Well, I think there's little disagreement that a "large" fraction is human caused... I will admit that at least some of us basically troll for fun by denying part 1 and part 2 above, because we hate the "solutions" to part 3.
Read any story touching in any way on global warming, including this one, and you will see an enormous body of comments claiming quite seriously than it isn't happening, and another enormous body of comments claiming that if it is happening then humans have little or nothing to do with it. You will also hear such statements many other places, including on the floor of the US Congress. If these are all trolls, then they're surely part of the best-organized and most subtle trolling campaign in history, with about half the US political establishment in on the act. Neat trick!
Usually part 3 is the establishment of a neo-pol pot regime
Right, because building windmills or tightening CAFE standards is exactly like murdering a fifth of the population over the course of four years. Jesus H. Christ. Do you have any idea at all of what the words you use actually mean?
or national socialism
Never mind, question answered.
or some financial scam to make the rich richer and the poor poorer
Careful, you're starting to sound like one those commie socialist atheist hippie terrorist 99%ers.
or most commonly meaningless feel good frippery that will do absolutely nothing but "raise awareness"
As long as denialism has a substantial voice in the political process, which clearly it does, people who want policy based on science rather than ideology have their work cut out for them. Fighting the propaganda put out by the head-in-the-sand crowd is, at this point, a full-time job.
Starvation has been around forever, yes. Deliberate starvation as a lifestyle among large numbers of adolescents and young adults... not so much. "Diet rebound" or "weight loss rebound" is hardly anecdotal; it's a subject of considerable study. Look it up.
I'm deeply skeptical of attempts to reproduce the "natural" diet, exercise plan, etc. of our ancestors, for a couple of reasons.
First of all, you can't recreate the environment in which humans evolved. You just can't. That world is gone. You could, I suppose, move to central Africa and try to live a life as much as possible like the way you think people lived a quarter of a million years ago, but the environment has changed considerably in that time and in any case, most people in the industrialized world (such as, you know, pretty much everyone who's likely to read the book) aren't going to change their lives to that degree just to get into shape.
Second, who's to say that our remote ancestors even had the ideal environment for their bodies? We're a young species; a lot of our anatomy is obviously best suited to an arboreal lifestyle, and the transition from semi-quadrupedal tree-dwellers to bipedal ground-dwellers isn't really complete -- many of the knee and back problems which even very healthy people tend to develop in old age can be traced to this, as can the not-so-trivial problem that childbirth is more difficult and dangerous for humans than for practically any other mammalian species. It's reasonable to suspect that our physiology, too, is the result of many quick-fix compromises over the last few million years, more so than most animals'.
So the best thing, it seems to me, is not to try to live like our ancestors did in a world that no longer exists, but to come up with diet and exercise plans that work well for us, as we are, in the world in which we live. Weightlifting is an example. No non-human animal does anything even remotely like it, and it's a safe bet that early humans didn't either -- but there's a fair body of evidence that there's no other single type of exercise that carries the same level of whole-body ftiness benefit that repetitively moving heavy weights in carefully planned and controlled motions does. Running is probably the second-best form of exercise in terms of overall benefit, but running with shoes on a concrete or asphalt track is very different from running barefoot (with feet conditioned to it by a lifetime of never even having heard of shoes) through long grass. Bicycling? Again, completely alien to our ancestors.
I'm all for looking at our biology for ways to improve our health, and studying our evolution is certainly one way to do that. But assuming that we're going to come up with any kind of "natural, and therefore healthy" lifestyle based on dim of ideas of how long-ago proto-humans lived in a vanished world is just silly.
There's actually a rather direct connection between the obesity epidemic and the presentation of skeletally thin models as a standard of beauty. An awful lot of basically healthy teenage girls try to starve themselves into looking like models, inevitably fail (girls who become models are already naturally very thin, even before they start the starvation diets) and "rebound" and end up weighing more than they did before. (Starvation sets off all kinds of nasty reactions in the body, and one of the things it does is encourage the body to pack on as much fat as possible when food becomes plentiful again; this made sense for our ancestors, living in times of feast alternating with famine, but it's terrible in the modern world.) After a few cycles of this, they end up with deeply screwed up metabolisms and lifelong problems maintaining a healthy weight. I don't know how much of the modern obsesity problem is attributable to this phenomenon, but I'm guessing it's a non-trivial amount.
