I recognize that your analysis is highly over-simplified because you are trying to make a point, and that's a fairly obvious and acceptable rhetorical device. But your 'facts' ("There are more trees today than there has [sic] ever been...") are simply wrong, and grotesquely so. Even limiting the discussion to trees and forests within the United States, your statement is completely false.
Not that there is any point in replying - but thanks for assuming that I'm an idiot. The game wasn't at all boring, at least to the hockey fans in attendance, and while people might have been tired towards the end of the game, that wouldn't have mattered during the second (of three, you see) periods.
The convincing aspect of my observation (if only to the original observer) was the unambiguous back-and-forth nature of the phenomenon. Coupled with the statistical unlikelyhood of several hundred people yawning simultaneously because of random or unrelated stimuli, it was quite adequately compelling, even for an astute and thoughtful observer.
Your 'dying streetlight' analogy is fairly weird; it would never occur to me that temporary proximity might have been the cause of a flickering streetlight going out. However, if four or five lamps sequentially went dark just as I passed beneath, I might start to wonder . . .
I was attending my first professional hockey game, approximately 30 years ago - some guys from my high school were playing, but I'd be lying if I called them buddies. A hockey rink, for those who don't know, is smaller than an (American) football stadium, but larger that a basketball court. Anyway, during the second period, I yawned hugely. Moments later, a few people across the ice yawned back. The people sitting around me yawned, and then, to all appearances, everybody on the other side yawned. Personal experience, after all, is more convincing than any amount of scientific data; I've known yawns were contagious ever since.
And someone perhaps just a tiny bit more widely read would know that the word "soma" considerably predates "Brave New World" - by a few thousand years or so.
Oh, come on! Did you think about this at all before posting? There are myriad perfectly legitimate reasons a person might deviate from their 'normal' payment pattern - arguably far more than there are suspicious reasons. My sister just refinanced her house, specifically so she could pay off a number of other debts, including some high credit card balances. (I'm not arguing that that is a smart thing to do, but it is certainly legitimate.) Or you could accept a new credit card offer and take advantage of '0% interest on balance transfers for a limited time.'
I picked these examples because not only are they perfectly innocent, but they are also things that the finance industry spends a lot of time and money encouraging consumers to do.
Ultimately, we can't know anything. This understanding underlies all my beliefs and opinions, and I remain sceptical even of my own thinking. I never said that I was sure I was right, but rather pointed out that my best thinking (which is pretty good thinking) has led to different conclusions over the course of my life. My point was precisely to demonstrate the need for the humility you accuse me of lacking.
Doing nothing is simply not an option, and finding solutions to these problems will demand the best we've got. Like you, I fear people who are so certain of what they think they know that they can neither think clearly nor hear what others are saying.
The U.S. government has already decided on a (much more sophisticated) version of your plan. High-level waste is to be encapsulated in glass/ceramic casings and stored inside underground salt deposits (which are both stable and dry over geological time periods). Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, has been selected as the best possible location within the United States, because the geology is close to ideal and the area is sparsely populated. This is by far the best-thought-out solution presented thus far, at least for disposal on dry land.
However, there is unavoidably still some degree of risk. This stuff is not only intensely radioactive, but also incredibly toxic, and it must remain protected, dry, and out of dangerous hands for a period of time longer than all of recorded history. It is just not reasonable to think we can anticipate all contigencies and guarantee outcomes that far into the future.
Anyway, the good people of Nevada freaked out - not surprisingly (your standard 'not in my backyard' mentality) - and the whole thing seems to be on hold for the time being. Although most peoples' fears may be based on 'a little learning,' the danger, should anything go wrong, is very real.
I have now changed my mind twice about the issue of nuclear power. At any given time, I like to think, my opinions have been knowledgable, well-reasoned, and justified by current circumstances. Still, facts and circumstances change.
