Private donations in a socialist system is always going to be less than in a freer system because of the apathy that socialism breeds.
That's not completely obvious but is a plausible claim. But it isn't very relevant to the bit that you are responding to. The issue in cases like the Jimmy Fund is not whether there would be more private donations with no government funding. The most relevant question is if the *total* amount of funding is more. In that context, the data is pretty clear. And the claim that this is a consequence of the current system simply isn't easily justified given that the same pattern holds in a large variety of different societies at different times for different goals. I can give similar examples such asthe transition from private to public fire departments in the United States in the 19th century.
What you're really asking is whether I would be happy in confiscating peoples' private wealth using a threat of force. No, I would not be happy with that.
Happy is a distinct question from what one would do or thinks people would do. Presumably you wouldn't be happy being killed by a giant asteroid either, or watching children die slowly of cancer. The universe is cold and unforgiving. It doesn't care what makes us happy. So sometimes when we have different values, we need to decide which values we are going to emphasize. You say that solutions using "aggression" are unethical. But sometimes there's no really easy ethical solution, because reality just sucks.
Humans are complicated creatures with a lot of different values they care about. It is easy to look at a single human value and point to it and emphasize that value above all else. Some emphasize liberty, others survival, others equality, others compassion. But it is a mistake to think that when focusing on any single one one can handle all the others. If the universe were created by a loving God that might be true. But this reality is harsh, and it doesn't care whether a given configuration or set of heuristics will make ethics particularly simple.
I have one more hypothetical that I want to ask you, and this one isn't that far from ones that have happened historically. You have care of a young child who is starving. The child is so weak they can barely whimper about their hunger because they've had so little food. You have almost no food. You can steal food from a rich merchant with food. The rich person won't miss it but the child will die without it. Do you do so? If not, why not? If yes, how is this not an unethical use of aggression?
So, you raise some valid points. What evidence is there that the cancer research results would not have happened without largescale government funding? Well, we know how much funding there was before hand and so we can see that voluntary donations ended up being much less. The Jimmy Fund for example was one of the first major fundraisers for childhood cancer research. Despite that, they and other similar institutions raised comparatively little money in their first 20 years or so (when there was essentially zero federal funding for cancer research) compared to the amount supplied by the federal government once it became a national priority. This is discussed in some detail in "The Emperor of All Maladies" which is an excellent book about the history of cancer, So we do actually have some idea where funding levels compare.
Not only because it's not ethical to harm people in order to help them, but because the same ends can be achieved by means that don't see our freedoms trampled on.
I think community and bulk funding of various things is essential. I just don't think that funding should be enforced via agression. I think it should be through wholly voluntary means
In general, one should be suspicious when an ideological belief and reality correspond perfectly. In this case, there's an ideological belief (voluntary payments good, involuntary bad) and an assertion about reality (voluntary payments will be sufficient and work as well). The vast majority of the time, reality is pretty messy. It isn't going to correspond well to any simple ideology. In this particular context, I'm curious how you would respond to a hypothetical similar to the asteroid, but where you have detailed economic data and the like showing that you simply aren't going to raise enough funds through voluntary donations. Would you still be in favor of just using voluntary donations? What if you have an extremely reliable oracle telling you? Still. If your answer to both is no, then it should strike you as convenient that you think reality happens to never create similar situations. If your answer in either case is yes, where and how do you draw the line?
No. This is quite different. In the Newton case, he discovered a set of rules and had a deity that he thought occasionally intervened. That's different than a deity that runs the entire universe by fiat with no rules at all. The rest of what you have to say is simply irrelevant to question at hand, especially given that other Islamic philosophers didn't have this viewpoint, so there's no issue of seeing similarities. This isn't an issue of similarities between Islam and more Western religions, it is an issue about a specific philosophical viewpoint. Your statements about invasion and bombing really have nothing to do with the question at hand of why the Muslim world went from being the center of science and thought to being very much not so. That's not the matter under discussion under this subthread, and whether Al-Ghazali was responsible for this decline doesn't address such issues at all.
