You could test the ability of Astrologers to make predictions people are likely to rate as corresponding to their lives, but that's not quite the same as testing the predictions.
Regardless, whether you could study Astrologers predictions scientifically or not, Astrologers do not.
"It is based on the idea that gravity and other forces influence our lives" You mean, if I fall down it hurts?
"It likely breaks down when you use it to predict the future" Then it is not a scientific model. Predicting the future is what scientific models are for, and what they do.
"All models have their limits and become invalid when you exceed them." Absolutely. The limits of Newtonian mechanics are so extreme almost no measurements humans are capable of can reach them.
The limits of astrology are reached before you manage to state what astrology claims.
Hmm, what counts as "testable" is really the question. There really should be as little room for disagreement about success/failure as possible, while astrology's whole mode is to have as much such room as possible.
To be as fair as possible, Chiropratic treatment has some evidentiary basis, and well-run studies have been shown to it effective for accute back problems (but not chronic ones). It's only when a chiropractor claims it makes sense to see them on any sort of regular basis that they become scam artists. That's almost always the case, of course.
But yes, astrology goes in the pile with homeopathy & creationism. Deserving of not just disbelief (like, say, all religions) but of active contempt; for they dare to make false claim to the mantle of science.
The population issue is bogus. You'd have to boost people into space faster than they are born, and create new habitat faster than the people already there fill it. Isaac Asimov adroitly addressed this suggestion by calculating the date when humanity would be a mass of living tissue expanding outward at the speed of light if no other limits slowed us down; it's not all that long.
Protecting our species from extinction in case the earth is destroyed is a great idea, and I support it entirely. If we're talking about setting up a colony, we should send humans. We're not anywhere near the scientific and technological level to begin colonizing now. If we want to get there before a catastrophe occurs, we ought to gather new knowledge efficiently. By sending robots.
If you heard the New World was there, would you dive in and start swimming? Or would you give any thought at all to whether the best approach might involve a boat?
"If it'd been an empty plane flying on autopilot, there would have been nothing like the interest or enthusiasm for crossing the Atlantic nonstop."
Yes, it would be a PR problem. Considerably safer if your only goal was getting across the Atlantic in a plan with less than 2 people in it. (Well, autopilots weren't good enough then)
"The geological data the Apollo astronauts obtained in just a few days on the moon, for example, outstrips what we've yet gotten after years of probing Mars."
The geological data we got by bringing rocks back from the moon outstrips what we'll ever get from not bringing stuff back, no question. But the humans up there didn't make any decisions about which rocks to look at without consulting with people on the ground anyway, so I'm not sure what the theoretical advantage they provided was.
Also, consider that for the current, known price of putting one astronaut on the ISS (barely out of the atmosphere, a tiny fraction of the cost to put a man on the moon) we can (at the current known price) put four rovers on Mars for several years.
Is one astronaut on Mars 20 years from now going to be more useful than dozens robots a year from now until then?
Astrology is a flawed mental shortcut for NOT understanding the world.
Astrology is not a more-flawed model; it's not a model at all.
Scientific models account for the evidence available to them; they provide correct predictions over their domain, within calculable error.
"Like astrology, Newtonian physics is a model that has been proven wrong. I'm convinced that it is a more useful model than astrology, but that's a matter of opinion."
It is not a matter of opinion; it is indisputable. The entirety of modern engineering is built on Newtonian mechanics, which has never been proved wrong, because it is not wrong. Newtonian mechanics describes how things in the physical world behave with extraordinary precision. There are other considerably more complex, harder to use models that describe certain extreme case with more precision, notably quantum mechanics and relativity. None of these models are "right"; they are more or less precise, and more or less useful in different cases. Sorry, but the "Newtonian mechanics proven wrong" meme bugs the hell out of me almost as much as astrology.
Astrology is not a model, and can't be proven wrong as it is not evidence based, and makes no testable predictions.
Gee, I dunno. Maybe the guy who said: "...the eee requires hacking skills to graft in more storage. The eee is too limited in terms of storage..." The EEE isn't limited at all in terms of storage; it's just aware that an internally mounted HDD is not the best for an ultraportable. You can connect to all the storage you could ever want via SD, USB, or network. Out of the myriad ways to attach storage, the EEE offers you several. You've decided to consider only one, one that is a particularly poor choice for an ultra portable, and declare the EEE limited based on it's lack.
