You can find the Rule of St Benedict here, it is not specifically monastic, but rather outlines general Christian ethical ideals of piety, humility, charity, forbearance and chastity.
You could probably omit piety and chastity, but a lot of the rules do make sense for any community: not to nurse a grudge; to bear wrongs and insults patiently, don't be a grumbler or detractor, settle personal disputes quickly and peacefully, avoid mocking or depraved speech, and to keep a sense of perspective (see rule #47, chapter 4).
Small talk performs a function, one that is not needed in every context.
Americans are the most notoriously friendly people on Earth. "Notorious", because most people from other countries find Americans' tendency to strike up conversations with strangers off-putting.
I think this is a legacy of immigration. I think it grew out of interactions between people penned in close quarters with others they didn't understand very well, who had different cultures, religions and languages. I believe those people developed a norm of effusively over-the-top superficial friendliness to compensate for the fact that subtleties were lost on each other, subtleties which told you whether someone was safe or not.
When a stranger asks "How are you?" he's not asking for personal information; he's just signalling that he's friendly and therefore safe. You signal back with an equally conventional "Fine, and how are you?" regardless of what your actual condition is. That's all small talk is, it's establishing a safe space between strangers.
Now America isn't culturally uniform; if you go to places that don't trace their culture back to the late 19th C earth 20th C immigration boom, the norm for approachability varies dramatically. In the rural South it's even more over-the-top than average, but in rural New England and out West people can appear suspicious or hostile to strangers. Again, it's superficial; if you're actually in need people there will give you the shirt of their backs; they're just not broadcasting "I'm not threatening" all the time.
People don't do that consciously, it's what we're trained to do because it worked for our grandparents and great-grandparents.
My wife asked me the other day whether I thought Kanye West might not be right in his head. This is what I said to her: West is a talented, intelligent, driven individual who rose from comfortable but modest beginnings to astonishing levels of professional success. Life experience has not taught him to be humble, hasn't even shown him the need for it.
There's a word for that, it's called "arrogance", but a lot of people who have it are really extremely capable people. Until fate gets around to humbling them, if it ever does, what reason would they ever have to doubt themselves? Naturally people like that sound a little unhinged; they're living in a different reality than you or me.
I think Musk fits this mold. If a bus were to hit him tomorrow he'd go down in the history books as the most significant tech entrepreneur of our age; where as Bill Gates made a fortune catching the PC wave, Musk actually drove change in a way that Gates never did. Why wouldn't Musk believe he can do anything just through sheer force of will? If he weren't a bit of an egotist he'd never have tried any of the things he's known for.
But his overblown reaction to the Thai cave rescue operation not needing him, personally, exposed Musk as, well, kind of a dick. But be honest: you'd probably be a dick too.
Yes, this is *exactly* how they started the ball rolling in the good old days, with spitballing mission concepts. The thing that made the good old days good, however, was that would be followed up with a hundred billion dollars in funding.
Do I really want to put my life in the hands of other people? There's a time and a place for everything. Monitoring behavior doesn't belong in the bedroom, but it certainly belongs on the road.
The difference is that you can imagine all the tricky corner cases you want, and then engineer a robot so it will consistently handle them. You can train a human to handle them, but whether he does or not depends on how he feels that day.
Now there may be combinations of factors that are unforeseen in testing that a robot might fail to handle properly, but the same can be said for humans. I very strongly suspect that most people's notion of how could they are in tricky, surprise driving situations is over-inflated by their sense of mastery over routine driving. You might even have successfully pulled off a few occasional emergency maneuvers in your life, but that might just have been dumb luck.
What you really ought to do is go out on a track and practice things that are too dangerous to do on the road, over and over again until you *know* you can handle them. I wish this kind of training was routinely available to drivers.
The scaling question probably has to do with the construction of the wing, not the net mass of the aircraft. The video shows the drone penetrating the sheet metal covering of the wing; I don't know if that would be more robust on an airliner, but I expect it is. However that leaves the question of the effect on an airliner, which travels at greater speeds, quite open.
The thing about research is a lot of the time what you're looking for isn't answers, you're looking for questions that should be asking, or trying to justify funding for questions you think need addressing.
