I suppose the "weird stuff" in there might be the block of U+03XX "combining diacritical" marks; so the string requires sticking a bunch of diacriticals over Arabic characters (which might invoke whatever fancy part of the code is broken). Someone with more time could play around with reducing this to a more "minimal" crash example.
The point, though, is that asking "what's the fastest spinning object" is a subtle question without a well-defined answer if by "fastest" you mean "rotations per unit time." You can move from a big, spinning ensemble of atoms, to a rotating diatomic molecule, to electrons "orbiting" an atom, to intrinsic spin in subatomic particles --- getting "faster and faster," but moving at each step from where the "classical limit" of quantum mechanics is a sensible description to where it isn't (and where "rotations per minute" may not be a sensible concept, even though "angular momentum" still is).
If you want multiple atoms, consider a diatomic molecule, such as Hydrogen (H2), which will have its low-lying rotational states quantized in units of hbar. Two hydrogen atoms, separated by ~10^-10m, "rotating" with an angular momentum of hbar, are "spinning" on the order of hbar/(2*r^2*m) ~ 6*10^12 Hz, but in a rather "quantum-mechnicsy" way. There's no fundamental "dividing point" between such a diatomic system, larger ensembles like the one mentioned in the article, or smaller objects with even higher "rotational speeds" (up to infinity) where "rotational speed" is no longer a sensible quantity to care about (angular momentum is the more "fundamental" quantity, but if you want the most angular momentum you want something "big and slowly" turning rather than "tiny and quickly" turning).
If his boss is insisting he does something illegal that endangers his safety in the work place (his truck); I am sure OSAH or someone at the DOL would love to hear about it.
But what if his boss is doing something technically legal, but endangering, like sending text messages requiring time to respond, and simultaneously making each driver's employment depend on cutting stopped time to the minimum possible? Result: the driver has to do something dangerous or illegal to keep his job (respond to texts on-the-go instead of pulling over), because his employer is an asshat who will cut every corner and use every legal loophole possible to screw over employees for profit maximization. The ideal solution to this type of problem involves guillotines for the entire owner/management class... but, so long as asshat employers are allowed to be in charge of the world (who will exploit every loophole given them against their employees), ridiculously picky regulations (like specifically banning texting to driving employees) are necessary for safety to counter every creative abuse the employers dream up. Just saying "forget regulations; be a fucking decent person and don't screw over your employee's basic safety" never works, because too many owner/managers aren't fucking decent people.
Well, once you get into the quantum mechanical realm, you can get things "spinning" pretty darn fast, though you require increasingly "nuanced" definitions of what "spin" means as you transition from the familiar world of classical mechanics to quantum-mechanical systems.
The magnetic moment of a proton in a 1T magnetic field precesses at ~2.7*10^8 Hz (which produces the signals that NMR looks at). Put an electron in a 1T magnetic field, and it is precessing at ~2.7*10^11 Hz.
A proton's "intrinsic spin" of hbar/2, for an object with the mass and radius of a proton (~1GeV/c^2, ~10^-15m), would "classically" be equivalent to something spinning at hbar/(2*r^2*m) ~ 6.3*10^22 Hz. An electron has an intrinsic spin oh hbar/2, and a size of 0, "equivalent" to an object "spinning" infinitely fast... of course, at this point, it doesn't make much sense to describe the quantum mechanical spin as though it were a "classical" spinning object.
True, but how much more of "some" blame do we really need to be heaping on rape victims, for daring to wear the clothing they want without considering themselves to be the sexual property of a male? I don't care if a woman walks in front of you bare naked, gyrating her hips and bobbling her breasts --- if she doesn't explicitly say "yes" to sex, you don't have any excuse for raping her, whatsoever. Claiming that a woman was "asking for it," when she wasn't "asking for it" any more than a sharply-dressed male is "asking" to be ass-raped, is downright wrong.
