Although, come to think of it, I suspect that the people who still believe this myth probably don't use the internet much.
Sadly, that's untrue. They use the Internet to squeal their paranoid nonsense at each other in increasingly deafening volumes. They create special web sites for themselves, where they can tell each other "the truth" free from liberal constraints like "reality".
And when presented with some new falsehood, they'll forward it to all of their friends with joyous abandon, undimmed by the previous 9,000 times those friends have replied by debunking it.
The Internet is at least a powerful tool for spreading idiocy, not just a world wide web but also a global echo chamber where stupid ideas can see print and take on the same black-and-white power of a newspaper.
And they appear to have nothing whatsoever better to do with their time.
I do not mean to leave liberals out of this: stupid liberals can use the internet to spread stupidity just as effectively as conservatives can. But I've seen nothing with the sheer idiocy-concentrating power of conservapedia or the freepers. That's industrial-grade stupid.
Thank you; that's MUCH better. It's something you can disagree with.
In context, it's clear that he's using "virtual" in a way different from the way Slashdotters do. The next sentence is much more compelling: "In addition, reporting of an event, happy or sad, can be consumed as entertainment and not as an occasion for reflection." That is sadly true: technology has broadened the world, and in some ways, people ignore situations near to hand in favor of 24-hour entertainment. Taking news on a news channel feels virtuous, participating in the large-scale problems, but if it means you're not actually physically helping with the poor and downtrodden right near you, you're not doing anything more valuable than watching TV.
I still disagree with plenty he said, but it's reasonably insightful and worth arguing about. He's clearly NOT saying what people immediately assumed he meant. And ironically, it's very similar to what he was warning people about.
Aside from everybody spotting the obvious irony here, I went to read the original article to see if I could get all contrarian and spot some useful insight. I find that whenever I hear a story of the form "Person X said something monumentally stupid", there's practically always something in either the subsequent or preceding sentence that provides context and makes it debatable or thought-provoking or even obvious. That doesn't necessarily apply to people who make a living saying monumentally stupid things, often for political gain, but people who actually think for a living (and I do include the Pope in that category) often think more subtly than single-sentence extracts from newspaper articles makes them out to be.
Except in this case, that's all there is. The article is 5 sentences long. It gives no context and only the barest hint of who the audience is. It doesn't link to the full text. As far as I can tell it's not the Montreal Gazette's fault; they ran the entire article as it came to the off the Agence France-Press wire service. I had a reasonably high impression of AFP; perhaps I need to reconsider that.
Maybe there will be a more useful article coming in the future, one that provides something more than an opportunity for something other than simply going "tsk tsk" at the Pope. But RTFA in this case isn't going to make you any smarter.
(Look, I'm not here to defend the Pope. Yes, I'm aware of all the terrible things the Church and he personally have done, and I think it needs to be prosecuted. But I want my opinions to come from actual crimes, not suspiciously short quotes.)
Actually, a Haskell Indian Nations University, named after a guy named (Dudley) Haskell, a white guy tangentially involved in its creation. But the irony is still appreciated.
Yep, but Haskell came first, and has broader name recognition (and so I thought it made the joke best). And Haskell apparently some real-world uses, which means it must have gotten a LOT better since I first beta-tested it, back when it was compiled into Common Lisp.
Huge fan of it, actually. I don't get to work in it but my coding style was heavily influenced by the things I learned coding in Haskell. My main fondness: by the time you got the damn thing to compile, the program would generally work. Aggravating at the time, but it made me really respect how much work the compiler could do in spotting bugs if your language is REALLY bondage-and-discipline strong typing.
The LP features of Curry won't endear it to anybody who didn't already grok Haskell, but they're certainly a neat addition, and a lot more than syntactic sugar.
One of the advantages of a pure text editor, which has no drawing functions, is that you're not tempted to try.
Unlike using one of the office products, which have rudimentary drawing tools that are worse than just sketching it on the back of a napkin. Even if that means putting the napkin itself into a presentation for your boss. Even simply org charts or flow charts will result in a bewildering uneditable mess, and nearly any text change will cause some elements to move in different ways than others.
Maybe somebody out there has mastered those tools, but I find them utterly useless, and time spent on supposedly trivial items has wasted more of my productivity than anything except the Internet.
Not if you're going to see it in print, that is. A writer writes the words. An editor and publisher will have it put into the final form.
