The problem is that the the terms "left" and "right", which properly refer to labor and capital, have been misused to refer to social issues. Journalists (and other professionals) tend to be more socially liberal, because they tend to be more educated and live in urban areas, while on most issues the "socially conservative" position reflects either a rural viewpoint or a flat-out ignorant one.
The media is just as leftist as the major corporations that own it -- or, in the case of NPR, that sponsor it.
Maybe business taxes are different, but aren't taxes usually taken off revenue, not profit?
Business taxes are different, and are taken off of profit. (I'm sure some accountant will point out how that's not technically right, but it's the basic idea.)
It is as if a schoolboy of the nineteenth century - instead of having drummed into his poor head a lot of nonsense about Greek and Latin and obscure geometric theorems - had been taught, instead, how to concentrate, and how to use libraries, and how to assimilate knowledge - how, above all, to THINK.
And how, exactly, does one teach someone to THINK? You have to teach about language -- studying a foreign language is a great way to do that. You have to teach the skills of reasoning, such as formal logic -- and an excellent way to do this is through the study of geometric proofs.
You can't teach thinking in the abstract. You need things to think about, and examples of thinking in action.
Learning facts is a waste of brain capacity. Computers are perfect for storing facts, and quickly looking up the facts we need.
There are indeed some sorts of facts which it is a waste to learn. I think of these as being "map of the cat" sorts of things, after a story about Richard Feynman:
I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors, the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I hadn't the foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the nerves or to the cat. So I went to the librarian in the biology section and asked her if she could find me a map of the cat.
"A map of the cat, sir?" she asked, horrified. "You mean a zoological chart!" From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate student who was looking for a "map of the cat."
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"
"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
But what facts these are depends in large part on what you're doing. I don't want my vet to need a map of my dog.
I'd say part of mastering a field is knowing what stuff you need to know, and what stuff you look up in a reference book (or, these days, on a computer).
I don't know every street in my neighborhood. That would be a waste of time. But I know where the major streets and big landmarks are -- I'd be lost all the time if I had to look them up. It's the same of any field of knowledge.
They're too loud, and the spring pressure is way too high.
Unicomp also makes a "quiet touch" version, which is a heck of lot louder than any other "quiet" keyboard and which use a rubber dome. It's got a nice feel, not as hard as the buckling spring but still nicely firm.
People who are worried that idiots will try what they see on TV
The Discovery Channel's lawyers aren't so much worried that idiots will try it, as that idiots -- or those hurt by idiots -- will sue. "We didn't tell him how to make nitroglycerin" is a more effective legal defense than "Yes, we told him how to make nitroglycerin but told him it was a dangerous thing to do."
But my true point is that they block out the mudane details like names of companies or locations for seemingly little purpose.
I think the names of companies are blotted out so as to not give free advertising. Like the "cola myths" bit -- if Pepsi's buying ad space, don't give Coke free exposure.
Unfortunately defendants aren't allowed to set rules of the Court.
I was assuming that the rules of the court include the right to due process, the presumption of innocence, and the right to question witnesses against you.
Yes, in a typical criminal trial those exist more in theory then in fact.
The defendant is free to argue that the lab is at fault, but unless your name is OJ Simpson you aren't getting anywhere, statistically speaking.
I'm not arguing that the lab is at fault. I'm arguing that the whole notion of DNA evidence being used as the main evidence to link someone to a crime is faulty. Even if done right it's not as reliable as it is presented to be, and it's very easy to do wrong.
Even if you show prior instances of errors done by labs, you'd have to show that this particular error was done this time by this lab
If due process and the presumption of innocence are in place, it's up to the prosecution to prove their evidence reliable. Prior instances of errors show that it is not.
As a practical matter, would I expect this tack to work? Probably not. Is that because DNA evidence is reliable? No, it's because due process is a joke and criminal defendants are, as a practical matter, guilty until proven innocent.
If IBM are working on a higher-level, trying to build a system where we can see the associations in terms of "A frequently_sees B" "B helps A" and "A respects B" therefore "A likes B" is much more useful.
That sort of symbol manipulation was the way AI was done for decades.
