User talk:Armondikov
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| Thread title | Replies | Last modified |
|---|---|---|
| Atmospheric chemistry Delingpole style | 5 | 19:29, 30 April 2012 |
| Just wanted to say... | 7 | 16:23, 30 April 2012 |
| LSU's educational standards get ever higher | 5 | 15:33, 17 April 2012 |
| Chemists and safe words | 1 | 08:53, 11 April 2012 |
| Thanks. | 7 | 18:22, 8 April 2012 |
| Thanks for telling me guys! | 1 | 15:36, 3 April 2012 |
| The Kool-Aid... | 7 | 00:16, 1 April 2012 |
| Chemistry | 3 | 10:09, 29 March 2012 |
| Chemistry meets Universal Darwinism | 4 | 20:05, 26 March 2012 |
| Wazzock | 1 | 14:45, 25 March 2012 |
| Dan Savage answers a profound philosophical question | 1 | 00:42, 16 March 2012 |
| ADK007.svg | 2 | 08:26, 15 March 2012 |
| The Walking Dead | 3 | 19:29, 14 March 2012 |
| Let me guess | 2 | 15:41, 13 March 2012 |
| For you | 1 | 14:35, 8 March 2012 |
| The categories, they do nothing! | 10 | 18:15, 5 March 2012 |
| Thank you | 0 | 04:49, 4 March 2012 |
| 1-star reviews | 10 | 03:14, 25 February 2012 |
| "Devil cannot create" | 1 | 00:56, 24 February 2012 |
| Wittgenstein | 2 | 20:17, 23 February 2012 |
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Atmospheric chemistry Delingpole style
Is it just me or is Delingpole going crazy even by his standards (if that's possible)? Now he's peddling the imminent ice age stuff and frothing at the mouth over the "ultra-greenies" like the Royal Society and the CSIR, and Ben Goldacre, apparently. (Probably still butthurt over this tweet.)
It's funny 'cos delingPOLE is like a penis!!!!!!!!
Anyway, the point about climate cycles is that no matter how you spin it - cooling, no-as-bad-as or otherwise - pumping a fuck ton of CO2 into the atmosphere is by far not helping. So no, the "religion" isn't going to collapse, even if we do get a shock cooling spree a la Day After Tomorrow. The potential for the temperature to plummet is far more complicated than what Delingpole seems to suggest; not that I can gather what he's suggesting. Is he saying a) we shouldn't bother because warming from CO2 will work against this deadly cooling, because it's likely that this could make it worse by affecting ocean currents. Or b) ha ha ha, warming alarmists are wrong and... somehow we should listen to the cooling alarmists?
Don't worry, global warming isn't happening, but it's good for ya! On the cooling article, I thought he was letting this guy make a guest post.
Just wanted to say...
...your blog is awesome. I don't post much here anymore, but I still lurk, and for the past few months your blog has been by far the best part of this site for me. Keep up the good work!
I might use the blog to brainstorm a philosophy of science course - I know they're just first-years I'm teaching now but they really are quite useless at this. So perhaps it'll be less talking shit and more focused later.
LSU's educational standards get ever higher
There's nothing wrong with alternative medicine if it's just a supplementation of "scientific" med (for want of a better word). There are tons of herbs that have real effect for a variety of real illnesses kittah or human. (Cinnamon for example, really does stabilize your blood sugar, though they don't know why. Study after study has proven a direct link, and not just a correlation). Giving your cat pumpkin and valarium help digestion and "stressies".
Granted, i've never read one darn study to suggest that accupuncture does squat for anyone.
Cept there are still hosts of people out there in the medical and "rational" community that bristle when you tell them things like "massage has real, medical benefits if done right", "eating a spoon full of sugar cinnamon helps the medicine go down", and "good ol' pot has a host of medical benefits". These types seem to think if it doesn't come in a pill, it's got no value to medicine.
Thanks.
Excellent work. If I had a clue what to do, I would've been right there with you.
How did that work? I searched through the source code and it seemed to have written over the entire thing.
