The ending of exponential growth of academia around 1970: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg... "Actually, during the period since 1970, the expansion of American science has not stopped altogether. Federal funding of scientific research, in inflation-corrected dollars, doubled during that period, and by no coincidence at all, the number of academic researchers has also doubled. Such a controlled rate of growth (controlled only by the available funding, to be sure) is not, however, consistent with the lifestyle that academic researchers have evolved. The average American professor in a research university turns out about 15 Ph.D students in the course of a career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D is basically training to become a research professor. It didn't take long for American students to catch on to what was happening. The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since."
AC wrote: "Jenny Mcarthy is a free thinker... and embodies the best tennants of 19th century science, when people made decisions based on their observations and in light of the best known understanding at the time. Today we have something akin to a blind belief in whatever the church, ughh i mean experts happen to be handing out at the time. Today an expert more often than nought is somebody who is paid to lobby for a paticular world view. Think about it in 2000 all the experts were saying the stock market is going to be going up and up and up. In 2008 all the experts were saying that real estate is a can't loose proposition, and I just happen to have a house you can buy. Stop believing in experts. Believe in yourself. If it is cloudy, and your skin is getting wet when you stand outside, it is probably raining outside despite the fact that the weather experts are on the radio right now saying you will have a clear and sunny day outside. Stand up and have the courage to say it's raining, fuck the experts. Jenny Mcarthy is a hero. So in spite of the fact that I have no advanced degree in meterology, I feel that I can accurately tell if it is raining or not. This used to be common sense, but today there is a global witch hunt on for whomever decides to believe in their own observations vs what the experts in the media are saying."
Conflict-of-interest definitely makes this all harder to sort through. Compare with the book "Disclipined Minds" http://disciplinedminds.tripod... "Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
All that said, a lot of time the experts are right -- for example, expert Civil Engineers designing and building bridges. Thinking is hard work, and a lot of "free thinking" may be re-inventing plausible but otherwise bad ideas. Perhaps the more variables involved, and the less we know about them, the more problematical the notion of "Expertise" becomes, other than to admit ignorance (which does not sound that impressive)? However, 2000 years ago, perhaps bridge building was more by trial and error, same as much medicine today? Certainly Cathedral building shows a process of trial and error before civil engineering became better understood in terms of materials and structures.
Here is a related diagram about different types of problem domains, where perhaps bridge building today is in one area but medicine in another:
Like at Chernobyl, as I suggest here: http://p2pfoundation.net/backu... "At SUNY Stony Brook, I knew one grad student who studied wildlife (turtles) in a reservation around a nuclear contaminated area, and while there was more mutations, in general, the wildlife was thriving [because human activities including hunting and habitat destruction were effectively excluded].... So, despite the problems, half-seriously, I suggest designating the NY Adirondack Park (where I live) for a nuclear waste disposal of glassified (vitrified) apple-sized lumps of waste.:-) That would be very good for a resurgence of wildlife in the Park. I might move out, but I would know a place I love would be "forever wild" for sure.:-)"
"Keeping old plants online is simply the capitalist thing to do: They're bought and paid for and still work. Why would you shut them down?"
In theory, fission-based nuclear energy is quite workable. In practice so far, within either a Soviet command economy or a Western capitalist economy, the "externalities" of systemic risk of meltdown (like Fukushima) have not been accounted for in up-front costs. So, these plants have never been "paid for". It is just that the general public has been forced to take on a risk, either as individuals or as a society. Fukushima is a tragic example of this. And many people affected by Fukushima are just left to pay many of the disastrous costs on their own, plus taxes go up for everyone, plus there are many other costs (like inspecting Japanese seafood or seaweed for radiation). So, the cost of Fukushima was not paid for up front. If the plants had been shut down sooner, huge future costs would have been avoided. Because capitalistic organizations eventually specialize in internalizing profits while socializing risks and costs and capturing their regulators via revolving doors and (legal) bribes, high risk nuclear power is a particularly difficult thing for such societies to manage. Sure, we could build much safer reactors, including probably thorium ones, but even now plans for new reactors are not fully fail-safe. TRIGA is an example of an alternative that is much more fail-safe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Of course, I could say much the same for coal plants and their environmental affects. as externalities. Oil dependency also has huge costs in military defense of supply lines and pollution risks like the Exxon Valdez in Alaska or recently the US Gulf Coast.
That is why many renewables (as well as energy efficiency) have been cheaper than fossil fuels since the 1970s, all things considered. But all things were not considered, so we got coal and oil and bug health costs and big defense costs all paid either on health insurance premiums or taxes, not electric bills or at the gasoline pump. Even PV has externalities (including potentially cadmium runoff from some types of panels, as well as potentially blighting the landscape), although overall they are probably much less than coal and oil, and ideas like "solar roadways" may reduce the blight problem, as well as reduce the need for above ground electrical wires. http://www.solarroadways.com/i... "The Solar Roadway is a series of structurally-engineered solar panels that are driven upon. The idea is to replace all current petroleum-based asphalt roads, parking lots, and driveways with Solar Road Panels that collect energy to be used by our homes and businesses."
With the costs of PV solar falling as predicted decades ago, to now reaching "grid parity" in more and more areas, it is rapidly becoming uneconomical to install anything but solar, especially as battery and fuel cell technology continues to improve for energy storage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... "Predictions from the 2006 time-frame expected retail grid parity for solar in the 2016 to 2020 era, but due to rapid downward pricing changes, more recent calculations have forced dramatic reductions in time scale, and the suggestion that solar has already reached grid parity in a wide variety of locations."
Hot fusion or cold (LENR) fusion may change that equation. I don't see fission being more cost effective than solar anytime soon though, although maybe factory-made micro reactors (like Hyperion) will prove me wrong on that.
1998: "'God of the Internet' is dead " http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci... "Jon Postel, a key figure in the development of the Internet from its inception, died at the weekend of heart problems aged 55."
Now, thanks to a successful internet, I have learned all about how to prevent and reverse heart disease by eating more vegetables and getting enough vitamin D (a problem for many indoors-oriented technies). Sadly, too late for Jon. Hopefully not too late for Roblimo though? http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
The failure to adopt SQLite as a de-facto "Standard" for web browsers shows a deep problem, since a shared FOSS codebase is probably the best standard we can have. http://programmers.stackexchan...
Contrast that with suggestions of making de-facto standards by on the ground successes with working code. Which is what SQLite has done in a whole area of embedded storage.
Like Alan Kay has said, any standard with more than three lines is ambiguous. I can agree having had to work implementing a couple standards at IBM.
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/1... "The mitochondrial dysfunction identified in the JAMA study I've been talking about is ultimately only one downstream symptom of many upstream causes. Other researchers have found systemic inflammation,(ix) brain inflammation,(x) gut inflammation,(xi) elevated levels of toxins and metals, gluten and casein antibodies,(xii) nutrient deficiencies including omega-3 fats,(xiii) vitamin D,(xiv) zinc, and magnesium, and collections of metabolic dysfunction related to quirky genes that make it difficult to perform chemical reactions essential for health in the body such as methylation and sulfation.(xv)
The take home message here is that the answer to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders will not be found in one of these factors, but in all of them taken together in varying degrees in each individual. There is no such thing as "autism." Rather there are "autisms"--different patterns of biological dysfunction unique to each child that result in multiple insults to the brain that all manifest with symptoms we call autism."
Also: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org... http://www.dailycal.org/2014/0... "To further validate their theories, the researchers cited a study involving Somali mothers, who naturally absorb less sunlight due to their dark skin pigmentation. When they moved north to Stockholm, a less-sunny region, they were found to be 4.5 times more likely to have autistic children, compared to the the country's lighter-skinned natives."
But, would be nice to develop it before-hand; from: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... --- Self-replicating technical artifacts such as dogs, corn, and trees have been in use by humanity for thousands of years. While humans cannot lay credit to the original creation of such systems, they can claim the adaptation and selective breeding of these for defense, food, and building materials.
In the past few millennia, many people have become dependent on technology that is not self-replicating. Primarily this technology involves fairly pure forms of metals, plastics, and crystals. These technologies have expanded the earth's human carrying capacity in the short term, but are not sustainable in the long term. Such technologies lack the closed resource cycles, independent operation, redundancy, and resiliency found in natural systems. A symptom of the use of such non-sustainable systems is the fear that a single problem (like Y2K) could cause a major disruption of life-support infrastructure in the developed world.
For example, both Brittle Power (Amory and Hunter Lovins) and Energy, Vulnerability, and War (Wilson Clark and Jake Page), make clear how vulnerable our energy infrastructure is. As Brittle Power (pg.391-392) mentions, this vulnerability also holds for food and manufacturing production:
"The production and distribution of food are currently so centralized, with small buffer stocks and supply lines averaging thirteen hundred miles long, that bad weather or a truckers' strike can put many retail stores on short rations in a matter of days. This vulnerability is especially pronounced in the Northeast, which imports over eighty percent of its food. In a disaster, the lack of regional self sufficiency both in food production and food storage would cause havoc, but no one is planning for such possibilities."
And in reference to energy production:
"The Joint Committee on Defense Production notes that American industry is tailor made for easy disruption. Its qualities include large unit scale, concentration of key facilities, reliance on advanced materials inputs and on specialized electronics and automation, highly energy- and capital- intensive plants, and small inventories. The Committee found that correcting these defects, even incrementally and over many decades, could be very costly. But the cost of not doing so could be even higher -- a rapid regression of tens, or even hundreds of years in the American economy, should it be gravely disrupted."
