Actually you put your finger on what I think the real problem is: the voting system for selecting "the best" in each category.
No matter how you tweak it, you're going to run afoul of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which basically establishes there's no rational, consistent, fair way for a group of voters to select the most preferred anything if there's more than two candidates. Occam's Razor prefers this as an explanation for the occasional inexplicable result to one that posits a widespread secret conspiracy to subvert the vote. If you want me believe somebody orchestrated a campaign like that in the modern age, show me the digital footprint of that campaign and I'll believe you. The Sads and Rabids after all left a substantial one; are the SJWs and CHORFs that much smarter than them?
The option I like is approval voting, in which each individual voter is allowed to vote for *all* the candidates he thinks are good enough. This works because it doesn't even attempt to select the "best" candidate; it selects the candidate the greatest number of people would be happy with. So you amend the voting system to ask people to select all the candidates that they think should be remembered for all time as a great story.
Mathematics tells us that "best" is a concept best left to individual critics, not voters.
Yet despite your claims, during years 1 and 2, when Vox was not running any campaign, the Correia was called racist, sexist, Nazi, and almost every other insult the SJWs can think of. Why, if was only Vox's fault?
I never claimed Correia was racist, sexist or Nazi. Nor did I claim it was only Vox's fault; I claimed the Sads' association with Vox is a result of their own actions and inactions; it's not fair, put it was predictable.
As for "why", I always say to my kids that there's at least one actual example of any kind of person you can imagine, somewhere in the world. So what some person on the Internet says doesn't prove anything about society as a whole or other people you might associate that person with. If you looked hard enough on the Internet you'd find a Jewish neo-Nazi -- or at least someone who claims to be one.
I remember watching the New England Patriots play the Chicago Bears in SuperBowl XX (1986). This was in the pre-Belichick/Brady era, and the Patriots got clobbered 46-10. Here's the thing: there were points scored on both sides, but that doesn't add up to some kind of moral victory for the Patriots.
The Sad Puppy case always struck me as weak; if you look back over the entire history of the awards what you see there was never much of a preference for the kind of stories they write. The overall pattern is one of eclecticism; Starship Troopers wins Best Novel one year, Canticle for Leibowitz the next. Occasionally there's run for a couple of years for one kind of story or another.
I don't think Torgeson, Correia et al are racists, homophobes, or misogynists. Their feelings were hurt by not winning. Writers are sensitive, even writers of manly adventure stories. It's abundantly clear that they're in denial about their hurt feelings, so they're trying to advance the idea that there's some kind of conspiracy against them, but they don't really care that much.
I don't even think Vox Day is a racist or misogynist. He's a griefer out for attention. That's why he feels he's won no matter what the ballot outcome. It's not a victory that an ordinary person would recognize as such (which would involve the other guy realizing he's lost). The Sad Puppies weren't victims until they decided to play footsie with Day; it's not SJWs or CHORFs doing the victimizing, it's the Rabids.
Hugos Refuse To Award Anyone Rather Than Submit To Fan's Votes
There is no such entity as "Hugos" that can refuse or accept anything. The ballot was duly submitted to the fans, who in fact voted. They just didn't vote the way you thought they should vote. Well, tough; it's their vote and they can do whatever the hell they want with it, and if they don't think any of the nominees are worthy, that's why "no award" is on the ballot.
Actually we can predict pretty damn well. It depends on what you compare to: perfection, or what we could predict thirty years ago, or seventy-five years ago.
We're living in an era of rapid improvements in weather forecasting in terms of accuracy, precision and scope. Back in the 70s there was a perennial science fair project in which the student compared the accuracy of tomorrow's weather forecast to simply assuming that tomorrow would be like today. The answer back then was, it was about equally accurate. Today would be a totally different story. The forecasts we get for three days out is better than the forecast we used to get for tomorrow back in the 70s; people just haven't updated their thinking.
It's not surprising when you realize that the difference is satellite tracking, meteorological data networks, and incomprehensibly more powerful computers. Today's smart phones are roughly as powerful as the supercomputers of the 1980s.
I don't think anyone knows all the specific mechanisms for sure, but it's fairly safe to assume that that macronutrient approaches, when they work, work by altering the energy in/out balance without conscious management of eating and exercise behaviors. Otherwise, where do you think the fat went?
When the body has energy it normally breaks up glycogen into glucose which in turn is converted to pyruvic acid. Pyruvic acid is then converted into acetyl CoA and that is chucked into the furnace. When it doesn't have enough glycogen and glucose lying around to meet current demands, the body hydrolzes fat into glycerol and fatty acids; thosefatty acids are oxidized into acetyl CoA. So while a calorie might not be a calorie, the body's cellular energy demands can be met by carbohydrates, fat, or protein, and all are in fact ultimately consumed in the citric acid cycle.
Now as to efficacy, randomized control studies show that all of these macronutrient diets say that despite dramatic short term results, long term results are modest. That's better than simple calorie restriction diets which leave people worse off in the long term, but it's better than diets where the patient tries to consciously manipulate his energy consumption and use fare.
So Concorde was not an elite project for elite passengers, it was intended to be the norm for passenger transport - and Boeing agreed. Market conditions swung against them both however, and it was never to be.
