This is why the current weapons laws are completely backwards. The weapons that are illegal are exactly the ones we need to protect democracy, and the weapons that are legal are exactly the ones we should ban.
For instance, there is no reason for handguns to be available. They are not tools of war so much as of murder.
Antitank weapons, RPGs, and heavy-caliber machineguns, however, we should have. You can't arm a rebellion with the "Saturday night specials" used to rob take-out pizza restaurants.
I know that at first glance this sounds absurd, like I'm trying to write satire -- but I'm not. It's true that I'm not sure that I'm entirely serious, but I really do think that the logic is there.
I wonder how much simple size has to do with it. The country is just too big for our voices to be heard. We are not faces, or even communities, but just pliable masses.
"Obama! Obama! Rescue me! You are the Anointed One, and perfect in my sight!"
Yet he's just another politician. In fact, I think his campaign has been the most calculatingly PR-driven of the bunch. The man doesn't even have a platform (yes, I've read his website), just a bunch of slogans involving abstract nouns.
People say Obama's a great orator, too, but I don't even see that. Honestly, I think they just think "black man = good speaker" (It's part of the stereotype, if you haven't noticed, along with being good at basketball). But have you actually listened to him? He uses more "verbal junk" -- "umms" and "uuhs" and the like -- than the other candidates, and really the only thing he has going for him is his voice (which, yes, is good; it's a nice tenor. Hillary sounded too treble. Blame women's smaller Adam's apple.)
I saw Obama speak firsthand at the beginning of his campaign before I knew about him, and since I had heard so many people raving about him I was expecting good things. Let me tell you: I was incredibly disappointed. He was ushered on stage on cue, gave an empty speech about "not cowtowing to special interests" and "change" (Good god, can it get any more cliche? The man's speeches are the political equivalent of Hallmark cards.) and then left while some bubbly, upbeat alt-rock played ("Suddenly I see!") before anybody could ask him a single question. The whole thing was, so transparently, a scripted show.
For a comparison: When I saw Wesley Clark a few years earlier (when he was running for president), he gave a speech in which he outlined specific policy objectives, and reserved time at the end to answer questions. He understood what he was talking about!
I feel reasonably confident that I know what I would be voting for if I voted for McCain. Unfortunately, I don't like what that would be: A president focused on foreign policy to the neglect of domestic issues, who would tend to support the use of military force, even in situations when it might not be needed. But what about Obama? The man is an actor; which concrete policies would he advocate? He just hasn't said!
And what he has said, I don't believe. Let me give you a concrete example for why that is. Obama had maintained for most of his campaign that it would be his strategy to reach out to the groups that we, the U.S., currently refuse to talk to, and that, moreover, he would try to do so in a way that would make the U.S. be respected as a fair arbiter. In particular, he had spoken of the need (1) for a Palestinian state, and (2) to engage the Palestinians. Yet recently at AIPAC, he swore he would not talk to HAMAS (exactly contradicting his previous promises of engagement) and that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided" -- thereby immediately displaying a partiality which has lost him almost all of his credibility with the Arabs with whom he has been telling us he will be uniquely able to negotiate.
We have just had eight years under a president who didn't know what the hell he was doing. Do we really need four more?
But what choice have we got? McCain isn't exactly appealing himself.
"Democracy." Heh! It's just the process by which the idiots you went to high school with run the country. And by "run," I mean, "are told what to decide by television ads."
I agree completely with parent. A few additional thoughts:
Although I second the suggestion to get a book, I'd also suggest the following website: All About Circuits. It's basically a short textbook, online. It has some nice intuitive explanations.
As for books... My top choice would be Hambley's Electronics. It's a complete, correct, and accessible introduction to the subject. It's a great book. The Art of Electronics is also very good.
I also completely agree with the suggestion to get a solderless breadboard. That's the way to have fun with this stuff. You can always build a soldered, "final" circuit later (which is fun in its own way), but I have to admit that that's more of an exercise in fabrication than it is a good way to explore electronics.
For me, the crucial central component of a lab bench is an oscilloscope, and that will be the hardest thing to get inexpensively. Digital scopes are wonderful! I haven't investigated this thoroughly, but you might go with a USB "oscilloscope" that uses a laptop/PC for its interface, as these tend to be cheaper.
Finally, there's the question of "what circuits should I build?" Personally, I always found op-amp circuits to be a lot of fun, and I think audio circuits are often a good choice as they are interesting and practical, give a good way to experiment with filters and many other analog signal processing circuits, and yet are low-enough frequency that the parasitics are negligible (i.e., the schematic is an accurate representation of what you've built).
As a side note, although the 741 is an armored tank and as cheap as dirt, my personal favorite op-amp is the LM6132. They're more expensive, but man are they beautiful!:-) (Seriously though, just buy 741s unless you're running off batteries or really need something faster.)
Oh! And while we're on the subject of buying things: The place to look is Digikey. You need to lump together orders to save on shipping, but it is almost always the best choice for buying chips.
A coal power plant is about 30-40% efficient, already worse than the gas furnace.
I like the rest of your post, but this is apples and oranges. In fact -- and I know I'm stretching the language here -- I'd say that a gas furnace is 100% inefficient, since it extracts no exergy from the high-exergy fuel that it burns.
I know, we hear these numbers all the time -- but they're bogus. Too often the "efficiencies" we're told are based on energy, when what really matters is exergy. (I.e., a bathtub full of lukewarm water has a ton of energy, but very little exergy.) In this case, the coal plant has extracted most of the exergy from the coal and the waste heat that warms your house is low exergy, whereas a gas furnace wastes much more exergy to produce the same amount of heat.
