The title is confusing. Expertise is not a science.
Right. But when you talk about how the scientific investigation of X is done, you can refer to that subject as 'the science of X'. Not a common way to phrase it, but it is correct. Would you rather they called it 'expertisology'?
The point still stands that just because "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" doesn't prove that EVERY time you have a hammer, you're falsely believing something is a nail.
Well, it isn't so much about believing it's a nail, it's about assuming the hammer is the right tool for every job just because it's worked before or it's what you're good at or it's all you've got. I think we'd all agree that sometimes we do get lucky and the next problem turns out to be 'how can I open walnuts' (which would be my example), but it's still sloppy thinking to make that assumption, even if it turns out to be right once in a while.
Anyway, from my perspective you were thinking "The 'things are made of atoms' model works really well in everyday life, so I'll apply it to the entire universe!", and it failed. Or restated: when all you really understand are atoms, everything starts to look like it's made of atoms.:)
>>>>When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And when you have a 20th-century binary computer, everything looks like a 20th century binary computer program.
>>>When you discover the atom, everything looks like its made of atoms. Oh wait, most things actually are!
>>Actually, virtually nothing is made of atoms [nasa.gov]. Sorry about that.
>... has nothing to do whatsoever with the point I was making, so awesome, thanks for contributing.
Actually, he was right on point. You made exactly the same mistake, and for essentially the same reason.
Sorry, but where I live 44TW * 20% = 8.8TW and 8.8TW is considered less than 15TW.
Pointing out the current rate that heat flows out of the Earth is like pointing out the current rate that coal is deposited. It does set a limit on the sustainable rate that we could tap that resource, but that's not the type of resource usage KOS and I were suggesting. With 10^31 joules 'saved up', we could use a thousand times as much power as we do now for generations without making a dent in that 'stockpile'.
You may be completely right about its technical/economic feasibility, but that doesn't make your original argument relevant.
The bigger problem if we use enough geothermal to freeze the upper mantle
Which would take an engineering project lasting millennia, spanning much of Earth, and done miles underground and much of it beneath the seabed. And we have to believe that nobody discovers the danger, even after planet-wide geological changes occur, and this method of harvesting energy remains one of the most reasonable for the entire time-span.
No, if it was possible to tap that energy it could supply us for quite a long time, even at an energy usage rate a thousand times what we have now - the mantle would just cool a bit. It wouldn't be 'renewable', but if aliens/time travelers/angels dug the holes for us tomorrow (and assured us that it wouldn't cause earthquakes, etc) we wouldn't have to worry about energy problems for quite some time.
The real problem is that, like wind and solar, it's hard to collect enough of that highly diffuse energy to be useful.
Won't the core stop rotating and the Earth's protective magnetic field disappear if we used too much of it? Granted, that would not be an easy thing to do.
Technically true but irrelevant, because radioactivity in the Earth generates more than twice as much power as mankind currently uses, and even without that it would take several billion years at our current rate of energy usage to drain the heat that's already there.
If two particles of dark matter can annihilate each other to produce a particle of antimatter and a particle of matter, it follows that the dark matter particles must be as massive as regular matter/antimatter.
Well, some particular kind of 'regular' matter/antimatter particle, yes.
Q: What's worse that a Fukushima-style radiation leak?
A: A Fukushima-style radiation leak in a small, enclosed space that you're going to have to live in for the next 300 years.
Q: What's better that a Fukushima-style radiation leak?
A: A Fukushima-style radiation leak in a module almost completely surrounded by empty space with no direct connection to the radiation-proof box you live in.
Interracial marriage and homosexuality? You seriously believe that?
Interracial marriage would be a stretch, but several states would have quite a fight on their hands.
As for homosexuality, Bowers v. Hardwick was in 1986, and Lawrence v. Texas wasn't until 2003. So yes, seriously.
I'm a sort of moderate libertarian, but Ron Paul and the capital-'L' Libertarian party are a bit too extreme for me. So I end up supporting free-market Democrats and open-minded Republicans. The only reason I'd vote for Paul is to pressure both parties to adopt a few of his positions, or to help 'rotate' the political axis from left/right to libertarian/authoritarian.
They really could have done well if they're taken the approach the we have different, complimentary ways of thinking, so the machines need us the same way we still need computers.
-Morpheus points to a giant blackboard covered in math.
Morpheus: This equation describes an image. Do you know what that image is of?
Neo: No.
Morpheus: Even the computers of the 20th century could do this in a fraction of a second.
-Hologram of the girl in red appears.
Morpheus: Now... do you know if she's pretty?
Neo: Well, yeah. It's obvious.
Morpheus: Not to a machine. It could take minutes for a machine just to figure out if it had seen her earlier today. By the time it figures out that she's a woman, that she's attractive, and that she smiled at it earlier, you'd already have her phone number.
