In the cases of Ants and Bees, the difference between a Breeding female (queen) and a worker female (drone) is not genetic, it is environmental.
Nonsense. It's completely genetic. The suppression of the workers' reproductive system is triggered by pheromones produced by the queen, and the queen contains genes that control this production. The workers' reaction to the pheromones is controlled by their genes. Actually, the genes are shared by the queen and worker, whose caste is determined by the activation of other genes. The entire setup is determined by the colony's shared genes, not by anything in the environment.
Treating the queen an workers as independent creatures and treating the reproductive pheromones as "environmental" shows a severe misunderstanding of the concept of "environment". Honeybees were one of the primary species that led biologists to develop the concept of a colonial "super-organism", treating bee and ant colonies as a single "individual" for many purposes. There are a lot of problems and open questions with such concepts, but it's clear that treating interactions between different members of a Hymenoptera colony as "external" is simply wrong. You can only make sense of such social creatures by treating the colony as a third "level" between the individual and the environment. The colony's properties are in many respects more similar to our bodies' internal properties than they are to the colony's environment.
the only difference from every other woman is that they could not have children since they had no ovaries
That's Nature trying to tell you something. Weird edge cases like that should not exist.
On the contrary, it's "Nature" that produced the described intermediate case, and Nature is never trying to tell us anything. Nature isn't an intelligent creature, and is incapable of having thoughts or purposes, much less communicating them.
There are plenty of species that produce non-reproducing individuals as a normal part of the population. In bees and ants, the overwhelming majority are such sterile, non-reproducing "females". In such species, this is not just normal; it's the basis of their evolutionary success. And note that there's at least one species (the domestic honeybee) that's quite important to us humans. All those little worker bees busy pollinating our crops are non-reproducing somatic females. If you think they're a weird edge case that shouldn't exist, you're asking for a major agricultural disaster.;-)
Granted, in humans it really is an edge case. But it's really nothing more than a biochemical accident. There's no intelligence or "life force" or whatever trying to tell us anything.
Telling "Nature" that something shouldn't exist is utterly futile. The universe produces what it produces, and doesn't care what you or I think. Punishing such "weird" individuals amounts to punishing innocent victims of random biochemical accidents. Do you really want a society in which such punishment is allowed or encouraged?
Why would [a traffic light] be out of your direct vision? Lights are at such a small minute of arc out of your normal sight line, if you can't tell what color it is, you cannot operate a vehicle safely.
You obviously don't live in the Boston area.;-)
About a mile from where I live (Waltham MA USA), at the intersection of two main streets (US 20 and South Street), if you're eastbound in the inner of two lanes, the traffic light directly ahead of your lane is often green when you actually have a red light and the traffic coming from your right has a green light. If I lean far forward in my seat, I can spot the red light above the upper-left corner of my car and another off to the right that apply to my lane. But I'm on the tall side (6'1"), and the lights are high and off to the sides, so I can't easily see the "correct" lights when sitting normally. I barely avoided accidents here several times before I figured out the problem. It turns out to be well known to the locals, and has been that way for many years. Apparently the city's traffic-control folks consider it a normal, legal way to set up the traffic lights.
Similar goofy, misleading traffic lights can be found all around the metro area. Around here, you often see drivers with out-of-state plates and a "WTF??" look on their faces as they try to figure out what they can legally do. The local joke is that it's part of the general campaign to make driving difficult for outsiders (meaning anyone who doesn't live within a few blocks of the intersection). It goes along with such practices as rarely including the names of major streets on street signs, with the explanation that "If you don't know what street you're on, you shouldn't be driving here."
This isn't nearly the only part of the world where such SNAFUs are common.
(And no, I don't actually know who the above-mentioned green light applies to. Maybe to the folks turning right from South Street. It's a mystery to a lot of the local folks.;-)
An even better way to get on a "list" is to be born into the wrong religion for where you live. Of course, most people are effectively assigned a religion at birth, and have little say in the matter until they're legally adults. Even then, in some countries you can legally be executed for changing your religion. This isn't true in the US or most of Europe, but you can find that you're still listed as a member of your birth religion even if you change or abandon it. And this gives the authorities all the excuse they need to track you at every opportunity.
There's nothing requiring the owner of the car to be the one driving it.
And there was an instructive example of this that got a bit of publicity back in the 1970s, mostly in the scientific press. The reports described a researcher who had for some years had his grant applications turned down without explanation. After a lot of questioning, he finally learned that he was on a US government list of "subversives". Further questioning turned up the explanation: There was a listed "subversive" group that had regular meetings in his city, some distance from where he lived or worked. The security investigators drove down the street during the group's meetings, recording all the auto license numbers, and kept a list of the numbers that belonged to people who didn't live or work nearby. His license number was on the list of regular attendees.
The explanation was that, after his teenage son got his driver's license, he regularly borrowed his dad's car to visit his girl friend, who lived on the same block as the "subversive" meeting. The security folks didn't notice the car was often there on days of non-meetings, only that it was there on many of the meeting days. The car was registered to the kid's father, so they concluded that the car's owner was at the meeting. Why else would he be there on meeting nights?
Once you get on a "subversive" list, of course, it's next to impossible to get off it. This sort of thing is worth remembering when people are talking about such tracking efforts. You and I could easily be on assorted government lists for equally accurate reasons.
These days, the word is "terrorist" rather than "subversive" or "anti-American" or whatever, but the problems are no different. There will be many false positives. Witch hunts are a universal in human society.
I would actually say statistics is probably the *most* broadly-applicable branch of mathematics. *Everyone* - scientist, politician, gambler, civic-minded citizen, and commercial watching bumpkin would benefit from a firm grasp of at least the basics of statistics,... No other field I can think of is as broadly used with as little understanding (how many times have you seen a % today?), which makes it ripe for exploitation....