I love rTorrent; it's my choice as well. But it does have some serious issues stemming from basic design decisions. I'll talk about those in the first half of my post; in the second I'll ask what we really like so much about rTorrent anyway.
Here's rTorrent's problem: The original rTorrent devs made a decision to do all file IO using writable shared memory maps. This is somewhat faster than "normal" file IO, but it creates a number of problems.
Problem 1: rTorrent can't download as many chunks simultaneously as other clients. Every chunk that's open is mapped in memory, taking up space (in memory of course, but also in address space). This adds up, and ends up meaning that there's actually a relatively low upper bound on the number of chunks rTorrent can simultaneously download. That means rTorrent is great when you're downloading a few torrents from a few fast seeds (and this saturates your pipe), but if you try to download lots of torrents simultaneously from many slow seeds, it won't be able to! Unfortunately, this is the real bottleneck for all but the most popular torrents, not your CPU speed!
Problem 2: rTorrent is incompatible with a number of popular filesystems. Obviously, rTorrent is incompatible with filesystems which do not support shared writable memory maps. In particular, it does not work with FUSE. This is especially a problem because it means rTorrent does not work with ntfs-3g -- which is an issue for many people with large external USB drives.
So what makes rTorrent good? I think the real answer is this: screen+rTorrent is easy, and it works. With this combination, it is very easy to set up a "remote torrent box" that you can ssh into. That's why I use it; it's wonderful for that.
Yet, I think this does not reflect well on rTorrent so much as it reflects poorly on other "parts of Linux."
Why do we like rTorrent? Because it runs on the console. Why do we like console apps? Because they work with screen. Why do we like screen? Because there is no good alternative for X clients.
There does exist a program called xmove which, when it was developed, aimed to be "screen for x clients." It works by acting as an "X proxy server" between the client and the real X server, and you can tell it to redirect to one X server or another. This is the obvious way to do it, and it would seem the right one. But in practice it does not work, because it cannot authenticate to X servers when you try to use ssh X forwarding. Basically, getting ssh, xmove, your x-server, and your x-client to cooperate is unwieldy and impractical. Someone who really understands X authentication could get it to work, I'm sure, but the cargo-cult "change this config file" solutions abounding on web forums either don't work or effectively disable X authentication, and xmove is no longer under development so the situation is unlikely to change. (And though it occurs to me to dig through the source code myself, I do not have the time to invest in learning the intricacies of X authentication!)
Now, you can use VNC software, but that's an ugly hack. Why on earth should I take screenshots of my programs and JPEG them when the whole goddamn point of X was to allow clients and servers to run on different machines? VNC is an ugly hack to get Win32 GUIs across a network; it's just an absurd extra layer on top of X.
The other alternative which might be worth considering is web interfaces for torrent clients; this achieves roughly the same thing as screen+rtorrent. uTorrent, for instance, has a nice one. However, methinx something is wrong when the authors of programs start duplicating their GUIs in web interfaces. We want to get a GUI across the network? That's what X is for. And if X cannot gracefully handle unreliable connections, then there's something wrong with the way we work with X.
I think the role of math as "leading" is oversold. I get the impression that a heck of a lot of math was inspired by physics. It seems as though the two develop in tandem. In particular, vector calc and E&M come to mind.
It can also be argued that philosophy is more basic than math. Some might say that we need our ontologies and epistemologies before we can do calculations involving them.
Your line of logic is illogical - it insists on everything being either black or white, with no shades of grey.
As joggle wrote (@joggle: Thank you!), that's what logic -- is! If you use the word "logical" to refer to any other style of thought, you're not really using the word correctly.
It's funny: Many people attach a value judgment to the word "logical," and they use the word to mean, variously, "making sense," or "rational." Alas, these are more general ideas than logic!
A friend pointed this out to me. Any way of viewing the world consists of two components: ontology (what exists in the world), and epistemology (what we know about these things).
The logical worldview is just one of these.
In logic, the ontology is that there are facts which are either true or false, and the epistemology is that we know a fact is either true, false, or unknown.
It seems you don't like the choices we made in building this worldview. That's fine! Yet if you're not using this ontology and epistemology, then you're not being logical. (But you might nevertheless make sense!;-) )
Another option is a probabilistic worldview. Here, we keep the same ontology: There are facts which are true or false. However, we change the epistemology: We have a degree of belief ranging from 0 to 1, which replaces the Boolean "true" or "false" of logic.
Although belief in this system is in "shades of grey," being is not; it is still black or white -- so I don't think a probabilistic worldview is what you're looking for either.
It sounds like what you really want is this third option: Fuzzy logic. Here, we keep the same epistemology as logic -- we either know or do not know things -- but rather we change the ontology: Facts can simultaneously be partially true, and partially false. E.g., we know that a statement is 80% true and 20% false.
We can work with a fuzzy worldview.
Let's try the statement, "You and I are the same." Obviously, we are separate objects, so on the one hand, this is false. Yet we are both humans, so on the other, this is true. A fuzzy worldview can give us a way out: The statement "You and I are the same" might be 80% true and 20% false.
Now let's try, "I am the same as a dog." Well, a dog and I are both mammals. More, I believe that we both have emotions, that we both love and hate, experience joy and sadness. But a dog and I also clearly have less in common than do you and I. So perhaps the statement "I am the same as a dog" is only 40% true and 60% false.
What about the statement, "I am the same as a magnet?" If we have a fuzzy worldview, I doubt this is 100% false!
If so, can the statement "A magnet is capable of feeling" be 100% false?
What about the statement, "No God exists?"
This isn't exactly trolling. It's more like poking your assumptions to see what you really mean when you use phrases like "critical thought."
