Imagined future and reality are often different, but they are basically the same thing. Ever read about telepathic people? I am now talking into your mind directly. See, it actually became true, just had to use an invention called the internet.
No, you're not. You're typing into your Web browser and clicking the "Submit" button, and your Web browser is sending your text over a TCP connection to the Slashdot servers, and the person reading your post is reading it in their Web browser, which has read your text over a separate TCP connection to the Slashdot servers. That is not "direct" by any sensible definition of "direct"; there's a lot of stuff between you and the reader.
Source looks to be a scottish tabloid running an empty "hurr them yanks sure is dumb" story.
Scotsmen are welcome to correct me if this is a well-respected newspaper in their country. But it sure looks like nonsense.
If it's based on anything, it's based on some fringe crackpot books for homeschooled kids.
Not quite:
Thousands of children in the southern state will receive publicly-funded vouchers for the next school year to attend private schools where Scotland's most famous mythological beast will be taught as a real living creature.
These private schools follow a fundamentalist curriculum including the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme to teach controversial religious beliefs aimed at disproving evolution and proving creationism.
So, if the story is true, these books are being used in some private schools; there may be home-schoolers who use them, but they're not the only ones.
Having only grazed over the article, Windows NT is Microsoft's current flagship operating system. Windows NT 6.1 being their latest "stable" release marketed under the names Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
But if they really meant "Windows NT" as in Windows NT 4.0, then I agree, that is pretty darn bad
Given that the paper from ERPScan lists the OSes atop which SAP runs as "Windows NT", "AIX", "Linux", "SunOS", "HP-UX", and "OS/400", I suspect that when they say "Windows NT" they mean, as you suggest, "Windows NT the family of operating systems, older ones of which were sold under the name "Windows NT" and newer versions of which aren't", not "Windows NT 3.x and 4.0", i.e. Windows Server 20xx (and Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7, if anybody's running it on their desktop) are lumped under "Windows NT" (and Solaris N is lumped under "SunOS").
Your second thing first: It's not going to be possible to teach all of the various philosophies that occurred around and before the American Revolution. Remember that Ben Franklin was not just in France to bang hookers and get drunk, but to learn from them what Philosophies and Policies worked the best after all of the hell that was the French Revolution. My suggestion would be to start reading backward from Franklin, Jefferson, etc... It's simply way to much to try and reply to. Make sure you don't neglect Adam Smith and his contemporaries since it does related to how we were founded.
I didn't ask, in the question you still haven't made any effort to answer, about the philosophies on which you claim the US is based; I specifically asked for "some citations that all these exercises of power by the elite would not have been possible if church and state were separated". This is a question about history, not philosophy.
For the first part which is longer, I believe you may have overlooked the more obvious quote which backs the practice. In the late medieval times, perhaps you are correct. Earlier, we have documentation suggesting otherwise.
Citations, please?
Also, outside of Europe there is widespread accounts of the practice. Reasons are generally different outside of Europe for the most part, tending to be Religious as opposed to simply power of title.
Pay attention to that first quote, and go back and read the paper.
Why don't you go back and read the paper; in particular, try reading this bit:
The Germanic "mundium" payment of the free bridegroom to his bride or her family implied the right to take possession of the bride by means of taking her home and having the first sexual intercourse with her. If an unfree man in the early Middle Ages wanted to marry a free woman, he not only had to ask his lord’s permission; it was also the lord who paid the mundium for the servant's bride as a loan. The unfree man was not legally entitled (position)???to act independently from his lord, and by paying the mundium, the lord acquired not only a new subject and wife for his servant but also (in a very formal sense) the right to take the woman home and to perform the "Beilager", a symbolic custom representing the first sexual intercourse with the bride. The Germanic "Beilager" was an important part of the Germanic marriage ritual that was later integrated into the ecclesiastical ritual of marriage (Wettlaufer 1998: 81-127; See Figure 1).
However, actual intercourse between lord and bride was never part of the (legal) marriage procedure. The lord obtained no marital rights from his role as procurator for the unfree servant bridegroom, but simply the right to have his loan for the mundium repaid. This repayment was due when the couple’s own daughters married. Later, different marriage payments were merged and fused together and changed their function, but the idea of a lord's privilege on the first night apparently remained connected to these payments. This new explanation of the relation between medieval marriage-payments and the literary theme of the right of the first night sheds some light on the obscure origin of a widespread popular belief during the European Middle Ages that such a right had formerly existed and was strongly connected to customary payments or fines like merchet, amobr, cullage, vadimonium, etc. (Cf. Wettlaufer 1999: 105-195).