As a young science geek (I was born in 1952), I was excited by the possibilities of nuclear technology - power generation, of course, but also less obvious things like, say, canal excavation or spacecraft propulsion. Those were heady times, looking forward to the atomic age.
A few years later, we had developed a better understanding of some long term problems, most seriously the storage of radioactive waste. (High-level wastes are small in volume, but pretty much inimical to life; there are in addition large quantities of low-level waste and irradiated materials to deal with). I had also learned a lot more about the gulf between idealized science and the behavior of those governments and large corporations who were actually capable of building nuclear installations. I decided the risks were just too great to accept.
Today, with much more sophisticated reactor technologies, and at least a glimmering of real solutions to the waste storage problem, I think the risks of operating nuclear plants have become justifiable. And faced with the worsening consequences - moral, environmental, and political - of our world-wide petroleum addiction, nuclear power is the best alternative we have.
I was just going to say something casual like, "Dude, your signature rocks," but what I mean is, I think your signature is important! Thanks. It occurred to me that maybe it was time to re-introduce this idea into our public discourse, but then I realized that both sides would use it (meaning entirely different things, of course) and it would probably end up just adding to the confusion.
Hi, rjh; always a pleasure to encounter someone who is familiar with the history of English usage. You should, perhaps, be a little careful about assuming ignorance on the part of those who might disagree with you. "The language changes. Deal with it," is simply rude.
I am quite familiar with the attempt, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, to make written English correspond with the formal structure of Latin grammar (that is, at least, Latin grammar as taught in English public schools). My area of particular interest, for what it's worth, is the great vowel shift.
There is a huge difference between your examples and the phrase under discussion. Those rules were never widely adopted or practiced by writers and educated speakers. Despite the preaching of grammarians, they were honoured more in the breach than in the observance.
However, "begs the question" has had, until very recently, only the one specific meaning. The casual usage you support in this case is not merely different from, but in fact contradictory to, the original meaning, and has come about because many people have heard the phrase without correctly understanding its meaning. So it does serve as a marker, if you will, as to the sophistication of its user. (And, for what it's worth, the modern language experts that I know agree with me.)
However, "begging the question" did not have this conversational meaning, as you call it, before this latest generation started using it that way without understanding its history. Until recently, no educated speaker of English would have used it that way - and it still makes many of us cringe.
According to a quick Google search, as of 2003 India had approximately 150 million Muslims, versus 195 million for Indonesia (and 145 million for Pakistan). You are simply incorrect.
Actually, the parent is rather carefully worded. Frequency response is most often measured into a device with a fairly high and well-controlled input impedance. The load is easy to drive, and doesn't require much juice.
Headphones will typically have a lower and much more complex (and reactive) impedance. They are harder to drive, and draw a lot more current. The quality of the power supply becomes important here - while it may in fact be able to produce bass transients at correct levels, the output my sag during sustained bass notes. This is unfortunately very common.
There is still a big quality difference, but I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the OTHER big difference between the packaged sets you buy and the recordings you make yourself from broadcast: those nasty little ads which run along the bottom of the screen. When it was just a little logo in the corner, that wasn't so bad, but now many of them are animated, often with sound, and can take up nearly a third of the screen! Who wants that crap on their archive copies?
They bug me enough that I will often turn off the program because of a particularly aggressive reminder about the next wrestling bout or mindless reality show. I can't imagine watching them over and over.
The statement "elucidate is an obscure word" is functionally equivalent to the statement "I am neither well-read nor well-educated." I personally found the article admirably lucid.
For what it's worth: virtually all near-sightedness is caused by early childhood experience (i.e., reading) which affects the structure of the eye as it develops. Far-sightnedness, on the other hand, tends to be genetic in origin.
Thanks, but I'll stick with "philology recapitulates ontology." It still makes me giggle every time I re-read it. I just wish there were someone else I could share the joke with...
Is your wide-awake brain as much fun as your "up for 48 hours" brain? Good luck with whatever you're working on.
