Scrolling down a bit I find this story is in fact that other routine kind of/. falsehood: a patent application being reported as a patent grant.
So while in this case the summary does more-or-less accurately reflect the claims, it lies when it says HP has a patent on those claims. It has nothing of the kind, nor is there any reason to believe it ever will.
So if by "explaining the whole thing" you mean "misleads the reader into believing falsehoods that fundamentally change the sense of the facts purportedly being reported" I'll grant your point. Otherwise, not so much.
My comment is a reflection on the emprical fact that/. patent stories almost never accurately summarize the claims--which are the only part of the patent that has legal teeth. Almost every patent-related story on/. has a long list of outraged replies from people who think that the summary has something to do with the patent, followed by an explanation from someone who has bothered to read and understand the claims as to why the summary is false, followed by a bunch of replies to the tune of "well so what the system sucks anyway!"
It gets tiresome, and I thought it would be fun to try to short-circuit the process.
If you've checked the actual claims in the patent itself and verified that the summary accurately reflects them, fair enough. If you've taken the summary at face value then you have a very high probability of not knowing anything about the what has actually been patented.
I wish the summary said something about what the patent was about. I guess I'll check back in a few hours and scroll down to read the explanation that someone who has actually bothered to read and understand the claims has posted--I can't be bothered to be that guy this time, but I'm sure someone else will do it.
Just think, if/. summaries on these stories bothered to tell us what the patent was about we could all be spared that effort, but we all know from long experience that they don't, so there's no point in responding to the summary with outrage unless you want to look like a completely newless clewbie.
Both of those sources have quite the tenacity for half-crazed cutting edge ideas that the government loves to gobble up.
Cutting edge? Apparently the flying car has been "promised" by someone for fifty years, although I'm damned if I can figure out who made this promise or when or to whom.
No one ever promised me a flying car, so I guess I'm just not special!
I suspect that the vast majority of the sea is at sea level.
The Earth's gravitational field is not purely radial, resulting in very significant deviations from mean sea level over much of the ocean's surface. I believe the deviations can be up to tens of metres--I may be recalling incorrectly but I think there's a big one in the South Pacific that is something like 60 m deep and is getting on for a thousand kilometres across.
I know that the creationists and the anti-climate change groups are different, however.... what do you expect when you are dealing with people who espouse the idea of "irreducible complexity"?
Creationism and climate change scepticism are distinguished precisely by the practical role of "irreducible complexity" in each field. Evolution is demonstrably highly reducible to nothing more than the laws of probability. We have endless amounts of experimental and observation evidence to that effect, to the point that creationists have to deny what amounts to simple arithmetic to claim that evolution has not occurred.
Young Earth Creationists are actually more consistent than Old Earth Creationists because the former merely have to invoke a great big miracle: the Earth was created with the appearance of being old 6000 years ago, implying just that God is a liar, a charlatan and a cheat. If Young Earth Creationists admit that then they have an unassailable albeit insane argument. Old Earth Creationists on the other hand have to accept what physics, chemistry and geology tell us about the age of the Earth, while denying the laws of probability, which isn't even remotely self-consistent.
Climate change sceptics (at least the honest ones) are legitimately concerned regarding the known problems of modelling complex fluids on coarse grids precisely because we know that it the nature of the Navier-Stokes equations to be sensitive to phenomena on all scales. This is not quite formally "irreducible complexity" but it comes close enough in practical terms. It is doubtful (although given advances in turbulence research in the past twenty years no longer quite inconceivable) that anyone will ever produce a physically legitimate model of the Earth's atmosphere that is remotely predictive or even usefully non-predictive (that is, which reproduces the statistical behaviour of the climate but can't be used for prediction due to sensitivity to initial conditions.)
Climate change sceptics are also concerned about the anti-scientific attitude of AGW proponents who claim to be so terrified that their data and methods will be cherry-picked by "the other side" that they won't release them to full public scrutiny, despite the huge public policy implications of their claims and conclusions.
Such people are obviously either hiding something, or hate the scientific process, which ultimately depends on revealing the full body of your work to scrutiny by anyone who cares to scrutinize it, not just the anointed priesthood. Science, even in recent times, has had too many contributions made by gifted amateurs to justify any claims that the debate ought not to be open to all.
