But what if it's a pro-reality bias as well? What kind of balance are you hoping for anyway? I actually thought the article itself was as unbiased as possible. I read slashdot in part because I am a scientist and I care deeply about these kinds of issues. Also science funding is not strictly a democrat/republican issue. The Clinton presidency (actually the congressional election that followed it) marked the beginning of the end of basic science in the U.S. with the cancellation of the SSC.
I want to hear about our candidates individual science policies before I vote. I'm not voting on the basis of party affiliation. It's very hard these days to squeeze out details of science policy, but this article does a good job. My take on the prospects of the U.S. remaining relevant in global, basic science is: Obama: bad Romney: maybe slightly worse? Ryan: horrible Expectations given the economy: poor
This matters to me, and if my conclusion is wrong due to a media bias, then please let me know! But balance is not bias. I don't need 10 climatologists and 10 anti-global-warming creationists to get the facts on global warming. To gauge Ryan's stance on basic science funding I need nothing more than a careful analysis of his own budget proposals and voting record. This is great stuff! By contrast, in the 2004 election I searched and searched through platforms and speeches to find any mention of basic science at all. I eventually found very brief statements from Kerry and Bush deeply buried in lengthy platform statements. Kerry said that basic science should remain on a par with applied science spending. Bush said that basic science should be privately funded. Since industry has proven to be irrelevant in recent years (post Bell labs) when it comes to basic science, I voted... well I got outvoted.
I'm basically a religious person, but a scientist by training. From one point of view, science is a way of dealing with a lot of the uncertainty in the world we live in. The scientific method is an art -- general guidelines that have been proven to be successful at improving our knowledge and understanding of the world. I don't buy into the absolute statements from others saying "Science says..." or "Science is...".
I carry much of my scientific skepticism and open-mindedness to studying the Bible. I find that when I study it with historical context and probable authorship in mind, there is a lot of insight and wisdom to be found. But there are (at least) two distinct creation legends incorporated into Genesis, and I can't understand how or why so many people insist on glossing over that fact and trying to just accept (blind belief) some kind of amalgamation of these stories and the genealogies that follow as a literal truth.
I don't think that science and religion really need to be at odds. They are two different approaches to knowledge of course, but neither one is absolutely the best approach for every situation. Where there are apparent contradictions between the two, I increase my uncertainty and hope that in the future I'll understand things better.
With religion, I try to respect my past experiences and beliefs while at the same time being willing to change my beliefs when it seems reasonable to do so. I don't like to think of works like the Bible as an absolute authority, but as a collection of writings that have long been recognized as profound, helpful, and inspired. I think that any philosophy that's more rigid than this would make me more susceptible to influence.
Now that we're way off topic, I'll go back to Santorum. He's just spouting propaganda of course, willing to say whatever is necessary to get votes. He's preying off of people's desire to feel safe and comfortable with a status-quo, and the desire to be smug and feel in-the-right. What's true or is not true has (apparently) nothing to do with politics. An honest politician is like a sickly gazelle in the Savannah. Evolution has weeded these out in the U.S. long ago.
You've hit the nail on the head with that link. Glad you were modded up!
My take on this is that alternative theories to dark matter are always welcome but they have a lot of explaining to do. If there is no dark matter then how else can we explain the galactic rotational velocity profiles, gravitational lensing maps, AND cosmic microwave background fluctuations fitted to cosmological models. For me the strongest evidence is found in the lensing study of colliding galaxies. The mass (dark matter) distribution has separated from the visible light distribution.
In science, it's particularly exciting when new theories are proposed that not only explain previous observations but predict new, unknown phenomena that can be tested. Sure that doesn't always happen even with good, valuable theories but this dark matter alternative theory falls well short of the "exciting" mark because it fails to explain the bulk of the existing evidence for dark matter. It also smells strongly of computational error. Being able to investigate and rule out or reveal computing errors is probably what best separates mediocre scientists from great ones these days.
I'm way behind on this discussion but it looks like people are misinterpreting this report. The CDF experiment at Fermilab had reported last April on a possible observation of a new particle. They say that it is *not* a Higgs candidate, but could be something else (even more startling than a Higgs, such as a supersymmetric particle). Something with a mass of about 140 MeV/c^2 appears to be decaying into W and two quarks. This report is here: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2011/today11-04-07.html
TFA is a report from the D0 experiment that they do not see this same thing. They should have been able to see it if it were real, but they did not. If D0 had also seen the same kind of signal that CDF did, then things would really get exciting! But for now I guess one could say that results are inconclusive on whether or not there is new physics here.
1) This is (probably) not about the Higgs at all. 2) This is not (yet) about CERN/LHC. D0 and CDF are the two collider experiments sitting on Fermilab's main ring, and they share a healthy kind of rivalry. The LHC at CERN hosts six experiments: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/LHCExperiments-en.html . The beams at these accelerators are designed to intersect (collide) at certain points around which various impressive arrays of detectors are built. Hence we have multiple experiments with independent data sets and their own unique strengths and systematics running in parallel at the same lab.
Disclaimer: I'm not really current on any of this but I can at least point out that all this discussion is off-topic and even the/. post title, "Data Review Brings Major Setback In Higgs Boson Hunt", is completely off the mark.
I'm typing this response using a Colemak keyboard layout. I'm still really slow at it since I only started learning it two weeks ago. But I decided to (temporarily) sabotage my typing speed because I want to be the kind of person who is willing to make the effort to break out of this kind of vicious cycle. My fingers are putting up a good fight - they really long for the old days - but screw them!
Qwerty is a "bad" layout for lots of reasons, so why does nearly *everyone* still use it even some 130 years after its beginnings? One reason is that Qwerty is not actually "awful", because most random layouts are a bit worse. But the main reason (after Dvorak came out in the '30s) was that schools taught Qwerty because businesses bought those typewriters, and businesses bought them because schools taught to them. These days Qwerty is still ubiquitous simply because it is.
