Israel isn't really a theocracy. The Likud party in charge is a secular one. More than half of the country considers itself "secular", and only fifteen percent considers itself "religious".
If you're going to talk about the dual citizenship bit for Jews, that's based on Jews as an ethnic group, not as a religion.
Muslims and Christians live there alongside Jews and enjoy the same rights of citizenship that they do; they vote and hold office.
Republicans - People = Humans who can think for them sleves
Except when we need to be protected from tits on TV (ha! on-topic!). Except when we need to have government approval of our sexuality to get married. Except when we need the federal government to overrule the states' right to legalize marijuana within their borders.
Yeah, I can just smell the independence vibe coming off the Republican party.
You actually believe your own propaganda, don't you. Here's a hint: the Republicans in power ain't conservatives. Running up horrific debt in foreign policy adventures isn't a conservative act. Especially now that, since the WMD tack failed to pan out, we're there to spread freedom and democracy.
He's the implicate order guy, yes? I remember reading about it in Grant Morrison's Animal Man, and thinking that it just sounded like the whole Platonic cave dealie.
And y'know what? Using the implicate order as an explanation for why fictional characters in long-standing continuities can be reinvented while retaining the central essences of their identities is fine with me. (The whole story centered around the massive rewriting of DC comics continuity in 'Crisis on Infinite Earths', and the characters' attempts to find out just what the hell had happened.)
As for using it as a real tool to describe the universe itself? Smells faintly religious, and not at all like science. Sounds like Bohm had some interesting philosophy, but I'm not really clear on what that has to do with the physical world.
Dear me, that's disturbing. I wonder how many people ended up with really, really sketchy views on science from that.
This, perhaps, is a danger of trying to popularize science---you end up mangling it and turning it into something not rigorous, and thus not really useful.
While these isomorphisms provide a useful view on some ideas (Buddhism's Interconnectedness of All Things and chaos theory's butterfly effect), it's dangerous to assume that those connections are rigorously true, that rather than connecting an unknown idea in the audience's mind to a familiar one, you're saying that the universe really runs on Buddhism. And that ain't science.
You know, I was trying to think of a way to say that it's intellectually bankrupt to attach real value and meaning to isomorphisms between ancient cultures and modern science. (Alan Sokal touched on this when he made his famous jab at postmodern literary analysis.) But you've said it better than I ever could. It's a shame your comment won't be seen by a tenth of the people who saw the parent. (It's at Score:0 as I write this.)
And yet I don't mind when Doug Hofstadter does it. I wonder why that is. Does he say that the isomorphisms are strictly tools for thinking, not rigorous methods of proof? I remember him saying something like that.
The tendency to give this sort of credence to foreign cultures simply because they seem alien is foolish and, I think, a bit demeaning to both science and the culture being reappropriated.
I suppose it'll stick around, though, if only because it's such a useful (but misleading?) tool for teaching the layperson.
This is point-set topology, right? I got to take a course in that, but I never got to do algebraic. It was pretty interesting, or so I thought. I'm trying to see how much if it I still remember.
So you mean that... the standard topology (with basis all open intervals in the set) on (0,1) is homeomorphic to R^1 (via the arctan function and some trivial algebra to move (0,1) onto (-1,1))? That was the one we'd use most often, the (0,1) interval. At least, I think it was the open interval. Is the closed interval still homeomorphic to R^1? Are all one-dimensional complete sets (e.g., the reals, but not the rationals) homeomorphic to either R^1 or S^1?
Or is point-set stuff totally useless here, and I'm making shit up?
Man, taking all those math courses really served only to point out how little I know about math...
Man, this thread boomed while I was off at work. I'm impressed.
Do me a favor. Think of the number of times guns are used in the US per day, okay? Now, try and do a vague mental breakdown of the proportions of legal and illegal uses (what's this "legitimate" crap?) of them. Legal: hunting, target shooting, scaring off criminals, cops shooting brown people. Illegal: armed robbery, murder, rape at gunpoint, cops shooting white people. (Not meant to be an all-inclusive list.) Do you seriously think that guns are used more often illegally than legally?