Very nice! This is much better than what many of my elementary teachers did. Let's hope your students take your lessons and apply them in other classes!;-)
I should add, however, that it's entirely possible for multiplying flowers to make sense if you come up with a consistent set of rules for doing so.:-)
Take the idea of a metric space, for instance. In particular, consider R^2 with a non-Euclidean metric (say, Manhattan distance, for a simple example). It is self-consistent and makes perfect sense -- but if you've been drilled with "d = sqrt( (x2-x1)^2 + (y2-y1)^2 )" for a long time, then it's "wrong."
So what if we define,
Flowers = {Violet, Daisy, Tulip}
And define a multiplication function,
mul : Flowers X Flowers --> Flowers
as, (here I switch to C-like pseudocode, since "mathy" notation is getting cumbersome in forum-limited HTML)
flower mul(flower a, flower b)
{ ..if(a == Violet OR b == Violet) {return Violet;} ..if(a == Daisy) {return b;} ..if(b == Daisy) {return a;} ..if(a == Tulip AND b == Tulip) {return Violet;}
}
Then it's perfectly reasonable to define,
flower square(flower x)
{ ..return mul(x, x);
}
in which case we can also define the square root as the inverse mapping, in which case,
1 - Violet has two square roots: Tulip and Violet
2 - The square root of Daisy is Daisy,
3 - The square root of Tulip does not exist -- or is at least not a flower
We can also define an addition function sensibly as,
I feel like there are lots of ways to make pantheist / panpsychist / hylozoist beliefs (or even some kinds of primitive animism) consistent with observation.
Drawing inspiration from the early hylozoists: How can you know what a magnet experiences when it pulls bits of iron towards itself? Is it longing? Does it "want?"
Does it have a soul?
"That's nonsense," you say; "It's just a lump of matter." Yet if you truly are a materialist (in the philosophical sense: "The material universe is all there is.") then you have to acknowledge that you are just so much matter yourself. That's perfectly reasonable, but it leaves a few questions: Why do you think or feel? How do you explain your consciousness? And there are only a few logical ways to deal with these questions.
Either (1) the magnet feels and so do you (in which case it is quite sensible to speak of a "spirit in all things"), or (2) the magnet does not feel and neither do you (in which case, it is no worse for me to destroy you than for me to destroy any other Turing machine), or (3) you are somehow different from the magnet (in which case, that "something different" can reasonably be called a "soul.")
I'm getting a somewhat different vibe when I reread your posts now: It seems your main issue is with bailing out people who chose mortgages with absurd terms, and on this I mostly agree with you. If you bought more house than you can afford, you shouldn't be living in that house.
(That said, we should require that lenders forgive the absurd interest they were charging. We shouldn't subsidize McMansions; we also shouldn't sanction lending practices that are essentially white-collar scams.)
So on the particular substantive issues being discussed here, we probably agree for the most part.
Rather, I was responding to the political philosophy you expressed, which did strike me as quite libertarian (I wasn't referring to the party in particular), since it emphasized "property rights" as good and "socialism" as bad.
As for your response:
You're talking about preemptively protecting yourself from rights violations with further rights violations.
Are you saying that I am violating my own rights by not going outdoors? Or is it that I am somehow violating the right of people on the streets at night to see me? What rights violation is taking place?
I do see that I am preemptively avoiding a rights violation; I think that' about as far as you can push "rights" semantics here.
That is an emergency situation and has no bearings on determining how a normal (non-emergency) community should function.
But no! My entire point was that publicly available health care in the normal society would have prevented that emergency!
Of course, my epidemic example is a little over-dramatic. In practice, the "emergencies" that happen are smaller: People get pneumonia and lose a week of work (or worse, try to work anyway and get everyone else sick); Mom's breast cancer spreads to her liver because she didn't get a mammogram early enough to catch it; a child requires special education and cannot contribute to society because he didn't receive adequate medical care when he was born premature; etc. Each of these seems like it does not affect you, but together they place a load on society which in fact does you harm, and the philosophical obsession with personal property is myopic.
Let me make a comparison.
Cuba has an infant mortality rate of 5.93 deaths/1,000 live births. The United States has an infant mortality rate of 6.3 deaths/1,000 live births. Cuba is slightly better.
Life expectancy at birth in Cuba is 77.27 years. Life expectancy at birth in the U.S. is 78.14 years. The US is slightly better, but Cuba is on par -- despite being in the tropics and having to cope with, e.g., dengue fever.
The U.S. has a per-capita GDP of $46,000. Cubans are just as healthy, despite having a GDP of just $4,500 -- one tenth that of the U.S.
The moral of the story is: National health care is efficient, and it improves quality of life.
I give Cuba as a particularly striking example, which I would hope would embarrass Americans. But socialized medicine is also the dominant system in Europe, and by most metrics life is very nice for Europeans.
Dude, you're not thinking clearly. Commercial transactions don't capture all value.
I live in a city. When there are a ton of desperate poor around, it affects my quality of life. I can't go outside at night.
By myself, I cannot do a damn thing to change this: I do not have the resources. If we want to change the city, we require collective action. Government is the means by which collective action is achieved.
If an epidemic spreads through the city, simply having enough money to pay for my own medical bills isn't enough. No: What was really needed was for the first poor schmuck who caught the disease to begin with and started spreading it around to have received adequate medical care before the situation ballooned out of control.
Libertarianism is dogs eating dogs. You might win, but it won't have been very pleasant for you even if you do.
What I'm saying is that you can't make statements about existence or non-existence without definitions.
We have no consistent definitions for what God might be. There is of course the tired old man-in-the-sky interpretation, which is clearly false, but less well-defined, mystical interpretations -- especially those that don't particularly make predictions about the world -- simply aren't well-enough defined for us to even begin talking about them with the precise mathematical language of existence and non-existence. It's just nonsense to try.