You most certainly can prove a negative, and scientists do so all the time. The argument is generally of the form, "If X is true, the phenomenon Y must be observed under conditions Z. We have created conditions Z, proved by positive calibration that if Y occurred we would see it. Therefore X is false."
Only people who are completely ignorant of exactly the kind of experimental science that has driven our understanding of the universe in the past century would claim that you can't prove a negative. I blame first year introductions to logic, which teach some medieval nonsense in the guise of "logic" that doesn't even touch on the empirical falsehood of Leibniz's Law, much less introduce the logic of science, which is Bayesian.
As sarcastic as this is it brings up a good point.
What is sarcastic about it? Of the many professions who deal with children on a daily basis, Catholic priests seem to have a disproportionately high rate of child molestation, and that's just the ones we know about despite the attempts of a famously self-protective organization to suppress the facts.
Likewise, I see nothing blasphemous about the Dawkins' quote in the article: he does nothing but accurately describe the God of the Old Testament, and anyone who is passing familiar with the book will know that it is easy to cite long and detailed passages that justify his description. So would quoting the Bible be considered blasphemy? It sure as hell could be used to bring certain variants of Christianity into contempt, and I've been accused of insulting Islam online for quoting from the Koran (the passages with regard to the treatment of women are especially juicy: "Women are our fields. We may go into them as we will" and the like.)
atheism is simply the assertion of a universal negative. such an assertion is both unproven and unprovable.
Nonsense. An atheist does not believe in God in exactly the same sense that they do not believe in the invisible pink elephant in the room. No one would claim that anyone has "faith" that there is not an invisible pink elephant in the room, because it is precisely on the basis of such lack of evidence that we form negative conclusions.
We do this all the time in daily life, and there is nothing special about "God" as a subject of belief that warrants the extraordinary suspension of ordinary logic that you're asking for.
If A implies X, in the absence of X it is reasonable to infer not-A.
Scientists use this kind of logic to disprove the existence of things all the time. There is no 17 keV neutrino, for example: there was an anomaly in a couple of experiments that suggested there was, we created new experiments with apparatus such that "if a 17 keV neutrino existed it would have these effects, these effects were no observed in by experiments with proven sensitivity to those effects, therefore there is no 17 keV neutrino."
Again, atheists disbelieve in God in exactly the same way as these examples, and it only religious nutjobs who want to put "belief in God" in some special category such that "disbelief in God" is only and purely a matter of faith. Conceding that point, however, concedes the very fallacy that atheists reject: that there is anything special about the subject matter of religious belief that warrants suspension of ordinary standards of everyday logic.
Will you now propose that we eliminate all strongly-held beliefs?
I don't recall proposing to eliminate any beliefs at all--perhaps you are holding that belief without evidence.
An ideology is not just a "strongly held belief", but rather one that is insulated from change based on evidence. For historical reasons we call secular faith "ideology" rather than "faith", but the epistemology of ideology and religious faith is the same: the belief that there is a higher standard then empirical reality that is the source of truth, allowing the adherents of the ideology or faith a free pass to ignore any mere facts that contradict their ideology or faith.
Anyone who thinks that political violence is a particularly good means of achieving any particular end is necessarily an anti-empiricist, because they must steadfastly ignore the truly vast amount of data that suggests political violence is the least efficient means of achieving political change.
Whereas empiricists--Gandhi, say--have been able to bring about massive political change peacefully. And yes, I know Gandhi was religious. But in his political methods he was an empiricist. He describes his autobiography as "the story of my experiments with truth" for a reason. It was his empiricism that distinguished him from all the other religious nutjobs out there throwing bombs, not his faith or ideology.
No one has ever been blown up in the name of an excess of rational empiricism, so it is clear--if you care about empirical evidence--that not just any strongly held belief will do to motivate people to kill. It has to be an anti-empirical belief, for the reasons cited above.
