Just to be sure: You did realize that whole web site is satire, right?
I wondered if it might be. If it is, it's incredibly sophisticated and subtle.
And I can still feel bad for the kids - wanna bet that if I don't realize it's a big parody, then neither will the kids who get sent there by clueless adults to learn about creationism?
The problem with doing satire of something that's already silly (like creationism, new age religions, conspiracy theories, or folks like Jack Thompson) is that unless the satire isn't subtle, it's almost impossible to tell the satirical material from the real thing.
You can't parody a tabloid conspiracy theory for example without it looking like the real thing; "Elvis found alive at area 51, complaining of rectal probe rash" - I'd laugh if that were serious or not, but it's no less crazy than your typical tabloid story. Or how about: "Jack Thompson implicates UT2004 in horrific clown rampage" - does that seem any crazier than what Jack spouts off normally? The only way to guess that's a parody is the inclusion of a clown...
Same thing happens here. Some of the more obviously funny stuff, like "thermodynamics of hellfire", might just as easily have been some student's idea of a joke project. And the "serious" entries are a little to close to actual creationist reasoning, so it isn't hard to imagine that little kids would make stuff like that if they grew up on it.
I was able to hold a straight face up until this little gem "Honorable mention: Thermodynamics of Hellfire"... then I cracked up. And I felt bad for the poor little kids - they'll never understand even basic level science if the adults in their life encourage them to use faulty logic and reasoning.
Side note - I love the part about a project that put the building blocks of life into a jar and watched them not evolve. You'd think they'd at least try to replicate these guys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey
From the description in TFA it seems similar, but I don't have the background in chemistry to make an educated guess. Anyone with credentials care to enlighten me?
And if this stuff is just a new aerogel varient, what's the advantage to it? I was under the impression that we'd need to make aerogel in space if we wanted it in quantity, this new stuff seems to have been made on earth, but requires pressure and/or cold to stay stable.
Well, we could suck all the Co2 out of the atmosphere. This would remove the greenhouse effect, both the manmade one and the naturally occuring one, and drop the planetary temperature. And we get our Co2 for making this stuff in the bargin! It's a win-win situation (well, except for the living - they'll be royally screwed - but they were just taking up space anyways).
Anyway, yes it was bread/toppings/cheese, but it was also cobbled together from stuff that I didn't know would mix well. That was the point. And I suck at all things cooking related, so figuring out how to use up leftovers without either eating them straight (not so good for mushrooms) or mixing them into something like ramen, omlets or spagheti sauce is kinda cool.
(Side note: The plain bagels/cheese approach is good by itself. Anything else is optional)
Actually, I think the best food combos are discovered by neccesity. If all you have left is peanut butter, bread and bananas, then hey, ya might as well try...
I did something like this not so long ago. We had mushrooms (the regular kind - not the hallucenogenic ones), and needed to use them up. I fried them with garlic and onions, put them on bagels, added chedar, and then toasted the lot. It actually worked pretty good...
Didn't GTA learn you anything better? You gotta go kill him, either with a baseball bat or a submachine gun. Then steal his wallet and use the money to buy a hooker. Kids these days.
Get him in the back seat of your car first. That way, he'll replenish your health first, and then when you're done, he gets out, you run him over and get your money back!
Oh wait, my bad, he's a lawyer. I mistook him for a whore. It's a common mistake.
Yep. Couple kids were bullied, ostracised, ignored by their parents, and went postal. They got ahold of guns, tried (and failed) to make a bomb explode and killed a bunch of people before offing themsleves. They were likely mentally unsound, and better armed than most, but they were still following a very old and depressingly common murder-suicide pattern.
What was your point exactly?
Video games, violent music, lax gun laws and countless of other things were blamed for the shootings, but at most any one of these might have been a minor contributing factor. Taking action against games because some whack job plays doom and shoots someone is like taking action against religion because some loonie bombs an abortion clinic - in both cases you're trying to absolve personal responsibility from the perpatrator by shifting the blame to something that impacted their lives. Might as well blame butterflies flapping their wings for the hurricane season, to borrow from the old chaos theory meme.
