I've spent a lot of time with Finns, and I have a couple close Finnish friends.
I would say that there is a character, at least in Finland, of a practicality that almost borders on pessimism. On one hand, this is good. You don't have people suing the school because there child got a 'F', you
don't have people wanting to ban all guns because some crazy person shot someone else. You don't have this crazy idealism that forces people to want to make radical, sweeping changes to society.
I have read somewhere that there is a theory that the United States is a kind of utopia. The immigrants who came over here to make a living where willing to give up their language, their culture, their social network of friends and family in order to live in a new world. The kind of person who became an immigrant would be an optimist, one who believed in a better tomorrow, that the promised land was just over the horizon. This person was probably overly optimistic and over-confident. These are the kinds of traits you would need to survive in a totally new and different land. The people who stayed at home decided to tough out whatever crap they were dealing with in their everyday life.
In one sense, this is good. Americans are always driven to create that utopia. We are always inventing and willing to change and even revolutionize.
On the other hand, we are immensely dissapointed that we don't yet live in that utopia. We are always looking for that dream job, that lottery ticket, that invention that will make us rich. Or a new technology that will bring us happiness and world peace: "This is the next, greatest, newest thing, and it is going to totally revolutionize your life and the United States!" I find that at least my Finnish friends are less materialistic, more satisfied with smaller houses and less stuff, and more apt to look for happiness with friends and family. Not that I'm saying they are happy -- in fact, they have high alcoholism and suicide rates -- but they answers they look for in life revolve more around people than they do things.
Maybe it has more to do with the politics of business, rather than the technical merits. If they support OpenSolaris, it looks like they are supporting Sun (regardless of what the reality of supporting OpenSolaris). If they go with Linux, they don't appear to have any allegiance to any other major tech company.
There also is the theory that men who are on the Autistic spectrum have a harder time sucessfully having a baby -- i.e. getting a decent job, finding a spouse, etc. So, they take longer and are older when they do have a child.
I don't think you really bought Sirius for Stern. Here's why:
When Stern was on terrestrail radio, he broadcasted from 6AM to 10AM Eastern time. They had about 20-30 minutes of commercials. So, in a week, you got about 12.5 hours of Stern ( 2.5 hours * 5 days).
Now that he's on Satellite, he is regularly on until 12 noon. That's six hours, minus about 10-15 minutes of commercials. He has taken off about half of his Fridays. That's right, he is still on Fridays. So, you are getting 20.25 hours ( 4.5 hours * 4.5 days ) on Sirius.
So you were getting way more Stern than you ever got. Also, the shows are regularly re-broadcast later in the day and evening, in case you weren't able to catch the whole show in the morning. So on terrestrial radio, if you didn't catch his four hour show in the morning, you didn't get it at all. Now, you can listen to all six hours in the morning, afternoon, evening, and at night.
You say in your subject "Stern == boring". How is it that Stern was interesting when you were listening to bleeps and half an hour of commericials on terrestrial, but now that he is on satellite doing outrageous stuff, not breaking for two hours, he's suddenly boring?
You bought Sirius for Stern, and decided that getting twice the Stern you got on terrestrial radio wasn't enough, so you "fixed" it by moving to XM, where you got no Stern whatsoever? Uh, what are you listening to on XM? Oprah's half-hour-a-week show on her whole friggin channel?
I'm sorry, but I can't help but thinking you are an anti-Stern troll.
That's exactly right. Fiction, or a story, is not interactive. Fiction is a retelling *of the past*. It's not what you're doing right now.
A story has three parts. In the first act, we have the status quo, situation normal. A good storyteller might call this the set up. Then, something happens that disturbs the status quo -- something that the protagonist has to deal with. They can't go back to the status quo. In the third act, there is the final confrontation with whatever the obstacle is. After the final confrontation, there is a new equalibrium, a new status quo.
So, if you are having a bad day, you don't know where the story ends. You might get in a car wreck in the morning. You might get fired by your boss in the afternoon for being late. Your wife might leave you in the evening for getting fired and wrecking the car. At any point, you might decide to tell a story about 'the car wreck', 'the firing', or 'my wife leaving me', or you might tell a story about 'my horrible day'. Any one of those events might be the climax or final confrontation of this particular story you are choosing to tell.
