This study is demonstrating that games elicit physiological responses associated with violence and that people more "familiar" with the subject have greater responses.
[..] This obviously doesn't mean that games make people violent, but it does make a strong argument for the need for parental supervision and control of content available to minors.
Nothing new here. This obviously applies to any stimulus related to trauma. If you beat the shit out of your kid with a tuna, you can be sure that he will show elevated blood pressure and increased aggressiveness for the rest of his life when he smells tuna. This doesn't incriminate tunas, obviously.
That games lead to adrenalin, and that adrenalin temporarily leads to increased alertness to danger, and that this may (again temporarily) lead to less socially acceptable answers, is not very interesting or surprising. This is true of sports, driving in the city, hearing a strange noise, or - for some people - the smell of tuna. It's a game, not a gun.
If we seriously believe, as a society, that alertness to danger is bad, why don't we give our children marihuana or heroin?
What I want to know is for instance whether there is any residual effect specifically related to the visual display besides the effect of adrenalin, how long the effect lasts (my guess is very short), and how they determined the validity of linking the responses to the scenario to their extravagant conclusions.
Re:No, just naives ... Re:Neanderthals?
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Stone Age Dentists
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· Score: 1
The one medical treatment they certainly would have known about is anesthetics.
The evidence is about 11 teeth that show signs of drilling (the concentric grooves in the holes) while the owner of the teeth was still alive. The case for a flint-based dental drill is less obvious, and the remains of any natural resin used to fill the hole would have disappeared.
The idea isn't that ridiculous in itself. The ancient Egyptians had dentists. The oldest complete set of false teeth and bridgework found is Etruscan and dates from 700BC. Drilling and filling teeth is a technique of unknown age and origin. The main technology added in the 19th century is fillings that are durable and harden at room temperature. It is possible to test whether it is possible to drill holes in teeth using some manually driven stone drill.
I agree about the dildo, and archeologists also have an irritating tendency to ascribe anything they can't categorize to some religious purpose, but I think popular history tends to understate the technological skills of ancient peoples that didn't leave written history, instead of exaggerating them. This seems to be caused by an infatuation with modern 'inventors' and the anachonistic belief that inventions immediately spread all over the world and are never lost, in combination with the scientific skepticism we expect of the archeologists.
Take the example of the capacitator. Is the invention Iraqi? Greek? German? Dutch? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We know of Von Kleist, Van Musschenbroek, Franklin and Volta because of written history, not because we found 'batteries'. In the Iraqi case we did find something that appears to be a battery, but then we skeptically conclude that they probably didn't use it as a battery.
I'm in the UK and I purposely *avoid*.com products, hey, I don't want to pay for a company to ship a paperback 3000 miles from the USA, I'd prefer them to post it from somewhere in the EU and charge me that instead (pretty well the same rate as from the UK). Don't have to pay import taxes either...
Only in the.uk,.au,.za, and.ca domains this works. In many countries the custom is to use the localized domain name for the site in the local language(s), and the.com domain name for the English\International version even if they only sell in the EU. This makes sense from the perspective of the non-English-speaking part of the population, and local search engines.
The.eu tld is going to help solve this problem to some extent, I hope. There is no point in having legal information, real estate, used cars, pizza delivery, and holiday arrangements in the international tld just because the site is in English.
A real solution for this problem would at least distinguish country of domicile of the company, language(s) supported by the site, and countries of residence of the intended audience. Why is there still no proper metadata standard for this stuff?
Oh, and I hate websites that automatically redirect me to another language version based on my IP. I am perfectly capable of deciding for myself what language I want to use.
Anyway, you can use whois or do a traceroute to determine where some site is based. Nice software idea: combine Google results with whois. It doesn't really help in deciding what the site's intended audience is, obviously.
The results of some googling: Prehistoric man used drug plants long before they invented agriculture, and the first crops grown may have been drugs. Apparently the Neanderthals used Ephedra as a stimulant, and Opium was grown as a crop as early as 4000 BC. The use of Cannabis dates back to 4500 BC in China. Nightshade, Piper betle, and Mandrake are also mentioned.
I don't think the stone age dentist would have had a problem alleviating the pain.
After the Middle Ages, LOTS of stuff had to be rediscovered (often badly, often not at all) that was well-known before the christian churches destroyed or locked up "pagan" knowledge and killed the people in the know.
I rarely defend Christianity, but I do think it deserves a more balanced view than this one. The Catholic Church, its monasteries and universities, and the "Holy Roman Empire" at least kept alive the memory (and some of the works) of the great civilization that fell apart. Without it it would have been almost completely forgotten. Unfortunately it did not keep the spirit of free scientific inquiry and exchange of ideas alive. Throughout the middle ages people believed they lived in a world which was naturally degenerating. Only in the early 14th century arrogant artists in Italy started to consider themselves the equals of this old civilization and invented the notion of Dark Ages in between. The ironic thing is that we do not consider Petrarch's Italy equal to Rome, but we did retain his notion of Dark Ages.
I think the reality is that the exchange of ideas necessary for building up a significant body of knowledge only works in an empire of the size of China or Rome, and these are more the exception than the rule. In the dark ages there were simply too litle books and too small an audience for books to keep knowledge alive. "We" may know more than they did, but "we" are still just a few of the 6 billion people on earth, and if we lose our libraries, universities, and means of communication for some reason even we might lose it in a few generations. In the classical world this small elite of educated people probably consisted of not more than tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand people.
