Me too. If the dates require numbers, I double check. If not, I *always* put the 3 letter (ISO) month name.
I grew up with dd/MM/yyyy; however after starting work in an international company and dealing with US colleagues writing MM/dd/yyyy and Japanese colleagues writing yyyy-MM-dd, I eventually switched to the Japanese style for almost everything I do in daily life - it's a scaled order (like the one I grew up with; just the other way around) but also has the additional advantage of sorting correctly in a text sort as well. If I speak a date without the year, I tend to stick to what I grew up with though "11th of August" instead of "August 11th". I generally never write a date without the year though so both 11/08 and 08/11 look "wrong" to my brain.
Someone has already pointed out that sandwich is British (as am I), so what do you call a sandwich? I lived in Scarborough Beach, Perth for six months and I completely failed to notice that Aussies have a different word for sandwich.
I'm not Aussie, but I lived there for 6 years. In my experience, the Australian word "sandwich" is more strictly defined as two pieces of sliced bread with something in between. Rolls, buns, baguette bread, etc. that have been sliced open and something placed in between get called a sandwich everywhere else in the English speaking world that I know of, but not Australia.
And really, Fahrenheit is more precise than Celsius (1 degree C ~= 2 degrees F), with more "octaves" to divide out a sense of whether ("it's in the 60s today, in the 50's tomorrow, and in the 70s the day after") is, to me at least, far more descriptive of the weather than, say, it will be around 10s today, the 10s again tomorrow, and the 20s the day after (where the "20s" could be anything from a chilly high sixties to a sweltering mid-eighties Fahrenheit).
The thing is, in metric countries, I've never heard anyone say the temperature is "in the twenties". We generally say, "low twenties" for 21-23; "mid twenties" for 24-26 and "high twenties" for 27-29. You'll note that this is somewhat MORE granular than dividing the Fahrenheit scale in to groupings of 10. There's of course nothing stopping you dividing Fahrenheit further of course, and many people do (including yourself in your post with "high sixties" and "mid eighties"), but the point is that both systems are granular enough for normal usage since in neither system does anyone really care about a difference of one unit.
Generally, it's a matter of what you're used to as to what feels more comfortable or "fitting to reality". I grew up with metric and so the imperial system feels unnatural to me. Most people who grew up with imperial say that metric feels unnatural to them. So, which one is more "natural feeling" is therefore an invalid argument from either side and the sensible argument has to come from practicality. Generally, metric is more mathematically practical - this is hopefully immediately obvious even to the people who don't want to use it.
Metric makes sense, but why not km/liter, far more analogous to mpg. What point is there in inverting the ratio, and multiplying by 100?
I do understand the argument that others have put forth for MPG over L/100km (km/L is used in some countries from what I've heard but it's pretty rare). The idea being that you can more easily say, "I've got approx x number of gallons left in the tank, which means I can go y distance". However this is actually less of a problem with L/100Km than most people who are used to MPG think. When I'm driving, I can look at my fuel gauge and think, "Hmm, I've got approx x litres left, which gets me y kilometres... this is [more|less] than the amount I need to get to my destination.". It clearly is another way of looking at it since it's reversed, but the calculation is no less simple.
In today's world economy, you could be doing business with a French speaker today, a Spanish speaker tomorrow, a Hindii speaker next week and a Russian speaker the week after.
Have you actually tried that? Even if there are no language problems, cultural differences are going to be a wellspring of headaches for a long time to come. The world isn't nearly as small as some people believe.
Can't speak for the GP, but yes - I have tried it, and it's fairly common to do in international companies within Europe.
I work for the European HQ (based in Germany) of a large multinational with a Japanese parent company. On a daily basis, I deal with at least 3 or 4 different EU cultures plus Japanese culture. At least once every couple of weeks, I deal with India. Generally a few times a month, there'll be something I need to deal with in North Africa, Middle East, or Russia.
Yep, there's a lot of cultural differences, but the other side of the coin to remember is that most people in these situations are forgiving of cultural mistakes. They are aware that they and you are probably not 100% familiar with each others' cultures and there's a mutual understanding to politely ignore cultural faux pas.
Linguistically by the way, I speak around 5 languages with varying degrees of proficiency, or up to 15 if you count languages where I know some, but couldn't really talk to someone about any particular topic. Nevertheless, the people commenting that English tends to be the language used are quite right - it's our official language for business in my company (despite being, as said, based in Germany) and if I see a Frenchman and a Russian talking to each other, I'd put pretty high odds they'll be speaking English to each other. I personally even speak German at home with my wife, but English to my German colleagues at work...
Ya know you actually don't have a clue what it was but you do seem to have that special kind of arrogance that makes you think can just fill in the blanks about something for which you have no actual information and make it fit your world view.
I find it interesting you call me arrogant and then claim to know things about me. At no point did I say, "it is xyz", I just said, "I think it is FAR more likely that xyz". As in, based on the evidence and available knowledge, one cause seems more likely than another. If there were more evidence in favour of another cause, I'd happily change my mind to that.
It was 10 minutes before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded while watching the pre launch with no sound. The thought flashed through my head quite vividly, "I wonder what it will look like when it explodes". You could maybe explain it away that I'd deduced that conditions were ripe for it to explode but since I didn't really know anything about the O ring issues and cold at the time I had no basis for deducing that there was much of a chance it would explode beyond the fact that all launches have some chance of exploding.
I doubt that you'd deduced it would explode through any special knowledge, as you say you yourself. But - based on the evidence thus far - I also doubt it was precognition that would turn our understanding of the universe and physics completely on its head. It seems more likely to me that you thought, "I wonder what it would look like if it explodes" and then after it did, your memory altered itself to make you think you had thought something slightly different.
No, I can't prove it, but there is plenty of evidence of memories changing themselves like that, and none whatsoever for the kind of precognition you're describing. It's simply a matter of probabilities.
That might not be the case - maybe you said it out loud to someone who also remembers you saying it, in which case the chance of it being changed memory is lessened significantly.
But to me, even the chance that you spontaneously thought it, then it happened, and it was just "dumb luck" is significantly higher than the chance of this kind of precognition being a phenomenon that exists in our universe.
It is a chronic characteristic of our species, especially the arrogant, intelligent ones like yourself that we think we have it all figured out and that everything falls to Occam's Razor. Time after time it turns out that we actually don't know it all, in fact we don't know much about a lot of things.