Hot coffee and LSL? Probably not. Obscenity/porn isn't just nudity - something can be offensive to prudes without being legally obscene. If you look at genuine pornography (I hear there's some on the internet - you can check there), there is generally more than just exposed skin and naughty bits.
The Japanese stuff I'm not so sure about. It might very well qualify as obscene under current laws. Certainly anything comparable to actual porn would fit the description. However, I don't know where you could get that in north america, so it's possibly a moot point anyway.
If the bill dies, Jacko still has his moment in the spotlight, which he craves. The man is a media whore. And when it does die, he can go on about "activist judges" and liberal bias in the courts (nevermind that there are censorship wonks on the left as well as the right). Jackass's crusade will continue no matter how many times he loses.
This isn't about protecting minors. This is about lawyers getting paid, politicians getting votes, and whores like Jack getting attention. Those objectives were accomplished the moment this thing passed. If it dies, all that happens is the damage done by their stupidity gets fixed - which is something to be sure, but it isn't enough.
There really needs to be a "three strikes and you're out" rule for passing legislation that latter gets shot down for violating the constitution. The courts shouldn't have to constantly prune back this crap.
Getting someone disbarred isn't exactly easy, which is a pity. Personally, I figure that the bar association is probably not too concerned about some senile crusader trying to prolong a career in the spotlight by pushing crap like this.
Given that there are far more dangerous abuses of the legal system that lawyers get up to, the bar association likely turns a blind eye to minor infractions, especially if disbarring Jacko would be unpopular in whatever district he's licensed to practice in. OTOH, I dearly hope that one day he either goes too far and gets in hot water, or else pushes the wrong person and ends up on the business end of a lawsuit.
Care more about utility =! care only about utility. The difference between the two is signifigant.
Geeks care about function first, then form. Many non geeks are the opposite. We'll readily decorate our gaming rigs with LEDs and fancy case art, but what we care about first is the hardware within. A geek will settle for a beige case if what's inside works well, but he will not settle for an alienware box that contains crap parts.
(2) Does it really work (well)? Over the years, I've seen my colleagues on the PC side throw up their hands and reformat/reinstall some Windows version much more often than I've had to resort to the (non-destructive) "archive and install," or earlier "clean install" processes. (I'm a Mac user, and I'd probably be a lifelong Mac user if I'd've been born after 1984, but I actually predate the Intel 4004, let alone the Motorola 68000. But I digress...).
I beleive that was my point. I asked a loaded question as to whether windows was something that works, but that isn't pretty, which is what the OP said PC users prefered over mac users. Reread what I posted, you're agreeing with me here:-P
And in any case, my point was more that where the OP said "most IBM PC users prefer", he should instead have said "most hardcore geeks prefer". Most PC users are as likely to prefer form over function as most mac users. The geek community prefers function over form, but we haven't been the majority of PC users for a decade or more.
Which is the philosophy of most IBM PC users. If it works, it doesn't need to be pretty.
Oh I dunno. What about the popularity of windows? Does that fit the description of something that "works, but isn't pretty"?
Assuming you have two otherwise equal PC products and one has a more attractive interface, better marketing/branding, or is otherwise "prettier" than the other, which one wins in the market? Actually, I wouldn't even say that it has to be a question of equally functional products - appearance can triumph over functionality. Companies ranging from microsoft to AOL are proof of this.
I agree with most of your post, but your average PC user really isn't that different from your average mac user in this regard. It's just us hardcore geeks who care more about utility than appearance.
Actually, I'd be more worried about a new car's paint flaking off because of the danger of rust. After all, if the function of the surface is partly to protect the underlying metal, and that functionality is lost due to the paint breaking off faster than it should, then you can't really say that the car is still working properly.
Could you make the same claim about the Macs in the article?
Eh, not really. I got my start on the Sega Genesis and arcade machines back in the day, and have since gone over into PC gaming exclusively. I've had it both ways.