Eh, let us not wildly exaggerate the pain involved. My father had all his fillings as a child without anaesthesia. It isn't unheard of for people to refuse it today.
I never had a filling done with an anaesthetic. There is really hardly any pain involved if you don't need a root canal treatment first, and I don't think these stone age dentists did those. Root canals are doable without anaesthesia too: I tried it twice.
Spar, Ahold, Carrefour, Delhaize. In most countries just 2 or 3 multinational chains dominate the market. Most multinational European chains operate under different names in different member countries, though. Ahold and Delhaize also operate in the US under 10 different names.
Saying "irrefutable scientific proof of a miracle" is like asking, "Can an omnipotent god create an unmoveable object?" If he's omnipotent, then he can't create an object that he can't move - otherwise, he wouldn't be omnipotent, by definition.
The solution depends on whether the omnipotence is of the continuing or self-embracing type, obviously. A truly omnipotent god has both, and will be able to choose which one to use. The handbook for gods suggests it is better to take the continuing omnipotence, unless your god also takes omniscience in which case he will never have to undo his actions anyway. There is only one generally accepted limit on omnipotence: it is not possible to convince a skeptic. That's why gods avoid them like the plague.
Creationists have facts, too. Just look at humanity as it exists today. How could pedophiles have evolved (there's no evolutionary advantage to having sex with someone who is too young to bear offspring). How can the fetish of stomping small creatures to death have come into being through evolution? No, humans as they exist today could only have been the product of a cruel and twisted god.
Do you seriously not see the reproductive advantage of killing any rat, mouse, spider, scorpion, ant etc. on sight? I have delegated that task to my cat, because I am smarter than my ancestors, but I think it's a good instinct to have for a relatively stupid species with very vulnerable offspring and a habit of storing food.
I don't really see how trying to impregnate unsuitable candidates would be a disadvantage. Since we are not very good at judging sexual maturity the pedophile might get lucky, certainly if he is a low ranking male in a chimp-like hierarchy. Many animals (dogs, rabbits) also mate with everything that moves.
More generally: evolution selects genes, and morality is not the criterium for selection. "Fitness" is also a moving target in a changing environment. There is no way we can make a connection between genes and complex behaviours like pedophilia or killing. We don't know whether there is a specific genetic factor at all, and we can't judge how this genetic factor works out positively in other circumstances.
One picky point: The terms "retrodiction" and "postdiction" seem to be in competition. The paired prefixes "pre-" and "post-" would say that "prediction" and "postdiction" are the better pair. And "postdiction" is one char shorter, which will probably save you several seconds of typing over your lifetime.;-)
Anyway, whichever you call it, this is a good example. One of the creationists bogus claims is that paleontology can't make predictions, because they can't find fossils from the future. This is a parody, of course, but it's the essence of the logical fallacy.
I also prefer the natural pair pre-/post-, but since I am not a native speaker of English I checked wikipedia to see whether the word exists in English and was referred to retrodiction.
I have more affinity with law than with paleontology. The paleontologist 'postdicts' the existence of creature X and 'predicts' that therefore there might be a fossil to be found in some place, just like the police officer 'postdicts' that person X was at some spot, and 'predicts' that a footprint matching one of his pairs of shoes might be found in that spot. The difference is that the paleontologist has a much better case for considering the fossil evidence of the existence of the creature, which is the only thing he is trying to prove.
This is a classical "postdiction", i.e., a prediction of what you'll find if you dig in such-and-such a place. As such, it's goood support for the biologists' understanding of how vertebrates colonized the land. It's not proof, of course, because scientists generally don't do proof. Rather, it's a demo of the predictive power of evolutionary theory.
It's proof beyond a reasonable doubt for the existence of the creature and clear and convincing evidence of the predictive power of evolution theory. Some countries put people on electric chairs based on less 'proof' than that.;)
One of the key problems I have with the approach many "scientists" use towards evolution is that they are much like the prosecutors in a case against an alleged criminal.
The prosecutor has to ensure there is sufficient evidence to convict the accused in that particular case. The problem is that the evidence can be matched carefully and a beautiful timeline chart shows how they belive the crime occured along with support evidence and so one to the point of completing the trial with a conviction. all is well and fine, just and truth have prevailed.
Fast forward years later and DNA tests are conducted which prove the person who has done the time was NOT the person who actually committed the crime. So while in the context of the known situation the prosecutors (scientists) illustrate a substantiated timeline complete with supporting evidence, yet underneath it all, they are dead wrong on the conclusion.
And so it is with science....
This is the "teleological" aspect in the way science (and specifically the media) look for evidence. As I already stated it is not only important to look for missing links, but also to account for the fossils you find that don't fit into an existing "gap" in your story. You have to be willing classify all of them without prejudice.
This is the problem for the prosecution in criminal law: out of all the things that could be evidence of some story, they select just those things that fit into one of the stories they have in mind. Their search space is too large, and their theories very hard to prove.
Scientific publishing creates another problem: it is very hard to get your failed experiment or your unclassifiable observation published. The lesson should not be that you should randomly gather data without a theory (impossible, because you can't describe and classify it in a useful way for future reference without a theory), but that you should look equally hard for data that confirms and disconfirms your theory even though nobody is going to appreciate the negatives.
