"Bilateral symmetry is great for this: You have an advantage over predators since it's equally likely you'll go one way vs. the other, rather than having an obvious preference for, say, left turns."
I'm pretty sure that it's very common for prey animals like fish to actually prefer turning one direction over the other to escape and that many predators have actually adapted to this behavior, preferring to strike from a position where the prey animal will flee closer to them.
"The brain is rather bilaterally symmetric itself, and quite redundant. You might have noticed the slot in the middle?"
The brain is actually divided into two parts doing different kinds of work for the sake of efficiency. Experiments have shown that doing so results in a quicker response for prey animals reacting to danger. When the brain halves are not so specialized/divided the prey animal spends far more time frozen in position when confronted by danger.
Interestingly the same design also causes the directional preference in fleeing behavior, meaning that it's better for survival to be fast rather than random.
Sometimes we rag on bad articles here and say things like "I go to/. for the comments" but as someone who is trying to kick video game addiction I found the article quite fascinating and even handed, the plasticity of our minds is quite amazing.
So punishing students for cheating and giving the next batch fair warning (due to the rampant cheating the previous year) is being a douche?
So a student facing a penalty for not doing the required work in order to take an exam is a douche move? Granted the description is theatrical but it's not like the stated policy implied the exam would ever be accepted in the first place.
At the same time when you accidentally rewrite parts of your lore to make it fit your new expansion it only emphasizes some of the lack of thought that goes into the writing.
"it trains your mind to be led by something other than your mind itself."
Total BS. TV does not do this any more than any other kind of media does.
Say someone is presenting an argument about taxation. As long as the content of the argument is the same it doesn't matter whether or not it's in book form, TV form, radio form, or in-person form. There is nothing intrinsically evil about TV in particular that would turn you stupid by listening and watching him because his argument has the same substance no matter where it happens to be.
No, there is nothing wrong with any particular medium of communication. When people want to they argue in any medium and it has always been up to the observer to seek the truth. After all (no disrespect intended) both Glenn Beck and Clifford Stoll want *you* to believer *their* point of view when you encounter their arguments. They want your mind, as you put it, to be led by theirs, and no matter what medium they chose you are completely free to disregard anything they say if you don't like it.
As a pro-lifer I'd just like to chime in that I didn't look at the word cloning and then make up my mind to outlaw it.
While I'm far more socially conservative.than most people here for sure I like doing research into how this kind of thing is done before I reach any kind of moral decision, especially in the complicated world of stem cells and stem cell research.
Your example from the Bible is fallacious because nowhere in the Bible (your passage included) does it promise that every believer will be able to perform miracles let alone some percentage of believers from every human generation. In fact many believers consider miracles to be a thing entirely of the past reserved only for the special instances already mentioned in the Bible.
Moreover, you can't possibly disprove those miracles unless you can prove that their result never happened *historically* (e.g. prove that Jesus never rose from the dead) because of their nature as one-shot miracles defying the scientific method. Even then the most difficult stories to justify are often considered allegorical (though you can also take the Creationist approach and just deny the modern understanding of history).
The Bible, as many believers believe it, is extremely slippery. It goes so far as to say that God resists being tested in this manner. If you're going to disprove it you're going to have to work a lot harder than the cursory work you did.
Your Daoist argument also has a logical hole: perhaps what you thought you were supposed to do wasn't what you were supposed to do. Chances are in Daoism there's no other way to know for certain what you're supposed to do than if you achieve that power, and so the circle is closed and you can't disprove it with the method you described.
Except that while TFA is simply obvious hindsight science (with an unimpressive graph) the site you linked to is taking seriously somone managing web crawling bots who predictis some kind of vague doomsday in ~72 hours (such that the manager has been saying goodbye to friends), and who also predicted that summer 2010 there would be floods of US refugees heading to Canada and has made many such (failed) predictions repeatedly.
Real internet crackpots. Almost as funny as the guys trying to correlate random number generators to real world events and the other dude who claimed the earth was hollow and had a neutron star inside it.
There's a bit of a problem with that though. For instance it gets really tiring arguing with conspiracy theorists because most people don't have the expertise to argue that it's completely impossible for evil US government overlords to have destroyed their own world trade center for nefarious purposes. The average person doesn't have the expertise to argue about melting point this, temperature of that, or explain exactly how the conspiracy theorist's "common sense" logic is misapplied.
In such cases argument from authority provides two very real and useful shortcuts. It helps you to identify the idiots expounding these theories (since they're often consistently unreliable) as well as the experts who don't always have the time to respond to every nutcase (since they're often consistently reliable).