You have to decide in advance what events *of the past* are going to be in your story. You have to know the climax of the story in order to build it up properly. This subject is coincidentally the subject of my last journal entry.
In this wikipedia article, it gives a reference to this snippet of Feynman's text which "Describes why element 137 is the last classically stable element."
So I guess the answer is that an ion is not a 'classically stable element'.
Nobody is saying we should do nothing. GP asked if we should impose sanctions. You say that attention is warranted. What exactly does that mean?
Let the punishment fit the crime. Isn't there a difference between you calling and threatening to harm my children and actually harming them? Should we impose the same penalties on NK for *saying* they have a bomb, and actually testing one?
I think the question still stands. What should our response be?
I think the news is that there is still *no* confirmation. North Korea said they were going to test a nuclear bomb, there was an explosion, and AFAIK, they claimed success. However, we're a week out and we are still not sure.
So yes, we should know by now, but we don't. This is news.
That's true. I did give the caveat that this wasn't a Utopia. Also, let me add that the family we stayed with was an Indigenous Quichua family, not a Hispanic Ecuadorian family. So there are some differences. One of the problems is that there is absolutely no privacy. Everyone knows (and watches) everything you do. People have to sneak about on moonless nights to have sex. If you really get fed up with someone and don't want to interact with them, you have to leave and go live with some other relatives for a while. You don't have your own room, or a door you can shut, to get away from people -- they lived in open-air, plywood-floored, thatched roof huts.
Personally, I was only there for 10 weeks -- not long enough to get fed up with anyone -- but when I came back, I felt a profound loneliness -- sleeping alone, quietness, not seeing people's faces and hearing their voices.
Again, it's not a Utopia, but at least in my mind, too many people are preferable to not enough. I grew up as the oldest of four children in a small house, so my upbringing may be a bit different than an average American's. My place was always noisey, with too many annoying younger siblings running around. I have a hard time sleeping without noise.
However, as far as raising children, I think it's a better experience for a child to have several people competing to faun over them than two overworked parents saying "Not now, I'm busy", or taking out there stress by discplining and micromanaging their children. And there is a difference between actually helping take care of a child versus just telling someone else how to do it.
I dated a Chinese girl who was raised for several years when she was a teenager by her grandmother. Her parents lived and worked in different cities. While it might seem like some kind of child neglect to American sensibilities, to her and her grandmother it was a great time. Her grandmother was retired and had time to teach her piano, singing, dancing, and calligraphy. It was fortunate she spent this time with her because her grandmother died shortly after she went back to live with her parents.
I am in my late 20s, and several people I know have babies. While they are happy with the children, they realize is is basically a lot of frustrating work rearing children. Children will play power games with their parents that they wouldn't dare with their grandparents. It would help tremendously, at least as far as my friends are concerned, to have other people helping out with the kids. And we do sort of have this in our society, with day care and school. But the impersonal nature of these instituions can't do better than having loving relatives who have a personal interest in the kids future.
I wasn't being sarcastic. I don't think 'sensitiveness', in the sense of caring and considerate, is a hallmark trait of Aspies. Often it's reported that Aspies are *insensitive*, cold, callous, uncaring, emotionless, etc. Now, that's not the reality inside the Aspie's head; but that's what normal people percieve. Also, Aspies are reported as overly-sensitive, in the sense of having inapropriate emotional reactions to what others percieve as minor things.
I was diagnosed with Asperger's, so I am not just talking out of nowhere.
I would be fine with it too, if it were discussed and voted on in public, instead of agreed to in private, in violation of the constitution ( specifically the authority of the Senate to enter into Treaty ), and rammed down our throats.
Why do you think that employment in the IT industry causes divorce? Long hours?
Personally, I feel that people who are attracted to IT, and those who succeed in IT, are people on the Autism spectrum. People diagnosed as having Aspergers syndrome or Aspergers usually have:
Lack of observed desire for friendship
Poor ability to make friends
Indifferent to the feelings of others
Social awkwardness
Indiscriminate social interaction
Lack of eye contact
Brief response to questions
Gullibility
Sounds like an average woman's dream guy.
Couple that with easy divorce and people not willing to make sacrifices for a marriage, you have divorce.
