This is a perfect example of how deceptive headlines get created.
Never underestimate the power of really stupid people who are profoundly ignorant of the subject they report on.
The "earth sized body" is a pure fiction, as near as I can tell. The radius is not explicitly stated in the paper, and the estimated masses are around one solar mass, which means they are no where near earth-sized. Some ignoramous just made that up, and the highly-paid/-tard editors passed it on, stripping the tiny bit of correct information from the original PR headline.
Please inform me where I can find all these uncorrupted journalists
All over the place: just look for the ones exposing corruption. There are a lot of them. But you won't see them if you spend all your time playing a soviet shill on/.
"Some A are not X" in no way refutes "Only A are X".
An idiot or soviet shill might be too stupid to understand the OP's point that "Only journalists are a true force opposed to corruption", but no one else here is quite that stupid.
My basic point is, people search for meaning in life. That's why we have religion
Huh?
How do lies and fantasies and logically contradictory meaningless gibberish provide meaning?
Your claim is no different from saying, "People search for facts in life. That's whey we have religion." It makes no sense at all: the purported conclusion is completely unrelated to the nominal premise, and there is no true middle premise that can form a valid syllogism.
People search for facts in life. Religion supplies facts. Ergo, people have religion
The middle premise is obviously false, and even more obviously false if you replace "facts" with "meaning", since an omnipotent loving god not only is logically contradictory it contradicts almost every fact about human life we know, from the bad design of the retina to the propensity of old people to lose control of their bowels. An omnipotent god could have created a universe that was exactly like this one in every respect that didn't have those problems. That is a logical contradiction, but a god whose power is limited by logical possibility is not omnipotent (all powerful) but rather one whose power is limited.
Believers are all remarkably inconsistent or stupid, because they claim to believe in an "omnipotent" god who has limited powers.
To have meaning requires logical consistency, and nothing that lacks all logical consistency can be considered a source of meaning. If people want to use religion as a source of meaning they may as well just make shit up... oh wait...
Another way to put it: if we were so sure that what we know is 100% correct then we wouldn't need to build the LHC to test our theories in the first place.
There's a nice equivocation in this statement: we can be as sure as we are of anything that LHC black holes won't destroy the Earth. If they did we'd see evidence in the cosmic-ray spectrum due to evaporating black hole signatures and the like, as well as the Earth not actually being here because it would have been destroyed in the past.
So while we do need to build the LHC to test theories regarding the Higgs boson, we do not need to build it to test theories regarding LHC black holes. That's the thing about science: all sources of experimental knowledge are equally valid, and you don't get to say our knowlege of black holes supposedly created by high energy collisions "doesn't count" because it comes from cosmic rays rather than accelerators.
Furthermore, I'm not sure why you and others keep bringing up the 100% correct thing. You can't be sure 100% certainty that the act of typing your next post into/. won't invoke some as-yet-to-be-discovered physical law and cause you to grow a second head. But for some reason you won't explain you aren't worried about that, even though you seem to pretend to be worried about LHC black holes destroying the Earth, which has no greater probablity.
Why is that? Why aren't you posting about all the other things that you can't be 100% sure of not destroying the Earth? Why only the LHC and not hitherto undiscovered physical laws that will cause the DROID phone to result in the death of us all? The "not 100% sure" standard is so silly that you'd have to terrified of damned near everything, if you were remotely intellectually honest.
which due to the grouping of particle collisions in the LHC is different from a single high speed collision happening in the upper atmosphere
This statement makes no sense. The quarks have no clue if they're in the atmosphere or the LHC.
The ignorant, murderous assholes who have been making a living for themselves inducing panic in people by waving their hands about LHC black holes have been making much of this "we don't know everything" rhetoric. But unlike the scientists who have performed these actual calculations, the ignorant murderous assholes have never produced any numbers: just vague handwaving and wild specuation that requires almost everything we know about physics to be wrong (expect for a few very carefully chosen bits they need to be right to keep thier speculations afloat.)
In fact, if you are worried about LHC black holes destroying the Earth then you should ALSO be worried that clicking your heels together three times and saying, "There's no place like home" will turn you into a bowl of cornflakes. After all, we can't be 100% sure it won't happen, and in fact the probability of it happening is slightly higher than the bizzare balance of known and novel physics that would be required to allow the LHC to create black holes, much less have them destroy the Earth.
So my question to the ignorant murderous assholes is: why are you making such a fuss about LHC black holes when there are so many millions of other things that pose a far greater risk to the Earth? Giant asteroid collisions caused by global warming (the atmosphere expands, increasing the odds of impact). Death by cell phone radiation interacting with the local galactic magentic field causing the Earth to fall into the sun. And so on. If you are worried about LHC black holes you have set the thresold for worry so low that if you aren't completely intellectually dishonest there are a vast array of other risks you should be in a panic about.
Well, it is boingboing after all, which is the 'Net's equivalent of Orwell's "Two Minutes Hate": the editors post inane stories in the most inflammatory language possible, the crowd all goes apeshit for a short time, and then moves on to the next thing, having done nothing, accomplished nothing, and learned nothing.
Please explain to me how a holstered handgun that is hidden from public view represents a danger to anyone.
The fact that you ask for a theoretical explanation of an empirical fact suggests you aren't really interested in the facts, and attempting to deflect the debate from facts is a sure sign you have an ideology. The fact is that in environments where there are no handguns to speak of (Canada) the number of gun crimes of opportunity and passion, and accidental discharges, by citizens carrying guns is very low, whereas concealed-carry environments the rate is much higher.
Because of course only a complete fucking idiot would fail to realize that an angry person with a holstered gun poses a greater danger to all around them than an angry person without a holstered gun. But do please try to claim otherwise. It amuses rational people when ideotards act stupid on the Internet.
With regard to cops vs citizens with guns, you may be interested to know that the statistic cited in my.sig is based on the data about cops shooting the wrong person when coming upon a crime in progress. Armed citizens are ten times less likely to shoot the wrong person than cops, because they are there when the crime actually occurs.
