You know you probably agree with the other poster right? He didn't ask for atheism to be taught in science classes, and most secularists would object to any statement in science classes promoting atheism beyond "The existence or non-existence of a generic god is not presently falsifiable, as such no evidence establishing the claims that a generic god exists or does not exist can be scientifically demonstrated at this time".
Yes because what matters is what is written on a piece of paper and not how things work in practice. The worlds republics and constitutional monarchies both have issues, but I will take a paper thin veneer of feudalism the UK has, something which would vanish the second someone actually tried to apply it, to the corporatist state the US has become with massive legalised bribery.
And here is your problem. Nothing meets your falsifiability criterion. Young Earth Creationism is demonstrably falsifiable. It claims the Earth is 6000 years old and we have loads of evidence that it is over 10,000. Your falsifiability criterion is specifically designed to ignore advances in the scientific epistemology since Quine so that you can shill for the fossil fuel industry.
Well we can start with opertunity costs. Many of our smartest minds are directed not towards determining what the best allocation of resources is 6-12 months / 2 years / etc. down the line, but how best to use priviledged access to the stock market to make a thousandth of a penny on over a microsecond.
If I present to you two pills. Both have been exposed to ebola but one has been put into a chamber which is linked to a computer. 97% of the time when I hit the enter key on the computer the chamber is flooded with gamma radiation killing every living thing in there. I hit the enter key, remove the pill and give both to you. I now through some form of compulsion require you to take one of the pills. Which one are you going to take?
There are lots of problems with your question. A big one is that person 1 is a logical contradiction and cannot exist. It is not possible to 'believe in' evolution any more than it is to believe in the hypothesis that the historical Jesus drank wine. Jesus drank wine is very likely to be true given the culture he existed in and there is evidence to suggest as much. There is no faith or trust involved here, it is a descriptive statement. Institutions, people, articles of faith, statements with spiritual components, these are things you believe in. I believe in my family. I believe in western democratic institutions, at least compared with the alternatives. I believe in the scientific establishment, again at least compared with the alternatives. I believe that the modern synthesis of the theory of evolution is the best explanation for the observations of the natural world that we have. I don't believe in evolution, evolution isn't the correct kind of noun for someone to believe in. A person who 'believes in evolution' is a square circle or a married bachelor. So if my only options are 1 and 2, I will take 2 because 1 doesn't exist.
The normative component of your question is a silly strawman, to see how it is a silly strawman work out why this characature of religious folk is stupid, then apply the same reasoning to your person 1: 2. Good party-line believer who recites a firm belief in YHWH but has shaky hands.. but who cares, after all your brain is just material and your spirit is eternal, so why should it matter? Don't you BELIEVE in YHWH?
See how stupid that is? See why it is stupid. Well now you know why your question is stupid. I don't think religious people are stupid, I think they are wrong about one very specific part of their belief system. I do however think your arguments are weak and that it is best to engage people with an open mind and as much respect as practical, especiallly if you are looking to convince them. In this regard your efforts here have failed utterly.
There are experts on various scriptures, they are things like academic historians, philosophers, scholars in theology. Of course most of them say that the widely held interpretations of those holy books are questionable.
You can. For me the primitives are a pain to work with compared with matplotlib. Not that anything I've used has good 2D primitives for plotting, just gradations of less crappy.
Sorry but I use both R and python in my work as a biomechanist and while I love working with python and hate working in R, R is not only less verbose for this task, but it is more consistent, intuitive and better documented. Very few languages beat python for simple, easy to read code, but it is not up to the task of doing general purpose statistics. To see why this is the case consider a problem with that blog post. All the diagnostic plots I need to do to check the regression are missing, no qq, no cook's, not even something simple like fitted vs. residual. Now consider what happens when I notice that while the fit is decent the residuals depend on what subject I'm looking at and I need to vary the error term. Or need to switch to a mixed effects model because there is clearly a dependence on the intercept by subject. Seriously when i say I hate R, I mean it. The code is ugly, it can be hard to read and woe betide the poor git who makes the mistake of needing a plot more complicated that something lattice can do. It is still better than python for statistics.
I'm opposed to the death penalty on pragmatic grounds and I agree it is basically classist and racist as applied, but your opening argument is just daft. Why? Well you said:
"If it is illegal to kill, it should be for the state as well"
The same argument works for:
"If it is illegal to restrict someones freedom of movement, it should be for the state as well" "If it is illegal to take money from someone, it should be for the state as well.
