Or Obama will need to majorly screw up in the next few weeks, like pull a Spitzer. Exactly. I swear, about the only thing that could take Obama down at this point, would be the revelation that he regularly attended the sermons of some preacher who, like, claims that the government engineered AIDS to wipe out blacks or something!
In case anyone hasn't heard the related joke, here it is:
An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are visiting their friend, who is a farmer. He's not very good at math, so he asks them for help with the problem. The farmer wants to enclose as much land as possible using only 200 yards of fencing.
The engineer reasons that for a fixed perimeter, a circle maximizes area, so he arranges it in a circle.
The physicist waits until it gets foggy and dark, lays the fence in a straight line, stands at the middle, and says, "look, look, I've encircled the earth!"
The mathematician builds a tiny enclosure, stands inside of it, and says, "I define myself as outside the fence."
I agree with your philosophy, but let's not forget, it's not like your helpless in all of this. (Oops, triple negative. Fixed: "You can do something about that!") I personally don't notice, because I don't *try* to notice, things looking fake. I just accept whatever fantasy the director wants to show me, and don't look for the rough edges or try to reverse engineer how they got the shot to work[1]. Until about last week (when I saw Terminator) for the first time, I never felt my illusion break enough to say "Fake!"
It's not because special effects are all that great -- it's that I let misdirection work in my favor;-)
Not surprisingly, one of my peeves when I go on imdb and look at the goofs section, is how 99% of them are continuity errors, which, sorry, just aren't that interesting.
[1]with the possible exception of scenes involving viscious swearing in front of a minor:-O
Sorry, you forgot some important events in your timeline. I corrected it:
1933 Last wild Thylacine captured 1936 Last Thylacine in captivity dies 1936 Thylacine added to list of protected wildlife 1953 DNA discovered 2011 Apple names next OS X version after the Thylacine
Since medieval times theologians have wondered, "did the Son of Man come to save everyone, or just humans?" There were a surprising number of medieval philosophers who were concerned with question -- should a race of sentient cyclopean starfish be discovered -- of whether human Jesus was sent to save their souls, or whether they would have to wait for cyclopean starfish Jesus. Well, that's reassuring. I'm glad to hear that all those urban legends about medieval philosphers debating angels on pinheads were false, and they were devoting their time to serious topics.
That's interesting. I picked "random game" and one it gave me was to write text that would be persuasive enough to a human with internet handle "cstdenis", to get him to register on the GWAP site. Guess I see what it's for now!
Good point: carrying the analogy over, the only way to "gag the internet" would be to "freeze" it (stop data transfer), and "push it back" (make it so the servers holding that data can't reconnect to new internets).
People like you are IDIOTS and you drive me INSANE! There is NO real difference between the beers! They all taste like rotten piss! Did you guys not get the memo? People aren't comparing beer taste because of the genuine differences in the beer. They do is a form of male bonding ("rapport building") with a meaningless topic as the referent. It is also a form of signaling whereby you can acknowledge someone's superiority ("alpha male") and thus that you are not a threat.
I support your right to brew beer. But I also have the right to call you people complete IDIOTS for maintaining a pretense of seriousness when you had by now better damn well know there ain't a single difference.
It is exactly like wine-tasting. Double-blind tests will REMOVE your ability to detect quality, or even most of the intra-type differences.
You know what really pissed me off? A guy at work came into my office yesterday, barely acknowledged my existence, and went to yack for 30 minutes with my officemate about their beer-brewing techniques, while the latter had just been bitching the whole day about how he couldn't have a single interruption because of a serious deadline. (I wasn't bothered, but he had thrown a phone off his desk in protest at management asking for updates.) I got to hear all their bullshit about the subtleties of flavor and how you gotta learn about anaerobic process[1], blah blah blah. The alpha (my officemate) was yacking on about vegemite, yeast, and all the usual garbage. I freaking wanted to yell at them YOU IDIOTS THERE'S NO DIFFERENCE.
