Never heard of Scientific American until now (firmware engineer). Guess thats the point, they want publicity.
Two posts in a row. You must really want publicity. Scientific American is a very old publication and is not really something that would be considered obscure on a site like slashdot.
A college I once attended had really old editions of Scientific American in the stacks. In the 19th century it was the kind of print publication with technical diagrams and new patents on the front page. It was a vigorous can-do kind of magazine.
It's become more the effete intellectual kind of journal that Eisenhower warned against when he spoke of the scientific-technological elite [intellectualtakeout.org]. Yes, in that same speech where the much more quoted 'military-industrial complex' bromide was created.
As much as I dislike the military-industrial complex, it has provided a ton of jobs for engineers and manufacturers. It's one of the most successful socialist institutions (unfortunately we sacrifice things like universal healthcare to keep it going and it's an environmental nightmare). Our large investments in research have likewise paid off—government money has funded most of the basic research that has propelled America to the status of a global tech leader. I'm sure Eisenhower had Oppenheimer and
I subscribed to Sci Am for about a decade and a half, in the early '90s it was still a thick publication full of charts, graphs, how-to articles, complex setups for amateur scientist investigation, and mathematical games. When I cancelled my subscription around 2005 or so the average article was under six pages, counting the full page illustration on the title page.
Never heard of Scientific American until now (firmware engineer). Guess thats the point, they want publicity.
Two posts in a row. You must really want publicity. Scientific American is a very old publication and is not really something that would be considered obscure on a site like slashdot.
I had a subscription of the German version (Spektrum der Wissenschaft) when I was a teenager in the 80s. I still have some special editions somewhere. Firmware engineer.
Okay. Not only has Scientific American been under continuous publication since 1845, it is in fact the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. If you haven't heard of them, it's not because they need publicity, it's because you've not been paying attention.
Scientific American is a much different publication than it has been in the past. It's more of a slick consumer rag than it used to be. I remember when I was young and the 'Mathematical Games' column was something to take serious. I remember when a column was published about public key cryptosystems. Rivest offered a copy of the RSA paper to anybody who wrote in for it. When it came about a year later, the cover letter mentioned that there was 'question of the legality' of distributing it that he hadn'
Scientific American breaking tradition to express a political opinion for the first time in 175 years is in the best spirit of the publication and the nation. I have never lived with an administration so willing to claim that their 'alternative facts' were equivalent to reality. I have disagreed with and simultaneously respected the choices of presidents (of both parties) before Trump because those men clearly held in their minds and in their hearts the best interests of the country. Trump lies, and he lies
Scientific American breaking tradition to express a political opinion for the first time in 175 years is in the best spirit of the publication and the nation.
Oh, great. We're already listening to alternate national anthems at games, watching the police hold back as whole blocks of cities get burned to the ground, and worrying that getting fast food from the wrong chicken sandwich shop will lead to people spreading rumors that we want to kill trans people. Thank goodness I'll soon get a nice dose of "orang
That's because 'alternative facts' aren't lies (like you've been lead to believe), they're just true things that (somehow) don't get mentioned in most media publications. I can give you examples if you like.
What kind of troll are you? I guess the Trump campaign is getting desperate.
Alternative facts are lies. To say otherwise is a fucking lie and make YOU a liar or incredibly stupid.
If you mean Kellyanne Conway's original use of the term, sure. She should have just admitted that she didn't know where that stat came from, but Trump supporters have jobs, so a lower turnout for Trump than Obama on a weekday is expected.
But I don't support the genetic fallacy, and the concept does accurately describe some situations. See also "hate facts".
To say otherwise is a fucking lie and make YOU a liar or incredibly stupid.
Thank goodness I'll soon get a nice dose of "orange man bad" with every issue of Pop-Sci for High-school Students.
I think the best way for you to protest this endorsement is to cancel your subscription to Scientific American. Oh, you don't actually subscribe to Scientific American? Okay... so you're complaining about the content of a magazine you don't subscribe to? Do you even read it? Here's a pro-tip from the "party of personal responsibility": if SA's presidential endorsement bothers you, then don't rea
Here's a pro-tip from the "party of personal responsibility": if SA's presidential endorsement bothers you, then don't read SA. That's all you gotta do.