Not saving typically meant either A) you spent alot of quarters in the arcade or B) you learned to make the most of your lives/continues/whatever. It didn't really make you "uber".
Nowadays, games have more depth and skill involved. They're longer and typically harder to finish. Yes, you can reload save games to keep your progress, but the tradeoff is that reloading is neccesary. Beating an old side scroller without saving was difficult, but not impossible, for an average player; beating a modern FPS of any respectable length without saving is damn near impossible for even an expert player. There are no extra lives, no continues, and no slot to put in more quarters - you either save or start over all the way from the beginning. And the time it takes to get to the end is so much longer as well.
And the games that do let you respawn are often the ones in which dying is taken for granted, and thus the game is corrospandingly more frustrating. MMOs like WoW are a good example of this - you might die a dozen times in a dungeon instance, but actually beating the fights is hard. Multiplayer FPS games are another example - you spawn, you're fragged, you respawn, you hope to god you'll get a kill - nope, fragged again. This is somehow easier than falling into a spike pit in Sonic the Hedgehog?
Indeed. The modern advances in tata-rendering, textured bump mapping and inverse nippomatics are truely a driving force in the industry:-P
Actually, I wonder how they'd do motion capture for this sort of thing? "Here, wear these patches and bounce"? Who gets the privlege of helping the motion capture subject with her equipment?
This isn't flamebait, it's the truth. Religious leaders make a living by telling people what god is. If someone else comes along and contradicts them, that costs them some of their credibility.
When the Catholic church preached geocentric theory, they felt threatened by Galileo (despite the fact that the sun revolving around the earth is NOT a prerequisite for the existance of god). When creationists insist upon a literal interpretation of genesis, they fell threatened by biology and astrophysics (despite the fact that god's existance does not rest on a literal interpretaion of the bible). Neither heliocentric theory, nor the big bang, nor evolution contradicts the idea that god exists, but they do all conflict with the strict religious doctrine of the die-hard beleivers. People who insist that you can't beleive in god and science are setting up a false dichotomy.
All manner of anti-scientific doctrine are God(TM) instead of plain old fashioned "god". The difference between the two is that anyone with faith can believe in god, but only someone who subscribes to a specific religion can beleive in that religion's specific God. The people who simply beleive in god aren't threatened by scientific inquiry, while the people who preach about the existance of God get defensive whenever the facts contradict their specific scripture.
After all, if we learn more about the universe, that helps the people of faith better understand the being they beleive in - but if what we learn contradics what the preachers say, than those preachers are out of a job. It isn't science vs. religion, and never has been - it's people who sell their specific version of God trying to put down ideas that make them less creidble. Which is exactly why you get popes and such telling people like Hawking to "get off their turf".
It really annoys me when people mod down opposing views instead of posting a counter arguement. If you disagree with what I say, then state what you disagree with, and make an arguement.
"Nuclear weapons aren't especially useful for defense."
That, my friend, is incorrect.
One of the first major considerations the US had for it's nuclear aresenal was precisely that. The bomb was first used as a terror weapon of sorts to frighten the Japanese into surrender, but when the cold war began, and the Americans feared a Soviet land invasion of Europe, the bomb was considered as a tactical weapon.
What good does a vast column of tanks do if they're nuked? What about an aircraft carrier group? How about nuking a vital land crossing - you kill the troops already there and prevent more from making the passage by contaminating it.
It never came to that of course. And the strategy evolved from what I've just described to the doctrine of MAD, especially once the USSR had the bomb. Why nuke the other guy on your allies soil, when you can hit his cities instead?
But the idea of a tactical nuclear strike is valid, especially as a last resort measure. Moreover, when the people who have the bombs are religious zealots, the odds of them using the bomb near their own borders increase. When you're dealing with an enemy that truely beleives that god is on their side, you cannot expect them to behave rationally when threatened directly. Do you realy expect a theocratic dictator to fear fallout or the lose of his countrymen?
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I wondered if it might be. If it is, it's incredibly sophisticated and subtle.
