It's possible the color words which are perceived differently by a particular race or which made the most difference to survival (think poisonous plants and animals vs. food sources) for people at the time and place of the language's early development lead to different color words coming about in different orders. It's being studied now whether the words and the groupings the words represent themselves limit and enhance color perception ability.
Ok, you're falling into the same problem that the author was complaining about in that you're attributing to biology that which is generally cultural. The reason for the ordering of colors is likely not from biological or evolutionary constraints.
Having words for light/dark (intensity) is the first and foremost necessary, as it distinguishes linguistically the difference detected by rods in the eye. Even with the rainbow of colors, we still distinguish between them internally with lighter tints, and darker shades.
Following that is red, then blue/green (as one word) then following less reliably a progression of colors. When the list typically hits blue/green again, that is when the old word is concreted to one, and the newer word is given to the other.
This does not mean that we can visually distinguish these colors better than other colors. In fact, we know by empirical biological evidence that humans can actually distinguish the variations of green the best of all shades.
What has happened here is that a language by assimilating, aquiring or generating a new word for a color or concept is now able to linguistically distinguish color or concept. While we read the rainbow as: Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Blue-Violet, Russians read it as Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Cyan-Blue-Violet, and the Japanese natively read it as Red-Orange-Yellow-Green/Blue-Violet does not mean that one is able to distinguish the difference in the colors, but rather than mentally categorizing it allows that color to be compressed as information in a category, rather than remembered for the complexity of the color it really is.
There have been tests looking for tetrachromats, people with 4 types of cones (essentially, a normal set of cones, and a color-blind set of cones) which can typically only occur in women (as the genes controling this are sex-linked onto the X gene. Yes there are males with more than one X chromosome, but of the 1:500/1000 births that rarity is, along with having only one X chromosome with color-blindness, and the mosaic property occuring in their eye... it's a vanishing small number.) Testing this, they asked women to pair colors together that match, notably giving a number of options that could only be distinguished if visually recognized by a tetrachromat. They found a few, however, the tetrachromats can't tell you why the colors don't match, because there exist no words to express the difference, despite their ability to recognize the mismatch.
It's not that Russian speakers can visually recognize more types of blue than English speakers, it's that they have an easier time categorizing the difference.
I'm confused... Clinton tells congress that he wouldn't sign an unbalanced budget, strong arming them into actually balancing the budget, and somehow the Republicans are the heros?
i get told now and then to do something not quite above board.. so i send the requester an email asking them to state in explicit detail what they want so i can be clear (and also have a record/trail). most times, the request is not repeated. doesn't make me terribly popular, but i sure as hell am not going to get tossed for another person's bad (or illegal?) request.
While reading about the right to refuse an illegal direct order in the military, I heard that this was pretty much the suggested procedure.
1) Receive order, which you believe is illegal. 2) Ask for direct and explicit confirmation of that order exactly as you see it. 3) If the order is repeated and is still as far as you can tell, illegal, refuse the order on grounds that it is illegal. 4) (Not officially part of the policy) If the superior informs you that he'll kill you for not following a direct order, follow the order anyways.
This can be kind of shown best by an example, "Seargent, break into that store and grab supplies." "Sir, are you ordering me to illegally break into a private business and steal supplies?" "Yes, Seargent, that's exactly what I'm telling you to do." "Sir, I believe that to be an illegal order, and I do not have to follow it." (Typical result: "Seargent, you will carry out my orders or I will shoot you for insubordination!" "Sir, I don't think the illegal order is worth my life, I will comply.")
Of course, there are good illegal orders to continue to refuse to follow. "Seargent, kill that man!" "Sir, are you asking me to execute a Prisoner of War who is safely in custody?" "Yes, Seargent, that's exactly what I'm telling you to do." "Sir, I believe that to be an illegal order, and I do not have to follow it." "Seargeant, you will carry out my orders or I will shoot you for insubordination!" "Sir, my stance on this issue is clear, I will not follow a direct command to commit murder, and violate the Geneva Convention." *BAM* Seargent is dead, but at least he died innocent, and it's now the officer's issue to deal with.
