Engineer 2: Wha...? We're getting weird reports in the field from people getting pops and clicks in Britney Spear's music. Only hers.
Engineer 1: Who wants to listen to... oh, never mind. What's the problem?
Time passes. Testing occurs.
Engineer 1: It turns out that the keyboard her band uses isn't encodable because the particular waveform it produces yields a Fourier series that doesn't converge. Net result -- the keyboard makes the codec explode. Too bad we didn't know that some fourier series don't converge to the functions they represent.
Engineer 2: yeah, well, we'll just have to put an advisory on those iPods -- "Warning! The music of Britney Spears is not suitable for listening through this device."
Not that it's anywhere in the same league as particle physics, but you might enjoy reading Michael Crichton's Aliens Cause Global Warming speech. Best line: "There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period. "
This is not the first time someone's done this, and it's no doubt too much to hope that it will be the last time, but this article somehow turns "following the law" into "ignoring the law." Perhaps Roland should read From The Friggin' Law Itself:
(a)(1) Each advisory committee meeting shall be open to the public.
(2) Except when the President determines otherwise for reasons of national security, timely notice of each such meeting shall be published in the Federal Register, and the Administrator shall prescribe regulations to provide for other types of public notice to insure that all interested persons are notified of such meeting prior thereto.
(3) Interested persons shall be permitted to attend, appear before, or file statements with any advisory committee, subject to such reasonable rules or regulations as the Administrator may prescribe.
(b) Subject to section 552 of title 5, United States Code, the records, reports, transcripts, minutes, appendixes, working papers, drafts, studies, agenda, or other documents which were made available to or prepared for or by each advisory committee shall be available for public inspection and copying at a single location in the offices of the advisory committee or the agency to which the advisory committee reports until the advisory committee ceases to exist.
(c) Detailed minutes of each meeting of each advisory committee shall be kept and shall contain a record of the persons present, a complete and accurate description of matters discussed and conclusions reached, and copies of all reports received, issued, or approved by the advisory committee. The accuracy of all minutes shall be certified to by the chairman of the advisory committee.
(d) Subsections (a)(1) and (a)(3) of this section shall not apply to any portion of an advisory committee meeting where the President, or the head of the agency to which the advisory committee reports, determines that such portion of such meeting may be closed to the public in accordance with subsection (c) of section 552b of title 5, United States Code. Any such determination shall be in writing and shall contain the reasons for such determination. If such a determination is made, the advisory committee shall issue a report at least annually setting forth a summary of its activities and such related matters as would be informative to the public consistent with the policy of section 552(b) of title 5, United States Code.
No question: Chertoff's actions are entirely within the scope of the law.
NOW: is all this secrecy a good thing? I doubt it. But anyone who really cares about this ought to do something: join the NSA, put your uber-coding skillz to good use, and find bin Laden.
The only questions left then are whether the living human being is a person -- which requires some sophistry to deny -- and whether abortion could be justifiable homicide.
And then:
My choice of drawing the line at fertilization is simple: that is the point at which the organism comes into existence. Any other line to be drawn has to assume that "personhood" is attached to one's abilities, which is not easily defensible.
It feels like you're either labelling everything I've said as sophistry or ignoring what I've discussed about the fuzzy boundaries of human life. There's no flashing arrow pointing to the DNA combination step in human development saying "most important". There's no reason to assume there *must* be a crucial step that's more important than the others that are also required. More about this in my other post in this thread.
I apologize and recant. The term "sophistry" was applied too broadly, and you haven't deserved that label.
There is a subtle difference in approaches that one can take here. Your approach, similar to Thomson's approach, talks about the rights of the fetus over against the rights of the mother. That is, IMO, the responsible avenue to pursue. Others approach the issue by trying to cut off the fetus from a claim to rights entirely, by denying personhood to the fetus. In particular, I was recently reading this, which posits that we can draw a line between "person" and "human" in a rather question-begging manner.
I do NOT believe that you have been begging questions, although you haven't answered all of them to my satisfaction (and vice-versa, no doubt). You have flirted with the question of personhood, but my understanding of your argument from the beginning was that you were focusing on rights.
You don't need to teach babies language, they will learn in on their own.
Let's modify this statement slightly. "Babies will learn language on their own, so it's best to give them as much exposure as possible -- in other words, to interact with them regularly."
My daughter was using words reliably at 7 months. Her first? "Ki-ka", referring to the neighbor's cat. It was a consistent pattern of usage, too. "Da-da" was next, and eventually "Ma-ma."