The people most likely to make the leaps of discovery are the ones who have no regard for "conventional wisdom".
Conventional wisdom can often be wrong; but it usually has a basis in reality since otherwise it wouldn't be considered wisdom of any kind. We know we don't know everything and we know that in many cases we know "damn near nothing" about a lot of things. But we do have a reasonable picture of the basic functioning of elements of the fundamental properties of the universe and from our understanding at this point in time, precognition of any kind seems very unlikely. That might change in the future - maybe someone will discover something really new and interesting about time that turns our ideas on our heads; but until such a thing happens, there are two things to do:
1) Continue to study and refine our knowledge
2) Focus on things that we believe are wrong
Perhaps you should consider studying in the field of neuroscience, or perhaps deep in to the fields of physics dealing with time (depending on whether you think the precognition might be a property of the brain; or of the universe), or even both if you've got the time and the smarts. Maybe you'll come up with something really interesting.
If you look at my post history, you might get a somewhat different picture of me than you currently seem to have. Yes, I'm scientifically minded and consider Occam's Razor to be a fairly re
That is simply not true. We started out with fire, earth, air and water. We then moved to atoms, elements and molecules. Then to subatomic particles. Then to quantum mechanics which is decidely not simple. Now we are at dark matter, dark energy and string theory which are extreme increases in complexity if they prove out. Likewise we went from no understanding of mechanics to Newton and calculus to Relativity. Those are not simplifications either. Out understanding of physics today is vastly more complex than ever.
I fail to see how you consider these things to be increases in complexity. When we moved from "fire, earth, air and water" to "atoms" and the initial subatomic particles, we simplified from four types of things down to three (protons, electrons, neutrons). The structure of how these three come together makes up elements and the structure of how these atoms come together makes up molecules.
Then we discovered more kinds of subatomic particles, giving us a further array of "more types of things" again (thereby THAT is a complexity increase). However string theory, if it pans out to be more than just a bunch of very pretty maths, would simplify this down to one. To me, it seems like the complexity of HOW it all goes together is increased, but the complexity of WHAT there is is reduced.
I never said our understanding of physics isn't more complex - of course it is. What I said was that "complex things are usually just made up of a LOT of very very simple things behaving in very very simple ways". So I was really only talking about physical matter and not the interactions of it. That said however, it also seems apparent to me that the interactions of things is also simple when you're talking about sufficiently small areas of interaction and time slices. It's only when this gets extrapolated to larger areas of interaction or longer time periods that things become complex. Or, to put it another way, "complex interactions are usually just made up of a LOT of very simple interactions".
Precognition is completely different from a drug induced mystical experience. Precognition suggestions time doesn't operate on the simplistic level we think it does.
My reason for using the drug induced mystical experience as an example was to show that the mind can "lie" to itself. You're coming at it from the wrong direction by saying, "I experienced precognition, what does that say about the nature of the universe?" when you should be saying, "I experienced something that appears to be precognition, what are the possible causes?"
I think it's FAR more likely that your mind lied to you. You experienced a waking dream; later an event happened; as the events were over a particular threshold of similarity (threshold depending on many other factors of your mind and personality) you now remember those two events as being identical and believe that you saw the event before it happened.
We have very many examples in psychology for the mind playing tricks. We have no evidence anywhere for the competing theory is that it is possible to be aware of specific events that have not yet happened. It therefore seems clear to me that without evidence, it makes more sense to assume the former than the latter.
And for that matter, when you step into a transporter, is the guy who comes out on the other side really you?
And for that matter, when you wake up after a deep sleep, is the guy that wakes up really the same as the guy who went to sleep at night?
This is the reason I don't fear the idea of transferring my brain in to a machine should it ever become a reality. If it remembers being me, thinks like me, and the other "me" isn't there anymore, then it IS me. Fearing the "loss of self" would have to mean I'd fear dreamless sleep or comatose states in the same way, and that wouldn't make a lot of sense from a practical standpoint...
I find the reductionist approach to be too simplistic to explain the wonderous magic that is life, intelligence and time. The reductionist approach may prove to be the winning answer, but it will certainly be disappointing if our existence is really that mechanized.
To me, this sounds too much like an argument from desire. You would find it "disappointing" and therefore do not want it to be true, and so have a hard time imagining it to be true. The universe however does not pander to your desires, and what is, is. It may be that something more complex is needed, however so far we've time and again seen that in reality, complex things are usually just made up of a LOT of very very simple things behaving in very very simple ways. I see no reason our brains should be any different.
I once experienced a vivid instance of precognition and it permenently moved me out of the camp that our existence is as simple as the reductionists try to make it.
I once (well, more than once) experienced the sensation of the universe cradling me in its arms; being spoken to by gods; pulling the fabric of the universe in to my heart with my bare hands; and crystal clear visions of events happening far out the scope of my vision. These experiences were brought on by having taken LSD, but that doesn't make them any less of an experience than your precognition. I can however clearly say that despite the extremely positive changes that these experiences have brought about in my personality, I do not attribute them to any kind of mystical "external" forces - the insights that lead to these changes were simply brought about my own brain figuring things out in a drastically altered state from what it is used to.
While precognition may appear to stand at a different level to these sorts of changes, it's a numbers game in the end. Had your precognition been wrong, you probably would've forgotten about it by now. Many people experience clear and "startling" visions of events that have not yet come to pass. They're nothing more than a kind of waking dream. Very rarely, the event does come to pass (more common when the event is mundane of course) and when it does, people can almost (but not quite) be forgiven for assuming that something "magical" has happened.
Drop me a quick email at my username excluding the last three characters at Google's well known email service. I'll keep you informed when it's published and if you like, maybe I can ask you a few questions about your experiences and thoughts on the subject (no promises I'll use anything you give me; but I promise I'll read it and consider it)
For reference, the book is about two-thirds done as far as content is concerned - I'm expecting to start approaching publishers by around September/October.
Sorry for the off-topic post, but as you don't make an email address public, I can't contact you any other way.
I'm currently writing a book (non-fiction) on the topic of self-discovery using psychedelics (specifically LSD) and would like to paraphrase your comment. I'd be happy to give attribution or not, as you'd prefer.
Specifically the context will be the discussion of negative experiences during a psychedelic trip and how it can be used as a learning experience for self-improvement; I'd like to paraphrase your post as a part of an explanation that many drugs (both legal and illegal) are used to numb these negative feelings instead, which potentially leads to even worse situations both for the individual and the society in which they are in.
