Here's the thing: everything you've ever heard about feminists is true... of some feminist somewhere. It's also false. Just like everything you've ever heard about Trump voters is true... of some Trump voter somewhere. It's also false.
Some mens-rights advocates have, in response to the whole sexual harassment thing, pointed out that women sometimes sexually harass men too. They were roundly mocked by feminists, but it turns out those mens-rights types have a surprising ally in their point of view: other feminists. The jargon those feminists use might sound foreign (essentialism) but they're making exactly the same point: being a woman shouldn't automatically make you a victim and being a man shouldn't automatically make you a victimizer.
That's because any large group of people (like "all men" or "all women") is bound to have people who aren't very much alike. That's even true of people who identify with some kind of ideological label like "conservative" or "environmentalist". If there's enough of them it's always easy to cherry pick viewpoints to suit your purpose.
People across the political spectrum love them their stereotypes and straw men, because it makes it easy to feel like you're right all the time. But this violates the most basic principle of civilized behavior: the golden rule. That's not how you want your views to be treated.
Well the challenge was to show any proof that busloads of people were showing up at the polls to vote as dead people -- something which on the face of it is ridiculous, because you'd have to have enough dead voters on the rolls to justify renting a bus, and then you'd have to keep the whole conspiracy secret.
But I'll take this one, which in fact was investigated. It ended in six counts of ballot fraud, all committed by the same person forging her deceased parents' signatures on mail-in ballots.
The point isn't that voter fraud doesn't happen. But the idea that it's what causes hours long waits at minority polling stations is a fantasy.
from Iran, this would be a great time to drive a bargain.
In general you don't want to bargain with a regime that is too secure to feel the need to compromise. But it's a mistake to think you want to deal with a weak, insecure regime. Such a regime can't afford to be seen as compromising. What you want is someone who desperately needs a win, even a small one.
This is not something new that's been trotted out for Trump. I remember people talking about "the Nixon administration", and I'm sure it goes back further than that.
It's customary to say the "the X administration" to avoid (a) personifying the entire country or (b) implying that the legislative branch necessarily supports whatever X is saying or doing.
Now you're telling me the impact is less than half a degree ON AVERAGE over a year? What disaster exactly do we have coming from all of this??
Here's an interesting exercise I worked out last year.
Take some amount of temperature change -- say half a degree. Work out how much energy per liter that is -- there are some HVAC sites with the information you need. You'll have to make some assumptions about the humidity and air pressure, which means that your results are likely going to be off by an order of magnitude, but that's fine for our purposes.
Now here's the good bit: multiply the change in energy per liter by the number liters in the troposphere. The answer you'll get is a half a degree equals a shit-ton of energy. As in it makes humanity's entire nuclear arsenal look like a damp squib.
Here's the thing: which scale is the ideal one for thinking about this in? The one liter scale or the troposphere-wide scale? The answer is neither. It's the effect of continent-wide pressure and temperature gradients we need to be worrying about. Even a half degree's worth of thermal energy/liter can on the meso-scale alter patterns of prevailing winds and precipitation, and those are very big things indeed.
The argument runs like this: If you're an armchair climatologist you don't know anything so your views are worthless. If you are an actual climatologist you have a professional interest in promoting climate change, so your views are worthless.
Alright, name one documented instance where a busload of dead voters cast fraudulent votes.
For that matter if this is some kind of voter conspiracy, why wait for the last second? Poll workers are not detectives, they don't exercise judgment; they simply go by their voter registration lists. Either you're on the list and can vote, or you've been purged and have to cast a provisional ballot. Showing up with a mob of impersonating buddies at the last minute doesn't affect that one way or the other.
The reason people show up at the end of the day is they have jobs.
I'm convinced that of the great advantages of voting machines is that you can manipulate an election without rigging the count. You just rig the wait times.
I've been voting for almost 40 years now on optically scanned paper ballots, and I have never had to wait more than five minutes, even in the most hotly contested elections they just throw up another row of cheap, pop-up voting booths. And there's never any machine glitches to deal with either.