Huh? I'm typing this on an Eee with a 64 Whr battery that lasts over eight hours of normal use. I'm rarely away from a charging point for longer than that. This machine has totally changed my computing life: I take it with me everywhere (1.3 kg!) and while it's never going to win awards for speed it runs adequately fast. I've got cygwin loaded on it and even do a little Python development as well as word processing, Web browsing and e-mail. It pretty much hits the sweet spot between a PDA/smartphone (I have a Blackberry, and while it's ok, it doesn't fill the "computer" niche at all well) and a desktop machine (or even a full-sized laptop, which is what I used to use for most ordinary computing tasks.)
previous homoerotic behaviors become depressingly heteronormative at that point.
It's all about market share. I've been with a number of bi-curious women who are comfortable doing damn near anything with another female, "So long," as one of them put it, "there's a penis in the room." As supplier of said organ I've never had a problem with that, but I can see it could be kinda depressing from a certain perspective. "Lesbian porn" that can appeal to that audience of hetero-experimentalists will make a lot more money than the pure stuff, though.
Based on FBI reports, domestic environmental/animal rights groups carried out the most terrorist attacks within the US.
Given that the definition of these groups as "terrorist" is entirely for political purposes I'm unconvinced by these claims. I know of exactly no one who is the least bit terrified by domestic environmental/animal rights groups. Calling a group "terrorists" when they fail completely to make anyone afraid of them is pretty suspect.
If you want to dispute this then please tell me: who is terrified of these groups? Show me.
I think the description "strong beliefs held without evidence or even against the evidence" applies equally well to political as religious faith. The only thing that distinguishes them is the content of the beliefs, not the epistemic justification (which is in all cases, "it's just true!")
So while my examples were religious, and most killing today by non-governmental groups is based on religious faith rather than political faith, I think your observations are accurate.
We really should refer to "political faith" in the same way we refer to "religious faith", because in general neither have any empirical support, and both are enemies of human life and well-being everywhere, except now and then by co-incidence.
I love the bullshit reply from the supplements industry group
Translation: "Science says it has no effect, but MAGIC says that it does! Which one are you going to believe?"
I find it more tempting every day to give up on science and sell lies to stupid people. It's so much easier and more profitable. No FDA oversight, no warranties, no consequences. There are whole industries based on this full of extremely lucrative positions for anyone who possess and brain and lacks a conscience. Financial advisor. Inspirational speaker. Various kinds of "alternative" medical practitioner. Far easier to do those things than try to build a business around something that actually works to improve people's lives.
Of course, if Norman Borlaug had done that the world would be missing a billion-odd people with billions more living in even greater misery than they do now.
because engineering is a world of black and white thinking,
Unlike, say, the Department of Women's Studies.
Seriously, only amongst religious engineers have I ever encountered any of the kind of black and white thinking that I've seen routinely in sociology and the like, and continue to hear about in those departments to this day.
So I'd have to say the problem with religious engineers is their religion, not their engineering degree.
So many of the Engineers I have known view "seeing both sides of the story" as some kind of weakness or soft-spined compromise.
You've clearly never been in a graduate seminar in sociology or a related discipline if you think this kind of rigid close-mindedness is at all specific to engineers.
My g/f is in grad school right now and had the temerity to bring up "men's issues" in one of her seminars, and was summarily told there were no such thing: men's higher death rate, young men's vastly higher suicide rate and murder rate, etc were all non-issues because they were being experienced by men. And white middle class men at that.
This kind of ignorant stereotyping of engineers is just part of the same phenomena: some people's problems need understanding and explanation, other people's just need condemnation. Right?
I don't think the terrorist recruiters are specifically seeking out Engineering students.
No, they are specifically seeking out Muslims. Or in the case of Northern Ireland, Catholics or Protestants (depending on which side of the divide they are on) and in India, Hindus or Sikhs.
Oddly enough, everyone is recruiting based on religion, almost as if strongly held beliefs for which you have no evidence is a prerequisite for killing lots of people in the name of them.
Which, given what an abysmal record political violence has at achieving its purported ends, is no surprise: only someone who is willing to believe strongly in the absence or or even opposed to the evidence would think that political violence was a useful or interesting way to further any particular cause.
