But it's not like airlines really advertise amenities. When I search for a flight, I get a list of departure/arrival times and prices. Maybe I'll see what kind of plane I'm flying on so I can go to a third-party site to see which seats are good. United had some of their economy seats spaced out more for better leg room for a while, but I never saw anything about which flights had that and which didn't.
What about talking to the housemate to get them to use a less aggressive client? Most P2P software that I know of has bandwidth cap options built in, which makes me think the poster is trying to do this under the table. How is the housemate going to react if/when they find out about it? Is this really a problem that's best addressed with technology?
Your first link is based on cherry-picking the results of a post-hoc meta-analysis -- a double bias. The second (about PEAR) isn't any better. Also, note that those two articles contradict each other -- PEAR claims evidence of psychokinesis, while the SRI/SAIC analysis of the same claims a null result.
The Art of Electronics, which many people have recommended, is a well-written book, but it comes with a couple caveats. First, it is twenty years old, which means it spends a lot of time on topics that aren't as important today (JFETs, for example). Second, and more importantly, it's an electronics book, which means it's intended to be read after a corresponding class in basic circuit theory. Electronics is the study of how semiconductor devices are used in electrical circuits, not the study of electrical circuits in general. While the first chapter of AoE does offer a review of circuit theory concepts, it's pretty terse. If you're good at calculus and want a good textbook, try Engineering Circuit Analysis by Hayt, Kemmerly, and Durbin. This may be a bit more work than you're looking for, but one of the things you quickly learn about electricity is that it's pretty abstract (being invisible and all), and visualization aids like LEDs and even expensive test equipment don't help as much as you might think unless you already have an idea of what's going on. If you're just doing digital circuits you can get by with less, but for anything remotely analog, knowing the theory helps a lot.
Why should I believe that deep self-examination is any less prone to error, illusion, and limitations than any other sense or mode of thought? I've been wrong about plenty of things before, including myself. It's easy to come up with an idea that seems correct if there's no way of verifying it, especially if there's a cultural (or biological) predilection towards it in the first place. I bet you could convince lots people that the lines in a Cafe Wall illusion are really curvy if nobody could put a ruler against it.
Well, the universe holds vast power over me (me being a part of it and all) and has demonstrated a willingness to severely hurt me. As a small mammal, that bothers me. Also, as far as I can tell, I'm either forced to endure it forever or doomed to escape through absolute extinction. They don't affect my day to day life much, but in the long run, issues like those are going to affect me more than anything else. Once I start pondering what I want my life to be about or what the point in continuing to live is, the big questions are pretty well inescapable.
I really don't get the issues with widescreen that are brought up throughout this thread. It's the same number of vertical dots whether widescreen resolution (1920x1200, for instance) or 4:3 (1600x1200, for instance). I don't get how you would have to "scroll more" on a widescreen display.
All other things being equal, you wouldn't, but note that the hypothetical widescreen you mention is actually a bigger monitor. Since the price of a monitor is largely a function of its total surface area, a better comparison would be between, say, a 19" 4:3 and a 19" widescreen, in which case you either get smaller images (unaccepable to some) or less vertical display.
I agree that text and widget size should be resolution-independent. Is it so hard to have a global scale factor that says widget X is N pixels wide?
Most of what I do on a computer involves reading. My eyesight isn't so good, so I can't run at high resolution without getting a headache -- the text is just too small, especially on a laptop, which doesn't have the greatest screen to begin with. Keeping my text size constant and squashing the monitor means I'm seeing less of a page than I would with a 4:3 aspect ratio. I'm sure many people find it easier to have more windows open at once, but I find that most displays are still too small for that. On a 24" widescreen, sure, but 15 inches is too small as it is. Let me keep my non-widescreen, please.