Personally, I think the ideal of marriage of a man and a woman who are best friends and meet each other's fantasy of the perfect make is unrealistic. It creates a disillusioned, jaded populace. I spent a summer in a field study school with an Indigenous family in Ecuador. The living pattern was basically the oldest mom and dad, their children, grandchildren, and various extended family members and in-laws. Life was centered around the cooking fire, and to me, it felt like there was a big party that never ended.
Now, I'm not saying the system was perfect or a utopia, but it seems that the young couples had less stress raising young children because they had a greater support network. Children basically ran around freely and could entertain each other. Other women and grandmothers would handle children who needed more care.
In the US and Europe, people live basically isolated, lonely, stressed out lives.
"Umm, your going to have to help me follow your logic here. You say that the Douglas' structural theory correctly predicts Kosherness of animals that were not originaly specified by divine revelation. So does that mean that God is somehow still involved in Kosher classification?"
It depends on what 'involved' means.
A lot of people are looking for rational reasons to explain why certain animals are kosher and some are not, other than "God said so; that's all we need". (The one rabbi I spoke to was satisfied with the "God said so" answer.) A lot of people buy the 'health' theory -- that it was dangerous to eat pork and shelfish in the hot middle-eastern climate. However, pigs and shelfish are a small part of the animals considered to be unkosher. Why aren't camels kosher? Why not birds of prey? This is where the health theory fails -- they aren't particularly germy. It's not even clear that pigs or shelfish are really that dangerous, any more than other kinds of meat in the hot sun. There are a lot of unkosher animals that are perfectly healthy to eat, even in the middle east.
Douglas' theory is that unkosher animals are unkosher because they don't fit in with the categories or kinds of animals that God created in the six days of creation. This seems to explain *every* animal listed as not Kosher.
It also accurately predicts what animals are later ruled unkosher. If God's specification of Kosherness is based on categories, or otherwise similar to Douglas' theory, I guess you could stay that God is still sort of declaring certain animals clean and unclean.
Sorry, I'm lost on the nuclear war bit. Are pigs and shelfish more susceptible to storing radioactive particles, moreso than other animals? Where can I read more about the wars in Hindu writings?
What Delay did was a kind of money laundering -- there are limits to what individuals or corporations can give, so Delay got around those limits by giving money to an organization, which in turn gave it to a candidate, to whom Delay had already maxed out his contribution. But it is not illegal for corporations to give money.
Yeah, sounds like more failure-prone technological solutions to the war on terror, like gait recognition, face recognition, headline scanning, which all are failure-prone, technological solutions to a human problem. What we really need is people skills, like actual fluent translators, experts with experience, covert agents, and inside guys.
It seems to me that modern nation-states are realizing that they are mostly too small to have any weight in the current and upcoming political environment. There exists now the European Union, the Eurasion Union, the African Union, Caribbean Community, South American Community of Nations, and the Arab League.
Orwell correctly predicted that the future would have continental super-states. Nowadays, the only securable border is an ocean.
"There are also talks of absolutely prohibiting croporate political donations,"
There may be talk, but for decades now, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that corporations are legal persons, and enjoy all the constitutional protections afforded to persons. So, if we ever passed a law that forbade corporate political donations, the Supreme Court would strike it down as unconstitutional. And corporations would certainly bring it all the way up to the Supreme Court.
The only way to fix this clusterfack is a constitutional amendment removing corporations' personhood.
The reason I bring up penguins is that this theory makes correct predictions about animals that aren't specifically referenced in the Bible. So the health theory doesn't really say anything about penguins or ostriches -- I don't know if they are particularly germy, like pigs.
But 2000 years later, when Jews are living all around the world, and they have to decide whether or not new animals, such as ostriches or penguins, are Kosher, the Douglas' structural theory correctly predicts that they aren't Kosher. In fact, when you look at whether or not new animals are Kosher, Douglas' theory generally makes correct predictions, whereas the germ theory is kind of mum.
A lot of people on the autistic spectrum do better with pressure on the chest. For this reason, they sell weighted blankets to help them sleep. So, for AS people, it is not about being close and warmth, but just plain old mechanical pressure.
Slashdot Mirror
I've spent a lot of time with Finns, and I have a couple close Finnish friends.
