It happens to me in a bad way. I have gotten to be pretty good at deliberately paying attention to the things I need to conciously focus on, but it hasn't been easy. Consciously focusing on something for an extended period of time is difficult. Meditation is a way of consciously focusing on nothing for an extended period of time, and it can help, but I would recommend something else. When you're already distracted, it's hard to get the most out of meditation, however, an hour or two of vigorous yoga such as Astanga per week can help because it's a practice which helps you learn conscious focus, and the workout from a vigorous practice clears the mind. The slower types of yoga practice are nice, but not useful for the kinds of problem you're talking about. BTW, I always thought yoga was for 50+ year old women, until I started dating a 30 year old cute little girl who, it turns out, teaches yoga classes a couple times a week. It's worth a try.
This is far from a conservative/liberal thing! Look at the European uproar over GMOs, which are essentially gene-therapy treated plants. It's not the conservatives that are all up in arms about that, however, over here, it is the consevatives that typically want to stand in the way of progress. I don't think that dichotomy is particlularly useful.
Would you kill 100 people so 25 million people could be 10 dollars better off?
Would you kill 100 people so 10 people could be 25 million dollars better off? Evidently, for some people, the answer to that question is yes.
The point that gets missed in all these kind of discussions is that it's not up to us. Evolution happens faster when there's harsher selection, but it's not a continuous, smooth process. It's periods of easy-living proliferation of all manner of things of a variety of fitnesses, punctuated by short periods of hard-living, during which the less fit die off. So no social policy we could institute would serve this function, except periodic rounding up and extermination of the weak, and that's something that happens all by itself as disease, war, and famine break out. Since harsher selection is not a higher standard of fitness, but a greater frequency of "restriction points", what we're doing by limiting the severity of famine, disease, and war is decreasing the average severity of restriction points, just creating lighter selection and slower evolution. But don't worry, catastrophes come in a variety of severities. We may be putting off the bad ones, but they'll come around, eventually. It's a self-correcting system, because if the incidence and severity of restriction points was too light, proliferation would be faster, and the incidence and severity of disasters would increase, just like population density increases the danger of famine and disease. If the incidence and severity of disaster was too great, population density would decline to the point that a single event wouldn't affect as many people, disease couldn't spread as fast, etc, not to mention that the remaining people would be more hardened.
We're just in a period of easy-living right now, as we should be. Don't underestimate Nature. It will take it's course. It's good that people talk about these things though, because understanding makes it easier to do our ethical duty in caring for others without worrying about whether we're "polluting" our fitness. It will be set at the appropriate level, no matter what we do.
Losing a bunch of windows when your browser crashes?
There's a firefox extension for that. Even preserves bropwsing history, so the back button works after the crash as if nothing had happened.
That's a bit harsh. The Blair case, and the Schon affair were examples of true dishonesty, where people completely made things up. In this case, some of her sources just don't check out. I agree that it's alarming that the source of one of the quotes included denied he had ever spoken to someone from Wired, but people forget things. We have no way of knowing how reliable the source is. I agree that all stories should have all sources checked out fully, because that's part of the social contract we have with publishers, but it sounds like they're starting to do that. The thing to do now would be to declare amnesty on all unsourceable quotes and anecdotes, so that people who may have made things up can come clean and not have to continue in deception, and fully check everything out from now on.
Right, and TFA specifically mentions that sites that need freshness(however that's determined) are the ones which are given bonuses for being updated, whereas sites with essentially static info don't get either a boost or a penalty.
I don't want someone to be able to find out my name and SSN just by getting within 10 feet of me. That could be put to all kinds of nefarious use. People really need to realize that the age of computers has made data dangerous. Consequences of information availability aren't immediately obvious, but rather have to be carefully considered. We won't see any advance in this until most of our current crop of not-raised-with-computers lawmakers die off, so it's just a matter of damage limitation until then.
A-fuckin-Men!
How many more years am I going to have to make $22k working 60+ hours a week, doing technically challenging things that 95% of the population couldn't do, before I can start earning a real living? My younger brother, in CS, is already making about 4x as much as me. He's married with a kid on the way. My GF says her clock is ticking. What am I supposed to do about that making $22k?
More depressing stats: the average age at awarding of first R01 grant is 42!
I must like doing this or something. Most of us know we could never make it in advertising, too.
A wonderful discussion that you can and should have in a discussion of cultural influences in our nation's history.
