This is called taking the piss. A schoolboy with a basic grasp of PHP could write them a website that worked. Until your website works, and works reliably, all else is optional.
It's really just a bunch of selfish caveman playing with these magical Toys the modern world has, and stubbornly fighting over territory. FFS the world needs to grow up, and this is why.
Physics is built upon mathematical structures which have their origin in the 19th century. Both Set Theory and Peano Arithmetic effectively grant you the assumption that there is no limit on how high you can effectively count. This leads to models of these theories essentially asserting that there are countable numbers which are greater than the number of particles in the observable universe. I fear this is leading to a hidden paradox in the reasoning process that physicists are using, albeit one that is hard to see and communicate.
Consider this assumption as follows: (you can count) (higher than) (you can count) and compare this with the statement 'X > X'. There must be a practical physical limit on counting, and by assuming this limit away, you are rendering the resulting reasoning system physically implausible. An effect known in classical logic is that from a single contradiction, using the rules of logic, you can logically derive any statement at all. The problem with the foundations of mathematics as they are is that they are incompatible with physical plausibility, and to naively shoehorrn in physical plausibility leads to logical inconsistency and 'weird stuff' appearing. I fear that this is the beast that theoretical physicists are actually wrestling with, albeit unknowingly.
Opinions in psychotherapy, psychology and psychiatry seem to change with the seasons, and to depend upon whom it is you ask. Such opinions should not be used as the basis for sound reasoning. End of story. Sure in some cases internet addiction is a problem, but trying to generalise from a few children with problems to all children is stupid. That said, this is what I posted on facebook a little earlier today (the relevance is stimulus addiction):
Violent video games are like hardcore porn without the sex. They're just as addictive and it is just as important that the mental discipline is learned to know fantasy from reality, and when enough stimulation is enough. It is society's responsibility to teach parents the principles of separation so that patents can teach their children. Else the bad knock on effects of explicit media will simply not go away, and will be rediscovered and reinvented time after time. Management of stimulation must be a parental responsibility and society must be structured so as not to make thus too hard a task. Right now we are having an Adhd epidemic as children get stimulus addicted and in desperation we turn to (charlatan) mind doctors and their magic pills in the hope that they will make this problem go away. Fail to manage stimulation levels, and it won't.
Put another way, there is, with logical certainty, no qualitative improvement in survival strategy beyond something like the following:
You take Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour. You trust in God. When God tells you to fuck, you fucking fuck who God tells you to fuck when, and only when, God, and God alone, tells you to fuck, and you fuck who, and only who, God tells you you can fuck. If you are unsure about who Jesus is, who God is, what Christ and Saviour mean in this context, there is no better method to find out than reading a decent Bible, and you even have a number of translations to choose from.
Lfe is crazy, there is fuck all we can do about it, but we need a surefire method of stopping us questioning this logically certain fact, which requires nothing stronger to prove than the fact that, in Lisp, if you have 100 words to play with, you cannot make a 101-element linked list even if the manual suggest you can, and that real world evidence suggests with at least 99% confidence that the 'can I have another one' routine always works. You can do the same argument on any computer with an actually finite number of cells availble. The observable universe, by the way, is capable of represenign a computer, but is also finite in extent.
That is equivalent, in the absence of semantics, to counting to 14 and knowing to stop. If a computer can't do that, it is certainly not worthy of the adjective intelligent. Likewise, the Apostles creed is a slightly longer counting exercise, requiring you to give appropriate meanings to words as you read them, subject to never reusing a word anywhere. Any computational capable device that doesn't pass such silly sanity checks should be switched off, taken outside and hacked to death with a chainsaw. The Bible takes that principle and the question of assigning a sensible meaning reliably to any sensible way of reading verses, and uses the principle of forcing a computer to actually count, well past the point of taking the piss. From the point of a Christian with a PhD in models of Peano Arithmetic, which is part of that branch of mathematics, mathematical logic, which practically gave birth to the modern notion of computation, that superseding the old school victorian model consising of a human being bored so heavily by rigorous schooling that he'd rather commit suicide than make a mistake. Turing was such a person, faced with an education system that still hadn't got is point, I had to resort to taking the piss with my degree just to stay sane. Seriously, the first use of the Bible is as a sanity check. If you take the English Standard Version of the Bible, try to read it, try to find any semblence of sense, fail, and still consider yourself capable of reading English, you have basically proved yourself insane past the point that any reasonable non-Christian is going to care. The non-Christian will see you as a worthless piece of shit that should be put out of its misery: the true Christian will take one extra step prior to execution, and that is the step of exhaustively verifying that there is genuinely no plausible chance of redemption. That's the bit Christianity adds to your life. It means that when it comes down to the question 'that piece if shit village idiot you fired, who then jumped off a bridge and killed himself, are you absolutely logically certain you needed to'. Faced with someome who even pauses to consider 'yes' as an acceptable answer, whilst my faith in Christ and the Gospel will have no issue, my faith in the Bible may be marred by the suspicion that 'thou shalt not kill' indeed is missing a bit of small print. Does this make sense? (That last question does include yes as a safe answer, btw.)
