Chapter 5 concludes with on why smart people believe such odd things?
Because they are not very smart.
I have found that many people confuse being educated with being intelligent or "smart". They are most certainly not the same thing. In fact, it's my experience that the more educated someone is the more likely it is that they will be conned by homeopaths, scaremongers and the like. This is education up to, as especially including, the university level. This is probably due to hubris on the part of educated people that they're "too smart/educated to be conned".
The only people I knew who were conned by "The Great Global Warming Swindle" were third level graduates. Same goes for people who frequent homeopaths and acupuncturists. They've almost all graduated from universities with adequate degrees. Some with STEM degrees!
I personally do not think that our education system promotes or advocates critical thinking. All of these people have received mathematics education to at least secondary school level, and I take this as solid evidence that teaching mathematics does not promote critical thinking by itself. Western secondary education at least does not seem to create a smart populace. An educated one perhaps, but as this post is all about, those two concepts are most certainly not the same thing.
I think where you said 'explicit' you meant to say 'implicit' since you're saying that those who stay in a religion are IMPLYING, not directly stating, that they are in support of the religions stances.
No, I meant explicit. Indeed I meant it as the very opposite of implicit approval. They ARE stating directly that they support the religious stances of their church leaders, and also support the actions and directions of the church.
I find it shocking that you would attack that religious freedom of expression so openly by saying that our country should abandon the religious for which rights.....
I never said any such things. I said that if an organization is being lead in a direction that its followers disapprove of, then they should either try to change that direction or leave. I never said anything about curtailing religious freedom of expression, and it's also clear that you ignored the second link in my post.
Having said that, I do object to religious organizations behaving politically, as the LDS church has done. There is a line between a church declaring its stance, and a church behaving like a political party. Donating $20 million dollars to a referendum campaign crosses that line. Such behavior is prohibited in many european countries, notably France, and with good reason. Church leaders should not wield political power. This is a lesson which I fear the US will have to learn the hard way.
The OP was saying you have to leave your religion if one person or even a substantial group of people who claim to be of your religion does something you don't like.
That's not what I said. I said that if your organization is being lead in a direction you oppose and you have no say in that direction, then you should leave. There's no point letting other people drag you about. It is the leadership of an organization that is the problem. If they become extremists, then you should get out, otherwise you are explicitly supporting extremism.
The moderates usually have no authority over the extremists, so how should they police them?
Leave the group.
If the organization or group you are in is being lead in a direction you are opposed to and you have no say in that course, then you should leave. To stay is to explicitly condone the actions of the leadership. The best contemporary example of this in the context of religious groups is in fact the "Mormon" Church of Latter Day Saints, which has seen many followers leave because of the way in which it conducted itself during the Proposition 8 vote.
Here was a church leadership which injected its organization voluminously and inappropriately into a contemporary political issue. They turned an institution of private religious belief into public political party. Their church is now feeling the backlash from this, and attempting to take off their political cap as quickly as they put it on is simply not possible.
By staying in their church, Mormons explicitly endorse their churches actions and stances. Ostensibly on the issue of gay marriage, but more importantly on the long term decision that the LDS church can and will inject itself and its considerable demographic and monetary clout directly and voluminously into any political debate that takes its fancy. Many european states, learning from experience, outrightly ban such behavior, but in the US, obviously things are different.
You can stay and support the actions of your church leaders, or you can leave. There are other sects, and other interpretations. The same goes for Muslims, particularly those in western countries, who frequent mosques with radical imams. Protestants break off and form new churches all the time. Even catholics can pick other pulpits if they take exception to their current priest. Staying to avoid social difficulty, or pretending that your presence is not being used to support your church leader's views and actions, are not valid excuses. Staying to "change from within" is only valid if you are actively doing so, otherwise it too is an excuse.
People can and should leave a church if that church's actions or beliefs go against their own principles. To stay is to abandon those principles.
You stood to have your reputation and indeed your life ruined. Claiming entrapment would not have been an adequate defense. You left yourself wide open to not only statutory rape laws, but also workplace harassment laws. You had no legal protection or recourse and were essentially at the mercy of the whims of probably up to three people.