I was on a team in college that built both hybrid-electric and straight E85 racecars. In this competition, power-to-weight and handling were everything!
So this is exactly how we built those cars. They were a space frame covered with aircraft fabric. Prior to that, we had been using fiberglass shells, but the aircraft fabric was so much lighter that I expect it's what we'll use for the foreseeable future.
After it is stretched tight over the frame and heat-shrunk, that stuff is like a drum head. I don't see flutter as a problem!
Sometimes I wonder if Democrats were bending over for Bush these past eight years for precisely that reason. The more you let your opponent fuck up the country, the better you look, eh?
I'm sure you can find some troops which do not follow the rules. They are the exception, and not the rule. Why would I want to support an organization which specifically, openly, and spitefully discriminates against me?
I think it depends on what part of the country you're in. In a red state, maybe you're right. In the northeast, scouting is pretty much 100% secular in my experience.
Dude, you need to stop hating people just because they believe in God. It's fucking irrelevant 99% of the time.
You hate religious people because they're intolerant? Well, here's irony: So are you!
Don't you realize that all you're perpetrating is cultural bigotry? Whether you practice a religion (and if you do, which one you practice) is almost entirely determined by the culture you were born into -- the place on the map, the socioeconomic group, the particular family. Congratulations, you're an atheist: Don't you realize how much of that is simply because of your education level -- which in turn is strongly determined by the income level of your parents when you were growing up? I know it's nice to feel superior to everybody else, but right now you're being really goddamn caustic.
Most religious people -- and no, I don't count myself as one of them -- are just as good as you are. I've known about as many intelligent, open-minded and generally good people who ascribe strongly to a religion as those who don't. The religious ones all have one thing in common: They see their religion as a path for themselves, and not as something they need to assault their neighbors with.
As for the Scouts: There are two basic classes of problems that affect the organization. The first is that the people currently running the national office are a bunch of reactionaries. The second is that -- like all things -- Scouting is a product of its time, so, yes, it has some military and religious overtones. But had you actually been involved in Scouting -- at least in any reasonable troop -- you'd know that that simply wasn't the point. It was just completely fucking irrelevant. Do you think Boy Scouts is like church? If it is, it sure as hell isn't being done right.
And what's your solution? Boycott scouts? Sounds like a plan: Rather than taking a really fucking good idea -- "Let's provide a structured way for boys to learn practical life and outdoor skills, to gain independence and learn to lead themselves instead of being led by adult authority (Yes! Don't you realize how important a part of Scouting this is?)" -- and getting involved even though there's some politics involved that you don't like; let's dismiss the whole thing entirely! That sounds great! *rolls eyes*
And look: When GP used the phrase "so-called atheists," he wasn't mocking the idea that there is no god. No, I'm pretty sure he was just mocking people like you who think it matters that you don't believe in a god. Really, I don't care.
Debating the existence of God is a waste of everybody's time, because it's ill-defined. It's not true; it's not false; the closest I can come to an answer is mu. It doesn't fucking mean anything. So stop thinking you're special, some kind of oppressed minority, because you could afford enough education to develop an atheistic worldview.
And don't go fucking Godwin. Religion is by definition (nice Latin) a totalitarian regime? C'mon! There are a billion instances in history of religion being just the opposite. Do words and phrases like "mysticism" or "The Protestant Reformation" mean anything to you?
More generally, I'm sick and fucking tired of people who pretend to be educated and liberal and progressive acting like goddamned bigots. Get the hell over yourself and your prejudices. Most religious people are decent. Most people who don't believe in any religion at all are just as good. Most Boy Scouts are just kids learning skills that you were too lazy to learn, and they don't give a damn about your philosophical angst.
Basically, just stop thinking that narcissistic "liberal" bigotry is any different from reactionary conservative bigotry. And stop condemning anyone associated with something just because there's some politics involved that you don't like. The politics will change.
And then, after you sober up from your masturbatory navel-gazing, start thinking about how there are actually real problems in the world. Those are the things that real progressives want to solve.
In particular: "lifetime number of sexual partners was the best predictor of HSV-2 infection (Bassett et al., 1993)."
* (Warning: They did a Western blot test here, which I understand tends to have false negatives, in which case all of the numbers given in Table 2 are actually underestimates of the real prevalence.)
With this in mind, may I suggest the following revision: "
I don't mind dating a girl that has been with everybody, as long as she had a good shower afterwards, and a full STD screening." There are still some things the screening can easily miss (e.g., warts -- they're often not visible to the naked eye), so screening doesn't completely "undo" the statistical significance of lots of partners, but it goes a long way.
(Don't buy the modern feminist bullshit. "Slut" is an insult for a reason: It's shorthand for "statistically more likely to unwittingly cause harm to subsequent sexual partners by spreading disease." Me, I don't call incurable infections "empowering." Feminists shouldn't trivialize themselves with this shit when they could be working to address substantive political and economic issues affecting women. But what do I know; I'm just using science.)
Mod up! Good info here. I'm curious about this now; I wonder if small doctors' offices like the ones I was talking about maintain a similar level of security? I'm sure they hadn't modified the hardware (as different from your case); the computers I've seen each time I've looked have clearly just been vanilla Dell models. I wonder if they at least leave them off the internet as AC suggested? There are hints that they don't, but now I need to investigate this more to know for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why the current weapons laws are completely backwards. The weapons that are illegal are exactly the ones we need to protect democracy, and the weapons that are legal are exactly the ones we should ban.
For instance, there is no reason for handguns to be available. They are not tools of war so much as of murder.