I got to review Jef Raskin's book in its manuscript form, and "manuscript" is very close to what it was. One of the early human-computer interface experts, who helped develop the Macintosh, created his book in double-spaced Courier, designed to be proof-read, not published. Drawings were sketched; a real artist created what ended up in the book.
I don't know what he used, and he'd probably find "ed" to be a little ridiculous: it's a line editor, not suited to blocks of text. He probably used something WYSIWYG. But didn't bother with any formatting, and that saved him a lot of time and care.
Not that I'm disagreeing with your point, but I think you're misreading that page. That 25% figure is for people who were high at the time of the offense. (I assume you're looking at table 2).
This study wasn't designed to look for epigenetic factors. It was basically: line up a lot of people, measure 'em, and give 'em a quick gene scan. (Not a full sequencing, necessarily; it was a meta-study to get the maximum data, and they needed hundreds of thousands.) That genetic scan doesn't tell you anything epigenetic.
The rest is a lot of math. And in the end they accounted for only a small part of the overall variation. 10% is still interesting, but not nearly enough to merit the kind of headlines this gets.
Let me know when you find some. I mostly meet deniers, with a deep ignorance of climatology or any other science and a deep conviction of a conspiracy.
If you locate some actual skeptics, people capable of analyzing the evidence, who have come to the opposite conclusion of the vast majority of actual climatologists, I'd love to hear from them.
Certainly. They get assistance from parents, the government, churches, charities, etc. That's why they're not dying in droves.
But it sure doesn't put them anywhere near that $75k happiness limit. It's surviving. Remarkably, for most of the world, that's enough for them to justify going on living to themselves, which can seem surprising to people who are much closer to that happiness limit.
more people should have the ability to try to make it and be given the opportunity to do so if they have skills, talent, ambition.
Ah, but there's the rub. This study suggests a kind of range. At the upper limit is $75,000, about the amount of ambition you'd expect the median person to have. Some less, some more, but basically you'd expect people to apply whatever skills they have to reach that level, then stop.
The bottom end is subsistence: below this line, you die, or are at least severely incapacitated and even minor traumas (like an illness) could push you over. That's around $11,000 in the US (the poverty level).
Wages are negotiated essentially between those levels. The fewer skills you have, the more you can be pushed to the bottom end. No matter how many skills you have, somebody is always going to be pushed there by basic economics unless something interferes.
I'm all for that interference, actually, but my point is that I think that the $75k threshold has to be looked as the top end, not the bottom.
The world GDP is about $36,000 for a family of 4, about half what's needed to be happy but well above the minimum. In the US, it's closer to $200,000. Obviously, these numbers are not evenly distributed. The question is how evenly you can distribute it without throwing economics entirely out the window.
I'd be surprised if those flight attendants can do much more than cover their costs. The profit margins on that stuff is high, but not that high.
Still, they will keep the flight attendants anyway. They help keep order on board by being an authority figure (telling you to follow the rules, sorting out complaints) as well as helping out when things go wrong.
Since you have to have them, they can also try to earn more money by selling stuff. But I doubt if it would be sufficient reason by itself.
Exactly. I think of them as like a collection agency, buying up a debt. In this case the debt isn't as clear-cut as that a collection agency buys: you don't a bill you can point to, and you may have to sue to get it.
But if you have in fact been legally infringed, you're (legally) owed the money, and might as well sell off that hard-to-collect debt. (Whether you're morally entitled to that debt is a different question, and not one for the courts.)
In Vegas, they rent sports cars, by the hour. This isn't how you'd commute every day. It's for tourist who want to rent a Ferrari or Lotus and drive it at Ludicrous Speed out in the desert.
Even 90 is probably to low for that, since a lot of people manage that in their off-the-rack sedans, but I suspect that they don't think they can get away with no speed limit at all.
So, it's a way of making more money from the tourist trade, in Sin City. They already had the gambling and the hookers; why not add the fast cars?
Believers are in the same position: they accept some deity(ies), while believers in other deities threaten eternal punishment. So belief is no protection against having chosen the wrong deity. We're stuck with a large set of arbitrary, conflicting infinite promises/threats.
So we step back and ask if any of these infinities have anything behind them besides "I said so". Since none of them do, my choice can be arbitrary.
Then again, I could have saved a bunch of work by simply rejecting your premise. Its probability is non-zero, but so are an infinite number of other hypotheses, and "it might be true so it must be treated as true" is not a form of logic you want to get started with. It leads you to very bad places very fast.
