my own from the reference documentation, which I assumed would be easy since I'd done the same for SHA1 and following the reference documentation was easy. I found that the documentation for MD5 provided example code, but its ambiguous licensing terms rendered it useless. (I forget exactly what, but it's something stupid like mixing statements of "public domain" and "all rights reserved.") The documentation also left a lot to be desired when it comes to endian issues. It explicitly says to use big endian for this and little endian for that, then says nothing at all about a couple of other things, and given the nature of the algorithm it isn't something you can just figure out by seeing where the math goes wrong. If it doesn't give you the right answer, the answer you do get gives you no clue whatsoever about where you went wrong.
So after trying random combinations of endianness for a while, I give up and decide to consult the reference implementation to figure out the correct endianness. However, the code is blatantly unreadable, and after trying to understand it for an hour, I'm no closer to figuring out the answer to my simple question about the endianness of one part of the process.
So I look at the code for the GPL md5sum program. Interestingly, it strongly resembles the reference implementation's code, but claims to be a copy of someone else's implementation which is public domain. So I find that person's code, and he freely admits to copying the code from the reference implementation, claiming that doing so is OK since it's public domain. (...and it might be, but it might not be. Like I said, the licensing terms are ambiguous.)
Indeed, every implementation of the hash algorithm I could find appeared to be a derivative of the code in the documentation....and, like I said, it's pretty much all picked up the GPL licensing terms for some fucking reason, turning it into code that I can't use. Eventually I simply had to resort to making random changes until finally the code started spitting out the correct answers. The correct endianness was obvious in retrospect, which probably explains why it wasn't documented.
So, while I was planning to release my code as public domain, as I initially thought that attaching any license to such simple code was dumb, I eventually realized the GPL people are being every bit as dumb every day, and it's time people started doing something about it. So I decided to use the license for anything I release. Insisting that people not use my small little functions when they choose to spread the GPL virus is certainly no worse than insisting that I use the GPL just because I use one small little function in what is otherwise mostly my own work.
The MD5 code is available here if anyone cares. Also some SHA1 code and some FFT code there. IIRC, FFT code is another area where everything is infected with the GPL, which is unfortunate as the algorithm itself, while not anything particularly difficult, seems to lack
As for spelling, while I agree, I believe the same thing could be said about math.
Any time we teach kids something that they end up forgetting by the next year, we're just wasting everyone's time.
Of what was presented to me in math class, most of it was either something I already knew because it was something I was already using it, or it was something I didn't know but I could easily imagine a use for, and so it all stuck with me. However, I also remember one day we were going over a homework problem involving calculating the height of a flag pole using some geometry when someone asked "what are we ever going to use this for?" I can't imagine that kid could solve the same problem today. All of the math that kid supposedly "learned" was likely forgotten shortly after getting out of high school.
The simple fact is that our brains absorb information much more easily when it's perceived as useful. Useful information is simply more interesting and so we think about it more. Given that our progress as a species is only possible because of specialization, we'd likely do a whole lot better if we gave up this obsession with creating "well rounded individuals" and instead figured out what interests kids early on and let them become specialists immediately. Then, if math turns out to be useful in their specialty (Honestly, where isn't it useful?), then they'll learn the math, and it'll be easier to learn because they'll see the usefulness of it immediately and so it will be far more interesting to them.
I'd be very interested in knowing some of your seeds. Do they include Evanescence, Paramore, and/or Skillet?
On the Christian side of things, most of it is Jump5, the rest from PureNRG. Despite being only two artists, they make up half of what I listen to. The vast majority of Jump5's songs don't mention God explicitly, though once you know they're a Christian artist, you kind of assume that's what the lyrics are about. "All I Can Do" is a good example, as there's nothing in the lyrics to indicate it is a religious song, yet knowing that Jump5 is a Christian artist, you rather have to assume that they're singing about God. PureNRG does a similar trick with about half of their songs, but then occasionally ruin one by tossing in a "Jesus" for no apparent reason.
On the non-Christian side, there's a lot of Hannah Montana (half of her songs are actually quite good, try "Are You Ready" for example), T-Squad, the various S Club's, a few Aaron Carter songs, some Steps, and a bunch of single tracks from many artists who only released one or two good songs, like "I Am what I Am" by Jonas Brothers, who otherwise produce nothing but garbage.
Overwhelmingly, they're all from teen artists, as it seems they're the only ones interested in releasing happy music with lyrics that aren't completely trivial. The occasional happy song from an adult artists tends to be nothing more than "I love you!" repeated endlessly, as seemingly the only time they're happy is when they're in love. Contrast that with something like Jump5's "Way of the World" which, sometime about the 2:30 mark, you realize you've never heard something so emotional that wasn't completely depressing....and I think that's what sets the music I like apart from most music. It's apparently easy to write an emotional song which is depressing, and so it seems that's what most artists do. Meanwhile, music that's meant to just be happy and fun, like Jump5's "Spinnin' Around," no one wants to take seriously.