Antitank weapons, RPGs, and heavy-caliber machineguns, however, we should have. You can't arm a rebellion with the "Saturday night specials" used to rob take-out pizza restaurants.
I know that at first glance this sounds absurd, like I'm trying to write satire -- but I'm not. It's true that I'm not sure that I'm entirely serious, but I really do think that the logic is there.
Semantics. Parent might as well have said, "I've come to accept that our representatives just don't represent us."
I wonder how much simple size has to do with it. The country is just too big for our voices to be heard. We are not faces, or even communities, but just pliable masses.
Everybody wants a Messiah!
"Obama! Obama! Rescue me! You are the Anointed One, and perfect in my sight!"
Yet he's just another politician. In fact, I think his campaign has been the most calculatingly PR-driven of the bunch. The man doesn't even have a platform (yes, I've read his website), just a bunch of slogans involving abstract nouns.
People say Obama's a great orator, too, but I don't even see that. Honestly, I think they just think "black man = good speaker" (It's part of the stereotype, if you haven't noticed, along with being good at basketball). But have you actually listened to him? He uses more "verbal junk" -- "umms" and "uuhs" and the like -- than the other candidates, and really the only thing he has going for him is his voice (which, yes, is good; it's a nice tenor. Hillary sounded too treble. Blame women's smaller Adam's apple.)
I saw Obama speak firsthand at the beginning of his campaign before I knew about him, and since I had heard so many people raving about him I was expecting good things. Let me tell you: I was incredibly disappointed. He was ushered on stage on cue, gave an empty speech about "not cowtowing to special interests" and "change" (Good god, can it get any more cliche? The man's speeches are the political equivalent of Hallmark cards.) and then left while some bubbly, upbeat alt-rock played ("Suddenly I see!") before anybody could ask him a single question. The whole thing was, so transparently, a scripted show.
For a comparison: When I saw Wesley Clark a few years earlier (when he was running for president), he gave a speech in which he outlined specific policy objectives, and reserved time at the end to answer questions. He understood what he was talking about!
I feel reasonably confident that I know what I would be voting for if I voted for McCain. Unfortunately, I don't like what that would be: A president focused on foreign policy to the neglect of domestic issues, who would tend to support the use of military force, even in situations when it might not be needed. But what about Obama? The man is an actor; which concrete policies would he advocate? He just hasn't said!
And what he has said, I don't believe. Let me give you a concrete example for why that is. Obama had maintained for most of his campaign that it would be his strategy to reach out to the groups that we, the U.S., currently refuse to talk to, and that, moreover, he would try to do so in a way that would make the U.S. be respected as a fair arbiter. In particular, he had spoken of the need (1) for a Palestinian state, and (2) to engage the Palestinians. Yet recently at AIPAC, he swore he would not talk to HAMAS (exactly contradicting his previous promises of engagement) and that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided" -- thereby immediately displaying a partiality which has lost him almost all of his credibility with the Arabs with whom he has been telling us he will be uniquely able to negotiate.
We have just had eight years under a president who didn't know what the hell he was doing. Do we really need four more?
But what choice have we got? McCain isn't exactly appealing himself.
"Democracy." Heh! It's just the process by which the idiots you went to high school with run the country. And by "run," I mean, "are told what to decide by television ads."
I agree completely with parent. A few additional thoughts:
Although I second the suggestion to get a book, I'd also suggest the following website: All About Circuits. It's basically a short textbook, online. It has some nice intuitive explanations.
As for books... My top choice would be Hambley's Electronics. It's a complete, correct, and accessible introduction to the subject. It's a great book. The Art of Electronics is also very good.
I also completely agree with the suggestion to get a solderless breadboard. That's the way to have fun with this stuff. You can always build a soldered, "final" circuit later (which is fun in its own way), but I have to admit that that's more of an exercise in fabrication than it is a good way to explore electronics.
For me, the crucial central component of a lab bench is an oscilloscope, and that will be the hardest thing to get inexpensively. Digital scopes are wonderful! I haven't investigated this thoroughly, but you might go with a USB "oscilloscope" that uses a laptop/PC for its interface, as these tend to be cheaper.
Finally, there's the question of "what circuits should I build?" Personally, I always found op-amp circuits to be a lot of fun, and I think audio circuits are often a good choice as they are interesting and practical, give a good way to experiment with filters and many other analog signal processing circuits, and yet are low-enough frequency that the parasitics are negligible (i.e., the schematic is an accurate representation of what you've built).
As a side note, although the 741 is an armored tank and as cheap as dirt, my personal favorite op-amp is the LM6132. They're more expensive, but man are they beautiful! :-) (Seriously though, just buy 741s unless you're running off batteries or really need something faster.)
Oh! And while we're on the subject of buying things: The place to look is Digikey. You need to lump together orders to save on shipping, but it is almost always the best choice for buying chips.
I like the rest of your post, but this is apples and oranges. In fact -- and I know I'm stretching the language here -- I'd say that a gas furnace is 100% inefficient, since it extracts no exergy from the high-exergy fuel that it burns.
I know, we hear these numbers all the time -- but they're bogus. Too often the "efficiencies" we're told are based on energy, when what really matters is exergy. (I.e., a bathtub full of lukewarm water has a ton of energy, but very little exergy.) In this case, the coal plant has extracted most of the exergy from the coal and the waste heat that warms your house is low exergy, whereas a gas furnace wastes much more exergy to produce the same amount of heat.
I love rTorrent; it's my choice as well. But it does have some serious issues stemming from basic design decisions. I'll talk about those in the first half of my post; in the second I'll ask what we really like so much about rTorrent anyway.