But, is it because they want those men to force non-consensual sex on them, which the poster above seemed to think was the message women intend to send through "slutty" clothing choices? Surely, just because someone wants to command attention/respect doesn't mean they want to be raped by any ogling passer-by. Men wear "attractive" clothes in order to up their social status and get more attention/respect from their peers/superiors, too, but one doesn't generally say that a man wearing a classy suit is a "slut" asking to be raped, even if the clothing might be used to attract desired, consensual sexual contact. "Slut-shaming" is a ridiculously misogynist double standard used to support rapists over rape victims.
Jevon's Paradox: greater efficiency leads to greater resource use. Walking across campus to socialize with a friend over coffee: 20 minutes. Only going to do that once a day. Quickly glancing at your Facebook page, and firing off a one-liner response to a comment? Takes just a minute. Done hundreds of times per day...
"Conservative" is a ridiculous word to use here (indicating some nostalgia for preserving the status-quo systems of a mythical "good old days"). But, dogmatic? Sure. I'm absolutely dogmatic. I take it as God-given dogma to consider all humans as humans worthy of dignity and respect, including the approximately half of the species without penises. Oh, and I'm Christian, too --- but far too conservative in my Christian beliefs to be a fan of the nineteenth-century heresies that inform present-day "fundamentalist" Christianity.
Have you ever considered asking a woman about why she chooses the clothing she wears, instead of simply assuming that all women's lives and decisions revolve around becoming receptacles for your penis? Ever think someone might want to wear clothes that they find attractive (or, perhaps just comfortable), without doing so to beg for non-consensual sex? Would you consider a man wearing spiffy attractive clothes to be asking to get ass-raped by any homosexual who found them attractive? Are you so psychotically out-of-control that you can't keep your dick in your pants at the sight of a little cleavage or tall shoes? Note, many human societies permit women to be topless without constantly being raped... it's not a "natural, scientifically-proven fact" that the typical male is so helplessly weak-willed that they can't hold back from rape sprees at the slightest provocation. If you have personal problems with this, then please take a tiny bit of personal responsibility and lock yourself up away from human society, rather than demand every female wear burqas to prevent your uncontrollable rape-rages.
I said nothing about intelligence, or individual variation. Yes, individual people can be right-wing and smart and rational and scientific. However, you are an exception, and on average, the overall population will generally correlate far-right-wing ideology with Fox News-style anti-intellectualism, and (tepid) progressivism with more "sciencey-sounding" NPR-style media.
I read the article. My point is that I suspect the appearance of causality, even in those cases where participants were conditioned with "scientific" or "non-scientific" lingo beforehand, is mediated by political propaganda, which form a subconscious association between "science" and political liberalism (thanks to the right wing's persistent popular use of anti-intellectualism in conjunction with anti-human ideologies). Talk about "sciencey" things, and you'll fire up the parts of a typical American's brain that are also generally activated in more "politically liberal" contexts; not because science is fundamentally more "socially progressive" in itself, but because the American right has worked to systematically exclude rational, "scientific-sounding" discourse in the public sphere in favor of racist/sexist/emotional appeals.
See the above AC post for a perfect example of my point. Note, how the right-wing mindset approaches the issue of rape: it's the fault of the woman for wearing the wrong kind of clothes (seducing those poor, innocent, helpless men into raping them). Such attitudes indicate the typical connection between right-wing ideology, and assigning less blame and approbation to the rapist in a date-rape scenario (she must've deserved it for inviting him in for drinks, right?).
A likely correlative effect: those who "believe" more in science are, on average, people less influenced by the hyper-misogynistic and "fuck you I've got mine" narratives of the US right-wing (proclaimed alongside the anti-intellectual, anti-scientific propaganda of the same groups). The less time you spend watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh, the more likely you are to be both more "scientifically-minded" and less a fan of rape. Scientific rationality and "humanist" motivations have become indelibly tied together in the general public's mind thanks to the right wing propaganda machine's persistent war against both.
Indeed, but I happen to live in frickin' California, where they grow all this stuff, and the low-grade 80/20 ground beef at $2.69/lb is still cheaper than most of the fruit/veggies on the store shelf (grown in California and right across the border in Mexico). So the "parts of the country unsuitable for producing produce" argument doesn't apply where I am. Yes, I can eat locally and seasonally and healthily here, but only because I make nearly double minimum wage (plus healthcare benefits) and have only one mouth to feed --- for a lot of people, even right here in the middle of fruit-land, that's not so easy an option.
