companies like Ticketmaster have preferential early access to the best seats
Not just early access. In many cases they have exclusive access. I travel a good deal, and I like baseball, so I try to see games wherever I go. 26 of the 30 major league teams do not sell their own tickets either on line or over the phone; they sell all their tickets to Ticketmaster. So if I want to go to a game in Detroit, I either have to go through Ticketmaster or get the tickets in person at the Detroit box office (not really an option since I live in Boston.) So Ticketmaster has an unfair advantage: Ticketmaster can buy tickets from the team remotely but I cannot.
In this case the free-market model is violated twice -- both on the reseller end (Ticketmaster has no competition) and on the product end (Major League Baseball has no competition, thanks to its insane anti-trust exemption.)
I have, at times in the past, led a poor and miserable life. I don't right now (though that doesn't mean I won't again.) So, what, when I got sick and went to the local clinic, you would have said, "Sorry pal, you seem poor and miserable to me, we have a policy here that we only treat positive, fulfilled people"?
For your own sake you might want to rethink that a bit. If only because one thing that would make me and my nine poor, miserable friends feel positive and fulfilled is ganging up on people who try to stop us from rising up out of poverty and misery.
I had to slide out of providing support for my mom, which took up a lot of (exasperating) time.
My mom is in her seventies, and wanted a computer, because she wanted to use email because she doesn't like feeling left out. Fair enough. So I set up an idiot-simple Linux laptop for her, hiding all icons except Firefox and Thunderbird. "This one is the Internet; This one is email."
The problem is, that wasn't simple enough. My mom kept calling me with imaginary problems. She thought the laptop had crashed, because the screen saver came on. She accidentally minimized the Firefox window and thought she'd deleted it. No amount of explanation could make it clear to her what the scroll bar was for; whenever anything was off the screen she thought it was gone. Honestly, it was driving me insane. Restraining myself from saying something like "RETARDED MONKEYS can do this! You have two masters' degrees! What the hell is your problem!" was practically giving me an ulcer.
However, she provided the solution herself. Somehow or other she realized that the system I'd set up wasn't "what everybody else has" (probably one of her friends saw it and told her) so she became convinced that the whole problem was that I had set her computer up wrong, and if she had Windows and Outlook like everybody else, she wouldn't have any problems.
Off she goes and gets whatever the clerk at Best Buy told her was good. Of course, she can't use that either, but MY problem is solved, because when she calls for help I just say "Sorry, Ma, I don't know anything about Windows. Call Best Buy." End of high blood pressure.
So hey, it turns out Microsoft is good for something after all.
The main reason Americans don't travel is because they know virtually nothing about the world outside of the US & everyone fears the unkown.
There are political problems as well. Americans are pretty unpopular in a lot of places right now. In my own experience, I've been to Spain, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands in the last few years (all on business.) I have a pretty strong Boston accent, and even when speaking Spanish it's obvious I'm an American. I couldn't get through a day without being harangued about US foreign policy. There's no way to win there--I can either try to defend policies I don't agree with, or I can defend myself by admitting I don't like the policies either -- which I am, perhaps irrationally, reluctant to do. At home, I'm happy to say, "I voted for the other guy, I think our policy on [ISSUE] stinks"; abroad I don't want to take sides against what is, after all, my home, even if I actually think the policy stinks.
When I'm abroad these days I try to stay at work, so I don't have to tactfully escape a total stranger snarling at me that "You Americans want to rule everything!" Everybody knows Americans are all workaholics anyway, so nobody thinks it's strange that I want to work late.
Absolutely true. In one respect the computer industry is exactly like the construction industry: nobody has two minutes to tell you how to do something...but they all have forty-five minutes to tell you why you did it wrong.
When I started working at a tech company, as a lowly new-guy know-nothing, I found that any question starting with "How do I..." or "What's the best way to..." would be ignored; so I had to adopt another strategy. Say I wanted to do X. Research showed me there were (say) about six or seven ways to do X. Which is the best in my situation? I don't know. So I pick an approach at random, though I don't actually use it. Then I wander down to the coffee machine and casually remark, "So, I needed to do X, and I used approach Y." I would then, inevitably, get a half-hour discussion of why that was stupid, and what I should have done was use approach Z, because of this, this, and this. Then I would go off and use approach Z.
In ten years in the tech industry, that strategy has never failed once. I think the key difference is the subtext. In the first strategy, the subtext is, "Hey, can you spend your valuable time helping me do something trivial?" while in the second strategy, the subtext is, "Hey, here's a chance to show off how smart you are." People being what they are, the first subtext will usually fail--but the second will always succeed.
The "slippery slope" is a well known logical fallacy; why did they include it?
The slippery slope is not a fallacy. It may *contain* a fallacy.
The slippery slope argument goes like this: If A happens, B becomes more likely to happen. B will initiate a negative trend of events.