They've got no interest in singling out Wikileaks. They'd want to exclude anybody like Wikileaks.
Unfortunately, despite the confident tone of the headline, they haven't actually produced any legislation. The underlying story (four clicks-through-blogs down) says that they're "drafting" and amendment. So exactly how they intend to define journalism isn't clear.
The House bill (already passed) defines it as:
person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.
followed by a bunch of exceptions for people designated as terrorists.
to attack the speaker of the idea, instead of the idea itself is just wrong.
It's just turnabout. Every time you talk with a denier, sooner or later they will accuse scientists of either deliberate deception for personal gain, or abject stupidity. I have never, not once, met one whose argument did not fundamentally rest on one of those two options.
When faced with such an argument, no amount of rational persuasion is going to be effective. When faced with somebody prone to consider such an argument, showing them papers and math is never going to be effective. It has passed out of the bounds of science, and into rhetoric.
That's unfortunate. And for rational, coherent, genuinely skeptical people, you don't have to go there; it's a matter of science. For everybody else, it's a matter of politics, which scientists are well advised to stay away from, except that they too have to live with the results.
And if you did, you can just as easily assume the same breakthrough would enable us to bypass the ELE right here: divert the asteroid, plug the volcano, or just build a massive orbiting space station. Life's easy once you assume that the laws of physics are negotiable.
And that's not uncommon. There are plenty of circumstances where you may have a large number of short lists floating around. Say, a list of a person's children, which will be less than 4 in 99% of cases and even the extreme cases aren't going to kill you. There may be many instances of the list, but each will be small.
Sorting those lists via some O(n^2) sort is lower overhead than building up fancy data structures. Especially if you're building the lists incrementally, such as via an insertion sort (much like an incremental bubble sort).
Slashdot Mirror
Although, come to think of it, I suspect that the people who still believe this myth probably don't use the internet much.
Sadly, that's untrue. They use the Internet to squeal their paranoid nonsense at each other in increasingly deafening volumes. They create special web sites for themselves, where they can tell each other "the truth" free from liberal constraints like "reality".
And when presented with some new falsehood, they'll forward it to all of their friends with joyous abandon, undimmed by the previous 9,000 times those friends have replied by debunking it.
The Internet is at least a powerful tool for spreading idiocy, not just a world wide web but also a global echo chamber where stupid ideas can see print and take on the same black-and-white power of a newspaper.
And they appear to have nothing whatsoever better to do with their time.
I do not mean to leave liberals out of this: stupid liberals can use the internet to spread stupidity just as effectively as conservatives can. But I've seen nothing with the sheer idiocy-concentrating power of conservapedia or the freepers. That's industrial-grade stupid.
Thank you; that's MUCH better. It's something you can disagree with.
In context, it's clear that he's using "virtual" in a way different from the way Slashdotters do. The next sentence is much more compelling: "In addition, reporting of an event, happy or sad, can be consumed as entertainment and not as an occasion for reflection." That is sadly true: technology has broadened the world, and in some ways, people ignore situations near to hand in favor of 24-hour entertainment. Taking news on a news channel feels virtuous, participating in the large-scale problems, but if it means you're not actually physically helping with the poor and downtrodden right near you, you're not doing anything more valuable than watching TV.
I still disagree with plenty he said, but it's reasonably insightful and worth arguing about. He's clearly NOT saying what people immediately assumed he meant. And ironically, it's very similar to what he was warning people about.
Aside from everybody spotting the obvious irony here, I went to read the original article to see if I could get all contrarian and spot some useful insight. I find that whenever I hear a story of the form "Person X said something monumentally stupid", there's practically always something in either the subsequent or preceding sentence that provides context and makes it debatable or thought-provoking or even obvious. That doesn't necessarily apply to people who make a living saying monumentally stupid things, often for political gain, but people who actually think for a living (and I do include the Pope in that category) often think more subtly than single-sentence extracts from newspaper articles makes them out to be.
Except in this case, that's all there is. The article is 5 sentences long. It gives no context and only the barest hint of who the audience is. It doesn't link to the full text. As far as I can tell it's not the Montreal Gazette's fault; they ran the entire article as it came to the off the Agence France-Press wire service. I had a reasonably high impression of AFP; perhaps I need to reconsider that.
Maybe there will be a more useful article coming in the future, one that provides something more than an opportunity for something other than simply going "tsk tsk" at the Pope. But RTFA in this case isn't going to make you any smarter.
