... you just have to trust your immune system. The whole "hygienic" germ-free hysteria that our culture promotes (and which has been promoted for many years by many corporations that sell relevant products) is a self-fullfilling prophecy. If you don't eat some dirt as a kid, you won't ever develop the appropriate defenses.
If you don't grovel around in the real world and exercise the ol' immune system, you'll have all kinds of allergies and asthma and whatnot. When I was a kid... oh, never mind. No, DO mind. When I was a kid, hardly anyone had allergies, or asthma, or ear-aches, or any of that crap.
Blanket overuse of antibiotics is exactly the same as pesticides and herbicides ending up with pesticide and herbicide resistant pests and weeds. You can't just make "negative" manifestations of nature go away like that. Most of the/. readership is probably engineer-types, and that is engineer thinking. Biology is way, way more complicated.;-) I feel like I'm one of the few biologists/ecologists here...
Anyway, e.g., the polio outbreak of the 40's and 50's was actually due largely to too much cleanliness. Very young children would typically develop resistance to the (totally ubiquitous, endemic) polio virus in earlier times (via eating dirt), but "modern" notions of hygiene precluded this.
Just look at the numbers. Corn is so heavily subsidized that it sells for less than it costs to produce. Much of that cost is petroleum for fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and tractors. Making ethanol to burn is an energy loss - it's much more efficient to simply burn the damned petroleum in your car instead of spewing it all over the land, harvesting the stuff, processing it into ethanol, and then burning the ethanol.
Biodiesel comes from oil crops, again, heavily dependent on petroleum for big yields. Or you rip down rainforests in various parts of the world for oil-palm plantations, which yield for a couple of years, and then require huge inputs.
These "solutions" are simply not energetically viable.
As far as those of you who don't "believe in Peak Oil", you are free to believe what you want. But have a look at the production numbers, fer chrissake. I think we've already peaked, or at least plateaued, which amounts to the same thing. Per-capita production peaked years ago. Look at supply vs. demand. Look at oil company reports.
And no, oil fields do not refill after a couple of years. I can't believe some of the wishful thinking going on here.
No, not just you. Yes, it seems silly to me, too. Especially since with your typical pee-cee, the hard drive is tucked away in an opaque box, so you won't be seeing the little bugger at work anyway. But some people just don't have a life, and need to see their hard drive innards at work. News for nerds, indeeds. Woot!
"Ok, so now they teach the " Fact of Evolution" not the " Theory of Evolution" hmmm.... you know that humanism, atheism, and being agnostic are all religions too, just because you claim that you don't find science in ID, doesn't mean you are absolutely correct either, both Evolution and ID are Theories, and therefore perfectly legitimate to be discussed, also, if you are so sure ID is incorrect, where is the fear coming from that it cannot even be mentioned and discussed by rational thinking people."
ID can be mentioned and discussed by anyone who wants to. It simply is not science. It is the same old "God of the Gaps" nonsense that has been going on for over a century.
ID is saying "I don't understand (fill in the blank) therefore it must be God!" This is not science.
Evolution is a fact, if anything is. The body of evidence for evolution is overwhelming. The "theory" part is exactly how it all works. It is subject to new data, revision and refinement - that's science.
Humanism etc. are not religions - and it's just bullshit to say so. Religion is claiming that "my book is the literal truth of God, period", and "oh by the way, everybody else's book is blasphemy and you will all burn in hell". No possibility of debate, or discussion, or change.
The Bible (which I have read many times, and indeed studied), whatever else it might be, is not a science text. Get over it. If your faith depends on ID, it is a sorry faith.
OK, I've been in this biz since 1976. MS was nothing then, a purveyor of a barely adequate BASIC interpreter (that, true to form, they ripped off from somebody else, and secured with virulent patents - from DAY ONE. Notice the pattern).
My question is... Why do people put up with this shit? What happened? Who cares what MS thinks? I guess I've just about had it with this bullshit. MS is an emperor with no clothes. They're just a bit bloated bag of shit. I don't care about my/. karma or any other such nonsense. Why can't people just see that the emperor has no clothes? And is full of shit? Has PR and marketing budgets totally overcome people's ability to think rationally? WTF???