When I read about places where people wait for hours to vote, I wonder how it is possible to spend so much money on computerizing a process, only to make it much, much slower and more cumbersome -- unless it was somehow intentional.
It says they beached themselves and then "essentially" "froze to death" when they were out of the water. In fact the article is clear that the sharks didn't literally freeze in the water; they are believed to have beached themselves after suffering cold shock in 6F water.
In any case "freeze to death" is an idiom. When someone "freezes to death" they don't have their tissues freeze, then die. It's the other way around.
Look, you don't have to be an expert to have an opinion on this. The problem is people not having their facts straight, either about what the science says, what the science said before this is happening... they don't even seem to know what is going on right now. It's cold outside their door, therefore they seem to think the whole world is cold.
What missing heat? Practically the entire Northern Hemisphere has enjoyed unusually mild temperatures this week, except for North America and Greenland.
In the 1970s, the theory successfully predicted a reversal of a three decade aerosol-driven cooling tend before it happened. That was the result of sufficient computing power becoming available to run detailed models, which successfully excluded the continuation of cooling.
It's also worth noting that by the mid 90s scientists were predicting that "global warming" would also include extreme cold weather events as well as heat waves -- thus the preference for the term "climate change".
Finally, if you actually look at global temperature anomaly map, it's quite evident that the cold snap we're in is a highly localized phenomenon. Almost the ENTIRE PLANET is ANOMALOUSLY HOT, except for parts of North America and Greenland.
It's easy to say a theory has no consistent predictions when you use a straw man.
The convention was called by the London 6 Power Conference. The attendees were reluctant to set up a West German constitution because it prejudiced German reunification, but had no choice. Their result was subject to the approval of the Trizone occupying powers. So, yeah. The Americans, Brits, and French were OK with a de-nazification friendly constitution.
Of course they had a choice. You could argue that some people were naive about Nazi intentions in 1938, but nobody was caught by surprise 1941. Hitler had made his intentions clear all the way back in 1925 when he published Mein Kampf. And as it became more undeniably obvious he was going to follow through his plans, the option was always there to step back, to reduce your company's involvement. And many companies no doubt did. But others doubled down as long as there was a quick buck to be made.
Those companies had a choice. The men running those companies had a choice too. Even when there was no more choice, taking the path that led there had been a choice. After the war men like Alfred P Sloan and Henry Ford pretended they'd been ill-used by the Nazis, but it was their actions to make that possible, and they were well-paid for those actions. They transferred resources and technology to the Nazis even after it was clear that those things were going to be used against American soldiers. Ford even secretly kept it up after war had been formally declared and thousands of Americans were being killed.
Well, they have to work within the boundaries of a Constitution that was written by the victorious allies in WW2 to ensure the thorough de-Nazification of the country which had been thoroughly under the Nazi party's thumb for sixteen years.
Yes, it's important to confirm that what appears to be multiple sources are actually multiple independent sources. And parents should try to reinforce that. But they have another, more important role, which is laying the groundwork for their children to become critical thinkers. And the single most important lesson that is squarely in the parental wheelhouse is emotional restraint. No you don't hit Johnny because you think he stole your toy, and you don't jump to the conclusion that he stole your toy before you check to see whether you misplaced it.
Once you believe something because of the way it makes you feel, all the machinery of critical thinking is critically undermined; the output of your reasoning process is corrupted by bad input data.
Nobody naturally thinks the way you learned to think studying geometry; that's a highly unnatural although very useful skill. People naturally think in more of a Bayesian fashion, weighing the credibility of new evidence in light of their prior beliefs. So what parents need to do is to teach their kids is to believe as little as they can, and to be ruthlessly unsentimental about whatever they do choose the believe in.
What most parents, and schools, do is the exact opposite. They indoctrinate children in habits of knee-jerk sentimentality and pride. History is probably the worst subject in this regard. Children are taught to believe in pure heroes and villains, so that as adults they can only visualize their political leaders as uncomplicated robots.
