This is why I love my school (Caltech). Only one humanities class per term, usually with only 2--3 essays or so; mostly humanities are reading, and interesting reading since they know that they're audience is people like me. So e.g. they have a class on science fiction, or ones on philosophy or pyschology, that are actually interesting subjects---instead of, say, literary analysis.
The humanities classes wasn't really what I wanted to reply about though. What I think is great about my classes is that the homework isn't menial---it's pretty much necessary, if you want to understand the material. It's deep, hard problems that make me think and pace the room and go "hmmm" and gain new insights in the way that only working through all the mental steps can make you do (as opposed to listening to a professor explain them or reading them in a book). Homework can be really fun and interesting, if it's done right, and I think it's much easier to do it right for math/science courses. Then again, I've had some pretty banal math/science homework in high school.
Basically, at college homework is so much better. I hear that there are high schools like this, I guess for gifted kids; too bad I didn't go to one. But my point is that homework in and of itself isn't bad, but depends on the teachers' estimation of the students' intelligences.
What? Where did this converse thing come from? If p => q, it is NOT necessarily true that ~p => ~q. You may be confused with the contrapositive, i.e. ~q => ~p, which DOES necessarily follow from p => q.
In conclusion, nice strawman.
(The rest of your argument about a god's necessity and how that makes your argument invulnerable I'll leave for someone else to demolish; I just had to point out the clear logical fallacy.)
It comes down to how probable you think it is. If it is probable that we should have evolved the way we did... Mmm, are you familiar with the definition of probability? Because the probability of something that has already happened, having happened, is 1. That is, the probability that we evolved in the way we did is 1. Probabilities are observer-dependent things, and change with new information or events.
What I'm saying is that the anthropic principle applies. It could have been, pre-our-evolution, that the probability of our evolution was 0.000000001. But now, post-our-evolution, the probability is 1. So we can't really make arguments are about "how probable" it is that we evolved the way we did, and what that implied, because the number could have been completely arbitrary---anything inside the interval (0, 1]. The information of what that number was is lost to us, however, since now that number is 1.
It's not really a coping strategy, because you only experience one sensation, i.e. that of right now. Right now is, in some sense, true---whereas the future is, in some sense, false.
To those people, I say that you always have a choice about your emotional state. Cf. existentialism, especially Sartre.
Quite the opposite. If you believe in nothing giving you purpose except something quite outside human experience, you might as well believe in nothing giving you purpose. Cf. Nietzsche.
These nihilistic views (in which I include theism) miss a basic fact about life: the only moment of life I ever experience is RIGHT NOW. So worrying about the "point" of those future RIGHT NOWs, which I am not currently experiencing, makes no sense. Give purpose to RIGHT NOW, and you win.
And RIGHT NOW my purpose is to take a Chemistry final, heh---not for the future experience or grades or whatnot, but because it should be interesting. See, it's all in how you frame things in your mind.
For the record, quantum DRM is mathematically unbreakable. IIRC. (I am not a quantum cryptographer, but have attended a few talks that quantum cryptographers have given here at Caltech.)
Roger Penrose has been advocating quantum mechanics (or rather, quantum gravity) as the key to understanding the brain for some time. It's pretty hard to believe, and a lot of people dismiss him out of hand. However, if you read his entire book Shadows of the Mind, you might agree with me that he could be correct.
Another book I read on the subject a long time ago was The Quantum Brain, by Jeffrey Satinover.
The Bell Inequality rules out local counterfactually definite hidden variable theories. Nonlocal theories in particular are quite doable, and David Bohm worked on those for a long time before he died. I've been reading some of his books (but not scientific papers), and they seem fairly reasonable; however, I think they fall in to the "not mainstream enough to take seriously" category.
I don't know what 't Hooft's theory is though.
On another note, I've written a paper on why the Bell Inequality does not falsify local counterfactually definite hidden variable theories, but I'm 95 % sure my conclusions must be based on some kind of misunderstanding because I can't have been the first person to see this.
No, I think you missed my point. I'm saying to just multiply the pi in, which is what I did in the example above.
I also don't see why measuring a triangle requires using parts of pi/180. There's nothing fundamental about 180 besides the definition of a degree. It's just as valid to say that the sum of the angles of a triangle is pi (or 3.14 for engineering purposes), so you have (say) 1.570, 0.795, 0.795 as your angles.
I don't really understand this perspective. I don't have the maths for general relativity, but let's try special relativity.
