You have an interesting definition of force. Apparently hearing something is "force" in this definition. Therefore, censoring is "protecting" from force. That's pretty empowering for the censors, I guess.
Yes forcing me to participate in activities or forcing me to listen to your message and not walk away are forms of force. Also anything using tax funded (such as school, courthouses, town halls) is a forcing me to pay for it, so you'd better have a compelling reason why taxpayers must promote these things and not curtail anyones right is the process. And there's no censoring going on here, you can post the ten commandments and hold all the prayer sessions you want on your own property or using any privately owned resources available to you(such as, say privately owned TV stations/billboards/etc.).
So the government shouldn't say it includes gay couples.
As long as they don't say it excludes gays either, I'm fine with that. I'm ok with the idea of the government getting out of the marriage business all together, but it is pretty useful to legally recognize weather or not someone should be considered family. And they should extend this ability to select family members to anyone, unless there is a compelling reason not to (i.e. children who can truly consent to it).
Why shouldn't a society get to choose what it thinks is a marriage and what it thinks isn't a marriage? Should every tiny segment of society always get to choose for the rest of society? What if the rest of society resists? Should the majority be forced by the minority?
Society can think whatever it wants, the natural course of things is for society to break up into different sub-cultures (or individuals go off on their own) if they can't work with each other. But I'm not talking about what society does, I'm talking about what the government does. Government actions are compulsory for everyone, and therefore should be limited to the bare minimum required to allow all the different sub-cultures to coexist and not step on eachother's rights.
How does this belief system work? Does it follow any logical rules, or is it just "say anything to gain power"?
Gain what power? I'm against the government (or anyone else) having power (or even too much influence) except where there is compelling reason why they must. The number one compelling reason why they must is to stop other people/organizations from becoming powerful.
-No teaching of evolution (later scaled back to putting warning stickers that evolution was "only" a theory and trying to give equal time to Intelligent Design, as if it had equal credibility).
Who was "forced" in this example? What were they forced to do?
I understand that you want religious messages censored. I'm wondering why not censoring them is considered force.
Biology teachers who wanted to teach their subject were forced not to teach it (at least, that's what the religious attempted to enforce). When that effort was defeated, school administrators were forced to put warning stickers on books when they felt the stickers were misleading and teachers were forced to teach a philosophical argument in science class even though they knew it wasn't science.
-Posting the 10 commandments in schools and courthouses, presumably to give the impression that they have the weight of official government policy behind them.
Who was forced? What were they forced to do?
If the religious had their way schools would be forced to post religious commandments, and taxpayers would be forced to use public, taxpayer-funded buildings to
spread words that many disagree with. Students and whoever had business in court would be forced to see that the government endorses that there is one God, who is your Lord, and that he issued these 9 other commandments.
-Marriage can only be between a man and a woman (some compromise and allow calling it Civil Unions, but stating that 1 man/1 woman and having kids is the "gold standard"). Constitutional amendments even proposed to this end.
Who was forced? What were they forced to do?
Why should society have to recognize any given relationship as a marriage? What if we don't agree that it's a marriage?
A marriage is what it has always been throughout history in all societies. It's not a definition created by "the right". There are hundreds of thousands of years of history on this in all societies and all religions throughout the world. No gay marriages in that history -- until about 12 years ago.
Gay people who want to use the same methods of establishing property rights and next-of-kin status to their loved ones are forced not to. If you personally want to view gays (or previously divorced people, or mixed-race couples) as 'not married' that's your right, but the government should extend equal laws to everyone. The government shouldn't be telling me what the "gold standard" for families or anything else is.
-Teachers and coaches leading students in prayer at school events, designated school "prayer time", ect.
Who was forced? What were they forced to do?
Students were forced to attend prayer sessions, and at least forced to watch all their peers pray, and usually expected to participate in saying the prayers.
Are you joking? Off the top of my head they've tried to enforce:
-No teaching of evolution (later scaled back to putting warning stickers that evolution was "only" a theory and trying to give equal time to Intelligent Design, as if it had equal credibility).
-Posting the 10 commandments in schools and courthouses, presumably to give the impression that they have the weight of official government policy behind them.
