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That reminds me of an old engineering joke:

Ford, whose electrical engineers couldnâ(TM)t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Fordâ(TM)s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.

Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetzâ(TM)s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.

Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Fordâ(TM)s request with the following:

Making chalk mark on generator $1.

Knowing where to make mark $9,999.

Ford paid the bill.

* http://www.snopes.com/business...
* http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

and people having loud animated conversations on their cell phones in crowded public spaces are rude.

I never got this. If two people are sat on the bus/train whatever and having a chat, no one gives a shit, remove one of the people and half the conversation and people are suddenly put out by it.

And yet, it is a tested and documented phenomenon. Google will find many reports of this, see for example this paper (PDF) or this webpage, this webpage, or this webpage.

If you have a genuine intellectual curiosity about the subject, information is pretty easy to find. Here's one link: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

If you've already made up your mind, then it doesn't really matter what sort of evidence I provide.

but the more we know, the more it goes towards "some kind of dualism", although certainly not a religious one

I'd have to ask where you're getting this from. It's one thing to suggest that science does not yet have a good answer and so the actual mechanism are unclear, but it is quite another to suggest that a lack of understanding suggests a kind of mysticism that people refer to as dualism. In fact, I think that as we progress we'll eventually find that consciousness is hardly unique, but is merely that result of having enough sophisticated hardware wired together in the correct way. We're only scraping at the crust in terms of understanding the human brain and as our tools and knowledge improves, so too will our ability to make better hypotheses.

We're also approaching answers to these questions with computers. I recall a story were researchers were able to model a simple brain in software and use a hardware interface to simulate the body by using sensor feedback to represent input to the software brain. It turned out that this robot behaved quite similarly to the organism which is was modeled after. In time we'll be able to build more complex robots that more closely model our own selves, and I suspect that consciousness is merely an emergent property of the way our brains are physically arranged.

We're increasingly finding more support for this as personality traits (empathy, aggressiveness, etc.) or other characteristics (sexual attraction, gender perception) are tied to different areas or the physical arrangements of parts of the brain. There's still a lot of work to be done to fully understand how the mechanism works, and studies that can show a casual relationship still need to be conducted, but we're getting closer and technological advances will allow us to conduct the types of experiments in the future, that are not currently possible.

What will become more interesting is when humans unlock the knowledge required to build advanced consciousnesses or to modify our own biology in such a way to free ourselves from evolutionary baggage that often clouds or consciousness or manifests itself in other undesirable ways. Eventually consciousness will be no more remarkable than phototropism.

How about UFO's? The CIA spread disinformation about UFO's in the 1950's and 1960's to hide their experimental aircraft program. Another example of a conspiracy that took hold with the general public and survived to this day.

It's not amount of time since the event occurred, or the number of people involved, it's the cover story that makes the conspiracy succeed or fail.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Southern California relies on the Colorado River -- which is drying up due to drought, dams, and water being diverted for farmlands. It now ends 50 miles inland instead of reaching the sea.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

California doesn't receive enough rainfall to support the agriculture grown in the region (except maybe the north west portion). Almonds may not be the biggest crop, but they are among the ones which require the most water, and almond growers say that even though they're now giving their almond trees brackish water from wells, they plan to grow more almond trees b/c they're very profitable -- water shortage be damned.

Most farmland is in mid-eastern to eastern half of the US... which gets enough rainfall to support crops. California generally doesn't rely on rainfall - it needs water pumped from rivers, aqueducts, and aquifers. The areas of CA that get the most rainfall are the mountains which feed a few rivers. It's not sustainable. Water rights issues won't matter if there's no water to squabble over. CA needs to build more storage for fresh water -- often, when it rains, water washes quickly into concrete channels and is fed out to the sea instead of stored. Sad, really.

https://www.crwr.utexas.edu/gi...

Yep

It takes more than a lack of empathy to make a sociopath.

Yes, there's also aggression and violence, or at least the genetic alleles for them. They can show up as a murderer or just an asshole.

And a surgeon who operates unnecessarily is not a benefit to society.

Yes, but on the other hand a surgeon who can distance themselves from the fact that they're millimeters away from killing someone and concentrate on doing the job right ca be an advantage.
The case I was thinking of was actually a neuroscientist who is a pro-social psychopath, lots of murderers in his family including Lizzie Borden. See eg http://www.smithsonianmag.com/... for an interesting short read.

It is probably in our best interests that the climates we live in are compatible with us.