I thought that the sentence was generally unnecessary, also. Yes, geeks will understand it, yes slashdot is targetting geeks... but why should we be acting so damn pretencious?
Welcome to capitalism... a corporation doing something better than the Government does it?
Actually, if you receive plastics from the recycling programs of your near by cities, then you do indirectly receive subsidies, as the government sells it so cheap, precisely so that you guys will actually make money off of it. If they were to charge you what would be profitable for them to collect it? I don't think you would be making money...
Plastic and glass bottles can be recycled, not by crushing, but by reusing the bottle itself.
Totally, and that's what I try to do with them. Sending them to be processed is potentially even worse than just throwing it away (considering that we have plenty of landfill space).
Metal cans can be recycled.
Right, I mentioned those. Definitely good to recycle these, and they're the one thing that I actively recycle.
Paper&cartons can be economically recycled for many uses (though not all). If you wish, organic materials (leaves & grass, etc.) can be composted and used as fertilizer.
They can also be thrown away and in the rotting process they release methane, which is trapped by landfills and used for generating power, which is put back into the grid.
Something else to note is that not all organic materials deteriorate or break down as easily as others. In a hot and dry desert (like New Mexico, where I came from) orange peels, if simply thrown away, will actually dry up and end up outlasting aluminum cans. Totally serious.
Other burnables can be "recycled" into heating energy.
Typically a good idea, but one has to be careful about what you're burning. If you burn only hydrocarbons, well, you're set, with a simple filtering system and an efficient burn system, you generate CO2, and water. However when you start adding non-hydrocarbons, you start ending up with unclean burns, requiring more filtering, require more work, etc.
I recall hearing that recycling costs $8 billion a year, as a result of subsidizing the recycling of materials that have a net negative economic impact, because using new materials instead would be cheaper, easier and require less industrial processing to make.
That's actually the case for everything but metals. As Penn and Teller put it, when recycling becomes so efficient that bums on the street will do the sorting, then you'll know it's actually beneficial for society.
This does not account for at 2.5GiB of RAM that the system did not consume all free memory. Also, this does not account for the constant thrashing of the harddrive to keep up with the virtual memory system.
Either way, Vista never had enough space, and never had a reasonable enough way of handling it to make the machine useable.
OSX on the other hand, I have apparently 20GiB of swap space used, and the machine doesn't really page at all.
For the record, I knew it was paging and thrashing because I pulled up the Performance Monitor which listed the page faults per second, which typically hovered at about 400-3,000.
At boot, the OS and all the annoying IT/antivirus scripts combine to take up 730 MiB of RAM. Obviously everyone's setup is a little different, but that is a pretty drastic gap.
That's about what it said at boot up for me also, however as mentioned, when I upgraded to 2.5GiB of RAM, the used space went up to a little over a gigabyte. As a result, when I had only 1GiB, the system ran at the speed of disk.
If you think that a modern system working at the speed of disk can outperform a way older system running at the speed of slow RAM, well, you're wrong. Thrashing was the biggest cause of the pain of slowdown back in the days of the 486, and it still is today. If an OS isn't managing it's memory well, and just off boot has a larger working set of pages than is physically available? Well then, you're just plain screwed.
I think Generation X and beyond have all been kind of led in the way that many other generations have come, in that information is true once an authority says it.
This is why the whole geocentric notion stuck around for so long, because the authorities needed simply point at the Bible and say, "See?"
So, I don't think it's a failing of any individual to believe information presented to them as if it were true, if that were not the case, then con men would be poor, carnival games would be winnable, and no one would dare lie.
People are trusting by nature, and anything presented with an honest heart is typically given credit of authority as long as it does not conflict with their own person biases as they already exist.
Why else would some 75% of Americans not believe in evolution? (Was that the statistic? Don't believe me, go look for it yourself, I'm just using vague hand wavings to give you an idea of where to go with the information.)
The going idea I believe from the YEC is that plate tectonics happened fairly rapidly. Basically, saying that since the magnetic stripes in the ocean aren't deep enough to be compliant with what they would expect from an Old Earth hypothesis, that it points to a Young Earth.
