I might read the sequels at some point. The machine gun scene was so like a scene from Doom it made me laugh, but otherwise I felt that Sabriel was just a passive character. But I could definitely see potential for interesting further development and Sabriel is still better than most of the fantasy out there.
I read Sabriel. I really don't get what's supposed to be all that good about it. I'm sure the entire book was simply a contrivance to set up a scene in a girl's school where a bunch of people with machine guns mow down hordes of attacking zombies. (They're not called 'zombies' of course, that would give the game away, but a zombie by any other name would smell the same.) That was an entertaining scene, but really not good enough to justify reading an entire book. I suggest reading something a bit more literary instead, the Earthsea books for example.
I was completely unaware of the whole bassist joke thing. Though this story isn't a joke, it's just plain true. I picked up the bass so I could play Joy Division bass lines. I had pretty well mastered them in a few weeks. But Peter Hook's career is still going strong.
You can't override your genes any more than you can override gravity. But genes aren't these super-specific things that serve only one purpose - like making you a couch potato. The behavior of a gene is a function of its environment. Sure, there might be a gene that in a specific environment results in someone being a couch potato. But in a different environment (eg. in a household with no couches, a household where there is peer pressure to go out and exercise, etc.) the same gene might have no such effect. It only makes sense to talk of overriding the gene if you believe some teleological principle that this gene is specifically the the one purpose of making you a couch potato. But any biologist will tell you that this isn't a smart way of looking at genes. A gene is a fuzzy thing, so that while there is no overriding of genes (unless you excise ot or inhibit it with drugs), they are also complex enough not to determine your behavior in a naively simple way. It's this informal talk of a specific gene for X or Y that is harmful, not research that finds a genuine correlation between certain genes and certain behaviour.
Weird! I sold my copy of Led Zep's remasters a week before building the theremin. I'll be disappointed if the version of Whole Lotta Love on there had the theremin on it. I hadn't noticed it. Still, the money I got from selling it went towards this which has some amazing theremin playing. I had no clue I was simply exchanging one theremin track for another!
I used to (attempt to) play bass but I guess I couldn't fit it in around other things, including programming. I have been playing with writing some code to combine my interests but I can't stand using the horrible audio APIs on my PowerBook. I wish I could just pour audio samples into the audio device and be done with it rather than go through hoops to connect this or that object to this or that device. I have code to generate raw samples, convert them to wav, and play them via quicktime, but that way it's no longer interactive...
makes a computer seem very introverted. What's more, if you hook up a scope or measure the magnetic fields around the CPU it looks like it's very busy indeed. It'll certainly run the batteries down faster on a laptop. But it's not exactly very interesting is it?
...I just built myself a theremin based partly on this. It transmits a pair of RF signals at around 1MHz. As you move your hand around it varies the inductance of the coils so that the coils transmit at slightly different frequencies. As a result you get a signal at the average of the two frequencies modulated by the beat frequency. Tune an AM receiver to the average frequency and you get to listen to just the beats. It took a couple of hours to build. (The project I linked to above has an AM receiver built into the circuit but I didn't bother with that as I already had a spare radio.)
As soon as Bush has eliminated every last terrorist on Earth we can declare the War on Terrorism over and have our rights returned to us. Meanwhile the best we can do is grant extreme powers to the government so that we can hasten that day. If these nay-sayers all had their way then the government would be so crippled that this war would be unwinnable and we'll never get our rights back. The people complaining of our loss of rights are the ones who are bringing about their permanent demise.
Way too much! I used to get excited about a 10% speedup. But these days I just can't get excited about it when I know that next year's PC+old code will blow away current PC+optimized code. (Probably because, as everyone knows, time passes faster when you're older.) I'd rather spend time on algorithmic stuff that might make, say, an O(log N) improvement in speed that will continue to pay off more and more over time. But I suppose it's good to know there are young whippersnappers out there prepared to optimize the libraries I may have to use.
...it could be a virus for he human brain. An intelligent alien species could reverse engineer the human brain and try to figure out the right 'buttons' to push to make us engage in various types of behavior. Essentially they'd have to use the fact that the human brain isn't a perfect processing machine. For example there are optical illusions which make us see things that aren't really there at all. Similarly there might be thought illusions that arise the moment we are tricked into thinking about certain things. The 'virus' might look like the most innocuous thing but if it had the right triggers embedded in it then it might make humans perform certain prescribed actions that would look completely irrational to those uninfected.