Dude, if you said this on purpose, it's hilarious (but meaningless). However, I suspect you meant to say that "philogeny recapitulates ontogeny" - which still doesn't have much to do with your thesis.
This is a wonderful initiative, which I think most of us will want to encourage - but to really determine it's value, we need to know how good the book is. Does it match the standards of currently available conventional (i.e. expensive) texts? It would be great to see a review by a highly-qualified engineer or professor.
This may sound off-topic at first, but please bear with me.
The logic in the article reminded me of the Y2K situation. At the time I was Chief Financial Officer for a mid-sized non-profit organization, and I was approached repeatedly by attorneys and accounting firms with the same argument: there MIGHT be a problem, and if you cannot show that you took appropriate steps to deal with it, you could be held negligent.
Of course, what they wanted was for me to hire them to perform an audit of our computer systems and hardware, in exchange for a hefty fee. Instead, I simply pointed out that I was better qualified, and better positioned, to evaluate our risk exposure than any lawyer or outside accountant, and that I had already done so to my own satisfaction. (I did keep records.)
Similarly, IT managers running Linux should be quite competent to determine what risk they face from SCO without the need for legal counsel. Most of them, obviously, have decided that the risk is not sufficient to demand indemnification.
Both the book and the movie were based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel," originally published in 1950, wherein a monolith is discovered on the Moon.
The front cover of the novel "2001: a space odyssey" states that it was "based on the screenplay of the MGM film by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke."
I think Palm's decision is probably a mistake, but hardly unprecedented. A lot of game developers, for example, have done the same thing.
The math is really pretty simple - if Macintosh development and support costs total less than the potential income from sales to Mac owners, the company stands to make money. Nonetheless, we have repeatedly seen companies forego such profits, reasoning that the market share is too small to bother with.
As long as they allow independent developers to step into the breach, no-one should suffer from this - but all too often that route is blocked as well. How they justify this to their financial officers I can't understand.
Slashdot Mirror
I recognize that your analysis is highly over-simplified because you are trying to make a point, and that's a fairly obvious and acceptable rhetorical device. But your 'facts' ("There are more trees today than there has [sic] ever been...") are simply wrong, and grotesquely so. Even limiting the discussion to trees and forests within the United States, your statement is completely false.
Not that there is any point in replying - but thanks for assuming that I'm an idiot. The game wasn't at all boring, at least to the hockey fans in attendance, and while people might have been tired towards the end of the game, that wouldn't have mattered during the second (of three, you see) periods. The convincing aspect of my observation (if only to the original observer) was the unambiguous back-and-forth nature of the phenomenon. Coupled with the statistical unlikelyhood of several hundred people yawning simultaneously because of random or unrelated stimuli, it was quite adequately compelling, even for an astute and thoughtful observer. Your 'dying streetlight' analogy is fairly weird; it would never occur to me that temporary proximity might have been the cause of a flickering streetlight going out. However, if four or five lamps sequentially went dark just as I passed beneath, I might start to wonder . . .
I was attending my first professional hockey game, approximately 30 years ago - some guys from my high school were playing, but I'd be lying if I called them buddies. A hockey rink, for those who don't know, is smaller than an (American) football stadium, but larger that a basketball court. Anyway, during the second period, I yawned hugely. Moments later, a few people across the ice yawned back. The people sitting around me yawned, and then, to all appearances, everybody on the other side yawned. Personal experience, after all, is more convincing than any amount of scientific data; I've known yawns were contagious ever since.
And someone perhaps just a tiny bit more widely read would know that the word "soma" considerably predates "Brave New World" - by a few thousand years or so.
"Labor can be motivated by money. Invention cannot."
Another excellent post, kfg. Damn, you're good!
