of course, what i should have said was "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" rather than "occam's razor", since they are totally different things, and i've completely fucked up the thrust of my argument.
feel free to substitute in what i was supposed to say if you are at all interested in what i was trying to say, and i don't blame you if you arent:)
by all means adopt a reasonable starting position regarding a book based on the prior history of presentations resembling it's cover, since Occam's Razor favours this. it's a perfectly valid sceptical starting point, provided you are open to further verifiable evidence that can corroborate the cover's insinuations and promote them to a more rigourously established position.
a better lesson is that "don't judge a book by it's cover" is a logical fallacy of the "special pleading" type and is contradictory to Occam's Razor.
presumably you have some sources you can cite for your claims, in which case i am happy to read them and reassess the validity of the claim made in the slashdot story. At the moment all you've done is waved your hands, so from my perspective, occam's razor still applies.
you get those popping gurgling after-fires with a carburettor as well. My single cylinder motorcycle engine makes a real racket when i'm engine braking down a long steep hill.
yeah, if you define "touch" as "interact", which is so vague as to render the term redundant. however if you define "touch" as mechanical pressure, then it is distinguished from the other four senses.
And let's face it, that IS how it is defined.
And yes, hearing involves mechanical pressure but it is the pattern of motion rather than just the mechanical pressure being sensed. If you poke yourself in the ear drum with a q-tip you aren't "hearing" the q-tip.
in TFA it says Noscript doesnt stop the problem 100% - but there is a link to a page that says that only applies in noscript's default setup. You can get it to stop this problem completely.
In my opinion, broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people in the world; those who assume a continuum is actually two discrete choices between its extremes, and those who don't.:-p
"made by hand" is a specific subset of "produced by humans". For instance, genocide isn't exactly "made by hand" but it is exclusively "produced by humans" and therefore is artificial, and therefore if you used "unnatural" as a synonym of "artificial" as a lot of people do (hence the point i was making) you can say that genocide is unnatural.
i would like to make clear that in general, and in this case, i don't use unnatural as a synonym for artificial, but was simply pointing out where the people tend to argue at cross purposes with regards to the idea of something being "unnatural" or not
it depends whether you are using the word "natural" as the opposite of "unnatural", or the opposite of "artificial". "Unnatural" is a fuzzy value judgement, based on what you consider to be the true "nature" of the subject in question. Artificial is a little more concrete, although in complex systems there are artificial and non-artificial components, thus blurring the issue again.
The important thing berners-lee is missing is that cults rely on restriction of information to thrive, not the ready availability of it. Fair enough - cults find a wider audience through the web, but so does all the anti-cult information that exposes their various scams.
I mean, look at Scientology - thanks to the web, a lot more people know what Scientology is nowadays, and why it is a scam. So when they are walking past a "free stress test" stand they are less likely to get sucked in.
Problems created by misinformation are solved by education, not censorship.
that might work in some cases but the only info fundamentalists have to be fundamental about is what's printed in their holy text. in the case of fundamentalist christians if the bible says god did it in 6 days, then that's as good as god telling them himself.
if you try to contradict the bible with logic and evidence they just disappear down the rabbit hole of denialism and supernatural conspiracy theories, whereby any contrary evidence is either god testing their faith or satan spreading lies.
pretty much the best inroad into opening their minds is to demonstrate where the bible contradicts itself - since the bible can't be true and not true at the same time the conflict can't be explained away as satanic lies or faith testing divine trickery.
this at least forces them into a moderate position of having to take some of the bible with a grain of salt, which then opens the door for them to be more reasonable about accepting scientific evidence about the history of the world.
if you stand back and look at it, it becomes clear that fundamentalists don't worship their god, they actually worship their holy text - only once you knock it off its own pedestal are you able to open their minds to any external evidence.
