Nice.
"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
- Sir John Harington 1561-1612, who, I learn, also invented the flush toilet.
All true, with the proviso that draws can be very interesting. For example Reshevsky v Petrosian - Zurich 1953 in which, to quote from two of the comments: "24...Re6!! a wonderful example of an exchange sacrifice to set up an impenetrable blockade", and: "Beautiful draws don't get publicized nearly half or even a quarter as much as beautiful wins"
The Pacific Islanders are a different type of "foreigner" to, for example, the English (and French and Dutch and...) settlers in Northern America: when they first arrived in the Marquesas, Hawaii, New Zealand, etc there was no-one already there to call them foreigners!
The Pacific islanders develop a twin-hulled sailing canoe which is an extremely effective sea-going vessel. In boats of this kind they continue the process of spreading eastwards through Polynesia (Greek polus many, nesos island). The first staging posts are Tonga and Samoa.
The earliest surviving trace of human occupation in these islands is about 420 BC in Tonga and 200 BC in Samoa. But colonists are likely to have arrived considerably earlier than this, since by the 1st century BC humans have reached the much more inaccessible Marquesas Islands.
The final thrust, to the most remote island groups of the Pacific, takes place from the Marquesas. Hawaii is reached in about AD 400; Easter Island perhaps a century later; Tahiti and the Society Islands in about 600.
The last great step in man's colonization of the planet involves the longest sea journey of all - thousands of miles southwest from the Marquesas or Tahiti to New Zealand. This is accomplished in about AD 800.
"Because it's obvious to any thinking person that there was a Creator."
Peter Medawar's views on religion:... I believe that a reasonable case can be made for saying, not that we believe in God because He exists but rather that He exists because we believe in Him... Considered as an element of the world, God has the same degree and kind of objective reality as do other products of mind... I regret my disbelief in God and religious answers generally, for I believe it would give satisfaction and comfort to many in need of it if it were possible to discover and propound good scientific and philosophic reasons to believe in God... To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive... I am a rationalist—something of a period piece nowadays, I admit... --- from 'The question of the existence of God' in "The limits of science" (1984)
Medawar was a thinking person. You can form your own view as to whether he believed there was a "Creator".
But someone who probably does know is Professor John Hattie of the University of Melbourne.
"His research interests include performance indicators and evaluation in education, as well as creativity measurement and models of teaching and learning. He is a proponent of evidence based quantitative research methodologies on the influences on student achievement. Prior to his move to the University of Melbourne, Hattie was a member of the independent advisory group reporting to the New Zealand's Minister of Education on the national standards in reading, writing and maths for all primary school children in New Zealand. Hattie undertook the largest ever meta-analysis of quantitative measures of the effect of different factors on educational outcomes. His book, Visible Learning, is the result of this study."
This link has a short extract from an interview from a 30minutes BBC interview, which I recommend listening to if it's accessible from your domicile.
Not necessarily "tactically stupid". If Wikipedia" is trustworthy on this:
Finland worked to maintain good relations with the Western powers. The Finnish government stressed that Finland was fighting as a co-belligerent with Germany against the Soviet Union only to protect itself. Furthermore, Finland stressed that it was still the same democratic country as it had been in the Winter War. However, on 12 July 1941, the United Kingdom had signed an agreement of joint action with the Soviet Union. Furthermore, under German pressure, Finland had to close the British legation in Helsinki. As a result, diplomatic relations between Finland and the United Kingdom were broken on 1 August. On 28 November, Britain presented Finland an ultimatum, in which it demanded that Finland cease military operations by 3 December. Unofficially, Finland informed the Western powers that troops would halt their advance in the next few days. The reply did not satisfy the United Kingdom, which declared war on Finland on 6 December 1941. The Commonwealth member states of Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand followed.
