"What I'm still not hearing is why it's not OK to teach which parts of evolutionary theory are rock solid and which parts are still mostly guesswork and why. It seems to me that would improve a student's understanding of science, not detract from it."
Which parts are "still mostly guesswork" that would actually come up in an undergraduate class?
Teaching this is currently fine and does not need an additional law to protect it.
You aren't that familiar with Saudi Arabia then. Twenty years ago they went on a "Saudiazation" project because living off of the oil was running out. There have been plenty of changes in Saudi Arabia, and it isn't as socially embarrassing to work for a living as it used to be.
Or maybe I misunderstood you. Hopefully you aren't trying to say that Saudi Arabia is working against a science education (like Oklahoma is reported to be) because that is even more so not true.
But to the extent that Saudi Arabia "rode the wave" of oil, they have actually been working to wean themselves off of it. Their economic problems might not be apparent from the outside, but unlike the US they don't make a habit of airing their laundry in public.
I think the split in the Republican party is inevitable. Its happened before (one of the two parties loses focus resulting in a split) and inevitably one of the two spawned fades into insignificance.
Its possible such splits will occur more frequently as there is very little to (meaningfully) distinguish between the two parties at a national level. They focus on a small number of divisive issues in order to distract the electorate that a bunch of mice are voting for white cats vs black cats. With such a hyperfocus on distracting minutia it is no wonder that the more extreme elements in the Republican party have found traction.
Heh. I noticed as soon it was on the screen. It wasn't *terrible*, but it wasn't that good, either. To be fair, I don't think anyone I was with noticed.
Its possible the reason it jumped out at me is that I do rendering work. Once you start working with textures and seeing how they come out it really sensitizes you to what is fake. There are rendered images that when I first saw them years ago I couldn't tell the difference from a photograph. Now I can glance at them and -- while appreciating that they look very nice -- see that they are clearly rendered.
CGI has come a long way, that's for sure. But I think we are still a long way off from rendering flawless images. Even physical based renders (which, on paper, sounds great because it is using accurate physics rather than a biased render engine) have fundamental flaws. To use a trivial example, edges are perfect -- it doesn't matter how perfect the engine is, you are still limited by your 3d mesh. Similarly, if your render engine can perfectly represent a substance indistinguishable from physical reality it will look too good, too clean.
Its the same thing as working with physical models: its fairly easy to make something *perfect* but quite another to make it seem *real*. One of the biggest give aways in a movie with models is that things are too clean and too precise. It takes effort to dirty them up in believable ways.
ah, putting words into Apple's mouth is so much fun. Of course, they never said any such thing. Instead, as you could read from the quotes above, they say that they believe in the customer's privacy. You aren't playing devil's advocate, you are willfully misrepresenting Apple's position.
in what way is the advertising unsolicited? the receiver did not ask their friends to spam them.
You wouldn't by any chance represent a sales or marketing type, would you? I had to deal with a spammer for a while (as in, supporting his activities). Even though he was buying software to harvest emails to send unwanted and unsolicited email, he too found ways to justify his activities.
What was particularly memorable was dealing with his complaints about his spam being filtered out as being spam. He insisted and swore up and down that it wasn't. Unfortunately for him, spam filters are pretty good these days and even if *he* as the *sender* didn't feel like it was spam, the rest of the world disagreed.
So, yes, it *is* unsolicited advertising. I'm glad you don't have my email address because by the sound of things you wouldn't honor any request to quit fucking spamming me.
yeah. I taught myself basic back a long time ago. Numbered lines and lots of gotos. There was gosub, but I didn't really get it. Then I taught myself C, and since then have learned numerous other languages.
The advantage of basic over C, at least for someone's first exposure to programming, is the immediacy of execution. I wouldn't recommend basic at this point, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it just that there are better languages.
Personally I'd recommend Python to a beginner because the syntax is very straightforward and it is an interpreted language. But there's no major reason not to use perl or javascript or even php as a learning language. (Other than the required goat sacrifices on Friday nights required for Perl, some places frown on that.:)
Easy: get a bunch of corporate representatives to agree that "linux is good" with a desire to increase adoption through standardization and there you go. They call themselves the "Linux Foundation" which is accurate inasmuch as their reason for existence has to do with promoting linux.
According to the blog, one of the members (unnamed) is a major GPL violator and then speculates that the change to the bylaws was to prevent a representative of an organization that attempts to enforce the GPL from joining the board.