I would say that there is a character, at least in Finland, of a practicality that almost borders on pessimism. On one hand, this is good. You don't have people suing the school because there child got a 'F', you don't have people wanting to ban all guns because some crazy person shot someone else. You don't have this crazy idealism that forces people to want to make radical, sweeping changes to society.
I have read somewhere that there is a theory that the United States is a kind of utopia. The immigrants who came over here to make a living where willing to give up their language, their culture, their social network of friends and family in order to live in a new world. The kind of person who became an immigrant would be an optimist, one who believed in a better tomorrow, that the promised land was just over the horizon. This person was probably overly optimistic and over-confident. These are the kinds of traits you would need to survive in a totally new and different land. The people who stayed at home decided to tough out whatever crap they were dealing with in their everyday life.
In one sense, this is good. Americans are always driven to create that utopia. We are always inventing and willing to change and even revolutionize.
On the other hand, we are immensely dissapointed that we don't yet live in that utopia. We are always looking for that dream job, that lottery ticket, that invention that will make us rich. Or a new technology that will bring us happiness and world peace: "This is the next, greatest, newest thing, and it is going to totally revolutionize your life and the United States!" I find that at least my Finnish friends are less materialistic, more satisfied with smaller houses and less stuff, and more apt to look for happiness with friends and family. Not that I'm saying they are happy -- in fact, they have high alcoholism and suicide rates -- but they answers they look for in life revolve more around people than they do things.
Maybe it has more to do with the politics of business, rather than the technical merits. If they support OpenSolaris, it looks like they are supporting Sun (regardless of what the reality of supporting OpenSolaris). If they go with Linux, they don't appear to have any allegiance to any other major tech company.
There also is the theory that men who are on the Autistic spectrum have a harder time sucessfully having a baby -- i.e. getting a decent job, finding a spouse, etc. So, they take longer and are older when they do have a child.
I don't think you really bought Sirius for Stern. Here's why:
When Stern was on terrestrail radio, he broadcasted from 6AM to 10AM Eastern time. They had about 20-30 minutes of commercials. So, in a week, you got about 12.5 hours of Stern ( 2.5 hours * 5 days).
Now that he's on Satellite, he is regularly on until 12 noon. That's six hours, minus about 10-15 minutes of commercials. He has taken off about half of his Fridays. That's right, he is still on Fridays. So, you are getting 20.25 hours ( 4.5 hours * 4.5 days ) on Sirius.
So you were getting way more Stern than you ever got. Also, the shows are regularly re-broadcast later in the day and evening, in case you weren't able to catch the whole show in the morning. So on terrestrial radio, if you didn't catch his four hour show in the morning, you didn't get it at all. Now, you can listen to all six hours in the morning, afternoon, evening, and at night.
You say in your subject "Stern == boring". How is it that Stern was interesting when you were listening to bleeps and half an hour of commericials on terrestrial, but now that he is on satellite doing outrageous stuff, not breaking for two hours, he's suddenly boring?
You bought Sirius for Stern, and decided that getting twice the Stern you got on terrestrial radio wasn't enough, so you "fixed" it by moving to XM, where you got no Stern whatsoever? Uh, what are you listening to on XM? Oprah's half-hour-a-week show on her whole friggin channel?
I'm sorry, but I can't help but thinking you are an anti-Stern troll.
Have you ever heard of sarcasm?
That's exactly right. Fiction, or a story, is not interactive. Fiction is a retelling *of the past*. It's not what you're doing right now.
A story has three parts. In the first act, we have the status quo, situation normal. A good storyteller might call this the set up. Then, something happens that disturbs the status quo -- something that the protagonist has to deal with. They can't go back to the status quo. In the third act, there is the final confrontation with whatever the obstacle is. After the final confrontation, there is a new equalibrium, a new status quo.
So, if you are having a bad day, you don't know where the story ends. You might get in a car wreck in the morning. You might get fired by your boss in the afternoon for being late. Your wife might leave you in the evening for getting fired and wrecking the car. At any point, you might decide to tell a story about 'the car wreck', 'the firing', or 'my wife leaving me', or you might tell a story about 'my horrible day'. Any one of those events might be the climax or final confrontation of this particular story you are choosing to tell.
You have to decide in advance what events *of the past* are going to be in your story. You have to know the climax of the story in order to build it up properly. This subject is coincidentally the subject of my last journal entry.