Indeed, the only adult artist I'm aware of who likes to write happy songs that aren't just stupid is Colbie Caillat.
I also really like Danger Radio, but as their lyrics aren't exceptionally happy, I can't explain it other than to say the songwriting is exceptional and the lyrical content isn't particularly depressing....and I should also mention a band called "Hum" for exceptional songwriting, but I have to warn you that the lyrics are also exceptionally depressing.
I'd argue that kids shouldn't read novels... At least to the degree that they shouldn't watch television. Both are merely forms of entertainment, and in the modern day of Facebook and the internet in general, the idea that some kid is going to grow up without learning how to read is laughable. (Though it is worth noting that I wouldn't argue that kids shouldn't watch television, as everyone needs some entertainment now and then. Rather, we should make sure that our kids have better things to do so they don't feel the need to use television to avoid inescapable boredom. Given the choice between setting things on fire with a chemistry set, or yet another sitcom, what kid would choose television? I know a good month of my youth was spent mixing aluminum foil and hydrochloric acid in sealed plastic bottles. While I probably didn't learn a lot from that, I certainly learned more from it than I would have learned watching television, and I'd certainly have learned even more were it not that my "chemistry set" consisted of some toilet bowl cleaner I found under the bathroom sink.)
Unfortunately our education system is designed as if, back in the 1800's, some people were like "we need to make people smarter" and then, not really knowing how to do that, they just made a list of what qualities smart people had, and set out to make kids resemble smart people.
Thus, there's a huge emphasis on reading. Why did intelligent people in the 1800's read? Was it because reading made you smart, or because only smart people knew how to read and there was nothing the fuck else to do back in the 1800's? So the smart people read, and the dumb people watched the grass grow during the day and made moonshine at night. Does that mean that reading novels will make our kids smart?...or are we confusing correlation with causation?
Another thing that really gets me is spelling. Several hours a week for ten years of my life were spent learning all of the various random ways in which we use letters to form words, all of which could have been used for something that might have actually benefited me, like a class about how to avoid being taken advantage of in the free market. Again, smart people know how to spell, but it doesn't mean that forcing kids to learn how to spell is going to make them smart. I'm sure we've all seen the famous internet posting about spelling reform where, as it progresses, it implements the suggested changes in its own text. I've spent enough time running a Minecraft server that the unusual ways in which kids choose to spell words doesn't even phase me anymore, and so last time I saw it, it didn't give me any trouble until it started implementing changes which made no phonetic sense at all, like replacing all W's with V's. The only reason phonetic spelling is hard to read is because we're not used to seeing it and thus every phonetically spelled word is a new word we're unfamiliar with. Stop teaching spelling and in ten years everyone will wonder why we ever wasted so much time teaching it rather than making our kids better at math and science.
Pandora's problem is their love of Apple's minimalist design philosophies.
In the early days of Pandora they'd occasionally post a blog entry about improvements to their song selection algorithms. These were always met with endless replies from people saying it just wasn't working for them. Many people wanted more options, like to choose the specific song attributes they're interested in hearing. Many others wanted to give more specific feedback than simply "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." I'd personally love a "never play the same song twice" option, as I too mainly use Pandora for music discovery. Anyway, eventually one of their blog posts acquired so many replies from people complaining about the performance of the service that they quickly posted something completely different and never again mentioned anything relevant to their service on their blog.
Anyway, from what I gathered back then when they were actually talking about things, they love the "simplicity" of Apple's design, and thus seek to imitate it. One of the core Apple designs is that customization options are a no-no because they might confuse users. Instead you choose just one way that something works, and it "just works" that way, whether it does what any particular person wants or not. Thus the advanced control over the song selection process that people want is completely out of the question. You're going to hear repeats because they assume that the average listener wants it to work like a radio station that plays their favorite music, and so that's how it's going to work, even if something a little different would work better for some users.
Also, while it's difficult to claim to know without seeing the functionality of their software, I suspect their song selection engine assigns weights to how important each musical quality is that are identical for each user. In other words, they've decided that people think that vocal styles matter a certain amount, and instrumentation matters a certain amount, and the process makes no attempt to determine how much these things matter for any particular user. Thus, if you don't judge music the same way everyone else does, Pandora doesn't seem very effective....and for me it isn't. I tend to listen to hundreds upon hundreds of songs before it plays one new song that I like which I haven't heard before.
