That counts as the single most conveniently ignored fact for Christian and the rest of the Okcupid team.
They can be great for laughs, and I've laughed at them... but I've also seen indications that they aren't just joking, and probably think they know a lot more from their half-baked statistics than they do.
I'm going to define a category consisting of all high-school dropouts in the US, plus lee1026. I expect I would be able to find that many unflattering traits are overrepresented in this group, so obviously the category is meaningful.
It is now a known fact that at least one journal (Climate Research), when publishing papers that the "top dog" climate scientists didn't like, then faced retribution from those same "top dogs" who conspired to then boycott said publication (to not publish in it, or even cite any publications in it) to manipulate its editorial staff.
That says very little unless you also say why they did it. If they suddenly started arguing for UFO abductions in the editorials, for instance, I think we all would agree that wanting to distance yourself from them would be a reasonable thing to do.
You imply, without stating outright, that the paper CR published that climate scientists didn't like was perfectly honest, good science. It was not. The reaction wasn't some secret scheme to manipulate the staff as you suggest, it was a highly public boycott campaign. Contributors were leaving it in droves. Even the climate scientist Hans von Storch, up to that time a darling of the climate denial movement for his bitter feud with Michael Mann, resigned in protest from his position as the board's chief editor because of that paper.
In Cuba, if you do not show up at work, you get fired.
I don't know about Cuba, but many of the jokes people living in the eastern bloc made were about low work morale. I don't think they got fired that easily, unless they slacked so much they were actually seen as troublemakers:)
Not that surprising. Some skills are in high-demand in a totalitarian state. I know the moment it opens up, I'm going to pick up a couple of mass demonstration coreographers for cheap.
Good luck in North Korea. Remember that you will be allowed to see will be strictly limited, and the North Korean government is well known to go to unusual lengths to present a good image outwards.
In most academic domains including philosophy there is broad agreement on what positions are reasonable.
Well, how could there not be, considering already established "philosophers" effectively get to choose their successors? It doesn't mean they are right. It absolutely does not mean that they are focusing on the right issues.
To their credit, and unlike other professions, some of them recognize the problem (what Popper wrote on it in "The open society and its enemies" was IMH non-professional O very poignant. But it doesn't appear philosophy departments have done much to attempt to solve the problem.)
What about the fucking PARENTS, Michelle? I'd point at the parents as the single biggest reason for childhood obesity.
Customs and tradition change much, as time passes, and the faith of men changes and they think differently of many things. But the hearts of men never change, in all times. -- Sigrid Undset (Nobel prize in literature,1928)
If the parents are the problem, you need to tell me why today's parents are so much worse than yesterday's. Like Undset, I refuse to believe that any generation inherently has better moral character than another.
You're right that portion/serving sizes are hugely important.
But it's a bit of a mystery to me why they have grown so much in the US. A meal is bought as a unit, like toothpaste. That toothpaste tubes get imperceptibly smaller and smaller I can understand, it makes perverse business sense. But why do serving sizes go the other way?
Whatever it is, I think we must accept that serving sizes is a consequence of something else, not a direct driver of obesity in itself. (This is not to say it wouldn't be effective to reduce serving sizes, if it could be done somehow)
Hey, no one disagrees that excessive sugar, alcohol and HFCS is bad for you. Nor that carbohydrates rich in fibre and "slower" starches are comparatively better. The problem is that you stone-age people want to give fat a free pass. You are useful idiots for the meat industry when you do that.
Especially when it comes to overweight (as opposed to all the other health trouble you can get from eating too much of the wrong food), fats are every inch as bad as carbohydrates.
Well hello Mr. Atkins, I wondered when you would show up.
This is a geek website, so I assume you can show us the broad, epidemiological consumption that overweight is strongly related to carbohydrate intake and not related to saturated fat intake.
Government for telling people that the world is coming to an end, and keep your kids inside.
I don't get it. Do the government own the entire media only where you live? Because newspaper headline scares outnumber government information campaigns about keeping your child indoors about ten to... zero.
I don't have to read that, I know it already. Even if I don't know a clue about what the story is like, I've worked it out.
"The mousetrap" is the one story - the one story in the whole history of detective mysteries - where the butler actually did it. That's it. That's the big secret. That's why "the butler did it" became the classic meme that it is.
Clearly, my explanation is perfect, so don't come along spoiling it with actual facts from the story like whether there is a butler in it.
Point is, I learned cursive. I practiced it a great deal, because I went to a Waldorf-Steiner school, and they are a bit hung up on stuff like that.
They also made us write at least four pages every day as homework, basically recounting from memory and keywords everything the teacher talked about yesterday. Like for doctors, all that writing made my handwriting steadily decline, and I had to "re-learn" cursive - getting back into the habit of writing legibly - at least twice. My handwriting is currently legible, but the most irregular of anyone I know.
For all that effort, it would still be hours of work for me to decrypt, say, my great-grandmother's letters. It's a specialised skill. Knowing how to write in cursive myself doesn't help appreciably. Not everyone needs to learn it.
It must be depressing to outright refuse to read thousands of man-years worth of original mathematical, scientific, medical and philosophical works because they used ink and joined letters together.
I had a folk music teacher once. He had studied classical music at a conservatory, alongside philology and linguistics, learned hebrew and yiddish when he found out his grandmother had been jewish, wrote a yiddish dictionary, wrote over 2500 mediawiki articles in his own dialect (which he'd written an extensive grammar for) etc. In general, a bit of a polymath. I asked him once if he could read the arabic alphabet. He said he had tried to learn it twice in his youth, but given up both times. Arabic is apparently quite a bit harder to learn than other alphabetic scripts.
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Minigolf counts!
That counts as the single most conveniently ignored fact for Christian and the rest of the Okcupid team.
