There's no perfect colour green, either, but I don't bother posting that on/.
Since certainty of any kind, absolute or otherwise, is necessary for neither knowledge nor action, it isn't clear why you think the lack of it has anything to do with knowing or acting.
The problem with books like this -- even by physicists -- is that they all too rarely study the right things physicists have done. Induction/inference in epistemology is put on a mathematically sound axiom-based foundation by Richard Cox and E. T. Jaynes.
It's worth noting that Jaynes was a physicist. Cox, I believe, was best described as a mathematician.
It's real fun to talk to "philosophers"--particularly of the post-modern variety--in terms of Bayesian inference and Shannon information. Continental post-structuralists in particular rely heavily on obfuscation as a rhetorical technique, and it's delightful to watch them flounder when you introduce fairly undemanding mathematical notions of information, complexity and inference.
The sad thing is that although Cox could be said to have answered Hume's challenge, philosophers will be teaching Hume's argument for centuries yet, in the same way logicians teach the identity of indescernibles almost a hundred years after it was conclusively shown to be false.
Scientific epistemology doesn't, at root, deal with "certainty." It doesn't deal with capital-T "Truth" either.
The way I handle this is to use "Where are my socks?" as a model question in any discussion involving philosophy of knowledge. If someone's epistemlogical approach can't explain both the operational adequacy of various well-known methods of answering that question correctly, and the pathological cases where those methods produce incorrect answers, it isn't worth considering further.
And if a "philosopher" wants to talk about some kind of purported knowledge that is fundamentally different in kind from the kind of answers that question admits of, they aren't doing anything that's interesting to me, either as a scientist or as a poet.
No Popper attempted to resolve the problem of induction, most famously put forward my Hume, by trying to absolve science of induction entirely with a method that relies on deductive reasoning
A method which, by the way, was explicitly rejected by some guy named Newton, who wrote (in a letter to Oldenburg, then the President of the Royal Society) that "I do not prove 'tis thus because not otherwise, but positively and directly by experiment."
The thing that Popper's method fails to capture is the crucial role of definition in induction: scientists are engaged in a process of creation, to find definitions that allow consistent descriptions of phenomena. Non-scientists, particularly non-experimentalists, often fail to understand how this works.
When Newton said he proved things positively by experiment he was including his definitions in the frame. So when he spends 35 pages of the Opticks describing seven different experiments that prove "light from the sun consists of rays of differing refrangibity" he was effectively including operationally meaningful notions of "ray" and "refraction".
While 20th century positivists went overboard on operationalism, it does have an important role in the scientific process, and one that Popper fails to get.
If you like something Ayn Rand says, then I guarantee you can find another philosopher said it only in a far more intellectually rigorous manner.
Yeah, mostly Locke, Aristotle and--remarkably given her hostility toward the man and his work--Kant.
People interested in Rand's notion of concepts are well-advised to look at the work of Peter Abelard, too. Although he's famous for other reasons, his conceptualist "third way" between nominalism and idealism is actually viable, and quite close to what Rand was dreaming of.
From the sounds of this book it's nothing but a collection of just-so stories about the history of physics (Hey look, I'm writing a review of a review!) Science is a lot bigger than physics, and physics has a large number of special features that most sciences--biology, geology, astronomy, etc--don't have. As such, it's a lousy place to start when talking about science as such.
The critical piece that's missing from all discussions of induction I'm aware is the creative role of definition. Newton, for example, created definitions of mass, force, etc, such that he could build a consistent, albeit incomplete, mathematical description of phenomena. The concepts he created were not given: they are as much a product of the needs of the knowing subject as they are constrained by the facts. Constrained: not determined.
Unfortunately, philosophers are (still!) innumerate, and as such are not able to grasp the notion of a constraint: they think there must be either just one right way to conceptualize reality (idealism), or that any old way will do (nominalism).
Rand claimed on the one hand to reject these alternatives, but then argued strongly that there was exactly one correct way because "reality really is that way", which is obviously nonsense: even within physics there are frequently several equally correct ways of conceptualizing the same phenomena (Newtonian vs classical physics, for example, which give quite different accounts of the cause of motion, one based on force, one based on the principle of least action or similar.)
Wonder how the false paternity rate is in Austrailia.
Probably about 5%. Data suggest values between 2 and 25% false paternity (child fathered by someone other than the mother's socially pair-bonded partner) depending mostly on how hierarchical the society is, and there can be variation within a country due do sub-culture differences.
As somewhat polygamous, pair-bonding social primates, the optimum mating strategy for humans is for females to pair-bond with the highest-status male they can and then get pregnant from a higher-status male. For males it is to impregnate as many women as possible. Naively, "men are stupid (indiscriminate) and women are dishonest" is not a bad way to understand our basic proclivities.
Any civilization peopled by individuals who want a life that is more than a state of constant tribal or clan warfare needs to deal with these tendencies--just as we deal with our tendency to murder, which has a similar origin. Relatively flat distributions of social benefits seem to do the job. Social democracies like the candanavian nations have very low rates of false paternity, while in places like Somalia its very high.
Liberal democracies, like the US, Canada and Australia, are mid-to-low-range.