"The core of each tower was a rectangular area 87 by 135 feet (27 by 41 m) and contained 47 steel columns running from the bedrock to the top of the tower.[6] The columns tapered with height, and consisted of welded box sections at lower floors and rolled wide-flange sections at upper floors."
there is a citation in this block of text on the wikipedia page.
remember, mods, it's only insightful if it's true
Re:Ignorance vs. the Unknown
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
by the time they tested the first nuke, they were damn sure it wouldn't ignite the atmosphere. the idea that that they just crossed their fingers is a silly myth that is pretty much identical to the current nonsense about black holes eating the earth.
from wikipedia's manhattan project page "Teller also raised the speculative possibility that an atomic bomb might "ignite" the atmosphere, because of a hypothetical fusion reaction of nitrogen nuclei. Bethe calculated, according to Serber, that it could not happen. In his book The Road from Los Alamos, Bethe says a refutation was written by Konopinski, C. Marvin, and Teller as report LA-602, showing that ignition of the atmosphere was impossible, not just unlikely."
so in the same sense that i dont know if the next time i fart the world will explode, we dont know if the LHC will create a black hole, but in the sense of all established science, the scientists that designed and built the thing are certain it wont.
just thought i'd make that distinction as "know" is a very overloaded word.
I agree what everything in your post but it sounds almost like you're disagreeing with me somehow but i can't quite follow your point - what's too easy?
i think the goal of most of the more vocal book-publishing creationists is to convince the layman there are obvious "common sense" contradictions that kill evolution stone dead in its tracks.
anything more subtle and technical is a waste of time, as we see when creationists make more specific rigorously defined claims that are consistently shredded by informed rebuttals from the only audience that could even appreciate any significance in what they are trying to say.
It's not just individual line rates that are the issue - there is contention to take into account too. You can bet that if everyone that is contending for your bandwidth all streamed HD video simultaneously everything would grind to a halt.
Slashdot Mirror
of course, what i should have said was "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" rather than "occam's razor", since they are totally different things, and i've completely fucked up the thrust of my argument.
feel free to substitute in what i was supposed to say if you are at all interested in what i was trying to say, and i don't blame you if you arent :)
That's not a good lesson.
by all means adopt a reasonable starting position regarding a book based on the prior history of presentations resembling it's cover, since Occam's Razor favours this. it's a perfectly valid sceptical starting point, provided you are open to further verifiable evidence that can corroborate the cover's insinuations and promote them to a more rigourously established position.
a better lesson is that "don't judge a book by it's cover" is a logical fallacy of the "special pleading" type and is contradictory to Occam's Razor.
presumably you have some sources you can cite for your claims, in which case i am happy to read them and reassess the validity of the claim made in the slashdot story. At the moment all you've done is waved your hands, so from my perspective, occam's razor still applies.
you get those popping gurgling after-fires with a carburettor as well. My single cylinder motorcycle engine makes a real racket when i'm engine braking down a long steep hill.
You could stand on your head.
except a centimetre is one dimensional
google target wine
GPL gives the maximum freedom to the user.
why not just AMISH? they'll never find out, it's on a computer.
yeah, if you define "touch" as "interact", which is so vague as to render the term redundant. however if you define "touch" as mechanical pressure, then it is distinguished from the other four senses.
And let's face it, that IS how it is defined.
And yes, hearing involves mechanical pressure but it is the pattern of motion rather than just the mechanical pressure being sensed. If you poke yourself in the ear drum with a q-tip you aren't "hearing" the q-tip.
the C stands for central. was it central? no it wasn't.
in TFA it says Noscript doesnt stop the problem 100% - but there is a link to a page that says that only applies in noscript's default setup. You can get it to stop this problem completely.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1973
noscript -> options -> plugins -> forbid IFRAME.
should be helpful till someone comes up with a proper solution.
In my opinion, broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people in the world; those who assume a continuum is actually two discrete choices between its extremes, and those who don't. :-p
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/artificial?jss=0
"made by hand" is a specific subset of "produced by humans". For instance, genocide isn't exactly "made by hand" but it is exclusively "produced by humans" and therefore is artificial, and therefore if you used "unnatural" as a synonym of "artificial" as a lot of people do (hence the point i was making) you can say that genocide is unnatural.
i would like to make clear that in general, and in this case, i don't use unnatural as a synonym for artificial, but was simply pointing out where the people tend to argue at cross purposes with regards to the idea of something being "unnatural" or not
if you look at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/unnatural?jss=0 you can see that the conflation of definitions 1 and 4 is where people often slip up in this kind of argument
it depends whether you are using the word "natural" as the opposite of "unnatural", or the opposite of "artificial". "Unnatural" is a fuzzy value judgement, based on what you consider to be the true "nature" of the subject in question. Artificial is a little more concrete, although in complex systems there are artificial and non-artificial components, thus blurring the issue again.
