Speciation is the genetic degeneration of a species to a point where certain members of the species are no longer able to reproduce with certain other members of the species.
There's nothing at all to imply that this sort of microevolution would eventually accumulate to create a different kind of animal, which was my original point in the comment you quoted.
A new species is most definitely a "different kind of animal". And beyond that, if you'll read the link I gave you (Here's Google's cached version as it seems to be unreachable at the moment) you'll notice observed instances of very large changes: unicellular algae becoming colonial, bacteria undergoing large changes in morphology.
For instance, if poodles became so inbred that they were no longer able to successfully reproduce with other breeds, would you say they had become a different species?
Yes. That is exactly the usual biological definition of a species.
Now, if they also somehow developed opposable thumbs, I'd say they were a different species
No, that wouldn't necessarily tell whether they were a different species. Some dogs have dewclaws, some don't, they're still the same species.
That's the nature of an unobservable object. All you can do is infer its existence through its effects on other objects, in this case through the gravitational effects on stars.
But on a deep level, that true of every object. I can only infer the existence of this pen through the effects of light that is (theoretically) reflected off it and absorbed by my retinas, and through the effects it has on the various nerve receptors in my skin. The simplest explanation is a pen, but it could be something else (impluses fed to a brain in a vat, the dream of a butterfly).
So at what point do we consider a thing no longer theoretical.
he had grown up with the solid idea that nothing worth having is ever free unless you're being scammed in some way.
Ask him if he pays for oxygen. Or sunlight. Or language or mathematics.
In its natural state, the world gives us a whole lot of stuff for free. Food actually literally grows on trees! So does fuel for heat and material for building shelter. And oxygen comes out of them. The idea that you have to pay for everything is of great benefit to those who want to amass wealth and power, but does not reflect the truth of the world.
I thought that was the point of civil disobedience, that you showed the world the injustice by suffering through the situation in a more public way.
The point of civil disobedience, as formulated by Thoreau, is that people ought not resign their consciences to the state, that "we should be men first, and subjects afterward," that "It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right."
The idea of suffering through the situation to get public sympathy seems to have been an addition by Gandhi and MLK.
The first documented use of the term "spam" that I've seen was in response to a USENET experiment called ARMM (Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation) that went into sorcerer's apprentice mode and posted and posted and posted...
Spam is UBE - unsolicited bulk e-mail (or other electronic communication). This was spam. Suspension may be too harsh, though: I'd just put her in the stocks for a few hours and hand every recipient a rotten tomato.
Technically your liberty went out the window the moment you had to get licensed to drive in the first place
Nonsense. Operating a dangerous machine on public roads is not a right. Driving is an action that inherently puts other people at significant risk of death or injury; requiring operators of motor vehicles to be licensed is no more an infringement of liberties than outlawing shooting your gun into the air on a crowded city street.
The point of my original post is that the nature of mathematical functions do not change depending on the nature of the physical container they're thought about in.
I don't know what you mean by "the physical container they're thought about in" - do you mean the physical engine of thought, the brain or computer or other processing system "thinking" about them? Mathematical functions are ideas, thoughts: I'm skeptical of any broad, sweeping generalization about then "nature" of thoughts and of the physical systems that can generate them.
Or do you mean the physical phenomena that we describe with mathematical language? If we describe two different phenomena with the same mathematical language, sure, the nature of the mathematical functions is the same. So what?
Either way, it is not the point made in your original post. Your original post made no mention of "the physical container they're thought about in", and claimed that mathematical statements were true "in any circumstances", that math was "universal truth." No. Universal truth is not based on axioms.
The real issue is that nurses are not nurses anymore. They are doctors.
Uh, no.
Doctors are less doctors and are more specialists.
It is true that more doctors are specializing rather than going into primary care. This has nothing to do with the roles of doctors and nurses.
When a person thinks "nurse", they think of a doctors assistant. Not someone that is directly responsible for giving medical care to a patient.
If a person thinks this, then that person has no idea what a nurse does. Nurses have been giving direct care to patients since the days of Florence Nightingale.
So, in a bizarre kind of way, we may be seeing a 1984ish situation where language is actually having a heavy influence on behavior.
No, we're seeing a situation in which massive ignorance of a vitally important medical profession leads to that profession being undervalued as mere doctor's assistants.
Forgive me if I am unsubtle here but my mother and both grandmothers were nurses - it hits home for me.
Somebody, has generally already done the research.
