You don't even need a model. Then magically we find out that vegetarians who wear blue pants on Tuesday and were born in November are more likely to get cancer and should get checked regularly, or something. We don't even need to know why, it's not important. But this isn't the end of the scientific method, it's the observation at the start, which is what the author of the article has failed to grasp.
You see, all science starts with an observation of something interesting -- in your hypothetical case, that vegetarians wearing blue pants born in November are more likely to get cancer.
As you say, that's useful in itself, but only to a degree -- it doesn't allow you to predict whether this strange phenomenon is related to other forms of cancer aetiology. But then someone thinks about it, and comes up with a hypothesis to test -- for example:
that the blue dye in the pants is absorbed by the body and triggers oncogenesis
that vegetarians are unusually susceptible because their low protein diet activates a different metabolic gene expression pathway, which is disrupted by the blue dye, and
that being born in November (in the Northern hemisphere) meant conception during the summer, when protein consumption is high, thus it is linked to an epigenetic change in these same metabolic genes that again increases susceptibility to the effects of the blue dye.
These hypotheses are then tested via the scientific method, and any knowledge gained not only helps to prevent against this particular type of cancer, but also helps to understand and potentially prevent or cure other related forms of cancer, as well as metabolic disorders.
In other words, having masses of statistical data is fantastic, but it's the start of the process, not the end of it. All this article proves is that its author doesn't understand the scientific method at all (and that he clearly has never applied for grant funding!)
just get lots of practice flirting. Now, that's what will get you laid. Learn how to flirt, be funny, be positive, happy, cool and casual... you don't need to be bad per se if you've mastered those traits. Practise chatting to strangers, see every new cute girl as a challenge. The main thing is that girls love someone with confidence, charm and wit (just as guys love the same traits in a girl).
Oh, and remember -- rejection is a natural part of the coupling process: some you win, some you lose. The problem is that most nice guys take it too much to heart, and see a single rejection by some apparently suitable girl as something that reflects on them, whereas in reality very few guys or girls get through life with no rejections at all.
(What's worse is that the nice guys then become more negative as a result of each rejection, leading to more rejections (because nobody wants to be with someone negative!)... and it becomes a vicious circle.)
Yet after the first incident you didn't think wow, maybe if I had moved over then there wouldn't have been a high speed chase through downtown Seattle? What, so being threatened with physical violence immediately implies that you were in the wrong? What sort of twisted logic is that?
Did you even consider the possibility that maybe the other guy might have been a crazy moron? Especially considering the fact that the other guy was tailgating the OP before the high-speed road-rage chase...
I think the whole carrying-a-firearm thing is going slightly overboard, personally. But if someone had to get shot, I wouldn't mind too much if it was one of the tailgating arseholes of the world.
(and the native WordPerfect 8.x was better anyway) As someone who tried using the hideous abomination that was Corel WP 8 for linux back in 1999... tell me your statement was just a bad joke?
I'll see your moose antlers / stag beetles and raise you stone tablets... Cuneiform all the way, baby...
First written language and the first typed language. (It's a little known fact that the Sumerians invented the first typewriter. Half the keys looked like this:
Whether you believe in god or not, that argument no more disproves his existence than all the silly "proofs" adduced by believers. I wasn't trying to disprove His/Her/Its existence... I was merely pointing out that "literal acceptance of everything in the Bible" does not fit with a stationary sun/moving Earth system. And I was suggesting that maybe it wouldn't hurt to accept some passages in the Bible as allegorical...
(Although, Kepler actually had a rather nice take on the Joshua miracle, suggesting that "the sun stood still" referred to the rotation of the sun on its axis... Of course, that was only because Kepler assigned the rotation of the Sun as the source of planetary motion, but still -- it was a nice way of saving the hypothesis...)
Personally, I highly doubt the existence of any form of God. However, since this is only something that can be proved/disproved after a one-way trip (and since I don't find the lack of a God particularly appealing, regardless of how much I suspect that to be the case), I'm keeping my options open...:)
In Joshua, God was using a point of view that would make sense to the people of that time. It's just applied Relativity:) In other words, no I don't believe in a strict literal interpretation of Joshua. Did God make the day longer as described? I believe so. Did he do it by making the sun literally freeze in position in space? Well, if the earth is rotating about its poles -- and I believe that science is correct in this assertion -- then, no I don't think He did. I believe the passage you quote in Joshua is told in a way that made sense to the people who witnessed the event, rather than in a way that reflects the exact method God used to accomplish the task. But the only "relative" explanation of Joshua would be that the Earth stopped rotating on its axis (this was, in fact, Galileo's alternate suggestion for Joshua). However, if the Earth suddenly stopped that would have very, very bad effects for everything on the surface of the Earth! I'm not sure, though, as to why the passage can't be seen as allegorical. The Bible is at best a work written by men... surely they were allowed to get it wrong occasionally!