If you can demonstrate a causal connection between A and B, or show that such a connection is at least plausible, then the argument is entirely valid. If not, the argument is fallacious.
My company just landed a DoD contract--one technical section of the US Army is going to use our debugging software. We've been thinking about including default screen savers that say "Torture is bad."
You find a nice girl, you get dinner at a restaurant down the road, you watch the movie from the home theater...
Actually, the one thing the movies are still good for is first dates. I wouldn't ask a woman to come over to my place for the first date, and if I did she'd probably say no, because that's kind of creepy.
What I like to do is see an earlier showing of the movie and *then* get dinner. That kills two birds with one stone: generally fewer annoying people at the 6:45 shows, and it also gives you an automatic conversation-starter at dinner afterwards.
That's true. Many people simply accept what they hear uncritically, and reporters are no different (though I think we have a right to expect them to have higher standards.)
In 2000 I got together with a guy I know who spent several years in China, and met his wife, a Chinese woman he met in Beijing, and who came back to the States with him. As it happened, that day I had been walking through Copley Square in Boston and had seen a large group of Chinese people doing what looked like tai chi set to music. It turned out they were practicioners of falun gong, a kind of qigong.
I knew nothing about falun gong, and my friend explained that they were a spiritualist movement that was outlawed in China in 1999 after they became politicized and demonstrated in favor of democracy. His wife added, very sincerely, that they had really been outlawed because they were all very bad people. "They kill their parents!"
She wasn't uneducated or anything--she was an intelligent woman--but she had simply accepted the official version of the news and it hadn't occurred to her to doubt it. She also thought that the Tibetans were glad to have the Chinese occupying their country ("We're nice to them, we give them rice.")
I found that an eye-opening experience. It certainly made me ask, "Wait a minute, where are my blind spots? How much of what I believe is actually total bullshit?"
It seems to me that many people never perform that kind of self-checking, either through laziness or because they find it threatening. I also think that when you ask a question that makes someone angry, it's because you're questioning something they believe on faith and have neither evidence nor logic to support it (completely regardless of whether it's true or not.)
I don't agree. I like my work, and while it's not my entire life, it's a big part of it. Why wouldn't I want it to be well-maintained? I actually do maintain a file (I call it my "I got hit by a truck" file") that has a pile of information that whoever took over for me would need. It's true, no one is indispensable (except Bill Belichick) but I can make my successor's job a lot easier.
Also, I've never really bought the "I'd spend all my time with my kids" argument. For one thing, there isn't that much time you could do that anyway. Are you going to keep them out of school until you die? Do you think your kids really want to be around you 24 hours a day anyway, whether you have terminal cancer or not? Plus, you know, while you're alive you usually have to work. My landlord wouldn't stop asking for his rent just because I was dying.
Bear in mind that the signature on the back of the card is not a security measure for you; it's security for the store.
If you look at the card, you'll see a notice by the signature field that says "NOT VALID UNTIL SIGNED." This is because the card constitutes a binding contract between you and the credit card company. Until you sign it, the card is not a financial instrument.
Let's say you don't sign the card, and you use it to but $1500 worth of stuff at a store, and then you don't pay the credit card bill. The credit card company is not legally obligated to pay the store for the goods you bought, because the unsigned card was not a binding agreement. You can be prosecuted for acting in bad faith, but the store won't get its $1500.
That's why the store needs you to sign it--and that's why, when I was a cashier (for my sins) I would often have to ask people to sign their credit cards.
Incredulous customer: But don't you see how ridiculous that is? I might have just stolen this card and be forging the signature on it!
Me: That's true, but remember, I'm not doing this to protect you; I'm doing it to protect the store.
Technically, by insisting on a signature, I was performing good-faith assurance. Sure, the guy might be signing a fake name; but a store can't be held legally responsible for detecting forged signatures, since it's not reasonable that a minimum-wage cashier be required to be trained in forgery. (Court cases have upheld this.) As long as the card has a signature on it, the credit card company has to reimburse the store for whatever gets bought. That's the only thing the store cares about.
The lesson? Remember that the only person who has any interest in protecting you is yourself.
According to Herodotos, the Medes and Persians (back when Koroush, whom the Greeks called Kyros, was the Shah -- sixth century BC) had a custom whereby they would reconsider, while sober, any decision they had made when they were drunk -- and vice versa.
I wonder just how much those incidents would be reduced if companies were fined a stiff penalty for digging without calling these numbers.
Not much. At least in New England, where I had all my construction experience, there really aren't many excavation "companies". Most excavation is done by one-man outfits. Whenever my crew built a house, we called up a guy named Stu who owned an excavator and paid him to dig the foundation. He also did all the digging if we needed to re-lay pipes or conduits.