So there are a variety of problems with this. First, what do you mean by harm? Second, while it does depend what yardstick you measure success, I suspect that if one looks at history, you will consider a lot of things we have today to be signs of success that came due to government funding. For example, most of the funding for cancer research in the last seventy years has been from the government. For example, in 1950, childhood leukemia was death sentence. Now, most children with leukemia survive to adulthood, and with some types of leukemia survival rates exceed 90% http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/news/childhood-leukemia-survival-rates-improve-significantlyhttp://www.cancer.org/Cancer/LeukemiainChildren/OverviewGuide/childhood-leukemia-overview-survival-rates. Similar data holds for most other types of cancer as well many other diseases. And while charity (especially to groups like the Jimmy Fund) has certainly helped fund that research, the largescale success came from government funding. So, do you think fewer children dying of cancer is a decent way to measure success?
And it bears note that cancer is not the only example of this. One can go back centuries and point to research and exploration done by governments, where no one else had the resources to do so.
Another relevant measure of success might be the survival of humanity as a whole. Thus for example, existential threats to humanity like large near Earth asteroids are an obvious threat. Are you ok with taxes that go to fund defense against such threats?
I'm not aware of any philosophy that claimed that. The most common philosophy that is blamed for wrecking the Muslim's worlds scientific progress was that espoused by Al-Ghazali in his highly influential book "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philosophers. The most damaging thing in that philosophy was the idea that there were no actual laws of the universe, only things occurring the way Allah decided to. So for example if one lit a piece of cloth with a candle, the cloth catches fire not from any property of the cloth but because Allah has decided in this particular instance for the cloth to catch fire. And according to Al-Ghazali, asserting otherwise was essentially heresy. This sort of view of things is extremely inimical to discovering or codifying laws of the universe. There were other problems that happened about the same time such governments becoming more intertwined with religion in much of the Muslim world. But I suspect that is the philosophy that Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about.
Pretty close to everything has a shorter lifespan on a bus. The general bumpiness and repeated acceleration changes make all electronics have fairly short lifespans. Still, your basic point is sound.
All government is a tradeoff. In your view are taxes for defense not ok then? Absolutes are really easy to state, but the universe is tricky and complicated. If one took your conclusion to its logical standpoint no form of government would be acceptable at all. That's not even libertarianism. That's anarchy.
In order to effectively and reliably fund things, one needs regular sources of funding. And simply going to people and asking for a fraction of a cent is not an efficient or reliable way of getting money. Moreover, scientific research,like defense, is a public good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good which means that everyone benefits whether they pay for it or not. Thus, people will have no incentive given the option not to pay for it since they will benefit either way. The only effective or fair way to pay for public goods is for everyone to pay.
I know that some sorts of proposed Majorana particles would require extending the Standard Model. Is this discovery consistent with the Standard Model or a conservative extension thereof?
It isn't confusing an issue when the person I'm responding to said "Iran is a sovereign nation and if they wish to produce nuclear weapons because they feel threatened by their neighbors (Israel, a nuclear power) or as a deterrent then that is their prerogative." Context matters.
The IRA, the ETA and the Irgun all made a practice of often warning about their bombs. These aren't the only examples. Destroying a building and causing disruption while making a point that they could have blown things up is often quite helpful for their causes. Indeed, there's been a serious argument made by some analysts that terrorists start to lose when they go and target civilians with no warning. (I don't offhand have citations for that last bit, but it is discussed with citations to research by others in Steven Pinker's excellent book "The Better Angels of Our Nature".)
Second, the large US stockpile is a concern, and the US is (correctly) taking steps to reduce the size of that stockpile (indeed has been for the last twenty years, in cooperation with Russia which has done the same to their stockpile). But the US weapons (in addition to being under treat compliance) are very tightly guarded and have many safeguards against accidental or malicious use. There's no such guarantee that Iranian weapons would be that way, and likely wouldn't be.