-School children should be lead by teachers in pledging themselves to a nation "under God", (originally compulsory, after complaints it was scaled back to they must stand respectfully and watch all their all peers pledge themselves).
-Marriage can only be between a man and a woman (some compromise and allow calling it Civil Unions, but stating that 1 man/1 woman and having kids is the "gold standard"). Constitutional amendments even proposed to this end. .
-Teachers and coaches leading students in prayer at school events, designated school "prayer time", ect.
"Okay. Tell me which letter of the alphabet you want me to fire."
That doesn't make any sense. The letters were the sponsors of the show, you can't fire them!
Obviously what they needed was some more sponsors, like maybe from the Greek alphabet, or Chinese characters or something.
I definitely talk in my head. I am aware the the thoughts are already complete before I form them into words. At various times in my life, I have tried to train myself to not verbalize the thoughts (because it just seems so cool!). But in the end, I just don't trust that I really know/understand what I'm thinking if I don't form words out of the thoughts, and I always revert to internal verbalizations as my natural state.
San Francisco's trolleys use a moving cable under the ground! That's why they are more properly called "cable cars". The trolley just grabs the cable and lets the cable tow the car around. The cable motion is created by big turning wheels at the end points of the lines, and I don't know what motors they use to turn them. It has probably changed a few times over years, as old as they are it might not have even been electricity back in the beginning.
Well, like I sort-of said at in my other reply to you (but I'll repeat here in case anyone needs more clarification), there is no such thing as a "DC transformer". A transformer relies on changing (AC) current to do its transforming, it won't work at all with DC. The equivalent devices for DC are Buck (for stepping down) or Boost (for stepping up) converters, and they are much more complicated devices that need a transistor (or similar switch) to rapidly switch current on and off to an inductor to do their converting.
Well, I pulled that number from a foggy memory of what my Power Systems Analysis professor told us when we discussed it in class. He's the one to be impressed with (or not) as he's the one who researched it. I just wanted to convey an approximation of how long a line it took to make DC transmission practical.
It would be more efficient to transmit DC, if we are talking about the same voltages. AC is impeded by inductance as well as resistance, so in addition to the inefficiencies of converting, you also are better off transmitting DC if it is the same voltage.
The trick is, transmitting at higher voltages is more efficient than transmitting the same power at lower voltage. This is because to send the same power at low voltage, you must send more current, and more current means more energy wasted as heat from the resistance of the line. So voltages from the generator are stepped way up before being transmitted.
And the reason AC won out is that it is much, much cheaper and easier to step up AC voltage (you just need a transformer, which is nothing but a couple coils of wire around an iron core) than to step up DC voltages (which requires a boost converter, which at its heart is a giant transistor [big enough to survive the voltages and currents of a power plant in this case] and a huge inductor [big fat coil of wire] along with timing and firing circuits to control the action of the transistor).
Boost converters are expensive, but over a long enough run of transmission line the advantages of DC over AC do make up the difference (as I recall, the break-even point is about a 400 mile long line). So you do find some long distance transmission lines that are DC. I know there is one out here in Sylmar, California that runs up to Washington state somewhere.
What I want to know is, when the hell is someone going to make the sword/lightsaber game for the Wii that we've all been waiting for. This comes up every now and then and the apologists all jump out and say "Errors in the motion sensors add up so you can't make perfect 1 to 1 movements, blah, blah, blah."
Which is all a bunch of BS. OK you can't make perfect 1 to 1 movement with perfectly free movement of the sword, but you don't need to! I've already seen "good enough" control to make the sword/lightsaber game possible!
Go load up Wii Sports. Choose Baseball for 2 players (so you can play around without a pitch coming). Grab the control for the batter and tip/twirl the Wiimote around over your shoulder. Notice how the Mii tips/twirls the bat just like you? Now, just change it from a bat to a sword, move it from over-the-shoulder to waist level in front of the player, and put the camera behind the Mii (KOTOR style). There, you just made the greatest sword game ever without even doing anything clever.
