From the windowing systems we use on modern computers to the fonts we take for granted seeing on our screens, Steve Jobs may not have been the first inventor of these things, but he saw their potential and used his influence to bring them to the mainstream. His iPod changed he way I listen to music, and made listening to audiobooks a practical and easy thing; imagine scrolling through a 22 hour single audio file without something like a click wheel. Before the iPod, audiobooks were simply impractical, usually spanning dozens of CD's. Or the interface on other mp3 players was only practical while listening to 5 minute files. Now I can carry around a library of 10 to 15 books, along with podcasts of my favorite radio shows.
Again, I am not sure that Steve Jobs actually "invented" these things. Instead, I suspect that Steve's role was to say to his team "design me a good interface for a music player", and then to look at their ideas, and discard those he thought didn't live up to his ideals. He knew what he wanted, and knew how to say no. He was a leader, and he lead entire sectors into the modern age; the computer industry, the computer animation industry, and the music industry, all dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming into the form that we see them in today.
RIP Steve Jobs. You died far too young. You are an example to us all.
I think the idea that climate changes in general, and food issues specifically, will lead to war is pretty well accepted.
When I see people talking about climate and its relationship with incidents such as the rise and fall of civilizations or wars specifically, I somewhat agree. However, I believe it is more complicated than this. My problem with such ideas is that they seem to minimize such things as the role of culture in the prosperity of a society. As an analogue, consider the debate about the role of "nature versus nurture" in the lives of children growing to adults. In the past it was argued that parenting was the most important factor in determining a child's success in life, and that children were like blank slates. Others argued that genetics were far more important. I think those who study such things today say that both nature and nurture play a role. A great example I heard was that the genetics are analogous to the "quality of the musical instrument", but that nurture and free will still have an influence in the types of music that can be played.
I think the problem I have with saying that climate controls the fate of civilizations is that it removes our ability to choose, to influence our fate. I refuse to accept that we as humans are simply debris floating helplessly down the river of fate. We have the ability to change things.
Nowhere at all. You're absolutely right that there are rapid changes (or 'phase changes' in the jargon of some fields). However, if those happened to ice sheets, we might reasonably expect to have seen them before, right?
Alone, maybe these ice sheets melting may be seen as strong evidence of global warming. However, when one takes the bulk of evidence into view, the picture becomes even more certain. Firstly, we have an idea that a great deal of the extra energy being trapped on the Earth is in fact in the deep ocean, where it doesn't yet have a direct interaction with the atmosphere. The temperature of the deep ocean is somewhat simple to measure, and any results from such measurements should be relatively uncontroversial. It seems likely that that stored heat will eventually reach the surface, and when it does, we will definitely notice it in our weather. One place where warming oceans are posited to have an impact is at the interface of the ocean and glaciers, otherwise known as ice shelves. It seems very likely that warmer oceans have already, and will cause an erosion in these ice shelves; when this happens, the speed of ice flow into the ocean will very likely rise, causing increased ice mass transport from the land to the sea. This is already being observed, in Greenland, and elsewhere.
If one combines these observations with other weather phenomenon around the world, the picture becomes even more certain. Catastrophic floods, in Pakistan, in Australia. Droughts in the US South, in Asia, and also in Australia. Retreating Arctic sea ice. Record heat waves. Massive increases in Arctic average temperatures. Disappearing ice shelves. Disappearing glaciers. Steadily rising sea levels. The list of anomalies could go on and on. It is this huge list of anomalies that I find most convincing, especially since these anomalies fit with what has been predicted by scientists. It fits together, with what I understand of the science, with what I observe, with what I read about what others have observed. It fits. Science is always about probability. One evaluates the probabilities of various options and picks the most probable as the most reasonable explanation. This fitting together of my scientific understanding, of my observations, of the observations of others, of the theorizing of others who spend their lives studying these things makes for a highly probable explanation.
On the other hand, we have the so called deniers. Their explanations for my observations, for the observations of other scientists are baffling and shifting. They seem to veer from one explanation to another. First it is sun spots. Then cosmic rays. Then it isn't warming. Then it is, but we cannot be causing it? Why? Because it has warmed before in the past when we weren't there. Then it is all a conspiracy. Somehow all of the independent scientists around the world are conspiring to cook the books, to falsify. Falsify what? So those melting glaciers aren't really melting? The heat waves aren't really happening? The arctic ice sheets aren't really melting? The permafrost isn't really thawing? Oh no no, they say, "the Earth is warming, but we aren't causing it". Well then what is causing it? Why specifically are the scientists wrong? What are the alternative theories? "Well, it might be sun spots, or it might be cosmic rays. " The problem is, their explanations do not gybe with the evidence. For one, they trends in sun spots and cosmic rays do not match the temperature trends observed, as Mike Lockwood of Rutherford Labs has opined in published scientific literature.
Looking at the balance of the above, I must ascribe a higher probability of truth to the cogent arguments put forward by scientists, rather than the muddled and seemingly dishonest arguments put forward by others. Either most of the world's scientists are constructing an elaborate conspiracy, complete with inter-related falsified data that, across tens of thousands of papers creates a uniformly
I'll believe and support AGW when it's advocates support going full nuclear.
So you then implicitly acknowledge that you have no intellectual basis for your beliefs on global warming, and you instead base your views on the perceived trustworthiness of various authorities? This is what the above statement seems to imply.
Watching Microsoft lately, it seems likely to me that Microsoft is starting to use its current OS hegemony to make coexistence with other OS's increasingly difficult. Some minor anecdotes: our current corporate email system is from MS. Most employees access it via webmail. Lately MS has made it nearly unusable on browsers other than Internet Explorer. It was always less than ideal using Firefox to access it, but now it requires re-entry of the password nearly every minute. The password reset utility requires a silly workaround, requiring a browser restart. I personally don't use this system, but other users will likely be irritated enough to fall back to using Windows, rather than their Mac laptop. The corporate Wifi network also seems Windows-centric, with the login process being cumbersome on non-windows laptops. The recent Slashdot posting about new Windows 8 PC's having the potential to lock out other operating systems also gives me chills, and fits my hypothesis.