Third, your remark about Israel doesn't reflect the actual geopolitical situation. Despite Israel and Iran not even sharing a border, Iran is one of the largest funders of Hezbollah and other groups which systematically engage in attacks on Israel. http://www.cfr.org/iran/state-sponsors-iran/p9362. In that context, Israel being afraid of what Iran, or elements in the Iranian government, would do with nuclear weapons makes sense. As for sabotaging industry- it is Iran, not Israel which refuses to recognize Israel's existence. At this point, Israel has peace treaties and functional relations with Egypt and Jordan (and a decent amount of tourism between the countries and commercial exchange). Israel is not on good terms with Syria, but they've at least had limited dialogue. Iran is pretty much the only country in the region which has both continued to sponsor attacks on Israel and has never sat down at the negotiating table. While one can argue that there's a large history of hostility and menacing on both sides, the essential facts are that Israel has sat down and signed treaties with other nations in the area, and Iran has never shown any indication or willingness to ever sit down. Israel is not at all blameless in the current situation, but it is Iran's belicose government that is the essential reason that Israel is concerned, quite legitimately, over Iranian nuclear ambitions.
Marconi's RDF was good enough to do precision-bombing and instrument-only landing in the 1940s.
I don't know where you are getting this idea from. While instrument-only landings did occur, that's after one already knows one is in the right vicinity and is making the right final approach on instruments. The claim that anything in WW2 was precision-bombing is hard for me to understand given that some of their navigation was so inaccurate that sometimes British and American bombers didn't even target the intended city.
The statement about mean IQ is somewhat accurate. However, there are subtle issues going on here. IQ is to some extent impacted by early childhood nutrition:, how much children are subject to disease http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1701/3801, http://www.economist.com/node/16479286, toxin exposure http://www.ricknevin.com/uploads/Nevin_2000_Env_Res_Author_Manuscript.pdf and stereotype threat (essentially there's evidence that reminding a group about negative stereotypes about the group can cause them to perform more poorly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat ). So the problem with 11 isn't so much that it is false (the statistics are very robust) but that they likely don't reflect actual differences in underlying intelligence except at a very broad level. In this case, one could actually respond that the issues of nutrition and disease aren't that relevant if one cares about the actual intelligence of the individuals one is interacting with; their functional intelligence is likely higher than their tested intelligence, since stereotype threat can plausible explain most of the remaining difference. So in this single issue he is hitting on a potentially true statement, but even that statement is somewhat misguided. And most of the rest of the article, including the other bits you quote, is just appalling.
It may have not been pre-vowel shift. By many estimates the Great Vowel Shift http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift was almost completely done by 1500, and Shakespeare is born in 1564. Moreover, when Shakespeare does decide to use rhymes (such as in the end of Richard II) one sees essentially modern rhyme choices, suggesting that the intended pronunciation was not far from ours.
So what? We already know those numbers are wrong and they were wild guesses at the time they were made.
The problem is that every single one of those numbers where we've been able to confirm it was wrong moves in one direction, and not the direction of making intelligent life less common.
Our telescopes aren't that good. A Dyson sphere, especially a red-shifted one is going to be practically invisible in most of the spectrum we observe at.
In order to be in equilibrium a Dyson sphere needs to be putting out as much energy as the star itself would, but red-shifted. We should be able to detect that. There's in fact a project specifically to search for them http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm. Further discussion here- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/12/02/no-dyson-spheres-found-yet/. The project in question by 2010 had searched systematically for Dyson spheres or partial Dyson spheres within 300 parsecs (around 1000 light years), primarily using data from IRAS which is almost 20 years old. Other projects have tried to look further out. Spitzer time isn't being directly devoted to this, but it is sensitive enough that if there were any Dyson spheres that went across its field of view out to the edge of our galaxy they likely would have been noticed, and similar remarks are potentially true for nearby galaxies.
Not sure why this should be surprising. Someone has to be first and it may well be us.
Sure we could be first, and someone has to be. But that's not likely, since we've arrived on the scene very late as far as we can tell.
Strongly disagree. It very much is in the surprising category. Back of the envelope calculations made fifty years ago suggested that life and intelligent life should be much more common than they are. (That's why this is the Fermi question, he did essentially make a Fermi calculation). Since Fermi's time, the situation, if anything has gotten more extreme not less so. We know that planets are common, and planets in the habitable zone are not rare See for example, this estimate that gives that about a third of sun-like stars have planets in the habitable zone http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1109/1109.4682v1.pdf. While there's some criticism of that estimate http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/29/new-study-13-of-sun-like-stars-might-have-terrestrial-planets-in-their-habitable-zones/ even critics agree that that's about the right order of magnitude. . And that's just sun-like stars. This is part of a much larger pattern where stable, Earth-like conditions are increasingly common. For example, for a long time, it was claimed that an Earth-like planet would need a large moon to stabilize the climate and weather enough for life but we now know that that's probably not the case http://www.universetoday.com/91331/life-on-alien-planets-may-not-require-a-large-moon-after-all/. Recent work suggests that red dwarf stars have much broader habitable zones than previously thought http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228374.400-most-common-stars-are-more-lifefriendly-than-thought.html. And all of this is just for Earth-like, carbon-based life operating at temperatures close to those we are used to.