Like I said, I'm generally in favour of citizens owning guns, although handguns are a bit silly, and gun registration is no more a big deal than car registration. But until people on both sides of the debate take an inclusive view of the pertinent facts, rather than just pumping the ones they like while asking for theoretical justification for the ones they don't, the debate will never get anywhere because the two sides will neither of them be connected to reality.
Ok, go back to your delusions now, studiously ignoring the facts you don't like and hooting loudly about the ones you do. Just remember: the facts don't care. They are just facts, and if you can't understand how they can be that way it simply means you're stupid. Every time you ask for a theoretical justification of a fact as if that was an argument you reveal yourself as an ideotard. And like I said: while that's amusing, it isn't useful.
i cannot help but marvel at the inherent wisdom in these complex systems and the incredible harmony they share
Others have pointed out what a weak argument this is, to no good effect because obviously you aren't interested in anything that contradicts your faith (by definition: it wouldn't be faith otherwise).
But I'm entirely unsure what you mean by "inherent wisdom" and "incredible harmony" of complex natural systems.
There are some pretty clever hacks, but so many amazingly stupid kludges and disgusting inefficiencies that it is hard to see any wisdom or harmony unless one takes a ridiculously narrow focus. These stupid kludges and disgusting inefficiencies don't change the reality of the clever hacks, but they are so common that they put the lie to any overall claim of system elegance.
Pointing out "Some X are Y" does not prove "All X are Y". It only takes one "X is not Y" to prove "Not all X are Y", and that's what people here have been point out. No number of cases where "X is Y" disproves that, and any claim that natural systems were the result of any kind of caring, omnipotent being is logically incoherent on that basis. Kindly old mother nature kills off vast numbers of completely innocent beings, often in horrible ways, simply because evolution is all too frequently a "race to the bottom".
If an omnipotent being was responsible for this they have some serious explaining to do, because (being omnipotent) they could have got exactly the same effect through far more efficient and humane means. So anyone who believes natural systems were the result of an omnipotent being has a choice between being logically incoherent (the preferred solution) or admiting that that being was a prick, because (again, being omnipotent) they could have created a kinder, gentler universe that was exactly like this one in every respect (being omnipotent.)
Awesome. Please post this as a reply to every story on/. that introduces the "new" idea of engineers looking to nature for solution ideas, which has been a "new" idea for over a century.
After a couple of decades of posting this database link ever couple of months when we get stories on this "new" idea maybe, possibly, people will learn that engineers have been looking to nature for inspiration for over a century.
The notion that this is a new idea or phenomenon is one of the most curious anomalies of human society, and the mean-time-between mentions on/. may be usable as some kind of measure of the time it takes for average people to completely forget something that they were told was new and interesting a few weeks or months before.
Should the day come though I won't be cowering under a desk waiting to be murdered by some mental case or Mumbai copy-cat.
In the meantime, while waiting for one of those highly improbable fantasy scenarios to occur, you and your handgun will be a danger to everyone around you. The risk from improper/accidental/intentional use of an available handgun in mundane circumstances is far greater than the reduction in risk due to its value in an Hollywood fantasy scenario.
As the Fort Hood shootings demonstrate, being in a heavily armed environment does not necessarily make anyone safer (I'm assuming American military bases are heavily armed environments.)
I'm generally in favour of an armed citizenry, and I know that statistically there has been a correlation between armed citizens and reductions in certain types of crime, but there is also an increase in accidental deaths and the use of handguns in crimes of passion and opportunity.
Invoking highly improbable fantasy scenarios in the context of concealed carry laws, and at the same time not mentioning the much more significant increase in deaths due to mundane occurences, completely misses the point about why the right to keep and bear arms is important.
If the IEA is capable of any logic at all, they are not cooking the books or withholding data. What's the motive of retaining data or fixing charts?
This is a textbook example of a logical fallacy I call "argumentum ad stultum" (argument from stupidity). It has the form, "X would be stupid, therefore it is implausible that anyone would do X."
The problem is that the unstated middle premise is: "People tend not to do things that are stupid", which is trivially false. I'm sure you could name a group you think is routinely stupid: conservatives, liberals, the French...
The problem is that the Law of Common Humanity tells us: We are just like Them, at least at a deep enough level, and unfortunately stupid is very deep indeed. If we're honest with ourselves we'll admit that we're stupid a good deal of the time too--I know I am (look at me, I'm responding to some guy on/. trying to change the world just a little bit for the better! Now that's stupid!)
So I have no problem believing that the IEA is fudging the data based on every little bit of interpretive wiggle room they have, just the way stupid people dominated the economic debate in the run-up to the crash (which I personally wrote about in the summer of 2006, pointing out that housing was headed for a fall, and recall good articles on CDOs from the spring of 2006 warning of upcoming problems.) But no one wanted to listen to the Cassandra's in the midst of all the euphoria.
It's the same with Peak Oil, which is a robust first-order theory that cannot be fixed by any higher-order corrections, which is why the detailed debates about it are silly, just like the detailed debates about housing were silly: you cannot borrow and flip your way to prosperity across the whole economy, no matter how clever your economic theory. Likewise, you cannot change the fundamental linear shape of the oil production curve, which is all that peak oil rests on.
But it is far more comfortable to believe that "someone will do something" to make things better at some unspecified date in the future. So there is a huge pressure to believe that, and to twist things to make that belief seem plausible. The IEA could very easily be doing that, even though it is an incredibly stupid thing to do.
The question here is whether the claim is so absurd that no "ordinary person" would believe it to be true.
American politics demonstrates that the answer to this question is always, "No." There is no claim so absurd that a significant fraction of the American voting public won't believe it to be true.
The question for Beck now is: "Why did Glenn Beck resort to going to an international treaty organziation in an attempt to suppress an ordinary American's First Ammendment right to free speech? Doens't Glenn Beck believe that the Constitution is the highest law, and that only people hate American want to subordinate it to international treaty obligations?"
But shouldn't a committee, a congress or cabinet if you will, be even brighter than just an individual?
Huh? No, of course not.