Here's rTorrent's problem: The original rTorrent devs made a decision to do all file IO using writable shared memory maps. This is somewhat faster than "normal" file IO, but it creates a number of problems.
Problem 1: rTorrent can't download as many chunks simultaneously as other clients.
Every chunk that's open is mapped in memory, taking up space (in memory of course, but also in address space). This adds up, and ends up meaning that there's actually a relatively low upper bound on the number of chunks rTorrent can simultaneously download. That means rTorrent is great when you're downloading a few torrents from a few fast seeds (and this saturates your pipe), but if you try to download lots of torrents simultaneously from many slow seeds, it won't be able to! Unfortunately, this is the real bottleneck for all but the most popular torrents, not your CPU speed!
Problem 2: rTorrent is incompatible with a number of popular filesystems.
Obviously, rTorrent is incompatible with filesystems which do not support shared writable memory maps. In particular, it does not work with FUSE. This is especially a problem because it means rTorrent does not work with ntfs-3g -- which is an issue for many people with large external USB drives.
So what makes rTorrent good? I think the real answer is this: screen+rTorrent is easy, and it works. With this combination, it is very easy to set up a "remote torrent box" that you can ssh into. That's why I use it; it's wonderful for that.
Yet, I think this does not reflect well on rTorrent so much as it reflects poorly on other "parts of Linux."
Why do we like rTorrent? Because it runs on the console. Why do we like console apps? Because they work with screen. Why do we like screen? Because there is no good alternative for X clients.
There does exist a program called xmove which, when it was developed, aimed to be "screen for x clients." It works by acting as an "X proxy server" between the client and the real X server, and you can tell it to redirect to one X server or another. This is the obvious way to do it, and it would seem the right one. But in practice it does not work, because it cannot authenticate to X servers when you try to use ssh X forwarding. Basically, getting ssh, xmove, your x-server, and your x-client to cooperate is unwieldy and impractical. Someone who really understands X authentication could get it to work, I'm sure, but the cargo-cult "change this config file" solutions abounding on web forums either don't work or effectively disable X authentication, and xmove is no longer under development so the situation is unlikely to change. (And though it occurs to me to dig through the source code myself, I do not have the time to invest in learning the intricacies of X authentication!)
Now, you can use VNC software, but that's an ugly hack. Why on earth should I take screenshots of my programs and JPEG them when the whole goddamn point of X was to allow clients and servers to run on different machines? VNC is an ugly hack to get Win32 GUIs across a network; it's just an absurd extra layer on top of X.
The other alternative which might be worth considering is web interfaces for torrent clients; this achieves roughly the same thing as screen+rtorrent. uTorrent, for instance, has a nice one. However, methinx something is wrong when the authors of programs start duplicating their GUIs in web interfaces. We want to get a GUI across the network? That's what X is for. And if X cannot gracefully handle unreliable connections, then there's something wrong with the way we work with X.
I think the role of math as "leading" is oversold. I get the impression that a heck of a lot of math was inspired by physics. It seems as though the two develop in tandem. In particular, vector calc and E&M come to mind.
It can also be argued that philosophy is more basic than math. Some might say that we need our ontologies and epistemologies before we can do calculations involving them.
*looks at what he hath wrought*
When I go to these lengths to procrastinate, something is terribly wrong....
As joggle wrote (@joggle: Thank you!), that's what logic -- is! If you use the word "logical" to refer to any other style of thought, you're not really using the word correctly.
It's funny: Many people attach a value judgment to the word "logical," and they use the word to mean, variously, "making sense," or "rational." Alas, these are more general ideas than logic!
A friend pointed this out to me. Any way of viewing the world consists of two components: ontology (what exists in the world), and epistemology (what we know about these things).
The logical worldview is just one of these.
In logic, the ontology is that there are facts which are either true or false, and the epistemology is that we know a fact is either true, false, or unknown.
It seems you don't like the choices we made in building this worldview. That's fine! Yet if you're not using this ontology and epistemology, then you're not being logical. (But you might nevertheless make sense! ;-) )
Another option is a probabilistic worldview. Here, we keep the same ontology: There are facts which are true or false. However, we change the epistemology: We have a degree of belief ranging from 0 to 1, which replaces the Boolean "true" or "false" of logic.
Although belief in this system is in "shades of grey," being is not; it is still black or white -- so I don't think a probabilistic worldview is what you're looking for either.
It sounds like what you really want is this third option: Fuzzy logic. Here, we keep the same epistemology as logic -- we either know or do not know things -- but rather we change the ontology: Facts can simultaneously be partially true, and partially false. E.g., we know that a statement is 80% true and 20% false.
We can work with a fuzzy worldview.
Let's try the statement, "You and I are the same." Obviously, we are separate objects, so on the one hand, this is false. Yet we are both humans, so on the other, this is true. A fuzzy worldview can give us a way out: The statement "You and I are the same" might be 80% true and 20% false.
Now let's try, "I am the same as a dog." Well, a dog and I are both mammals. More, I believe that we both have emotions, that we both love and hate, experience joy and sadness. But a dog and I also clearly have less in common than do you and I. So perhaps the statement "I am the same as a dog" is only 40% true and 60% false.
What about the statement, "I am the same as a magnet?" If we have a fuzzy worldview, I doubt this is 100% false!
If so, can the statement "A magnet is capable of feeling" be 100% false?
What about the statement, "No God exists?"
This isn't exactly trolling. It's more like poking your assumptions to see what you really mean when you use phrases like "critical thought."