This is true, but it's worth noting that routine air travel was a much more elite activity back when these planes were designed. We used to call people who flew regularly as "the jet set" or "jet-setters", and it implied disposable wealth and high economic status jobs. So when the energy crisis hit you'd think that flying would become even more the province of the elite; but this also coincided with air travel de-regulation and the airlines figured out that even with high fuel costs they could pack people in like sardines and charge prices that by previous standards seemed low. It comes down to what a CPA colleague of mine calls the accounting koan: When are fixed costs variable and variable costs fixed? When the cost is a per unit cost.
De-regulation and high fuel prices ushered in the era of the working stiff airline passenger. Leisure travel might still be glamorous, but flying certainly isn't. Not like it used to be.
No, they cure it 100% of the time. The problem is few people actually follow a proper regimen.
Well, we're in dueling half-truths territory here. It's true that altering the balance between your calorie intake and output will inevitably cause your weight to drop. It's also true that this does not work better than a placebo when it comes to sustainable weight loss -- in fact the yoyo effect makes it worse than a placebo. Which leads us to one of only two possible conclusions: either the strategy is faulty or nearly all human beings are faulty.
One thing I've noticed over the years is how stable weight is when you aren't paying any attention to it. If you weigh yourself regularly at the same time of day, say when you go to do your gym routine, your weight readings will oscillate a percent or so around an average figure; if your average weight is 200 pounds you might get readings mostly in the range 197-203 lbs. This kind of remarkably precise stability doesn't happen by accident. Your nervous system and gut must be working in concert to keep your body composition in equilibrium, and it does an amazingly good job.
So how far does this feedback mechanism have to be from perfect to be a problem?
Imagine you're a six foot tall, 25 year old man who weighs 200 lbs. Unless you're a serious athlete that's a bit chunky, but not obese; it puts you at roughly the 75th percentile of American men your age for BMI. Now suppose you gain 1% of your body mass every year. When you are fifty years old you'll weigh 260 pounds. If you have any genetic disposition to obesity-related problems like hypertension, diabetes, or osteoarthritis there's a good chance you'll have one of them, in which case your BMI of 35.3 qualifies you for bariatric surgery according to the NIH guidelines.
But we don't experience our lives a year at time; the changes you need to stop this have to be done a day at a time. How much of your body weight have you gained on a *daily* basis over the last 25 years? 0.0027%. So when you're 25 and 200 pounds, and your weight measurements are swinging back and forth by three pounds on a daily basis, there's an underlying trend of gaining weight at a literally imperceptible rate of 2.4 grams per day. That about the same as adding a penny to your pocket, and that's only 0.2% of your normal daily weight fluctuation.
This is the ultimate case of tortoise (underlying bias toward weight gain) vs hare (conscious alteration of calorie balance), and because this race is lifelong the hare is screwed. But slowing the turtle down just a *tiny* bit would alter the race. It'd mean that you wouldn't put on those 60 pounds in the first place, or if you had then an attempt to diet down a few pounds would stick.
1% a year is good enough for evolution; by the time you're 50 it's supposed to be time for you to make room for your offspring. But most of us would appreciate being able to enjoy another twenty or thirty years of good health.
Well you put your finger on why Mars 3 doesn't loom large in our recollection of Mars missions, but I think you're being a little harsh. As others have discovered in the years since, landing on Mars is really, really hard. There's just enough atmosphere to be a problem. Just getting something from the surface of the Earth to the surface of Mars in 1972 was an amazing achievement.
Because the editors think Americans are ignorant, knee-jerk bigots who'll automatically think anything that takes a gratuitous dig at the French is insightful.
Oooh, those French think they're so elite, using French names for stuff.
Normally we take it for granted that most devices are insecure if they're not physically secured. From a technical standpoint vulnerability to physical attacks is the least interesting kind; you just tell your clients to lock the network closets, maybe log access to them. But the fact that a class of devices widely deployed -- in fact ubiquitously deployed -- in sensitive roles has been co-opted puts a different light on things.
In fact it flips things entirely around. If there were an easily exploitable remote vulnerability and there were a widespread attack using that, certainly that would be an emergency, but we'd know what to do. Send out an urgent bulletin, get the patch out, work like hell while the customers secure their equipment. But what if this is a widespread physical attack? An occasional instance of this wouldn't be a big deal; you'd expect that occasionally a sloppy facility will intersect with something like a disgruntled employee. But widespread program of physical attack violates one of our underlying assumptions about security, which is that physical vulnerabilities are not a big deal. What's more it suggests a degree of organization, planning and resources that make you wonder: who the hell is doing this, and why?
I think if we look into this and discover an extremely widespread remote exploit is behind it, that will be the happy outcome. If it turns out that someone managed this by physical access, that means we were in a cyber-war and didn't know it.
You can't know. In point of fact some people thing that inanimate objects have souls or spirits; that particular belief is called "animism". Even animists can't have an ethical prohibitions against breaking (most) rocks or cutting down (most) trees or hunting (most) animals. But in an animist society it's quite possible reasonable for there to be rules that make certain trees or rocks sacrosanct.
The question is what is the standard of empirical evidence should be demanded in a society in which people have a wide variety of metaphysical opinions? As a practical matter of course if the vast majority of people in society believe a mass of cultured cells with analogous tissues to a human brain is a person, that mass of cells would be sacrosanct. But that'd also be true of, say, a vase -- in a society where the vast majority believed pottery was conscious.
A hundred years ago we'd have been utterly out to sea on the question of this brain analog; but I think now we have enough scientific knowledge of actual brains in operation to at least begin to argue whether it's remotely plausible that this group of cells can process information in any way that resembles an actual brain processing human experiences. But of course we can't rule out the kinds of processes that might underly hypothetical brick cognition.