There was an interesting brief article on this topic over at the Language Log blog, which is run by (mostly) professional linguists. It was triggered by the burst of articles about the Piraha, an Amazon-basin tribe whose language lacks words for numbers (but has some general words for sizes).
Many people were amazed by this discovery, because how can you even survive in this world, even as a remnant primitive tribe, without the ability to count things? The author's argument is that, in the modern Western world, it's equally difficult to survive without an understanding of the properties of groups of things, i.e., probability and statistics. But, while English may have appropriate terminology, only a tiny fraction of our population (e.g., well under a million Americans) have any understanding at all of even the simplest statistical words. He argues that this is as surprising as the Pirahas' lack of counting words. The foundations of much of modern technology require such an understanding, implying that most of the population in the "advanced" world have no understanding whatsoever of many of the things that have important in their lives.
The current topic is merely part of the general attitude that we can survive with no understanding of the world that's developing around us. Sensible people wouldn't want their children "educated" by schools that go along with such ideas.
And once you've picked up that most people use what the author calls "distribution talk" words without actually understanding them, a lot of things you read (including here at/.) that contain such words will start to make a lot more sense. For example, the oft-repeated mantra here that "correlation doesn't imply causation" generally signals a lack of comprehension of correlation, causation, or implication. In a statistical setting, correlation very often does imply (some sort of) causation, though ferreting it out often requires further research. But this mantra is used primarily to dismiss a conclusion that the writer just doesn't want to believe, when the writer has no actual evidence on the topic. It's generally a safe way to dismiss someone's conclusion, since so few of the other readers here have any understanding of statistical reasoning.
(One of my other favorite comments on this was that a correlation was the universe's way of whispering "Hey, there's something interesting going on over here that you might want to know more about.";-)
There are hundreds of thousands of people who spent many years studying biology and zoology to become veterinarians and, you know, help animals who will disagree with you.
Hmmm... I'm guessing that most of those veterinarians also help animals that agree with me.
After all, they mostly don't even know me, so how could they base their actions on whether or not a given animal agrees with me or not?
(Weren't we just talking about the usefulness of mathematics for teaching basic logic?;-)
... you have to ask within this context specifically: do we want more politicians that are actually incapable of balancing a budget?
Apparently we do; we keep voting them into office.
(Though I'd have to admit that the logic behind this conclusion is probably inaccessible to those who can't handle basic math, which means most of our high-school graduates now.;-)
So, can I sell nonexistent Yorkshire pudding? That would be even quieter. Just sayin'.
Sure; what you'd better not try selling is fake Yorkshire pudding. That would be a trademark violation, which is a much more serious crime than selling something that you don't have.
... all started when you claimed AGW was based on "science", a curious science that silenced detractors...
Hmmm... If that's what those evil AGW "scientists" have been doing, they've been remarkably incompetent at the job. Every discussion I see on the topic on any of the various forums that I follow seems to be dominated by he AGW "deniers". The scientists seem to have utterly failed to silence any of their detractors, even in "geek" forums like/. where you'd expect that they'd have the upper hand.
Actually, I'd question whether the climate scientists have even been trying to silence anyone. Is there much evidence of this? It seems a little odd that they'd waste their time, since the general scientific approach is to encourage "independent testing" and publishing of all contrary results. Fighting unscientific comments from non-scientists isn't generally considered worth the time it would take. But I suppose it's possible that climatologists are an exception to this pattern, and I'm just not aware of the evidence that they're trying (and failing;-) to suppress the independent research.
The sentence says this year is the warmest on record for the US. It says the past 13 are the warmest period for the whole planet, no mention of recorded or time at all.
Actually, you're just showing off a poor understanding of the English language. The actual text in question is:
... even as the U.S. endures its warmest year on record (the 13 warmest years for the entire planet have all occurred since 1998),...
Anyone with minimal competence in (written) English will understand that the parenthesized part is an addendum to what came before, and what came before included "on record". So that "on record" would normally be understood to apply to the parenthesized extension of the sentence.
Of course, such a misreading could be due to ignorance or malice. But it's fairly common to make "mistakes" like this for propaganda purposes. I suspect that this was the case here. In particular, I suspect that the parent comment was written by someone (Baloroth 3270816) understood the statement quite well, but decided to ignore the normal reading of the typical English speaker, and claim that it said something other than what it actually said. This was done for the usual propaganda reasons.
(It can be useful to study propaganda techniques; it gives you the ability to both see through them and also use them for your own purposes.;-)
Statement 1: "Thomas Edison invented the light bulb."
Statement 2: "Thomas Edison took the initiative in creating the light bulb."
Statement 2 is very weasel-worded. What exactly does it mean to "take the initiative in creating the [product X]"?
Actually, statement 2 is a much more accurate description. As various historians have pointed out, claiming that Thomas Edison "invented the light bulb" is factually incorrect. If you use any reasonable definition, light bulbs were built and demonstrated by several people before Edison got into developing it. The practical problem that he worked on was making one that was practical for home and office use. His contribution was primarily managerial: he put together a team of engineers that did massive materials testing to find materials that would continue to glow sufficiently long to be a practical product. Yes, he was a trained engineer himself, but giving him total credit for the work that was mostly done by his employees is highly misleading. Some of his engineers did a lot of work, and refusing to give them credit is a typical failure mode of our development system. And in this case, saying that he "invented" the product is simply wrong. It was the classical story of the results of the work of many people, not all of them working for Edison.
A much better description of Edison's contribution would be something like "... took the initiative in the development research project that led to the first really practical light bulb". This gives him credit for the overall task, while making it clear that his job was as the leader of a research team, not as a sole genius inventor.