He had his own liability insurance, so if he made a mistake and wrecked something (he never did), it wouldn't be on us. Supposing he had, his insurance company would be on the hook for whatever damage he did, plus if he hadn't done his homework and checked with the state and town authorities before digging he'd have to pay a fine and maybe lose his license (though that rarely happens, because the building trades are something of an old-boy network.) Making the fine really big wouldn't help, because there's only so much one guy can pay. And if you drove him out of business, the guy who bought his equipment at the bankruptcy sale would start right in, so there would be no net decrease.
In Sherborn, Mass., in 1987, there was a guy who punctured a gas line with a backhoe, realized he'd done it, and just ran away. The house blew up--I found pieces of shingle more than a mile away. There was nothing left but a pile of rubble in a big hole.
...not necessarily how smart you think they are, but how much effort you think they're willing to put in.
I have an older sister, a biochemist, who's extremely smart, but who had never really used a computer at all until very recently. She emailed me a while ago and asked, "How do computers work?"
I thought about it, and decided to explain it so she could really understand it. Over the last year I've been sending her mid-length essays explaining things in stages. For instance, start with binary numbers; then a short primer on Boolean logic; then a simple explanation of Claude Shannon's paper on how Boolean gates could be physically implemented using electromagnetic relays. Then explanations of semiconductors, why silicon, why boron, why phosphorus. And so on.
It seems to me that most people aren't really good at sustained systematic study; I'm not myself. Instead, I start by learning a fact pretty much at random, then another fact, and so on, until I have a large enough collection of facts that a pattern emerges and I can grasp an underlying principle. Once you understand the principles, you can learn anything about a system fairly easily.
That was how I learned Linux--after asking a number of people and receiving various replies, all of which were a variation on "Don't start by doing X," until I had to conclude that there just isn't any good way to start, so I might as well start at random. It helped that I had a laptop I didn't need, so I could install any distro I wanted and if I screwed up beyond my ability to repair it, I'd just re-install. That turned out to be handy, since you can do stuff people warn you against. ("What actually happens if I edit/etc/inittab to set initdefault to 0?" "Exactly how far would rm -rf/ go if I hit Escape after about two seconds?" Worth trying.)
Under the Julian calendar, Franklin was born January 6, 1705. Under the Gregorian calendar, he was born on January 17, 1706. So this month is his 300th *and* 301st birthday!
Under the Julian calendar the new year began on March 25, because that was the Roman New Year; in Caesar's day, the vernal equinox fell on the 25th. That was no problem because as Pontifex Maximus, Caesar was in charge of the calendar, and if it got out of whack, he could just decree "March is going to have a few extra days this year so we can catch up." He was too lazy to bother keeping up, though (he only held the office for political reasons) so eventually he got the Alexandrian astromomer Sosigenes and all his mathematician friends to design a new, non-lunar calendar that would never need to be adjusted. They did all the work, but Caesar named the calendar after himself, basically because he could.
They did a good job, but not quite good enough, and gradually the calendar got out of whack again. In the mid-16th century this was a big concern to the Catholic Church because the date of the vernal equinox is important in calculating the date of Easter. The Pope held the office of Pontifex Maximus by that time [which he still does] and therefore was technically still in charge of the calendar. The telescope had been invented by then, and Europe had far better mathematical techniques that they had learned from the Arabs, so the Pope appointed a team that re-re-designed the calendar into the one we use now. Some things never change, though; even though Pope Gregory did none of the work, he still named the calendar after himself, basically because he could.
As far as you know. On the one hand, as a customer, when I'm given incorrect change, I just take it, because trying to explain to a bored high-school kid that 11.01 minus 5.76 equals 5.25 just isn't worth a few cents. Easier to forget about it and keep my blood pressure down.
On the other hand, if a cashier made a mistake and realized it, probably most of the time he'd keep quiet and hope the customer wouldn't notice, especially if he's already automatically shut the drawer, so to fix it he'd have to call over a supervisor and tell him he's made a mistake.
PS: I think, no matter how much frickin money they make, they ALL drive beat up pickups
Naturally. I spent fifteen years in the construction industry, and drove crummy third-hand pickups the whole time. I always had a lot of heavy equipment to move, and needed the space; and why would I drive a nice car to a work site?
By the way, I doubt there was as direct a cause-effect relationship as the story implies. Even where there's a high general level of education (as is the case in Massachusetts, where I did all my construction work) the huge majority of people in the building trades never went to college; most of them barely finished high school, and rarely did well there. I find it very unlikely that the poster explained the Pythagorean theorem to the contractor in five minutes in such a way that he could grasp and retain it. Probably what really happened was the guy listened in polite incomprehension, made a joke to end the conversation, and later got rid of one of his guys for some totally unrelated reason, such as the guy turned up drunk, or accidentally blew up the compressor, or got mad and shot somebody else with a nailgun (I have seen all these things happen.)
how about pre-empting football for cartoons for a change?
Can't happen. The networks follow the "Heidi Rule", which states that nothing is more important than football. This goes back to a game in November 1968 when the network switched away from a Jets-Raiders game with under a minute to play and the Raiders far behind, in order to start the prime-time movie of the week, which was "Heidi". In the last forty-nine seconds of the game, which viewers didn't get to see, Oakland scored a touchdown, made an amazing end-zone fumble recovery, scored another touchdown, and won the game.