As for why I think I know so much about it, back when they had their "backstage" web site, I wrote a robot to scan all of the pages (they had no robots.txt at the time) and record the half-dozen song attributes listed for each song, then applied my own song selection algorithm to the data, judging the results by listening to the 30 second samples from the web site. Despite that I only had a half-dozen attributes per song, compared to the hundreds per song that Pandora claims to have, the results from my own algorithm were on par with what I got from Pandora. I thought about writing to them and asking for access to their database, but despite throwing everything I could at the problem, I never could get results that were obviously better than their own with the limited data I had. Thus I didn't think I'd have any luck convincing them I could do any better than they were doing. (They certainly weren't open to the idea that they could improve things on their blog.)
It's really quite sad. They've invested a lot in creating an in-depth analysis of a large catalog of music, but they insist on not using that data to it's fullest potential, simply because someone likes clean and simple user interfaces without a lot of confusing options.
Sometime about two or three years ago I noticed the song selection take a distinctive turn for the worse, as any time I enter a song from any of half of my favorite artists, I end up with a station that simply will not play anything other than Christian music. Thus I hear nothing but "God," "Jesus," "Lord," and "Hallelujah" which, as an atheist, annoys me to hell. I like music with lyrics that aren't depressing, and a
One of the best Slashdot posts I've read in a while, deserving of more than a +5 score, yet for some reason it seems a lot of people don't get what you're saying.
I shall try to restate it in hopefully more clear terms (though I thought you did quite well explaining it yourself) but it probably won't do much good since they likely only read the first sentence or two of what you had to say.
The "organic" label refers to many different practices. Some of these things may be beneficial. Some of them may be complete bullshit. Thus, to study the differences between "organic" and "non-organic" produce is to study a random selection of whichever "organic" properties happen to apply to the particular "organic" produce you happen to use in your study.
Let's try the classic car analogy. In the horse and buggy days, one might have studied "motorized transportation" vs. "non-motorized transportation" and come to different conclusions simply as a result of what model of car they chose to use in their study (reliable models vs. unreliable ones), or even whether they chose a car at all, rather than a motorcycle or a motorboat. If one chose to study motorboats vs. horse and buggy, they might find that they're quite fast, but limited in their routes and destinations, and thus nowhere near being a replacement for everyday transportation. Similarly, the non-motorized category might have included walking, horseback, or piggyback, rather than horse and buggy, thus even if reliable well-built cars were used for the motorized category, they might have come to the conclusion that motorized transportation requires much wider roads. Thus the results of a study may come out for motorized transportation or non-motorized transportation, and wouldn't be incorrect in either case, but in both cases would be completely useless since no one needs to make a decision about motorized vs. non-motorized transportation, they need to make a decision about car vs. horse and buggy, or motorcycle vs. horse, or steamboat vs. sailboat.
The "organic" label suffers an even more broad definition. While specific practices that fall under that label might be very useful, the label in general means essentially nothing other than that at some point in time someone thought that a particular method was more natural than current popular methods. Thus, when one studies organic vs. non-organic, they might be studying anything. Indeed, even the non-organic half of the study is similarly broadly defined. Some farmers may be already using a process that could be certified as organic yet they simply haven't bothered to obtain the certification, and among those who aren't using "organic" methods, there's a wide range of things they may be doing as well. So when one compares organic vs. non-organic, they may be comparing any number of things to any number of other things. The same applies to consumers making the comparison themselves. They also may just as well be comparing things that have nothing to do with organic vs. non-organic, such as local vs. non-local produce, or different varieties of plant, or different harvesting times, etc.
The only way to properly study something is to make what you're studying the only variable. You grow two crops of the same plant, in the same place under the same conditions, with identical criteria for deciding when to harvest....but when you do this, you're not comparing organic vs. non-organic methods. You're instead testing one specific method, and thus such studies won't ever be published as supporting or rejecting the use of organic methods, as the study was more specific than that, and so doesn't apply to the organic vs. non-organic debate.
Any comparison of organic vs. non-organic can only tell you what you're statistically likely to end up with, and even that is only possible when it includes samples from all over the country, including all organic and non-organic methods, weighted for the prevalence of their use....and that's a huge study for someth
I typed newlines, but apparently Slashdot decided to eat them. I thought it was just a bug with the preview as I've seen it do that before, with the newlines showing up in the final post, but apparently I no longer have any choice but to use tags if I want newlines.
I notice that when I find myself having a difficult time reading, it's because I'm reading text written by some idiot who likes to use every uncommon word in his vocabulary as often as possible.