It's a problem if you're not wealthy and trying to feed a family on this country's relatively low working-class wages. You might be awash in money, but a whole lot of people in this country are not --- try living on minimum wage and/or food stamps, and it will be more obvious why so many low income people are fat. It's extremely difficult to afford a good diet --- that will keep you feeling full and energetic without piling on the pounds of useless lard --- for a sadly large portion of the US population.
Unfortunately, I see kale costing about as much per weight, and far more per calorie, than cheap nasty ground beef at the places I shop. Fortunately, I've got enough money in my food budget to include fresh fruits and veg --- but, if I were squeezed for cash and had a hungry family to feed, the beef would seem far more economical than the kale. Which just goes to show how fucked up our megacorporate food system is, since beef takes a heckuva lot more resources to produce (and should be way more expensive) than basic veggies. But, we've subsidized the heck out of cheap, nasty ground beef production, and made fresh veggies a budget-busting luxury out of reach of many working-class families.
I read the article, and agree that "responding when your sound is made" doesn't prove this is a name. But, it sure doesn't disprove it's a name (or even provide slight evidence against) either (since, as noted by posters below, there are plenty of examples where humans use names this way too); that was a silly muddled piece of logic by an author less clever than they thought. To test for "nameness," one would still need to check whether other dolphins do call out each others' sounds, perhaps even in "conversations" without the "named" dolphin present.
"Is there a Jeff Pullum here?" "Yep, Jeff Pullum, right over here!"
The protocol actually makes a lot of sense --- especially in a crowded street (or dolphin pod), where lots of people are calling out at once. If you just answered "here!," it would be easy to confuse with a bunch of other people answering "here!" to other calls for their own names. This mechanism provides a clear two-way authentication handshake that your response is directed specifically back to the initial caller (without needing to know their name). Just because it's not the protocol that you use, doesn't mean it's not a perfectly good idea.
That is a practice I would consider problematic. Yes, there's a big difference between a surgical operation in sanitary hospital conditions, and sending a teenager out into the wilderness to get their dick chopped by a rusty ceremonial blade so they can prove their manliness by toughing out the pain and blood loss (and not dying of infection). But, even that procedure still provides a better chance of surviving and being sexually functional than its female counterparts.
Oooh, a country with a billion person population had a rare 20-casualty event, that made world news because it was so uncommon. That's, like, 6 hours worth of gun deaths in the US?
Yes, drunken brawls are bad, and I agree there's no reason to accept and promote such violent behavior. However, adding ubiquitous guns to the situation only makes things worse.
Alcohol prohibition was deadly because people *really* like alcohol, and will do a lot to get buzzed. Gun ownership, however? Not so much --- a lot of people in the world are perfectly happy living in democratically determined gun-restricted areas. Given that the big motivators for gun ownership are living under fear and paranoia that you've gotta constantly be ready to kill or be killed, it's not something that people who've experienced less violent (and unequal) societies especially want.
I don't consider it to have bad for me at all; I'm perfectly satisfied with my genitalia as it is. As for the balance of medical opinion, the US medical community leans towards it. On the other hand, medical communities in many European countries --- that have better health outcomes and less institutional pressures to over-operate for profit --- tend to lean against; personally, I put more confidence in the medical practices of countries with overall healthier populations (not the one that outspends everyone else for third-world-worthy results, thanks to Capitalism...). However, the weight of clear-cut (ahem) benefit either way is rather slim.
There are two approaches to achieving power equity.
One is an arms race: everyone tries to arm up as fast as possible to keep pace with the folks at the top. In practice, however, this is futile: the folks "on top" always have the resources (stolen from the labor of everyone lower in the social chain) to far outgun everyone else. Society ends up wasting massive resources making the world an ever more dangerous place. Arms dealers and the powerful benefit; everyone else loses. Real power equity slips further and further from reality, since the most powerful will always have the resources to race ahead fastest.