The negative reaction from football fans was so huge that the networks had to promise that they would never again cut away from a football game in progress, NO MATTER WHAT. Alien starships land, China signs eternal frienship pact with Russia, Bill Gates donates a fortune to the Free Software Foundation, they're still going to show every down. That's written into their contract with the NFL.
And honestly, it's the right decision. I love Futurama too, but for every one person who watches Futurama, there are a hundred people who would rather watch football. At best, Futurama brings the station a modest profit; football puts two full quarters of the fiscal year in the black by itself.
Actually Farscape was killed because the parent company of the Sci-Fi network went bankrupt, and Farscape cost too much to make. At least they wound up the story in the two-part movie (wich I thought was pretty good.)
That's one more reason I thought Firefly would be a great pickup for the SF Network--not only does it have a pre-made audience, it would be cheaper to make. Eight regular characters and only a half-dozen sets, plus one or two CGI shots an episode, and you can come in under budget pretty easily, I would think.
Unfortunately, Fox still owns the broadcast contract, and has shown no willingness to let someone else buy it from them. They only let Paramount make the movie because it wasn't TV competition--and even then they wouldn't let them use the word "Firefly" in the title or the ads. In all seriousness, I think the weakest point of the movie (which I thought was really great otherwise) was the title, which I think really hurt it at the box office. Who would go see an action movie called "Serenity", if they hadn't seen the show? They would have been much better off calling it something like "Captain Reynolds Versus the Cannibal Space Pirates", or the eqivalent.
Re:apologies, slightly off-topic...[but only a lit
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Cornell has the hightest suicide rate among ivy leagues? I still think I was being toyed with)
I think this is true, actually. Not sure who is #2, but I think MIT is #3.
According to Cornell (gannett.cornell.edu) over the last ten years the suicide rate is two students per year, about the same as the US college average; apparently the suicide rate is twice as high among Americans of the same age range who are not in college.
Cornell happens to be near a very deep (and pretty) gorge where a number of people have leapt to their deaths; possibly that's where the idea got started.
By the way, MIT isn't an Ivy League school. I'm pretty sure MIT doesn't even have a football team.
i always laugh when these "experts" can't explain something they think they have a really good handle on.
So do they--though, I suspect, not for the same reasons. For a scientist, there is nothing better than getting a result that isn't what you expected, since it's almost sure to lead you to a better understanding than you had before, which is the driving motive behind all science.
I watched the two-part mini-series, and then about the first seven or eight episodes, before stopping. I thought the writing and acting were quite good, but the never-ending gloom and doom got to me eventually. If I want that I can watch CNN.
The basic problem is in the premise. The Cylons are hugely more powerful than the human fleet; they could wipe them out at any time, and the fact that they haven't done so just shows that they choose not to, for as-yet-unrevealed reasons. Since the humans cannot possibly put up any sort of a fight against the invincible Cylons, the only possible plots involve humans fighting each other.
Basically what bothers me about the show is that its message is that adversity brings out the worst in people, that the terrible situation our heroes are in reduces them, makes them smaller and meaner. If I'm going to watch a story about a gigantic disaster and people's reactions to it, I would prefer a story where the disaster makes people grow rather than shrink, and teaches the lesson that people are at their best when things are worst. For one thing, I believe that's actually true; and for another, even if it weren't, I think that kind of story would help encourage it.
I'm not saying BSG sucks or anything--I think it's well-made all round--but I find it overly negative.
It may be worth pointing out here that when the Declaration says "all men are created equal", what it means is that every man stands in exactly the same relation to God as every other man; that there is no one man, and no group of men, that is inherently favored above other men by God by right of birth. It's in the Declaration because it's an explicit rejection of the doctrine of Divine Right. Remember that when the Declaration was written, there were still serious thinkers who seriously claimed that the power of kings came directly from God, and opposing it was blasphemy. Even if the Declaration hadn't gone on to claim independence from the Crown, simply signing their names to a document that asserted the equality of men was lese majeste, technically a capital crime.
Re:'Know Thyself' as the Delphic Oracle slogan?
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Not the only one...
According to Plato's dialogue Charmides, the god Apollo instructed the makers of the shrine at Delphi to carve "Know thyself!" over the lintel, not as a piece of advice, but as the proper salutation of the god to men.
Later generations carved other grammata underneath it: "Be temperate!" and "Nothing too much!" (And, according to Plutarch, who wrote much later and never saw it himself, the Greek letter E, for some reason.)
Rock gasses or not, the stoned state of the Pythia was no accident--she breathed the smoke from burning laurel leaves to get into a mental state that she perceived as being receptive to the pronouncements of the god.