As for that last, irreducible mote of uncertainty that always exists in any scientific estimation, we all do things which *might* kill someone all the time; if we drive to work there's a small possibility that will kill someone on the way. As long as the probability is remote it's OK. That's why it's OK to drive to work on normal streets and highways, but taking a short cut through a crowded pedestrian plaza would be wrong.
You missed the forest for the trees. "Cherry picking" occurs on both sides of the debate, which is political, not scientific.
Well, we have a different view on what the forest is. Mine is that when you remove the cherry picking, the notion that climate has stabilized is clearly false. All people make mistakes, but that doesn't make everyone equally right.
When people point to a 15 year stabilization of temperatures as evidence in the climate change debate
An oldy but moldy, taken straight from the "How to Lie with Statistic" playbook: cherry pick your baseline to produce the trend (or lack of trend) you want.
Climate deniers like to say "there has been no significant warming since 1998", although strictly what they mean is "there has been no significant warming *compared to* 1998." Why 1998? BECAUSE 1998 WAS BY FAR THE HOTTEST YEAR EVER ON THE INSTRUMENTAL RECORD. It's like saying, "My income hasn't gone up significantly since 1998," when 1998 was the year your hit the PowerBall. If you use five year moving averages the "stabilization" effect disappears.
FTW: two other forms of cherry picking in one assertion. First, there's the kind of geographic cherrypicking that says "If Europe was warm in the middle ages it was warm everywhere," or "if there's snow in Washington DC it's cold everywhere", or "If there is unseasonal summer pack ice in western Hudson Bay then there must be unseasonable ice everywhere in the Arctic," all of which are trivial to refute but rely on the fact that most people won't bother to look up what's happening elsewhere.
Second form is cherry picking papers that sound like theysay what you want to hear. It's not that papers aren't important but science isn't like theology; it deals in contradictory evidence, which is abundant if you're trying to extrapolate global climate from local climate. That means you can prove anything by picking the right paper; you need to read the literature in a field as a whole. Since most of us don't have time to do that, let me suggest a more convenient way to get yourself up to speed on a topic: find a review paper in a journal that is (a) relevant to the question and (b) in the top quartile of journals in that field by impact factor.
What a review paper does is summarize all the significant and contradictory evidence that has been published on a question. It's a convenient and highly efficient way to go straight to the horse's mouth on a question, rather than relying on scientifically illiterate reporters. Choosing a top journal by impact factor eliminates what are essentially vanity press publications where authors can pay to get whatever they want into a "scientific journal". When some anti-vaxxer crackpot cites "their science" it's always in one of these pay-for-play "predatory journals".
Well, that's just equivocation; the poster isn't talking about people who deny that the climate in the Holocene is different than the climate in the Pleistocene. He's talking about people who deny climate changed in the past twenty years, or even in the past 100. That's still very much a live issue for deniers.
Except -- its a long standing legal principle that suspicion is not tantamount to punishment, a principle that was established in the days when suspicion was propagated within the government by letters written in copperplate calligraphy and acted upon by a human magistrate, all very cumbersome, labor-intensive and expensive.
Of course now that you can be selected for suspicion by an algorithm and that suspicion can be acted upon (albeit non-decisively) by IT, there is no practical distinction between indefinitely prolonged suspicion and punishment. But recognizing that fact will require an act of the very suspicion-friendly SCOTUS, or an act of Congress, which at present is particularly hostile to the 14th Amendment, particularly Section 5 ("The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.")
Well, you're supposed to have proposal criteria which disqualify proposals that won't work adequately.
The problem is, especially in IT, organizations issuing RFPs don't necessarily know what those criteria should be. This is especially true in government IT procurements where an agency has received a political mandate to address a problem it's never dealt with before. It doesn't know how to address that problem, much less how to draft criteria for an IT system to address that problem.
As with any kind of organization, some government agencies are better than others. The best ones become very good at doing stuff they do all the time. But I've never seen a government agency that's any good at doing stuff that's *new* to it. That's hard for anyone, but even harder for governments. Government is by it's very nature not agile.
On top of that you sometimes have really misguided policies that are supposed to reduce costs. For example one I've seen is that the lowest cost bid that meets the criteria should always be chosen. This is fine for a routine RFP, but when an organization has never attempted something before it can't be expected to get the bid rejection criteria right before it's ever seen any proposed solutions; in such cases the organization needs to be able to weigh the proposals that meet the a priori criteria by risk. Another one is a demand that a vendor not charge more for any item than it charges other customers; the problem with this is that it adds enough complexity to the process of drafting a bid that it actually narrows the pool of bidders to organizations that specialize in government contracting. Bigger consultancies form separate subsidiaries for government contracting that overcharge for everything, and since competition is so sparse they get away with it.
Like I said, that's not the real world. But it demonstrates that comparing the maneuverability of a stealth aircraft against a non-stealth fighter is kind of an empty hypothetical.
Actually I think you have it backward; it's saying that maneuverability of stealth aircraft isn't an issue that's the hypothetical position, because it depends on lots of assumptions that may not always be true, e.g., rules of engagement allow beyond visual range, your stealth beats the other guy's technology but the other guy has no stealth of his own; you can choose the range of engagement; you've got plenty of BVR weapons to handle whatever comes up, etc.
