Sorry, my wife is a pediatrician, and I can't let this pass unremarked upon.
The supposed "link" between the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine and autism, based on the notion that the mercury in MMR causes autism, has been studied over and over again. NO credible studies have turned up any links. The one famous study in the Lancet that *did* allege a link turned out to have falsified data. Do the reading here, here, and here.
Despite the clear research, my wife gets several patients per year whose parents have been "educated" by reading anti-vaccine junk on the Web. As a result, they refuse to vaccinate their kids. That's nutty. I'm all in favor of reducing environmental risks, but avoiding vaccines is not an effective route to doing so. The diseases that vaccines protect against are far more likely to be dangerous to a child than any supposed benefit obtained by avoiding vaccines.
The key is in the difference between the words "facile" and "precise." You are absolutely right that written language is more precise, and written language with diagrams even more so, than spoken language. The problem is facility. The time it took me to write this and think about my choice of words is about 10x the time it would have taken for me to explain it verbally.
In an interface situation in which the computer provides me with reasonable feedback so that I can judge the correctness of the results, being facile is important because it allows me to keep up with the speed of my thought. The result is that I can be more efficient.
Do some research on epicycles. One of the reasons Galileo had a hard time gaining a hearing was that the "epicycle theory" worked for reliably predicting crop planting times and such.
Which is not to say that it's the best theory; just that the Galileo affair was not a simple matter of obvious truth v. obvious falsehood.
I don't want to engage in a debate about inconsistencies in the Bible, but I would ask you to join me in deprecating the "skeptics annotated bible" as a reliable source.
I had a student this year who wanted to write a paper about violence in a particular film and constrast it with violence in the book of Proverbs. Trouble was, this student is Korean. His English is good, but not good enough to notice that the "skeptics annotated bible", which he stumbled on through a Google search, contains bizarre mistranslations and highly tendentious interpretations.
As a result, he had to rewrite his paper.
It's one thing to express one's opinions about the meaning of the Bible. It's another thing to do a hatchet job and present it as a reliable source.
Spot on. Many interfaces today make it difficult to get from user's idea to computer's execution. Because we are much more facile at using spoken language to be precise than we are at using mouse+keyboard to be precise, a "G+AUI" (graphical+audio user interface) should, in principle, be much more powerful than a GUI.
Dragon Naturally Speaking is a baby step in that direction, but it is pretty much limited to single nouns or verbs.
Right... but it means that someone else is *not* owning it and receiving the benefits thereof. I'm all in favor of property rights, but this is ridiculous!
Yeah, this will last for a couple of years and then the loophole will close. There's no way that the government will tolerate large chunks of revenue being slucked permanently out of the economy.
Or, consider that professors are human beings, and human beings are prone to abuse of power. I've had students who have been targeted for beliefs *not relevant* to the class material. There are professors (right and left, but statistically left) whose entire mission is to force a particular worldview.
Case in point: The professor of logic at UMBC (University of MD, Baltimore College) taught a course in Critical Reasoning. Turned out this particular professor had a "thing" against Christians. So several of the examples in his text... which he wrote... pulled random quotes out of the Bible, out of context, and used them as examples of X, Y, and Z logical fallacies. Without exception, each of his "examples" could be shown on further scrutiny to be instances of irony, rhetoric, or what have you. One would think that a brilliant professor capable of teaching at the college level would (a) be able to find clearer examples, (b) be conscious of his own biases, and (c) have a desire to teach his students the actual subject instead of distracting them with his polemic. And, I believe that he *was* capable of those things, but chose not to do them.
You could use the same type of test by showing 5 photos of happy people, and one photo of somebody badly injured and say humans are hard-wired for medicine.
jcr's point was simply that while McCarthy might, in principle, have been every bit as wicked as Hitler, he never actually demonstrated that degree of wickedness. Therefore, we can't extrapolate and claim that "McCarthy would have gone that far, if only given the opportunity."
Your point is that McCarthy's wickedness is a difference in degree, not kind. It's a fair point -- but degree still matters.
And my point is that, even early in his adult political career, Hitler was acting like a thug. McCarthy was never an actual thug, even if he used the legal system to ruin people's lives.
Here are a couple of points to ponder about semantics:
The claim that semantics is entirely arbitrary necessarily implies that any association of symbols with ideas is equally valid and useful. (If not, then there is an underlying relationship between at least some symbols and some ideas, which strips away the "entirely" from "arbitrary.") Yet, in every language, the words for different numbers are linked together ("three", "thirteen", "thirty-three"). The words for family members are linked together ("mother", "grandmother",...). What makes those relationships seem natural to us?