It's not that science is too hard for the precious little ones, it's that it's too expensive and controversial for their parents.
Yes, science can be hard, but it rewards effort. But you know what's hard but not rewarding? Sitting through an overcrowded biology class taught by someone who barely knows the subject, or worse, thinks Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs.
Because of the unique way we do education in this country, the quality of science education you get varies from world class to third world depending on which state you live in, and for states at the bottom which town you live in. In fact the list of the best high schools in the country are dominated by states ranked roughly in the second quartile from the bottom.
At least not in the book. In the book he's a gifted young student who starts down the road of science but is corrupted by his juvenile fascination with the occult.
You can see that Frankenstein was no scientist by the one thing that was never present in any of his plans: publication. Because that's really the defining characteristic of what a scientist is: he is someone who submits his work for others to critique and build upon. Science is about expanding humanity's understanding. Frankenstein was something different. Here is what he himself says:
I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.
So what Frankenstein wanted to be was something more like a wizard: not someone who advances knowledge through sharing, but someone whose possession of ancient and secret knowledge confers power on himself. And while he turns from studying occult books to science in his school career, he never stops thinking like or acting like an occultist.
I don't think that the novel is a cautionary tale about science; I think i'ts really a cautionary tale about romanticism. Frankenstein is pretty much undeniably a literary portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a man she was madly in love with for his prodigious charisma and intellect but could be cold and heartless toward people who weren't useful to him in his self-aggrandizement.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for instance?
Here's the thing: everything you've ever heard about feminists is true... of some feminist somewhere. It's also false. Just like everything you've ever heard about Trump voters is true ... of some Trump voter somewhere. It's also false.
Some mens-rights advocates have, in response to the whole sexual harassment thing, pointed out that women sometimes sexually harass men too. They were roundly mocked by feminists, but it turns out those mens-rights types have a surprising ally in their point of view: other feminists. The jargon those feminists use might sound foreign (essentialism) but they're making exactly the same point: being a woman shouldn't automatically make you a victim and being a man shouldn't automatically make you a victimizer.
That's because any large group of people (like "all men" or "all women") is bound to have people who aren't very much alike. That's even true of people who identify with some kind of ideological label like "conservative" or "environmentalist". If there's enough of them it's always easy to cherry pick viewpoints to suit your purpose.
People across the political spectrum love them their stereotypes and straw men, because it makes it easy to feel like you're right all the time. But this violates the most basic principle of civilized behavior: the golden rule. That's not how you want your views to be treated.
Well, you're both off roughly by an order of magnitude.
4 deaths/sec * 60 sec/minute * 60 min/hr * 24 hr/day * 365.25 day/yr --> 126,230,400 deaths/yr.
The actual figure is 2,473,018 deaths/year (in 2008) which means the poster probably meant to say about 4 deaths/minute:
2,473,018 deaths/year / 365.25 days/year / 24 hours/day / 60 minutes/hour --> 4.7 deaths/minute
Well the challenge was to show any proof that busloads of people were showing up at the polls to vote as dead people -- something which on the face of it is ridiculous, because you'd have to have enough dead voters on the rolls to justify renting a bus, and then you'd have to keep the whole conspiracy secret.
But I'll take this one, which in fact was investigated. It ended in six counts of ballot fraud, all committed by the same person forging her deceased parents' signatures on mail-in ballots.
The point isn't that voter fraud doesn't happen. But the idea that it's what causes hours long waits at minority polling stations is a fantasy.
from Iran, this would be a great time to drive a bargain.
In general you don't want to bargain with a regime that is too secure to feel the need to compromise. But it's a mistake to think you want to deal with a weak, insecure regime. Such a regime can't afford to be seen as compromising. What you want is someone who desperately needs a win, even a small one.
This is not something new that's been trotted out for Trump. I remember people talking about "the Nixon administration", and I'm sure it goes back further than that.
It's customary to say the "the X administration" to avoid (a) personifying the entire country or (b) implying that the legislative branch necessarily supports whatever X is saying or doing.
