You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 22nd, 2008.
Sure, there are other options for testing regular expressions, but this test engine appears to be aimed specifically at .Net regular expressions. Quite useful!
David Bush has some good YouTube videos on Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5. Here Dave shows the basics of using LINQ in C#.
The Law of Conservation of Energy (aka. the first law of thermodynamics) states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. So what is the logic behind the term renewable energy? The energy from burned oil hasn’t left the universe at all. That energy cannot be “made new” since it has been around for billions of years and will exist as long as the universe itself does. Thus, just as one doesn’t create new energy, no form of energy is truly renewable. We can only change the form of an energy source and then use it to our advantage.
Obama didn’t support the surge when it was first proposed, so he was recently asked whether he would have chosen to support it had he known then what he knows now. Here’s the exchange:
Reporter: “If you had it to do over again, knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?”
Obama: “No, because keep in mind that question, you wouldn’t … but keep in mind that kind of hypothetical is very difficult to know hindsight is 20-20 … later … but I think that what I’m absolutely convinced of is that at that time we had to change the political debate because the view of the Bush administration at that time was one that I just disagreed with.”
Is this man’s reasoning what we want in the White House?
Nancy Pelosi and other dems have spoken recently about Bush’s failed policies. The current economic woes are offered as evidence to support such claims. But correlation does not establish causality. Two events can coincide without either causing the other. Did Bush’s economic strategies cause higher oil prices, the weakened dollar, etc.? Pelosi presents no evidence to substantiate such a notion.
One of the key fallacies involved with such reasoning by the dems is Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, which means “After this, therefore because of this.” The fallacious reasoning at work is easy to demonstrate. I might utter a magic phrase on day x. On day y, rain falls. I then claim that my magic phrase caused the rain to fall. That’s Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc reasoning. And politicians love it.
Why do the politicians employ such specious reasoning? They think you’re stupid. And that’s why you need them to take care of you. Or so they think.
To logicize is to employ logic. You might logicize about a specific event’s causes, for example. And yes, that’s an actual English word.
We’ll be looking at various topics through the lens of reason and understanding. The subjects we’ll cover include politics, software development, language, religion, technology, and psychology (among others). While not every post will involve a formal examination of an argument’s structure and validity, the logicality (or lack thereof) of various statements and ideas will be a recurring theme here.
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