The other is a disarmament race. Whoever is farthest ahead in violence capability and accumulated power receives severe approbation and resistance from everyone around them. Instead of cheering on the US Military's ever-increasing superiority, the citizenry demands a weaker military with fewer resources (instead of stocking up on bigger guns at home "just in case"). Communities demand that police officers do routine patrol work unarmed (which has been very effective in many places, since criminals don't feel like their only options are kill or be killed when a cop shows up). When you knock down the violent scumbags on top, you actually do get closer to real power equity.
Yes, keeping them out of the hands of law-abiding citizens (which are very difficult to tell from the hands of law-breaking citizens, especially when you try to prevent background checks and waiting periods) will also make them harder to get in the hands of criminals. When you can pick up guns and ammo cheap at Wal*Mart, instead of paying inflated black-market prices, then more folks in precarious enough financial situations to consider knocking over a liquor store can get them. When there's little or no risk or penalty associated with owning/carrying a gun while not in the middle of committing a crime, criminals can breathe easy while carrying a gun and scouting out their next target. When the criminals have to assume that everyone else around them might be packing, they'll be more likely/willing to start shooting everyone in sight (just to be safe) if they feel things are going wrong.
Not to mention, a lot of gun deaths aren't just due to hardened criminals --- they're from negligent "law abiding" citizens who've been convinced they need a loaded gun under every pillow to keep the bad guys out. Then, a domestic dispute turns into a gun murder; or their kid's playmate finds a cool "toy" in the dresser drawer, or an over-zealous petty authoritarian goon "protects" his neighborhood from "suspicious" people with the wrong skin color; or, cops gun down a civilian reaching for their ID because they've been trained to assume everyone else has guns; or, a half-hearted suicide attempt by a depressed person (who would have survived and gotten help in most other cases) is made point-and-click easy.
Indeed, new regulations that leave the same current number of handguns floating around as before won't particularly decrease the deaths caused by those guns (though they will prevent increasing risk by introducing even more guns). You'll also want policies that reduce the number of cheap, easy-to-get guns floating around in the first place --- by mandating better stewardship practices by gun owners (firearm safes, trigger locks, restrictions on private transfers, etc.), by restricting access to ammunition, and by (voluntary) disarmament and destruction of weapons.
Correct; my parents are religious (and I continue in the same faith), but circumcision is not a part of their/my faith practice (Christianity, which explicitly rejected mandating circumcision right from the start). In light of current medical information, I would probably not have a male child of my own circumcised (... not that I even have any near-term plans to have children). However, I think the issue of male circumcision is a delicately balanced issue --- weighing small chances of major harms against benefits that will vary strongly depending on other external factors; along with harder-to-quantify issues of personal subjective experience. On the other hand, female circumcision is downright barbaric --- when you're just plain obliterating the capability for genital sexual pleasure, for no potential health benefits whatsoever.
It's true, I cannot personally compare "before" and "after" experiences. And I'm not particularly pro-male-circumcision; however, I understand that my parents did this to me in good faith, on the basis of "best practices" medical advice they would have heard at the time, and I don't feel that I've suffered any for it. In the absence of direct comparison from personal experience, what can be noted is that both circumcised (at birth) and uncircumcised males generally enjoy the sensations of penile sex, and are capable of reaching orgasm, in nearly equal self-reported numbers. In comparison, females who have suffered clitoral removal are nearly certain to report finding vaginal sex to be somewhere between uninspiring and painful, and are much less likely to ever experience orgasm, than un-mutilated females. Thus, the impact of female circumcision is nearly incomparably worse than the effects of foreskin removal.
Note that later-in-life circumcision may have different impacts on sexual enjoyment: when your brain has already been "wired" to associate one type of stimulation with sexual pleasure, and then you significantly change your body, then I'm sure a lot will feel "missing". However, the developing brain is quite plastic, and can adapt to provide equal levels of pleasure/pain for varying raw stimulus --- so a male circumcised from birth isn't necessarily missing out on enjoyment even if the brain has to provide more "amplification gain" to the raw signals arriving from more de-sensitized nerves.