Neo: Wait, so they need us?
Morpheus: As much as we need them. You would never think this -gestures at the virtual world around them- is something a human being is doing without the help of a machine. And you shouldn't think that the Agent that's after you is on his own either. He borrows the thoughts of people in the matrix to help predict what you'll do next, to know how to intimidate you, to know how to pry information out of you. The dry humor, the need to gloat - that's not the way a machine works, that's how his flesh and blood tools work.
Neo: So the matrix...
Morpheus: Is how they train us, get us to be their intuition and creativity, and above all so we can teach them to make better machines. This isn't about survival - we're too much more capable as a team. It's about which side ends up in the driver's seat for the rest of time, and what gets put away when it isn't being used.
The problem is that it fosters an industry of organic chop shops, kidnapping people and parting them out, in order to have a supply of fresh organs to sell you.
The formal market and the black market are competing methods of supplying a needed good - the more organs that are available through legitimate channels the fewer people will try to procure through illegitimate ones. To borrow your 'chop shop' analogy, we should ban the sale of all auto parts to prevent auto theft - does that make any sense?
Whilst I agree that running your boss over and taking an axe to a server are fairly unlikely impulses to act upon, having sex with aforementioned married hottie is something that could very realistically happen is an appropriate situation presented itself.
Well, she could get divorced, but then again my boss could start gunning people down in the parking lot, and the server is likely to end up being auctioned off in the fairly near future... But my point was as things are now I have fantasies that I'm in no danger of acting on, as do other people, and I don't know why people with a sexual interest in children can't be that way as well.
And as for the hottie in the current situation, after getting involved with a couple of separated women, I will never get anywhere near that kind of crazy drama again.
Who do you think hires and fires Catholic priests?
Having some photos of girls that might be 16-17 showing off their tits (developed tits) at a club or party is not child porn.
In the real world maybe not, but according to the legal system it certainly is.
I would think that somebody that has pornographic pictures of children nude or engaged in sexual acts is a reasonable indicator that... at some point, [they] will attempt to bring their own fantasies to life.
Absolutely not. Limiting myself to fantasies I had today at work, I can think of three - running my boss over with a car, having sex with the married hottie, and taking an axe to a certain server - that I would never act upon. I can't bring myself to believe that people who fantasize about children are somehow the only ones who must, without fail, act on their every dark desire.
If I found child pornography on a computer in my company I would investigate it immediately. Absolute first thing I would determine is if the employee is actually accessing it, and is it accessible from the public Internet. Meaning, was my company hacked and the system being used as a dump to serve child porn. Either way, once my initial investigation was complete (which would be that day), I would involve the authorities without question.
The phrase my joke was referring to only mentioned oral.
So the 'Buttfucker enablement act' isn't going to sit will with the voters.
That's not the name of the legislation the lawmakers take credit for, that's the nickname of the court case ten years down the line that they will blame on 'judicial activism'.
You're right that there are two ways to do it, as I mentioned in my first post. One way makes "daytime" and "Monday" completely distinct things (Tuesday starts the middle of the local solar day), the other makes new days start at some arbitrary time (say 9:00 UTC) which seems at least as confusing as our current time zones.
If we really wanted to we could have September 21st start as a Tuesday in 2011, go to Wednesday at 9:00 AM, and become 2012 at 2:00 PM. Heck we could even make September 21st become October 21st at 10:15 PM, (and have October 1st follow October 31st.) But all that would do is add needless confusion.
Unless there's a good reason, why not keep with the easy standard of having longer time measurements increment when the smaller ones reset (i.e. year, month, day, and day of the week all change at the same time)?
Do you often have problems remembering whether to go to work on Sunday or on Monday?
No. But if the days change at 9 AM, and my boss asks on Friday "When did you clock in Monday?", it isn't clear if he's talking about the first day of the week where I clocked in at 9:15, or the second when I clocked in at 8:45. And in more informal situations, like when we "meet for lunch on Wednesday", there's lots of room for confusion where the day switches around midday. Yes, you can add more words to clarify, but what does the average person gain from all of this?
Tradition is not a good argument to use when discussing a technical issue.
My point was that the traditional system was better because of actual properties it has, not that it was better because it was traditional. Having a convenient standard is a good thing, and human beings generally have common time periods of being active broken up by sleeping periods, and a good terminology should reflect that.
Tradition is not a good argument to use when discussing a technical issue.
But this isn't just a technical issue, you're talking a huge amount of effort changing the way billions of people express time, most of whom will not significantly benefit. Tradition may be irrelevant when choosing the best system, but as a practical matter the effort to change it isn't. What you have is a solution without a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The title is confusing. Expertise is not a science.
Right. But when you talk about how the scientific investigation of X is done, you can refer to that subject as 'the science of X'. Not a common way to phrase it, but it is correct. Would you rather they called it 'expertisology'?