The "missing link" is of course only meaningful if you trust the scientists to not throw away the skeletons of giants, dragons, and whatever else they find that doesn't fit their story.
You only have to read a slashdot story on Climate Change (and the amount of time posters call it "global warming" to know that the vast majority of people all over the world are not getting the full story on climate change.
I'm more worried about the current administration's failure to legislate forced change to energy (particularly oil & gas) consumption, then I am about the American public's lack of awareness of the facts.
It's a classic free rider problem and therefore a responsibility of government. It's also a worldwide free rider problem, where individual countries can choose to be a free rider.
The vast majority of people is not competent to judge what is happening. As always, people will believe the story if they believe in the authority of the messenger. In many countries in Europe, the climate change story has been adopted as fact for some time by governments, media, and meteorological services. In the US it hasn't.
The willingness to act on climate change obviously also depends on the consequences. In the Netherlands the government is already investing billions to deal with higher sea levels and more river water than was projected in the past. The last two decades have been so extremely wet that it cannot be a coincidence anymore according to the national meteorological service.
Re:One Point For Gmail
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Gmail vs Pine
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's not all. You are allowing Google to both hold your messages (privacy may become an issue at some point) and you rely on them to stay available to you -- they could decide to drop GMail at any time, or the servers could crash, etc. If you use Pine, you have complete control: You are storing your own data, you can implement any backup technology that satisfies your need for security and data retention, there are no extra privacy issues to speak of, the goverment can't get your private messages with a general legal attack on Google.
Regarding privacy: surely Google has deeper pockets and better lawyers than you do? Is your private information really safer at home, considering that the police or a burglar can carry the computer away? Why have years of emails available online in the first place? Isn't it better to just download your email with pop and store it offline?
I use imap, thunderbird, pine (for SSH), and squirrelmail (for web) myself. I seriously doubt it helps to protect my privacy.
I don't even like the term transitional form. It seems to imply that there is a set goal of evolution, that the species is making the transition from this form to that form.
Evolution is not teleological, but the search for fossils by scientists guided by the theory of evolution is. History depends on retrodiction to prove the validity of theories, and retrodiction always uses this teleological perspective. As science understands evolution better it is able to predict the existence of more 'missing links', and if most fossils that scientists find are either known or classifiable as a 'missing link' between known species this is very strong evidence for the validity of the theory of evolution.
The same is true for history in general: the big story creates 'missing links' to search for. Which culture(s) is/are the original source(s) of the Indogermanic languages? Why are there no texts about Jesus that bridge the time of Jesus and the second century? Why are there no records of the early Islamic state in Medina, even though the town has been unharmed and inhabited by Muslims since the days of Mohammed?
Creationists abuse this teleological terminology to their own ends to misrepresent the status of evolution as a scientific theory, just like they misrepresent the meaning of theory itself (as in 'it is just a theory'). They can get away with it because too many people don't understand scientific method. Scientists should resist the temptation to let ID influence scientific method and terminology, because doing so will only seem to validate the credibility of the Intelligent Design lobby.
I second this. In an earlier discussion on Slashdot I looked up how the participants are selected in PISA assessments. All participating countries have compulsory education for the age cohort tested, and children in alternative vocational programs *are* included. The PISA scientists aren't stupid.
I can also attest for the Netherlands, another high performer, that almost no children are below the government radar: less than 3% drop out before 18, compared to more than 21% in the US, and less than 4% of 16-19 year olds is neither financially independent and employed nor in school (which is basically illegal).
We do traditionally have a highly stratified system, where children are selected early for vocational (50%), generic, or academic aptitude at age 12-14, but all of them participate in the correct proportions in PISA assessments.
If Americans feel their children have mysterious skills that aren't tested by existing assessments, they should design a standardized test for it and compare with the other countries. I think the reality is that countries like the US and Italy just get very bad value for money when it comes to education, and unrealistic education policy is part of the problem.
Why? Simple mathematics. As soon as your car is more than 1 metre wide it's length across the diagonal is at least 10cm longer than its long front to back. So it physically wont fit in the gap to get out.
Theoretically you don't need the complete diagonal length, but it is physically impossible to do it in one movement and definitely not advisable to park this way. You may be forced to slowly work your way out sidewards of a parking space because other cars parked to close to you or the car in front of you is offset to your left. It is frustrating because you hardly register any improvement, but your window for getting out quickly gets larger for every inch you are able to move sidewards. You first check of course whether the other cars where thoughtful enough to leave their car in free and not on the brake, so you can (gently) nudge them out of the way.
If the curb isn't too tall, you can do it "by feel"... you know you're at the curb when the back right tire pushes up against it. On the other hand, if you are parking next to a wall, that's a good way to scrape up your rear fender.
Don't try this when you are parallel parking along a canal in a Dutch town. There are sometimes no curbs. Use your side mirror. Aligning yourself with a car behind you is an easy method, but this creates a problem if there is no car behind you but for instance a tree.
Here in the US we'd call that high-density housing and its only where you're stuck if you can't afford any better.
Here in the Netherlands the government-enforced 'vinex' guidelines require this density in parts of the country. The size of parcels is basically related to the distance from from the large cities. If you want a big garden, you are going to spend a large part of your live in your car. Incomes in higher density areas are on average some 30% higher than in lower density areas, and the most popular areas are generally within (former) city walls.