Your initial stance was prudent and appropriate and you should have stuck to it, and not allowed yourself to be talked or persuaded out of it. Being lucky is not worth the risk to you of getting unlucky even once. I don't care how happy your relationship was. It's just not worth it. Your story and example could get a lot of naive young people into a lot of trouble.
Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Woman on plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents? Narrator: You wouldn't believe.
Woman on plane: Which car company do you work for? Narrator: A major one.
Interesting. Thanks for the link. I've always been an elite fan and it appears that an online space sim community has finally implemented landing on planets, which will make it the first game, to my knowladeg, to have done so since Frontier First Encounters back in 1995.
If you count the very deep, layered, challenging and dramatic storylines dealing with superheros in tights, then yes, American comics are far from juvenile.
This could have been a good idea, if it weren't for the ridiculous love interest angle.
Let's face it, how many fundamental concepts about science and engineering do we learn, not in school, but from educational programs or segments on TV or in other media. MacGyver, Star Trek, Mythbusters for more solid science. A lot of it is exaggerated yes, but the fact is that dramatic presentations of science do help inspire young people to see science as a career path.
Love interests though, are tacky, hackneyed and generally trite, especially in a work dealing with teenagers. Angst ridden, irrational and melodramatic farces are not the appropriate setting in which to sell science, mathematics or statistics. Many teenagers will be attracted to these fields, and indeed others, as an escape from all the bullshit they have to put up with in teenage social circles. Throwing all that bullshit right back into a publication designed to sell science is going to be counterproductive. People do not read Sci-Fi novels for the sex(in most cases).
It is particularly poor form for the writer to make the main character a young girl, and to have her more interested in a silly relationship than in the topic the manga is supposed to be promoting. And yes, crushes and such are silly and frankly demeaning things in the way they are portrayed, particularly when it comes to young women and girls. It's a slap in the face to every girl with an interest in STEM to open this publication and have their supposed role model revert to a giggling schoolgirl in a mini-skirt chasing a man. This manga is probably not going to convert many talented people to statistics.
I think the general pervasiveness of love interests, sex, etc in representations of young people in the media, is due more to adult obsession with the sexual lives of teenagers, rather than the reality of teenage life. In fact, the reality is that teenagers are having less sex now than in 1991. The stereotyped view of teenage life we are presented with is probably exaggerated/and or out of date.
So writers, please. Sell the science, not the sex.
At some point early on in Resident Evil 4, you encountered a door. Leon promptly kicked it open with his boot and you ran into the next room. It was a statement. The entirety of Resident Evil 4 was a statement. That statement was, "Survival Horror has Evolved". The evolution could be seen early on in games like Resident Evil 3 and Dino Crisis 2. Games like Dead Space are continuing that evolution. The genre is changing, not dying.
If you want a genre that is truly going extinct, just look at RPGs. I'm still waiting for any half decent one to come out in the PS3. It's depressing when you think back to the genre's boom time of 1997-2000.
When I was young and savvy, I always knew that nuclear power was bad. Polluting. Toxic. Dangerous. Wrong. But now that I'm older, I'm not so sure. In fact I think it's pretty safe. But, I can't objectively confirm this. My current opinion is still just as uniformed as my previous one.
Trouble is, it's difficult to separate the facts from the rhetoric, and it is danm near impossible to find an unbiased introduction to radioactivity, its uses dangers and safety limits. I would like to learn more, but there is precious little information available. I mean real information, with numbers. Without them, I'm just getting gas. And no, I am not going to rely on wiki-trips.
It's easy to find information on astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics, radio, electricity, etc, etc, etc. But radioactivity? Not a chance. How close to I have to be to an exposed nuclear rod before I am "at risk"? 10 meters? 100 meters? A kilometer? In orbit? Give me graphs. Give me numbers. Help me understand. I'm not stupid, nor are most people. But without hard numbers, I can't confirm or deny my suspicions?
Or you could just keep making Radioactive super-mutant movies and promoting candle wick alternate energy sources. Whichever.