Seriously folks. MS was extremeley toxic from day ONE. They totally subverted and perverted the whole notion of the personal computer. Doesn't anyone remember the early 80's? My question is how this was allowed to happen, how did they do it? It blows my mind. Sort of like the Bush admistration - do people like bending over and getting... well, you know.
Gates, like Bush, is a scumbag of the first water, and now he's the richest person on the planet. WTF? Something is so seriously wrong, that it defies description.
OK, I feel a tiny bit better now. But only a tiny bit, because it seems the world is completely bamboozeled by the MS bullshit machine.
The appropriate technical term for outfits like SCO is "corporate scum". They really need to be put out of our misery, the sooner the better. I can't believe they're still out there, twitching away. They should be dead and gone. Disgusting, foul parasites, that's what they've become. And Darl is a pathetic loser to the bone. What's wrong with these people?
"Forest" is land covered in trees, but the reforestation in most of the US is nothing like the original forest. It is greatly reduced in species diversity at every level, from trees, birds, mammals, and right on down to the microbiota.
Your remark about environmentalists 'tending to "overlook" these images' is bullshit.
As you well knew when you posted it, anonymously, and cowardly.
"There currently exists no widely accepted theory (and yes, I mean theory.) which can explain speciation. There might be some fringe ideas that could eventually get refined into something that makes sense, but I don't know of any."
There absolutely do exist widely accepted theories that explain speciation, and have been for some time. In fact, there is a large literature on the subject. In fact, having taught biogeography and evolution at the college level, I have a few textbooks on the subject right here on my bookshelf.
In a nutshell: as soon as there is reproductive isolation between two populations of a species, they drift their separate ways. After a while, the two populations couldn't interbreed even if you brought them back together. (Reproductive isolation can come about in several ways, including geographical, behavioral, polyploidy, etc.)
You can practically see speciation happening all the time, though, of course, the exact moment of the event is impossible to identify, enabling anti-evolutionists to say "there is no proof - evolution has never been seen to occur".
I have made a thorough study of the anti-evolution/creationist wack-job websites. They are dishonest in the extreme, still using the same arguments that were debunked decades ago, and citing references from the 19th century as the latest cutting-edge research. No matter how many times you point this out to them, they continue to present this information as somehow debunking evolution. I used to join in the debate quite actively, but it's a waste of time with these people. I think we're being way too polite with them, and Fundamentalist wack-jobs in general.
I think what most anti-evolutionists don't understand is that very small changes to regulatory genes can have huge effects on the organism. A single change in the timing of a single gene group turning on and off during epigenesis (embryo development) results in a very different organism. Epigenesis is where Evolution has huge leverage.
There are plenty of unsolved mysteries in Evolutionary research, but speciation is not one of them.
- sgage
"Nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of Evolution" - Ernst Mayr
... blogging isn't anything. The word has lost all meaning. "Blogging" - a disgusting word, it sounds like explosive vomiting. The only more disgusting groovy tech word is "bots". Do you know what bots really are? Think "very disgusting parasite". But I digress...
Seriously, though, the term "weblogging" refers to an enormous variety of web-activities. Most weblogs are just relatively frequently updated collections of annotated links, and nothing more.
The word "Blog" confers no magical, or even meaningful, status on the "blogger".
"Really? There's no such thing as a labor market?"
When one big multinational corporation is the only game in town, no, there is no such thing as a labor market. One word: WalMart.
The rest of your msg goes on to describe why the "globalization" thing is so pernicious.
"That means lower wages and less burdensome regulation." Exactly right - screw labor, and screw the environment. "Burdensome", you say, as if the regulations exist simply to burden the noble capitalist. As we well know, without regulations, corporations would continue to dump their shit wherever they please. Say, you wouldn't be an Ayn Rand fan, would you?
"All companies, regardless of size, would like a government attuned to their interests, and all of 'em would dearly love for their competition to just disappear." Yes, exactly. And when they get big enough, they start attuning governments to their interests, and making their competition disappear. The notion of level playing fields and fair competition is, as you well know, total bullshit.
The line between extremely-large corporate interests and the government ritht here in the good ol' USA is blurring fast. When the line goes away, Benito Mussolini had a word for it: he called it perfect fascism.
