Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => Politics => Topic started by: roo_ster on March 13, 2012, 08:47:49 PM
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James Q. Wilson, RIP
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/03/james-q-wilson-rip.html
Political scientist James Q. Wilson has died at age 80.
He was the rare social scientist who gave the impression that the social sciences are a blast. And why shouldn't they be? Lots of guys study statistics to be better sports fans. Dr. Wilson studied statistics to fight crime. He was like Batman with a reverse Polish notation HP calculator on his utility belt.
He's getting praised for coming up with the "broken windows" metaphor of crime-fighting in a 1982 magazine article, but probably his even more important idea was "incapacitation" in his 1975 book Thinking About Crime. This was the simple observation that criminals can't prey upon civilians if they are in prison. Therefore, lock more criminals up for longer sentences. That this was considered a revolutionary insight in 1975 says a lot about the academic atmosphere that helped get us into an era of high crime.
Of course, locking up more violent and property criminals and thus reducing crime is crazy talk to the lefties.
James Q Wilson
Richard J. Herrnstein
Charles Murray
Three men who look at the data and then tell us what they mean, rather than what their political filters allow them to mean.
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Sadly, I have an HP calculator with RPN that I used in college. =D
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I actually prefer RPN.
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I actually prefer RPN.
Let me guess...you prefer LISP as well :)
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RPN is faster, and more logical,
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I'm an RPN fan myself. Ideal if you still use a manual check register also. I use it at work too. I agree that it is more logical and it definitely is faster once you get the hang of it.
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I actually prefer RPN.
Ditto. I had one calculator, back in the day, that ran RPN.
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Never had an RPN calculator. I like the concept though, unambiguous order of operations.
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I very much like RPN, every computer I use has one installed as does my cell phone.
Sadly, little harder to find an actual RPN calculator.
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I very much like RPN, every computer I use has one installed as does my cell phone.
Sadly, little harder to find an actual RPN calculator.
It's not that difficult. HP still makes a handful of RPN calculators.
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It's not that difficult. HP still makes a handful of RPN calculators.
Interesting
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I am so used to my HP-15 I can get stumped, briefly, by an algebraic gadget if the equation is at all complex. Just the fun of watching the uninitiated hunt for an equals button makes mine worth having. :)
I enjoy
http://www.freeware-guide.com/OldGoodFreeware/Excalibur.html
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Not one reply about this Wilson character. Just a bunch of RPN worship. This board is hilarious. :laugh:
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I maintain that if you are using an RPN calculator and prefer it, you are not using a calculator to its full potential. In other words, you are using a calculator as an adding machine/slide rule replacement/abacus. If that's the way you use the calculator, then RPN makes sense. Its stack-based input is a better, less ambiguous method for ENTERING moderately complicated arithmetic.
The TI-89 (the only noncrippled model) is used at a much higher level. You program in complete equations, print them up, and when you have verified them you load variables, and do things in general. You can save complete equations into variables, trivially. If you feel like assigning units, you can do complete calculations and and have the calculator analyze units all the way through for you. You also have a spreadsheet and TI BASIC. If you think that RPN is really any advantage for a modern calculator, you are just out of touch. You don't HAVE to type in nested expressions repeatedly, or you are doing it wrong i.e. using the calculator as an advanced slide rule for arithmetic.
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Features you have no use for are just bloatware. Who needs it?
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I see the point. If you just want to, you know, calculate equation, and that's what you use calculators for, then I can see that RPN is a better input method. But you are out of touch if you think you can actually compare calculators on the basis of input method at all.
If you enter certain academic programs, you will need advanced calculator functions. When I transitioned from a Physics undergrad (where I never even owned a calculator) to an engineering discipline, I found out that there are pockets of academia where misguided (incidentally Korean) professors assume that every student knows a TI-89 inside and out. I didn't even own one. When I went out and bought one, I had to read the manual to figure out how to get to the home screen.
In Physics, if I needed the value of a transcendent function or something, I could raise my hand and ask the professor, and the professor would apologize for putting something like that on a test and would write it on the blackboard for the other students.
In grad school, it was more like "um, Mr. Professor, how am I supposed to numerically integrate the Gibbs Free Energy equation for all the systems in this giant table so that I can do the second part of the test?" and it was met with silence and an expression of disgust.
But the calculators are pretty neat anyway. In real life, I'm usually close enough to a computer to just fire up perl.