During its rise to power, Microsoft was known to use technical sabotage to destroy its opponents. It would write its OS in ways that would cause competing software to either crash or run sub-optimally. This, along with deeply unethical business tactics were largely responsible for Microsoft's dominance. I am sceptical that Microsoft will be able to succeed in preserving its current dominant position. Much of the computing world is now based on the web, where more open standards are often demanded. However, that doesn't mean that MS can't do harm trying to hold on to its dominant position.
What I really want to know is how all these trees got together and decided to fuck up the measurements.
One hypothesis: Humans have messed up salmon spawning cycles. We overfish. We dam rivers. We do all sorts of things to interfere with salmon reaching the forests where they formerly spawned. When fish die after spewing, they are eaten by animals such as bears. Those bears then go elsewhere and defecate. The nutrients in their waste, over years, decades, and centuries is an important factor in the growth rates of trees. Those nutrients, transported by the salmon to the forest and distributed initially by animals form a huge net transport of nutrients from one system to another. One could then hypothesize that this might be related to changes in tree ring growth.
I've posted this here before in the past, but the marginal tax rates from the mid 1940's to the early 1960's was 93% on money earned by an individual over $200000. This period was also a time of outstanding economic health for the American middle class. One could make the argument that this act of redistribution effectively created the modern American consuming middle class. I could make the argument that having more money in the hands of the masses allowed them to (a) consume the goods that modern technology was creating and (b) invest in education, allowing workers who would have previously languished in low paying jobs to become engineers and doctors. However, I don't have the time to write a proper detailed argument right now.
Watching HP change from an innovator and creator of truly innovative products into a marketing flagship has been disappointing. They spun off their truly innovative activities to Agilent, and instead sought to become largely a brand-name stamped on generic low quality computers that could have been made by any number of competitors. In my opinion this is a result of adopting business school ideology in the management of the company. The MBA type managers had very little actual knowledge of technology. They wanted to maximize profit while minimizing costs, leveraging existing assets to provide the highest rate of return. Creating truly innovative products was seen as too expensive and not profitable enough. The managers likely didn't see the benefits in true innovation, the way it percolates throughout a company. Now HP is a shell of its former self. It is sad to see a formerly great organization reduced to this.
It isn't a stereotype. It is what is taught. I also have engineer friends who are taking or have taken their MBA's, but this doesn't change the fact that a key part of what is taught is that to manage a group of people, one does not need to know or understand what those underneath you do. My friends got the degree because it is a credential, an a way into other jobs. I am sure some of what they learned will be helpful too. However I have also seen first hand the consequences of a person with an MBA managing a food production company when he had no background in food production. The result was disastrous.
The key problem is that they are taught to abstract out the details of what they are managing, to effectively blind themselves to minutiae, to delegate those things to others. They manage based largely on parameters, on graphs and equations that are supposed to describe what is most important about the businesses they are managing. What they typically lack is the type of vision that someone like Steve Jobs has. They often have trouble crafting a wider view of what they do. I am certain there are exceptions to this, perhaps many exceptions. But this doesn't change what lies at the heart of the ideology of most business schools.
Those steps, which include hiring managers from other companies, could transform the free-wheeling Apple created by Jobs into a more bureaucratic company. But Sculley says he’s convinced “a more disciplined environment will actually help us get innovative hints done quickly and effectively.”
Apple, while having a solid management, still might miss Mr. Jobs. The company is weak in top engineering talent to guide product development. Moreover, more traditional managers like Mr. Sculley have often proved no more adept at running technology companies than the original entrepreneurs. Some analysts and former employees are worried that Apple is losing its spark and becoming stodgy, a process some refer to as ”Scullification.”
But problems could arise in a year or two, when the time comes to develop completely new products. Almost all analysts and company officials say that Mr. Jobs lent a certain creative spark and vision to Apple, as exemplified in his leadership in the development of the Macintosh computer, a project he pushed with such passion that he neglected other Apple models.
Mr. Sculley will hear none of that. ”We have the foundations in place for a really great Apple,” he said on Friday, in one of the first interviews he has granted since emerging victorious from his struggle with Mr. Jobs. ”We talk about vision and what Steve contributed to vision, and it’s an immense contribution, no doubt about it,” said Mr. Sculley.
”Computers were big boring blue boxes until Steve Jobs came along,” Mr. Sculley said. And Apple will continue to be driven by the same vision of making computers for the individual in a youth-oriented company, he asserted. ”But people tend to confuse vision with innovation,” Mr. Sculley added. ”The real question is innovation, and most of the innovation, including the innovations in Macintosh, came from a lot of people.”
The distinguishing thing about Steven Jobs is that he has a vision, a pervasive philosophy, about the role of personal computers in modern life. His whole professional career has been an effort–remarkably successful, at that–to bring that vision to life.
I can think of no greater expose of the weaknesses of the MBA bean counter management methodology than the comparison of Steve Jobs with John Sculley. The above quotes paint a picture of Sculley as a visionless bureaucrat with little appreciation for the subtleties of technology, and of Steve Jobs as a genius whose vision spanned the technology he was building and the users he was marketing to. The management school idea that managers do not need to understand their products to be good managers is patently ridiculous in this light.
In the mid 1980's we saw an advertising executive from Pepsi replace the founding technological genius of the company. Was the future really in any doubt?
Science is NEVER settled, it is only through questioning and skepticism that science can progress.
Exactly. This is why we should never trust science, and certainly never take action on climate change.
I know what you mean. Newton's and Einstein's theories of gravity always seemed suspect to me. Which is why I always try to remain inside buildings or attached to the ground in some way, just in they are wrong and gravity can change into a repulsive force.
This is nothing more than a clever restatement of epistemological nihilism. Basically restated it says, "Because we cannot produce a perfect theory, we can have no theory whose predictions we can have a high degree of certainty about,"
It's a moronic position when you consider that the same basic fact that no theory is complete applies to all theories, including theories like Newtonian mechanics and Quantum mechanics, both of which despite obvious missing pieces and flaws are among the most successful theories ever developed.
