That's an interesting perspective. I disagree with many particulars, but I'm not sure they matter.

"A monogamous relationship is a monogamous relationship." True, that. And irrelevant (imho) to legal marriage. Legal marriage is what forces third parties to treat me and my wife in a special way. So, for example, her employer-provided medical insurance covers me, but would not cover her (hypothetical) ten boyfriends. Also, she is on an international assignment, and they limit some of the benefits provided based on family size. I count, but her niece and nephew don't. Since we don't have kids, we don't get the awesome free tuition to an international school near us, and (importantly) we don't get to just pick some random relatives (or even our niece and nephew) to get it instead.

Even my Sam's Club membership automatically includes her, at no extra cost. They leverage the institution of marriage as a way of limiting the scope of the benefit of two people using one membership in a way that mostly works well for the people who act on each other's behalf.

Also, when those monogamous relationships fall apart, there is often disagreement on how commonly held property and (previously) shared responsibilities are split. That can require some form of mediation, especially because there is often a large power/status difference between the parties. That fact does not change if the government gets out of the business of pre authorizing the relationships that get special legal mediation.

So, I know you must be tired of people trying to convince you of the social benefit of legal marriage, but I'm going to try one more tactic. So many people get married and get a benefit from it, both personally (which you dismiss) and socially (which you seem to ignore) that I hope you try to see this from their perspective. Legal marriage will endure whether you join it or not (I hope). Please don't be against it; just don't join it.

-*-*-*-
Next topic, a particular that I think does matter: Taxes! "I pay taxes so their little snot-nosed kids can go to school, and they get a tax break? Why isn't there a kid tax?"

I don't know why you pay taxes - you could always move to Somalia. But I'll tell you why I feel comfortable with my government forcing you to pay taxes, especially for education. The education is not just for the benefit of the child or parent. That education benefits society. An educated populace can invent new great things for us all to use. An educated populace (in a democracy) is critical for good collective decision making. An educated populace is wealthier and safer to be in. Because you benefit from those things, my government takes a bite out of your wealth, even though you are short-sighted, tight, and stupid, as evidenced by your desire not to support those things. I wish your education had been better, but I can only imagine the horror of your ideas if you hadn't gotten at least as much as you did.

I'm really tempted to ask more about your anti-culturalists. Have they moved around the US a lot? Are they politically active, especially where they have to deal with (i.e. compromise with or attack for political gain) the opposition? Are they devout? Are they privileged in gender identity, sexual orientation, race, gender, weight, wealth, creed, education, (certainly citizenship status!), or handed-ness? [I list these in the order in which being under privileged would imho provide cultural sensitivity.]

Maybe not your point, but no. In my experience vinegar attracts more. As much as I'd usually hate to use a cartoon as a reference: http://xkcd.com/357/

On to your point: I personally feel that Dawkins has legitimatized a great deal of speaking out against religious stupidity. I hasten to add that a lot of religious stupidity gets called out by other religious thinkers - The Christian Left poking holes in Focus on the Family's agenda. But still, he adds a useful voice for atheists who wish to promote that methodology in public and political life. He is by no means perfect here. For example, he's deeply entrenched in his misogyny, unable to see how his behavior supports the demeaning of women within his community - presumably because he feels it's so much worse in the religious communities he attacks.

But I have to disagree with you (respectfully). What you believe (and also why, and how you come to those conclusions) may be personal, but it is also very much my business too when you act out on those beliefs. No human ant colony required; I'm speaking of real, complex, human societies. I'm a US citizen, and monotheistic, Abraham based religious views inform the majority of our public policy debate. If you engage in those debates then you should expect to have your views challenged.

But I do believe that respectful challenging is more effective than mockery. So while I don't mean to mock your view that it's no one else's business, I still think you're wrong, and I just told you so. And I told you why.

dftba

This doesn't meet the ground rules you laid out, but you could consider taking notes on paper and then getting electronic copies of them.

I'm thinking of the Livescribe products. It's a smart pen/dot paper combination. The big additional win from the Echo or Pulse smartpen is that it will record audio while notetaking. There is an add-on app for the pen that lets you use it as a stylus for your mouse cursor on the laptop (the pen must be tethered to the laptop with a usb cable). I've never used that aspect of the pen.

The recorded audio can be cued up after class by just pointed to the note you wrote at the same time, as well as by more normal play/pause/scrub controls.

Also, the handwritten text can be searched in the base desktop application. There is an additional software that will convert the handwritten image to fully editable text - but again, I haven't bought it or used it.

You can also send complete audio/image combinations to an online account and sync them with your iPad/iPhone, so you don't need to carry around all your notebooks just to read them, though you will need them if you'd like to take new notes (assuming you keep one notebook per class, as intended)

To be honest, I bought this long after school, because I thought it was so damn cool. I haven't had much call to use it, so I can't really be for or against it. Anyone else use it in an actual class?

http://www.livescribe.com/

"How Economic Inequality Harms Societies" (video http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html )

I dunno about 'wealth'. This video talks about income instead. Income *is* more evenly distributed in every developed, western-style economy than it is in the US. The UK seems to be a close second in income inequality.