Now bird strikes have been part of aviation since the beginning, but drone strikes are a new phenomenon. Are they pretty much analogous, or do we need to start thinking about drones differently? What the researchers actually did here was compare the damage done by a simulated bird strike to a drone strike, and found that the nature of the damage in their test rig was different. Birds made a bigger hole in the skin, drones made a bigger dent in the wing's structural members. This doesn't autoamtically scale to something like an A380, but it makes sense to do a scaled down test with cheap surplus light aviation wings before applying for funding to do it on a larger scale.
The problem with people's self-assessment as drivers is they judge themselves as they are on a good day, when they are performing best. On his best days, an average driver performs considerably better than most of the other drivers on the road, who are having a typical day. This does not make him a good driver; to understand the risk a driver represents to others you have to evaluate his performance on his worst days, which nobody does, particularly to themselves.
We can pretty much assume that when you take your driving test, you're performing the best that you can. So somebody who barely scrapes "acceptable" is going to be much less than acceptable on a typical day of driving. You suppress all your bad habits during the test: things like rolling into an intersection; changing lanes without signalling; cutting people off; driving with one or even (for short periods) no hands; tailgating; speeding; weaving, etc.
I think self-driving car technology can in fact be used to improve human driving performance, because the inputs to the system can detect many of these bad habits. Every time you tailgate or cut someone off, the car would automatically chime an alarm; at the end of the year your alarms would be toted up and if you exceed an allowance you pay an insurance surcharge.
The principle is simple: people behave better when they're being monitored. If the average driver consistently drove as well has he is capable of driving, then the roads would be much safer for everyone.
She's charged under a section of USC called "Conspiracy to Commit Fraud against the United States", which SCOTUS has defined to include interfering with government functions.
I don't think most people understand the First Amendment; it doesn't protect you from legal consequences of speech, like inciting riots, libel, obscenity, or revealing state secrets. Nor does it exempt you from laws regulating the manner and circumstances of speech; you can't shout through a bullhorn at your neighbor at 3am, even if you're shouting political slogans. And it certainly doesn't exempt you from laws regulating the behavior of foreign agents on US soil, for example by laundering foreign money to obscure its source.
The First Amendment does not preclude government regulation of speech; instead it sets a very high bar, particularly for prior restraint. There has to be a significant public interest (like national security) involved, the regulation must be narrowly tailored (i.e. it must address just the interest at stake without affecting any other speech), and it has to be administered in an even-handed manner. Falsehood is largely protected, because of the difficulty of people agreeing on the truth, but false speech made with actual malice and fraudulent intent can be legally punished.
So yes, this woman can be prosecuted for spreading discord in this particular way. If the government of Russia wants to sow discord in the US, it and its citizens are free to do so, and American citizens are free to assist them, as long as they do so transparently.
You know, it's hard to say whether Ecuador has the legal right to expel Assange. Ecuador (like the United States), is a signatory to a number of treaties which govern the treatment of asylum seekers, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951).
These treaties establish a right of a foreign national to seek asylum in a signatory country if he genuinely faces persecution, and imposes duties upon signatory countries, such as various forms of non-discrimination and provision of administrative support. So while it is bad manners for Assange to be a political PITA to Ecuador, that's not legally sufficient grounds for expelling a refugee admitted under these treaties. Ecuador would have to find that Assange does not face persecution, except for conditions spelled out under Article 14 of the UDHR.
This puts Ecuador in a bind: unless something has substantively changed, it can't expel Assange without either (a) admitting that it violated the sovereignty of the UK by granting him bogus asylum in the first place or (b) apparently violating Assange's rights as a legitimate refugee under conventions that Ecuador is signatory to.
They have demonstrated mathematically that a hypothetical quantum computer could, at least in theory, do the kind of things that have people interested in quantum computing for.
Not to detract from the mathematical achievement, the news to me at least is that this hadn't been done yet.
Your eyeball is being misled by ENSO events, which obscure the underlying trend. Yes, *what is physically happening* is actually important, not just what your eyeballs tell you. You can smooth out the weather events by taking a moving average.