I imagine that what is going on is that one part of my brain is just scanning my eyes across the text, snapping little photos under the high-res portion of my retina, then passing them along to the next stage in the pipeline. With common language, that next stage can largely guess what a lot of things are, and so it works with lower quality data which allows me to read faster. Then suddenly I start reading text from an author who likes to use uncommon words and that stage of the pipeline suddenly needs more data. Usually when you read, you don't look at the letters, you just recognize the whole words, sometimes even just the shapes of the words....but when you encounter new words you don't see often, those letters aren't in the cache, and you have to back up and examine the letters more closely....and if it's a word you've never seen before, you'll need to look even closer if you want to guess how to pronounce it, or you just do as I tend to do and commit the word shape to your memory and surprise yourself six months later when someone uses it in conversation and you find that the smudge of sounds you've been using for that word in your mind as you read aren't even remotely similar to the actual pronunciation.
So I wouldn't be so sure it's the font that is allowing you to read more easily. It might just be that he didn't include any text on the page written by some overeducated jackass.
We should probably be willing to accept 50%. We're dealing with a driver who remembers every detail of an accident perfectly, and whose decisions can be analyzed, and the driver upgraded to never make the same mistake again. Even if there's a small increase in accidents initially, the accident rate will likely go down so quickly that more lives will be saved by using the cars sooner than would be saved if we waited until we were certain that these cars are safer than humans.
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Judging from what I read in your link, it sounds like they just put everyone in a single primary (regardless of party affiliation) and the top two winners of that primary go on the ballot for the main election. I don't see how that would make things harder for third party candidates. Indeed, getting enough supporters to win a primary is probably easier than getting enough supporters to win a main election due to fewer people voting in primaries, and once on the main ballot, any candidate is likely to get about 50% of the vote simply because they aren't affiliated with the one of the two main parties that someone doesn't like.
For example, a republican, a democrat, and a libertarian may be in the primary. If the republican and democrat are the top two, then only they will be on the ballot, but if the libertarian can't beat either of them in the primary, they're probably not going to beat both of them in the main election, and so it doesn't matter. However, if the libertarian did beat one in the primary, then he'll be on the ballot with the other in the main election. In that case, someone may see a republican and a libertarian on the ballot and vote for the libertarian simply because they hate republicans, or see a democrat and a libertarian and vote libertarian simply because they hate democrats. This could easily give any third party candidate about 50% of the vote, allowing their actual supporters to put them over the top.
Thus I fail to see how top two primaries, as described in your link, would do anything but help third party candidates.
I have one of these scripts on my web site. It isn't there to track if people click the links. It's to allow me to link to shady web sites without Google knowing that I'm linking to shady web sites and penalizing me for doing so. (They are useful for discussion sometimes.) The script itself is blocked by robots.txt, and so Google never sees that there's a redirect that points to the web site since it never makes a request to the script, whereas simply using a nofollow tag would still allow Google to know about the link's existence, even if it doesn't follow the link.
I posted this yesterday, but somehow posted it in reply to my own message by mistake.
I really suspected it wasn't a sphere, but my brain power wasn't able to imagine what the correct shape would be, so I'm happy to finally know.
Still, absent that mistake, the explanation is essentially correct. Second satellite makes the set of possible locations a 2D surface, third satellite reduces it to a line of some sort, fourth cuts that down to two possible points, etc. So three satellites still isn't sufficient for a 3D fix.
Let's go one satellite at a time...
First satellite: You know approximately what time it is because the satellite tells you. You know the position of the satellite, and all of the other satellites, because it tells you in its signal. However, you don't know how far away the satellite is because you don't know the difference in time between when it sent its signal and when you received it. Thus, while one satellite tells you a lot, it does nothing at all to narrow down your position.
Second satellite: Now you know the difference in time between when you heard the two satellites, and thus, you know how much further you are from one of them than you are from the other. So in 3D space, you can use this information to narrow down your position to a point that lies on a sphere. This sphere intersects the earth, forming a circle. Thus, you know a lot of place where you might be, but you still really don't know much.
Third satellite: Now you're able to cut that huge sphere down to a circle. Where this circle intersects the earth, are two points. One point is flying around at high speed, the other relatively stationary. Thus, you kind of know where you are now. ...but only kind of. While the earth is a sphere and we intersected that with a circle to get two points, the places on the earth you might be aren't an infinitely thin mathematical sphere. There's thousands of feet of elevation in which you might exist. ...and worse than that, even if you don't care to know your elevation, the intersection of that circle with the atmosphere isn't straight up and down -- it's at some bizarre and slowly changing angle -- thus you can't ignore it because it isn't just your elevation you don't know, but rather, you're equally uncertain about your latitude and longitude. You know your position to within a mile or so, but if you want to be more accurate than that, you need to either know your elevation or find another satellite.
