I agree with your analysis, but would further point out that culturally, western capitalist democracies hold the idea that if everyone looks out for themselves, the greater good will be achieved. It's in the interest of your neighbor, for example, for you personally to be as greedy as possible. Now, I'm not anti-capitalism but as long as this idea is considered unarguable, we're at a stumbling block.
Indeed. In fact I suspect that the great political conflict today is over the dominance of self-interest over the common good. I would even go further and suggest that the dominance of private interest over the common good is a defining characteristic of fascism, especially that of Mussolini, Franco, or the South American varieties (Chile for example). Read John Ralson Saul's "Voltaire's Bastards" for a more in depth discussion.
You act like money didn't control everything from the beginning.
That's how it's been since the very introduction of money and an economic system based around the collection of as much as money possible, and will be until it's eventual abolition.
I disagree. The ancient Greeks invented what we know as money, money as a universal medium of exchange. At the same time however, the ancient Greeks developed a culture that expressed deep ambivalence about greed and money and its influence on people. In the myth of Erysikhthon, the king is cursed with insatiable hunger that causes him to consume everything around him. In the end, he ends up consuming his own flesh. The myth of Midas is also an obvious example. In Sophocles' writings, money "creates friends, honours, tyranny, and physical beauty"; money is said to "destroy cities, drive men from their homes, transform good men into evil-doers, and to cause men to know every type of impiety". And yet it was also obvious to the ancient Greeks that money increased their standard of living.
There is a difference between a society that worships money and its accumulation, versus a society that remains wary of money but that also uses it as a means to improve material well being. In the last 30 to 40 years, we have clearly moved from the latter and towards the former. Just because we use money doesn't mean we must worship it.
Take an honest look at what has happened in the US/UK since the early 1980's. We have seen a steady erosion of democratic state involvement in the economy, and a massive migration of money away from the control of the state and into the hands of a few very well monied private interests. When those monied interests successfully cause your taxes to be lowered, what has really happened is that the money that you would have paid in taxes now remains in private hands. In effect, instead of you paying taxes to build roads, you pay your money to the private interests in exchange for some other service. In other words, your lower tax rates result in an increase in wealth and power for the organizations that sell you goods.
Also, the educational system has been fundamentally altered in the past few decades. University degrees in fields that are concerned with the general public interest have largely disappeared, replaced by degrees that are glorified exercises in job training. The broad liberal arts education that was the foundation of the development of our democratic institutions has been made an expensive and disappearing luxury. Education that causes a person to question, to think, to understand our history and culture doesn't exist in a meaningful way in our civilization any more. If you want political power today, you seek your training in administration, in business methods, instead of in philosophy, history and other humanities. Money is the lingua franca, the ultimate justification for all activities. Education itself is now treated as an economic good, something to improve the GDP instead of a good in and of itself. Greed and selfishness, once generally thought of as negative characteristics are now glorified in our money based brave new world.
Do not rebut my arguments by stating for example that "arts students don't get jobs", or that "you cannot afford to spend money on a degree that doesn't pay". I am fully aware of this reality. I ask you to step back outside these statements, to look at the changes of the last 30 years in terms of the health of our civilization, morally and ethically. Is the wide stratification of wealth that has developed recently a good thing for society? Must it be this way? And are the above mentioned developments a symptom of a gradual slide into what might be recognized as fascism?
When I consider that the human brain is many orders of magnitude more powerful than any electronic computer, and uses only a few hundred calories a day, it makes me realize that our electronic computers have a huge potential for improvement in both energy efficiency and power.
When I was learning those topics (all the ones you listed save for laying bricks) I didn't take any notes in class. Maybe I'm just the target subject, but if I forgot something in QM then I can still remember enough to look it up in my text or even online.
Instead of QM and nuclear physics, I would have used literature analysis or the like, because there you specifically want the professor's insights rather than verifiable points of fact.
My intro quantum professor had very chaotic notes. They were non-linear, jumping around from board to board. I took notes, but I think the notes were more pointers or reminders of points made in class. The professor had a way of referring to material in many other courses, both taken and to be taken by most of the students. And yet it all made sense in a deep way. Going to his lectures was like going on a journey. By the time the lecture was over, you felt as if you had been transported somewhere else.