Genetic testing for paternity ought to be routine, and has the opportunity to be as socially disruptive as the Pill was a generation or two ago.
No, Australia has corporations. No free market there, only a market of protected special-interests hiding from liability behind the skirts of the Nanny State.
However, in my view, ideally, HFT market makers add these factors: immediacy and continuity.
This suggests that without HFTs the market would not have immediacy and continuity, which is nonsense. Market makers were providing sufficient immediacy and continuity before HFT was common, and would continue to do so if HFT were engineered out of the system.
You could argue that spreads are lower because of HFT, but you really haven't made that case, which is tricky. Spreads have come down in the last decade, but I'd expect in a market dominated by HFT for them to be far smaller than they are. This actually makes me doubt claims about the supposedly large fraction of market activity that HFT accounts for.
There are any number of "fair" auction strategies out there that could be implemented, although all of them would have the effect of reducing liquidity. Personally, having traded in highly illiquid markets outside the US I do appreciate the benefit of the highly liquid US markets, but again, these markets were highly liquid prior to HFT and would continue to be so without it.
HFT apologists make claims for the benefits of HFT, but they never point out that all those benefits existed before HFT ever existed. HFT is merely a way for the people who provide those benefits to skim more off their priviledged position close to the market.
if you are referring to the wikileaks tape perhaps you missed the unedited version that shows guys in the group that included the journalist were carrying AK47s and RPGs. Somehow wikileaks edited out that part.
Except they didn't, which is why you know about it.
Wikileaks released an unedited version of the tape.
Both versions of the tape show the gunner firing on good samaritans who were bringing aid to the wounded after the initial attack.
I'm amazed that you are acute enough to be able to tell there are RPGs carried by the earlier group, which was attacked legally in accordance with the rules of engagement, but didn't notice the end of the tape where there is a clearly illegal attack on innocent people who are obviously doing nothing but bringing aid to the wounded.
They even have their kids in their van, for heaven's sake!
The placebos work by improving the body's ability to heal itself, by changing some process in the brain
How do you know?
Have you tested this idea with published controlled experiments and systematic observations?
In the scientific literature--the public record of ideas tested by controlled experiment and systematic observations--there is still an open question regarding how and why placebos work. On what basis do you make this claim that you know how they do it?
Are you just engaging in pre-scientific speculation of the same useless and frequently counter-productive kind that dominated human thought for all the dark millenia before the scientific revolution? If so, why?
Three hundred years after Newton, "It just makes sense to me" should never be the reason anyone gives for a belief that is held in anything other than the most tentative and contingent way.
EVERY test I have read about(100s) regard placebo effects show no real effect. Whether that placebo was administered by pill, fake surgery, acupuncturist, chiropractor, or prayer
You've missed some really important and classic placebo studies then. Google "placebo opiate production" and see what you'll find. There is ample evidence that placebos are capable of increasing endogenous endorophin production, which is why they are particularly effective against pain and inflamation.
This effect of placebos has been known for decades, so it kind of harms your credibility that you aren't aware of it.
Just rate the games and sell them dammit, let the market decide.
Part of the problem is a one-dimensional rating scale is being used to report a multi-dimensional evalution. It doesn't recognize that people's tastes--and values--differ.
A useful rating system would properly have a bunch of, say, five-point axes, with labels like:
Sex: Consensual Non-consensual Kinky
Violence: Impersonal (shooting, etc) Personal (fights) Military/War
Horror: Fear Pain
Religion: For/Against and what religion
Nationalism: For/Against and what nation
So any typical Hollywood thriller would have 1 ratings on sex, 5 ratings on at least one violence axis, 1's on horror, 3 on religion (Christianity) and 5 on nationalism (For/USA).
This would put Micrsoft et al in the position of saying, "We are ok with 5 on violence, horror and nationalism, 3 on religion, and 1 on sex". They wouldn't be able to hide behind the cowardly euphemisms of "Adults Only" and the like.
Normal people do yearn to fuck someone when they see a naked body. There's a bit of a difference.
You're an American, aren't you?
Normal people who grow up in societies without the kind of bizzare fetishization and commericalization of sexuality that saturates American society do not yearn to fuck someone when they see a naked body. Sometimes we just look on appreciatively, somethings we think, "Whatever". Sometimes in the right circumstances we are aroused, but only someone who has grown up in a sexually dysfunctional society would think that nudity in any way normally causes people to yearn to fuck someone.
And only someone who is seriously twisted would think that the desire to fuck someone is generally a bad thing. Would you say that food ads are in any way problematic because they induce a desire to eat?
The message? Graphic violence is OK and normal and natural. Sex is obscene, uncommon, not a part of normal adult life, and must not be shown for any reason.
Empires depend for their existence on the normalization of extreme violence against subject peoples. Therefore the normalization of violence is an important feature of any imperial system, from the Rome to Washington.
Human evolution has been driven primarily by mate-competition and sexual selection. As such sexuality is a powerful influencer of human behaviour. Make mating opportunities seem scarce and only available via socially approved means and you will have a high level of control of male behaviour.
