Dak

one of my old landladies who is a ****ing whore and should die rented me and my friends a house that came with fleas. :mad: :mad: 1/ you have my sympathys (fleas suck), and 2/ deflea the dog, and try to use flea powder, flea spray, and regular washing to keep them down around your house; if worst comes to worst you'll have to fumigate (which is both inconvienient and irritating), so try to stop an infestation from happening, rather than fixing it once it does. in the uk, the council offers free de-fleaing under certain circumstances, so it's worth cheking wether your local counsil will do it for free maybe.

coincidentally, if it comes back, it'll be ignorable: you can opt-out, and not see the forum on the forums index, nor the posts in the recent posts list. anything spilling out of P&R and into the main science bits will be dealt with heavily (probably by an irate YT ), so, if you want, it'd be as if P&R had never come back. which makes you wonder why some people are so against it, given that we're taking pains to make it so isolated and easy to ignore...

is it actually suggested that they be steralised without their consent? I could see it being something you are encouraged to do when you're, say, 16. the argument is that poor people have more accidental births, not more intentional births, so there'd be no need for a quota in order to address the issue of poor people 'outbreeding' non-poor people; simply lowering the accidental birth-rate would be enough. anyhoo, the same argument could be applied to catholics (with their adversion to contraseptives), and it's not as if catholics have out-bread non-catholics yet.

p&r 3.0 if it doesn't work, we could allways try turning it into just p. ethics and non-religious philosophy should, in theory, be groovy. not likely to get "bwah, how dare you critisize kantiism, you stupid utalitarian"

most systems could be abused. what i mean was that theres a huge gulf between suggesting we steralise people and give them the unsteraliser on demand, and the suggestion that we choose who gets unsteralised; i don't think this system neccesarily would end up being abused.

is the proposal actually to steralise, say, at birth and reverse it upon request? or is the suggestion that, rather than going and buying some condoms or going on the pill, you should take a steralising pill that just rendered you permenently (but reversably) infertile? either way, fearing abuse of the situation is somewhat slippery-sloapy. also, this'd probably be easyer to do to males: something like a reversable vasectomy.

he was. eg, if theres a duplicate at points 3 and 7, then, once you've compared 3 with 7 and id'd the duplicate, it's pointless to then compare 4,5,and6 with 7 (as you've allready compared them with 3, which == 7), and it's pointless to compare 7 with everything past 7, as you allready know the item entered at point 7 is a duplicate. if, once you've compared 3 with 7 and id'd the duplication, you then delete item 7, you prevent the above. essentially, you'd save len(list)-currentListItem number of comparisons (tho i think what atheist was originally getting at was that deleting items from a list could take alot of re-arranging of data too, so might not be worth it) oh, by-the-by, it took 3 hours in the end ta. i didn't think of sorting them first. but a quick google suggests that bubble-sort isn't very good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_sort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/harrison/Java/sorting-demo.html will do, but i don't think python has them. guess this would be a good time to learn C... ===edit=== dups = [] dicnohash.sort() for a in range(0,len(dicnohash)): if dicnohash[a] == dicnohash[a+1]: dups.append(dicnohash[a]) took, like, a few seconds

what about if taking the pill were voluntary? that'd work, i think.

i like this idea. do you have javascript disabled in firefox? other than that, it happens to me occasionally if i don't wait for the page to load before clicking it.

I have a large list of words, with several duplicates, so i wrote a small python script to generate a list of all the dupes: dicnohash = the list dups = the list of duplicates in the list dups = [] for a in range(0,len(dicnohash)): for b in range(a+1,len(dicnohash)): if dicnohash[a] == dicnohash[b]: dups.append(dicnohash[b]) break it just compares each item with each item after it, and if they match, it logs the match in the dups list (which is later written to file), and then breaks to the next item in the list. however, there are nearly 100,000 items in the list, so i guess it's going to do a max of somewhere in the range of 5,000,000,000 comparisons that's probably why it's taking so long my question is, how could this be done faster? I honestly can't think of any way of doing it that'd take less comparisons than the way above. it only needs to be done once, so i'm using the above code + patience, but i'm still interested

unless you're searching thru the text for a key-phrase or unless you want casual access, without the need to copy/paste before you can access it.

or, if worse comes to worst(?), just keep several computers knocking about, with copies of archaic OSs and word-processors on them?

some words can be pronounced with or without the 'h': a hotel, a historic, a herb; an 'otel, an 'istoric, an 'erb. so with those words, you can (afaik) write a or an: a historic or an historic. but if you actually say " an historic ", then you are a moron like people who pronounce 'h' as 'haitch' in order to sound posh.

