I agree with you; teaching with the available tools can be done incorrectly. That doesn't mean it can't be done correctly.
Teaching WITH the tools isn't the problem. The problem is allowing the tools to replace the thought process before the thought process has been internalized. The chemistry student had not yet internalized the concept of neutral buffer solutions and pH, so the answer that resulted in a neutral buffer solution being more acidic than concentrated HCl wasn't obviously wrong. And yet the "tool" gave him that answer.
I have no problem with people using a calculator to do math, as long as they aren't in math class being taught the processes that the calculator is replacing. Or to do chemsistry, as long as they aren't supposed to be learning the processes that the calculator is doing for them. Then the calculator is a tool and not a crutch.
To assume that a thing with red blinky light is a bomb is a display of poor training. I agree that it SHOULD alert people.
Why do people keep trying to ignore ALL the events and focus on just one thing? Nobody ASSUMED it was a bomb. SOMEONE was alerted. She asked a question about the blinky thing and was IGNORED. So, even according to you, there was no sign of poor training, there was exactly what should have happened. Someone was alerted. Someone was ignored and so she moved the alert up the chain. Like she should.
If you're looking for bombs, don't assume they all have countdown timers on them like they do in the movies.
This has nothing to do with the incident in Boston. There was no countdown timer, and the airport employee was not "looking for bombs". She was working in the normal course of her duties and saw something odd. She asked about it and got ignored, which is an even odder reaction.
What should she have done, written of off as harmless? And then it turns out to be a bomb, and the review of the surveilance tapes shows that the person with the bomb was noticed by an airport employee who did nothing about it. Yeah, you'll be in the front of the line offering her a new job and telling her she did the right thing.
Personally I think that shows a fundamental flaw in our schools - we should be taught using the tools available to us, we shouldn't be taught to ignore those tools.
When I have a hard question to answer in the real world, I use Google.
Imagine a world where nobody has to think about anything anymore. Who will be writing the web pages that I can go find the answers on?
Here's the point: when you are a student you are supposed to be learning HOW to do things and WHY they are done that way. HOW doesn't mean "press the following keys on my calculator", it means knowing what the physical interpretation is and the limitations and when to do what.
Here's one quick example. In chemistry, when solving concentration problems using equilibrium constants, there is a quick way that ignores decreases in concentration of some species and the long way that requires solving the quadratic equation. Knowing when you can use the short way and when you need the long way, and why, is part of what you need to learn in that class.
Here's another example: if you are given a circuit for an amplifier in electronics class and are asked for the DC voltage gain, yes, you could get the answer by entering all the components in a spice simulation and dividing the DC output by the DC input, but you won't know WHY the gain is what it is, or even how to change the circuit to get a different gain.
And here's an anecdotal story about why "using the tools available" in a learning class is not a good idea. I taught an undergrad analytical chem lab. One of the students forgot his calculator on quiz day. He begged to borrow mine. "It's an HP, it's reverse polish..." "No problem", he said. He took the quiz, and one of the problems was about the hydrogen ion concentration in a certain solution. The correct answer was somewhere around 10^-7 (pH of 7). HIS answer was: 1. One. 1.0000000. His minor mistake was pressing enter before pressing divide. His REAL mistake was not realizing that his answer was patently ridiculous, off by 6 orders of magnitude. But the calculator, his "tool", was beyond question. That's why "learning to use the tools" must FOLLOW learning to use the mind.
I don't know how to read this statement. We weren't talking about "real". You made a comment about the impossibility of rationally determining the truth of religion, and I pointed out that there were a significant number of posts/posters here making the outright claim that all religions are science fiction.
I think those people are real, I just think they are demonstrating the same kind of irrational behaviour they accuse religious believers of. If they think religious belivers cannot prove the existance of God, then they, too, cannot disprove the existance of God.
If you are now applying the term "real" instead of the previous "truth", then you should know that "real" and "truth" are two different concepts. There are those who deny the holocaust. They are real (they exist), the ideas are real (they exist), but they simply aren't true.
No-one can disprove this dinosaur that appears only to him, but it doesn't mean that we show him any particular deference because of it.
Being deliberately insulting to a majority of the people on the planet may buy you karma points in/., but it doesn't make you look like less of a jerk or more intelligent. You can show deference to, e.g., the Pope, not because you think he believes in a purple dinosaur but because of his status as a human being, without being a jerk about it and comparing his beliefs to some purple dinosaur you fictionalized.
Technically, Christianity was also derived from a science fiction book
Technically, you are wrong.
L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction books, and the Star Wars universe, were written and marketed as science fiction from day one. Neither the Bible nor the Q'uran were marketed or written as science fiction, much less "fiction" of any kind. Deliberately misrepresenting the facts doesn't make your arguments against religion any stronger, they only make you look like a jerk.
It's also something you do when you're tired or distracted and just there to pick up a friend.
Why you do it and why you are at the airport really isn't relevant to what I said. Doing it for whatever reason is still a way to get the attention of people you don't want to be attracting attention from.
Ticket agents don't have the right to expect you to id yourself unless you're trying to fly somewhere.
Red herring. Airport employees have the right to expect you to be responsive to simple questions about unusual activities. They have the right to expect to be treated like human beings, not like simple appliances that you can ignore. She wasn't expected to id herself, she was asked about the flashing lights and clay-like object she was carrying. "Oh, it's a statue (shows statue) and this is a kool project I'm working on..." would have prevented a lot of nonsense.
If you're a terrorist, you sort of do want that, at least until the bomb goes off.