Well, then global warming should be good news,

And for some, after adjustment, it will be good news. For others? a catastrophe. This is the part that so many do not get. Canada so far has had an extension of the term between killing frosts, so the frost free season is lengthening. - also the Western US. Here is some interesting US data.

http://nca2014.globalchange.go....

Then again, some places might not be so fortunate. Some may even become colder. As the Greenland ice melts, the Weather in England might get a little frosty. This might happen if the gulf stream gets interrupted by the cold fresh water influx from Greenland.

At present in Ireland, they grow cabbage palm at the same latitude as Newfoundland - the warming effects of the gulf stream are so dominant, all may go away.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/... And some areas that are now verdant, may become arid. All sort of the luck of the draw.

I always like to put discussions in the manner in which others can relate. Strategically, is it wise to gamble that the US will always be blessed by climate? If large portions of the country turn into desert - is that a good formula for continued role as the world's superpower.

And that petrofuel. Is it patriotic and smart burning huge amounts of that portable energy dense fuel in gas guzzlers that we may some day need for our jet fighters?

Not the most glamorous web page, but interesting: http://vanrcook.tripod.com/Ger... Oddly enough, many people who consider themselves more patriotic, and love their country more than others, are happy to burn as much fossil fuel and use as much of the energy dense petrofuel, that they may have a leading role in our diminished power. All by foolishly believing people who are not at all patriotic, but have money as the central theme of their lives, but are smart enough to enlist them.

Me? I consider it my patriotic duty to enable the warfighters the best chance of fulfilling their missions.

So I'm going to drive, but I'm also going to conserve. I'm also going to attempt to have my country in good shape as long as possible.

Guess you would know more that the Smithsonian, right, professor?

The equivalent for a coal fired plant would be evacuating a neighbourhood for a couple of weeks until the fire was put out. (Happened in Australia recently to a mine waste pile).

Who cares about the damn plant?

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, it can be mildly addictive. Their claims are modest, and credible.

        http://www.drugabuse.gov/publi...

It's difficult to estimate the frequency of contamination of marijuana with other substances. But fairly frequent contamination is documented in "Cannabis and Cannabinoids: Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Therapeutic Potential", By Ethan B Russo

        https://books.google.com/books...

Ethan cites Johnson's old study of 8000 samples, with a wide array of contaminants, including tobacco and PCP. Johnson's study was from 30 years ago: an article in the Smithsonian magazine from March, 2015 cites the increasing levels of heavy metals and mold in modern marijuana:

          http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

So I'm afraid that the idea that pot is automatically uncontaminated and therefore safer than tobacco is ill-founded. It may be _less_ harmful, and have a _lower_ level of contamination. But it's apparently quite frequent to find things in actual testing that should not be in pot for human use.

Yes. It started back 1976 with Ford and Carter, and continued on. It used to be incumbent/challenger, then alternated. It's only been "stuck" for the last 3 elections - and I suspect it's because of political motivations.

And he's right....which you seem to accept since you offered no counter arguments.

No, he's not right. CO2 emissions aren't down because of the switch to natural gas. They're down because of the recession.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

There's also a major issue happening at Chernobyl, outlined here that indicates the actual damage is greater than we thought. It seems that the radiation has killed off much of the microbes and such that help decay plants. If they have a major forest fire there, this could quite easily stir up all that radioactive dust that is just under the surface.

Is that any more ridiculous than suggesting that the universe is a computer simulation?

Better solution: Mandate that businesses (and by that, I mainly mean developers) provide enough parking for their projected number of customers and employees

Do you mean build so much parking that there's never a shortage when the price is zero? That's actually a very bad idea, because the economically optimal number of parking spaces is the number where MR=MC. This means wherever the cost of providing a parking space is not zero, the lost revenue from not providing it should also be nonzero. In other words, in an unpriced parking lot, it's financially optimal for it to get filled up completely at times. For a very similar reason, if you never miss a flight, you're spending too much time at the airport.

No, rather than micromanaging the number of parking spaces, it's better to decide what is the problem you're trying to solve, and give the businesses freedom to decide how to solve it. Is the problem that their parking lots are filling up completely? Then simply require that their parking lots never fill up completely.

Why it is it so expensive?