Although we know that neutrinos have mass, we don't know what the mass is because our current experiments are only sensitive to the square of the mass difference between different types of neutrino. However, we do know that all types of neutrino have mass, although the most plausible values are less than a millionth of the electron mass, making it tricky to detect by time-of-flight measurements because any detectable neutrino is going to be ultra-relativistic, travelling so close to the speed of light as to be indistinguishable from a massless particle under almost all circumstances, which is why it was so difficult to prove they do have mass.
I don't think between the area not being that wide and slight variations of terrain you are going to have much luck with that sun/shadow thing.
Most of the cameras have some sky in the shot. Light curves are easy to take, which will give you a very good idea of camera longitude. Being on the US/Mexican border gives you the latitude.
You might have to take data over a few days to narrow it down to a mile or so, but beyond that, who cares? Avoid those 21 miles of the border and you're good to go.
The watchers shouldn't be able to find the camera locations, so this stuff about "jumping into their truck with a gun" isn't even possible.
Others have pointed this out by why not pile on a little. Are you really seriously saying that it isn't possible to find when you can see what it's pointed at?
Why, exactly, do you believe that?
These cameras are in fixed locations and will be showing pretty much the same thing for years to come. Even without active intervention involving guys with flags wandering along the border and seeing if they show up anywhere, there are any number of relatively trivial ways of locating them. My personal bet is that a list of locations will show up on the Web within a week.
And remember, you don't have to know to the foot where they are, just the general area they are pointing at. So within a year the border-crossing activity at these points will drop off, people will stop watching the cameras, and then it'll start up again. Or basic cammo or other counter-measures will become more routine. This kind of thing is an irritant to people who are engaged in the sorts of activity they are intended to help stop, just like all the other "War on Whatever" stuff that the US wastes so much money (and so many lives) on.
us having evolved to have them would probably indicate that they give some sort of advantage to not having them.
Or that it is not worth the cost of getting rid of them.
In any case, this is one of the most innuendo-laced collections of speculative bullshit/. has linked in a long time, and that's saying something. Everything in the article is prefaced with "may be" and "could be" and "possibly". Well, the Earth may be in danger because it is possible it could be hit by a low-albedo asteroid tomorrow. Doesn't that scare you and make you want to pay attention to me? If not, why are you paying attention to article?
The scare-mongering/. headline is a nice example of the evolution of lies: researches say, "This is an interesting topic", Scientific American says, "This may be happening and it may be scary!" and/. says, "Things that definitely keep us healthy are definitely dieing off!"
"Nerds" used to refer to overly pedantic people who cared about the truth. I guess/. isn't news for those people any more.
The terrorist was not a citizen. The Bill of Rights does not apply.
I know there is a wealth of case law to contradict this, but on one reading the Bill of Rights applies to the government, insofar as it lists what the federal government of the US may not do, rather than to "the people" (does the word "citizen" even appear in the Bill of Rights? I don't believe it does, at least not in the first ten.)
These guys are not stupid, if they wanted to do it they would succeed.
Huh? If these guys were smart they wouldn't be using violence as a purported means to achieve their ends.
Only the brain-dead use political violence, or they do so not to achieve what they claim to want, but rather because they like killing people.
Just ask the Basque, recently celebrating a half century of killing people in the name of an independent homeland they are no closer to now than they were decades ago. Just ask the Tamils. Just ask the Palestinians. Just ask the Catholics in Northern Ireland.
Political violence can get you there eventually, but winning the lottery can make you rich too, and that doesn't make it a good retirement plan.
Meanwhile, India somehow managed to liberate itself from British rule without decades of senseless terrorism. It's almost as if there is another way, a better way, that doesn't involve an endless cycle of posturing monkeys thumping their chests and splattering collateral damage all over the landscape.
So don't confuse al Qaeda--or their co-dependent partners in violence who run the US government--with anyone intelligent.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the summary explains the whole thing:
Scrolling down a bit I find this story is in fact that other routine kind of /. falsehood: a patent application being reported as a patent grant.
So while in this case the summary does more-or-less accurately reflect the claims, it lies when it says HP has a patent on those claims. It has nothing of the kind, nor is there any reason to believe it ever will.