Fourth satellite: That circle of possible locations is now narrowed down to two points. One is flying randomly through space, the other is near earth. You don't even need to find an intersection with the surface of the earth, unless by some odd chance you're having difficulty figuring out which of those two points is you.
Fifth satellite: No longer any questions, you know exactly which point is you. ...but still, the math is only narrowing you down to about a 10 ft. radius...
Sixth satellite: ...and so it's nice to have some additional data to average together for a slightly more accurate result.
Seventh satellite: ...and it's nice to have some spares for when some become obstructed by trees or tall buildings.
About that photon as waves and particles thing... Maybe someone can tell me something since everyone on Slashdot is an amateur physicist.
Many years ago, for reasons I don't recall, I searched the internet for "science bullshit" and ended up on some web site which mostly talked about things I had no understanding of whatsoever, but there were two items on the list of a hundred or so where I had some idea what the guy was talking about. One of them was the experiment that shows the dual wave and particle nature of photons.
Apparently the experiment involves firing a laser at a small slit and observing the nice smooth pattern that results, then doing the same with two slits and observing an interference pattern, showing that light is a wave. Then you block the laser to the point that only a single photon is able to make it through at a time, and so you get a bunch of single points on the other side, which shows that light can be particles as well, but when you remember the position of all of those single points and sum them all together, you end up with that interference pattern again, indicating that light is simultaneously a particle and a wave.
This guy's response: "Who's to say that the function that collapses a waveform doesn't simply always result in a single point?" In other words, light is always a wave, but in the way that the wave collapses, all of the energy ends up in just one place. It seemed like a wonderfully simple explanation to me.
The other thing on the web site that wasn't way over my head was his own theory on how tornadoes work. In school I'd always been told that a hot air mass meets a cold air mass, one slides over the other, and in doing so creates some twisting motion, and occasionally that twisting motion turns sideways. It'd always seemed like an incredibly stupid explanation to me. This guy's theory was that cold air moves into a place where hot air used to be, and trough contact with the much warmer ground, the air heats up quickly, which then causes the now warmer air to rise, creating a vacuum underneath it into which more of the cold air is drawn into and heated, which, as the process continues, the momentum of the air flow increases until it's a violent wind storm. I think that makes a hell of a lot more sense since it provides and explanation for where the energy of a tornado comes from, whereas what I learned in school would have me believe it's just the momentum of the air masses, which makes no sense at all since they weren't tornado force winds before they met and so the energy just isn't there in the form of momentum.
Unfortunately I've never been able to find the web site again, despite looking many times over the years.
I should probably post this anonymously, to avoid all the bad karma... ...but fuck it. Getting bad karma for this would just make me feel good as I'd know I've forced some people to think about the issue.
I agree entirely with what you've said. In fact, I wrote my own open source license, The Antiviral License. The section "Lack of Silly Distinctions" is especially relevant to this discussion.
I'd thought about writing such a license for quite some time, but finally decided to do it after needing a function to calculate MD5 hashes for a Minecraft classic server I was working on. I didn't specifically need a non-GPL function, as I had no intention of distributing the code, but I like to leave my options open. ...but every freely available implementation I could find was GPL.
So I set about writing my own from the reference documentation, which I assumed would be easy since I'd done the same for SHA1 and following the reference documentation was easy. I found that the documentation for MD5 provided example code, but its ambiguous licensing terms rendered it useless. (I forget exactly what, but it's something stupid like mixing statements of "public domain" and "all rights reserved.") The documentation also left a lot to be desired when it comes to endian issues. It explicitly says to use big endian for this and little endian for that, then says nothing at all about a couple of other things, and given the nature of the algorithm it isn't something you can just figure out by seeing where the math goes wrong. If it doesn't give you the right answer, the answer you do get gives you no clue whatsoever about where you went wrong.
So after trying random combinations of endianness for a while, I give up and decide to consult the reference implementation to figure out the correct endianness. However, the code is blatantly unreadable, and after trying to understand it for an hour, I'm no closer to figuring out the answer to my simple question about the endianness of one part of the process.
So I look at the code for the GPL md5sum program. Interestingly, it strongly resembles the reference implementation's code, but claims to be a copy of someone else's implementation which is public domain. So I find that person's code, and he freely admits to copying the code from the reference implementation, claiming that doing so is OK since it's public domain. (...and it might be, but it might not be. Like I said, the licensing terms are ambiguous.)