Haven't you ever seen that crazy made-up "NASA funded" quiz that asks about how to rescue yourself from a crash on the moon, that purports to be a tool to show how much smarter committees are than than individuals? It's hilarious! Amidst radically under-specified conditions the "committee" result is a mish-mash of inconsistent assumptions and unphysical claims, my faviourite being that the recoil from a 45 calibre pistol is sufficient to be usd as a means of transportation. In individual, in the quiet of their own mind, can sit down and work out that that is nonsense, but it sure sounds clever in a committee, and if you stop and do the analysis the other bozos have moved on to the next point, so by the time you point out that the idea is stupid you're so far out of context that it no longer matters.
Only someone with insufficient education or experience of the world would think a committee could possibly be smarter than an individual.
That said, what education gives you is a discipline of mind that allows you to learn from your mistakes and from the world of others far more quickly and efficiently than any other form of experience. Only people who don't have it under-rate it.
I don't know what RDBMS you used, but from my experience with both Oracle and DB2, neither would do something that stupid normally.
There actually was a major database vendor in the'90's that did things that way, but I can't recall who it was. I just remember reading some of their internal docs that had a comment to the effect "Outer joins need to be updated in the next release. Current implementation is totally broken", and based on performance compared to everything else I assumed that they had the order of evalution wrong, as the GP describes.
So it did happen back in the day, but it's been a decade since and all the other major vendors had things right even then.
I'm not a mechanical engineer nor did any of my college coursework overlap with that but my gut feeling was pure skepticism and doubt.
I just get a blank page when I click on the link, so I'm not sure what the physical footprint of the town is, but when you consider modern sports stadia the ability to cover an area say 1 km across doesn't seem out of place. Modern materials are incredibly strong, and I would expect this dome would be designed as something like a kevlar rope net with panels in the holes to seal it. The internal atmospheric pressure will then keep the net under tension, and everything is good.
There is one big problem with it, which is that any failure is a catastrophic failure, albeit a catastrophe in slow motion. Unexpectedly high snow load, hurricane force winds, rocks falling from the sky and human error can all take structures of this kind down. I've seen two soccer domes fail under snow load (one was patchable and reinflatable) and know of another that was in the general vicinity of a tornado (nothing remained, although it was not actually hit by the tornado, it was just in the general area.)
As every engineer knows, if something can fail, it will. Domes like this can fail, therefore this one will. If the mean time between failure can be made long enough, it could still be worth-while, but I'd want to be sure that there was a re-inflation drill once a year or so (which policy would last for about a decade until some idiot in a suit realized they could pay themselves more today by leaving the people of tomorrow unprepared.)
There's also an interesting ecological twist: the ecosystem under the dome obviously can't be the local one, so you would have to replace a lot of vegetation with stuff that can survive without winter, and since the dome would inevitably become home to various exotic plants and animals it would be a continual source of invaders into the local ecosystem (which wouldn't survive the winter, but which would make every spring and summer a new surprise.)
Yeah, the/. editors have clearly outsourced themselves to someplace where English is very poorly understood, because surely no self-declared "nerds" would ever make such an elementary mistake as to call a town of 7000 people a "city".
The alternative, of course, is that/. editors are a bunch of sensationalist manipulators who are not above falsehood to get page views.
It's an evolutionary advantage for the entire herd when a single injured member is incapacitated, thereby allowing predators to focus on the injured member instead of healthy members of the herd.
Kin selection, which is what you are invoking here, should generally be the last place you look for evolutionary explanations. It can be important, but it's a second-order effect and is easily incorrectly invoked, as you are doing here.
Kin selection would operate in this case only because "the herd" consists of close relatives of the injured animal. If you consider a kin-group consisting of (injured animal with major spinal cord damage)+(really close relatives), your argument requires that the advantage to (really close relatives) in terms of increased numbers of offspring due to preferential predation on (injured animal with major spinal cord damage) is bigger than the disadvantage to the entire group when one of its members is no longer available for breeding.
The problem is this: it makes no difference to the group which animal gets eaten. If the injured animal could heal, then it would be an un-injured animal, presumably capable of reproducing. So unless you are going to argue that spinal cord injuries that heal are necessarily going to reduce the reproductive fitness of the individual, your argument makes no sense: the question raised was "Why don't they heal?" and your answer amounts to the unsubstantiated claim that "healed animals will have radically lower reproductive fitness."
It is true that injured animals will have radically lowered reproductive fitness, but we're asking, "Why don't they heal given that healed animals would have the same reproductive fitness as any other?"
Saying, "Injured animals have lower reproductive fitness and therefore it is an advantage to their kin group to have them eaten rather than their more fit kin" does nothing to explain why injured animals don't heal and therefore become as reproductively fit as their uninjured kin.
And kin selection leaves out all kinds of solitary animals, like bears, say, that so far as I know have the same problem with non-healing spinal cords as humans.
My personal bet on the evolutionary mechanism behind this is that non-lethal severe spinal cord injuries are sufficiently rare that there just isn't that much evolutionary pressure on healing them, and that scaring, which is a generic mechanism in warm-blooded animals that suppresses regeneration of all kinds, is such a coarse filter that it happened to turn off regeneration in the spine entirely.
In general, cold blooded animals do not scar, but do have some capacity to regenerate, sometimes entire limbs. This works for them because they can effectively shut down for a long periods of time while the healing process takes place. Warm blooded animals have to keep their body temperature up, which means they can't afford the long down-times of cold-bloods, so they have been selected for rapid "field dressing" in the form of scaring, and what we know about the gene pathways suggests that that interferes with regeneration. Lack of regeneration in the spinal nerves could easily be a consequence of that, and like I said: there's probably not much evolutionary pressure on it because how often does an animal get a non-lethal injury that cuts the spinal cord? We see humans with spinal injuries surviving because of medical intervention, but things mentioned in the summary like inflammation, are major killers in untreated spinal injury. That's just speculation, though, and as I hope I've shown above, it's very easy to screw up when trying to reason informally about this stuff.
Even if the doctors are telling the CDC it's verified who is checking that they actually did the tests?
Yeah, the thing that caught my eye was the claim in the summary: "The medical data is normalized so that fir example reports of hypertension, HTN, and high blood pressure all mean the same thing when a researcher enters a query against the data."