I take extensive notes in lectures also. However, I don't take transcripts. I jot questions, extensions of ideas, etc. If the prof is noticing that the students don't know how to do that... because they type faster than they write, and therefore can transcribe the lecture instead of interacting with it... then she needs to do *something* to try to train them in the art of good note-taking. What would you suggest? Just let them "sink or swim"?
"Biologically", like the definition in your sig? The dictionary definition of "human being" points to "human", which is this: Human, noun: a bipedal primate mammal of the genus Homo (H. sapiens) : MAN; broadly : any living or extinct member of the family Hominidae. Interestingly, this includes dead people, but not a zygote, which is not bipedal.
BTW, biological definitions don't work like this. A one-legged man, even if from birth, still fits the definition because he belongs genetically to a class that, on average, has those characteristics. A zygote fits the definition not because he has two legs NOW but because, on average, he will at some time in his life. Children are considered "sexual reproducers" and "mammals" for the same reasons, even though they don't reproduce sexually at the moment, nor produce milk.
I'm at work on the "small model" -- it's taking time. No, I wouldn't say that the arguments have turned out to be flawed, though.:-D
In this particular thread, the question at stake was personhood, not the rights accorded to persons. I agree (as I did with the parent) that the question still to be answered is
whether abortion could be justifiable homicide.
That's the question that I challenge my classes with. I'm simply insisting that we view the question through the lense of competing rights, not by appealing to some imaginary line that denies personhood to a living human being.
I've got mod points, but I thought your point was good enough that it wanted some amplification:
To me, staring at a screen, typing every word that a prof says into a Word document is a stupid waste of technology. Isn't that what sound and video recorders are for?
A more sophisticated solution for her class would be to allow laptops ONLY for the purpose of recording lectures via microphone and sound card. What is technology for if not reducing the amount of drudgery? What is more "drudgesome" than copying down lectures verbatim?
Oh, and Mod Parent Up.
Stuff I didn't get from TA
on
DNA Origami
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And I'm not a biologist, so don't kill me.
How does the template interact with the DNA to cause self-assembly in the desired pattern?
If I throw RNA in with the object, can the structure reproduce?
Since these are all based on a single gene, they all code for the same protein, right?
How could these structures be used for molecular computing? (the article hints at it; I want details).
Responses starting with IAABiochemist are encouraged...
I hereby declare my patent on all absorptions, emissions, and reflections of photons by electrons. Even *thinking* about my patent requires photon-electron interactions in your brain, so you owe me royalties both for thought *and* use!
Generally speaking, you need to move electrons around in order for chemical processes to take place inside a cell. That requires oxidizers and reducers; oxygen is one such, with nice properties that make it suitable for sustaining life:
When reduced in the presence of acid (H+ ions), it forms water.
It has a relatively strong oxidizing potential (more energy than, say, copper ions or nitrogen), but not so much that it rips molecules apart at room temperature (like fluorine).
The fact that O2 is gaseous seems to improve its availability, but I haven't run numbers on that one.
Oxygen is the simplest substance around that has those characteristics.
But couldn't life evolve to, say, breathe helium and drink alkaline, for instance?
Definitely no on the first one. Helium has no chemical properties whatsoever. Hydrogen isn't a good candidate either, since H2 is a reducer rather than an oxidizer. I would imagine that a cell that relied on an outside reducer would need to have free oxidizers sitting around inside itself. It would probably rip itself apart.
Drinking alkaline is more reasonable, depending on the concentration.
I don't know if there's a rule that says, "Anything in the universe that's alive has to breathe (carbon dioxide|oxygen), drink water, be carbon-based, etc."
The "carbon requirement" is simply this: only carbon can form large, stable, complex molecules. Sulfur and nitrogen can form polymers, but not complex ones. Silicon can form large complex molecules, but they tend to fall apart because of the availability of d-orbitals.
You're correct that the question is "when does it become wrong to kill?" (see my parent post -- we're in agreement)
The problem with drawing a line somewhere has little to do with either souls or potential, and everything to do with *how* to draw that line.
My choice of drawing the line at fertilization is simple: that is the point at which the organism comes into existence. Any other line to be draw has to assume that "personhood" is attached to one's abilities, which is not easily defensible.
Re:Right and left are false dichotomies
on
Netroots Politics
·
· Score: 1
You don't deserve the "troll" rating, but I don't think you're seeing clearly either. The reason that we call Republicans "right" and Democrats "left" is that Europe already has set the parameters for extreme right and extreme left with fascist and socialist parties respectively. You'll notice that it's not in the U.S. but in Germany that neo-nazis are winning elections.
