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User: Pfhorrest

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  1. Re:Military nightmare on Using a Bomb Robot to Kill a Suspect Is an Unprecedented Shift in Policing (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    Don't let the door hit you on the way out, Texas.

  2. Re:truth vs fact on How Technology Disrupted the Truth (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Less than the whole truth does not mean less than the true. A fact, in absence of other relevant facts, is still "the truth" (inasmuch as that just means "true"). It may not be the whole truth (inasmuch as that means "all the facts"), but it's still the truth.

    A fact is not all the facts, duh. It takes all the facts to have the whole truth, but a single fact is still the truth, else it wouldn't be a fact.

  3. Re:truth vs fact on How Technology Disrupted the Truth (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    An "untrue fact" is not a fact. It may be a "factual claim", as in a "claim of fact", as in it purports to assert a fact, but if what asserts is not true, then it is not, in fact, a fact at all.

    "Truth" just means "true-ness", and is synonymous with "factuality", just as "true" is synonymous with "factual"; and "a truth" is synonymous with "a fact".

    Construing "truth" to mean something beyond factuality is a mistake similar to construing "belief" to mean something about faith. Take the proposition "the sky is blue". Do you agree with that proposition? Then you believe it. Which just means you hold it to be true. Which is to say, a fact. Whether that is because you looked up and verified it observationally or just because you feel it in your hearts of hearts, doesn't make a difference; one of those is definitely the right reason to believe something (that is, hold it to be true, or a fact), and the other the wrong reason, but your reason for believing something doesn't make it a belief or not, and doesn't make the thing believed any more or less true or factual; it just makes the belief more or less justified.

  4. Re:truth vs fact on How Technology Disrupted the Truth (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    And in any case, "prevailing belief" != "fact".

    Facts are true propositions, and being widely believed doesn't make a proposition true.

  5. Re:truth vs fact on How Technology Disrupted the Truth (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    That line is stupid and has spawned no end of stupid repetition of this false dichotomy.

    Truth is a property of propositions.

    Facts are propositions that have that property.

  6. Brits don't elect their head of state, just their head of government, so they didn't elect their member of the EU council, either, if it's really heads of state and not heads of government representing them in the council.

  7. Re:#BlackLivesMatter on Using a Bomb Robot to Kill a Suspect Is an Unprecedented Shift in Policing (vice.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Many (but not all) libertarians, especially the American variety, are very much right-wing when it comes to egalitarianism, in that they have no problem with a tiny elite subset of the population controlling all the wealth and thus power of society, so long as it's "not the government" doing that.

    The original left-right divide was not just about liberty but about equality as well. The left was for the common people, against the aristocracy; that was their ends. Their means was removing the authority of the aristocracy and granting liberty to the common people. Being nominally in favor of liberty, but perfectly OK with an aristocratic elite ruling over the common people so long as it's done by "libertarian" means, is hardly in line with the history of the left, and much more squarely aligned with the original right.

    (In truth, the existence of an aristocratic elite is evidence that the supposedly libertarian principles by which they're operating aren't so libertarian after all, and some kind of authoritarian power still remains for them to exploit. There are libertarians who acknowledge this, libertarian socialists; "socialism" doesn't equal authoritarianism. My personal suspect for that bit of authority remaining to exploit is the enforcement of certain kinds of contracts, especially those of rent and interest, but also things like exclusivity and non-compete arrangements).

  8. If the company is using a custom font for their logotype, it's not going to be in the database this uses (and even if it was, you're not going to be able to find the font unless the company provides it to you, or someone leaked it, in which case using it is already copyright violation, but knowing its name isn't).

    If the company is using a publicly available font for their logotype, they have no grounds for complaint if someone else uses the same font. I can't start "Pfhorrest Comics" with a logotype of just those words in Comic Sans and then sue you for making your "Magarity Comics" logo also use Comic Sans.

  9. Re:Parody is Fine on NRA Complaint Takes Down 38,000 Websites (vice.com) · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Freedom of speech means you are free to say what you want but it does not mean freedom from consequences when you speak.