Oh, come on! Did you think about this at all before posting? There are myriad perfectly legitimate reasons a person might deviate from their 'normal' payment pattern - arguably far more than there are suspicious reasons. My sister just refinanced her house, specifically so she could pay off a number of other debts, including some high credit card balances. (I'm not arguing that that is a smart thing to do, but it is certainly legitimate.) Or you could accept a new credit card offer and take advantage of '0% interest on balance transfers for a limited time.'
I picked these examples because not only are they perfectly innocent, but they are also things that the finance industry spends a lot of time and money encouraging consumers to do.
Doing nothing is simply not an option, and finding solutions to these problems will demand the best we've got. Like you, I fear people who are so certain of what they think they know that they can neither think clearly nor hear what others are saying.
The U.S. government has already decided on a (much more sophisticated) version of your plan. High-level waste is to be encapsulated in glass/ceramic casings and stored inside underground salt deposits (which are both stable and dry over geological time periods). Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, has been selected as the best possible location within the United States, because the geology is close to ideal and the area is sparsely populated. This is by far the best-thought-out solution presented thus far, at least for disposal on dry land.
However, there is unavoidably still some degree of risk. This stuff is not only intensely radioactive, but also incredibly toxic, and it must remain protected, dry, and out of dangerous hands for a period of time longer than all of recorded history. It is just not reasonable to think we can anticipate all contigencies and guarantee outcomes that far into the future.
Anyway, the good people of Nevada freaked out - not surprisingly (your standard 'not in my backyard' mentality) - and the whole thing seems to be on hold for the time being. Although most peoples' fears may be based on 'a little learning,' the danger, should anything go wrong, is very real.
I have now changed my mind twice about the issue of nuclear power. At any given time, I like to think, my opinions have been knowledgable, well-reasoned, and justified by current circumstances. Still, facts and circumstances change.
As a young science geek (I was born in 1952), I was excited by the possibilities of nuclear technology - power generation, of course, but also less obvious things like, say, canal excavation or spacecraft propulsion. Those were heady times, looking forward to the atomic age.
A few years later, we had developed a better understanding of some long term problems, most seriously the storage of radioactive waste. (High-level wastes are small in volume, but pretty much inimical to life; there are in addition large quantities of low-level waste and irradiated materials to deal with). I had also learned a lot more about the gulf between idealized science and the behavior of those governments and large corporations who were actually capable of building nuclear installations. I decided the risks were just too great to accept.
Today, with much more sophisticated reactor technologies, and at least a glimmering of real solutions to the waste storage problem, I think the risks of operating nuclear plants have become justifiable. And faced with the worsening consequences - moral, environmental, and political - of our world-wide petroleum addiction, nuclear power is the best alternative we have.
A new low, even for Slashdot. I shudder to think what might be found in TFA.
I was just going to say something casual like, "Dude, your signature rocks," but what I mean is, I think your signature is important! Thanks. It occurred to me that maybe it was time to re-introduce this idea into our public discourse, but then I realized that both sides would use it (meaning entirely different things, of course) and it would probably end up just adding to the confusion.
Hi, rjh; always a pleasure to encounter someone who is familiar with the history of English usage. You should, perhaps, be a little careful about assuming ignorance on the part of those who might disagree with you. "The language changes. Deal with it," is simply rude.
I am quite familiar with the attempt, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, to make written English correspond with the formal structure of Latin grammar (that is, at least, Latin grammar as taught in English public schools). My area of particular interest, for what it's worth, is the great vowel shift.
There is a huge difference between your examples and the phrase under discussion. Those rules were never widely adopted or practiced by writers and educated speakers. Despite the preaching of grammarians, they were honoured more in the breach than in the observance.
However, "begs the question" has had, until very recently, only the one specific meaning. The casual usage you support in this case is not merely different from, but in fact contradictory to, the original meaning, and has come about because many people have heard the phrase without correctly understanding its meaning. So it does serve as a marker, if you will, as to the sophistication of its user. (And, for what it's worth, the modern language experts that I know agree with me.)