Only in your mind its called 'killing babies', not every thinks like that.
Anyone can play the relativism game. Just because "not everyone thinks like that" doesn't mean that everyone's beliefs are equally well-founded.
Are fetuses (latin for "babies") living human beings? Biologically, the answer is yes. Abortion *is* killing on demand.
The only questions left then are whether the living human being is a person -- which requires some sophistry to deny -- and whether abortion could be justifiable homicide.
Definition supplied here. Note that my usage corresponds to adj. 1 and 3, yours to 2 and 4. I'm hardly using a specialized, technical definition.
I'm surprised that in your studies you never ran across phrases like "the general expression", meaning "an expression true for every value of the variables involved."
Re: logic and induction
My major point was simply to distinguish induction from deduction. However, I should also point out that your quote from the Wiki,
Originally, logic consisted only of deductive reasoning which concerns what follows universally from given premises. However, it is important to note that inductive reasoning--the study of deriving a reliable generalization from observations--has sometimes been included in the study of logic
doesn't really support your claim that I'm using a specialized, abstruse meaning for the terms "inductive" and "logical"; rather, it would seem to suggest that the mainstream of philosophy agrees with me, and that your more flexible definition of logic which includes induction is only used by some.
Before you set DEA on me, I would ask you to read this.
I suspect we are using language differently.
Using at least one set of standard meanings, I read
In general, the future will be like the past
as "In the generalized case (i.e., always), the future will be like the past." Clearly, that's not a true statement. Hence, my comment: This is false, drawing attention to the meaning of the face-value wording.
However, I also realized that you probably didn't mean that. You probably meant something like "as a general rule, with exceptions, the future will be like the past."
In which case, your sample argument now raises (and begs) the question: are light switches part of the generality, or part of the exception set? Clearly, (2) in the sense in which I think you meant it doesn't imply (C) without further qualification about the likelihood of light switches following the general rule (2). In particular, one would need to know statistics about light switches. Hence my comment about strong and weak inductive arguments.
The word "illogical" is another problematic word, because most people associate "illogical" with poor reasoning. Inductive reasoning is NOT inherently poor reasoning! It is simply not deductive, and therefore not logical by definition. That is to say, there is no principle of deductive reasoning that allows one to say "If X happens n times, X will therefore happen n+1 times." I much prefer to use the terms "not logical" and "non-logical" rather than the term "illogical" to describe inductive reasoning because of the negative connotation of the word "illogical."
Bottom line: logical reasoning == deductive reasoning, while inductive reasoning is in a separate category. You can't cross over from one to the other.
Footnote in case you are a math or comp sci major: inductive reasoning should not be confused with "proof by induction" in mathematics, which is (distressingly enough) a form of deductive argument based on the premise (pick one) of Zorn's Lemma, the Well-Ordering Principle, or the Axiom of Choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Engineer 1: Who wants to listen to ... oh, never mind. What's the problem?
Time passes. Testing occurs.
Engineer 1: It turns out that the keyboard her band uses isn't encodable because the particular waveform it produces yields a Fourier series that doesn't converge. Net result -- the keyboard makes the codec explode. Too bad we didn't know that some fourier series don't converge to the functions they represent.
Engineer 2: yeah, well, we'll just have to put an advisory on those iPods -- "Warning! The music of Britney Spears is not suitable for listening through this device."
Not that it's anywhere in the same league as particle physics, but you might enjoy reading Michael Crichton's Aliens Cause Global Warming speech. Best line: "There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period. "
+5 well-put.
(a)(1) Each advisory committee meeting shall be open to the public. (2) Except when the President determines otherwise for reasons of national security, timely notice of each such meeting shall be published in the Federal Register, and the Administrator shall prescribe regulations to provide for other types of public notice to insure that all interested persons are notified of such meeting prior thereto. (3) Interested persons shall be permitted to attend, appear before, or file statements with any advisory committee, subject to such reasonable rules or regulations as the Administrator may prescribe. (b) Subject to section 552 of title 5, United States Code, the records, reports, transcripts, minutes, appendixes, working papers, drafts, studies, agenda, or other documents which were made available to or prepared for or by each advisory committee shall be available for public inspection and copying at a single location in the offices of the advisory committee or the agency to which the advisory committee reports until the advisory committee ceases to exist. (c) Detailed minutes of each meeting of each advisory committee shall be kept and shall contain a record of the persons present, a complete and accurate description of matters discussed and conclusions reached, and copies of all reports received, issued, or approved by the advisory committee. The accuracy of all minutes shall be certified to by the chairman of the advisory committee. (d) Subsections (a)(1) and (a)(3) of this section shall not apply to any portion of an advisory committee meeting where the President, or the head of the agency to which the advisory committee reports, determines that such portion of such meeting may be closed to the public in accordance with subsection (c) of section 552b of title 5, United States Code. Any such determination shall be in writing and shall contain the reasons for such determination. If such a determination is made, the advisory committee shall issue a report at least annually setting forth a summary of its activities and such related matters as would be informative to the public consistent with the policy of section 552(b) of title 5, United States Code.
