Keep in mind that in the last 10 years this party---with the current PM as Finance Minister---has lowered Canada's gross federal debt from over 100% of GDP to under 70% of GDP, making it the only G8 country to have a balanced budget for the last 5 years running, and making it one of the least-indebted G8 nations.
For all the sleaze involved with the Sponsorship scandal (which, if you'll recall, involved barely more money than has already been spent on the inquiry looking at it), fiscal irresponsibility is perhaps the most nonsensical avenue on which to attack the current Canadian federal Liberals.
There are reasons for Canadians to be looking for a new government, but curbing prolifigate spending isn't one of them.
> I don't mean to jump in, but does 'competition' require that the company
> in the 'lead' has to help their competitor
In certain cases, yes---anti-trust law would require a company with enough market power to not abuse that power to stifle competition.
Business regulations of this sort aren't about "fairness"---they're about economic efficiency---and are important for getting the full benefits of a free market economy.
> But we would no have done a damn thing to keep psychopaths from killing us.
But we would have saved more lives.
That is, if you'll recall, the goal. Dead is dead, whether it was a terrorist or a car accident that caused it. Use the money where it'll save the most lives.
Unless killing terrorists is somehow more important to you than lowering the overall number of innocent people killed. In which case, arguably, you might have some psychopathic tendencies of your own.
> Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the perception was that the
> Madrid bombings were a direct result of the involvement in the Iraq war.
You're wrong, but only by the implications you draw from this. As the grandparent post said, the Spanish government (already in a fairly tight race) lost support because it was seen as being deceitful and manipulative about the attacks, not merely because the attacks happened.
The result was that enough support shifted away from the perceived-untrustworthy party to their main opposition that the main opposition won. This new government then followed through on its long-standing campaign promise of withdrawing its troops from what had always been a very unpopular war in Spain.
It was not---based on the reports I've read---the bombing itself that shifted support away from the governing party, but that party's deceptive response to it. Accordingly, while "Madrid scared the Spanish into leaving Iraq!!!" makes a nice, simple story, it's not true---the truth is a much more mundane one of an electorate shifting away from untrustworthy politicians, with the Iraq withdrawal happening as a mere side-effect.
> I doubt it. I'm sure the IRA would be reviled universally if they had
> killed 3,000 citizens, destroyed billions of dollars of property, and
> changed a way of life.
"the Troubles touched the lives of most people within Northern Ireland on a daily basis....Between three and four thousand people (many of them civilians) died as a result of the violence. Many people today have had their political, social and communal attitudes and perspectives shaped by the Troubles."
> It's convenient. I can go surfing around in iTMS, find a song I want,
> and be listening to it 20 seconds later.
Alas, that's very close to why some of us can't use it:
I can go surfing around in iTMS, utterly fail to find a song I want, and be listening to my CD collection 20 seconds later.
iTunes is a spiffy idea and I'd happily use it, but I haven't even been able to use a free download I got, much less pay for additional ones. After looking for 4-6 songs on my to-get list and finding none of them on iTunes---often nothing from the bands, which get/got enough radio play that they're hardly niche---I gave up.
Ahh, well. With the 500Mth download impending, iTunes'll eventually convince record companies to put most of their music on there. Until then, there's always the horizon-broadening cornucopia of music offered up to my ears by the competition between a large number of identical ClearChannel radio stations. Sigh...
> You can't win jack shit either, as it's American only.
If you don't try and "correct" people when you have no idea what you're talking about, you won't look foolish when that's pointed out:
Eligibility. In order to be eligible, entrants must be 13 years of age or older, and a legal resident of one of the 50 United States, including Washington, D.C., Austria, Belgium, Canada (excluding the Province of Quebec), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland or the United Kingdom.
> And just easily I can show that other viewers have an easier time
> extracting information in those other designs.
No, you can't.
How do I know that? Because you foolishly leaped to say the opposite of a very simple and non-controversial statement. Let's take a look at it:
You can easily do experiments that show that viewers have an easier time extracting information in a specific graphic design than in others.
Let's have one graphic design in the experiment be a standard set of histograms. Let's let the other graphic design be the same histograms, with 200,000 other random histograms jammed in there for no reason.
I can guarantee you that no viewers will have an easier time extracting information from the latter design than from the former. Hence, your kneejerk "well, I can do the opposite, so nyah!" claim is just nonsense.
There are useful observations to be made about different viewers and different graphic designs, but it'll take a lot more thought than you put into that one.
While interesting and pretty, this is not exactly cutting-edge research; the techniques for paint-and-water diffusion were laid out by Cassidy Curtis and his co-authors in 1997 (link), and instrumented haptic brushes with underlying simulated-brush models were examined in 2001 (brush modelsinstrumented brush (pdf).