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I suppose the "weird stuff" in there might be the block of U+03XX "combining diacritical" marks; so the string requires sticking a bunch of diacriticals over Arabic characters (which might invoke whatever fancy part of the code is broken). Someone with more time could play around with reducing this to a more "minimal" crash example.
The point, though, is that asking "what's the fastest spinning object" is a subtle question without a well-defined answer if by "fastest" you mean "rotations per unit time." You can move from a big, spinning ensemble of atoms, to a rotating diatomic molecule, to electrons "orbiting" an atom, to intrinsic spin in subatomic particles --- getting "faster and faster," but moving at each step from where the "classical limit" of quantum mechanics is a sensible description to where it isn't (and where "rotations per minute" may not be a sensible concept, even though "angular momentum" still is).
If you want multiple atoms, consider a diatomic molecule, such as Hydrogen (H2), which will have its low-lying rotational states quantized in units of hbar. Two hydrogen atoms, separated by ~10^-10m, "rotating" with an angular momentum of hbar, are "spinning" on the order of hbar/(2*r^2*m) ~ 6*10^12 Hz, but in a rather "quantum-mechnicsy" way. There's no fundamental "dividing point" between such a diatomic system, larger ensembles like the one mentioned in the article, or smaller objects with even higher "rotational speeds" (up to infinity) where "rotational speed" is no longer a sensible quantity to care about (angular momentum is the more "fundamental" quantity, but if you want the most angular momentum you want something "big and slowly" turning rather than "tiny and quickly" turning).
If his boss is insisting he does something illegal that endangers his safety in the work place (his truck); I am sure OSAH or someone at the DOL would love to hear about it.
But what if his boss is doing something technically legal, but endangering, like sending text messages requiring time to respond, and simultaneously making each driver's employment depend on cutting stopped time to the minimum possible? Result: the driver has to do something dangerous or illegal to keep his job (respond to texts on-the-go instead of pulling over), because his employer is an asshat who will cut every corner and use every legal loophole possible to screw over employees for profit maximization. The ideal solution to this type of problem involves guillotines for the entire owner/management class... but, so long as asshat employers are allowed to be in charge of the world (who will exploit every loophole given them against their employees), ridiculously picky regulations (like specifically banning texting to driving employees) are necessary for safety to counter every creative abuse the employers dream up. Just saying "forget regulations; be a fucking decent person and don't screw over your employee's basic safety" never works, because too many owner/managers aren't fucking decent people.
Well, once you get into the quantum mechanical realm, you can get things "spinning" pretty darn fast, though you require increasingly "nuanced" definitions of what "spin" means as you transition from the familiar world of classical mechanics to quantum-mechanical systems.
The magnetic moment of a proton in a 1T magnetic field precesses at ~2.7*10^8 Hz (which produces the signals that NMR looks at).
Put an electron in a 1T magnetic field, and it is precessing at ~2.7*10^11 Hz.
A proton's "intrinsic spin" of hbar/2, for an object with the mass and radius of a proton (~1GeV/c^2, ~10^-15m), would "classically" be equivalent to something spinning at hbar/(2*r^2*m) ~ 6.3*10^22 Hz. An electron has an intrinsic spin oh hbar/2, and a size of 0, "equivalent" to an object "spinning" infinitely fast... of course, at this point, it doesn't make much sense to describe the quantum mechanical spin as though it were a "classical" spinning object.
True, but how much more of "some" blame do we really need to be heaping on rape victims, for daring to wear the clothing they want without considering themselves to be the sexual property of a male? I don't care if a woman walks in front of you bare naked, gyrating her hips and bobbling her breasts --- if she doesn't explicitly say "yes" to sex, you don't have any excuse for raping her, whatsoever. Claiming that a woman was "asking for it," when she wasn't "asking for it" any more than a sharply-dressed male is "asking" to be ass-raped, is downright wrong.
