I don't think we have enough evidence to point to the probability of intelligent life existing anywhere else. I personally believe there is, but that is purely because the notion appeals to me. We don't know enough to speak about this question except in the most hand-waving fashion.
But I can think of two really good reasons for them to have this argument. First, it forces the people having this argument to confront the meaning of their beliefs. How many people ever bother to do that, even if they're right (I'm speaking to *you* whoever you are reading this)? There are three general classes of views consistent with some kind of belief in the Bible that I can think of.
1) The Bible is history, and other intelligent life may have fallen as humanity did in the Garden, but we may meet aliens living in a state of grace. 2) The Bible is history, but other intelligent life fell with humanity through some unexplained mechanism. Note that in this formulation Adam and Eve wouldn't necessarily be of the human species, if we interpret "mankind" to be "rational creatures". 3) The Bible is mythology. In this view, the myth of the Garden speaks to us about the nature of being a rational being. It was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that exiled us from our animal state, therefore any creature capable of distinguishing good and evil is fallen and needs redemption.
Now here is the second reason I can think of for having this argument: we are going to meet non-human intelligent beings very soon. We'll have created them. Are they persons? Can we own an intelligent computer program, or a machine on which an intelligent program runs? Can the ethics we have developed over the centuries apply to them at all? That's not a scientific question, although scientific opinion has a bearing on this (e.g. we have evidence now that great apes are self-aware in ways that few animals other than humans are).
Discussing the nature of personhood in the context of a *naturally occurring* entity would be an important intermediate case. It would allow us to dispense with the distraction that "we made these things out of nuts and bolts and wire so it belongs to us." Of course, that never stopped people from enslaving indigenous human populations they ran across, but hopefully most of us are beyond that now.
One thing that these discussions need is a usable definition of "supernatural".
As you point out "outside our current understanding" is not tantamount to "supernatural". Outside the practical limits of our understanding (e.g. questions whose answers are not verifiable by an efficient algorithm) is not supernatural either. Questions that are not decidable at all in a finite amount of time are not supernatural.
C.S. Lewis, the fantasy author and Christian apologist, points out that *randomness* is not supernatural either; nor is indeterminacy in a quantum mechanics sense. One might characterize his position as agreeing with Einstein that God does not play dice, but recognizing that God allows dice to be played. Lewis proposes a definition of supernatural that amounts to this: a supernatural event is the result of conscious intent. When God creates a "miracle", he wills a new set of conditions into existence. One must be very careful in this formulation not draw the boundaries of "supernatural" to broadly, because the consequences of the supernatural event proceed by completely natural means. So the Virgin Birth is not supernatural, although the Immaculate Conception *was*. Supernatural events, in his view, are "naturalized" as soon as they occur, like immigrants to a country becoming citizens.
Now, here's a subtle point about this definition: according to it, all conscious human acts are supernatural. If I sneeze, it is not a supernatural event, but if I sock you in the mouth, it is, at least according to this definition.
Lewis doesn't miss this point. In fact, that's exactly what he wants. The strategy of his argument is to focus 'rationalists' on the nature of human reason itself. Whether you want to use his definition of "supernatural" or not, his opinion is that what we regard as the salient characteristics of God are those that we attribute to humans as rational animals. This is what he would regard as the true meaning of "being created in God's image", and he gives us examples in his fiction of non-human persons with equal claim to humans to "being created in God's image".
This strategy is philosophically dicey. He wants to set reason up as something that in a way exists independently of matter. 1 + 1 = 2, regardless of what kind of brain comes up with it. Now if you want to say "no causality exists independent of matter", he'll say, "Well, if that's the case, somebody who things 1 + 1 = 3 has just as much justification as you do in believing 1 + 1 = 2. You both believe your opinions for the same reason: the action of external events on your brain. You can't claim that reason makes you hold your opinion without admitting that reason affects matter, and reason is not material."
The Myans, like most societies, saw time as cyclical. It makes sense. The sun moves in a 24 hour pattern, and the fixed starts in a roughly 365.25 day pattern. Why not eternity? The idea of a linear time with an end was an innovation of Christian thought.
That's like saying if you intend to stick your fingers in the meat grinder, you ought to keep something you can use as a tourniquet handy. It's true, in a completely useless way.
These guys were helping with the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. The reason that Ponzi schemes are illegal is that *they are destined to collapse*. When you're helping run the biggest one ever, it's going to be the biggest crash and burn ever. Evading the consequences means moving as much cash as you can overseas, planning to change your identity, and getting the hell out of Dodge a *long* time before you think you might need to. And that's assuming you don't trip the money laundering detectors, which you certainly will.
Madoff and these guys for a very, very brief time had a model nobody else had, and it depended on computation to do things faster than anybody else had ever tried to. But it didn't take long for other people to copy the general idea, Instead of patting themselves on the back for being so clever, pocketing the huge profits they made, then moving on to the next thing, they decided to *pretend* their advantage could go on forever. You have to think they were mentally ill on some level, because they *had* to have known they'd be caught. Somehow they must have had a need that went deeper than money, a need to be regarded as brilliant beyond ordinary mortals, if only for a limited time.
"The submarines were meant to threaten the United States directly, but none of the attacks occurred because the subs were developed too late in the war, and American intelligence was too good."
Being an engineer, it strikes me that "being too late in the war" and "the enemy intelligence was too good" are not likely to be unrelated facts. It sounds like a classic case of coming up with a brilliant piece of engineering to fix a hopeless situation you should never have been in.
So -- the boss is a crook. Not on the level of a literal pirate, of course, but he's a sneak, the kind of liar who thinks pretending not to see something in plain sight means denying it was there isn't a lie.
What in the world makes you think he isn't planning to pin this on you?