In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on earth is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space. The heart of any community is its library, which stores a wide variety of technological processes, only some of which are used at any one time in any specific environment. If an independent community is like a cell, its library is like its DNA. A library has many functions: the education of new community members; the support of important activities such as farming and material extraction; historical recording of events; support for planning and design. And the library grows and evolves with the community.
The earth's library of technological knowledge is fragmented and obscure, and some important knowledge has been lost already. How can we create a library strong enough to foster the growth of new communities in space? How can we today use what we know to improve human life? --- The development of the Oscomak infrastructure will be an ambitious undertaking, requiring the involvement of tens of thousands of knowledgeable individuals over a period of years. There is no way one single entity can fund this work. However, there is a way to allow such individuals to cooperate -- as an "open source" community, sharing knowledge and building a distributed repository over the internet.
The US great plains over the last two hundred years in some places went from two feet or more of topsoil covered with with Prairie grass, Native Americans, and Buffalo to now more like six inches of topsoil mostly due to atrocious soil farming practices by the European invaders more akin to strip mining than stewardship. That is a lot of carbon loss. http://bigprairieprepress.com/... "The farming practices of early settlers caused erosion of the topsoil. By the late 1870's the topsoil had vanished in the center of the prairie and the settlers who farmed there moved out to its edges. This was the beginning of the process that would create the Big Prairie Desert. This pattern of land use, dry conditions and soil erosion is what caused the dust bowl that was begining at about the same time in states further west."
Related (although perhaps an underestimate of the total loss): http://boingboing.net/2011/05/... "These pillars --- located outside a rest area off Highway 80 in Adair County, Iowa -- represent the topsoil Iowa has lost since large-scale farming began 150 years ago. In the 19th century, Iowa had 14-16 inches of topsoil. Today, it has just 6-8 inches of the stuff, and more is being lost all the time. The irony: The very farms that are depleting the topsoil desperately need it, too. "
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde... "Although the figure is frequently being revised upwards with new discoveries, over 2,700 Gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon is stored in soils worldwide, which is well above the combined total of atmosphere (780 Gt) or biomass (575 Gt), most of which is wood. Carbon is taken out of the atmosphere by plant photosynthesis; about 60 Gt annually is incorporated into various types of soil organic matter (SOM) including surface litter; about 60 Gt annually is respired or oxidized from soil.[2] "
So, three-quarters of more of the carbon-rich top soil of the center of an entire continent (North America) was lost, much of it a century ago. That I think may help explain some global climate changes even more than recent fossil fuel use.
From: http://people.oregonstate.edu/... "When we lose soil, we are losing a resource that is, for practical purposes and human timespans, essentially non-renewable. An inch of soil takes between 200 - 1000 years to form, yet it can be swept away in a few seasons."
Ways to create topsoil faster included organic farming (focusing on adding organic matter to the soil) and remineralization from ground-up rock dust. http://remineralize.org/
Still, maybe without all the extra carbon in the air we'd already be in another mini ice age?
As I'm too often involved in myself sometimes::-) http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d... "This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful."
But more seriously, there are a lot of fine dedicated well-meaning people who work at three letter agencies. There are no doubt a lot of not-so-fine ones too. Any big bureaucracy has complex and often self-perpetuating social dynamics. If such places are to improve, IMHO one needs to support and encourage the fine people there and hope their actions can outweigh the not-so-fine ones. For example, IMHO Tom Armour was one of the finer ones: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
Saying the KGB, the NSA, the Russian Oligarchy and so on are empty husks is a bit like saying capitalism is full of contradictions and unfairness and so it will fall apart on its own. I've said such things myself sometimes: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post... "Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?"
Yet capitalism is still here and seemingly stringer than ever (as far as control of the US political machinery). And may well be for some time as the underlying power system morphs into new forms. Ancient China went hundreds of years at a stretch with peasants suffering all sorts of things, especially famine, and not much changing. Yet, something like a "basic income" might be a step towards improving capitalism even if it would not fix everything about it (the worst of consumerism, addictions, waste, short--term planning, systemic risks, externalities, etc.).
Short-term power in human societies also translates itself into sexual access and the spread of genes (e.g. Bill Clinton, theoretically). The best we can perhaps due as a society is structure how the competition for mates plays out in our society, as in what is valued. James P. Hogan wrote about that in his sc
By Marine Major General Smedley Butler: http://www.ratical.org/ratvill... "WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes...."
Of course, "heart disease" is a racket too these days: https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... "The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions. Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."
Possibly could draw an expanded parallel between "terrorism" and "heart disease" as far as causes and cures? As in invading Afghanistan and Iraq was like giving a world with morally-clogged arteries an angioplasty and then a triple bypass? At great costs? And without really solving the underlying problem (from past short-sighted behavior by the USA and others)? While people who sell arms and people who own domestic oil sources and drilling equipment (Bush friends?) profit greatly from all the uncertainty?
By me on the security clearance process reduces cognitive diversity in three letter agencies: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201... "This essay discusses how the USA's security clearance process (mainly related to ensuring secrecy) may [ironically] have a counter-productive negative effect on the USA's national security by reducing "cognitive diversity" among security professionals. "
So much of the discussion on this topic ignores that some people like working around plants in agriculture, or like building things with machine tools, or like working with heavy equipment, and so on. Granted, they may not like their boss, or may not like being overworked, or may not like low pay. To suggest such people become programmers (or nail salon workers or whatever) ignores that a lot of a person's life satisfaction may come from doing work they love. I love programming and think it is a useful thing for many people to know, but I accept most people may not like to do a lot of programming, say if they like working outdoors or like working with people or plants or visibly moving machines. It is a deep flaw in our current discussions to ignore the potential positive value of meaningful work in someone's life and just focus on getting people to do work they may not like 40 hours a week so they can get a paycheck to buy stuff, raise a family, and maybe have a hobby they enjoy in their remaining time. "Work" can be better than that.
Two essays on that, one by EF Schumacher: http://www.centerforneweconomi... "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
And one by Bob Black: http://www.whywork.org/rethink... "What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them."
Still, with more and more AI and robotics, there will be less and less jobs where it makes sense to pay a human to do them. So, we need a mix of a "basic income" for the exchange economy, an expanded volunteer/gift economy, improved local subsistence via 3D printing, solar panels, cold fusion, and agricultural robotics, and improved democratic participatory planning at all levels of government. Then at least parents will be able to spend more time raising their kids well, a job that can take about as much time and energy as most people can put into it, especially if you forgo institutionalizing kids from an early age in prison-like compulsory schools. More ideas on this: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
It turns out they are not that much cheaper though, so I don't really see the value proposition in practice implied by Phil Shapiro since they are not yet $100 and screens still cost money: "Review: Asus crafts a tiny $179 Chromebox out of cheap, low-power parts" http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...
I'm surprised Roblimo could miss pointing the Chromebox out, just mentioning the Raspberry Pi. Although he was right to point out the SSD speedup is significant for any small computer.
Another big miss is that for US$50 you can buy an Android Smartphone and use it only with Wi-Fi. Example of what we paid $50 for a few months ago, but now is $31? http://www.amazon.com/Kyocera-... "The Kyocera Hydro is sophistication and style in a mainstream Android smartphone that can work for everyone. Plus it offers water-resistance, giving consumers the âoeno-fearâ durability and security they demand. With a 3.5 inch HVGA touchscreen, 3.2 MP camera and video, and Android 4.0, you get the best of all worlds."
Although I would much rather use the Chromebook with a keyboard for making content than trying to use an Android phone. But $30 to be connected with the global internet? That is an amazing realization of many educational technologist's dreams (e.g. Alan Kay Dynabook or OLPC XO-1). And perhaps also some nightmares... See also the 1950s short story by Theodore Sturgeon called "The Skills of Xanadu" on where that all could lead.
Also, I don't see why a teacher or librarian is so keen to limit people's mobility (although it doesn't surprise me, going with the "school is prison" meme).
A big value to my $250 Samsung Chromebook is how light and portable it is. I still use my Quad Core Mac Pro Desktop with three big screens for work and running VirtualBox VMs (and the Chromebook could not replace that, especially the screens) -- used to run Debian for about five years until we (my wife especially) got tired of all the random breakage with every "apt-get dist-upgrade" around 2008 (probably much better now). But I use my Chromebook (with Linux under the covers) for just noodling around or surfing the web and posting on Slashdot sitting in our living room, or doing some light for-fun development work. As I said in another post, I wrote this JavaScript-based information manager tool bootstrapping system entirely on the Chromebook: https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Why do I use the Chromebook instead of my desktop (treadmill workstation actually) Mac Pro? Psychological and social, mostly. I gain some distance from my daily paying work by using a different computer in a different place. I also have done it partially as an experiment in learning about the next generation of computing. It's true that our two-year old Macbook Pro is still a much better computer as far as keyboard and screen and CPU and what it can do -- but it is often otherwise in use these days. My wife would always complain about me leaving a lot of tabs open in Firefox. And so on. The Chromebook is more a personal computer just for me. And it was cheap enough that I could justify it as an experiment compared to another $1000-$2500 Macbook.