Also, the idea of plate tectonics was initially proposed as a potential explanation for the flood. In such a scenario it's possible that the kangaroos did not migrate at all, but simply were let out and went one way in migration which then tectonically moved away as the flood waters settled.
See? Isn't it fun making stuff up under your own hypothetical worlds?
Ah, I generally use the website's password storage for that.
Of course, I love when I use a "I forgot my password" program and they email me my password. It's like, "Um..... thanks?"
I swear... seriously, everyone seems to have really poor password security, so I have a standard throw-away password for random sites that I don't particularly care if they go one way or the other.
As far as the software goes, my laptop will run Vista adequately if not well, and you could say the same of a three-year-old Apple laptop and Leopard.
*Absolutely shocked* You're like... not serious right? My 550MHz G4 with 1GiB of RAM PowerBook runs Leopard significantly better than my Pentium 4 3.8GHz with 2.5GiB of RAM Dell Desktop (about 2 years old). And significantly better than the Dell Desktop 2.8GHz with 512MiB of RAM...
And I don't even want to address the P4 3.8GHz running in 64-bit mode with 1GiB of RAM... Vista at boot consumed about 1060 some megabytes of RAM after a clean reboot. This meant that just to run the OS it was paging everything like crazy. I've not been on such a slow computer since back in the days of 3.1!
There are a good number of folks with 5-6 year old Macs that are still happily using them. Every one of those six-year-old macs means that Apple has 1/2 the OS sales (per user) as Windows.
I still have a laptop from like... 2001 that I use. It was one of the last Titanium Books. It's amazingly useful still. Yes, it's slow, and all that, but it still does a good job of websurfing etc. In fact, if I didn't have my better Mac already, I'd still be using the laptop for surfing, etc.
You know... this is one reason why I don't store ANY of my passwords for webpages anywhere but my head.
Granted my IMs all store my password, because I want them to log in automatically, but I just simply do not trust a webbrowser to keep any of my passwords.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, you're falling into the same problem that the author was complaining about in that you're attributing to biology that which is generally cultural. The reason for the ordering of colors is likely not from biological or evolutionary constraints.
Having words for light/dark (intensity) is the first and foremost necessary, as it distinguishes linguistically the difference detected by rods in the eye. Even with the rainbow of colors, we still distinguish between them internally with lighter tints, and darker shades.
Following that is red, then blue/green (as one word) then following less reliably a progression of colors. When the list typically hits blue/green again, that is when the old word is concreted to one, and the newer word is given to the other.
This does not mean that we can visually distinguish these colors better than other colors. In fact, we know by empirical biological evidence that humans can actually distinguish the variations of green the best of all shades.
What has happened here is that a language by assimilating, aquiring or generating a new word for a color or concept is now able to linguistically distinguish color or concept. While we read the rainbow as: Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Blue-Violet, Russians read it as Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Cyan-Blue-Violet, and the Japanese natively read it as Red-Orange-Yellow-Green/Blue-Violet does not mean that one is able to distinguish the difference in the colors, but rather than mentally categorizing it allows that color to be compressed as information in a category, rather than remembered for the complexity of the color it really is.
There have been tests looking for tetrachromats, people with 4 types of cones (essentially, a normal set of cones, and a color-blind set of cones) which can typically only occur in women (as the genes controling this are sex-linked onto the X gene. Yes there are males with more than one X chromosome, but of the 1:500/1000 births that rarity is, along with having only one X chromosome with color-blindness, and the mosaic property occuring in their eye... it's a vanishing small number.) Testing this, they asked women to pair colors together that match, notably giving a number of options that could only be distinguished if visually recognized by a tetrachromat. They found a few, however, the tetrachromats can't tell you why the colors don't match, because there exist no words to express the difference, despite their ability to recognize the mismatch.
It's not that Russian speakers can visually recognize more types of blue than English speakers, it's that they have an easier time categorizing the difference.