Beertasting is, at root, just a cover for keeping beer legal despite its psychoactive properties that for everything else would justify banning or harsh regulation. And I support its legality! But please guys, keep your beer talk in actual, meatspace, SOCIAL situations, where it actually accomplishes a FUNCTION (signaling/bonding), rather than conducting the modern day equivalent of counting angels on pinheads.
[1]No, I'm not denying the validity of the chemistry, just importance of having precision down to a the level of understanding all that.
Not that I disagree with your point, but what does that mean, and what figure should I be looking at, and what's its significance?
I found this to be a better exposition, but who will heed the warning?
We need a truce: Conservatives will acknowledge the dire emergency of global warming, if liberals acknowledge the dire emergency of future national bankruptcy (i.e. increasing liabilities of the federal government, state/local governments, and some private employers).
It is freedom, in a way, that binds you with some responsibility. And how difficult it is for many people to understand. For whom to understand? You mean like all those/.ers that have no problem pirating software, music, etc?
MJ users are less likely to drink to excess (probably largely because it leads rapidly to vomiting when combined, as compared to drinking alone) Where did you get that idea? I've never had a problem combining the two. Marijuana makes you less inclined to drink but it doesn't automatically make you sick if you attempt to drink while under the influence of weed. I've known quite a few people (myself included) who can combine the two to ridiculous excess without any issue. What's the difference between a drunk driver and a stoned driver?
A drunk driver blows through a stop sign without stopping. A stoned driver stops at the stop sign and waits for it to turn green.
A stoned AND drunk driver blows through a stop sign without even having the decency to wait for it to turn green.
I wonder how much MADD has contributed to automated-driver research, which would eliminate the problem of drunk driving once installed in your car because you could tell it to drive you home whenver you're impaired in any way?
Or how much they've contributed to efforts to stop zoning, so that it would be remotely possible for the average person to have a residence in walking distance of a bar?
Good. Providing too many options, especially UI options, is a stupid mistake made by many open-source projects. You end up with software which is impossible to test and which often looks terrible. Right, because too many options -- buried in an "advanced options" screen -- makes all of the UI look "terrible".
Crazy. You gotta love this: it's "crazy" to fork a project based on UI issues, but it's not crazy to allow people the option (in any way whatsoever) to use any interface OTHER than the one developers decreed for the latest version. It's crap like this that makes me delay upgrades as long as possible.
I used to think making a good UI was just a matter of following one's intuitions. Now I realize how many people's UI intuitions are horrible.
Okay, I know I'm karmaless, and this discussion is dead, but maybe, just maybe someone is reading this comment that I actually intended to post closer to the posting date of the story.
To answer your question: yes, the answer to discovered vs. invented matters to ME, and it's clear it will have experimental implications (i.e. we can test it), although it's too complicated for me to formulate.
How, you ask? Well, it relates to a different question I have: is it possible for a universe to exist in which mathematics as we know it, doesn't exist? Where NO observation is isomorphic to any implication of the e.g. Peano postulates or whatever the standard is now?
IANAAIP (academically educated in philosophy), but I believe it was Kant who said there are truths we can infer about the world purely from thought, which are necessary for interaction with the world. One example is math. We can derive theorems about the world, he claims, before interacting with it.
But here's the kicker -- some of the things he said we need to understand about the world to interact with it, were wrong. For example, while we might think in Euclidean geometry, the world doesn't obey it -- it's just an often-useful approximation. So is math like this -- just a useful set of postulates isomorphic to many tasks in the world, but sometimes quite *wrong*?
We arguably developed math at first to deal with the world. Add a bean to my bag of six beans, I have seven. Cool. But turning back to my question, what if there were a universe where that process simply can't happen? What if there's nothing such as "units" that can be "added" and therefore no need for that universe's conscious entities (if conscious entities can exist in that universe!) to develop peano math to deal with things (if the concept of addable consciousnesses is meaningless too!). Wow, I almost sound high discussing this.
