It may be a little harder to find meditative practices practiced outside the context of a religious tradition, but there's quite a bit of that around, too. (Even if most of the practices themselves are adapted from one or more of the religious traditions.)
Religion and spirituality are separate concepts. Many people avoid meditation because they don't want to accept the idea of a "spirituality" and thus determine that since they can't explain why this is any different than sleeping it must be a complete waste of time for whacked-out new age hippies.
Just as meditation can be practiced outside religion, many forms of meditation can be practiced without discomforting yourself with the ideal that this is somehow "mystical." Kundalini meditation cannot. Yoga, breathing exercises, quiet contemplation, the like, can all be taken as direct physical/psychological stimulus if you like. While it is true that rejecting the spiritual limits your options, it is also true that you have nothing to gain by enduring uncomfortable ideals; those discomforted by the ideal of "spirituality" will not benefit from such mystical meditations, although they may benefit from exploring this as a flaw in themselves if they so choose. Meditations that revolve around sexuality, for example, are usually avoided by those uncomfortable with sex; however I chose to pursue these in order to understand and correct this discomfort.
The point still stands. People don't know how NOT to quickly move from one thing to the other without observation. They encounter stress, and they can't understand what's happening. They develop hateful relationships because someone does something that they dislike and they MUST obsess about it because they CANNOT look into themselves and determine that this does not affect them in any meaningful way. They make bad decisions because they cannot take the time to reason; they only know that something has happened and they MUST react, so they react as habitual rather than as considered and understood.
Nobody plays Go (or Chess; but Go is a superior game)
I have to ask: why is Go superior to Chess? Easier to pick up? More possible permutations? It was created in China as opposed to Chess which is a Western game?
I don't see how any of these reasons make Go inherently superior to Chess. Hell, even Checkers is a pretty damn good game and there are a million other good ones out there.
Let's say that "superiority" is a fuzzy term first. No matter my arguments, someone will come with a completely different list of valuable aspects of a game and claim that X is superior to Y because these aspects are more important.
Checkers is a simpler game than Chess, but in the same vein. I would call Chess superior, because Checkers allows for isometric thinking (i.e. breadth, but very little depth... look at the field and play). Checkers is also quite shallow: pieces move around and do not really guard other pieces to any great strategic extent (they do, but not to the extent of Chess or Go), so moves are usually pretty isolated and play is rather basic. All pieces being identical initially, and then in two classes, Checkers allows a huge amount of flexibility on a strategically simple game.
When we talk about Chess in relation to Checkers, moving a pawn to a position is in no way similar to moving a knight, bishop, rook, or queen to that position. Getting any piece there is different. Their strategic meaning is completely different. Having a bunch of pieces in one area can be a weakness if they can't function as an efficient military unit; you have to have a proper strategy. This makes Chess superior to Checkers.
Now, let's compare Chess and Checkers to Backgammon, let's say. Chess and Checkers being in the same vein, we'll take just Chess. Backgammon is man versus luck: you roll dice and see what happens. Chess on the other hand sets up two opposing armies with strategic configuration, pitting a man with a concrete goal (unconditional capture of the king) against another man by strategy. Thus, Chess represents the struggle of Man versus Man: a man's tactical cunning against his opponent will produce victory.
In Go, you start with an empty board. Immediately playing against your opponent will win you... nothing. The brief study of Joseki helps ensure that such petty plays as to immediately confront lone stones comes out balanced; the farther reaching study of Go teaches the foundations of this, so that altering the Joseki only puts you at a loss since your opponent responds with devastating play that shifts the balance to his favor. Thus the opening is about playing your influence, spreading out enough to gain territorial control but not so much as to lose strength in the later play of the game as your opponent isolates your dispersed stones from one another while approaching them with his own.
The play of Go further continues with understandings of not just small patterns here and there; but of the intrinsic connections that form between stones. Go follows the concept of "Life and Death," and shapes begin to form which can become alive or be killed by cunning play. At the same time, seemingly distant stones may provide a clear path to escape death and to connect shape: stones may be impossible to divide from each other despite the board being so open. Play can thus establish strong territorial control, but only by seeing many, many possibilities and at the same time few or none. Rather than playing small areas and connecting, you play small areas and at the same time consider the larger, far reaching impact of each individual stone to the whole of the playing field.
Thus improvement of the game of Go is considered to come from improvement of the self. You have no direct goal against your opponent; your goal is to maintain control of territory, by influence. Your influence includes securing large and small areas of the board, and encroaching deeply into opponent territory maybe
It sounds like an attempt at filling the gap left by the lack of meditation our society experiences. Nobody plays Go (or Chess; but Go is a superior game), nobody quietly contemplates, nobody does listening meditations or anything. The most basic are breath awareness exercises-- sit quietly, close your eyes, observe the sound of the air passing through your nose and into your lungs, how your chest and belly expand, how your body shifts... then focus as well on your heart beat, and then add the focus of your attention on your muscles adjusting to hold your posture against gravity, shifting your balance constantly. All of these things at once, just for a minute or two, or an hour if you wish; time is a personal decision.
