1) on a console where they are locked up tighter than a stereotypical tight-ass' asshole.
Actually Sony are quite permissive when it comes to user control of downloaded content. You can install content you've purchased on up to five PS3's and every user account, whether on PSN or not, can use any content downloaded by another account on the same PS3. As DRM goes, I've seen a lot worse that what goes on at the Playstation Store, and I've rarely seen something better. Hopefully, Microsoft will see that this method works and will down their current policies in the next generation of consoles.
That said, Sony has a bad policy with regard to the encryption of data stored on the PS3. Let me put it this way; Backup your saves often.
As near as I can tell, aside from its absurdly incomprehensible addresses, the only real(and significant) problem with IPv6 is that it essentially requires everyone to upgrade to it at once. If I have an IPv6 address, I can't talk to the majority of the internet, which means I simultaneously need an IPv4 address, which means the rest of the internet has precious little reason to follow my example or even join an IPv6 network at all.
The essential problem here is the disconnected nature of IPv4 and IPv6. There really is no way to establish two way connections between these networks. You can't get Aunt Tilly's or anyone elses IPv4 network card to talk to an IPv6 network card without a significant upgrade, and there is general apathy and unwillingness to install such upgrades at all levels of the network. If a backbone ISP won't do it, why should a webhost, company, or regular user.
I've seen various comments suggesting that IPv4 scarcity will spur people to make the switch or that a "market based" solution will deliver us. You'd think people would figure out by now that the market cannot find its ass with both hands. If this situation is allowed to continue we will face indefinite IPv4 rationing and price gouging, increasingly more convoluted and disruptive NAT, and a general decline in the usefulness and global communications potential of the internet.
There is only one solution. The Law. Governments worldwide need to cut this Gordian knot by mandating that you cannot sell, provide, service or even eventually own any network connected device or OS that cannot use, by default, IPv6. We have the technology. The move needs to start with ISPs, retailers, hosting companies and business; These all need to be using, selling and servicing only IPv6 capable devices in three years. That's a realistic timespan. After this, home users and others will simply be told that after, say, 2015, IPv4 devices will no longer be permitted by law to connect to an ISPs network without a permit or the like.
Harsh. Possibly extremely disruptive and expensive. But if such steps are not taken then we will be stuck forever with expensive IPv4 address and the unholy scourge of NAT, three layers deep or more. It will be expensive. It will be painful. But it will be worth it. We need to get Y2K on this problem before the coming quagmire gums up and possibly fragments the internet.
Admittedly, I'm not an expert, but I'm looking forward to the end of NAT on every router.
India and Pakistan also have nuclear weapons, and their relationship is even more volatile than that between Iran and Israel. Why should the rest of us (especially those in countires without nuclear weapons anyway) care what weapons Iran develops?
Your example, like most examples against top posting, is artificial and disingenuous. Email conversations are not message board conversations, where third parties may enter in the middle of a discussion and might require some context. Generally, they are a linear conversation where the only reason for quoting previous emails is for the sake of completeness.
Very often, email conversations consists of one to two line replies. If we are to consider bottom posting, then after only a few brief exchanges, people will have to scroll down through a page/screen or more of text after every reply. This is especially irritating when 99% of the time both recipients know the full context of the discussion. So why must they be subjected to it over an over with bottom posting?
On a message board like this one, or Usenet, or any general forum when multiple parties are communicating, yes bottom posting should be preferred. But in one to one email bottom posting makes less sense.
I generally find that people adapt their style to the correct one for their setting. Top posting for email, bottom for newslists and forums. Linear flow for IM. Attempting to enforce a dogmatic, one size fits all approach to online, offline and textual conversations does not make any sense. Top posting for emails may irritate some, but imposing it by fiat on email users would be of detriment to the vast majority of them in their working and personal lives.
I mean, the web and computers are inherently 'visual' mediums.
Which part of Hypertext Transfer Protocol are you having trouble with? Just because you spend most of your time online watching youtube videos and browsing the latest AJAX powered dynamic rollercoaster does not mean that the rest of the web, and especially the parts where real work is done, are "inherently visual". Far from it.
I'm thinking geez...what a crock. NONE of the people needing training were handicapped...yet the rules still applied...
I'd like to take you to task on this, but Steve Krug has put this far more succinctly that I ever could. Read that link to become educated about 1) Why accessibility is important 2) Why most (able bodied) developers don't care about it, and 3) Why this problem persists (We haven't automated accessibility.)
