IIRC, thats within about 1 order of magnitude of the tensile stength of Titanium. I don't see why that isnt doable. If we can break steel, why can't we pressurize a little wire?
I am by no means a parent, but in my limited experience, the most intellectually robust people are the ones that don't shield themselves from any kind of knowledge, be it regular news media, goatse, or what have you. Because these people are constantly challenging their ideas, and desensitizing themselves to emotional shock, they can more easily deal with the core of real problems, and do it in possibly counterintuitive ways.
If I was a parent, I would let the kid absorb any information they wanted to so long as it didn't physically hurt them. I would just provide them with context. Yes a four year old isn't going to do very well with that, but its a process. Of course if they took something to the extreme, I might have to stop them - rarely does one solution work all the time - but I think openness and sunshine should be the default, not control.
Problem is, it's only going to be perfectly 180 degrees out of phase in a sort of ellipsoid around it. You have to be standing in the right place for that to work.
It might be because most nerds started with dead trees before they did anything else. Granted, there are some who went right into electronics or something, but at some point, a great many of the people here got into dead tree books.
I dunno, my document was only about 4 pages or so - so I didn't get to see how it would work on a real paper. I did notice that Word still has a few kinks in it that need to be ironed out. For instance, if I wanted to put a diagram in, it was easy to position it such that my text would only be above it and cut short before it overlapped. Not so with tables, the UI for positioning the two was vastly different despite the fact that they are close to the same thing in terms of how they need to be positioned.
My friend is very good with LaTeX all his homeworks and papers come out beautiful. Interestingly, I was reading about work 2007's new equation editor, and apparently they borrowed from LaTeX in the implementation and made it interoperable with MathML. Word's UI has always been confusing for positioning things that aren't text and it doesn't let you see the markup easily to fix what you did wrong which is my major gripe with it. However, 2007 does make some very pretty documents very easily although Word's major defects are still there with the diagram positioning etc.
While I may not like vista so much, I will give MS props for Word 2007. I was writing a pro looking research paper for class and it turned out really nice without much effort. I suppose I could learn LaTex, and I will at some point, but for people that never will, I think they finally did something right.
it's harder to convince the public how evil relativity is because it forbids light from getting here in the time the bible says it did.
Well that was kind of my point. Sure these people do exist, but they are few in number and can't gain much traction because most people don't feel very connected to the abstract topics dealt with in physics and chemistry. If I start talking about Lorentz contractions I'm going to get a lot of blank stares. If I talk about "monkeys are your grandfather" people feel like WTF because their grandfather isn't a monkey. It's all emotion and no reason.
I have a feeling we are just nitpicking each others points. Let's just agree we agree:D
I have a professor in cell biology that made an interesting remark. He said that with respect to science like physics and chemistry, people trust the scientists because they realize that they don't know what's going on. However with biology, since we are alive, and living things fit easily into our intuition, they like to talk out their ass and not listen to people in the know.
After all, you don't see people rebelling in schools against relativity and electromagnetism.
uhhh, what are you talking about with the resizable brushes? What I do is I make a new brush and click edit. Keep the window open and you can resize on the fly. There are problems, but that is definitely not one of them.
I was thinking of refuting some of your points and then I realized that a great deal of our arguments rests in our somewhat different definition of human rights. I'm currently on about 4 hours of sleep for several consecutive days so if what I say next doesn't make any sense, please forgive me.
If you get down to it, what is a human right? If we use one of the more general definitions found on Google: "Universal rights to which every person is entitled because they are justified by a moral standard that stands above the laws of any individual." I think it would be good to define our human rights according to the most basic standard, the ones everyone everywhere agrees on. However, there are few morals that are universal human characteristics.
A list compiled in 1991 of many universal human traits
In this list, a cursory scan reveals that there are many events that trigger various procedures, but the only moral prohibition I could find was incest. Perhaps if you look more closely, you might find something else (and there were things I think you could argue about, but incest was the only one clearly wrong or right). From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that anything goes except when it might screw up your genes. Different localities require or are at least amenable to variation in procedure.