We do none of this stuff, and then we sit around wondering why people are bad at observing things. People want answers to shit; we still want to understand what's happening around us. But we've trained ourselves to be intolerant of the task of observation. We want to look, see, and understand; but our minds are looking for an ANSWER, not simply looking. So we don't understand what we're seeing, and we can't form a viable answer of what's going on around us.
It's like when you put a can of soup to the right of a jar of mayonaise in the cabinet. Then you open the cabinet and somebody moved the mayo a foot to the left next to a bottle of oil, and you spend 10 minutes trying to find it. You NEED it to be there, because you don't know HOW to observe and understand.
Here we have an attempt to make people stop, relax, stare and contemplate the art, the sculptures. Talk about what they see. A hollow attempt to regain these abilities that we no longer have.
The sad part is this is all completely whacked out and ridiculous... and that I'm right.
The assigned book was total shit. It talked about math some, then ran directly to the graphing calculator. Most students failed that class. *I* failed that class and I passed Calculus 2 and Statistics and Probability in my sleep (my teacher was pissed at my test scores, because I got 4 problems wrong EVER yet I never did any homework or classwork... the material was just easy for me, I handwaved at tests and got every single problem right almost every time); I failed Calc 2 recently (5 years of NOT doing math and I took Calc2 for a refresher) so I decided, hmm, I need algebra skills. Hmm, why can't I learn algebra now?
The book I got recently to self-teach uses a different model. Instead of running directly to the graphing calculator, it... well, it does cover graphing calculators, spreadsheets, and computer graphing programs, yes. As an aside. Also it runs to Geometry and starts discussing the applications of Algebra in the study of Geometry. Also it pulls out real world problems solved algebraically. It also fully explains example problems, and incorporates a certain amount of overlap. Also, the author does some number theory coverage early, because he wants more wiggle room to explain concepts more clearly and to enter more advanced concepts.
The book I got myself teaches math. The assigned book I tried to use in the instructor-lead class teaches calculators.
What we need is GOOD textbooks. Not cheap textbooks, not expensive textbooks, not the latest edition of A FUCKING ALGEBRA TEXT discussing a subject that hasn't changed since BEFORE KNOWN CHINESE HISTORY (yeah, math has advanced... in the form of Geometry and Trigonometry and Calculus and Physics, not in the form of Algebra; and even then, not in the past 2 years). What we need is GOOD textbooks that cover the subject in the best way possible.
First TFS and TFA both make reference to problems which "keep super computers busy for days." That's pretty misleading since the bees are only dealing with "a few hundred" flowers. At brute force that would take your cell phone maybe a couple minutes to solve.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Start with one flower. I guess the closest. Now you have 99 flowers to chose from.
Now ignoring the one you've been to, you now have 98.
Now 97.
Including starting point selection, there are 9.33262154 × 10^157 potential paths. With a dedicated logic circuit capable of iteratively computing one path per second and comparing it against the currently stored path (and then discarding whichever is higher cost), at 1 million THz clock, this takes 10^139 seconds or 3.17 x 10^131 years. The GPC is using one hell of a specialized algorithm; and the bee is doing it better.
I think the problem with your analogy that there are an unlimited number of dimensions and responses where you could put your arm out to make the catch
No, the problem with his analogy is that he's analogizing solving a problem ahead of time versus solving a problem in real time as it occurs. Adjusting slightly to catch a baseball as it gets closer eventually ends in the perfect position for catch; adjusting your path as you travel eventually ends in "oh shit, if I went to Dallas before Austin my total distance traveled would be shorter."
Then you fail context, considering the post's title and the rest of the content, as well as the ridiculous notion that the kernel would do something different for Debian than for Fedora.
Windows marketing has nothing to do with its success. Look at the prevalence of Vista during the huge backlash of "GET THIS FUCKING SHIT OFF MY COMPUTER" "Sorry we can't, you don't have a license." This was a key factor in the rise of MacOSX use.
This shit doesn't contain "DNA," it contains a chemical sequence that's sufficiently unique. They say "DNA" because DNA is so variant no two people who aren't clones (such as twins) have the same DNA. But it catches idiots with buzzwords.
I'm not American so I'm curious - what is it you guys learn about the kamikaze?
In high school, mention of WW2 Japanese Kamikaze fighters basically said that Japanese bomb runners couldn't make it back ever (lies!); so they'd fly over the states and fire bombs, then crash and burn on a suitable target. They also never mentioned that these things couldn't even reach California; all the fighting occurred over Hawaii.
The real truth, as I said in my post, was that the Kamikaze came when Japan ran low on bombs. They were out of weapons, out of energy, thrashing around and ready to seek an end to the war. We wanted to march an army into Japan, blaze a path to Tokyo from the shoreline, and force the Emperor to surrender at gunpoint; least that's how I was told it. "If we send soldiers in, we'll have to kill every last man, woman, and child on that island; they'll all fight to the death." That says ground troops to capital. But that's all they had left; if we sent a message to them (we had communications!) stating a desire to negotiate for peace, the only thing they could say is "come cut your way into our heart!" They couldn't raise their huge cache of reserve missiles and start blazing away; they had no such thing.