Machine shops and hardware stores buy and stock tools designed for the US customary system because stuff needs to be made compatible with all the old stuff that's in inches & feet. Well, that and many other reasons that are similarly circular. It's like a function minimizer that's gotten stuck on a local minimum because it cannot find a downhill path to the global minimum. Sorry that's an obscure analogy, but free markets act kind of the same way, and are unable to pop themselves out of a local optimization. The US takes great pride in being a slave to market forces, no matter where they take us.
MS Windows and Office are popular for the same kinds of reasons.
I don't know what the solution is, but I also have to point out that the US equivalent to the kilogram is the slug, not pounds or ounces. Technically we should ask for food boxes to give a net mass in slugs (yummy!), not a net weight that for all we know could have been measured in a centerfuge. Fluid ounces are a stupid unit, but technically a measure of volume and are used correctly AFAIKT.
I liked parts of the letter too, but I can't easily judge how much wisdom (or lack thereof) is being expressed. There seemed to be a lot of exaggerations but to some extent that's the norm for corporate management-speak. A couple easy examples:
Return the company to a strategy that seeks high growth and high profit margins through innovation and overwhelmingly superior products with unrivaled user experience.
This strikes me as a particularly desperate statement that struggles against reality.
Dramatically increase efficiency by eliminating outdated and bureaucratic R&D practices like geographically distributed software development and outsourcing.
How dramatic? Isn't outsourcing done (like it or not) to reduce costs? Distributed software development can be made to work fairly well. Multiple R&D sites allow you to attract talent from a wider pool of applicants.
Big corporate shakeups like this are a sign of a struggling company. There are enormous costs involved in doing this. In some cases it works well, but it may also be posturing by some few investors that are hoping to dump the company later on for personal profit. If I were a shareholder I'd need a lot more convincing, more details, real data, and some independent confirmation of the data before I went along with it.
The mass of a cubic centimeter of water spans a relatively huge range, depending on the composition of the water and the circumstances under which it's measured. The composition of even distilled water varies, since both hydrogen and oxygen have a variety of isotopes, the ratios of which vary from one source of water to another.
I think you're right here. "Relatively" is the key word. The trick to the standardization of SI units is that one cannot measure anything in units that involve mass to greater accuracy than the kilogram itself is known to. As technology advances we bump up against these standards every now and then, when certain other kinds of ultra-high precision measurements become possible.
If you boil this down to a theoretical, idealized system (e.g., using a composition of water that's impossible to reproduce), you might as well base it on something more stable, like the mass of a particular kind of atom. If you do that, you might as well simply base it on a fundamental constant, which is exactly what TFA is talking about. A fundamental constant is really the way to go here. The fact that different ways of measuring it disagree is really just a minor bump in the road.
Yeah, the density of water depends on composition, temperature, and pressure. Atmospheric pressure changes naturally so much, I'm sure that measuring and reproducing any kind of average sea-level air pressure is going to be one of the limiting factors in defining the kilogram that way. It's fine to define mass in terms of fundamental constants, but one has to be very clever and choose this constant to be something that is not only easy to measure, but something that can be measured more accurately than any other mass-related measurement or constant.
I know just enough to see why high precision measurement science is extremely tricky stuff, and how it often comes into direct contact with the definitions of standard units. I also think it's a big deal that the two different experiments to tie the new mass definition to the old one disagree. One cannot just average the results -- that's meaningless. One of the two experiments is wrong, if not both, and so the average result is guaranteed to be wrong. Picking one result at random at least has a chance of being correct, but clearly that's not satisfactory either.
... True libertarians are against the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, Medicaid Part D, the banned use of new stem cell lines, and are FOR abortion rights....
This kind of statement is why I'm an independent. I have views on many issues but they aren't exactly one party platform or another. I think that partisan politics of all sorts in the US are based on us-vs-them thinking and attempt to substitute anger and conflict in place of discussion about important issues.
I never thought of Fox News as libertarian however. More of a GOP mouthpiece, though really the bias is simply against anything center or left-of-center. Most politics is antagonistic. Don't vote for that guy because blah blah blah. If you take a stand on anything then you're more open to attack. Libertarianism is a stand for something. Fox News is a stand against a lot of things.
I really appreciate the Windows-in-VM and Windows terminal server suggestions. I'll pass those along. We do actually have a terminal server set up, so this seems like the easiest way to go. Unfortunately one could not integrate outlook-on-a-TS with a Linux desktop, with new email and meeting notifications. Still all things considered this would be a better way of working for many if not most people here. My office is about 90% R&D.
I still don't think this would fly since the IT is outsourced, security is such a big deal, and so on. Expanding users' choices is always more expensive if you look at IT costs all by themselves. I just chalk this up to the inertia of a large corporation.
We're using Office 2003, and Vista 32-bit, SP1. They migrated from Windows 2000 a couple years ago.
For years (at other jobs) I would regularly organize my email, but I found that this never helps when I go searching for an email. I have never come up with an organization system that is fast, simple, and unambiguous. I like gmail's approach a lot, and I guess I kinda treat Outlook the same way, moving the inbox into an archive folder every few months because of server quotas. But this relies on good and fast searching. Outlook 2003's search capability is neither fast nor complete.
I also don't like how Outlook composes email. It's modal, effectively deciding between plaintext, html, and RTF based on what I'm replying to. New emails seem to pick a mode depending on the phase of the moon. Some modes are buggy and limited. I personally don't feel comfortable sending RTF emails since that's in no way a standard. I want to be sending emails, not "Microsofts".