"Mean the same thing", eh? To whom? Meaning is a verb: it is what knowing subjects do with data, information, raw stuff.
People mean anything they want by anything they say or hear (just get into an argument with your girlfriend if you want empirical proof...)
While data normalization can handle trivial terminological differences, it cannot deal with the reality that what one doc means by "hypertension" does not map on to what another doc means by "hypertension", so the database will be full of inconsistent and contradictory information. This is ok, so long as the people using it realize that the categories are loosely bound statistical clusters that can't be interogated... err... meaningfully... without the use of extremely high-power analytical techniques. Simply asking questions like, "Where are flu-like symptoms being reported" will give you a probability distribution with significant spacial heteroskedasity, not an answer.
In this scheme, the no-name band that is most successful in cloning the big-band sound will score the highest.
Which gaming of the system is trivially defeatable via a cut for bands that are clearly clones of existing big-name bands. If some random/. reader can spot the issue--and it will only be an issue with a system that can actually measure similarity accurately--then you can be pretty sure the researchers working on this stuff will spot it as well.
Since, by hypothesis, they have a system that can accurately measure similarity it becomes tivial to eliminate bands that are too similar, and therefore clones.
A liberal, as defined in this era, would not want to spend the money because it doesn't do anything to further their socialist agenda and spread the wealth.
The problem is that "liberal" and "conservative" as defined in the US have no substantive policy differences, just different talking points that the American media sells to American consumers as profound and fundamental differences in policy, to the extent that when members of your two nominally different poltical parties do exactly the same thing those actions are universally believed to have different meanings.
When a "conservative" runs up a massive budget deficit it's to keep America safe. When a "liberal" does exactly the same thing it's because they're growing government power to promote their socialist agenda.
When a "conservative" bails out a business it is "saving the American free enterprise system" (still don't understand that, but that's what "conservatives" say.) When a "liberal" bails out a business it's to reward their friends in Big Labour and promote their socialist agenda.
When a "liberal" says we must "spread the wealth" it's furthering thier socialist agenda, but when Sarah Palin said it--which she did!--it's "conservative" government support of the common man, or Real Americans, or something.
I've put the above examples in conservative-interpretive terms because conservatives are the dominant political and cultural force in America today, as suggested by Obama's continuance of almost all substantive Bush-era policies on killing people around the world and looting the national treasury in favour of Big Business. But one could just as easily put a liberal-interpetive spin on them: "conservative" spending is "supporting the military-industrial complex" while "liberal" spending is "providing jobs for our hard-working men and women" (in the military-industrial complex.) And so on.
No actual policy ever changes as presidents and congreses come and go: the single-party oligarchs and keptocrats change the window-dressing and continue to amass power and loot, and the nattering idiots that populate American political discourse continue to steadfastly quibble with each other as if the two wings of the Party were the least bit different from each other in any substantive sense.
Basically, the only thing the attacker gets is the ability to make the client's browser request whatever the attacker wants.
Oh, is that all? So for example, you can serve something that looks like my bank's home page but originates on your server.
Then when I enter my user name and password your server collects them, and if you're feeling particularly clever redirects me back to my bank's real site. Now you have access to my account, and I'm none the wiser.
This is far more serious than image loading, because you can serve arbitarary web pages to me. As others here have pointed out, you could even serve my bank's authentic webpage but with some added javascript to just forward my username and password to you. Can you do that with an embedded image tag?
I can understand that it doesn't seem right to punish someone for things out of their control
I can't, because I can't understand the idea of "punishment" at all. I understand the idea of conditioning, and the notion that imposing a negative consequence on someone because they have violated some behavioural norm may in some cases reduce the rate of such violations.
But when people talk about "punishment" they seem to have something quite different in mind. In particular, people who talk about "punishment" often attempt to justify it by claiming it is "deserved", but I've never been able to get anyone to tell me what it means to "deserve" something other than, "I would personally feel really good if I saw that happen to that person."
So when someone says, "A murderer deserves life imprisonment" what they mean is "I would feel better if that person was put in prison for life." I don't really see why people's feelings should be the basis for the criminal law system.
On that basis, while investigation into motives remains important for the purposes of conditioning individuals--both the particular individual involved in the crime and everyone else who is aware the crime has been committed and is aware of the negative conditioning consequent upon it--it doesn't seem to me that how we feel about someone being treated a particular way ought to come into sentencing. The only guideline ought to be the effect of the negative conditioning on the likelihood that similar crimes will be committed again, either by the same person or by others.
Letting people out of jail time based on their genetic makeup just doesn't make any sense in this view, any more than it would make sense to give an average person who had committed a violent crime even more jail-time simply because they had taken an anger-management course at some point and therefore might be expected to be able to have a greater-than-average degree of control over their violent impulses.
The perception of pain, and indeed all neurological processes, are not incorporeal and can be shown to have actual physical mechanisms.
Three hundred and fifty years after Willis et al showed that the brain was the physical seat of perception, it is incredible that the mythology of "mind over matter" is even coherent to anyone anymore: mind is matter. Why anyone believes otherwise is a mystery.
Yet we still see people in response to this article saying "the placebo effect isn't an effect", as if the physiological response that results in an altered state of belief isn't real because they believe for some reason that psychological states aren't real. The placebo effect is a perfectly ordinary physiological effect, as all psychological effects are. That we can access our physiology via words, ideas and beliefs is no great suprise, since those words, ideas as beliefs are generated by our physiology as well.
I guess maybe most people are simply too dim to understand the concept of a system that can act as both a creator/transmitter of beliefs and a reciever/responder to beliefs, although given their own hands, for example, act both as input and output devices makes that a little hard to credit.
It would be extremely interesting to know exactly where the failure of reasoning occurs in people who believe that mind and matter are independent and unrelated things, and the mind is somehow "less real" than the matter that constitutes it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a perfect example of how deceptive headlines get created.
Never underestimate the power of really stupid people who are profoundly ignorant of the subject they report on.