If you do a single thing to me without permission, then in a crisis I simply cannot allow myself to trust you. If in that crisis I have to execute someone to save a friend, your life will be in danger. Thus it is best to always ask permission! And with regards to permission, if I give you one of my internet passwords, you may consider that permission to use it. As an example, see http://allsup.co/friends/slashdot.org/msg-whyi.php and email me to ask what to put at the end of the URL so that the if(test()) { showpage(); } else die(horribly()); line in the PHP script will not commit computational suicide. Use the address super.secret.slashdot@allsup.co for this purpose, and include a URL that at least points to slashdot, preferably this article, or this comment as proof you have read and understood this. You have my permission to try the passwords you find anywhere you like, since I've checked to my satisfaction that they no longer work.
Then it will generally still work, will probably be cheap to replace, and in case it is damaged, it will still be at least nearly perfectly usable. In the case of my android tablet that I used to use for this, I made the mistake of leaving in on the floor next to the power socket whilst on charge (short power cable and all that), was enthusiastically showing a friend round my toy collection (toy=laptop/workstation/synth/etc) and accidently put my chairleg down on my android tablet. It still boots but touchscreen functionality doesn't work and, being a cheap tablet, usb otg didn't work properly anyway, so its now unusable. If it were a real book, it wouldn't even have broken! That's why I do not trust e-readers for books that are even remotely important: they are just too fragile and, even though I'm careful 99% of the time, there is that issue of the remaining 1% where even the most careful human doesn't have his (or her) brain engaged properly and is temporarily a complete klutz. Real paperware books are reasonably robust against issues of accidental clumsiness. And robustness saves lives! Seriously, suppose you're on the ISS and the only copy of the maintenance manual is accessible via an e-reader and you break it?
At first it was the other way around, but: Java was always in a no-mans land: too low level to have the high level features of Js, too high level to have the power and speed of C/C++. What is needed is a data-structure based language for low level programming that is accessible to Js so that Js code can create and manipulate low level programs and request their compilation. Appropriate compilers then simply need to be made visible to Js in a natural way. If you want a bytecode vm, implement it using the low level side of this, then control it from Js. Of course python3 style features should be worked in, and whilst v8 is great if you're on an x86 or x64 machine, a llvm or something based backend for other machines needs sorting out. But then js is clearly the better language. If you want type safety, you want something like Haskell, and that is a descendent of lisp, so is best represented as data structures again, not necessarily text. Bridging the gap back to the programmer is the bit Lisp screwed up, and hopefully we can get it right this time around.
I tend to start with accepting reality as shown by current science -- at least that that is a good approximation. Metaphysical stuff about the past is beyond experiment and the best we can do is extrapolate backwards from the present given a long list of assumptions. The important thing is: how do we live in this reality? A consequence of our evolved nature, are a number of selfish and tribalistic traits -- we have not yet go to the point of seeing ourselves as part of one big organism called Life, and thus don't properly concern ourselves with the suffering of others in the same way we don't put our hand in a fire because we know it will hurt. Once you take that and start thinking it through, the natural consequences bear a great similarity to a lot of the teachings we find in various ancient spiritual teachings (Bible, Taoist and Indic stuff). Then you start to see what these ancient teachings are going on about, and how in the hands of those who were taught them formally but didn't understand as fully as the greats of the distant past, distorted understandings through centuries of Chinese whispers.