It's hard to predict the form that such a 'virus' might take. Just making up random stuff off the top of my head: they could leave us a story about such irrelevant subjects like the history of an ancient tribe lost in some desert for 40 years but as a result of reading this story the readers' beheviour might be irrevocably changed so that they are no longer capable of understanding basic biology. You simply wouldn't be able to tell merely by skimming the subject matter as the effect would be embedded within hidden triggers. By leaving enough of these subtle 'viruses' spread out through our culture they could bring our civilization to its knees without us even realizing that we've been the victim of alien attack.
...the crap on your code to get the speed from 1.5 trillion operations per second to 2 trillion. Or if you're smart you can sit on the beach drinking cocktails for 6 months and wait for the next generation of CPUs to come out.
If a task requires N operations then it takes time O(log N) to execute because of Moore's law. It hardly seems worthwhile to make heroic efforts to incrementally optimize your code, especially when there is a pretty clear cap on the maximum possible efficiency you can squeeze out relative to processor speeds.
Here I am, developing software for a living. I know C++ (and all the latest C++ techniques, or so I thought), how to use g++ (and CL) and how to write a Makefile. Collaboration is easy: I share a filesystem and perforce repository with my colleagues. And I talk to them, sometimes using a whiteboard.
But I looked at that web page: Codex, T-SQL, inscrutable jokes about woodpeckers, meta-models, Da Vinci, Biztalk Server 2004, Visio and text whose individual words I understand and yet whose sentences I can't grasp. I must be some kind of dinosaur ('dragon' if you live in Kansas) from an age gone by. Uh...uh...uh...>panic!...I've no clue what they're talking about. Does that mean I'm not collaborating properly? I didn't even realize. This is so awful. What can I do? Obviously just talking to people isn't enough.
People who buy PS's and Xboxes might not be but there's quite a bit of loyalty among Nintendo buyers. This is probably going to be significant when Nintendo release their next round of hardware which I expect to be slightly underspecced compared to the competition. Interestingly Nintendo, unlike Sony and MS, are a games company, and can't afford to burn cash establishing a market. But that's fine, because of their customer loyalty they have an already established market.
ID is a hypothesis and a theory - there is no imcompatibility between these concepts. And I'm not sure what NASA has to do with anything.
As for Creationism being tested and rejected, you're simply playing into the hands of Creationists who'd love people to say their theory is testable, and hence qualifies to be called 'science'.
I have no idea how you define theory. To me it means a body of knowledge, hypotheses, concepts and ideas. Often it's a detailed model or description or a prescription for making predictions though the latter isn't essential. I don't see how ID fails in this respect. It's not a well developed theory, but it does make predictions (eg. if we keep looking we'll find examples of (supposed) irreducible complexity in nature).
the fact that the book used to promote Intelligible Drivel is identical to the book used to promote Creationism...is entirely relevant
You're going to have to explain to me why. Newtonian gravity was influenced by his occult beliefs. I don't care one bit. Similarly I don't care if ID is straight out of the Bible - if it claims to be science what's important is whether or not it's testable, whether we can in fact carry out the required tests, and what the results of those tests are.
If you're going to argue at all you need to argue intelligently. You can't just throw out stuff about applications to biology without acknowledging that modern Creationists make exactly the same sorts of predictions as Evolutionists - that microevolution takes place. And you can't sensibly say things like "ID isn't a theory". Of course it is. Maybe you mean it's not a "falsifiable theory" - in which case you need to say what you mean. Statements like this make you look bad.
What's more, in science it's generally considered to be best to argue for or against something based on its current merits, not on some historical features of the development of a theory. So what if an earlier edition of a book was different? That's like criticising special relativity by finding mistakes in early drafts of Einstein's work. It's irrelevant.
Creationists are making inroads in schools today partly because many vocal supporters of Evolution argue no more cogently than Creationists.
A Christian's beliefs about the mode of creation are a matter of personal conscience
I think Johnson's original definition of consicence still stands today: "the knowledge or faculty by which we judge of the goodness or wickedness of ourselves". So my question is this: what does conscience have to do with the mode of creation of the universe (if indeed it was created)? That's a question for science, not conscience. It is neither good nor wicked to judge something to be true or false according to the evidence which we discover. This isn't a trivial linguistic point: many Christians believe that it is morally wrong to suggest that apes and humans have a common ancestor because it devalues humans (though they do seem to find it acceptable to say they share creator) whereas other people believe what is true is true regardless of apparent moral implications. (And many people will point out that there are no moral implications derivable from facts about nature.)