The most important point Krug makes is the real reason you should care about and implement accessibility in your websites. "It's the right thing to do."
Top posting is not evil. It's a natural response to the fact that email dialogues begin at the top of the message. Just because you'd like the actual new content of the message to be all the way at the bottom doesn't mean everyone else does. Gmail does this right. Top or bottom posted, the quoted text is automatically hidden, as it should be. The first and only thing that should be seen by default in an email message is new content.
We need to put such trivialities behind us and deal with the real problem facing email today. Salutations and Valedictions. Why the hell to you put my name at the top or your name at the bottom when its says right at the top who the emails is from and to?! This madness must end!!!
I would argue that Twitter and Wave have the exact opposite effect. In the hands of an lucid and incisive orator, they are next to useless as a medium for the dissemination of ideas. On the other hand, for vapid, shrill and fallacious authors they are a godsend, enabling them to broadcast their general message of stupidity and ignorance to a wider field than ever before.
In a way, they are a microcosm of the Internet itself!
My experience with Brother is that they have little to no Linux support on any models. I tried in vain for years to get any Brother printer to print anything from Linux, and have only recently succeeded in printing from one on Jaunty using an outdated postscript driver for one of their older models. It wasn't easy, and the system was printing over the network via a windows machine anyway, so I can't say if it would have worked with a direct connection.
To top it off, they eat ink like a Tank eats petrol. Colour Brother printers that run out of yellow ink will refuse to print any document, whatsoever, until they are topped up. And usually they can handle only about ~200 pages before requiring a refill on one or more of their four ink wells. It costs about $30 to get a refill, and the system is locked down pretty tight against third party suppliers.
Brother sells plastic pastel printers on an one time basis to small businesses and home users who have not yet been burned by their shoddy products. Avoid.
Can anyone tell me why it costs nearly $10 to register a domain for a year? What is the profit margin on this? Who keeps the profit?
Well frankly, I profit from not having any domain name I want snapped up as part of a bulk script that buys a thousand names for a penny. Zero cost didn't work out so well for usenet, email and blog comments. What the hell makes you think that the magic of the market is going to find a better solution to the one we have now.
The idea that somehow installing a tracking device interferes with the owner's use of the vehicle is preposterous. It is even more preposterous to make that claim if the owner has no knowledge of the installation of the device.
Precisely. For example, it's clear that a concealed spy camera, placed discretely in people's living rooms or bedrooms can have no effect on their normal behavior or use of these rooms. So, it's clear that no one should need warrants to install such devices. To enforce such a debilitating requirement would give "empower" criminal citizens to do as they please within the privacy of their own homes. Clearly, an unjust and unfair outcome.
However, to equate it with pseudo-science is a disservice, and with advances in neurology, psychology is getting closer and closer to completely "hard" science every day.
I disagree. I have seen no reason to believe that any of those professions have made any progress whatsoever towards rigor and objectiveness. In fact, they've probably moved even farther into the depths of pseudoscience as time has gone by. Sloppy studies are still with us, and the softer sciences have done little and less to deal with them.
Ask yourself; how did intelligent design manage to convince so many people that it was a legitimate scientific discipline for so long? The answer is not to be found in fancy PR campaigns, prominent proponents or actual studies done. The truth is, it managed to masquerade as a science for so long because that's just how low the bar for modern science has sunk. This is the path we have set for our society, and when the homeopaths and astrologers start showing up in university departments we will have only ourselves to blame.
And here I thought nerds were the type of people who would support the seeking of knowledge and the establishment of data.:-/
We do, but this study is neither.
This is a pop/junk science questionnaire with only the filmiest pretense of rigor. Remember, people in the soft "sciences" cannot simply make claims and dress them up with rhetorical argument anymore. They have to be "scientific". This means that they dress up in white coats, conduct "studies" and present a few graphs, equations and/or statistics(Once again see . Apparently, this is enough to convince some that they are in fact contributing usefully to human knowledge. However, in almost all cases, you will find that these studies are politically or ideologically motivated and funded, with the intent to push or "prove" a point of view.
This study has successfully managed to push the point of view that "gamers are aggressive to strangers". This is what is being reported on Slashdot and countless other sites. Do you imagine that the author's are ignorant of this? Do you imagine that they will seek to correct this "misconception". I doubt it. I imagine the entire purpose of the study, from its inception, was to denounce and mischaracterise people who play video games. See how anti-social they are? They are meaner to strangers. This was more than likely the ultimate aim of the study.
