For the record, I was not serious people. I facetiously adopted the scattered military brass mindset to support the point made in the post I was replying to.
I'm really hoping that someone's going to admonish me with a "woosh!" indicating that you were just being satiric or ironic or something and not serious, because if you really believe...
Let me get this straight. You read my post above and your thoughts went something like: "Is this guy serious? omg i think he's serious! wtfbbq!" -clicks reply, indignant-
Was it the fact that I liked a baby to the military-industrial complex that tipped you? Or the non-sequitur that I presented as a "scientific" experiment?
You're right, it doesn't matter. Put a driver-facing spike in the middle of the steering wheel and let's call it a day.
My snark-laden point is: striving for an unreachable goal is not without value. Having said that, did anyone actually read the article and take note of the number of "safety" features Volvo is planning that promise to unexpectedly lock up the brakes? Apparently we need only wait by the tracks until our enemies try to cross and then run around in front of the car until the next train comes...
Let's be honest. The reason the military doesn't want their own people to see the wikileaks documents is because it doesn't want them to realize what a complete farce this war (and by extension the war in Iraq) is.
Sorry, but this theory of yours is ridiculous.
If the military can achieve preventing anyone within its ranks from seeing the documents, then it will be just like they were never leaked in the first place. The scientific experiement is so simple to conduct you can even use a baby in place of the military industrial complex, as follows:
show toy to baby
note reaction (baby notices presence of toy, reaches for it, goes "goo" perhaps)
place toy behind cardboard (make sure the cardboard you use doesn't interest baby)
note reaction (baby ceases to recognize toy is still present)
For that baby, the wikileaks isn't just out of view, it ceases to exist! This has been proven over and over again. If you don't find this experiment convincing and you're willing to take the time and effort, redo it but this time make sure "Firewall" or something computery is written on the cardboard this time, you'll get the exact same result. (Don't use glitter as that will attract baby and it will be hard to "separate evidence" as science-like people term it.)
So we should make a law that puts the leaked information behind a piece of uninteresting cardboard, problem solved. I said, PROBLEM SOLVED. NEXT PROBLEM, PLEASE! as this one is solved
Smacking a properly-designed modern car into an immovable object at any legal roadway speed is generally not fatal.
Uh...relatively low speed impacts can be fatal. Especially when smacked into an "immovable" object. Remember, it's 1/2*m*v^2—small changes to v make big changes to your face.
Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ...
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
Were you using the latest Chrome? I've always been on the beta channel and it's been super stable, and super fast, even with Wave (well, by Oct or so last year, anyway). I'm so addicted to Chrome speed I can't load Gmail in FF anymore. More than a second or two and I'm like whaaaaat.
As a photographer, I'm not allowed to shoot over a person's fence if the area of their private property I'm photographing is not "normally viewable from a public area." Does the government have a right to do this kind of photography for anything other than surveying type activity in which they're not allowed to identify individuals?
Why is there such a thing as an "illegal pool"? If people want pools, shouldn't they tell their government that's what they want, and get the laws changed? (How did law get into place in the first place that makes parts of your home illegal?
Don't worry. It's a bad photo. Uninteresting sky. Boring scene.
Technology is great if it serves the art. This is just a demo of the tech, unfortunately. You'd think with all that time and effort it would have been worth paying a photographer to decide on the content. Oh well...
Actually, I'm just putting the finishing touches on a program that will do the conducting part, controlling tempo of the different synthesizers comprising the orchestra to maximize impact. Next up: perfect the program that replaces audience members and judges the performance. It will tell you whether you had a good time or not and let your social network know what you saw by proxy to increase your "urbane" cred. Comes with an OpenSocial plugin so if one of your friends is using this app, it automatically comments in real time on your friend's status update with something witty about the performance you "saw" in real time.
If WolframTones ever finishes development on their opera / broadway / symphony / concerto composition modules. We'll finally be able to close the loop on this whole culture thing and remove the last humans if Sony can get their robot humanoids to dance on pointe.
I believe this is a troll, but I am responding anyway because I think there are actually people out there that think this. So I prefer to think of this as a +0 Devil's Advocate post.