Can you quantify that problem?
Now you're telling me the impact is less than half a degree ON AVERAGE over a year? What disaster exactly do we have coming from all of this??
Here's an interesting exercise I worked out last year.
Take some amount of temperature change -- say half a degree. Work out how much energy per liter that is -- there are some HVAC sites with the information you need. You'll have to make some assumptions about the humidity and air pressure, which means that your results are likely going to be off by an order of magnitude, but that's fine for our purposes.
Now here's the good bit: multiply the change in energy per liter by the number liters in the troposphere. The answer you'll get is a half a degree equals a shit-ton of energy. As in it makes humanity's entire nuclear arsenal look like a damp squib.
Here's the thing: which scale is the ideal one for thinking about this in? The one liter scale or the troposphere-wide scale? The answer is neither. It's the effect of continent-wide pressure and temperature gradients we need to be worrying about. Even a half degree's worth of thermal energy/liter can on the meso-scale alter patterns of prevailing winds and precipitation, and those are very big things indeed.
The argument runs like this: If you're an armchair climatologist you don't know anything so your views are worthless. If you are an actual climatologist you have a professional interest in promoting climate change, so your views are worthless.
You know, that was my first reaction too. Then it occurred to me: climate change isn't really a scientific controversy. The controversy is political.
Who was it again who put climate change on the table for this particular localized weather event? A lot of people still listen to that man, which means any story about the North American cold Snap of 2017-2018 has to address their politically rooted misconceptions.
Alright, name one documented instance where a busload of dead voters cast fraudulent votes.
For that matter if this is some kind of voter conspiracy, why wait for the last second? Poll workers are not detectives, they don't exercise judgment; they simply go by their voter registration lists. Either you're on the list and can vote, or you've been purged and have to cast a provisional ballot. Showing up with a mob of impersonating buddies at the last minute doesn't affect that one way or the other.
The reason people show up at the end of the day is they have jobs.
I'm convinced that of the great advantages of voting machines is that you can manipulate an election without rigging the count. You just rig the wait times.
I've been voting for almost 40 years now on optically scanned paper ballots, and I have never had to wait more than five minutes, even in the most hotly contested elections they just throw up another row of cheap, pop-up voting booths. And there's never any machine glitches to deal with either.
When I read about places where people wait for hours to vote, I wonder how it is possible to spend so much money on computerizing a process, only to make it much, much slower and more cumbersome -- unless it was somehow intentional.
So... slavery's coming back?
It says they beached themselves and then "essentially" "froze to death" when they were out of the water. In fact the article is clear that the sharks didn't literally freeze in the water; they are believed to have beached themselves after suffering cold shock in 6F water.
In any case "freeze to death" is an idiom. When someone "freezes to death" they don't have their tissues freeze, then die. It's the other way around.
Look, you don't have to be an expert to have an opinion on this. The problem is people not having their facts straight, either about what the science says, what the science said before this is happening ... they don't even seem to know what is going on right now. It's cold outside their door, therefore they seem to think the whole world is cold.
What missing heat? Practically the entire Northern Hemisphere has enjoyed unusually mild temperatures this week, except for North America and Greenland.
I don't think you're familiar enough with what science actually says to be anti-science.
In the 1970s, the theory successfully predicted a reversal of a three decade aerosol-driven cooling tend before it happened. That was the result of sufficient computing power becoming available to run detailed models, which successfully excluded the continuation of cooling.
It's also worth noting that by the mid 90s scientists were predicting that "global warming" would also include extreme cold weather events as well as heat waves -- thus the preference for the term "climate change".
Finally, if you actually look at global temperature anomaly map, it's quite evident that the cold snap we're in is a highly localized phenomenon. Almost the ENTIRE PLANET is ANOMALOUSLY HOT, except for parts of North America and Greenland.
It's easy to say a theory has no consistent predictions when you use a straw man.