We need to see life and humanity as a whole, and ourselves as parts in that. We need to serve the whole primarily, not our individual selves, nor priorities personal success, or that of our genes or families or tribes etc. above that of the whole. If you try to give this whole an intuitively graspable personal nature (just like a child sees his teddy bear), so as to related to this whole on more than a dry intellectual level, you end up with concepts that look a lot like the ancient idea of the 'one true God'. Identifying our selves with this whole, just as you consider your arm you (if I hit your arm, you would naturally say I hit you) changes your perspective, and from that perspective ancient religious teachings have a clear (and important) message that is lost on most modern people, religious or otherwise.
The inspired free rational thinking of one generation becomes the dogma of a later generation. That's already happened with spiritual teachings in the form of what we call 'religion'. It is happening again with science. The cause is human nature and psychology (maintaining understanding is much harder than merely copying words and appearing charismatic and learned to a naive audience, and so evolutionary pressure tends to favour the latter as a strategy for being successful -- the only problem is when one of those pesky individuals who actually understands what the stuff is supposed to be about comes along and tries to explain it -- then they nail him to a lump of wood and build a new religion around his teachings.) Science needs to learn about its future from religion, because religion is what modern science will become unless people are far more careful than they are these days.
Ok. Let's think for a moment. What can a piece of paper with 2(i) in Physics do, on its own? Nothing, that's what.
What can a student capable of getting a 2(i) in Physics on their own merit do? Probably quite a bit. What can a student capable of only getting a 3 in Physics on their own merit do? Probably less.
Exams are meant to test what a student has learned. If someone can't add up or multiply, having a first class maths degree to their name doesn't change that.
Judging people by qualifications is a shortcut to assessing their actual ability. But if qualifications are unreliable, and cheating makes them unreliable, then we have to revert to actually assessing what people can do, and ultimately by methods that are not written exams: rather the throw-em-in-the-deep-end sink-or-swim type tests. This takes more effort and resources, for no material gain. Hence everybody loses.
But cheating and corruption are the natural destination for a system which prizes exam results and pins career prospects on the back of them, rather than on genuine ability.
Bipolar Disorder, Psychosis and Schizophrenia for Dummies who know a little physics etc.
Life is generally in a good position when it has potential (like gravitational potential in the case of high ground) and the capacity to use it in a controlled fashion. That means balancing in a position that would otherwise be considered an unstable equilibrium in the sense of dynamical systems theory. Our bodies are at their most efficient when well balanced (just watch a good dancer to see this in action) and our brains are at their best when similarly balanced. If something disturbs the equilibrium, this disturbance and the required correction can be used to understand the disturbance. This is how stimulation affects us.
Now consider a simple example of a balancing physical object, but with no control mechanism: a spinning top. This has three states--spinning upright (when the gravitational potential is near its maximum), wobbling (when the gravitational potential is slightly lower, in which case it behaves erratically and gives up its energy randomly until...) finally we have the fallen over state. This is what medical people term depression. The simple solution is to get upright and balanced again, but this is hard in our modern overly complex society, and the result of trying to get up is often a lot of wobbling, which gets diagnosed as things like mania, psychosis and schizophrenia depending on how exactly this wobbling manifests itself. The key is to get balanced before you get pushed over, and that is hard when the medical mental health people seem to have the idea that you fix a wobbling spinning top by knocking it over and gluing it to the floor.
Trying to understand mental health in a 'sum of the parts' way is just dumb, but it is the obsession of the medical fraternity, and is to the extent that it is politically very difficult to suggest otherwise. How our genetic code creates us is an approach that misses the point that without the environmental context in which that genetic code develops, it won't develop, so you need to understand the environment as well (and that means understanding the entire world in complete detail, which is rather a long way the other side of impossible).
Viewed as an equilbrium seeking system, 'mental illnesses' like mania and schizophrenia are just seen as things like oscillations and resonant modes that are being excited by either an appropriate drive, or are resonating within the equilibrium seeking system. The biological stuff is just an implementation detail in much the way that transistors on a chip are implementation details of your python program that you are running that you can safely ignore in most cases. Medication is basically trying to solve a software problem by randomly pumping noise into the processor. A computer will crash instantly if you do this, but humans are rather more robust, and can survive for a long time in an unbalanced state. They are, however, rather unproductive in this state and won't tend to find life enjoyable. But they can survive for a long time, but can become desperate to get out of such states.