As far as the Catholic Church's position on evolution, well, Catholicism != Christianity for all flavors of Christianity. Rather, Catholicism is a subset of Christianity. Therefore, it is inaccurate to state that Catholics believe "x" therefore all Christians must believe "x." Well, of course!:) But all I meant to point out was that the largest (and not by any means the most progressive) subset of Christianity has no problem in accepting large parts of the Bible as allegorical. Which comes back to my point above: the Bible is surely the witnessing of men, dia spektrou, if you will.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the thoughts of Stephen Jay Gould -- I think he managed to write one of the few balanced and measured essays on a topic that is filled with so much polemical writing.
Back in Galileo's day, the position of the Church was that the earth was the center of the universe, and all the heavens (lower-case "h") revolved around it. No matter how hard I try, I can't find that in the Bible. Ergo, no conflict between science and religion. Um... the issue stemmed partly from Joshua 10:13, which reads:
"And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day."
Obviously this passage only makes literal sense if the Earth is stationary, and the church was reluctant to treat any passage as allegorical unless there was direct proof to the contrary (something, incidentally, which Galileo failed to provide at the time).
This leaves you in a bit of a quandary, though, doesn't it? Do you now renounce the Bible, or renounce scientific observation?:)
Having said that, I'm not quite ready to embrace evolution as the origin of species (as opposed to evolution within species, which I do accept), but this discovery is definitely interesting. You might be interested to know that the Catholic church has no problem with evolution... I think you're getting yourself needlessly caught up in all of this what-the-bible-says business! Personally, my advice would be to follow the teachings of Jesus, and solve all your problems with more alcohol...
(incidentally, if that trick doesn't work, you might be interested in reading this essay by Stephen Jay Gould, on religion, science, and the unnecessary conflict between them...)
Sometime soon I'm expecting being moved to ubuntu, though they're hesitant on purchasing new hardware here. My motherboard's memory is maxed out and I'm still running with 96% memory, 50% swap. I suspect Firefox 2 of being the memory hog, especially when it suddenly becomes the processor hog after a few days (used to be about every 24 hours of continuous running). Firefox2 is a memory hog... or rather, it's got lots of memory leaks. Plus it never recovers well from ACPI sleep.
Why not give FF3 a go? The memory management situation is a *lot* better...
Copying video games from each other, we each had our disk of copy protection cracking software, some were better than others though. I had all the good games, moon patrol, Conan the Barbarian, Ms. Pac Man, Karateka, Serpentine, Q Bert, etc... Funniest part of Kareteka was the end -- you kill the baddies, kill the Eagle (*screech screech, screech screech*), kill Big Momma (our technical name at the time for the evil head honcho dude) and then finally get to the girl...
And she just stands there! So of course you sidle up to her, expecting some romantic finish (the first time any of us did this, there was a crowd of ten around the computer, in awe that someone had finished the game)... and she takes one look at you, and kills you with a single kick! As if to say, "Geez, kiddo, you mean I got myself captured and locked up in some stinky dungeon just to be rescued by a loser like you??"
Of course, the trick was to psych yourself up and run into her arms. Whereupon you got a pretty romantic kiss for the time (including a little leg pop from her)...
We worked that out the next time, after the laughter of the alternate ending had faded...:)
The actual protection was a bad sector on the floppy and the program would read it and make sure the error matched what it was expecting. The side-effect was that the rom software on the disk drive did a reset of the head position a couple of times to try and read the sector and that was the grinding noise that you would hear. That noise is forever associated with the terror of wondering if the last day's writing on my school essay was gone for good. You really heard about those bad sectors back with the 5 1/4" floppy drives... and it was exactly the sound of impending doom:(
My favourite aspect of piracy on the Apple ][, though, was the custom "Cracked by..." messages inserted by the software pirates. I still remember my copy of Skyfox (great game!) having the cracker's name, followed by "Nothing fancy, but it works"... Now, every time I see or hear that phrase, a little bit of my memory conjures up the memory of happy hours spent playing the game as a kid:)
As someone else said, there are other ways to replicate what you're looking for, but there wasn't any way to get the functionality of the awesome bar. Well, actually, there was:
People still buy unlocked phones don't they? Last time I checked, some of those suckers have pretty hefty price tags! They do... but most often it's because phones and toilets don't mix too well (who knew?)
It's only the really geeky who will buy a new phone just because it's got a built in GPS or a scroll-wheel...