In science class, however, you should be talking about organisms and atoms. You should be presenting the best available facts, knowing yourself that they're all currently under investigation. The second thing you do in science class is discuss how to use the scientific method. How observations become theories, and what we're being taught is the thory that has floated to the top of the pile. What has allowed it do do this is experimentation. Experimentation affects only scientific theories, ones that can, in principle, be proved wrong. No experiment can prove or disprove that a higher power "set things into motion". This means that ID isn't a scientific theory, and belongs in a discussion of cultural influences, not scientific ones.
You've made a good point that a discussion of historical events should include the total cultural context in which they occurred. That takes care of history class. In science class, however, we're not concerned about cultural context.
It's not considered important to mention in a discussion of how a nuclear reactor works that we were the ones who developed the science only because our research program received a kick in the pants from the scientists, mostly German Jews, who fled their home country.
I agree with you that the removal of happenings from their cultural context is terrible, and that the removal of mention of religion isn't what educators should be doing. However, when the student are in science class, they should be learning about science.
Just about every statement presented as fact in a high school biology text book is actually under investigation. Things are presented as fact because it's not the place of high school biology to present all the nuances of current scientific thought. You have to take it in stages. Everyone should know the germ theory of disease, and that a cell is the basic unit of life. Leave nuances such as viruses and prions for a later date or for interested students. You teach people how to think, and how to use the scientific method. One of the key principles of any theory is that it is must be, in principle, falsifiable. Evolution is, in principle, falsifiable, because you could do an experiment asking, for example, "does an organism evolve to be "fit" for its niche, or do the organisms remain unchanging, only proliferating if the happen upon a niche that happens to be compatible with them?" The outcome of the experiment would either show that organisms don't change, or that they actually do adapt to their surroundings. Since you can do the experiment, in theory, evolution meets the criteria for a scientific theory.
Is ID falsifiable? Can you do an experiment that proves that some higher power didn't "set things into motion"? You can't do that any more than you can prove or disprove the existence of a higher power. You can't do the experiment, therefore it's not a scientific theory. Therefore, it belongs in a discussion of cultural influences, not scientific ones.
ID is just fancy footwork by conservatives and neoluddites to try to sneak discussion of religious beliefs into science class. Should it be discussed? Sure, but science class is for science. It's for discussion of the best theories we currently have. In the pitifully small amount of time you have left after teaching the facts, as we now know them, you can discuss exceptions and nuances such as gaps in the fossil record. Ideally, you'd wrap everything in a statistical treatment, so that you could assign probabilities to every theory from "humans evolved from slime" to "god created us yesterday" and score them according to likelihood, but there simply isn't time, and statistics aren't covered well enough in high school anyways.
Unfortunately, you simply did a bad job of bringing across the matchmaker metaphor.
I'll use someone else's words (from the jacket of Dawkin's "The Blind Watchmaker"):
"One of the most famous arguments of the creationist theory of the universe is the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley's: Just as a watch is too complicated and too functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed."
The Kansas board of education is the one that made the famous ill-fated decision. The article we're discussing is about a decision made in Pennsylvania.
Fundamentalism is not limited to the deep south!
It's well-established that the chance to vote on gay marriage and abortion amendments is what brought out the midwestern voters, who are the ones responsible for this second, ill-fated term.
So don't try to pin this on the south! We might be called the "bible belt", but fundamentalism runs strong throughout this country.
The details, as usual for press releases, are kinda lacking.
What protein are they talking about? A transcript of an as yet unidentified ORF?
Has anyone been been able to find this in the primary literature? There's no Ben Wu or Eric Ting listed on pubmed.
You know, having an ad filter so agressive that it blocks legitimate pages doesn't make you cool. Adding doubleclick to your hosts file is a crude hack. Would you accept a spamfilter which gave you a 1% false positive rate, and never changed no matter how many emails you received? Face it, using the hosts file is a crude hack. We need more adaptable solutions, but for now, Adblock is clearly the best. What we really need is for adversisers to not drive us to such ends.
$0.02 I don't block adsense, appropriately placed banners, most other neutrally colored, non-flashing, moving or otherwise distracting ads. However, somewhere between the data leaving your server and rendering on my machine, it ceases to become yours and becomes mine. I have every right to determine how something displays on my screen, just as you have every right to choose to serve the content or not.
Slashdot Mirror
It happens to me in a bad way. I have gotten to be pretty good at deliberately paying attention to the things I need to conciously focus on, but it hasn't been easy. Consciously focusing on something for an extended period of time is difficult. Meditation is a way of consciously focusing on nothing for an extended period of time, and it can help, but I would recommend something else. When you're already distracted, it's hard to get the most out of meditation, however, an hour or two of vigorous yoga such as Astanga per week can help because it's a practice which helps you learn conscious focus, and the workout from a vigorous practice clears the mind. The slower types of yoga practice are nice, but not useful for the kinds of problem you're talking about. BTW, I always thought yoga was for 50+ year old women, until I started dating a 30 year old cute little girl who, it turns out, teaches yoga classes a couple times a week. It's worth a try.