Oh, and why we're at it, why leave out 1940-1970, during which the globe actually cooled on the instrumental record. Here's a hint about why you don't want to go there: what physically happened actually matters.
Like I said, read the paper; everything's there. Calling the conclusions "magical" isn't an argument, it's just posturing when you haven't done the work.
Both versions show a robust warming effect, so even though the difference is mathematically significant, it's not practically so. Also note the high degree of correlation between versions.
The reason for the revising an aggregate data set is to correct systematic errors in aggregation, and you can read about the reasons in the scientific literature. Some of the adjustments are due to better calibration of remote sensing readings. Others are due to accounting for instrument biases -- for example one change was accounting for the fact that ships consistently give higher readings than buoys because of waste heat from the ship.
Revising an estimation based on additional information isn't some kind of dodgy practice, as long as you document why and how much. If you have a problem with the adjustments (other than the result) it's all there for you to contest.
That's one spectacularly weak straw man. I wonder if you can really understand that little about statistics or even basic weather.
It's like claiming that in order for a team to improve its record, it has to win every single game. It's normal even for winning teams to have streaks one way or the other.
In the case of climate "streaks" are called "weather", and the 800 pound gorilla of inter-year variation is the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, which send the entire planet's temperature careening back and forth by 2/10 of a degree one way or the other (against the projected 2 degree/century,.02 degree background rise).
Now you can reduce the ENSO transients on the data by taking a moving average -- this in effect creates a low pass filter. Since ENSO events frequently span adjacent years, a five year moving average does the trick. If you do that, since 1980 the moving average has increased 26/37 times, something that has about a 1% of happening the underlying trend was just flipping a coin.
Slashdot Mirror
You can find the Rule of St Benedict here, it is not specifically monastic, but rather outlines general Christian ethical ideals of piety, humility, charity, forbearance and chastity.
You could probably omit piety and chastity, but a lot of the rules do make sense for any community: not to nurse a grudge; to bear wrongs and insults patiently, don't be a grumbler or detractor, settle personal disputes quickly and peacefully, avoid mocking or depraved speech, and to keep a sense of perspective (see rule #47, chapter 4).
O brave new world/That has such people in't.
Small talk performs a function, one that is not needed in every context.
Americans are the most notoriously friendly people on Earth. "Notorious", because most people from other countries find Americans' tendency to strike up conversations with strangers off-putting.
I think this is a legacy of immigration. I think it grew out of interactions between people penned in close quarters with others they didn't understand very well, who had different cultures, religions and languages. I believe those people developed a norm of effusively over-the-top superficial friendliness to compensate for the fact that subtleties were lost on each other, subtleties which told you whether someone was safe or not.
When a stranger asks "How are you?" he's not asking for personal information; he's just signalling that he's friendly and therefore safe. You signal back with an equally conventional "Fine, and how are you?" regardless of what your actual condition is. That's all small talk is, it's establishing a safe space between strangers.
Now America isn't culturally uniform; if you go to places that don't trace their culture back to the late 19th C earth 20th C immigration boom, the norm for approachability varies dramatically. In the rural South it's even more over-the-top than average, but in rural New England and out West people can appear suspicious or hostile to strangers. Again, it's superficial; if you're actually in need people there will give you the shirt of their backs; they're just not broadcasting "I'm not threatening" all the time.
People don't do that consciously, it's what we're trained to do because it worked for our grandparents and great-grandparents.
And they dance the tango. No, really.
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
My wife asked me the other day whether I thought Kanye West might not be right in his head. This is what I said to her: West is a talented, intelligent, driven individual who rose from comfortable but modest beginnings to astonishing levels of professional success. Life experience has not taught him to be humble, hasn't even shown him the need for it.
There's a word for that, it's called "arrogance", but a lot of people who have it are really extremely capable people. Until fate gets around to humbling them, if it ever does, what reason would they ever have to doubt themselves? Naturally people like that sound a little unhinged; they're living in a different reality than you or me.