So if you want to build up a theory of morality axiomatically, it seems that the only human right is to not be forced to have sex with your mom (although I had sex with your mom all night long haha).
So the next level of requirements would have extremely broad, but not universal acceptance - things like prohibitions on unnecessary killing. So most (and I think we can agree in all relatively functional) civil societies, we can adopt this idea.
However, like your drowning man example, if it is an effortless or nearly effortless action to save someone from death, but you let them die, aren't you in effect killing them? I think there are two ways you could argue this: How much effort is nearly effortless? Can we put a hard number, or perhaps a mean in Joules expended? Is it unethical for a someone living in the US saving their neighbors (perhaps as a doctor) but never send money to Africa? Either you're killing all the people you could potentially save, or it is outside of your responsibility. As a practical matter, if you choose to save some people, you are excluding others (you only have so much time/money).
The point is, in the real world, it is impossible to completely satisfy this sort of ethics unless you run yourself into an early grave. After all, how can you sleep at night? Literally. People die while you are sleeping. Obviously, as a practical matter, one must kill a large number of people in order to live a happy life. Things are getting crazy!
So including POSITIVE obligations as part of our definition of secondary human rights is crazy as a practical matter. It is much better to define things we shouldn't do that don't conflict with the basic satisfaction of our metabolic processes, because, while they may add a finite number of steps to avoid each action, they are manageable. Positive obligations to all people add many simultaneous steps each second and build up at an unmanageable rate. Not taking action to kill people is pretty easy to do in my book.
So we have our not killing people thing in place on the basis that most people don't like it. However, the no screwing mom prohibition was explained as proliferating your genes without nearly guaranteed defects. So why is killing people bad? A good example of the point I am about to make is: "My name is Inigo Montoya. You kill my father. Prepare to die." What you reap is what you sow. Most people don't want retaliation vis a vis death used against them no matter what sort of wrong they might commit. The best way to insure that is that people agree, hey, let's NOT kill each other because it causes a cycle of violence.
You raise a good point about Health Care as a Human right. Since human rights tend to center around freedom, any "human right" that creates undue dependencies probably does not qualify as such (although it might be a good idea).
I think if you want to explicitly state the assumptions that Health Care as a Human Right implies, it would probably be similar to:
"All people are entitled to promote their health just as they are entitled to pursue happiness. Direct implications: Murder is banned, intentionally making someone sick is banned (of course there are nuances here but you get the gist). The government must provide reasonable health care to certain groups that because of its intervention do not have reasonable access to it (so basic health care for prisoners et al). The government may not declare special cases to prevent an individual from seeking health care (Government can't order doctors to not help you if they don't like you, but preserves things like transplant priority lists)."
Government funded health care as a general case may be a good idea, or a bad idea, but it is definitely not a human right. Depriving some of their resources for benefit of others is a scheme to get good average case coverage, and necessarily deprives some people of certain other rights protected things like property. Conflicting rights don't make much sense when making universal declarations.
Don't forget that those 1% are self selecting and may not actually represent the other 99% of the voting public to a degree that would allow you to predict elections. IE It may not be a representative sample. OTOH, if I was a politician and that was the only data I had, well, it's better than a blind guess.
He has a point though. We should really be focused on instituting changes such that your vote does matter, and that your expression is more nuanced than yes/no. This idea of tiers is a good one, as are priority ballots (I forget the official name) that allow you to vote for candidate A with 5 points and candidate b with 4 pts etc.
Well it might be more efficient than a dam depending on how much friction other water generates vs air (although I think I could argue that it's more). Also, depending on the efficiency of the plastic vs frictional losses by the generator, it might be more efficient per a dollar spent. In any case, unless the mass production of this plastic would be egregiously harmful, you wouldn't need to make dams and screw up rivers for this solution. I'd like to see the numbers on this.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, thats within about 1 order of magnitude of the tensile stength of Titanium. I don't see why that isnt doable. If we can break steel, why can't we pressurize a little wire?