Relations between Finland and the United States were more complex; the American public was sympathetic to the "brave little democracy", and there were anti-communist feelings. At first, the United States empathised with the Finnish cause[citation needed]; however, the situation became problematic after Finnish troops crossed the 1939 border. Finnish and German troops were a threat to the Murmansk Railway and northern communication supply line between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. On 25 October 1941, the United States demanded that Finland cease all hostilities against the Soviet Union and withdraw behind the 1939 border. In public, President Ryti rejected the demands, but in private he wrote to Mannerheim on 5 November 1941 asking him to halt the offensive. Mannerheim agreed and secretly instructed General Hjalmar Siilasvuo to break off the assault against the Murmansk Railway.
"Compressible flow (gas dynamics) is the branch of fluid mechanics that deals with flows having significant changes in fluid density. Gases, but not liquids, display such behavior. To distinguish between compressible and incompressible flow in gases, the Mach number (the ratio of the speed of the flow to the speed of sound) must be greater than about 0.3 (since there is a density change that is greater than 5%) before significant compressibility occurs."
So: in physics fluids can be gases or liquids, and the post you're correcting was in fact right on that.
But from that Wikipedia quote whether a gas and a liquid "follow essentially the same physics" would seem to depend on the Mach number of the gas being relatively small?
"Honestly though, saying all those people need to code is like saying I need to learn how to write a sonata in order to listen to music."
You don't need to learn how to write music to appreciate music. But if you do it's likely you will appreciate music much better. And if you want to be a performer I - and musicians I've spoken to - think it's a *really* good thing for performers to learn how to write music even if your career will be only performing, not composing: it gives you a different way of looking at music. If you go back to the 19th and 18th centuries (and probably before then) it was common for performers to also be composers. This seems to have become less common as the 20th century progressed, but - hopefully - is now reversing.
So, yes, learning to write a sonata is an excellent idea if you want to *really* *listen* to (as opposed to hear) music.
Whether this reasoning applies to coding is a different question, probably needing a different answer. Has anyone on this topic yet posted a car analogy?
I broadly agree with this. That said, it's worth considering a comment by the mathematician Mark Kac in making a distinction between an "ordinary genius" like Hans Bethe and a "magician" like Richard Feynman:
"There are two kinds of geniuses: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘magicians.’ an ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they’ve done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians... Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Kac
1. Leopold Mozart (his father) who taught him.
2. Other composers - for example J C Bach, J S Bach and Handel (looking at scores), Haydn - who influenced him
What Mozart would have achieved without any such assistance is impossible to know. As it is, he took what he learned and made it his own, but he didn't stand on his own shoulders.
"That's different, in poker you bluff when the probabilities are such that your opponent will lose calling you in the long run. In chess you're creating an objectively worse but more complicated position in the hope that your opponent doesn't have the skills, time and preparation/experience to play it optimally. I rarely do it when we're even, but I've gotten better at doing it when I'm behind."
Picking up on the "hovering" in the summary "Now memorialized accounts will have the word 'Remembering' hovering above a person's name", I was going to ask a sarcastic question along the lines of whether there would also be a "tasteful" angel's wings icon alongside the "hovering" text.
The words actually used by Facebook are "We’ve also redesigned memorialized profiles to pay tribute to the deceased by adding “Remembering” above their name", so why does the summary use "hovering", which seems just wrong?
I don't know about the USA but in the UK the right-wing press was in the "vanguard" of anti-MMR campaigning in the 2000's - try a web search using: MMR Daily Mail.
(On other issues the left can be anti-science - I'd be interested in any real research on the relative anti-science of the left and the right. Anti-science includes forbidding people to conduct research which might show your own dearly loved pet policy might have awkward consequences.)
In support of that: "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." - J B S Haldane in "Possible Worlds and Other Papers" (1927), p. 286 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Electric_Bell"...It is located in a corridor adjacent to the foyer of the Clarendon Laboratory at the University of Oxford, England, and is still ringing, though inaudibly, because it is behind two layers of glass..."
The case is seen clearly in a photograph in the Wikipedia article, and once you know the bell(s) are inside a glass case you can clearly see the case in the photograph on the motherboard.vice.com page.