Obviously argument from authority is not always accurate and is never sound in a strict logical sense, but the fact is that it's something that's impossible for us to completely live without in the day to day.
Current world population is 6.7 billion. You're several zeroes off, every time I read 1 trillion people as some kind of sustainable number I uncomfortably winced.
Yeah, webassign was required for my statistics class for all homework and all exams. When your instructor basically relies on webassign to grade all your work like mine did there is nothing you can torrent that will help you, you have no option but to pay.
Except that these attacks can be orchestrated by one person who gave money to some goon with a large botnet for loan, while protests are the physical presences of many people gathered at a location to fight for a cause.
Because of this these have little power. They are not personal enough to be meaningful and don't involve the movement or commitment of enough outraged individuals.
It's too bad angry sheep modded you up. The GP never said protests inspired by MLK were legal, in fact, he stated the opposite. But if you can't tell the difference between the sit-ins of the civil rights era and revenge DDOS ATTACKS I'm not sure you really are one to talk about anything, especially history.
I think the best idea for establishing a neutral body to arbitrate these sorts of things and be free of human frailties would be some kind of robots that would do everything for us and thus fully establish our future utopian society.
I hated greens as a kid. I would only eat 4-5 peas at a meal, more would make me gag. As I've gotten older they've gotten a lot more tolerable than they used to be. I'm trying my best to eat healthier but it cab be hard to undo 16 years of habits...
One interesting factoid I learned related to this is that in obscure amazonian tribes the people's immune systems are hyperactivated compared to ours. This isn't all too surprising considering how clean your average civilized household is compared to the jungle where diseases and parasites of all forms run rampant. So, like your musculature, if your body doesn't use it it won't bother spending the energy in the first place.
See, you -say- you're happy, but then you're not born again in Jesus... which is it?
Snarky comments aside, I don't think sex is the key to happiness. Sure, it's pleasurable, but the idea you can't be happy without it? That's quite a leap. There are many things which can make someone happy in life and many good friendships that someone can have which have nothing to do with sex at all. I know because, well, I've experienced them before.
Everyone (in the US at least) has the constitutional right to pursue happiness as they so choose. You find it hard to believe him, but then do you really know anything about him and what his life is really like?
Maybe you think you do. I, however, just don't buy that.
The thing is, even if a telephone poll can never represent the people who don't like taking telephone polls, is not taking telephone polls really correlated with other opinions, e.g. Obama approval? If it isn't than the difference between poll haters and poll participants will be insignificant. If it is, I'm no statistician, but it might be possible to measure the difference and apply it to a telephone poll.
My guess is that they probably have been doing this already for quite awhile, if it's at all possible.
While I agree that having battle.net still online is great and all, it's anything but cheat free.
If you want to play Starcraft (mostly non-UMS) cheat free you still need to install the iCCup launcher and play there. People still try to cheat but at least there are mods there who handle these things, as opposed to no control and no consequences whatsoever like on battle.net (minus blacklist programs run by hosts).
As for other old Blizzard games I don't know so much about the prevalence of cheating.
Not to mention, have you even watched any part of the single player campaign? Starcraft 2's missions already appear infinitely superior to Brood War's. No longer do you endlessly destroy gigantic, preset computer bases. There are interesting twists and mechanics in every mission. Dialogue trees between missions, and computers with extra data on planets and such fill in on a lot of lore if you so choose. Also, there are upgrades and units you research and build in single player that affect your own campaign, not just that mission.
Single player in Starcraft 2 is simply just going to be better. It's a real campaign. They put real effort into it, which you can see plainly from any single player gameplay video that's on youtube and any interview that you read. Blizzard isn't copping out.
I don't see why a casual player not having a chance against an experienced player is a problem.
I mean, can you imagine someone complaining about American football because they can't pass the ball as well as a pro quarterback?
Moreover, some of what you say is simply untrue. If you follow the Korean scene at all, where Starcraft 1 is played at its highest level, you see just as many macro-oriented large army games, if not more of these, as you see micro-oriented rush attacks. You yourself may lose to rushing all the time, but that's because learning defensive timing is just plain harder than massing up a bunch of units early on and then deciding to attack.
Part of your problem may also be playing opponents of a different skill level. The matchmaking system in SC2 is a lot better than in Warcraft 3. If you aren't a serious player, you'll still end up winning ~50% of your matches for the most part because you'll be playing other non-serious players. Blizzard in fact is currently citing matchmaking in beta for the bottom 3% of players is a problem that they are trying to fix. So Blizzard is concerned with your plight and wants you to have a fair chance at victory should you decide to play the ladder.