Indeed. I've been reading H. Beam Piper's "Fuzzy" stories to my kids and it is quite amusing to have the "veridicator" play such a prominent role as an infallible method of separating truth from lies (although the narration admits the possibility of unintentional deception wherein someone truly believes what they are saying it emphatically rejects the possibility of deliberate deception).
To the topic at hand, it is certainly interesting and even useful when applied intelligently. For example, it is well established that single "books" (e.g., in the Bible) have multiple authors. Some of this is trivial (anyone reading the Noah story as related in the Bible should be able to immediately tell that there is a minimum of two separate traditions being merged), but serious textual analysis is good for making finer discrimination -- with the caveat that it does not provide absolute answers.
and then there are authors who have a diverse writing style. Try author identifying software | reader identification of anonymized works on a corpus including the work of Walter Jon Williams -- and I doubt that he is the only author to vary style.
they succeeded with nothing like 100% using a small sample set which has the side effect of avoiding confusion.
Put another way: face recognition seems promising with similar accuracy rate when limited to a small set of faces. But once you open the flood gates the accuracy goes way down.
Proponents fall back on the "it works as a pre-filter" which, depending on the size of the population you are working with, might have sufficient true positive with a low enough false positive to make it workable. But it is also a far cry from the claims of identification.
You are right that as a group we are very focused on the individual. Everyone must own their own car. Everyone must drive themselves. Everyone must hold their own job. Everyone must pay for things themselves.
The thing is, this belief set is not an expression of individualism, its an expression of group identity. So while it is true that Americans can, by and large, be described as "me first" that in no way argues against a fascist group identity. If you aren't an individualist, me first kinda person then you aren't American...
Group think has always been strong in the US with occasional spasms where there was a noticeable split (e.g., Vietnam), but despite politics emphasizing divisive aspects (e.g., women's rights vs abortion) there is a high degree of cultural conformity. If you don't see it you should hang around foreigners more.
Lastly, you talk about American reluctance for a strong central government -- but that is exactly what we have. And it is only getting stronger. While the southern states made their reason for secession (slavery*) abundantly clear in their declarations it is still a useful way to describe the issue of state rights. Compare secession with the various states pursuing legal recourse against "Obamacare". While the states sometimes complain about specific federal oppressions it amounts to children asking their parent to reconsider. There is no serious consideration that the states are anything but inferior to the federal government.
So, yes, there is quite a bit of rhetoric about Americans eschewing a strong central government. The truth, however, is that one has been created in order to have a central army, central welfare, central intelligence, "protection from terrorists", etc.
* if in doubt, read the declarations. They make no bones about slavery being the cause.
Because the short reply pretty well covered it? As did some others, but lets try again:
The Bible establishes the fundamental tenets of Christianity. No christian will disagree with the statement that literally believing and following everything in the Bible is absolutely fundamental to being a "good" christian. http://www.1stap.com/en/html/t...
Many hundreds of thousands of "good" Christians around the world are acting on the Bible and are committing murder and torture of innocent people, and abuse of even their own women on a daily basis. Of the many millions of Christians around the world, a high percentage are clearly in at least quiet agreement with terrorist organizations like IRA's motives and methods.
It boggles my mind how any supposedly intelligent people can still seriously think anyone that voluntarily chooses to follow such a religion deserves to get given the benefit of all doubt, and even be treated like civilized people when they clearly aren't civilized BY THEIR OWN CHOICE.
Will you still buy a Samsung phone? If not, will you buy any phone? You see, the problem is they *all* have the same problem that some portion of their supply chain may (and probably does) include some form of worker abuse.
So: do you throw out your phone that was produced on the backs of children? Why not? You have been informed and can no longer deny that you are profiting from child labor (and other forms of abuse).
Unless you:
1) grow or hunt all of your own food 2) only utilize tools that you have constructed yourself 3) using only materials that you produced yourself
Then you are, to some degree, a hypocrite for blaming Apple.
I would point out to the well documented facts that Apple makes an attempt to police their suppliers for abuses (as opposed to say Samsung or Nike) as a mitigating factor for Apple.
But, hey, feel free to go ahead and start throwing stones.
wow. So if all manufacturers cheat then it is okay. That's amazing. So what do you think is the correct response? To dial back the regulations and pollute ourselves to death?
Coal companies just as uniformly lied about waste and did illegal dumping of chemical toxins into the water supply. Should the government not have attempted to regulate that? Were they wrong to go after companies until finally standards improved a little (to dumping chemical toxins in Mexico, often with water bringing them back into the US)?
