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What is a logical fallacy?


All arguments have the same basic structure: A therefore B. 

They begin with one or more premises (A), which is a fact or assumption upon which the argument is based. They then apply a logical principle (therefore) to arrive at a conclusion (B). An example of a logical principle is that of equivalence. For example, if you begin with the premises that A=B and B=C, you can apply the logical principle of equivalence to conclude that A=C. A logical fallacy is a false or incorrect logical principle. An argument that is based upon a logical fallacy is therefore not valid. It is important to note that if the logic of an argument is valid then the conclusion must also be valid, which means that if the premises are all true then the conclusion must also be true. Valid logic applied to one or more false premises, however, leads to an invalid argument. Also, if an argument is not valid the conclusion may, by chance, still be true.

Top 20 Logical Fallacies (in alphabetical order)

- Introduction to Argument
Structure of a Logical Argument Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, our arguments all follow a certain basic structure. They begin with one or more premises, which are facts that the argument takes for granted as the starting point. Then a principle of logic is applied in order to come to a conclusion. This structure is often illustrated symbolically with the following example: 

Premise 1: If A = B, Premise 2: and B = C Logical connection: Then (apply principle of equivalence) Conclusion: A = C 

In order for an argument to be considered valid the logical form of the argument must work – must be valid. A valid argument is one in which, if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true also. However, if one or more premise is false then a valid logical argument may still lead to a false conclusion. A sound argument is one in which the logic is valid and the premises are true, in which case the conclusion must be true. 

Also it is important to note that an argument may use wrong information, or faulty logic to reach a conclusion that happens to be true. An invalid or unsound argument does not necessarily prove the conclusion false. Demonstrating that an argument is not valid or not sound, however, removes it as support for the truth of the conclusion – it means that the conclusion is not necessarily true. 

Breaking down an argument into its components is a very useful exercise, for it enables us to examine both our own arguments and those of others and critically analyze them for validity. This is an excellent way of sharpening one’s thinking, avoiding biases, and making effective arguments. 

Examine your Premises 

As stated above, in order for an argument to be sound all of its premises must be true. Often, different people come to different conclusions because they are starting with different premises. So examining all the premises of each argument is a good place to start. 

There are three types of potential problems with premises. The first, and most obvious, is that a premise can be wrong. 

Another type of premise error occurs when one or more premises is an unwarranted assumption. The premise may or may not be true, but it has not been established sufficiently to serve as a premise for an argument. Identifying all the assumptions upon which an argument is dependent is often the most critical step in analyzing an argument. Frequently, different conclusions are arrived at because of differing assumptions. 

Often people will choose the assumptions that best fit the conclusion they prefer. In fact, psychological experiments show that most people start with conclusions they desire, then reverse engineer arguments to support them – a process called rationalization. 

One way to resolve the problem of using assumptions as premises is to carefully identify and disclose those assumptions up front. Such arguments are often called “hypothetical,” or prefaced with the statement “Let’s assume for the sake of argument.” Also, if two people examine their arguments and realize they are using different assumptions as premises, then at least they can “agree to disagree.” They will realize that their disagreement cannot be resolved until more information is available to clarify which assumptions are more likely to be correct. 

The third type of premise difficulty is the most insidious: the hidden premise. I have seen this listed as a logical fallacy – the unstated major premise, but it is more accurate to consider it here. Obviously, if a disagreement is based upon a hidden premise, then the disagreement will be irresolvable. So when coming to an impasse in resolving differences, it is a good idea to go back and see if there are any implied premises that have not been addressed. 

