These people need to understand reality is not "Pick 'n' Mix" - everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but no-one's entitled to their own facts.
That's your opinion.
(Just kidding)
The religious right in the USA might rail against "moral relativism" (basically, the idea that it is possible to hold a valid opinion different to their own), but they're demonstrating a much more dangerous habit themselves - factual relativism.
Mod Parent Up.
The thing is, the Republican Party is increasingly dominated by True Believers of one stripe or another. They may be either True Believers in the power of unfettered capitalism, small government, or Jesus Christ. But their belief is the important thing, and facts are either tools which promote their belief, or else annoyances which need to be swept under the rug. Speaking as a center-leftist, I'm not saying that the liberal left isn't guilty of the same thing. A true-Blue San Francisco knee-jerk liberal is just a True Believer in different causes- perhaps environmentalism, anti-globalization, or some idiocy like animal rights for salmon. So I think it's worth acknowledging that the Republicans don't have a monopoly on irrational thought... though they sure seem to be heading in that direction.
As a Democrat, I was not a rabid fan of Bush I, but I'll give him this: he was a competent, pragmatic president, and our nation would be in far better shape if he'd been running it for the past five years. Under the administration of George W. Bush, the country has seen the ascendancy of the true believers, where belief and loyalty are more important than facts or competence. This has had predictable results in the massive fuck-up of the Iraq occupation, and the massive fuck-up of Hurricane Katrina. I'm not dead-set against Republicans- I'd consider voting for John McCain- but for the nation's sake, the Republicans need to get their party back from the nut-jobs. It looks like the original plan was for the Republican party to gain power by exploiting the lunatic fringe. Unfortunately, the reverse seems to have happened.
I'd forgotten, but there was something I wanted to bring up if a "politics" article did come up, and one has.
It is, today, September 12. Four years and one day ago, it was September 11th, 2001, and I was in New York watching the dust cloud rise. And it's just remarkable, just stunning... I mean, who could have predicted that four years later, the most powerful nation on earth would yet to have brought bin Laden to justice for what he did? Who could have believed that instead, the administration would use lies about WMD to invade a nation with no connection to 9/11? Who would have believed that we'd be in an endless guerilla war with almost two thousand American lives lost and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead. That a nation which prides itself in being a beacon of freedom would be torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib and running a gulag in Cuba. And there's no end in sight to any of it. It's just disgusting. And profoundly sad. What's happened to my country? We rose up after 9-11 but somehow in the past four years, it brought us down so low, I barely even recognize the country anymore.
We shouldn't be giving this guy the authority to use nuclear weapons. If he were watching TV in my house, he wouldn't even be entrusted with the remote control. God... just, one day, I want to walk up to him. And spit in his face, and then walk away.
I don't think the American people would consider the destruction of "only one" American city to be an acceptable resolution to a foreign policy crisis.
Well, judging by his actions, George W. seems to think the destruction of an American city is an acceptable outcome for his domestic policy.
In the Bible, God gave Adam and Eve the choice of being forever in the garden or eating the fruit. He told them not to, but allowed them to. Have you ever considered that God also allows you to be an agnostic if you want to be one?
I've considered it, but I really have a hard time making up my mind one way or the other.
If you were buying into the industry, why would you compete with Skype when you could buy it?
But why buy into it at all? Skype isn't a natural extension of eBay's business strategy; it's not even related to what they do. It's sorta like Pizza Hut coming out and announcing they're going to buy Lockheed Martin and build fighter jets. The general tone of the NY Times article is bafflement. Generally speaking, businesses do best when they stick to their core business- when they stick to one thing that they know how to do.
I think it goes deeper than that. I think there is a failure by many in the press- in particular the "humanities graduates" that the article rails against- to understand the scientific method and believe in things like objective truth. "There are just so many perceptions and viewpoints, all equally valid," goes the postmodernist thinking, so they give "equal time" to them all, never mind whether one is completely unsupported by evidence. It's not just an issue in science: you see the same bullshit when a politician says that black is white and down is up but the press lacks the brains or testicles to call them on it.
