- shirt
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“From a hard science perspective, it IS bad science. That is the bureaucrat's excuse for it, yes. The end justifies the means...they appear to get short-term results more quickly, because they're ignoring the underlying flaws in their hypotheses, and treating disproven theories as proven facts. But, in the long run, they've produced SLOWER results, because they get things wrong and then build on them, generation after generation, without understanding what their results even were, much less where they actually came from. Instrumentalism would have us still believing dryads make willow trees magic, and the 6,000 year old earth is the center of the universe. It was the move toward scientific realism that dragged us out of such nonsense. Along with the dark matter/energy nonsense and the "proof" of black holes that may well be MECOs, this is a great example of what is BAD about scientific instrumentalism: You say this is circumstantial evidence in support of instrumentalism, but in fact it's a sign of how something can be touted as "proof" when in fact it's just a reverse-engineering of the details of a theory, to fit the observed facts. Dryads live in willow trees. Wait, scientists have found that willow bark makes people's pain go away, and willow shoots make tomato cuttings grow roots? Now that we think of it, that actually is proof that those dryads are giving life! Sure, we didn't predict it, in fact it contradicts our predictions, but upon looking back, it fits perfectly! That is instrumentalism. Anyone who violates the rules of hard science is, in a sense, a fraud. Their work is only ever accurate by lucky happenstance. This is as true of instrumentalists as of alchemists and astrologers. The difference is simply one of subtlety.”
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posted in
Schrödinger’s Equation
(Woot Shirts)
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6 months ago
- wine
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“In what fantasy world is nine dollars per pound a good price? Tell me, did you know they sell jeans for under $100?”
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posted in
B&R Farms California Blenheim Dried Apricots 2-Pound Bag
(Woot Wines)
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11 months ago
- shirt
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“I am reasonably certain that the teacher let the girls vote for the bunny's first name, and the boys vote for his last name. And this amply illustrates what the Founding Fathers were trying to tell us: Democracies are bad, republics are good.”
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posted in
Eatser Bunny
(Woot Shirts)
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a year ago
- woot
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“The US had supported the tyrannical Shah of Iran for years. The only place the people of Iran could turn to overthrow him was the Soviet-backed Islamic Revolution. If the US hadn't been supporting tyranny in the first place, that may not have happened. In Egypt, the US is widely perceived as being an integral part of how Mubarak retained his dictatorship for the past thirty years. We have sent SIXTY BILLION DOLLARS, and enormous supplies of weaponry that are used against his own people. Or our government has...unfortunately, we end up being associated with that government of corrupt neocons and other foreign policy thugs. If the result of the people of Egypt having to fight against the US-sponsored dictatorship is a government that considers the US to be their enemy, it'll be our own damned fault. We should FINALLY recognize that violating other countries, in ways we'd find intolerable if someone did it to us, is evil, and stop. Then we'll stop suffering the blowback.”
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posted in
12 Ways We're Helping The Egyptian People
(World of Woot)
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a year ago
- woot
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“Life does not cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
- George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma (1911) Or, stated differently: Nothing's more laughable than some whiner who thinks that humor about a given topic is somehow a bad thing. And that's precisely what it is...some self-important gits don't grasp that humor is always a comfort, and need not be automatically a sign of disrespect. Satirists aren't responsible for the incompetence of some members of the audience. If a listener doesn't "get" the humor, that's his own blanking problem. Ironically, it's hard to say you've really succeeded until you have a few nattering nabobs of negativism objecting to how "offensive" your parody is.”
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posted in
12 Ways We're Helping The Egyptian People
(World of Woot)
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a year ago
- woot
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“Not true...all of them route through the Wootalyzer website. If Amazon bullied Wootalyzer into taking their site down, ALL wootalyzer feeds would die. Let's hope Amazon is not behind it, because I'm not going to waste my time manually loading every Woot page each day, and will also develop a sudden preference for EBay over Amazon. At which point, I won't see much need to maintain my Amazon Prime membership.”
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posted in
Amazon Kindle Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)
(Woots)
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2 years ago
- woot
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“Best cultural reference, ever. How do you mark a post "quality" on this system? There must be some sort of thumbs-up link around here somewhere...”
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posted in
Amazon Kindle Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)
(Woots)
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2 years ago
- woot
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“I'm sure they're telling themselves that the butt-kissing format of the copy for the item is so over-the-top that it counts as kewl, sarky irony. But no, it's a worse indication of selling out than having an Amazon-only, Amazon-brand product on day one: They didn't even have the balls to show they are undamaged by writing some really biting, witty copy. Woot's famous for not being afraid of mocking or being honestly critical of what they sell...but all they did, this time, was emphasize how we should all hurry up and buy one of these (implicitly wonderful) proprietary attempts to force us to pay a premium for mere electronic information. I'll stick to any of the million more open formats for reading electronic text, like my phone...especially now that its maker is apparently effing up one of my favorite websites. You know, I interviewed with IMDB, which Amazon owns, and while they didn't seem messed up internally by Amazon, it was the Amazon corporate guy, there "to make sure that you fit in with our wider corporate culture", as opposed to the looser, cleverer IMDB developer culture, that was the complete ass. So, now that I think about it, I'm not surprised they're already corporatizing Woot.”
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posted in
Amazon Kindle Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)
(Woots)
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2 years ago
- shirt
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“ANOTHER Escher ripoff, and this one not even subtle about it.”
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posted in
Can’t see the forest…
(Woot Shirts)
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2 years ago
- shirt
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“You know, this is yet another derivative (perhaps indirectly) of the famous Escher pic. http://antikosmikos.altervista.org/_altervista_ht/m._c._escher_two_worlds.jpg
Can't find a decent version of it, but you get the idea.”
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posted in
Shirt Title Pending
(Woot Shirts)
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2 years ago