"Besides, how hard would it have been to include an ide interface?" Perhaps you do not appreciate how small the EEE is. There is no room in the case for a hdd. A typical laptop hdd would account for an additional quarter of the EEEs mass, not counting the bigger battery you'd need to spin it.
There was some Sci-Fi story on that topic, the engineer is trying to figure out how to communicate enough with a far away space ship to solve some problem, when his phone-gossip wife gives him the solution: Just keep talking, all the time.
I can't remember the title or anything, but from the subject and tone I suppose I can date it to sometime after Sputnik and before Feminism.
There are plenty of volunteers for suicide missions with much less lofty goals, as a quick review of the news will depressingly demonstrate.
I'm sure you'd have a ton of volunteers for this, many of them perfectly sane and competent. Everybody dies; but not everybody dies on fricking Mars.
But it will never happen. Manned space exploration is foolish. Robots do a radically better job for a tiny fraction of the price. The only reason we go with humans is the emotional feel-good PR. You need to sell the story to the public, and that doesn't work so well if you're going to kill the guy, no matter how OK he is with that.
That's a typical Geocoder error. Geocoders (programs that figure out lat/long coordinates from an address) typically operate from a database of street segments, so they know the numbers on your side of your street run from 700 to 800 (for example) but they've no information on how they are actually distributed along the block, so they just assume it's an even spread. Also, the data is often lousy to begin with.
No. I looked at the features available, and the price asked. It was worth it to me, so I bought it. If I got annoyed every time some marketing guy said something about a future product that didn't turn out that way... well, I've better things to do with my time.
The EEE hardwires in some storage. There's a couple ways to plug in more storage that don't even require turning the thing off. If you really must have 200gigs on an internal drive in a 2 lb, under $500 laptop, available today, then the EEE isn't what you want. Then again, the EEE exists, and what you want doesn't. I don't know why you fault the EEE for this.
"So people are really so stuck in their ways that work has to start when the clock says 9?"
People are so stuck in their ways that work has to start when the clock say a particular thing. Doesn't matter what it it, but it has to be the same thing all year. Yes this is stupid, but it is pretty clearly the case. Note that anyone NOT stuck in their ways on this point should be entirely untroubled by DST.
DST seems stupid because you assume people set their schedules intelligently. DST is a crude but effective adaptation to the inherent stupidity of aggregate human behavior.
Bingo. I suggested an SD card for humorous effect, but I've actually got an EEE, and I've never wanted extra storage on it at all. I use a USB key occasionally, but just for ease of file exchange. It's exclusively a thin client, running a web browser or Remote Desktop. Storage, and even significant processing power, doesn't need to come along in my backpack; it can live across the network.
Or they have, but have the slightest comprehension of base rates.
Plane crashes with both fatalities and survivors (all that "study" looked at), are so fabulously rare that worrying about how to give yourself a very small increased chance of survival is a waste of time. Which assumes there was a way to do it at all, which that "study" doesn't establish because their result is radically below the margin of statistical error, never mind other probable errors in study design.
While it is sometimes a fun read, Popular Mechanics is not exactly a rigorous scientific journal.
So in response to my pointing out you're a jerk and an idiot, you claim you're just pretending to be an idiot, as part of being a jerk? Sorry, but that defense is itself completely idiotic, so my judgment stands.
You should try Over the Edge; it's rules system is only slightly more complex than what you describe, and it's great.
Of course, playing the way you describe, you weren't playing D&D. Which is fine if you don't like D&D, but if you don't like D&D, it maty be little surprise that you won't like 4th edition D&D. I've played 4th Edition, and can tell you: It isn't WoW brought to the table. It isn't the super-rules-light role playing you describe. It feels to me like D&D, made more fun.
Of course, this new edition throws much of the original inconsistencies, awkward mechanics and years of cruft, and replaces them with something intended to be more streamlined. One can argue the degree to which they've succeeded, but basically, your concerns are much of what they've attempted to address.
But people who commute every day in giant trucks so they can tow a boat twice a year are not people I wish to emulate.
I get around almost exclusively by bicycle. Given the modest amount I use a laptop, anything much bigger than my EEE isn't coming along. Given the small but non-zero chance of me dumping the bike and smashing the thing, anything much more expensive than my EEE isn't coming along. 800x480 is small, but useable, and is awesome compared to a computer you don't have with you.
