Well, the problem is that if _everyone_ started being logical about their consumption, the economy would crumble. Long story incoming, but bear with me.
Basically what happens ever since the Great Depression is that we can produce orders of magnitude more than we can possibly sell. That's, in a nutshell, what happened in the Great Depression in the first place. Think supply and demand. It works somewhat like this:
- think a graph that plots number of units produced versus the cost per unit to produce it. Obviously, the more units you produce, the less it will cost, so it looks sorta hyperbole shaped.
- Now think a second curve on that graph: number of units produced, vs the price at which you can sell them. Yeah, Say's Law sorta applies, supply produces its own demand, but at an increasingly lower price. E.g., everyone needs a pair of shoes, but if you want to sell them _two_ pairs of shoes, you'll need to make them a bit more affordable. And if you want to sell them _three_ pairs of shoes, you'll have to lower the price some more.
The point where the two curves intersect is basically the supply and demand equilibrium point.
What happened in the Great Depression was that the two curves became basically parallel. There was no point where you'd cover even the production price, much less make a profit. Hence, factories going bankrupt and it didn't make sense for someone else to start a new factory. Hence, unemployment exploded.
Of course, there were other factors, such as the devastating effects of a forced deflation, but in a nutshell, supply-vs-demand this is what happened. It will help illustrate my point just fine.
Since then, we learned to deal with it by messing with both sides of the equation. E.g.,
- demand side: government spending (sometimes even to wasteful extremes) to create extra demand. It keeps some companies in business producing, say, missiles. And those companies then go and buy trucks, keeping those companies in business too. And their employees go and buy clothes and TVs, so they help keep more companies in business. There's a bit of a multiplier effect there. See, Keynesian Multiplier. At any rate, it raises aggregate demand to keep the economy going.
- demand side: think marketting, fashion, planned obsolescence, minor upgrades presented as the next must-have thing, etc. Basically making people want to throw their perfectly good 2-year-old car and buy a new one just because the new one has rounded headlights. Basically instead of just lowering the price to make people buy a second car, convince them that the car they bought last year are sooo unfashionable now, and they have to throw it away and buy a new one.
- supply side: the previous point also has the side-effect of lowering supply. More and more people are moved from manufacturing an excess of goods, to jobs like design (someone has to come up with those rounded headlights), marketting, PR, R&D to come up with those minor upgrades that marketting will then present as the greatest paradigm shift ever, etc.
If people just started being sane about their purchases, all that edifice would have a harder time keeping working. If you see cars as just transport, for example, then there is no need to upgrade as long as the new one doesn't offer an earth-shattering advantage in that department.
Fuel economy makes a poor incentive to upgrade. You're not going to to buy an 100,000$ car just because it uses 5% less fuel than your 2 year old car. It just won't pay for itself by the time the next upgrade would be due. If it's just transport and the only difference is the mpg, then you're going to hold onto a car for 20 years. And if you're logical, it also won't be MPG alone, but total cost, so you won't get an expensive Porsche when a cheap Skoda does the same job.
So basically, expect the economy to go very funny very fast if people actually started being sane about their purchases. At the moment you can be the smart one not blowing your money on fashionable crap, basically, at the expense of relying on everyone else to be the dumb ones who do. But if everyone snapped out of it, you may well get to live in interesting times.
Worse yet: why does _everyone_ and their grandma feel like they _have_ to sound like a hip smack-talking wisecracking wigger when they write a "the worst X" list? They say that if you try too hard to make an impression, usually that's the impression you make. Same here. Most of these lists sound, at best, like a bad case of mid-life crisis or like the "pretty fly for a white guy" kinda teenager, since they mention Offspring: some poser trying to sound artificially cool, hip, funny and all gangsta.
How about just telling me what's bad about a game? Or in the case of covers you'd think it would be obvious by itself. I don't need some contrived smack-talking wisecracking metaphors to convince me that something really is that bad.
Also, I wonder how many of these lists are some lame effort to establish street cred. Take a site which otherwise gives only scores between 95% and 100% to please the publisher, slap a "15 worst games which are 20 years old" (or otherwise noone makes money off them any more, so the publisher still won't be mad at us) on it, and voila, now they can claim that they say the bad stuff too. Or, hey, let's play it even safer and pick only on something as mild and irrelevant as box art cover. Surely the publisher won't be too pissed off at _that_.
Based on my experience with programming projects, I'd say it must have been like this:
- the client's manager (the pharaoh) couldn't be arsed to actually think what he needs and to specify it, and probably was also affraid to sign anything that doesn't cover all potential aspects, hypothetical future needs, buzzwords, etc, in one go. So it has to have not only a pond, but also sphinxes, obelisks, etc, just in case someone ever needs them, and sometimes because he just didn't really understand what he wants. Maybe also a case of new alpha dog having to piss on everything and mark his territory, so building a pond doesn't sound as grandious as restructuring the whole burial process in Egypt.
- the team's marketting guy just had to sell the biggest and most expensive thing he could, even if the client doesn't actually need it. So he took the Pharaoh to a restaurant and to golf, and established himself as the guy the Pharaoh can trust, unlike those pesky IT nerds... err... embalmers who insist that they need a pyramid for it like a fish needs a bycicle. He had to cut the price and deadline a bit, though, but he's proud that he made a sale, and it's not his problem how that's going to be built with only 20 men within the promised time.
- some other politics and power games were involved, such as between the vizier for construction and the vizier for agriculture, or between the nomarch (governor) of Saqqara and the nomarch of Thebes. Extra funds and grandious requirements are piled just to make a silly "I'm greater than you because my pet project got more funding than yours" point.
- the builders' manager had read in some "Construction Week" ragazine for managers that pyramids are the latest cool buzzword, and everything should be built with pyramids. He doesn't really understand what those are, when they're used, and when they're not used, since those ragazines are little more than fashion magazines and never actually give you the actual information needed to make an informed choice or design. So the pond must have pyramids too, he's sure that's what makes a project successful. He's also the only guy the marketter consulted with, if any.
- a couple of workers don't give a fuck about actually solving the problem, they just want the latest buzzwords on the resume so they can apply to an even better paid job. They heard that spiral ramps are the latest buzzword, so they have to have "has used spiral ramps" on their resume. The original spec for 3 ft tall pyramids in the corners of the pond gets ballooned into a gigantic monstrosity just so they can get that buzzword on their resume. (Of course, now there's a problem with the deadline, but that's not their problem.)
- the architect fully cooperates with the above, or maybe is one of the above, plus he has to justify his job. His boss doesn't really understand architecture, but can be smoked with lots of buzzwords and complicated diagrams. A complicated architecture with lots of clever buzzwords, (A) makes the boss go, "whoa, this guy is so smart, I'm happy we have him to plan all this for us", i.e., establishing credentials, and (B) "whoa, these projects are so complicated, good thing we had an architect to plan it for us", i.e., making sure he gets to keep his job and be called upon for the next pond too, and (C) it lets him get paid for months, maybe years, of just painting diagrams, which is good.
- a couple of workers are in it just for fun and playing with the biggest rocks and newest techniques, and only incidentally get to be paid for it. They'll cheerfully help inflate the spec even more, because it lets them play with big stones and logs instead of the boring old bricks for a 3ft decoration.
- most of the builders are contractors or consultants paid by the hour. 'Nuff said.
- at least one manager involved has realized that, according to the corporate rules, he'd get a promotion if he had just a couple more people under him. Unsurprisingly, his solution to everything is to hire more people and push for even mo
If I have to be honest, in your original post the way you describe how you kept doing that girl's work, I suspected you were going for mod Sarcasm +1 or something; this is slashdot after all...
Well, you have to understand that (A) it wasn't a big effort, and (B) hey, I got to hang out with a cute redhead:P, and (C) in retrospect it's also what you were saying about the carrot. You know, showing off, seeing some recognition, that kinda thing.
Well, ok, now it's a bit of sarcasm. I never actually had much of an illusion that it was actually a "girlfriend", but more of a case of A and C. Or maybe she was good at delegating all the work.
By giving in and doing progressively more tasks that were originally assigned (usurped?) by you, you give a signal to them that it's fine to slack, since "hey it's cool to slack off and postpone, Moraelin will do it anyway". You do not want to nourish that idea or reward it.
I'll aggree that it's a bad idea, but... on the other hand, I do know enough people who got to tell the professor "umm, we're not ready" because they didn't.
Just as an extra point, though, you don't need to assume that someone necessarily doubted your coding skills.
A lot of people ending up majoring in anything even remotely computer-related, (A) love to code cool stuff, hence don't really need more reasons to write your part of the code too, and (B) well, don't really need help to solve most college assignments. Those college assignments are generally designed to be at the level of someone who's only now learning that trade in college, not for the level of someone who was doing that kind of stuff, at that level, 4 years ago.
If you will, think getting one of those chemistry engineering problems... when you've been doing that, and more complex stuff, even before high school. I'm sure you're dealing with problems far more complex than that, but for the sake of giving a simple example, think being asked to solve getting salt from HCl and natrium. I'm sure you wouldn't really set up a whole group and delegate parts of it, when it's actually less effort to just solve it by yourself.
For some of us those college assignments were really _that_ trivial. Even if you don't already know the exact algorithm, chances are a short search or a trip to the library are all it takes. But they didn't even need that, they just needed at most having a look through the lecture notes. We're not exactly talking post-grad school there, so they didn't ask anyone to research new stuff, they just wanted to see us able to apply whatever techniques or algorithms or formulas they already taught us. And, again, which a lot of us already knew anyway.