"Why is it that your shopping for a deal on price is a virtue, but a company doing the same thing is a vice?"
For that matter, why is it that you posted such a stupid question? An individual shopping for the best price in a somewhat fair market is not at all analogous to multinational companies abusing their clout to screw labor, screw the environment, subvert governments and destroy competition whenever and however they can.
In fact, they are so not-analogous that I suspect that even you understood that you were posting a stupid question.
Maybe not, though.
Speaking of mechanical computers...
on
Lego Logic Gates
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
When I was a kid back in the 60's, I had a toy mechanical computer called 'Digicomp'. It was a funky conglomeration of springs-and-rods-and-plastic-things that you built from a kit, and programmed it by putting little pieces of tube over various tabs to affect the flip-flops.
To operate it, you pushed a sliding thing in and out (a clock cycle). You could add and subtract and multiply and divide in binary, albeit rather small numbers. Hard to describe this thing, but it was very cool!
Actually, the following year I got Digicomp II for Christmas, which ran by letting a stream of marbles flow through it by gravity, and these marbles toggled the flip-flops. Very cool again!
These toys came with excellent little books on Boolean Algebra, and sure taught me a lot about the interface between binary math and physical things. I felt right at home when I started programming 6502's and Z-80's in machine language back in the day...
Are these things, or anything like them, still around?
Why does a dish full of rat brain neurons care what happens to a flight simulator? How did they actually "train" it? How do you reward a dish of cells? Where's the feedback? I don't mean any old information from the world, I mean "good/bad" feedback. The article is not particularly detailed.
I don't think that a dishful of cells spontaneously learned how to "control" pitch and roll. What does input data regarding pitch and roll state mean to a dishful of cells? Why should they learn to "control" it?
I am tempted to call bullshit, but I'll just chalk it up to a typically crap piece of science reporting.
I for one would welcome our new CP/M overlords, and in their native tongue, no less! I learned 8080/Z-80 assembly language by disassembling the CP/M BIOS on my Osborne 1 back in the day. Customizing WordStar, Modem7, and all that happy stuff using DDT. Playing Adventure. Working on ZCPR. Wow, that's starting to be a long time ago - thanks for the memories!
- Steve
LSD, Community, and Philosophy...
on
Lysergically Yours
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you are interested in how these inter-relate, you might be amused by Art Kleps' account of the Millbrook experiment in the 60's. It is quite informative, and hilarious at times. He can be a bit self-serving (and down right catty) in his take on the various personalities of the time, especially Leary, but even that is hilarious. Warning: Kleps was a nihilistic solipsist. Check it out!
... and I haven't read every message to see if it's been said already. So here I go...
Holy shit! Who cares about all this crap? What ever happened to real life? How did we survive without convergence of shitty media crap, which is utterly worthless, and always has been?
The majority opinion here seems to be that this matters in some way or another. What a completely useless distraction.
Sorry to fart in your church, but man, who fucking cares?
I'm happy to see that quite a few folks here don't watch TV. I haven't had TV for nearly 10 years, and don't miss it one bit. Ditch the TV, and you will be given a gift of time. The unmediated life is the way to go!
The rights that Corporations currently have, at least in the US (I'll admit that I don't know how things are done in the EU), are way WAY over the top already.
The idea of private corporate entities having the "right" to actually physically invade homes and businesses because they "believe" someone might be violating their IP is a hideous travesty of freedom and of polity. Any politician in any country that would vote for such a thing is a corporate tool, period, and should be dumped ASAP.
If a corporation thinks that the law is being broken, they can call the cops, get a warrant, whatever. But if someone shows up at my home who is not a duly accredited representative of the law with a search warrant, and insists they are going to search my home and property, they are going to be in for a very rude surprise.
For fuck's sake people, wake up! Battle lines being drawn, to coin a phrase.
Slashdot Mirror
... you just have to trust your immune system. The whole "hygienic" germ-free hysteria that our culture promotes (and which has been promoted for many years by many corporations that sell relevant products) is a self-fullfilling prophecy. If you don't eat some dirt as a kid, you won't ever develop the appropriate defenses.