And then, having gone back and reread the paper, count the number of times the word "symbolic" and derivatives thereof appear in the paper. Perhaps the paper is trying to tell you something....
There are specific fees documented in Sweden for paying a Noble instead of letting them bang the new bride. That is very much proof of the practice as law, though I'm willing to guess that you will insist that everyone was allowed to pay or could afford to pay.
Given that, you really might want to avoid the argumentam ad cinematographeum (i.e., the mere fact that some movie happens to use some notion as a plot device does not, in any way, shape, or form, support that notion being true).
This paper does a better job than I could based on memories over 20 years ago, so here is a link. Paper.
The paper does an excellent job of saying
The jus primae noctis was, in the European late medieval context, a widespread popular belief in an ancient privilege of the lord of the manor to share the wedding bed with his peasants' brides. Symbolic gestures, reflecting this belief, were developed by the lords and used as humiliating signs of superiority over the dependent peasants in the 15th century, a time of diminishing status differences. Actual intercourse in the exercise of the alleged right is difficult to prove, and there is no hard evidence to suggest that it ever actually happened.
Pay careful attention to that last sentence; it appears that the paper doesn't support any claim that this right actually existed.
(Oh, and could you either 1) cough up some citations that all these exercises of power by the elite would not have been possible if church and state were separated or 2) withdraw that claim made in your earlier posting?)
Forced tithing was a practice, but I agree that there were numerous ways for people to take property back then. If you were a person of title, all sorts of measures could be taken to get your stuff if a Noble wanted it.
Yes, but did that have anything to do with the noble holding a religious position? (As per my question in the comment to which you're replying, I will not find a claim of "yes" credible without a citation, and "citation" means more than "there are accounts, trust me" - point to one of them, so I can check its believability myself.)
There are accounts outside of your link that back the historical truth of lords banging newly weds first.
Reliable historical accounts? Accounts that it happened on occasion, or that it was a widespread custom? Cite some, please.
There was historical significance in adding that plot to movies.
I presume by that you don't mean "they wouldn't have added that plot to movies if it hadn't happened", as that would be a statement of truly mind-boggling idiocy. (By that logic, there really was an emperor named Ming the Merciless....)
Robin Hood Men in Tights had the plot long before Braveheart.
Now, was it a written law? Probably not, but that does not mean it was not practiced or enforced. Many morally questionable laws were never written, but were practiced. Noble's were not so ignorant they could not see problems writing down certain laws.
Which raises the question of whether they were "laws" in a sense that anything more than "I have more swords than you do" backs them up.
The US tried to separate all aspects of Political leadership from Religion because you end up with the policies such as you had in England where a Lord had the right to bang a newly wed wife before the Husband
In the name of religion? Srsly? Citation please that it was "in the name of religion" rather than "in the name of I have more people with swords or guns than you do"?
Why I say ""A is correlated with B" does not necessarily mean "A causes B"; B could cause A or C could cause both A and B"? I say it because, err, umm, it's true. Srsly.
Because the fact is that you have to prove a causation by noting its correlation.
And, given a correlation, you can hypothesise a causation: people respond to negative stimuli when avoiding a situation. But just parroting "correlation does not equal causation" is complete anti-intellectual fappery. Correlation IMPLIES there's a causation. It doesn't tell us what the causation IS,
Or, to put it differently, ""A is correlated with B" does not necessarily mean "A causes B"; B could cause A or C could cause both A and B", as somebody once said.
but then again, so what?
"So" people shouldn't necessarily assume, solely from an observation that A and B are correlated, that A necessarily causes B or even is likely to cause B. There may be other reasons to hypothesize that the causation is "A causes B" rather than "B causes A" or "C causes A and B", but, absent those other reasons, it might be worth investigating the other possibilities, and it may be worth it even with those other reasons.
So "correlation does not imply causation" might be a too-broad and too-easily-misinterpreted response to "A and B are correlated, therefore A causes B", with the right response being a more nuanced "OK, what if B caused A, or something else caused both of them?", if there's a reason to believe that might be the case. (In this particular case, what if there's a characteristic that causes both a tendency to belief in hell (or hellfire) and a tendency not to commit crimes or, at least, the violent crimes the rates of which were most strongly negatively correlated with belief in hell and positively correlated with belief in heaven?)
It is a grave tragedy that people don't understand basic logic and the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, or the statistical version of it as laid out in e.g. Jaynes Probability Theory, the Logic of Science.