One of the more insightful comments I have read in this thread.
You and I have very different views of the world, for the simple reason that you're American, and I'm from Argentina. Our views on politics is simply too different, the difference being that I'm familiar with the US political system, and you probably just know that Argentina is in South America and its capital is Buenos Aires. As a curiosity you can read the preamble of the Argentine constitution and find it interestingly familiar.
Well, from memory I believe the PM/President of Argentina is Eva Kirshner or something like that. I'm not sure if you have an American style Congress/Senate/Presidential Head of State structure, or whether it is closer to the British Parliamentary system. Judging from the Spanish origin of your country, and because you have fallen under the American sphere of influence during your country's formative years, I would suspect you have a president as Head of State, because the alternative would be that you have a royal figurehead as head. That would imply that you similarly have a Congress and a Senate.
It strikes me that your country has a weakness for ideology. You went the more socialist route, and your economy crashed. Specifically, some time in the 1980's as I remember, your debt had built up. Unfortunately for you, your debt was denominated in US dollars. A crisis of confidence caused your currency to collapse, while your debt, denominated in US dollars remained unchanged or increased. This caused your effective debt to increase massively, a hundred times or more if memory serves. This was of course unserviceable. Most of the cherished government services your country had built up ceased to exist. Your formerly healthy middle class largely disappeared, and your country entered an economic stasis similar to that of Cuba after the 1950's, with most of the cars on your streets dating to the 1980's for more than a decade.
Politically your country has experienced massive ideological swings, with Peronists one pole and more right wing leaders on the other (you will forgive me if I have trouble categorizing Peron as "left" or "right", as I believe both left and right wing extremist ideologies are remarkably similar, especially in their inability to describe a successful path for managing a civilization. In any case, your country has had violent swings from left to right, and has had trouble I think finding a stable equilibrium in "the center".
If I could describe the weaknesses in Argentina that might have lead to its difficulties, I would say that (a) your country has a weakness for ideologies and (b) that your country doesn't make or manufacture much of anything that the rest of the world demands, or at least demands enough to support generous public expenditures. Germany and Norway on the other hand do make or manufacture things, and they are able to afford more generous public expenditures, while still maintaining a healthy economy.
Oh, and you had a war with Britain over the Falkland Islands.
The above is from memory. I could probably be more elegant and accurate if I did some research. I can understand your skepticism about government action and socialism. However, I do believe it is possible to find a comfortable center where the best ideas are taken from both left and right. Above all, I believe it is important to be rationally educated, and to understand the philosophical justifications for what we think. Otherwise, I worry that America for one will fall under the sway of dangerously irrational leaders who will wreak havoc on the lives of the citizens they lead.
Ok, first let's dial down the tone here; I am really not sure the insults are necessary. Thank you for your detailed reply.
No, I simply stated that book STORES exists as an excercise in commerce. It's in their interest to make profit off the goods they offer, and yes, the worth of a product is measured in the profit it makes.
I think my concerns are broader than just bookstores. I would hope you would agree that our system of commerce is a tool to serve the public good. That is, our system of money serves many purposes, limiting our consumption to goods we need, working hard to produce goods for others, following careers in fields where there is demand, producing goods that are needed, etc. In other words, this system is a tool designed to increase the material well being of society. But only a tool.
In the case of literature, we have a system of copyright that was designed to encourage authors to write. It allowed the authors to extract a profit for the work they created for a limited time. Thereafter, the material they created would revert fully to the public domain. This system was not designed to give the author absolute ownership of the work they created, but it did allow them some measure of control over it. The key thing to remember here is that the copyright system was a tool to benefit the public good; it balanced the needs of the public for written work with the needs of the author to eat, live, and prosper materially.
What I fear is changing is that we are mistaking those tools, commerce, copyright, etc. for the public good that they were meant to serve. Instead of creating something for the public good and making money by doing so, we think the purpose of making these goods is only to make money. Money becomes the reason for everything, for working, for creating, for living. Is the purpose of a bookstore ONLY to make money? Or does it also serve another purpose?
And this is the first point where I'm going to disagree with you: You're just limiting yourself to Western civilization. Completely forgetting about our dear friends at the East and their own schools of thought.
I am not completely forgetting the East. However since this is the civilization I live in, and since many of the principles of our civilization have seeped into the eastern civilizations, I feel it is appropriate for me to base my discussion around such Western views. Our systems of money, of laws, of science, of education, of private property come almost completely from ancient Greek civilization. Those ideas have spread around the world, including to China, Japan, and the other Asian nations.
1) The works will not disappear from public consciousness. "On ne tue point les idees". Ideas cannot be killed.
Perhaps, but ideas can die a slow death from neglect. Case in point: the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was founded on classical Greek ideals and principles (the same ideals and principles that inspired the French Philosophes). For a time, it was quite democratic (apart from slavery of course). Officials were elected yearly, and there was a Senate that was tasked with preventing the rise of a tyrant. Then Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, starting the path that would lead to a long string of emperors, some despotic and some good. Arguably the Roman Empire was at its peak under its first real emperor, Augustus. After that, Rome slowly started moving away from the Greek heritage that had made it so powerful. Emperor Constantine came to power, signalling a rise in superstition and a decline in rationalism. The Roman Empire became a theocracy, casting aside its rational heritage. And for about 1000 years, Rome forgot many things. Most pointedly, the successor civilization to the Roman Empire lost the ability to build complex architectural structures. This drought in architecture was broken in the 1400's, when Filippo Brunelleschi, inspired by his exploration of Roman architecture b
Small town bookstores sell the crap you mentioned, because it SELLS. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Sartre DON'T.
You sir are a troll. I think you will find you and I have profoundly different world views. I suspect that in your worldview, society exists as an exercise in commerce. We humans are born, we become educated so that we can earn and then we consume. In this worldview, a book, say by Rousseau, exists as a way to make money. People buy it for whatever reason, be it amusement or education, and the bookseller/author/publisher make money. The fact that, Rousseau's "The Social Contract" for instance is one of the defining books of our civilization, that it informed the framers of the US constitution for example is beside the point. Its worth is measured in the profit it makes.