To make this happen you will need a high level of control of female behaviour, which is most easily done by imbuing society with a great horror of sex and beating (sometimes literally) into women that if they have sex with men outside of socially approved circumstances they are evil, dispicable people.
Sexually liberal societies tend not to be particularly war-like. Sexually repressed societies tend to produce male violence in abundance, which finds many channels, from the freelance terrorism of the Nineteen Nitwits (18 of whom were from Saudi Arabia, 1 from Yemen) to the more extensive and organized violence carried out by the American and allied militaries.
Now if your post only contained some information about things that were germane to the problem of aging, rather than to reports on your mental state, which is irrelevant to the problem of aging.
The Pope thought the Sun moved around the Earth, and doubted Gallileo was correct, and was confident that heliocentric heresy would be proven wrong. All of those things are facts about the Pope, and have no place in any discussion of celestial mechanics.
The Nature article is informative. The rest of your post may as well contain information about your height, weight and hair colour, as they are as relevant to the question of aging as information about your mental state.
People talk about personalized medicine, and I'm sure that would be a great breakthrough. In fact, it will probably require several great breakthroughs before it becomes practical.
Most of them would be economic. Current medical practice is based on mass-produced industrialized delivery of medical care. Doctors are trained that way, and can maximize patient through-put that way.
Until physician behaviour changes, personalized medicine will be a dead letter, and there is exactly zero incentive for physician behaviour to change.
The rest of your argument is just "science is hard" whining. That's true, but irrelevant. Science has always been hard. Go read Newton's "Opticks" and see how hard it was to prove the proposition "Light from the sun consists of rays of differing refrangibility": it took him thirty-odd pages to describe seven different experiments to prove that one simple thing. I'm sure a lot of other people had fiddled with prisms before Newton, but they all thought it would be "too hard" to investigate the phenomenology of light by systematic observation and controlled experiment, which is what science is. Nobody remembers them, and rightly so.
A miracle diet for humans would have to do a lot better than that. eg. Calorie restriction in mice makes them live twice as long.
Sure, but mice will die from a dirty look. So will most other mammals.
Humans are ridiculously long-lived, as others have already pointed out here. The average mammal lives about a billion of its own heartbeats. Humans live twice that.
There are pretty obvious evolutionary reasons for that, although every time I say that I get people saying, "Huh, wut?" so I'll spell it out: grandparents are the transmitters of culture amongst humans, and culture has been an important force in hominid evolution for probably something like a million years. Even chimps and bonobos have something akin to culture.
Culture is instilled in children between birth and adolescence, during which time most of them are simply not paying attention to the processes that are shaping them. As such, they have no clue how it's done when they have kids of their own. But having a few old folks around, who have lived twice as long as would otherwise be evolutionarily useful, is sufficient to supply all the information required.
Ergo, long-lived proto-humans had opportunities to pass knowledge down across generations that were vastly greater than their shorter-lived cousins, and we were selected for astonishingly long lives.
Data suggest that the maximum mean lifespan of humans is about 96 years, and we are pushing up close to that limit today. It is doubtful that without some significant genetic intervention we will be able to alter that limit, nor is it entirely clear why we would want to. Epicurus said, "For a wise man one lifetime is enough, and a fool wouldn't know what to do with eternity."
I was able to actually see the TV, see how it looked, and spin the thing around to look at how the I/O ports are configured.
Having just helped my g/f buy a netbook at Best Buy, I'd highly recommend you do the same thing to the TV they actually sold you, which may not be the one on the shelf.
Seriously: the clowns at Best Buy tried to sell us the wrong netbook with the wrong battery at the wrong price. That was AFTER I had opened the box to check things and noticed a 25 Whr battery that was supposed to last six hours, spoke to the sales-person about it, who spoke to the "Geek Squad" clown about it, who assured me that advances in battery tech and power management made it totally plausible that it was the right battery.
When I realized the price was wrong on the bill I got the sales clown to bug the manager who tried to blow me off. I then pointed out the model number on the bill was different from the one on the self and the manager claimed the last four digits were only for colour. I leaned on them (politely) and got them to look up the model number online, and lo and behold it was rather more than the colour that varied with those crucial last digits.
So a computer-literate, physically imposing man who has been described as 'forceful' in performance reviews was just barely able to get the correct product out of Best Buy. I can only imagine what the average person goes home with.
The best thing: after all this my g/f decided to buy a carry-bag for the netbook, and they charged her the wrong price for it (she went back the next day and got it reduced to the posted price, and they immediately pulled the posted price off the stand...)
I've had pretty terrible experiences with TigerDirect, who have great prices but really annoying follow-up (endless calls from salespeople). But I'd gladly buy from them if it meant never having to set foot in Best Buy again.
That is actually more of a Chinese date format which is the format frankly that makes the most sense
It is the ISO date format: YYYY-MM-DD. It is the only acceptable standard date format for most uses.
People ignorant of modern standards, or incapble of adapting to changing times, still use some weird and archaic date formats, gifting us with ambiguous nonsense like 10/6/8.