We also shouldn't expect intelligent life to be at or near our own tech level. As a species we are very young. The probability that other intelligent life if is out there is at our tech level is small. If humans are any indication, species which form civilizations can likely take to the stars in the blink of an eye as far as age of stars are concerned. Let's use a hypothetical examples. Humans as a species have been around for around million years (there are definitional issues but this seems like an ok approximation). Now, even if it took another 3000 years to develop effective interstellar travel, that's still about the same amount of time. Traveling then at about a thousandth the speed of light, that would take around 10 million years to spread through the Milky Way. So if intelligent life even remotely like us is out there, we should expect it to have already spread out. But we don't see that.
At a related level, we see no indication of large scale engineering projects. We see no Dyson spheres, or Matrioshka brains or anything else that would be visible to us through our telescopes. And this applies not just to our own galaxy but to neighboring galaxies such as Andromeda. The entire universe looks to our eyes completely natural. And note that while humans have only come up with a few ideas for stellar engineering and similarly largescale projects, we've only been thinking about it for fifty years. This strongly suggests that there are no old civilizations in our neighboring galaxies. Put all of that together and you get that at a galactic level, there's no signs of intelligent life in our entire local cluster. That should be shocking.
Yes, strongly agree about scrap yards. And for metals in some respects it will be easier for the second civilization. Aluminum is a really good example of that, where the process to extract it from ore is both energy intensive and technologically complicated, but once another civilization has left a lot in a purified form reforging the remainder will be easy. Mass transit without cheap coal or oil is going to be tough. Trains running on wood have been done before but they aren't great. And airplanes as well as quick ships will be nearly impossible, meaning that a multicontinent economy will be severely hampered. Overall, I'm not sure how things will turn out. Nick Bostrom at the Future of Humanity Institute has brought up this as an issue that needs to be thought about, but neither he nor anyone else seems to have really sat down and done a detailed analysis. It might depend a lot on exactly how far back we are set and which resources and knowledge still remain accessible.
It doesn't need to be periodic. Reaching our current tech levels involved the consumption of a lot of natural resources that aren't easily renewable (such as most of the easily accessible oil). It isn't obvious that if our tech level is pushed back that we could actually have any decent chance of returning to a substantial tech level.
There is a reason to expect them: similar problems seem to show up in a lot of evolved life forms. But even then, that's not the important part: the important issue is that there's a surprising lack of signs of intelligent life.
While this discovery is very cool, it may be a very bad sign. One of the most plausible explanations for the Fermi paradox is that intelligent life almost always wipes itself out before it is able to engage in largescale space travel (as so-called Great Filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_filter. One of the other more satisfying explanations is that the sun is one of the first stars to have enough metal to plausibly form planets. That now seems to be less likely. There are other explanations, such as the low metal systems not having enough carbon for life to form and prosper, or that complex life is very rare. However, this discovery potentially removes one of the more plausible possible explanations, and thus makes the possibility of a Great Filter in our future to seem more likely. This is disturbing.
Issa is one of the richest congressman with over 400 million dollars to his name and yet there are still allegations that he has used his office to his own financial benefit http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20105655-503544.html. Instead of just tweeting at him, maybe even the score by donating a bit to his opponents in the upcoming election? Dick Eiden http://eiden4congress.net/ is running as a Democrat. Mike Paster has run as a libertarian before, but I can't tell if he is running this time. His old website http://www.mikepasterforyourcongress.org/. is down. Also, his official contact details http://vote-ca.org/intro.aspx?state=ca&id=capastermike list a fairly unprofessional looking hotmail address, which doesn't fill me with confidence. And without a website even up, donating to him is a bit tough. So the Democrat looks like the most viable option (libertarians when you complain about how people don't support you, this is very close to why...).