Wheeler might be better known as part of the Misner/Thorne/Wheeler team that produced the Bible of General Relativity, but he's also the co-author of Spacetime Physics, one of the best SR books I've ever read. It's part of the school of physics textbooks that puts equations in service of language where they belong. If you have a basic physics background and want to learn more about relativity without wading through tons of Lorentz transfomations, give it a try.
The population of the psychology at large is not fixed. Fear of nuclear power was and continues to be propagated by anti-nuclear activists, who happen to be louder than other people. It can be unmade, but not if people who know what they're talking about refuse to speak out.
Personally, I rank the real damage caused by coal plants as bigger threat than imaginary damage caused by lowered property values. Actually, I would love a nuclear plant in my back yard -- it would make it that much cheaper to buy a house.
Of course, after shit happens, you'll still probably claim that nuclear plants are perfectly safe because the incident was an anomaly, just like Chernobyl didn't count because it was "stupid design run by idiots" and TMI didn't count because it was due to problems in the nuclear industry that "have since been fixed". Well, life includes anomalies, and they will happen.
People make those claims because they're good arguments. When you find a problem in something you've built, do you fix it, or give up and scrap the whole project? By your logic, we shouldn't be building houses, much less anything more complex. Chernobyl *was* poorly-designed and (at the time of the accident) run by a skeleton screw of incompetents. TMI *was* due to fixable problems, and injured, let's see, *nobody*.
The Bhopal chemical plant accident has killed 20,000 people and injured over 120,000. Chemical plant accidents are much more common than nuclear plant accidents and are often much more dangerous. Do a search for "United States refinery accidents". Several of the links on the first page are for lawyers -- that's how much worse it is. Does that mean we should shut down all chemical plants? No, because the problems are correctly recognized to be with the design and operation of the plants, which (despite what you seem to think) are not "anomalies" but systemic problems that can be fixed. Plants with good safety systems and procedures still have accidents, but few to no people are killed. Look at the history of nuclear power accidents and you'll see that almost all of them are like this. A reactor goes critical, but is contained. A worker doesn't follow procedure when replacing a part -- he's killed, but nobody else is.
Chernobyl was 22 years ago. TMI was 29 years ago. If nuclear power is so dangerous, why do the same two (bad) examples keep getting talked about over and over? Why do we have to turn to the Soviet Union (hardly a world leader in safety) for an example of a real disaster? The answer is that fear of nuclear power, like fear of terrorism, is largely a modern-day bogeyman created by a failure to understand the scale of the risks involved.
According to the Usenet Physics FAQ, one photon will trigger the retina, but the brain filters out the signal unless it gets several in a small period if time:
Dividing by two is easy -- just take the output of one of the flip-flops. Dividing by other numbers can be done by connecting the flip-flop outputs and/or their complements to an AND gate. This requires some extra circuitry and wiring, but in an integrated circuit the overhead will be insignificant. Even in a discrete circuit, if you make the reference 2^32Hz (~4.2GHz), you're only looking at maybe two counter ICs to divide down to 1Hz, although no counter IC I know of can handle a 4GHz signal.
The real issue with using this would be whether your manufacturing process can make transistors fast enough for it. The quote in the summary suggests this will be popular in an analog role for high-frequency applications like wireless. Maybe we'll see discrete timing references too.
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? It's plain old information theory. Just because an increase in X implies a decrease in Y doesn't mean the Uncertainty Principle is involved.
Many of the crazier high-profile evangelicals have called people with different political views (read: anything remotely left-leaning) traitors, with the implication that they should receive a traitor's punishment.
It's also worth noting that while Islam is over a thousand years old, modern suicide bombing didn't appears until the 1980s, and it was just as popular with the secular Tamil Tigers as it was with Islamic groups in the Middle East. According to Wikipedia, the first suicide attack against Israel was by a Japanese communist group. So I don't think it's fair to say that suicide bombing is an inherently Muslim idea. It may be that the lack of American suicide bombers is more due to the lack of region-based internal conflict than anything else -- the population is so distributed now that there isn't as much of a base for terrorist operations as there was during, say, the pre-Civil War period, which saw things like cross-border raids between pro- and anti-slavery forces in Missouri and Kansas. Americans are perfectly happy to do all sorts of nasty things up close and personal, there just has to be something more important than the price of gas on the line.