I'm at a kind of satellite office for a big telecom company, and we all have "managed" workstations -- PCs running Windows, exchange server, lots of 3rd-party security software, internal websites with ActiveX, etc. So we're heavily entrenched in a Windows computing environment.
But ironically almost all of the equipment we're working on is running a Linux kernel. We have to do development on remote *nix servers. So ssh, Xwindows, telnet, scripting with Perl/Python/Tcl/whatever,... these are the tools for most of the actual work done around here. Windows is a complete disaster for this environment! Some folks install their own Linux in a VM, others use Cygwin a lot, and others struggle along with software like Exceed and Putty. Either way it's very awkward.
So every couple days someone asks "can I _please_ switch to Linux on my desktop? Please??" I can't even pretend to know the whole scope of the answer, but MS Exchange (especially calendaring) and liberal use of Word and Excel documents factor in heavily.
I'll echo the sentiment that Outlook is a horrible, nasty email client! I don't hate anyone with enough savage intensity to recommend Outlook to them. (Just try searching for that email you vaguely recall reading 2 months ago.) But we even use Exchange to schedule our conference rooms! I don't know any other client that works well enough with Exchange to be an adequate replacement.
So my conclusion (if I'm not just ranting) is that if you abandon multi-platform support at an early enough stage within a company (probably starting with an Exchange server) then you can become locked in subtly and deeply. Divorcing Windows on the desktop at my workplace is like pulling a thread on a sweater. Pretty soon the whole thing unravels.
Book burnings now are entirely symbolic. There is widespread access to knowledge, publishing is relatively cheap, so burning books accomplishes exactly nothing. But originally it was much more dramatic, both strategically and emotionally effective at stamping out schools of thought. The pyres probably also symbolized burning clothes and possessions of someone who was infected with some plague -- these books contain contagious ideas that taint the reader in some fatal way.
I think a Quran-burning party is a kind of hate rally. It serves to attack the religion, but also to dehumanize Muslims themselves. It's an early step toward radicalization for those involved in the burning.
If they choose which content they host, isn't that dangerously close to saying they SUPPORT content they host?
For me, this comes the closest to identifying the problem with what rackspace did. If they can justify themselves, it comes down to how precisely one can define hate speech. If that's easy to define, then they aren't supporting the content they host, they are just subjecting it (or doing random spot-checks) to a predefined filter.
So I wonder if I can find a precise definition. I don't think you can consider satire or criticism as hate speech, but most politicking these days is mud-slinging, which is essentially hate speech. In this you promote falsehoods as the truth and present them in an emotionally-charged way. But what's true and what's not is impossible to know....
Even if there's a lot of grey area, I think anyone would have to agree that advertising a Quran-burning event is definitely a kind of hate speech. At best it's an attempt to strengthen the bonds of church members by celebrating a common hatred. Again, a whole lot of partisan politics is this same thing.
Sorry about the stream-of-consciousness post. I think rackspace has discredited themselves here by having a uselessly-vague qualification in their AUP, combined with the stupidity to actually enforce it.
Sorry to stay off topic. I'm a protestant Christian too, but perhaps on the other side of the spectrum. I was just recently observing how very often Jesus was struggling against the literalism of the church officials of his day. A prime example is his _constant_ struggle to change their perception of Sabbath day law from a very literal "don't do any work" to perhaps a more inward devotion on a daily basis. The official interpretation at the time must have been based on a rather literal interpretation of creation: on the seventh day he rested.
Much of the sermon on the mount is about internalizing the ideas behind the biblical laws instead of focusing on outward appearance, and going beyond a literal interpretation. To me this sermon is the very heart of Christianity.
I don't know what you mean that "Jesus spoke about the literalness of the historical record..." I know he quoted a lot, and that some of the gospels argue that Jesus is the Christ based on prophecies and even genealogy, but this appears to me to be the New Testament writers' arguments to persuade the Jewish population. Jesus' own arguments about Christendom were mostly focused on his moral teachings and healing works, although the idea of a Christ is certainly defined by older prophecies. I have to think that any holistic reading of the NT would paint Jesus as a radical liberal activist trying to raise the people's understanding of the Bible and of God to a higher level, to be less ritualistic, and to put excuses aside and just live our lives in ways that reflect our Divine inheritance. "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect." (a common refrain, from KJV)
I always thought the phrase "security through obscurity" means protection by a weak or unstudied algorithm that is ad-hoc and thought to be unknowable. Passwords usually involve strong but publicly-known hashing algorithms. Isn't it better to rely on strong encryption techniques than merely obscure ones?
Okay I hadn't considered cases like gay marriage since I was thinking too much about the big picture. But I don't think this is a trend or a taste of what's to come, since in general human rights abuses in the US have been on the decline over the past century or more. And I don't see how Kagan's recognition that individual ideologies influence law (law is based on ideology anyway) will create more abuses of human rights than protection of them.
I think a good supreme court should be rife with activism. I mean, it should be composed of diverse intellectuals who actively debate the issues at hand in order to find common ground.
I'm not saying that she's the second coming of Christ! But I haven't yet seen any major red flags or accusations in the press that aren't just emotionally overcharged propaganda stunts.
I recently heard someone describe the constitution as "written as a living document." Try reading some of it, and comparing the language with both present-day bills and other late-1700's legal or philosophical writing. The constitution is actually a very easy read, comparatively! It's a much more "common" English. I think that's because it's intended to convey a kind of sensibility more clearly than any actual laws.
The end result is that while it's very easy to understand, or get the gist of, it's also very much subject to interpretation when it comes down to specific issues. And I think that was the original intent of the authors.