Imagine a world where coding is as ubiquitous as reading and writing is to us today. Bear in mind that centuries ago, reading and writing was about as ubiquitous as coding is today, and was at one point in time the preserve of the masses. Writing for machines and reading machine instructions will at some stage become part of our everyday literacy. The thing is, efficiency matters: in a competitive marketplace, for a given market niche, barring underhand business tactics, the more efficient (and effective) software will tend to do better. Eventually underhanded business tactics will become too inefficient relative to the state of the art, and will be destined to die out (as, in general, will self-serving greed, it too not being the most overall efficient use of resources). Maths is unavoidable, and computer science is an outgrowth of maths, and is the part relevant to modern digital computers. Furthermore, concepts and phenomena we see in computer science and artificial intelligence often have implications and applications well beyond digital computers once considered in mathematical generality. Long term, coding is not enough, but not being able to code when computers are as ubiquitous as they are today is as sensible as not being able to read or write, or do simple arithmetic.
Of course, you could use a few Bash aliases for fun.
Who needs:47,80s/hello/world when you can do
mknod -p a b c head -n 47 myfile > a & tail -n $(($(wc -l myfile) - 80)) myfile > c & ( head -n 80 myfile | tail -n $((80 - 47)) | sed -E 's/hello/world/' ) > b & (sleep 1 ; cat a b c > myfile.version2)
on the command line.
Caveat, this has neither been run, nor tested, so may need debugging.
When I first played with Linux in 1995, with no *nix experience, I recall the situation of getting trapped in ed or vi. After trying various random key combinations, I discovered that Ctrl-Z got me back to a command prompt, then jobs -l gave a list of stopped jobs with PIDs which I could pass to kill -9. That restored sanity. Years later I actually got round to learning vi(m) after hearing from a local sysadmin how useful it was, and by then there were tutorials online that eased you into it. The thing I'm most grateful for with vim is how I can get a command prompt on windows, mac, linux, or over ssh to my webhost, and the environment works the same way. But for things like android programming I tend to follow the sheeple and use eclipse/android-studio and I'm beginning to get into Code::Blocks for some things. I've thought for years of writing my own vim-like editor as an exercise, but haven't got round to it yet.
I can imagine Streisand effects coming into play. If google blacklists one article, in compliance, what is to stop other articles containing the information and possibly linking to the original appearing.
How many biologists understand the nature of randomness though? When it comes to metaphysical stuff, the biologists are punting the difficult bit into the term 'random' and ascribing this 'random' thingamajig the properties that fundies ascribe to their God. Then things such as mind, consciousness and intelligence have yet to be turned into sufficiently concretely defined concepts to answer questions like 'is evolution directed in an intelligent way' let alone how and if human intelligence and consciousness arise from brain activity, or emerge in other ways. We really know less than we think, and many untestable hypothetical foundations are elavated to the position of unquestionable dogma by the phenomena of 'near universal acceptance by experts'.
That climate change is happening is beyond doubt, but the case that humanly produced CO2 emissions are the primary cause, and that massively reducing our CO2 emissions will fix the issue is not beyond doubt. Funding for projects which subject these ideas to scrutiny is harder to get than funding for projects which assume the CO2 caused warming and then show results consistent with it. The diagram correlating CO2 with global temperature as inferred from ice cores, famously used by Gore in his 'inconvenient truth' has been claimed by some to put the causative relationship the wrong way round (suggesting that instead rising temperatures cause the oceans to release stored CO2, hence the increase in CO2). Some have advanced the notion that solar activity is the cause, with evidence. But global warming has become so politicised that proper scientific debate is stifled, for example by the need to adhere to CO2 caused warming theories in order to get funding for your project.
Your point of 'Never underestimate the power of a person to disagree if agreeing means that they will need to alter their worldview.' is just as valid for the wide acceptance of the CO2-warming relationship. The great political momentum attached to this worldview is hard to argue against, even on scientific grounds, since those who don't wish to change can keep pointing to the mass who believe CO2 causes global warming.
Caveat: I'm not an expert in this area, but find how politicised it is to be worrying.
Slashdot Mirror
This is called taking the piss. A schoolboy with a basic grasp of PHP could write them a website that worked. Until your website works, and works reliably, all else is optional.
It's really just a bunch of selfish caveman playing with these magical Toys the modern world has, and stubbornly fighting over territory. FFS the world needs to grow up, and this is why.
Physics is built upon mathematical structures which have their origin in the 19th century. Both Set Theory and Peano Arithmetic effectively grant you the assumption that there is no limit on how high you can effectively count. This leads to models of these theories essentially asserting that there are countable numbers which are greater than the number of particles in the observable universe. I fear this is leading to a hidden paradox in the reasoning process that physicists are using, albeit one that is hard to see and communicate.