OK, we all know that won't get him out of it, but he's just demonstrated that he isn't exactly the world's sharpest thinker. People like that have a way of being just clever enough to make your life hell. And "anonymous" wants to know how to *fix* this situation? It's like listening to a woman tell you all the iron clad proof that her husband is cheating on her, then have her ask whether you think he might be seeing someone else. The fact that she has to ask tells you everything you need to know.
The number one cause of *serious* unhappiness at work, in my experience, is being forced to do something makes you feel like you don't have integrity. "Integrity" isn't some management buzz-word like "excellence". It's something that's very dear to any reasonably healthy human mind. Integrity is, of course, matching word to deed, doing what you said you will, and being truthful about what you have done. True, we all tell little white lies, but when something bothers you, it's wise to listen to that feeling, because it means that the lies aren't so white anymore. That's when it goes beyond how you present yourself to customers and vendors who ought to know the game. That's when begin to doubt that you are the person you thought you were. Unless you've got to pay your kid's chemotherapy bills or something like that, there's now way that's worth it. Every time you give into that, it's like you kill yourself a little bit. Keep it up and pretty soon your body will be walking around doing your master's bidding, but practically speaking nobody will be home. You'll be nothing more than another soul-less drone slaving away, wiling to endure any indignity for a paycheck.
This is a hell of an economy to say this, but when you're miserable because the people you work for are managing in the world of make-believe, maybe your purely monetary self-interest and your self-respect aren't in conflict after all. What would you rather say in a few years, "I did all kinds of stupid things for that idiotic company, then it crashed and burned and I spent years and thousands of dollars to make the problems go away," or "I thought what they were doing was wrong so I quit. I had a hell of a time making ends meet for a few months, but I did what I thought was right." Speaking as a former manager, all the biggest headaches I had were from people who didn't have the integrity to face up to a problem. The honest engineers working for me might not *tell* me a happy story, but they consistently delivered more than I thought they could when things got rough. The other guys simply made the problems worse. I have no patience for make-believe in management, because sooner or later it catches up from you and exacts a price you can't pay.
Let's see. Seafood that's not tasty and contains toxins. And you think that's going to keep Japanese foodies from eating it?
I've eaten (non-toxic) jellyfish. It's about as interesting as chewing on one of those rawhide bones they give to dogs. You wouldn't think there'd be any point to collecting, drying, shipping and lavishing culinary talent on such a thing. But of course, that's exactly what makes it a delicacy.
Your reasoning is impeccable, but your assumptions are not valid.
You are assuming that the speed recorded is calculated by the device software using two successive fixes, that the speed at the any fix represents the net distance divided by elapsed time since the prior fix. That's not correct.
Fix data, speed data and heading data are not delivered by the actual embedded GPS unit (as opposed to the device it is embedded in) as a single record. The GPS module sends each of these data whenever it has a new solution to equations it uses to calculated them from the satellite data. In any case, we don't know if the device even uses all the fix, heading and speed data record it receives when it chooses to assemble these data from the embedded GPS unit into a waypoint.
The only thing we can infer from the speed figures at any single point is that that is the best estimate the embedded GPS unit can make of its instantaneous speed at some point in the last few seconds.
We might compare the timestamps and positions of two adjacent fixes and calculate an average speed as you suggest. There'd be considerable uncertainty in this calculation though. For one thing the timestamps only have a one second resolution, so if the waypoints are take in under ten seconds apart, you'd have to slap some pretty wide error bars on your estimation. Secondly, if you plot a sequence of GPS points taken from a fixed location, they start by falling into an impressively small target area, like they're falling into a bucket. But if you watch long enough, they'll slew over to a new bucket position as satellites set or rise or are affected by local obstructions. If you happened to catch adjacent points as this was going on, your average speed and heading would be very inaccurate.
So yes, the judge made the right decision, but not for the reasons you state.
Embarrassment of being raised by natural science geeks #322: When people talk about "tits and ass", you think they are talking about the taxonomic family of passerine birds and the domesticated beast of burden Equus africanus asinus.
Embarrassment of being raised by natural science geeks #323: when embarrassment of being raised by natural science geeks #322 happens, you get more excited than the other people present.
Well, a hogshead is about 14,533 cubic inches, which makes a cube-root-hogshead about 24.403 inches -- very close to two feet. So a mile being 5280 feet, you can talk about last 2600 cube-root-hogshead problem.
Note how this also means you can replace the mess of units used for car mileage (miles and reciprocal gallons) with a single unit -- the hogshead, and a simple ratio exponent.
First of all, I think it's too bad somebody marked you flamebait because they disagree with you.
One argument I have heard from gay Christians is that the passages in the Bible only refer to the same kind of incontinence that is condemned when it is practiced by heterosexuals. The passages don't even consider the possibility of a loving homosexual relationship because there was no legal framework in which such a relationship could be expressed. The conditions for homosexual love then resemble what we would have if there were no institution of marriage for heterosexuals. Were that the case the most obvious and attention drawing instances of heterosexual love would be exploitative (e.g. prostitution, slavery etc.)
Many of the commandments are simply impossible to keep in any case if (a) you aren't wandering in the desert or (b) don't have a temple in Jerusalem.
In any case, the fundamentalist use the Bible as if the words are filled with a kind of holy radioactivity as opposed to meaning. It's the mark up the Bible with your highlighter thing. Sooner or later somebody is going to cut some letters out of the Bible, paste them onto a death threat note, then claim God told them to do it.
It's funny, but people seem to be tolerant of their own messes more readily than somebody else's, especially when it's their country. I'm not saying we didn't make a lot of things better, but if you want gratitude for coming in and fixing somebody else's country, man, the bar is high. Especially when you have all kinds of ethnic and religious fault lines running through the country, which pretty much means every time you scratch your ass, millions of people on one side win and millions on the other lose.