We did however buy a $1000 Win 8 ASUS laptop a few months ago anyway. What a disappointment as a laptop. Even with a bigger screen and much faster pr
Sorry to say, from the slurring of the interviewer in the video, which suggested clogged arteries throughout your body. Check out health ideas here for unclogging them through nutritional changes: http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra... http://www.diseaseproof.com/ar... "Cardiovascular disease (CVD) accounted for 32.3% of deaths in the United States in 2010, but you can protect yourself. A significant number of research studies have documented that heart disease is easily and almost completely preventable (and reversible) through a diet rich in plant produce and lower in processed foods and animal products."
Good luck Rob, I think we may have we met once briefly around 1999 at an Open Source conference in NYC (one where Ralph Nader spoke), and thanks for all the stories.
And the shift does not have to be that unpleasant as your tastes will adapt after six weeks: https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... "Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap--as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation--and more self-discipline--than most people are ever willing to muster.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits--and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure--thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation - and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
Another good health resource if you are willing to take one week to do a medically supervised water-only fast in Santa Rosa, CA for a quick reboot of your taste buds. Compared to a heart bypass operation or years of physical therapy for a stroke, you won't even have to stop posting to Slashdot the whole time during a fast. Posting would help keep you busy and distracted as your body re-calibrates itself and goes into "garbage collection" mode and shifts to new biological pathways during the fast. See: http://www.healthpromoting.com... "TrueNorth Health Center was founded in 1984 by Drs. Alan Goldhamer and Jennifer Marano. The integrative medicine approach they established offers participants the opportunity to obtain evaluation and treatment for a wide variety of problems. The staff at TrueNorth Health Center includes medical doctors, osteopaths, chiropractors, naturopaths, psychologists, research scientists, and other health professionals. The Center is now the largest facility in the world that specialize
I just wrote a completely open ended HTML5/CSS/JavaScript app on my Samsung $250 Chromebook using the regular user mode and "Caret". I saved versions of the files on the Chromebook and ran them locally from Chrome. The app I wrote uses IndexedDB for local storage of snippets of HTML (which can include JavaScript). The app is intended to support boostrapping a better app by supporting experiments with HTML5/CSS/JavaScript. You can edit text and have it included as a section of HTML on the page. From start to finish (well, it's not really "done") I wrote it on the Chromebook.
in that the universe seemingly must exist for us to perceive it
Specific intelligence are apparently limited by many things whether the size of the brain/processor, or the materials it is made of, or the amount of energy to run it. But more than that, the though processes seem to be shaped by some combination of evolutionary pressures and chance (or possibly even design, like if we are living in a simulation). So, an extension of what you are suggesting is that all those shaping forces in some sense may limit the kind of ideas we can have about the universe as well as the questions we might think to ask about everything. I wrote my undergrad thesis in Psychology related to this topic in 1985 called "Why Intelligence: Object, Stability, Evolution, and Model".
A related book from a database perspective: "Data and Reality" by William Kent http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxr... "Data and Reality illustrates extensively the pitfalls of any simplistic attempts to capture reality as data in the sense of todayâ(TM)s database systems. The approach taken by the author is one which very logically and carefully delineates the facets of reality being represented in an information system, and also describes the data processing models used in such systems. The linguistic, semantic, and philosophical problems of describing reality are comprehensively examined⦠The depth of discussion of these concepts, as they impact on information systems, is not likely to be found elsewhere.⦠the value of this book resides in its critical, probing approach to the difficulties of modeling reality in typical information systems... it is very well written and should prove both enjoyable and enlightening to a careful reader. -ACM Computing Reviews, August 1980"
There are other possible implications as well if we are living in a simulation -- although it is still possible we may live in the simulation but our minds could also not be of it (like a human can play a video game without the video game simulating the player's mind).
If not a joke, your contributions would be missed, whether agreed with or not. See also my comment to someone else related to depression: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
And on the value of public disagreements: https://sites.google.com/site/... " The theory Dan Sperber suggested--the argumentative theory of reasoning--proposes that instead of having a purely individual function, reasoning has a social and, more specifically, argumentative function. The function of reasoning would be to find and evaluate reasons in dialogic contexts--more plainly, to argue with others. Here's a very quick summary of the evolutionary rationale behind this theory. Communication is hugely important for humans, and there is good reason to believe that this has been the case throughout our evolution, as different types of collaborative--and therefore communicative--activities already played a big role in our ancestors' lives (hunting, collecting, raising children, etc.). However, for communication to be possible, listeners have to have ways to discriminate reliable, trustworthy information from potentially dangerous information--otherwise speakers would be wont to abuse them through lies and deception. Listeners must have mechanisms of epistemic vigilance. One way listeners and speakers can improve the reliability of communication is through arguments. The speaker gives a reason to accept a given conclusion. The listener can then evaluate this reason to decide whether she should accept the conclusion. In both cases, they have used reasoning--to find and evaluate a reason respectively. If reasoning does its job properly, communication has been improved: a true conclusion is more likely to be supported by good arguments, and therefore accepted, thereby making both the speaker--who managed to convince the listener--and the listener--who acquired a potentially valuable piece of information--better off.
Our evolutionary account is much more in touch with the prevailing view of the evolution of human cognition. According to this view--alternatively named the social brain hypothesis, or the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, among others--most of human cognition evolved to answer the demands of our social world...."
And: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.... "We do not claim that reasoning has nothing to do with the truth. We claim that reasoning did not evolve to allow the lone reasoner to find the truth. We think it evolved to argue. But arguing is not only about trying to convince other people; it's also about listening to their arguments. So reasoning is two-sided. On the one hand, it is used to produce arguments. Here its goal is to convince people. Accordingly, it displays a strong confirmation bias -- what people see as the "rhetoric" side of reasoning. On the other hand, reasoning is also used to evaluate arguments. Here its goal is to tease out good arguments from bad ones so as to accept warranted conclusions and, if things go well, get better beliefs and make better decisions in the end."
So, thanks for being part of that process. In any case, hang in there, there is a chance it might get better.
Also, tangentially, on things "getting better" and depression and being in a minority: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... "Its goal is to prevent suicide among LGBT youth by having gay adults convey the message that these teens' lives will improve."
Yes: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it (Evelyn Beatrice Hall, regarding Voltaire's beliefs)"
The antidote to bad speech is more good speech.
I agree "chilling precedent" is a risk here. What could it be next? Using campaign finance disclosures against Progressive Democratic or Green voters? So, there is wisdom in the CA law on that.
From here about me BTW: http://www.fec.gov/finance/dis... "FERNHOUT, PAUL
KUCINICH, DENNIS J
VIA KUCINICH FOR PRESIDENT INC. 06/30/2003 500.00 26940295925 09/21/2003 250.00 26960140255
STEIN, JILL
VIA JILL STEIN FOR PRESIDENT 10/22/2012 250.00 13964633282 Total Contributions: 1000.00"
Yet I know in some sense that does foreclose some opportunities laws or not -- although it may also open others. There was also a time in the USA before the secret ballot when people would sometimes even have to fight their way through to the polls. It's not clear to me the secret ballot even is worth it if the cost is vote fraud via voting computers and also not being able to vote via the internet. Still, there was a chilling effect a bit in knowing any campaign donation would be a matter of record, it's true. I live in a very staunch Republican area. Although in looking at that record I do regret not donating to Cynthia McKinney's campaign as a matter of record (although I did vote for her against Obama). I think I was still a bit disillusioned supporting Kucinich where he seemed to cave on antiwar stuff at the Democratic Convention. Still, we homeschool which Republicans tend to support and Democrats tend to work against somewhat as Democrats push expanding compulsory prison-like public schooling. Republicans have tended to support digital rights a bit better than Democrats. Greens tend to be a bit anti-technology whereas I would like to see better technology. I feel Kucinich actually made more sense coherently given his stated beliefs and personal religion back when he was against abortion (even if preventing abortion in the USA may not be practical culturally or legally or politically). McKinney has her own anger management issues apparently like at an ID checkpoint (not saying sometimes anger is not justified though). Sometimes we don't have the combination of choices we might wish for -- or even know exactly what we might wish for. Possibly the deeper issue is that, compared to other Western democracies, the USA has only two parties -- far right (Republicans) and center right (Democrats). It's hard to make good choices with such a limited set of options. And even left/right is a little arbitrary, since there is no reason that, say, opposition to abortion should go with Republicans. Once could almost just as easily imagine the Democrat platform arguing for the sanctity of life from conception with collective responsibility for care and Republicans arguing for the individual right to choose with an individual responsibility for care. Same for many other arbitrary constellations of political alliances which differ in other countries.
Although, it sounds like from what others write here that Eich was a controversial choice even before he took the position for various reasons, including both for management style and also on technology vs. marketing. And it sounds like some of the propaganda for Proposition 8 was essentially gay bashing. Things are so rarely black and white. If Eich been less controversial, and if Proposition 8 commercials had been less indirectly gay bashing, then it seems possible Mozilla might have said something like "Mozilla takes no position on the protected speech of employees; however Mozilla endorses inclusiveness and diversity" (or something like that).
Still, it is ironically interesting that 50 seconds into the third video here (pro-Proposition 8) the actor (?) says "It's already
First, future generations may find of historical interest all those NSA records. Just think of all the data historians in 100 years (if humanity still exists) will be able to use for PhDs! And I'm only half joking about that.