    Stop parroting that tripe. Freedom of any sort absolutely means freedom from certain consequences. It may not mean freedom from all consequences, but for it to be freedom at all in the first place means that certain kinds of retaliation are forbidden; at the very least, retaliation by the government, but also, for example, calling me a buttmonkey doesn't mean I can break your nose because "lol sure you're free to say that but that doesn't make you free from the consequences of saying it!".

  10. Re: 90% of dinosaurs survived? on Scientists Say The Asteroid That Killed The Dinosaurs Almost Wiped Us Out Too (theweek.com) · · Score: 1

    "Organic" has connotations far broader and predating the chemical one. The adjective "organic" as applied to chemistry is an application of one of those older senses, the one meaning "pertaining to life", and even that is not the original sense.

  11. Re: What is this I don't even on Physicists Confirm a Pear-Shaped Nucleus, and It Could Ruin Time Travel Forever (sciencealert.com) · · Score: 1

    entropy should increase going backwards in time

    And what exactly would "going backwards in time" here mean? Yeah, if you just reverse the velocity/etc of everything in the universe and then let that play on, you wouldn't expect entropy to decrease, but is that really "going backwards in time"?

    What I'm saying is that our very concept of a directionality of time, the very concepts of "past" and "future", arise from phenomena like memory, and other records in some parts of the universe of those parts' interactions with other parts of the universe; and a projection of the patterns apparent in those records, including our own memories.

    Consider every possible point in the phase space of the universe to be equally real, every configuration the universe could possibly have; all of them co-exist, eternally, "timelessly". Those points in the phase space where there exist objects like brains that have records of other parts of the universe, necessarily have records of the universe as it was (is) in less-entropic states, because the processes involved in forming those records happen along paths from less entropic to more entropic states. So no matter what state of the universe you find yourself existing in, your memories and all the other records of other states of the universe present in that universe will be of less-entropic states. We call that direction in the phase-space, the (less-entropic) configurations of the universe that we have records of in this present configuration of the universe, "the past", and then we project a line from that past direction through the present and on into the other direction in the phase-space and call that "the future".

    Because there are more higher-entropy states than lower-entropy states adjacent to any point in the phase-space, "possible pasts" (paths into less-entropic regions of the phase-space) quickly converge and the past seems certain and concrete; the further into the past you project, the more things had to be a certain way to account for the present state. But conversely, possible futures (paths into more-entropic regions of the phase-space) diverge, and the future seems uncertain, and the further into the future we project the more ways there are for the universe to be that are compatible with the present state.

    Thinking about it this way makes questions like "how did the incredibly unlikely low-entropy conditions at the start of the universe arise?" kind of silly, because we are just projecting back from the present state of the universe into necessarily increasingly less-entropic prior states. Any being finding itself in any possible configuration of the universe would find the records available in that configuration (memories, etc) to be of less-entropic states, and projecting back further and further that way find that their universe seemed to begin in an improbably low-entropy condition. Because past means the direction of lower entropy in the phase space, so of course the further in the past you project, the lower entropy it will have to be, to be compatible with the information present at whatever configuration you find your universe to be in; and the furthest in the past you could possible project would be to the nearest (in the phase-space) entropic minimum, which will appear to you as the beginning of time.

    All that we have access to is the present, and the only records that can be in the present are from lower-entropy states of the universe (because creating those records has to increase entropy), so attempting to extrapolate a past and future from the present will always end up with the most distant past seeming improbably low-entropy.

  12. Re:Time has a direction independent of entropy on Physicists Confirm a Pear-Shaped Nucleus, and It Could Ruin Time Travel Forever (sciencealert.com) · · Score: 1

    Right, I was a little sloppy in my thinking/writing, sorry. I was thinking about orienting all of the vectors to the same direction, and forgot to account for the magnitudes of those vectors as well.

    So, in the thought experiment again: take the velocities of all the molecules in a gas, reorient them to a common direction, and average their magnitudes. Momentum and energy are both conserved, the velocity of the ensemble increases and its temperature decreases, and the whole thing is effected via the magical decrease in entropy we imposed (because we are the gods of this simulation and we can just do that): we reduced the Shannon entropy of the description that is the model, and in doing so reduced the thermodynamic entropy of the object of the model.