At 12+ houses per acre, the houses are so close together that you can stand in one place and touch two houses at the same time. It means if you raise your voice or burp loudly your neighbor can hear it.
Not here in the Netherlands. Our home construction methods are completely different. We don't use wood framing. Traditionally this is because we have few trees in the country and lots of clay for bricks and roof tiles, and people look down on flimsy building materials and lightweight roof constructions. The inside/warm and outside/cold walls in newer houses don't have structural connections passing on noise or heat. US houses of the same floor area are much cheaper to build.
And I really dont get the wasteland comment. Just because the human density is low doesnt mean its an unpleasant part of the country. In fact, the more lush and beautiful the land is in your area, the more of it you'd want to have for your own and separate you from your neighbor.
It's a cultural choice. Economically speaking it's wasteland in the sense that it costs the US economy money to let people live in those parts of the country. The biggest employer in most rural states is the government and generic services, and most of the land is used for heavily subsidized, destructive, and low yield agriculture. For Americans it is apparently a worthwhile investment of money and time (spent in your car) to live far apart, but it is an expensive luxury. I agree parts of the US are spectacularly beautiful, but on the other hand the 'manmade' parts of the landscape look very sloppy with above ground utilities and stuff like that.
Considering how quickly house prices drop in proportion to population density here in a tiny country such as the Netherlands, we apparently have much less tolerance for being far away from civilization (and more for smaller living quarters). Few want to live 40+ minutes from a major city.
A sidenote: the few people who emigrate from here to the US, Canada, and Australia generally do go to sparsely populated areas, but these people usually don't have to work (anymore) for a living. We obviously don't have the choice, given that our population density is some 16 times higher than in the US. US expats who go to the Netherlands usually want to live in or near a historical town center if they can afford it.
That's only a land area factor of, oh, 19. Yes, the US is 19X the size of Spain, but with only 7X the population. Things are nowhere near as close to one another as they are in Europe. It's not ideal, but that's the way things are in the US. You just about have to drive to get to where you need to go in anywhere less than a day, unless you happen to be right on a bus route that goes very near where you're going.
It is not impossible to live on a smaller parcel of land. It is a choice to live far apart. Americans would live closer together in fewer population centers had the government not subsidized people to live in wasteland. There are complete states that economically depend on government, education, health care, and selling each other burgers and petrol. It is in principle never too late to plan houses closer together, but the American people actually wants to use the land area. A density of let's say 12+ houses an acre makes good public transport connections to work and the nearest public transport hubs possible. If the density is too low, people have to walk too far. The population density creates jobs in the private sector, and fast and frequent transport to other population centers will pay when you get enough people without a car to the hub efficiently.
Yes, these are needed, but not a single of these items comes from the government. I mean, in general. Nowadays, of course, the government has its claws everywhere.
Having a monopoly on violence and theft is the first imperative for a budding state. There is a fine dividing line between robber barons and kings taxing their subjects: the king was there first. In an anarchic situation most people will voluntarily subject themselves to any group that is able to monopolize violence and theft in an area, because economic activity depends on the ability to leave your house and land carrying goods to sell to others, without getting robbed or your house plundered. Without a protector there is no market. States organize markets, mint coins, define who owns what and how goods can legally change hands, adjudicate conflicts about property, et cetera. It is their main purpose.
We have seen it happen in the Dark Ages in Europe (feudalism), and we still see proto-states developing in a power vacuum like the Mafia in 1943-1945 in liberated Sicily and more recently warlords in other parts of the world (Afghanistan, Somalia, Hizbullah etc in Lebanon, Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine Authority, the diverse 'militia' in Iraq, etc). People need these warlords to get the local economy running. You can't run a shop without protection. As Olson puts it in Power and Prosperity (2000):
the Mafia family with a true and continuing monopoly on crime in a neighbourhood will not commit any robberies at all. If it monopolizes crime in the neighbourhood, it will gain from promoting business profitability and safe residential life there. Thus the secure Mafia family will maximize its take by selling protection - both against the crime it would commit itself (if not paid) as well as that which would be committed by others.
As soon as government regulation becomes involved, you no longer have true capitalism.
On the contrary. Without government the development of capitalism is impossible. You need money, property, markets, investment, etc. It only works in a society where people dare to give money to someone else in some other town in the expectation that they will make more money. It only happens in countries with a wealthy and efficient bureacracy. It is of course possible to organize capitalism around a some kind of commercial banking and property titling operation employing its own police officers, but a company like this is not really distinguishable from government.
The game should be compelling enough to teach people that it is worth staying even though they will never get to be 10 times as powerful as a newbie. What the company looses in power to make people stay, it gains in making it worth to enter the game later.
The problem of the beancounter is that by listening too much to the customers he already has, he looses the customers he could have. This attitude is what causes the limited shelf life of online worlds.
The game teaches the players to be the way they are. The dominance of hoarding games in the fantasy genre is in no way a reflection of what 'the market' wants. It is the players that adapt to the games being offered.
Compare it to a team-based fps game with a team competition: people have no problem with the option of hoarding being unavailable, take on a specific role in the team, even an unglamorous one like guarding the base, and will even sacrifice themselves for the team if that is what happens to be what the game rewards.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure there will always be the chance of suitcase bombs and such.