My problem with the war all along was that once the original WMD rationale didn't pan out, there wasn't any kind of strategic focus. I caught some flack from my fellow liberals when I said, well, doing such and so is probably good, or the surge will probably reduce violence. But the problem was never that there weren't worthwhile things to get done. It was that the "and then what happens" part seldom got thought through very far, and the "and then after that" part about never. We would invade "and then we'd be greeted as liberators." Ok and what happens after that? We'd rebuild X schools, yeah that's good. But then what happens after that? If we use much higher troop levels, we can control violence better (well, duh). And then what? Actually the surge was probably the most promising piece of strategy in the war, because there actually *were* a lot of things we wanted to be able to do in the breathing space that gave us. But we didn't know *how* to do them and most of them didn't happen.
And there was never a sequence of milestones that ended like this: "and then Iraq was able to manage its own internal and external security and most of our guys get to come home." Maybe it wasn't humanly possible to envision a series of milestones like that, between the Kurds and the Sunni and the Shia and the outside interference from Iran and Jihadi groups. Still, much of the strategic thinking in Washington seemed to amount to this: we were fighting there so we could get to keep on fighting there.
That's the problem with sending our good men and women -- and even the *bad* men and women too like those shits in the Abu Ghraib photos -- to die.. It's not that there aren't imaginable goals that are worth the cost, or that even helping the people of Iraq isn't worth the cost. It's that without a better strategy, the only certain payoff for the death of one of guys has been that we get to send *more* of our guys to be killed. That's a mindset that has for any practical purpose accepted defeat, but won't admit it for political reasons.
He's not attacking me, he's just doing what we all do sometimes: using a post as springboard to make his own point. I agree it's not inconsistent with mine.
Sure, but belt-and-suspenders is a good philosophy when it comes to something like this. When you take your laptop and plug it into the hotel outlet, you're trusting whoever wired that outlet to have done it to code. It almost always is, but the one time it isn't could be the one that damages the laptop or takes your life.
GFI and fuses are apples and oranges. Fuses and circuit breakers are current overload protection. Ground Fault Interruption protects against current moving in a path it was not intended to (e.g. between hot and ground rather than hot and neutral). There are plenty of ways to kill yourself with current moving between hot and neutral as intended. You can use more current on the cord than the circuit is rated for. You plug your 2A cord into a 20A circuit, and you can start a fire by drawing 10A and the GFI is happy as a clam. Your laptop is off and your frayed cord is drawing one amp because of the current that is currently melting the plastic in the cord. In that case not only is the GFI and circuit breaker happy to let you start that fire, the 2A fuse in your plug is too. You need arc-fault detection.
GFI units include a circuit breaker, so yes, there is redundancy. I'm assuming the UK codes don't let you wire buildings without circuit breakers, so it's not like the UK relies on plug fuses exclusively and the US on circuit breakers. If I am correct, then the UK has redundant current overload protection where the US does not. GFI handles ground faults, of course, but that's almost not relevant in many cases, e.g. non-grounded equipment which is supposed to have an electrically isolated case. Of course you'll want GFI if you're in the habit of using your laptop in the bathtub, but in most cases arc-fault interruption would be even more desirable.
Imagine a world where you have overload protection in your device (e.g. laptop), in the power cord plug, in the circuit breaker panel; the breaker panel also provides arc and ground fault protection. People would *still* die from electrical faults in that world, although many fewer. If you assume everything works perfectly, you can install all your protection at the breaker panel. In fact, in such a perfect world, all you'd need is current overload protection at the panel, and the odd GFI here and there to protect the people who use their laptop in the bathtub. But in the real world, you can't count on anything working, as advertised, including any of the fancy stuff you install in the panel.
In any case, the outlets in the US design wear out too quickly, in my opinion. It's a lot like the original USB design, which was fine for plugging your printer in and leaving it plugged in for the life of your system or your printer. The plug was not designed for lots of connect/disconnect cycles.
The point of the thought experiment isn't realism. It's priorities. If you prefer, imagine a choice between two doors: behind door A is the job of your dreams, behind door B is the woman of your dreams. There isn't a right answer.
Your point about "enough" is well taken. Being able to get "enough" of something is probably a sign of psychological health. But there are only 24 hours in a day; there's no limit to how much money you can accrue on a balance sheet.
I've been told that ever since I was in grade school. But it's not science. It's religion.
Animals self-evidently *do* control their behavior. They wouldn't need brains if they didn't. Squirrels don't eat every nut they pick up; they bury most of them. Now people will say that's *instinct*, but that's just a word we use without really examining what it *means*. "It's *instinct*," we say, as if that closes the case. We might as as well make a up a nonsense word like "bragtittle" and use it in place of "instinct" if we're going to think that way. What we call "instinct" ranges from things that aren't much more than reflex, all the way up to behaviors that are learned by animals from their parents and exist in variations that might almost be called "culture".
Humans differ from other animals in that we have an enormous brain capacity for modeling situations, imagining ourselves in those models, inductively drawing knowledge from both real and hypothetical situations, then drawing symbolic inferences from that knowledge.
What does that have to with the idea that "personal responsibility" has anything to do with whether a two year sentence is any better than a one year sentence? Almost nothing, because the very question is inane.
"Personal responsibility" is quite relevant where the value of restitution and reparation can be calculated. If you steal a thousand dollars, personal responsibility would mean giving it back, paying the victim for his trouble, and paying back society for the effort of making you do that. There may be certain reparation aspects involved in beatings, e.g. paying hospital bills, lost time, pain and suffering etc, but in the end there is no a priori way to say that six months in jail per person beaten is any worse or better than one year per person beaten.