Part of the problem there is, well, the massive disparities in previous experience and skill level between students. If you give homework that would require major research and collaboration for a die-hard geek, you've buried everyone else alive.
I would assume that chemistry has somewhat less of that problem. I would assume there aren't many who've been spending 40+ hours a week doing biochemistry and chemical engineering for fun since they were 12. (But then, it's a wild assumption and I might be wrong.) So it would probably be somewhat easier to gauge the difficulty of a problem so it's challenging for a broader slice of students.
Duly noted, I was only talking about my own field, not yours. I thought that much was obvious, though in retrospect it wasn't. I really should have made it clear.
I may be wrong in assuming this, but perhaps you weren't very good at delegating tasks to your team members ? That's a part of teamwork too : finding out who is good at what, and delegating responsibilities accordingly. (No flame intended)
None taken. I _know_ I'm no good at managing anyone, but then that's why I didn't go to a management school. It's one of the first things I tell my employer too.
Still, you've piqued my interest. So also not as a flame or anything, just out of genuine curiosity, how should I have went about delegating to, say, my first "sidekick"?
The story is a fairly straightforward one. It started with mostly "ok, so which part do you want to start with?" Ok, so he wants to do the part that plots the graphs. Sure. (I don't think I fucked up _too_ hard so far. After all, whole methodologies, e.g. Extreme Programming, involve people choosing which part they think they need next or would like to do next. But then I may be wrong.)
Some time goes by and I'm getting only hot air from him. "Yeah, I'm working on it" and "yeah, it's almost ready, I just need another week to debug something" and the like. He doesn't want to show me the supposed work so far either, when I offer to help him debug it.
So it gets split down further. "Ok, how about drawing the X and Y axes for that graph? Might as well start with that, just so we have _something_ to show the prof. We can tweak and polish the actual graph drawing afterwards, as time allows." Ok, good idea, he says, he'll get to that ASAP. We're one month before the deadline by now, so it would be high time.
Let's also say at this point that it's such a bloody trivial task, I'd expect anyone to say, "sure, lemme at the keyboard for 5 minutes." I mean, even if you make it configurable to draw extra lines at the hundreds, or logarithmic ticks, and whatever else you can possibly think of, it has no excuse to take more than half an hour tops. It's just bloody trivial, really.
Time goes by, I'm getting more reassuring that he's working on it, he's debugging it, etc. (Hello? For a task that trivial?) A week before the deadline I'm already getting, understandably, impatient. I had had the foresight to do the rest of the graph drawing functions myself in that time, though, so I'm really just waiting for his drawing the bloody X and Y axes. Still, it would be high time to actually get those and see to fitting them into the rest of the program, you know?
I manage to squeeze an, "Oh, I'm just debugging the drawing the ticks and units along the axes, otherwise it's almost ready," out of him. Fine, I say, we can draw just the two lines for now, I'm sure we can smoke the prof as to why there are no numbers and ticks on them. You know, just a vertical line and a horizontal line. How trivial is _that_?
Again, I'd expect a, "sure, lemme at the keyboard for 5 minutes." I mean, ffs, it's only 2 lines, right? I get an, "ok, I'll get right to it." Inquiries in the next days get me more "I'm working on it" and "I'm just debugging it" bullshit. Frankly, I can't imagine anyone spending a week working hard on _that_ task.
A day before the deadline I give up and do that part too, in all its "glory". I.e., with ticks and numbers and everything. Not that it's anything to brag about, really, since you can see how trivial a task _that_ is.
So, umm, what would you advise me to do in _that_ situation?
Bear in mind that I'm not his boss or anything at that point, so it's not like I can fire him for loafing around. So how would I convince him to start working? Beg? Whine? Bribe him? Suck his cock? Sorry about the obscenity, but, just for extreme example sake, I'm doubting that even _that_ would have motivated him.
Should I basically ruin my own grades and reputation by taking the hard line and just waiting for the work that he blatantly hasn't even started? Give up and go to the prof and say I don't want to work with "the great Wally" any more? Even the professor doesn
No objections there. In fact, I wish I could mod you up, but then I've posted in this thread already. Very refreshing to see a sane attitude, in any case.
Let me tell you about those group assignments: _no_ university, college, or polytechnic _ever_ had assignments complex enough and under enough time pressure to actually _require_ cooperation. They're simple stuff doable by average students, who've been given 20x the necessary time for either to do it on his own. A really good student tends to plough through that assignment in an afternoon or two... and usually ends up having to.
What really happens in those groups is that you end up teamed with various clones of Wally (from the Dilbert comics), who can't be arsed to do _anything_ for the project.
E.g., take it from experience, in the first year in college I ended up having pretty much my own sidekick, sorta like Batman and Robin. His claim to glory was looking over my shoulder when I was at a computer in the lab. Now I don't think I was some kind of genius, but somehow I ended up with some "the great Moraelin" kinda reputation pretty fast. This guy ended up being "the great Wally" because he was with me all the time, so people _assumed_ some kind of teamwork was involved. It looked like pair programming, I guess, although that guy never actually offered any actual advice or information or ever coded anything for that matter.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a nerd, so I'll take any kind of popularity or friend, if it's available. I didn't mind having my own fan following around.
By the time we get our first group assignment, it seemed only natural to pair him with me. After all, everyone could swear that we're already such a great team. Let me tell you, the guy did _nothing_. Admittedly, I did do a stunt and come up with a far more grandiose idea than the professor wanted to give our team. (Hey, I must keep that "the great Moraelin" reputation.) But I asked him to do only some small trivial parts of it, merely token so I can say with a straight face that he did something too. To get an idea, by the end I had reduced it to asking him to write a function that draws two perpendicular lines on the screen. _That_ trivial. He didn't even do that. In fact other than reassuring me that he's working on it and almost ready, he didn't do anything at all. I ended up writing it all by myself.
The same theme repeated throughout college, even if with different people. I still wonder what had happened to my first sidekick. I think he wasn't around any more by the next year. No problem, I got other sidekicks. I even had a sorta girlfriend based on just doing her assignments too. She never even saw the program when we were teamed for such a group assignment, until we presented it to the professor. Wasn't interested in seeing it either. (And tbh, it didn't bother me much:) Smart girl otherwise, mind you, but, you know, why bother working when someone else can do all your assignments?
Getting teamed with another guy on another occasion, well, got me another guy pretending to be my best friend. He did at least paint about two pages of flowcharts after the fact, though, before getting bored with that too. In the meantime the "girlfriend" had been teamed up with someone else, but, hey, I got to do their work too, although I wasn't on their team.
So basically, please spare me the bull about learning to function in a team. I've yet to see even one team in college which actually worked as a team. Invariably it was one "maverick" doing all the work, and a bunch of Wallys doing little more than moral support, if even that.
Well, ok, so it may be a useful lesson for later. I was reading a study that said that about 3 out of 4 programmers can't actually program, or don't program, and just find some way or another to live as parasites off others. Ranging from "oh, you're my best friend, please help me", to taking all credit and trying to discredit the real worker to the boss, to being the boss's personal pet, to God knows what other creative ways. Yeah, you can get used to that kind of people in those group assignments, but that's about it.
But even that's not as useful as you may think. Yeah, it taught some of us geeks to be "good team players", meaning: to not mind a Wally just hanging around and taking credit. But it also taught whole generations of Wallys that that's one way to get the job done.
This got me thinking. How many users are out there that know their computer was infected or screwed with while they were visiting a porn site, and are too afraid of getting fired (for looking at porn) to tell IT that something is wrong.
Food for thought.
Actually, here's another thought for you: how many got pwned by other means, but are affraid that some "lusers are idiots" type will blame it on porn? I've only skimmed through the thread and I already see two blanket generalizations to the effect that, respectively, (A) infections come from porn surfing, and (B) the user is lying through his teeth if he's saying otherwise.
The fact is, there are so many ways to get pwned today, it's not even funny. Email attachments, trojan programs packed as some cutesy screen server or utility you can download, phishing-like schemes where you're sent to a page chock-full of IE exploits, warez sites (tend to be worse than porn as infection risk goes), spyware serving ads with exploits in them, or rarely a genuine site or ad provider getting pwned and helping spread exploits (don't assume that _only_ spam zombies can possibly ever get installed when security is breached), etc.
Yes, you can say that they should have known better, but it's still not porn. And it sometimes comes with the endorsement, real or faked by a trojan who took over a friend's address book, of someone they know. E.g., every company has a wiseguy or two setting up some jokes mailing list and forwarding there anything he receives, indiscriminately, including links to other sites. And by indiscriminately, I mean here one even managed to forward a couple of business emails to that list.
Then there are malicious insider jobs. There are cases of sheer idiocy on the part of some techie or programmer or PHB. (You can occasionally read advice even on/. to the effect of leaving a backdoor to some client's machine so you can remotely debug it, for example. Or insecure stuff left in programs just on the assumption that noone will know it's there.) Etc.
The problems with thinking you can live for ever off doing each other's laundry are many.
Sure, it can be a working momentary bubble. But the question is: will it last? Extrapolating that just because something worked for a year or a decade, it can continue for ever, is just inviting proof that you're wrong. The Dutch also thought that they could live for ever off speculating on tulip bulbs, and the 90's dot-com bubble also had people arguing that having a product or income is officially obsolete and you can live for ever off speculating on dot-coms. Needless to say, they were wrong.
