M. Porcius Cato

I generally enjoyed "Julius Caesar" for its depiction of Pompey (played by Chrisopher Noth, Sex and City). The portrayal of Pompey simultaneously manages to convey why he was known as Sulla's adulescentulus carnifex (teenage butcher) and to show his more sympathetic side. Unfortunately, Jeremy Sisto--though a fine actor--was far too young to play Caesar. Sisto's youth was especially problematic, given that Christopher Walken played Cato, who was Caesar's younger rival.

I just took the first 20--same formula works if you go to 40 or more.

You've pretty provided a perfectly-textbook example of the genetic fallacy. Whether some people or even most people share their parents' beliefs is irrelevant to whether a proposition is true or false. Therefore, brining a person's parents' beliefs into an argument is completely illogical.

I forgot to add that the notion that an historical claim is false because it comes from a source you disagree with is an example of the genetic fallacy.

No--not obvious at all. If she practices good methods, that's all that matters--her anti-Nazi sympathies are completely irrelevant.

I don't mind being used as an example, but your position is the very one I'm arguing against: I maintain that motives alone are not sufficient to doubt an account. For example, Anne Frank was presumably strongly anti-Nazi, but I don't doubt her diary of life under them at all--why should I? In fact, if Anne Frank said that the Nazis were rounding up Jews while she was in hiding but she was NEUTRAL towards the Nazis, I'd think she was not only unreliable but insane. When it comes to tyranny, moderation is no virtue.

Very nice bait, but not biting. But just you wait...

Fair enough--but I'm assuming you place Tacitus in the top ten list of all historians *in spite* of his occasional unreliability whereas you place Suetonius nowhere near the top 10 *because* of his fairly consistent unreliability, no?

Grant and Eisenhower were both very good generals, but not such great presidents. How do you explain this?

To restore the republic simply by killing Caesar. The killing Caesar part worked, the rest...not so much.

I mentioned in a thread on the Gracchan grain dole that the distribution of income is typically best described by a power function (sort of like an exponential/logarithmic curve). You probably have some inking of this distribution if you've ever heard a politician or professor complaining bitterly about the fact the top 1% owns 50% of the wealth (or whatever it is in your local area). However, economists have been pointing out for some time that this power law of income distribution really says nothing about corruption or anything like that: it's simply a consequence of there being a distribution of motivation/merit/opportunity/etc that is applied over the long term. To illustrate this prinicple, I thought I'd check whether the power function also describes the distribution of posts made to UNRV. As you can see in the chart below, the fit of the function is almost perfect! I thought this was a pretty cool example of economics applied to everyday life.

You wouldn't happen to be dealing with Ed.D. and Education Ph.D. are you? They're from another planet.

There is no ONE perfect measure, but in COMBINATION the scores do a pretty darned good job of predicting job performance. Even still, all these measures are just accounting for what the candidate brings to the task. There remain random factors the scores can't address: for example, the variations in performance of a highly-qualified person whose wife and children are tragically killed in an automobile accident; or a highly-qualified person whose boss is hitting on her; or a highly-qualified person who gets sucked into UNRV (I swear, it's just like a car accident!!! You can't look away!) ....

BTW, I agree with Phil's post.

"Destiny" is a load of mystical BS; so, yes, you might as well argue that fishing was Gaius' "destiny" and Augustus stupidly stood in the way of Gaius fulfilling his birth-right--catching a really big bass.

There's a much simpler solution--simply require job applicants to take the GRE. Nice idea in theory. I know numerous individuals in my civilian profession and Phds in related fields who I worked with who'd score extremely high on a GRE--and a lot of them are friggin' worthless. I've found that academic intelligence has little to do with drive, common sense, managerial skills, etc. I'd use it as a baseline only but never without a serious interview with the individual, there are a lot of educated idiots out there. Yep, there sure are a lot of educated idiots out there. Even more uneducated idiots though. So, if you're playing the odds--go with education. Also, personal interviews aren't better predictors of job performance than test scores (not that you said that)--in fact, they're often worse than no interviews at all because they're weighted so highly by the interviewer (who mystically *knows* how good a candidate is) that the interviewer ignores/discounts the test scores. Personal interviews are also notoriously racist, sexist, classist, and all the other bad -ists, which is one reason universities dropped the damned things years ago. With proper grooming, it's possible to make complete idiots look even...presidential.