That the date of death (19790509 or 9th of May 1979) for a jewish martyr, lynched during the iranian islamic revolution is hardcoded in a registry key used by Stuxnet. QED
Ok, I'm convinced: it wasn't the Israelis.
Two things convince me of that: the unbelievably lame little astro-turf campaign going on here with AC's all repeating "I'm gonna go with the OBVIOUS on this one" without one shred of actual evidence to back it up; and this particular claim that a group as canny as the Israelis would effectively sign the worm with a value that points back to them.
The astro-turfer's efforts are simply racist, no different from the police looking for a convenient person of the correct racial orgin to pin a crime on. You don't need to have any evidence, just a general knowledge that your favourite ethic group are likely to be criminals, so if a crime was committed it's OBVIOUS that one of them must have done it, right?
But this "signature" is proof of non-Israeli origin, as it requires an incredibly subtle and clever attack on Iran's nuclear program to also include an apparently clear indication of who did it.
In my experience with the Israelis, they aren't shy about taking credit. Nor are they shy about bombing Iranian nuclear facilities.
So sticking them with Stuxnet requires that Israel for some reason decide to take an indirect, deniable, clandestine approach, AND AT THE SAME TIME hardcode a clear pointer to Israeli origin in the code.
For anyone who finds anything "obvious" about that, I recommend a visit to Dr. Ockham.
My point is that it can take a very long time for the observable consequences of unobservables to come to light, as it did in the case of quantum theory: thirty years between the theory's development and Bell's theoretical work, and another twenty-plus years before that work was properly tested by experiment.
Furthermore, Bell's work showed it is possible to discover the direct empirical consequences of things that are not just hard to observe, but absolutely unobservable by any means whatsoever. So merely involving things that are hard to observe is no big kick against a new theory.
Another example: the very notion of "experimental research into general relativity" was borderline absurd until the '80's, and now GR is an engineering problem (GPS requires curvature corrections.)
Yet another example: Young's wave theory of light was dismissed for some decades in the 1800's because it predicted absurd consequences like there being a bright spot (due to diffraction) in the shadow of a circular disk. No one bothered to test this simply because it was so obviously wrong (and Young had made some enemies along the way, too.)
So physics has a long history of theories that are apparently beyond experimental examination for reasons ranging from neglect to ontology, and yet all those theories were eventually subject to experimental confirmation in the best Newtonian fashion.
I'm not a big fan of string theory, personally. The string theorists I've known have been really smug, annoying people, insufficiently willing to engage in the sort of intense self-criticism that makes for a great scientist (Einstein joked about how he changed his mind about gravity every few months in the years leading up to GR.) But that doesn't change the reality that string theories have some interesting properties, and while model-building is extremely difficult with them they remain a potentially viable approach to a unified description of all reality, and should not be dismissed out of hand based on a single experiment that only tests one particular sub-class of them (and based on the comments here the primary predictors of low-energy black holes are non-string multi-dimensional theories like Randall-Sundrum.)
Yes, of course it does, as quantum theory, which is based on the notion that there are unobservables (the wavefunction under a potential barrier during tunneling, for example) demonstrates.
If you posit the existence of something that can't be observed, how do you verify that hypothesis?
By examining the logical consequences of such a "thing" for observables, as we do in quantum theory. The canonical example of this is experimental violation of Bell's Inequalities.
What are the applications for a theory that doesn't suggest effects we can detect and verify?
None, but this question has nothing to do with theories that involve non-observables.
I know what you're saying but String Theory turns a lot of people off when its nature seems to be "unobservable" as you so put it.
1) As others have pointed out, "String Theory" is actually a family of theories (so is "quantum theory" for that matter) that may make quite different predictions. Talking about "string theory" as if it was one theory is like talking about "dark matter" as if it was one thing: a strong signpost that you're missing something important.
One of the issues with string theory or M-theory is that while these theories have lovely formal properties at very high energies, what they predict at low energies (which includes the LHC energy range!) is hard to figure out. This is what makes them difficult to test. However, mini-black-holes are a relatively generic prediction of some major and "natural" sub-families, and it's nice to see them knocked off.
2) There is no problem with unobservables. Quantum theory is fundamentally based on unobservability, and yet Bell's inequalities are experimentally violated, which is a kind of very indirect, testable consquence of something about the unobservable realm.
This is the amazing thing about Bell's work: he showed that it was possible to do "experimental metaphysics" of exactly the kind the positivists and others denied. In "Language Truth and Logic" AJ Ayer explicitly states that the kind of thing Bell did was impossible because he--Ayer--couldn't imagine it.
Fortunately for us, reality is not limited by the imagination of the likes of Ayer.
Referring to it as a major newspaper and your main information source rather undermines your argument.
Really? My argument about Polanski? Juxtaposition doesn't imply logical dependency, y'know.
I didn't realize the Sun was quite that dismal: we have Sun papers in Canada, which at least originally had some corporate association with your Sun, I believe. While they mostly do have semi-naked chicks on page 3 they are definitely several steps above the National Enquirer.
Slashdot Mirror
There's is no absolute certainty...
So?
There's no perfect colour green, either, but I don't bother posting that on /.