When I hear educational theorists pronouncing with dogmatic certainty that lectures are an ineffective method of instruction I think back to that course, and find that I am skeptical of their dogma. Lectures are no doubt ineffective in many cases, but I think that such masterful lecturers are the exceptions that disprove their axiomatic claims.
But what if the subject in hand is quantum mechanics, or nuclear physics, or subjects that are more conceptual than practical?
I remember learning quantum mechanics. I remember reading a particular paragraph in a textbook over and over, because I knew it was important. I remember that in reading that paragraph, something eventually clicked, and the entire course became more clear. It seemed to happen in a moment. Suddenly, everything before and after in the course made sense in a deeper way. It was exhilarating. I don't use the material so much now, but I suspect that if I went back and re-read it, I would understand it at a much deeper and more lasting level than I did then. I find this has been so with many other topics in my university education.
So basically, this is going to pass no matter what, and the USA will follow shortly thereafter.
In a sense, the US has more checks and balances than the Canadian Parliamentary system. When it comes down to it, Parliament has almost no limit to its power, and can in principle pass whatever it chooses to. The only consolation is that Parliament is composed of a group of hopefully disinterested individuals (my tongue is planted gently in my cheek, but I think the idea is that the diversity of their individual interests will somewhat cancel out). Three hundred collective dictators are likely better than one.
So yes the bill will likely pass. And heaven help us. Sixty percent of voters voted against Harper, but the Canadian system still gives him power.
The biggest thing with Hybrids is that they are designed to invert the normal efficiency ideas. Usually, you get a lot more efficiency driving a steady rate on the freeway. It's one reason they list dual "city/highway" mileage targets on the sales brochures. With a hybrid, that's not the case, because a lot of the efficiency gains have to do with recapturing energy from stop-and-start driving.
In my city, most taxi cabs are hybrids. The reason for this is that they are more efficient in city driving. Anyone with a brain realizes this. Hybrids are better in the city than on the highway. To act as if this is some dirty little secret is disingenuous.
...Some teachers in the Los Angeles public schools, for example, complain that the form that supervisors use to evaluate teachers has a check box on whether they use technology, suggesting that they must use it for its own sake.
That is a concern shared by Ms. Rosenbaum, who teaches at Post Falls High School in this town in northern Idaho, near Coeur d’Alene. Rather than relying on technology, she seeks to engage students with questions — the Socratic method — as she did recently as she was taking her sophomore English class through “The Book Thief,” a novel about a family in Germany that hides a Jewish girl during World War II.
Ms. Rosenbaum, tall with an easy smile but also a commanding presence, stood in the center of the room with rows of desks on each side, pacing, peppering the students with questions and using each answer to prompt the next. What is an example of foreshadowing in this chapter? Why did the character say that? How would you feel in that situation?
Mr. Otter said of a teacher like Ms. Rosenbaum, “If she only has an abacus in her classroom, she’s missing the boat.”
I am a physics guy who is just as tech immersed as many posters here. But one of my main worries with the "modernization" of the educational system that is being pushed on multiple fronts these days is that it will cause us to lose touch with deeply engrained educational legacies that are at the heart of western civilization itself. I am speaking for one of the Socratic method, where we learn by constantly questioning. The type of thinking that Socrates displayed is at the heart of our civilization. It lies at the root of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. It helped us overthrow despotic absolute monarchs. It led to the development of our democratic systems. I think most of us really do not realize how much Socrates changed the world.
The Socratic method is a way of educating that is "real time" and "interactive". A teacher asks questions, and as a student answers, further questions are asked. The student and the teacher each try to analyze the soundness of each other's logic. This method accomplishes many things, but one very important facet is that it instills in a student the habit of questioning everything. It encourages students to habitually seek after knowledge and truth.
I suspect many readers will not have experienced this type of education to any great extent. Our system has evolved into one that encourages rote memorization of facts. Many of our teachers are information dispensers. Possibly that is why many readers think there will be very little change if education becomes a matter between a student and his/her computer. But perhaps some of us have had a teacher or a professor who has somehow reached us, who caused us to think, who kindled a fire inside of us. In a world where teachers become bystanders to education, I worry that such experiences will become less and less frequent.