Indeed, every implementation of the hash algorithm I could find appeared to be a derivative of the code in the documentation. ...and, like I said, it's pretty much all picked up the GPL licensing terms for some fucking reason, turning it into code that I can't use. Eventually I simply had to resort to making random changes until finally the code started spitting out the correct answers. The correct endianness was obvious in retrospect, which probably explains why it wasn't documented.
So, while I was planning to release my code as public domain, as I initially thought that attaching any license to such simple code was dumb, I eventually realized the GPL people are being every bit as dumb every day, and it's time people started doing something about it. So I decided to use the license for anything I release. Insisting that people not use my small little functions when they choose to spread the GPL virus is certainly no worse than insisting that I use the GPL just because I use one small little function in what is otherwise mostly my own work.
The MD5 code is available here if anyone cares. Also some SHA1 code and some FFT code there. IIRC, FFT code is another area where everything is infected with the GPL, which is unfortunate as the algorithm itself, while not anything particularly difficult, seems to lack
As for spelling, while I agree, I believe the same thing could be said about math.
Any time we teach kids something that they end up forgetting by the next year, we're just wasting everyone's time.
Of what was presented to me in math class, most of it was either something I already knew because it was something I was already using it, or it was something I didn't know but I could easily imagine a use for, and so it all stuck with me. However, I also remember one day we were going over a homework problem involving calculating the height of a flag pole using some geometry when someone asked "what are we ever going to use this for?" I can't imagine that kid could solve the same problem today. All of the math that kid supposedly "learned" was likely forgotten shortly after getting out of high school.
The simple fact is that our brains absorb information much more easily when it's perceived as useful. Useful information is simply more interesting and so we think about it more. Given that our progress as a species is only possible because of specialization, we'd likely do a whole lot better if we gave up this obsession with creating "well rounded individuals" and instead figured out what interests kids early on and let them become specialists immediately. Then, if math turns out to be useful in their specialty (Honestly, where isn't it useful?), then they'll learn the math, and it'll be easier to learn because they'll see the usefulness of it immediately and so it will be far more interesting to them.
I'd be very interested in knowing some of your seeds. Do they include Evanescence, Paramore, and/or Skillet?
On the Christian side of things, most of it is Jump5, the rest from PureNRG. Despite being only two artists, they make up half of what I listen to. The vast majority of Jump5's songs don't mention God explicitly, though once you know they're a Christian artist, you kind of assume that's what the lyrics are about. "All I Can Do" is a good example, as there's nothing in the lyrics to indicate it is a religious song, yet knowing that Jump5 is a Christian artist, you rather have to assume that they're singing about God. PureNRG does a similar trick with about half of their songs, but then occasionally ruin one by tossing in a "Jesus" for no apparent reason.
On the non-Christian side, there's a lot of Hannah Montana (half of her songs are actually quite good, try "Are You Ready" for example), T-Squad, the various S Club's, a few Aaron Carter songs, some Steps, and a bunch of single tracks from many artists who only released one or two good songs, like "I Am what I Am" by Jonas Brothers, who otherwise produce nothing but garbage.
Overwhelmingly, they're all from teen artists, as it seems they're the only ones interested in releasing happy music with lyrics that aren't completely trivial. The occasional happy song from an adult artists tends to be nothing more than "I love you!" repeated endlessly, as seemingly the only time they're happy is when they're in love. Contrast that with something like Jump5's "Way of the World" which, sometime about the 2:30 mark, you realize you've never heard something so emotional that wasn't completely depressing. ...and I think that's what sets the music I like apart from most music. It's apparently easy to write an emotional song which is depressing, and so it seems that's what most artists do. Meanwhile, music that's meant to just be happy and fun, like Jump5's "Spinnin' Around," no one wants to take seriously.
Indeed, the only adult artist I'm aware of who likes to write happy songs that aren't just stupid is Colbie Caillat.
I also really like Danger Radio, but as their lyrics aren't exceptionally happy, I can't explain it other than to say the songwriting is exceptional and the lyrical content isn't particularly depressing. ...and I should also mention a band called "Hum" for exceptional songwriting, but I have to warn you that the lyrics are also exceptionally depressing.
I'd argue that kids shouldn't read novels... At least to the degree that they shouldn't watch television. Both are merely forms of entertainment, and in the modern day of Facebook and the internet in general, the idea that some kid is going to grow up without learning how to read is laughable. (Though it is worth noting that I wouldn't argue that kids shouldn't watch television, as everyone needs some entertainment now and then. Rather, we should make sure that our kids have better things to do so they don't feel the need to use television to avoid inescapable boredom. Given the choice between setting things on fire with a chemistry set, or yet another sitcom, what kid would choose television? I know a good month of my youth was spent mixing aluminum foil and hydrochloric acid in sealed plastic bottles. While I probably didn't learn a lot from that, I certainly learned more from it than I would have learned watching television, and I'd certainly have learned even more were it not that my "chemistry set" consisted of some toilet bowl cleaner I found under the bathroom sink.)