Try http://annoyances.org/ or http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_index.htm. I was going to send you to Blackviper.com, but his site appears to be down.
I guess you haven't been getting much russian spam from Constabulary G. Waiting?
No, you mean incandescent.
This is slashdot, after all. Please spell your technological terms correctly. I'm not even going to comment on your punctuation.
This is far from a conservative/liberal thing! Look at the European uproar over GMOs, which are essentially gene-therapy treated plants. It's not the conservatives that are all up in arms about that, however, over here, it is the consevatives that typically want to stand in the way of progress. I don't think that dichotomy is particlularly useful.
Would you kill 100 people so 25 million people could be 10 dollars better off?
Would you kill 100 people so 10 people could be 25 million dollars better off? Evidently, for some people, the answer to that question is yes.
The point that gets missed in all these kind of discussions is that it's not up to us. Evolution happens faster when there's harsher selection, but it's not a continuous, smooth process. It's periods of easy-living proliferation of all manner of things of a variety of fitnesses, punctuated by short periods of hard-living, during which the less fit die off. So no social policy we could institute would serve this function, except periodic rounding up and extermination of the weak, and that's something that happens all by itself as disease, war, and famine break out. Since harsher selection is not a higher standard of fitness, but a greater frequency of "restriction points", what we're doing by limiting the severity of famine, disease, and war is decreasing the average severity of restriction points, just creating lighter selection and slower evolution. But don't worry, catastrophes come in a variety of severities. We may be putting off the bad ones, but they'll come around, eventually. It's a self-correcting system, because if the incidence and severity of restriction points was too light, proliferation would be faster, and the incidence and severity of disasters would increase, just like population density increases the danger of famine and disease. If the incidence and severity of disaster was too great, population density would decline to the point that a single event wouldn't affect as many people, disease couldn't spread as fast, etc, not to mention that the remaining people would be more hardened.
We're just in a period of easy-living right now, as we should be. Don't underestimate Nature. It will take it's course. It's good that people talk about these things though, because understanding makes it easier to do our ethical duty in caring for others without worrying about whether we're "polluting" our fitness. It will be set at the appropriate level, no matter what we do.
Losing a bunch of windows when your browser crashes? There's a firefox extension for that. Even preserves bropwsing history, so the back button works after the crash as if nothing had happened.
sarcasm layered on top of sarcasm...how do you people ever tell what someone's really saying?
Don't forget about Jan Hendrik Schon. Anyone know what he's been up to lately?
That's a bit harsh. The Blair case, and the Schon affair were examples of true dishonesty, where people completely made things up. In this case, some of her sources just don't check out. I agree that it's alarming that the source of one of the quotes included denied he had ever spoken to someone from Wired, but people forget things. We have no way of knowing how reliable the source is. I agree that all stories should have all sources checked out fully, because that's part of the social contract we have with publishers, but it sounds like they're starting to do that. The thing to do now would be to declare amnesty on all unsourceable quotes and anecdotes, so that people who may have made things up can come clean and not have to continue in deception, and fully check everything out from now on.
Right, and TFA specifically mentions that sites that need freshness(however that's determined) are the ones which are given bonuses for being updated, whereas sites with essentially static info don't get either a boost or a penalty.
I don't want someone to be able to find out my name and SSN just by getting within 10 feet of me. That could be put to all kinds of nefarious use. People really need to realize that the age of computers has made data dangerous. Consequences of information availability aren't immediately obvious, but rather have to be carefully considered. We won't see any advance in this until most of our current crop of not-raised-with-computers lawmakers die off, so it's just a matter of damage limitation until then.
You mean like this?
That would be great, because Amazon does such a good job with recommendations currently.
If website recommendations were to work like Amazon's, I'd get recommendations to visit www.slashdot.org, while I'm reading a thread.
A-fuckin-Men! How many more years am I going to have to make $22k working 60+ hours a week, doing technically challenging things that 95% of the population couldn't do, before I can start earning a real living? My younger brother, in CS, is already making about 4x as much as me. He's married with a kid on the way. My GF says her clock is ticking. What am I supposed to do about that making $22k? More depressing stats: the average age at awarding of first R01 grant is 42! I must like doing this or something. Most of us know we could never make it in advertising, too.
we need a firefox extension!