No one knows what Columbus was wearing when he set foot in the New World, but on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong took his ''one giant leap'' onto the Moon, he was clad in this custom-made spacesuit, model A7L, serial number 056. Its cost, estimated at the time as $100,000 (more than $670,000 today), sounds high only if you think of it as couture. In reality, once helmet, gloves and an oxygen-supplying backpack were added, it was a wearable spacecraft. Cocooned within 21 layers of synthetics, neoprene rubber and metalized polyester films, Armstrong was protected from the airless Moon's extremes of heat and cold (plus 240 Fahrenheit degrees in sunlight to minus 280 in shadow), deadly solar ultraviolet radiation and even the potential hazard of micrometeorites hurtling through the void at 10 miles per second.

The Apollo suits were blends of cutting-edge technology and Old World craftsmanship. Each suit was hand-built by seamstresses who had to be extraordinarily precise; a stitching error as small as 1/32 inch could mean the difference between a space-worthy suit and a reject. While most of the suit's materials existed long before the Moon program, one was invented specifically for the job. After a spacecraft fire killed three Apollo astronauts during a ground test in 1967, NASA dictated the suits had to withstand temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The solution was a state-of-the-art fabric called Beta cloth, made of Teflon-coated glass microfibers, used for the suit's outermost layer.

For the suit's creator, the International Latex Corporation in Dover, Delaware, the toughest challenge was to contain the pressure necessary to support life (about 3.75 pounds per square inch of pure oxygen), while maintaining enough flexibility to afford freedom of motion. A division of the company that manufactured Playtex bras and girdles, ILC had engineers who understood a thing or two about rubber garments. They invented a bellowslike joint called a convolute out of neoprene reinforced with nylon tricot that allowed an astronaut to bend at the shoulders, elbows, knees, hips and ankles with relatively little effort. Steel aircraft cables were used throughout the suit to absorb tension forces and help maintain its shape under pressure.

Neil Armstrong's Spacesuit Was Made by a Bra Manufacturer [Nov 2013]

Sorry, but taste receptors for glutamates is a real thing.

MSG wasn't the magic cure-all make things taste good people thought it was, but there are many foods which have glutamates in them which enhance the flavors of things.

Parmesan (not that Kraft crap) and mushrooms being good examples of this.

You are so utterly wrong and full of shit it isn't funny.

It's in the Smithsonian, which typically doesn't print rubbish. The fact that carrots improve eye health (and hence eyesight) was confirmed science, but they didn't do squat for night vision (that's the myth part). The myth existed due to misunderstandings of what "improved eyesight" entails.

In WWII they release misinformation in an attempt to forestall the discovery that the allies had radar. However, the myth existed as an old wive's tale before. In addition, the sugar shortages led to a popularity campaign to boost carrot consumption, which apparently they had in excess in storage.

WWII propoganda campaing popularized the myth that carrots help you see in the dark

The privatization of the herds has been well documented and is a very interesting success story. I've seen at least 2 documentaries on it.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Basically, if you're a big game hunter, there's not much left to hunt. So people raise the Rhinos on farms and then sell them for hunting or whatever... They sell for tens of thousands of dollars, far more than their horns are worth, so you can rest assured the farmers protect them ferociously.

The problem with this approach is that a lot of endangered species aren't something someone would want to "Buy" so it only works for animals that look good in a trophy room. In the U.S. for example, most of the surviving large animals are ones that hunters protect because they like to hunt them. Around me, hunters have reintroduced wild turkeys, black bears, cougars, bobcats, etc... none of those species lived around here when I was a kid, but a couple of years ago my father hit a black bear that was big enough to total his F150. They're so plentiful they're a nuisance now. Hunters are some of the most involved conservationists there are.

Make the Rhinos more valuable alive than dead, and the problem solves itself.

Robbing energy from the wind is perhaps poorly studied and less well understood, but there's no doubt it will alter something, for better or worse.

Robbing energy from the wind is highly studied and well understood, and it results in a minimal localized heating effect (lack of cooling effect, actually) immediately downwind of the actual turbine, which is rapidly lost in the statistical noise. If you were able to use google you'd know this already. You do have to learn to filter out the hits from obvious idiots, but since your rhetoric matches theirs, you're probably suffering from confirmation bias. I know it can be hard to wade through the hits from jackholes who don't know what the fuck they're talking about, but all you have to do is just ignore all the results that give you a warm fuzzy feeling.