I think punishments for such transgressions achieve a number of distinct ends:
(1) They modify the criminal's future behavior (reform). (2) They modify potential criminal's future behavior by making him an example (not very effective, in my opinion because most crimes are stupid and impulsive acts) (3) They remove the criminal from the community and eliminate additional crimes he might commit. (4) The suffering of the criminal gives us emotional satisfaction.
In addition to these desirable consequences, there are lots of undesirable ones with imprisonment as well: it costs us money, prisons become universities of crime, etc.
A rational punishment is one that would maximize the net benefits of the intended consequences over the costs of the unintended ones. So in the case of the "aggression gene", we could argue either way. We could say that the criminal will need more punishment to counteract his innate tendencies, so let's go longer. Or we could say that the prisoner is incorrigible. That leads to two possibilities: we throw away the key, or if the undesirables are too big on that, we might reduce or even dispense with prison altogether, supposing *calculation* showed that was the best option. But as I doubt anyone can really perform this calculation, it's anybody's guess as to whether one sentence or another is better. What we get is an altogether different calculation: the trade off between the societal cost of imprisonment and the political benefit of being "tough on crime". Since the cost is borne be society at large and the benefit reaped by politicians, it's not a very good deal for us. Personally, I don't care how "tough" you get on crime. I'd rather see efficient.
If I were philosopher king, I'd arrange things according to one simple idea: the probability of being caught is a greater deterrent than the magnitude of punishment. What is a greater influence on your driving speed, a sign saying speeding fines are $500, or a police car by the side of the road? What I'd do is make prisoners perform economically valuable work, and use the money to pay for crime prevention. They would get out of prison literally when their debt to society was paid.
I will relay a story my scoutmaster told me about a troop of young inner city scouts he led, many, many years ago. They'd never been out of the city, so he took them camping all he could.
One time he took them to a boy scout camp that happened to be next to a girl scout camp. He should have known that would be trouble, because there was one scout who used to go up to every girl he met, and say the same thing: "You wanna fuck?" So the scoutmaster walks into camp, and all the guys are teasing Kid Wannafuck about how his dick is going to shrivel up and fall off, and he realizes his mistake. So he sits them all down and has a long talk about STDs, pregnancy, birth control and condoms, because *these* kids parents aren't going to bother doing it.
One of the many morals of this story is that sometimes persistence counts for more than technique. It really does connect to the whole 419 scam; this kid knew that he had almost no chance with any particular girl, but if he asked *enough* of them sooner or later he'd get lucky.
Getting back to the value of wealth as an indicator of intelligence, I won't argue that intelligence has no instrumental value in becoming wealthy. Obviously it does. But priorities also matter. I know artists -- not quite starving, but not rolling in dough either. If they put the energy and creativity they lavish on art into making money, they'd probably do pretty well. The one thing I've noticed about people who've made fortunes in their lifetimes (sometimes made and lost several) is that they're driven to perform wealth-generating activities. It may be that wealth is the end goal of those activities, or it may be that wealth is a by-product. Personally, I think the people who become wealthy as a by-product seem much happier than people who pursue wealth as its own end. It appears to me there's something puny and pinched in the character of people who are obsessed with wealth as its own end. The difference between wealth and, say, sex is that you can never get enough wealth. But if you are persistent enough in pursuing either of them, sooner or later you'll get some.
I like to think of this thought experiment. Suppose you are a young unattached man with modest prospects, and you have a bit of good fortune above your station: you are about to interview for a job that could mean fame and wealth. As you eat lunch, you strike up this conversation with this amazing woman; she's beautiful, smart and interesting, and as you chat you realize that you're starting to get somewhere with her. You are not quite to the exchange of telephone numbers stage, when you realize for your horror you're about to be late for your interview. You have to leave RIGHT NOW, you don't even have time to say a decent goodbye. What do you go for, the job or the woman?
Well, I can tell you as an older guy who's had both love and money slip through my fingers (then return later), I wouldn't have a microsecond's hesitation. I'd go for the woman. Money is just a proxy for the experiences you can buy with it. And some experiences you just can't buy.
Well, I'd bet a really good manager probably *could*, because part of being a good manager is knowing your limitations. And the skills needed to get the most out of people working for you are valuable and transferrable.
The thing is, there are lots of *lucky* managers out there who think they're skilled.
Think of the science museum display with the thousands of balls and pegs that gradually builds a normal distribution as the balls drop. That ball in the far right bin isn't really any smarter than the ones in the middle. I'm not saying there aren't good managers out there. I'm saying there *are* lucky ones.
OK, I'm an engineer, but I've had the *rudiments* of a liberal education, and *I* can see that the idea that zombies represent fear of technology *per se* is weak.
No.
What zombies represent are fear of the economic and cultural changes which are facilitated by technology. Depersonalization. How far is it from a cubical drone to a zombie? Pretty much add the taste for human brain and you're there. Take something like a MacDonald's restaurant -- not to pick on them, but all franchises are the same. A franchise is a complicated economic relationship in which the individual store, although possibly independently owned, has everything defined by corporate HQ (in this case MacDonald's HQ). The franchisee has a detailed manual which specifies how to *everything*, how to respond to any kind of situation that might arise. In fact, it doesn't just *say* how. It *mandates*. It is a big collection of algorithms. And every one of those algorithms is executed by *people*, not based on their own judgment, but triggered by the conditions specified in the manual.
So what zombies represent is not a fear of technology, but a fear of *becoming* technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't be having this argument?
Really?
I don't think we have enough evidence to point to the probability of intelligent life existing anywhere else. I personally believe there is, but that is purely because the notion appeals to me. We don't know enough to speak about this question except in the most hand-waving fashion.