So I don't disagree with you about the constitution providing for only a very limited government. But what that really means, and what any of our laws really mean, is not as rigid a thing as half-lives of isotopes or rules for parsing ANSI C. In this context, what Kagan says seems consistent with what anyone with a good understanding of law would have to say. The constitution does establish the role and the boundaries for the supreme court, but the more subtle nuances of laws need to be resolved in each case based on the original intent of the law as well as the practical and popular needs of our society. Any kind of statement you make here needs to acknowledge both importance of existing law as well as the times we live in and the people we have become.
This is a very strong sign of activism, disregarding the constitution in favor of a form of democracy that puts the minority in the tyranny of the majority, such a thing is no different than living in a dictatorship.
No, I think you're reaching this conclusion only because you want to. You're extrapolating way beyond Kagan's statement and envisioning a land where the "minority" (the US citizenship I presume) live in subjugation under the harsh dictatorship of the "majority" (some kind of self-perpetuating regime of former Democrats). While that's a great premise for a sci-fi novel, thankfully there's no connection to the appointment of Kagan.
I don't think socialism is cynical at all. I think socialism would "work" if (1) someone was smart enough to construct a perfect algorithm to regulate an efficient economy, and (2) everyone was so thrilled by (1) and happy to help out their society as a whole that they worked to the best of their abilities. A perfect citizen in a socialist economy is probably someone who is more motivated by doing good for others than for themself. That's extremely optimistic!
The free market is also optimistic. Someone realized that with highly simplistic models, an efficient society can be constructed of individuals seeking only their own wealth and happiness. The optimism here is not that all people are saintly but that this simplistic model reflects reality. Unfortunately lots of situations, including waste trade between disparate nations, violate a lot of these free market model assumptions.
Maybe government regulations are an attempt to borrow from socialism to patch up those various problem areas where a free market fails completely to maximize social welfare. I won't argue that it's a bad solution, but in some cases (like this) it's better than nothing, and I don't think it's really "cynical" either.
In a free market, if someone buys their favorite breakfast cereal from the least expensive and most convenient store, they aren't being selfish. They are benefiting everyone by supporting those choices which surely others will also appreciate. On the surface at least, that's a case where free market works and where greedy, selfish people aren't evil. Well, perhaps the devil is in the details, so to speak.
Even the Baldur's Gate series had multiplayer (even though it wasn't that good). I'd have bought DAO in a heartbeat if it had some kind of LAN-based multiplayer.
I agree with your sarcasm -- it's amazing how much people "believe" in a free market so much that they assume it is the best system even in economic sectors where it was never proven or even theorized to work. A rational perspective is so often trumped by irrational bindings to the concept of good and evil. It's like saying "look and see how well Newtonian gravity explains the way cars roll downhill and planets orbit the sun! Newtonian gravity is good and just, and all heretical theories like those of that anarchist, Einstein, are evil!"
On the flip side, I stumbled across this page while trying to get a good overview of the toxic waste export issues: http://ban.org/Library/ierarticle.html
I was appalled by how much propaganda there is in this report. Every headline and sentence is loaded with manipulative wording. It's really comical! While I'm inclined to agree with the message on the whole, which justifies the Basel ban, every instinct tells me not to trust these wordsmiths. There's no actual evidence presented (that I could find) to support the Basel ban. I'm not saying that the Basel ban was a bad idea or that the US should not now support it, but my search to find a rational argument backed up by evidence is unsuccessful so far.
I mostly agree here, FWIW, but it's still probably easier to learn MS Word or OOO Writer "from scratch" (whatever that means) than LaTeX. The main reason I believe this is that it takes programmer's skills to understand TeX/LaTeX error messages and go back to the source document and figure out how to fix the problem. For long equations or complicated tables I often comment out sections to figure out what's not working, or pull out pieces to render one at a time, etc. This process is familiar and intuitive to me, but only because I've been programming for the last 30 years.
For people who can deal with fixing strange LaTeX errors (at least better than they can deal with bizarre Word formatting quirks), LaTeX is great. Besides equations, it's great for including and captioning figures. It's also better than Word at tables, large documents, and collaborative writing. Others have pointed these out but I wanted to add figures to the list of LaTeX advantages over WYSIWYG.
Of course, just because a program costs thousands of $ doesn't mean it's any good either. I'm short on examples, but in my experience the more expensive the software the worse it is. AutoCAD and ClearQuest are the only ones coming to mind now, as I think I've mentally blocked out the worst experiences. There are exceptions to this of course. Fluent is pretty good.
But I agree in general that if you're doing professional work, your software choices are expanded because cost is not an issue.
The first link mentions that the "Independence of irrelevant alternatives" criteria is not satisfied by this voting method, which I've also seen called the "3rd-party spoiler effect." There are several other voting systems that do avoid this effect and more, and are equally simple. The simplest is an approval vote, where each voter gives a thumbs-up or down vote for each candidate (or a score from 1-10, or whatever). It's hot-or-not style voting, which people seem to understand quite easily. Another is an instant-runoff election where you rank your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice candidates. This doesn't work for multiple-seat elections. If by counting up all top votes one candidate gets a majority, they win. Otherwise the lowest vote-getter drops out of the running and their votes go to the 2nd choice listed. The process iterates until there is a majority winner. This got some good attention a while ago (including support early in Obama's political career), but is probably more complicated and no better than approval voting.
I believe, but can't prove because I'm too lazy, that a 2-party system is a stable equilibrium with the most common voting system in the US, plurality. Any 3rd-party works against its own interest, precisely because of this spoiler effect.
Slashdot Mirror
But what if it's a pro-reality bias as well? What kind of balance are you hoping for anyway? I actually thought the article itself was as unbiased as possible. I read slashdot in part because I am a scientist and I care deeply about these kinds of issues. Also science funding is not strictly a democrat/republican issue. The Clinton presidency (actually the congressional election that followed it) marked the beginning of the end of basic science in the U.S. with the cancellation of the SSC.