So if by "explaining the whole thing" you mean "misleads the reader into believing falsehoods that fundamentally change the sense of the facts purportedly being reported" I'll grant your point. Otherwise, not so much.
Actually, the summary explains the whole thing
My comment is a reflection on the emprical fact that /. patent stories almost never accurately summarize the claims--which are the only part of the patent that has legal teeth. Almost every patent-related story on /. has a long list of outraged replies from people who think that the summary has something to do with the patent, followed by an explanation from someone who has bothered to read and understand the claims as to why the summary is false, followed by a bunch of replies to the tune of "well so what the system sucks anyway!"
It gets tiresome, and I thought it would be fun to try to short-circuit the process.
If you've checked the actual claims in the patent itself and verified that the summary accurately reflects them, fair enough. If you've taken the summary at face value then you have a very high probability of not knowing anything about the what has actually been patented.
I wish the summary said something about what the patent was about. I guess I'll check back in a few hours and scroll down to read the explanation that someone who has actually bothered to read and understand the claims has posted--I can't be bothered to be that guy this time, but I'm sure someone else will do it.
Just think, if /. summaries on these stories bothered to tell us what the patent was about we could all be spared that effort, but we all know from long experience that they don't, so there's no point in responding to the summary with outrage unless you want to look like a completely newless clewbie.
Both of those sources have quite the tenacity for half-crazed cutting edge ideas that the government loves to gobble up.
Cutting edge? Apparently the flying car has been "promised" by someone for fifty years, although I'm damned if I can figure out who made this promise or when or to whom.
No one ever promised me a flying car, so I guess I'm just not special!
I suspect that the vast majority of the sea is at sea level.
The Earth's gravitational field is not purely radial, resulting in very significant deviations from mean sea level over much of the ocean's surface. I believe the deviations can be up to tens of metres--I may be recalling incorrectly but I think there's a big one in the South Pacific that is something like 60 m deep and is getting on for a thousand kilometres across.
I know that the creationists and the anti-climate change groups are different, however.... what do you expect when you are dealing with people who espouse the idea of "irreducible complexity"?
Creationism and climate change scepticism are distinguished precisely by the practical role of "irreducible complexity" in each field. Evolution is demonstrably highly reducible to nothing more than the laws of probability. We have endless amounts of experimental and observation evidence to that effect, to the point that creationists have to deny what amounts to simple arithmetic to claim that evolution has not occurred.
Young Earth Creationists are actually more consistent than Old Earth Creationists because the former merely have to invoke a great big miracle: the Earth was created with the appearance of being old 6000 years ago, implying just that God is a liar, a charlatan and a cheat. If Young Earth Creationists admit that then they have an unassailable albeit insane argument. Old Earth Creationists on the other hand have to accept what physics, chemistry and geology tell us about the age of the Earth, while denying the laws of probability, which isn't even remotely self-consistent.
Climate change sceptics (at least the honest ones) are legitimately concerned regarding the known problems of modelling complex fluids on coarse grids precisely because we know that it the nature of the Navier-Stokes equations to be sensitive to phenomena on all scales. This is not quite formally "irreducible complexity" but it comes close enough in practical terms. It is doubtful (although given advances in turbulence research in the past twenty years no longer quite inconceivable) that anyone will ever produce a physically legitimate model of the Earth's atmosphere that is remotely predictive or even usefully non-predictive (that is, which reproduces the statistical behaviour of the climate but can't be used for prediction due to sensitivity to initial conditions.)
Climate change sceptics are also concerned about the anti-scientific attitude of AGW proponents who claim to be so terrified that their data and methods will be cherry-picked by "the other side" that they won't release them to full public scrutiny, despite the huge public policy implications of their claims and conclusions.
Such people are obviously either hiding something, or hate the scientific process, which ultimately depends on revealing the full body of your work to scrutiny by anyone who cares to scrutinize it, not just the anointed priesthood. Science, even in recent times, has had too many contributions made by gifted amateurs to justify any claims that the debate ought not to be open to all.
It tells me that you can't prove a negative.