40% of chemistry PhDs were women.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Soviet Russia Had a Better Record of Training Women in STEM Than America Does Today
Perhaps it's time for the United States to take a page from the Soviet book just this one time
By Rose Eveleth
smithsonian.com
December 12, 2013

Between 1962 and 1964, 40 percent of the chemistry PhD's awarded in Soviet Russia went to women. At that same time in the United States, that number was a measly five percent. In 2006, that number was still lower than the Soviets' from the '60s—just 35 percent, according to the American Institute of Physics Research Center. In 2012, still only 37 percent of chemistry PhDs in America went to women.

Take this letter from a girl from Ukraine to Yuri Gagarin:

I have wanted to ask you for a long time already: ‘is it possible for a simple village girl to fly to the cosmos?’ But I never decided to do it. Now that the first Soviet woman has flown into space, I finally decided to write you a letter.I know [to become a cosmonaut] one needs training and more training, one needs courage and strength of character. And although I haven’t yet trained ‘properly’, I am still confident of my strength. It seems to me that with the kind of preparation that you gave Valia Tereshkova, I would also be able to fly to the cosmos.

The rover is light...they had to get it there on that most rickety looking lunar lander.

It's kind of funny that they once envisioned this:

http://public.media.smithsonia...

But instead we got this:

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def...

To be frank, it looks like a 2nd grade science project using cardboard, aluminum foil, and brass-colored duct-tape.

If somebody brought a model of that to school in the 50's as a lunar lander project, it would be laughed at, smashed, and given an "F", not necessarily in that order.

I remember seeing some aerospace contractor sketches of the early 60's. It started out a bit cleaner, but over time became more and more skeletal. No politically-conscious manager would approve a contract with something that ugly, so they dressed it up a bit.

I would note that Von Braun sketched up spindly looking designs in the early 50's: http://www.astronautix.com/cra...

Ahead of his time.

According to William Seabrook, who had more range of diet than many human meat eaters, it is pretty good and tastes like high quality veal.

                      http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

"Hypatia (born c. AD 350 – 370; died 415[1][3]) was a Greek mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher in Egypt, then a part of the Byzantine Empire. She was the head of the Neoplatonic school at Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and astronomy."

"One day on the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, in the year 415 or 416, a mob of Christian zealots led by Peter the Lector accosted a woman’s carriage and dragged her from it and into a church, where they stripped her and beat her to death with roofing tiles. They then tore her body apart and burned it. Who was this woman and what was her crime? Hypatia was one of the last great thinkers of ancient Alexandria and one of the first women to study and teach mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. Though she is remembered more for her violent death, her dramatic life is a fascinating lens through which we may view the plight of science in an era of religious and sectarian conflict."

I hate these islamic extremists at least as much as anyone here. But it isn't just islam that is capable of such things.

There's no way you could use all of that water. It's unpossible.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Democrats and Republicans are just as dumb as the supporters of the circus parties in the Byzantine empire:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

They will vote for anybody who fulfills these requirements:

• Is of their party
• has a pulse
• Is of their party
• has enough money to run TV commercials
• Is of their party
• has enough money to give them a vote-for-me button
• Is of their party

You keep asking for accomplishments, for the 3rd time already - don't you get it? give it up already!

the QWERTY layout was designed to SLOW down typists of the day,

Just so you know, that's a myth.

Yeah about that: There is no gender gap in tech salaries

Oh, wait,... http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

In fact women of great standing within tech have long said the exact opposite and that it's the constant lies and fearmongering from Social Justice types convincing people there's a wage gap that doesn't exist.

There's a word for when someone uses fear and lies to control someone else's behavior for their own gain. Generally we call that an abusive relationship.

Reinforced by the fact that marketing has convinced Americans that they smell bad, when nobody saw a problem before, and they still don't in Europe.

I love your optimism. Love it!
However you are leaving out one critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to agriculture: Water.

Where can we start?
How about the Cripps Institue predictions about water in the Western US/Colorado River Basin, that are now playing out.
How about Californias Central Valley?
How about overdrilling and polluting the aquifer under Sao Paolo in Brazil?
What about the overdrilling in India due to cheap and illeagal diesel pumps?
Etc;

Has anyone studied the effect on the environment of taking all of that energy out of the wind? What if seeds and dust aren't carried as far?

This is such an unfounded concern, I'm not even sure where to start. I grew up in the prairie of Minnesota and I could only hope that the wind is reduced there. It is absolutely brutal at times and causes erosion and top soil loss. Why do you want dust carried far? What seeds are you concerned about falling too close to the parent plant? I just, this hasn't been studied because there's nothing to argue about. Like solar there's a lot of energy to be harvested. There's no way to harvest all of it, a lot of it is dissipated as friction against water and earth and I can't think of one positive purpose of that friction.