Consider this assumption as follows:
(you can count) (higher than) (you can count)
and compare this with the statement 'X > X'. There must be a practical physical limit on counting, and by assuming this limit away, you are rendering the resulting reasoning system physically implausible. An effect known in classical logic is that from a single contradiction, using the rules of logic, you can logically derive any statement at all. The problem with the foundations of mathematics as they are is that they are incompatible with physical plausibility, and to naively shoehorrn in physical plausibility leads to logical inconsistency and 'weird stuff' appearing. I fear that this is the beast that theoretical physicists are actually wrestling with, albeit unknowingly.
Opinions in psychotherapy, psychology and psychiatry seem to change with the seasons, and to depend upon whom it is you ask. Such opinions should not be used as the basis for sound reasoning. End of story. Sure in some cases internet addiction is a problem, but trying to generalise from a few children with problems to all children is stupid. That said, this is what I posted on facebook a little earlier today (the relevance is stimulus addiction):
Violent video games are like hardcore porn without the sex. They're just as addictive and it is just as important that the mental discipline is learned to know fantasy from reality, and when enough stimulation is enough. It is society's responsibility to teach parents the principles of separation so that patents can teach their children. Else the bad knock on effects of explicit media will simply not go away, and will be rediscovered and reinvented time after time. Management of stimulation must be a parental responsibility and society must be structured so as not to make thus too hard a task. Right now we are having an Adhd epidemic as children get stimulus addicted and in desperation we turn to (charlatan) mind doctors and their magic pills in the hope that they will make this problem go away. Fail to manage stimulation levels, and it won't.
for x in listOfSynonymsForWorse:
print("{} than a bad zombie movie".format(x))
Put another way, there is, with logical certainty, no qualitative improvement in survival strategy beyond something like the following:
You take Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour. You trust in God. When God tells you to fuck, you fucking fuck who God
tells you to fuck when, and only when, God, and God alone, tells you to fuck, and you fuck who, and only who, God tells you
you can fuck. If you are unsure about who Jesus is, who God is, what Christ and Saviour mean in this context, there is no
better method to find out than reading a decent Bible, and you even have a number of translations to choose from.
Lfe is crazy, there is fuck all we can do about it, but we need a surefire method of stopping us questioning this logically certain fact,
which requires nothing stronger to prove than the fact that, in Lisp, if you have 100 words to play with, you cannot make a 101-element
linked list even if the manual suggest you can, and that real world evidence suggests with at least 99% confidence that the 'can
I have another one' routine always works. You can do the same argument on any computer with an actually finite number of cells availble. The
observable universe, by the way, is capable of represenign a computer, but is also finite in extent.
That is equivalent, in the absence of semantics, to counting to 14 and knowing to stop. If a computer can't do that, it is certainly not worthy of the adjective intelligent. Likewise, the Apostles creed is a slightly longer counting exercise, requiring you to give appropriate meanings to words as you read them, subject to never reusing a word anywhere. Any computational capable device that doesn't pass such silly sanity checks should be switched off, taken outside and hacked to death with a chainsaw. The Bible takes that principle and the question of assigning a sensible meaning reliably to any sensible way of reading verses, and uses the principle of forcing a computer to actually count, well past the point of taking the piss. From the point of a Christian with a PhD in models of Peano Arithmetic, which is part of that branch of mathematics, mathematical logic, which practically gave birth to the modern notion of computation, that superseding the old school victorian model consising of a human being bored so heavily by rigorous schooling that he'd rather commit suicide than make a mistake. Turing was such a person, faced with an education system that still hadn't got is point, I had to resort to taking the piss with my degree just to stay sane. Seriously, the first use of the Bible is as a sanity check. If you take the English Standard Version of the Bible, try to read it, try to find any semblence of sense, fail, and still consider yourself capable of reading English, you have basically proved yourself insane past the point that any reasonable non-Christian is going to care. The non-Christian will see you as a worthless piece of shit that should be put out of its misery: the true Christian will take one extra step prior to execution, and that is the step of exhaustively verifying that there is genuinely no plausible chance of redemption. That's the bit Christianity adds to your life. It means that when it comes down to the question 'that piece if shit village idiot you fired, who then jumped off a bridge and killed himself, are you absolutely logically certain you needed to'. Faced with someome who even pauses to consider 'yes' as an acceptable answer, whilst my faith in Christ and the Gospel will have no issue, my faith in the Bible may be marred by the suspicion that 'thou shalt not kill' indeed is missing a bit of small print. Does this make sense? (That last question does include yes as a safe answer, btw.)
