So I don't have to type it all out again, here's the short version:
Cultures are supposed to conflict. That's what makes them separate cultures. If you don't find another culture inferior, superior, or at least alien in some way, then you should really consider the fact that it probably isn't another culture at all.
(actual logical point) You realize where 'cultures' come from, right? People select behaviors that seem to work well, and abstain from those that don't, until they have a complete set. So, to make it nice and bolded for you, the only reason cultures exist at all is because they discriminate against each other.
So, what do we call people that identify themselves with a culture and then complain about it leading to discrimination? Hm... complaint of behavior inherent in one's own actions... ah, yes. We have a word for that:
Hypocrite (/actual logical point)
So, uh, to answer your question: yes. I feel I judge cultures of themselves and not of the shade of brown the majority of the constituents are coated with, so I'll discriminate all i damn well please, thanks. And I obviously think my culture is the best one, because if I didn't, I'd, you know, switch. Which brings me to my next point:
(opinion) The best culture is the American culture: i.e. no culture at all, or everyone's personal culture, however you decide to look at it. We are US, your cultural and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile! (/opinion)
Could have been an acerbic remark on the quality and educational value of the the presentation. It honestly sounds like something I would say after viewing something that insulted my intelligence and was overall a waste of my time.
Not that I know anything about the talk you went to, but don't assume people are always being completely serious, even if they have a very straight-faced delivery.
"Theory of evolution", not just "Evolution". Evolution itself isn't science, it's the basic data that science starts out with: we see species change over the course of generations, changes accumulating with reproductive cycles. While the "Theory" can be disproved, in that our explanation of the phenomenon can (and probably will, at some point) be shown to be mostly or partly incorrect, "evolution" itself isn't an explanation, it's a thing we see, and is thus "true" in the sense that it's a fact.
So saying "disproving evolution" is just stupid, as the phrase itself is fundamentally incorrect. Say "Disproving the theory of evolution" or "disproving evolutionary theory" instead, because that's what you mean.
This lesson in "using the fucking english language properly" brought to you by Jim. Have a nice day.
(1) Residual magnetism-- moderately reliable, but a healthy margin of error. (2) Other isotopes-- there's other airborne materials that can be used in ways similar to c13. Modelling-- as a species that's been building stuff out of earth for a million years or so, we've developed a decent set of analysis tools for the materials involved. (4) No, they aren't (dated solely by fossils contained, except by your volunteering park ranger tour guide) (5) Cyclic distribution patterns -- we have these things called 'seasons' that cause regular yearly variations in deposition of sediment, wear on rocks, etc, and there are various other such cycles (lunar, etc.) (6) Relative distribution-- we can tell what came before what in an area by fossil distributions, comparing distributions gives us a general idea of the timescales involved.
I know you're just trolling, but in case anyone legitimately wanted to know the answer to your question, I figured I'd post enough info on the subject to at least point them toward topics of interest in the field.
Eh, human populations haven't been that big all that long, the likelihood is that any branches were cut off fairly quickly, making any fossil from a time period reasonably similar to the trunk line (i.e. our ancestors). Of course, i'm not an expert in the field, so I suppose I could be wrong, and 'reasonably similar' is even more arbitrary coming from me than from someone whose primary area of study lies in geneology.
"The fact is that the evolution from apes to man is a continuum"
It would be a continuum if, if you selected any of the infinite points on the 'path' from ape to man, that point would be embodied in a real creature at some point in history. Since there are a finite number of generations between 'ape' and 'human', the process is necessarily stepped, not continuous.
We understand the situation you're complaining about, but making statements that don't hold up to basic logic isn't going to make creationists any more reasonable about their standards of proof.
"Islamic fundies killed more Americans than Soviets and communists ever did, mind you."
The irrelevance of your comment aside (it could easily be argued that this is _because_ Reagan took steps to hinder the communist dictatorships) I think you're probably just plain wrong, unless the combined casualties of the Korean and Vietnamese civil wars we involved ourselves in were a lot smaller than I thought they were.