(Look, I'm not here to defend the Pope. Yes, I'm aware of all the terrible things the Church and he personally have done, and I think it needs to be prosecuted. But I want my opinions to come from actual crimes, not suspiciously short quotes.)
Actually, a Haskell Indian Nations University, named after a guy named (Dudley) Haskell, a white guy tangentially involved in its creation. But the irony is still appreciated.
Yep, but Haskell came first, and has broader name recognition (and so I thought it made the joke best). And Haskell apparently some real-world uses, which means it must have gotten a LOT better since I first beta-tested it, back when it was compiled into Common Lisp.
Huge fan of it, actually. I don't get to work in it but my coding style was heavily influenced by the things I learned coding in Haskell. My main fondness: by the time you got the damn thing to compile, the program would generally work. Aggravating at the time, but it made me really respect how much work the compiler could do in spotting bugs if your language is REALLY bondage-and-discipline strong typing.
The LP features of Curry won't endear it to anybody who didn't already grok Haskell, but they're certainly a neat addition, and a lot more than syntactic sugar.
Only if they write it in Haskell.
One of the advantages of a pure text editor, which has no drawing functions, is that you're not tempted to try.
Unlike using one of the office products, which have rudimentary drawing tools that are worse than just sketching it on the back of a napkin. Even if that means putting the napkin itself into a presentation for your boss. Even simply org charts or flow charts will result in a bewildering uneditable mess, and nearly any text change will cause some elements to move in different ways than others.
Maybe somebody out there has mastered those tools, but I find them utterly useless, and time spent on supposedly trivial items has wasted more of my productivity than anything except the Internet.
Not if you're going to see it in print, that is. A writer writes the words. An editor and publisher will have it put into the final form.
I got to review Jef Raskin's book in its manuscript form, and "manuscript" is very close to what it was. One of the early human-computer interface experts, who helped develop the Macintosh, created his book in double-spaced Courier, designed to be proof-read, not published. Drawings were sketched; a real artist created what ended up in the book.
I don't know what he used, and he'd probably find "ed" to be a little ridiculous: it's a line editor, not suited to blocks of text. He probably used something WYSIWYG. But didn't bother with any formatting, and that saved him a lot of time and care.
Not that I'm disagreeing with your point, but I think you're misreading that page. That 25% figure is for people who were high at the time of the offense. (I assume you're looking at table 2).
There's lots of room for all sorts of other factors. These genes account for only 10% of the height difference:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100929132529.htm
This study wasn't designed to look for epigenetic factors. It was basically: line up a lot of people, measure 'em, and give 'em a quick gene scan. (Not a full sequencing, necessarily; it was a meta-study to get the maximum data, and they needed hundreds of thousands.) That genetic scan doesn't tell you anything epigenetic.
The rest is a lot of math. And in the end they accounted for only a small part of the overall variation. 10% is still interesting, but not nearly enough to merit the kind of headlines this gets.
I think I'll point some skeptics at this paper
Let me know when you find some. I mostly meet deniers, with a deep ignorance of climatology or any other science and a deep conviction of a conspiracy.
If you locate some actual skeptics, people capable of analyzing the evidence, who have come to the opposite conclusion of the vast majority of actual climatologists, I'd love to hear from them.
Ironically, the primary site for which I really need a faster Javascript engine is Slashdot. For a heavily-commented article I switch to Chrome.
Certainly. They get assistance from parents, the government, churches, charities, etc. That's why they're not dying in droves.
But it sure doesn't put them anywhere near that $75k happiness limit. It's surviving. Remarkably, for most of the world, that's enough for them to justify going on living to themselves, which can seem surprising to people who are much closer to that happiness limit.
more people should have the ability to try to make it and be given the opportunity to do so if they have skills, talent, ambition.
Ah, but there's the rub. This study suggests a kind of range. At the upper limit is $75,000, about the amount of ambition you'd expect the median person to have. Some less, some more, but basically you'd expect people to apply whatever skills they have to reach that level, then stop.
The bottom end is subsistence: below this line, you die, or are at least severely incapacitated and even minor traumas (like an illness) could push you over. That's around $11,000 in the US (the poverty level).
Wages are negotiated essentially between those levels. The fewer skills you have, the more you can be pushed to the bottom end. No matter how many skills you have, somebody is always going to be pushed there by basic economics unless something interferes.