Does anyone see where I am going? Here is a sketch of the potential experimental implications:
1) If it's possible for a universe to exist with nothing isomorphic to math, we can maybe construct a computer simulation with mind-blowing implications.
2) If it's not possible for universes to lack math, then we have discovered a *different* result regarding math universality and thus have another step toward simulating a real universe, since we know a constraint.
Thoughts? (Damn I wish I posted this before but I couldn't spell it all out at the time.)
Both the USA and the Europe destroyed their own native forests a long time ago. Europe, maybe. The USA, no. The US has about as much forestland as it did 100 years ago, and yet still imports lumber to avoid cutting them down.
Why don't you stop complaining about the Amazon forest and start complaining about how your farmers aren't giving away their lands for re-forestation? Actually, they pretty much are. The West has experienced a massive exodus. Most of it has lower population densities than in the 1890s. It's gotten so cheap that there are serious proposals (Buffalo Commons) to buy up a lot of it to let buffalo run free!
And can you please explain me how YOUR government, or any other, would be more competent to keep the Amazon from being destructed? Have you seen the Endangered Species Act? On very little evidence, land can be locked out of use to protect endangered species, of which there are plenty in the Amazon. Second, the US has a strong economy and relatively non-corrupt government. That means the best option for the poorest among us is to leech off the freebies (welfare, homeless shelters) or get a low-wage job that lets you earn more than you could squatting some forest land. Note that a lot of Brazilian people come to America to take crappy jobs rather than rape the rainforest. Now imagine how much of the Amazon would get raped if Brazil had the US's economy and government!
And the idea of poisoning a foodstuff just to get around import duties should be considered abhorrent. I look at it differently. To me, the fact that an import restriction makes inediblizing a food into an attractive option, says a lot more about the abhorrence of the import restriction!
(Similarly, a lot of people find it abhorrent the way migrant workers are treated, while my reaction is: what about what they're coming here to escape from?)
No, he really doesn't. He needs to be himself, and when the right woman finds him, it'll click. The key here is 'finds him'. You don't find a woman when you're looking for one. At least I didn't. Then I met the one who became my wife because I decided to stop 'looking' and just be myself. I don't know why advice like this ever gets modded up. For one thing, "being himself" has gotten him into this situation, how do you think it's going to get him out? The only people who honestly think that "be yourself" is good advice, are people who are so natural at social interaction in the first place that they have to try, in order to *not* be successful.
Second, "stop looking" only works when you have a whole "infrastructure" in place such that dates basically give themselves to you. You know what it would mean for me to "stop trying" and "be myself"? I'd stay home all the time playing video games. That's "myself". That's "natural". That's "not trying". Do you really think that's going to find me a babe?
The real key to your success is something you didn't reveal in your post. Things you didn't mention and didn't even find noteworthy because they came so naturally to you. And as long as you're not revealing those things, your advice is dangerous garbage.
Here, let me do an improvement on your "advice":
1) Be Brad Pitt. 2) {something completely non-sensical}
How does "Spam, spam, spam, Usenet, and spam" constitute "using spam to mean unwanted e-correspondence"? It's not clear what the term "spam" means in that context.
Slashdot Mirror
This would be a good time to bring up that Richard Dawkins thinks there's a greater than 1% chance that earth life was designed by an intelligence.
;-)
So, do you think he advocates spending money on this idea, or does he just not understand the concept of probability?
Considering that those people don't actually pay back their loans, I'm guessing the answer is no ;-)
j/k, j/k, you're good, you're good
In case anyone hasn't heard the related joke, here it is:
An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are visiting their friend, who is a farmer. He's not very good at math, so he asks them for help with the problem. The farmer wants to enclose as much land as possible using only 200 yards of fencing.
The engineer reasons that for a fixed perimeter, a circle maximizes area, so he arranges it in a circle.
