It's disturbing, but it looks relatively painless compared to beheading (NOT as painless as you'd think--there's a lot of debate about how long a disembodied head may remain conscious, ranging from instant black-out to 13-ish seconds to a matter of constitution and aiming of the hatchet), electrocution (also standard), etc. The only painless method is nitrogenation, and that's only "humane" because animals are stupid; lethal injection always seemed like a terrible fate for a human, who has to watch himself die slowly, feel the doctors strap him down, prep him, see the needle being brought over, feel it puncture the skin, feel the slow onset of drug-induced lethargy... versus a bullet to the head, where you stay at the "well this is it, I'm going to die" state and transition to dead without watching it actually happen (the bullet moves fast). Painless suffocation would be faster--nitrogen will drop you quick--but you still know the air is going to kill you, and there's a lead-up with psychological horror of invisible death.
It's still wasteful. Genetic tampering would produce a less-expensive crop and a simplified process.
Google tells me they don't use a meat grinder; they use a "macerator", essentially the same thing but operating with a feed profile that effectively acts within the same time frame as breaking the animal's neck. So potentially more humane than snapping their necks, depending on if the animal survives a brief moment to experience a broken neck or not.
It looks like the auger is large enough to pass a chick without harm, shuttling it... to its doom. So the process is as stressful as the standard factory shuffle of grabbing and shifting and moving the animal around while it's greatly confused about what's happening. And then: Crunch.
I wouldn't call it cruel. Disturbing, but not cruel. The cycle of life and death is acceptable; this is... a lot of incidental death. I believe it would be quite profitable if we could find a way to force development of female chicks; likewise, we could limit the overproduction and routine destruction of these animals. Of course, then the GMO crowd would freak out--and the most likely way to pull this off is by hormonal injections into a laying hen, so of course some others would start talking about these "estrogenized hens" or something that will shrink your testicles or give you breasts or whatnot (i.e. the ridiculous notion that an injection into a parent causing a hormone imbalance in produced eggs which forces development of a female despite genetic male chromosomes would result in a chick that carries an estrogenic load and lays eggs carrying an estrogenic load that differs from any other hen and poses a health threat by overloading the human system with estrogen when eaten).
Dropping a chicken live into a meat grinder would be costly and expensive. The meat grinder would be useless until disassembled and cleaned; the output would contain bone, brain, beak, and feathers, with obvious texture imperfections.
This is what I was thinking: people are panicking over nasty-shit-at-sea. How is disposal actually handled, what are the actual environmental impacts, etc? Imagine dumping barrels of Vitamin A into the ocean: people wouldn't bat an eye; but that shit is toxic as living hell and would cause a localized ecological disaster, possibly mass extinction. Nuclear reactor water? A thousand gallons isn't going to hurt anything; but people are panicking about how if Fukushima leaks a few liters into the ocean it will destroy all life on the planet.
No kidding. My first thought here was that all games, movies, and music are digital versions. One comes by CD, one comes by Internet pipe. Baen ships eBooks on CD.
It's used by the powerful as a method for impressing and influencing the masses. See Global Warming. Technical correctness and scope are discarded as useful, and sometimes conflicting positions are taken. Global Warming, again is a good example: Some scientists are claiming that we're grossly underestimating the magnitude, some scientist are claiming we've grossly overestimated it, some scientists are claiming we've Columbused it (it's a 10 degree increase but we're billing it as a 0.1 degree increase to not cause panic), some are claiming we've been in a slump and we're following a global cooling trend now; politicians are cherry picking as desirable for their own cause, as are people arguing in Web forums.
It's a belief system. We have theocratic (our holy man says so, so it must be so), deific (our gods would be angered), spiritual (it is wrong to act cruelly, as karma will then bring cruelty down upon you), philosophic (it is wrong to act cruelly, because you shouldn't be a dick), and rational (we can demonstrate and repeat it, and we haven't been able to break it despite applied critical thinking and assault... for now) belief systems. Belief systems that are explicitly one of these can act as theocratic (scientists/my favorite news outlet/etc say so, so I believe this) or philosophic (I believe this, and here is all the evidence and literature that backs me, and everything else is misguided) systems when the unwashed masses fail to be rational or intelligent. These are both social effects: people want either an authority that allows them to be part of a common body (theocratic) or they want to show their social value by debate (philosophic)--and of course debate only requires you to convince others that you are correct, with no need for you to actually be correct.