The convention was called by the London 6 Power Conference. The attendees were reluctant to set up a West German constitution because it prejudiced German reunification, but had no choice. Their result was subject to the approval of the Trizone occupying powers. So, yeah. The Americans, Brits, and French were OK with a de-nazification friendly constitution.
Of course they had a choice. You could argue that some people were naive about Nazi intentions in 1938, but nobody was caught by surprise 1941. Hitler had made his intentions clear all the way back in 1925 when he published Mein Kampf. And as it became more undeniably obvious he was going to follow through his plans, the option was always there to step back, to reduce your company's involvement. And many companies no doubt did. But others doubled down as long as there was a quick buck to be made.
Those companies had a choice. The men running those companies had a choice too. Even when there was no more choice, taking the path that led there had been a choice. After the war men like Alfred P Sloan and Henry Ford pretended they'd been ill-used by the Nazis, but it was their actions to make that possible, and they were well-paid for those actions. They transferred resources and technology to the Nazis even after it was clear that those things were going to be used against American soldiers. Ford even secretly kept it up after war had been formally declared and thousands of Americans were being killed.
Well, they have to work within the boundaries of a Constitution that was written by the victorious allies in WW2 to ensure the thorough de-Nazification of the country which had been thoroughly under the Nazi party's thumb for sixteen years.
A bumper crop of metaphors.
convert problems I don't know how to solve into problems I *do* know how to solve. That's what programming is.
So using that methodology, I have to ask here: which programming languages are the most popular?
Yes, it's important to confirm that what appears to be multiple sources are actually multiple independent sources. And parents should try to reinforce that. But they have another, more important role, which is laying the groundwork for their children to become critical thinkers. And the single most important lesson that is squarely in the parental wheelhouse is emotional restraint. No you don't hit Johnny because you think he stole your toy, and you don't jump to the conclusion that he stole your toy before you check to see whether you misplaced it.
Once you believe something because of the way it makes you feel, all the machinery of critical thinking is critically undermined; the output of your reasoning process is corrupted by bad input data.
Nobody naturally thinks the way you learned to think studying geometry; that's a highly unnatural although very useful skill. People naturally think in more of a Bayesian fashion, weighing the credibility of new evidence in light of their prior beliefs. So what parents need to do is to teach their kids is to believe as little as they can, and to be ruthlessly unsentimental about whatever they do choose the believe in.
What most parents, and schools, do is the exact opposite. They indoctrinate children in habits of knee-jerk sentimentality and pride. History is probably the worst subject in this regard. Children are taught to believe in pure heroes and villains, so that as adults they can only visualize their political leaders as uncomplicated robots.
It's not that science is too hard for the precious little ones, it's that it's too expensive and controversial for their parents.
Yes, science can be hard, but it rewards effort. But you know what's hard but not rewarding? Sitting through an overcrowded biology class taught by someone who barely knows the subject, or worse, thinks Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs.
Because of the unique way we do education in this country, the quality of science education you get varies from world class to third world depending on which state you live in, and for states at the bottom which town you live in. In fact the list of the best high schools in the country are dominated by states ranked roughly in the second quartile from the bottom.
At least not in the book. In the book he's a gifted young student who starts down the road of science but is corrupted by his juvenile fascination with the occult.
You can see that Frankenstein was no scientist by the one thing that was never present in any of his plans: publication. Because that's really the defining characteristic of what a scientist is: he is someone who submits his work for others to critique and build upon. Science is about expanding humanity's understanding. Frankenstein was something different. Here is what he himself says:
I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.
So what Frankenstein wanted to be was something more like a wizard: not someone who advances knowledge through sharing, but someone whose possession of ancient and secret knowledge confers power on himself. And while he turns from studying occult books to science in his school career, he never stops thinking like or acting like an occultist.
I don't think that the novel is a cautionary tale about science; I think i'ts really a cautionary tale about romanticism. Frankenstein is pretty much undeniably a literary portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a man she was madly in love with for his prodigious charisma and intellect but could be cold and heartless toward people who weren't useful to him in his self-aggrandizement.