The Kamikaze weren't the "Glorious Japanese Warriors giving their lives!" They were the "last act of broken desperation." We could have negotiated their surrender if we offered their nation its dignity.
Funny, wherever Japan could realistically strike enemy civilian populations in WWII, they did a pretty brutal job of it.
Yeah, note my comment on Japan's attacks on Korea. They acted in direct opposition to their own warrior's philosophy. The Catholic Church did the same, with the pope initiating brutal invasions and territorial expansion by the sword; over time, it was decided this was simply wrong. I believe with time and maybe some guidance (maybe just time!), the warriors would have found it difficult to explain the honor in such brutality, especially (unfortunately) losing their own loved ones to such barbarianism. When you're already devastated over a middle school being bombed in a war, a sudden switch to the topic of that time you were in some other country running through a middle school cutting childrens' throats quickly puts a nasty pit in your stomach.
Nonsense. Getting soul cleansing and shamastic treatments won't do shit. The only one who has a real effect on your spiritual chakras is you yourself; regular meditation will help lower your blood pressure, clear your mind, and improve the flow of energy through your body. This will improve your health, your work life, and your sexual life.
Don't let silly witchdoctors sell you bullshit. If you want to balance your spiritual centers, spend some $25 on books (I recommend Meditation: The Complete Guide by Patricia Monaghan for $12) and decide on what path best suits you. For me this was yoga and martial arts (Aikido) for physical meditations; and Kundalini Meditaiton (Kundalini Awakening: A Gentle Guide to Chakra Activation and Spiritual Growth for $10 was my reading material) for mental meditation. The martial arts and yoga have obviously increased my flexibility and given me physical activity to keep me healthy; but the mental stuff has helped reduce stress a great deal by teaching me to stay calm and focused.
It's really the same way with chiropracty and doctors and witch doctors. To a point, you need to know when you're sick and when you're ailing; but to a large degree, you need to leave off what's not working. Massages don't fix tension for me, and an hour of deep tissue massage isn't going to do shit for me; I'll get bored very fast and it's annoying. If you have a vehement distaste to anything "spiritual" or "religious" such that you can't let go of it and experiment with full intent, Kundalini Meditation will probably irritate you and worsen your health; whereas if you have difficulty with sexual images, Tantric Meditation will be disruptive to your mental health. In the opposite cases (i.e. where you're seeking spiritual calm or seeking to confront and accept sexuality, such as if you're always nervous or self-conscious about sex), these things will be very rewarding.
QED. There are no silver bullets. ESPECIALLY not modern medicine, as evidenced by the huge number of "Doctors" that are "General Practitioners" but all they really do is prescribe pain killers and antidepressants and Adderall. Even TCM was better than that... the doctor listened to your problem, tried to align your chi and your yin and yang, gave you some root to boil, then 3 days later you come back "That didn't help and now I feel like this..." and they sat down and went "Oh, hmm. Let's examine you further..." Today's "doctors" just throw a different medication at you (Zoloft instead of Xanax) because "You're having a bad medication to that brand..." Sometimes there's 2 drugs to treat the same thing, and they go through 5 different brands that are all one or the other.
Nothing medical (that is, anything intended to maintain health, which starts all the way with shamans talking to the dead and prescribing spiritual journeys and goes all the way up to surgery and pills) has ever been more than a best-effort system. We can scientifically pair down pills to treat infections, that's the best thing we have: Penicillin will kill your chlamydia. Too bad we're fuzzy on deciding if chlamydia is the ONLY thing that's wrong with you, or even if the symptoms we're seeing are coming from the chlamydia (even if we can CONFIRM you have it) or if that's in WAY early stages and doing jack shit while some other problem is causing similar symptoms to an advanced case.
Chiropractic health professionals either deal with the skeletal system or with bullshit. Some of them you walk into the office, they know everything about all ligaments, tendons, joints, bone structure, etc; and they can throw you under an X-ray and point out all the stress points from your posture and all long-term damage done from you always sitting wrong. They can also supply physical therapy, nudging the joints here and there to straighten things out that have gone a bit awry.
The bullshit artists are the ones that want you to believe all ailments are cured by chiropractic practice, which the parent seems to be.
Of course, I believe that anthropogenic CO2 has a warming effect. You'd have to be an idiot not to. Just as you'd have to be an idiot to take the wildly speculative high-end-of-the-margin-of-error conclusions of UN funded climate researchers at face value, or think that the planet's climate has been balancing on the head of a pin instead of sitting in a self-correcting trough. That the UN pushes so hard for their solution and so hard against honest research into techniques that would give us such fine-grained control over our climate reveals a great deal about their probable motivations.
See I don't believe much that human CO2 production has a huge effect; CO2 comes from a lot of sources, including constant venting from dormant volcanoes. Volcanic vents are also pushing a ton of methane, which we seem to understand as 72 times as warming as CO2 over 20 years or 25 times as warming over 100 years (Methane has a short half life... its net lifetime is 10 years and it breaks down into CO2 and H2O). In other words, we have bigger problems.