Now, think of the number of times public-network P2P software is used daily in this country. Legal: Linux distros. Illegal: Metallica, "The Incredibles", copies of Photoshop. Do you seriously think that public-network P2P is used more often legally than illegally?
Now, I'm not arguing that P2P should be illegal. There are substantial non-infringing uses (imagine how hard it would be to sling those ISOs around without BitTorrent!), and that's what matters. What I am saying is that it requires a remarkably distorted view to say that guns are made for evildoing and should be heavily controlled if not banned, while P2P is nothing of the sort.
Analogy time! Knives:HTTP/FTP/etc::Guns:P2P. There's plenty of non-infringing (non-murdering) uses for both, but the latter group certainly makes it easier.
I personally won't buy lossy formats. I don't consider them good enough quality for what I listen to. (Classical)
AllOfMP3.com offers a pretty good selection of classical, much of it lossless.
Personally, I can't tell the frickin' difference, and am glad for it. Does anyone actually get enjoyment out of being able to detect the flaws in 320kbit AAC audio?
[I] felt like the steam went out of it towards the end, when he had to mangle the novel a bit to deal with the realities of casting, etc.
Indeed. I missed Ivanova in the fifth season. And it felt as if they were just wrapping up loose ends much of the time. jms had originally intended to end the fourth season with 'Intersections in Real Time'. (And here I thought 'Z'Ha'Dum' ended S3 on a downer...)
Still, Londo's story wasn't finished, and I thought it was worth telling. The telepaths, meh, shadow of the Vorlons, we all knew that already. The Drakh, though, shadow of the Shadows, much spookier. And I nearly cried when Londo flashes back through his career on the station, forward to his dream of death at G'Kar's hands, then turns to accept his fate and that of his people. Whew.
And I almost cried at the final episode, but then again, who didn't? The music... so sad... jms's one single appearance ever... ah, we'll miss him.
Part of your quote got chopped, and I'm curious as to what it said.
Y'know, they could have just turned the loudspeakers at him and been all, YOU WILL COOPERATE WITH THE STATE FOR THE GOOD OF THE STATE AND YOUR OWN SURVIVAL. (Anyone remember that? Anyone?)
... the page itself says that nybble is an acceptable alternate spelling. (And since when do links not have the domain name tagged to the end of them? That's weird. Must be that wikipedia.org is 'trusted'. Or something.)
Yes, I too know the delights of gnuplot for graphs, and the usage of make to smush together twenty graphs and diagrams (mmm, dia) into one LaTeX output document.
Have you seen WikiTeX? It allows for direct inclusion of graphviz, gnuplot, LaTeX and LilyPond directly into a wiki page. (It's a MediaWiki extension.) You lose the excellent typesetting, but man is it ever quick and easy.
I came to Babylon 5 rather late, after it had originally aired. I remember seeing individual episodes from the first season, and thinking that, meh, the effects were pretty spiffy but I really didn't know who anyone was.
I watched the whole thing last year and came to a somewhat different conclusion. jms ruined me for lesser SF. I can no longer stand most TNG or DS9 episodes. (Though I may yet watch DS9 as a whole---maybe it's good that way.)
jms made a five-year novel-for-television. We shall not see one man's vision so clearly transferred to the small screen for a long, long time, if ever again.
This is just a final middle-finger from the industry to jms. Punks.
Avery Lee of VirtualDub fame says (scroll down to the 3/17/2004 news) that MSVC compilers suck horribly at optimizing MMX or SSE code. Check out his examples. I wish I knew assembler so I really could understand how horrible they are.
Slashdot Mirror
move to Israel
Israel isn't really a theocracy. The Likud party in charge is a secular one. More than half of the country considers itself "secular", and only fifteen percent considers itself "religious".
If you're going to talk about the dual citizenship bit for Jews, that's based on Jews as an ethnic group, not as a religion.
Muslims and Christians live there alongside Jews and enjoy the same rights of citizenship that they do; they vote and hold office.
What makes Israel a theocracy?
--grendel drago
Republicans - People = Humans who can think for them sleves
Except when we need to be protected from tits on TV (ha! on-topic!). Except when we need to have government approval of our sexuality to get married. Except when we need the federal government to overrule the states' right to legalize marijuana within their borders.