I have observed that over the past several months the number of stories about Iran in the media has been on the increase. The tone and frequency of what I have seen make me suspect the US is preparing the citizenry for a military conflict with Iran. Specifically, I refer to the number of media pieces covering Iran's nuclear capabilities. It is subtle but I don't think it is my imagination. Having watched the run-up to other wars, most especially the wars in Iraq, my intuition is that what I have seen in the media recently is similar to what I saw during the months preceding the other wars. These conflicts don't happen by accident. They require significant logistical planning, and the US would be crazy to jump into a conflict with Iran without devoting significant effort to detailed contingency planning. Part of that planning would very likely include preparing the minds of citizens for war with Iran.
I believe that the narrative of this war will be that we are acting to prevent Iran from developing a strong nuclear weapons program. It will be argued that Iran will become untouchable once it builds an arsenal of nuclear weapons. If it does happen, I don't think it will be easy. Iran is a mountainous territory, unlike western Iraq, which is flat desert. We will not be able to push columns of tanks clear across the country like we did in Iraq. Iran is also more technologically advanced than Iraq, as demonstrated by the possibility that they used GPS spoofing to force a US drone to land in their territory.
I am not sure of what I am saying, but I have found in the past, my instincts have often been correct in matters such as this. The nature of the narrative in TFA really makes me suspect that something will happen within the next few months. There is just too much probability that something will happen in the Strait of Hormuz that will precipitate a shooting war. The posturing. The ultimatums. The movement of military assets into the strait. I could be wrong. Check back in one year. I just don't think the US will let Iran become a nuclear armed state.
BTW, I think I made a post about Libya and Gaddafi a few months ago (June 2011 I think) that was quite correct, if you check my post history.
I believe that there is growing scientific evidence of a link between blood sugar spikes and dementia. I have read of scientists who hypothesize that one of the reasons older people get dementia is that their ability to moderate their blood sugar levels decreases as they get older. This seems perhaps to link in with TFA. Here is a preliminary survey of the scientific literature.
To be fair, there are no glaciers in the Atacama desert region. You need precipitation to have glaciers... oops, we're back round to evidence of no precipitation again.
Fair enough, though in scanning satellite photos, I notice some mountain peaks that do have some ice, though likely not much. Most especially, Nevado Coropuna, a very high altitude volcano (~6000m) seems to have glaciers. Those are likely due to precipitation caused by air being forced upwards by the mountain. I suspect (though I do not know) that the ice on this mountain would be somewhat old (centuries perhaps in places?), though there would be a limit because of (a) volcanic activity and (b) the slope of the mountain would cause the ice to flow to lower elevations. I suspect that ice cores of the ice on this mountain would indicate precipitation rates for the surrounding areas. Imagine the mountain received precipitation and the surrounding areas didn't for many years. Then an event occurred such that the surrounding areas actually did receive precipitation. I suspect that such an event would result in even more snow on the mountain than other years, which could be read in ice cores.
lol. If you want a series of videos that combines tongue in cheek humor with strong arguments backed up with references to real science, check out this guy's youtube channel. His videos are very well produced, enjoyable, and enlightening.
I give an outline of a scientific argument. You give sneering insults. It is only technobabble to someone with no background in geology. My outline of topics is basic sedimentology. Smaller sedimentary particles take longer to settle than larger particles. Faster water picks up more and larger particles than slower water. Seasonal patterns in sediment deposition give delineation of years. In this way, past precipitation patterns may be inferred. As to rivulets, you should read about how we infer the past existence of liquid water on Mars. Your agressive and content free reply betrays the insecurity of ignorance.
How can you know what kind of weather occurred in Peru over the last 150 years? Did someone find Mayan engravings? Or there is this very old guy that can swear that this never happened since he was born? Or maybe it was a Union soldier that got lost and decided to start a weather journal?
Ok, I have some homework for you. Go home and read your textbook on Sedimentology, focussing specifically on lake sediments caused by runoff. Read about how the flows of rivers can be read by drilling sediment cores out of lake beds. Then find your textbook on Glaciology, and read about how cores of ice drilled from long term ice deposits can be used to track snowfall. While you are at it, you can read about how rainfall events leave specific signatures in sand and dirt, including rivulets and specific patterns in the distribution of different sizes of sedimentary particles. I suspect snowfall events could also be inferred with similar observations.
You would be amazed at what geologists and geographers can find out simply by using observation and logic.