Anyway, there's no real point in comparing the eee on anything but cost and portability. If those aren't the utterly dominant factors for you, you don't want an EEE. But as long as we're at it: Lack of storage is a red herring; SD cards and USB thumb drives are cheap if you bizarrely want to use an EEE as your primary computer. If you use it like me (and everyone else I know who has one), the storage and OS are irrelevant because if you want to run anything but a web browser, you remotely connect to a more powerful computer. In this role as a portable terminal, all that matters is screen, keyboard, portability and price. Portability and price are obviously great. I like the keyboard, but some others don't. A bigger screen would obviously be nice, but until I can have everything, it's good enough.
You are simply incorrect. Businesses make profits by doing whatever it is they do, and their owners get the money. In the case of publicly traded companies, the owners are stockholders. Trading of stocks between various people with different beliefs about how much money companies will make does indeed result in more savy/lucky investors taking money from less savy/lucky ones. But the sum of this game is not zero. The sum of this game is the amount of money made by publicly traded companies. Which is, on average, a very non-zero number.
"Well for one thing...I don't own the router, I don't pay for the internet service, so yes, what I do on the internet sure is my parent's business. But what I do locally is not."
Do you own the house? With any luck you've got good parents who will try to give you what independence they think they can, while shielding you from the worst consequences of any mistakes you might make for a few more years. But if you're arguing with adults (like most of us here), I'd drop the whole "My parents aren't the boss of me" line. It just makes us laugh nostalgically about our own adolescence, when we all said the same thing, and it wasn't true then either. They are the boss of you; legally, morally, and in most cases to your benefit.
And yeah, I know I'm just an old guy who doesn't get it.
Slashdot Mirror
You could test the ability of Astrologers to make predictions people are likely to rate as corresponding to their lives, but that's not quite the same as testing the predictions.
Regardless, whether you could study Astrologers predictions scientifically or not, Astrologers do not.
"It is based on the idea that gravity and other forces influence our lives"
You mean, if I fall down it hurts?
"It likely breaks down when you use it to predict the future"
Then it is not a scientific model. Predicting the future is what scientific models are for, and what they do.
"All models have their limits and become invalid when you exceed them."
Absolutely. The limits of Newtonian mechanics are so extreme almost no measurements humans are capable of can reach them.
The limits of astrology are reached before you manage to state what astrology claims.
Hmm, what counts as "testable" is really the question. There really should be as little room for disagreement about success/failure as possible, while astrology's whole mode is to have as much such room as possible.
To be as fair as possible, Chiropratic treatment has some evidentiary basis, and well-run studies have been shown to it effective for accute back problems (but not chronic ones). It's only when a chiropractor claims it makes sense to see them on any sort of regular basis that they become scam artists. That's almost always the case, of course.
But yes, astrology goes in the pile with homeopathy & creationism. Deserving of not just disbelief (like, say, all religions) but of active contempt; for they dare to make false claim to the mantle of science.
The population issue is bogus. You'd have to boost people into space faster than they are born, and create new habitat faster than the people already there fill it. Isaac Asimov adroitly addressed this suggestion by calculating the date when humanity would be a mass of living tissue expanding outward at the speed of light if no other limits slowed us down; it's not all that long.
Protecting our species from extinction in case the earth is destroyed is a great idea, and I support it entirely. If we're talking about setting up a colony, we should send humans. We're not anywhere near the scientific and technological level to begin colonizing now. If we want to get there before a catastrophe occurs, we ought to gather new knowledge efficiently. By sending robots.
If you heard the New World was there, would you dive in and start swimming? Or would you give any thought at all to whether the best approach might involve a boat?
"If it'd been an empty plane flying on autopilot, there would have been nothing like the interest or enthusiasm for crossing the Atlantic nonstop."
Yes, it would be a PR problem. Considerably safer if your only goal was getting across the Atlantic in a plan with less than 2 people in it. (Well, autopilots weren't good enough then)
"The geological data the Apollo astronauts obtained in just a few days on the moon, for example, outstrips what we've yet gotten after years of probing Mars."
The geological data we got by bringing rocks back from the moon outstrips what we'll ever get from not bringing stuff back, no question. But the humans up there didn't make any decisions about which rocks to look at without consulting with people on the ground anyway, so I'm not sure what the theoretical advantage they provided was.
