there's an old essay by jeremy bernstein entitled something like "scientific cranks: how to recognize them and what to do with them until the doctor arrives" (can't find it online, dang), in which bernstein writes about getting regular submissions from obvious crank scientists, claiming to have solved some of science's biggest mysteries -- guys showing up with a unified field theory scrawled with crayon on a shopping bag, that sort of thing.
bernstein goes on to list a number of clues that someone is a crank, the first being that the crank doesn't understand even the most fundamental basics of the field they're trying to overturn. someone who clearly doesn't have a clue about simple physics will nonetheless claim to have disproved the theory of relativity, you get the idea.
and another obvious giveaway is that the problem allegedly solved is never a small one, it's never minor, it's never just an incremental addition to scientific knowledge as it stands. rather, it's invariably an all-encompassing, universal, ground-breaking discovery that will shake the very pillars of science as we know it, etc., etc. as i recall, bernstein claims that that's pretty much a dead giveaway of crankhood since, these days, while you might get the *occasional* wondrous discovery, most of science is just slowly and methodically pushing the boundaries of what we know outward, just a bit at a time. fill in a missing piece here, tweak or refine a little bit over there, that sort of thing.
which brings us to mailing lists.
and as long-time mailing list participants will know, the concept of ML etiquette may have started out a bit chaotic but, over the years, it's settled down nicely. the fundamental principles have long been in place and, as technology (like general science) marches on, those principles might have to be tweaked or refined every so often, but not much more than that.
and then (in the spirit of bernstein) the cranks arrive. no! they proclaim! you've been completely wrong all this time! i bring you a *new* unified mailing list theory which overthrows the current orthodoxy! a theory in which HTML is a *good* thing, and in which top posting saves time! i bring you the new paradigm of the next century and, why no, i really *don't* know the current rules and why they're there or why so many people have agreed to abide by them but ... no matter! change is good, and years of constancy are to be swept away by my new universal worldview!
cranks, the lot of them. bernstein would be amused.
rday
Robert P. J. Day wrote:
there's an old essay by jeremy bernstein entitled something like "scientific cranks: how to recognize them and what to do with them until the doctor arrives" (can't find it online, dang),
A quick google suggests that excerpts and a reference were posted on Usenet in 1985 (before the Great Renaming, in a mainly UUCP world). Google has an archive copy at http://groups-beta.google.com/group/net.physics/msg/b1c193d57a4d6b0a?dmode=s...
James.
PS: The sigmonster's on form today...
top posting...
interesting that this topic has appeared to generate more responses than any other topic posted... gotta be a way to market this somehow.. you guys up for ordering a subscription to a 'toppost' magazine.. or maybe we can do a toppost blog type of site, and we can get advertising dollars, get a VC to throw some bling (cash you you people in virginia) and we're set..!!!
this whole thing reminds me of how people reacted when others bought game to the game of basketball... these guys who kept saying that the proper way to play basketball was with a two-handed bounce pass.. these guys couldn't hang with the guys who came with the no-look pass... as they say, game recognizes game..
look, bottom line, no matter how much you squeal, people post what they post. if you don't like it (or if you do) you can either read it, trash it, comment on it, move on. but as someone already said, this ain't life/death stuff here!!
peace...
-----Original Message----- From: fedora-list-bounces@redhat.com [mailto:fedora-list-bounces@redhat.com]On Behalf Of Robert P. J. Day Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 3:26 AM To: Fedora List Subject: bad posting habits, jeremy bernstein and scientific cranks
there's an old essay by jeremy bernstein entitled something like "scientific cranks: how to recognize them and what to do with them until the doctor arrives" (can't find it online, dang), in which bernstein writes about getting regular submissions from obvious crank scientists, claiming to have solved some of science's biggest mysteries -- guys showing up with a unified field theory scrawled with crayon on a shopping bag, that sort of thing.
bernstein goes on to list a number of clues that someone is a crank, the first being that the crank doesn't understand even the most fundamental basics of the field they're trying to overturn. someone who clearly doesn't have a clue about simple physics will nonetheless claim to have disproved the theory of relativity, you get the idea.