The environment changes, the organisms change. The universe loves organisms, and she'll never stop springing them up in places you'd never think you'd find them.
More realistic version: The environment changes, the organisms die, or at least the ones unsuitable for the new environment die. Evolution is a process of death, either death as an early termination of an organism, or death as a failure to pass on genes. If you step back and look at the grand process of life, it has a beauty to it. The great Permian Triassic extinction brought the rise of the dinosaurs, and the extinction of the dinosaurs allowed a whole new set of species to appear, including our own.
But when you bring it down to your own life, a moral person cannot possibly take pleasure in the thought of the extinction of his children, of his grandchildren, let alone the extinction of his entire species. And that is really at the heart of the issue of global warming. The geological record gives good evidence that (a) the climate can get a great deal warmer than it is today and (b) that those periods of warming are associated with large scale extinctions. There is strong evidence that a warming world will have a profoundly different distribution of precipitation. Given that our current agricultural systems are dependent on our current precipitation patterns, it seems likely that changing precipitation patterns will result in a reduction in agricultural production. If there is less food in the world, then famine is likely to result. The systems we have developed where most of us can live in cities while others far away grow our food will be put under stress. A survey of history will clearly show what happens then. The disinterested intellectual systems of reason decay. Fear grows with material shortages, and with it grows superstition. Humans start to lose track of objective reality, they start to make decisions based on illusion and superstition. As they lose track of reality, humans become increasingly unable to implement the necessary changes to survive in a changing world.
If you want to get an idea of what I am talking about, read about the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages, especially in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Read about the major mass extinctions, and then ponder the question whether humans would have been able to rise above the environmental pressures that destroyed more than 90% of species in the time of the dinosaurs. And even if we weren't to go extinct, consider what it would look like of 90% of us were to die. Not just 90% of those in some far away desert, but 90% of the people in your own country. Consider what such a world would look like. It won't happen tomorrow. It won't happen next year, nor even in a decade. If you live another 30 years, you will see enough to see the shape of things to come. But you will still be able to consume comfortably for some time to come. It is your children who will have to deal with the consequences of your selfish consumption.
Given how unlikely it is for a piece of space debris to hit any particular target, I would count this person as being extraordinarily unlucky to come even close to getting hit. It's the same fallacy at work when someone gets into an accident and survives. They are counted as being lucky to survive, when the person was in fact extremely unlucky to be in an accident in the first place.
Not to mention that we would have a totally different world economy if people weren't continually replacing perfectly functional items, from clothing to electronics to vehicles. So much of the global economy is dependent on people buying more things.
It doesn't have to be this way. We have made the economic system we are currently living under; it has been designed to achieve particular ends, such as efficient allocation of resources. This system is isn't a law of nature. We can change it. We can tweak it.
We've already seen that consumers simply don't care much about freedom, whether it's on their computing devices or in regards to their own civil liberties (do you see many Americans protesting the Patriot Act? No). Yes, history shows that freedom is short-lived, and eventually replaced by non-freedom. We just need to realize that this is the natural order of things, and it's going to happen here sooner or later. The good thing about modern times, however, is that it's much easier to move to different places in the world as circumstances change, so if the US mandates that all computer platforms become walled gardens by law and that Linux is illegal or whatever, it'll still be possible to pack up and move to Canada, Europe, Russia, China, etc.
Wow. Just wow. This coming from the country of Washington, of Jefferson, of Franklin. You will forgive me if I find your apathy disturbing. Your comment demonstrates clearly to me how our modern social science worldview, where we study society as disinterested observers, breeds poisonous apathy. We become emotionally detached from our society. Go back and read the philosophes, the philosophers. Read some Locke, Descartes, Voltaire. Read some Aristotle, some Cicero. I've heard it said that most of the energy for the French Revolution came from young people getting stirred up by reading Cicero.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your analysis, but would further point out that culturally, western capitalist democracies hold the idea that if everyone looks out for themselves, the greater good will be achieved. It's in the interest of your neighbor, for example, for you personally to be as greedy as possible. Now, I'm not anti-capitalism but as long as this idea is considered unarguable, we're at a stumbling block.