If you are a terrorist, you want as many people as possible to be SCARED, and if they aren't noticing you they they aren't going to be SCARED. You don't have to be a bomber to be a terrorist, Fred. Bombs are illegal and can get yourself killed; simply acting goofy enough to scare people will get you questioned but unlikely to cause you death, and still accomplish the goal of scaring people.
If your goal is to test the responses of security to different situations, you will be pushing the system incrementally until you push hard enough so it notices you. That's how you know where the limits are. Wearing a flashing light device is certainly pushing the system.
Even if your goal is full-out attack, you might start by sending in a front to attract attention, like the first guy attacking the flight attendant. You send one guy up first, hoping all the defenses identify themselves, and then you take out the defenses. So no, "not being noticed" is not a global property of terrorists.
was said instead as "Many muslim women have appeared Burqa-less, so why can't she?" they would get the pants sued off them.
No lawsuit. Why bother suing when the store has already been burned to the ground and the manager and assistant manager killed? The latter is a much more effective deterrent than the former, and much more likely. Just ask the Dutch(?) newspapers.
Sortof like the response yesterday to the farmer in Backwater, Nowhere, who was holding up the construction of a microwave tower. Instead of suing him, simply putting the tower elsewhere, or figuring out some other means of delivering network access (microwave towers aren't the only way to get the Internet, dude), the first responses from/.ers suggested polluting his crops with radioactive material or simply burning them down. If you can't get what you want by asking, do it by force.
I think this really depends on whether Jediism is actually a registered religion.
Well, the simple answer is to include someone's midichlorian level on their id. You have a zero, you ain't a Jedi, and you can't wear the hoodie, bro.
A little? Come on, you have MIT right there in the city, you expect this shit. It's the price you pay for having a local crop of geniuses.
Oh, please, it doesn't take genius to make a blinking light or to attach one to a sweatshirt. Ignoring potential risks is NOT a price to pay for having a university in town.
Getting the attention of the police in unpleasant ways IS the price to pay for acting out of the ordinary and refusing to respond to simple questions.
I still have the right to be goofy, and risking a bullet wound for some decorative LEDs on my shirt is way over the top.
So don't act in a way that escalates the situation into a confrontation like that. Simple solution.
It's not like mad bombers advertise their devices.
But it is like terrorists to act in ways that encourage terror and disrupt normal operations. It is like terrorists to act in ways that test security responses to various activities while remaining within the law. If you are going to disrupt a facility, you don't just leave your briefcase sitting by itself, you put a blinking light on it to attract attention. You ain't a very good terrorist if nobody pays any attention to what you are doing.
Of course now, after the fact, she says. She has no reason to lie, either.
I'd say that calling the police over somebody with flashing lights, or a red hat, or a leather jacket (all of which have equal relevance to terrorism or bombs) constitutes flying into a panic.
Lots of people wear red hats. Lots of people have leather jackets. Very few people have red blinky lights, and VERY FEW REFUSE TO ANSWER A SIMPLE QUESTION FROM AIRPORT EMPLOYEES ABOUT THAT LIGHT. Yes, you seem to think that "she says" should be all it takes, but it isn't.
By the way, calling security at the place you work when you see something odd and the person who is being odd won't communicate with you is not "flying into a panic".
Just to be clear, this was not a TSA checkpoint,
I didn't say it was a TSA checkpoint, Fred. I said that some people are stupid enough to think that joking about bombs is smart EVEN AT a TSA checkpoint and thus they need to put up signs to warn them. The fact she wasn't at a TSA checkpoint is irrelevant. The fact was that she acted stupidly or arrogantly or both and she got called on it. Do you really believe that "other people are carrying suitcases" is an excuse for not responding to a simple question about something unusual YOU are doing? Then YOU are a nitwit, too.
... that somebody could fly into a panic over a few blinking lights
They didn't "fly into a panic". She didn't just walk into an airport with a blinking light attached to her.
She walked into an airport with a blinking electronic device AND DELIBERATELY IGNORED A SIMPLE QUESTION ASKED TO HER BY AN AIRPORT EMPLOYEE. That is either stupid ("I don't have to deal with airport employees") or arrogant ("Airport employees are beneath my level of acknowledgement") or both.
That employee reported the situation, which is hardly "fly[ing] into a panic".
The police came to investigate the situation, knowing in advance that they were dealing with an uncooperative subject.
Nobody panicked. The nitwit with the blinky was a nitwit and acted like one. "She goes to MIT so she's socially incompetent" isn't an excuse. It is rarely smart to act like a nitwit when dealing with security issues, but enough people do that they have to put up signs that warn that jokes about bombs are not funny at TSA checkpoints.
It was simply unimaginable that they would have the resources to invade the public's privacy
You cannot be serious. Who was stupid enough not to think that cops would have the resources to invade people's privacy? Certainly not the founders -- they wrote the fourth amendment.
Oh, you mean that they wouldn't be able to invade everyone's all the time! So what? One, ten, a thousand. Still invasion of privacy. If it's valid to do to one person for no reason, it's valid to do to a million for no reason.
Where once privacy protections were taken for granted by the very nature of what tailing people required,
You mean "back when criminals were stupid and took chances based on the odds...".
An intentional radio emitter which has not been FCC certificated and will not have the required paperwork for import to the US definitely is illegal for sale in the US. It is also almost certainly illegal to USE in every country on the planet, as well. Certainly within the US.
like radar detectors,
Radar detectors are not intentional emitters and do not require the same certification. They must be certified for either class A or class B emission levels. Because they ARE active radio receivers, they can be detected by the signals they leak. They are, however, illegal in few places, including Virginia and Ontario, CA.