I suspect that's why people have been saying "hey, that seems a lot like [insert drawing program here]" - this is a (somewhat) new twist on old techniques. (Which, of course, is why it's a one-page submission to the conference, rather than a 10-pager like the original "Computer-Generated Watercolor". Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
> this sounds more like evidence that it is possible to psychosomatically increase
> heat-generation/blood flow to at least parts of your body than any mystical/ethereal force?
Possibly, although I haven't found a mechanism which fits the data yet---see my response to the previous poster.
> (which doesn't necessarily mean that that isn't what "chi" *is*... one can
> think of many useful things for increased blood flow/heat generation)
Yes, which IMHO is a more useful approach than bickering about what it actually is, at least at this point. There are observable effects from various traditional medical practices---for example, one of the top hand surgeons in Rhode Island became very interested in acupuncture after observing gall bladder surgery with no anaesthetic other than acupuncture (he was carrying on a conversation with the patient during the procedure)---and at this early stage, measuring and categorizing the observable effects is more productive than attempting to form a hypothesis on the underlying cause.
> Have you noticed the appearance of your hand when generating chi. It should
> appear mottled. Your hand also probably feels cooler. This is due to changes
> in blood flow. I guess you were measuring the increased heat given out by the
> increased blood flow.
I had considered that, hence my original "physiological changes" suggestion; however, upon thinking about it there is no actual evidence for that hypothesis, and there are three pieces against it:
1) There was no observable change in my hands, either at the time (although I couldn't see the palms, for obvious reasons), or now (when I can see the palms).
2) There was no lag---the sensor spikes coincided exactly with the "channelling" period. For a blood-heat-based explanation---which was (and still is) one of the stronger hypotheses I've considered---I would expect at the very least a residual effect due to the surrounding tissues absorbing some of that heat and releasing it after the blood rush. There was no such moderating effect observed.
3) The temperature difference between the inside of my cupped hands in a medium-temperature room and that same condition with a rush of blood sounds like it would be a lesser change than the difference between having the sensor exposed to the air or cupped in my hands; however, that was not the observed result. By far the largest change was observed during "channelling", even though the likely temperature difference between my cupped hands (29C or more---since I'm male, they tend to stay pretty warm) and my blood (37C at core, 31C in arms) is likely to be lower than that between my hands and the ambient temperature in the room (~20C), yet the sensor observed a much greater difference during large "channelling".
My bias is to look for a purely-physiological explanation, but so far I haven't found one that satisfactorily explained the data. And, after all, data is king---any hypothesis which fails to match the data is discarded.
> If you took them yourself, you'd know it was not some mystical "force" creating
> the power of those styles. Even in asia, fery few people believe in chi these days.
I totally agree with you based on my experience with Goju Karate, Jujitsu, Shorinji Kempo, Chi Kung, Baguazhang, and Kung Fu. No question, chi is just a convenient way of thinking about your body and isn't actually real---that was my experience.
Except then I accidentally measured the damn stuff.
Surprised the heck out of me when I did it---I was TOTALLY expecting a different result. So I repeated the experiment. And again. And again. And...well, I explained the result to friends kinda like this:
I was sitting in
a research talk about databases, and having trouble paying attention
because I'd just presented and it was right after lunch. The speakers
were passing around wireless heat sensors, so I started playing with one
when it came around to me. The standard demo was to hold it in one hand
and then cup your other hand over it - the sensor would pick up the heat
change, and the assosciated data stream being shown on the screen at the
front of the room would spike up to a new level accordingly.
After doing that a couple of times, I was bored again. I decided it would
be fun try pretend to channel chi into it; nothing would happen, of
course, but the idea was worth a few seconds of chuckling---flinging chi
at a doctorate-level research project! Amusing notion, but with only one
problem:
I was wrong.
I did a half-hearted two seconds of a standard little
meditation/visualization meant to build up chi, and pictured it flowing
through my arms down into the sensor, fully expecting the
continuously-updated data display to be wholly unchanged. You can imagine
I was a mite surprised, then, when the sensor output spiked at the exact
moment I was doing this.
My immediate thought was that it was pure coincidence - the sensor's
readings probably spike randomly every now and then no matter what's going
on. If I waited a little while, I figured, I'd see a similar spike
without me doing anything, and that would be that.
So I waited.
Nothing.
Okay, first two hypotheses---that nothing would happen and that it was a
coincidence---were false. But it was probably a fluke---I doubted it'd
happen again.
So I did the little two-second meditaty thing again...and the sensor
spiked again, exactly at the instant I was visualizing the chi hitting it.
So much for hypothesis #3.
At this point, I figured it was pretty clear that I was indeed causing the
spikes in the sensor readings, but how? I guessed that maybe I'd been
inadvertently tensing my hands a little, moving them closer to the sensor
cupped inside. So, of course, I test that, doing the channel-thing again,
but this time keeping _very_ careful watch on my hands to see that they're
completely motionless.
Spike!
I ran that test a second time, holding my hands motionless through the
both tests and the maybe-it's-coincidence-after-all? waiting period in
between; spikes (only) at the instant of channelling, just as before.