I was thinking that. Surely for smaller stars, there's still a "Goldilocks zone" where stellar input + tidal heating = just the right amount of heat. It may be considerably narrower than the Sun's, but there are so many more red dwarfs than there are Sun-like stars that I'd expect the numbers to even out. Add in the extremely long lifetimes of smaller stars, and it seems like red dwarfs are still good candidates for extra-Solar-System life.
You must have needed a whole truckload of straw for that man you just built and then demolished. Good job! Let us know if you need any help cleaning up.
It's not a question of what OS I'm going to run on my current machine; it's a question of what my next machine will be. I really don't like the direction 10.7 went (actually, IMO 10.4 was the high point, and the interface has been trending downhill ever since) and by the time I'm ready to buy again, new Macs will be shipping with 10.8 or higher. At some point, I have to wonder if it's worth it. Sure, there's always the option of buying a new Mac purely for use as a Linux box, but that seems like a real waste of money.
Well yeah, for left-handers I imagine it's great. For the right-handed majority, believe me, not so much. Centered still makes the most sense to me; ergonomically, having your head and hands in line with the middle of the machine is surely the best position for long-term work.
I admire your optimism. And that's not snark; I really do. For myself, I do my best to answer what I perceive to be honest questions, but there is just so damned much wilful ignorance on display in any science-related story that I often have a hard time keeping my baser instincts in check.
It looks like the Lemur does have a centered trackpad, but the Pangolin doesn't. Hard to tell from the pictures, since they don't show any non-angled shots. Something to think about, anyway; thanks for the link. I remember looking at System76 before and being underwhelmed by their offerings, but they appear to have improved. The x220 looks like a slick machine, but it's probably just a little too small.
I've got nothing at all against Apple laptops; they're fine machines, and I'm happily typing this on my MBP. But the "Mac tax," while never as high as the anti-Apple zealots make it out to be, is a real thing; I could get a significantly better price-performance ratio from a number of PC makers. Up until now, the slickness of the Mac OS (in both Classic and OS X versions) and the general fit and finish of Apple products have been enough to keep me from minding too much. But as OS X becomes more iOS-like and thus less suitable for real work, and Linux DEs get better and easier to customize, the interface argument carries less weight. That pretty much leaves the hardware, and I'd like to see what my options are in that realm.
Okay, serious question: does anyone sell a full-sized Linux laptop (or even a Windows laptop that is known to play well with Linux) with a centered trackpad? Every once in a while I think about getting off the Apple treadmill and buying a commodity PC laptop to run Linux on, and what keeps stopping me is the fact that damn near every PC laptop larger than a netbook has a trackpad shifted way the hell over to the left. I've tried using a few of these machines and they just seem like a bad case of RSI waiting to happen. It may seem like a trivial concern, but if your entire right arm from shoulder to wrist is on fire after an hour of work, this is a real problem.
When I saw "genome copying error" I immediately thought "mutation". Someone it trying to make the basic normal process of mutation sound more exciting than it actually is.
The point is that copy errors are not the only kind of mutation, nor indeed the most common kind.
actually, it's officers who have the right to interpret orders. as an enlisted or noncom you can still be convicted for refusing to follow an order from your CoC regardless of merit.
Um, no. Everyone in the military, from E-1 to O-10, has both the right and the duty to refuse an unlawful order. And officers can also convicted for refusing to obey an order if they thought it was unlawful, but the court-martial finds otherwise. Obviously political reality enters into this -- a corporal is a lot more likely to end up behind bars for refusing to obey an order than is a colonel -- but under the law, there's essentially no difference between the obligations of officers and enlisted in this regard.
You should maintain a healthy skepticism of ALL politicians and those who cling to them.