I do not doubt that many bookstores would not be able to profit financially by selling philosophical classics. I acknowledge the fact that the level of culture and education in much of the West, especially in the US has deteriorated. And I suspect that if you haven't seriously read Voltaire, Rousseau, and Sartre, you will have no idea what I am bemoaning, no idea what will actually be lost if we as a civilization begin to forget our intellectual roots. These works will just disappear in the public consciousness. Our civilization will forget what democracy is, will forget about Truth and Justice, about the beauty of science, about the joy of understanding the world for its own sake. We will become a nation of consumers, voting for whatever politician we think will increase our ability to consume. The problem is that we will lack the intellectual ability to understand what is actually in our own best interest. Our lack of real education and culture will make us too stupid to make real decisions about our society; others more powerful than us will start making the real decisions in their own interests. Looking at the current level of political discourse, I would say we are already well on that path.
All that the "independents" in my area offer is the same junk as in the supermarket "best-sellers" list or remaindered copies of over-hyped books.
Ask them to order-in something different and they claim "that is out of print" and perhaps I would prefer some garbage written by Jeremy Clarkson as that is also filed in the Transport section.
Let them die.
Go visit Powell's Books in Portland. Then come back and tell me you will eat your words. Most people do not understand what a real bookstore looks like, one that is devoted not to playing the corporate money game, but instead to disseminating knowledge and culture. Go to bookstores in Paris' Latin Quarter. When I was there, these stores were full of people. Philosophical works were displayed prominently; Voltaire, Rousseau, Sartre were easy to find, while empty vapid corporate writing was difficult to find.
Perhaps I am a bit of a luddite, but I am deeply uncomfortable with literature that only exists as states in a chip. If we could imagine a totalitarian government, perhaps like Stalin's or Mussolini's, there is the potential for such a government to implement widespread control over what we read and write. We all take for granted the freedom of the internet, but that can change. A totalitarian government could build systems that could track every page you read, and wipe books out of existence with the execution of a single command. At least with a printed book, there is no way to wipe it out other than to physically destroy it. There is no possibility of surreptitiously modifying the work after it has been published, deleting words or paragraphs without a trace. I have read enough history to have a deep distrust of human nature. A survey of the history of the Roman Empire should be enough to display what we are capable of doing.
Most people have not cared about new big ideas throughout history.
Well, maybe, and maybe not. I think you might be surprised at how widespread Enlightenment ideas were in Europe. Faraday used to give public scientific demonstrations that were widely attended. However, what matters I think more is that the elites of our society, those who make the important decisions are increasingly seeing the world through dollar signs. The Public Interest is less important to them, and private interest is their dominant concern. They backhandedly acknowledge the Public Interest by saying that it is served by everyone acting in their own private interests. This is a profound shift from the Enlightenment approach, that led to the rise of our modern democratic systems. Enlightenment philosophes like Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire tried to balance the Public and private interests; they believed in liberty and justice for all members of society. Today, politics seems to be an exercise in maximizing the gross national product.
That fails to explain why there are colder outer planets with significant atmosphere that have orders of magnitutude more violence. And the place on earth with the higest average wind is Antartica [sic].
Comparing the weather systems between Earth and say Jupiter/Saturn is like comparing apples to oran ^C ^C ^C ^C elephants. Different atmospheric composition. Different gravitation. They are gas giants. Their atmospheres are very deep. The chemicals in their atmospheres have different latent heats of vaporization than those on Earth. The main driver of weather phenomenon on Earth such as hurricanes is the condensation of water vapor, which is by mass a relatively small percentage of the Earth's atmosphere. I would speculate that on Jupiter or Saturn, you have chemicals condensing in storms that compose a very large percentage of the atmosphere (by mass). This alone would result in far more violent weather.
Honestly, who feeds you this stuff? You make me want to change my sig to
"A problem with the self-esteem movement is that it encourages idiots to be proud of their opinions."
When a reasonable scientific speculation can be labelled as "troll", I think it speaks more to the decline in public scientific discourse than it does about my comment.
Given the continuing rise in ocean temperatures, and given the fact that northern latitudes have experienced a marked warming in recent years, it seems to me a reasonable speculation that this bloom is at least in part temperature related.
Japan's economic success lasted a couple of decades, and by all measure ended 20 years ago.
Your measure of economic success is skewed in my opinion. Has Japan suddenly regressed to being undeveloped? Did they rip up their roads, their hight speed rail lines, their factories? Did they suddenly become Somalia? Or even Argentina? No. They had the "misfortune" of developing a prosperous middle class economy. And that is being declared an unacceptable luxury by the modern robber barons/billionaires who mould our current economic system.
I think a lot of what we attribute to our superior economic system, or work ethic, or diversity (or maybe we don't attribute it to anything, and simply take for granted that we are #1 and always will be) is actually very predictable based on the discovery of the world's largest stockpile of undeveloped natural resources in 1492. A new resource is discovered or developed, it is exploited resulting in growth, then it peters out. Look at how population growth within the US has shifted from California to Texas in the last decade. Some say it is mostly superior governance, I say it is mostly cheap land.
I guess that explains Japan's economic success. Or Hong Kong's. Or Switzerland's. Or Taiwan's. Or Korea's. Yep. Land. I'm not sure I am fully able to explain America's economic success. But I think an hypothesis is forming for me about America's economic decline, that it is associated with an intellectual decline exemplified by half-baked economic ideologies indirectly referred to in the above comment.
In my opinion, there is something wrong when the west's best engineers and architects are designing structures in countries that train very few of their own engineers and architects. It seems to me an economic distortion that is a result of our oversized reliance on foreign oil. Our best and our brightest are often not working on building our own society. I am skeptical of the long term economic wisdom of our current system.
