overtone

Seems a reasonable argument, among others. You state it as if it were not. The issue is a couple of orders of magnitude more complex, for starters - counting the rounds in a magazine is quite simple. How does one measure and classify information?

Feynman did math as everyone else does it, only faster and better and in complete comprehension of what he was doing. The issue of "arithmetic" was probably a reference to the fact that most high school algebra problems can be solved by putting in specific numbers and looking at the consequences, considering what you want. This is quite true, and like the fact that most introductory calculus problems can be solved by intelligent and competent applications of the min/max principle (if a quantity is split into shares, their product is maximized and their sum is minimized when they are all equal) difficult to apply by people of lesser abilities than Feynman. Feynman's point that the specific rules are worthless (you will never be able to use them in real life) if you don't have enough understanding to handle simple problems without the specific manipulations they require is also valid, but there is a large grey area here: people who need more work to get a handle on the rules, and benefit from the experience of employing those rules in situations simple enough to allow the creation or inculcation of that understanding he values from scratch, so to speak. That is, practice with the "rules" can set up insight, is one way to acquire that understanding. I once had a student who took an entire semester of introductory calculus (derivatives, without doing any calculus at all (that I know of), using instead the methods Isaac Newton used in Principia Mathematica to prove that his calculus techniques were valid and gave the same answers as the geometric methods then used. I passed him, based on his getting enough right answers on the homework and exams (and employing a considerable amount of mathematical insight and ability to do that), but it put me in an odd and interesting ethical position I have not settled in my own mind to this day. The grade, the permanent record I signed my name to, will not be read by others as an estimation of that student's ability to solve problems of a particular type, but of his familiarity with a set of "rules" he in fact may not be familiar with. So which is more important? In some abstract sense, problem solving of course. But that unfamiliarity (if it does describe that particular student) may very well bite him in the ass some day - there's a reason for those rules.

There's a "documentary" around, I think it's fairly easy to find, about a trio of teenage coal country hicks learning how to build a working rocket back in the Sputnik days. "October Sky", iirc. In the sense of this thread, they learned how to make a bomb right away, by accident, if that's what they had wanted - making something blow up was so easy they had a hard time not doing it.

You can't safely handle a wide variety of petroleum derivatives, household and farmhold caustics and acids, anhydrous ammonia (and many other ammonia products and derivatives), or a wide variety of common industrial products, unless you know how to keep them from sudden combustion or explosive reaction. You can't load your own shotgun ammo, let alone make fireworks and the like, without knowing how to keep from blowing yourself up. You can't safely manage a cutting torch, or do any oxyacetylene braising and welding, or deal with large projects involving epoxy glue, or paint your car, without being aware of the circumstances that create uncontrolled explosion. There are big, bright warnings on the drain cleaner you buy at the hardware store. Anyone who can safely handle the ingredients of a bomb knows how to unsafely handle them - any bomb, including nuclear. There are tens of thousands of people with military training in explosives walking the streets of America. The car bomb predates the internet by three generations. The terrorist bomb predates the Civil War. The KKK in America terror bombed in the forties and fifties. We have more whackjob terrorists because we have hundreds of millions of people. The proportionale risk is very low - lower than it used to be.

For a more scientifically grounded approach than Harris's, Daniel Dennett's writings ("Darwins' Dangerous Idea" preliminary, "Freedom Evolves" if you're solid) Iain McGilchrist's enlightening "The Master and His Emissary" or even, if you're prepared to extend on your own, Gregory Bateson's lifetime of essays (a gentle posthumous collation with significant expansion by his daughter Mary is titled Angels Fear) Dennett includes a critique of the claims based on that often mentioned delay between a decision and the communicated awareness of it, mentioned above. An analogous inquiry might be: If we cannot choose differently according to how objects reflect light , what purpose would awareness of colors serve? The basic problem is the tendency of people to elevate some human abstractions, heuristics, mental shortcuts, etc, to unearned status superior to others - especially: cause and effect - as it they were somehow more real or part of reality. The consequence is a naive collapse into a simplistic determinism as soon as the person recognizes that there is no "supernatural" component in mental events. The natural world is too easily underestimated. In the old days those who rejected the supernatural fell back into clockwork or other mechanical oversimplifications, nowdays into the computer - an improvement, but essentially the same box of billiard balls simplistically described.

It hardly takes a genius to look at a picture of a bottle with the soap flake level marked and descriptions of how the wick was sealed. And that's without the slightest familiarity with even high school level chemistry. For example. Sounds like a plan. Meanwhile, should they also be given lobotomies to erase the common rural knowledge of how to make a fertilizer bomb - the far cheaper and far more convenient way to break a rock or take out a stump? It's the knowledge you were trying to eliminate from the world, right? Except, of course, farmers and military vets and anyone dealing with anhydrous ammonia or gunpowder or fireworks or natural gas infrastructure or gasoline infrastructure or - - - - it's kind of a long list.