Had it been a search, it would have been unconstitutional.
It wasn't, and you repeating it ad-nauseum doesn't make it so. It was a police officer investigating a reported crime following the suspect. The suspect met the officer at the door and then walked away, back into the scene of the alleged crime.
If you owned a business and a police officer found an open door at 2AM, you'd feel pretty good if he entered the premises and caught the guy prying your cash register open, yes? Or should the cop think "nothing suspicious here, I'll just move along"?
If someone was breaking into my house and the cops showed up, met the guy at the door, and then didn't bother following him because he went back inside my house, I'd be REALLY PISSED -- at the cops. If the guy got away because he slipped out the back before reinforcements arrived, I'd be REALLY REALLY pissed at the cops.
And if the suspect went back into the house to retrieve a gun so he could shoot the cop, you'd probably be dancing in the streets that yet another jack-booted thug was put down, huh? Hate to break your bubble, but the courts have consistently supported the right of the cops to frisk a suspect for the purpose of ensuring their own safety. Following the suspect through an open door as he walks back into the scene of a reported crime to ensure their own safety is not beyond the pale.
Maybe you're only comparing your record to cyclists you've noticed. The ones acting like idiots tend to leave an impression, much like the car-driving idiots.
No, in THIS town, the ones acting responsibly leave the impression, because they are so rare. Yes, I notice when a biker stops when he should. I notice when he signals a turn. Those who don't do either are so common that they are easily forgettable.
Last night's fun bike incident: a young lady wearing over-the-ear headphones, waving her arms about apparently in time to the music, perhaps emulating the dance moves in her favorite music video. Zero hands on the handlebars. She was being followed by another rider who was having to concentrate on her because she was going slower than he was in the same bike lane. We got to the three-way stop. She didn't touch her handlebars, just kept waving her arms and busted the stop sign at full speed. So did the biker behind her. I turned north and lost sight of both.
That depends on your personal definition of "anecdotal." But that's not what the statement I replied to was saying. The statement I replied to was a very clear statement that "I did X and Y happened" is unreliable and contains no useful data. That is patently absurd, as I've already shown.
In science, when we see that after doing X, Y happened, we don't immediately make a new law.
Nobody said we did. What _I_ said was that we DO get data from "I did X and Y happened", and that is it not the unreliable useless statement that it was claimed to be. Please stop going hyperbolic, ok?
We need to repeat X until Y happens every time.
That's just patently absurd, too. If Y doesn't happen the first time, then X doesn't cause Y. If you need to change X so that Y happens, then it isn't X anymore, it's X' or Z or something else. No, science is NOT just repeating the same thing over and over until the desired result appears.
For instance, if you stood in front of the radar antenna, and the chocolate bar in your pocket melted, you would need to check all the variables to see why that happened. Did you just happen to step from the shadow and into the sun? Did your body heat finally catch up to the chocolate?
If you read carefully, you would have noticed that I didn't say that the data we got from "I stood in front of the microwave antenna..." PROVED anything, I said it was hardly the useless unreliable data that science has learned to ignore that the OP claimed it was. Of course you would do other experiments to see what happens, but this particular piece of "I did X and Y happened" was reliable and useful, because it triggered the investigation and put the idea "hey, maybe microwaves can be used to cook" in someone's head.
If you rely solely on anecdotal evidence, you would immediately jump to the conclusion that it was the radar dish even though you were standing right next to a dryer vent.
I tire of responding to your hyperbole. Nobody said you would leap to any final conclusions or claim "proof" of anything based on a single "I did X and Y happened" observation, so continuing down this path is unreliable and useless.
Aw come on, do you happen to remotely understand the science behind any of the topics you mentioned? "global warming"? genetics?, Physics?
Yes, I do.
Gregor Mendel made many experiments using peas to help develop the science of genetics. Most of those experiments involved "I crossed a pea with attribute X with a pea with attribute Y and Z was the result." That's exactly the statement that "science" has learned contains no reliable or useful data. And yet, to Gregor Mendel, it contained data about what attributes were genetically determined and what happens when you mix them.
X-rays were discovered by bombarding a target with high energy electrons (a cathode ray tube) and noticing the result. The idea that microwaves could be used to cook food came about because a radio engineer working in front of a microwave antenna noticed that the candy bar in his pocket melted. "I stood in front of the microwave antenna and my candy bar melted." The same allegedly unreliable, dataless statement that we were told "science" ignores.
Or are you just throwing out strawmen intentionally?
Since I'm not throwing out strawmen, I cannot be throwing them out intentionally. I understand that the concepts might be hard for some people to grasp, but science really does use "I did X and Y happened" on a daily, recurring, regular basis in its search for the truth.
That sounds like it is falsifiable, but that we don't have the resources for the experiments to be conducted. "We can't do it" and "it can never ever be done no matter what resources we have" are not the same thing. We can't test it now, but it is possible that we learn terraforming and find planets sufficiently similar to the Earth that we could later be able to test it.
First of all, "sufficiently similar" is not "identical except for one thing". Second, we might be able to do this in ten thousand years, but ten thousand years is ten thousand years from now and there will be many, many changes that will invalidate the results.
And finally, the very act of using the resources from THIS planet to attempt to create a duplicate will change this planet in ways that almost certainly will invalidate the experiment.
In order to perform this experiment, you would need to construct a planet identical to earth except for the presence of humans. That means the same diameter, the same plant and other animal life, the same distance from the same sun in an identical orbit. It cannot be done. The theory is not falsifiable.