Indeed. In fact I suspect that the great political conflict today is over the dominance of self-interest over the common good. I would even go further and suggest that the dominance of private interest over the common good is a defining characteristic of fascism, especially that of Mussolini, Franco, or the South American varieties (Chile for example). Read John Ralson Saul's "Voltaire's Bastards" for a more in depth discussion.
You act like money didn't control everything from the beginning.
That's how it's been since the very introduction of money and an economic system based around the collection of as much as money possible, and will be until it's eventual abolition.
I disagree. The ancient Greeks invented what we know as money, money as a universal medium of exchange. At the same time however, the ancient Greeks developed a culture that expressed deep ambivalence about greed and money and its influence on people. In the myth of Erysikhthon, the king is cursed with insatiable hunger that causes him to consume everything around him. In the end, he ends up consuming his own flesh. The myth of Midas is also an obvious example. In Sophocles' writings, money "creates friends, honours, tyranny, and physical beauty"; money is said to "destroy cities, drive men from their homes, transform good men into evil-doers, and to cause men to know every type of impiety". And yet it was also obvious to the ancient Greeks that money increased their standard of living.
There is a difference between a society that worships money and its accumulation, versus a society that remains wary of money but that also uses it as a means to improve material well being. In the last 30 to 40 years, we have clearly moved from the latter and towards the former. Just because we use money doesn't mean we must worship it.
And so Britain sinks further into Fascism.
Take an honest look at what has happened in the US/UK since the early 1980's. We have seen a steady erosion of democratic state involvement in the economy, and a massive migration of money away from the control of the state and into the hands of a few very well monied private interests. When those monied interests successfully cause your taxes to be lowered, what has really happened is that the money that you would have paid in taxes now remains in private hands. In effect, instead of you paying taxes to build roads, you pay your money to the private interests in exchange for some other service. In other words, your lower tax rates result in an increase in wealth and power for the organizations that sell you goods.
Also, the educational system has been fundamentally altered in the past few decades. University degrees in fields that are concerned with the general public interest have largely disappeared, replaced by degrees that are glorified exercises in job training. The broad liberal arts education that was the foundation of the development of our democratic institutions has been made an expensive and disappearing luxury. Education that causes a person to question, to think, to understand our history and culture doesn't exist in a meaningful way in our civilization any more. If you want political power today, you seek your training in administration, in business methods, instead of in philosophy, history and other humanities. Money is the lingua franca, the ultimate justification for all activities. Education itself is now treated as an economic good, something to improve the GDP instead of a good in and of itself. Greed and selfishness, once generally thought of as negative characteristics are now glorified in our money based brave new world.
Do not rebut my arguments by stating for example that "arts students don't get jobs", or that "you cannot afford to spend money on a degree that doesn't pay". I am fully aware of this reality. I ask you to step back outside these statements, to look at the changes of the last 30 years in terms of the health of our civilization, morally and ethically. Is the wide stratification of wealth that has developed recently a good thing for society? Must it be this way? And are the above mentioned developments a symptom of a gradual slide into what might be recognized as fascism?
When I consider that the human brain is many orders of magnitude more powerful than any electronic computer, and uses only a few hundred calories a day, it makes me realize that our electronic computers have a huge potential for improvement in both energy efficiency and power.
Market demand be damned. The simple fact is that I shouldn't have to "hack" my device to make it Turing complete.
When I was learning those topics (all the ones you listed save for laying bricks) I didn't take any notes in class. Maybe I'm just the target subject, but if I forgot something in QM then I can still remember enough to look it up in my text or even online.
Instead of QM and nuclear physics, I would have used literature analysis or the like, because there you specifically want the professor's insights rather than verifiable points of fact.
My intro quantum professor had very chaotic notes. They were non-linear, jumping around from board to board. I took notes, but I think the notes were more pointers or reminders of points made in class. The professor had a way of referring to material in many other courses, both taken and to be taken by most of the students. And yet it all made sense in a deep way. Going to his lectures was like going on a journey. By the time the lecture was over, you felt as if you had been transported somewhere else.
When I hear educational theorists pronouncing with dogmatic certainty that lectures are an ineffective method of instruction I think back to that course, and find that I am skeptical of their dogma. Lectures are no doubt ineffective in many cases, but I think that such masterful lecturers are the exceptions that disprove their axiomatic claims.