The root problem is that _someone_ has to produce the stuff for you, so you all can concentrate on doing each other's laundry. At the end of the day, someone has to bake the bread you eat, make the shoes you wear, make the computer you use, build the car you drive, refine the oil you use in that car, build the house you live in, etc. An economy that's all services, implies that someone else is willing to give you all the other stuff, basically, for free, without getting anything tangible in return. Some other countries have to be basically the slaves that send you their grain and shoes and oil, but suspiciously there are no ships bringing something _back_ in payment.
That's a very fragile situation by itself. It can go pear shaped in a variety of ways, some more fun than others. E.g.,
1. You can just lose that technology edge. A lot of the intangible stuff America controls is, basically, technology. People are willing to pay big bucks for hi-tech stuff, or for the technology itself, but get paid ridiculously low prices on the low-tech stuff they have to export to pay for those hi-tech imports. You _don't_ want to discover what it's like to be on the other end of that relationship.
So, yes, looking at the topic, you can start worrying now. Unless you maintain that technology edge, the whole economy built on doing each other's laundry may well crumble in record time.
2. They can just decide they don't want to give you their stuff for free any more. A lot of that paying tangible Chinese goods for intangible American technology and management, is actually based on some very artificial IP treaties. All it takes is everyone deciding they've had it with paying America for the privilege of being allowed to make a 3G cell phone... which they already know how to make, they're just not allowed to without paying through the nose.
From the perspective of a second or third world country, those treaties do nothing for their own economy or inovation. They're pretty much some colonial treaties in which the powerful colonial nations told the rest of the world, "see, you have to send us whole ships worth of ore, oil and manufactured goods to buy your right to do some things our way." It's like telling your neighbours, "I used a lawnmower first, I patented it, so all of you who want to use lawnmowers too, have to pay me a bunch of money and products as a license fee."
Now I'm not against patents or IP as such, and they serve their role... in a first world country. But everyone else sees no benefit, and is just forced in basically a vassal condition for no tangible benefit. They make shoes for us... just so we allow them to make TVs. It's not very different from, say, the salt tax the British used to levy and enforce in India: India produced that salt, but had to pay to the UK to be allowed to actually use it. You can bet (and see in various interviews) that a _lot_ of people in those countries overtly think "why the fuck should we keep paying for intangible IP?" already.
3. A lot of what the USA "exported" was just money, which created an artificial bubble. A lot of products came into America, and all they got in return were bits of paper. That's what trade deficit means. It created an illusion that you can happily live off doing each other laundry, because a lot of the tangible products were basically coming in for free. Some african or asian country was perfectly happy to send you some cars or sho
Yes, it has been perfectly clear that you are talking about fundamentalists/literalists. Thus I ignore most of the rest of your post which is about examples of blind faith and backwards beliefs, not contradiction, as a useless segway. I know fundamentalists believe strange things, would believe whatever their religious leaders told them, would go to war or burn witches because those leaders said it was just and holy.
Well, see, except that's what religion as a whole used to _mean_. It took repeated plagues and an age of depression and disillusionment to even _start_ to budge people's faith. And even from there it would be another half a millenium of going "downhill" (from the church's point of view) to get to today's liberal, or even agnostic/apathic, attitude about one's own professed faith. Being a literalist/fundamentalist didn't use to mean "some weirdos down south", it was the normal and expected frame of mind.
It wasn't a few weirdoes. _Masses_ of people went on an massive exodus in the first crusade, or indebted themselves to buy equipment and supplies for those who did. Or raised in massive revolt and waged bitter war upon each other for something as ridiculous (by today's standard) as whether the other's position is fully supported by a literal read of the bible. See, for example, the hussite wars. It was the expected baseline, rather than being something extreme.
Why I'm saying that is just to make it clear about what _context_ I'm talking. When one religion replaced another, that was the context in which it happened. When fundamentalists chose to believe something absurd, we're not talking about a few deranged loonies doing it, but _masses_ of people doing it. That, in a nutshell is what I'm wondering about. I can understand a few being deranged, that is no surprised. Whole populations forcing themselves to be schizophrenic, well, that's a damn scary thought.
This is what I meant when I said that some people believe that they are both rational and human. Rational thought is a useful trick that humans have taught themselves. It is not the natural mode in which our brains operate, and it takes much learning and diligence to operate in that mode for extended periods.
That is an interesting hypothesis, to be sure.
However, from what I can tell, at least technically, humans _are_ rational and logical full time. Where human logic tends to fail is in the fact that most use it backwards or circularly, starting from what they want to believe and working from there towards how they can justify it. E.g., instead of starting from the facts and working towards "ok, then I need a pony", they start from "I want a pony" and work backwards towards finding some unconvincing justification for it. Discarding any facts that stand in the way. (I religion case, the "pony" being "I don't want to permanently die".)
Even there, IMHO usually there is some actual logic behind it all, they just don't want to admit it, sometimes not even to themselves. E.g., when someone comes up with something like "so I need ayacht and you need to work overtime to make that happen", there tend to be some good logical reasons behind it, mostly along the lines of (A) "a yacht would increase my social status, which is a good thing", and (B) "who the fuck cares about _you_? You're the worthless peon there." Except they can't admit that publically, or for most people even to themselves. So they work backwards to some unconvincing rationale as to why they objectivel need/deserve/whatever a yacht, and why it's only good/right/whatever that you break your back working for it.
It tends to end up very unconvincing, which is why it appears like lack of logic from the outside. If you take it at face value as "X and Y => Z", and think he/she genuinely started at X and Y and genuinely arived at Z, it looks like the bugger can't even think logically at all. In reality he/she started from Z and was grasping for straws to find some semi-believa
That however is an entirely different point from being unfashionable and indeed unfit for merely _having_ a MySpace page. If you want to question his competence in getting something done, sure, that's a very valid concern. Please do continue that line of thought. But deciding that someone's even trying with MySpace automatically makes him a loser, is already in the realm of the brain-damaged.
And I'll point you to the financial-analyst-with-a-hotmail-address example he's used. We're not talking someone who's, say, too stupid to even figure out how to use Hotmail. The point was that merely using Hotmail makes someone automatically too unreliable (or maybe too unfashionable) to get advice from. You know, without any further consideration for what their qualifications may be, or even whether he's using that Hotmail address well. That's it. Hotmail address ==> don't trust that guy.
I'm sorry, but that's on par with phrenology, astrology and palm reading.
How about, say, St. Cyril of Alexandria? Would that qualify as a properly Christian source for you? You know, seein' as it's one of the guys who shaped the doctrine of Immaculate Conception at the Council of Ephesus, 431 AD? That's as official as it possibly gets, to my mind. Here, catch: "Who can put Mary's high honor into words? She is both mother and virgin. I am overwhelmed by the wonder of this miracle." You'll notice how that's presented as an overwhelming miracle in itself, not as something that's common and happening all the time.
Too old? How about one of the Novenas on EWTN Global Catholic Network? "O Mary, Mother of God, endowed in your glorious Immaculate Conception with the fullness of grace; unique among women in that you are both mother and virgin" Ok, not exactly an official text of the Church, but just shows that someone actually believed that to be unique, and presumably noone protested too much.
I could give more examples, some even more explicit, prayers stating unequivocally stuff like "never was another maiden a mother", but it's almost 2AM and I have better stuff to do than research and cross-reference this crap any more just to make a stupid point. If in your denomination the uniqueness of Mary's situation isn't a central point, or whether you want to believe that it's some unimportant thing, in the end, suit yourself. It would be sorta absurd for me to persuade you to some religious position over another, given that I don't really give a damn about either position, other than as some idle armchair-philosopher musings:P
We're talking a rabidly fundamentalist theocracy. And a dogma that it was a major sin and reason for some righteous divine smiting even to spill one's seed on the groundm instead of getting a woman pregnant with it. See, Onan. They had some very strict views as to what you're allowed to do with your genitals, and what the woman's role and rights in it all are.
So even _if_ stoning wouldn't be involved (I'm not that convinced it wouldn't), we're at the very least talking some _major_ social stigma. We're not talking 2007 USA and students experimenting with sex all over the place, we're talking far more strict views and times. Something closer in many ways to modern day Iran than to modern day USA or Western Europe. Being the unpopular one could carry some extreme penalties even in the more open-minded Greece (Socrates was essentially judged and sentenced to death just for making himself unpopular), so don't tell me that in Israel someone could just shrug and go "so we fucked, big deal." Even in the 21'th century, in most places in the world it would be a _major_ stigma upon the girl and her whole family, and some would consider even suicide before admitting something like that.
What I'm saying is that the incentive to lie about it would certainly be there.
Okay, but your example was not something that a Bible thumper would do either. It was contrived and falacious. I was questioning your need to invent contradictions where none exist. If you're going to take issue with either of these legends, it made more sense to do it from your actual viewpoint, and take issue with the beliefs themselves rather than construct a strawman you can say contradicts itself.
Well, do _you_ need to construct a strawman _you_ can deal with? The point isn't what _I_ believe, but the contradictions other people choose to believe at the same time. So what on Earth, other than some cheap attempt to derail the topic, would it serve to shift to a completely different topic of your choosing?
At the end of the day, we all believe contradictions. For example, some believe both that they are rational beings and that they are human.
Well, bingo. Someone give that man a cigar;) _That_ is the topic. The kind of contradicting things people can believe at the same time.
Anyway, believe whatever you will, but it's not a straw man. A _lot_ of religious drivel has been written around the premise that Mary's pregnancy is something unique and inexplicable in any other way than divine intervention.