Maybe that's just it--he didn't want to go to war in the first place but for Augustus' expectations, and he was looking for the first way out. Who says what his 'destiny' was? Maybe his 'destiny' was to go fishing.

Want to rethink that? (clue - think of numbers above 6) EDIT/ As for numbers below 6, you missed 4 (for the metre). OK--you got me on 4, and sure you can also grab 25 and 50 too. But my entire point was that once the number of subdivisions goes beyond a certain number, such that one needs to make infinitesemal subdivisions (as in chemistry where you'd want to divide a unit by 25 and 50), the value of the metric system increases. As one needs to make a wide variety of small sub-divisions, the value of a 12-unit system increases. Think about it: why not employ a decimal system for time?

Indeed. However, can't you just hear the cries of discrimination and impending lawsuits against the idea of using standardized tests. Alas for the protection of stupidity guised in the bane that is political correctness. The legal case against using GREs would be enormously weak--at least in the US, employers can employ any standard they'd like in hiring (including personality tests, which are just as effective in predicting managerial skills as college GPA and SAT). BTW, I meant to mention that many firms now place a very high value on graduate school accomplishment (e.g., McKinsey) because they know that graduate school fosters critical thinking skills that are sorely lacking among most college graduates.

OK--now do the bake-off: you can cleanly subdivide the foot by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6; you can subdivide the meter by 1, 2, and 5. So the foot stomps the meter!

There's a much simpler solution--simply require job applicants to take the GRE.

I'd not certainly not make the argument that all classes in college are worth the money; however, I would point out that college is NOT vocational school and it SHOULD NOT be vocational school either. Most people come to college with no idea what they want to do, so it would be a disservice to most students to offer nothing but "practical" classes. Furthermore, the worthless classes are extremely popular for the same reason, and the university is more than happy to take the money of rudderless students who have no idea what they want to do. Hell, we go out of our way to *tempt* students with easy, worthless classes. Second, one of the biggest reasons that college offers such a competitive advantage is that the high school diploma is a nearly meaningless scrap of paper--people routinely graduate from high school with extremely poor reading and mathematics skills. Polls of employers routinely show that they demand college degrees for jobs requiring quite modest reading and mathematics skills (ones that should be well within the mastery of a good high school student). If a certain score on the SAT were required to graduate from high school, or if high schools offered different types of degrees, it would go a long way in reducing the competitive advantage of college (from which most students never even graduate). Last, I think Ursus' advice is terribly anti-intellectual. If you're in school to learn about the world, you should work hard enough to get good grades. If you're in school just so you can get your union-card into the middle class, stop it, and read Socrates: the unexamined life is not worth a man's living.

Hmmmm....a wise guy, huh? As PP implied, a meter is much closer to a yard (3 feet) than a foot. Also, how many centimeters is 2/3 of a meter? The answer isn't even: it's an unwieldy 66.666666666666666666666666--ok, you get the point. Now, how many inches is 2/3 of a foot? The answer is a nice clean 8 inches. Elegant, easy to find on a tape measure, no need to guess by interpolating between hatch marks. Again, the Imperial system stinks when doing chemistry because we deal with quantities that differ by orders of magnitude rather than by quantities that differ by orders of 2 and 3. I think that it's interesting that when you give people a free hand to choose which system they want (as in the States), the metric system rapidly gains favor in the areas where it really is most useful whereas the Imperial system generally persists where it is. So, again, I'd favor no jail-time for outlaw inch-lovers.

David Irving is a PERFECT example for my argument. The guy is currently sitting in jail for his historical writing. If even today we jail historians when their views fall "too far" outside the mainstream, I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine what it's like during an era of one-man rule. (Obviously, holocaust denial is wrong and evil.) I assume you don't mean to imply that Tacitus and Suetonius were equally unreliable do you? That seems fantastically unjust.