The deeper issue relating to "prison" is more, is what we are doing effective? With a huge relative-to-population real prison and parole population in the USA, with vast numbers of people living in relative poverty, with thousands of nukes ready to destroy the world as we know it in a few minutes and related anxiety, with schools increasingly like prisons, and so on, one might argue the USA has already become its own anxiety-provoking prison for all too much of its population. Perhaps that's one reason for the US drug war -- while the Soviet Union had to guard its borders from escapees, the USA has to guard its medicine cabinets from escapees? (See also Wikpedia on "Rat Park".) There used to be a time when people in the USA aspired to more than that, and in that sense the USA is rapidly heading into a "Dark Age". From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... "Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in North America: community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsive to citizen's needs, and self-policing by the learned professions. She argues that this decay threatens to create a dark age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a dark age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost."
I agree that pervasive one-way surveillance in a society shifts the balance of power, which is the reasons for US constitutional protections relating to search and seizure of documents. One can contrast that with David Brin's two-way "Transparent Society" idea, or Marshall Brain's similar suggestions in "Manna". Historically humans living in tight-knit tribal villages may have not had much privacy from each other in many ways, so our very conception of privacy via anonymity and hidden transactions or hidden records may be a new thing. In any case, these are somewhat different times from 100,000 BC or 1776 AD given cheap storage, cheap sensing, and cheap search. There also the unreliability of cryptographic systems in practice (OpenSSL bugs, spear phishing, MITM, key loggers, evil upgrades, provider compromise, and so on), so depending on encryption seems problematical, assuming hiding information really had social value in general in social movements. I'm not saying privacy is evil; I'm just suggesting that depending on privacy in a social movement is probably foolish at the very least for practical reasons. Beyond practicalities, I feel the way forward has more to do with popularizing good ideas (like about the potential for abundance for all such as by a "basic income") rather than trying to hide plans of whatever sorts from prying eyes. In the USA and many other countries we have hard-won democratic freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. I feel it is best to use those freedoms to build something better, even knowing such efforts for change will be under constant public scrutiny. The problem is of course that building something better is hard work filled with a lot of uncertainty, including from resistance put up by those with a powerful position in the status quo or those who aspire to such a position. See also, on "Security: Crypto Imagination vs. Reality": http://xkcd.com/538/
There is a scene near the end of James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" where a soldier makes a silent plea for sanity with another soldier at a command post by how the soldier moves and carries his equipment, and that is something to think about. What signals do we send others when we focus on encryption as a way to security rather than focusing on broad social and material uplift? I'm not saying there is not conflict there, just that we can look to a parallel ar
Insightful post. James P. Hogan, a fan of true scientific inquiry, has some good fictional examples of this process in his "Giants" novels and some others (including his last).
I can ask if the scientific process as a skill (including critical thinking and assessment of intent as you put it) is learnable to any significant degree in the day-to-say environment for most of today's kids? So many kids are caught between forced schooling and entrancing but mostly passive media consumption, while they are also generally being fed crap nutritionally and essentially denied sunlight and exercise by all the demands and distractions.
From John Taylor Gatto from around 1991: http://www.informationliberati... "After an adult lifetime spent teaching school, I believe the method of mass-schooling is its only real content. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son's or daughter's education. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love -- and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life.
Thirty years ago [in the early 60s] these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television [[or now also computer games and the web etc.]] and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time as well. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a path of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know."
I am, to some extent, a creation of highly-regulated 1960s and 1970s TV. There was not that much on of interest to kids, and much of what was on of interest to kids often either had a moral purpose (even cartoons or comedies/dramas like Yogi's Friends or Batman or Thunderbirds or the Andy Griffith Show) or was connected to scientific or cultural literacy (PBS, Sealab 2020, Wild Kingdom). The pacing was slower then, too, making it more feasible to, say, build with blocks while sort of half-following the screen. So, a limited amount of TV could be a boon even without much parental supervision -- while still leaving plenty of time with nothing interesting on TV to trigger boredom which lead to other things to do which lead to skills connected to science and engineering and citizenship, like in my case building with TogL's (somewhat like LEGO), electronics experiments or eventually computer programming, reading Isaac Asimov novels, playing with our dog, going outside with other kids on the street or a park, going to a summer day camp for sports and arts, or going to church on Sundays. Today's distracted and overwhelmed parents (typically both working full-time, if there even are two) have a much harder (perhaps impossible) job of navigating a complex media landscape for their kids -- even as they may also have a much broader range of good stuff than ever before (including, say. a classic like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood available on-demand on Amazon alongside an amazing range of scientific documentaries and pro-social media programs and movies). The latest Kindle Fire with parental controls on specifying kids' media is perhaps a step in the right direction there, as is the OLPC tablet and pre-selected educati
Step 1. Ad hominem attack. Step 2. Make vague references to vast numbers of rebutting examples without actually supplying any. Step 3. More ad hominem. Step 4. Ignore actual citations (like in Tart's latest book). Step 5. Claim area is under study by reputable people without naming any. Step 6. Profit?:-)
== Some links related to healthy democratic education reform
BTW, from 2006, not that I agree with most of their business-oriented recommendations: "To fix US schools, panel says, start over" http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/... "That's the conclusion of a bipartisan group of scholars and business leaders, school chancellors and education commissioners, and former cabinet secretaries and governors. They declare that America's public education system, designed to meet the needs of 100 years ago when the workplace revolved around an assembly line, is unsuited to today's global marketplace. Already, they warn, many Americans are in danger of falling behind and seeing their standard of living plummet."
Reform in what direction? We didn't get where we are today in public schooling without a hugenumber of powerful interlocking factions, as explained here: https://www.johntaylorgatto.co... "This is not to say sensitive, intelligent, moral, and concerned individuals aren't distributed through each of the twenty-two categories, but the conflict of interest is so glaring between serving a system loyally and serving the public that it is finally overwhelming. Indeed, it isn't hard to see that in strictly economic terms this edifice of competing and conflicting interests is better served by badly performing schools than by successful ones. On economic grounds alone a disincentive exists to improve schools. When schools are bad, demands for increased funding and personnel, and professional control removed from public oversight, can be pressed by simply pointing to the perilous state of the enterprise. But when things go well, getting an extra buck is like pulling teeth."
Chris Mercogliano, previously of the Albany Free School, is an example of a true reformer, with 30+ years of success including with some of the toughest kids rejected by mainstream schools, a success almost almost totally ignored: http://www.chrismercogliano.co...
Or on homeschooling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... "During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency, nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent, with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were "mentally retarded teenagers" - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical western children, "by western standards of measurement."[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional developm
You are correct of course. Thanks for pointing that out. I should have written "proof". Likely Tart puts it better. To agree with you, from: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/A... "There are a few caveats to take into account to refine what a lack of supporting evidence says about a hypothesis. Absence of evidence is not necessarily strong evidence that outright disproves the hypothesis in the way that an observation that contradicts the hypothesis would be.... As such, absence of evidence acting against a hypothesis is only a probabilistic approach and works best in a full Bayesian-style framework, which also takes into account other probabilities and other evidence."
== Some rambles on weighing the meaning of absence of evidence in US society
First, Tart claims evidence os paranormal activity from research studies. People may dispute that including by questioning the studies, so let's just assume there still is no evidence for the sake of discussion.
An important factor in weighing the meaning of the absence of evidence is the intense competition for research funds which is increasingly corrupting science. See: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg... "Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals."
For example, when Pons and Fleischmann submitted their "cold fusion" results to a peer review process for grant funding, it turned out one of the reviewers was working in the same area and was about to publish on it. This conflict (whoever is most at fault) ultimately lead to the press conference announcement (against the scientist's preferences) at the university wanted to claim priority on the discovery (via creating artificial scarcity through patents). A handful of hot-fusion scientists (especially at MIT) after fairly brief and limited attempts then claimed the results could not be duplicated an that failure to replicate was essentially proof that Pons and Fleischmann were wrong and "cold fusion" could not exists given popular conceptions of nuclear physics at the time. Pons and Fleishmann may have been wrong in several ways, including in calling it "fusion" of any sort and also in their neutron measurements. But these were expert chemists well experienced in heat measurements and that part of what they did was likely valid, and likely they did detect excess heat. But for *decades* any mention of doing cold fusion research became academic suicide based on the handful of failures to replicate by people whose short-term interests were served by not finding results. Only a few (mostly older, tenured) people continued to work on that. Related: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/r... http://www.e-catworld.com/2014... http://undsci.berkeley.edu/art...
"Cold Fusion" (now LENR) Research has been picking up in the last few years though, such as with this LENR conference ironically at MIT: http://world.std.com/~mica/201...
Another example is when Halton Arp was denied telescope time to pursue his "electric universe" ideas. Ignaz Semmelweis is another example from centuries ago, where his evidence of how to prevent disease by hand-washing was dismissed as in conflict with conceptions of health and disease at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
The ending of exponential growth of academia around 1970: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Actually, during the period since 1970, the expansion of American science has not stopped altogether. Federal funding of scientific research, in inflation-corrected dollars, doubled during that period, and by no coincidence at all, the number of academic researchers has also doubled. Such a controlled rate of growth (controlled only by the available funding, to be sure) is not, however, consistent with the lifestyle that academic researchers have evolved. The average American professor in a research university turns out about 15 Ph.D students in the course of a career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D is basically training to become a research professor. It didn't take long for American students to catch on to what was happening. The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since."