The point still stands that just because "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" doesn't prove that EVERY time you have a hammer, you're falsely believing something is a nail.
Well, it isn't so much about believing it's a nail, it's about assuming the hammer is the right tool for every job just because it's worked before or it's what you're good at or it's all you've got. I think we'd all agree that sometimes we do get lucky and the next problem turns out to be 'how can I open walnuts' (which would be my example), but it's still sloppy thinking to make that assumption, even if it turns out to be right once in a while.
Anyway, from my perspective you were thinking "The 'things are made of atoms' model works really well in everyday life, so I'll apply it to the entire universe!", and it failed. Or restated: when all you really understand are atoms, everything starts to look like it's made of atoms. :)
>>>>When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And when you have a 20th-century binary computer, everything looks like a 20th century binary computer program.
>>>When you discover the atom, everything looks like its made of atoms. Oh wait, most things actually are!
>>Actually, virtually nothing is made of atoms [nasa.gov]. Sorry about that.
>... has nothing to do whatsoever with the point I was making, so awesome, thanks for contributing.
Actually, he was right on point. You made exactly the same mistake, and for essentially the same reason.
Do your fingers double as keyboard-sensitive erotic zones, also?
Oh, yes.
Yes, YES, YES!!!!
And I'm spent.
Sorry, but where I live 44TW * 20% = 8.8TW and 8.8TW is considered less than 15TW.
Pointing out the current rate that heat flows out of the Earth is like pointing out the current rate that coal is deposited. It does set a limit on the sustainable rate that we could tap that resource, but that's not the type of resource usage KOS and I were suggesting. With 10^31 joules 'saved up', we could use a thousand times as much power as we do now for generations without making a dent in that 'stockpile'.
You may be completely right about its technical/economic feasibility, but that doesn't make your original argument relevant.
Even if it was doable, it isn't sustainable. It also isn't clean, as it releases methane, brings up heavy metals and radioactive materials.
True, but that's a different claim than:
I say that it's not enough on its own now to support our current, ever growing, energy needs.
The bigger problem if we use enough geothermal to freeze the upper mantle
Which would take an engineering project lasting millennia, spanning much of Earth, and done miles underground and much of it beneath the seabed. And we have to believe that nobody discovers the danger, even after planet-wide geological changes occur, and this method of harvesting energy remains one of the most reasonable for the entire time-span.
Really not too concerned.
The real problem is that, like wind and solar, it's hard to collect enough of that highly diffuse energy to be useful.
Won't the core stop rotating and the Earth's protective magnetic field disappear if we used too much of it? Granted, that would not be an easy thing to do.
Technically true but irrelevant, because radioactivity in the Earth generates more than twice as much power as mankind currently uses, and even without that it would take several billion years at our current rate of energy usage to drain the heat that's already there.
If two particles of dark matter can annihilate each other to produce a particle of antimatter and a particle of matter, it follows that the dark matter particles must be as massive as regular matter/antimatter.
Well, some particular kind of 'regular' matter/antimatter particle, yes.
So they wouldn't be very weakly interactive.
Why?
Q: What's worse that a Fukushima-style radiation leak?
A: A Fukushima-style radiation leak in a small, enclosed space that you're going to have to live in for the next 300 years.
Q: What's better that a Fukushima-style radiation leak?
A: A Fukushima-style radiation leak in a module almost completely surrounded by empty space with no direct connection to the radiation-proof box you live in.
Interracial marriage and homosexuality? You seriously believe that?
Interracial marriage would be a stretch, but several states would have quite a fight on their hands.
As for homosexuality, Bowers v. Hardwick was in 1986, and Lawrence v. Texas wasn't until 2003. So yes, seriously.
I'm a sort of moderate libertarian, but Ron Paul and the capital-'L' Libertarian party are a bit too extreme for me. So I end up supporting free-market Democrats and open-minded Republicans. The only reason I'd vote for Paul is to pressure both parties to adopt a few of his positions, or to help 'rotate' the political axis from left/right to libertarian/authoritarian.
Or they need us to solve captchas.
They really could have done well if they're taken the approach the we have different, complimentary ways of thinking, so the machines need us the same way we still need computers.
-Morpheus points to a giant blackboard covered in math. ... do you know if she's pretty?
Morpheus: This equation describes an image. Do you know what that image is of?
Neo: No.
Morpheus: Even the computers of the 20th century could do this in a fraction of a second.
-Hologram of the girl in red appears.
Morpheus: Now
Neo: Well, yeah. It's obvious.
Morpheus: Not to a machine. It could take minutes for a machine just to figure out if it had seen her earlier today. By the time it figures out that she's a woman, that she's attractive, and that she smiled at it earlier, you'd already have her phone number.
Neo: Wait, so they need us?