No one could have a functioning grasp of the fundamentals of science and agree with your statement. Science is about building predictive models about the world. The models do not, and scientists do not expect, that a scientific model's internals form a strict correspondence with reality, as long as it generates reliably testable predictions within a well-defined domain.
Religion is not science; evolution is. Religion doesn't belong in public school science classrooms, evolution does. I have heard dozens of arguments challenging this basic statement, but none I have not been able to take apart piece by piece.
Here is a quote from a part of the article that I just completely made up: Said a lead engineer on the project,
"The hard part was figuring out how to wirelessly transmit payment to the power provider for the stolen energy."
Owing to the rarity of these monsters, I think it is unlikely that this new record will be broken any time soon.
Yea, the only way we'd stand a good chance of finding a bigger star than this would be...well, let's just say there'd have to be thousands of stars for that to even be possible.
...related plants were cross bred and not fish genes inserted into tomatoes.
I'm sorry, but your point is lost. You yourself already acknowledged that horizontal gene transfer is a natural process in your previous comment. What ever does this statement you make here have to do with this discussion?
You seem to be attempting to make dire implications about our current practices, but have not yet drawn a clear dividing line between current practices, previous practices, and nature's own practices. So...that doesn't leave you with much of a statement of any kind.
To be clear, I'm for any genetic modification, whether it's crossing tomatoes and fish or whatever, that produces better quality, more nutritional, less expensive, and tastier food. I'm against even the most banal kind of cross—even those that might happen in nature were we not to prevent it—that results in less nutritional, lower quality, more expensive, and less tasty food (which is strongly and directly related to changes that allow foods to thrive in monocultures).
No, most people do not. Go to China and ask. Go to Africa and ask.
Well, I naturally assumed you meant people that ought to matter to the discussion. Most people in general don't know how medical treatment works either...are you against that too?
Ah, that's why they have to run experiments, because they know everything. If they do it all then why the experiments. Experiments are run because they do not know everything, not even a small fraction.
So, if I'm to understand your blockheaded statement here, you mean to say that you will only be happy with GM food if we cease to investigate it? You can't think of a single other thing of great utility to humans about which there is yet more to learn? What a fatuous statement...I cannot cast my gaze in any direction without settling on several such counterexamples.
When did I say anything about him? Or is this FUD and misdirection?
Let me get this straight...in this discussion where you are against GM food and I am not, you accuse me of spreading FUD? This is neither FUD nor misdirection, it is simply direction.
By introducing Mr. Borlaug into the discussion, I am asserting that you are one of the people that wikipedia article is describing "who consider genetic crossbreeding to be unnatural or to have negative effects." But a quick survey of the results of Mr. Borlaug's work ought to inform you about what you're saying we should give up without good reason.
Sociopaths lack the empathic response. People that respond negatively to disturbing videos are responding emotionally, though not necessarily empathically.
There is obviously overlap, but that overlap can be trained away in many people. It is quite common, for instance, for surgeons to initially respond to use of a cautery gun by getting ill or faint (mostly because of the normally out-of-context smell of cooked meat that one knows is produced from a live human...the association is unsettling). But talk to any surgeon that's been doing the job for a long time, and that smell simply makes them hungry.
Why shouldn't it make them hungry? Cooked meat, human or otherwise, is supposed to trigger that response. The hunger response is the mechanical reaction of a working human brain. Feelings of guilt at being hungry are, in the operating room, entirely misplaced; why should a surgeon feel guilty because of an automatic response when, in the offing, they are helping the patient? Much in the same way, these workers are ostensibly helping customers by protecting them from content they presumably don't want to see (though that is debatable).
I know a doctor that once told me she gets great satisfaction from draining cysts. Despite the absolutely foul smell and gross result, she said it is absolutely one of the most satisfying activities she does as a doctor because it is a nearly risk-free procedure to a patient and the payoff is profound in that the patient immediately feels better. In that scenario, where you might think she's sick because she enjoys dealing with gross stuff, she sees herself as someone willing to endure something gross in particular because it does have such a great and positive effect; emotionally speaking, when viewed in the proper context (and it is the indisputably correct view), it is perhaps one of the most emotionally satisfying demonstrations of empathy I can think of.