And of course there's bound to be lots of clever stuff you can figure out like motion capturing a bunch of kids playing with fake swords (with wiimotes embedded) so you can map the wiimote acceleration profiles to expected real life movements. Or correcting for the small integration errors whenever the wiimote happens to swing past the sensor bar. That's just icing on the cake that makes the control even closer to what's expected.
Yeah the control will never be exactly 1 to 1. Olympic fencers will be pissed off that they can't get the millimeter perfect movements they use. Everyone else will be wildly flailing their swords with big broad movements so as long a the sword goes left when they swing left it will be fine. The players' hand/eye coordination will adjust to what the game will actually do. Players already adjust to controls that are much less intuitive/realistic. Just throw in a few easy "whack the pinata" levels at the beginning and I bet people will subconsciously adjust themselves in no time.
The blurb for number six is written very strangely. They say "You use this very special switch every day of your life" for a type of switch I've never seen before - a switch on an AC power outlet! I think whoever wrote this one must be in Brittan-or-Somewhere, as those are clearly not US power outlets, he calls AC outlets "mains", and apparently they have switches on all their AC "mains" where the writer comes from.
The weirdest part is that the writer acknowledges that "this little fella is an unusual one: most of the world's mains sockets don't have a switch on them at all! Shocking, isn't it?" Well, if most of the world's sockets don't have these switches, why do you assume the reader uses one every day?
Still, putting switches on the AC outlet is a damn good idea, why haven't we copied that one yet?
No, he's referring to Foundation and Earth, which Asimov wrote himself in 1986. Which was also what I thought you were talking about at first, as it has the Solarians who never interacted with anyone but their robots and had made themselves hermaphrodites so they could reproduce without interacting with others. But clearly you were talking about a different Asimov story.
I don't see much point in writing to that waste of oxygen (my congressman) about anything.
He writes to me on a regular basis (in "charming" "folksy" "down to earth" fake sloppy hand writing that looks like a 7 year old wrote it) to tell me how he supports everything I oppose and opposes everything I support, and how hard he's working to make the country worse (in my opinion).
I'm sure he fully supports the wonderful job that FEMA is doing to make everyone proud of the amazing, wonderful government and president we have now.
If I was the god of airlines, I would rip out the overhead bins entirely. Tons of time is wasted as everyone tries to squeeze past eachother in the crowded aisleways to find space to stuff in their giant (bigger than my checked luggage) suitcases. Then at the end of the flight you've got to wait for the same people to squeeze their way around to get the bags back down, often dropping their 50 pound suitcases on eachothers' heads in the process.
If it doesn't fit under the seat in front of you, it's not a carry-on! If it has wheels, it's not a carry-on (that would be a roll-on)! Surely you're carrying at least on prohibited item anyway (I mean are you going to shave at your destination? Sharp objects like razors were never permitted even before 9/11) so you have to check a bag anyway. Just check everything you possibly can.
That only works if you have a direct flight (or an even number of connections).
For the normal "fly from home city to hub then fly from hub city to actual destination" the bags near the cargo door of the first flight get offloaded earlier and end up deeper away from the cargo door on the connecting flight.
I guess you're right on a lot of points, sometimes the doctors do casually mention "looks like a stomach virus" or something, so maybe they do know what's going on. They just often don't seem to communicate it very well to the patient. I think the soccer mom type you mentioned is probably the cause of this. That soccer mom just wants to know "Are they going to die?" and "What drugs do I need to buy to make this go away?" and over time they train the doctors to just give the "executive summary" of the problem, focussed on how to quickly fix it.
I really wish that wasn't the case though, as it has put me off to doctors entirely. Assuming its a non-emergency situation (in which case I want the doctor to shut up and save me) the main reason I would go to a doctor is for the insight into what's going on and why and how and what factors contribute to worsening or improving the conditions and what are the trade offs involved in my possible treatments.
It always seems like they just want to throw a pill at you, often without telling you what the pill does, and say "thank you, drive thru". On many occasions I've ended up taking what turned out to be a glorified asprin before I wised up and started asking specifically what it was for (and eventually just stopped going to doctors altogether). I'm not comfortable throwing exotic chemicals into my body, but I'll do it if the benefit/risk ratio is high enough. Easing minor, dull pain is not a very high benefit for that ratio, so I'd like to know if the doc is just going after the symptoms (which I can probably just endure for a few days/weeks) or if that pill is meant to prevent the spread of the disease into my vital organs.