As this video points out at the very beginning, income differences between nations MAKE NO DIFFERENCE in life expectancy (or any of the other measures of societal well-being used in the man's talk). But WITHIN a country, every income group does a bit worse than the income group just above.

In addition, countries with high inequality do worse (example used in video: child mortality) at all income levels than a country with with lower inequality (given comparable GDP/capita). Yes, the difference is large at the bottom and small at the top, but it is consistent across the whole income gradient.

So, go ahead and sneer that people who want greater income equality are just ungrateful, greedy, lazy, stupid, confused or whatever. But the fight for greater income equality has the data to show that it is a *cause* of negative social outcomes, and the data to show that it hurts the rich too (just not as much as it hurts the poor).

I don't vote for the leader of the world. I do vote for the leader of my country and several representatives for my state in the national legislative body. So I have limited influence on income inequality across the whole world. I support open borders, free trade, reduced agricultural subsidies, and anything else that would help raise the world's poor out of the trap they live in. But you are suggesting that I should let my version of "The American Dream" be better realized in Denmark than in the US (social mobility is highest in Denmark, lowest in US). I don't know what kind of country you want to live in - but daddy's income shouldn't be the most important thing in *your* income. It should be about how hard you work. That happens in more equal societies, not in the US.

Ignorance about how the world works is curable - but now you have no excuse.

Well, according to a old Planet Money episode I recently listened to, innovation and productivity in the financial sector is finding new (and efficient) ways to find capital for new businesses. Or, conversely, finding investment opportunities for existing capital. Banks have historically done this one way: They guarantee depositors a fixed interest rate (attracting small amounts of capital from large numbers of risk averse investors) and give loans, presumably with a mixture of risk profiles. Of course they also have support roles too: processing transactions for businesses for a fee, checking/debit card accounts for consumers. Most of these support roles are not big money makers for banks. (That matters because finding ways to cover costs helps make those checking account "fee-free" - that helps the lower income levels a lot more than it helps rich people's bank accounts.)

Saying "banking isn't an industry - they don't produce anything" is like saying "hair styling isn't an industry - they don't produce anything". Banking could well be a growth industry - it makes no sense to limit bonuses based on that line of reasoning.

You got it totally wrong, and this matters to me because if you say something this silly too many times, people who matter (unlike me or you) may come to believe that the whole idea is stupid. And then they won't implement the idea. The real reason (according to Taleb) to forbid bonuses is because of the asymmetry of knowledge. I've read his book, "The Black Swan"; it was fascinating, you should read it too. If you can grant me that there will *always* be opportunities to hide low-probability large-loss risks in the system, then bonuses give exactly the WRONG incentive. That's true whether or not 'banking' is a growth industry or a support process.

Of course, you might think I've got it wrong - so we can have a polite conversation about our analogies or reasoning or such. I'm assuming you're a swell person who just has a bit of flawed understanding.

Between "The Black Swan" (book) and "How Economic Inequality Harms Societies" (video http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html ) I'm thinking this is the most important thing we have to do in our nation.

What is cheating, really? I mean this to be completely serious. There are some interesting stories here already on how someone cheated on this or that test. Some of them sound like 'studying' to me (like working every sample problem until the answers are memorized? Cheating!?). Some of them just sound like study groups.

I got a B.A. in 1992 and I recall only one or two times where instructors gave any guidance at all about what level of cooperation among classmates was appropriate. Since that had never happened in high school, I had no experience applying those guidelines. So with only one or two classes as exceptions, I did all of my homework alone. The one large study group I attended regularly was a logic class in the Math Dept. that had tremendous overlap (in subject matter, not students) with a formal logic class I had already taken in the Philosophy Dept. I would *always* do the proofs first, in my room, then join the study group. I acted more like a TA, trying to explain why something was, or was not, a proof. I was probably more rigorous than was necessary (imho: Mathematicians use logic as a tool, like an Engineer uses math; Philosophers study logic as a subject, like Mathematicians study math) because of my prior exposure.

I remember most clearly how worried I was that I was cheating with my fellow classmates. I didn't know the boundary lines.

I also worried I was cheating when I was not the leading light in a class and I needed help, badly. Since I didn't know how much help was too much, I never asked. When I took a class where I was completely over my head, I simply sank like a stone.

With social skills that come from loving Logic like a Philosopher, it's clear that I needed *practice* with group work. The few sentences at the beginning of the course from the prof simply do not cut it when you're halfway through a Data Structures assignment and need help (serious help) just getting the $%^&* code to compile. When the guideline is vague ("You may discuss assignments outside of class, but I expect you to turn in code that is your own") is it cheating to ask the code-god in your residence suite to just find the syntax error and just tell you what it is? Don't explain it, I won't understand, just tell me!

The original article says their survey included the option I "received unpermitted help". You tell me? Did I cheat?

If he is re-elected, I wonder if it will be news in Texas.