But I can think of two really good reasons for them to have this argument. First, it forces the people having this argument to confront the meaning of their beliefs. How many people ever bother to do that, even if they're right (I'm speaking to *you* whoever you are reading this)? There are three general classes of views consistent with some kind of belief in the Bible that I can think of.
1) The Bible is history, and other intelligent life may have fallen as humanity did in the Garden, but we may meet aliens living in a state of grace.
2) The Bible is history, but other intelligent life fell with humanity through some unexplained mechanism. Note that in this formulation Adam and Eve wouldn't necessarily be of the human species, if we interpret "mankind" to be "rational creatures".
3) The Bible is mythology. In this view, the myth of the Garden speaks to us about the nature of being a rational being. It was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that exiled us from our animal state, therefore any creature capable of distinguishing good and evil is fallen and needs redemption.
Now here is the second reason I can think of for having this argument: we are going to meet non-human intelligent beings very soon. We'll have created them. Are they persons? Can we own an intelligent computer program, or a machine on which an intelligent program runs? Can the ethics we have developed over the centuries apply to them at all? That's not a scientific question, although scientific opinion has a bearing on this (e.g. we have evidence now that great apes are self-aware in ways that few animals other than humans are).
Discussing the nature of personhood in the context of a *naturally occurring* entity would be an important intermediate case. It would allow us to dispense with the distraction that "we made these things out of nuts and bolts and wire so it belongs to us." Of course, that never stopped people from enslaving indigenous human populations they ran across, but hopefully most of us are beyond that now.
One thing that these discussions need is a usable definition of "supernatural".
As you point out "outside our current understanding" is not tantamount to "supernatural". Outside the practical limits of our understanding (e.g. questions whose answers are not verifiable by an efficient algorithm) is not supernatural either. Questions that are not decidable at all in a finite amount of time are not supernatural.
C.S. Lewis, the fantasy author and Christian apologist, points out that *randomness* is not supernatural either; nor is indeterminacy in a quantum mechanics sense. One might characterize his position as agreeing with Einstein that God does not play dice, but recognizing that God allows dice to be played. Lewis proposes a definition of supernatural that amounts to this: a supernatural event is the result of conscious intent. When God creates a "miracle", he wills a new set of conditions into existence. One must be very careful in this formulation not draw the boundaries of "supernatural" to broadly, because the consequences of the supernatural event proceed by completely natural means. So the Virgin Birth is not supernatural, although the Immaculate Conception *was*. Supernatural events, in his view, are "naturalized" as soon as they occur, like immigrants to a country becoming citizens.
Now, here's a subtle point about this definition: according to it, all conscious human acts are supernatural. If I sneeze, it is not a supernatural event, but if I sock you in the mouth, it is, at least according to this definition.
Lewis doesn't miss this point. In fact, that's exactly what he wants. The strategy of his argument is to focus 'rationalists' on the nature of human reason itself. Whether you want to use his definition of "supernatural" or not, his opinion is that what we regard as the salient characteristics of God are those that we attribute to humans as rational animals. This is what he would regard as the true meaning of "being created in God's image", and he gives us examples in his fiction of non-human persons with equal claim to humans to "being created in God's image".
This strategy is philosophically dicey. He wants to set reason up as something that in a way exists independently of matter. 1 + 1 = 2, regardless of what kind of brain comes up with it. Now if you want to say "no causality exists independent of matter", he'll say, "Well, if that's the case, somebody who things 1 + 1 = 3 has just as much justification as you do in believing 1 + 1 = 2. You both believe your opinions for the same reason: the action of external events on your brain. You can't claim that reason makes you hold your opinion without admitting that reason affects matter, and reason is not material."
and power-efficienct processors."
Given the inspiration for the algorithm, why would this be so surprising?
The Myans, like most societies, saw time as cyclical. It makes sense. The sun moves in a 24 hour pattern, and the fixed starts in a roughly 365.25 day pattern. Why not eternity? The idea of a linear time with an end was an innovation of Christian thought.
That's like saying if you intend to stick your fingers in the meat grinder, you ought to keep something you can use as a tourniquet handy. It's true, in a completely useless way.
These guys were helping with the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. The reason that Ponzi schemes are illegal is that *they are destined to collapse*. When you're helping run the biggest one ever, it's going to be the biggest crash and burn ever. Evading the consequences means moving as much cash as you can overseas, planning to change your identity, and getting the hell out of Dodge a *long* time before you think you might need to. And that's assuming you don't trip the money laundering detectors, which you certainly will.
Madoff and these guys for a very, very brief time had a model nobody else had, and it depended on computation to do things faster than anybody else had ever tried to. But it didn't take long for other people to copy the general idea, Instead of patting themselves on the back for being so clever, pocketing the huge profits they made, then moving on to the next thing, they decided to *pretend* their advantage could go on forever. You have to think they were mentally ill on some level, because they *had* to have known they'd be caught. Somehow they must have had a need that went deeper than money, a need to be regarded as brilliant beyond ordinary mortals, if only for a limited time.
"The submarines were meant to threaten the United States directly, but none of the attacks occurred because the subs were developed too late in the war, and American intelligence was too good."
Being an engineer, it strikes me that "being too late in the war" and "the enemy intelligence was too good" are not likely to be unrelated facts. It sounds like a classic case of coming up with a brilliant piece of engineering to fix a hopeless situation you should never have been in.
So -- the boss is a crook. Not on the level of a literal pirate, of course, but he's a sneak, the kind of liar who thinks pretending not to see something in plain sight means denying it was there isn't a lie.
What in the world makes you think he isn't planning to pin this on you?