/. readership is probably engineer-types, and that is engineer thinking. Biology is way, way more complicated. ;-) I feel like I'm one of the few biologists/ecologists here...
:-)
If you don't grovel around in the real world and exercise the ol' immune system, you'll have all kinds of allergies and asthma and whatnot. When I was a kid... oh, never mind. No, DO mind. When I was a kid, hardly anyone had allergies, or asthma, or ear-aches, or any of that crap.
Blanket overuse of antibiotics is exactly the same as pesticides and herbicides ending up with pesticide and herbicide resistant pests and weeds. You can't just make "negative" manifestations of nature go away like that. Most of the
Anyway, e.g., the polio outbreak of the 40's and 50's was actually due largely to too much cleanliness. Very young children would typically develop resistance to the (totally ubiquitous, endemic) polio virus in earlier times (via eating dirt), but "modern" notions of hygiene precluded this.
So, eat dirt or die!
- sgage
Just look at the numbers. Corn is so heavily subsidized that it sells for less than it costs to produce. Much of that cost is petroleum for fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and tractors. Making ethanol to burn is an energy loss - it's much more efficient to simply burn the damned petroleum in your car instead of spewing it all over the land, harvesting the stuff, processing it into ethanol, and then burning the ethanol.
Biodiesel comes from oil crops, again, heavily dependent on petroleum for big yields. Or you rip down rainforests in various parts of the world for oil-palm plantations, which yield for a couple of years, and then require huge inputs.
These "solutions" are simply not energetically viable.
As far as those of you who don't "believe in Peak Oil", you are free to believe what you want. But have a look at the production numbers, fer chrissake. I think we've already peaked, or at least plateaued, which amounts to the same thing. Per-capita production peaked years ago. Look at supply vs. demand. Look at oil company reports.
And no, oil fields do not refill after a couple of years. I can't believe some of the wishful thinking going on here.
- sgage
No, not just you. Yes, it seems silly to me, too. Especially since with your typical pee-cee, the hard drive is tucked away in an opaque box, so you won't be seeing the little bugger at work anyway. But some people just don't have a life, and need to see their hard drive innards at work. News for nerds, indeeds. Woot!
- sgage
"Ok, so now they teach the " Fact of Evolution" not the " Theory of Evolution" hmmm.... you know that humanism, atheism, and being agnostic are all religions too, just because you claim that you don't find science in ID, doesn't mean you are absolutely correct either, both Evolution and ID are Theories, and therefore perfectly legitimate to be discussed, also, if you are so sure ID is incorrect, where is the fear coming from that it cannot even be mentioned and discussed by rational thinking people."
ID can be mentioned and discussed by anyone who wants to. It simply is not science. It is the same old "God of the Gaps" nonsense that has been going on for over a century.
ID is saying "I don't understand (fill in the blank) therefore it must be God!" This is not science.
Evolution is a fact, if anything is. The body of evidence for evolution is overwhelming. The "theory" part is exactly how it all works. It is subject to new data, revision and refinement - that's science.
Humanism etc. are not religions - and it's just bullshit to say so. Religion is claiming that "my book is the literal truth of God, period", and "oh by the way, everybody else's book is blasphemy and you will all burn in hell". No possibility of debate, or discussion, or change.
The Bible (which I have read many times, and indeed studied), whatever else it might be, is not a science text. Get over it. If your faith depends on ID, it is a sorry faith.
OK, I've been in this biz since 1976. MS was nothing then, a purveyor of a barely adequate BASIC interpreter (that, true to form, they ripped off from somebody else, and secured with virulent patents - from DAY ONE. Notice the pattern).
/. karma or any other such nonsense. Why can't people just see that the emperor has no clothes? And is full of shit? Has PR and marketing budgets totally overcome people's ability to think rationally? WTF???
My question is... Why do people put up with this shit? What happened? Who cares what MS thinks? I guess I've just about had it with this bullshit. MS is an emperor with no clothes. They're just a bit bloated bag of shit. I don't care about my
Seriously folks. MS was extremeley toxic from day ONE. They totally subverted and perverted the whole notion of the personal computer. Doesn't anyone remember the early 80's? My question is how this was allowed to happen, how did they do it? It blows my mind. Sort of like the Bush admistration - do people like bending over and getting... well, you know.