The laser can also take out suitcases, and wearing a tinfoil hat would be a dead giveaway.
This study is demonstrating that games elicit physiological responses associated with violence and that people more "familiar" with the subject have greater responses.
[..] This obviously doesn't mean that games make people violent, but it does make a strong argument for the need for parental supervision and control of content available to minors.
Nothing new here. This obviously applies to any stimulus related to trauma. If you beat the shit out of your kid with a tuna, you can be sure that he will show elevated blood pressure and increased aggressiveness for the rest of his life when he smells tuna. This doesn't incriminate tunas, obviously.
That games lead to adrenalin, and that adrenalin temporarily leads to increased alertness to danger, and that this may (again temporarily) lead to less socially acceptable answers, is not very interesting or surprising. This is true of sports, driving in the city, hearing a strange noise, or - for some people - the smell of tuna. It's a game, not a gun.
If we seriously believe, as a society, that alertness to danger is bad, why don't we give our children marihuana or heroin?
What I want to know is for instance whether there is any residual effect specifically related to the visual display besides the effect of adrenalin, how long the effect lasts (my guess is very short), and how they determined the validity of linking the responses to the scenario to their extravagant conclusions.
The one medical treatment they certainly would have known about is anesthetics.
The evidence is about 11 teeth that show signs of drilling (the concentric grooves in the holes) while the owner of the teeth was still alive. The case for a flint-based dental drill is less obvious, and the remains of any natural resin used to fill the hole would have disappeared.
The idea isn't that ridiculous in itself. The ancient Egyptians had dentists. The oldest complete set of false teeth and bridgework found is Etruscan and dates from 700BC. Drilling and filling teeth is a technique of unknown age and origin. The main technology added in the 19th century is fillings that are durable and harden at room temperature. It is possible to test whether it is possible to drill holes in teeth using some manually driven stone drill.
I agree about the dildo, and archeologists also have an irritating tendency to ascribe anything they can't categorize to some religious purpose, but I think popular history tends to understate the technological skills of ancient peoples that didn't leave written history, instead of exaggerating them. This seems to be caused by an infatuation with modern 'inventors' and the anachonistic belief that inventions immediately spread all over the world and are never lost, in combination with the scientific skepticism we expect of the archeologists.
Take the example of the capacitator. Is the invention Iraqi? Greek? German? Dutch? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We know of Von Kleist, Van Musschenbroek, Franklin and Volta because of written history, not because we found 'batteries'. In the Iraqi case we did find something that appears to be a battery, but then we skeptically conclude that they probably didn't use it as a battery.
I'm in the UK and I purposely *avoid* .com products, hey, I don't want to pay for a company to ship a paperback 3000 miles from the USA, I'd prefer them to post it from somewhere in the EU and charge me that instead (pretty well the same rate as from the UK). Don't have to pay import taxes either...
.uk, .au, .za, and .ca domains this works. In many countries the custom is to use the localized domain name for the site in the local language(s), and the .com domain name for the English\International version even if they only sell in the EU. This makes sense from the perspective of the non-English-speaking part of the population, and local search engines.
.eu tld is going to help solve this problem to some extent, I hope. There is no point in having legal information, real estate, used cars, pizza delivery, and holiday arrangements in the international tld just because the site is in English.
Only in the
The
A real solution for this problem would at least distinguish country of domicile of the company, language(s) supported by the site, and countries of residence of the intended audience. Why is there still no proper metadata standard for this stuff?
Oh, and I hate websites that automatically redirect me to another language version based on my IP. I am perfectly capable of deciding for myself what language I want to use.
Anyway, you can use whois or do a traceroute to determine where some site is based. Nice software idea: combine Google results with whois. It doesn't really help in deciding what the site's intended audience is, obviously.
The results of some googling: Prehistoric man used drug plants long before they invented agriculture, and the first crops grown may have been drugs. Apparently the Neanderthals used Ephedra as a stimulant, and Opium was grown as a crop as early as 4000 BC. The use of Cannabis dates back to 4500 BC in China. Nightshade, Piper betle, and Mandrake are also mentioned.
I don't think the stone age dentist would have had a problem alleviating the pain.
After the Middle Ages, LOTS of stuff had to be rediscovered (often badly, often not at all) that was well-known before the christian churches destroyed or locked up "pagan" knowledge and killed the people in the know.
I rarely defend Christianity, but I do think it deserves a more balanced view than this one. The Catholic Church, its monasteries and universities, and the "Holy Roman Empire" at least kept alive the memory (and some of the works) of the great civilization that fell apart. Without it it would have been almost completely forgotten. Unfortunately it did not keep the spirit of free scientific inquiry and exchange of ideas alive. Throughout the middle ages people believed they lived in a world which was naturally degenerating. Only in the early 14th century arrogant artists in Italy started to consider themselves the equals of this old civilization and invented the notion of Dark Ages in between. The ironic thing is that we do not consider Petrarch's Italy equal to Rome, but we did retain his notion of Dark Ages.
I think the reality is that the exchange of ideas necessary for building up a significant body of knowledge only works in an empire of the size of China or Rome, and these are more the exception than the rule. In the dark ages there were simply too litle books and too small an audience for books to keep knowledge alive. "We" may know more than they did, but "we" are still just a few of the 6 billion people on earth, and if we lose our libraries, universities, and means of communication for some reason even we might lose it in a few generations. In the classical world this small elite of educated people probably consisted of not more than tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand people.