That said, I'd like to congratulate you on having an opinion AND an open mind enough to say that research and politics SUPPORTING your opinion are coming from agenda-driven idiots. Most people (I guess the modern term is "sheeple" but Oxford hasn't accepted it yet) are too retarded to pull this one off.
And second, pollution does have an effect on quality of life. The black soot cloud over Mexico City or Beijing is going to make breathing harder than if you're hiking up in the Swiss Alps. Sure, Swiss Alps are cold and fucking suck; but when you draw in a breath of frigid, painful air, you can feel and taste the quality in the same manner as when you drink cool spring water with just a slight hint of carbonates instead of slightly reddish-yellow city water supply crap with tons of chlorine and metal ions. Both such things are not only more enjoyable, but healthier than their polluted substitutes.
This larger, more visible effect has gotten my attention recently. The political arena of doomsday predictions less so.
I'm unsure that dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a good idea. WW2 was drawn out specifically because of a lot of fail on our military strategy; but it was over before the bomb. I'd like to say going into this that I don't blame the politicians outright; at the very least, I don't think Congress (don't hold me to that; one or two may have deviated, MOST of them probably didn't know shit) or Truman (I'm WELL more confident in this) had proper intelligence: I think either the military made bad judgments, or the defense department (today's NSA and CIA are branches of the DOD) thought it would be more interesting to blow shit up (science experiment).
By the end of WW2, we had famous "Kamikaze" bombers. Your history class fucked up here. Kamikaze bombers weren't status quo; Japan ran out of bombs and planes and fuel, and all it had left were planes with tanks of remaining fuel in them to crash into shit. Japanese bombers routinely made bomb runs across the pacific to Hawaii; they couldn't reach California. When they ran out of bombs, they went one way; but originally they came back.
What we were told in school is that Japanese fighters could make it to California (bullshit) but never back, so they always came, launched tons of bombs, then kamikaze. What actually happened was desperation in a nation that wanted to say they were sorry and go home; their dignity was bruised, but they were beaten and ready to talk peace. Hell, the original bombing run on Hawaii was supposed to be a negotiation session: the Japanese sent us a memo, but we didn't translate it fast enough. They wanted to DECLARE their intent so we'd either negotiate or at least move assets and (especially) people out of the way.
The biggest offense of WW2 was America's useless attacks on Japan. Japan hit a military base in Hawaii. Japan hit navy cruisers, aircraft carriers if they could (which was never), naval bases, any kind of military installation they could touch. They quickly realized this was stupid: the reason a warning was sent was because Japan wanted to negotiate under pressure of declared war, as the military advisors IN Japan knew that a war with America was a losing prospect considering they could only reach Hawaii.
They expected military retaliation after this; unfortunately, what they got was "Strategic Bombing"... no, not just military installations, but CIVILIAN installations. We blew up schools, churches, houses... that's called terrorism today. It pissed them off, too, because attacking non-combatants is an honorless act of cowardice. They were already beaten and humiliated when we dropped the bombs; nuking the shit out of something offshore with no population would have been enough of a military experiment, and they would have crumbled at that.
We broke their back, then came in and told them they were barbarians. If we would have negotiated diplomatically and with honor, we could have talked them down. They were broken, they knew they were broken. All we had to do was tell them we could fight longer and harder than they could (they knew this), we had better resources (they knew this), and we had a really nasty weapon we didn't want to lose. Expressing a distaste for the pointless, honorless act of destroying entire cities of civilians and a desire to end the bloodshed and try to move onto peaceful grounds would have appealed to the Japanese in every way; instead we continued to attack them, treated them like animals, then devastated them until their sense of honor and dignity broke in the face of such emotional stress as having everyone they know and love wiped out.
America lost that war. We failed at diplomacy. We failed as human beings. We destroyed civilian human lives and then came in to mop up the remains of a culture of beauty and philosophy, a culture that still understood the difference between a "warrior" and a "soldier." Now Japan is a land of broken, childish merchants, of bright lights and unbelievably ridiculo
This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. It's the same idea as "let's just destroy the desert, because it's a wasteland with no ecosystem anyway." The sun shining over the ocean has the LARGEST effect on our planet, because it's a giant fucking thermal battery (look up SPECIFIC HEAT OF WATER). Yes, it has spectral refraction and reflects a lot of light back out; but colored shit like trees reflect a LOT more infra-red... green leafy plants reflect a ton of heat away, and the ocean heat sinks it. Of course, the temperature of the ocean is a MAJOR climate driver, and fucking with it will not only severely stress sea life but will also severely affect land weather patterns and shift global temperatures around like crazy.
This is what happens when you think. You realize that the "obvious" is idiotic.
Slashdot Mirror
It may be a little harder to find meditative practices practiced outside the context of a religious tradition, but there's quite a bit of that around, too. (Even if most of the practices themselves are adapted from one or more of the religious traditions.)
Religion and spirituality are separate concepts. Many people avoid meditation because they don't want to accept the idea of a "spirituality" and thus determine that since they can't explain why this is any different than sleeping it must be a complete waste of time for whacked-out new age hippies.