Yeah, I can just smell the independence vibe coming off the Republican party.
You actually believe your own propaganda, don't you. Here's a hint: the Republicans in power ain't conservatives. Running up horrific debt in foreign policy adventures isn't a conservative act. Especially now that, since the WMD tack failed to pan out, we're there to spread freedom and democracy.
--grendel drago
Oh, you think you jest, but you don't.
--grendel drago
He's the implicate order guy, yes? I remember reading about it in Grant Morrison's Animal Man , and thinking that it just sounded like the whole Platonic cave dealie.
And y'know what? Using the implicate order as an explanation for why fictional characters in long-standing continuities can be reinvented while retaining the central essences of their identities is fine with me. (The whole story centered around the massive rewriting of DC comics continuity in 'Crisis on Infinite Earths', and the characters' attempts to find out just what the hell had happened.)
As for using it as a real tool to describe the universe itself? Smells faintly religious, and not at all like science. Sounds like Bohm had some interesting philosophy, but I'm not really clear on what that has to do with the physical world.
--grendel drago
Dear me, that's disturbing. I wonder how many people ended up with really, really sketchy views on science from that.
This, perhaps, is a danger of trying to popularize science---you end up mangling it and turning it into something not rigorous, and thus not really useful.
While these isomorphisms provide a useful view on some ideas (Buddhism's Interconnectedness of All Things and chaos theory's butterfly effect), it's dangerous to assume that those connections are rigorously true, that rather than connecting an unknown idea in the audience's mind to a familiar one, you're saying that the universe really runs on Buddhism. And that ain't science.
--grendel drago
You know, I was trying to think of a way to say that it's intellectually bankrupt to attach real value and meaning to isomorphisms between ancient cultures and modern science. (Alan Sokal touched on this when he made his famous jab at postmodern literary analysis.) But you've said it better than I ever could. It's a shame your comment won't be seen by a tenth of the people who saw the parent. (It's at Score:0 as I write this.)
And yet I don't mind when Doug Hofstadter does it. I wonder why that is. Does he say that the isomorphisms are strictly tools for thinking, not rigorous methods of proof? I remember him saying something like that.
The tendency to give this sort of credence to foreign cultures simply because they seem alien is foolish and, I think, a bit demeaning to both science and the culture being reappropriated.
I suppose it'll stick around, though, if only because it's such a useful (but misleading?) tool for teaching the layperson.
--grendel drago
This is point-set topology, right? I got to take a course in that, but I never got to do algebraic. It was pretty interesting, or so I thought. I'm trying to see how much if it I still remember.
So you mean that... the standard topology (with basis all open intervals in the set) on (0,1) is homeomorphic to R^1 (via the arctan function and some trivial algebra to move (0,1) onto (-1,1))? That was the one we'd use most often, the (0,1) interval. At least, I think it was the open interval. Is the closed interval still homeomorphic to R^1? Are all one-dimensional complete sets (e.g., the reals, but not the rationals) homeomorphic to either R^1 or S^1?
Or is point-set stuff totally useless here, and I'm making shit up?
Man, taking all those math courses really served only to point out how little I know about math...
--grendel drago
You may have a future with Rockwell Automation...
--grendel drago
Man, this thread boomed while I was off at work. I'm impressed.
Do me a favor. Think of the number of times guns are used in the US per day, okay? Now, try and do a vague mental breakdown of the proportions of legal and illegal uses (what's this "legitimate" crap?) of them. Legal: hunting, target shooting, scaring off criminals, cops shooting brown people. Illegal: armed robbery, murder, rape at gunpoint, cops shooting white people. (Not meant to be an all-inclusive list.) Do you seriously think that guns are used more often illegally than legally?
Now, think of the number of times public-network P2P software is used daily in this country. Legal: Linux distros. Illegal: Metallica, "The Incredibles", copies of Photoshop. Do you seriously think that public-network P2P is used more often legally than illegally?
Now, I'm not arguing that P2P should be illegal. There are substantial non-infringing uses (imagine how hard it would be to sling those ISOs around without BitTorrent!), and that's what matters. What I am saying is that it requires a remarkably distorted view to say that guns are made for evildoing and should be heavily controlled if not banned, while P2P is nothing of the sort.