People argue as if all these assumptions will always be true, or they argue as if none of them will ever be true. What I think that that most of the time all of them will be true, but occasionally some of them won't be. That's worrying because of the all-egg-in-one-basket nature of the program. If we're going up against North Korea, sure. But you've got to assume that countries like China are developing tactic and technologies which exploit our dependency on this one platform.
So let's assume for the moment that it's possible that our BVR-only philosophy might sometimes have some flaws in it. Why not make an aircraft that if it finds itself in an unexpected dogfight has some chance? Because the Marines need a STOVL aircraft they can operate from improvised forward bases, and the all-eggs-in-one-basket approach means everyone has to live with the limitations that imposes.
Well, then why the all-eggs-in-one-basket approach? Because that makes the program too big to fail. Basically this program was designed in such a way that if it were ever cancelled our national defense would be crippled.
It's apples and oranges; the F35 and F22 were built to do two different jobs. The F22 is a no-compromises air superiority fighter with very limited (initially *no*) ground attack capabilities. The F35 is supposed to be a versatile multi-role workhorse that can attack ground targets and defend itself on its way to and from those targets. The role for the F22 is to sweep the skies of enemy aircraft at the start of a conflict, after which they have limited utility; you only need so many of them.
So you can't substitute the F22 for the F35, although if the F35 had lived up to its hype you could go the other way. The F22 could be adapted to *some* of the F35's roles, but that wouldn't save money. The F22 costs more than most WW2 aircraft carriers did, even adjusting for inflation.
What's more the F22 simply can't be adapted for the Marine Corps's needs. They need a modern, stealthy replacement for the Harrier jump jet that can be operated from amphibious assault ships (aka "helicopter carriers") and hastily improvised forward air bases.
Here's a crazy scenario: suppose you decide to invade Iran. You can't just sail your carrier up to the northern end of the Persian Gulf to support your drive to Tehran, the way we did on the way to Baghdad. You'd have to sail that carrier past 300 miles of Iraqi shoreline dotted with advanced anti-ship defenses in waters crawling with mini-subs. And it's a long, long way over rough terrain to get from the Gulf of Oman to Tehran in the extreme north of the country. Imagine fighting your way from New York City to Chicago, only the terrain in between was all mountains. So you land a Marine expeditionary force at the Gulf of Oman that fights its way northwest along the Persian Gulf. After they capture the shore batteries, you bring in your destroyers to clear out the mini-subs and then bring in your carriers.
Now that expeditionary force needs close air support and ground attack capabilities, and it needs to have them in an environment where the enemy has extensive, state of the art anti-aircraft missile installations. The logic for a Marine stealth jump jet in this scenario is compelling; what's questionable is trying to make that aircraft work for everyone else.
Take the idea that people are too conflict averse. I absolutely agree with that. But the danger is when beating the other guy starts to become an end in itself. Having mutual respect and support is also important. I've had really productive work relationships that were full of heated arguments, but respect enabled us to see when we were both right (or wrong) and were just arguing past each other.
The solution to a false dichotomy (creative conflict vs. mutual respect) isn't to choose the other side; it's to find a way to do both.
Or take the boast that standards are "unreasonably high". That makes no sense. It's illogical to be proud of anything that's "unreasonable", because "unreasonable" equals "irrational". It shows a defect in thinking. Now I really like the idea of being more data driven; people make too many decisions based on their "guy" (aka personal prejudices); it's just lazy, emotional decision making. But data doesn't make you infallible, and covering up your failures with an illogical slogan is just as lazy and emotionally driven.
The thing is being a contrarian has its advantages; when all the other investors are selling, you're buying, and that tends to give you an edge. But it's not the same as knowing what you are doing. Ultimately both the conventional and contrarian choice in a false dichotomy is wrong.
The culture at Amazon strikes me as only superficially rational, and I expect in the long run they'll pay the price.
At first, I read that as "Oracle Has 'Destroyed' the Market For Java"... which, of course, seemed quite plausible.
Too late. Sun already did that -- at least if we're talking about Java as a mobile platform. I spent years tracking J2ME as a potential target for our apps. Java may not have been all things to all people, but back in the day (late 90s early 00s) personal basis profile would have been ideal for what we were doing. Even MIDP would have been a good match.
The problem is that there never was *a* standard J2ME implementation; J2ME was only a set of specifications. Implementations came from third parties and they were either incompatible in various tricky ways or they were impractical to distribute to customers (e.g. IBM's Palm implementation of J2ME, which was almost impossible to buy unless you knew the right people at IBM, none of whom were interested in app developers). In practice that meant that if you wanted to develop for J2ME you were tied to phones from a particular carrier, and couldn't target PDAs or early tablet computers at all.
When I heard about Dalvik I was overjoyed. Not because I thought it would be any fundamentally better than J2ME, but because Google was going to use it to create a cross-vendor, cross-carrier market for apps. I have no idea what the whole point of J2ME was for Sun. So far as I can see just about all the effort Sun put into it accomplished nothing.
Probably. It also reduces the release of oxygen into the water by algae and cyanobacteria. But it also reduces consumption of oxygen by living matter too.
I think that the notion that smart watches are a fad is why the Fossil CEO is mentioning them; it sounds more hopeful than "most people under 35 use their phone to tell time rather than a watch."
Slashdot Mirror
Actually you put your finger on what I think the real problem is: the voting system for selecting "the best" in each category.