Part of the semantic process is the recognition that a new word needs to be created. Hence: "I/O buffer", "sniglet", "ecoterrorist." That recognition is inductive rather than deductive, which means that a computer can't do it.
Piggybacking on the above, part of creating new words is recognizing -- better, asserting -- the analogy between the old word/concept and the new word/concept. Can a computer do that? Remains to be seen. I doubt it.
Besides, I moved from West Virginia to South Florida when I was 11. Seventeen years of hearing hillbilly jokes tends to thicken the skin!
Wow - that's some pretty cool time compression to fit 17 years of jokes into 11!
Or did you just really *not* want to come out of the womb?;-)
Um... I would guess that he's 28 and has spent the last 17 years of life in Florida hearing jokes about West Virginians. Or did you imagine that in West Virginia, they all sit around telling jokes about themselves?
I'm not bothered in the least by the spelling and grammatical issues. I'm bothered by the mod system.
Yes, everyone's favorite headache.
Specifically, I find that
The "troll" mod is too nebulous. I've read Wiki and/. definitions of "troll", and I can guarantee that the mod rating is scarcely applied according to definition. Usually, "troll" is used to mean "I don't like what you said", which might as well just mean "wrong." So how 'bout it? Change "Troll" to "Wrong." One's just as much an opinion as the other, and the latter makes more sense.
Having an un-meta-modded "Overrated" encourages censorship (colloquially speaking) and cowardice. I've seen many posts marked "overrated" as their sole moderation.
Acronyms are allowed to form plurals with apostrophes, according to some. It was standard practice as late as the 80's, which is when I learned grammar (hence "80's" rather than "80s"). However, the practice is controversial and probably on its way out.
Mathematics does have hypotheses. Some eventually get proven (Fermat's Last Theorem), while others accumulate statstical support (Riemann Hypothesis). If mathematics were simply a matter of proving things, without doing numerical experiments, then mathematical hypotheses would not exist.
Mathematicians don't actually work in the manner you describe. Proof is the last, not first, step in mathematical research. Mathematicians look instead for patterns and connections -- the same kind of inductive reasoning that scientists use, in fact. The major difference between math and science is the degree of confidence at the end of the process.
The axioms in math aren't proven. In fact, it's unclear exactly what their status is. Some, like the axioms of set theory, seem to be fundamental features of our thought. Others, like the parallel postulate are just a matter of convention. In principle, an axiom could be "falsified" either by constructing a consistent math system that denies it, or else by showing that the axiom leads to inconsistencies.
Whatever you do, you MUST be protected from accidental deletion and corruption. That means you need a backup, which RAID is not.
Hear, hear! I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
RAID is not backup!
If you consider all of the possible things that can make your data suffer, in order of likelihood:
User failure (file deletion, etc.)
Program bugs (got a lot of those with one particular app at work)
OS crash
HDD failure
pwnage
you can see that RAID will only help with item #4. Anyone with any data more important than ripped CDs needs actual hard backup: tapes, DVDs, offsite, whatever.
It's not just strict plagarism of content. Mass media unquestionably look to each other to decide which stories are "hot." Haven't you ever been amazed that, with the 6 billion+ people in the world, the major news outlets all seem to converge on the same stories to report? Compare:
I recognize that the life of Joe Schmoe might be less important than, say, airstrikes in Pakistan. Nevertheless, I would expect truly indepedent and free-thinking press staffs to have significant differences of opinion on what's important to run.
Instead, it appears that they steal story ideas from each other.
Slashdot Mirror
The supposed "link" between the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine and autism, based on the notion that the mercury in MMR causes autism, has been studied over and over again. NO credible studies have turned up any links. The one famous study in the Lancet that *did* allege a link turned out to have falsified data. Do the reading here, here, and here.
Despite the clear research, my wife gets several patients per year whose parents have been "educated" by reading anti-vaccine junk on the Web. As a result, they refuse to vaccinate their kids. That's nutty. I'm all in favor of reducing environmental risks, but avoiding vaccines is not an effective route to doing so. The diseases that vaccines protect against are far more likely to be dangerous to a child than any supposed benefit obtained by avoiding vaccines.
The key is in the difference between the words "facile" and "precise." You are absolutely right that written language is more precise, and written language with diagrams even more so, than spoken language. The problem is facility. The time it took me to write this and think about my choice of words is about 10x the time it would have taken for me to explain it verbally.