Of course, when talking to the media, it's hard to get across nuanced statements like this. They're likely to go "Huh?", and finally accept it when you shrug, sigh, and say "He invented it.". This was probably the main explanation for Gore's clumsy statement.
OTOH, Al Gore was a politician running for office. By then, he fully understood the bumper-sticker mentality of the media, and his statement was probably about as brief as he thought he could get across on the spur of the moment. But it was clearly still a bit too wordy, and he was probably not surprised when his opponents willfully misquoted him so egregiously.
How much work on the internet do we do outside normal HTTP/HTTPS protocols?
Well, I have four terminal windows visible on my screen that are ssh'd to three different computers. There's no HTTP involved there.
Most of our email clients are now Web Based.
I'd question that. It may be true that most of the email UIs are Web based. But most of them still send the actual message across the Internet using SMTP or POP or whatever. It's possible to do this via HTTP, but an actual email protocol is a whole lot easier to program in most cases. A quick google doesn't turn up anything like real data on this topic, but maybe someone knows the actual statistics. I do know that almost all of my email has SMTP headers (though they're not always quite valid;-)
I also find myself writing code occasionally that does ICMP and/or SNMP, but I'd guess that those are a tiny portion of IP traffic.
If you're working on unix/linux systems, you can "remote" any GUI tool by the use of the $DISPLAY variable, and this definitely doesn't involve HTTP. I know lots of people who do this routinely, but I suspect that they're not a cross section of the Internet user population.-)
Yeah, but if we really want to pick nits, we should also point out that "internet" and "Internet" aren't synonyms. The lower-case version was in use some years before the upper-case one was standardized and officially came into existence in 1983. Actually, I haven't been able to discover the earliest known uses of "internet". Does anyone have good data on this? (The data should include evidence that the writer(s) were actually using a definition consistent with the lower-case name.)
... got caught up in some kafkaesque three-day struggle that mostly seemed to involve going to different places to wait for hours to get some stamp on a piece of paper just so I could go back to the place I was before that to get another stamp so I could go somewhere else to wait for several hours for another stamp...
That's also the norm pretty much everywhere. One of my favorite stories from when I moved here (Massachusetts) was while getting a local driver's license. I went to the DMV (Dept of Motor Vehicles), filled out the form, and the person I handed it to told me they couldn't approve it until I had proof of (auto) insurance. So I went to a local insurance dealer - who told me that they couldn't insure me because I didn't have a state driver's license yet. I went back to the DMV, and when I got the same rejection, told the person that I'd just come from an auto-isurance company, where I was told that I had to get a driver's license first. The person behind the counter grinned, and accepted by application.
She knew exactly what the game was. When I mentioned this to a few other people that I was working with, most of them said that the same runaround had happened to them.
I wonder if there's any place in the world where you can't find similar stories.
(And to forestall the usual comments about the evils of government bureaucracies, note that one of the two parties to this runaround was a retail outlet of a private corporation.;-)
As far as this binary planet stuff, by that same logic, the Sun and Jupiter are binaries, which most astronomers would question.
Oh, I dunno; I've seen comments from a number of astronomers to the effect that the solar system consists of Sol, Jupiter, and a lot of insignificant rubble. It's because of Jupiter that the barycenter of the solar system is (usually) outside the sun. So Jupiter and the other planets don't actually orbit the sun; they orbit a point on the line between the sun and Jupiter. You can practically see the grins as you read comments like these.
It might be more accurate to say that "most astronomers" consider such discussions silly. Classifications can be important for understanding, but discussions like this aren't contributing much of anything to the total understanding of how the universe, or even the solar system, actually works.
... our notions of Pluto have gradually dwindled from a huge pitch-dark planet, able to perturb the mighty Neptune in its orbit, down to a small bright billiard ball with a gravitational pull only slightly bigger than that of yo' mama.
Heh. This does remind me of the ongoing observations back in the 1960s and 70s, to the effect that if you looked at the size estimates for Pluto and graphed them, you'd find that Pluto should disappear entirely sometime in the early 1990s. This didn't happen, as we well know. But it apparently did upset the IAU people, who decided they could handle the problem by making it disappear from the list of planets.
Another theory is that there was a growing embarrassment from the use of the term "planet" to include things as utterly different as Mercury and Jupiter. This made the term essentially meaningless in any technical sense. So they started a process of attaching adjectives. Now Mercury is a "rocky" planet, Jupiter is a "gas giant" planet, etc. Now we just need to take the final step of requiring an adjective for the remaining big spheroidal rocks with measurable atmospheres, and the unadorned term "planet" will no longer be a valid technical term.
Why do you call the committee members pseudo-scientists?
They don't experiment.
Hmmm... I kinda suspect that very few astronomers ever do any experiments on their subject matter. I think I'd be a bit nervous if some astronomers started performing experiments on our sun, for example.;-)
This is a favorite tool for debunking (or at least confusing) people in discussions where "science" has been defined to require experiments. There are quite a lot of "observational" sciences, and astronomy is the poster child for this. I've also known a number of biologists studying animal behavior who like to point out that they rarely perform experiments on their subjects.
Astronomers do run lots of mathematical models, of course, but calling this an "experiment" is stretching the concept past the breaking point.
They don't work in a lab.
I've heard some astronomers have fun with this by pointing out that being literally in their "lab", i.e., next to that big telescope they're using, would defeat their purpose. A human body radiates too much heat, which can produce distortions in a big telescope that damages the image quality. So they do the work remotely, in the next building over or on the other side of the world, and run the "lab" equipment via electronic links. Astronomers have long been among the first adopters of new networking technology, for just this reason. Their "labs" consist of equipment scattered around the world (and the solar system), plus computers that are of in some computer center somewhere. They work on this equipment via the Internet. They don't need to be "in the lab" to do their work.