OK, we all know that won't get him out of it, but he's just demonstrated that he isn't exactly the world's sharpest thinker. People like that have a way of being just clever enough to make your life hell. And "anonymous" wants to know how to *fix* this situation? It's like listening to a woman tell you all the iron clad proof that her husband is cheating on her, then have her ask whether you think he might be seeing someone else. The fact that she has to ask tells you everything you need to know.
The number one cause of *serious* unhappiness at work, in my experience, is being forced to do something makes you feel like you don't have integrity. "Integrity" isn't some management buzz-word like "excellence". It's something that's very dear to any reasonably healthy human mind. Integrity is, of course, matching word to deed, doing what you said you will, and being truthful about what you have done. True, we all tell little white lies, but when something bothers you, it's wise to listen to that feeling, because it means that the lies aren't so white anymore. That's when it goes beyond how you present yourself to customers and vendors who ought to know the game. That's when begin to doubt that you are the person you thought you were. Unless you've got to pay your kid's chemotherapy bills or something like that, there's now way that's worth it. Every time you give into that, it's like you kill yourself a little bit. Keep it up and pretty soon your body will be walking around doing your master's bidding, but practically speaking nobody will be home. You'll be nothing more than another soul-less drone slaving away, wiling to endure any indignity for a paycheck.
This is a hell of an economy to say this, but when you're miserable because the people you work for are managing in the world of make-believe, maybe your purely monetary self-interest and your self-respect aren't in conflict after all. What would you rather say in a few years, "I did all kinds of stupid things for that idiotic company, then it crashed and burned and I spent years and thousands of dollars to make the problems go away," or "I thought what they were doing was wrong so I quit. I had a hell of a time making ends meet for a few months, but I did what I thought was right." Speaking as a former manager, all the biggest headaches I had were from people who didn't have the integrity to face up to a problem. The honest engineers working for me might not *tell* me a happy story, but they consistently delivered more than I thought they could when things got rough. The other guys simply made the problems worse. I have no patience for make-believe in management, because sooner or later it catches up from you and exacts a price you can't pay.
Let's see. Seafood that's not tasty and contains toxins. And you think that's going to keep Japanese foodies from eating it?
I've eaten (non-toxic) jellyfish. It's about as interesting as chewing on one of those rawhide bones they give to dogs. You wouldn't think there'd be any point to collecting, drying, shipping and lavishing culinary talent on such a thing. But of course, that's exactly what makes it a delicacy.
Your reasoning is impeccable, but your assumptions are not valid.
You are assuming that the speed recorded is calculated by the device software using two successive fixes, that the speed at the any fix represents the net distance divided by elapsed time since the prior fix. That's not correct.
Fix data, speed data and heading data are not delivered by the actual embedded GPS unit (as opposed to the device it is embedded in) as a single record. The GPS module sends each of these data whenever it has a new solution to equations it uses to calculated them from the satellite data. In any case, we don't know if the device even uses all the fix, heading and speed data record it receives when it chooses to assemble these data from the embedded GPS unit into a waypoint.
The only thing we can infer from the speed figures at any single point is that that is the best estimate the embedded GPS unit can make of its instantaneous speed at some point in the last few seconds.
We might compare the timestamps and positions of two adjacent fixes and calculate an average speed as you suggest. There'd be considerable uncertainty in this calculation though. For one thing the timestamps only have a one second resolution, so if the waypoints are take in under ten seconds apart, you'd have to slap some pretty wide error bars on your estimation. Secondly, if you plot a sequence of GPS points taken from a fixed location, they start by falling into an impressively small target area, like they're falling into a bucket. But if you watch long enough, they'll slew over to a new bucket position as satellites set or rise or are affected by local obstructions. If you happened to catch adjacent points as this was going on, your average speed and heading would be very inaccurate.
So yes, the judge made the right decision, but not for the reasons you state.
... our National Data wouldn't be walking around without pants.
You believe that?
You must be gullible.
Embarrassment of being raised by natural science geeks #322: When people talk about "tits and ass", you think they are talking about the taxonomic family of passerine birds and the domesticated beast of burden Equus africanus asinus.
Embarrassment of being raised by natural science geeks #323: when embarrassment of being raised by natural science geeks #322 happens, you get more excited than the other people present.
Well, a hogshead is about 14,533 cubic inches, which makes a cube-root-hogshead about 24.403 inches -- very close to two feet.
So a mile being 5280 feet, you can talk about last 2600 cube-root-hogshead problem.
Note how this also means you can replace the mess of units used for car mileage (miles and reciprocal gallons) with a single unit -- the hogshead, and a simple ratio exponent.
First of all, I think it's too bad somebody marked you flamebait because they disagree with you.
One argument I have heard from gay Christians is that the passages in the Bible only refer to the same kind of incontinence that is condemned when it is practiced by heterosexuals. The passages don't even consider the possibility of a loving homosexual relationship because there was no legal framework in which such a relationship could be expressed. The conditions for homosexual love then resemble what we would have if there were no institution of marriage for heterosexuals. Were that the case the most obvious and attention drawing instances of heterosexual love would be exploitative (e.g. prostitution, slavery etc.)
Many of the commandments are simply impossible to keep in any case if (a) you aren't wandering in the desert or (b) don't have a temple in Jerusalem.
In any case, the fundamentalist use the Bible as if the words are filled with a kind of holy radioactivity as opposed to meaning. It's the mark up the Bible with your highlighter thing. Sooner or later somebody is going to cut some letters out of the Bible, paste them onto a death threat note, then claim God told them to do it.
It's funny, but people seem to be tolerant of their own messes more readily than somebody else's, especially when it's their country. I'm not saying we didn't make a lot of things better, but if you want gratitude for coming in and fixing somebody else's country, man, the bar is high. Especially when you have all kinds of ethnic and religious fault lines running through the country, which pretty much means every time you scratch your ass, millions of people on one side win and millions on the other lose.