Yes. There is no way to disprove the claim that man is causing global warming because there is no possible experiment that man can conduct that removes him from the possibilities. I.e., were we able to create a duplicate planet without humans but otherwise identical to earth, we could observe the climate. If that climate behaved identically, then we have shown that man was not the cause of the result. He could not be the cause if the effect occured without him.
Unfortunately, simply relying on ancient "data" is not sufficient. Too many things change over time, and much, if not all, of the ancient "data" is not data but someone's interpretation of the actual data. Nobody was here to make observations, so there can be no direct data.
And to stop the "but we've got lots of data" responses... here's just one example. We have ice cores with ancient trapped bubbles, from which we claim to have data about atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The DATA is actually a measurement of concentration of CO2 in the gas in the tiny trapped bubble. The ASSUMPTION is that this gas will neither migrate out of nor collect in those bubbles over the tens of thousands of years they were buried, or that CO2 would diffuse into or out of the bubbles after they were brought to the surface. There are many things that occur over long time periods that aren't obvious when studying something for a short time. Rocks seem to be rather stable and unchanging, but the Grand Canyon is what happens over long periods of time to those stable rocks.
Many things that "science" claims are facts fall into the same kind of bucket. Evolution (origin of life 'E'volution, not short-term mutation 'e'volution.) The Big Bang. Things that MAY or MAY NOT be true, and nobody will ever be able to prove one way or the other. In the case of AGW, there is enough evidence that something else could be the cause that assuming the 'A' is a fact is stretching the point.
For example: I got chiropractic care following a car injury, and I tell you for a fact that chiropractic adjustment afforded me relief from pain. This is not anecdotal: this is an irrefutable fact.
This is where you are wrong. It is not a fact, it is your interpretation of three facts.
Fact 1: You hurt.
Fact 2: You went to a chiropractor.
Fact 3: You didn't hurt after you went.
You interpret those three facts to assign the cause of the relief to the chiropractor. However, as has been already mentioned, this does not prove causality, although this data (the facts) are reliable (we trust your report) and useful (you weren't worse off after you went, so at LEAST we can say that whatever he did to you did not make you worse.)
You could have simply gotten better on your own with no benefit from the chiro. Your facts don't rule out that possibility.
The next step is to find someone with an identical injury and NOT send him to the chiro and see if Fact 3 still happens. The only way to prove causality is to do duplicate experiments and see that the only time that 3 happens is if 2 also happens and 3 does NOT happen when 2 does not.
But that takes lots of "I did X and Y happened", which we've been told science thinks is unreliable and produces no useful data.
That's correct -- all of those are insufficient to show causality.
The statement was not about causality, the statement I replied to was "Science long ago abandoned the idea that reliable and useful data could be gained by "After I did X, Y happened"". There is a big difference between "proving causality" and "reliable and useful data".
In fact, each of the examples of "I did X and Y happened" are part of "science". Mendel's genetic experiments, analytical chemistry, Galileo and gravity, experimental subatomic physics, and the discovery of the modern microwave oven.
And yes, modern science has adopted even the first piece of anecdotal evidence in the quest to prove anthropogenic causes of global warming. That's science's failure, though, not it's advantage. Science cannot use anything BUT anecdotal evidence for proving AGW because there is no experiment that can be performed to disprove it.
In either case, "science" uses a lot of "I did X and Y happened" situations to reach valid and useful conclusions. Just the simple example of "I mixed X and Y and got a yellow precipitate" is one step in a checklist of determining the identity of an unknown substance in the analytical chem lab -- at least for students who are learning the process. That bit of data tells you something about the unknown, and that makes the bit of data both reliable and useful.
In short, you just have a poor understanding of how science is done.
That's funny. I do it on a daily basis. It's your understanding of how science happens that needs a bit of reworking. Or maybe just a groking of the difference between "data" and "proof".
Science long ago abandoned the idea that reliable and useful data could be gained by "After I did X, Y happened"
Really? You mean like "after the development of the automobile, the global climate started getting warmer"? Like "after I crossed one pea having quality X with another pea having quality Y, a pea with both X and Y was produced"? Like "after I mixed solution A with solution B, a yellow precipitate formed"? Like "after I dropped a small marble and a large rock from the balcony of this tilting building, they both hit the ground at the same time"? Like "after I bombarded a lead target with a high-energy beam of electrons, a bunch of particles were produced"? Like "after I stood in front of the radar antenna, the bar of chocolate in my pocket was melted"?
Yeah, you're right. No data ever comes of "after I did X, Y happened". It's a good thing we simply ignore any data produced that way.
Yes, you get the benefit of not having a paper record of your bill to use for tax or other purposes, not having a reminder that a bill is due, having the vendor suck the money out of your account before you even know there is a problem with the last bill, and the fun of trying to get the money back when you prove they overcharged you for something.
Like Comcast, which offered me a "delivered, no cost digital self-install kit" and then went ahead and charged me $10 for it anyway.
Thanks, I think I'll keep the bill and pay after I see it is correct.
Companies should not be allowed to profit from people being sick or hurt.
So every doctor should just break even on his multi-year, multi-tens-of-thousands of dollar investment in schooling, and his million dollar investments in simple medical equipment? They should all eat at the local soup kitchen and live in the homeless shelter because eating well and living well would be profiting from sick and hurt. Yeah. That's a good way to ensure a good supply of doctors to deal with all the colds and flus and sprained ankles that will start showing up at the ER when it all becomes free.