Jaynes points out (and proves!) that while the discovery that A and B are correlated does not mean that A causes B or that increasing the prevalence of A in a population will increase the prevalence of B, it does make it more plausible that this is so, compared to the hypothesis that A and B are independent, depending on one's prior beliefs that are themselves statistical knowledge. His specific example, IIRC, is how a policeman observing a man standing in front of a broken window of a jewelry store, his pockets full of gems, is justified in inferring that the man in question is in fact robbing the store; even though there are many other possible explanations for the observed correlation between a broken window in a jewelry store and a man nearby with pockets full of jewelry, those explanations are all rather "special" and hence less probable on the basis of our prior knowledge of e.g. the probability of a completely innocent man walking by a jewelry store with pockets full of jewelry at a time when a construction crew happened to have broken the window.
I.e, "A and B are correlated" (again, phrased in a way not to bias the reader towards a particular direction of causation) does not, solely by itself, even suggest, much less imply, that A causes B; you need additional information ("one's prior beliefs" - as long as they're statistical knowledge rather than bias, and based on an applicable sample).
Their numbers must be off. First of all, Sweden has a larger Muslim population than Christian.
I presume you're referring here to them classifying Sweden in the "non-Catholic Christian" category. I guess there's "Christian" in the sense of "fervent believer" and "Christian" in the sense of "I guess I believe in Jesus" and "Christian" in "I'm a member of the Church of Sweden even if that's just by default", but according to the "Religious Demography" section of the page on Sweden in the U.S. State Department 2010 Report on Religious Freedom:
Religious membership or affiliation is concentrated in a few major denominations. According to the Church of Sweden (Lutheran), an estimated 71.3 percent (6,664,000 persons) of citizens are members; other Protestant groups total approximately 4.4 percent (400,000) of the population. Membership in the Church of Sweden has decreased steadily since it separated from the state in 2000. During 2009, 73,396 members left the Church (1.6 percent of registered members). Church-led studies found that individuals left primarily for economic reasons: membership carries a tax on income, normally less than 1 percent (separated members can still attend services).
Researchers estimate that approximately 5 percent (450,000 to 500,000) of the population is Muslim, although the officially sanctioned Muslim Council of Sweden, for government funding purposes, reported only 110,000 active participants.
Second of all, I have yet to find a Swede who believes in heaven.
Data for belief in hell, belief in heaven, belief in God, and religious attendance were taken from the 1981–1984, 1990–1993, 1994–1999, 1999–2004, and 2005–2007 waves of the World Values Surveys (WVS) and European Value Surveys [13]. Some countries included the question in multiple survey years (individual survey participants only participated once); others included the question at only one data collection wave. In total, these data were based on participants from 67 countries (N = 143,197; mean N per country = 2137, range = 3629016). Weighted means were computed for each country based on a proportional weighting variable supplied with the WVS.
Belief in heaven, hell and God was assessed with the oral question, “Which, if any, of the following do you believe in?”, followed by a list of concepts including “Heaven,” “Hell” and “God”. Accepted answers were Yes and No. Religious attendance was assessed with the question, “Apart from weddings, funerals, and christenings, about how often do you attend religious services these days?”; the response options were 1 = More than once a week, 2 = Once a week, 3 = Once a month, 4 = Only on special holy days/Christmas/Easter, 5 = Other specific holy days, 6 = Once a year, 7 = Less than once a year, 8 = Never or practically never. A weighted average was computed for each country across all available data, using the supplied individual weighting variable.
Sadly, the raw data is in formats that require SPSS, SAS, or STATA, so I can't just dig in to them and see what the data for Sweden are. However, they have some on-line data analysis modules, but the "believe in heaven" and "believe in hell" questions only showed up, at least for Sweden, for pre-2000 surveys, and show about 90% didn't believe in hell and 10% did while about 70% didn't believe in heaven and 30% did, giving the 20% difference in the graph.
Correlation usually means that there is most likely a causation - but very well hidden.
Or B causes D which in turn causes E which in turn causes A. One key point is that correlation does not, in and of itself, say anything whatsoever about the direction of causation.
According to Table 1 of the study, the choices of religious affiliation include "Roman Catholic," "Other Christian," and "Muslim."
According to Table 1 of the study, the choices of specific religions to correlate with the levels of various crimes are "Roman Catholic", "Other Christian", and Muslim". According to the paragraph following Figure 1 of the study, the religious groups they identified as "national majorities" are Roman Catholic, predominantly non-Catholic Christian, Muslim, and "Other" ("which comprises of either unaffiliated majorities, or more localized majority religions such as Hinduism, Shintoism and syncretic religions that combine Islam and Christianity with traditional indigenous religions").