Slashdot Mirror
companies like Ticketmaster have preferential early access to the best seats
Not just early access. In many cases they have exclusive access. I travel a good deal, and I like baseball, so I try to see games wherever I go. 26 of the 30 major league teams do not sell their own tickets either on line or over the phone; they sell all their tickets to Ticketmaster. So if I want to go to a game in Detroit, I either have to go through Ticketmaster or get the tickets in person at the Detroit box office (not really an option since I live in Boston.) So Ticketmaster has an unfair advantage: Ticketmaster can buy tickets from the team remotely but I cannot.
In this case the free-market model is violated twice -- both on the reseller end (Ticketmaster has no competition) and on the product end (Major League Baseball has no competition, thanks to its insane anti-trust exemption.)
I have, at times in the past, led a poor and miserable life. I don't right now (though that doesn't mean I won't again.) So, what, when I got sick and went to the local clinic, you would have said, "Sorry pal, you seem poor and miserable to me, we have a policy here that we only treat positive, fulfilled people"?
For your own sake you might want to rethink that a bit. If only because one thing that would make me and my nine poor, miserable friends feel positive and fulfilled is ganging up on people who try to stop us from rising up out of poverty and misery.
I had to slide out of providing support for my mom, which took up a lot of (exasperating) time.
My mom is in her seventies, and wanted a computer, because she wanted to use email because she doesn't like feeling left out. Fair enough. So I set up an idiot-simple Linux laptop for her, hiding all icons except Firefox and Thunderbird. "This one is the Internet; This one is email."
The problem is, that wasn't simple enough. My mom kept calling me with imaginary problems. She thought the laptop had crashed, because the screen saver came on. She accidentally minimized the Firefox window and thought she'd deleted it. No amount of explanation could make it clear to her what the scroll bar was for; whenever anything was off the screen she thought it was gone. Honestly, it was driving me insane. Restraining myself from saying something like "RETARDED MONKEYS can do this! You have two masters' degrees! What the hell is your problem!" was practically giving me an ulcer.
However, she provided the solution herself. Somehow or other she realized that the system I'd set up wasn't "what everybody else has" (probably one of her friends saw it and told her) so she became convinced that the whole problem was that I had set her computer up wrong, and if she had Windows and Outlook like everybody else, she wouldn't have any problems.
Off she goes and gets whatever the clerk at Best Buy told her was good. Of course, she can't use that either, but MY problem is solved, because when she calls for help I just say "Sorry, Ma, I don't know anything about Windows. Call Best Buy." End of high blood pressure.
So hey, it turns out Microsoft is good for something after all.
The main reason Americans don't travel is because they know virtually nothing about the world outside of the US & everyone fears the unkown.
There are political problems as well. Americans are pretty unpopular in a lot of places right now. In my own experience, I've been to Spain, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands in the last few years (all on business.) I have a pretty strong Boston accent, and even when speaking Spanish it's obvious I'm an American. I couldn't get through a day without being harangued about US foreign policy. There's no way to win there--I can either try to defend policies I don't agree with, or I can defend myself by admitting I don't like the policies either -- which I am, perhaps irrationally, reluctant to do. At home, I'm happy to say, "I voted for the other guy, I think our policy on [ISSUE] stinks"; abroad I don't want to take sides against what is, after all, my home, even if I actually think the policy stinks.
When I'm abroad these days I try to stay at work, so I don't have to tactfully escape a total stranger snarling at me that "You Americans want to rule everything!" Everybody knows Americans are all workaholics anyway, so nobody thinks it's strange that I want to work late.
Absolutely true. In one respect the computer industry is exactly like the construction industry: nobody has two minutes to tell you how to do something...but they all have forty-five minutes to tell you why you did it wrong.
When I started working at a tech company, as a lowly new-guy know-nothing, I found that any question starting with "How do I..." or "What's the best way to..." would be ignored; so I had to adopt another strategy. Say I wanted to do X. Research showed me there were (say) about six or seven ways to do X. Which is the best in my situation? I don't know. So I pick an approach at random, though I don't actually use it. Then I wander down to the coffee machine and casually remark, "So, I needed to do X, and I used approach Y." I would then, inevitably, get a half-hour discussion of why that was stupid, and what I should have done was use approach Z, because of this, this, and this. Then I would go off and use approach Z.
In ten years in the tech industry, that strategy has never failed once. I think the key difference is the subtext. In the first strategy, the subtext is, "Hey, can you spend your valuable time helping me do something trivial?" while in the second strategy, the subtext is, "Hey, here's a chance to show off how smart you are." People being what they are, the first subtext will usually fail--but the second will always succeed.
The "slippery slope" is a well known logical fallacy; why did they include it?
The slippery slope is not a fallacy. It may *contain* a fallacy.
The slippery slope argument goes like this: If A happens, B becomes more likely to happen. B will initiate a negative trend of events.
If you can demonstrate a causal connection between A and B, or show that such a connection is at least plausible, then the argument is entirely valid. If not, the argument is fallacious.