I want to hear about our candidates individual science policies before I vote. I'm not voting on the basis of party affiliation. It's very hard these days to squeeze out details of science policy, but this article does a good job. My take on the prospects of the U.S. remaining relevant in global, basic science is:
Obama: bad
Romney: maybe slightly worse?
Ryan: horrible
Expectations given the economy: poor
This matters to me, and if my conclusion is wrong due to a media bias, then please let me know! But balance is not bias. I don't need 10 climatologists and 10 anti-global-warming creationists to get the facts on global warming. To gauge Ryan's stance on basic science funding I need nothing more than a careful analysis of his own budget proposals and voting record. This is great stuff! By contrast, in the 2004 election I searched and searched through platforms and speeches to find any mention of basic science at all. I eventually found very brief statements from Kerry and Bush deeply buried in lengthy platform statements. Kerry said that basic science should remain on a par with applied science spending. Bush said that basic science should be privately funded. Since industry has proven to be irrelevant in recent years (post Bell labs) when it comes to basic science, I voted ... well I got outvoted.
I'm basically a religious person, but a scientist by training. From one point of view, science is a way of dealing with a lot of the uncertainty in the world we live in. The scientific method is an art -- general guidelines that have been proven to be successful at improving our knowledge and understanding of the world. I don't buy into the absolute statements from others saying "Science says ..." or "Science is ...".
I carry much of my scientific skepticism and open-mindedness to studying the Bible. I find that when I study it with historical context and probable authorship in mind, there is a lot of insight and wisdom to be found. But there are (at least) two distinct creation legends incorporated into Genesis, and I can't understand how or why so many people insist on glossing over that fact and trying to just accept (blind belief) some kind of amalgamation of these stories and the genealogies that follow as a literal truth.
I don't think that science and religion really need to be at odds. They are two different approaches to knowledge of course, but neither one is absolutely the best approach for every situation. Where there are apparent contradictions between the two, I increase my uncertainty and hope that in the future I'll understand things better.
With religion, I try to respect my past experiences and beliefs while at the same time being willing to change my beliefs when it seems reasonable to do so. I don't like to think of works like the Bible as an absolute authority, but as a collection of writings that have long been recognized as profound, helpful, and inspired. I think that any philosophy that's more rigid than this would make me more susceptible to influence.
Now that we're way off topic, I'll go back to Santorum. He's just spouting propaganda of course, willing to say whatever is necessary to get votes. He's preying off of people's desire to feel safe and comfortable with a status-quo, and the desire to be smug and feel in-the-right. What's true or is not true has (apparently) nothing to do with politics. An honest politician is like a sickly gazelle in the Savannah. Evolution has weeded these out in the U.S. long ago.
You've hit the nail on the head with that link. Glad you were modded up!
My take on this is that alternative theories to dark matter are always welcome but they have a lot of explaining to do. If there is no dark matter then how else can we explain the galactic rotational velocity profiles, gravitational lensing maps, AND cosmic microwave background fluctuations fitted to cosmological models. For me the strongest evidence is found in the lensing study of colliding galaxies. The mass (dark matter) distribution has separated from the visible light distribution.
In science, it's particularly exciting when new theories are proposed that not only explain previous observations but predict new, unknown phenomena that can be tested. Sure that doesn't always happen even with good, valuable theories but this dark matter alternative theory falls well short of the "exciting" mark because it fails to explain the bulk of the existing evidence for dark matter. It also smells strongly of computational error. Being able to investigate and rule out or reveal computing errors is probably what best separates mediocre scientists from great ones these days.
I'm way behind on this discussion but it looks like people are misinterpreting this report. The CDF experiment at Fermilab had reported last April on a possible observation of a new particle. They say that it is *not* a Higgs candidate, but could be something else (even more startling than a Higgs, such as a supersymmetric particle). Something with a mass of about 140 MeV/c^2 appears to be decaying into W and two quarks. This report is here: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2011/today11-04-07.html
TFA is a report from the D0 experiment that they do not see this same thing. They should have been able to see it if it were real, but they did not. If D0 had also seen the same kind of signal that CDF did, then things would really get exciting! But for now I guess one could say that results are inconclusive on whether or not there is new physics here.
1) This is (probably) not about the Higgs at all.
2) This is not (yet) about CERN/LHC. D0 and CDF are the two collider experiments sitting on Fermilab's main ring, and they share a healthy kind of rivalry. The LHC at CERN hosts six experiments: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/LHCExperiments-en.html . The beams at these accelerators are designed to intersect (collide) at certain points around which various impressive arrays of detectors are built. Hence we have multiple experiments with independent data sets and their own unique strengths and systematics running in parallel at the same lab.
Disclaimer: I'm not really current on any of this but I can at least point out that all this discussion is off-topic and even the /. post title, "Data Review Brings Major Setback In Higgs Boson Hunt", is completely off the mark.
I'm typing this response using a Colemak keyboard layout. I'm still really slow at it since I only started learning it two weeks ago. But I decided to (temporarily) sabotage my typing speed because I want to be the kind of person who is willing to make the effort to break out of this kind of vicious cycle. My fingers are putting up a good fight - they really long for the old days - but screw them!
Qwerty is a "bad" layout for lots of reasons, so why does nearly *everyone* still use it even some 130 years after its beginnings? One reason is that Qwerty is not actually "awful", because most random layouts are a bit worse. But the main reason (after Dvorak came out in the '30s) was that schools taught Qwerty because businesses bought those typewriters, and businesses bought them because schools taught to them. These days Qwerty is still ubiquitous simply because it is.
Machine shops and hardware stores buy and stock tools designed for the US customary system because stuff needs to be made compatible with all the old stuff that's in inches & feet. Well, that and many other reasons that are similarly circular. It's like a function minimizer that's gotten stuck on a local minimum because it cannot find a downhill path to the global minimum. Sorry that's an obscure analogy, but free markets act kind of the same way, and are unable to pop themselves out of a local optimization. The US takes great pride in being a slave to market forces, no matter where they take us.