The first of those items doesn't mean the study completely ignored nations where the national majority is "Other"; it just means that that those societies were, in the correlations with the "three dummy coded variables that indicated a country’s predominant religious group as Roman Catholic, Other Christian, and Muslim", not marked as Roman Catholic, Other Christian, or Muslim.
Heaven, Hell, Net Effect
0, 0, None
0, 1, Less Crime
1, 0, More Crime
1, 1, None
Actually, neither "belief in heaven" nor "belief in hell" were Booleans for the societies as a whole, even if they were Boolean in the surveys. What was measured for societies were the rates of belief in heaven and hell.
if you can affect A, but not B, and A is correlated with B, then you can affect B, regardless of C through Z (which you can figure out some other time).
this is an argument for hellfire preaching as a means to reduce crime.
X x Y x W = A. X x P x Q = B. If Y, W, P, and Q are independent, then if you affect A by modifying Y or W, you have no effect on B. (This is the "third variable explanation" from the paper, X being the third variable in this case.)
A x C x D x E x F x G x H x I x J x K x L x M x N x O x P x Q x R x S x T x U x V x W x X x Y x Z = B
In this equation, A is correlated with B. If you know what A is and how to influence it, you'd be pretty stupid to not use it or even ignore it.
That's not a study, that's a formula. In a study, such as this one, all you have is "A and B are correlated" (which I prefer to "A is correlated with B" or "B is correlated with A", as it more clearly indicates that it's not as if one is the independent variable and the other is the dependent variable); you don't have an established theory with a formula. I.e., your example is irrelevant to the statement in the paper at this point.
The same pattern also emerges for three out of the four religious groups that form national majorities–predominantly Roman Catholic, predominantly non-Catholic Christian, and predominantly ‘Other,’ which comprises of either unaffiliated majorities, or more localized majority religions such as Hinduism, Shintoism and syncretic religions that combine Islam and Christianity with traditional indigenous religions (see Figure 1). The only exception to this observation is predominantly Muslim countries in Asia, for which the uniformly high levels of both belief in heaven and hell (Ms = 93% and 91% respectively), produce insufficient variance for prediction.
So presumably some flavors of "Other" believe in a hell of some sort (for example, "being reincarnated as something in the "sucks to be you" category" might fill the bill), as does Islam. I don't see "IL" in Figure 1, so, unless I've missed something, there's no country where Judaism is a national majority (I'm assuming it's still a national majority in Israel), so I'm not sure it addresses the "Judeo" part of that.
(Oh, and the data point for the US is a fair bit above the line, meaning a higher crime rate for the US's value of {believers in hell} - {believers in heaven} than the line would predict. I don't know whether that's significant; if it is, maybe hell is a less effective deterrent here in the City on the Hill.)
"Shariff noted that because the findings were based off of correlational data, they do not prove causation."
And the paper itself even explains with some detail:
First and foremost, these findings are correlational, and thus reverse-causation and third variable explanations need to be discounted before causal claims can be firmly endorsed.
(I.e., "A is correlated with B" does not necessarily mean "A causes B"; B could cause A or C could cause both A and B.)
Actually, most modern processers have separate paths from instruction cache and data cache making them much more like Harvard architecture than Von Neumann.
Except for the ability to load arbitrary applications rather than running what's in the instruction memory, and being able to add new applications to the repertoire under program control, but that really isn't that important, I guess. To be fair, you could have a "modified Harvard architecture" in which you have instructions to write to the instruction memory and I/O data paths to allow data to be read into instruction memory.
In any case, there are two issues that matter here - the "macroarchitecture" issue of whether the set of software the machine can run is fixed into the machine or extensible and modifiable, and the "microarchitecture" issue of whether there are separate data paths, at any point, for code and data fetching. For the first of those two issues, most modern processors are much more like the IAS machine than like, say, the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator at Harvard. On the second of those issues, well, which data paths are you talking about? The ones between the processor and the level-1 caches, or the ones between the level-1 caches and the rest of the memory hierarchy? (Are there any systems with split I&D level 2 or higher level caches?)
That's why self modifying code is hideously slow on the modern CPUs that actually bother to flush things when a write aliasing the instruction cache is made.
...or on the ones where you explicitly do an icache flush.
However, if, instead of modifying existing code, you generate new code in a fresh chunk of virtual memory and start using that code, it's not so bad. I suspect more of the latter (e.g., just-in-time compiling) is done than the former these days.
Please also remember, that he was driven into suicide by the nation he protected because he just was who he was.
You may criticize the government's punishment of homosexual acts, but don't misrepresent the situation.