I only care about definitions for linguistic discussion; when it comes to real-world behavior, considering psychology and sociology is more useful than talking in theory. It's like decision making: if people are rational, they'll seek the best alternative, hence capitalism; however people are irrational, hence all the defects in capitalism in practice. (Amusingly, capitalists like to use the exact same argument against socialism: People are not rational and will not play well together, hurting themselves as they damage the system; but they also use the inverse: People are rational and will not work harder than they have to, because it would make no sense.)
It's significantly critical that drivers are either incompatible or sub-optimal if migrated from one base to another. In theory this can be separated; in practice, monoliths don't separate in that way.
Oops. You're right, I thought it was stock 284. Never mind.
There IS a stock Chevy Cobalt that comes with 280HP front wheel drive, for people who don't want their car to go when they hit the gas. SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEESPIN!
DragonflyBSD is the only interesting BSD. Minix is the other interesting Unix-like. Dragonfly has a whole hell of a lot of novel concepts or novel implementations of concepts: HAMMERFS (runs 30 second snapshots for 24 hours, then 1 day snapshots, then 1 week, 1 month--a versioning file system, semi-useful), checkpointing with freeze/thaw (you can actually freeze an application and reboot, to the point that you can even move the application to another machine running Dragonfly with the same files at the same paths and thaw the application, continue running it as if you just ran sigstop/sigcont), and extremely good scheduling on SMP that scales to thousands of processors and threads way better than FreeBSD (unsure on how it compares to Linux).
Minix of course is obvious: It's a fully fault-tolerant self-healing microkernel.
I would enjoy seeing the Linux extensions (events, iptables, filesystems, etc.) rolled into Minix so that udev, dbus, systemd, and basically a straight Linux distro stack work without modification; and then seeing the DragonFlyBSD scheduling concepts and freeze/thaw checkpointing implemented in Minix, with the tools to call checkpointing ported from DragonFlyBSD. Then we could drop the whole thing straight into a Linux distribution like Ubuntu or Fedora and play with it in a VM, and it would work as expected. Obviously you'd need to port tons of drivers to get a usable desktop system; but to get "you can run Linux on this now", you just need to port some Linux-specific subsystems onto Minix and run it in VMware or KVM or VirtualBox. Straight direct comparisons can then be made.
"We can't figure out the correct way to handle this, and obviously haven't specified the problem. Let's throw an even more costly and probably incorrect solution at a poorly-understood problem!"
The Internet is failing a lot more lately. It's all this streaming media. And I mean THE INTERNET IS FAILING. I've seen Internet Pulse go red on 30% of its peering arrangements at 15%-20% packet loss from time to time. The only thing that helps is Netflix has boxes at ISPs to deliver content from a local caching repeater; that 90% free capacity became 10% free capacity pretty damn fast.
That would seem to indicate, with the 30,000 cars on the road, that each car has drawn enough energy to drive almost 100 miles over 2 years. With a 68kWh battery going 300 miles, that's about oh... 23kWh per car per year? It burns 1/3 of a tank idling per year, huh?
Not bad. How much fuel do gasoline cars burn idling?
Airplane analogy is funny, since the original understandings of aerodynamics were flawed and highly incorrect. Less incorrect than what they teach you in school, but still wrong.
In essence, the plane you get on may have been built by someone who has strange and falsifiable beliefs about how planes work, and may have been built based on some superstitious bullshit about aerodynamics. Hell, it could be built on grade school ideals and still work. Yet it does work.