Gates, like Bush, is a scumbag of the first water, and now he's the richest person on the planet. WTF? Something is so seriously wrong, that it defies description.
OK, I feel a tiny bit better now. But only a tiny bit, because it seems the world is completely bamboozeled by the MS bullshit machine.
Over and out.
- s
The appropriate technical term for outfits like SCO is "corporate scum". They really need to be put out of our misery, the sooner the better. I can't believe they're still out there, twitching away. They should be dead and gone. Disgusting, foul parasites, that's what they've become. And Darl is a pathetic loser to the bone. What's wrong with these people?
- sgage
"Forest" is land covered in trees, but the reforestation in most of the US is nothing like the original forest. It is greatly reduced in species diversity at every level, from trees, birds, mammals, and right on down to the microbiota.
Your remark about environmentalists 'tending to "overlook" these images' is bullshit.
As you well knew when you posted it, anonymously, and cowardly.
- sgage (forest ecologist)
"There currently exists no widely accepted theory (and yes, I mean theory.) which can explain speciation. There might be some fringe ideas that could eventually get refined into something that makes sense, but I don't know of any."
There absolutely do exist widely accepted theories that explain speciation, and have been for some time. In fact, there is a large literature on the subject. In fact, having taught biogeography and evolution at the college level, I have a few textbooks on the subject right here on my bookshelf.
In a nutshell: as soon as there is reproductive isolation between two populations of a species, they drift their separate ways. After a while, the two populations couldn't interbreed even if you brought them back together. (Reproductive isolation can come about in several ways, including geographical, behavioral, polyploidy, etc.)
You can practically see speciation happening all the time, though, of course, the exact moment of the event is impossible to identify, enabling anti-evolutionists to say "there is no proof - evolution has never been seen to occur".
I have made a thorough study of the anti-evolution/creationist wack-job websites. They are dishonest in the extreme, still using the same arguments that were debunked decades ago, and citing references from the 19th century as the latest cutting-edge research. No matter how many times you point this out to them, they continue to present this information as somehow debunking evolution. I used to join in the debate quite actively, but it's a waste of time with these people. I think we're being way too polite with them, and Fundamentalist wack-jobs in general.
I think what most anti-evolutionists don't understand is that very small changes to regulatory genes can have huge effects on the organism. A single change in the timing of a single gene group turning on and off during epigenesis (embryo development) results in a very different organism. Epigenesis is where Evolution has huge leverage.
There are plenty of unsolved mysteries in Evolutionary research, but speciation is not one of them.
- sgage
"Nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of Evolution" - Ernst Mayr
... blogging isn't anything. The word has lost all meaning. "Blogging" - a disgusting word, it sounds like explosive vomiting. The only more disgusting groovy tech word is "bots". Do you know what bots really are? Think "very disgusting parasite". But I digress...
Seriously, though, the term "weblogging" refers to an enormous variety of web-activities. Most weblogs are just relatively frequently updated collections of annotated links, and nothing more.
The word "Blog" confers no magical, or even meaningful, status on the "blogger".
- sgage
Well, I would have said that Zubrin was a wacko nutbag, but "barking mad cult leader" works for me :-)
- sgage
"Really? There's no such thing as a labor market?"
When one big multinational corporation is the only game in town, no, there is no such thing as a labor market. One word: WalMart.
The rest of your msg goes on to describe why the "globalization" thing is so pernicious.
"That means lower wages and less burdensome regulation." Exactly right - screw labor, and screw the environment. "Burdensome", you say, as if the regulations exist simply to burden the noble capitalist. As we well know, without regulations, corporations would continue to dump their shit wherever they please. Say, you wouldn't be an Ayn Rand fan, would you?
"All companies, regardless of size, would like a government attuned to their interests, and all of 'em would dearly love for their competition to just disappear." Yes, exactly. And when they get big enough, they start attuning governments to their interests, and making their competition disappear. The notion of level playing fields and fair competition is, as you well know, total bullshit.
The line between extremely-large corporate interests and the government ritht here in the good ol' USA is blurring fast. When the line goes away, Benito Mussolini had a word for it: he called it perfect fascism.