That modern-day semi-christians have no trouble taking the bible as just a metaphor, and as "yeah, well, so it happened more than once, big deal" is one thing, but talk to some genuine bible thumpers or look back in history and you'll see those notions taken a lot more literally, and a lot more rabidly as unique one-of-a-kind miracles. Just tell one of them your "ah well, see, lots of girls end up pregnant while technically virgin: e.g., via anal sex" or "yeah, well, lots of people woke from the dead without divine intervention" ideas, and see them start foaming at the mouth, not shruging it off as "yeah, so it is, just this time it was divine."
A lot of people today seem to have this notion that being "christian" pretty much means taking the bible as a fable, along the lines of "yeah, well, maybe the Genesis really means creating it all through evolution, and the 'days' were really 500,000 years each". (And similarly loose interpretation of everything else, New Testament included.) That's actually a very new and fairly minority notion. For most of the last 2000 years, the Bible was supposed to be a _literal_, hard-fact chronicle, and where it was vague, the Pope's interpretation was literal, God-dictated fact. People actually calculated stuff like the age of the Earth by totalling the ages of the people mentioned in the bible, in all seriousness. It wasn't a metaphor, it was for them hard fact and hard numbers. Some still do. People sold off their farms and went to the first crusade, because the church told them that the end of the world is nigh and God is gonna be mightily pissed off if humans don't free Jesus's tomb by then. _That_ kind of blind faith.
And before you start screaming "strawman!" again, there's a reason I'm telling you all that: that the same literalist interpretation applied to _everything_ coming from Rome. Including the lots of stuff about Mary's virgin pregnancy being so utterly unique and miraculous, as to be in itself _proof_ that Jesus can't be anyone else but God incarnate. That wasn't just a case of "yeah, well, so it was another girl who got pregnant while virgin, only this time with God", it was one thing that the church hammered on non-stop as being as miraculous as it can possibly get. It was one of the cornerstones of Christian faith, not just some footnote as to how Jesus got down here.
But if you want an actual historical example of people who genuinely believed both, take the authors of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum. (Mighty fine witch-hunter manual, and interesting insight in the workings of two thoroughly deranged, rabidly fundamentalist minds, and disturbingly extreme cases of mysoginism to boot.) They were perfectly able to reconcile a ra
If you want to take issue with these, I think the easier way to do it would be to propose the obvious explanation for both: there wasn't any "incubi", there were just "the guy from the next village over that she doesn't want to tell her parents about", and similar with Mary. "Oh yeah, Joseph, it was totally the Holy Spirit that knocked me up."
Well, if we're talking about what I believe, basically that's my point of view too. On both accounts.
Doesn't that make more sense than trying to create a contradiction where none exists?
I'm not saying _I_ am confused by that, I'm saying there are and were people whose religion involves believing things that directly contradict each other. Yes, it can be easily resolved by reducing it to "so both Mary and those 'incubus victims' were just girls who got laid by a man, not by some God or demon". But that's not a reduction that a bible thumper would do, or has done.
That's all I'm saying. _Not_ that it confuses me no end that two incredible claims contradict each other. Just that some people actually managed to believe both at the same time.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that you were wrong when you said the aircraft's HEIGHT is used in the collision calculation. If we assume the aircraft is relatively "still" compared to the speed of the falling object, then the LENGTH of the aircraft is what you take into consideration (as well as width of the object.) You would use height if the debris were hovering in the air and staying relatively still compared to the movement of the plane (little to no downward movement).
I'm not disputing that, we're just talking about orthogonal things.
If you're going to calculate the probability of a hit, yes, you need to consider the aircraft's area when seen from above. No arguments about that.
I wasn't talking about that however. I was merely disputing the claim that since the A340 covers 5 nautical miles in 38 seconds, then the 5 nautical miles distance counted as dangerously close. You know, that the airplane could have just covered that distance. And I'm saying that the airplane just can't possibly cover that distance in the couple of milliseconds time window, even if it was aimed directly at the falling debris.
If you will, I'm saying that the airplane isn't fast enough to fly _into_ the debris. As you more aptly illustrated the the infinitesimal size of that time window, at that scale you can _almost_ consider that the airplane stood still. (Almost. Typical cruise speed for a, say, A340-300 is 875 km/h, meaning 243 m/s, meaning that in a 5ms time window (debris falling at mach 10), it will have moved only 1.2m or about 4ft. Not completely stationary, and you'll basically have to modify the airplane's surface by that. But close enough to stationary.) It will at most be hit from above, not fly horizontally into the side of the debris, and certainly not from 5 miles away.
On the other hand, neither argument is right or wrong, they're just halves of the whole calculation, if you want to do it all. (I didn't.) Yes, you end up calculating pretty much the surface of the airplane vs the surface of, say, a circle with a 5 nautical mile radius, if you want to find the probability. But you can do that only once you can _base_ that argument on the fact that the airplane didn't move much in that time interval. Which in turn is based on the time window being very very small.
I.e., it's not a case that your argument is right and mine is wrong, it's just a case that yours is a second half that _has_ to be based on the first half which I did there. Until you've calculated at least approximately how long that time window was, and how much the airplane moved during that time, you don't know if you can approximate the airplane as being a stationary target.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you couldn't have done the same calculation without me. You probably could. But you would have had to do it anyway. Hence it's a bit silly to proclaim something as fundamentally wrong to even consider, when it has to be the first half of your maths anyway.
1. I didn't say (necessarily) "raped". Let's face it, since the dawn of time, a lot of men were curious about that. I can just imagine a caveman in a stylish sabertooth-skin loincloth pleading with his woman to let him try that way too. Note that I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just that it happens.
And a lot do say "yes" at some point or another. I was reading a statistic about a decade ago, and IIRC about 50% of the polled women had taken it up that route in the USA, and it was raising well over 80% in some other countries. Don't quote me, though, it's been a really long time since I've read that.
And "you _must_ be virgin at marriage" expectations just seem to make that happen more. It doesn't take a genius to figure out, "hmm, if she took it up the ass, she can jolly well stay a virgin for all I care". Throw in a rabidly fundamentalist theocracy, with a habit of killing people for as little as spilling their seed on the ground... and it just gets a lot more tempting to try that instead of outright breaking the tabu.
2. I never said it's _only_ the virgin conception, but I didn't feel like going into the whole list of absurdities, contradictions and non-sequiturs. It was a long message as it is.
3. See, the thing is, "if you believe Jesus is God" also tends to raise the bar of what I'd expect in the way of miracles. He can come down here in a more convincing way than asking everyone to just trust Mary that there was a miracle involved, without any other proof. God can do a lot better than that.
If far simpler explanations exist for a lot of the stuff, ranging from the virgin birth, to the thoroughly unsurprising fact that someone wasn't quite dead after a couple of hours on the cross(*).... I dunno, I'll tend to apply Occam's Razor. If it's no different from a normal every day event, then I'll believe that the normal every day event was what happened. E.g., if I find an apple under an apple tree, dunno about you, but I'll assume it simply fell, not that this particular apple came down via divine miracle.
((*)It usually took days to die on the cross, since the cross itself didn't do much more than make your stay up there painful and uncomfortable. Volunteers, whether religious nuts or in the name of scientific experimentation, spent comparable times with their wrists tied to a cross without coming even near to death.)
"Flaming debris" involves a lot higher speeeds, since the reason it's flaming isn't friction, it's almost adiabatic compression of the air in front of the falling object. Basically it's like compressing gas in a cylinder with a piston. The piston is the falling object, and the sides and bottom of the cylinder are just the air being unable to get out of the way fast enough.
(It's also the same thing that creates the first flaming fireball in the nuke. The shockwave compresses the air so hard, it becomes glowing plasma.)
Now I'm too lazy to search for the speeds at which that happens, but let's just say in layman's terms that's "bloody incredibly fast." We're talking massively hypersonic speeds. It makes the A340 look like a snail by comparison.
An A340 is how tall? 17m? If the falling debris was fallong only at sound speed (340m/s), it would be within the right height band to actually collide for only 0.05s. At flaming debris speeds, make that a couple of milliseconds.
So for the A340 to collide, it would have to cross that 5.75 miles distance not in 38s, but in the above mentioned couple of milliseconds. So, no, that's not close at all.
I, for example, would cheerfully buy one of these for my gaming desktop as drive D:. Well, ok, E:. My WD Raptor is plenty fast to boot Windows. I have no real need to accelerate that, so C: can jolly well stay a hard drive.
Load times of other stuf, however, can suck plenty even on that.
E.g., games. Games are a prime candidate for this kind of thing, since basically they don't change often. A game might get pathched a few times, maybe even once every couple of weeks for a MMO, but otherwise tends to be left alone. Most nowadays also save their save games in some subdirectory of "My Files", not in their own directory. So the game drive wouldn't even be worn out by my quicksave addiction.
Isn't this like getting financial advice from someone with a hotmail address?
Oh please... Here's an idea for you: how about you turn on the brain and judge the man (or woman), not his email address or MySpace page?
Financial advice: either you trust that guy to be a competent economist, or you don't. That's it. If someone has a Ph.D. from Harvard, who gives a rat's arse about whether he has also a Hotmail address or not.
President: either you trust the guy enough to basically give him a hell of a lot of power, or you don't. The fact that he also has some stupid MySpace page should be the least of your worries.
Note that in both cases we're not talking about some Anonymous Coward with a Hotmail address or MySpace page, but about someone who's known and easy to check. We're not talking "Moraelin for president" or "NightElf12345@hotmail.com offers you free financial advice", but someone who's well known, and whose credentials and opinions are known, public and damn easy to check. So how about doing just that?