They can be great for laughs, and I've laughed at them... but I've also seen indications that they aren't just joking, and probably think they know a lot more from their half-baked statistics than they do.
They told you that too, did they? Apparently you think that if it's non-PC, it must be true and intellectually brave to believe.
I'm going to define a category consisting of all high-school dropouts in the US, plus lee1026. I expect I would be able to find that many unflattering traits are overrepresented in this group, so obviously the category is meaningful.
That says very little unless you also say why they did it. If they suddenly started arguing for UFO abductions in the editorials, for instance, I think we all would agree that wanting to distance yourself from them would be a reasonable thing to do.
You imply, without stating outright, that the paper CR published that climate scientists didn't like was perfectly honest, good science. It was not. The reaction wasn't some secret scheme to manipulate the staff as you suggest, it was a highly public boycott campaign. Contributors were leaving it in droves. Even the climate scientist Hans von Storch, up to that time a darling of the climate denial movement for his bitter feud with Michael Mann, resigned in protest from his position as the board's chief editor because of that paper.
I don't know about Cuba, but many of the jokes people living in the eastern bloc made were about low work morale. I don't think they got fired that easily, unless they slacked so much they were actually seen as troublemakers :)
Not that surprising. Some skills are in high-demand in a totalitarian state. I know the moment it opens up, I'm going to pick up a couple of mass demonstration coreographers for cheap.
In North Korea, the difference is not so large. It's no garden-variety dictatorship, it's a totalitarian state.
Good luck in North Korea. Remember that you will be allowed to see will be strictly limited, and the North Korean government is well known to go to unusual lengths to present a good image outwards.
Well, how could there not be, considering already established "philosophers" effectively get to choose their successors? It doesn't mean they are right. It absolutely does not mean that they are focusing on the right issues.
To their credit, and unlike other professions, some of them recognize the problem (what Popper wrote on it in "The open society and its enemies" was IMH non-professional O very poignant. But it doesn't appear philosophy departments have done much to attempt to solve the problem.)
Ice 9.
Customs and tradition change much, as time passes, and the faith of men changes and they think differently of many things. But the hearts of men never change, in all times.
-- Sigrid Undset (Nobel prize in literature,1928)
If the parents are the problem, you need to tell me why today's parents are so much worse than yesterday's. Like Undset, I refuse to believe that any generation inherently has better moral character than another.
You're right that portion/serving sizes are hugely important.
But it's a bit of a mystery to me why they have grown so much in the US. A meal is bought as a unit, like toothpaste. That toothpaste tubes get imperceptibly smaller and smaller I can understand, it makes perverse business sense. But why do serving sizes go the other way?
Whatever it is, I think we must accept that serving sizes is a consequence of something else, not a direct driver of obesity in itself. (This is not to say it wouldn't be effective to reduce serving sizes, if it could be done somehow)
You have died of dysentery.
Hey, no one disagrees that excessive sugar, alcohol and HFCS is bad for you. Nor that carbohydrates rich in fibre and "slower" starches are comparatively better. The problem is that you stone-age people want to give fat a free pass. You are useful idiots for the meat industry when you do that.
Especially when it comes to overweight (as opposed to all the other health trouble you can get from eating too much of the wrong food), fats are every inch as bad as carbohydrates.
Depends on a lot of things. But they don't usually die of obesity-related diseases, despite your theory. Strange, that.
Well hello Mr. Atkins, I wondered when you would show up.
This is a geek website, so I assume you can show us the broad, epidemiological consumption that overweight is strongly related to carbohydrate intake and not related to saturated fat intake.
I don't get it. Do the government own the entire media only where you live? Because newspaper headline scares outnumber government information campaigns about keeping your child indoors about ten to... zero.
I don't have to read that, I know it already. Even if I don't know a clue about what the story is like, I've worked it out.
"The mousetrap" is the one story - the one story in the whole history of detective mysteries - where the butler actually did it. That's it. That's the big secret. That's why "the butler did it" became the classic meme that it is.
Clearly, my explanation is perfect, so don't come along spoiling it with actual facts from the story like whether there is a butler in it.
It's a specialized skill today, because we don't produce and consume the enormous amounts of handwritten text that our grandparents did.
Point is, I learned cursive. I practiced it a great deal, because I went to a Waldorf-Steiner school, and they are a bit hung up on stuff like that.
They also made us write at least four pages every day as homework, basically recounting from memory and keywords everything the teacher talked about yesterday. Like for doctors, all that writing made my handwriting steadily decline, and I had to "re-learn" cursive - getting back into the habit of writing legibly - at least twice. My handwriting is currently legible, but the most irregular of anyone I know.
For all that effort, it would still be hours of work for me to decrypt, say, my great-grandmother's letters. It's a specialised skill. Knowing how to write in cursive myself doesn't help appreciably. Not everyone needs to learn it.
Compare that to the greek alphabet, or the hebrew, for instance. You can learn those in days or weeks rather than months.
Hm. Take a look at Leibniz' cursive, Martin Luther's, Leonardo da Vinci's? Even someone who obviously spent a lot of effort at a beautiful script, like George Washington, can be tricky to read for modern eyes.
This is common for alphabets as well. There's a reason they teach both at the same time in schools.
I had a folk music teacher once. He had studied classical music at a conservatory, alongside philology and linguistics, learned hebrew and yiddish when he found out his grandmother had been jewish, wrote a yiddish dictionary, wrote over 2500 mediawiki articles in his own dialect (which he'd written an extensive grammar for) etc. In general, a bit of a polymath. I asked him once if he could read the arabic alphabet. He said he had tried to learn it twice in his youth, but given up both times. Arabic is apparently quite a bit harder to learn than other alphabetic scripts.