Yeah, the relationship change was to keep the poetry writing out of my message list, hehe... sorry ;)
Life? hehe... I'll write one or another soon, if I find the time *laugh*
Sorry, just been so busy with work, life, and relationships, that it's been a pretty low priority for me.
I'm confused... Clinton tells congress that he wouldn't sign an unbalanced budget, strong arming them into actually balancing the budget, and somehow the Republicans are the heros?
*scratches her head*
Did you hear that Paris lost her inheritance? ...
Oh wait... I'm on the wrong forum again. *goes back to her gossip webpages*
Sure, but what about us that are thin? It's like saying "Most people earn too much money, so we're going to tax everyone an extra $1,000 this year."
I think everyone would be certainly pretty upset.
That's what I'm thinking, too. It's like, hey! I have to eat food to make that energy... you can't "recover" it from me like that!
While reading about the right to refuse an illegal direct order in the military, I heard that this was pretty much the suggested procedure.
1) Receive order, which you believe is illegal.
2) Ask for direct and explicit confirmation of that order exactly as you see it.
3) If the order is repeated and is still as far as you can tell, illegal, refuse the order on grounds that it is illegal.
4) (Not officially part of the policy) If the superior informs you that he'll kill you for not following a direct order, follow the order anyways.
This can be kind of shown best by an example, "Seargent, break into that store and grab supplies." "Sir, are you ordering me to illegally break into a private business and steal supplies?" "Yes, Seargent, that's exactly what I'm telling you to do." "Sir, I believe that to be an illegal order, and I do not have to follow it." (Typical result: "Seargent, you will carry out my orders or I will shoot you for insubordination!" "Sir, I don't think the illegal order is worth my life, I will comply.")
Of course, there are good illegal orders to continue to refuse to follow. "Seargent, kill that man!" "Sir, are you asking me to execute a Prisoner of War who is safely in custody?" "Yes, Seargent, that's exactly what I'm telling you to do." "Sir, I believe that to be an illegal order, and I do not have to follow it." "Seargeant, you will carry out my orders or I will shoot you for insubordination!" "Sir, my stance on this issue is clear, I will not follow a direct command to commit murder, and violate the Geneva Convention." *BAM* Seargent is dead, but at least he died innocent, and it's now the officer's issue to deal with.
Eh... I'm not a pretentious person. I make mistakes, and I don't care about big words. :) It would be funny though.
I thought that the sentence was generally unnecessary, also. Yes, geeks will understand it, yes slashdot is targetting geeks... but why should we be acting so damn pretencious?
Welcome to capitalism... a corporation doing something better than the Government does it?
Actually, if you receive plastics from the recycling programs of your near by cities, then you do indirectly receive subsidies, as the government sells it so cheap, precisely so that you guys will actually make money off of it. If they were to charge you what would be profitable for them to collect it? I don't think you would be making money...
Totally, and that's what I try to do with them. Sending them to be processed is potentially even worse than just throwing it away (considering that we have plenty of landfill space).
Right, I mentioned those. Definitely good to recycle these, and they're the one thing that I actively recycle.
They can also be thrown away and in the rotting process they release methane, which is trapped by landfills and used for generating power, which is put back into the grid.
Something else to note is that not all organic materials deteriorate or break down as easily as others. In a hot and dry desert (like New Mexico, where I came from) orange peels, if simply thrown away, will actually dry up and end up outlasting aluminum cans. Totally serious.
Typically a good idea, but one has to be careful about what you're burning. If you burn only hydrocarbons, well, you're set, with a simple filtering system and an efficient burn system, you generate CO2, and water. However when you start adding non-hydrocarbons, you start ending up with unclean burns, requiring more filtering, require more work, etc.
I recall hearing that recycling costs $8 billion a year, as a result of subsidizing the recycling of materials that have a net negative economic impact, because using new materials instead would be cheaper, easier and require less industrial processing to make.
That's actually the case for everything but metals. As Penn and Teller put it, when recycling becomes so efficient that bums on the street will do the sorting, then you'll know it's actually beneficial for society.
Eh... how can we bother with learning anything about foreign cultures when even Space.com can't get the names of Martian landscape right.