Hypothesis #4 bites the dust.
Well, alright, I thought, if I'm doing something to influence the sensor,
is it just yes/no, or is it actually measuring something? If I'm
theoretically channelling _more_ chi, will I get a bigger spike in the
readings?
Hypothesis #5.
This time I do the building-chi visualization for a little longer, maybe
3-4 seconds, and visualize a more powerful stream of chi flowing through
my hands into the sensor.
And the sensor spikes like I've never seen before, not when I was doing
the previous tests, not when I or anyone else was cupping and uncupping
our hands around it, never---this spike is significantly larger than any
other change I'd seen the sensors detec
> > The teaching of science and mathematics must be purged of its authoritarian and elitist
> > characteristics95, and the content of these subjects enriched by incorporating the insights of
> > the feminist, queer, multiculturalist and ecological critiques
>
> There is, indeed, nothing wrong with that extract, bar a slightly irritating use of scare
> quotes. Could you present an argument, rather than just assuming that it's absurdity is self-evident?
Regardless of whether you apply feminist, queer, multiculturalist, or ecological critiques, 2+2=4.
That, in a nutshell, is the bogusness Sokal is trying to demonstrate in his paper. Sometimes, regardless of your viewpoint, there is an objectively right answer.
In addition, Peak Oil catastrophes can be headed off with biodiesel (Peakists say we'd need more cropland to produce a useful amount than we have; they're demonstrably wrong), with solar (Peakists say we'd need to use more cropland for solar energy, which is again demonstrably wrong---ever heard of a nice, sunny desert?), and so forth.
Peak Oil folks take one valid idea (oil is finite, and running out will be painful), but then devolve into irrational fear-mongering about it. If thermal depolymerization can net the US four billion barrels of oil from agricultural waste we currently throw away, running out of ground oil ain't going to be causing a new Stone Age.
That you have no idea what you're talking about does not appear to have dissuaded you from doing so:
>>> - breakthroughs in graphics
>
>All designed in the 60's through 80's, but lacking in powerful enough hardware until the late 90's.
Total nonsense. Most of the recent advances---such as fluid sims, deformable objects, motion capture, and the like---were made possible because of better algorithms---i.e., research---rather than any advance in hardware. I can guarantee you running algorithms from the 60's-80's on modern hardware wouldn't give you the kinds of results the multi-billion-dollar entertainment industries are looking for.
>>> - breakthroughs in vision
>
> ???
Did you get mail today? How do you think it got sorted?
Computer vision algorithms started doing that in the last two decades.
Most uses of vision in industry are pretty low-profile---things like automatic verification of manufactured component quality---but are neither trivial nor ancient.
>>> - stunning advancements in computer architecture
>
>Eh? What stunning advancements? Most of the architectures in
> use today go all the way back to the early 70's.
You'd be a fool to think that a P4 is 70's technology just because an 8086 was designed a long time ago. Building a computer with modern lithography and 70's-era designs would be a laughable failure; caching, for example, has improved hugely since then, with significant work on parallelizing the multi-stage decoding, fetching, and execution of individual instructions with extensive branch prediction and speculative prefetching.
Part of the problem is, earth-shaking discoveries don't spring fully-formed from a computer scientist's brow. Each one is built up over years of painstaking work, carefully laying the groundwork necessary to get there.
That's the reason you can point to much earlier precursors of "recent" advances, and also the reason you can't point to truly recent ones---the research that's being done right now is too abstract and specialized for you to know about it, and by the time it's something that you'd have heard of, it's probably no longer new.
Essentially, your complaint is "why haven't I heard of all the new advances at the cutting edge of computer science???" My response is "why should we go out of our way to tell you what we're working on if you can't be bothered to look for yourself?"
You haven't heard because you haven't looked hard enough. The only one to blame for that is you.
> Very little has come out of comp. science research in universities and research institutes in the last few years.
How about Google and Akamai? Both were---to the extent of my knowledge---basic research that turned out to be immensely useful. Both are now woven deeply into the fabric of the internet---I'm pretty sure you've used both today---and neither is all that old.
That you don't know about research results doesn't mean they're not there.
> Employing US citizens shouldn't be a big deal, however many of the graduate schools actively discriminate against US citizens
And thus I know you have no clue what you're talking about.
My department just went through the yearly prospective student search. We were all keen to get qualified US applicants. We got some, of course, but---as usual---most of the applicants were foreign citizens. Accordingly, since we want the best students, half or so are not US citizens.
That's hardly unfair discrimination against US students. Unless you somehow believe that US universities should only admit US citizens. Which, in addition to being truly discriminatory, would be a great way to shoot the US's technological supremacy in the foot, and with it the US economy.
Moreover, US citizens are---while grad students---just as much indentured servants as foreigners are. Other than being unable to receive certain funds from the US government, there is effectively no difference between US and non-US students. Any complaints to the contrary sound an awful lot like sour grapes.