And I can still feel bad for the kids - wanna bet that if I don't realize it's a big parody, then neither will the kids who get sent there by clueless adults to learn about creationism?
The problem with doing satire of something that's already silly (like creationism, new age religions, conspiracy theories, or folks like Jack Thompson) is that unless the satire isn't subtle, it's almost impossible to tell the satirical material from the real thing.
You can't parody a tabloid conspiracy theory for example without it looking like the real thing; "Elvis found alive at area 51, complaining of rectal probe rash" - I'd laugh if that were serious or not, but it's no less crazy than your typical tabloid story. Or how about: "Jack Thompson implicates UT2004 in horrific clown rampage" - does that seem any crazier than what Jack spouts off normally? The only way to guess that's a parody is the inclusion of a clown...
Same thing happens here. Some of the more obviously funny stuff, like "thermodynamics of hellfire", might just as easily have been some student's idea of a joke project. And the "serious" entries are a little to close to actual creationist reasoning, so it isn't hard to imagine that little kids would make stuff like that if they grew up on it.
I was able to hold a straight face up until this little gem "Honorable mention: Thermodynamics of Hellfire"... then I cracked up. And I felt bad for the poor little kids - they'll never understand even basic level science if the adults in their life encourage them to use faulty logic and reasoning.
Side note - I love the part about a project that put the building blocks of life into a jar and watched them not evolve. You'd think they'd at least try to replicate these guys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey
That, or we use the NASA model and swap the units of measurement. Kelvin you say? Well let's just assume they meant Celsius!
I wonder if this is similar to Aerogel?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel
From the description in TFA it seems similar, but I don't have the background in chemistry to make an educated guess. Anyone with credentials care to enlighten me?
And if this stuff is just a new aerogel varient, what's the advantage to it? I was under the impression that we'd need to make aerogel in space if we wanted it in quantity, this new stuff seems to have been made on earth, but requires pressure and/or cold to stay stable.
Well, we could suck all the Co2 out of the atmosphere. This would remove the greenhouse effect, both the manmade one and the naturally occuring one, and drop the planetary temperature. And we get our Co2 for making this stuff in the bargin! It's a win-win situation (well, except for the living - they'll be royally screwed - but they were just taking up space anyways).
I think there might be prior art :-)
Anyway, yes it was bread/toppings/cheese, but it was also cobbled together from stuff that I didn't know would mix well. That was the point. And I suck at all things cooking related, so figuring out how to use up leftovers without either eating them straight (not so good for mushrooms) or mixing them into something like ramen, omlets or spagheti sauce is kinda cool.
(Side note: The plain bagels/cheese approach is good by itself. Anything else is optional)
Actually, I think the best food combos are discovered by neccesity. If all you have left is peanut butter, bread and bananas, then hey, ya might as well try...
I did something like this not so long ago. We had mushrooms (the regular kind - not the hallucenogenic ones), and needed to use them up. I fried them with garlic and onions, put them on bagels, added chedar, and then toasted the lot. It actually worked pretty good...
Get him in the back seat of your car first. That way, he'll replenish your health first, and then when you're done, he gets out, you run him over and get your money back!
Oh wait, my bad, he's a lawyer. I mistook him for a whore. It's a common mistake.
Yep. Couple kids were bullied, ostracised, ignored by their parents, and went postal. They got ahold of guns, tried (and failed) to make a bomb explode and killed a bunch of people before offing themsleves. They were likely mentally unsound, and better armed than most, but they were still following a very old and depressingly common murder-suicide pattern.
What was your point exactly?
Video games, violent music, lax gun laws and countless of other things were blamed for the shootings, but at most any one of these might have been a minor contributing factor. Taking action against games because some whack job plays doom and shoots someone is like taking action against religion because some loonie bombs an abortion clinic - in both cases you're trying to absolve personal responsibility from the perpatrator by shifting the blame to something that impacted their lives. Might as well blame butterflies flapping their wings for the hurricane season, to borrow from the old chaos theory meme.