"Marwth Vallis Regions"? Anyone else see what's wrong with that?
(Ok, yes, my computer naming convention at work is after the Welsh words for the planets, what's it to you?)
This does not account for at 2.5GiB of RAM that the system did not consume all free memory. Also, this does not account for the constant thrashing of the harddrive to keep up with the virtual memory system.
Either way, Vista never had enough space, and never had a reasonable enough way of handling it to make the machine useable.
OSX on the other hand, I have apparently 20GiB of swap space used, and the machine doesn't really page at all.
For the record, I knew it was paging and thrashing because I pulled up the Performance Monitor which listed the page faults per second, which typically hovered at about 400-3,000.
That's about what it said at boot up for me also, however as mentioned, when I upgraded to 2.5GiB of RAM, the used space went up to a little over a gigabyte. As a result, when I had only 1GiB, the system ran at the speed of disk.
If you think that a modern system working at the speed of disk can outperform a way older system running at the speed of slow RAM, well, you're wrong. Thrashing was the biggest cause of the pain of slowdown back in the days of the 486, and it still is today. If an OS isn't managing it's memory well, and just off boot has a larger working set of pages than is physically available? Well then, you're just plain screwed.
*ahem* uh... she isn't doing anything wrong.
I think Generation X and beyond have all been kind of led in the way that many other generations have come, in that information is true once an authority says it.
This is why the whole geocentric notion stuck around for so long, because the authorities needed simply point at the Bible and say, "See?"
So, I don't think it's a failing of any individual to believe information presented to them as if it were true, if that were not the case, then con men would be poor, carnival games would be winnable, and no one would dare lie.
People are trusting by nature, and anything presented with an honest heart is typically given credit of authority as long as it does not conflict with their own person biases as they already exist.
Why else would some 75% of Americans not believe in evolution? (Was that the statistic? Don't believe me, go look for it yourself, I'm just using vague hand wavings to give you an idea of where to go with the information.)
The going idea I believe from the YEC is that plate tectonics happened fairly rapidly. Basically, saying that since the magnetic stripes in the ocean aren't deep enough to be compliant with what they would expect from an Old Earth hypothesis, that it points to a Young Earth.
Also, the idea of plate tectonics was initially proposed as a potential explanation for the flood. In such a scenario it's possible that the kangaroos did not migrate at all, but simply were let out and went one way in migration which then tectonically moved away as the flood waters settled.
See? Isn't it fun making stuff up under your own hypothetical worlds?
Ah, I generally use the website's password storage for that.
Of course, I love when I use a "I forgot my password" program and they email me my password. It's like, "Um..... thanks?"
I swear... seriously, everyone seems to have really poor password security, so I have a standard throw-away password for random sites that I don't particularly care if they go one way or the other.
*Absolutely shocked* You're like... not serious right? My 550MHz G4 with 1GiB of RAM PowerBook runs Leopard significantly better than my Pentium 4 3.8GHz with 2.5GiB of RAM Dell Desktop (about 2 years old). And significantly better than the Dell Desktop 2.8GHz with 512MiB of RAM...
And I don't even want to address the P4 3.8GHz running in 64-bit mode with 1GiB of RAM... Vista at boot consumed about 1060 some megabytes of RAM after a clean reboot. This meant that just to run the OS it was paging everything like crazy. I've not been on such a slow computer since back in the days of 3.1!
I still have a laptop from like... 2001 that I use. It was one of the last Titanium Books. It's amazingly useful still. Yes, it's slow, and all that, but it still does a good job of websurfing etc. In fact, if I didn't have my better Mac already, I'd still be using the laptop for surfing, etc.
Well this story kind of points out why obviously, this statement isn't necessarily true.
You know... this is one reason why I don't store ANY of my passwords for webpages anywhere but my head.
Granted my IMs all store my password, because I want them to log in automatically, but I just simply do not trust a webbrowser to keep any of my passwords.
Oddly enough through randomly clicking, the first person I shot had the egg, and I won.
It was a seriously weird affair.