It turned out to be a dead end, which is why interest in things like neural networks, genetic algorithms, and subsumption architectures, has grown.
A "strip-search" performed by anyone other than a police officer acting with probable cause is a sexual assault.
People, including teens and children, have the right to defend themselves by any means necessary against such an attack, and should be trained to do so.
After some pervert principal gets his testicles crushed and his eyes gouged by a student he's trying to attack, perhaps we might see an end to this bullshit.
Be that as it may, it doesn't change the fact that there are many MUAs that have no problems with IMAP while Outlook constantly chokes on it.
Sure. IMAP is mild suckage and I generally recommend against it for tech-savvy users, but Outlook is Pure Concentrated Evil that must be cleansed from the face of the earth with atomic fire...
There are two types of fool. One who says, "this is old and therefore good", and one who says "this is new and therefore better".
Change for its own sake is great when you're dealing with your air or water supplies, but is a lousy problem-solving strategy. These "slacker DBs" don
t seem to introduce anything new. They're keyed value storage, dbm with glitter and racing stripes glued on.
What are you yammering on about? Everything is deterministic, even so-called "randomness".
What are you yammering on about? Hidden variable formulations of quantum theory went out the window decades ago. The universe does indeed behave randomly; there's no determination of when, say, a single free neutron will decay.
They just have decided "IMAP sucks" and they all just POP.
Well, IMAP does suck. Silly idea. Why do I want my old mail hanging around on the server, where I can't grep it, and a bored admin can poke around in it? POP your mail off the server and store it locally.
But what it shared with daytime soaps, as far as I could see, was the constant, relentless, inescapable sense of tragedy and depression, with scene after scene of people emoting at each other, invariably choosing to misunderstand what was right under their noses if it would carry the conflict on a little further.
Consider: "What Shakespeare and Sophocles and their ilk shared with daytime soaps, as far as I could see, was the constant, relentless, inescapable sense of tragedy and depression, with scene after scene of people emoting at each other, invariably choosing to misunderstand what was right under their noses if it would carry the conflict on a little further."
You -- and many others who prefer science fiction heavy on the technical and short on the human -- seem to have confused actual human drama with the shallow facsimile presented in soap operas, and therefore classify any attempt to portray and explore human behavior as "soap opera".
We can certainly argue about whether BSG, or Shakespeare, or Sophocles, did it well. But I'm saddened to see how many people want more space battles and less human moments. The greatness of science fiction is that it lets a competent author create any setting desirable to explore the deep issues; the weakness is that is lets a bad author create a setting so full of shiny distractions that you don't notice the shallowness.
More precisely, if the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle's response (to be pedantic--the universe's response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe.
If the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus, then their actions are not "determined" by the entire previous history of the universe. The experimenter is part of the universe near the particle, so universe near the particle is not determined. Congratulations, it's a tautology.
That's it's not immediately recognized is because the one of the confusions that results in the whole free will versus determinism brou-ha-ha: the mistaken belief that the observer is somehow separate from the observed.
The other confusion is the question of what "determined" means. We think of it was fated, pre-destined. We still carry around this notion of a Newtonian clockwork universe, that given the initial configuration of the universe you could apply a simple set of laws to figure out the state today. We worry that the universe is losslessly compressible to that set of laws plus initial conditions. Once the-powers-that-be flipped the switch it was all fated, so they really need not have bothered, so where's that leave us?
But the universe is not compressible, not without loss. There is no fully comprehensive model of the cosmos that is simpler than the cosmos itself, no way to tell what an individual particle is going to do at time T other than to run the entire universe up to and including time t. You can't even run it up to t minus epsilon and they say, oh, it'll definitely do X. The damn universe keeps producing new information, in the algorithmic sense of the word. And you're part of it! It's like that Kilgore Trout story, "Now It Can Be Told" -- not even the creator of the universe knew what the man was going to say next.
Now we know that if a human has free will, then particles must have free will. Since it's nonsensical to talk about a particle with will, it's also nonsensical to talk about a human with free will.
And now we know that if a human has a fated destiny, then particles must have a fated destiny. Since it's nonsensical to talk about a particle with a fated destiny, it's also nonsensical to talk about a human with a fated destiny.