The physicist waits until it gets foggy and dark, lays the fence in a straight line, stands at the middle, and says, "look, look, I've encircled the earth!"
The mathematician builds a tiny enclosure, stands inside of it, and says, "I define myself as outside the fence."
I agree with your philosophy, but let's not forget, it's not like your helpless in all of this. (Oops, triple negative. Fixed: "You can do something about that!") I personally don't notice, because I don't *try* to notice, things looking fake. I just accept whatever fantasy the director wants to show me, and don't look for the rough edges or try to reverse engineer how they got the shot to work[1]. Until about last week (when I saw Terminator) for the first time, I never felt my illusion break enough to say "Fake!"
;-)
:-O
It's not because special effects are all that great -- it's that I let misdirection work in my favor
Not surprisingly, one of my peeves when I go on imdb and look at the goofs section, is how 99% of them are continuity errors, which, sorry, just aren't that interesting.
[1]with the possible exception of scenes involving viscious swearing in front of a minor
Sorry, you forgot some important events in your timeline. I corrected it:
1933 Last wild Thylacine captured
1936 Last Thylacine in captivity dies
1936 Thylacine added to list of protected wildlife
1953 DNA discovered
2011 Apple names next OS X version after the Thylacine
No, no, it's okay, no gratitude is necessary.
USENET is already used for something else, he'd have to use something original like "world wide web".
That's interesting. I picked "random game" and one it gave me was to write text that would be persuasive enough to a human with internet handle "cstdenis", to get him to register on the GWAP site. Guess I see what it's for now!
Good point: carrying the analogy over, the only way to "gag the internet" would be to "freeze" it (stop data transfer), and "push it back" (make it so the servers holding that data can't reconnect to new internets).
Goodbye, hope of regaining karma on this account.
People like you are IDIOTS and you drive me INSANE! There is NO real difference between the beers! They all taste like rotten piss! Did you guys not get the memo? People aren't comparing beer taste because of the genuine differences in the beer. They do is a form of male bonding ("rapport building") with a meaningless topic as the referent. It is also a form of signaling whereby you can acknowledge someone's superiority ("alpha male") and thus that you are not a threat.
I support your right to brew beer. But I also have the right to call you people complete IDIOTS for maintaining a pretense of seriousness when you had by now better damn well know there ain't a single difference.
It is exactly like wine-tasting. Double-blind tests will REMOVE your ability to detect quality, or even most of the intra-type differences.
You know what really pissed me off? A guy at work came into my office yesterday, barely acknowledged my existence, and went to yack for 30 minutes with my officemate about their beer-brewing techniques, while the latter had just been bitching the whole day about how he couldn't have a single interruption because of a serious deadline. (I wasn't bothered, but he had thrown a phone off his desk in protest at management asking for updates.) I got to hear all their bullshit about the subtleties of flavor and how you gotta learn about anaerobic process[1], blah blah blah. The alpha (my officemate) was yacking on about vegemite, yeast, and all the usual garbage. I freaking wanted to yell at them YOU IDIOTS THERE'S NO DIFFERENCE.
Beertasting is, at root, just a cover for keeping beer legal despite its psychoactive properties that for everything else would justify banning or harsh regulation. And I support its legality! But please guys, keep your beer talk in actual, meatspace, SOCIAL situations, where it actually accomplishes a FUNCTION (signaling/bonding), rather than conducting the modern day equivalent of counting angels on pinheads.
[1]No, I'm not denying the validity of the chemistry, just importance of having precision down to a the level of understanding all that.
I'd love to have been born with specially modified genes that make me glow. Once I turn 12, I'd have to fend off lusty women with a stick.
The real victim would be the human race, which would have to deal with a thriving subspecies of visibly weird mutants.
Come on, admit it, that would creep you out.
now the country's technically insolvent.
Not that I disagree with your point, but what does that mean, and what figure should I be looking at, and what's its significance?
I found this to be a better exposition, but who will heed the warning?