I really wish the doctors would treat diseases interactively like that, discussing what's going on and why. I mean you wouldn't expect, say, a financial planner to just collect your bank statements, pay stubs, and tax records and then say "ok your need buy this much of Mutual Fund A, a little bit of Fund B, you will retire at age 63 and have income X. Thank you, drive thru." The whole point of paying for a professional like that is to pick their brains in their area of expertise and develop a strategy based on your own goals and value judgements.
I agree with you that you can't expect "front-line" doctors to try to find the cause of weird, rare, unknown to science type diseases (although it would be nice if they could refer you to researches studying those things). But in my experience they don't delve into anything much at all, they seem to just look at a database somewhere that lists "symptoms x,y, and z -> give them pill w". Maybe (if you're "lucky") the database will say "perform test t to screen for failure of organ r".
Doctors seem to go through an extensive education which should give them the ability to actually have some insight like "Hmm, your spleen seems to be agitated by something, but the characteristics are not typical for a viral infection. Have you been eating a lot of wild game meat recently?" and figure out what is really going on. If they are just going to do a database lookup, why can't they just make a website somewhere where we can type in our symptoms? It would save us all a lot of time and money, and the doctors could focus on stuff that actually requires some expertise.
But contrary to popular opinion, you don't need sex to survive.
Technically correct, you only need sex to not suffer. The difference between not having your survival needs met (like food) and not having your sexual needs met is that not getting food is a mercifully short problem. Not getting sex can prolong your misery indefinitely.
Without sex, existence can't really be called life, its just survival. You suffer emptiness and lack of meaning, wondering why you continue to exist when all you feel is pain. But that's the point, the religions are selling a miracle (literally!) cure for pain and emptiness in your life. It would be much harder to get people to swallow that snake oil if people found a real cure right here on Earth.
What do you mean there is no sex in the game? Even before "Hot Date" you could get two Sims with a high enough "friendship/love" rating (either male/female or female/female but for some reason not male/male), to go to the bed, take off their clothes (behind a blur, of course, just like when they shower or go to the toilet), get in to the bed together, cuddle up to each other and then slide completely under the blankets. The blankets would then bounce up and down for a several seconds and the Sims would emerge with much higher "social" and "fun" scores.
The poster was probably wrong to use the term "diestic" and "thestic" (and spelled them wrong too!), but what he described was essentially correct. I can't comment on Sikhism or Jainism, but Buddhism describes enlightenment as losing your illusion of self to rejoin the universal consciousness (a.k.a. the Buddha Nature) and the Vedas (which underly Hinduism) describe the "Brahman" as sort of a universal organism of which everything (including us) is a component. The gods in Hinduism are still just part of the Brahman (although perhaps larger/more fundamental/closer to understanding the big picture).
It is kind of hard to say if the Buddha Nature or the Brahman count as "God", it sort of depends on what you mean by that word.
I think this must be one of those "different learning styles" things. I get what your saying when you say "learn to read" (and thus don't take offense), but I never was able to "get the most out of a technical book" as you put it.
I could read the words, but static words on a page were never able to convey the real relationships between things to me. However, I could easily grok the meaning of the material if either: (a) I was in a lab type situation (or using a computer simulation or something like that) were I could vary the parameters and watch the effects on the whole system or (b) I was in a lecture situation where the professor was working each step and I could ask them the stop and explain why they did that last step or ask what would have happened if we stuck a negative number in two steps ago, etc.
Once I was able to "get it" the book was useful as a reference to look up the particulars I had forgotten or jog my memory as to what approach you needed to use, but I could never really learn anything for the first time from a book unless it was fairly easy material (i.e. High School level).
As for college, my feeling is at that level you should already be learning the subject on your own and the lectures are just there to confirm your own findings.
You were able to figure out on your own things like Fluid Mechanics or Closed Loop Control Theory before the lecture? My hats off to you then. My feeling is that college was about material that you would never have been able to figure out on your own.
