Are you talking about the 1982 Apple ][/C64 game "Aztec"? That was great -- and certainly Indy did inspire it, seeing how the movie just came out a year before.
If you want a movie with more betrayals of science per frame than any other, watch "The Core". The concept is utterly shameful.
Perhaps betrayals of scientific *fact*, but I thought it was actually fairly accurate in how it portrayed scientific *culture* -- in particular the uneasy relationship between "media-scientists", who spend their time talking to the press, hosting TV shows, etc. and the scientists that actually do research.
In statistics this selection works well because the selection of the Null hypothesis is non-arbitrary -- it's usually the given data you're trying to disprove/verify (like if a manufacturer claims that a certain part can withstand 8mA of current before breaking).
I don't see how this style of hypothesis verification can work in discussions where two parties hold completely different assumptions.
But the choice of a null model isn't at all arbitrary in this case either. Early man had no gods, as far as anyone can tell. Idols, temples, etc, are all rather recent in the archeological record. And even existing primitive tribes today are overwhelmingly animistic rather than theistic. So, it really appears that religion is an *introduced hypothesis*, and therefore in need of verification.
I rather think that this observation also explains the popularity of Creationism -- the only way the theists can get out of this hole is if they deny the archeological record and assume that theism started with "Adam and Eve".
Same with your invisable rabbit - if I can not prove it isn't there how does it become scientific fact?
It sounds like you are arguing from a Popperian perspective. But practicing scientists know that falsification (proving a theory false) is only one part of science, and in fact is something that is rarely possible in practice.
More typically in practice one needs to reject a null hypothesis with some level of confidence. For example, if I have invented a new drug, the reasonable null hypothesis is that it doesn't work, and it is up to *me* to show the world that it works through clinical trials.
Now, I may just be really unlucky and all the test patients die for reasons unrelated to my drug, and maybe my drug really does work. But, that would not be a logical conclusion for anyone to make, even if theoretically possible. And nobody needs to prove that my drug doesn't work -- my failure to demonstrate that it works would be good enough to reject the drug.
Similarly, it's up to the theists to cause the rest of us to reject the null hypothesis that there are no gods.
I'd be curious to know about these "logically broken proofs" that you speak of, especially in regards to Descartes
The classic Cartesian "proof" of god goes something like: 1. Everything has a cause 2. That cause must be as real (or more) than the effect 3. I (Descartes) have an idea of god as a perfect and infinite being 4. The cause of this idea of must exist. [by (1)] 5. The cause of this idea of god must have as much reality as the idea of god 6. Therefore, god has infinite reality.
Descartes would fail Logic 101 if he were a student today.
Atheists can no more disprove God's existence than believers can prove it. While I have a certain admiration of those with strong convictions, the righteousness of BOTH sides annoys me.
That's sophistry. The burden of proof clearly lies with the theists to prove the existence of god or gods, just as it does for me to prove the existence of my invisible rabbit. And despite thousands of years of trying, the best the theists have managed is logically broken proofs similar to Descartes'. Meanwhile, I'm still working on proving my bunny...
I'm not so sure. I've never owned a car in my life (and I'm 33 year old research scientist) and I'm always having conversations that go "What? You don't have a car? It must take you forever to get here by subway" and then finding out that it takes *longer* for them to drive, time which presumably is lost to them, because at least I can read on the subway. Yes, there are cities that don't have subways and places in those cities that aren't near a subway stop, but nobody's forcing me to live there.
Yeah, and nobody wants to buy poems either these days. That's why both poetry and IF are largely done by amateur enthusiasts these days. as Montfort pointed out in _Twisty Little Passages_ But there are exceptions -- 1893 is a commercial text adventure (okay, it does have a few B&W pictures from the fair, but it is more or less a text adventure)
What's the joke? English Lit. majors can't get a job? Gee. That's really interesting, because every company depends on the spoken and written word for every last FUCKING dime they make or spend, no matter how smart management thinks they are.
Yes, language is important. However whether English Lit. as a field of study is important is a different issue entirely, as language and literature exist independently of critical analysis. The same can't be said of science, which is a product of scientists, or art, which is a product of artists.
Gosling really has his head in the sand in regard to the future of Sun by claiming that Sun is platform neutral and has nothing to fear from x86. Sun makes its money by selling Sparc workstations. Simply claiming that Sun isn't tied to a hardware architecture is just silly. Yes, it has made software for the x86, but like Apple, Sun is a hardware company -- all the software (including Java) exists simply to sell hardware. What happens when people realize that Sparcs no longer have the price/performance ratio?