The whole thing is based on several confusions. Let me recommend Raymond Smullyan's essay Is God a Taoist?:
Mortal:
Well, are my acts determined by the laws of nature or aren't they?
God:
The word determined here is subtly but powerfully misleading and has contributed so much to the confusions of the free will versus determinism controversies. Your acts are certainly in accordance with the laws of nature, but to say they are determined by the laws of nature creates a totally misleading psychological image which is that your will could somehow be in conflict with the laws of nature and that the latter is somehow more powerful than you, and could "determine" your acts whether you liked it or not. But it is simply impossible for your will to ever conflict with natural law. You and natural law are really one and the same.
Mortal:
What do you mean that I cannot conflict with nature? Suppose I were to become very stubborn, and I determined not to obey the laws of nature. What could stop me? If I became sufficiently stubborn even you could not stop me!
God:
You are absolutely right! I certainly could not stop you. Nothing could stop you. But there is no need to stop you, because you could not even start! As Goethe very beautifully expressed it, "In trying to oppose Nature, we are, in the very process of doing so, acting according to the laws of nature!" Don't you see that the so-called "laws of nature" are nothing more than a description of how in fact you and other beings do act? They are merely a description of how you act, not a prescription of of how you should act, not a power or force which compels or determines your acts. To be valid a law of nature must take into account how in fact you do act, or, if you like, how you choose to act.
Mortal:
So you really claim that I am incapable of determining to act against natural law?
God:
It is interesting that you have twice now used the phrase "determined to act" instead of "chosen to act." This identification is quite common. Often one uses the statement "I am determined to do this" synonymously with "I have chosen to do this." This very psychological identification should reveal that determinism and choice are much closer than they might appear. Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside you. But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the "you" and the "not you." Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin? Or where does the rest of the universe leave off and you begin? Once you can see the so-called "you" and the so-called "nature" as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you. Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism will vanish. If I may use a crude analogy, imagine two bodies moving toward each other by virtue of gravitational attraction. Each body, if sentient, might wonder whether it is he or the other fellow who is exerting the "force." In a way it is both, in a way it is neither. It is best to say that it is the configuration of the two which is crucial.
You make it sound like the first guy to develop an gasoline-powered automobile back in the turn of the 19th century actually knew all of those costs and externalizations and their cumulative effects.
Of course not. But many of the costs were clear decades ago. Certainly the political costs of keeping petroleum flowing were clear by WWII; the climate effects of burning fossil fuels were known by the 1960s. But it was inconvenient to deal with them, so we didn't.
Amazingly enough France doesn't have this problem because they recycle the waste.
Sorry, but reprocessing plants don't get rid of all waste. And they are plutonium factories. Prime terrorist targets. Do you think we'd let Iran have one?
And we haven't even touched on the reactor safety issues of having a bunch of nuclear plants built by developing nations.
I know that many technophiles have a romantic attachment to nuclear power, to the idea of Mighty Science Harnessing the Power of the Atom. But its time to get over it.
I have yet to see any proof that we are running out of fissionable material.
You're unaware that the planet's supply of uranium is limited? Odd gap in your education, that.
We really don't know how much oil there is down there, but it's not running out anytime soon.
We've already run out of how much oil we can use as fuel. Even if there were trillions of barrels in magic reserves under the crust somewhere and we invented a technology to tap them for cheap, the limiting factor is the CO2 emissions produced by burning fossil fuels.
You mean like all those entities currently running it that haven't had accidents?
And that still haven't figured out what to do with the waste?
Waste, safety, weapons proliferation, and fuel sarcity make uranium/plutonium fission a dead end. We should abandon them and put the resources for nuclear into developing fusion and accelerator-driven "energy amplifier" systems, as well as making better use of that large fusion reactor conveniently located 93 million miles away.
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No, in point of fact journalists and news orgainzations are to the right of the general public. They favor the interests of, and act as mouthpieces for, big business and the investing class.
The problem is that the the terms "left" and "right", which properly refer to labor and capital, have been misused to refer to social issues. Journalists (and other professionals) tend to be more socially liberal, because they tend to be more educated and live in urban areas, while on most issues the "socially conservative" position reflects either a rural viewpoint or a flat-out ignorant one.