I think Musk fits this mold. If a bus were to hit him tomorrow he'd go down in the history books as the most significant tech entrepreneur of our age; where as Bill Gates made a fortune catching the PC wave, Musk actually drove change in a way that Gates never did. Why wouldn't Musk believe he can do anything just through sheer force of will? If he weren't a bit of an egotist he'd never have tried any of the things he's known for.
But his overblown reaction to the Thai cave rescue operation not needing him, personally, exposed Musk as, well, kind of a dick. But be honest: you'd probably be a dick too.
(1) Fail at planning.
(2) Ask the impossible of your employees at the last minute.
(3) Have competitors who suck just as bad as you at management.
Yes, this is *exactly* how they started the ball rolling in the good old days, with spitballing mission concepts. The thing that made the good old days good, however, was that would be followed up with a hundred billion dollars in funding.
Do I really want to put my life in the hands of other people? There's a time and a place for everything. Monitoring behavior doesn't belong in the bedroom, but it certainly belongs on the road.
The difference is that you can imagine all the tricky corner cases you want, and then engineer a robot so it will consistently handle them. You can train a human to handle them, but whether he does or not depends on how he feels that day.
Now there may be combinations of factors that are unforeseen in testing that a robot might fail to handle properly, but the same can be said for humans. I very strongly suspect that most people's notion of how could they are in tricky, surprise driving situations is over-inflated by their sense of mastery over routine driving. You might even have successfully pulled off a few occasional emergency maneuvers in your life, but that might just have been dumb luck.
What you really ought to do is go out on a track and practice things that are too dangerous to do on the road, over and over again until you *know* you can handle them. I wish this kind of training was routinely available to drivers.
The scaling question probably has to do with the construction of the wing, not the net mass of the aircraft. The video shows the drone penetrating the sheet metal covering of the wing; I don't know if that would be more robust on an airliner, but I expect it is. However that leaves the question of the effect on an airliner, which travels at greater speeds, quite open.
The thing about research is a lot of the time what you're looking for isn't answers, you're looking for questions that should be asking, or trying to justify funding for questions you think need addressing.
Now bird strikes have been part of aviation since the beginning, but drone strikes are a new phenomenon. Are they pretty much analogous, or do we need to start thinking about drones differently? What the researchers actually did here was compare the damage done by a simulated bird strike to a drone strike, and found that the nature of the damage in their test rig was different. Birds made a bigger hole in the skin, drones made a bigger dent in the wing's structural members. This doesn't autoamtically scale to something like an A380, but it makes sense to do a scaled down test with cheap surplus light aviation wings before applying for funding to do it on a larger scale.
The problem with people's self-assessment as drivers is they judge themselves as they are on a good day, when they are performing best. On his best days, an average driver performs considerably better than most of the other drivers on the road, who are having a typical day. This does not make him a good driver; to understand the risk a driver represents to others you have to evaluate his performance on his worst days, which nobody does, particularly to themselves.
We can pretty much assume that when you take your driving test, you're performing the best that you can. So somebody who barely scrapes "acceptable" is going to be much less than acceptable on a typical day of driving. You suppress all your bad habits during the test: things like rolling into an intersection; changing lanes without signalling; cutting people off; driving with one or even (for short periods) no hands; tailgating; speeding; weaving, etc.
I think self-driving car technology can in fact be used to improve human driving performance, because the inputs to the system can detect many of these bad habits. Every time you tailgate or cut someone off, the car would automatically chime an alarm; at the end of the year your alarms would be toted up and if you exceed an allowance you pay an insurance surcharge.
The principle is simple: people behave better when they're being monitored. If the average driver consistently drove as well has he is capable of driving, then the roads would be much safer for everyone.
She's charged under a section of USC called "Conspiracy to Commit Fraud against the United States", which SCOTUS has defined to include interfering with government functions.
The point is that Ecuador has already accepted Assange's claim.
You're assuming it's some kind of speech regulation law she's been charged under. She hasn't; she's been charged with fraud.