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You have an interesting definition of force. Apparently hearing something is "force" in this definition. Therefore, censoring is "protecting" from force. That's pretty empowering for the censors, I guess.
Yes forcing me to participate in activities or forcing me to listen to your message and not walk away are forms of force. Also anything using tax funded (such as school, courthouses, town halls) is a forcing me to pay for it, so you'd better have a compelling reason why taxpayers must promote these things and not curtail anyones right is the process. And there's no censoring going on here, you can post the ten commandments and hold all the prayer sessions you want on your own property or using any privately owned resources available to you(such as, say privately owned TV stations/billboards/etc.).
So the government shouldn't say it includes gay couples.
As long as they don't say it excludes gays either, I'm fine with that. I'm ok with the idea of the government getting out of the marriage business all together, but it is pretty useful to legally recognize weather or not someone should be considered family. And they should extend this ability to select family members to anyone, unless there is a compelling reason not to (i.e. children who can truly consent to it).
Why shouldn't a society get to choose what it thinks is a marriage and what it thinks isn't a marriage? Should every tiny segment of society always get to choose for the rest of society? What if the rest of society resists? Should the majority be forced by the minority?
Society can think whatever it wants, the natural course of things is for society to break up into different sub-cultures (or individuals go off on their own) if they can't work with each other. But I'm not talking about what society does, I'm talking about what the government does. Government actions are compulsory for everyone, and therefore should be limited to the bare minimum required to allow all the different sub-cultures to coexist and not step on eachother's rights.
How does this belief system work? Does it follow any logical rules, or is it just "say anything to gain power"?
Gain what power? I'm against the government (or anyone else) having power (or even too much influence) except where there is compelling reason why they must. The number one compelling reason why they must is to stop other people/organizations from becoming powerful.
Who was "forced" in this example? What were they forced to do?
I understand that you want religious messages censored. I'm wondering why not censoring them is considered force.
Biology teachers who wanted to teach their subject were forced not to teach it (at least, that's what the religious attempted to enforce). When that effort was defeated, school administrators were forced to put warning stickers on books when they felt the stickers were misleading and teachers were forced to teach a philosophical argument in science class even though they knew it wasn't science.
-Posting the 10 commandments in schools and courthouses, presumably to give the impression that they have the weight of official government policy behind them.
Who was forced? What were they forced to do?
If the religious had their way schools would be forced to post religious commandments, and taxpayers would be forced to use public, taxpayer-funded buildings to spread words that many disagree with. Students and whoever had business in court would be forced to see that the government endorses that there is one God, who is your Lord, and that he issued these 9 other commandments.
-Marriage can only be between a man and a woman (some compromise and allow calling it Civil Unions, but stating that 1 man/1 woman and having kids is the "gold standard"). Constitutional amendments even proposed to this end.Who was forced? What were they forced to do?
Why should society have to recognize any given relationship as a marriage? What if we don't agree that it's a marriage?
A marriage is what it has always been throughout history in all societies. It's not a definition created by "the right". There are hundreds of thousands of years of history on this in all societies and all religions throughout the world. No gay marriages in that history -- until about 12 years ago.
Gay people who want to use the same methods of establishing property rights and next-of-kin status to their loved ones are forced not to. If you personally want to view gays (or previously divorced people, or mixed-race couples) as 'not married' that's your right, but the government should extend equal laws to everyone. The government shouldn't be telling me what the "gold standard" for families or anything else is.
-Teachers and coaches leading students in prayer at school events, designated school "prayer time", ect.Who was forced? What were they forced to do?
Students were forced to attend prayer sessions, and at least forced to watch all their peers pray, and usually expected to participate in saying the prayers.
Are you joking? Off the top of my head they've tried to enforce:
-No teaching of evolution (later scaled back to putting warning stickers that evolution was "only" a theory and trying to give equal time to Intelligent Design, as if it had equal credibility).
-Posting the 10 commandments in schools and courthouses, presumably to give the impression that they have the weight of official government policy behind them.