North Korea isn't exactly a paradise, and doesn't have much (in fact zero?) domination by Muslims. We can only imagine what Marx would have written about a "communist" system that gives the appearance of being a hereditary monarchy.
In 1994 there was a genocide in Rwanda: the religious affiliations in Rwanda in 2002 were about 57% Roman Catholic, 26% Protestant, 11% Seventh-day Adventist, 5% Muslim, 1% other, according to this Wikipedia article, which also has information on the role of Christian religions in the genocide: "... Timothy Longman has provided the most detailed discussion of the role of religion in the Rwandan genocide in Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, published in 2010. Longman argues that both Catholic and Protestant churches helped to make the genocide possible by giving moral sanction to the killing...." Read the article for a more nuanced fuller picture. Actually, these articles on the Rwandan Genocide, Religion in Rwanda, and Islam in Rwanda suggest that Islam bad, Christianity now at least not so bad (I paraphrase what I understand to be the general thrust of some posts on this) is an oversimplification.
And that's before we start thinking about the Chinese Communist "Great Leap Forward" and "Cultural Revolution", the Khmer Rouge rule of Cambodia, the Korean civil war, and the two World Wars (which were arguably two European Civil Wars, the second of which ended less than 70 years ago), including the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. And, as I understand it, Islam played no part in the Sri Lankan civil war.
I'm tempted to say that religions/ideologies don't kill people, people kill people. But I don't believe that either.
The Babel Fish Argument for the Non-Existence of God (from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams):... The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.... Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
"Slavery" is not just in South Korea. For example, a recent report on the problem here in Britain from the right-wing Daily Telegraph on 29.November.2014. (I mention that it is right wing to avoid any impression that this is an issue raised only by bleeding heart liberals.) Theresa May is the British Home Secretary (political head of the Home Office, the department responsible for law and order, security and immigration) and is a member of the UK Conservative Party, again on the right of British Politics.
Theresa May says tens of thousands held as modern slaves in Britain "As many as 13,000 people in Britain are being held in conditions of slavery, four times the number previously thought, it has been revealed. In what is said to be the first scientific estimate of the scale of modern slavery in the UK, the Home Office has said the number of victims last year was between 10,000 and 13,000. They include women forced into prostitution, domestic staff and workers in fields, factories and fishing boats.... outlining the strategy for government departments, its agencies and partners, Home Secretary Theresa May said legislation was 'only part of the answer'. The 'grim reality' is that slavery still exists in towns, cities and the countryside across the world, including the UK, she said...."
If you're suggesting that the slavery problem in South Korea is in any way comparable to what's happened recently in North Korea, some information:
A 17-minute BBC TV Newsnight report from 2008 Risking lives to escape N Korea Hundred of thousands of North Koreans are fleeing their country illegally, crossing north into China. A camera team from South Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper spent the past 10 months filming activity at the border. The BBC's Olenka Frenkiel was given exclusive access to their material.
A 2011 lecture by the British politician David Alton North Korea – A Different Approach – Cambridge University Lecture which has useful background on the history of Korea (the Japanese occupation, the Korean war), and has two sections on "4. Human Rights" and "5. Humanitarian Situation".
For example, from "4. Human Rights":... My own interest in North Korea began through an encounter with an escapee, Yoo Sang-joon. A North Korean Christian who had escaped from the country and came to see me at Westminster. His story was harrowing and disturbing. He told me how he had seen his wife, and all bar one of his children shot dead by Kim Jong-Il's militia. He subsequently escaped across the border to China with his one remaining son. The boy died en route. He encouraged me to read the prison memoirs of Soon Ok Lee. In them she describes in detail the brutality and barbarism of the system in North Korea. 'Eyes of the Tailless Animals' is Soon Ok Lee's account of the sham judicial system, the show trials, the starvation, the forced labour, the degradation, humiliation and rape of prisoners. Through her eyes we get a glimpse of this corrupt, paranoid and tyrannical regime.