Quite possibly not - and even if some research on the condition in question has been done, it almost certainly wasn't done on this patient. Human beings have this annoying tendency to be quirky, to respond differently to the same treatment: one man's cure proves fatal to another.
Science only works with control groups.
Which, of course, you don't have in clinical practice. You've got one patient, you can't put him or her in the matter duplicator and use one of them as a control and one as a test case.
Nurses are responsible for infection control, for monitoring and record keeping of vital signs and other diagnostic data, and for administering medication. They are often the primary providers of patient education, and are often the ones who keep harried doctors from making stupid mistakes - in a "primary nursing" environment, nurses are the ones who are tracking and coordinating all the varied aspects of care, the ones who see the "big picture".
If you want to live, go to the hospital with the best nurses.
Just because the "modulo 2 arithmetic addition operator" happens to use the plus symbol doesn't mean it's equivalent to the addition operator on the set of real numbers, which is what is (by default) meant by the "+" function.
"By default", parallel lines remain at a constant distance. Doesn't make non-Euclidean geometry go away.
The point is that the axioms and definitions we make "by default" because of socialization are not the only ones.
We've been vaccinating people against disease for what? Forty years?
The Jenner smallpox vaccine was over 200 years ago. So we've been vaccinating people for a long time. The basic idea is a win. But...
I doubt vaccinations will be laughed at in a hundred years, because they have a proven track record.
Vaccination itself, no. But I hope that the idea of putting thimerisol (a mercury compound) into vaccines will be laughed out of practice, indeed I think this is already occurring.
We may - or may not - find that other additives currently used in vaccines ought to go.
We may - or may not - find that a different scheduling is easier on the immune system and causes fewer complications. (We usually don't catch three or four major diseases at once, after all.)
We may - or may not - find that some of the vaccines for minor diseases aren't worth the hassle. (For example, for a generally healthy person like me, without a lot of exposure and in a normal flu season, I don't think that the risk of complications from a flu shot is worth the benefit of being immunized against a strain that might not even be current. And it turns out it may not be useful in the elderly after all. Instead I'm watching my vitamin D.)
1 + 1 = 2 will be true in any universe, under any god(s), in any circumstances. And all of mathematics is built up from that.
1 + 1 = 0 under the circumstances of modulo 2 arithmetic.
Any mathematical statement rests upon a set of assumptions and definitions. If you want universal truths, math is a bad place to look.
Physics is the model of the universe that we build out of mathematics. It's no more surprising that the more we look the more we see a deep connection between physics and math, than that when we look at a digital photo we see a bunch of pixels. Or that we see the connection between anything and the number 5 to be more and more manifest the harder we look.
Or why not ask your physician who, I would think, knows a bit more than a writer who does the bare minimum of research, if any, to meet his deadline.
It was only a few decades ago that physicians were endorsing cigarettes, and sticking radium rods up kids noses as a treatment for enlarged adenoids. Not to mention fun treatments like frontal lobotomies.
Certainly some contemporary common practices among physicians will be looked back with as much amazement. Not to say that current vaccination methods are or are not in that set, only that physicians can be very very wrong and you ought not to blindly trust them.
If I produce high quality apples that you want to resell, why shouldn't I be allowed to limit the minimum price you can sell them at?
Why should you? Using government force to get me to do something should be the exception, not the rule. You say "it is used by manufacturers to artificially keep the value of the products up" - why should the government help you keep prices artificially high? There might be justification for that in some special cases (for example, agricultural price supports keep farmers in the black during times of glut so they'll still be there in times of drought or famine), but I don't see one for ordinary consumer goods.
I bought your widget - or more precisely, the widget that used to be yours. You got paid. It's mine. You're finished, over, out of the picture, take the money that used to be mine and go home. That's what "bought and sold" means. If you want to dictate my actions after that, then you haven't really sold it and I haven't really bought it. If you want to dictate my actions, we have another sort of transaction called "hiring", where for an exorbitant fee I can be persuaded to perform various actions from my extensive skill set for your benefit.
In a sane world, after I've bought it I can give that widget away, sell it for twice what I paid for it, paint it red and glue bits of garbage to it to make a sculpture out of it, take it apart to see what makes it tick, or take it out in a field and smash it with a sledgehammer. If any of these things make it harder for you to sell widgets in the future, well, tough tittie.
so i write a comment board. someone wants to put < >...in their comments. rather than just disable-output-escaping, now i have to (new XMLSerializer()).serializeToString the content, and then tediously work through all of the markup, then turn it back into a node tree in javascript. or on the server.