So you propose... what? That instead of actually checking and judging the person, you'd rather make some superficial meaningless criterion like their email address the top and only criterion? Would you rather take advice from the janitor because he has a more fashionable email address? Geesh...
1. Even if it was invented later, still, at some point people -- and for that matter the church sponsoring those inquisition trials -- had to believe or preach _both_ at the same time. Both that (A) Marry's virgin pregnancy was a one-time divine-intervention-only miracle, and (B) that the same was possible via incubus, and happened all the time.
2. Believe it or not, incubi and succubi aren't an inqusition-only thing. Belief in that kind of thing is spread all over the world, including in areas where the catholic inquisition had no say. E.g., you can see the same or similar beliefs in orthodox Eastern Europe, various tribes, etc, and even in Europe they appear _long_ before the inquisition.
3. While having sex with the devil in exchange for power was indeed a theme for inquisition trials, incubi and succubi generally just used as a makeshift explanation for erotic dreams. If a boy dreamt something erotic and came in his nightgown, the succubus explanation was what they thought of it, but noone brought him to trial for it. Ditto for girls having erotic dreams. They may have told the bugger to fast and pray and have a crucifix near the bed to hold demons at bay, but that was just about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the problem is that if _everyone_ started being logical about their consumption, the economy would crumble. Long story incoming, but bear with me.
Basically what happens ever since the Great Depression is that we can produce orders of magnitude more than we can possibly sell. That's, in a nutshell, what happened in the Great Depression in the first place. Think supply and demand. It works somewhat like this:
- think a graph that plots number of units produced versus the cost per unit to produce it. Obviously, the more units you produce, the less it will cost, so it looks sorta hyperbole shaped.
- Now think a second curve on that graph: number of units produced, vs the price at which you can sell them. Yeah, Say's Law sorta applies, supply produces its own demand, but at an increasingly lower price. E.g., everyone needs a pair of shoes, but if you want to sell them _two_ pairs of shoes, you'll need to make them a bit more affordable. And if you want to sell them _three_ pairs of shoes, you'll have to lower the price some more.
The point where the two curves intersect is basically the supply and demand equilibrium point.
What happened in the Great Depression was that the two curves became basically parallel. There was no point where you'd cover even the production price, much less make a profit. Hence, factories going bankrupt and it didn't make sense for someone else to start a new factory. Hence, unemployment exploded.
Of course, there were other factors, such as the devastating effects of a forced deflation, but in a nutshell, supply-vs-demand this is what happened. It will help illustrate my point just fine.
Since then, we learned to deal with it by messing with both sides of the equation. E.g.,
- demand side: government spending (sometimes even to wasteful extremes) to create extra demand. It keeps some companies in business producing, say, missiles. And those companies then go and buy trucks, keeping those companies in business too. And their employees go and buy clothes and TVs, so they help keep more companies in business. There's a bit of a multiplier effect there. See, Keynesian Multiplier. At any rate, it raises aggregate demand to keep the economy going.
- demand side: think marketting, fashion, planned obsolescence, minor upgrades presented as the next must-have thing, etc. Basically making people want to throw their perfectly good 2-year-old car and buy a new one just because the new one has rounded headlights. Basically instead of just lowering the price to make people buy a second car, convince them that the car they bought last year are sooo unfashionable now, and they have to throw it away and buy a new one.
- supply side: the previous point also has the side-effect of lowering supply. More and more people are moved from manufacturing an excess of goods, to jobs like design (someone has to come up with those rounded headlights), marketting, PR, R&D to come up with those minor upgrades that marketting will then present as the greatest paradigm shift ever, etc.
If people just started being sane about their purchases, all that edifice would have a harder time keeping working. If you see cars as just transport, for example, then there is no need to upgrade as long as the new one doesn't offer an earth-shattering advantage in that department.
Fuel economy makes a poor incentive to upgrade. You're not going to to buy an 100,000$ car just because it uses 5% less fuel than your 2 year old car. It just won't pay for itself by the time the next upgrade would be due. If it's just transport and the only difference is the mpg, then you're going to hold onto a car for 20 years. And if you're logical, it also won't be MPG alone, but total cost, so you won't get an expensive Porsche when a cheap Skoda does the same job.
So basically, expect the economy to go very funny very fast if people actually started being sane about their purchases. At the moment you can be the smart one not blowing your money on fashionable crap, basically, at the expense of relying on everyone else to be the dumb ones who do. But if everyone snapped out of it, you may well get to live in interesting times.
Worse yet: why does _everyone_ and their grandma feel like they _have_ to sound like a hip smack-talking wisecracking wigger when they write a "the worst X" list? They say that if you try too hard to make an impression, usually that's the impression you make. Same here. Most of these lists sound, at best, like a bad case of mid-life crisis or like the "pretty fly for a white guy" kinda teenager, since they mention Offspring: some poser trying to sound artificially cool, hip, funny and all gangsta.
How about just telling me what's bad about a game? Or in the case of covers you'd think it would be obvious by itself. I don't need some contrived smack-talking wisecracking metaphors to convince me that something really is that bad.
Also, I wonder how many of these lists are some lame effort to establish street cred. Take a site which otherwise gives only scores between 95% and 100% to please the publisher, slap a "15 worst games which are 20 years old" (or otherwise noone makes money off them any more, so the publisher still won't be mad at us) on it, and voila, now they can claim that they say the bad stuff too. Or, hey, let's play it even safer and pick only on something as mild and irrelevant as box art cover. Surely the publisher won't be too pissed off at _that_.
Based on my experience with programming projects, I'd say it must have been like this:
- the client's manager (the pharaoh) couldn't be arsed to actually think what he needs and to specify it, and probably was also affraid to sign anything that doesn't cover all potential aspects, hypothetical future needs, buzzwords, etc, in one go. So it has to have not only a pond, but also sphinxes, obelisks, etc, just in case someone ever needs them, and sometimes because he just didn't really understand what he wants. Maybe also a case of new alpha dog having to piss on everything and mark his territory, so building a pond doesn't sound as grandious as restructuring the whole burial process in Egypt.
- the team's marketting guy just had to sell the biggest and most expensive thing he could, even if the client doesn't actually need it. So he took the Pharaoh to a restaurant and to golf, and established himself as the guy the Pharaoh can trust, unlike those pesky IT nerds... err... embalmers who insist that they need a pyramid for it like a fish needs a bycicle. He had to cut the price and deadline a bit, though, but he's proud that he made a sale, and it's not his problem how that's going to be built with only 20 men within the promised time.
- some other politics and power games were involved, such as between the vizier for construction and the vizier for agriculture, or between the nomarch (governor) of Saqqara and the nomarch of Thebes. Extra funds and grandious requirements are piled just to make a silly "I'm greater than you because my pet project got more funding than yours" point.
- the builders' manager had read in some "Construction Week" ragazine for managers that pyramids are the latest cool buzzword, and everything should be built with pyramids. He doesn't really understand what those are, when they're used, and when they're not used, since those ragazines are little more than fashion magazines and never actually give you the actual information needed to make an informed choice or design. So the pond must have pyramids too, he's sure that's what makes a project successful. He's also the only guy the marketter consulted with, if any.
- a couple of workers don't give a fuck about actually solving the problem, they just want the latest buzzwords on the resume so they can apply to an even better paid job. They heard that spiral ramps are the latest buzzword, so they have to have "has used spiral ramps" on their resume. The original spec for 3 ft tall pyramids in the corners of the pond gets ballooned into a gigantic monstrosity just so they can get that buzzword on their resume. (Of course, now there's a problem with the deadline, but that's not their problem.)
- the architect fully cooperates with the above, or maybe is one of the above, plus he has to justify his job. His boss doesn't really understand architecture, but can be smoked with lots of buzzwords and complicated diagrams. A complicated architecture with lots of clever buzzwords, (A) makes the boss go, "whoa, this guy is so smart, I'm happy we have him to plan all this for us", i.e., establishing credentials, and (B) "whoa, these projects are so complicated, good thing we had an architect to plan it for us", i.e., making sure he gets to keep his job and be called upon for the next pond too, and (C) it lets him get paid for months, maybe years, of just painting diagrams, which is good.
- a couple of workers are in it just for fun and playing with the biggest rocks and newest techniques, and only incidentally get to be paid for it. They'll cheerfully help inflate the spec even more, because it lets them play with big stones and logs instead of the boring old bricks for a 3ft decoration.
- most of the builders are contractors or consultants paid by the hour. 'Nuff said.
- at least one manager involved has realized that, according to the corporate rules, he'd get a promotion if he had just a couple more people under him. Unsurprisingly, his solution to everything is to hire more people and push for even mo
Well, you have to understand that (A) it wasn't a big effort, and (B) hey, I got to hang out with a cute redhead
Well, ok, now it's a bit of sarcasm. I never actually had much of an illusion that it was actually a "girlfriend", but more of a case of A and C. Or maybe she was good at delegating all the work.
I'll aggree that it's a bad idea, but... on the other hand, I do know enough people who got to tell the professor "umm, we're not ready" because they didn't.
Just as an extra point, though, you don't need to assume that someone necessarily doubted your coding skills.
A lot of people ending up majoring in anything even remotely computer-related, (A) love to code cool stuff, hence don't really need more reasons to write your part of the code too, and (B) well, don't really need help to solve most college assignments. Those college assignments are generally designed to be at the level of someone who's only now learning that trade in college, not for the level of someone who was doing that kind of stuff, at that level, 4 years ago.
