Aw, a Christian apologist. Now, for many of the things I mentioned the bible DOES appear to support them. Several of the things I mentioned are actually either ordered or committed by God himself. But that's beside the point... my post didn't actually say that the bible condoned ANY of those things. Only that it contained them. Whoopsie. You should read carefully before bringing out the brimstone.
If a television program depicts (non biblical) mass rape, but as a bad thing, do you think Christian moralists would judge it appropriate for children?
Come on, the bible is good wholesome reading for the whole family. Rape, pillaging, slavery, incest, pedophilia, bestiality, torture, biological warfare and glorification of questionable morals for all.
Good. Then you'll all get to deal with some of what I have to put up with when going into (or near) the US, and hopefully will vote for someone who will stop it.
"if a blue chip stock price crashes in some kind of algorithm-fueled artificial negative feedback loop, billions can be lost... and thousands of jobs"
I don't understand the difference. If the blue chip price crashes, the idiots who put out low sell prices will lose money and get fired. That's so sad. Those people should be out of business. The problem comes when you protect those people, such as by reversing trades after the flash crash.
It would be an interesting experiment for someone to start up a stock exchange that has a two minute delay on trades or some other barrier to HFT. See if it wins in competition with the others.
Interesting. Where I live there's a law that if the register rings up a price higher than the price on the item, you pay the lowest price minus 10%. It encourages retailers to set their prices carefully. Usually what happens is that someone discovers a mismatch, gets the deal and the retailer hurriedly fixes the price tag.
Kind of sucks if you're an online retailer and you can sell out before you notice the problem, but those are the risks you take if you use an automated system.
He said you're overstating it. Which you are, at least in this post. I was actually about to reply that your first post was a tautology.
High impact factor journals publish things that are "trendy," i.e. of interest to many scientists. These things tend to be new, unexpected, or both. You can show mathematically that things that are new and unexpected are more likely to be incorrect, regardless of the quality of the research.
But good research that simply reaches the wrong conclusion isn't retracted (yes, anyone who reads journal articles, even old ones, as if they're Truth is a fool). Papers are retracted because errors were made or fraud was committed. It's worrisome that the retraction rate correlates with impact factor, but not really surprising. There are many reasons that might be, other than the one you've fixated on. The high impact factor journals do take their leadership positions seriously. For example, Nature has been on a bit of a campaign the last few years to improve the quality of the statistics in science. It's almost certain that some of the correlation is explained by the fact that articles in high impact factor journals are read, examined and replicated by more scientists.
Published retraction indexes sound like an excellent idea though.
Meh. People anthropomorphize all the time. What he meant is that the scientific method, both formally and in practice, includes skepticism as a fundamental feature. The standard of evidence is set higher than 50%+1 and you try to disprove hypotheses and theories.
Most religions, on the other hand, claim absolute truth.
Google is a web advertising company, as is Facebook. Apple sells computing devices, mostly mobile ones now.
Google does search, in order to sell ads. Facebook provides a way for people to keep track of each other, in order to sell ads. Apple sells music, books, movies and tv shows in order to sell iPhones, iPads and Macs.
Stuck in your ways hey? There's nothing wrong with that syntax, it's just unfamiliar to you.
revalue = object.methodname(); would be as yucky to a SmallTalk or Objective C programmer who had never used anything else. Personally, I used to write PyObjC code, so I barely see the difference anymore.
True, but that distinction gets lost when you read it aloud. Putting the commas in remind the reader to put in the pauses that make the sentence unambiguous.
The maintainability of code seems to have very little to do with how much the compiler holds your hand, and very much to do with how you write it. I've seen quite a bit of assembler code that is MUCH easier to understand and maintain than almost all of the MatLab code I've ever seen, and a good deal of the C++, Java, whatever is cool this week, code. Programmers today seem to have poorer self discipline skills because they rely on the language to catch their errors and force them to do things correctly. Until we've got true AI, a person (i.e. the programmer) will be better at that than the computer.
The only language feature I've ever seen that consistently makes code more readable is Python's whitespace requirement. Even that can be used for evil though, if somebody makes a habit of mixing spaces and tabs.
Many people consider (and have long considered) Office for Mac to be superior to the Windows one. It's developed by a separate team and they often try out features in the smaller market. Mac Office seems to have much better file consistency - it's more likely to handle Win Office or Open Office files correctly and not screw them up whereas Win Office seems to delight in moving figures and corrupting tables whenever you open a file it didn't create.
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Aw, a Christian apologist. Now, for many of the things I mentioned the bible DOES appear to support them. Several of the things I mentioned are actually either ordered or committed by God himself. But that's beside the point... my post didn't actually say that the bible condoned ANY of those things. Only that it contained them. Whoopsie. You should read carefully before bringing out the brimstone.
If a television program depicts (non biblical) mass rape, but as a bad thing, do you think Christian moralists would judge it appropriate for children?
The problem is, the bible is like the army - long stretches of absolute boredom punctuated occasionally by frantic action. A page turner it ain't.