I'm not sure this is the case, in practice. things get researched based on how much funding they can get: that slants science, in practice, towards putting more effort into 'good' science that can benifit mankind. which apparently includes weapons-tech...

also, if the word is going to be expanded when read, it's whatever the expansion would take. eg, if it's 'urban middle school' and you're intending it to be pronounced as such, it'd be 'an UMS'. what is UMS? i be intregued...

yeah, same goes. i'd be interested, but with only two people a wiki wouldn't be too great.

i'd've asked for $1000 and the first iphone she bought

you could say the same about any encyclopaedia, or any collection of info at all for that matter. it should be trivial to design an assignment that cant be done by copy/pasting from wiki (or better, find a subject where the wiki article has a mistake )

i'd suspect that, had we not made such a big deal of it, there wouldn't be the idea of a struggle between western civilisation and 'terrorists', so less people would descide to join the struggle.

as the end of sayo's article pretty much said, statements like this mean pretty little without some kind of quantification (how much of the chemicals leach out?). arsenic is a by-product of copper production. if you drink water that's deliverd through copper pipes, you'll be drinking water that's 'contaminated' by copper. but it doesn't matter, as theres not too much of it. (complete guess alert) you'd probably get hypohydration (basically water poisoning) before arsenic poisoning if you drunk as much tap water as you could.

how about this: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=15213107 seems a quite strong observed correlation between smoking and early death amongst doctors. not to mention that several mechanisms (most notably lung cancer) are understood to be causeable by cigarette smoke.

actually, i'm pretty sure most people discount most (of what they percieve to be) quantumn phisics, based on the fact it's hard to understand and 'sounds silly'. tho, of course, it's less in the public's eye that evolution/GW. otoh, it contradicts most peoples self-interest to believe that smoking and alcohol are harmful, yet most people believe these facts (which i'd point out are quite simple and easy to understand). I'd say that conflict with self-interest probably gives motivation to deny, whilst complexity seems to facilitate denial somehow. anyhoo, my point was actually that the complexity begets confusion, which aids the spreading of the kind of crap that is floating around about GW/evolution, which makes it easyer to disbelieve (standard strawman -- look at y; mistake it for x; see how y is wrong; conclude, therefore, that x is wrong). 'smoking is bad for you. it causes cancer.'. that's quite simple, and hard to spread FUD about. the scientific opinion is also quite easily discernable. which is why i suspect that (now) theres few people who deny that smoking is bad for you, despite the motivation to do so. acid rain and (afaik) ozone depletion, whilst bad, aren't exactly contributors to GW. which i believe is geoguy's point -- you accept GW without understanding it. 'so what', says I: you don't need to understand something to accept it. for example, I do not understand, but would not deny the validity of, the following: -maths -women -men, for that matter -phisics -GW -any language barring english i don't think i'm wrong to accept the above, despite my inability to understand them. except, apparently, when it is your opinion v science, in which case the science is crap and you're right? or am i misunderstanding your stance?

hehe. I guess you have to step away from empericism, at least. given that the suggestion is that our sences might be unreliable, i don't think empericism can be used to disprove that. isn't "we're living in a non-illusionary world" an axiom of science? i.e., our sences might be innacurate and fallilbe, but, if we see something, it's probably there?

by reports, do you mean papers, or media-reports?

it's interesting that the harder something is to understand, the less people 'believe' in it. also, the harder something is to understand, the more there is confusion about what 'science' says, and the more crap there is flying about; which must make it easyer to not believe in it.