Just as meditation can be practiced outside religion, many forms of meditation can be practiced without discomforting yourself with the ideal that this is somehow "mystical." Kundalini meditation cannot. Yoga, breathing exercises, quiet contemplation, the like, can all be taken as direct physical/psychological stimulus if you like. While it is true that rejecting the spiritual limits your options, it is also true that you have nothing to gain by enduring uncomfortable ideals; those discomforted by the ideal of "spirituality" will not benefit from such mystical meditations, although they may benefit from exploring this as a flaw in themselves if they so choose. Meditations that revolve around sexuality, for example, are usually avoided by those uncomfortable with sex; however I chose to pursue these in order to understand and correct this discomfort.
The point still stands. People don't know how NOT to quickly move from one thing to the other without observation. They encounter stress, and they can't understand what's happening. They develop hateful relationships because someone does something that they dislike and they MUST obsess about it because they CANNOT look into themselves and determine that this does not affect them in any meaningful way. They make bad decisions because they cannot take the time to reason; they only know that something has happened and they MUST react, so they react as habitual rather than as considered and understood.
Nobody plays Go (or Chess; but Go is a superior game)
I have to ask: why is Go superior to Chess? Easier to pick up? More possible permutations? It was created in China as opposed to Chess which is a Western game?
I don't see how any of these reasons make Go inherently superior to Chess. Hell, even Checkers is a pretty damn good game and there are a million other good ones out there.
Let's say that "superiority" is a fuzzy term first. No matter my arguments, someone will come with a completely different list of valuable aspects of a game and claim that X is superior to Y because these aspects are more important.
Checkers is a simpler game than Chess, but in the same vein. I would call Chess superior, because Checkers allows for isometric thinking (i.e. breadth, but very little depth... look at the field and play). Checkers is also quite shallow: pieces move around and do not really guard other pieces to any great strategic extent (they do, but not to the extent of Chess or Go), so moves are usually pretty isolated and play is rather basic. All pieces being identical initially, and then in two classes, Checkers allows a huge amount of flexibility on a strategically simple game.
When we talk about Chess in relation to Checkers, moving a pawn to a position is in no way similar to moving a knight, bishop, rook, or queen to that position. Getting any piece there is different. Their strategic meaning is completely different. Having a bunch of pieces in one area can be a weakness if they can't function as an efficient military unit; you have to have a proper strategy. This makes Chess superior to Checkers.
Now, let's compare Chess and Checkers to Backgammon, let's say. Chess and Checkers being in the same vein, we'll take just Chess. Backgammon is man versus luck: you roll dice and see what happens. Chess on the other hand sets up two opposing armies with strategic configuration, pitting a man with a concrete goal (unconditional capture of the king) against another man by strategy. Thus, Chess represents the struggle of Man versus Man: a man's tactical cunning against his opponent will produce victory.
In Go, you start with an empty board. Immediately playing against your opponent will win you ... nothing. The brief study of Joseki helps ensure that such petty plays as to immediately confront lone stones comes out balanced; the farther reaching study of Go teaches the foundations of this, so that altering the Joseki only puts you at a loss since your opponent responds with devastating play that shifts the balance to his favor. Thus the opening is about playing your influence, spreading out enough to gain territorial control but not so much as to lose strength in the later play of the game as your opponent isolates your dispersed stones from one another while approaching them with his own.
The play of Go further continues with understandings of not just small patterns here and there; but of the intrinsic connections that form between stones. Go follows the concept of "Life and Death," and shapes begin to form which can become alive or be killed by cunning play. At the same time, seemingly distant stones may provide a clear path to escape death and to connect shape: stones may be impossible to divide from each other despite the board being so open. Play can thus establish strong territorial control, but only by seeing many, many possibilities and at the same time few or none. Rather than playing small areas and connecting, you play small areas and at the same time consider the larger, far reaching impact of each individual stone to the whole of the playing field.
Thus improvement of the game of Go is considered to come from improvement of the self. You have no direct goal against your opponent; your goal is to maintain control of territory, by influence. Your influence includes securing large and small areas of the board, and encroaching deeply into opponent territory maybe
It sounds like an attempt at filling the gap left by the lack of meditation our society experiences. Nobody plays Go (or Chess; but Go is a superior game), nobody quietly contemplates, nobody does listening meditations or anything. The most basic are breath awareness exercises-- sit quietly, close your eyes, observe the sound of the air passing through your nose and into your lungs, how your chest and belly expand, how your body shifts... then focus as well on your heart beat, and then add the focus of your attention on your muscles adjusting to hold your posture against gravity, shifting your balance constantly. All of these things at once, just for a minute or two, or an hour if you wish; time is a personal decision.
We do none of this stuff, and then we sit around wondering why people are bad at observing things. People want answers to shit; we still want to understand what's happening around us. But we've trained ourselves to be intolerant of the task of observation. We want to look, see, and understand; but our minds are looking for an ANSWER, not simply looking. So we don't understand what we're seeing, and we can't form a viable answer of what's going on around us.
It's like when you put a can of soup to the right of a jar of mayonaise in the cabinet. Then you open the cabinet and somebody moved the mayo a foot to the left next to a bottle of oil, and you spend 10 minutes trying to find it. You NEED it to be there, because you don't know HOW to observe and understand.