But, is it because they want those men to force non-consensual sex on them, which the poster above seemed to think was the message women intend to send through "slutty" clothing choices? Surely, just because someone wants to command attention/respect doesn't mean they want to be raped by any ogling passer-by. Men wear "attractive" clothes in order to up their social status and get more attention/respect from their peers/superiors, too, but one doesn't generally say that a man wearing a classy suit is a "slut" asking to be raped, even if the clothing might be used to attract desired, consensual sexual contact. "Slut-shaming" is a ridiculously misogynist double standard used to support rapists over rape victims.
Jevon's Paradox: greater efficiency leads to greater resource use. Walking across campus to socialize with a friend over coffee: 20 minutes. Only going to do that once a day. Quickly glancing at your Facebook page, and firing off a one-liner response to a comment? Takes just a minute. Done hundreds of times per day...
"Conservative" is a ridiculous word to use here (indicating some nostalgia for preserving the status-quo systems of a mythical "good old days"). But, dogmatic? Sure. I'm absolutely dogmatic. I take it as God-given dogma to consider all humans as humans worthy of dignity and respect, including the approximately half of the species without penises. Oh, and I'm Christian, too --- but far too conservative in my Christian beliefs to be a fan of the nineteenth-century heresies that inform present-day "fundamentalist" Christianity.
Why do women wear high heels shoes...
Have you ever considered asking a woman about why she chooses the clothing she wears, instead of simply assuming that all women's lives and decisions revolve around becoming receptacles for your penis? Ever think someone might want to wear clothes that they find attractive (or, perhaps just comfortable), without doing so to beg for non-consensual sex? Would you consider a man wearing spiffy attractive clothes to be asking to get ass-raped by any homosexual who found them attractive? Are you so psychotically out-of-control that you can't keep your dick in your pants at the sight of a little cleavage or tall shoes? Note, many human societies permit women to be topless without constantly being raped... it's not a "natural, scientifically-proven fact" that the typical male is so helplessly weak-willed that they can't hold back from rape sprees at the slightest provocation. If you have personal problems with this, then please take a tiny bit of personal responsibility and lock yourself up away from human society, rather than demand every female wear burqas to prevent your uncontrollable rape-rages.
I said nothing about intelligence, or individual variation. Yes, individual people can be right-wing and smart and rational and scientific. However, you are an exception, and on average, the overall population will generally correlate far-right-wing ideology with Fox News-style anti-intellectualism, and (tepid) progressivism with more "sciencey-sounding" NPR-style media.
I read the article. My point is that I suspect the appearance of causality, even in those cases where participants were conditioned with "scientific" or "non-scientific" lingo beforehand, is mediated by political propaganda, which form a subconscious association between "science" and political liberalism (thanks to the right wing's persistent popular use of anti-intellectualism in conjunction with anti-human ideologies). Talk about "sciencey" things, and you'll fire up the parts of a typical American's brain that are also generally activated in more "politically liberal" contexts; not because science is fundamentally more "socially progressive" in itself, but because the American right has worked to systematically exclude rational, "scientific-sounding" discourse in the public sphere in favor of racist/sexist/emotional appeals.
See the above AC post for a perfect example of my point. Note, how the right-wing mindset approaches the issue of rape: it's the fault of the woman for wearing the wrong kind of clothes (seducing those poor, innocent, helpless men into raping them). Such attitudes indicate the typical connection between right-wing ideology, and assigning less blame and approbation to the rapist in a date-rape scenario (she must've deserved it for inviting him in for drinks, right?).
A likely correlative effect: those who "believe" more in science are, on average, people less influenced by the hyper-misogynistic and "fuck you I've got mine" narratives of the US right-wing (proclaimed alongside the anti-intellectual, anti-scientific propaganda of the same groups). The less time you spend watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh, the more likely you are to be both more "scientifically-minded" and less a fan of rape. Scientific rationality and "humanist" motivations have become indelibly tied together in the general public's mind thanks to the right wing propaganda machine's persistent war against both.
Indeed, but I happen to live in frickin' California, where they grow all this stuff, and the low-grade 80/20 ground beef at $2.69/lb is still cheaper than most of the fruit/veggies on the store shelf (grown in California and right across the border in Mexico). So the "parts of the country unsuitable for producing produce" argument doesn't apply where I am. Yes, I can eat locally and seasonally and healthily here, but only because I make nearly double minimum wage (plus healthcare benefits) and have only one mouth to feed --- for a lot of people, even right here in the middle of fruit-land, that's not so easy an option.