I am by no means a parent, but in my limited experience, the most intellectually robust people are the ones that don't shield themselves from any kind of knowledge, be it regular news media, goatse, or what have you. Because these people are constantly challenging their ideas, and desensitizing themselves to emotional shock, they can more easily deal with the core of real problems, and do it in possibly counterintuitive ways.
If I was a parent, I would let the kid absorb any information they wanted to so long as it didn't physically hurt them. I would just provide them with context. Yes a four year old isn't going to do very well with that, but its a process. Of course if they took something to the extreme, I might have to stop them - rarely does one solution work all the time - but I think openness and sunshine should be the default, not control.
Can't we just place our passports in tinfoil? The faraday cage should prevent the RFID from being used against us.
Not every agnostic evaluates their lives through money and wealth, they just see it as a means to freedom.
Is that like coitus interuptus?
Problem is, it's only going to be perfectly 180 degrees out of phase in a sort of ellipsoid around it. You have to be standing in the right place for that to work.
Well obviously if you want to go back in time you would just use negative acceleration!
It might be because most nerds started with dead trees before they did anything else. Granted, there are some who went right into electronics or something, but at some point, a great many of the people here got into dead tree books.
I feel deja vu. Didn't we have this argument before?
I dunno, my document was only about 4 pages or so - so I didn't get to see how it would work on a real paper. I did notice that Word still has a few kinks in it that need to be ironed out. For instance, if I wanted to put a diagram in, it was easy to position it such that my text would only be above it and cut short before it overlapped. Not so with tables, the UI for positioning the two was vastly different despite the fact that they are close to the same thing in terms of how they need to be positioned.
My friend is very good with LaTeX all his homeworks and papers come out beautiful. Interestingly, I was reading about work 2007's new equation editor, and apparently they borrowed from LaTeX in the implementation and made it interoperable with MathML. Word's UI has always been confusing for positioning things that aren't text and it doesn't let you see the markup easily to fix what you did wrong which is my major gripe with it. However, 2007 does make some very pretty documents very easily although Word's major defects are still there with the diagram positioning etc.
While I may not like vista so much, I will give MS props for Word 2007. I was writing a pro looking research paper for class and it turned out really nice without much effort. I suppose I could learn LaTex, and I will at some point, but for people that never will, I think they finally did something right.
Well that was kind of my point. Sure these people do exist, but they are few in number and can't gain much traction because most people don't feel very connected to the abstract topics dealt with in physics and chemistry. If I start talking about Lorentz contractions I'm going to get a lot of blank stares. If I talk about "monkeys are your grandfather" people feel like WTF because their grandfather isn't a monkey. It's all emotion and no reason.
I have a feeling we are just nitpicking each others points. Let's just agree we agree :D
Don't they do that already? Don't people watch it? Only problem: They let them off the island afterward.
I have a professor in cell biology that made an interesting remark. He said that with respect to science like physics and chemistry, people trust the scientists because they realize that they don't know what's going on. However with biology, since we are alive, and living things fit easily into our intuition, they like to talk out their ass and not listen to people in the know.
After all, you don't see people rebelling in schools against relativity and electromagnetism.
I wish I had mod points. Mod parent funny!
x=time
y=learning acquired normalized to one
So as someone said before, it should be nearly flat, not steep. However, hill analogies work much better on laymen.
uhhh, what are you talking about with the resizable brushes? What I do is I make a new brush and click edit. Keep the window open and you can resize on the fly. There are problems, but that is definitely not one of them.
In this list, a cursory scan reveals that there are many events that trigger various procedures, but the only moral prohibition I could find was incest. Perhaps if you look more closely, you might find something else (and there were things I think you could argue about, but incest was the only one clearly wrong or right). From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that anything goes except when it might screw up your genes. Different localities require or are at least amenable to variation in procedure.
So if you want to build up a theory of morality axiomatically, it seems that the only human right is to not be forced to have sex with your mom (although I had sex with your mom all night long haha).