The media is just as leftist as the major corporations that own it -- or, in the case of NPR, that sponsor it.
Business taxes are different, and are taken off of profit. (I'm sure some accountant will point out how that's not technically right, but it's the basic idea.)
And how, exactly, does one teach someone to THINK? You have to teach about language -- studying a foreign language is a great way to do that. You have to teach the skills of reasoning, such as formal logic -- and an excellent way to do this is through the study of geometric proofs.
You can't teach thinking in the abstract. You need things to think about, and examples of thinking in action.
There are indeed some sorts of facts which it is a waste to learn. I think of these as being "map of the cat" sorts of things, after a story about Richard Feynman:
But what facts these are depends in large part on what you're doing. I don't want my vet to need a map of my dog.
I'd say part of mastering a field is knowing what stuff you need to know, and what stuff you look up in a reference book (or, these days, on a computer).
I don't know every street in my neighborhood. That would be a waste of time. But I know where the major streets and big landmarks are -- I'd be lost all the time if I had to look them up. It's the same of any field of knowledge.
Unicomp also makes a "quiet touch" version, which is a heck of lot louder than any other "quiet" keyboard and which use a rubber dome. It's got a nice feel, not as hard as the buckling spring but still nicely firm.
Except that "mitochondrial Eve" lived more like 150,000 years ago than 10,000. So once you decide that Hera is her, the time is fixed.
Sometimes. And sometimes the world around us is as unsubtle as a lightning strike, a tsunami, or an asteroid impact.
The Discovery Channel's lawyers aren't so much worried that idiots will try it, as that idiots -- or those hurt by idiots -- will sue. "We didn't tell him how to make nitroglycerin" is a more effective legal defense than "Yes, we told him how to make nitroglycerin but told him it was a dangerous thing to do."
I think the names of companies are blotted out so as to not give free advertising. Like the "cola myths" bit -- if Pepsi's buying ad space, don't give Coke free exposure.
I was assuming that the rules of the court include the right to due process, the presumption of innocence, and the right to question witnesses against you.
Yes, in a typical criminal trial those exist more in theory then in fact.
I'm not arguing that the lab is at fault. I'm arguing that the whole notion of DNA evidence being used as the main evidence to link someone to a crime is faulty. Even if done right it's not as reliable as it is presented to be, and it's very easy to do wrong.
If due process and the presumption of innocence are in place, it's up to the prosecution to prove their evidence reliable. Prior instances of errors show that it is not.
As a practical matter, would I expect this tack to work? Probably not. Is that because DNA evidence is reliable? No, it's because due process is a joke and criminal defendants are, as a practical matter, guilty until proven innocent.
I don't have to explain my DNA being at the crime scene, I have to explain DNA that matched mine being at the lab.
You took a sample of my DNA. You took it to the lab. Please prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you didn't screw up and contaminate a sample somewhere with my DNA.
Furthermore, spurious DNA matches are not as improbable as cops and prosecutors like to suggest.
DNA is lousy forensic evidence, and should be used only for exoneration.
And the scary thing is that other forensic "science" is even worse.
Hmm. What country do you live in where this is the case?
That sort of symbol manipulation was the way AI was done for decades.
It turned out to be a dead end, which is why interest in things like neural networks, genetic algorithms, and subsumption architectures, has grown.
A "strip-search" performed by anyone other than a police officer acting with probable cause is a sexual assault.
People, including teens and children, have the right to defend themselves by any means necessary against such an attack, and should be trained to do so.
After some pervert principal gets his testicles crushed and his eyes gouged by a student he's trying to attack, perhaps we might see an end to this bullshit.
Sure. IMAP is mild suckage and I generally recommend against it for tech-savvy users, but Outlook is Pure Concentrated Evil that must be cleansed from the face of the earth with atomic fire...
There are two types of fool. One who says, "this is old and therefore good", and one who says "this is new and therefore better".
Change for its own sake is great when you're dealing with your air or water supplies, but is a lousy problem-solving strategy. These "slacker DBs" don t seem to introduce anything new. They're keyed value storage, dbm with glitter and racing stripes glued on.