(Highlight-copy and middle-click paste in Linux can be its own problem which sometimes requires using caps-lock so the window into which you intend to paste doesn't get focus, causing a field to be automatically highlighted, blowing away the clipboard data you'd intended to paste This isn't the behaviour I see on my own system (xorg 7.3). The selection buffer has the last selection made, not the selection in the active window, regardless of the status of the capslock key.
But anyway, even with middlemouse.contentLoadURL set to false, you can still paste urls into the location bar with a middle click.
Or unless you are using Linux and you miss the link because trying to click the scroll wheel caused the link to scroll away, so instead you've pasted your clipboard contents (often what you most recently had highlighted, even accidentally) to the current tab, and if the clipboard contained something Firefox could interpret as a valid URL or deduce a domain it will take you somewhere you likely didn't want to go and away from where you wanted to stay in that tab, instead of opening a new tab to the place you wanted to go. about:config is your friend:
middlemouse.contentLoadURL "false"
(But seriously, didn't you even try to search the internet for a solution, rather than bitching about it on/. ??)
Buying stuff to send signal is ridiculous. -- "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore Hmmm... there seems to be a conflict between your comment and your sig...:)
Handles desktop items too. Running with IceWM it generally sits on ~50MB/60MB of RAM, but as we know wasted RAM is wasted RAM so I'm thinking they suck up as much as they can. I also use IceWM with ROX... Of my 1.2Gig RAM, ROX is currently using 12 Meg of writable memory, and IceWM a whopping great 2.1 Meg. Both load exceptionally fast, and provide all the bells and whistles I need.
I don't really see the need for a menu bar with ROX, there's a right-click menu that gives you all the options. I don't think ROX is perfect, but it's by far the lightest, fastest and easiest file manager out there. (Thunar isn't bad either, but lacks a desktop display).
Which masses are we referring to here? A few people who were lucky enough to have access to expensive graphics workstations, or the other 99.99999999999% of the western world at that time? I think we're referring to the academic world, which had a much greater proportion of Apple use.
Anyway, I remember loving hypercard for application development -- it was such a beautiful, simple interpreted language and a joy to program in.
I don't shut down my computer for weeks at a time, and as long as firefox remains stable I don't shut it down either...
Currently, I have a relatively modest 54 tabs open, which include a lot of newspaper articles waiting to be read, some perldoc tabs, my email, some pubmed searches, a few online journals, some wikipedia pages, some pages related to phylogenetic tree construction, the TV guide, some political stuff and some slashdot pages. Firefox 3 RC1 has been running for a couple of days and is taking up 224Mb of private dirty memory, so I think it's doing pretty well.
I have no idea how you live with only 5 or 6 tabs open at a time...!!
what more detail do you need? the main is eating shit out of a bowl cause he posted a picture of a god online. Actually, according to the article, the two are not related: "The legal notice smacks of his anger with the police and judiciary making a mockery of the rights of an individual and the pitiable conditions of the Yerwada jail where he was detained with a number of hardened criminals. He is reported to have been beaten by a lathi and asked to use the same bowl to eat and to use in the toilet."
Now, I realise that TFA is beating the English language with a lathi here, but I think the implication is that the beating and eating shit aspect is to do with the conditions of the jail where he was detained -- and that they would apply to any criminals there.
(Of course, jailing anyone because he defiles a picture of a god is bad enough in itself, regardless of whether being beaten is part of the punishment...)
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I'm still in grant-writing mode. Spinning this sort of bullshit to get funding happens in my sleep ... :)
You see, all science starts with an observation of something interesting -- in your hypothetical case, that vegetarians wearing blue pants born in November are more likely to get cancer.
As you say, that's useful in itself, but only to a degree -- it doesn't allow you to predict whether this strange phenomenon is related to other forms of cancer aetiology. But then someone thinks about it, and comes up with a hypothesis to test -- for example:
These hypotheses are then tested via the scientific method, and any knowledge gained not only helps to prevent against this particular type of cancer, but also helps to understand and potentially prevent or cure other related forms of cancer, as well as metabolic disorders.
In other words, having masses of statistical data is fantastic, but it's the start of the process, not the end of it. All this article proves is that its author doesn't understand the scientific method at all (and that he clearly has never applied for grant funding!)
Oh, and remember -- rejection is a natural part of the coupling process: some you win, some you lose. The problem is that most nice guys take it too much to heart, and see a single rejection by some apparently suitable girl as something that reflects on them, whereas in reality very few guys or girls get through life with no rejections at all.
(What's worse is that the nice guys then become more negative as a result of each rejection, leading to more rejections (because nobody wants to be with someone negative!) ... and it becomes a vicious circle.)