So the next level of requirements would have extremely broad, but not universal acceptance - things like prohibitions on unnecessary killing. So most (and I think we can agree in all relatively functional) civil societies, we can adopt this idea.
However, like your drowning man example, if it is an effortless or nearly effortless action to save someone from death, but you let them die, aren't you in effect killing them? I think there are two ways you could argue this: How much effort is nearly effortless? Can we put a hard number, or perhaps a mean in Joules expended? Is it unethical for a someone living in the US saving their neighbors (perhaps as a doctor) but never send money to Africa? Either you're killing all the people you could potentially save, or it is outside of your responsibility. As a practical matter, if you choose to save some people, you are excluding others (you only have so much time/money).
The point is, in the real world, it is impossible to completely satisfy this sort of ethics unless you run yourself into an early grave. After all, how can you sleep at night? Literally. People die while you are sleeping. Obviously, as a practical matter, one must kill a large number of people in order to live a happy life. Things are getting crazy!
So including POSITIVE obligations as part of our definition of secondary human rights is crazy as a practical matter. It is much better to define things we shouldn't do that don't conflict with the basic satisfaction of our metabolic processes, because, while they may add a finite number of steps to avoid each action, they are manageable. Positive obligations to all people add many simultaneous steps each second and build up at an unmanageable rate. Not taking action to kill people is pretty easy to do in my book.
So we have our not killing people thing in place on the basis that most people don't like it. However, the no screwing mom prohibition was explained as proliferating your genes without nearly guaranteed defects. So why is killing people bad? A good example of the point I am about to make is: "My name is Inigo Montoya. You kill my father. Prepare to die." What you reap is what you sow. Most people don't want retaliation vis a vis death used against them no matter what sort of wrong they might commit. The best way to insure that is that people agree, hey, let's NOT kill each other because it causes a cycle of violence.
So this no unnece
Well? What did the department do with it? You can't just waste that...
You raise a good point about Health Care as a Human right. Since human rights tend to center around freedom, any "human right" that creates undue dependencies probably does not qualify as such (although it might be a good idea).
I think if you want to explicitly state the assumptions that Health Care as a Human Right implies, it would probably be similar to:
"All people are entitled to promote their health just as they are entitled to pursue happiness. Direct implications: Murder is banned, intentionally making someone sick is banned (of course there are nuances here but you get the gist). The government must provide reasonable health care to certain groups that because of its intervention do not have reasonable access to it (so basic health care for prisoners et al). The government may not declare special cases to prevent an individual from seeking health care (Government can't order doctors to not help you if they don't like you, but preserves things like transplant priority lists)."
Government funded health care as a general case may be a good idea, or a bad idea, but it is definitely not a human right. Depriving some of their resources for benefit of others is a scheme to get good average case coverage, and necessarily deprives some people of certain other rights protected things like property. Conflicting rights don't make much sense when making universal declarations.
I hope I expressed that clearly.
Don't forget that those 1% are self selecting and may not actually represent the other 99% of the voting public to a degree that would allow you to predict elections. IE It may not be a representative sample. OTOH, if I was a politician and that was the only data I had, well, it's better than a blind guess.
He has a point though. We should really be focused on instituting changes such that your vote does matter, and that your expression is more nuanced than yes/no. This idea of tiers is a good one, as are priority ballots (I forget the official name) that allow you to vote for candidate A with 5 points and candidate b with 4 pts etc.
I didn't mean "think positive" as an attack on you, I meant it in a sarcastic way. Sorry for the confusion.
He could be talking about Aciclovir or HIV meds :D Always think positive
Well it might be more efficient than a dam depending on how much friction other water generates vs air (although I think I could argue that it's more). Also, depending on the efficiency of the plastic vs frictional losses by the generator, it might be more efficient per a dollar spent. In any case, unless the mass production of this plastic would be egregiously harmful, you wouldn't need to make dams and screw up rivers for this solution. I'd like to see the numbers on this.