How does that affect terraforming?

How does that affect our ability to transform the planet into a more livable human environment? I can't even parse this or apply it to the topic at hand. "How does that affect X?" when X has nothing to do with the discussion just sounds like fear mongering.

What about migratory birds? Has anyone bothered to solve the problem of mass kills during migration season?

This is well documented and researched but I am constantly confused as to why "migratory birds" are the stipulated losses. It's any birds. Migratory or not. And the numbers have been scientifically estimated to be 140,000 to 328,000 per year. But we're getting smarter about designing these windmills to prevent avian death.

These questions will never be answered

Well, the first two are just too fucking vapid and inane to be answered. The latter, I've answered for you.

, I don't think, because the politics that drive wind power are the same as those that drive anthro climate change - "We're right, shut up if you disagree?"

You know, that could be said about any politics anywhere because modern politics are about inaction and hot air. Companies and scientists are trying hard to expand our energy portfolio away from fossil fuels. And that's smart whether it's biofuel algae, solar, wind or even failed corrupt initiatives like corn ethanol. In the end there are going to be regionally localized energy productions that will account for a large amount of that local populace's consumption. This will likely still be augmented by fossil fuels -- maybe as emergency or backup but I don't think we'll ever see them completely removed from the equation.

The Earth is going to be destroyed by people (on both sides of the political aisle) who refuse to take a reasoned approach to our energy crisis. The root causes of our energy shortage, climate change, starvation, hunger, crime, and disease, are all one in the same: OVERPOPULATION.

We're 7 times as numerous as the Earth can sustain. Unless and until we fix that problem, our habitable climate WILL be destroyed.

Scientifically, can you explain how you came to calculate the multiplier of "7 times as numerous as Earth can sustain?" Because the idea that the Earth can only sustain a nice round even number like a billion people raises suspicions. But it's pretty evident that nothing is going to talk sense into you, Malthus. Science and human ingenuity has gotten us past radical adj

Seriously, who depends on Wikipedia as a reliable reference? How about something a LITTLE more serious, like the Smithsonian magazine?

To wit: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

"But Arbuckle's lawyers introduced medical evidence showing that Rappe had had a chronic bladder condition, and her autopsy concluded that there "were no marks of violence on the body, no signs that the girl had been attacked in any way." (The defense also had witnesses with damaging information about Rappe's past, but Arbuckle wouldn't let them testify, he said, out of respect for the dead.) The doctor who treated Rappe at the hotel testified that she had told him Arbuckle did not try to sexually assault her, but the prosecutor got the point dismissed as hearsay."

And:

"It wasn't until the third trial, in March of 1922, that Arbuckle allowed his attorneys to call the witnesses who had known Rappe to the stand. ...They testified that Rappe had suffered previous abdominal attacks; drank heavily and often disrobed at parties after doing so; was promiscuous, and had an illegitimate daughter."

If not a hooker, then perhaps it's too close to call. Fatty deserved better.

Turbine bird deaths are a red herring. An estimated 10000-40000 birds die each year from turbines.

First of all, your numbers are plain wrong, by an order of magnitude.

But given any number, the question is - what is that number out of how many working turbines?

Because there are a LOT of structures, and powerlines, and other things that also kill birds as you mentioned. But you are giving us no idea if the number killed by turbines is proportionately higher or not, only absolute numbers with no means to intelligently compare...

All the intelligent reader has to do is mull over how many times they have seen dead birds beneath skyscrapers and other structures, and compare that to a rough average of at least a few dead birds per day, per turbine.

But then you are AC, so all you were really interested in is making up facts (most of those number s are suspect: and spin to make wind power seem harmless.

The eye pupil is known to exhibit interesting behaviour at times,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
one notable being photic reflex (which also affects a quarter of a population)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

IMHO, human vision is still incompletely understood at whole population (global) level,
with all sorts of exceptions and special trade-off cases being documented:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
http://discovermagazine.com/20... ### check this one!

Finally, let's not forget, that it is well known that manly colour vocabulary is 4-bit, while females have true colour sets ;-O
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
http://io9.com/5919311/some-wo...
https://www.google.be/search?r...

Last but not least: make sure you see the image of the OP in fractional ways (say, top 10th of the image),
along with another person that sees it in the alternative mode. You may come up with surprises. ;-)

Smithsonian Magazine has an article in their current issue about copiers. The Soviet Union controlled access to copiers initially.