1. Windows 1
2. Windows 2
3. Windows 3 / 3.10 / 3.11
4. Windows 95
4.1 Windows 98
4.9 Windows ME
Windows NT (Started at 3 to be on parity with regular windows at the time)
3. NT 3.1 / 3.5 /3.51
4. NT 4
5. Windows 2000
5.1 Windows XP
5.2 Windows XP 64 / Server Edition
6. Windows Vista
The important thing berners-lee is missing is that cults rely on restriction of information to thrive, not the ready availability of it. Fair enough - cults find a wider audience through the web, but so does all the anti-cult information that exposes their various scams.
I mean, look at Scientology - thanks to the web, a lot more people know what Scientology is nowadays, and why it is a scam. So when they are walking past a "free stress test" stand they are less likely to get sucked in.
Problems created by misinformation are solved by education, not censorship.
conjures up images of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52pXvOFy1A4
that might work in some cases but the only info fundamentalists have to be fundamental about is what's printed in their holy text. in the case of fundamentalist christians if the bible says god did it in 6 days, then that's as good as god telling them himself.
if you try to contradict the bible with logic and evidence they just disappear down the rabbit hole of denialism and supernatural conspiracy theories, whereby any contrary evidence is either god testing their faith or satan spreading lies.
pretty much the best inroad into opening their minds is to demonstrate where the bible contradicts itself - since the bible can't be true and not true at the same time the conflict can't be explained away as satanic lies or faith testing divine trickery.
this at least forces them into a moderate position of having to take some of the bible with a grain of salt, which then opens the door for them to be more reasonable about accepting scientific evidence about the history of the world.
if you stand back and look at it, it becomes clear that fundamentalists don't worship their god, they actually worship their holy text - only once you knock it off its own pedestal are you able to open their minds to any external evidence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center#Structural_design
"The core of each tower was a rectangular area 87 by 135 feet (27 by 41 m) and contained 47 steel columns running from the bedrock to the top of the tower.[6] The columns tapered with height, and consisted of welded box sections at lower floors and rolled wide-flange sections at upper floors."
there is a citation in this block of text on the wikipedia page.
remember, mods, it's only insightful if it's true
by the time they tested the first nuke, they were damn sure it wouldn't ignite the atmosphere. the idea that that they just crossed their fingers is a silly myth that is pretty much identical to the current nonsense about black holes eating the earth.
from wikipedia's manhattan project page "Teller also raised the speculative possibility that an atomic bomb might "ignite" the atmosphere, because of a hypothetical fusion reaction of nitrogen nuclei. Bethe calculated, according to Serber, that it could not happen. In his book The Road from Los Alamos, Bethe says a refutation was written by Konopinski, C. Marvin, and Teller as report LA-602, showing that ignition of the atmosphere was impossible, not just unlikely."
so in the same sense that i dont know if the next time i fart the world will explode, we dont know if the LHC will create a black hole, but in the sense of all established science, the scientists that designed and built the thing are certain it wont.
just thought i'd make that distinction as "know" is a very overloaded word.
I agree what everything in your post but it sounds almost like you're disagreeing with me somehow but i can't quite follow your point - what's too easy?
anything more subtle and technical is a waste of time, as we see when creationists make more specific rigorously defined claims that are consistently shredded by informed rebuttals from the only audience that could even appreciate any significance in what they are trying to say.
It's not just individual line rates that are the issue - there is contention to take into account too. You can bet that if everyone that is contending for your bandwidth all streamed HD video simultaneously everything would grind to a halt.
the "12 year old" has a five digit slashdot ID, which is even more disheartening
http://www.911myths.com/html/wtc_molten_steel.html
this podcast is always interesting to listen to and has a related episode - http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4085