Let's say you're traveling at 5 m/s. Gamma = (1 - 5^2/299792458^2)^(-1/2) = 1.0000000000000001390812570067023. So the theory that predicts that your mass remains constant (which is the assumption in F = ma) is invalid by 0.00000000000001390812570067023 %. Completely insignificant, yes: but it's still wrong. It is fundamentally incorrect to say that your mass remains constant, even if it does to an extremely good approximation.
(Now some smartass is going to come along and use some quantum argument to tell me mass cannot vary by such a small amount, or some such:-P.)
That's how I see it, though. It's fine to use things like Newton's Laws or the kinetic theory of gases or whatever, as long as you realize they don't reflect the underlying reality in an essentially true fashion. Of course I guess we'll need a Theory of Everything before we can really say that we're not using approximations, but that's why I'm a theoretical physics student!:-D.
Fair enough, although I don't see why you need the pi in there if you're an engineer. Try maybe 0.087 +/- 0.017? That translates back to 4.98 +/- -.97, which I would imagine is not any more accurate of a measurement than 5 +/- 1 degree.
Seriously. s = r*theta works with radians, and doesn't work with degrees (where you need s = r*theta/360). I don't see what working with differing radii has to do with anything, at all.
Will it affect their business model? Of course. But according to the developer, the goal is to open-source everything they can, and if the business model has to change, then it'll change. That's the stupidest meta-business model I've ever heard.
One of the people here at Caltech got a pre-approved credit card offer. He decided he would crumple it, tear it up into many pieces, then tape it back together. He would then fill it out with a change-of-name and change-of-address form as well.... and he got approved.
Or whatever. It's New Years Eve, I don't want to get worked up about some damn Internet article. I love all you crazy Slashdotters, keep up the good work.
You complain about wanting concessions for experienced users like shortcuts to commonly-used features that you need one-click access to... isn't that what the Quick Access Toolbar is for?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure IQ isn't averaged locally. So if everybody in Indiana had IQ 160, that wouldn't be a problem.
This is why I love my school (Caltech). Only one humanities class per term, usually with only 2--3 essays or so; mostly humanities are reading, and interesting reading since they know that they're audience is people like me. So e.g. they have a class on science fiction, or ones on philosophy or pyschology, that are actually interesting subjects---instead of, say, literary analysis.
The humanities classes wasn't really what I wanted to reply about though. What I think is great about my classes is that the homework isn't menial---it's pretty much necessary, if you want to understand the material. It's deep, hard problems that make me think and pace the room and go "hmmm" and gain new insights in the way that only working through all the mental steps can make you do (as opposed to listening to a professor explain them or reading them in a book). Homework can be really fun and interesting, if it's done right, and I think it's much easier to do it right for math/science courses. Then again, I've had some pretty banal math/science homework in high school.
Basically, at college homework is so much better. I hear that there are high schools like this, I guess for gifted kids; too bad I didn't go to one. But my point is that homework in and of itself isn't bad, but depends on the teachers' estimation of the students' intelligences.
What? Where did this converse thing come from? If p => q, it is NOT necessarily true that ~p => ~q. You may be confused with the contrapositive, i.e. ~q => ~p, which DOES necessarily follow from p => q.
In conclusion, nice strawman.
(The rest of your argument about a god's necessity and how that makes your argument invulnerable I'll leave for someone else to demolish; I just had to point out the clear logical fallacy.)
What I'm saying is that the anthropic principle applies. It could have been, pre-our-evolution, that the probability of our evolution was 0.000000001. But now, post-our-evolution, the probability is 1. So we can't really make arguments are about "how probable" it is that we evolved the way we did, and what that implied, because the number could have been completely arbitrary---anything inside the interval (0, 1]. The information of what that number was is lost to us, however, since now that number is 1.
Someone hasn't upgraded to 3.5...
No, scythes.
:)
Keen falchion = 15-20/x2 ==> expected multiplier value = 0.3*2 + 0.7*1 = 1.3;
Keen scythe = 19-20/x4 ==> expected multiplier value = 0.1*4 + 0.9*1 = 1.3
And a x4 critical is so much more fun than a x2 critical!
It's not really a coping strategy, because you only experience one sensation, i.e. that of right now. Right now is, in some sense, true---whereas the future is, in some sense, false.
To those people, I say that you always have a choice about your emotional state. Cf. existentialism, especially Sartre.
