bascule

Let me source a quote to the contrary from the Washington Post, since you seem to like them: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/17/AR2007091701716.html This was also mentioned in the original article I linked. How is that tantamount to national healthcare, and how does it cover half the population? Considering the tax cuts Bush pushed disproportionately benefit the upper class, do you think this was even a consideration for him (provided you're even correct)

Bush has vetoed a bill that would expand health coverage for mostly lower income children an additional 4 million from the 6.6 million the program presently covers. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071003/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_children_s_health The bill, which costs approximately $7 billion a year, would be funded by a $0.61 increase in the excise tax on cigarettes. I really don't know what to say. Bush is one of, if not the most fiscally irresponsible presidents in history, and has bolstered defense spending (NOT including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) to levels which exceed the rest of the world combined. Now he's trying to paint himself as somehow being fiscally responsible, and I guess the first victims are America's children. Awesome.

Okay, I'll move past that argument if you and everyone else can move past this strawman: Is anyone saying she shouldn't have even been stopped and that the device shouldn't have been inspected and/or confiscated? Not that I've seen. I think what people (at least me) are having a problem with is the escalation that occurred, accusations of a "hoax", and the subsequent pressing of charges.

From my gut feeling (which is pretty much all of those who don't learn the underlying math are forced to go on) I really like models that incorporate some pre-bang temporal (and thus spatial/informational) context as an explanation for the non-uniformity of the big bang. I just have considerable trouble attributing it to quantum fluctuations (alone), but then again I have trouble accepting (in my "gut", mind you) that quantum indeterminacy cannot be attributed to hidden variables, even when it's been experimentally demonstrated to the contrary. I guess you can group me with the creationists in that respect *shrug*

Let me just say that I bought this issue and was quite intrigued by the discussion. It occurred between two neuroscientists who weren't so much arguing for which parts of the brain elicit consciousness as it was a discussion of how the content of consciousness is structured in the brain. One was arguing there's a direct correlation between certain groups of neurons and certain types of content. The other described a holistic approach which I considered more in tune with the ideas behind functionalism. Sadly (at least for me) neither attempted to pursue any kind of philosophical component to their arguments, including ones with a principally scientific basis (i.e. materialism, functionalism). I guess they prefer the "hard problem" be left to the philosophers. That said, both asserted that improved brain scanning techniques would allow this debate to be settled empirically. I look forward to the resolution.

I know you're trying to single Martin out for an argument from popularity, but seriously... you're comparing the Trouble with Physics to The Secret? You may as well compare Steven Weinberg to Deepak Chopra </slippery slope> Martin's guess the X ratio polls are all in good fun and shouldn't be interpreted too seriously. I think if there's something to be taken from them it's that string theory research/interest is waning in light of certain intractable problems, many of which are enumerated by Smolin in his book, but I don't want to speak for Martin... -- On an unrelated note, wonder what caused the spike in interest regarding TwP... A potential hypothesis: The book's original publication date was September 19, 2006, and it may be drawing some additional attention due to its one year anniversary (which may even be a delayed effect as more readers become interested after reading blogs et al about the one year anniversary)

I posted this because I was curious what the implications of this discovery were. From what you're saying I gather... not much?

My preferred cure for a hangover is a glass of beer and a plate of good food. My favorite is a plate of sushi with a glass of Kirin. When I had the worst hangover of my life I will attest that a bowl took me from being unable to keep any food down to devouring my lunch with no issues whatsoever.

I'd rather not derail this thread with an in-depth discussion of Ruby's flaws. Perhaps you'd like to post a thread on Perl vs. Python vs. Ruby? Let me just say that I greatly respect Python and totally agree that for all intents and purposes it is "better" than Ruby, particularly in terms of its implementation. The ruby-core developers are definitely playing catchup at this point, and for now Ruby is one of the slowest languages in existence.

Yeah, I'm really failing to understand what the big deal is. There are tons of buildings where you could easily walk into the lobby with a high powered explosive and kill hundreds or thousands of people. Imagine if someone walked into the lobby or the central elevator shafts of the Empire State Building with a suitcase loaded with plastique. (when I visited the only security checkpoints I went through were for ticketed individuals who were going up to the observation deck, and the central elevator shafts had a single guard and were blocked only by a velvet rope) The only real counterargument I'm hearing is bare wires or LEDs make it "obvious" and if someone were able to bomb a large public place with an "obvious" bomb (i.e. anything with the appearance of an improvised electronic device) it would be a PR disaster compared to if the bomber exercised a little forethought and placed the bomb in something nondescript like a suitcase. Never mind LEDs attached to your clothing aren't particularly useful for a bomb, and in fact would harm any realistic bombing operation by drawing unnecessary attention. Is the potential PR disaster of an "obvious" bomb (which clearly isn't, as this incident and the ATHF one demonstrates) really worth the cost to those prosecuted for false positives?

Neuroscientists generally understand that long term memory is encoded in the connection structure of the cerebral cortex, although the nature of specific mechanisms of memory storage is still a matter of various interpretations and debate (e.g. are memories statically represented by particular groups of neurons or do they flow freely throughout the cerebral cortex) There's no need to involve a non-physical mechanism for memory

See http://www.im2000.org in regard to revamping the e-mail infrastructure (a protocol created by Dan Bernstein, author of the popular qmail software). However, given present investment in the e-mail infrastructure that's unlikely to happen. A more likely direction e-mail might migrate to is XMPP, i.e. the Jabber protocol

There's bad publicity in either case (false negative or positive on a potential bomb threat), although I'm sad to see the media by and large calling this a "bomb hoax" when there's no evidence that was the intention. I certainly have no problem with security people reacting to things that look suspicious, I'm just wishing they'd exercise more common sense. Common sense, it seems, has gone out the window and been replaced by hyperparanoia. I think it's important to balance security concerns with the fact that false positives can harm others, and at any rate unless there's actual evidence that something was intended as a hoax we shouldn't consider such an act to be malicious. I think the best way the security staff could've handled this is to confiscate the device, search her, have the device inspected, then let her go on her merry way as soon as it's determined that the device is benign.