This doesn't always hold true, of course. Lots of technology is built on the false assumption that method X provides good results or is critical, whereas method X is highly detrimental to efficient operation. Forensic science is loaded with cases of imprisoning or executing people for well-known pseudoscience and myth, which people take as dogmatic truth. Project Management even has established specific methods and practices which are wholly mishandled: a work breakdown structure is specifically a deliverable-oriented collection of work denoted by adjective-nouns, and specifically NOT tasks and NOT verbs; yet many classes teach a work breakdown structure is a set of tasks and actions which may produce deliverables.
People, as a whole, do in fact manage to fuck this up.
Going in the other direction, people performed certain rituals because of the perception of repeatable results. The purification and sacrifice of harvest to the gods, for example, once provided drinkable water where water was unsafe. This ritual involved loading harvested wheat, barley, and honey (honey is at the center of many religious practices) into a pot and bringing it to boil, adding flowers and herbs, and then sacrificing a single head of wheat as the pot finished cooling. Close it up and come back in a few months and your god has blessed the water and made it safe; it now carries happiness and prosperity.
Many are of an attitude whereas if their only experience with water was tap water and fruit juice, and they witnessed such a ritual, they would reject the notion that anything drinkable could come from boiling barley and honey and flowers; they would likely suppose that the water would become rancid over months, becoming dangerous to drink. Science would provide otherwise, but the scientific-minded masses wouldn't look into that because this is "hokey ritual stuff".
Actually you hear a lot of people on Slashdot, Fark, etc. as well as people who are social liberals (particularly the anti-religious) claiming that they're "enlightened" somehow and immediately and arbitrarily rejecting anything that sounds hokey--that means anything from "levitating objects with my mind" to "taking some physical action which looks similar to a physical action I saw once in a religion, so must be some religious thing and thus superstitious bullshit".
It's not a vocal minority; it's an entire subset of the unwashed masses, amusingly most of the entire group that has decided it's time to move on from old beliefs and onto a more rational way of thinking. They're not moving to a more rational way of thinking; they're bluntly rejecting one set of ideals and trying to move onto a new belief system, which has the side effect of rejecting anything that hints at old ideals they want to reject. Rather than reason, it's an emotional reaction.
The original analogy should have made this pretty clear, since the Vatican and the Pope and Jesus put down one set of rules while the billions of Catholics on this planet follow a variety of entirely different sets of rules, some in direct violation with what's actually in their proclaimed religion.
To be fair, science is effectively a belief system, in the same way that Catholicism is effectively violent and/or judgmental (Jesus says don't do that, but Catholics say "JUDGE AND MURDER ALL THE UNBELIEVERS!!"). People have taken not simply that there is some rational thinking and a process of exploration; but that everything that offends the senses and bears no proof is immediately "superstitious yahoo" territory. This leads to several forms of hilarity.
On one end, you have the obvious rejection of anything that people quickly judge as hokey, which leads to conflicts with actual science. For example, people reject meditation entirely because it's internally associated with some spiritual-religious-whatever stuff: the projection of the mind into the spiritual realm, the attuning of spiritual energy to the body, and so on. At the same time, science has shown that meditation can reduce anxiety and paranoia, improve sleep, and increase the ability to apply rational thinking by calming the mind. We even have technological meditation, something called "biofeedback" whereby people train themselves to consciously lower their heart rate and blood pressure by directly addressing their body's reaction to stress. And of course martial arts is mainly about training the mind to accept the body's limits--those limits being set somewhere, but typically well beyond what the mind normally wants to accept. All based on sound neuroscience, psychology, or "We don't know, but we've done experiments and studies and we've noticed a real pattern" (which is statistics and experimental design).
On the other, you have the undeniable fact that most science is... essentially no different than assuming the existence of gods. You basically make up a bunch of shit that loosely fits in with your observations and current knowledge. The difference is we test all that stuff in science and try to break it; whereas in religion we try to protect our views. "Don't question our god! Our god will be angry! This will result in famine and dead births!" Science is more like "does this make sense? We've found a flaw. Can we adjust the theory for this? Oh, our theory was actually bullshit; here's a new one we just made up that seems to work better." It's still essentially the same, though: we're assuming a theory is correct. Just, for the moment.