What are you yammering on about? Hidden variable formulations of quantum theory went out the window decades ago. The universe does indeed behave randomly; there's no determination of when, say, a single free neutron will decay.
Well, IMAP does suck. Silly idea. Why do I want my old mail hanging around on the server, where I can't grep it, and a bored admin can poke around in it? POP your mail off the server and store it locally.
Not when you don't own the land free and clear, you can't.
Consider: "What Shakespeare and Sophocles and their ilk shared with daytime soaps, as far as I could see, was the constant, relentless, inescapable sense of tragedy and depression, with scene after scene of people emoting at each other, invariably choosing to misunderstand what was right under their noses if it would carry the conflict on a little further."
You -- and many others who prefer science fiction heavy on the technical and short on the human -- seem to have confused actual human drama with the shallow facsimile presented in soap operas, and therefore classify any attempt to portray and explore human behavior as "soap opera".
We can certainly argue about whether BSG, or Shakespeare, or Sophocles, did it well. But I'm saddened to see how many people want more space battles and less human moments. The greatness of science fiction is that it lets a competent author create any setting desirable to explore the deep issues; the weakness is that is lets a bad author create a setting so full of shiny distractions that you don't notice the shallowness.
If the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus, then their actions are not "determined" by the entire previous history of the universe. The experimenter is part of the universe near the particle, so universe near the particle is not determined. Congratulations, it's a tautology.
That's it's not immediately recognized is because the one of the confusions that results in the whole free will versus determinism brou-ha-ha: the mistaken belief that the observer is somehow separate from the observed.
The other confusion is the question of what "determined" means. We think of it was fated, pre-destined. We still carry around this notion of a Newtonian clockwork universe, that given the initial configuration of the universe you could apply a simple set of laws to figure out the state today. We worry that the universe is losslessly compressible to that set of laws plus initial conditions. Once the-powers-that-be flipped the switch it was all fated, so they really need not have bothered, so where's that leave us?
But the universe is not compressible, not without loss. There is no fully comprehensive model of the cosmos that is simpler than the cosmos itself, no way to tell what an individual particle is going to do at time T other than to run the entire universe up to and including time t. You can't even run it up to t minus epsilon and they say, oh, it'll definitely do X. The damn universe keeps producing new information, in the algorithmic sense of the word. And you're part of it! It's like that Kilgore Trout story, "Now It Can Be Told" -- not even the creator of the universe knew what the man was going to say next.
And now we know that if a human has a fated destiny, then particles must have a fated destiny. Since it's nonsensical to talk about a particle with a fated destiny, it's also nonsensical to talk about a human with a fated destiny.
The whole thing is based on several confusions. Let me recommend Raymond Smullyan's essay Is God a Taoist?:
Of course not. But many of the costs were clear decades ago. Certainly the political costs of keeping petroleum flowing were clear by WWII; the climate effects of burning fossil fuels were known by the 1960s. But it was inconvenient to deal with them, so we didn't.
Sorry, but reprocessing plants don't get rid of all waste. And they are plutonium factories. Prime terrorist targets. Do you think we'd let Iran have one?
Concerns have been raised about contamination both from processing, and from transporting waste to France's reprocessing center.
In point of fact, France has large problems with nuclear waste. The people in the region slated to be the waste dump are fighting it, oddly enough.
They have attempted to sweep the problem under the rug by shipping waste to Russia.
And we haven't even touched on the reactor safety issues of having a bunch of nuclear plants built by developing nations.
I know that many technophiles have a romantic attachment to nuclear power, to the idea of Mighty Science Harnessing the Power of the Atom. But its time to get over it.
You're unaware that the planet's supply of uranium is limited? Odd gap in your education, that.
We've already run out of how much oil we can use as fuel. Even if there were trillions of barrels in magic reserves under the crust somewhere and we invented a technology to tap them for cheap, the limiting factor is the CO2 emissions produced by burning fossil fuels.
And that still haven't figured out what to do with the waste?
Waste, safety, weapons proliferation, and fuel sarcity make uranium/plutonium fission a dead end. We should abandon them and put the resources for nuclear into developing fusion and accelerator-driven "energy amplifier" systems, as well as making better use of that large fusion reactor conveniently located 93 million miles away.