I have no problem with rich people. Sometimes I aspire to be one myself =) Certainly all new money is used by the rich, because it comes from the Federal Reserve and goes immediately to the other big banks who will use most of it to invest on their behalf, but at the same time a lot of rich folks are not part of that early process.
While I have no problem with rich people and clearly see how they benefit society, I do take issue with the growth of the gap between rich and poor that appears to be inherent in our system of money.
Furthermore, those who are first in possession of the new money have a huge advantage: the market has yet to be affected by it, so they can use it to purchase lots of goods at uninflated prices. By the time the new money gets to Joe Sixpack in the form of a necessary wage increase to keep up with inflation, the new equilibrium is all but settled and he ends up about where he was before.
Torrent sites ARE vital, dammit! And even though Russia and Sweden are little-known backwaters of the USA, they are still part of the USA and deserve the same protections that the more popular states get!
No, if the banks had been allowed to fail we would have entered a new utopia where money doesn't matter and people's net worth was based on how much good they could do in the world. As such, the "richest" people would have been the best people, and they could use the resources at their disposal to bring about world peace, the end of hunger, and OMG ponies!
See how easy it is to make unsupported counterfactual arguments?
I disagree. Science is a process, and one thing that is certain is that you can never be certain that you have all the facts. It's now taken for granted that excess stress warps your body, but until that was discovered there was no reason to believe that a sample containing all body types of men, women, and children was not randomized. And with radiation, there was no precedent for a substance that caused harm not days or weeks but years or decades later. The concept of such extremely delayed harm just hadn't been thought of.
You can't dismiss the erroneous stuff as "not science" simply because it turned out to be wrong. It's not as if the people doing it were stupid or lazy; it's just that nobody perceived the hidden flaws in the hypothesis (radiation is harmless) or methodology (poorhouse cadavers are a random sample). It is all a process of unwitting experimentation that has real consequences.
You can't view science the process as some thing that is separate from the people who practice it. It does not magically "progress" on its own and its conclusions are not foregone (or ever final, really). It relies entirely on smart and insightful people to stare at problems, new or old, and ask new questions. They are bound to find things that others missed and consequently falsify accepted truths, and they are bound to miss things themselves. The process results in increased knowledge about the universe we live in, but it contains its fair share of missteps along the way. To claim that it is "not science" if there are unknowns in play which later become rectified is to essentially invalidate the process, reserving "science" to mean "a final body of knowledge that we know for sure is true," a goal that is far, far off if not unattainable.
You skipped a step in your first calculation: the switches are per synapse, not per neuron. The number of synapses per neuron varies radically, but all the numbers are quite high.
Neurons such as Purkinje cells in the cerebellum can have over 1000 dendritic branches, making connections with tens of thousands of other cells; other neurons, such as the magnocellular neurons of the supraoptic nucleus, have only one or two dendrites, each of which receives thousands of synapses.
This has been done at least once with the film Russian Ark, an uninterrupted walk through St. Petersburg's Winter Palace with over 2000 actors and two live orchestras. The film's content won't be enthralling unless you enjoy history and art, which I do, but it's quite a technical achievement no matter what.
One story can be listened to here--it's a podcast and the story begins around 10:20, but I'll recount it here.
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) was first classified around 1900, but no one knew the cause. People decided that a logical step was to dissect the bodies of SIDS babies and compare them to normal cadavers. What they found was that the thymus gland, part of the immune system, was different. SIDS kids had thymuses which were twice the size of other cadavers, and its proximity to the windpipe led to the reasonable hypothesis that if the kid rolled over wrong, the gland would press on the trachea and suffocate the child while he slept.
The treatment proscribed with this was to shrink the thymus gland using radiation, doses of 200-400 rads. The treatment worked in shrinking the thymus all right, but the then-unknown side effect was to vastly increase the risk of cancer. Estimates put the death toll from this procedure alone at 20,000-30,000 people due to thyroid cancer which developed decades later. And this use of radiation was a very widespread phenomenon not limited to medical science: you could go into a shoe store and have your feet x-rayed, irradiated water was sold, and it was said everywhere that "radioactivity is harmless." So there is one ill: death on a massive scale due to a lack of knowledge of radiation's long-term effects.