This isn't unique to astronomers, of course. I've done Internet software development since the early 1980s, and I've often worked on computers in remote parts of the world. I've never been near most of the computers where I have accounts. This isn't at all unusual these days. Thus, my wife works in medical IT, and she routinely works with computers and databases whose physical locations she doesn't even know.
If you think that working in a lab is required for a "scientific" occupation, you're stuck back in the 1960s. Nowadays, it's often easier (and sometimes safer;-) to be far away from the lab equipment that you're using.
At least with Christianity, the Bible is the literal word of God....
Catholicism does not claim the Bible being the literal word of God.
Actually, according to current American usage, "literal" is now mostly used as a synonym for "metaphorical". American Catholics can therefore claim that the Bible is indeed the "literal" word of God, as "literal" is understood by modern Americans. But there may be problems translating such claims into many other languages.
There is a special danger in using modern meanings of words for a text that's centuries old. A shift in a word's common meaning can easily lead to "interesting" changes in what God apparently said.
My favorite example is that language historians sometimes point out that the words in old Hebrew (and Greek and Latin) translated as "virgin" apparently just referred to a young woman when those texts were written. It's common for such terms to develop the meaning that "virgin" has in modern English. E.g., in German, the word "jungfrau" (literally "young woman") is commonly used to mean a woman who hasn't engaged in sex. When this happens in common speech, it's just funny; when it happens in a religious text, you get a miracle.
It is especially funny seeing the word "literal" shift to a meaning that's the antonym of its older meaning. There's gotta be a good (i.e., bad) joke here involving the word "ironic".;-)
Here's the deal with Stallman: the vast majority of the 'FOSS' developer community thinks he's a dictatorial asshole.
Huh? I've been a software developer (and a musician;-) for several decades, and I can't think of a single instance in which Stallman has dictated anything to me.
I can think of many cases in which other people, e.g., employers, legislators, the RIAA, etc. have dictated my actions (or inactions;-), by threatening me with unemployment, fines, or imprisonment if I disobey their dictates. We're discussing just such dictates right now, after all.
But as far as I can tell, Stallman hasn't dictated anything to any of us. He has written and spoken about his own opinions, of course. But speaking one's own thoughts freely hardly satisfies the definition of "dictatorial". Not unless you're using a very different dictionary than any I've ever seen.
I'd be much more likely to apply the phrase "dictatorial asshole" to someone who threatens me with legal action for telling a friend "Heh, you've gotta listen to this recording I just found."
And "Desktop" systems seem to be receeding back into the niches that need them... business, developers, gamers, power-users. Casual users will basically abandon them (and already largely have) for laptops, tablets, and portables.
You left out those of us running web sites. Yeah, I have a laptop, and I'm typing this on it. It's handy because it's portable (and I'm typing this on the patio;-). But the web server on this thing isn't visible online. I could make it so when I'm home, but when I carry it even a hundred meters from home, its address would change or (more likely) disappear from the Internet, and all my sites would be offline.
So I keep a home "desktop". I can and do have a web server running on the laptop at http://localhost/, and I do a lot of development and testing on the laptop. Then I rsync it to the "real" server back home when I'm within reach of usable wifi, and it appears online.
If there's a way to make a laptop (or tablet or smartphone) permanently visible online as it wanders, with a reliable FQDN, I'd like to know how to do it. So far, all my comments along these lines have been answered with (1) insults to my intelligence/understanding/hackitude/whatever, and (2) no link to an explanation of how to make it work. I conclude that my detractors don't know, either, and they're just taking the opportunity to insult someone as ignorant as they are.
It's especially curious that Mac and linux users don't seem to be able to answer this problem with anything but insults, since they have the ability to enable a localhost web server by checking a single setting (buried deep in that maze of settings;-).
Of course, I could be missing something. If so, does anyone have a link to the documentation?
Meanwhile, I'll keep my desktop running and connected to the local ISP.
... will allow your ISP to give you gradually sterner warnings and possible punishment if you download copyrighted material.
I'd wonder if this applies to my downloading of/. a couple of times per day. After all, as we're notified at the bottom of the main page, all the comments here are copyrighted by the posters. I certainly don't have signed licenses from every commenter in this or any other thread giving me permission to download their copyrighted material. So presumably I'm in violation of all sorts of copyright laws every time I download a discussion page here.
The obvious weaselly attempt to downplay this would be based on the idea that, if someone posts on a public forum like this, they have implicitly given everyone (or at least all "members" of the forum;-) to download their copyrighted material.
But TFS doesn't include any such qualifications, and neither do any of the few other comments I've seen on the topic elsewhere. So, unless the editors are trying to mislead us, they really do mean if I "download copyrighted material", not if I "download copyrighted material from sites that don't want me to download anything".
One might get the idea that this "Internet" thing is merely a ruse to trick us all into violating copyright. Sorta like if a store put its goods out on the public walkways, with no price tags anywhere. Lots of tags saying how useful or fashionable or whatever the goods are, but nothing suggesting that they want any money in exchange for carrying something away. Then they turn around and cry "theft" when people pick things up and walk away with them.
Of course, this parallel isn't exact. On the Internet, if I see something I like and carry off a copy, the thing is still sitting there as before, available to everyone else who likes it, not to mention the sites' owners. Or maybe I want to post a comment about how awful something is. Whatever. Metaphors only go so far in discussions like this.
Anyway, are they really suggesting that my ISP should start warning me that when I download pages from slashdot.org, I'm in clear violations of stated copyrights? If so, will/. have to shut down to protect its reader?