When I first saw "time," I read the caption, "wait for it."
"Wait for what," I thought to myself.
I then spent a brief moment pondering, and then decided that whatever it was I was supposed to wait for was not worth my time, and moved on with my life.
Since then, I've cleaned my garage, put my TV up on my wall, and planted some grass seed, all of which probably would not have been accomplished had I allowed myself that nerdy sense of self-importance that comes with being a self-righteous elitist who misplaces value on "art" projects like this.
Of course, I suspect that of the number of people that do enjoy it, there is only a very small percentage that sit there and literally "wait" for an update. There are those of us who will clean our garages, put TVs up on walls, plant grass seed and so on and then once a day or so, go back and spend 2 minutes or so checking what's happened over the course of the day in the comic.
Personally, I'm really enjoying it thus far. The characters are somehow beautifully naive about the world and have a curiosity to go and learn as if they somehow didn't exist prior to the existence of the comic itself.
Call it art; call it wonderful; call it crap; call it masturbation... whatever - as long as I and others enjoy it, we really don't care what you think.
My mind is MY mind, and not subject to anyone's manipulation, thank you very much.
Not to nitpick, but your mind is subject to the manipulation of anyone and everyone you come in to contact with - usually with neither you nor them being aware that they're manipulating you.
At least the psychotherapy option is honest in that both parties are aware of the manipulation (and in most cases, agree to it).
If they freak out and go apeshit over it, the parent-child relationship doesn't hold a lot of trust anyway.
Don't have kids, do you?
I do, and if my kid texted me something like that, I'd probably either assume I was being pranked, or freak out a little (but definitely wouldn't go "ape-shit" or anything). If the latter, then when they told me it was all just a prank, I'd see the funny side of it and we'd have a good laugh together.
I've never understood the type of child-parent relationship where so little trust exists. Someone, somewhere, screwed up bad in that situation.
Even if the college grad isn't a dick, it's human nature to write off anything you don't understand, and anything that's wasn't done the way you'd do it, with a "the last guy was a crappy programmer" proclamation.
Funny you say that, since in all my years of coding so far, my default assumption is, "damn, everyone else is so much better than me - the reason I can't wrap my head around why they did it this particular way in this code is because they're better than me"... at which point I dive in, spend a lot of time trying to get a feel for what they did, and in 60% of cases DO learn something interesting and new to me that justifies why they did what they did (in the other 40% it seems they really were just crappy coders; or working under a deadline turning proof-of-concept code in to very messy production code; or whatever).
Part of it might be that I'm a self taught coder. Never formally studied; just lots of books, online examples/tutorials, and now somewhere around 25 years of experience/practice (10 years of it being my "day job" as opposed to just a hobby). I know there's a lot of theory that I don't get as well as someone who has just been in university studying it - but I also know that a great deal, if not most of it is stuff I can or already do understand, just don't know a lot of the terminology or formalised concepts.
(note: 60/40 figures are gut feeling figures only - I haven't actually recorded each instance to determine the real ratio)
Do you really want to stand up and make the claim that people are buying iOS devices for any other reason than they enjoy the experience?
Oh, that one is very easy. I can confidently say that a lot of people are buying iOS devices as fashion accessories - because if it doesn't have an apple on the back, it's not considered one.
Or of course those who buy it because they're not aware of any other option. There's a surprising number of people who call all smartphones "iPhones" and all tablets "iPads". My father-in-law has a relatively new Galaxy Tab and STILL calls it an iPad. He got it as a gift from my mother-in-law and only ended up with that because she asked me what to buy him. I'm sure if he ever breaks it and needs a new one, he'll wander in to an Apple store and pick up an iPad; because that's the only name that seems to register with him.
Thankfully it only takes one... I met my wife on a dating site. We just celebrated our second wedding anniversary and are preparing for our daughter's birthday.
Dating sites aren't always as horrid and retched as they seem to be - they're a great way for a shy guy and a shy girl who may otherwise never have crossed paths to get together.
Other cultures don't have the same historical roots as the US (and northern Europe), and thus have different value systems. That is NOT a bigoted statement
Correct, it's not... however your original statement:
I find this absurd, though it might hold true for Americans, since we inherited a fair amount of our work ethic from our Protestant forebears. For the rest of the world? I'm sure they'd be content to sit on their butts, and spend time with their families.
... certainly sounded as such to me.
In some cultures; work is a means to an end.
In some other cultures work is an ends to itself.
If you freed people from the need to work, the latter cultures would continue to work; while the former would have no reason to since the ends are met.
I feel this is only true in a very narrow scope. I don't personally know of any cultures where there is so little motivation that people would not perform some kind of useful work even without getting paid for it; and I like to think of myself as fairly well travelled with a good understanding of many different cultures. Money is ONE of the ends that we get from work (which we then, in theory, spend on improving the quality of our lives). However many of us also work for reasons beyond money. I recently turned down a job offer for significantly more money than I'm currently on because I would've found the job tedious and uninteresting. For me, my reasons for working are:
1) Money, to give myself and my family a better quality of life.
2) Keep myself thinking, which I enjoy.
3) Feeling that I'm doing something positive and useful for my fellow man (admittedly, nothing spectacular, but still useful nevertheless).
4) Feeling that I'm bettering myself through learning new things as I work.
5) Expanded social contacts, with people who may not necessarily be like-minded, giving me new ways to look at things and think about.
If I were a multi-millionaire, I'd still work... probably not the same job, since I'd have a lot more freedom to do other things that fulfill my other reasons better than my current job; but I WOULD still work.
I personally believe that people like myself exist in pretty much every culture. As I said, some cultures more so, and some cultures less so, but I don't believe there's such a large variance between them as you're implying.
As a person who lives in a large city, with a fairly large Hispanic population, I can say with authority that cultural differences exist.
I don't believe you can say that with any kind of authority based on that statement alone, no. Within your city, you may find that there are significant differences between the hispanic residents and the non-hispanic residents; however that in and of itself has no bearing on the culture of hispanic people in general - only on the hispanic culture within your city, which likely has many other influencing factors beyond the culture from which these people (or their forebears) came.
To me, this all seems like a problem with cyclist education and your local laws.