I think they used mostly scrolls by the time Christians came along.
Come on, the bible is good wholesome reading for the whole family. Rape, pillaging, slavery, incest, pedophilia, bestiality, torture, biological warfare and glorification of questionable morals for all.
Good. Then you'll all get to deal with some of what I have to put up with when going into (or near) the US, and hopefully will vote for someone who will stop it.
Interesting how many management types use Sun Tzu as some kind of bible and completely ignore #5.
Depends on how the higher dimensional noodly appendage intersects our hyperplane. String, particle, cone, all different sections of the same object.
It's obviously the Thor particle, after that hammer that's so heavy.
In modern field theory a "particle" could just as well be described as "the tip of a noodly appendage, poking through into reality."
"if a blue chip stock price crashes in some kind of algorithm-fueled artificial negative feedback loop, billions can be lost... and thousands of jobs"
I don't understand the difference. If the blue chip price crashes, the idiots who put out low sell prices will lose money and get fired. That's so sad. Those people should be out of business. The problem comes when you protect those people, such as by reversing trades after the flash crash.
It would be an interesting experiment for someone to start up a stock exchange that has a two minute delay on trades or some other barrier to HFT. See if it wins in competition with the others.
The risk (to Amazon) is that their pricing will become a joke and nobody will use it.
If I buy something that looks like a good deal on Amazon and I'm consistently told that the seller is out of stock, I'm going to quit using Amazon.
Interesting. Where I live there's a law that if the register rings up a price higher than the price on the item, you pay the lowest price minus 10%. It encourages retailers to set their prices carefully. Usually what happens is that someone discovers a mismatch, gets the deal and the retailer hurriedly fixes the price tag.
Kind of sucks if you're an online retailer and you can sell out before you notice the problem, but those are the risks you take if you use an automated system.
He said you're overstating it. Which you are, at least in this post. I was actually about to reply that your first post was a tautology.
High impact factor journals publish things that are "trendy," i.e. of interest to many scientists. These things tend to be new, unexpected, or both. You can show mathematically that things that are new and unexpected are more likely to be incorrect, regardless of the quality of the research.
But good research that simply reaches the wrong conclusion isn't retracted (yes, anyone who reads journal articles, even old ones, as if they're Truth is a fool). Papers are retracted because errors were made or fraud was committed. It's worrisome that the retraction rate correlates with impact factor, but not really surprising. There are many reasons that might be, other than the one you've fixated on. The high impact factor journals do take their leadership positions seriously. For example, Nature has been on a bit of a campaign the last few years to improve the quality of the statistics in science. It's almost certain that some of the correlation is explained by the fact that articles in high impact factor journals are read, examined and replicated by more scientists.
Published retraction indexes sound like an excellent idea though.
Meh. People anthropomorphize all the time. What he meant is that the scientific method, both formally and in practice, includes skepticism as a fundamental feature. The standard of evidence is set higher than 50%+1 and you try to disprove hypotheses and theories.
Most religions, on the other hand, claim absolute truth.
Google is a web advertising company, as is Facebook. Apple sells computing devices, mostly mobile ones now.
Google does search, in order to sell ads. Facebook provides a way for people to keep track of each other, in order to sell ads. Apple sells music, books, movies and tv shows in order to sell iPhones, iPads and Macs.
Sure, because there aren't any C++ developers trowelling out tons of apps of questionable utility.
Stuck in your ways hey? There's nothing wrong with that syntax, it's just unfamiliar to you.
revalue = object.methodname(); would be as yucky to a SmallTalk or Objective C programmer who had never used anything else. Personally, I used to write PyObjC code, so I barely see the difference anymore.
True, but that distinction gets lost when you read it aloud. Putting the commas in remind the reader to put in the pauses that make the sentence unambiguous.
The maintainability of code seems to have very little to do with how much the compiler holds your hand, and very much to do with how you write it. I've seen quite a bit of assembler code that is MUCH easier to understand and maintain than almost all of the MatLab code I've ever seen, and a good deal of the C++, Java, whatever is cool this week, code. Programmers today seem to have poorer self discipline skills because they rely on the language to catch their errors and force them to do things correctly. Until we've got true AI, a person (i.e. the programmer) will be better at that than the computer.
The only language feature I've ever seen that consistently makes code more readable is Python's whitespace requirement. Even that can be used for evil though, if somebody makes a habit of mixing spaces and tabs.
I was asking how you could write such a great rant without even commenting on that little gem.
Many people consider (and have long considered) Office for Mac to be superior to the Windows one. It's developed by a separate team and they often try out features in the smaller market. Mac Office seems to have much better file consistency - it's more likely to handle Win Office or Open Office files correctly and not screw them up whereas Win Office seems to delight in moving figures and corrupting tables whenever you open a file it didn't create.
So the thesis for the "no" side is that grammar matters less now that writing has become a much more important day-to-day communication medium.
That makes perfect sense.
It should be "I helped my uncle, Jack, off his donkey." yes, it's always irritated me that people fix that example with a single comma.
And then my phone omits a period....