Look who conducted this study. And evolutionary psychologist. People who spend their time coming up with all manner of ridiculous rationalisations for how we have "evolved" our various cultural behaviors; a premise logically flawed from its very outset. They are among the worst kind of cargo-cultists, debasing and perverting scientific methods in an effort to gain legitimacy for a field of study on par with phrenology. Sometimes I think that if phrenology has been discovered today, it would likewise be an accepted "scientific" practice.
Granting legitimacy to these people simply because they throw out a smattering of statistics is no better than doing so because they wore a white lab coat. This isn't science. It's science theater. A pantomime whose aim is convince the onlooker that rigor is being applied to the study, not to obtain rigor itself. The lay public is smarter than they are given credit for and legitimizing these studies damages public support for science is the long term. If we ask people to accept junk as science, then we shouldn't be surprised when they conclude that all science is junk.
Your argument fails utterly to explain the continued rule of the Chinese Communist party in the the largest trading partner country of most western nations. Where are the Chinese middle-class masses, yearning for their freedom?
Wow. Talk about a runaway argument. Iran's developing nuclear weapons is a threat to Israel, so the only alternative the Israelis have is to prematurely attack, so it's the Iranian's own fault they got bombed. They are "demanding" to be attacked? This is the kind of logic best seen in wife beaters.
Simply having nuclear weapons is not the same as having them on a missile currently flying through the air towards Tel Aviv. There's a significant difference. Frankly, the Israeli first strike policy has in recent years become a belligerent one. Perhaps it works when you're bombing Hamas militia men in the Gaza strip, but international warfare is a different game. Israeli jets flying 2000km to strike targets in another country because they might be a threat sometime in the future is not going to go down well with most reasonable people in the world. Who would be the real rogue state at that point?
It's clear that Iran's goal in gaining nuclear weapons is to gain greater military influence in the middle east, including Israel. But we should all ask ourselves how it came to this point. Has everybody really been as diplomatic as they could have been? What is bombing Iranian sites likely to accomplish in the long term? Is Iran having nuclear weapons really that much worse than their current chemical and biological arsenals? Might we not in fact be better off with a mutual nuclear deterrent in the Middle East region, akin to the MAD policies during the cold war?
People need start thinking rationally about issues like this. This black and white, us and them mentality is taken too extremes these days by people that ought to know better. When did we lose our ability for reasoned debate?
The way it works is if you're a threat to us, or a region containing friends of ours, then we don't want you to have them (Iran, Syria).
Who's "us"*, and why should Iran or Syria give a damn what we think? Try not to forget here that Iran is at the end of the day a sovereign nation of over 70 million people, and owes the west little and less. Saying that the Iranians are somehow not entitled to nuclear weapons by default, or have to be "allowed" to develop them, is as baseless as applying the concept of "fairness" to nuclear arsenals.
They have the money, means and motivation to develop nuclear weapons. Sanctions, condemnations and diplomatic pressure can all be railed against them, but the reality is that short of using military force, the only people who can stop the Iranians developing the bomb are the Iranians. As someone who lives in a country without nuclear weapons, I for one do not see any moral justification in using such force as a means to such an end.
Frankly, given their usage history, it's clear that nuclear weapons are little more than an international dick waving competition. If the Iranians want to pull their yokes out and dangle them about with the rest of the boys, I really don't care. If that makes all the rest of the boys feel a bit smaller, well, I really couldn't care less.
Thank's for that. I have been wondering exactly how signals are in fact decorrelated. I knew that any two continuous signals must be correlated almost everywhere along their runs, but I wasn't sure how to account for this. I'll be sure to add your comment to the page.
Basically my point with the Saturn/S&P correlation was to show just how spurious a correlation study can be. I think it's worth noting that along with the Hill's criteria, most studies probably don't even bother to perform such checks as linear detrending, etc. A lot of what we see in correlation studies is just as spurious and incomplete as that example. By the way, it turns out I was not the first to stumble across this result, showing that again, there is not correlation so silly that someone will not accept it as proof of causation.
Basically, my core point is that a lot of correlation studies lack rigour of the most basic kind, and are just a number thrown out to make a point. The more I learn about the subject, the more convinced of this point I become.
There is no question that the domestication process had a major impact on dogs. There has been a kind of taboo on looking at the other side of this, though: what were the effects on the humanoids, how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs?