Slashdot Mirror
In the cases of Ants and Bees, the difference between a Breeding female (queen) and a worker female (drone) is not genetic, it is environmental.
Nonsense. It's completely genetic. The suppression of the workers' reproductive system is triggered by pheromones produced by the queen, and the queen contains genes that control this production. The workers' reaction to the pheromones is controlled by their genes. Actually, the genes are shared by the queen and worker, whose caste is determined by the activation of other genes. The entire setup is determined by the colony's shared genes, not by anything in the environment.
Treating the queen an workers as independent creatures and treating the reproductive pheromones as "environmental" shows a severe misunderstanding of the concept of "environment". Honeybees were one of the primary species that led biologists to develop the concept of a colonial "super-organism", treating bee and ant colonies as a single "individual" for many purposes. There are a lot of problems and open questions with such concepts, but it's clear that treating interactions between different members of a Hymenoptera colony as "external" is simply wrong. You can only make sense of such social creatures by treating the colony as a third "level" between the individual and the environment. The colony's properties are in many respects more similar to our bodies' internal properties than they are to the colony's environment.
the only difference from every other woman is that they could not have children since they had no ovaries
That's Nature trying to tell you something. Weird edge cases like that should not exist.
On the contrary, it's "Nature" that produced the described intermediate case, and Nature is never trying to tell us anything. Nature isn't an intelligent creature, and is incapable of having thoughts or purposes, much less communicating them.
There are plenty of species that produce non-reproducing individuals as a normal part of the population. In bees and ants, the overwhelming majority are such sterile, non-reproducing "females". In such species, this is not just normal; it's the basis of their evolutionary success. And note that there's at least one species (the domestic honeybee) that's quite important to us humans. All those little worker bees busy pollinating our crops are non-reproducing somatic females. If you think they're a weird edge case that shouldn't exist, you're asking for a major agricultural disaster. ;-)
Granted, in humans it really is an edge case. But it's really nothing more than a biochemical accident. There's no intelligence or "life force" or whatever trying to tell us anything.
Telling "Nature" that something shouldn't exist is utterly futile. The universe produces what it produces, and doesn't care what you or I think. Punishing such "weird" individuals amounts to punishing innocent victims of random biochemical accidents. Do you really want a society in which such punishment is allowed or encouraged?
Why would [a traffic light] be out of your direct vision? Lights are at such a small minute of arc out of your normal sight line, if you can't tell what color it is, you cannot operate a vehicle safely.
You obviously don't live in the Boston area. ;-)
About a mile from where I live (Waltham MA USA), at the intersection of two main streets (US 20 and South Street), if you're eastbound in the inner of two lanes, the traffic light directly ahead of your lane is often green when you actually have a red light and the traffic coming from your right has a green light. If I lean far forward in my seat, I can spot the red light above the upper-left corner of my car and another off to the right that apply to my lane. But I'm on the tall side (6'1"), and the lights are high and off to the sides, so I can't easily see the "correct" lights when sitting normally. I barely avoided accidents here several times before I figured out the problem. It turns out to be well known to the locals, and has been that way for many years. Apparently the city's traffic-control folks consider it a normal, legal way to set up the traffic lights.
Similar goofy, misleading traffic lights can be found all around the metro area. Around here, you often see drivers with out-of-state plates and a "WTF??" look on their faces as they try to figure out what they can legally do. The local joke is that it's part of the general campaign to make driving difficult for outsiders (meaning anyone who doesn't live within a few blocks of the intersection). It goes along with such practices as rarely including the names of major streets on street signs, with the explanation that "If you don't know what street you're on, you shouldn't be driving here."
This isn't nearly the only part of the world where such SNAFUs are common.
(And no, I don't actually know who the above-mentioned green light applies to. Maybe to the folks turning right from South Street. It's a mystery to a lot of the local folks. ;-)
An even better way to get on a "list" is to be born into the wrong religion for where you live. Of course, most people are effectively assigned a religion at birth, and have little say in the matter until they're legally adults. Even then, in some countries you can legally be executed for changing your religion. This isn't true in the US or most of Europe, but you can find that you're still listed as a member of your birth religion even if you change or abandon it. And this gives the authorities all the excuse they need to track you at every opportunity.
Stop voting these assholes into office.
I tried that. It didn't work.
There's nothing requiring the owner of the car to be the one driving it.
And there was an instructive example of this that got a bit of publicity back in the 1970s, mostly in the scientific press. The reports described a researcher who had for some years had his grant applications turned down without explanation. After a lot of questioning, he finally learned that he was on a US government list of "subversives". Further questioning turned up the explanation: There was a listed "subversive" group that had regular meetings in his city, some distance from where he lived or worked. The security investigators drove down the street during the group's meetings, recording all the auto license numbers, and kept a list of the numbers that belonged to people who didn't live or work nearby. His license number was on the list of regular attendees.
The explanation was that, after his teenage son got his driver's license, he regularly borrowed his dad's car to visit his girl friend, who lived on the same block as the "subversive" meeting. The security folks didn't notice the car was often there on days of non-meetings, only that it was there on many of the meeting days. The car was registered to the kid's father, so they concluded that the car's owner was at the meeting. Why else would he be there on meeting nights?
Once you get on a "subversive" list, of course, it's next to impossible to get off it. This sort of thing is worth remembering when people are talking about such tracking efforts. You and I could easily be on assorted government lists for equally accurate reasons.
These days, the word is "terrorist" rather than "subversive" or "anti-American" or whatever, but the problems are no different. There will be many false positives. Witch hunts are a universal in human society.