Or maybe you meant american _civillians_, in which case you'll get hit with the irrelevance thing again, as the soviets and communists weren't targeting our civillians at all.
Well, firstly, while most republicans are anti-abortion ("pro-life" is political nomenclature BS, as is "pro-choice", so apologies to anyone that gets offended by my calling a horse a horse), plenty of people that vote republican take the pro-abortion stance. This is a distinction that seems to be lost on most idio^W^W^W in most political discussions in america for some reason. Voting for a party no more makes you a member of the party itself than having tea at your neighbor's house makes you their brother.
And, well, regarding your comment about slavery, the Republican party did have the moral high ground on the slavery issue. The other parties did not care at all: it was a complete and total non-issue for them, platform-wise. And northerners in general didn't care either: note that legal slavery existed for a year or two longer in the north than it did in the south (if you accept the emancipation proclamation as a binding legal document, given that it only applied to states which Lincoln technically had no authority over at the time). It was the republican party, and the republican party alone that drove the issue, with the passive univolvement of most of the north and objections on economic, not moral, grounds from the south (the southerners were rather pissed about restrictive tariffs pushed entirely by northern states destroying their ability to, you know, make a living. The slavery thing was seen as a slap in the face, the final insult to compound the injury of taxation without representation. As far as the morals of the situation went, southerners were roughly equal in apathy to their northern brethren).
Not that I'm claiming the party or its supporting block of voters are the epitome of morals, of course. Even at the beginning, Lincoln had some... issues with using executive power to seize the assets of anyone that printed dissenting opinions, and in several cases actually had newspapers burned to the ground for offending him. But credit where credit is due, Emancipation itself rests squarely in the laurels of the Republican party.
Kicking out a governor or state legislature over a stupid policy isn't that hard, and has very little effect in most states. Kicking out a congressman over a similar policy results in the loss of committee positions, and a resulting dramatic decrease in the size of the yearly pork-barrel.
The reason we push for state-level instead of more local-level control is, thus, not a theory-grounded one, but a practical one: Its the shortest alteration to the current structure that, from a practical standpoint, has the greatest overall increase in accountability (from 'none' to 'some' = infinite fractional increase'). You see, the main distinguishing feature of most libertarians is that they acknowledge that the platform is an idealization, and has to bow at some point to practical concerns. It's even in the party platform-- they provide for government doing things that the free market couldn't reasonably do, despite the basic idea being, ostensibly "the free market can do anthing".
Begging the question is assuming as a premise one of the things your argument is intended to prove. What the post is doing is creating a "straw man", i.e. rebutting a position that one's opponent has not actually put forward (usually done purposefully as part of an ad hominem attack).
This lesson in vocabulary brought to you by the association of people that took rhetoric and philosophy electives in college. Have a nice day:)
I would imagine that it's not hypocracy, I'd think that they just don't think that anything completely voluntary and fully disclosed can possibly be considered regressive. Which would seem rather sensible to me. (You are hurt by a lottery based on how you rank on the "stupidity" scale primarily, not the economic scale. Plus, entertainment is supposed to be a money sink, that's why it's called entertainment and not investment.)
So, yeah, it's not so much that you aren't getting your point across as that you don't have a point at all.
Computer science is fundamentally an engineering discipline, as you're concerned with making computers actually do things. There's not really a pure science (i.e. empirical testing + attempts at explanation) aspect to it, as anything you get out you essentially had to put in first. Of course, this is if you think of computer science in the context of programming/languages: hardware behavior has a pure science aspect, but it generally falls under materials science (whereas the computer science folks are, again, building components to do things, rather than testing materials for behavior patterns).
So, while I suppose you could group "software engineering" apart from "hardware engineering" as subsets of computer science, you can't actually separate "computer science" and "computer engineering", because the only difference is which word the guy naming the course of study liked better.
Do I have a point? No, not really. I just thought it ought to be said.
Unfortunately, I had a half-decent grade school education and a dictionary (to look up words like 'tesseract' and know how cellular biology basically worked), so the fact that even the remotest semi-scientific allusion in L'Engle's work was completely (a) wrong or (b)poorly explained to the point where it might as well have been wrong kind of put me off of her books. The fact that she didn't bother to make the fantasy bits internally consistent finished it off for me.