Moreover, you don't take into account multiplayer custom maps and mods. These are going to be incredibly, ridiculously fun. Already people are making physics based mods, first person shooters, RPGs, and top down arcade shooters all within the Starcraft 2 engine that can be a part of any custom map that you play. The Starcraft 2 editor is so much more powerful than Warcraft 3's ever was, and if you enjoy programming at all you could easily make some fun stuff on your own if you want.
I don't disagree with your point, but I would quip that macro is not strategy, micro is not execution.
The most commonly accepted definitions by those who follow the scene are: macro is usually execution of strategy. E.g. building units, buildings, and upgrades at the right timings to execute your overall strategy. Micro is execution of tactics, tactics being methods of prolonging the life or increasing the effectiveness of your army.
I say this just to avoid confusion, because otherwise all the definitions meld together and become detrimental to any sort of conversation about the game and how you play it.
I have looked up where it was that Blizzard stated that the 2nd and 3rd titles would also be full-priced. I could not find anything anywhere stating that they will charge you $60 for each expansion, or price each expansion as a complete game unto itself.
As it is the pricing for the future expansions is undecided, no one knows what they will cost. The whole "WHY AM I PAYING $180 FOR ONE GAME" panic is just that, a panic caused by nothing more than rumor and misinterpretation.
Finally, each expansion will contain new multiplayer units, or at least bring something new to multiplayer. That will be reason enough for many people to buy the expansions.
It is primarily to test their competitive multiplayer for the most hardcore of players, and does not provide you with either the single player experience or the custom map experience.
Already players have been making first person shooter mods, rpg mods, kart racing mods,physics based mods, even mods which mimic Resident Evil. When you buy SC2 for $60, you're not just buying SC2. You're also buying access to everything that map makers create, which can easily include not just the aforementioned genres but also arcade classics like top-down shooters.
SC2 has the most powerful editor yet for a Blizzard game. I don't think you should write off the game so easily even if you dislike the "normal" game. Indeed, if you like programming at all you could probably make some really cool stuff yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
"Bilateral symmetry is great for this: You have an advantage over predators since it's equally likely you'll go one way vs. the other, rather than having an obvious preference for, say, left turns."
I'm pretty sure that it's very common for prey animals like fish to actually prefer turning one direction over the other to escape and that many predators have actually adapted to this behavior, preferring to strike from a position where the prey animal will flee closer to them.
"The brain is rather bilaterally symmetric itself, and quite redundant. You might have noticed the slot in the middle?"
The brain is actually divided into two parts doing different kinds of work for the sake of efficiency. Experiments have shown that doing so results in a quicker response for prey animals reacting to danger. When the brain halves are not so specialized/divided the prey animal spends far more time frozen in position when confronted by danger.
Interestingly the same design also causes the directional preference in fleeing behavior, meaning that it's better for survival to be fast rather than random.
Sometimes we rag on bad articles here and say things like "I go to /. for the comments" but as someone who is trying to kick video game addiction I found the article quite fascinating and even handed, the plasticity of our minds is quite amazing.
So punishing students for cheating and giving the next batch fair warning (due to the rampant cheating the previous year) is being a douche?
So a student facing a penalty for not doing the required work in order to take an exam is a douche move? Granted the description is theatrical but it's not like the stated policy implied the exam would ever be accepted in the first place.
At the same time when you accidentally rewrite parts of your lore to make it fit your new expansion it only emphasizes some of the lack of thought that goes into the writing.
"it trains your mind to be led by something other than your mind itself."
Total BS. TV does not do this any more than any other kind of media does.
Say someone is presenting an argument about taxation. As long as the content of the argument is the same it doesn't matter whether or not it's in book form, TV form, radio form, or in-person form. There is nothing intrinsically evil about TV in particular that would turn you stupid by listening and watching him because his argument has the same substance no matter where it happens to be.
No, there is nothing wrong with any particular medium of communication. When people want to they argue in any medium and it has always been up to the observer to seek the truth. After all (no disrespect intended) both Glenn Beck and Clifford Stoll want *you* to believer *their* point of view when you encounter their arguments. They want your mind, as you put it, to be led by theirs, and no matter what medium they chose you are completely free to disregard anything they say if you don't like it.
As a pro-lifer I'd just like to chime in that I didn't look at the word cloning and then make up my mind to outlaw it.