. Quicksilver is a 300 or 400 page story told in 900 pages
Well, to each their own, but really, all this "too many diversions from the plot/ too long" stuff really misses the point. Literature isn't *about* plot, any more than painting is about reproducing a scene with photographic realism. Sure pulp genre fiction often is little more than a plot (just as cheesy amateur paintings often just try to represent a house by a stream), but literature and art are capable of much more than that. Unfortunately, writers like Stephenson and Vonnegut often alienate both genre and literary readers because they use the tools of genre SF to make more serious works.
Really, until Google's G-mail becomes a reality, Yahoo is more or less necessary for e-mail -- what's the alternative, Snotmail? Of course everyone has e-mail at work, but who's foolish enough to give *that* address to e-retailiers and risk missing something important at work in the deluge of spam...
What is is just so silly about technophobes is that they never win. The original saboteurs tried to halt technology by throwing their shoes at their feared machines. Did they win? The simple fact is that if something is possible to do, it *will* be done. What's more, within a generation, nobody understands what the big deal was. Nobody complains that flying is "unnatural" anymore.
I've got a simple solution -- the technophobes can go start reactionary communities similar in spirit to the Amish, and the rest of us can enjoy the fruits of technology, plus the added fun of having the technophobe communities as tourist attractions.
No, it can still be boring even if you do know how to play it, just like the Xanth novels can be unfunny even if you get all the puns. I'm not arguing that you are wrong to like Go (or even, God forbid, Xanth novels), just that your argument claiming that people who find Go boring must not "get it" is flawed.
It's even said that no two Go games have ever been the same - which is saying alot since the game is 3000 years old. How could it be boring?
Because it doesn't simulate anything? I mean I'm not a huge chess fan myself, but at least I can see how that lead to the development of miniature warfare gaming, which in turn influenced many computer strategy games. With the exception of Othello, Go didn't really "go" anywhere.
And yet, over the last 100 years, America has come to the defense of several countries, such as France, England...
Canada came to the defense of England and France in both world wars before the US did... and without having to be attacked. The US only entered WWI after its ships were attacked by Germans, and WWII after being attacked by the Japanese
failed attempts in Vietnam.
How was interfering in someone else's civil war coming to the defense of a country? If England had decided to enter the US civil war on the side of the South (as it almost did) would that "been coming to the defense of the country"?
Are they really paid to sing all the day : "Microsoft is good and they are friendly" ?
Yes, that's basically what they do. Plus they try to convince people that their platform is cool and cutting-edge. Basically what every Linux user does for free (although often not very well). But to be fair, Apple's the one that started it as a paid position, and others besides (such as Be) did the same thing, so it isn't like Microsoft is doing something singularly evil in this regard.
I'm sort of in the same situation in that I once worked for a biotech firm and am now at a non-profit research institution,
However, I disagree that industry wouldn't go for author-pay -- my firm would pay lots of money to ship me around the world to talk about our research at research conferences, so I don't see what would be any different about paying fees for publication -- when a company sends someone to a conference or publishes a paper, its all about exposure.
The frightening thing is that I've seen people use camcorders like this -- in a museum, of all places! Rather than look at the exhibits directly, they were looking at them through their camcorder while filming. I can understand wanting to preserve one's daughter's first piano recital or something, but watching a museum visit over and over?
No journal would publish something *just because* someone paid page charges -- it still has to be accepted by peer review -- page charges are just a way that some journals use to defray subscription cost (theoretically). For instance, I've had to pay page charges for my paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
I really, really don't understand the objection to author-pay at all. $1500 sounds like a lot, but it is really trivial compared to the cost of the research. I can't see anyone saying -- "Well, we just spent $300,000 doing this study, I guess we aren't going to spend the $1500 to publish it:".
What isn't trivial, as you bring up, is the cost of journals -- a decent university library will literally spend a million dollars or more a year to subscribe to all the journals they need. The simple fact is author-paying would save universities lots of money even if the libraries paid the fees for the authors if it meant they wouldn't have to subscribe to closed-journals
Why do journals cost so much? Because they can. For profit publishers want to maximize their profits, and even theoretically non-profit professional societies charge way more than cost for their journals -- there's a bloated bureaucracy assorted with every professional society, and they naturally want to maximize their salaries.
Dogs, coyotes, and wolves can interbreed and make perfectly fertile offspring -- that's a real problem for the preservation of wolves and coyotes. There's a quite a bit of tradition involved in deciding what is a species and what isn't. Greeks and Romans saw wolves as something other than wild dogs, and thus we do too. And of course, the vast majority of organisms on Earth are asexual, making the whole issue of "fertile offspring" moot. Logically, all decisions should simply be based on percent identity of DNA, but then the question becomes what percent should be the cutoff.
Slashdot Mirror
Drug use in America's high schools is at an all-time low.
Um, since when? Does it include the 19th century? Somehow I doubt that opium (the only narcotic available) was a big problem in US schools back then.
Are you talking about the 1982 Apple ][/C64 game "Aztec"? That was great -- and certainly Indy did inspire it, seeing how the movie just came out a year before.