AC wrote: "Jenny Mcarthy is a free thinker ... and embodies the best tennants of 19th century science, when people made decisions based on their observations and in light of the best known understanding at the time. Today we have something akin to a blind belief in whatever the church, ughh i mean experts happen to be handing out at the time. Today an expert more often than nought is somebody who is paid to lobby for a paticular world view. Think about it in 2000 all the experts were saying the stock market is going to be going up and up and up. In 2008 all the experts were saying that real estate is a can't loose proposition, and I just happen to have a house you can buy. Stop believing in experts. Believe in yourself. If it is cloudy, and your skin is getting wet when you stand outside, it is probably raining outside despite the fact that the weather experts are on the radio right now saying you will have a clear and sunny day outside. Stand up and have the courage to say it's raining, fuck the experts. Jenny Mcarthy is a hero. So in spite of the fact that I have no advanced degree in meterology, I feel that I can accurately tell if it is raining or not. This used to be common sense, but today there is a global witch hunt on for whomever decides to believe in their own observations vs what the experts in the media are saying."
Conflict-of-interest definitely makes this all harder to sort through. Compare with the book "Disclipined Minds"
http://disciplinedminds.tripod...
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
Other social problems with mainstream science:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
All that said, a lot of time the experts are right -- for example, expert Civil Engineers designing and building bridges. Thinking is hard work, and a lot of "free thinking" may be re-inventing plausible but otherwise bad ideas. Perhaps the more variables involved, and the less we know about them, the more problematical the notion of "Expertise" becomes, other than to admit ignorance (which does not sound that impressive)? However, 2000 years ago, perhaps bridge building was more by trial and error, same as much medicine today? Certainly Cathedral building shows a process of trial and error before civil engineering became better understood in terms of materials and structures.
Here is a related diagram about different types of problem domains, where perhaps bridge building today is in one area but medicine in another:
Like at Chernobyl, as I suggest here: http://p2pfoundation.net/backu... ... So, despite the problems, half-seriously, I suggest designating the NY Adirondack Park (where I live) for a nuclear waste disposal of glassified (vitrified) apple-sized lumps of waste. :-) That would be very good for a resurgence of wildlife in the Park. I might move out, but I would know a place I love would be "forever wild" for sure. :-)"
"At SUNY Stony Brook, I knew one grad student who studied wildlife (turtles) in a reservation around a nuclear contaminated area, and while there was more mutations, in general, the wildlife was thriving [because human activities including hunting and habitat destruction were effectively excluded].
See also: "Chernobyl Area Becomes Wildlife Haven"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
"Keeping old plants online is simply the capitalist thing to do: They're bought and paid for and still work. Why would you shut them down?"
In theory, fission-based nuclear energy is quite workable. In practice so far, within either a Soviet command economy or a Western capitalist economy, the "externalities" of systemic risk of meltdown (like Fukushima) have not been accounted for in up-front costs. So, these plants have never been "paid for". It is just that the general public has been forced to take on a risk, either as individuals or as a society. Fukushima is a tragic example of this. And many people affected by Fukushima are just left to pay many of the disastrous costs on their own, plus taxes go up for everyone, plus there are many other costs (like inspecting Japanese seafood or seaweed for radiation). So, the cost of Fukushima was not paid for up front. If the plants had been shut down sooner, huge future costs would have been avoided. Because capitalistic organizations eventually specialize in internalizing profits while socializing risks and costs and capturing their regulators via revolving doors and (legal) bribes, high risk nuclear power is a particularly difficult thing for such societies to manage. Sure, we could build much safer reactors, including probably thorium ones, but even now plans for new reactors are not fully fail-safe. TRIGA is an example of an alternative that is much more fail-safe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Of course, I could say much the same for coal plants and their environmental affects. as externalities. Oil dependency also has huge costs in military defense of supply lines and pollution risks like the Exxon Valdez in Alaska or recently the US Gulf Coast.
That is why many renewables (as well as energy efficiency) have been cheaper than fossil fuels since the 1970s, all things considered. But all things were not considered, so we got coal and oil and bug health costs and big defense costs all paid either on health insurance premiums or taxes, not electric bills or at the gasoline pump. Even PV has externalities (including potentially cadmium runoff from some types of panels, as well as potentially blighting the landscape), although overall they are probably much less than coal and oil, and ideas like "solar roadways" may reduce the blight problem, as well as reduce the need for above ground electrical wires.
http://www.solarroadways.com/i...
"The Solar Roadway is a series of structurally-engineered solar panels that are driven upon. The idea is to replace all current petroleum-based asphalt roads, parking lots, and driveways with Solar Road Panels that collect energy to be used by our homes and businesses."
With the costs of PV solar falling as predicted decades ago, to now reaching "grid parity" in more and more areas, it is rapidly becoming uneconomical to install anything but solar, especially as battery and fuel cell technology continues to improve for energy storage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
"Predictions from the 2006 time-frame expected retail grid parity for solar in the 2016 to 2020 era, but due to rapid downward pricing changes, more recent calculations have forced dramatic reductions in time scale, and the suggestion that solar has already reached grid parity in a wide variety of locations."
Hot fusion or cold (LENR) fusion may change that equation. I don't see fission being more cost effective than solar anytime soon though, although maybe factory-made micro reactors (like Hyperion) will prove me wrong on that.
1998: "'God of the Internet' is dead "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci...
"Jon Postel, a key figure in the development of the Internet from its inception, died at the weekend of heart problems aged 55."
Now, thanks to a successful internet, I have learned all about how to prevent and reverse heart disease by eating more vegetables and getting enough vitamin D (a problem for many indoors-oriented technies). Sadly, too late for Jon. Hopefully not too late for Roblimo though?
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
The failure to adopt SQLite as a de-facto "Standard" for web browsers shows a deep problem, since a shared FOSS codebase is probably the best standard we can have.
http://programmers.stackexchan...
Contrast that with suggestions of making de-facto standards by on the ground successes with working code. Which is what SQLite has done in a whole area of embedded storage.
Like Alan Kay has said, any standard with more than three lines is ambiguous. I can agree having had to work implementing a couple standards at IBM.
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/1...
"The mitochondrial dysfunction identified in the JAMA study I've been talking about is ultimately only one downstream symptom of many upstream causes. Other researchers have found systemic inflammation,(ix) brain inflammation,(x) gut inflammation,(xi) elevated levels of toxins and metals, gluten and casein antibodies,(xii) nutrient deficiencies including omega-3 fats,(xiii) vitamin D,(xiv) zinc, and magnesium, and collections of metabolic dysfunction related to quirky genes that make it difficult to perform chemical reactions essential for health in the body such as methylation and sulfation.(xv)
The take home message here is that the answer to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders will not be found in one of these factors, but in all of them taken together in varying degrees in each individual. There is no such thing as "autism." Rather there are "autisms"--different patterns of biological dysfunction unique to each child that result in multiple insults to the brain that all manifest with symptoms we call autism."
Also:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
http://www.dailycal.org/2014/0...
"To further validate their theories, the researchers cited a study involving Somali mothers, who naturally absorb less sunlight due to their dark skin pigmentation. When they moved north to Stockholm, a less-sunny region, they were found to be 4.5 times more likely to have autistic children, compared to the the country's lighter-skinned natives."
Also may help:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/chil...
Good luck!
Even to suggesting a "basic income": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://www.rawilson.com/home.h...
http://www.rawilson.com/though...
http://deoxy.org/raw.htm
Thanks for the pointer. I'd be curious where specifically (which book or other writing) wherein he says that, if you know off-hand.
But, would be nice to develop it before-hand; from: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
---
Self-replicating technical artifacts such as dogs, corn, and trees have been in use by humanity for thousands of years. While humans cannot lay credit to the original creation of such systems, they can claim the adaptation and selective breeding of these for defense, food, and building materials.
In the past few millennia, many people have become dependent on technology that is not self-replicating. Primarily this technology involves fairly pure forms of metals, plastics, and crystals. These technologies have expanded the earth's human carrying capacity in the short term, but are not sustainable in the long term. Such technologies lack the closed resource cycles, independent operation, redundancy, and resiliency found in natural systems. A symptom of the use of such non-sustainable systems is the fear that a single problem (like Y2K) could cause a major disruption of life-support infrastructure in the developed world.
For example, both Brittle Power (Amory and Hunter Lovins) and Energy, Vulnerability, and War (Wilson Clark and Jake Page), make clear how vulnerable our energy infrastructure is. As Brittle Power (pg.391-392) mentions, this vulnerability also holds for food and manufacturing production:
"The production and distribution of food are currently so centralized, with small buffer stocks and supply lines averaging thirteen hundred miles long, that bad weather or a truckers' strike can put many retail stores on short rations in a matter of days. This vulnerability is especially pronounced in the Northeast, which imports over eighty percent of its food. In a disaster, the lack of regional self sufficiency both in food production and food storage would cause havoc, but no one is planning for such possibilities."
And in reference to energy production:
"The Joint Committee on Defense Production notes that American industry is tailor made for easy disruption. Its qualities include large unit scale, concentration of key facilities, reliance on advanced materials inputs and on specialized electronics and automation, highly energy- and capital- intensive plants, and small inventories. The Committee found that correcting these defects, even incrementally and over many decades, could be very costly. But the cost of not doing so could be even higher -- a rapid regression of tens, or even hundreds of years in the American economy, should it be gravely disrupted."
In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on earth is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space.
The heart of any community is its library, which stores a wide variety of technological processes, only some of which are used at any one time in any specific environment. If an independent community is like a cell, its library is like its DNA. A library has many functions: the education of new community members; the support of important activities such as farming and material extraction; historical recording of events; support for planning and design. And the library grows and evolves with the community.