Man is more likely to have been affected by its domestication of annual plants like wheat. Growing wheat required settling down into stable communities, tending the plants meticulously, harvesting and storing them as a mass collective effort. Can't remember where I read it, but man has been described as a subservient species to plants like wheat which modified themselves to capture a host organisms. At any rate, I think at least that the adage "You are what you eat" does apply in some small way to the evolution of humans.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Sony are quite permissive when it comes to user control of downloaded content. You can install content you've purchased on up to five PS3's and every user account, whether on PSN or not, can use any content downloaded by another account on the same PS3. As DRM goes, I've seen a lot worse that what goes on at the Playstation Store, and I've rarely seen something better. Hopefully, Microsoft will see that this method works and will down their current policies in the next generation of consoles.
That said, Sony has a bad policy with regard to the encryption of data stored on the PS3. Let me put it this way; Backup your saves often.
As near as I can tell, aside from its absurdly incomprehensible addresses, the only real(and significant) problem with IPv6 is that it essentially requires everyone to upgrade to it at once. If I have an IPv6 address, I can't talk to the majority of the internet, which means I simultaneously need an IPv4 address, which means the rest of the internet has precious little reason to follow my example or even join an IPv6 network at all.
The essential problem here is the disconnected nature of IPv4 and IPv6. There really is no way to establish two way connections between these
networks. You can't get Aunt Tilly's or anyone elses IPv4 network card to talk to an IPv6 network card without a significant upgrade, and there is general apathy and unwillingness to install such upgrades at all levels of the network. If a backbone ISP won't do it, why should a webhost, company, or regular user.
I've seen various comments suggesting that IPv4 scarcity will spur people to make the switch or that a "market based" solution will deliver us. You'd think people would figure out by now that the market cannot find its ass with both hands. If this situation is allowed to continue we will face indefinite IPv4 rationing and price gouging, increasingly more convoluted and disruptive NAT, and a general decline in the usefulness and global communications potential of the internet.
There is only one solution. The Law. Governments worldwide need to cut this Gordian knot by mandating that you cannot sell, provide, service or even eventually own any network connected device or OS that cannot use, by default, IPv6. We have the technology. The move needs to start with ISPs, retailers, hosting companies and business; These all need to be using, selling and servicing only IPv6 capable devices in three years. That's a realistic timespan. After this, home users and others will simply be told that after, say, 2015, IPv4 devices will no longer be permitted by law to connect to an ISPs network without a permit or the like.
Harsh. Possibly extremely disruptive and expensive. But if such steps are not taken then we will be stuck forever with expensive IPv4 address and the unholy scourge of NAT, three layers deep or more. It will be expensive. It will be painful. But it will be worth it. We need to get Y2K on this problem before the coming quagmire gums up and possibly fragments the internet.
Amen.
India and Pakistan also have nuclear weapons, and their relationship is even more volatile than that between Iran and Israel. Why should the rest of us (especially those in countires without nuclear weapons anyway) care what weapons Iran develops?
In a society where perception has become reality; what's the difference?
Your example, like most examples against top posting, is artificial and disingenuous. Email conversations are not message board conversations, where third parties may enter in the middle of a discussion and might require some context. Generally, they are a linear conversation where the only reason for quoting previous emails is for the sake of completeness.
Very often, email conversations consists of one to two line replies. If we are to consider bottom posting, then after only a few brief exchanges, people will have to scroll down through a page/screen or more of text after every reply. This is especially irritating when 99% of the time both recipients know the full context of the discussion. So why must they be subjected to it over an over with bottom posting?
On a message board like this one, or Usenet, or any general forum when multiple parties are communicating, yes bottom posting should be preferred. But in one to one email bottom posting makes less sense.
I generally find that people adapt their style to the correct one for their setting. Top posting for email, bottom for newslists and forums. Linear flow for IM. Attempting to enforce a dogmatic, one size fits all approach to online, offline and textual conversations does not make any sense. Top posting for emails may irritate some, but imposing it by fiat on email users would be of detriment to the vast majority of them in their working and personal lives.
Which part of Hypertext Transfer Protocol are you having trouble with? Just because you spend most of your time online watching youtube videos and browsing the latest AJAX powered dynamic rollercoaster does not mean that the rest of the web, and especially the parts where real work is done, are "inherently visual". Far from it.
I'd like to take you to task on this, but Steve Krug has put this far more succinctly that I ever could. Read that link to become educated about
1) Why accessibility is important
2) Why most (able bodied) developers don't care about it, and
3) Why this problem persists (We haven't automated accessibility.)