But what if the subject in hand is quantum mechanics, or nuclear physics, or subjects that are more conceptual than practical?
I remember learning quantum mechanics. I remember reading a particular paragraph in a textbook over and over, because I knew it was important. I remember that in reading that paragraph, something eventually clicked, and the entire course became more clear. It seemed to happen in a moment. Suddenly, everything before and after in the course made sense in a deeper way. It was exhilarating. I don't use the material so much now, but I suspect that if I went back and re-read it, I would understand it at a much deeper and more lasting level than I did then. I find this has been so with many other topics in my university education.
So basically, this is going to pass no matter what, and the USA will follow shortly thereafter.
In a sense, the US has more checks and balances than the Canadian Parliamentary system. When it comes down to it, Parliament has almost no limit to its power, and can in principle pass whatever it chooses to. The only consolation is that Parliament is composed of a group of hopefully disinterested individuals (my tongue is planted gently in my cheek, but I think the idea is that the diversity of their individual interests will somewhat cancel out). Three hundred collective dictators are likely better than one.
So yes the bill will likely pass. And heaven help us. Sixty percent of voters voted against Harper, but the Canadian system still gives him power.
Continuously Variable Transmissions haven't come close to automotive implementation yet
I believe the most hybrids, including the Prius, use a continuously variable transmission. They always have. I've driven one.
The biggest thing with Hybrids is that they are designed to invert the normal efficiency ideas. Usually, you get a lot more efficiency driving a steady rate on the freeway. It's one reason they list dual "city/highway" mileage targets on the sales brochures. With a hybrid, that's not the case, because a lot of the efficiency gains have to do with recapturing energy from stop-and-start driving.
In my city, most taxi cabs are hybrids. The reason for this is that they are more efficient in city driving. Anyone with a brain realizes this. Hybrids are better in the city than on the highway. To act as if this is some dirty little secret is disingenuous.
First some quote from TFA:
...Some teachers in the Los Angeles public schools, for example, complain that the form that supervisors use to evaluate teachers has a check box on whether they use technology, suggesting that they must use it for its own sake.
That is a concern shared by Ms. Rosenbaum, who teaches at Post Falls High School in this town in northern Idaho, near Coeur d’Alene. Rather than relying on technology, she seeks to engage students with questions — the Socratic method — as she did recently as she was taking her sophomore English class through “The Book Thief,” a novel about a family in Germany that hides a Jewish girl during World War II.
Ms. Rosenbaum, tall with an easy smile but also a commanding presence, stood in the center of the room with rows of desks on each side, pacing, peppering the students with questions and using each answer to prompt the next. What is an example of foreshadowing in this chapter? Why did the character say that? How would you feel in that situation?
Mr. Otter said of a teacher like Ms. Rosenbaum, “If she only has an abacus in her classroom, she’s missing the boat.”
I am a physics guy who is just as tech immersed as many posters here. But one of my main worries with the "modernization" of the educational system that is being pushed on multiple fronts these days is that it will cause us to lose touch with deeply engrained educational legacies that are at the heart of western civilization itself. I am speaking for one of the Socratic method, where we learn by constantly questioning. The type of thinking that Socrates displayed is at the heart of our civilization. It lies at the root of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. It helped us overthrow despotic absolute monarchs. It led to the development of our democratic systems. I think most of us really do not realize how much Socrates changed the world.
The Socratic method is a way of educating that is "real time" and "interactive". A teacher asks questions, and as a student answers, further questions are asked. The student and the teacher each try to analyze the soundness of each other's logic. This method accomplishes many things, but one very important facet is that it instills in a student the habit of questioning everything. It encourages students to habitually seek after knowledge and truth.
I suspect many readers will not have experienced this type of education to any great extent. Our system has evolved into one that encourages rote memorization of facts. Many of our teachers are information dispensers. Possibly that is why many readers think there will be very little change if education becomes a matter between a student and his/her computer. But perhaps some of us have had a teacher or a professor who has somehow reached us, who caused us to think, who kindled a fire inside of us. In a world where teachers become bystanders to education, I worry that such experiences will become less and less frequent.
Here is a link to a comment I made on June 1, 2011 predicting Gaddafi's decline.