Did you even consider the possibility that maybe the other guy might have been a crazy moron? Especially considering the fact that the other guy was tailgating the OP before the high-speed road-rage chase
I think the whole carrying-a-firearm thing is going slightly overboard, personally. But if someone had to get shot, I wouldn't mind too much if it was one of the tailgating arseholes of the world.
Definitely different experiences! I knew someone who lost their Honours thesis thanks to WP 8.1, too, so I wasn't alone ...
:)
It's a pity about Corel, really -- they had the right idea, but they were 10 years too early for the mainstream linux market.
(Mind you, it was partly thanks to WP being such a bomb that I discovered LaTeX and LyX, so really I should be eternally grateful to Corel and co
try setting the environment variable MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 ... although it's pretty strange that RedHat doesn't provide libpangocairo ...
First written language and the first typed language. (It's a little known fact that the Sumerians invented the first typewriter. Half the keys looked like this:
>-
and half looked like this:
|
^
It made texting a breeze
(Although, Kepler actually had a rather nice take on the Joshua miracle, suggesting that "the sun stood still" referred to the rotation of the sun on its axis
Personally, I highly doubt the existence of any form of God. However, since this is only something that can be proved/disproved after a one-way trip (and since I don't find the lack of a God particularly appealing, regardless of how much I suspect that to be the case), I'm keeping my options open
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the thoughts of Stephen Jay Gould -- I think he managed to write one of the few balanced and measured essays on a topic that is filled with so much polemical writing.
"And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day."
Obviously this passage only makes literal sense if the Earth is stationary, and the church was reluctant to treat any passage as allegorical unless there was direct proof to the contrary (something, incidentally, which Galileo failed to provide at the time).
This leaves you in a bit of a quandary, though, doesn't it? Do you now renounce the Bible, or renounce scientific observation?
(incidentally, if that trick doesn't work, you might be interested in reading this essay by Stephen Jay Gould, on religion, science, and the unnecessary conflict between them
Why not give FF3 a go? The memory management situation is a *lot* better
And she just stands there! So of course you sidle up to her, expecting some romantic finish (the first time any of us did this, there was a crowd of ten around the computer, in awe that someone had finished the game)
Of course, the trick was to psych yourself up and run into her arms. Whereupon you got a pretty romantic kiss for the time (including a little leg pop from her)
We worked that out the next time, after the laughter of the alternate ending had faded
My favourite aspect of piracy on the Apple ][, though, was the custom "Cracked by
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1722
Doesn't work with FF3, sadly, but it was a heck of a lot faster than the bloated, somewhat-less-than awesome bar.
But that's the price of progress, I guess
It's only the really geeky who will buy a new phone just because it's got a built in GPS or a scroll-wheel
But anyway, even with middlemouse.contentLoadURL set to false, you can still paste urls into the location bar with a middle click.
middlemouse.contentLoadURL "false"
(But seriously, didn't you even try to search the internet for a solution, rather than bitching about it on
But that project didn't work out so well, so you're probably right -- it's a bad idea
--
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore Hmmm
I don't really see the need for a menu bar with ROX, there's a right-click menu that gives you all the options. I don't think ROX is perfect, but it's by far the lightest, fastest and easiest file manager out there. (Thunar isn't bad either, but lacks a desktop display).
Anyway, I remember loving hypercard for application development -- it was such a beautiful, simple interpreted language and a joy to program in.
oh, and the tabmix plus extension has a tablist which is a godsend for keep track and closing unwanted tabs.
... but then, when I find them, it's kinda nostalgic :)
... :)
It must be admitted that sometimes tabs stay open much longer than they should
(It might also be suggested that my messy web surfing habits are highly related to my love of Perl
I don't shut down my computer for weeks at a time, and as long as firefox remains stable I don't shut it down either ...
...!!
Currently, I have a relatively modest 54 tabs open, which include a lot of newspaper articles waiting to be read, some perldoc tabs, my email, some pubmed searches, a few online journals, some wikipedia pages, some pages related to phylogenetic tree construction, the TV guide, some political stuff and some slashdot pages. Firefox 3 RC1 has been running for a couple of days and is taking up 224Mb of private dirty memory, so I think it's doing pretty well.
I have no idea how you live with only 5 or 6 tabs open at a time
Now, I realise that TFA is beating the English language with a lathi here, but I think the implication is that the beating and eating shit aspect is to do with the conditions of the jail where he was detained -- and that they would apply to any criminals there.
(Of course, jailing anyone because he defiles a picture of a god is bad enough in itself, regardless of whether being beaten is part of the punishment