I'm all for that interference, actually, but my point is that I think that the $75k threshold has to be looked as the top end, not the bottom.
The world GDP is about $36,000 for a family of 4, about half what's needed to be happy but well above the minimum. In the US, it's closer to $200,000. Obviously, these numbers are not evenly distributed. The question is how evenly you can distribute it without throwing economics entirely out the window.
I'd be surprised if those flight attendants can do much more than cover their costs. The profit margins on that stuff is high, but not that high.
Still, they will keep the flight attendants anyway. They help keep order on board by being an authority figure (telling you to follow the rules, sorting out complaints) as well as helping out when things go wrong.
Since you have to have them, they can also try to earn more money by selling stuff. But I doubt if it would be sufficient reason by itself.
Exactly. I think of them as like a collection agency, buying up a debt. In this case the debt isn't as clear-cut as that a collection agency buys: you don't a bill you can point to, and you may have to sue to get it.
But if you have in fact been legally infringed, you're (legally) owed the money, and might as well sell off that hard-to-collect debt. (Whether you're morally entitled to that debt is a different question, and not one for the courts.)
In Vegas, they rent sports cars, by the hour. This isn't how you'd commute every day. It's for tourist who want to rent a Ferrari or Lotus and drive it at Ludicrous Speed out in the desert.
Even 90 is probably to low for that, since a lot of people manage that in their off-the-rack sedans, but I suspect that they don't think they can get away with no speed limit at all.
So, it's a way of making more money from the tourist trade, in Sin City. They already had the gambling and the hookers; why not add the fast cars?
Sure, if you like. And if you want to spend your Sunday mornings telling gravity how wonderful it is, be my guest.
Believers are in the same position: they accept some deity(ies), while believers in other deities threaten eternal punishment. So belief is no protection against having chosen the wrong deity. We're stuck with a large set of arbitrary, conflicting infinite promises/threats.
So we step back and ask if any of these infinities have anything behind them besides "I said so". Since none of them do, my choice can be arbitrary.
Then again, I could have saved a bunch of work by simply rejecting your premise. Its probability is non-zero, but so are an infinite number of other hypotheses, and "it might be true so it must be treated as true" is not a form of logic you want to get started with. It leads you to very bad places very fast.
They've got no interest in singling out Wikileaks. They'd want to exclude anybody like Wikileaks.
Unfortunately, despite the confident tone of the headline, they haven't actually produced any legislation. The underlying story (four clicks-through-blogs down) says that they're "drafting" and amendment. So exactly how they intend to define journalism isn't clear.
The House bill (already passed) defines it as:
person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.
followed by a bunch of exceptions for people designated as terrorists.
The Senate version is similar but more thorough:
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-s448/text
Which would probably include both professional bloggers and Wikileaks. So, they're gonna rewrite it, but they don't say how.
People like to read stories that confirm their own preconceived notions.
Including, ironically, this one.
to attack the speaker of the idea, instead of the idea itself is just wrong.
It's just turnabout. Every time you talk with a denier, sooner or later they will accuse scientists of either deliberate deception for personal gain, or abject stupidity. I have never, not once, met one whose argument did not fundamentally rest on one of those two options.
When faced with such an argument, no amount of rational persuasion is going to be effective. When faced with somebody prone to consider such an argument, showing them papers and math is never going to be effective. It has passed out of the bounds of science, and into rhetoric.
That's unfortunate. And for rational, coherent, genuinely skeptical people, you don't have to go there; it's a matter of science. For everybody else, it's a matter of politics, which scientists are well advised to stay away from, except that they too have to live with the results.
Kefauver and Wertham (a German doctor no less) opened their testimony with statements calling Hitler a "beginner"
Thus demonstrating that that Godwin's Law applied even before Mike Godwin was born.
we cannot assume some breakthrough
And if you did, you can just as easily assume the same breakthrough would enable us to bypass the ELE right here: divert the asteroid, plug the volcano, or just build a massive orbiting space station. Life's easy once you assume that the laws of physics are negotiable.
And that's not uncommon. There are plenty of circumstances where you may have a large number of short lists floating around. Say, a list of a person's children, which will be less than 4 in 99% of cases and even the extreme cases aren't going to kill you. There may be many instances of the list, but each will be small.
Sorting those lists via some O(n^2) sort is lower overhead than building up fancy data structures. Especially if you're building the lists incrementally, such as via an insertion sort (much like an incremental bubble sort).