And why, in the name of all that's holy, would you even think of trying to do this in Javascript in the browser? Filter special characters on the server side.
I spent 6 years in medicine, and two years in law enforcement. You truly get to meet the scrapings of the gene pool that way.
Hmmm. Judging by what I've been seeing lately, I'm not sure if you're referring to suspects or to your law enforcement co-workers...
Perhaps I'm unfairly projecting the situation in Baltimore. A friend of mine was recently beaten and arrested by Baltimore cops for participating in a nonviolent animal rights demonstration, and a few weeks later a friend of hers, an acquaintance of mine, was arrested for trying to film Baltimore cops threatening and harassing her boyfriend. I've seen Baltimore cops arrive on the scene of a disturbance, grab a guy who wasn't involved and slam him against the wall, assault another guy who was only involved peripherally, let the instigators go, and completely ignore a witness who attempted to tell them what was going on.
No wonder that Baltimore citizens have no trust in their police force.
I know there's at least one intelligent and decent human being serving on the BCPD, but the environment seems to be corroding his soul.
I hope higher standards were in place where you served.
Unemployment was extremely high from the start of the New Deal until WWII.
Employment began to recover in FDR's first term, reaching just short of the boom's 1929 peak by 1937. In 1937, conservative opposition slowed New Deal projects - and employment fell again, though not as steeply. Opposition ebbed a bit, the New Deal was strengthened, and employment recovered to higher than 1929 levels - and was trending still higher - by 1940, before the U.S. entry into WWII. (Note that that chart shows non-farm, non-WPA employment.)
The same pattern can be seen in GDP and in industrial production - a turn-around from sharp decline to sharp rise when the New Deal was implemented, a fall-off at the start of FDR's second term when opposition slowed it, but a still a full recovery before WWII.
GDP (constant dollars) was higher in 1937, and in every subsequent year, that it was in 1929 - an argument can be made that the Depression ended in 1937, and was followed by a milder recession brought on by the slowing of New Deal projects.
If the leader of a nation that's suffering a famine ordered the destruction of a great deal of that nation's remaining food, wouldn't you say that's a misguided, even evil act? Then shouldn't you decry at least the part of the New Deal that led to crops being burned and livestock being left to rot in the fields?
The crop destruction was indeed tragic. But, had agricultural prices stayed so low, farms would have folded and there would have been even less food. Farms were dealing not just with the Depression, but with the Dust Bowl and with the mechanization of agricultural that was destroying the tenant system. (Raw speculation - displaced farmers moving into the workforce may well have had an impact on unemployment numbers.)
I'm not sure what else could have been done. It did raise farm income, keeping farmers growing, and food prices didn't go up much. But my final answer on that one is: I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
No. It's not a "degeneration", and it's not about individual "certain members". It's about populations. If two groups can't interbreed, they're not the same species.
A new species is most definitely a "different kind of animal". And beyond that, if you'll read the link I gave you (Here's Google's cached version as it seems to be unreachable at the moment) you'll notice observed instances of very large changes: unicellular algae becoming colonial, bacteria undergoing large changes in morphology.
And earlier this year, a remarkable mutation was observed in E. Coli bacteria that left them able to metabolize citrate. Certainly that a "different kind" of bacteria.
Yes. That is exactly the usual biological definition of a species.
No, that wouldn't necessarily tell whether they were a different species. Some dogs have dewclaws, some don't, they're still the same species.
Incorrect. Speciation - the development of new organisms - has indeed been observed in plants, insects, bacteria, and algae.
Top brass also wants a date with Scarlett Johansson. And a pony for each officer on the force.
I figure the odds are about the same for each.
But on a deep level, that true of every object. I can only infer the existence of this pen through the effects of light that is (theoretically) reflected off it and absorbed by my retinas, and through the effects it has on the various nerve receptors in my skin. The simplest explanation is a pen, but it could be something else (impluses fed to a brain in a vat, the dream of a butterfly).
So at what point do we consider a thing no longer theoretical.
Ask him if he pays for oxygen. Or sunlight. Or language or mathematics.
In its natural state, the world gives us a whole lot of stuff for free. Food actually literally grows on trees! So does fuel for heat and material for building shelter. And oxygen comes out of them. The idea that you have to pay for everything is of great benefit to those who want to amass wealth and power, but does not reflect the truth of the world.