Here we have an attempt to make people stop, relax, stare and contemplate the art, the sculptures. Talk about what they see. A hollow attempt to regain these abilities that we no longer have.
The sad part is this is all completely whacked out and ridiculous ... and that I'm right.
I took a college algebra course to refresh (I've done calc and stat). They gave this book: http://www.amazon.com/College-Algebra-Enhanced-Graphing-Utilities/dp/0136004911/
I bought this book recently to reteach myself math: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0030291070/
The assigned book was total shit. It talked about math some, then ran directly to the graphing calculator. Most students failed that class. *I* failed that class and I passed Calculus 2 and Statistics and Probability in my sleep (my teacher was pissed at my test scores, because I got 4 problems wrong EVER yet I never did any homework or classwork... the material was just easy for me, I handwaved at tests and got every single problem right almost every time); I failed Calc 2 recently (5 years of NOT doing math and I took Calc2 for a refresher) so I decided, hmm, I need algebra skills. Hmm, why can't I learn algebra now?
The book I got recently to self-teach uses a different model. Instead of running directly to the graphing calculator, it... well, it does cover graphing calculators, spreadsheets, and computer graphing programs, yes. As an aside. Also it runs to Geometry and starts discussing the applications of Algebra in the study of Geometry. Also it pulls out real world problems solved algebraically. It also fully explains example problems, and incorporates a certain amount of overlap. Also, the author does some number theory coverage early, because he wants more wiggle room to explain concepts more clearly and to enter more advanced concepts.
The book I got myself teaches math. The assigned book I tried to use in the instructor-lead class teaches calculators.
What we need is GOOD textbooks. Not cheap textbooks, not expensive textbooks, not the latest edition of A FUCKING ALGEBRA TEXT discussing a subject that hasn't changed since BEFORE KNOWN CHINESE HISTORY (yeah, math has advanced... in the form of Geometry and Trigonometry and Calculus and Physics, not in the form of Algebra; and even then, not in the past 2 years). What we need is GOOD textbooks that cover the subject in the best way possible.
First TFS and TFA both make reference to problems which "keep super computers busy for days." That's pretty misleading since the bees are only dealing with "a few hundred" flowers. At brute force that would take your cell phone maybe a couple minutes to solve.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Start with one flower. I guess the closest. Now you have 99 flowers to chose from.
Now ignoring the one you've been to, you now have 98.
Now 97.
Including starting point selection, there are 9.33262154 × 10^157 potential paths. With a dedicated logic circuit capable of iteratively computing one path per second and comparing it against the currently stored path (and then discarding whichever is higher cost), at 1 million THz clock, this takes 10^139 seconds or 3.17 x 10^131 years. The GPC is using one hell of a specialized algorithm; and the bee is doing it better.
Oh, you know, disappears from here, reappears there.
I think the problem with your analogy that there are an unlimited number of dimensions and responses where you could put your arm out to make the catch
No, the problem with his analogy is that he's analogizing solving a problem ahead of time versus solving a problem in real time as it occurs. Adjusting slightly to catch a baseball as it gets closer eventually ends in the perfect position for catch; adjusting your path as you travel eventually ends in "oh shit, if I went to Dallas before Austin my total distance traveled would be shorter."
Then you fail context, considering the post's title and the rest of the content, as well as the ridiculous notion that the kernel would do something different for Debian than for Fedora.
Go to his town, go to the recording studio down the street.
They hired someone else, actually, and told him to "sound like Vincent Price." Drastically cheaper.
Iron Maiden wanted Vincent Price to do the 15 second opening in Number of the Beast. He wanted $25000 for the recording.
Um, what does the video subsystem and wifi have to do with memory compression?
Any updates to the Compressed RAM subsystem, and is this suitable for Android and XO yet? How about Desktop Debian/Ubuntu?
Windows marketing has nothing to do with its success. Look at the prevalence of Vista during the huge backlash of "GET THIS FUCKING SHIT OFF MY COMPUTER" "Sorry we can't, you don't have a license." This was a key factor in the rise of MacOSX use.
Smaller lego, really.
This shit doesn't contain "DNA," it contains a chemical sequence that's sufficiently unique. They say "DNA" because DNA is so variant no two people who aren't clones (such as twins) have the same DNA. But it catches idiots with buzzwords.
Or 40mg of Adderall right? Or maybe Xanax and Zoloft...
Yeah my first thought was "What the hell is this bullshit?"
I'm not American so I'm curious - what is it you guys learn about the kamikaze?
In high school, mention of WW2 Japanese Kamikaze fighters basically said that Japanese bomb runners couldn't make it back ever (lies!); so they'd fly over the states and fire bombs, then crash and burn on a suitable target. They also never mentioned that these things couldn't even reach California; all the fighting occurred over Hawaii.