But this particular story isn't over and goes even farther back to the 18th Century, a little after the Revolutionary War. The newly-formed medical schools needed bodies to dissect and would pay people to dig 'em up and bring 'em in. This didn't sit well with living relatives and there were riots, so most European countries (where the schools were) passed laws which mandated that anyone who died in a poorhouse would have his body given to the anatomists. The result is that the overwhelming majority (estimated to be 99%) of cadavers used in medical science were those of poor people.
All of which sounded fine until 1936 when Hans Selye showed that being poor causes physical changes in the body. One of the effects of chronic stress found very often in the poor is that the immune system is weakened, and part of that weakening is a shrunken thymus gland. So what was thought to be a normal thymus was not, and tens of thousands of children with perfectly healthy thymuses were irradiated because of reasoning that was completely logical yet mistaken.
I am in no way anti-science, and anyone who claims to be yet lives in any technological society is a fool at best and a hypocrite at worst. But the prevailing attitude is that science can do no harm when in fact it has and does cause harm--and there is no way to prevent that without stagnation. Anyone who refuses to admit as much is a zealot no longer grounded in reality.
An excellent book on the topic is Jacques Barzun's Science: The Glorious Entertainment. It was written in the 1960s but remains quite relevant today, especially in its insights as to how most people act as though science is their religion, with the same amount of zealotry and faith in what the "clergy" tell them.
The group mentality here is that Religion has done nothing good for the world while causing great ills and that Science does the exact opposite. Both claims are demonstrably false, but it's pointless to try and point out the good that religion has done. The ills of science are a little more accepted, but only slightly so.
Let me be clear: I take no issue with mocking the cult's wacky beliefs. What I take issue with is the misinformation in the summary that paints a much larger group as being completely irrational and that much of the "conversation" here is general religion-bashing; due in part to the atheist zealots who are even more vigilant of possible soapboxes than their religious counterparts, and due in part to the misleading headline. If you equate the belief in a supreme being with the belief that USB is the devil's connection then you are as much a zealot as those in the cult, and the fact that the reader is led to believe that this measure is backed by all Christians in Brazil shows a complete lack of journalistic integrity.
Feel free to abuse the moderation system and mark this Troll as well so that the Two Minutes Hate may continue uninterrupted.
The article's author says he hasn't found anything to back it up. The Brazilian article itself specifically says that it's an "evangelical cult."
But of course some cult rumored to be doing something bizarre isn't as sensational as generalizing it to all evangelical Christians in Brazil. The linked article's author is guilty of this, and Taco is guilty of repeating it. There's no question in my mind that the point is just to poke more fun at religion, in this case, for no good reason at all.
Interesting. I had heard of, and didn't care about, the Aqua Buddha thing--I did stuff in college, too, though usually it was just tossing people in the creek on their birthdays. I thought it was silly that Conway made a big deal about it, though I cared even less for Paul's manufactured indignance in his response.
The opthamologist certification was news to me, so I looked it up, and it's a little shady. For anyone interested, a detailed writeup (with opinions included) is here. His stated reason for creating his own cert board was that he shouldn't be required to re-certify if people who were certified before 1992 don't have to. I understand the sentiment, but..if you're going to take a stand on something like that, you should make it very public, which he hasn't done. And recertification consists of an exam every decade--that's not THAT much of a pain. This seems quite self-serving, which lines up with your accusations.
I am not from KY--why is Harlan famous, other than being the setting for the fantastic show Justified?
Rand never struck me as the same kind of man his father, Ron Paul, is. He has the look and manner of a groomed politician which I find inherently mistrustful, and some of what's coming out is proving that impression to be correct. I like some of his platform, and I like that he has pledged to DownsizeDC to introduce in the Senate a few very important bills that would do more to clean up Congress than anything done in the past hundred years.
The more I find out about stuff like what you listed, the less I trust him, but I think the fact that he is a darling of the Tea Party works in the public's favor: they're not known for ignoring things they don't like. The post I linked is one I wrote previously, and it details the DownsizeDC bills as well as how much public pressure matters. Paul is a first-term senator and will be watched very carefully by the people who put him there. If he's as self-serving as you make him out to be, he's going to run into problems very quickly.
Oh, I wouldn't count on that. I don't know about the other new Republican senators, but this certainly goes against Rand Paul's ideals. He's going to be a huge and welcome thorn in the side of both parties.
The difference is that/.'s comment system means that there will actually be some decent discussion of the issue. It's far from perfect, but it's the best I've encountered, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to read and take part in it. If you don't like it, you can always hide the section. I'm not trying to be adversarial; there's just really no other way to suggest that.