I have observed that over the past several months the number of stories about Iran in the media has been on the increase. The tone and frequency of what I have seen make me suspect the US is preparing the citizenry for a military conflict with Iran. Specifically, I refer to the number of media pieces covering Iran's nuclear capabilities. It is subtle but I don't think it is my imagination. Having watched the run-up to other wars, most especially the wars in Iraq, my intuition is that what I have seen in the media recently is similar to what I saw during the months preceding the other wars. These conflicts don't happen by accident. They require significant logistical planning, and the US would be crazy to jump into a conflict with Iran without devoting significant effort to detailed contingency planning. Part of that planning would very likely include preparing the minds of citizens for war with Iran.
I believe that the narrative of this war will be that we are acting to prevent Iran from developing a strong nuclear weapons program. It will be argued that Iran will become untouchable once it builds an arsenal of nuclear weapons. If it does happen, I don't think it will be easy. Iran is a mountainous territory, unlike western Iraq, which is flat desert. We will not be able to push columns of tanks clear across the country like we did in Iraq. Iran is also more technologically advanced than Iraq, as demonstrated by the possibility that they used GPS spoofing to force a US drone to land in their territory.
I am not sure of what I am saying, but I have found in the past, my instincts have often been correct in matters such as this. The nature of the narrative in TFA really makes me suspect that something will happen within the next few months. There is just too much probability that something will happen in the Strait of Hormuz that will precipitate a shooting war. The posturing. The ultimatums. The movement of military assets into the strait. I could be wrong. Check back in one year. I just don't think the US will let Iran become a nuclear armed state.
BTW, I think I made a post about Libya and Gaddafi a few months ago (June 2011 I think) that was quite correct, if you check my post history.
Yes Twitter is and can be used for protest and civil disobedience ^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C Terrorism.
I believe that there is growing scientific evidence of a link between blood sugar spikes and dementia. I have read of scientists who hypothesize that one of the reasons older people get dementia is that their ability to moderate their blood sugar levels decreases as they get older. This seems perhaps to link in with TFA. Here is a preliminary survey of the scientific literature.
Soon we can turn Antarctica into a useful human settle-able land with farming and cities. Maybe Al Gore Warming isn't so bad.
Above modded +5 interesting???? How about funny?
Addendum: Here are some other peaks with ice closer to the desert: Cerro Aucanquilcha, Callejón Cañapa, Cerro Palpana, San Pedro, and several more.
To be fair, there are no glaciers in the Atacama desert region. You need precipitation to have glaciers... oops, we're back round to evidence of no precipitation again.
Fair enough, though in scanning satellite photos, I notice some mountain peaks that do have some ice, though likely not much. Most especially, Nevado Coropuna, a very high altitude volcano (~6000m) seems to have glaciers. Those are likely due to precipitation caused by air being forced upwards by the mountain. I suspect (though I do not know) that the ice on this mountain would be somewhat old (centuries perhaps in places?), though there would be a limit because of (a) volcanic activity and (b) the slope of the mountain would cause the ice to flow to lower elevations. I suspect that ice cores of the ice on this mountain would indicate precipitation rates for the surrounding areas. Imagine the mountain received precipitation and the surrounding areas didn't for many years. Then an event occurred such that the surrounding areas actually did receive precipitation. I suspect that such an event would result in even more snow on the mountain than other years, which could be read in ice cores.
lol. If you want a series of videos that combines tongue in cheek humor with strong arguments backed up with references to real science, check out this guy's youtube channel. His videos are very well produced, enjoyable, and enlightening.
I give an outline of a scientific argument. You give sneering insults. It is only technobabble to someone with no background in geology. My outline of topics is basic sedimentology. Smaller sedimentary particles take longer to settle than larger particles. Faster water picks up more and larger particles than slower water. Seasonal patterns in sediment deposition give delineation of years. In this way, past precipitation patterns may be inferred. As to rivulets, you should read about how we infer the past existence of liquid water on Mars. Your agressive and content free reply betrays the insecurity of ignorance.
How can you know what kind of weather occurred in Peru over the last 150 years? Did someone find Mayan engravings? Or there is this very old guy that can swear that this never happened since he was born? Or maybe it was a Union soldier that got lost and decided to start a weather journal?