The most important point Krug makes is the real reason you should care about and implement accessibility in your websites. "It's the right thing to do."
Top posting is not evil. It's a natural response to the fact that email dialogues begin at the top of the message. Just because you'd like the actual new content of the message to be all the way at the bottom doesn't mean everyone else does. Gmail does this right. Top or bottom posted, the quoted text is automatically hidden, as it should be. The first and only thing that should be seen by default in an email message is new content.
We need to put such trivialities behind us and deal with the real problem facing email today. Salutations and Valedictions. Why the hell to you put my name at the top or your name at the bottom when its says right at the top who the emails is from and to?! This madness must end!!!
I would argue that Twitter and Wave have the exact opposite effect. In the hands of an lucid and incisive orator, they are next to useless as a medium for the dissemination of ideas. On the other hand, for vapid, shrill and fallacious authors they are a godsend, enabling them to broadcast their general message of stupidity and ignorance to a wider field than ever before.
In a way, they are a microcosm of the Internet itself!
My experience with Brother is that they have little to no Linux support on any models. I tried in vain for years to get any Brother printer to print anything from Linux, and have only recently succeeded in printing from one on Jaunty using an outdated postscript driver for one of their older models. It wasn't easy, and the system was printing over the network via a windows machine anyway, so I can't say if it would have worked with a direct connection.
To top it off, they eat ink like a Tank eats petrol. Colour Brother printers that run out of yellow ink will refuse to print any document, whatsoever, until they are topped up. And usually they can handle only about ~200 pages before requiring a refill on one or more of their four ink wells. It costs about $30 to get a refill, and the system is locked down pretty tight against third party suppliers.
Brother sells plastic pastel printers on an one time basis to small businesses and home users who have not yet been burned by their shoddy products. Avoid.
Well frankly, I profit from not having any domain name I want snapped up as part of a bulk script that buys a thousand names for a penny. Zero cost didn't work out so well for usenet, email and blog comments. What the hell makes you think that the magic of the market is going to find a better solution to the one we have now.
$10 a year is bargain.
That'll show 'em!!
If you've got the dough, Icann has the domain! Would you like a TLD with that?
Precisely. For example, it's clear that a concealed spy camera, placed discretely in people's living rooms or bedrooms can have no effect on their normal behavior or use of these rooms. So, it's clear that no one should need warrants to install such devices. To enforce such a debilitating requirement would give "empower" criminal citizens to do as they please within the privacy of their own homes. Clearly, an unjust and unfair outcome.
There are terrorists, pedophiles and drug dealers out there. Any arguments for civil liberties and the rule of law are automatically invalid!
I disagree. I have seen no reason to believe that any of those professions have made any progress whatsoever towards rigor and objectiveness. In fact, they've probably moved even farther into the depths of pseudoscience as time has gone by. Sloppy studies are still with us, and the softer sciences have done little and less to deal with them.
Ask yourself; how did intelligent design manage to convince so many people that it was a legitimate scientific discipline for so long? The answer is not to be found in fancy PR campaigns, prominent proponents or actual studies done. The truth is, it managed to masquerade as a science for so long because that's just how low the bar for modern science has sunk. This is the path we have set for our society, and when the homeopaths and astrologers start showing up in university departments we will have only ourselves to blame.
We do, but this study is neither.
This is a pop/junk science questionnaire with only the filmiest pretense of rigor. Remember, people in the soft "sciences" cannot simply make claims and dress them up with rhetorical argument anymore. They have to be "scientific". This means that they dress up in white coats, conduct "studies" and present a few graphs, equations and/or statistics(Once again see . Apparently, this is enough to convince some that they are in fact contributing usefully to human knowledge. However, in almost all cases, you will find that these studies are politically or ideologically motivated and funded, with the intent to push or "prove" a point of view.
This study has successfully managed to push the point of view that "gamers are aggressive to strangers". This is what is being reported on Slashdot and countless other sites. Do you imagine that the author's are ignorant of this? Do you imagine that they will seek to correct this "misconception". I doubt it. I imagine the entire purpose of the study, from its inception, was to denounce and mischaracterise people who play video games. See how anti-social they are? They are meaner to strangers. This was more than likely the ultimate aim of the study.
Look who conducted this study. And evolutionary psychologist. People who spend their time coming up with all manner of ridiculous rationalisations for how we have "evolved" our various cultural behaviors; a premise logically flawed from its very outset. They are among the worst kind of cargo-cultists, debasing and perverting scientific methods in an effort to gain legitimacy for a field of study on par with phrenology. Sometimes I think that if phrenology has been discovered today, it would likewise be an accepted "scientific" practice.