The real truth, as I said in my post, was that the Kamikaze came when Japan ran low on bombs. They were out of weapons, out of energy, thrashing around and ready to seek an end to the war. We wanted to march an army into Japan, blaze a path to Tokyo from the shoreline, and force the Emperor to surrender at gunpoint; least that's how I was told it. "If we send soldiers in, we'll have to kill every last man, woman, and child on that island; they'll all fight to the death." That says ground troops to capital. But that's all they had left; if we sent a message to them (we had communications!) stating a desire to negotiate for peace, the only thing they could say is "come cut your way into our heart!" They couldn't raise their huge cache of reserve missiles and start blazing away; they had no such thing.
The Kamikaze weren't the "Glorious Japanese Warriors giving their lives!" They were the "last act of broken desperation." We could have negotiated their surrender if we offered their nation its dignity.
Funny, wherever Japan could realistically strike enemy civilian populations in WWII, they did a pretty brutal job of it.
Yeah, note my comment on Japan's attacks on Korea. They acted in direct opposition to their own warrior's philosophy. The Catholic Church did the same, with the pope initiating brutal invasions and territorial expansion by the sword; over time, it was decided this was simply wrong. I believe with time and maybe some guidance (maybe just time!), the warriors would have found it difficult to explain the honor in such brutality, especially (unfortunately) losing their own loved ones to such barbarianism. When you're already devastated over a middle school being bombed in a war, a sudden switch to the topic of that time you were in some other country running through a middle school cutting childrens' throats quickly puts a nasty pit in your stomach.
Nonsense. Getting soul cleansing and shamastic treatments won't do shit. The only one who has a real effect on your spiritual chakras is you yourself; regular meditation will help lower your blood pressure, clear your mind, and improve the flow of energy through your body. This will improve your health, your work life, and your sexual life.
Don't let silly witchdoctors sell you bullshit. If you want to balance your spiritual centers, spend some $25 on books (I recommend Meditation: The Complete Guide by Patricia Monaghan for $12) and decide on what path best suits you. For me this was yoga and martial arts (Aikido) for physical meditations; and Kundalini Meditaiton (Kundalini Awakening: A Gentle Guide to Chakra Activation and Spiritual Growth for $10 was my reading material) for mental meditation. The martial arts and yoga have obviously increased my flexibility and given me physical activity to keep me healthy; but the mental stuff has helped reduce stress a great deal by teaching me to stay calm and focused.
It's really the same way with chiropracty and doctors and witch doctors. To a point, you need to know when you're sick and when you're ailing; but to a large degree, you need to leave off what's not working. Massages don't fix tension for me, and an hour of deep tissue massage isn't going to do shit for me; I'll get bored very fast and it's annoying. If you have a vehement distaste to anything "spiritual" or "religious" such that you can't let go of it and experiment with full intent, Kundalini Meditation will probably irritate you and worsen your health; whereas if you have difficulty with sexual images, Tantric Meditation will be disruptive to your mental health. In the opposite cases (i.e. where you're seeking spiritual calm or seeking to confront and accept sexuality, such as if you're always nervous or self-conscious about sex), these things will be very rewarding.
QED. There are no silver bullets. ESPECIALLY not modern medicine, as evidenced by the huge number of "Doctors" that are "General Practitioners" but all they really do is prescribe pain killers and antidepressants and Adderall. Even TCM was better than that... the doctor listened to your problem, tried to align your chi and your yin and yang, gave you some root to boil, then 3 days later you come back "That didn't help and now I feel like this..." and they sat down and went "Oh, hmm. Let's examine you further..." Today's "doctors" just throw a different medication at you (Zoloft instead of Xanax) because "You're having a bad medication to that brand..." Sometimes there's 2 drugs to treat the same thing, and they go through 5 different brands that are all one or the other.
Nothing medical (that is, anything intended to maintain health, which starts all the way with shamans talking to the dead and prescribing spiritual journeys and goes all the way up to surgery and pills) has ever been more than a best-effort system. We can scientifically pair down pills to treat infections, that's the best thing we have: Penicillin will kill your chlamydia. Too bad we're fuzzy on deciding if chlamydia is the ONLY thing that's wrong with you, or even if the symptoms we're seeing are coming from the chlamydia (even if we can CONFIRM you have it) or if that's in WAY early stages and doing jack shit while some other problem is causing similar symptoms to an advanced case.
Chiropractic health professionals either deal with the skeletal system or with bullshit. Some of them you walk into the office, they know everything about all ligaments, tendons, joints, bone structure, etc; and they can throw you under an X-ray and point out all the stress points from your posture and all long-term damage done from you always sitting wrong. They can also supply physical therapy, nudging the joints here and there to straighten things out that have gone a bit awry.
The bullshit artists are the ones that want you to believe all ailments are cured by chiropractic practice, which the parent seems to be.
Of course, I believe that anthropogenic CO2 has a warming effect. You'd have to be an idiot not to. Just as you'd have to be an idiot to take the wildly speculative high-end-of-the-margin-of-error conclusions of UN funded climate researchers at face value, or think that the planet's climate has been balancing on the head of a pin instead of sitting in a self-correcting trough. That the UN pushes so hard for their solution and so hard against honest research into techniques that would give us such fine-grained control over our climate reveals a great deal about their probable motivations.