> Been in the OEM business for many years, and we have yet to see any documentation from Microsoft
> preventing us from installing ANYTHING we want on the OSes for our PCs.
Are you in the EU?
If not, no offense, but it's really not relevant whether or not you've seen such restrictions. Clearly, such restrictions indeed were sufficiently present in the EU that Microsoft lost an antitrust case. ('sides, I notice you mention "no documentation"---a lack of a written requirement that OEMs not install competing software doesn't mean that such a demand---and crippling non-compliance penalties---could not be made abundantly clear.)
> This is gotten insane, in the US they preach capitalisim, yet when lawmakers or competitors
> draw into question a company that is too successful, the get put on a block and picked apart.
Perhaps that's because economic theory---and practical experience---tells us that monopolies and near-monopolies are much less efficient than the multiple-competing-entities model that capitalism is predicated upon?
When a company with a monopoly abuses its power, everyone loses except for that company. Basic economics. If the government is intended to govern for the people, not the companies, then it is obvious that government action against monopolistic abuses is desirable.
> I mean, who are we kidding here? If you have a big pipe to the internet and can get all of the movies
> and music you want on demand (and for no charge) are you going to run to the store to buy even a
> single track (if it were available) off a cd that you like? No! You're going to hose it off some
> torrent or IRC or whatever.
Who are you kidding here? I have plenty of bandwidth, and no particular interest in P2Ping the music I'm looking for. If there's something I want, I'll either buy it (physical or d/l) if I can find a price I consider reasonable, or simply spend my time on something else if it's too hard or expensive to be worthwhile.
"If P2P is easy, nobody will buy music" is simply false---I'm hardly alone in my spending habits---and making that claim shows either ignorance or willful deceit.
Besides, if easy and legal copying would kill the music industry, why haven't CD sales collapsed in Canada? Copying CDs and downloading mp3s is court-affirmed legal there, but I haven't heard of music sales rates plunging below the corresponding US levels. That fact alone suggests the legality or illegality of copying/downloading makes very little difference in music revenue.
I think you're giving customers far too little credit; by and large, we're pretty honest.
> Also consider that history is littered with ideological problems
> science has had. Phrenology is one obvious example
That's not a problem with science; that's a problem with either current knowledge or a lack of application of science (or both). Science is the meta-method that underlies the advance of our knowledge about the natural world. It's not what we know, it's how we know.
> I'm also curoius what using the Internet has to do with the value of religion or philosophy.
Science creates tangible advances; the Internet is one example. Philosophic advances are less obvious.
While I agree that the previous poster is thinking of value somewhat narrowly---one could potentially characterize "human rights" and "democracy with universal suffrage" as soft-science/humanities advances---he is correct in observing that more than a few soft-science/humanities academics have become so divorced from reality as to be useless, and are little more than insulting when they try to speak authoritatively about fields where validity actually can be tested against reality (see other posts for some egregious examples).
Soft-science/humanities aren't the only ones to suffer the risk of drifting away from relevance---all academic disciplines can suffer from tunnel vision. Hard sciences, though, have a constant "does this pass the reality test?" check against going too far afield. No amount of impassioned writing will let you successfully etch 35nm chip features.
That hard sciences have this anti-garbage oracle to test against makes some technologists snobbish and (IMHO) narrow-minded, which is unnecessary and (IMHO) counter-productive. On the other hand, they do have something of a point: lacking such a convenient filter, whole areas of other disciplines have become rotten and useless.
Frankly, I think researchers in those areas have taken the lazy route and abdicated their responsibilities; IMHO, humanities research is too important to let this kind of intellectual rot be considered acceptable.
> It was a specialty of communists, to put ideology above individual human beings.
> "Masses are everything, one person means nothing" -- an old communist motto.
"Kill them all. Let God sort them out."
Many groups have put ideology above individual human beings. Saying "it's Communist!!" is both incorrect and unnecessary - the Cold War is over now, you know, and Communism is no longer the Big Scary Enemy. (It may or may not be bad, but it's no longer reasonable to have knee-jerk reactions about it - that's so 80's...)
> We can live with people being able to break the rules. It's called freedom.
No.
Freedom is when reasonable actions are not against the rules.
There are some rules ("no mass murder") that are good rules, and that you should not be able to break (with impunity, at least). These are the rules that actually make people's lives better.
If something is not a good rule, it should not be a rule. That you can get away with breaking it doesn't make it "okay". What you describe is nothing more than a fascist state with incompetent police.
> It would seem that I understand my freedoms and democracy better than you.
> Oh, and I voted for Bush, too. I guess I shouldn't exist according to your logic.
Not at all; he simply disagrees with you.
You believe you understand your freedoms better than he does; he believes you don't have as many freedoms as you think.
Whether you understand the creation of a law doesn't really determine whether you understand its effect.
> Our economic engine was producing war time goods at a rate that all
> the nations of the world combined could not match our power.