Unfortunately our education system is designed as if, back in the 1800's, some people were like "we need to make people smarter" and then, not really knowing how to do that, they just made a list of what qualities smart people had, and set out to make kids resemble smart people.
Thus, there's a huge emphasis on reading. Why did intelligent people in the 1800's read? Was it because reading made you smart, or because only smart people knew how to read and there was nothing the fuck else to do back in the 1800's? So the smart people read, and the dumb people watched the grass grow during the day and made moonshine at night. Does that mean that reading novels will make our kids smart? ...or are we confusing correlation with causation?
Another thing that really gets me is spelling. Several hours a week for ten years of my life were spent learning all of the various random ways in which we use letters to form words, all of which could have been used for something that might have actually benefited me, like a class about how to avoid being taken advantage of in the free market. Again, smart people know how to spell, but it doesn't mean that forcing kids to learn how to spell is going to make them smart. I'm sure we've all seen the famous internet posting about spelling reform where, as it progresses, it implements the suggested changes in its own text. I've spent enough time running a Minecraft server that the unusual ways in which kids choose to spell words doesn't even phase me anymore, and so last time I saw it, it didn't give me any trouble until it started implementing changes which made no phonetic sense at all, like replacing all W's with V's. The only reason phonetic spelling is hard to read is because we're not used to seeing it and thus every phonetically spelled word is a new word we're unfamiliar with. Stop teaching spelling and in ten years everyone will wonder why we ever wasted so much time teaching it rather than making our kids better at math and science.
Pandora's problem is their love of Apple's minimalist design philosophies.
In the early days of Pandora they'd occasionally post a blog entry about improvements to their song selection algorithms. These were always met with endless replies from people saying it just wasn't working for them. Many people wanted more options, like to choose the specific song attributes they're interested in hearing. Many others wanted to give more specific feedback than simply "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." I'd personally love a "never play the same song twice" option, as I too mainly use Pandora for music discovery. Anyway, eventually one of their blog posts acquired so many replies from people complaining about the performance of the service that they quickly posted something completely different and never again mentioned anything relevant to their service on their blog.
Anyway, from what I gathered back then when they were actually talking about things, they love the "simplicity" of Apple's design, and thus seek to imitate it. One of the core Apple designs is that customization options are a no-no because they might confuse users. Instead you choose just one way that something works, and it "just works" that way, whether it does what any particular person wants or not. Thus the advanced control over the song selection process that people want is completely out of the question. You're going to hear repeats because they assume that the average listener wants it to work like a radio station that plays their favorite music, and so that's how it's going to work, even if something a little different would work better for some users.
Also, while it's difficult to claim to know without seeing the functionality of their software, I suspect their song selection engine assigns weights to how important each musical quality is that are identical for each user. In other words, they've decided that people think that vocal styles matter a certain amount, and instrumentation matters a certain amount, and the process makes no attempt to determine how much these things matter for any particular user. Thus, if you don't judge music the same way everyone else does, Pandora doesn't seem very effective. ...and for me it isn't. I tend to listen to hundreds upon hundreds of songs before it plays one new song that I like which I haven't heard before.
As for why I think I know so much about it, back when they had their "backstage" web site, I wrote a robot to scan all of the pages (they had no robots.txt at the time) and record the half-dozen song attributes listed for each song, then applied my own song selection algorithm to the data, judging the results by listening to the 30 second samples from the web site. Despite that I only had a half-dozen attributes per song, compared to the hundreds per song that Pandora claims to have, the results from my own algorithm were on par with what I got from Pandora. I thought about writing to them and asking for access to their database, but despite throwing everything I could at the problem, I never could get results that were obviously better than their own with the limited data I had. Thus I didn't think I'd have any luck convincing them I could do any better than they were doing. (They certainly weren't open to the idea that they could improve things on their blog.)
It's really quite sad. They've invested a lot in creating an in-depth analysis of a large catalog of music, but they insist on not using that data to it's fullest potential, simply because someone likes clean and simple user interfaces without a lot of confusing options.
Sometime about two or three years ago I noticed the song selection take a distinctive turn for the worse, as any time I enter a song from any of half of my favorite artists, I end up with a station that simply will not play anything other than Christian music. Thus I hear nothing but "God," "Jesus," "Lord," and "Hallelujah" which, as an atheist, annoys me to hell. I like music with lyrics that aren't depressing, and a
One of the best Slashdot posts I've read in a while, deserving of more than a +5 score, yet for some reason it seems a lot of people don't get what you're saying.