So it's mediation and mitigation of the guilt response that allows people like her to continue helping people, and if anything it makes them the opposite of a sociopath...likewise with any gruesome job—if one works in a slaughterhouse, a mortuary or morgue, crime scene cleanup, etc. So I tend to think that only people that are internally emotionally secure could do such a job. If your response is that it would take a sociopath, that is probably based primarily on fear about what you might discover about your own emotional stability in the same situation.
BTW, I just spent the last 5 minutes getting high off of the wikipedia article on binaural beats, which includes audio of two examples. I am naturally skeptical of anything that claims to alter human consciousness. While I did not experience an awakening to the presence of the spirit plane or anything like that, I admit that I feel a weird emptiness behind my eyeballs, and it feels like the bridge of my nose is stuffed with cotton.
Well, x doesn't stand for "pedophilia," it stands for "badness of teacher." Pedophilia is just one possibility for making the teacher worse...but you gotta start with bad and go worse from there, not a good teacher and add a dash of pedobear.
Often, I find that one can evaluate the sense of a statement by taking it to its natural limit. So, if the occasional bad teacher can be good for students, then the occasional worst possible teacher should be great for the students, like a pedophile.
Limit[thisStupidStatement[x], x -> Infinity] = CatholicSchool
Google is a horrible company! Remember the time they offered up $10M to improve the sad lot of humanity and it took them longer than expected to make sure the money was put to best use? They're just like Hitler!
No we haven't been doing this, inserting foreign genes into species that doesn't naturally carry it.
Please read at least the very basics about that which you speak before ye spake it. To wit: "Plant breeding is the art and science of changing the genetics of plants for the benefit of humankind... Plant breeding has been practiced for thousands of years, since near the beginning of human civilization.... Classical plant breeding uses deliberate interbreeding (crossing) of closely or distantly related individuals to produce new crop varieties or lines with desirable properties. Plants are crossbred to introduce traits/genes from one variety or line into a new genetic background." [source]
That took me just a few seconds to track down. For shame!
There's a big difference between FUD and running a world wide experiment most people know nothing about.
Most people do know something about it. The people doing the work know a lot about it...it seems to me that it is you who is ignorant. Fortunately, this is a correctable problem, and the correction I offer doesn't happen to require a large fraction of the world population to starve.
Educate thyself about Norman Borlaug: "Throughout his years of research, Borlaug's programs often faced opposition by people who consider genetic crossbreeding to be unnatural or to have negative effects. Borlaug's work has been criticized for bringing large-scale monoculture, input-intensive farming techniques to countries that had previously relied on subsistence farming. These farming techniques reap large profits for U.S. agribusiness and agrochemical corporations such as Monsanto Company and have been criticized for widening social inequality in the countries owing to uneven food distribution while forcing a capitalist agenda of U.S. corporations onto countries that had undergone land reform."
Borlaug's work has perhaps saved more lives and alleviated more human suffering than any single other person's in the history of humankind. And note that even in this strongest criticism I was able to find on his work from an unbiased source, the criticism is not actually aimed at his work so much as what everyone else did with it: large-scale monoculture. (It seems to me I heard someone else say that a little higher up this thread...hmm.) Let us also keep in mind that it's not fair to apply hindsight bias...at the time his work was done, monoculture seemed like a sensible thing to do. It's only since then that this idea has moved from good idea to bad idea to just plain unethical.
Not even the scientists in the field know everything.
No scientist in any field knows everything. Newton didn't understand general relativity, but that doesn't mean that the world wasn't able to do great things by his understanding of gravity.
Admit it: GM food is not a scientific issue for you; it's a political one. This means you don't care about facts, you only care about persuading people to your point of view, even in spite of the truth. Crafting a highly emotional argument without being shackled by reality ought to give you a big leg up in this debate, which is why I can't figure out one thing: how are you making such a hash of it here?
You don't like related UI elements visually grouped in an appropriate way that implies functionality? Would you prefer the "go back" button is in the upper left and the "go forward" button in the middle right of the browser UI?