The earth's library of technological knowledge is fragmented and obscure, and some important knowledge has been lost already. How can we create a library strong enough to foster the growth of new communities in space? How can we today use what we know to improve human life?
---
The development of the Oscomak infrastructure will be an ambitious undertaking, requiring the involvement of tens of thousands of knowledgeable individuals over a period of years. There is no way one single entity can fund this work. However, there is a way to allow such individuals to cooperate -- as an "open source" community, sharing knowledge and building a distributed repository over the internet.
The revolutionary aspec
The US great plains over the last two hundred years in some places went from two feet or more of topsoil covered with with Prairie grass, Native Americans, and Buffalo to now more like six inches of topsoil mostly due to atrocious soil farming practices by the European invaders more akin to strip mining than stewardship. That is a lot of carbon loss.
http://bigprairieprepress.com/...
"The farming practices of early settlers caused erosion of the topsoil. By the late 1870's the topsoil had vanished in the center of the prairie and the settlers who farmed there moved out to its edges. This was the beginning of the process that would create the Big Prairie Desert. This pattern of land use, dry conditions and soil erosion is what caused the dust bowl that was begining at about the same time in states further west."
Related (although perhaps an underestimate of the total loss):
http://boingboing.net/2011/05/...
"These pillars --- located outside a rest area off Highway 80 in Adair County, Iowa -- represent the topsoil Iowa has lost since large-scale farming began 150 years ago. In the 19th century, Iowa had 14-16 inches of topsoil. Today, it has just 6-8 inches of the stuff, and more is being lost all the time. The irony: The very farms that are depleting the topsoil desperately need it, too. "
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...
"Although the figure is frequently being revised upwards with new discoveries, over 2,700 Gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon is stored in soils worldwide, which is well above the combined total of atmosphere (780 Gt) or biomass (575 Gt), most of which is wood. Carbon is taken out of the atmosphere by plant photosynthesis; about 60 Gt annually is incorporated into various types of soil organic matter (SOM) including surface litter; about 60 Gt annually is respired or oxidized from soil.[2] "
So, three-quarters of more of the carbon-rich top soil of the center of an entire continent (North America) was lost, much of it a century ago. That I think may help explain some global climate changes even more than recent fossil fuel use.
From:
http://people.oregonstate.edu/...
"When we lose soil, we are losing a resource that is, for practical purposes and human timespans, essentially non-renewable. An inch of soil takes between 200 - 1000 years to form, yet it can be swept away in a few seasons."
Ways to create topsoil faster included organic farming (focusing on adding organic matter to the soil) and remineralization from ground-up rock dust.
http://remineralize.org/
Still, maybe without all the extra carbon in the air we'd already be in another mini ice age?
As I'm too often involved in myself sometimes: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d...
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful."
But more seriously, there are a lot of fine dedicated well-meaning people who work at three letter agencies. There are no doubt a lot of not-so-fine ones too. Any big bureaucracy has complex and often self-perpetuating social dynamics. If such places are to improve, IMHO one needs to support and encourage the fine people there and hope their actions can outweigh the not-so-fine ones. For example, IMHO Tom Armour was one of the finer ones:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
Saying the KGB, the NSA, the Russian Oligarchy and so on are empty husks is a bit like saying capitalism is full of contradictions and unfairness and so it will fall apart on its own. I've said such things myself sometimes:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?"
Yet capitalism is still here and seemingly stringer than ever (as far as control of the US political machinery). And may well be for some time as the underlying power system morphs into new forms. Ancient China went hundreds of years at a stretch with peasants suffering all sorts of things, especially famine, and not much changing. Yet, something like a "basic income" might be a step towards improving capitalism even if it would not fix everything about it (the worst of consumerism, addictions, waste, short--term planning, systemic risks, externalities, etc.).
Short-term power in human societies also translates itself into sexual access and the spread of genes (e.g. Bill Clinton, theoretically). The best we can perhaps due as a society is structure how the competition for mates plays out in our society, as in what is valued. James P. Hogan wrote about that in his sc
By Marine Major General Smedley Butler: http://www.ratical.org/ratvill... ..."
"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
Of course, "heart disease" is a racket too these days:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions. Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."
Possibly could draw an expanded parallel between "terrorism" and "heart disease" as far as causes and cures? As in invading Afghanistan and Iraq was like giving a world with morally-clogged arteries an angioplasty and then a triple bypass? At great costs? And without really solving the underlying problem (from past short-sighted behavior by the USA and others)? While people who sell arms and people who own domestic oil sources and drilling equipment (Bush friends?) profit greatly from all the uncertainty?
By someone else: http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff...
By me on the need for better intelligence tools for the public: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
By me on the security clearance process reduces cognitive diversity in three letter agencies: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"This essay discusses how the USA's security clearance process (mainly related to ensuring secrecy) may [ironically] have a counter-productive negative effect on the USA's national security by reducing "cognitive diversity" among security professionals. "
So much of the discussion on this topic ignores that some people like working around plants in agriculture, or like building things with machine tools, or like working with heavy equipment, and so on. Granted, they may not like their boss, or may not like being overworked, or may not like low pay. To suggest such people become programmers (or nail salon workers or whatever) ignores that a lot of a person's life satisfaction may come from doing work they love. I love programming and think it is a useful thing for many people to know, but I accept most people may not like to do a lot of programming, say if they like working outdoors or like working with people or plants or visibly moving machines. It is a deep flaw in our current discussions to ignore the potential positive value of meaningful work in someone's life and just focus on getting people to do work they may not like 40 hours a week so they can get a paycheck to buy stuff, raise a family, and maybe have a hobby they enjoy in their remaining time. "Work" can be better than that.
Two essays on that, one by EF Schumacher:
http://www.centerforneweconomi...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
And one by Bob Black:
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them."
Still, with more and more AI and robotics, there will be less and less jobs where it makes sense to pay a human to do them. So, we need a mix of a "basic income" for the exchange economy, an expanded volunteer/gift economy, improved local subsistence via 3D printing, solar panels, cold fusion, and agricultural robotics, and improved democratic participatory planning at all levels of government. Then at least parents will be able to spend more time raising their kids well, a job that can take about as much time and energy as most people can put into it, especially if you forgo institutionalizing kids from an early age in prison-like compulsory schools. More ideas on this:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
http://www.google.com/intl/en/...
It turns out they are not that much cheaper though, so I don't really see the value proposition in practice implied by Phil Shapiro since they are not yet $100 and screens still cost money:
"Review: Asus crafts a tiny $179 Chromebox out of cheap, low-power parts"
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...
I'm surprised Roblimo could miss pointing the Chromebox out, just mentioning the Raspberry Pi. Although he was right to point out the SSD speedup is significant for any small computer.
Another big miss is that for US$50 you can buy an Android Smartphone and use it only with Wi-Fi. Example of what we paid $50 for a few months ago, but now is $31?
http://www.amazon.com/Kyocera-...
"The Kyocera Hydro is sophistication and style in a mainstream Android smartphone that can work for everyone. Plus it offers water-resistance, giving consumers the âoeno-fearâ durability and security they demand. With a 3.5 inch HVGA touchscreen, 3.2 MP camera and video, and Android 4.0, you get the best of all worlds."
Although I would much rather use the Chromebook with a keyboard for making content than trying to use an Android phone. But $30 to be connected with the global internet? That is an amazing realization of many educational technologist's dreams (e.g. Alan Kay Dynabook or OLPC XO-1). And perhaps also some nightmares... See also the 1950s short story by Theodore Sturgeon called "The Skills of Xanadu" on where that all could lead.
My own hopes and predictions from 2000 based in part on seeing the "Cybiko":
"[unrev-II] The DKR hardware I'd like to make..."
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Also, I don't see why a teacher or librarian is so keen to limit people's mobility (although it doesn't surprise me, going with the "school is prison" meme).
A big value to my $250 Samsung Chromebook is how light and portable it is. I still use my Quad Core Mac Pro Desktop with three big screens for work and running VirtualBox VMs (and the Chromebook could not replace that, especially the screens) -- used to run Debian for about five years until we (my wife especially) got tired of all the random breakage with every "apt-get dist-upgrade" around 2008 (probably much better now). But I use my Chromebook (with Linux under the covers) for just noodling around or surfing the web and posting on Slashdot sitting in our living room, or doing some light for-fun development work. As I said in another post, I wrote this JavaScript-based information manager tool bootstrapping system entirely on the Chromebook:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Why do I use the Chromebook instead of my desktop (treadmill workstation actually) Mac Pro? Psychological and social, mostly. I gain some distance from my daily paying work by using a different computer in a different place. I also have done it partially as an experiment in learning about the next generation of computing. It's true that our two-year old Macbook Pro is still a much better computer as far as keyboard and screen and CPU and what it can do -- but it is often otherwise in use these days. My wife would always complain about me leaving a lot of tabs open in Firefox. And so on. The Chromebook is more a personal computer just for me. And it was cheap enough that I could justify it as an experiment compared to another $1000-$2500 Macbook.
We did however buy a $1000 Win 8 ASUS laptop a few months ago anyway. What a disappointment as a laptop. Even with a bigger screen and much faster pr
Sorry to say, from the slurring of the interviewer in the video, which suggested clogged arteries throughout your body. Check out health ideas here for unclogging them through nutritional changes:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://www.diseaseproof.com/ar...