I still think my analogy holds, and holds well.
--grendel drago
You know, you should have said guns, not knives.
Analogy time! Knives:HTTP/FTP/etc::Guns:P2P. There's plenty of non-infringing (non-murdering) uses for both, but the latter group certainly makes it easier.
--grendel drago
and I'm still in disbelief that there are no alternative readers for Windows given Adobe's piss-poor performance.
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/
--grendel drago
And I'm sure we'll have solar as a major component of distributed power generation right after that commercial fusion plant gets built.
--grendel drago
I personally won't buy lossy formats. I don't consider them good enough quality for what I listen to. (Classical)
AllOfMP3.com offers a pretty good selection of classical, much of it lossless.
Personally, I can't tell the frickin' difference, and am glad for it. Does anyone actually get enjoyment out of being able to detect the flaws in 320kbit AAC audio?
--grendel drago
Ssh! Those kids subsidize everyone else. Well, their overindulgent parents do. Either way, it means cheaper stuff for me!
--grendel drago
[I] felt like the steam went out of it towards the end, when he had to mangle the novel a bit to deal with the realities of casting, etc.
Indeed. I missed Ivanova in the fifth season. And it felt as if they were just wrapping up loose ends much of the time. jms had originally intended to end the fourth season with 'Intersections in Real Time'. (And here I thought 'Z'Ha'Dum' ended S3 on a downer...)
Still, Londo's story wasn't finished, and I thought it was worth telling. The telepaths, meh, shadow of the Vorlons, we all knew that already. The Drakh, though, shadow of the Shadows, much spookier. And I nearly cried when Londo flashes back through his career on the station, forward to his dream of death at G'Kar's hands, then turns to accept his fate and that of his people. Whew.
And I almost cried at the final episode, but then again, who didn't? The music... so sad... jms's one single appearance ever... ah, we'll miss him.
--grendel drago
Part of your quote got chopped, and I'm curious as to what it said.
Y'know, they could have just turned the loudspeakers at him and been all, YOU WILL COOPERATE WITH THE STATE FOR THE GOOD OF THE STATE AND YOUR OWN SURVIVAL. (Anyone remember that? Anyone?)
--grendel drago
b) the eye "witnesses" said they had red banadanas, when Al Qaidas colour is green.
Green represents Islam. Red represents Arabs. They're Pan-Arabic colors, seen on most of the flags of the middle east.
Just letting you know.
--grendel drago
... the page itself says that nybble is an acceptable alternate spelling. (And since when do links not have the domain name tagged to the end of them? That's weird. Must be that wikipedia.org is 'trusted'. Or something.)
--grendel drago
No, I didn't, but now I do. Fun!
--grendel drago
Not to nitpick, but I've heard of a half byte referred to as a nibble.
You mean nybble , don't you?
--grendel drago
Yes, I too know the delights of gnuplot for graphs, and the usage of make to smush together twenty graphs and diagrams (mmm, dia) into one LaTeX output document.
Have you seen WikiTeX? It allows for direct inclusion of graphviz, gnuplot, LaTeX and LilyPond directly into a wiki page. (It's a MediaWiki extension.) You lose the excellent typesetting, but man is it ever quick and easy.
--grendel drago
I came to Babylon 5 rather late, after it had originally aired. I remember seeing individual episodes from the first season, and thinking that, meh, the effects were pretty spiffy but I really didn't know who anyone was.
I watched the whole thing last year and came to a somewhat different conclusion. jms ruined me for lesser SF. I can no longer stand most TNG or DS9 episodes. (Though I may yet watch DS9 as a whole---maybe it's good that way.)
jms made a five-year novel-for-television. We shall not see one man's vision so clearly transferred to the small screen for a long, long time, if ever again.
This is just a final middle-finger from the industry to jms. Punks.
--grendel drago
Wasn't someone going to come out with better solar panels, like five times better? Anyone remember that?
--grendel drago
Avery Lee of VirtualDub fame says (scroll down to the 3/17/2004 news) that MSVC compilers suck horribly at optimizing MMX or SSE code. Check out his examples. I wish I knew assembler so I really could understand how horrible they are.
--grendel drago