No matter how you tweak it, you're going to run afoul of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which basically establishes there's no rational, consistent, fair way for a group of voters to select the most preferred anything if there's more than two candidates. Occam's Razor prefers this as an explanation for the occasional inexplicable result to one that posits a widespread secret conspiracy to subvert the vote. If you want me believe somebody orchestrated a campaign like that in the modern age, show me the digital footprint of that campaign and I'll believe you. The Sads and Rabids after all left a substantial one; are the SJWs and CHORFs that much smarter than them?
The option I like is approval voting, in which each individual voter is allowed to vote for *all* the candidates he thinks are good enough. This works because it doesn't even attempt to select the "best" candidate; it selects the candidate the greatest number of people would be happy with. So you amend the voting system to ask people to select all the candidates that they think should be remembered for all time as a great story.
Mathematics tells us that "best" is a concept best left to individual critics, not voters.
Yet despite your claims, during years 1 and 2, when Vox was not running any campaign, the Correia was called racist, sexist, Nazi, and almost every other insult the SJWs can think of.
Why, if was only Vox's fault?
I never claimed Correia was racist, sexist or Nazi. Nor did I claim it was only Vox's fault; I claimed the Sads' association with Vox is a result of their own actions and inactions; it's not fair, put it was predictable.
As for "why", I always say to my kids that there's at least one actual example of any kind of person you can imagine, somewhere in the world. So what some person on the Internet says doesn't prove anything about society as a whole or other people you might associate that person with. If you looked hard enough on the Internet you'd find a Jewish neo-Nazi -- or at least someone who claims to be one.
I remember watching the New England Patriots play the Chicago Bears in SuperBowl XX (1986). This was in the pre-Belichick/Brady era, and the Patriots got clobbered 46-10. Here's the thing: there were points scored on both sides, but that doesn't add up to some kind of moral victory for the Patriots.
The Sad Puppy case always struck me as weak; if you look back over the entire history of the awards what you see there was never much of a preference for the kind of stories they write. The overall pattern is one of eclecticism; Starship Troopers wins Best Novel one year, Canticle for Leibowitz the next. Occasionally there's run for a couple of years for one kind of story or another.
I don't think Torgeson, Correia et al are racists, homophobes, or misogynists. Their feelings were hurt by not winning. Writers are sensitive, even writers of manly adventure stories. It's abundantly clear that they're in denial about their hurt feelings, so they're trying to advance the idea that there's some kind of conspiracy against them, but they don't really care that much.
I don't even think Vox Day is a racist or misogynist. He's a griefer out for attention. That's why he feels he's won no matter what the ballot outcome. It's not a victory that an ordinary person would recognize as such (which would involve the other guy realizing he's lost). The Sad Puppies weren't victims until they decided to play footsie with Day; it's not SJWs or CHORFs doing the victimizing, it's the Rabids.
There is no such entity as "Hugos" that can refuse or accept anything. The ballot was duly submitted to the fans, who in fact voted. They just didn't vote the way you thought they should vote. Well, tough; it's their vote and they can do whatever the hell they want with it, and if they don't think any of the nominees are worthy, that's why "no award" is on the ballot.
Actually we can predict pretty damn well. It depends on what you compare to: perfection, or what we could predict thirty years ago, or seventy-five years ago.
We're living in an era of rapid improvements in weather forecasting in terms of accuracy, precision and scope. Back in the 70s there was a perennial science fair project in which the student compared the accuracy of tomorrow's weather forecast to simply assuming that tomorrow would be like today. The answer back then was, it was about equally accurate. Today would be a totally different story. The forecasts we get for three days out is better than the forecast we used to get for tomorrow back in the 70s; people just haven't updated their thinking.
It's not surprising when you realize that the difference is satellite tracking, meteorological data networks, and incomprehensibly more powerful computers. Today's smart phones are roughly as powerful as the supercomputers of the 1980s.
I don't think anyone knows all the specific mechanisms for sure, but it's fairly safe to assume that that macronutrient approaches, when they work, work by altering the energy in/out balance without conscious management of eating and exercise behaviors. Otherwise, where do you think the fat went?
When the body has energy it normally breaks up glycogen into glucose which in turn is converted to pyruvic acid. Pyruvic acid is then converted into acetyl CoA and that is chucked into the furnace. When it doesn't have enough glycogen and glucose lying around to meet current demands, the body hydrolzes fat into glycerol and fatty acids; thosefatty acids are oxidized into acetyl CoA. So while a calorie might not be a calorie, the body's cellular energy demands can be met by carbohydrates, fat, or protein, and all are in fact ultimately consumed in the citric acid cycle.
Now as to efficacy, randomized control studies show that all of these macronutrient diets say that despite dramatic short term results, long term results are modest. That's better than simple calorie restriction diets which leave people worse off in the long term, but it's better than diets where the patient tries to consciously manipulate his energy consumption and use fare.
So Concorde was not an elite project for elite passengers, it was intended to be the norm for passenger transport - and Boeing agreed. Market conditions swung against them both however, and it was never to be.
This is true, but it's worth noting that routine air travel was a much more elite activity back when these planes were designed. We used to call people who flew regularly as "the jet set" or "jet-setters", and it implied disposable wealth and high economic status jobs. So when the energy crisis hit you'd think that flying would become even more the province of the elite; but this also coincided with air travel de-regulation and the airlines figured out that even with high fuel costs they could pack people in like sardines and charge prices that by previous standards seemed low. It comes down to what a CPA colleague of mine calls the accounting koan: When are fixed costs variable and variable costs fixed? When the cost is a per unit cost.