Ok, I have some homework for you. Go home and read your textbook on Sedimentology, focussing specifically on lake sediments caused by runoff. Read about how the flows of rivers can be read by drilling sediment cores out of lake beds. Then find your textbook on Glaciology, and read about how cores of ice drilled from long term ice deposits can be used to track snowfall. While you are at it, you can read about how rainfall events leave specific signatures in sand and dirt, including rivulets and specific patterns in the distribution of different sizes of sedimentary particles. I suspect snowfall events could also be inferred with similar observations.
You would be amazed at what geologists and geographers can find out simply by using observation and logic.
The environment changes, the organisms change. The universe loves organisms, and she'll never stop springing them up in places you'd never think you'd find them.
More realistic version: The environment changes, the organisms die, or at least the ones unsuitable for the new environment die. Evolution is a process of death, either death as an early termination of an organism, or death as a failure to pass on genes. If you step back and look at the grand process of life, it has a beauty to it. The great Permian Triassic extinction brought the rise of the dinosaurs, and the extinction of the dinosaurs allowed a whole new set of species to appear, including our own.
But when you bring it down to your own life, a moral person cannot possibly take pleasure in the thought of the extinction of his children, of his grandchildren, let alone the extinction of his entire species. And that is really at the heart of the issue of global warming. The geological record gives good evidence that (a) the climate can get a great deal warmer than it is today and (b) that those periods of warming are associated with large scale extinctions. There is strong evidence that a warming world will have a profoundly different distribution of precipitation. Given that our current agricultural systems are dependent on our current precipitation patterns, it seems likely that changing precipitation patterns will result in a reduction in agricultural production. If there is less food in the world, then famine is likely to result. The systems we have developed where most of us can live in cities while others far away grow our food will be put under stress. A survey of history will clearly show what happens then. The disinterested intellectual systems of reason decay. Fear grows with material shortages, and with it grows superstition. Humans start to lose track of objective reality, they start to make decisions based on illusion and superstition. As they lose track of reality, humans become increasingly unable to implement the necessary changes to survive in a changing world.
If you want to get an idea of what I am talking about, read about the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages, especially in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Read about the major mass extinctions, and then ponder the question whether humans would have been able to rise above the environmental pressures that destroyed more than 90% of species in the time of the dinosaurs. And even if we weren't to go extinct, consider what it would look like of 90% of us were to die. Not just 90% of those in some far away desert, but 90% of the people in your own country. Consider what such a world would look like. It won't happen tomorrow. It won't happen next year, nor even in a decade. If you live another 30 years, you will see enough to see the shape of things to come. But you will still be able to consume comfortably for some time to come. It is your children who will have to deal with the consequences of your selfish consumption.
Given how unlikely it is for a piece of space debris to hit any particular target, I would count this person as being extraordinarily unlucky to come even close to getting hit. It's the same fallacy at work when someone gets into an accident and survives. They are counted as being lucky to survive, when the person was in fact extremely unlucky to be in an accident in the first place.
Not to mention that we would have a totally different world economy if people weren't continually replacing perfectly functional items, from clothing to electronics to vehicles. So much of the global economy is dependent on people buying more things.
It doesn't have to be this way. We have made the economic system we are currently living under; it has been designed to achieve particular ends, such as efficient allocation of resources. This system is isn't a law of nature. We can change it. We can tweak it.
We've already seen that consumers simply don't care much about freedom, whether it's on their computing devices or in regards to their own civil liberties (do you see many Americans protesting the Patriot Act? No). Yes, history shows that freedom is short-lived, and eventually replaced by non-freedom. We just need to realize that this is the natural order of things, and it's going to happen here sooner or later. The good thing about modern times, however, is that it's much easier to move to different places in the world as circumstances change, so if the US mandates that all computer platforms become walled gardens by law and that Linux is illegal or whatever, it'll still be possible to pack up and move to Canada, Europe, Russia, China, etc.
Wow. Just wow. This coming from the country of Washington, of Jefferson, of Franklin. You will forgive me if I find your apathy disturbing. Your comment demonstrates clearly to me how our modern social science worldview, where we study society as disinterested observers, breeds poisonous apathy. We become emotionally detached from our society. Go back and read the philosophes, the philosophers. Read some Locke, Descartes, Voltaire. Read some Aristotle, some Cicero. I've heard it said that most of the energy for the French Revolution came from young people getting stirred up by reading Cicero.