Since certainty of any kind, absolute or otherwise, is necessary for neither knowledge nor action, it isn't clear why you think the lack of it has anything to do with knowing or acting.
The problem with books like this -- even by physicists -- is that they all too rarely study the right things physicists have done. Induction/inference in epistemology is put on a mathematically sound axiom-based foundation by Richard Cox and E. T. Jaynes.
It's worth noting that Jaynes was a physicist. Cox, I believe, was best described as a mathematician.
It's real fun to talk to "philosophers"--particularly of the post-modern variety--in terms of Bayesian inference and Shannon information. Continental post-structuralists in particular rely heavily on obfuscation as a rhetorical technique, and it's delightful to watch them flounder when you introduce fairly undemanding mathematical notions of information, complexity and inference.
The sad thing is that although Cox could be said to have answered Hume's challenge, philosophers will be teaching Hume's argument for centuries yet, in the same way logicians teach the identity of indescernibles almost a hundred years after it was conclusively shown to be false.
Scientific epistemology doesn't, at root, deal with "certainty." It doesn't deal with capital-T "Truth" either.
The way I handle this is to use "Where are my socks?" as a model question in any discussion involving philosophy of knowledge. If someone's epistemlogical approach can't explain both the operational adequacy of various well-known methods of answering that question correctly, and the pathological cases where those methods produce incorrect answers, it isn't worth considering further.
And if a "philosopher" wants to talk about some kind of purported knowledge that is fundamentally different in kind from the kind of answers that question admits of, they aren't doing anything that's interesting to me, either as a scientist or as a poet.
No Popper attempted to resolve the problem of induction, most famously put forward my Hume, by trying to absolve science of induction entirely with a method that relies on deductive reasoning
A method which, by the way, was explicitly rejected by some guy named Newton, who wrote (in a letter to Oldenburg, then the President of the Royal Society) that "I do not prove 'tis thus because not otherwise, but positively and directly by experiment."
The thing that Popper's method fails to capture is the crucial role of definition in induction: scientists are engaged in a process of creation, to find definitions that allow consistent descriptions of phenomena. Non-scientists, particularly non-experimentalists, often fail to understand how this works.
When Newton said he proved things positively by experiment he was including his definitions in the frame. So when he spends 35 pages of the Opticks describing seven different experiments that prove "light from the sun consists of rays of differing refrangibity" he was effectively including operationally meaningful notions of "ray" and "refraction".
While 20th century positivists went overboard on operationalism, it does have an important role in the scientific process, and one that Popper fails to get.
If you like something Ayn Rand says, then I guarantee you can find another philosopher said it only in a far more intellectually rigorous manner.
Yeah, mostly Locke, Aristotle and--remarkably given her hostility toward the man and his work--Kant.
People interested in Rand's notion of concepts are well-advised to look at the work of Peter Abelard, too. Although he's famous for other reasons, his conceptualist "third way" between nominalism and idealism is actually viable, and quite close to what Rand was dreaming of.
From the sounds of this book it's nothing but a collection of just-so stories about the history of physics (Hey look, I'm writing a review of a review!) Science is a lot bigger than physics, and physics has a large number of special features that most sciences--biology, geology, astronomy, etc--don't have. As such, it's a lousy place to start when talking about science as such.
The critical piece that's missing from all discussions of induction I'm aware is the creative role of definition. Newton, for example, created definitions of mass, force, etc, such that he could build a consistent, albeit incomplete, mathematical description of phenomena. The concepts he created were not given: they are as much a product of the needs of the knowing subject as they are constrained by the facts. Constrained: not determined.
Unfortunately, philosophers are (still!) innumerate, and as such are not able to grasp the notion of a constraint: they think there must be either just one right way to conceptualize reality (idealism), or that any old way will do (nominalism).
Rand claimed on the one hand to reject these alternatives, but then argued strongly that there was exactly one correct way because "reality really is that way", which is obviously nonsense: even within physics there are frequently several equally correct ways of conceptualizing the same phenomena (Newtonian vs classical physics, for example, which give quite different accounts of the cause of motion, one based on force, one based on the principle of least action or similar.)
Wonder how the false paternity rate is in Austrailia.
Probably about 5%. Data suggest values between 2 and 25% false paternity (child fathered by someone other than the mother's socially pair-bonded partner) depending mostly on how hierarchical the society is, and there can be variation within a country due do sub-culture differences.
As somewhat polygamous, pair-bonding social primates, the optimum mating strategy for humans is for females to pair-bond with the highest-status male they can and then get pregnant from a higher-status male. For males it is to impregnate as many women as possible. Naively, "men are stupid (indiscriminate) and women are dishonest" is not a bad way to understand our basic proclivities.
Any civilization peopled by individuals who want a life that is more than a state of constant tribal or clan warfare needs to deal with these tendencies--just as we deal with our tendency to murder, which has a similar origin. Relatively flat distributions of social benefits seem to do the job. Social democracies like the candanavian nations have very low rates of false paternity, while in places like Somalia its very high.
Liberal democracies, like the US, Canada and Australia, are mid-to-low-range.
Genetic testing for paternity ought to be routine, and has the opportunity to be as socially disruptive as the Pill was a generation or two ago.