Got a cite for that?
I'm not necessarily disputing anything you're claiming; however, neither is it at all clear that what you've said is actually true. In particular...
> There were no limits to the power we could project.
I think you're underestimating the remaining power of the other industrialized nations at the end of WWII. Even by D-Day, Britain had enough military might remaining to take responsibility for as much of the assault as the USA.
If you look at this link, for example, you'll see that while the USA was well-supplied with equipment, it was severely undermanned for dreams of world conquest. At the end of the war, there were about 1100 divisions available to the countries most involved, of which less than 10% were American.
Moreover, this link suggests that the USA didn't enjoy such a dominant position in equipment after all; for example, the USSR was producing more tanks than the US by the end of the war.
Given the numbers and logistics involved, your assertion of the manifest ability of the USA to "roll over" the rest of the world seems...optimistic.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you figure?
Keep in mind that in the last 10 years this party---with the current PM as Finance Minister---has lowered Canada's gross federal debt from over 100% of GDP to under 70% of GDP, making it the only G8 country to have a balanced budget for the last 5 years running, and making it one of the least-indebted G8 nations.
For all the sleaze involved with the Sponsorship scandal (which, if you'll recall, involved barely more money than has already been spent on the inquiry looking at it), fiscal irresponsibility is perhaps the most nonsensical avenue on which to attack the current Canadian federal Liberals.
There are reasons for Canadians to be looking for a new government, but curbing prolifigate spending isn't one of them.
> in the 'lead' has to help their competitor
In certain cases, yes---anti-trust law would require a company with enough market power to not abuse that power to stifle competition.
Business regulations of this sort aren't about "fairness"---they're about economic efficiency---and are important for getting the full benefits of a free market economy.
But we would have saved more lives.
That is, if you'll recall, the goal. Dead is dead, whether it was a terrorist or a car accident that caused it. Use the money where it'll save the most lives.
Unless killing terrorists is somehow more important to you than lowering the overall number of innocent people killed. In which case, arguably, you might have some psychopathic tendencies of your own.
> Madrid bombings were a direct result of the involvement in the Iraq war.
You're wrong, but only by the implications you draw from this. As the grandparent post said, the Spanish government (already in a fairly tight race) lost support because it was seen as being deceitful and manipulative about the attacks, not merely because the attacks happened.
The result was that enough support shifted away from the perceived-untrustworthy party to their main opposition that the main opposition won. This new government then followed through on its long-standing campaign promise of withdrawing its troops from what had always been a very unpopular war in Spain.
It was not---based on the reports I've read---the bombing itself that shifted support away from the governing party, but that party's deceptive response to it. Accordingly, while "Madrid scared the Spanish into leaving Iraq!!!" makes a nice, simple story, it's not true---the truth is a much more mundane one of an electorate shifting away from untrustworthy politicians, with the Iraq withdrawal happening as a mere side-effect.
> killed 3,000 citizens, destroyed billions of dollars of property, and
> changed a way of life.
"the Troubles touched the lives of most people within Northern Ireland on a daily basis....Between three and four thousand people (many of them civilians) died as a result of the violence. Many people today have had their political, social and communal attitudes and perspectives shaped by the Troubles."
(Source: Wikipedia)
Are you sure it's not a matter of "well, it's different when it happens to us!"
> and be listening to it 20 seconds later.
Alas, that's very close to why some of us can't use it:
I can go surfing around in iTMS, utterly fail to find a song I want, and be listening to my CD collection 20 seconds later.
iTunes is a spiffy idea and I'd happily use it, but I haven't even been able to use a free download I got, much less pay for additional ones. After looking for 4-6 songs on my to-get list and finding none of them on iTunes---often nothing from the bands, which get/got enough radio play that they're hardly niche---I gave up.
Ahh, well. With the 500Mth download impending, iTunes'll eventually convince record companies to put most of their music on there. Until then, there's always the horizon-broadening cornucopia of music offered up to my ears by the competition between a large number of identical ClearChannel radio stations. Sigh...
If you don't try and "correct" people when you have no idea what you're talking about, you won't look foolish when that's pointed out:
Eligibility. In order to be eligible, entrants must be 13 years of age or older, and a legal resident of one of the 50 United States, including Washington, D.C., Austria, Belgium, Canada (excluding the Province of Quebec), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland or the United Kingdom.
(Source: TFA)
> extracting information in those other designs.
No, you can't.
How do I know that? Because you foolishly leaped to say the opposite of a very simple and non-controversial statement. Let's take a look at it:
You can easily do experiments that show that viewers have an easier time extracting information in a specific graphic design than in others.
Let's have one graphic design in the experiment be a standard set of histograms. Let's let the other graphic design be the same histograms, with 200,000 other random histograms jammed in there for no reason.
I can guarantee you that no viewers will have an easier time extracting information from the latter design than from the former. Hence, your kneejerk "well, I can do the opposite, so nyah!" claim is just nonsense.