Your argument suggests prison and fines shouldn't be possible. Part of the point of having a criminal justice system is to provide a careful way for the state to violate certain rights of those people who have failed to respect the rights of others for reasons including deterence, rehabilitation, punishment, recompense and prevention. The reason to be opposed to the death penalty is that it sucks for many those things.
I don't disagree with your summary, I'd say the comparative peace of the C20th and C21st are a result of nuclear weapons and perhaps the comparatively large number of democratic states which are not in the habit of going to war with one another. The US is more like the old greek democracies than the Romans in their later imperial days, the Mongols or the British. But the AC I replied to is still wrong in their use of dates and in their interpretation of the idea of the Pax Americana.
You do realise that the Pax Americana is typically held to have started in 1945 right, with a few (but not many) historians arguing for 1918. And it isn't a statement about freedom but about the comparative absence of violence.
British living in the US and I cant drive. Sure our rail and public transport system sucks compared with the rest of Europe. It is still way, way, way, way, way better than the crap that passes for public transport in the US, even in the big cities.
The tradition is you make an accusation after you have evidence, not before so you get sued and can go hunting through someones correspondences looking for muck to rake. If there is evidence that the emails not being released here are relevant to some ongoing legal action then you might have a point, but there is precisely no evidence Mann has done anything other than do a PCA in a way which might have introduced some ambiguity. This was corrected in numerous later publications which validated his findings. If you suggest I'm a murderer with no evidence then you may find yourself with a lawsuit and you can be sure I'm not going to let someone who throws around frivilous accusations have access to my correspondences without a court mandate.
It's almost as though theorists saying something is so isn't enough to convince engineers and experimentalists. This clear breach of the scientific method, where whatever theorists say must be so and experimentalists have to live with it whatever they mesure, has gone unpunished. Until this study we didn't know that this is why birds do this. Even after this study we don't know if this is why birds do this (the energetics could be a co-incidence). You sir, are an insufficiently skeptical moron.
Are some conferences in physics, maths and astronomy like that, sure. They tend to be the big, high impact ones, which I usually skip back when I worked in physics. If I wanted to read someone's paper, I would just read their bloody paper. I go to conferences to hear what people are working on now, where they are and how I can wiggle my way onto their grants and papers by providing analysis and collaborating. There are lots of conferences in physics like that, even if they tend to be the smaller ones.
Not to mention that this is a completely bullshit attitude to take to oral presentations. I often present preliminary data at conferences, part of the point of these things is to get feedback from colleagues about things like what variables might explain the results seen and to search for collaborators who have the expertise to help you pin down your result precisely. Most talks I go to are "I collected this data to test X, I saw Y, X either can or cannot explain Y but Z definitely can, comments?". The exception is some engineering conferences where you are presenting finished work and it is a peer reviewed paper which other can cite, then you should know your shit.
I agree this is subjective, and I agree this is a horses for courses situation. But MATLAB isn't designed for abstract numerical computing, it is designed for linear algebra. If you have a task which you know can be reduced entirely (or at least almost entirely) to linear algebra (like a prototype neural network training scheme I was looking at a while back in MATLAB), then sure I'd say I find MATLAB's syntax a bit easier to work with. But if we are talking general numerical computing, or numerical computing involving a large chunk of code that needs to be properly organised then I think python's (with numpy and scipy) features wins out. Where exactly that line is depends.
Re:What is the added value over Python?
on
GNU Octave Gets a GUI
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· Score: 5, Informative
MATLAB compatibility. From my experience that is just about it, both are pretty feature complete but as Octave basically copies MATLAB warts and all so I don't know why anyone would use it if they knew other nicer programming languages. And if you have access to MATLAB and use it every day then MATLAB is just way faster than Octave (or at least was last time I used it).
Being a copy of MATLAB is really useful though, and Octave serves a role there. I code primarily in python (or C/C++) for work, but most of my colleagues use MATLAB. The Linux MATLAB client is crap and a pain to install and keep working, but Octave is one apt-get away and usually does the trick when I need to run my colleagues scripts or write something for them. It has a permanent spot on my hard drive for that.