It's a problem if you're not wealthy and trying to feed a family on this country's relatively low working-class wages. You might be awash in money, but a whole lot of people in this country are not --- try living on minimum wage and/or food stamps, and it will be more obvious why so many low income people are fat. It's extremely difficult to afford a good diet --- that will keep you feeling full and energetic without piling on the pounds of useless lard --- for a sadly large portion of the US population.
Unfortunately, I see kale costing about as much per weight, and far more per calorie, than cheap nasty ground beef at the places I shop. Fortunately, I've got enough money in my food budget to include fresh fruits and veg --- but, if I were squeezed for cash and had a hungry family to feed, the beef would seem far more economical than the kale. Which just goes to show how fucked up our megacorporate food system is, since beef takes a heckuva lot more resources to produce (and should be way more expensive) than basic veggies. But, we've subsidized the heck out of cheap, nasty ground beef production, and made fresh veggies a budget-busting luxury out of reach of many working-class families.
I read the article, and agree that "responding when your sound is made" doesn't prove this is a name. But, it sure doesn't disprove it's a name (or even provide slight evidence against) either (since, as noted by posters below, there are plenty of examples where humans use names this way too); that was a silly muddled piece of logic by an author less clever than they thought. To test for "nameness," one would still need to check whether other dolphins do call out each others' sounds, perhaps even in "conversations" without the "named" dolphin present.
"Is there a Jeff Pullum here?"
"Yep, Jeff Pullum, right over here!"
The protocol actually makes a lot of sense --- especially in a crowded street (or dolphin pod), where lots of people are calling out at once. If you just answered "here!," it would be easy to confuse with a bunch of other people answering "here!" to other calls for their own names. This mechanism provides a clear two-way authentication handshake that your response is directed specifically back to the initial caller (without needing to know their name). Just because it's not the protocol that you use, doesn't mean it's not a perfectly good idea.
That is a practice I would consider problematic. Yes, there's a big difference between a surgical operation in sanitary hospital conditions, and sending a teenager out into the wilderness to get their dick chopped by a rusty ceremonial blade so they can prove their manliness by toughing out the pain and blood loss (and not dying of infection). But, even that procedure still provides a better chance of surviving and being sexually functional than its female counterparts.
Oooh, a country with a billion person population had a rare 20-casualty event, that made world news because it was so uncommon. That's, like, 6 hours worth of gun deaths in the US?
Yes, drunken brawls are bad, and I agree there's no reason to accept and promote such violent behavior. However, adding ubiquitous guns to the situation only makes things worse.
Alcohol prohibition was deadly because people *really* like alcohol, and will do a lot to get buzzed. Gun ownership, however? Not so much --- a lot of people in the world are perfectly happy living in democratically determined gun-restricted areas. Given that the big motivators for gun ownership are living under fear and paranoia that you've gotta constantly be ready to kill or be killed, it's not something that people who've experienced less violent (and unequal) societies especially want.
I don't consider it to have bad for me at all; I'm perfectly satisfied with my genitalia as it is. As for the balance of medical opinion, the US medical community leans towards it. On the other hand, medical communities in many European countries --- that have better health outcomes and less institutional pressures to over-operate for profit --- tend to lean against; personally, I put more confidence in the medical practices of countries with overall healthier populations (not the one that outspends everyone else for third-world-worthy results, thanks to Capitalism...). However, the weight of clear-cut (ahem) benefit either way is rather slim.
There are two approaches to achieving power equity.
One is an arms race: everyone tries to arm up as fast as possible to keep pace with the folks at the top. In practice, however, this is futile: the folks "on top" always have the resources (stolen from the labor of everyone lower in the social chain) to far outgun everyone else. Society ends up wasting massive resources making the world an ever more dangerous place. Arms dealers and the powerful benefit; everyone else loses. Real power equity slips further and further from reality, since the most powerful will always have the resources to race ahead fastest.
