>> ^BoneRemake:

>> ^toferyu:
Kid should have his own show !

ya don't go calling someone who enlisted in an armed force a fucking kid.


Calm down, Francis.

Below is the parable of the ox: (http://www.johnkay.com/2012/07/25/the-parable-of-the-ox)

Though it is about our economies in general, it also says something between the lines about markets without guidance. Namely that in ANY market, given enough time, you will get people who "abuse" the lack of rules and change the game in their favor. (Libor, credit default swaps, monopolies, etc etc) As free market policies work only when there is plenty of competition, as soon as some one cheats or in another form effectively removes competition the entire thing will collapse. Free market policies can be optimal during a time, however, that time is limited as before (just started market, monopoly or wild west) and after (mature market, few or 1 large competitors ruling the market, monopoly) you need guidance to make sure all the stakeholders are protected, not just those with power.

(BTW though there are rules setup to make sure the system works, you can see those are reactionary because otherwise the system doesnt work at all. They make sure there are good options for everyone, not just maximum options for those with power, aka in this case the cheaters)

25 July 2012, Financial Times

In 1906, the great statistician Francis Galton observed a competition to guess the weight of an ox at a country fair. Eight hundred people entered. Galton, being the kind of man he was, ran statistical tests on the numbers. He discovered that the average guess (1,197lb) was extremely close to the actual weight (1,198lb) of the ox. This story was told by James Surowiecki, in his entertaining book The Wisdom of Crowds.

Not many people know the events that followed. A few years later, the scales seemed to become less and less reliable. Repairs were expensive; but the fair organiser had a brilliant idea. Since attendees were so good at guessing the weight of an ox, it was unnecessary to repair the scales. The organiser would simply ask everyone to guess the weight, and take the average of their estimates.

A new problem emerged, however. Once weight-guessing competitions became the rage, some participants tried to cheat. They even sought privileged information from the farmer who had bred the ox. It was feared that if some people had an edge, others would be reluctant to enter the weight-guessing competition. With only a few entrants, you could not rely on the wisdom of the crowd. The process of weight discovery would be damaged.

Strict regulatory rules were introduced. The farmer was asked to prepare three monthly bulletins on the development of his ox. These bulletins were posted on the door of the market for everyone to read. If the farmer gave his friends any other information about the beast, that was also to be posted on the market door. Anyone who entered the competition with knowledge concerning the ox that was not available to the world at large would be expelled from the market. In this way, the integrity of the weight-guessing process would be maintained.

Professional analysts scrutinised the contents of these regulatory announcements and advised their clients on their implications. They wined and dined farmers; once the farmers were required to be careful about the information they disclosed, however, these lunches became less fruitful.

Some brighter analysts realised that understanding the nutrition and health of the ox was not that useful anyway. What mattered were the guesses of the bystanders. Since the beast was no longer being weighed, the key to success lay not in correctly assessing its weight, but rather in correctly assessing what other people would guess. Or what others would guess others would guess. And so on.

Some, such as old Farmer Buffett, claimed that the results of this process were more and more divorced from the realities of ox-rearing. He was ignored, however. True, Farmer Buffett’s beasts did appear healthy and well fed, and his finances were ever more prosperous: but, it was agreed, he was a simple countryman who did not really understand how markets work.

International bodies were established to define the rules for assessing the weight of the ox. There were two competing standards – generally accepted ox-weighing principles and international ox-weighing standards. However, both agreed on one fundamental principle, which followed from the need to eliminate the role of subjective assessment by any individual. The weight of the ox was officially defined as the average of everyone’s guesses.

One difficulty was that sometimes there were few, or even no, guesses of the oxen’s weight. But that problem was soon overcome. Mathematicians from the University of Chicago developed models from which it was possible to estimate what, if there had actually been many guesses as to the weight of the animal, the average of these guesses would have been. No knowledge of animal husbandry was required, only a powerful computer.

By this time, there was a large industry of professional weight guessers, organisers of weight- guessing competitions and advisers helping people to refine their guesses. Some people suggested that it might be cheaper to repair the scales, but they were derided: why go back to relying on the judgment of a single auctioneer when you could benefit from the aggregated wisdom of so many clever people?

And then the ox died. Among all this activity, no one had remembered to feed it.

and i'm pretty sure Obama is bright enough to understand that the drug war is a bust, and that many many brilliant minds including Sir Francis Crick (modeled DNA while on LSD) and Steve Jobs (acid head) have essentially used (to the great benefit of humanity) what amounts to "smart drugs"

but Obama is in the business of maintaining a vast Empire. This supersedes his tendencies towards logical policy.