I understand that doctors have to make a living but sacrificing health care for share price is unethical at best and immoral at worst.
You know, the last time I needed them, the ambulance drivers didn't bother asking me for insurance information before carting me to the hospital, and the hospital cared mostly about my medical history before they treated me. It would have been very hard for the doctor to ask me who my insurance carrier was while I was under general anethesia, so I suspect that he didn't bother. And I know he didn't ask before I went under. Funny that, huh? Medical care without any concern for share price, at a private hospital.
You know, I think it's great that my surgeon has some perks in life, since his skill and training and years of experience was what put me back together so well. I think the nurses are UNDERpaid. If YOU want a car mechanic operating on you, that's ok with me. I think some incentive for hard working people to stay in the profession of medicine is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Teaching WITH the tools isn't the problem. The problem is allowing the tools to replace the thought process before the thought process has been internalized. The chemistry student had not yet internalized the concept of neutral buffer solutions and pH, so the answer that resulted in a neutral buffer solution being more acidic than concentrated HCl wasn't obviously wrong. And yet the "tool" gave him that answer.
I have no problem with people using a calculator to do math, as long as they aren't in math class being taught the processes that the calculator is replacing. Or to do chemsistry, as long as they aren't supposed to be learning the processes that the calculator is doing for them. Then the calculator is a tool and not a crutch.
Why do people keep trying to ignore ALL the events and focus on just one thing? Nobody ASSUMED it was a bomb. SOMEONE was alerted. She asked a question about the blinky thing and was IGNORED. So, even according to you, there was no sign of poor training, there was exactly what should have happened. Someone was alerted. Someone was ignored and so she moved the alert up the chain. Like she should.
If you're looking for bombs, don't assume they all have countdown timers on them like they do in the movies.
This has nothing to do with the incident in Boston. There was no countdown timer, and the airport employee was not "looking for bombs". She was working in the normal course of her duties and saw something odd. She asked about it and got ignored, which is an even odder reaction.
What should she have done, written of off as harmless? And then it turns out to be a bomb, and the review of the surveilance tapes shows that the person with the bomb was noticed by an airport employee who did nothing about it. Yeah, you'll be in the front of the line offering her a new job and telling her she did the right thing.
Yeah, and then you can bring deep, cold seawater up from the depths of the ocean to cool it off, and bingo, cold sterile water!
When I have a hard question to answer in the real world, I use Google.
Imagine a world where nobody has to think about anything anymore. Who will be writing the web pages that I can go find the answers on?
Here's the point: when you are a student you are supposed to be learning HOW to do things and WHY they are done that way. HOW doesn't mean "press the following keys on my calculator", it means knowing what the physical interpretation is and the limitations and when to do what.
Here's one quick example. In chemistry, when solving concentration problems using equilibrium constants, there is a quick way that ignores decreases in concentration of some species and the long way that requires solving the quadratic equation. Knowing when you can use the short way and when you need the long way, and why, is part of what you need to learn in that class.
Here's another example: if you are given a circuit for an amplifier in electronics class and are asked for the DC voltage gain, yes, you could get the answer by entering all the components in a spice simulation and dividing the DC output by the DC input, but you won't know WHY the gain is what it is, or even how to change the circuit to get a different gain.
And here's an anecdotal story about why "using the tools available" in a learning class is not a good idea. I taught an undergrad analytical chem lab. One of the students forgot his calculator on quiz day. He begged to borrow mine. "It's an HP, it's reverse polish..." "No problem", he said. He took the quiz, and one of the problems was about the hydrogen ion concentration in a certain solution. The correct answer was somewhere around 10^-7 (pH of 7). HIS answer was: 1. One. 1.0000000. His minor mistake was pressing enter before pressing divide. His REAL mistake was not realizing that his answer was patently ridiculous, off by 6 orders of magnitude. But the calculator, his "tool", was beyond question. That's why "learning to use the tools" must FOLLOW learning to use the mind.
I don't know how to read this statement. We weren't talking about "real". You made a comment about the impossibility of rationally determining the truth of religion, and I pointed out that there were a significant number of posts/posters here making the outright claim that all religions are science fiction.
I think those people are real, I just think they are demonstrating the same kind of irrational behaviour they accuse religious believers of. If they think religious belivers cannot prove the existance of God, then they, too, cannot disprove the existance of God.
If you are now applying the term "real" instead of the previous "truth", then you should know that "real" and "truth" are two different concepts. There are those who deny the holocaust. They are real (they exist), the ideas are real (they exist), but they simply aren't true.
No-one can disprove this dinosaur that appears only to him, but it doesn't mean that we show him any particular deference because of it.
Being deliberately insulting to a majority of the people on the planet may buy you karma points in /., but it doesn't make you look like less of a jerk or more intelligent. You can show deference to, e.g., the Pope, not because you think he believes in a purple dinosaur but because of his status as a human being, without being a jerk about it and comparing his beliefs to some purple dinosaur you fictionalized.
So you admit that those /.ers who are calling all religions "science fiction" are not being rational. Thanks.
Technically, you are wrong.
L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction books, and the Star Wars universe, were written and marketed as science fiction from day one. Neither the Bible nor the Q'uran were marketed or written as science fiction, much less "fiction" of any kind. Deliberately misrepresenting the facts doesn't make your arguments against religion any stronger, they only make you look like a jerk.
Why you do it and why you are at the airport really isn't relevant to what I said. Doing it for whatever reason is still a way to get the attention of people you don't want to be attracting attention from.
Ticket agents don't have the right to expect you to id yourself unless you're trying to fly somewhere.