De-regulation and high fuel prices ushered in the era of the working stiff airline passenger. Leisure travel might still be glamorous, but flying certainly isn't. Not like it used to be.
Not to mention bullet wounds.
No, they cure it 100% of the time. The problem is few people actually follow a proper regimen.
Well, we're in dueling half-truths territory here. It's true that altering the balance between your calorie intake and output will inevitably cause your weight to drop. It's also true that this does not work better than a placebo when it comes to sustainable weight loss -- in fact the yoyo effect makes it worse than a placebo. Which leads us to one of only two possible conclusions: either the strategy is faulty or nearly all human beings are faulty.
One thing I've noticed over the years is how stable weight is when you aren't paying any attention to it. If you weigh yourself regularly at the same time of day, say when you go to do your gym routine, your weight readings will oscillate a percent or so around an average figure; if your average weight is 200 pounds you might get readings mostly in the range 197-203 lbs. This kind of remarkably precise stability doesn't happen by accident. Your nervous system and gut must be working in concert to keep your body composition in equilibrium, and it does an amazingly good job.
So how far does this feedback mechanism have to be from perfect to be a problem?
Imagine you're a six foot tall, 25 year old man who weighs 200 lbs. Unless you're a serious athlete that's a bit chunky, but not obese; it puts you at roughly the 75th percentile of American men your age for BMI. Now suppose you gain 1% of your body mass every year. When you are fifty years old you'll weigh 260 pounds. If you have any genetic disposition to obesity-related problems like hypertension, diabetes, or osteoarthritis there's a good chance you'll have one of them, in which case your BMI of 35.3 qualifies you for bariatric surgery according to the NIH guidelines.
But we don't experience our lives a year at time; the changes you need to stop this have to be done a day at a time. How much of your body weight have you gained on a *daily* basis over the last 25 years? 0.0027%. So when you're 25 and 200 pounds, and your weight measurements are swinging back and forth by three pounds on a daily basis, there's an underlying trend of gaining weight at a literally imperceptible rate of 2.4 grams per day. That about the same as adding a penny to your pocket, and that's only 0.2% of your normal daily weight fluctuation.
This is the ultimate case of tortoise (underlying bias toward weight gain) vs hare (conscious alteration of calorie balance), and because this race is lifelong the hare is screwed. But slowing the turtle down just a *tiny* bit would alter the race. It'd mean that you wouldn't put on those 60 pounds in the first place, or if you had then an attempt to diet down a few pounds would stick.
1% a year is good enough for evolution; by the time you're 50 it's supposed to be time for you to make room for your offspring. But most of us would appreciate being able to enjoy another twenty or thirty years of good health.
Well you put your finger on why Mars 3 doesn't loom large in our recollection of Mars missions, but I think you're being a little harsh. As others have discovered in the years since, landing on Mars is really, really hard. There's just enough atmosphere to be a problem. Just getting something from the surface of the Earth to the surface of Mars in 1972 was an amazing achievement.
Because the editors think Americans are ignorant, knee-jerk bigots who'll automatically think anything that takes a gratuitous dig at the French is insightful.
Oooh, those French think they're so elite, using French names for stuff.
You're missing the point.
Normally we take it for granted that most devices are insecure if they're not physically secured. From a technical standpoint vulnerability to physical attacks is the least interesting kind; you just tell your clients to lock the network closets, maybe log access to them. But the fact that a class of devices widely deployed -- in fact ubiquitously deployed -- in sensitive roles has been co-opted puts a different light on things.
In fact it flips things entirely around. If there were an easily exploitable remote vulnerability and there were a widespread attack using that, certainly that would be an emergency, but we'd know what to do. Send out an urgent bulletin, get the patch out, work like hell while the customers secure their equipment. But what if this is a widespread physical attack? An occasional instance of this wouldn't be a big deal; you'd expect that occasionally a sloppy facility will intersect with something like a disgruntled employee. But widespread program of physical attack violates one of our underlying assumptions about security, which is that physical vulnerabilities are not a big deal. What's more it suggests a degree of organization, planning and resources that make you wonder: who the hell is doing this, and why?
I think if we look into this and discover an extremely widespread remote exploit is behind it, that will be the happy outcome. If it turns out that someone managed this by physical access, that means we were in a cyber-war and didn't know it.
How do you know a brick isn't conscious?
You can't know. In point of fact some people thing that inanimate objects have souls or spirits; that particular belief is called "animism". Even animists can't have an ethical prohibitions against breaking (most) rocks or cutting down (most) trees or hunting (most) animals. But in an animist society it's quite possible reasonable for there to be rules that make certain trees or rocks sacrosanct.
The question is what is the standard of empirical evidence should be demanded in a society in which people have a wide variety of metaphysical opinions? As a practical matter of course if the vast majority of people in society believe a mass of cultured cells with analogous tissues to a human brain is a person, that mass of cells would be sacrosanct. But that'd also be true of, say, a vase -- in a society where the vast majority believed pottery was conscious.
A hundred years ago we'd have been utterly out to sea on the question of this brain analog; but I think now we have enough scientific knowledge of actual brains in operation to at least begin to argue whether it's remotely plausible that this group of cells can process information in any way that resembles an actual brain processing human experiences. But of course we can't rule out the kinds of processes that might underly hypothetical brick cognition.