Nah, it's not E=mc^2 that should have been outlawed. What should have been outlawed was the racism that led the U.S. to decide in 1943 that the bombs whose whole raison d'etre was to defeat the Nazis, ought to be used first to blow up Japanese people. What should have been outlawed was the grasping for geopolitical power that prompted the use of the bomb as a demonstration to the world (especially to the USSR) of American might, even Japan was trying to negotiate an end to the war.
The point of civil disobedience, as formulated by Thoreau, is that people ought not resign their consciences to the state, that "we should be men first, and subjects afterward," that "It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right."
The idea of suffering through the situation to get public sympathy seems to have been an addition by Gandhi and MLK.
No, there is no need for something to be commercial to be spam. One of the first recorded spams was an anti-war message sent to all CTSS MAIL users about 1971. The first major USENET spam was in January 1994, telling us "Jesus is Coming Soon". (Well, apparently he wasn't. Whoops!)
The first documented use of the term "spam" that I've seen was in response to a USENET experiment called ARMM (Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation) that went into sorcerer's apprentice mode and posted and posted and posted...
Spam is UBE - unsolicited bulk e-mail (or other electronic communication). This was spam. Suspension may be too harsh, though: I'd just put her in the stocks for a few hours and hand every recipient a rotten tomato.
Would that it were so.
Nonsense. Operating a dangerous machine on public roads is not a right. Driving is an action that inherently puts other people at significant risk of death or injury; requiring operators of motor vehicles to be licensed is no more an infringement of liberties than outlawing shooting your gun into the air on a crowded city street.
Not quite. I don't leave my face behind everywhere I go.
These days, if someone cards me at the liquor store I am delighted! Wow, you really thought I was that young?
I don't know what you mean by "the physical container they're thought about in" - do you mean the physical engine of thought, the brain or computer or other processing system "thinking" about them? Mathematical functions are ideas, thoughts: I'm skeptical of any broad, sweeping generalization about then "nature" of thoughts and of the physical systems that can generate them.
Or do you mean the physical phenomena that we describe with mathematical language? If we describe two different phenomena with the same mathematical language, sure, the nature of the mathematical functions is the same. So what?
Either way, it is not the point made in your original post. Your original post made no mention of "the physical container they're thought about in", and claimed that mathematical statements were true "in any circumstances", that math was "universal truth." No. Universal truth is not based on axioms.
Uh, no.
It is true that more doctors are specializing rather than going into primary care. This has nothing to do with the roles of doctors and nurses.
If a person thinks this, then that person has no idea what a nurse does. Nurses have been giving direct care to patients since the days of Florence Nightingale.
No, we're seeing a situation in which massive ignorance of a vitally important medical profession leads to that profession being undervalued as mere doctor's assistants.
Forgive me if I am unsubtle here but my mother and both grandmothers were nurses - it hits home for me.
Acutally, little of medical practice is "evidence-based".
Quite possibly not - and even if some research on the condition in question has been done, it almost certainly wasn't done on this patient. Human beings have this annoying tendency to be quirky, to respond differently to the same treatment: one man's cure proves fatal to another.
Which, of course, you don't have in clinical practice. You've got one patient, you can't put him or her in the matter duplicator and use one of them as a control and one as a test case.
You apparently have no fscking idea what a nurse does.
One of best predictors of whether or not you survive your hospital stay is the quality of nursing care.
Nurses are responsible for infection control, for monitoring and record keeping of vital signs and other diagnostic data, and for administering medication. They are often the primary providers of patient education, and are often the ones who keep harried doctors from making stupid mistakes - in a "primary nursing" environment, nurses are the ones who are tracking and coordinating all the varied aspects of care, the ones who see the "big picture".
If you want to live, go to the hospital with the best nurses.
"By default", parallel lines remain at a constant distance. Doesn't make non-Euclidean geometry go away.
The point is that the axioms and definitions we make "by default" because of socialization are not the only ones.
The Jenner smallpox vaccine was over 200 years ago. So we've been vaccinating people for a long time. The basic idea is a win. But...
Vaccination itself, no. But I hope that the idea of putting thimerisol (a mercury compound) into vaccines will be laughed out of practice, indeed I think this is already occurring.
We may - or may not - find that other additives currently used in vaccines ought to go.
We may - or may not - find that a different scheduling is easier on the immune system and causes fewer complications. (We usually don't catch three or four major diseases at once, after all.)