Granting legitimacy to these people simply because they throw out a smattering of statistics is no better than doing so because they wore a white lab coat. This isn't science. It's science theater. A pantomime whose aim is convince the onlooker that rigor is being applied to the study, not to obtain rigor itself. The lay public is smarter than they are given credit for and legitimizing these studies damages public support for science is the long term. If we ask people to accept junk as science, then we shouldn't be surprised when they conclude that all science is junk.
You are one in a thousand.
Your argument fails utterly to explain the continued rule of the Chinese Communist party in the the largest trading partner country of most western nations. Where are the Chinese middle-class masses, yearning for their freedom?
Wow. Talk about a runaway argument. Iran's developing nuclear weapons is a threat to Israel, so the only alternative the Israelis have is to prematurely attack, so it's the Iranian's own fault they got bombed. They are "demanding" to be attacked? This is the kind of logic best seen in wife beaters.
Simply having nuclear weapons is not the same as having them on a missile currently flying through the air towards Tel Aviv. There's a significant difference. Frankly, the Israeli first strike policy has in recent years become a belligerent one. Perhaps it works when you're bombing Hamas militia men in the Gaza strip, but international warfare is a different game. Israeli jets flying 2000km to strike targets in another country because they might be a threat sometime in the future is not going to go down well with most reasonable people in the world. Who would be the real rogue state at that point?
It's clear that Iran's goal in gaining nuclear weapons is to gain greater military influence in the middle east, including Israel. But we should all ask ourselves how it came to this point. Has everybody really been as diplomatic as they could have been? What is bombing Iranian sites likely to accomplish in the long term? Is Iran having nuclear weapons really that much worse than their current chemical and biological arsenals? Might we not in fact be better off with a mutual nuclear deterrent in the Middle East region, akin to the MAD policies during the cold war?
People need start thinking rationally about issues like this. This black and white, us and them mentality is taken too extremes these days by people that ought to know better. When did we lose our ability for reasoned debate?
Who's "us"*, and why should Iran or Syria give a damn what we think? Try not to forget here that Iran is at the end of the day a sovereign nation of over 70 million people, and owes the west little and less. Saying that the Iranians are somehow not entitled to nuclear weapons by default, or have to be "allowed" to develop them, is as baseless as applying the concept of "fairness" to nuclear arsenals.
They have the money, means and motivation to develop nuclear weapons. Sanctions, condemnations and diplomatic pressure can all be railed against them, but the reality is that short of using military force, the only people who can stop the Iranians developing the bomb are the Iranians. As someone who lives in a country without nuclear weapons, I for one do not see any moral justification in using such force as a means to such an end.
Frankly, given their usage history, it's clear that nuclear weapons are little more than an international dick waving competition. If the Iranians want to pull their yokes out and dangle them about with the rest of the boys, I really don't care. If that makes all the rest of the boys feel a bit smaller, well, I really couldn't care less.
*Oh the pun-age
I have yet to hear a coherent reason why Iran as a nation is not entitled to develop nuclear weapons.
I summon; Mega-Ultra-Chicken.
Since this logic does not apply to sex offenders, why should it apply to anyone else?
Thank's for that. I have been wondering exactly how signals are in fact decorrelated. I knew that any two continuous signals must be correlated almost everywhere along their runs, but I wasn't sure how to account for this. I'll be sure to add your comment to the page.
Basically my point with the Saturn/S&P correlation was to show just how spurious a correlation study can be. I think it's worth noting that along with the Hill's criteria, most studies probably don't even bother to perform such checks as linear detrending, etc. A lot of what we see in correlation studies is just as spurious and incomplete as that example. By the way, it turns out I was not the first to stumble across this result, showing that again, there is not correlation so silly that someone will not accept it as proof of causation.
Basically, my core point is that a lot of correlation studies lack rigour of the most basic kind, and are just a number thrown out to make a point. The more I learn about the subject, the more convinced of this point I become.
Man is more likely to have been affected by its domestication of annual plants like wheat. Growing wheat required settling down into stable communities, tending the plants meticulously, harvesting and storing them as a mass collective effort. Can't remember where I read it, but man has been described as a subservient species to plants like wheat which modified themselves to capture a host organisms. At any rate, I think at least that the adage "You are what you eat" does apply in some small way to the evolution of humans.