The other major problem is that increasingly, news is seen as a form of entertainment. If this is the case, then whether your report is true or not is secondary to whether it tells a good story. For this reason, science journalists love to report on controversies where they don't exist. A compelling narrative needs conflict; "scientists unanimous: all support theory" might be accurate, but it just isn't as exciting as "scientists bitterly divided, killing each other with bare hands over theory".
And as far as bad science journalism, I'd like to point out that journals like _Science_ and _Nature_ actually contribute to this by frequently publishing attention-grabbing bad science, just because they know it will get coverage.
Also there's the input situation with no click wheel type of thing (or even an iPod Shuffle kind of interface)...
The wheel would be useful for more than MP3s- I think the wheel would actually be a great interface device for a cellphone. It would allow you to rapidly scroll through a list of contacts and navigate those damned endless menus.
They also flew over the same route 3 times before the shoot down, so the Serbians were able to position AAA along the route and shoot the F-117 down.
That's the same reason them Russkies managed to down the U-2. They flew the same route twice, and the second time around, the Russians were ready for them with their big SAMs.
Let them know (since they are elected) that they can't let the districts do stupid tech things.
Hey, I'm still pissed off about the fact that we had those stupid scissors that couldn't cut anything in grade school. I mean, they were about as sharp as a basketball.
Plus, for some insane reason, most of them were left-handed.
I can say for a fact the NSF does fund useless projects- they've funded me to study dinosaurs, after all.
But the thing is, the NSF is a bargain. It costs about 5.5 billion a year and funds things as diverse as biotech, computing, and fisheries management. It funds undergrads, graduate students, and professors, and it buys equipment and pays for research projects. In the process it cultivates basic research in the United States, in all areas of the sciences. Yet NASA gets over three times that- 16 billion this year.
But you have to question whether the $150 billion dollars we've spent on the Space Shuttle is really worth it in scientific terms. It's not that I object to the research- some of it, like the Hubble, I'm very much a supporter of. And I could think of worse ways to spend the money (that billion a week in Iraq isn't buying us very much) But what it comes down to is return on investment. If our goal is research and exploration, funding the NSF and NASA's unmanned program will allow us to get more out of each tax dollar.
The most obvious is all of the tech that will be discovered along the way, which would be valuable both to private industry and the military.
You could do the same thing far more efficiently by directly funding research through the National Science Foundation. Unfortunately, the NSF has seen its budget cut while funding for NASA has been increased.
I think that NASA's unmanned programs do some valuable research and they should continue, or even be expanded, but the manned program is just a publicity stunt. I mean what did the Shuttle program ever discover, other than a bunch of science-fair projects along the lines of "does classical music make plants grow better... in SPACE?" Their biggest single contribution to research has been repairing a robot- the Hubble Space Telescope. I think that says something about where space exploration is going. The sooner we get humans out of space exploration entirely, the more progress we'll make. Likewise, if there really is any way to make money from going to Mars, it will doubtless be cheaper to send robots to do it, instead of sending humans.
I think that was teflon. Imagine a world without it.
According to Wikipedia, "Teflon is the brand name of a polymer compound discovered by Roy J. Plunkett (1910-1994) of DuPont in 1938 and introduced as a commercial product in 1946." As for Velcro, "The hook and loop fastener was invented in 1948 by Georges de Mestral, a Swiss engineer. The idea came to him after he took a close look at the seed pod burrs which kept sticking to his dog on their daily walk in the Alps."
This is particularly pointless. Who looks at their mouse while using it?
People who are stoned out of their minds?
Re:Deeper pockets than Microsoft?
on
Microsoft Sues EU
·
· Score: 3, Funny
We are putting a European army together now, this is probably as good time to test that it works. Lets try fighting instead of legal wrangling.