... Professor Vitit Muntarbhorn, the previous United Nations Special Rapporteur on North Korea, told me that he estimates that 400,000 people have died in North Korea's prison camps in the last 30 years. Vitit Muntarbhorn... has described North Korea's human rights record as "abysmal" due to "the repressive nature of the power base: at once cloistered, controlled and callous." The exploitation of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer) The LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office I) was the first computer used for commercial business applications. Overseen by Oliver Standingford, Raymond Thompson of J. Lyons and Co.and and David Caminer, modelled closely on the Cambridge EDSAC. LEO I ran its first business application in 1951. In 1954 Lyons formed LEO Computers Ltd to market LEO I and its successors LEO II and LEO III to other companies. LEO Computers eventually became part of English Electric Company (EELM) and then International Computers Limited (ICL) and ultimately Fujitsu. LEO series computers were still in use until 1981.
One of the LEO III's quirkier features was a loudspeaker connected to the central processor which enabled operators to tell whether a program was looping by the distinctive sound it made.
http://www.leo-computers.org.uk/ In 1951 the LEO I computer was operational and ran
the world's first regular routine office computer job.
1. It might be the case that variation in "intelligence" between human populations is greater than the variation within human populations, but I personally would want really convincing evidence for that, and proof that the tests are *really* measuring intelligence, *and* that that intelligence is in some way fixed in the different populations.
But assuming, for now, that there *really* are differences in average "intelligence" between human populations, even then:
2. You correctly say "None of this means there are not individual Northeast Asians with low IQ or blacks with high IQ. Of course there are both. Averages are averages, they are not indicative of individuals. Everyone should be treated like an individual".
3. Then follow that with "but we shouldn't blind ourselves to scientific reality". The problem is that if you/we are not *very* careful with how we present scientific "reality" - and any uncertainty in that "reality" - it gets rapidly distorted into unscientific unreal "certainty".
As a simple example, the average height of World War 1 British soldiers who survived was 1.inch greater than those who died, and this difference was highly statistically significant. http://www.psychologytoday.com... But selecting soldiers purely on the basis of height would be really stupid, as any American or Australian or British soldiers that fought against the Japanese in the Pacific could testify.
4. Lee Smolin in "The Trouble With Physics" (2006): in chapter 19 "How Science Really Works" he states that he believes the reason why there are not more women or blacks in physics, compared with equally challenging fields such as mathematics or astronomy is blatent prejudice, points out that women have less difficulty in getting hired as pure mathematicians, probably because it is clearer in mathematics that you have done something good, and adds "In all my experience, I have never seen a woman or an African-American hired through an affirmative-action program who didn't strongly deserve it - that is, who wasn't already arguably the best applicant".
5. I'd be more impressed by advocates of "conclusive" evidence of racial differences in intelligence if the "race" they considered the most intelligent wasn't the one they happened to belong to. And I'd be really impressed if they then went on to argue that any of their policy implications for races less "intelligent" than theirs should also apply to them in relation to the races more intelligent than theirs. But I won't be holding my breath.
As an actual example of the first position, Richard Lynn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... at least has the guts to take his findings seriously, and I look forward to Caucasian advocates of racial differences between Caucasians and Africans making the same advocacy for East Asians being more intelligent than Caucasians.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice.
"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
- Sir John Harington 1561-1612, who, I learn, also invented the flush toilet.
All true, with the proviso that draws can be very interesting. For example Reshevsky v Petrosian - Zurich 1953 in which, to quote from two of the comments: "24...Re6!! a wonderful example of an exchange sacrifice to set up an impenetrable blockade", and: "Beautiful draws don't get publicized nearly half or even a quarter as much as beautiful wins"
The Pacific Islanders are a different type of "foreigner" to, for example, the English (and French and Dutch and ...) settlers in Northern America: when they first arrived in the Marquesas, Hawaii, New Zealand, etc there was no-one already there to call them foreigners!
