berntb

18 ms·

121.
by berntb 10y ago
Re intelligence -- most examinations are done in the Western Protestant world, for obvious reasons. (I.e. in the Muslim world it can be all the time ay up to suicide to admit to atheism...) >> The rest of your rebuttal also appears to
122.
by berntb 10y ago
>> Show me the statistical argument for one vs the other The research shows a correlation between intelligence(/education) and not being religious. 30 seconds with Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religi
123.
by berntb 10y ago
>> The GP said such people were mythical An absolute value would mean rationality was totally correlated with intelligence. It isn't. I posted this in another comment -- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18
124.
by berntb 10y ago
1. Don't make bad arguments just because you think someone's position is insulting. (As my point 2 noted, it was a flawed example.) If nothing else, you're not helping your cause... 2. bleachedsleet argument needs that intell
125.
by berntb 10y ago
I think you really know the obvious counter arguments yourself: 1. You argue through authority, for a subject where believers are infamous for throwing out their reasoning capacity (even becoming creationists)? :-( (Is this some meta level
126.
by berntb 10y ago
I guess that you are smarter than to use anecdotal data points to argue against a statistical argument yourself? At least, for any other subject..? (What does it say about a position that intelligent adherents can't reason about it?)
127.
by berntb 10y ago
Well, thinking about this a bit more... you could argue that my position is really simplified. Christianity wasn't that nice either. Exterminating all competing religions (Asatru, Catharism, South American religions etc) and probably e
128.
by berntb 10y ago
I referenced this earlier, but got no answer. It is from 2005. I haven't seen anything after that. "Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica, the venerable standard-bearer of facts about the world
129.
by berntb 10y ago
I was clumsily trying to explain Space fountains. :-) This do discuss the Forward thing and so on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain#History
130.
by berntb 10y ago
That is a lot of money. :-( So it is true, the bad US health care system really is a startup limitation. Maybe it is time for countries with nice weather and cheap health care to woo Silicon Valley...? Something like: "Get here for les
131.
by berntb 10y ago
Iirc, Robert L Forward's variant was an electromagnetic cannon launching metal pellets, which were slowed down at the top and fired back down. The pellets would go up and down like a juggler's balls was thrown. Since you'd re
132.
by berntb 10y ago
Norway had (by necessity) access with boats to most of the population and were limited in land area. Far easier to control. But it was still a thin veneer 1066. :-) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_
133.
by berntb 10y ago
I think I'll ask for the book as a Christmas present. :-) I borrowed "Den dynamiska medeltiden" many years ago, that was the best book I've read on the subject. This looks like a more modern substitute. After this, I loo
134.
by berntb 10y ago
Good point about tests and dynamic data structures. Thanks.
135.
by berntb 10y ago
Uhm, I still don't get why the development (/execution) environment would have been different for Lisp? I am aware of that Unix/Linux is/was quite a simple solution. It is designed to be. It was still (more or less) the
136.
by berntb 10y ago
I was answering a question about where the Anglo Saxon nobility went after 1066. I didn't touch the main subject of this discussion (how history would have been different). Edit: But please expand on the subject, as if I had meant that
137.
by berntb 10y ago
Interesting, but there was a viking invasion from Scandinavia weeks earlier! This was 1066, not 1200+ or something. Christianity was then quite old in Normandy and very new in Scandinavia. (Also, the population density was really low, compa
138.
by berntb 10y ago
It was a religion for a violent clan society, think Somalia or something. Check e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmgang A good illustration is the Swedish "peace laws" from the 13th century -- it became f
139.
by berntb 10y ago
They had already lost the language, the religion and much of the culture. In the beginning, they burned and pillaged the churches and the cloisters. When they went to England, they had already started to build them instead. BBC had a good
140.
by berntb 10y ago
It seems I was trolled, but in a funny way. I discuss how you can see bad behaviour from even old accounts at HN, dismissing serious references with just hand waving. This got a well written answer about how non serious my example reference
141.
by berntb 10y ago
I never argued anything positive about shell programming. Ever. :-) I still don't get your point, but assume you are saying that Unix is a poor replacement for a real lisp machine environment?
142.
by berntb 10y ago
Well, you got an influx to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard "Composed primarily of Scandinavians for the first 100 years, the guard began to see increasing numbers of Anglo-Saxons after the succ
143.
by berntb 10y ago
OK, you more or less agree with my argument. Enough about that, then. I am curious about something else. Do you have non anecdotal information about Wikipedia's general dependability? How is the dependability for large subjects? For
144.
by berntb 10y ago
Uh... did I miss something? You don't need a lisp machine or a PDP-10 to run a lisp variant? (Do you argue that it was too late when sh had scripting? The sh is gone now, bash will probably be replaced too.)
145.
by berntb 10y ago
I didn't argue that Wikipedia always was correct (no source is that, I'd guess), just that it smelled really bad to dismiss it with just hand waving . It do have sources and have been whetted (for reasonably popular subjects.)
146.
by berntb 10y ago
I use the bookmark feature for articles that I want to keep, not read later. For instance, I seldom bookmark news. (I would, without data, guess your way is more popular.) Otoh, I often bookmark an article just to keep a reference to the co
147.
by berntb 10y ago
Huh? There were early Lisps with free source, too. Also, 1, I am not a GC basher. 2. I was wondering why Lisp didn't take over most of the world 15+ years ago. Overhead was more expensive then. (And small embedded systems will always h
148.
by berntb 10y ago
Cool. And sad. But re old accounts: I've recently seen a few cases where old accounts with high karma dismissed Wikipedia -- without any references of their own. That is a "quality smell", if anything is. (One particularly sh
149.
by berntb 10y ago
Ah, of course. I have long wondered why (Common) Lisp didn't take over the world at the end of the 90s to the beginning of the millennium. :-( They have a GC, but so do Java. There were good compilers since at least the 80s. But the li
150.
by berntb 10y ago
I think the main difference is that you will still get most jobs in the west, even if you have the "wrong" opinions. Like reading Chomsky's collected works in the US. (Or follow Islamist web sites in, well, any country.) I.e.

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