Participating in public discussions about political issues is a part of taking personal responsibility for how your country (and the world) change, and somehow I think you'd have different advice if SA came out against sex reassignment surgery, or denied climate change, or endorsed Trump. But no worries, there seem to be plenty of people willing to stop wa
somehow I think you'd have different advice if SA came out against sex reassignment surgery, or denied climate change, or endorsed Trump
As it happens, I am not a straw-man liberal, and my opinion of sex reassignment surgery is not as simple as you seem to think. I would be opposed to SA denying climate change, because doing so would be antithetical to science. I would also oppose SA endorsing Trump, as that would be contrary to the reasons they've endorsed Biden. My remedy for protesting those actions, shou
I can cancel my subscription and stop patronizing the magazine.
So if they had endorsed Trump, say based on his expansion of "compassionate use" classifications for medications, and slashdot ran an article about it, you'd stand on principle and wouldn't comment? Really?
alternative facts
Well, we both agree that Trump lies sometimes, and sometimes other people lie about him, leading to people legitimately presenting facts in order to defend him.
If we're really down to arguing if about whether the "real d
So if they had endorsed Trump, say based on his expansion of "compassionate use" classifications for medications, and slashdot ran an article about it, you'd stand on principle and wouldn't comment? Really?
Well, if we're having a discussion about it, I have no principle to stand on that says I shouldn't comment. Nor have I suggested that you should refrain from comment (I did say that an adequate form of protest would be to cancel your subscription, but I did not mean to suggest that you can't also talk abo
I did not mean to suggest that you can't also talk about it.... that phrase is not the issue, the issue is lies, whatever term you want to use to identify them.
Oh. So... what were we arguing about?
To be clear, I think we can agree to disagree on our opinions of the current administration.
I don't have a very high opinion of any administration - I expect them to play politics and lie, and they rarely disappoint. What I'm upset with is the media doing the same thing - not only do I expect more from them,
You're right, it's different now. In fact, in 175 years of publication, it has changed pretty fundamentally more than once. Its current incarnation may not be the best, but it also reflects the reality of print periodicals today. Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games was a great period, but he's dead now. You can't run a magazine for as long as they have and have it be at the top of its game the whole time. There are ebbs and flows. I get that it's not as good as it was, say, 20 years ago, but I think that's
This reflects more on you than them. Please hand in you nerd card on the way out.
More on topic it is important that they are now favoring someone in the political realm for the first time in 175 years of existence. To me it signals the end of good times, as factions are clearly growing vocally malcontent within our society.
Never heard of Scientific American until now (firmware engineer).
What do you want us to think, that you're ignorant? Why are you saying that?
Because he doesn't know that it is a surprise to many that he has never heard of "the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States" (first issue 1845).
I suppose it shouldn't really be a great surprise though. Probably for people younger than about 30, the concept of magazine subscriptions are much rarer than for older people. Our household subscription load has gone from almost a dozen magazines to three (one kid's science/culture magazine, Cook's Illu
...you are not a scientist. Your work does not involve the finding of new science. Your job is to merely work with existing knowledge. You are basically a glorified craftsman, no different than a blacksmith of yore.
To paraphrase Thomas Kuhn, he said that engineers are not scientists and their work does not involve science. They work within the constraints of existing knowledge. Once you have obtained enough knowledge to do something with it, the science has ended and the engineering begins.
I think you're a bit harsh on the engineers but you have a good point.