I would actually say statistics is probably the *most* broadly-applicable branch of mathematics. *Everyone* - scientist, politician, gambler, civic-minded citizen, and commercial watching bumpkin would benefit from a firm grasp of at least the basics of statistics, ... No other field I can think of is as broadly used with as little understanding (how many times have you seen a % today?), which makes it ripe for exploitation. ...
There was an interesting brief article on this topic over at the Language Log blog, which is run by (mostly) professional linguists. It was triggered by the burst of articles about the Piraha, an Amazon-basin tribe whose language lacks words for numbers (but has some general words for sizes).
Many people were amazed by this discovery, because how can you even survive in this world, even as a remnant primitive tribe, without the ability to count things? The author's argument is that, in the modern Western world, it's equally difficult to survive without an understanding of the properties of groups of things, i.e., probability and statistics. But, while English may have appropriate terminology, only a tiny fraction of our population (e.g., well under a million Americans) have any understanding at all of even the simplest statistical words. He argues that this is as surprising as the Pirahas' lack of counting words. The foundations of much of modern technology require such an understanding, implying that most of the population in the "advanced" world have no understanding whatsoever of many of the things that have important in their lives.
The current topic is merely part of the general attitude that we can survive with no understanding of the world that's developing around us. Sensible people wouldn't want their children "educated" by schools that go along with such ideas.
And once you've picked up that most people use what the author calls "distribution talk" words without actually understanding them, a lot of things you read (including here at /.) that contain such words will start to make a lot more sense. For example, the oft-repeated mantra here that "correlation doesn't imply causation" generally signals a lack of comprehension of correlation, causation, or implication. In a statistical setting, correlation very often does imply (some sort of) causation, though ferreting it out often requires further research. But this mantra is used primarily to dismiss a conclusion that the writer just doesn't want to believe, when the writer has no actual evidence on the topic. It's generally a safe way to dismiss someone's conclusion, since so few of the other readers here have any understanding of statistical reasoning.
(One of my other favorite comments on this was that a correlation was the universe's way of whispering "Hey, there's something interesting going on over here that you might want to know more about." ;-)
There are hundreds of thousands of people who spent many years studying biology and zoology to become veterinarians and, you know, help animals who will disagree with you.
Hmmm ... I'm guessing that most of those veterinarians also help animals that agree with me.
After all, they mostly don't even know me, so how could they base their actions on whether or not a given animal agrees with me or not?
(Weren't we just talking about the usefulness of mathematics for teaching basic logic? ;-)
... you have to ask within this context specifically: do we want more politicians that are actually incapable of balancing a budget?
Apparently we do; we keep voting them into office.
(Though I'd have to admit that the logic behind this conclusion is probably inaccessible to those who can't handle basic math, which means most of our high-school graduates now. ;-)
So, can I sell nonexistent Yorkshire pudding? That would be even quieter. Just sayin'.
Sure; what you'd better not try selling is fake Yorkshire pudding. That would be a trademark violation, which is a much more serious crime than selling something that you don't have.
Hmmm ... If that's what those evil AGW "scientists" have been doing, they've been remarkably incompetent at the job. Every discussion I see on the topic on any of the various forums that I follow seems to be dominated by he AGW "deniers". The scientists seem to have utterly failed to silence any of their detractors, even in "geek" forums like /. where you'd expect that they'd have the upper hand.
Actually, I'd question whether the climate scientists have even been trying to silence anyone. Is there much evidence of this? It seems a little odd that they'd waste their time, since the general scientific approach is to encourage "independent testing" and publishing of all contrary results. Fighting unscientific comments from non-scientists isn't generally considered worth the time it would take. But I suppose it's possible that climatologists are an exception to this pattern, and I'm just not aware of the evidence that they're trying (and failing ;-) to suppress the independent research.
The sentence says this year is the warmest on record for the US. It says the past 13 are the warmest period for the whole planet, no mention of recorded or time at all.
Actually, you're just showing off a poor understanding of the English language. The actual text in question is:
... even as the U.S. endures its warmest year on record (the 13 warmest years for the entire planet have all occurred since 1998), ...
Anyone with minimal competence in (written) English will understand that the parenthesized part is an addendum to what came before, and what came before included "on record". So that "on record" would normally be understood to apply to the parenthesized extension of the sentence.
Of course, such a misreading could be due to ignorance or malice. But it's fairly common to make "mistakes" like this for propaganda purposes. I suspect that this was the case here. In particular, I suspect that the parent comment was written by someone (Baloroth 3270816) understood the statement quite well, but decided to ignore the normal reading of the typical English speaker, and claim that it said something other than what it actually said. This was done for the usual propaganda reasons.
(It can be useful to study propaganda techniques; it gives you the ability to both see through them and also use them for your own purposes. ;-)
Statement 1: "Thomas Edison invented the light bulb."
Statement 2: "Thomas Edison took the initiative in creating the light bulb."
Statement 2 is very weasel-worded. What exactly does it mean to "take the initiative in creating the [product X]"?
Actually, statement 2 is a much more accurate description. As various historians have pointed out, claiming that Thomas Edison "invented the light bulb" is factually incorrect. If you use any reasonable definition, light bulbs were built and demonstrated by several people before Edison got into developing it. The practical problem that he worked on was making one that was practical for home and office use. His contribution was primarily managerial: he put together a team of engineers that did massive materials testing to find materials that would continue to glow sufficiently long to be a practical product. Yes, he was a trained engineer himself, but giving him total credit for the work that was mostly done by his employees is highly misleading. Some of his engineers did a lot of work, and refusing to give them credit is a typical failure mode of our development system. And in this case, saying that he "invented" the product is simply wrong. It was the classical story of the results of the work of many people, not all of them working for Edison.
A much better description of Edison's contribution would be something like "... took the initiative in the development research project that led to the first really practical light bulb". This gives him credit for the overall task, while making it clear that his job was as the leader of a research team, not as a sole genius inventor.