In European cities, where cycling is much more common, there seems to be significantly fewer (although sadly still more than zero) idiots. I assume it's simply that because cycling is so much more common, both the cyclists and the vehicle drivers are more used to dealing with each other.
Beyond that, cyclists can and do end up taking the blame when they cause an accident. An acquaintance of mine here in Germany was cycling drunk one day, ran a red light and got hit side on by a VW convertible going 50km/h. He was thrown a significant distance and woke up in hospital, lucky to be alive. Upon being released from hospital, a couple of police officers had a nice chat with him about the accident and the end result was that he ended up paying two separate fines for cycling whilst under the influence as well as running a red light; AND he had to pay for the damage he caused to the car (normally there's a type of insurance here that covers that sort of thing, but being the relatively irresponsible type (obviously) he doesn't have it).
Though in the way this idea is commonly used, it says that we all will end up doing useful labor anyway, since we can't stand being idle. I find this absurd, though it might hold true for Americans, since we inherited a fair amount of our work ethic from our Protestant forebears. For the rest of the world? I'm sure they'd be content to sit on their butts, and spend time with their families.
Actually, I find this comment fairly bigoted. My experience with the world is that no matter where you go there are slackers who don't want to do anything, and there are highly motivated people that do. The ratio of these varies a little from place to place, but not significantly.
In many highly socialised countries (looking at the Scandinavian countries for example), it is quite possible to just quit working and live (poorly, but acceptably) off the various benefits for the rest of your life. However, it's a choice that only few make; both through wanting to have a better life than is provided by that choice as well as the simple motivation to get out there and do something.
I grew up in New Zealand, and like many young New Zealanders of my generation spent a couple of years after school just kind of doing nothing. I got the benefit from the govt, pretended to look for a job, drank a lot and partied. However I got sick of this after a short while and then started to actually DO things with my life. This is also true for the vast majority of my friends who were doing the same thing at the same time.
I often find that companies use for example megacorp.com for their corporate / investor relations website, and megacorp.co.uk for their consumer website.
My employer has esesntially that set it. We use a ".com" as a kind of global landing page that will link to the various regions as well as corporate/investor relations type of thing. Then each country has their own page, as well as some special domains for multinational entities that are still nevertheless sub-entities of the corporate whole.
You know, lightening up a little will help with both the migraines and the depression. Both are symptoms and not diseases in their own right.
I don't suffer from either (migraines or depression (although I did have depression issues last time I (unsuccessfully) quit smoking)) but to call them symptoms rather than diseases is very short-sighted.
If you've got something wrong with your serotonin and/or dopamine production (or reuptake), there's a good chance you'll be depressed. Sure, you COULD say that the depression (sadness/unhappiness) is a symptom of the problem (the problem itself being the serotonin/dopamine issue), but since it's pretty much the ONLY symptom, why not just call it the disease itself?
<snip>people can certainly engineer themselves into that position, not documenting what they do, relying on obscure sources of information etc. They think they are engineering job security but it's just engineering a dead-end job because they can't be promoted away from their current position. <snip> No one should be so vital that 2 weeks away from the office shuts down work for everyone else, if they are, then there is something seriously wrong with management.
Oh, I know the situation full well, but it's possible that it's not his own fault. I know this because I myself was in that situation a little while back. I had to engineer my way out of it.
As I mentioned, I'm the subject matter expert for my company's APIs within Europe (including both development and third-party developer support around these APIs). When I first started in this job, I was the only person in Europe that could do it and any time I took a break, I'd come back to an inbox full of "help me now, the world is falling apart" emails. I got sick of that (obviously) and convinced management to hire some developers under me. Now, when I take a holiday, I've got a small group of guys who, while less experienced than me, can certainly get the job done, and my immediate superior can take care of the management aspects of my job.
I'm now no longer "indispensable", but I am highly regarded by my co-workers and management, so don't feel I've put myself in a position to be replaced by someone cheaper.
Annual leave owing to employees is written up as a debt owing (from the company to the employee) here, so looks bad in the books.
That actually is the law in the US as well. The relative lack of vacation-usage in the US (which is not as dramatic as many of the posters here make it out to be) is more a cultural behavior than legal.
If they owe it to you legally though, surely its in their best interest to force you to take it rather than you not taking it? Or are there no penalties for them if you don't?
I believe the phrase you're looking for is "Liberté, égalité, fraternité".
But yes, that has always been my main dislike of American culture in general* - it seems to me to be based entirely on "conflict".
What I mean by this is that every interaction seems to be one of "how do I rip the other person off, and how do I avoid getting ripped off by them". Every contract I've ever seen from the US seems to written with these kinds of expectations in mind. All I ever seem to hear from US employees is about confrontations or arguments with their management; all I ever seem to hear from US renters is how much their landlord is trying to screw them over; and all I ever seem to hear from US taxpayers is how much the government is wasting their money on stuff they don't want to be paying for.
Believe it or not America, it is possible to have a society based on that crazy idea of "be nice to others and they'll be nice back to you". My rental agreement here in Germany is a pretty boilerplate kind of thing and mostly spells out my rights as codified in law as well as my obligations also as codified in law. Should any part of the contract be against what is spelled out in the law, that part of the contract is null and void.
Sure, it's possible for people to try to abuse the system. You could get an employer that will treat his employees like crap (to the maximum extent allowed by the law); but then you know what happens? The employees quit and find jobs at employers that aren't total dickheads. There's enough of these employers around that the abusive one will never any headway because he can't get the employees he wants.
Now, I really don't know how to fix the situation in the US. The culture of conflict seems to be so ingrained that "being nice" is going to get you screwed over there. If for whatever reason I tried running a company there, I'd probably go broke in no time flat - giving my employees a fair wage, 30 days annual leave per year, and insisting that they take time off to make up for their overtime would give me a serious disadvantage compared to my competition; and I doubt that the customers there would care enough to pay for my (necessarily) more expensive products.
Much more strict labour laws would probably go some way towards helping, but even suggesting such a thing seems to be able to incite violence in certain segments of the population, so I wouldn't even hope for that to be realistic in any reasonable timeframe.
* - note: "in general" - I don't want a thousand people responding saying "I'm American, and I'm not like that!"
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Me too. If the dates require numbers, I double check. If not, I *always* put the 3 letter (ISO) month name.