Indeed. And part of that healthy skepticism is recognizing that while all political parties are inherently brutal and corrupt, they are not equally so; some are, in fact, markedly worse than others. The "oh, forget about it, they're all the same" attitude that a lot of people take is intellectual laziness which, if enough people adopt it, paves the road to power for real monsters.
The Conservatives engage in massive election fraud, while their co-ideologues south of the border, the Republicans, make political hay with completely baseless complaints of widespread voter fraud. If I were a suspicious, conspiracy-minded sort, I might think there was some sort of connection. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." But surely this kind of thing is just a coincidence... right?
A couple of days ago, I told an English friend of mine, who was claiming that the UK would never tolerate anything like America's level of right-wing crazy, that I strongly suspected their Tories would be just as bad as our Republicans given the chance. I think this is all the proof I need that it's already happened. Not just the proposal itself, but the smug, smarmy, iron-fist-in-the-velvet-glove way Perry is defending it.
The idea has support from MP Claire Perry, who said, 'There is a "hands off our internet" movement that sees any change in how access is delivered as censorship.'
If this goes through, does this mean that providers such as Comcast, Verizon, et al, who both provide the physical means of communications and who also offer the services described in the article, will now be treated as telecommunication companies, subject to all the rules and regulations therein?
If what you're asking is whether or not internet service will be regulated like phone service, the answer is, "No, of course not." This kind of "If they do X (thing I don't like) then logically it means they must also do Y (thing I do like) -- beware of unintended consequences, government and megacorporations, hah hah hah!" thinking is intuitive and appealing, but it's deeply unrealistic.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I think there's little disagreement that a "large" fraction is human caused ... I will admit that at least some of us basically troll for fun by denying part 1 and part 2 above, because we hate the "solutions" to part 3.
Read any story touching in any way on global warming, including this one, and you will see an enormous body of comments claiming quite seriously than it isn't happening, and another enormous body of comments claiming that if it is happening then humans have little or nothing to do with it. You will also hear such statements many other places, including on the floor of the US Congress. If these are all trolls, then they're surely part of the best-organized and most subtle trolling campaign in history, with about half the US political establishment in on the act. Neat trick!
Usually part 3 is the establishment of a neo-pol pot regime
Right, because building windmills or tightening CAFE standards is exactly like murdering a fifth of the population over the course of four years. Jesus H. Christ. Do you have any idea at all of what the words you use actually mean?
or national socialism
Never mind, question answered.
or some financial scam to make the rich richer and the poor poorer
Careful, you're starting to sound like one those commie socialist atheist hippie terrorist 99%ers.
or most commonly meaningless feel good frippery that will do absolutely nothing but "raise awareness"
As long as denialism has a substantial voice in the political process, which clearly it does, people who want policy based on science rather than ideology have their work cut out for them. Fighting the propaganda put out by the head-in-the-sand crowd is, at this point, a full-time job.
Starvation has been around forever, yes. Deliberate starvation as a lifestyle among large numbers of adolescents and young adults ... not so much. "Diet rebound" or "weight loss rebound" is hardly anecdotal; it's a subject of considerable study. Look it up.
I'm deeply skeptical of attempts to reproduce the "natural" diet, exercise plan, etc. of our ancestors, for a couple of reasons.
First of all, you can't recreate the environment in which humans evolved. You just can't. That world is gone. You could, I suppose, move to central Africa and try to live a life as much as possible like the way you think people lived a quarter of a million years ago, but the environment has changed considerably in that time and in any case, most people in the industrialized world (such as, you know, pretty much everyone who's likely to read the book) aren't going to change their lives to that degree just to get into shape.
Second, who's to say that our remote ancestors even had the ideal environment for their bodies? We're a young species; a lot of our anatomy is obviously best suited to an arboreal lifestyle, and the transition from semi-quadrupedal tree-dwellers to bipedal ground-dwellers isn't really complete -- many of the knee and back problems which even very healthy people tend to develop in old age can be traced to this, as can the not-so-trivial problem that childbirth is more difficult and dangerous for humans than for practically any other mammalian species. It's reasonable to suspect that our physiology, too, is the result of many quick-fix compromises over the last few million years, more so than most animals'.