Red herring. Airport employees have the right to expect you to be responsive to simple questions about unusual activities. They have the right to expect to be treated like human beings, not like simple appliances that you can ignore. She wasn't expected to id herself, she was asked about the flashing lights and clay-like object she was carrying. "Oh, it's a statue (shows statue) and this is a kool project I'm working on ..." would have prevented a lot of nonsense.
If you're a terrorist, you sort of do want that, at least until the bomb goes off.
If you are a terrorist, you want as many people as possible to be SCARED, and if they aren't noticing you they they aren't going to be SCARED. You don't have to be a bomber to be a terrorist, Fred. Bombs are illegal and can get yourself killed; simply acting goofy enough to scare people will get you questioned but unlikely to cause you death, and still accomplish the goal of scaring people.
If your goal is to test the responses of security to different situations, you will be pushing the system incrementally until you push hard enough so it notices you. That's how you know where the limits are. Wearing a flashing light device is certainly pushing the system.
Even if your goal is full-out attack, you might start by sending in a front to attract attention, like the first guy attacking the flight attendant. You send one guy up first, hoping all the defenses identify themselves, and then you take out the defenses. So no, "not being noticed" is not a global property of terrorists.
No lawsuit. Why bother suing when the store has already been burned to the ground and the manager and assistant manager killed? The latter is a much more effective deterrent than the former, and much more likely. Just ask the Dutch(?) newspapers.
Sortof like the response yesterday to the farmer in Backwater, Nowhere, who was holding up the construction of a microwave tower. Instead of suing him, simply putting the tower elsewhere, or figuring out some other means of delivering network access (microwave towers aren't the only way to get the Internet, dude), the first responses from /.ers suggested polluting his crops with radioactive material or simply burning them down. If you can't get what you want by asking, do it by force.
I think this really depends on whether Jediism is actually a registered religion.
Well, the simple answer is to include someone's midichlorian level on their id. You have a zero, you ain't a Jedi, and you can't wear the hoodie, bro.
Oh, please, it doesn't take genius to make a blinking light or to attach one to a sweatshirt. Ignoring potential risks is NOT a price to pay for having a university in town.
Getting the attention of the police in unpleasant ways IS the price to pay for acting out of the ordinary and refusing to respond to simple questions.
I still have the right to be goofy, and risking a bullet wound for some decorative LEDs on my shirt is way over the top.
So don't act in a way that escalates the situation into a confrontation like that. Simple solution.
It's not like mad bombers advertise their devices.
But it is like terrorists to act in ways that encourage terror and disrupt normal operations. It is like terrorists to act in ways that test security responses to various activities while remaining within the law. If you are going to disrupt a facility, you don't just leave your briefcase sitting by itself, you put a blinking light on it to attract attention. You ain't a very good terrorist if nobody pays any attention to what you are doing.
Of course now, after the fact, she says. She has no reason to lie, either.
I'd say that calling the police over somebody with flashing lights, or a red hat, or a leather jacket (all of which have equal relevance to terrorism or bombs) constitutes flying into a panic.
Lots of people wear red hats. Lots of people have leather jackets. Very few people have red blinky lights, and VERY FEW REFUSE TO ANSWER A SIMPLE QUESTION FROM AIRPORT EMPLOYEES ABOUT THAT LIGHT. Yes, you seem to think that "she says" should be all it takes, but it isn't.
By the way, calling security at the place you work when you see something odd and the person who is being odd won't communicate with you is not "flying into a panic".
Just to be clear, this was not a TSA checkpoint,
I didn't say it was a TSA checkpoint, Fred. I said that some people are stupid enough to think that joking about bombs is smart EVEN AT a TSA checkpoint and thus they need to put up signs to warn them. The fact she wasn't at a TSA checkpoint is irrelevant. The fact was that she acted stupidly or arrogantly or both and she got called on it. Do you really believe that "other people are carrying suitcases" is an excuse for not responding to a simple question about something unusual YOU are doing? Then YOU are a nitwit, too.
They didn't "fly into a panic". She didn't just walk into an airport with a blinking light attached to her.
She walked into an airport with a blinking electronic device AND DELIBERATELY IGNORED A SIMPLE QUESTION ASKED TO HER BY AN AIRPORT EMPLOYEE. That is either stupid ("I don't have to deal with airport employees") or arrogant ("Airport employees are beneath my level of acknowledgement") or both.
That employee reported the situation, which is hardly "fly[ing] into a panic".
The police came to investigate the situation, knowing in advance that they were dealing with an uncooperative subject.
Nobody panicked. The nitwit with the blinky was a nitwit and acted like one. "She goes to MIT so she's socially incompetent" isn't an excuse. It is rarely smart to act like a nitwit when dealing with security issues, but enough people do that they have to put up signs that warn that jokes about bombs are not funny at TSA checkpoints.
You cannot be serious. Who was stupid enough not to think that cops would have the resources to invade people's privacy? Certainly not the founders -- they wrote the fourth amendment.
Oh, you mean that they wouldn't be able to invade everyone's all the time! So what? One, ten, a thousand. Still invasion of privacy. If it's valid to do to one person for no reason, it's valid to do to a million for no reason.
Where once privacy protections were taken for granted by the very nature of what tailing people required,
You mean "back when criminals were stupid and took chances based on the odds...".