Their exploration and settling of the Pacific is one of the great feats of human history: Migration by sea in the south Pacific: 2000 BC - AD 800:
The Pacific islanders develop a twin-hulled sailing canoe which is an extremely effective sea-going vessel. In boats of this kind they continue the process of spreading eastwards through Polynesia (Greek polus many, nesos island). The first staging posts are Tonga and Samoa. The earliest surviving trace of human occupation in these islands is about 420 BC in Tonga and 200 BC in Samoa. But colonists are likely to have arrived considerably earlier than this, since by the 1st century BC humans have reached the much more inaccessible Marquesas Islands. The final thrust, to the most remote island groups of the Pacific, takes place from the Marquesas. Hawaii is reached in about AD 400; Easter Island perhaps a century later; Tahiti and the Society Islands in about 600. The last great step in man's colonization of the planet involves the longest sea journey of all - thousands of miles southwest from the Marquesas or Tahiti to New Zealand. This is accomplished in about AD 800.
"Because it's obvious to any thinking person that there was a Creator."
Peter Medawar's views on religion: ... I believe that a reasonable case can be made for saying, not that we believe in God because He exists but rather that He exists because we believe in Him... Considered as an element of the world, God has the same degree and kind of objective reality as do other products of mind... I regret my disbelief in God and religious answers generally, for I believe it would give satisfaction and comfort to many in need of it if it were possible to discover and propound good scientific and philosophic reasons to believe in God... To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive... I am a rationalist—something of a period piece nowadays, I admit... --- from 'The question of the existence of God' in "The limits of science" (1984)
Medawar was a thinking person. You can form your own view as to whether he believed there was a "Creator".
I have no idea.
But someone who probably does know is Professor John Hattie of the University of Melbourne.
"His research interests include performance indicators and evaluation in education, as well as creativity measurement and models of teaching and learning. He is a proponent of evidence based quantitative research methodologies on the influences on student achievement. Prior to his move to the University of Melbourne, Hattie was a member of the independent advisory group reporting to the New Zealand's Minister of Education on the national standards in reading, writing and maths for all primary school children in New Zealand. Hattie undertook the largest ever meta-analysis of quantitative measures of the effect of different factors on educational outcomes. His book, Visible Learning, is the result of this study."
This link has a short extract from an interview from a 30minutes BBC interview, which I recommend listening to if it's accessible from your domicile.
Not necessarily "tactically stupid". If Wikipedia" is trustworthy on this:
Finland worked to maintain good relations with the Western powers. The Finnish government stressed that Finland was fighting as a co-belligerent with Germany against the Soviet Union only to protect itself. Furthermore, Finland stressed that it was still the same democratic country as it had been in the Winter War. However, on 12 July 1941, the United Kingdom had signed an agreement of joint action with the Soviet Union. Furthermore, under German pressure, Finland had to close the British legation in Helsinki. As a result, diplomatic relations between Finland and the United Kingdom were broken on 1 August. On 28 November, Britain presented Finland an ultimatum, in which it demanded that Finland cease military operations by 3 December. Unofficially, Finland informed the Western powers that troops would halt their advance in the next few days. The reply did not satisfy the United Kingdom, which declared war on Finland on 6 December 1941. The Commonwealth member states of Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand followed.
Relations between Finland and the United States were more complex; the American public was sympathetic to the "brave little democracy", and there were anti-communist feelings. At first, the United States empathised with the Finnish cause[citation needed]; however, the situation became problematic after Finnish troops crossed the 1939 border. Finnish and German troops were a threat to the Murmansk Railway and northern communication supply line between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. On 25 October 1941, the United States demanded that Finland cease all hostilities against the Soviet Union and withdraw behind the 1939 border. In public, President Ryti rejected the demands, but in private he wrote to Mannerheim on 5 November 1941 asking him to halt the offensive. Mannerheim agreed and secretly instructed General Hjalmar Siilasvuo to break off the assault against the Murmansk Railway.