No, Australia has corporations. No free market there, only a market of protected special-interests hiding from liability behind the skirts of the Nanny State.
However, in my view, ideally, HFT market makers add these factors: immediacy and continuity.
This suggests that without HFTs the market would not have immediacy and continuity, which is nonsense. Market makers were providing sufficient immediacy and continuity before HFT was common, and would continue to do so if HFT were engineered out of the system.
You could argue that spreads are lower because of HFT, but you really haven't made that case, which is tricky. Spreads have come down in the last decade, but I'd expect in a market dominated by HFT for them to be far smaller than they are. This actually makes me doubt claims about the supposedly large fraction of market activity that HFT accounts for.
There are any number of "fair" auction strategies out there that could be implemented, although all of them would have the effect of reducing liquidity. Personally, having traded in highly illiquid markets outside the US I do appreciate the benefit of the highly liquid US markets, but again, these markets were highly liquid prior to HFT and would continue to be so without it.
HFT apologists make claims for the benefits of HFT, but they never point out that all those benefits existed before HFT ever existed. HFT is merely a way for the people who provide those benefits to skim more off their priviledged position close to the market.
if you are referring to the wikileaks tape perhaps you missed the unedited version that shows guys in the group that included the journalist were carrying AK47s and RPGs. Somehow wikileaks edited out that part.
Except they didn't, which is why you know about it.
Wikileaks released an unedited version of the tape.
Both versions of the tape show the gunner firing on good samaritans who were bringing aid to the wounded after the initial attack.
I'm amazed that you are acute enough to be able to tell there are RPGs carried by the earlier group, which was attacked legally in accordance with the rules of engagement, but didn't notice the end of the tape where there is a clearly illegal attack on innocent people who are obviously doing nothing but bringing aid to the wounded.
They even have their kids in their van, for heaven's sake!
The placebos work by improving the body's ability to heal itself, by changing some process in the brain
How do you know?
Have you tested this idea with published controlled experiments and systematic observations?
In the scientific literature--the public record of ideas tested by controlled experiment and systematic observations--there is still an open question regarding how and why placebos work. On what basis do you make this claim that you know how they do it?
Are you just engaging in pre-scientific speculation of the same useless and frequently counter-productive kind that dominated human thought for all the dark millenia before the scientific revolution? If so, why?
Three hundred years after Newton, "It just makes sense to me" should never be the reason anyone gives for a belief that is held in anything other than the most tentative and contingent way.
EVERY test I have read about(100s) regard placebo effects show no real effect. Whether that placebo was administered by pill, fake surgery, acupuncturist, chiropractor, or prayer
You've missed some really important and classic placebo studies then. Google "placebo opiate production" and see what you'll find. There is ample evidence that placebos are capable of increasing endogenous endorophin production, which is why they are particularly effective against pain and inflamation.
This effect of placebos has been known for decades, so it kind of harms your credibility that you aren't aware of it.
Just rate the games and sell them dammit, let the market decide.
Part of the problem is a one-dimensional rating scale is being used to report a multi-dimensional evalution. It doesn't recognize that people's tastes--and values--differ.
A useful rating system would properly have a bunch of, say, five-point axes, with labels like:
Sex:
Consensual
Non-consensual
Kinky
Violence:
Impersonal (shooting, etc)
Personal (fights)
Military/War
Horror:
Fear
Pain
Religion:
For/Against and what religion
Nationalism:
For/Against and what nation
So any typical Hollywood thriller would have 1 ratings on sex, 5 ratings on at least one violence axis, 1's on horror, 3 on religion (Christianity) and 5 on nationalism (For/USA).
This would put Micrsoft et al in the position of saying, "We are ok with 5 on violence, horror and nationalism, 3 on religion, and 1 on sex". They wouldn't be able to hide behind the cowardly euphemisms of "Adults Only" and the like.
Normal people do yearn to fuck someone when they see a naked body. There's a bit of a difference.
You're an American, aren't you?
Normal people who grow up in societies without the kind of bizzare fetishization and commericalization of sexuality that saturates American society do not yearn to fuck someone when they see a naked body. Sometimes we just look on appreciatively, somethings we think, "Whatever". Sometimes in the right circumstances we are aroused, but only someone who has grown up in a sexually dysfunctional society would think that nudity in any way normally causes people to yearn to fuck someone.
And only someone who is seriously twisted would think that the desire to fuck someone is generally a bad thing. Would you say that food ads are in any way problematic because they induce a desire to eat?
The message? Graphic violence is OK and normal and natural. Sex is obscene, uncommon, not a part of normal adult life, and must not be shown for any reason.
Empires depend for their existence on the normalization of extreme violence against subject peoples. Therefore the normalization of violence is an important feature of any imperial system, from the Rome to Washington.
Human evolution has been driven primarily by mate-competition and sexual selection. As such sexuality is a powerful influencer of human behaviour. Make mating opportunities seem scarce and only available via socially approved means and you will have a high level of control of male behaviour.