The idea is interesting, but I don't think I could stomach hearing the media prattle on about how a country is turning into a "cybocracy" or an "informationsuperhighwocracy".
Slashdot Mirror
(To everyone that took my post above seriously: if you cannot understand the ironic mind, at least respond appropriately like this guy did.)
Oh jesus...now I see how trolling was discovered.
For the record, I was not serious people. I facetiously adopted the scattered military brass mindset to support the point made in the post I was replying to.
mg ppl.
Let me get this straight. You read my post above and your thoughts went something like: "Is this guy serious? omg i think he's serious! wtfbbq!" -clicks reply, indignant-
Was it the fact that I liked a baby to the military-industrial complex that tipped you? Or the non-sequitur that I presented as a "scientific" experiment?
Reading your post made me a little bit sad. :-/
You're right, it doesn't matter. Put a driver-facing spike in the middle of the steering wheel and let's call it a day.
My snark-laden point is: striving for an unreachable goal is not without value. Having said that, did anyone actually read the article and take note of the number of "safety" features Volvo is planning that promise to unexpectedly lock up the brakes? Apparently we need only wait by the tracks until our enemies try to cross and then run around in front of the car until the next train comes...
Sorry, but this theory of yours is ridiculous.
If the military can achieve preventing anyone within its ranks from seeing the documents, then it will be just like they were never leaked in the first place. The scientific experiement is so simple to conduct you can even use a baby in place of the military industrial complex, as follows:
For that baby, the wikileaks isn't just out of view, it ceases to exist! This has been proven over and over again. If you don't find this experiment convincing and you're willing to take the time and effort, redo it but this time make sure "Firewall" or something computery is written on the cardboard this time, you'll get the exact same result. (Don't use glitter as that will attract baby and it will be hard to "separate evidence" as science-like people term it.)
So we should make a law that puts the leaked information behind a piece of uninteresting cardboard, problem solved. I said, PROBLEM SOLVED. NEXT PROBLEM, PLEASE! as this one is solved
I don't get why people keep trying to calculate pi...it's irrational! -ba dump ching-
Uh...relatively low speed impacts can be fatal. Especially when smacked into an "immovable" object. Remember, it's 1/2*m*v^2 —small changes to v make big changes to your face.
Were you using the latest Chrome? I've always been on the beta channel and it's been super stable, and super fast, even with Wave (well, by Oct or so last year, anyway). I'm so addicted to Chrome speed I can't load Gmail in FF anymore. More than a second or two and I'm like whaaaaat.
As a photographer, I'm not allowed to shoot over a person's fence if the area of their private property I'm photographing is not "normally viewable from a public area." Does the government have a right to do this kind of photography for anything other than surveying type activity in which they're not allowed to identify individuals?
Why is there such a thing as an "illegal pool"? If people want pools, shouldn't they tell their government that's what they want, and get the laws changed? (How did law get into place in the first place that makes parts of your home illegal?
Don't worry. It's a bad photo. Uninteresting sky. Boring scene.
Technology is great if it serves the art. This is just a demo of the tech, unfortunately. You'd think with all that time and effort it would have been worth paying a photographer to decide on the content. Oh well...
Actually, I'm just putting the finishing touches on a program that will do the conducting part, controlling tempo of the different synthesizers comprising the orchestra to maximize impact. Next up: perfect the program that replaces audience members and judges the performance. It will tell you whether you had a good time or not and let your social network know what you saw by proxy to increase your "urbane" cred. Comes with an OpenSocial plugin so if one of your friends is using this app, it automatically comments in real time on your friend's status update with something witty about the performance you "saw" in real time.
If WolframTones ever finishes development on their opera / broadway / symphony / concerto composition modules. We'll finally be able to close the loop on this whole culture thing and remove the last humans if Sony can get their robot humanoids to dance on pointe.
I believe this is a troll, but I am responding anyway because I think there are actually people out there that think this. So I prefer to think of this as a +0 Devil's Advocate post.