Don't try waving the hand and pretending that its okay, just admit your a corporate shill and be honest with yourself and everyone else.
you might be interested to know that we are (slowly) moving heavy manufacturing to China. It isn't just "mass produced" commodity goods. Like GM and vehicles (I know someone involved in that collaboration).
This isn't an immediate concern, but the more production capacity that gets moved out of the US the worse we are off for it, economically speaking. The one area where we still appear to lead the world is in the production of imaginary property -- we continue to export our culture far more than we import that of others.
But even there, more and more of the production is being done in Asia or Eastern Europe. Hollywood can keep pretending that JJ Abrams "makes the movie" -- but the reality is that the *easiest* thing to disappear from this country is something which is produced with intangible assets. Story ideas, new approaches to filming, etc., have no geographical basis and can be done anywhere.
Its a mistake to focus on the labor costs, the actual problem is the entire production process. If it were just a matter of slapping components together they could probably do that in the US -- but the problem is more complex. Its hard for your worker (or robot, or however your production factory works) to slap components together when they don't even have them. You need quick turn arounds (cheap shipping for bulk transfers across the ocean doesn't really work for this), you need assembly close to sources.
A problem for the US isn't just that we've outsourced manufacturing, but that we've moved so much of the production pipeline overseas that it is becoming more and more untenable to have any manufacturing done in the US. Sure, there are exceptions, but the more parts are sourced from Asia the more you will see the product manufacturing being moved wholesale to Asia.
The problem for the US is that, in the long run, without production capacity we will lack buying power. Asia is unconcerned about this: the Chinese market is so much larger than the US that it won't take much longer and we can take a hike for all they care. In the near term they still need us to fuel their own economic growth -- but really that is just to speed things up. In the long term Asia has little to no need for the rest of the world.
I would agree with your summary, except that we have had *very* bad presidents before. Its easy to forget that those scandals that occurred decades before we were born are just as real as the garbage going on in the present.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! Thanks! That identifies two misrepresentations. Fox News, for the win!
"What I'm still not hearing is why it's not OK to teach which parts of evolutionary theory are rock solid and which parts are still mostly guesswork and why. It seems to me that would improve a student's understanding of science, not detract from it."
Which parts are "still mostly guesswork" that would actually come up in an undergraduate class?
Teaching this is currently fine and does not need an additional law to protect it.
You aren't that familiar with Saudi Arabia then. Twenty years ago they went on a "Saudiazation" project because living off of the oil was running out. There have been plenty of changes in Saudi Arabia, and it isn't as socially embarrassing to work for a living as it used to be.
Or maybe I misunderstood you. Hopefully you aren't trying to say that Saudi Arabia is working against a science education (like Oklahoma is reported to be) because that is even more so not true.
But to the extent that Saudi Arabia "rode the wave" of oil, they have actually been working to wean themselves off of it. Their economic problems might not be apparent from the outside, but unlike the US they don't make a habit of airing their laundry in public.
true, and a point I often make. However, were they to vote contrary to their states representation there *might* be consequences.
I would love a citation for this
I think the split in the Republican party is inevitable. Its happened before (one of the two parties loses focus resulting in a split) and inevitably one of the two spawned fades into insignificance.
Its possible such splits will occur more frequently as there is very little to (meaningfully) distinguish between the two parties at a national level. They focus on a small number of divisive issues in order to distract the electorate that a bunch of mice are voting for white cats vs black cats. With such a hyperfocus on distracting minutia it is no wonder that the more extreme elements in the Republican party have found traction.
Heh. I noticed as soon it was on the screen. It wasn't *terrible*, but it wasn't that good, either. To be fair, I don't think anyone I was with noticed.
Its possible the reason it jumped out at me is that I do rendering work. Once you start working with textures and seeing how they come out it really sensitizes you to what is fake. There are rendered images that when I first saw them years ago I couldn't tell the difference from a photograph. Now I can glance at them and -- while appreciating that they look very nice -- see that they are clearly rendered.
CGI has come a long way, that's for sure. But I think we are still a long way off from rendering flawless images. Even physical based renders (which, on paper, sounds great because it is using accurate physics rather than a biased render engine) have fundamental flaws. To use a trivial example, edges are perfect -- it doesn't matter how perfect the engine is, you are still limited by your 3d mesh. Similarly, if your render engine can perfectly represent a substance indistinguishable from physical reality it will look too good, too clean.