If you do a single thing to me without permission, then in a crisis I simply cannot allow myself to trust you. If in that crisis I have to execute someone to save a friend, your life will be in danger. Thus it is best to always ask permission! And with regards to permission, if I give you one of my internet passwords, you may consider that permission to use it. As an example, see http://allsup.co/friends/slashdot.org/msg-whyi.php and email me to ask what to put at the end of the URL so that the if(test()) { showpage(); } else die(horribly()); line in the PHP script will not commit computational suicide. Use the address super.secret.slashdot@allsup.co for this purpose, and include a URL that at least points to slashdot, preferably this article, or this comment as proof you
have read and understood this. You have my permission to try the passwords you find anywhere you like, since I've checked to my satisfaction that they no longer work.
Then it will generally still work, will probably be cheap to replace, and in case it is damaged, it will still be at least nearly perfectly usable. In the case of my android tablet that I used to use for this, I made the mistake of leaving in on the floor next to the power socket whilst on charge (short power cable and all that), was enthusiastically showing a friend round my toy collection (toy=laptop/workstation/synth/etc) and accidently put my chairleg down on my android tablet. It still boots but touchscreen functionality doesn't work and, being a cheap tablet, usb otg didn't work properly anyway, so its now unusable. If it were a real book, it wouldn't even have broken! That's why I do not trust e-readers for books that are even remotely important: they are just too fragile and, even though I'm careful 99% of the time, there is that issue of the remaining 1% where even the most careful human doesn't have his (or her) brain engaged properly and is temporarily a complete klutz. Real paperware books are reasonably robust against issues of accidental clumsiness. And robustness saves lives! Seriously, suppose you're on the ISS and the only copy of the maintenance manual is accessible via an e-reader and you break it?
//... Top Secret internal document, do not copy!
#define BENDTHEMOVERABARREL "Very"
#define AND " "
#define SHAFTTHEMUPTHEARSE "Fair"
const char * officialPolicyTowardsArtists = BENDTHEMOVERABARREL AND SHAFTTHEMUPTHEARSE;
//... p.s. be careful not to leak the above onto the internet
At first it was the other way around, but: Java was always in a no-mans land: too low level to have the high level features of Js, too high level to have the power and speed of C/C++. What is needed is a data-structure based language for low level programming that is accessible to Js so that Js code can create and manipulate low level programs and request their compilation. Appropriate compilers then simply need to be made visible to Js in a natural way. If you want a bytecode vm, implement it using the low level side of this, then control it from Js. Of course python3 style features should be worked in, and whilst v8 is great if you're on an x86 or x64 machine, a llvm or something based backend for other machines needs sorting out. But then js is clearly the better language. If you want type safety, you want something like Haskell, and that is a descendent of lisp, so is best represented as data structures again, not necessarily text. Bridging the gap back to the programmer is the bit Lisp screwed up, and hopefully we can get it right this time around.
The Turing Test is Interactive; Poems are Not. It's almost comedic how the Turing Test is misunderstood, misrepresented and suchlike.
while ((c = ...
...
{
}
/* INSERT THIS */
if( x.interactive == RMI_NEVER && x.ignore_missing_files == true && x.recursive == true ) {
char *mayi = getenv("RM_ALLOWRF");
if(mayi && strcmp(mayi,"YES")) {
printf("rm -rf allowed\n");
} else {
printf("rm -rf not allowed (set RM_ALOWRF=YES to enable)\n");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
}
/* END INSERT */
if (argc <= optind)
{
...
I tend to start with accepting reality as shown by current science -- at least that that is a good approximation. Metaphysical stuff about the past is beyond experiment and the best we can do is extrapolate backwards from the present given a long list of assumptions.
The important thing is: how do we live in this reality? A consequence of our evolved nature, are a number of selfish and tribalistic traits -- we have not yet go to the point of seeing ourselves as part of one big organism called Life, and thus don't properly concern ourselves with the suffering of others in the same way we don't put our hand in a fire because we know it will hurt. Once you take that and start thinking it through, the natural consequences bear a great similarity to a lot of the teachings we find in various ancient spiritual teachings (Bible, Taoist and Indic stuff). Then you start to see what these ancient teachings are going on about, and how in the hands of those who were taught them formally but didn't understand as fully as the greats of the distant past, distorted understandings through centuries of Chinese whispers.