Eh, let us not wildly exaggerate the pain involved. My father had all his fillings as a child without anaesthesia. It isn't unheard of for people to refuse it today.
I never had a filling done with an anaesthetic. There is really hardly any pain involved if you don't need a root canal treatment first, and I don't think these stone age dentists did those. Root canals are doable without anaesthesia too: I tried it twice.
Spar, Ahold, Carrefour, Delhaize. In most countries just 2 or 3 multinational chains dominate the market. Most multinational European chains operate under different names in different member countries, though. Ahold and Delhaize also operate in the US under 10 different names.
Saying "irrefutable scientific proof of a miracle" is like asking, "Can an omnipotent god create an unmoveable object?" If he's omnipotent, then he can't create an object that he can't move - otherwise, he wouldn't be omnipotent, by definition.
The solution depends on whether the omnipotence is of the continuing or self-embracing type, obviously. A truly omnipotent god has both, and will be able to choose which one to use. The handbook for gods suggests it is better to take the continuing omnipotence, unless your god also takes omniscience in which case he will never have to undo his actions anyway. There is only one generally accepted limit on omnipotence: it is not possible to convince a skeptic. That's why gods avoid them like the plague.
Creationists have facts, too. Just look at humanity as it exists today. How could pedophiles have evolved (there's no evolutionary advantage to having sex with someone who is too young to bear offspring). How can the fetish of stomping small creatures to death have come into being through evolution? No, humans as they exist today could only have been the product of a cruel and twisted god.
Do you seriously not see the reproductive advantage of killing any rat, mouse, spider, scorpion, ant etc. on sight? I have delegated that task to my cat, because I am smarter than my ancestors, but I think it's a good instinct to have for a relatively stupid species with very vulnerable offspring and a habit of storing food.
I don't really see how trying to impregnate unsuitable candidates would be a disadvantage. Since we are not very good at judging sexual maturity the pedophile might get lucky, certainly if he is a low ranking male in a chimp-like hierarchy. Many animals (dogs, rabbits) also mate with everything that moves.
More generally: evolution selects genes, and morality is not the criterium for selection. "Fitness" is also a moving target in a changing environment. There is no way we can make a connection between genes and complex behaviours like pedophilia or killing. We don't know whether there is a specific genetic factor at all, and we can't judge how this genetic factor works out positively in other circumstances.
One picky point: The terms "retrodiction" and "postdiction" seem to be in competition. The paired prefixes "pre-" and "post-" would say that "prediction" and "postdiction" are the better pair. And "postdiction" is one char shorter, which will probably save you several seconds of typing over your lifetime. ;-)
;)
Anyway, whichever you call it, this is a good example. One of the creationists bogus claims is that paleontology can't make predictions, because they can't find fossils from the future. This is a parody, of course, but it's the essence of the logical fallacy.
I also prefer the natural pair pre-/post-, but since I am not a native speaker of English I checked wikipedia to see whether the word exists in English and was referred to retrodiction.
I have more affinity with law than with paleontology. The paleontologist 'postdicts' the existence of creature X and 'predicts' that therefore there might be a fossil to be found in some place, just like the police officer 'postdicts' that person X was at some spot, and 'predicts' that a footprint matching one of his pairs of shoes might be found in that spot. The difference is that the paleontologist has a much better case for considering the fossil evidence of the existence of the creature, which is the only thing he is trying to prove.
This is a classical "postdiction", i.e., a prediction of what you'll find if you dig in such-and-such a place. As such, it's goood support for the biologists' understanding of how vertebrates colonized the land. It's not proof, of course, because scientists generally don't do proof. Rather, it's a demo of the predictive power of evolutionary theory.
It's proof beyond a reasonable doubt for the existence of the creature and clear and convincing evidence of the predictive power of evolution theory. Some countries put people on electric chairs based on less 'proof' than that.
One of the key problems I have with the approach many "scientists" use towards evolution is that they are much like the prosecutors in a case against an alleged criminal.
The prosecutor has to ensure there is sufficient evidence to convict the accused in that particular case. The problem is that the evidence can be matched carefully and a beautiful timeline chart shows how they belive the crime occured along with support evidence and so one to the point of completing the trial with a conviction. all is well and fine, just and truth have prevailed.
Fast forward years later and DNA tests are conducted which prove the person who has done the time was NOT the person who actually committed the crime. So while in the context of the known situation the prosecutors (scientists) illustrate a substantiated timeline complete with supporting evidence, yet underneath it all, they are dead wrong on the conclusion.
And so it is with science....
This is the "teleological" aspect in the way science (and specifically the media) look for evidence. As I already stated it is not only important to look for missing links, but also to account for the fossils you find that don't fit into an existing "gap" in your story. You have to be willing classify all of them without prejudice.
This is the problem for the prosecution in criminal law: out of all the things that could be evidence of some story, they select just those things that fit into one of the stories they have in mind. Their search space is too large, and their theories very hard to prove.
Scientific publishing creates another problem: it is very hard to get your failed experiment or your unclassifiable observation published. The lesson should not be that you should randomly gather data without a theory (impossible, because you can't describe and classify it in a useful way for future reference without a theory), but that you should look equally hard for data that confirms and disconfirms your theory even though nobody is going to appreciate the negatives.