If you want a movie with more betrayals of science per frame than any other, watch "The Core". The concept is utterly shameful.
Perhaps betrayals of scientific *fact*, but I thought it was actually fairly accurate in how it portrayed scientific *culture* -- in particular the uneasy relationship between "media-scientists", who spend their time talking to the press, hosting TV shows, etc. and the scientists that actually do research.
In statistics this selection works well because the selection of the Null hypothesis is non-arbitrary -- it's usually the given data you're trying to disprove/verify (like if a manufacturer claims that a certain part can withstand 8mA of current before breaking).
I don't see how this style of hypothesis verification can work in discussions where two parties hold completely different assumptions.
But the choice of a null model isn't at all arbitrary in this case either. Early man had no gods, as far as anyone can tell. Idols, temples, etc, are all rather recent in the archeological record. And even existing primitive tribes today are overwhelmingly animistic rather than theistic. So, it really appears that religion is an *introduced hypothesis*, and therefore in need of verification.
I rather think that this observation also explains the popularity of Creationism -- the only way the theists can get out of this hole is if they deny the archeological record and assume that theism started with "Adam and Eve".
Same with your invisable rabbit - if I can not prove it isn't there how does it become scientific fact?
It sounds like you are arguing from a Popperian perspective. But practicing scientists know that falsification (proving a theory false) is only one part of science, and in fact is something that is rarely possible in practice.
More typically in practice one needs to reject a null hypothesis with some level of confidence. For example, if I have invented a new drug, the reasonable null hypothesis is that it doesn't work, and it is up to *me* to show the world that it works through clinical trials.
Now, I may just be really unlucky and all the test patients die for reasons unrelated to my drug, and maybe my drug really does work. But, that would not be a logical conclusion for anyone to make, even if theoretically possible. And nobody needs to prove that my drug doesn't work -- my failure to demonstrate that it works would be good enough to reject the drug.
Similarly, it's up to the theists to cause the rest of us to reject the null hypothesis that there are no gods.
I'd be curious to know about these "logically broken proofs" that you speak of, especially in regards to Descartes
The classic Cartesian "proof" of god goes something like:
1. Everything has a cause
2. That cause must be as real (or more) than the effect
3. I (Descartes) have an idea of god as a perfect and infinite being
4. The cause of this idea of must exist. [by (1)]
5. The cause of this idea of god must have as much reality as the idea of god
6. Therefore, god has infinite reality.
Descartes would fail Logic 101 if he were a student today.
Atheists can no more disprove God's existence than believers can prove it. While I have a certain admiration of those with strong convictions, the righteousness of BOTH sides annoys me.
That's sophistry. The burden of proof clearly lies with the theists to prove the existence of god or gods, just as it does for me to prove the existence of my invisible rabbit. And despite thousands of years of trying, the best the theists have managed is logically broken proofs similar to Descartes'. Meanwhile, I'm still working on proving my bunny...
I'm not so sure. I've never owned a car in my life (and I'm 33 year old research scientist) and I'm always having conversations that go "What? You don't have a car? It must take you forever to get here by subway" and then finding out that it takes *longer* for them to drive, time which presumably is lost to them, because at least I can read on the subway. Yes, there are cities that don't have subways and places in those cities that aren't near a subway stop, but nobody's forcing me to live there.
Yeah, and nobody wants to buy poems either these days. That's why both poetry and IF are largely done by amateur enthusiasts these days. as Montfort pointed out in _Twisty Little Passages_ But there are exceptions -- 1893 is a commercial text adventure (okay, it does have a few B&W pictures from the fair, but it is more or less a text adventure)
What's the joke? English Lit. majors can't get a job? Gee. That's really interesting, because every company depends on the spoken and written word for every last FUCKING dime they make or spend, no matter how smart management thinks they are.
Yes, language is important. However whether English Lit. as a field of study is important is a different issue entirely, as language and literature exist independently of critical analysis. The same can't be said of science, which is a product of scientists, or art, which is a product of artists.
Gosling really has his head in the sand in regard to the future of Sun by claiming that Sun is platform neutral and has nothing to fear from x86. Sun makes its money by selling Sparc workstations. Simply claiming that Sun isn't tied to a hardware architecture is just silly. Yes, it has made software for the x86, but like Apple, Sun is a hardware company -- all the software (including Java) exists simply to sell hardware. What happens when people realize that Sparcs no longer have the price/performance ratio?
. Quicksilver is a 300 or 400 page story told in 900 pages
Well, to each their own, but really, all this "too many diversions from the plot/ too long" stuff really misses the point. Literature isn't *about* plot, any more than painting is about reproducing a scene with photographic realism. Sure pulp genre fiction often is little more than a plot (just as cheesy amateur paintings often just try to represent a house by a stream), but literature and art are capable of much more than that. Unfortunately, writers like Stephenson and Vonnegut often alienate both genre and literary readers because they use the tools of genre SF to make more serious works.