He wasn't punished for a physical quality; he was punished for an action - shoving a penis up his anus.
Debate becomes meaningless when people don't acknowledge the facts.
OK, then, he was driven into suicide because he had sex with a man as a result of being attracted to men. (Presumably you're making the assertion at the end of the last sentence of the second paragraph because Turing not only acknowledged a sexual relationship with Arnold Murray but acknowledged that particular act, as opposed to various other acts in which they could have engaged instead, rather than just guessing at what happened.)
And nobody even bothers to think about the talent we lost to the fact he was a homosexual. Intelligence *is* genetic, after all; it is the duty of the smart to breed.
And for those of use who believe in evolution and genetics influencing ability, robbing the world of future geniuses by refusing to breed.
Robbing the world of future children who might, or might not, have been geniuses. (Those who believe in evolution and genetics influencing ability are presumably familiar with, for example, the notion of recessive genes.... They're presumably also familiar with the notion that merely having a set of genes for some trait does not always magically ensure that the trait will manifest itself in the way you want; had, for example, Alan not been a particularly good father in this hypothetical world where he was a father, the kids might, or might not, have ended up as geniuses or, even if they did, they might not have ended up as productive geniuses.)
And, if he contributed more to the success of his brother John's children as a result of not having children of his own than he would have contributed to the success of his own children had he had any, perhaps it was a net win for the cause of geniuses. (Google is your friend.)
Congratulations, you just summed up the attitudes of Apple users everywhere
IM THE ONLY ONE WHO MATTERS.
He also summed up the attitudes of the people who think that its a Horrible Error to offer laptops without Ethernet - "I use it every day, it's insane to leave it out!"
Slashdot Mirror
Imagined future and reality are often different, but they are basically the same thing. Ever read about telepathic people? I am now talking into your mind directly. See, it actually became true, just had to use an invention called the internet.
No, you're not. You're typing into your Web browser and clicking the "Submit" button, and your Web browser is sending your text over a TCP connection to the Slashdot servers, and the person reading your post is reading it in their Web browser, which has read your text over a separate TCP connection to the Slashdot servers. That is not "direct" by any sensible definition of "direct"; there's a lot of stuff between you and the reader.
Source looks to be a scottish tabloid running an empty "hurr them yanks sure is dumb" story.
Scotsmen are welcome to correct me if this is a well-respected newspaper in their country. But it sure looks like nonsense.
If it's based on anything, it's based on some fringe crackpot books for homeschooled kids.
Not quite:
So, if the story is true, these books are being used in some private schools; there may be home-schoolers who use them, but they're not the only ones.
Persians now live outside of Persia, because Persia is ruled by Iranians, who kicked them out of Iran for political and religious reasons.
So what are your definitions of "Persian" and "Iranian"? (Presumably by "Persian" you don't mean "Parsi".)
I have no idea what the hell SAP is
It's the main product of SAP AG, SAP ERP.
Having only grazed over the article, Windows NT is Microsoft's current flagship operating system. Windows NT 6.1 being their latest "stable" release marketed under the names Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
But if they really meant "Windows NT" as in Windows NT 4.0, then I agree, that is pretty darn bad
Given that the paper from ERPScan lists the OSes atop which SAP runs as "Windows NT", "AIX", "Linux", "SunOS", "HP-UX", and "OS/400", I suspect that when they say "Windows NT" they mean, as you suggest, "Windows NT the family of operating systems, older ones of which were sold under the name "Windows NT" and newer versions of which aren't", not "Windows NT 3.x and 4.0", i.e. Windows Server 20xx (and Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7, if anybody's running it on their desktop) are lumped under "Windows NT" (and Solaris N is lumped under "SunOS").
Your second thing first: It's not going to be possible to teach all of the various philosophies that occurred around and before the American Revolution. Remember that Ben Franklin was not just in France to bang hookers and get drunk, but to learn from them what Philosophies and Policies worked the best after all of the hell that was the French Revolution. My suggestion would be to start reading backward from Franklin, Jefferson, etc... It's simply way to much to try and reply to. Make sure you don't neglect Adam Smith and his contemporaries since it does related to how we were founded.
I didn't ask, in the question you still haven't made any effort to answer, about the philosophies on which you claim the US is based; I specifically asked for "some citations that all these exercises of power by the elite would not have been possible if church and state were separated". This is a question about history, not philosophy.
For the first part which is longer, I believe you may have overlooked the more obvious quote which backs the practice. In the late medieval times, perhaps you are correct. Earlier, we have documentation suggesting otherwise.