and another obvious giveaway is that the problem allegedly solved is never a small one, it's never minor, it's never just an incremental addition to scientific knowledge as it stands. rather, it's invariably an all-encompassing, universal, ground-breaking discovery that will shake the very pillars of science as we know it, etc., etc. as i recall, bernstein claims that that's pretty much a dead giveaway of crankhood since, these days, while you might get the *occasional* wondrous discovery, most of science is just slowly and methodically pushing the boundaries of what we know outward, just a bit at a time. fill in a missing piece here, tweak or refine a little bit over there, that sort of thing.
which brings us to mailing lists.
and as long-time mailing list participants will know, the concept of ML etiquette may have started out a bit chaotic but, over the years, it's settled down nicely. the fundamental principles have long been in place and, as technology (like general science) marches on, those principles might have to be tweaked or refined every so often, but not much more than that.
and then (in the spirit of bernstein) the cranks arrive. no! they proclaim! you've been completely wrong all this time! i bring you a *new* unified mailing list theory which overthrows the current orthodoxy! a theory in which HTML is a *good* thing, and in which top posting saves time! i bring you the new paradigm of the next century and, why no, i really *don't* know the current rules and why they're there or why so many people have agreed to abide by them but ... no matter! change is good, and years of constancy are to be swept away by my new universal worldview!
cranks, the lot of them. bernstein would be amused.
rday
-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
bruce wrote:
top posting...
interesting that this topic has appeared to generate more responses than any other topic posted... gotta be a way to market this somehow.. you guys up for ordering a subscription to a 'toppost' magazine.. or maybe we can do a toppost blog type of site, and we can get advertising dollars, get a VC to throw some bling (cash you you people in virginia) and we're set..!!!
this whole thing reminds me of how people reacted when others bought game to the game of basketball... these guys who kept saying that the proper way to play basketball was with a two-handed bounce pass.. these guys couldn't hang with the guys who came with the no-look pass... as they say, game recognizes game..
look, bottom line, no matter how much you squeal, people post what they post. if you don't like it (or if you do) you can either read it, trash it, comment on it, move on. but as someone already said, this ain't life/death stuff here!!
You're right, it's not life or death and people will post however they think appropriate. But the people that persist in top/html-posting after being asked not to do so won't be getting help from the people that object to it, and that does appear to include most of the most knowledgeable people on the list. So by not following the list conventions, you're shooting yourself in the foot. But that's your choice.
Paul.
paul...
morning... where's the oj... but hey, you're right, and i fully agree with you. if you're asking someone for help, then you should play by their rules. but you know, this karma thing seems to come around and it appears to have a serious bite!!!
over my career/life, more than a few times, i've seen people who were hell bent on having others march/act/behave to their way of doing things, get completely blown away when they were put in situations were the table was turned. but that's life!!!
but on a serious note. i couldn't find away to keep this directly to you/off them list.
on a more serious note, thanks for the help yesterday!! now if i could figure out how to get my mysql upgraded to the correct version i want to run!!!
peace..
-----Original Message----- From: fedora-list-bounces@redhat.com [mailto:fedora-list-bounces@redhat.com]On Behalf Of Paul Howarth Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 5:50 AM To: For users of Fedora Core releases Subject: Re: bad posting habits, jeremy bernstein and scientific cranks
bruce wrote:
top posting...
interesting that this topic has appeared to generate more responses than
any
other topic posted... gotta be a way to market this somehow.. you guys up for ordering a subscription to a 'toppost' magazine.. or maybe we can do a toppost blog type of site, and we can get advertising dollars, get a VC to throw some bling (cash you you people in virginia) and we're set..!!!
this whole thing reminds me of how people reacted when others bought game
to
the game of basketball... these guys who kept saying that the proper way
to
play basketball was with a two-handed bounce pass.. these guys couldn't
hang
with the guys who came with the no-look pass... as they say, game
recognizes
game..
look, bottom line, no matter how much you squeal, people post what they post. if you don't like it (or if you do) you can either read it, trash
it,
comment on it, move on. but as someone already said, this ain't life/death stuff here!!
You're right, it's not life or death and people will post however they think appropriate. But the people that persist in top/html-posting after being asked not to do so won't be getting help from the people that object to it, and that does appear to include most of the most knowledgeable people on the list. So by not following the list conventions, you're shooting yourself in the foot. But that's your choice.
Paul.