Its the same thing as working with physical models: its fairly easy to make something *perfect* but quite another to make it seem *real*. One of the biggest give aways in a movie with models is that things are too clean and too precise. It takes effort to dirty them up in believable ways.
ah, putting words into Apple's mouth is so much fun. Of course, they never said any such thing. Instead, as you could read from the quotes above, they say that they believe in the customer's privacy. You aren't playing devil's advocate, you are willfully misrepresenting Apple's position.
Nice strawman, btw
in what way is the advertising unsolicited? the receiver did not ask their friends to spam them.
You wouldn't by any chance represent a sales or marketing type, would you? I had to deal with a spammer for a while (as in, supporting his activities). Even though he was buying software to harvest emails to send unwanted and unsolicited email, he too found ways to justify his activities.
What was particularly memorable was dealing with his complaints about his spam being filtered out as being spam. He insisted and swore up and down that it wasn't. Unfortunately for him, spam filters are pretty good these days and even if *he* as the *sender* didn't feel like it was spam, the rest of the world disagreed.
So, yes, it *is* unsolicited advertising. I'm glad you don't have my email address because by the sound of things you wouldn't honor any request to quit fucking spamming me.
yeah. I taught myself basic back a long time ago. Numbered lines and lots of gotos. There was gosub, but I didn't really get it. Then I taught myself C, and since then have learned numerous other languages.
The advantage of basic over C, at least for someone's first exposure to programming, is the immediacy of execution. I wouldn't recommend basic at this point, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it just that there are better languages.
Personally I'd recommend Python to a beginner because the syntax is very straightforward and it is an interpreted language. But there's no major reason not to use perl or javascript or even php as a learning language. (Other than the required goat sacrifices on Friday nights required for Perl, some places frown on that. :)
Easy: get a bunch of corporate representatives to agree that "linux is good" with a desire to increase adoption through standardization and there you go. They call themselves the "Linux Foundation" which is accurate inasmuch as their reason for existence has to do with promoting linux.
According to the blog, one of the members (unnamed) is a major GPL violator and then speculates that the change to the bylaws was to prevent a representative of an organization that attempts to enforce the GPL from joining the board.
Indeed. I've been reading H. Beam Piper's "Fuzzy" stories to my kids and it is quite amusing to have the "veridicator" play such a prominent role as an infallible method of separating truth from lies (although the narration admits the possibility of unintentional deception wherein someone truly believes what they are saying it emphatically rejects the possibility of deliberate deception).
To the topic at hand, it is certainly interesting and even useful when applied intelligently. For example, it is well established that single "books" (e.g., in the Bible) have multiple authors. Some of this is trivial (anyone reading the Noah story as related in the Bible should be able to immediately tell that there is a minimum of two separate traditions being merged), but serious textual analysis is good for making finer discrimination -- with the caveat that it does not provide absolute answers.
and then there are authors who have a diverse writing style. Try author identifying software | reader identification of anonymized works on a corpus including the work of Walter Jon Williams -- and I doubt that he is the only author to vary style.
they succeeded with nothing like 100% using a small sample set which has the side effect of avoiding confusion.
Put another way: face recognition seems promising with similar accuracy rate when limited to a small set of faces. But once you open the flood gates the accuracy goes way down.
Proponents fall back on the "it works as a pre-filter" which, depending on the size of the population you are working with, might have sufficient true positive with a low enough false positive to make it workable. But it is also a far cry from the claims of identification.
doh! should've paid attention to the preview.
Oh you meant "which way is [insert holy city of choice]"?
Off topic.
Oh, you meant, "which way is "? But that wouldn't sound as silly as "Which way is east in space?"
I'm all for mocking religion, but it is such an easy target there's no reason to misrepresent anything.
You are right that as a group we are very focused on the individual. Everyone must own their own car. Everyone must drive themselves. Everyone must hold their own job. Everyone must pay for things themselves.
The thing is, this belief set is not an expression of individualism, its an expression of group identity. So while it is true that Americans can, by and large, be described as "me first" that in no way argues against a fascist group identity. If you aren't an individualist, me first kinda person then you aren't American...
Group think has always been strong in the US with occasional spasms where there was a noticeable split (e.g., Vietnam), but despite politics emphasizing divisive aspects (e.g., women's rights vs abortion) there is a high degree of cultural conformity. If you don't see it you should hang around foreigners more.
Lastly, you talk about American reluctance for a strong central government -- but that is exactly what we have. And it is only getting stronger. While the southern states made their reason for secession (slavery*) abundantly clear in their declarations it is still a useful way to describe the issue of state rights. Compare secession with the various states pursuing legal recourse against "Obamacare". While the states sometimes complain about specific federal oppressions it amounts to children asking their parent to reconsider. There is no serious consideration that the states are anything but inferior to the federal government.