Deserved what? Narrowly avoiding(and she probably will not forever) being thrown naked and defenseless into the badger pit that is the modern media meatgrider? Having her reputation, name, credentials and career permanently ruined because of one email?
She lives in an environment dominated by a culture of fear and overprotection. An environment where kids have to be protected from every bogeyman imaginable. An environment where computers, and especially the Internet, are seen primarily as a negative and dangerous influence on young people. She, and millions of professionals like here have received absolutely computer training, education or even basic information in their entire lives.
"Some guy is giving free stuff on the Internet". What's your immediate reaction? Now, what's the immediate reaction of someone who is not technically knowledgeable?
I've said it once and I'll say it again. PC game developers are complacent about quality. Too complacent. There is in fact a culture of complacency among PC developers. Console developers by contrast, owing to many years of zero patch capability after release, have much, much higher standards and bugs, major and minor are not tolerated to anywhere near the same extent as they are in PC titles.
This problem has not gone away and is only becoming more evident as PC developers attempt to port or move into console development. Almost universally, they run into serious quality issues, allowing bugs, glitches and crashes to occur far, far more frequently that any console player is used to dealing with.
In 1995, I spent over four hours trying to get Discworld to run with sound on my PC. Last month, my brother spent over six hours trying to get Fallout 3 to even play on his PC. In 1995, every single game on the SNES, Mega Drive, and nascent Playstation ran flawlessly from the moment it was turned on. Today, that is still the case with consoles.
PC gamers can say what they like about games on consoles and the people who play them. But one thing they cannot deny is just how solid and reliable console games have been, and continue to be. You put in the cartridge/disc, and the game "Just Works(TM)" from day one. No patches, no bugs, no crashes. This is a standard which PC developers should obviously be reaching from, yet in over a decade, by objective measures, they have not made one lick of progress in this direction.
This complacency is what will spell the end of PC gaming if developers do not get their acts together. People are not going to spend four hours downloading and installing patches for games that refuse to work out of the box when consoles begin to offer those same titles, with the same specs and control schemes. People are not going to keep buying $200 upgrades just to turn something on anymore, when custom hardware consoles offer long term(5+ years) powerful capabilities in just one purchase. People are not going to put up with imbalanced, glitchy or hacked PC games for months in online play, when console developers aggressively pounce on issues and issue automatic mandatory patches within days (Many developers already do this in Xbox360(see article) and PS3 titles).
In short, the culture of quality in console gaming that the PC gaming industry needs to swiftly adopt.
Abortion is really an interesting topic for debate.
Abortion is a really inflammatory topic for an argument.
Western society is by now, entirely incapable of holding any form of rational discussion on the topic of abortion whatsoever. It's impossible. We can't do it. Everyone either adopts an entrenched position, or will find themselves shot down by extremists. You cannot even support something like Plan B without being labeled a "murderer" or "baby killer". You can't do it.
Our generation is not going to resolve the abortion debate. This is because our generation is not having an abortion debate. We can't. We are having an abortion row. Well, some people are. The rest of will have to live with the outcomes of whoever wins this frankly embarrassing shouting match.
And in case you think I'm being "impartially neutral"; I am pro abortion. I trust women to make their own decisions about when and how they have children. I think that the vast majority of women who have abortions make the right decision and I think that their current and future children benefit from that decision. I think society benefits from the very hard decisions that women make. I do not recognize a fetus so deserving of rights that the rights and freedoms of free women should be taken away. The latter are more important than the former, by far.
No, really? Is there anyone who is pro choice who doesn't feel the same way? I mean, I've never heard anyone who was honestly "pro-abortion," just "pro-having the option when life hits the fan."
I work in a higher education institution and I can confirm that spam in universities is every bit as bad as commercial spam. I have missed "critical" correspondence amid the deluge.