MS Windows and Office are popular for the same kinds of reasons.
I don't know what the solution is, but I also have to point out that the US equivalent to the kilogram is the slug, not pounds or ounces. Technically we should ask for food boxes to give a net mass in slugs (yummy!), not a net weight that for all we know could have been measured in a centerfuge. Fluid ounces are a stupid unit, but technically a measure of volume and are used correctly AFAIKT.
I liked parts of the letter too, but I can't easily judge how much wisdom (or lack thereof) is being expressed. There seemed to be a lot of exaggerations but to some extent that's the norm for corporate management-speak. A couple easy examples:
Return the company to a strategy that seeks high growth and high profit margins through innovation and overwhelmingly superior products with unrivaled user experience.
This strikes me as a particularly desperate statement that struggles against reality.
Dramatically increase efficiency by eliminating outdated and bureaucratic R&D practices like geographically distributed software development and outsourcing.
How dramatic? Isn't outsourcing done (like it or not) to reduce costs? Distributed software development can be made to work fairly well. Multiple R&D sites allow you to attract talent from a wider pool of applicants.
Big corporate shakeups like this are a sign of a struggling company. There are enormous costs involved in doing this. In some cases it works well, but it may also be posturing by some few investors that are hoping to dump the company later on for personal profit. If I were a shareholder I'd need a lot more convincing, more details, real data, and some independent confirmation of the data before I went along with it.
The mass of a cubic centimeter of water spans a relatively huge range, depending on the composition of the water and the circumstances under which it's measured. The composition of even distilled water varies, since both hydrogen and oxygen have a variety of isotopes, the ratios of which vary from one source of water to another.
I think you're right here. "Relatively" is the key word. The trick to the standardization of SI units is that one cannot measure anything in units that involve mass to greater accuracy than the kilogram itself is known to. As technology advances we bump up against these standards every now and then, when certain other kinds of ultra-high precision measurements become possible.
If you boil this down to a theoretical, idealized system (e.g., using a composition of water that's impossible to reproduce), you might as well base it on something more stable, like the mass of a particular kind of atom. If you do that, you might as well simply base it on a fundamental constant, which is exactly what TFA is talking about. A fundamental constant is really the way to go here. The fact that different ways of measuring it disagree is really just a minor bump in the road.
Yeah, the density of water depends on composition, temperature, and pressure. Atmospheric pressure changes naturally so much, I'm sure that measuring and reproducing any kind of average sea-level air pressure is going to be one of the limiting factors in defining the kilogram that way. It's fine to define mass in terms of fundamental constants, but one has to be very clever and choose this constant to be something that is not only easy to measure, but something that can be measured more accurately than any other mass-related measurement or constant.
I know just enough to see why high precision measurement science is extremely tricky stuff, and how it often comes into direct contact with the definitions of standard units. I also think it's a big deal that the two different experiments to tie the new mass definition to the old one disagree. One cannot just average the results -- that's meaningless. One of the two experiments is wrong, if not both, and so the average result is guaranteed to be wrong. Picking one result at random at least has a chance of being correct, but clearly that's not satisfactory either.
... True libertarians are against the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, Medicaid Part D, the banned use of new stem cell lines, and are FOR abortion rights. ...
This kind of statement is why I'm an independent. I have views on many issues but they aren't exactly one party platform or another. I think that partisan politics of all sorts in the US are based on us-vs-them thinking and attempt to substitute anger and conflict in place of discussion about important issues.
I never thought of Fox News as libertarian however. More of a GOP mouthpiece, though really the bias is simply against anything center or left-of-center. Most politics is antagonistic. Don't vote for that guy because blah blah blah. If you take a stand on anything then you're more open to attack. Libertarianism is a stand for something. Fox News is a stand against a lot of things.
I really appreciate the Windows-in-VM and Windows terminal server suggestions. I'll pass those along. We do actually have a terminal server set up, so this seems like the easiest way to go. Unfortunately one could not integrate outlook-on-a-TS with a Linux desktop, with new email and meeting notifications. Still all things considered this would be a better way of working for many if not most people here. My office is about 90% R&D.
I still don't think this would fly since the IT is outsourced, security is such a big deal, and so on. Expanding users' choices is always more expensive if you look at IT costs all by themselves. I just chalk this up to the inertia of a large corporation.
We're using Office 2003, and Vista 32-bit, SP1. They migrated from Windows 2000 a couple years ago.
For years (at other jobs) I would regularly organize my email, but I found that this never helps when I go searching for an email. I have never come up with an organization system that is fast, simple, and unambiguous. I like gmail's approach a lot, and I guess I kinda treat Outlook the same way, moving the inbox into an archive folder every few months because of server quotas. But this relies on good and fast searching. Outlook 2003's search capability is neither fast nor complete.
I also don't like how Outlook composes email. It's modal, effectively deciding between plaintext, html, and RTF based on what I'm replying to. New emails seem to pick a mode depending on the phase of the moon. Some modes are buggy and limited. I personally don't feel comfortable sending RTF emails since that's in no way a standard. I want to be sending emails, not "Microsofts".
I'm at a kind of satellite office for a big telecom company, and we all have "managed" workstations -- PCs running Windows, exchange server, lots of 3rd-party security software, internal websites with ActiveX, etc. So we're heavily entrenched in a Windows computing environment.
But ironically almost all of the equipment we're working on is running a Linux kernel. We have to do development on remote *nix servers. So ssh, Xwindows, telnet, scripting with Perl/Python/Tcl/whatever, ... these are the tools for most of the actual work done around here. Windows is a complete disaster for this environment! Some folks install their own Linux in a VM, others use Cygwin a lot, and others struggle along with software like Exceed and Putty. Either way it's very awkward.