My company just landed a DoD contract--one technical section of the US Army is going to use our debugging software. We've been thinking about including default screen savers that say "Torture is bad."
"The Brass Rat" is the students' name for the MIT emblem, which (like Caltech's) is a beaver: Nature's engineer.
One thing many people seem to have missed is that MIT put a huge MIT ring on the cannon...thus giving Caltech the finger.
You find a nice girl, you get dinner at a restaurant down the road, you watch the movie from the home theater...
Actually, the one thing the movies are still good for is first dates. I wouldn't ask a woman to come over to my place for the first date, and if I did she'd probably say no, because that's kind of creepy.
What I like to do is see an earlier showing of the movie and *then* get dinner. That kills two birds with one stone: generally fewer annoying people at the 6:45 shows, and it also gives you an automatic conversation-starter at dinner afterwards.
That's true. Many people simply accept what they hear uncritically, and reporters are no different (though I think we have a right to expect them to have higher standards.)
In 2000 I got together with a guy I know who spent several years in China, and met his wife, a Chinese woman he met in Beijing, and who came back to the States with him. As it happened, that day I had been walking through Copley Square in Boston and had seen a large group of Chinese people doing what looked like tai chi set to music. It turned out they were practicioners of falun gong, a kind of qigong.
I knew nothing about falun gong, and my friend explained that they were a spiritualist movement that was outlawed in China in 1999 after they became politicized and demonstrated in favor of democracy. His wife added, very sincerely, that they had really been outlawed because they were all very bad people. "They kill their parents!"
She wasn't uneducated or anything--she was an intelligent woman--but she had simply accepted the official version of the news and it hadn't occurred to her to doubt it. She also thought that the Tibetans were glad to have the Chinese occupying their country ("We're nice to them, we give them rice.")
I found that an eye-opening experience. It certainly made me ask, "Wait a minute, where are my blind spots? How much of what I believe is actually total bullshit?"
It seems to me that many people never perform that kind of self-checking, either through laziness or because they find it threatening. I also think that when you ask a question that makes someone angry, it's because you're questioning something they believe on faith and have neither evidence nor logic to support it (completely regardless of whether it's true or not.)
I don't agree. I like my work, and while it's not my entire life, it's a big part of it. Why wouldn't I want it to be well-maintained? I actually do maintain a file (I call it my "I got hit by a truck" file") that has a pile of information that whoever took over for me would need. It's true, no one is indispensable (except Bill Belichick) but I can make my successor's job a lot easier.
Also, I've never really bought the "I'd spend all my time with my kids" argument. For one thing, there isn't that much time you could do that anyway. Are you going to keep them out of school until you die? Do you think your kids really want to be around you 24 hours a day anyway, whether you have terminal cancer or not? Plus, you know, while you're alive you usually have to work. My landlord wouldn't stop asking for his rent just because I was dying.
Bear in mind that the signature on the back of the card is not a security measure for you; it's security for the store.
If you look at the card, you'll see a notice by the signature field that says "NOT VALID UNTIL SIGNED." This is because the card constitutes a binding contract between you and the credit card company. Until you sign it, the card is not a financial instrument.
Let's say you don't sign the card, and you use it to but $1500 worth of stuff at a store, and then you don't pay the credit card bill. The credit card company is not legally obligated to pay the store for the goods you bought, because the unsigned card was not a binding agreement. You can be prosecuted for acting in bad faith, but the store won't get its $1500.
That's why the store needs you to sign it--and that's why, when I was a cashier (for my sins) I would often have to ask people to sign their credit cards.
Incredulous customer: But don't you see how ridiculous that is? I might have just stolen this card and be forging the signature on it!
Me: That's true, but remember, I'm not doing this to protect you; I'm doing it to protect the store.
Technically, by insisting on a signature, I was performing good-faith assurance. Sure, the guy might be signing a fake name; but a store can't be held legally responsible for detecting forged signatures, since it's not reasonable that a minimum-wage cashier be required to be trained in forgery. (Court cases have upheld this.) As long as the card has a signature on it, the credit card company has to reimburse the store for whatever gets bought. That's the only thing the store cares about.
The lesson? Remember that the only person who has any interest in protecting you is yourself.
According to Herodotos, the Medes and Persians (back when Koroush, whom the Greeks called Kyros, was the Shah -- sixth century BC) had a custom whereby they would reconsider, while sober, any decision they had made when they were drunk -- and vice versa.
I wonder just how much those incidents would be reduced if companies were fined a stiff penalty for digging without calling these numbers.
Not much. At least in New England, where I had all my construction experience, there really aren't many excavation "companies". Most excavation is done by one-man outfits. Whenever my crew built a house, we called up a guy named Stu who owned an excavator and paid him to dig the foundation. He also did all the digging if we needed to re-lay pipes or conduits.