-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
bruce wrote:
morning... where's the oj... but hey, you're right, and i fully agree with you. if you're asking someone for help, then you should play by their rules. but you know, this karma thing seems to come around and it appears to have a serious bite!!!
over my career/life, more than a few times, i've seen people who were hell bent on having others march/act/behave to their way of doing things, get completely blown away when they were put in situations were the table was turned. but that's life!!!
When the tables are turned, they need to adapt to the new set of circumstances, to fit in with the prevailing culture. Seems reasonable to me.
but on a serious note. i couldn't find away to keep this directly to you/off them list.
Well, my email address appears in my postings, so I'd have thought sending en email to my email address would do the job ;-)
on a more serious note, thanks for the help yesterday!! now if i could figure out how to get my mysql upgraded to the correct version i want to run!!!
There have been quite a number of posts on how to upgrade FC3 to MySQL v4 over the last couple of months. I'd root one out and point you in the right direction if you weren't such a persistent top-poster...
Paul.
[mailto:fedora-list-bounces@redhat.com]On Behalf Of Paul Howarth
paul... this is all i see/get regarding your email address... nothing else shows in my 'outlook' client.
so, shoot me your email!! which is another way to reduce traffic!
peace
bruce wrote:
[mailto:fedora-list-bounces@redhat.com]On Behalf Of Paul Howarth
paul... this is all i see/get regarding your email address... nothing else shows in my 'outlook' client.
Curious. The Outlook client at $WORKPLACE continues after my name with my email address in square brackets.
What should certainly work for you is to open the message and then select "Options..." from the "View" menu of the message window. Near the bottom of the resulting dialog box is an area labelled "Internet headers:". Scroll down that area until you see the "From:" header, which will show the sender's email address.
Regarding MySQL, you should start a new thread (post a new message to fedora-list@redhat.com rather than reply to an existing one) with a suitable Subject: header if you can't find the solution using google or the list archives.
Paul.
On Wednesday 30 March 2005 09:17, bruce wrote:
A real email user agent might be in order.
From the header of your message, Bruce:
X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1478 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 9.0, Build 9.0.2910.0
That isn't considered by many of us to be a major indicator of a good email user agent. Admittedly, it may be the only thing you feel works, or your linux install isn't yet configured, but please try to make allowances for its shortcomings.
On Wednesday, Mar 30, 2005, at 08:17 US/Central, bruce wrote:
[mailto:fedora-list-bounces@redhat.com]On Behalf Of Paul Howarth
paul... this is all i see/get regarding your email address... nothing else shows in my 'outlook' client.
How attached are you to using 'Outlook'? I ask because Thunderbird is an e-mail client that works on Windows (as old as Win98) as well as Fedora Linux (as well as OS/X, too.):
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
Using TBird on Windows will give you a leg-up for when you use TBird on Linux since the interface will be identical (within 0.01% difference). And it works really well. I use it at work to connect to our Exchange server.
Regards, - Robert http://www.cwelug.org/downloads Help others get OpenSource software. Distribute FLOSS for Windows, Linux, *BSD, and MacOS X with BitTorrent
----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Citek" rwcitek@alum.calberkeley.org To: bedouglas@earthlink.net Cc: "Fedora Users" fedora-list@redhat.com Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 9:14 AM Subject: e-mail client (was: bad posting habits ...)
On Wednesday, Mar 30, 2005, at 08:17 US/Central, bruce wrote:
[mailto:fedora-list-bounces@redhat.com]On Behalf Of Paul Howarth
paul... this is all i see/get regarding your email address... nothing else shows in my 'outlook' client.
How attached are you to using 'Outlook'? I ask because Thunderbird is an e-mail client that works on Windows (as old as Win98) as well as Fedora Linux (as well as OS/X, too.):
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
Using TBird on Windows will give you a leg-up for when you use TBird on Linux since the interface will be identical (within 0.01% difference). And it works really well. I use it at work to connect to our Exchange server.
Regards,
- Robert
As to the Outlook/Outlook Express vs. Thunderbird/Evo/whatever argument, there are many legitimate reasons for people to use Outlook/Outlook Express. Maybe they have a corporate standard, maybe there are technical reasons (T-Bird doesn't handle IMAP right for me), or they might just just like Outlook/Outlook Express better.