The election system is not the biggest issue. Washington has a tendency to corrupt just about everyone who goes there, even people with the best intentions. (Election reform is also damn near impossible in the current environment.)
What is needed is the watchful eye and the accusing mouth of the public. Public pressure works better than anything else. Fortunately, the excesses of the Bush administration were obvious enough to get people to pay attention, which is why you see so much talk about the (often) relatively smaller excesses of the Obama administration. The Republicans just elected to the House and Senate are going to be watched very carefully--certainly not by their fanboys, but by the sizable number of swing voters who made it possible for them to be put into office.
Indeed. Scams aren't new either--con men and grifters have been around for centuries. The advent of computers only made them more efficient, as it has done for just about everything.
Yes, this is also true. I posted in another topic recently about how the media is definitely the fourth branch of government, and how it has failed the people of this country. They share a lot of the blame, yet you and I have seen through it--what stops the vast majority of Americans? I believe that it's apathy, preferring to be spoon-fed news from the preferred spin-factory instead of taking the initiative to check out various sources to try to get at the truth.
Yes, it takes a lot of effort, and I guess I really shouldn't expect everyone to be as invested as I am. I don't have a good answer for reforming the media except to call them on things when I see them--I just wrote to the producers of WHYY's Fresh Air about this today--and to try to raise awareness of how complicit the media is in the polarization of American politics. If enough people get fed up about it, things will change--yesterday's election result is proof of that. It's just a lot harder to convince people that their news source is mostly a government and/or corporate shill than it is to convince them that Congress failed to fix the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no problem with rich people. Sometimes I aspire to be one myself =) Certainly all new money is used by the rich, because it comes from the Federal Reserve and goes immediately to the other big banks who will use most of it to invest on their behalf, but at the same time a lot of rich folks are not part of that early process.
While I have no problem with rich people and clearly see how they benefit society, I do take issue with the growth of the gap between rich and poor that appears to be inherent in our system of money.
Furthermore, those who are first in possession of the new money have a huge advantage: the market has yet to be affected by it, so they can use it to purchase lots of goods at uninflated prices. By the time the new money gets to Joe Sixpack in the form of a necessary wage increase to keep up with inflation, the new equilibrium is all but settled and he ends up about where he was before.
Fiat money is a tool for the rich to get richer.
Comparing the human brain to *any* human technology, be it a digital computer or an analog calculator, is a massive category error.
Hooray! Someone's talking sense! The link in my sig gives a number of additional examples of how our brains are not like computers.
(I hate URL shorteners too, but the original URL was too long to let me write anything meaningful enough to encourage interest.)
wants to remove the separation of state and religion and that he wants the US government to establish an Official Religion
[citation needed]
Torrent sites ARE vital, dammit! And even though Russia and Sweden are little-known backwaters of the USA, they are still part of the USA and deserve the same protections that the more popular states get!
No, if the banks had been allowed to fail we would have entered a new utopia where money doesn't matter and people's net worth was based on how much good they could do in the world. As such, the "richest" people would have been the best people, and they could use the resources at their disposal to bring about world peace, the end of hunger, and OMG ponies!
See how easy it is to make unsupported counterfactual arguments?
I saw this on CSI like eight years ago.
I disagree. Science is a process, and one thing that is certain is that you can never be certain that you have all the facts. It's now taken for granted that excess stress warps your body, but until that was discovered there was no reason to believe that a sample containing all body types of men, women, and children was not randomized. And with radiation, there was no precedent for a substance that caused harm not days or weeks but years or decades later. The concept of such extremely delayed harm just hadn't been thought of.
You can't dismiss the erroneous stuff as "not science" simply because it turned out to be wrong. It's not as if the people doing it were stupid or lazy; it's just that nobody perceived the hidden flaws in the hypothesis (radiation is harmless) or methodology (poorhouse cadavers are a random sample). It is all a process of unwitting experimentation that has real consequences.
You can't view science the process as some thing that is separate from the people who practice it. It does not magically "progress" on its own and its conclusions are not foregone (or ever final, really). It relies entirely on smart and insightful people to stare at problems, new or old, and ask new questions. They are bound to find things that others missed and consequently falsify accepted truths, and they are bound to miss things themselves. The process results in increased knowledge about the universe we live in, but it contains its fair share of missteps along the way. To claim that it is "not science" if there are unknowns in play which later become rectified is to essentially invalidate the process, reserving "science" to mean "a final body of knowledge that we know for sure is true," a goal that is far, far off if not unattainable.