We need to see life and humanity as a whole, and ourselves as parts in that. We need to serve the whole primarily, not our individual selves, nor priorities personal success, or that of our genes or families or tribes etc. above that of the whole. If you try to give this whole an intuitively graspable personal nature (just like a child sees his teddy bear), so as to related to this whole on more than a dry intellectual level, you end up with concepts that look a lot like the ancient idea of the 'one true God'. Identifying our selves with this whole, just as you consider your arm you (if I hit your arm, you would naturally say I hit you) changes your perspective, and from that perspective ancient religious teachings have a clear (and important) message that is lost on most modern people, religious or otherwise.
The inspired free rational thinking of one generation becomes the dogma of a later generation. That's already happened with spiritual teachings in the form of what we call 'religion'. It is happening again with science. The cause is human nature and psychology (maintaining understanding is much harder than merely copying words and appearing charismatic and learned to a naive audience, and so evolutionary pressure tends to favour the latter as a strategy for being successful -- the only problem is when one of those pesky individuals who actually understands what the stuff is supposed to be about comes along and tries to explain it -- then they nail him to a lump of wood and build a new religion around his teachings.) Science needs to learn about its future from religion, because religion is what modern science will become unless people are far more careful than they are these days.
See http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...
Ok. Let's think for a moment. What can a piece of paper with 2(i) in Physics do, on its own? Nothing, that's what.
What can a student capable of getting a 2(i) in Physics on their own merit do? Probably quite a bit.
What can a student capable of only getting a 3 in Physics on their own merit do? Probably less.
Exams are meant to test what a student has learned. If someone can't add up or multiply, having a first class maths degree to their name doesn't change that.
Judging people by qualifications is a shortcut to assessing their actual ability. But if qualifications are unreliable, and cheating makes them unreliable, then we have to revert to actually assessing what people can do, and ultimately by methods that are not written exams: rather the throw-em-in-the-deep-end sink-or-swim type tests. This takes more effort and resources, for no material gain. Hence everybody loses.
But cheating and corruption are the natural destination for a system which prizes exam results and pins career prospects on the back of them, rather than on genuine ability.
did the metastable false vacuum come from?
Bipolar Disorder, Psychosis and Schizophrenia for Dummies who know a little physics etc.
Life is generally in a good position when it has potential (like gravitational potential in the case of high ground) and the capacity to use it in a controlled fashion. That means balancing in a position that would otherwise be considered an unstable equilibrium in the sense of dynamical systems theory. Our bodies are at their most efficient when well balanced (just watch a good dancer to see this in action) and our brains are at their best when similarly balanced. If something disturbs the equilibrium, this disturbance and the required correction can be used to understand the disturbance. This is how stimulation affects us.
Now consider a simple example of a balancing physical object, but with no control mechanism: a spinning top. This has three states--spinning upright (when the gravitational potential is near its maximum), wobbling (when the gravitational potential is slightly lower, in which case it behaves erratically and gives up its energy randomly until...) finally we have the fallen over state. This is what medical people term depression. The simple solution is to get upright and balanced again, but this is hard in our modern overly complex society, and the result of trying to get up is often a lot of wobbling, which gets diagnosed as things like mania, psychosis and schizophrenia depending on how exactly this wobbling manifests itself. The key is to get balanced before you get pushed over, and that is hard when the medical mental health people seem to have the idea that you fix a wobbling spinning top by knocking it over and gluing it to the floor.
Trying to understand mental health in a 'sum of the parts' way is just dumb, but it is the obsession of the medical fraternity, and is to the extent that it is politically very difficult to suggest otherwise. How our genetic code creates us is an approach that misses the point that without the environmental context in which that genetic code develops, it won't develop, so you need to understand the environment as well (and that means understanding the entire world in complete detail, which is rather a long way the other side of impossible).
Viewed as an equilbrium seeking system, 'mental illnesses' like mania and schizophrenia are just seen as things like oscillations and resonant modes that are being excited by either an appropriate drive, or are resonating within the equilibrium seeking system. The biological stuff is just an implementation detail in much the way that transistors on a chip are implementation details of your python program that you are running that you can safely ignore in most cases. Medication is basically trying to solve a software problem by randomly pumping noise into the processor. A computer will crash instantly if you do this, but humans are rather more robust, and can survive for a long time in an unbalanced state. They are, however, rather unproductive in this state and won't tend to find life enjoyable. But they can survive for a long time, but can become desperate to get out of such states.
