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Fictional Town "Eureka" To Become Real?
Zarath writes "The fictional town of Eureka (from the TV series by the same name) is going to potentially become a real life town as the University of Queensland, in Australia, plans to build a multibillion-dollar 'brain city' dedicated to science and research. The city, hoping to hold at least 10,000 people, is looking to attract 4,500 of the brightest scientists from around the world to live and work there. The city is planned to be built west of the city of Brisbane, in Queensland. While not funded by the Department of Defense (like the [city of the] TV series), the potential for such a community is very interesting and exciting."
but we call ours Los Alamos...
the research triangle park
Because it is fairly isolated. If it gets blown up, space-time torn, or radiated, there is less chance of contamination to other continents.
So... you want intelligent people to move to Australia?
This, being the same Australia that's introducing filtering and censorship to its entire Internet?
Yeah, good luck with that... Oh, and enjoy your forthcoming Dark Age.
I haven't seen the show, so forgive me if the writers have handled my objections in some clever fashion in one of the episodes, but..
I don't see the upside to this, it's easier now than ever before for people to collaborate remotely, negating much of the need for being in the same physical location.
I do see a downside to this, putting all our intellectual eggs in one basket makes a pretty attractive target for terrorists, whether they be Islamic, Luddite, or some other group in the future that isn't particularly keen on progress or reason as a means of dealing with reality.
Does anybody else think this is an extremely bad idea? Let's put all the best and brightest minds in ONE PLACE...
I didn't RTFA but did any of these asshats consult the best and brightest minds before they decided penning them all in in one place for any singe natural disaster or attack of any sort to take them out in one fell swoop....
I thought nerds preferred the cold dark of their parents basements or garages, to any kind of socialization?
Not entirely true. Geeks love to be around geeks, and only get awkward in the general population. We nerds are highly gregarious whenever we're in friendly company.
As an example go check out a gaming convention.
BTW, I think this town sounds like a lot of fun. I'm probably not bright/geeky enough to be invited to live there, but it would be cool to visit. I'm betting it would be worth it just for all the little inside jokes you'd see around. I'll bet the graffiti alone would be worth it.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
you'll get a town full of people who have a desperate and ego-driven need to be seen as smart
kind of like joining mensa. anyone who needs that sort of attention and reinforcement is not exactly niels bohr
the smart guys in any room are always low key and in the back, not attention whores
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why is it that years into this concept we still have people with such a fixation on the geographic side of things?
Los Alamos made sense in the day where even simple telephones were unreliable and getting large amounts of documentation from team to team would take hours if not days and there would be no real accounting for the integrity of them once they got there. But today this kind of thing is sadly out of touch with technology. Not to mention that there is a presumption that a great number of high end scientists will get along under one roof. This is doubtful, at best.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Nice. And the very next time someone feels their religion is threatened by some research going on over there, it will be bombed all to hell sending us all into the dark ages once again. ...I hope for humanity's sake that it collectively outgrows religion.
Maybe you should read "The Lucifer Principle" before wishing that. The sociobiological, "mob mentality" roots of every time religion goes bad applies equally to anti-religious social structures, like Soviet communism. Just look how much the Chinese government still couches all its net censorship in terms of "preserving public morality" despite officially being an atheist country that discourages religions as a competitor to communist values.
You don't need faith in God to have a credo that distinguishes the "moral" from the "immoral" and provides justification for those who seek power to rally a group to destroy its competitors and to violently deny reality in favor of one's preconceived notions. It's wired into us as part of our evolutionary legacy. We will *not* "grow out of it" without ceasing to be human.
What people need is a positive credo. Some religions provide that. Some secular philosophies provide that. Many don't (or are twisted to not provide one). Abolishing religion does absolutely nothing to fix the problem -- it just throws out the baby with the bathwater and leaves us testing new social structures that haven't had time to be vetted yet. We should instead be seeking creeds that do work and selecting strains of global memes that are most beneficial, instead of most harmful, to humanity.
Seems to me that the *really* smart thing to do would be to recruit more kinds of smart people than just scientists. Out here in Portland some of the smartest people I know doing some of the most innovative work are working at cafes and creating new vegan food that actually tastes good, doing funky little magazines, and otherwise finding ways to make all sorts of work intellectually challenging and fun.
I've been in some of the most famous concentrations of smart people in the world and I see no reasons to believe that a "city of smart people" would also need to have some sizable population of dimwits. If anything, if living expenses were cheap, healthcare provided, and "low status" jobs were normally flextime and twenty hours a week or less, plenty of smart folks would flock there for a chance to live in a way that they could pay their bills and still be able to pursue their other projects. Not only could you fill all of your janitor jobs with smart people who would respect the job and be able to talk to the other people there, you would have to bloody near barricade the walls to keep too many people for applying.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Corporation can often be the worst researchers, everyone knows treating the symptoms is far more profitable than curing the disease. There are many areas of research where the results end up in the the public domain for the greater good. Examples are treating vermin species by introducing predators to reduce their numbers, this takes a considerable amount of research to be done successfully, generates absolutely no profit but can save billions.
Consider the rate of research that was achieved by government during two world wars, far faster than during any other periods, consider the internet the device you are using for to put out wrong headed comments or even the space race.
There seems to be this real crazy attitude that somehow citizens are not part of the government, or truly weird stuff like, you can't trust the government because it just just run by corporations for the benefit of corporations but you can quite illogically trust those corrupt corporations who are using their greed driven values to corrupt government.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Then you should be aware that IQ tests don't really mean anything (other than that you are good at taking IQ tests). Especially not for someone over the age of 20.
For example, if you're 35 (just a guess based on the fact that you have five kids), an IQ of 180 means (stated simply) you're "as smart as someone who is 63." What the hell does that even mean? Clearly it's a bullshit metric.
I mean, if we define intelligence as
most IQ tests (nearly all?) test only the third prong.
However, your point that IQ doesn't mean shit for shit is well said.