Division is how the ruling elite maintains their order.
and Obama is the public representation of the ruling elite.

The solution remains in an informed populace.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'rage, quit, francis' to 'rage, quit, francis, magic, mtg, mana screwed' - edited by xxovercastxx

>> ^Auger8:

It's not that the other guy won't play it's that Francis has no cards and can only seem to draw lands, and the other guy has like 20 cards with upkeeps, timers, and abilities so it takes him forever to finish a turn, that and he's surely doomed to die. (Ya, old Magic geek here so sue me. )
>> ^shang:
yea their channel is full of hilarious skits, my favorite is him playing magic card game and knocks the table over cause the guy wont play.



Ah, only CCG's I've played are Star Trek CCG and Rift CCG

It's not that the other guy won't play it's that Francis has no cards and can only seem to draw lands, and the other guy has like 20 cards with upkeeps, timers, and abilities so it takes him forever to finish a turn, that and he's surely doomed to die. (Ya, old Magic geek here so sue me. )
>> ^shang:

yea their channel is full of hilarious skits, my favorite is him playing magic card game and knocks the table over cause the guy wont play.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'rage, quit' to 'rage, quit, francis' - edited by Deano

This guy's Francis character is hilarious. He is the epitome of the raging nerd. He recently did one video parodying the brouhaha nerds were whinging about with the Mass Effect 3 DLC. Oh, he also did that "Friday" parody: "Tuesday (Is Raid Night)"

>> ^VoodooV:

his voice sounds very familiar, yet I don't know of this lightsaber video you speak of. Link?


That's a silly voice he puts on for one of his characters, named Francis. This is what the poster sounds like.

And here's the Francis videos people mentioned:

Diablo 3 Auction House

Light Sabers

Wowee. Right up my alley.

I looked up this design on the wikitube. It's a design called the bitter magnet, named for its inventor (1933), Francis Bitter:

The strongest continuous magnetic fields on Earth have been produced by Bitter magnets. As of 2011 the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida, USA, houses the world's strongest resistive magnet. This system has a maximum field strength of 36.2 teslas and consists of hundreds of separate Bitter plates. The system consumes 19.6 megawatts of electric power and requires about 139 litres of water pumped through it per second for cooling.[2]. This magnet is mainly used for material science experimentation. For similarly designed examples of bitter coils see the external links below. The strongest continuous manmade magnetic field, 45 T, was produced by a device consisting of a Bitter magnet inside a superconducting magnet.[1]

I must concede that there certainly is controversy on the definition of what "atheism" means.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism#Definitions_and_distinctions

On, among other details, the negative/positive we're arguing for here. I suppose "Atheism" is too broad a word nowadays to be able to narrow down - this is a problem, because it causes confusion in both adversaries and proponents.
>> ^shinyblurry:

I'm sorry but the dictionary disagrees with you:
a·the·ist   /ˈeɪθiɪst/ Show Spelled[ey-thee-ist] Show IPA
noun
a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.

>> ^gwiz665:
False.
Atheism is a negative position, not a positive one. It makes no claims as to what is, it only says what is not. It is "no belief in X" not, "belief in no X".
>> ^shinyblurry:
atheism denies the existence of a deity. to say you lack belief is an autobiographical statement of your psychology and has nothing to do with the question of whether God exists. If you want to say you don't know, you are an agnostic.
>> ^HaricotVert:
Quote-mining a mischaracterization of atheism. How trite. Atheism is a lack of belief in a deity, not "I believe that no god exists." There is a subtle but important difference.
The concept or existence of a god is precisely not excluded from the realm of possibility. The arrogance of assuming that for some reason every atheist is a "gnostic atheist" who just "doesn't understand" or is "closeminded" to the idea of god is ridiculous. Provide us with scientific evidence, or the messiah appearing at the superbowl (per Maher's rant) and I would be more than happy to reevaluate my current logical position in light of new evidence. To do otherwise would be a violation of the very science and reason I already live by.
Here is a handy chart to clarify the distinction between gnosticism and theism.
>> ^shinyblurry:
of all choices, atheism requires the greatest faith, as it demands that ones limited store of human knowledge is sufficient to exclude the possibility of God.
francis collins human genome project

I'm sorry but the dictionary disagrees with you:

a·the·ist   /ˈeɪθiɪst/ Show Spelled[ey-thee-ist] Show IPA
noun

a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.


