Re: The Philosophy of War

<hal@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:airg82tji28cc7s5rvmic8o1mringaavpb@xxxxxxxxxx
On 8 Jun 2006 09:30:49 -0700, "Shuurai" <Shuurai11@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


David L. Burkhead wrote:
If you're not claiming it's scientific, then there's no need to point
out
your error in doing so (on the grounds that 1) an "Internet
Encyclopedia of
Philosophy" is hardly a peer reviewed journal and 2) Philosophy is not
science).

In the end, the article is a whole lot of words to say that some people
think war is never justified, while others think can be, at least
sometimes,
justified but that different people differ on what those justifications
might be where the conclusion is: "the nature of the philosophy of war
is
complex." Well, duh.

Yeah - reminded me of one of those undergrad papers wherre you have to
write a set number of words and you have to keep adding them to get
there... It was an interesting article though.

A normal person, on posting such an article, might have included some
personal commentary or opinion, in attempt to form a discussion.
Unfortunately, his was just to bait Kirk.

*** you losers are shallow

BTW, we're still waiting for an answer to the stats questions. Once you
answer those two questions, I'll answer the three you gave me. Three
answers for the price of two. A bargain.

I suspect we'll still be waiting when the universe acheives level
entropy.

Let me repeat, in case you can't find it:

would be happy, surprised but happy, if Hal could even solve an easy but
not trivial problem in statistics. Hal has accused me of only being able to
plug numbers into equations by rote but I submit that Hal doesn't even have
that much knowledge of the subject. Take, for example, the following:

In a set of flips of a fair coin (defined as heads and tails each having
equal chances of coming up with an exactly 0 chance of any other
outcome--such as "on edge") we use the following notation for results:
(x,y) where x is the number of heads and y is the number of tails out of a
total number x+y of flips. For example (2,2) would be 4 flips with 2 coming
up tails and 2 coming up heads (11, 9) would be 20 flips with 11 heads and 9
tails. The order of heads/tails is not considered, only the total number of
heads and tails. Thus HHTT is considered the same result as HTHT or HTTH or
whatever.


Problem 1: Which is more likely given the appropriate number of flips
(10,10) or (50,50). (Alternate representation: are you more likely to get
exactly half heads out of 20 throws or out of 100.)


Problem 2: Rank, in order of increasing probability, the following:
(1,1), (2,2), (5,5), (4,6), (3,7), (10,10), (9,11), (8,12), (50,50),
(49,51), (48,52)


Both problems can be exactly solved (numbers are small enough that
approximations such as Stirling's Formula are not required) and reveal
issues that what seems "obvious" to people who can't do the math is often
wrong.


Note that the information needed both to formulate and answer these
questions was given the first _day_ in undergraduate Statistical Mechanics.
Problem one should be able to be answered correctly exactly as fast as it
can be read. Problem 2 requires a bit of work but no more than 10 minutes
in Excel, most of that simply typing in the numbers.



--
David L. Burkhead "Dum Vivimus Vivamus"
mailto:dburkhead@xxxxxxxxxxx "While we live, let us live."
My webcomic Cold Servings
http://www.coldservings.com
Updates Wednesdays



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