A 1958 Soviet Union computer used ternary logic.
And according to this and this Donald Knuth thinks that sometime "flip-flop" will be replaced by "flip-flap-flop". Also this.
"Appeal to Authority is a fallacy. You don't have to be an "expert" to be able to evaluate written material."
You might want to test your argument using as an example Andrew Wiles's 1994 proof of the modularity theorem for semistable elliptic curves. Is his proof valid or not?
Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressible_flow
"Compressible flow (gas dynamics) is the branch of fluid mechanics that deals with flows having significant changes in fluid density. Gases, but not liquids, display such behavior. To distinguish between compressible and incompressible flow in gases, the Mach number (the ratio of the speed of the flow to the speed of sound) must be greater than about 0.3 (since there is a density change that is greater than 5%) before significant compressibility occurs."
So: in physics fluids can be gases or liquids, and the post you're correcting was in fact right on that.
But from that Wikipedia quote whether a gas and a liquid "follow essentially the same physics" would seem to depend on the Mach number of the gas being relatively small?
"Honestly though, saying all those people need to code is like saying I need to learn how to write a sonata in order to listen to music."
You don't need to learn how to write music to appreciate music. But if you do it's likely you will appreciate music much better. And if you want to be a performer I - and musicians I've spoken to - think it's a *really* good thing for performers to learn how to write music even if your career will be only performing, not composing: it gives you a different way of looking at music. If you go back to the 19th and 18th centuries (and probably before then) it was common for performers to also be composers. This seems to have become less common as the 20th century progressed, but - hopefully - is now reversing.
So, yes, learning to write a sonata is an excellent idea if you want to *really* *listen* to (as opposed to hear) music.
Whether this reasoning applies to coding is a different question, probably needing a different answer. Has anyone on this topic yet posted a car analogy?
Lawyers don't sue people, people sue people?
I broadly agree with this. That said, it's worth considering a comment by the mathematician Mark Kac in making a distinction between an "ordinary genius" like Hans Bethe and a "magician" like Richard Feynman:
"There are two kinds of geniuses: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘magicians.’ an ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they’ve done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians... Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Kac
1. Leopold Mozart (his father) who taught him. 2. Other composers - for example J C Bach, J S Bach and Handel (looking at scores), Haydn - who influenced him What Mozart would have achieved without any such assistance is impossible to know. As it is, he took what he learned and made it his own, but he didn't stand on his own shoulders.
"That's different, in poker you bluff when the probabilities are such that your opponent will lose calling you in the long run. In chess you're creating an objectively worse but more complicated position in the hope that your opponent doesn't have the skills, time and preparation/experience to play it optimally. I rarely do it when we're even, but I've gotten better at doing it when I'm behind."
A good example of this at a very high level of skill is Geller - Korchnoi (Candidates Quarterfinal 1971) Sicilian Defense: Scheveningen. Classical Variation moves 22. Rg4 h5!?
Picking up on the "hovering" in the summary "Now memorialized accounts will have the word 'Remembering' hovering above a person's name", I was going to ask a sarcastic question along the lines of whether there would also be a "tasteful" angel's wings icon alongside the "hovering" text.
But looking at the linked facebook page" all I see on the example is "Remembering" placed above the person's name. No apparent "hovering".
The words actually used by Facebook are "We’ve also redesigned memorialized profiles to pay tribute to the deceased by adding “Remembering” above their name", so why does the summary use "hovering", which seems just wrong?
I don't know about the USA but in the UK the right-wing press was in the "vanguard" of anti-MMR campaigning in the 2000's - try a web search using: MMR Daily Mail.
(On other issues the left can be anti-science - I'd be interested in any real research on the relative anti-science of the left and the right. Anti-science includes forbidding people to conduct research which might show your own dearly loved pet policy might have awkward consequences.)
(almost) nothing is new - in 1720 an English public company advertised itself as "a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company#cite_note-29
Yes. It's weirder.