While I'm far more socially conservative.than most people here for sure I like doing research into how this kind of thing is done before I reach any kind of moral decision, especially in the complicated world of stem cells and stem cell research.
Your example from the Bible is fallacious because nowhere in the Bible (your passage included) does it promise that every believer will be able to perform miracles let alone some percentage of believers from every human generation. In fact many believers consider miracles to be a thing entirely of the past reserved only for the special instances already mentioned in the Bible.
Moreover, you can't possibly disprove those miracles unless you can prove that their result never happened *historically* (e.g. prove that Jesus never rose from the dead) because of their nature as one-shot miracles defying the scientific method. Even then the most difficult stories to justify are often considered allegorical (though you can also take the Creationist approach and just deny the modern understanding of history).
The Bible, as many believers believe it, is extremely slippery. It goes so far as to say that God resists being tested in this manner. If you're going to disprove it you're going to have to work a lot harder than the cursory work you did.
Your Daoist argument also has a logical hole: perhaps what you thought you were supposed to do wasn't what you were supposed to do. Chances are in Daoism there's no other way to know for certain what you're supposed to do than if you achieve that power, and so the circle is closed and you can't disprove it with the method you described.
Except that while TFA is simply obvious hindsight science (with an unimpressive graph) the site you linked to is taking seriously somone managing web crawling bots who predictis some kind of vague doomsday in ~72 hours (such that the manager has been saying goodbye to friends), and who also predicted that summer 2010 there would be floods of US refugees heading to Canada and has made many such (failed) predictions repeatedly.
Real internet crackpots. Almost as funny as the guys trying to correlate random number generators to real world events and the other dude who claimed the earth was hollow and had a neutron star inside it.
There's a bit of a problem with that though. For instance it gets really tiring arguing with conspiracy theorists because most people don't have the expertise to argue that it's completely impossible for evil US government overlords to have destroyed their own world trade center for nefarious purposes. The average person doesn't have the expertise to argue about melting point this, temperature of that, or explain exactly how the conspiracy theorist's "common sense" logic is misapplied.
In such cases argument from authority provides two very real and useful shortcuts. It helps you to identify the idiots expounding these theories (since they're often consistently unreliable) as well as the experts who don't always have the time to respond to every nutcase (since they're often consistently reliable).
Obviously argument from authority is not always accurate and is never sound in a strict logical sense, but the fact is that it's something that's impossible for us to completely live without in the day to day.
Current world population is 6.7 billion. You're several zeroes off, every time I read 1 trillion people as some kind of sustainable number I uncomfortably winced.
Yeah, webassign was required for my statistics class for all homework and all exams. When your instructor basically relies on webassign to grade all your work like mine did there is nothing you can torrent that will help you, you have no option but to pay.
Because usually you give further information about the author at the end of an article rather than the beginning. It's common practice.
Except that these attacks can be orchestrated by one person who gave money to some goon with a large botnet for loan, while protests are the physical presences of many people gathered at a location to fight for a cause.
Because of this these have little power. They are not personal enough to be meaningful and don't involve the movement or commitment of enough outraged individuals.
It's too bad angry sheep modded you up. The GP never said protests inspired by MLK were legal, in fact, he stated the opposite. But if you can't tell the difference between the sit-ins of the civil rights era and revenge DDOS ATTACKS I'm not sure you really are one to talk about anything, especially history.
I think the best idea for establishing a neutral body to arbitrate these sorts of things and be free of human frailties would be some kind of robots that would do everything for us and thus fully establish our future utopian society.
I hated greens as a kid. I would only eat 4-5 peas at a meal, more would make me gag. As I've gotten older they've gotten a lot more tolerable than they used to be. I'm trying my best to eat healthier but it cab be hard to undo 16 years of habits...
One interesting factoid I learned related to this is that in obscure amazonian tribes the people's immune systems are hyperactivated compared to ours. This isn't all too surprising considering how clean your average civilized household is compared to the jungle where diseases and parasites of all forms run rampant. So, like your musculature, if your body doesn't use it it won't bother spending the energy in the first place.
See, you -say- you're happy, but then you're not born again in Jesus... which is it?
Snarky comments aside, I don't think sex is the key to happiness. Sure, it's pleasurable, but the idea you can't be happy without it? That's quite a leap. There are many things which can make someone happy in life and many good friendships that someone can have which have nothing to do with sex at all. I know because, well, I've experienced them before.
Everyone (in the US at least) has the constitutional right to pursue happiness as they so choose. You find it hard to believe him, but then do you really know anything about him and what his life is really like?