The "earth sized body" is a pure fiction, as near as I can tell. The radius is not explicitly stated in the paper, and the estimated masses are around one solar mass, which means they are no where near earth-sized. Some ignoramous just made that up, and the highly-paid /-tard editors passed it on, stripping the tiny bit of correct information from the original PR headline.
Please inform me where I can find all these uncorrupted journalists
All over the place: just look for the ones exposing corruption. There are a lot of them. But you won't see them if you spend all your time playing a soviet shill on /.
There are plenty of corrupt journalists, too.
Not a philosophy major, I assume?
"Some A are not X" in no way refutes "Only A are X".
An idiot or soviet shill might be too stupid to understand the OP's point that "Only journalists are a true force opposed to corruption", but no one else here is quite that stupid.
My basic point is, people search for meaning in life. That's why we have religion
Huh?
How do lies and fantasies and logically contradictory meaningless gibberish provide meaning?
Your claim is no different from saying, "People search for facts in life. That's whey we have religion." It makes no sense at all: the purported conclusion is completely unrelated to the nominal premise, and there is no true middle premise that can form a valid syllogism.
People search for facts in life.
Religion supplies facts.
Ergo, people have religion
The middle premise is obviously false, and even more obviously false if you replace "facts" with "meaning", since an omnipotent loving god not only is logically contradictory it contradicts almost every fact about human life we know, from the bad design of the retina to the propensity of old people to lose control of their bowels. An omnipotent god could have created a universe that was exactly like this one in every respect that didn't have those problems. That is a logical contradiction, but a god whose power is limited by logical possibility is not omnipotent (all powerful) but rather one whose power is limited.
Believers are all remarkably inconsistent or stupid, because they claim to believe in an "omnipotent" god who has limited powers.
To have meaning requires logical consistency, and nothing that lacks all logical consistency can be considered a source of meaning. If people want to use religion as a source of meaning they may as well just make shit up... oh wait...
Another way to put it: if we were so sure that what we know is 100% correct then we wouldn't need to build the LHC to test our theories in the first place.
There's a nice equivocation in this statement: we can be as sure as we are of anything that LHC black holes won't destroy the Earth. If they did we'd see evidence in the cosmic-ray spectrum due to evaporating black hole signatures and the like, as well as the Earth not actually being here because it would have been destroyed in the past.
So while we do need to build the LHC to test theories regarding the Higgs boson, we do not need to build it to test theories regarding LHC black holes. That's the thing about science: all sources of experimental knowledge are equally valid, and you don't get to say our knowlege of black holes supposedly created by high energy collisions "doesn't count" because it comes from cosmic rays rather than accelerators.
Furthermore, I'm not sure why you and others keep bringing up the 100% correct thing. You can't be sure 100% certainty that the act of typing your next post into /. won't invoke some as-yet-to-be-discovered physical law and cause you to grow a second head. But for some reason you won't explain you aren't worried about that, even though you seem to pretend to be worried about LHC black holes destroying the Earth, which has no greater probablity.
Why is that? Why aren't you posting about all the other things that you can't be 100% sure of not destroying the Earth? Why only the LHC and not hitherto undiscovered physical laws that will cause the DROID phone to result in the death of us all? The "not 100% sure" standard is so silly that you'd have to terrified of damned near everything, if you were remotely intellectually honest.
which due to the grouping of particle collisions in the LHC is different from a single high speed collision happening in the upper atmosphere
This statement makes no sense. The quarks have no clue if they're in the atmosphere or the LHC.
The ignorant, murderous assholes who have been making a living for themselves inducing panic in people by waving their hands about LHC black holes have been making much of this "we don't know everything" rhetoric. But unlike the scientists who have performed these actual calculations, the ignorant murderous assholes have never produced any numbers: just vague handwaving and wild specuation that requires almost everything we know about physics to be wrong (expect for a few very carefully chosen bits they need to be right to keep thier speculations afloat.)
In fact, if you are worried about LHC black holes destroying the Earth then you should ALSO be worried that clicking your heels together three times and saying, "There's no place like home" will turn you into a bowl of cornflakes. After all, we can't be 100% sure it won't happen, and in fact the probability of it happening is slightly higher than the bizzare balance of known and novel physics that would be required to allow the LHC to create black holes, much less have them destroy the Earth.
So my question to the ignorant murderous assholes is: why are you making such a fuss about LHC black holes when there are so many millions of other things that pose a far greater risk to the Earth? Giant asteroid collisions caused by global warming (the atmosphere expands, increasing the odds of impact). Death by cell phone radiation interacting with the local galactic magentic field causing the Earth to fall into the sun. And so on. If you are worried about LHC black holes you have set the thresold for worry so low that if you aren't completely intellectually dishonest there are a vast array of other risks you should be in a panic about.
So why aren't you?
Wow, talk about misrepresenting the facts
Well, it is boingboing after all, which is the 'Net's equivalent of Orwell's "Two Minutes Hate": the editors post inane stories in the most inflammatory language possible, the crowd all goes apeshit for a short time, and then moves on to the next thing, having done nothing, accomplished nothing, and learned nothing.
Please explain to me how a holstered handgun that is hidden from public view represents a danger to anyone.
The fact that you ask for a theoretical explanation of an empirical fact suggests you aren't really interested in the facts, and attempting to deflect the debate from facts is a sure sign you have an ideology. The fact is that in environments where there are no handguns to speak of (Canada) the number of gun crimes of opportunity and passion, and accidental discharges, by citizens carrying guns is very low, whereas concealed-carry environments the rate is much higher.
Because of course only a complete fucking idiot would fail to realize that an angry person with a holstered gun poses a greater danger to all around them than an angry person without a holstered gun. But do please try to claim otherwise. It amuses rational people when ideotards act stupid on the Internet.
With regard to cops vs citizens with guns, you may be interested to know that the statistic cited in my .sig is based on the data about cops shooting the wrong person when coming upon a crime in progress. Armed citizens are ten times less likely to shoot the wrong person than cops, because they are there when the crime actually occurs.