IBM effort to build a BRAIN


from Kononia House
International Business Machines (aka IBM) has set out to tackle an impossible task – creating a super computer that can act like the human brain. The company has succeeded in producing a multitude of artificial neurons and synapses, and the researchers claim to have conquered more processes than are found in a cat's brain. The 4.5 percent of the human brain they have simulated does do amazing things for a computer, but of course there is no way that it can truly compare to the astoundingly efficient, powerful and ever-changing folds of gray matter inside each of our heads. 
The human cerebral cortex consists of about 20 billion neurons in an über complex network connected by about 200 trillion synapses. IBM has succeeded in simulating a fraction of that processing power in a supercomputer that has 147,456 parallel processors, each with about 1GB of working memory. It's 1.6 billion computer neurons and 8.87 trillion synapses work together to simulate the thalamocortical loops found between the thalamus and cerebral cortex in the human brain. The simulations exceed the scale of processes found in the cortex of the house cat brain, and about 4.5 percent of those in the human brain. IBM hopes to add the 732,544 more processes to make up the power of one entire human brain by 2019. 
The computer has a great deal of processing power, but what exactly can these simulations accomplish? 
Specifically, the computational neuroscientists at IBM are working in reproducing the thalamocortical loops that are proportionally so much larger in humans than in other mammals and might be a key to why humans (generally speaking) have higher reasoning abilities than, say, dogs. 
The thalamus acts like a sensory relay station sending signals about spatial sense and motor signals to the cerebral cortex. It also regulates consciousness, sleep, and alertness. The cerebral cortex is the "gray matter" of our brains. It is vital for our ability to perceive the world - sight, sound, taste, smell, touch - for memory, for consciousness and thought, and for language. Descartes was able to say, "I think, therefore I am," because he had a cerebral cortex. 
The IBM researchers have therefore attempted to reproduce sight, memory, and computational ability through their supercomputer, given the rather cold name "C2."  C2 has no eyes, but it does have a "brain-cam", the data from which gets converted into an MPEG movie that can be replayed. It has artificial neurons that fire across synapses and C2's makers claim it has simulated the brains of a mouse, a rat, and a cat. 
The IBM researchers report that the simulations "incorporate phenomenological spiking neurons, individual learning synapses, axonal delays, and dynamic synaptic channels, exceed the scale of the cat cortex, marking the dawn of a new era in the scale of cortical simulations." 
Biological v. Computer Brains: 
As far as computer science goes, this stuff is fantastic. The processing power and memory required to simulate even a mouse brain goes far beyond what can be accomplished with the common laptop. Consider the computational power in 147,456 CPUs and 144 terabytes (144,000 gigabytes) of memory. That's what these guys are working with. 
Biologists flippantly say that the brain is the result of adaptive evolution over millions of years. It works because the creatures whose brains didn't work died. Yet, brilliant scientists modeling their supercomputer on existing biology have struggled to produce anything close to the full power of a living brain. The researchers are pleased to have surpassed the computational power of a cat. Yet, the computer still has no hope of pouncing on rodents in the grass, of computing the exact distance to leap and sending signals to a system of muscles within a fraction of a second. The computer cannot use the vast acres of data taken in by one sweep of a cat's head or prick of its ears or whiff of the air in the exceptionally efficient and effective way that a cat does to know that a vole is hiding in the grass two feet away. The computer doesn't enjoy eating that vole. It has no emotion. It cannot care, and it cannot add more neurons to itself to simulate caring. In fact, it is questionable whether the IBM researchers, with all their biological brain power can figure out how to simulate "caring" in a computer at all. Ever.

These great minds have worked day and night to attempt to recreate merely the processes of the cat and mouse and rat brains with little true reflection of those brains' abilities, and they have given themselves eight more years to get close to simulating a full human brain. Even then, we suspect it will fall dismally short of the reality. 
It is easy to say that the brains of "higher" organisms evolved over millions of years. However, biologists are hard pressed to demonstrate that any such thing is even possible. Neuroscientists don't fully understand how the brain works, let alone how it came to be.  Unfeeling, unthinking, computers may be able to solve complex mathematical problems or pull up items from their memories faster than we can, but they use far more power to do so, and they miss the nuances.  As Mark Fischetti writes in Scientific American, "The incredibly efficient brain consumes less juice than a dim lightbulb and fits nicely inside our head. Biology does a lot with a little: the human genome, which grows our body and directs us through years of complex life, requires less data than a laptop operating system. Even a cat's brain smokes the newest iPad - 1,000 times more data storage and a million times quicker to act on it."
Related Links:

Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?


By MARK BITTMAN from the New York Times

THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli ...” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”

This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy Meals” can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)

In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)

Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food’s value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink’s value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)

Besides, that argument, even if we all needed to gain weight, is not always true. A meal of real food cooked at home can easily contain more calories, most of them of the “healthy” variety. (Olive oil accounts for many of the calories in the roast chicken meal, for example.)In comparing prices of real food and junk food, I used supermarket ingredients, not the pricier organic or local food that many people would consider ideal. But food choices are not black and white; the alternative to fast food is not necessarily organic food, any more than the alternative to soda is Bordeaux.

The alternative to soda is water, and the alternative to junk food is not grass-fed beef and greens from a farmers’ market, but anything other than junk food: rice, grains, pasta, beans, fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products, bread, peanut butter, a thousand other things cooked at home — in almost every case a far superior alternative.


FOOD FOR THOUGHT !