To make this happen you will need a high level of control of female behaviour, which is most easily done by imbuing society with a great horror of sex and beating (sometimes literally) into women that if they have sex with men outside of socially approved circumstances they are evil, dispicable people.
Sexually liberal societies tend not to be particularly war-like. Sexually repressed societies tend to produce male violence in abundance, which finds many channels, from the freelance terrorism of the Nineteen Nitwits (18 of whom were from Saudi Arabia, 1 from Yemen) to the more extensive and organized violence carried out by the American and allied militaries.
I think... I doubt... I'm confident...
Now if your post only contained some information about things that were germane to the problem of aging, rather than to reports on your mental state, which is irrelevant to the problem of aging.
The Pope thought the Sun moved around the Earth, and doubted Gallileo was correct, and was confident that heliocentric heresy would be proven wrong. All of those things are facts about the Pope, and have no place in any discussion of celestial mechanics.
The Nature article is informative. The rest of your post may as well contain information about your height, weight and hair colour, as they are as relevant to the question of aging as information about your mental state.
People talk about personalized medicine, and I'm sure that would be a great breakthrough. In fact, it will probably require several great breakthroughs before it becomes practical.
Most of them would be economic. Current medical practice is based on mass-produced industrialized delivery of medical care. Doctors are trained that way, and can maximize patient through-put that way.
Until physician behaviour changes, personalized medicine will be a dead letter, and there is exactly zero incentive for physician behaviour to change.
The rest of your argument is just "science is hard" whining. That's true, but irrelevant. Science has always been hard. Go read Newton's "Opticks" and see how hard it was to prove the proposition "Light from the sun consists of rays of differing refrangibility": it took him thirty-odd pages to describe seven different experiments to prove that one simple thing. I'm sure a lot of other people had fiddled with prisms before Newton, but they all thought it would be "too hard" to investigate the phenomenology of light by systematic observation and controlled experiment, which is what science is. Nobody remembers them, and rightly so.
A miracle diet for humans would have to do a lot better than that. eg. Calorie restriction in mice makes them live twice as long.
Sure, but mice will die from a dirty look. So will most other mammals.
Humans are ridiculously long-lived, as others have already pointed out here. The average mammal lives about a billion of its own heartbeats. Humans live twice that.
There are pretty obvious evolutionary reasons for that, although every time I say that I get people saying, "Huh, wut?" so I'll spell it out: grandparents are the transmitters of culture amongst humans, and culture has been an important force in hominid evolution for probably something like a million years. Even chimps and bonobos have something akin to culture.
Culture is instilled in children between birth and adolescence, during which time most of them are simply not paying attention to the processes that are shaping them. As such, they have no clue how it's done when they have kids of their own. But having a few old folks around, who have lived twice as long as would otherwise be evolutionarily useful, is sufficient to supply all the information required.
Ergo, long-lived proto-humans had opportunities to pass knowledge down across generations that were vastly greater than their shorter-lived cousins, and we were selected for astonishingly long lives.
Data suggest that the maximum mean lifespan of humans is about 96 years, and we are pushing up close to that limit today. It is doubtful that without some significant genetic intervention we will be able to alter that limit, nor is it entirely clear why we would want to. Epicurus said, "For a wise man one lifetime is enough, and a fool wouldn't know what to do with eternity."
I was able to actually see the TV, see how it looked, and spin the thing around to look at how the I/O ports are configured.
Having just helped my g/f buy a netbook at Best Buy, I'd highly recommend you do the same thing to the TV they actually sold you, which may not be the one on the shelf.
Seriously: the clowns at Best Buy tried to sell us the wrong netbook with the wrong battery at the wrong price. That was AFTER I had opened the box to check things and noticed a 25 Whr battery that was supposed to last six hours, spoke to the sales-person about it, who spoke to the "Geek Squad" clown about it, who assured me that advances in battery tech and power management made it totally plausible that it was the right battery.
When I realized the price was wrong on the bill I got the sales clown to bug the manager who tried to blow me off. I then pointed out the model number on the bill was different from the one on the self and the manager claimed the last four digits were only for colour. I leaned on them (politely) and got them to look up the model number online, and lo and behold it was rather more than the colour that varied with those crucial last digits.
So a computer-literate, physically imposing man who has been described as 'forceful' in performance reviews was just barely able to get the correct product out of Best Buy. I can only imagine what the average person goes home with.
The best thing: after all this my g/f decided to buy a carry-bag for the netbook, and they charged her the wrong price for it (she went back the next day and got it reduced to the posted price, and they immediately pulled the posted price off the stand...)
I've had pretty terrible experiences with TigerDirect, who have great prices but really annoying follow-up (endless calls from salespeople). But I'd gladly buy from them if it meant never having to set foot in Best Buy again.
That is actually more of a Chinese date format which is the format frankly that makes the most sense
It is the ISO date format: YYYY-MM-DD. It is the only acceptable standard date format for most uses.
People ignorant of modern standards, or incapble of adapting to changing times, still use some weird and archaic date formats, gifting us with ambiguous nonsense like 10/6/8.
That the date of death (19790509 or 9th of May 1979) for a jewish martyr, lynched during the iranian islamic revolution is hardcoded in a registry key used by Stuxnet. QED
Ok, I'm convinced: it wasn't the Israelis.