I think I might have forgiven her if the story was even slightly original, but as it was, I just refuse to read any author with a spelling anywhere within three alterations of her name. I wanted my money back after reading those things, and they were borrowed!
Exactly. So saying "everyone should watch lots of porn" and then filtering porn out of other people's internet would be hypocritical, whereas "everyone should watch lots of violence" coupled with the same action would be "unrelated".
I was just pointing out that there was no actual hypocrisy in the cited example.
GP is mocking the use of the Fahrenheit scale, which is rather nonstandard because apparrently the freezing point of ice, water, and ammonium chloride and the human body temperature aren't arbitrary enough landmarks for a european temperature scale... they prefer to base their scale on the melting and freezing point of a pure substance that's a famous solvent, and thus basically never pure in nature. Thus the reference to "hogsheads", another horribly nonstandard measurement, because it's a measure based on the size of something with a definite volume rather than a unit weight of said pure substance. It's very important that standard units be observed, because this 'multiplication' thing is far too advanced for the minds of a messageboard of 'techies' to comprehend.
Now that I've explained the joke and thus spoiled it, I'm off to steal some candy from a baby or something! To destiny!
Bah, you beat me to it. I'll note that there's a competing effect from the reduction in density with temperature, as well, since the reynold's number is a length scale times a velocity vector over the kinematic viscosity, and kinematic viscosity is the ratio of viscosity to density. Really, though, neither property is going to change enough in the liquid phase to alter the flow characteristics significantly, so, yeah, GP is full of it.
People want to believe that other humans' actions cause global warming
I know the schtick about 'culture glorifying victimization' is old hat by now, but it's still more or less true. People want to believe that other people are screwing things up for them. That's why people that ride bikes blame emissions on the people that drive cars, people that drive cars blame them durned SUVs, people that drive SUVs blame those industrial folks, and industrial fellows point out that six billion humans and the domestic animals to feed them, plus razing forest for housing and infrastructure, isn't exactly a small contributor to CO2 levels, and it's all a conspiracy to make them look bad. And actually making sure the science is done right doesn't enter the picture.
Seriously, people hate being optimistic, with a few exceptions. They need to blame someone for something, because knowing the thing that's going wrong ('cause there's obviously just one, or a few) means that everything else, aka everything they're doing, is perfectly all right, and if things go awry it's not their ball.
Don't knock it, though. It's actually a socially positive force in most cases, as pretending small problems are big ones means the small problems get fixed (nobody's going to complain about better emission controls, or at least having cleaner air, regardless of wether OMFG we r all gunna dy3 scenario would actually result from a lack of such controls). However, it's good to be aware of the strong effect of the 'blame the other guy, wether there's actually a problem or not' impulse, on the principle that self-knowledge leads to self-control, which is generally productive.
In conclusion, the increase in ground-level ozone is going to kill us all by next wednesday, and it's all the fault of those damned kids and their 'Rap' music.
In our defense, profit = mobility and infrastructure, which are my personal favorite forms of freedom. And we did make people pretend to have elections, which was an increase in popular power, though it's most definitely a mistake to equate such power with freedom.
since when is government suppression of free speech a liberal goal?
Pretty much since the inception of the progressive party, the american beginning of what we commonly refer to as 'liberal' policy. A central idea of your average 'liberal' party is that the government is responsible for eliminating any kind of social conflict, a doctrine which pretty much directly supports getting the government to shut people up that try to 'make trouble'. The fact that the liberal factions in various governments over the last century and a half haven't been stupid enough to word it the way you have doesn't mean it isn't true.
Slashdot Mirror
So I don't have to type it all out again, here's the short version:
Cultures are supposed to conflict. That's what makes them separate cultures. If you don't find another culture inferior, superior, or at least alien in some way, then you should really consider the fact that it probably isn't another culture at all.