"Cardiovascular disease (CVD) accounted for 32.3% of deaths in the United States in 2010, but you can protect yourself. A significant number of research studies have documented that heart disease is easily and almost completely preventable (and reversible) through a diet rich in plant produce and lower in processed foods and animal products."
More in general:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://www.changemakers.com/mo...
http://www.changemakers.com/di...
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
Good luck Rob, I think we may have we met once briefly around 1999 at an Open Source conference in NYC (one where Ralph Nader spoke), and thanks for all the stories.
And the shift does not have to be that unpleasant as your tastes will adapt after six weeks:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap--as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation--and more self-discipline--than most people are ever willing to muster.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits--and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure--thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation - and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
Another good health resource if you are willing to take one week to do a medically supervised water-only fast in Santa Rosa, CA for a quick reboot of your taste buds. Compared to a heart bypass operation or years of physical therapy for a stroke, you won't even have to stop posting to Slashdot the whole time during a fast. Posting would help keep you busy and distracted as your body re-calibrates itself and goes into "garbage collection" mode and shifts to new biological pathways during the fast. See:
http://www.healthpromoting.com...
"TrueNorth Health Center was founded in 1984 by Drs. Alan Goldhamer and Jennifer Marano. The integrative medicine approach they established offers participants the opportunity to obtain evaluation and treatment for a wide variety of problems. The staff at TrueNorth Health Center includes medical doctors, osteopaths, chiropractors, naturopaths, psychologists, research scientists, and other health professionals. The Center is now the largest facility in the world that specialize
https://chrome.google.com/webs...
I just wrote a completely open ended HTML5/CSS/JavaScript app on my Samsung $250 Chromebook using the regular user mode and "Caret". I saved versions of the files on the Chromebook and ran them locally from Chrome. The app I wrote uses IndexedDB for local storage of snippets of HTML (which can include JavaScript). The app is intended to support boostrapping a better app by supporting experiments with HTML5/CSS/JavaScript. You can edit text and have it included as a section of HTML on the page. From start to finish (well, it's not really "done") I wrote it on the Chromebook.
I just put the code up on GitHub as an example for you (again using only the Chromebook) :
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
You can try a demo version here which will store data in your browser: http://rawgithub.com/pdfernhou...
Here is a direct link to the bootstrap.json content to paste in as a start: https://raw.githubusercontent....
See the GitHub repo for basic instructions on how to use it.
Granted, to do C compiling I'd need some tool that converted C to JavaScript in a special way, but more and more such tools exists.
https://github.com/kripken/ems...
http://www.infoq.com/research/...
So, more and more things are possible with Chromebooks or similar devices.
in that the universe seemingly must exist for us to perceive it
Specific intelligence are apparently limited by many things whether the size of the brain/processor, or the materials it is made of, or the amount of energy to run it. But more than that, the though processes seem to be shaped by some combination of evolutionary pressures and chance (or possibly even design, like if we are living in a simulation). So, an extension of what you are suggesting is that all those shaping forces in some sense may limit the kind of ideas we can have about the universe as well as the questions we might think to ask about everything. I wrote my undergrad thesis in Psychology related to this topic in 1985 called "Why Intelligence: Object, Stability, Evolution, and Model".
A related book from a database perspective:
"Data and Reality" by William Kent
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxr...
"Data and Reality illustrates extensively the pitfalls of any simplistic attempts to capture reality as data in the sense of todayâ(TM)s database systems. The approach taken by the author is one which very logically and carefully delineates the facets of reality being represented in an information system, and also describes the data processing models used in such systems. The linguistic, semantic, and philosophical problems of describing reality are comprehensively examined⦠The depth of discussion of these concepts, as they impact on information systems, is not likely to be found elsewhere.⦠the value of this book resides in its critical, probing approach to the difficulties of modeling reality in typical information systems... it is very well written and should prove both enjoyable and enlightening to a careful reader. -ACM Computing Reviews, August 1980"
There are other possible implications as well if we are living in a simulation -- although it is still possible we may live in the simulation but our minds could also not be of it (like a human can play a video game without the video game simulating the player's mind).
By coincidence, I just read this to my kid the other day.
We watched the video of it first, but the written text is so much funnier than an otherwise confusing-conceptually video set in a diner.
"Rapidly losing the will to live here."
If not a joke, your contributions would be missed, whether agreed with or not. See also my comment to someone else related to depression: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
And on the value of public disagreements: ..."
https://sites.google.com/site/...
" The theory Dan Sperber suggested--the argumentative theory of reasoning--proposes that instead of having a purely individual function, reasoning has a social and, more specifically, argumentative function. The function of reasoning would be to find and evaluate reasons in dialogic contexts--more plainly, to argue with others. Here's a very quick summary of the evolutionary rationale behind this theory. Communication is hugely important for humans, and there is good reason to believe that this has been the case throughout our evolution, as different types of collaborative--and therefore communicative--activities already played a big role in our ancestors' lives (hunting, collecting, raising children, etc.). However, for communication to be possible, listeners have to have ways to discriminate reliable, trustworthy information from potentially dangerous information--otherwise speakers would be wont to abuse them through lies and deception. Listeners must have mechanisms of epistemic vigilance. One way listeners and speakers can improve the reliability of communication is through arguments. The speaker gives a reason to accept a given conclusion. The listener can then evaluate this reason to decide whether she should accept the conclusion. In both cases, they have used reasoning--to find and evaluate a reason respectively. If reasoning does its job properly, communication has been improved: a true conclusion is more likely to be supported by good arguments, and therefore accepted, thereby making both the speaker--who managed to convince the listener--and the listener--who acquired a potentially valuable piece of information--better off.
Our evolutionary account is much more in touch with the prevailing view of the evolution of human cognition. According to this view--alternatively named the social brain hypothesis, or the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, among others--most of human cognition evolved to answer the demands of our social world.
And:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes....
"We do not claim that reasoning has nothing to do with the truth. We claim that reasoning did not evolve to allow the lone reasoner to find the truth. We think it evolved to argue. But arguing is not only about trying to convince other people; it's also about listening to their arguments. So reasoning is two-sided. On the one hand, it is used to produce arguments. Here its goal is to convince people. Accordingly, it displays a strong confirmation bias -- what people see as the "rhetoric" side of reasoning. On the other hand, reasoning is also used to evaluate arguments. Here its goal is to tease out good arguments from bad ones so as to accept warranted conclusions and, if things go well, get better beliefs and make better decisions in the end."
So, thanks for being part of that process. In any case, hang in there, there is a chance it might get better.
Also, tangentially, on things "getting better" and depression and being in a minority:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"Its goal is to prevent suicide among LGBT youth by having gay adults convey the message that these teens' lives will improve."
Example:
"It Gets Better - Princeton University"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
But that sentiment can apply to lots of things given a life so full of
Yes: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it (Evelyn Beatrice Hall, regarding Voltaire's beliefs)"
The antidote to bad speech is more good speech.
I agree "chilling precedent" is a risk here. What could it be next? Using campaign finance disclosures against Progressive Democratic or Green voters? So, there is wisdom in the CA law on that.
From here about me BTW:
http://www.fec.gov/finance/dis...
"FERNHOUT, PAUL
KUCINICH, DENNIS J
VIA KUCINICH FOR PRESIDENT INC.
06/30/2003 500.00 26940295925
09/21/2003 250.00 26960140255
STEIN, JILL
VIA JILL STEIN FOR PRESIDENT
10/22/2012 250.00 13964633282
Total Contributions: 1000.00"
Yet I know in some sense that does foreclose some opportunities laws or not -- although it may also open others. There was also a time in the USA before the secret ballot when people would sometimes even have to fight their way through to the polls. It's not clear to me the secret ballot even is worth it if the cost is vote fraud via voting computers and also not being able to vote via the internet. Still, there was a chilling effect a bit in knowing any campaign donation would be a matter of record, it's true. I live in a very staunch Republican area. Although in looking at that record I do regret not donating to Cynthia McKinney's campaign as a matter of record (although I did vote for her against Obama). I think I was still a bit disillusioned supporting Kucinich where he seemed to cave on antiwar stuff at the Democratic Convention. Still, we homeschool which Republicans tend to support and Democrats tend to work against somewhat as Democrats push expanding compulsory prison-like public schooling. Republicans have tended to support digital rights a bit better than Democrats. Greens tend to be a bit anti-technology whereas I would like to see better technology. I feel Kucinich actually made more sense coherently given his stated beliefs and personal religion back when he was against abortion (even if preventing abortion in the USA may not be practical culturally or legally or politically). McKinney has her own anger management issues apparently like at an ID checkpoint (not saying sometimes anger is not justified though). Sometimes we don't have the combination of choices we might wish for -- or even know exactly what we might wish for. Possibly the deeper issue is that, compared to other Western democracies, the USA has only two parties -- far right (Republicans) and center right (Democrats). It's hard to make good choices with such a limited set of options. And even left/right is a little arbitrary, since there is no reason that, say, opposition to abortion should go with Republicans. Once could almost just as easily imagine the Democrat platform arguing for the sanctity of life from conception with collective responsibility for care and Republicans arguing for the individual right to choose with an individual responsibility for care. Same for many other arbitrary constellations of political alliances which differ in other countries.