I grew up with dd/MM/yyyy; however after starting work in an international company and dealing with US colleagues writing MM/dd/yyyy and Japanese colleagues writing yyyy-MM-dd, I eventually switched to the Japanese style for almost everything I do in daily life - it's a scaled order (like the one I grew up with; just the other way around) but also has the additional advantage of sorting correctly in a text sort as well. If I speak a date without the year, I tend to stick to what I grew up with though "11th of August" instead of "August 11th". I generally never write a date without the year though so both 11/08 and 08/11 look "wrong" to my brain.
Someone has already pointed out that sandwich is British (as am I), so what do you call a sandwich? I lived in Scarborough Beach, Perth for six months and I completely failed to notice that Aussies have a different word for sandwich.
I'm not Aussie, but I lived there for 6 years. In my experience, the Australian word "sandwich" is more strictly defined as two pieces of sliced bread with something in between. Rolls, buns, baguette bread, etc. that have been sliced open and something placed in between get called a sandwich everywhere else in the English speaking world that I know of, but not Australia.
And really, Fahrenheit is more precise than Celsius (1 degree C ~= 2 degrees F), with more "octaves" to divide out a sense of whether ("it's in the 60s today, in the 50's tomorrow, and in the 70s the day after") is, to me at least, far more descriptive of the weather than, say, it will be around 10s today, the 10s again tomorrow, and the 20s the day after (where the "20s" could be anything from a chilly high sixties to a sweltering mid-eighties Fahrenheit).
The thing is, in metric countries, I've never heard anyone say the temperature is "in the twenties". We generally say, "low twenties" for 21-23; "mid twenties" for 24-26 and "high twenties" for 27-29. You'll note that this is somewhat MORE granular than dividing the Fahrenheit scale in to groupings of 10. There's of course nothing stopping you dividing Fahrenheit further of course, and many people do (including yourself in your post with "high sixties" and "mid eighties"), but the point is that both systems are granular enough for normal usage since in neither system does anyone really care about a difference of one unit.
Generally, it's a matter of what you're used to as to what feels more comfortable or "fitting to reality". I grew up with metric and so the imperial system feels unnatural to me. Most people who grew up with imperial say that metric feels unnatural to them. So, which one is more "natural feeling" is therefore an invalid argument from either side and the sensible argument has to come from practicality. Generally, metric is more mathematically practical - this is hopefully immediately obvious even to the people who don't want to use it.
Metric makes sense, but why not km/liter, far more analogous to mpg. What point is there in inverting the ratio, and multiplying by 100?
I do understand the argument that others have put forth for MPG over L/100km (km/L is used in some countries from what I've heard but it's pretty rare). The idea being that you can more easily say, "I've got approx x number of gallons left in the tank, which means I can go y distance". However this is actually less of a problem with L/100Km than most people who are used to MPG think. When I'm driving, I can look at my fuel gauge and think, "Hmm, I've got approx x litres left, which gets me y kilometres... this is [more|less] than the amount I need to get to my destination.". It clearly is another way of looking at it since it's reversed, but the calculation is no less simple.
Have you actually tried that? Even if there are no language problems, cultural differences are going to be a wellspring of headaches for a long time to come. The world isn't nearly as small as some people believe.
Can't speak for the GP, but yes - I have tried it, and it's fairly common to do in international companies within Europe.
I work for the European HQ (based in Germany) of a large multinational with a Japanese parent company. On a daily basis, I deal with at least 3 or 4 different EU cultures plus Japanese culture. At least once every couple of weeks, I deal with India. Generally a few times a month, there'll be something I need to deal with in North Africa, Middle East, or Russia.
Yep, there's a lot of cultural differences, but the other side of the coin to remember is that most people in these situations are forgiving of cultural mistakes. They are aware that they and you are probably not 100% familiar with each others' cultures and there's a mutual understanding to politely ignore cultural faux pas.
Linguistically by the way, I speak around 5 languages with varying degrees of proficiency, or up to 15 if you count languages where I know some, but couldn't really talk to someone about any particular topic. Nevertheless, the people commenting that English tends to be the language used are quite right - it's our official language for business in my company (despite being, as said, based in Germany) and if I see a Frenchman and a Russian talking to each other, I'd put pretty high odds they'll be speaking English to each other. I personally even speak German at home with my wife, but English to my German colleagues at work...
Ya know you actually don't have a clue what it was but you do seem to have that special kind of arrogance that makes you think can just fill in the blanks about something for which you have no actual information and make it fit your world view.
I find it interesting you call me arrogant and then claim to know things about me. At no point did I say, "it is xyz", I just said, "I think it is FAR more likely that xyz". As in, based on the evidence and available knowledge, one cause seems more likely than another. If there were more evidence in favour of another cause, I'd happily change my mind to that.
It was 10 minutes before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded while watching the pre launch with no sound. The thought flashed through my head quite vividly, "I wonder what it will look like when it explodes". You could maybe explain it away that I'd deduced that conditions were ripe for it to explode but since I didn't really know anything about the O ring issues and cold at the time I had no basis for deducing that there was much of a chance it would explode beyond the fact that all launches have some chance of exploding.
I doubt that you'd deduced it would explode through any special knowledge, as you say you yourself. But - based on the evidence thus far - I also doubt it was precognition that would turn our understanding of the universe and physics completely on its head. It seems more likely to me that you thought, "I wonder what it would look like if it explodes" and then after it did, your memory altered itself to make you think you had thought something slightly different.
No, I can't prove it, but there is plenty of evidence of memories changing themselves like that, and none whatsoever for the kind of precognition you're describing. It's simply a matter of probabilities.
That might not be the case - maybe you said it out loud to someone who also remembers you saying it, in which case the chance of it being changed memory is lessened significantly.
But to me, even the chance that you spontaneously thought it, then it happened, and it was just "dumb luck" is significantly higher than the chance of this kind of precognition being a phenomenon that exists in our universe.
It is a chronic characteristic of our species, especially the arrogant, intelligent ones like yourself that we think we have it all figured out and that everything falls to Occam's Razor. Time after time it turns out that we actually don't know it all, in fact we don't know much about a lot of things.
The people most likely to make the leaps of discovery are the ones who have no regard for "conventional wisdom".