Slashdot Mirror
Private donations in a socialist system is always going to be less than in a freer system because of the apathy that socialism breeds.
That's not completely obvious but is a plausible claim. But it isn't very relevant to the bit that you are responding to. The issue in cases like the Jimmy Fund is not whether there would be more private donations with no government funding. The most relevant question is if the *total* amount of funding is more. In that context, the data is pretty clear. And the claim that this is a consequence of the current system simply isn't easily justified given that the same pattern holds in a large variety of different societies at different times for different goals. I can give similar examples such asthe transition from private to public fire departments in the United States in the 19th century.
What you're really asking is whether I would be happy in confiscating peoples' private wealth using a threat of force. No, I would not be happy with that.
Happy is a distinct question from what one would do or thinks people would do. Presumably you wouldn't be happy being killed by a giant asteroid either, or watching children die slowly of cancer. The universe is cold and unforgiving. It doesn't care what makes us happy. So sometimes when we have different values, we need to decide which values we are going to emphasize. You say that solutions using "aggression" are unethical. But sometimes there's no really easy ethical solution, because reality just sucks.
Humans are complicated creatures with a lot of different values they care about. It is easy to look at a single human value and point to it and emphasize that value above all else. Some emphasize liberty, others survival, others equality, others compassion. But it is a mistake to think that when focusing on any single one one can handle all the others. If the universe were created by a loving God that might be true. But this reality is harsh, and it doesn't care whether a given configuration or set of heuristics will make ethics particularly simple.
I have one more hypothetical that I want to ask you, and this one isn't that far from ones that have happened historically. You have care of a young child who is starving. The child is so weak they can barely whimper about their hunger because they've had so little food. You have almost no food. You can steal food from a rich merchant with food. The rich person won't miss it but the child will die without it. Do you do so? If not, why not? If yes, how is this not an unethical use of aggression?
This means it wasn't Voldemort making a Horcrux out of the Pioneer Plaque!
Not only because it's not ethical to harm people in order to help them, but because the same ends can be achieved by means that don't see our freedoms trampled on. I think community and bulk funding of various things is essential. I just don't think that funding should be enforced via agression. I think it should be through wholly voluntary means
In general, one should be suspicious when an ideological belief and reality correspond perfectly. In this case, there's an ideological belief (voluntary payments good, involuntary bad) and an assertion about reality (voluntary payments will be sufficient and work as well). The vast majority of the time, reality is pretty messy. It isn't going to correspond well to any simple ideology. In this particular context, I'm curious how you would respond to a hypothetical similar to the asteroid, but where you have detailed economic data and the like showing that you simply aren't going to raise enough funds through voluntary donations. Would you still be in favor of just using voluntary donations? What if you have an extremely reliable oracle telling you? Still. If your answer to both is no, then it should strike you as convenient that you think reality happens to never create similar situations. If your answer in either case is yes, where and how do you draw the line?
No. This is quite different. In the Newton case, he discovered a set of rules and had a deity that he thought occasionally intervened. That's different than a deity that runs the entire universe by fiat with no rules at all. The rest of what you have to say is simply irrelevant to question at hand, especially given that other Islamic philosophers didn't have this viewpoint, so there's no issue of seeing similarities. This isn't an issue of similarities between Islam and more Western religions, it is an issue about a specific philosophical viewpoint. Your statements about invasion and bombing really have nothing to do with the question at hand of why the Muslim world went from being the center of science and thought to being very much not so. That's not the matter under discussion under this subthread, and whether Al-Ghazali was responsible for this decline doesn't address such issues at all.
So there are a variety of problems with this. First, what do you mean by harm? Second, while it does depend what yardstick you measure success, I suspect that if one looks at history, you will consider a lot of things we have today to be signs of success that came due to government funding. For example, most of the funding for cancer research in the last seventy years has been from the government. For example, in 1950, childhood leukemia was death sentence. Now, most children with leukemia survive to adulthood, and with some types of leukemia survival rates exceed 90% http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/news/childhood-leukemia-survival-rates-improve-significantly http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/LeukemiainChildren/OverviewGuide/childhood-leukemia-overview-survival-rates. Similar data holds for most other types of cancer as well many other diseases. And while charity (especially to groups like the Jimmy Fund) has certainly helped fund that research, the largescale success came from government funding. So, do you think fewer children dying of cancer is a decent way to measure success?