Although, it sounds like from what others write here that Eich was a controversial choice even before he took the position for various reasons, including both for management style and also on technology vs. marketing. And it sounds like some of the propaganda for Proposition 8 was essentially gay bashing. Things are so rarely black and white. If Eich been less controversial, and if Proposition 8 commercials had been less indirectly gay bashing, then it seems possible Mozilla might have said something like "Mozilla takes no position on the protected speech of employees; however Mozilla endorses inclusiveness and diversity" (or something like that).
Still, it is ironically interesting that 50 seconds into the third video here (pro-Proposition 8) the actor (?) says "It's already
http://freethoughtblogs.com/si...
First, future generations may find of historical interest all those NSA records. Just think of all the data historians in 100 years (if humanity still exists) will be able to use for PhDs! And I'm only half joking about that.
The deeper issue relating to "prison" is more, is what we are doing effective? With a huge relative-to-population real prison and parole population in the USA, with vast numbers of people living in relative poverty, with thousands of nukes ready to destroy the world as we know it in a few minutes and related anxiety, with schools increasingly like prisons, and so on, one might argue the USA has already become its own anxiety-provoking prison for all too much of its population. Perhaps that's one reason for the US drug war -- while the Soviet Union had to guard its borders from escapees, the USA has to guard its medicine cabinets from escapees? (See also Wikpedia on "Rat Park".) There used to be a time when people in the USA aspired to more than that, and in that sense the USA is rapidly heading into a "Dark Age". From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
"Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in North America: community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsive to citizen's needs, and self-policing by the learned professions. She argues that this decay threatens to create a dark age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a dark age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost."
I agree that pervasive one-way surveillance in a society shifts the balance of power, which is the reasons for US constitutional protections relating to search and seizure of documents. One can contrast that with David Brin's two-way "Transparent Society" idea, or Marshall Brain's similar suggestions in "Manna". Historically humans living in tight-knit tribal villages may have not had much privacy from each other in many ways, so our very conception of privacy via anonymity and hidden transactions or hidden records may be a new thing. In any case, these are somewhat different times from 100,000 BC or 1776 AD given cheap storage, cheap sensing, and cheap search. There also the unreliability of cryptographic systems in practice (OpenSSL bugs, spear phishing, MITM, key loggers, evil upgrades, provider compromise, and so on), so depending on encryption seems problematical, assuming hiding information really had social value in general in social movements. I'm not saying privacy is evil; I'm just suggesting that depending on privacy in a social movement is probably foolish at the very least for practical reasons. Beyond practicalities, I feel the way forward has more to do with popularizing good ideas (like about the potential for abundance for all such as by a "basic income") rather than trying to hide plans of whatever sorts from prying eyes. In the USA and many other countries we have hard-won democratic freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. I feel it is best to use those freedoms to build something better, even knowing such efforts for change will be under constant public scrutiny. The problem is of course that building something better is hard work filled with a lot of uncertainty, including from resistance put up by those with a powerful position in the status quo or those who aspire to such a position. See also, on "Security: Crypto Imagination vs. Reality":
http://xkcd.com/538/
There is a scene near the end of James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" where a soldier makes a silent plea for sanity with another soldier at a command post by how the soldier moves and carries his equipment, and that is something to think about. What signals do we send others when we focus on encryption as a way to security rather than focusing on broad social and material uplift? I'm not saying there is not conflict there, just that we can look to a parallel ar
Insightful post. James P. Hogan, a fan of true scientific inquiry, has some good fictional examples of this process in his "Giants" novels and some others (including his last).
I can ask if the scientific process as a skill (including critical thinking and assessment of intent as you put it) is learnable to any significant degree in the day-to-say environment for most of today's kids? So many kids are caught between forced schooling and entrancing but mostly passive media consumption, while they are also generally being fed crap nutritionally and essentially denied sunlight and exercise by all the demands and distractions.
From John Taylor Gatto from around 1991:
http://www.informationliberati...
"After an adult lifetime spent teaching school, I believe the method of mass-schooling is its only real content. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son's or daughter's education. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love -- and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life.
Thirty years ago [in the early 60s] these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television [[or now also computer games and the web etc.]] and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time as well. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a path of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know."
I am, to some extent, a creation of highly-regulated 1960s and 1970s TV. There was not that much on of interest to kids, and much of what was on of interest to kids often either had a moral purpose (even cartoons or comedies/dramas like Yogi's Friends or Batman or Thunderbirds or the Andy Griffith Show) or was connected to scientific or cultural literacy (PBS, Sealab 2020, Wild Kingdom). The pacing was slower then, too, making it more feasible to, say, build with blocks while sort of half-following the screen. So, a limited amount of TV could be a boon even without much parental supervision -- while still leaving plenty of time with nothing interesting on TV to trigger boredom which lead to other things to do which lead to skills connected to science and engineering and citizenship, like in my case building with TogL's (somewhat like LEGO), electronics experiments or eventually computer programming, reading Isaac Asimov novels, playing with our dog, going outside with other kids on the street or a park, going to a summer day camp for sports and arts, or going to church on Sundays. Today's distracted and overwhelmed parents (typically both working full-time, if there even are two) have a much harder (perhaps impossible) job of navigating a complex media landscape for their kids -- even as they may also have a much broader range of good stuff than ever before (including, say. a classic like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood available on-demand on Amazon alongside an amazing range of scientific documentaries and pro-social media programs and movies). The latest Kindle Fire with parental controls on specifying kids' media is perhaps a step in the right direction there, as is the OLPC tablet and pre-selected educati
Great pattern you've discovered for a rebuttal.
Step 1. Ad hominem attack. :-)
Step 2. Make vague references to vast numbers of rebutting examples without actually supplying any.
Step 3. More ad hominem.
Step 4. Ignore actual citations (like in Tart's latest book).
Step 5. Claim area is under study by reputable people without naming any.
Step 6. Profit?
== Some links related to healthy democratic education reform
BTW, from 2006, not that I agree with most of their business-oriented recommendations:
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/...
"That's the conclusion of a bipartisan group of scholars and business leaders, school chancellors and education commissioners, and former cabinet secretaries and governors. They declare that America's public education system, designed to meet the needs of 100 years ago when the workplace revolved around an assembly line, is unsuited to today's global marketplace. Already, they warn, many Americans are in danger of falling behind and seeing their standard of living plummet."
Reform in what direction? We didn't get where we are today in public schooling without a hugenumber of powerful interlocking factions, as explained here:
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"This is not to say sensitive, intelligent, moral, and concerned individuals aren't distributed through each of the twenty-two categories, but the conflict of interest is so glaring between serving a system loyally and serving the public that it is finally overwhelming. Indeed, it isn't hard to see that in strictly economic terms this edifice of competing and conflicting interests is better served by badly performing schools than by successful ones. On economic grounds alone a disincentive exists to improve schools. When schools are bad, demands for increased funding and personnel, and professional control removed from public oversight, can be pressed by simply pointing to the perilous state of the enterprise. But when things go well, getting an extra buck is like pulling teeth."
Chris Mercogliano, previously of the Albany Free School, is an example of a true reformer, with 30+ years of success including with some of the toughest kids rejected by mainstream schools, a success almost almost totally ignored:
http://www.chrismercogliano.co...
Or on homeschooling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
"During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency, nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent, with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were "mentally retarded teenagers" - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical western children, "by western standards of measurement."[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional developm
You are correct of course. Thanks for pointing that out. I should have written "proof". Likely Tart puts it better. To agree with you, from: ... As such, absence of evidence acting against a hypothesis is only a probabilistic approach and works best in a full Bayesian-style framework, which also takes into account other probabilities and other evidence."
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/A...
"There are a few caveats to take into account to refine what a lack of supporting evidence says about a hypothesis. Absence of evidence is not necessarily strong evidence that outright disproves the hypothesis in the way that an observation that contradicts the hypothesis would be.
== Some rambles on weighing the meaning of absence of evidence in US society
First, Tart claims evidence os paranormal activity from research studies. People may dispute that including by questioning the studies, so let's just assume there still is no evidence for the sake of discussion.
An important factor in weighing the meaning of the absence of evidence is the intense competition for research funds which is increasingly corrupting science. See: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals."
For example, when Pons and Fleischmann submitted their "cold fusion" results to a peer review process for grant funding, it turned out one of the reviewers was working in the same area and was about to publish on it. This conflict (whoever is most at fault) ultimately lead to the press conference announcement (against the scientist's preferences) at the university wanted to claim priority on the discovery (via creating artificial scarcity through patents). A handful of hot-fusion scientists (especially at MIT) after fairly brief and limited attempts then claimed the results could not be duplicated an that failure to replicate was essentially proof that Pons and Fleischmann were wrong and "cold fusion" could not exists given popular conceptions of nuclear physics at the time. Pons and Fleishmann may have been wrong in several ways, including in calling it "fusion" of any sort and also in their neutron measurements. But these were expert chemists well experienced in heat measurements and that part of what they did was likely valid, and likely they did detect excess heat. But for *decades* any mention of doing cold fusion research became academic suicide based on the handful of failures to replicate by people whose short-term interests were served by not finding results. Only a few (mostly older, tenured) people continued to work on that. Related:
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/r...
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...
http://undsci.berkeley.edu/art...
"Cold Fusion" (now LENR) Research has been picking up in the last few years though, such as with this LENR conference ironically at MIT:
http://world.std.com/~mica/201...
Another example is when Halton Arp was denied telescope time to pursue his "electric universe" ideas. Ignaz Semmelweis is another example from centuries ago, where his evidence of how to prevent disease by hand-washing was dismissed as in conflict with conceptions of health and disease at the time.