I can see the dispatches now:
"Reports are coming in that Microsoft's rapid assault has caught the Polish Army off guard and put them into full retreat. Vladimir Putin expressed little concern over a suspicious buildup of Microsoft tanks along the Russian border, citing assurances from Bill Gates that Microsoft would honor the recently signed Microsoft-Russia nonagression pact. Throughout Microsoft-held territory, police went door-to-door rounding up Mac users for internment in camps. The French reported that their retreat-and-surrender operation was proceeding brilliantly, despite a massive shortage of white flags."
I dunno man... Ant Man? Just not seeing the returns on that one.
Shit, I can come up characters just as good as "Ant Man"! Like Slug Boy, Earwig Lad, Captain Fruit Fly, Dung Beetle Man, Pillbug Woman, and the Amazing Aphid.
Anyone care to give me $50 million apiece to develop these properties for the big screen?
Sure, some outrageous hypotheses that are subject to ridicule are later found to be true. However, this happens only in very rare cases, and once the evidence is provided to back up the claims, the ridicule evaporates.
Outrageous hypotheses end up being vindicated fairly often. A few examples:
continental drift
the idea that the moon formed following a collision between earth and a planetoid
asteroid/comet impact as the cause of the Cretaceous mass extinction which wiped out the dinosaurs
evolution of mitochondria and chloroplasts from free-living bacteria
But otherwise, I agree with the basic premises of your Ignorant Fuckwit Theory. There's a world of difference between oddball hypotheses and bullshit pseudoscientific babble, and it's not that hard to tell the difference. A major clue here is that something as important as a new theory of how supernovas occur is going to be in a good scientific journal, not a random web page.
Wikipedia has a lengthy article on the Electric Universe Model, although there is a warning at the top that "The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article are disputed."
Wow, Wikipedia's really going out on a limb here, aren't they? That's what I love about Wikipedia though- not afraid to call 'em as they see them.
We are Gods creatures. He made the world. We can not understand his work in science. But we can understand it in art. In Humanity. In Compassion. In Literature.
Well said! I mean, what the hell did people ever figure out by doing science? It was because of religion and faith in God that humans eradicated smallpox, put men in space, invented the internet, figured out how to splice genes, and built giant telescopes to peer back into the dawn of time! Oh, wait, that was science that did all that shit, wasn't it?
There's one simple reason why people do science: it works.
There are skin impressions associated with tyrannosaurs from Alberta and Mongolia, and they seem to show the same pebbly skin that's seen in the herbivorous dinosaurs. So there's no evidence of feathers in large tyrannosaurs. On the other hand, it's possible that either (a) they had feathers over part of the body only, or (b) the young tyrannosaurs had feathers, but the adults didn't (just as young ostriches have a much more extensive feather covering than the adults). The tiny, primitive tyrannosaurs known from China have feather-like coverings, but it would have looked superficially like mammalian hair rather than fluffy like a chick. I think there are also reports of scaly skin in Allosaurus as well.
Slashdot Mirror
That's your opinion.
(Just kidding)
The religious right in the USA might rail against "moral relativism" (basically, the idea that it is possible to hold a valid opinion different to their own), but they're demonstrating a much more dangerous habit themselves - factual relativism.
Mod Parent Up.
The thing is, the Republican Party is increasingly dominated by True Believers of one stripe or another. They may be either True Believers in the power of unfettered capitalism, small government, or Jesus Christ. But their belief is the important thing, and facts are either tools which promote their belief, or else annoyances which need to be swept under the rug. Speaking as a center-leftist, I'm not saying that the liberal left isn't guilty of the same thing. A true-Blue San Francisco knee-jerk liberal is just a True Believer in different causes- perhaps environmentalism, anti-globalization, or some idiocy like animal rights for salmon. So I think it's worth acknowledging that the Republicans don't have a monopoly on irrational thought... though they sure seem to be heading in that direction.