So the best thing, it seems to me, is not to try to live like our ancestors did in a world that no longer exists, but to come up with diet and exercise plans that work well for us, as we are, in the world in which we live. Weightlifting is an example. No non-human animal does anything even remotely like it, and it's a safe bet that early humans didn't either -- but there's a fair body of evidence that there's no other single type of exercise that carries the same level of whole-body ftiness benefit that repetitively moving heavy weights in carefully planned and controlled motions does. Running is probably the second-best form of exercise in terms of overall benefit, but running with shoes on a concrete or asphalt track is very different from running barefoot (with feet conditioned to it by a lifetime of never even having heard of shoes) through long grass. Bicycling? Again, completely alien to our ancestors.
I'm all for looking at our biology for ways to improve our health, and studying our evolution is certainly one way to do that. But assuming that we're going to come up with any kind of "natural, and therefore healthy" lifestyle based on dim of ideas of how long-ago proto-humans lived in a vanished world is just silly.
There's actually a rather direct connection between the obesity epidemic and the presentation of skeletally thin models as a standard of beauty. An awful lot of basically healthy teenage girls try to starve themselves into looking like models, inevitably fail (girls who become models are already naturally very thin, even before they start the starvation diets) and "rebound" and end up weighing more than they did before. (Starvation sets off all kinds of nasty reactions in the body, and one of the things it does is encourage the body to pack on as much fat as possible when food becomes plentiful again; this made sense for our ancestors, living in times of feast alternating with famine, but it's terrible in the modern world.) After a few cycles of this, they end up with deeply screwed up metabolisms and lifelong problems maintaining a healthy weight. I don't know how much of the modern obsesity problem is attributable to this phenomenon, but I'm guessing it's a non-trivial amount.
That makes sense, thanks.
I was thinking that. Surely for smaller stars, there's still a "Goldilocks zone" where stellar input + tidal heating = just the right amount of heat. It may be considerably narrower than the Sun's, but there are so many more red dwarfs than there are Sun-like stars that I'd expect the numbers to even out. Add in the extremely long lifetimes of smaller stars, and it seems like red dwarfs are still good candidates for extra-Solar-System life.
You must have needed a whole truckload of straw for that man you just built and then demolished. Good job! Let us know if you need any help cleaning up.
It's not a question of what OS I'm going to run on my current machine; it's a question of what my next machine will be. I really don't like the direction 10.7 went (actually, IMO 10.4 was the high point, and the interface has been trending downhill ever since) and by the time I'm ready to buy again, new Macs will be shipping with 10.8 or higher. At some point, I have to wonder if it's worth it. Sure, there's always the option of buying a new Mac purely for use as a Linux box, but that seems like a real waste of money.
Well yeah, for left-handers I imagine it's great. For the right-handed majority, believe me, not so much. Centered still makes the most sense to me; ergonomically, having your head and hands in line with the middle of the machine is surely the best position for long-term work.
I admire your optimism. And that's not snark; I really do. For myself, I do my best to answer what I perceive to be honest questions, but there is just so damned much wilful ignorance on display in any science-related story that I often have a hard time keeping my baser instincts in check.
What level of detail were you hoping for? I might be able to quench your curiosity.
Probably not; to be blunt, people who post comments like GPP's are more interested in whining than they are in knowledge.
It looks like the Lemur does have a centered trackpad, but the Pangolin doesn't. Hard to tell from the pictures, since they don't show any non-angled shots. Something to think about, anyway; thanks for the link. I remember looking at System76 before and being underwhelmed by their offerings, but they appear to have improved. The x220 looks like a slick machine, but it's probably just a little too small.