If you will, think getting one of those chemistry engineering problems... when you've been doing that, and more complex stuff, even before high school. I'm sure you're dealing with problems far more complex than that, but for the sake of giving a simple example, think being asked to solve getting salt from HCl and natrium. I'm sure you wouldn't really set up a whole group and delegate parts of it, when it's actually less effort to just solve it by yourself.
For some of us those college assignments were really _that_ trivial. Even if you don't already know the exact algorithm, chances are a short search or a trip to the library are all it takes. But they didn't even need that, they just needed at most having a look through the lecture notes. We're not exactly talking post-grad school there, so they didn't ask anyone to research new stuff, they just wanted to see us able to apply whatever techniques or algorithms or formulas they already taught us. And, again, which a lot of us already knew anyway.
Part of the problem there is, well, the massive disparities in previous experience and skill level between students. If you give homework that would require major research and collaboration for a die-hard geek, you've buried everyone else alive.
I would assume that chemistry has somewhat less of that problem. I would assume there aren't many who've been spending 40+ hours a week doing biochemistry and chemical engineering for fun since they were 12. (But then, it's a wild assumption and I might be wrong.) So it would probably be somewhat easier to gauge the difficulty of a problem so it's challenging for a broader slice of students.
Duly noted, I was only talking about my own field, not yours. I thought that much was obvious, though in retrospect it wasn't. I really should have made it clear.
None taken. I _know_ I'm no good at managing anyone, but then that's why I didn't go to a management school. It's one of the first things I tell my employer too.
Still, you've piqued my interest. So also not as a flame or anything, just out of genuine curiosity, how should I have went about delegating to, say, my first "sidekick"?
The story is a fairly straightforward one. It started with mostly "ok, so which part do you want to start with?" Ok, so he wants to do the part that plots the graphs. Sure. (I don't think I fucked up _too_ hard so far. After all, whole methodologies, e.g. Extreme Programming, involve people choosing which part they think they need next or would like to do next. But then I may be wrong.)
Some time goes by and I'm getting only hot air from him. "Yeah, I'm working on it" and "yeah, it's almost ready, I just need another week to debug something" and the like. He doesn't want to show me the supposed work so far either, when I offer to help him debug it.
So it gets split down further. "Ok, how about drawing the X and Y axes for that graph? Might as well start with that, just so we have _something_ to show the prof. We can tweak and polish the actual graph drawing afterwards, as time allows." Ok, good idea, he says, he'll get to that ASAP. We're one month before the deadline by now, so it would be high time.
Let's also say at this point that it's such a bloody trivial task, I'd expect anyone to say, "sure, lemme at the keyboard for 5 minutes." I mean, even if you make it configurable to draw extra lines at the hundreds, or logarithmic ticks, and whatever else you can possibly think of, it has no excuse to take more than half an hour tops. It's just bloody trivial, really.
Time goes by, I'm getting more reassuring that he's working on it, he's debugging it, etc. (Hello? For a task that trivial?) A week before the deadline I'm already getting, understandably, impatient. I had had the foresight to do the rest of the graph drawing functions myself in that time, though, so I'm really just waiting for his drawing the bloody X and Y axes. Still, it would be high time to actually get those and see to fitting them into the rest of the program, you know?
I manage to squeeze an, "Oh, I'm just debugging the drawing the ticks and units along the axes, otherwise it's almost ready," out of him. Fine, I say, we can draw just the two lines for now, I'm sure we can smoke the prof as to why there are no numbers and ticks on them. You know, just a vertical line and a horizontal line. How trivial is _that_?
Again, I'd expect a, "sure, lemme at the keyboard for 5 minutes." I mean, ffs, it's only 2 lines, right? I get an, "ok, I'll get right to it." Inquiries in the next days get me more "I'm working on it" and "I'm just debugging it" bullshit. Frankly, I can't imagine anyone spending a week working hard on _that_ task.
A day before the deadline I give up and do that part too, in all its "glory". I.e., with ticks and numbers and everything. Not that it's anything to brag about, really, since you can see how trivial a task _that_ is.
So, umm, what would you advise me to do in _that_ situation?
Bear in mind that I'm not his boss or anything at that point, so it's not like I can fire him for loafing around. So how would I convince him to start working? Beg? Whine? Bribe him? Suck his cock? Sorry about the obscenity, but, just for extreme example sake, I'm doubting that even _that_ would have motivated him.
Should I basically ruin my own grades and reputation by taking the hard line and just waiting for the work that he blatantly hasn't even started? Give up and go to the prof and say I don't want to work with "the great Wally" any more? Even the professor doesn
No objections there. In fact, I wish I could mod you up, but then I've posted in this thread already. Very refreshing to see a sane attitude, in any case.
Ah, ideal world utopias... how cute.
Let me tell you about those group assignments: _no_ university, college, or polytechnic _ever_ had assignments complex enough and under enough time pressure to actually _require_ cooperation. They're simple stuff doable by average students, who've been given 20x the necessary time for either to do it on his own. A really good student tends to plough through that assignment in an afternoon or two... and usually ends up having to.
What really happens in those groups is that you end up teamed with various clones of Wally (from the Dilbert comics), who can't be arsed to do _anything_ for the project.
E.g., take it from experience, in the first year in college I ended up having pretty much my own sidekick, sorta like Batman and Robin. His claim to glory was looking over my shoulder when I was at a computer in the lab. Now I don't think I was some kind of genius, but somehow I ended up with some "the great Moraelin" kinda reputation pretty fast. This guy ended up being "the great Wally" because he was with me all the time, so people _assumed_ some kind of teamwork was involved. It looked like pair programming, I guess, although that guy never actually offered any actual advice or information or ever coded anything for that matter.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a nerd, so I'll take any kind of popularity or friend, if it's available. I didn't mind having my own fan following around.
By the time we get our first group assignment, it seemed only natural to pair him with me. After all, everyone could swear that we're already such a great team. Let me tell you, the guy did _nothing_. Admittedly, I did do a stunt and come up with a far more grandiose idea than the professor wanted to give our team. (Hey, I must keep that "the great Moraelin" reputation.) But I asked him to do only some small trivial parts of it, merely token so I can say with a straight face that he did something too. To get an idea, by the end I had reduced it to asking him to write a function that draws two perpendicular lines on the screen. _That_ trivial. He didn't even do that. In fact other than reassuring me that he's working on it and almost ready, he didn't do anything at all. I ended up writing it all by myself.
The same theme repeated throughout college, even if with different people. I still wonder what had happened to my first sidekick. I think he wasn't around any more by the next year. No problem, I got other sidekicks. I even had a sorta girlfriend based on just doing her assignments too. She never even saw the program when we were teamed for such a group assignment, until we presented it to the professor. Wasn't interested in seeing it either. (And tbh, it didn't bother me much:) Smart girl otherwise, mind you, but, you know, why bother working when someone else can do all your assignments?
Getting teamed with another guy on another occasion, well, got me another guy pretending to be my best friend. He did at least paint about two pages of flowcharts after the fact, though, before getting bored with that too. In the meantime the "girlfriend" had been teamed up with someone else, but, hey, I got to do their work too, although I wasn't on their team.
So basically, please spare me the bull about learning to function in a team. I've yet to see even one team in college which actually worked as a team. Invariably it was one "maverick" doing all the work, and a bunch of Wallys doing little more than moral support, if even that.
Well, ok, so it may be a useful lesson for later. I was reading a study that said that about 3 out of 4 programmers can't actually program, or don't program, and just find some way or another to live as parasites off others. Ranging from "oh, you're my best friend, please help me", to taking all credit and trying to discredit the real worker to the boss, to being the boss's personal pet, to God knows what other creative ways. Yeah, you can get used to that kind of people in those group assignments, but that's about it.
But even that's not as useful as you may think. Yeah, it taught some of us geeks to be "good team players", meaning: to not mind a Wally just hanging around and taking credit. But it also taught whole generations of Wallys that that's one way to get the job done.
Actually, here's another thought for you: how many got pwned by other means, but are affraid that some "lusers are idiots" type will blame it on porn? I've only skimmed through the thread and I already see two blanket generalizations to the effect that, respectively, (A) infections come from porn surfing, and (B) the user is lying through his teeth if he's saying otherwise.
The fact is, there are so many ways to get pwned today, it's not even funny. Email attachments, trojan programs packed as some cutesy screen server or utility you can download, phishing-like schemes where you're sent to a page chock-full of IE exploits, warez sites (tend to be worse than porn as infection risk goes), spyware serving ads with exploits in them, or rarely a genuine site or ad provider getting pwned and helping spread exploits (don't assume that _only_ spam zombies can possibly ever get installed when security is breached), etc.
Yes, you can say that they should have known better, but it's still not porn. And it sometimes comes with the endorsement, real or faked by a trojan who took over a friend's address book, of someone they know. E.g., every company has a wiseguy or two setting up some jokes mailing list and forwarding there anything he receives, indiscriminately, including links to other sites. And by indiscriminately, I mean here one even managed to forward a couple of business emails to that list.
Then there are malicious insider jobs. There are cases of sheer idiocy on the part of some techie or programmer or PHB. (You can occasionally read advice even on
The problems with thinking you can live for ever off doing each other's laundry are many.
Sure, it can be a working momentary bubble. But the question is: will it last? Extrapolating that just because something worked for a year or a decade, it can continue for ever, is just inviting proof that you're wrong. The Dutch also thought that they could live for ever off speculating on tulip bulbs, and the 90's dot-com bubble also had people arguing that having a product or income is officially obsolete and you can live for ever off speculating on dot-coms. Needless to say, they were wrong.