Hot coffee and LSL? Probably not. Obscenity/porn isn't just nudity - something can be offensive to prudes without being legally obscene. If you look at genuine pornography (I hear there's some on the internet - you can check there), there is generally more than just exposed skin and naughty bits.
The Japanese stuff I'm not so sure about. It might very well qualify as obscene under current laws. Certainly anything comparable to actual porn would fit the description. However, I don't know where you could get that in north america, so it's possibly a moot point anyway.
You're missing the obvious point.
If the bill dies, Jacko still has his moment in the spotlight, which he craves. The man is a media whore. And when it does die, he can go on about "activist judges" and liberal bias in the courts (nevermind that there are censorship wonks on the left as well as the right). Jackass's crusade will continue no matter how many times he loses.
This isn't about protecting minors. This is about lawyers getting paid, politicians getting votes, and whores like Jack getting attention. Those objectives were accomplished the moment this thing passed. If it dies, all that happens is the damage done by their stupidity gets fixed - which is something to be sure, but it isn't enough.
There really needs to be a "three strikes and you're out" rule for passing legislation that latter gets shot down for violating the constitution. The courts shouldn't have to constantly prune back this crap.
Getting someone disbarred isn't exactly easy, which is a pity. Personally, I figure that the bar association is probably not too concerned about some senile crusader trying to prolong a career in the spotlight by pushing crap like this.
Given that there are far more dangerous abuses of the legal system that lawyers get up to, the bar association likely turns a blind eye to minor infractions, especially if disbarring Jacko would be unpopular in whatever district he's licensed to practice in. OTOH, I dearly hope that one day he either goes too far and gets in hot water, or else pushes the wrong person and ends up on the business end of a lawsuit.
Indeed. At this stage, we're just padding out the thread.
Care more about utility =! care only about utility. The difference between the two is signifigant.
Geeks care about function first, then form. Many non geeks are the opposite. We'll readily decorate our gaming rigs with LEDs and fancy case art, but what we care about first is the hardware within. A geek will settle for a beige case if what's inside works well, but he will not settle for an alienware box that contains crap parts.
Yeah, curse those horrible chemicals! Do you know how many people die each year from the chemical DHMO? And they put that stuff in soft drinks!
Why can't they make these things out of non-chemicals, like plastic, or rubber? Chemicals are the devil, I say!
(For those without a sarcasm gland, the above is should be taken with a grain of salt. Warning: grains of salt should only be taken oraly.)
I beleive that was my point. I asked a loaded question as to whether windows was something that works, but that isn't pretty, which is what the OP said PC users prefered over mac users. Reread what I posted, you're agreeing with me here
And in any case, my point was more that where the OP said "most IBM PC users prefer", he should instead have said "most hardcore geeks prefer". Most PC users are as likely to prefer form over function as most mac users. The geek community prefers function over form, but we haven't been the majority of PC users for a decade or more.
Only in Soviet Russia.
True. I was thinking of the Macs in TFA when I wrote that. My bad.
Which is the philosophy of most IBM PC users. If it works, it doesn't need to be pretty.
Oh I dunno. What about the popularity of windows? Does that fit the description of something that "works, but isn't pretty"?
Assuming you have two otherwise equal PC products and one has a more attractive interface, better marketing/branding, or is otherwise "prettier" than the other, which one wins in the market? Actually, I wouldn't even say that it has to be a question of equally functional products - appearance can triumph over functionality. Companies ranging from microsoft to AOL are proof of this.
I agree with most of your post, but your average PC user really isn't that different from your average mac user in this regard. It's just us hardcore geeks who care more about utility than appearance.
Actually, I'd be more worried about a new car's paint flaking off because of the danger of rust. After all, if the function of the surface is partly to protect the underlying metal, and that functionality is lost due to the paint breaking off faster than it should, then you can't really say that the car is still working properly.
Could you make the same claim about the Macs in the article?
Eh, not really. I got my start on the Sega Genesis and arcade machines back in the day, and have since gone over into PC gaming exclusively. I've had it both ways.