However, "begging the question" did not have this conversational meaning, as you call it, before this latest generation started using it that way without understanding its history. Until recently, no educated speaker of English would have used it that way - and it still makes many of us cringe.
According to a quick Google search, as of 2003 India had approximately 150 million Muslims, versus 195 million for Indonesia (and 145 million for Pakistan). You are simply incorrect.
Actually, the parent is rather carefully worded. Frequency response is most often measured into a device with a fairly high and well-controlled input impedance. The load is easy to drive, and doesn't require much juice.
Headphones will typically have a lower and much more complex (and reactive) impedance. They are harder to drive, and draw a lot more current. The quality of the power supply becomes important here - while it may in fact be able to produce bass transients at correct levels, the output my sag during sustained bass notes. This is unfortunately very common.
Sorry - I don't have mod points, and apparently neither does anyone else who got the joke. If you understand it, though, it's a good one. Thanks!
There is still a big quality difference, but I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the OTHER big difference between the packaged sets you buy and the recordings you make yourself from broadcast: those nasty little ads which run along the bottom of the screen. When it was just a little logo in the corner, that wasn't so bad, but now many of them are animated, often with sound, and can take up nearly a third of the screen! Who wants that crap on their archive copies?
They bug me enough that I will often turn off the program because of a particularly aggressive reminder about the next wrestling bout or mindless reality show. I can't imagine watching them over and over.
The statement "elucidate is an obscure word" is functionally equivalent to the statement "I am neither well-read nor well-educated." I personally found the article admirably lucid.
For what it's worth: virtually all near-sightedness is caused by early childhood experience (i.e., reading) which affects the structure of the eye as it develops. Far-sightnedness, on the other hand, tends to be genetic in origin.
Thanks, but I'll stick with "philology recapitulates ontology." It still makes me giggle every time I re-read it. I just wish there were someone else I could share the joke with... Is your wide-awake brain as much fun as your "up for 48 hours" brain? Good luck with whatever you're working on.
Dude, if you said this on purpose, it's hilarious (but meaningless). However, I suspect you meant to say that "philogeny recapitulates ontogeny" - which still doesn't have much to do with your thesis.
This is a wonderful initiative, which I think most of us will want to encourage - but to really determine it's value, we need to know how good the book is. Does it match the standards of currently available conventional (i.e. expensive) texts? It would be great to see a review by a highly-qualified engineer or professor.
This may sound off-topic at first, but please bear with me.
The logic in the article reminded me of the Y2K situation. At the time I was Chief Financial Officer for a mid-sized non-profit organization, and I was approached repeatedly by attorneys and accounting firms with the same argument: there MIGHT be a problem, and if you cannot show that you took appropriate steps to deal with it, you could be held negligent.
Of course, what they wanted was for me to hire them to perform an audit of our computer systems and hardware, in exchange for a hefty fee. Instead, I simply pointed out that I was better qualified, and better positioned, to evaluate our risk exposure than any lawyer or outside accountant, and that I had already done so to my own satisfaction. (I did keep records.)
Similarly, IT managers running Linux should be quite competent to determine what risk they face from SCO without the need for legal counsel. Most of them, obviously, have decided that the risk is not sufficient to demand indemnification.
Just for the sake of nit-picking accuracy:
Both the book and the movie were based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel," originally published in 1950, wherein a monolith is discovered on the Moon.
The front cover of the novel "2001: a space odyssey" states that it was "based on the screenplay of the MGM film by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke."
I think Palm's decision is probably a mistake, but hardly unprecedented. A lot of game developers, for example, have done the same thing.
The math is really pretty simple - if Macintosh development and support costs total less than the potential income from sales to Mac owners, the company stands to make money. Nonetheless, we have repeatedly seen companies forego such profits, reasoning that the market share is too small to bother with.
As long as they allow independent developers to step into the breach, no-one should suffer from this - but all too often that route is blocked as well. How they justify this to their financial officers I can't understand.