The root problem is that _someone_ has to produce the stuff for you, so you all can concentrate on doing each other's laundry. At the end of the day, someone has to bake the bread you eat, make the shoes you wear, make the computer you use, build the car you drive, refine the oil you use in that car, build the house you live in, etc. An economy that's all services, implies that someone else is willing to give you all the other stuff, basically, for free, without getting anything tangible in return. Some other countries have to be basically the slaves that send you their grain and shoes and oil, but suspiciously there are no ships bringing something _back_ in payment.
That's a very fragile situation by itself. It can go pear shaped in a variety of ways, some more fun than others. E.g.,
1. You can just lose that technology edge. A lot of the intangible stuff America controls is, basically, technology. People are willing to pay big bucks for hi-tech stuff, or for the technology itself, but get paid ridiculously low prices on the low-tech stuff they have to export to pay for those hi-tech imports. You _don't_ want to discover what it's like to be on the other end of that relationship.
So, yes, looking at the topic, you can start worrying now. Unless you maintain that technology edge, the whole economy built on doing each other's laundry may well crumble in record time.
2. They can just decide they don't want to give you their stuff for free any more. A lot of that paying tangible Chinese goods for intangible American technology and management, is actually based on some very artificial IP treaties. All it takes is everyone deciding they've had it with paying America for the privilege of being allowed to make a 3G cell phone... which they already know how to make, they're just not allowed to without paying through the nose.
From the perspective of a second or third world country, those treaties do nothing for their own economy or inovation. They're pretty much some colonial treaties in which the powerful colonial nations told the rest of the world, "see, you have to send us whole ships worth of ore, oil and manufactured goods to buy your right to do some things our way." It's like telling your neighbours, "I used a lawnmower first, I patented it, so all of you who want to use lawnmowers too, have to pay me a bunch of money and products as a license fee."
Now I'm not against patents or IP as such, and they serve their role... in a first world country. But everyone else sees no benefit, and is just forced in basically a vassal condition for no tangible benefit. They make shoes for us... just so we allow them to make TVs. It's not very different from, say, the salt tax the British used to levy and enforce in India: India produced that salt, but had to pay to the UK to be allowed to actually use it. You can bet (and see in various interviews) that a _lot_ of people in those countries overtly think "why the fuck should we keep paying for intangible IP?" already.
3. A lot of what the USA "exported" was just money, which created an artificial bubble. A lot of products came into America, and all they got in return were bits of paper. That's what trade deficit means. It created an illusion that you can happily live off doing each other laundry, because a lot of the tangible products were basically coming in for free. Some african or asian country was perfectly happy to send you some cars or sho
Well, see, except that's what religion as a whole used to _mean_. It took repeated plagues and an age of depression and disillusionment to even _start_ to budge people's faith. And even from there it would be another half a millenium of going "downhill" (from the church's point of view) to get to today's liberal, or even agnostic/apathic, attitude about one's own professed faith. Being a literalist/fundamentalist didn't use to mean "some weirdos down south", it was the normal and expected frame of mind.
It wasn't a few weirdoes. _Masses_ of people went on an massive exodus in the first crusade, or indebted themselves to buy equipment and supplies for those who did. Or raised in massive revolt and waged bitter war upon each other for something as ridiculous (by today's standard) as whether the other's position is fully supported by a literal read of the bible. See, for example, the hussite wars. It was the expected baseline, rather than being something extreme.
Why I'm saying that is just to make it clear about what _context_ I'm talking. When one religion replaced another, that was the context in which it happened. When fundamentalists chose to believe something absurd, we're not talking about a few deranged loonies doing it, but _masses_ of people doing it. That, in a nutshell is what I'm wondering about. I can understand a few being deranged, that is no surprised. Whole populations forcing themselves to be schizophrenic, well, that's a damn scary thought.
That is an interesting hypothesis, to be sure.
However, from what I can tell, at least technically, humans _are_ rational and logical full time. Where human logic tends to fail is in the fact that most use it backwards or circularly, starting from what they want to believe and working from there towards how they can justify it. E.g., instead of starting from the facts and working towards "ok, then I need a pony", they start from "I want a pony" and work backwards towards finding some unconvincing justification for it. Discarding any facts that stand in the way. (I religion case, the "pony" being "I don't want to permanently die".)
Even there, IMHO usually there is some actual logic behind it all, they just don't want to admit it, sometimes not even to themselves. E.g., when someone comes up with something like "so I need ayacht and you need to work overtime to make that happen", there tend to be some good logical reasons behind it, mostly along the lines of (A) "a yacht would increase my social status, which is a good thing", and (B) "who the fuck cares about _you_? You're the worthless peon there." Except they can't admit that publically, or for most people even to themselves. So they work backwards to some unconvincing rationale as to why they objectivel need/deserve/whatever a yacht, and why it's only good/right/whatever that you break your back working for it.
It tends to end up very unconvincing, which is why it appears like lack of logic from the outside. If you take it at face value as "X and Y => Z", and think he/she genuinely started at X and Y and genuinely arived at Z, it looks like the bugger can't even think logically at all. In reality he/she started from Z and was grasping for straws to find some semi-believa
That however is an entirely different point from being unfashionable and indeed unfit for merely _having_ a MySpace page. If you want to question his competence in getting something done, sure, that's a very valid concern. Please do continue that line of thought. But deciding that someone's even trying with MySpace automatically makes him a loser, is already in the realm of the brain-damaged.
And I'll point you to the financial-analyst-with-a-hotmail-address example he's used. We're not talking someone who's, say, too stupid to even figure out how to use Hotmail. The point was that merely using Hotmail makes someone automatically too unreliable (or maybe too unfashionable) to get advice from. You know, without any further consideration for what their qualifications may be, or even whether he's using that Hotmail address well. That's it. Hotmail address ==> don't trust that guy.
I'm sorry, but that's on par with phrenology, astrology and palm reading.
How about, say, St. Cyril of Alexandria? Would that qualify as a properly Christian source for you? You know, seein' as it's one of the guys who shaped the doctrine of Immaculate Conception at the Council of Ephesus, 431 AD? That's as official as it possibly gets, to my mind. Here, catch: "Who can put Mary's high honor into words? She is both mother and virgin. I am overwhelmed by the wonder of this miracle." You'll notice how that's presented as an overwhelming miracle in itself, not as something that's common and happening all the time.
:P
Too old? How about one of the Novenas on EWTN Global Catholic Network? "O Mary, Mother of God, endowed in your glorious Immaculate Conception with the fullness of grace; unique among women in that you are both mother and virgin " Ok, not exactly an official text of the Church, but just shows that someone actually believed that to be unique, and presumably noone protested too much.
I could give more examples, some even more explicit, prayers stating unequivocally stuff like "never was another maiden a mother", but it's almost 2AM and I have better stuff to do than research and cross-reference this crap any more just to make a stupid point. If in your denomination the uniqueness of Mary's situation isn't a central point, or whether you want to believe that it's some unimportant thing, in the end, suit yourself. It would be sorta absurd for me to persuade you to some religious position over another, given that I don't really give a damn about either position, other than as some idle armchair-philosopher musings
We're talking a rabidly fundamentalist theocracy. And a dogma that it was a major sin and reason for some righteous divine smiting even to spill one's seed on the groundm instead of getting a woman pregnant with it. See, Onan. They had some very strict views as to what you're allowed to do with your genitals, and what the woman's role and rights in it all are.
So even _if_ stoning wouldn't be involved (I'm not that convinced it wouldn't), we're at the very least talking some _major_ social stigma. We're not talking 2007 USA and students experimenting with sex all over the place, we're talking far more strict views and times. Something closer in many ways to modern day Iran than to modern day USA or Western Europe. Being the unpopular one could carry some extreme penalties even in the more open-minded Greece (Socrates was essentially judged and sentenced to death just for making himself unpopular), so don't tell me that in Israel someone could just shrug and go "so we fucked, big deal." Even in the 21'th century, in most places in the world it would be a _major_ stigma upon the girl and her whole family, and some would consider even suicide before admitting something like that.
What I'm saying is that the incentive to lie about it would certainly be there.
Well, do _you_ need to construct a strawman _you_ can deal with? The point isn't what _I_ believe, but the contradictions other people choose to believe at the same time. So what on Earth, other than some cheap attempt to derail the topic, would it serve to shift to a completely different topic of your choosing?
Well, bingo. Someone give that man a cigar ;) _That_ is the topic. The kind of contradicting things people can believe at the same time.
Anyway, believe whatever you will, but it's not a straw man. A _lot_ of religious drivel has been written around the premise that Mary's pregnancy is something unique and inexplicable in any other way than divine intervention.
That modern-day semi-christians have no trouble taking the bible as just a metaphor, and as "yeah, well, so it happened more than once, big deal" is one thing, but talk to some genuine bible thumpers or look back in history and you'll see those notions taken a lot more literally, and a lot more rabidly as unique one-of-a-kind miracles. Just tell one of them your "ah well, see, lots of girls end up pregnant while technically virgin: e.g., via anal sex" or "yeah, well, lots of people woke from the dead without divine intervention" ideas, and see them start foaming at the mouth, not shruging it off as "yeah, so it is, just this time it was divine."