Einstein was smart enough to label his theories as "theories"
Unfortunately I believe you have made a slight error. Nothing to feel bad about, people make this error all the time and you are one in a long line of people.
"Theory" is used to mean a body of related scientific work - typically work done "on paper" rather than experimental work. People make a distinction between doing "lab work", say, and "theory". When people say "Theory of relativity" there is no implication that this work is tentative and not "established fact". Admittedly, the word "theory" can also be used to mean a tentative hypothesis, and it is even used by physicists in this way, but most physicists are canny enough to distinguish between the two uses of the word "theory". Typically you can tell the difference in context. If a physicsts says "I have a theory that maybe...." then it carries the tentative hypothesis meaning. If the physicist says "I'm teaching the theory of relativity" this semester it carries the meaning of being a body of concepts and formulas that need explaining but that aren't considered tentative.
I know you might find it hard to understand all this but scientists usually don't even have to think to figure out which meaning is intended so I'm sure that with enough practice you can do the same.
It's worth pointing out also that supporters of Creationism make much of this issue and deliberately try to confuse the two meanings of the word. I have always found this bizarre because you can ask any biologist what is meant by the word "theory" in "theory of evolution" and have the issue cleared up in seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
I might read the sequels at some point. The machine gun scene was so like a scene from Doom it made me laugh, but otherwise I felt that Sabriel was just a passive character. But I could definitely see potential for interesting further development and Sabriel is still better than most of the fantasy out there.
I read Sabriel. I really don't get what's supposed to be all that good about it. I'm sure the entire book was simply a contrivance to set up a scene in a girl's school where a bunch of people with machine guns mow down hordes of attacking zombies. (They're not called 'zombies' of course, that would give the game away, but a zombie by any other name would smell the same.) That was an entertaining scene, but really not good enough to justify reading an entire book. I suggest reading something a bit more literary instead, the Earthsea books for example.
I was completely unaware of the whole bassist joke thing. Though this story isn't a joke, it's just plain true. I picked up the bass so I could play Joy Division bass lines. I had pretty well mastered them in a few weeks. But Peter Hook's career is still going strong.
I guess the 'desert tribe' and 'biology' reference was too obscure for some people...
You can't override your genes any more than you can override gravity. But genes aren't these super-specific things that serve only one purpose - like making you a couch potato. The behavior of a gene is a function of its environment. Sure, there might be a gene that in a specific environment results in someone being a couch potato. But in a different environment (eg. in a household with no couches, a household where there is peer pressure to go out and exercise, etc.) the same gene might have no such effect. It only makes sense to talk of overriding the gene if you believe some teleological principle that this gene is specifically the the one purpose of making you a couch potato. But any biologist will tell you that this isn't a smart way of looking at genes. A gene is a fuzzy thing, so that while there is no overriding of genes (unless you excise ot or inhibit it with drugs), they are also complex enough not to determine your behavior in a naively simple way. It's this informal talk of a specific gene for X or Y that is harmful, not research that finds a genuine correlation between certain genes and certain behaviour.
Weird! I sold my copy of Led Zep's remasters a week before building the theremin. I'll be disappointed if the version of Whole Lotta Love on there had the theremin on it. I hadn't noticed it. Still, the money I got from selling it went towards this which has some amazing theremin playing. I had no clue I was simply exchanging one theremin track for another!
I used to (attempt to) play bass but I guess I couldn't fit it in around other things, including programming. I have been playing with writing some code to combine my interests but I can't stand using the horrible audio APIs on my PowerBook. I wish I could just pour audio samples into the audio device and be done with it rather than go through hoops to connect this or that object to this or that device. I have code to generate raw samples, convert them to wav, and play them via quicktime, but that way it's no longer interactive...
makes a computer seem very introverted. What's more, if you hook up a scope or measure the magnetic fields around the CPU it looks like it's very busy indeed. It'll certainly run the batteries down faster on a laptop. But it's not exactly very interesting is it?
...I just built myself a theremin based partly on this. It transmits a pair of RF signals at around 1MHz. As you move your hand around it varies the inductance of the coils so that the coils transmit at slightly different frequencies. As a result you get a signal at the average of the two frequencies modulated by the beat frequency. Tune an AM receiver to the average frequency and you get to listen to just the beats. It took a couple of hours to build. (The project I linked to above has an AM receiver built into the circuit but I didn't bother with that as I already had a spare radio.)