Like I said, I'm generally in favour of citizens owning guns, although handguns are a bit silly, and gun registration is no more a big deal than car registration. But until people on both sides of the debate take an inclusive view of the pertinent facts, rather than just pumping the ones they like while asking for theoretical justification for the ones they don't, the debate will never get anywhere because the two sides will neither of them be connected to reality.
Ok, go back to your delusions now, studiously ignoring the facts you don't like and hooting loudly about the ones you do. Just remember: the facts don't care. They are just facts, and if you can't understand how they can be that way it simply means you're stupid. Every time you ask for a theoretical justification of a fact as if that was an argument you reveal yourself as an ideotard. And like I said: while that's amusing, it isn't useful.
i cannot help but marvel at the inherent wisdom in these complex systems and the incredible harmony they share
Others have pointed out what a weak argument this is, to no good effect because obviously you aren't interested in anything that contradicts your faith (by definition: it wouldn't be faith otherwise).
But I'm entirely unsure what you mean by "inherent wisdom" and "incredible harmony" of complex natural systems.
There are some pretty clever hacks, but so many amazingly stupid kludges and disgusting inefficiencies that it is hard to see any wisdom or harmony unless one takes a ridiculously narrow focus. These stupid kludges and disgusting inefficiencies don't change the reality of the clever hacks, but they are so common that they put the lie to any overall claim of system elegance.
Pointing out "Some X are Y" does not prove "All X are Y". It only takes one "X is not Y" to prove "Not all X are Y", and that's what people here have been point out. No number of cases where "X is Y" disproves that, and any claim that natural systems were the result of any kind of caring, omnipotent being is logically incoherent on that basis. Kindly old mother nature kills off vast numbers of completely innocent beings, often in horrible ways, simply because evolution is all too frequently a "race to the bottom".
If an omnipotent being was responsible for this they have some serious explaining to do, because (being omnipotent) they could have got exactly the same effect through far more efficient and humane means. So anyone who believes natural systems were the result of an omnipotent being has a choice between being logically incoherent (the preferred solution) or admiting that that being was a prick, because (again, being omnipotent) they could have created a kinder, gentler universe that was exactly like this one in every respect (being omnipotent.)
Check out the bio-mimicry database
Awesome. Please post this as a reply to every story on /. that introduces the "new" idea of engineers looking to nature for solution ideas, which has been a "new" idea for over a century.
After a couple of decades of posting this database link ever couple of months when we get stories on this "new" idea maybe, possibly, people will learn that engineers have been looking to nature for inspiration for over a century.
The notion that this is a new idea or phenomenon is one of the most curious anomalies of human society, and the mean-time-between mentions on /. may be usable as some kind of measure of the time it takes for average people to completely forget something that they were told was new and interesting a few weeks or months before.
Should the day come though I won't be cowering under a desk waiting to be murdered by some mental case or Mumbai copy-cat.
In the meantime, while waiting for one of those highly improbable fantasy scenarios to occur, you and your handgun will be a danger to everyone around you. The risk from improper/accidental/intentional use of an available handgun in mundane circumstances is far greater than the reduction in risk due to its value in an Hollywood fantasy scenario.
As the Fort Hood shootings demonstrate, being in a heavily armed environment does not necessarily make anyone safer (I'm assuming American military bases are heavily armed environments.)
I'm generally in favour of an armed citizenry, and I know that statistically there has been a correlation between armed citizens and reductions in certain types of crime, but there is also an increase in accidental deaths and the use of handguns in crimes of passion and opportunity.
Invoking highly improbable fantasy scenarios in the context of concealed carry laws, and at the same time not mentioning the much more significant increase in deaths due to mundane occurences, completely misses the point about why the right to keep and bear arms is important.
If the IEA is capable of any logic at all, they are not cooking the books or withholding data. What's the motive of retaining data or fixing charts?
This is a textbook example of a logical fallacy I call "argumentum ad stultum" (argument from stupidity). It has the form, "X would be stupid, therefore it is implausible that anyone would do X."
The problem is that the unstated middle premise is: "People tend not to do things that are stupid", which is trivially false. I'm sure you could name a group you think is routinely stupid: conservatives, liberals, the French...
The problem is that the Law of Common Humanity tells us: We are just like Them, at least at a deep enough level, and unfortunately stupid is very deep indeed. If we're honest with ourselves we'll admit that we're stupid a good deal of the time too--I know I am (look at me, I'm responding to some guy on /. trying to change the world just a little bit for the better! Now that's stupid!)
So I have no problem believing that the IEA is fudging the data based on every little bit of interpretive wiggle room they have, just the way stupid people dominated the economic debate in the run-up to the crash (which I personally wrote about in the summer of 2006, pointing out that housing was headed for a fall, and recall good articles on CDOs from the spring of 2006 warning of upcoming problems.) But no one wanted to listen to the Cassandra's in the midst of all the euphoria.
It's the same with Peak Oil, which is a robust first-order theory that cannot be fixed by any higher-order corrections, which is why the detailed debates about it are silly, just like the detailed debates about housing were silly: you cannot borrow and flip your way to prosperity across the whole economy, no matter how clever your economic theory. Likewise, you cannot change the fundamental linear shape of the oil production curve, which is all that peak oil rests on.
But it is far more comfortable to believe that "someone will do something" to make things better at some unspecified date in the future. So there is a huge pressure to believe that, and to twist things to make that belief seem plausible. The IEA could very easily be doing that, even though it is an incredibly stupid thing to do.
The question here is whether the claim is so absurd that no "ordinary person" would believe it to be true.
American politics demonstrates that the answer to this question is always, "No." There is no claim so absurd that a significant fraction of the American voting public won't believe it to be true.
The question for Beck now is: "Why did Glenn Beck resort to going to an international treaty organziation in an attempt to suppress an ordinary American's First Ammendment right to free speech? Doens't Glenn Beck believe that the Constitution is the highest law, and that only people hate American want to subordinate it to international treaty obligations?"
But shouldn't a committee, a congress or cabinet if you will, be even brighter than just an individual?
Huh? No, of course not.