Sports games, concerts, seminars, grant funding, research opportunities, exhibitions, astronomical events, workshops, training programs, lectures, presentations, groups, religious services, bereavements, marriage announcements, faculty announcements, announcements for faculty positions, calls, recalls, talks, reminders, forwards, art exhibits, cancellations, car lights, missing animals, missing people, missing USB keys, HR notices and every manner of newsletter, weekly, monthly or per semester... do battle for my inbox day after day. And this is all before people start using the internal email to buy, sell, solicit, advertise, as a soapbox on just about any conceivable issue (this is a university), or indeed as an instant messaging replacement for people who couldn't be bothered to type in several names and instead hit "reply all", or the sysadmin send us emails to tell us that the email system and/or internet is/was down... again.
Not a single part of this post is an exaggeration or fabrication. I've gotten all this and more. I imagine it's the same everywhere else.
Why not compensate for Coriolis force by using rockets?
Hello? Hello? Anybody home? Huh? Think, McFly. Think! What problem were space elevators dreamed up to solve?
Sorry for being so caustic, but I am so tired of this fuzzy thinking masquerading as hard science. Space elevators were always, always science fiction that was only ever taken seriously by people with too many dreams and not enough mathematics to ground them. Yes, raising an object into orbit cost relatively little energy-wise. But the reality is it costs metric kiloton meters per second to actually send something up into orbit and you cannot get around this.
Normal surface based engineering has our engineering brains mostly tuned to dealing with energy budgets, with momentum almost always using the earth as a giant sink and so being completely ignored for static and even non static projects. But momentum is there and the universe requires that that book be balanced, and space flight shows us just how hard that can be when you try to do something useful.
You can tell when an idea becomes an ideology when ludicrous notions like towing an asteroid into orbit are seriously put forward by proponents. Space elevators ARE science fiction, at least as far as Earth is concerned. Maybe for some other wierd planet their budgets, physical and economical, will add up, but on THIS world, rockets are still the most logical option. If something like a (working) SCRAMJET comes along and solves the momentum budget problem for us, then we can leave rockets behind. Until that time, if it ever comes, we can stick to rockets in the knowledge that they work and they are cheap.
Do such leaps happen in such evolutionary algorithms ?
All the time apparently. Typically in the evolutionary algorithms I have seen, the solution will march along making only slight improvements for a few generations then, "Boom!", makes a big order of magnitude or greater improvement in one or two generations, then settles down to incremental improvements again.
This page has a good graph of the behavior I'm talking about, as well as some code snippets.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what SHE said!!
Because they are not very smart.
I have found that many people confuse being educated with being intelligent or "smart". They are most certainly not the same thing. In fact, it's my experience that the more educated someone is the more likely it is that they will be conned by homeopaths, scaremongers and the like. This is education up to, as especially including, the university level. This is probably due to hubris on the part of educated people that they're "too smart/educated to be conned".
The only people I knew who were conned by "The Great Global Warming Swindle" were third level graduates. Same goes for people who frequent homeopaths and acupuncturists. They've almost all graduated from universities with adequate degrees. Some with STEM degrees!
I personally do not think that our education system promotes or advocates critical thinking. All of these people have received mathematics education to at least secondary school level, and I take this as solid evidence that teaching mathematics does not promote critical thinking by itself. Western secondary education at least does not seem to create a smart populace. An educated one perhaps, but as this post is all about, those two concepts are most certainly not the same thing.
No, I meant explicit. Indeed I meant it as the very opposite of implicit approval. They ARE stating directly that they support the religious stances of their church leaders, and also support the actions and directions of the church.
I never said any such things. I said that if an organization is being lead in a direction that its followers disapprove of, then they should either try to change that direction or leave. I never said anything about curtailing religious freedom of expression, and it's also clear that you ignored the second link in my post.
Having said that, I do object to religious organizations behaving politically, as the LDS church has done. There is a line between a church declaring its stance, and a church behaving like a political party. Donating $20 million dollars to a referendum campaign crosses that line. Such behavior is prohibited in many european countries, notably France, and with good reason. Church leaders should not wield political power. This is a lesson which I fear the US will have to learn the hard way.
That's not what I said. I said that if your organization is being lead in a direction you oppose and you have no say in that direction, then you should leave. There's no point letting other people drag you about. It is the leadership of an organization that is the problem. If they become extremists, then you should get out, otherwise you are explicitly supporting extremism.
Actually, you are what many experienced programmers refer to as "A Terrorist".