Citations, please? Also, outside of Europe there is widespread accounts of the practice. Reasons are generally different outside of Europe for the most part, tending to be Religious as opposed to simply power of title.
Pay attention to that first quote, and go back and read the paper.
Why don't you go back and read the paper; in particular, try reading this bit:
And then, having gone back and reread the paper, count the number of times the word "symbolic" and derivatives thereof appear in the paper. Perhaps the paper is trying to tell you something....
There are specific fees documented in Sweden for paying a Noble instead of letting them bang the new bride. That is very much proof of the practice as law, though I'm willing to guess that you will insist that everyone was allowed to pay or could afford to pay.
Obviously not everything in movies is factual,
Gee, ya think?
Given that, you really might want to avoid the argumentam ad cinematographeum (i.e., the mere fact that some movie happens to use some notion as a plot device does not, in any way, shape, or form, support that notion being true).
This paper does a better job than I could based on memories over 20 years ago, so here is a link. Paper.
The paper does an excellent job of saying
Pay careful attention to that last sentence; it appears that the paper doesn't support any claim that this right actually existed.
(Oh, and could you either 1) cough up some citations that all these exercises of power by the elite would not have been possible if church and state were separated or 2) withdraw that claim made in your earlier posting?)
Forced tithing was a practice, but I agree that there were numerous ways for people to take property back then. If you were a person of title, all sorts of measures could be taken to get your stuff if a Noble wanted it.
Yes, but did that have anything to do with the noble holding a religious position? (As per my question in the comment to which you're replying, I will not find a claim of "yes" credible without a citation, and "citation" means more than "there are accounts, trust me" - point to one of them, so I can check its believability myself.)
There are accounts outside of your link that back the historical truth of lords banging newly weds first.
Reliable historical accounts? Accounts that it happened on occasion, or that it was a widespread custom? Cite some, please.
There was historical significance in adding that plot to movies.
I presume by that you don't mean "they wouldn't have added that plot to movies if it hadn't happened", as that would be a statement of truly mind-boggling idiocy. (By that logic, there really was an emperor named Ming the Merciless....)
Robin Hood Men in Tights had the plot long before Braveheart.
And by that logic, King Louis XVI played skeet using peasants as clay pigeons. Anna Maria Italiano's widower isn't exactly known for his deep interest in complete historical accuracy in his movies (for example, I really doubt that they had soldiers from Nazi Germany in late 19th Century California).
Now, was it a written law? Probably not, but that does not mean it was not practiced or enforced. Many morally questionable laws were never written, but were practiced. Noble's were not so ignorant they could not see problems writing down certain laws.
Which raises the question of whether they were "laws" in a sense that anything more than "I have more swords than you do" backs them up.
The US tried to separate all aspects of Political leadership from Religion because you end up with the policies such as you had in England where a Lord had the right to bang a newly wed wife before the Husband
O RLY?.
or steal your property in the name of religion.
In the name of religion? Srsly? Citation please that it was "in the name of religion" rather than "in the name of I have more people with swords or guns than you do"?
I don't understand why you say this
Why I say ""A is correlated with B" does not necessarily mean "A causes B"; B could cause A or C could cause both A and B"? I say it because, err, umm, it's true. Srsly.
Because the fact is that you have to prove a causation by noting its correlation.
And, given a correlation, you can hypothesise a causation: people respond to negative stimuli when avoiding a situation. But just parroting "correlation does not equal causation" is complete anti-intellectual fappery. Correlation IMPLIES there's a causation. It doesn't tell us what the causation IS,
Or, to put it differently, ""A is correlated with B" does not necessarily mean "A causes B"; B could cause A or C could cause both A and B", as somebody once said.
but then again, so what?
"So" people shouldn't necessarily assume, solely from an observation that A and B are correlated, that A necessarily causes B or even is likely to cause B. There may be other reasons to hypothesize that the causation is "A causes B" rather than "B causes A" or "C causes A and B", but, absent those other reasons, it might be worth investigating the other possibilities, and it may be worth it even with those other reasons.
So "correlation does not imply causation" might be a too-broad and too-easily-misinterpreted response to "A and B are correlated, therefore A causes B", with the right response being a more nuanced "OK, what if B caused A, or something else caused both of them?", if there's a reason to believe that might be the case. (In this particular case, what if there's a characteristic that causes both a tendency to belief in hell (or hellfire) and a tendency not to commit crimes or, at least, the violent crimes the rates of which were most strongly negatively correlated with belief in hell and positively correlated with belief in heaven?)