No question: Chertoff's actions are entirely within the scope of the law.
NOW: is all this secrecy a good thing? I doubt it. But anyone who really cares about this ought to do something: join the NSA, put your uber-coding skillz to good use, and find bin Laden.
Unless he's also a biologist, I don't think this Martin Fleischmann has published since the '89 debacle.
Or was I missing some irony there?
That was part of the joke ...
Yeah, but when you have questions about reproductive activities, you've got instant tech support...
The only questions left then are whether the living human being is a person -- which requires some sophistry to deny -- and whether abortion could be justifiable homicide.
And then:
My choice of drawing the line at fertilization is simple: that is the point at which the organism comes into existence. Any other line to be drawn has to assume that "personhood" is attached to one's abilities, which is not easily defensible.
It feels like you're either labelling everything I've said as sophistry or ignoring what I've discussed about the fuzzy boundaries of human life. There's no flashing arrow pointing to the DNA combination step in human development saying "most important". There's no reason to assume there *must* be a crucial step that's more important than the others that are also required. More about this in my other post in this thread.
I apologize and recant. The term "sophistry" was applied too broadly, and you haven't deserved that label.
There is a subtle difference in approaches that one can take here. Your approach, similar to Thomson's approach, talks about the rights of the fetus over against the rights of the mother. That is, IMO, the responsible avenue to pursue. Others approach the issue by trying to cut off the fetus from a claim to rights entirely, by denying personhood to the fetus. In particular, I was recently reading this, which posits that we can draw a line between "person" and "human" in a rather question-begging manner.
I do NOT believe that you have been begging questions, although you haven't answered all of them to my satisfaction (and vice-versa, no doubt). You have flirted with the question of personhood, but my understanding of your argument from the beginning was that you were focusing on rights.
Let's modify this statement slightly. "Babies will learn language on their own, so it's best to give them as much exposure as possible -- in other words, to interact with them regularly."
Babies that (for whatever reason) are speech-delayed benefit greatly from being read to or talked to.
My daughter was using words reliably at 7 months. Her first? "Ki-ka", referring to the neighbor's cat. It was a consistent pattern of usage, too. "Da-da" was next, and eventually "Ma-ma."
I take extensive notes in lectures also. However, I don't take transcripts. I jot questions, extensions of ideas, etc. If the prof is noticing that the students don't know how to do that ... because they type faster than they write, and therefore can transcribe the lecture instead of interacting with it ... then she needs to do *something* to try to train them in the art of good note-taking. What would you suggest? Just let them "sink or swim"?
BTW, biological definitions don't work like this. A one-legged man, even if from birth, still fits the definition because he belongs genetically to a class that, on average, has those characteristics. A zygote fits the definition not because he has two legs NOW but because, on average, he will at some time in his life. Children are considered "sexual reproducers" and "mammals" for the same reasons, even though they don't reproduce sexually at the moment, nor produce milk.
I'm at work on the "small model" -- it's taking time. No, I wouldn't say that the arguments have turned out to be flawed, though. :-D
In this particular thread, the question at stake was personhood, not the rights accorded to persons. I agree (as I did with the parent) that the question still to be answered is
whether abortion could be justifiable homicide.
That's the question that I challenge my classes with. I'm simply insisting that we view the question through the lense of competing rights, not by appealing to some imaginary line that denies personhood to a living human being.
To me, staring at a screen, typing every word that a prof says into a Word document is a stupid waste of technology. Isn't that what sound and video recorders are for?
A more sophisticated solution for her class would be to allow laptops ONLY for the purpose of recording lectures via microphone and sound card. What is technology for if not reducing the amount of drudgery? What is more "drudgesome" than copying down lectures verbatim?
Oh, and Mod Parent Up.
Responses starting with IAABiochemist are encouraged...
All your wavefunctions are belong to me.