And it bears note that cancer is not the only example of this. One can go back centuries and point to research and exploration done by governments, where no one else had the resources to do so.
Another relevant measure of success might be the survival of humanity as a whole. Thus for example, existential threats to humanity like large near Earth asteroids are an obvious threat. Are you ok with taxes that go to fund defense against such threats?
I'm not aware of any philosophy that claimed that. The most common philosophy that is blamed for wrecking the Muslim's worlds scientific progress was that espoused by Al-Ghazali in his highly influential book "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philosophers. The most damaging thing in that philosophy was the idea that there were no actual laws of the universe, only things occurring the way Allah decided to. So for example if one lit a piece of cloth with a candle, the cloth catches fire not from any property of the cloth but because Allah has decided in this particular instance for the cloth to catch fire. And according to Al-Ghazali, asserting otherwise was essentially heresy. This sort of view of things is extremely inimical to discovering or codifying laws of the universe. There were other problems that happened about the same time such governments becoming more intertwined with religion in much of the Muslim world. But I suspect that is the philosophy that Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about.
Pretty close to everything has a shorter lifespan on a bus. The general bumpiness and repeated acceleration changes make all electronics have fairly short lifespans. Still, your basic point is sound.
And the fact that basic economics/game theory shows that that won't in general be enough? The notion of a public good was created for a reason.
All government is a tradeoff. In your view are taxes for defense not ok then? Absolutes are really easy to state, but the universe is tricky and complicated. If one took your conclusion to its logical standpoint no form of government would be acceptable at all. That's not even libertarianism. That's anarchy.
In order to effectively and reliably fund things, one needs regular sources of funding. And simply going to people and asking for a fraction of a cent is not an efficient or reliable way of getting money. Moreover, scientific research,like defense, is a public good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good which means that everyone benefits whether they pay for it or not. Thus, people will have no incentive given the option not to pay for it since they will benefit either way. The only effective or fair way to pay for public goods is for everyone to pay.
I know that some sorts of proposed Majorana particles would require extending the Standard Model. Is this discovery consistent with the Standard Model or a conservative extension thereof?
It isn't confusing an issue when the person I'm responding to said "Iran is a sovereign nation and if they wish to produce nuclear weapons because they feel threatened by their neighbors (Israel, a nuclear power) or as a deterrent then that is their prerogative." Context matters.
The IRA, the ETA and the Irgun all made a practice of often warning about their bombs. These aren't the only examples. Destroying a building and causing disruption while making a point that they could have blown things up is often quite helpful for their causes. Indeed, there's been a serious argument made by some analysts that terrorists start to lose when they go and target civilians with no warning. (I don't offhand have citations for that last bit, but it is discussed with citations to research by others in Steven Pinker's excellent book "The Better Angels of Our Nature".)
There's a lot wrong with your remark. First of all, Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons so attempting to research or build nuclear weapons is a direct violation of their treaty obligations.
Second, the large US stockpile is a concern, and the US is (correctly) taking steps to reduce the size of that stockpile (indeed has been for the last twenty years, in cooperation with Russia which has done the same to their stockpile). But the US weapons (in addition to being under treat compliance) are very tightly guarded and have many safeguards against accidental or malicious use. There's no such guarantee that Iranian weapons would be that way, and likely wouldn't be.
Third, your remark about Israel doesn't reflect the actual geopolitical situation. Despite Israel and Iran not even sharing a border, Iran is one of the largest funders of Hezbollah and other groups which systematically engage in attacks on Israel. http://www.cfr.org/iran/state-sponsors-iran/p9362. In that context, Israel being afraid of what Iran, or elements in the Iranian government, would do with nuclear weapons makes sense. As for sabotaging industry- it is Iran, not Israel which refuses to recognize Israel's existence. At this point, Israel has peace treaties and functional relations with Egypt and Jordan (and a decent amount of tourism between the countries and commercial exchange). Israel is not on good terms with Syria, but they've at least had limited dialogue. Iran is pretty much the only country in the region which has both continued to sponsor attacks on Israel and has never sat down at the negotiating table. While one can argue that there's a large history of hostility and menacing on both sides, the essential facts are that Israel has sat down and signed treaties with other nations in the area, and Iran has never shown any indication or willingness to ever sit down. Israel is not at all blameless in the current situation, but it is Iran's belicose government that is the essential reason that Israel is concerned, quite legitimately, over Iranian nuclear ambitions.