So every couple days someone asks "can I _please_ switch to Linux on my desktop? Please??" I can't even pretend to know the whole scope of the answer, but MS Exchange (especially calendaring) and liberal use of Word and Excel documents factor in heavily.
I'll echo the sentiment that Outlook is a horrible, nasty email client! I don't hate anyone with enough savage intensity to recommend Outlook to them. (Just try searching for that email you vaguely recall reading 2 months ago.) But we even use Exchange to schedule our conference rooms! I don't know any other client that works well enough with Exchange to be an adequate replacement.
So my conclusion (if I'm not just ranting) is that if you abandon multi-platform support at an early enough stage within a company (probably starting with an Exchange server) then you can become locked in subtly and deeply. Divorcing Windows on the desktop at my workplace is like pulling a thread on a sweater. Pretty soon the whole thing unravels.
Book burnings now are entirely symbolic. There is widespread access to knowledge, publishing is relatively cheap, so burning books accomplishes exactly nothing. But originally it was much more dramatic, both strategically and emotionally effective at stamping out schools of thought. The pyres probably also symbolized burning clothes and possessions of someone who was infected with some plague -- these books contain contagious ideas that taint the reader in some fatal way.
I think a Quran-burning party is a kind of hate rally. It serves to attack the religion, but also to dehumanize Muslims themselves. It's an early step toward radicalization for those involved in the burning.
If they choose which content they host, isn't that dangerously close to saying they SUPPORT content they host?
For me, this comes the closest to identifying the problem with what rackspace did. If they can justify themselves, it comes down to how precisely one can define hate speech. If that's easy to define, then they aren't supporting the content they host, they are just subjecting it (or doing random spot-checks) to a predefined filter.
So I wonder if I can find a precise definition. I don't think you can consider satire or criticism as hate speech, but most politicking these days is mud-slinging, which is essentially hate speech. In this you promote falsehoods as the truth and present them in an emotionally-charged way. But what's true and what's not is impossible to know. ...
Even if there's a lot of grey area, I think anyone would have to agree that advertising a Quran-burning event is definitely a kind of hate speech. At best it's an attempt to strengthen the bonds of church members by celebrating a common hatred. Again, a whole lot of partisan politics is this same thing.
Sorry about the stream-of-consciousness post. I think rackspace has discredited themselves here by having a uselessly-vague qualification in their AUP, combined with the stupidity to actually enforce it.
Sorry to stay off topic. I'm a protestant Christian too, but perhaps on the other side of the spectrum. I was just recently observing how very often Jesus was struggling against the literalism of the church officials of his day. A prime example is his _constant_ struggle to change their perception of Sabbath day law from a very literal "don't do any work" to perhaps a more inward devotion on a daily basis. The official interpretation at the time must have been based on a rather literal interpretation of creation: on the seventh day he rested.
Much of the sermon on the mount is about internalizing the ideas behind the biblical laws instead of focusing on outward appearance, and going beyond a literal interpretation. To me this sermon is the very heart of Christianity.
I don't know what you mean that "Jesus spoke about the literalness of the historical record..." I know he quoted a lot, and that some of the gospels argue that Jesus is the Christ based on prophecies and even genealogy, but this appears to me to be the New Testament writers' arguments to persuade the Jewish population. Jesus' own arguments about Christendom were mostly focused on his moral teachings and healing works, although the idea of a Christ is certainly defined by older prophecies. I have to think that any holistic reading of the NT would paint Jesus as a radical liberal activist trying to raise the people's understanding of the Bible and of God to a higher level, to be less ritualistic, and to put excuses aside and just live our lives in ways that reflect our Divine inheritance. "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect." (a common refrain, from KJV)
I always thought the phrase "security through obscurity" means protection by a weak or unstudied algorithm that is ad-hoc and thought to be unknowable. Passwords usually involve strong but publicly-known hashing algorithms. Isn't it better to rely on strong encryption techniques than merely obscure ones?
Okay I hadn't considered cases like gay marriage since I was thinking too much about the big picture. But I don't think this is a trend or a taste of what's to come, since in general human rights abuses in the US have been on the decline over the past century or more. And I don't see how Kagan's recognition that individual ideologies influence law (law is based on ideology anyway) will create more abuses of human rights than protection of them.
I think a good supreme court should be rife with activism. I mean, it should be composed of diverse intellectuals who actively debate the issues at hand in order to find common ground.
I'm not saying that she's the second coming of Christ! But I haven't yet seen any major red flags or accusations in the press that aren't just emotionally overcharged propaganda stunts.
I recently heard someone describe the constitution as "written as a living document." Try reading some of it, and comparing the language with both present-day bills and other late-1700's legal or philosophical writing. The constitution is actually a very easy read, comparatively! It's a much more "common" English. I think that's because it's intended to convey a kind of sensibility more clearly than any actual laws.
The end result is that while it's very easy to understand, or get the gist of, it's also very much subject to interpretation when it comes down to specific issues. And I think that was the original intent of the authors.
So I don't disagree with you about the constitution providing for only a very limited government. But what that really means, and what any of our laws really mean, is not as rigid a thing as half-lives of isotopes or rules for parsing ANSI C. In this context, what Kagan says seems consistent with what anyone with a good understanding of law would have to say. The constitution does establish the role and the boundaries for the supreme court, but the more subtle nuances of laws need to be resolved in each case based on the original intent of the law as well as the practical and popular needs of our society. Any kind of statement you make here needs to acknowledge both importance of existing law as well as the times we live in and the people we have become.
This is a very strong sign of activism, disregarding the constitution in favor of a form of democracy that puts the minority in the tyranny of the majority, such a thing is no different than living in a dictatorship.