I've got an even better idea. At the polling station, each voter is asked whether they think a 20-question multiple choice test can accurately reflect the complexities of the world and the voter's approach to it. Anyone who answers "yes" gets their vote dropped, leaving the choice to people who understand that simplistic, "issue"-based politics are worthless at addressing real problems.
Re:Not if you are un-American!
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 1
Both ways are commonly used in the US, but putting the month first ("March fifteenth") is more common. Putting the day first ("the fifteenth of March") sounds more formal and literary to my ear, though the real formal way to write the date is "March 15, 2008". Leaving off the articles ("fifteen March") is just as comprehensible but sounds stilted, like I'm reading off of a form.
Despite the variance in spoken language, the numerical abbreviations (3-15-2008, 3/15/2008, 3/15, etc.) are always understood to be month-first.
This system makes sense to me for the same reason that putting the hour before the minute when I tell time does -- the coarser information is often more important and tells me up front whether I'm dealing with something in the immediate future or something longer term. I don't think it ends up being noticeably better in the long run, but I don't think it's senseless, either.
Which conclusions? How similar are they, really? And most importantly, why are the commonalities better explained by a common "spiritual truth" than by the fact that the practitioners who come up with this stuff are all humans with a religious bent, sharing a common nature? It's not unreasonable to put the burden of proof on the believer when every testable supernatural prediction of religions has turned out false. For example, numerous cultures have global flood myths and astrology, but when you look closely, you find that the details are different and the science doesn't work out. Many people have out-of-body experiences, but when you look closely, you find that they can't really see anything they wouldn't have been able to otherwise. You can't point to shared belief as evidence without taking into account basic features of human thought such as selection bias.
It takes ten years of college to do original research in physics, but even middle school students can learn Newton's Laws. Are your universal principles written down anywhere in a simple form that everyone can agree on? What are the limits of these principles? What do they cover and what do they not cover? Why has there been no progress in thousands of years when every other field of human endeavor has seen great revolutions in thought? Why, if these truths are so compelling, is there still so much strife between religions?
I agree that atheists need to take a deeper approach to analyzing religions, but you don't need to be an expert to ask these sorts of questions and realize that you get more sensible and consistent answers if these beliefs are simply incorrect.
I have no idea why you're modded -1. There's nothing unusual in your comment.
"Harm" is a fuzzy word. If you're thinking of something like turning you over to authorities for deviancy, that might have been less common (though I doubt it). But what the merchant could (and did) do was talk with the neighbors, which could lead to ostracism, among other things. There wasn't as much harm because people had a lot more pressure to conform. And that I think is the root problem, which is still prevalent today -- people are intolerant. For most, the threat of being fired and/or shunned is much nearer and more pressing than the threat of being jailed because your buying habits look fishy. I'm no expert on Japanese culture (though I have read a bit), but I suspect the real reason that government tracking doesn't get much notice is because Japan is already a socially oppressive place, even in one's private life.
Now all this makes it sound like more (optional) privacy is the answer. But I don't know. It seems like the mindset required to support privacy is pretty close to the mindset required to just be more tolerant in the first place. So if there were enough people willing to make a stand for privacy, I bet we wouldn't need it nearly as much.
You're astonished that a completely different culture has different standards for privacy? The modern American conception of privacy is hardly universal, and it wasn't too long ago that things like your shopping habits couldn't be private because the people who sold to you all knew you personally.
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But it's not like airlines really advertise amenities. When I search for a flight, I get a list of departure/arrival times and prices. Maybe I'll see what kind of plane I'm flying on so I can go to a third-party site to see which seats are good. United had some of their economy seats spaced out more for better leg room for a while, but I never saw anything about which flights had that and which didn't.