There is currently a chance - some realistic probability - that the aspects of "the system" that pissed the bomber off were the ones involved in the re-election of an obviously non-white President and the public discussion of some further restrictions on firearm possession. I'm not sure I would want to change those aspects of "the system". I would prefer to change those aspects of "the system" that act to create any assumption - in any vulnerable person's mind - that there is some large and respectable fraction of the US population that needs such action, that such deeds speak for, support, or benefit. As far as making bombs, I recall learning how anarchists and terrorists of the past had constructed their weaponry from books in my high school library, along with tips on blowing stumps from the diary farmers I threw hay for, as a teenager.

If time and space are fixed continuous, a priori infinities of the same "size" as the number line that includes the transcendentals etc, then you are correct - two physical setups moving in some unalterable deterministic fashion that involves exactly pi as some relative motion, will never repeat a position. If time and space are a priori quantized, fundamentally discontinuous in some manner fixed in advance, no such relative motion is possible - all relations are rational, only a finite number of different relative positions exist, and in time all attainable states will be repeated. If the continuity or quantization of time and space is of some currently undescribed nature, in which it is not fixed in advance say, then I don't know how to answer the question. AFAIK nobody has established which of those three situations, or some other unimagined there, obtains.

In analogy to the principle that a proof teaches us where to concentrate our doubts: If you assume that reality is other than it appears to be, and specifically that the observed physical role and function of consciousness does not exist, and then find yourself confronted with many mysteries, and specifically several related to the stubborn existence and behaviors of a purposeless and role-free consciousness, there is at least one obvious possible conclusion. The fact that the ability to communicate awareness of a decision takes a second or two implies very little about the role of consciousness in making that decision. Take away the consciousness during the decision making, and what happens? Alternatively: How does the decision making process differ in situations free of consciousness? That is no idle question - we make thousands of decisions a minute without any consciousness being involved. One of the hallmarks of great skill is the complexity of the decisions the skillful can make unconsciously, without "thinking about them". That normally takes a great deal of practice.

Whatever the trait is that streetlights screw up, it may not be persisting: moths (at least the bigger ones that I can identify visually in passing) are quite a bit less common around lights than they used to be, in every location I can compare. It's possible that these moths I rcognize are much reduced in population in my areas of observation. It's also possible that a large and increasing fraction of the population no longer gets trapped by lights as easily or as often, for whatever reason, and so I don't see them.

1) the dimming of sunlight - alck of penetration (it is just as strong above the atmosphere) is pretty well established, and its cause a matter of research now. 2) it would be a lousy way to control weather - its effects are difficult to predict in any detail. 3) Your notion that cooling would be more dangerous than warming is unfounded. The warming we face - which is proceeding in spite of the dimming, a matter of concern as it implies a stronger and potentially sudden (if whatever is dimming the light goes away or hits a limit) onset of background warming - is very serious.

There is little relevant difference. The problems with the general class are essentially the same as the problems with any specific member of it, such as an "antibiotic" (anti-bacterial). But they are using antibacterials, and resistance to them is potentially generalizable. And as for the OP: general antimicrobials are more, not less, likely to have larger ecological effects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial

Spending some time in NC visiting family and inlaws, ran into a somewhat more civilized (ie pleasant and personable company) version of this http://www.wildandwonderfulwhites.com/ frequently. Also ran into about three dozen distinguishable varieties of pecan, all of which were good, some memorable (English thinshell, say). Resident family, religious people all, infomed me that per capita NC is one of the most diverse areas of fundie religion in the world - mostly Judeo Christian and offshoots, but not all. I grew up in towns with little churches all over the place, and found them not actually diverse, but NC appears to be not in that model.

I was responding to the posted (quoted) claim, not whatever is in wiki. You had questions, and I thought that some of the difficulty might stem from whatver omission or misprint created the false claim. Sorry to have offended.

For a=1, b=2, c=2, f(x) = 1/x, u=1, the claim is false. (Assuming all that refers to real numbers and functions of them, closed intervals on the real number line, or reasonably analogous entities).

If you are actually comfortable with trigonometry already (usually a seriously neglected topic) then "algebra based physics" is probably a quit on your part. But there is this: the human brain seems to need a certain amount of maturity or development before it can handle the concept of a limit. Check yourself - see if you can follow the technical, formal definition of a limit; see if the concept makes intuitive sense to you, if you can do simple algebra with limits without finding yourself baffled. If you can't, don't sweat it - you will be able to later, in a year or so. But maybe don't kill yourself in a calculus course now - be wary. If you can, you're good to go - anyone with the algebra skills to handle trig can handle basic calculus, and if your school is setting things up like most you want Calculus II to learn about integration, half the topic (and the part where, when you handle it, you feel like a certified smart person).