Slashdot Mirror
From the windowing systems we use on modern computers to the fonts we take for granted seeing on our screens, Steve Jobs may not have been the first inventor of these things, but he saw their potential and used his influence to bring them to the mainstream. His iPod changed he way I listen to music, and made listening to audiobooks a practical and easy thing; imagine scrolling through a 22 hour single audio file without something like a click wheel. Before the iPod, audiobooks were simply impractical, usually spanning dozens of CD's. Or the interface on other mp3 players was only practical while listening to 5 minute files. Now I can carry around a library of 10 to 15 books, along with podcasts of my favorite radio shows.
Again, I am not sure that Steve Jobs actually "invented" these things. Instead, I suspect that Steve's role was to say to his team "design me a good interface for a music player", and then to look at their ideas, and discard those he thought didn't live up to his ideals. He knew what he wanted, and knew how to say no. He was a leader, and he lead entire sectors into the modern age; the computer industry, the computer animation industry, and the music industry, all dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming into the form that we see them in today.
RIP Steve Jobs. You died far too young. You are an example to us all.
I think the idea that climate changes in general, and food issues specifically, will lead to war is pretty well accepted.
When I see people talking about climate and its relationship with incidents such as the rise and fall of civilizations or wars specifically, I somewhat agree. However, I believe it is more complicated than this. My problem with such ideas is that they seem to minimize such things as the role of culture in the prosperity of a society. As an analogue, consider the debate about the role of "nature versus nurture" in the lives of children growing to adults. In the past it was argued that parenting was the most important factor in determining a child's success in life, and that children were like blank slates. Others argued that genetics were far more important. I think those who study such things today say that both nature and nurture play a role. A great example I heard was that the genetics are analogous to the "quality of the musical instrument", but that nurture and free will still have an influence in the types of music that can be played.
I think the problem I have with saying that climate controls the fate of civilizations is that it removes our ability to choose, to influence our fate. I refuse to accept that we as humans are simply debris floating helplessly down the river of fate. We have the ability to change things.
Nowhere at all. You're absolutely right that there are rapid changes (or 'phase changes' in the jargon of some fields). However, if those happened to ice sheets, we might reasonably expect to have seen them before, right?
Alone, maybe these ice sheets melting may be seen as strong evidence of global warming. However, when one takes the bulk of evidence into view, the picture becomes even more certain. Firstly, we have an idea that a great deal of the extra energy being trapped on the Earth is in fact in the deep ocean, where it doesn't yet have a direct interaction with the atmosphere. The temperature of the deep ocean is somewhat simple to measure, and any results from such measurements should be relatively uncontroversial. It seems likely that that stored heat will eventually reach the surface, and when it does, we will definitely notice it in our weather. One place where warming oceans are posited to have an impact is at the interface of the ocean and glaciers, otherwise known as ice shelves. It seems very likely that warmer oceans have already, and will cause an erosion in these ice shelves; when this happens, the speed of ice flow into the ocean will very likely rise, causing increased ice mass transport from the land to the sea. This is already being observed, in Greenland, and elsewhere.
If one combines these observations with other weather phenomenon around the world, the picture becomes even more certain. Catastrophic floods, in Pakistan, in Australia. Droughts in the US South, in Asia, and also in Australia. Retreating Arctic sea ice. Record heat waves. Massive increases in Arctic average temperatures. Disappearing ice shelves. Disappearing glaciers. Steadily rising sea levels. The list of anomalies could go on and on. It is this huge list of anomalies that I find most convincing, especially since these anomalies fit with what has been predicted by scientists. It fits together, with what I understand of the science, with what I observe, with what I read about what others have observed. It fits. Science is always about probability. One evaluates the probabilities of various options and picks the most probable as the most reasonable explanation. This fitting together of my scientific understanding, of my observations, of the observations of others, of the theorizing of others who spend their lives studying these things makes for a highly probable explanation.
On the other hand, we have the so called deniers. Their explanations for my observations, for the observations of other scientists are baffling and shifting. They seem to veer from one explanation to another. First it is sun spots. Then cosmic rays. Then it isn't warming. Then it is, but we cannot be causing it? Why? Because it has warmed before in the past when we weren't there. Then it is all a conspiracy. Somehow all of the independent scientists around the world are conspiring to cook the books, to falsify. Falsify what? So those melting glaciers aren't really melting? The heat waves aren't really happening? The arctic ice sheets aren't really melting? The permafrost isn't really thawing? Oh no no, they say, "the Earth is warming, but we aren't causing it". Well then what is causing it? Why specifically are the scientists wrong? What are the alternative theories? "Well, it might be sun spots, or it might be cosmic rays. " The problem is, their explanations do not gybe with the evidence. For one, they trends in sun spots and cosmic rays do not match the temperature trends observed, as Mike Lockwood of Rutherford Labs has opined in published scientific literature.
Looking at the balance of the above, I must ascribe a higher probability of truth to the cogent arguments put forward by scientists, rather than the muddled and seemingly dishonest arguments put forward by others. Either most of the world's scientists are constructing an elaborate conspiracy, complete with inter-related falsified data that, across tens of thousands of papers creates a uniformly
I'll believe and support AGW when it's advocates support going full nuclear.
So you then implicitly acknowledge that you have no intellectual basis for your beliefs on global warming, and you instead base your views on the perceived trustworthiness of various authorities? This is what the above statement seems to imply.
Watching Microsoft lately, it seems likely to me that Microsoft is starting to use its current OS hegemony to make coexistence with other OS's increasingly difficult. Some minor anecdotes: our current corporate email system is from MS. Most employees access it via webmail. Lately MS has made it nearly unusable on browsers other than Internet Explorer. It was always less than ideal using Firefox to access it, but now it requires re-entry of the password nearly every minute. The password reset utility requires a silly workaround, requiring a browser restart. I personally don't use this system, but other users will likely be irritated enough to fall back to using Windows, rather than their Mac laptop. The corporate Wifi network also seems Windows-centric, with the login process being cumbersome on non-windows laptops. The recent Slashdot posting about new Windows 8 PC's having the potential to lock out other operating systems also gives me chills, and fits my hypothesis.