You most certainly can prove a negative, and scientists do so all the time. The argument is generally of the form, "If X is true, the phenomenon Y must be observed under conditions Z. We have created conditions Z, proved by positive calibration that if Y occurred we would see it. Therefore X is false."
Only people who are completely ignorant of exactly the kind of experimental science that has driven our understanding of the universe in the past century would claim that you can't prove a negative. I blame first year introductions to logic, which teach some medieval nonsense in the guise of "logic" that doesn't even touch on the empirical falsehood of Leibniz's Law, much less introduce the logic of science, which is Bayesian.
As sarcastic as this is it brings up a good point.
What is sarcastic about it? Of the many professions who deal with children on a daily basis, Catholic priests seem to have a disproportionately high rate of child molestation, and that's just the ones we know about despite the attempts of a famously self-protective organization to suppress the facts.
Likewise, I see nothing blasphemous about the Dawkins' quote in the article: he does nothing but accurately describe the God of the Old Testament, and anyone who is passing familiar with the book will know that it is easy to cite long and detailed passages that justify his description. So would quoting the Bible be considered blasphemy? It sure as hell could be used to bring certain variants of Christianity into contempt, and I've been accused of insulting Islam online for quoting from the Koran (the passages with regard to the treatment of women are especially juicy: "Women are our fields. We may go into them as we will" and the like.)
atheism is simply the assertion of a universal negative. such an assertion is both unproven and unprovable.
Nonsense. An atheist does not believe in God in exactly the same sense that they do not believe in the invisible pink elephant in the room. No one would claim that anyone has "faith" that there is not an invisible pink elephant in the room, because it is precisely on the basis of such lack of evidence that we form negative conclusions.
We do this all the time in daily life, and there is nothing special about "God" as a subject of belief that warrants the extraordinary suspension of ordinary logic that you're asking for.
If A implies X, in the absence of X it is reasonable to infer not-A.
Scientists use this kind of logic to disprove the existence of things all the time. There is no 17 keV neutrino, for example: there was an anomaly in a couple of experiments that suggested there was, we created new experiments with apparatus such that "if a 17 keV neutrino existed it would have these effects, these effects were no observed in by experiments with proven sensitivity to those effects, therefore there is no 17 keV neutrino."
Again, atheists disbelieve in God in exactly the same way as these examples, and it only religious nutjobs who want to put "belief in God" in some special category such that "disbelief in God" is only and purely a matter of faith. Conceding that point, however, concedes the very fallacy that atheists reject: that there is anything special about the subject matter of religious belief that warrants suspension of ordinary standards of everyday logic.
Will you now propose that we eliminate all strongly-held beliefs?
I don't recall proposing to eliminate any beliefs at all--perhaps you are holding that belief without evidence.
An ideology is not just a "strongly held belief", but rather one that is insulated from change based on evidence. For historical reasons we call secular faith "ideology" rather than "faith", but the epistemology of ideology and religious faith is the same: the belief that there is a higher standard then empirical reality that is the source of truth, allowing the adherents of the ideology or faith a free pass to ignore any mere facts that contradict their ideology or faith.
Anyone who thinks that political violence is a particularly good means of achieving any particular end is necessarily an anti-empiricist, because they must steadfastly ignore the truly vast amount of data that suggests political violence is the least efficient means of achieving political change.
Whereas empiricists--Gandhi, say--have been able to bring about massive political change peacefully. And yes, I know Gandhi was religious. But in his political methods he was an empiricist. He describes his autobiography as "the story of my experiments with truth" for a reason. It was his empiricism that distinguished him from all the other religious nutjobs out there throwing bombs, not his faith or ideology.
No one has ever been blown up in the name of an excess of rational empiricism, so it is clear--if you care about empirical evidence--that not just any strongly held belief will do to motivate people to kill. It has to be an anti-empirical belief, for the reasons cited above.
battery life!