As a Democrat, I was not a rabid fan of Bush I, but I'll give him this: he was a competent, pragmatic president, and our nation would be in far better shape if he'd been running it for the past five years. Under the administration of George W. Bush, the country has seen the ascendancy of the true believers, where belief and loyalty are more important than facts or competence. This has had predictable results in the massive fuck-up of the Iraq occupation, and the massive fuck-up of Hurricane Katrina. I'm not dead-set against Republicans- I'd consider voting for John McCain- but for the nation's sake, the Republicans need to get their party back from the nut-jobs. It looks like the original plan was for the Republican party to gain power by exploiting the lunatic fringe. Unfortunately, the reverse seems to have happened.
It is, today, September 12. Four years and one day ago, it was September 11th, 2001, and I was in New York watching the dust cloud rise. And it's just remarkable, just stunning... I mean, who could have predicted that four years later, the most powerful nation on earth would yet to have brought bin Laden to justice for what he did? Who could have believed that instead, the administration would use lies about WMD to invade a nation with no connection to 9/11? Who would have believed that we'd be in an endless guerilla war with almost two thousand American lives lost and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead. That a nation which prides itself in being a beacon of freedom would be torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib and running a gulag in Cuba. And there's no end in sight to any of it. It's just disgusting. And profoundly sad. What's happened to my country? We rose up after 9-11 but somehow in the past four years, it brought us down so low, I barely even recognize the country anymore.
We shouldn't be giving this guy the authority to use nuclear weapons. If he were watching TV in my house, he wouldn't even be entrusted with the remote control. God... just, one day, I want to walk up to him. And spit in his face, and then walk away.
It would be an improvement over the current situation, at any rate.
Well, judging by his actions, George W. seems to think the destruction of an American city is an acceptable outcome for his domestic policy.
I've considered it, but I really have a hard time making up my mind one way or the other.
But why buy into it at all? Skype isn't a natural extension of eBay's business strategy; it's not even related to what they do. It's sorta like Pizza Hut coming out and announcing they're going to buy Lockheed Martin and build fighter jets. The general tone of the NY Times article is bafflement. Generally speaking, businesses do best when they stick to their core business- when they stick to one thing that they know how to do.
I think it goes deeper than that. I think there is a failure by many in the press- in particular the "humanities graduates" that the article rails against- to understand the scientific method and believe in things like objective truth. "There are just so many perceptions and viewpoints, all equally valid," goes the postmodernist thinking, so they give "equal time" to them all, never mind whether one is completely unsupported by evidence. It's not just an issue in science: you see the same bullshit when a politician says that black is white and down is up but the press lacks the brains or testicles to call them on it.
The other major problem is that increasingly, news is seen as a form of entertainment. If this is the case, then whether your report is true or not is secondary to whether it tells a good story. For this reason, science journalists love to report on controversies where they don't exist. A compelling narrative needs conflict; "scientists unanimous: all support theory" might be accurate, but it just isn't as exciting as "scientists bitterly divided, killing each other with bare hands over theory".
And as far as bad science journalism, I'd like to point out that journals like _Science_ and _Nature_ actually contribute to this by frequently publishing attention-grabbing bad science, just because they know it will get coverage.
The wheel would be useful for more than MP3s- I think the wheel would actually be a great interface device for a cellphone. It would allow you to rapidly scroll through a list of contacts and navigate those damned endless menus.
That's the same reason them Russkies managed to down the U-2. They flew the same route twice, and the second time around, the Russians were ready for them with their big SAMs.
What about asexual and shunning sunlight, like slashdotters?
Hey, I'm still pissed off about the fact that we had those stupid scissors that couldn't cut anything in grade school. I mean, they were about as sharp as a basketball.
Plus, for some insane reason, most of them were left-handed.
Soylent Green is PEOPLE!
But the thing is, the NSF is a bargain. It costs about 5.5 billion a year and funds things as diverse as biotech, computing, and fisheries management. It funds undergrads, graduate students, and professors, and it buys equipment and pays for research projects. In the process it cultivates basic research in the United States, in all areas of the sciences. Yet NASA gets over three times that- 16 billion this year.