Open the page, CTRL-A, CTRL-C, open Word or Excel, CTRL-V. It's a different format in Word/Excel, and everything is there. As it pastes, it writes everything down line by line. (Maybe just in Excel.)
The Kool-Aid...
...you drank it, didn't you? Wake me up when the Singularity is here. :P
Taste the hemlock flavoured kool-aid! The Singularity is only Twenty Minutes Into The Future!!
Is it past midnight in the UK yet? Loosing daylight saving today has thrown me off...
Oh, yeah, I just realized it's already April 1 over there. What cult should I join? Maybe I'll "retire" and become a memeticist, or even (shiver) a Freudian.
Wait, are you saying "Second Life exists, and is a computer program. The world exists, clearly, so it too must be a computer program." wasn't enough to give it away? I figured this would be slightly more original (though slightly more difficult) than the traditional stunt of going off to become a creationist like Trent did back in 09.
Time is an abstract invention of the human brain and the educated stupid. Physics doesn't need time. It is passed midnight, midday, sun-up and sun-down on the four points of the one true cubic Earth.
So true -- otherwise presentism wouldn't be a fallacy.
Chemistry
We should talk chemistry some time. I take hydrogens off compounds, albeit the complete story I have is on O-H bonds, not C-H. But hopefully we'll get there.
Chemistry meets Universal Darwinism
They're coming for you! (Bonus: Read the bottom of the internet to see a memetics proponent jump into the mix.)
The issue with trying to bridge the gap between chemistry and biology that way is pretty much the same reason that memes can't follow a strict Darwinian evolution; the systems are far too volatile. As Darwinian evolution simply falls out of "descent with modification" there's no way you can apply that to a chemical system unless you're talking about autocatalysis, which while I think is a great idea for the "beginning of life", is a minute sub-set of chemical interactions. Certainly, reducing biological evolution to chemistry simply ignores a ton of emergent properties that are required for descent and modification to even make sense. This is like trying to ask whether a single atom, taken in isolation, is a solid, liquid or gas. You're talking about properties that simply don't make sense at that scale.
Either Pigliucci is explaining this remarkably badly, or Pross isn't actually saying particularly interesting. There's a trade-off between thermodynamic and kinetic stability, yes? And?
Oh no, parts of it are just plain wrong. He seems to be trying to make some kind of analogy from DKS to biological fitness, which doesn't make much sense. There are some other howlers in there as well, like evolution leading to increasing complexity and conflating evolution with natural selection. Why is it that people who are so enthusiastic about applying evolution to everything so often don't even understand it?
Dunno. Maybe the ID advocates have a point when they say evolution is there to destroy God, so applying it to everything would obviously kill Him off for good.
Above I should have said "evolution inevitably leading to increasing complexity." Re: ID, this comes up a number of times in Biology and Ideology, just substitute any proponent of Universal Darwinism for Dawkins here: "Darwinism is not being presented as a representative element of the scientific enterprise, with a legitimate place at the round table of ethical and social debate. It is clearly understood as the defining account of reality. Where most evolutionary biologists would argue that Darwinism offers a description of reality, Dawkins goes further, insisting that it is to be seen as an explanation of things. Darwinism is a worldview, a grand récit, a metanarrative—a totalizing framework, by which the great questions of life are to be evaluated and answered."
Wazzock
Susan used to say it, perhaps that's where you remember it? or perhaps this? Sophiebecause liberals 22:56, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
ADK007.svg
Seems like File:ADK007.svg which you are using on the "Now" page has some empty flowtext. The old version has 2 pieces of flowtext, one of them empty and the other containing "\m/". If you are using Inkscape, you can remove the empty flowtext in the XML editor (Edit -> XML Editor), and convert the second to regular text (Text -> Convert to Text). After this, the file should render correctly in MediaWiki. If you used a fancy font, you should additionally convert the text to paths (Object -> Convert to Path).
The Walking Dead
Is awesome! Watch it when you can. Actually, there's a Walking Dead marathon on Sunday for us. OuO
Blech! I say skip it. Bland, one-dimensional characters, almost no action and no urgency to the plot (which moves at a snail's pace). At best you can say there are some nice setpieces with zombies, but that's dragged down hard by long conversations between characters we know almost nothing about.