You skipped a step in your first calculation: the switches are per synapse, not per neuron. The number of synapses per neuron varies radically, but all the numbers are quite high.
From WP:Neuron:
Neurons such as Purkinje cells in the cerebellum can have over 1000 dendritic branches, making connections with tens of thousands of other cells; other neurons, such as the magnocellular neurons of the supraoptic nucleus, have only one or two dendrites, each of which receives thousands of synapses.
This has been done at least once with the film Russian Ark, an uninterrupted walk through St. Petersburg's Winter Palace with over 2000 actors and two live orchestras. The film's content won't be enthralling unless you enjoy history and art, which I do, but it's quite a technical achievement no matter what.
I'm hoping you don't own them for the same reasons...
Thanks for illustrating my point.
One story can be listened to here--it's a podcast and the story begins around 10:20, but I'll recount it here.
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) was first classified around 1900, but no one knew the cause. People decided that a logical step was to dissect the bodies of SIDS babies and compare them to normal cadavers. What they found was that the thymus gland, part of the immune system, was different. SIDS kids had thymuses which were twice the size of other cadavers, and its proximity to the windpipe led to the reasonable hypothesis that if the kid rolled over wrong, the gland would press on the trachea and suffocate the child while he slept.
The treatment proscribed with this was to shrink the thymus gland using radiation, doses of 200-400 rads. The treatment worked in shrinking the thymus all right, but the then-unknown side effect was to vastly increase the risk of cancer. Estimates put the death toll from this procedure alone at 20,000-30,000 people due to thyroid cancer which developed decades later. And this use of radiation was a very widespread phenomenon not limited to medical science: you could go into a shoe store and have your feet x-rayed, irradiated water was sold, and it was said everywhere that "radioactivity is harmless." So there is one ill: death on a massive scale due to a lack of knowledge of radiation's long-term effects.
But this particular story isn't over and goes even farther back to the 18th Century, a little after the Revolutionary War. The newly-formed medical schools needed bodies to dissect and would pay people to dig 'em up and bring 'em in. This didn't sit well with living relatives and there were riots, so most European countries (where the schools were) passed laws which mandated that anyone who died in a poorhouse would have his body given to the anatomists. The result is that the overwhelming majority (estimated to be 99%) of cadavers used in medical science were those of poor people.
All of which sounded fine until 1936 when Hans Selye showed that being poor causes physical changes in the body. One of the effects of chronic stress found very often in the poor is that the immune system is weakened, and part of that weakening is a shrunken thymus gland. So what was thought to be a normal thymus was not, and tens of thousands of children with perfectly healthy thymuses were irradiated because of reasoning that was completely logical yet mistaken.
I am in no way anti-science, and anyone who claims to be yet lives in any technological society is a fool at best and a hypocrite at worst. But the prevailing attitude is that science can do no harm when in fact it has and does cause harm--and there is no way to prevent that without stagnation. Anyone who refuses to admit as much is a zealot no longer grounded in reality.
An excellent book on the topic is Jacques Barzun's Science: The Glorious Entertainment. It was written in the 1960s but remains quite relevant today, especially in its insights as to how most people act as though science is their religion, with the same amount of zealotry and faith in what the "clergy" tell them.
Are you really surprised?
The group mentality here is that Religion has done nothing good for the world while causing great ills and that Science does the exact opposite. Both claims are demonstrably false, but it's pointless to try and point out the good that religion has done. The ills of science are a little more accepted, but only slightly so.
Let me be clear: I take no issue with mocking the cult's wacky beliefs. What I take issue with is the misinformation in the summary that paints a much larger group as being completely irrational and that much of the "conversation" here is general religion-bashing; due in part to the atheist zealots who are even more vigilant of possible soapboxes than their religious counterparts, and due in part to the misleading headline. If you equate the belief in a supreme being with the belief that USB is the devil's connection then you are as much a zealot as those in the cult, and the fact that the reader is led to believe that this measure is backed by all Christians in Brazil shows a complete lack of journalistic integrity.
Feel free to abuse the moderation system and mark this Troll as well so that the Two Minutes Hate may continue uninterrupted.