Haven't you ever seen that crazy made-up "NASA funded" quiz that asks about how to rescue yourself from a crash on the moon, that purports to be a tool to show how much smarter committees are than than individuals? It's hilarious! Amidst radically under-specified conditions the "committee" result is a mish-mash of inconsistent assumptions and unphysical claims, my faviourite being that the recoil from a 45 calibre pistol is sufficient to be usd as a means of transportation. In individual, in the quiet of their own mind, can sit down and work out that that is nonsense, but it sure sounds clever in a committee, and if you stop and do the analysis the other bozos have moved on to the next point, so by the time you point out that the idea is stupid you're so far out of context that it no longer matters.
Only someone with insufficient education or experience of the world would think a committee could possibly be smarter than an individual.
That said, what education gives you is a discipline of mind that allows you to learn from your mistakes and from the world of others far more quickly and efficiently than any other form of experience. Only people who don't have it under-rate it.
I don't know what RDBMS you used, but from my experience with both Oracle and DB2, neither would do something that stupid normally.
There actually was a major database vendor in the'90's that did things that way, but I can't recall who it was. I just remember reading some of their internal docs that had a comment to the effect "Outer joins need to be updated in the next release. Current implementation is totally broken", and based on performance compared to everything else I assumed that they had the order of evalution wrong, as the GP describes.
So it did happen back in the day, but it's been a decade since and all the other major vendors had things right even then.
I'm not a mechanical engineer nor did any of my college coursework overlap with that but my gut feeling was pure skepticism and doubt.
I just get a blank page when I click on the link, so I'm not sure what the physical footprint of the town is, but when you consider modern sports stadia the ability to cover an area say 1 km across doesn't seem out of place. Modern materials are incredibly strong, and I would expect this dome would be designed as something like a kevlar rope net with panels in the holes to seal it. The internal atmospheric pressure will then keep the net under tension, and everything is good.
There is one big problem with it, which is that any failure is a catastrophic failure, albeit a catastrophe in slow motion. Unexpectedly high snow load, hurricane force winds, rocks falling from the sky and human error can all take structures of this kind down. I've seen two soccer domes fail under snow load (one was patchable and reinflatable) and know of another that was in the general vicinity of a tornado (nothing remained, although it was not actually hit by the tornado, it was just in the general area.)
As every engineer knows, if something can fail, it will. Domes like this can fail, therefore this one will. If the mean time between failure can be made long enough, it could still be worth-while, but I'd want to be sure that there was a re-inflation drill once a year or so (which policy would last for about a decade until some idiot in a suit realized they could pay themselves more today by leaving the people of tomorrow unprepared.)
There's also an interesting ecological twist: the ecosystem under the dome obviously can't be the local one, so you would have to replace a lot of vegetation with stuff that can survive without winter, and since the dome would inevitably become home to various exotic plants and animals it would be a continual source of invaders into the local ecosystem (which wouldn't survive the winter, but which would make every spring and summer a new surprise.)
The town from TFA was about 7,000 people
Yeah, the /. editors have clearly outsourced themselves to someplace where English is very poorly understood, because surely no self-declared "nerds" would ever make such an elementary mistake as to call a town of 7000 people a "city".
The alternative, of course, is that /. editors are a bunch of sensationalist manipulators who are not above falsehood to get page views.
It's an evolutionary advantage for the entire herd when a single injured member is incapacitated, thereby allowing predators to focus on the injured member instead of healthy members of the herd.
Kin selection, which is what you are invoking here, should generally be the last place you look for evolutionary explanations. It can be important, but it's a second-order effect and is easily incorrectly invoked, as you are doing here.
Kin selection would operate in this case only because "the herd" consists of close relatives of the injured animal. If you consider a kin-group consisting of (injured animal with major spinal cord damage)+(really close relatives), your argument requires that the advantage to (really close relatives) in terms of increased numbers of offspring due to preferential predation on (injured animal with major spinal cord damage) is bigger than the disadvantage to the entire group when one of its members is no longer available for breeding.
The problem is this: it makes no difference to the group which animal gets eaten. If the injured animal could heal, then it would be an un-injured animal, presumably capable of reproducing. So unless you are going to argue that spinal cord injuries that heal are necessarily going to reduce the reproductive fitness of the individual, your argument makes no sense: the question raised was "Why don't they heal?" and your answer amounts to the unsubstantiated claim that "healed animals will have radically lower reproductive fitness."
It is true that injured animals will have radically lowered reproductive fitness, but we're asking, "Why don't they heal given that healed animals would have the same reproductive fitness as any other?"
Saying, "Injured animals have lower reproductive fitness and therefore it is an advantage to their kin group to have them eaten rather than their more fit kin" does nothing to explain why injured animals don't heal and therefore become as reproductively fit as their uninjured kin.
And kin selection leaves out all kinds of solitary animals, like bears, say, that so far as I know have the same problem with non-healing spinal cords as humans.
My personal bet on the evolutionary mechanism behind this is that non-lethal severe spinal cord injuries are sufficiently rare that there just isn't that much evolutionary pressure on healing them, and that scaring, which is a generic mechanism in warm-blooded animals that suppresses regeneration of all kinds, is such a coarse filter that it happened to turn off regeneration in the spine entirely.
In general, cold blooded animals do not scar, but do have some capacity to regenerate, sometimes entire limbs. This works for them because they can effectively shut down for a long periods of time while the healing process takes place. Warm blooded animals have to keep their body temperature up, which means they can't afford the long down-times of cold-bloods, so they have been selected for rapid "field dressing" in the form of scaring, and what we know about the gene pathways suggests that that interferes with regeneration. Lack of regeneration in the spinal nerves could easily be a consequence of that, and like I said: there's probably not much evolutionary pressure on it because how often does an animal get a non-lethal injury that cuts the spinal cord? We see humans with spinal injuries surviving because of medical intervention, but things mentioned in the summary like inflammation, are major killers in untreated spinal injury. That's just speculation, though, and as I hope I've shown above, it's very easy to screw up when trying to reason informally about this stuff.
Even if the doctors are telling the CDC it's verified who is checking that they actually did the tests?