Of course, when talking to the media, it's hard to get across nuanced statements like this. They're likely to go "Huh?", and finally accept it when you shrug, sigh, and say "He invented it.". This was probably the main explanation for Gore's clumsy statement.
OTOH, Al Gore was a politician running for office. By then, he fully understood the bumper-sticker mentality of the media, and his statement was probably about as brief as he thought he could get across on the spur of the moment. But it was clearly still a bit too wordy, and he was probably not surprised when his opponents willfully misquoted him so egregiously.
It's time to get over the 2000 election.
Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.
(With apologies to George Santayana for slightly misquoting him to match the current situation. ;-)
Whaddaya wanna bet that there are no more than 15 billion distinct faces in that collection?
How much work on the internet do we do outside normal HTTP/HTTPS protocols?
Well, I have four terminal windows visible on my screen that are ssh'd to three different computers. There's no HTTP involved there.
Most of our email clients are now Web Based.
I'd question that. It may be true that most of the email UIs are Web based. But most of them still send the actual message across the Internet using SMTP or POP or whatever. It's possible to do this via HTTP, but an actual email protocol is a whole lot easier to program in most cases. A quick google doesn't turn up anything like real data on this topic, but maybe someone knows the actual statistics. I do know that almost all of my email has SMTP headers (though they're not always quite valid ;-)
I also find myself writing code occasionally that does ICMP and/or SNMP, but I'd guess that those are a tiny portion of IP traffic.
If you're working on unix/linux systems, you can "remote" any GUI tool by the use of the $DISPLAY variable, and this definitely doesn't involve HTTP. I know lots of people who do this routinely, but I suspect that they're not a cross section of the Internet user population .-)
I wonder if we can get any pickier than that ...
... got caught up in some kafkaesque three-day struggle that mostly seemed to involve going to different places to wait for hours to get some stamp on a piece of paper just so I could go back to the place I was before that to get another stamp so I could go somewhere else to wait for several hours for another stamp...
That's also the norm pretty much everywhere. One of my favorite stories from when I moved here (Massachusetts) was while getting a local driver's license. I went to the DMV (Dept of Motor Vehicles), filled out the form, and the person I handed it to told me they couldn't approve it until I had proof of (auto) insurance. So I went to a local insurance dealer - who told me that they couldn't insure me because I didn't have a state driver's license yet. I went back to the DMV, and when I got the same rejection, told the person that I'd just come from an auto-isurance company, where I was told that I had to get a driver's license first. The person behind the counter grinned, and accepted by application.
She knew exactly what the game was. When I mentioned this to a few other people that I was working with, most of them said that the same runaround had happened to them.
I wonder if there's any place in the world where you can't find similar stories.
(And to forestall the usual comments about the evils of government bureaucracies, note that one of the two parties to this runaround was a retail outlet of a private corporation. ;-)
As far as this binary planet stuff, by that same logic, the Sun and Jupiter are binaries, which most astronomers would question.
Oh, I dunno; I've seen comments from a number of astronomers to the effect that the solar system consists of Sol, Jupiter, and a lot of insignificant rubble. It's because of Jupiter that the barycenter of the solar system is (usually) outside the sun. So Jupiter and the other planets don't actually orbit the sun; they orbit a point on the line between the sun and Jupiter. You can practically see the grins as you read comments like these.
It might be more accurate to say that "most astronomers" consider such discussions silly. Classifications can be important for understanding, but discussions like this aren't contributing much of anything to the total understanding of how the universe, or even the solar system, actually works.
... our notions of Pluto have gradually dwindled from a huge pitch-dark planet, able to perturb the mighty Neptune in its orbit, down to a small bright billiard ball with a gravitational pull only slightly bigger than that of yo' mama.
Heh. This does remind me of the ongoing observations back in the 1960s and 70s, to the effect that if you looked at the size estimates for Pluto and graphed them, you'd find that Pluto should disappear entirely sometime in the early 1990s. This didn't happen, as we well know. But it apparently did upset the IAU people, who decided they could handle the problem by making it disappear from the list of planets.
Another theory is that there was a growing embarrassment from the use of the term "planet" to include things as utterly different as Mercury and Jupiter. This made the term essentially meaningless in any technical sense. So they started a process of attaching adjectives. Now Mercury is a "rocky" planet, Jupiter is a "gas giant" planet, etc. Now we just need to take the final step of requiring an adjective for the remaining big spheroidal rocks with measurable atmospheres, and the unadorned term "planet" will no longer be a valid technical term.
Why do you call the committee members pseudo-scientists?
They don't experiment.
Hmmm ... I kinda suspect that very few astronomers ever do any experiments on their subject matter. I think I'd be a bit nervous if some astronomers started performing experiments on our sun, for example. ;-)
This is a favorite tool for debunking (or at least confusing) people in discussions where "science" has been defined to require experiments. There are quite a lot of "observational" sciences, and astronomy is the poster child for this. I've also known a number of biologists studying animal behavior who like to point out that they rarely perform experiments on their subjects.
Astronomers do run lots of mathematical models, of course, but calling this an "experiment" is stretching the concept past the breaking point.
They don't work in a lab.
I've heard some astronomers have fun with this by pointing out that being literally in their "lab", i.e., next to that big telescope they're using, would defeat their purpose. A human body radiates too much heat, which can produce distortions in a big telescope that damages the image quality. So they do the work remotely, in the next building over or on the other side of the world, and run the "lab" equipment via electronic links. Astronomers have long been among the first adopters of new networking technology, for just this reason. Their "labs" consist of equipment scattered around the world (and the solar system), plus computers that are of in some computer center somewhere. They work on this equipment via the Internet. They don't need to be "in the lab" to do their work.