Ah, I was looking at the city, not the county. Though even on the county WP page there's only a brief mention of the murders.
Whoever modded your original response as Troll is out of line.
Aww, isn't that cute? The little AC still thinks he has a major party looking out for his interests!
The article's author says he hasn't found anything to back it up. The Brazilian article itself specifically says that it's an "evangelical cult."
But of course some cult rumored to be doing something bizarre isn't as sensational as generalizing it to all evangelical Christians in Brazil. The linked article's author is guilty of this, and Taco is guilty of repeating it. There's no question in my mind that the point is just to poke more fun at religion, in this case, for no good reason at all.
Interesting. I had heard of, and didn't care about, the Aqua Buddha thing--I did stuff in college, too, though usually it was just tossing people in the creek on their birthdays. I thought it was silly that Conway made a big deal about it, though I cared even less for Paul's manufactured indignance in his response.
The opthamologist certification was news to me, so I looked it up, and it's a little shady. For anyone interested, a detailed writeup (with opinions included) is here. His stated reason for creating his own cert board was that he shouldn't be required to re-certify if people who were certified before 1992 don't have to. I understand the sentiment, but..if you're going to take a stand on something like that, you should make it very public, which he hasn't done. And recertification consists of an exam every decade--that's not THAT much of a pain. This seems quite self-serving, which lines up with your accusations.
I am not from KY--why is Harlan famous, other than being the setting for the fantastic show Justified?
Rand never struck me as the same kind of man his father, Ron Paul, is. He has the look and manner of a groomed politician which I find inherently mistrustful, and some of what's coming out is proving that impression to be correct. I like some of his platform, and I like that he has pledged to DownsizeDC to introduce in the Senate a few very important bills that would do more to clean up Congress than anything done in the past hundred years.
The more I find out about stuff like what you listed, the less I trust him, but I think the fact that he is a darling of the Tea Party works in the public's favor: they're not known for ignoring things they don't like. The post I linked is one I wrote previously, and it details the DownsizeDC bills as well as how much public pressure matters. Paul is a first-term senator and will be watched very carefully by the people who put him there. If he's as self-serving as you make him out to be, he's going to run into problems very quickly.
***facepalm***
You're absolutely right. That was a moment of sheer idiocy, and I apologize for getting it all over your screen.
Oh, I wouldn't count on that. I don't know about the other new Republican senators, but this certainly goes against Rand Paul's ideals. He's going to be a huge and welcome thorn in the side of both parties.
to navigate it's intricacies
Dammit, I hate it when I do that.
So you're a generalist, then? =p
The difference is that /.'s comment system means that there will actually be some decent discussion of the issue. It's far from perfect, but it's the best I've encountered, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to read and take part in it. If you don't like it, you can always hide the section. I'm not trying to be adversarial; there's just really no other way to suggest that.
The election system is not the biggest issue. Washington has a tendency to corrupt just about everyone who goes there, even people with the best intentions. (Election reform is also damn near impossible in the current environment.)
What is needed is the watchful eye and the accusing mouth of the public. Public pressure works better than anything else. Fortunately, the excesses of the Bush administration were obvious enough to get people to pay attention, which is why you see so much talk about the (often) relatively smaller excesses of the Obama administration. The Republicans just elected to the House and Senate are going to be watched very carefully--certainly not by their fanboys, but by the sizable number of swing voters who made it possible for them to be put into office.
America is waking up.
Indeed. Scams aren't new either--con men and grifters have been around for centuries. The advent of computers only made them more efficient, as it has done for just about everything.
Yes, this is also true. I posted in another topic recently about how the media is definitely the fourth branch of government, and how it has failed the people of this country. They share a lot of the blame, yet you and I have seen through it--what stops the vast majority of Americans? I believe that it's apathy, preferring to be spoon-fed news from the preferred spin-factory instead of taking the initiative to check out various sources to try to get at the truth.
Yes, it takes a lot of effort, and I guess I really shouldn't expect everyone to be as invested as I am. I don't have a good answer for reforming the media except to call them on things when I see them--I just wrote to the producers of WHYY's Fresh Air about this today--and to try to raise awareness of how complicit the media is in the polarization of American politics. If enough people get fed up about it, things will change--yesterday's election result is proof of that. It's just a lot harder to convince people that their news source is mostly a government and/or corporate shill than it is to convince them that Congress failed to fix the economy.