An intentional radio emitter which has not been FCC certificated and will not have the required paperwork for import to the US definitely is illegal for sale in the US. It is also almost certainly illegal to USE in every country on the planet, as well. Certainly within the US.
like radar detectors,
Radar detectors are not intentional emitters and do not require the same certification. They must be certified for either class A or class B emission levels. Because they ARE active radio receivers, they can be detected by the signals they leak. They are, however, illegal in few places, including Virginia and Ontario, CA.
Had it been a search, it would have been unconstitutional.
It wasn't, and you repeating it ad-nauseum doesn't make it so. It was a police officer investigating a reported crime following the suspect. The suspect met the officer at the door and then walked away, back into the scene of the alleged crime.
If you owned a business and a police officer found an open door at 2AM, you'd feel pretty good if he entered the premises and caught the guy prying your cash register open, yes? Or should the cop think "nothing suspicious here, I'll just move along"?
If someone was breaking into my house and the cops showed up, met the guy at the door, and then didn't bother following him because he went back inside my house, I'd be REALLY PISSED -- at the cops. If the guy got away because he slipped out the back before reinforcements arrived, I'd be REALLY REALLY pissed at the cops.
And if the suspect went back into the house to retrieve a gun so he could shoot the cop, you'd probably be dancing in the streets that yet another jack-booted thug was put down, huh? Hate to break your bubble, but the courts have consistently supported the right of the cops to frisk a suspect for the purpose of ensuring their own safety. Following the suspect through an open door as he walks back into the scene of a reported crime to ensure their own safety is not beyond the pale.
No, in THIS town, the ones acting responsibly leave the impression, because they are so rare. Yes, I notice when a biker stops when he should. I notice when he signals a turn. Those who don't do either are so common that they are easily forgettable.
Last night's fun bike incident: a young lady wearing over-the-ear headphones, waving her arms about apparently in time to the music, perhaps emulating the dance moves in her favorite music video. Zero hands on the handlebars. She was being followed by another rider who was having to concentrate on her because she was going slower than he was in the same bike lane. We got to the three-way stop. She didn't touch her handlebars, just kept waving her arms and busted the stop sign at full speed. So did the biker behind her. I turned north and lost sight of both.
That depends on your personal definition of "anecdotal." But that's not what the statement I replied to was saying. The statement I replied to was a very clear statement that "I did X and Y happened" is unreliable and contains no useful data. That is patently absurd, as I've already shown.
In science, when we see that after doing X, Y happened, we don't immediately make a new law.
Nobody said we did. What _I_ said was that we DO get data from "I did X and Y happened", and that is it not the unreliable useless statement that it was claimed to be. Please stop going hyperbolic, ok?
We need to repeat X until Y happens every time.
That's just patently absurd, too. If Y doesn't happen the first time, then X doesn't cause Y. If you need to change X so that Y happens, then it isn't X anymore, it's X' or Z or something else. No, science is NOT just repeating the same thing over and over until the desired result appears.
For instance, if you stood in front of the radar antenna, and the chocolate bar in your pocket melted, you would need to check all the variables to see why that happened. Did you just happen to step from the shadow and into the sun? Did your body heat finally catch up to the chocolate?
If you read carefully, you would have noticed that I didn't say that the data we got from "I stood in front of the microwave antenna..." PROVED anything, I said it was hardly the useless unreliable data that science has learned to ignore that the OP claimed it was. Of course you would do other experiments to see what happens, but this particular piece of "I did X and Y happened" was reliable and useful, because it triggered the investigation and put the idea "hey, maybe microwaves can be used to cook" in someone's head.
If you rely solely on anecdotal evidence, you would immediately jump to the conclusion that it was the radar dish even though you were standing right next to a dryer vent.
I tire of responding to your hyperbole. Nobody said you would leap to any final conclusions or claim "proof" of anything based on a single "I did X and Y happened" observation, so continuing down this path is unreliable and useless.
Yes, I do.
Gregor Mendel made many experiments using peas to help develop the science of genetics. Most of those experiments involved "I crossed a pea with attribute X with a pea with attribute Y and Z was the result." That's exactly the statement that "science" has learned contains no reliable or useful data. And yet, to Gregor Mendel, it contained data about what attributes were genetically determined and what happens when you mix them.
X-rays were discovered by bombarding a target with high energy electrons (a cathode ray tube) and noticing the result. The idea that microwaves could be used to cook food came about because a radio engineer working in front of a microwave antenna noticed that the candy bar in his pocket melted. "I stood in front of the microwave antenna and my candy bar melted." The same allegedly unreliable, dataless statement that we were told "science" ignores.
Or are you just throwing out strawmen intentionally?
Since I'm not throwing out strawmen, I cannot be throwing them out intentionally. I understand that the concepts might be hard for some people to grasp, but science really does use "I did X and Y happened" on a daily, recurring, regular basis in its search for the truth.
First of all, "sufficiently similar" is not "identical except for one thing". Second, we might be able to do this in ten thousand years, but ten thousand years is ten thousand years from now and there will be many, many changes that will invalidate the results.
And finally, the very act of using the resources from THIS planet to attempt to create a duplicate will change this planet in ways that almost certainly will invalidate the experiment.
In order to perform this experiment, you would need to construct a planet identical to earth except for the presence of humans. That means the same diameter, the same plant and other animal life, the same distance from the same sun in an identical orbit. It cannot be done. The theory is not falsifiable.
Yes. There is no way to disprove the claim that man is causing global warming because there is no possible experiment that man can conduct that removes him from the possibilities. I.e., were we able to create a duplicate planet without humans but otherwise identical to earth, we could observe the climate. If that climate behaved identically, then we have shown that man was not the cause of the result. He could not be the cause if the effect occured without him.