Then you have stuff like Buddhism, where they focus on spirituality and growth, and pursue enlightenment: any suggestion that their views are incorrect is met with study, discernment, and acceptance or rejection based on their best judgment. Science really can't prove them wrong; and in fact much of what is discovered in such religions can't be said to be essentially wrong. Buddhists believe we should approach all situations with an open mind, that we should not bring harm upon people when we don't strictly need to, that we should try to help those in need, etc. Sikh are also big on that "don't go around beating people up and robbing them" thing. Although sociology tells us people are combative and group psychology tells us they don't strictly function that way, it's also true that spreading beliefs like this does induce shifts in mass social behavior. Our society might be more stable, less crime ridden, and more wealthy if we followed such beliefs. Or not. But you can't really say "It would benefit you and all around you if you didn't act like a dickhead..." is an essentially wrong belief; you can only cite the prisoner's dilemma and some other byzantine problems.
World is a strange place. The truth doesn't lie "half-way" between anything; it just involves a lot of information, and you cannot understand the truth without understanding things that are not the truth and why they are not the truth.
Oh hell no, I think stuff should be applied to everyone. I mean, if gays are 95% of the HIV population or 95% of gays are HIV+, that's just... the truth. If not, then we won't see everyone walking around with HIV bangles being gay/everyone gay having an HIV bangle. A lot of times we try to cover stuff: the public will hold a (correct or incorrect) belief that group X is mostly affected by Y, which is bad, but we can't do anything to broaden awareness because it'll spotlight group X unfairly. Well, bullshit. Either you're wrong, or too fucking bad for group X.
Of course, the proposal using challenge-response implementation rather than broadcast advertising averts this.
Nice. My vocabulary is slightly larger; now I too can sound like an idiot by using words misinterpreted by other people who don't properly understand. How do I profit from this?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey now, I'm a neo-separatist. I want to dissolve the North American Empire of Crassus.
It's disturbing, but it looks relatively painless compared to beheading (NOT as painless as you'd think--there's a lot of debate about how long a disembodied head may remain conscious, ranging from instant black-out to 13-ish seconds to a matter of constitution and aiming of the hatchet), electrocution (also standard), etc. The only painless method is nitrogenation, and that's only "humane" because animals are stupid; lethal injection always seemed like a terrible fate for a human, who has to watch himself die slowly, feel the doctors strap him down, prep him, see the needle being brought over, feel it puncture the skin, feel the slow onset of drug-induced lethargy... versus a bullet to the head, where you stay at the "well this is it, I'm going to die" state and transition to dead without watching it actually happen (the bullet moves fast). Painless suffocation would be faster--nitrogen will drop you quick--but you still know the air is going to kill you, and there's a lead-up with psychological horror of invisible death.
It's still wasteful. Genetic tampering would produce a less-expensive crop and a simplified process.
Google tells me they don't use a meat grinder; they use a "macerator", essentially the same thing but operating with a feed profile that effectively acts within the same time frame as breaking the animal's neck. So potentially more humane than snapping their necks, depending on if the animal survives a brief moment to experience a broken neck or not.
It looks like the auger is large enough to pass a chick without harm, shuttling it ... to its doom. So the process is as stressful as the standard factory shuffle of grabbing and shifting and moving the animal around while it's greatly confused about what's happening. And then: Crunch.
I wouldn't call it cruel. Disturbing, but not cruel. The cycle of life and death is acceptable; this is ... a lot of incidental death. I believe it would be quite profitable if we could find a way to force development of female chicks; likewise, we could limit the overproduction and routine destruction of these animals. Of course, then the GMO crowd would freak out--and the most likely way to pull this off is by hormonal injections into a laying hen, so of course some others would start talking about these "estrogenized hens" or something that will shrink your testicles or give you breasts or whatnot (i.e. the ridiculous notion that an injection into a parent causing a hormone imbalance in produced eggs which forces development of a female despite genetic male chromosomes would result in a chick that carries an estrogenic load and lays eggs carrying an estrogenic load that differs from any other hen and poses a health threat by overloading the human system with estrogen when eaten).