Also, consider that for the current, known price of putting one astronaut on the ISS (barely out of the atmosphere, a tiny fraction of the cost to put a man on the moon) we can (at the current known price) put four rovers on Mars for several years.
Is one astronaut on Mars 20 years from now going to be more useful than dozens robots a year from now until then?
Astrology is a flawed mental shortcut for NOT understanding the world.
Astrology is not a more-flawed model; it's not a model at all.
Scientific models account for the evidence available to them; they provide correct predictions over their domain, within calculable error.
"Like astrology, Newtonian physics is a model that has been proven wrong. I'm convinced that it is a more useful model than astrology, but that's a matter of opinion."
It is not a matter of opinion; it is indisputable. The entirety of modern engineering is built on Newtonian mechanics, which has never been proved wrong, because it is not wrong. Newtonian mechanics describes how things in the physical world behave with extraordinary precision. There are other considerably more complex, harder to use models that describe certain extreme case with more precision, notably quantum mechanics and relativity. None of these models are "right"; they are more or less precise, and more or less useful in different cases. Sorry, but the "Newtonian mechanics proven wrong" meme bugs the hell out of me almost as much as astrology.
Astrology is not a model, and can't be proven wrong as it is not evidence based, and makes no testable predictions.
"Who's faulting the eee?"
Gee, I dunno. Maybe the guy who said: "...the eee requires hacking skills to graft in more storage. The eee is too limited in terms of storage..." The EEE isn't limited at all in terms of storage; it's just aware that an internally mounted HDD is not the best for an ultraportable. You can connect to all the storage you could ever want via SD, USB, or network. Out of the myriad ways to attach storage, the EEE offers you several. You've decided to consider only one, one that is a particularly poor choice for an ultra portable, and declare the EEE limited based on it's lack.
"Besides, how hard would it have been to include an ide interface?"
Perhaps you do not appreciate how small the EEE is. There is no room in the case for a hdd. A typical laptop hdd would account for an additional quarter of the EEEs mass, not counting the bigger battery you'd need to spin it.
There was some Sci-Fi story on that topic, the engineer is trying to figure out how to communicate enough with a far away space ship to solve some problem, when his phone-gossip wife gives him the solution: Just keep talking, all the time.
I can't remember the title or anything, but from the subject and tone I suppose I can date it to sometime after Sputnik and before Feminism.
There are plenty of volunteers for suicide missions with much less lofty goals, as a quick review of the news will depressingly demonstrate.
I'm sure you'd have a ton of volunteers for this, many of them perfectly sane and competent. Everybody dies; but not everybody dies on fricking Mars.
But it will never happen. Manned space exploration is foolish. Robots do a radically better job for a tiny fraction of the price. The only reason we go with humans is the emotional feel-good PR. You need to sell the story to the public, and that doesn't work so well if you're going to kill the guy, no matter how OK he is with that.
That's a typical Geocoder error. Geocoders (programs that figure out lat/long coordinates from an address) typically operate from a database of street segments, so they know the numbers on your side of your street run from 700 to 800 (for example) but they've no information on how they are actually distributed along the block, so they just assume it's an even spread. Also, the data is often lousy to begin with.
"Doesn't anyone object to being manipulated?"
No. I looked at the features available, and the price asked. It was worth it to me, so I bought it. If I got annoyed every time some marketing guy said something about a future product that didn't turn out that way... well, I've better things to do with my time.
The EEE hardwires in some storage. There's a couple ways to plug in more storage that don't even require turning the thing off. If you really must have 200gigs on an internal drive in a 2 lb, under $500 laptop, available today, then the EEE isn't what you want. Then again, the EEE exists, and what you want doesn't. I don't know why you fault the EEE for this.
"So people are really so stuck in their ways that work has to start when the clock says 9?"
People are so stuck in their ways that work has to start when the clock say a particular thing. Doesn't matter what it it, but it has to be the same thing all year. Yes this is stupid, but it is pretty clearly the case. Note that anyone NOT stuck in their ways on this point should be entirely untroubled by DST.
DST seems stupid because you assume people set their schedules intelligently. DST is a crude but effective adaptation to the inherent stupidity of aggregate human behavior.
Bingo. I suggested an SD card for humorous effect, but I've actually got an EEE, and I've never wanted extra storage on it at all. I use a USB key occasionally, but just for ease of file exchange.