I see. Perhaps I should be clear then, I don't consider anyone to be in a privileged position when it comes to art, I consider the entire idea to be absurd. Art is a label of convenience, nothing more and while having operating descriptive definitions of art is useful, normative ideas about art (the 'moral value' of art for example), are unhelpful. So, when someone criticises science fiction, or comic books, or video games, or interactive stories, or children's literature, or modern art, or any of the myriad of things people love to criticise and claim are not art I will generally take the most belligerent position possible in opposition to them, asserting that while I don't think there is a standard, if we are going to impose an arbitrary one I chose the one which undermines their pet genre, in the case of people criticising science fiction this is generally the 'high art - low art' types who think that dropping out of a 3 year college degree in ancient who-gives-a-fuck and media studies gives them a deep insight into the world because they spent all their time playing in a boring alternative band and pretending that impenetrable bullshit is 'really deep' and that they are better than the people whose study actually makes a material difference to the world because those people "just don't get it". It isn't that I think this is a good standard, no standard is good, they are all arbitrary. I pick this one when someone else implies there is a standard to piss those people off and force them to defend their arbitrary bullshit. If you agree there is no standard, that it is all subjective and that people who like the My Little Pony theme song are no better or worse than people who like Chopin then we're all cool.
I'm sorry I cant follow what you are saying. I never said they weren't just regular people. I said they had a better understanding of nature than your average artist. Want grab 10 random artists, 10 random sci-fi authors and administer a physics pop quiz and see who does better?
I'm happy to listen to you, and if you have books for me to read all the better. I said art was good for generating ideas. I said being receptive to those ideas was open minded. I never said you had to accept them or, upon proper reflection, think they are of any merit.
"no, that's not true at all." Below I suggest the following experiment: If we selected 20 artists at random, and 20 science fiction writers and asked them "What is the ideal gas law?", which group do you think will score higher.
He is right, a pithy quote from a book doesn't necessarily apply. Of course the question of if it applies depends on a reasonably deep understanding of the text, the historical parallels it is evoking and a basic familiarity with the literary tropes being employed. I was pointing out that the sentiment had some pedigree, and wasn't simply a random quote from some book.
Slashdot Mirror
You know you probably agree with the other poster right? He didn't ask for atheism to be taught in science classes, and most secularists would object to any statement in science classes promoting atheism beyond "The existence or non-existence of a generic god is not presently falsifiable, as such no evidence establishing the claims that a generic god exists or does not exist can be scientifically demonstrated at this time".
Yes because what matters is what is written on a piece of paper and not how things work in practice. The worlds republics and constitutional monarchies both have issues, but I will take a paper thin veneer of feudalism the UK has, something which would vanish the second someone actually tried to apply it, to the corporatist state the US has become with massive legalised bribery.
And here is your problem. Nothing meets your falsifiability criterion. Young Earth Creationism is demonstrably falsifiable. It claims the Earth is 6000 years old and we have loads of evidence that it is over 10,000. Your falsifiability criterion is specifically designed to ignore advances in the scientific epistemology since Quine so that you can shill for the fossil fuel industry.
Well we can start with opertunity costs. Many of our smartest minds are directed not towards determining what the best allocation of resources is 6-12 months / 2 years / etc. down the line, but how best to use priviledged access to the stock market to make a thousandth of a penny on over a microsecond.
If I present to you two pills. Both have been exposed to ebola but one has been put into a chamber which is linked to a computer. 97% of the time when I hit the enter key on the computer the chamber is flooded with gamma radiation killing every living thing in there. I hit the enter key, remove the pill and give both to you. I now through some form of compulsion require you to take one of the pills. Which one are you going to take?
There are lots of problems with your question. A big one is that person 1 is a logical contradiction and cannot exist. It is not possible to 'believe in' evolution any more than it is to believe in the hypothesis that the historical Jesus drank wine. Jesus drank wine is very likely to be true given the culture he existed in and there is evidence to suggest as much. There is no faith or trust involved here, it is a descriptive statement. Institutions, people, articles of faith, statements with spiritual components, these are things you believe in. I believe in my family. I believe in western democratic institutions, at least compared with the alternatives. I believe in the scientific establishment, again at least compared with the alternatives. I believe that the modern synthesis of the theory of evolution is the best explanation for the observations of the natural world that we have. I don't believe in evolution, evolution isn't the correct kind of noun for someone to believe in. A person who 'believes in evolution' is a square circle or a married bachelor. So if my only options are 1 and 2, I will take 2 because 1 doesn't exist.