If we are agreed that dividing the universe into self and non-self leaves out a lot of the universe, that significant properties or features of reality are not divisible or classifiable in that way and cannot be accurately labeled with either term, then I'm settled. The existence of reality that has not been divided up into the toucher and the touched can be established by way of reason and bootstrap rationality, but the experience of it is perhaps more informative - it would prevent assertions about "the one doing the touching", by directly displaying their meaninglessness in this context, for starters. Or Copernicus, looking through a telescope at stuff millions of miles away; or Newton, sitting around under apple trees having thoughts.

The experience of thoughts and perceptions happening without reference to a self is important here - many religions provide rituals or methodologies for evoking this experience, and the resultant exhiliration is something the recurring self often finds memorable even if the self cannot create or consider anything but a shadow or residue of the event. One takeaway lesson for the self, when recreated, is that the division of self from everything else occurs in a larger context and is only a part or aspect of a larger universe - not a necessary and all-encompassing property of reality.

It would not be unusual for evolution to have produced a characteristic that proved to handicap survival or even doom the unfortunate short term beneficiary - individuals, even species - in the long run of changing circumstances. Large size in dinosaurs might be the most famous example, but excreting oxygen as a waste product of metabolism was maybe the most significant for the most species. Whether human level brain power continues to pay for itself, cover its extraordinary metabolic and physiological costs, remains to be seen. I'm betting on yes - if I'm wrong, there will be nobody capable of understanding the concept "bet" and coming around to collect, anyway. Meanwhile, managing the reproductive and pathogenic effects of social pair bonding is almost certainly a boon to human prosperity and long term species success. Even nukes have their upside - they probably can't wipe us out altogether, and the asteroid they may prove crucial in handling probably can.

In US schools, extroverts have more fun, more friends, higher status, better contacts for their future adult life, less depression, fewer health problems, lower odds of being bullied, in general a much better suited experience, then the nerds and geeks and loners and feebs and bookworms and wallflowers and foureyes and so forth. (Note: four generations of names. This situation is not new). They play well with others. They earn high and positive evaluations on social skills. They are the "popular" kids. It seems to me that many Americans take that as some kind of universal human condition. That US schools are set up and run primarily rewarding, fostering, nurturing, promoting in general, academic excellence in science, in ->anyone<- whether extroverted or introverted, cannot be presumed. The argument made (in passing, an example in the middle of the book) by Susan Cain, which intrigues me, is that by primarily rewarding and catering to extroverts, being dominated by the values and viewpoints of the extroverted personalities so unusually predominant in the US population, US education shortchanges not just introverts but the intellectual realms in which introverts have advantage by nature. Science is one of them. Hence, in part, the ubiquitous failure of US schools to teach science well. Or math. Or literature. Or philosophy. Or music other than marching and brass bands, in which the US genuinely excels. And so forth.

How so? Are you assuming the US school system fosters and rewards academic excellence in science? That would be at odds with the thread OP. (btw: by "set up", a problematic term, I mean in reality arranged and operated, actually run. The declared goals, official pronouncements, ostensible desires even, of those doing the setting up and supposed running, are not assumed to be either clear and competently derived or successfully implemented. )

Why "but"? It's the introverts who excel academically in any system. In the US they are excelling despite a system designed for other kinds of people - so misfit are they that they have a category name, a term for the odd little group they make on the margin of the main show. Excelling in academic achievement is a special, sideline, sort of personal hobby or quirk, in the American school. That's a bit odd, eh? The guess is that not all who could, not even all who would excel, will buck the system and choose to marginalize themselves in that fashion. And of course the influence of the special group set apart from the rest of the students is less than it would be were they the central body of a system designed for their abilities and approach.

Ran across an intriguing take on this issue, from author Susan Cain in the book "Quiet". She points out that extroverted people are less often drawn to, or good at, intellectual pursuits in general and science in particular - and the US, being a country founded by nomads and "men of action", is predictably and by direct rigorous measure a country unusually (even uniquely) dominated by extroverts. The introverts stayed home, the extroverts set sail across the Atlantic, basically. The bonny ship the Diamond did not go fishing for the whale with a crew of contemplative analyzers and inveterate bookworms. Our entire educational system is set up and run to be comfortable for extroverts, foster extroversion, meet the needs of people for whom the concept of the nerd is not a wierd cultural artifact but an aspect of reality (a reality the Chinese, say, do not share). So change to our educational system that abets instruction in science would not be comfortable change for most Americans.

After reading that, we are immediately presented with : 1) the fact that large fast food chains are prominent in any list of corporations with "religious ties" - they are not nearly as prominent in lists of corporations known for excellent working environments and good values. 2) a list of examples of religion-tied fast food corporations blatantly discriminating - in their hiring, franchising, and customer service - on the basis of religion. Hello?

No linear regression model can exist for such a situation. You can then turn to the realization that minor gains in short term personal safety are not the most important factor for most people in the US. Most gun owners are quite safe, after all, as is - the price of acquiring that last marginal gain in immediate personal safety is too high, in most American's estimation. You are talking about a country in which teenagers are routinely expected to obtain driver's licenses, children go swimming for recreation, and cigarettes are sold over the counter.