(actual logical point)
You realize where 'cultures' come from, right? People select behaviors that seem to work well, and abstain from those that don't, until they have a complete set. So, to make it nice and bolded for you, the only reason cultures exist at all is because they discriminate against each other.
So, what do we call people that identify themselves with a culture and then complain about it leading to discrimination? Hm... complaint of behavior inherent in one's own actions... ah, yes. We have a word for that:
Hypocrite
(/actual logical point)
So, uh, to answer your question: yes. I feel I judge cultures of themselves and not of the shade of brown the majority of the constituents are coated with, so I'll discriminate all i damn well please, thanks. And I obviously think my culture is the best one, because if I didn't, I'd, you know, switch. Which brings me to my next point:
(opinion)
The best culture is the American culture: i.e. no culture at all, or everyone's personal culture, however you decide to look at it. We are US, your cultural and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile!
(/opinion)
Could have been an acerbic remark on the quality and educational value of the the presentation. It honestly sounds like something I would say after viewing something that insulted my intelligence and was overall a waste of my time.
Not that I know anything about the talk you went to, but don't assume people are always being completely serious, even if they have a very straight-faced delivery.
"Theory of evolution", not just "Evolution". Evolution itself isn't science, it's the basic data that science starts out with: we see species change over the course of generations, changes accumulating with reproductive cycles. While the "Theory" can be disproved, in that our explanation of the phenomenon can (and probably will, at some point) be shown to be mostly or partly incorrect, "evolution" itself isn't an explanation, it's a thing we see, and is thus "true" in the sense that it's a fact.
So saying "disproving evolution" is just stupid, as the phrase itself is fundamentally incorrect. Say "Disproving the theory of evolution" or "disproving evolutionary theory" instead, because that's what you mean.
This lesson in "using the fucking english language properly" brought to you by Jim. Have a nice day.
(1) Residual magnetism-- moderately reliable, but a healthy margin of error.
(2) Other isotopes-- there's other airborne materials that can be used in ways similar to c13.
Modelling-- as a species that's been building stuff out of earth for a million years or so, we've developed a decent set of analysis tools for the materials involved.
(4) No, they aren't (dated solely by fossils contained, except by your volunteering park ranger tour guide)
(5) Cyclic distribution patterns -- we have these things called 'seasons' that cause regular yearly variations in deposition of sediment, wear on rocks, etc, and there are various other such cycles (lunar, etc.)
(6) Relative distribution-- we can tell what came before what in an area by fossil distributions, comparing distributions gives us a general idea of the timescales involved.
I know you're just trolling, but in case anyone legitimately wanted to know the answer to your question, I figured I'd post enough info on the subject to at least point them toward topics of interest in the field.
Eh, human populations haven't been that big all that long, the likelihood is that any branches were cut off fairly quickly, making any fossil from a time period reasonably similar to the trunk line (i.e. our ancestors). Of course, i'm not an expert in the field, so I suppose I could be wrong, and 'reasonably similar' is even more arbitrary coming from me than from someone whose primary area of study lies in geneology.
"The fact is that the evolution from apes to man is a continuum"
It would be a continuum if, if you selected any of the infinite points on the 'path' from ape to man, that point would be embodied in a real creature at some point in history. Since there are a finite number of generations between 'ape' and 'human', the process is necessarily stepped, not continuous.
We understand the situation you're complaining about, but making statements that don't hold up to basic logic isn't going to make creationists any more reasonable about their standards of proof.
"Islamic fundies killed more Americans than Soviets and communists ever did, mind you."
The irrelevance of your comment aside (it could easily be argued that this is _because_ Reagan took steps to hinder the communist dictatorships) I think you're probably just plain wrong, unless the combined casualties of the Korean and Vietnamese civil wars we involved ourselves in were a lot smaller than I thought they were.
Or maybe you meant american _civillians_, in which case you'll get hit with the irrelevance thing again, as the soviets and communists weren't targeting our civillians at all.