I shall try to restate it in hopefully more clear terms (though I thought you did quite well explaining it yourself) but it probably won't do much good since they likely only read the first sentence or two of what you had to say.
The "organic" label refers to many different practices. Some of these things may be beneficial. Some of them may be complete bullshit. Thus, to study the differences between "organic" and "non-organic" produce is to study a random selection of whichever "organic" properties happen to apply to the particular "organic" produce you happen to use in your study.
Let's try the classic car analogy. In the horse and buggy days, one might have studied "motorized transportation" vs. "non-motorized transportation" and come to different conclusions simply as a result of what model of car they chose to use in their study (reliable models vs. unreliable ones), or even whether they chose a car at all, rather than a motorcycle or a motorboat. If one chose to study motorboats vs. horse and buggy, they might find that they're quite fast, but limited in their routes and destinations, and thus nowhere near being a replacement for everyday transportation. Similarly, the non-motorized category might have included walking, horseback, or piggyback, rather than horse and buggy, thus even if reliable well-built cars were used for the motorized category, they might have come to the conclusion that motorized transportation requires much wider roads. Thus the results of a study may come out for motorized transportation or non-motorized transportation, and wouldn't be incorrect in either case, but in both cases would be completely useless since no one needs to make a decision about motorized vs. non-motorized transportation, they need to make a decision about car vs. horse and buggy, or motorcycle vs. horse, or steamboat vs. sailboat.
The "organic" label suffers an even more broad definition. While specific practices that fall under that label might be very useful, the label in general means essentially nothing other than that at some point in time someone thought that a particular method was more natural than current popular methods. Thus, when one studies organic vs. non-organic, they might be studying anything. Indeed, even the non-organic half of the study is similarly broadly defined. Some farmers may be already using a process that could be certified as organic yet they simply haven't bothered to obtain the certification, and among those who aren't using "organic" methods, there's a wide range of things they may be doing as well. So when one compares organic vs. non-organic, they may be comparing any number of things to any number of other things. The same applies to consumers making the comparison themselves. They also may just as well be comparing things that have nothing to do with organic vs. non-organic, such as local vs. non-local produce, or different varieties of plant, or different harvesting times, etc.
The only way to properly study something is to make what you're studying the only variable. You grow two crops of the same plant, in the same place under the same conditions, with identical criteria for deciding when to harvest. ...but when you do this, you're not comparing organic vs. non-organic methods. You're instead testing one specific method, and thus such studies won't ever be published as supporting or rejecting the use of organic methods, as the study was more specific than that, and so doesn't apply to the organic vs. non-organic debate.
Any comparison of organic vs. non-organic can only tell you what you're statistically likely to end up with, and even that is only possible when it includes samples from all over the country, including all organic and non-organic methods, weighted for the prevalence of their use. ...and that's a huge study for someth
I typed newlines, but apparently Slashdot decided to eat them. I thought it was just a bug with the preview as I've seen it do that before, with the newlines showing up in the final post, but apparently I no longer have any choice but to use
tags if I want newlines.
I notice that when I find myself having a difficult time reading, it's because I'm reading text written by some idiot who likes to use every uncommon word in his vocabulary as often as possible. I imagine that what is going on is that one part of my brain is just scanning my eyes across the text, snapping little photos under the high-res portion of my retina, then passing them along to the next stage in the pipeline. With common language, that next stage can largely guess what a lot of things are, and so it works with lower quality data which allows me to read faster. Then suddenly I start reading text from an author who likes to use uncommon words and that stage of the pipeline suddenly needs more data. Usually when you read, you don't look at the letters, you just recognize the whole words, sometimes even just the shapes of the words. ...but when you encounter new words you don't see often, those letters aren't in the cache, and you have to back up and examine the letters more closely. ...and if it's a word you've never seen before, you'll need to look even closer if you want to guess how to pronounce it, or you just do as I tend to do and commit the word shape to your memory and surprise yourself six months later when someone uses it in conversation and you find that the smudge of sounds you've been using for that word in your mind as you read aren't even remotely similar to the actual pronunciation.
So I wouldn't be so sure it's the font that is allowing you to read more easily. It might just be that he didn't include any text on the page written by some overeducated jackass.
We should probably be willing to accept 50%. We're dealing with a driver who remembers every detail of an accident perfectly, and whose decisions can be analyzed, and the driver upgraded to never make the same mistake again. Even if there's a small increase in accidents initially, the accident rate will likely go down so quickly that more lives will be saved by using the cars sooner than would be saved if we waited until we were certain that these cars are safer than humans.