The normative component of your question is a silly strawman, to see how it is a silly strawman work out why this characature of religious folk is stupid, then apply the same reasoning to your person 1:
2. Good party-line believer who recites a firm belief in YHWH but has shaky hands.. but who cares, after all your brain is just material and your spirit is eternal, so why should it matter? Don't you BELIEVE in YHWH?
See how stupid that is? See why it is stupid. Well now you know why your question is stupid. I don't think religious people are stupid, I think they are wrong about one very specific part of their belief system. I do however think your arguments are weak and that it is best to engage people with an open mind and as much respect as practical, especiallly if you are looking to convince them. In this regard your efforts here have failed utterly.
There are experts on various scriptures, they are things like academic historians, philosophers, scholars in theology. Of course most of them say that the widely held interpretations of those holy books are questionable.
You can. For me the primitives are a pain to work with compared with matplotlib. Not that anything I've used has good 2D primitives for plotting, just gradations of less crappy.
Sorry but I use both R and python in my work as a biomechanist and while I love working with python and hate working in R, R is not only less verbose for this task, but it is more consistent, intuitive and better documented. Very few languages beat python for simple, easy to read code, but it is not up to the task of doing general purpose statistics. To see why this is the case consider a problem with that blog post. All the diagnostic plots I need to do to check the regression are missing, no qq, no cook's, not even something simple like fitted vs. residual. Now consider what happens when I notice that while the fit is decent the residuals depend on what subject I'm looking at and I need to vary the error term. Or need to switch to a mixed effects model because there is clearly a dependence on the intercept by subject.
Seriously when i say I hate R, I mean it. The code is ugly, it can be hard to read and woe betide the poor git who makes the mistake of needing a plot more complicated that something lattice can do. It is still better than python for statistics.
I'm opposed to the death penalty on pragmatic grounds and I agree it is basically classist and racist as applied, but your opening argument is just daft. Why? Well you said:
"If it is illegal to kill, it should be for the state as well"
The same argument works for:
"If it is illegal to restrict someones freedom of movement, it should be for the state as well"
"If it is illegal to take money from someone, it should be for the state as well.
Your argument suggests prison and fines shouldn't be possible. Part of the point of having a criminal justice system is to provide a careful way for the state to violate certain rights of those people who have failed to respect the rights of others for reasons including deterence, rehabilitation, punishment, recompense and prevention. The reason to be opposed to the death penalty is that it sucks for many those things.
I don't disagree with your summary, I'd say the comparative peace of the C20th and C21st are a result of nuclear weapons and perhaps the comparatively large number of democratic states which are not in the habit of going to war with one another. The US is more like the old greek democracies than the Romans in their later imperial days, the Mongols or the British. But the AC I replied to is still wrong in their use of dates and in their interpretation of the idea of the Pax Americana.
You do realise that the Pax Americana is typically held to have started in 1945 right, with a few (but not many) historians arguing for 1918. And it isn't a statement about freedom but about the comparative absence of violence.
Great, which journal is it in? And why do you think this is relevant?
British living in the US and I cant drive. Sure our rail and public transport system sucks compared with the rest of Europe. It is still way, way, way, way, way better than the crap that passes for public transport in the US, even in the big cities.
The tradition is you make an accusation after you have evidence, not before so you get sued and can go hunting through someones correspondences looking for muck to rake. If there is evidence that the emails not being released here are relevant to some ongoing legal action then you might have a point, but there is precisely no evidence Mann has done anything other than do a PCA in a way which might have introduced some ambiguity. This was corrected in numerous later publications which validated his findings. If you suggest I'm a murderer with no evidence then you may find yourself with a lawsuit and you can be sure I'm not going to let someone who throws around frivilous accusations have access to my correspondences without a court mandate.
Credit reporting agencies aren't about reporting credit, they are gangs who job it is to record which of the peons isn't being compliant.
For fixed wing aircraft, yes. For birds in the specific context of analysing the flap phasing within the V, not so much.
It's almost as though theorists saying something is so isn't enough to convince engineers and experimentalists. This clear breach of the scientific method, where whatever theorists say must be so and experimentalists have to live with it whatever they mesure, has gone unpunished. Until this study we didn't know that this is why birds do this. Even after this study we don't know if this is why birds do this (the energetics could be a co-incidence). You sir, are an insufficiently skeptical moron.