I haven't read the article yet, but it sounds interesting (Smithsonian Magazine is a gem, the TV channel, a travesty):

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

The topic at hand is a history chorus, and it's rhyming...

More important than public schools?

Yes. Many times more important than public schools.
Without modern education systems, but with roads: the world might (worst reasonable case) devolve into a 1800's style agrarian/industrial economy where farm-folk trade with the industrial city-folk. Education would happen because books would be traded, and parents would teach their children as they had for millenia. It might not be quantum physics, but people would prosper and ideas would be exchanged.
Without roads (and bridges and tunnels), but with modern education systems: No one can reach schools unless a school is right nearby or they can chop through the woods, ford rivers, cross mountain ranges. Trading of goods and food would not happen except on small-scales. Most families would be like this one: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Regarding violent death - we are in a lot better shape than in previous years. Amount of people dying in wars and conflicts is getting smaller and smaller. It is just that our information coverage of that is getting better and better.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

These days, environmental issues (be it global warming, overfishing, pollution, sweet water depletion, pick your one) seem to be a lot more dangerous to our civilization than wars. 50 years ago, there was a chance that huge mutual nuclear war will wipe humanity off the planet. This was what doomdays clock is about. Doomsday clock doesn't care if you have local war with million casualties. Million deaths yearly due to wars or eating McDonald food is not going to make any difference to humanity as whole. Making Earth Venus-like does, even if it happens in 400 years, but cannot be prevented.

Actually the sociopaths tend to go into management, not programming. From my own experience I would say that programmers are very rarely in the psychopathy spectrum, more typically going toward the autism spectrum. I was curious as to what value psychopaths had in an evolutionary sense (both individually and in society), and I learned that they can be valuable. In an experiment with spiders, an equivalent to psychopathy was indicated as a group survival trait, as without it nobody defended the group against external enemies. In society, some level of psychopathy is to my mind almost essential to being a successful politician - imagine a President who could not lie ("No, we have no intentions of invading next week."), and truly did "feel our pain" when he ordered thousands of soldiers to kill, and die. I wouldn't want a surgeon to "feel my pain" either.

Incidents of sociopathy/psychopathy increase from about 1% to 4% as you go up in the corporate (or government) hierarchy. (I would say the incidence among executives of big financial institutions is probably more like 20%, but that's just me.) It's also high among surgeons but not other doctors. Sociopaths are often natural leaders. In fact in that sense it is can be a positive trait. This book was recommended to me, and I coincidentally saw an article also recommending it - written by a neuroscientist who discovered in the course of his research that he had psychopathic traits: The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath.

See also The Pros to Being a Psychopath. Quote:

Psychopaths are assertive. Psychopaths don’t procrastinate. Psychopaths tend to focus on the positive. Psychopaths don’t take things personally; they don’t beat themselves up if things go wrong, even if they’re to blame. And they’re pretty cool under pressure. Those kinds of characteristics aren’t just important in the business arena, but also in everyday life.

The key here is keeping it in context. Let’s think of psychopathic traits—ruthlessness, toughness, charm, focus—as the dials on a [recording] studio deck. If you were to turn all of those dials up to max, then you’re going to overload the circuit. You’re going to wind up getting 30 years inside or the electric chair or something like that. But if you have some of them up high and some of them down low, depending on the context, in certain endeavors, certain professions, you are going to be predisposed to great success. The key is to be able to turn them back down again.

So I applied my newfound knowledge to the US Constitution. I realized that, having dealt with royal and other psychopaths and seen both their use and their risk, the founding fathers tried to construct a system that essentially pitted power-seekers (which to me is mostly psychopaths) against each other, allowing the system to make use of their talents competitively while never allowing any single one or group to take complete control - and always have a way for the system to re-stabilize away from any monopoly of power over time. This is an interesting new perspective.

Actually the sociopaths tend to go into management, not programming. From my own experience I would say that programmers are very rarely in the psychopathy spectrum, more typically going toward the autism spectrum. I was curious as to what value psychopaths had in an evolutionary sense (both individually and in society), and I learned that they can be valuable. In an experiment with spiders, an equivalent to psychopathy was indicated as a group survival trait, as without it nobody defended the group against external enemies. In society, some level of psychopathy is to my mind almost essential to being a successful politician - imagine a President who could not lie ("No, we have no intentions of invading next week."), and truly did "feel our pain" when he ordered thousands of soldiers to kill, and die. I wouldn't want a surgeon to "feel my pain" either.