Ah, but you're all just ACs. Just trolling, I guess, rather than interested in learning any new truths. For everyone else reading this, I thought I'd include a standard rejoinder about the nature of scientific 'proof', just in case.

When one does not have proof, one need not avoid any conclusions; evidence is sufficient. Most of the evidence suggests that there is no imaginary friend; all of the evidence otherwise is provided by anecdote, fallacy, fraud, or fiction. There is evidence that his friend is imaginary, in one sense of the word. There are indicators in the brain that are associated with religious activity; literally faith is all in your head.

I'll believe in god when there is more evidence in favor of its existence than there is against it. I won't do it because some random clown on the the street with a bullhorn (or on the Internet) yells about it. That isn't evidence. You believe; too bad for you. If I knew more about you, I might even be able to explain why you believe (probably because you were raised with the notion of god as a child, but perhaps not). But your belief is not evidence.

See? An open mind that evaluates evidence and comes to a conclusion using the best data available. That's how you have to deal with the scientific worldview.

That must be why Sarah Palin thought Obama was diminishing the standing of the US ... by actually following the law in this one case, he is setting a precedent (and a standard) few Republicans would like to be held to.

No, the investigators should have done no such thing. They aren't scientists, and they weren't investigating faulty scientific reasoning. They were investigating some kind of unspecified 'scientific misconduct', like falsify data or some other kind of fraudulent activity. They wanted a story of how the paper was written, why it was written, where the data came from, to investigate whether there was improper behavior. They aren't there to do statistics checking, though the allegations they are investigating seems to have had some simple calculations that need to be debunked by the scientist himself.

Elsewhere in the interview, 'the subject' spoke to the fact that the note (journal article) included statements of all these assumptions. 'The subject' mentioned that he had no statistics in the paper, only an observation. What made it interesting was that is was the first observation of dead polar bears at sea. That's it. These calculations were for putting a single observation into context.

Also, since I took the time to read the whole interview (but not much else), I'll let you know that 'the subject' had to explain that you can't add the 4 and 3 together (or rather "Its just goofy.") because they were spotted on different passes, different days. He also points out that some sightings don't count because they aren't on transects*, but they are seen on the way to or back from the transect. The alleged misconduct seems to be based on complaints that the analysis was poor. But that isn't scientific misconduct! Nobody could make any sweeping conclusions based on a single observation of 3 dead polar bears, and that's basically all the note (article) seems to have said. At least, that's the characterization of the note by the author.

As one of the mother jones articles on this subject points out, the observation of dead polar bears at sea has been confirmed many times over since the publication of this journal article.

* The transect is the randomized path through the survey area, which is about 11% of the total area.

Well, you're right that the submission is a bit sketchy. The link to the interview was hosted by Mother Jones, so a quick site search provided the following links to actual articles which claim things and explain them.

http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/07/charles-monnett-polar-bear-scientist
http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/08/details-monnett-polar-bear-boemre

I'm not a fan of Mother Jones, so I can't speak to whether these articles are 'fair and balanced' or are just part of the 'lame-stream media', but you can read them and go from them.

I'll also point out that that Dr. Monnett's attorney's didn't 'willing allow' this. Dr. Monnett signed a Kalkines warning, which means (according to wikipedia) that he is being forced to co-operate with an internal investigation, although he is immune to criminal charges (presumably due to his 5th amendment rights). If he doesn't answer questions, he'll be fired.

I did read the whole interview. I'll beg you to cite one example of unreasonable or unscientific behavior about his [Monnett's] handling of data. You know, because I'm not a scientist, but I'd like to learn something new about the scientific method. Clearly you aren't one either; if you were you'd already have provided references to the literature. Just saying he's not doing his job properly is an 'allegation' but we don't have to take you seriously unless you provide some kind of evidence.

For some context, on page 4 of the interview, note the following, somewhat shortened:

So I think I've got some leeway in interpreting Dr. Monnett in a favorable light here. He's trying to be understandable, rather than formal, in his descriptions of how the data is collected. Also, Eric May never explains what misconduct is alleged, but it seems clear that coming to a poor scientific conclusion is NOT the issue. If the analysis is bad, the IG doesn't need to get involved. The paper was peer-reviewed and published, so there is an opportunity for people with scientific backgrounds to critique it.

You seem to be mischaracterizing the comments about the storm, and you seem to find it ridiculous that the result of a storm could be extrapolated to the entire arctic polar bear population. Dr. Monnett does not conclude that the storm is the cause of death, he suggests it for the purposes of discussion. But if a storm kills polar bears, that's interesting in and of itself. Polar bears have been in the arctic for a long time, and storms have happened before. Why haven't these storms killed polar bears in the past? We don't know - but it seems reasonable and scientific to ASK THE EFFING QUESTION and even make some suggestions that are consistent with the data. Data, by the way, that he knows better than most people, because he's been doing this for a long time.

If it isn't the storm, we still need an explanation for 3 dead polar bears in the water, something that had never been observed before. It's the observation that merits the published note in a journal, so even if you disagree with the conclusions, you can't object to the publication of the note on 'administrative' grounds, can you?