In this wikipedia article, it gives a reference to this snippet of Feynman's text which "Describes why element 137 is the last classically stable element."
So I guess the answer is that an ion is not a 'classically stable element'.
Nobody is saying we should do nothing. GP asked if we should impose sanctions. You say that attention is warranted. What exactly does that mean?
Let the punishment fit the crime. Isn't there a difference between you calling and threatening to harm my children and actually harming them? Should we impose the same penalties on NK for *saying* they have a bomb, and actually testing one?
I think the question still stands. What should our response be?
I think the news is that there is still *no* confirmation. North Korea said they were going to test a nuclear bomb, there was an explosion, and AFAIK, they claimed success. However, we're a week out and we are still not sure.
So yes, we should know by now, but we don't. This is news.
That's true. I did give the caveat that this wasn't a Utopia. Also, let me add that the family we stayed with was an Indigenous Quichua family, not a Hispanic Ecuadorian family. So there are some differences. One of the problems is that there is absolutely no privacy. Everyone knows (and watches) everything you do. People have to sneak about on moonless nights to have sex. If you really get fed up with someone and don't want to interact with them, you have to leave and go live with some other relatives for a while. You don't have your own room, or a door you can shut, to get away from people -- they lived in open-air, plywood-floored, thatched roof huts.
Personally, I was only there for 10 weeks -- not long enough to get fed up with anyone -- but when I came back, I felt a profound loneliness -- sleeping alone, quietness, not seeing people's faces and hearing their voices.
Again, it's not a Utopia, but at least in my mind, too many people are preferable to not enough. I grew up as the oldest of four children in a small house, so my upbringing may be a bit different than an average American's. My place was always noisey, with too many annoying younger siblings running around. I have a hard time sleeping without noise.
However, as far as raising children, I think it's a better experience for a child to have several people competing to faun over them than two overworked parents saying "Not now, I'm busy", or taking out there stress by discplining and micromanaging their children. And there is a difference between actually helping take care of a child versus just telling someone else how to do it.
I dated a Chinese girl who was raised for several years when she was a teenager by her grandmother. Her parents lived and worked in different cities. While it might seem like some kind of child neglect to American sensibilities, to her and her grandmother it was a great time. Her grandmother was retired and had time to teach her piano, singing, dancing, and calligraphy. It was fortunate she spent this time with her because her grandmother died shortly after she went back to live with her parents.
I am in my late 20s, and several people I know have babies. While they are happy with the children, they realize is is basically a lot of frustrating work rearing children. Children will play power games with their parents that they wouldn't dare with their grandparents. It would help tremendously, at least as far as my friends are concerned, to have other people helping out with the kids. And we do sort of have this in our society, with day care and school. But the impersonal nature of these instituions can't do better than having loving relatives who have a personal interest in the kids future.
I wasn't being sarcastic. I don't think 'sensitiveness', in the sense of caring and considerate, is a hallmark trait of Aspies. Often it's reported that Aspies are *insensitive*, cold, callous, uncaring, emotionless, etc. Now, that's not the reality inside the Aspie's head; but that's what normal people percieve. Also, Aspies are reported as overly-sensitive, in the sense of having inapropriate emotional reactions to what others percieve as minor things.
I was diagnosed with Asperger's, so I am not just talking out of nowhere.
I would be fine with it too, if it were discussed and voted on in public, instead of agreed to in private, in violation of the constitution ( specifically the authority of the Senate to enter into Treaty ), and rammed down our throats.
Personally, I feel that people who are attracted to IT, and those who succeed in IT, are people on the Autism spectrum. People diagnosed as having Aspergers syndrome or Aspergers usually have:
- Lack of observed desire for friendship
- Poor ability to make friends
- Indifferent to the feelings of others
- Social awkwardness
- Indiscriminate social interaction
- Lack of eye contact
- Brief response to questions
- Gullibility
Sounds like an average woman's dream guy.Couple that with easy divorce and people not willing to make sacrifices for a marriage, you have divorce.
Personally, I think the ideal of marriage of a man and a woman who are best friends and meet each other's fantasy of the perfect make is unrealistic. It creates a disillusioned, jaded populace. I spent a summer in a field study school with an Indigenous family in Ecuador. The living pattern was basically the oldest mom and dad, their children, grandchildren, and various extended family members and in-laws. Life was centered around the cooking fire, and to me, it felt like there was a big party that never ended.