  13. Re:Time has a direction independent of entropy on Physicists Confirm a Pear-Shaped Nucleus, and It Could Ruin Time Travel Forever (sciencealert.com) · · Score: 1

    Model a gas in a simulation, and output all of the momenta of every molecule in that gas. That list of vectors will have a very high Shannon entropy. Now decrease the Shannon entropy of that chunk of information, say setting all the vectors to the same value, the average of them all.

    Now make your model of the gas reflect those changes. Look: all your molecules are comoving now, the temperature of the gas has dropped dramatically (and its overall velocity increased as necessary to conserve energy), and the thermodynamic entropy has gone down just like the Shannon entropy has.

    Temperature is noise. It's a measure of how disordered the motions of the members of an ensemble of molecules are. If you somehow change that ensemble so that the description of those motions has less Shannon entropy, then the ensemble itself has less thermodynamic entropy too.

  14. Sure, but I never said otherwise. I was just disputing sexconcer's notion of finding the "center of the universe", and telling your motion relative to the CMB doesn't help you do anything like that.

  15. Re:What is this I don't even on Physicists Confirm a Pear-Shaped Nucleus, and It Could Ruin Time Travel Forever (sciencealert.com) · · Score: 1

    Thanks, for some reason I have a bad habit of swapping less/more when discussing entropy. Some part of my mind wants to think of the more-entropic state as "lesser", I guess.

    But entropy very much can be defined without memory. You can be given a random series of bits that mean nothing to you, and mathematically describe how entropic that piece of information is, in absolute terms with no reference to any other benchmark information.

  16. Re: What is this I don't even on Physicists Confirm a Pear-Shaped Nucleus, and It Could Ruin Time Travel Forever (sciencealert.com) · · Score: 1

    universe seems to us to be more entropic in the past [...] and less entropic in the future

    whoops, I switched "less" and "more" there for some reason

  17. Re: What is this I don't even on Physicists Confirm a Pear-Shaped Nucleus, and It Could Ruin Time Travel Forever (sciencealert.com) · · Score: 1

    I never said that entropy causes memory, I said that the necessity of memory increasing universal entropy means that the states we we remember are always less-entropic ones, and so the universe seems to us to be more entropic in the past (i.e. in the states we can remember) and less entropic in the future (i.e. in our predictions of states that will follow from that trend).

  18. forget about expansion or relativity or anything like that

    you suddenly pop into existence in the middle of a foggy field

    your KNOWN universe is everything within a certain distance of you; beyond that, it's lost in the fog, and wherever the boundaries of the field may be, if there are any at all, they're lost in the distant fog.

    the part of the field that you know of, that you have any experience of, appears to be centered on you, because the ability to know and experience it is a function of its distance from you.

    if the TOTAL universe is finite, we don't know it, and we have no idea where its boundaries are. but the KNOWN universe, the boundaries of everything we have any information about, are a function of the distance of things from us, and consequently we find ourselves always at the center of that.

  19. The boundaries of the known universe are what they are because of where the rest of universe is relative to us, i.e. we can observe things up to a certain distance in any direction. We will thus always observe ourselves to be the center of the known universe.

  20. Re:What is this I don't even on Physicists Confirm a Pear-Shaped Nucleus, and It Could Ruin Time Travel Forever (sciencealert.com) · · Score: 1

    The process of a brain (or any other mechanism) recording information about its environment decreases the entropy of the brain (or other mechanism), thus necessitating an even greater increase in entropy in the environment, so that the second law is obeyed for the total brain-environment system.

    So for any system where some part of the system is recording information about the rest of the system, the total entropy of that system will have to go up, modulo any exchange of entropy with something outside the system. So for the universe as a whole, unless it has an extra-universal entropy sink, any time any information about the universe is recorded in some part of the universe, the total entropy of the universe has to go up (even though the entropy of that part with the record goes down).

    In fact even if the universe had a magical extra-universal entropy sink that took away just enough entropy to keep universal entropy constant (rather than increasing), a brain or any other recording mechanism is still pumping entropy out of itself into its environment (in the process of lowering its own internal entropy, to make the recording), so even if universal entropy didn't go up, any ongoing record would show an external world (i.e. the environment outside of the brain or other recording mechanism) always increasing in entropy.