Huh? I'm typing this on an Eee with a 64 Whr battery that lasts over eight hours of normal use. I'm rarely away from a charging point for longer than that. This machine has totally changed my computing life: I take it with me everywhere (1.3 kg!) and while it's never going to win awards for speed it runs adequately fast. I've got cygwin loaded on it and even do a little Python development as well as word processing, Web browsing and e-mail. It pretty much hits the sweet spot between a PDA/smartphone (I have a Blackberry, and while it's ok, it doesn't fill the "computer" niche at all well) and a desktop machine (or even a full-sized laptop, which is what I used to use for most ordinary computing tasks.)
previous homoerotic behaviors become depressingly heteronormative at that point.
It's all about market share. I've been with a number of bi-curious women who are comfortable doing damn near anything with another female, "So long," as one of them put it, "there's a penis in the room." As supplier of said organ I've never had a problem with that, but I can see it could be kinda depressing from a certain perspective. "Lesbian porn" that can appeal to that audience of hetero-experimentalists will make a lot more money than the pure stuff, though.
Based on FBI reports, domestic environmental/animal rights groups carried out the most terrorist attacks within the US.
Given that the definition of these groups as "terrorist" is entirely for political purposes I'm unconvinced by these claims. I know of exactly no one who is the least bit terrified by domestic environmental/animal rights groups. Calling a group "terrorists" when they fail completely to make anyone afraid of them is pretty suspect.
If you want to dispute this then please tell me: who is terrified of these groups? Show me.
I think the description "strong beliefs held without evidence or even against the evidence" applies equally well to political as religious faith. The only thing that distinguishes them is the content of the beliefs, not the epistemic justification (which is in all cases, "it's just true!")
So while my examples were religious, and most killing today by non-governmental groups is based on religious faith rather than political faith, I think your observations are accurate.
We really should refer to "political faith" in the same way we refer to "religious faith", because in general neither have any empirical support, and both are enemies of human life and well-being everywhere, except now and then by co-incidence.
I love the bullshit reply from the supplements industry group
Translation: "Science says it has no effect, but MAGIC says that it does! Which one are you going to believe?"
I find it more tempting every day to give up on science and sell lies to stupid people. It's so much easier and more profitable. No FDA oversight, no warranties, no consequences. There are whole industries based on this full of extremely lucrative positions for anyone who possess and brain and lacks a conscience. Financial advisor. Inspirational speaker. Various kinds of "alternative" medical practitioner. Far easier to do those things than try to build a business around something that actually works to improve people's lives.
Of course, if Norman Borlaug had done that the world would be missing a billion-odd people with billions more living in even greater misery than they do now.
because engineering is a world of black and white thinking,
Unlike, say, the Department of Women's Studies.
Seriously, only amongst religious engineers have I ever encountered any of the kind of black and white thinking that I've seen routinely in sociology and the like, and continue to hear about in those departments to this day.
So I'd have to say the problem with religious engineers is their religion, not their engineering degree.
Not all terrorists are religious.
No, but all Islamic, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu and Sikh terrorists are.
The three guys left over aren't, but are you really worried about them?
So many of the Engineers I have known view "seeing both sides of the story" as some kind of weakness or soft-spined compromise.
You've clearly never been in a graduate seminar in sociology or a related discipline if you think this kind of rigid close-mindedness is at all specific to engineers.
My g/f is in grad school right now and had the temerity to bring up "men's issues" in one of her seminars, and was summarily told there were no such thing: men's higher death rate, young men's vastly higher suicide rate and murder rate, etc were all non-issues because they were being experienced by men. And white middle class men at that.
This kind of ignorant stereotyping of engineers is just part of the same phenomena: some people's problems need understanding and explanation, other people's just need condemnation. Right?
I don't think the terrorist recruiters are specifically seeking out Engineering students.
No, they are specifically seeking out Muslims. Or in the case of Northern Ireland, Catholics or Protestants (depending on which side of the divide they are on) and in India, Hindus or Sikhs.
Oddly enough, everyone is recruiting based on religion, almost as if strongly held beliefs for which you have no evidence is a prerequisite for killing lots of people in the name of them.
Which, given what an abysmal record political violence has at achieving its purported ends, is no surprise: only someone who is willing to believe strongly in the absence or or even opposed to the evidence would think that political violence was a useful or interesting way to further any particular cause.
