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- Immiseration: Marx wrote about immiseration, the poor getting poorer, etc. in the mid-19th century. Are we supposed to say that he was right that "real wages would fall, and working conditions deteriorate" between then and now? Ever tried working for a 19th-century wage in a 19th-century factory? On both these counts, workers are now much better off than they have ever have been (excluding the effects of the current recession/stagnation). And the historical trend has been for real wages to increase. Maybe not as much as productivity, but that is a red herring: the point is that the poor have not gotten poorer, virtually everyone has been getting richer. Real wages have been stagnant? Maybe (although you also have to look at total compensation including benefits), but since virtually everything has been getting cheaper, people have still been getting richer: http://myslu.stlawu.edu/~shorwitz/Good/myths.htm

- Crisis: see the previous point for the claim that workers would be paid less and less. Which also contradicts what the author himself has said since we have moved from mere stagnation to a decrease in real wages (these are not the same thing). I don't understand what he means by overproduction, etc. If anything, there was too much demand (not too little) for many goods such as housing. There is also something strange about the idea that too little demand, rather than making prices fall to the lower equilibrium price, would lead to indebtedness. Too little demand (whatever that means) should lead to lower prices, and hence to lower levels of debt.

- Stagnation: seems plausible. But one should also mention that Marx's explanation for the TRPF, which was based on his labour theory of value, should be discarded along with the labour theory of value.

- Alienation: is there any evidence that workers are feeling more alienated now than before? And, even granted that Marx was correct about this, what should we do about it? Is there any system of production that does not result in either some degree of alienation or massive poverty due to a great lack of productivity. I, for one, would take some alienation at work 40h per week if it means that I can go back to my confortable home with all my gizmos, rather than having to work 7 days a week on my farm to barely scrape by.

- False consciousness: completely untestable since we have to assume that people are being exploited in the first place.

The sexagesimal (base 60) numbering system was around for more than a thousand years before the greeks. (approx 2000 BC). It is an odd system but one fully capable of supporting quadratic equations, algeba, roots, powers, multiplication, division and reciprocals.

http://it.stlawu.edu/~dmelvill/mesomath/index.html

As a species we have gradually transitioned from hunter-gatherer societies to fixed agrarian settlements and animal husbandry around 10,000 years ago. Essentially the capability of human intellect has changed little in that time. If you were able to take a child from the city of Ur or Uruk 5,000 years ago and put them in modern schools they would do as well (or as badly) as modern students.

The greatest impediment to human progress has not been intellect, numbering systems or technologies. What has kept us from moving to the stars 500 to 1000 years ago has been that we are terrible at keeping knowledge and invention once it is discovered. The rises and falls of civilizations has been the great eraser of knowledge and frequently does the CTRL-ALT-DEL on all of the progress we have made to date.

By the time our sun begins to get warmer and gradually blooms out to a red giant life on this planet will either be completely extinct or so far along the evolutionary path that Homo Sapiens will be as relevant as the dinosaurs are to us today.

Apparently the white hair on polar bears acts like optic fibre. It collects light over a larger surface than the bare skin of the animal and channels it to the body to keep it warm.

Never heard of this before. Too bad it's not true and you are propagating another "urban myth" (although Polar Bears aren't especially urban).

Thanks for playing.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program.

This is highly dubious. There has been a scientific myth around for some time that polar bear hairs are optical fibres. Yeah right. Just think about it, there is little sunlight at the north pole in fact none during winter when warmth is most needed, the most usable light is in fact available when the bear needs it least: summer.

Why are polar bears white? Camouflage is the best guess to catch food to supply energy, not to have optical fibre hair.

The fact that crows can count without having language makes an argument that Sapir-Whorf has nothing to do with this.

The other fact is that the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is dead. If language influences us, it is in a much more subtle way than what we're seeing in this article.

I'd recommend The Number Sense to anyone who is aware that Sapir-Whorf is gone, gone, gone. Dehaene explains how the lower-level numbers (1, 2, 3) are built into our cognitive systems at a most basic level, whereas anything above that is just "many" (he illustrates cross-species differences with examples such as crows counting to seven). His most convincing example outside of experiments is the expression of numbers in various languages.

In Japanese, the kanji for the first 3 numbers are one stroke, two strokes, and three strokes. only on the forth number does it increase.

In Cuneiform, wedge-shaped strokes are expressed in columns and rows with a maximum value of three.

Roman numerals, I, II, and III... then IV.

In current arabic numerals, supposedly, 1 is a single line, 2 is two lines with a connecting stroke, while 3 is 3 lines with two connecting strokes.

This page illustrates the supposed evolution between a few different number sets (Tamil, Hindi, Brahmi, early Arabic) and if you look at the pictures you'll see they all seems to grow out of counting strokes for 1-3, but 4 is a completely different character.

Trinary, anyone?

Does A Good Game Make A Good Movie Idea?

Marketing is everying. So most movies are based on something that has established name recognition. Twenty years ago, I saw so many bad movies based on song titles, I swore never to watch another one. (Well, I might make an exception for this song.) Popular books always used to get made into movies, even if the book wasn't all that cinematic. And now we're seing movies based on theme park rides. Why? Marketing. Known trademark. Anything but creativity.

I'm suprised it took them so long to get around to video games. Established audience, well-known brand, yada yada.

To answer the question that was meant: can you make a decent movie out of a video game? Hey, you can make a decent movie out of last week's canned peas if you can find the right talent. Look at who is making the movie, not the meaningless marketting noise.

The degree minute thing probably came from the Sumerians who actually used base 60 for their counting systems. It is postulated that they regularly traded with another race and so came up with a base which could be used equally to translate from their 'old' units and those of their fellow traders.

Base 60 makes it easy to divide values by common fractions, a half, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. Hence 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an degree and 6 x 60 degrees in a circle. The sumerians also gave us positional notation (ie. that the same symbol in different positions in a number means a difference value) which is where our hundreds, tens and units comes from. Some even believe that they invented 0 (in which case it was lost for some thousands of years afterwards) and it's shape comes from drawing () with a stylus in a clay tablet (their write once memory). You can find out more here.

Totally off topic but never mind.

This has been a common claim in the literature. Some references and refutations here.

Obviously it's not binary. It looks like cuneiform.