Dropping a chicken live into a meat grinder would be costly and expensive. The meat grinder would be useless until disassembled and cleaned; the output would contain bone, brain, beak, and feathers, with obvious texture imperfections.
This is what I was thinking: people are panicking over nasty-shit-at-sea. How is disposal actually handled, what are the actual environmental impacts, etc? Imagine dumping barrels of Vitamin A into the ocean: people wouldn't bat an eye; but that shit is toxic as living hell and would cause a localized ecological disaster, possibly mass extinction. Nuclear reactor water? A thousand gallons isn't going to hurt anything; but people are panicking about how if Fukushima leaks a few liters into the ocean it will destroy all life on the planet.
No kidding. My first thought here was that all games, movies, and music are digital versions. One comes by CD, one comes by Internet pipe. Baen ships eBooks on CD.
It's used by the powerful as a method for impressing and influencing the masses. See Global Warming. Technical correctness and scope are discarded as useful, and sometimes conflicting positions are taken. Global Warming, again is a good example: Some scientists are claiming that we're grossly underestimating the magnitude, some scientist are claiming we've grossly overestimated it, some scientists are claiming we've Columbused it (it's a 10 degree increase but we're billing it as a 0.1 degree increase to not cause panic), some are claiming we've been in a slump and we're following a global cooling trend now; politicians are cherry picking as desirable for their own cause, as are people arguing in Web forums.
It's a belief system. We have theocratic (our holy man says so, so it must be so), deific (our gods would be angered), spiritual (it is wrong to act cruelly, as karma will then bring cruelty down upon you), philosophic (it is wrong to act cruelly, because you shouldn't be a dick), and rational (we can demonstrate and repeat it, and we haven't been able to break it despite applied critical thinking and assault... for now) belief systems. Belief systems that are explicitly one of these can act as theocratic (scientists/my favorite news outlet/etc say so, so I believe this) or philosophic (I believe this, and here is all the evidence and literature that backs me, and everything else is misguided) systems when the unwashed masses fail to be rational or intelligent. These are both social effects: people want either an authority that allows them to be part of a common body (theocratic) or they want to show their social value by debate (philosophic)--and of course debate only requires you to convince others that you are correct, with no need for you to actually be correct.
I only care about definitions for linguistic discussion; when it comes to real-world behavior, considering psychology and sociology is more useful than talking in theory. It's like decision making: if people are rational, they'll seek the best alternative, hence capitalism; however people are irrational, hence all the defects in capitalism in practice. (Amusingly, capitalists like to use the exact same argument against socialism: People are not rational and will not play well together, hurting themselves as they damage the system; but they also use the inverse: People are rational and will not work harder than they have to, because it would make no sense.)
It's significantly critical that drivers are either incompatible or sub-optimal if migrated from one base to another. In theory this can be separated; in practice, monoliths don't separate in that way.
Oops. You're right, I thought it was stock 284. Never mind.
There IS a stock Chevy Cobalt that comes with 280HP front wheel drive, for people who don't want their car to go when they hit the gas. SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEESPIN!
Equivalent for 100 miles of driving for a 350hp car may have been a better comparison.
Dragonfly BSD is substantially different from FreeBSD in that it's not using the same fundamental memory management or task scheduling strategies.
DragonflyBSD is the only interesting BSD. Minix is the other interesting Unix-like. Dragonfly has a whole hell of a lot of novel concepts or novel implementations of concepts: HAMMERFS (runs 30 second snapshots for 24 hours, then 1 day snapshots, then 1 week, 1 month--a versioning file system, semi-useful), checkpointing with freeze/thaw (you can actually freeze an application and reboot, to the point that you can even move the application to another machine running Dragonfly with the same files at the same paths and thaw the application, continue running it as if you just ran sigstop/sigcont), and extremely good scheduling on SMP that scales to thousands of processors and threads way better than FreeBSD (unsure on how it compares to Linux).
Minix of course is obvious: It's a fully fault-tolerant self-healing microkernel.