There are useful observations to be made about different viewers and different graphic designs, but it'll take a lot more thought than you put into that one.
I suspect that's why people have been saying "hey, that seems a lot like [insert drawing program here]" - this is a (somewhat) new twist on old techniques. (Which, of course, is why it's a one-page submission to the conference, rather than a 10-pager like the original "Computer-Generated Watercolor". Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
> heat-generation/blood flow to at least parts of your body than any mystical/ethereal force?
Possibly, although I haven't found a mechanism which fits the data yet---see my response to the previous poster.
> (which doesn't necessarily mean that that isn't what "chi" *is*... one can
> think of many useful things for increased blood flow/heat generation)
Yes, which IMHO is a more useful approach than bickering about what it actually is, at least at this point. There are observable effects from various traditional medical practices---for example, one of the top hand surgeons in Rhode Island became very interested in acupuncture after observing gall bladder surgery with no anaesthetic other than acupuncture (he was carrying on a conversation with the patient during the procedure)---and at this early stage, measuring and categorizing the observable effects is more productive than attempting to form a hypothesis on the underlying cause.
Basically, gather data, then explain the data.
> appear mottled. Your hand also probably feels cooler. This is due to changes
> in blood flow. I guess you were measuring the increased heat given out by the
> increased blood flow.
I had considered that, hence my original "physiological changes" suggestion; however, upon thinking about it there is no actual evidence for that hypothesis, and there are three pieces against it:
1) There was no observable change in my hands, either at the time (although I couldn't see the palms, for obvious reasons), or now (when I can see the palms).
2) There was no lag---the sensor spikes coincided exactly with the "channelling" period. For a blood-heat-based explanation---which was (and still is) one of the stronger hypotheses I've considered---I would expect at the very least a residual effect due to the surrounding tissues absorbing some of that heat and releasing it after the blood rush. There was no such moderating effect observed.
3) The temperature difference between the inside of my cupped hands in a medium-temperature room and that same condition with a rush of blood sounds like it would be a lesser change than the difference between having the sensor exposed to the air or cupped in my hands; however, that was not the observed result. By far the largest change was observed during "channelling", even though the likely temperature difference between my cupped hands (29C or more---since I'm male, they tend to stay pretty warm) and my blood (37C at core, 31C in arms) is likely to be lower than that between my hands and the ambient temperature in the room (~20C), yet the sensor observed a much greater difference during large "channelling".
My bias is to look for a purely-physiological explanation, but so far I haven't found one that satisfactorily explained the data. And, after all, data is king---any hypothesis which fails to match the data is discarded.
> the power of those styles. Even in asia, fery few people believe in chi these days.
I totally agree with you based on my experience with Goju Karate, Jujitsu, Shorinji Kempo, Chi Kung, Baguazhang, and Kung Fu. No question, chi is just a convenient way of thinking about your body and isn't actually real---that was my experience.
Except then I accidentally measured the damn stuff.
Surprised the heck out of me when I did it---I was TOTALLY expecting a different result. So I repeated the experiment. And again. And again. And...well, I explained the result to friends kinda like this:
I was sitting in a research talk about databases, and having trouble paying attention because I'd just presented and it was right after lunch. The speakers were passing around wireless heat sensors, so I started playing with one when it came around to me. The standard demo was to hold it in one hand and then cup your other hand over it - the sensor would pick up the heat change, and the assosciated data stream being shown on the screen at the front of the room would spike up to a new level accordingly.
After doing that a couple of times, I was bored again. I decided it would be fun try pretend to channel chi into it; nothing would happen, of course, but the idea was worth a few seconds of chuckling---flinging chi at a doctorate-level research project! Amusing notion, but with only one problem:
I was wrong.
I did a half-hearted two seconds of a standard little meditation/visualization meant to build up chi, and pictured it flowing through my arms down into the sensor, fully expecting the continuously-updated data display to be wholly unchanged. You can imagine I was a mite surprised, then, when the sensor output spiked at the exact moment I was doing this.
My immediate thought was that it was pure coincidence - the sensor's readings probably spike randomly every now and then no matter what's going on. If I waited a little while, I figured, I'd see a similar spike without me doing anything, and that would be that.
So I waited.
Nothing.
Okay, first two hypotheses---that nothing would happen and that it was a coincidence---were false. But it was probably a fluke---I doubted it'd happen again.
So I did the little two-second meditaty thing again...and the sensor spiked again, exactly at the instant I was visualizing the chi hitting it. So much for hypothesis #3.
At this point, I figured it was pretty clear that I was indeed causing the spikes in the sensor readings, but how? I guessed that maybe I'd been inadvertently tensing my hands a little, moving them closer to the sensor cupped inside. So, of course, I test that, doing the channel-thing again, but this time keeping _very_ careful watch on my hands to see that they're completely motionless.
Spike!