Personally, the biggest difference I've noticed between scientists and engineers is that engineers tend to view the world in more reductive terms. They tend to vi
Oddly, I find the opposite. It isn't just ad copy that likes to talk about science "proving" things again and again... All too few scientists seem to have even the slightest concern throwing around words like proof. More than a few seem to want to ignore falsification entirely or point out that falsification itself may not be a panacea and so both sides are moot. (I've also heard the argument that philosophy has no sway over science because science is more important foremost etc)
Code is interesting because if you're working with a self-contained program, solving problems is definitely deductive because you can account for all the rules/variables. But when you are dealing with bugs that relate to how one piece of software interacts within a system/network, then it becomes inductive. Sorry if that is a rough description and perhaps incorrect, I am clearly not a programmer by trade, but I think the argument holds up.
When it comes to science, unfortunately many universities no longer i
I'm not even from the US and I've known of Scientific American since my childhood. You really must have been living under some kind of rock that firmware engineers live under.
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
- Henry Spencer, University of Toronto Unix hack
Never heard of them (Score:0, Troll)
Re:Never heard of them (Score:5, Insightful)
Never heard of Scientific American until now (firmware engineer). Guess thats the point, they want publicity.
Two posts in a row. You must really want publicity. Scientific American is a very old publication and is not really something that would be considered obscure on a site like slashdot.
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A college I once attended had really old editions of Scientific American in the stacks. In the 19th century it was the kind of print publication with technical diagrams and new patents on the front page. It was a vigorous can-do kind of magazine.
It's become more the effete intellectual kind of journal that Eisenhower warned against when he spoke of the scientific-technological elite [intellectualtakeout.org]. Yes, in that same speech where the much more quoted 'military-industrial complex' bromide was created.
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As much as I dislike the military-industrial complex, it has provided a ton of jobs for engineers and manufacturers. It's one of the most successful socialist institutions (unfortunately we sacrifice things like universal healthcare to keep it going and it's an environmental nightmare). Our large investments in research have likewise paid off—government money has funded most of the basic research that has propelled America to the status of a global tech leader. I'm sure Eisenhower had Oppenheimer and
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I subscribed to Sci Am for about a decade and a half, in the early '90s it was still a thick publication full of charts, graphs, how-to articles, complex setups for amateur scientist investigation, and mathematical games. When I cancelled my subscription around 2005 or so the average article was under six pages, counting the full page illustration on the title page.
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Never heard of Scientific American until now (firmware engineer). Guess thats the point, they want publicity.
Two posts in a row. You must really want publicity. Scientific American is a very old publication and is not really something that would be considered obscure on a site like slashdot.
I had a subscription of the German version (Spektrum der Wissenschaft) when I was a teenager in the 80s. I still
have some special editions somewhere. Firmware engineer.
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That they don't dabble in recursion because of memory constraints?
Re:Never heard of them (Score:5, Insightful)
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Scientific American is a much different publication than it has been in the past. It's more of a slick consumer rag than it used to be. I remember when I was young and the 'Mathematical Games' column was something to take serious. I remember when a column was published about public key cryptosystems. Rivest offered a copy of the RSA paper to anybody who wrote in for it. When it came about a year later, the cover letter mentioned that there was 'question of the legality' of distributing it that he hadn'
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Scientific American is a much different publication than it has been in the past. It's more of a slick consumer rag than it used to be.
Yes, I'd say this article about them becoming political proves that quite well.
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Oh, great. We're already listening to alternate national anthems at games, watching the police hold back as whole blocks of cities get burned to the ground, and worrying that getting fast food from the wrong chicken sandwich shop will lead to people spreading rumors that we want to kill trans people. Thank goodness I'll soon get a nice dose of "orang
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That's because 'alternative facts' aren't lies (like you've been lead to believe), they're just true things that (somehow) don't get mentioned in most media publications. I can give you examples if you like.
What kind of troll are you? I guess the Trump campaign is getting desperate.
Alternative facts are lies. To say otherwise is a fucking lie and make YOU a liar or incredibly stupid.
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If you mean Kellyanne Conway's original use of the term, sure. She should have just admitted that she didn't know where that stat came from, but Trump supporters have jobs, so a lower turnout for Trump than Obama on a weekday is expected.
But I don't support the genetic fallacy, and the concept does accurately describe some situations. See also "hate facts".
