ecoli

what's the definition of a private interest group? Using a lose definition, this could be anything from corporate industry groups to labor unions to my high school chess club.

I don't think i argued for an inevitable decline.

 

I didn't mention nazis or germany either, and any reference to the ussr was at most implied. I just thought communism might be an interesting case study for societies movining toward majority atheism. Which isn't to say that communism failed because of atheism, or even that it was truly an athesitic society (i tacitly assumed so occasionaly in earlier posts which was incorrect). There was a restructuring of critical institutions, and i think any society moving from religious to atheist will quite likely undergo some such restructuring.

 

Denmark and Sweden hasn't yet, so i don't see them as a useful guide, a couple of generations is not enough time to consider them successful atheist societies. OK, so they are much better examples of atheistic society than communism, in the sense that they are in fact athesitic societies whereas communist weren't really. I'm contradicting what i said in other posts but they were already a mess of contradictions and non-sequiturs anyway, so yeah.

 

 

 

I'm not trying to show that atheist society is inherently inferior/superior, just to think about what some of the changes might be in order to make a success of it. Religiosity is declining what with better education and better standards of living regardless.

My brain accidentally merged yours and Bill Angel's posts: it was he who made the comparison to Nazi germany as well as the other, stronger, claims. My apologies.

They claimed extension of the tax cuts would help them create jobs. We assumed they meant jobs for Americans, since it was our tax revenue they were keeping to do it. I don't see where it's heavy-handed to say the job-creators aren't interested in hiring Americans, when they were given the chance AND the funds to do it yet hired offshore workers in three out of four cases. They used money that should have been public revenue slated for US job creation to grow 60% of their own revenue without hiring US workers.

Call it an irrevocable philosophical difference, but I can't convince myself to frame a tax cut as a loss of our tax revenue. The loss of tax revenue is detrimental to the treasury's coffers, I understand, but that money didn't belong 'to the people' until the IRS took that money under threat of force (regardless of the potential benefits of gov't infrastructure).

I would say the general shittiness of the economy is also partly to do with high unemployment. It's too bad there isn't a way to stimulate US companies to hire US workers. Maybe Ryan's plan to give the wealthy even more tax breaks will make them hire US workers THIS time, since that's not in any way insane or ludicrous.

Now I believe you're conflating cause and effect... is the economy really better off if people are spending 20% more on iPhones (those of us who have jobs, anyway)? I don't know, but connection between tax & stimulus, job creation and economic health is not as clear [to me] as you seem to be implying.

Attributing lack of job creation or overseas job creation to the Bush tax cuts seem a bit heavy-handed to me. Especially when there are other factors to consider; such as Americans can't do many modern manufacturing jobs and the general shittiness of the economy which obviously has slowed down hiring despite the cuts.

Additionally, I also don't necessarily buy the assertion that foreign workers don't contribute as much to the economy. This is still an area which economist debate. If hiring foreign workers allows Apple to drop the price of an iPhone, Americans have more discretionary income. Note that I'm only saying that outsourcing/offshoring is often Pareto optimal, not that all players directly benefit.

Funny looking lactobacillus

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19425985.200-how-to-give-a-rat-a-death-wish.html

I was thinking of this study: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/08/29/from-guts-to-brains-%E2%80%93-eating-probiotic-bacteria-changes-behaviour-in-mice/

That was my first idea, but let's say that idea is out, too. The tree is on a slant. I could attempt to climb it, but I wouldn't want to climb it with a chain saw. Doesn't sound too safe nor appeal to me.

Well maybe if you had a ladder. Landscappers do this to trim top branches or large trees (ie- to prevent trees from growing around telephone/electrical wires)

Denmark and Sweden can't have been significantly non-religious for more than a couple of generations, so the most you could assert as strong fact is that atheistic societies needn't immediately decline into chaos.

So, rapid (which you define as a few generations) political change is too quick for the inevitable descent into atheistic chaos when the examples are modern Denmark and Sweden, but rapid change turning into chaos is valid evidence with regards to Nazi Germany and the USSR?

Even if these were good examples, you'd still be cherry picking the data.

you can't cut it down first then chop it into sections?

First, we need to change the way we vote. The winner-take-all system of voting practically guarantees there will eventually become two dominant parties that are nearly the same. We desperately need the representational power to vote for our favorite candidates instead of trying to keep our least favorite out of office, since that's a really stupid way to run a democracy.

However, the tradeoff of coalition type gov'ts is that smaller, fringe parties often have much more power, since a majority party needs to woo extremists to keep power. Imagine, for example, if a mainstream republican party needed to keep a separate tea party happy to retain majority coalition. Things are bad enough with tea parties candidates winning a few local elections and congressional seats, imagine a whole separate coordinated entity?