I would enjoy seeing the Linux extensions (events, iptables, filesystems, etc.) rolled into Minix so that udev, dbus, systemd, and basically a straight Linux distro stack work without modification; and then seeing the DragonFlyBSD scheduling concepts and freeze/thaw checkpointing implemented in Minix, with the tools to call checkpointing ported from DragonFlyBSD. Then we could drop the whole thing straight into a Linux distribution like Ubuntu or Fedora and play with it in a VM, and it would work as expected. Obviously you'd need to port tons of drivers to get a usable desktop system; but to get "you can run Linux on this now", you just need to port some Linux-specific subsystems onto Minix and run it in VMware or KVM or VirtualBox. Straight direct comparisons can then be made.
"We can't figure out the correct way to handle this, and obviously haven't specified the problem. Let's throw an even more costly and probably incorrect solution at a poorly-understood problem!"
My Mazda 3 econobox 4 cylinder has 300HP you retard.
The Internet is failing a lot more lately. It's all this streaming media. And I mean THE INTERNET IS FAILING. I've seen Internet Pulse go red on 30% of its peering arrangements at 15%-20% packet loss from time to time. The only thing that helps is Netflix has boxes at ISPs to deliver content from a local caching repeater; that 90% free capacity became 10% free capacity pretty damn fast.
That would seem to indicate, with the 30,000 cars on the road, that each car has drawn enough energy to drive almost 100 miles over 2 years. With a 68kWh battery going 300 miles, that's about oh... 23kWh per car per year? It burns 1/3 of a tank idling per year, huh?
Not bad. How much fuel do gasoline cars burn idling?
I don't understand. The damaged electronics were all plugged in.
Your luxury bed is not a luxury car, you retard. It doesn't have active air suspension for greater cornering stability either.
Airplane analogy is funny, since the original understandings of aerodynamics were flawed and highly incorrect. Less incorrect than what they teach you in school, but still wrong.
In essence, the plane you get on may have been built by someone who has strange and falsifiable beliefs about how planes work, and may have been built based on some superstitious bullshit about aerodynamics. Hell, it could be built on grade school ideals and still work. Yet it does work.
This doesn't always hold true, of course. Lots of technology is built on the false assumption that method X provides good results or is critical, whereas method X is highly detrimental to efficient operation. Forensic science is loaded with cases of imprisoning or executing people for well-known pseudoscience and myth, which people take as dogmatic truth. Project Management even has established specific methods and practices which are wholly mishandled: a work breakdown structure is specifically a deliverable-oriented collection of work denoted by adjective-nouns, and specifically NOT tasks and NOT verbs; yet many classes teach a work breakdown structure is a set of tasks and actions which may produce deliverables.
People, as a whole, do in fact manage to fuck this up.
Going in the other direction, people performed certain rituals because of the perception of repeatable results. The purification and sacrifice of harvest to the gods, for example, once provided drinkable water where water was unsafe. This ritual involved loading harvested wheat, barley, and honey (honey is at the center of many religious practices) into a pot and bringing it to boil, adding flowers and herbs, and then sacrificing a single head of wheat as the pot finished cooling. Close it up and come back in a few months and your god has blessed the water and made it safe; it now carries happiness and prosperity.
Many are of an attitude whereas if their only experience with water was tap water and fruit juice, and they witnessed such a ritual, they would reject the notion that anything drinkable could come from boiling barley and honey and flowers; they would likely suppose that the water would become rancid over months, becoming dangerous to drink. Science would provide otherwise, but the scientific-minded masses wouldn't look into that because this is "hokey ritual stuff".
Actually you hear a lot of people on Slashdot, Fark, etc. as well as people who are social liberals (particularly the anti-religious) claiming that they're "enlightened" somehow and immediately and arbitrarily rejecting anything that sounds hokey--that means anything from "levitating objects with my mind" to "taking some physical action which looks similar to a physical action I saw once in a religion, so must be some religious thing and thus superstitious bullshit".
It's not a vocal minority; it's an entire subset of the unwashed masses, amusingly most of the entire group that has decided it's time to move on from old beliefs and onto a more rational way of thinking. They're not moving to a more rational way of thinking; they're bluntly rejecting one set of ideals and trying to move onto a new belief system, which has the side effect of rejecting anything that hints at old ideals they want to reject. Rather than reason, it's an emotional reaction.