Leave the group.
If the organization or group you are in is being lead in a direction you are opposed to and you have no say in that course, then you should leave. To stay is to explicitly condone the actions of the leadership. The best contemporary example of this in the context of religious groups is in fact the "Mormon" Church of Latter Day Saints, which has seen many followers leave because of the way in which it conducted itself during the Proposition 8 vote.
Here was a church leadership which injected its organization voluminously and inappropriately into a contemporary political issue. They turned an institution of private religious belief into public political party. Their church is now feeling the backlash from this, and attempting to take off their political cap as quickly as they put it on is simply not possible.
By staying in their church, Mormons explicitly endorse their churches actions and stances. Ostensibly on the issue of gay marriage, but more importantly on the long term decision that the LDS church can and will inject itself and its considerable demographic and monetary clout directly and voluminously into any political debate that takes its fancy. Many european states, learning from experience, outrightly ban such behavior, but in the US, obviously things are different.
You can stay and support the actions of your church leaders, or you can leave. There are other sects, and other interpretations. The same goes for Muslims, particularly those in western countries, who frequent mosques with radical imams. Protestants break off and form new churches all the time. Even catholics can pick other pulpits if they take exception to their current priest. Staying to avoid social difficulty, or pretending that your presence is not being used to support your church leader's views and actions, are not valid excuses. Staying to "change from within" is only valid if you are actively doing so, otherwise it too is an excuse.
People can and should leave a church if that church's actions or beliefs go against their own principles. To stay is to abandon those principles.
You were extremely foolish.
You stood to have your reputation and indeed your life ruined. Claiming entrapment would not have been an adequate defense. You left yourself wide open to not only statutory rape laws, but also workplace harassment laws. You had no legal protection or recourse and were essentially at the mercy of the whims of probably up to three people.
Your initial stance was prudent and appropriate and you should have stuck to it, and not allowed yourself to be talked or persuaded out of it. Being lucky is not worth the risk to you of getting unlucky even once. I don't care how happy your relationship was. It's just not worth it. Your story and example could get a lot of naive young people into a lot of trouble.
OK, is this whole red thing some kind of mass troll, or is a new format change about to be hoist on us all? Screenshots, or it never happened.
Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Woman on plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?
Narrator: You wouldn't believe.
Woman on plane: Which car company do you work for?
Narrator: A major one.
Interesting. Thanks for the link. I've always been an elite fan and it appears that an online space sim community has finally implemented landing on planets, which will make it the first game, to my knowladeg, to have done so since Frontier First Encounters back in 1995.
If you count the very deep, layered, challenging and dramatic storylines dealing with superheros in tights, then yes, American comics are far from juvenile.
This could have been a good idea, if it weren't for the ridiculous love interest angle.
Let's face it, how many fundamental concepts about science and engineering do we learn, not in school, but from educational programs or segments on TV or in other media. MacGyver, Star Trek, Mythbusters for more solid science. A lot of it is exaggerated yes, but the fact is that dramatic presentations of science do help inspire young people to see science as a career path.
Love interests though, are tacky, hackneyed and generally trite, especially in a work dealing with teenagers. Angst ridden, irrational and melodramatic farces are not the appropriate setting in which to sell science, mathematics or statistics. Many teenagers will be attracted to these fields, and indeed others, as an escape from all the bullshit they have to put up with in teenage social circles. Throwing all that bullshit right back into a publication designed to sell science is going to be counterproductive. People do not read Sci-Fi novels for the sex(in most cases).
It is particularly poor form for the writer to make the main character a young girl, and to have her more interested in a silly relationship than in the topic the manga is supposed to be promoting. And yes, crushes and such are silly and frankly demeaning things in the way they are portrayed, particularly when it comes to young women and girls. It's a slap in the face to every girl with an interest in STEM to open this publication and have their supposed role model revert to a giggling schoolgirl in a mini-skirt chasing a man. This manga is probably not going to convert many talented people to statistics.
I think the general pervasiveness of love interests, sex, etc in representations of young people in the media, is due more to adult obsession with the sexual lives of teenagers, rather than the reality of teenage life. In fact, the reality is that teenagers are having less sex now than in 1991. The stereotyped view of teenage life we are presented with is probably exaggerated/and or out of date.