It is a grave tragedy that people don't understand basic logic and the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, or the statistical version of it as laid out in e.g. Jaynes Probability Theory, the Logic of Science .
Jaynes points out (and proves!) that while the discovery that A and B are correlated does not mean that A causes B or that increasing the prevalence of A in a population will increase the prevalence of B, it does make it more plausible that this is so, compared to the hypothesis that A and B are independent, depending on one's prior beliefs that are themselves statistical knowledge. His specific example, IIRC, is how a policeman observing a man standing in front of a broken window of a jewelry store, his pockets full of gems, is justified in inferring that the man in question is in fact robbing the store; even though there are many other possible explanations for the observed correlation between a broken window in a jewelry store and a man nearby with pockets full of jewelry, those explanations are all rather "special" and hence less probable on the basis of our prior knowledge of e.g. the probability of a completely innocent man walking by a jewelry store with pockets full of jewelry at a time when a construction crew happened to have broken the window.
I.e, "A and B are correlated" (again, phrased in a way not to bias the reader towards a particular direction of causation) does not, solely by itself, even suggest, much less imply, that A causes B; you need additional information ("one's prior beliefs" - as long as they're statistical knowledge rather than bias, and based on an applicable sample).
Their numbers must be off. First of all, Sweden has a larger Muslim population than Christian.
I presume you're referring here to them classifying Sweden in the "non-Catholic Christian" category. I guess there's "Christian" in the sense of "fervent believer" and "Christian" in the sense of "I guess I believe in Jesus" and "Christian" in "I'm a member of the Church of Sweden even if that's just by default", but according to the "Religious Demography" section of the page on Sweden in the U.S. State Department 2010 Report on Religious Freedom:
Second of all, I have yet to find a Swede who believes in heaven.
As the paper says, they got the data from the World Values Survey:
Sadly, the raw data is in formats that require SPSS, SAS, or STATA, so I can't just dig in to them and see what the data for Sweden are. However, they have some on-line data analysis modules, but the "believe in heaven" and "believe in hell" questions only showed up, at least for Sweden, for pre-2000 surveys, and show about 90% didn't believe in hell and 10% did while about 70% didn't believe in heaven and 30% did, giving the 20% difference in the graph.
So the data might be off by virtue of being old.
Or A causes C which in turn causes B.
Correlation usually means that there is most likely a causation - but very well hidden.
Or B causes D which in turn causes E which in turn causes A. One key point is that correlation does not, in and of itself, say anything whatsoever about the direction of causation.
According to Table 1 of the study, the choices of religious affiliation include "Roman Catholic," "Other Christian," and "Muslim."
According to Table 1 of the study, the choices of specific religions to correlate with the levels of various crimes are "Roman Catholic", "Other Christian", and Muslim". According to the paragraph following Figure 1 of the study, the religious groups they identified as "national majorities" are Roman Catholic, predominantly non-Catholic Christian, Muslim, and "Other" ("which comprises of either unaffiliated majorities, or more localized majority religions such as Hinduism, Shintoism and syncretic religions that combine Islam and Christianity with traditional indigenous religions").
The first of those items doesn't mean the study completely ignored nations where the national majority is "Other"; it just means that that those societies were, in the correlations with the "three dummy coded variables that indicated a country’s predominant religious group as Roman Catholic, Other Christian, and Muslim", not marked as Roman Catholic, Other Christian, or Muslim.
Belief in chart:
Heaven, Hell, Net Effect
0, 0, None
0, 1, Less Crime
1, 0, More Crime
1, 1, None
Actually, neither "belief in heaven" nor "belief in hell" were Booleans for the societies as a whole, even if they were Boolean in the surveys. What was measured for societies were the rates of belief in heaven and hell.
you miss the point.
if you can affect A, but not B, and A is correlated with B, then you can affect B, regardless of C through Z (which you can figure out some other time).
this is an argument for hellfire preaching as a means to reduce crime.
X x Y x W = A. X x P x Q = B. If Y, W, P, and Q are independent, then if you affect A by modifying Y or W, you have no effect on B. (This is the "third variable explanation" from the paper, X being the third variable in this case.)
A x C x D x E x F x G x H x I x J x K x L x M x N x O x P x Q x R x S x T x U x V x W x X x Y x Z = B
In this equation, A is correlated with B. If you know what A is and how to influence it, you'd be pretty stupid to not use it or even ignore it.
That's not a study, that's a formula. In a study, such as this one, all you have is "A and B are correlated" (which I prefer to "A is correlated with B" or "B is correlated with A", as it more clearly indicates that it's not as if one is the independent variable and the other is the dependent variable); you don't have an established theory with a formula. I.e., your example is irrelevant to the statement in the paper at this point.