>> ^gwiz665:
False.
Atheism is a negative position, not a positive one. It makes no claims as to what is, it only says what is not. It is "no belief in X" not, "belief in no X".
>> ^shinyblurry:
atheism denies the existence of a deity. to say you lack belief is an autobiographical statement of your psychology and has nothing to do with the question of whether God exists. If you want to say you don't know, you are an agnostic.
>> ^HaricotVert:
Quote-mining a mischaracterization of atheism. How trite. Atheism is a lack of belief in a deity, not "I believe that no god exists." There is a subtle but important difference.
The concept or existence of a god is precisely not excluded from the realm of possibility. The arrogance of assuming that for some reason every atheist is a "gnostic atheist" who just "doesn't understand" or is "closeminded" to the idea of god is ridiculous. Provide us with scientific evidence, or the messiah appearing at the superbowl (per Maher's rant) and I would be more than happy to reevaluate my current logical position in light of new evidence. To do otherwise would be a violation of the very science and reason I already live by.
Here is a handy chart to clarify the distinction between gnosticism and theism.
>> ^shinyblurry:
of all choices, atheism requires the greatest faith, as it demands that ones limited store of human knowledge is sufficient to exclude the possibility of God.
francis collins human genome project

>> ^gwiz665:

False.
Atheism is a negative position, not a positive one. It makes no claims as to what is, it only says what is not. It is "no belief in X" not, "belief in no X".
>> ^shinyblurry:
atheism denies the existence of a deity. to say you lack belief is an autobiographical statement of your psychology and has nothing to do with the question of whether God exists. If you want to say you don't know, you are an agnostic.

>> ^HaricotVert:
Quote-mining a mischaracterization of atheism. How trite. Atheism is a lack of belief in a deity, not "I believe that no god exists." There is a subtle but important difference.
The concept or existence of a god is precisely not excluded from the realm of possibility. The arrogance of assuming that for some reason every atheist is a "gnostic atheist" who just "doesn't understand" or is "closeminded" to the idea of god is ridiculous. Provide us with scientific evidence, or the messiah appearing at the superbowl (per Maher's rant) and I would be more than happy to reevaluate my current logical position in light of new evidence. To do otherwise would be a violation of the very science and reason I already live by.
Here is a handy chart to clarify the distinction between gnosticism and theism.
>> ^shinyblurry:
of all choices, atheism requires the greatest faith, as it demands that ones limited store of human knowledge is sufficient to exclude the possibility of God.
francis collins human genome project





What a minute.

Atheism IS the belief that there is no God/Deity. Isn't it?

It's agnostics that simply take no position and say they don't believe one way or the other...

False.
Atheism is a negative position, not a positive one. It makes no claims as to what is, it only says what is not. It is "no belief in X" not, "belief in no X".
>> ^shinyblurry:

atheism denies the existence of a deity. to say you lack belief is an autobiographical statement of your psychology and has nothing to do with the question of whether God exists. If you want to say you don't know, you are an agnostic.

>> ^HaricotVert:
Quote-mining a mischaracterization of atheism. How trite. Atheism is a lack of belief in a deity, not "I believe that no god exists." There is a subtle but important difference.
The concept or existence of a god is precisely not excluded from the realm of possibility. The arrogance of assuming that for some reason every atheist is a "gnostic atheist" who just "doesn't understand" or is "closeminded" to the idea of god is ridiculous. Provide us with scientific evidence, or the messiah appearing at the superbowl (per Maher's rant) and I would be more than happy to reevaluate my current logical position in light of new evidence. To do otherwise would be a violation of the very science and reason I already live by.
Here is a handy chart to clarify the distinction between gnosticism and theism.
>> ^shinyblurry:
of all choices, atheism requires the greatest faith, as it demands that ones limited store of human knowledge is sufficient to exclude the possibility of God.
francis collins human genome project

atheism denies the existence of a deity. to say you lack belief is an autobiographical statement of your psychology and has nothing to do with the question of whether God exists. If you want to say you don't know, you are an agnostic.


>> ^HaricotVert:
Quote-mining a mischaracterization of atheism. How trite. Atheism is a lack of belief in a deity, not "I believe that no god exists." There is a subtle but important difference.
The concept or existence of a god is precisely not excluded from the realm of possibility. The arrogance of assuming that for some reason every atheist is a "gnostic atheist" who just "doesn't understand" or is "closeminded" to the idea of god is ridiculous. Provide us with scientific evidence, or the messiah appearing at the superbowl (per Maher's rant) and I would be more than happy to reevaluate my current logical position in light of new evidence. To do otherwise would be a violation of the very science and reason I already live by.
Here is a handy chart to clarify the distinction between gnosticism and theism.
>> ^shinyblurry:
of all choices, atheism requires the greatest faith, as it demands that ones limited store of human knowledge is sufficient to exclude the possibility of God.
francis collins human genome project