He had his own liability insurance, so if he made a mistake and wrecked something (he never did), it wouldn't be on us. Supposing he had, his insurance company would be on the hook for whatever damage he did, plus if he hadn't done his homework and checked with the state and town authorities before digging he'd have to pay a fine and maybe lose his license (though that rarely happens, because the building trades are something of an old-boy network.) Making the fine really big wouldn't help, because there's only so much one guy can pay. And if you drove him out of business, the guy who bought his equipment at the bankruptcy sale would start right in, so there would be no net decrease.
In Sherborn, Mass., in 1987, there was a guy who punctured a gas line with a backhoe, realized he'd done it, and just ran away. The house blew up--I found pieces of shingle more than a mile away. There was nothing left but a pile of rubble in a big hole.
...not necessarily how smart you think they are, but how much effort you think they're willing to put in.
/etc/inittab to set initdefault to 0?" "Exactly how far would rm -rf/ go if I hit Escape after about two seconds?" Worth trying.)
I have an older sister, a biochemist, who's extremely smart, but who had never really used a computer at all until very recently. She emailed me a while ago and asked, "How do computers work?"
I thought about it, and decided to explain it so she could really understand it. Over the last year I've been sending her mid-length essays explaining things in stages. For instance, start with binary numbers; then a short primer on Boolean logic; then a simple explanation of Claude Shannon's paper on how Boolean gates could be physically implemented using electromagnetic relays. Then explanations of semiconductors, why silicon, why boron, why phosphorus. And so on.
It seems to me that most people aren't really good at sustained systematic study; I'm not myself. Instead, I start by learning a fact pretty much at random, then another fact, and so on, until I have a large enough collection of facts that a pattern emerges and I can grasp an underlying principle. Once you understand the principles, you can learn anything about a system fairly easily.
That was how I learned Linux--after asking a number of people and receiving various replies, all of which were a variation on "Don't start by doing X," until I had to conclude that there just isn't any good way to start, so I might as well start at random. It helped that I had a laptop I didn't need, so I could install any distro I wanted and if I screwed up beyond my ability to repair it, I'd just re-install. That turned out to be handy, since you can do stuff people warn you against. ("What actually happens if I edit
Under the Julian calendar, Franklin was born January 6, 1705. Under the Gregorian calendar, he was born on January 17, 1706. So this month is his 300th *and* 301st birthday!
Under the Julian calendar the new year began on March 25, because that was the Roman New Year; in Caesar's day, the vernal equinox fell on the 25th. That was no problem because as Pontifex Maximus, Caesar was in charge of the calendar, and if it got out of whack, he could just decree "March is going to have a few extra days this year so we can catch up." He was too lazy to bother keeping up, though (he only held the office for political reasons) so eventually he got the Alexandrian astromomer Sosigenes and all his mathematician friends to design a new, non-lunar calendar that would never need to be adjusted. They did all the work, but Caesar named the calendar after himself, basically because he could.
They did a good job, but not quite good enough, and gradually the calendar got out of whack again. In the mid-16th century this was a big concern to the Catholic Church because the date of the vernal equinox is important in calculating the date of Easter. The Pope held the office of Pontifex Maximus by that time [which he still does] and therefore was technically still in charge of the calendar. The telescope had been invented by then, and Europe had far better mathematical techniques that they had learned from the Arabs, so the Pope appointed a team that re-re-designed the calendar into the one we use now. Some things never change, though; even though Pope Gregory did none of the work, he still named the calendar after himself, basically because he could.
Neither the customer or clerk notices this.
As far as you know. On the one hand, as a customer, when I'm given incorrect change, I just take it, because trying to explain to a bored high-school kid that 11.01 minus 5.76 equals 5.25 just isn't worth a few cents. Easier to forget about it and keep my blood pressure down.
On the other hand, if a cashier made a mistake and realized it, probably most of the time he'd keep quiet and hope the customer wouldn't notice, especially if he's already automatically shut the drawer, so to fix it he'd have to call over a supervisor and tell him he's made a mistake.
PS: I think, no matter how much frickin money they make, they ALL drive beat up pickups
Naturally. I spent fifteen years in the construction industry, and drove crummy third-hand pickups the whole time. I always had a lot of heavy equipment to move, and needed the space; and why would I drive a nice car to a work site?
By the way, I doubt there was as direct a cause-effect relationship as the story implies. Even where there's a high general level of education (as is the case in Massachusetts, where I did all my construction work) the huge majority of people in the building trades never went to college; most of them barely finished high school, and rarely did well there. I find it very unlikely that the poster explained the Pythagorean theorem to the contractor in five minutes in such a way that he could grasp and retain it. Probably what really happened was the guy listened in polite incomprehension, made a joke to end the conversation, and later got rid of one of his guys for some totally unrelated reason, such as the guy turned up drunk, or accidentally blew up the compressor, or got mad and shot somebody else with a nailgun (I have seen all these things happen.)
how about pre-empting football for cartoons for a change?