To say that using Outlook/Outlook Express is some sort of faux pas is just silly. Making someone feel like they are bad for using a product from big, bad Microsoft is nuts.
Thomas
On Wednesday, Mar 30, 2005, at 10:20 US/Central, Thomas Cameron wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Citek" rwcitek@alum.calberkeley.org
How attached are you to using 'Outlook'? I ask because Thunderbird is an e-mail client that works on Windows (as old as Win98) as well as Fedora Linux (as well as OS/X, too.):
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
Using TBird on Windows will give you a leg-up for when you use TBird on Linux since the interface will be identical (within 0.01% difference). And it works really well. I use it at work to connect to our Exchange server.
As to the Outlook/Outlook Express vs. Thunderbird/Evo/whatever argument, there are many legitimate reasons for people to use Outlook/Outlook Express. Maybe they have a corporate standard, maybe there are technical reasons (T-Bird doesn't handle IMAP right for me), or they might just just like Outlook/Outlook Express better.
Agreed. But but that doesn't invalidate the two points I was making: 1) Thunderbird works on more than one platform: Windows, Linux, and OS/X 2) Thunderbird eases the transition from one platform to another, specifically from Windows to Linux.
If you are using Fedora Core 3, installing Thunderbird is as easy as:
apt-get install MozillaThunderbird
or the yum equivalent.
Regards, - Robert http://www.cwelug.org/downloads Help others get OpenSource software. Distribute FLOSS for Windows, Linux, *BSD, and MacOS X with BitTorrent
On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 06:17:12AM -0800, bruce wrote:
[mailto:fedora-list-bounces@redhat.com]On Behalf Of Paul Howarth
paul... this is all i see/get regarding your email address... nothing else shows in my 'outlook' client.
It will Just Work when you actually reply.
This is because Outhouse shows the envelope-sender address. Replies will still go to the rfc(2)822 From: header, though.
Switching to a less broken mailer would work too.
w
On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 16:05 -0800, Will Yardley wrote:
On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 06:17:12AM -0800, bruce wrote:
[mailto:fedora-list-bounces@redhat.com]On Behalf Of Paul Howarth
paul... this is all i see/get regarding your email address... nothing else shows in my 'outlook' client.
It will Just Work when you actually reply.
This is because Outhouse shows the envelope-sender address. Replies will still go to the rfc(2)822 From: header, though.
Only in the absence of a Reply-To: header, which the list sets so that replies go to the list.
Paul.
On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 07:14:18AM +0100, Paul Howarth wrote:
On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 16:05 -0800, Will Yardley wrote:
paul... this is all i see/get regarding your email address... nothing else shows in my 'outlook' client.
It will Just Work when you actually reply.
This is because Outhouse shows the envelope-sender address. Replies will still go to the rfc(2)822 From: header, though.
Only in the absence of a Reply-To: header, which the list sets so that replies go to the list.
Ugh. I guess now is not the time to start a flamewar on another kind of brokenness.
w
From: Paul Howarth paul@city-fan.org Subject: Re: bad posting habits, jeremy bernstein and scientific cranks Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 14:50:24 +0100
You're right, it's not life or death and people will post however they think appropriate. But the people that persist in top/html-posting after being asked not to do so won't be getting help from the people that object to it, and that does appear to include most of the most knowledgeable people on the list. So by not following the list conventions, you're shooting yourself in the foot. But that's your choice.
Oh!, now, finally, I come to understand as follows. Thanks.
There must be top-posters(T), bottom-posters(B), html-posters(H), plain-text-posters(P), and so on. This is fact and it's a freedom. But after some mail-following-work(quoting, what to say?) among each other, mail text will be as follows in any quoting orders,
T-B-H-P-P-P-T-B..... or
B-T-T-B-T-H ...
.... (any combination)
For sure, those are obviously not human (easily) readable texts. And it might charge heavy trimming work for last posters. That's why minimal rule required. I did not notice. Hmmmm.
// M. Iizuka of Visual Spatial
On Wednesday, Mar 30, 2005, at 05:25 US/Central, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
there's an old essay by jeremy bernstein entitled something like "scientific cranks: how to recognize them and what to do with them until the doctor arrives" (can't find it online, dang), in which bernstein writes about getting regular submissions from obvious crank scientists, claiming to have solved some of science's biggest mysteries -- guys showing up with a unified field theory scrawled with crayon on a shopping bag, that sort of thing.