Yeah, the thing that caught my eye was the claim in the summary: "The medical data is normalized so that fir example reports of hypertension, HTN, and high blood pressure all mean the same thing when a researcher enters a query against the data."
"Mean the same thing", eh? To whom? Meaning is a verb: it is what knowing subjects do with data, information, raw stuff.
People mean anything they want by anything they say or hear (just get into an argument with your girlfriend if you want empirical proof...)
While data normalization can handle trivial terminological differences, it cannot deal with the reality that what one doc means by "hypertension" does not map on to what another doc means by "hypertension", so the database will be full of inconsistent and contradictory information. This is ok, so long as the people using it realize that the categories are loosely bound statistical clusters that can't be interogated... err... meaningfully... without the use of extremely high-power analytical techniques. Simply asking questions like, "Where are flu-like symptoms being reported" will give you a probability distribution with significant spacial heteroskedasity, not an answer.
In this scheme, the no-name band that is most successful in cloning the big-band sound will score the highest.
Which gaming of the system is trivially defeatable via a cut for bands that are clearly clones of existing big-name bands. If some random /. reader can spot the issue--and it will only be an issue with a system that can actually measure similarity accurately--then you can be pretty sure the researchers working on this stuff will spot it as well.
Since, by hypothesis, they have a system that can accurately measure similarity it becomes tivial to eliminate bands that are too similar, and therefore clones.
and not just because I'm an alumnae
There's more than one of you?
A liberal, as defined in this era, would not want to spend the money because it doesn't do anything to further their socialist agenda and spread the wealth.
The problem is that "liberal" and "conservative" as defined in the US have no substantive policy differences, just different talking points that the American media sells to American consumers as profound and fundamental differences in policy, to the extent that when members of your two nominally different poltical parties do exactly the same thing those actions are universally believed to have different meanings.
When a "conservative" runs up a massive budget deficit it's to keep America safe. When a "liberal" does exactly the same thing it's because they're growing government power to promote their socialist agenda.
When a "conservative" bails out a business it is "saving the American free enterprise system" (still don't understand that, but that's what "conservatives" say.) When a "liberal" bails out a business it's to reward their friends in Big Labour and promote their socialist agenda.
When a "liberal" says we must "spread the wealth" it's furthering thier socialist agenda, but when Sarah Palin said it--which she did!--it's "conservative" government support of the common man, or Real Americans, or something.
I've put the above examples in conservative-interpretive terms because conservatives are the dominant political and cultural force in America today, as suggested by Obama's continuance of almost all substantive Bush-era policies on killing people around the world and looting the national treasury in favour of Big Business. But one could just as easily put a liberal-interpetive spin on them: "conservative" spending is "supporting the military-industrial complex" while "liberal" spending is "providing jobs for our hard-working men and women" (in the military-industrial complex.) And so on.
No actual policy ever changes as presidents and congreses come and go: the single-party oligarchs and keptocrats change the window-dressing and continue to amass power and loot, and the nattering idiots that populate American political discourse continue to steadfastly quibble with each other as if the two wings of the Party were the least bit different from each other in any substantive sense.
For your own sake: wake up, people. Please.
Basically, the only thing the attacker gets is the ability to make the client's browser request whatever the attacker wants.
Oh, is that all? So for example, you can serve something that looks like my bank's home page but originates on your server.
Then when I enter my user name and password your server collects them, and if you're feeling particularly clever redirects me back to my bank's real site. Now you have access to my account, and I'm none the wiser.
This is far more serious than image loading, because you can serve arbitarary web pages to me. As others here have pointed out, you could even serve my bank's authentic webpage but with some added javascript to just forward my username and password to you. Can you do that with an embedded image tag?
No, I didn't think so.
I can understand that it doesn't seem right to punish someone for things out of their control
I can't, because I can't understand the idea of "punishment" at all. I understand the idea of conditioning, and the notion that imposing a negative consequence on someone because they have violated some behavioural norm may in some cases reduce the rate of such violations.
But when people talk about "punishment" they seem to have something quite different in mind. In particular, people who talk about "punishment" often attempt to justify it by claiming it is "deserved", but I've never been able to get anyone to tell me what it means to "deserve" something other than, "I would personally feel really good if I saw that happen to that person."
So when someone says, "A murderer deserves life imprisonment" what they mean is "I would feel better if that person was put in prison for life." I don't really see why people's feelings should be the basis for the criminal law system.
On that basis, while investigation into motives remains important for the purposes of conditioning individuals--both the particular individual involved in the crime and everyone else who is aware the crime has been committed and is aware of the negative conditioning consequent upon it--it doesn't seem to me that how we feel about someone being treated a particular way ought to come into sentencing. The only guideline ought to be the effect of the negative conditioning on the likelihood that similar crimes will be committed again, either by the same person or by others.
Letting people out of jail time based on their genetic makeup just doesn't make any sense in this view, any more than it would make sense to give an average person who had committed a violent crime even more jail-time simply because they had taken an anger-management course at some point and therefore might be expected to be able to have a greater-than-average degree of control over their violent impulses.
The perception of pain, and indeed all neurological processes, are not incorporeal and can be shown to have actual physical mechanisms.
Three hundred and fifty years after Willis et al showed that the brain was the physical seat of perception, it is incredible that the mythology of "mind over matter" is even coherent to anyone anymore: mind is matter. Why anyone believes otherwise is a mystery.
Yet we still see people in response to this article saying "the placebo effect isn't an effect", as if the physiological response that results in an altered state of belief isn't real because they believe for some reason that psychological states aren't real. The placebo effect is a perfectly ordinary physiological effect, as all psychological effects are. That we can access our physiology via words, ideas and beliefs is no great suprise, since those words, ideas as beliefs are generated by our physiology as well.
I guess maybe most people are simply too dim to understand the concept of a system that can act as both a creator/transmitter of beliefs and a reciever/responder to beliefs, although given their own hands, for example, act both as input and output devices makes that a little hard to credit.
It would be extremely interesting to know exactly where the failure of reasoning occurs in people who believe that mind and matter are independent and unrelated things, and the mind is somehow "less real" than the matter that constitutes it.