POLITICAL FOOD FOR THOUGHT:

- Socialist is not Social Democrat

- Nazi stands for National Socialism

- Liberal in Canada are centrist

- Progressive Conservatism in Canada is right wing

- New Democratic Party in Canada is left wing

- Libertarian are not Liberal

- Socialist International is different from International Socialist

- Coffee Party and Tea Party are very different

- Radical in France is center-left

- Fascism and Communism are 2 extremes that are indeed very close.



No Missing Link! Peoples Is Peoples... And Apes Is Apes

from  Koinonia House
There were once a much wider variety of human beings on this planet than there are now, according to new genetic analyses of Neanderthals in Europe and Denisovans in East Asia. Modern humans once interbred with these other groups, apparently sharing genetic material that includes the ability to fight off certain diseases. Yet, not all creatures designated as "hominids" are related to humans. 
In 2008, a piece of bone and a tooth of what is believed to be a young girl were found in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, along with stone blades and body ornaments. Twenty years ago the small bone and a tooth would not have been much to go on. These days, however, 40 mg of real bone from a fossil can tell researchers a great deal of information - if the bone contains enough genetic material for researchers to sequence the DNA. 
Researchers were able to compare DNA all around, and it turns out that the Denisovan girl and Neanderthals are related, but not directly. According to comparisons of genetic code, the Denisovan shared a common ancestor with Neanderthals and modern humans. 
"It amazed me that we found this other extinct group of humans," evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, Germany, told LiveScience. "When we got this little finger bone from Siberia, I was totally expecting it to be either Neanderthal or modern human. When it was something else, that was totally surprising and shocking to me." 
Ancient humans might bear some superficial physical differences from modern homo sapiens, but they were all still humans and able to breed with one another. In fact, interbreeding between modern-form humans and Neanderthals may have given us modern humans certain genes that helped boost our immune systems.
At the least, Neanderthals share key immunity genes with us, namely the HLA (human leucocyte antigen) class 1 gene. HLA proteins are important in helping the body defend itself against new infections. A variant called HLA-B*73 is found both in modern humans and Denisovans. 
There's quite a bit of Neanderthal DNA floating around out there in the population. According to researchers, up to four percent of Neanderthal DNA and up to six percent of Denisovan DNA have survived in modern humans. It's been known for some time now that Neanderthals bred with the people whose descendants are now found in Europe and western Asia. Denisovan genes can also be found in the population of Europe and especially in the people of Asia and the oceanic islands. 

THE GRAND CANYON FORMATION - ALTERNATE THEORIES

From Koinonia House - June 15, 2011


The Grand Canyon is a geological wonder, a vast chasm stretching 277 miles west to east through northern Arizona. The canyon offers one of the best geological cross sections in the world, with nearly 30 distinct layers found from the bottom to the top; its mesas, buttes, colorful slopes and spires illustrate the geological story of the great American southwest. School children are fed a simple tale about how the canyon was formed, but as any honest geologist will admit, nobody knows exactly how it got there. 

The true cause of the Grand Canyon is still hotly debated among geologists, and all recognize there's no solid answer. There are too many missing pieces. The basic park ranger explanation is that the Colorado Plateau - 130,000 square miles covering northern Arizona, southern and eastern Utah, western Colorado and northwestern New Mexico - began to rise up 50-70 million years ago, causing the existing Colorado River to downcut. After millions of years of steady uplift, the Colorado River carved out the Grand Canyon. The higher the plateau rose, pushed upward by magma from deep in the earth, the more powerful the erosional forces of the river proved to be. 

The Colorado River was tamed a great deal when the Glen Canyon Dam was finished in 1966. The dam controls the flow of the river now. The Colorado's flashfloods once carried boulders the size of VW Buses, and it transported an estimated 160 million tons of sediment every year, scouring the canyon bottom. Still, many people consider the vast expanse of the Grand Canyon and despise the Colorado as an underfit river, one that could not have possibly hauled out all the necessary sediment. 

A Few Puzzles:
The simple explanation does have serious geological issues. The Colorado River flows into the Gulf of California – the Sea of Cortez - which contains sediments from geologically young Pliocene layers - not older layers.  It appears that the eastern part of the Grand Canyon is much older than the western part of the Grand Canyon, but nobody knows exactly what happened. 

The western end of the canyon is fairly young. Local sediments come from the Basin and Range area to the west of the Canyon and are from Miocene layers. No river could have carved through there until after the Miocene. There's also no evidence that an older Colorado River ran through the Grand Wash Cliffs at the western end of the canyon. There is therefore an upper Colorado River system to the east that did not originally continue west of the Colorado Plateau. 