The "missing link" is of course only meaningful if you trust the scientists to not throw away the skeletons of giants, dragons, and whatever else they find that doesn't fit their story.
You only have to read a slashdot story on Climate Change (and the amount of time posters call it "global warming" to know that the vast majority of people all over the world are not getting the full story on climate change.
I'm more worried about the current administration's failure to legislate forced change to energy (particularly oil & gas) consumption, then I am about the American public's lack of awareness of the facts.
It's a classic free rider problem and therefore a responsibility of government. It's also a worldwide free rider problem, where individual countries can choose to be a free rider.
The vast majority of people is not competent to judge what is happening. As always, people will believe the story if they believe in the authority of the messenger. In many countries in Europe, the climate change story has been adopted as fact for some time by governments, media, and meteorological services. In the US it hasn't.
The willingness to act on climate change obviously also depends on the consequences. In the Netherlands the government is already investing billions to deal with higher sea levels and more river water than was projected in the past. The last two decades have been so extremely wet that it cannot be a coincidence anymore according to the national meteorological service.
That's not all. You are allowing Google to both hold your messages (privacy may become an issue at some point) and you rely on them to stay available to you -- they could decide to drop GMail at any time, or the servers could crash, etc. If you use Pine, you have complete control: You are storing your own data, you can implement any backup technology that satisfies your need for security and data retention, there are no extra privacy issues to speak of, the goverment can't get your private messages with a general legal attack on Google.
Regarding privacy: surely Google has deeper pockets and better lawyers than you do? Is your private information really safer at home, considering that the police or a burglar can carry the computer away? Why have years of emails available online in the first place? Isn't it better to just download your email with pop and store it offline?
I use imap, thunderbird, pine (for SSH), and squirrelmail (for web) myself. I seriously doubt it helps to protect my privacy.
I don't even like the term transitional form. It seems to imply that there is a set goal of evolution, that the species is making the transition from this form to that form.
Evolution is not teleological, but the search for fossils by scientists guided by the theory of evolution is. History depends on retrodiction to prove the validity of theories, and retrodiction always uses this teleological perspective. As science understands evolution better it is able to predict the existence of more 'missing links', and if most fossils that scientists find are either known or classifiable as a 'missing link' between known species this is very strong evidence for the validity of the theory of evolution.
The same is true for history in general: the big story creates 'missing links' to search for. Which culture(s) is/are the original source(s) of the Indogermanic languages? Why are there no texts about Jesus that bridge the time of Jesus and the second century? Why are there no records of the early Islamic state in Medina, even though the town has been unharmed and inhabited by Muslims since the days of Mohammed?
Creationists abuse this teleological terminology to their own ends to misrepresent the status of evolution as a scientific theory, just like they misrepresent the meaning of theory itself (as in 'it is just a theory'). They can get away with it because too many people don't understand scientific method. Scientists should resist the temptation to let ID influence scientific method and terminology, because doing so will only seem to validate the credibility of the Intelligent Design lobby.
I second this. In an earlier discussion on Slashdot I looked up how the participants are selected in PISA assessments. All participating countries have compulsory education for the age cohort tested, and children in alternative vocational programs *are* included. The PISA scientists aren't stupid.
I can also attest for the Netherlands, another high performer, that almost no children are below the government radar: less than 3% drop out before 18, compared to more than 21% in the US, and less than 4% of 16-19 year olds is neither financially independent and employed nor in school (which is basically illegal).
We do traditionally have a highly stratified system, where children are selected early for vocational (50%), generic, or academic aptitude at age 12-14, but all of them participate in the correct proportions in PISA assessments.
If Americans feel their children have mysterious skills that aren't tested by existing assessments, they should design a standardized test for it and compare with the other countries. I think the reality is that countries like the US and Italy just get very bad value for money when it comes to education, and unrealistic education policy is part of the problem.
Oops. 'cars where' should be 'drivers were'.
Why? Simple mathematics. As soon as your car is more than 1 metre wide it's length across the diagonal is at least 10cm longer than its long front to back. So it physically wont fit in the gap to get out.
Theoretically you don't need the complete diagonal length, but it is physically impossible to do it in one movement and definitely not advisable to park this way. You may be forced to slowly work your way out sidewards of a parking space because other cars parked to close to you or the car in front of you is offset to your left. It is frustrating because you hardly register any improvement, but your window for getting out quickly gets larger for every inch you are able to move sidewards. You first check of course whether the other cars where thoughtful enough to leave their car in free and not on the brake, so you can (gently) nudge them out of the way.
a tight parking spot You must be joking - you could fit a Hummer in that spot.
I see two tight parking spots...
If the curb isn't too tall, you can do it "by feel"... you know you're at the curb when the back right tire pushes up against it. On the other hand, if you are parking next to a wall, that's a good way to scrape up your rear fender.
Don't try this when you are parallel parking along a canal in a Dutch town. There are sometimes no curbs. Use your side mirror. Aligning yourself with a car behind you is an easy method, but this creates a problem if there is no car behind you but for instance a tree.
12 homes per acre?? Thats insanity.
Here in the US we'd call that high-density housing and its only where you're stuck if you can't afford any better.
Here in the Netherlands the government-enforced 'vinex' guidelines require this density in parts of the country. The size of parcels is basically related to the distance from from the large cities. If you want a big garden, you are going to spend a large part of your live in your car. Incomes in higher density areas are on average some 30% higher than in lower density areas, and the most popular areas are generally within (former) city walls.