See I don't believe much that human CO2 production has a huge effect; CO2 comes from a lot of sources, including constant venting from dormant volcanoes. Volcanic vents are also pushing a ton of methane, which we seem to understand as 72 times as warming as CO2 over 20 years or 25 times as warming over 100 years (Methane has a short half life... its net lifetime is 10 years and it breaks down into CO2 and H2O). In other words, we have bigger problems.
That said, I'd like to congratulate you on having an opinion AND an open mind enough to say that research and politics SUPPORTING your opinion are coming from agenda-driven idiots. Most people (I guess the modern term is "sheeple" but Oxford hasn't accepted it yet) are too retarded to pull this one off.
And second, pollution does have an effect on quality of life. The black soot cloud over Mexico City or Beijing is going to make breathing harder than if you're hiking up in the Swiss Alps. Sure, Swiss Alps are cold and fucking suck; but when you draw in a breath of frigid, painful air, you can feel and taste the quality in the same manner as when you drink cool spring water with just a slight hint of carbonates instead of slightly reddish-yellow city water supply crap with tons of chlorine and metal ions. Both such things are not only more enjoyable, but healthier than their polluted substitutes.
This larger, more visible effect has gotten my attention recently. The political arena of doomsday predictions less so.
Damn, genius! Mars is a lot further away from Earth than Earth is! Who woulda thunk?!
Here's your sign...
I'm unsure that dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a good idea. WW2 was drawn out specifically because of a lot of fail on our military strategy; but it was over before the bomb. I'd like to say going into this that I don't blame the politicians outright; at the very least, I don't think Congress (don't hold me to that; one or two may have deviated, MOST of them probably didn't know shit) or Truman (I'm WELL more confident in this) had proper intelligence: I think either the military made bad judgments, or the defense department (today's NSA and CIA are branches of the DOD) thought it would be more interesting to blow shit up (science experiment).
By the end of WW2, we had famous "Kamikaze" bombers. Your history class fucked up here. Kamikaze bombers weren't status quo; Japan ran out of bombs and planes and fuel, and all it had left were planes with tanks of remaining fuel in them to crash into shit. Japanese bombers routinely made bomb runs across the pacific to Hawaii; they couldn't reach California. When they ran out of bombs, they went one way; but originally they came back.
What we were told in school is that Japanese fighters could make it to California (bullshit) but never back, so they always came, launched tons of bombs, then kamikaze. What actually happened was desperation in a nation that wanted to say they were sorry and go home; their dignity was bruised, but they were beaten and ready to talk peace. Hell, the original bombing run on Hawaii was supposed to be a negotiation session: the Japanese sent us a memo, but we didn't translate it fast enough. They wanted to DECLARE their intent so we'd either negotiate or at least move assets and (especially) people out of the way.
The biggest offense of WW2 was America's useless attacks on Japan. Japan hit a military base in Hawaii. Japan hit navy cruisers, aircraft carriers if they could (which was never), naval bases, any kind of military installation they could touch. They quickly realized this was stupid: the reason a warning was sent was because Japan wanted to negotiate under pressure of declared war, as the military advisors IN Japan knew that a war with America was a losing prospect considering they could only reach Hawaii.
They expected military retaliation after this; unfortunately, what they got was "Strategic Bombing" ... no, not just military installations, but CIVILIAN installations. We blew up schools, churches, houses... that's called terrorism today. It pissed them off, too, because attacking non-combatants is an honorless act of cowardice. They were already beaten and humiliated when we dropped the bombs; nuking the shit out of something offshore with no population would have been enough of a military experiment, and they would have crumbled at that.
We broke their back, then came in and told them they were barbarians. If we would have negotiated diplomatically and with honor, we could have talked them down. They were broken, they knew they were broken. All we had to do was tell them we could fight longer and harder than they could (they knew this), we had better resources (they knew this), and we had a really nasty weapon we didn't want to lose. Expressing a distaste for the pointless, honorless act of destroying entire cities of civilians and a desire to end the bloodshed and try to move onto peaceful grounds would have appealed to the Japanese in every way; instead we continued to attack them, treated them like animals, then devastated them until their sense of honor and dignity broke in the face of such emotional stress as having everyone they know and love wiped out.
America lost that war. We failed at diplomacy. We failed as human beings. We destroyed civilian human lives and then came in to mop up the remains of a culture of beauty and philosophy, a culture that still understood the difference between a "warrior" and a "soldier." Now Japan is a land of broken, childish merchants, of bright lights and unbelievably ridiculo
This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. It's the same idea as "let's just destroy the desert, because it's a wasteland with no ecosystem anyway." The sun shining over the ocean has the LARGEST effect on our planet, because it's a giant fucking thermal battery (look up SPECIFIC HEAT OF WATER). Yes, it has spectral refraction and reflects a lot of light back out; but colored shit like trees reflect a LOT more infra-red... green leafy plants reflect a ton of heat away, and the ocean heat sinks it. Of course, the temperature of the ocean is a MAJOR climate driver, and fucking with it will not only severely stress sea life but will also severely affect land weather patterns and shift global temperatures around like crazy.
This is what happens when you think. You realize that the "obvious" is idiotic.