In support of that: "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." - J B S Haldane in "Possible Worlds and Other Papers" (1927), p. 286 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane
The case is seen clearly in a photograph in the Wikipedia article, and once you know the bell(s) are inside a glass case you can clearly see the case in the photograph on the motherboard.vice.com page.
North Korea isn't exactly a paradise, and doesn't have much (in fact zero?) domination by Muslims. We can only imagine what Marx would have written about a "communist" system that gives the appearance of being a hereditary monarchy.
In 1994 there was a genocide in Rwanda: the religious affiliations in Rwanda in 2002 were about 57% Roman Catholic, 26% Protestant, 11% Seventh-day Adventist, 5% Muslim, 1% other, according to this Wikipedia article, which also has information on the role of Christian religions in the genocide: "... Timothy Longman has provided the most detailed discussion of the role of religion in the Rwandan genocide in Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, published in 2010. Longman argues that both Catholic and Protestant churches helped to make the genocide possible by giving moral sanction to the killing. ..." Read the article for a more nuanced fuller picture. Actually, these articles on the Rwandan Genocide, Religion in Rwanda, and Islam in Rwanda suggest that Islam bad, Christianity now at least not so bad (I paraphrase what I understand to be the general thrust of some posts on this) is an oversimplification.
And that's before we start thinking about the Chinese Communist "Great Leap Forward" and "Cultural Revolution", the Khmer Rouge rule of Cambodia, the Korean civil war, and the two World Wars (which were arguably two European Civil Wars, the second of which ended less than 70 years ago), including the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. And, as I understand it, Islam played no part in the Sri Lankan civil war.
I'm tempted to say that religions/ideologies don't kill people, people kill people. But I don't believe that either.
My enemy's enemy is my friend is a dangerous quarter-truth. Worse is acting on a principle that anyone who isn't with us is against us.
The Babel Fish Argument for the Non-Existence of God (from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams): ... The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. ... Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
(Caveat: I don't necessarily agree with that!)
"Slavery" is not just in South Korea. For example, a recent report on the problem here in Britain from the right-wing Daily Telegraph on 29.November.2014. (I mention that it is right wing to avoid any impression that this is an issue raised only by bleeding heart liberals.) Theresa May is the British Home Secretary (political head of the Home Office, the department responsible for law and order, security and immigration) and is a member of the UK Conservative Party, again on the right of British Politics.
Theresa May says tens of thousands held as modern slaves in Britain "As many as 13,000 people in Britain are being held in conditions of slavery, four times the number previously thought, it has been revealed. In what is said to be the first scientific estimate of the scale of modern slavery in the UK, the Home Office has said the number of victims last year was between 10,000 and 13,000. They include women forced into prostitution, domestic staff and workers in fields, factories and fishing boats. ... outlining the strategy for government departments, its agencies and partners, Home Secretary Theresa May said legislation was 'only part of the answer'. The 'grim reality' is that slavery still exists in towns, cities and the countryside across the world, including the UK, she said. ..."
If you're suggesting that the slavery problem in South Korea is in any way comparable to what's happened recently in North Korea, some information:
A 17-minute BBC TV Newsnight report from 2008 Risking lives to escape N Korea Hundred of thousands of North Koreans are fleeing their country illegally, crossing north into China. A camera team from South Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper spent the past 10 months filming activity at the border. The BBC's Olenka Frenkiel was given exclusive access to their material.
"Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea" - a book by Barbara Demick
A 2011 lecture by the British politician David Alton North Korea – A Different Approach – Cambridge University Lecture which has useful background on the history of Korea (the Japanese occupation, the Korean war), and has two sections on "4. Human Rights" and "5. Humanitarian Situation".