Well, firstly, while most republicans are anti-abortion ("pro-life" is political nomenclature BS, as is "pro-choice", so apologies to anyone that gets offended by my calling a horse a horse), plenty of people that vote republican take the pro-abortion stance. This is a distinction that seems to be lost on most idio^W^W^W in most political discussions in america for some reason. Voting for a party no more makes you a member of the party itself than having tea at your neighbor's house makes you their brother.
And, well, regarding your comment about slavery, the Republican party did have the moral high ground on the slavery issue. The other parties did not care at all: it was a complete and total non-issue for them, platform-wise. And northerners in general didn't care either: note that legal slavery existed for a year or two longer in the north than it did in the south (if you accept the emancipation proclamation as a binding legal document, given that it only applied to states which Lincoln technically had no authority over at the time). It was the republican party, and the republican party alone that drove the issue, with the passive univolvement of most of the north and objections on economic, not moral, grounds from the south (the southerners were rather pissed about restrictive tariffs pushed entirely by northern states destroying their ability to, you know, make a living. The slavery thing was seen as a slap in the face, the final insult to compound the injury of taxation without representation. As far as the morals of the situation went, southerners were roughly equal in apathy to their northern brethren).
Not that I'm claiming the party or its supporting block of voters are the epitome of morals, of course. Even at the beginning, Lincoln had some... issues with using executive power to seize the assets of anyone that printed dissenting opinions, and in several cases actually had newspapers burned to the ground for offending him. But credit where credit is due, Emancipation itself rests squarely in the laurels of the Republican party.
Kicking out a governor or state legislature over a stupid policy isn't that hard, and has very little effect in most states. Kicking out a congressman over a similar policy results in the loss of committee positions, and a resulting dramatic decrease in the size of the yearly pork-barrel.
The reason we push for state-level instead of more local-level control is, thus, not a theory-grounded one, but a practical one: Its the shortest alteration to the current structure that, from a practical standpoint, has the greatest overall increase in accountability (from 'none' to 'some' = infinite fractional increase'). You see, the main distinguishing feature of most libertarians is that they acknowledge that the platform is an idealization, and has to bow at some point to practical concerns. It's even in the party platform-- they provide for government doing things that the free market couldn't reasonably do, despite the basic idea being, ostensibly "the free market can do anthing".
Begging the question is assuming as a premise one of the things your argument is intended to prove. What the post is doing is creating a "straw man", i.e. rebutting a position that one's opponent has not actually put forward (usually done purposefully as part of an ad hominem attack).
:)
This lesson in vocabulary brought to you by the association of people that took rhetoric and philosophy electives in college. Have a nice day
I would imagine that it's not hypocracy, I'd think that they just don't think that anything completely voluntary and fully disclosed can possibly be considered regressive. Which would seem rather sensible to me. (You are hurt by a lottery based on how you rank on the "stupidity" scale primarily, not the economic scale. Plus, entertainment is supposed to be a money sink, that's why it's called entertainment and not investment.)
So, yeah, it's not so much that you aren't getting your point across as that you don't have a point at all.
Computer science is fundamentally an engineering discipline, as you're concerned with making computers actually do things. There's not really a pure science (i.e. empirical testing + attempts at explanation) aspect to it, as anything you get out you essentially had to put in first. Of course, this is if you think of computer science in the context of programming/languages: hardware behavior has a pure science aspect, but it generally falls under materials science (whereas the computer science folks are, again, building components to do things, rather than testing materials for behavior patterns).
So, while I suppose you could group "software engineering" apart from "hardware engineering" as subsets of computer science, you can't actually separate "computer science" and "computer engineering", because the only difference is which word the guy naming the course of study liked better.
Do I have a point? No, not really. I just thought it ought to be said.
Unfortunately, I had a half-decent grade school education and a dictionary (to look up words like 'tesseract' and know how cellular biology basically worked), so the fact that even the remotest semi-scientific allusion in L'Engle's work was completely (a) wrong or (b)poorly explained to the point where it might as well have been wrong kind of put me off of her books. The fact that she didn't bother to make the fantasy bits internally consistent finished it off for me.