I don't think most people understand the First Amendment; it doesn't protect you from legal consequences of speech, like inciting riots, libel, obscenity, or revealing state secrets. Nor does it exempt you from laws regulating the manner and circumstances of speech; you can't shout through a bullhorn at your neighbor at 3am, even if you're shouting political slogans. And it certainly doesn't exempt you from laws regulating the behavior of foreign agents on US soil, for example by laundering foreign money to obscure its source.
The First Amendment does not preclude government regulation of speech; instead it sets a very high bar, particularly for prior restraint. There has to be a significant public interest (like national security) involved, the regulation must be narrowly tailored (i.e. it must address just the interest at stake without affecting any other speech), and it has to be administered in an even-handed manner. Falsehood is largely protected, because of the difficulty of people agreeing on the truth, but false speech made with actual malice and fraudulent intent can be legally punished.
So yes, this woman can be prosecuted for spreading discord in this particular way. If the government of Russia wants to sow discord in the US, it and its citizens are free to do so, and American citizens are free to assist them, as long as they do so transparently.
You know, it's hard to say whether Ecuador has the legal right to expel Assange. Ecuador (like the United States), is a signatory to a number of treaties which govern the treatment of asylum seekers, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951).
These treaties establish a right of a foreign national to seek asylum in a signatory country if he genuinely faces persecution, and imposes duties upon signatory countries, such as various forms of non-discrimination and provision of administrative support. So while it is bad manners for Assange to be a political PITA to Ecuador, that's not legally sufficient grounds for expelling a refugee admitted under these treaties. Ecuador would have to find that Assange does not face persecution, except for conditions spelled out under Article 14 of the UDHR.
This puts Ecuador in a bind: unless something has substantively changed, it can't expel Assange without either (a) admitting that it violated the sovereignty of the UK by granting him bogus asylum in the first place or (b) apparently violating Assange's rights as a legitimate refugee under conventions that Ecuador is signatory to.
So the results may be true or not.
Well, yes AND no.
They have demonstrated mathematically that a hypothetical quantum computer could, at least in theory, do the kind of things that have people interested in quantum computing for.
Not to detract from the mathematical achievement, the news to me at least is that this hadn't been done yet.
If you think winter temperatures are up by 20C, I'd like to know where you get that data from.
Anthropogenic warming is caused by solar forcing, which is weakest in whatever hemisphere is currently experiencing winter.
I am referring to the paper which explains the changes in the dataset. It's easy to find.
Your eyeball is being misled by ENSO events, which obscure the underlying trend. Yes, *what is physically happening* is actually important, not just what your eyeballs tell you. You can smooth out the weather events by taking a moving average.
Oh, and why we're at it, why leave out 1940-1970, during which the globe actually cooled on the instrumental record. Here's a hint about why you don't want to go there: what physically happened actually matters.
Like I said, read the paper; everything's there. Calling the conclusions "magical" isn't an argument, it's just posturing when you haven't done the work.
Both versions show a robust warming effect, so even though the difference is mathematically significant, it's not practically so. Also note the high degree of correlation between versions.
The reason for the revising an aggregate data set is to correct systematic errors in aggregation, and you can read about the reasons in the scientific literature. Some of the adjustments are due to better calibration of remote sensing readings. Others are due to accounting for instrument biases -- for example one change was accounting for the fact that ships consistently give higher readings than buoys because of waste heat from the ship.
Revising an estimation based on additional information isn't some kind of dodgy practice, as long as you document why and how much. If you have a problem with the adjustments (other than the result) it's all there for you to contest.
That's one spectacularly weak straw man. I wonder if you can really understand that little about statistics or even basic weather.
It's like claiming that in order for a team to improve its record, it has to win every single game. It's normal even for winning teams to have streaks one way or the other.
In the case of climate "streaks" are called "weather", and the 800 pound gorilla of inter-year variation is the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, which send the entire planet's temperature careening back and forth by 2/10 of a degree one way or the other (against the projected 2 degree/century, .02 degree background rise).
Now you can reduce the ENSO transients on the data by taking a moving average -- this in effect creates a low pass filter. Since ENSO events frequently span adjacent years, a five year moving average does the trick. If you do that, since 1980 the moving average has increased 26/37 times, something that has about a 1% of happening the underlying trend was just flipping a coin.