My problem with the war all along was that once the original WMD rationale didn't pan out, there wasn't any kind of strategic focus. I caught some flack from my fellow liberals when I said, well, doing such and so is probably good, or the surge will probably reduce violence. But the problem was never that there weren't worthwhile things to get done. It was that the "and then what happens" part seldom got thought through very far, and the "and then after that" part about never. We would invade "and then we'd be greeted as liberators." Ok and what happens after that? We'd rebuild X schools, yeah that's good. But then what happens after that? If we use much higher troop levels, we can control violence better (well, duh). And then what? Actually the surge was probably the most promising piece of strategy in the war, because there actually *were* a lot of things we wanted to be able to do in the breathing space that gave us. But we didn't know *how* to do them and most of them didn't happen.
And there was never a sequence of milestones that ended like this: "and then Iraq was able to manage its own internal and external security and most of our guys get to come home." Maybe it wasn't humanly possible to envision a series of milestones like that, between the Kurds and the Sunni and the Shia and the outside interference from Iran and Jihadi groups. Still, much of the strategic thinking in Washington seemed to amount to this: we were fighting there so we could get to keep on fighting there.
That's the problem with sending our good men and women -- and even the *bad* men and women too like those shits in the Abu Ghraib photos -- to die.. It's not that there aren't imaginable goals that are worth the cost, or that even helping the people of Iraq isn't worth the cost. It's that without a better strategy, the only certain payoff for the death of one of guys has been that we get to send *more* of our guys to be killed. That's a mindset that has for any practical purpose accepted defeat, but won't admit it for political reasons.
He's not attacking me, he's just doing what we all do sometimes: using a post as springboard to make his own point. I agree it's not inconsistent with mine.
You don't understand. This means kdawson is moving backwards through time.
Come to think of it, that explains a lot.
Sure, but belt-and-suspenders is a good philosophy when it comes to something like this. When you take your laptop and plug it into the hotel outlet, you're trusting whoever wired that outlet to have done it to code. It almost always is, but the one time it isn't could be the one that damages the laptop or takes your life.
GFI and fuses are apples and oranges. Fuses and circuit breakers are current overload protection. Ground Fault Interruption protects against current moving in a path it was not intended to (e.g. between hot and ground rather than hot and neutral). There are plenty of ways to kill yourself with current moving between hot and neutral as intended. You can use more current on the cord than the circuit is rated for. You plug your 2A cord into a 20A circuit, and you can start a fire by drawing 10A and the GFI is happy as a clam. Your laptop is off and your frayed cord is drawing one amp because of the current that is currently melting the plastic in the cord. In that case not only is the GFI and circuit breaker happy to let you start that fire, the 2A fuse in your plug is too. You need arc-fault detection.
GFI units include a circuit breaker, so yes, there is redundancy. I'm assuming the UK codes don't let you wire buildings without circuit breakers, so it's not like the UK relies on plug fuses exclusively and the US on circuit breakers. If I am correct, then the UK has redundant current overload protection where the US does not. GFI handles ground faults, of course, but that's almost not relevant in many cases, e.g. non-grounded equipment which is supposed to have an electrically isolated case. Of course you'll want GFI if you're in the habit of using your laptop in the bathtub, but in most cases arc-fault interruption would be even more desirable.
Imagine a world where you have overload protection in your device (e.g. laptop), in the power cord plug, in the circuit breaker panel; the breaker panel also provides arc and ground fault protection. People would *still* die from electrical faults in that world, although many fewer. If you assume everything works perfectly, you can install all your protection at the breaker panel. In fact, in such a perfect world, all you'd need is current overload protection at the panel, and the odd GFI here and there to protect the people who use their laptop in the bathtub. But in the real world, you can't count on anything working, as advertised, including any of the fancy stuff you install in the panel.
In any case, the outlets in the US design wear out too quickly, in my opinion. It's a lot like the original USB design, which was fine for plugging your printer in and leaving it plugged in for the life of your system or your printer. The plug was not designed for lots of connect/disconnect cycles.
The point of the thought experiment isn't realism. It's priorities. If you prefer, imagine a choice between two doors: behind door A is the job of your dreams, behind door B is the woman of your dreams. There isn't a right answer.
Your point about "enough" is well taken. Being able to get "enough" of something is probably a sign of psychological health. But there are only 24 hours in a day; there's no limit to how much money you can accrue on a balance sheet.
I've been told that ever since I was in grade school. But it's not science. It's religion.
Animals self-evidently *do* control their behavior. They wouldn't need brains if they didn't. Squirrels don't eat every nut they pick up; they bury most of them. Now people will say that's *instinct*, but that's just a word we use without really examining what it *means*. "It's *instinct*," we say, as if that closes the case. We might as as well make a up a nonsense word like "bragtittle" and use it in place of "instinct" if we're going to think that way. What we call "instinct" ranges from things that aren't much more than reflex, all the way up to behaviors that are learned by animals from their parents and exist in variations that might almost be called "culture".
Humans differ from other animals in that we have an enormous brain capacity for modeling situations, imagining ourselves in those models, inductively drawing knowledge from both real and hypothetical situations, then drawing symbolic inferences from that knowledge.
What does that have to with the idea that "personal responsibility" has anything to do with whether a two year sentence is any better than a one year sentence? Almost nothing, because the very question is inane.
"Personal responsibility" is quite relevant where the value of restitution and reparation can be calculated. If you steal a thousand dollars, personal responsibility would mean giving it back, paying the victim for his trouble, and paying back society for the effort of making you do that. There may be certain reparation aspects involved in beatings, e.g. paying hospital bills, lost time, pain and suffering etc, but in the end there is no a priori way to say that six months in jail per person beaten is any worse or better than one year per person beaten.