  21. Re: What is this I don't even on Physicists Confirm a Pear-Shaped Nucleus, and It Could Ruin Time Travel Forever (sciencealert.com) · · Score: 1

    The process of a brain (or any other mechanism) recording information about its environment decreases the entropy of the brain (or other mechanism), thus necessitating an even greater increase in entropy in the environment, so that the second law is obeyed for the total brain-environment system.

    So for any system where some part of the system is recording information about the rest of the system, the total entropy of that system will have to go up, modulo any exchange of entropy with something outside the system. So for the universe as a whole, unless it has an extra-universal entropy sink, any time any information about the universe is recorded in some part of the universe, the total entropy of the universe has to go up (even though the entropy of that part with the record goes down).

    In fact even if the universe had a magical extra-universal entropy sink that took away just enough entropy to keep universal entropy constant (rather than increasing), a brain or any other recording mechanism is still pumping entropy out of itself into its environment (in the process of lowering its own internal entropy, to make the recording), so even if universal entropy didn't go up, any ongoing record would show an external world (i.e. the environment outside of brain or other recording mechanism) always increasing in entropy.

  22. What is this I don't even on Physicists Confirm a Pear-Shaped Nucleus, and It Could Ruin Time Travel Forever (sciencealert.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Time only "goes from" the past to the future because we define those terms by the way that time "goes", and time "goes" the way it does, from less-entropic to more-entropic states, because the process of memory formation, like all processes, necessitates an increase in entropy. Time isn't actually "going" anywhere, there are just different possible states of the universe, and the ones we we remember (or are otherwise recorded for us to gather information from) are necessarily more entropic, and we call the states we already remember (or otherwise has record of) "past" and the opposite direction in the configuration space "future".

    What the hell could pear-shaped nuclei possible have to do with any of that?

  23. Re:Putin is happy and Texas gets a woody on In the Aftermath Of Brexit, Brits Google About Irish Passport, Meaning Of EU, and Why it All Happened · · Score: 1

    Sorry, over here in California with an economy larger than all but five countries I couldn't care less about the loss of Texas' measly GDP.

  24. Re:Putin is happy and Texas gets a woody on In the Aftermath Of Brexit, Brits Google About Irish Passport, Meaning Of EU, and Why it All Happened · · Score: 1

    On a separate but related note: Texas secessionists are smart enough to understand what Brexit is and have been emboldened by it. Expect to hear more about Texit if Hillary becomes president.

    I say let them go. Nothing of value will be lost. And we can deport all our right-wing nutjobs there. They'll probably even emigrate willingly!

  25. Re:definitely due to the rise of the populist righ on In the Aftermath Of Brexit, Brits Google About Irish Passport, Meaning Of EU, and Why it All Happened · · Score: 1

    For fun (?), I've replaced every instance of "English" in GP's rant with "German", and "Muslim" with "Jew", etc:

    Are you in Germany? Do you know what happens here? Do you know what the damnable jews have done? They rape our women, they demand concessions like zero pork products in schools, which also means German children are forbidden to bring their own lunch with pork. No one is allowed to speak up against jews, but those days ended yesterday. A nice, healthy nationalism will emerge, where the Germans are in charge of their own destiny. No more taking in the sodden camel jockeys, who have paid nothing into the system, but live off the dole, take housing meant for the Germans, did I mention rape our women. buy old monument chapels and churches and use them for the Godforsaken worship of their false god, yahweh and his child-raping prophet, moses. Fuck them. This is Germany -- a white, northern European country that deserves to set her own agenda, not one of globalism from Belgium. Look at the EU. Immigration has destroyed the EU in the last couple of years. It's unsafe to walk so many cities now. jewish men demand no beer be sold within their sight, even though this is Europe, not Turdistan. Fuck the jews. They have done more to ruin Germany and Europe in just a few years. Call me a bigot. This is Germany! You want to come here? Assimilate. Speak German, keep your head down, cause zero trouble, leave our women alone. This is Germany.

    Heil Cameron, I guess?