This isn't unique to astronomers, of course. I've done Internet software development since the early 1980s, and I've often worked on computers in remote parts of the world. I've never been near most of the computers where I have accounts. This isn't at all unusual these days. Thus, my wife works in medical IT, and she routinely works with computers and databases whose physical locations she doesn't even know.
If you think that working in a lab is required for a "scientific" occupation, you're stuck back in the 1960s. Nowadays, it's often easier (and sometimes safer ;-) to be far away from the lab equipment that you're using.
At least with Christianity, the Bible is the literal word of God. ...
Catholicism does not claim the Bible being the literal word of God.
Actually, according to current American usage, "literal" is now mostly used as a synonym for "metaphorical". American Catholics can therefore claim that the Bible is indeed the "literal" word of God, as "literal" is understood by modern Americans. But there may be problems translating such claims into many other languages.
There is a special danger in using modern meanings of words for a text that's centuries old. A shift in a word's common meaning can easily lead to "interesting" changes in what God apparently said.
My favorite example is that language historians sometimes point out that the words in old Hebrew (and Greek and Latin) translated as "virgin" apparently just referred to a young woman when those texts were written. It's common for such terms to develop the meaning that "virgin" has in modern English. E.g., in German, the word "jungfrau" (literally "young woman") is commonly used to mean a woman who hasn't engaged in sex. When this happens in common speech, it's just funny; when it happens in a religious text, you get a miracle.
It is especially funny seeing the word "literal" shift to a meaning that's the antonym of its older meaning. There's gotta be a good (i.e., bad) joke here involving the word "ironic". ;-)
Here's the deal with Stallman: the vast majority of the 'FOSS' developer community thinks he's a dictatorial asshole.
Huh? I've been a software developer (and a musician ;-) for several decades, and I can't think of a single instance in which Stallman has dictated anything to me.
I can think of many cases in which other people, e.g., employers, legislators, the RIAA, etc. have dictated my actions (or inactions ;-), by threatening me with unemployment, fines, or imprisonment if I disobey their dictates. We're discussing just such dictates right now, after all.
But as far as I can tell, Stallman hasn't dictated anything to any of us. He has written and spoken about his own opinions, of course. But speaking one's own thoughts freely hardly satisfies the definition of "dictatorial". Not unless you're using a very different dictionary than any I've ever seen.
I'd be much more likely to apply the phrase "dictatorial asshole" to someone who threatens me with legal action for telling a friend "Heh, you've gotta listen to this recording I just found."
And "Desktop" systems seem to be receeding back into the niches that need them... business, developers, gamers, power-users. Casual users will basically abandon them (and already largely have) for laptops, tablets, and portables.
You left out those of us running web sites. Yeah, I have a laptop, and I'm typing this on it. It's handy because it's portable (and I'm typing this on the patio ;-). But the web server on this thing isn't visible online. I could make it so when I'm home, but when I carry it even a hundred meters from home, its address would change or (more likely) disappear from the Internet, and all my sites would be offline.
So I keep a home "desktop". I can and do have a web server running on the laptop at http://localhost/, and I do a lot of development and testing on the laptop. Then I rsync it to the "real" server back home when I'm within reach of usable wifi, and it appears online.
If there's a way to make a laptop (or tablet or smartphone) permanently visible online as it wanders, with a reliable FQDN, I'd like to know how to do it. So far, all my comments along these lines have been answered with (1) insults to my intelligence/understanding/hackitude/whatever, and (2) no link to an explanation of how to make it work. I conclude that my detractors don't know, either, and they're just taking the opportunity to insult someone as ignorant as they are.
It's especially curious that Mac and linux users don't seem to be able to answer this problem with anything but insults, since they have the ability to enable a localhost web server by checking a single setting (buried deep in that maze of settings ;-).
Of course, I could be missing something. If so, does anyone have a link to the documentation?
Meanwhile, I'll keep my desktop running and connected to the local ISP.
... will allow your ISP to give you gradually sterner warnings and possible punishment if you download copyrighted material.
I'd wonder if this applies to my downloading of /. a couple of times per day. After all, as we're notified at the bottom of the main page, all the comments here are copyrighted by the posters. I certainly don't have signed licenses from every commenter in this or any other thread giving me permission to download their copyrighted material. So presumably I'm in violation of all sorts of copyright laws every time I download a discussion page here.
The obvious weaselly attempt to downplay this would be based on the idea that, if someone posts on a public forum like this, they have implicitly given everyone (or at least all "members" of the forum ;-) to download their copyrighted material.
But TFS doesn't include any such qualifications, and neither do any of the few other comments I've seen on the topic elsewhere. So, unless the editors are trying to mislead us, they really do mean if I "download copyrighted material", not if I "download copyrighted material from sites that don't want me to download anything".
One might get the idea that this "Internet" thing is merely a ruse to trick us all into violating copyright. Sorta like if a store put its goods out on the public walkways, with no price tags anywhere. Lots of tags saying how useful or fashionable or whatever the goods are, but nothing suggesting that they want any money in exchange for carrying something away. Then they turn around and cry "theft" when people pick things up and walk away with them.
Of course, this parallel isn't exact. On the Internet, if I see something I like and carry off a copy, the thing is still sitting there as before, available to everyone else who likes it, not to mention the sites' owners. Or maybe I want to post a comment about how awful something is. Whatever. Metaphors only go so far in discussions like this.
Anyway, are they really suggesting that my ISP should start warning me that when I download pages from slashdot.org, I'm in clear violations of stated copyrights? If so, will /. have to shut down to protect its reader?
(Interested slash-dummies want to know. ;-)