The easy solution here is extensive use of type coersion or methods that check the types of their arguments and respond accordingly. Blocks come to mind in both cases, specifically from a syntactic standpoint (not to mention procs when talking about full closures). Furthermore, Ruby does smooth over a lot of the ugliness in the Python syntax, namely explicitly passing self as an argument to methods and explicitly referencing self for instance variables. Of course this leads into Python's dicts versus Ruby's metaclass structure, which really comes down to personal preference. From an ideological perspective I'd prefer something like dicts, but the syntax this approach leads to leaves me with something of a bad taste in my mouth. I have similar qualms with Erlang in this regard. All that said, Ruby has a number of features that make it more programmer friendly which you certainly won't find in a language like Perl (5). The "runtime is an open book" approach, with extensive hooks into the method dispatch system, allows for expressive metaprogramming. Modules like ParseTree facilitate parse transforms, certainly not on the order of Lisp macros (unfortunately Ruby does not parse to sexps, but it's close) but enough to facilitate some really powerful transformations, such as translating the Ruby Enumerable interface into SQL: http://errtheblog.com/post/11998 As far as core Ruby and the stdlib go, Pickaxe v2 is an excellent language reference. I'll certainly admit ri leaves a little to be desired, and with gems YMMV, some are immaculately documented (check out anything by Zed Shaw, why, or Evan Weaver) and some are completely undocumented. However, you'll find the same thing with CPAN. There are dozens of templating engines available. ERb is going for the lowest common denominator approach and targeting people familiar with JSP/PHP. It's also relatively fast, and great for injecting Ruby code into YAML (which of course gets back to Steve Yegge's thing about why are config files written in something other than code which knows how to evaluate itself, but...) Rails real innovations lie in things like its REST abstractions, to where you write one REST interface for all CRUD operations that can be used to facilitate manipulating the resources from an HTML-based interface or a REST-based API (which can return XML, JSON, etc) with similar innovations on the REST client side (ActiveResource). There's effectively one DAO to rule them all, and its interface functions quite similarly to ActiveRecord. You can certainly make that case for Python, however I'd make it specifically against core Ruby. Core Ruby (i.e. the VM) is something of an implementation nightmare, and Ruby has remained quite slow compared to most languages. Its garbage collector is simplistic (mark and sweep only) and has a tendency to mark pages dirty when they really aren't (i.e. it's not copy on write safe when forking). This is supposed to get fixed this Christmas with the 1.9.1 release which includes a new stack machine called YARV, however YARV has been dragging along for many years (I remember discussing its impending release with my roommate some 4 years ago) and I entirely expect that the Christmas deadline won't be met for one reason or another. That said I've been using YARV from the developer trunk and it really is quite impressive. It's substantially faster and there's a number of new concurrency primitives I've been playing with, but they certainly can't hold a candle to Stackless Python (which in turn can't hold a candle to Erlang)

That's one way of looking at it, unfortunately we've posted record trade deficits for the past several years. That said Americans depend on imports for all sorts of day to day goods. We feed and clothe ourselves with imports, drive imported cars (or for the more environmentally conscious among us ride imported bikes), and come home to living rooms filled with imported gadgets.

Looks like one of my shot-in-the-dark guesses finally panned out

The impact of Darwin's theory had massive consequences. It lead to everything from William Graham Sumner's economic theories which incorporated the idea of evolution by natural selection, to Sir Francis Galton's eugenics theories which would be usurped by the Nazis to form the basis of their "racial biology" and thus provide a "scientific" basis for the Holocaust. If Galileo wasn't the death knell for religion being the most authoritative source of knowledge about the universe, Darwin certainly was. Do you want him to merely gloss over Darwin, or do you think he should espouse a "teach the controversy" sort of position? I don't think you can properly teach the social impact of Darwin's theories without noting that it relegated the Adam and Eve story to, at best, an allegory and instigated a conflict that continues to rage today. Without that historical backdrop, how would you teach about something like the Scopes Monkey Trial?

Looks like it's an article from Scientific American Mind, which is an (excellent) adjunct of SciAm. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=F65C0F4E-E7F2-99DF-383DC0B16998C011

Is there any evidence he wasn't teaching about religion's role in the time period? I see him teaching science is correct and the Bible, if interpreted literally, is wrong.

The US Dollar is now valued below the Canadian Dollar. http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=1&from=USD&to=CAD&submit=Convert& What does this say about America's fiscal policy? The Senate just approved a measure to raise the statutory limit on the national debt: http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=110&session=1&vote=00354 The Fed just lowered interest rates to satisfy Wall Street. Is the greenback becoming increasingly irrelevant? I think the Fed has been underregulating and our government has been far too unconcerned with sound fiscal policy. The Bush tax cuts coupled with increases in spending have massively ratcheted up the national debt. Both of these have negatively impacted the dollar.

Can you please post this stuff in pseudoscience?

Because 99.999999% of the things in the world with wires and breadboards are not bombs. The same thing goes for bars of chocolate. If you can disguise a bomb as everything, why not treat everything as a bomb?

A bar of chocolate: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4204980.stm Remember... any time you see someone with a bar of chocolate in an airport lobby, they could be a terrorist bomber. React accordingly.

Latency can certainly be a painful issue if you're using lousy soft synths... even a 30ms latency is about 1/32nd beat off (at 60 bpm). Try doing anything live with syncopated rhythms or shuffle/offbeats and it can get pretty confusing.

Yes, it's my favorite Devo album