It's exclusively a thin client, running a web browser or Remote Desktop. Storage, and even significant processing power, doesn't need to come along in my backpack; it can live across the network.
Yeah, sliding a card into the SD slot on the side of the thing is pretty tough. That really takes some takes some seriously leet skilz.
Or they have, but have the slightest comprehension of base rates.
Plane crashes with both fatalities and survivors (all that "study" looked at), are so fabulously rare that worrying about how to give yourself a very small increased chance of survival is a waste of time. Which assumes there was a way to do it at all, which that "study" doesn't establish because their result is radically below the margin of statistical error, never mind other probable errors in study design.
While it is sometimes a fun read, Popular Mechanics is not exactly a rigorous scientific journal.
So in response to my pointing out you're a jerk and an idiot, you claim you're just pretending to be an idiot, as part of being a jerk? Sorry, but that defense is itself completely idiotic, so my judgment stands.
Also, find the shift key.
All the D&D players I know are married.
People who worry what sort of sterotype is associated with a particular hobby are insecure.
People who mock others based on their assumptions about a geeky sub-culture? That's just sad.
Doing so on Slashdot? Umm, yeah, sorry that life thing didn't work out for you...
That's GW. They come out with something; when everyone says it's great, they immediately drop it and wander off in another direction.
This is WoTC. They'll publish dozens of books; everyone will complain how much they suck; they'll sell a zillion copies and make a mint.
You should try Over the Edge; it's rules system is only slightly more complex than what you describe, and it's great.
Of course, playing the way you describe, you weren't playing D&D. Which is fine if you don't like D&D, but if you don't like D&D, it maty be little surprise that you won't like 4th edition D&D.
I've played 4th Edition, and can tell you: It isn't WoW brought to the table. It isn't the super-rules-light role playing you describe. It feels to me like D&D, made more fun.
Yeah, it's amazing he made up that whole long comment just to entertain us in just minutes after the subject of D&D came up.
Of course, this new edition throws much of the original inconsistencies, awkward mechanics and years of cruft, and replaces them with something intended to be more streamlined. One can argue the degree to which they've succeeded, but basically, your concerns are much of what they've attempted to address.
Yes, it works that way in the US too. The point the poster is making is that that is a somewhat recent development.
The kid in the article was (alledgedly) spoofing that information.
But people who commute every day in giant trucks so they can tow a boat twice a year are not people I wish to emulate.
I get around almost exclusively by bicycle. Given the modest amount I use a laptop, anything much bigger than my EEE isn't coming along. Given the small but non-zero chance of me dumping the bike and smashing the thing, anything much more expensive than my EEE isn't coming along. 800x480 is small, but useable, and is awesome compared to a computer you don't have with you.
Anyway, there's no real point in comparing the eee on anything but cost and portability. If those aren't the utterly dominant factors for you, you don't want an EEE. But as long as we're at it: Lack of storage is a red herring; SD cards and USB thumb drives are cheap if you bizarrely want to use an EEE as your primary computer. If you use it like me (and everyone else I know who has one), the storage and OS are irrelevant because if you want to run anything but a web browser, you remotely connect to a more powerful computer. In this role as a portable terminal, all that matters is screen, keyboard, portability and price. Portability and price are obviously great. I like the keyboard, but some others don't. A bigger screen would obviously be nice, but until I can have everything, it's good enough.
"Stocks are definitely a zero sum game"
You are simply incorrect. Businesses make profits by doing whatever it is they do, and their owners get the money. In the case of publicly traded companies, the owners are stockholders. Trading of stocks between various people with different beliefs about how much money companies will make does indeed result in more savy/lucky investors taking money from less savy/lucky ones. But the sum of this game is not zero. The sum of this game is the amount of money made by publicly traded companies. Which is, on average, a very non-zero number.
"Well for one thing...I don't own the router, I don't pay for the internet service, so yes, what I do on the internet sure is my parent's business. But what I do locally is not."
Do you own the house? With any luck you've got good parents who will try to give you what independence they think they can, while shielding you from the worst consequences of any mistakes you might make for a few more years. But if you're arguing with adults (like most of us here), I'd drop the whole "My parents aren't the boss of me" line. It just makes us laugh nostalgically about our own adolescence, when we all said the same thing, and it wasn't true then either. They are the boss of you; legally, morally, and in most cases to your benefit.
And yeah, I know I'm just an old guy who doesn't get it.