Conventional wisdom can often be wrong; but it usually has a basis in reality since otherwise it wouldn't be considered wisdom of any kind. We know we don't know everything and we know that in many cases we know "damn near nothing" about a lot of things. But we do have a reasonable picture of the basic functioning of elements of the fundamental properties of the universe and from our understanding at this point in time, precognition of any kind seems very unlikely. That might change in the future - maybe someone will discover something really new and interesting about time that turns our ideas on our heads; but until such a thing happens, there are two things to do:
1) Continue to study and refine our knowledge
2) Focus on things that we believe are wrong
Perhaps you should consider studying in the field of neuroscience, or perhaps deep in to the fields of physics dealing with time (depending on whether you think the precognition might be a property of the brain; or of the universe), or even both if you've got the time and the smarts. Maybe you'll come up with something really interesting.
If you look at my post history, you might get a somewhat different picture of me than you currently seem to have. Yes, I'm scientifically minded and consider Occam's Razor to be a fairly re
That is simply not true. We started out with fire, earth, air and water. We then moved to atoms, elements and molecules. Then to subatomic particles. Then to quantum mechanics which is decidely not simple. Now we are at dark matter, dark energy and string theory which are extreme increases in complexity if they prove out. Likewise we went from no understanding of mechanics to Newton and calculus to Relativity. Those are not simplifications either. Out understanding of physics today is vastly more complex than ever.
I fail to see how you consider these things to be increases in complexity. When we moved from "fire, earth, air and water" to "atoms" and the initial subatomic particles, we simplified from four types of things down to three (protons, electrons, neutrons). The structure of how these three come together makes up elements and the structure of how these atoms come together makes up molecules.
Then we discovered more kinds of subatomic particles, giving us a further array of "more types of things" again (thereby THAT is a complexity increase). However string theory, if it pans out to be more than just a bunch of very pretty maths, would simplify this down to one. To me, it seems like the complexity of HOW it all goes together is increased, but the complexity of WHAT there is is reduced.
I never said our understanding of physics isn't more complex - of course it is. What I said was that "complex things are usually just made up of a LOT of very very simple things behaving in very very simple ways". So I was really only talking about physical matter and not the interactions of it. That said however, it also seems apparent to me that the interactions of things is also simple when you're talking about sufficiently small areas of interaction and time slices. It's only when this gets extrapolated to larger areas of interaction or longer time periods that things become complex. Or, to put it another way, "complex interactions are usually just made up of a LOT of very simple interactions".
Precognition is completely different from a drug induced mystical experience. Precognition suggestions time doesn't operate on the simplistic level we think it does.
My reason for using the drug induced mystical experience as an example was to show that the mind can "lie" to itself. You're coming at it from the wrong direction by saying, "I experienced precognition, what does that say about the nature of the universe?" when you should be saying, "I experienced something that appears to be precognition, what are the possible causes?"
I think it's FAR more likely that your mind lied to you. You experienced a waking dream; later an event happened; as the events were over a particular threshold of similarity (threshold depending on many other factors of your mind and personality) you now remember those two events as being identical and believe that you saw the event before it happened.
We have very many examples in psychology for the mind playing tricks. We have no evidence anywhere for the competing theory is that it is possible to be aware of specific events that have not yet happened. It therefore seems clear to me that without evidence, it makes more sense to assume the former than the latter.
And for that matter, when you step into a transporter, is the guy who comes out on the other side really you?
And for that matter, when you wake up after a deep sleep, is the guy that wakes up really the same as the guy who went to sleep at night?
This is the reason I don't fear the idea of transferring my brain in to a machine should it ever become a reality. If it remembers being me, thinks like me, and the other "me" isn't there anymore, then it IS me. Fearing the "loss of self" would have to mean I'd fear dreamless sleep or comatose states in the same way, and that wouldn't make a lot of sense from a practical standpoint...
I find the reductionist approach to be too simplistic to explain the wonderous magic that is life, intelligence and time. The reductionist approach may prove to be the winning answer, but it will certainly be disappointing if our existence is really that mechanized.
To me, this sounds too much like an argument from desire. You would find it "disappointing" and therefore do not want it to be true, and so have a hard time imagining it to be true. The universe however does not pander to your desires, and what is, is. It may be that something more complex is needed, however so far we've time and again seen that in reality, complex things are usually just made up of a LOT of very very simple things behaving in very very simple ways. I see no reason our brains should be any different.
I once experienced a vivid instance of precognition and it permenently moved me out of the camp that our existence is as simple as the reductionists try to make it.
I once (well, more than once) experienced the sensation of the universe cradling me in its arms; being spoken to by gods; pulling the fabric of the universe in to my heart with my bare hands; and crystal clear visions of events happening far out the scope of my vision. These experiences were brought on by having taken LSD, but that doesn't make them any less of an experience than your precognition. I can however clearly say that despite the extremely positive changes that these experiences have brought about in my personality, I do not attribute them to any kind of mystical "external" forces - the insights that lead to these changes were simply brought about my own brain figuring things out in a drastically altered state from what it is used to.
While precognition may appear to stand at a different level to these sorts of changes, it's a numbers game in the end. Had your precognition been wrong, you probably would've forgotten about it by now. Many people experience clear and "startling" visions of events that have not yet come to pass. They're nothing more than a kind of waking dream. Very rarely, the event does come to pass (more common when the event is mundane of course) and when it does, people can almost (but not quite) be forgiven for assuming that something "magical" has happened.
Drop me a quick email at my username excluding the last three characters at Google's well known email service. I'll keep you informed when it's published and if you like, maybe I can ask you a few questions about your experiences and thoughts on the subject (no promises I'll use anything you give me; but I promise I'll read it and consider it)
For reference, the book is about two-thirds done as far as content is concerned - I'm expecting to start approaching publishers by around September/October.
Sorry for the off-topic post, but as you don't make an email address public, I can't contact you any other way.
I'm currently writing a book (non-fiction) on the topic of self-discovery using psychedelics (specifically LSD) and would like to paraphrase your comment. I'd be happy to give attribution or not, as you'd prefer.
Specifically the context will be the discussion of negative experiences during a psychedelic trip and how it can be used as a learning experience for self-improvement; I'd like to paraphrase your post as a part of an explanation that many drugs (both legal and illegal) are used to numb these negative feelings instead, which potentially leads to even worse situations both for the individual and the society in which they are in.
When I first saw "time," I read the caption, "wait for it."
"Wait for what," I thought to myself.
I then spent a brief moment pondering, and then decided that whatever it was I was supposed to wait for was not worth my time, and moved on with my life.