Maybe you think you do. I, however, just don't buy that.
The thing is, even if a telephone poll can never represent the people who don't like taking telephone polls, is not taking telephone polls really correlated with other opinions, e.g. Obama approval? If it isn't than the difference between poll haters and poll participants will be insignificant. If it is, I'm no statistician, but it might be possible to measure the difference and apply it to a telephone poll.
My guess is that they probably have been doing this already for quite awhile, if it's at all possible.
While I agree that having battle.net still online is great and all, it's anything but cheat free.
If you want to play Starcraft (mostly non-UMS) cheat free you still need to install the iCCup launcher and play there. People still try to cheat but at least there are mods there who handle these things, as opposed to no control and no consequences whatsoever like on battle.net (minus blacklist programs run by hosts).
As for other old Blizzard games I don't know so much about the prevalence of cheating.
Not to mention, have you even watched any part of the single player campaign? Starcraft 2's missions already appear infinitely superior to Brood War's. No longer do you endlessly destroy gigantic, preset computer bases. There are interesting twists and mechanics in every mission. Dialogue trees between missions, and computers with extra data on planets and such fill in on a lot of lore if you so choose. Also, there are upgrades and units you research and build in single player that affect your own campaign, not just that mission.
Single player in Starcraft 2 is simply just going to be better. It's a real campaign. They put real effort into it, which you can see plainly from any single player gameplay video that's on youtube and any interview that you read. Blizzard isn't copping out.
I don't see why a casual player not having a chance against an experienced player is a problem.
I mean, can you imagine someone complaining about American football because they can't pass the ball as well as a pro quarterback?
Moreover, some of what you say is simply untrue. If you follow the Korean scene at all, where Starcraft 1 is played at its highest level, you see just as many macro-oriented large army games, if not more of these, as you see micro-oriented rush attacks. You yourself may lose to rushing all the time, but that's because learning defensive timing is just plain harder than massing up a bunch of units early on and then deciding to attack.
Part of your problem may also be playing opponents of a different skill level. The matchmaking system in SC2 is a lot better than in Warcraft 3. If you aren't a serious player, you'll still end up winning ~50% of your matches for the most part because you'll be playing other non-serious players. Blizzard in fact is currently citing matchmaking in beta for the bottom 3% of players is a problem that they are trying to fix. So Blizzard is concerned with your plight and wants you to have a fair chance at victory should you decide to play the ladder.
Moreover, you don't take into account multiplayer custom maps and mods. These are going to be incredibly, ridiculously fun. Already people are making physics based mods, first person shooters, RPGs, and top down arcade shooters all within the Starcraft 2 engine that can be a part of any custom map that you play. The Starcraft 2 editor is so much more powerful than Warcraft 3's ever was, and if you enjoy programming at all you could easily make some fun stuff on your own if you want.
I don't disagree with your point, but I would quip that macro is not strategy, micro is not execution.
The most commonly accepted definitions by those who follow the scene are: macro is usually execution of strategy. E.g. building units, buildings, and upgrades at the right timings to execute your overall strategy. Micro is execution of tactics, tactics being methods of prolonging the life or increasing the effectiveness of your army.
I say this just to avoid confusion, because otherwise all the definitions meld together and become detrimental to any sort of conversation about the game and how you play it.
I have looked up where it was that Blizzard stated that the 2nd and 3rd titles would also be full-priced. I could not find anything anywhere stating that they will charge you $60 for each expansion, or price each expansion as a complete game unto itself.
As it is the pricing for the future expansions is undecided, no one knows what they will cost. The whole "WHY AM I PAYING $180 FOR ONE GAME" panic is just that, a panic caused by nothing more than rumor and misinterpretation.
Finally, each expansion will contain new multiplayer units, or at least bring something new to multiplayer. That will be reason enough for many people to buy the expansions.
Keep in mind that the beta IS NOT A DEMO.
It is primarily to test their competitive multiplayer for the most hardcore of players, and does not provide you with either the single player experience or the custom map experience.
Already players have been making first person shooter mods, rpg mods, kart racing mods,physics based mods, even mods which mimic Resident Evil. When you buy SC2 for $60, you're not just buying SC2. You're also buying access to everything that map makers create, which can easily include not just the aforementioned genres but also arcade classics like top-down shooters.
SC2 has the most powerful editor yet for a Blizzard game. I don't think you should write off the game so easily even if you dislike the "normal" game. Indeed, if you like programming at all you could probably make some really cool stuff yourself.