During its rise to power, Microsoft was known to use technical sabotage to destroy its opponents. It would write its OS in ways that would cause competing software to either crash or run sub-optimally. This, along with deeply unethical business tactics were largely responsible for Microsoft's dominance. I am sceptical that Microsoft will be able to succeed in preserving its current dominant position. Much of the computing world is now based on the web, where more open standards are often demanded. However, that doesn't mean that MS can't do harm trying to hold on to its dominant position.
What I really want to know is how all these trees got together and decided to fuck up the measurements.
One hypothesis: Humans have messed up salmon spawning cycles. We overfish. We dam rivers. We do all sorts of things to interfere with salmon reaching the forests where they formerly spawned. When fish die after spewing, they are eaten by animals such as bears. Those bears then go elsewhere and defecate. The nutrients in their waste, over years, decades, and centuries is an important factor in the growth rates of trees. Those nutrients, transported by the salmon to the forest and distributed initially by animals form a huge net transport of nutrients from one system to another. One could then hypothesize that this might be related to changes in tree ring growth.
I've posted this here before in the past, but the marginal tax rates from the mid 1940's to the early 1960's was 93% on money earned by an individual over $200000. This period was also a time of outstanding economic health for the American middle class. One could make the argument that this act of redistribution effectively created the modern American consuming middle class. I could make the argument that having more money in the hands of the masses allowed them to (a) consume the goods that modern technology was creating and (b) invest in education, allowing workers who would have previously languished in low paying jobs to become engineers and doctors. However, I don't have the time to write a proper detailed argument right now.
Watching HP change from an innovator and creator of truly innovative products into a marketing flagship has been disappointing. They spun off their truly innovative activities to Agilent, and instead sought to become largely a brand-name stamped on generic low quality computers that could have been made by any number of competitors. In my opinion this is a result of adopting business school ideology in the management of the company. The MBA type managers had very little actual knowledge of technology. They wanted to maximize profit while minimizing costs, leveraging existing assets to provide the highest rate of return. Creating truly innovative products was seen as too expensive and not profitable enough. The managers likely didn't see the benefits in true innovation, the way it percolates throughout a company. Now HP is a shell of its former self. It is sad to see a formerly great organization reduced to this.
It isn't a stereotype. It is what is taught. I also have engineer friends who are taking or have taken their MBA's, but this doesn't change the fact that a key part of what is taught is that to manage a group of people, one does not need to know or understand what those underneath you do. My friends got the degree because it is a credential, an a way into other jobs. I am sure some of what they learned will be helpful too. However I have also seen first hand the consequences of a person with an MBA managing a food production company when he had no background in food production. The result was disastrous.
The key problem is that they are taught to abstract out the details of what they are managing, to effectively blind themselves to minutiae, to delegate those things to others. They manage based largely on parameters, on graphs and equations that are supposed to describe what is most important about the businesses they are managing. What they typically lack is the type of vision that someone like Steve Jobs has. They often have trouble crafting a wider view of what they do. I am certain there are exceptions to this, perhaps many exceptions. But this doesn't change what lies at the heart of the ideology of most business schools.
From the quotes in TFA:
Those steps, which include hiring managers from other companies, could transform the free-wheeling Apple created by Jobs into a more bureaucratic company. But Sculley says he’s convinced “a more disciplined environment will actually help us get innovative hints done quickly and effectively.”
Apple, while having a solid management, still might miss Mr. Jobs. The company is weak in top engineering talent to guide product development. Moreover, more traditional managers like Mr. Sculley have often proved no more adept at running technology companies than the original entrepreneurs. Some analysts and former employees are worried that Apple is losing its spark and becoming stodgy, a process some refer to as ”Scullification.”
But problems could arise in a year or two, when the time comes to develop completely new products. Almost all analysts and company officials say that Mr. Jobs lent a certain creative spark and vision to Apple, as exemplified in his leadership in the development of the Macintosh computer, a project he pushed with such passion that he neglected other Apple models.
Mr. Sculley will hear none of that. ”We have the foundations in place for a really great Apple,” he said on Friday, in one of the first interviews he has granted since emerging victorious from his struggle with Mr. Jobs. ”We talk about vision and what Steve contributed to vision, and it’s an immense contribution, no doubt about it,” said Mr. Sculley.
”Computers were big boring blue boxes until Steve Jobs came along,” Mr. Sculley said. And Apple will continue to be driven by the same vision of making computers for the individual in a youth-oriented company, he asserted. ”But people tend to confuse vision with innovation,” Mr. Sculley added. ”The real question is innovation, and most of the innovation, including the innovations in Macintosh, came from a lot of people.”
The distinguishing thing about Steven Jobs is that he has a vision, a pervasive philosophy, about the role of personal computers in modern life. His whole professional career has been an effort–remarkably successful, at that–to bring that vision to life.
I can think of no greater expose of the weaknesses of the MBA bean counter management methodology than the comparison of Steve Jobs with John Sculley. The above quotes paint a picture of Sculley as a visionless bureaucrat with little appreciation for the subtleties of technology, and of Steve Jobs as a genius whose vision spanned the technology he was building and the users he was marketing to. The management school idea that managers do not need to understand their products to be good managers is patently ridiculous in this light.
In the mid 1980's we saw an advertising executive from Pepsi replace the founding technological genius of the company. Was the future really in any doubt?
Science is NEVER settled, it is only through questioning and skepticism that science can progress.
Exactly. This is why we should never trust science, and certainly never take action on climate change.
I know what you mean. Newton's and Einstein's theories of gravity always seemed suspect to me. Which is why I always try to remain inside buildings or attached to the ground in some way, just in they are wrong and gravity can change into a repulsive force.
This is nothing more than a clever restatement of epistemological nihilism. Basically restated it says, "Because we cannot produce a perfect theory, we can have no theory whose predictions we can have a high degree of certainty about,"
It's a moronic position when you consider that the same basic fact that no theory is complete applies to all theories, including theories like Newtonian mechanics and Quantum mechanics, both of which despite obvious missing pieces and flaws are among the most successful theories ever developed.