Since then, I've cleaned my garage, put my TV up on my wall, and planted some grass seed, all of which probably would not have been accomplished had I allowed myself that nerdy sense of self-importance that comes with being a self-righteous elitist who misplaces value on "art" projects like this.
Of course, I suspect that of the number of people that do enjoy it, there is only a very small percentage that sit there and literally "wait" for an update. There are those of us who will clean our garages, put TVs up on walls, plant grass seed and so on and then once a day or so, go back and spend 2 minutes or so checking what's happened over the course of the day in the comic.
Personally, I'm really enjoying it thus far. The characters are somehow beautifully naive about the world and have a curiosity to go and learn as if they somehow didn't exist prior to the existence of the comic itself.
Call it art; call it wonderful; call it crap; call it masturbation... whatever - as long as I and others enjoy it, we really don't care what you think.
My mind is MY mind, and not subject to anyone's manipulation, thank you very much.
Not to nitpick, but your mind is subject to the manipulation of anyone and everyone you come in to contact with - usually with neither you nor them being aware that they're manipulating you.
At least the psychotherapy option is honest in that both parties are aware of the manipulation (and in most cases, agree to it).
If they freak out and go apeshit over it, the parent-child relationship doesn't hold a lot of trust anyway.
Don't have kids, do you?
I do, and if my kid texted me something like that, I'd probably either assume I was being pranked, or freak out a little (but definitely wouldn't go "ape-shit" or anything). If the latter, then when they told me it was all just a prank, I'd see the funny side of it and we'd have a good laugh together.
I've never understood the type of child-parent relationship where so little trust exists. Someone, somewhere, screwed up bad in that situation.
Even if the college grad isn't a dick, it's human nature to write off anything you don't understand, and anything that's wasn't done the way you'd do it, with a "the last guy was a crappy programmer" proclamation.
Funny you say that, since in all my years of coding so far, my default assumption is, "damn, everyone else is so much better than me - the reason I can't wrap my head around why they did it this particular way in this code is because they're better than me"... at which point I dive in, spend a lot of time trying to get a feel for what they did, and in 60% of cases DO learn something interesting and new to me that justifies why they did what they did (in the other 40% it seems they really were just crappy coders; or working under a deadline turning proof-of-concept code in to very messy production code; or whatever).
Part of it might be that I'm a self taught coder. Never formally studied; just lots of books, online examples/tutorials, and now somewhere around 25 years of experience/practice (10 years of it being my "day job" as opposed to just a hobby). I know there's a lot of theory that I don't get as well as someone who has just been in university studying it - but I also know that a great deal, if not most of it is stuff I can or already do understand, just don't know a lot of the terminology or formalised concepts.
(note: 60/40 figures are gut feeling figures only - I haven't actually recorded each instance to determine the real ratio)
Do you really want to stand up and make the claim that people are buying iOS devices for any other reason than they enjoy the experience?
Oh, that one is very easy. I can confidently say that a lot of people are buying iOS devices as fashion accessories - because if it doesn't have an apple on the back, it's not considered one.
Or of course those who buy it because they're not aware of any other option. There's a surprising number of people who call all smartphones "iPhones" and all tablets "iPads". My father-in-law has a relatively new Galaxy Tab and STILL calls it an iPad. He got it as a gift from my mother-in-law and only ended up with that because she asked me what to buy him. I'm sure if he ever breaks it and needs a new one, he'll wander in to an Apple store and pick up an iPad; because that's the only name that seems to register with him.
How many women on these sites are real?
Thankfully it only takes one... I met my wife on a dating site. We just celebrated our second wedding anniversary and are preparing for our daughter's birthday.
Dating sites aren't always as horrid and retched as they seem to be - they're a great way for a shy guy and a shy girl who may otherwise never have crossed paths to get together.
Other cultures don't have the same historical roots as the US (and northern Europe), and thus have different value systems. That is NOT a bigoted statement
Correct, it's not... however your original statement:
I find this absurd, though it might hold true for Americans, since we inherited a fair amount of our work ethic from our Protestant forebears. For the rest of the world? I'm sure they'd be content to sit on their butts, and spend time with their families.
... certainly sounded as such to me.
In some cultures; work is a means to an end.
In some other cultures work is an ends to itself.
If you freed people from the need to work, the latter cultures would continue to work; while the former would have no reason to since the ends are met.
I feel this is only true in a very narrow scope. I don't personally know of any cultures where there is so little motivation that people would not perform some kind of useful work even without getting paid for it; and I like to think of myself as fairly well travelled with a good understanding of many different cultures. Money is ONE of the ends that we get from work (which we then, in theory, spend on improving the quality of our lives). However many of us also work for reasons beyond money. I recently turned down a job offer for significantly more money than I'm currently on because I would've found the job tedious and uninteresting. For me, my reasons for working are:
1) Money, to give myself and my family a better quality of life.
2) Keep myself thinking, which I enjoy.
3) Feeling that I'm doing something positive and useful for my fellow man (admittedly, nothing spectacular, but still useful nevertheless).
4) Feeling that I'm bettering myself through learning new things as I work.
5) Expanded social contacts, with people who may not necessarily be like-minded, giving me new ways to look at things and think about.
If I were a multi-millionaire, I'd still work... probably not the same job, since I'd have a lot more freedom to do other things that fulfill my other reasons better than my current job; but I WOULD still work.
I personally believe that people like myself exist in pretty much every culture. As I said, some cultures more so, and some cultures less so, but I don't believe there's such a large variance between them as you're implying.
As a person who lives in a large city, with a fairly large Hispanic population, I can say with authority that cultural differences exist.
I don't believe you can say that with any kind of authority based on that statement alone, no. Within your city, you may find that there are significant differences between the hispanic residents and the non-hispanic residents; however that in and of itself has no bearing on the culture of hispanic people in general - only on the hispanic culture within your city, which likely has many other influencing factors beyond the culture from which these people (or their forebears) came.
To me, this all seems like a problem with cyclist education and your local laws.
In European cities, where cycling is much more common, there seems to be significantly fewer (although sadly still more than zero) idiots. I assume it's simply that because cycling is so much more common, both the cyclists and the vehicle drivers are more used to dealing with each other.