We may - or may not - find that some of the vaccines for minor diseases aren't worth the hassle. (For example, for a generally healthy person like me, without a lot of exposure and in a normal flu season, I don't think that the risk of complications from a flu shot is worth the benefit of being immunized against a strain that might not even be current. And it turns out it may not be useful in the elderly after all. Instead I'm watching my vitamin D.)
1 + 1 = 0 under the circumstances of modulo 2 arithmetic.
Any mathematical statement rests upon a set of assumptions and definitions. If you want universal truths, math is a bad place to look.
Physics is the model of the universe that we build out of mathematics. It's no more surprising that the more we look the more we see a deep connection between physics and math, than that when we look at a digital photo we see a bunch of pixels. Or that we see the connection between anything and the number 5 to be more and more manifest the harder we look.
It was only a few decades ago that physicians were endorsing cigarettes, and sticking radium rods up kids noses as a treatment for enlarged adenoids. Not to mention fun treatments like frontal lobotomies.
Certainly some contemporary common practices among physicians will be looked back with as much amazement. Not to say that current vaccination methods are or are not in that set, only that physicians can be very very wrong and you ought not to blindly trust them.
Why should you? Using government force to get me to do something should be the exception, not the rule. You say "it is used by manufacturers to artificially keep the value of the products up" - why should the government help you keep prices artificially high? There might be justification for that in some special cases (for example, agricultural price supports keep farmers in the black during times of glut so they'll still be there in times of drought or famine), but I don't see one for ordinary consumer goods.
I bought your widget - or more precisely, the widget that used to be yours. You got paid. It's mine. You're finished, over, out of the picture, take the money that used to be mine and go home. That's what "bought and sold" means. If you want to dictate my actions after that, then you haven't really sold it and I haven't really bought it. If you want to dictate my actions, we have another sort of transaction called "hiring", where for an exorbitant fee I can be persuaded to perform various actions from my extensive skill set for your benefit.
In a sane world, after I've bought it I can give that widget away, sell it for twice what I paid for it, paint it red and glue bits of garbage to it to make a sculpture out of it, take it apart to see what makes it tick, or take it out in a field and smash it with a sledgehammer. If any of these things make it harder for you to sell widgets in the future, well, tough tittie.
And why, in the name of all that's holy, would you even think of trying to do this in Javascript in the browser? Filter special characters on the server side.
And his dying words were, "Let me not seem to have lived in vain". I've always found that haunting. Aren't we all just full of Tycho trivia?
Hmmm. Judging by what I've been seeing lately, I'm not sure if you're referring to suspects or to your law enforcement co-workers...
Perhaps I'm unfairly projecting the situation in Baltimore. A friend of mine was recently beaten and arrested by Baltimore cops for participating in a nonviolent animal rights demonstration, and a few weeks later a friend of hers, an acquaintance of mine, was arrested for trying to film Baltimore cops threatening and harassing her boyfriend. I've seen Baltimore cops arrive on the scene of a disturbance, grab a guy who wasn't involved and slam him against the wall, assault another guy who was only involved peripherally, let the instigators go, and completely ignore a witness who attempted to tell them what was going on.
No wonder that Baltimore citizens have no trust in their police force.
I know there's at least one intelligent and decent human being serving on the BCPD, but the environment seems to be corroding his soul.
I hope higher standards were in place where you served.
Employment began to recover in FDR's first term, reaching just short of the boom's 1929 peak by 1937. In 1937, conservative opposition slowed New Deal projects - and employment fell again, though not as steeply. Opposition ebbed a bit, the New Deal was strengthened, and employment recovered to higher than 1929 levels - and was trending still higher - by 1940, before the U.S. entry into WWII. (Note that that chart shows non-farm, non-WPA employment.)
The same pattern can be seen in GDP and in industrial production - a turn-around from sharp decline to sharp rise when the New Deal was implemented, a fall-off at the start of FDR's second term when opposition slowed it, but a still a full recovery before WWII.
GDP (constant dollars) was higher in 1937, and in every subsequent year, that it was in 1929 - an argument can be made that the Depression ended in 1937, and was followed by a milder recession brought on by the slowing of New Deal projects.
The crop destruction was indeed tragic. But, had agricultural prices stayed so low, farms would have folded and there would have been even less food. Farms were dealing not just with the Depression, but with the Dust Bowl and with the mechanization of agricultural that was destroying the tenant system. (Raw speculation - displaced farmers moving into the workforce may well have had an impact on unemployment numbers.)
I'm not sure what else could have been done. It did raise farm income, keeping farmers growing, and food prices didn't go up much. But my final answer on that one is: I don't know.