No one could have a functioning grasp of the fundamentals of science and agree with your statement. Science is about building predictive models about the world. The models do not, and scientists do not expect, that a scientific model's internals form a strict correspondence with reality, as long as it generates reliably testable predictions within a well-defined domain.
Religion is not science; evolution is. Religion doesn't belong in public school science classrooms, evolution does. I have heard dozens of arguments challenging this basic statement, but none I have not been able to take apart piece by piece.
If you are so inclined to engage me on this, please read a summary of my previous responses first so as not to waste everyone's time.
Here is a quote from a part of the article that I just completely made up: Said a lead engineer on the project, "The hard part was figuring out how to wirelessly transmit payment to the power provider for the stolen energy."
Yea, the only way we'd stand a good chance of finding a bigger star than this would be...well, let's just say there'd have to be thousands of stars for that to even be possible.
I'm sorry, but your point is lost. You yourself already acknowledged that horizontal gene transfer is a natural process in your previous comment. What ever does this statement you make here have to do with this discussion?
You seem to be attempting to make dire implications about our current practices, but have not yet drawn a clear dividing line between current practices, previous practices, and nature's own practices. So...that doesn't leave you with much of a statement of any kind.
To be clear, I'm for any genetic modification, whether it's crossing tomatoes and fish or whatever, that produces better quality, more nutritional, less expensive, and tastier food. I'm against even the most banal kind of cross—even those that might happen in nature were we not to prevent it—that results in less nutritional, lower quality, more expensive, and less tasty food (which is strongly and directly related to changes that allow foods to thrive in monocultures).
Well, I naturally assumed you meant people that ought to matter to the discussion. Most people in general don't know how medical treatment works either...are you against that too?
So, if I'm to understand your blockheaded statement here, you mean to say that you will only be happy with GM food if we cease to investigate it? You can't think of a single other thing of great utility to humans about which there is yet more to learn? What a fatuous statement...I cannot cast my gaze in any direction without settling on several such counterexamples.
Let me get this straight...in this discussion where you are against GM food and I am not, you accuse me of spreading FUD? This is neither FUD nor misdirection, it is simply direction.
By introducing Mr. Borlaug into the discussion, I am asserting that you are one of the people that wikipedia article is describing "who consider genetic crossbreeding to be unnatural or to have negative effects." But a quick survey of the results of Mr. Borlaug's work ought to inform you about what you're saying we should give up without good reason.
Sociopaths lack the empathic response. People that respond negatively to disturbing videos are responding emotionally, though not necessarily empathically.
There is obviously overlap, but that overlap can be trained away in many people. It is quite common, for instance, for surgeons to initially respond to use of a cautery gun by getting ill or faint (mostly because of the normally out-of-context smell of cooked meat that one knows is produced from a live human...the association is unsettling). But talk to any surgeon that's been doing the job for a long time, and that smell simply makes them hungry.
Why shouldn't it make them hungry? Cooked meat, human or otherwise, is supposed to trigger that response. The hunger response is the mechanical reaction of a working human brain. Feelings of guilt at being hungry are, in the operating room, entirely misplaced; why should a surgeon feel guilty because of an automatic response when, in the offing, they are helping the patient? Much in the same way, these workers are ostensibly helping customers by protecting them from content they presumably don't want to see (though that is debatable).
I know a doctor that once told me she gets great satisfaction from draining cysts. Despite the absolutely foul smell and gross result, she said it is absolutely one of the most satisfying activities she does as a doctor because it is a nearly risk-free procedure to a patient and the payoff is profound in that the patient immediately feels better. In that scenario, where you might think she's sick because she enjoys dealing with gross stuff, she sees herself as someone willing to endure something gross in particular because it does have such a great and positive effect; emotionally speaking, when viewed in the proper context (and it is the indisputably correct view), it is perhaps one of the most emotionally satisfying demonstrations of empathy I can think of.
So it's mediation and mitigation of the guilt response that allows people like her to continue helping people, and if anything it makes them the opposite of a sociopath...likewise with any gruesome job—if one works in a slaughterhouse, a mortuary or morgue, crime scene cleanup, etc. So I tend to think that only people that are internally emotionally secure could do such a job. If your response is that it would take a sociopath, that is probably based primarily on fear about what you might discover about your own emotional stability in the same situation.