One of the more insightful comments I have read in this thread.
Thank you for your post. It was enlightening.
You and I have very different views of the world, for the simple reason that you're American, and I'm from Argentina. Our views on politics is simply too different, the difference being that I'm familiar with the US political system, and you probably just know that Argentina is in South America and its capital is Buenos Aires. As a curiosity you can read the preamble of the Argentine constitution and find it interestingly familiar.
Well, from memory I believe the PM/President of Argentina is Eva Kirshner or something like that. I'm not sure if you have an American style Congress/Senate/Presidential Head of State structure, or whether it is closer to the British Parliamentary system. Judging from the Spanish origin of your country, and because you have fallen under the American sphere of influence during your country's formative years, I would suspect you have a president as Head of State, because the alternative would be that you have a royal figurehead as head. That would imply that you similarly have a Congress and a Senate.
It strikes me that your country has a weakness for ideology. You went the more socialist route, and your economy crashed. Specifically, some time in the 1980's as I remember, your debt had built up. Unfortunately for you, your debt was denominated in US dollars. A crisis of confidence caused your currency to collapse, while your debt, denominated in US dollars remained unchanged or increased. This caused your effective debt to increase massively, a hundred times or more if memory serves. This was of course unserviceable. Most of the cherished government services your country had built up ceased to exist. Your formerly healthy middle class largely disappeared, and your country entered an economic stasis similar to that of Cuba after the 1950's, with most of the cars on your streets dating to the 1980's for more than a decade.
Politically your country has experienced massive ideological swings, with Peronists one pole and more right wing leaders on the other (you will forgive me if I have trouble categorizing Peron as "left" or "right", as I believe both left and right wing extremist ideologies are remarkably similar, especially in their inability to describe a successful path for managing a civilization. In any case, your country has had violent swings from left to right, and has had trouble I think finding a stable equilibrium in "the center".
If I could describe the weaknesses in Argentina that might have lead to its difficulties, I would say that (a) your country has a weakness for ideologies and (b) that your country doesn't make or manufacture much of anything that the rest of the world demands, or at least demands enough to support generous public expenditures. Germany and Norway on the other hand do make or manufacture things, and they are able to afford more generous public expenditures, while still maintaining a healthy economy.
Oh, and you had a war with Britain over the Falkland Islands.
The above is from memory. I could probably be more elegant and accurate if I did some research. I can understand your skepticism about government action and socialism. However, I do believe it is possible to find a comfortable center where the best ideas are taken from both left and right. Above all, I believe it is important to be rationally educated, and to understand the philosophical justifications for what we think. Otherwise, I worry that America for one will fall under the sway of dangerously irrational leaders who will wreak havoc on the lives of the citizens they lead.
Ok, first let's dial down the tone here; I am really not sure the insults are necessary. Thank you for your detailed reply.
No, I simply stated that book STORES exists as an excercise in commerce. It's in their interest to make profit off the goods they offer, and yes, the worth of a product is measured in the profit it makes.
I think my concerns are broader than just bookstores. I would hope you would agree that our system of commerce is a tool to serve the public good. That is, our system of money serves many purposes, limiting our consumption to goods we need, working hard to produce goods for others, following careers in fields where there is demand, producing goods that are needed, etc. In other words, this system is a tool designed to increase the material well being of society. But only a tool.
In the case of literature, we have a system of copyright that was designed to encourage authors to write. It allowed the authors to extract a profit for the work they created for a limited time. Thereafter, the material they created would revert fully to the public domain. This system was not designed to give the author absolute ownership of the work they created, but it did allow them some measure of control over it. The key thing to remember here is that the copyright system was a tool to benefit the public good; it balanced the needs of the public for written work with the needs of the author to eat, live, and prosper materially.
What I fear is changing is that we are mistaking those tools, commerce, copyright, etc. for the public good that they were meant to serve. Instead of creating something for the public good and making money by doing so, we think the purpose of making these goods is only to make money. Money becomes the reason for everything, for working, for creating, for living. Is the purpose of a bookstore ONLY to make money? Or does it also serve another purpose?
And this is the first point where I'm going to disagree with you: You're just limiting yourself to Western civilization. Completely forgetting about our dear friends at the East and their own schools of thought.
I am not completely forgetting the East. However since this is the civilization I live in, and since many of the principles of our civilization have seeped into the eastern civilizations, I feel it is appropriate for me to base my discussion around such Western views. Our systems of money, of laws, of science, of education, of private property come almost completely from ancient Greek civilization. Those ideas have spread around the world, including to China, Japan, and the other Asian nations.
1) The works will not disappear from public consciousness. "On ne tue point les idees". Ideas cannot be killed.
Perhaps, but ideas can die a slow death from neglect. Case in point: the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was founded on classical Greek ideals and principles (the same ideals and principles that inspired the French Philosophes). For a time, it was quite democratic (apart from slavery of course). Officials were elected yearly, and there was a Senate that was tasked with preventing the rise of a tyrant. Then Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, starting the path that would lead to a long string of emperors, some despotic and some good. Arguably the Roman Empire was at its peak under its first real emperor, Augustus. After that, Rome slowly started moving away from the Greek heritage that had made it so powerful. Emperor Constantine came to power, signalling a rise in superstition and a decline in rationalism. The Roman Empire became a theocracy, casting aside its rational heritage. And for about 1000 years, Rome forgot many things. Most pointedly, the successor civilization to the Roman Empire lost the ability to build complex architectural structures. This drought in architecture was broken in the 1400's, when Filippo Brunelleschi, inspired by his exploration of Roman architecture b
Small town bookstores sell the crap you mentioned, because it SELLS. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Sartre DON'T.