I've got nothing at all against Apple laptops; they're fine machines, and I'm happily typing this on my MBP. But the "Mac tax," while never as high as the anti-Apple zealots make it out to be, is a real thing; I could get a significantly better price-performance ratio from a number of PC makers. Up until now, the slickness of the Mac OS (in both Classic and OS X versions) and the general fit and finish of Apple products have been enough to keep me from minding too much. But as OS X becomes more iOS-like and thus less suitable for real work, and Linux DEs get better and easier to customize, the interface argument carries less weight. That pretty much leaves the hardware, and I'd like to see what my options are in that realm.
Okay, serious question: does anyone sell a full-sized Linux laptop (or even a Windows laptop that is known to play well with Linux) with a centered trackpad? Every once in a while I think about getting off the Apple treadmill and buying a commodity PC laptop to run Linux on, and what keeps stopping me is the fact that damn near every PC laptop larger than a netbook has a trackpad shifted way the hell over to the left. I've tried using a few of these machines and they just seem like a bad case of RSI waiting to happen. It may seem like a trivial concern, but if your entire right arm from shoulder to wrist is on fire after an hour of work, this is a real problem.
I sure hope there was more to this study that the submitter simply failed to mention
You could always RTFA and find out. Radical notion, I know, but give it a try some time.
When I saw "genome copying error" I immediately thought "mutation". Someone it trying to make the basic normal process of mutation sound more exciting than it actually is.
The point is that copy errors are not the only kind of mutation, nor indeed the most common kind.
I think the modern UH-1s and (especially) AH-1s are considerably upgraded from their Vietnam-era equivalents, but otherwise, yeah, good point.
And the model being built for the Marines, they don't even want it.
AFAIK, that's exactly backward: the Marines have refused to adopt the F/A-18E/F precisely because they're holding out for the F-35.
The F22 is however not a bluff. It is the deadliest, sneakiest air superiority fighter ever created by man.
And apparently, some of its pilots agree with you.
actually, it's officers who have the right to interpret orders. as an enlisted or noncom you can still be convicted for refusing to follow an order from your CoC regardless of merit.
Um, no. Everyone in the military, from E-1 to O-10, has both the right and the duty to refuse an unlawful order. And officers can also convicted for refusing to obey an order if they thought it was unlawful, but the court-martial finds otherwise. Obviously political reality enters into this -- a corporal is a lot more likely to end up behind bars for refusing to obey an order than is a colonel -- but under the law, there's essentially no difference between the obligations of officers and enlisted in this regard.
You should maintain a healthy skepticism of ALL politicians and those who cling to them.
Indeed. And part of that healthy skepticism is recognizing that while all political parties are inherently brutal and corrupt, they are not equally so; some are, in fact, markedly worse than others. The "oh, forget about it, they're all the same" attitude that a lot of people take is intellectual laziness which, if enough people adopt it, paves the road to power for real monsters.
The Conservatives engage in massive election fraud, while their co-ideologues south of the border, the Republicans, make political hay with completely baseless complaints of widespread voter fraud. If I were a suspicious, conspiracy-minded sort, I might think there was some sort of connection. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." But surely this kind of thing is just a coincidence ... right?
Ah, yes. Clearly.
A couple of days ago, I told an English friend of mine, who was claiming that the UK would never tolerate anything like America's level of right-wing crazy, that I strongly suspected their Tories would be just as bad as our Republicans given the chance. I think this is all the proof I need that it's already happened. Not just the proposal itself, but the smug, smarmy, iron-fist-in-the-velvet-glove way Perry is defending it.
The idea has support from MP Claire Perry, who said, 'There is a "hands off our internet" movement that sees any change in how access is delivered as censorship.'
Yes. And?
If this goes through, does this mean that providers such as Comcast, Verizon, et al, who both provide the physical means of communications and who also offer the services described in the article, will now be treated as telecommunication companies, subject to all the rules and regulations therein?
If what you're asking is whether or not internet service will be regulated like phone service, the answer is, "No, of course not." This kind of "If they do X (thing I don't like) then logically it means they must also do Y (thing I do like) -- beware of unintended consequences, government and megacorporations, hah hah hah!" thinking is intuitive and appealing, but it's deeply unrealistic.