-School children should be lead by teachers in pledging themselves to a nation "under God", (originally compulsory, after complaints it was scaled back to they must stand respectfully and watch all their all peers pledge themselves).
-Marriage can only be between a man and a woman (some compromise and allow calling it Civil Unions, but stating that 1 man/1 woman and having kids is the "gold standard"). Constitutional amendments even proposed to this end.
. -Teachers and coaches leading students in prayer at school events, designated school "prayer time", ect.
"Okay. Tell me which letter of the alphabet you want me to fire."
That doesn't make any sense. The letters were the sponsors of the show, you can't fire them!
Obviously what they needed was some more sponsors, like maybe from the Greek alphabet, or Chinese characters or something.
I definitely talk in my head. I am aware the the thoughts are already complete before I form them into words. At various times in my life, I have tried to train myself to not verbalize the thoughts (because it just seems so cool!). But in the end, I just don't trust that I really know/understand what I'm thinking if I don't form words out of the thoughts, and I always revert to internal verbalizations as my natural state.
San Francisco's trolleys use a moving cable under the ground! That's why they are more properly called "cable cars". The trolley just grabs the cable and lets the cable tow the car around. The cable motion is created by big turning wheels at the end points of the lines, and I don't know what motors they use to turn them. It has probably changed a few times over years, as old as they are it might not have even been electricity back in the beginning.
Well, like I sort-of said at in my other reply to you (but I'll repeat here in case anyone needs more clarification), there is no such thing as a "DC transformer". A transformer relies on changing (AC) current to do its transforming, it won't work at all with DC. The equivalent devices for DC are Buck (for stepping down) or Boost (for stepping up) converters, and they are much more complicated devices that need a transistor (or similar switch) to rapidly switch current on and off to an inductor to do their converting.
Well, I pulled that number from a foggy memory of what my Power Systems Analysis professor told us when we discussed it in class. He's the one to be impressed with (or not) as he's the one who researched it. I just wanted to convey an approximation of how long a line it took to make DC transmission practical.
It would be more efficient to transmit DC, if we are talking about the same voltages. AC is impeded by inductance as well as resistance, so in addition to the inefficiencies of converting, you also are better off transmitting DC if it is the same voltage.
The trick is, transmitting at higher voltages is more efficient than transmitting the same power at lower voltage. This is because to send the same power at low voltage, you must send more current, and more current means more energy wasted as heat from the resistance of the line. So voltages from the generator are stepped way up before being transmitted.
And the reason AC won out is that it is much, much cheaper and easier to step up AC voltage (you just need a transformer, which is nothing but a couple coils of wire around an iron core) than to step up DC voltages (which requires a boost converter, which at its heart is a giant transistor [big enough to survive the voltages and currents of a power plant in this case] and a huge inductor [big fat coil of wire] along with timing and firing circuits to control the action of the transistor).
Boost converters are expensive, but over a long enough run of transmission line the advantages of DC over AC do make up the difference (as I recall, the break-even point is about a 400 mile long line). So you do find some long distance transmission lines that are DC. I know there is one out here in Sylmar, California that runs up to Washington state somewhere.
What I want to know is, when the hell is someone going to make the sword/lightsaber game for the Wii that we've all been waiting for. This comes up every now and then and the apologists all jump out and say "Errors in the motion sensors add up so you can't make perfect 1 to 1 movements, blah, blah, blah."
Which is all a bunch of BS. OK you can't make perfect 1 to 1 movement with perfectly free movement of the sword, but you don't need to! I've already seen "good enough" control to make the sword/lightsaber game possible!
Go load up Wii Sports. Choose Baseball for 2 players (so you can play around without a pitch coming). Grab the control for the batter and tip/twirl the Wiimote around over your shoulder. Notice how the Mii tips/twirls the bat just like you? Now, just change it from a bat to a sword, move it from over-the-shoulder to waist level in front of the player, and put the camera behind the Mii (KOTOR style). There, you just made the greatest sword game ever without even doing anything clever.
And of course there's bound to be lots of clever stuff you can figure out like motion capturing a bunch of kids playing with fake swords (with wiimotes embedded) so you can map the wiimote acceleration profiles to expected real life movements. Or correcting for the small integration errors whenever the wiimote happens to swing past the sensor bar. That's just icing on the cake that makes the control even closer to what's expected.