Not saving typically meant either A) you spent alot of quarters in the arcade or B) you learned to make the most of your lives/continues/whatever. It didn't really make you "uber".
Nowadays, games have more depth and skill involved. They're longer and typically harder to finish. Yes, you can reload save games to keep your progress, but the tradeoff is that reloading is neccesary. Beating an old side scroller without saving was difficult, but not impossible, for an average player; beating a modern FPS of any respectable length without saving is damn near impossible for even an expert player. There are no extra lives, no continues, and no slot to put in more quarters - you either save or start over all the way from the beginning. And the time it takes to get to the end is so much longer as well.
And the games that do let you respawn are often the ones in which dying is taken for granted, and thus the game is corrospandingly more frustrating. MMOs like WoW are a good example of this - you might die a dozen times in a dungeon instance, but actually beating the fights is hard. Multiplayer FPS games are another example - you spawn, you're fragged, you respawn, you hope to god you'll get a kill - nope, fragged again. This is somehow easier than falling into a spike pit in Sonic the Hedgehog?
Indeed. The modern advances in tata-rendering, textured bump mapping and inverse nippomatics are truely a driving force in the industry :-P
Actually, I wonder how they'd do motion capture for this sort of thing? "Here, wear these patches and bounce"? Who gets the privlege of helping the motion capture subject with her equipment?
This isn't flamebait, it's the truth. Religious leaders make a living by telling people what god is. If someone else comes along and contradicts them, that costs them some of their credibility.
When the Catholic church preached geocentric theory, they felt threatened by Galileo (despite the fact that the sun revolving around the earth is NOT a prerequisite for the existance of god). When creationists insist upon a literal interpretation of genesis, they fell threatened by biology and astrophysics (despite the fact that god's existance does not rest on a literal interpretaion of the bible). Neither heliocentric theory, nor the big bang, nor evolution contradicts the idea that god exists, but they do all conflict with the strict religious doctrine of the die-hard beleivers. People who insist that you can't beleive in god and science are setting up a false dichotomy.
All manner of anti-scientific doctrine are God(TM) instead of plain old fashioned "god". The difference between the two is that anyone with faith can believe in god, but only someone who subscribes to a specific religion can beleive in that religion's specific God. The people who simply beleive in god aren't threatened by scientific inquiry, while the people who preach about the existance of God get defensive whenever the facts contradict their specific scripture.
After all, if we learn more about the universe, that helps the people of faith better understand the being they beleive in - but if what we learn contradics what the preachers say, than those preachers are out of a job. It isn't science vs. religion, and never has been - it's people who sell their specific version of God trying to put down ideas that make them less creidble. Which is exactly why you get popes and such telling people like Hawking to "get off their turf".
It really annoys me when people mod down opposing views instead of posting a counter arguement. If you disagree with what I say, then state what you disagree with, and make an arguement.
Because then the people who make a living telling people what God(TM) is will be out of a job?
"Nuclear weapons aren't especially useful for defense."
That, my friend, is incorrect.
One of the first major considerations the US had for it's nuclear aresenal was precisely that. The bomb was first used as a terror weapon of sorts to frighten the Japanese into surrender, but when the cold war began, and the Americans feared a Soviet land invasion of Europe, the bomb was considered as a tactical weapon.
What good does a vast column of tanks do if they're nuked? What about an aircraft carrier group? How about nuking a vital land crossing - you kill the troops already there and prevent more from making the passage by contaminating it.
It never came to that of course. And the strategy evolved from what I've just described to the doctrine of MAD, especially once the USSR had the bomb. Why nuke the other guy on your allies soil, when you can hit his cities instead?
But the idea of a tactical nuclear strike is valid, especially as a last resort measure. Moreover, when the people who have the bombs are religious zealots, the odds of them using the bomb near their own borders increase. When you're dealing with an enemy that truely beleives that god is on their side, you cannot expect them to behave rationally when threatened directly. Do you realy expect a theocratic dictator to fear fallout or the lose of his countrymen?