I think I might have forgiven her if the story was even slightly original, but as it was, I just refuse to read any author with a spelling anywhere within three alterations of her name. I wanted my money back after reading those things, and they were borrowed!
Fax being short for Fascimile, why would you capitalise the A and the X in the word? That's like calling someone named Richard "DICK".
Exactly. So saying "everyone should watch lots of porn" and then filtering porn out of other people's internet would be hypocritical, whereas "everyone should watch lots of violence" coupled with the same action would be "unrelated".
I was just pointing out that there was no actual hypocrisy in the cited example.
This word, 'hypocritical'. You keep using it, but I do not think it means what you think it means.
GP is mocking the use of the Fahrenheit scale, which is rather nonstandard because apparrently the freezing point of ice, water, and ammonium chloride and the human body temperature aren't arbitrary enough landmarks for a european temperature scale... they prefer to base their scale on the melting and freezing point of a pure substance that's a famous solvent, and thus basically never pure in nature. Thus the reference to "hogsheads", another horribly nonstandard measurement, because it's a measure based on the size of something with a definite volume rather than a unit weight of said pure substance. It's very important that standard units be observed, because this 'multiplication' thing is far too advanced for the minds of a messageboard of 'techies' to comprehend.
Now that I've explained the joke and thus spoiled it, I'm off to steal some candy from a baby or something! To destiny!
Bah, you beat me to it. I'll note that there's a competing effect from the reduction in density with temperature, as well, since the reynold's number is a length scale times a velocity vector over the kinematic viscosity, and kinematic viscosity is the ratio of viscosity to density. Really, though, neither property is going to change enough in the liquid phase to alter the flow characteristics significantly, so, yeah, GP is full of it.
Yeah, the GP had a misprint:
People want to believe that other humans' actions cause global warming
I know the schtick about 'culture glorifying victimization' is old hat by now, but it's still more or less true. People want to believe that other people are screwing things up for them. That's why people that ride bikes blame emissions on the people that drive cars, people that drive cars blame them durned SUVs, people that drive SUVs blame those industrial folks, and industrial fellows point out that six billion humans and the domestic animals to feed them, plus razing forest for housing and infrastructure, isn't exactly a small contributor to CO2 levels, and it's all a conspiracy to make them look bad. And actually making sure the science is done right doesn't enter the picture.
Seriously, people hate being optimistic, with a few exceptions. They need to blame someone for something, because knowing the thing that's going wrong ('cause there's obviously just one, or a few) means that everything else, aka everything they're doing, is perfectly all right, and if things go awry it's not their ball.
Don't knock it, though. It's actually a socially positive force in most cases, as pretending small problems are big ones means the small problems get fixed (nobody's going to complain about better emission controls, or at least having cleaner air, regardless of wether OMFG we r all gunna dy3 scenario would actually result from a lack of such controls). However, it's good to be aware of the strong effect of the 'blame the other guy, wether there's actually a problem or not' impulse, on the principle that self-knowledge leads to self-control, which is generally productive.
In conclusion, the increase in ground-level ozone is going to kill us all by next wednesday, and it's all the fault of those damned kids and their 'Rap' music.
In our defense, profit = mobility and infrastructure, which are my personal favorite forms of freedom. And we did make people pretend to have elections, which was an increase in popular power, though it's most definitely a mistake to equate such power with freedom.
Wow, church is obviously a lot more entertaining in Canada than it is here in the U.S..
You say this because you aren't from Canada or the EU, I assume.
since when is government suppression of free speech a liberal goal?
Pretty much since the inception of the progressive party, the american beginning of what we commonly refer to as 'liberal' policy. A central idea of your average 'liberal' party is that the government is responsible for eliminating any kind of social conflict, a doctrine which pretty much directly supports getting the government to shut people up that try to 'make trouble'. The fact that the liberal factions in various governments over the last century and a half haven't been stupid enough to word it the way you have doesn't mean it isn't true.
"Common carriers, by definition, cannot discriminate based on the content of the information being transmitted."
However, I can still send mark my mail first or second class and be treated accordingly. So you're not entirely correct there, bud.