It doesn't sound like anything is proven, or else it would be "case closed".
Wikipedia is not authoritative. Neutrinos have been known to have mass for over five years now, and the physics community is now focused on refining the parameters that characterize massive neutrinos.
Although we know that neutrinos have mass, we don't know what the mass is because our current experiments are only sensitive to the square of the mass difference between different types of neutrino. However, we do know that all types of neutrino have mass, although the most plausible values are less than a millionth of the electron mass, making it tricky to detect by time-of-flight measurements because any detectable neutrino is going to be ultra-relativistic, travelling so close to the speed of light as to be indistinguishable from a massless particle under almost all circumstances, which is why it was so difficult to prove they do have mass.
I don't think between the area not being that wide and slight variations of terrain you are going to have much luck with that sun/shadow thing.
Most of the cameras have some sky in the shot. Light curves are easy to take, which will give you a very good idea of camera longitude. Being on the US/Mexican border gives you the latitude.
You might have to take data over a few days to narrow it down to a mile or so, but beyond that, who cares? Avoid those 21 miles of the border and you're good to go.
These things are basically self-locating.
The watchers shouldn't be able to find the camera locations, so this stuff about "jumping into their truck with a gun" isn't even possible.
Others have pointed this out by why not pile on a little. Are you really seriously saying that it isn't possible to find when you can see what it's pointed at?
Why, exactly, do you believe that?
These cameras are in fixed locations and will be showing pretty much the same thing for years to come. Even without active intervention involving guys with flags wandering along the border and seeing if they show up anywhere, there are any number of relatively trivial ways of locating them. My personal bet is that a list of locations will show up on the Web within a week.
And remember, you don't have to know to the foot where they are, just the general area they are pointing at. So within a year the border-crossing activity at these points will drop off, people will stop watching the cameras, and then it'll start up again. Or basic cammo or other counter-measures will become more routine. This kind of thing is an irritant to people who are engaged in the sorts of activity they are intended to help stop, just like all the other "War on Whatever" stuff that the US wastes so much money (and so many lives) on.
us having evolved to have them would probably indicate that they give some sort of advantage to not having them.
Or that it is not worth the cost of getting rid of them.
In any case, this is one of the most innuendo-laced collections of speculative bullshit /. has linked in a long time, and that's saying something. Everything in the article is prefaced with "may be" and "could be" and "possibly". Well, the Earth may be in danger because it is possible it could be hit by a low-albedo asteroid tomorrow. Doesn't that scare you and make you want to pay attention to me? If not, why are you paying attention to article?
The scare-mongering /. headline is a nice example of the evolution of lies: researches say, "This is an interesting topic", Scientific American says, "This may be happening and it may be scary!" and /. says, "Things that definitely keep us healthy are definitely dieing off!"
"Nerds" used to refer to overly pedantic people who cared about the truth. I guess /. isn't news for those people any more.
The terrorist was not a citizen. The Bill of Rights does not apply.
I know there is a wealth of case law to contradict this, but on one reading the Bill of Rights applies to the government, insofar as it lists what the federal government of the US may not do, rather than to "the people" (does the word "citizen" even appear in the Bill of Rights? I don't believe it does, at least not in the first ten.)
These guys are not stupid, if they wanted to do it they would succeed.
Huh? If these guys were smart they wouldn't be using violence as a purported means to achieve their ends.
Only the brain-dead use political violence, or they do so not to achieve what they claim to want, but rather because they like killing people.
Just ask the Basque, recently celebrating a half century of killing people in the name of an independent homeland they are no closer to now than they were decades ago. Just ask the Tamils. Just ask the Palestinians. Just ask the Catholics in Northern Ireland.
Political violence can get you there eventually, but winning the lottery can make you rich too, and that doesn't make it a good retirement plan.
Meanwhile, India somehow managed to liberate itself from British rule without decades of senseless terrorism. It's almost as if there is another way, a better way, that doesn't involve an endless cycle of posturing monkeys thumping their chests and splattering collateral damage all over the landscape.
So don't confuse al Qaeda--or their co-dependent partners in violence who run the US government--with anyone intelligent.