Morpheus: As much as we need them. You would never think this -gestures at the virtual world around them- is something a human being is doing without the help of a machine. And you shouldn't think that the Agent that's after you is on his own either. He borrows the thoughts of people in the matrix to help predict what you'll do next, to know how to intimidate you, to know how to pry information out of you. The dry humor, the need to gloat - that's not the way a machine works, that's how his flesh and blood tools work.
Neo: So the matrix...
Morpheus: Is how they train us, get us to be their intuition and creativity, and above all so we can teach them to make better machines. This isn't about survival - we're too much more capable as a team. It's about which side ends up in the driver's seat for the rest of time, and what gets put away when it isn't being used.
The problem is that it fosters an industry of organic chop shops, kidnapping people and parting them out, in order to have a supply of fresh organs to sell you.
The formal market and the black market are competing methods of supplying a needed good - the more organs that are available through legitimate channels the fewer people will try to procure through illegitimate ones. To borrow your 'chop shop' analogy, we should ban the sale of all auto parts to prevent auto theft - does that make any sense?
Whilst I agree that running your boss over and taking an axe to a server are fairly unlikely impulses to act upon, having sex with aforementioned married hottie is something that could very realistically happen is an appropriate situation presented itself.
Well, she could get divorced, but then again my boss could start gunning people down in the parking lot, and the server is likely to end up being auctioned off in the fairly near future... But my point was as things are now I have fantasies that I'm in no danger of acting on, as do other people, and I don't know why people with a sexual interest in children can't be that way as well.
And as for the hottie in the current situation, after getting involved with a couple of separated women, I will never get anywhere near that kind of crazy drama again.
I think I strongly disagree with this, but I'd like it if you went into a little more detail before I end up responding to something you didn't mean.
Is a Catholic Bishop considered an employer?
Who do you think hires and fires Catholic priests?
Having some photos of girls that might be 16-17 showing off their tits (developed tits) at a club or party is not child porn.
In the real world maybe not, but according to the legal system it certainly is.
I would think that somebody that has pornographic pictures of children nude or engaged in sexual acts is a reasonable indicator that ... at some point, [they] will attempt to bring their own fantasies to life.
Absolutely not. Limiting myself to fantasies I had today at work, I can think of three - running my boss over with a car, having sex with the married hottie, and taking an axe to a certain server - that I would never act upon. I can't bring myself to believe that people who fantasize about children are somehow the only ones who must, without fail, act on their every dark desire.
If I found child pornography on a computer in my company I would investigate it immediately. Absolute first thing I would determine is if the employee is actually accessing it, and is it accessible from the public Internet. Meaning, was my company hacked and the system being used as a dump to serve child porn. Either way, once my initial investigation was complete (which would be that day), I would involve the authorities without question.
This I agree with, without reservation.
You can't just abolish the oral part alone...
The phrase my joke was referring to only mentioned oral.
So the 'Buttfucker enablement act' isn't going to sit will with the voters.
That's not the name of the legislation the lawmakers take credit for, that's the nickname of the court case ten years down the line that they will blame on 'judicial activism'.
"...no politician wants to go down in state history as the one who made oral sex officially legal."
You'd think introducing the Blowjob Legalization Act would make a politician a bit more electable...
It may SOUND "absurd" but there are a LOT of people arguing for exactly that in this thread.
Where?
You're right that there are two ways to do it, as I mentioned in my first post. One way makes "daytime" and "Monday" completely distinct things (Tuesday starts the middle of the local solar day), the other makes new days start at some arbitrary time (say 9:00 UTC) which seems at least as confusing as our current time zones.
Unless there's a good reason, why not keep with the easy standard of having longer time measurements increment when the smaller ones reset (i.e. year, month, day, and day of the week all change at the same time)?
Do you often have problems remembering whether to go to work on Sunday or on Monday?
No. But if the days change at 9 AM, and my boss asks on Friday "When did you clock in Monday?", it isn't clear if he's talking about the first day of the week where I clocked in at 9:15, or the second when I clocked in at 8:45. And in more informal situations, like when we "meet for lunch on Wednesday", there's lots of room for confusion where the day switches around midday. Yes, you can add more words to clarify, but what does the average person gain from all of this?
Tradition is not a good argument to use when discussing a technical issue.
My point was that the traditional system was better because of actual properties it has, not that it was better because it was traditional. Having a convenient standard is a good thing, and human beings generally have common time periods of being active broken up by sleeping periods, and a good terminology should reflect that.
Tradition is not a good argument to use when discussing a technical issue.
But this isn't just a technical issue, you're talking a huge amount of effort changing the way billions of people express time, most of whom will not significantly benefit. Tradition may be irrelevant when choosing the best system, but as a practical matter the effort to change it isn't. What you have is a solution without a problem.
Oh, and it pissed off the French, which was always a plus to the Brits back then.
Still is.