In an interface situation in which the computer provides me with reasonable feedback so that I can judge the correctness of the results, being facile is important because it allows me to keep up with the speed of my thought. The result is that I can be more efficient.
Which is not to say that it's the best theory; just that the Galileo affair was not a simple matter of obvious truth v. obvious falsehood.
...right, that part. Where was that in the Bible, again?
I had a student this year who wanted to write a paper about violence in a particular film and constrast it with violence in the book of Proverbs. Trouble was, this student is Korean. His English is good, but not good enough to notice that the "skeptics annotated bible", which he stumbled on through a Google search, contains bizarre mistranslations and highly tendentious interpretations.
As a result, he had to rewrite his paper.
It's one thing to express one's opinions about the meaning of the Bible. It's another thing to do a hatchet job and present it as a reliable source.
Bleh.
Dragon Naturally Speaking is a baby step in that direction, but it is pretty much limited to single nouns or verbs.
Right ... but it means that someone else is *not* owning it and receiving the benefits thereof. I'm all in favor of property rights, but this is ridiculous!
Money, yes. Land, no.
Yeah, this will last for a couple of years and then the loophole will close. There's no way that the government will tolerate large chunks of revenue being slucked permanently out of the economy.
Consider speech codes on campus, for example.
Or, consider that professors are human beings, and human beings are prone to abuse of power. I've had students who have been targeted for beliefs *not relevant* to the class material. There are professors (right and left, but statistically left) whose entire mission is to force a particular worldview.
Case in point: The professor of logic at UMBC (University of MD, Baltimore College) taught a course in Critical Reasoning. Turned out this particular professor had a "thing" against Christians. So several of the examples in his text ... which he wrote ... pulled random quotes out of the Bible, out of context, and used them as examples of X, Y, and Z logical fallacies. Without exception, each of his "examples" could be shown on further scrutiny to be instances of irony, rhetoric, or what have you. One would think that a brilliant professor capable of teaching at the college level would (a) be able to find clearer examples, (b) be conscious of his own biases, and (c) have a desire to teach his students the actual subject instead of distracting them with his polemic. And, I believe that he *was* capable of those things, but chose not to do them.
Another case in point: here.
That said, I think "outing" liberal professors is silly. The students know, and they can generally avoid the obnoxious ones.
Finite power over infinite time. Don't worry.
Keep it up! I tried to complain about e-voting in Frederick Co. during the 2004 election. I got a patronizing smile for my efforts.
There's something eerie about a man named "Oswald" replying to the post above...
Or psychology ...
He might have, which gives us pause for thought.
jcr's point was simply that while McCarthy might, in principle, have been every bit as wicked as Hitler, he never actually demonstrated that degree of wickedness. Therefore, we can't extrapolate and claim that "McCarthy would have gone that far, if only given the opportunity."
Your point is that McCarthy's wickedness is a difference in degree, not kind. It's a fair point -- but degree still matters.
And my point is that, even early in his adult political career, Hitler was acting like a thug. McCarthy was never an actual thug, even if he used the legal system to ruin people's lives.
Whatever else Hitler did, he started out violently. Read up on his early exploits that landed him in jail, writing Mein Kampf.
Wow - that's some pretty cool time compression to fit 17 years of jokes into 11!
Or did you just really *not* want to come out of the womb? ;-)
Um ... I would guess that he's 28 and has spent the last 17 years of life in Florida hearing jokes about West Virginians. Or did you imagine that in West Virginia, they all sit around telling jokes about themselves?
"captainmode" = "off"
Yes, everyone's favorite headache.
Specifically, I find that
My dream moderation system:
Thanks for reading this.
That's one of the most important questions. Hope he has to answer it.
pro
more pro
con.
I'm "con" myself.
Hear, hear! I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
RAID is not backup!
If you consider all of the possible things that can make your data suffer, in order of likelihood:
you can see that RAID will only help with item #4. Anyone with any data more important than ripped CDs needs actual hard backup: tapes, DVDs, offsite, whatever.
Good point. Even granting a US-o-centric slant, though, it still seems like the major news orgs take their cues from each other.
The Washington Post
CNN
The New York Times
I recognize that the life of Joe Schmoe might be less important than, say, airstrikes in Pakistan. Nevertheless, I would expect truly indepedent and free-thinking press staffs to have significant differences of opinion on what's important to run.
Instead, it appears that they steal story ideas from each other.