The other is a disarmament race. Whoever is farthest ahead in violence capability and accumulated power receives severe approbation and resistance from everyone around them. Instead of cheering on the US Military's ever-increasing superiority, the citizenry demands a weaker military with fewer resources (instead of stocking up on bigger guns at home "just in case"). Communities demand that police officers do routine patrol work unarmed (which has been very effective in many places, since criminals don't feel like their only options are kill or be killed when a cop shows up). When you knock down the violent scumbags on top, you actually do get closer to real power equity.
Yes, keeping them out of the hands of law-abiding citizens (which are very difficult to tell from the hands of law-breaking citizens, especially when you try to prevent background checks and waiting periods) will also make them harder to get in the hands of criminals. When you can pick up guns and ammo cheap at Wal*Mart, instead of paying inflated black-market prices, then more folks in precarious enough financial situations to consider knocking over a liquor store can get them. When there's little or no risk or penalty associated with owning/carrying a gun while not in the middle of committing a crime, criminals can breathe easy while carrying a gun and scouting out their next target. When the criminals have to assume that everyone else around them might be packing, they'll be more likely/willing to start shooting everyone in sight (just to be safe) if they feel things are going wrong.
Not to mention, a lot of gun deaths aren't just due to hardened criminals --- they're from negligent "law abiding" citizens who've been convinced they need a loaded gun under every pillow to keep the bad guys out. Then, a domestic dispute turns into a gun murder; or their kid's playmate finds a cool "toy" in the dresser drawer, or an over-zealous petty authoritarian goon "protects" his neighborhood from "suspicious" people with the wrong skin color; or, cops gun down a civilian reaching for their ID because they've been trained to assume everyone else has guns; or, a half-hearted suicide attempt by a depressed person (who would have survived and gotten help in most other cases) is made point-and-click easy.
Indeed, new regulations that leave the same current number of handguns floating around as before won't particularly decrease the deaths caused by those guns (though they will prevent increasing risk by introducing even more guns). You'll also want policies that reduce the number of cheap, easy-to-get guns floating around in the first place --- by mandating better stewardship practices by gun owners (firearm safes, trigger locks, restrictions on private transfers, etc.), by restricting access to ammunition, and by (voluntary) disarmament and destruction of weapons.
Correct; my parents are religious (and I continue in the same faith), but circumcision is not a part of their/my faith practice (Christianity, which explicitly rejected mandating circumcision right from the start). In light of current medical information, I would probably not have a male child of my own circumcised (... not that I even have any near-term plans to have children). However, I think the issue of male circumcision is a delicately balanced issue --- weighing small chances of major harms against benefits that will vary strongly depending on other external factors; along with harder-to-quantify issues of personal subjective experience. On the other hand, female circumcision is downright barbaric --- when you're just plain obliterating the capability for genital sexual pleasure, for no potential health benefits whatsoever.
It's true, I cannot personally compare "before" and "after" experiences. And I'm not particularly pro-male-circumcision; however, I understand that my parents did this to me in good faith, on the basis of "best practices" medical advice they would have heard at the time, and I don't feel that I've suffered any for it. In the absence of direct comparison from personal experience, what can be noted is that both circumcised (at birth) and uncircumcised males generally enjoy the sensations of penile sex, and are capable of reaching orgasm, in nearly equal self-reported numbers. In comparison, females who have suffered clitoral removal are nearly certain to report finding vaginal sex to be somewhere between uninspiring and painful, and are much less likely to ever experience orgasm, than un-mutilated females. Thus, the impact of female circumcision is nearly incomparably worse than the effects of foreskin removal.
Note that later-in-life circumcision may have different impacts on sexual enjoyment: when your brain has already been "wired" to associate one type of stimulation with sexual pleasure, and then you significantly change your body, then I'm sure a lot will feel "missing". However, the developing brain is quite plastic, and can adapt to provide equal levels of pleasure/pain for varying raw stimulus --- so a male circumcised from birth isn't necessarily missing out on enjoyment even if the brain has to provide more "amplification gain" to the raw signals arriving from more de-sensitized nerves.