As for that last, irreducible mote of uncertainty that always exists in any scientific estimation, we all do things which *might* kill someone all the time; if we drive to work there's a small possibility that will kill someone on the way. As long as the probability is remote it's OK. That's why it's OK to drive to work on normal streets and highways, but taking a short cut through a crowded pedestrian plaza would be wrong.
You missed the forest for the trees. "Cherry picking" occurs on both sides of the debate, which is political, not scientific.
Well, we have a different view on what the forest is. Mine is that when you remove the cherry picking, the notion that climate has stabilized is clearly false. All people make mistakes, but that doesn't make everyone equally right.
When people point to a 15 year stabilization of temperatures as evidence in the climate change debate
An oldy but moldy, taken straight from the "How to Lie with Statistic" playbook: cherry pick your baseline to produce the trend (or lack of trend) you want.
Climate deniers like to say "there has been no significant warming since 1998", although strictly what they mean is "there has been no significant warming *compared to* 1998." Why 1998? BECAUSE 1998 WAS BY FAR THE HOTTEST YEAR EVER ON THE INSTRUMENTAL RECORD. It's like saying, "My income hasn't gone up significantly since 1998," when 1998 was the year your hit the PowerBall. If you use five year moving averages the "stabilization" effect disappears.
Or when they point out evidence that it was just as warm 1000 years ago as today,
FTW: two other forms of cherry picking in one assertion. First, there's the kind of geographic cherrypicking that says "If Europe was warm in the middle ages it was warm everywhere," or "if there's snow in Washington DC it's cold everywhere", or "If there is unseasonal summer pack ice in western Hudson Bay then there must be unseasonable ice everywhere in the Arctic," all of which are trivial to refute but rely on the fact that most people won't bother to look up what's happening elsewhere.
Second form is cherry picking papers that sound like theysay what you want to hear. It's not that papers aren't important but science isn't like theology; it deals in contradictory evidence, which is abundant if you're trying to extrapolate global climate from local climate. That means you can prove anything by picking the right paper; you need to read the literature in a field as a whole. Since most of us don't have time to do that, let me suggest a more convenient way to get yourself up to speed on a topic: find a review paper in a journal that is (a) relevant to the question and (b) in the top quartile of journals in that field by impact factor.
What a review paper does is summarize all the significant and contradictory evidence that has been published on a question. It's a convenient and highly efficient way to go straight to the horse's mouth on a question, rather than relying on scientifically illiterate reporters. Choosing a top journal by impact factor eliminates what are essentially vanity press publications where authors can pay to get whatever they want into a "scientific journal". When some anti-vaxxer crackpot cites "their science" it's always in one of these pay-for-play "predatory journals".
Well, that's just equivocation; the poster isn't talking about people who deny that the climate in the Holocene is different than the climate in the Pleistocene. He's talking about people who deny climate changed in the past twenty years, or even in the past 100. That's still very much a live issue for deniers.
Except -- its a long standing legal principle that suspicion is not tantamount to punishment, a principle that was established in the days when suspicion was propagated within the government by letters written in copperplate calligraphy and acted upon by a human magistrate, all very cumbersome, labor-intensive and expensive.
Of course now that you can be selected for suspicion by an algorithm and that suspicion can be acted upon (albeit non-decisively) by IT, there is no practical distinction between indefinitely prolonged suspicion and punishment. But recognizing that fact will require an act of the very suspicion-friendly SCOTUS, or an act of Congress, which at present is particularly hostile to the 14th Amendment, particularly Section 5 ("The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.")
Well, you're supposed to have proposal criteria which disqualify proposals that won't work adequately.
The problem is, especially in IT, organizations issuing RFPs don't necessarily know what those criteria should be. This is especially true in government IT procurements where an agency has received a political mandate to address a problem it's never dealt with before. It doesn't know how to address that problem, much less how to draft criteria for an IT system to address that problem.
As with any kind of organization, some government agencies are better than others. The best ones become very good at doing stuff they do all the time. But I've never seen a government agency that's any good at doing stuff that's *new* to it. That's hard for anyone, but even harder for governments. Government is by it's very nature not agile.
On top of that you sometimes have really misguided policies that are supposed to reduce costs. For example one I've seen is that the lowest cost bid that meets the criteria should always be chosen. This is fine for a routine RFP, but when an organization has never attempted something before it can't be expected to get the bid rejection criteria right before it's ever seen any proposed solutions; in such cases the organization needs to be able to weigh the proposals that meet the a priori criteria by risk. Another one is a demand that a vendor not charge more for any item than it charges other customers; the problem with this is that it adds enough complexity to the process of drafting a bid that it actually narrows the pool of bidders to organizations that specialize in government contracting. Bigger consultancies form separate subsidiaries for government contracting that overcharge for everything, and since competition is so sparse they get away with it.
Like I said, that's not the real world. But it demonstrates that comparing the maneuverability of a stealth aircraft against a non-stealth fighter is kind of an empty hypothetical.
Actually I think you have it backward; it's saying that maneuverability of stealth aircraft isn't an issue that's the hypothetical position, because it depends on lots of assumptions that may not always be true, e.g., rules of engagement allow beyond visual range, your stealth beats the other guy's technology but the other guy has no stealth of his own; you can choose the range of engagement; you've got plenty of BVR weapons to handle whatever comes up, etc.