What about talking to the housemate to get them to use a less aggressive client? Most P2P software that I know of has bandwidth cap options built in, which makes me think the poster is trying to do this under the table. How is the housemate going to react if/when they find out about it? Is this really a problem that's best addressed with technology?
How about a teaser (T-ser)?
Your first link is based on cherry-picking the results of a post-hoc meta-analysis -- a double bias. The second (about PEAR) isn't any better. Also, note that those two articles contradict each other -- PEAR claims evidence of psychokinesis, while the SRI/SAIC analysis of the same claims a null result.
Got a source for the ant claim?
The Art of Electronics, which many people have recommended, is a well-written book, but it comes with a couple caveats. First, it is twenty years old, which means it spends a lot of time on topics that aren't as important today (JFETs, for example). Second, and more importantly, it's an electronics book, which means it's intended to be read after a corresponding class in basic circuit theory. Electronics is the study of how semiconductor devices are used in electrical circuits, not the study of electrical circuits in general. While the first chapter of AoE does offer a review of circuit theory concepts, it's pretty terse. If you're good at calculus and want a good textbook, try Engineering Circuit Analysis by Hayt, Kemmerly, and Durbin. This may be a bit more work than you're looking for, but one of the things you quickly learn about electricity is that it's pretty abstract (being invisible and all), and visualization aids like LEDs and even expensive test equipment don't help as much as you might think unless you already have an idea of what's going on. If you're just doing digital circuits you can get by with less, but for anything remotely analog, knowing the theory helps a lot.
Why should I believe that deep self-examination is any less prone to error, illusion, and limitations than any other sense or mode of thought? I've been wrong about plenty of things before, including myself. It's easy to come up with an idea that seems correct if there's no way of verifying it, especially if there's a cultural (or biological) predilection towards it in the first place. I bet you could convince lots people that the lines in a Cafe Wall illusion are really curvy if nobody could put a ruler against it.
Well, the universe holds vast power over me (me being a part of it and all) and has demonstrated a willingness to severely hurt me. As a small mammal, that bothers me. Also, as far as I can tell, I'm either forced to endure it forever or doomed to escape through absolute extinction. They don't affect my day to day life much, but in the long run, issues like those are going to affect me more than anything else. Once I start pondering what I want my life to be about or what the point in continuing to live is, the big questions are pretty well inescapable.
I really don't get the issues with widescreen that are brought up throughout this thread. It's the same number of vertical dots whether widescreen resolution (1920x1200, for instance) or 4:3 (1600x1200, for instance). I don't get how you would have to "scroll more" on a widescreen display.
All other things being equal, you wouldn't, but note that the hypothetical widescreen you mention is actually a bigger monitor. Since the price of a monitor is largely a function of its total surface area, a better comparison would be between, say, a 19" 4:3 and a 19" widescreen, in which case you either get smaller images (unaccepable to some) or less vertical display.I agree that text and widget size should be resolution-independent. Is it so hard to have a global scale factor that says widget X is N pixels wide?
Most of what I do on a computer involves reading. My eyesight isn't so good, so I can't run at high resolution without getting a headache -- the text is just too small, especially on a laptop, which doesn't have the greatest screen to begin with. Keeping my text size constant and squashing the monitor means I'm seeing less of a page than I would with a 4:3 aspect ratio. I'm sure many people find it easier to have more windows open at once, but I find that most displays are still too small for that. On a 24" widescreen, sure, but 15 inches is too small as it is. Let me keep my non-widescreen, please.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm curious what makes Ada binary libraries more secure than any other language's binary libraries.
Wheeler might be better known as part of the Misner/Thorne/Wheeler team that produced the Bible of General Relativity, but he's also the co-author of Spacetime Physics, one of the best SR books I've ever read. It's part of the school of physics textbooks that puts equations in service of language where they belong. If you have a basic physics background and want to learn more about relativity without wading through tons of Lorentz transfomations, give it a try.