Odd that Dutch combines the two. Sorry you got Grammar-Nazi-ed, though. It was a good post.
Oxygen is the simplest substance around that has those characteristics.
But couldn't life evolve to, say, breathe helium and drink alkaline, for instance?
Definitely no on the first one. Helium has no chemical properties whatsoever. Hydrogen isn't a good candidate either, since H2 is a reducer rather than an oxidizer. I would imagine that a cell that relied on an outside reducer would need to have free oxidizers sitting around inside itself. It would probably rip itself apart.
Drinking alkaline is more reasonable, depending on the concentration.
I don't know if there's a rule that says, "Anything in the universe that's alive has to breathe (carbon dioxide|oxygen), drink water, be carbon-based, etc."
The "carbon requirement" is simply this: only carbon can form large, stable, complex molecules. Sulfur and nitrogen can form polymers, but not complex ones. Silicon can form large complex molecules, but they tend to fall apart because of the availability of d-orbitals.
You mean, "What if someone sneezed at escape velocity"?
The problem with drawing a line somewhere has little to do with either souls or potential, and everything to do with *how* to draw that line.
My choice of drawing the line at fertilization is simple: that is the point at which the organism comes into existence. Any other line to be draw has to assume that "personhood" is attached to one's abilities, which is not easily defensible.
You don't deserve the "troll" rating, but I don't think you're seeing clearly either. The reason that we call Republicans "right" and Democrats "left" is that Europe already has set the parameters for extreme right and extreme left with fascist and socialist parties respectively. You'll notice that it's not in the U.S. but in Germany that neo-nazis are winning elections.
Incorrect
Only in your mind its called 'killing babies', not every thinks like that.
Anyone can play the relativism game. Just because "not everyone thinks like that" doesn't mean that everyone's beliefs are equally well-founded.
Are fetuses (latin for "babies") living human beings? Biologically, the answer is yes. Abortion *is* killing on demand.
The only questions left then are whether the living human being is a person -- which requires some sophistry to deny -- and whether abortion could be justifiable homicide.
Read up on Judith Jarvis Tompson.
:-)
Definition supplied here. Note that my usage corresponds to adj. 1 and 3, yours to 2 and 4. I'm hardly using a specialized, technical definition.
I'm surprised that in your studies you never ran across phrases like "the general expression", meaning "an expression true for every value of the variables involved."
Re: logic and induction
My major point was simply to distinguish induction from deduction. However, I should also point out that your quote from the Wiki,
Originally, logic consisted only of deductive reasoning which concerns what follows universally from given premises. However, it is important to note that inductive reasoning--the study of deriving a reliable generalization from observations--has sometimes been included in the study of logic
doesn't really support your claim that I'm using a specialized, abstruse meaning for the terms "inductive" and "logical"; rather, it would seem to suggest that the mainstream of philosophy agrees with me, and that your more flexible definition of logic which includes induction is only used by some.
But no matter; that's just an issue of wordplay.
The last word is yours.
I suspect we are using language differently.
Using at least one set of standard meanings, I read
In general, the future will be like the past
as "In the generalized case (i.e., always), the future will be like the past." Clearly, that's not a true statement. Hence, my comment: This is false, drawing attention to the meaning of the face-value wording.
However, I also realized that you probably didn't mean that. You probably meant something like "as a general rule, with exceptions, the future will be like the past."
In which case, your sample argument now raises (and begs) the question: are light switches part of the generality, or part of the exception set? Clearly, (2) in the sense in which I think you meant it doesn't imply (C) without further qualification about the likelihood of light switches following the general rule (2). In particular, one would need to know statistics about light switches. Hence my comment about strong and weak inductive arguments.
The word "illogical" is another problematic word, because most people associate "illogical" with poor reasoning. Inductive reasoning is NOT inherently poor reasoning! It is simply not deductive, and therefore not logical by definition. That is to say, there is no principle of deductive reasoning that allows one to say "If X happens n times, X will therefore happen n+1 times." I much prefer to use the terms "not logical" and "non-logical" rather than the term "illogical" to describe inductive reasoning because of the negative connotation of the word "illogical."
Bottom line: logical reasoning == deductive reasoning, while inductive reasoning is in a separate category. You can't cross over from one to the other.
Footnote in case you are a math or comp sci major: inductive reasoning should not be confused with "proof by induction" in mathematics, which is (distressingly enough) a form of deductive argument based on the premise (pick one) of Zorn's Lemma, the Well-Ordering Principle, or the Axiom of Choice.