We need a truce: Conservatives will acknowledge the dire emergency of global warming, if liberals acknowledge the dire emergency of future national bankruptcy (i.e. increasing liabilities of the federal government, state/local governments, and some private employers).
Knowing the last 640 days of criminal history ought to be enough for anyone!
Well, there are *civilian* uses for not having a loud sonic boom, like, being able to fly one of those things over populated areas.
But it certainly sounds like mission creep for JAXA, which is supposed to be more focused on Gundam-style robots.
A drunk driver blows through a stop sign without stopping.
A stoned driver stops at the stop sign and waits for it to turn green.
A stoned AND drunk driver blows through a stop sign without even having the decency to wait for it to turn green.
I wonder how much MADD has contributed to automated-driver research, which would eliminate the problem of drunk driving once installed in your car because you could tell it to drive you home whenver you're impaired in any way?
Or how much they've contributed to efforts to stop zoning, so that it would be remotely possible for the average person to have a residence in walking distance of a bar?
I used to think making a good UI was just a matter of following one's intuitions. Now I realize how many people's UI intuitions are horrible.
Okay, I know I'm karmaless, and this discussion is dead, but maybe, just maybe someone is reading this comment that I actually intended to post closer to the posting date of the story.
To answer your question: yes, the answer to discovered vs. invented matters to ME, and it's clear it will have experimental implications (i.e. we can test it), although it's too complicated for me to formulate.
How, you ask? Well, it relates to a different question I have: is it possible for a universe to exist in which mathematics as we know it, doesn't exist? Where NO observation is isomorphic to any implication of the e.g. Peano postulates or whatever the standard is now?
IANAAIP (academically educated in philosophy), but I believe it was Kant who said there are truths we can infer about the world purely from thought, which are necessary for interaction with the world. One example is math. We can derive theorems about the world, he claims, before interacting with it.
But here's the kicker -- some of the things he said we need to understand about the world to interact with it, were wrong. For example, while we might think in Euclidean geometry, the world doesn't obey it -- it's just an often-useful approximation. So is math like this -- just a useful set of postulates isomorphic to many tasks in the world, but sometimes quite *wrong*?
We arguably developed math at first to deal with the world. Add a bean to my bag of six beans, I have seven. Cool. But turning back to my question, what if there were a universe where that process simply can't happen? What if there's nothing such as "units" that can be "added" and therefore no need for that universe's conscious entities (if conscious entities can exist in that universe!) to develop peano math to deal with things (if the concept of addable consciousnesses is meaningless too!). Wow, I almost sound high discussing this.
Does anyone see where I am going? Here is a sketch of the potential experimental implications:
1) If it's possible for a universe to exist with nothing isomorphic to math, we can maybe construct a computer simulation with mind-blowing implications.
2) If it's not possible for universes to lack math, then we have discovered a *different* result regarding math universality and thus have another step toward simulating a real universe, since we know a constraint.
Thoughts? (Damn I wish I posted this before but I couldn't spell it all out at the time.)
Didn't you read? The summary says he's testing out his hairy hardon on her. I think that counts!
(Similarly, a lot of people find it abhorrent the way migrant workers are treated, while my reaction is: what about what they're coming here to escape from?)
Second, "stop looking" only works when you have a whole "infrastructure" in place such that dates basically give themselves to you. You know what it would mean for me to "stop trying" and "be myself"? I'd stay home all the time playing video games. That's "myself". That's "natural". That's "not trying". Do you really think that's going to find me a babe?
The real key to your success is something you didn't reveal in your post. Things you didn't mention and didn't even find noteworthy because they came so naturally to you. And as long as you're not revealing those things, your advice is dangerous garbage.
Here, let me do an improvement on your "advice":
1) Be Brad Pitt.
2) {something completely non-sensical}
How does "Spam, spam, spam, Usenet, and spam" constitute "using spam to mean unwanted e-correspondence"? It's not clear what the term "spam" means in that context.