Incidents of sociopathy/psychopathy increase from about 1% to 4% as you go up in the corporate (or government) hierarchy. (I would say the incidence among executives of big financial institutions is probably more like 20%, but that's just me.) It's also high among surgeons but not other doctors. Sociopaths are often natural leaders. In fact in that sense it is can be a positive trait. This book was recommended to me, and I coincidentally saw an article also recommending it - written by a neuroscientist who discovered in the course of his research that he had psychopathic traits: The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath.

See also The Pros to Being a Psychopath. Quote:

Psychopaths are assertive. Psychopaths don’t procrastinate. Psychopaths tend to focus on the positive. Psychopaths don’t take things personally; they don’t beat themselves up if things go wrong, even if they’re to blame. And they’re pretty cool under pressure. Those kinds of characteristics aren’t just important in the business arena, but also in everyday life.

The key here is keeping it in context. Let’s think of psychopathic traits—ruthlessness, toughness, charm, focus—as the dials on a [recording] studio deck. If you were to turn all of those dials up to max, then you’re going to overload the circuit. You’re going to wind up getting 30 years inside or the electric chair or something like that. But if you have some of them up high and some of them down low, depending on the context, in certain endeavors, certain professions, you are going to be predisposed to great success. The key is to be able to turn them back down again.

So I applied my newfound knowledge to the US Constitution. I realized that, having dealt with royal and other psychopaths and seen both their use and their risk, the founding fathers tried to construct a system that essentially pitted power-seekers (which to me is mostly psychopaths) against each other, allowing the system to make use of their talents competitively while never allowing any single one or group to take complete control - and always have a way for the system to re-stabilize away from any monopoly of power over time. This is an interesting new perspective.

What they REALLY need to do to prevent ebola outbreaks in the first place is to get over their illogical social moires and accept cremation as being an acceptable alternative to burial for ebola victims.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Maybe it's just you that doesn't have Google.

Here's a properly readable source with proper links to somewhat less readable scientifically sound sources:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

...but if you missed it, you wouldn't know. By that logic, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/... didn't miss anything important either (they had been unaware of WWII)

"Most of it's green. Like most northern areas if you take pictures at the right time you can get very dead looking terrain."

The problem isn't the green, the problem is the growing mass of dead tissue that is decomposing at an incredibly slow rate due to the lack of (or greatly reduced population of) bacteria, fungus, and molds that aid in the decomposing process.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

As stated previously, a single incident like Chernobyl can be isolated and mitigated. A 'Chernobyl event every year' on the other hand, can lead to a cascading effect where microbial life is so effected that the standard processes our ecologies depend on shift dramatically.

"I suggest you check your research. They've been testing/developing pebble bed reactors, but they've run into issues such that they're not replacements for rod type reactors yet."

Fair point, I was under the mistaken impression that France have taken a pair of pebble bed reactors live many years ago. That's what I get for trusting my recollection of a 30 year old news story ;)

"My point has always been not that nuclear is harmless, but that it's less harmful than the alternatives while still remaining affordable(minus political stuff)."

Nuclear without incident is less harmful. A single incident is still less harmful. But a sustained practice that leads to a significant incident each year can have a much larger impact by means of cascading ecological change.

And when you get back to the root issue, $/kW, we wind up in an interesting position. http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/a... has a nice breakdown of what we can look forward to. And the question then is, if Nuclear is no cheaper than wind/hydro, and comes with dramatically more risk, why aren't we investing in more wind/hydro solutions instead?

-Rick

Wrong. We've produced "...machines that exhibit the agency and awareness of..." a worm: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

"The washing, touching, and kissing of these bodies — typical in many West African burials — can be deadly. But prohibiting communities from properly honoring their dead ones — and thereby worsening their distrust in medical professionals—can be deadly, too. ref

Ghusl Al Mayyah (Washing the Body)

The Difficulty of Burying Ebola's Victims - Smithsonian

Ebola cremation ruling prompts secret burials in Liberia

Makes me wonder what the local governments in the region are doing to combat the outbreak, they do have governments in that part of the planet? If Ebola broke out in Texas for instance, a state of emergency would be declared then quarantine imposed on anyone within a ten miles of an Ebola victim. The situation would have been resolved within months. They do have governments in that part of the planet?