Very nice! This is much better than what many of my elementary teachers did. Let's hope your students take your lessons and apply them in other classes! ;-)
I should add, however, that it's entirely possible for multiplying flowers to make sense if you come up with a consistent set of rules for doing so. :-)
Take the idea of a metric space, for instance. In particular, consider R^2 with a non-Euclidean metric (say, Manhattan distance, for a simple example). It is self-consistent and makes perfect sense -- but if you've been drilled with "d = sqrt( (x2-x1)^2 + (y2-y1)^2 )" for a long time, then it's "wrong."
So what if we define,
Flowers = {Violet, Daisy, Tulip}
And define a multiplication function,
mul : Flowers X Flowers --> Flowers
as, (here I switch to C-like pseudocode, since "mathy" notation is getting cumbersome in forum-limited HTML)
flower mul(flower a, flower b){
}
Then it's perfectly reasonable to define,
flower square(flower x){
}
in which case we can also define the square root as the inverse mapping, in which case,
1 - Violet has two square roots: Tulip and Violet
2 - The square root of Daisy is Daisy,
3 - The square root of Tulip does not exist -- or is at least not a flower
We can also define an addition function sensibly as,
flower add(flower a, flower b){
}
And then, although we do not have an entire field of flowers, we can at least play ring around the rosie. ;-)
I feel like there are lots of ways to make pantheist / panpsychist / hylozoist beliefs (or even some kinds of primitive animism) consistent with observation.
Drawing inspiration from the early hylozoists: How can you know what a magnet experiences when it pulls bits of iron towards itself? Is it longing? Does it "want?"
Does it have a soul?
"That's nonsense," you say; "It's just a lump of matter." Yet if you truly are a materialist (in the philosophical sense: "The material universe is all there is.") then you have to acknowledge that you are just so much matter yourself. That's perfectly reasonable, but it leaves a few questions: Why do you think or feel? How do you explain your consciousness? And there are only a few logical ways to deal with these questions.
Either (1) the magnet feels and so do you (in which case it is quite sensible to speak of a "spirit in all things"), or (2) the magnet does not feel and neither do you (in which case, it is no worse for me to destroy you than for me to destroy any other Turing machine), or (3) you are somehow different from the magnet (in which case, that "something different" can reasonably be called a "soul.")
Devil's advocate, at your service.
I'm getting a somewhat different vibe when I reread your posts now: It seems your main issue is with bailing out people who chose mortgages with absurd terms, and on this I mostly agree with you. If you bought more house than you can afford, you shouldn't be living in that house.
(That said, we should require that lenders forgive the absurd interest they were charging. We shouldn't subsidize McMansions; we also shouldn't sanction lending practices that are essentially white-collar scams.)
So on the particular substantive issues being discussed here, we probably agree for the most part.
Rather, I was responding to the political philosophy you expressed, which did strike me as quite libertarian (I wasn't referring to the party in particular), since it emphasized "property rights" as good and "socialism" as bad.
As for your response:
You're talking about preemptively protecting yourself from rights violations with further rights violations.Are you saying that I am violating my own rights by not going outdoors? Or is it that I am somehow violating the right of people on the streets at night to see me? What rights violation is taking place?
I do see that I am preemptively avoiding a rights violation; I think that' about as far as you can push "rights" semantics here.
That is an emergency situation and has no bearings on determining how a normal (non-emergency) community should function.But no! My entire point was that publicly available health care in the normal society would have prevented that emergency!
Of course, my epidemic example is a little over-dramatic. In practice, the "emergencies" that happen are smaller: People get pneumonia and lose a week of work (or worse, try to work anyway and get everyone else sick); Mom's breast cancer spreads to her liver because she didn't get a mammogram early enough to catch it; a child requires special education and cannot contribute to society because he didn't receive adequate medical care when he was born premature; etc. Each of these seems like it does not affect you, but together they place a load on society which in fact does you harm, and the philosophical obsession with personal property is myopic.
Let me make a comparison.
Cuba has an infant mortality rate of 5.93 deaths/1,000 live births. The United States has an infant mortality rate of 6.3 deaths/1,000 live births. Cuba is slightly better.
Life expectancy at birth in Cuba is 77.27 years. Life expectancy at birth in the U.S. is 78.14 years. The US is slightly better, but Cuba is on par -- despite being in the tropics and having to cope with, e.g., dengue fever.
The U.S. has a per-capita GDP of $46,000. Cubans are just as healthy, despite having a GDP of just $4,500 -- one tenth that of the U.S.
The moral of the story is: National health care is efficient, and it improves quality of life.
I give Cuba as a particularly striking example, which I would hope would embarrass Americans. But socialized medicine is also the dominant system in Europe, and by most metrics life is very nice for Europeans.
I am not a religious man, but I know bad modding when I see it. Parent is by no means flamebait; the post is conciliatory, even. Mods: Please correct.
In fairness, what you get out of a system of logic depends entirely on the postulates you use.
If it is possible to postulate the existence of god(s) in a way consistent with observation, then it is not really illogical.
God doesn't really fail logic. It might fail Occam's Razor, but that's more of a rule-of-thumb than anything else.
Dude, you're not thinking clearly. Commercial transactions don't capture all value.
I live in a city. When there are a ton of desperate poor around, it affects my quality of life. I can't go outside at night.
By myself, I cannot do a damn thing to change this: I do not have the resources. If we want to change the city, we require collective action. Government is the means by which collective action is achieved.
If an epidemic spreads through the city, simply having enough money to pay for my own medical bills isn't enough. No: What was really needed was for the first poor schmuck who caught the disease to begin with and started spreading it around to have received adequate medical care before the situation ballooned out of control.
Libertarianism is dogs eating dogs. You might win, but it won't have been very pleasant for you even if you do.
What I'm saying is that you can't make statements about existence or non-existence without definitions.