To be fair, though, the most recent episode was pretty great. I just wish more were like that.
I'll be the first to say "the books are better!" even though I haven't read them all yet. The whole clinging-onto-the-constructs-of-the-past thing that seems to pervade the show is kinda hard to accept and the show moves slower than Lost, which actually had some mystery in it. If you watch it while muted you realize that the action scenes really aren't a whole lot besides some camera tricks and prop work.
The categories, they do nothing!
A cognitive linguistics paper just for you.
Heh, nope, you would be a tenured prof in a linguistics or psych department if you had. "Cognitive linguistics" itself is a problematic term because it usually means "the branch of psycholinguistics that became George Lakoff's personality cult" rather than the more obvious meaning of "the application of cognitive psychology to linguistics."
It's not really so subtle at all if you're familiar with the history of the fields, though. It's sort of like how "evolutionary psychology" often doesn't mean "psychology done from an evolutionary perspective," but "selfish gene + Cosmides and Tooby."
Sometimes I just want to roll the clock back a couple of years to before I stumbled head first into fuzziness. Things were just so much better.
Too late, you have already unasked the question.
Sometimes, academics ask questions that defeat the purpose of the intent of the underscored themes. This whole discussion on Categories by Danziger, creates a non "day to day life and use of language" and imposes, instead, this artificial construct of what catigories SHOULD do, and therefore why they are imperfect and imprecise. But what she wants them to do, and what they actually do do are two totally different things.
Her work on "language space and culture (1998)" just makes me wonder why she wants to prove her thesis, rather than wants to work with the proof she has to MAKE a thesis.
Thank you
Thank you for what you have done for me. I do not expect that we agree on science. But I genuinely appreciate you taking out the more spurious elements of the article. People do not listen to me because they assume I want the article to be completely uncritical, which is of course untrue. Cheers, Notedscholar (talk), March 03, 11:46pm
1-star reviews
I remember you said something about using the 1-star reviews on Amazon -- I found a great one on Gould's Mismeasure of Man, emphasis "mein": "I recommend instead books that are sound on these issues: Why Race matters (by Michael Levin); Race, Evolution and Behavior : A Life History Perspective (by J. P. Rushton); Mein Kampf; The Real American Dilemma: Race, Immigration, and the Future of America (by Jared Taylor.)"
I love how science is always right... till it contradicts what *I* believe.
Hey, me too! It's so convenient.
Because the 1-star trick totally works. Though I fear such reviews might be soon replaced by a simply dichotomy of like/dislike as in practice no one really works outside of a 4 point system anyway. You know, like Strictly Come Dancing judges only really scoring between 7 and 10 even though in theory they have 1-10 to play with? Pretty soon the entire world will be just one big thumbs up button that we kick any time we're feeling anything slightly stronger than pure ambivalence about something.
what is teh one star trick, by the way?
"DON'T TRUST THIS BOOK! Scientists are now discovering that Gould misrepresented the science to fit his radical Marxist ideologies!"
In my experience, being accused of being a Marxist (unless you actually are Marx) is synonymous with being right.
Actually, the part of the book on Morton's skulls has been debunked. I don't know why he even went after that, though, since cranial capacity is not a proxy measure for intelligence anyway. Now it's a whipping boy of the self-proclaimed "racial realists," because if one of Gould's arguments was wrong, he was obviously just a PC-Marxist hack and racism is not racist.
the funny thing is that the guy who's review you found is a real nut job. self styled "self educated biologist", math person who has discovred some new math or something. click his link to find out about him
Wittgenstein
Re: latest essays: Read und learn your Wittgenstein.
This one seems like a more to-the-point explanation to me.
Witty and religion interesting enough. I'm wondering if some of it is clumsily walking into ignosticism when they're saying "is P" is used in different senses. I'm pretty sure I could coax the "is P" out of a religious believer, and if they couldn't do that then their model of their own belief would be somewhat... well, crap at doing its job.
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