I choose to interpret that as a request for exam
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I think the best way for you to protest this endorsement is to cancel your subscription to Scientific American. Oh, you don't actually subscribe to Scientific American? Okay... so you're complaining about the content of a magazine you don't subscribe to? Do you even read it? Here's a pro-tip from the "party of personal responsibility": if SA's presidential endorsement bothers you, then don't rea
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Participating in public discussions about political issues is a part of taking personal responsibility for how your country (and the world) change, and somehow I think you'd have different advice if SA came out against sex reassignment surgery, or denied climate change, or endorsed Trump. But no worries, there seem to be plenty of people willing to stop wa
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As it happens, I am not a straw-man liberal, and my opinion of sex reassignment surgery is not as simple as you seem to think. I would be opposed to SA denying climate change, because doing so would be antithetical to science. I would also oppose SA endorsing Trump, as that would be contrary to the reasons they've endorsed Biden. My remedy for protesting those actions, shou
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So if they had endorsed Trump, say based on his expansion of "compassionate use" classifications for medications, and slashdot ran an article about it, you'd stand on principle and wouldn't comment? Really?
Well, we both agree that Trump lies sometimes, and sometimes other people lie about him, leading to people legitimately presenting facts in order to defend him.
If we're really down to arguing if about whether the "real d
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Well, if we're having a discussion about it, I have no principle to stand on that says I shouldn't comment. Nor have I suggested that you should refrain from comment (I did say that an adequate form of protest would be to cancel your subscription, but I did not mean to suggest that you can't also talk abo
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Oh. So ... what were we arguing about?
I don't have a very high opinion of any administration - I expect them to play politics and lie, and they rarely disappoint. What I'm upset with is the media doing the same thing - not only do I expect more from them,
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Re:Never heard of them (Score:5, Insightful)
More on topic it is important that they are now favoring someone in the political realm for the first time in 175 years of existence. To me it signals the end of good times, as factions are clearly growing vocally malcontent within our society.
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Never heard of Scientific American until now (firmware engineer).
What do you want us to think, that you're ignorant? Why are you saying that?
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Never heard of Scientific American until now (firmware engineer).
What do you want us to think, that you're ignorant? Why are you saying that?
Because he doesn't know that it is a surprise to many that he has never heard of "the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States" (first issue 1845).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I suppose it shouldn't really be a great surprise though. Probably for people younger than about 30, the concept of magazine subscriptions are much rarer than for older people. Our household subscription load has gone from almost a dozen magazines to three (one kid's science/culture magazine, Cook's Illu
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The Salem Hypothesis is confirmed again. And anyone in the western world who says they haven't heard if SciAm is a liar
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...you are not a scientist. Your work does not involve the finding of new science. Your job is to merely work with existing knowledge. You are basically a glorified craftsman, no different than a blacksmith of yore.
To paraphrase Thomas Kuhn, he said that engineers are not scientists and their work does not involve science. They work within the constraints of existing knowledge. Once you have obtained enough knowledge to do something with it, the science has ended and the engineering begins.
I think you're a bit harsh on the engineers but you have a good point.
Personally, the biggest difference I've noticed between scientists and engineers is that engineers tend to view the world in more reductive terms. They tend to vi
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Oddly, I find the opposite. It isn't just ad copy that likes to talk about science "proving" things again and again... All too few scientists seem to have even the slightest concern throwing around words like proof. More than a few seem to want to ignore falsification entirely or point out that falsification itself may not be a panacea and so both sides are moot. (I've also heard the argument that philosophy has no sway over science because science is more important foremost etc)
In my mind a good scient
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Code is interesting because if you're working with a self-contained program, solving problems is definitely deductive because you can account for all the rules/variables. But when you are dealing with bugs that relate to how one piece of software interacts within a system/network, then it becomes inductive. Sorry if that is a rough description and perhaps incorrect, I am clearly not a programmer by trade, but I think the argument holds up.
When it comes to science, unfortunately many universities no longer i
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There's a reason why your ignorance has been downvoted into oblivion. Might want to work on that.
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