We have no consistent definitions for what God might be. There is of course the tired old man-in-the-sky interpretation, which is clearly false, but less well-defined, mystical interpretations -- especially those that don't particularly make predictions about the world -- simply aren't well-enough defined for us to even begin talking about them with the precise mathematical language of existence and non-existence. It's just nonsense to try.
I was on a team in college that built both hybrid-electric and straight E85 racecars. In this competition, power-to-weight and handling were everything!
So this is exactly how we built those cars. They were a space frame covered with aircraft fabric. Prior to that, we had been using fiberglass shells, but the aircraft fabric was so much lighter that I expect it's what we'll use for the foreseeable future.
After it is stretched tight over the frame and heat-shrunk, that stuff is like a drum head. I don't see flutter as a problem!
Agreed; Obama is a collection of empty slogans engineered by a West Wing scriptwriter (fact!). But what good on Earth has Bush done for the world?
Sometimes I wonder if Democrats were bending over for Bush these past eight years for precisely that reason. The more you let your opponent fuck up the country, the better you look, eh?
I think it depends on what part of the country you're in. In a red state, maybe you're right. In the northeast, scouting is pretty much 100% secular in my experience.
Dude, you need to stop hating people just because they believe in God. It's fucking irrelevant 99% of the time.
You hate religious people because they're intolerant? Well, here's irony: So are you!
Don't you realize that all you're perpetrating is cultural bigotry? Whether you practice a religion (and if you do, which one you practice) is almost entirely determined by the culture you were born into -- the place on the map, the socioeconomic group, the particular family. Congratulations, you're an atheist: Don't you realize how much of that is simply because of your education level -- which in turn is strongly determined by the income level of your parents when you were growing up? I know it's nice to feel superior to everybody else, but right now you're being really goddamn caustic.
Most religious people -- and no, I don't count myself as one of them -- are just as good as you are. I've known about as many intelligent, open-minded and generally good people who ascribe strongly to a religion as those who don't. The religious ones all have one thing in common: They see their religion as a path for themselves, and not as something they need to assault their neighbors with.
As for the Scouts: There are two basic classes of problems that affect the organization. The first is that the people currently running the national office are a bunch of reactionaries. The second is that -- like all things -- Scouting is a product of its time, so, yes, it has some military and religious overtones. But had you actually been involved in Scouting -- at least in any reasonable troop -- you'd know that that simply wasn't the point. It was just completely fucking irrelevant. Do you think Boy Scouts is like church? If it is, it sure as hell isn't being done right.
And what's your solution? Boycott scouts? Sounds like a plan: Rather than taking a really fucking good idea -- "Let's provide a structured way for boys to learn practical life and outdoor skills, to gain independence and learn to lead themselves instead of being led by adult authority (Yes! Don't you realize how important a part of Scouting this is?)" -- and getting involved even though there's some politics involved that you don't like; let's dismiss the whole thing entirely! That sounds great! *rolls eyes*
And look: When GP used the phrase "so-called atheists," he wasn't mocking the idea that there is no god. No, I'm pretty sure he was just mocking people like you who think it matters that you don't believe in a god. Really, I don't care.
Debating the existence of God is a waste of everybody's time, because it's ill-defined. It's not true; it's not false; the closest I can come to an answer is mu. It doesn't fucking mean anything. So stop thinking you're special, some kind of oppressed minority, because you could afford enough education to develop an atheistic worldview.
And don't go fucking Godwin. Religion is by definition (nice Latin) a totalitarian regime? C'mon! There are a billion instances in history of religion being just the opposite. Do words and phrases like "mysticism" or "The Protestant Reformation" mean anything to you?
More generally, I'm sick and fucking tired of people who pretend to be educated and liberal and progressive acting like goddamned bigots. Get the hell over yourself and your prejudices. Most religious people are decent. Most people who don't believe in any religion at all are just as good. Most Boy Scouts are just kids learning skills that you were too lazy to learn, and they don't give a damn about your philosophical angst.
Basically, just stop thinking that narcissistic "liberal" bigotry is any different from reactionary conservative bigotry. And stop condemning anyone associated with something just because there's some politics involved that you don't like. The politics will change.
And then, after you sober up from your masturbatory navel-gazing, start thinking about how there are actually real problems in the world. Those are the things that real progressives want to solve.
So you weren't going for DoD money?
Are you sure? You might want to look at the data*.
In particular: "lifetime number of sexual partners was the best predictor of HSV-2 infection (Bassett et al., 1993)."
* (Warning: They did a Western blot test here, which I understand tends to have false negatives, in which case all of the numbers given in Table 2 are actually underestimates of the real prevalence.)
With this in mind, may I suggest the following revision: " I don't mind dating a girl that has been with everybody, as long as she had a good shower afterwards, and a full STD screening." There are still some things the screening can easily miss (e.g., warts -- they're often not visible to the naked eye), so screening doesn't completely "undo" the statistical significance of lots of partners, but it goes a long way.
(Don't buy the modern feminist bullshit. "Slut" is an insult for a reason: It's shorthand for "statistically more likely to unwittingly cause harm to subsequent sexual partners by spreading disease." Me, I don't call incurable infections "empowering." Feminists shouldn't trivialize themselves with this shit when they could be working to address substantive political and economic issues affecting women. But what do I know; I'm just using science.)
Mod up! Good info here. I'm curious about this now; I wonder if small doctors' offices like the ones I was talking about maintain a similar level of security? I'm sure they hadn't modified the hardware (as different from your case); the computers I've seen each time I've looked have clearly just been vanilla Dell models. I wonder if they at least leave them off the internet as AC suggested? There are hints that they don't, but now I need to investigate this more to know for sure.