So writers, please. Sell the science, not the sex.
At some point early on in Resident Evil 4, you encountered a door. Leon promptly kicked it open with his boot and you ran into the next room. It was a statement. The entirety of Resident Evil 4 was a statement. That statement was, "Survival Horror has Evolved". The evolution could be seen early on in games like Resident Evil 3 and Dino Crisis 2. Games like Dead Space are continuing that evolution. The genre is changing, not dying.
If you want a genre that is truly going extinct, just look at RPGs. I'm still waiting for any half decent one to come out in the PS3. It's depressing when you think back to the genre's boom time of 1997-2000.
When I was young and savvy, I always knew that nuclear power was bad. Polluting. Toxic. Dangerous. Wrong. But now that I'm older, I'm not so sure. In fact I think it's pretty safe. But, I can't objectively confirm this. My current opinion is still just as uniformed as my previous one.
Trouble is, it's difficult to separate the facts from the rhetoric, and it is danm near impossible to find an unbiased introduction to radioactivity, its uses dangers and safety limits. I would like to learn more, but there is precious little information available. I mean real information, with numbers. Without them, I'm just getting gas. And no, I am not going to rely on wiki-trips.
It's easy to find information on astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics, radio, electricity, etc, etc, etc. But radioactivity? Not a chance. How close to I have to be to an exposed nuclear rod before I am "at risk"? 10 meters? 100 meters? A kilometer? In orbit? Give me graphs. Give me numbers. Help me understand. I'm not stupid, nor are most people. But without hard numbers, I can't confirm or deny my suspicions?
Or you could just keep making Radioactive super-mutant movies and promoting candle wick alternate energy sources. Whichever.
Deserved what? Narrowly avoiding(and she probably will not forever) being thrown naked and defenseless into the badger pit that is the modern media meatgrider? Having her reputation, name, credentials and career permanently ruined because of one email?
She lives in an environment dominated by a culture of fear and overprotection. An environment where kids have to be protected from every bogeyman imaginable. An environment where computers, and especially the Internet, are seen primarily as a negative and dangerous influence on young people. She, and millions of professionals like here have received absolutely computer training, education or even basic information in their entire lives.
"Some guy is giving free stuff on the Internet". What's your immediate reaction? Now, what's the immediate reaction of someone who is not technically knowledgeable?
I've said it once and I'll say it again. PC game developers are complacent about quality. Too complacent. There is in fact a culture of complacency among PC developers. Console developers by contrast, owing to many years of zero patch capability after release, have much, much higher standards and bugs, major and minor are not tolerated to anywhere near the same extent as they are in PC titles.
This problem has not gone away and is only becoming more evident as PC developers attempt to port or move into console development. Almost universally, they run into serious quality issues, allowing bugs, glitches and crashes to occur far, far more frequently that any console player is used to dealing with.
In 1995, I spent over four hours trying to get Discworld to run with sound on my PC. Last month, my brother spent over six hours trying to get Fallout 3 to even play on his PC. In 1995, every single game on the SNES, Mega Drive, and nascent Playstation ran flawlessly from the moment it was turned on. Today, that is still the case with consoles.
PC gamers can say what they like about games on consoles and the people who play them. But one thing they cannot deny is just how solid and reliable console games have been, and continue to be. You put in the cartridge/disc, and the game "Just Works(TM)" from day one. No patches, no bugs, no crashes. This is a standard which PC developers should obviously be reaching from, yet in over a decade, by objective measures, they have not made one lick of progress in this direction.
This complacency is what will spell the end of PC gaming if developers do not get their acts together. People are not going to spend four hours downloading and installing patches for games that refuse to work out of the box when consoles begin to offer those same titles, with the same specs and control schemes. People are not going to keep buying $200 upgrades just to turn something on anymore, when custom hardware consoles offer long term(5+ years) powerful capabilities in just one purchase. People are not going to put up with imbalanced, glitchy or hacked PC games for months in online play, when console developers aggressively pounce on issues and issue automatic mandatory patches within days (Many developers already do this in Xbox360(see article) and PS3 titles).