"Why is it that your shopping for a deal on price is a virtue, but a company doing the same thing is a vice?"
For that matter, why is it that you posted such a stupid question? An individual shopping for the best price in a somewhat fair market is not at all analogous to multinational companies abusing their clout to screw labor, screw the environment, subvert governments and destroy competition whenever and however they can.
In fact, they are so not-analogous that I suspect that even you understood that you were posting a stupid question.
Maybe not, though.
When I was a kid back in the 60's, I had a toy mechanical computer called 'Digicomp'. It was a funky conglomeration of springs-and-rods-and-plastic-things that you built from a kit, and programmed it by putting little pieces of tube over various tabs to affect the flip-flops.
To operate it, you pushed a sliding thing in and out (a clock cycle). You could add and subtract and multiply and divide in binary, albeit rather small numbers. Hard to describe this thing, but it was very cool!
Actually, the following year I got Digicomp II for Christmas, which ran by letting a stream of marbles flow through it by gravity, and these marbles toggled the flip-flops. Very cool again!
These toys came with excellent little books on Boolean Algebra, and sure taught me a lot about the interface between binary math and physical things. I felt right at home when I started programming 6502's and Z-80's in machine language back in the day...
Are these things, or anything like them, still around?
- sgage
... draw pictures on their retinas, deserves whatever they get. :-)
Why does a dish full of rat brain neurons care what happens to a flight simulator? How did they actually "train" it? How do you reward a dish of cells? Where's the feedback? I don't mean any old information from the world, I mean "good/bad" feedback. The article is not particularly detailed.
I don't think that a dishful of cells spontaneously learned how to "control" pitch and roll. What does input data regarding pitch and roll state mean to a dishful of cells? Why should they learn to "control" it?
I am tempted to call bullshit, but I'll just chalk it up to a typically crap piece of science reporting.
The plural of abacus is abaci - only one "i"
- sgage
I parsed it as "thrive on crack" too!
- Steve
... I'm surprised no one has noted the acronym for Tunnel In The Sky.
:-)
I'm so immature (though probably older than 95% of Slashdot posters).
- S
I for one would welcome our new CP/M overlords, and in their native tongue, no less! I learned 8080/Z-80 assembly language by disassembling the CP/M BIOS on my Osborne 1 back in the day. Customizing WordStar, Modem7, and all that happy stuff using DDT. Playing Adventure. Working on ZCPR. Wow, that's starting to be a long time ago - thanks for the memories!
- Steve
If you are interested in how these inter-relate, you might be amused by Art Kleps' account of the Millbrook experiment in the 60's. It is quite informative, and hilarious at times. He can be a bit self-serving (and down right catty) in his take on the various personalities of the time, especially Leary, but even that is hilarious. Warning: Kleps was a nihilistic solipsist. Check it out!
http://okneoac.com/table.html
- Steve
... and I haven't read every message to see if it's been said already. So here I go...
Holy shit! Who cares about all this crap? What ever happened to real life? How did we survive without convergence of shitty media crap, which is utterly worthless, and always has been?
The majority opinion here seems to be that this matters in some way or another. What a completely useless distraction.
Sorry to fart in your church, but man, who fucking cares?
... how much energy it takes to find, gather, concentrate, etc., one kg of "fusion fuel".
- Steve
I'm happy to see that quite a few folks here don't watch TV. I haven't had TV for nearly 10 years, and don't miss it one bit. Ditch the TV, and you will be given a gift of time. The unmediated life is the way to go!
The rights that Corporations currently have, at least in the US (I'll admit that I don't know how things are done in the EU), are way WAY over the top already.
The idea of private corporate entities having the "right" to actually physically invade homes and businesses because they "believe" someone might be violating their IP is a hideous travesty of freedom and of polity. Any politician in any country that would vote for such a thing is a corporate tool, period, and should be dumped ASAP.
If a corporation thinks that the law is being broken, they can call the cops, get a warrant, whatever. But if someone shows up at my home who is not a duly accredited representative of the law with a search warrant, and insists they are going to search my home and property, they are going to be in for a very rude surprise.
For fuck's sake people, wake up! Battle lines being drawn, to coin a phrase.
I'd like to add to this jolly thread, but I've got to go curl a steamer.