Marconi's RDF was good enough to do precision-bombing and instrument-only landing in the 1940s.
I don't know where you are getting this idea from. While instrument-only landings did occur, that's after one already knows one is in the right vicinity and is making the right final approach on instruments. The claim that anything in WW2 was precision-bombing is hard for me to understand given that some of their navigation was so inaccurate that sometimes British and American bombers didn't even target the intended city.
The statement about mean IQ is somewhat accurate. However, there are subtle issues going on here. IQ is to some extent impacted by early childhood nutrition :, how much children are subject to disease http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1701/3801, http://www.economist.com/node/16479286, toxin exposure http://www.ricknevin.com/uploads/Nevin_2000_Env_Res_Author_Manuscript.pdf and stereotype threat (essentially there's evidence that reminding a group about negative stereotypes about the group can cause them to perform more poorly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat ). So the problem with 11 isn't so much that it is false (the statistics are very robust) but that they likely don't reflect actual differences in underlying intelligence except at a very broad level. In this case, one could actually respond that the issues of nutrition and disease aren't that relevant if one cares about the actual intelligence of the individuals one is interacting with; their functional intelligence is likely higher than their tested intelligence, since stereotype threat can plausible explain most of the remaining difference. So in this single issue he is hitting on a potentially true statement, but even that statement is somewhat misguided. And most of the rest of the article, including the other bits you quote, is just appalling.
It may have not been pre-vowel shift. By many estimates the Great Vowel Shift http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift was almost completely done by 1500, and Shakespeare is born in 1564. Moreover, when Shakespeare does decide to use rhymes (such as in the end of Richard II) one sees essentially modern rhyme choices, suggesting that the intended pronunciation was not far from ours.
So what? We already know those numbers are wrong and they were wild guesses at the time they were made.
The problem is that every single one of those numbers where we've been able to confirm it was wrong moves in one direction, and not the direction of making intelligent life less common.
Our telescopes aren't that good. A Dyson sphere, especially a red-shifted one is going to be practically invisible in most of the spectrum we observe at.
In order to be in equilibrium a Dyson sphere needs to be putting out as much energy as the star itself would, but red-shifted. We should be able to detect that. There's in fact a project specifically to search for them http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm. Further discussion here- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/12/02/no-dyson-spheres-found-yet/. The project in question by 2010 had searched systematically for Dyson spheres or partial Dyson spheres within 300 parsecs (around 1000 light years), primarily using data from IRAS which is almost 20 years old. Other projects have tried to look further out. Spitzer time isn't being directly devoted to this, but it is sensitive enough that if there were any Dyson spheres that went across its field of view out to the edge of our galaxy they likely would have been noticed, and similar remarks are potentially true for nearby galaxies.
Not sure why this should be surprising. Someone has to be first and it may well be us.
Sure we could be first, and someone has to be. But that's not likely, since we've arrived on the scene very late as far as we can tell.
Strongly disagree. It very much is in the surprising category. Back of the envelope calculations made fifty years ago suggested that life and intelligent life should be much more common than they are. (That's why this is the Fermi question, he did essentially make a Fermi calculation). Since Fermi's time, the situation, if anything has gotten more extreme not less so. We know that planets are common, and planets in the habitable zone are not rare See for example, this estimate that gives that about a third of sun-like stars have planets in the habitable zone http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1109/1109.4682v1.pdf. While there's some criticism of that estimate http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/29/new-study-13-of-sun-like-stars-might-have-terrestrial-planets-in-their-habitable-zones/ even critics agree that that's about the right order of magnitude. . And that's just sun-like stars. This is part of a much larger pattern where stable, Earth-like conditions are increasingly common. For example, for a long time, it was claimed that an Earth-like planet would need a large moon to stabilize the climate and weather enough for life but we now know that that's probably not the case http://www.universetoday.com/91331/life-on-alien-planets-may-not-require-a-large-moon-after-all/. Recent work suggests that red dwarf stars have much broader habitable zones than previously thought http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228374.400-most-common-stars-are-more-lifefriendly-than-thought.html. And all of this is just for Earth-like, carbon-based life operating at temperatures close to those we are used to.