Unfortunately, simply relying on ancient "data" is not sufficient. Too many things change over time, and much, if not all, of the ancient "data" is not data but someone's interpretation of the actual data. Nobody was here to make observations, so there can be no direct data.
And to stop the "but we've got lots of data" responses ... here's just one example. We have ice cores with ancient trapped bubbles, from which we claim to have data about atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The DATA is actually a measurement of concentration of CO2 in the gas in the tiny trapped bubble. The ASSUMPTION is that this gas will neither migrate out of nor collect in those bubbles over the tens of thousands of years they were buried, or that CO2 would diffuse into or out of the bubbles after they were brought to the surface. There are many things that occur over long time periods that aren't obvious when studying something for a short time. Rocks seem to be rather stable and unchanging, but the Grand Canyon is what happens over long periods of time to those stable rocks.
Many things that "science" claims are facts fall into the same kind of bucket. Evolution (origin of life 'E'volution, not short-term mutation 'e'volution.) The Big Bang. Things that MAY or MAY NOT be true, and nobody will ever be able to prove one way or the other. In the case of AGW, there is enough evidence that something else could be the cause that assuming the 'A' is a fact is stretching the point.
This is where you are wrong. It is not a fact, it is your interpretation of three facts.
Fact 1: You hurt.
Fact 2: You went to a chiropractor.
Fact 3: You didn't hurt after you went.
You interpret those three facts to assign the cause of the relief to the chiropractor. However, as has been already mentioned, this does not prove causality, although this data (the facts) are reliable (we trust your report) and useful (you weren't worse off after you went, so at LEAST we can say that whatever he did to you did not make you worse.)
You could have simply gotten better on your own with no benefit from the chiro. Your facts don't rule out that possibility.
The next step is to find someone with an identical injury and NOT send him to the chiro and see if Fact 3 still happens. The only way to prove causality is to do duplicate experiments and see that the only time that 3 happens is if 2 also happens and 3 does NOT happen when 2 does not.
But that takes lots of "I did X and Y happened", which we've been told science thinks is unreliable and produces no useful data.
The statement was not about causality, the statement I replied to was "Science long ago abandoned the idea that reliable and useful data could be gained by "After I did X, Y happened"". There is a big difference between "proving causality" and "reliable and useful data".
In fact, each of the examples of "I did X and Y happened" are part of "science". Mendel's genetic experiments, analytical chemistry, Galileo and gravity, experimental subatomic physics, and the discovery of the modern microwave oven.
And yes, modern science has adopted even the first piece of anecdotal evidence in the quest to prove anthropogenic causes of global warming. That's science's failure, though, not it's advantage. Science cannot use anything BUT anecdotal evidence for proving AGW because there is no experiment that can be performed to disprove it.
In either case, "science" uses a lot of "I did X and Y happened" situations to reach valid and useful conclusions. Just the simple example of "I mixed X and Y and got a yellow precipitate" is one step in a checklist of determining the identity of an unknown substance in the analytical chem lab -- at least for students who are learning the process. That bit of data tells you something about the unknown, and that makes the bit of data both reliable and useful.
In short, you just have a poor understanding of how science is done.
That's funny. I do it on a daily basis. It's your understanding of how science happens that needs a bit of reworking. Or maybe just a groking of the difference between "data" and "proof".
Really? You mean like "after the development of the automobile, the global climate started getting warmer"? Like "after I crossed one pea having quality X with another pea having quality Y, a pea with both X and Y was produced"? Like "after I mixed solution A with solution B, a yellow precipitate formed"? Like "after I dropped a small marble and a large rock from the balcony of this tilting building, they both hit the ground at the same time"? Like "after I bombarded a lead target with a high-energy beam of electrons, a bunch of particles were produced"? Like "after I stood in front of the radar antenna, the bar of chocolate in my pocket was melted"?
Yeah, you're right. No data ever comes of "after I did X, Y happened". It's a good thing we simply ignore any data produced that way.
Yes, you get the benefit of not having a paper record of your bill to use for tax or other purposes, not having a reminder that a bill is due, having the vendor suck the money out of your account before you even know there is a problem with the last bill, and the fun of trying to get the money back when you prove they overcharged you for something.
Like Comcast, which offered me a "delivered, no cost digital self-install kit" and then went ahead and charged me $10 for it anyway.
Thanks, I think I'll keep the bill and pay after I see it is correct.
So every doctor should just break even on his multi-year, multi-tens-of-thousands of dollar investment in schooling, and his million dollar investments in simple medical equipment? They should all eat at the local soup kitchen and live in the homeless shelter because eating well and living well would be profiting from sick and hurt. Yeah. That's a good way to ensure a good supply of doctors to deal with all the colds and flus and sprained ankles that will start showing up at the ER when it all becomes free.
I understand that doctors have to make a living but sacrificing health care for share price is unethical at best and immoral at worst.
You know, the last time I needed them, the ambulance drivers didn't bother asking me for insurance information before carting me to the hospital, and the hospital cared mostly about my medical history before they treated me. It would have been very hard for the doctor to ask me who my insurance carrier was while I was under general anethesia, so I suspect that he didn't bother. And I know he didn't ask before I went under. Funny that, huh? Medical care without any concern for share price, at a private hospital.
You know, I think it's great that my surgeon has some perks in life, since his skill and training and years of experience was what put me back together so well. I think the nurses are UNDERpaid. If YOU want a car mechanic operating on you, that's ok with me. I think some incentive for hard working people to stay in the profession of medicine is a good thing.