Two things convince me of that: the unbelievably lame little astro-turf campaign going on here with AC's all repeating "I'm gonna go with the OBVIOUS on this one" without one shred of actual evidence to back it up; and this particular claim that a group as canny as the Israelis would effectively sign the worm with a value that points back to them.
The astro-turfer's efforts are simply racist, no different from the police looking for a convenient person of the correct racial orgin to pin a crime on. You don't need to have any evidence, just a general knowledge that your favourite ethic group are likely to be criminals, so if a crime was committed it's OBVIOUS that one of them must have done it, right?
But this "signature" is proof of non-Israeli origin, as it requires an incredibly subtle and clever attack on Iran's nuclear program to also include an apparently clear indication of who did it.
In my experience with the Israelis, they aren't shy about taking credit. Nor are they shy about bombing Iranian nuclear facilities.
So sticking them with Stuxnet requires that Israel for some reason decide to take an indirect, deniable, clandestine approach, AND AT THE SAME TIME hardcode a clear pointer to Israeli origin in the code.
For anyone who finds anything "obvious" about that, I recommend a visit to Dr. Ockham.
My point is that it can take a very long time for the observable consequences of unobservables to come to light, as it did in the case of quantum theory: thirty years between the theory's development and Bell's theoretical work, and another twenty-plus years before that work was properly tested by experiment.
Furthermore, Bell's work showed it is possible to discover the direct empirical consequences of things that are not just hard to observe, but absolutely unobservable by any means whatsoever. So merely involving things that are hard to observe is no big kick against a new theory.
Another example: the very notion of "experimental research into general relativity" was borderline absurd until the '80's, and now GR is an engineering problem (GPS requires curvature corrections.)
Yet another example: Young's wave theory of light was dismissed for some decades in the 1800's because it predicted absurd consequences like there being a bright spot (due to diffraction) in the shadow of a circular disk. No one bothered to test this simply because it was so obviously wrong (and Young had made some enemies along the way, too.)
So physics has a long history of theories that are apparently beyond experimental examination for reasons ranging from neglect to ontology, and yet all those theories were eventually subject to experimental confirmation in the best Newtonian fashion.
I'm not a big fan of string theory, personally. The string theorists I've known have been really smug, annoying people, insufficiently willing to engage in the sort of intense self-criticism that makes for a great scientist (Einstein joked about how he changed his mind about gravity every few months in the years leading up to GR.) But that doesn't change the reality that string theories have some interesting properties, and while model-building is extremely difficult with them they remain a potentially viable approach to a unified description of all reality, and should not be dismissed out of hand based on a single experiment that only tests one particular sub-class of them (and based on the comments here the primary predictors of low-energy black holes are non-string multi-dimensional theories like Randall-Sundrum.)
Does it matter if something inobservable exists?
Yes, of course it does, as quantum theory, which is based on the notion that there are unobservables (the wavefunction under a potential barrier during tunneling, for example) demonstrates.
If you posit the existence of something that can't be observed, how do you verify that hypothesis?
By examining the logical consequences of such a "thing" for observables, as we do in quantum theory. The canonical example of this is experimental violation of Bell's Inequalities.
What are the applications for a theory that doesn't suggest effects we can detect and verify?
None, but this question has nothing to do with theories that involve non-observables.
I know what you're saying but String Theory turns a lot of people off when its nature seems to be "unobservable" as you so put it.
1) As others have pointed out, "String Theory" is actually a family of theories (so is "quantum theory" for that matter) that may make quite different predictions. Talking about "string theory" as if it was one theory is like talking about "dark matter" as if it was one thing: a strong signpost that you're missing something important.
One of the issues with string theory or M-theory is that while these theories have lovely formal properties at very high energies, what they predict at low energies (which includes the LHC energy range!) is hard to figure out. This is what makes them difficult to test. However, mini-black-holes are a relatively generic prediction of some major and "natural" sub-families, and it's nice to see them knocked off.
2) There is no problem with unobservables. Quantum theory is fundamentally based on unobservability, and yet Bell's inequalities are experimentally violated, which is a kind of very indirect, testable consquence of something about the unobservable realm.
This is the amazing thing about Bell's work: he showed that it was possible to do "experimental metaphysics" of exactly the kind the positivists and others denied. In "Language Truth and Logic" AJ Ayer explicitly states that the kind of thing Bell did was impossible because he--Ayer--couldn't imagine it.
Fortunately for us, reality is not limited by the imagination of the likes of Ayer.
Referring to it as a major newspaper and your main information source rather undermines your argument.
Really? My argument about Polanski? Juxtaposition doesn't imply logical dependency, y'know.
I didn't realize the Sun was quite that dismal: we have Sun papers in Canada, which at least originally had some corporate association with your Sun, I believe. While they mostly do have semi-naked chicks on page 3 they are definitely several steps above the National Enquirer.
Therefore, you have greatly developed infrastructure and what we'll call "international relations" as to obtain oil cheaply.
I wish a) I had mod points and b) "Funny" gave you karma, because man you deserve it.