Quite the opposite. If you believe in nothing giving you purpose except something quite outside human experience, you might as well believe in nothing giving you purpose. Cf. Nietzsche.
These nihilistic views (in which I include theism) miss a basic fact about life: the only moment of life I ever experience is RIGHT NOW. So worrying about the "point" of those future RIGHT NOWs, which I am not currently experiencing, makes no sense. Give purpose to RIGHT NOW, and you win.
And RIGHT NOW my purpose is to take a Chemistry final, heh---not for the future experience or grades or whatnot, but because it should be interesting. See, it's all in how you frame things in your mind.
http://today.caltech.edu/calendar/item.tcl?calenda r_id=71129
One of the "nontrivial examples" mentioned as able to be "quantumly copy protected" was DVDs and other multimedia.
Your question, by the way, makes no sense in the context of basic knowledge of quantum information theory.
Please read the Wikipedia article on quantum cryptography before "of course not"ing me.
Kthxbye.
For the record, quantum DRM is mathematically unbreakable. IIRC. (I am not a quantum cryptographer, but have attended a few talks that quantum cryptographers have given here at Caltech.)
Roger Penrose has been advocating quantum mechanics (or rather, quantum gravity) as the key to understanding the brain for some time. It's pretty hard to believe, and a lot of people dismiss him out of hand. However, if you read his entire book Shadows of the Mind, you might agree with me that he could be correct.
Another book I read on the subject a long time ago was The Quantum Brain, by Jeffrey Satinover.
The Bell Inequality rules out local counterfactually definite hidden variable theories. Nonlocal theories in particular are quite doable, and David Bohm worked on those for a long time before he died. I've been reading some of his books (but not scientific papers), and they seem fairly reasonable; however, I think they fall in to the "not mainstream enough to take seriously" category.
I don't know what 't Hooft's theory is though.
On another note, I've written a paper on why the Bell Inequality does not falsify local counterfactually definite hidden variable theories, but I'm 95 % sure my conclusions must be based on some kind of misunderstanding because I can't have been the first person to see this.
No, I think you missed my point. I'm saying to just multiply the pi in, which is what I did in the example above.
I also don't see why measuring a triangle requires using parts of pi/180. There's nothing fundamental about 180 besides the definition of a degree. It's just as valid to say that the sum of the angles of a triangle is pi (or 3.14 for engineering purposes), so you have (say) 1.570, 0.795, 0.795 as your angles.
I don't really understand this perspective. I don't have the maths for general relativity, but let's try special relativity.
:-P.)
:-D.
Let's say you're traveling at 5 m/s. Gamma = (1 - 5^2/299792458^2)^(-1/2) = 1.0000000000000001390812570067023. So the theory that predicts that your mass remains constant (which is the assumption in F = ma) is invalid by 0.00000000000001390812570067023 %. Completely insignificant, yes: but it's still wrong. It is fundamentally incorrect to say that your mass remains constant, even if it does to an extremely good approximation.
(Now some smartass is going to come along and use some quantum argument to tell me mass cannot vary by such a small amount, or some such
That's how I see it, though. It's fine to use things like Newton's Laws or the kinetic theory of gases or whatever, as long as you realize they don't reflect the underlying reality in an essentially true fashion. Of course I guess we'll need a Theory of Everything before we can really say that we're not using approximations, but that's why I'm a theoretical physics student!
Fair enough, although I don't see why you need the pi in there if you're an engineer. Try maybe 0.087 +/- 0.017? That translates back to 4.98 +/- -.97, which I would imagine is not any more accurate of a measurement than 5 +/- 1 degree.
Uh, so multiply by the radius?
Seriously. s = r*theta works with radians, and doesn't work with degrees (where you need s = r*theta/360). I don't see what working with differing radii has to do with anything, at all.
One of the people here at Caltech got a pre-approved credit card offer. He decided he would crumple it, tear it up into many pieces, then tape it back together. He would then fill it out with a change-of-name and change-of-address form as well. ... and he got approved.
This made me smile :-D.
They probably only apply to those properly "under God."
You complain about wanting concessions for experienced users like shortcuts to commonly-used features that you need one-click access to... isn't that what the Quick Access Toolbar is for?
Ah, but the n00bs (as opposed to newbies) will never be the next master; therefore "hurting" them (ridiculing their ideas) is perfectly acceptable.
You have a serious defect in your humor/satire gene, by the way. Just sayin'.
Yeah, but what if you want to use more than one accessory? If there is a solution, I don't know of it and would be interested in what you've found.