Imagine a world where coding is as ubiquitous as reading and writing is to us today. Bear in mind that centuries ago, reading and writing was about as ubiquitous as coding is today, and was at one point in time the preserve of the masses. Writing for machines and reading machine instructions will at some stage become part of our everyday literacy. The thing is, efficiency matters: in a competitive marketplace, for a given market niche, barring underhand business tactics, the more efficient (and effective) software will tend to do better. Eventually underhanded business tactics will become too inefficient relative to the state of the art, and will be destined to die out (as, in general, will self-serving greed, it too not being the most overall efficient use of resources). Maths is unavoidable, and computer science is an outgrowth of maths, and is the part relevant to modern digital computers. Furthermore, concepts and phenomena we see in computer science and artificial intelligence often have implications and applications well beyond digital computers once considered in mathematical generality. Long term, coding is not enough, but not being able to code when computers are as ubiquitous as they are today is as sensible as not being able to read or write, or do simple arithmetic.
Whats all that got to do with the price of eggs?
Of course, you could use a few Bash aliases for fun.
Who needs :47,80s/hello/world when you can do
mknod -p a b c
head -n 47 myfile > a & tail -n $(($(wc -l myfile) - 80)) myfile > c & ( head -n 80 myfile | tail -n $((80 - 47)) | sed -E 's/hello/world/' ) > b & (sleep 1 ; cat a b c > myfile.version2)
on the command line.
Caveat, this has neither been run, nor tested, so may need debugging.
When I first played with Linux in 1995, with no *nix experience, I recall the situation of getting trapped in ed or vi. After trying various random key combinations, I discovered that Ctrl-Z got me back to a command prompt, then jobs -l gave a list of stopped jobs with PIDs which I could pass to kill -9. That restored sanity. Years later I actually got round to learning vi(m) after hearing from a local sysadmin how useful it was, and by then there were tutorials online that eased you into it. The thing I'm most grateful for with vim is how I can get a command prompt on windows, mac, linux, or over ssh to my webhost, and the environment works the same way. But for things like android programming I tend to follow the sheeple and use eclipse/android-studio and I'm beginning to get into Code::Blocks for some things. I've thought for years of writing my own vim-like editor as an exercise, but haven't got round to it yet.
I can imagine Streisand effects coming into play. If google blacklists one article, in compliance, what is to stop other articles containing the information and possibly linking to the original appearing.
How many biologists understand the nature of randomness though? When it comes to metaphysical stuff, the biologists are punting the difficult bit into the term 'random' and ascribing this 'random' thingamajig the properties that fundies ascribe to their God. Then things such as mind, consciousness and intelligence have yet to be turned into sufficiently concretely defined concepts to answer questions like 'is evolution directed in an intelligent way' let alone how and if human intelligence and consciousness arise from brain activity, or emerge in other ways. We really know less than we think, and many untestable hypothetical foundations are elavated to the position of unquestionable dogma by the phenomena of 'near universal acceptance by experts'.
That climate change is happening is beyond doubt, but the case that humanly produced CO2 emissions are the primary cause, and that massively reducing our CO2 emissions will fix the issue is not beyond doubt. Funding for projects which subject these ideas to scrutiny is harder to get than funding for projects which assume the CO2 caused warming and then show results consistent with it. The diagram correlating CO2 with global temperature as inferred from ice cores, famously used by Gore in his 'inconvenient truth' has been claimed by some to put the causative relationship the wrong way round (suggesting that instead rising temperatures cause the oceans to release stored CO2, hence the increase in CO2). Some have advanced the notion that solar activity is the cause, with evidence. But global warming has become so politicised that proper scientific debate is stifled, for example by the need to adhere to CO2 caused warming theories in order to get funding for your project.
Your point of 'Never underestimate the power of a person to disagree if agreeing means that they will need to alter their worldview.' is just as valid for the wide acceptance of the CO2-warming relationship. The great political momentum attached to this worldview is hard to argue against, even on scientific grounds, since those who don't wish to change can keep pointing to the mass who believe CO2 causes global warming.
Caveat: I'm not an expert in this area, but find how politicised it is to be worrying.