I ran that test a second time, holding my hands motionless through the both tests and the maybe-it's-coincidence-after-all? waiting period in between; spikes (only) at the instant of channelling, just as before. Hypothesis #4 bites the dust.
Well, alright, I thought, if I'm doing something to influence the sensor, is it just yes/no, or is it actually measuring something? If I'm theoretically channelling _more_ chi, will I get a bigger spike in the readings?
Hypothesis #5.
This time I do the building-chi visualization for a little longer, maybe 3-4 seconds, and visualize a more powerful stream of chi flowing through my hands into the sensor.
And the sensor spikes like I've never seen before, not when I was doing the previous tests, not when I or anyone else was cupping and uncupping our hands around it, never---this spike is significantly larger than any other change I'd seen the sensors detec
> > characteristics95, and the content of these subjects enriched by incorporating the insights of
> > the feminist, queer, multiculturalist and ecological critiques
>
> There is, indeed, nothing wrong with that extract, bar a slightly irritating use of scare
> quotes. Could you present an argument, rather than just assuming that it's absurdity is self-evident?
Regardless of whether you apply feminist, queer, multiculturalist, or ecological critiques, 2+2=4.
That, in a nutshell, is the bogusness Sokal is trying to demonstrate in his paper. Sometimes, regardless of your viewpoint, there is an objectively right answer.
Peak Oil folks take one valid idea (oil is finite, and running out will be painful), but then devolve into irrational fear-mongering about it. If thermal depolymerization can net the US four billion barrels of oil from agricultural waste we currently throw away, running out of ground oil ain't going to be causing a new Stone Age.
>>> - breakthroughs in graphics
>
>All designed in the 60's through 80's, but lacking in powerful enough hardware until the late 90's.
Total nonsense. Most of the recent advances---such as fluid sims, deformable objects, motion capture, and the like---were made possible because of better algorithms---i.e., research---rather than any advance in hardware. I can guarantee you running algorithms from the 60's-80's on modern hardware wouldn't give you the kinds of results the multi-billion-dollar entertainment industries are looking for.
>>> - breakthroughs in vision
>
> ???
Did you get mail today? How do you think it got sorted? Computer vision algorithms started doing that in the last two decades.
Most uses of vision in industry are pretty low-profile---things like automatic verification of manufactured component quality---but are neither trivial nor ancient.
>>> - stunning advancements in computer architecture
>
>Eh? What stunning advancements? Most of the architectures in
> use today go all the way back to the early 70's.
You'd be a fool to think that a P4 is 70's technology just because an 8086 was designed a long time ago. Building a computer with modern lithography and 70's-era designs would be a laughable failure; caching, for example, has improved hugely since then, with significant work on parallelizing the multi-stage decoding, fetching, and execution of individual instructions with extensive branch prediction and speculative prefetching.
Part of the problem is, earth-shaking discoveries don't spring fully-formed from a computer scientist's brow. Each one is built up over years of painstaking work, carefully laying the groundwork necessary to get there.
That's the reason you can point to much earlier precursors of "recent" advances, and also the reason you can't point to truly recent ones---the research that's being done right now is too abstract and specialized for you to know about it, and by the time it's something that you'd have heard of, it's probably no longer new.
Essentially, your complaint is "why haven't I heard of all the new advances at the cutting edge of computer science???" My response is "why should we go out of our way to tell you what we're working on if you can't be bothered to look for yourself?"
You haven't heard because you haven't looked hard enough. The only one to blame for that is you.
How about Google and Akamai? Both were---to the extent of my knowledge---basic research that turned out to be immensely useful. Both are now woven deeply into the fabric of the internet---I'm pretty sure you've used both today---and neither is all that old.
That you don't know about research results doesn't mean they're not there.
And thus I know you have no clue what you're talking about.
My department just went through the yearly prospective student search. We were all keen to get qualified US applicants. We got some, of course, but---as usual---most of the applicants were foreign citizens. Accordingly, since we want the best students, half or so are not US citizens.
That's hardly unfair discrimination against US students. Unless you somehow believe that US universities should only admit US citizens. Which, in addition to being truly discriminatory, would be a great way to shoot the US's technological supremacy in the foot, and with it the US economy.
Moreover, US citizens are---while grad students---just as much indentured servants as foreigners are. Other than being unable to receive certain funds from the US government, there is effectively no difference between US and non-US students. Any complaints to the contrary sound an awful lot like sour grapes.
> preventing us from installing ANYTHING we want on the OSes for our PCs.
Are you in the EU?
If not, no offense, but it's really not relevant whether or not you've seen such restrictions. Clearly, such restrictions indeed were sufficiently present in the EU that Microsoft lost an antitrust case. ('sides, I notice you mention "no documentation"---a lack of a written requirement that OEMs not install competing software doesn't mean that such a demand---and crippling non-compliance penalties---could not be made abundantly clear.)
> This is gotten insane, in the US they preach capitalisim, yet when lawmakers or competitors
> draw into question a company that is too successful, the get put on a block and picked apart.