Are some conferences in physics, maths and astronomy like that, sure. They tend to be the big, high impact ones, which I usually skip back when I worked in physics. If I wanted to read someone's paper, I would just read their bloody paper. I go to conferences to hear what people are working on now, where they are and how I can wiggle my way onto their grants and papers by providing analysis and collaborating. There are lots of conferences in physics like that, even if they tend to be the smaller ones.
Not to mention that this is a completely bullshit attitude to take to oral presentations. I often present preliminary data at conferences, part of the point of these things is to get feedback from colleagues about things like what variables might explain the results seen and to search for collaborators who have the expertise to help you pin down your result precisely. Most talks I go to are "I collected this data to test X, I saw Y, X either can or cannot explain Y but Z definitely can, comments?".
The exception is some engineering conferences where you are presenting finished work and it is a peer reviewed paper which other can cite, then you should know your shit.
I agree this is subjective, and I agree this is a horses for courses situation. But MATLAB isn't designed for abstract numerical computing, it is designed for linear algebra. If you have a task which you know can be reduced entirely (or at least almost entirely) to linear algebra (like a prototype neural network training scheme I was looking at a while back in MATLAB), then sure I'd say I find MATLAB's syntax a bit easier to work with. But if we are talking general numerical computing, or numerical computing involving a large chunk of code that needs to be properly organised then I think python's (with numpy and scipy) features wins out. Where exactly that line is depends.
MATLAB compatibility. From my experience that is just about it, both are pretty feature complete but as Octave basically copies MATLAB warts and all so I don't know why anyone would use it if they knew other nicer programming languages. And if you have access to MATLAB and use it every day then MATLAB is just way faster than Octave (or at least was last time I used it).
Being a copy of MATLAB is really useful though, and Octave serves a role there. I code primarily in python (or C/C++) for work, but most of my colleagues use MATLAB. The Linux MATLAB client is crap and a pain to install and keep working, but Octave is one apt-get away and usually does the trick when I need to run my colleagues scripts or write something for them. It has a permanent spot on my hard drive for that.
I see. Perhaps I should be clear then, I don't consider anyone to be in a privileged position when it comes to art, I consider the entire idea to be absurd. Art is a label of convenience, nothing more and while having operating descriptive definitions of art is useful, normative ideas about art (the 'moral value' of art for example), are unhelpful. So, when someone criticises science fiction, or comic books, or video games, or interactive stories, or children's literature, or modern art, or any of the myriad of things people love to criticise and claim are not art I will generally take the most belligerent position possible in opposition to them, asserting that while I don't think there is a standard, if we are going to impose an arbitrary one I chose the one which undermines their pet genre, in the case of people criticising science fiction this is generally the 'high art - low art' types who think that dropping out of a 3 year college degree in ancient who-gives-a-fuck and media studies gives them a deep insight into the world because they spent all their time playing in a boring alternative band and pretending that impenetrable bullshit is 'really deep' and that they are better than the people whose study actually makes a material difference to the world because those people "just don't get it".
It isn't that I think this is a good standard, no standard is good, they are all arbitrary. I pick this one when someone else implies there is a standard to piss those people off and force them to defend their arbitrary bullshit. If you agree there is no standard, that it is all subjective and that people who like the My Little Pony theme song are no better or worse than people who like Chopin then we're all cool.
I'm sorry I cant follow what you are saying. I never said they weren't just regular people. I said they had a better understanding of nature than your average artist. Want grab 10 random artists, 10 random sci-fi authors and administer a physics pop quiz and see who does better?
I'm happy to listen to you, and if you have books for me to read all the better. I said art was good for generating ideas. I said being receptive to those ideas was open minded. I never said you had to accept them or, upon proper reflection, think they are of any merit.
"no, that's not true at all."
Below I suggest the following experiment:
If we selected 20 artists at random, and 20 science fiction writers and asked them "What is the ideal gas law?", which group do you think will score higher.
He is right, a pithy quote from a book doesn't necessarily apply. Of course the question of if it applies depends on a reasonably deep understanding of the text, the historical parallels it is evoking and a basic familiarity with the literary tropes being employed. I was pointing out that the sentiment had some pedigree, and wasn't simply a random quote from some book.