No, I think you're reaching this conclusion only because you want to. You're extrapolating way beyond Kagan's statement and envisioning a land where the "minority" (the US citizenship I presume) live in subjugation under the harsh dictatorship of the "majority" (some kind of self-perpetuating regime of former Democrats). While that's a great premise for a sci-fi novel, thankfully there's no connection to the appointment of Kagan.
I don't think socialism is cynical at all. I think socialism would "work" if (1) someone was smart enough to construct a perfect algorithm to regulate an efficient economy, and (2) everyone was so thrilled by (1) and happy to help out their society as a whole that they worked to the best of their abilities. A perfect citizen in a socialist economy is probably someone who is more motivated by doing good for others than for themself. That's extremely optimistic!
The free market is also optimistic. Someone realized that with highly simplistic models, an efficient society can be constructed of individuals seeking only their own wealth and happiness. The optimism here is not that all people are saintly but that this simplistic model reflects reality. Unfortunately lots of situations, including waste trade between disparate nations, violate a lot of these free market model assumptions.
Maybe government regulations are an attempt to borrow from socialism to patch up those various problem areas where a free market fails completely to maximize social welfare. I won't argue that it's a bad solution, but in some cases (like this) it's better than nothing, and I don't think it's really "cynical" either.
In a free market, if someone buys their favorite breakfast cereal from the least expensive and most convenient store, they aren't being selfish. They are benefiting everyone by supporting those choices which surely others will also appreciate. On the surface at least, that's a case where free market works and where greedy, selfish people aren't evil. Well, perhaps the devil is in the details, so to speak.
Even the Baldur's Gate series had multiplayer (even though it wasn't that good). I'd have bought DAO in a heartbeat if it had some kind of LAN-based multiplayer.
I agree with your sarcasm -- it's amazing how much people "believe" in a free market so much that they assume it is the best system even in economic sectors where it was never proven or even theorized to work. A rational perspective is so often trumped by irrational bindings to the concept of good and evil. It's like saying "look and see how well Newtonian gravity explains the way cars roll downhill and planets orbit the sun! Newtonian gravity is good and just, and all heretical theories like those of that anarchist, Einstein, are evil!"
On the flip side, I stumbled across this page while trying to get a good overview of the toxic waste export issues:
http://ban.org/Library/ierarticle.html
I was appalled by how much propaganda there is in this report. Every headline and sentence is loaded with manipulative wording. It's really comical! While I'm inclined to agree with the message on the whole, which justifies the Basel ban, every instinct tells me not to trust these wordsmiths. There's no actual evidence presented (that I could find) to support the Basel ban. I'm not saying that the Basel ban was a bad idea or that the US should not now support it, but my search to find a rational argument backed up by evidence is unsuccessful so far.
I'm not sure either but someone will figure it out and add it to Qt.
I mostly agree here, FWIW, but it's still probably easier to learn MS Word or OOO Writer "from scratch" (whatever that means) than LaTeX. The main reason I believe this is that it takes programmer's skills to understand TeX/LaTeX error messages and go back to the source document and figure out how to fix the problem. For long equations or complicated tables I often comment out sections to figure out what's not working, or pull out pieces to render one at a time, etc. This process is familiar and intuitive to me, but only because I've been programming for the last 30 years.
For people who can deal with fixing strange LaTeX errors (at least better than they can deal with bizarre Word formatting quirks), LaTeX is great. Besides equations, it's great for including and captioning figures. It's also better than Word at tables, large documents, and collaborative writing. Others have pointed these out but I wanted to add figures to the list of LaTeX advantages over WYSIWYG.
Of course, just because a program costs thousands of $ doesn't mean it's any good either. I'm short on examples, but in my experience the more expensive the software the worse it is. AutoCAD and ClearQuest are the only ones coming to mind now, as I think I've mentally blocked out the worst experiences. There are exceptions to this of course. Fluent is pretty good.
But I agree in general that if you're doing professional work, your software choices are expanded because cost is not an issue.
This one has flaws too, but at least it's better than FPTP hopefully.
Some important things regarding the flaw of this voting method...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting#Voting_systems_criteria
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting#Tactical_voting
The first link mentions that the "Independence of irrelevant alternatives" criteria is not satisfied by this voting method, which I've also seen called the "3rd-party spoiler effect." There are several other voting systems that do avoid this effect and more, and are equally simple. The simplest is an approval vote, where each voter gives a thumbs-up or down vote for each candidate (or a score from 1-10, or whatever). It's hot-or-not style voting, which people seem to understand quite easily. Another is an instant-runoff election where you rank your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice candidates. This doesn't work for multiple-seat elections. If by counting up all top votes one candidate gets a majority, they win. Otherwise the lowest vote-getter drops out of the running and their votes go to the 2nd choice listed. The process iterates until there is a majority winner. This got some good attention a while ago (including support early in Obama's political career), but is probably more complicated and no better than approval voting.
I believe, but can't prove because I'm too lazy, that a 2-party system is a stable equilibrium with the most common voting system in the US, plurality. Any 3rd-party works against its own interest, precisely because of this spoiler effect.
Normal, face-to-face conversation:
"I might be interested in this book, but don't yet know what ETL, Kettle, Pentaho, or BI refer to. Could you help me out please?"
"Sure! An ETL is a ..."
Slashdot:
would it kill you to state what an acronym stands for the first time you use it?
You must be new here.
Do you need a de-acronymization of SQL?
Do you need a de-acronymization of XML?
Since it was established fairly on that PDI is Pentaho Data Integration ...
(Note that PDI is the only TLA defined in the summary but it isn't actually used there.)
... ...
Did you buy your four digit id, or are you just cranky today?
I have low tolerance for idiots and none for trollish anonymous coward bitch-boys like yourself.