People argue as if all these assumptions will always be true, or they argue as if none of them will ever be true. What I think that that most of the time all of them will be true, but occasionally some of them won't be. That's worrying because of the all-egg-in-one-basket nature of the program. If we're going up against North Korea, sure. But you've got to assume that countries like China are developing tactic and technologies which exploit our dependency on this one platform.
So let's assume for the moment that it's possible that our BVR-only philosophy might sometimes have some flaws in it. Why not make an aircraft that if it finds itself in an unexpected dogfight has some chance? Because the Marines need a STOVL aircraft they can operate from improvised forward bases, and the all-eggs-in-one-basket approach means everyone has to live with the limitations that imposes.
Well, then why the all-eggs-in-one-basket approach? Because that makes the program too big to fail. Basically this program was designed in such a way that if it were ever cancelled our national defense would be crippled.
It's apples and oranges; the F35 and F22 were built to do two different jobs. The F22 is a no-compromises air superiority fighter with very limited (initially *no*) ground attack capabilities. The F35 is supposed to be a versatile multi-role workhorse that can attack ground targets and defend itself on its way to and from those targets. The role for the F22 is to sweep the skies of enemy aircraft at the start of a conflict, after which they have limited utility; you only need so many of them.
So you can't substitute the F22 for the F35, although if the F35 had lived up to its hype you could go the other way. The F22 could be adapted to *some* of the F35's roles, but that wouldn't save money. The F22 costs more than most WW2 aircraft carriers did, even adjusting for inflation.
What's more the F22 simply can't be adapted for the Marine Corps's needs. They need a modern, stealthy replacement for the Harrier jump jet that can be operated from amphibious assault ships (aka "helicopter carriers") and hastily improvised forward air bases.
Here's a crazy scenario: suppose you decide to invade Iran. You can't just sail your carrier up to the northern end of the Persian Gulf to support your drive to Tehran, the way we did on the way to Baghdad. You'd have to sail that carrier past 300 miles of Iraqi shoreline dotted with advanced anti-ship defenses in waters crawling with mini-subs. And it's a long, long way over rough terrain to get from the Gulf of Oman to Tehran in the extreme north of the country. Imagine fighting your way from New York City to Chicago, only the terrain in between was all mountains. So you land a Marine expeditionary force at the Gulf of Oman that fights its way northwest along the Persian Gulf. After they capture the shore batteries, you bring in your destroyers to clear out the mini-subs and then bring in your carriers.
Now that expeditionary force needs close air support and ground attack capabilities, and it needs to have them in an environment where the enemy has extensive, state of the art anti-aircraft missile installations. The logic for a Marine stealth jump jet in this scenario is compelling; what's questionable is trying to make that aircraft work for everyone else.
Take the idea that people are too conflict averse. I absolutely agree with that. But the danger is when beating the other guy starts to become an end in itself. Having mutual respect and support is also important. I've had really productive work relationships that were full of heated arguments, but respect enabled us to see when we were both right (or wrong) and were just arguing past each other.
The solution to a false dichotomy (creative conflict vs. mutual respect) isn't to choose the other side; it's to find a way to do both.
Or take the boast that standards are "unreasonably high". That makes no sense. It's illogical to be proud of anything that's "unreasonable", because "unreasonable" equals "irrational". It shows a defect in thinking. Now I really like the idea of being more data driven; people make too many decisions based on their "guy" (aka personal prejudices); it's just lazy, emotional decision making. But data doesn't make you infallible, and covering up your failures with an illogical slogan is just as lazy and emotionally driven.
The thing is being a contrarian has its advantages; when all the other investors are selling, you're buying, and that tends to give you an edge. But it's not the same as knowing what you are doing. Ultimately both the conventional and contrarian choice in a false dichotomy is wrong.
The culture at Amazon strikes me as only superficially rational, and I expect in the long run they'll pay the price.
At first, I read that as "Oracle Has 'Destroyed' the Market For Java"... which, of course, seemed quite plausible.
Too late. Sun already did that -- at least if we're talking about Java as a mobile platform. I spent years tracking J2ME as a potential target for our apps. Java may not have been all things to all people, but back in the day (late 90s early 00s) personal basis profile would have been ideal for what we were doing. Even MIDP would have been a good match.
The problem is that there never was *a* standard J2ME implementation; J2ME was only a set of specifications. Implementations came from third parties and they were either incompatible in various tricky ways or they were impractical to distribute to customers (e.g. IBM's Palm implementation of J2ME, which was almost impossible to buy unless you knew the right people at IBM, none of whom were interested in app developers). In practice that meant that if you wanted to develop for J2ME you were tied to phones from a particular carrier, and couldn't target PDAs or early tablet computers at all.
When I heard about Dalvik I was overjoyed. Not because I thought it would be any fundamentally better than J2ME, but because Google was going to use it to create a cross-vendor, cross-carrier market for apps. I have no idea what the whole point of J2ME was for Sun. So far as I can see just about all the effort Sun put into it accomplished nothing.
Probably. It also reduces the release of oxygen into the water by algae and cyanobacteria. But it also reduces consumption of oxygen by living matter too.
Well, I'm not holding my breath; it's been over ten years now.
LOL! Smart watches are a fad, like tablets.
I think that the notion that smart watches are a fad is why the Fossil CEO is mentioning them; it sounds more hopeful than "most people under 35 use their phone to tell time rather than a watch."