Alternate Theories:
The first thought, of course, is that the deposits were carried away by a different route. Perhaps the canyon was carved by a river that flowed down through Marble Canyon through what is now the Little Colorado River, draining into the Rio Grande. According to the theory, another small but steep and vigorous river rushed westward across the Basin and Range. It moved eastward by headward erosion until it ran into the upper Colorado. It "captured" the Colorado , caveman style, and the two married and carved the Grand Canyon in 4-6 million years, dumping into the Sea of Cortez like today. 

There's a problem there, though. The Continental Divide would have prevented the Little Colorado River from reaching the Rio Grande, and the sediment evidence is not there. 

Some argue that the old river flowed south at Peach Springs Canyon, until the river burst through whatever blocked the way to the western part of the Grand Canyon. Some argue that the Colorado Plateau tipped one way and then the other as it rose so that the Colorado River flowed in the opposite direction. Some argue the river flowed underground, or flowed northwest, draining into lakes in Nevada and Utah. 

The deposits to prove these drainage systems haven't been found.  That's part of the problem; there is a lot of data that is just plain missing.

Numeronym (number-based word)

A numeronym is a word where a number is used to form an abbreviation (albeit not an acronym or an initialism). 

Pronouncing the letters and numbers may sound similar to the full word: "K9" for "canine" (phonetically: "kay" + "nine"). A similar example in French is "K7" for "cassette" (phonetically: "ka" + "sept").

Alternatively, the letters between the first and last are replaced by a number representing the number of letters omitted, such as "i18n" for "internationalization". Sometimes the last letter is also counted and omitted.

Examples:
  • 101 - for basic introduction to a subject
  • 212 - for New Yorker
  • 411 - for information
  • 911 - for help
  • a11y - Accessibility
  • C10k problem - limitation that most web servers currently have
  • c11y - Consumability
  • c14n - Canonicalisation / Canonicalization
  • d11n - Documentation
  • E10S - Electrolysis
  • E15 - The Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland[4]
  • G8 - Group of Eight
  • G20 - G-20 major economies
  • g11n - Globalisation / Globalization[5]
  • i14y - Interoperability[6]
  • i18n - Internationalisation / Internationalization
  • L10n - Localisation / Localization
  • m10n - Mavenization
  • m12n - Modularisation / Modularization[7]
  • m17n - Multilingualization
  • n11n - Normalisation/Normalization
  • P13n - Personalisation / Personalization
  • P23R - Prozess-Daten-Beschleuniger[8]
  • P45 - Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
  • s10n - Subscription
  • tr8n – Translation[9]
  • W3 - World Wide Web
  • W3C - World Wide Web Consortium
  • WWI - World War I
  • WWII - World War II
  • v11n - Versification[10]
  • v12n - Virtualization
  • Y2K - the Year 2000 problem

How Eating at Home Can Save Your Life

The slow insidious displacement of home cooked and communally shared family meals by the industrial food system has fattened our nation and weakened our family ties. In 1900, 2 percent of meals were eaten outside the home. In 2010, 50 percent were eaten away from home and one in five breakfasts is from McDonald's. Most family meals happen about three times a week, last less than 20 minutes and are spent watching television or texting while each family member eats a different microwaved "food." More meals are eaten in the minivan than the kitchen.


Research shows that children who have regular meals with their parents do better in every way, from better grades, to healthier relationships, to staying out of trouble. They are 42 percent less likely to drink, 50 percent less likely to smoke and 66 percent less like to smoke marijuana. Regular family dinners protect girls from bulimia, anorexia, and diet pills. Family dinners also reduce the incidence of childhood obesity. In a study on household routines and obesity in U.S. preschool-aged children, it was shown that kids as young as four have a lower risk of obesity if they eat regular family dinners, have enough sleep, and don't watch TV on weekdays.

We complain of not having enough time to cook, but Americans spend more time watching cooking on the Food Network than actually preparing their own meals. In his series, "Food Revolution," Jamie Oliver showed us how we have raised a generation of Americans who can't recognize a single vegetable or fruit, and don't know how to cook.

The family dinner has been hijacked by the food industry. The transformations of the American home and meal outlined above did not happen by accident. Broccoli, peaches, almonds, kidney beans and other whole foods don't need a food ingredient label or bar code, but for some reason these foods -- the foods we co-evolved with over millennia -- had to be "improved" by Food Science. As a result, the processed-food industry and industrial agriculture has changed our diet, decade by decade, not by accident but by intention.

That we need nutritionists and doctors to teach us how to eat is a sad reflection of the state of society. These are things our grandparents knew without thinking twice about them. What foods to eat, how to prepare them, and an understanding of why you should share them in family and community have been embedded in cultural traditions since the dawn of human society.