So, yes, there is quite a bit of rhetoric about Americans eschewing a strong central government. The truth, however, is that one has been created in order to have a central army, central welfare, central intelligence, "protection from terrorists", etc.
* if in doubt, read the declarations. They make no bones about slavery being the cause.
Because the short reply pretty well covered it? As did some others, but lets try again:
The Bible establishes the fundamental tenets of Christianity. No christian will disagree with the statement that literally believing and following everything in the Bible is absolutely fundamental to being a "good" christian.
http://www.1stap.com/en/html/t...
The Bible includes many passages on torture and death to all non-believers, and treating women like chattels.
http://www.whatchristianswantt...
http://othersidereflections.bl...
Many hundreds of thousands of "good" Christians around the world are acting on the Bible and are committing murder and torture of innocent people, and abuse of even their own women on a daily basis. Of the many millions of Christians around the world, a high percentage are clearly in at least quiet agreement with terrorist organizations like IRA's motives and methods.
It boggles my mind how any supposedly intelligent people can still seriously think anyone that voluntarily chooses to follow such a religion deserves to get given the benefit of all doubt, and even be treated like civilized people when they clearly aren't civilized BY THEIR OWN CHOICE.
+1 Insightful
okay, the cat is out of the bag.
Will you still buy a Samsung phone? If not, will you buy any phone? You see, the problem is they *all* have the same problem that some portion of their supply chain may (and probably does) include some form of worker abuse.
So: do you throw out your phone that was produced on the backs of children? Why not? You have been informed and can no longer deny that you are profiting from child labor (and other forms of abuse).
Unless you:
1) grow or hunt all of your own food
2) only utilize tools that you have constructed yourself
3) using only materials that you produced yourself
Then you are, to some degree, a hypocrite for blaming Apple.
I would point out to the well documented facts that Apple makes an attempt to police their suppliers for abuses (as opposed to say Samsung or Nike) as a mitigating factor for Apple.
But, hey, feel free to go ahead and start throwing stones.
because money
(assuming it even exists, as other comments indicate someone was just jumping the gun and assuming that a brandname was the same as a domain name.)
wow. So if all manufacturers cheat then it is okay. That's amazing. So what do you think is the correct response? To dial back the regulations and pollute ourselves to death?
Coal companies just as uniformly lied about waste and did illegal dumping of chemical toxins into the water supply. Should the government not have attempted to regulate that? Were they wrong to go after companies until finally standards improved a little (to dumping chemical toxins in Mexico, often with water bringing them back into the US)?
Don't try waving the hand and pretending that its okay, just admit your a corporate shill and be honest with yourself and everyone else.
you might be interested to know that we are (slowly) moving heavy manufacturing to China. It isn't just "mass produced" commodity goods. Like GM and vehicles (I know someone involved in that collaboration).
This isn't an immediate concern, but the more production capacity that gets moved out of the US the worse we are off for it, economically speaking. The one area where we still appear to lead the world is in the production of imaginary property -- we continue to export our culture far more than we import that of others.
But even there, more and more of the production is being done in Asia or Eastern Europe. Hollywood can keep pretending that JJ Abrams "makes the movie" -- but the reality is that the *easiest* thing to disappear from this country is something which is produced with intangible assets. Story ideas, new approaches to filming, etc., have no geographical basis and can be done anywhere.
Its a mistake to focus on the labor costs, the actual problem is the entire production process. If it were just a matter of slapping components together they could probably do that in the US -- but the problem is more complex. Its hard for your worker (or robot, or however your production factory works) to slap components together when they don't even have them. You need quick turn arounds (cheap shipping for bulk transfers across the ocean doesn't really work for this), you need assembly close to sources.
A problem for the US isn't just that we've outsourced manufacturing, but that we've moved so much of the production pipeline overseas that it is becoming more and more untenable to have any manufacturing done in the US. Sure, there are exceptions, but the more parts are sourced from Asia the more you will see the product manufacturing being moved wholesale to Asia.
The problem for the US is that, in the long run, without production capacity we will lack buying power. Asia is unconcerned about this: the Chinese market is so much larger than the US that it won't take much longer and we can take a hike for all they care. In the near term they still need us to fuel their own economic growth -- but really that is just to speed things up. In the long term Asia has little to no need for the rest of the world.
I would agree with your summary, except that we have had *very* bad presidents before. Its easy to forget that those scandals that occurred decades before we were born are just as real as the garbage going on in the present.