The original analogy should have made this pretty clear, since the Vatican and the Pope and Jesus put down one set of rules while the billions of Catholics on this planet follow a variety of entirely different sets of rules, some in direct violation with what's actually in their proclaimed religion.
Not sure what that means. Doesn't make any sense.
To be fair, science is effectively a belief system, in the same way that Catholicism is effectively violent and/or judgmental (Jesus says don't do that, but Catholics say "JUDGE AND MURDER ALL THE UNBELIEVERS!!"). People have taken not simply that there is some rational thinking and a process of exploration; but that everything that offends the senses and bears no proof is immediately "superstitious yahoo" territory. This leads to several forms of hilarity.
On one end, you have the obvious rejection of anything that people quickly judge as hokey, which leads to conflicts with actual science. For example, people reject meditation entirely because it's internally associated with some spiritual-religious-whatever stuff: the projection of the mind into the spiritual realm, the attuning of spiritual energy to the body, and so on. At the same time, science has shown that meditation can reduce anxiety and paranoia, improve sleep, and increase the ability to apply rational thinking by calming the mind. We even have technological meditation, something called "biofeedback" whereby people train themselves to consciously lower their heart rate and blood pressure by directly addressing their body's reaction to stress. And of course martial arts is mainly about training the mind to accept the body's limits--those limits being set somewhere, but typically well beyond what the mind normally wants to accept. All based on sound neuroscience, psychology, or "We don't know, but we've done experiments and studies and we've noticed a real pattern" (which is statistics and experimental design).
On the other, you have the undeniable fact that most science is ... essentially no different than assuming the existence of gods. You basically make up a bunch of shit that loosely fits in with your observations and current knowledge. The difference is we test all that stuff in science and try to break it; whereas in religion we try to protect our views. "Don't question our god! Our god will be angry! This will result in famine and dead births!" Science is more like "does this make sense? We've found a flaw. Can we adjust the theory for this? Oh, our theory was actually bullshit; here's a new one we just made up that seems to work better." It's still essentially the same, though: we're assuming a theory is correct. Just, for the moment.
Then you have stuff like Buddhism, where they focus on spirituality and growth, and pursue enlightenment: any suggestion that their views are incorrect is met with study, discernment, and acceptance or rejection based on their best judgment. Science really can't prove them wrong; and in fact much of what is discovered in such religions can't be said to be essentially wrong. Buddhists believe we should approach all situations with an open mind, that we should not bring harm upon people when we don't strictly need to, that we should try to help those in need, etc. Sikh are also big on that "don't go around beating people up and robbing them" thing. Although sociology tells us people are combative and group psychology tells us they don't strictly function that way, it's also true that spreading beliefs like this does induce shifts in mass social behavior. Our society might be more stable, less crime ridden, and more wealthy if we followed such beliefs. Or not. But you can't really say "It would benefit you and all around you if you didn't act like a dickhead..." is an essentially wrong belief; you can only cite the prisoner's dilemma and some other byzantine problems.
World is a strange place. The truth doesn't lie "half-way" between anything; it just involves a lot of information, and you cannot understand the truth without understanding things that are not the truth and why they are not the truth.
I wish they'd release the source.
Oh hell no, I think stuff should be applied to everyone. I mean, if gays are 95% of the HIV population or 95% of gays are HIV+, that's just... the truth. If not, then we won't see everyone walking around with HIV bangles being gay/everyone gay having an HIV bangle. A lot of times we try to cover stuff: the public will hold a (correct or incorrect) belief that group X is mostly affected by Y, which is bad, but we can't do anything to broaden awareness because it'll spotlight group X unfairly. Well, bullshit. Either you're wrong, or too fucking bad for group X.
Of course, the proposal using challenge-response implementation rather than broadcast advertising averts this.
Nice. My vocabulary is slightly larger; now I too can sound like an idiot by using words misinterpreted by other people who don't properly understand. How do I profit from this?