The population of the psychology at large is not fixed. Fear of nuclear power was and continues to be propagated by anti-nuclear activists, who happen to be louder than other people. It can be unmade, but not if people who know what they're talking about refuse to speak out.
Personally, I rank the real damage caused by coal plants as bigger threat than imaginary damage caused by lowered property values. Actually, I would love a nuclear plant in my back yard -- it would make it that much cheaper to buy a house.
People make those claims because they're good arguments. When you find a problem in something you've built, do you fix it, or give up and scrap the whole project? By your logic, we shouldn't be building houses, much less anything more complex. Chernobyl *was* poorly-designed and (at the time of the accident) run by a skeleton screw of incompetents. TMI *was* due to fixable problems, and injured, let's see, *nobody*.Of course, after shit happens, you'll still probably claim that nuclear plants are perfectly safe because the incident was an anomaly, just like Chernobyl didn't count because it was "stupid design run by idiots" and TMI didn't count because it was due to problems in the nuclear industry that "have since been fixed". Well, life includes anomalies, and they will happen.
The Bhopal chemical plant accident has killed 20,000 people and injured over 120,000. Chemical plant accidents are much more common than nuclear plant accidents and are often much more dangerous. Do a search for "United States refinery accidents". Several of the links on the first page are for lawyers -- that's how much worse it is. Does that mean we should shut down all chemical plants? No, because the problems are correctly recognized to be with the design and operation of the plants, which (despite what you seem to think) are not "anomalies" but systemic problems that can be fixed. Plants with good safety systems and procedures still have accidents, but few to no people are killed. Look at the history of nuclear power accidents and you'll see that almost all of them are like this. A reactor goes critical, but is contained. A worker doesn't follow procedure when replacing a part -- he's killed, but nobody else is.
Chernobyl was 22 years ago. TMI was 29 years ago. If nuclear power is so dangerous, why do the same two (bad) examples keep getting talked about over and over? Why do we have to turn to the Soviet Union (hardly a world leader in safety) for an example of a real disaster? The answer is that fear of nuclear power, like fear of terrorism, is largely a modern-day bogeyman created by a failure to understand the scale of the risks involved.
According to the Usenet Physics FAQ, one photon will trigger the retina, but the brain filters out the signal unless it gets several in a small period if time:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.html
Yeah, I know Intel's CPUs can do it, but your average ASIC process is probably a different story...
You don't do it with a CPU. You do it in hardware with a digital counter, like this:
http://www.play-hookey.com/digital/ripple_counter.html
Dividing by two is easy -- just take the output of one of the flip-flops. Dividing by other numbers can be done by connecting the flip-flop outputs and/or their complements to an AND gate. This requires some extra circuitry and wiring, but in an integrated circuit the overhead will be insignificant. Even in a discrete circuit, if you make the reference 2^32Hz (~4.2GHz), you're only looking at maybe two counter ICs to divide down to 1Hz, although no counter IC I know of can handle a 4GHz signal.
The real issue with using this would be whether your manufacturing process can make transistors fast enough for it. The quote in the summary suggests this will be popular in an analog role for high-frequency applications like wireless. Maybe we'll see discrete timing references too.
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? It's plain old information theory. Just because an increase in X implies a decrease in Y doesn't mean the Uncertainty Principle is involved.
But American evangelicals have bombed and killed people who disagree. Here's a list of crimes against abortion clinics:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_viol.htm
And here are some hate crime statistics from the FBI:
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/hate_crime/index.html
Many of the crazier high-profile evangelicals have called people with different political views (read: anything remotely left-leaning) traitors, with the implication that they should receive a traitor's punishment.