In short, the culture of quality in console gaming that the PC gaming industry needs to swiftly adopt.
Abortion is a really inflammatory topic for an argument.
Western society is by now, entirely incapable of holding any form of rational discussion on the topic of abortion whatsoever. It's impossible. We can't do it. Everyone either adopts an entrenched position, or will find themselves shot down by extremists. You cannot even support something like Plan B without being labeled a "murderer" or "baby killer". You can't do it.
Our generation is not going to resolve the abortion debate. This is because our generation is not having an abortion debate. We can't. We are having an abortion row. Well, some people are. The rest of will have to live with the outcomes of whoever wins this frankly embarrassing shouting match.
And in case you think I'm being "impartially neutral"; I am pro abortion. I trust women to make their own decisions about when and how they have children. I think that the vast majority of women who have abortions make the right decision and I think that their current and future children benefit from that decision. I think society benefits from the very hard decisions that women make. I do not recognize a fetus so deserving of rights that the rights and freedoms of free women should be taken away. The latter are more important than the former, by far.
Here you go.
I work in a higher education institution and I can confirm that spam in universities is every bit as bad as commercial spam. I have missed "critical" correspondence amid the deluge.
Sports games, concerts, seminars, grant funding, research opportunities, exhibitions, astronomical events, workshops, training programs, lectures, presentations, groups, religious services, bereavements, marriage announcements, faculty announcements, announcements for faculty positions, calls, recalls, talks, reminders, forwards, art exhibits, cancellations, car lights, missing animals, missing people, missing USB keys, HR notices and every manner of newsletter, weekly, monthly or per semester ... do battle for my inbox day after day. And this is all before people start using the internal email to buy, sell, solicit, advertise, as a soapbox on just about any conceivable issue (this is a university), or indeed as an instant messaging replacement for people who couldn't be bothered to type in several names and instead hit "reply all", or the sysadmin send us emails to tell us that the email system and/or internet is/was down... again.
Not a single part of this post is an exaggeration or fabrication. I've gotten all this and more. I imagine it's the same everywhere else.
Hello? Hello? Anybody home? Huh? Think, McFly. Think! What problem were space elevators dreamed up to solve?
Sorry for being so caustic, but I am so tired of this fuzzy thinking masquerading as hard science. Space elevators were always, always science fiction that was only ever taken seriously by people with too many dreams and not enough mathematics to ground them. Yes, raising an object into orbit cost relatively little energy-wise. But the reality is it costs metric kiloton meters per second to actually send something up into orbit and you cannot get around this.
Normal surface based engineering has our engineering brains mostly tuned to dealing with energy budgets, with momentum almost always using the earth as a giant sink and so being completely ignored for static and even non static projects. But momentum is there and the universe requires that that book be balanced, and space flight shows us just how hard that can be when you try to do something useful.
You can tell when an idea becomes an ideology when ludicrous notions like towing an asteroid into orbit are seriously put forward by proponents. Space elevators ARE science fiction, at least as far as Earth is concerned. Maybe for some other wierd planet their budgets, physical and economical, will add up, but on THIS world, rockets are still the most logical option. If something like a (working) SCRAMJET comes along and solves the momentum budget problem for us, then we can leave rockets behind. Until that time, if it ever comes, we can stick to rockets in the knowledge that they work and they are cheap.
No quite right. You need:
2a) Randomly change those polygons for a number of copies
2b) Choose the "fittest" group based on its likeness to the Mona Lisa.
Natural selection of random mutation is what is going on here. Just Random mutation will simply get you a random result.
All the time apparently. Typically in the evolutionary algorithms I have seen, the solution will march along making only slight improvements for a few generations then, "Boom!", makes a big order of magnitude or greater improvement in one or two generations, then settles down to incremental improvements again.
This page has a good graph of the behavior I'm talking about, as well as some code snippets.
"He's a Lumberjack and he's OK..."
Look buddy. You either start screaming during the Two Minutes Hate, or people are going to start asking questions. OK?