Your sig points out the importance of punctuation, not capitalization. It also points out something else...
A wonderful discussion that you can and should have in a discussion of cultural influences in our nation's history.
In science class, however, you should be talking about organisms and atoms. You should be presenting the best available facts, knowing yourself that they're all currently under investigation. The second thing you do in science class is discuss how to use the scientific method. How observations become theories, and what we're being taught is the thory that has floated to the top of the pile. What has allowed it do do this is experimentation. Experimentation affects only scientific theories, ones that can, in principle, be proved wrong. No experiment can prove or disprove that a higher power "set things into motion". This means that ID isn't a scientific theory, and belongs in a discussion of cultural influences, not scientific ones.
You've made a good point that a discussion of historical events should include the total cultural context in which they occurred. That takes care of history class. In science class, however, we're not concerned about cultural context.
It's not considered important to mention in a discussion of how a nuclear reactor works that we were the ones who developed the science only because our research program received a kick in the pants from the scientists, mostly German Jews, who fled their home country.
I agree with you that the removal of happenings from their cultural context is terrible, and that the removal of mention of religion isn't what educators should be doing. However, when the student are in science class, they should be learning about science.
Just about every statement presented as fact in a high school biology text book is actually under investigation. Things are presented as fact because it's not the place of high school biology to present all the nuances of current scientific thought. You have to take it in stages. Everyone should know the germ theory of disease, and that a cell is the basic unit of life. Leave nuances such as viruses and prions for a later date or for interested students. You teach people how to think, and how to use the scientific method. One of the key principles of any theory is that it is must be, in principle, falsifiable. Evolution is, in principle, falsifiable, because you could do an experiment asking, for example, "does an organism evolve to be "fit" for its niche, or do the organisms remain unchanging, only proliferating if the happen upon a niche that happens to be compatible with them?" The outcome of the experiment would either show that organisms don't change, or that they actually do adapt to their surroundings. Since you can do the experiment, in theory, evolution meets the criteria for a scientific theory.
Is ID falsifiable? Can you do an experiment that proves that some higher power didn't "set things into motion"? You can't do that any more than you can prove or disprove the existence of a higher power. You can't do the experiment, therefore it's not a scientific theory. Therefore, it belongs in a discussion of cultural influences, not scientific ones.
ID is just fancy footwork by conservatives and neoluddites to try to sneak discussion of religious beliefs into science class. Should it be discussed? Sure, but science class is for science. It's for discussion of the best theories we currently have. In the pitifully small amount of time you have left after teaching the facts, as we now know them, you can discuss exceptions and nuances such as gaps in the fossil record. Ideally, you'd wrap everything in a statistical treatment, so that you could assign probabilities to every theory from "humans evolved from slime" to "god created us yesterday" and score them according to likelihood, but there simply isn't time, and statistics aren't covered well enough in high school anyways.
I'll use someone else's words (from the jacket of Dawkin's "The Blind Watchmaker"): Of course, the book from which this quote was taken also does a much better job of refuting the metaphor than the people who replied to you.
The Kansas board of education is the one that made the famous ill-fated decision. The article we're discussing is about a decision made in Pennsylvania.
Fundamentalism is not limited to the deep south!
It's well-established that the chance to vote on gay marriage and abortion amendments is what brought out the midwestern voters, who are the ones responsible for this second, ill-fated term.
So don't try to pin this on the south! We might be called the "bible belt", but fundamentalism runs strong throughout this country.
The details, as usual for press releases, are kinda lacking. What protein are they talking about? A transcript of an as yet unidentified ORF? Has anyone been been able to find this in the primary literature? There's no Ben Wu or Eric Ting listed on pubmed.
That would be crude. It would also be rude, not to mention lewd. Hey, don't be a prude, do it dude!
Makes perfect sense to me! Get with the program, gramps!
You know, having an ad filter so agressive that it blocks legitimate pages doesn't make you cool. Adding doubleclick to your hosts file is a crude hack. Would you accept a spamfilter which gave you a 1% false positive rate, and never changed no matter how many emails you received? Face it, using the hosts file is a crude hack. We need more adaptable solutions, but for now, Adblock is clearly the best. What we really need is for adversisers to not drive us to such ends.
$0.02
I don't block adsense, appropriately placed banners, most other neutrally colored, non-flashing, moving or otherwise distracting ads. However, somewhere between the data leaving your server and rendering on my machine, it ceases to become yours and becomes mine. I have every right to determine how something displays on my screen, just as you have every right to choose to serve the content or not.