I think punishments for such transgressions achieve a number of distinct ends:
(1) They modify the criminal's future behavior (reform).
(2) They modify potential criminal's future behavior by making him an example (not very effective, in my opinion because most crimes are stupid and impulsive acts)
(3) They remove the criminal from the community and eliminate additional crimes he might commit.
(4) The suffering of the criminal gives us emotional satisfaction.
In addition to these desirable consequences, there are lots of undesirable ones with imprisonment as well: it costs us money, prisons become universities of crime, etc.
A rational punishment is one that would maximize the net benefits of the intended consequences over the costs of the unintended ones. So in the case of the "aggression gene", we could argue either way. We could say that the criminal will need more punishment to counteract his innate tendencies, so let's go longer. Or we could say that the prisoner is incorrigible. That leads to two possibilities: we throw away the key, or if the undesirables are too big on that, we might reduce or even dispense with prison altogether, supposing *calculation* showed that was the best option. But as I doubt anyone can really perform this calculation, it's anybody's guess as to whether one sentence or another is better. What we get is an altogether different calculation: the trade off between the societal cost of imprisonment and the political benefit of being "tough on crime". Since the cost is borne be society at large and the benefit reaped by politicians, it's not a very good deal for us. Personally, I don't care how "tough" you get on crime. I'd rather see efficient.
If I were philosopher king, I'd arrange things according to one simple idea: the probability of being caught is a greater deterrent than the magnitude of punishment. What is a greater influence on your driving speed, a sign saying speeding fines are $500, or a police car by the side of the road? What I'd do is make prisoners perform economically valuable work, and use the money to pay for crime prevention. They would get out of prison literally when their debt to society was paid.
I will relay a story my scoutmaster told me about a troop of young inner city scouts he led, many, many years ago. They'd never been out of the city, so he took them camping all he could.
One time he took them to a boy scout camp that happened to be next to a girl scout camp. He should have known that would be trouble, because there was one scout who used to go up to every girl he met, and say the same thing: "You wanna fuck?" So the scoutmaster walks into camp, and all the guys are teasing Kid Wannafuck about how his dick is going to shrivel up and fall off, and he realizes his mistake. So he sits them all down and has a long talk about STDs, pregnancy, birth control and condoms, because *these* kids parents aren't going to bother doing it.
One of the many morals of this story is that sometimes persistence counts for more than technique. It really does connect to the whole 419 scam; this kid knew that he had almost no chance with any particular girl, but if he asked *enough* of them sooner or later he'd get lucky.
Getting back to the value of wealth as an indicator of intelligence, I won't argue that intelligence has no instrumental value in becoming wealthy. Obviously it does. But priorities also matter. I know artists -- not quite starving, but not rolling in dough either. If they put the energy and creativity they lavish on art into making money, they'd probably do pretty well. The one thing I've noticed about people who've made fortunes in their lifetimes (sometimes made and lost several) is that they're driven to perform wealth-generating activities. It may be that wealth is the end goal of those activities, or it may be that wealth is a by-product. Personally, I think the people who become wealthy as a by-product seem much happier than people who pursue wealth as its own end. It appears to me there's something puny and pinched in the character of people who are obsessed with wealth as its own end. The difference between wealth and, say, sex is that you can never get enough wealth. But if you are persistent enough in pursuing either of them, sooner or later you'll get some.
I like to think of this thought experiment. Suppose you are a young unattached man with modest prospects, and you have a bit of good fortune above your station: you are about to interview for a job that could mean fame and wealth. As you eat lunch, you strike up this conversation with this amazing woman; she's beautiful, smart and interesting, and as you chat you realize that you're starting to get somewhere with her. You are not quite to the exchange of telephone numbers stage, when you realize for your horror you're about to be late for your interview. You have to leave RIGHT NOW, you don't even have time to say a decent goodbye. What do you go for, the job or the woman?
Well, I can tell you as an older guy who's had both love and money slip through my fingers (then return later), I wouldn't have a microsecond's hesitation. I'd go for the woman. Money is just a proxy for the experiences you can buy with it. And some experiences you just can't buy.
Well, I'd bet a really good manager probably *could*, because part of being a good manager is knowing your limitations. And the skills needed to get the most out of people working for you are valuable and transferrable.
The thing is, there are lots of *lucky* managers out there who think they're skilled.
Think of the science museum display with the thousands of balls and pegs that gradually builds a normal distribution as the balls drop. That ball in the far right bin isn't really any smarter than the ones in the middle. I'm not saying there aren't good managers out there. I'm saying there *are* lucky ones.
How dare you spoil my theory with facts! Blast you.
OK, I'm an engineer, but I've had the *rudiments* of a liberal education, and *I* can see that the idea that zombies represent fear of technology *per se* is weak.
No.
What zombies represent are fear of the economic and cultural changes which are facilitated by technology. Depersonalization. How far is it from a cubical drone to a zombie? Pretty much add the taste for human brain and you're there. Take something like a MacDonald's restaurant -- not to pick on them, but all franchises are the same. A franchise is a complicated economic relationship in which the individual store, although possibly independently owned, has everything defined by corporate HQ (in this case MacDonald's HQ). The franchisee has a detailed manual which specifies how to *everything*, how to respond to any kind of situation that might arise. In fact, it doesn't just *say* how. It *mandates*. It is a big collection of algorithms. And every one of those algorithms is executed by *people*, not based on their own judgment, but triggered by the conditions specified in the manual.
So what zombies represent is not a fear of technology, but a fear of *becoming* technology.