Can't happen. The networks follow the "Heidi Rule", which states that nothing is more important than football. This goes back to a game in November 1968 when the network switched away from a Jets-Raiders game with under a minute to play and the Raiders far behind, in order to start the prime-time movie of the week, which was "Heidi". In the last forty-nine seconds of the game, which viewers didn't get to see, Oakland scored a touchdown, made an amazing end-zone fumble recovery, scored another touchdown, and won the game.
The negative reaction from football fans was so huge that the networks had to promise that they would never again cut away from a football game in progress, NO MATTER WHAT. Alien starships land, China signs eternal frienship pact with Russia, Bill Gates donates a fortune to the Free Software Foundation, they're still going to show every down. That's written into their contract with the NFL.
And honestly, it's the right decision. I love Futurama too, but for every one person who watches Futurama, there are a hundred people who would rather watch football. At best, Futurama brings the station a modest profit; football puts two full quarters of the fiscal year in the black by itself.
Actually Farscape was killed because the parent company of the Sci-Fi network went bankrupt, and Farscape cost too much to make. At least they wound up the story in the two-part movie (wich I thought was pretty good.)
That's one more reason I thought Firefly would be a great pickup for the SF Network--not only does it have a pre-made audience, it would be cheaper to make. Eight regular characters and only a half-dozen sets, plus one or two CGI shots an episode, and you can come in under budget pretty easily, I would think.
Unfortunately, Fox still owns the broadcast contract, and has shown no willingness to let someone else buy it from them. They only let Paramount make the movie because it wasn't TV competition--and even then they wouldn't let them use the word "Firefly" in the title or the ads. In all seriousness, I think the weakest point of the movie (which I thought was really great otherwise) was the title, which I think really hurt it at the box office. Who would go see an action movie called "Serenity", if they hadn't seen the show? They would have been much better off calling it something like "Captain Reynolds Versus the Cannibal Space Pirates", or the eqivalent.
Cornell has the hightest suicide rate among ivy leagues? I still think I was being toyed with)
I think this is true, actually. Not sure who is #2, but I think MIT is #3.
According to Cornell (gannett.cornell.edu) over the last ten years the suicide rate is two students per year, about the same as the US college average; apparently the suicide rate is twice as high among Americans of the same age range who are not in college.
Cornell happens to be near a very deep (and pretty) gorge where a number of people have leapt to their deaths; possibly that's where the idea got started.
By the way, MIT isn't an Ivy League school. I'm pretty sure MIT doesn't even have a football team.
i always laugh when these "experts" can't explain something they think they have a really good handle on.
So do they--though, I suspect, not for the same reasons. For a scientist, there is nothing better than getting a result that isn't what you expected, since it's almost sure to lead you to a better understanding than you had before, which is the driving motive behind all science.
I watched the two-part mini-series, and then about the first seven or eight episodes, before stopping. I thought the writing and acting were quite good, but the never-ending gloom and doom got to me eventually. If I want that I can watch CNN.
The basic problem is in the premise. The Cylons are hugely more powerful than the human fleet; they could wipe them out at any time, and the fact that they haven't done so just shows that they choose not to, for as-yet-unrevealed reasons. Since the humans cannot possibly put up any sort of a fight against the invincible Cylons, the only possible plots involve humans fighting each other.
Basically what bothers me about the show is that its message is that adversity brings out the worst in people, that the terrible situation our heroes are in reduces them, makes them smaller and meaner. If I'm going to watch a story about a gigantic disaster and people's reactions to it, I would prefer a story where the disaster makes people grow rather than shrink, and teaches the lesson that people are at their best when things are worst. For one thing, I believe that's actually true; and for another, even if it weren't, I think that kind of story would help encourage it.
I'm not saying BSG sucks or anything--I think it's well-made all round--but I find it overly negative.
It may be worth pointing out here that when the Declaration says "all men are created equal", what it means is that every man stands in exactly the same relation to God as every other man; that there is no one man, and no group of men, that is inherently favored above other men by God by right of birth. It's in the Declaration because it's an explicit rejection of the doctrine of Divine Right. Remember that when the Declaration was written, there were still serious thinkers who seriously claimed that the power of kings came directly from God, and opposing it was blasphemy. Even if the Declaration hadn't gone on to claim independence from the Crown, simply signing their names to a document that asserted the equality of men was lese majeste, technically a capital crime.
Not the only one...
According to Plato's dialogue Charmides, the god Apollo instructed the makers of the shrine at Delphi to carve "Know thyself!" over the lintel, not as a piece of advice, but as the proper salutation of the god to men.
Later generations carved other grammata underneath it: "Be temperate!" and "Nothing too much!" (And, according to Plutarch, who wrote much later and never saw it himself, the Greek letter E, for some reason.)
Rock gasses or not, the stoned state of the Pythia was no accident--she breathed the smoke from burning laurel leaves to get into a mental state that she perceived as being receptive to the pronouncements of the god.