So full of win.
BTW, I just spent the last 5 minutes getting high off of the wikipedia article on binaural beats, which includes audio of two examples. I am naturally skeptical of anything that claims to alter human consciousness. While I did not experience an awakening to the presence of the spirit plane or anything like that, I admit that I feel a weird emptiness behind my eyeballs, and it feels like the bridge of my nose is stuffed with cotton.
Something definitely happened in my brain.
Well, x doesn't stand for "pedophilia," it stands for "badness of teacher." Pedophilia is just one possibility for making the teacher worse...but you gotta start with bad and go worse from there, not a good teacher and add a dash of pedobear.
Often, I find that one can evaluate the sense of a statement by taking it to its natural limit. So, if the occasional bad teacher can be good for students, then the occasional worst possible teacher should be great for the students, like a pedophile.
Limit[thisStupidStatement[x], x -> Infinity] = CatholicSchool
Quick?! This is /.! I would've expected the answer immediately following: "F1r5TTT P05T blhah!!!! (md5sum btw)"
Google is a horrible company! Remember the time they offered up $10M to improve the sad lot of humanity and it took them longer than expected to make sure the money was put to best use? They're just like Hitler!
Please read at least the very basics about that which you speak before ye spake it. To wit: "Plant breeding is the art and science of changing the genetics of plants for the benefit of humankind... Plant breeding has been practiced for thousands of years, since near the beginning of human civilization.... Classical plant breeding uses deliberate interbreeding (crossing) of closely or distantly related individuals to produce new crop varieties or lines with desirable properties. Plants are crossbred to introduce traits/genes from one variety or line into a new genetic background." [source]
That took me just a few seconds to track down. For shame!
Most people do know something about it. The people doing the work know a lot about it...it seems to me that it is you who is ignorant. Fortunately, this is a correctable problem, and the correction I offer doesn't happen to require a large fraction of the world population to starve.
Educate thyself about Norman Borlaug: "Throughout his years of research, Borlaug's programs often faced opposition by people who consider genetic crossbreeding to be unnatural or to have negative effects. Borlaug's work has been criticized for bringing large-scale monoculture, input-intensive farming techniques to countries that had previously relied on subsistence farming. These farming techniques reap large profits for U.S. agribusiness and agrochemical corporations such as Monsanto Company and have been criticized for widening social inequality in the countries owing to uneven food distribution while forcing a capitalist agenda of U.S. corporations onto countries that had undergone land reform."
Borlaug's work has perhaps saved more lives and alleviated more human suffering than any single other person's in the history of humankind. And note that even in this strongest criticism I was able to find on his work from an unbiased source, the criticism is not actually aimed at his work so much as what everyone else did with it: large-scale monoculture. (It seems to me I heard someone else say that a little higher up this thread...hmm.) Let us also keep in mind that it's not fair to apply hindsight bias...at the time his work was done, monoculture seemed like a sensible thing to do. It's only since then that this idea has moved from good idea to bad idea to just plain unethical.
No scientist in any field knows everything. Newton didn't understand general relativity, but that doesn't mean that the world wasn't able to do great things by his understanding of gravity.
Admit it: GM food is not a scientific issue for you; it's a political one. This means you don't care about facts, you only care about persuading people to your point of view, even in spite of the truth. Crafting a highly emotional argument without being shackled by reality ought to give you a big leg up in this debate, which is why I can't figure out one thing: how are you making such a hash of it here?
You don't like related UI elements visually grouped in an appropriate way that implies functionality? Would you prefer the "go back" button is in the upper left and the "go forward" button in the middle right of the browser UI?
The idea is interesting, but I don't think I could stomach hearing the media prattle on about how a country is turning into a "cybocracy" or an "informationsuperhighwocracy".
"Unimaginably huge"?
It's the number of water molecules in a little more than 8 gallons of water. If you can't imagine 8 gallons of water, then you don't belong here.
Here's a quick calculation involving an actual unimaginably huge number: 1 hella / Graham's number ~= 0.
That's how big 10^27 is: close to zero.