But you have to question whether the $150 billion dollars we've spent on the Space Shuttle is really worth it in scientific terms. It's not that I object to the research- some of it, like the Hubble, I'm very much a supporter of. And I could think of worse ways to spend the money (that billion a week in Iraq isn't buying us very much) But what it comes down to is return on investment. If our goal is research and exploration, funding the NSF and NASA's unmanned program will allow us to get more out of each tax dollar.
I would so love it if someone would name this one "Freud".
You could do the same thing far more efficiently by directly funding research through the National Science Foundation. Unfortunately, the NSF has seen its budget cut while funding for NASA has been increased.
I think that NASA's unmanned programs do some valuable research and they should continue, or even be expanded, but the manned program is just a publicity stunt. I mean what did the Shuttle program ever discover, other than a bunch of science-fair projects along the lines of "does classical music make plants grow better... in SPACE?" Their biggest single contribution to research has been repairing a robot- the Hubble Space Telescope. I think that says something about where space exploration is going. The sooner we get humans out of space exploration entirely, the more progress we'll make. Likewise, if there really is any way to make money from going to Mars, it will doubtless be cheaper to send robots to do it, instead of sending humans.
You raise an interesting point, but- Hey, look! Bigfoot riding a unicorn!
According to Wikipedia, "Teflon is the brand name of a polymer compound discovered by Roy J. Plunkett (1910-1994) of DuPont in 1938 and introduced as a commercial product in 1946." As for Velcro, "The hook and loop fastener was invented in 1948 by Georges de Mestral, a Swiss engineer. The idea came to him after he took a close look at the seed pod burrs which kept sticking to his dog on their daily walk in the Alps."
People who are stoned out of their minds?
I can see the dispatches now:
"Reports are coming in that Microsoft's rapid assault has caught the Polish Army off guard and put them into full retreat. Vladimir Putin expressed little concern over a suspicious buildup of Microsoft tanks along the Russian border, citing assurances from Bill Gates that Microsoft would honor the recently signed Microsoft-Russia nonagression pact. Throughout Microsoft-held territory, police went door-to-door rounding up Mac users for internment in camps. The French reported that their retreat-and-surrender operation was proceeding brilliantly, despite a massive shortage of white flags."
Shit, I can come up characters just as good as "Ant Man"! Like Slug Boy, Earwig Lad, Captain Fruit Fly, Dung Beetle Man, Pillbug Woman, and the Amazing Aphid.
Anyone care to give me $50 million apiece to develop these properties for the big screen?
Outrageous hypotheses end up being vindicated fairly often. A few examples:
But otherwise, I agree with the basic premises of your Ignorant Fuckwit Theory. There's a world of difference between oddball hypotheses and bullshit pseudoscientific babble, and it's not that hard to tell the difference. A major clue here is that something as important as a new theory of how supernovas occur is going to be in a good scientific journal, not a random web page.
Wow, Wikipedia's really going out on a limb here, aren't they? That's what I love about Wikipedia though- not afraid to call 'em as they see them.
Well said! I mean, what the hell did people ever figure out by doing science? It was because of religion and faith in God that humans eradicated smallpox, put men in space, invented the internet, figured out how to splice genes, and built giant telescopes to peer back into the dawn of time! Oh, wait, that was science that did all that shit, wasn't it?
There's one simple reason why people do science: it works.
There are skin impressions associated with tyrannosaurs from Alberta and Mongolia, and they seem to show the same pebbly skin that's seen in the herbivorous dinosaurs. So there's no evidence of feathers in large tyrannosaurs. On the other hand, it's possible that either (a) they had feathers over part of the body only, or (b) the young tyrannosaurs had feathers, but the adults didn't (just as young ostriches have a much more extensive feather covering than the adults). The tiny, primitive tyrannosaurs known from China have feather-like coverings, but it would have looked superficially like mammalian hair rather than fluffy like a chick. I think there are also reports of scaly skin in Allosaurus as well.