All this news about Saturn and no mention of the news that the F ring is not a ring but actually a spiral!
Yes. The truth is revealed in this if you haven't already seen it.
As soon as Bush has eliminated every last terrorist on Earth we can declare the War on Terrorism over and have our rights returned to us. Meanwhile the best we can do is grant extreme powers to the government so that we can hasten that day. If these nay-sayers all had their way then the government would be so crippled that this war would be unwinnable and we'll never get our rights back. The people complaining of our loss of rights are the ones who are bringing about their permanent demise.
Way too much! I used to get excited about a 10% speedup. But these days I just can't get excited about it when I know that next year's PC+old code will blow away current PC+optimized code. (Probably because, as everyone knows, time passes faster when you're older.) I'd rather spend time on algorithmic stuff that might make, say, an O(log N) improvement in speed that will continue to pay off more and more over time. But I suppose it's good to know there are young whippersnappers out there prepared to optimize the libraries I may have to use.
It's hard to predict the form that such a 'virus' might take. Just making up random stuff off the top of my head: they could leave us a story about such irrelevant subjects like the history of an ancient tribe lost in some desert for 40 years but as a result of reading this story the readers' beheviour might be irrevocably changed so that they are no longer capable of understanding basic biology. You simply wouldn't be able to tell merely by skimming the subject matter as the effect would be embedded within hidden triggers. By leaving enough of these subtle 'viruses' spread out through our culture they could bring our civilization to its knees without us even realizing that we've been the victim of alien attack.
If a task requires N operations then it takes time O(log N) to execute because of Moore's law. It hardly seems worthwhile to make heroic efforts to incrementally optimize your code, especially when there is a pretty clear cap on the maximum possible efficiency you can squeeze out relative to processor speeds.
That link is, like, so eighties. Get with the program!
But I looked at that web page: Codex, T-SQL, inscrutable jokes about woodpeckers, meta-models, Da Vinci, Biztalk Server 2004, Visio and text whose individual words I understand and yet whose sentences I can't grasp. I must be some kind of dinosaur ('dragon' if you live in Kansas) from an age gone by. Uh...uh...uh...>panic!...I've no clue what they're talking about. Does that mean I'm not collaborating properly? I didn't even realize. This is so awful. What can I do? Obviously just talking to people isn't enough.
People who buy PS's and Xboxes might not be but there's quite a bit of loyalty among Nintendo buyers. This is probably going to be significant when Nintendo release their next round of hardware which I expect to be slightly underspecced compared to the competition. Interestingly Nintendo, unlike Sony and MS, are a games company, and can't afford to burn cash establishing a market. But that's fine, because of their customer loyalty they have an already established market.
As for Creationism being tested and rejected, you're simply playing into the hands of Creationists who'd love people to say their theory is testable, and hence qualifies to be called 'science'.
The rest is just footnotes.
Right, mod this up. +1 insightful. +1 funny. +1 interesting. +1 i-want-to-have-your-babies
3, 2, 1 ... you're back in the room
What's more, in science it's generally considered to be best to argue for or against something based on its current merits, not on some historical features of the development of a theory. So what if an earlier edition of a book was different? That's like criticising special relativity by finding mistakes in early drafts of Einstein's work. It's irrelevant.
Creationists are making inroads in schools today partly because many vocal supporters of Evolution argue no more cogently than Creationists.
"Theory" is used to mean a body of related scientific work - typically work done "on paper" rather than experimental work. People make a distinction between doing "lab work", say, and "theory". When people say "Theory of relativity" there is no implication that this work is tentative and not "established fact". Admittedly, the word "theory" can also be used to mean a tentative hypothesis, and it is even used by physicists in this way, but most physicists are canny enough to distinguish between the two uses of the word "theory". Typically you can tell the difference in context. If a physicsts says "I have a theory that maybe...." then it carries the tentative hypothesis meaning. If the physicist says "I'm teaching the theory of relativity" this semester it carries the meaning of being a body of concepts and formulas that need explaining but that aren't considered tentative.
I know you might find it hard to understand all this but scientists usually don't even have to think to figure out which meaning is intended so I'm sure that with enough practice you can do the same.
It's worth pointing out also that supporters of Creationism make much of this issue and deliberately try to confuse the two meanings of the word. I have always found this bizarre because you can ask any biologist what is meant by the word "theory" in "theory of evolution" and have the issue cleared up in seconds.