Beyond that, cyclists can and do end up taking the blame when they cause an accident. An acquaintance of mine here in Germany was cycling drunk one day, ran a red light and got hit side on by a VW convertible going 50km/h. He was thrown a significant distance and woke up in hospital, lucky to be alive. Upon being released from hospital, a couple of police officers had a nice chat with him about the accident and the end result was that he ended up paying two separate fines for cycling whilst under the influence as well as running a red light; AND he had to pay for the damage he caused to the car (normally there's a type of insurance here that covers that sort of thing, but being the relatively irresponsible type (obviously) he doesn't have it).
Though in the way this idea is commonly used, it says that we all will end up doing useful labor anyway, since we can't stand being idle. I find this absurd, though it might hold true for Americans, since we inherited a fair amount of our work ethic from our Protestant forebears. For the rest of the world? I'm sure they'd be content to sit on their butts, and spend time with their families.
Actually, I find this comment fairly bigoted. My experience with the world is that no matter where you go there are slackers who don't want to do anything, and there are highly motivated people that do. The ratio of these varies a little from place to place, but not significantly.
In many highly socialised countries (looking at the Scandinavian countries for example), it is quite possible to just quit working and live (poorly, but acceptably) off the various benefits for the rest of your life. However, it's a choice that only few make; both through wanting to have a better life than is provided by that choice as well as the simple motivation to get out there and do something.
I grew up in New Zealand, and like many young New Zealanders of my generation spent a couple of years after school just kind of doing nothing. I got the benefit from the govt, pretended to look for a job, drank a lot and partied. However I got sick of this after a short while and then started to actually DO things with my life. This is also true for the vast majority of my friends who were doing the same thing at the same time.
My employer has esesntially that set it.
Holy hell, what was in my lunch that made me type that?!
I think I probably meant to type: "My employer has essentially the same."
I often find that companies use for example megacorp.com for their corporate / investor relations website, and megacorp.co.uk for their consumer website.
My employer has esesntially that set it. We use a ".com" as a kind of global landing page that will link to the various regions as well as corporate/investor relations type of thing. Then each country has their own page, as well as some special domains for multinational entities that are still nevertheless sub-entities of the corporate whole.
It can sound confusing until you look at it:
Landing page for anyone, anywhere.
Japanese domestic market.
United Kingdom domestic market.
United States domestic market.
German domestic market.
Many, many, many, more domestic markets.
European headquarters (my employer) providing European-wide services (also hosts a lot of the content that appears on the various countries' sites)
Really pretty simple and clear for the most part.
You know, lightening up a little will help with both the migraines and the depression. Both are symptoms and not diseases in their own right.
I don't suffer from either (migraines or depression (although I did have depression issues last time I (unsuccessfully) quit smoking)) but to call them symptoms rather than diseases is very short-sighted.
If you've got something wrong with your serotonin and/or dopamine production (or reuptake), there's a good chance you'll be depressed. Sure, you COULD say that the depression (sadness/unhappiness) is a symptom of the problem (the problem itself being the serotonin/dopamine issue), but since it's pretty much the ONLY symptom, why not just call it the disease itself?
<snip>people can certainly engineer themselves into that position, not documenting what they do, relying on obscure sources of information etc. They think they are engineering job security but it's just engineering a dead-end job because they can't be promoted away from their current position.
<snip>
No one should be so vital that 2 weeks away from the office shuts down work for everyone else, if they are, then there is something seriously wrong with management.
Oh, I know the situation full well, but it's possible that it's not his own fault. I know this because I myself was in that situation a little while back. I had to engineer my way out of it.
As I mentioned, I'm the subject matter expert for my company's APIs within Europe (including both development and third-party developer support around these APIs). When I first started in this job, I was the only person in Europe that could do it and any time I took a break, I'd come back to an inbox full of "help me now, the world is falling apart" emails. I got sick of that (obviously) and convinced management to hire some developers under me. Now, when I take a holiday, I've got a small group of guys who, while less experienced than me, can certainly get the job done, and my immediate superior can take care of the management aspects of my job.
I'm now no longer "indispensable", but I am highly regarded by my co-workers and management, so don't feel I've put myself in a position to be replaced by someone cheaper.
Annual leave owing to employees is written up as a debt owing (from the company to the employee) here, so looks bad in the books.
That actually is the law in the US as well. The relative lack of vacation-usage in the US (which is not as dramatic as many of the posters here make it out to be) is more a cultural behavior than legal.
If they owe it to you legally though, surely its in their best interest to force you to take it rather than you not taking it? Or are there no penalties for them if you don't?
Fraternité, Liberté, Société
I believe the phrase you're looking for is "Liberté, égalité, fraternité".
But yes, that has always been my main dislike of American culture in general* - it seems to me to be based entirely on "conflict".
What I mean by this is that every interaction seems to be one of "how do I rip the other person off, and how do I avoid getting ripped off by them". Every contract I've ever seen from the US seems to written with these kinds of expectations in mind. All I ever seem to hear from US employees is about confrontations or arguments with their management; all I ever seem to hear from US renters is how much their landlord is trying to screw them over; and all I ever seem to hear from US taxpayers is how much the government is wasting their money on stuff they don't want to be paying for.
Believe it or not America, it is possible to have a society based on that crazy idea of "be nice to others and they'll be nice back to you". My rental agreement here in Germany is a pretty boilerplate kind of thing and mostly spells out my rights as codified in law as well as my obligations also as codified in law. Should any part of the contract be against what is spelled out in the law, that part of the contract is null and void.
Sure, it's possible for people to try to abuse the system. You could get an employer that will treat his employees like crap (to the maximum extent allowed by the law); but then you know what happens? The employees quit and find jobs at employers that aren't total dickheads. There's enough of these employers around that the abusive one will never any headway because he can't get the employees he wants.
Now, I really don't know how to fix the situation in the US. The culture of conflict seems to be so ingrained that "being nice" is going to get you screwed over there. If for whatever reason I tried running a company there, I'd probably go broke in no time flat - giving my employees a fair wage, 30 days annual leave per year, and insisting that they take time off to make up for their overtime would give me a serious disadvantage compared to my competition; and I doubt that the customers there would care enough to pay for my (necessarily) more expensive products.
Much more strict labour laws would probably go some way towards helping, but even suggesting such a thing seems to be able to incite violence in certain segments of the population, so I wouldn't even hope for that to be realistic in any reasonable timeframe.
* - note: "in general" - I don't want a thousand people responding saying "I'm American, and I'm not like that!"