Yeah the control will never be exactly 1 to 1. Olympic fencers will be pissed off that they can't get the millimeter perfect movements they use. Everyone else will be wildly flailing their swords with big broad movements so as long a the sword goes left when they swing left it will be fine. The players' hand/eye coordination will adjust to what the game will actually do. Players already adjust to controls that are much less intuitive/realistic. Just throw in a few easy "whack the pinata" levels at the beginning and I bet people will subconsciously adjust themselves in no time.
The blurb for number six is written very strangely. They say "You use this very special switch every day of your life" for a type of switch I've never seen before - a switch on an AC power outlet! I think whoever wrote this one must be in Brittan-or-Somewhere, as those are clearly not US power outlets, he calls AC outlets "mains", and apparently they have switches on all their AC "mains" where the writer comes from.
The weirdest part is that the writer acknowledges that "this little fella is an unusual one: most of the world's mains sockets don't have a switch on them at all! Shocking, isn't it?" Well, if most of the world's sockets don't have these switches, why do you assume the reader uses one every day?
Still, putting switches on the AC outlet is a damn good idea, why haven't we copied that one yet?
In other words, in Americanese, a "Semi".
No, he's referring to Foundation and Earth, which Asimov wrote himself in 1986. Which was also what I thought you were talking about at first, as it has the Solarians who never interacted with anyone but their robots and had made themselves hermaphrodites so they could reproduce without interacting with others. But clearly you were talking about a different Asimov story.
I don't see much point in writing to that waste of oxygen (my congressman) about anything.
He writes to me on a regular basis (in "charming" "folksy" "down to earth" fake sloppy hand writing that looks like a 7 year old wrote it) to tell me how he supports everything I oppose and opposes everything I support, and how hard he's working to make the country worse (in my opinion).
I'm sure he fully supports the wonderful job that FEMA is doing to make everyone proud of the amazing, wonderful government and president we have now.
If I was the god of airlines, I would rip out the overhead bins entirely. Tons of time is wasted as everyone tries to squeeze past eachother in the crowded aisleways to find space to stuff in their giant (bigger than my checked luggage) suitcases. Then at the end of the flight you've got to wait for the same people to squeeze their way around to get the bags back down, often dropping their 50 pound suitcases on eachothers' heads in the process.
If it doesn't fit under the seat in front of you, it's not a carry-on! If it has wheels, it's not a carry-on (that would be a roll-on)! Surely you're carrying at least on prohibited item anyway (I mean are you going to shave at your destination? Sharp objects like razors were never permitted even before 9/11) so you have to check a bag anyway. Just check everything you possibly can.
That only works if you have a direct flight (or an even number of connections). For the normal "fly from home city to hub then fly from hub city to actual destination" the bags near the cargo door of the first flight get offloaded earlier and end up deeper away from the cargo door on the connecting flight.
I guess you're right on a lot of points, sometimes the doctors do casually mention "looks like a stomach virus" or something, so maybe they do know what's going on. They just often don't seem to communicate it very well to the patient. I think the soccer mom type you mentioned is probably the cause of this. That soccer mom just wants to know "Are they going to die?" and "What drugs do I need to buy to make this go away?" and over time they train the doctors to just give the "executive summary" of the problem, focussed on how to quickly fix it.
I really wish that wasn't the case though, as it has put me off to doctors entirely. Assuming its a non-emergency situation (in which case I want the doctor to shut up and save me) the main reason I would go to a doctor is for the insight into what's going on and why and how and what factors contribute to worsening or improving the conditions and what are the trade offs involved in my possible treatments.
It always seems like they just want to throw a pill at you, often without telling you what the pill does, and say "thank you, drive thru". On many occasions I've ended up taking what turned out to be a glorified asprin before I wised up and started asking specifically what it was for (and eventually just stopped going to doctors altogether). I'm not comfortable throwing exotic chemicals into my body, but I'll do it if the benefit/risk ratio is high enough. Easing minor, dull pain is not a very high benefit for that ratio, so I'd like to know if the doc is just going after the symptoms (which I can probably just endure for a few days/weeks) or if that pill is meant to prevent the spread of the disease into my vital organs.