At 12+ houses per acre, the houses are so close together that you can stand in one place and touch two houses at the same time. It means if you raise your voice or burp loudly your neighbor can hear it.
Not here in the Netherlands. Our home construction methods are completely different. We don't use wood framing. Traditionally this is because we have few trees in the country and lots of clay for bricks and roof tiles, and people look down on flimsy building materials and lightweight roof constructions. The inside/warm and outside/cold walls in newer houses don't have structural connections passing on noise or heat. US houses of the same floor area are much cheaper to build.
And I really dont get the wasteland comment. Just because the human density is low doesnt mean its an unpleasant part of the country. In fact, the more lush and beautiful the land is in your area, the more of it you'd want to have for your own and separate you from your neighbor.
It's a cultural choice. Economically speaking it's wasteland in the sense that it costs the US economy money to let people live in those parts of the country. The biggest employer in most rural states is the government and generic services, and most of the land is used for heavily subsidized, destructive, and low yield agriculture. For Americans it is apparently a worthwhile investment of money and time (spent in your car) to live far apart, but it is an expensive luxury. I agree parts of the US are spectacularly beautiful, but on the other hand the 'manmade' parts of the landscape look very sloppy with above ground utilities and stuff like that.
Considering how quickly house prices drop in proportion to population density here in a tiny country such as the Netherlands, we apparently have much less tolerance for being far away from civilization (and more for smaller living quarters). Few want to live 40+ minutes from a major city.
A sidenote: the few people who emigrate from here to the US, Canada, and Australia generally do go to sparsely populated areas, but these people usually don't have to work (anymore) for a living. We obviously don't have the choice, given that our population density is some 16 times higher than in the US. US expats who go to the Netherlands usually want to live in or near a historical town center if they can afford it.
That's only a land area factor of, oh, 19. Yes, the US is 19X the size of Spain, but with only 7X the population. Things are nowhere near as close to one another as they are in Europe. It's not ideal, but that's the way things are in the US. You just about have to drive to get to where you need to go in anywhere less than a day, unless you happen to be right on a bus route that goes very near where you're going.
It is not impossible to live on a smaller parcel of land. It is a choice to live far apart. Americans would live closer together in fewer population centers had the government not subsidized people to live in wasteland. There are complete states that economically depend on government, education, health care, and selling each other burgers and petrol. It is in principle never too late to plan houses closer together, but the American people actually wants to use the land area. A density of let's say 12+ houses an acre makes good public transport connections to work and the nearest public transport hubs possible. If the density is too low, people have to walk too far. The population density creates jobs in the private sector, and fast and frequent transport to other population centers will pay when you get enough people without a car to the hub efficiently.
Yes, these are needed, but not a single of these items comes from the government. I mean, in general. Nowadays, of course, the government has its claws everywhere.
Having a monopoly on violence and theft is the first imperative for a budding state. There is a fine dividing line between robber barons and kings taxing their subjects: the king was there first. In an anarchic situation most people will voluntarily subject themselves to any group that is able to monopolize violence and theft in an area, because economic activity depends on the ability to leave your house and land carrying goods to sell to others, without getting robbed or your house plundered. Without a protector there is no market. States organize markets, mint coins, define who owns what and how goods can legally change hands, adjudicate conflicts about property, et cetera. It is their main purpose.
We have seen it happen in the Dark Ages in Europe (feudalism), and we still see proto-states developing in a power vacuum like the Mafia in 1943-1945 in liberated Sicily and more recently warlords in other parts of the world (Afghanistan, Somalia, Hizbullah etc in Lebanon, Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine Authority, the diverse 'militia' in Iraq, etc). People need these warlords to get the local economy running. You can't run a shop without protection. As Olson puts it in Power and Prosperity (2000):
the Mafia family with a true and continuing monopoly on crime in a neighbourhood will not commit any robberies at all. If it monopolizes crime in the neighbourhood, it will gain from promoting business profitability and safe residential life there. Thus the secure Mafia family will maximize its take by selling protection - both against the crime it would commit itself (if not paid) as well as that which would be committed by others.
As soon as government regulation becomes involved, you no longer have true capitalism.
On the contrary. Without government the development of capitalism is impossible. You need money, property, markets, investment, etc. It only works in a society where people dare to give money to someone else in some other town in the expectation that they will make more money. It only happens in countries with a wealthy and efficient bureacracy. It is of course possible to organize capitalism around a some kind of commercial banking and property titling operation employing its own police officers, but a company like this is not really distinguishable from government.
The game should be compelling enough to teach people that it is worth staying even though they will never get to be 10 times as powerful as a newbie. What the company looses in power to make people stay, it gains in making it worth to enter the game later.
The problem of the beancounter is that by listening too much to the customers he already has, he looses the customers he could have. This attitude is what causes the limited shelf life of online worlds.
The game teaches the players to be the way they are. The dominance of hoarding games in the fantasy genre is in no way a reflection of what 'the market' wants. It is the players that adapt to the games being offered.
Compare it to a team-based fps game with a team competition: people have no problem with the option of hoarding being unavailable, take on a specific role in the team, even an unglamorous one like guarding the base, and will even sacrifice themselves for the team if that is what happens to be what the game rewards.