Quote from FireroseNekowolfYou can sneer at us all you want, but that does not change the fact that these topics are controversial topics. The fact you dare to insult our intelligence makes you no more above us than on our own ground. Just because I may insult others does not mean I do not understand the subjects at hand, does not mean I lack "deep and meaningful understanding." And as I have expressed, the idea that you equate them to criticize us is just as much an insult. You are no better than we are.
If you cannot discuss those kinds of topics without resorting to insults, then you are not mature enough to discuss those topics. It really begins and ends there.
Have you ever watched an RSA question and answer session where the audience throws insults at the speaker and the speaker responds with more insults back at the audience? Do presenters at FORA or TED get on stage and start attacking the audience? No, they don't. You see that kind of behavior on Jerry Springer, not academic conferences.
I have both reviewed papers for and moderated at academic conferences, and I can tell you, that kind of behavior gets you kicked out and banned from legitimate places that discuss controversial topics. It's the people who resort to insulting each other that make controversial topics so controversial and taboo in the first place! They are the ones closing off discussion and keeping others from feeling welcome to communities of critical thinkers.
So don't think that you're justified just because you feel the topics you are involved in are so important, because the opposite is true. The more important the subject of discussion, the more critical it is that you do not antagonize or harass other people in that discussion. The PPNS should be the best behaved section of the Minecraft forum, not the worst.
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I would argue that these have different meanings. At least the way I use them (as well as my friends). For example:
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
Or, perhaps more famously:
While that might seem like an issue, I ask that you consider the English language as a whole. The way things are spelled and pronounced in English is undeniably rubbish. It seems to lack any sort of real consistency. Consider:
bomb
comb
tomb
womb
Only two of these rhyme. The two that do rhyme, also rhyme with boom, fume, and rheum. Comb rhymes with home, foam, and ohm. Or how about these:
cough - off
rough - stuff
bough - bow
dough - bow
Then you've got things like the read that rhymes with seed and the read that rhymes with said.
Man, this language is already messed up beyond redemption, I really don't want to fault people who can't make sense of it because it really is all nonsense.
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If it wasn't smartphones, it'd be something else. Public school culture has been like this for decades and has almost nothing to do with technology. Kids will invariably find something to use as a way to separate into cliques. So don't go blaming it on technology, because that kind of behavior is ancient.
O-okay.
Are you going anywhere with this? Language changes. It has been constantly changing since we've started using it to communicate and it will continue to change as long as there are people around to speak it, regardless of technology.
The internet gave languages kind of a quantum leap in terms of change, but I'm sure so did the invention of writing. This is nothing new or terrible.
But at the same time you don't seem to have a problem writing a long run-on sentence without using proper capitalization. Myself, I have hard time not using capitalization on forums or in emails. It's just so practiced and ingrained in the way that I write, I have to make a conscious effort not to do it. There is a notable exception to this and that's when I'm talking with someone through a chat or IM medium. In that case I forego punctuating or capitalizing my sentences. And I'm kind of 50-50 when it comes to capitalizing proper nouns. It's strange, actually.
There is really nothing wrong with language changing. There just isn't. If you think there is, you're going to have a bad time, because languages will continue to change whether you want them to or not.
Also it's rofl, not rolf.
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Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh...no.
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You're damn right it did. I love digital distribution. Physical media was always such a chore. I remember the days of keeping a stack of CDs for games you wanted to play. I also remember trying to update Windows on 56k. It was a nightmare having to download anything of any size. I also remember having only one phone line and no cell phones, so if I had to download something large (and by large I mean anything more than a few hundred KB; 3-4 MB was a "leave it on overnight" kind of job), I wouldn't be getting any phone calls from anyone.
I do not miss one bit of that.
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To elaborate, the blue light is predominantly absorbed by the red blood cells in the capillaries on your retina, white blood cells don't, leaving a little tiny white dot.
This is a different phenomenon from floaters, which is a result of imperfections in the vitreous humor (which is a gel-like substance that fills the interior of your eyeball). These are common and tend to become more frequent with age.
Floaters are also commonly seen while looking at the sky but can also be seen when looking at any well-lit monochromatic surface.
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What, you don't remember?
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There's a fine line between accepting that mediocrity will exist and being okay with mediocrity. Being okay with mediocrity implies that you're okay with a result that could have been better. That's not generally looked upon as a desirable attitude.
If something comes out mediocre, you should accept it for what it is, but you shouldn't be okay with that. You should identify what makes it mediocre. What decisions led to that result? What different decisions could have been made that would have improved the final outcome? Was there anything you could have actually done about it?
Look, I run into this kind of thing all the time at work. Things never work out quite the way you plan or want. I don't get upset about it, but I'm also not okay with it, because I care. I care about what I produce. I don't want to look at something that I know I could have done a better job on and say "good enough". But I recognize at the same time that I am fallible, I'm not perfect, but I do have the benefit of hindsight and experience.
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Does that mean that my testicles are the most fit? After all, the rest of my body does pretty much jack all to produce offspring, it's just an overly-complicated energy-hungry bus used to ferry around a relatively small pair of gamete factories.
I'm composed of a huge number of living cells, so am I really even a single living thing? It's more like I'm a collection of a bunch of smaller living things that are cooperating their functions, each cell specializing at a particular task.
See, it's kind of hard to argue that individual fitness is really that important when it comes to multicellular organisms such as ourselves, because we're living examples of an ancestry that found evolutionary success through cooperation rather than competition.
Rather than being a bunch of individual cells each competing for resources, at some point we had an ancestor that was perhaps a colony of cells. It's unlikely the cells had specialized in function yet, but as a group they happened to be fit enough to survive. And as time went on, descendants became more capable of survival by sacrificing the reproductive capability of some cells in order to specialize other cells precisely for that purpose.
And then what seems to be really absurd about the whole thing is just how ridiculously long it takes humans to produce offspring. Human children are an enormous drain on resources. We rarely have more than one at a time, and it takes 9 months to gestate, does a ridiculous damage to the mother upon birth, and then is practically helpless and must be looked after for years beyond that.
That huge drain on resources requires a pretty big support network. Something on the order of a society or tribe. A group. You don't really find wild humans wandering the wilderness alone, because it's not a very successful strategy for survival. Even if you're really really good at it.
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Yes, because the color of light reflected depends on the physical properties of the material the ball is made from.
To be specific, color is a perception of a particular spectral distribution of electromagnetic radiation. That spectrum is very much not an illusion and I would argue that the perception is not an illusion as well...at least most of the time. There are certain situations where color is an illusion. For example:
A and B share the same spectral distribution. It won't appear this way. To me, A looks darker than B, and the little strip connecting them looks like a gradient. But if you cover up the surrounding area, suddenly that all vanishes and it becomes apparent that they really are identical.
But they really didn't look that way at first. That's an illusion. Your color perception has to handle a wide variety of different lighting conditions and shadowing, so you get some weirdo effects like this where your brain is attempting to correct for errors in the raw visual data recorded by your eyes. Part of that correction process depends on having some kind of abstract mental model of what it is you're looking at. In this case, you have an abstract idea of a checkerboard with a shadow being cast on it.
In order to process those kinds of ideas out of raw visual data requires you to make certain sacrifices. In this case that sacrifice is the ability to actually tell precisely what spectral distribution of light is really hitting your retinas.
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