I really wish the doctors would treat diseases interactively like that, discussing what's going on and why. I mean you wouldn't expect, say, a financial planner to just collect your bank statements, pay stubs, and tax records and then say "ok your need buy this much of Mutual Fund A, a little bit of Fund B, you will retire at age 63 and have income X. Thank you, drive thru." The whole point of paying for a professional like that is to pick their brains in their area of expertise and develop a strategy based on your own goals and value judgements.
I agree with you that you can't expect "front-line" doctors to try to find the cause of weird, rare, unknown to science type diseases (although it would be nice if they could refer you to researches studying those things). But in my experience they don't delve into anything much at all, they seem to just look at a database somewhere that lists "symptoms x,y, and z -> give them pill w". Maybe (if you're "lucky") the database will say "perform test t to screen for failure of organ r".
Doctors seem to go through an extensive education which should give them the ability to actually have some insight like "Hmm, your spleen seems to be agitated by something, but the characteristics are not typical for a viral infection. Have you been eating a lot of wild game meat recently?" and figure out what is really going on. If they are just going to do a database lookup, why can't they just make a website somewhere where we can type in our symptoms? It would save us all a lot of time and money, and the doctors could focus on stuff that actually requires some expertise.
I'd say that's pretty much how all the King Arthur legends developed, and probably every other myth/legend/story from pre-copyright days.
Technically correct, you only need sex to not suffer. The difference between not having your survival needs met (like food) and not having your sexual needs met is that not getting food is a mercifully short problem. Not getting sex can prolong your misery indefinitely.
Without sex, existence can't really be called life, its just survival. You suffer emptiness and lack of meaning, wondering why you continue to exist when all you feel is pain. But that's the point, the religions are selling a miracle (literally!) cure for pain and emptiness in your life. It would be much harder to get people to swallow that snake oil if people found a real cure right here on Earth.
What do you mean there is no sex in the game? Even before "Hot Date" you could get two Sims with a high enough "friendship/love" rating (either male/female or female/female but for some reason not male/male), to go to the bed, take off their clothes (behind a blur, of course, just like when they shower or go to the toilet), get in to the bed together, cuddle up to each other and then slide completely under the blankets. The blankets would then bounce up and down for a several seconds and the Sims would emerge with much higher "social" and "fun" scores.
The poster was probably wrong to use the term "diestic" and "thestic" (and spelled them wrong too!), but what he described was essentially correct. I can't comment on Sikhism or Jainism, but Buddhism describes enlightenment as losing your illusion of self to rejoin the universal consciousness (a.k.a. the Buddha Nature) and the Vedas (which underly Hinduism) describe the "Brahman" as sort of a universal organism of which everything (including us) is a component. The gods in Hinduism are still just part of the Brahman (although perhaps larger/more fundamental/closer to understanding the big picture).
It is kind of hard to say if the Buddha Nature or the Brahman count as "God", it sort of depends on what you mean by that word.
I think this must be one of those "different learning styles" things. I get what your saying when you say "learn to read" (and thus don't take offense), but I never was able to "get the most out of a technical book" as you put it.
I could read the words, but static words on a page were never able to convey the real relationships between things to me. However, I could easily grok the meaning of the material if either:
(a) I was in a lab type situation (or using a computer simulation or something like that) were I could vary the parameters and watch the effects on the whole system or
(b) I was in a lecture situation where the professor was working each step and I could ask them the stop and explain why they did that last step or ask what would have happened if we stuck a negative number in two steps ago, etc.
Once I was able to "get it" the book was useful as a reference to look up the particulars I had forgotten or jog my memory as to what approach you needed to use, but I could never really learn anything for the first time from a book unless it was fairly easy material (i.e. High School level).
You were able to figure out on your own things like Fluid Mechanics or Closed Loop Control Theory before the lecture? My hats off to you then. My feeling is that college was about material that you would never have been able to figure out on your own.
I'm still trying to figure out why the European Space Agency went after him.