We also shouldn't expect intelligent life to be at or near our own tech level. As a species we are very young. The probability that other intelligent life if is out there is at our tech level is small. If humans are any indication, species which form civilizations can likely take to the stars in the blink of an eye as far as age of stars are concerned. Let's use a hypothetical examples. Humans as a species have been around for around million years (there are definitional issues but this seems like an ok approximation). Now, even if it took another 3000 years to develop effective interstellar travel, that's still about the same amount of time. Traveling then at about a thousandth the speed of light, that would take around 10 million years to spread through the Milky Way. So if intelligent life even remotely like us is out there, we should expect it to have already spread out. But we don't see that.
At a related level, we see no indication of large scale engineering projects. We see no Dyson spheres, or Matrioshka brains or anything else that would be visible to us through our telescopes. And this applies not just to our own galaxy but to neighboring galaxies such as Andromeda. The entire universe looks to our eyes completely natural. And note that while humans have only come up with a few ideas for stellar engineering and similarly largescale projects, we've only been thinking about it for fifty years. This strongly suggests that there are no old civilizations in our neighboring galaxies. Put all of that together and you get that at a galactic level, there's no signs of intelligent life in our entire local cluster. That should be shocking.
Yes, strongly agree about scrap yards. And for metals in some respects it will be easier for the second civilization. Aluminum is a really good example of that, where the process to extract it from ore is both energy intensive and technologically complicated, but once another civilization has left a lot in a purified form reforging the remainder will be easy. Mass transit without cheap coal or oil is going to be tough. Trains running on wood have been done before but they aren't great. And airplanes as well as quick ships will be nearly impossible, meaning that a multicontinent economy will be severely hampered. Overall, I'm not sure how things will turn out. Nick Bostrom at the Future of Humanity Institute has brought up this as an issue that needs to be thought about, but neither he nor anyone else seems to have really sat down and done a detailed analysis. It might depend a lot on exactly how far back we are set and which resources and knowledge still remain accessible.
It doesn't need to be periodic. Reaching our current tech levels involved the consumption of a lot of natural resources that aren't easily renewable (such as most of the easily accessible oil). It isn't obvious that if our tech level is pushed back that we could actually have any decent chance of returning to a substantial tech level.
There is a reason to expect them: similar problems seem to show up in a lot of evolved life forms. But even then, that's not the important part: the important issue is that there's a surprising lack of signs of intelligent life.
That seems interesting but not very likely. Capturing a single rogue planet maybe, but two in the same system seems pretty unlikely.
While this discovery is very cool, it may be a very bad sign. One of the most plausible explanations for the Fermi paradox is that intelligent life almost always wipes itself out before it is able to engage in largescale space travel (as so-called Great Filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_filter. One of the other more satisfying explanations is that the sun is one of the first stars to have enough metal to plausibly form planets. That now seems to be less likely. There are other explanations, such as the low metal systems not having enough carbon for life to form and prosper, or that complex life is very rare. However, this discovery potentially removes one of the more plausible possible explanations, and thus makes the possibility of a Great Filter in our future to seem more likely. This is disturbing.
Issa is one of the richest congressman with over 400 million dollars to his name and yet there are still allegations that he has used his office to his own financial benefit http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20105655-503544.html. Instead of just tweeting at him, maybe even the score by donating a bit to his opponents in the upcoming election? Dick Eiden http://eiden4congress.net/ is running as a Democrat. Mike Paster has run as a libertarian before, but I can't tell if he is running this time. His old website http://www.mikepasterforyourcongress.org/. is down. Also, his official contact details http://vote-ca.org/intro.aspx?state=ca&id=capastermike list a fairly unprofessional looking hotmail address, which doesn't fill me with confidence. And without a website even up, donating to him is a bit tough. So the Democrat looks like the most viable option (libertarians when you complain about how people don't support you, this is very close to why...).