It's also worth noting that while Islam is over a thousand years old, modern suicide bombing didn't appears until the 1980s, and it was just as popular with the secular Tamil Tigers as it was with Islamic groups in the Middle East. According to Wikipedia, the first suicide attack against Israel was by a Japanese communist group. So I don't think it's fair to say that suicide bombing is an inherently Muslim idea. It may be that the lack of American suicide bombers is more due to the lack of region-based internal conflict than anything else -- the population is so distributed now that there isn't as much of a base for terrorist operations as there was during, say, the pre-Civil War period, which saw things like cross-border raids between pro- and anti-slavery forces in Missouri and Kansas. Americans are perfectly happy to do all sorts of nasty things up close and personal, there just has to be something more important than the price of gas on the line.
I've got an even better idea. At the polling station, each voter is asked whether they think a 20-question multiple choice test can accurately reflect the complexities of the world and the voter's approach to it. Anyone who answers "yes" gets their vote dropped, leaving the choice to people who understand that simplistic, "issue"-based politics are worthless at addressing real problems.
Both ways are commonly used in the US, but putting the month first ("March fifteenth") is more common. Putting the day first ("the fifteenth of March") sounds more formal and literary to my ear, though the real formal way to write the date is "March 15, 2008". Leaving off the articles ("fifteen March") is just as comprehensible but sounds stilted, like I'm reading off of a form.
Despite the variance in spoken language, the numerical abbreviations (3-15-2008, 3/15/2008, 3/15, etc.) are always understood to be month-first.
This system makes sense to me for the same reason that putting the hour before the minute when I tell time does -- the coarser information is often more important and tells me up front whether I'm dealing with something in the immediate future or something longer term. I don't think it ends up being noticeably better in the long run, but I don't think it's senseless, either.
Do "box office" revenues include DVD sales?
Which conclusions? How similar are they, really? And most importantly, why are the commonalities better explained by a common "spiritual truth" than by the fact that the practitioners who come up with this stuff are all humans with a religious bent, sharing a common nature? It's not unreasonable to put the burden of proof on the believer when every testable supernatural prediction of religions has turned out false. For example, numerous cultures have global flood myths and astrology, but when you look closely, you find that the details are different and the science doesn't work out. Many people have out-of-body experiences, but when you look closely, you find that they can't really see anything they wouldn't have been able to otherwise. You can't point to shared belief as evidence without taking into account basic features of human thought such as selection bias.
It takes ten years of college to do original research in physics, but even middle school students can learn Newton's Laws. Are your universal principles written down anywhere in a simple form that everyone can agree on? What are the limits of these principles? What do they cover and what do they not cover? Why has there been no progress in thousands of years when every other field of human endeavor has seen great revolutions in thought? Why, if these truths are so compelling, is there still so much strife between religions?
I agree that atheists need to take a deeper approach to analyzing religions, but you don't need to be an expert to ask these sorts of questions and realize that you get more sensible and consistent answers if these beliefs are simply incorrect.
I have no idea why you're modded -1. There's nothing unusual in your comment.
"Harm" is a fuzzy word. If you're thinking of something like turning you over to authorities for deviancy, that might have been less common (though I doubt it). But what the merchant could (and did) do was talk with the neighbors, which could lead to ostracism, among other things. There wasn't as much harm because people had a lot more pressure to conform. And that I think is the root problem, which is still prevalent today -- people are intolerant. For most, the threat of being fired and/or shunned is much nearer and more pressing than the threat of being jailed because your buying habits look fishy. I'm no expert on Japanese culture (though I have read a bit), but I suspect the real reason that government tracking doesn't get much notice is because Japan is already a socially oppressive place, even in one's private life.
Now all this makes it sound like more (optional) privacy is the answer. But I don't know. It seems like the mindset required to support privacy is pretty close to the mindset required to just be more tolerant in the first place. So if there were enough people willing to make a stand for privacy, I bet we wouldn't need it nearly as much.
You're astonished that a completely different culture has different standards for privacy? The modern American conception of privacy is hardly universal, and it wasn't too long ago that things like your shopping habits couldn't be private because the people who sold to you all knew you personally.