You sir are a troll. I think you will find you and I have profoundly different world views. I suspect that in your worldview, society exists as an exercise in commerce. We humans are born, we become educated so that we can earn and then we consume. In this worldview, a book, say by Rousseau, exists as a way to make money. People buy it for whatever reason, be it amusement or education, and the bookseller/author/publisher make money. The fact that, Rousseau's "The Social Contract" for instance is one of the defining books of our civilization, that it informed the framers of the US constitution for example is beside the point. Its worth is measured in the profit it makes.
I do not doubt that many bookstores would not be able to profit financially by selling philosophical classics. I acknowledge the fact that the level of culture and education in much of the West, especially in the US has deteriorated. And I suspect that if you haven't seriously read Voltaire, Rousseau, and Sartre, you will have no idea what I am bemoaning, no idea what will actually be lost if we as a civilization begin to forget our intellectual roots. These works will just disappear in the public consciousness. Our civilization will forget what democracy is, will forget about Truth and Justice, about the beauty of science, about the joy of understanding the world for its own sake. We will become a nation of consumers, voting for whatever politician we think will increase our ability to consume. The problem is that we will lack the intellectual ability to understand what is actually in our own best interest. Our lack of real education and culture will make us too stupid to make real decisions about our society; others more powerful than us will start making the real decisions in their own interests. Looking at the current level of political discourse, I would say we are already well on that path.
All that the "independents" in my area offer is the same junk as in the supermarket "best-sellers" list or remaindered copies of over-hyped books.
Ask them to order-in something different and they claim "that is out of print" and perhaps I would prefer some garbage written by Jeremy Clarkson as that is also filed in the Transport section.
Let them die.
Go visit Powell's Books in Portland. Then come back and tell me you will eat your words. Most people do not understand what a real bookstore looks like, one that is devoted not to playing the corporate money game, but instead to disseminating knowledge and culture. Go to bookstores in Paris' Latin Quarter. When I was there, these stores were full of people. Philosophical works were displayed prominently; Voltaire, Rousseau, Sartre were easy to find, while empty vapid corporate writing was difficult to find.
Perhaps I am a bit of a luddite, but I am deeply uncomfortable with literature that only exists as states in a chip. If we could imagine a totalitarian government, perhaps like Stalin's or Mussolini's, there is the potential for such a government to implement widespread control over what we read and write. We all take for granted the freedom of the internet, but that can change. A totalitarian government could build systems that could track every page you read, and wipe books out of existence with the execution of a single command. At least with a printed book, there is no way to wipe it out other than to physically destroy it. There is no possibility of surreptitiously modifying the work after it has been published, deleting words or paragraphs without a trace. I have read enough history to have a deep distrust of human nature. A survey of the history of the Roman Empire should be enough to display what we are capable of doing.
Most people have not cared about new big ideas throughout history.
Well, maybe, and maybe not. I think you might be surprised at how widespread Enlightenment ideas were in Europe. Faraday used to give public scientific demonstrations that were widely attended. However, what matters I think more is that the elites of our society, those who make the important decisions are increasingly seeing the world through dollar signs. The Public Interest is less important to them, and private interest is their dominant concern. They backhandedly acknowledge the Public Interest by saying that it is served by everyone acting in their own private interests. This is a profound shift from the Enlightenment approach, that led to the rise of our modern democratic systems. Enlightenment philosophes like Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire tried to balance the Public and private interests; they believed in liberty and justice for all members of society. Today, politics seems to be an exercise in maximizing the gross national product.
That fails to explain why there are colder outer planets with significant atmosphere that have orders of magnitutude more violence. And the place on earth with the higest average wind is Antartica [sic].
Comparing the weather systems between Earth and say Jupiter/Saturn is like comparing apples to oran ^C ^C ^C ^C elephants. Different atmospheric composition. Different gravitation. They are gas giants. Their atmospheres are very deep. The chemicals in their atmospheres have different latent heats of vaporization than those on Earth. The main driver of weather phenomenon on Earth such as hurricanes is the condensation of water vapor, which is by mass a relatively small percentage of the Earth's atmosphere. I would speculate that on Jupiter or Saturn, you have chemicals condensing in storms that compose a very large percentage of the atmosphere (by mass). This alone would result in far more violent weather.
Honestly, who feeds you this stuff? You make me want to change my sig to
"A problem with the self-esteem movement is that it encourages idiots to be proud of their opinions."
But I like my current sig better.
When a reasonable scientific speculation can be labelled as "troll", I think it speaks more to the decline in public scientific discourse than it does about my comment.
ROFL
Given the continuing rise in ocean temperatures, and given the fact that northern latitudes have experienced a marked warming in recent years, it seems to me a reasonable speculation that this bloom is at least in part temperature related.
Japan's economic success lasted a couple of decades, and by all measure ended 20 years ago.
Your measure of economic success is skewed in my opinion. Has Japan suddenly regressed to being undeveloped? Did they rip up their roads, their hight speed rail lines, their factories? Did they suddenly become Somalia? Or even Argentina? No. They had the "misfortune" of developing a prosperous middle class economy. And that is being declared an unacceptable luxury by the modern robber barons/billionaires who mould our current economic system.
I think a lot of what we attribute to our superior economic system, or work ethic, or diversity (or maybe we don't attribute it to anything, and simply take for granted that we are #1 and always will be) is actually very predictable based on the discovery of the world's largest stockpile of undeveloped natural resources in 1492. A new resource is discovered or developed, it is exploited resulting in growth, then it peters out. Look at how population growth within the US has shifted from California to Texas in the last decade. Some say it is mostly superior governance, I say it is mostly cheap land.
I guess that explains Japan's economic success. Or Hong Kong's. Or Switzerland's. Or Taiwan's. Or Korea's. Yep. Land. I'm not sure I am fully able to explain America's economic success. But I think an hypothesis is forming for me about America's economic decline, that it is associated with an intellectual decline exemplified by half-baked economic ideologies indirectly referred to in the above comment.
In my opinion, there is something wrong when the west's best engineers and architects are designing structures in countries that train very few of their own engineers and architects. It seems to me an economic distortion that is a result of our oversized reliance on foreign oil. Our best and our brightest are often not working on building our own society. I am skeptical of the long term economic wisdom of our current system.