Perhaps that's because economic theory---and practical experience---tells us that monopolies and near-monopolies are much less efficient than the multiple-competing-entities model that capitalism is predicated upon?
When a company with a monopoly abuses its power, everyone loses except for that company. Basic economics. If the government is intended to govern for the people, not the companies, then it is obvious that government action against monopolistic abuses is desirable.
> and music you want on demand (and for no charge) are you going to run to the store to buy even a
> single track (if it were available) off a cd that you like? No! You're going to hose it off some
> torrent or IRC or whatever.
Who are you kidding here? I have plenty of bandwidth, and no particular interest in P2Ping the music I'm looking for. If there's something I want, I'll either buy it (physical or d/l) if I can find a price I consider reasonable, or simply spend my time on something else if it's too hard or expensive to be worthwhile.
"If P2P is easy, nobody will buy music" is simply false---I'm hardly alone in my spending habits---and making that claim shows either ignorance or willful deceit.
Besides, if easy and legal copying would kill the music industry, why haven't CD sales collapsed in Canada? Copying CDs and downloading mp3s is court-affirmed legal there, but I haven't heard of music sales rates plunging below the corresponding US levels. That fact alone suggests the legality or illegality of copying/downloading makes very little difference in music revenue.
I think you're giving customers far too little credit; by and large, we're pretty honest.
> science has had. Phrenology is one obvious example
That's not a problem with science; that's a problem with either current knowledge or a lack of application of science (or both). Science is the meta-method that underlies the advance of our knowledge about the natural world. It's not what we know, it's how we know.
> I'm also curoius what using the Internet has to do with the value of religion or philosophy.
Science creates tangible advances; the Internet is one example. Philosophic advances are less obvious.
While I agree that the previous poster is thinking of value somewhat narrowly---one could potentially characterize "human rights" and "democracy with universal suffrage" as soft-science/humanities advances---he is correct in observing that more than a few soft-science/humanities academics have become so divorced from reality as to be useless, and are little more than insulting when they try to speak authoritatively about fields where validity actually can be tested against reality (see other posts for some egregious examples).
Soft-science/humanities aren't the only ones to suffer the risk of drifting away from relevance---all academic disciplines can suffer from tunnel vision. Hard sciences, though, have a constant "does this pass the reality test?" check against going too far afield. No amount of impassioned writing will let you successfully etch 35nm chip features.
That hard sciences have this anti-garbage oracle to test against makes some technologists snobbish and (IMHO) narrow-minded, which is unnecessary and (IMHO) counter-productive. On the other hand, they do have something of a point: lacking such a convenient filter, whole areas of other disciplines have become rotten and useless.
Frankly, I think researchers in those areas have taken the lazy route and abdicated their responsibilities; IMHO, humanities research is too important to let this kind of intellectual rot be considered acceptable.
> "Masses are everything, one person means nothing" -- an old communist motto.
"Kill them all. Let God sort them out."
Many groups have put ideology above individual human beings. Saying "it's Communist!!" is both incorrect and unnecessary - the Cold War is over now, you know, and Communism is no longer the Big Scary Enemy. (It may or may not be bad, but it's no longer reasonable to have knee-jerk reactions about it - that's so 80's...)
No. Freedom is when reasonable actions are not against the rules.
There are some rules ("no mass murder") that are good rules, and that you should not be able to break (with impunity, at least). These are the rules that actually make people's lives better.
If something is not a good rule, it should not be a rule. That you can get away with breaking it doesn't make it "okay". What you describe is nothing more than a fascist state with incompetent police.
> Oh, and I voted for Bush, too. I guess I shouldn't exist according to your logic.
Not at all; he simply disagrees with you. You believe you understand your freedoms better than he does; he believes you don't have as many freedoms as you think.
Whether you understand the creation of a law doesn't really determine whether you understand its effect.
> the nations of the world combined could not match our power.
Got a cite for that?
I'm not necessarily disputing anything you're claiming; however, neither is it at all clear that what you've said is actually true. In particular...
> There were no limits to the power we could project.
I think you're underestimating the remaining power of the other industrialized nations at the end of WWII. Even by D-Day, Britain had enough military might remaining to take responsibility for as much of the assault as the USA.
If you look at this link, for example, you'll see that while the USA was well-supplied with equipment, it was severely undermanned for dreams of world conquest. At the end of the war, there were about 1100 divisions available to the countries most involved, of which less than 10% were American. Moreover, this link suggests that the USA didn't enjoy such a dominant position in equipment after all; for example, the USSR was producing more tanks than the US by the end of the war.
Given the numbers and logistics involved, your assertion of the manifest ability of the USA to "roll over" the rest of the world seems...optimistic.
Can you back that up, or is that just an article of faith?
Without providing compelling evidence of your assumption, your entire argument is nothing more than a statement of your opinion.
(I'm not saying you're not right, just that you haven't provided any reason to believe you are.)