For example, from "4. Human Rights": ... My own interest in North Korea began through an encounter with an escapee, Yoo Sang-joon. A North Korean Christian who had escaped from the country and came to see me at Westminster. His story was harrowing and disturbing. He told me how he had seen his wife, and all bar one of his children shot dead by Kim Jong-Il's militia. He subsequently escaped across the border to China with his one remaining son. The boy died en route. He encouraged me to read the prison memoirs of Soon Ok Lee. In them she describes in detail the brutality and barbarism of the system in North Korea. 'Eyes of the Tailless Animals' is Soon Ok Lee's account of the sham judicial system, the show trials, the starvation, the forced labour, the degradation, humiliation and rape of prisoners. Through her eyes we get a glimpse of this corrupt, paranoid and tyrannical regime.
... Professor Vitit Muntarbhorn, the previous United Nations Special Rapporteur on North Korea, told me that he estimates that 400,000 people have died in North Korea's prison camps in the last 30 years. Vitit Muntarbhorn ... has described North Korea's human rights record as "abysmal" due to "the repressive nature of the power base: at once cloistered, controlled and callous." The exploitation of
"Who do you suppose were the first businesses to use computers?"
Not the banks! Actually a British chain of tea shops! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Lyons_and_Co.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer) The LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office I) was the first computer used for commercial business applications. Overseen by Oliver Standingford, Raymond Thompson of J. Lyons and Co.and and David Caminer, modelled closely on the Cambridge EDSAC. LEO I ran its first business application in 1951. In 1954 Lyons formed LEO Computers Ltd to market LEO I and its successors LEO II and LEO III to other companies. LEO Computers eventually became part of English Electric Company (EELM) and then International Computers Limited (ICL) and ultimately Fujitsu. LEO series computers were still in use until 1981.
One of the LEO III's quirkier features was a loudspeaker connected to the central processor which enabled operators to tell whether a program was looping by the distinctive sound it made.
http://www.leo-computers.org.uk/ In 1951 the LEO I computer was operational and ran the world's first regular routine office computer job.
"Please stick to the science."
That prompts a few points.
1. It might be the case that variation in "intelligence" between human populations is greater than the variation within human populations, but I personally would want really convincing evidence for that, and proof that the tests are *really* measuring intelligence, *and* that that intelligence is in some way fixed in the different populations.
But assuming, for now, that there *really* are differences in average "intelligence" between human populations, even then:
2. You correctly say "None of this means there are not individual Northeast Asians with low IQ or blacks with high IQ. Of course there are both. Averages are averages, they are not indicative of individuals. Everyone should be treated like an individual".
3. Then follow that with "but we shouldn't blind ourselves to scientific reality". The problem is that if you/we are not *very* careful with how we present scientific "reality" - and any uncertainty in that "reality" - it gets rapidly distorted into unscientific unreal "certainty".
As a simple example, the average height of World War 1 British soldiers who survived was 1.inch greater than those who died, and this difference was highly statistically significant. http://www.psychologytoday.com... But selecting soldiers purely on the basis of height would be really stupid, as any American or Australian or British soldiers that fought against the Japanese in the Pacific could testify.
4. Lee Smolin in "The Trouble With Physics" (2006): in chapter 19 "How Science Really Works" he states that he believes the reason why there are not more women or blacks in physics, compared with equally challenging fields such as mathematics or astronomy is blatent prejudice, points out that women have less difficulty in getting hired as pure mathematicians, probably because it is clearer in mathematics that you have done something good, and adds "In all my experience, I have never seen a woman or an African-American hired through an affirmative-action program who didn't strongly deserve it - that is, who wasn't already arguably the best applicant".
5. I'd be more impressed by advocates of "conclusive" evidence of racial differences in intelligence if the "race" they considered the most intelligent wasn't the one they happened to belong to. And I'd be really impressed if they then went on to argue that any of their policy implications for races less "intelligent" than theirs should also apply to them in relation to the races more intelligent than theirs. But I won't be holding my breath.
As an actual example of the first position, Richard Lynn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... at least has the guts to take his findings seriously, and I look forward to Caucasian advocates of racial differences between Caucasians and Africans making the same advocacy for East Asians being more intelligent than Caucasians.