Sweden?
In Figure 1 of The Fine Article, "SE" is the yellow point bit above the line, to the right of and above the green point "PR".
Noraway?
"NO" is a bit to the right of and below "SE".
Japan?
"JP" is the red point below the line near the right-hand side of the cluster in the lower left.
(I avoided the temptation to say "see figure 1". Oh, wait, no I didn't.... :-))
Who else believes in hell?
Well, let's look at The Fine Paper:
So presumably some flavors of "Other" believe in a hell of some sort (for example, "being reincarnated as something in the "sucks to be you" category" might fill the bill), as does Islam. I don't see "IL" in Figure 1, so, unless I've missed something, there's no country where Judaism is a national majority (I'm assuming it's still a national majority in Israel), so I'm not sure it addresses the "Judeo" part of that.
(Oh, and the data point for the US is a fair bit above the line, meaning a higher crime rate for the US's value of {believers in hell} - {believers in heaven} than the line would predict. I don't know whether that's significant; if it is, maybe hell is a less effective deterrent here in the City on the Hill.)
"Shariff noted that because the findings were based off of correlational data, they do not prove causation."
And the paper itself even explains with some detail:
(I.e., "A is correlated with B" does not necessarily mean "A causes B"; B could cause A or C could cause both A and B.)
Actually, most modern processers have separate paths from instruction cache and data cache making them much more like Harvard architecture than Von Neumann.
Except for the ability to load arbitrary applications rather than running what's in the instruction memory, and being able to add new applications to the repertoire under program control, but that really isn't that important, I guess. To be fair, you could have a "modified Harvard architecture" in which you have instructions to write to the instruction memory and I/O data paths to allow data to be read into instruction memory.
In any case, there are two issues that matter here - the "macroarchitecture" issue of whether the set of software the machine can run is fixed into the machine or extensible and modifiable, and the "microarchitecture" issue of whether there are separate data paths, at any point, for code and data fetching. For the first of those two issues, most modern processors are much more like the IAS machine than like, say, the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator at Harvard. On the second of those issues, well, which data paths are you talking about? The ones between the processor and the level-1 caches, or the ones between the level-1 caches and the rest of the memory hierarchy? (Are there any systems with split I&D level 2 or higher level caches?)
That's why self modifying code is hideously slow on the modern CPUs that actually bother to flush things when a write aliasing the instruction cache is made.
...or on the ones where you explicitly do an icache flush.
However, if, instead of modifying existing code, you generate new code in a fresh chunk of virtual memory and start using that code, it's not so bad. I suspect more of the latter (e.g., just-in-time compiling) is done than the former these days.
Please also remember, that he was driven into suicide by the nation he protected because he just was who he was.
You may criticize the government's punishment of homosexual acts, but don't misrepresent the situation. He wasn't punished for a physical quality; he was punished for an action - shoving a penis up his anus.
Debate becomes meaningless when people don't acknowledge the facts.
OK, then, he was driven into suicide because he had sex with a man as a result of being attracted to men. (Presumably you're making the assertion at the end of the last sentence of the second paragraph because Turing not only acknowledged a sexual relationship with Arnold Murray but acknowledged that particular act, as opposed to various other acts in which they could have engaged instead, rather than just guessing at what happened.)
And nobody even bothers to think about the talent we lost to the fact he was a homosexual. Intelligence *is* genetic, after all; it is the duty of the smart to breed.
So get to work; one child is far from enough. You're not doing your duty!
And for those of use who believe in evolution and genetics influencing ability, robbing the world of future geniuses by refusing to breed.
Robbing the world of future children who might, or might not, have been geniuses. (Those who believe in evolution and genetics influencing ability are presumably familiar with, for example, the notion of recessive genes.... They're presumably also familiar with the notion that merely having a set of genes for some trait does not always magically ensure that the trait will manifest itself in the way you want; had, for example, Alan not been a particularly good father in this hypothetical world where he was a father, the kids might, or might not, have ended up as geniuses or, even if they did, they might not have ended up as productive geniuses.)
And, if he contributed more to the success of his brother John's children as a result of not having children of his own than he would have contributed to the success of his own children had he had any, perhaps it was a net win for the cause of geniuses. (Google is your friend.)
Congratulations, you just summed up the attitudes of Apple users everywhere
IM THE ONLY ONE WHO MATTERS.
He also summed up the attitudes of the people who think that its a Horrible Error to offer laptops without Ethernet - "I use it every day, it's insane to leave it out!"