In a similar vein, Clay Shirky gave an interesting talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference a couple of years ago titled "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" which he has posted on his website:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
<quote> The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.
If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's Open Source, right? Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...", the froth would start coming out. The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy. </quote>
s/Microsoft/top posting/g s/Bill Gates/HTML e-mail/g
I would simply add that an external enemy not only galvanizes a group, but also causes the group to lose focus.
Regards, - Robert http://www.cwelug.org/downloads Help others get OpenSource software. Distribute FLOSS for Windows, Linux, *BSD, and MacOS X with BitTorrent
Robert P. J. Day wrote:
and then (in the spirit of bernstein) the cranks arrive. no! they proclaim! you've been completely wrong all this time! i bring you a *new* unified mailing list theory which overthrows the current orthodoxy! a theory in which HTML is a *good* thing, and in which top posting saves time! i bring you the new paradigm of the next century and, why no, i really *don't* know the current rules and why they're there or why so many people have agreed to abide by them but ... no matter! change is good, and years of constancy are to be swept away by my new universal worldview!
cranks, the lot of them. bernstein would be amused.
rday
Unfortunately, I don't think your analogy is very apt. You're right that scientific progress has pretty much always been incremental. Times in history that are considered "scientific revolutions" have actually been merely more rapid evolutions. In the field of physics, for example, the beginning of the twentieth century brought us relativity and quantum mechanics. Both theories required scientists to accept counter-intuitive ideas, but only because pushing the old ideas into realms in which they were no longer applicable led to contradictions that were even less intuitive, or to blatant disagreement with experience. Even so, the old ideas were not discarded but extended. For example, when formulating the general theory of relativity one of Einstein's two fundamental requirements was that the theory go over into Newton's theory of gravity in the "weak field limit" (the other, that the laws of nature be "generally covariant", means absolutely nothing to one who has not s tudied physics). Bohr's "correspondence principle" says pretty much the same thing about quantum theory. The cranks of which you speak often have no understanding of the old theories or the limits they had reached, and just assume ideas that seem weird are automatically works of genius.
In the field of technology and the response to it by the society in which we live, on the other hand, revolution is the norm. A quarter century ago, who'd have thought that only the disadvantaged would not own a "personal computer"? Why would you even think you would have needed one then? Fifteen years ago "The Internet" was pretty much email, telnet and FTP. "Gopher" clients were cutting edge as I recall. Who would have thought Mosaic would take off the way it did? Although I get as urinated as the rest when I get an HTML email with flashing graphics for cheap software (yes, spam filtering takes care of it for the most part, thank you), I submit that in twenty years email as we know it today may be a distant memory.
Science is a huge edifice of logically connected facts, experiences and theories, and does not change lightly. Things like the proper form for business letters are conventions (incidentally I embrace the quaint conventions of proper English punctuation and capitalization, a preference "rday" apparently does not share). Some conventions, like which side of the road you drive on, are literally life-and-death issues. Others, like whether the Fedora list should be top-posted or bottom-posted to, I dare say, would make no observable change to the world as most people know it. A statement like "energy is conserved" is a hugely universal principle, because it can apply to mechanical energy, it can be expanded to include thermodynamic energy, and finally matter itself. If a crank reported he had discovered a violation of energy conservation I would consider it more likely that he had merely discovered a new form of energy (though of course much more likely that he is just wron g). A preference for top-posting or bottom-posting is not a logically connected construct. You may list reasons for preferring one, others may state reasons for another--and you may label one who disagrees with your reasons a "crank". I may groan as I scroll through a quoted message, then a quoted response to it, etc. until finally I get to a single sentence by the poster, and declare "bottom posting is awful!" But isn't the real problem that someone was too lazy to take 30 seconds to edit his post so that what he is actually responding to is clear (which in some cases actually requires quoting all of the previous posts)? In other words, bottom posting is *not* a unified general principle, though maybe "be courteous" is.
So on this list I "do as the Romans". But I don't believe the debate over top versus bottom posting is worth one hundredth of the bandwidth that one way or the other allegedly saves.
All opinions expressed here are my own, of course.
-- David Liguori