A lot of people today seem to have this notion that being "christian" pretty much means taking the bible as a fable, along the lines of "yeah, well, maybe the Genesis really means creating it all through evolution, and the 'days' were really 500,000 years each". (And similarly loose interpretation of everything else, New Testament included.) That's actually a very new and fairly minority notion. For most of the last 2000 years, the Bible was supposed to be a _literal_, hard-fact chronicle, and where it was vague, the Pope's interpretation was literal, God-dictated fact. People actually calculated stuff like the age of the Earth by totalling the ages of the people mentioned in the bible, in all seriousness. It wasn't a metaphor, it was for them hard fact and hard numbers. Some still do. People sold off their farms and went to the first crusade, because the church told them that the end of the world is nigh and God is gonna be mightily pissed off if humans don't free Jesus's tomb by then. _That_ kind of blind faith.
And before you start screaming "strawman!" again, there's a reason I'm telling you all that: that the same literalist interpretation applied to _everything_ coming from Rome. Including the lots of stuff about Mary's virgin pregnancy being so utterly unique and miraculous, as to be in itself _proof_ that Jesus can't be anyone else but God incarnate. That wasn't just a case of "yeah, well, so it was another girl who got pregnant while virgin, only this time with God", it was one thing that the church hammered on non-stop as being as miraculous as it can possibly get. It was one of the cornerstones of Christian faith, not just some footnote as to how Jesus got down here.
But if you want an actual historical example of people who genuinely believed both, take the authors of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum. (Mighty fine witch-hunter manual, and interesting insight in the workings of two thoroughly deranged, rabidly fundamentalist minds, and disturbingly extreme cases of mysoginism to boot.) They were perfectly able to reconcile a ra
Well, if we're talking about what I believe, basically that's my point of view too. On both accounts.
I'm not saying _I_ am confused by that, I'm saying there are and were people whose religion involves believing things that directly contradict each other. Yes, it can be easily resolved by reducing it to "so both Mary and those 'incubus victims' were just girls who got laid by a man, not by some God or demon". But that's not a reduction that a bible thumper would do, or has done.
That's all I'm saying. _Not_ that it confuses me no end that two incredible claims contradict each other. Just that some people actually managed to believe both at the same time.
I'm not disputing that, we're just talking about orthogonal things.
If you're going to calculate the probability of a hit, yes, you need to consider the aircraft's area when seen from above. No arguments about that.
I wasn't talking about that however. I was merely disputing the claim that since the A340 covers 5 nautical miles in 38 seconds, then the 5 nautical miles distance counted as dangerously close. You know, that the airplane could have just covered that distance. And I'm saying that the airplane just can't possibly cover that distance in the couple of milliseconds time window, even if it was aimed directly at the falling debris.
If you will, I'm saying that the airplane isn't fast enough to fly _into_ the debris. As you more aptly illustrated the the infinitesimal size of that time window, at that scale you can _almost_ consider that the airplane stood still. (Almost. Typical cruise speed for a, say, A340-300 is 875 km/h, meaning 243 m/s, meaning that in a 5ms time window (debris falling at mach 10), it will have moved only 1.2m or about 4ft. Not completely stationary, and you'll basically have to modify the airplane's surface by that. But close enough to stationary.) It will at most be hit from above, not fly horizontally into the side of the debris, and certainly not from 5 miles away.
On the other hand, neither argument is right or wrong, they're just halves of the whole calculation, if you want to do it all. (I didn't.) Yes, you end up calculating pretty much the surface of the airplane vs the surface of, say, a circle with a 5 nautical mile radius, if you want to find the probability. But you can do that only once you can _base_ that argument on the fact that the airplane didn't move much in that time interval. Which in turn is based on the time window being very very small.
I.e., it's not a case that your argument is right and mine is wrong, it's just a case that yours is a second half that _has_ to be based on the first half which I did there. Until you've calculated at least approximately how long that time window was, and how much the airplane moved during that time, you don't know if you can approximate the airplane as being a stationary target.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you couldn't have done the same calculation without me. You probably could. But you would have had to do it anyway. Hence it's a bit silly to proclaim something as fundamentally wrong to even consider, when it has to be the first half of your maths anyway.
Basically, that's just what I was hinting at, yes.
1. I didn't say (necessarily) "raped". Let's face it, since the dawn of time, a lot of men were curious about that. I can just imagine a caveman in a stylish sabertooth-skin loincloth pleading with his woman to let him try that way too. Note that I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just that it happens.
And a lot do say "yes" at some point or another. I was reading a statistic about a decade ago, and IIRC about 50% of the polled women had taken it up that route in the USA, and it was raising well over 80% in some other countries. Don't quote me, though, it's been a really long time since I've read that.
And "you _must_ be virgin at marriage" expectations just seem to make that happen more. It doesn't take a genius to figure out, "hmm, if she took it up the ass, she can jolly well stay a virgin for all I care". Throw in a rabidly fundamentalist theocracy, with a habit of killing people for as little as spilling their seed on the ground... and it just gets a lot more tempting to try that instead of outright breaking the tabu.
2. I never said it's _only_ the virgin conception, but I didn't feel like going into the whole list of absurdities, contradictions and non-sequiturs. It was a long message as it is.
3. See, the thing is, "if you believe Jesus is God" also tends to raise the bar of what I'd expect in the way of miracles. He can come down here in a more convincing way than asking everyone to just trust Mary that there was a miracle involved, without any other proof. God can do a lot better than that.
If far simpler explanations exist for a lot of the stuff, ranging from the virgin birth, to the thoroughly unsurprising fact that someone wasn't quite dead after a couple of hours on the cross(*).... I dunno, I'll tend to apply Occam's Razor. If it's no different from a normal every day event, then I'll believe that the normal every day event was what happened. E.g., if I find an apple under an apple tree, dunno about you, but I'll assume it simply fell, not that this particular apple came down via divine miracle.
((*)It usually took days to die on the cross, since the cross itself didn't do much more than make your stay up there painful and uncomfortable. Volunteers, whether religious nuts or in the name of scientific experimentation, spent comparable times with their wrists tied to a cross without coming even near to death.)
"Flaming debris" involves a lot higher speeeds, since the reason it's flaming isn't friction, it's almost adiabatic compression of the air in front of the falling object. Basically it's like compressing gas in a cylinder with a piston. The piston is the falling object, and the sides and bottom of the cylinder are just the air being unable to get out of the way fast enough.
(It's also the same thing that creates the first flaming fireball in the nuke. The shockwave compresses the air so hard, it becomes glowing plasma.)
Now I'm too lazy to search for the speeds at which that happens, but let's just say in layman's terms that's "bloody incredibly fast." We're talking massively hypersonic speeds. It makes the A340 look like a snail by comparison.
An A340 is how tall? 17m? If the falling debris was fallong only at sound speed (340m/s), it would be within the right height band to actually collide for only 0.05s. At flaming debris speeds, make that a couple of milliseconds.
So for the A340 to collide, it would have to cross that 5.75 miles distance not in 38s, but in the above mentioned couple of milliseconds. So, no, that's not close at all.
So use it as a second drive.
I, for example, would cheerfully buy one of these for my gaming desktop as drive D:. Well, ok, E:. My WD Raptor is plenty fast to boot Windows. I have no real need to accelerate that, so C: can jolly well stay a hard drive.
Load times of other stuf, however, can suck plenty even on that.
E.g., games. Games are a prime candidate for this kind of thing, since basically they don't change often. A game might get pathched a few times, maybe even once every couple of weeks for a MMO, but otherwise tends to be left alone. Most nowadays also save their save games in some subdirectory of "My Files", not in their own directory. So the game drive wouldn't even be worn out by my quicksave addiction.
I thought it became 666 after sales tax.
Oh please... Here's an idea for you: how about you turn on the brain and judge the man (or woman), not his email address or MySpace page?
Financial advice: either you trust that guy to be a competent economist, or you don't. That's it. If someone has a Ph.D. from Harvard, who gives a rat's arse about whether he has also a Hotmail address or not.
President: either you trust the guy enough to basically give him a hell of a lot of power, or you don't. The fact that he also has some stupid MySpace page should be the least of your worries.
Note that in both cases we're not talking about some Anonymous Coward with a Hotmail address or MySpace page, but about someone who's known and easy to check. We're not talking "Moraelin for president" or "NightElf12345@hotmail.com offers you free financial advice", but someone who's well known, and whose credentials and opinions are known, public and damn easy to check. So how about doing just that?
So you propose... what? That instead of actually checking and judging the person, you'd rather make some superficial meaningless criterion like their email address the top and only criterion? Would you rather take advice from the janitor because he has a more fashionable email address? Geesh...
Duly noted, but:
1. Even if it was invented later, still, at some point people -- and for that matter the church sponsoring those inquisition trials -- had to believe or preach _both_ at the same time. Both that (A) Marry's virgin pregnancy was a one-time divine-intervention-only miracle, and (B) that the same was possible via incubus, and happened all the time.
2. Believe it or not, incubi and succubi aren't an inqusition-only thing. Belief in that kind of thing is spread all over the world, including in areas where the catholic inquisition had no say. E.g., you can see the same or similar beliefs in orthodox Eastern Europe, various tribes, etc, and even in Europe they appear _long_ before the inquisition.
3. While having sex with the devil in exchange for power was indeed a theme for inquisition trials, incubi and succubi generally just used as a makeshift explanation for erotic dreams. If a boy dreamt something erotic and came in his nightgown, the succubus explanation was what they thought of it, but noone brought him to trial for it. Ditto for girls having erotic dreams. They may have told the bugger to fast and pray and have a crucifix near the bed to hold demons at bay, but that was just about it.