Really, until Google's G-mail becomes a reality, Yahoo is more or less necessary for e-mail -- what's the alternative, Snotmail?
Of course everyone has e-mail at work, but who's foolish enough to give *that* address to e-retailiers and risk missing something important at work in the deluge of spam...
What is is just so silly about technophobes is that they never win. The original saboteurs tried to halt technology by throwing their shoes at their feared machines. Did they win? The simple fact is that if something is possible to do, it *will* be done. What's more, within a generation, nobody understands what the big deal was. Nobody complains that flying is "unnatural" anymore.
I've got a simple solution -- the technophobes can go start reactionary communities similar in spirit to the Amish, and the rest of us can enjoy the fruits of technology, plus the added fun of having the technophobe communities as tourist attractions.
It's only boring if don't know how to play it!
No, it can still be boring even if you do know how to play it, just like the Xanth novels can be unfunny even if you get all the puns. I'm not arguing that you are wrong to like Go (or even, God forbid, Xanth novels), just that your argument claiming that people who find Go boring must not "get it" is flawed.
It's even said that no two Go games have ever been the same - which is saying alot since the game is 3000 years old.
How could it be boring?
Because it doesn't simulate anything? I mean I'm not a huge chess fan myself, but at least I can see how that lead to the development of miniature warfare gaming, which in turn influenced many computer strategy games. With the exception of Othello, Go didn't really "go" anywhere.
And yet, over the last 100 years, America has come to the defense of several countries, such as France, England...
Canada came to the defense of England and France in both world wars before the US did... and without having to be attacked. The US only entered WWI after its ships were attacked by Germans, and WWII after being attacked by the Japanese
failed attempts in Vietnam.
How was interfering in someone else's civil war coming to the defense of a country? If England had decided to enter the US civil war on the side of the South (as it almost did) would that "been coming to the defense of the country"?
Are they really paid to sing all the day : "Microsoft is good and they are friendly" ?
Yes, that's basically what they do. Plus they try to convince people that their platform is cool and cutting-edge. Basically what every Linux user does for free (although often not very well). But to be fair, Apple's the one that started it as a paid position, and others besides (such as Be) did the same thing, so it isn't like Microsoft is doing something singularly evil in this regard.
I'm sort of in the same situation in that I once worked for a biotech firm and am now at a non-profit research institution,
However, I disagree that industry wouldn't go for author-pay -- my firm would pay lots of money to ship me around the world to talk about our research at research conferences, so I don't see what would be any different about paying fees for publication -- when a company sends someone to a conference or publishes a paper, its all about exposure.
The frightening thing is that I've seen people use camcorders like this -- in a museum, of all places! Rather than look at the exhibits directly, they were looking at them through their camcorder while filming. I can understand wanting to preserve one's daughter's first piano recital or something, but watching a museum visit over and over?
No journal would publish something *just because* someone paid page charges -- it still has to be accepted by peer review -- page charges are just a way that some journals use to defray subscription cost (theoretically). For instance, I've had to pay page charges for my paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
I really, really don't understand the objection to author-pay at all. $1500 sounds like a lot, but it is really trivial compared to the cost of the research. I can't see anyone saying -- "Well, we just spent $300,000 doing this study, I guess we aren't going to spend the $1500 to publish it:".
What isn't trivial, as you bring up, is the cost of journals -- a decent university library will literally spend a million dollars or more a year to subscribe to all the journals they need. The simple fact is author-paying would save universities lots of money even if the libraries paid the fees for the authors if it meant they wouldn't have to subscribe to closed-journals
Why do journals cost so much? Because they can. For profit publishers want to maximize their profits, and even theoretically non-profit professional societies charge way more than cost for their journals -- there's a bloated bureaucracy assorted with every professional society, and they naturally want to maximize their salaries.
Liber is book in Latin -- "Libri" means either "books" or "of a/the book"
Dogs, coyotes, and wolves can interbreed and make perfectly fertile offspring -- that's a real problem for the preservation of wolves and coyotes. There's a quite a bit of tradition involved in deciding what is a species and what isn't. Greeks and Romans saw wolves as something other than wild dogs, and thus we do too. And of course, the vast majority of organisms on Earth are asexual, making the whole issue of "fertile offspring" moot. Logically, all decisions should simply be based on percent identity of DNA, but then the question becomes what percent should be the cutoff.
The part that went to Lucent is called Bell Labs -- the part that stayed is called AT&T Labs
I am sorry, after seeing the peso pictured I would have to say it has nothing to do with the $ symbol.
Despite having both a forwards and reverse $ symbol on it?