Now, I'm not saying the system was perfect or a utopia, but it seems that the young couples had less stress raising young children because they had a greater support network. Children basically ran around freely and could entertain each other. Other women and grandmothers would handle children who needed more care.
In the US and Europe, people live basically isolated, lonely, stressed out lives.
I'll be damned! Thanks!
George isn't an editor.
"Umm, your going to have to help me follow your logic here. You say that the Douglas' structural theory correctly predicts Kosherness of animals that were not originaly specified by divine revelation. So does that mean that God is somehow still involved in Kosher classification?"
It depends on what 'involved' means.
A lot of people are looking for rational reasons to explain why certain animals are kosher and some are not, other than "God said so; that's all we need". (The one rabbi I spoke to was satisfied with the "God said so" answer.) A lot of people buy the 'health' theory -- that it was dangerous to eat pork and shelfish in the hot middle-eastern climate. However, pigs and shelfish are a small part of the animals considered to be unkosher. Why aren't camels kosher? Why not birds of prey? This is where the health theory fails -- they aren't particularly germy. It's not even clear that pigs or shelfish are really that dangerous, any more than other kinds of meat in the hot sun. There are a lot of unkosher animals that are perfectly healthy to eat, even in the middle east.
Douglas' theory is that unkosher animals are unkosher because they don't fit in with the categories or kinds of animals that God created in the six days of creation. This seems to explain *every* animal listed as not Kosher.
It also accurately predicts what animals are later ruled unkosher. If God's specification of Kosherness is based on categories, or otherwise similar to Douglas' theory, I guess you could stay that God is still sort of declaring certain animals clean and unclean.
Sorry, I'm lost on the nuclear war bit. Are pigs and shelfish more susceptible to storing radioactive particles, moreso than other animals? Where can I read more about the wars in Hindu writings?
What Delay did was a kind of money laundering -- there are limits to what individuals or corporations can give, so Delay got around those limits by giving money to an organization, which in turn gave it to a candidate, to whom Delay had already maxed out his contribution. But it is not illegal for corporations to give money.
Yeah, sounds like more failure-prone technological solutions to the war on terror, like gait recognition, face recognition, headline scanning, which all are failure-prone, technological solutions to a human problem. What we really need is people skills, like actual fluent translators, experts with experience, covert agents, and inside guys.
How about Citizendiumianiters?
Say hello to the North American Union.
It seems to me that modern nation-states are realizing that they are mostly too small to have any weight in the current and upcoming political environment. There exists now the European Union, the Eurasion Union, the African Union, Caribbean Community, South American Community of Nations, and the Arab League.
Orwell correctly predicted that the future would have continental super-states. Nowadays, the only securable border is an ocean.
As a wise man (who happened to be a Jew) once told me, "When everyone is shouting, whisper."
I was racking my brain how to respond to GP. You hit the nail right on the head.
"There are also talks of absolutely prohibiting croporate political donations,"
There may be talk, but for decades now, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that corporations are legal persons, and enjoy all the constitutional protections afforded to persons. So, if we ever passed a law that forbade corporate political donations, the Supreme Court would strike it down as unconstitutional. And corporations would certainly bring it all the way up to the Supreme Court.
The only way to fix this clusterfack is a constitutional amendment removing corporations' personhood.
Weighted Blankets of various prices.
I sometimes sleep with a 20 lb bag of rice on my chest. It was $11 at the Chinese grocery store.
The reason I bring up penguins is that this theory makes correct predictions about animals that aren't specifically referenced in the Bible. So the health theory doesn't really say anything about penguins or ostriches -- I don't know if they are particularly germy, like pigs.
But 2000 years later, when Jews are living all around the world, and they have to decide whether or not new animals, such as ostriches or penguins, are Kosher, the Douglas' structural theory correctly predicts that they aren't Kosher. In fact, when you look at whether or not new animals are Kosher, Douglas' theory generally makes correct predictions, whereas the germ theory is kind of mum.
A lot of people on the autistic spectrum do better with pressure on the chest. For this reason, they sell weighted blankets to help them sleep. So, for AS people, it is not about being close and warmth, but just plain old mechanical pressure.