And didn't the Bush tax cuts prove that the "wealth-creators" aren't interested in employing Americans?

How do you figure this?

I also remember another study linking toxoplasmosis to higher risk behavior (though I do not think it was with humans).

That was a study on mice and lactobacillus.

Maybe most scientist, not all dismiss the concept of God is because God is supposed to have no cause, thus he is an uncaused cause that violates causality.

why the diagonal must be 1? if do alignment sequence and compare the object with itself , it get max score because there is fully matching.

 

please, clarify that.

 

 

 

thanks

For a similarity score, 0 is not at all similar and 1 is identical. The diagonal of a square similarity matrix should, therefore, by 1s. 1 - similarity is distance, if your max score is 0, you are measuring distance, not similarity.

Sure, which one?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuG1vyQ1mUQ

pistachios > peanuts > cashew

cashews > peanuts > pistachios

peanuts > cashews > pistachios

My preferences are nontransitive

Hard to compare, while both culinary nuts, neither is a botanical nut. Pistachios are seeds while peanuts are actually legumes.

From http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/allen-quist-michele-bachmann-campaign:

"and went undercover at an adult bookstore and a gay bathhouse in an effort to prove to a local newspaper reporter that they had become a "haven for anal intercourse." "

sure... Want to know how I know this guy is secretly gay?

No, Python isn't compiled into C. There's a C program that reads Python source files and directly interprets them.

Oops I meant interpreter not compiler.

if it's a similarity matrix, the diagonal should be 1s (0s would be a distance matrix).

As for clustering, it really depends on your task/goals. Hierarchical clustering is a fairly standard approach, however.

The amount of money spent on untested supplements and sham cures like copper or magnetic bracelets, homeopathic remedies, Reiki and the volumes of people running away from vaccines these days runs contrary to this claim. People seek out sources that tell them what they want to hear to reinforce their biases and/or to give them the path of least resistance, much like in politics. They are too credulous and easily fooled. Why listen to a doctor when it's easier to believe that vaccinations cause your kid's autism or that wearing a special bracelet will cure you of arthritis or cancer? Why bother with the facts when the politician you like spouts lies that fit with your views and make it easy to hate his opponent?

Interesting you should bring that up, since belief in "alternative" medicine is stereotypically associated with liberal ideology, though I can't find any data on it but along those lines:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/03/the-republican-fluency-with-science/

I will say that Dem politicians are not nearly as proudly outspoken being anti-science, but I'd put that down to the hyper-religious consensus among republicans.

However, Black americans are the group most likely to take the Bible as the literal word of God, and are more entrenched in the Dem camp: http://evostudies.org/2010/06/how-does-creationism-harm-african-americans/

How political ideology informs scientific belief is strange indeed.

it depends completely on what alignment algorithm and scoring function you use. For ex - if you assign a negative penalty for a mismatch and you have more mismatches than matches you could get a negative score. This is true for any sequence, biological or otherwise.

Clinton could easily have used those surplus funds for other things, being a "tax and spend liberal" as the conservatives often portray the Dems (and not without reason at times). Instead, he taxed those that had been given a 12-year break in the Reagan-Bush years and chose to balance the budget and reduce the deficit in every way he could.

 

I really dislike some of the stuff Clinton let slip through, like allowing our news outlets to be owned by the very people we should be kept informed about, setting the stage for financial shenanigans by the repeal of Glass-Steagall, but I do give him credit where it's due. And Bush's tax policies took effect in 2002, before the Iraq war, and quickly sunk the deficit to almost $400B.

Not much to add, but you've made some good points here.

Paradox: the set of mathematics that doesn't include set theory

My hunch is that there wouldn't be enough mass at the core to hold it together... ?

machine code comes down to specific instructions to a processor given in binary, but I believe it sufficient to write your compiler to turn whatever language into something like a lower level language like Assembly (which is already in great shape to be interpreted directly by a machine). For example, python is compiled directly into C code.

A language can be designed with a specific mathematical theory behind it, which can ease (or complicate) implementation or design. For example, OCaml is a functional programming language that's based on lambda calculus

For some reason I thought you lived in S. Carolina? I can't give an honest yea or nay to this conundrum. People, married or not, gay or not, have legal avenues to pursue their best endeavours. At the moment Christian fundamentalist have a voting bloc and

control. I didn't like it that Obama got into office, but I had to accept him and he's a Christian.

* disclaimer - statement doesn't apply in some states if you are gay and want to get married.